Many people are familiar with facilitated communication (FC), the thoroughly debunked but remarkably resilient treatment used with autistic children.¹ A “facilitator” holds the hand or arm of the purported communicator who types on a keyboard. Research shows that FC is a kind of Ouija board phenomenon in which the facilitator unwittingly types for the autistic person. Numerous studies provide overwhelming evidence that FC does not work.² The facilitator—not the nonverbal individual—is the true author of the typing. Nonetheless, FC continues to be widely used, sometimes with tragic consequences.

FC Controversy at Syracuse University

Recently a new controversy about FC broke out on the campus of Syracuse University, spurred by an exposé and an editorial in The Daily Orange student newspaper.

In the 1990s, the primary promoter of FC in the United States was Douglas Biklen, professor of education at Syracuse. After learning about the technique on a trip to Australia, he returned to the United States and organized conferences on FC. In 1992, Biklen founded the Facilitated Communication Institute at Syracuse, but by the early 1990s controlled studies began to reveal the truth about FC. An influential PBS Frontline documentary, “Prisoners of Silence,” exposed the lack of evidence behind the method, and professional organizations, including the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, issued policy statements against the use of FC.³

But FC never went away. Some progress in the right direction has been made. For example, the University of New Hampshire Institute on Disability, which used to offer training in FC, has recently discontinued all FC programming. Syracuse has remained steadfast in its support of the discredited treatment; however, in 2002, the university’s Communication Sciences and Disorders Department left the School of Education, effectively separating itself from Biklen’s program. In 2010, the Facilitated Communication Institute changed its name to the Institute on Communication and Inclusion.

In the past year, Slate and the New York Times published stories about the case of the Rutgers University philosophy professor, Anna Stubblefield, who was convicted of the sexual assault of a thirty-three-year-old nonverbal man with cerebral palsy. Stubblefield said she and the man were in love and that he had communicated his consent to sex using—you guessed it—FC. Despite an obvious conflict of interest, Stubblefield herself was the facilitator.

Now the Syracuse University student newspaper, The Daily Orange, has blasted FC and the Institute on Communication and Inclusion in a lengthy article and an editorial. The April 11 article written by Assistant News Editor Michael Burke provides a history of FC—at Syracuse and elsewhere—and includes comments from researchers who condemn the technique. The article also recounts several cases of false claims of sexual abuse that have been made through FC over the years. These cases were frequently dismissed on grounds that the typed communications could not be validated, but the legal process often took months or years to complete. In the meantime, parents who were falsely accused were forced to leave their families until the cases were resolved. Some parents lost custody of their children, and at least one teaching career was ruined.⁴

The Daily Orange editorial board cited the Stubblefield case and said it was shameful for Syracuse to promote FC. They urged the university to give up the practice:

It is inexcusable and equal-parts embarrassing for Syracuse University as a research institution to stand behind facilitated communication (FC) despite it being a potentially life-destroying practice that has been empirically debunked.

—The Daily Orange editorial board, April 11, 2016

In a letter published in the same issue of The Daily Orange, a group of faculty and staff defended FC and the Institute for Communication and Inclusion. They described the work of the institute as “civil and human rights work” and connected the criticisms of FC to the historic mistreatment and institutionalization of people who lack language skills. Later in the week, additional letters appeared, one from a professor of Public Health and Anthropology that criticized the institute’s defenders and another by a doctoral student in disability studies who supported FC.

For those who have loved ones who are nonverbal, the promise of fluency through facilitation is enormously attractive. As a result, it can be very difficult to get people to give up FC. But, if there is a positive side to the tragic case of Anna Stubblefield and her victim, it is that a spotlight has been thrown on the epicenter of this pseudoscientific treatment. As Michael Burke reported in his article, Anna Stubblefield was trained in FC at Syracuse University.

Apple Computer, FC, and Rapid Prompting Method

April is Autism Acceptance Month, and as it turns out it is the occasion for Apple Inc. to align itself with pseudoscience. Autism acceptance sounds like an admirable goal, and in many ways it is. Autism Acceptance Month is a project of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), which is part of—and arguably the largest force behind—the neurodiversity movement. What is neurodiversity? A 2011 National Symposium on Neurodiversity defined the term this way:

Neurodiversity is a concept and social movement that advocates for viewing autism as a variation of human wiring, rather than a disease. As such, neurodiversity activists reject the idea that autism should be cured, advocating instead for celebrating autistic forms of communication and self-expression, and for promoting support systems that allow autistic people to live as autistic people. (National Symposium on Neurodiversity website)

ASAN’s motto “Nothing About Us Without Us” means that autistic people should be involved in the decisions that affect their lives. ASAN also advocates for “identity first” descriptions. In the past, parents and professionals preferred the phrase “people with autism” in an effort to avoid defining people by their diagnoses. A person with autism was a person first. But ASAN has turned that view around in an effort to embrace the label. Supporters of this approach want to be called autistic people or autistics “the same way one refers to ‘Muslims,’ ‘African-Americans,’ ‘Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘gifted,’ ‘athletic,’ or ‘Jewish’” (ASAN website).

ASAN sees autistic people as an oppressed group, and Autism Acceptance Month is designed to encourage us to embrace autistic people as they are. In support of these ideas, Apple released two beautifully produced videos featuring Dillan Barmache, a young man with autism. Dillan appears to be essentially nonverbal. In the videos, he makes verbal noises and exhibits echolalic speech—repeating the words he hears—which is a common feature of autism. His primary mode of communication is through an iPad. He types on a keypad that his therapist holds for him, and all his words are played back by a computer voice coming from his iPad. As presented in the videos, Dillan is a happy and appealing young person whose mind has been unlocked by his iPad.

A local news report from a Los Angeles ABC affiliate provides a bit more background on Dillan’s case. He can be seen using keyboards and letter boards, and we learn that his therapist attends classes with him. In June of 2014, Dillan graduated from middle school and gave the commencement address through his iPad.

If you are beginning to wonder where Apple’s support of pseudoscience comes in, hold on. We’re getting there. But first a brief side trip.

Rapid Prompting Method

Dillan’s typing is part of something called Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), which was developed in Bangalore, India, by Soma Mukhopadhyay, the mother Tito, a boy with severe autism. At the beginning of training, the method involves rapid fire questioning and prompting and starts with simple forced choice problems, such as “Is the sky red or blue?” The words “red” and “blue” are written on torn scraps of paper, and the student is prompted to touch the correct one.

Eventually children go on to spell out words and sentences by tapping letter boards with their fingers or typing on keyboards. Tito has become a remarkable example of what his mother’s technique can do. In videos he can be seen writing with paper and pencil and typing independently at a keyboard. He has published two books of poetry and a collection of short stories.

Soma Mukhopadhyay using a letter board with a young student.

Mukhopadhyay and Tito came to the United States in 2001, and in 2005 Soma started working with Helping Autism through Learning and Outreach (HALO) in Austin, Texas. Children, parents, and teachers come to HALO to be trained in Soma^® RPM by Soma Mukhopadhyay herself. Soma now gives workshops on RPM worldwide, and she and Tito have been featured in news reports on CBS 60 Minutes II and CNN, as well as in a documentary film, A Mother’s Courage: Talking Back to Autism, narrated by Academy Award winner Kate Winslet.⁵ RPM appears to be spreading rapidly, and Dillan Barmache has become its most recent spokesperson. Or has he?

Has RPM avoided the pitfalls of FC? RPM seems to have solved the problem of authorship because its users are typing independently. No one is holding their hands. But RPM bears a close resemblance to FC, and there is still reason to question whether the students are actually the authors of their typing. Here are some of the questions that remain:

Could the Adults Be Guiding the Children?

In videos of RPM training, the letter board or keyboard is held aloft by a person who is verbally competent—a parent or therapist. (See the picture of Soma above.)

Why is this done? It seems unnecessary. Why not place the letter board or keyboard on the table and walk away from the child? Instead, Dillan’s therapist accompanies him throughout the school day so that she can hold his keyboard. Tito is perhaps RPM’s most successful case, and although he seems to have some independent typing and writing skills, this CBS 60 Minutes video shows that when Tito is writing with pencil and paper, his mother is almost always holding onto the clipboard he uses for support.

Prompting is a well-established technique that is widely used in teaching, but the goal is to eliminate the prompts as soon as possible and have the student perform independently. If prompting is excessive or is not faded out quickly enough, the student can become “prompt dependent.”⁶ Rather than learning to identify the printed word blue for the color of the sky, the student relies on the teacher’s guidance and gestures. As the history of FC suggests, all of this can happen without the facilitator or RPM therapist being aware of it. FC involves unconscious prompting very much like the famous case of Clever Hans, the horse who seemed to be able answer mathematical questions by rhythmically stomping his hooves. Subsequent testing showed that he was responding not to the problems he was asked to solve but to subtle cues provided by his owner.

Clever Hans and his owner, Wilhelm von Osten.

Often the RPM therapist can be seen moving the letter board around in the air, potentially guiding students to the correct responses. Meanwhile, the therapist is always looking intently at the letter board even when the child is not. Although the child’s hand is not being held, the possibility remains that the parent or therapist is subtly guiding the responses in the desired direction. In addition, parents and therapists often stand or sit very close, touching the child elsewhere on the body. This physical contact provides another avenue for subtle cuing.

Perhaps the strongest evidence for prompt dependence comes from the most famous of all RPM students, Tito. In her book, Strange Son: Two Mothers, Two Sons, and the Quest to Unlock the Hidden World of Autism, Portia Iverson relates her experiences with Soma and Tito when they first came to the United States. Mukhopadhyay trained Iverson’s autistic son, Dov, and Strange Son is generally very supportive of RPM. However, Iverson writes that she encouraged Soma to have Tito see a psychologist, Samuel Smithyman. Smithyman’s primary goal in working with Tito was to determine whether it was possible to communicate with the boy without his mother in the room. After two years of trying, he gave up.⁷ “I thought eventually we’d be able to connect. But we never really could”.⁸

Why Have There Been No Tests of RPM?

RPM, like FC, is amenable to easy tests of authorship. It would be quite simple to separate the communicator and therapist, obstruct the vision of the therapist, or ask questions of the students that their therapists are unable to hear. But in the over ten years that HALO has been in operation, there have been no empirical tests of authorship like the ones that revealed the truth about FC. The only published study of RPM is an analysis of videos provided by HALO that did not test for authorship.⁹

One reason for the absence of empirical tests is that, so far, RPM has not produced any accusations of sexual abuse. The truth about FC only began to emerge when descriptions of sexual abuse were typed out on the letter boards of children who were using the technique. Court cases brought against their parents or other adults made it imperative that the true author of the statements—facilitator or communicator—be determined by objective testing. If a sexual abuse case ever surfaces involving RPM, Mukhopadhyay’s apparent reluctance to conduct validating research will be swept aside.

How Do the Children Learn So Fast?

The typical RPM success story recounts children who, though previously nonverbal, are able to spell words correctly and solve math problems after just a few days of training. The report below comes from a newspaper account of RPM training Soma conducted in Ireland with a nine-year-old boy who was previously nonverbal:

“The trainer proved to his parents that he could understand everything they said and that he could already spell. He just had no way of showing them. Before the end of the three-day workshop he spelled out that his favourite colour was orange and he knew God lived in Heaven.”

This is a familiar story. Children trained in FC were also said to have been silently absorbing spelling and grammar all along, and FC merely provided a key to unlock what was already inside. Later, scientific testing revealed that the good spellers were actually the facilitators.

Critics of FC Are Also Critical of RPM

I was alerted to the concerns surrounding RPM by James Todd, a psychology professor at Eastern Michigan University, and Jason Travers, a professor of special education at the University of Kansas. Both are prominent critics of FC and RPM. Todd provided expert testimony in the Anna Stubblefield sexual assault case, and both have published articles about FC and RPM.

In preparation for this article, I asked Todd and Travers to watch segments of unedited video from a recent WGRZ-TV (Buffalo, NY) segment about two children, Kaylie and Philip, who have been trained using RPM.

Todd and Travers agreed that the parents in these videos were undoubtedly sincere and well-intentioned, but Todd suggested that while holding the keyboards in the air, the parents were providing subtle cues to their children. Travers said, “Kaylie often appears to be typing without looking at the keyboard and with her eyes closed, and we can see her mother providing pressure toward the finger to indicate when a key should be pressed. Philip also appears at times to be typing without looking, and when errors accrue, his mother restarts the word as if the error never happened.”

I also asked Howard Shane of Harvard University Medical School to comment for this article. Shane is Director of the Center for Communication Enhancement and the Autism Language Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and he was involved in some of the earliest tests showing that FC was invalid. Shane has watched many videos of children trained using RPM, and, consistent with Todd and Travers, he believes the typing was very likely the result of subtle—probably unconscious—guidance by the parent or therapist. He pointed out that the proponents of RPM have never provided a justification for holding the keyboard in the air. “Why not construct a keyboard stand at the child’s preferred height and angle and put it on a table?” he asks.

Shane speaks from experience. Over several decades he and his colleagues have designed technologies to help people communicate independently. He is troubled by the on-going need for facilitation and prompting in FC and RPM:

“Our approach is to try to find some access point. Some movement that the individual can use to control a microprocessor, and we have been very successful. We see some of the most physically disabled children on the planet, and to suggest that a child with autism is not capable of independently controlling some kind of communication technology is insulting.”—Howard Shane, PhD, Boston Children’s Hospital.

So at the very least, we are unable to say whether RPM really works or not. Are the children really learning to speak, or are they being prodded by their parents and therapist? Serious questions remain. In a 2014 article comparing FC and RPM, Amy Tostanoski of Texas State University and her coauthors found striking similarities between the two techniques. They concluded their assessment by saying, “Clients, proponents, and practitioners of RPM should demand scientific validation of RPM in order to ensure the safety of people with disabilities receiving RPM.”¹⁰

Coming Full Circle

And now we are back to Apple. Both FC and RPM often involve an iPad or another kind of tablet, and Apple’s Autism Acceptance Month videos featuring Dillan appear to associate the Apple iPad with the heartwarming story of a young man freed from the bonds of silence and isolation. But does Apple realize that the communication technique featured in the video has not been tested and may be pseudoscience? Does Apple understand that there is reason to believe that Dillan is not the author of the sentences coming out of his tablet?

Whether Apple realizes it or not, what they have done is actually worse than just encouraging RPM. As I mentioned above, Autism Acceptance Month is a project of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN). Although ASAN has many admirable goals, they take the following position on the available autism treatments:

Many therapies and products for Autistic children and adults are helpful and should be made more widely available, such as physical therapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy, and augmentative and assistive communication technology (including supported typing, facilitated communication and other methodologies that support communications access). (“Position Statements,” Autistic Self Advocacy Network website)

ASAN explicitly endorses not only the yet-to-be-validated and possibly pseudoscientific rapid prompting method (RPM) but the thoroughly debunked quack therapy facilitated communication. In their push to have the voices of autistic people heard, ASAN appears not to be concerned whether the voices are actually those of people with autism. The voices of their well-meaning caregivers will do.

Just to bring us full circle, you will recall that ASAN is part of the neurodiversity movement—perhaps the most visible and active segment of that movement. Several paragraphs back I gave you a definition of neurodiversity that was crafted at the National Symposium on Neurodiversity in 2011. Perhaps now is the time to point out that that symposium was held at Syracuse University and was cosponsored by the Institute on Communication and Inclusion, formerly known as the Facilitated Communication Institute. FC is an integral part of the neurodiversity movement, and before her legal troubles began, Anna Stubblefield was an active participant in the movement. In 2011, she published an article in Disability Studies Quarterly suggesting that opposition to FC should be considered hate speech.¹¹

To its credit, Apple pioneered user-friendly interfaces, and for years the company has made special efforts to increase the accessibility of their machines for people with a wide range of abilities.¹² But in this case, Apple has given its support to an organization that promotes pseudoscience, and indeed Apple is profiting from that pseudoscience. Apple may not be selling the snake oil, but at very least Apple is selling the bottles the snake oil comes in.

For people with autism, the stakes are very high. RPM has been promoted as the key to unlocking their hidden voices, but if the therapists are the ones directing the typing, then RPM instead takes away their voices. We now know that FC is a dangerous illusion that turns nonverbal people into marionettes controlled by their facilitators, and many professionals believe that RPM may be doing the same thing. Given RPM’s surging popularity, empirical tests of authorship are desperately needed.

Acceptance is an admirable thing, but as long as ASAN continues to endorse bogus communication techniques, it will fail at its own goal. Before acceptance can be achieved, we must allow the authentic person to emerge. Who is the real Tito? The one sitting at his mother’s side writing poetry or the one separated from his mother who, after two years of trying, is incapable of communicating with his psychologist? How we answer this question—for Tito and for all children using RPM—will determine whether we treat them with the respect they deserve or subject them to more indignity. It will determine whether we waste their time on meaningless training that increases their dependence or give them an education that reveals their true voices and makes them less dependent.

RPM has been promoted in the United States for over ten years. It is time someone determined whether or not it works.

Notes

1. I last wrote about facilitated communication in May of 2015
2. Jacobson, John W., Richard M. Foxx, and James A. Mulick. 2015. "Facilitated communication." Controversial Therapies for Autism and Intellectual Disabilities: Fad, Fashion, and Science in Professional Practice, 283.
3. Palfreman, J., Producer. 1993. Frontline: “Prisoners of Silence.” Boston, MA: WGBH Public Television (October 19).
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication
5. Tostanoski, Amy, Russell Lang, Tracy Raulston, et al. 2014. "Voices from the Past: Comparing the Rapid Prompting Method and Facilitated Communication." Developmental Neurorehabilitation 17(4): 219–223.
6. Lang, Russell, Amy Harbison Tostanoski, Jason Travers, and James Todd. 2014. "The Only Study Investigating the Rapid Prompting Method Has Serious Methodological Flaws but Data Suggest the Most Likely Outcome Is Prompt Dependency." Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention 8(1): 40–48.
7. Iversen, Portia. Strange Son: Two Mothers, Two Sons, and the Quest to Unlock the Hidden World of Autism. Penguin, 2007.
8. Iversen, 2007, p. 370.
9. Chen, Grace Megumi, Keith Jonathon Yoder, Barbara Lynn Ganzel, et al. 2012 "Harnessing Repetitive Behaviours to Engage Attention and Learning in a Novel Therapy for Autism: An Exploratory Analysis." Frontiers in Psychology 3: 12.
10. Tostanoski et al. 2014, p. 4.
11. Stubblefield, Anna. 2011. "Sound and Fury: When Opposition to Facilitated Communication Functions as Hate Speech." Disability Studies Quarterly 31(4 ).
12. Broussard, Mitchel. Apple Celebrates Autism Acceptance Month With Two New Videos, MacRumors, April 2, 2016. Available online at http://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/02/apple-autism-acceptance-month/.

Crackpot scientists are very fond of abusing and trivializing science—especially physics—and particularly fundamental physics. It is therefore critical to fight crackpot science where it hurts the most: at the fundamental level. While there is much critique of the promoters of pseudoscience and their ideas are debunked at the factual level, few profound analyses of the fallacy of the way they misuse fundamental science are available. My purpose in this article is to help fill this gap.One of the early trivializers of fundamental physics is Deepak Chopra, whose indiscriminate use of words such as quantum, energy, field, and non-locality renders them as frivolous as a burp after a course of tandoori chicken. Accordingly, it is worthwhile to examine his “physics” and unravel the egregious conceptual blunders he incessantly concocts, especially when these blunders serve as the foundation for the conclusions that he touts as scientific facts to his readers and followers.

The Book

Chopra came to prominence by publishing Quantum Healing, a trend-setting book on mind/body medicine in which he beguiles his readers into believing that Ayurveda, the traditional Indian medicine, has a scientific basis. His mission ever since has been to tout the message that the universe is conscious, that consciousness creates and governs matter, and that modern physics is at the heart of this message. The pernicious tactic that he uses for this purpose is to decorate his speeches and writings with the names of famous physicists such as Einstein, Planck, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg and to attribute his own ideas about mind and matter to them.¹

Since Quantum Healing initiated the fashionable trivialization of one of the greatest scientific and intellectual achievements of mankind, it is instructive to present for the layperson a rigorous scientific evaluation of that book’s content. But first we have to evaluate the professional integrity of the author. After all, the primary premise of science is honesty. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann were credible scientists before their hasty announcement of the discovery of cold fusion in March 1989, after which they fell out of grace in the scientific community (Huizenga 1992). Does Quantum Healing stand the test of scientific honesty?

The book’s title heralds a revolutionary idea that demands a level of intellectual integrity from the author equal to that of other revolutionary scientists. This integrity is, in part, exhibited by the way scientists usually acknowledge individuals who had a role in shaping the ideas expressed in the work. Einstein, in his article on the groundbreaking special theory of relativity, acknowledges Michele Besso, an obscure friend of Einstein’s who worked at the Bern’s patent office at the same time that Einstein did (Einstein 1952). In a separate account of how special relativity was born, Einstein elaborates on the conversations he had with Besso and how those conversations helped consolidate his idea of the relativity of time (Hassani 2010, 362). Similarly, Planck’s two seminal papers that originated quantum theory contain numerous mentions of the physicists who helped him shape the quantum idea. His gratitude is especially manifest in his Nobel Lecture in which he attributes his discovery of the electromagnetic quanta to Ludwig Boltzmann, the creator of statistical mechanics, by declaring “. . . this problem led me automatically to a consideration of . . . Boltzmann’s trend of ideas; until after some weeks of the most strenuous work of my life, light came into the darkness, and a new undreamed-of perspective opened up before me” (Planck 1918).

Such acknowledgements of the discoverers of scientific ideas are not only a sign of honesty but also a reminder that science is a collective enterprise encompassing not just the invention of a single person but the collaboration of a community that stretches across the globe and extends into the past and future. In order to contribute to science, one first has to learn the relevant contributions made to it by other scientists; one can see further only “by standing upon the shoulders of giants,” and any “new kind of science” that undermines—or even disagrees with—the well-established and empirically tested ideas without presenting good evidence to the contrary can only be the invention of a crackpot.

Chopra ought to be held to as strict an integrity standard as the scientists he is so fond of mentioning in his speeches and writings. This is so not only because he is writing about (his distorted version of) science, but also because he commands millions of followers who literally regard him as a prophet. His words, fogged by a plume of terminology stolen from science—a discipline revered and trusted, albeit misunderstood, by the public—are powerful maxims and mottos for his disciples.

The Swindle: The Disappearance of Maharishi

An intellectually honest author of a nonfiction work writes a second edition only when there are substantial changes in the content of the work, usually several years after the original edition. These changes, and the reason and purpose behind them, are clearly stated in the preface of the new edition, while the preface of the earlier edition is also kept in the book for comparison. The hardcover edition of Quantum Healing came out in 1989 and its paperback edition in 1990. In the Introduction, Chopra narrates his meetings with “one of the greatest living sages,” who imparted to him some ancient techniques that “would restore the mind’s healing abilities” (Chopra 1989, 2–4; also available online at http://skepticaleducator.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/IntroToFirstEd.pdf). In one of the meetings, the sage tells Chopra: I have been waiting a long time to bring out some special techniques. I believe they will become the medicine of the future. They were known in the distant past but were lost in the confusion of time; now I want you to learn them, and at the same time I want you to explain, clearly and scientifically, how they work.²

From his words, one gets the unmistakable impression that, were it not for his contacts with this great sage, Chopra would not have come across the “discovery” described in his book. In fact, he feels so much indebted to the sage that he dedicates the book “With a full heart and deepest thanks to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi” (Chopra 1989; also available online at http://skepticaleducator.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Dedication.pdf). As Maharishi’s influence on Chopra’s “discovery” is evident throughout the book, one might think that, like an honest scientist, Chopra is acknowledging the conversations he had with the sage and how those conversations might have helped shape his ideas. However, that would be premature thinking, because the acknowledgement appears only in the printings of the book up to the fourteenth.

The sixteenth and subsequent printings³ seem to be the “second edition,” because they contain a single page titled “Preface to the New Edition.” However, the usual practice of imprinting “Second Edition” on the cover is foregone. Furthermore, unlike any ordinary new editions, no preface to the first edition is retained in the new edition. So, why write a preface to the “new edition?” A conspicuous change in the new edition is that all citations of Maharishi’s name are erased; the meetings with him, which were the starting point of quantum healing, are not mentioned at all; the crucial “primordial sound” techniques, which were “the strongest healing therapies in Ayurveda” and were prescribed for incurable diseases such as cancer, are gone; there is no mention of the revelation of “some great secret” that took place after meeting with Maharishi; no mention of how Maharishi taught Chopra “how to pierce the mask of matter.” Therefore, the new preface is most likely a smokescreen for Chopra’s deletion of the name of the person who implanted the idea of the book in his mind.

This deletion is shamelessly manifest in the bibliographies of the two “editions.” In the bibliography of the earlier printings of the book, Chopra writes “I enthusiastically recommend the following eleven books, all of which entered into my own education on these fascinating subjects” (Chopra 1989; also available online at http://skepticaleducator.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Biblio1.pdf). Two of those eleven books are by Maharishi. In the bibliography of the sixteenth and later printings, he also recommends eleven books, but he lists only nine!⁴ You can guess which two are missing. In an act that should make both Chopra and his publisher ashamed of themselves, and in a frenzied rush that can be ascribed only to charlatans and fraudsters who want to hide the evidence, Chopra erased all traces of Maharishi’s name and the guru’s influence on Quantum Healing, but he forgot to count the number of the remaining books in its bibliography.

Does the “second edition” contain substantial changes in the content of the book? Although Chopra mentions the change in his views in the preface of the new edition, he doesn’t say how the change affected its content. In fact, if you compare the pages of the first and second editions, as I did, you’ll see practically no change in the content except for the removal of any reference to Maharishi. What makes all of this suspicious is that there is absolutely no explanation for any of these changes in the book itself.

The Blunder: ‘Explanation’ after Maharishi’s Death

As a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, Chopra hurriedly wrote an article on February 13, 2008⁵ (available online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/the-maharishi-years-the-u_b_86412.html). It is important to examine the highlights of this article, as it narrates Chopra’s tumultuous relationship with Maharishi, especially because the article is filled with numerous accounts of intimate encounters of the two, containing outlandish claims that often resemble miracles.

Chopra begins the article with reporting the publication of his book, Perfect Health, in 1991, at least six years after he met Maharishi. He does not mention his earlier book, Quantum Healing, by far his most influential book, the germ of the idea of which was planted in his mind after several meetings with the guru. He completely ignores that in 1985, right after his meetings with Maharishi, he quit his job at the New England Memorial Hospital to establish the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center in Boston (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepak_Chopra). He forgoes the fact that it was in this Center that his ideas for writing Quantum Healing took shape (Chopra 1989). He does not explain why he changed the name of the center to Ayurveda Health Center in the later printings of the book.

Chopra continues: “When I was in meditation I had a vision of Maharishi lying in a hospital bed with intravenous tubes in his body breathing on a respirator.” He immediately takes a chartered airplane from Chicago to Delhi only to find Maharishi exactly as he saw him in his vision. Because of the seriousness of Maharishi’s condition, it was decided that he should be flown to London. Chopra flies to London and makes arrangements for Maharishi to be admitted to a private hospital. As he was standing outside the hospital, watching an ambulance navigate the snarled traffic, one of the accompanying doctors ran up with the news that Maharishi had suddenly died. Chopra rushes to the ambulance, “picking Maharishi’s body up and carrying him in my arms through London traffic.” However, after twenty-four to thirty-six hours the attending informed them that Maharishi was recovering miraculously.

But the recovery was somewhat slow. “There was a point where the doctor informed us that [Maharishi] had severe anemia and needed a blood transfusion. When they typed and cross-matched Maharishi’s blood, I turned out to be the only match.” After the hospital, Maharishi was moved to a country home in the southwest of England where “I spent hours personally nursing him.” In all, Maharishi was out of circulation for almost a year; few in the Transcendental Meditation movement knew where he was. After he was fully recovered, he was flown via helicopter to the small village of Vlodrop in Holland.

It is not clear who decided to move Maharishi out of sight. What is clear is that he remained in Vlodrop while Chopra “was sent, as one of his main emissaries, on a routine of almost constant jet travel. . . . Everywhere I went I was given the respect accorded to my guru, bringing with it a level of pomp and ceremony that verged on veneration.” In July 1993, Chopra went to see Maharishi in his private rooms to pay “his respects,” at which time Maharishi said, “People are telling me that you are competing with me. . . . I want you to stop traveling and live here at the ashram with me.” He also wanted Chopra to stop writing books. After delivering what amounted to an ultimatum, “I was given twenty-four hours to make up my mind.”

February 13, 2008, when the article appeared in the Huffington Post, was just eight days after Maharishi’s death and more than fourteen years after Chopra broke up with him some time in the second half of 1993. Chopra must have had the article ready when Maharishi was still on his deathbed. What reason could one have to wait over fourteen years to tell such a self-praising, intimate story of a relationship between oneself and another person, and then publish the story right after the death of the latter? Could it be anything but an intention to smear the facts?

Any intelligent reader who is not mesmerized by Chopra’s insidious charm can see in the Huffington Post article the power struggle between an old guru and a conniving disciple who is trying to steal the guru’s congregation for personal gain. The reader can also detect Chopra’s egregious attempt at portraying himself as a superhuman being with a miraculous power of healing who can see events that are happening thousands of miles away. A follower, on the other hand, believes every word of the narrative and spreads the story to other potential followers. This is the audience for whom Chopra wrote the article. And this is the audience who should be made aware of his professional dishonesty.

Chopra’s removal of all references to Maharishi in the later printings of Quantum Healing—regardless of any personal conflict he may have had with the guru—reveals his lack of professional integrity, as by his own admission in the earlier printings, it was his numerous meetings with Maharishi that inspired him “to explain, clearly and scientifically, how [the Ayurveda techniques] work.” And his explanation of the conflict, hurriedly published in the Huffington Post right after Maharishi’s death, is a telltale sign of professional hypocrisy at its worse.

Paraphrasing a famous quote by the late Carl Sagan, extraordinary book titles require extraordinary professionalism. This article has documented sufficient evidence to demonstrate that Deepak Chopra’s professionalism in the writing of Quantum Healing is of such a low quality that it borders on charlatanism.

Notes

1. In the keynote lecture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-ijyqWzDrY&feature=kp) that Chopra delivered in a meeting arranged by Salesforce in 2013, he repeatedly mentions the names of various famous scientists including Newton, Einstein, Planck, etc., to convince his audience that dark energy and dark matter are not only unknown but also “unknowable” and that scientists should not try to uncover the truth. The clip at https://youtu.be/dA89wWI6ljo compares Chopra’s message with another poet/prophet who also advised against seeking truth and was instrumental in paving the way for the Dark Ages.
2. The sage seems to have it backward. A technique that is in any way related to science comes after the prerequisite scientific knowledge has been gained. One doesn’t start with a technique and then ask for (or order) a scientific explanation. It is like the pope asking a devout Catholic scientist to find a scientific basis for the Hail Mary!
3. I haven’t seen the fifteenth printing, so I don’t know if Maharishi’s name is present there or not.
4. Because the “second edition” of Quantum Healing is only a fake, the dates appearing on the copyright page refer to the first “edition,” namely 1989 for the hardcover and 1990 for the trade edition. It is therefore hard to reference the “second edition”—which presumably appeared in 1993 or 1994 after Chopra broke up with the guru—in the proper normal way. Only by looking at the printing number on the copyright page can one anticipate whether or not the book contains Maharishi’s name. As of the thirty-fourth printing that I purchased in 2013, Chopra has not corrected the bibliography: he still recommends eleven books and lists only nine! This bibliography can be found online at http://skepticaleducator.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Chopras-bibliography.pdf.
5. The date of the post has changed at least once since I first discovered it on July 2, 2011. On March 18, 2015, the date was changed to 12/31/1969 7:00 pm EST and the post appeared to have been updated on 11/17/2011! (Copy available online at http://skepticaleducator.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Deepak-Chopra-The-Maharishi-Years-The-Untold-Story-Recollections-of-a-Former-Disciple-.pdf.) As I understand it, 12/31/1969 7:00 pm EST is the epoch time of some platforms, and is the default to which the system reverts whenever the date/time of a file is entered incorrectly. One occasion on which this could occur is when one tinkers with an existing date/time. I have kept a copy of the post as it appeared on July 2, 2011, showing its original date and time of publication, just in case the date changes again (copy available online at http://skepticaleducator.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Deepak-Chopra_-The-Maharishi-Years-The-Untold-Story_-Recollections-of-a-Former-Disciple.pdf).

References

Chopra, D. 1989. Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. New York: Bantam Books.

Einstein, A. 1952. The Principle of Relativity. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.

Hassani, S. 2010. From Atoms to Galaxies. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Huizenga, J. 1992. Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.

Planck, M. 1918. Nobel lecture. Available at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1918/planck-lecture.html.

Articles about online harassment have made a resurgence in the last couple of weeks, with social media users sharing data gathered two years ago about online harassment. This research—which analyzed whether men and women experience online harassment differently—was controversial at the time. And with the awareness of online abuse gaining more momentum, readers are seeking solutions. Yet, some of these articles fail to properly understand the very data they report on, and some of that data is not as useful as it seems.

In the last couple of years, we’ve seen articles claiming that men are harassed more than women online, that abuse of men and women can’t be compared because they are contextually distinct, that abuse of men is categorically underreported, or that men are more likely to be verbally abused, but women are more likely to be the victims of serious threats of violence and stalking. Some of these articles are well-written and clearly researched, so I mean no indictment of them as a whole, but with such drastically different conclusions based on a small handful of the same studies, something is up in Journalism Town.

And the cycle only gets worse on social media. The Verge reports that Upworthy and Buzzed have both concluded that a large portion of readers tweet out a link when they’ve only read about a quarter of an article. Add your best friend’s cousin’s Facebook analysis, and the original data is lost in an endless stream of clicks and half-truths.

Click on any of these oft-cited articles, and you will eventually be led to two sources that are most commonly cited: one is a study out of the research outfit Demos, which describes itself as “Britain’s leading cross-party think tank.” The other is a piece of Pew research, which the organization calls its “first in-depth study of online harassment among young adults.” Pew has long earned its reputation as a thorough and effective research organization, so let’s begin with what their research actually says.

In her overview, “5 facts about online harassment,” Pew writer Maeve Duggan writes, “Online men are more likely to experience at least one of the six types of harassment we queried – 44% have had some sort of harassment experience compared with 37% of online women. Men are somewhat more likely to experience certain ‘less severe’ kinds of harassment like name-calling and embarrassment. They are also more likely to receive physical threats online. Women – and particularly young women – are more likely to experience certain types of ‘more severe’ harassment, such as stalking and sexual harassment. Among female internet users 18-24, 26% say they have been stalked online and 25% have been sexually harassed.” Duggan is a research analyst who worked on the report itself.

Putting aside that surveys are, by their nature, self-reported, this report clearly does not indicate that “Men are harassed more than women online.” It would be more accurate to say, “Men are more likely to have been harassed, at least a little, at least once, than women online.” This is, of course, very different from a claim that men bear the brunt of the aggregate abuse online.

The other source, a study of harassment released by Demos, comes closer to that claim. In this study, Demos looked at tweets sent to male and female celebrities on Twitter, and found that “2.54% of the tweets containing the @ username of male public figures contained abuse, compared to only 0.95% of the tweets received by prominent women.” The Daily Beast reported that this study found that “men are harassed more than women online.” But this is a serious overreach.

First, the research took into account a very small subset of the online population (British celebrities). Second, the method of identifying “abusive” messages was incredibly limited. In order to set off the researchers’ abuse-spotting algorithm, the Tweet had to contain a swear word from Google’s search language filter. That list includes (sorry, Mom) words such as “boner,” “crap,” “damn,” “fag,” “bitch,” and four spellings of the word “boobs.” It also includes questionable choices like “LMFAO” and “pawn.”

I wrote to Demos and asked them if this is not an inherently limiting way to look for abuse. For one thing, this system would tag a Tweet saying, “Carrie, you’re the best damn writer in the world” as abusive, but not tag one that said, “Carrie, I want to come to your home and murder you” (“murder” is not on the list; neither is “rape,” “assault,” “maim,” “death,” or “kill”).

Rob Macpherson, a communications officer for Demos responded, acknowledging the issue with false positives:

There are two stages to the filtering process. First we collected tweets that contain one or more of the words in the list. Then the researchers went through and read hundreds of tweets to judge which ones were using the language in an abusive context, and which ones were in a non-abusive context. To use your examples the “best fucking writer on the planet” one would have clearly been classified as not abusive. (emphasis added)

This is good, but still leaves the entire question of what is abusive up to the subjective impressions of the research team. And of the two million tweets the system analyzed, “hundreds” of them would be a small subset indeed. Further, it ignores all the abusive messages that don’t happen to contain Google’s classified swear words.

I asked Macpherson what he thought of headlines such as The Daily Beast’s, using Demos research to conclude that “men are harassed more than women online.”

“I personally think headlines will always provide a simplified synopsis of deeper research,” he said, “and interested readers would always benefit from reading the full story, or even better investigating the analysis themselves.”

Macpherson could not be more right. No study is perfect, and any study will face its limitations. This is why we rely on reporters to analyze and accurately report on research, going beneath the headlines and press releases. Of the aforementioned articles, only one (at Forbes) delved into the methodology behind the Demos study, and asked good questions. As writer Danielle Citron notes, “Typically, cyber harassment is understood as repeated online speech constituting a ‘course of conduct’ that causes substantial or severe emotional distress, not a one-off comment.”

It is also worth noting that none of the articles mentioned that the vast majority of the abusive tweets tagged by the Demos study came from men. Still, many reporters are quick to point out that a previous study showed that women are almost as likely to use the words “slut” and “whore” as men, again ignoring a whole slew of words that add up to harassment. The study also fails to ask how this stacks up to gendered language flung at men. It goes without saying, I suppose, that gendered insults are almost exclusively leveled at women; the only question left is who to blame.

The question of online harassment is one that will be answered only with rigorous research and honest analysis. It appears that much more is needed. Until then, be nice out there.

Can puppetry encourage a love of science? With a long running podcast, The Infinite Monkey Cage, and a popular app, The Incomplete Map of the Cosmic Genome, it seems a curious side-step to create puppet versions of Dr. Brian Cox and Robin Ince—and then make a video series about their fictional adventures in a science museum.

But creativity is the watchword for both Trent and Melinda Burton, and it’s not the first time that the plush-and-felt clones of the science stars have been given an outing. They’ve appeared as cute advertising for tours and projects before—but this is the first time the puppet duo have had their own series. The series, Quest for Wonder, was launched at the start of April and is releasing episodes weekly, featuring a number of guest scientists.

Kylie Sturgess: What exactly does Quest for Wonder involve? When I first clicked on the YouTube video … to find out more about it, the first thing I did was laugh. I don’t know if that’s a good review or not.

Trent Burton: That’s always a good start. I guess Quest for Wonder is a new six-part web series that we’re making with Professor Brian Cox and Robin Ince. It’s sort of a science comedy show with puppets for all ages—[that] is probably the best way to describe it.

Kylie: What got you into puppetry? I know that Brian Cox and Robin Ince already have a massive reputation as science communicators. They’ve got the podcasts, the TV series, they tour everywhere—why puppets specifically?

Melinda Burton: I have been very passionate about puppetry since I was a child. Jim Henson is one of my all time heroes, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve kept my interest in puppetry and over the last few years have actually done something with that. I started to volunteer with a puppet theater and making puppets and performing puppetry, all that kind of thing.

Then through our work with Robin we started to think about how we could incorporate puppetry into our work with science and comedy and science communications, so we came up with the idea of creating puppets of Robin and Brian, and thankfully they were happy to let us go ahead with it and that’s were it started.

Kylie: It’s a six-part series, and as you said it’s something that can appeal to all ages, but how do you achieve that? I know puppets are very zeitgeist-y at the moment—but there’s a lot of people you’re trying to communicate big concepts to…?

Trent: I suppose the level of science that we talk about in the series is not going into the depths of quantum physics or anything like that. It’s kind of introducing concepts and ideas, which is probably more for a younger audience.

We think a lot of Robin and Brian’s adult fans are going to come and watch the show because it’s Robin and Brian, and the show has the same kind of interplay between the two.

Kylie: What was it like creating the story? Here you have two people who have got a very established reputation—what have you got the puppets doing in their stead?

Trent: Robin and Brian have already got kind of their on-air personalities, if you will, that people identify with, so we wanted to make sure that when we did something with the puppets, it wasn’t just a case of putting that coming out of puppets’ mouths, because otherwise what’s the point? We might as well have the real people!

We came up with a story for the series that I think is something unique to the puppets; you couldn’t really tell this kind of wacky story without puppets. You couldn’t do it with real Robin and Brian! Essentially Brian has lost his wonder. He’s meant to be heading onto TV to talk about all the things he talks about and point at mountains and stand on volcanoes and be all wonderful and Brian-like.

But he’s lost his wonder, in this case in the show his wonder is actually his little friend, who you will have seen in the trailers—it’s a little blue ball of fuzz. His wonder is his little pet that goes everywhere with him and she’s escaped—so the story of the show is really those two coming together to go on a quest for wonder to get Brian’s pet wonder back.

Melinda: Wonder is like the personification of Brian’s wonder. She’s the thing that makes him feel inspired, and without having her around he finds himself not able to be curious and interested in things in the same way as when she’s around.

Trent: That’s kind of what we really wanted to do with the show. There’s so much high-school and late primary school science that is fairly cut-and-dry: here is the periodic table, here are the solubility rules, here are the parts of a flower—“remember that, that’s what makes science.” That was something we really wanted to get away from and make a kids science show that wasn’t just about “facts and the boring bits.” Science is about wonder, curiosity, discovery, and the future, and enthusiasm that is vital to science.

Melinda: The musicians that we’ve been working with are a lovely band called Simone and Girlfunkle who are also from our hometown of Perth; we worked with them to create the flavor of music that runs throughout the show, and I think it really adds a unique character and emphasizes the fun and the silliness of it. After all, it’s a science show, but it’s supposed to be fun too.

Kylie: There’s been a lot of talk about effective science communication recently. The World Science Festival was held in Australia for the first time with Alan Alda turning up on our television, telling us about how we should be combining art and science in order to reach out and be more imaginative with teaching science concepts. Is this kind of project a step in that kind of direction? Do you get questions about the potential of “dumbing down science”?

Trent: I think we’ve certainly got that in the past, and I think even Brian when he does his big landmark shows gets criticized for “dumbing down physics.” Well, if you’re going to make a mainstream kind of show, which is what we’re doing, of course you have to dumb down quantum physics because not everyone has a doctorate in quantum physics. I certainly don’t!

Melinda: I think that’s linked to the way we describe the Cosmic Genome site—the top place online for the scientifically curious. The creature in Quest for Wonder is called “Wonder.” What we are all about is inspiring curiosity and wonder about science, which hopefully spurs people onto then go and look at more in-depth concepts, and they’ll be less daunting.

It’s engaging; it’s fun; it’s a bit silly, but it’s with people that you know, and hopefully it makes people feel interested and not deterred by the fact that it’s quantum physics we’re talking about!

Trent: I think a key thing is—one of the things Robin often says is that just because you don’t understand it fully doesn’t mean that it’s worthless.

Part of the fun and part of the enjoyment is being confused along the way. The scientists themselves in all these fields don’t have all the answers, and that’s kind of the point. If you can make if fun along the way, then it’s the same as anything else. Science is no different to learning about music or art or sport or whatever it is. It’s just something fun and interesting.

Melinda: Any topic is complicated and detailed and difficult, but it’s the way that you talk about it—and so the way we talk about it is in a fun and hopefully engaging way that makes it less scary.

Trent: I’ve had more success explaining quantum physics to people than I have explaining the rules of Australian Rules football to people!

New episodes will be released each Thursday, and the entire series will be available free on the Cosmic Genome site.

Most people assume that the chupacabra, like its cryptozoological brethren Bigfoot and Nessie, dates back many decades or centuries. However, as discussed in my book Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore and in the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer, the origin of the mysterious vampire beast el chupacabra can be traced back to a Puerto Rican eyewitness who saw the 1995 film Species, which featured a nearly identical monster. Though both vampire legends and “mysterious” animal predation date back many centuries, there seems to be no evidence of any blood-sucking “chupacabra” before the 1990s.

The beast turned twenty last year, and its recent vintage poses a thorny problem for those who wish to claim it exists, because any evolutionary provenance for these unknown monsters is glaringly absent. Real animals don’t simply appear out of nowhere; all animals are subject to the same evolutionary pressures and must have descended from earlier, equally known animals. The tree of life simply doesn’t have a branch for the chupacabra, any more than it does for Bigfoot, Nessie, dragons, or the Jersey Devil.¹

When forced to account for this conspicuous lack of historical record, proponents often co-opt native myths and legends of supernatural spirits, taking them out of context and mischaracterizing them as actual eyewitness accounts of encounters with unknown corporeal creatures. (For more on this process, see Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero’s Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids; and Michel Meurger’s Lake Monster Traditions: A Cross-Cultural Analysis; as well as the book I coauthored with Joe Nickell, Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World’s Most Elusive Creatures.)

The chupacabra has two origin stories invoked to help explain its sudden appearance: the first is that the creature is an extraterrestrial brought here by visiting aliens; the second is that the chupacabra is an escaped entity created in a top-secret U.S. government genetics laboratory experiment gone wrong—essentially a classic conspiracy-laden Frankenstein scenario. Not coincidentally, these two origin stories are identical to those of Sil, a chupacabra-like monster in the film Species (see Figure 1 and Radford 2014).

The alien/Frankenstein’s monster explanation, though embraced by many Puerto Ricans and others soon after the chupacabra’s 1995 appearance, was unsatisfactory (and perhaps too outlandish) to some, who then offered their own histories of the vampire beast. A blank slate history creates an information vacuum easily filled by mystery-mongering speculation. (For analysis of historical chupacabra claims since the 1950s, see my SI columns “The Mystery of the Texas Chupacabra” in the March/April 2014 issue and “Texas Monsters and the Chupacabra” in the May/June 2015 issue.)

Figure 1a. The movie monster from the film Species.

Figure 1b. The “chupacabra” first described in 1995 in Puerto Rico by eyewitness Madelyne Tolentino, which she’d recently seen. Illustration by the author.

Chupacabra Lore Attributed to Early New Mexico

Because the chupacabra first appeared in Puerto Rico and for several years was mostly reported in Spanish-speaking countries, it’s not surprising that Latin America would serve as a plausible setting for an origin story. In his book Enchanted Legends and Lore of New Mexico, Ray John De Aragon includes a fanciful tale titled “The Sheepherder and the Chupacabra,” in which a shepherd named Francisco recounts a story:

Dona Serafina, the old curandera [medicine woman] . . . said that many, many years ago, people were finding dead cattle, dead chickens, dead cibolos (bison), dead sheep, and goats and even a person who seemed like the blood had been drained out. Since whatever it was mainly attacked goats, she said—a goatsucker—the people called the mystery animal a chupacabra. Dona Serafina went on to tell them that ancient Indians had this strange breed of animal. She said that she herself had seen one with her own eyes following an Indian witch doctor who had it as a pet. “The chupacabra stopped and stared at me,” she said. “It was an evil stare that sent a chill up and down my spine. But I was not going to show it that I was afraid. I just took out my detente, my picture with an embroidered edge that said [in English] The Sacred Heart of Jesus is with me. Detentes are to keep evil away from you and protect you. When the chupacabra saw the detente, it gave me a mad stare and followed its master, dragging its long skinny tail and turning to look back at me every now and then. I just held my detente out with my hand toward him. I don’t go anywhere without my detente. You never know when you’re going to see a chupacabra.”

Some time after hearing this emotional story, while out on the plains tending sheep, Francisco encountered

a strange creature . . . sniffing and giving the shepherd a mad stare. . . . It was a chupacabra, and it hungrily looked around at the scared sheep. Francisco took his detente out of his shirt pocket, and while holding it in his hand he recited the Lord’s Prayer several times in succession. The chupacabra looked at him with its red eyes and growled fiercely, then turned and walked away. His detente had saved his life. (De Aragon 2012, 91–92)

Anyone familiar with folklore or the true story of the chupacabra—and I modestly count myself in both categories—will recognize that it has no basis whatsoever in fact or history. If it is indeed a “legend” of New Mexico, it’s a new one fabricated in 2012 by De Aragon with no truth or historical provenance. It’s a brand new story featuring a creature that first appeared in 1995, retroactively providing the beast with a fictional—and to many readers likely plausible—ancient heritage. The idea that a chupacabra was kept as a pet by a Native American witch doctor centuries ago is a novel twist, and the theme of a threatening demonic beast being scared off by the faithful who invoke Jesus is straight out of standard Catholic canon. (For more on the chupacabra being used as a symbol of Satan by religious authorities—primarily Pentecostals—see pages 53 to 55 in Tracking the Chupacabra.)

This fictional story, while making for an entertaining tale, runs the very real risk of being taken as a genuine historical legend by the book’s readers. Though De Aragon clearly created the story, he implies that it is based on a legend told to him as true. Folklorists are careful to give references and citations for the stories they offer, to demonstrate both scholarly diligence and proper attribution, but these are unfortunately absent in De Aragon’s book.

Figure 2. A garbled—and possibly nonexistent—legend suggests that conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado encountered knife-wielding cannibal dwarves while exploring what is now New Mexico in the 1500s. Illustration by Celestia Ward.

Even if De Aragon had heard some odd kernel of a demon vampire story that he embellished into his chupacabra tale, the details and facts he offers are so far removed from the original sources that any historical account of a real chupacabra encounter is hopelessly lost and garbled. Absent even a shred of corroborating evidence (for example, a written historical mention of the creature or even an independent “eyewitness” account of an encounter with one), it’s safe to assume that this “legend” is wholly fictional.

Coronado, Zuni, and the Chupacabra

Another “legendary” claim to a natural history of the chupacabra comes from Bob Curran in his book Vampires: A Field Guide to the Creatures That Stalk the Night. He describes early explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s encounter with the goatsucker (see Figure 2). In a chapter titled “El Chupacabra,” Curran writes:

A legend says that as he camped during the night, Coronado’s livestock were attacked. It is told that some of his men drove off the attackers—described as small, dark, horny-skinned men—with torches and spears. In the morning, many of the cattle, which made up the main herd (1,500 animals), were dead, drained of blood. Despite this setback, Coronado was able to buy cattle from local Indians, replacing most of those that he’d lost, and press onward in his quest. In the Zuni Indian pueblo at Hawikuh in Western New Mexico, he heard tales of strange grey men “with knives on their backs” who had sporadically fought with the Zunis in times long past. They could jump, the Zunis told him, and drop off their warriors from above, killing them with pointed sticks. It was said, the Zunis went on, that they drank blood. These tales were of little interest to Coronado, as his destination was the legendary Cibola, and all this talk of ferocious dwarves was only a distraction. (Curran 2005, 46)

There are many clues that this story—confused as it is—is not true. To his credit, Curran does offer several caveats about its veracity (“a legend says . . .” “it is told that . . .” etc.), and as with De Aragon’s legend it’s important to pay attention to this story’s fifthhand provenance: Curran is describing what a legend says that Coronado claims about what he heard from Zuni Indians when they told him about what their forefathers told them they did a half-millennia ago.

I have no idea what, if anything, this alleged legend means, and Curran clearly doesn’t either. Spanish conquistador Coronado was of course attacking and killing Zunis, not swapping friendly stories with them, and it’s possible that the tribe told him the stories of the savage knife-spined dwarfs as an indirect warning to Coronado of the dangers his men faced in the area unless they moved along. Even if the legend is true—and there’s no reason to think it is—there’s also the problem that Spaniards and Indians didn’t speak the same language; in fact, the two groups communicated largely through hand signals and rough interpretations.

In his book Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest in Pursuit of Coronado, Douglas Preston (1992) describes several instances in which the meanings of words and messages got mangled and mistranslated between Coronado and Zunis (chickens were mistaken for turkeys and cattle for buffalo, for example). When communicating important messages from Coronado “it is unclear just how much of this the Zuni understood,” Preston notes, which is not surprising since messages between the groups were “explained through signs” (285). Preston states that Coronado “asked the Indians to paint a cloth for him showing all the animals in the area, which they did” (304). It depicted buffalo, elk, coyotes, and other known animals—yet the chupacabra was conspicuously missing.

A more serious problem is that—even assuming for the moment that details of the legend are true and that Coronado accurately understood and reported what he heard from the Zuni—there’s no clear connection with the chupacabra. Chupacabra have appeared in various forms and been reported to have a disparate variety of features including wings, a tail, red eyes, and so on—none of the reports described “small, dark, horny-skinned men” or “strange grey men” or “ferocious [warrior] dwarves” armed with torches and spears. Even assuming the description has some basis in fact, the “knives” mentioned on the backs could simply describe where these mysterious “dwarves” sheathed their blades. The vampirism claim, though also superficially aligned with the chupacabra, is in fact unremarkable and standard lore universally used to demonize enemies (with echoes of the blood libel myths as well).

Curran offers another (even more confusing and improbable) version of this story in his book American Vampires: Their True Bloody History from New York to California. It concerns Coronado’s expedition whose cattle were attacked one night.

The attackers were “little gray men” with hard and spiky skins, which set upon the animals in order to draw their blood and consume some of their internal organs. They were only driven away by fire—the men held lighted torches to push them back. Local natives later told the Spaniards that these were chupacabras (goat suckers) and that they lived in the surrounding hills. They were cannibals who drank blood, and, if confronted they would attack humans as well as animals. It was said that they only came at night. . . . Locals told them that the beings . . . had lived there for a very long time, attacking their goats and cattle and sometimes themselves, and that there were some among them who could change shape, taking on the guise of a bird or coyote. (Curran 2013b, 190)²

Cannibals, of course, eat their own kind and therefore the “chupacabras” Curran describes would be neither extraterrestrial nor canid nor demon but instead human—an identification reinforced by the descriptions of them as “little men” using spears. But of course this “legend” is not internally consistent, as these “chupacabras” are also magical shape-shifting creatures.

Thus we see that the dramatic, specific, and mysterious details offered in the legend are unlikely in the extreme. Even if the Zuni did in fact try to describe some animal unknown to the invading Spaniards, who knows how garbled the description must have been (between Zuni hand signs and drawings translated into Spanish and later to English) to end up with something like “strange grey men with knives on their backs.”

If this story is not made out of whole cloth, then its fabric content certainly approaches 100 percent. Again, despite the legend repeatedly invoking the label chupacabra to describe the mythical cannibalistic, vampiric, gray dwarves that Coronado is dubiously reported to have heard about, the connection to the chupacabra is virtually nonexistent. To clarify the question about the source—and therefore historical veracity—of this story I contacted Curran, who told me “I’ve used the Coronado story in a couple of books but I’ve no idea whether it’s true or not.”³

Ancient Alien and Pre-Atomic Age Chupacabras

Other pseudohistories of the chupacabra can be found in a sensational, special edition of the Spanish-language magazine Contacto OVNI (UFO Con-tact), which contains an article titled “El Chupacabras Hace 70 Anos” (“70 Years of the Chupacabra”) and offered wild conjecture about the creature’s origins, including a section titled “Chupacabras of the Pre-Atomic Era,” which tries in vain to link the beast to a wholly unrelated 1925 news story about animal predation in Africa (Romero 1996).

In the archives of the Universidad Interamericana at Bayamon, Puerto Rico, I discovered another Spanish-language booklet, rather boldly titled La Verdadera Historia del Chupacabras (The True History of Chupacabras), which purports to reveal the true history of the beast. After beginning with long-since discredited accounts of the chupacabra by UFO researcher Jorge Martin, the ninety-six-page book—written under the name Redaccion Noticiosa (1996)—suggests that the Taino Indians (an Arawak-related group who inhabited many Caribbean islands when Columbus reached the Americas) knew of the chupacabra. It notes that “figures of beasts are prominent in the mythology and artifacts found in the Taina culture” (translation mine); and “We here at Redaccion Noticiosa believe that the presence of the chupacabra dates back to the pre-Conquest days when the Tainos ruled the island.”

The booklet goes on to theorize that the Tainos’ reverence for the El Yunque rainforest and the deities they believed existed there (claimed by some to be the home of the original chupacabra) allowed the animal to thrive there. Nonetheless, the Tainos would apparently hunt—and sometimes eat—the chupacabra, as depicted in a fantastic drawing illustrating a stereotypical scene of an armed Taino man watching a woman preparing food next to a chupacabra being roasted on a spit over an open fire (see Figure 3).

Perhaps the most outlandish fictional origin story for the chupacabra presented as speculative fact comes from writer Scott Corrales, contributing a chapter on the beast to a book of conspiracy theories. In it he quotes a Chilean researcher named Ferrer who was told by an elderly man that “‘his grandfather’s grandfathers’ were well aware that these predators [chupacabras] existed and that they were, in fact, gods who came to leave messages. In the past, these messages were articulated as complete sentences, but now they were numerical in nature . . . 666—the mark of the beast” (Corrales 2004, 127). Corrales gives free rein to this fact-free speculation and conjecture, concluding by asking ominously, “Who or what are these strange deities feared and worshipped by the ancient Atacamans [people from Atacama, Chile]? . . . . What would occur if the Atacamans neglected to perform the [blood sacrifice] ritual? Did their deities send monstrous minions [i.e., chupacabra] to collect the blood they needed?” (Corrales 2004).

Figure 3. Taino couple roast a chupacabra over an open fire. From La Verdadera del Chupacabras. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Redaccion Noticiosa.

Conclusion

I’ve discovered several examples of fabricated pseudohistories of the chupacabra, ranging from Zuni medicine man pet to vampiric minions sent by Mesoamerican deities to spear-wielding cannibal shape-shifting dwarves. I don’t begrudge authors their speculative historical fiction—Curran and De Aragon are fine storytellers who offer vivid, engaging stories based on myths and legends—but one false explanation is as good as any other absent references or documentation.

The true history of the chupacabra is a fascinating and improbable story in its own right, full of conspiracy theories, vampire lore, and media hype. Presenting fabricated stories as “legends” only serves to blur the lines between fact and fiction—lines that researchers such as myself have worked hard to clarify (for years I have had a standing, unclaimed $1,000 reward for any verifiable, published pre-1990s reference to a vampiric chupacabra anywhere in the world).The gradual expansion of what is popularly called a “chupacabra” is common; in my book I describe how the word originally referred to a very specific alien-type creature in the mid-1990s but had expanded to include hairless canids by 2000, and by 2010 virtually any animal not immediately identifiable was dubbed (either informally or by the news media) as a chu-pacabra. This same phenomenon has occurred in the literature as well, with stories under the name “chupacabra” retroactively applied to legends and rumors that historical figures claimed to have heard about some strange encounter. Since the references here predate the publication of my research, it’s too soon to tell what effect, if any, it will have in correcting the record.

The migration of narrative themes seen in these and other pseudohistories of the chupacabra is to be expected. Rumor, urban legends, and folklore are not fixed but instead are constantly changing. As the researcher who first identified the origin of the chupacabra, I can lament the confounding stories that have emerged around this Hispanic vampire beast. However, the forces of folklore cannot be stopped, and trying to correct the record is a Canutian task. Folklore has a life of its own, and the best I can do is explain the true origin of the chu-pacabra back as far as I can and help document the monster’s spread in pop culture. The information is there for those who wish to look, but I know better than most that the truth never stands in the way of a good story.

Notes

1. There have, of course, been various attempts to place mythical creatures within an evolutionary framework. For a fascinating look at taxonomical attempts to find a place for fairies, water spirits, and angels in a Darwinian worldview, for example, see Charles W. Leadbeater’s 1913 book The Hidden Side of Things.
2. It’s not clear in this legend why animals that look and act exactly like coyotes—which are well known to attack livestock, including goats and cattle—were assumed by locals to not be coyotes at all but instead chupacabras that had cleverly changed into coyote form before attacking the livestock. This seems rather like assuming that a pet dog that soiled the floor must have really been an unknown shape-shifting animal at the time—instead of the dog it obviously was—because a beloved pet wouldn’t do that.
3. Curran told me: “According to my notes it comes from a book which I was shown in the Biblioteca National in Barcelona a good number of years ago. The book is Las Adventuras del Gran General Francesco de Coronado, Explorador y Goberndor de Nueva Galicia y Otres en America and the date I have for it is 1895. For some reason I don’t have the author but it is published in Madrid or so my notes say. It is in Catalan Spanish (I think that it’s Catalan) but I got a friend to translate some portions for me” (Curran 2013a).

References

• Corrales, Scott. 2004. Chupacabras: A study in darkness. In The New Conspiracy Reader: From Planet X to the War on Terrorism—What You Really Don’t Know, edited by Al Hidell and Joan D’Arc. New York: Citadel Press.
• Curran, Bob. 2005. Vampires: A Field Guide to the Creatures that Stalk the Night. Pompton Plains, New Jersey: Career Press.
• ———. 2013a. Interview by the author, January 27.
• ———. 2013b. American Vampires: Their True Bloody History from New York to California. Pompton Plains, New Jersey: Career Press.
• De Aragon, Ray John. 2012. Enchanted Legends and Lore of New Mexico: Witches, Ghosts, and Spirits. Charleston, South Carolina: The History Press.Preston, Douglas. 1992. Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest in Pursuit of Coronado. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Radford, Benjamin. 2014. Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore. Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press.
• Redaccion Noticiosa. 1996. La Verdadera Historia del Chupacabras. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Redaccion Noticiosa.
• Romero, Armando Nicolau. 1996. El Chupacabras hace 70 anos. In Contacto OVNI—Edicion Especial. Corporativo Mina, Mexico.

Rob Brotherton’s Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories (2015) follows a trend in the literature on conspiracism that has increasingly moved away from seeing conspiracy as being a feature of one side of the political spectrum and toward viewing it as a capacity within everyone with a human brain. Brotherton, an academic psychologist and science writer, places a lot of the recent scholarship on conspiracy theory in context, especially the growing body of relevant research in psychology.

Brotherton’s focus on the research moves away from a tendency started by Richard Hofstadter, who wrote about right-wing conspiracist movements in his classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964). In doing so, however Brotherton goes back and defines, for the purposes of his discussion, the conspiracist “style” and what separates theories from conspiracy theories. He identifies six features that are common (though not always diagnostic) of conspiracy theory:

1. Conspiracy theories focus on “unanswered [and often unanswerable] questions”;
2. Conspiracy theories posit that “nothing is at it appears”;
3. Conspiracy theories suggest that “everything is under control”;
4. Conspiracy theories reveal that “everything is evil”;
5. Conspiracy theories are rife with “anomaly hunting”;
6. Conspiracy theories deploy “heads I win, tails you lose” logic.

These points are pretty straightforward, and Brotherton’s description of the conspiracist style, I think, builds on points made by Michael Barkun that in conspiracy thinking, “nothing is as it seems, nothing happens by accident, and everything is connected, with no room for accident or coincidence.”

Whereas Barkun looks at the history and development of specific conspiracist narratives, Brotherton focuses on why such narratives arise in the first place and looks to psychology for those answers. In part, Brotherton seems to be providing a follow up to the work of Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, whose American Conspiracy Theories (2014) looked at evidence that suggests that a constant drumbeat of conspiracism is always at work in American popular consciousness, as evidenced by decades’ worth of letters to the editor published in major American newspapers. Parent and Uscinski’s study indicates that conspiracy theory is not an aberration in American political thought, as would be suggested by Hofstadter's use of the word paranoid in the title of his seminal essay.

Brotherton takes the next step and ascribes the tendency to psychological factors that operate on everyone. Conspiracy theory is not the domain of a partisan far-right fringe in this formulation, but an inevitable outgrowth of normal human psychology and predispositions. He illustrates this point with new studies that illuminate psychological principles all skeptics should be familiar with. He then shows how these principles are at work in a variety of conspiracy theories.

Rob Brotherton’s Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe in Conspiracy Theories is an easy, fun read and provides a valuable synthesis of the growing body of scholarship on conspiracy theory.

Susan Gerbic, founder of the Guerilla Skeptics on Wikipedia Project, contacted CSI recently to have us upload some pictures and such for an update to the Wikipedia article about Skeptical Inquirer. Several of us were involved in making some content available for this endeavor, and Kendrick Frazier, our editor, created a bibliography of important articles concerning the origin of CSICOP and Skeptical Inquirer.

The biggest concern we had regarding this bibliography was the fact that very little of it was easily available, if available at all. As part of my role as librarian and archivist for the Center for Inquiry, we decided I should try to find these items and get them together in one place, either in links or by creating electronic copies for preservation purposes.

Below is Ken’s bibliography as written, and each article is linked to the text of the article and a pdf of the original article. These items now reside on our server in an effort to preserve the early history of CSICOP. The items were scanned from the originals, and text was created from the scans using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, and then manually corrected as needed.

I am hoping we can continue to preserve the history of our organization in this manner and provide our members with more and more of this type of information in the future.

Notable Articles about CSICOP and Skeptical Inquirer

(Chronological order. First two decades)

1. Boyce Rensberger, “Paranormal Phenomena Facing Scientific Study.” New York Times, May 1, 1976, p. 26
2. Kendrick Frazier, “Science and the Parascience Cults.” Science News (cover article), May 29, 1976, pp. 346–350.
3. “Attacking the New Nonsense.” TIME, December 12, 1977.
4. Kendrick Frazier, “UFOs, Horoscopes, Bigfoot, Psychics, and Other Nonsense.” Smithsonian, March 1978.
5. Kendrick Frazier, “UFOs! Horoscopes! (And Other Nonsense).” Reader’s Digest, July 1978.
   (Condensed from Smithsonian. Also published in dozens of languages in Reader’s Digest’s international editions.)
6. Douglas R. Hofstadter, “About Two Kinds of Inquiry: ‘National Enquirer’ and ‘The Skeptical Inquirer’.” Scientific American (“Metamagical Themas” column), February 1982.
   [Republished as Chapter 5, “World Views in Collision: The Skeptical Inquirer versus the National Enquirer,” with an eight-page “Post Scriptum” of further meditations on the topic, including a long exchange with M. Truzzi, in Hofstadter’s 1985 book Metamagical Themas (New York: Basic Books), pp. 91–114.]
7. James Cornell, “Science vs. the Paranormal: Skeptics Fight an Uphill Battle in their Efforts to Overthrow the Forces of Pseudoscience.” Psychology Today, March 1984.
8. Alan L. Otten, “People Will Believe Anything, Which Is Why Csicops Exist: These Defenders of Science Debunk ‘False’ Notions; How to Regard Astrology.” Wall Street Journal, July 19, 1985, pp. 1, 15.
9. David F. Marks, “Investigating the Paranormal,” Nature (cover article), 120: 119–123, March 13–19, 1986.
10. Carl Sagan, “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection: How Not to Be Fooled,” PARADE Magazine, February 1, 1987, with a box titled “The Skeptical Inquirer.”

—Compiled by KF 3/31/16

Amazon.com sells a lot of other stuff besides books. One of its most intriguing offerings is the SweatEvaporating/Sauna/HealthyUrn/NanoAnion/NegativeIon/FarInfraredRay/Hyperthermia/Fumigate/PulseMagneticField/PurpleClay/Underglaze Pastel And Yellow-glazed---Lotus Out Of Clear Water. I am not making this up: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B019QTUIA2/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UTF8&condition=new.

I will quote the whole deliciously garbled product description for your enjoyment:

Embedded 2200pcs Health-rock Gemstone by specific rules, healthy urn manufacturing procedure would go through nine processes, such as mud-mading,carving, firing, moulding, open-air drying, grinding and so on. When temperature inside healthy urn can be to 42-47¡æ by two-in-one regulator putting vapour of steamy-fumigating pot into urn, health-rock gemstone will release a large number of anions and far infrared rays to form an enclosed pulsed magnetic field. With five-in-one therapy which is combined with anions, far infrared rays, fumigating, hyperthermia, and pulsed magnetic field therapy, healthy urn can cause human body to expel aging wastes and activate cells¡¯ activity, which can reduce burdens on kidneys and liver, also can improve absorption function of human circulation system and muscle tissue. As immunology theories, natural curability of human body can strengthen around 6 times when body temperature rises 1¡æ, and strengthen around 36 times when body temperature rises 2¡æ. So when body temperature rises 1-2¡æ in healthy urn, human body will achieve efficacies, such as unimpeded meridian, five viscera balance, endocrine balance, anti-free radical activity, blood cleaning and so on. Healthy urn can recuperate diseases as below: Opening human body sebaceous glands and dredging the third-expelling channel for deep-layer sweat by far infrared rays, fumigating, hyperthermia, and nuclear magnetic resonance, healthy urn whose detoxifying effect is to 90% can promote metabolism, regulate endocrine, dredge vein. replenish anion, improve immunity, improve natural curability and so on.

The name SweatEvaporating/Sauna/HealthyUrn/NanoAnion/NegativeIon/FarInfraredRay/Hyperthermia/Fumigate/PulseMagneticField/PurpleClay/Underglaze Pastel And Yellow-glazed---Lotus Out Of Clear Water is to product names as Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysili-ogogogoch is to town names. (A nice little town in Wales. I visited there once, and quickly learned how to pronounce its name correctly and then forgot just as quickly.) They definitely need a better, shorter name for marketing. The ancient Greeks used a type of large ceramic jar called an amphora to store and transport wine. So I propose the name CAMphora, since this product combines several Complementary/Alternative Medicine therapies to offer “health in a jar.” True, the traditional amphora had two handles, and this jar has none; but it’s close enough for a company that thinks the language in their product description is close enough to English.

The Sungao company sells it for $24,600 with free shipping from China (but possibly with import fees or customs duties?). They offer other versions with different artwork for $26,900. They also sell purely decorative vases with no health claims. I was unable to find out anything about the company. There is a #sungao with pictures of swimwear.

When I first learned of this product, I thought “This has to be a spoof; please, please tell me it’s a spoof!” I wrote Amazon to ask if it was a real product and if anyone had actually bought one; they didn’t answer.

My flabber was thoroughly gasted. Apparently you sit in the jar and put water and maybe Chinese herbs into it and it is connected to 220-volt electricity. Among other things, it promises to treat:

• Stains and fine wrinkles
• Dysmenorrhea and menoxenia (yes, that’s a real word. Don’t feel bad; I had to look it up too.)
• Rheumatism and bone pain
• Lumbar muscle strain
• Arthritis
• Decreased resistance
• Body figure getting out of shape
• Senility
• Endocrine disorder

It is allegedly a “Perfect Fusion” of these five therapies:

1. Anion therapy
2. Fumigating therapy
3. Hyperthermia therapy
4. Far infrared rays therapy
5. Pulsed magnetic circulating field therapy

These therapies are imaginatively described on this web page http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019QTUIA2/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me. Would you believe “As air vitamin, nano anion of healthy urn can dissolve in vapour and be above to 20000pcs/cc and promote human body metabolism” and that it is effective for over thirty diseases? I wouldn’t either. Nor do I believe that the far infrared rays of the jar are “close to vibration frequency of human body molecules” and that therefore they are able to “promote endocrine balance, prevent aging, strengthen immunity, skin-detox function, and do adjuvant physiotherapy of multiple symptoms.”

It has “health-rock gemstone” that releases nano anions, far-infrared rays and pulsed magnetic field with zero radioactivity when temperature is above 38 degrees.” (One wonders if there is non-zero radioactivity at lower temperatures.)

There’s more: “Opening human body sebaceous glands and dredging the third-expelling channel for deep-layer sweat by far infrared rays, fumigating, hyperthermia, and nuclear magnetic resonance, healthy urn whose detoxifying effect is to 90% can promote metabolism and ensure fresh and lively internal environment.”

The claims go on and on, promising to cure “tumor, fatigue, depression, insomnia, neurological diseases and so on.” It’s really entertaining to read as an example of sciencey-sounding twaddle. It’s also entertaining as an example of incompetent translation from Chinese.

You will be reassured to know that it is environmentally friendly, with energy-saving performance, low-carbon environmental protection, noiseless, lightless and pollution free.

Of course, they don’t provide any scientific references to support their claims; and surprisingly, they don’t even offer the usual testimonials. They don’t even explain how you use it. Do you sit inside it? Does it accommodate people of all sizes and shapes? Do you have to add Chinese herbs? How often do you use it and for how long? It mentions “Capacity-2000 volt.” What do you suppose that means? It sounds scary.

I’ve come across a lot of nonsense in alternative health claims, but this one takes the cake. It’s right up there with Ancestor Bands, those colored silicone bracelets with “embedded frequencies” that promise to help you tap into the proper frequencies that your Ancestors transmit throughout the Cosmos to impart their newfound universal knowledge of the universe and increase your mental power, physical strength, and reverse the effects of aging. “Try it today, feel the difference tomorrow.” (https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/frequencies-and-their-kindred-delusions/) You might feel a difference with Ancestor Bands, but you are guaranteed to see a difference in your financial status if you invest in a CAMphora.

If it’s true that laughter is the best medicine, just reading about this jar might be therapeutic. On the other hand, it might make you cry. It’s discouraging to think that there might be someone out there with more money than sense who would fork out $24,600 for this “health in a jar.” And to think that there are people unscrupulous or deluded enough to sell those jars.

This Book Won’t Cure Your Cancer. By Gideon Burrows. 
NGO media, 2015. ISBN 978-0955369599. 212 pp. 
Paperback. $15.79.

Gideon Burrows has inoperable brain cancer that is slow growing but is inevitably going to kill him. He has written a remarkable book about his experience, This Book Won’t Cure Your Cancer. He is a professional wordsmith, and he describes his experience of illness so vividly that the reader enters into his life, feels what he feels, and shares his suspense about what the next scan or doctor visit will reveal.

Along with him we suffer through the panic and fear, the chaos, the agonies of delays and uncertainty, the unpleasant hospital environment, and specialists with poor bedside manners. We follow him through difficult decisions about how to share the bad news with friends, relatives, and his young children; we understand why this engenders guilty feelings. The story is as engaging as a detective story; we can hardly wait to see what the next scan will show and how the story of his illness will play out. It puts a human face on the cancer experience, which would make the book valuable for that alone, but it is much more. The gradually unfolding episodes of his personal story are interwoven with what amounts to a primer on how to think critically about science-based medicine vs. alternative treatments. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

Untrustworthy Information

When people are diagnosed with cancer, they are vulnerable and desperate. They look for information and are likely to find cookbooks, miracle stories, alternative medicine, and “forbidden cancer cures.” Their friends bombard them with advice. Most of those sources “offer hope to people when they need it most, but have earned no right to do so.”

Burrows read “the biggest cancer book of all time,” Anticancer: A New Way of Life, by Servan-Schreiber, and was bitterly disappointed. It offers a plan to keep cancer at bay through mental balance and diet, but he realized that Servan-Schreiber makes unwarranted extrapolations from single scientific studies and anecdotes, and he blames the victim by trying to establish a lifestyle cause for a kind of tumor for which science has found no cause and which is likely due only to bad luck. Servan-Schreiber thought he had beat cancer, but it returned with a vengeance. Then he wrote a second book. Instead of acknowledging that his methods hadn’t worked, he rationalized that he hadn’t followed his own advice carefully enough: He hadn’t done enough to control stress or maybe he hadn’t eaten properly. He died shortly after the second book was published. People are still reading his books and following his advice; many of them don’t realize he is dead.

The Cancer Culture

Burrows describes the prevailing cancer culture that depicts it as a battle, calls patients brave warriors, and celebrates the victorious survivors. He says,

Cancer is not a brave battle to fight, it is a terrible disease to run away from. It is a puzzle to try to solve, something to try to keep at bay using the very best tools we have. . . . I’m not brave. I’m just getting on. Making the most of what I’ve got. Crying, and laughing, and forgetting, and remembering, and plodding and pedaling on. Like we all do, cancer or not.

Three different specialists gave him the same prognosis. His cancer is inoperable. It will inevitably progress and need treatment, but for now all that is needed is to monitor it with scans and to control his seizures with medication. Friends suggested he keep looking for a surgeon who would be willing to operate. What if he searched the world and found five doctors who wouldn’t operate and a sixth who would? Would it be rational to trust the sixth doctor’s opinion more than that of the other five? Of course not. He should trust him less. Unfortunately, many patients play this game, spend enormous amounts of money, and end up worse or no better than they would have been.

He talks about the false promises of unconventional cancer doctors such as Burzynski (see David Gorski’s article “Stanislaw Burzynski: Four Decades of an Unproven Cancer Cure” in the March/April 2014 SI) and the impetus to “try anything.” He said it is not reasonable to “try anything” if there is no evidence that “anything” works. People say it’s worth trying because there is no evidence that it doesn’t work. He spotted the fallacy in that reasoning: “There are many millions of things that have not been proven to not cure cancer, but mostly because many millions of things have never been tried. That does not mean they are a potential cure, nor that they are sensible to pursue.”

What if he proposed that blowing up 100 red balloons would cure cancer? Is that really any more ridiculous than coffee enemas? When does one anything become something we should try, and who gets to decide what is too ridiculous to try? Even alternative practitioners disagree with each other. Where do you draw the line? If a treatment has not been proven to work, is not biologically plausible, has not been tested in animals, and is not backed by the majority of scientific experts, shouldn’t it fall on the same side of the line as the red balloons?

He doesn’t blame people who go off in pursuit of a promised miracle cure. He understands their desperation and the comfort of having a hope to cling to. Rather, he blames those who offer that anything without a fair, accurate, and accountable foundation. The power and responsibility to advise about cancer treatment “should only be earned by results, proof, and accountability.”

What Constitutes Proof?

Burrows describes how people ignore reality to cling to their beliefs. When alternative medicine proponent Chris Woollams’s daughter survived for longer than average, he credited her alternative treatments; when her tumor recurred and killed her, he blamed her for not following his regime properly. When “Wellness Warrior” Jessica Ainscough died, her followers claimed it was because she didn’t do Gerson therapy correctly. Those who get both conventional and alternative treatment and survive often refuse to give credit to the conventional treatment: “. . . it doesn’t matter what you think cured you or made you feel better. Opinion doesn’t come into it, only the biology and science.”

Testimonials abound. “It worked for me” is a kind of “social proof” but in reality is no evidence at all. In fact, personal testimonies are the enemy of proof. We hear about successes, but we don’t hear about the failures because no records are kept. To be taken seriously, a theory has to be falsifiable. Excusing failures by saying the treatment wasn’t properly followed leaves no way to determine whether it actually works. Controlled scientific studies can test whether it works; they are based on falsifiability. Proponents of alternative medicine often reject the scientific approach; they argue that their treatments are not amenable to randomized controlled trials, and that they might still work for an individual even when studies show they didn’t work for the people in the studies.

He faults alternative providers for not carrying out even the most basic scientific controls. If they have a treatment that works, they should want to inform the world. It would be simple to publish honest, even independently audited lists of all treated patients with data on all the successes and failures. The argument that there isn’t money to test alternative medicine is a red herring; even small businesses monitor their performance indicators. Diet advice and cancer cookbooks abound, but, he notes, “The most science has shown is that having a generally healthy diet and exercising regularly lowers our risk of getting cancer. It does not prevent cancer. It does not cure it.”

Other bits of wisdom he imparts include:

The News Media

The news media report real new developments in scientific cancer treatment right along with sensationalist stories about unreliable pseudoscientific claims. They strive for “balance” and give alternative treatments more credit than they deserve. This is wrong-headed; it’s not a matter of two politicians presenting opposing views; it’s a matter of scientific fact and expert opinion versus speculation and uninformed opinions of non-experts (and sometimes even of charlatans). The news serves to confuse rather than to inform.

Confronting Rubbish

Is it rude or cruel to confront people who talk rubbish about cancer? If we don’t, are we allowing potentially more damage to be done just to avoid a personal feeling of discomfort? “How far does our reluctance to criticize mean that energy, passion, and grief is channeled away from cancer cure research, not towards it?”

Ancient Wisdom

“Ancient practice is not always ancient wisdom. . . . That something was being done in the earliest days of civilization to cure illnesses should make us more wary of those treatments, not keener to try them for ourselves… progress means replacement of the old and ineffective, the unproven and dangerous, by the new and better, the proven and safer.”

Religion

People ask, “What about God?” As an atheist, the question never arose for Burrows, even though he holds a degree in theology. He explains why prayer is only likely to make those who pray feel like they are acting virtuously, and why it is logically indefensible as an attempt to improve health outcomes.

Cancer is Natural

“Cancer doesn’t care about you.” It isn’t something gone wrong; it’s DNA doing what DNA is supposed to do. Without DNA mutation, there would be no evolution, no us. Cancer is a natural consequence of the same mechanisms that make our hair grow and our wounds heal. There are many cancers, and half of us will get one eventually. Cancers are not always a death sentence. We can cure some of them and live with others.

Doctor-Bashing

Proponents of alternative medicine love to criticize doctors. It’s undeniable that there is a lot wrong with conventional medicine. The system is flawed. Individual doctors are not perfect; they miss diagnoses and make mistakes. “But if we exercise skepticism and doubt about medically trained doctors, oncology and conventional medicine, then we should subject alternative medicine to at least the same level of doubt and scrutiny. In fact, I would argue alternative medicine deserves far more doubt because it self-consciously puts itself outside conventional medicine that has been proven by time and experience to, mostly but not always, get it right.”

Big Pharma and Conspiracies

Big Pharma deserves blame for many sins, but it is ridiculous to say it doesn’t want to find a cure for cancer or already has a cure and is keeping it secret. He explains why those conspiracy theories are completely wrong-headed. The idea that there’s no money in natural products is easily refuted by the success of bottled water and natural health food stores.

Who Are the Experts?

Self-declared “experts” write books. But it takes only two minutes on the Internet to demonstrate that there are experts in that field who question or disagree with them. Failure to reveal the controversy should make readers question whether anything else in the book is true. Burrows put his life in the hands of real experts who know far more about his tumor than any patient or self-proclaimed cancer guru. He can make choices about his care, but “they set the boundaries between which I can make decisions. That’s the rational way to behave, and I understand that they know best.”

Major Issues for Society

Conventional medicine and alternative medicine operate in two separate universes that don’t communicate with each other. Alternative providers fail to understand the scientific realities of modern cancer treatment. Conventional providers often fail to appreciate their patients’ fears and misunderstandings. Patients are left in limbo. As a society, we need to have a sensible conversation about dying and not just keep patients with cancer alive longer at all costs. We should learn when to let go. A recent study found that hospice patients with an end-of-life plan not only have a better quality of life than those who insist on every possible intervention, but they actually live longer.

Hope

At the end of the book, Burrows’s condition is stable and he is far from devoid of hope; but his hope is centered in realism and rationalism. He hopes for the possible, not for the impossible. Perhaps a change in medication will better control his seizures; perhaps he will survive long enough for science to find an effective cure for his cancer. He believes that reality and science are always better than lies and belief in magic. He thinks it is a shame that patients turn to alternative medicine and make themselves ineligible for clinical trials that offer real hope for contributing to the greater good.

Burrows predicts that believers in alternative medicine will demonize him for writing this book, but he makes them this promise: “If you can show me firm, peer-reviewed scientific evidence that your cancer prevention therapy or cure works, I will no longer call it alternative medicine. I’ll call it medicine. And if proven to work for my particular brain tumor, I’ll be first in line for a dose.” Burrows’s message is that we often act irrationally around cancer. He wrote his book not to advise patients about cancer treatment but to encourage people to look at the information they are given (from both conventional and unconventional sources) with a sharper critical eye. This book beautifully complements Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Reading both of them will help you understand pretty much everything worth knowing about cancer and the people who suffer from it.

Late last year at the United Nations climate change summit in Paris, world leaders reached a historic accord committing their countries to lowering greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades and beyond.

The combined commitments by countries fall short of what many scientists say is needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, but the Paris accord marks an essential first step. World leaders pledged to revisit their commitments every five years with the goal of ratcheting up efforts to rapidly reduce emissions.

Yet over the next decade, as the United States joins with other countries in a quest to decarbonize the world economy, it will be essential to also ratchet up U.S. public opinion.

The challenge is to move the majority of Americans who remain ambivalent about the issue toward greater support for government action.

Recent studies, including several that I have conducted, suggest a portfolio of related communication strategies that can help shift the conversation about climate change, building public demand for solutions.

Talking Up Consensus

As simple as it might sound, perceptions of scientific consensus on climate change serve as a key “gateway belief,” influencing other beliefs about the issue, which in turn shape support for policy action, report Sander van der Linden and colleagues (2015) in a recently published study.

Even for individuals who closely follow the issue, it is impossible to track the latest scientific findings or studies about climate change, much less parse the many complexities involved. Instead, as with medical questions or technology issues, most people use what they perceive as the consensus opinion of relevant experts as a mental short cut.

On the issue of climate change, the problem is that many members of the public are not very good at accurately estimating the true level of scientific consensus. Surveys of climate scientists and comprehensive reviews of thousands of peer-reviewed studies confirm the same basic fact: at least 97 percent of climate scientists say that human-caused climate change is happening (see Doran and Zimmerman 2009; Anderegg et al. 2010; Cook et al. 2013). One study, in fact, indicates the consensus is actually as high as 99.9 percent (Powell 2015). Yet recent surveys find that only one out of ten Americans correctly estimate agreement among climate scientists as greater than 90 percent (Leiserowitz et al. 2014).

To evaluate strategies for correcting perceptions of expert consensus, van der Linden and his colleagues (2014) tested the effects of different variations on the same message: “97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.” In one experimental condition, subjects were presented just with the text of the message. In a second condition, the text was paired with a pie chart visually conveying the level of consensus. In other conditions, subjects were presented with variations on a relevant metaphor such as, “If 97% of engineers concluded that a particular bridge is unsafe to cross, would you believe them? 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.”

Across each of their experimental conditions, boosting awareness of scientific consensus increased beliefs that climate change is happening, that it is human caused, and that it is a worrisome problem. These shifts in beliefs in turn increased subjects’ support for policy action, with some of the biggest increases observed among Republicans, who tend to be more dismissive of the issue (van der Linden et al. 2015). Interestingly, in comparison to the tested metaphors, subjects who received either the simple text statement or the pie chart displayed the greatest increase in their beliefs.

Metaphors are especially useful for explaining complex mechanisms related to climate science, reasoned van der Linden and his colleagues (2014), but when trying to convey the strength of scientific consensus, “presenting information in a way that is short, simple, and easy to comprehend and remember seems to offer the highest probability of success for all audiences examined,” they concluded.

Reframing the Debate

As we educate the public about scientific consensus, evidence suggests we also need to reframe the focus of debate. Americans tend to view climate change as a scientific or environmental issue, but not as a problem that affects them personally or that connects to issues that they already perceive as important.

Successfully reframing climate change means remaining true to the underlying science of the issue while applying research to tailor messages to different audiences, making the complex issue understandable and personally important (see Nisbet 2009).

For example, in a series of studies conducted with several colleagues, we examined how Americans respond to information about climate change when the issue is framed as a public health problem. A public health focus stresses scientific findings that link climate change to an increase in the incidence of infectious diseases, asthma, allergies, heat stroke, and other health problems, risks that differentially impact children, the elderly, and the poor.

To test the effects of this frame, in an initial study, we conducted in-depth interviews with seventy respondents from twenty-nine states, recruiting subjects from six previously defined audience segments. These segments ranged on a continuum from those individuals deeply alarmed by climate change to those who were deeply dismissive of the problem. Across all six audience segments, when asked to read a short essay that framed climate change in terms of public health, individuals said that the information was both useful and compelling, particularly at the end of the essay when locally focused policy actions were paired with specific benefits to public health (Maibach et al. 2010).

In a follow-up study, we conducted a nationally representative online survey in which respondents from each of the six audience segments were randomly assigned to three different experimental conditions allowing us to evaluate their emotional reactions to strategically framed messages about climate change. In comparison to messages that defined climate change in terms of either the environment or national security, talking about climate change as a public health problem generated greater feelings of hope among subjects. Research suggests that this emotion helps promote greater public involvement and participation on the issue. Among subjects who tended to doubt or dismiss climate change as a problem, the public health focus helped defuse anger in reaction to information about the issue, creating the opportunity for opinion change (Myers et al. 2012).

Working with a Diversity of 
Opinion Leaders

The research on consensus messaging and framing suggest easy-to-adopt talking points and novel lines of emphasis that scientists and other experts can use in face-to-face conversations, presentations, meetings, media interviews, and via social media. Yet to ratchet up public engagement with climate change, scientists and experts will also have to be joined by a variety of opinion leaders from across sectors of society, trusted voices that can influence otherwise difficult-to-reach audiences (see Nisbet and Kotcher 2009).

Studies, for example, have identified TV weathercasters as an especially important community influencer. Local TV broadcasts remain the top news source for a majority of Americans, and most say they watch the local news primarily for the weathercast. Given their training, visibility, reach, and trusted status, weathercasters hold the unique ability to describe how local weather conditions, such as heat waves, drought, or heavy precipitation, may be related to climate change.

Connecting the dots on such events is important. Research shows that when people understand that they have personally experienced the effects of climate change, they are more likely to be concerned about the issue and to support a variety of policy actions (Placky et al. 2015). To date, more than 250 local weathercasters in the United States representing 185 stations and 105 media markets have been recruited to include regular “Climate Matters” segments as part of their broadcasts, using easily adopted visuals that are localized to specific audiences.

A longitudinal study evaluating a pilot program at a local TV station in Columbia, South Carolina, found that after one year of regular Climate Matters segments, viewers of the station’s broadcast had developed a more science-based understanding of climate change than viewers of other local news stations (Placky et al. 2015). Pope Francis’s recent effort to reframe climate change in terms of religious duty and social justice is another example of the impact that trusted voices can have on public opinion.

Following the release of the pope’s encyclical on the subject and his visit to the United States this past year, 17 percent of Americans and 35 percent of Catholics reported that the pope’s position on climate change had influenced their views. In comparison to six months prior to the pope’s visit, significantly more Americans were likely to say that climate change is a moral issue, a social fairness issue, and a religious issue (Maibach et al. 2015). These findings provide strong evidence that the pope’s reframing of climate change had an impact on how the public thinks about the problem, connecting to widely shared values that transcend political differences.

The Need for Compromise

Ratcheting up public support for government action on climate change not only requires a sophisticated, research-based understanding of effective communication approaches but also an acceptance that there are strong limits to what even the best-funded and most carefully planned strategy can accomplish. Research findings evaluating different communication strategies are often messy, complex, and difficult to translate into practice. They are also subject to revision based on new research, changes in the dynamics surrounding an issue, or in applying across policy decisions and social contexts. Moreover, no matter how knowledgeable and adept experts and their partners might be in applying research to their communication efforts, progress on climate change will ultimately require the different sides in the debate to give ground, negotiate, and compromise. In the case of climate change, the major question therefore is whether public demand for action and the openness to compromise will happen too late, preventing society from successfully avoiding the most serious risks.

References

• Anderegg, W.R., J.W. Prall, J. Harold, et al. 2010. Expert credibility in climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107(27): 12107–12109.
• Cook, J., D. Nuccitelli, S.A. Green, et al. 2013. Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters 8(2): 024024.
• Doran, P.T., and M.K. Zimmerman. 2009. Examining the scientific consensus on climate change. Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union 90(3): 22–23.
• Leiserowitz, A., E. Maibach, C. Roser-Renouf, et al. 2014. Climate Change in the American Mind: Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in November 2013. Yale University and George Mason University. Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, New Haven, Conn. Available online at http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/sites/default/files/reports/Climate-Beliefs-November-2013.pdf.
• Maibach, E., A. Leiserowitz, C. Roser-Renouf, et al. 2015. The Francis effect: How Pope Francis changed the conversation about climate change. George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication: Fairfax, VA.
• Maibach, E.W., M. Nisbet, P. Baldwin, et al. 2010. Reframing climate change as a public health issue: An exploratory study of public reactions. BMC Public Health 10(1): 299.
• Myers, T.A., M.C. Nisbet, E.W. Maibach, et al. 2012. A public health frame arouses hopeful emotions about climate change. Climatic Change 113(3–4), 1105–1112.
• Nisbet, M.C. 2009. Communicating climate change: Why frames matter for public engagement. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 51(2): 12–23
• Nisbet, M.C., and J.E. Kotcher. 2009. A two-step flow of influence? Opinion-leader campaigns on climate change. Science Communication 30(3): 328–54.
• Placky, B.W., E. Maibach, J. Witte, et al. 2015. Climate matters: A comprehensive educational resource program for broadcast meteorologists. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00235.1, in press.
• Powell, James Lawrence. 2015. The consensus on anthropogenic global warming. Skeptical Inquirer 39(6): 42–45.
• Van der Linden, S.L., A.A. Leiserowitz, G.D. Feinberg, et al. 2014. How to communicate the scientific consensus on climate change: Plain facts, pie charts or metaphors? Climatic Change 126(1–2): 255–62.
• ———. 2015. The scientific consensus on climate change as a gateway belief: Experimental evidence. PloS one 10(2): e0118489.

Was Mary Magdalene the lover of Christ and did she have a son by him? This idea—made popular by The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s wildly successful novel and its film adaptation—has stimulated debates, disputes, and even some serious attempts at historical research in recent years. Today, some claim they have found evidence for the fatherhood of Christ in an ancient fresco preserved in a Templar church at Tempio di Ormelle, near Treviso in northern Italy. Is it true?

Portrait of a Woman

The figure of Magdalene—a sinner converted by Jesus and turned into one of his most devoted followers—has always stimulated the curiosity and imagination of artists and mystery mongers alike. The hypothesis of her being Jesus Christ’s companion was first suggested long before Brown. “It’s an idea born in the Parisian ‘counterculture’ at the end of the nineteenth century, developed by artists that were protesters and often involved in the occult, who wanted to shake up the conventions,” Mario Arturo Iannaccone, historian of Christianity, told the author in a personal interview. “For example, in 1888, an opera titled The Lover of Christ was performed in Paris. It was written by Darzens and the lover was, obviously, Mary Magdalene. In 1896, a book titled The Gospel of Mary (Magdalene) was published; it was an important apocryphal work that helped strengthen feminism. In various novels, Mary Magdalene became a femme fatale. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, wrote a story about Mary Magdalene and Jesus titled The Risen, filled with double meanings.”

But even the 1800s’ artists were fascinated by this woman and portrayed her in several paintings. “During the decadent era they turned her into a disturbing character, such as Salomé,” continues Iannaccone. “There are many examples in which she is represented as a beautiful woman bejeweled, or naked, symbolizing her newfound innocence. An example is the ‘penitent’ Magdalenes by Francesco Hayez, painted in 1825 and 1833. But at that time, hundreds of women of high society asked to be portrayed in the nude or seminude à la Madeleine, as it was called. They liked to represent this way their youthful beauty and purity.”

A Holy Family

Some believe that it was not only decadent and romantic painters who depicted Magdalene, but before them came the painters of the Renaissance and, further back, medieval artists. In these ancient works of art, Magdalene was not merely a disturbing woman; she would be depicted lying on a bed, after giving birth to a child, while Jesus holds a baby in his arms: his son.

Even Italian Nobel laureate Dario Fo, the author of a text devoted to Christ and to Magdalene, thinks that there might be some truth in the case of a not-so-platonic love between Jesus and Mary—a hypothesis that Fo sees confirmed in several famous works: “From the cycle of painting by Giotto in the upper church of Assisi, all devoted to Mary Magdalene, where she ascends to heaven assisted by the angels, well before the Madonna, to a fresco at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua,” said Fo in an interview found on Diego Cuoghi’s website. “While portraying Jesus chasing the money changers from the temple, Giotto also paints a little boy who, scared, runs to take refuge near a woman: Mary Magdalene, on whose head stands a halo. That baby, suggests the painter, clings to his mother as if to ask protection from the outburst of a man who had always been seen smiling. His father, Jesus.”

On YouTube and in some publications devoted to the occult, it is quite easy to find those who are convinced that they have discovered a twelfth-century fresco depicting a “holy family” composed of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and their child.

The fresco in question is located in Tempio Ormelle, on the wall of a medieval church built by the Templar Knights. According to some, the church was dedicated to Mary Magdalene, of whom the Templars were devout, and the fact that in a fresco worn by time, a lady portrayed is actually Mary Magdalene can be deduced from the fact that she wears a red robe, traditionally attributed to her, and by the presence of a tower behind her, her other feature.

Is it really possible, however, that a painting with such outrageous and heretical content could have been painted and its significance remain unnoticed for centuries? If this interpretation were true, it would be really one of the most shocking discoveries in the history of art and, especially, in the history of the Church.

The Templars and Magdalene

The version of Mary Magdalene—who was alternatively seen as the first feminist, sorceress, witch, priestess of a vaguely defined religion of a Mother Goddess—as the true founder of Christianity (or of a Christian alternative) is actually a very modern myth. “It is a reinterpretation of the figure of this woman that was proposed in the late nineteenth century,” says Iannaccone. “Since then, Magdalene has been charged with new meanings, becoming a prism that reflects the entire spectrum of modern protesters against traditional Christianity.”

The Da Vinci Code had popularized the idea of ​​a Jesus bloodline. “These are modern fantasies often connected to sacred or graalian bloodlines,” continues Iannaccone. “No serious historian, caring for his own reputation, ever took them seriously, simply because they lack the necessary foundations. More important are the studies of so-called feminist theology, which aim to re-evaluate the role played by women in early Christianity and therefore also that of Magdalene: this is an ideological, historical, and theological area that is both respectable and culturally relevant. Where, however, the modern myth of Magdalene has no place.”

Also, in The Da Vinci Code, one of the key clues of an intimate relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene was sought in the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, where an effeminate figure, with long hair, sits at the right hand of Christ.

“This is the apostle John, as any art student knows,” noted Diego Cuoghi, expert of art history and author of a study on the issue of Ormelle, in a personal interview with the author. Leonardo himself wrote clearly in his preparatory notes who that figure represented. Cuoghi continues: “Perhaps it will seem trivial, but Christian sacred art is based on the texts of Christian religion. For this reason, in almost all Medieval and Renaissance Last Suppers Giovanni is always represented as young, boyish-looking, and with a hairless face, unlike the other apostles who look like adults, often bearded; and he often has the head reclined on the shoulder or chest of Jesus.”

If, then, the one painted by Leonardo is not Magdalene, could she be depicted in the fresco at Tempio Ormelle?

Cuoghi says: “First of all, it should be clarified that the color red is not a characteristic exclusive to Mary Magdalene, but belongs also to the Madonna, for example. And the tower is a characteristic iconography of Santa Barbara (who was locked in a tower) and, again, of the Virgin Mary (also called Turris Davidic in litanies).”

The iconographic elements that distinguish Magdalene in art, in fact, are different: the jar of ointments in Medieval times, as Mary Magdalene washed the feet of Christ, and the skull, the book, and the crucifix from the sixteenth century onward.

“As for the Templars,” continues Cuoghi, “they never dedicated any church to Mary Magdalene but only to the Virgin Mary, whose cult was passionately widespread by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote the rule of the Templars and ‘invented’ the term ‘Notre Dame.’”

Iannaccone agrees: “The Templars were mostly French and the tradition of the repentant prostitute landed in Provence became fixed in the tenth century, giving rise to a lively worship that later extended to all of France. Therefore a number of French Templars was certainly devoted to Saint Mary Magdalene, but in the same way they were of other saints.”

The fresco in Tempio Ormelle: Jesus holds a baby, but it is not his son. It actually is a “Dormitio Viriginis,” or the death of the Virgin Mary, where Jesus, her son, receives her soul in the form of a baby.
Another example of “Dormitio Viriginis” by Jacopo Torriti, in Santa Maria Maggiore (Rome), dating back to the end of the thirteenth century, like the Tempor Ormelle's fresco.
Another “Dormitio” in which the soul of Mary as a child in diapers can be clearly seen.

A Little Mysterious Fresco

What then does the Tempio Ormelle fresco depict, if the figure lying in bed is not Magdalene? And why does a man (who is certainly Jesus, since he is characterized by a crossed cloud) hold in his arms a newborn baby?

Often, those who venture into this kind of reckless interpretation ignore the entire history of art and interpret the images according to their own personal biases. A famous example of this kind of behavior is that of those who today see flying saucers, aircraft, and ships in Medieval and Renaissance paintings (see this column, SI, March/April 2014 and July/August 2014).

“Do you really think it possible that, in the thirteenth century, a painting with such a subject (Mary Magdalene giving birth to Jesus’s son) could be painted on the walls of a church? Do you think that the ecclesiastics who commissioned the work to the artist would not have had anything to say? I do not think so,” observes Cuoghi. “Just think of the many paintings that Caravaggio was forced to do all over because they did not meet the standards required or what happened with the Last Supper by Veronese, destined to the refectory of the Dominican convent of Saints John and Paul in Venice, where the artist had placed all kind of people, dwarves, acrobats, and animals, as if it were a spectacle at the palace. The painting was refused and the artist tried by the Inquisition.”

A closer examination of the painting on the walls of the church of Tempio, then, reveals something quite different.

“This is what is called a Dormitio Virginis, or the transit of the Virgin, the final episode of Mary’s life as told by some apocryphal accounts but depicted in many works of art until the late fifteenth century, especially in the churches dedicated to her,” according to Cuoghi. “This scene depicts the Virgin dying while standing next to her son Jesus, who receives her soul in the form of a baby in diapers. In other versions, Jesus is already in heaven, and brings with him the soul of the Virgin Mary. Beautiful examples of the Dormitio can be seen in Rome in the apse mosaics by Pietro Cavallini, in Santa Maria in Trastevere, and in those by Jacopo Torriti in Santa Maria Maggiore, both dating from the late thirteenth century, the same period of the paintings at Tempio Ormelle.”

Not surprisingly, on the walls of the same church, dedicated to Our Lady as many of those built by the Templars, the life of Mary is depicted in fresco after fresco. And the cycle ends with the Dormitio, or the death and ascension into heaven of the Virgin.

Modernity of Magdalene

And what about the Giotto’s frescoes that so surprised Dario Fo? Iannaccone has an answer: Leafing through the extensive bibliography of texts written by scholars who have studied the work of this painter, from Toesca and Salvini until Frugoni, Pisani, Wolf, Fornari, one can easily verify that none of them went even close to these “modern” interpretations—precisely because they are modern readings, unhistorical, with no method, which totally ignore the sources. Dario Fo collected the jokes of his son Jacopo, a comedian, who clung, I do not know with how much conviction, to the inventions of Dan Brown. Before the release of The Da Vinci Code he never spoke about this.

But why today is there so much discussion about Magdalene? What’s so special about this woman to attract the attention of fans of mysteries?

“Magdalene has been presented as a free woman, aware of her charm, who follows Jesus by her own choice,” concludes Iannaccone.

She is a complete female figure, closer to modern sensibilities than, for example, Mary the mother of Jesus or any other women who followed him. She was called “apostle to the apostles” because she was very close to Jesus and because she received, according to the Gospels, the announcement of his Resurrection. Saint Gregory the Great wrote in a sermon that he had converted to holiness after a lifetime of sin. This (historically uncertain) proposal was successful. Two or three figures of women mentioned in the Gospels were merged into a coherent character, the perfect penitent who, however, had experienced everything in life, including free sexuality.

Like the fabled Yeti or Abominable Snowman of the Himalaya Mountains, and the Sasquatch/Bigfoot of North America, Australia’s Yowie (or Yahoo, among many other names) is a supposed hairy man-beast that leaves strange tracks and wonderment wherever it ambles. Equated with an entity from Aboriginal mythology, also called Dulagarl (or Doolagahl, “great hairy man”), it was regarded as a magical being from the time of creation—what Aborigines call the Dreamtime. Interestingly, however, “[M]any early Europeans claimed to have seen the Yowie, many years before they came to learn about it from the aborigines” (Gilroy 1976, 9). It remains, according to cryptozoologist Loren Coleman (2006), “one of the world’s greatest zoological or anthropological mysteries.”

I first went in search of the creature in 2000 guided by skeptic Peter Rodgers. We ventured into the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, which—according to Yowie popularizer Rex Gilroy (1995, 212)—“continues to be a hotbed of Yowie man-beast activities—a vast region of hundreds of square miles containing inaccessible forest regions seldom if ever visited by Europeans.” We drove into the Katoomba township bushland and took the world’s steepest incline railway (originally built as a coal-mine transport in 1878) down into Jamison Valley rainforest where Gilroy himself once reported an encounter (1976, 10). We next drove to Jenolan Caves—which Gilroy (1995, 219) claims the Aborigines believed to be Yowie lairs—and bushwalked (hiked) through the surrounding mountainous terrain in a vain search for the elusive creature (Nickell 2001, 16–17).

In 2015, before and after the annual Australian Skeptics National Convention in Brisbane (of which I was honored to be a headliner) held October 16–18, I was able to resume my quest for the Yowie (and began several other investigations). I am indebted to Ross Balch for his tireless help in Brisbane and rural Queensland to the north, and to Kevin Davies and Nick Ware for their dedicated assistance in Canberra and the New South Wales countryside. I photographed a Yowie with a rather wooden personality, did research at an Aboriginal institute, and kept an eye out for any exotic creature in the wild. Here is some of what I found.

Figure 1. Yowie statue in Yowie Park at Kilcoy, Queensland, Australia (Author's photo).

Will the Real Yowie . . .

My study began when Ross Balch drove Myles Power and me through scattered Yowie territory to Yowie Park at Kilcoy. There, with parrots flitting about, we took photographs of the cracked wooden sculpture of the fabled man-beast (Figure 1). As I did so I quipped, “It doesn’t get more real than this!” I meant that, of course, to apply to skeptics’ sightings: Yowies seem not to appear to skeptics—even those looking for them, although it is obligatory for those who report encounters to insist they were previously skeptical.

But what about the Aboriginal elder who insisted, regarding the Dulagarl, “He only appears to Aboriginal people” (Mumbulla 1997)? Do the numerous non-Aboriginal sightings contradict him? Or is it possible he is talking about a quite different being—not the Yowie/Yahoo who today apes (so to speak) Bigfoot, but rather his people’s supernatural entity who could induce sleep and fly through the air to kidnap lone women from the bush, yet who—according to some tribal/regional traditions—contrastingly carried clubs, used fire, and ate men. Other creatures of Aboriginal lore included the Quinkins who, variously shaped, were generally quite small; however, the giant Quinkin, Turramulli, towered over tall trees, had three taloned fingers on each hand, and as many clawed toes on each foot (Healy and Cropper 1994, 116, 118; 2006, 6–12). None of these entities sounds like a Bigfoot type.

Indeed, just as Bigfoot was originally a “wild man of the woods” adapted from European tales and retrofitted onto Native American supernatural beings synthesized for the purpose (Nickell 2011; Loxton and Prothero 2013, 30–36), the Yowie/Yahoo is similarly derivative. Australian examples (from “A Catalogue of Cases” 2006) show that the earliest reports—the first in 1789 being acknowledged as “obviously a hoax,” and continuing well after the beginning of the twentieth century—were sightings of a “WILD MAN or monstrous GIANT,” a “Hairy Man,” “in appearance half man, half baboon,” “wild man of the bush,” “like a blackfellow [Aborigine] only considerably larger,” “hairy men,” “an old man . . . covered with a thick coat of hair,” “the hairy man of the wood,” and so on.

As an example, in 1871 a “little girl” reported an encounter that was part of a “wild man” tradition in the area. She described an old man having a bent back, a covering of hair, tremendously long fingernails, and being about the height of her grandfather. He seemed to wish to avoid the girl (“A Catalogue” 2006, 207).

The term Yowie appears to have been used little if at all during this period, but the appellation “yourie” or “yowrie” appears by perhaps the 1920s, maybe after the Yowrie River or the nearby crossroads community of Yowrie, named by 1885. There was a Yowie Bay, but it was originally named Ewey Bay after the offspring of ewes called “eweys” (Healy and Cropper 2006, 13–143, 25), so the term Yowie may not be aboriginal at all (“A Catalogue” 2006, 217; Healy and Cropper 2006, 14, 25).

Yahoos

Moreover, if we consider the earlier, parallel term “Yahoo,” we must at once recall that it was used—indeed invented1—by English satirist Jonathan Swift in his Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 343–351). It describes his race of hairy, goat-bearded, manlike animals. Swift’s Yahoos are brutes but, satirically, have human depravities.

By 1856 comes a report of a man-beast described alternately as a “wild man of the woods” or a “yahoo.” A case of uncertain date in the 1860s involved a twelve-foot-tall Yahoo that had webbed feet and belched fire. In the same decade a Miss Derrincourt encountered “something in the shape of a very tall man, seemingly covered with a coat of hair . . . what the people here call a Yahoo or some such name.” Still another case of that period involved an encounter with a “hideous yahoo” near an abandoned village (“A Catalogue” 2006, 204–206).

Graham Joyner (1994) conducted an in-depth study of the issue, which he reported in Canberra Historical Journal. He found that Aborigines probably adopted the term Yahoo from settlers, rather than the other way around.

‘Littlefoot’

In addition to the “hairy giant” tradition, another type of Yowie is represented by the Aborigines’ Junjudees (among other terms). These are small, hairy, magical creatures comparable to European fairies, elves, and leprechauns. Still, they seem as real as any if we believe the stories of teenagers who encountered them in 1978–1979 on Towers Hill, near Charters Towers, Queensland. One teen was attacked but claimed to have fought off the three-foot-tall creature with a rock (Healy and Cropper 2006, 120–121). Among many other reports were multiple sightings of similar creatures in 1994 in the vicinity of Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland (Pinkney 2003, 31–32).

Some Aborigines emphasize the Junjudees’ supernatural powers, telling colorful tales about their exploits. For instance, they are guardian beings of certain places, are mischievous, and are attracted to honey. They are also a sort of bogeyman, used to keep children from wandering off, according to Australian Folklore (Ryan 2002, 137–138).

Yowie hunters, somewhat embarrassed by the little hairy folk, rationalize that they may be very young Yowies—no matter what Aborigines say about their “indigenous fairies” (as one researcher calls them [Povah 2006]).

What Manner of Beast?

Yowies are described in a widely diverse manner—beginning with height, which, based on 263 cases (“A Catalogue” 2006), ranges from about two to thirteen feet. The earliest-known record of an Aboriginal sighting came in July 1871 when a “gorilla”-like creature was encountered, but we must keep in mind that due to their long isolation on the Australian island–continent, the Aborigines had no knowledge of primates other than man. It was the early settlers and journalists who began to describe man-beasts with terms such as “huge monkey or baboon,” “upright gorilla,” and so on—from 1849 to the present.

In the early 1870s, in New South Wales, prospectors saw what they thought were “hairy men creeping around their tents,” but a Sydney Mail correspondent concluded, “They were probably the large badgers or wombats which abound there” (“A Catalogue” 2006, 207). Wombats, marsupials that somewhat resemble (according to American Heritage Dictionary 1970) “small bears,” may well be responsible for a number of other Yowie reports.

The kangaroo and its cousins the wallaby and the wallaroo are also good suspects. When, in 1954, three Queensland youths reported an encounter with a six-foot-tall creature covered with hair, possessing a long tail, and having an “apron” draped from its waist, the latter detail was an obvious clue pointing to a marsupial pouch. Someone suggested that the boys had been scared by “a cranky old wallaroo” (“A Catalogue” 2006, 224). Again, other cases may be explained by such related marsupials.

In addition to animals, there are numerous other possibilities: hoaxes, including those of a diminutive man who wore a hairy suit with bicycle-reflector eyes (Healy and Cropper 2006, 168–169); claims made by persons with fantasy-prone personalities and by ubiquitous attention seekers; real wild men, like a bearded, naked, mentally disturbed man mistaken for a Yowie (“A Catalogue” 2006, 262); and many other possibilities, including simple hallucinations and apparitional experiences. For example, “waking dreams” that occur between wakefulness and sleep (Nickell 2012, 353–354) may explain some cases of persons waking to see a Yowie looking at them (see Healy and Cropper 2006, 105, 170–171, 223). Again, like sightings of ghosts—typically seen when the percipient is tired, performing routine work, daydreaming, or the like—a Yowie’s image may well up from the subconscious and be superimposed on the visual scene (Nickell 2012, 345).

‘Bigfoot’

The American Sasquatch—after 1958 usually called Bigfoot (Nickell 2011, 68)—no doubt had an influence on Yowie sightings. That is especially so after 1967 when Roger Patterson’s famous hoax film greatly publicized that elusive manimal (Nickell 2011, 68–72).

Patterson’s “Bigsuit” (a modified gorilla costume) had pendulous breasts, one of several details found in Australian cases occurring (or being reported) only post-Patterson (at least as found in “A Catalogue” 2006). In addition to breasts, these motifs include Bigfoot’s legendary foul odor; large, clawless, human-like footprints; and possibly other features (cf. Bord and Bord 2006, 215–310).

The Yowie is becoming increasingly standardized in its appearance. It is sometimes said that it resembles “depictions of the American Bigfoot” or that “America’s Bigfoot would be an identical type” (“A Catalogue” 2006, 239, 271; cf. Nickell 2011, 225–229; 2013).

Even so, people I spoke with generally dismissed the Yowie. In 2000, for example, staffers at the information center at Echo Point in the Blue Mountains (Nickell 2001, 17) insisted the Yowie was only a mythical creature pursued by a few fringe enthusiasts, and this seems to remain the majority view. Several people laughed at my query, and a young bookstore employee in Canberra told me that, although having been born and raised in the Blue Mountains, she had never seen a Yowie or had reason to take the possibility seriously. Still, the wooden statue at Kilcoy stares vacantly on, a little monument to belief.

Acknowledgments

In addition to those mentioned in the text, I am grateful to the staff at AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Studies), Canberra, and CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga. I again want to thank John and Mary Frantz for their generous financial assistance, which makes many of my investigations possible.

Note

1. The invention of the word is credited to Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, 1726, by the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary (1971).

References

• American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 1970. New York: Houghton-Mifflin Co.
• Bord, Janet, and Colin Bord. 2006. Bigfoot Casebook Updated. N.p.: Pine Winds Press.
• “A Catalogue of Cases 1789 to 2006.” 2006. Appendix A of Healy and Cropper 2006, 203–295.
• Coleman, Loren. 2006. Introduction to Healy and Cropper 2006, vii–viii.
• Gilroy, Rex. 1976. Psychic Australian, August, 8–25.———. 1995. Mysterious Australia. Mapleton, QL, Australia: Nexus Publishing.
• Healy, Tony, and Paul Cropper. 1994. Out of the Shadows: Mystery Animals of Australia. Sydney: Ironbark.
• ———. 2006. The Yowie: In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot. San Antonio, TX: Anomalist Books.Joyner, Graham. 1994. Cited in Healy and Cropper 2006, 12–13.
• Loxton, Daniel, and Donald R. Prothero. 2013. Abominable Science! New York: Columbia University Press.
• Mumbulla, Percy. 1997. Quoted in Healy and Cropper 2006, 12.
• Nickell, Joe. 2001. Mysterious Australia. Skeptical Inquirer 25:2 (March/April), 15–18.
• ———. 2011. Tracking the Man-Beasts: Sasquatch, Vampires, Zombies, and More. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• ———. 2012. The Science of Ghosts. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• ———. 2013. Bigfoot lookalikes. Skeptical Inquirer 37(5) (September/October): 12–15.
• Oxford English Dictionary. 1971. Compact Edition, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Pinkney, John. 2003. Great Australian Mysteries. Rowville, Victoria, Australia: The Five Mile Press.
• Povah, Frank. 2006. Quoted in Healy and Cropper 2006, 123.
• Ryan, J.S. 2002. The necessary other, or “when one needs a monster”: The return of the Australian Yowie, Australian Folklore 17: 130–142.
• Swift, Jonathan. 1726. Reprinted as Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1876.

Is biological race a mere myth or a troublesome fact better left unexplored? 
Some might suggest that, properly conceived, race is neither fable nor farce 
but rather a potential windfall for both science and society.

Some would see any notion of “race” recede unceremoniously into the dustbin of history, taking its ignominious place alongside the likes of phlogiston theory, Ptolemaic geocentricism, or perhaps even the Iron Curtain or Spanish Inquisition. But race endures, in one form or another, despite its obnoxious—though apparently captivating—dossier.

In 1942, anthropologist Ashley Montagu declared biological race “man’s most dangerous myth,” and, since then, most scientists have consistently agreed (Montagu 1942). Nevertheless, to most Americans in particular, heritable race seems as obvious as the colors of their neighbors’ skins and the textures of their hair. So too have a determined minority of researchers always found cause to dissent from the professional consensus.

Here, I recount the latest popular skirmish over the science of race and attempt to reveal a victor, if there be one. Is biological race indeed a mere myth, as the academic majority has asked us to concede for more than seven decades? Is it instead a scandalously inconvenient truth—something we all know exists but, for whatever reasons, prefer not to discuss in polite company? Or is it possible that a far less familiar rendition of biological race could prove not only viable but both scientifically and socially valuable as well?

RACE REVIVED

“The productive questions pertain to how races came to be and the extent to which racial variation has significant consequences with respect to function in the modern world.”
     —Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele, 2004

I have no reason to believe that Nicholas Wade, longtime science editor and journalist, is a racist, if “racist” is to mean believing in the inherent superiority of one human race over any other. In fact, he expressly condemns the idea. But in the more limited and hopefully sober context of the science of race, Wade is a veritable maverick. Indeed, his conclusions that biological human races (or subspecies, for these purposes) do exist, and conform generally to ancestral continental regions, appear remarkably more consistent with those of the general public.

In his most recent and certainly controversial book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, Wade immediately acknowledges that the vast majority of both anthropologists and geneticists deny the existence of biological race (Wade 2014). Indeed, “race is a recent human invention,” according to the American Anthropological Association (2008), and a mere “social construct,” per the American Sociological Association (2003). First to decode the human genome, Craig Venter was also quick to announce during his White House visit in 2000 that “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”

But academics especially are resistant to biological race, or the idea that “human evolution is recent, copious, and regional,” Wade contends, because they fear for their careers in left-leaning political atmospheres and because they tend to be “obsessed with intelligence” and paralyzed by the “unlikely” possibility that genetics might one day demonstrate the intellectual superiority of one major race over others.

According to Wade, “social scientists often write as if they believe that culture explains everything and race [indeed, biology] explains nothing, and that all cultures are of equal value.” But “the emerging truth,” he insists, “is more complicated.” Although the author sees individuals as fundamentally similar, “their societies differ greatly in their structure, institutions, and their achievements.” Indeed, “contrary to the central belief of multiculturalists, Western culture has achieved far more” than others “because Europeans, probably for reasons of both evolution and history, have been able to create open and innovative societies, starkly different from the default human arrangements of tribalism or autocracy.”

Wade admits that much of his argument is speculative and has yet to be confirmed by hard, genetic evidence. Nevertheless, he argues, “even a small shift in [genetically based] social behavior can generate a very different kind of society,” perhaps one where trust and cooperation can extend beyond kin or the tribe—thus facilitating trade, for example, or one emphasizing punishment for nonconformity—thus advancing rule-orientation and isolationism, for instance. “It is reasonable to assume,” the author writes, “that if traits like skin color have evolved in a population, the same may be true of its social behavior.”

But what profound environmental conditions could possibly have selected for more progressive behavioral adaptations in some but not all populations? As the climate warmed following the Pleistocene Ice Age, Wade reminds that the agricultural revolution erupted around 10,000 years ago among settlements in the Near East and China. Increased food production led to population explosions, which in turn spurred social stratification, wealth disparities, and more frequent warfare. “Human social behavior,” Wade says, “had to adapt to a succession of makeovers as settled tribes developed into chiefdoms, chiefdoms into archaic states, and states into empires.”

Meanwhile, other societies transformed far less dramatically. “For lack of good soils, favorable climate, navigable rivers, and population pressures,” Wade observes, “Africa south of the Sahara remained largely tribal throughout the historical period, as did Australia, Polynesia, and the circumpolar regions.”

Citing economist Gregory Clark (2007), Wade then postulates that, during the period between 1200 and 1800 ce—twenty-four generations and “plenty of time for a significant change in social behavior if the pressure of natural selection were sufficiently intense”—the English in particular evolved a greater tendency toward “bourgeoisification” and at least four traits—nonviolence, literacy, thrift, and patience—thus enabling them to escape the so-called “Malthusian trap,” in which agrarian societies never quite learn to produce more than their expanding numbers can consume, and, finally, to lead the world into the Industrial Revolution.

In other words, according to this author, modern industrialized societies have emerged only as a result of two evolved sets of behaviors—initially, those that favor broader trust and contribute to the breakdown of tribalism and, subsequently, those that favor discipline and delayed gratification and lead to increased productivity and wealth. On the other hand, says Wade, sub-Saharan Africans, for example, though well-adapted to their unique environmental circumstances, generally never evolved traits necessary to move beyond tribalism. Only an evolutionary explanation for this disparity, he concludes, can reveal, for instance, why foreign aid to non-modern societies frequently fails and why Western institutions, including democracy and free markets, cannot be readily transferred to (or forced upon) yet pre-industrial cultures.

So how many races have evolved in Wade’s estimation? Three major races—Caucasian, East Asian, and African—resulted from an early migration out of Africa some 50,000 years ago, followed by a division between European and Asian populations shortly thereafter. Quoting statistical geneticist Neil Risch, however, Wade adds Pacific Islanders and Native Americans to the list because “population genetic studies have recapitulated the classical definition of races based on continental ancestry” (Risch et al. 2002).

To those who would object that there can be no biological race when so many thousands of people fail to fit neatly into any discrete racial category, Wade responds, “to say there are no precise boundaries between races is like saying there are no square circles.” Races, he adds, are merely “way stations” on the evolutionary road toward speciation. Different variations of a species can arise where different populations face different selective challenges, and humans have no special exemption from this process. However, the forces of differentiation can reverse course when, as now, races intermingle due to increased migration, travel, and intermarriage.

RACE REJECTED

“It is only tradition and shortsightedness that leads us to think there are multiple distinct oceans.”
     —Guy P. Harrison, 2010

If we inherit from our parents traits typically associated with race, including skin, hair, and eye color, why do most scientists insist that race is more social construct than biological reality? Are they suffering from an acute case of political correctness, as Wade suggests, or perhaps a misplaced paternalistic desire to deceive the irresponsible and shortsighted masses for the greater good of humanity? More ignoble things have happened, of course, even within scientific communities. But according to geneticist Daniel J. Fairbanks, the denial of biological race is all about the evidence.

In his new book, Everyone Is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race, Fairbanks points out that, although large-scale analyses of human DNA have recently unleashed a deluge of detailed genetic information, such analyses have so far failed to reveal discrete genetic boundaries along traditional lines of racial classification (Fairbanks 2015). “What they do reveal,” he argues, “are complex and fascinating ancestral backgrounds that mirror known historical immigration, both ancient and modern.”

In 1972, Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin analyzed seventeen different genes among seven groups classified by geographic origin. He famously discovered that subjects within racial groups varied more among themselves than their overall group varied from other groups and concluded that there exists virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance to racial classifications (Lewontin 1972). But Lewontin’s word on the subject was by no means the last. Later characterizing his conclusion as “Lewontin’s Fallacy,” for example, Cambridge geneticist A.W.F. Edwards reminded us how easy it is to predict race simply by inspecting people’s genes (Edwards 2003).

So who was right? Both of them were, according to geneticist Lynn Jorde and anthropologist Stephen Wooding. Summarizing several large-scale studies on the topic in 2004, they confirmed Lewontin’s finding that about 85–90 percent of all human genetic variation exists within continental groups, while only 10–15 percent exists between them (Jorde and Wooding 2004). Even so, as Edwards had insisted, they were also able to assign all native European, East Asian, and sub-Saharan African subjects to their continent of origin using DNA alone. In the end, however, Jorde and Wooding showed that geographically intermediate populations—South Indians, for example—did not fit neatly into commonly conceived racial categories. “Ancestry,” they concluded, was “a more subtle and complex description” of one’s genetic makeup than “race.”

Fairbanks concurs. Humans have been highly mobile for thousands of years, he notes. As a result, our biological variation “is complex, overlapping, and more continuous than discrete.” When one analyzes DNA from a geographically broad and truly representative sample, the author surmises, “the notion of discrete racial boundaries disappears.”

Nor are the genetic signatures of typically conceived racial traits always consistent between populations native to different geographic regions. Consider skin color, for example. We know, of course, that the first Homo sapiens inherited dark skin previously evolved in Africa to protect against sun exposure and folate degradation, which negatively affects fetal development. Even today, the ancestral variant of the MC1R gene, conferring high skin pigmentation, is carried uniformly among native Africans.

But around 30,000 years ago, Fairbanks notes, long after our species had first ventured out of Africa into the Caucasus region, a new variant appeared. KITLG evolved in this population prior to the European-Asian split to reduce pigmentation and facilitate vitamin D absorption in regions of diminished sunlight. Some 15,000 years later, however, another variant, SLC24A5, evolved by selective sweep as one group migrated westward into Europe. Extremely rare in other native populations, nearly 100 percent of modern native Europeans carry this variant. On the other hand, as their assorted skin tones demonstrate, African Americans and Caribbean Americans carry two copies of an ancestral variant, two copies of the SLC24A5 variant, or one of each. Asians, by contrast, developed their own pigment-reducing variants—of the OCA2 gene, for example—via convergent evolution, whereby similar phenotypic traits result independently among different populations due to similar environmental pressures.

So how can biology support the traditional, or “folk,” notion of race when the genetic signatures of that notion’s most relied upon trait—that is, skin color—are so diverse among populations sharing the same or a similar degree of skin pigmentation? Fairbanks judges the idea utterly bankrupt “in light of the obvious fact that actual variation for skin color in humans does not fall into discrete classes” but rather “ranges from intense to little pigmentation in continuously varying gradations” (Fairbanks 2015).

To Wade, Fairbanks offers the following reply: “Traditional racial classifications constitute an oversimplified way to represent the distribution of genetic variation among the people of the world. Mutations have been creating new DNA variants throughout human history, and the notion that a small proportion of them define human races fails to recognize the complex nature of their distribution” (Fairbanks 2015).

A SEVERE RESPONSE

“I use the term scientific racism to refer to scientists who continue to believe that race is a biological reality.”
     —Robert Wald Sussman, 2014

Since neither author disputes the absence of completely discrete racial categories, one could argue that part of the battle is really one over mere semantics, if not politics. Regardless, critical aspects of Wade’s analysis were quickly and sharply criticized by several well-respected researchers.

The former president of the American Anthropological Association and co-drafter of its statement on race, Alan Goodman, for example, argues that Wade’s “speculations follow from misunderstandings about most everything, including the idea of race, evolution and gene action, culture and institutions, and most fundamentally, the scientific process” (Goodman 2014). Indeed, he compares Wade’s book to the most maligned texts on race ever published, including Madison Grant’s 1916 The Passing of the Great Race, Arthur Jenson’s 1969 paper proposing racial intelligence differences, and Herrnstein and Murray’s 1994 The Bell Curve.

But Wade’s “biggest error,” according to Goodman, “is his inability to separate the data on human variation from race.” He mistakenly assumes, in other words, “that all he sees is due to genes” and that culture means little to nothing. A “mix of mysticism and sociobiology,” he continues, Wade’s simplistic view of human culture ignores the archaeological and historical fact that cultures are “open systems” that constantly change and interact. And although biological human variation can sometimes fall into geographic patterns, Goodman emphasizes, our centuries-long attempt to force all such variation into racial categories has failed miserably.

Characterizing Wade’s analysis similarly as a “spectacular failure of logic,” population geneticist Jennifer Raff takes special issue with the author’s attempt to cluster human genetic variation into five or, really, any given number of races (Raff 2014). To do so, Wade relied in part on a 2002 study featuring a program called Structure, which is used to group people across the globe based on genetic similarities (Rosenberg et al. 2002). And, indeed, when Rosenberg et al. asked Structure to bunch genetic data into five major groups, it produced clusters conforming to the continents.

But, as Raff observes, the program was capable of dividing the data into any number of clusters, up to twenty in this case, depending on the researchers’ pre-specified criteria. When asked for six groups, for example, Structure provided an additional “major” cluster, the Kalash of northwestern Pakistan—which Wade arbitrarily, according to Raff, rejected as a racial category. In the end, she concludes, Wade seems to prefer the number five “simply because it matches his pre-conceived notions of what race should be.”

Interestingly, when Rosenberg et al. subsequently expanded their dataset to include additional genetic markers for the same population samples, Structure simply rejected the Kalesh and decided instead that one of Wade’s five human races, the Native Americans, should be split into two clusters (Rosenberg et al. 2005). In any event, Rosenberg et al. expressly warned in their second paper that Structure’s results “should not be taken as evidence of [their] support of any particular concept of ‘biological race.’”

Structure was able to generate discrete clusters from a very limited quantity of genetic variation, adds population geneticist Jeremy Yoder, because its results reflect what his colleagues refer to as isolation-by-distance, or the fact that populations separated by sufficient geographic expanses will display genetic distinctions even if intimately connected through migration and interbreeding (Yoder 2014). In reality, however, human genetic variation is clinal, or gradual in transition between such populations. In simpler terms, people living closer together tend to be more closely related than those living farther apart.

In his review of Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance, biological anthropologist Greg Laden admits that human races might have existed in the past and could emerge at some point in the future (Laden 2014). He also concedes that “genes undoubtedly do underlie human behavior in countless ways.” Nevertheless, he argues, Wade’s “fashionable” hypothesis proposing the genetic underpinnings of racially-based behaviors remains groundless. “There is simply not an accepted list of alleles,” Laden writes, “that account for behavioral variation.”

Chimpanzees, by contrast, can be divided into genetically-based subspecies (or races). Their genetic diversity has proven much greater than ours, and they demonstrate considerable cultural variation as well. Even so, Laden points out, scientists have so far been unable to sort cultural variation among chimps according to their subspecies. So if biologically-based races cannot explain cultural differences among chimpanzees, despite their superior genetic diversity as a species, why would anyone presume the opposite of humans?

None of which is to imply that every review of Wade has been entirely negative. Conservative journalist Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple), for example, praises the author lavishly as a “courageous man . . . who dares raise his head above the intellectual parapet” (Daniels 2014). While judging Wade’s arguments mostly unconvincing, he nevertheless defends his right to publish them: “That the concept of race has been used to justify the most hideous of crimes should no more inhibit us from examining it dispassionately . . . than the fact that economic egalitarianism has been used to justify crimes just as hideous. . . .”

Similarly, political scientist and coauthor of The Bell Curve Charles Murray warned readers of the social science “orthodoxy’s” then-impending attempt to “not just refute” Wade’s analysis “but to discredit it utterly—to make people embarrassed to be seen purchasing it in public” (Murray 2014). “It is unhelpful,” Murray predicts, “for social scientists and the media to continue to proclaim that ‘race is a social construct’” when “the problem facing us down the road is the increasing rate at which the technical literature reports new links between specific genes and specific traits.” Although “we don’t yet know what the genetically significant racial differences will turn out to be,” Murray contends, “we have to expect that they will be many.”

Perhaps; perhaps not. But race is clearly problematic from a biological perspective—at least as Wade and many before him have imagined it. Humans do not sort neatly into separate genetic categories or into a handful of continentally-based groups. Nor have we discovered sufficient evidence to suggest that human behaviors match to known patterns of genetic diversity. Nonetheless, because no “is” ever implies an “ought,” the cultural past should never define, let alone restrain, the scientific present.

CHARACTERIZING 
BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY

“Instead of wasting our time ‘refuting’ straw-man positions dredged from a distant past or from fiction, we should deal with the strongest contemporary attempts to rehabilitate race that are scientifically respectable and genetically informed.”
     —Neven Sesardic, 2010

To this somewhat belated point, I have avoided the task of defining “biological race,” in large measure because no single definition has achieved widespread acceptance. In any event, the preeminent evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr once described “geographic race” generally as “an aggregate of phenotypically similar populations of a species inhabiting a geographic subdivision of the range of that species and differing taxonomically from other populations of that species” (Mayr 2002). A “human race,” he added, “consists of the descendants of a once-isolated geographic population primarily adapted for the environmental conditions of their original home country.”

Sounds much like Wade, so far. But unlike Wade, Mayr firmly rejects any typological, essentialist, or folk approach to human race denying profuse variability and mistaking non-biological attributes—especially those implicating personality and behavior—for racial traits. Accepting culture’s profound sway, Mayr warned that it is “generally unwise to assume that every apparent difference . . . has a biological cause.” Nonetheless, he concluded, recognizing human races “is only recognizing a biological fact”: “Geographic groups of humans, what biologists call races, tend to differ from each other in mean differences and sometimes even in specific single genes. But when it comes to the capacities that are required for the optimal functioning of our society, I am sure that any racial group can be matched by that of some individual in another racial group. This is what population analysis reveals.”

So how might one rescue biological race from the present-day miasma of popular imparsimony and professional denialism, perhaps even to the advancement of science and benefit of society? Evolutionary biologist and professor of science philosophy Massimo Pigliucci thinks he has an answer.

More than a decade ago, he and colleague Jonathan Kaplan proposed that “the best way of making sense of systematic variation within the human species is likely to rely on the ecotypic conception of biological races” (Pigliucci and Kaplan 2003). Ecotypes, they specify, are “functional-ecological entities” genetically adapted to certain environments and distinguished from one another based on “many or a very few genetic differences.” Consistent with clinal variation, ecotypes are not always phylogenetically distinct, and gene flow between them is common. Thus, a single population might consist of many overlapping ecotypes.

All of which 1is far more descriptive of human evolution than even the otherwise agreeable notion of “ancestry,” for example. For Pigliucci and Kaplan, the question of human biological race turns not on whether there exists significant between-population variation overall, as Lewontin, for example, suggested, but rather on “whether there is [any] variation in genes associated with significant adaptive differences between populations.” As such, if we accept an ecotypic description of race, “much of the evidence used to suggest that there are no biologically significant human races is, in fact, irrelevant.”

On the other hand, as Pigliucci observed more recently, the ecotypic model implies the failure of folk race as well. First, “the same folk ‘race’ may have evolved independently several times,” as explained above in the context of skin color, “and be characterized by different genetic makeups” (Pigliucci 2013). Second, ecotypes are “only superficially different from each other because they are usually selected for only a relatively small number of traits that are advantageous in certain environments.” In other words, the popular notion of the “black race,” for example, centers on a scientifically incoherent unit—one “defined by a mishmash of [a] small and superficial set of biological traits … and a convoluted cultural history” (Pigliucci 2014).

So, while the essentialist and folk concepts of human race can claim “no support in biology,” Pigliucci concludes, scientists “should not fall into the trap of claiming that there is no systematic variation within human populations of interest to biology.” Consider, for a moment, the context of competitive sports. While the common notion that blacks are better runners than whites is demonstrably false, some evidence does suggest that certain West Africans have a genetic edge as sprinters, and that certain East and North Africans possess an innate advantage as long-distance runners (Harrison 2010). As the ecotypic perspective predicts, the most meaningful biological human races are likely far smaller and more numerous than their baseless essentialist and folk counterparts (Pigliucci and Kaplan 2003).

So, given the concept’s exceptionally sordid history, why not abandon every notion of human race, including the ecotypic version? Indeed, we might be wise to avoid the term race altogether, as Pigliucci and Kaplan acknowledge. But if a pattern of genetic variation is scientifically coherent and meaningful, it will likely prove valuable as well. Further study of ecotypes “could yield insights into our recent evolution,” the authors urge, “and perhaps shed increased light onto the history of migrations and gene flow.” By contrast, both the failure to replace the folk concept of race and the continued denial of meaningful patterns of human genetic variation have “hampered research into these areas, a situation from which neither biology nor social policy surely benefit.”

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• Sarich, V., and F. Miele. 2004. Race: The Reality of Human Differences. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Sesardic, N. 2010. Race: A social deconstruction of a biological concept. Biological Philosophy 25: 143–62.
• Sussman, R.W. 2014. The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Wade, N. 2014. A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. NY: Penguin Press.
• Yoder, J. 2014. How A Troublesome Inheritance Gets Human Genetics Wrong. Available online at http://www.molecularecologist.com/2014/05/troublesome-inheritance/; accessed November 16, 2015.

Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) isn’t the first place you’d expect to find a skeptics conference. Deep in the heart of Chelsea, attendees of the eighth annual Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS, pronounced “nexus”) had to brave their way past infamously anti-GMO Chipotle; an organic, grass-fed burger joint; and an empty building boasting $5 psychic readings before arriving at the hub of rationality. But as Twitter user Marc McDonald noted, maybe it wasn’t the skeptics who needed to be nervous.

Fashion faux pas aside, FIT and NECSS have made strangely great partners over the past four years, when the conference cosponsored by the New York City Skeptics and the New England Skeptical Society, home to the Novella clan of Skeptics Guide to the Universe fame, outgrew its former digs. Between 400 and 500 people converge here every spring, with travelers from thirty states and ten different countries arriving for the weekend fittingly starting on Friday the 13th of May 2016.

Photo by Bruce Press.

Not all those people come to NECSS for the same reasons. Cathy Smith, a hospital pharmacist from Michigan, couldn’t resist the Friday schedule. “I saw a whole day of science-based medicine, and it was like, ‘Oh, I gotta do that,’” she said. Smith convinced her husband to make NECSS their one conference trip this year, but the lure of the Statue of Liberty, the American Museum of Natural History, and The Book of Mormon probably minimized the arm-twisting.

The Science-Based Medicine blog began in 2008, with a mission statement of scientifically examining medical and health topics of interest to the public. Regular contributors include Skeptical Inquirer writers Steven Novella and Harriet Hall, as well as recent additions such as dentist Grant Ritchey and pediatrician Clay Jones. The newcomers had perhaps the most engaging talks on this Friday the 13th, discussing the howlingly outrageous topic of “cranial osteopathy” (the dental manipulation of skeletal bones!) and the maddeningly angering idea of baby chiropractic.

Many of the alternative medical practices addressed were lesser-known quackeries, including “functional medicine,” as presented by Harriet Hall, and “magnetic protocol therapy,” used to treat the fictional ailment of chronic Lyme disease, described by Saul Hymes. Throughout the seven talks it became apparent that all these procedures share at least a couple traits in common—they claim to cure everything, the very everything you’ll be convinced you have after a battery of unnecessary and misinterpreted tests.

Former naturopath and progressive metal drummer Nicolas Tessier appreciated the day of science-based medicine, but it was really the conference’s entertainment options that brought him down to NECSS from Alberta, Canada. The chance to see George Hrab perform the best of his skeptically themed songs, as arranged for string quartet in May 12’s The Broad Street Score, was too big of a draw. “You never get to see a show with no microphones,” Tessier said. “It was George’s voice and them on the stage.”

Photo by Bruce Press.

Hrab took the stage again the following night, along with the Skeptics Guide Rogues and Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” for a repeat performance of the previous year’s Skeptical Extravaganza of Special Significance. “Repeat” probably isn’t the right word, though, considering almost the entire show is improvised. Hrab and crew debuted the new game of “Non Sequitur,” which eventually led newest SGU cast member Cara Santa Maria to yell, “I’m the galactic mayor of Poopy Town!” The Extravaganza also brought back the fan-favorite “Freeze Frame,” with a static scene from Back to the Future portrayed with Nye in the Doc Brown role.

The presence of that Science Guy was a big incentive for recent University of Maryland graduate Ben Nichols to take the six-hour trip to NECSS in 90 degree heat. “Yesterday morning I had a nineteen-page final, and an hour after that I got on a bus,” Nichols said. As a newly minted aerospace engineer, Nichols appreciates the “science” part of the NECSS acronym and was especially excited to hear from Jennifer Lopez of the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, which manages the laboratory on the International Space Station. But the real reason Nichols came to his third NECSS is more personal.

“The thing that really keeps me coming back is all the people that I’ve met,” Nichols said.

There was no better place to meet speakers and fellow conference attendees than the Saturday night social at Smithfield Hall, where half the bar was reserved solely for NECSS. A special thank you was given to the Secular Coalition of America, whose generosity bought everyone their first drink. NECSS emcee and magician Jamy Ian Swiss took the microphone and jazzed the crowd before pointing out that not everyone arrives at skepticism from a good place or applies their skepticism equally. In other words, “Fuck Bill Maher!”

One name that wasn’t spoken often by speakers or attendees was that of Richard Dawkins. The executive committee of NECSS created a firestorm when they withdrew their speaking invitation to the evolutionary biologist and science communicator after Dawkins retweeted a video that many found offensive, only to reinvite him shortly before Dawkins suffered a stroke. Swiss was candid about the situation while introducing a panel on Sunday called “Free Speech, Social Justice, and Political Correctness” that featured neuroscientist Heather Berlin, Will Creeley of the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education, linguist John McWhorter, Julia Galef of the Rationally Speaking podcast, and SciBabe Yvette d’Entremont.

Moderator Brian Wecht started by trying to define the contentious terms, to which Berlin said she considers social justice to simply be “equality among all people,” a stark contrast to the pejorative manner in which the term is sometimes used. D’Entremont preferred to shy away from labels, saying the word feminist conjures up meanings that aren’t always intended. “Maybe I just want equal pay” she said. Creeley said rather than shut them down, it’s important to talk to the person you disagree with the most, and McWhorter continued that the person probably isn’t crazy but had a logical thought process to arrive at their stance, however flawed that logic might be.

As diplomatic as Swiss was introducing what looked ahead of time to be the most controversial segment of NECSS 2016, he was much less so following the surprise pot-stirrer of the weekend, letting out a forceful “Oops!” as science journalist John Horgan left the stage to a smattering of confused applause. Horgan, perhaps best known for his 1996 book The End of Science, used his spot as the final speaker of the weekend to ask skeptics to stop picking on “soft targets,” such as homeopathy and Bigfoot, and to focus their attention on bigger issues such as untestable theories of physics and the nature of war.

Swiss deftly thought on his feet and countered Horgan’s old argument. It’s not that skeptics aren’t interested in those things or don’t occasionally think and talk about them, but we are uniquely qualified to deal with all that other nonsense, Swiss said. In fact, it’s why the skeptics’ movement was founded—to tackle the issues people think important but that mainstream science considers too ridiculous to bother with. Homeopathy may be a “soft target,” but it’s something that takes millions of dollars from people while giving nothing back. Maybe when homeopathy belief comes down to under 10 percent of the population, we can give it a rest, Swiss said. Until then, there’s still work to be done.

And NECSS will return in 2017 to help continue that work.

This is a story about the wonder of science and the power of connection.

In 2014, a seven-year-old girl living in São Paulo, Brazil was assigned to write about the planet Saturn. Her father, Nix, is a friend of mine and also a part of the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) project, which is why I know about this story. Isabela selected Carolyn Porco’s research into the planet Saturn. Isabela sat down and drew a picture and asked her dad if he could send it to Carolyn. As anyone with small children knows, at seven most children think their parents know everything. It is usually in the early teens when that bubble is busted, and Nix wanted to preserve that perception as long as possible. Nix had attended The Amazing Meeting in July 2014, and while there he met a woman who was retired from JPL. Nix asked her to get Carolyn’s contact info in the hopes that he would be able to avoid the “contact” email that oftentimes gets lost, and get the drawing directly to Carolyn.

The writing is in Portuguese, but here is the text in English:

Dear Carolyn Porco,

My name is Isabela and I always dreamed of being like you, did you know?

So when I grow up, I want to be a space scientist.

Have you seen the movie Gravity?
It's about space too.

Kiss, Isabela.

From: “Isa”

To Isabela’s shock (and her father’s too), Carolyn responded. She thanked her for the drawing and said that she had seen Gravity and hoped to read about Isabela in the news someday about a space discovery she will make, and she encouraged her to go into science as it is a wonderful and rewarding career.

Isabela was thrilled, and Nix wrote to me explaining how that made his heart beam to see that Carolyn took time to make his daughter so happy.

I know how Isabela feels. When I was in junior high, I walked to the local high school that was a couple miles away and met my favorite author, Beverly Clearly. I didn’t have enough money to purchase a book, but I did get her autograph on a paper. I was just stunned that a nobody like me could actually do that. I was also amazed that a famous person like her would even consider spending any time in my hometown of Salinas, California. (She lives in Carmel, California, which is only thirty minutes way, but I didn’t know that at the time.)

When I was an older adult attending college in 2001, we were asked to read Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries by Ken Feder for an archaeology class. I loved the book and quickly finished it. We were able to write a chapter summation for extra credit, and I went through and wrote a report on each chapter. I had a question about Feder’s use of BC and AD and asked my professor. His answer was that maybe I should write to Feder and ask. That was crazy talk. I’d only had email for a couple years, and approaching a famous author and asking him a question and expecting a response was just not something I did. I mean, who did I think I was? I did finally look up his email using this fairly new thing called The Internet and wrote him an email. And as you can guess, he responded and answered my question. I glowed all that day and still have the email. I could never have responded again and actually continued a conversation, as he might not respond back and then I would have felt horrible that I had “bothered him.” But even as an adult, who should know better, I still felt so special to get a response, just like Isabela.

So fast forward to May 15, 2016. I’m about to attend SkeptiCal (held in Oakland, California) sponsored by the Bay Area Skeptics and the Sacramento Area Skeptics, when I realize that Carolyn Porco will be one of the speakers. I looked up the correct spelling of “hello” in Portuguese and wrote out a sign hoping to talk Carolyn into a quick photo. I was there early and found her early as well. I explained what I wanted to do and she happily agreed. She told me that she remembered that letter from Isabela and still has it.

I took the photo and posted it on Facebook and tagged Nix. Here is the photo and his response:

“The look on her face says it all! Thank you very, very, very much!”

Is there a moral to this story? Take a chance and reach out to your heroes might be the takeaway. Keep in mind that they might not respond, but don’t take that personally. They could very well not have received the email; some organizations have many layers to get through, and the email can easily get misplaced. They might not have the time to respond, or mean to and just forget. Or it just might be one of hundreds of emails they received that day and yours does not get priority. But I think the bigger take away is that even the very small action of something personal like a thank you can mean so much to a little girl in Brazil and a big girl in Salinas. Our celebrities might not understand why we look up to them. They might not get that we go all giddy when we get that personal response. But we do, and it is something awesome that I still feel all the time.

As I said, I just attended SkeptiCal, and the room was full of people I admire. People who even know my name without looking at my nametag, people who give me hugs and thank me for being there. Some of them are the speakers but most are not. They were sitting in the audience just like me. They were running things behind the scenes and working the tables and the check-in area. It is a lot of work to run these conferences. Our heroes are sometimes invisible: doing the graphics, making nametags, arranging the speakers. A deep-felt thank you from me to the SkeptiCal organizers and to all those awesome people in our community that get things done, for no reward other than just because it needs to be done.

One more update. As many of you know, I run a project that seeks to improve the Wikipedia pages of our skeptical spokespeople. We call it the “We Got Your Wiki Back” project. On February 7, 2013, I rewrote the stub page for Ken Feder. It was an embarrassment to our community, and now it is a work of art (even if I do say so myself). I wrote to Ken after I was finished and told him what I had done and reminded him of my email to him back in 2001 and how impressed I was that he actually took the time to answer me. Not only did he remember my email, but he said he thought about it and changed a few things in his classroom lectures based on my question. I think he said he now uses BKF and AKF when he gives dates. “Before Ken Feder” and “After Ken Feder.” He is a funny guy.

My full report and photos of SkeptiCal are forthcoming, so stay tuned.

In April, Houston, Texas, was struck by a massive flood that claimed seven lives. On his blog “The End of the American Dream,” Michael Snyder noted that this was the “8th historic flood in this country since the end of September.” While other writers pointed to global warming as a likely explanation for such extreme weather, Mr. Snyder saw a biblical sign:

So why is this happening?

Some believe that “climate change” is responsible for these bizarre weather patterns, others are pointing the finger at El Nino, and yet others believe that this is a sign that we are approaching “the last days” described in the Bible.

What everybody should be able to agree on is that what we are witnessing is highly, highly unusual.

As it turns out, Snyder is the author of several books about the coming rapture, so it is possible his interpretation was influenced by financial self-interest. But he is not the only one seeing religious meaning in the weather. During the Houston floods of May 2015, some conservative observers claimed that the city was being punished for rampant “witchcraft and sodomy,” pointing out that Houston had a “sodomite mayor.”

In the happier world of falling in love, people often see the hand of fate at work. A Jewish single person is sometimes said to be searching for their “bashert.” The common meaning of this Yiddish word is soul mate, but its original meaning is “destiny or fate.” On the other hand, “star-crossed” lovers—the most famous of all being Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—are astrologically doomed from the start. As deserving of happiness as the lovers may be, things are bound to go badly.

In an interesting recent case of seeing destiny in love, Ashley Goodwin and Kyle Rebman, the Fort Wayne, Indiana, couple in this news story (see video below), met when Ashley was in the hospital and Kyle, a technician, took care of her. Eventually they fell in love and got engaged. Meanwhile, years earlier Kyle had been diagnosed with kidney disease, and by coincidence it was discovered that Ashley was a match. Without hesitation, she donated a kidney to her future husband, and both made a speedy recovery. They will be married this summer.

According to the report, Ashley believes that it was all meant to be. “What are the chances that he would just so happen to be working when I was sick and that’s how our relationship bloomed, and I was the one to donate the kidney to him?”

The Science of Fate

You might guess there wouldn’t be much psychological research on belief in fate, destiny, or purpose, but you’d be wrong. There is a surprisingly deep vein of studies on these topics in both children and adults. A recent poll found that 38 percent of Americans believed natural disasters were signs from God, but more abstract notions of fate, destiny, or purpose are also very common.¹ Humans appear to see fate in many places, and science is here to tell us why. Or, at least, how.

Jean Piaget was the first developmental psychologist to propose that children see physical objects as designed for a purpose, and subsequent research has borne him out. Psychologist Deborah Keleman of Boston University has argued that young children exhibit “promiscuous teleology” (a phrase only an academic could love), meaning they find goals and purposes in almost everything.² For example, although older children and adults understand that only living things have goals, young children are less exclusive. A seven- or eight-year-old might say that a mountain is shaped the way it is so that animals have something to climb on. Keleman suggests that children start out with this promiscuous teleology as a kind of cognitive building block and that, as they age, they learn to narrow the identification of goals and purposes to biological things.

In addition to finding purpose in the design of objects, children also see meaning in events. In a 2015 study, Konika Banerjee and Paul Bloom of Yale University tested children’s preferences for natural and purposeful explanations for life events. They selected three groups of participants: young children five-to-seven years old, older children eight-to-ten years old, and adults. The participants were given a series of simple life events, such as “Briana’s cat ran away.” Figure 1 shows an example case.³

Figure 1. Typical life event and explanations from the Banerjee and Bloom (2015).

For each of these life events, children were given the choice between only one explanation—a natural one (e.g., “because she left the door open”)—and two explanations—one natural and the other teleological (e.g., “because she left the door open and to teach her responsibility”). Banerjee and Bloom found that the majority of younger children chose explanations that included an underlying intention, but the preference for intentional explanations decreased with age.

Figure 2. Results from Banerjee and Bloom (2015, Experiment 1). The descending black bars show that preference for purpose or goal-related explanations decreases with age. [The white bars were a control condition designed to determine whether young children simply had a preference for two explanations over one. The results suggest that it was the teleological nature of the answer that appealed to the children, not merely the number of explanations.]

In a study like this, you might imagine the children who chose the purposeful explanations all came from religious households, but Banerjee and Bloom found exposure to religion did not matter. There was no difference in the number of teleological explanations given by children from religious and nonreligious families. The same was true of the adults. Although adults had much lower levels of intentional explanations, their responses were not related to their level of religiosity.

Banerjee and Bloom concluded that children have a broad tendency to animate the world with purposeful explanations. They suggested that this tendency diminishes over time because (1) children judge a broader set of events to be more “significant” than adults, who eventually come to find many of these things trivial; and (2) with age, people become aware of the social norms that label these explanations superstitious.

Interestingly, Banerjee and Bloom take no stance on whether identifying a design or purpose necessarily requires thinking about a designer or a god. They point out that it is possible to infer the purpose of a functional object (e.g., a door knob) without thinking about a designer.

The situations used by Banerjee and Bloom were designed to appeal to children, and as a result they were not very good tests of adult beliefs about intention or fate. But several other studies show that, when events are considered unusual or personally significant, adults also see meaning, fate, or intention. Furthermore, although religious people are more likely to see destiny in important events (i.e., the hand of God), many atheists also see intention in the world.

For example, in a study of students who were either European Canadians or East Asian Canadians, Ara Norenzayan and Albert Lee asked participants to read scenarios of very unlikely events and then describe how much each event could be attributed to fate or destiny. Norenzayan and Lee examined two demographic factors, both of which affected people’s judgments of fate: religion (Christian vs. nonreligious) and culture (European Canadian vs. Asian Canadian). As expected, Christians were more likely than nonreligious participants to point to fate as a cause, but Asian Canadians—regardless of whether they were religious or nonreligious—also were more likely to cite destiny as a cause.⁴

The study by Norenzayan and Lee revealed two distinct forms people’s notions of fate can take. The first is the traditional one: God, a deity who acts as an agent controlling events on Earth. The second was simply a belief that—without reference to an external agent—the universe is interconnected and aimed at certain outcomes. In fact, the cultural difference in the interconnectedness form of destiny—most often seen in Asian Canadians—was a more powerful factor than religion.

Norenzayan and Lee also showed how the interconnected universe concept could be induced by suggestion. In a separate experiment, European Canadians who were primed by reading a short essay about the “butterfly effect,” later gave more fatalistic explanations for unlikely events.

In a 2014 study, Banerjee and Bloom made things even more real by asking participants to think about an actual important life event they had experienced. In this case, 53 percent of God-believing participants and 24 percent of nonbelievers attributed their personal event to fate. Even among people who were described as “ardent atheists,” 21 percent saw some form of fate involved in their lives.⁵

In a similar investigation, Bethany Heywood and Jesse Bering found that—consistent with previous research—theists were more likely to explain difficult life experiences by reference to some external intention (e.g., “God’s plan”). But fully half of the thirty-four atheists in the study also gave at least one answer that implied a purpose to the events (e.g., “it was meant to be”).⁶

So, children exhibit “promiscuous teleology,” and even ardent atheists often see destiny in the things that happen. Despite the fact that—if I have not already made this point, perhaps now is the time to say—ideas of fate are supernatural. Paranormal. Our scientific understanding of the origins of the universe, of species, and of human behavior do not make room for fate or destiny. These concepts would require some entity or designer standing apart from the natural world and yet controlling it. Not a scientific idea, but lots of people still believe—from a very young age.

Why?

This is where things get murky. Several researchers in this field hoped to get to the bottom of why this fatalistic view is so common, but their answers have been all rather speculative. Deborah Keleman’s observations of promiscuous teleology have led her to conclude that young children are “intuitive theists” who see design in the natural world—a characteristic that poses a challenge for science education, which should be aimed at creating a natural understanding of the world, free of designers and gods.⁷ But Keleman is careful not to speculate on whether children’s tendency to see purpose in the world is due to nature or nurture.

In contrast, in his (very interesting and entertaining) book The Belief Instinct, evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering argues that our tendency to see design is an “adaptive illusion” that stems from the uniquely human ability to create a “theory of mind,” hypotheses about other people’s thoughts and motives. So Bering comes down on the side of nature, suggesting that our intuitive theism is a built-in product of natural selection.

Teasing apart nature and nurture is always a difficult task. Even the five-year-old children in Banerjee’s and Bloom’s studies have been in the world for five years, listening to adults yammering on, day in and day out. There must be some socializing effect of all that talk.

Figure 3. An illustration from the Meltzoff and Moore (1977) study appearing to show that newborn infants were capable of imitating the facial expressions of adults.

A recent cautionary tale shows just how careful we must be when making assumptions about nature vs. nurture. For years, psychology professors have been teaching their students about a classic 1977 study by Andrew Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore, which purported to show that newborn babies were capable of imitation, a strong indication of an inherited ability.⁸

Meltzoff’s and Moore’s research always seemed a bit too good to be true, and now a new, more rigorous study in Current Biology shows the original results were probably wrong. A report on the new study in Research Digest puts it this way:

Based on their results, the researchers said that the idea of “innate imitation modules” and other such concepts founded on the ideal of neonatal imitation “should be modified or abandoned altogether.”

Human behavior is always a mixture of nature and nurture, and determining the proportions of each is rarely easy. So when it comes to our tendency to see purpose, destiny, or fate in the universe, we must be cautious in our interpretations. The study of European and Asian Canadians, for example, suggests that culture affects the type of fate that people see in the world—God versus an interconnected universe—but as yet, we have less information about how culture and socialization affect our basic tendency to see fate. At very least we can say that, for whatever reason, many young children see a design in the objects and events in the world—a design that goes far beyond science. Whether, as Bering suggests, our intuitive theism is a side effect of a built-in human adaptive advantage or is learned through socialization, this tendency to see the hand of fate represents an important obstacle to achieving a clearer, more scientific understanding of the world.

Column Update: Brief Conversations Can Change Minds

In my June 2015 column “Has Science a Problem?,” I reported on Science magazine’s retraction of a paper by Michael LaCour and Donald Green that claimed to show a brief conversation with a canvasser could produce lasting changes in attitudes towards gay marriage. LaCour was discovered to have fabricated data and made false statements about the funding of the study.

Now, in an ironic turn of events, the very researchers who caught the problems in the LaCour and Green paper have shown that, when done properly in a legitimate study, the questionable findings of the LaCour and Green paper turn out to be true. Or something very close to them. David Broockman and Josh Kalla, the researchers who discovered the problems with the previous study, went on to do their own study of canvassing in the context of rights for transgender people. The results showed that canvassing had a lasting effect on respondents, and—unlike the purported findings of the earlier study, it did not matter whether the canvasser was transgender or cisgender. Jesse Singal at New York Magazine’s “Science of Us” blog has the full story.

Incidentally, Broockman and Kalla’s follow-up study was published in Science, the same journal that retracted the LaCour and Green paper. Perhaps anticipating a rigorous review of their work, Boockman and Kalla made extra efforts to be open about the plan of their research and, upon publication, made the raw data available for other researchers to examine and reanalyze. The author’s describe how they prepared the study for publication in an interview at Retraction Watch.

Notes

1. Cited in Banerjee, Konika, and Paul Bloom. “‘Everything Happens for a Reason’: Children’s Beliefs About Purpose in Life Events.” Child Development 86, no. 2 (2015): 503-518.
2. Kelemen, Deborah. “Function, goals and intention: Children’s teleological reasoning about objects.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3, no. 12 (1999): 461-468.
3. Banerjee, Konika, and Paul Bloom. “‘Everything Happens for a Reason’: Children’s Beliefs About Purpose in Life Events.” Child Development 86, no. 2 (2015): 503-518.
4. Norenzayan, Ara, and Albert Lee. “It was meant to happen: explaining cultural variations in fate attributions.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98, no. 5 (2010): 702.
5. Banerjee, Konika, and Paul Bloom. “Why did this happen to me? Religious believers’ and non-believers’ teleological reasoning about life events.” Cognition 133, no. 1 (2014): 277-303. (Study 2)
6. Heywood, Bethany T., and Jesse M. Bering. “Meant to be”: how religious beliefs and cultural religiosity affect the implicit bias to think teleologically.” Religion, Brain & Behavior 4, no. 3 (2014): 183-201.
7. Kelemen, Deborah. “Are children ‘intuitive theists’? Reasoning about purpose and design in nature.” Psychological Science 15, no. 5 (2004): 295-301.
8. Meltzoff, Andrew N., and M. Keith Moore. “Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates.” Science 198, no. 4312 (1977): 75-78.

Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology. By Leah Remini. Ballantine Books, New York, 2015. ISBN 978-1-101-88696-0. 234 pp. Hardcover, $27.

The actress Leah Remini, known for playing outspoken, ballsy characters—most famously in the long-running sitcom The King of Queens—always seemed miscast as a Scientologist. Not that actors have to be like the characters they play, but it seemed a pity.

As it turns out, like many other Scientologists her age, Remini was brought into the Church by a parent, in her case at seven when her divorced mother’s new boyfriend was a member. The boyfriend didn’t last, but Remini liked that he listened seriously to her and her sister. When they began taking introductory courses and doing drills, she found this approach permeated the Church. She liked feeling equal to grown-ups, and she believed that Scientology was a way of helping people and doing good for the world, which Remini says is common to many members. When her mother proposed moving to Florida to become part of the Church full time, Remini and her sister went willingly.

In her new book, Troublemaker, written with Rebecca Paley, Remini interweaves stories of her personal and professional life with her history in and growing doubts about Scientology. Paley deserves a lot of credit for helping keep Remini’s voice. Remini also seems content to discuss her own flaws and mistakes.

The tranche of books about Scien­tology that began in 2011 with Janet Reitman’s Inside Scientology (reviewed in SI, January/February 2012) and continued in 2013 with Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear (now a movie), Jenna Miscavige-Hill’s Beyond Belief, and John Sweeney’s The Church of Fear 
(see my review of all three in the May/June 2013 Skeptical Inquirer, online at http://www.csicop.org/si/show/clear_and_fear_scientology_under_review) all had new revelations to make about the worst abuses the Church of Scientology has heaped on its most devoted members. These books revealed the existence of the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF), Scientology’s equivalent to prison, the autocratic behavior of Church leader David Miscavige, and the lengths to which the Church will go to keep its best-known adherent, Tom Cruise, happy. Remini’s book does not contain new information on this level. Instead, it paints an intimate picture of the lives of dedicated Scientologists, those who are close adherents but not deep insiders. Remini was not, after all, a celebrity for half her time in Scientology.

As a result, many practices are outlined in a new kind of detail. L. Ron Hubbard’s “tone scale” has been described from Hubbard’s writing by, for example, Reitman and Wright. Remini talks about what it was like learning to use it by being required to stop complete strangers on Hollywood Boulevard, ask them questions, and assess the tone of their answers. She similarly discusses what it feels like to go through auditing and security-checking, and how the Church’s manipulation works when you’re the person on the receiving end. You are, she writes, encouraged to report the misdeeds of others—but doing so is likely to open you to extra auditing as well. She also writes about the extensive financial burden Scientology places on ordinary families, “helping” them raise their credit limits to donate the maximum to the Church.

In one section, Remini recalls her interview with John Sweeney for his 2007 BBC documentary, Scientology and Me. “The guy is crazy,” Church spokesman Tommy Davis warned her. Sweeney then startled her by asking, “Does David Miscavige hit people?” As she tells it now, she was deeply upset by the way Davis and his fellow Church PR person, Mike Rinder, treated Sweeney, pushing him to the limit until he exploded (an incident the Church recorded and placed on YouTube). She regretted that he apologized for that explosion. “The BBC,” she writes, “had no idea of what this man had to endure.” By 2010, Rinder had left the Church and was telling Sweeney the truth on his follow-up documentary, The Secrets of Scientology.

“I don’t go on the Internet,” she told Sweeney in 2007 in an interview that didn’t air (but that both recount in their books). In late 2012, inspired by an email sent by former Scientology member Debbie Cook outlining the abuse that actually happened within the Church, she finally did.

Remini left in 2013. In contemporaneous interviews, the reason seemed to boil down to her years-long inability to get an answer to a single question: What had happened to Church leader David Miscavige’s wife, Shelly, who had vanished from public view? Troublemaker makes it plain that this particular question was one Remini kept picking at. But she had other doubts, raised by what she saw of Cruise’s behavior and the Church’s slavish efforts to keep him happy (which included forcing Remini to write myriad reports and apologies for tiny infractions at his wedding).

As far as Remini could see, the latter violated L. Ron Hubbard’s own policies, and besides, what kind of role model Scientologist was a three-time divorcee? Meanwhile, her mother had reached the high-level status of OT VIII and class VI auditor and found “she couldn’t move objects with her mind or cure cancer by the force of her will. She was still just herself.” In a situation where many families choose to stay with Scientology when one member leaves, Remini was lucky: most of her family left with her, as you can see in her reality series, It’s All Relative.

Now, two years later, Remini sums it up: “Despite its claims to the contrary, the practice doesn’t help you better the world or even yourself; it only helps you be a better Scientologist.”

Whether because of my natural temperament, my training as a mathematician, or a late midlife reckoning and reconsideration, I look on the whole biographical endeavor, my own included, as a dubious one. Even George Washington’s signature line about cutting down the cherry tree, “I cannot tell a lie,” is probably flapdoodle. More likely he said, “No comment” or “I don’t recall the incident” or maybe “The tree was rotten anyway.” I tend to scoff when reading that a new biography has revealed that the great So-And-So always did X because 
(s)he secretly believed Y. I’m not particularly ornery, but I often react to such statements about the alleged actions or beliefs of well-known people with a silent That’s B.S. A more likely reaction if someone makes the claim directly to me is a polite, but pointed “How do you know that?” or even “How could anyone know that?” or, in the case of autobiographies, “How could anyone remember that?”

Point of Inquiry has also covered John Allen Paulos' book.
Click here to listen.

Memories are often inaccurate or fabricated, perspectives biased, “laws” and assumptions unfounded, contingencies unpredictable; even the very notion of a self is suspect. (But like the nutritionist who secretly enjoys candy and donuts, I’ve always enjoyed reading [auto]biographies, ranging from James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. to Mary Karr’s Liars’ Club.)

Given my skepticism of the biographical enterprise, it might seem I’ve taken a bold and/or foolhardy step to write a quasi-memoir of my own, but quasi- here means “not so much.”

True to my doubts, what I’ve written is a meta-memoir, even an anti-memoir. Employing ideas from mathematics (quite broadly and non-technically construed) as well as analytic philosophy and related realms, but requiring no special background in mathematics, I’ve tried to convey some of the concerns and questions most of us don’t, but arguably should, have when reading biographies and memoirs or even when just thinking about our own lives. The “arguably” is the burden of this book; imparting a certain modicum of mathematical understanding and biographical numeracy is its presumptuous goal.

One of the first questions that comes to mind when considering a life is an abstract “What is its average length?” or perhaps a more visceral “How long have I got?” Quite relevant is evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s article “The Median Isn’t the Message,” in which he describes his cancer diagnosis and the associated median life span of eight months that it allowed. But the median, of course, is not the mean or simple average of patients’ life spans; it is the life span shorter than which half the patients survive and longer than which the other half do. Moreover, the statistical distribution of life spans is right-skewed, meaning many people live considerably longer than the median as did Gould (twenty years). Knowledge of statistics and distributions allayed his anxieties and, more generally, as I’ll try to show, mathematical knowledge can shed much-needed light on many other life situations and life stories.

Let me illustrate with a somewhat disguised statistical point. Whatever else a biography may be, it is usually considered to be a story, the story of a person’s life. And probably people’s most common response to a story is a tendency to suspend disbelief when reading, hearing, or viewing one in order not to spoil its enjoyment. “Let’s pretend. It’ll be fun.” This mindset is quite opposed to that prevailing in mathematics and science where people typically suspend belief in order not to jump to conclusions until they have compelling evidence. “Wait. Why should we believe that?” These two different approaches are not unrelated to different tolerances for false-positive and false-negative conclusions, which I’ll elaborate on later. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the latter show-me tentativeness is the approach I will adopt here. It’s in line with the bumper sticker that counsels: Don’t believe everything you think.

I’ve always liked the idea of rubbing together incongruous subjects, which seems to me almost a necessary condition for generating creative ideas. At times this habit of rubbing together has earned me a good number of eye rolls, sometimes even a bit of vituperation. People don’t always like it when notions or relations they hold dear have reflections in domains such as mathematics that they consider reductive or somehow inappropriate.

That’s too bad considering that mathematics is a most productive way of looking at the world. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked that he looked forward to the day when philosophy disappeared as a subject but all other subjects were approached philosophically. I have a related but weaker wish for mathematics. I certainly don’t wish for it to disappear as a subject, but I do wish that it, too, was more widely seen to be an adverb and that its insights and ideas could inform the approach to all other subjects, including biography. With this as a partial motivation, I have over the years written about the connections between mathematics and humor, journalism, the stock market, analytic philosophy, religion, and a number of other topics (but not fish and bicycles). Nonobvious but significant points of correspondence almost always arise if one searches for them.

Here I hope to show that the points of correspondence between mathematics and biography are, despite superficial appearances, quite profound. Carl Sagan, the astronomer, skeptic, and science writer, wrote that we—our DNA, our teeth, our blood—are starstuff, made out of the very same material as the stars. As naturally occurring entities in the universe, we are, in a sense, also “mathstuff”—changing and developing according to mathematically expressible relations, instantiating mathematical notions of all sorts, and illustrating mathematical principles from diverse fields. “Mathstuff,” I maintain, is a defensible neologism since patterns are, at least to mathematicians, nonmaterial stuff. It’s thus eminently reasonable to try to obtain an understanding of this mathstuff of which, it can be maintained, we and everything else are made. In particular, how do these mathematical patterns express themselves in our life stories?

Bias and Mindsets, 
Statistics and Biography

I had a number of professors at University of Wisconsin who, I was warned, were horrible; some were said to mumble, others were given to excessive abstraction, a few constantly digressed. Many just lectured. When I enrolled in their courses despite these warnings, I was often surprised. Turns out I usually liked abstract, mumbling digressers. And I much preferred hearing a lecture from someone knowledgeable than listening to fellow students getting together in study groups and giving their usually uninformed perspectives on the topic. Contrariwise, I was often disappointed by those “fun” professors whom most deemed wonderful. The same phenomenon holds for people about whom I’ve heard only bad (or good) assessments that I find to be baseless after meeting the people in question. I sometimes still get annoyed at my own trustingness.

This, of course, is not a particularly unique realization. Everyone has experienced variants of it. One doesn’t have to be too statistically savvy to know that comments and surveys that derive from only a dozen or so people are not very reliable. Neither is it arcane mathematical knowledge that self-selected samples are not very likely to be representative of the population at large. A small self-selected sample of people responding to a television “poll” about more stringent gun control, for example, may very well arouse a disproportionate number of passionate NRA members and significantly skew the results.

Another example of wayward statistics in academe: Like many universities, mine requires that students take a core survey course in mathematics if they’re not going on in the subject. Passing the course requires that a student’s grade be at least a C-. Suspecting that the number of C-’s would be much larger than the number of D+’s because of how crucial this small difference is, I decided to examine the number of C-’s and D+’s given in this course over the years for which I could find the records.

Sure enough, I found that approximately eight hundred C-’s and one hundred D+’s were awarded. Someone might point out that the number of D+’s should be lower than the number of C-’s simply as a result of the normal bell-shaped distribution with an average of C or so. This, however, cannot be the explanation, since the drop-off was so precipitous, eight times as many C-’s as D+’s. (The four hundred or so plain D’s and roughly seven hundred F’s given out during this period indicate that general grade inflation was not the issue.) The reason was probably that, at the crucial cutoff between C- and D+, the faculty were likely to give students a bit of a break. Assigning grades is not a cut-and-dried activity, and many professors seemed to have given students the benefit of a doubt in these close calls rather than being blindly bound to rigid grading that is inevitably somewhat arbitrary.

To vary the examples a bit, consider the museum guard who claimed that a dinosaur on exhibit was 70,000,009 years old. Asked how he knew that, he said that he had been told it was 70,000,000 years old when he’d been hired nine years before. The precision would be laughable, but shouldn’t we find it almost as laughable when someone claims to be relating someone else’s verbatim (precise) conversations as well as their dates, locations, and contexts?

Why are such elementary understandings and explanations seldom invoked in our reading of personal profiles or full-scale biographies? Biographers (and, of course, autobiographers) select themselves in part because they resonate in one way or another with the subject. They may interview many people about their subject, but even their choice of interviewees is likely to be influenced by their biases. So are the questions they ask, rephrasing them over and over if they don’t get the answer they want. Pick almost any potential biographical subject and ask ten people who know him or her what they think of the person, and the responses will certainly be quite varied. Picking only eyewitnesses to events in a subject’s life certainly doesn’t guarantee truth either. Recall the trial lawyer’s quip “The only thing worse than one eyewitness is two eyewitnesses.”

Here’s a simple thought experiment: consider just yourself as a subject and think of who in your background would write the most scathing biography of you, who would write the most sympathetic account (C- rather than D+ on the scale of a whole life), and who would write the most clueless one. Or, if it doesn’t hurt too much, imagine a biography of Stephen Hawking written by Kim Kardashian and one of her written by him. Or come up with your own incongruous pairs of reciprocal biographers. The difficulty of adopting the perspective of a biographical subject’s perspective is suggested by the story of two strangers walking on opposite sides of a river. One of them yells across, “How do I get to the other side of the river?” The second one answers, “You are on the other side of the river.”

Any story of adultery, to cite one last example, will read quite differently depending on which of four natural biographers write it: the injured spouse, the wandering spouse, the outside lover, or a “neutral” observer. It’s interesting to imagine Madame Bovary from Charles Bovary’s point of view. The fake 2007 newspaper headline in the Onion, a satirical magazine, makes the same point: “Majority of Parents Abuse Children, Children Report.” Despite these obvious concerns, most people assume biographies or magazine profiles or even informal spoken descriptions of a person are more or less accurate. You might have inferred that this annoys me.

Phrasing the issue in the jargon of mathematical logic, I note that “is a biography of X” is a so-called unary predicate, and it would be preferable if it were replaced by the binary predicate “is a biography of X written by Y.” Perhaps it’s even more prudent to consider ternary predicates: “is a biography of X written by Y at time Z.” An “autobiography of X,” by contrast, really is a unary predicate unless you happen to be a schizophrenic. Comedian Steven Wright’s quip that he was writing an unauthorized autobiography also comes to mind.

Ideally nasty biographies should give a rough measure of the ratio of research undertaken to secrets uncovered. Laudatory ones as well should provide a ratio of the time taken to the positive tidbits found. Autobiographies should be scrutinized for any traces of the Lake Wobegon effect, whereby the author and everyone closely associated with him or her is above average. The problem, of course, is that if one looks hard enough, one will likely find what one is looking for. We’re all subject to confirmation bias, the tendency to look largely for confirmation of our hunches and beliefs and rarely for disconfirmation, but perhaps few more so than biographers, who are often either in thrall to their subjects or else detest them.

Whether reading a life story or just listening to a neighbor, we should be aware that very many of our beliefs and attitudes are likely to be a consequence of probabilistic misunderstanding and statistical failings, bad sampling in particular. Most people, for example, become somewhat more reclusive when depressed or otherwise behaving “abnormally,” so these behaviors will be under-sampled and thus likely will play a smaller role in their biographies than they do in their lives. Likewise, successful people (as well as their biographers) will tend to see a strong connection between their personal qualities and their success even if they self-effacingly say how lucky they’ve been; conversely, less successful people will tend to see a weak connection. Neither viewpoint is statistically robust.

One other quite significant, albeit underappreciated, point about statistics in the presentation of biographies bears repeating. As I mentioned earlier, an important aspect of a story is that there is a tendency to suspend disbelief while seeing, reading, or hearing it so as to not spoil its enjoyment. “Let’s pretend there really is a monster like this.” Loosely paraphrased in statistical parlance, this means that one risks a so-called Type I error (a false-positive); that is, saying an important incident or phenomenon occurred that really did not. This is not the situation in statistical or scientific contexts where one typically suspends belief so as to not be fooled. “How do we know that?” In statistical parlance, one risks making a so-called Type II error (a false-negative); that is, saying that an important incident or phenomenon that really did occur did not.

Both biographers (storytellers generally) and statisticians (scientists generally) wish to avoid both sorts of errors, but biographers are a bit more careful about not ruling things out, scientists a bit more careful before admitting them. What exists for the two sorts, their ontology, is different; for storytellers it’s generally more baroque, for scientists more bare-bones. To parody this difference in mindset, we might say that out of five crises, storytellers predict seven of them, and scientists predict three of them—hyperbolic versus hypobolic, which should be a word.

Type I and Type II errors are part of a complex of notions surrounding Bayes’s theorem, an extremely seminal result in probability theory that tells us how to update our probabilities in the light of new evidence. For example, if a fair coin (heads-tails, H-T) and a two-headed coin (H-H) are on a table and we choose one of them, the probability we choose the fair coin is 1/2. But if after we’ve chosen a coin, we flip it three times and obtain three consecutive heads, Bayes’s theorem tells us the probability that we chose the fair coin shrinks to 1/9.

This is, of course, much harder to do with more nebulous stories and biographies, but do biographers make much of an attempt to indicate how they come to their initial evaluations of a subject or how they’ve changed their minds about him or her in the light of new documentary evidence? I doubt it. Certainly excusable, but why make so little use of possibly relevant mathematical and scientific tools?

One proto-Bayesian, the empiricist Scottish philosopher David Hume, underlined the importance of considering the probability of supporting evidence when he questioned the authority of religious hearsay: one shouldn’t trust the supposed evidence for a miracle, he argued, unless it would be even more miraculous if the report were untrue. In ancient times, biographies of saints and kings were replete with miracles. Contemporary biographies are devoid of miracles but still contain too many exploits and adventures that seem considerably less likely than their nonoccurrence. It’s the same impulse, but attenuated.

When I first saw the meme, my Facebook friends were already debunking it.

The graphic states that $1.3 billion divided by 300 million is $4.33 million. If you have a calculator at hand (there’s one called Google) or remember your scientific notation, this takes just seconds to disprove. Divide that record-setting Powerball jackpot among all Americans, and we’d each get just $4.33.

But at the time of this writing, this Facebook post had racked up 912,000 likes and over 1.3 million shares. It seems that many, many people didn’t do the math.

One group that doesn’t do the math nearly often enough: journalists. Take this reporter’s tale, told to Poynter.org, about an insurgence of urban rats:

“I interviewed an exterminator who told me these rats were huge, but mistakenly gave me their length in centimeters rather than millimeters. Being notoriously bad at math, I wrote it verbatim and none of our proofreaders caught it.

“It’s a wonder I didn’t start a riot with news of what would have been 12-foot rats running rampant across the city.”

Somehow, while mathematical errors are among the easiest types to debunk, they’re also terrifically easy to disseminate. Why does bad math spread so easily? And why don’t journalists stop to check their math more often?

Just imagine how big that cheese must be.
AlexK100 via Wikimedia Commons.

Innumerate—or Just Anxious?

The most obvious answer is “people are bad at math.” And there is some truth to this: 61 percent of U.S. residents have Level 2 numeracy or below, on a scale of 1–5, according to the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), a large-scale study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). That means a majority of Americans struggle with simple problems such as reading line graphs and thermometers.

The U.S. had one of the lowest numeracy levels of the twenty-two countries surveyed, but the others didn’t do too hot either: across the sample, 53 percent of respondents achieved Level 2 or below.

But this is only a partial explanation. There’s also the issue of how good people think they are at math. Our society seems to encourage people to proclaim “I can’t do math to save my life!”—a claim they wouldn’t dare make about reading. And not surprisingly, low math confidence goes hand-in-hand with high math anxiety.¹

Math anxiety affects women disproportionately,² partially through the psychological process known as stereotype threat. An oft-cited study found that the two sexes performed equally well on a math test—but when women were reminded of the stereotype that they’re worse at math, their scores fell considerably.³ It’s likely that this stereotype threat further pressures women to avoid math.

Worryingly, math anxiety is also pretty prevalent among journalists. A study of 148 editorial staffers at one newspaper found that the journalists’ math skills weren’t great—on average, they missed nearly a third of basic, junior-high level questions.⁴ But their math confidence was even worse, and was low even among the best performers on the test.

9 + 7 = 39

It’s not just journalists. Because of math anxiety, many of us shy away from even the simplest of math problems. And studies have consistently shown that high math-anxiety people perform worse on math tasks.⁵ This seems to be true even when you control for math ability.^6,7

A particularly interesting study found that highly math-anxious individuals performed badly on a test of “number sense,” which asked them to judge if equations were true or false. As the statements became increasingly implausible (such as 9 + 7 = 39), the math-anxious participants actually made more errors.⁸

This chimes well with my observations. As a volunteer tutor for a GED-prep program, I’ve noticed how rarely students stop to ask themselves whether a math answer makes sense. My husband, a university physics professor, has observed the same phenomenon. Now I have an inkling why.

Mathiness = Truthiness

Another reason why we don’t fact-check math: there’s a tendency to ascribe truthiness to a claim with numbers in it. In one experiment, Mérola and Hitt found that low-numeracy individuals were almost as persuaded by irrelevant data as they were by relevant data.⁹ For high-numeracy individuals, relevance was much more persuasive.

What’s more, for the high-numeracy individuals, it didn’t make any difference which political party was trying to persuade them. But for the low-numeracy participants, political party seemed to make all the difference: completely irrelevant data from their own party swayed them, while pertinent data from the opposite party did not.

In essence, the authors say, these participants were not so much persuaded by argument as “impressed by a barrage of figures.” We might then hypothesize that low-numeracy individuals are more likely to pass on bad-math memes—not just because they’re less likely to understand the math, but because they find the very presence of figures impressive and persuasive.

Those who juggle numbers with ease shouldn’t get too complacent, however. Kahan, Peters, Dawson, and Slovic found that the more numerate people are, the more polarized they are when evaluating a data-fueled political argument.¹⁰ The authors theorize that highly numerate people use their abilities “opportunistically.” These participants settled for the wrong answer—the one that seemed true at first blush—if that supported their political affiliation. But when their outlook was threatened, they switched on their more advanced math skills and discovered the correct answer.

Check One, Check Two

Finally, I think there’s some additional blame to lay at journalists’ feet. While the same anti-math mindset tends to afflict both readers and writers, and while we might aspire to a culture in which more social media users fact-check their posts, journalists have a professional responsibility to check the math in their stories.

Too often, that doesn’t happen. Take this contention by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, broadcast at 2:21 pm PST on January 12, 2012:

By 7:21 pm, the figures were rather different:

Does the federal government employ 4,443 people, or 4.44 million? Was the increase thirteen people or 13,000? Never mind, somehow it didn’t stand in the way of Matthews making his point. (Nor did he feel compelled to acknowledge the error—it’s a wonder what overdubbing and graphics can do.)¹¹

The avoidance of this fact-checking responsibility—whether it’s driven by carelessness, lack of time, or even debilitating math anxiety—represents a professional and ethical failure. As journalist Craig Silverman states, “We’re not a fancy retweeting service for companies and governments—our role is to verify information.” That even goes for the seemingly unassailable figures put out by respected non-profits. When it comes to checking numbers, no cow is sacred.

Watching Our Language

There is, however, reason to be hopeful. The rise of data journalism has revealed a class of news practitioners who are passionate about getting the numbers right and urge the end of the “I suck at math” excuse. Training organizations offer “math for journalists” classes, too.

It’s time to start spreading this message more widely. Math is doable. And it’s essential. We need it to understand everything from politics to finance, sports to health. So if you must claim to be “bad at math,” at the very least, say it under your breath. Children may be listening.

Notes

1. Ashcraft, M.H. 2002. Math anxiety: Personal, educational, and cognitive consequences. Current Directions in Psychological Science 11(5): 181–185. Available online at http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00196.
2. Ibid.
3. Spencer, S.J., C.M. Steele, and D.M. Quinn. 1999. Stereotype threat and women’s math performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 35(1): 4–28. Available online at http://doi.org/10.1006/jesp.1998.1373.
4. Maier, S.R. 2003. Numeracy in the newsroom: A case study of mathematical competence and confidence. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 80(4): 921–936.
5. Ho, H.-Z., D. Senturk, A.G. Lam, et al. 2000. The affective and cognitive dimensions of math anxiety: A cross-national study. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education 31(3): 362–379.
6. Ashcraft, as above.
7. Silk, K.J., and R.L. Parrott. 2014. Math anxiety and exposure to statistics in messages about genetically modified foods: Effects of numeracy, math self-efficacy, and form of presentation. Journal of Health Communication 19(7): 838–52. Available online at http://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2013.837549.
8. Faust, M.W., M.H. Ashcraft, and D.E. Fleck. 1996. Mathematics anxiety effects in simple and complex addition. Mathematical Cognition 2(1): 25–62.
9. Mérola, V., and M.P. Hitt. 2016. Numeracy and the persuasive effect of policy information and party cues. Public Opinion Quarterly 80(2): 554–562. Available online at http://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfv051.
10. Kahan, D.M., E. Peters, E.C. Dawson, et al. 2013. Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government. Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 307. Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2319992.
11. Credit due to NewsBusters for finding this error, and h/t to conquermaths for alerting me to it. Both clips verified using the Internet Archive.

I’m a people person. I know that is a cliché, but it is true. I’m a major fan of technology as well; social media is amazing. I’ve never been more connected to people before, and my friends are all over the world; it is a great time to be alive. Yet with all that said, I feel passionately about people meetingeach other face-to-face. Sitting down with them and sharing the beverage of your choice, working with them on a common project, brainstorming solutions, and giving them your undivided attention when they are trying to explain something that they know a lot about. In the skeptic world I think this interaction happens at conferences and meetings; I think of it as the first step toward activism.

The Monterey County Skeptics held their first SkeptiCamp in Seaside, California, on the first Saturday of 2015.

I attended the Skeptic’s Toolbox in 2002 and was hooked; it was thrilling to meet like-minded people and listen to lectures in person. The leader of the Toolbox, Ray Hyman, advised me to start my own local conference. At the time I lacked confidence in myself, and I honestly believed that I was the only skeptic living in Monterey County.In 2007, I received a message on the JREF forum from someone living in a nearby city. Steve Wheeler noticed that my forum profile listed my location as Salinas, California. We chatted and eventually started using Yahoo Groups to find other like-minded people. Then Meetup.com came along and our group of four grew to about eight members. Monterey County Skeptics (MCS) was now a “thing.”

We are a social group that is run completely through Meetup.com and Facebook. We do have a blog, but it has very few followers and rarely posts updates. We do not collect dues; our meetings usually involve eating and talking about world events, books, our cats, podcasts, and for some strange reason North Korea. There is nothing formal about us, and our bimonthly meetup hosts about twelve people. We are just a typical skeptic meetup.

At the same time that we were forming MCS, a member of the Denver skeptics, Reed Esau, came up with the idea that groups could throw a one-day, usually free, mini lecture event, called a SkeptiCamp, and the speakers are . . . drumroll . . . themselves. What a terrific idea. For some motivated skeptic groups this idea really took off. Esau was himself inspired by Daniel Loxton’s essay “Where Do We Go from Here?” and also by attending The Amazing Meeting in 2007.

Since the first SkeptiCamp held in Denver, Colorado, in 2007, they have happened all over the world. The first Camp held outside North America was in Scotland by the Edinburgh Skeptics in 2009. The first non-English SkeptiCamp was held in Madrid, Spain, in 2012. Camps develop their own unique style and try out new techniques. For example, the Australian skeptics have a cupcake contest at their event each year. The Atlanta skeptics in 2014 tested a new style of presentation where the slides for each presentation were on a timer and moved on their own, which kept the lecture on time and hopping. The Chicago skeptics raffle off a plush narwhal to raise funds. As more SkeptiCamps happen, the creativity and uniqueness amplifies. This October, Esau tells me, the hundredth SkeptiCamp will happen in Brisbane, Australia, an event I’m happy to say I will be attending.

Lately I’ve noticed a trend where SkeptiCamps are held the day before a larger conference. This encourages people to show up early and gives more attendees a chance to participate, making the whole conference experience last longer.

Monterey County Skeptics finally joined the rest of the skeptic world and had its first Camp on the first Saturday of 2015. This was a very important step for our group.

Because this was our first organized event, we thought we would aim for an attendance of thirty people, completely free, and host it in Seaside at the Peace Center that offered us the room for a low donation. Deborah Warken, Kathy McKenzie, and I exchanged a few emails and with very little effort we managed to pull it together. We did not want to publish a website for the event, so I suggested Lanyrd, which is a free conference website that gives people the ability to create conference events and track speakers, and it acts as a repository for all videos, blog posts, photos, and anything else associated with the event. We were even able to set up a “call for speakers” that we posted all over our local social media sites. We attracted Kyle Polich from the Data Skeptic Podcast who drove from Los Angeles (about a six-hour drive) and two other speakers, Jay Diamond (Reason 4 Reason) and Nitin Tomar from the San Jose area (an hour drive). All other speakers—Glenn Church, Kathy McKenzie, Mark Folsom, and me—were local to the area. Lanyrd made it super simple to manage our SkeptiCamp.

Kathy wrote up a short summary for the event and emailed it to all the local media; several posted it on their Calendar sections. One reporter called and wrote up an article that was released a few days before the event; another reporter attended lectures and wrote up an article that included photos. That article ran on the front page of the local section of the largest local newspaper. One mistake we made early on was not having an email address to give to the first reporter, so I fielded many questions from my personal email account. We learned quickly and opened up MCSkeptics@gmail.com, which allowed others to help with the emails. And boy did we get them. For a small group of skeptics, we received at least forty emails over a couple days. We had said we wanted people to RSVP to the event because we had limited seating, and that was really hard to manage. We thought we could hold only forty people, and we were counting fifty-two if everyone showed up. We didn’t want to have to supply lunch, so we asked people to bring their own. That brought in even more emails from people asking if there was a microwave or refrigerator at the location.

The day of the event arrived. Several of the members brought fruit and pastries. I purchased name-tags for the attendees and fumbled with my computer the day before and made professional-looking name tags for the eight speakers. Professional mentalist Mark Edward was our emcee throughout the day; in between each speaker he performed some feat of mentalism, showing us the tricks of the psychics. We had some video and audio problems, but mostly we managed. One thing I’m really proud of is that I ordered a large 16x20 poster with our logo for the podium. I think that was a really nice touch because there were a lot of photos and videos taken that day. We brought in magazines and books to distribute for free; one man read about us in the paper and brought his old Skeptic magazines to give away.

We collected donations for the building, and ran about forty-five minutes long. But we started out with forty to forty-five attendees and ended the six-hour day with thirty-five. I call that a win. We all had a great time; lots of people attended who had never heard of skepticism as anything other than a way of thinking. They didn’t know there was a community. We had emails after the event, and our next meetup had twenty-two people attend—a previously unheard of number. We bonded, met new people, showed the public that we exist, and found that there are a lot more skeptics than we realized.

I encourage everyone reading this who thinks they are alone in their area to be skeptical. If you aren’t comfortable trying to start with a SkeptiCamp, you might want to start with a Skeptics in the Pub event. Advertising is free on a lot of local media; Facebook and Twitter can help a lot also. Try to reach out to local news media; you are doing them a favor. They have deadlines to fulfill and a story about critical thinkers might just be what they are looking for. I remember listening to a recent podcast and the host was talking about how popular their skeptic events are now, but in the beginning it was just two people who hadn’t known each other at first sitting in a pub sharing a drink month after month. Eventually people started joining them and they grew into something amazing.

We need face-to-face interactions. Some of our people tell me that our meetups are where they can be themselves; they don’t have to guard their language, and no subject is taboo. Often they tell me that they are uncomfortable having these conversations at home and never have them at work. This is their chance to meet like-minded people with whom they can discuss all kinds of topics without looking over their shoulder wondering who might be listening.

At the end of our SkeptiCamp we were tired, but a happy tired, and we didn’t have to even discuss it. It was obvious that we would be doing this again the next year, the first Saturday of the year. We opened up a Lanyrd conference page for January 2, 2016, location to be determined. We are going to publicize the 2016 event better, find a larger location, and try to arrange for more food and much better recording. Please don’t overthink it; just reach out and try to make contact with one other local person. You might be sitting alone at a pub for an hour, but be persistent. I assure you, you are not the only skeptic in your community.