Australian Media and Politicians Taking Steps to Stamp Out Pseudoscience

It’s been a month of interesting times for anti-vaccinationists in Australia, with a slew of commentary, media campaigns, documentaries, and even political condemnation for their failure to follow international health guidelines—to the point that in the state of New South Wales, they’re even considering getting religious exemptions en masse to avoid new vaccination policies.

We cannot claim that a single person or group is behind these changes; to do so is to neglect the hundreds and thousands of people who have raised their voices in many different ways. It takes more than a Facebook group, or a spokesperson, or even a whole newspaper to keep momentum going when it comes to public health—particularly with a solution to preventable deaths that has gained unnecessary and dangerous levels of controversy. While I usually despair when it comes to mainstream media’s coverage of pseudoscientific claims, particularly when it comes to eager attitudes about (false) balance, I’ve been personally overawed by the support for vaccinations on a number of fronts. Here’s a few of the highlights.

One massive newspaper campaign in NSW, which was then echoed by a number of other media outlets, has been particularly influential—the “No Jab, No Play” campaign, which started on May 5 and ran for two weeks. Stories included personal accounts of family tragedies and resilience (such as the Dana McCaffery case), regional effects of low vaccination rates, and even political pressure resulting in changed laws in support of vaccination. Other media outlets, like the Sydney Morning Herald and Herald Sun, soon echoed the pro-vaccination rally.

I wrote to Claire Harvey, the Features Editor for the Sunday Telegraph, News Limited, as to how the campaign started:

Basically it started because I was searching for a childcare centre in NSW and became aware of the loophole in the law. I asked Sunday Telegraph editor Mick Carroll and Daily Telegraph editor Paul Whittaker if they were keen to let me run a campaign. They were - so I assigned reporters led by Jane Hansen to about thirty-five story ideas and we approached state and federal governments telling them what we were about to do. Neither had a commitment to change the law so we started rolling out the stories from May 5th.

We ran approximately sixty stories and by two weeks later, NSW Opposition leader John Robertson and Tony Abbott both said they would act. Robertson said he would introduce bills to parliament - whereupon premier Barry O'Farrell announced he'd put a plan to Cabinet that went even further than Robertson's proposed bill. We are still campaigning for federal change - although Abbott is on board, we'd rather have legislation before parliament than a promise.

We have copped a huge amount of vitriol and nastiness but also vast support from our readers. Our heartland is western Sydney, where the vast majority of parents vaccinate. Their children's health is put at risk by parents in wealthy parts of Sydney where rates are much lower, and in 'alternative lifestyle' areas like Byron Bay where rates are shockingly low.

We are proud to have changed the law but now we want to help change people's attitudes by continuing to report the facts about vaccinations - they save lives.

On May 9 in the New South Wales House of Assembly, the Minister for Fair Trading, the Honourable Anthony Roberts, presented a speech in reply to the question “What action is the Government taking to protect the community from being misled by the Australian Vaccination Network?” He outlined the Government’s actions to finally enforce the change of the highly misleading name of the anti-vaccination group, the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN):

Just the day before, in the Upper House, the 2013 Health Legislation Amendment Bill passed, prior to being sent to become law. The Hansard transcript includes a number of interchanges in support of vaccination, including:

The Hon. TREVOR KHAN: …The Australian Vaccination Network publishes a website that could be described as highly sceptical, indeed far more than that.

The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: I think “insane” is the word you are looking for.

As the Telegraph continued their No Jab, No Play Campaign, on May 26 the documentary “Jabbed: Love, Fear and Vaccines” was aired on the TV station SBS—directed by award-winning documentary maker Sonya Pemberton. While the reach of the documentary was limited, due to SBS being a traditionally low-rating and occasionally difficult to tune into station, the film was made available via internet streaming and for purchase through the website. Reviews were favourable, such as this one on the AusMed site by Janet McCalman, which particularly notes the documentary’s effort not to judge families regarding their choices. A forum with the director Sonya Pemberton is planned for Wednesday, June 5 in Melbourne.

The Conversation website, known as an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community, ran an interview on the May 27, “Pneumococcal rates plunge after widespread vaccination of infants.” It was conducted by the editor, Sunanda Creagh, with Public Health Physician Clayton Chiu and Professor of Pediatric Infectious Diseases David Isaacs, on the plunging rates of pneumococcal rates as a result of widespread vaccination. In it, they discussed the benefits of vaccinations, particularly “because of the herd immunity we get in the community.”

On May 29, the Telegraph ran the story “Big win for No Jab, No Play as NSW state cabinet approves tough new vaccination laws,” announcing that Health Minister Jillian Skinner amended the Public Health Act to make the checking of vaccine records compulsory—and to give staff the power to turn away those who aren't up to date. That same day, opinion columnist Janet Albrechtsen wrote “Zealots Forget The Epidemics” for the Commentary pages in the national broadsheet The Australian:

“According to our federal Department of Health, there is a whooping cough epidemic in this country…it’s not hard to figure out why. In Australia, up to one in five children in some regions are not fully immunised…Recent moves by NSW Labor Opposition Leader John Robertson and federal Liberal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to empower childcare centres to refuse care to unvaccinated children are a good start, but let’s go further. No parent should receive tax benefits if they refuse to vaccinate their children.”

This was also the day that Bill Gates arrived in Australia—and as a staunch advocate (and financial backer) of vaccination, he was reported voicing his support in a number of news items and radio shows, particularly for his address at the National Press Club in Canberra and on ABC’s panel program Q&A.

By May 30, the Daily Telegraph was reporting on how Meryl Dorey of the Australian Vaccination Network had “urged followers on social media to join the ‘Church of Conscious Living’ as a way of avoiding vaccination laws,” which included the rejection of vaccination for adults, children, and animals. This will not be the end of challenges against vaccination, but at least with raised awareness and hastened responses to improving flawed laws and limited regulations, the month of May will hopefully be a significant turning point for improving vaccination rates in Australia.

Many thanks to Claire Harvey for her quotes for this article.

The greatest thing about a sound bath is that it is perfectly acceptable to fall asleep during the procedure. Packed with forty or fifty people into a small, domed room in the California desert—a room supposedly blueprinted by aliens—listening to a middle-aged nurse play quartz singing bowls, a person might think they were supposed to stay awake. Not so. At the Integratron, falling asleep is a given.

I get to the Integratron by way of Ross’s old pickup truck. We drive the three and a half hours from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree, reading printed pages from the website as we go. George Van Tassel, the facility’s designer, said aliens gave him the instructions. The building was supposed to rejuvenate the body, adding decades to a visitor’s life. Tesla coils and other technology would give the Integratron its power. Unfortunately, Van Tassel died “mysteriously” before completing the job. Today, it stands—still powerful—but not as powerful as it could have been.

“Do you think it’s INtegratron, or InTEGratron?” I ask Ross.

“InTEGratron,” he says, pretty confidently, almost as if it were a word.

We pull into the parking lot around noon and are greeted by a smiling group of folks in organic cotton and cowboy hats. I see several Sanskrit tattoos. Everyone is chatting. Some are lying in “Hammock Village,” just south of the Integratron itself. A group of tourists are fanning themselves in the desert sun. We pay for our $20 sound bath tickets and head in.

The building is a huge boob. The nipple is open to the sunlight and fresh air. The structure has two levels. Artifacts and photos line the walls of the bottom floor. The docent tells us to remove our shoes and head upstairs. He warns us not to take pictures of anyone’s face, because “this is a Church of the Face.”

He hands us yoga mats and blankets, and we lie on the floor. I lie horizontally and am immediately corrected by the docent.

“You want your head to be toward the center to get the best effect,” he says. I realize I’m the only one who hasn’t done this automatically. My internal head placement compass is off. I adjust.

Everyone is breathing quietly now, staring up at the smooth, wooden ceiling. A lovely middle-aged woman takes her seat among the singing bowls. She will be our instrumentalist. The quartz bowls are huge, translucent, and soft pink. They take up a full twenty square feet of space, and are gleaming in the sunlight.

“I’m an old cardiac nurse and a huge skeptic. The guy who built this place says aliens gave him the design. Yeah, okay...” the woman says with a snicker, “but how could he know that the human energy field is exactly fifty-five feet across, just like this building?”

Yeah! How could he know? This seems like a good point, if the human energy field is a thing. Just to make sure, I check when I get home. It’s not a thing.

“The one problem here is snoring. Snoring is amplified, just like the sounds of the bowls. If someone snores, tell them to stop,” she says.

We’re all thinking about the farting situation, but no one says anything.

The nurse tells us that the vibrations of the bowls are powerful healing tools. She invites us to lie down and listen. The tones start out low and rhythmic and grow steadier and louder. Some of them sound like a dial tone, and my brain keeps misfiring: “Hang up the phone!” Some of the sounds are downright unpleasant, but most are lovely and comforting. It’s very easy to fall asleep. Within minutes, I’m completely out.

When I wake up, people are gathering their blankets and leaving. I’m startled into wakefulness, thinking I’ve failed. I’ve missed the whole thing! But Ross has been awake the whole time and tells me I’ve missed nothing; it was all music and the steady breathing of a room full of sleeping people. I don’t feel anything mystical or metaphysical, but I do feel peaceful and rested.

Outside, we meet Trevor, a staff person, who is dressed in a cowboy hat and has a friendly smile. We ask him about the building and where it gets its special powers. He explains that the building is built exactly over a spike in the earth’s magnetic field.

“What does that mean exactly?” I ask.

“Well, scientists have come here and confirmed it.”

“Oh…. Okay.”

He says the building has powerful forces that heal people by restoring our negative ions, which are lost primarily through standing in heavy wind. When I ask him what happens when you don’t have enough negative ions, he’s not sure. But it’s definitely bad.

“So what about people in a really windy place like Tibet? Do they just lose them all the time?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says, “but scientists say a good way to combat it is to wear a scarf.”

Oh.

It’s clear that “the scientists” are the ones providing the information here, but Trevor can’t give us any names. They come through a lot, to study the place, he says. They’ve verified that there’s something inexplicable going on, here. Something beyond science’s grasp. He seems pleased. The scientists have validated the Integratron, and that’s enough for him. In a sense, I can’t blame him. Scientists could say little to add to my most-beloved experiences. They are beloved, perhaps, because they are outside a need for explanations.

When we head out, Trevor shakes our hands and says it was great to meet us.

“This place attracts the coolest people, man,” he says. “Robert Downey Jr., Robert Plant, and people like you guys.”

We start the three and a half hour drive home. The sun is beating down, and Ross’s air conditioner is feeble. The truck rocks us slowly along the dirt path. I sleep the whole way home.

The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe.
By Michael D. Gordin. University of Chicago Press, Illinois, 2012. ISBN: 978-0226304427. 304 pp. Hardcover, $29.

Skeptics often say they are trying to expose pseudoscience, but in reality we tend to use this term loosely. Creationism, homeopathy, al­ternative medicine, and cold fusion are clearly pseudoscientific, but what about ancient aliens, UFOs, alien abductions, Bigfoot, crystals, the Moon hoax, and many other claims investigated in the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer? Are these examples of pseudoscience, just bad science, or perhaps not related to science at all?

One definition of pseudoscience presents it as claims that are presented as scientific but do not adhere to valid scientific method. Another describes pseudoscience as the misuse of methods that seem scientific in order to undercut real science. In his excellent new book The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, Princeton historian Michael D. Gordin asserts that scientists only apply the label of pseudoscience—which he defines as “doctrines that are non-science but pretend to be, or aspire to be, or are simply mistaken for scientific”—to ideas that they feel are threatening because of their public appeal. It is the way pseudoscience masquerades as real science and is used to attack real science that sets it apart from the easily dismissed claims of cranks and charlatans.

No advocate for an unorthodox perspective ever calls his or her work pseudoscience. This is a term of opprobrium, assigned by scientists who are defending the consensus. Gordin notes that in practice, the term pseudoscience is generally reserved for ideas that are perceived as major challenges to science—especially in the eyes of the public. Less threatening ideas are simply labeled as bad science or non-science, on the assumption that they will self-destruct and be quickly forgotten.

Gordin’s highly readable book ex­amines in detail several twentieth-century examples of pseudoscience. Major emphasis is on the pseudocosmologist Immanuel Velikovsky. His other prime examples are Trofim Lysenko, who nearly destroyed mid-century Russian genetics, and the advocates for Biblical creationism who attempted to establish a scientific basis for a planet less than ten thousand years old. Lysenkoism was a threat be­cause of the personal support given by Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party, which virtually outlawed research that challenged Lysenko and thereby had a strong negative impact on Soviet agriculture. In a sense, Lysenko could be held responsible for the death of millions in the U.S.S.R. The creationist authors who developed “flood geology,” primarily George McCready Price, Henry Morris, and John Whitcomb, have been (and continue to be) a threat because of support by Christian fundamentalists who use these ideas to attack evolutionary biology in particular and science in general. Velikovsky is different, in that he achieved substantial fame and influence on his own merits without the support of any organized religious or political institutions.

Many readers of the Skeptical Inquirer are familiar with the outlines of Velikovsky’s rise and fall. Gordin had access to the complete Velikovsky archives held by Princeton University, which he used to document many details of this story. He places in context the “Velikovsky affair,” which dealt with the opposition to his 1950 book Worlds in Collision. One of many controversies he illuminates is the question whether Velikovsky’s book was reviewed (or refereed) before publication. The fact is that it was reviewed by several scientists who said, in effect, even though it was bunk as science, the book was still likely to be popular enough that its publication would be a sound business decision.

That is exactly what happened. Scien­tists excoriated the book for its obvious failings, but many non-scientist reviewers lavished praise upon it. This deep division between the “two cultures” of science and the humanities came as a shock to many scientists. Velikovsky, while of course pleased that his book rose to the top of the bestseller lists, was also stung by its unanimous condemnation by scientists. He never understood their criticism of planets rapidly shifting orbits within historic time, and he sought their recognition as a bona fide scholar. He did not do this by publishing papers or making presentations at scientific conferences, but rather by courting individual scientists—especially his Princeton neighbor Albert Einstein. These efforts at personal diplomacy were not successful. Scientists immediately recognized that his planetary collisions, and his suggestion that electromagnetism rather than gravitation dominated planetary motions, were (in Einstein’s terms) “crazy.” Velikovsky was simply not speaking the same language as the scientific community.

But this is only half the story. It seemed likely that for all the immediate popularity of his book, he would quickly be forgotten. What makes this story so interesting, what elevates Velikovsky to the rank of true pseudoscientist, was the resurrection of interest in his work during the Vietnam War years, when he became a darling of the counterculture, gaining support among humanist scholars as well as rebellious students. He was invited to speak on campuses, conferences were held to discuss his ideas, and his books again ascended the best-seller charts. Precisely because of his rejection by the scientific community, he became the symbol of the lone scholar defying the conservative establishment.

Gordin also explores the relationships between different pseudoscientists. Superficially, there were striking similarities between Velikovsky and the creationist positions of Price in The New Geology (1923) and Whitcomb and Morris in The Genesis Flood (1961). All rejected the uniformitarian geology of their time. All sought to explain many geological features in terms of recent catastrophic events. And both sides sought evidence to support or verify events in the Old Testament, such as the Noachian flood and the escape of the Israelites from Egypt. Velikovsky began correspondence with Price in 1951, and he sent the manuscript of his second book, Earth in Upheaval, to Price for his comments. Price replied that “While I have not always been able to agree with some of the details. I have admired the handsome way in which you have demolished Charles Lyell as well as [Charles Darwin].” Later in a review, Price described “Earth in Upheaval as one of the most thought-provoking books of modern times.” However, Velikovsky and the creationists soon fell into dispute. Velikovsky sought naturalistic explanations for the Bible stories, while the creationists preferred direct attribution to acts of God. In the end, each side ostracized the other and went its own way, not acknowledging any commonality of ideas.

In his final chapter, Gordin turns to the new phase of pseudoscience, practiced by a few rogue scientists themselves. Climate change denialism is the prime example, where a handful of scientists, allied with an effective PR machine, are publicly challenging the scientific consensus that global warming is real and is due primarily to human consumption of fossil fuels. Scientists have watched in disbelief that as the evidence for global warming has become ever more solid, the deniers have been increasingly successful in the public and political arena. One has only to attend a meeting of atmospheric and climate scientists, such as the December 2012 American Geophysical Union, to appreciate the overwhelming support and increasing sophistication of our understating of human-caused global warming. At this gathering, thousands of scientists made hundreds of presentations of research results, ranging from the minutia of modeling the feedback of cloud formation on the greenhouse effect to documenting the incredible rate of loss of Arctic ice. Leaders of the scientific community made impassioned statements about the threat we face and the necessity for action. Yet outside the halls of science, polls show that half of Americans deny the reality of climate change, while Senator Jim Inhofe recently announced not only that human induced climate change is a hoax, but also boasted, “we have won” in the court of public opinion. Today pseudoscience is still with us, and is as dangerous a challenge to science as it ever was in the past.

Hamlet and his father's Ghost by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825)

More humans have died than you will ever meet, see, or learn about. Since our split from the apes, Earth has been littered with the detritus of human demise—nearly 110 billion bodies. If spirits did live on after death, most of the people you meet will have already met their end.

Every single house on Earth would be haunted by default.

If becoming a ghost were the next stage of life after death, our planet would be absolutely packed with ectoplasm. Earth currently harbors over seven billion human beings, all very much alive. We pack them in skyscrapers and in endless suburbs. But adding another 110 billion souls to the population would make everyone a neighbor. If ghosts could interact with matter, they would need space to haunt, and in the United States, we value our space. If the seven billion humans alive today wanted to live like Americans, they would need over four times the landmass currently available on Earth. By extrapolation, all the haunting space required by ghosts would push that number to 185 times all the landmass on Earth. If ghosts existed, you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one (or it passing through one). Ghost hunter’s thermal cameras would see a blur of reds and blues wherever they looked.

Famous for being able to pass through matter, ghosts might simply pack together instead of being neighbors to everyone on the planet. Just how much space these phantasmal people would require is impossible to determine. How many ghosts could fit on the head of a pin? How many Ghostbusters’ ecto-containment chambers would you need to hold them all?

A new view of death accompanies real-life ghosts. When the body is just a vessel—a way station for the eternal spirit—life is a race to your best self. If ghosts manifest themselves as a picture of the person at the instant they died, old, grotesque ghosts would evaporate. Like how most animals strive to raise their children to reproductive maturity, all humans would occupy this material plane only until they looked however they wanted to look for eternity. Droves of twenty-somethings would commit suicide, seeking to remain young for all time. Billions of Dorian Grays make their pacts with death. Why live until you are old if you are bound to exist in that form forever? “Live fast, die young” is sound advice in a world where ghosts exist.

Carrying on as a ghost taking the last form of the deceased still would be spooky. Unfortunate fetuses and grotesque accident victims would float around with the twenty-something ghosts who had control over their demise. The universe extinguishes the lives of millions of children under the age of five each year. A world where ghosts exist suffers the hauntings of billions of supremely creepy (and presumably naked) baby ghosts.

If you thought the NSA’s spying was bad, a world filled with spooks has no privacy at all. Able to float through walls and haunt at will, each of the 110 billion ghosts is a real-life Santa Claus. They see you when you’re sleeping; they know when you’re awake. They know when you’ve been bad or good; so don’t do anything you wouldn’t want every single ancestor you have to see and judge you on.

The cottage séance industry quickly tanks, because whom your great aunt wants you to marry is a simple haunt away. The sale of ghost hunter tools like EMF detectors and thermal imaging cameras would skyrocket. Knowing when you are truly alone would be big business. And if ghosts do interact through electromagnetic radiation, as hunters claim, we might have to re-think our radio and Wi-Fi systems. Dearly departed grandmothers would mess with our Internet.

Death is no longer a release in a world where ghosts exist. The paranoia that comes from knowing every member of the human race can judge each and every action you take would surely create a new form of PTSD. But being in contact with a dead relative that can phase through walls has its benefits. Every locked door would be effectively transparent. Earth would be filled with 110 billions lenses of truth. The term secret would lose its value.

Depending on ghost “rules,” there might be far fewer than you’d expect. If the only ghosts that remain after death have “unfinished business,” at least it wouldn’t be so crowded. But if even a small percentage of humans were wronged before death, you would have to deal with billions of ornery phantoms—surely enough to make their presence known.

Instead of asking “who you gonna call” every second of every day, there remains no evidence of the life of death. Where there should be billions of ghosts, there are bumbling investigators, specks of dust in camera lenses, and psychologically dubious recollections. We should be swimming in ghastly illusions, so what do you see?

Herbal supplements are big business. In the United States alone, 2011 sales of all herbal products were estimated to be $5.3 billion (Blu­menthal et al. 2012). Meanwhile the industry has managed to maintain a “mom and pop” image to the public, the righteous underdog constantly under attack by Big Pharma. In reality, the herbal product industry is just another drug industry, one selling products that are poorly regulated and likely don’t work for their claimed indications.

There are already a fair number of scientific studies looking at various herbal products for specific indications. There is nothing inherently implausible about the usefulness of plant-based remedies. Many modern drugs are derived from plants. Plant parts contain many substances, some of which are pharmacologically active and can be exploited for medical use.

The deception inherent to the herbal product industry, in my opinion, is the notion that herbs are something other than drugs. This is closely tied to the naturalistic fallacy: the idea that a substance that is “natural” (a poorly defined concept) is somehow magically safe and effective.

In reality, herbs often contain multiple active ingredients that potentially have drug-like activity in the body. These drugs are often poorly understood, may not even be identified, and exist in highly variable doses within herbal products (Wurglics et al. 2001). Herbs have drug-drug interactions and the same potential for side effects and toxicity as any drug, mitigated only by the fact that herbal products generally contain low doses of active ingredients.

Some popular herbal products have been studied in standard placebo-controlled trials, and they have generally not fared well. A recent scientific study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, for example, looked at the drug silymarin for the treatment of liver disease due to chronic hepatitis C that has not responded to standard therapy with interferons (Fried et al. 2012). Silymarin is an extract of milk thistle, an herb commonly used to treat liver disease.

There have now been large, double-blind clinical trials of echinacea and cold symptoms (Barret et al. 2002; Taylor et al. 2003; Turner et al. 2005), Gingko biloba and memory loss or Alzheimer’s disease (Snitz et al. 2009), black cohosh and hot flashes (Newton et al. 2006), saw palmetto and benign prostatic hypertrophy (Tacklind et al. 2009), and others. Even St. John’s Wort, which is supposed to be a big herbal remedy win, has been shown to have no effect on moderate or severe depression (although the jury is still out on minor depressive symptoms; see Hypericum Depression Trial Study Group 2002). Many of these studies were funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).

Despite this string of negative studies, the herbal remedy industry continues to rake in billions of dollars every year. Large, rigorous, and negative studies seem to have little impact on the sales of herbal products overall (although they may affect the relative popularity of specific herbs to some extent).

To make matters worse, in the United States herbal drugs were essentially deregulated in 1994 by the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). Herbs are now regulated more like food rather than drugs. Further, a special category of health claims, so-called structure function claims, was carved out for supplements. Companies can market herbs without any prior approval from the FDA or need to provide evidence of safety or effectiveness. They can even claim that their product supports the structure or function of the body in some way, as long as they don’t mention a specific disease by name. This amounts to a massive loophole easily exploited by any savvy marketer.

The deal that DSHEA and NCCAM made with the public was this: Let the supplement industry have free reign to market untested products with unsupported claims, and then we’ll fund reliable studies to arm the public with scientific information so they can make good decisions for themselves. This “experiment” (really just a gift to the supplement industry) has been a dismal failure.The result has been an explosion of the supplement industry flooding the marketplace with useless products and false claims.

Part of the problem is that negative studies are too easy to dismiss. In every case the supplement industry finds some reason to minimize the implications of the studies showing their products do not work, instead preferring to cherry pick small and unreliable studies with positive results. No study can possibly address every possible permutation of how an herb can be used.

For example, herbal apologists may claim that the dose was not high enough, the wrong part of the plant was used, the preparation was not correct, or the treatment population was wrong in some way. For echinacea they claimed that the wrong cold viruses were used. There is always something they can point to. Of course, this logic works both ways: if it’s so difficult to find the right preparation for the right condition, then how do they justify selling highly variable products to the general population with broad claims?

How are the “traditional” uses of herbal products derived in the first place? The impression that is often given is that centuries of successful traditional use is behind many herbal product claims, but this is often a modern marketing fiction.

It seems reasonable to require manufacturers and marketers of herbal products to prove that their product is safe and effective for whatever it is they claim it treats. Not only is this not required under DSHEA, companies can continue to market their herbs with claims that have been contradicted by major scientific studies funded by taxpayer dollars.

As with many things, the marketing of herbal products is largely based on ideology and a compelling narrative rather than actual science and evidence. For the most part consumers are left to their own devices to sort out which products are likely to be useful.

Finally, keep in mind that if an herbal product contains a useful active ingredient, it would likely be identified, purified, and properly studied. The best result is likely to come from taking a precisely measured amount of a specific active ingredient with known pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics as well as drug-drug interactions.

Herbs are not only drugs, they are a mixture of various drugs of unknown dose, activity, and interactions, often with evidence that they do not work. It takes effective marketing to convince the public this is somehow better than taking highly purified and studied pharmaceuticals.

References

Barrett, B.P., R.L. Brown, K. Locken, et al. 2002. Treatment of the common cold with unrefined echinacea: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Annals of Internal Medicine 137(12): 939–946.

Blumenthal, M., A. Lindstrom, C. Ooyen, et al. 2012. Herb supplement sales increase 4.5% in 2011. HerbalGram 95: 60–64. Online at http://cms.herbalgram.org/herbalgram/issue95/hg95-mktrpt.html.

Fried, M.W., V.J. Navarro, N. Afdhal, et al. 2012. Effect of silymarin (milk thistle) on liver disease in patients with chronic hepatitis C unsuccessfully treated with interferon therapy, a randomized controlled trial. Journal of the American Medical Association 308(3): 274–282. doi:10.1001/jama.2012.8265.

Hypericum Depression Trial Study Group. 2002. Effect of Hypericum perforatum (St John’s Wort) in major depressive disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of the American Medical Association 287(14): 1807–14.

Newton, K.M., S.D. Reed, A.Z. LaCroix, et al. Treatment of vasomotor symptoms of menopause with black cohosh, multibotanicals, soy, hormone therapy, or placebo: A randomized trial. Annals of Internal Medicine 145(12): 869–79.

Snitz, B.E., E.S. O’Meara, M.C. Carlson, et al. 2009. Ginkgo biloba for preventing cognitive decline in older adults: A randomized trial. Journal of the American Medical Association 302(24): 2663–2670. doi:10.1001/jama.2009.1913.

Tacklind, J., R. MacDonald, I. Rutks, et al. 2009. Serenoa repens for benign prostatic hyperplasia. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (April 15) (2):CD001423. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD001423.pub2.

Taylor, J.A., W. Weber, L. Standish, et al. 2003. Efficacy and safety of echinacea in treating upper respiratory tract infections in children: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of the American Medical Association 290(21): 2824–2830.

Turner, R.B., R. Bauer, K. Woelkart, et al. 2005. An evaluation of Echinacea angustifolia in experimental rhinovirus infections. New England Journal of Medicine 353(4): 341–348.

Wurglics, M., K. Westerhoff, A. Kaunzinger, et al. 2001. Comparison of German St. John’s Wort products according to hyperforin and total hypericin content. Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association (Wash) 41(4): 560–66.

I recently uncovered rampant plagiarism in a HarperCollins title The Element Encyclopedia of Vampires: An A–Z of the Undead, “written” (more accurately “cut-and-pasted-from-the-Internet”) by Theresa Cheung. The full article on my investigation appears in the current (July/August 2013) issue of Skeptical Inquirer, on newsstands now. I included how I discovered it, my findings, and the publisher’s response, as well as several examples of the plagiarism in Cheung’s book, but there was not enough space in the magazine to print all, or even most, of the cases I found. What follows are more examples.

Example 1: Gelnhausen entry (pp. 252–253)

Virtually all of Cheung’s material appears to have been plagiarized nearly verbatim from the book The Natural History of the Vampire, by Anthony Masters (1972), via the website http://www.shroudeater.com/cgelnh.htm.

Here is the original, written by Masters (1972):

“To put an end to her torture she finally confessed to all these crimes, but no sooner had she been taken off the rack, she claimed to be innocent. So she was tortured again until she made the following confession: ‘For the last forty years she had fornicated with countless devils that had visited her in the shape of cats, dogs, fleas and worms; that she had murdered over two hundred and forty people; had given birth to about seventeen children conceived by her devil lovers, had murdered them, eaten them and drunk their blood. This time, Clara had no chance to retract her confession, because she died when she was taken off the rack.... The judicial report concluded: ‘The devil would not let her reveal anything more and so wrung her neck.’ On August 23, 1597, her corpse was burned.”

Here is the entry as written by Cheung (2010):

Cheung: “She was tortured in the most ghastly manner in order to get her to confess, but no sooner had she been taken off the rack she claimed to be innocent. So she was tortured again until she had confessed to consorting with the Devil, who visited her in the shape of cats, dogs, and worms. She also confessed to giving birth to somewhere in the region of 17 children (the exact number is unclear) conceived with her devil lovers, murdering them, and drinking their blood. This time, Clara had no chance to retract her confession, because she died when she was taken off the rack. The judicial report concluded: ‘The devil would not let her reveal anything more and so wrung her neck.’ On August 23, 1597, her corpse was burned.”

Example 2: Goths entry (pp. 264–265)

This entry seems to have been plagiarized near-verbatim from the website Answers.com: http://www.answers.com/topic/gothic-8#ixzz1EFfQu4BM

Here is the original as it appears on the website:

A: “the gothic counter-cultural movement that appeared in most urban centers of the West during the 1980s. The movement’s origins can be traced to late 1970s musical groups in the United Kingdom . It certainly also had its direct precursors in such bands as Black Sabbath and the punk rock music of the 1970s. Possibly the most prominent of those groups was Bauhaus, a rock band formed in 1978. In the following year, the band released the single “Bela Lugosi's Dead,” their most popular recording to date. The song was picked up in 1983 for use in the opening sequence of the film version of Whitley Strieber's The Hunger. Bauhaus was soon joined by such groups as Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cult, The Cure, and The Sisters of Mercy. Together these bands created a variant music called gothic rock or death rock. A circuit of music clubs, most notably The Bat Cave in London, opened to provide a stage for their performances.”

Here is the entry as written by Cheung (2010):

B. “The word ‘Goth’ was applied to adherents of a counter-cultural movement that appeared in most urban centers in the West in the 1980s. The origins of the Goth movement can be traced back to bands and nightclubs in the United Kingdom during the waning years of the punk movement in the late 1970s. Perhaps the most significant of these bands was Bauhaus, a gothic rock band formed in 1978 who released in 1979 the single ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead.’ Bauhaus was joined by other bands including: The Cult, The Cure, The Sisters of Mercy, and Siouxsie and the Banshees who often played in a London nightclub aptly named The Bat Cave.”

Example 3: Ekimmu entry (pp. 207–208)

This entry seems to have been plagiarized from Rosemary Ellen Guiley’s book The Encyclopedia of Vampires, Werewolves, and Other Monsters (2005):

1A: “In Babylonian and Assyrian demonology, the restless spirit of the dead that is denied entry to the underworld, and so is doomed to prowl the earth.” (Guiley 2005, 117)

1B: “Found among the ancient Assyrians and Sumerians, the ekimmu were vampire-like creatures believed to be the restless spirits or souls of dead people denied entry to the underworld and so doomed to wander the earth forever....” (Cheung 2010, 207)

2A: “Ekimmu means ‘that which is snatched away.’ One became an ekimmu by dying a violent or unsavory death, such as by murder, in battle, drowning, or succumbing to exposure in the desert, which left the corpse unburied. An ekimmu also is created due to lack of burial, improper burial, and lack of proper attention by the living, especially concerning the leaving of food and liquids intended to sustain the spirit on its journey to the underworld.” (Guiley 2005, 117)

2B: “Ekimmu means ‘that which is snatched away,’ and there were a number of ways that a corpse could become an ekimmu, including violent death; incorrect burial rites or no burial at all; lack of proper attention to the dead by the living, especially concerning the leaving of food and drink to sustain the spirit on its journey to the underworld” (Cheung 2010, 207)

Example 4: Strigoii entry (p. 560)

Cheung has also apparently copied some of her entry on the Strigoii from this webpage: http://www.mythicalcreaturesguide.com/page/The+Strigoii (accessed March 4, 2011)

1A: “The Strigoii might drink blood, but more often they ate normal food (as did the Moroii). However, rather than drinking blood or vital fluids, they could draw the energy from another person by a kind of osmosis, leaving them weak and sickly and helpless. Besides attacking people, the Strigoii spread disease...” (Mystical Creatures Guide)

1B: “The strigoii could drink blood but more often than not they preferred to eat normal food. However, rather than drinking blood or other vital fluids, they could draw energy from a person by a kind of osmosis, leaving them weak and helpless. As well as attacking people they could spread disease.” (Cheung 2010, 560)

Join the investigation!

If you would like to join this investigation, get a copy of The Element Encyclopedia of Vampires: An A–Z of the Undead (either used or from a library if you wish), and choose three or four random entries. Pick a dozen potentially unique or rare phrases or short sentences from the entry, and then enter them in an Internet search. If you find a match, see if the words and sentences before and after it were also copied, and if they are, carefully note the source and URL. Participants can e-mail me at bradford@centerforinquiry.net with their findings.

In the fall of my junior year at college, the investigation into the crash of TWA 800 was still underway. I was spending the year in Toledo, Spain and living with a local family as an exchange student. It was an election year, 1996, the end of Clinton’s first term. I was not a Clinton fan. During one of my calls back home, I talked to a family member whose client was an executive at TWA, which was based in my hometown of St. Louis. And my family member told me that this client said that after the election it was going to come out that a training missile had taken down TWA Flight 800. But only after the election.

I mentioned this conversation in passing to fellow exchange student, who I will call Joe. In September, I voted in my first presidential election for Bob Dole by mail-in ballot at the US Embassy in Madrid. (I often wonder who that kid was. Surely not me!) In December, we were locked out of our dormitory, so I spent the winter backpacking through Europe. In January, the students reassembled in Toledo for the spring semester. We swapped stories of our travels and Joe took me aside and said, “When was back home, my dad told me that the day after the election, there were reports that TWA 800 was shot down by a training missile, and I immediately thought of what you told me.” I felt that I had peered into some secret vault; that I had inside knowledge of nefarious doings of a president I did not particularly like. And damn it, I was right; what I believed had been independently confirmed and verified. It was, as the phrase goes, a slam dunk.

After I became interested in conspiracy theory professionally, I revisited my old theory; that TWA had been taken down by a missile, the one that I KNEW was true. I contacted my buddy, Joe. He didn’t remember having that conversation with me. I contacted my relative who originally told me the story. He had no idea what I was talking about.

On the evening of July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747, took off from JFK airport en route to Paris. The flight, which was originally scheduled for an 8:00PM take off, was delayed a half hour. A few minutes into the flight, the aircraft exploded, snapping the plane into two large parts, roughly separating the cockpit from the fuselage. Two-hundred and thirty people died. As planes generally don’t simply explode, considering that the Atlanta Olympics were scheduled to start on the 19, and given reports of a vague threat of terrorism by a Saudi group (sent in, charmingly, by fax), terrorism was a distinct possibility. Add to this that within the first two days of the investigation, at least a hundred eyewitness reported seeing a “flare” or “streak” rising to hit the plane (later attributed to an optical illusion caused by the rear of the plane staying aloft slightly longer than the cockpit) and reports that an unidentified blip on radar appeared slightly before the plane lost contact, according to a LexisNexis Academic broadcast transcript search, a missile was one the several possibilities being discussed on television. The hypothesis appeared in print as early as July 19 in the Washington Times. On July 21, the Sunday Times reported that:

“For the first 48 hours of the investigation, the FBI focused on two main lines of inquiry: a missile or a bomb. Pentagon officials were sceptical that a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile could have brought down the 747, however. Both the American Stinger and the Russian SA-14 Gremlin require considerable training to use with any accuracy. Their maximum range is 15,000ft and to have any chance of hitting an aircraft, a terrorist would need a stable platform such as a large boat. None was seen in the vicinity.”

On July 24, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story entitled: “SCENARIO OF A MISSILE ATTACK: A DIFFICULT SHOT, BUT POSSIBLE.”

Over the next four months, the salvage operation dredged up 95% of the aircraft, a remarkable achievement, and the aircraft had been reassembled in a hanger on shore. The reconstructed craft showed that the explosion had begun in the fuel tank. The remnants of TWA 800 are used to this day in training new crash investigators. According to Newsweek:

Minute residues of explosives were found on some of the wreckage; they turned out to have been left on the plane before the crash, when the jet was used in a drill for explosive-sniffing dogs.

On November 5, 1996, Bill Clinton was reelected to a second term as President, much to the chagrin of my weird, twenty-year old self.

On November 7, 1996, according Reuters (and reprinted in the Globe and Mail), former Kennedy advisor and ABC 20-year ABC foreign correspondent Pierre Salinger, who was speaking to airline executives in Cannes, France, accused the US Navy of firing a training missile at the airliner. The paper reported:

Mr. Salinger told airline officials that an agent of the U.S. Secret Service gave him a document in Paris showing that TWA Flight 800 had entered an area where the U.S. Navy was carrying out missile tests.

On November 9, 1996, The Washington Times reported that had Salinger retracted his accusation:

One-time network TV correspondent Pierre Salinger, who commanded world attention as President Kennedy's spokesman, admitted yesterday he used old Internet files as "evidence" that a U.S. military missile shot down TWA Flight 800 by accident.

[...]

Mr. Salinger would not show reporters in Cannes, France, the two-page document he said he received five weeks ago, but the facts he cited matched exactly a report found by The Washington Times posted Sept. 18 on an Internet site called "cloaks-and-daggers."

In that scenario, the Boeing 747, flying unexpectedly low, was hit by an errant missile guided by the Navy's Aegis system - the type that downed an Iranian airliner in 1988 - fired from a Navy ship out of Norfolk in "Warning Area W-105" off the Long Island, N.Y., coast.

A few days later, on November 17, the Washington Times traced Salinger’s rumor back of a missile back to its earliest incarnation:

Although he maintains he is right, Mr. Salinger concedes his source was an unnamed Frenchman. He also allows that he himself was photographed holding up the message on the letterhead of a Landover software firm called L-Soft. The firm has sold thousands of Listserv devices that it claims deliver 11 million electronic messages a day from Web sites.

What Mr. Salinger had was a download from L-Soft's discussion forum (http://www.lsoft.com), a site with something over 200 participants speculating on various theories about the plane crash.

The large L-Soft logo is automatically added to messages downloaded from its free forum, where a visitor finds the information by searching for "flight-800."

"I think this list is where he got it from," L-Soft marketing executive John Karpovich told The Washington Times.

The story went back even further, as the Times reported. The day after Salinger made his accusations, a writer at EmergencyNet-News.com traced the story cited by Salinger to its point of entry onto the Net, a writer named “Parveez Syad" or "Parveez Hussein,” who they accused of being an Iranian disinfo propagandist, though he denied that claim. The original report, dated July 24, 1996, and with unnamed French intelligence sources and all, can be read in its entirety at the twf.org website.

How should we, then, evaluate the new testimony by former NTSB employees that there was a cover-up, allegations that appear in a new film (which will premiere on July 17, classily on the anniversary of the crash)? It will have to account for all of the data in the 50,000 page crash report.

The more important question, of course, is how should we evaluate my brain? Well, it seems that all of the elements of the conspiracy theory that I believed were out on the Internet well before the election. To be fair, that year in Spain I had limited access to the Internet; the only way we could check our email that was to buy time on a PC at a private computer retailer’s. Nonetheless, the elements were all there even before I left the country. As vividly as I remember hearing the story before the election, and as much as it seemed to come true with Salinger’s statements, and as strange as it still sounds and feels to me, I have to dismiss my memories. Because, really, what’s more likely, that I heard the story repeated by Salinger which jibed with the theories I would have heard before I went to Spain, and fabricated a memory that confirmed my distrust of the president, and being in Spain that I never heard the sound debunking of the conspiracy theory? Or that the final report, which concluded that an electrical fire in the fuel tank initiated the blast, is a fiction, the wreckage that is used as a teaching tool for investigators is tainted, and that all of the other experts, including 500 FBI agents, police, Coast Guard, and the military personal who would have fired or seen the fateful missile fired were all lying, with never a single leak? It seems clear. All the evidence suggests that at twenty-years old, I was a moron, and without evidence to the contrary I have no excuse to doubt that.

Next they’ll tell me I never met Bugs Bunny at Disney World.

Sources

Adams, James and Nick Rufford. “Sea gives up clues to the fate of flight 800.” The Sunday Times. 21 July 1996.

Gertz, Bill. “Possible terrorism probed in jet crash; President discourages speculation.” The Washington Times. 19 July 1996: A1.

Grunwald, Michael. “FBI Role in TWA Case Draws Senate Scrutiny.” The Washington Post. 26 Nov 1998: A01.

McKenna, James T. "NTSB Re-interviews Flight 800 Witnesses.” Aviation Week and Space Technology 150.20 (May 1999): 58.

“Missile Hit Flight 800, TWA Told.” The Globe and Mail. 8 Nov 1996: A2.

Murray, Frank J. “How Salinger Got Tangled in TWA-crash Web; Iranian May Be Source of Navy Missile Rumors.” The Washington Times. 17 Nov 1996: A3.

Ruane, Michael E. “Scenario of a Missile Attack: A Difficult Shot, but Possible.” The Philadelphia Inquirer. 24 July 1996: A01.

Underwood, Anne. “What Brought down TWA Flight 800?” Newsweek. Nov 1996 (Winter 1997): 42.

Think hard by Mutiara Karina

A neuron fires. Then another. An electrochemical cascade surges across your cerebral cortex. If we had brain scanners advanced enough, we could tell that this neuronal thunderstorm was the result of an intense focusing on a brand new Bentley. The vibrations emanate from your head and the universe feels them. It responds in kind. In no time at all, you have a new car. You thank the universe for manifesting your wish. The law of attraction proves itself again.

If The Secret weren’t a secret but a reality, “attractiveness” would take on an altogether different meaning. Like degrees of physical attractiveness, everyone would have a degree of mental ability to manifest anything they desired. Shoes, cars, diamonds, lovers, outcomes, anything. If brain waves could really make it out of the head and into some cosmic crucible of creation, neurology would be radically transformed (not to mention that it would become the most groundbreaking science in history). Probing the inner workings of the brain would no longer require invasive surgery or less precise EEG technology. If the universe could hear your thoughts, so could Dr. Novella.

Birthdays would be decidedly more boring. When anyone can simply think themselves a present, you would really have to “keep Christ in Christmas,” because there wouldn’t be much else. Throngs of expectant children would sit on Christmas morning rapt in contemplation until that Red Ryder BB gun finds its way under the tree. “Black Friday” and “cyber Monday” wouldn’t be spent in enormous lines or on heavily loaded servers but in moments of extreme visualization.

If intense mental focus and desire did sent out a requisition form to the universe, men would be plagued with embarrassing deliveries. Those men who actually did think about sex every seven seconds would surely ruin a few brunches. Visualizing pornography would manifest millions of confused, and nude, actors.

When your spending is limited only by imagination, fashion loses the true meaning of the term. No longer can one establish class by the clothes and accessories one can afford. It’s a liberating, if a bit bland, turn of events. The intense request for the finer things in life would stress production lines around the world. Why Bentley and Rolex ramped up production would be a mystery to them, though the final owners of each product would be known to the cosmos. Oprah was right about one thing: if the law of attraction worked, “everyone gets a car!”

The universe works in mysterious ways, or so The Secret says. All cosmic deliveries would be serendipitous surprises. Delivery trucks around the world would always be driven by coincidence and whim. “Oh, you wanted this Armani suit? I just happen to have a free one here in my truck! Lucky you!” No one can track their orders from the universe, but at least they get there.

Of course, everyone is famous when you can think anything into being. Celebrity would become meaningless, with everyone famous for no reason. Seven billion Kardashians.

Money seems pointless when anything can be birthed from your brain, to the stars, and to your front door. How hard something is to visualize is now the global value system. A sandwich? Two minutes of moderate focus. A promotion? Two weeks.

There is a dark side to a world where thinking is doing. Every accident, every illness, every misfortune is either the result of negative thinking or insufficient positive thinking. Cancer patients with a poor prognosis do not want a cure enough. Starving African children need to start visualizing some roast beef and gravy but don’t. Can’t escape poverty? It’s your fault for poor mental imagery. The ghetto got you down? Blame yourself for not asking the universe for more. “Be positive” isn’t a recommendation, it’s a requirement. You have no right to be without wealth or opportunity. Visualize it!

If the law of attraction were the norm, so would blaming the victim.

The calculus of contemplation is bad enough. The universe would have to arbitrate between what would surely be millions of similar requests for fame or fortune. Who gets the Bentley? Maybe it comes down to who wanted it more. But this still means that the medical patient that didn’t get better didn’t want enough to get better. The universe works in mysterious ways, unless you want a new cocktail dress; then you just have to think really hard about it.

Crime is another conundrum in a world where attraction doesn’t describe magnetism or sex. How does one solve a murder that was visualized? CSI would have to be outfitted with the latest in neurotechnology. Minority Report-style pre-cogs would need to be brought in to determine when a dirty deed would be visualized and when. The violation of privacy today is nothing compared to when the FBI and IRS needs a record of what you thought about in the last six months.

Instead of thoughts venturing outside the brain to call the customer service of the cosmos, wealth, material gain, and inequality are accounted for by things we can’t control—parents, date of birth, genetics, environment, and a bit of luck. “Life coaches” can advise a serious visualization regiment that seems to work because affluent, white, western people have the opportunities to get what they desire. Meanwhile, the philosophy of “attraction” easily rationalizes the needless suffering of millions now and millions to come. The world would be a glut of wealth and fame and instant gratification if The Secret were no secret. What do you see?

Elise Andrew is a U.K. blogger, social media specialist, science communicator, and webmaster. She is the founder and maintainer of the Facebook page “I F****** Love Science,” which as of June 2013, has 5.6 million likes. She also runs the mirror page “Science is Awesome,” with posts that are usually links to news of new discoveries or theories, light-hearted re-posts of science-related images and cartoons. She will be presenting in Australia for ScienceWeek on August 12th at an event called IFLSLive / IFLSOz. This will feature a number of scientists and science communicators in conjunction with Science Alert at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

Kylie Sturgess: Firstly, Elise, how did your career in science start? Have you always been “effing in love with science”?

Elise: No, actually. Completely not at all! I don’t know what it was. Maybe it just wasn’t taught in the right way or maybe the emphasis wasn’t placed on it, but I studied science because I was good at it. Taking science was a purely practical decision for me. A STEM degree seemed the best way to get a good job to end up in a field that I enjoyed.

It was purely practical. I didn’t go on to get so excited about it until I went to university, where obviously they encourage a lot more research, a lot more self-learning. You manage to get your teeth into it. You learn so much more and I remember sitting there in lectures, thinking, “Wow. This is so cool. How is it possible that everybody else is just walking around out there in their lives without knowing all this cool stuff?”

That was when it completely began for me, when I went to university. I feel so lucky that I did that, because I look back on it and I almost cringe in fear at how close I came to never discovering all of this.

Kylie: What’s the journey with I F****** Love Science been like? From media interviews, for example, I’ve noticed that you’ve said you’ve got an incredibly open platform, you get to see the best and worst of people. Is it always extremes?

Elise: No, it’s not, of course. Of course not. The problem is the extremes stand out always, whether it’s the great or whether it’s the horrible people. I get so many amazing messages every single day from amazing people telling me that they’re in their forties and my Facebook page has made them decide to go back to school.

I got a message from one woman who said that she was saving all of my best posts into a scrapbook. That she’d just had a baby and she was going to give the scrapbook to the baby when it was old enough to read to encourage it to love science right from the start.

Yeah, I get so many amazing messages from people. Then at the same time I get so many horrendous, terrifying messages from people. While neither of those categories are really in the majority, it’s still absolutely what stand out in your mind. It’s impossible to have it not.

A message I got the other day—I don’t know if you saw, but I posted something about conspiracy theories. There’s a certain conspiracy theory that’s been publicized by an English guy named David Icke, which is that the world is secretly controlled by lizard people.

Kylie: Oh, yes…

Elise: I didn’t even mention David Icke at all. I just mentioned the fact that four percent of Americans seriously believe that the world is controlled by lizard people. I got the most insane [abusive] message about it. Anyone that messages like that, I ignore anyway, but that is what sticks in your mind and that is what you remember. When you look through the IFLS comments, there are some really inane, really silly stuff, and that is what sticks in your mind.

Kylie: How did the journey begin? How did you first think about starting up a Facebook page?

Elise: I don’t know if I even really did. I was at university. I was in my final year, and ever since I first went to university, I’ve always been so, “Oh, this is so cool, I just want to shout it to the world, I want to tell everyone!”

So I used to post it on my personal page. I’ve always loved silly humor and silly science jokes and random facts. All the stuff that’s on IFLS is really just the inside of my own brain. That’s what I’ve always called it. It’s what I’m finding interesting that day. There’s no more thought or curation to it than that. It is literally... “This is the paper I’ve read today. This is the joke I’ve laughed at today. This is the picture or the photograph I think is beautiful today.” It’s just all the sh** that I think is cool.

I used to put it all on my personal Facebook page. One day a friend of mine popped up and said, “You’re always posting this stuff. Why don’t you make a page? Would that not be a better idea? Then that way people can subscribe to it if they want to and you don’t have to spam them all the time with all this science stuff.”

I said, yeah, OK, that sounds like a good idea. Why not? I’ll do that. I uploaded all the content I’d been posting to my personal page and I just went to bed. The day after, I had a thousand followers. It just took off right away.

Kylie: Wow. Incredible. Your email inbox must be absolutely astounding then, with all the photos that you get.

Elise: My email inbox is kind of a scary place at times!

Kylie: I guess one of the things about science communication is people worry about whether or not there’s an interest beyond the products of science to actual communication in civic science or promoting critical thinking.

For example—love of science may not actually translate to “having science information that influences me when I make a decision,” particularly when they’re decisions that might be based on factors like emotion or culture. Or people often worry that such sites encourage, “Oh, yeah, I cheerlead for science, but only when it doesn’t conflict with my other values.”

So—when does it actually translate into action that makes a difference in the world? How do you know that the I F****** Love Science page is making a difference in the world?

Elise: No, you are absolutely right. Everyone f****** loves science until it gets round to debunking their own personal bull**** belief! I think it’s important to remember that the scientific community isn’t immune to that. We’re all prone to confirmation bias, whether we like it or not.

I think the difference is that people who are scientifically literate often—not always—often have the ability to acknowledge that and take steps to prevent it. So I think it really comes down to education, and you’ve just got to keep pushing it at people. It is true that there are always going to be a certain population of people who say they are fans of things, but that fanship doesn’t really go that deep. You get that in everything. You get that in absolutely everything.

There will always been some, and even if that percentage is tiny, who do take it further. And I get messages from people every single day who show me that they do. That’s the great thing about reaching that many people. I think 5.6 million people subscribe to that page.

That page reached 60 million people a week. Even if only one percent of those 5.6 million go beyond, reading my latest article or sharing a funny joke—even if just one percent, that’s still 50,000 people I’ve influenced in the last year. I don’t think that’s bad going for someone who’s twenty-three and a year out of university! It could be worse! I mean, I do absolutely see what you’re saying. But I think it’s important to just...oh, I had a whole thing to say about this, and I’ve just lost it in my head now.

Kylie: It’s tough because if it’s something you’re really passionate about and then suddenly people start turning around and saying, “Yes, but it’s a job,” and you go, “Well, it didn’t actually start out like that…” I can understand the hesitation…

Elise: I don’t know. I did have something in my head, but I’ve completely lost it, so maybe it will come back to me. If it comes back to me, I’ll just completely interrupt what I’m saying in a minute or two!

Kylie: Well, one thing that people ask is if more pseudoscience will be debunked on the site, or where’s more dinosaurs, more physics, more this and that? Do you think that there is a direction that I F****** Love Science will go in?

Elise: No, I really hope not, because I think that’s what the problem is. Oh, now I’ve remembered what I wanted to go into now, so this works into it quite nicely! I think what you get is that the problem is that science is such a broad field. I think sometimes you forget that science covers so much. We all have our own specific interests. Anyone who says that they love all science equally, most of the time, they’re full of sh**. Everybody has their own specific field that they’re interested in.

For me, it’s biology. It’s always going to be biology. That’s what I studied, that’s what my first love is, that’s what I hope to go back and do my PhD in some day. Evolutionary biology, ecology, genetics.

I have to take physical steps sometimes to prevent myself from posting about that too much. I have to look at it and think, “OK, I’ve done three biology stories today. I really need to go and look for something else!”

So everybody has what they want to be featured. They want dinosaurs, they want physics, they want space, they want this, they want that. But the point of IFLS isn’t just to give you what you want. It’s to give you new things that might interest you that you might want to go and learn about. So I really try really, really hard to keep it as general as it’s possible to be.

I don’t want it to be all about jokes, but I don’t want it to be all about information, either. I don’t want it to be all about physics. I want it to be about everything, so everybody’s got something on there that is for them, that works for them. Even if the rest of it isn’t, maybe, it can open you up to new things.

Going back, sorry—I really feel that the role of a science communicator today isn’t necessarily to teach people. I know that sounds really strange, but I feel that on IFLS, I’m not necessarily trying to teach anyone anything. I just want to open them up to how much there is to be taught and how much there is to learn, because as I found out for myself at university, nobody enjoys learning if it’s something they’ve got to do.

You go to school and it’s something you’ve got to do and it’s not fun. It’s only when you start learning for yourself and start exploring that you start enjoying it and start really feeling it. That’s what I’m really trying to do on IFLS, because if you want to learn about science, there’s so much out there. There’s full online courses you can take. People upload entire lecture series to YouTube. There’s textbooks you can download, there’s documentaries, everything you can do completely for free, things that twenty years ago would never have been possible. It doesn’t even occur to most people to go and check those things out, because science is to them something that, when they were a kid, or when they were in school, it got stuck in their head that science is hard and science is boring, and science is not for them.

So I’m not necessarily trying to teach people on IFLS, but I am trying to just pique their interest a bit and show them that it’s not as exclusive. It’s not this old boys’ club with old men sitting around stroking their white beards, talking about how clever they are.

Science is amazing and it’s f****** interesting and you should want to go and learn about it. That’s why I link to different sources and show them different things—there’s YouTube, there’s this website, there’s that website.

I try really hard not to overly rely on one source for example, even though there’s some that I’m overly keen about. I’m always trying to link people to all these different ideas and all these different places on the Internet. I recommend the science page of the week or different places they can go. That’s what I think is really important about it. I’m never going to teach people promotion of critical thinking or translating scientific information that influences me and blah, blah, blah, blah… But I can open people up to everything that’s out there—and then they’ll go and do that themselves, because the best education is always self-education, but you have to pique their interest to get there.

You have to get them to realize, “You know, this is actually pretty cool. I want to know more about this random fact that’s come across my desk on this Facebook page. This was really interesting. I’m going to follow this link that she linked to and I’m going to learn more about this today.”

Absolutely not everyone does, I completely accept that. Like I said earlier, even if it’s just 1 percent, even if it’s 10 percent, even if it’s just 1 percent, even if it’s just half a percent that actually do that? To me that’s a win.

You post a Carl Sagan quote and it’ll get 10,000 shares and of that, maybe... Like I said, 1 percent, 10 percent, 5 percent—I have no idea what the numbers are—but they’ll go and look up the YouTube series! I’ll link to Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” on YouTube and they’ll go and watch. They’ll go and learn more, and they’ll start on that journey.

So that’s just what I’m trying to do; I’m just trying to push people along on that journey a little bit, just give them a little shove.

I’m like, “This is seriously cool. You should go and look at this; you should go and learn about this. Not because you have to, not because someone’s forcing you to, but because it’s f****** cool and you should want to.” The rest of it just goes on its own.

Kylie: Definitely. Well, speaking of effing awesome, have you been to Australia before, and what do you hope for the “I F****** Love Science Live” an evening celebrating science event?

Elise: I have never been to Australia before, so I’m super excited. I’m so grateful to Chris, of Science Alert, for making this happen, because Australia has always been somewhere I’ve wanted to go. As a biologist, the ecosystems and the animals...the Great Barrier Reef, I mean, that’s a biologist’s wet dream, isn’t it, really?

Kylie: Definitely!

Elise: Of all the places in the world, I think if you were to ask any biologist the places they want to visit, it would be the Amazon rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef. This is an absolute dream come true. I’m so excited.

As for what I’m hoping to get out of it, I don’t really know. I’ve done a couple of these meet-ups before. What I love about them is the level of excitement you feel in the air. It’s people who are genuinely so excited about this stuff. They’re so enthusiastic, and they feel just as strongly as I do. I love that. I love connecting with people who feel the same way I do about this stuff, who want to jump around like, this is so cool! I love this!

To meet people like that and to connect with people like that is really, really exciting for me.

“I F****** Love Science” and mirror page “Science Is Awesome” can both be found on Facebook.

Let's be honest for a second; skeptics are oddballs. The level of rational thought skeptics demand of themselves and others is categorically aberrant. Skeptics proudly adorn themselves in science t-shirts understood by less than ten percent of the population. (We all know that at least one skeptic just thought, “What was the sample size of that study?”) A skeptic is more likely to get starstruck by Bill Nye than Johnny Depp. It should be a surprise to no one when skeptics congregate at conferences, the conversations and talks are nothing short of extraordinary with one-liners that cannot be found anywhere else. Not convinced? Keep reading.

SkeptiCal 2013 will serve as our case study. Nearly 200 skeptics gathered to discuss the favorite topics: UFOs, evidence, paranormal investigation, hoaxes, and magic. Speakers included Eugenie Scott, D.J. Grothe, Julia Galef, Jill Tarter, Laurie Issel-Tarver, and Anthony Pratkanis.

Perfectly Polite Wart Examination

“Randi has a lot of warts; we checked.” - Tyler Measom

James Randi was supposed to make an appearance via Skype at the conference but he fell ill. Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein filled in for him. Measom and Weinstein are the filmmakers of the film, “An Honest Liar,” a documentary about James Randi. They were explaining the negotiation between Randi and themselves about telling Randi's story. James Randi demanded that if they were going to make a documentary, it could not just be a fluff piece; it had to tell his story, warts and all.

Baby, You Sure Have a Cute Jaw

“This totally adorable mandible.” - Eugenie C. Scott

To illustrate the difference between legends, hoaxes, pranks, and frauds, Dr. Scott brought up the Piltdown Man. Piltdown Man describes a collection of bones found in England in 1912 once thought to be a primate relative of humans. Even thought it was met with suspicion by many scientists at first, it took over forty years to prove it was a hoax made of human skull bones and lower jaw of an orangutan. During the talk, Dr. Scott referenced other findings that discredited Piltdown Man, including the first Australopithecus africanus skull discovered: the “Taung Child,” the skull of a child approximately six years old. Dr. Scott brought recreations of both Piltdown Man and Taung Child and showed them to the audience to explain how the Piltdown Man hoax was created and why the Taung Child was more credible. As she lifted the mandible, she smiled and commented in the way only an anthropologist can, about the cuteness of the lower jaw.

You Can Fool Yourself

“A bet is a tax on bullshit.” - Julia Galef (quoting Nate Silver)

In her talk about heuristics, Galef introduced the audience to different ways to train their brain in order to consider things differently. The easiest method was to place a bet. When asked a question, we can come up with an instinctual answer. However we can assess how confident our rational mind is by placing a monetary bet (even just in our mind) on our answer.

Just an Earthling

“I'm just trying to spread the meme of earthling.” - Dr. Jill Tarter

Dr. Jill Tarter is a SETI researcher and she realizes the burden of proof will be high if she ever needs to convince the world that she found evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Her candid talk about the potential evidentiary shortcomings eventually wove its way to the choices facing earth's inhabitants if an intelligent life form is found in the universe. Tarter thinks a discovery of an outside intelligence would stir people to think of themselves as earthlings and she promotes an earthling perspective while we wait.

The Mineral Man

“He thought he could detect gold perfectly.” - Jay Diamond

Jerry Schwartz, Leonard Tramiel, and Jay Diamond shared their experience investigating a paranormal claim. Their claimant, a man who believes has many different supernatural powers, wanted to claim their group's $50,000 prize by proving he could detect gold using a dousing rod. Before the preliminary test, after many hours of fair negotiation, he pulled out. In an act of incredible integrity, he confessed that he did some testing himself and found he could not reach the bar set by the upcoming experiment.

Pirates and Fraudsters

Imagine you were in Disneyland on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. You look around at all the pirates, hear the music, experience the trappings. You get swept up in the ride, singing along to the songs. Now imagine someone could see you but not the trappings of the ride. You'd look crazy. - Anthony Pratkanis [paraphrased]

Professor and fraud researcher Anthony Pratkanis enthusiastically described how fraudsters prey on people, the myths about fraud victims, and explained why the myths are wrong. He also tackled the common line; how did they get taken for so much money? He explained that it is hard to understand the experience from the outside. It is similar to watching someone on Pirates of the Caribbean but without being able to see the ride.

Magical Shooting

“Are you willing to potentially shoot a man in the face with a paintball gun?” - Ryan Kane

Magician Ryan Kane called out for volunteers in the audience to help him with his finale. When a volunteer threw his hand up, he asked him directly about his willingness to take up arms. Luckily for Kane, the trick went off as planned and no one's face was pelted with a paint-filled projectile.

Such diverse and curious comments cannot be found in any other group. The wide breadth of topics under the skeptical umbrella and the intellectual curiosity of the participants makes it a breeding ground for unusual and engrossing exchanges speckled with conversational curiosities.

A dwelling of the ancient Sinagua people in the Coconino National Forest.

The Palatki site is located in the Coconino National Forest, just west of Sedona, Arizona. In a region where people can visit the massive cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, few bother making the trip to this tiny jewel of a place with its swirl of massive red rocks enveloping the living space of the ancient Sinagua people. Only about fifty or sixty tourists visit the site each day, so at any particular time you have the place pretty much to yourself and the one or two volunteer docents who monitor it.

As a result, I was more than a little surprised during a recent visit when a tour group approached, huffing and puffing up the trail to the site. I was even more surprised when one of the people in the group walked up to me as I was admiring one of the beautiful ancient rock art panels and said: “Hey! I recognize you! You’re an archaeology professor, aren’t you? I’ve seen you on TV.”

Imagine my reaction. I’m six miles up a dirt road in the middle of Arizona, and my television fame precedes me! I replied politely, even enthusiastically, “Yup. That’s me.”

Ancient rock art panel of the Sinagua people.

“Wow! How wonderful running into you here. I just saw you on a show about that scientist who believes in ancient astronauts. What’s his name?”

“Do you mean Erich von Däniken?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s the guy. Von Däniken.”

“Von Däniken isn’t a scientist. He’s a fantasy writer as far as I’m concerned.”

“Well, you really should reconsider your skepticism. After all, there’s some very good evidence for those ancient astronauts visiting earth. First of all, how do you explain the fact that the Maya had a base-12 number system? Doesn’t that prove that the Maya were an alien race with six fingers on each hand?”

“Actually that’s not the case,” I pointed out, “the Maya didn’t have a base-12 system. Theirs was a base-20 system.”

“Okay, base-12, base-20. Whatever. It’s just that the Maya system allowed them to count so high, so much higher than would be necessary for a simple farming people. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Look,” I patiently explained, “the Maya developed an impressive numerical system. So what? The fact that they could count high is in keeping with their brilliant architectural, artistic, engineering, and calendrical achievements. The Maya were smart. That proves they were, well, smart. That doesn’t prove they were extraterrestrials.”

“Oh, okay. Well, I just think you need to keep an open mind.”

“My mind is open, always; I just haven’t seen any evidence to support the ancient astronaut hypothesis.”

We shook hands and, grinning, my new friend walked away.

My encounter exemplifies so much of what is wrong about the ancient astronaut belief. Let’s ignore the inconvenient fact that there is ab­solutely no material, archaeological evidence for it: no laser guns found in neat stratigraphic context next to the bones of woolly mammoths, no light sabers secreted in Egyptian tombs, and no Star Trek–style communicators reverentially placed in Hopewell burial mounds. There’s another thing just as fundamentally wrong here: There is no need for a hypothesis of technologically sophisticated aliens dispensing knowledge to ancient human beings.

The archaeological record shows clearly that our human ancestors were enormously intelligent and resourceful. They were more than capable of developing sophisticated technologies on their own. Rather than exhibiting a pattern of new ideas appearing magically and without antecedents at ancient sites, the actual record shows lengthy developmental sequences—in the domestication of plants and animals, the evolution of Egyptian pyramids, metallurgy, and so on. The development of these things didn’t occur overnight; they weren’t “air-lifted” to Earth from another planet. Instead, the stories of these accomplishments are filled with the very human pattern of trial and error, fits and starts, missteps and leaps forward.

To assume that the achievements of ancient humanity were made possible by visitors from outer space is to grossly underestimate the intelligence and capabilities of our ancestors and to ignore the enormously fascinating actual archaeological record.

And you don’t need six fingers on each hand to understand that.

This first appeared on the Ohio Archaeology Blog.

Are you Psychic? By C. P.

You open up the morning paper to check the obituaries. With a shaking hand, you read what you’ve been dreading all along—your own name. Your number is up; your fate is sealed. Sometime in the next month you are going to die. Everyone knows it. And you know it, too. At least you have time to choose your own epitaph. You’re psychic; everyone is, or at least has the potential to be.

Peeking at the hand fate dealt you is commonplace in a world where psychics actually exist. For them, the future is as clear as the past, though abilities would range from Spidey sense to Oracle at Delphi. The most powerful seers—the Nostradamuses, if you will—among them wouldn’t be relegated to pricey phones lines. Such powers almost demand public service. A Minority Report-style pre-cognition division would surely spring up in every police department that could afford one. Seismologists and volcanologists could no longer be persecuted for inadequate predictions—the onus would be on the psychics to alert the public of impending natural disasters. Predicting better than even our best computer models, tune in for the psychic weather forecast on the nightly news.

If people had psychic future-sight every phone number would be for a Miss Cleo. Casinos around the world would close. Gambling isn’t a matter of luck anymore; can you predict the snake eyes or not? And the lottery hardly seems fair when any real psychic could pluck the numbers from the tealeaves. Insurance plans would diversify and skyrocket. When a psychic insurance agent could predict a cancer diagnosis, future-existing conditions are what they will deny. Forget about the heat of competition. Every sports team is a group of players on a stage going through the determined script until the last whistle blows.

Raising children in a world full of actual psychics would involve going through another stage of development: existential turmoil. If a psychic taps into the loom of fate to see where a string weaves, children would quickly learn that they live in a determined world. Perhaps they will learn about free will like psychology students learn about behaviorism—a clever idea that eventually fell by the wayside in the light of how the world really is. Is anyone really responsible for his or her actions? Should we punish criminals if they are beholden to fate and not sadistic whim? Parents in a world full of real psychics wouldn’t look forward to fielding such questions. The “birds and the bees” talk is much easier to handle.

Real psychics wouldn’t just grasp the future. They would be able to sense beyond what an eye or ear can tell them—a “sixth sense” for objects and feelings. Marriage disputes over where the hell the remote is are no more. Car keys, if not in the pocket, are never lost. Neither are children or loved ones. Real psychics wouldn’t be the laughing stocks of detectives anymore; they would be their saviors. Resolving a manhunt or Amber Alert would be a simple matter of having the psychic manpower (and psychic children would find hide and seek pretty boring). Every cold case would be hot again.

The best real psychics would be on par with Professor X—mentalists who wouldn’t have to rely on parlor tricks to see inside a mind. Reading minds would change love lives. Potential lovers on a first date wouldn’t have to wonder “does she like my cologne” or “does he notice my twinkling eye.” But mind games go both ways. First daters might also want to invest in psychic-proof helmets like Magneto if they have something more amorous in mind.

With the help of real psychics, we could finally answer questions whose answers would send waves across scientific fields. Are other animals conscious like us? Do they feel pain? Just ask them psychically. We could communicate with “locked-in” patients to discover what happens to the brain when the body undergoes too much trauma to speak (yet another reason to throw away “facilitated communication”).

The scientific advances might be masked by the drawbacks of a world where there are true psychics. The ability to read a thought is the key to the last lock of privacy. When the shelter of the skull can be penetrated by psychic power, a potential new way to oppress arises. The “thought crimes” of 1984 would be legislated under mentally conservative politicians. The private and sometimes terrible thoughts we have would stain us socially in the minds of others. Whenever we look over a great edge and think about jumping, or about pushing others…When we fantasize about killing that dog incessantly barking in the middle of the night…All the natural thoughts we never act on but embarrassingly sequester even within our own minds would be there for others to search and judge and stereotype and ridicule and hate.

For centuries, ethicists have had to work from theories of mind—what we imagine others to be thinking—instead of actual minds. In a world where a psychic could really capture a thought not his or her own, ethics would have to be revolutionized. The Fifth Amendment would be useless. You can’t avoid incriminating yourself when you can’t avoid telepathic examination. The ethics of accessing minds would germinate whole new fields of thought.

A world full of real psychics would include those who converse with the dead. (We’d have at least 100 billion ghosts to talk to.) John Edward or Sylvia Browne wouldn’t have to ask a crowd if anyone had a family member who died with a name starting with “P”—it would be completely obvious to them. Of course, such mediums would be out of work, as any world full of psychic powers would produce people with a higher hit rate than Sylvia—that is to say, better than practically zero. As amazing as talking to your dead relatives would be, the truth would come out in a psychic world: not everyone’s grandmother can be proud of them.

But instead of seeing a world filled with real expressions of psychic power, we see conflation, cold reading, and cons. And coincidence doesn’t mean a thing; it would be weirder if you didn’t have a dream that seemingly predicted the future. Though 40 percent of the public believes in extra-sensory perception, only two percent of scientists in the National Academy of Sciences think it has been demonstrated¹. Despite this, so-called psychic fortunetellers and grief vampires take money all over the world for their predictions and premonitions, without making any serious changes to society. Could you reduce psychic powers to the absurd?

Reference

McConnell, R.A., and Clark, T.K. 1991. “National Academy of Sciences' Opinion on Parapsychology” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 85, 333–365.

A Lively CSICon 2012 Nashville Eyes Latest Trends in Science, Pseudoscience, and Belief

NOTE: CSICon³ is only 3 months away! Join us for CSICon³ October 24-27, 2013, part of the CFI Summit, a joint conference with CSI’s sister organizations, the Center for Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism. Find out more at cfisummit.org.

Our CSICOP group (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) originated the skeptics’ conference. So it was refreshing when, after a multiyear hiatus, CSI got back into the conference scene in October 2011 with its CSICon conference in New Orleans. That proved a fun intellectual idea fest (see reports in our March/April 2012 issue). It was good to be back. For the 2012 conference (October 25–28), CSI moved the CSICon site north to Nashville, another lively location, and the talks, symposia, and surrounding events garnered generally great reviews from participants.

The irrepressible Richard Wiseman, the U.K. psychologist and CSI Fellow, emceed throughout the conference with his usual effervescent wit. Many speakers were CSI Fellows; all were knowledgeable experts. Chief conference organizer and CSI Executive Director Barry Karr didn’t speak but was everywhere in evidence. The Halloween party again was a big hit. There was a midnight séance to call up Houdini (he didn’t show). The whole thing concluded on Sunday with a lively first-ever full-audience interactive discussion with members of the CSI Executive Council.

CSI dedicated the conference to our founder and former longtime chairman, the philosopher Paul Kurtz. Kurtz died the weekend before at the age of eighty-six (see our January/February 2013 issue for tributes). In the opening remarks, committee CEO and President Ronald A. Lindsay and I, representing Skeptical Inquirer and the CSI Executive Council, lauded Kurtz’s powerful legacy in creating the modern skeptical movement. Many speakers over the next days likewise remarked on Kurtz’s key role in creating the first organized movement to advance critical inquiry, the scientific attitude, and informed scientific criticism of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims.

All conference photos by Brian Engler

A live-audience two-hour taping of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast followed. The Novella clan (Steven, Bob, and Jay), Rebecca Watson, and Evan Bernstein showed why their weekly science-and-skepticism show is so popular. George Hrab then entertained with his unique combination of guitar and skeptical wit.

(All this was preceded by two preconference workshops, one by the Skepchicks applying skepticism to everyday nonsense, one on conducting investigations.)

The conference was off to a fine start. I was able to hear most sessions (I missed a couple of individual speakers). Some highlights I found memorable follow.

Biologist P.Z. Myers is most known for his outspoken attacks on religion, but at CSICon for the second year in a row, he surprised many by giving a straight science talk. The first part dealt with differing rates of evolution. “Selection works best in very large populations with a low mutation rate,” he said. “Small populations with a high mutation rate are dominated by chance.” Lest we think humans are numerous in biological terms, he quickly disabused. Humans have “a small population,” about 7310⁹. In contrast Pelagibacter, which make up half of all bacterial plankton in the ocean in summer, number about 2310²⁸. “So in humans, selection is not the prime pressure for change.”

Recent research into the gorilla genome shows, to the surprise of some, that “in 30 percent of the genome gorillas are closer to humans or chimpanzees than the latter are to each other.” He then described how that agrees with calculations in what’s called coalescent theory, a population genetics model for tracing genes back to common ancestors. The anti-evolution Discovery Institute, Myers said, claims that the gorilla genome research messes up the human genetics connections to the great apes. “That’s hilarious,” Myers said. “These people don’t have a goddamned clue about evolutionary biology. They are dead wrong.”

Psychologist James Alcock led off a session on Belief and Memory with a survey about belief, noting that beliefs are a dynamic production and can be produced very quickly. Some beliefs are based on reason and carefully assembled evidence, but many are based on social constructions (we rely on the perceptions and reactions of others we trust) and feeling. The “feeling of knowing” is an emotion and is not tied to knowledge and may have nothing to do with reality. As for belief and disbelief, assessment is a two-stage process. We automatically believe new information before we assess it. Judging it comes later, if at all. The brain processes content information and veracity information separately. He revisited “The Belief Engine” he wrote about in SI many years ago (“we are a belief-generating engine”) and ended by emphasizing again that some beliefs correlate with reality, and some do not.

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus noted that beliefs can begin to feel like memories, “then we have false memories.” She described some of her and colleagues’ ground-breaking experiments demonstrating that beliefs can be implanted. She also gave examples of prominent political figures recalling false memories, noting, “no one is protected from having false memories.” She also emphasized the notorious unreliability of eyewitness testimony, noting the Innocence Project has used DNA evidence to overturn 225 wrongful convictions, “most based on faulty memories.” She facetiously proposed that the oath administered to witnesses testifying should be changed to: “Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, or whatever you think you remember?”

Neuroscientist Indre Viskontas praised the value of storytelling as a memory aid (“to remember details of a past event make them part of a great story”) but noted that remembering is a reconstructive process and remembering is often the functional equivalent of imagining.

In “Is Paul Dead?” investigator Massimo Polidoro gave one of the most entertaining talks, a multimedia feast of imagery and music and sounds playfully exploring the persistent idea that Paul McCartney of the Beatles is dead. “What is going on here?” Polidoro asked. “There’s no evidence of a preplanned hoax. . . . You start with an idea, and you look for proof. It can be anything. And it always works.”

Another hilarious session featured Richard Wiseman, Jon Ronson (author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, made into the movie with George Cooney), and Rebecca Watson recounting their CSI “Paranormal Road Trip.” In this journey earlier that week by car from CSI headquarters in Amherst, New York, to the Nashville conference site looking for “paranormal” adventures they encountered a lot of “haunted houses” but nothing paranormal. Wiseman did find himself gobsmacked during a visit to the underground lair in Kentucky of a leading collector of magic memorabilia (“a cave full of magic”). There, neatly shelved eighty feet underground, he found one of only fifteen first editions of a 1902 book, The Expert at the Card Table, by someone known only by the pseudonym S.W. Erdnase. The book was far ahead of its time, said Wiseman, “the best sleight of hand ever.” “We still don’t know who wrote that book,” Wiseman said. “It is a real mystery.” The group’s planned visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky didn’t happen. Recounted Watson: “They said yes, you can film. But you can’t make fun of us. We ended up skipping it.”

That evening, at the CSI Halloween Party, Wiseman was presented his earlier-announced CSI Balles Annual Prize in Critical Thinking (SI, September/October 2012), for the best skeptical book of the year, Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There. On first thought the CSI Halloween Party might seem a strange venue for awarding Wiseman his prize. But maybe it all does fit. He seemed to relish it.

Sara Mayhew, the writer/illustrator of Manga-style graphic novels (see her cover article in the March/April 2012 Skeptical Inquirer) gave another entertaining talk, illustrated with her drawings. “I want to create a fandom-type feeling for skeptics and scientist heroes,” she said. She noted that these comic versions of anime are a multimillion-dollar art form with a high female readership, about 70 percent in the U.S. “Good role models present a variety of different people. Manga does that. Having more female role models is good for young men and males as well.” She said one can apply the same goal to science role models.

“My goal is to combine my love of science and critical thinking with this emotional art form for people to connect.” Like Indiana Jones (“a cool scientist role model”) or the women in her stories, “We need more of these epic stories,” but instead of “faith” and “believe” as themes, seen too often in other epics, “we can have a message of, ‘How do we know about the world?’ in an honest way. We need heroes who think their way out of crises, who care about the truth.”

With two strong statements—“Just because you call something science doesn’t make it so” and “There is no scientific evidence against evolution,” Eugenie C. Scott of the National Center for Science Education began her report on the current status of evolution-creation disputes. At their root is that creationists mistakenly believe that “evidence against evolution equals evidence for creation,” thus their continual attacks on evolution and their evolving strategies for undermining its teaching.

Statehouse legislatures are a prime target. About forty “Evidence Against Evolution” bills, also called “academic freedom” bills, exist in various stages. Two have passed, in Louisiana and Tennessee.

Creationists are masters at distorting the meaning of words. “If you see ‘balanced’ and ‘evolution’ on the same page, you know you are looking at a creationist document.” Other euphemisms to look out for are “full range of views” and “teach the controversy.” Says Scott: “To miseducate young learners does them no favors.”

Most all these latest bills avoid mentioning religion, stress free speech, advocate teacher protection if teaching “alternatives” to evolution, and use permissive language (“allow” not “require”). “They are very clever the way they set up these bills.”

What to do? Inform yourself, pay attention to your legislature and state and local school boards, and support good science standards and teaching. As for the court cases so far, the news is good: “One hundred percent of the case law has been in favor of evolution.”

A symposium on science and public policy was actually an update and elaboration of a controversy played out in recent issues of the Skeptical Inquirer: social science research into political beliefs as described in SI contributing editor Chris Mooney’s 2012 book The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality, his SI article “Why the GOP Distrusts Science,” and the ensuing controversy (letters in SI and Ronald A. Lindsay’s somewhat critical review of Mooney’s book in SI.) My introduction was a shorter form of what became my editorial “Can We Have Civilized Conversations about Touchy Science Policy Issues” in our January/February 2013 issue.

Mooney, knowing he was much the target of the ensuing two talks, began by noting that he is a science journalist covering the research on the subject. “I’m reporting on the research. So if you don’t like the conclusions, don’t blame me, blame the science.” He reiterated that those studies show that “there’s something unique about Republicans’ view of science,” and it involves “not just denial of science” but “denial of reality.” He maintained that liberals and conservatives “have different personalities.” Without even considering political content, key conservative traits are conscientiousness and order and stability while a key liberal trait is openness to new experience and new ideas. These traits explain much about the different parties’ political views and their attitudes toward science. In his view conservatives’ need for “cognitive closure” and a tendency toward authoritarian certainty and black-and-white views is antithetical to scientific thinking.

Dan Kahan, a professor of law and of psychology at Yale University, was first up. The essential problem all are concerned about, he said, is “the failure of valid and amply disseminated science to persuade.” He offered “one good explanation” and four “not so good” explanations.

The good explanation, said Kahan, is what he calls “identity-protective cognition.” It is simply this: “People have group allegiances that make them interpret science findings in different ways.” Those ways consistently go in the direction of the values that protect their group identity. Other, not-so-good explanations include science denial, misinformation, a rationality deficit, and authoritarian personality. Science denialism fails as an explanation because views are divided along lines consistent with their group. People of each party “count someone as an expert when he has positions consistent with their cultural outlook.” Both parties believe in being guided by a scientific consensus, “but they disagree on what that consensus is.”

Lindsay recounted the evidence he amassed in his SI review calling into question Mooney’s key conclusions. He concluded that one problem is that many of the studies Mooney cited may actually not be measuring conservatism.

Unfortunately the session’s time ran out before Mooney could give any real response, other than to say that he disagreed with virtually all of Lindsay’s criticisms. Nevertheless, after the session they were seen sitting at a table together in what seemed amiable conversation, so perhaps, in this setting at least, the civility sought in the title of my SI editorial prevailed.

In his “The Science of Medicine” column in the November/December 2010 Skeptical Inquirer, Yale School of Medicine physician Steven Novella wrote tellingly about “The Misunderstood Placebo,” and in his talk he returned to that topic.

The so-called placebo effect is a subjective-only effect, he said, not an objective one. It is manipulated by psychology only, not physiology. Most placebo effects are illusory effects that depend upon belief in getting traction. As for the often-vaunted “mind-body” connection? “Well, yeah,” said Novella, “because it’s the same option. What other option is there?” So-called “placebo medicine” exploits the confusion about placebos. It makes vague use of the term “healing” and plays into the branding and marketing of “complementary and alternative medicine” (see sidebar about the pseudoscience in medical schools). An example of the exploitation of placebo confusion is the often heard statement that “Acupuncture works—as a placebo.” That, said Novella, “just means that the outcome was negative.” So what’s the harm? Extolling a placebo is “installing bizarre, unscientific, mystical, nonscientific beliefs in patients.”

In case you didn’t know it, the world was supposed to end on December 21, 2012. The myth of an impeding apocalypse on that date—drawing on everything from the Mayan calendar to supposed Sumerian or biblical predictions, to worries about comets or the nonexistent planet Nibiru, to pole shifts, planetary alignments, and solar flares—infected credulous websites across the Internet and worried the hell out of a significant share of the world’s population (10 percent of Americans, according to a Reuters poll). Things got so bad that in the first week of December the Russian government put out an announcement that the world would not end later that month, and in the United States NASA did much the same thing.

Come to think about it, as I write up these notes in mid December, it’s probably all for naught, but in the oft chance the world continues after the winter solstice, I’ll continue. Planetary scientist David Morrison, as SI readers know, has been at the forefront of trying to rebut these rumors, providing accurate scientific information through NASA’s “Ask an Astrobiologist” website, CSI’s website, and in articles and other forums. He spoke at CSICon Nashville.

The whole thing would be silly and laughable except that Morrison gets pained messages from children so caught up in these beliefs that they tell him they are contemplating suicide or killing their pets to spare them from the devastation.

Morrison recounted some of these messages and the “conflation of a variety of threads” of non-fact-based belief about all of it.

“None of these ‘facts’ is true,” he emphasized. “No scientist supports any of these claims. None of these stories is covered in newspapers or TV.” It has been almost entirely an Internet phenomenon.

As for a supposed galactic alignment, “I don’t know what an alignment is. It’s not a term used by astronomers. There is no alignment in December. There is no core of fact to this. These things are not going to happen.”

Says Morrison: “It’s all part of a mindset that believes in prophecy.”

Morrison labels this new outlook “Cosmophobia—the fear of the end of the universe.” People who believe it are getting all their “information” on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet. The problem has been exacerbated by the fact that “science shows on cable TV have gotten a lot worse.” Assuming short attention spans, the trend now, even on mainstream channels, is to be “hyper-exciting,” with explosions, impacts, and so on every ninety seconds.

The conspiracy meme doesn’t help, says Morrison. “People afraid of the government in one area have spread it to every topic.”

Sharon Hill, using lively illustrations, spoke on “How to Think about Weird News.” Hill, a geologist by training, does the Doubtful News blog and writes a column on CSI’s website called “Sounds Science-y.” (An SI article on that subject by Hill appeared in our March/April 2012 issue.)

“I’m a ‘weird news’ junky,” she said. “Weird news is my favorite conversation topic.” Weird news makes for a good story, she says: “Mystery is mongered. The wow factor is stressed. . . . TV and entertainment is our new misinformation highway.”

She considers the main audience for her Doubtful News site “the critical thinking community.” The topics she examines are endless, the sources pitiful: “Real things entwined with wrongness.” Videos are hoaxed, birds fall from the sky, strange sounds are heard, dead carcasses of normal animals are claimed to be demonoids or monsters. She has a whole category called “underwater mysteries.” Then there are the quack cancer cures, always a problem for science-minded skeptics (“There is almost no way to write about them without sounding heartless”), bogus consumer products, and emotional appeals. You’d think it’d all tire Hill out. But she’s still enthusiastic. “I’m pretty dedicated to not missing something good.”

Scott O. Lilienfeld had the “honor” of being the conference’s final speaker, but he performed his task so well no one’s interest wavered. “It has been an amazing conference,” he said. He dedicated his talk to CSI founder Paul Kurtz, who, Lilienfeld observed, “was always respectful and gentlemanly.”

Lilienfeld, a psychologist and member of the CSI Executive Council, spoke on “The Great Myths of Popular Psychology.” He noted that “even for our brightest students, it’s a confusing world out there.” The pop psychology industry perpetuates myths, and no one is immune. For instance, 77 percent of his students begin by believing that schizophrenics have “multiple personalities,” 63 percent think memory is like a video camera, 47 percent say memories don’t change, and 61 percent think hypnosis is useful in solving crimes. This “naïve realism—the belief that the world is exactly as we see it”—is exemplified by the belief that eyewitness observation is always correct and in the often-heard (and often exactly wrong) phrases “seeing is believing” and “I know what I saw.”

Lilienfeld ranged over a variety of examples of selective perception and memory, including illusory correlations (such as the repeatedly debunked idea that psychiatric admissions increase during the full moon) where “our brains are making the correlation.” He ended by bringing up the troubling implications of some recent research. Debunking can be effective, these studies show, but it can also have backfire effects, reinforcing beliefs instead of disabusing people of them. “We need more than debunking; we need alternative accounts. . . . Spend more time telling what’s true, not what’s false.”

It was good advice and a fine way to end a memorable conference.

The next CSICon will be at the same time next year (the last weekend before Halloween in October 2013) in Seattle/Tacoma. It will be a joint conference of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism, with a distinct skeptic track. Look for future announcements.

Economic Fraud: How Cons and Criminals Scam the Public

“What harm does it do?” That is the perennial challenge hurled at skeptics. What harm is there in people credulously believing in things that aren’t true, that are too good to be true? When it comes to economic fraud crimes, the harm is self-evident. Money is lost, lots of it. Sometimes one’s life savings, sometimes entire fortunes.

Psychologist Anthony Pratkanis, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, is deeply involved in this issue, and he gave a powerful presentation on the weapons of fraud—how cons and criminals scam the public. Americans alone lose $40 billion a year in telemarketing fraud, $110 billion in fraud generally. Worldwide, the totals are staggering.

There is no evidence for the myth of the weak victim. The weak and the strong are taken. And the evidence indicates that seniors are less susceptible, not more; they are just targeted more. Victims are more likely to have experienced a negative life event. And contrary to what you might expect, victims are more, not less, financially literate. They think they are immune. That makes everyone susceptible.

Social influence is the weapon in fraud crimes, Pratkanis emphasized.

He showed parts of a training video, “Weapons of Fraud,” detailing how scam artists tailor their pitch to what makes you vulnerable. (“It’s like cold reading.”) They keep and share records of phone conversations. They use such weapons as phantom fixation (something you would like that is completely unavailable), social proof (“other people are winning”), false scarcity (about this rare 1860 coin, “There are only four left in the world”), authority, reciprocity, and a whole litany of others.

Can we stop it? Pratkanis described a project he and his psychologist colleagues have been working on with the FBI and other law enforcement authorities. It is called Santa Monica’s Reverse Boiler Room. It involves identifying victims before the con is completed, calling them, and warning them. The reverse call center sends out prevention messages, giving people a coping strategy.

Ethical safeguards have been put in place, and the FBI is on-site to monitor. Victims are debriefed.

Does it work? “It has cut the victimization rate in half,” says Pratkanis. “This is the first demonstration of an effective deterrent to this crime. . . . Forewarning works.”

As a scientist, Pratkanis says he finds this work “exhilarating.” But as a human being, “I got depressed. We can see how it [scamming] works. Yet it keeps going on and on.”

His advice to others? “Develop those skeptical skills. Keep asking those critical questions.” —K.F.

‘Quackademic Medicine’: Teaching Pseudoscience in Medical Schools

A problem of serious concern to skeptics these days is the rapid perfusion of pseudoscience into medical schools. This practice is eagerly promoted by proponents of so-called alternative medicine and increasingly allowed by a medical education culture not alert to what’s at stake.

Prominent physicians in the skeptical movement brought the practice into the spotlight in a major CSICon symposium on the problem.

One good label for the infiltration of pseudoscience into medical schools is “Quackademic Medicine,” a term coined by physician Robert W. Donnell. In the CSI symposium, cancer surgeon David Gorski, who edits the Science-Based Medicine website, used that term approvingly. He noted that quackery has undergone a linguistic evolution, a “ major rebranding of quackery.” What forty years ago was properly called “unscientific medicine” began to be called, in the 1970s and 1980s, “alternative medicine.” (He considers that simply “unproven” and “often, disproven” practices.) “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” (CAM) came along in the 1990s, and now there is another rebranding: “Integrative Medicine.” Gorski’s succinct take? “Integrative medicine=science+magic.”

Major medical schools like the University of Maryland and Georgetown have been integrating CAM throughout their curriculum and even into basic science courses. This has proven popular. “Bioenergetic medicine” is another new term, allowing the teaching of such nonscientific concepts as a “vital force” and “qi.”

“This is the foot in the door . . . like the Trojan Horse,” said Gorski. Harvard, Michigan, and the Cleveland Clinic are all welcoming these intrusions of questionable medical concepts into their curricula.

Often the cry is heard to “treat the whole patient.” “This pisses me off,” said Gorski. “That’s what doctors already do,” he notes. “And it creates a false dichotomy: You don’t need to use quackery to ‘treat the whole patient.’”

He and other concerned physicians see an increasing hostility toward science-based medicine. One commentator even has called evidence-based healthcare “microfascism.”

Contributing to the problem is the relative indifference of most physicians, what Gorski refers to as a “shruggie,” a person who doesn’t care. “Most doctors just don’t care.”

“SkepDoc” Harriet Hall, a frequent SI contributor, said what’s happening in medical schools is a reflection of what’s happening in society overall. The view is, in short, “We don’t need no stinkin’ intellectuals” and “We don’t need no education—we have Google.” Other factors include the ideas that positive thinking makes it so and “my facts are as good as any others,” a distrust for authority, looking for an easy solution, postmodernism (truth is relative), and a rising acceptability of doctor-bashing.

She told the story of a retired physician who took up acupuncture and soon found it working on everything. Wrote this doctor: “There is nothing like personal experience to convince one of an effect.” Hall noted that he made a litany of common mistakes: confirmation bias, using biased sources, not recognizing how charisma can influence your view, cherry-picking the data, not understanding why science is necessary, relying on personal experience, the cause-effect fallacy, the ancient wisdom fallacy, and relying on the personal experience of others. “The plural of anecdote is not evidence,” Hall commented. She lamented that critical thinking is not taught in medical schools.

Kimball Atwood, another frequent contributor to SI and to Science-Based Medicine, reiterated Gorski’s view that misleading language contributes to giving nonscientific and pseudoscientific medical practices a free pass. Terms such as “allopathic,” “holistic,” “complementary,” “alternative,” “integrative,” and “Western” all mislead.

Atwood raised a reasonable question: “Why discuss implausible claims at all?” He believes medical schools should teach scientific skepticism. There are also important lessons in the history of medicine that can be taught, like the downfall of bloodletting and the “pre-scientific practices” that persist today, such as homeopathy, where teaching about Avogadro’s number could help students understand homeopathy’s innate implausibility. Skepticism, with its emphasis on logical fallacies and its insistence that clear thinking should trump pseudoscience, has great value.

As for worries that it may be impolite or impolitic to raise such issues, Atwood said, “Clear thinking should not be sacrificed on the altar of politeness.”

It is a question of medical ethics, he emphasized: “Implausible treatments are unethical. Deceptive placebos are unethical. And human studies of highly implausible claims are unethical.”

Eugenie C. Scott was the only non-physician who spoke. As executive director of the National Center for Science Education (and a physical anthropologist) she has great concerns about allowing more and more pseudoscience into medical schools. “It will miseducate students,” she said. As for academic freedom, that is important, she noted, because it allows teachers to teach unpopular ideas and to challenge students. But there is also “academic judgment,” she insisted.

“The issues are quite profound.”

The Skeptical Inquirer plans a future article on how nonscientific concepts are making their way into the education of physicians. —K.F.

Gender Issues in Science: What’s Different, What’s Not?

Gender issues continue to gain attention and generate controversy. Good science, critical inquiry, and clear thinking all can help illuminate, not exacerbate, the issues. A morning session on gender issues explored the degree to which psychological differences between the sexes exist and to what degree they are hardwired or the result of culture.

Richard Lippa of California State University, Fullerton, offered a thoughtful examination of Janet Hyde’s argument that there are not that many differences. He first looked at psychological differences. In the dimensions of agreeableness and neuroticism, women tend to be more highly represented. In the domain of mental illness, males tend to have such disorders as autism, mental retardation, reading disorders, and Tourette’s syndrome, while women experience more depression by a 2:1 ratio and also tend to have more bipolar, panic, and conversion disorders. Among personality disorders, males tend much more than females to be antisocial or sociopaths. “So there are big differences in psychology,” he said.

As for overall intelligence, any differences are small. One area where differences are big is along the people-things dimension. Men tend always to be more interested in things-oriented occupations, women in people-oriented occupations, and studies show that holds true over fifty-three nations. As for social behaviors, men tend to be more aggressive (10:1 male:female ratio of murderers).

Overall, between men and women, he said studies show that some differences are small, some differences are moderate, and some differences are large.

Psychologist Carol Tavris (author of such books as The Mismeasure of Women) next took the stage. “That was a terrific talk,” she said of Lippa’s presentation. “I have no differences with it. So I’m going to leave now!” The audience laughed. She proceeded.

She called for perspective (“either/or thinking is not going to get us anywhere”) and a sense of history. She noted that women have come a long way since 1960. She reiterated, “I completely agree with Richard regarding psychological differences.” But she said many sex differences have flipped over in the past decade or two. “The problem is stereotypes.” She cautioned against “taking snapshots that assume differences at any time tell us about fundamental differences.” Another caution is that in surveys “what people say has little to do with how they behave. . . . You don’t see the major differences when you look at behavior.”

As an example, she said if you define aggression as “intention to harm,” you don’t see sex differences. “We just express it in different ways. . . . Women are likely to ruminate more than men.” As for brain differences, there are indeed many anatomical and activity differences in men/women brains, but it all comes down to “so what?” She pointed to three general problems with generalizing about brain differences: There is no correlation with behavior, brains are complex, and each brain is unique.

What is the future of sex differences, and where are we going from here? Tavris summarized things this way. A lot in society is changing. It’s women who are getting the educations. We are seeing huge differences in economic status. Women are now earning more, getting better educated, and getting better jobs, so many are delaying marriage. “The whole planet is becoming Sweden,” is how she put it. Changes are being caused by the global economy and circumstances.

A memorable moment came when a man in the audience concerned about how to think about gender differences asked Tavris for advice about raising his daughter. She replied succinctly: “Enjoy the ones that matter, ignore the rest.” —K.F.

Two years ago the prepublication re­lease of a research paper by psychologist Daryl Bem claiming experimental evidence for precognition created a worldwide media stir and intense controversy within the scientific and skeptical communities.

Bem, of Cornell University, claimed that through nine experiments he had demonstrated the existence of precognition, specifically the existence of “conscious cognitive awareness . . . of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process.” Essentially, he had claimed to have produced evidence that psychic abilities not only exist but can transcend time and allow the future to reach backward to change the past.

Informed critics of parapsychology were almost uniformly incredulous. Although Bem is a respected psychologist, they found so many flaws in the research protocols and methods that in their view the conclusions had no validity. One of the most stinging re­bukes came in the form of an ex­tended, in-depth critique of all nine experiments by York University psychologist and CSI Executive Council member James Alcock in the Skeptical Inquirer (“Back from the Future: Parapsy­chology and the Bem Affair,” SI, March/April 2011; see also editorial “Why the Bem Experiments are Not Parapsychology’s Next Big Thing” in the same issue).

Alcock also concluded that the journal that published Bem’s study, the Journal of Personality and Social Psy­chology (JPSP), had done everyone a disservice by publishing this “badly flawed research article.” Parapsy­chology and the journal’s own reputation, he wrote, had been damaged, and the article’s publication disserved the public as well, “for it only adds to [public] confusion about the existence of psi.”

Experiments attempting to replicate Bem’s results were quickly conducted at various universities, but none were accepted for publication by JPSP. In fact, it said it would not consider publishing replication failures. This fact raised more controversy and concern.

Now the journal has had an apparent change of heart. It has finally published a set of experiments that attempted (and failed) to replicate Bem’s results. Seven experiments conducted by Jeff Galek of Carnegie Mellon University, Robyn A. LeBoeuf of the University of Florida, Leif D. Nelson of the Uni­versity of California at Berkeley, and Joseph P. Simmons of the University of Pennsylvania have been published in JPSP’s final issue of 2012 (Vol. 103, No. 6) under the title “Correcting the Past: Failures to Replicate Psi.”

The article is lengthy, but the central conclusion is succinctly stated:

“Across seven experiments (N= 3,289), we replicate the procedure of Experiments 8 and 9 from Bem (2011), which had originally demonstrated retroactive facilitation of recall. We failed to replicate that finding.” They further conducted a meta-analysis of all replication attempts of the Bem experiments “and find that the average effect size (d=0.04) is not different from 0.”

To put it even more directly (from the beginning of their conclusions section): “We conducted seven experiments testing for precognition and found no evidence supporting its existence.”

How can their results be reconciled with Bem’s? “It is unclear how Bem could find significant support for a hypothesis that appears to be untrue,” the authors say. They suggest such possibilities as what psychologists call Type I error—a false rejection of the null hypothesis. They also point to concerns about researcher degrees of freedom, which also raise the likelihood of falsely rejecting the null hy­pothesis. While many experimental decisions are defensible, “because their application is at the discretion of the researcher examining data after the completion of the experiment, they can make a true effect more difficult to discern. . . . Researcher degrees of freedom do not make a finding false . . . but they do make it much harder to distinguish between truth and falseness in reported data.”

They end by quoting philosopher of science Karl Popper: “An effect is not an effect unless it is replicable, and a science is not a science unless it conducts (and values) attempted replications.” They do compliment Bem for encouraging the independent replication of his experiments.

Alcock, who wrote SI’s 2011 critique, has mixed feelings about the Galek et al. paper:

While I am happy that they carried out this research and that it was published, I find it very odd that they focused on Bem’s studies as though they had been carefully de­signed and well-executed. They were so poorly designed and so badly executed that the results do not merit the careful consideration that this research gives them. However, the experiments that Galek address, #8 and #9, were the best of a bad lot. Nonetheless, I am glad that they have done this research and that it is in print. It counters Bem’s claims very nicely, without ruffling any feathers I guess.

Ray Hyman, professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Ore­gon and also a CSI Executive Coun­cil member, is another longtime expert on such research. Here is his initial comment:

The number and size of their experiments, the detailed analyses, along with their inclusion of several other studies which fail to replicate Bem, deprive the parapsychologists of their standard excuses for dismissing failed replications. Bem and his supporters have one other excuse they can use. They can, and will, point to ways in which the Galak et al. experiments differ from Bem’s experimental protocol. The authors have anticipated this and have adhered so closely to Bem’s protocol, that whatever differences remain appear trivial.

Publication by JPSP of the Galek et al. paper may or may not bring to end this latest dramatic claim of scientific evidence of the paranormal, but—combined with the previous critiques—it appears to have dealt a serious blow. As Alcock emphasized in his 2011 critique (and as Hyman has often also stressed), over the past eighty-odd years this kind of drama has played out multiple times, and “each time parapsychologists ultimately failed to persuade the scientific world that parapsychological phenomena (psi) really exist.”

Indian astrologers claim they can tell a person’s intelligence from his or her horoscope. But twenty-seven astrologers failed to perform better than chance when given forty horoscopes of intellectually bright subjects and mentally handicapped subjects.

In the world of astrology, India has many claims to fame. It has an astrology fundamentally different from both Chinese and Western astrology,¹ possibly more part- and full-time astrologers than in the rest of the world put together, and the world’s longest-running English astrological monthly (The Astrological Magazine 1895–2007). Its main government funding agency, the University Grants Commission, provides support for BSc and MSc courses in astrology in Indian universities. And as for the general public, one finds almost universal belief in it.

Indian astronomer and astrology critic Balachandra Rao (2000, 149) notes: “The belief in astrology among our masses is so deep that for every trivial decision in their personal lives—like whether to apply for a job or not—they readily rush to the astrologers with their horoscopes.” Likewise, many will consult an astrologer to ensure their marriage date will be auspicious. In 1963, the astrologer’s advice, for example, led to a postponement of the wedding of the Crown Prince of Sikkim by a year. A day seen as generally auspicious can thus lead to a large number of weddings taking place, putting severe pressure on facilities like wedding halls, caterers, etc.

Prediction of Events

Western astrologers are generally taught that astrology is nonfatalistic and therefore not a good bet for predicting events. Indian astrologers hold the opposite view, and every astrologer worthy of the name must be able to make such forecasts. Unfortunately, these predictions do not carry any controls. For example, B.V. Raman (1912–1998), publisher-editor of The Astrological Magazine, wrote that “when Saturn was in Aries in 1939 England had to declare war against Germany” (note the fatalism) in a work intended “to present a case for astrology” (Raman 1992, 119). However, this reasoning fails to notice that Saturn was also in Aries in 1909 and 1968 when nothing much happened other than overseas state visits by Edward VII and Elizabeth II, respectively.

Indian astrologers often make ex­treme claims about Indian astronomy, as when The Astrological Magazine for March 1984 claimed Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto had been discovered around 500 BC (Rao 2000, 36). But their claims about Indian astrology tend to be even more extreme, as in the August 25, 2003, Indian Express wherein Raj Baldev, who claimed to be “an authority on the subject of Astronomy, Astrology, Cosmo-Mathe­matics and Meta­physics” said that ancient Hindu astrology “is a complete science” where even one million billionth of a second “makes a lot of difference.” Skeptics might wonder at this, since it implies that the shadows cast on ancient sundials were routinely positioned to better accuracy than a hundred millionth of the diameter of an atom. Even at night. Can we believe it?

Complexity without End

Indian astrology is more complex than Western astrology, with countless authoritative aphorisms to cover every possible situation. Indeed, the few Western authors who have described it for Western use have typically required decades of study before proceeding. But as one of them has noted: “This is of course natural for a society over 6,000 years old whose elders have not only employed astrology but embraced it” (Braha 1986, x).²

And there is no Western equivalent to the ways in which those authoritative aphorisms can be modified via suitably chosen amulets, mantras, colors, gemstones (yellow or blue sapphire is said to strengthen Jupiter or Saturn, respectively), and by performing yajnas (a spiritual ceremony involving offerings to fire performed by a Hindu priest). Ironically these modifications specified by the astrologer are essentially fatalistic ways of achieving non-fatalistic outcomes.

Indian horoscopes are a different shape from Western horoscopes, and their signs, houses, and aspects are calculated differently. They also differ in how they are interpreted. A Western-style interpretation focusing on the owner’s personality and motivations would be rejected in India, where clients expect fortune-telling.

Miraculous Nadis

Indian Nadi astrology has many variations, but if any of them worked it would be a miracle. Nadi astrologers, when approached by a client, are found to have a huge collection of horoscopes on ancient palm leaves, one of which turns out to be the client’s. But a little thinking shows that it is not as miraculous as it may seem. Consider the following scenario.

After providing birth details during the first visit, the client is asked to return a few days later on the pretext that it will take time to find his horoscope among the thousands held by the astrologer. While the client is away, the astrologer, based on the information supplied by the client, writes his or her horoscope on a fresh palm leaf and soaks it in a slurry of coconut kernels and mango bark, both of which are rich in tannin. This gives the palm leaf an ancient look (Premanand et al. 1993, 331). During the second visit the client is appropriately impressed that his/her horoscope turned up after so many centuries.

Electronic Destinies

In 1984, the first companies to offer computerized horoscopes appeared in India, seventeen years after they had started business in Europe. In twenty minutes (today, in just a few seconds) they could do the calculations that previously took three months. A computer horoscope may cost twenty-five rupees (about fifty cents) for an ordinary one and fifty rupees (about $1) for a longer one, more in big cities or air-conditioned centers. Predictions cost up to 500 rupees depending on the number of years ahead (Rao 2000, 147).³ Many websites offer free horoscopes; see, for example, www.bestindiansites.com/astrology.

As in the West, Indian astrologers immediately complained that the computer was devoid of intuition and experience, and did not meet their clients’ need to talk and vent their feelings. Indeed, about two decades ago an educated young man committed suicide after a computer horoscope predicted total failure in everything he did (Premanand et al. 1993, 307). Never­theless, as in the West, computer horoscopes seem here to stay.

In 1989, I was showing a visitor around my newly established astronomy center in Pune. At that time we had just set up our new computer and I explained its capabilities to the visitor. At the end, I waited for any questions she may have had. Yes, she did have a question: “Does this computer cast horoscopes?”

The Ultimate Accolade

The lobby for Indian astrology had its crowning glory when, in February 2001, the University Grants Commis­sion (UGC) decided to provide funds for BSc and MSc courses in astrology at Indian universities. Its circular stated: “There is urgent need to rejuvenate the science of Vedic Astrology in India . . . and to provide opportunities to get this important science exported to the world.” Actually, the phrase Vedic Astrology is an oxymoron since the prefix Vedic has nothing to do with the Vedas, the ancient and sacred literature of the Hindus, which do not mention astrology. In fact, scholars agree that the usual planetary astrology came to India with the Greeks who had visited India since Alexander’s campaign in the third century BC.

Within nine months of the UGC’s announcement, forty-five of India’s 200 universities had applied for the UGC grants of 1.5 million rupees (about $30,000) to establish departments of astrology. Of these, twenty were accepted (Siddhanta 2001, 2). To those Indians who believe that astrological considerations influence the course of their business and family lives—and this category involves leaders of major political parties—the UGC’s decision might seem sensible if overdue.

But the decision provoked outrage among India’s academics, especially those in the science faculties. More than 100 scientists and 300 social scientists wrote in protest to the government. Of the thirty letters-to-the-editor that appeared in the Indian science journal Current Science, most of them from scientists in university departments or research institutes, about half dismissed astrology as a pseudoscience, and a quarter felt that decisive tests were needed. Against this, the rest felt there was nothing wrong with funding something that most Indian people believe in. But the protests were without effect because, in Indian law, Vedic astrology is seen as a scientific discipline.

Nevertheless, in 2004, several scientists asked the Andhra Pradesh High Court to stop the UGC from funding courses in Vedic astrology because it was a pseudoscience, it would impose Hindu beliefs on the education system,⁴ and it would reduce the funds available for genuine scientific research. However, the court dismissed their case on the grounds that it was not correct for a court to interfere with a UGC decision that did not violate Indian law.

In 2011, an appeal under the act that bans false advertising was made to the Mumbai High Court. It was dismissed by the court arguing that the act “does not cover astrology and related sciences. Astrology is a trusted science and is being practiced for over 4000 years. . . .” (as reported in The Times of India February 3, 2011).

Failed Predictions

To justify calling it a science, astrology must fulfill the basic requirement of a scientific theory—it must make test­able and correct predictions. Here the performance of astrology in predicting the results of events has been very poor. The nearest we have are follow-ups to predictions of public events such as elections, where failure is the norm. For example, the elections in 1971 were a showdown between Indira Gandhi and her political opponents. The Astrological Magazine was filled with predictions by amateurs and professionals, most of whom predicted that Gandhi would lose. In fact, she won with an overwhelming majority.

The 1980 elections attracted another frenzy of predictions, most of which saw Gandhi losing. For example B.V. Raman (whom I discussed earlier), in a rare departure from his usual vagueness, predicted that Gandhi’s efforts to regain office “may misfire. Her ability to influence the Govern­ment will be disconcertingly limited in effectiveness” and the outcome “may not see a stable Govern­ment.” An Indian horary astrol­oger (one who answers questions) predicted that Gandhi “can never become the Prime Minister.” However, she won with a huge majority, was prime minister, and formed a very stable government.

Also in 1980, at a large international conference organized by the Indian Astrologers Federation, both the president and secretary of the Federation predicted a war with Pakistan in 1982, which India would win, and a world war between 1982 and 1984. All wrong! These examples and many more are given by Rao (2000, 113–122), who notes that no astrologer predicted Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, and that the golden rule seems to be “predict only those things which please the listener’s ego.”⁵

Lack of Criticism

In the West, books critical of astrology are not hard to find, but in India the reverse is true. Some excellent books exist, such as Premanand et al. (1993) and Rao (2000), but all are hampered by a lack of Indian tests with which to counter true believers. Even Current Science had to wait until Manoj Komath’s (2009) review, which drew heavily on Western sources such as the critical but user-friendly www.astrology-and-science.com. Unfortunately, given the low level of income and high level of illiteracy of the masses, web sources may not be very effective in general.

UGC’s funding of astrology might have been justifiable had Indian astrology ever been a source of new knowledge (it hadn’t; see Siddhanta 2001, 13), or if its modus operandi had been verified by controlled tests. But unlike astrology in the West, where several hundred controlled tests have found no support commensurate with its claims (Dean 2007), astrology in India had hitherto been without controlled tests, even though its focus on predicting yes/no events would make testing easy.⁶ I will now describe a controlled test that my colleagues and I conducted recently.

Our Experiment

Our experiment was performed in the university city of Pune (formerly Poona) about 160 km (100 miles) southeast of Mumbai (formerly Bom­bay) in the state of Maharashtra, which is the second-largest in population and third-largest in area of India’s twenty-five states. Pune itself has a population of about 3.5 million.

For the experiment I was assisted by Professor Sudhakar Kunte from the Department of Statistics at Pune Uni­versity, Narendra Dabholkar from the Committee for the Eradication of Super­stitions, and Prakash Ghatpande a former professional astrologer who has subsequently turned into a critic of astrology.

Indian astrologers claim that they are able to tell intelligence from a person’s horoscope. So volunteers from the Committee for the Eradication of Superstitions went to different schools and collected the names of teenage school children rated by their teachers as mentally bright. They also collected names from special schools for the mentally handicapped. The destinies of these cases could hardly be more different, so they were ideal for testing the above claim. From the collected data we selected 100 bright and 100 mentally handicapped cases whose age distribution is shown on the next page.

Birth details were obtained from their parents because birth certificates are rare in India. Professional Indian astrologers routinely assume that birth details provided by parents are correct, so our procedure followed the norm. Each horoscope (birth chart) was calculated by one of us (PG) using commercial astrological software. All horoscopes were coded and stored in safe custody by Professor Kunte at Pune University, so that neither the experimenters (our group of four) nor the astrologers could know the identities of the individuals.

Publicity

We announced our experiment at a press conference in Pune May 12, 2008, and invited practicing astrologers to take part. We explained that each participant would be given forty horoscopes drawn at random from our set of 200 and would have to judge whether their owners were mentally bright or handicapped. We also invited established astrological organizations to take part, for which they would be given all 200 horoscopes, a respectably large sample size.

The press conference, which was reported in almost all local and regional newspapers, proved to be an efficient way to reach astrologers. Within a few days we received about 150 telephone calls from astrologers all over Maha­rashtra expressing interest. We asked them to send us their names, experience, and method of prediction used, together with a stamped self-addressed envelope for mailing the forty horoscopes. They were then allowed one month for making their judgments. In due course, fifty-one astrologers asked for horoscopes, of which twenty-seven from all over Maharashtra sent back their judgments. The rest did not tell us why they chose not to participate.

Objections

Astrologers from the Pune and Maha­rashtra astrological societies expressed concern that, because the data had been collected by skeptics, the experiment would be biased. We assured them that the skepticism of data collectors had no active role in running the experiment, and that the experiment was of the double-blind kind to make sure it was entirely fair. But they were not convinced, and tried (unsuccessfully) to dissuade other astrologers from participating.

A month later, at a Pune astrological seminar, we explained that tests, indeed many tests, are necessary if astrology is to establish itself as a science. The organizer then said he could provide a set of ten rules that would tell whether a horoscope’s owner was mentally bright or handicapped, and urged the astrologers present to participate in our experiment.

In India, leading astrologers have their own astrological organizations, and so we wrote to those on our list (about a dozen) inviting them to judge all 200 horoscopes. Two responded with expressions of interest, of which one sent in its judgment. The other remained silent.

An Interesting Sub-Test

Although the Maharashtra Astro­logical Society had urged astrologers to boycott our experiment, its president kept meeting with us. Among other things he gave us a rule for predicting sex and another rule for predicting intelligence, both of which he claimed were correct in 60 percent of cases. But when applied to our set of 200 horoscopes, the predictions were respectively 47 and 50 percent correct, which offers no advantage over pure guessing or tossing a coin.

Results of Our Main Test

Breakdown by age of our 100 + 100 test cases. About half of the mentally handicapped cases are older than our bright teenagers, which could have provided cues but evidently didn’t.

Of the twenty-seven astrologers who participated, not all provided personal details, but fifteen were hobbyists, eight were professionals, nine had up to ten years of experience, and seventeen had more than ten years of experience. So they clearly formed a competent group. Their average experience was fourteen years.

If the astrologers could tell intelligence from a person’s horoscope, they would score close to forty hits out of forty. In fact the highest score was of twenty-four hits by a single astrologer followed by twenty-two hits (by two astrologers). The remaining twenty-four astrologers all scored twenty hits or less, including one professional astrologer who found thirty-seven intelligent and three undecided (so none were mentally handicapped!), of which seventeen were correct. The average for all twenty-seven astrologers was 17.25 hits, less than the twenty expected by chance (e.g., coin tossing) and well within the difference of ± 3.16 needed to be statistically significant at p=0.05. So much for the benefits of their average fourteen years of experience! Certainly no scientific theory would survive such a poor success rate!

The institution whose team of astrologers had judged all 200 horoscopes got 102 hits, of which fifty-one were bright and fifty-one were mentally handicapped, so their judgments were, again, no better than tossing a coin.

Tragically, our statistician, Sudhakar Kunte, died in an accident in 2011, and the security he imposed on data storage has so far made it difficult for us to perform further tests, such as whether the astrologers agreed on their judgments, whether they could pick high IQ better than low, and whether the three astrological methods used (Nirayan, Sayan, Krishnamurty) differed in success rate. We hope that the access to this data will eventually be possible.

Only two tests of Western astrol­ogers have involved the judgment of intelligence. In Clark (1961) twenty astrologers averaged 72 percent hits for ten cases of high IQ paired with cerebral palsy, but this famous result could not be replicated by Joseph (1975), where twenty-three astrologers averaged only 53 percent hits for ten cases of high IQ when paired with the severely mentally handicapped. In any case the sampling error associated with N=10 is more than enough to explain both results, which is consistent with the dozens of other tests that have been made of Western astrology (Dean 2007). It is also consistent with the few tests of Western astrologers who practice Vedic astrology, for example Dudley (1995).

Conclusion

Our experiment with twenty-seven Indian astrologers judging forty horoscopes each, and a team of astrologers judging 200 horoscopes, showed that none were able to tell bright children from mentally handicapped children better than chance. Our results contradict the claims of Indian astrologers and are consistent with the many tests of Western astrologers. In summary, our results are firmly against Indian astrology being considered as a science.⁷

Acknowledgments

The Department of Statistics, Pune University, and the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, provided infrastructural support while this experiment was being conducted. A brief account appeared in Current Science 96(5), 641–643, 2009. My special thanks to Geoffrey Dean of Perth, Western Australia, for providing information on tests of Western astrology as well as giving me a general background of astrology in the West versus the East.

Notes

1. Babylonian omen ideas arrived in India around 450 BC during the Persian occupation, followed, around 200 AD, by Greek astrological ideas based on planets. To these were added new ideas to suit Indian culture. The end result was largely the Indian astrology still in use today, which exists in numerous schools disagreeing over details (most schools of astrology, Indian or Western, disagree over details). The main differences from Western astrology are a preoccupation with reincarnation and karma, use of the sidereal zodiac instead of the tropical zodiac (they now differ by nearly one sign due to precession), exclusion of the non-classical planets Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto in favor of the two lunar nodes Rahu and Ketu, use of twenty-seven lunar mansions or nakshatras, and progressively smaller and smaller subdivisions of the signs (Stein 1995 and Rao 2000).

2. Braha (1986, xiii) warns that the complexity can be dealt with only by intuition and experience, so Indian astrology cannot be properly learnt from books. But tests of Western astrologers have found that neither self-rated use of intuition nor experience raise their success rate above chance (Dean and Kelly 2003). So why should Indian astrologers be any different?

3. At one time Rao ran a computer horoscope service but without predictions. It was “only to prove to ‘omniscient’ astrologers that a confirmed anti-astrologer can also do what astrologers do, and with greater efficiency and knowledge.” His charge for fooling you was thirty rupees.

4. According to ancient Hindu texts, each believer has 8,400,000 rebirths from which they are released only by attaining enlightenment. At say, fifty years per birth, and no change over time, the allocated rebirths span more than 400 million years, roughly the age of the earliest hominids.

5. More examples can be found in Prema­nand et al. (1993) and also via Internet search engine, albeit with a need to persevere in your searching. For starters, try searching for “astrology michael prabhu.”

6. But some come close. For example Rakesh Anand (2010) used astrology to make several important decisions in his life, but the results were disastrous. So he prepared horoscopes for twenty-four celebrities and nine personal friends, changed their names, and was able to get 101 astrologers from everywhere in far northern India to predict their life and events. But none succeeded. For example, they predicted no political career from the horoscope of George Bush and no big money from the horoscope of Bill Gates. He concluded, “astrology is a misleading and useless superstition” (6). He also offered a prize of one million rupees (about $20,000) to any Indian astrologer who could demonstrate that astrology works, so far with no takers. For details, visit www.godvslife.com.

7. Over the years I have made many public statements against the pseudoscience of astrology, which earned me a chapter titled “The Narlikar Episode” in a 348-page, 1998 book Astrology and the Hoax of “Scientific Temper” by the astrologer Gayatri Devi Vasudev, then editor of The Astrological Magazine. Her book tries to show that scientific inquiry or “scientific temper” is prejudiced against astrology, and that critics are quite ignorant of both science and astrology. The above chapter accused me of venturing into areas I had not investigated and was therefore ignorant of. For example, I had made the supposedly inexcusable mistake of declaring that astrology was not a science. I hope the present investigation can set the record straight.

References

Anand, R. 2010. Astrology Tested Fake. Jammu: God vs Life Publications.

Braha, J.T. 1986. Ancient Hindu Astrology for the Modern Western Astrologer. Miami: Hermetician Press.

Clark, V. 1961. Experimental astrology. In Search 3(1): 102–109.

Dean, G. 2007. The case for and against astrology. In B. Farha (ed.), Paranormal Claims: A Critical Analysis. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, pp. 115–129.

Dean, G., and I.W. Kelly. 2003. Is astrology relevant to consciousness and psi? Journal of Consciousness Studies 10(6–7): 175–198.

Dean, G., A. Mather, and I.W. Kelly. 1995. Astrology. In G. Stein, editor, Encyclopedia of the Paranormal, Prometheus Books.

Dudley, J. 1995. An attempt to predict accidental death with Vedic astrology. Correlation 14(2): 7–11. (Twenty road deaths vs controls gave 11 hits vs 10 expected by chance.)

Joseph, R.A. 1975. A Vernon Clark-model experiment distinguishing exceptionally gifted high performance from profoundly retarded low performance children. Journal of Geocosmic Research 1(3): 55–72.

Komath, M. 2009. Testing astrology. Current Science 96(12): 1568–1572.

Premanand, B., M. Bhatty, and M.S. Risbud (eds). 1993. Astrology: Science or Ego-Trip? Published by Indian Skeptics. (The best single survey of both Indian and Western astrology, impressively thorough, many anecdotes, but very few tests, none of them Indian.)

Raman, B.V. 1992. Planetary Influences on Human Affairs. New Delhi: UBSD.

Rao, S.B. 2000. Astrology Believe It or Not? Bangalore: Navakarnataka Publications.

Siddhanta, K. 2001. Some questions concerning the UGC course in astrology. Breakthrough 9(2): 1–36.

Stein, G. 1995. Encyclopedia of the Paranormal. Amherst: Prometheus Books. Entry on astrology.

This is the week that it was announced that Jenny McCarthy was joining the popular daytime television show “The View” in the USA. We can take some comfort in the fact that backlash about her appointment has not just come from science blogs and independent media sites, but also mainstream publications like Time and The New Yorker.

It’s also timely that Dr. Paul A. Offit, the chief of the infectious diseases division of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has a newly released book “Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine.” In it he criticizes the negative impact that celebrities like Jenny McCarthy can have on the public understanding and support of good health and science. In addition, he offers a scathing exposé of the alternative medicine industry, revealing how even though some popular therapies are remarkably helpful due to the placebo response—many of them are ineffective, expensive, and even deadly.

Kylie Sturgess: I thought that, despite the often incredibly tragic stories that were within Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine, that it was a brisk and engaging read. Was this a book intended for broad audiences, as implied by the rather catchy title?

Dr Paul Offit: Definitely. Many Americans, and frankly, many citizens of this world, use some form of alternative therapy, even if it's just large doses of vitamins. Sure, I'm trying to influence the way people think about this. I want them to be just as skeptical about alternative therapies as they are about conventional therapies. The phrase, “do you believe in magic?”—other than the fact that it's a Lovin' Spoonful song—was just engaging to me. It's playful. It's provocative. It's fun. I think, therefore, it is more likely to attract the attention of a general audience.

Kylie: I enjoyed where the book opened with your own experiences on being on the other side of scalpel, as it were—being worried about health conditions and how you related to others who might feel similar. They might be scared, or I'm sure, worried, and then turn to alternative medicine. Was there any time during your early career or life, that you thought, “There might be something in it…” about alternative medicine?

Paul: No, there wasn't. I think the crossover point for me—frankly, the real reason I wrote the book—was a few years ago when I had micro‑fracture surgery on my left knee. During the recovery, I saw an orthopedic surgeon, who had done the operation. He recommended that I take chondroitin sulfate and glucosamine, because he explained to me this would decrease inflammation and therefore decrease pain. He also said it would help in the deposition of collagen in the area where the microsurgery had been performed, which surprised me.

I had certainly never learned about this in medical school! It didn't make either biological or physiological sense that those two substances would do anything to decrease inflammation or do anything to promote collagen deposition, especially specifically in my left knee. I went and looked to see whether there were studies that looked at these two substances in either reducing inflammation or promoting healing. There were a couple studies that showed that it didn't do anything—it was no better than placebo. That taught me that we had crossed over. That there was no line between conventional medicine and alternative medicine. That we had roundly embraced this, I think, largely because we believed in magic.

Kylie: Does it raise concerns about medical schools and their practices?

Paul: Yes. I think that this is such a powerful, lucrative industry, and they've been so good at getting their message out there. So much so that you have a number of medical schools that have visions of integrative or holistic medicine—Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia as an example. Our medical students are taught occasionally about homeopathy or how to manipulate healing energies. I think it's a transition from the scientific method—the system that brought us out of the Age of Darkness and into the Age of Enlightenment—to, frankly, a world of magic.

Kylie: What are the schools doing? What safeguards exist in order to prevent this from happening? I mean, in general, there must be protection acts and consumer rights for health in the USA. Some of our listeners might not be familiar with them. Are there ones in general, and are there ones for medical schools?

Paul: There are two questions there: I would say that regarding the use of these dietary supplements and mega-vitamins, no, there are no protections. At least in the United States since 1994, with the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, the regulatory agency in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration, no longer has purview of any of those products. Therefore, that industry is under no obligation to support its claims or admit its harms. The manufacturing is essentially unsupervised. The label may not reflect what's actually in the bottle. Contaminants are a common problem.

Sometimes there are ingredients that are never listed on the label. No, I would say the protections don't exist—which is interesting because I think most Americans probably think they do. I think that when they walk into their pharmacy or their general nutrition center, or their health food store, they assume when they buy something off that shelf, that somebody is looking over the shoulder of the company that makes it, when that's not true.

Kylie: So what happened? Seriously, what happened? Did somebody fall asleep on the job, or something like that? It just sounds bizarre!

Paul: I think what happened was that over the past thirty years, this industry got more and more powerful and became more and more lucrative. It's estimated to be at least a $28 billion a year industry. They were media savvy. They were politically connected. They were able to push through an act in the mid-1990s, that the New York Times correctly called, “The Snake Oil Protection Act.” That's exactly what it is. The consumer loses.

Kylie: The other half of my question was regarding medical schools. Is it a similar thing, big businesses were pushing the schools in order to allow these odd practices to start being taught?

Paul: I think that's right. I think these groups have become so powerful, they're able to convince, through the use of money and connections, medical schools to allow teaching this.

Actually, I just got an email from a medical student at New York State Medical School in Valhalla, New York. He was upset that he'd just attended a class that was taught by a homeopath. The homeopath explained that his medicine, which by definition is diluted to the point that it's not there anymore, works, and that we don't know how it works because there were some things that science just can't understand.

He was really upset about that. He wrote a letter to the Dean of his medical school expressing his displeasure that he had just spent an hour learning about homeopathy in the twenty-first century. The letter that he got back basically told him to be more open-minded.

This has nothing to do with open-mindedness. This is nothing about being open-minded to politics or religious beliefs. This is about science, which isn't terribly open-minded, because frankly, homeopathy—as we all know—does not contain an active ingredient. You don't have to be open-minded or not open-minded. The issue is whether or not it is a scientific issue and should thus be discussed in a scientific venue and in a scientific manner, or in a political manner.

Kylie: We've got business. We've got politics. There's also celebrity. One large part of the book deals with celebrity endorsement. For example, I didn't know about the case of Steve McQueen, which is something you discuss in the book, and his tragic death due to trusting alternative medicine. Just how influential are celebrities?

Paul: Companies pick celebrities to endorse products for a reason. They know that we feel that the consumer believes that they know the celebrity because they've seen them on the big screen or the little screen. They believe, they trust them, and they believe they know them. In this country, people like Suzanne Somers, who promotes her anti‑aging products and Jenny McCarthy, a B-level actress, who promotes her autism “cures.” Jenny McCarthy is about to get a position on “The View,” which is a very popular morning show.

So, what is it about Jenny McCarthy that gives her special insight into autism? That gives her insight into the research and development of associated with autism cures or causes? What is it about Suzanne Somers that gives her special insight into how the body and why the body ages? Nothing, they're just actresses.

Kylie: I read Jenny McCarthy's first two books, about her son and autism and annotated them in order to find out all the claims—most of it was just anecdotal. She was picking up messages from other concerned mothers and that led her to be convinced.

Paul: You could argue that Jenny McCarthy is an expert on her child, that she knows her child best. This doesn't therefore mean that she understands broadly the cause or causes of Autism. Not at all—she's never published a research paper on the disorder. She's never reviewed a research paper. She's never been part of any review applications of the National Institutes of Health. She doesn't know anything about it, really.

A number of years ago, Jenny McCarthy, Holly Robinson Peete, and a non‑celebrity mother, were on “Larry King Live.” And I'll never forget this, Larry King looked at the non-celebrity mother and looked at Jenny McCarthy, and said, “What do you think causes autism?” Then he posed the same question to the non‑celebrity mom. And then again to Holly Robinson Peete.

You're watching this show thinking, “Why don't you get an autism expert on the show? Ask them that question.”

Kylie: I've lost track of who first said, “Alternative medicine that's proven to work is called medicine”—you credit Dr. Joe Schwartz at the end of chapter four in your book. But I've heard other celebrities, who I admire, say similar things and yet it doesn't seem to work, in terms of celebrities generally promoting positive, pro-science messages. Do you think there should be an answer in the form of celebrities to speaking out for science?

Paul: I hope to live that long! I think it was Tim Minchin, actually, who was the first person who said, “You know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.” He's great.

By doing what he does, which is to make science engaging and fun, and skepticism engaging and fun, I think he does a lot for the cause. As a general rule, I think, celebrities—who tend to live in California, in the United States, at least, certainly the movie stars—there is a New Age culture that often embraces an anti‑science point of view. In some ways, they're the last people to stand up for good science.

Kylie: We have multi‑billion dollar enterprises pushing alternative medicine—should we have just as much money behind scientists? Would it really make that much of a change, do you think?

Paul: I think the one thing to change is the law.

For example, in our hospital I'm the head of something called the Therapeutic Standards Committee. We try and decide how drugs or therapies are used in our hospital, to provide some sort of standard. In other words, a physician can't do anything they want in our hospital. If they are engaged in a practice, or a therapy, or a medicine that we don't consider to have clear evidence for safety and efficacy, we review that therapy.

We face the issue of dietary supplements. I would say that's the most fifth most commonly used class of drugs in our hospital. By dietary supplements, I mean, melatonin, Co‑Enzyme Q10, Kava, Echinacea, et cetera. There are doctors in our hospital who like these supplements and want to use them. In order to get that on our formulary we have to at least look to see whether there are data showing efficacy, data showing safety, and at the very least, a statement from the manufacturer that the product is what it claims to be.

For the most part, I would say, the only medication for which we find clear evidence of safety and efficacy is melatonin. With melatonin, we were able to get from several companies something called, a Certificate of Analysis, where they provide us with a letter that says, “This is exactly what it's claimed to be. We guarantee it. There's nothing else in it. If it says 200 milligrams, that's what it is.”

With everything else, the other 54,000 supplements that are marketed in the United States, we could find essentially no clear evidence for safety and no clear evidence for efficacy. Doctors at our hospitals wanted to use these anyway, despite that we could find very few companies that were willing to provide us with even a simple letter that backed their product to be what it claimed to be. It's that bad.

Kylie: That's incredible. It must be very difficult to be an informed consumer, when you have very few laws to help you out and may not even have access to scientific papers, or know the right kind of questions to ask…

Paul: Yeah, I think the term “informed” should be put in quotes, when it comes to this because there's very little information to be had. We, at the Therapeutic Standards Committee at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia have access to all the medical journals and know how to get to them very quickly. The head of our pharmacy is very good at knowing what the most recent data are regarding anything the FDA has seen as far as consumer alert watches. We're very well informed. We can find very little information on this.

I'll give you a perfect example. I was on a National Public Radio show in the United States called “Science Friday.” Ira Flatow is the host; they had a caller on the show, who I thought summarized this issue well, although I'm not sure she meant to. She was angry that the Food and Drug Administration had recently approved a drug for the treatment of premenstrual symptom, specifically hot flashes. The drug was Paroxetine. The trade name is Paxil. This was a low-dose form of Paxil, which is often used as an anti‑depressant. In any case, they had licensed the drug, even though the data for efficacy was marginal. You went from five-and-a-half hot flashes a day to four hot flashes a day. There was always the question with Paxil of the increased risk of suicide ideation.

Her attitude was "I'm angry with the FDA; I'm angry that they license this drug of marginal efficacy and it’s potentially risky." So she said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Therefore, what I'm going to do instead is use black cohosh for my hot flashes.”

Now, the fact is, just because the FDA licenses a product doesn't mean you have to use it. I mean, the FDA doesn't pin people down and make them use these products. What the FDA does, by requiring safety studies and requiring efficacy studies before licensure, is make the company generate data. With regard to black cohosh, there is essentially no data.

Now, recently the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, has done a study on black cohosh and shows it doesn't make any difference. It doesn't even reduce hot flashes by one-and-a-half a day. However, there was recently a problem with black cohosh being found to cause severe hepatic or liver damage. Even though, it doesn't look like it was the black cohosh, itself. It may have been something contaminating the black cohosh, because again, manufacturers are unregulated in this industry.

Her attitude was interesting. Her attitude was essentially: “Here you have this big pharmaceutical company making Paxil—marginal benefit. I'm going to go to what I consider a safer, more effective alternative. Even though, it's not safer. It's not in any way as effective.” That's because she puts dietary supplements under this untouchable halo.

Kylie: I've also noticed people reacting with shock to an article by you, or at least a citation of you in the Huffington Post, about vitamins increasing risk of heart disease and cancer, which sounds terrifying to me. What did you find personally shocking in the research that you did for the book?

Paul: That was probably the most shocking thing. My expertise is in infectious disease and specifically in vaccines. This is not something that I have spent a long time looking at. When I went through the studies, of which there are more than twenty, you clearly find (and I'm not talking about multivitamins, which are at or about the recommended daily allowance, I'm talking about mega‑vitamins) when people take five‑fold, or ten‑fold, or twenty‑fold the recommended daily allowance they suffer these consequences.

If you take large quantities of Vitamin A, Vitamin E, beta-carotene, and selenium, you clearly increase your risk of cancer, increase your risk of heart disease, and have the potential of shortening your life.

There was one study where the increased incidence of cancer was 46 percent. They had to cut the study short because the data safety monitoring board was so struck by the data!

What's interesting in that is that nobody knows it! I didn't know it. I'm in the medical field, and I didn't know it. It was only after I looked through these data that I found that out. What I then published initially was an op‑ed piece in The New York Times. I got a lot of pushback from that. People felt I had attached the “Church of Vitamins and Supplements” and that I should be brought down.

The thing that most amazed me, actually, was that probably the biggest lobbying group for the industry in the United States is a group called the Council for Responsible Nutrition. One of my theories is that whenever a group has the either “responsible” or “justice” in the title, you should watch out!

They attacked me. They attacked me, personally. They said that I stand alone on this, that this is not the medical consensus, which is absolutely wrong. It absolutely is the medical consensus. This is not a scientific controversy. It's something that generally the public doesn't know, but it's not a scientific controversy.

Basically, what they said was that people shouldn't read my book, which shocked me. As powerful as this industry is, they can just ignore me. I'm nobody. My book will come and go. They will be here forever. It really struck me that they chose to engage me at all. I thought they would have been smart to just say, “No comment.”

Kylie: What would you suggest if you had friends, family, loved ones who were using alternative medicine, risking their lives? What's the best advice you could give to them?

Paul: Just so I'm not setting myself up as having a completely negative view of the industry: I think there is something to be said for the placebo response, which is unfortunately named. I think when people hear the word “placebo,” they assume that it's dismissive, trivializing, that it's just all in my head and that it's not real.

I think that in fact, the placebo response can be a physiological response. I think believing that you are about to be helped in some way goes a long way to being helped in some way. Clearly there are studies. There are five books published on the placebo response, each of which has several hundred articles referenced.

You can learn, for example, to release your own endorphins, these pain-relieving chemicals made by your pituitary and hypothalamus. You can learn to release your own dopamine. You can learn to up‑regulate and down‑regulate your own immune system specifically via various chemokines and cytokines. That's cool. It think that's really interesting and worth study.

Acupuncture is the perfect example of this to me: acupuncture is the product of second‑century BC China. This is a culture that not only didn't believe in dissection, but punished those who dissected human bodies by death. There was a real disincentive to really learn about anatomy.

The Chinese believed that there were 365 different parts of the body because there were 365 days of the year. They believed that there should be twelve meridians, the longitudinal arcs ranging from head to toe into which one inserted needles, because there are twelve great rivers in China.

If you believe that human anatomy has nothing to do with rivers in China or days of the year, then there's nothing accurate about acupuncture. Indeed, if you look at people who benefit from acupuncture, it doesn't matter where you put the needles. In fact, it doesn't even matter whether you put the needles under the skin! Even these retractable needles seem to work, so‑called “acupressure.” That is interesting!

Also, there were some studies. They aren't as strong. If you give those people who benefit from acupuncture Naloxone, which is an endorphin blocker—you actually block the effect. That suggests that at least some of these people are learning to release their endorphins. That's interesting too!

I think, then, it's incumbent upon the acupuncturist to figure out in what manner, the lowest burden, lowest risk, the least expensive way to induce this response. It may just be that you're lying down in the office for thirty minutes, smelling incense, and listening to relaxing music. That may be it. Figure it out. You can figure it out.

When Mehta Oz on his show says things like, “There are just some things that science can't know,”—this isn't one of them. If you're benefiting from something medical, you can figure out what it is about the physiology or biology of that situation that makes you better. You don't have to look to the gods to understand why! We don't have to do that anymore. We can figure this part of it out. We're not asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin here! We're asking a scientific question that can be answered in a scientific venue.

And I wish we did that—that's the part of alternative medicine that bugs me, this spirituality that borders on mysticism. We don't have to do that here. We can understand it!

Kylie: What next? Are you going to be touring with the book? Hopefully, coming to Australia? That would be awesome.

Paul: Unfortunately, because I've taken such a clear and definitive stance on the science of vaccines, I tend not to appear in public! I have my detractors. I know this may be amazing to you, but I do have my detractors, Kylie! I do radio and television and certainly newspapers. I'm happy to do that, but I generally don't go to bookstores and speak. I don't find that terribly productive. There's usually one person in the audience that dominates. It's more depressing than it is uplifting.

Kylie: Hopefully, I'll get to see you one day at a conference, because it would be awesome to hear you speak live as well. Thank you so much for talking to me, Paul Offit.

Paul: Thank you, Kylie.

Allegedly invisible entities—popular belief notwithstanding—are indistinguishable from imaginary beings.

Popular belief aside, the best scientific evidence indicates that entities that are reputedly capable of invisibility¹—ghosts and other spirits, for example, as well as some extraterrestrials, angels, fairies, and many others—are indistinguishable from imaginary beings.

Natural Invisibility?

Invisible, in this context, does not mean transparent² (like a jellyfish), nor camouflaged³ (such as a chameleon), nor obscured (as with a magician’s rabbit), nor microscopic (like a bacterium) but instead truly invisible: that is, when the entity is in the invisible mode it is incapable of being seen by human vision in the visual spectrum. It neither reflects, refracts, absorbs, scatters, nor radiates light.⁴

No physical entity—that is, a being composed of ordinary matter⁵—can exist in an invisible state, short of being dematerialized, in which case it would not exist as matter. The very substance of such a matter-centric being—a person or other living (or even nonliving) thing of the natural world—necessarily renders it visible and at the same time incapable of invisibility. But if this is true, then what of an invisible girl exhibited at Paris in the eighteenth century?

Supposedly a prodigy born in one of the provinces, she was kept, presumably for her own safety, in a small casket. This had glass panels on the top, front, and back so spectators could see through the box, which was suspended from the ceiling by four chains. Thus there was nowhere for anyone to hide. Yet a horn attached to one end of the casket allowed people to address questions to the invisible girl and to hear her voice in reply! Theories that it was a ventriloquial trick were soon discredited. As to the theory that a tiny dwarf hid behind the trumpet, that notion was likewise rejected because—had such a miniature mortal existed—it would have been more sensible to exhibit it than to fake an “invisible girl.”

As it happened, there really was no invisible girl but rather a real one hidden in the adjacent room. She addressed spectators through a speaking tube—with its end that emerged from the wall being concealed by the large mouth of the trumpet. A picture on the wall had a secret peephole through which the hidden girl could observe objects held up to the casket and so describe them in detail (Gibson 1967, 44–45).

Advanced Technology?

Of course, one may assert that some technological advance may make invisibility possible, but this is merely a science-fiction notion. It was advanced as early as 1897 in a novella by H.G. Wells. Titled The Invisible Man, it tells of a scientist named Griffin whose optics research enables him to alter a body’s refractive index to that of air; thus it neither absorbs nor reflects light and so becomes invisible. (Griffin succeeds in making himself invisible but—unable to reverse the effect—embarks on a rampage that culminates in his own killing by a mob. As he dies, his body slowly returns to visibility.) Another science fiction story is the humorous Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951). (Mistakenly accused of murder, a man injects himself with a secret formula that renders him invisible so he can elude authorities and trap the real killer—with the help of a couple of wacky private eyes.)

Fiction notwithstanding, in 1943—according to a later book, The Phila­delphia Experiment (Moore and Berlitz 1979)—invisibility supposedly became a reality. Allegedly, the United States Navy conducted an experiment with “electronic force fields” at the Phila­delphia Navy Yard that succeeded in rendering a battleship and its entire crew invisible! Reportedly, however, the experiment had such traumatic effects on the personnel that the research was abandoned, the project classified above top secret, and the entire incident publicly denied—another great government conspiracy.

In fact, the “experiment” was nothing but an outrageous hoax, perpetrated on credulous researchers by one Carl M. Allen, who also called himself Carlos Allende. Born in 1925, Allende was considered brilliant but lazy and given to practical jokes. He later (1969) admitted the invisibility claims were “false . . . the crazyest [sic] pack of lies I ever wrote.” Still later he retracted the confession, and the subsequent book and a 1984 movie helped keep the hoax alive (Stein 1993, 176–77).

But can we really be certain that no technology in this or another universe can ever be devised to cause invisibility? Well, we certainly can imagine such. “However,” according to Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained, “although there are many theoretical suggestions as to how invisibility might be achieved, for the time being ‘real’ invisibility or perfect transparency . . . remains firmly within the realm of science fiction” (McGovern 2007, 347). (To all those who would, from their armchairs, opine, say, about theoretical physics, we would only ask them to wait until they have accomplished invisibility and then get back to us.)

Extra-Dimensional Realms?

But suppose invisibility already exists. One may hypothesize means by which an entity supposedly appears and disappears, such as a “parallel universe” (Sachs 1980, 84) or “another dimension or space-time continuum” (Sachs 1980, 239). However, these concepts also are unproven, and cases supposedly proving them typically do not withstand scrutiny.

Consider, for instance, the case of Oliver Larch, whose disappearance on Christmas Eve 1889 is one for the annals of the incredible. Leaving the Larch family farmhouse on the outskirts of South Bend, Indiana, to fetch water, the eleven-year-old boy was soon heard crying out in alarm. His parents and neighbors, who had gathered to sing to Mrs. Larch’s organ music, rushed outside. By lantern light the group followed Oliver’s footsteps in the snow until, about halfway to the well, they abruptly ended! “Because it defied logical explanation,” writes Frank Edwards (1962, 103), “the disappearance of this boy was quietly filed away and forgotten.”

Unfortunately, this story succumbed to investigation. Like another disappearance narrative—that of Tennessee farmer David Lang, who in 1880 vanished in full view of witnesses but whose voice could be heard faintly at the site over subsequent years—the Larch story turns out to have been plagiarized from a trilogy of Ambrose Bierce short stories. The Larch tale bears obvious similarities to Bierce’s “Charles Ashmore’s Trail,” just as the Lang yarn does to his “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field” (Nickell 1980; 1988, 61–73). At the end of his “Mysterious Disappearances” trilogy is a postscript in which he relates the theories of an obvious crackpot who postulates, says Bierce, that “in the visible world there are void places” likened to the “cells in a Swiss cheese,” that somehow explain disappearances (Bierce 1893).

Alien Domains

At some point, such thinking crosses over into the paranormal. Take extra­terrestrials, for example. Alien beings are sometimes said to have the power of invisibility—not unlike fairies and other magical beings (to be discussed later). According to many witnesses, an extraterrestrial may suddenly come into view, or vanish in an instant, while others report similar behavior of UFOs. Some think the disappearing craft simply “returns to its original dimension” (Sachs 1980, 84), while there is also the implication that, before and after it was perceived, it was invisible.

A major proponent of invisible UFOs was Trevor James Constable—a man with strange ideas indeed. Consta­ble stated in his book Sky Creatures (1978, 7–8) that “the main direction in which UFO phenomena lead human inquiry” is “into the invisible.” Constable postulated that UFOs were “invisible” beings in an “invisible [infrared] realm.” They “occasionally emerge into the visible portion of the spectrum,” being sustained and propelled by “orgone energy” (1978, 12, 18).

Imagined by a crank named Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), orgone energy is said to be “life energy.” It supposedly causes stars to twinkle, produces lightning and other static electric phenomena, and animates dowsing rods—among many other functions. In the human body it purportedly recharges red blood cells through breathing and provides sexual energy (Gardner 1957, 250–262). Constable notwithstanding, Reich’s orgone proved to be imaginary and, after Reich ignored an injunction against selling his allegedly curative but worthless Orgone Accumulator boxes, he was tried, fined, and sentenced to two years in prison, where he died (Randi 1995, 222).

Constable proposed that there were two main types of UFOs: 1) actual living “critters” that inhabit Etheria, an invisible world of the atmosphere (just as fish live in the sea), and 2) inanimate craft piloted by Etherean intelligences—both propelled of course by orgone energy (Constable 1978; Sachs 1980, 71). He claimed to have captured both types on infrared film, but his work seems doubtful in the extreme, has never been conducted or reported in any responsible scientific manner, and has not been replicated by mainstream science. Not surprisingly, he rants against “official science” for “evading its responsibilities” to investigate UFOs rather than engage in “organized obscurantism and ridicule” (Constable 1978, 15–17). However, to the extent scientists have engaged in ridicule of UFOs, cranks like Trevor James Constable have mostly themselves—and their runaway imaginations—to blame.

Spirit Realm

Some claim that a person does not really die at death but instead becomes a ghost or spirit, supposedly formed of energy, and lives on, invisibly, in that state. As with aliens, some speak of an “invisible realm” for spirits (Guiley 2000, 356). Proof, however, is lacking. Moreover, we know from the science of neurology that when the brain dies, brain function ceases; any energy given off by the body necessarily dissipates. Nevertheless, “ghost hunters” purport to detect such energy using gadgetry—electromagnetic-field meters, thermal imaging cameras, and so on—but that approach is just so much pseudoscience (Nickell 2006).

Some claim the invisible entity may be viewed psychically. That is to say, a spirit of the dead, for instance, may be seen by a “medium”; or an angel, deity, or the like may be perceived by a “visionary.” Invariably, however, such seers are revealed to have fantasy-prone personalities (Wilson and Barber 1983; Nickell 1995, 40–42, 157, 162, 167, 176, 211–14), or they appear to be hallucinating (Nickell 2007, 80, 245–55, 260–62) or both—assuming they are not outright charlatans. There is no convincing scientific evidence that anyone has psychic powers of any kind—hence James Randi’s longstanding offer of a substantial reward to anyone who can prove he or she has such abilities under scientifically controlled conditions (Randi 1991, 151–53).

Consider Mary Ann Winkowski, for example. The real-life model for the central character in the fantasy TV series Ghost Whisperer, Winkowski claims to see and talk to earthbound spirits (not those who have supposedly “crossed over” to the Other Side). Since she was a child of four, she says, she has been able to “see” the dead at funerals even though they are invisible to others. She maintains that the spirits “smoke, comb their hair, change their clothes—all those things we always do too. Only I’ve never been able to figure out where they get the stuff from” (Winkowski 2000, 150).

As a child, Winkowski had what seem to have been imaginary playmates, although she insists they were not imaginary. As an adult she claims to receive special messages from paranormal entities and frequently encounters apparitions—as well as exhibiting numerous other traits consistent with being a classic fantasizer. There is a distinct lack of objective evidence for her claims that spirit entities exist (for instance, an anomaly in a client’s photo, supposedly depicting spirit energy, was actually caused by the flash rebounding from the camera’s wrist strap).

The evidence strongly suggests in­stead that Winkowski is simply participating in encounters of her own imagination (Nickell 2010). Therefore, the source of the “stuff” that puzzles her—the inanimate objects that are seen in the possession of apparitions that supposedly represent life energy—is clear. As Tyrrell (1973) noted, apparitions of visibly rendered invisible people invariably wear clothes and are accompanied by objects—just as they are in dreams—because the items are necessary to the apparitional drama. In other words, the inanimate objects, like the entities themselves, are imaginary.

Visionary Experiences?

As to the perceptions of reputed visionaries, similar problems present themselves. Take Joseph Smith, for instance, the Mormon founder who claimed to receive instructions from an entity, an angel of God named Moroni. He appeared at Smith’s bedside and told him how to find a holy account, written on gold plates and now known as the Book of Mormon. Regarded by many as a veritable confidence man, and certainly a person with an extraordinary propensity to fantasize (Wilson and Barber 1983), Smith appears to have experienced common “waking dreams” (hypnagogic hallucinations) that occur in the twilight between sleeping and waking (Nickell 2004, 296–303).

Or consider the famed Catholic visionary, Lucia Santos, who at age ten was one of three shepherd children who encountered the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal, in 1910. She and her seven-year-old cousin Jacinta Marto saw the dazzling apparition, radiant in white light, and Lucia convinced Jacinta’s brother Francisco to eventually “see” her too. Only Lucia ever talked to the Virgin, who supposedly appeared on the same day during each of several months, yet remained invisible to the onlookers. As it happened, Lucia was a precocious, imaginative, and charismatic child who had earlier apparitional experiences. Clearly a fantasizer who manipulated the other children (Nickell 2009), she was, her mother said, “nothing but a fake who is leading half the world astray” (qtd. in Zimdars–Swartz 1991, 86).

Magick?

During the witch craze of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, it was sometimes reported that devils called incubuses were either “visible or invisible.” Supposedly they would copulate with “witches,” whereupon, although the female was said to be in the throes of ecstasy, the incubus was not visible, yet at other times “a blacke vapor of the length and bignesse of a man” was allegedly seen to depart from her. Reginald Scot repeats such tales in his Discoverie of Witchcraft ([1584] 1972, 43–44), albeit with profound skepticism.

According to other legends, witches are themselves said to have the power of invisibility—as well as of flying, shape-shifting, astral projection, clairvoyance, and other supernatural powers (Guiley 1991, 647–50). Then again, according to gypsy lore, a man could become invisible to witches by doing as follows: “He must rise before the sun, turn all his clothes inside out and then put them on. Then he must cut a green turf and place it on his head. Thus he becomes invisible, for the witches believe he is under the earth, being themselves apparently bewitched by this” (Leland 1995, 148).

Occasionally, invisibility magic even purports to make someone invisible from himself. Usually, however, the intent is to prevent others from seeing him. One such fourteenth-century charm involves reciting Genesis 19:11: “And they smote the men that were at the door of the house with blindness. . . .” This is predicated on the belief that holy writ will cast a spell of blindness over others—though that is not really the same, even if it did work, as actually becoming invisible (Cavendish 1970, 11:1453).

Yet a medieval grimoire offered a talisman promising to “make you invisible, even to spirits.” Reputedly, “You will be able to traverse the bosom of the seas, the bowels of the earth. Likewise you will be able to sweep through the air, nor will any human act be hidden from you.” One needed to “say only: Benatir, Caracrau, Dedos, Etinarmi” (Wedeck 1961, 47).

Among the magical items reputed to make their bearer invisible are various cloaks, amulets, rings, and potions. These may be found in folktales and legends (McGovern 2007, 347). Ac­cord­ing to one folklore authority (Leach 1984, 526–27), “Some beings, gods and ghosts and angels, need no such paraphernalia to appear and disappear, but dwarfs and men must have some talisman to do the trick.”

Behind all such claims and practices is the belief in magic—the attempt to use spells, offerings, invocations, or the like to supplant natural processes. Whereas the latter constitute the domain of science, magical thinking—the opposite of science (Randi 1995, 193)—is rooted in superstition.

Interestingly, throughout folklore certain entities that supposedly have the power of shapeshifting (the ability to alter their shape) also typically have the power of invisibility. Such reputed shapeshifters include ghosts, spiritual entities, monsters, witches, and others (Leach 1984, 1004–1005). A good example is the vampire, which may transform itself into a bat, feline, hound, insect, etc., as well as have the power of invisibility—in addition to being unseen in a mirror (Bunson 1993, 42, 70, 100, 176–77). Another example is the fairy (see Thompson [1955] 1989, 41–44). Shapeshifting’s link with invisibility emphasizes the latter’s magical/fantasy nature.

Deistic Power?

Various demigods and deities throughout history have been attributed power over visibility. In Greek mythology, Perseus, for instance, son of Zeus and Danaë, wore a helmet that conferred invisibility. This helped him become victorious over the snake-haired monster Medusa whom he decapitated (McGovern 2007, 347).

Some gods, like those of early Hin­du literature, were not only invisible but “could assume any visible form at will to favoured worshippers” (Hastings 1914, 7:405). This was also true of the god of the Bible. It was in order to be seen that he appeared to Moses in the form of a burning bush (Exodus 3:2–4). In New Testament passages are references to “the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) and to “the invisible things of him” (Romans 1:20).

According to the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (Hastings 1914, 7:404):

The attribute of invisibility is one which is shared by gods, spirits, demons, the dead and the region of the dead, or the world of the gods, while the power of becoming invisible belongs to those beings as well as to certain mortals. Where invisibility was ascribed to gods or spirits, one simple reason probably was that in the case of most of them, apart from animal-gods or worshipful parts of nature, they were in fact unseen.

And that brings us back to our original point, that allegedly invisible entities—popular belief notwithstanding—are indistinguishable from imaginary beings. That is, an invisible entity necessarily means an immaterial one, one that therefore can exist only as a product of the imagination.

Notes

1. Invisible: Not seen in the visible electromagnetic spectrum (VES) (wavelength from 400nm to 690nm; frequency from 750THz to 435THz). Light is electromagnetic radiation (EMR), i.e., energy emission (oscillating transverse wave) produced when charged particles (electrons) are accelerated. The quantum of EMR is the photon.

2. Transparency: The condition of allowing some light (EMR) to pass through.

3. Camouflage: Concealment against background environment by resembling the background and disrupting patterns and edges. Certain technological claims of invisibility—using metamaterials, nanotubes, crystal prisms, and mirrors to create a two-dimensional illusion—are nothing more than static active/adaptive camouflage.

4. Again, light is EMR (see n. 1).

5. Ordinary matter: made of atoms and molecules, which are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, composed of fermions—namely quarks and leptons.

References

Bierce, Ambrose. 1893. Can Such Things Be?; quoted in Nickell 1988, 67–68.

Bunson, Matthew. 1993. The Vampire Encyclo­pedia. New York: Grammercy.

Cavendish, Richard, ed. 1970. Man, Myth & Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Super­natural. New York: Marshall Cavendish Corporation.

Constable, Trevor James. 1978. Sky Creatures. New York: Pocket Books.

Edwards, Frank. 1962. Strangest of All. New York: Signet.

Gardner, Martin. 1957. Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science. New York: Dover.

Gibson, Walter B. 1967. Secrets of Magic Ancient and Modern. New York: Grosset and Dunlap.

Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 1991. Encyclopedia of the Strange, Mystical, & Unexplained. New York: Grammercy Books.

———. 2000. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, 2nd ed. New York: Checkmark Books.

Hastings, James, ed. 1914. Encyclopedia of Reli­gion and Ethics. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

Leach, Maria, ed. 1984. Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Leland, Charles Godfrey. 1995. Gypsy Sorcery & Fortune Telling. Edison, NJ: Castle Books.

Moore, William L., and Charles Berlitz. 1979. The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisi­bility. New York: Grosset and Dunlap.

McGovern, Una, ed. 2007. Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained. Edinburgh: Chambers.

Nickell, Joe. 1980. Ambrose Bierce and those ‘mysterious disappearance’ legends. Indiana Folklore 13:1–2; reprinted in Nickell 1988.

———. 1988. Secrets of the Supernatural. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

———. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, NY: Prome­theus Books.

———. 2004. The Mystery Chronicles. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

———. 2006. Ghost hunters. Skeptical Inquirer 30(5) (September/October): 23–26.

———. 2007. Adventures in Paranormal Investi­gation. Lexington: University Press of Ken­tucky.

———. 2009. The real secrets of Fatima. Skeptical Inquirer 33(6): 14–17.

———. 2010. The real “Ghost Whisperer.” Skeptical Inquirer 34(4): 16–17.

Randi, James. 1991. James Randi Psychic Investi­gator. London: Boxtree.

———. 1995. The Supernatural A-Z. London: Brock­hampton Press.

Sachs, Margaret. 1980. The UFO Encyclopedia. New York: Perigee Books.

Scot, Reginald. (1584) 1972. Discoverie of Witch­craft. Reprinted 1930 edition, New York: Dover.

Stein, Gordon. 1993. The Encyclopedia of Hoaxes. Detroit, MI: Gale Research.

Thompson, Stith. (1955) 1989. Motif–Index of Folk Literature, vol. 3. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Tyrrell, G.N.M. 1973. Apparitions. London: The Society for Psychical Research.

Wedeck, Harry E. 1961. A Treasury of Witchcraft. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press.

Wilson, Sheryl C., and Theodore X. Barber. 1983. The fantasy-prone personality: Impli­cations for understanding imagery, hypnosis, and parapsychological phenomena. In Imagery, Current Theory, Research and Appli­cation, ed. Anees A. Sheikh, 340–90. New York: Wiley.

Winkowski, Mary Ann. 2000. As Alive, So Dead: Investigating the Paranormal. Avon Lake, OH: Graveworm Press.

Zimdars–Swartz, Sandra L. 1991. Encountering Mary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
By Lawrence Wright. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2013.
ISBN: 978-0-307-70066-7. 432 pp. Hardcover, $28.95.

Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape
By Jenna Miscavige Hill with Lisa Pulitzer. William Morrow, New York, 2013.
ISBN: 978-0-06-224847-3. 404 pp. Hardcover, $27.99.

The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology
By John Sweeney. Silvertail Books (www.silvertailbooks.com), 2013.
ISBN: 978-1-909269-03-3. 324 pp. Paperback, £12.99.

We very likely have Katie Holmes to thank for the timing of this latest crop of books on Scientology, the belief system so notably promoted by her ex-husband, Tom Cruise. Yes, at least two of these authors have been researching their books for many years, but for promotional opportunities you can’t beat a good celebrity crack-up. That said, the Church of Scientology’s known love of litigation and the United Kingdom’s libel laws have made British publishers skittish: Transworld canceled New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, and BBC investigative journalist John Sweeney’s agent, turned down by every major British publisher, created a new independent publishing company to get The Church of Fear into the marketplace.

Wright’s frame for Going Clear is the personal story of Hollywood screenwriter Paul Haggis (Crash, Million-Dollar Baby), which ran in the New Yorker in 2011. A good choice: Haggis found Scientology as an alienated twenty-one-year-old in London, Ontario, in 1975 and stayed with it through his waxing and waning career. He didn’t begin asking questions until 2008, when the Church’s name appeared on a list of organizations supporting Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative to ban gay marriage. When Haggis, two of whose daughters are gay, failed to get satisfactory answers about the issue, he began researching the Church he thought he knew. What he learned led to his resignation. He tells Wright: “I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.”

All told, Wright interviewed more than two hundred current and former Scientologists in addition to research in archives and on the Internet. The effort shows. If you haven’t been following the progression of books and articles over the last thirty years, this is as complete and rounded an account of Scientology and its people as you’re likely to find—now or in the future. Wright notes that for years the Church has been buying up original Hubbard-related journals, letters, and photographs and withdrawing them from public view.

If you have been following the Church, however, it’s surprising how much of the book’s material is familiar. Most of the details of the life and lies of Scientology founder and pulp-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard were laid bare in two 1987 books, British journalist Russell L. Miller’s Bare-Faced Messiah and American former Scientologist Bent Corydon’s Messiah or Madman?. In Time’s “The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power” (1991), Richard Behar took a hard look at the Church’s operation and finances. Vanity Fair’s Maureen Orth published a close-up look at Tom Cruise’s love life just prior to Holmes, showing the Church’s micromanagement of everything its biggest celebrity spokesman might want. Finally, in 2011’s Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion, Janet Reitman broke new ground by studying the transfer of power within the Church after Hubbard died—pardon me, “discarded his body”—to current leader David Miscavige, uncovering the level of torture and abuse endured by members of Scientology’s elite “Sea Org,” and taking a first look at the stories of kids who’ve grown up in Scientology.

Elements of all these prior works are visible in Wright’s account, which pulls them together and fills in missing detail and personal context. The material less familiar to me included Hubbard’s “Affirmations,” a thirty-page diary of sorts that the Church calls a forgery but that was introduced as an exhibit in the Church’s 1984 lawsuit against its former archivist, Gerald Armstrong. In it, Hubbard wrote candidly about himself and his fears that Wright believes are an early attempt at using the methods later known as Dianetics, Scientology’s precursor and foundation.

Wright has also done a good job on the Church’s finances. Its extreme wealth derives in part from the 1993 settlement with the Internal Revenue Service that classed it as a tax-exempt religion. Hubbard stopped paying tax in 1973; by 1991 the Church owed $1 billion in back taxes and had brought more than 2,300 suits against the IRS on behalf of individual Scientologists and two hundred of its own. The two organizations went all out spying on each other until, in 1991, Miscavige, by then installed as leader, abruptly called on the commissioner and proposed détente. The settlement took two years to negotiate; the Church eventually paid $12.5 million in back taxes and dropped all its lawsuits. The kicker: if they had paid the full sum in 1991 the Church by now might be just a historical oddity. Instead, it has $1 billion in assets, mostly held in offshore accounts, despite declining membership according to polls and census figures.

“Public” Scientologists—that is, those who live and work outside the Church and simply take courses or use “the tech”—almost certainly have little idea how the Church treats those who give their lives to it by becoming members of the inner-circle “Sea Org.” They are told to avoid the media and are offered Internet filtering software to block anti-Scientology sites that might tell them that anyone, from highly visible spokespeople to children, may abruptly disappear for months or years of punishment where their basic biological needs are barely met and they are forced to do hard physical labor at exploitive or nonexistent rates of pay. Even more protected from the reality of this side of the Church are its celebrity spokespeople; their experiences of Scientology are limited to its beautifully appointed Celebrity Centers.

Where Wright’s book is at its best is in the personal stories: Haggis’s, of course, but many others, including that of Spanky Taylor. For a time she was John Travolta’s trusted personal Church liaison until she was abruptly sent away for punishment and finally left the Church. It can happen to anyone: even Church president Heber Jentzsch, a frequent public spokesman in the 1990s, has been in “the Hole,” whose tortures are vividly described to Wright, since 2006.

This decade’s significant change in how we think about Scientologists—as opposed to Scientology—has to be this: a substantial portion of today’s Scientologists did not choose to join. Instead, as Miscavige’s niece, Jenna Miscavige Hill, recounts in Beyond Belief, their involvement is a result of decisions made by their parents or grandparents. Hill’s parents, like Miscavige himself, were brought into Scientology as children; she knew she was a Thetan as soon as she could talk. She was two when her parents abandoned family life in New Hampshire and committed their lives entirely to the Church. Hill grew up with other Scientology kids in a rigidly controlled, isolated environment on a ranch in Southern California, rarely seeing her parents and schooled primarily in Hubbard’s writings. One day, with the other kids, she signed a billion-year contract with the Sea Org. She was eight.

A billion years, thirty years—it’s all the same when you’re eight, but as Hill grew older she began to realize what she’d given away: her individuality, the right to ask questions, the right to family life. You can rationalize that, as well as punishments such as isolation and scrubbing bathrooms with a toothbrush, as long as you believe it’s to benefit the greater good. The Miscavige name subjected her to additional pressure and scrutiny as well as resentment from those who thought it gained her special privileges. In her mid-teens, Hill underwent months of “sec-checks” intended to force her to find and confess “withholds” from her present and past lives, and couldn’t understand why. Eventually she was told: her parents had left the Sea Org. Expected to go with them, she was being given the standard leaving treatment; the Church was collecting secrets it could use to silence her later.

She didn’t want to leave, not then. That came later, after she met and fell in love with Dallas Hill. After many struggles, internal and external, the pair “blew” for the real world. Hill has gone on to have the children she wouldn’t have been allowed inside the Sea Org and cofound the ExScientologyKids website. Gradually, she came to realize the extent to which her life had been owned by the Church. In 2007, when the high-ranking Mike Rinder blew, she finally learned the inside story of why and how her life had been micromanaged at the behest of her uncle.

Rinder’s high-profile defection, one of several over the past five or six years, came after his appearance as a Church spokesman in the documentary Scientology and Me, a 2007 episode of the BBC’s Panorama, a pro­gram with roughly the national weight and reach of 60 Minutes. The award-winning investigative reporter behind it, John Sweeney, followed up in 2010 with The Secrets of Scientology. Despite his long history as a war correspondent, Sweeney says his life’s most frightening moments came while investigating Scientology. This is the story he tells in The Church of Fear; it’s the stuff they didn’t broadcast, including detailed accounts of interviews with the actresses Anne Archer, Leah Remini, Juliette Lewis, and Kirstie Alley, all celebrity supporters. For me, it contains the most new and original (and entertaining) material of the three books reviewed here. Sweeney even visited Trementina, the “space alien cathedral” miles out in the New Mexico desert that stores all of Hubbard’s work on gold-plated discs in a heavily protected underground vault. Also in the book are leaked BlackBerry messages between Miscavige, Rinder, Davis, and other handlers showing that Sweeney’s developing paranoia that he was being spied on was entirely justified.

Sweeney has apologized many times for “the exploding tomato” incident: the moment in 2007, widely viewed on YouTube, when he turned bright red and started bellowing at Church spokesman Tommy Davis, Anne Archer’s son. By 2010, enough of Sweeney’s 2007 handlers had defected that he could put them on the air to explain exactly how he was goaded and manipulated following Hubbard’s strategy of pushing the enemy until he does things you can use to discredit him. However, this strategy collided with the strategy devised by Sweeney’s producer, Sarah Mole, which cast Sweeney as the hypothetical goat in Jurassic Park: bait to pull the predators into the open. A few days before the 2007 broadcast, the Church published the clip of his explosion, following later with a counter-documentary, Panorama Exposed. As an effort to discredit, it failed: the license fee-paying British public was inclined to view the tomato incident as an understandable lapse.

It was the pressure of lying in re­sponse to Sweeney’s knowledgeable point-blank questions that led to the defection of Mike Rinder, who had been pulled out of the Hole to handle Sweeney. The question that broke his back: Had David Miscavige ever hit him? In 2007, Rinder said no. In 2010, a much happier Rinder said instead that the culture of violence in the Church starts at the top and spreads outward and estimated he’d personally been beaten by Miscavige fifty times. Wright lists twelve people who say they, too, were victims of assault by Miscavige and twenty-one who say they witnessed such incidents.

The Church repeatedly has denied these and the other claims of violence, abuse, and deception that all three of these writers and many others continue to spread across the media, backed up by the many Internet sites that are enabling disaffected former Scientologists to find each other and share their stories. Church spokespeople have called critics, even Scien­tology’s own blown former top spokesmen, criminals, sex offenders, bigots, liars, suppressive persons, evil, and psychopaths. Midway through Sweeney’s book, as the number of such characterizations multiplies, it becomes impossible not to think of the actor’s agent George Fields (Sydney Pollack) in the 1982 movie Tootsie, explaining reality to his brilliant but unemployable client, Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman): “They can’t all be idiots, Michael. You argue with everybody.”

Science is great, one of the best processes humans have come up with. It has everything to do with how we live long, productive, healthy lives. It is not, however, the be-all and end-all method of how to solve every problem.

I am unabashedly a fan of science. I wholeheartedly recommend it. But lately I've been feeling a bit uneasy when science cheerleaders pronounce, “Science will solve everything!,” i.e., just apply science and all will be fixed. Because, SCIENCE! YAAAAYY.

I may get myself into trouble with this post, but as an advocate of science, I still say there is more to thinking and knowing than the scientific method. People who advocate fanatical reliance on science—where all competing methods of gaining knowledge are illegitimate—are practicing scientism.

Just Throw Science At It

The “just apply science” plan is an overly simplistic solution that not everyone will automatically buy into. There are other, also valid ways of evaluating problems. All the world's problems cannot be solved by throwing science at it. At least not now (probably never).

Lately, this position has been disputed. There is an ongoing debate in the science/skeptical community regarding philosophy. Is it dead? Does science need it? How does it inform us (if at all)? Can we discuss morals via a scientific basis? You will see heated exchanges about these questions crop up in publications, blogs and in conference discussions. You will also see science placed above the fields of the humanities. Should it be? It's worth thinking about. So I have been. I assume I'll be thinking it through for a while because it's weighty stuff. But, at some point, you have to stop collecting data and taking notes and finally write things down.

For a start, scientism has utility problems. If we need to justify everything with empirical evidence, and then justify that evidence with evidence, and so on, not only do we get bogged down in minutiae, we end up in a scientistic loop which we can't resolve. There must be a point where we accept a premise as a given - that reality is real, that we aren't being fooled by a devious creator. See this Peter S. Williams video.

Philip Kitcher writes in a May 2012 piece called The Trouble with Scientism, that it is folly to think everything human can be reduced to a scientific explanation:

“…it is tempting to infer that all phenomena―including human actions and interaction―can “in principle” be understood ultimately in the language of physics, although for the moment we might settle for biology or neuroscience. This is a great temptation. We should resist it. Even if a process is constituted by the movements of a large number of constituent parts, this does not mean that it can be adequately explained by tracing those motions."

He notes that “…human inquiry needs a synthesis, in which history and anthropology and literature and art play their parts.” (In a fair critique, Jerry Coyne notes that Kitcher's view of science may be too narrow in that the fields he sites also use an evidence-based methodology. That is a hazard with this kind of discussion that I noticed during my research—people start with different presumptions and the argument spins in another direction. In general, I think the issue is how much to exclusively or honorifically use science and potentially overemphasize its worth.)

I'm going to treat this subject broadly, as in the way "scientism" as a word is currently thrown about in our circles. It's similar to what I did with "pseudoscience" here.

Kitcher advocates for a good relationship to be forged between those non-science areas for the greater good of society. I accept that. Over-enthusiasm for science can mask the attention that should be paid to human social issues that are too complex for science to solve neatly and swiftly. For example, if science says that a fetus will be born with a serious debilitating condition that will result in a less than full life, these facts are possibly not the only deciding factors for whether a child is carried to term. If science says that this food item is devoid of nutritional value and can even cause deleterious health effects, should we ban it? It has other value that I might miss were it to disappear.

Look at our laws. Many are informed by science (cigarette restrictions, driving after alcohol consumption, environmental regulations) but are tempered by other human interests such as personal pleasures, social norms and economic considerations. Is there science to support those other human interests? I'm not sure—if you expand science and dig in for a while, perhaps. But I'm pretty sure there won't be one worldwide culture anytime soon that flattens all individual feelings about the items. Or that scientific inquiry will get to the core of every issue in the world.

Something is Missing

Hard-line scientism, while often suggested, is actually rare in practice today due to ethical standards in experimentation. Extreme real-world examples of scientism manifested in social eugenics (scientific racism) and Nazi science where experimentation was done without concern for human suffering and death. Science advocates today see all the good science has brought but we should acknowledge that science has limitations and can be dangerous, corrupt, boring, and counterproductive. To non-scientists, even mild scientism (such as demanding application of science to big questions) can feel cold and unethical, as if something distinctly human is missing.

A hint of scientism creeps into our conversations when we marginalize philosophy and religious thought and state no other form of inquiry or evaluation EXCEPT a scientific one is acceptable. Self-described skeptics may go so far as to reject certain subjects out-of-hand because "science" has already declared them to be nonsense, so they think. That approach limits human understanding and acceptance. Science looks to the outsider like a religion whose tenets MUST be followed.

When we overly indulge our science bias in informing decisions, such as in the realm of policy, the risk of making an unpopular guidance or rule increases. The book, Misunderstanding Science?: The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology (Irwin and Wynne, 2004) provides case studies of how we mess up when we use the scientific hammer at the expense of other tools and when we shut out the non-scientific views.

Not all questions are fit for a purely scientific approach and some decisions make little sense when they are solely dictated by the science. It's fine to talk about the science of kissing, why we dress a certain way, or the physiology of falling in love or sacrificing for our children—there is a scientific basis for the way we act and react. But is it practical or useful to the public to understand these activities as scientific? There's more to it when it comes to finding human meaning. Scientism can turn people off. That's why I dislike it—scientism, not science, that is. I'm going to stick with the conservative view and say we have not outgrown the need for philosophy and that some questions will not be answered satisfactorily by solely scientific means. Just as with other societal issues, the problems and answers are not black and white but complicated.

Undoubtedly, there are some things to which science is aptly applied that we should not water down with weak thinking. A recent flurry of accusations of scientism appeared as TED, a nonprofit that arranges conferences and broadcasts talks, was criticized by the scientific community for giving the stage to what were deemed to be "pseudoscientific" researchers Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock. As I wrote previously about pseudoscience, caution is needed when labeling. Just like with pseudoscience accusations against the non-mainstream researchers, the pejorative volley was returned by citing scientism. Predictably, it turned into a name-calling exercise that went nowhere. Scientism, again like pseudoscience, is not cut and dried, and is useful in some cases as a word to describe a category that the user defines for his/her own purposes. Mainstream science is not very accepting of Hancock and Sheldrake’s ideas for various reasons. In this case, citing poor science is not scientism.

New age purveyors, proponents of fringe ideas, spiritual gurus, and religious advocates may decry a scientific view as a rejection of soul, spirit, imagination, and whatever magical ideas they are promoting, to compensate for lack of rigor and sound evidence. Science is the emotionless establishment, the machine that denies the unknown and unweaves the rainbow.

That's nonsense. Science is an awesome thing. It has well-deserved respect in our society because it's damned reliable compared to other ways of finding out. Because of those qualities, it's easy to overreach and attribute problem-solving capabilities to the scientific method alone. It's too simple for the non-science viewpoint to fail to appreciate a clinical, serious approach to wondrous, awe-inspiring things.

Am I guilty of scientism? Several people have accused me of it when I ask for rigorous and sound evidence about the paranormal and alternative medicine and reject metaphysical excuses. If you ask a question about nature that should be answered objectively by scientific methods, requiring solid evidence is a fair demand to make. That's not scientism—that's looking for a way to get the best answer. I can comprehend that a single, inflexible approach is not suitable for every problem. Science doesn't know everything. Apply science and other tools of inquiry as needed.

Sharon Hill can be contacted at shill@centerforinquiry.net

Q: Is there any chance you could put my mind at ease and explain why the Social Security Death Index would list [Sandy Hook shooter] Adam Lanza as having died on December 13, 2012, the day before the Sandy Hook shooting? His mother is listed as dying on December 14. How accurate is the Index? I’m at my wit’s end. I am sincere in my inquiry. Thank you.

—B. Gee

A: I received the above query shortly after a piece I wrote about the Sandy Hook conspiracies received national media attention in early February. For the week afterward I got dozens of e-mails, many of them hate-filled, accusing me of being part of a government cover-up. I replied briefly to a few of the more benign ones, ignored the rest, and got back to work. But this e-mail seemed more reasonable, though I was wary of getting mired in spending countless fruitless hours trying to track down and answer any conspiracy claim I’m asked about. Years of experience have taught me that it’s often a fool’s errand. Nonetheless, I thought I’d try to give this person a template through which to not only research the question but also understand conspiracy thinking as well.

I responded to the writer: “I can try to look into the issue for you, but I’ll need more information. To start, where did you confirm that the Social Security Death Index listed Adam Lanza as having died on December 13, 2012? If you can point me to the verified original source I may be able to help you.”

In response, he sent the following, along with a screenshot of the web page: “I confirmed it myself by searching the index via Ancestry.com. The index is apparently accessible from any genealogy site. Genealogy Bank seems to be the link everyone is using.” Sure enough, the page had Lanza’s death listed as December 13, 2012, the day before he attacked the school in Newtown, Connecticut, killing nearly two dozen children and adults. I responded: “To answer your question, I don’t know. I still would like to see the original coroner’s report (instead of just a screen shot of a website), but I agree that it appears that the death date is wrong. Without having access to the original death certificate, or knowing who typed what up, my best guess is that it’s a typo.”

Government employees at the local, state, and federal level are not known for their perfection and accuracy. Just last week a friend of mine was enrolling his daughter in elementary school and noticed that some government office drone had mistyped his daughter’s date of birth in the official school records. He wanted to get it fixed in case it would be a problem later on, and he was told he’d have to fill out three forms in two different departments (Department of Education and the local school) to get it fixed. He decided not to bother with it, since the date is pretty close (it’s only off by a few days, and the month is the same) and there’s no harm done. But that means there’s a slight discrepancy between her birth certificate and the school’s official records. If (god forbid) she’s ever killed in a school shooting, this could be seen by conspiracy folks as evidence that something is suspicious when in fact it’s good old incompetence—the kind that happens every day but is usually ignored, later corrected, or never even noticed unless dates are cross-checked for some reason.

A similar “suspicious typo” comes up with Elvis conspiracies: Why is Elvis Presley’s middle name (Aaron) misspelled on his tombstone? Many conspiracy theorists point to this “mistake” as evidence that something suspicious is afoot, including that he was buried somewhere else, or may even be alive. The fact is that Elvis wanted his name changed from the original Aron to Aaron, so that’s what was done even though that’s not his original name. There’s no mystery.

I’m not making excuses, just offering my best guess. I think the real issue—assuming that it’s true that Lanza’s death date is one day off from the actual one—is what do you think it means, if anything? What conclusion are you, or anyone else, drawing from that fact? That Lanza was actually dead the day before dozens of people saw him walk into Sandy Hook school? That someone else killed the teachers and children? (If so, who, and why?).

Nancy Lanza’s death certificate indicates she was pronounced dead on December 14 as the result of multiple gunshot wounds. Obviously Adam was alive on December 14, regardless of what the SSA listing says—unless of course someone else killed his mother and the people at the school? (If so, who, and why?)

In science we have an important scientific principle called Occam’s Razor. This idea is that if you have a phenomenon to be explained and several different theories are proposed as solutions, the simplest one (or the one with the fewest assumptions) is likely to be the correct answer. So here’s the question: Is it more likely that A) someone somewhere made a simple typographical mistake entering the date in a computer (something that happens countless times a day in matters both large and small) and that Adam Lanza was actually killed December 14, as evidence and dozens of eyewitnesses can testify to first-hand; or B) that Lanza actually died one day earlier, and that some unknown person caused the Sandy Hook shooting for reasons no one has explained, and Lanza was being blamed for it, again for reasons no one has explained? And so on.

I’m not telling you what to think, and honestly I don’t care whether you think a conspiracy exists, or that there’s anything sinister or suspicious about the (apparent) error on a database. You asked for my opinion, and I’ve given you my best answer. If you find out more about it, I’ll be interested to hear.

He wrote back thanking me for my comments but was clearly not completely satisfied, and we ended our correspondence. That is, until two weeks later when I came across a story in the Huffington Post that addressed this issue:

Conspiracy theorists have seized on the error as yet another reason to think that Lanza is a false flag for the shooting. How could the Social Security Administration have made such an error? The mistake may not have been made by the Social Security Administration. The Death Master File—a database with information on millions of dead people that is used to prevent identity theft—is compiled from the social security records of Americans whose deaths have been reported to the Social Security Administration. Whoever reported Lanza’s death may have made the error. HuffPost contacted the Social Security Administration’s Danbury, Conn., office, which is responsible for the town of Newtown, where Lanza lived. A representative for the office said it was possible they had made a mistake, but a copy of the death certificate would be needed to change the error.

However, there is no death certificate for Adam Lanza—yet. Lanza’s certificate will become available after it’s been filed with the Newtown Registrar of Vital Records. That will happen once the case is completed, said Debbie Aurelia, the New­town town clerk. But the case won’t be completed until the toxicology reports are finished, which “won’t happen too quickly,” the office of the Medical Examiner told HuffPost over the phone. (On Jan. 17, CNSNews reported that state police said the report is still “several months away.”) Even if the Social Security Administration made the mistake, it wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened. In fact, between May 2007 and April 2010, more than 36,000 people were reported as dead by the Social Security Administration although they were still alive, CNN reported in 2011. A 2012 report by the Office of the Inspector General found the Social Security Administration failed to record the deaths of about 1.2 million people. Clearly, it is not immune from making mistakes; even the agency itself refuses to guarantee the accuracy of the Death Master File. HuffPost has requested a copy of Adam Lanza’s death certificate and will update the story when the request is fulfilled.

I contacted him with the link, and he wrote back: “Thank you. It’s good to see a mainstream source finally addressing it. I think what disturbed me the most was how close I came to thinking maybe there was something to this claim. I knew it had to be a mistake, but what an absolutely irresponsible mistake to make. Perhaps data entry has been outsourced as well. Anyway, thanks for taking the time to correspond.”

Sometimes critical thinking outreach is done one person at a time.

Reference

Stuart, Hunter. 2013. Sandy Hook hoax theories explained: Why Newtown ‘truther’ arguments don’t hold up. Huffington Post (February 11). Online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/11/sandy-hook-hoax-theories-explained-debunking-newtown-truther_n_2627233.html#died.