The famous conjuror, investigator, and author—and founding fellow of CSICOP—sat down with Skeptical Inquirer Editor Kendrick Frazier at CSICon 2016 Las Vegas for a live, ninety-minute onstage conversation. Here are excerpts.

Kendrick Frazier: It’s such a delight for me to be here with you. Our pasts have happily intersected a number of times over these four decades.

Before CSICOP was founded, you and Martin Gardner and Ray Hyman were trying to come up with some organized enterprise to deal with paranormal nonsense and flim-flam in society.

James Randi: Yes, the folks you mentioned were very instrumental in promoting the idea of getting a foundation ready to handle the so-called paranormal. I’d known Martin Gardner for many decades of course. I miss him more than most people who have passed on, I can tell you. Martin was an astonishing man.

Martin Gardner often spoke to me by telephone when I lived in New Jersey, and he lived in Croton on the Hudson. Even later when I moved off to Florida, I’d get calls from him every now and then.

He called me one day, we were chatting away, and there was a pause on the other end of the line when he said, “Randi, I have to tell you something.” I said, “Yes?” and I thought, “What can this be?” He told me, “I’m a deist.” A deist is someone who has a basic belief in a god of any shape or form, someone who has an interest in a superior power of some kind.

He said, “I have no evidence whatsoever to support my belief in a god. None.” He said, “You have all the evidence to the contrary. I’ve read it, I’ve read what you’ve said, I’ve heard what you’ve said, I’ve read books and books and books on it. They have all the reason on their side, the people who say there is no god.” I interrupted, I said, “Martin, I’ve never claimed there’s no god because I can’t prove that.” He said, “No, I know that’s your stance,” and it always has been my stance. I don’t say there is no god because I can’t prove there is no god. I barely say, “I don’t see enough evidence in nature to believe in a deity.”

He said, “I’ll tell you again, you have the whole case in the bag. I have no evidence to support my view at all.” That’s the kind of guy that Martin Gardner was. He would state the whole case. I said, “Martin, if that makes you comfortable,” and he said, “Yes, it does.” He said, “That’s why I have that belief; it makes me a little more comfortable about my life.”

I said, “That’s all I need. You’re a good friend. You’re an excellent friend, long time friend. All I need to do is hear you say that, and I accept that that is your conviction and I won’t argue with you about it.” He just said, “Thank you.” That’s how Martin was. If it gave him comfort, I was all for it.

Kendrick Frazier: In later years, I heard some criticism of him from fellow skeptics about that, but I think the skeptic community can certainly deal with a deist in the house, can we not?

James Randi: Kendrick, I might as well get this off my chest, at the very beginning. I think that the belief in a deity is such an, first of all, unprovable claim and such a rather ridiculous claim. I really look at it as ridiculous. I think it’s an easy way out to explain things to which we have no answer. There are many things, folks, to which we have no answers, no question of that.

I just think that a belief in a god is one of the most damaging things that infests humanity at this particular moment in history. It may improve. I see signs that it may be improving. I’ll leave it at that.

Kendrick Frazier: I was delighted when in 1976 I heard from Paul Kurtz that they were founding an organization that turned out to become CSICOP. You were a founding fellow, and Ray Hyman was and Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, and Jim Alcock came along very soon and many others. What did the founding of that organization in 1976 mean?

James Randi: Yes, that’s very true. We had to get an organization going. During one of the first meetings they said, “Of course, you’ll be the head of it, the main figure.” I said, “No, I’m in show biz. I’m a magician, ho, ho, ho. I’m a theatrical character. I work on TV and in theaters and I go out and entertain kids and adults. An entertainer should not be the head of an organization like that.”

I said, “However, I do know of this gentleman. . . ” It was Paul Kurtz of whom I was speaking. I said, “He has made a lot of good statements about the problem of believing in the paranormal and the supernatural.” I said, “We should approach him.” We did approach him, and Paul graciously agreed to accept the position. That’s the way it turned out. You have to have an academic. You have to have somebody who has some standing at a decent desk. Let’s put it that way.

Kendrick Frazier: Paul Kurtz was a different kind of person, but the combination of all these perspectives and backgrounds helped bring some solidity to the organization, CSICOP, would you say?

James Randi: Paul was very good. First of all an excellent academic in so many ways. He proved that many, many times with all his books, beautiful books that he wrote. Very concise and very factual and very convincing. Don’t ever hesitate to open up a Paul Kurtz book and read a chapter out of it; it’s always inspiring.

The fact that he was an academic, at a university, and he had the time, he had the interest. That was very important. Paul Kurtz worked out very, very well I must say.

Kendrick Frazier: There was another important figure at the time who turned out later to be a bit of a burr under our saddle. That was Marcello Truzzi.

James Randi: You just said a dirty word.

Kendrick Frazier: He was actually the first co-chairman of CSICOP, with Paul Kurtz, and the first editor of The Zetetic, which a year later when I became editor (1977), we renamed the Skeptical Inquirer. He was a sociologist of science at Eastern Michigan University.

James Randi: Yes, Marcello was a strange guy in many ways. We had to take him off the job simply because he insisted that we should have an equal number of pages from the pro-paranormal people and an equal of the anti-paranormal people. You can’t do a magazine like that. That’s ridiculous. You’ll have two completely different philosophies in the same book and opposing one another. No, that was not doable.

Kendrick Frazier: I want to ask you about one other key figure in the skeptical movement, less well known and appreciated today but very much in the public eye back then: Isaac Asimov. He wrote the foreword to your book Flim-Flam!

James Randi: Yes, he wrote the foreword to a couple of my books as a matter of fact. Isaac Asimov, that’s a name to conjure with, there’s no question about it. Isaac Asimov.

Kendrick Frazier: How would you describe CSICOP in those early years?

James Randi: We had a lot of exchanges of information with the press and with the media in general. This is before television was really the big thing that it is now of course. I think we had a very substantial influence on the printed media, particularly the printed media, in those days. There was so much nonsense and there’s even more today.

That’s what we were concerned with. We had to get into the media. I know that I exchanged a great number of personal letters with individual columnists. I found that was the way to go. I made contact with Johnny Carson, and I found out immediately that he was on our side, very much on our side. He wasn’t only a comedian, ladies and gentlemen. He was a great thinker.

Before the taping of my appearances on his Tonight Show, John would knock on my dressing room door. He just wanted to come around; he was so thoughtful and kind to me. He’d just simply ask, “What should I mention? What do you want me to plug? What do you want me to emphasize? What do I say if I’m asked so and so?” He wanted to be aware of how he could help me. He liked me and he liked what I did. We got to be very close.

The night that we exposed Peter Popoff—we got him and we got him good.

Kendrick Frazier: What made you a skeptic?

James Randi: Since I was a kid I’d been very skeptical. I got my introduction to religion. . . I went off to Sunday school. Then they started to read to me from the Bible and
I interrupted and said, “Excuse me, how do you know that’s true? It sounds strange.” “It’s in the Bible. It’s in the holy book of God.” Okay. I’d look around, they were all staring at me as if, “What kind of a critter is this?”

At the end of the class, they questioned me before I left and they said, “Why are you asking all these questions?” I said, “It’s a classroom and I thought I could ask questions. How do you know that’s true?” Never mind. They gave me a note to take to my parents and it simply said something to the effect that your boy Randi—that’s my real first name—is not necessarily welcome here at St. Cuthbert’s because he asked too many questions and he interrupts the teachers.

Kendrick Frazier: You were a skeptic of religion before being a skeptic of the paranormal?

James Randi: Yes, but with the same flavor.

Kendrick Frazier: What role did Houdini play as a role model in your life of magician, escape artist, illusionist, becoming an educator to the public about paranormal claims, and a debunker?

James Randi: When I first found out about Houdini, of course I read several books on him and some of his autobiographical material as well. I saw that he was against all paranormal beliefs. “Fooling With the Spirits” was a program he did on vaudeville with his wife Beatrice where they did a fake mind reading act that exposed the whole thing. That went on for some time on the Orpheum Circuit.

He died two years before my birthday, as a matter of fact. I thought that would be a good example. I took up being Harry Houdini, though I never claimed to be him. As a matter of fact, during my career I broke a couple of his records.

I must add very quickly that when I broke the records that Houdini had established, such as being sealed in a coffin underwater with no additional oxygen, etc., I broke it by a very slight margin purposely, because I didn’t want to outdo it, because I was a good twenty years younger than he was when he did it. He did some of these records shortly before he died. He didn’t die as a result of any of the experiments or stunts. I thought that was not fair to say that I had broken his record, because I was simply younger at the time.

Kendrick Frazier: Let’s jump ahead to one of the investigations that you and I and Paul Kurtz, Phil Klass, Jim Alcock, and Barry Karr went on. Our trip to Beijing, China, in 1988 to investigate a whole variety of paranormal claims. We were invited by the editor of a science daily newspaper to bring particularly Randi’s expertise to examine these claims that were getting publicity all over the world.

I want to set the scene for what it was like in China with Randi there in 1988. This was not the modern commercial China we have today. They were just coming out of the Maoist period. A lot of people on the streets were still dressed in very gray drab clothes. There were tens of thousands of bicycles, very few cars. Here we were with the great Randi, the Amazing Randi, with his cape and beard and black hat on the streets of Beijing. It was quite a sight.

James Randi: Yes, it was indeed, and it was a great adventure.

Kendrick Frazier: It was indeed. At this conference, we’ve seen a film clip that Phil Klass took during our China investigations of this woman writhing on a table while the Qigong master is in the other room doing his thing, and she is supposedly responding to it. But you set up the controlled conditions where she didn’t know when he was doing his thing and vice versa. I was the record keeper. It was a fairly astonishing thing for us to see. Describe what you remember about that.

James Randi: I remember that the Qigong master wasn’t very happy about that when we suggested the protocol for it. The woman on the table, she must have been very embarrassed because he would be going through his things like this and we put up the screen, the whole business, and she would suddenly start kicking like crazy, as you see in the film.

Then she would open her eyes and look around as if to get a hint as to whether she should have done that. She was rather disconcerted to say the least. I was embarrassed because it caught them out that it just didn’t work, because she didn’t move when he signaled her to move.

The parapsychologist who ran these tests with [“psychic”] kids was named Mr. Ding. The kids got such lax conditions, it was just ridiculous. They were supposed to tell how many matches were in a box with a certain color on them or what the colors were. Mr. Ding ran the tests.

They were always right, except one of the little flaws in his experimental protocol in my mind was that they were allowed to go into the school yard and play around with the boxes and maybe even peek into them, as you could imagine.

We suspected them of that, but of course Chinese children wouldn’t do a thing like that, would they? And they were always right—until we taped up the boxes. They didn’t understand why we would tape up the boxes. Maybe because you’re peeking, I don’t know. The experiment rather failed at that point.

This Mr. Ding, you’ve heard he went to prison. The government actually caught on to this and they decided this was a disgrace to the Republic of China.

Kendrick Frazier: Back then sometimes people would say, about you, “You’re just a magician. What do you know about scientific investigation?”... In other words that you’re biased or closed minded. How do you respond to that?

James Randi: If you want to take a look at it, I think my mind is pretty open. You can see right here. I show my head really freely, and you could almost read right through it. I don’t have scientific training. I learned in high school in Canada; I must say I learned much more physics and chemistry than the average American child. At that time, we learned. What we got out of high school in Canada, we were one year ahead of New York schools in the learning spectrum. We were much better informed. We were pretty well ready to go into first year of college.

Kendrick Frazier: I was going to ask you how you became so knowledgeable about science and the processes of science to impress the worldwide scientific community. That’s where it was, in high school?

James Randi: I must say,I owed a lot of it to Mr. Tovell, our physics teacher. He was a brilliant man. I only found out, about three years ago, he was much more qualified than for just a high school teacher. I don’t know why he took that position, but he was brilliant. Mr. Tovell would do wonderful things.

When he heard the two-minute bell to mark the change of class he would go to the blackboard and he would uncover something he’d written on the blackboard the previous day or night, and it would often be something like a perpetual motion machine. He would say, “This doesn’t work. Tomorrow I’m going to ask you a few pertinent questions about whether it does work or not. If you think it does work we’ll build it and we’ll see whether it works.” That was the kind of teacher he was. This was off the books. This was way off the books.

Kendrick Frazier: This goes to show you what a really great science teacher can be.

James Randi: Yes, any teacher of any kind, but particularly of science. He was a great teacher in that way. Good teachers. Mr. Chrysler, my English teacher, and Mr. Henderson, my mathematics teacher, who I bothered for endless days I’m sure, after hours, asking him to tell me what integral calculus was all about because we didn’t take calculus at that time. Today I can do a dy over a dx rather swiftly I think. I actually got to use calculus. I was interested, and I did this at home.

Kendrick Frazier: Obviously you could have become a PhD if you cared to go that route.

James Randi: A real FUD? I didn’t want to go that way. It came about at the Casino Theater. It’s now only a pile of dust someplace on Queen Street, but I saw the great Harry Blackstone. If any of you are amateur magicians, you will know right away who Harry Blackstone was. Not Harry Blackstone Junior—who I also knew and met of course—but the senior Harry Blackstone. He levitated a living woman on stage. That’s not easy to do. I thought it wasn’t easy to do. It’s actually pretty easy to do.

Part 2 will appear in our next issue.

The Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science (TIES) stresses the importance of promoting teacher leadership in the United States. Here at TIES we feel that our fellow teachers are our own best resources. We are looking for high school and college biology educators who are interested in presenting our TIES workshops to middle school science teachers in their state. Our reasoning is that a middle school science teacher will typically cover many areas of science within his/her annual curriculum, including earth science, physical science, and life science. It is virtually impossible to become an expert in all of these areas, at least not initially. The purpose of TIES is to inform interested middle school science teachers about the most up-to-date concepts of natural selection, common ancestry, and diversity in order for them to confidently cover the topics in their classrooms and fulfill their curriculum requirements. In addition to providing science teachers with innovative professional development opportunities, TIES also has ready-to-use online resources for the classroom, including presentation slides, labs, guided reading assignments, and an exam.

1. TIES received two rejections the week of April 8, one in New Mexico and one in Florida.
2. We confirmed another local workshop in North Carolina,

• October 5, 2017: CREW (Regional Professional Development for teachers in Western NC) Cherokee Central Schools, Cherokee, North Carolina, presented by Amanda Clapp

3. We also sent out three proposals this week. Two proposals are for state conferences next Fall, one in North Carolina and another in Florida. The third proposal is for the national science teachers’ conference in April 2018 in Atlanta (NSTA).
4. Since the last report, TIES presented workshops in Kansas, California, and Massachusetts.
5. The editor of the journal, Evolution: Education and Outreach, sent me the reviewers’ notes for my article on middle school evolution standards. I made the necessary revisions and sent it back.
6. Kenny is taking on the TIES Partnerships project. I feel the needs of this project match Kenny’s strengths nicely. Let’s give it one more go.
7. TIES Teacher Corps Member Kathryn Green presented the TIES project for us at the annual NARST Conference (National Association for Research in Science Teaching) in San Antonio, TX. NARST is a worldwide organization for improving science teaching and learning through research.
8. TIES Teacher Corps Member Blake Touchet found a creative way to support TIES at the Baton Rouge March for Science Event. Way to go, Blake!

9. Representing the Center for Inquiry at the Miami March for Science was great fun. Thankfully, a fellow TIES Teacher Corps Member, Dora Pilz, helped me out at our very busy table. We were approached by hundreds of marchers. The most successful bumper sticker by far was the one about vaccinations. One of my goals was to spread the word about Richard Dawkins’ event here on May 27^th. There were 970 tickets left for the Richard Dawkins Event in Miami on May 27^th before the march; there were 949 as of this morning. At the march, the Editor in Chief of UMiami Scientifica Magazine came by the CFI table offered to publish the event in his magazine.
   
   I’ll take the poster we created for the event over to Books and Books today. I’ll bring more brochures about the Dawkins/Barry event to next Saturday’s local People’s Climate March.
10. Something to think about: I was asked by several people about starting a local CFI chapter.
11. An article about TIES titled “Helping Teachers Teach Evolution in the United States” is one of the featured articles in the May/June 2017 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer.

In his book Dark Trails: Adventures of a Naturalist (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930), celebrated American naturalist and explorer George K. Cherrie wrote about his adventures around the world. Cherrie engaged in many expeditions, perhaps most famously accompanying Theodore Roosevelt on his nearly disastrous 1913–1914 jungle descent of Brazil’s Rio da Dúvida (“River of Doubt,” later renamed the Roosevelt River). The book provides a fascinating look at a prominent explorer’s enthnographic, botanical, and zoological studies, primarily in South America.

Cherrie’s memoir reflects a generally hard-nosed skepticism one would expect to find in a man of science. For example, in a section where he recounts being a witness to faith healing among a South American tribe, Cherrie could be channeling James Randi half a century later: “Of course it was a piece of crude prestidigitation. But the widespread success of such charlantry testifies to the high value of mental suggestion; on the other hand, suggestion of evil [e.g., a curse] works with equal efficacy” (p. 48–49).

However Cherrie—whether out of desire to tell a great story or a lapse into gullibility—occasionally succumbs to magical thinking where the supernatural is involved. One such episode appears in a chapter titled “Death and After Death,” in which Cherrie recounts for his readers a ghost story he endorses. Cherrie begins by noting:

For some years I have noted that when a group of people are thrown together for a few days or weeks, or sometimes for just a few hours, sooner or later the subject of ghosts will be broached. At such times there usually follows a period of silence. Then some one, with more or less diffidence, will relate an experience with what might be termed invisible or supernatural forces.

Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the famous Phila­delphia neurologist, held no brief for ghosts any more than I do. His life work with the inner mechanism of the mind and nerves should have tended, and doubtless did tend, to make him cynical regarding supernatural phenomena. But there is a strange story told of the great man, a story that he is said to have related many times himself. He told it in a way that left his listeners with a feeling that there was a question in the narrator’s mind as to its significance. The story was a curious incident of his medical career.

One evening after an exhausting day with patients, Mitchell had got into his dressing gown and retired with a book to rest. After reading for a few minutes, he dozed. He was awakened by the violent ringing of his front doorbell. When the maid did not answer it, he arose and went to the door himself. There he found a little girl, thinly clad and plainly in distress. Without waiting to be accosted, she said: “It’s my mother—she’s very sick, sir. Won’t you come, please?”

The night was cold with snow whirling and drifting before a bitter wind. Dr. Mitchell was very tired. He expostulated with the child and suggested that there were other doctors at the local hospital. Besides, she was a stranger to him. But the little messenger would not be put off; there was something in the way she spoke that caused the doctor to relent. Bidding her wait in the warm front hall, he got into his clothing and great-coat and followed her.

He found the mother ill with a violent form of pneumonia. If my recollection is correct, she turned out to be an old servant of the doctor’s. At any rate, Dr. Mitchell quickly telephoned for the proper medical help. Later, while sitting by the bedside, he complimented the sick woman on the intelligence and persistence of her little daughter. “But my daughter died a month ago!” cried the woman weakly. “Her shoes and shawl are in that little cupboard.”

Dr. Mitchell, amazed and perplexed, opened the cupboard door and saw the exact garments worn by the little girl who had brought him tither. The clothing was warm with the room’s warmth and could not possibly have been out in the cold and snow of that wintry night. “Not that I hold any brief for ghosts,” he concluded in recounting the incident, “but there you are!”

It seems that George Cherrie got suckered. This is, of course, a version of the venerable “Ghost in Search of Help” urban legend. As Joe Nickell has noted, “a book by Billy Graham contains a remarkably similar story, wherein the implication is that the little girl in the tale is not a ghost but rather an angel” and references a Reader’s Digest story. Predictably, however, “Graham provides no documentation beyond the vague reference to Reader’s Digest, which in any event is hardly a scholarly source. In fact, I soon discovered that the tale is an old one, circulated in various forms with conflicting details” (Nickell 2011). Indeed, in his Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, folklore expert Jan Brunvand (2012) notes that “Evidence suggests that Dr. Mitchell himself sometimes spread the story, possibly as a deliberate hoax” (264). It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that a genial but mischievous prankster accidentally launched a mystery when a little fib got out of hand and was later retold as avowed truth.

There is irony in the fact that this pioneering naturalist and self-professed skeptic would relate a well-worn urban legend as ostensible fact. Elsewhere in Dark Trails, Cherrie recounts seemingly supernatural stories recounted to him by others during his travels, though Cherrie seems to lend this story much credence—after all, Mitchell was a respected doctor. (Though Cherrie exhibits respect for other cultures and seemingly primitive tribes he encountered on his journeys, there is a perhaps inescapable sense that an improbable ghost story would be more believable to Cherrie when related by a Caucasian British doctor than, say, a Brazilian peasant farmer.)

Cherrie, to his credit, tacitly acknowledges that he has no firsthand knowledge of the veracity of Mitchell’s “strange story,” one “that he is said to have related many times himself.” Nevertheless, he clearly takes Mitchell’s anecdote at face value in offering it as evidence of an encounter with the supernatural—complete with the classic pseudoskeptical rejoinder: “Not that I hold any brief for ghosts, but there you are!”

It’s a good lesson for skeptics to question all extraordinary claims—not only from those with whom we may disagree or who may hold a different worldview, but also those whom we consider friends. An ounce of undue credibility can easily become a pound of mystery when compounded and spread by well-meaning but unskeptical folks.

References

• Brunvand, Jan Harold. 2012. Encyclopedia of Urban Legends: Updated and Expanded Edition. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
• Cherrie, George K. 1930. Dark Trails: Adventures of a Naturalist. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
• Nickell, Joe. 2011. The doctor’s ghostly visitor: Tracking ‘the girl in the snow.’ Skeptical Briefs 21(2). Available online at http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/the_doctors_ghostly_visitor_tracking_the_girl_in_the_snow/.

It’s pretty clear nowadays that we are not the rational animals we’d like to believe we are; in fact, we are more accurately called the “rationalizing animal.” Skeptics are often puzzled when we calmly provide evidence that a popular belief is wrong, that some group is holding onto a way of doing things that’s long past its sell-by date, and recipients of this valuable information don’t say, “Why, thank you! I had no idea!” Why would people prefer to justify mistaken beliefs, behavior, and practices rather than change them for better ones? Isn’t it good to know you didn’t cause your child’s autism with vaccinations?

As skeptics we are faced constantly with what psychologists call “the motivated rejection of science.” Take global warming, for example. It’s easy to assume that climate-change deniers are less educated or informed than wise scientists, but it’s not so simple. An article in Psychological Science by Stephan Lewandowsky and Klaus Oberauer found that attitudes about global warming are unrelated to levels of scientific literacy, numeracy, or education. They are associated with political partisanship; that is, among liberals, higher levels of scientific literacy and education are associated with increased acceptance of climate change, the importance of vaccination, and trust in science. But among conservatives, higher levels of scientific literacy and education are associated with reduced acceptance. That’s motivated cognition; people are emotionally motivated to reject findings that threaten their core beliefs or worldview. At present, the researchers found, public rejection of scientific findings is more prevalent on the political right than the left, yet, they added, “the cognitive mechanisms driving rejection of science are found regardless of political orientation.” Meaning: It depends what scientific finding it is. Whether your worldview comes from the left or right, you will be tempted to sacrifice skepticism even when your side is promoting some cockamamie belief without evidence.

Decades ago, the great social psychologist Gordon Allport, in his brilliant book The Nature of Prejudice, offered this exchange to illustrate the weasely way a person with a prejudice or other entrenched belief argues with you.

Mr. X: The trouble with Jews is that they only take care of their own group.

Mr. Y: But the record of the Community Chest campaign shows that they give more generously, in proportion to their numbers, to the general charities of the community, than do non-Jews.

Mr. X: That shows they are always trying to buy favor and intrude into Christian affairs. They think of nothing but money; that is why there are so many Jewish bankers.

Mr. Y: But a recent study shows that the percentage of Jews in the banking business is negligible, far smaller than the percentage of non-Jews.

Mr. X: That’s just it; they don’t go in for respectable business; they are only in the movie business or run night clubs.

Notice that people like Mr. X—which is all of us on occasion—don’t actually argue or respond to the point; they slide off your evidence and raise an irrelevant digression rather than face, let alone change, their fundamental belief. “I believe it” becomes enough.

The key motivational mechanism that underlies the reluctance to change our minds, to admit mistakes, and to be unwilling to accept unwelcome scientific findings is cognitive dissonance—the discomfort we feel when two cognitions, or cognition and behavior, contradict each other. Leon Festinger, who developed this theory sixty years ago, showed that the key thing about dissonance is that, like extreme hunger, it is uncomfortable, and, like hunger, we are motivated to reduce it. For smokers, the dissonant cognitions are “Smoking is bad for me” versus “I’m a heavy smoker.” To reduce that dissonance, smokers either have to quit or justify smoking. Before we make a decision (about a car, a candidate, or anything else), we are as open-minded as we are likely to be; but after we make a decision, we have to reduce dissonance. To do this, we will emphasize everything good about the car we bought or the candidate we are supporting or the belief we accepted and notice only the flaws in the alternatives.

Dissonance theory comprises three cognitive biases in particular:

1. The bias that we, personally, don’t have any biases—the belief that we perceive objects and events clearly, as they really are. Any opinion I hold must be reasonable; if it weren’t, I wouldn’t hold it. If my opponents—or kids or friends or partner—don’t agree with me, it is because they are biased.
2. The bias that we are better, kinder, smarter, more moral, and nicer than average. This bias is useful for plumping up our self-esteem, but it also blocks us from accepting information that we have been not-so-kind, not-so-smart, not-so-ethical, and not-so nice.
3. The confirmation bias, the fact that we notice and remember information that confirms what we believe and ignore, forget, or minimize information that disconfirms it. We might even call it the consonance bias, because it keeps our beliefs in harmony by eliminating dissonant information before we are even aware of it.

Dissonance is painful enough when you realize that you bought a lemon of a car and paid too much for it. But it’s most painful when an important element of the self-concept is threatened; your post-car-purchase dissonance will be greater if you see yourself as a car expert and superb negotiator. We have two ways to reduce dissonance: either accept the evidence and change the self-concept (“Yes, that was a foolish/incompetent/unethical thing to do; was I ever wrong to believe that”) or deny the evidence and preserve the self-concept (“That study was fatally flawed”). Guess which is the popular choice?

Understanding cognitive dissonance helps explain the astonishing obstinacy that some people reveal when they are shown to be wrong. Consider the conspiracy theorists who vehemently deny the horrifying evidence that Adam Lanza killed twenty children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. They maintain it was all a conspiracy of the gun-control lobby, and they persist in that delusion even when faced by grieving parents holding photos of their beloved children. But dissonance theory explains why people can hold crazy ideas without necessarily being crazy. If we start from where the disbelievers are, holding core beliefs in the importance of owning guns, that guns are safe, and that gun-control people want to take their guns away, then information that guns were used for a rampage that left twenty little children (and six school staff) dead is powerfully dissonant. By denying the evidence that this tragedy occurred, they get to retain their gun beliefs and their self-esteem: why, they were smart and right all along to oppose gun control of any kind. Indeed, dissonance theory would predict that their opposition would become even stronger—look at the effort those bastards put into creating the fiction of Sandy Hook. They must really want to take our guns away.

The greatest danger of dissonance reduction occurs not when a belief or action is a one-time thing like buying a car, but when it sets a person on a course of action. The metaphor that we use in our book is that of a pyramid. Imagine that two students are at the top of a pyramid, a millimeter apart in their attitudes toward cheating: it is not a good thing to do, but there are worse crimes in the world. Now they are both taking an important exam, when they draw a blank on a crucial question. Failure looms, at which point each one gets an easy opportunity to cheat by reading another student’s answers. After a long moment of indecision, one spontaneously yields and the other resists. Each gains something important, but at a cost: one gives up integrity for a good grade; the other gives up a good grade to preserve his integrity.

As soon as they make a decision—to cheat or not—they will justify the action they took in order to reduce dissonance, that is, to keep their behavior consonant with their attitudes. They can’t change the behavior, so they shift their attitude. The one who cheated will justify that action by deciding that cheating is not such a big deal: “Hey, everyone cheats. It’s no big deal. And I needed to do this for my future career.” But the one who resisted the temptation will justify that action by deciding that cheating is far more immoral than he originally thought: “In fact, cheating is disgraceful. People who cheat should be expelled.” By the time they finish justifying their actions, they have slid to the bottom and now stand at opposite corners of its base, far apart from one another. The one who didn’t cheat considers the other to be totally immoral, and the one who cheated thinks the other is hopelessly puritanical—and, come to think of it, why don’t I just buy the services of a professional cheater to take the whole course for me? I really need the credits, and so what if I never learn what this class requires? I’ll learn on the job. Hey, neurosurgery can’t be that hard.

As we go through life we will find ourselves on the top of many such metaphorical pyramids, whenever we are called upon to make important decisions and moral choices: for example, whether to accept growing evidence that a decision we made is likely wrong; decide whether or not a sensational rape or murder case in the media is true; whether to blow the whistle at company corruption or decide not to rock the boat. As soon as we make a decision, we stop noticing or looking for disconfirming evidence, and we are on that path to the bottom, where certainty lies.

This process blurs the distinction that people like to draw between “us good guys” and “those bad guys,” or, occasionally in the skeptic world, “us smart, reasonable guys and those ignorant, crazy guys.” Often, when standing at the top of the pyramid we are faced not with a clear go-or-no-go decision but instead with ambiguous choices whose consequences are unknown or unknowable. We make an impulsive decision, and then we justify it to reduce the ambiguity of the choice. And soon we are trapped in a process of action, justification, and further action that increases our commitment to that first tentative decision. Taking the next step down the pyramid in that direction is almost inevitable, because otherwise we have to go back up and say, “I was wrong to take that first little step.” How do you corrupt an innocent person? How does a company or a country get enmeshed in illegal or unethical decisions? They only have to take a small step off the pyramid, and self-justification will do the rest.

Dissonance reduction has benefits, including letting us sleep at night—and besides it’s good to hold an informed opinion and not change it with every fad or every new study that comes along. But it is also essential to be able to let go of that opinion when the weight of the evidence dictates, even if we are far down that pyramid. Dissonance reduction may be built into our mental wiring, but how we think about our mistaken actions and beliefs is not.

Living with dissonance requires us to learn how to admit our mistakes and separate them from our self-esteem. Our brains may be wired for self-justification, but that is no justification for not overriding the impulse—and we can. That’s what the skeptical movement is designed to help us do: show that people can remain committed to their country, political party, friends, and family, yet understand that it is not disloyal to disagree with actions or policies or candidates we find wrong or reprehensible. And when we are faced with evidence of our own mistaken beliefs, we can learn to say: “When I, a kind and smart person, make a mistake, I remain a kind and smart person; the mistake remains a mistake. Now, how do I remedy what I did and make sure I don’t repeat it?”

Skeptics already have an immense challenge in debunking pseudoscience, con artists, and conspiracy theories; to this burden we’d add another: facing our own sources of dissonance—ambiguity, complexity, and compromise. For some on the left, “compromise” means selling out; for some on the right, “compromise” means consorting with the enemy. But no politician will do everything we want; no feminist or civil rights activist can achieve 100 percent ideological purity; no human being can be 100 percent free of bias. That may be the most dissonant message of all.

I’m always happy to talk to anyone who will listen to a rational interpretation or my particular opinion on what’s paranormal and what’s not. I have worked hard for over thirty-five years to get to this precarious little plateau. Lately, I’m being a lot more choosey about who, for, where, and when I doit. This is unfortunate. I’ve spent a considerable amount of my life searching out and performing experiences that defy critical thinking. That’s been my job as a magician and mentalist: to create these kinds of interludes, package them for consumption by the masses, and reap the meager benefits of doing so.

Along the way, I’ve grown accustomed to people asking, “How did you do that?” So much so that while researching for my book Psychic Blues, I learned not to offer any explanations. People deeply involved with psychic matters (and consequently themselves) aren’t interested in facts—they want the magic to be real. Even with a rational explanation, many preferred to think of me as “Poor Mark, he’s really quite mediumistic, but he just can’t handle it yet.”

Well, “yet” came and went twenty-five years ago.

We have reached a point in the media and society where the same is true. Years of X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and now decades of reality-show ghost hunters have left in their wake a whole generation of “paranormal investigators” who offer their services to opine and freely supply their interpretations of any event they can’t understand. Rationally speaking, there’s not much we can do about this; because such things as ghosts and poltergeists have yet to be quantified as anything science can measure, this “anything goes” strategy leaves the door open for any television reality programming to basically seek out anyone who has a black t-shirt and a flashlight.

These homegrown “experts” frequently arrive on the scene young and fresh-faced with little or no training in criminology, psychology, or the techniques of deception. This is especially true in the area of self-deception.

It’s certainly possible I may be self-deceived in my own thinking, but I have the backing of evidentiary science to back my views. Science is all we have unless you choose to go backward in time or become mired in theology. Peer reviewed professional papers and journals don’t get peer reviewed if they reek of self-deception. That’s why they are peer reviewed.

Part of this instilled paranoia is an outgrowth of the well-known distrust of the scientific method and the mad scientist trope about out of control materialism creating monsters and atom bombs. Even “conspiracy theories” are now conspiracy theories. Yes, I know we don’t know everything through science, and please don’t trot out that tired “. . . more things in heaven and Earth Horatio” quote again. I’m sick to death of it.

I get that.

Problem is, the very people who should be thinking things through and applying science get away with making the most outrageous “sciencey” sounding claims that by and large most media reporters fall hook, line, and sinker for. News people seldom care or have time to research past their own noses. I recently had an investigative reporter for Inside Edition seriously ask me this question after watching mentalist Oz Pearlman on America’s Got Talent, “. . . You mean he really isn’t reading minds?” I was speechless for a stage beat or two.

So now we come to the crunch. These so-called experts with their flashlights and ghost-breaking toys have become the go-to people! Since they haven’t reached a point where they have a book, peer reviewed paper, agent, or any visible means of credibility, they are hungry for every bit of media attention they can grab.

The media knows this and so drags out a roast beef sandwich on a string in front of whoever they can get to show up for free. Don’t kid yourself; the same savvy media people also know that people who speak the truth (or what science and rational thinking tends to point to) are too busy actually out there in the real world making a difference (and a living) to bother with being the lone voice of critical thinking in the present day sea of shell games and con-artistry. Consequently, those die-hard paranormal seekers will gladly speak their minds for free. I can’t tell you how many times I have been contacted and promised a “great piece of tape” or “massive exposure.” I don’t want to sound too braggadocio—but I have a whole shelf of “exposure.”

The media in America don’t seem to have the time or inclination to ask the big questions. They seek the gloss and sell the soap flakes. They know where the ratings are and that’s all they care about. This situation is deplorable, but all we have to do is look at “Dr. Phil” and his tacit acceptance of all things psychic while at the same time paying lip service to reality by frequently announcing he’s the “biggest skeptic out there” to see which way the wind is blowing.

Without going into too many details, I have had very bad experiences with the media because I was often too anxious to please them and leapt without looking into the who, what, and where of the direction the editors were going to tilt the material.

Even if and when you get paid, interviewees or on-screen performers never get any “editorial privilege” in these types of programs unless they are a Bill Cosby or Bill Clinton. The snippets cut-to-fit are usually brief, subject to out-of-context editing, and completely out of the performer’s control.

When I made an agreement back in 1997 to appear on NBC’s Secrets of the Psychics Revealed I was verbally guaranteed I would not be shown on camera doing the “secret move” allowing me to predict in advance a random audience created number. They showed it. I had nothing in writing and no editorial privilege. This national appearance nearly destroyed my magic career. I was tarred and feathered as an “exposer.” I still get flack for my part in it from mentalists around the world. Obviously, if I had known how things were going to be edited going in, I would have backed out. Yes, I got paid. But it wasn’t worth it in the long run. Pick your battles. . . .

Nowadays, I tend to ask for a lot up front and see what I can get in a “package” deal. That’s showbiz, folks. I guarantee: If you don’t ask, you won’t get paid. Even if you hold your ground and (thanks to people like Susan Gerbic) have a decent Wiki page or some previous solid creds, you are likely to be asked by a twenty-something apprentice who generally doesn’t know squat about anything and has been solely tasked to find out how hungry you are, to do it “for exposure.”

If you ask out front for a fee, you risk the chance of no call back or when pressed, hear the oft quoted phrase a few days later: “We have decided to go in another direction.” I have been met with this same Hollywood utterance after punching great holes in more than few ill-advised adventures into vampires, ghosts, and leprechauns as well.

On the other hand, professional organizations and big time news operations who recognize when they are dealing with a reliable source will gladly offer travel expenses, accommodation, and a per diem plus a customary consultant fee. This should be the rule and not the exception. While this sort of deal is of course negotiable, if you don’t ask, they won’t offer either.

These groups are generally asking for more than a five-second sound bite and have a level of class not normally on view in shows such as Nancy Grace or Inside Edition. Local news shows are a lost cause financially. If you can work it to your advantage, go for it. You get to know the situation in the first two or three minutes of phone conversation. It’s akin to doing a psychic reading. You learn to listen, stay chill, and wait for the pertinent facts to emerge.

People crave entertainment, not necessarily the truth, facts, or reality. A “reality” television program is anything but that. It’s a performance piece with no sets, no actors, no real writers, and very little direction. They “wing-it.” The producers get off dirt cheap. So why should they even consider paying anybody? And what happens with those voices who speak for rational thinking? Unless you have a contract, agent, or written deal, we fade into the background. Dare I say that truth is expensive?

We have a glut of non-information. Most of it coming from people who have a proprietary interest in self-promoting garbage they may even consciously know to be false. I see these misguided, “sciencey” ne’er-do-wells as a problem that’s only going to get worse.

Do we care?

Unless the public demands true parity and a fact-based both-sides-of-every-story approach, this trend of woefully un-educated gasbags will eventually become the norm. Talk show hosts are not educators. Political pundits are not engineers. We are being served the whole picture upside-down. Look at the recent Brian Williams fiasco, Fox News, and Trump. America is buying into lies, blatant deceit, and those who pander to it. We are already bearing the brunt of our willful ignorance in countries across the world. Now we get most of our hard news from comedians. We have to weed through our tendency to be entertained and intellectually do the math to come out with anything substantial.

After the past few months of reaching my limit with this unfortunate direction, I for one am going to be a lot more careful and cautious with any media attention I might attract, and this is sad.

I’m overexposed.

What is skepticism? And how should a good skeptic approach her commitment to the field? These are crucial questions that most of us take for granted but that—I think—are worth pause to ponder and reevaluate from time to time. Which is what I intend to do in this article, introducing readers to an approach called “virtue epistemology,” which has much to say of relevance to the conscientious skeptic.

The ethos of the modern skeptical movement, the one that traces its origins to Paul Kurtz and others in the 1970s, is perhaps best encapsulated by the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” popularized by Carl Sagan but first articulated by Marcello Truzzi as “an extraordinary claim requires an extraordinary proof.” Both versions, in turn, owe much to two illustrious antecedents: Pierre-Simon Laplace, who in 1812 wrote: “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness,” and David Hume, who said in 1748: “A wise man . . . proportions his belief to the evidence.”

Skepticism has evolved over the past several decades, expanding the circle of its concerns and therefore the type of claims it considers “extraordinary” and thus in need of proportional evidence in order to be verified. Moreover, skepticism has developed nationally and internationally as a powerful grassroots movement for the advocacy of science and critical thinking more generally. Broadly speaking, we can distinguish between those areas of inquiry that fall under “classic” skepticism—which include astrology, UFOlogy, psychics, paranormal experiences, ghosts, Bigfoot, and the like—and those additional issues that have contributed to evolve contemporary skepticism: intelligent design creationism, vaccine denialism, climate change denialism, and so forth. Some skeptics have even ventured into criticism of areas of academic research and scholarship, such as the replicability issue in psychology and the social sciences, the debate about the value of string theory in physics, and the general usefulness of philosophy.

There are important differences among the three sets of topics I have just identified insofar as our average skeptical practitioner is concerned. When it comes to the first group (astrology, UFOlogy, etc.), skeptics have developed expertise of their own, arguably superior to that of your average scientist. It is more likely that a Joe Nickell or a James Randi will identify the problem with an alleged claim of paranormal activity than a scientist who is unfamiliar with fringe literature, the methodology of tricksters, or the unconscious biases that lead perfectly honest people to convince themselves that they have had an extraordinary experience.

The second group of topics (including especially the various forms of modern “denialism”) is trickier, as it requires a significantly deeper understanding of the underlying science. Here the skeptic can, at most, play a mediation role between the technical literature and the general public, but not really contribute directly herself to the research, unless of course she happens to be a medical researcher or an atmospheric physicist, for example.

The final group of topics (issues in psychological research, fundamental physics, philosophy) is, I maintain, so far outside of the realm of expertise of the average skeptic (unless, again, she happens to be a research psychologist, a particle physicist, or a philosopher) that the proper attitude is simply not to open one’s mouth and to let the experts sort it out. This may sound harsh and unpalatable, but we need to be honest with both ourselves and the public at large: none of us is an expert on everything, and knowing one’s own limitations is the beginning of wisdom, as Socrates famously reminded us. It also does a lot to enhance our credibility.

Humility and competence, then, are virtues that ought to be cultivated by any skeptic who wishes to intelligently comment on any of the three groups of issues I’ve outlined here. That is why skepticism would benefit enormously by a dip into the field of virtue epistemology. Let me explain.

Virtue Epistemology 101

Epistemology, of course, is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge and provides the criteria for evidential warrant—it tells us when it is, in fact, rational to believe or disbelieve a given notion. Virtue epistemology is a particular approach within the field of epistemology, which takes its inspiration from virtue ethics. The latter is a general way to think about ethics that goes back to Aristotle and other ancient Greek and Roman thinkers.

Briefly, virtue ethics shifts the focus from questions such as “Is this action right/wrong?” to “Is the character of this agent virtuous or not?” The idea is that morality is a human attribute, which has the purpose of improving our lives as individuals embedded in a broader society. As such, it does not yield itself to universal analyses that take a god’s eye–view of things, but rather starts with the individual as moral agent.

Similarly with science: contrary to widespread belief (even among skeptics and scientists), science cannot aspire to a completely neutral view from nowhere, because it is by its own nature a human activity and is therefore bound by the limits (epistemic and otherwise) that characterize human intelligence and agency.

The best way to think about this is that science irreducibly depends on specific human perspectives and provides us therefore only limited access to the world-in-itself. We can observe and explore the world with increasingly sophisticated tools, but we will always have a partial view of reality and a distorted understanding of it.

That’s why both the scientist and the skeptic can benefit from a virtue epistemological way of thinking: since scientific knowledge is irreducibly human, our focus should be on the human agent and the kind of practices that make it possible for her to arrive at the best approximation to the truth that is accessible to our species.

In practice, this means that we should be cultivating epistemic virtues and strive to stay away from epistemic vices. Here is a partial list of both (another useful list can be found in a classic essay, “Proper Criticism,” by Ray Hyman, 2001):

This, of course, is much easier said than done, something that Aristotle—a good connoisseur of human psychology—understood very well. Which is why he said that virtue begins with understanding what one ought or ought not to do but becomes entrenched only with much practice and endless corrections, allowing us to internalize its precepts.

So far our discussion has been rather theoretical, but skeptics (and scientists) are pragmatic people. They work best with actual examples that they can chew on and use for future reference. So let me present you two cases of failure of virtue epistemology on the part of skeptics, so that we can appreciate what is going on and how to do things better.

Case 1: In Defense of Astrology?

Back in the 1970s, Paul Feyerabend was a very controversial philosopher of science. He most famously wrote Against Method, in which he argued that there simply isn’t any such thing as the scientific method. Scientists are pragmatic knowledge seekers; they use whatever method works and discard it as soon as it stops working. This position (which is now more or less standard in the field) means that science is not reducible to a how-to algorithm, programmable in a computer. It also led Feyerabend to advocate “methodological anarchism,” the idea that we should let anyone pursue the truth however they like, regardless of initial plausibility or of the academic credentials of the individual. The good stuff will be selected in the open marketplace of ideas; the bad stuff will go away. (Methodological anarchism traces its ancestry back to John Stuart Mill, though it is not a mainstream view in philosophy, and for good reasons, but that’s another story.)

Feyerabend—shockingly from a skeptic’s perspective—at one point wrote in defense of astrology. Not because he believed astrology has any merit, but in reaction to a famous manifesto against it that was initiated by none other than Paul Kurtz and countersigned by 186 scientists.

The anti-astrology manifesto read, in part:

We, the undersigned—astronomers, astrophysicists, and scientists in other fields—wish to caution the public against the unquestioning acceptance of the predictions and advice given privately and publicly by astrologers. . . . In ancient times people believed in the predictions and advice of astrologers because astrology was part and parcel of their magical world view. . . . Why do people believe in astrology? In these uncertain times many long for the comfort of having guidance in making decisions.

Surprisingly, Carl Sagan himself declined to sign the manifesto, explaining:

I struggled with [the manifesto’s] wording, and in the end found myself unable to sign, not because I thought astrology has any validity whatever, but because I felt . . . that the tone of the statement was authoritarian. It criticized astrology for having origins shrouded in superstition. But this is true as well for religion, chemistry, medicine and astronomy, to mention only four. The issue is not what faltering and rudimentary knowledge astrology came from, but what is its present validity. . . . Then there was speculation on the psychological motivations of those who believe in astrology. These motivations . . . might explain why astrology is not generally given the skeptical scrutiny it deserves, but is quite peripheral to whether it works. . . . The statement stressed that we can think of no mechanism by which astrology could work. This is certainly a relevant point but by itself it’s unconvincing. No mechanism was known for continental drift . . . when it was proposed by Alfred Wegener in the first quarter of the twentieth century to explain a range of puzzling data in geology and paleontology.(Sagan 1976)

Feyerabend was even harsher:

The learned gentlemen have strong convictions, they use their authority to spread these convictions (why 186 signatures if one has arguments?), they know a few phrases which sound like arguments, but they certainly do not know what they are talking about. . . . [The manifesto] shows the extent to which scientists are prepared to assert their authority even in areas in which they have no knowledge whatsoever. . . . It is interesting to see how closely both parties [i.e., astrologers and their critics] approach each other in ignorance, conceit and the wish for easy power over minds. (Feyerabend 1978)

Both Sagan’s and Feyerabend’s points were not that there is any substance to astrology—they both knew better than that—but that it matters how one approaches public criticism of pseudoscience. One must do it virtuously, by taking one’s opponents’ arguments seriously, engaging with them and deploying logic and evidence against them. One must also not simply attempt to use the weight of authority to squash a displeasing notion, because that would be intellectually unvirtuous. Although Sagan and Feyerabend did not use the language of virtue epistemology, they called for the scientists to behave better than the pseudoscientists, and rightly so.

Case 2: The Campeche UFOs

My second example concerns a famous sighting of alleged UFOs over the Mexican state of Campeche on March 5, 2004, a case investigated by Robert Sheaffer for the Skeptical Inquirer (see Sheaffer 2008). The basic facts are these: That night, a reconnaissance aircraft of the Mexican government was flying over the states of Campeche and Chiapas, looking for evidence of drug smuggling. The crew videotaped the appearance of up to eleven unidentified objects that were visible only in the infrared. However, despite initial claims to the contrary, a local radar installation could not verify the sighting.

As soon as the local press reported the incident, there was an unfortunate rush of half-baked skeptic “solutions,” all equally unfounded: according to local astronomer Jose de la Herrin, the UFOs were really meteor fragments; but for Dr. Julio Herrera of Mexico’s National Autonomous University they were electrical flares in the atmosphere; not so in the opinion of Rafael Navarro, also of the National Autonomous University, who thought it was clearly sparks of plasma energy; by contrast, the Urania Astronomical Society of Morelos declared the objects to be a group of weather balloons. The Campeche UFOs, alas, were none of those things. Actual investigation—instead of armchair skepticism—by Sheaffer revealed them to be stationary objects on the ground, over the distant horizon—specifically, flares erupting from a group of oil wells.

In this case, too, it seems, the a priori “knowledge” of some skeptics (the phenomenon couldn’t possibly be what it was purported to be) led to rather unvirtuous, completely unfounded in facts, “explanations” that had the only effect of tarnishing the reputation of the alleged skeptics themselves.

A Checklist for the Virtuous Skeptic

So what is the big deal here? The problem is that skepticism shares its core values with science, and such values include intellectual honesty, epistemic humility, and a number of other virtues. What is supposed to separate us from creationists, climate change deniers, and all the rest is not that we happen to be (mostly, often) right and they aren’t. It is that we really seek the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. This means we do the hard work of carrying out research; we don’t just sit on a collective arse and pontificate.

To make sure of this, I suggest two things: first, a push toward a peer review system within the skeptic community modeled on the one used by scientists. Peer review has its own shortcomings (ask the psychological and medical communities), but having one’s work checked by someone else is a first step toward improving the quality of what we publish. Second, here is a handy checklist for the aspiring virtuous skeptic to keep in mind whenever we are debunking the (alleged) nonsense du jour:

• Did I carefully consider my opponents’ arguments without dismissing them out of hand?
• Did I interpret what my opponent said in the most charitable way possible before mounting a response?
• Did I seriously entertain the possibility that I may be wrong? Or am I too blinded by my own preconceptions?
• Am I an expert on this matter? If not, did I consult experts, or did I just conjure my own unfounded opinion out of thin air?
• Did I check the reliability of my own sources or just Google whatever was convenient to throw at my opponent?
• After having done my research, do I actually know what I’m talking about, or am I simply repeating someone else’s opinion?

Virtue ethics is supposed to focus us on improving ourselves as moral agents. So, most of all, let us strive to live by Aristotle’s own words: “Humility requires us to honor truth above our friends.”

References and Further Readings

• Bok, B.J., L.E. Jerome, and P. Kurtz. 1975. Objections to astrology. The Humanist 35(4).
• Greco, J., and J. Turri. 2011. Virtue Epistemology. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Avail­able online at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
epistemology-virtue/.
• Feyerabend, P. 2010. Against Method. With a new introduction by Ian Hacking. 4th Edition, New York: Verso.
• Feyerabend, P. 1978. Science in a Free Society. New York: New Left Books.
• Hyman, R. 2001. Proper criticism. Skeptical Inquirer, 24(4) (July/August): 53–55. Avail­able online at http://www.csicop.org/si/show/proper_criticism.
• Kidd, I.J. 2016. Why did Feyerabend defend astrology? Integrity, virtue, and the authority of science. Social Epictemology 30(4): 464–482. Available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02691728.2015.1031851.
• Pigliucci, M. 2016. Was Feyerabend right in defending astrology? A commentary on Kidd. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 5(5): 1–6. Available online at http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-2Vs.
• Sagan, C. 1976. Reader’s forum. The Humanist 36(January/February): 13.
• Sheaffer, R. 2004. The Campeche, Mexico, ‘infrared UFO’ video. Skeptical Inquirer 28(5) (September/October): 36–40.
• ———. 2008. The fallacy of misplaced rationalism. Skeptical Inquirer 32(4) (July/August): 23–24.

In 2008, overdoses from opium-based painkillers surpassed motor vehicle accidents as the most common cause of accidental death in America. The reason: we’ve failed to learn from history.

About 6,000 years ago, around the time of Abraham, the Sumerians settled between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. They invented cuneiform writing. They invented farming. And they discovered a plant called “hul gil,” or “the plant of joy.” Carl Linneaus, an eighteenth-century botanist, called it Papaver somniferum. William Osler, the founder of Johns Hopkins Hospital, called it “God’s own medicine.” Today we call it the opium poppy.

One of the first to embrace opium was Hippocrates, who used it to treat insomnia. But it was a relatively unknown contemporary of Hippocrates named Diagoras of Melos who was the first to notice that many of his fellow Greeks had become addicted to the drug—hopelessly addicted. He warned against its use as opium users became opium addicts.

Two thousand years passed.

In 1803, Frederich Sertürner, a twenty-year-old German chemist, purified opium’s most abundant and most active ingredient. He called it “morphium” after the Greek God of Dreams: Morpheus. Sertürner found that morphium was six times more powerful than opium. He reasoned that with lesser quantities of the drug required to relieve pain, fewer people would become addicted. It didn’t work out that way. When he finished his studies, he was addicted to morphine. Sertürner warned, “I consider it my duty to attract attention to the terrible effects of this new substance I called morphium in order that calamity may be averted.” Again, no one listened. Within thirty years, the German pharmaceutical company Merck began mass-producing the drug, calling it morphine.

Opium addicts became morphine addicts.

In 1874, C.R. Alder Wright took the next step. He boiled morphine with the reactive form of acetic acid, producing a grey-white powder with the chemical name diacetylmorphine. Wright believed that he, too, had created a nonaddictive form of the drug. So he fed it to his dog, who became violently ill and frighteningly hyperactive. Wright threw the powder away—but not before publishing his findings in the Journal of the Chemical Society of London. Twenty years passed before anyone paid attention to Wright’s new compound.

The first to pick up on Wright’s experiment was a young chemistry professor named Heinrich Dreser who worked for a pharmaceutical company in the Rhineland named Bayer Laboratories. Dreser found, as had Wright before him, that diacetylmorphine was five times more potent than morphine and crossed the blood-brain barrier much more efficiently; as a consequence, lesser quantities of the drug were necessary to relieve pain. Dreser believed that he, too, had created a nonaddictive pain reliever. So he fed diacetylmorphine to rats, rabbits, a few workmen in his company, and a handful of local patients. Everyone seemed to love the drug, and no one had become addicted after four weeks of observation. Dreser was certain that he had stumbled upon the Holy Grail of pain relief.

In September 1898, Heinrich Dreser presented his findings to the 70th Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians. Even though he had no evidence to support his claims, Dreser said that diacetylmorphine could treat colds, sore throats, headaches, and severe respiratory infections. Dreser also believed that he had created the perfect drug to treat morphine addiction. Attendees at the meeting gave him a standing ovation.

At first, Bayer couldn’t decide what to name its new blockbuster drug. Some executives wanted to call it wunderlich, meaning miracle. Others wanted to call it heroisch, meaning heroic. The second group won out. In 1898, Bayer executives launched their new drug at the same time that they launched Bayer Aspirin. They called it Bayer Heroin. Because clinicians feared that aspirin might cause gastritis, the drug was available by prescription only. Heroin, which was believed to be safe, was available over the counter. In 1900, Eli Lilly, working in collaboration with Bayer, began distributing heroin in the United States. Clinicians embraced the drug. In 1906, the American Medical Association recommended heroin for the treatment of “bronchitis, pneumonia, consumption [tuberculosis], asthma, whooping cough, laryngitis, and certain forms of hay fever.”

Morphine addicts became heroin addicts.

It was back to the drawing board. Certainly there must be some way to separate pain relief from addiction. Again, scientists turned to opium. This time, however, they turned away from morphine. Although morphine is the most powerful component in opium, it isn’t the only component. Opium also contains codeine (methlymorphine), a mild analgesic and cough suppressant; alpha-narcotine and papaverine, two muscle relaxants; and thebaine, which was named for Thebes, a town in Egypt where the opium poppy was grown. Thebaine formed the basis of the next attempt to separate pain relief from addiction.

The first synthetic version of thebaine was produced in 1916 by two German chemists working at the University of Frankfurt. They called it oxycodone, an opioid. (By definition, an opiate is a drug obtained directly from opium, such as morphine; an opioid is an opiate that has been synthetically modified, such as heroin or oxycodone.)

Oxycodone made its American debut in the early 1950s in combination with aspirin (brand name Percodan), ibuprofen (Combunox), or acetominophen (Percocet). But the most addictive, most abused, and most deadly form of the drug was pure oxycodone offered in a time-released preparation called OxyContin, which was manufactured by Purdue Pharmaceuticals. By chewing the drug, users could bypass the time-release mechanism and ingest as much as 160 milligrams of oxycodone—a lethal dose of the drug. (Ironically, on a weight-by-weight basis, oxycodone is actually more powerful than morphine.)

Heroin addicts became opioid addicts.

In 2002, a survey taken at a high school in rural Michigan found that 98 percent of students had heard of OxyContin and 9.5 percent had tried it.

In 2003, Rush Limbaugh, who had mocked drug abusers on his radio show for being morally bankrupt, admitted that he was addicted to OxyContin.

In 2004, three million people were using OxyContin, the most prevalent prescription painkiller in the United States.

In 2007, 14,000 people in the United States died from prescription painkillers, a problem that cost the health care and criminal justice systems more than $55 billion.

In 2008, 15,000 people died from prescription painkillers, the leading cause of accidental deaths in thirty states.

In 2009, health insurers spent $72 billion in direct healthcare costs related to the treatment of addiction to painkillers.

In 2010, more people died from prescription painkillers than from heroin and cocaine combined.

In 2012, 12 million Americans reported the recreational use of prescription painkillers.

In 2014, retail pharmacies dispensed 245 million prescriptions for painkillers. About 2.5 million adults were addicted to the drug.

In 2015, 19,000 people died from prescription painkillers. More young people died from opioid overdose than from motor vehicle accidents.

Today, the United States, which contains 5 percent of the world’s population, uses 80 percent of the world’s painkillers.

On January 16, 2016, Gina Kolata and Sarah Cohen, in an article for the New York Times, stated, “The rising death rates for young white adults make them the first generation since the Vietnam War years of the mid-1960s to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the generation that preceded it.”

On March 15, 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued guidelines to physicians in an attempt to control the raging epidemic of opioid abuse. The CDC recommended that doctors should prescribe opioids, 1) only after nonprescription painkillers and physical therapies have failed; 2) in quantities not to exceed a three-day supply for short-term pain; and 3) only when improvement was significant.

In the end, the medical profession’s stubborn belief that it can separate pain relief from addiction has created a problem that will take decades to undo.

Over the years, I have been to many marches and rallies of one kind or another—several of them in Washington, DC. But the emotions I felt at the March for Science in Washington, DC, reminded me less of those previous marches and more of a road race.

These days my aging knees and lungs prevent me from doing much running, but for many years I was a several-days-a-week runner. I was never particularly competitive, but I was a happy jogger. Unless you are a runner, it is hard to communicate the feeling, but for me—someone who has never pretended to be an athlete—each run followed a predictable emotional arc. I would set out with the goal of running three to five miles, and as I began, I would say to myself, “This is never going to work. How will I possibly make it?” But after settling into my usual pace, somewhere near the middle of the run, I would begin to feel like I just might finish after all. Maybe I can do this. Typically, the last miles were a kind of joyous romp as I came to fully accept that I would survive the run and make it home in good shape. The daily miracle had occurred again.

Occasionally, I would sign up for a 10k or 5k road race. I was never very competitive, so my races were just for fun. And fun they were. The atmosphere at a road race is quite special. Yes, there is pain involved. If you try to run your fastest time, you won’t get through the race without some discomfort. But the communal experience is hard to beat. There are men and women of all ages. Friends running together, workplace teams, couples, families, parents pushing babies in strollers, and the occasional unofficial canine entrant. I’ve seen people in costumes at a New Year’s Eve midnight run, and I once saw a firefighter running in full gear in the heat of the summer.

What makes these sweaty parades so special is the massive life-affirming display of health and achievement. Every runner can say, “Look at me. I ran this whole damn thing!” If you can plod your way through three miles at a decent clip, you are out at the narrow tail of the distribution. Way above average for people in the U.S. Despite all the sweat and gasping for breath, it never fails to choke me up a bit to see all those people flying down the street. I know that many of them started out like me, not believing it was possible, and after lots of work are now surprising themselves with their achievements.

Science is an achievement, too. Science is hard. Many children love to read Harry Potter books, and, given their remarkable length, that is a notable achievement, too. But choosing to read a science book is something else entirely. Science involves math and technical vocabularies. Chemical symbols and strange-looking diagrams. It’s hard to wrap your head around it, so you have to do some work to unlock the codes. People who are unschooled in science often fear it, and those who are drawn to it are labeled geeks and nerds—names that suggest the opposite of “popular.”

The March for Science was a road race for science geeks and nerds. Despite the rain in DC, spirits were high, and there was a tremendous sense of joy and pride of accomplishment. It was as though both scientists and science enthusiasts were saying, “I made the effort to learn this stuff, and—guess what?— it’s really cool stuff.” It was a unique time and place where being a science nerd was the coolest thing you could be. Suddenly we all felt like the popular kids. Bill Nye played the role of the rock star we all know he is, and there was great music and many other inspiring speakers.

In addition, the marchers for science had noble goals in mind. They wanted to save the oceans, maintain biodiversity, and prevent global warming. They wanted to cure diseases and create new energy industries to build the economy. It is hard to feel anything but admiration for people who are in favor of—and in many cases, working toward—these high-minded goals. So, in addition to celebrating science for science’s sake, there was a strong theme of using science for the betterment of all. In that sense, the March for Science was much better than a road race.

Furthermore, the March for Science was all over the country and the world. There was a particularly large crowd in Chicago, where my friend Nate Butkus, the six-year-old host of The Show About Science podcast, marched with his family, but there were marches all over Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, Australia, and even Antarctica. To me, it felt like a worldwide mass movement for something really nerdy and important.

I’d never experienced anything like the March for Science before, and I came away from the weekend believing we need to do much more of this. There are school science fairs; there is Earth Day; and there is a growing crop of science podcasts. These are all great things, but science fairs are limited to the young, and Earth Day is an annual picnic that isn’t always all that scientific. Many people—even quite a few scientists—have yet to warm to podcasts. It’s true, skeptics have CSICon and other meetings, but try as we may, these gatherings don’t yet have the broad appeal of a pure celebration of science and discovery. We need to do much more of this.

Here is my collection of photos from the DC march, which may give you a sense of the wonderful atmosphere of the event. First the obligatory kid pics:

STEM + Art = STEAM

Dogs were marching for science, too.

The great Carl Sagan was remembered by many:

Some science types used their technical vocabularies to create great nerd humor:

And, yes, given the anti-science actions of the new administration (and the march’s location), some of the messages were political:

And there were some important public service announcements:

And my personal favorite:

Despite the rain, it was well worth the trip. I look forward participating in the next nerd fest.

This article is the epilogue to The Extended Selfish Gene and the fortieth anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene, both 
published in 2016 by Oxford University Press. Copyright 2016. Reprinted by permission of Richard Dawkins and OUP.

Scientists, unlike politicians, can take pleasure in being wrong. A politician who changes his mind is accused of “flip-flopping.” Tony Blair boasted that he had “not got a reverse gear.” Scientists on the whole prefer to see their ideas vindicated, but an occasional reversal gains respect, especially when graciously acknowledged. I have never heard of a scientist being maligned as a flip-flopper.

In some ways I would quite like to find ways to recant the central message of The Selfish Gene. So many exciting things are fast happening in the world of genomics, it would seem almost inevitable—even tantalizing—that a book with the word “gene” in the title would, forty years on, need drastic revision if not outright discarding. This might indeed be so, were it not that “gene” in this book is used in a special sense, tailored to evolution rather than embryology. My definition is the population geneticists’ definition adopted by George C. Williams, one of the acknowledged heroes of the book, now lost to us along with John Maynard Smith and Bill Hamilton: “A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.” I pushed it to a somewhat facetious conclusion: “To be strict, this book should be called . . . The slightly selfish big bit of chromosome and the even more selfish little bit of chromosome.” As opposed to the embryologist’s concern with how genes affect phenotypes, we have here the neo-Darwinist’s concern with changes in frequencies of entities in populations. Those entities are genes in the Williams sense (Williams later called that sense the “codex”). Genes can be counted and their frequency is the measure of their success. One of the central messages of this book is that the individual organism doesn’t have this property. An organism has a frequency of one, and therefore cannot “serve as a unit of natural selection” (not in the same sense of replicator anyway). If the organism is a unit of natural selection, it is in the quite different sense of gene “vehicle.” The measure of its success is the frequency of its genes in future generations, and the quantity it strives to maximize is what Hamilton defined as “inclusive fitness.”

A gene achieves its numerical success in the population by virtue of its (phenotypic) effects on individual bodies. A successful gene is represented in many bodies over a long period of time. It helps those bodies to survive long enough to reproduce in the environment. But the environment means not just the external environment of the body—trees, water, predators, etc.—but also the internal environment, and especially the other genes with which the selfish gene shares a succession of bodies through the population and down the generations. It follows that natural selection favours genes that flourish in the company of other genes in the breeding population. Genes are indeed “selfish” in the sense promoted in this book. They are also cooperative with other genes with which they share, not just the present particular body, but bodies in general, generated by the species’ gene pool. A sexually reproducing population is a cartel of mutually compatible, cooperating genes: cooperating today because they have flourished by cooperating through many generations of similar bodies in the ancestral past. The important point to understand (it is much misunderstood) is that the cooperativeness is favoured, not because a group of genes is naturally selected as a whole, but because individual genes are separately selected against the background of the other genes likely to be met in a body, and this means the other genes in the species’ gene pool. The pool, that is, from which every individual of a sexually reproducing species draws its genes as a sample. The genes of the species (but not other species) are continually meeting each other—and cooperating with each other—in a succession of bodies.

We still don’t really understand what drove the origin of sexual reproduction. But a consequence of sexual reproduction was the invention of the species as the habitat of cooperating cartels of mutually compatible genes. As explained in the chapter called “The Long Reach of the Gene,” the key to the cooperation is that, in every generation, all the genes in a body share the same “bottlenecked” exit route to the future: the sperms or eggs in which they aspire to sail into the next generation. The Cooperative Gene would have been an equally appropriate title for this book, and the book itself would not have changed at all. I suspect that a whole lot of mistaken criticisms could have been avoided.

Another good title would have been The Immortal Gene. As well as being more poetic than “selfish,” “immortal” captures a key part of the book’s argument. The high fidelity of DNA copying—mutations are rare—is essential to evolution by natural selection. High fidelity means that genes, in the form of exact informational copies, can survive for millions of years. Successful ones, that is. Unsuccessful ones, by definition, don’t. The difference wouldn’t be significant if the potential lifespan of a piece of genetic information was short anyway. To look at it another way, every living individual has been built, during its embryonic development, by genes which can trace their ancestry through a very large number of generations, in a very large number of individuals. Living animals have inherited the genes that helped huge numbers of ancestors to survive. That is why living animals have what it takes to survive—and reproduce. The details of what it takes vary from species to species—predator or prey, parasite or host, adapted to water or land, underground or forest canopy—but the general rule remains.

A central point of the book is the one developed by my friend the great Bill Hamilton, whose death I still mourn. Animals are expected to look after not only their own children but other genetic relatives. The simple way to express it, and the one that I favour, is Hamilton’s Rule: a gene for altruism will spread if the cost to the altruist, C, is less than the value, B, to the beneficiary, devalued by the coefficient of relatedness, r, between them. r is a proportion between 0 and 1. It has the value 1 for identical twins; 0.5 for offspring and full siblings; 0.25 for grandchildren, half-siblings, and nieces; 0.125 for first cousins. But when is it zero? What is the meaning of zero on this scale? This is harder to say, but it is important and it was not fully spelled out in the first edition of The Selfish Gene. Zero does not mean that the two individuals share no genes in common. All humans share more than 99 percent of our genes, more than 90 percent with a mouse, and three-quarters of our genes with a fish. These high percentages have confused many people into misunderstanding kin selection, including some distinguished scientists. But those figures are not what is meant by r. Where r is 0.5 for my brother (say), it is zero for a random member of the background population with whom I might be competing. For purposes of theorizing about the evolution of altruism, r between first cousins is 0.125 only when compared to the reference background population (r = 0), which is the rest of the population to whom altruism potentially might have been shown: competitors for food and space, fellow travellers through time in the environment of the species. The 0.5 (0.125, etc.) refers to the additional relatedness over and above the background population, whose relatedness approaches zero.

Genes in the Williams sense are things you can count as the generations go by, and it doesn’t matter what their molecular nature is; it doesn’t matter, for instance, that they are split up into a series of “exons” (expressed) separated by mostly inert “introns” (ignored by the translation machinery). Molecular genomics is a fascinating subject but it doesn’t heavily impinge on the “gene’s eye view” of evolution, which is the central theme of the book. To put the point another way, The Selfish Gene is quite likely a valid account of life on other planets even if the genes on those other planets have no connection with DNA. Nevertheless, there are ways in which the details of modern molecular genetics, the detailed study of DNA, can be gathered into the gene’s eye fold and it turns out that they vindicate my view of life rather than casting doubt on it. I’ll come on to this after what may seem like a radical change of subject, beginning with a specific question, which obviously stands for any number of similar questions.

How closely related are you to Queen Elizabeth II? As it happens, I know I’m her fifteenth cousin twice removed. Our common ancestor is Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York (1412–1460). One of Richard’s sons was King Edward IV, from whom Queen Elizabeth is descended. Another son was George, Duke of Clarence, from whom I am descended (allegedly drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine). You may not know it but you are very probably closer to the Queen than fifteenth cousin and so am I and so is the postman. There are so many different ways of being somebody’s distant cousin, and we are all related to each other in many of those ways. I know that I am my wife’s twelfth cousin twice removed (common ancestor George Hastings, 1st Earl of Huntingdon, 1488–1544). But it is highly probable that I am a closer cousin to her in various unknown ways (various pathways through our respective ancestries), and it is absolutely certain I am also her more distant cousin in many more ways. We all are. You and the Queen might simultaneously be ninth cousins six times removed, and twentieth cousins four times removed, and thirtieth cousins eight times removed. All of us, regardless of where in the world we live, are not only cousins of each other. We are cousins in hundreds of different ways. This is just another way of saying we are all members of the background population among whom r, the coefficient of relatedness, approaches zero. I could calculate r between me and the Queen using the one pathway for which records exist, but it would, as the definition requires, be so close to zero as to make no difference.

The reason for all that bewildering multiplicity of cousinship is sex. We have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on, up to astronomical numbers. If you go on multiplying by two back to the time of William the Conqueror, the number of your ancestors (and mine, and the Queen’s and the postman’s) would be at least a billion, which is more than the world population at the time. That calculation alone proves that, wherever you come from, we share many of our ancestors (ultimately all if you go sufficiently far back) and are cousins of each other many times over.

All that complexity disappears if you look at cousinship from the gene’s point of view (the point of view advocated, in different ways, throughout this book) as opposed to the individual organism’s point of view (as has been conventional among biologists). Stop asking: What kind of cousin am I to my wife (the postman, the Queen)? Instead, ask the question from the point of view of a single gene, say my gene for blue eyes: What relation is my blue eye gene to the postman’s blue eye gene? Polymorphisms such as the ABO blood groups go way back in history, and are shared by other apes and even monkeys. The A gene in a human sees the equivalent gene in a chimp as a closer cousin than the B gene in a human. As for the SRY gene on the Y chromosome, which determines maleness, my SRY gene “looks upon” the SRY gene of a kangaroo as its kissing cousin.

Or we can look at relatedness from a mitochondrion’s point of view. Mito­chondria are tiny bodies teeming in all our cells, vital to our survival. They reproduce asexually and retain the remnants of their own genomes (they are remotely descended from free-living bacteria). By the Williams definition, a mitochondrial genome can be thought of as a single “gene.” We get our mito­chondria from our mothers only. So if we were now to ask how close is the cousinship of your mitochondria to the Queen’s mitochondria there is a single answer. We may not know what that answer is, but we do know that her mitochondria and yours are cousins in only one way, not hundreds of ways as is the case from the point of view of the body as a whole. Trace your ancestry back through the generations, but always only through the maternal line and you follow a single narrow (mitochondrial) thread, as opposed to the ever branching thread of “whole organism pedigrees.” Do the same for the Queen, following her narrow maternal thread back through the generations. Sooner or later the two threads will meet and now, by simply counting generations along the two threads, you can easily calculate your mitochondrial cousinship to the Queen.

What you can do for mitochondria, you can in principle do for any particular gene, and this illustrates the difference between a gene’s point of view and an organism’s point of view. From a whole organism point of view you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc. But, like a mitochondrion, each gene has only one parent, one grandparent, one great-grandparent, etc. I have one gene for blue eyes and the Queen has two. In principle we could trace the generations back and discover the cousinship between my blue eye gene and each of the Queen’s two. The common ancestor of our two genes is called the “coalescence point.” Coalescence analysis has become a flourishing branch of genetics and very fascinating it is. Can you see how congenial it is to the “gene’s eye view” that this whole book espouses? We are not talking about altruism any more. The gene’s eye view is flexing its muscles in other domains, in this case looking back at ancestry.

You can even investigate the coalescence point between two alleles in one individual body. Prince Charles has blue eyes and we can assume that he has a pair of blue eye alleles opposite each other on Chromosome 15. How closely related to each other are Prince Charles’ two blue eye genes, one from his father, one from his mother? In this case we know one possible answer, only because royal pedigrees are documented in ways that most of our pedigrees are not. Queen Victoria had blue eyes and Prince Charles is descended from Victoria in two ways: via King Edward VII on his mother’s side; and via Princess Alice of Hesse on his father’s side. There’s a 50 percent probability that one of Victoria’s blue eye genes peeled off two copies of itself, one of which went to her son, Edward VII, and the other to her daughter Princess Alice. Further copies of these two sibling genes could easily have passed down the generations to Queen Elizabeth II on one side and Prince Philip on the other, whence they were reunited in Prince Charles. This would mean the “coalescence” point of Charles’s two genes was Victoria. We do not—cannot—know whether this actually is true for Charles’ blue eye genes. But statistically it has to be true that many of his pairs of genes coalesce back in Victoria. And the same kind of reasoning applies to pairs of your genes, and pairs of my genes. Even though we may not have Prince Charles’ well-documented pedigree to consult, any pair of your genes could, in principle, look back at their common ancestor, the coalescence point at which they were “peeled off” from a single ancestral gene.

Now, here’s something interesting. Although I can’t establish the exact coalescence point of any particular allelic pair of my genes, geneticists can in principle take all the pairs of genes from any one individual and, by considering all possible pathways back through the past (actually not all possible pathways because there are too many, but a statistical sample of them), derive a pattern of coalescences across the whole genome. Heng Li and Richard Durbin of the Sanger Institute in Cambridge realized a remarkable thing: the pattern of coalescences among pairs of genes in the genome of a single individual gives us enough information to reconstruct demographic details about datable moments in the prehistory of an entire species.

In our discussion of coalescence between pairs of genes, one from the father and one from the mother, the word gene means something a bit more fluid than the normal usage of molecular biologists. Indeed, you could say that the coalescence geneticists have reverted to something a bit like my “slightly selfish big bit of chromosome and even more selfish little bit of chromosome.” Coalescence analysis is studying chunks of DNA which might be larger or even smaller than a molecular biologist’s understanding of a single gene but which can still be seen as cousins of each other, having been “peeled off” from a shared ancestor some definite number of generations ago.

When a gene (in that sense) “peels off” two copies of itself and gives one to each of two offspring, the descendants of those two copies may, over time, accumulate differences due to mutation. These may be “under the radar” in the sense that they don’t show up as phenotypic differences. The mutated differences between them are proportional to the time that has elapsed since the split, a fact that biologists make good use of, over much greater time spans, in the so-called “molecular clock.” Moreover, the pairs of genes whose cousinship we are calculating needn’t have the same phenotypic effects as each other. I have one blue eye gene from my father paired with one brown eye gene from my mother. Although these genes are different, even they must have a coalescence somewhere in the past: the moment when a particular gene in a shared ancestor of my two parents peeled off one copy for one child and another copy to its sibling. That coalescence (unlike the two copies of Victoria’s blue eye gene) was a long time ago, and the pair of genes has had a long time to accumulate differences, not least the difference in the eye colours that they mediate.

Now, I said that the coalescence pattern within one individual’s genome can be used to reconstruct details of demographic prehistory. Any individual’s genome can do this. As it happens, I am one of the people in the world who has had his complete genome sequenced. This was for a television programme called Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life which I presented on Channel Four in 2012. Yan Wong, my co-author of The Ancestor’s Tale, from whom I learned everything I know about coalescence theory and much else besides, seized upon this and did the necessary Li/ Durbin style calculations using my genome, and my genome alone, to make inferences about human history. He found a large number of coalescences around 60,000 years ago. This suggests that the breeding population in which my ancestors were embedded was small 60,000 years ago. There were few people around, so the chance of a pair of modern genes coalescing in the same ancestor back at that time was high. There were fewer coalescences 300,000 years ago, suggesting that the effective population size was larger. These figures can be plotted as a graph of effective population size against time. Here’s the pattern he found, and it is the same pattern as the originators of the technique would expect to find from any European genome.

The black line shows the estimates of effective population size at various times in history based upon my genome (coalescences between genes from my father and my mother). It shows that the effective population size among my ancestral population plummeted around 60,000 years ago. The grey line shows the equivalent pattern derived from the genome of a Nigerian man. It also shows a drop in population around the same time, but a less dramatic one. Perhaps whatever calamity caused the drop was less severe in Africa than in Eurasia.

Incidentally Yan was my undergraduate pupil in New College, Oxford, before I started learning more from him than he learns from me. He then became a graduate student of Alan Grafen, whom I had also tutored as an undergraduate, who subsequently became my graduate student and whom I have described as being now my intellectual mentor. So Yan is both my student and my grandstudent—a neat memetic analogue to the point I was making earlier about how we are related in multiple ways—although the direction of cultural inheritance is more complicated than this simple formulation implies.

To summarize, the gene’s eye view of life, the central theme of this book, illuminates not just the evolution of altruism and selfishness, as expounded in previous editions. It also illuminates the deep past, in ways of which I had no inkling when I first wrote 
The Selfish Gene and which are expounded more fully in relevant passages (largely written by Yan, my co-author) of the second edition (2016) of The Ancestor’s Tale. So powerful is the gene’s eye view, the genome of a single individual is sufficient to make quantitatively detailed inferences about historical demography. What else might it be capable of? As foreshadowed by the Nigerian comparison, future analyses of individuals from different parts of the world could give a geographic dimension to these demographic signals from the past.

Might the gene’s eye view penetrate the remote past in yet other ways? Several of my books have developed an idea which I called “The Genetic Book of the Dead.” The gene pool of a species is a mutually supportive cartel of genes that have survived in particular environments of the past, both distant and recent. This makes it a kind of negative imprint of those environments. A sufficiently knowledgeable geneticist should be able to read out, from the genome of an animal, the environments in which its ancestors survived. In principle, the DNA in a mole Talpa europaea should be eloquent of an underground world, a world of damp, subterranean darkness, smelling of worms, leaf decay, and beetle larvae. The DNA of a dromedary, Camelus dromedarius, if we but knew how to read it, would spell out a coded description of ancient ancestral deserts, dust storms, dunes, and thirst. The DNA of Tursiops truncatus, the common bottlenose dolphin, spells, in a language that we may one day decipher, “open sea, pursue fish fast, avoid killer whales.” But the same dolphin DNA also contains paragraphs about earlier worlds in which the genes survived: on land when the ancestors escaped the attentions of tyrannosaurs and allosaurs long enough to breed. Then, before that, parts of the DNA surely spell out descriptions of even older feats of survival, back in the sea, when the ancestors were fish, pursued by sharks and even eurypterids (giant sea scorpions). Active research on “The Genetic Book of the Dead” lies in the future. Will it colour the epilogue of the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene?

The Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science (TIES) stresses the importance of promoting teacher leadership in the United States. Here at TIES we feel that our fellow teachers are our own best resources. We are looking for high school and college biology educators who are interested in presenting our TIES workshops to middle school science teachers in their state. Our reasoning is that a middle school science teacher will typically cover many areas of science within his/her annual curriculum, including earth science, physical science, and life science. It is virtually impossible to become an expert in all of these areas, at least not initially. The purpose of TIES is to inform interested middle school science teachers about the most up-to-date concepts of natural selection, common ancestry, and diversity in order for them to confidently cover the topics in their classrooms and fulfill their curriculum requirements. In addition to providing science teachers with innovative professional development opportunities, TIES also has ready-to-use online resources for the classroom, including presentation slides, labs, guided reading assignments, and an exam.

1. TIES associate, Kenny Coogan, turned an otherwise underwhelming week into a successful one.
   • We have another workshop confirmed:

     September 16th, 2017 Greensboro Science Center, NC, presented by Alison Manka, the School and Aquarium Programs Manager

   • Birmingham Zoo in Alabama would like to do middle & high workshop in October. Kenny is working out the details with them.
   • The Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota wants to touch base in January to schedule a spring workshop.
   • Omaha, Nebraska is another possible location.
2. On my end, I reached out to educators in West Virginia, South Carolina, Minnesota, Kentucky, and Alaska. So far, I got responses from South Carolina and West Virginia.
3. I also wrote a proposal for a workshop in Illinois after confirming we had a presenter available.
4. Kenny’s TEDx video on sloths is up to 600,000. TIES is featured in the accompanying materials. We added a link to it on our mainpage.
5. TIES FB is up to 917 fans, that is about 300 more than last November. 
6. The interview questions for the Dave Barry/Richard Dawkins event in Miami on May 27^th are completed. I will send them to Dave pending approval from Robyn Blumner.

Q:

I recently read your book Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries about the mistakes that ghost hunters make using EMF detectors during investigations and how they are not productive. However, I always understood that EMF meters/readers were used to measure EMF levels because high levels of EMF could cause hallucinations that result in paranormal-like experiences. Any thoughts on this?

—M. Chapman

A:

Many ghost hunters, including the T.A.P.S. team on the television show Ghost Hunters, use EMF detectors to search for electromagnetic fields because they believe that intense magnetic fields can create hallucinations, which in turn might create the illusion of ghosts. The basis for this theory comes primarily from research done by a Canadian cognitive neuroscientist, Michael Persinger. He found that hallucinations (such as out-of-body experiences) could be triggered by stimulating specific areas of the brain with fixed wavelength patterns of high-level electromagnetic fields.

He suggested that EMFs might therefore be responsible for everything from UFO sightings to religious apparitions to ghosts. As researcher Chris French notes:

The proposal is that fluctuations in the earth’s background magnetic field can interact with the temporal lobe, especially in individuals with a particularly sensitive temporal lobe, to produce a sense of a presence and visual hallucinations. . . . This explanation offers the intriguing possibility that such transcerebral magnetic stimulation may lie behind many reports of ghosts and hauntings. (French and Stone 2014, 99)

It’s an interesting theory. Unfortunately for the ghost hunters, it’s just a theory—not a proven effect. In fact, there’s little or no evidence to support the idea that EMFs create ghosts. Ghosts are not being seen in Persinger’s experimental laboratory in Ontario; they are being seen in abandoned hospitals and suburban basements. There is simply no evidence that common household appliances can generate EMFs of the frequency and power that induce hallucinations in a clinical setting.

The author uses an EMF detector to demonstrate for a television crew how electrical outlets can create false “ghost” readings at the historic KiMo theater in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Photo by Larry Barker.

Indeed, Yale neuroscientist Steven Novella says that the theory of EMFs as an origin for ghosts is “speculative at this point.” The electromagnetic stimulation used by Persinger

has to be focused, and at a certain frequency in order to have this effect. It seems unlikely that environmental electromagnetic fields would be fine-tuned just enough to cause this effect. . . . It’s an interesting idea; I just don’t think it’s terribly plausible. At present, while we can certainly duplicate it in a lab, I’m not aware of any evidence to suggest it actually happens out there in the world. (Novella 2010)

Richard Wiseman, in his book Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There, notes that several researchers tried to replicate Persinger’s results. A team of Swedish psychologists led by Pehr Granqvist

became worried that some of Persinger’s participants may have known what was expected of them and their experiences could therefore have been due to suggestion rather than the subtle magnetic fields. To rule out this possibility in his work, Granqvist had all of his participants wear Persinger’s borrowed helmet, but ensured that the [magnetic] coils were only turned on for half the participants. Neither the participants nor the experimenters knew when the magnetic fields were on and when they were off. The results were remarkable. Granqvist discovered that the magnetic fields had absolutely no effect. . . . Worse was to come for Persinger. In 2009, psychologist Chris French and his colleagues from Goldsmiths College in London carried out their own investigation into Persinger’s ideas by hiding coils behind the walls of a featureless white room, and then asking people to wander around the room and report any strange sensations. Seventy-nine people visited this most scientific of haunted houses for about 50 minutes each. Following in the footsteps of Granqvist, French and his team ensured that the coils were only switched on for half of the visits, and that neither the participants nor experimenters knew whether the coils were on or off. The magnetic fields had absolutely no effect on whether or not people reported a strange experience. (Wiseman 2011, 219–220)

In their rush to accept this “scientific” explanation for ghost sightings, investigators extrapolate far beyond the evidence. Until it can be demonstrated that generalized, nonclinical EMFs can create the psychological perception of ghostly phenomena, there is no investigative value in detecting such fields. If ghost investigators are certain that common household EMFs can create ghost hallucinations, there are simple ways to test that theory. If Persinger is correct and EMFs are in fact related to ghostly experience, it’s because the EMFs are causing the illusion of ghosts. If ghosts exist, they may or may not be related to EMFs (there’s no evidence showing they are), but ghost hunters who cite Persinger’s research in support of their methods are unwittingly undermining their own arguments: If you are sure that ghosts are real (and not the product of EMF-induced hallucinations), there is no logic or point in using a device to detect those EMFs.

References

• French, Christopher, and Anna Stone. 2014. Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
• Novella, Steven. 2010. Getting into the spirit of things. MonsterTalk podcast (March 2).
• Wiseman, Richard. 2011. Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There. London: Pan Macmillan.

As a philosopher, I ask a lot of “why” questions, such as the notorious one often associated with philosophers: Why are we here? No, seriously. Why are we here? Why are we here? Why do self-described skeptics get together and exchange ideas, listen to speakers, plan skeptic-related activities, and so forth? In other words: Why skepticism?

That question may be a little broad to start, so for now, let me make it more concrete: Why skeptic organizations? It’s one thing for people with similar interests to get together on occasion—that’s inevitable—but why do we have formal skeptic organizations? What do they accomplish? There are a number of skeptic organizations throughout the world. In the United States, there are several regional and local organizations and a couple of national organizations such as the Center for Inquiry (CFI) and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). What purpose do they serve? Well, in the case of the CFI/CSI, one thing they do is publish Skeptical Inquirer magazine. It’s a very good, informative magazine, but of course a cynic might ask: Isn’t the magazine just another example of skeptics talking to other skeptics? Is Skeptical Inquirer anything more than a forum for conversation among skeptics and a useful way to raise money for the organization so the organization can pay people to publish the magazine, which raises money for the organization to pay people to publish the magazine . . . and so on?

That’s the cynic’s view, of course—and I’m no cynic. Skeptical Inquirer does not exist just to raise money to perpetuate itself; it serves an important educational function. But before I discuss some of the important purposes served by skeptic organizations and the skeptic movement, let me pause to explain why I am asking these questions. Originally when I planned this piece, I was going to focus almost exclusively on the public policy initiatives of CSI and CFI—especially in the area of alternative medicine. I’m still going to talk about those, because I think they are important and I think they illustrate one critical part of the mission of skeptic organizations. But I changed my focus somewhat because of something that happened a few months ago. At another skeptic conference, namely the NECSS conference (the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism), John Horgan, a science journalist, delivered a blistering attack on the skeptic movement (Horgan 2016). In particular, Horgan accused skeptics of spending their time attacking so-called soft targets such as homeopathy and Bigfoot, while ignoring harder targets, such as the use of drugs to treat mental illness—which he thinks are largely ineffective and possibly harmful—and war, which he argues we should not regard as inevitable, and is certainly not deep rooted in human nature.

What about this charge? Do skeptics spend too much time investigating and evaluating claims about homeopathy, Bigfoot, ghosts, UFOs, and so forth? And, if so, are such issues really soft targets? Is the effort spent on examining these topics essentially a waste of time?

To answer those questions, I think we first have to step back a bit and look at the evidence. Seems like a reasonable way for skeptics to proceed. Let’s have a look at what unifies people who describe themselves as science-based skeptics, what they see as important activities, and what they consider the appropriate way to carry out these activities.

The mission statement of CSI provides a good place for us to start, doesn’t it? Certainly, CSI’s mission statement indicates how some skeptics see themselves. CSI states that it “promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims.”

Put another way, skeptics are interested in finding out the truth and are very much: 1) disinclined to accept the claim that X is true; 2) unless that claim has been properly evaluated; and 3) especially if the claim deals with something extraordinary or controversial.

The first two parts of that description are fairly self-explanatory. With respect to method, skeptics use scientific investigation where possible, testing claims under controlled conditions. Sometimes, of course, it is not possible to do that, so then we look at the alleged evidence for the claim and use reason, critical thinking, and our storehouse of accumulated scientifically validated knowledge to assess the claim.

But what about the third part of that description—the focus on controversial and extraordinary claims?

What’s that mean exactly? The mission statement itself doesn’t set forth any criteria for what constitutes an extraordinary or controversial claim.

So let me try to put some meat on the CSI mission statement by making a little clearer what constitutes a controversial or extraordinary claim and explaining why such claims should be the focus of work by skeptics. I’ll begin by stating what CSI does not do, as this contrast will help clarify the scope of and rationale for CSI’s work.

Let’s start with an obvious point. Although CSI sponsors limited investigations on some discrete topics, neither CSI nor any skeptic organization does much work in the nature of basic scientific research. Even if it wanted to, CSI could not do much in the way of basic scientific research. CSI doesn’t have the resources for that. Universities do basic research; some government agencies do basic research; to some extent commercial enterprises, such as drug manufacturers, do basic research; CSI does not do that. Skeptic organizations don’t try to duplicate the work of scientists.

Of course, we support scientific research and communicate the results of the latest scientific research to the public, and these are important activities. There’s a lamentable lack of understanding of science among the general public, and one task of skeptics, and skeptic organizations in particular, is to try to educate the public and, in doing so, to instill some recognition of the importance of scientific reasoning and critical thinking. In this regard, Skeptical Inquirer is very fortunate to have Ken Frazier, a justly renowned science journalist, as its editor. But other publications and organizations educate the public about science as well. Scientific American, for example, or NPR’s Science Friday program, and so forth. And these publications and programs are not usually considered to be skeptic publications or programs.

In other words, support for science and education about science is one aspect of what we skeptics do, but that doesn’t really make our work distinctive. What does make our work distinctive is attention to controversial and extraordinary claims—those aspects of science that may not receive that much attention from other organizations—from the universities, from the government, from commercial enterprises.

So what are these controversial claims? Perhaps the best way to describe them is just by listing some examples. Here’s a partial list of some controversial claims where skeptics have played both a constructive and a distinctive role: homeopathy, acupuncture, and a dozen other forms of alternative medicine; evolution; genetically modified organisms (GMOs); vaccination; climate change.

When I say these issues are controversial, that does not necessarily mean they are controversial among scientists. For most scientists, the ineffectiveness of homeopathy and acupuncture, the fact of evolution, the safety of GMOs, and the reality of climate change are not especially controversial. But they remain controversial among the general public. This is a crucial point because this highlights why what skeptics do is both important and unique.

The distinction between what most scientists think and what the general public thinks is one reason Horgan is mistaken when he says, for example, that homeopathy is a “soft target.” From a scientific viewpoint, it’s easy to show that homeopathic products are not effective, apart from a placebo effect. Moreover, the underlying theory that is supposed to support the usefulness of homeopathic products is nonsensical and is undercut by a basic knowledge of chemistry. In that sense, homeopathy is a soft target.

But that doesn’t prevent homeopathic products from having a very significant market in the United States and worldwide, especially in Europe. In the United States alone, the homeopathic marketplace brings in roughly $3 billion to $4 billion a year in sales, and about five million adults use homeopathic products more than once each year. Why do people rely on something that scientifically cannot have any effect on their conditions? Several reasons: First, many consumers think it does work, and in some cases, because of a placebo effect, it may provide some perceived relief; second, they do not understand or are not aware of the underlying chemical principles; third—and I believe this is both a critical and an often overlooked reason—homeopathic drugs are marketed just like any other remedy. The consumer sees them on the drugstore shelf alongside conventional products that have been tested and actually have active ingredients, and the consumer not unreasonably thinks a drugstore would not be allowed to sell these products unless they worked, right? Furthermore, for some people, homeopathic products actually have a marketing advantage over conventional drugs because in their ads and on their packaging they can boast of being “natural, safe, and gentle” with “no side effects” because, of course, they have no effects at all, neither direct effects nor side effects.

In addition, because companies can make a significant amount of money selling homeopathic junk, the homeopathic industry is fairly large and influential. No, Boiron and Hyland’s are not Pfizer or Merck, but they are not the mom-and-pop pharmacy down at the corner either. These companies make significant profits, and they vigorously resist any tighter regulation of the marketing of homeopathic products. The science behind homeopathy may be a soft target, but the industry certainly is not.

Speaking of regulation, this brings me to another reason why homeopathy is not a soft target, and this is a reason that also underscores the importance of skeptic organizations. The homeopathic industry has enjoyed the passive support of the government, in particular the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). What do I mean by that? Well, homeopathic drugs are within the purview of the FDA. In fact, on many ads for homeopathic products, or on their packaging, you will see a proud reference to the fact that the drug is “regulated” by the FDA. The ordinary consumer thinks, of course, that this implies the FDA has required this drug to be tested for safety and efficacy. Wrong. Wrong. The FDA does not require homeopathic drug manufacturers to provide evidence of their products’ safety and efficacy. Essentially, in most cases, all the FDA does is require that homeopathic drugs be prepared consistent with the homeopathic pharmacopeia and that the labeling for the drug accurately reflects that fact.

The reasons for this hands-off approach are somewhat complicated but essentially it’s a blend of some of the messy history behind the passage of the original Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (one of the key sponsors was a homeopathic physician) and the FDA’s own decisions about how best to use its limited resources. The scientists at the FDA are under no illusions about the fact that homeopathic drugs cannot be effective. But they believe that these drugs, for the most part, pose no significant danger provided they are used for self-limiting conditions and do not contain nondiluted active ingredients, such as zinc. The FDA has issued warning letters when these conditions have not been met. Just recently, for example, the FDA issued a warning letter advising consumers to stop using homeopathic teething tablets because there were reports of adverse reactions, possibly due to the tablets containing trace amounts of belladonna. Similarly, a few years ago during the avian flu scare, the FDA issued a warning letter instructing homeopathic manufacturers to stop advertising their products as a cure for the flu.

But, for the most part, the FDA gives homeopathic manufacturers a pass—which means that there are millions of people spending money on worthless products. Moreover, in some cases they almost certainly are foregoing conventional medicine to rely on a drug that will do nothing to help them.

In addition, with some exceptions, most scientists are not interested in doing anything about the lack of proper regulatory oversight by the FDA. Why would they be? Why would you run a study trying to see, for example, whether certain homeopathic drugs are really effective? There have been some studies done, but the most comprehensive study was one sponsored by the Australian government. It concluded that there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective. With respect to private researchers, there’s little incentive either to study homeopathy or to campaign against marketing homeopathic drugs. You’re not going to win a Nobel Prize conducting a study that shows that sugar tablets are not an effective treatment.

So this is where skeptics and skeptic organizations can step in: to advocate on issues of public significance where most of the scientific community either does not have much interest or, for other reasons, does not want to take on a prominent advocacy role.

I’m proud to say that during my tenure at CFI and CSI, we petitioned the FDA for tighter regulation of homeopathic products, and in 2015 both the FDA and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which has jurisdiction over product advertising, held hearings on the need for such regulation. We submitted comments to both agencies (you can find them on our website, “CFI and Dawkins Foundation Urge” 2015), and Michael DeDora, CFI’s director of government affairs, testified at the FDA hearing. Interestingly, other than a professor from Georgetown University, Michael was the only witness, as I recall, who argued for tighter regulation. Most of the witnesses at that hearing were representatives of the homeopathic industry.

We are no longer waiting to hear from these agencies. After I first delivered a version of these remarks at CSICon Las Vegas in October, the FTC on November 15 issued an enforcement policy statement that requires homeopathic products to use labeling indicating there is no scientific evidence that they work. Homeopathic products must now indicate in their advertising and labeling that there is no scientific evidence that the product works and the product’s claims are based on theories from the 1700s that are not accepted by most modern medical experts. See News and Comment, this issue, and http://tinyurl.com/z8dmhgt.

I had predicted that we might not hear until after the 2016 election because there could be political fallout if the agencies impose tighter regulation. You can imagine how some politicians would spin it, right? “Obama’s federal government is trying to take away your medicine.” However, I’m cautiously optimistic, especially now that the FTC has made its ruling. Even if the FDA doesn’t require homeopathic drugs to be tested for safety and efficacy, which would effectively mean the end of the homeopathic industry, I am hopeful that it too will require that homeopathic products stop making healthcare claims that cannot be substantiated.

As the marketing of homeopathic drugs indicates, some issues do have a significant impact on the public even though, for one reason or another, the general scientific community may not have a strong interest or may not want to engage in vigorous advocacy. This is especially true in the disputes over various forms of alternative medicine, whether it’s acupuncture, Reiki, cupping, and so on. It’s also true to some extent in disputes over GMOs and evolution. Genetically modified organisms have been studied to death. There is still some basic research to be done perhaps (and obviously each new product has to be separately tested), but the overwhelming evidence is that genetically modified crops are as safe to consume as any other crops. Nonetheless, there is continuing controversy in the United States over GMOs at the federal, state, and local level (and don’t even talk to me about Europe). And, of course, even though the fact of evolution is well-established, there’s still controversy over the teaching of evolution in many areas of the United States. Skeptics and skeptic organizations have a significant role to play in these controversies by helping to ensure, through their advocacy, that public policy, whether it’s government regulation of food ingredients or school board policy on curricula, reflect science and not ideology.

I think I’ve shown that skeptic organizations have a role to play on controversial issues and that, contrary to what John Horgan asserted in his speech, we skeptics don’t just talk to ourselves while poking fun at the gullible.

Let me pivot now to talk about extraordinary claims, claims that may not have that much relevance to public policy but on which a number of skeptics focus their energy. These are claims about bizarre entities, such as Bigfoot, ghosts, and aliens, or extraordinary powers, such as remote viewing, mind reading, and so on. People are, of course, free to spend their time as they see fit, and neither CSI nor any skeptic organization has any authority over what skeptics investigate and evaluate. But why should skeptic organizations devote resources to support investigations of these extraordinary claims?

First, the extent to which skeptics actually devote time to these various issues has been exaggerated. Just look at the topics for speeches and panels at our CSICon conference. Relatively little time has been devoted to these extraordinary claims. You would reach the same conclusion if you looked at the contents of Skeptical Inquirer, especially contents over the last decade. That said, it’s undeniable that this is a set of topics addressed by skeptics and to which CSI and Skeptical Inquirer devote some of their resources. Why? Although you can never refute with absolute certainty any claim about the existence of some entity or power—because then you would be talking about metaphysics, not science—most every skeptic recognizes that it is highly improbable that there are ghosts, a creature such as Bigfoot, chupacabras, or that people have the power to do remote viewing or mind reading.

It is true, of course, that to take just one example, if it were shown that there were ghosts, that would have a very, very significant impact on our understanding of the world. It would imply, among other things, that some people live on in some form after their death. A pretty significant finding. So one could justify some investigation and evaluation of these types of claims on the ground that were they true, that would have an extraordinary impact on how we view the world and ourselves. But that’s a very thin justification. Let me try another one.

Some of you may have heard of the broken windows theory of policing. This is the view that police should not ignore low-level offenses such as loitering or minor vandalism—hence the term “broken windows”—because to do so fosters an atmosphere of lawlessness leading to more serious crimes. Although there is some empirical evidence to support this theory, it’s very controversial in part because of the claim that broken windows policing disproportionately affects minorities and the poor. Please note: I’m not here to defend broken windows policing; I just want to suggest that something analogous may provide justification for critically examining the types of extraordinary claims I’ve mentioned—claims about Bigfoot, ghosts, and so forth.

I don’t have to tell this audience that belief in these paranormal or extraordinary entities and powers is widespread. Depending on the survey one consults, somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent of the American population believes in ghosts; about 30 percent believes in astrology; and more than 30 percent believes in telepathy. Poor Bigfoot usually doesn’t attract quite as much support, typically around 15 percent—but that’s still more than most third-party candidates enjoy!

Still, if gullibility were restricted to believing in ghosts, Bigfoot, or astrology, you might just shrug your shoulders at these numbers and say, so what? Yes, these people are sadly mistaken, but does it really make a difference?

The thing is it does make a difference, not so much because of what they believe, but because of how they come to believe. There are studies showing that the type of intuitive, magical thinking associated with belief in the paranormal and extraordinary entities is also associated with belief in conspiracies and with a difficulty in processing and in understanding science-based reasoning (Lobato et al. 2014). Furthermore, and this is a critical point, there is also some research indicating that getting people to think more analytically can reduce the type of intuitive thinking that leads to belief in the paranormal and in conspiracies (Gervais 2015). In other words, if we want people to be more receptive to science on really important public policy matters, such as regulating alternative medicine, GMOs, and so forth, we can’t ignore the windows that Bigfoot is breaking. We need to inculcate critical thinking with respect to all claims, including claims that in the abstract may not seem that important, so people acquire the habit of using critical thinking on the really important issues.

To sum up, skeptics and skeptic organizations are doing valuable work when they investigate and evaluate both controversial and extraordinary claims. The issues we address are only “soft” targets in the sense that there may be little scientific support for some of these claims. But these claims actually can be very resilient because of ideological support or commercial interests or because the habits of thought of too many people lead them to indulge in intuitive, magical thinking, which makes them susceptible to accepting claims that don’t have scientific support. Although believing in Casper or Sasquatch in isolation may seem harmless, if we leave these claims unrebutted, and if we don’t teach people about the proper way to analyze some of these claims, we are going to have a lot more people believing that 9/11 was an inside job, that climate change is a hoax, that our government is controlled by aliens, and so forth—and those beliefs are far from harmless.

So keep active, keep up the good work, and support organizations such as CFI and CSI so we can continue to advocate for appropriate science-based public policies, and we can continue to educate the general public about the methods of science and evidence-based reasoning.

References

• CFI and Dawkins Foundation Urge FTC to Stop Homeopathy’s False Advertising. 2015. November 23. Available online at http://www.centerforinquiry.net/newsroom/cfi_dawkins_ftc/. This press release has links to CFI’s comments to the FTC and its testimony before the FDA.
• Gervais, Will M. 2015. Overriding the controversy: Analytic thinking predicts endorsement of evolution. Cognition 142: 312–321.
• Horgan, John. 2016. Dear ‘skeptics,’ bash homeopathy and Bigfoot less, mammograms and war more. Scientific American blogs (May 16). Available online at https://blogs.scientific
american.com/cross-check/dear-skeptics-
bash-homeopathy-and-bigfoot-less-
mammograms-and-war-more/.
• Lobato, Emilio, et al. 2014. Examining the relationship between conspiracy theories, paranormal beliefs, and pseudoscience acceptance among a university population. Applied Cognitive Psychology 28: 617–625.

A few years ago, I took up the regular practice of meditation. Sitting in a quiet room, outside at a park, or on the train to work, I would assume an upright relaxed position and focus on my breath. The practice was not about making my mind empty or blank but simply letting my mind be at rest.

As thoughts or feelings inevitably arose, I would observe them without judging them. For example, if a thought about the need to finish a column for this magazine popped into my head, I would silently label the thought “worry,” before returning to focus on my breath. I learned, as psychologists describe, that the contents of my conscientiousness could be observed, and that the accompanying emotional reactions to them were seldom grounded in reality (Brown et al. 2007).

After several months of daily meditation, I noticed significant benefits. Meditation seemed to slow time down, enabling me to live and work in the present rather than worry about the future. I was quicker and more adept at recognizing how unrealistic expectations or unfounded worries were causing unnecessary stress. My sleep and mood improved. I felt happier, more content, and more at ease.

Inspired by my own experience, I began to read widely on the history, philosophy, and science of mindfulness. The story of the movement’s origins, the process by which it has gained scientific legitimacy, and its rise to popularity among well-educated, affluent Americans is fascinating and revealing.

Gaining Popularity and Legitimacy

With its roots in Buddhism, meditation is used widely by health professionals to treat depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, pain, insomnia, eating disorders, relationship problems, and other conditions. Professional athletes use meditation to improve their performance, as do CEOs and Silicon Valley programmers. Meditation is similarly taught in schools and colleges as a way to help students (and teachers) better regulate their emotions, to improve concentration, and to manage stress and anxiety (Harrington and Dunne 2015).

The concept of “mindfulness” traces to the Pali words sati, which in the Indian Buddhist tradition implies awareness, attention, or alertness, and vipassana, which means insight cultivated by meditation. But as the University of British Columbia’s Jeff Wilson (2014) detailed in his book-length study of America’s mindfulness movement, similar breath-attention techniques are found in Tibetan Buddhism and in the Japanese Zen meditation practice of zazen. All three strands of Buddhism influence approaches to mindfulness today.

Historically, in Asian Buddhist cultures, monks and nuns practiced meditation, not the broader population. For the ordained seeking the path to enlightenment, meditation was an instrument to facilitate asceticism, detachment, and renunciation, wrote Wilson (2014). During the mid-nineteenth century, as trade with Asia increased, Westerners began to take an interest in Buddhist teaching by way of pamphlets, books, and journals. Yet despite this interest, meditation did not emerge as a focus in the United States and Europe until the 1960s.

During this decade, reforms in immigration policy enabled hundreds of thousands of Asians to emigrate to the United States, including several prominent Tibetan and Zen missionaries who founded Buddhist centers and toured college campuses. Courses on Buddhism at the university level soon followed, offerings that were popular among students seeking counterculture alternatives to Western paradigms. Some of these students traveled to South Asia to study Buddhism or discovered meditation as part of the Peace Corp. By the 1970s, three main sources of meditation-focused teaching appeared “that would become the most important wellsprings of the American mindfulness movement,” wrote Wilson (2014, 31).

In 1976, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzburg founded the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts. Having studied Buddhism in South Asia, their goal was to create a retreat center that could emulate in an American context what they had experienced. In their teachings, articles, and books, Kornfield, Goldstein, and Salzburg deliberately downplayed elements of chanting, ceremony, and cosmology, noted Wilson (2014). Instead, they focused on meditation and mindfulness, integrating elements of Western psychology and psychotherapy.

The second main force in the rise of mindfulness was the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Exiled from Vietnam, he gained prominence as a speaker and activist against the war during the 1960s. By the mid-1970s, he shifted to focus on the promotion of mindfulness and meditation, publishing the Miracle of Mindfulness and more than 100 subsequent books. Today, some 350 official meditation practice groups are affiliated with Hanh’s teachings. Along with the Dalai Lama, he is the world’s best known Buddhist, noted Wilson (2014), having appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show numerous times and annually touring the United States.

Yet the most influential figure in the acceptance of mindfulness as a secular and scientific practice has been Jon Kabat-Zinn. As a student at MIT, Kabat-Zinn was introduced to meditation by a Zen missionary. He went on to study at the Providence Zen Center, at the Insight Meditation Center, and with Thich Nhat Hanh, drawing on these and other traditions to inform his own approach to teaching mindfulness. After earning a doctorate in molecular biology, Kabat-Zinn in 1979 started a stress reduction center at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, developing an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course.

Kabat-Zinn’s key innovation, noted Wilson (2014) was to take the traditional week-long meditation retreat, inaccessible to those with busy lives, and to offer participants classes that took place once a week for two months. Participants, who usually numbered between thirty-five and forty per course, were assigned guided meditation recordings to use at home for forty-five minutes each day for the duration of the course. They were also instructed on how to be mindful of their breath during their daily activities, expanding the “thread of meditative awareness” into every aspect of their lives (Kabat-
Zinn 2013).

Just as important, the course was able to be offered across clinical and institutional settings. Instructors, many with advanced degrees in the mental health professions, were required to complete an intensive certification process and to keep their training up to date. With the practice of meditation transformed into a clinical intervention, the effects on a range of mental, physical, and behavioral outcomes could be evaluated and published in the peer-reviewed literature.

According to historians Ann Harrington and John Dunne (2015), Kabat-
Zinn recognized that in a secular society, the health sector was where he could have the greatest impact as a Buddhist teacher. “Hospitals and medical centers in this society are Dukkha magnets,” he told a Buddhist magazine in 1991, using the Pali word for suffering. “People are drawn to hospitals primarily when they’re suffering, so it’s very natural to introduce programs to help them deal with the enormity of their suffering in a systematic way—as a complement to medical efforts" (Graham 1991).

Yet to gain legitimacy within the medical community, Kabat-Zinn understood that he needed to strip his approach of any overt religious connections, framing mindfulness as a mental skill acquired through meditation that involves “paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn 2005). By promoting mindfulness, meditation could help patients manage the suffering associated with illness, reasoned Kabat-Zinn, by enabling them to be more accepting of their experience, which in turn would lessen pain, anxiety, and depression. Most would still need traditional medical treatment, but meditation could help speed the recovery process and prepare them to successfully navigate future experiences and decisions (Harrington and Dunne 2015).

Kabat-Zinn had transformed meditation from a practice rooted in Buddhism to that of a scientifically based form of health promotion. Meditation was now the “property of psychologists, doctors, scientists, and diet counselors and to be engaged in by clients rather than believers, who are not expected to take refuge, read scriptures, believe in karma or rebirth, or to become Buddhist,” wrote Wilson (2014).

Technology, the Market, and Mindfulness

Popular interest in meditation and mindfulness blossomed during the 1990s. At Barnes & Noble and Borders, Americans could purchase previously difficult to find magazines such as Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and the Shambala Sun along with books by Goldstein, Kornfield, Salzburg, Hanh, Kabat-Zinn, and many other authors. The Chinese occupation of Tibet, noted Wilson (2014) brought worldwide media attention to the Dalai Lama along with acclaimed Hollywood movies about Tibet such as Seven Years in Tibet, Little Buddha, and Kundun. The 1993 Bill Moyers PBS special Healing and the Mind featured Kabat-Zinn and his MBSR approach, turning his books into best sellers. For sports fans and athletes, Phil Jackson, coach of the champion Chicago Bulls, related in interviews how he had encouraged Michael Jordan and other players to practice meditation.

During the 2000s, with books, talks, and documentaries about mindfulness instantly available via Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube and guided meditations downloadable to smart phones, public interest in mindfulness was set to explode. By 2012, an estimated two million American adults reported having practiced some form of meditation within the past twelve months (Monroe et al. 2017).

Today, more than 600 studies are published annually on meditation and mindfulness. Observational studies evaluate the efficacy of meditation on health-related outcomes and school performance. Other studies investigate how meditation might influence parts of the brain linked to positive emotions, cause some parts of the brain to grow, and be related to changes in brain wave activity among experienced practitioners (Ricard et al. 2014).

Yet as widespread as meditation has become in clinical settings, schools, and the business sector, many of the scientific findings have not yet been sufficiently replicated. Most researchers in the field are enthusiastic meditators themselves, enabling them to apply important insights but also potentially biasing their conclusions. Like in psychology more generally, there is a strong bias toward publication of positive or significant results. The methodological rigor of many studies also remains low with few longitudinal control studies conducted (Tang et al. 2015).

As scientists and researchers continue to resolve uncertainties about the effects of meditation on the brain and health, outside the community of practicing Buddhists, the mindfulness movement remains multidimensional and varied, noted historians Harrington and Dunne (2015). Many health professionals view mindfulness as a powerful medical intervention best taught by trained and credentialed clinicians. Still, many other Americans have come to see it as a form of mental fitness training, applicable in varied ways to boost performance in school, business, or athletics or advance their careers. Other Americans have come to embrace meditation as a practice similar to yoga that is related to overall health or emotional resilience. A few notable others, including Kabat-Zinn, have even started to promote mindfulness as an antidote to our polarized, fractured politics, providing a common basis for recognizing shared values and goals. From this perspective, a sense of interconnectedness begins with mastering the art of conscious living.

References

• Brown, K.W., R.M. Ryan, and J.D. Creswell. 2007. Mindfulness: Theoretical foundations and evidence for its salutary effects. Psychological Inquiry 18(4): 211–237.
• Graham, B. 1991. In the Dukkha magnet zone: An interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn. Tricycle. Available online at http://www.tricycle.com/interview/dukkha-magnet-zone.
• Harrington, A., and J.D. Dunne. 2015. When mindfulness is therapy: Ethical qualms, historical perspectives. The American Psychologist 70(7): 621–631.
• Kabat-Zinn, J. 2005. Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness. United Kingdom: Hachette.
• ———. 2013. Full Catastrophe Living, Revised Edition: How to Cope with Stress, Pain and Illness Using Mindfulness Meditation. United Kingdom: Hachette.
• Monroe, N.E., C.G. Moore, and C.M. Greco. 2017. Characteristics of adults who used mindfulness meditation: United States, 2012. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. doi:10.1089/acm.2016.0099.
• Ricard, M., A. Lutz, and R.J. Davidson. 2014. Mind of the meditator. Scientific American 311(5): 38–45.
• Tang, Y.Y., B.K. Hölzel, and M.I. Posner. 2015. The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 16(4): 213–225.
• Wilson, J. 2014. Mindful America: Meditation and the Mutual Transformation of Buddhism and American Culture. Oxford University Press.

It’s been just over a year since E! Network brought psychic Tyler Henry to our attention, touting him as the real deal on the reality show “Hollywood Medium.” I’ve written about him a few times, here, here, here, here and here. Now it has been announced that Tyler Henry has been given a third season, to be broadcast in May 2017. E! has also announced that Henry has a new batch of celebrities to read, including ex-CNN “victims’ rights” lawyer Nancy Grace, who frankly should know better than to support a grief vampire like Henry. That will be another article for another day; it is never ending.

Tyler Henry mostly reads celebrities. Usually ones who are hosted on the E! Network. The main dialog throughout the “Hollywood Medium” series is that Henry does not know who these celebrities are when he reads for them. That could possibly have been true at the beginning of 2016 when he was first starting out, but the claim is getting a bit old now that he is often in the entertainment news along with these same celebs he’s reading for. Of course he knows who they are! It’s not like he’s living in an isolated room with no Internet or TV access. I don’t know how much longer they are going to be able to keep saying he knows no celebrities. Maybe they have a new angle this season?

Past shows portray Henry as a naïve young man who is genuine and adorable, and never knows anyone he reads. In fact, they go to a lot of trouble to include footage of him talking about how he did not know each person beforehand. I think Shakespeare’s “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” applies here. If Henry is aware of the person beforehand, then what he is doing is called a hot-read, and is a popular method psychics use to get information from “the other side,” when really the information came from a Google search.

I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Tyler Henry, and I might be alone in thinking that what is going on with his readings has nothing to do with Google and everything to do with cold-reading. Of course, this is just my opinion after having been involved in investigating psychics for years and watching a lot of Henry’s readings, but I think that I have some good evidence to support my claim.

E! Network uploaded a YouTube video of Henry giving a fan a reading that has been viewed 266,418 times. There are 1,519 likes and 101 dislikes, along with 763 comments. Some of the comments are from the sitter, Jamie Horn, who says about her reading “It was amazing and emotional!” Yes, I bet it was. Horn won the reading from a Facebook contest. It was an all-expense paid trip, and even more importantly her father came through in the reading and said he was not worried about her at all. That must have been exhilarating.

Horn insists in the YouTube comments that only the promotion company knew who she was. How this promotion company works with the person they are promoting is unknown, however it makes sense that they want to get the best possible video out of it for … promotion, obviously.

Hot-reading through Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and any social media site is always a possibility. Mediums have been finding out information that “no one could have known” ever since people have been claiming that they are in communication with the dead. How hard is it to look at someone’s Facebook page to glean a bit of “assurance,” just in case the spirits are a bit groggy?

In this specific reading with Jamie Horn, I don’t think there is any hot-reading going on. Instead what I think is that, with a close look at the actual reading, we can see that there are almost no specific hits, some very general statements and lots of leading the sitter to giving up the information themselves. Information that Henry just regurgitates back to the sitter as if he knew it all along. Statements like “Who was David?” “David was my brother” Henry smiles and nods, “Yes, that is what he is saying, he is your brother.”

As Horn said in her comments, “It was amazing and emotional!”; it truly is. She does not have the ability at that moment to pause, back up, and really think about what he is saying. She isn’t even able to ask questions or take notes. We have that ability. I can sit here at my desk and watch and rewatch sections of the video repeatedly. I can look at her expressions and body language and take notes all the way through. I can sit here smugly with the luxury of knowing how this is done and ridicule Horn for being so gullible. Really, though, that smugness does not sit well with me. It is disquieting to watch another human being led through an emotional roller-coaster ride, having her memories of her family rewritten by this grief vampire. It is ugly to watch as he brings her to tears over and over again. She is not stupid; she is just uninformed. Possibly she was raised thinking this is normal. If mediums could really communicate with the dead, why do we have so many missing persons and unsolved crimes?

I don’t know if you are familiar with the Columbo TV movie series. One of my favorite episodes was loosely based on the relationship between Uri Geller and James Randi, called “Columbo Goes to the Guillotine.” It was released in 1989 and deals with a remote viewer (the Geller character) trying to get himself hired by the U.S. Government. The stunt that was pulled off by the remote viewer was amazing, and Columbo had no idea how it was done. He then meets a young magician and after explaining it to the kid, asks how he thought it was done. The kid says that he did not know how, but the way to figure it out was to always remember “it is a trick. Once you start with that premise, you can eventually work it out.”

So here I am, about to break down this reading in detail. Well actually not in detail here, only a few hardcore readers will want to read the minutia of detail that goes on behind the scenes. For those few people, I have a link to my notes located HERE. For everyone else, let’s break down the reading broadly so you can see what I see. The simplest solution is that this is a trick, so keep that in mind and the solution will become obvious.

The reading given to Horn can be summed up, for the sake of brevity, into three sections: First Impressions, The Reading, and Platitudes.

First Impressions: He knows nothing but what he can see, smell, and observe of her body language. Her age, ethnicity, accent, jewelry, style, and so much more go into how to approach this woman. Henry has been doing this for only a year or so; he is picking up the skill as he goes. As he does more of these readings, he will get better.

The first thing Henry does is set up the parameters for the reading. He tells her that 80 percent of the time she will hopefully understand the reading, and 20 percent will be something she will have to think about or ask family about later. I guess he is feeling pretty confident that he will be accurate 100 percent of the time. I love it when numbers are used; it gives us something to use for evaluation.

Henry starts by offering two talkative women and an older man. He is watching Horn’s body language, and she clearly wants to hear from the older man. Henry steers in that direction.

The older man has a sense of humor, is a sweet guy, does not tell long funny stories but little funny ones, likes to have fun, focuses on the moment, and does not want the family to focus on his health issues. And that is all. No mention of how this older man knows Horn, no names, no cause of death or anything specific about a year of birth/death or mentions Horn’s mother, siblings or, well … much of anything.

But Horn jumps on it, giving positive feedback, and is all smiles. Henry then, apparently stumped about what to do next, asks her for details about this person and their death.

This man, who Henry has now learned is Horn’s father, wants to acknowledge a Bob, Bobby or Robert. Horn explains that her husband’s name is Robert. Sounds like a hit, right? I’m sure Horn will spin it unknowingly that way. She probably thinks her father reached out to her husband Robert. But Henry did not say the older man was her father, he learned that when Horn said so. And Henry did not say that Robert was her husband; he was throwing out names and she claimed it. How common is a name like Robert? According to Social Security databases, Robert has been in the top five most popular male names in America for decades. Adding Bob and Bobby as well as saying “who is … ,“ and not stating if this is a living person or someone on the other side, or a pet or what have you, really ups the odds that Horn is going to supply a hit for the name.

Next is a series of complete misses. Horn did not react to any of these statements other than with a “maybe” statement. Henry did not feel like she gives him a strong response so he moves on after each of these.

He is seeing a mining shaft … someone lives in a mining town … old wood not in use any more … somebody lived near an abandoned mining shaft … or an abandoned well … something in the dirt or the ground.

Horses, “he’s having me bring up the horses … a female … was bucked off a horse or kicked off a horse … a childhood incident … I’m seeing Idaho … or going more in that direction.” Horn had already told Henry she was raised in Idaho, so this isn’t a hit.

“Do you know anyone with any Lynn connections?”

A child on the other side that did not live a full life. “Doesn’t look like the kind of situation where the child is kind of really born in the traditional sense and this is a loss that would have been traumatic to a woman … If someone suffered a miscarriage, a stillborn, or had a child that was birthed and died shortly after ... SIDS.”

Horn reacts positively to the SIDS reference. Sounds like Henry got it right, what a hit! Wrong, what is left to throw out there? I suppose if Horn had not reacted to the SIDS comment, then Henry could have kept going by suggesting a child that died after its first birthday, or died young after its second birthday, its third birthday, before it was a teenager. I guess at any time Henry could also have moved on to something else if he didn’t feel confident about where he was going with this. Oddly, Henry never mentions if it was a baby boy or girl, and no names. Not of his first wife or the baby, or anyone that would be associated with the child.

“Older female … who passed away of … feminine based cancer … Pat or Patricia … keep in mind breast or susceptibility to breast cancer or … female cancers … Pat, Patty, Patricia?”

“Older lady … she's having to bring up these rings … someone might have taken a piece of jewelry and then altered it into a different piece of jewelry.”

A woman comes through with mental decline; she is really independent and hated that she lost her mental abilities near the end. She was “experiencing some personality kind of stuff and a bit of a change … given a medication that makes them different … didn't die of Alzheimer's or dementia ... Forgetting.”

“Who had the stroke and then survived?”

“Who is Ellen or Helen … getting a very strong E sounding female name … unless I have the sides switched … or Elaine.”

“The teacher thing”

The next long exchange was more of the same, with Henry giving general questions and Horn trying very hard to make sense of them and claim them as family members.

Her father is “having me bring up the younger female in the family ... I don’t know the exact relation he would be to her ... a living family member ... going through a time of transition ... he’s watching over her." Then Henry gives a list of things for Horn to try to hit on. Watching her body language, she is struggling to make sense of it. “Going to college ... a decision to move ... a big shift or a big situation in their personal life ... a time of transition ... concerns over her ... struggling emotionally ... going through a rough patch.” And he "can’t establish the age range of this person." Henry finally asks Horn "who would be the youngest female within your family or anyone that you could think of as like fitting that bill? ... someone he would view like a daughter or like a granddaughter?"

Horn answers "my niece, Nicki ... possibly" Henry asks how old is Nicki. She replies "thirty-five, but she has a daughter that’s twenty-one that’s going to college." This would be his great-granddaughter. A quick calculation shows that her mother would have been about fourteen when the child was born, so keep that in mind with these next statements from Henry. Great-grandpa was a father figure to this female who is independent and needs help from the family; she is not getting the help she needs; he asks "is the father involved in this girl's life?" Horn replies "not really."

Now that Henry is on surer ground with this storyline; he says that great-great-grandpa acknowledged that the girl's father isn't in her life. The girl (still unnamed) is going through an academic as well as a residential shift ... she will go to school with one major and then shift it ... it will happen; it may have already happened ... Great-grandpa is joking about her love life, telling her to not to get to serious with anyone.

So this younger female is both independent and not independent at the same time. She is in college and experiencing an academic shift. She is going to change her major, or maybe already has. Her father isn't a part of her life. Remember, her mother was about fourteen when the child was born, so maybe not a strong relationship with her father? How vague is all this? Why doesn't Great-grandpa give this child some real advice, maybe tell her what major she should go for? What career is she going to have later on?

Why doesn't he know her name? Tell her the name of the person she will fall in love with? Steer her away from bad decisions, bad people ... didn't he say he was watching over her? That isn't creepy at all, is it?

This next exchange took Henry a while to get through. If you are just watching the video once, you might think they are amazing hits. But once you watch the reading more than once and take notes, you will see that nothing but what appears to be cold-reading is happening. When Horn tells Henry information, Henry repeats it back saying “yes, that is what I’m hearing” statements.

One is a woman who was not ready to die yet. This is something that Henry stays on for a very long time. In her YouTube comments, Horn says that this was really convincing, as he heard from her sister and answered a lot of questions about her death. Pay really close attention to what Henry really says. I think when I break it down you will see that he says almost nothing about the questions of her death, and didn't even know it was her sister until she tells him.

"A female who … is dying too soon." Horn smiles and said "yes." Henry says she did not die in her 80s or 90s. She is very unhappy because she thinks she died too soon. Henry thinks he is on the right track, and Horn agrees. She was too young to die, and she was not ready to go. Horn keeps agreeing with this. Henry says that this woman was looking forward to the upcoming year and to family. She had a career and things to look forward to. Horn says, "You’re right on."

Henry asks "Do you know if she was looking forward to anything specifically ... coming up that you can recall?" Horn replies, "I'm not sure. I will say things were going really well for her." Henry says that he is seeing money signs, like a promotion at work. Horn agrees. She felt secure in her life, and that more security was coming. She did not want to go.

"She is having me refer to being alone ... she had just talked to someone right before she had passed." All through this exchange Henry keeps repeating that she wasn't ready to die yet and that he keeps getting messages that are "so weird" and then Henry said that he is going "to get to the bottom of this." Horn keeps smiling and agreeing.

Then Henry starts saying again that she was alone, it was quick, and she was at home. And that she apologizes for the discovery. Horn acknowledges again, but Henry really does not know where to go with this so he changes tactics. He brings in two children, a boy and a girl. We do not know if this is the first time we are hearing about these children, as there are forty minutes missing from this reading and we are nearing the end, so possibly in the missing minutes he discovers that Horn has two children, a boy and girl.

The woman, who did not want to go yet, wants to acknowledge two kids that are not her kids but "like her kids." Then after Horn says "yes," Henry says these are nieces or nephews. And then there will be a third child. Horn looks really confused at this point; it seems that the two children are Horn's own kids, and as she is in her 50s, it is pretty unlikely that she is going to be having a third child. But she smiles, and Henry moves on.

The woman now says that she was not awake or aware when she passed. Then a house alarm is going off—"keep it in mind." No idea what that was about, but Horn laughs and agrees to keep it in mind. The woman "is having me refer to a female J name." Horn says, "that is me."

The woman keeps talking about being alone, being at home, and wanting to stay at home. She was not conscious when she passed and did not know why she passed.

Let’s pause here for a minute before we continue with this woman who did not want to die yet. What do we know? Well it seems to be Horn's sister and she died alone at home, in her sleep. She does not know how she died; some kind of mystery, even Horn does not know what happened. Oddly her sister does not know her own name or Jamie's name—just that it starts with a J, and she also doesn’t know her niece’s or nephew's names. Not her city, year, street name, career, or anything. Zilch. It's almost like he is just making this up. Sounds like a woman that died in her sleep and no one knows why. She talked to someone before she died, but what does that mean? A phone call, the doorman, a neighbor, someone at work ... and "before" means what? An hour? A day? It means whatever Horn wants it to mean. I've just re-listened to this exchange again; he does NOT mention a phone call. He clearly says, "She had just talked to someone right before she had passed." Horn and the YouTube commenters keep insinuating that Henry said she was talking to someone on the phone ... nope!

Finally, Henry gives up and asks Horn "where ultimately did she actually pass away?" Horn explains that her sister left the house at 1 a.m. in the rain, wearing all black and walked about a mile from the house. She crossed the street, and was hit and killed instantly by a car. The family does not know where she was going, but the autopsy showed that she had been drinking.

Henry agrees with all of this, and said that it was not a suicide but he feels a lot of "emotional up[s] and down[s]."

Henry mentions “they’re having me talk about the Bill connection again. So, Bill was who now?” Horn replies that Bill was her father’s brother. Apparently about forty minutes are missing from the reading, and this was something that happened during that edit. If it were amazing, then the editors would have left it in.

“There’s also an acknowledgement of a Tom … connected to Bill … it could even be a middle name.”

And now to the platitudes. Key the feel-good music. I’m not kidding that when you watch Henry’s show “Hollywood Medium,” they play music to tell you when to tear up and get that aww feel-good moment. Her father talks about how when he was dying he did not want a “tube,” and how happy he is for his daughter. He never worries about her and knows that she will be fine. He is at peace, he loves her, and everything is fine.

I want to mention that Tyler Henry was going to become a hospice nurse before he got picked up by E! Network. He would know all about how people near the end of their life have tubes in their noses and mouths and how uncomfortable it is. I remember him telling Jodie Sweetin about how her grandmother hated the tubes also, and wanted them removed. I wonder how common that is, but it sounds impressively detailed to a sitter who is looking to believe in what is being said.

What was missing might be as important as what was said. Henry missed anything that could be considered specific. He never knew anyone’s names, careers, years of death or birth, hobbies, nothing. Everything he threw out was general, and he expected Horn to come up with the answers; who had a stroke, what is it about horses, the teacher thing, wedding rings, and altered jewelry. These are statements that will fit pretty much anyone if you are general enough. The names he mentioned are all common names (see the Social Security Database for popular names): Robert, Bob, Bobby, Tom, Ellen, Helen, Elaine, Pat, Patty, Patricia, and Lynn.

Living family members are being waved at by dead family members, but there’s nothing like “Sara is doing so well in school, I watch her play the piano in church and am so proud of her good grades.” Nothing like that at all.

As far as his stats are concerned, it’s really difficult to say how many things he got wrong. Do we count every time he mentions something? Bob, Bobby, and Robert—is that three wrong or just one? How can you even measure a statement with no specificity?

What Henry did get right was that Horn wanted to hear from an older male. He eventually got her to tell him that it was her father, and the details of his death. The father acknowledged a younger female that is in college, and eventually he told Horn that he was happy for her. The other thing that Horn believes Henry was correct on was that he reached her sister and answered questions about her death. But we now know that isn’t true at all. He reached a woman who was not ready to die, and then he extracted the rest of the details from Horn herself.

It’s all very sad. The released reading was forty minutes long. Horn said the entire reading was eighty minutes long, and I believe her. The editors of this video have every incentive to leave in the very best parts of the reading, the best of the best. I can imagine how tedious the missing parts must be. Psychic expert Mark Edward often says, “The real magic happens in the editing room.”

I’m sure that this detailed breakdown is unlikely to convince anyone who wasn’t already convinced that psychics can’t really communicate with the dead. But what I hope it does do is prove that, in this case, Tyler Henry does not need to know anything about the sitter beforehand to provide a believable reading. Horn and other Henry supporters, according to the comments on YouTube, are 100 percent behind this reading, calling it “fabulous” and Henry “the real thing.” To people like myself, who are interested in the methods of psychic mediums, this video (and all the other readings I’ve seen Henry perform) convince me that the statements made are equivalent to a person performing a cold-read.

If I had to score this reading, I would give Tyler Henry a big fat zero.

Thank you to Doug Dean for help with the transcripts; Mark Honeychurch and Stuart Jones for the editing and proofreading. Mark Edward for his expertise and support, and to the Chamberboys YouTube channel for bringing this video to my attention.

To introduce you to the kind of really silly material that I regularly receive for consideration and can deal with only briefly, I ask you to consider this item: From Paris, France, I received a 102-page book—in French. Its title translates as: Released from Mathematics, to Finally Know What the Universe Really Is, Concretely, and How It Works.

For clarification, I’ve made very minor changes to the two paragraphs from the letter that accompanied the book so that you’ll have some idea of what really advanced nut-stuff can do to the human brain. Selected from that letter, written to me in English for my convenience:

Here is the explanation of what the “memory” of water is, and consequently homeopathy, and finally the complete and definitive explanation of what is really, concretely the universe, which, among other factors, at last goes to make the “paranormal” normal.

That “explanation” continued, with portions shown here exactly as emphasized in the original document. Prepare yourself:

The universe being only inter-reactions between frequencies of pulsation (of vibration) of atoms and of molecules, the “memory” of water (like that of other bodies), and consequently homeopathy, explains itself by the fact that water, the molecule of water (as that of other bodies) has this property to “espouse” the frequency of pulsation (of vibration) of other molecules put into contact with it, molecules which then can thus leave it while having left in it their frequency of pulsation (of vibration)—beneficial frequency in the case of homeopathy. It is all and it is all that makes the universe, the inter-reactions between the frequencies of pulsation (of vibration) of the atoms and the molecules, continuously in pulsation (vibrations).

And it went on and on in the same vein. Mercifully, I’ll allow the author to remain anonymous.

In 2012, I received by mail an “evaluation/promotion” copy of a 217-page book, Crystal Clear—subtitled, “The end of the world is not nigh. It is now!” No index of the contents, of course. . . . It deals with a hoax involving “Skully,” a beautiful life-sized human skull said to have been fashioned out of a solid piece of quartz. Advance Bummer: Skully was made of clear acrylic plastic.

This object, we’re told, had been presented to “3,912 professional psychics” over a period of six years and was given 1,735 “channeling” sessions by these “experts,” who were asked to determine the age, the source, and the general history of the object. Apparently, not one of these authorities experienced an epiphany that would’ve told them it was a fake only a few years old. Instead, we’re told, they all produced colorful stories—using their own preferred brands of supernaturalism—in attempting to divine the less-than-divine truth about Skully. This means—if all holidays are suspended, no weekends off—Skully was examined about twice a day, every day, for 2,192 days, which is six years! I find this difficult to believe, but—as always—I’ll try.

Richard T. Cole, the author of the book—who I cannot find among the plethora of Richard T. Coles on the Internet—notifies the reader that he’s disguised the names of all participants mentioned in the publication, often at the demands of lawyers. While the contents of the book provide some entertainment, they also evoke a certain sadness about the fact that grown people will involve themselves in such useless activity. There were many obvious clues that required no paranormal powers to provide suspicion about the qualifications of Skully as an ancient artifact. For example, no one seems to have tried scratching the artifact, which would have revealed that it’s made of relatively soft acrylic plastic that was easily scratched—while quartz is very, very, hard. Also, it weighed just 44 percent as much as a similar quartz object would; think of the weight of a solid stone skull, and I’m sure that you would probably have been sufficiently alerted.

The literary skills of Mr. Cole seem to be compromised by basic misunderstandings of how the real world works. He wrote, “The flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Scotland can trigger a hurricane in Sicily.” This naive concept of a poetic idea, enhanced by his incomplete grasp of optics, basic physics, and science, may have rather limited Cole’s analysis of Skully. Nevertheless, the book is still fascinating due to the examples of human frailty it relates.

We’re now bombarded by quack claims from every direction, even in advertisements for well-recognized quality items that have chosen to join the noisy ducks. The Philip Stein line of high-quality wristwatches got my attention when I saw their product name subtitled, “Natural Frequencies Inside.” What “unnatural frequencies” might be, I could not imagine. Reading on, I found:

Relax. Wear a Philip Stein. Our Natural Frequency Technology has key frequencies to life and health. Customers report benefits of better sleep, less stress, increased focus and improved overall well-being—we simply call it the Feel Good Watch.

This blurb was accompanied by an illustration with a mirror-image of the back of the watch that revealed two gold buttons labeled “Natural Frequency Technology,” both of which are countersunk into the watch-casing and therefore cannot make contact with the wearer’s wrist! Though I’m not about to buy one of these wonders of technology to find out, I doubt that there’s any wiring inside that transmits those beneficial “vibes” to the owner. Perhaps an interested reader might pursue that inquiry.

A confident, purring, female in a beautifully presented vocal ad explains as much as Phil is ever going to provide for us (my punctuation inserted):

Philip Stein’s “well-being technology” was engineered to help us re-connect with Nature. Our natural frequency technology acts like an antenna which is fine-tuned to pick up those natural frequencies that are most beneficial to human well-being. Live in tune. Philip Stein.

It goes without saying that a substantial reward should of course be available to the Philip Stein people, but I believe that they might have a certain reluctance to have their vapid claim examined. In any case, the “frequencies” mentioned are not defined as audible, vibrational, electromagnetic, or of some other cosmic origin, but the naïfs who are drawn in by such an ad wouldn’t know the difference anyway. They only have money from which they obviously can be parted, and I’m sure that the Stein company doesn’t much care.

Consider: the official Philip Stein page states, re their “iconic brand”:

. . . 2002 . . . marked the first time in history that frequency-based technology had been incorporated in a luxury watch brand. . .The Natural Frequency Tech­nology in Philip Stein watches are [sic] key frequencies beneficial to life and health. The frequencies embedded in Philip Stein watches provide information to the biofield that makes the person wearing a Philip Stein watch more resilient and adaptable to stress.

Within a year of the official launch of Philip Stein watches, the company was overwhelmed by testimonials—better sleep, less tension, improved concentration and improved overall wellbeing. But perhaps the most important endorsement came in 2003 when media giant Oprah Winfrey featured the watch on her “Oprah’s Favorite Things” show.

Better sleep, less stress, improved performance, overall wellbeing…

Well, if Oprah supports this claim, we can’t disbelieve! But moving along to an even greater and startling scientific discovery made by Phil:

Today, Philip Stein watches are sold in 25 countries around the world. The product line has expanded to include a wide range of styles. And, the company has taken its technology one step further, to include lifestyle accessories, including the Philip Stein Wine Wand. The wand uses a mix of natural frequencies to accelerate the “breathing” process of wine, making it ready to drink in minutes.

I obviously need a Stein Wand. Don’t we all? How I’ve muddled along without one for so long, I can’t imagine. I was driven to compare the price of a genuine Harry Potter Wand—with its far greater spectrum of attributes—to the Philip Stein Wine Wand. At $49.95, Harry’s product works just as well as Phil’s—which goes for $525—and Harry’s seems far more versatile.

Now, I’m much less enthused about the sort of science that I encounter in the press and on television, and the Information Age has become a possible enemy rather than a friend, as we once thought it would—and certainly could—be. Any nonsense that powerful people such as Oprah Winfrey choose to promote is featured as fact, quackery is extolled, and pseudoscience is flaunted in news media rather than on pulp magazine racks.

The woo-woo field being so bizarre, it’s sometimes difficult to spot the simple pranks. For example, there was a 2001 study published in a year-end issue of the British Medical Journal (now titled BMJ) that used the records of 3,393 patients who were being treated for blood infections at the Rabin Medical Center, the second-largest such facility in Israel, to study retroactive intercessory prayer (RIP). Yes, you read that correctly: retroactive intercessory prayer. Just try to think what that means, folks. Unfortunately, it’s the sort of thing that parapsychologists can easily take in stride. To compound the alleged miraculous power of prayer itself, those experimental prayers were performed several years after the patients had either already left the hospital alive or had died from their bloodstream infections! Nonetheless, three primary outcomes—mortality, length of stay in the hospital, and duration of fever—were all found to have been significantly improved in the intervention group, implying that prayer can even change events in the past. The author concluded that “Remote, retroactive intercessory prayer was associated with a shorter stay in hospital and a shorter duration of fever in patients with a bloodstream infection.”

Then, to the profound relief of those real scientists—and to myself—who, I admit with some embarrassment, had not readily detected the joke, the author ended his paper with this huge paragraph, though I must say that he’d assumed more perception by readers than I might have assumed:

Discussion

By now it should be abundantly clear to most readers that the reported study and its results are entirely fictitious. However, despite this irreverent satire, we believe that it might actually be worthwhile doing a large-scale retroactive prayer study of the kind discussed here, just for the sake of testing what we regard as an extremely improbable reality, i.e., a “God signal” that would manifest itself in the manner exemplified here—for certain combinations of prayer and prayee. Some have suggested that the notion of retroactive prayer is so preposterous that researchers need not waste their time investigating it. Others have pointed to instances in physics in which nonlocal interactions in quantum theory or alleged connections between consciousness and quantum theory make this possibility worth an empirical look. Although these latter connections are entirely speculations, and frowned on by nearly all physicists as being without substance (most would use stronger words), I do not believe one needs to invoke such metaphysics to justify an empirical test. For example, if it were true that a personal God exists who sometimes grants prayers, retroactive prayers are just as easy for Him to grant as proactive ones, and they do not require backwards in time signals from the prayee, since God knew who was going to be prayed for all along…

There was more, but this point is clearly made: there are scientific “papers” published regularly all over the world that are comparable to this one—without any discussion/disclaimer. They’re meant to be taken seriously, and they often are. The utter foolishness, the juvenile approach, the presumption of these “papers” makes them tissue-thin and patently transparent (multiple puns intended) to anyone with a trace of critical thinking operating for them. Serious journals continue to publish these useless items; the media grab them up and exploit them; and woo-woo is given another boost so that the quacks and frauds can continue to perpetuate their chosen opulent lifestyles.

In that issue of the BMJ, the author eventually—officially—admitted that his paper had been a joke, an understood and expected seasonal feature of this otherwise very sober publication, and in the next year they ran similar discussions on RIP and the possibility of quantum physics being involved.

And I trust that the subtle “RIP” acronym was not lost on my readers.

One winter evening a few years ago, G.F., a banker in Cesena, Italy, was traveling with his wife in the Apennines Mountains. Their destination was the hut that the two owned within the Lama Forest. Since it had snowed and the road was getting icy as they climbed, the banker decided to stop the car to apply tire chains. As he was about to begin, the man realized he was not alone. A few meters away from him in the fresh snow there was something unusual.

Instinctively, the banker took out his cell phone and took a picture with the flash on. In the grainy image, there is a creature with human features on its hands and knees, perhaps busy eating snow, looking at the viewer. There’s only one problem: the creature looks smaller than normal and resembles in every way an elf, including its elongated ears.

On August 2, 2001, Mr. Pierluigi Ricci went to the Command Station Bagno di Romagna of Forestry to make a very peculiar complaint. As he was about to drink from a well within the Armina Park, Mr. Ricci said there came upon him “a being high around 25 centimeters that I consider to be a ‘gnome’ of the woods.”

He then gave a fairly detailed description of it: human appearance and clothing consisting of a blue jacket, brown pants, beige fur boots, red and white beard; in other words, a textbook gnome.

Are these perhaps jokes or the ravings of mad men? The State Forestry doesn’t seem to think so, since an Italian news agency, Adnkronos, found a green folder of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry created about fifteen years ago titled “Gnomes and Fairies of the Woods.”

It contains information, reports, and photographic material relating to alleged sightings of mysterious creatures in the woods. All of them concentrated, curiously, in a particular area: the Apennines between Tuscany and Romagna, in particular around the area of ​​several municipalities such as San Piero in Bagno and Bagno di Romagna.

“We receive all kinds of reports,” says Stefano Cazora, chief press officer of the State Forestry Corps. “In this case, the gnome is seen as a guardian of nature, just like our Corp is recognized as the environmental protector.”

Origins of the Fairies

Sightings of fairies and gnomes are far from a contemporary discovery. The origin of fairies can be traced back to the figure of the Parcae of classical mythology, otherwise known in Latin as Fatum, and it was in the Middle Ages that their appearance became that of young girls with pointy hats; the addition of wings came only in the Victorian era.

It was slightly later that the first and most famous “sighting” photo in history came, made famous in the 1920s by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle came into possession of photographs taken at the English village of Cottingley by two girls and was amazed when he saw that they portrayed some fairies in flight and even a gnome handing a flower to one of the girls. He dedicated articles and a book, The Return of the Fairies, to the episode.

In more recent times, fairies have appeared in photographs and even home videos, always very grainy and shot in poor lighting conditions. In 2008 in Argentina, for example, a video surfaced that kids shot one night where a gnome, with his typical pointy hat, can be seen jumping to the side. The film was taken seriously, especially by some British newspapers, but it turned out to be a hoax.

The Fruit-Like Creatures

If fairies and gnomes really existed, however, we should occasionally find their remains because, as living creatures, it is assumed that sooner or later they too must die. In reality, strolling in the woods or during a picnic, one can find carcasses of other, far more familiar, woodland creatures, such as squirrels, rabbits, or sparrows—yet never the dead body of a fairy or an elf. Yet, according to some, the bodies of some fairies were actually found. In a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok, Thailand, there is a glass case in which are stored the tiny bodies of what seem to be two little deformed fetuses. There they are known as “Naree Pon,” which, according to local legends, are hybrids of plants and animals. They are born like fruit from a tree and then transform into beautiful female creatures that live only a few days. Aside from these two specimens, however, it does not appear that any have ever been found.

April Fool’s Tricks

In March 2007, a man taking his dog for a walk in Derbyshire, England, stumbled upon the tiny body of a mummified humanoid creature, about twenty centimeters long and with a pair of wings. The uproar caused by the news died down only when it was learned that it was an April Fool’s joke. The dehydrated fairy was in fact the work of a creator of tricks and illusions for magicians, Dan Baines, who had published the photos on his website, receiving more than 20,000 visits in one day. Baines revealed the joke on April 1 of that year.

The Cottingley fairy photographs taken by the girls also began as a joke that got out of hand. They had drawn and carved in some cardboard the silhouettes of fairies and a gnome, photographing them using their father’s camera. It was intended to be just an innocent joke for the family, but the photos ended up in the hands of Doyle, who took them for genuine. Embarrassed, the girls kept the secret for fifty years and only when everyone involved had already died did they decide to reveal the hoax.

Figments of Imagination

When the fairy report or image is not based on deception—however innocent and playful—how can we explain the sightings? Sometimes, especially in the dark or in a forest, we can catch the sight of some animal or form, and the power of suggestion turns it into a creature of the imagination. At other times, it’s the photos themselves that unleash the imagination: the more the picture is grainy and blurred, the more easily our brains find a meaning. It is the classical mechanism known as pareidolia, the cause of many UFOs, ghosts, Marian, and fairies sightings.

As for the Ranger files, the provincial command of Forlì-Cesena made it clear that there are no recent sightings and that it is not exactly an open case file, since there are no elements for an official crime or offense. It’s just an outdated dossier collecting stories that, at the time, encouraged local newspapers’ attention but ended up forgotten after a while.

However, these stories had at least one result: stimulating a brand new form of tourism. In Bagno di Romagna, a “path of the gnomes” theme walk has become popular, and another hiking area where nature hikes mix with fairy tales has been named after Mentino, a popular gnome. Fairies and gnomes are only figments of the imagination, but if they can encourage people to rediscover and preserve the authentic wonders of nature, they are welcome. And then—who knows—maybe one day we could even find some unknown “little people” actually hiding in our gardens.

The Rossdale Fairies

That was exactly what seemed to happen when, in 2014, newspapers reported that a professor in Manchester, John Hyatt, had photographed a group of small creatures, oddly looking like fairies, in flight. The picture indeed showed small winged creatures whose bodies resemble that of tiny human beings.

His images were “genuine and have not been altered in any way,” he told the newspapers. “The message to people is to approach them with an open mind. There are stranger things in life than fairies, and life grows everywhere” (Slater 2014).

However, after examining the photographs, Erica McAlister, an expert on insects at the Natural History Museum in London, recognized them. “My first impression was they can’t be fairies as there is no wand. But that is like saying mosquitoes aren’t flies because they don’t look like your typical house fly, so I had to approach this more taxonomically” (Freeborn 2014).

She finally identified the insects as “small swarming midges such as chironomids” that resemble mosquitoes but have longer limbs. They possess a more slender body and long slender legs that, in flight, hang down, in fact, resembling the limbs of a human being. “There are many undescribed species on the planet,” says McAlister, “and who knows what lies out there—we are still determining new species all the time, including large mammals. But as far as I know, no magical beings have turned up yet. Personally, I’m holding out for a unicorn.”

References

Freeborn, Amy. 2014. The Rossendale Fairies—a scientific tale of small proportions. Nature Plus, Natural History Museum, April 2. Available online at http://www.nhm.ac.uk/natureplus/blogs/behind-the-scenes/2014/04/04/the-rossendale-fairies--a-scientific-tale-of-small-proportions?fromGateway=true.

Slater, Chris. 2014. Pictured: Professor says he has photographic proof fairies are real. Manchester Evening News (April 2). Available online at http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/fairies-john-hyatt-rossendale-valley-6909619.

Strange mysteries may be found almost anywhere, but they seem especially plentiful and interesting in Australia. I investigated several during my first (2000) and second (2016) trips Down Under (including New Zealand on the latter). And I only scratched the surface. In addition to the several articles that have resulted—some old and some more recent (e.g., Nickell 2001; 2016)—I offer three diverse mysteries I chanced upon in Queensland: a dramatic event that sparked thoughts of UFOs, a “haunted” historic inn, and an alleged miracle-working saint. Here is my take on each.

Mystery Hole Down Under

It happened on a Saturday night, September 26, 2015, when something took a monstrous bite out of a beach at Inskip Point north of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. There was a thunder-like noise, and an entire campsite began to quickly disappear. People escaped with their lives, but some vehicles, including one with an attached “caravan” (camper), were lost to “Davy Jones’s Locker” (Gorrie 2015). Alarm spread to nearby campsites, and officials evacuated an initial 140 people, though the number later grew to an estimated 300 (Tran and Thackray 2015).

The incident, as a local newspaper noted, “attracted interest around the world” (Gorrie 2015). Internet sources adapted the story. For instance, UFO News asked, “What caused the earth to open and take a huge bite out of Inskip Point?” (Stokes 2015). A psychic even suggested it might be a sign of the Biblical “end times” (Walker 2015). This was enough for Queensland parliament member Tony Perrett to warn against wild speculation, as an investigation into the cause continued (“Call to Stay Calm” 2015).

A couple of weeks later, on October 12, Ross Balch (president of Brisbane Skeptic Society), Myles Power, and I happened to be in the area hunting the fabled Yowie (Australia’s Bigfoot). We had been to Yowie Park at Kilcoy (where a wood statue of the elusive man-beast stands [Nickell 2016]) when we received an invitation from Dr. Cassandra Perryman, a psychologist and fellow skeptic, to come to her home at Rainbow Beach not far from the mystery site. She had arranged for local fire captain Greg Haring to meet with us and take us to Inskip Point.

Putting us in his all-terrain vehicle, Haring first gave us a quick tour of Rainbow Beach (which gets its name from its colorful variety of mineral-sand deposits). As the tide was coming in, he would periodically pause to let the water retreat, then—deftly swerving around boulders—make a dash for the next stretch of beach. After this memorable ride, he took us to nearby Inskip Point and the very edge of the great “sinkhole.”

Figure 1. Aerial view of the great “sinkhole” at Inskip Point, Queensland, Australia, 2015.

It was a stunning scene. A semicircular area of former beach—spanning an estimated 200 by 100 meters and reportedly extending more than 10 meters deep—held trees that were now standing in the ocean. Aerial photos (see Figure 1) provided an even more impressive view of the phenomenon. (See “Skydivers” 2015; Stokes 2015.)

As it happens, the area has a history of such collapses occurring rather regularly, although they are rarely so large. A sizeable one occurred in 2011 (Stokes 2015). However, these are not the usual type of sinkhole that occurs, for example, when a segment of limestone cavern collapses. (I am familiar with this from my cave exploration days in Kentucky.) In fact, the Inskip beach collapse isn’t really a sinkhole at all.

A deposit of sand that becomes overly steep through underwater erosion may become unstable, prone to what is called a submarine landslide. In this event, the slope unravels with segments progressively slumping to fill the space left by the slumping of the segment below. According to an expert source, “This mechanism fits well with the situation at Inskip beach, both in terms of the geomorphological conditions and the reported characteristics of the beach collapse” (“Inskip” 2015).

While the 2015 occurrence is indeed memorable—especially to those who almost lost their lives to it!—it yet fails to provide evidence of some great “unexplained mystery.”

The Haunting of Plough Inn

Located at Brisbane’s South Bank, the Plough Inn is a hotel and tavern with a long history—and reportedly a resident ghost.

The original building of 1864 was replaced with a more substantial one in 1885. Its picturesque, balconied front is a relic of a streetscape; it once graced Stanley Street (a principal nineteenth-century thoroughfare), but its surroundings have evolved. It was protected when South Brisbane’s old wharves were transformed into the scenic, multi-faceted South Bank Parklands. After additions in 1922 and internal transformations to become a tavern during Expo ’88, it earned a listing on the Queensland Heritage Register in 1992 (Moore 2014; “Plough Inn” 2015) (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Historic Plough Inn in Brisbane, Australia: Note author at bottom left, sign at top center.

However, facts about the ghost of Plough Inn are as elusive as the alleged spirit itself. In The International Directory of Haunted Places, Dennis William Hauck (2000, 221) refers to the “apparition” of a female there but then states that it “has never been spotted.” Still, he says “her distinctive voice has been heard,” most frequently “near Room 7.” But wait: another source clarifies that she actually “lives . . . where Guest Room 7 used to be before the renovations” (“Ghosts” 2005; emphasis added). Anyway, she was “a young girl” or “young woman” who was definitely strangled, either by her “boyfriend” or her publican husband (Horswill and Stead 2009)—unless the latter instead threw her to her death from the exterior balcony as other sources state (e.g., Farrell 2015).

Sources that give a time frame for the female’s death agree that it was “in the 1920s.” We learn that since then “many claim to have heard her” (“Ghosts” 2005) as she “haunts Room 7” (Horswill and Stead 2009) or at least “wanders the hallways and the balcony where she met her end”—although that source calls the claim only a “story” (Moore 2014).

As we see, the story elements (or “motifs,” as folklorists call them) are quite variable. Variants are a “defining characteristic of folklore” according to distinguished folklorist (and CSI fellow and friend) Jan H. Brunvand (1978), since oral transmission naturally produces differing versions of the same story. But many of the variants in published ghost tales are explained by writers copying others while adding details and making other changes for literary purposes (Brunvand 2000, 132). I suggest we call such written products hacklore. In any case, Brunvand (1981, 21) sagely observes that when there is no certain original, the multiple versions of a tale do provide “good evidence against credibility.”

At the Plough Inn, alleged earwitnesses invariably go unidentified, but I did learn from one of the service staff, who had a room upstairs, that he recently heard a knock at his door when no one was there. Alas, such rapping noises are common, often caused by temperature changes and settlings of an old structure (Nickell 2012, 61). Pranks are also known (e.g., Christopher 1970, 170), among other explanations.

Ross Balch and I spent much time at the inn—during dinners, a skeptics-at-the-pub event, and a pleasant lunch with assistant hotel manager Mark Farrell. Farrell (2015) had no personal experiences to relate and said he was himself not really much of a believer in ghosts. I drank to that; indeed, the only spirits Ross and I encountered at the pub were those in bottles and glasses.

Miracle Worker?

During my stay in Brisbane, I was delighted to visit the little chapel of St. Stephen’s, which—dwarfed by the adjacent cathedral of the same name—is the oldest church in Queensland, opening in 1850. After it was replaced by the new edifice in 1874, the chapel functioned as a school, survived threats of demolition, and today is a shrine to Australia’s first and only saint, Mary MacKillop (1842–1909), canonized by Pope Benedict in 2010 (“St. Stephen’s” N.d.) (Figure 3).

Briefly, Mary was the child of Scottish immigrants to Australia. Her mother, during her pregnancy, wore an alleged relic of the True Cross (pieces of which so proliferated in the Middle Ages as to promote extreme skepticism). As a teenager, Mary worked as a stationery shop assistant and later as a teacher and governess, becoming her family’s main breadwinner. She soon opened a school for young ladies in western Victoria. In 1866, when she was twenty-four, Mary began operating in a former stable a congregation of religious sisters—teachers and care providers—called the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart. Her intensity in supporting working-class families and her conflict with clergy (including helping to expose a pedophile priest)—led to her brief excommunication and the expulsion of nearly half her followers. This injustice was soon rescinded, and though other troubles befell her, she went on to leave an indelible mark on the Catholic Church in Australia (Steer 2010; McCreanor 2001).

As a strong woman and charismatic leader, she did not affect the visions, the pretended stigmata, or the like of so many sainthood seekers. She worked tirelessly, traveling on horseback, by horse and cart, and by train to establish schools and foundations far and wide (McCreanor 2001, 119). When she suffered a stroke in 1902, which paralyzed her right side, she adapted to a wheelchair and learned to write left-handed. At her death on August 8, 1909, Cardinal Moran, the Archbishop of Sydney, said, “I consider this day to have assisted at the deathbed of a Saint” (“Mary MacKillop” 2015).

Almost immediately there grew a movement to have her canonized. In North Sydney, a Mary MacKillop Memorial Chapel was built, and her body was reinterred there. In 1926, she received the official title Servant of God, and a detailed investigation of her life began. This produced little that was negative (except for rumors that she overused brandy, which was said to have been prescribed for medicinal purposes). By 1951, a Cause for Canonization was issued. Other developments followed, and when Pope John Paul II visited Australia in 1986, he prayed at her tomb, a sign of things to come. He beatified MacKillop in 1995, and she was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010 (McCreanor 2001, 124–129; Steer 2010, 64).

Beatification and canonization had each required evidence that MacKillop helped bring about a miracle and, following her death, claims began to appear. In time, the reported 1961 disappearance of leukemia from a woman—Veronica Hopson, twenty-three, who had prayed to the future saint—was used for beatification in 1993. A medical professor who treated Mrs. Hopson, however, stated that while “From her point of view this was a miracle,” he did not himself define it as a supernatural event, saying: “A miracle is a very unusual event, a happy event, that is very difficult to explain. She’s certainly the only [such] patient in that period that I have seen survive” (Biggs 2010).

The search for a second miracle turned up numerous claims. One came from a man who prayed that his granddaughter not be born with serious disabilities as doctors had predicted; he felt his prayers were answered when the baby’s handicap was only Down Syndrome. A boy was said to have recovered from a brain tumor after prayers at MacKillop’s chapel, but medical science seemed to have earned most of the credit.

And then there was the supposedly miraculous “vision” of the Virgin Mary on a church wall at Yankalilla, a small town in South Australia. Alas, the church was Anglican, the image only a simulacrum (a semblance of something perceived in a random pattern—in this case a water stain), and the priest had the unfortunate name Nutter. (He later changed it to Notere, but not before selling holy water he obtained by tapping an underground stream behind the wall that bore the “apparition” [McCreanor 2001, 253–254].)

At length a New South Wales woman, Kathleen Evans, was rewarded with acceptance of her “miracle”—her 1993 recovery from lung cancer and a secondary cancer on her brain. As she recalled some seventeen years later, her doctors said chemotherapy and other treatments were useless, so she turned to praying and wearing a relic of Mary MacKillop: a swatch of fabric from clothing of the future saint. (That is what is termed “a second-class relic”: not an actual part of a saint, such as a piece of bone or lock of hair, but something that had touched the person.) She wore the relic on her own clothing (“Second Miracle” 2015).

The problem is that being judged miraculous on the basis of being “medically inexplicable,” such claims merely constitute negative evidence and invoke the logical fallacy called “an argument from ignorance.” One cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge: “We don’t know why the symptoms went away; therefore, it was a miracle.” In fact, there are numerous other possibilities: misdiagnosis, spontaneous remission (which can occur with some illnesses), prior medical treatment, and others, including the body’s own healing power. Often, investigation reveals there is more to the “miracle” than first thought (Nickell 2015).

Behind the claims of saints’ miracles are attempts to trump science—both by downplaying its role in cures and by selecting “medically inexplicable” cases. One priest best characterized the healing of Veronica Hopson by remarking, “The whole thing was medically surprising” (“The Miracles” 2015). If the Vatican wanted, understandably, to honor Mary MacKillop as a heroine of the church, they should simply have done so, and not played the superstition card in a miracles game. The Sydney Morning Herald observed that “the requirement for miracles . . . has begun to be questioned by many Catholics,” and Northern Territory News aptly noted, “You don’t have to believe in miracles to appreciate the works of Mary MacKillop” (McCreanor 2001, 179).

References

• Biggs, James. 2010. Quoted in Howden.
• Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1978. The Study of American Folklore. New York: W.W. Norton.
• ———. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: W.W. Norton.
• ———. 2000. The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
• Call to stay calm. 2015. Cooloola Advertiser (October 6).
• Christopher, Milbourne. 1970. ESP, Seers & Psychics. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.
• Farrell, Mark. 2015. Interview by author, October 15.
• Ghosts of Queensland, Brisbane and the Brisbane Region. 2005. Available online at http://www.chapelhill.homeip.net/FamilyHistory/other/QueenslandHistory/TheGhostsofQueensland.htm; accessed December 11, 2015.
• Gorrie, Arthur. 2015. Voyage to the bottom of the sea. Cooloola Advertiser (October 6).
• Hauck, Dennis William. 2000. The International Directory of Haunted Places. New York: Penguin Books.
• Horswill, Amanda, and Laura Stead. 2009. The Sunday Mail. Available online at http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/ghost-stories-from-brisbane/story-e6frep26-1225784427216; accessed December 11, 2015.
• Howden, Saffron. 2010. Mary’s first miracle. The Sydney Morning Herald. Available online at http://www.smh.com.au/national/marys-first-miracle-20101015-16nmd.html; accessed January 19, 2016.
• Inskip beach collapse: just don’t call it a “sinkhole.” 2015. Available online at http://theconversation.com/inskip-beach-collapse-just-don’t-call-it-a-sinkhole-48241; accessed February 8, 2017.
• Mary MacKillop. 2015. Available online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_MacKillop; accessed December 15, 2015.
• McCreanor, Sheila J. 2001. Sainthood in Australia: Mary MacKillop and the Print Media. North Sydney, NSW Australia: Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart.
• The Miracles. . . . 2015. Available online at http://www.heraldsun.com/au/archive/news/the-miracles-that-put-mary-mackillop-
on-the-path-to-sainthood/story-e6frf716-
1225812199236; accessed December 15, 2015.
• Moore, Tony. 2014. Once-in-99 year chance to buy a ghostly pub in Brisbane. Available online at http://www.brisbanetimes.com.an/queensland/oncein99-year-chance-to-buy-a-ghostly-pub-inbrisbane-20140321-2594b.html; accessed December 11, 2015.
• Nickell, Joe. 2001. Mysterious Australia. Skeptical Inquirer. 25(2) (March/April): 15–18.
• ———. 2012. The Science of Ghosts. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• ———. 2015. The new pope saints. Skeptical Inquirer 39(2) (March/April): 26–29.
• ———. 2016. Searching for the yowie, the Down Under Bigfoot. Skeptical Inquirer 40(2) (March/April): 16–18.
• Plough Inn. 2015. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plough_Inn; accessed December 11, 2015.
• Second Miracle—Kathleen Evans. 2015. Available online at http://www.marymackillop.org.au/marys-story/dsp-default.cfm?loadref=194; accessed December 15, 2015.
• Skydivers on a high over the sinkhole. 2015. Cooloola Advitiser (October 6).
• St. Stephen’s Chapel. N.d. Brochure. Brisbane, QL: Cathedral of St. Stephen.
• Steer, Judith. 2010. Mary MacKillop: Touching Our Lives. Strathfield, NSW, Australia: St. Paul Publications.
• Stokes, Christopher. 2015. Available online at http://ufOnews.blogspot.com/2015/09/beach-disappears-down-mysterious-hole.html; accessed December 9, 2015.
• Tran, Cindy, and Lucy Thackray. 2015. “There’s a real chance it could expand. . . .” Available online at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articles-3251093/There-a-real-chance-
expand-terrifying-sinkhole-swallowed-cars-caravans-Queensland-beach-growing-experts-no-idea-stop-it.html; accessed December 9, 2015.
• Walker, Carlie. 2015. Is the sinkhole at Inskip Point a sign of the end of times? Available online at www.frasercoastchronicle.com/AU/news/sign-of-the-end-of-times/2789524; accessed January 19, 2016.

Part 2: The famous conjuror, investigator, and author—and founding fellow of CSICOP—sat down with Skeptical Inquirer Editor Kendrick Frazier at CSICon Las Vegas 2016 for a live, ninety-minute onstage conversation. Here are excerpts.

Kendrick Frazier: Which of all of your books is your favorite and which is most successful?

James Randi: Flim-Flam! was probably the most successful. Yes, with an exclamation point, please, and a hyphen. It’s very important. Yes, Flim-Flam! really is the most general book on my investigations of the paranormal and the supernatural claims that are still infesting our society today. It sold very, very well. And The Faith Healers was a great success for me too.

Frazier: Tell us about your book that is completed, I understand, but not yet published, A Magician in the Laboratory. What is that about?

Randi: It’s going to deal with my visits to laboratories all over the world in almost every country in the world over these many years that I’ve had traveling. Where these scientists thought they had something discovered, something paranormal, something supernatural, whatever, I would go into the laboratories and show them where their errors were. They were not very happy about it.

Particularly in Russia. They were not happy about it at all, and I came in for all kinds of scolding. I was told by two of the scientists who were present, young fellows, months afterward I got letters from them saying that the man in charge of the whole thing said they would never let a magician in the laboratory again.

I showed them where they were so wrong. A magician showing scientists where they’re wrong? Come on, that’s not very logical at all. But I knew enough about science and about the way it works and doesn’t work. That’s the second thing you’ve got to know, is how it doesn’t work.

Frazier: When Carl Sagan wrote the introduction to Faith Healers, he said many kind things about you, but he also had some criticisms. He referred to you as “crotchety.”

Randi: I certainly am, yes. He couldn’t quite understand that I actually did sometimes get very angry, particularly at so-called faith healers and people who are supposed to be bringing relief to the people.

Frazier: In November 2014, the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article about you, “The Unbelievable Skepticism of the Amazing Randi.” It was quite a wonderful, very detailed, revealing article. How did you see it and how has it affected you?

Randi: It was a good article. I liked it very much. At the New York Times, after all, you would expect high standards, and we got them.

My partner, Deyvi, and I, we were very, very happy with the results of it. It was done kindly and decently. I was satisfied with it in most ways, and certainly the illustrations were very good. We were very flattered by it.

Frazier: Let me mention a few things that were said: “For many of his most zealous followers the opportunity to meet Randi at TAM”—your conference—“may be as close as they will ever come to a religious experience.”

Randi: That’s true. Bless you, bless you.

Frazier: [Continuing] “He, Randi, said he disliked being called a debunker. He prefers to describe himself as a scientific investigator. I don’t set out to debunk.” I think that’s fair, right?

Randi: I am a debunker, yes, by definition, but I think scientific investigator covers it better because I try to be scientific. I don’t have the credentials for that at all, but I have met the approval of many leading scientists, including Carl Sagan, and many, many other people around the world in that respect. I accept it. I do try to be as scientific as I possibly can, and I’m not afraid to phone people up and ask them for advice on how I should state something to make sure that I have it as accurately as I can.

Frazier: Then the writer talked about this person we have kept in the background here. “Randi’s campaign against [Uri] Geller helped make them both more famous than ever. Even today Geller credits Randi with helping him become a psychic phenomenon. ‘My most influential and important publicist,’ as Geller described him to me.’”

Randi: What do I think of that?

Frazier: Yes.

Randi: I think this is, what do they call it, a delusion on the part of Mr. Geller. Yes, a very dramatic delusion. He likes to think of it that way, that I made him, but he was well famous as a so-called psychic long before I was called by Time magazine to go in and investigate him. That investigation, that was fun . . . you have no idea. Geller, with his great psychic powers, didn’t know that I was a magician and that I knew how he was doing it. How would he not have known that?

At one point Geller bent a spoon and showed it to me. He said, “Did you see that?” I looked at him, I said, “Yes, Mr. Geller, I did see that.” He just looked, hesitating. Then he put the spoon down and went on with something else. I think it tipped to him at that moment. That was a revelation to him because I said it that pleasantly: “I did see that.”

Frazier: A biography of you is being written by Massimo Polidoro. How is that going?

Randi: I’m a very close friend of Massimo’s. I’ve known him since he was about so big and he’s actually lived at my home for some period of time and brushed up on his English while doing that. He’s now a famous writer in Italy, his homeland. He writes in both English and in Italian.

I’m pleased to have it in Massimo’s hands. Massimo has agreed to suspend activity on the book because he has so many other projects going all at the same time. He’s done very well for himself in that respect. He has agreed to suspend action on that until my next book comes out because it’s going to be very much autobiographical as well.

Frazier: Magician in the Laboratory? It’ll be autobiographical about your life as well as about your work in scientific laboratories?

Randi: Yes. I got a chance to express that, but Massimo will come out with his version of course from a different point of view. That’s quite understandable. He already has written a very, very good book on the history of Harry Houdini, among so many other books.

Frazier: In 2015, out came a documentary movie about you, An Honest Liar. Ruth and I were very privileged to be among the audience in Sydney, Australia, when you were on your Australian tour for the movie after the Australian Skeptics convention there two years ago. I found it a powerful and emotionally moving movie. I assume you agree?

Randi: Yes, I do. I must explain, for those who’ve seen it and for those who haven’t, that there was a sequence in there, you’ll all remember this, there is a point in the movie when I told the producers about something that happened in my family that I didn’t wish to be in the movie. I told them that this must not be used. It was less than twenty-four hours later that I came to my senses, the next day after I had a chance to think about it. I phoned them up and I said, “Wait a minute. I’m supposed to be honest about these things. I can’t have it that way. That sequence has got to get back in again, any way you want. Just put it back in again because it’s got to be the true story of my life.”

It turned out to be that, and the reaction we are getting to it, well, it’s now dubbed in eight different languages, subtitles, all over the world. It just showed in Russia I think for the first time, a couple of months ago. It’s on Netflix.

Frazier: How has it changed your life?

Randi: In odd ways that you might not realize. Deyvi and I, if we go out to a department store or something, not in our immediate neighborhood, there’s always somebody way across the store, “Mr. Randi,” and they come running at me. “I saw your movie. I loved it,” the whole thing. They recognize both of us of course. It has made a great deal of difference. I feel good because the true story is out there and it’s available to everybody. The producers of the film did a very, very good job. All with my approval, I assure you.

Frazier: That event in Sydney, Australia, that I mentioned. Toward the end you were asked a question from the audience that I thought was very revealing, something about you. I wrote about it later in my editor’s column in the Skeptical Inquirer. You were asked how to treat a friend who ardently believes in the paranormal. You said, “Be kind. Be kind. They believe because they need to believe. Be compassionate.” Is that a new Randi or is that the Randi of old?

Randi: It’s not a new Randi at all, but since I began these investigations I found that these people, they believed in it so much and they needed it so much that to disabuse them of the notion was often very difficult to do.

At showings of An Honest Liar, we can often drive to them if they’re in Florida and show up for Q&A following the film, to some delight. Those are always rather exciting and very good sessions.

When we do these Q&A things afterwards and the audience leaves, there’s always six or eight people left behind, Ken, that come to the foot of the stage. They look up at us and they’ll come up with the same statement as if it were written out there for them to read. They say, “You made a big change in my life,” often with tears coming down their faces.

Folks, you cannot buy that. That’s the greatest compliment we can possibly have. They will in many cases successfully explain how what we said in that film actually changed their minds in some way or another. As I say, that’s very, very flattering, and we know we made it. The film worked and it worked well. We get letters from all over the world now from people who say exactly the same thing. That’s very flattering.

Frazier: I want to ask you about another experience I recall. It was after a CSICOP Executive Council meeting in London. We were at a restaurant. You were bending the cutlery, surprisingly.

Randi: Me? Would I do a thing like that?

Frazier: A waiter was watching very intently, and it became very clear he was quite emotional about it. He eventually came over, and it was clear something was very strongly affecting him. I don’t recall whether it was that he had seen you debunking the idea that spoon bending is a paranormal phenomenon—I think that’s what it was—or whether he maybe thought you were a paranormal person yourself.

I recall your going over and taking him aside and talking to him privately about that to comfort him. I don’t know what was said, but you did do that, and I don’t know if you remember that experience at all.

Randi: I’ve had to do that occasionally to explain to people there are ways of doing this and then just do it right in front of their eyes. “How did you do that?” they’ll say. “I gestured with the spoon like this and I said to you, ‘Come over here.’ As I turned away and you didn’t notice that then I concealed the bend.” I explained to them how I did the thing.

Then it suddenly dawned on them, “Yes, it’s very easy actually.”

Frazier: None of us are as young as we used to be. You’ve had health challenges, a heart attack I believe, colon cancer, something you and I have shared.

Randi: I had cardiac bypass surgery.

Frazier: Cardiac bypass, aneurisms in your leg, cataracts, I don’t know what else. Yet you have persevered. I think we all want to know how are you doing health wise?

Randi: I’ve recently had a couple of TIAs; those are transient ischemic attacks. That really stands for a minor stroke. I lost the use of my right arm temporarily, for a matter of a few minutes, but it’s back again, yes. As a matter of fact, my hands are exceedingly flexible if you noticed. No, I’m doing very well, doing very well. For eighty-eight I only feel like eighty-six. True.

Frazier: Thank you, dear Randi. We all thank you.

Larry Kusche’s review of the Bermuda Triangle mystery (1986; 2015) provided one of the clearest victories for reason over rumor. His method remains convincing because it was so straightforward. Kusche demonstrated that many disappearances had been wrongly attributed to the Bermuda Triangle; the actual events either did not happen as reported or likely occurred outside of the infamous area. Kusche also demonstrated that the rate of actual disappearances within the triangle did not seem to differ meaningfully from the rate of disappearances in other parts of the ocean. In so doing, Kusche highlighted two issues that occur frequently in pseudoscience. The first involves reporting events inaccurately, and the second involves relying on handpicked observations rather than a representative set of observations (Hansson 2013).

Vaccinations and Autism: Inaccuracies and Anecdotes

Much of the debate surrounding vaccines and autism has been similarly based on straightforward considerations about whether the reported evidence is accurate and whether a representative set of evidence supports the vaccines-cause-autism claim. This debate was triggered by Andrew Wakefield and others’ (1998—Retracted) research involving twelve children who were referred to a pediatric gastroenterology unit. Wakefield et al. reported that all twelve children had experienced developmental problems at varying intervals after exposure to the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine; nine of these developmental disorders were identified as autism with a tenth being questionably identified as autism. Wakefield et al. used these results to suggest that the MMR vaccine could contribute to a syndrome involving gastrointestinal problems and regressive autism. This research fueled the well-known concern about childhood vaccination and its alleged contribution to autism—a genie that shows no sign of returning to its bottle.

Even if the Wakefield et al. results had been legitimate, the small sample size and selective nature of the sample should have encouraged a cautious interpretation. Nevertheless, the evidence was at least broadly interpretable: a small group of children received the MMR vaccine and subsequently experienced developmental problems. Of course, this evidence was not accurate. Wakefield created fraudulent results presumably for financial reasons (Deer 2011). Subsequent research revealed no evidence that childhood vaccine administration elevated the rate of developing autism (Taylor et al. 2014). In the absence of any scientific connection between vaccinations and autism, promoters of the vaccines-autism link could still handpick observations. Anti-vaccination proponents pointed to the many vaccinated children who later developed autism (noted by The Logic of Science 2016). The best-known example has probably been actress Jenny McCarthy’s son. In a strange twist, some have raised the possibility that McCarthy’s son did not actually develop autism (Rubin 2008).

We view the handpicking of confirmatory observations with understanding. It is natural for humans to seek explanations for difficult events, and the temporal proximity between a vaccination and the diagnosis of autism could certainly feel causal. Nevertheless, this aggregation of anecdotes, no matter how broad, is not science. Most objective observers can understand that if millions of children are vaccinated and a fraction of children develop autism, then many children who have been vaccinated will subsequently develop autism, even in the complete absence of any cause-effect link. Obviously, many people still believe that vaccinations cause autism, but at least the science and pseudoscience surrounding this debate remains relatively clear. The scientifically minded can point to the absence of any correlation between childhood vaccination and the development of autism. Proponents of the vaccines-autism link can point to the number of children who were vaccinated and later developed autism.

Vaccines and Autism: The Promotion of Irrelevant Research

This context is important for understanding an interesting tactic that subsequently developed regarding vaccinations and autism. The supposed science behind the vaccine-autism link came back. The vaccines-cause-autism community began offering several non-Wakefield studies as evidence of supportive science. As far as we can tell, this tactic was popularized by blogger Ginger Taylor in 2007 when she published a list of “just over a dozen studies” supporting the link between vaccines and autism (see Taylor 2013). This list has since expanded to well over 100 studies. Taylor’s work is paralleled by other lists to include Walia’s (2013) list of twenty-two studies, Adl-Tabatabai’s (2015) list of thirty studies, and Anti-Vaccine Scientific Support Arsenal’s (2015) list of twenty-six studies, the latter containing mostly perspectives and reviews. To illustrate the dissemination of this argument, the Activist Post’s Facebook page, where Walia’s list was posted on August 24, 2015, appears to have more than 500,000 followers presently. We do not need to address these studies specifically, as the collective implication of these studies has been debunked sufficiently by scientific research (e.g., see Taylor et al. 2014) and by scholars who have reviewed the concerns associated with many of these studies (e.g., Ditz 2013; The Logic of Science 2016).

Instead, our purpose is to highlight the promotion of irrelevant research as its own developing characteristic of pseudoscience. This tactic shares a connection with the old pseudoscientific tactic of using scientific-sounding language (Shermer 2002) because both tactics might make a community appear more scientific. Nevertheless, the promotion of irrelevant research goes much further by pointing to purportedly important scientific findings.

Radner and Radner (1982, 36) gave a nod toward the promotion of irrelevant research when they described the “grab-bag approach to evidence.” According to Radner and Radner, pseudoscience will use quantity of evidence (the grab bag) over quality of evidence in an attempt to wear down opponents. Radner and Radner’s grab bag focused mostly on the continued offering of confirming observations (e.g., Bermuda Triangle disappearances) or questionable pieces of evidence (e.g., an old jet-shaped figurine as evidence of ancient aliens). Radner and Radner also included the misuse of research findings in their grab bag after explaining that pseudoscientists are reluctant to “weed out” bad evidence from a scientific debate. To illustrate, they noted that parapsychologists continued to use the results of a flawed research design as evidence for psi.

At the same time, Radner and Radner did not really describe the promotion of irrelevant research as a specific method for making pseudoscience look like science. This tactic, as it has been used in the vaccines-autism domain, involves much more than the inclusion of a dubious study or two that lie at or near the center of a science-pseudoscience debate. The promotion of irrelevant research is an active aggregation of several questionable or peripherally related research studies in an attempt to justify the science underlying a questionable claim (see also Barrett [2008], who mentioned this tactic briefly). It includes, among other things, (a) results that have dubious legitimacy, (b) results that possibly occurred due to chance, (c) results based on inappropriate statistical procedures that create a false perception of a relationship, (d) results coming from poorly controlled research, (e) results where the supposedly harmful aspects of vaccines were manipulated at much stronger levels than is actually present in a vaccine, (f) results where the dependent variable was tangentially related to autism but was not autism (e.g., gastrointestinal problems), and (g) results containing multiple explanations due to confounding variables (see Ditz 2013; The Logic of Science 2016).

The promotion of irrelevant research potentially changes the landscape of the overall discussion surrounding vaccines and their relation to autism. It can shift the argument away from the misuse of handpicked examples or a manageable number of fallible research designs (all the while ignoring the broader absence of any systematic link between vaccinations and autism). It can move the argument to an assortment of scientific findings with questionable relevance and legitimacy (all the while ignoring the broader absence of any systematic link between vaccinations and autism). By doing so, the vaccines-cause-autism community no longer ignores the entirety of the science regarding vaccines and autism. They have instead developed and promoted a scientific debate that does not actually exist in science. Instead, this bogus scientific debate takes place in an electronic world between people who are usually consumers of science rather than being scientists themselves. Among actual scientists, this does not seem to be an issue. Taylor et al. (2014), in their statistical integration of several studies that examined vaccination and autism development, referred to almost none of the studies provided in the lists of research supposedly supporting the vaccination-autism link. Other scientists who have conducted research involving vaccination and autism have demonstrated similar levels of disregard (e.g., Uno et al. 2012).

We can illustrate the promotion of irrelevant research by considering this development relative to other questionable health-related claims. A Google search for “studies that show that vaccines cause autism” revealed the four aforementioned lists within the first thirty-two non-advertisement results. A Google search for “studies that show that new age crystals” did not immediately reveal similar lists within the first thirty results. A Google search for “studies that show that chiropractic” did reveal lists of research supporting chiropractic medicine that appear similar to the lists used to promote the vaccines-autism link. Hall (2014) reviewed the top chiropractic studies of 2013 (Luck 2013) and offered several methodological concerns. There is, however, a critically important distinction between this debate and the bogus scientific debate in the vaccine-autism domain. Hall reviewed the top chiropractic studies as reported by a chiropractic website. This stands in obvious contrast to proponents of the vaccines-autism link pointing to a set of research findings that appear to be generally irrelevant to the actual scientific debate.

Why has the promotion of irrelevant research occurred so prominently in the vaccines-autism domain? The anti-vaccination movement boomed after the publication of what appeared to be legitimate scientific research (Wakefield et al. 1998—Retracted). This caused many individuals to become firmly entrenched in the vaccines-cause-autism view. This initial entrenchment was surely reinforced by not vaccinating children, encouraging others to avoid vaccinating children, or both. It is difficult to admit wrongdoing in this regard because the consequences involve the well-being of children. The debate is also interdependent because this issue involves the well-being of unvaccinated and vaccinated children. This interdependence likely gave vaccination supporters additional initiative to press the anti-vaccination community for scientific justifications.

The vaccines-autism link has also been more neatly debunked than other forms of health-based pseudoscience. The vaccines-autism link is more easily examined because the results are not complicated by psychological rather than physical explanations. For instance, chiropractic medicine is difficult to investigate because it is seemingly impossible to create a proper control condition where participants believe they received chiropractic treatment when they did not. The vaccines-autism debate is not complicated by a placebo effect in this way. In fact, the vaccines-cause-autism theory could subtly encourage autism spectrum disorder diagnoses in vaccinated children; of course, this pattern of results has not been revealed in extensive scientific examinations (e.g., Taylor et al. 2014).

We also believe that the development of the Internet and social media has enabled this pseudoscientific tactic (see, e.g., Kata 2012). This promotion of irrelevant research has occurred overwhelmingly—possibly exclusively—in this context. The Internet provides quick access to a wealth of scientific and pseudoscientific information that allows groups on both sides of this debate to disseminate information swiftly and widely. This seems to have enhanced the ability of the scientifically minded to press supporters of the vaccine-autism link for the science behind their claims. Similarly, the Internet surely enhanced the ability for supporters of the vaccine-autism link to find and list several research studies that look, at first glance, as if they provide a noteworthy scientific argument. Taylor’s (2013) original list was clearly intended to address concerns that there is no scientific evidence for the vaccine-autism link. If the Internet and social media hastened the promotion of irrelevant research, it explains why the Radner and Radner (1982) grab bag focused primarily on confirmatory observations and poor examples of evidence. It would have been difficult for nonscientists in 1982 to quickly piece together and share lists of any research that has some remote possibility of supporting a pseudoscientific claim. The continued ability for individuals to do so suggests that the promotion of irrelevant research is likely to continue as a pseudoscientific tactic.

Pyrrhic Victories and Practical Implications

Unfortunately, the promotion of irrelevant research is intentionally or unintentionally clever because it can obscure the distinction between science and pseudoscience. Science advocates can explain fairly easily why handpicked observations or particular research designs might be misleading. It is more difficult for science advocates to address an extensive list of research findings that have dubious relevance and legitimacy. Yet if these lists are not addressed, newcomers might initially see science that purportedly promotes both points of view, which can create a sense of false equivalence (Skeptical Raptor 2015).

At the same time, entering this debate could create a series of Pyrrhic victories. Scientifically savvy individuals who critique the promotion of irrelevant research might win several battles while experiencing a setback in their overall campaign—a campaign that is waged with arguments rather than soldiers in an effort to promote reason rather than empires. Those who truly love science will be tempted to enter this debate knowing that they ultimately have a winning hand, but the vaccines-cause-autism community can offer a long list of weak counterarguments in the form of fraudulent research, poor research, tangentially related research, and alleged pro-vaccination conspiracies. Sadly, by the time the arguments about the science underlying vaccinations and autism are hashed out, newcomers to this issue might be understandably fatigued and confused about what they should believe (Radner and Radner 1982; Skeptical Raptor 2015). This can force science to rely on authority rather than a digestible explanation of the existing scientific evidence. Ironically, the reliance on authority to confirm belief is another tactic commonly associated with pseudoscience (e.g., Hansson 2013).

It might be wise for those who wish to promote science and reason to steer clear of the specifics associated with handpicked irrelevant research. Getting into the weeds of this debate might encourage people to believe that all scientific research endeavors are equally compelling and that the group with the greater number of supposedly supportive studies is the winner. It is probably more effective to keep the focus on the basic scientific principles that are more easily understood. If vaccines cause autism, then vaccinated children should be developing autism at an elevated rate compared to non-vaccinated children. There is no evidence of this pattern (see Taylor et al. 2014 for an introduction). The tangential findings provided by several questionable and legitimate studies consequently lack any substantial relevance. Only those who are really interested in the details of these generally irrelevant studies should bother with them. They can be directed to thoughtful reviews (e.g., Ditz 2013; The Logic of Science 2016).

Perhaps more important, the promotion of irrelevant research is, oddly enough, an acknowledgement that science matters. If science did not matter, there would be no reason to offer lists of supposedly supportive scientific studies. This creates two contradictory stances that the vaccines-cause-autism community can be asked to clarify. First, should decisions about vaccines and autism be based on the scientific evidence? It seems that some in this community believe that science matters (e.g., Taylor 2013) whereas others question the utility of science (e.g., Jameson 2015). Second, is there a conspiracy that stifles research supportive of a vaccine-autism link (e.g., Olmsted 2014)? If so, why are there so many published studies that supposedly support that link?

The answers to these questions need to be established before, not after, a debate ensues about whether science supports the vaccines-autism link. Clarifying the ground rules is clearly necessary because the vaccines-cause-autism community can claim that their science is legitimate but that any science discrediting the vaccine-autism link is biased by some type of nefarious pro-vaccination agenda (see, e.g., Jameson 2015). This community can also argue that there would be additional research supportive of the vaccine-autism link if it had not been suppressed by a nefarious pro-vaccination agenda (see, e.g., Olmsted 2014; Mikkelson 2015). If the vaccines-cause-autism community wants to have a legitimate scientific debate, we are confident that members of the scientific community would be happy to entertain it. It just needs to come with a commitment that scientific findings cannot be omitted for undocumented impropriety and that suppositious research findings that have been suppressed by some unsubstantiated pro-vaccination agenda would not be considered.

Conclusion

The promotion of irrelevant research reveals a fundamental contradiction. It acknowledges the importance of science but disregards the most informative scientific studies and the general consensus of the scientific community. Our science versus pseudoscience analysis of this development serves two purposes. First, we hope that it encourages an effective response to the promotion of irrelevant research in the vaccines-autism domain. Second, we want to highlight the promotion of irrelevant research as an important pseudoscientific tactic in its own right. We believe that the promotion of irrelevant research will expand as a pseudoscientific tactic, and promoters of science and reason should therefore be prepared to identify and address it.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force Academy, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.)

References

• Adl-Tabatabai, Sean. 2015. 30 solid scientific studies that prove that vaccines cause autism. YourNewsWire.com (December 9). Available online at http://yournewswire.com/30-solid-scientific-studies-that-prove-vaccines-cause-autism/.
• Anti-Vaccine Scientific Support Arsenal. 2015. Vaccines do cause autism—undeniable scientific proof (blog entry). Anti-Vaccine Scientific Support Arsenal (April 29). Available online at https://avscientificsupportarsenal.wordpress.com/.
• Barrett, Stephen. 2008. “Research” associated with the promotion of questionable theories, products, and services. Quackwatch (November 26). Available online at https://www.quackwatch.org/06ResearchProjects/ploys.html.
• Deer, Brian. 2011. How the vaccine crisis was meant to make money. British Medical Journal 342: c5258.
• Ditz, Liz. 2013. Those lists of papers claiming that vaccines cause autism: They don’t show what they claim (Part 1) (blog entry). I Speak of Dreams (August 23). Available online at http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2013/08/-those-lists-of-papers-that-claim-vaccines-cause-autism-part-1.html.
• Hall, Harriet. 2014. The top 10 chiropractic studies of 2013 (blog entry). Science-Based Medi­cine (January 21). Available online at https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/top-10-chiropractic-studies-of-2013/.
• Hansson, Sven O. 2013. Defining pseudoscience and science. In M. Pigliucci & M. Boudry (Eds.), Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem (pp. 61-77). University of Chicago Press.
• Jameson, Cathy. 2015. Vaccines: The science has spoken (blog entry). Age of Autism (June 7). Available online at http://www.ageof
autism.com/2015/06/vaccines-the-science-has-spoken.html.
• Kata, Anna. 2012. Anti-vaccine activists, web 2.0, and the postmodern paradigm—an overview of tactics and tropes used online by the anti-vaccination movement. Vaccine 30(25): 3778–3789.
• Kusche, Larry. 1986. The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved. New York, NY: Galahad Books. Reprinted 1995.
• ———. 2015. The Bermuda Triangle delusion: Looking back after forty years. Skeptical Inquirer 39(6) (November/December): 28–37.
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at http://www.ageofautism.com/2014/11/midweek-mashup-autism
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When Richard Dawkins was asked to justify his belief in the scientific method, he answered, “It works, bitches!”¹ When the scientific evidence is compelling, one would have to be willfully perverse to reject it. But some people do; they reject findings that don’t fit with their ideology. We call them denialists. We have climate change denialists, HIV/AIDS denialists, vaccine denialists, evolution denialists, even germ theory denialists. And we have statin denialists.

Statins work, bitches! But the public perception has been skewed by alarmist misinformation from statin denialists.

A Hilarious Example of Statin 
Denialist Propaganda

Statin denialists rely on “alternative facts”; in other words: lies. The worst example of anti-statin misinformation I have ever seen is a YouTube interview with Dr. Leonard Coldwell. Not a word of what he says is true, and much of it is hilariously funny. Some of his statements are so obviously ridiculous that it’s hard to believe they wouldn’t leave even the most scientifically naive viewer rolling on the floor. Who is Leonard Coldwell? He has no medical or scientific credentials, yet he claims to be the world’s leading authority on cancer and to have treated over 35,000 cancer patients with a 92.3 percent cure rate. I think even Alice’s White Queen, having practiced believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast, would find that hard to swallow.

For your entertainment, I will provide the complete transcript of Coldwell’s deliciously absurd video² along with my reality checks that are italicized and noted in brackets. To begin with, the interviewer says a number of statins have been pulled off the market.

[A little rudimentary fact-checking reveals that the number of statin-containing products removed from the market is three, and two of those were mixtures of statins with other drugs. The statins in those mixtures remain on the market, so the true number is one: Baycol, or cerivastatin, was voluntarily withdrawn from the market when post-marketing surveillance showed that it was five to ten times more likely than other statins to cause a serious complication, rhabdomyolysis.]

When the interviewer asks his opinion of statins, Coldwell says: “It’s mass murder. [Murder is premeditated killing. Does he really think doctors are deliberately trying to kill patients?] It always leads to hardening of the liver, [No, statins actually reduce the risk of cirrhosis of the liver.³] it cuts off at least twenty years of your life span. [Nonsense! It does just the opposite, particularly for patients at high risk of cardiovascular events.] Your brain is made from cholesterol. [Maybe if you’re a fathead! For the rest of us, our brain is made of a lot of other things in addition to cholesterol.] Statin is a cholesterol-lowering drug. So, if you want to have a brain that’s the size of a marble, keep on taking them. [Whaaat? No one has ever had a brain that’s the size of a marble for any reason; and the brains of patients on statins are the same size as the brains of patients not on statins.] You do not die of too much cholesterol, you die of not enough. [You don’t die of either; you die of heart attacks and strokes, and reducing high cholesterol levels reduces your risk of those events.] There is no such thing as too much cholesterol. [Yes, there most certainly is. People with familial hypercholesterolemia die prematurely.] In a burn unit, we use twenty to twenty-eight hard-boiled eggs a day, in a burn victim, [He just made that up. No burn unit does that, and if they tried it, the patients would surely rebel.] because we know only cholesterol builds healthy cells. [Only cholesterol? How silly! A lot of other components are required to build healthy cells.] Every cell in your system, 87 percent of the new cell, is built from cholesterol. [No, it isn’t! Lipids account for half the mass of cell membranes, and cholesterol makes up 20 percent of those lipids.⁴] Where does this cholesterol come from? They just made up the number of 250; they just made it up. [No, they didn’t! They measured cholesterol levels in large populations and found that people with higher levels of cholesterol were more likely to have heart attacks.] There’s no science, no nothing. They tested a couple of people living in a trailer park, from trash that they eat, [That’s insulting to people who live in trailer parks, and it’s demonstrably not true. Much of the original information about cholesterol and cardiovascular risk came from a large study that recruited a cross-section of people living in Framingham, Massachusetts, a prosperous town with no excess of trailer parks.] and they came up with the average is kind of like 250 of combined cholesterol. And that’s what everyone should have. [No one is recommending that everyone have 250 of combined cholesterol. Risk is determined not just by total cholesterol but by levels of “good” HDL cholesterol and “bad” LDL cholesterol, and of other lipid subfractions, as well as other risk factors such as smoking and diabetes.] It’s completely artificially made up. [No, it’s based on solid science.] I have patients who have a cholesterol of 600; they’re the healthiest people, never been sick.” [Never been sick yet. Patients with a cholesterol of 600 are at high risk of cardiovascular events and death, and it is irresponsible for a doctor not to treat such high levels.]

Incredible Silliness about Salt

“And you know where the myth comes from? People take table salt. Table salt is one-third glass, one-third sand, one-third salt. So now, the glass in the table salt is cutting the arteries. Now you’re bleeding to death internally. Now the cholesterol goes there and stops the bleeding. Keeps you alive, saves your life. The cholesterol is the bad guy because it narrows, of course, it clogs an open wound, that’s bleeding; of course it narrows for a short amount of time, the blood way. And then they say, oh yeah, because it’s now narrowed, it’s raising your blood pressure, and what’s raising your blood pressure is causing the narrowing. It’s the cholesterol, therefore, cholesterol is causing high blood pressure. Oh, very interesting.”

[This is by far the funniest part of the whole interview. Think about it. In the first place, the FDA tests salt and requires that all U.S. table salt be at least 97.5 percent pure sodium chloride. If table salt were one-third glass shards, wouldn’t you notice sharp particles in your salt? Wouldn’t it cut your tongue and mouth? Sprinkle some into your hand and see if anything feels sharp. If you swallow glass and sand, they might irritate the lining of the gastrointestinal tract; but then they would be eliminated in the feces. There is no way they could be absorbed into the blood stream and find their way to the coronary arteries.

This whole idea is a ridiculous urban myth that not even Mythbusters would take seriously enough to test; but anyone could easily test it in their own kitchen. Sand and glass are not soluble in water. If table salt were one-third sand and one-third glass, dissolving it in water would leave an insoluble residue comprising two-thirds of the original amount. The RationalWiki article on Leonard Coldwell says, “He has precious little understanding of medicine or human biology, and his understanding of basic science is virtually non-existent: any man who genuinely fails to understand the fact that glass and sand are not actually soluble in water is probably not best placed to offer health advice.”⁵]

Coldwell Continues Blathering

“So, the statin drugs are the most dangerous, useless drugs ever invented, [Doesn’t he know anything about the history of medicine? It would be trivially easy to identify drugs that were far more dangerous and totally useless.] and please remember your brain is built from cholesterol. 92–99 percent of the brain is built from cholesterol. [No, it isn’t! Our brain is 60 percent fat, with around 25 percent of that being cholesterol, mostly in the myelin that sheathes the neurons’ axons.⁶] Every statin drug starts shrinking the brain. [No statin drug shrinks the brain. In fact, statins may have a protective role in the development of dementia. A recent meta-analysis of observational studies showed they were associated with a significantly lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease.⁷]

And this is what people need to understand. Just have a couple of bananas on an empty stomach in the morning and you will see your liver get so much better really, really fast. It works so much better. Just help your body. [A non sequitur. There is no evidence that eating bananas can reverse liver disease, and how on Earth did he manage to segue from heart disease to liver disease?] You don’t need to cure it; you don’t need to fix it; just help it. It cures itself. Because my statement, there’s no healing force outside the human body, always comes true at the end of the day. There’s absolutely no healing force outside the human body. [No one claims statins “heal” or “cure” anything. They simply reduce the risk of cardiovascular events.] So, every time they tell you there’s a magic pill, [No one is suggesting statins are magic pills; they are drugs with risks and benefits, and the benefits have been determined to outweigh the risks.] and do you know why they always take the drugs off the market? When they become free or generic and they don’t need the big bucks.” [Several statins are now off-patent and available as generic drugs. Not one of those has ever been taken off the market.]

No one with a modicum of education in science and critical thinking would believe Coldwell’s claims. Even uneducated people with the tiniest bit of common sense ought to at least question the claim about salt being two-thirds sand and glass. And yet people do believe him and repeat his falsehoods.

Other Sources of Misinformation

Leonard Coldwell is far from the only one spreading “alternative facts” about statins. Joseph Mercola⁸ says “Cholesterol is NOT the cause of heart disease.” And “if you take statins, you MUST take CoQ₁₀.” He claims that statins impair numerous biological functions, including all your sex hormones. He says ninety-nine out of 100 people do not need statins. He says that statins are teratogenic, that they cause birth defects if taken during pregnancy. The evidence says otherwise.⁹

Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, cherry-picks the literature and writes alarmist headlines about statin studies on the Natural News website. Typical examples: “Drug’s benefits were 100% fabricated,” “Statins are totally worthless,” “Statins cause debilitating muscle pain in up to 40%,” “Lowering cholesterol has NO EFFECT on risk of heart disease or death,” “Flu vaccines are useless to people taking statin drugs—and both cause brain damage.” When you consult the actual studies he refers to, you will find that his headlines misrepresent their findings. He even repeats the nonsense about sand and glass in table salt.¹⁰

And then there is the International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics (THINCS), a group that disputes the role of cholesterol in cardiovascular disease. They are led by Uffe Ravnskov, author of The Cholesterol Myths, and Malcolm Kendrick, author of The Great Cholesterol Con. They cherry-pick the scientific literature to find studies that support their theses, ignore the flaws in those studies, and ignore the vast body of literature that contradicts them. In The Skeptic’s Dictionary, Bob Carroll explains how they use distortions and deceptive techniques in their arguments.¹¹

What Is the Evidence for Statins?

Statins have been extensively studied; a PubMed clinical query brings up over 30,000 published articles. I couldn’t possibly read them all, but expert panels and review articles have done the heavy lifting and have identified the studies worth reading. The panels not only read all the pertinent studies, both pro and con, but they critically evaluated the methodology and the credibility of their findings. A 2016 review in the Lancet was particularly thorough. It found that the benefits of statins have been underestimated. The evidence couldn’t be clearer: they reduce the rate of heart attacks and strokes in at-risk patients by as much as 50 percent in some cases.¹² Low-cost statins (about £2 for a month’s treatment) reduce LDL cholesterol by more than 50 percent. Large-scale evidence from randomized trials shows that for every 1 mmol/L reduction in LDL cholesterol with statin therapy, there is a proportional reduction of about 25 percent in the rate of major vascular events (coronary deaths, heart attacks, strokes, etc.) during each year that statins are used. Lowering LDL cholesterol by 2 mmol/L reduces risk by about 45 percent. Lowering LDL cholesterol by 2 mmol/L with statins for five years in 10,000 patients would prevent major vascular events in 1,000 patients at high risk and 500 patients at lower risk.

Statins may not work only by lowering cholesterol. Statins also have anti-inflammatory effects that probably contribute to the reduction in cardiovascular events. But the authors of the Lancet article felt there was sufficient evidence from various sources to establish a causal relationship between cholesterol and atherosclerosis. They noted that lower concentrations of cholesterol have been associated with higher death rates, particularly in the elderly (something the statin denialists love to point out), but they say those associations can be shown not to be causal.

Figure 1. Illustration of the Mayo Clinic visual decision aid available online.

The problem is that we only have population statistics. We can’t predict which individuals will benefit from statins, so we have to treat everyone at risk. That means that a lot of individuals who take statins will not benefit. One way to look at the data is to calculate the NNT, the number of patients needed to be treated for one patient to benefit. By one estimate, the NNT to prevent one heart attack in patients who already have heart disease is sixteen to twenty-three, to prevent a death, forty-eight. For patients who have risk factors but don’t yet have heart disease, the NNT is between seventy and 250.¹³ These are overall estimates for populations; the actual NNT will vary according to the individual’s personal risk factors. Visual decision aids¹⁴ are available online where you can input an individual’s cholesterol, blood pressure, and other risk numbers and get an easy-to-interpret diagram like the example from the Mayo Clinic in Figure 1.

Expert panels have repeatedly evaluated all the available evidence. In 2013, the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association jointly issued extensive treatment guidelines based on that evidence.¹⁵ The magnitude of the benefit is small, but it is greater for patients at higher risk. And if you are one of the patients who are saved from a heart attack, the benefit is pretty important. The guidelines are not prescriptions; they are intended to be used as general guidelines to facilitate interpretation of the evidence for the individual patient. Science can provide evidence about benefits and risks, but ultimately patients must choose whether to take the drugs and whether the benefits outweigh the risks for them, personally. People’s willingness to take risks varies, as does their attitude about insurance.

What about the Side Effects?

Any drug that has effects is likely to have side effects, and clinicians always weigh the benefits against the risks. What’s more, drug manufacturers have to demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the risks before the FDA ever approves a drug for marketing. That same review article in Lancet found that the adverse effects of statins have been overestimated.¹⁶ Devastating side effects have been reported, including cancer, dizziness, depression, anemia, acidosis, pancreatitis, cataracts, heart failure, hunger, nausea, sleep problems, memory loss, ringing in the ears, “a sense of detachment,”. . . the list goes on. But these are from anecdotal reports and uncontrolled observations.

When symptoms such as these have been evaluated in controlled studies, they have not been shown to occur more often with the drug than with placebo. The Lancet article concluded, “The only excesses of adverse events that have been reliably demonstrated to be caused by statin therapy are myopathy and diabetes mellitus, along with a probable excess of haemorrhagic stroke. These excesses are larger in certain circumstances, but the absolute risks remain small by comparison with the absolute benefits.” Treating 10,000 patients for five years might cause five cases of myopathy, fifty to 100 new cases of diabetes, and five to ten hemorrhagic strokes. The increase in hemorrhagic strokes is outweighed by the much greater decrease in ischemic strokes, and the clinical relevance of new diabetes diagnoses is minimal when weighed against the benefits of statin therapy. And a meta-analysis of subsequent studies found that the risk of diabetes was lower than in the study that first reported it.¹⁷

There are a lot of reports of muscle pain and weakness, but there is good evidence that most of them are not related to statin therapy. Out of 10,000 patients treated, only about ten to twenty will develop muscle pain and weakness, and only one of those will be diagnosed with myopathy requiring statin discontinuation. Only two to three cases of the serious complication rhabdomyolysis will be diagnosed for every 100,000 patients treated. The harmful effects of statins can usually be reversed by stopping the drug. If you don’t take statins and have a heart attack or stroke, those are not reversible.

Statin Denialism Harms Patients

Irresponsible media reports of statin side effects have frightened a lot of patients into discontinuing their treatment. Recently in the United Kingdom, following publication of exaggerated claims about statin side effects, more than 200,000 patients stopped their statins. By one estimate, this is likely to result in 2,000 to 6,000 cardiovascular events in the following decade that could have been prevented.¹⁸

Why Denialism?

Why do statin denialists rely on “alternative facts”? What motivates them to reject evidence that the majority of the medical and scientific community have reached a consensus on? I don’t think there’s a simple answer, but I suspect part of the problem is an anti-establishment ideology that automatically rejects anything that comes from Big Pharma or mainstream medicine, and sometimes even invents conspiracy theories. Another part is that so many people want to believe that if you just eat right, you won’t ever get sick, and that there must be natural lifestyle solutions to every health problem. There aren’t.

Other factors that can motivate denialism are religious ideology, self-interest (financial, political, economic), and the desire to protect oneself from unpleasant truths by denying reality. And of course, people who don’t understand how science works are more likely to reject it; they won’t accept the consensus of experts because they see it as nothing more than “opinion.”

Denialists are welcome to their poorly informed opinions, but they are not welcome to their “alternative facts.” Global warming is real, germs cause disease, HIV causes AIDS, evolution is an established fact, vaccines save lives. And statins, while they are not a panacea for everyone, have been clearly shown to do more good than harm for patients at risk.

Statins: They work, bitches!

Notes

1. The full Dawkins quotation is “[Science] works! Planes fly. Cars drive. Computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people. If you base the design of planes on science, they fly. If you base the design of rockets on science, they reach the moon. It works . . . bitches.” The saying “Science: It works, bitches” originally appeared in an xkcd cartoon and on a T-shirt, illustrated by a graph showing a perfect correlation between data from the COBE mission and Planck’s predictions for black body radiation.
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9trx6opxmBI
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27166128
4. http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/cell-membranes-14052567
5. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Leonard_Coldwell
6. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/iage/201402/cholesterol-and-our-aging-brain
7. http://atvb.ahajournals.org/content/24/5/806
8. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/07/20/the-truth-about-statin-drugs-revealed.aspx
9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22390808
10. http://blogs.naturalnews.com/the-truth-about-salt/
11. http://skepdic.com/refuge/bunk28.html
12. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)31357-5/fulltext
13. http://pharmamkting.blogspot.com/2008/01/statin-lottery-number-needed-to-treat.html
14. https://statindecisionaid.mayoclinic.org
15. http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/circulationaha/early/2013/11/11/01.cir.0000437738.63853.7a.full.pdf
16. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)31357-5/fulltext
17. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)61965-6/fulltext
18. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27353418?dopt=Abstract