I was recently reported for calling Britain’s heir to the throne “foolish and immoral.”¹ The quote happens to be correct; it comes from our new book titled More Good Than Harm? The Moral Maze of Complementary and Alternative Medicine.² In it, the ethicist Kevin Smith and I discuss the many ethical issues around alternative medicine and essentially conclude that it is not possible to practice alternative medicine ethically.

The exact quote from our book relates to Charles’s promotion in 2004 of something called the Gerson diet for cancer:

Despite the fact that they have attained their high positions merely through accidents of birth, monarchs undoubtedly have a good deal of influence over their “subjects.” It is therefore inescapable that many cancer patients will have been given false hope by the utterances of Prince Charles. Accordingly, we consider his public support for unproven cancer treatments to be both foolish and immoral.

Charles’s foolishness in respect to the promotion of quackery has, in my opinion, been demonstrated multiple times.³ His love affair with all things alternative started early in his life. As a teenager, Charles was taken by Laurence van der Post on a journey of “spiritual discovery” into the wilderness of northern Kenya. The fantasist van der Post wanted to attune Charles to the vitalistic ideas of Carl Jung, and it clearly is this belief in vitalism that provides the link to alternative medicine.

Throughout the 1980s, Charles lobbied for the statutory regulation of chiropractors and osteopaths in the United Kingdom. In 1993, this finally became reality. In 1982, Charles was elected as president of the British Medical Association (BMA). In his inauguration speech, the prince lectured the medics: 

Through the centuries healing has been practised by folk healers who are guided by traditional wisdom which sees illness as a disorder of the whole person, involving not only the patient’s body, but his mind, his self-image, his dependence on the physical and social environment, as well as his relation to the cosmos.

In 1993, Charles founded his Foundation for Integrated Health (FIH), which was closed in 2010 amid allegations of money laundering and fraud. In 2005, Charles commissioned the “Smallwood Report,”⁴ which stated that up to £480 million ($675 million) could be saved if one in ten family doctors offered homeopathy as an “alternative” to standard asthma treatments and that savings of up to £3.5 billion ($5 billion) could be achieved by offering spinal manipulation rather than drugs to people with back pain. To avert such nonsense from being implemented, I had publicly commented on this report before its publication. Prince Charles’s first private secretary therefore asked the vice chancellor of my university to investigate my alleged indiscretion; even though I was found to be not guilty of any wrong-doing, all local support at Exeter stopped, which eventually led to my early retirement.

In a 2006 speech to the general assembly of the World Health Organization, Charles urged the delegates to globally integrate conventional and alternative medicine into the mainstream. In 2009, the prince told our Secretary of Health that “despite waves of invective over the years from parts of the medical and scientific establishment … I cannot bear people suffering unnecessarily when a complementary approach could make a real difference” and opposed “large and threatened cuts” in the funding of homeopathic hospitals. He also complained that referrals to the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital were sabotaged by “what seems to amount to a recent anti-homeopathic campaign” despite “the fact that these homeopathic hospitals deal with many patients with real health problems who otherwise would require treatment elsewhere, often at greater expense.” In 2010, Charles even stated that he was proud to be perceived as “an enemy of the enlightenment.” In the same year, former fellows of the FIH launched a new organization, the College of Medicine and Integrated Health, aimed at supporting the use of alternative treatments on the National Health Service. One director of the college is Michael Dixon, formerly medical director of the FIH.⁵ Charles’s 2010 book Harmony is full of praise for even the most absurd forms of alternative therapies and bogus diagnostic tests.⁶

In 2011, Charles launched his Duchy Herbals Detox Tincture, which I publicly called the “Dodgy Originals Detox Tincture.”⁷ In 2015, The Guardian obtained the infamous “black spider memos,” which revealed that Charles had repeatedly lobbied politicians in favor of alternative medicine. In 2016, speaking at a global leaders’ summit on antimicrobial resistance, Charles explained that he had switched to organic farming on his estates because of the growing threat from antibiotic resistance and now treats his cattle with homeopathic remedies rather than conventional medication.

So, is it unfair to call Charles “foolish and immoral”? The late Christopher Hitchens would probably have denied this question:

So this is where all the vapid talk about the “soul” of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The “vacuum” will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.⁸

1. www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/01/17/professor-reignites-war-prince-charles-homeopathy-support/
2. https://www.amazon.co.uk/More-Harm-than-Good-Complementary-ebook/dp/B078ZQXQNP/
3. edzardernst.com/2017/11/happy-birthday-your-royal-highness/
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1821425/
5. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/dr-michael-dixon-a-pyromaniac-in-a-field-of-integrative-straw-men/
6. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Harmony-New-Way-Looking-World/dp/0007348037/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1384092482&sr=8-1&keywords=harmony+by+prince+charles
7. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1165495/Dodgy-Originals-This-remedy-Prince-Charless-company-like-liquid-sunshine.html
8. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/british-royal-family

Among the vast constellation of unexplained and Fortean topics, ghosts are by far the most elusive and unknown. Cryptozoologists who search for Bigfoot, for example, have reached a general consensus on what they’re looking for: a tall, bipedal, hairy, manlike animal. Not so with the most popular paranormal subject in the world: ghosts.

What are ghost hunters looking for? It’s not clear. As Owen Davies notes in his book The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts, historically “Ghosts shared certain characteristics with fairies, angels, and devils, and the tricky task of distinguishing between them often depended on the context in which they appeared: and this in turn changed over the centuries according to religious, philosophical, and scientific developments” (Davies 2007, 13).

Over the years various attempts have been made to classify and categorize ghosts (by early researchers including G.N.M. Tyrrell, Eleanor Sidgwick, and others associated with the Society for Psychical Research and more recently by writers such as Brad Steiger and John Zaffis) usually according to eyewitness reports. Of course there are inherent problems with classifying and categorizing potentially ambiguous and error-prone experiences. This was perhaps not obvious in the late 1800s, but over the past decades, it’s become clear from psychology research that sincere people misperceive and misremember events with alarming consistency. Research is only as good as the data, and the testimony and accounts of apparition witnesses simply cannot be taken at face value.

There are a half dozen or so different definitions of ghosts, and there’s equal evidence for all of them. Trying to classify inherently unknown entities whose very existence and nature remains unproven is a fool’s errand: How many types of ghosts are there? As many as you want there to be.

Many ghost-hunting books begin by boldly asserting that there are a specific number of types of ghosts (curiously the exact number varies somewhat, from two to a half dozen or so). For example, Rich Newman, in his 2011 book Ghost Hunting for Beginners, claims that there are three types of hauntings (he offers no source or reference for this, essentially offering a version of “they say ...”).

But the simple fact is that no one knows for sure whether ghosts exist, and therefore no one can be sure how many types of ghosts there are. Ghost reports and sightings can of course be catalogued, analyzed, and categorized, but ghosts themselves cannot. This is a basic mistake, confusing a type of ghost for a type of ghost report; they are not the same thing at all, and ghost hunters confuse the two at their peril. A ghost report is merely a record of something that someone—for whatever reason and under whatever circumstances—could not explain and chose to attribute to an unseen spirit and may or may not reflect an actual ghost appearance.

When sociologist Dennis Waskul and his wife interviewed ghost experiencers for their book Ghostly Encounters: The Hauntings of Everyday Life, they found:

Many participants in this study were not sure that they had encountered a ghost and remained uncertain that such phenomena were even possible, simply because they did not see something that approximated the conventional image of a “ghost.” Instead, many of our respondents were simply convinced that they had experienced something uncanny—something inexplicable, extraordinary, mysterious, or eerie. (Waskul and Waskul 2016, 20)

Thus, we see why defining and explaining ghostly phenomena is slippery and problematic. Many people who will go on record as having a ghostly experience didn’t necessarily see anything that most people would recognize as a classic “ghost,” and in fact may have had completely different experiences whose only common factor is that they could not be readily explained.

Disorder in the House

It’s difficult to overstate the lack of coherent research methods and assumptions about ghosts within the ghost-hunting communities. A chapter in the book Ghosts, Spirits & Hauntings by ghost hunters Larry Flaxman and Marie D. Jones (2011) shows just how disorganized the ghost hunting field is.

Though both authors are clearly believers in the existence of ghosts and the paranormal (Flaxman is senior researcher with fifteen years of experience at the Arkansas Paranormal and Anomalous Studies Team, a member of the T.A.P.S. group and “one of the nation’s largest and most active paranormal research organizations”), they acknowledge that ghost hunters still don’t know what ghosts are. Flaxman and Jones briefly describe about a half dozen theories about what ghosts might be. The most popular idea is that ghosts are the earthbound spirits of the deceased. They admit that “this theory creates more questions than it answers” but nonetheless note that it is “the gold standard that guides most ghost hunters and paranormal researchers.” But there are of course other theories, including:

1. Ghosts are “created by naturally occurring environmental conditions such as electricity and electromagnetic radiation”; evidence for this often comes in the form of EMF readings.
2. Ghosts are the “‘playback’ of energy or stored human emotion that was once present in the location and then somehow captured or ‘recorded’ into the environment”; evidence of this theory is often discussed in terms of “residual hauntings,” for example. Flaxman and Jones noted that if this theory is correct, it raises questions about the legitimacy of EVPs (ghost voices), which may in fact be “merely the thoughts and feelings of the investigators.”
3. 3) Ghosts “are very much alive and active, but present in alternate dimensions or realities.” Flaxman and Jones speculate that “if a ghostly apparition is indeed coming to us from another dimension or parallel universe, it might not be a dead person at all but a real, live person whom we are merely glimpsing across the great divide of reality.”
4. Ghosts may be either figments of our imaginations or products of temporary hallucinations (created, for example, by brain chemicals or low-level electromagnetic fields).
5. Ghosts “are sentient entities that enjoy vexing and even harming humans.” This theory suggests that ghosts are similar to supposed demonic entities or fairies.

In the end, Flaxman and Jones acknowledge that “the bottom line is ... even when we appear to have some kind of direct communication from a ghost, we cannot know for sure that we are dealing with a spirit of the dead” (p. 41). This refreshingly candid admission is exactly correct, and it fatally undermines virtually all of the other ghost hunters and paranormal researchers in the book and around the world. The fact that neither Flaxman and Jones—nor anyone else, for that matter—can conclusively rule out any of these competing explanations for ghosts demonstrates clearly that there are no proven facts about ghosts, no certain knowledge; it’s all guesswork, speculation, and opinion often presented as self-evident truth (“our team helped the ghost to move on”) or established fact (“through EVPs the spirit told us he was angry”).

Those who might suggest that each of the different theories Flaxman and Jones present as plausible candidates for ghosts may simply be different aspects of the same phenomenon should be aware that many of the explanations are in fact mutually exclusive. For example, a ghost cannot be both a sentient earthbound spirit and a hallucination; nor can a ghost be some sort of “stored environmental emotion” unknown to science and a malevolent, mischievous spirit or live human from another dimension. These theories must be entirely different phenomena with different mechanisms. An apt analogy might be a sommelier speculating about what ingredients may have been used to create a specific table wine, but the candidates are not different varieties of grapes but instead a tree, an airplane, a football, and a dolphin. If ghost experts don’t have enough known, independently verifiable information about what they’re studying to distinguish between a hallucination, a “time slip” from another reality, or a sentient spirit of the dead with verifiable knowledge of the past, the field is in far worse shape than anyone dared imagine.

Descriptive Ghost Categories

Instead of (or in addition to) offering discrete categories of ghost epistemology, many writers categorize ghosts by their apparent intent or purpose; through this prism the ghost’s behavior determines what “type” it is.

Any speculation about a potential ghost’s motivations, however, is a frivolous and pointless task because there’s no way to independently confirm it. No matter what “answer” a ghost hunter comes up with as to why whatever phenomenon he or she perceives as something a ghost “does” (appears at a certain location, makes a specific sound, etc.), another ghost hunter might come to a completely different—yet equally valid—conclusion based on the same logic and “evidence.” Does a ghost haunt a room because she died there in 1830 or because she saw her child die from a specific window in that room or just because she likes the wallpaper? Who knows? There’s no verifiable, provable right or wrong answer as to why a ghost does anything, and therefore as an investigative technique it’s a dead end.

Even if a ghost exists, and even if it can (and chooses to) communicate its motivations to a ghost hunter, and even if the ghost hunter correctly guesses the ghost’s intent based upon taps or knocks or some other inherently ambiguous method, that doesn’t solve any mystery; a ghost hunter concluding, “I believe this ghost wanders the hallway mourning his dead wife,” even if completely true, doesn’t explain anything or give any information upon which to further our knowledge of ghosts. It’s a waste of time and effort. Determining why a ghost seems to do something is no more useful than asking it what its favorite color is; there is no independently verifiable right or wrong answer.

Another way to examine these various efforts at ghost categorization—however well intentioned—is its fruitfulness: Has it helped us understand ghosts or apparitions? So far the answer seems to be a clear no. Just as spending time deciding why an apparition has chosen to manifest itself is pointless, there’s no point in spending time trying to figure out what type of spirit is in a place. Is it Type A, B, C, or D? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t matter; it’s not like a mechanical problem in which a person must first assess the situation to determine what tool to use for the specific job (wrench, screwdriver, pliers, hammer, etc.). No credible ghost investigator ever said, “Well, I was baffled by this paranormal haunting for weeks until I realized I’d made a silly mistake: I re-read a ghost hunting book and found out I wasn’t dealing with a residual haunting entity; it was really a poltergeist! I felt pretty silly, but once I figured that out I solved the mystery and proved the ghost existed.”

The important thing is determining whether a given apparently mysterious phenomenon (of whatever sort or category) has a mundane explanation. Guessing at—or claiming to know—why a ghost did something or what kind of spirit it might be is like trying to determine what musical note a sound is before proving or verifying that any sound exists or trying to figure out what color a light is when it’s not clear a light is even present.

This fundamental inability to decide anything about even the basic nature of ghosts is especially surprising given the fact that ghost hunting is the world’s most popular paranormal pursuit. Inspired by reality television shows such as Ghost Hunters and its ilk, tens of thousands of people around the world have taken up ghost hunting. Never before in human history has so much time, money, technology, and effort been devoted to the ostensible goal of understanding the spirit world—resulting in not a single verifiable conclusion.

If ghosts do exist and could be any or all of these different entities and therefore anything goes, then why bother to have the categories at all? If a ghost can truly be anything you imagine it to be, and have any characteristics you can imagine it to have, how is that different from an imagined ghost? Unless the definitions and explanations for ghosts are anchored in verifiable reality and empirical evidence, it’s all speculation and guesswork. When and if ghosts are proven to exist—and their differing properties can be scientifically quantified and categorized—it will be useful and important to distinguish between types of spirits and apparitions. Until then it’s merely a parlor game distracting amateur ghost hunters from the task at hand.

• Davies, Owen. 2007. The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts. New York: Palgrave.
• Flaxman, Larry, and Marie D. Jones. 2011. Not quite dead: When a ghost is not really a ghost. In Ghosts, Spirits, & Hauntings: Am I Being Haunted? Ed. by Michael Pye and Kirsten Dalley. Pompton Plains, New Jersey: Red Wheel Press.
• Newman, Rich. 2011. Ghost Hunting for Beginners: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started. Woodbury, Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications.
• Waskul, Dennis, and Michele Waskul. 2016. Ghostly Encounters: The Hauntings of Everyday Life. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press.

The planet Mars has always fascinated humanity. In fact, it seems to interest us considerably more than most things in the night sky.

This makes sense; Mars is often not only clearly visible but conspicuously red like blood. So many ancient societies associated Mars with war, always of considerable interest to the human species. Mars appeals to us both as a physical object for observation and as a lure for mythological speculation.

There is a duality here. On the one hand, there is the visible planet; the red coloration reflects its geology. On the other hand, there is the Mars of interpretation, whose red color reflects its attributional warlike nature; this says a lot more about human psychology than it does about the planet Mars itself.

The red planet causes us to observe and to speculate.

Speculation. That’s where the problems come in. There is physical reality, and there is interpretation; and it is frequently the interpretation, rather than the reality, that seizes the attention of human beings. Our brains are remarkably predisposed to the interpretation of objective physical reality in psychological, self-referential terms. Unfortunately, these terms are frequently just plain wrong.

Examples of this are legion. In previous articles in SI, my coauthors and I have discussed ordinary objects that have metamorphosed, in the minds of their observers, into nonexistent phenomena ranging from UFOs to Bigfoot, and we have found specific patterns of mental processing that contribute directly to these misinterpretations (e.g., Sharps et al. 2016). In the more prosaic but more sinister worlds of eyewitness memory and officer-involved shootings, we have frequently found innocuous things such as power tools being transformed, psychologically, into far less innocuous firearms (e.g., Sharps 2017). It is very clear that our brains can lead us to see meaningful patterns where none actually exist and that we may extrapolate what we believe about a given perception to the perception itself. We tend to interpret what we see in terms of what we believe; this brings us back to the planet Mars.

Mars was the special focus of Percival Lowell, an important pioneer in planetary astronomy. Using his own considerable wealth, he created the great observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona. Lowell’s computations there led ultimately to Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto, and Lowell’s financial and intellectual support led to a literally stellar progression of Lowell Observatory discoveries to the present day. Many of his observations, and those of other scientists at the Observatory, have proven startlingly accurate (e.g., Schindler 2016).

Some of his other observations, however, present problems.

One of Lowell’s most important discoveries, in his opinion, was finding canals on the surface of Mars. These long, straight, clearly artificial irrigation systems were ubiquitous. For Lowell, the dry landscape of Mars quite literally supported an intelligent race of beings with something like civil engineering degrees who were transporting water all over the place in their canals.

It wasn’t just Lowell. Schiaparelli saw canals, or at least ditches (canali). Schiaparelli’s ditches were long and straight and rectilinear, completely failing to obey the laws of perspective on the Martian planetary spheroid, but he saw and reported them anyway. Flammarion believed in canals, although he was also big on vegetation on the moon as well, so we might want to be a little careful there. Douglas, Lowell’s assistant, also saw canals—until he decided they didn’t really exist, was fired by Lowell as a result, and went on to invent dendrochronology at the University of Arizona. A lot of professional astronomers saw Martian canals, drew the things, and speculated on their nature.

But there aren’t any Martian canals.

That’s the problem: there just aren’t any damn canals on Mars. Lowell, and many other expert observers, saw them.

But they’re just not there.

The Mariner spacecraft thoroughly photographed Mars way back in 1964. Mariner found craters, rocks, flat bits and pointy bits, and bits with hills, but it didn’t find a single canal. Anywhere.

Mariner did, of course, photograph many Martian surface structures of great interest to planetary astronomers. Lowell saw many of them, half a century earlier, through his excellent telescopes. The man was no fool; some of his drawings of the Martian surface are practically identical, in broad outline, to photographs of the planet taken from the Hubble space telescope. But his canals, drawn with equal clarity, simply don’t exist.

You might assume that continuing progress in telescope technology would have reduced the observation of these canals in the early years of the twentieth century, but you’d be wrong. I had the honor of examining a number of globes and maps of Mars, held today in the excellent archives at the Lowell Observatory; these very clearly show an increase in the number and complexity of canals as new observations were made and new globes and maps created. Canals became more numerous and elegantly geometric as the observations poured in. Some canals even doubled in perfect parallel, an astonishing phenomenon termed gemination; all of this despite the fact that there were never any real canals to begin with.

These nonexistent canals had real staying power. As mentioned earlier, the Mariner orbiter, in 1964, proved that there were no canals on Mars, but I examined a 1969 map in the Lowell archives that still showed the canals, in all their impossible rectilinear glory. The ruler-straight lines of the canals were relatively faint, as if the planetary cartographers were somewhat ashamed of these non-existent features, but these completely imaginary ditches were certainly there, in the imaginations and on the maps of scientific areographers. This was five years after Mariner had completely disproved their existence.

How do we explain this? Was Lowell, a fine observational astronomer, hallucinating? And were all the other astronomers who “saw” these bizarre ditches, straight and clear and marching over the Martian landscape, similarly afflicted with bizarre psychological disorders?

Of course not. Hallucinations derive from three sources: organic brain changes, psychosis, and extraordinary levels of stress. Lowell suffered from none of these. Granted, in the 1890s, Lowell left astronomy for four years due to a “nervous” condition, but nobody has ever suggested that he suffered from any of the conditions that produce hallucinations, and he kept seeing canals anyway. So did a lot of less nervous people; his predecessor Schiaparelli observed whole networks of Martian canali, as did a number of contemporaneous astronomers, none of whom were psychotic or brain damaged.

What on Mars was going on?

Well, that would be nothing. What was happening was not on Mars at all. The canal phenomenon was very clearly happening on Earth in the minds of the astronomers affected; for whatever reasons, a lot of them had canals on the brain.

Now, if anybody had a right to have canals on the brain, it was the aforementioned Giovanni Schiaparelli. Born a mere twenty-five miles from Canale, Italy, within thirty miles of several major transportation canals and living during a period in which the Suez and Panama Canals were the wonders of the world, it would be rather strange if Schiaparelli did not regard canals as the apotheosis of civilization, even though he himself only referred to the Martian canals as channels or ditches (canali). He may very well have had a mental set (e.g., Sharps 2017) about such things, a habitual way of looking at the world in canal-related or channel-based terms. This is of course speculation and can never really be anything more, but what we know for certain is that such habits of mind are intensely individualistic, based in our own idiosyncratic experience, and may form one of the first dynamics suggested to explain observation of the nonexistent canals of Mars: Individual Differences. Some people see canals. Others don’t.

But why does anybody see them in the first place? As mentioned, research in my laboratory, published primarily in SI (e.g., Sharps et al. 2016), has elucidated some of the psychological dynamics of those who think they see Bigfoot, flying saucers, aliens, and ghosts. One of the things we found in that research was that people generally don’t make something out of nothing. In other words, you don’t see Bigfoot on a featureless plain; you see an ape-shaped tree stump or something similar, and your brain makes Bigfoot out of it for you. The same brain-based phenomena can also create a Loch Ness monster out of a school of Scottish salmon, a Death Star out of a helicopter with a broken landing light, and so on. These Gestalt reconfigurations result from our mental misperception and misinterpretation of real things in the real world—or on the real Mars—and these phenomena are governed by specific psychological laws. These laws are suggested to be a major psychological source of the observation of the canals of Mars.

But how does an astronomer such as Lowell or Schiaparelli maintain his beliefs in these canals, to the point at which, in the face of mounting professional opposition, he sees more and more of them? Human beings are social creatures with the ability to develop strong investments in our ideas and beliefs. This is suggested to be another major source of the Canal phenomenon: sociocognitive influences, to be joined with individual differences and Gestalt reconfiguration.

Based on an intensive review of the relevant literature, and on the observations I was privileged to make in the Lowell Archives and also through Lowell’s own 24-inch Clark telescope at the great Lowell Observatory, I submit that the erroneous observations of the canals of Mars can be better understood in terms of these three sets of dynamics.

Individual Differences

The precise influences on Lowell’s thinking cannot now be ascertained. But it is clear that in 1901, when Lowell drew an “artificial planet,” a mock-up disk designed to evaluate the accuracy of observational drawings, Lowell drew not one but two parallel canals, a “gemination,” when in fact there had been “only a broad shading” in that portion of the model (Sheehan 1988). Part of Lowell’s family wealth derived from investments in the great canal systems of the eastern United States. These were regarded at the time as among the modern wonders of the world and were used extensively to ship a tremendous variety of goods, including the textiles that were a major business interest of the Lowell clan (see Hoyt 1976 and Sheehan 1988); this was yet another source of his individual affiliation with canals and their builders. In the presence of this influence, he turned a “broad shading” into two very specific, but nonexistent, canals. It might readily be suggested that Lowell, perhaps like Schiaparelli, was something of a victim of a canal-based mental set. This speculation may or may not have merit, but we do know that when Lowell, as an individual, was offered the opportunity to draw a shadow, he drew a hydraulic engineering system.

These individual differences would of course have interacted with the conditions of any given observation—but in what way? In my own work at the Lowell Observatory, I observed both Mars and Jupiter through the great Clark telescope preserved there. Now, I am an aging researcher with very thick glasses, but what I can say is that the observations danced before me very swiftly, the result of atmospheric fluctuation. Sometimes I would seem to see a feature on Mars, and then it was gone, or obscured, within two or three seconds. This type of highly variable, atmospherically based visual fluctuation would certainly have been there for Lowell and his colleagues as well. Obviously their training and experience would have rendered them vastly superior observers to me. But expertise aside, the fact is that brevity of observation limits our precision, in astronomy as in criminal eyewitness identification. Brevity can completely change our interpretation of our observations (e.g., Sharps 2017), whether we think we see a criminal suspect with a gun or a canal on the planet Mars. In short, if we have strong individual psychological reasons to see canals, we will see them if the observational conditions permit them at all. Lowell saw them, to the degree that when his assistant A.E. Douglas questioned these interpretations, he was essentially fired. Observations are subject to the psychology of the individual interpreting them; this is a crucial principle that all scientists, in all fields, should consider.

Gestalt Reconfiguration

The astronomer E.M. Antoniadi was rather caustically critical of Lowell in most respects. Although he reported the odd Martian canal himself, he demonstrated, very enthusiastically, that many of the “canals” were in fact the result of observation of a series of surface features: craters, rocks, and so on, arranged by the forces of geology into linear patterns. Lowell, and the other “canal” observers, saw discrete surface features arranged by natural forces into relatively straight lines, and joined them, perceptually, into “canals” (e.g., Sheehan 1988).

How is this possible? Gestalt psychology, the venerable theoretical perspective that deals with perceptual and cognitive configuration, provides rather good answers (e.g., King and Wertheimer 2005; Kohler 1947). Consider two of the Gestalt laws of perception, the laws of closure and of good continuation (see Sharps 1993). When we see objects that are close together, we tend to see them as connected; and when they form contours, lines, or curves, we tend to see them as units. Lowell, and the other canal believers, saw craters and rocks very close together. These astronomers, with their human nervous systems, tended to see these things as contiguous. The contours thus created frequently formed lines, hence the canals. Contours of disconnected rocks were “closed,” perceptually, into solid lines; under brief observation conditions, these lines appeared very solid, and they showed “good continuation” with other discrete features of the Martian surface. These factors would have created, perceptually, the “canals” (Sheehan 1988).

If an astronomer such as Lowell was individually predisposed to see canals and observed them with unavoidable fluctuating brevity, the Gestalt phenomena of closure and good continuation would practically ensure that he would see them, real or not (Sheehan 1988; Sharps 1993; 2017).

Sociocognitive Factors

In a letter to Lowell’s brother, Lowell’s assistant, A.E. Douglas, pointed out that the canals might have a psychological origin. Lowell discharged him.

Lowell regarded any psychological explanation for the canals as anathema. He may have seen the psychological idea as psychopathological, rather than as rooted in the normal principles of cognition and perception; whatever the source, he fired Douglas. Lowell had invested enormously, in financial and in psychological terms, in the canals of Mars, and as has been demonstrated many times, strong investment leads to strong beliefs that are difficult to sway even in the presence of contrary evidence. The principle of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957; Sharps 2017) deals with this rather nicely. Even if a given idea proves to be completely wrong, we tend to hold to it, and even to defend it with relatively incoherent cognitive processing, if we’re sufficiently invested in it (Festinger 1957).

Lowell had given the canals of Mars everything he had, in terms of a very long-term emotional and financial investment. The canals of Mars, in Lowell’s mind, were the greatest discovery of his own observatory. To acknowledge error would have been virtually impossible for him, in view of this investment; he never gave up on his belief in the canals, even and especially in the face of mounting pressure and criticism from his colleagues and his detractors.

Conclusions

The Martian surface is densely covered with features derived from the geological processes of the planet and from astronomical impacts over an enormous span of time. These surface features create a variety of irregularities that are very clear in photographs from spacecraft and from modern telescopes. However, through the telescopes of the early twentieth century, these features would have been much less readily resolved. This relative lack of resolution would have resulted in perceptual and cognitive misinterpretation with reference to the Gestalt principles cited above. This is especially true when the fluctuating brevity of optical astronomical observation is considered and when we further consider the reinforcing factors derived from individual differences and from sociocognitive factors, cementing early interpretations of those observations into a form of cognitive concrete.

It’s obviously impossible to perform experiments on the astronomers of the past. But within the realm of theoretical psychology, we can absolutely state that the observation of the canals of Mars demonstrates neither psychopathology nor incompetence on the part of pioneering scientists such as Lowell. Instead, we find an important lesson for our more modern inquiries. The scientist does not lie outside of the natural world. Rather, the scientist is entirely part of that world and is subject to scientific law; in the present case, to elements of the Gestalt laws of perception and cognition and to the laws of related areas of experimental psychology. It is important for all scientists, in all disciplines, to be aware of these essential facts and to use them to exert caution in the interpretation of what might otherwise be interpreted as purely objective observations.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the Lowell Observatory for allowing me to conduct research for this article in their excellent facilities. Special gratitude goes to outstanding Lowell Observatory scholars Brian Skiff, Kevin Schindler (author of the excellent book Images of America: Lowell Observatory), and most especially to Archivist Lauren Amundson, for generously sharing their time and expertise with me during my research. Thanks also to CSUF student Amanda Briley for excellent research assistance. All interpretations (and mistakes) in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Lowell Observatory or of these outstanding scholars.

• Festinger, L. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.
• Hoyt, W.G. 1976. Lowell and Mars. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
• King, D.B., and M. Wertheimer. 2005. Max Wertheimer and Gestalt Theory. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
• Kohler, W. 1947. Gestalt Psychology. New York: Mentor.
• Schindler, K. 2016. Images of America: Lowell Observatory. Charleston, SC: Arcadia.
• Sharps, M.J. 1993. Gestalt laws of perceptual and cognitive organization. In Magill’s Survey of Social Science: Psychology. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press.
• ———. 2017. Processing Under Pressure: Stress, Memory, and Decision-Making in Law Enforcement. Flushing, NY: Looseleaf Law Publications.
• Sharps, M.J., S.W. Liao, and M.R. Herrera. 2016. Dissociation and paranormal beliefs: Toward a taxonomy of belief in the unreal. Skeptical Inquirer 40(3) (May/June): 40–44.
• Sheehan, W. 1988. Planets and Perception. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Hundreds of bizarre health claims such as “tonifies kidney essence” and “opens body orifices” could appear on complementary medicine labels under new laws being pushed by the Australian federal government.

Consumer advocacy group Choice is urging the Australian public to tell senators to knock back these laws so that Australians looking for vitamins and supplements can separate fact from fiction.

Their campaign points out that “Proposed laws could see dangerous and potentially misleading claims on therapeutic goods, especially complementary and alternative medicines like herbal and homeopathic treatments. It means that products can claim to decrease the time it takes to fall asleep or help maintain healthy heart function without having scientific evidence to back their claims.”

Token Skeptic podcaster Kylie Sturgess spoke to Katinka Day, the Campaigns Policy Team Leader at Choice Australia.

Katinka Day: There is a huge array of therapeutic products in chemists and supermarkets. So you know when you walk in to a chemist you’re often overwhelmed by choice, products spruiking a whole range of claims.

Currently the legislation is fairly weak in that it doesn’t really help consumers differentiate between products that are based on scientific evidence and products that aren’t. So it makes it really difficult for consumers to find products that are going to suit their needs or particular ailments. We’re talking about people who are at their most vulnerable, who are seeking to find a cure or prevent some issue happening. You know when it’s an issue around health people are more willing to spend lots of money. So that makes it a particular area of concern.

Choice is always concerned about truth in labelling. We’ve worked across a number of food issues, where we’ve seen products making unfounded or potentially misleading claims. But this area certainly got our attention due to these new laws that were being proposed to potentially tighten up this regulatory space. So it is a new area for us, but there is a lot of concerns that have been raised from looking into complementary medicines.

At the moment in Australia, complementary medicine or products are termed as low risk products, those that you would normally find in the chemist. They are able to make a wide range of claims. So they have a free text field and the onus is on them to hold the evidence. So there’s not any process where the regulators of Therapeutic Goods Administration has to check off those products. So it’s fairly loose at the moment.

Kylie Sturgess: So how did this campaign first get started? What are these new proposed laws that (and I’m quoting here from what I’ve seen from Choice’s media release), “Could see dangerous and potentially misleading claims on therapeutic goods.”

Day: The proposed law said that instead of a fill-it-in-text field for product claims, we’re going to create a pre-approved list of claims that companies have to choose from. So in theory that sounded really good: having a pre-approved list of claims that was concise and based on scientific evidence would’ve been a real big improvement.

But instead of that theyallowed industry to contribute to what that list would look like, and it ended up with a list of 1,000 different claims that can be made on therapeutic goods products. Eighty-six percent of those claims are not based on scientific evidence.

We think that this is going to lead to a whole range of products making claims that aren’t based on scientific evidence, which is why we think that we could see potentially dangerous and misleading claims on therapeutic goods.

Sturgess: Just how dangerous and misleading could these claims get? Could there be new kinds of problems arising from these changes?

Day: They’re dangerous in the sense that you could potentially have a product that claims to help support heart health, for example, without having scientific evidence that it does that. So, what you could see is that people are spending money on those products and foregoing actual treatments that do work. That’s where we see it being quite dangerous.

Then on the other hand, you’ve got homeopathic products. So homeopathy has been warned by the Federal Government that it is ineffective in terms of treating peoples’ problems. So the fact that now homeopathic products can make a whole range of claims, based on this legislation, could mean that people are potentially mislead into believing that a product does one thing when it doesn’t.

Sturgess: I’ve seen online that you’ve been sourcing hundreds of vitamin bottles and lollies and labeled them with the kinds of claims that vitamin companies are able to get away with under these proposed laws, and you’ve been taking them to politicians in Canberra. How has that been received?

Day: Yes, this month we went to Canberra and we had a hundred bottles that we’d mocked up with what the labels would look like under the proposed laws. So, we had a heart health product, we had a product that claimed to help you sleep, and a product that claimed to detox your liver. These are all claims that would be allowed under the new legislation, and all of those claims are not based on scientific evidence. 

We went and dropped one of these products off at every single senator’s office to highlight the issue. At the moment, how the legislation is standing, is that senators can knock it back and they have until 25th of June to knock back this piece of legislation before it becomes law. So we really wanted to highlight the detriment of these proposed laws to consumers by mocking up the products ourselves.

We got a fair bit of good feedback; once you kind of have these product claims on actual products you can see, you know how ridiculous it is and how it doesn’t help consumers make an informed choice.

Sturgess: Obviously Choice has made a very bold step by actually going out to Parliament and dropping it off to senators, but what can the general public do next? And what is Choice suggesting the public might do next, if they’re concerned about these kinds of claims being legitimized?

Day: On the same day we went to Parliament we got our campaign supporters to write to senators to remind them that they received a little delivery from Choice in their Parliament offices. We really need to highlight that there is consumer concern about these proposed laws.

You know if parliamentarians don’t hear from the public on a particular issue, they might not think it’s important to act. So we are really urging the public to contact senators. We actually do have a preformed letter that you can email to senators on our website, and if you head to choice.com.au you can find it through there. But yes—parliamentarians really need to hear from the public on this issue.

The petition can be found athttps://campaigns.choice.com.au/tga-fact-over-fiction/

One important social role of skepticism is mediating the public’s concerns and fears. Skeptics often find themselves helping (or trying to help) the public distinguish between real and exaggerated threats. Statisticians such as Joel Best and John Allen Paulos have written accessible, useful books on how to recognize real risk and distinguish dangers from false alarms.

Skeptics typically work hard to reassure the public that their fears of many things are exaggerated or outright fabricated: fears of vaccines, for example, or food additives, or GMOs, Satanists, immigrants, online predators, and so on. This is often a thankless job, as there is profit in alarmism. The public rewards the Chicken Littles of the world who warn (usually sincerely, though sometimes not) of some impending, previously unrecognized danger.

One example that comes to mind is the pink slime scare of 2012.

Remember the Slime?

Pink slime got a lot of publicity in late 2012—none of it good. The widely used beef and hamburger filler had parents and politicians upset, and an online petition urged the government to keep pink slime out of school lunches.

Pink slime was defended by its manufacturers and the U.S. government as eco-friendly, allowing more of an animal’s carcass to be used. It’s not as nutritious or tasty as full meat tissue, but many foods contain harmless fillers.

Pink slime sounds unappetizing, but it was consumed for years. Though some have raised concerns about the safety of pink slime, there have been no reports of any problems or food contamination because of the substance. Pink slime was regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which classifies it as “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS), a very common designation that applies to most foods we eat. Thus it’s safe—or at least no less safe than any other consumer meat, which must be correctly refrigerated, prepared, and cooked before eating.

The real problem with pink slime is the “ick factor”—it sounds gross. When it comes to the ick factor, it’s mostly psychological. Part of the psychology behind the ick factor is labeling. The language we use when we identify things influences how we interpret them. We can call an old car “used” or “pre-owned”; we can call civilians killed in wartime “men, women, and children” or “regrettable collateral damage.” And we can call processed beef parts “pink slime” or we can call it “boneless lean beef trimmings.”

Pink slime may not be appetizing, but it’s not much more disgusting than what’s in all-American hot dogs—you don’t want to know what kind of “miscellaneous parts” go into those ballpark favorites.

As New York Times reporter Alexander Aciman noted:

What seemed to scare consumers the most about pink slime—which an ABC News report claimed was used in 70 percent of ground beef sold in American supermarkets—was that the lean beef trimmings were treated with ammonia. That sounds scary, but is actually perfectly safe. Ammonia is used to kill harmful bacteria that exists in the meat, but is present in such tiny quantities that it is not harmful to consume. The United States Department of Agriculture affirmed as much in a letter back in 2012, a few weeks after the ABC story aired. Indeed, Chips Ahoy cookies and Velveeta cheese contain similar ammonium compounds, like ammonium phosphate, as does Wonder Bread. Understandably, though, people are scared of the word ammonia, which they associate with heavy-duty cleaning products. Perhaps unsurprisingly that’s why some quarter of a million people signed a petition asking that the government not serve their children ammonia-treated beef for lunch and why several fast-food chains, including McDonalds and Burger King, renounced the product and stopped using it in their burgers.

Many people would be disgusted at the idea of eating another animal’s skin and dermal fat—but they happily munch down pork rinds (made from fried skin) and leave the skin on cooked chicken and turkey. And let’s not forget Jell-O brand gelatin, a favorite dessert since 1897. You can call it Jell-O, or you can call it flavored and colored powdered cow bones, cartilage, and intestines. Gelatin is made from collagen, an animal tissue (which is why many strict vegans refuse to eat it). Feeding ground-up cow meat to children is a disgusting outrage, but feeding ground-up cow bones to kids is a delicious treat on a hot summer day.

Ultimately the debate about the future of pink slime should rest on the science of safety instead of the psychology of disgust. Food processing—and especially meat processing—isn’t pretty no matter what you call it or how you do it.

Contamination Fears

This exaggerated outraged concern over pink slime is perhaps best understood as a primal contamination fear. As far as I know, I was the only prominent skeptic at the time to write about this topic and try to allay the public’s fears. It’s not that others were ignoring the subject; it just wasn’t on the radar of skeptical organizations and public safety advocates.

Skepticism’s failure to help the public put the pink slime scare into perspective is no one’s fault; there are too few skeptics and too many potential topics and inevitably some worthy subjects simply slip through the cracks. Pink slime, though ripe for skeptical fear-allaying analysis, was a slippery subject because it didn’t fit neatly into classic skeptical categories; it had nothing to do with the paranormal, it wasn’t alternative medicine or pseudoscience, exactly. It was certainly a form of health scaremongering, but those promoting the scaremongering were not the usual suspects such as the Food Babe; they were hundreds of ordinary parents and caregivers who didn’t want to eat the stuff and feared, for no obvious reason, feeding it to kids. It was, one might ague, a form of moral panic.

Remember when Vani Hari, the “Food Babe,” demanded that Subway remove a harmless chemical called azodicarbonamide from its bread? I wrote about that for Discovery News:

Her petition, signed by over 50,000 people so far, calls the chemical a “dangerous ingredient” and ends with, “North Americans deserve to truly eat fresh—not yoga mats.” Added Hari, “When you look at the ingredients, if you can’t spell it or pronounce it, you probably shouldn’t eat it.” Yuck! Who wants to eat yoga mats? But is that really what’s in Subway bread?

According to a 1999 World Health Organization evaluation of studies on the effects of azodicarbonamide, there was a negligible impact from the chemical in animal test subjects, except in massive doses. All information regarding human testing was inconclusive. The ingredient is widely used throughout the food industry, including by Starbucks, McDonald’s, Burger King, Dunkin’ Donuts, and many other chains.

Azodicarbonamide is regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which classifies it as “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) when used as a dough conditioner or bleaching agent in flour. The GRAS designation is very common and applies to most foods we eat. Thus it’s safe—or at least no less safe than other foods. Of course no food is completely safe; all foods carry some inherent risk, whether it’s the risk of food-borne pathogens, the risk of mercury in seafood, or even allergic reaction.

The Food Babe website is littered with alarmist click-bait titles like “Are You Eating This Ingredient Banned All Over the World?” and “Why Chewing Gum Destroys Your Health” and, perhaps most memorably, “Do You Eat Beaver Butt?” Hari is smart enough to know that simply offering a carefully written, science-based article is not going to generate the publicity she seeks. Instead Hari launched the petition and circulated a photo of herself outside a Subway sandwich shop with a rolled yoga mat displayed prominently under one arm. Who needs statistics and peer-reviewed journal studies when you’ve got a bright blue yoga mat associated with food?

In another incident, Portland, Oregon decided to dump 38 million gallons of drinking water after a teenager urinated into an open reservoir. There was no risk involved, of course; as Laura Helmuth noted in a Slate article:

The decision seems to be based on some combination of chemophobia, homeopathy, and pee shame. The dose makes the poison, and clearly this dose is negligible. But is it possible to calculate precisely how illogical Portland’s decision is? Let’s try to put some numbers on it. Several smart people on Twitter quickly did the math and figured that a typical urination of about 1/8 gallon in a reservoir of 38 million gallons amounts to a concentration of 3 parts per billion. That’s billion with a B. For comparison, the Environmental Protection Agency’s limit for arsenic in drinking water—arsenic!—is 10 ppb. But of course urine is 95 percent water. (If you’re ever trapped in rubble after a natural disaster, go ahead and drink it.) Only about 2 percent of urine is nitrogen-rich urea. That means he’d have to urinate 166,666 times for the concentration of urea to approach that of the EPA’s limit for nitrates in drinking water. Draining the reservoir is paranoid, illogical, and expensive. But the most frustrating thing to me about the whole episode is that there is actually something Portland could do to its water supply that would have an immediate, positive, and repeatedly scientifically validated impact on public health: Add fluoride. Paranoia is not healthy.

Other Perspectives

There are countless other examples as well, but these give you a sense of the problem. I asked two prominent skeptics to share their thoughts on the topic: Terence Hines (professor of neurology and author of Pseudoscience and the Paranormal: A Critical Examination of the Evidence) and Susan Gerbic (grief vampire gadfly and Wikipedia wizard).

Said Terence Hines:

“That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.”

Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II

Well, probably. But if the rose had happened to have the bad luck to be named “stinking toilet flower” I doubt very much if its aroma would be as popular as it is with its current name. A very practical example of this was changing the name of a fish called “slimehead” to “orange roughy.” Slimehead wasn’t going to be a big seller at the fish monger. But “orange roughy” is quite popular. Happily, for the sellers of orange roughy, the name “slimehead” was never known to the general public. Had it been, no amount of re-branding could have erased the unpleasant emotional connotations of “slimehead.”

This was precisely the problem faced by the meat product that came to be known as “pink slime.” Although it was totally safe, the name attached to it by activists caused its doom. This is an excellent example of how the name of a thing can matter a great deal—and that an unpleasant sounding name can easily overcome a rational evaluation of a product. Another common example is the “Frankenfood” label for genetically modified plants or animals.

It’s important to recognize attempts by critics to demonize harmless, or even beneficial, new products or technologies by sticking them with icky or scary sounding names. It is easiest to arouse fear and anxiety in people over things that they don’t think they have any control over and that they don’t understand. This makes scientifically and technically untrained individuals particularly easy to manipulate into opposing new technologies and products, especially when they have some sort of sciencey sounding name or derivation. The classic example here is how easy it is to get people to sign petitions demanding that dihydrogen monoxide be banned as a dangerous chemical substance.

Skepticism has been criticized, to some extent correctly, for focusing on Bigfoot, astrology, lake monsters and the like, while paying less attention to beliefs that cause far more harm to society such as opposition to vaccinations. Challenging opposition to unfounded fears over new technologies can both help promote socially desirable goals and make skepticism more relevant to the general public. 

Susan Gerbic had this to say:

I suppose I should be flattered to be asked to talk about pink slime. It is a big step up from my normal work with grief vampires (psychics who claim to communicate with the dead). I also run the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) project and so my first instinct when I learn about something new is always to check to see what information the public is seeing when they are looking for information. We know that Wikipedia is one of the first places people will check, either directly or by following a link from an internet search. And more importantly this is where the media gets a lot of its information. Looking now at the Wikipedia page for Pink Slime I see that in the past thirty days it has been viewed 14,831 times and it has a daily average of 478 views. It is important to make sure the Wikipedia page has great information written in a way that the average reader can understand it, leave great citations for them to follow if they want more detailed information, and then make sure the page is available with the same standards in other languages. It’s a lot of work and a giant responsibility. It might be an overwhelming task, but it needs to be done.

Let’s move on from pink slime to a broader discussion about the skeptic’s role to combat the nonsense that is rampant on social media. Before we can improve Wikipedia pages, we need great citations to use. We need more people writing and researching about diverse topics and publishing them not on websites and blogs but in journals, books, and reputable news sites. This isn’t the domain for the average skeptic. We need to leave this up to the Ben Radfords, Steven Novellas, Harriet Halls, et al., of the world. They give us the ability to improve Wikipedia pages for What the Health, Spontaneous Human Combustion, Facilitated Communication, Weather pains, and so much more. If you don’t fall into this group of people, then maybe you can join us on GSoW? Our team just rewrote the Blue Whale (game), and some of the citations are from Radford. In fact, I would never have heard of this internet meme if not for Ben discussing it on his podcast, Squaring the Strange.

When it was brought to my attention, GSoW got to work on it and my editors fought to bring it into the shape it is today. Since our rewrite in September 2017 it has been viewed 3,371,847 times. Our rewrite of Spontaneous Human Combustion since August 2013 has 1,825,897 views. I know it is hard to believe, but people are still interested in these topics; people still need to be educated. The chupacabra myth was exposed years ago by Ben, yet the Spanish Wikipedia page has had 577,717 pageviews since GSoW rewrote it in July 2016. 

In order to combat bad information, rumors, and scare tactics we need to get well-written, calm analysis into the hands of the public so they can get great information. If you are not in a position to be one of the people who has the notability to do so, please support them in any way you can—review their books and share the content they create. If you have more time on your hands and want to make a bigger impact, please consider joining GSoW. We train and mentor from your first day. We just added our 569th Wikipedia page, Maury Island incident, last night. Only counting those 569 Wikipedia pages, we have just hit 24,335,113 pageviews. We add about 34K new views a day.

Stop fiddling away the day arguing on social media with trolls who are NOT reading the links you are providing to counter their nonsense! It is only driving up your blood pressure. Consider another path, one that allows you to educate people who are really interested in knowing more and help the media write their articles. You can do this with your cat, bunny, or dog curled up by your feet. If interested, contact me on Facebook, Susan Gerbic.

The news media and social media are inherently far more likely to spread exaggerated fears than to debunk them. News stories warning of dangers and threats will always get more attention than stories explaining why things are probably okay or a reported risk is remote. Skeptics can—and must—play a vital role in stemming the public’s fears of remote or nonexistent threats and dangers.

GSoW Roving Reporter, Annika Merkelbach

Susan Gerbic: Hello Annika, thank you for giving me a few minutes of your time today. I’m really interested in your experience with GWUP’s skeptic conference SkepKon, which was held May 10–12, 2018, in Cologne. I have a lot of questions about the conference and what is going on with the German skeptics. But before I get to those questions, can you please tell readers a bit about yourself?

Annika Merkelbach: Sure! I am Annika Merkelbach. I am twenty-eight years old and live in a little village close to Cologne in Germany. I am a teacher trainee of English and history and hope to become a teacher later. My hobbies include singing in a choir, reading books, spending time with family and friends, listening to podcasts, and visiting historical places and museums.

Gerbic: Wonderful. I also want to mention that you are one of my GSoW editors. You joined in June 2017 after listening to me being interviewed on the European Skeptic Podcast (ESP). I believe that the thing that was the catalyst for you to join was that I mentioned how few German Wikipedia pages the GSoW had actually written. I think only four. That’s pretty awful considering how many German speakers there are and that German Wikipedia is one of the most popular languages.

Merkelbach:Yes, definitely! German Wikipedia is one of the bigger ones compared to other languages and yet we only have as many editors as we have pages written, which means not enough of either!

Gerbic:People are always curious about what GSoW really does and what training is like. Can you explain to readers what your experiences have been in GSoW?

Merkelbach:GSoW is exciting. Training starts really easy with general topics like “What is Wikipedia?” and “How to insert a picture into an article?”. It’s really cool to make your first small edits and to play around in your own Sandbox. Most of the training is organized through a Google Docs spreadsheet and videos. It’s not magical at all, and anybody can do it. I am quite inexperienced with coding and programming and had no problems to get through it. If there are any questions I can always ask around our GSoW group, ask my buddy Ruth, who is mentoring me, or you.

Gerbic:So now let’s talk about SkepKon. What do you know about the history of this conference? Who runs it? Does it move around to different cities and have themes? I suppose it is only in German?

Merkelbach:SkepKon is a conference in the German speaking European countries, such as Germany and Austria. It is run by GWUP, “Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften,” which translates to “Society for the Scientific Investigation of Parasciences.” It has been around since 1989, but until 2012 it was called “GWUP-Konferenz.” “SkepKon” is short for “SkeptikerKonferenz,” which of course means “Skeptics Conference.” It was in different cities, for example Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, or Hamburg, and it follows different themes, but they are in segments, so there’s rarely one overarching topic for the whole conference. They did have an English speaker in 2015, but it indeed is mostly in German.

Gerbic:I think you told me that this was your first SkepKon? What was it like in comparison to the European Skeptic Conference that we both attended in Poland this last September? Who were the speakers?

Norbert Aust, Susanne Aust, Udo Endruscheit, and Natalie Grams from Informationsnetzwerk Homöopathie; the beer bottles contain homeopathic beer, i.e. are out of chocolate

Merkelbach:The first day started with Skeptical, which is an exciting science event. It started on Thursday with a comedic practical example of a double-blind study. Then Norbert Aust and Natalie Grams of Informationsnetzwerk Homöopathie opened the big 50 000 € challenge. If you can guess the content of a few homeopathy meds that have their tags removed they will give you the money (about 58,000 US Dollars). And yes, the money actually exists!
Skeptical went on with tidbits by Natalie Grams about informing the public via Twitter and other social media and about inconsistencies with most German insurance companies, because they actually pay for homeopathic “remedies,” but some don’t pay for (very well established and proven to work) eyeglasses or contact lenses.
Then Ralf Neugebauer talked about a very specific German topic, the “Reichsbürger” movement. They are people who reject modern Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany, which seems just harmless and confusing at first but can actually lead to almost extremist outcomes. “Reichsbürger” ideas also weaken trust in any kind of society or democratic government of Germany, which, given our history, is equally dangerous. Ralf Neugebauer told the audience where the ideas are originating and what you can do with rational arguments to debunk such ideas.
Another extremist idea was broached by Anna Zakrisson (Doctor Anna’s Imaginarium). She was talking about anti-vaxxers and what everyone can do to inform the public about the dangers of not vaccinating. One example she gave was really interesting: she claimed if you use a search engine to find out if a certain vaccination is dangerous, the first hits are usually anti-vaxxer pages. In my own opinion, that makes our involvement on Social Media or Wikipedia even more important! Here is a link to the video with English captions.
The next topic was completely different, but it can also be seen under the bigger topic of “conspiracies.” Lydia Benecke illustrated the difficulties behind the so called “satanic panic.” It is interesting that the world-wide satanic group still couldn’t be found, although it is claimed they are actually even in positions of power. It really blew my mind that most of the torturing sects are thought to be a conspiracy, too! A Satanist was invited and answered a few questions after Lydia Benecke’s presentation.
Axel Ebert finished the first day of SkepKon with a “bullshit detector”; giving tips how to bust and debunk conspiracies and over-generalizations. In the evening, a really cool Skeptics podcast for children called “Schlaulicht” celebrated their second anniversary and I was lucky enough to celebrate with them! As I am a big podcast lover this was one of the highlights of SkepKon 2018 for me, as well as meeting two other podcasters there, who actually invited me to the “Schaulicht” party.

Gerbic:And how did you like the second day?

Merkelbach:It was equally fascinating! Friday began with a meeting of members, which wasn’t open for the public or other ticket holders such as me (I joined GWUP after the conference). This is normal practice for SkepKon, because it’s not only a Skeptics’ conference but also one of the biggest possible meetings for all of the GWUP members around the German speaking countries. The next big topic of the open part of the conference was conspiracy theories. Marius Raab and Alexander Fischer discussed the philosophy behind conspiracies and how we as skeptics have to be skeptical in what we believe, too. Michael Marquardt explained conspiracy theories out of a scientific, historic, psychological, and philosophical perspective. He was also referring to alternative facts and fake news; meanwhile discussing several current topics.
Bernd Harder demonstrated how a conspiracy theory can start with a playful piece about an invented conspiracy. His presentation was hilarious while at the same time very disconcerting, because he was showing actual conspiracy theories about the skeptical movement. It was so fascinating that this part of the conference was also one of my highlights.
Matthias Keilich opened the next topic: Osteopathy. He gave us basic information about osteopathy and explained why it is pseudo-medicine. Christian Weymayr presented another more in-depth analysis of what evidence-based medicine tells us regarding osteopathy. The day ended with “regulars’ tables” with different topics in restaurants all around the city. Regulars’ tables may be something very German, but it actually just means sitting together, having some dinner, a snack or a drink, and talking about whatever catches your interest, in my case alternative medicine, but there were other possible topics like how to counter fake news or just getting to know each other, too.

Gerbic:Sounds terrific! And what happened on the last day?

Merkelbach:The first block of Saturday was about genetic technology and modification. Susanne Günther talked about glyphosate, its nightmarish reputation, and the reality of it at her own farm. She named synthetic fertilizers as one of the inventions of the last centuries that saved millions of lives. Another interesting factoid was that apparently working in shifts is equally hazardous to your health as glyphosate; alcohol, red meat, or coffee are said to be even more damaging. Kathrin Zinkant discussed opportunities of genetic modification of plants, especially talking about famines and inequality around the world when it comes to distribution of resources.
The second block was about fake news and critical thinking, a topic that was also very peripherally named by Michael Marquardt. Sebastian Herrmann opened the section with the idea of perceived truth and used the image of an elephant and his rider: The person sitting on the elephant feels he is in control, while actually the elephant runs around after its own volition; at the same time giving the rider a feeling of steering it. He was also mentioning the Dunning-Kruger effect. He said it’s important to not repeat faulty information, as it can only worsen the situation. Nikil Mukerji was providing further analysis on fake news and how to counter and debunk them. It’s important to distinguish between mistakes or bad journalism and actual fake news. He stated that it’s also important for us as skeptics to not fall into the pit of tribalism and “us vs. them,” because only working together and keeping each other well informed can lessen the effects of fake news. Holm Hümmler explained the connections between right wing politics and esoteric woo, which was very enlightening. Regarding esoteric healing, he was talking about detox and detox “remedies” while deducting if one wanted to detox, he or she should use their liver.
The last big topic of SkepKon was about psychology. Uwe Kanning presented results of his research regarding questionable testing in personnel work and using pseudoscience or outdated science in applications. Anna Beniermann ended the presentation part of SkepKon with a presentation about the difficulties of actually measuring opinions and which factors can distort the outcome of a study.
Natalie Grams finished with a very short speech about the challenges we face as skeptics and gave reasons why it’s nevertheless worth it.
As you already said, it was my first SkepKon. Regarding the presentations, it was quite similar to the European Skeptics Congress in Poland. The topics of course differed, as did the presenters. If I remember correctly only Holm Hümmler spoke at both conferences.

Gerbic:Who were your favorites? What did you learn? How many attended?

Anna Zakrisson

Merkelbach:My personal favorites regarding speakers were Natalie Grams, Anna Zakrisson, Lydia Benecke, and Bernd Harder. But I could go on and on with this list, because actually most of the speakers were really good and the topics were capturing and exciting. What I really liked was that there were roughly twenty speakers at Skeptical and SkepKon, of whom six were female. Most of the moderators were female, too, which showed that the event is not “male only”! There were over 250 attendees of the conference; for Skeptical there were even more.
I spoke to a few attendees and speakers about SkepKon. Some said the conference gave them hope for the future of skepticism. Others named the 50 000 € challenge as their personal highlight or Anna Zakrisson’s speech about the anti-vaxxer scene. What’s similar in all the answers I got was that everybody was happy to meet other skeptics and learning more about interesting topics.

Gerbic:Annika, you spoke to Martin Mahner and he gave you a lot of information about the conference. What was it he told you?

Merkelbach:He told me that SkepKon now seems well established. The numbers of visitors have almost doubled since 2012, which is marvelous! The only real challenge they still face is to find enough female speakers. While the ratio of female attendees is around 35–40 percent, the proportion of women among GWUP members is still under 20 percent. He told me that the average age of attendees is around 45, which makes the audience a bit younger than usual skeptical conferences. Martin Mahner is really happy that GWUP is diverse and hopes it can become even more diverse in the future, especially regarding female members and of course female speakers at SkepKon.

Gerbic:You are really new to world of organized skepticism, attending skeptic conferences and jumping in with both feet to science activism by joining GSoW. How do you feel about this new world you are involved in? Is it what you thought?

Merkelbach:It is exactly as I thought it would be and also completely different. I’ve been a member of clubs for years as I am in a choir and also volunteering in the local Red Cross association, which means I am used to people in groups. But skepticism is so much more, too! I would say it’s not only a movement, it’s a method and maybe even a lifestyle. I have been raised skeptical (but without knowing about the movement), so by entering the skeptic world thanks to my boyfriend I actually had to “learn” about a lot of pseudoscience and woo that is around. It’s really exciting to be a part of this and also very important personally, as I think pseudoscience and especially pseudomedicine are harmful, hazardous, and in some cases life-threatening.

Gerbic:I’m also curious about your thoughts about what the issues in Germany are that we as a skeptic community should be focusing on; any insight?

Merkelbach:I can’t really generalize here, because Germany is very diverse. I think the issues we face here are mostly similar to challenges elsewhere. Something that’s quite deeply ingrained in German history or medicine is homeopathy. Samuel Hahnemann was German, so homeopathy really has a different standing here. That’s why I think that the people of Informationsnetzwerk Homöopathie along with GWUP are doing such an important job of informing about homeopathy and why it (doesn’t) work. This is also where GSoW comes in, because it seems to be incredibly hard to keep well-worded but cutting-edge criticism of homeopathy on German Wikipedia. We noticed this problem on other pages, too. This doesn’t mean that German Wikipedia isn’t reliable, what I mean is we really need more German skeptic editors on Wikipedia to tip the scales of the majority system of Wikipedia in the favor of science and evidence!

Gerbic:You told me that you were treated really well at SkepKon by everyone. You managed to get photos and audio from several of the speakers. Judging from the messages I’ve seen from you on our Secret Cabal, you left very motivated. What goals have you made for yourself?

Audience and Amardeo Sarma and Su sanne Günther at SkepKon 2018

Merkelbach:Yes! My goals are to finish my GSoW training as soon as possible and then to start improving Wikipedia pages of skeptics, skeptical topics, and generally making scientific information more accessible for the broader public by translating German pages to English and vice versa. I also will write a few pages that don’t exist yet.

Gerbic:You also ran into some controversy over GSoW, right? Apparently, Susan Gerbic and the GSoW project are a bit controversial. Sum it up; what is going on with German Wikipedia?

Merkelbach:I think German Wikipedia has some guidelines that appear stricter than English Wikipedia. It can also be that because German Wikipedia is so active and big they are more alert on changes and are skeptical (pun intended) about new developments. In general, I think most German Wikipedia editors are not informed about us. We need to be clear about our goals and openly say that we want to improve Wikipedia for the public and that we only use our Facebook group to organize training. This might be a challenge we will have to face again and again. It might also be a problem with anti-skepticism trolls on the internet; not specifically targeted at GSoW.

Gerbic:What’s next? You are going to QED this October? I’ll be at CSICon a week after that.

Merkelbach:Yes! I will be in Manchester for QED, and I am really excited. I might have mentioned before that podcasts are one of my biggest hobbies and the members of one of my favorite podcasts, Skeptics Guide to the Universe, are coming to England! I am really happy to maybe meet them in person and getting my copy of their newly published book signed! Also, I will visit a lot of Skeptics in the Pub evenings in Cologne before that, and I will certainly stay in contact with all the amazing people I met at SkepKon.

Gerbic:Fantastic Annika, thank you for sharing. I love skeptic conferences and like you I always leave so motivated. SkepKon looked terrific. I look forward to all the great things you are going to be involved in with GSoW.

NOTE: All photography by Hans-Ludwig Reischmann used with his permission. GWUP’s conference videos can be found here. Special thanks to their video crew; these are high quality video, audio, and editing. Also I personally appreciate their quick release after the conference. 

“It is easy to bunk, but hard to debunk. Anyone who starts bunking will soon fall in with those who deal in claptrap, hokum and plain lies. Between them there may be jealousies, but at bottom there is a fellowship, and the debunker faces a league formed against him. The debunker, on the other hand, finds himself alone, for exposing sham is a lonely business because it has no profit motive.”

E. C. Riegel, Barnum and Bunk, 1928

On the last day of The Amazing Meeting #13 in 2015, in a tunnel-like corridor somewhere under the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas, I jogged after the small figure of James “The Amazing” Randi because I wanted to ask him a question.

“Mr. Randi,” I said, after first congratulating him on another successful conference, and thanking him for all the work he has done for science and skepticism, “why don’t you like to use the word debunker?”

“Well you see,” he said, immediately warming to the subject, “if you go into a situation calling yourself a debunker then it is as if you have prejudged the topic. It’s not neutral or scientific, and it can turn people against you, so I prefer to call myself a skeptic or an investigator” 

I nodded, as that made sense. We chatted a little more and shared the elevator up to our respective floors (“closer to heaven” he joked as he punched the button for the penthouse). I retired to my room, sat on the bed, and pulled out my business cards, wondering if I should get new ones. They read: “Mick West — Debunker”

Words, especially those used as labels, are tricky things. If forced to give ourselves a label, we’d want one that neatly encapsulates what we do, something that you can tell the taxi driver when they ask what you’re in town for. Many of the people reading this will say “I’m a skeptic.” But does that actually describe what you do? “Skeptic,” after all, is a noun, not a verb. It describes what you are but not what you do. What does it mean “to skeptic?”

The Wikipedia article on scientific skepticism offers a bewildering array of definitions, starting with its own “a practical, epistemological position in which one questions the veracity of claims lacking empirical evidence.” Translated into English that’s “a handy way of fact-based thinking where you check claims that don’t have good evidence.”

Like most of the quotes that follow, this suffers from a certain obviousness. “Think good,” it seems to be saying. Everyone feels that they think good. Everyone thinks they use critical thinking. Everyone knows that if a claim has no evidence then you shouldn’t believe it. Of course, not everyone actually “thinks good,” critical thinking is scattered and variable, and unfounded claims wash over the world in tidal waves of bunk, pseudoscience, fake news, and conspiracy theories. When you label yourself a skeptic what you are really telling your taxi driver is that you can think better than them. There’s an unfortunate touch of elitism in labeling yourself a skeptic.

“Skeptic” as a label also suffers a little from being rather abstract and academic sounding. What’s the actual practical process of skepticism? What does it actually do? Consistent answers are surprisingly difficult to find. But in most descriptions the practical part seems to boil down to evaluating claims using critical thinking. This is great, of course, and something that I do all the time. I look at claims of evidence, see what it’s based on. I check the logic for non sequiturs, and I look for common misunderstandings. But I don’t really feel that “evaluating claims” describes all that I do.

My favorite definition from the Wikipedia article on scientific skepticism comes from Daniel Loxton, from his excellent 2013 essay “Why is there a Skeptical Movement” (Loxton, 2013).

“Scientific skepticism (is) the practice or project of studying paranormal and pseudoscientific claims through the lens of science and critical scholarship, and then sharing the results with the public.”

I like this because it’s clear and practical—at least compared to the other definitions, like “provisionally proportioning acceptance of any claim to valid logic.” It also ends with something all the other definitions are missing, a practical next step and measurable outcome, namely: “sharing the results with the public.”

I’d argue that what Loxton is describing here is sufficiently different from the rest that it’s not actually scientific skepticism. It’s debunking.

Note the topics of study listed: “paranormal and pseudoscientific claims.” There’s the prejudging that Randi talked about. But it’s not a bad, unscientific prejudging. We know from a large body of work that paranormal claims of evidence do not hold up to scrutiny. We know that areas that science has labeled pseudoscience, such as homeopathy, astrology, healing touch, vaccines causing autism, and the dangers of GMO food, are likewise based on flimsy, wrong, or non-existent evidence.

The key here is “sharing the results.” While we know that the claims are probably false, and we know we can probably figure out what’s wrong with them, it’s of little practical use if you don’t communicate those results. Most definitions of skepticism lack any focus on this communication aspect (although it’s obviously something many skeptics do all the time). Instead the focus is on using critical thinking to evaluating claim—as if the only use of skepticism is for the isolated individual to use it to figure out if things they read are right or wrong. That’s a useful tool for the individual, and something we should be teaching people, but it’s not really what active skeptics do. What we do is better described as debunking.

When I say: “I’m a debunker,” it’s clear that what I’m saying I’m doing is “debunking.” Debunk is a verb, widely understood to mean “to expose the falseness of a claim.” To expose that falseness you first must find it. That means examining the claim of evidence with critical thinking, which you might think loops back to skepticism, a neutral and rational examination of claims.

But let us not fool ourselves here. While we are, of course, open to having our minds changed by new evidence, the fact of the matter is that we generally have a well-founded expectation of what we are going to find when we examine the supposed new evidence. The focus here is not so much in checking to see if a claim of evidence is true or false, we go into it knowing that the most likely outcome is that it is false. The focus is on figuring out (honestly, with the backing of science, evidence, and logic) where the claim went wrong, where the falsehood is, and then sharing those results with the public.

This applies across the spectrum of claims. When I look at a photo of some mountains that someone tells me proves the Earth is flat, I know with almost total certainty that what I am looking for is an error in their math. When Kenny Biddle, Ben Radford, or Joe Nickell go to scientifically investigate a haunted house, they know that almost certainly it’s not going to be ghosts, but some more worldly phenomena that is going bump in the night. When Randi tested psychics for the Million Dollar challenge it was done with scientific rigor, but the expectation (so certain he was willing to risk a million dollars) was that psychic powers would not be found. When SkepDoc Harriet Hall looks at a paper that claims homeopathic oscillococcinum cures the flu, she studies it carefully but does not expect to find it is correct. When scientists try to replicate an experiment that shows information travelling faster than light, or reactionless engines, they are perhaps hopeful that it might be real, but they know they are probably just looking for something like a faulty cable.

In all these cases what happens is the investigator—the skeptic, the debunker—will first examine the claim of evidence to find where the mistake is. Sometimes this will be finding the real cause of a phenomena, sometimes it will just be finding a mistake in the data, or the logic, or the math. Then when they have found the mistake they will write about it, tell someone about it or make a video about it. They will share the results with the public. They will debunk the claim.

This column is titled “practical debunking.” It’s about debunking as described above—a two stage process of investigation followed by communication. Both stages offer significant challenges, but both can be helped by avoiding debates and arguments that often boil down to the subjective interpretation of words, and instead focusing on physical experiments and demonstrations wherever possible and on clearly communicated math and science always.

Take homeopathy. It’s very difficult to communicate to people the amount of dilution involved in something such as oscillococcinum. The numbers are so large they are meaningless—phrases such as “one molecule dissolved in an ocean the size of the universe” don’t really get through to most people, as they don’t really know what a molecule is or how big the universe is. Instead a practical demonstration would be to fill a bottle of water, add a drop of chicken blood (or fermented wild duck heart if you have it), then shake the bottle and empty it out. Fill it with water again (no more blood), shake, dump it out. Repeat this rinsing out of the bottle 200 times (you might want to do a few less, they will get the idea). The last time you fill it up, take a drop of the water and then put it on a sugar cube. That’s oscillococcinum. It’s sugar, lactose (you can add some milk to the sugar cube if you like), and a sprinkle of nothing more than magical thinking. You can follow this up with an even more practical demonstration of eating a tube or two of the stuff.

Ghost hunting is a little different, as every situation varies. The key practical method here is to replicating the phenomena and not just explaining it. When a video of things moving in a hotel room went viral people were quick to explain it as the guy pulling things around with fishing line, but Kenny Biddle went the extra mile and created a video replicating the effects by pulling things around with fishing line (Biddle, 2017). Once you recreate a piece of evidence with non-supernatural methods, you debunk it as evidence for the supernatural.

Practical debunking takes a bit more time than just thinking and typing about claims. But it’s more effective, and it’s more fun to do. When I was debunking claims about controlled demolition of the World Trade Center, I made my own thermite incendiary devices and blew some things up. When faced with claims that the collapses of the twin towers were impossible because a small part (the top) could not destroy a large part (the bottom), I built an eight-foot stable structure that did exactly that. When they claimed that red/grey layered chips were evidence of nanothermite, I bashed an old wheelbarrow with a hammer until I found some similar chips, collected them with a magnet, and then heated them until they burst into flames. When the chemtrail folk claimed that normal contrails could not persist, I didn’t just show them the Wikipedia page, I collected physical copies of a dozen science books from the 2000s back to the 1940s and I made a video showing the paragraph in each book that debunked that claim.

Practical debunking is not simply doing physical demonstrations, it’s also about nailing things down in irrefutable manners that remove the need for more analysis. Many times when presented with a photo or a video of a “suspicious” plane (or, sometimes, a UFO) the Skydentify forum on Metabunk.org has managed to track down ADS-B and radar track of the exact plane, and shown it was just on a normal flight, and then demonstrated with a 3D reconstruction what it looked like from the perspective of the camera.

There’s a famous photo in 9/11 “Truth” culture showing a column (at the World Trade Center “Ground Zero” site) that has been cut at an angle. For well over a decade, arguments have gone back and forth, with the Truther’s saying it’s evidence of controlled demolition, and the skeptics pointing out quite reasonably that it’s not evidence because it looks like it was cut during cleanup. After seeing this photo come up almost daily for several years, I decided to address it conclusively. With the help of others, I tracked down the exact location of the column and not only proved that it was buried under a huge pile of debris immediately after the collapse but also found photos of the column uncut six weeks after the collapse, proving incontrovertibly that it was not evidence of controlled demolition (West, 2018).

So, I’m not going to get new business cards. I’m a skeptic and I’m a debunker; I do practical debunking and it works great. It’s also fun and interesting. In future columns, I’m going to share some of what I’ve done and what I’m working on. I want to share my experiences, my successes, and my failures. Truth is important, and increasing the amount of truth in the world and decreasing the amount of bunk can only be a good thing.

I want to share specifically with the skeptical community because I want to encourage people to do more with their skepticism than simply examine claims critically. I do not mean to belittle skeptics in any way. Skepticism, critical thinking, evaluating sources, spotting fallacies, and examining evidence are all wonderful qualities to practice in your own thoughts and they are things we should teach our children. But I also want to encourage you to take that skepticism and add communication—the creation of useful resources that expose the falsehood in claims by effectively conveying the results of your skeptical inquiry. I want to encourage you to be a debunker.

Biddle, K. (2017). Haunted Hotel Room Recreation. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJx4S8ciDto.

Loxton, D. (2013). Why Is There a Skeptical Movement? Retrieved from https://www.skeptic.com/downloads/Why-Is-There-a-Skeptical-Movement.pdf.

West, M. (2018). Debunked: The WTC 9/11 Angle Cut Column. [Not Thermite, Cut Later]. Retrieved from https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-the-wtc-9-11-angle-cut-column-not-thermite-cut-later.t9469/.

William M. London is a professor of public health at Cal State LA, the editor of Quackwatch's free emailed newsletter Consumer Health Digest, Consumer Health online columnist for Skeptical Inquirer, and a Committee for Skeptical Inquiry consultant. He will be leading Workshop 2B on “Numerical Hygiene” at CSICon 2018 on Thursday, October 26.

Susan Gerbic: “Numerical Hygiene” is an interesting title for a workshop. What does it mean, Bill?

Bill London: The title is inspired by a saying attributed to Michael Gregg that I found on a list of "Quotable Epidemiology Quotes": “We are always dealing with dirty data. The trick is do it with a clean mind.” I think the quotation can serve as a good elevator pitch for healthy skepticism. It takes know-how, effort, practice, and openness to scrutiny by others in order to keep our minds clean enough in order to draw sound conclusions from the data we encounter.

Since hygiene has been defined as: “conditions or practices conducive to maintaining health and preventing disease, especially through cleanliness,” I thought “Numerical Hygiene” would work as a title for a workshop that addresses the challenge of keeping a clean mind in order to be able to draw sound conclusions from quantitative data about health topics.

Gerbic: Thanks for clarifying the connection between numerical hygiene and skepticism. So what can you tell me about the workshop?

London: I must emphasize that you don’t need to be a math whiz and you don’t need formal training in statistics to have some fun and learn from the workshop. The workshop will include data interpretation tasks that I regularly assign in my undergraduate public health courses for students to work on with their classmates in small groups. I provide the groups with what I call “vignettes” in the form of descriptive statistics, tables, or graphs in combination with a brief narrative. Then I ask each group to see if they can make sense out of the data. Over the years, most of my students have had difficulty drawing sound conclusions about most of the vignettes, but I think follow-up class discussions help students to develop their quantitative reasoning and critical thinking skills.

To start off the “Numerical Hygiene” workshop, I’ll lead attendees in a brief icebreaker activity that will assign participants to small groups and then provide an opportunity for group members to get acquainted with each other. The icebreaker has both a silly side and a serious side to it, so I think it will be fun. (If I tell you now what it involves, I’ll spoil the activity.) I think the icebreaker is important to help group members to get comfortable working with and supporting each other through the data interpretation tasks that follow it. I think it’s a nice way to establish the workshop—and the rest of CSICon—as a combined social and educational event.

I expect that participants will do most of the talking during the workshop. My main role will be to facilitate interaction within and among the groups and also to try to illuminate some issues raised by the vignettes.

I imagine that some workshop participants will run into difficulties with some of the vignettes. But just like most of my students, they’ll gain some insights from the experience.

I also imagine that some participants will come to the workshop with all the insights needed to make sound interpretations of the data I’ll provide. But I think even the most insightful participants are likely to benefit from discussions of the difficulties people have in making sense of quantitative data and how to help people overcome those difficulties.

If some workshop participants get tempted to share the vignettes and insights about them with others after the workshop, I’d be delighted! And it would be great if the workshop inspires some participants to develop their own numerical hygiene vignettes. What happens in my Vegas workshop need not stay in Vegas!

Gerbic: Very interesting, Bill! Your description of the workshop reminds me of the Skeptic’s Toolbox in Eugene, Oregon, and the group work we did there. Didn’t we first meet at one of those?

London: Yes, we met at the 2012 Skeptic’s Toolbox. I remember it well. You were honored at that event with the “In the Trenches Award” for your activism.

The small-group case study project at that event is similar to what I have planned for “Numerical Hygiene” in that both involve making sense out of data. But each of the assigned cases to evaluate at Skeptic’s Toolbox had many more details to scrutinize than the various smaller “data vignettes” I’ll assign to groups to discuss within the scheduled two-hour time block. 

Gerbic: I’d like to know more about the work you do with Consumer Health Digest. What can you tell me about it?

London: Stephen Barrett, M.D. (who, like you, is a CSI fellow) launched the email newsletter Consumer Health Digest in 2001 as a service of the now defunct member-supported (and always inadequately funded) National Council Against Health Fraud, Inc. (NCAHF).

NCAHF was a nonprofit tax-exempt voluntary health and educational agency focused on combating health fraud, misinformation, and quackery as public health problems. It was founded based on principles of consumer protection and the scientific process. Throughout its history, which dates back before online communications became commonplace, NCAHF offered printed newsletters six times per year sent by snail mail to members who paid annual dues. It continued to do so even as email and web access became commonplace.

In 2000, I became NCAHF’s president, with editing responsibility for the printed newsletter, and Dr. Barrett became NCAHF’s vice president. Barrett thought NCAHF should take advantage of the opportunity to communicate electronically to reach an audience beyond just NCAHF members and the journalists on NCAHF’s mailing list. He also thought that we needed to communicate with our readers much more frequently than six times per year.

So he launched NCAHF’s website and started editing Consumer Health Digest as a weekly, emailed news digest with a focus on summarizing health-related scientific reports, legislative developments, enforcement actions, other news items, website evaluations, recommended and non-recommended books, research tips, and other information relevant to consumer protection and consumer decision-making. Each issue is about as long as a typical newspaper op-ed piece and generally includes three to five news items.

Consumer health encompasses all aspects of the marketplace related to the purchase of health products and services. Positively, it involves the facts and understanding that enable people to make wise choices. Negatively, it means avoiding unwise decisions based on deception, misinformation, or other factors.

Barrett also envisioned Consumer Health Digest as a means of providing ongoing updates to readers of the college textbook Consumer Health: A Guide to Intelligent Decisions. At the time, the most recent edition of the book (the sixth) had been published in 1997. Barrett was the lead author and I was one of his coauthors. Since then, three more editions of the book have been published.

In February 2002, I took on fact checking and copyediting responsibilities for each issue of Consumer Health Digest, while Barrett did the writing. Eventually, I started suggesting items to include in the newsletter. Starting this year, Barrett and I flipped our editing roles.

We currently have more than 10,500 subscribers who receive the newsletter for free via email. All issues of the newsletter going back to 2001 are archived on the NCAHF website, which Barrett maintains along with twenty-three other consumer health websites in his Quackwatch network. (An online archive of issues of NCAHF Newsletter from 1989 through 2002 is also available.)

Gerbic: That background is new to me. What kinds of health issues have you written about in Consumer Health Digest?

London: Here are nine of the item headlines this year that I think would be especially interesting to CSICon registrants:

• Homeopathic autism treatment scrutinized
• Recommendations from "The Dr. Oz Show" and "The Doctors" criticized
• Non-evidence-based beliefs common among chiropractic students in Australia
• "Master herbalist and iridologist" charged in diabetic boy's death
• Naturopath sentenced for life-threatening diet advice
• Pharmacist and assistant sentenced in massive drug compounding fraud
• "Tijuana Tumor Terminator" Geronimo Rubio scrutinized
• Discredited, alarmist HPV vaccine study retracted
• Facilitated communication practitioner sentenced

Gerbic: Those are interesting headlines! And so is the world of skeptical inquiry! You and I have been involved in this scientific skepticism world for a bunch of years now. It’s getting to the point that we are going to become the “old guard.” How did you get involved with skepticism?

London: Here’s the story of how I became a consultant to the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. (CSICOP’s name was shortened to CSI, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, in 2006).

My special interest area during my doctoral studies in the early 1980s was alcoholism. It became clear to me then that many mainstream teachings about alcoholism were not based on good evidence. Paul Kurtz, the founder and chair of CSICOP and the Council on Democratic and Secular Humanism, which published Free Inquiry magazine, had similar concerns. (CODESH’s name was eventually shortened to the Council for Secular Humanism.)

In 1985, the year I completed my doctoral program requirements, Free Inquiry published an article by James Christopher on “Sobriety without Superstition,” which suggested, quite reasonably I thought, that alcoholism recovery could be achieved without turning one’s life over to a “higher power,” contrary to Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) philosophy and professional treatment programs based on the teachings of A.A. Christopher then started a secular self-help alternative to A.A., initially called Secular Sobriety Groups. Following the advice of Kurtz, these groups were promoted as S.O.S. groups (Secular Organizations for Sobriety, or Save Our Selves). Under Kurtz’s leadership, CODESH nurtured and supported the development of S.O.S.

In 1988, while I was an assistant professor of health education at Kent State University, I prepared a questionnaire for S.O.S. members to report about their recovery experiences. With Christopher’s help, I was able to collect responses to questionnaires from attendees at three S.O.S. meetings in 1988 and 1990. I saw in the responses suggestive—though far from impressive—evidence that S.O.S. was a viable recovery alternative (especially given that it was already clear that A.A. and A.A.-based professional treatment programs are often ineffective in promoting alcoholism recovery).

Thus in 1990, Tom Flynn, invited me to come to Buffalo to be interviewed on camera about S.O.S. for an Inquiry Media Productions videotape. During my visit, I had the opportunity to have a long talk with Kurtz about secular humanism, skepticism, S.O.S., philosopher Herbert Fingarette’s brief 1988 book Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease, my experience teaching a consumer health course, and how, in 1988, I organized a conference on quackery that led to the creation of the Ohio Council Against Health Fraud, Inc. (a state division of NCAHF) with me as founding president and editor of the OCAHF Newsletter. During our conversation, Kurtz invited me to be a CSICOP consultant and I gladly accepted.

Gerbic: I always like finding out how people get involved with organized skepticism. I know you’re familiar with the work of many skeptic activists. We have an amazing list of speakers for this year’s CSICon. It’s always great, but we have a lot of new names, lots of people I haven’t met yet. Anyone in particular you are especially looking forward to hearing? I know for me, there are always surprises, topics I didn’t think I would find interesting that turn out to be extremely interesting. 

London: I won’t be surprised if some of the points I plan to make at my workshop will be very similar to points that at least one or two of the speakers will make during their talks. (But, for now, let’s not name names and let’s save the points for the conference).

I plan to hear all the talks. I’m especially interested in speakers I haven’t heard before. In keeping with the quantitative theme of my workshop, here’s an answer to your question in quantitative terms: At previous conferences, I’ve heard eighteen of the thirty-three scheduled speakers (other than me). I already have thirteen books in my personal collection signed by authors on the speaker roster. I am planning to bring at least six more books with me and look for opportunities during CSICon to request that the authors sign them.

Since attendees at my workshop will spend much of the time working in small groups, I might get a few minutes to sneak out of my workshop to take a quick peak at the concurrent workshop “The Investigators” presented by Joe Nickell and Kenny Biddle. I’m in awe of their investigative expertise and how they solve mysteries. I see that their workshop will get into their philosophy of investigation and their investigative strategies. From your interview with Biddle and what I’ve learned from their writings, I guess that the kind of data analysis they will mostly discuss will be qualitative (e.g., photographic), which provides CSICon Thursday attendees a nice option in contrast to the quantitative focus of my workshop.

Beyond the talks, it will be great just to be among hundreds of people gathered together because of their interest in skeptical inquiry. It will be refreshing just to have conversations with people who can relate to my strong aversion to woo! CSICon attendees are likely to have diverse viewpoints on many issues, but we’re also likely to have common ground in our attitudes toward truth seeking and in our appreciation of how challenging it can be to distinguish fact from fiction. I look forward to CSICon largely because of the opportunities it provides for social networking and inspiration for activism.

Gerbic: Wonderful, Bill. This will be a blast! Thanks for the reminder about getting books signed. Don’t overpack; make sure there is plenty of room for the signed books you will be bringing back. And if you have books at home that are unsigned, you might want to bring them along, or if they are hardcovers, just bring the dust jacket to save space for more books.

Anthony Bourdain. (Source: Wikimedia.)

Based on the title, you might imagine this column will be a tired diatribe about violent movies and video games or sex on the internet. Or perhaps it will be another admonishment about spending too much time on your screens and the perils of distracted drivers. That’s not where this column is going.

If you have been paying attention for the past couple of years, you are aware of two unfortunate trends. First, mass shootings have increased dramatically (Berkowitz, Lu, and Alcantara 2018). Mass shootings are a small fraction of overall homicide deaths, and homicides overall have been generally on the decline. But mass shootings are not. As a result, children have new fears about going to school, and throughout the United States, students are required to practice active shooter drills. Second, suicide rates are rising. We have been reminded of this last trend most recently by the deaths of fashion designer Kate Spade and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, both in a single week of June 2018.

Figure 1. U.S. suicide and homicide rates per 100,000 population from 1981–2016. Homicides experienced a slight increase in 2016 but have otherwise declined since the 1990s. In contrast, suicides have been on the rise and are currently at their highest rate during this period. (Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

The deaths of Spade and Bourdain brought an outpouring of concern on the internet. There were calls for compassion and expressions of caring, as well as renewed requests for increases in mental health funding and gun control. Many of the reports of these deaths also displayed the phone number of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (800-273-8255). But in the midst of all of this emotion, one relatively easy and evidence-based strategy received almost no attention. Why? Because this strategy impugns the very avenue by which we learn about celebrity suicides and mass shootings—the news media.

If this week has kicked your ass because you've faced suicidal ideation or lost someone you loved to it, please take extra care of yourself. This is all devastating. https://t.co/ECUEjetMGB

— MaryElizabeth Williams (@embeedub) June 8, 2018

The other half of these stories is just as important: when that someone sincerely asked, "Are you ok?," the person in pain answered honestly. Everyone can be that person that asks--you can also be that person that answers. We need you both in this world.

— ana marie cox (@anamariecox) June 8, 2018

As the figure above suggests there are thousands of suicides and homicides each year—44,965 suicides and 19,362 homicides in 2016 to be exact. These figures represent 123 suicides and 53 homicides per day. Tragically, the young are particularly vulnerable to both suicide and homicide. According to the National Center for Health Statistics (2017), in 2015, suicide and homicide were the second- and third-ranked causes of death in people aged 15–24, after unintentional injuries.

The overwhelming number of these unnatural deaths happen in the shadows, entirely out of our sight. They are not news. The deaths that do come to our attention are likely to come via television. According to a 2016 Pew survey, 57 percent of respondents said they got their news from television, and the next most popular method was online sources at 38 percent (Mitchell, Gottfried, Barthel, and Shearer 2016). Radio and print bring up the rear. And so, when it bleeds, the lede comes to us very quickly and very vividly on a screen, and mass shootings and celebrity suicides command our attention. We stare, and, in many cases, we feel real emotions: fear, loss, and sadness. But the very compelling nature of these stories creates an important ethical dilemma.

The Media and Suicide

When it comes to preventing suicide and mass shootings, the elephant in the living room is the news media. A study by Columbia University researchers published earlier this year in the journal PLOS One (Fink, Santaella-Tenorio, and Keyes 2018) found that suicides in the United States increased by 9.9 percent in the months following the death of beloved actor and comedian Robin Williams. This represented an excess of 1,841 deaths in the four months following his death, with males between the ages of 30 and 44 particularly affected. Although the researchers were quick to say that it was impossible to be certain the observed increase was caused by reports of Williams’s death, they point out that the effect was timed to his death in August of 2014 and that suffocation, the method Williams used, showed the greatest increase during that period.

Evidence that suicide can be spread through media contagion has a very long history. The response to Goethe’s wildly popular novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther), published in 1774, is one of the most famous cases. The novel’s main character shoots himself in the head after being spurned by the woman he loves, and when it was published, many men began to dress like the main character and take their own lives in the same manner. This copycat phenomenon was labeled the “Werther effect” and prompted the banning of the book in parts of Europe (Pirkis and Nordentoft 2011). Beginning in the 1970s, a series of empirical studies documented clusters of suicides at specific times and locations, and in the 1990s, research uncovered media contagion effects in the United States, western Europe, and Japan (Gould, Jamieson, and Romer 2003; Romer, Jamieson, and Jamieson 2006). Furthermore, a kind of dose-response effect has been identified, with the number of suicides being greater when more television networks cover a story than when fewer do (Phillips and Cartensen 1986). Finally, although most of the empirical research has been on the effects of news reports of actual suicides, there is some evidence that, as in the Werther case, fictional stories can encourage contagion. For example, a 2017 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed an increase in internet searches for “suicide” and “how to commit suicide” following the release of the Netflix series Thirteen Reasons Why, a show that closely examined a teen suicide and, in the final episode, depicted a suicide in great detail (Ayers, Althouse, Leas, Dredze, and Allem 2017).

The Media and Mass Shootings

There have been fewer empirical studies of media effects on mass shootings, and the evidence of a short-term contagion effect, similar to that observed with suicide, has been more mixed. A 2014 study using two different datasets found that shootings of four or more people were more likely to occur in the fourteen days following a mass shooting (Towers, Gomez-Lievano, Khan, Mubayi, and Castillo-Chavez 2015), but other studies have found no short-term contagion effect (e.g., Lankford and Tomek 2017). However, although unequivocal proof of short-term contagion is lacking, there is much stronger evidence that many mass shooters are motivated, at least in part, by a quest for fame, and that the United States produces a disproportional share of the fame-seeking rampage shooters. A recent estimate suggested that the United States accounted for 31 percent of rampage shooters worldwide but that we produced 75 percent of the world’s shooters who were driven by fame (Lankford 2016). The most chilling recent evidence of this motive was a video produced by the Parkland, Florida, shooter prior to his attack. In the brief recording, he referred to himself as the “next school shooter,” predicted the total number of people he would shoot, and talked about being seen on television after the attack.

What’s Really Going On?

The word contagion is, of course, merely a metaphor for what might actually be happening in these suicides and mass shootings. Unlike a disease, these killings do not require actual contact or transmission of a physical germ. The process is presumed to be a kind of mental priming effect that stimulates suicidal or homicidal ideation in people who are prone to these activities (Jo and Berkowitz 1994) or a process of generalized imitation in which vulnerable individuals learn by observing a model (Gould, Jamieson, and Romer 2003). The imitation theory is supported by cases that involve the use of similar methods. It is presumed that the publicity surrounding prior cases serves as a kind of vicarious reinforcement that encourages future behavior.

Which brings us back to the role of the media. Neither priming nor imitation would be possible without the effect of media reports that bring these episodes to our attention, and as a result, the media represents a potential point of intervention. Furthermore, although it may not have come to your attention, this is very old news.

For years a number of respected researchers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have offered guidelines for media reports of suicides and mass shootings (Meindl and Ivy 2017). For example, Lankford and Madfis (2017) have proposed four easy guidelines for the reporting of mass shootings:

• Don’t name the perpetrator.
• Don’t use photos or likenesses of the perpetrator.
• Stop using the names, photos, or likenesses of past perpetrators.
• Report everything else about these crimes in as much detail as desired.

Given the more extensive research history and the much more frequent occurrence of suicide contagion, there have long been recommendations from a variety of NGOs for the reporting of suicides in the media (e.g., World Health Organization 2000; Guardians New and Media 2000). For example, the World Health Organization (2000) recommends the following principles:

• Sensational coverage of suicides should be assiduously avoided, particularly when a celebrity is involved.
• Detailed descriptions of the method used and how the method was procured should be avoided.
• Suicide should not be reported as unexplainable or in a simplistic way. Suicide is never the result of a single factor or event.
• Suicide should not be depicted as a method of coping with personal problems.
• Reports should take account of the impact of suicide on families and other survivors.
• Glorifying suicide victims as martyrs and objects of public adulation may suggest to susceptible persons that their society honors suicidal behavior.
• Describing the physical consequences of non-fatal suicide attempts (brain damage, paralysis, etc.) can act as a deterrent.

In the case of Anthony Bourdain’s suicide, which has been the most widely covered recent death, by happenstance there are examples of both good and bad media reports. On the positive side, Asia Argento (Bourdain’s girlfriend) posted a message on Instagram that emphasized how devastating his death was for her. It is tragic to think of Argento’s expression of despair as positive thing, but by posting this widely circulated message, she reminded us of suicide’s effects on family members and close friends.

Instagram post by Asia Argento, who was Anthony Bourdain’s partner at the time of his death.

In contrast, a number of outlets quickly reported the method Bourdain used to take this life (e.g., Bios 2018). The reporting of methods is thought to encourage imitation of suicidal behavior.

What Can We Do?

The media are not responsible for all—or even most—of the homicides and suicides that occur each year, but there is strong evidence that a substantial number of these deaths are encouraged by the messages displayed on our television and computer screens. So why do we hear so little about this research? Why are the recommendations of the World Health Organization, Samaritans, and many crime and violence researchers largely ignored by the major news media? If we give it a moment of thought, the reasons are obvious. First, the news media have a clear conflict of interest. The old journalistic adage still holds: if it bleeds it leads. The sensational nature of mass killings and celebrity suicides produces very high ratings. Implementing some of the restrictions that could curtail copycat suicides or homicides might require a ratings sacrifice. Second, the United States places a high value on freedom of the press. There is little motivation for regulating the media. Finally, we, as viewers, are complicit. When mass shootings break out or celebrities take their own lives, we stare, and we want to know why. But we should begin to recognize that our prurient curiosity has very real public health consequences.

Dolores O’Riordan, lead singer of The Cranberries. (Source: Wikimedia.)

Often when we hear about a great tragedy, we are overcome by a feeling of powerlessness. The school shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was a devastating blow, and many of us searched in vain for things that might have prevented the massacre. That episode was followed by the now familiar calls for gun control, better policing, and better mental health treatment, and so far—as in the past—very few of these things have happened. But there is something we could do that would help. Something that would not be as difficult as gun control or increased mental health funding. Something that, in fact, is being done in other places.

Following tragedies in their countries, the news media in both Canada and Finland adopted major aspects of the recommended “Don’t Name Them, Don’t Show Them, But Report Everything Else” policy with respect to mass shootings in their countries (Lankford and Madfis 2018). Similarly, in January of this year, Dolores O’Riordan, the lead singer of The Cranberries, was found dead in her hotel room in London. In the following days and weeks there was an outpouring of sadness and affection for the beloved Irish singer, but the cause of death was not publicly released. Indeed, an inquest into her death was cancelled and not rescheduled (“Dolores O’Riordan Death” 2018). As a result, in the months since her death, the focus has remained on her life and accomplishments.

There are evidence-based responses to these tragedies that we are not implementing. Of course, a free news media is an essential feature of our democracy, but the classic example of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater is an apt comparison to what is going on now. Each time the news media panders to our curiosity about the details of these needless and premature deaths, they ensure that others will follow. When lives are at stake, it is reasonable to adopt modest limitations on freedom of expression and our need to know. The voluntary adoption of the reporting standards long promoted by researchers and advocacy organizations could make a substantial difference and would be a fitting way to honor those who are no longer with us. All we have to do is act.

• Ayers, John W., Benjamin M. Althouse, Eric C. Leas, Mark Dredze, and Jon-Patrick Allem. 2017. “Internet searches for suicide following the release of 13 Reasons Why.” JAMA internal medicine 177, no. 10: 1527–1529.
• Berkowitz, Bonnie, Denise Lu, and Chris Alcantrara. 2018. “Analysis | More Than 50 Years of U.S. Mass Shootings: The Victims, Sites, Killers and Weapons.” Washington Post. Last modified May 22. Available online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/mass-shootings-in-america/?utm_term=.3cb90edb9bc5.
• Bios, Paul. 2018. “CNN’s Anthony Bourdain Hangs Himself, Dead At 61.”Daily Wire. Available online at https://www.dailywire.com/news/31618/cnns-anthony-bourdain-hangs-himself-dead-61-paul-bois.
• “Dolores O’Riordan Death Inquest Removed from Schedule.” 2018. RTE.ie, last modified April 4. Available online. https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2018/0403/951902-inquest-into-death-of-dolores-oriordan-postponed/.
• Fink, Dennis S., Julian Santaella-Tenorio, and Katherine M. Keyes. 2018. “Increase in Suicides the Months After the Death of Robin Williams in the US.” PLOS | Public Library Of Science. Last modified February 7. Available online at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0191405.
• Gould, Madelyn, Patrick Jamieson, and Daniel Romer. 2003. “Media contagion and suicide among the young.” American Behavioral Scientist 46, no. 9: 1269–1284.
• Guardians New and Media. 2000. “Media guidelines for reporting suicide.” Surrey, UK: Samaritans. Available online at https://www.samaritans.org/sites/default/files/kcfinder/files/Samaritans%20Media%20Guidelines%20UK%20Apr17_Final%20web%281%29.pdf.
• Jo, Eunkyung and Leonard Berkowitz. 1994. “A priming effect analysis of media influences: An update,” in Media effects: Advances in theory and research ed., J. Bryant & D. Zillmann. (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum), 43–60.
• Lankford, Adam. 2016. Fame seeking-ram- page shooters: Initial findings and empirical predic- tions. Aggression and Violent Behavior 27, 122–129.
• Lankford, Adam, and Eric Madfis. 2018. “Don’t name them, don’t show them, but report everything else: A pragmatic proposal for denying mass killers the attention they seek and deterring future offenders.” American behavioral scientist 62, no. 2: 260–279.
• Lankford, Adam, and Sara Tomek. 2017. “Mass killings in the United States from 2006 to 2013: social contagion or random clusters?” Suicide and life-threatening behavior2017. DOI: 10.1111/sltb.12366.
• Meindl, James N., and Jonathan W. Ivy. 2017. “Mass shootings: The role of the media in promoting generalized imitation.” American journal of public health 107, no. 3: 368–370.
• Mitchell, Amy, Jeffrey Gottfried, Michael Barthel, and Elisa Shearer. 2016. “1. Pathways to News.” Pew Research Center's Journalism Project. Last modified July 7. Available online at http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/.
• National Center for Health Statistics. 2017. Health, United States, 2016: With Chartbook on Long-term Trends in Health. Hyattsville, MD.
• Phillips, David P., and Lundie L. Carstensen. 1986. “Clustering of teenage suicides after television news stories about suicide.” New England Journal of Medicine 315, no. 11: 685–689.
• Pirkis, Jane, and Merete Nordentoft. 2011. “Media Influences on Suicide and Attempted Suicide,” in R. C. O’Connor, S. Platt, & J. Gordon, eds., International Handbook of Suicide Prevention: Research, Policy and Practice: (New York: Wiley-Blackwell), 531–544.
• Romer, Daniel, Patrick E. Jamieson, and Kathleen H. Jamieson. 2006. “Are news reports of suicide contagious? A stringent test in six US cities.” Journal of Communication 56, no. 2: 253–270.
• Towers, Sherry, Andres Gomez-Lievano, Maryam Khan, Anuj Mubayi, and Carlos Castillo-Chavez. 2015. “Contagion in mass killings and school shootings.” PLoS One 10, no. 7 : e0117259. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0117259.
• World Health Organization. 2000. “Preventing suicide: A resource for media professional.” Available online at http://www.who.int/mental_health/media/en/426.pdf.

I recently got an email from a woman who said she was losing her mind trying to find out the truth about frying pans. Many articles say dangerous chemicals are released from various types of frying pan. We already have enough things to worry about; now I’m supposed to be afraid of my frying pan? Nope, not me.

The headlines say things like, “Best Non-Toxic Cookware Options: Don’t Let Your Cookware Kill You” and “Cookware is a scary toxic minefield.” The unreliable Mercola website says “Hundreds of Scientists Issue Warning About Chemical Dangers of Non-Stick Cookware” and “Another Reason to Ditch Your Non-Stick Cookware.” He explains that non-stick coatings contain PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid). When these pans are heated, the non-stick coating breaks down and releases toxins into the air. He says PFOA is accumulating in human blood at an alarming rate. It stays in the body for many years. In laboratory animals given large amounts, it can affect growth and development, reproduction, and liver damage. But mice are not the same as humans. Any exposure to PFOA from frying pans is much less than the large amounts given to the mice. The central principle of toxicology is that the poison is in the dose. The amounts that have accumulated in humans have never been shown to cause any harm.

What about human studies? He cites studies showing that PFOA was associated with an increase in the chance of infertility and that people with the highest PFOA concentrations in their blood were more than twice as likely to have thyroid disease than those with the lowest levels. These studies only show correlation; they are not evidence of causation. He says the Environmental Working Group’s report noted similar concerns about cancer, reproductive problems, immune system problems, hypothyroidism, birth defects, and organ damage. All based only on apparent correlations. Correlation is not causation. Autism is correlated with organic food sales.

Polymer fume fever (PFF) is a disease usually related to occupational exposure but can be caused by PFOA fumes when a nonstick pan is heated to very high temperatures (over 600 degrees F or over 842 F according to different sources). PFF is a self-limited illness characterized by fever, shivering, sore throat, and weakness, with minor pulmonary symptoms. It typically occurs several hours after exposure and resolves in a day or two.

In one suspected case of PFF reported in the British Medical Journal, a man awakened from a five-hour nap to find the room filled with white smoke from a pan on the fire that was not turned off. When he turned the fire off and put the pan under running water, an explosive vapor came out from the surface of the pan, and several hours later he felt fatigue and dyspnea and sought medical attention. His symptoms were completely resolved after three days.

In another case, a patient had more than forty attacks of polymer fume fever attributed to contaminated cigarettes; there were no permanent ill effects.

In yet another case, symptoms developed after fumes were produced when water in the pan was allowed to evaporate. The patient recovered without treatment.

While various sources say PFF can (rarely) lead to serious illness and death, I couldn’t find any case reports of human deaths caused by PFOA. Birds have died; they are very susceptible. In one reported case, five cockatiels died and the owner had symptoms of PFF for twenty-four hours after a non-stick pan accidentally overheated. PFF seems to occur with accidental overheating; I couldn’t find any case reports of PFF with typical use of nonstick pans in cooking.

Another concern is that bits of the non-stick coating can flake off and be ingested; the flakes are eliminated from the body, not absorbed, and are not harmful to humans.

The American Cancer Society says, “Other than the possible risk of flu-like symptoms from breathing in fumes from an overheated Teflon-coated pan, there are no known risks to humans from using Teflon-coated cookware. While PFOA is used in making Teflon, it is not present (or is present in extremely small amounts) in Teflon-coated products.”

Who ya gonna believe? I’ll take the American Cancer Society over Mercola any day. At least they don’t recommend lead. Dr. Mercola sells his own brand of ceramic pans, and guess what? They have been found to contain lead!

Several companies agreed to phase out PFOAs, but the chemicals that replaced them have not been as well studied. PFOAs are no longer manufactured in the United States and are not imported; but some older pans with PFOAs are still in use. Teflon no longer contains PFOA. It does contain polytetrafluoroethylene, which carries the same concerns about overheating. Temperatures sufficient to make most cooking oils smoke could result in polymer fume fever. I’m not worried; but if you are, you can take precautions. You can avoid using prolonged high heat for cooking. You can be careful not to leave empty pans on a hot burner. And you can keep your pet birds out of the kitchen.

Other Choices

Or you could switch to another type of cookware. There are warnings about some of them, but they don’t amount to much.

Aluminum: Despite alarmist rumors about Alzheimer’s and neurotoxicity, it is perfectly safe to cook in aluminum cookware.

Copper: Can leach into foods, especially when exposed to acidic foods, such as tomato sauce. But copper is a vital nutrient. Small amounts are good for us, and you won’t get a harmful amount from copper cookware.

Ceramic, enamel, glass: Lead is used in some ceramic, enamel, and glass cookware to reduce the chance of breaking. There is no evidence of harm from cooking with these. There are also warnings about nickel and cadmium found in some coatings. Again, there’s no evidence that they harm the users.

Stainless steel: A composite of different metals, stainless steel has the potential to leach tiny amounts of nickel, chromium, molybdenum, titanium, and other metals, which might be problematic for those suffering from metal sensitivities. However when used for short cooking times, there is very minimal leaching due to the stability of the metals.

Cast iron: Cast iron pans may expose you to small amounts of iron, but iron is an essential nutrient that helps prevent anemia. Unless you have an iron storage disease like hemochromatosis, this shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve used all kinds of pans but have recently gone back to cast iron, not for health reasons but for convenience and practicality. I prefer it because it doesn’t chip, can’t break, will last forever, goes straight from stovetop to oven, and if properly seasoned and maintained it is at least as non-stick as the non-stick pans. It’s easy to clean: just don’t use soap, because that destroys the seasoning.

The bottom line: Use whatever kind of pans you prefer. The foods you cook are more likely to harm you than the pans you cook them in.

I graduated from pharmacy school with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1987. Much of what one does on the job is actually learned on the job, not necessarily via one’s academic education. I experienced this myself, in many ways, including the shortcomings of education when dealing with customer questions. Years of pharmacy practice introduced me to many opportunities for skeptical outreach with customers.

Pharmacists are asked questions about over the counter (OTC) products as much as about Rx (pharmaceutical) products. In addition to conventional university education, medical professionals engage in continuing education throughout their careers. If these forms of formal education fail to include OTC products, it falls to the pharmacist to learn on their own.

Nutrition, for example, can be given short shrift in conventional education. This is unfortunate, as there are a huge number of nutritional supplements sold in most pharmacies. In addition to vitamins and minerals, there is a blinding array of herbal products and “fitness” related supplements available. Each of these products is a different chemical, or set of chemicals, so all require individual attention. In many cases, products can bridge the gap between food supplements and drugs, such as “energy drinks” and “pre-workout” supplements. These products often contain sugars, other carbohydrates such as maltodextrin, and caffeine. In addition, they may contain amino acids such as taurine or phenylalanine, which in large enough doses may act as stimulants.  Many customer questions are about nutritional supplements.

Skeptics are likely already familiar with homeopathic products being sold in pharmacies. Thankfully, some progress has already been made to abandon this practice. In September 2016, CVS pharmacy announced their decision to discontinue sales of some homeopathic products in their retail stores and online.

The presence of clearly worthless homeopathic products illustrates a conflict of interest at the root of all OTC counseling by pharmacists. For the bulk of retail history, pharmacies were independently owned—usually by the pharmacist. That suggests a tacit approval of anything stocked on the shelves, as why would an ethical pharmacist choose to sell a product they knew to be ineffective or possibly even dangerous? Yet this high standard was routinely ignored, as many pharmacies to this day choose to sell homeopathic products and even cigarettes.

Another ethical conundrum arises if a customer asks a pharmacist for advice about a particular product. Should the recommendation be based on the best medical knowledge we have or on the profit motive of a small business? Thankfully a deeper sort of ethical response is enabled in this circumstance, namely the ability to build trust with customers based on honest and forthright answers.

People who work in retail settings usually gain psychological insight based on innumerable encounters with customers. Retail pharmacists are no different. In my experience, a subtle pattern began to emerge when people asked me questions about OTC products: They often have a preconceived idea that they want the pharmacist to reinforce. Since the pharmacist is coming into the transaction “cold,” they will not know what preconceived idea the person has until it’s articulated by the customer. By that time, a question ostensibly looking for advice becomes a borderline argument if the pharmacist doesn’t give the expected answer.

A good example of a broadly held preconceived idea is that there are nutritional supplements that can give someone “energy.” Customers often zero in on vitamin supplements for this. Questions about vitamin and mineral supplements are instructive, as there can’t be a simple, broad-based answer. While vitamins and minerals won’t provide a person with “energy” there are evidence-based reasons to supplement diet in certain circumstances. It’s entirely rational for women to take iron supplements, and it behooves all pharmacists to learn about this issue, as there are multiple sorts of iron compounds available. The growth of vegetarianism and veganism creates the need for supplementation of vitamin B12 and perhaps other nutrients.

For many years, the “health food” industry focused on alleged “deficiencies” in the modern Western diet. Today there is something of a shift in focus, as there is an entire class of nutritional supplements being promoted to enhance one’s functional state from normal to superior. This would be the “sports nutrition” class of products. The cornerstone of this class is powdered protein supplements. Again, this is an area where pharmacists owe it to themselves and their customers to stay abreast of evidence-based research, as these nutritional supplements are very popular. At the very least, those engaged in bodybuilding and those on some vegan diets may benefit from these products. Protein powder is just the tip of the iceberg with regards to “performance” supplements. In many cases, the evidence for benefit from this class of products is only weakly positive. Some “pre-workout” supplements contain stimulants such as caffeine and should be treated with caution.

Customers turn to pharmacists for advice on OTC products that are not consumed. In some cases the questions are unusual, and the conventional pharmacy curriculum may not even mention them. I would occasionally receive questions about ear candles. For those not familiar, they are ostensibly used to remove ear wax. While this seems like the perfect counselling opportunity to direct someone towards an evidence-based product such as a rubber bulb ear syringe, we should consider the factor mentioned above: people often come to the pharmacist with preconceived ideas and are in fact looking not for information but instead reinforcement by the pharmacist of these ideas. Imagine if you were the customer; if you already knew that ear candles were bogus, why would you even ask a pharmacist about it? On the upside, a person in that situation may not even know there are genuinely effective ear wax removal products available. The first response to the question “do you sell ear candles” therefore might be “for ear wax removal?” Obviously the answer is “yes.” At that point it becomes easy to segue from “no, we don’t sell ear candles, but we do sell rubber ear syringe bulbs. Those are definitely effective.” To persuade a person to choose a rational therapy often requires an understanding of the claims of the irrational therapy. Comparing how ear candles are supposed to work with how an ear syringe actually works may be enough to persuade a customer to choose the rational therapy.

Slightly more far-out are questions about pH paper. There are various diets such as the “alkaline diet” that call for testing one’s urine for its alkalinity using pH paper. Again, this calls for a subtle, non-confrontational, evidence-based response.

Pharmacists sometimes receive questions that are so far-out it may take time to figure out what the real intent of the question actually is. On more than one occasion I was asked if the pharmacy sold something to “clean them out” or to “clean out their system.” At first I believed these were questions about laxatives from people who were too shy to use the word “laxative.” Eventually I realized they were questions about how to beat drug tests! I can assure you this is a subject that a pharmacy curriculum will not address. While it’s an honest answer to say “I don’t know” in my opinion, it’s better to have actually investigated the situation beforehand, as it helps maintain rapport. There’s no honest answer that would compel a pharmacist to recommend illegal or unethical products or behaviors in that situation, thankfully.

These days, a pharmacist may be asked questions about “gray area” drugs, commonly available on the internet. Two classes of drugs come to mind, namely SARMs and nootropics.

SARM is an acronym for selective androgen receptor modulator. These drugs mimic the action of anabolic steroids for building muscle but appear to have a much better side effect profile. Nootropics are drugs that claim to enhance cognitive functioning. There are already Rx drugs for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, so it’s a valid therapeutic modality. Not surprisingly, it’s easy to find hyperbolic claims about these drugs on the internet. It behooves a pharmacist to study and be aware of these claims, even if the substances are not sold in pharmacies. An honest appraisal must be nuanced, as there is legitimate evidence of benefit, coupled with unknown side effects, drug interactions, and long term toxicities.

There are numerous opportunities for ethical skepticism within pharmacy. Capitalism assures us that there will be more products available on pharmacy shelves, and the internet guarantees that there will be unusual products for sale online. Adopting an evidence-based skepticism in assessing these products enables pharmacists to benefit customers with questions. One’s university education on these subjects is necessarily limited, and it benefits the pharmacist as an individual to maintain their own continuing education on these topics.

Kavin Senapathy is a science communicator who lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Her bylines appear in a number of outlets, including Slate, SELF Magazine, and Forbes on many topics. Kavin also writes a new column for Skeptical Inquirer’s website called “Woo Watch.” She is also featured in a documentary film called Science Moms. Kavin will be speaking at CSICon Saturday, October 20, at 11:30 am.

Susan Gerbic: Great catching up with you, Kavin. It looks like your life has been pretty busy. Can you please tell readers a bit about yourself and what you have been up to lately?

Kavin Senapathy: Outside of being a mom to a delightfully argumentative seven-year-old and a five-year-old who likes to go to the dog park to hang out with the humans, it might seem like I spend all my time on Twitter, and sometimes it feels that way! Outside of that, I’ve been writing articles and stories covering issues like informed consent in childbirth, the so-called “new organ” discovery, the “GMO” debate, lotus birth, and more. I’ve also been having a great time this last year working with my fellow SciMoms and traveling to show the Science Moms movie, and helping out at my family business, Genome International. 

Gerbic: I heard lots of great comments about the documentary Science Moms, which was shown at CSICon last year. One of my GSoW editors, Rob Palmer, even came back from the conference and was so inspired that he wrote the Wikipedia page for Science Moms. Since Rob made the Wikipedia page public, it has been viewed over 15,000 times.

I have not heard how Science Moms has done regarding folks buying it. Can you divulge how the film is doing? Also, is there anything in the works to get it on one of the streaming services? If not, why not?

Senapathy: The film did really well regarding folks buying it. So well, in fact, that you can now watch it for free on YouTube! Filmmaker Natalie Newell was able to recoup a small fraction of the costs for her time—it was a labor of love, but love doesn’t pay the bills. Now, it’s time for our message—that there is a growing community of parents raising our kids with evidence rather than fear and hype—to spread even further. And I have to use this opportunity to plug our SciMoms project, which includes writing by all of us and guest contributors, and even a comic series featuring the SciMoms as LEGO characters going head to head with evil villains like Sue Doe Syence. It’s our way of running with the movie’s momentum.

Gerbic: You are now writing a column for Skeptical Inquirer’s website called “Woo Watch.” What have you got in store for us? Is it all going to be associated with alt-med?

Senapathy: There’s so much more than alt-med to talk about when it comes to woo! The world of alt-med does often collide with the evolving woo in the food and parenting worlds, though. I’ve even been keeping an eye on some pretty bogus stuff in the pet care industry. Stay tuned!

Gerbic: Your first article, “Lotus Birth,” was terrific. GSoW has already added the article to theWikipedia page for the practice. I see that Deepak Chopra is also a citation on the Lotus birth Wikipedia page. Oh joy, does it ever end?

Senapathy: When it comes to Deepak Chopra, the joy is as infinite as our consciousness, heh.

Gerbic: So, what have you got planned for CSICon 2018?

Senapathy: This will be my third year speaking at CSICon (I’m excited for the new venue and bigger con!) so I’ve decided to change it up a bit. In 2016, I spoke about what I call “fear babes”—the charismatic and beautiful people adept at exploiting and fueling fear to sell their ideologies and wares. In 2017, my fellow Science Moms and I had the U.S. premiere of the film at CSICon and had a great discussion with the audience about how we navigate parenting. This year, I’m going to talk about the series of events that led me to the skeptic’s movement. I don’t often get on stage and talk about myself and my childhood, but if anything, people might be interested to know that it wasn’t too long ago that I loved Dr. Oz and even bought a supplement he recommended (and when I ran out, I bought it again).

Gerbic: CSICon 2018 has a terrific lineup with many new faces. What lectures are you looking forward to, Kavin?

Senapathy: It looks like there will be a lot of interesting talks, but I’m particularly looking forward to fangirling over my favorite vagina doctor, and I’m also curious what Adam is going to ruin when it comes to skepticism!

Gerbic: This year the Halloween theme is going to be pajama party. That should be interesting. It was a blast last year, and I assume that it is a not-to-miss again this year.

Senapathy: My husband is coming this year, and he almost never comes on these trips with me. So, I’m gonna take the opportunity to make him dress up. (What the heck is a Halloween pajama party? I don’t know but we’ll figure it out.)

Gerbic: The tips I give to first-time CSICon attendees are that they should just expect to get very little sleep, bring a jacket as it is always over-airconditioned, follow the activities on theCSICon Facebook page, and make sure you say hello to someone new every day. The people you meet at these events are always great. Oh yeah, arrive on Wednesday or early Thursday and leave after breakfast on Monday morning. What tips can you share Kavin?

Senapathy: Everyone is welcoming, so don’t hesitate to talk to new people! If you’re like me and like to wear heels, I also highly recommend bringing at least one pair of flats. I’ll probably give up on heels Day 1.

The idea that animals have the potential to talk is an alluring one; from the mathematical stunts of Clever Hans to investigations of parrots, dolphins, and chimps—just look at viral BBC footage of a gopher yelling "Alan." It's interesting, exciting, and even cute—but is it really true that animals have language?

After the recent passing of Koko the Gorilla, I spoke to Daniel Midgley about the hopes we have about being the next Dr. Dolittle and just how realistic those hopes are. Daniel is a lecturer in applied linguistics at Edith Cowan University and at the University of Western Australia, as well as a presenter on the popular language podcast Talk the Talk.

Kylie Sturgess: What are the requirements to have language—by which I mean what must you demonstrate as a creature to be shown as having language as opposed to just doing basic communication? What's the difference?

Daniel Midgley: I'm glad that you mentioned that there's a difference between language and communication, because there's a lot of ways to communicate stuff but not all of them are language.

Sturgess: … I mean there are clicks and whistles and gestures. Waving feathers and things like that after all …

Midgley: I could draw something in the dirt and that would be a symbol to represent something else, but that's not exactly language. The question is what is language. I think it does involve using signs to refer to other things. If you are a Chomskyist generativist (which heaven forbid you be!), you might say something like, “A thing is language … a bunch of symbols are language if they go together in a certain order.”

There are different things that we do with language. We can take the units that we say and we can break them down and then build them up again in different ways. For example, I can have a word like “unbreakable” and I can take the word “break” out and put “stop” in there instead and I could say “unstoppable.” That's something that we do with language. Another thing that we do is we put things in a certain order. You'll notice that I said “unbreakable.” I didn't say “breakableun.” That's a couple of things that we do with language; we represent things, we do things in a certain order, and we take the pieces of them, break them apart, and build into new stuff.

Sturgess: One of the big challenges I've heard is “just because we don't understand an animal's 'language’” (and I'm using quote marks around language!), or because we are not the same species, means we can't dismiss that they have language at all. “It is language, but not as we know it.” How valid is that claim in your opinion?

Midgley: Well, we shouldn't assume too much—and that cuts both ways. We shouldn't assume that something isn't language, but then we shouldn't assume that it is either. We should be good skeptics, and we should demand evidence before assuming that something is language. If my dog has a series of sounds that it makes, is it language and I just don't know it? Maybe one day I'll discover something more about their communication. That's totally valid. We need to keep in mind, before we say that it is language, we should have knowledge of what language is. Like we talked about, the different elements of human language that we have.

It is very appealing though. People really like the idea that maybe whales, dolphins, horses, or…

Sturgess: People are always saying, “My dog understands me. My cat and I have a language that we understand.”

Midgley: I'm sure that we do. I'm sure that your dog does understand you! But once again, language is not the same as communication. Complicating this is the fact that we sometimes use the word language ambiguously, like we talked about. “The language of flowers” is sometimes said—when in fact, yes, flowers can represent something, but do we do the same kinds of things with flowers that we do with our words? Well, probably not!

As linguists, we like to keep things a little bit tighter. We like to tighten up that definition a little bit and not just say “Ah yes, body language is a kind of language ... .” Well, is it syntactic? Is it productive? Can we break it down and build it up? Is it representational? Those kinds of things are what we would want to see.

Sturgess: We had the sad news recently of the passing of Koko the gorilla. Koko the gorilla is an interesting case and probably the most famous pop culture example of an animal communicating via a large number of hand signs from a modified version of American Sign Language. Just how influential were these studies?

Midgley: These studies about apes and language and gorillas and bonobos, and even an orangutan—they have been enormously influential in people's minds. People really like the idea that a being from another species could learn to speak human language. It captivates people's attention. Unfortunately sometimes that means that they are not too careful about looking at this and figuring out whether this is truly language use or is there possibly another explanation.

People typically like these kind of experiments and people have done these kinds of experiments because we are trying to figure out just how human is language. Noam Chompsky famously said that language is uniquely human. I'm not a Chompsky-guy. I don't think that animals can't do language because of any dogmatic reasons. I just think that we need to be very skeptical about the kinds of things that we call language, especially when it comes to the primate projects, and when I look at Koko or Washoe or Viki the Chimp or other studies, I always look very carefully and say “All right. Is this communication coming off of their own bat or is there possibly another explanation? Are they being cued? Are they just handing back signs? Are they doing complicated tricks for treats?” These are things you've got to watch out for.

Sturgess: Recently there's been some criticism about the University of Northern Iowa holding a conference on facilitated communication. Now, facilitated communication is a practice based on the idea that facilitators can convey the thoughts of nonverbal individuals by supporting their hand over a keyboard or other communication device. It has been debunked a number of times and yet the practice is still out there. Is it fair to compare how we might interpret animal communication to the wish-fulfilment of facilitated communication?

Midgley: Well, let me use Koko as an example. Koko was able to apparently use 1,000 signs and was able to understand up to 2,000 words of spoken English.

But when you look at Koko's output, the one thing that I notice is there's a lot of interpretation from the human, from her human, Dr. Francine Patterson.

For example, during a chat session with somebody from America online, an internet user asked, “What would you like for your birthday?” Dr. Patterson signed the question to Koko. Koko responded “Birthday. Food. Smokes.” Those three signs. The AOL person responded “smokes?!?”

Sturgess: I could understand that; you don’t give a gorilla cigarettes!!

Midgley: That's right! And Dr. Patterson jumped in and said, “Well, Smokey is the name for her kitten. She might be referring to that.” Now, I'm not sure about that!

It seems to me that Dr. Patterson might be taking whatever signs Koko gives and then embarking on an elaborate explanation. Not for any dishonest purpose but because you really try. We live in a world that's full of speaking people. Whenever somebody says a thing, we try to figure out what they meant. We do this unconsciously and very easily.

If someone says “Oh, it's really hot in here,” you then think “why did they say that? They must have meant something. Maybe they intend for me to turn on the fan or something like that?” We do it all the time. It's very easy for someone to step in and say “Oh, well they must have meant this.”

At some point it begins to look a bit like what psychics do, where they say “I'm getting an M ... I sense somebody from the great beyond ... Did you have anybody in your life with an M?” And someone might respond, “Well, my mother's name, her middle name was Mary,” and that’s seen as a hit or a correct response.

Sturgess: “There's someone here who eats food and drives a car!”

Midgley: Yes, and it becomes an exercise in projection and wish-fulfilment. The facilitated communication cases are especially sad ... and I think it shares a lot of elements with this, the interpretation and stuff, because you get a message or you have an impression and then you could just filter anything that you get from either the gorilla or from the handicapped person into what you want it to be.

I've often heard that with facilitated communication we don't get anything about what the handicapped individual really wants or wants to communicate. We are seeing the facilitator doing their thing. I really think there are some strong parallels there, at least from the Koko chat data that I've seen.

Sturgess: Finally, with the passing of Koko, what’s next for studies in this field? Do you think it's likely to continue if not with primates, maybe other creatures? Maybe there might be animals with language on the horizon, we just haven't met them yet?

Midgley: I really hope that ape language studies don't continue …

Sturgess: Really?

Midgley: I don't think that they will because I feel like the field has been narrowing down ever since Herb Terrace did a scathing review of what was going on, especially with one chimp, “Nim Chimpsky” (his name is a great in-joke). We've seen the loss of lots of animals. There are hardly any left. Washoe passed away. Dar passed away recently. Now Koko. There's only one team that I'm aware of left still doing anything and that's Kanzi and Panbinisha with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.

There are some interesting insights to glean, but I think maybe we've learned everything that we can from teaching apes and primates to use human language. I would like to see more work studying the kinds of utterances and calls and communication that they do spontaneously with each other in their own setting. There's some really interesting stuff there we've found that vervets can lie … .

Sturgess: Oh really?

Midgley: Yes, if they are in a fight and one vervet looks like he's going to lose, he can give an eagle call. The one that says “Look out. There are eagles!” Then they all scatter, and he doesn't have to get beaten so badly.

Sturgess:I know that they've discovered chimps can play jokes where they would beckon a child close to the cage in the zoo and on the other hand they are defecating and then they throw it into the children's faces.

Midgley: Chimps are gross! Another study shows that apes signal their intentions. Sometimes they'll give a booming call almost as if to say “I'm going over there.” Then within 12 to 18 hours they will go over there. This is repeatable. What does that tell us? Well, that tells us that there's intentionality. That they are able to give vocalizations that are intentional to communicate future plans. That's super language-y and that's really cool.

Also, gibbons I believe have shown that they can take two of their signals and put them together in a way that doesn't just mean a combination of the two signals. I forget what it actually means but if one says “Look out” and the other one says “Eagle.” You put those two together and it doesn't mean “Look out there's an eagle,” instead, it means something totally different. That's really cool and I'm fascinated by that.

I don't think that the line between human language and animal communication is that stark. For Chompsky it is that human language is a qualitatively different thing, but I tend to think of it more as quantitative. We share a lot of the neural hardware that our ape friends do. They are able to do certain language-y things. Those are strategies that they use to get across their meaning. And we use different strategies to get across our meanings. In some ways they are more complex and in some ways we are kind of the same. We can see that apes make little inroads in little ways, and that's interesting to study.

Daniel Midgley’s work can be seen on talkthetalkpodcast.com and danielmidgley.com.

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One of the longest running skeptical podcasts has achieved a milestone rare to its—or any other—podcast genre. On May 19, 2018, episode number 500 of The Skeptic Zone was released. This Australian podcast has been continuously produced, with an episode released every single week without exception, for almost ten years. I just had to interview the man responsible for attaining this impressive benchmark in podcast production: Richard Saunders. Saunders was in northern California for SkeptiCal 2018, and he graciously made himself available for a Skype interview. In 2017, I was interviewed by Saunders at CSICon for episode 471 of The Zone, so I appreciated having the opportunity to interview him for this significant occasion.

I began by asking Saunders to name the skeptical podcasts of similar vintage. He said that only four others date back to the same period: The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, Skeptoid, Skepticality, and The Geologic Podcast.

Rob Palmer: Why do you think those five podcasts started at almost the same time? What happened to cause that?

Richard Saunders: It’s just the fact that that’s where the technology was heading. We all started independently of each other I think. The technology became available so that for people who had that sort of idea, the opportunity was there.

Palmer: Tell me about the origin of The Zone … It started with The Skeptic Tank, right?

Saunders: It was a series of things. Originally there was an audio show called The Skeptic Tank. Then there was a video show I put on Google videos called The Tank Vodcast, but it only lasted about ten episodes as it was too hard to produce … I stopped and reassessed, and thought it’s easier for people to listen to the show if they’re driving or jogging or whatever, so the whole thing was relaunched as The Skeptic Zone. [Note: All episodes are still available on iTunes.]

Palmer: Who came up with the tagline “The Podcast from Australia for Science and Reason”?

Saunders: I came up with that. But the name The Skeptic Zone was created by Stefan Sojka who is the part-time cohost of the show. He’s a professional musician, and he wrote the music and lyrics, and he sings the theme song. In the earlier episodes, the theme always has the lyrics, but later episodes don’t. For show 500, we used the old music with the lyrics because it was a milestone.

Palmer: How did you collect all of your reporters?

Saunders: I couldn’t to do the show without reporters because there’s too much content for me to come up with by myself. When I started the show, there were some people around who were sort of interested in doing that. But people have lives and they come and go. I have actively recruited very periodically … I’ll look out for a new reporter when I think it’s time for a fresher voice. Sometimes people approach me and they say “can I do something for your show?” and if I think it’s appropriate then I’ll explore that possibility. So, I’ve had about seventeen reporters in the run of the show, I think. Now there about six—sometimes they’re frequent, sometimes very infrequent—that I consider to be the current group of reporters.

Palmer: Which reporter has been with you the longest?

Saunders: That’s Dr. Rachie: Dr. Rachael Dunlop. She’s been on since episode one, but she contributes infrequently because she’s a busy working scientist, living in the States at the moment. So, she contributes when she has time. All of my reporters contribute when they have time. I certainly can’t afford to pay them. But through the generosity of listeners, I can afford to give them recording equipment from time to time over the years or pay for them to go to conferences, or something like that. Generally speaking, they do it on a volunteer basis because they want to do it.

Palmer: And which reporter has surprised you the most over the years?

Saunders: Maynard. I never thought that he would turn out to be the great reporter that he has become. His specialty is interviewing. He is the best interviewer on any Australian podcast. Maynard has been on for about eight years so he’s one of the earlier reporters. He came about because he was doing a story for a radio program, and one of the people he interviewed was Dr. Rachie. That’s how I came to meet him, and I was quite star-struck because he was a big radio star. Slowly he started to do his own stuff for The Zone, which I thought was funny and good for the show. And since then he’s become a mainstay on the show.

Palmer: There was a female guest on episode 500 who said The Skeptic Zone changed her worldview. She said she was an X-Files fan and went from being Mulder to being Scully after listening to The Zone. Who is she, and have others told you similar stories over the years?

Saunders: That was an Australian Skeptics committee member who I invited to be on the milestone episode. Actually, I don’t get avalanches of emails from listeners, but sometimes people write in and say that not only did they enjoy the show, but it taught them something and now they see things differently. Of course, that might happen to a lot of people, but they don’t usually bother to write.

Palmer: What is the international reach of the podcast?

Saunders: Most of my audience comes from the United States. A little more than from Australia simply because the population of the United States is so much bigger. Percentage wise, it’s Australia. But for overall numbers it’s the United States, followed by the U.K., followed by New Zealand and Canada. Quite a lot of people listen to it in Sweden and just generally dotted around the world. But most people downloading and listening to it live in the United States. But that doesn’t mean I tailor it especially for the United States listeners, because it’s still an Australian show. The United States listeners would be disappointed if I suddenly started producing a United States-centric show, because a lot of people listen to it because it’s from Australia ... I don’t try to be The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. They don’t try to be me. The European Skeptics Podcast does not try to be Skeptoid. None of us are trying to be each other. We are all just doing what we want to do.

And there are listeners who listen to every single episode of every one of us. But there’s no rivalry or competition between us. It’s an interesting thing. We’re not trying to get each other’s audiences. If people listen to the SGU, I win. If people listen to the ESP, I win. We all win because people are listening to skeptical content. If they listen to me I’m thrilled and very happy, but if they’d rather listen to The Skeptics’ Guide and get good skeptical information, why would that upset me? That’s all good. What I’ve done since the beginning of The Skeptic Zone is that I run free promotions for all the other podcasts. I will talk about them and encourage other people to listen to them! And I will keep doing that, and also I’ll never charge any money to promote skeptical events. I regularly promote upcoming conferences no matter where they are in the world.

Palmer: Has the podcast’s quality improved since the oldest episodes?

Saunders: If I didn’t think I had improved, that would be a very bad thing! But the show has not changed very much … It’s still a magazine show. That’s been the format for ten years now, but I hope the quality is a bit better. It’s a slicker production. The music is integrated a bit better now. So, I think those are the improvements. After doing it for so long you just learn a better technique, I think. In fact, I recently built a little desktop studio … a recording booth. The difference isn’t huge, but it’s noticeable. But while travelling I can’t use that.

Palmer: So how do you record interviews at good quality while traveling?

Saunders: I just record into my iPhone [it’s a 7], and the quality of the microphones in an iPhone now is so good that I can actually do that if I’m travelling, and it’s perfectly acceptable. If you put a little, fuzzy, microphone foam on the top of your iPhone then it turns into a very nice little field recorder. There are two reasons I use [the foam]: The first is that it cuts out the “PAH” sound of the letter “P.” The second reason is because it looks like a microphone then, and psychologically it’s much better to use something that looks like a microphone when you’re doing interviews. Suddenly it’s a bit more sophisticated. My advice is to put the phone in airplane mode. This prevents interruptions and also digital interference. I find it works so well now that people think it’s a professional microphone—which it sort of is!

Palmer: Tell me about the production details. What editing equipment do you use?

Saunders: Ninety percent of the Skeptic Zone these days is produced and edited on the iPhone or the iPad. There are now applications that allow me not only to do recording but multi-track mixing, music production, and editing and production. The only time I use the laptop is the last stage, which is for a little bit of final production.

Palmer: You are the sole person putting it all together, right? How did you learn to do this? On the fly?

Saunders: Yes, I have produced every episode. And I learned podcasting on the fly. I’ve always liked audio, radio, radio plays, and that sort of thing. I’m making it up as I go along.

Palmer: Have you ever considered farming out the editing job?

Saunders: No, I’ve considered quitting lots of times. But to farm it out, it wouldn’t be my show anymore … and part of it is that it’s a very Richard Saunders sort of show because I have final say over everything … If I were ever to farm it out I would just simply give it lock, stock, and barrel to somebody and say “You are now the keeper of The Skeptic Zone. If you want to continue with it, good luck.” And I would retire from it. I wouldn’t want to give half the production to someone … Well. I don’t know. Who can tell what the future has? One day I might do that. If the show is still popular and people still want it, and somebody else does it … but then it will be a different show anyway.

Palmer: How do you think your life would’ve been different if you didn’t get involved with the skeptical movement?

Saunders: I’d probably be a street sweeper. I really don’t know. You know what? I think I probably would’ve ended up in entertainment in some form or another. I’m not really sure how. I also do acting you know … I’ve got another career as a part-time actor and doing things like that. I was an extra in Superman ... not a very big part at all. More recently I do minor parts on soap operas and things like that. For The Skeptic Zone I do get some money from subscriptions, but it’s really only enough to keep the show going. It’s certainly not enough to pay the bills, so I do other things. I mean I wish it was. You know, if I can make enough money off The Skeptic Zone to pay the bills that would be fantastic, but it’s just enough to keep the show going. So, I still need to do the other stuff.

Palmer: It’s amazing to me how the skeptical movement operates on a shoestring budget. We’re supposed to be the ones funded by “Big Pharma,” while in reality the other side has so much money from selling snake oil.

Saunders: I would certainly sell-out completely if there was a company out there willing to give me free airfare. Because there are so many things—skeptical events in the States especially—I can’t do because it costs me a fortune every year. So, there’s the word. If anyone wants to buy me out, buy my soul, I’m available!

Palmer: How did you get into this whole thing? Who was the first famous skeptic you met? Or who was your first influence?

Saunders: The first famous skeptic I knew of was James Randi, when he appeared on Australian television in 1980. They made a TV documentary about him doing water divining tests. It’s called James Randi in Australia. That was shown on Australian TV and I watched that, and I thought that was just amazing, and it really changed my mind. That was probably my biggest skeptical influence followed by watching Cosmos with Carl Sagan.

Palmer: What was your most fascinating investigation? Or one that maybe didn’t turn out the way you thought it might?

Saunders: They all turn out the way I think they’re going to. My most fascinating time however was combining entertainment and investigations when I was doing the TV program in Australia called The One where I was constructing tests for lots of psychics to prove their psychic ability. That was probably the most fascinating time I’ve had. There were two series: one in 2008 and one in 2011. You can Google “The One” and “Richard Saunders” to find highlights from the show on YouTube.

Palmer: Where does your passion come from, to spend so much of your time doing this for so little?

Saunders: I guess the only answer is: because it’s the right thing to do, and apart from that I’m not sure. It’s interesting. I find the topics interesting. I always have. So, to do something within a topic you find interesting and fascinating is pretty good.

Palmer: I saw on your Wikipedia bio that you are a CSI Fellow. How did that happen?

Saunders: To be honest I don’t know. They wrote to me one day and said they’d like to offer me CSI Fellow, and I didn’t know what to think. Did they send this to the wrong person? I was thrilled. I was absolutely thrilled. I guess somebody or some people put my name forward as somebody who is doing a lot of work in the skeptical world. And yeah, that was a big surprise. I think more or less it’s just a way for them to show gratitude for what you’ve been doing … There are quite a few amazing people [who are or have been fellows] and that’s why it’s quite a thrill to be listed amongst these people!

Palmer: Do you have a favorite conference? Will you be at CSICon again this year?

Saunders: I’ve got a soft spot for The Amazing Meeting because I became part of it when I joined the committee for the million-dollar challenge. I was very busy and it was very tiring for me, but I’ve got a big soft spot for TAM. I’m sorry that came to an end. But I’ve never gone to a convention where I didn’t have a good time and met some really fine people, so I’m happy to turn up at the opening of an envelope. But I can’t attend CSICon this year because it’s one week off of the Australian Skeptics convention. For me to do both would be quite a feat, and I do suffer from jet leg. It takes me quite a few days to get over that. In fact, one of the things that I do with conventions, if they’re gracious enough to have me, I ask if I can arrive at the venue a few days before simply to get my head together, because I don’t cope very well with jet lag.

Palmer: How many people do you typically interview at cons?

Saunders: I just do as many as time permits, maybe eight if I’m lucky because I’m usually quite busy. But when I took Maynard to TAM one year, he did about thirty or forty interviews at least. He was a machine. The joy Maynard gets when he’s at these events is doing what he does best, which is interviewing people. And that gives me a lot of content for the podcast, which I appreciate.

Palmer: When you interviewed me during CSICon you did a sort of ambush interview, so I’m curious: do you give the more notable people a heads-up about an interview? Or, do you do the same thing you did with me, and just stick a mic in their face in the hallway without notice?

Saunders: It depends on who they are. Sometimes the organizer will even line up interviews in advance. Other times you just take the opportunity if it arises. After years if you get to know somebody … like say Richard Wiseman … I can simply tap him on the shoulder and say “do you have time for an interview?” You just take the opportunities as they arise.

Palmer: Who was your most surprising interview?

Saunders: One of the best interviews I’ve ever did … I don’t know if it was surprising but it was certainly delightful … and it turned out to be far more fun than I thought it would turn out to be, was Richard Wiseman. I was in Edinburgh where I was going to speak for the Edinburgh Skeptics, and one afternoon he and I took a walk along the river and I got my microphone out and we simply had a talk. We simply chatted as we walked along the river, and the conversation went all sorts of directions, so that by the end of it I had a really nice delightful interview, which I wasn’t expecting.

Palmer: Who would you like to interview for The Zone that you have not?

Saunders: Alan Alda. I’ve never seen him at a skeptical conference, but I went to see him speak in Australia about two years ago, and it was a thrill to see him speak. But I understand he would be a hard man to get to interview. But I’ve such respect for the man. Not only for his TV acting, but for his work in science. It would be a thrill to interview Alan Alda. He advocates good science communication. His passion is science. He did science programs on PBS for many years. If you search for “Alan Alda” and “science” you’ll see all the work he does promoting science, and that’s why he was in Australia: to promote science.

Palmer: Here’s a question outside the skeptical realm: I understand you are way into origami!

Saunders: That’s my other passion, and in fact one of the best successes of my life is inventing an origami Pegasus for James Randi, which is perfect because it combines not only entertainment, but it also combines my love of origami and skepticism all in the same thing. The original instructions are in the safekeeping of James Randi, but I also made a video of it available on YouTube. I haven’t designed anything for a long time. But even in the last couple of days, when I was at the SkeptiCal conference in Berkeley, I was making origami for people. People know I can do it, and it’s quite fun for me.

Palmer: Finally, tell me something about The Skeptic Zone cats that hasn’t been revealed on the podcast.

Saunders: (Laughing) I don’t know what to say! The Skeptic Zone cats are sisters, about two years old from the same litter. Their names are Henrietta and Maude. Sometimes they’re part of the show because when I’m recording they’ll sneak their way into the studio and jump up on the computer or knock the microphone over or demand attention. Sometimes I have to lock them out, and even then, they’ll start scratching the door.

I am grateful to Richard Saunders for sharing these details about The Skeptic Zone and his career. On a personal note, as I related in my previous article about joining the Guerrilla Skepticism project, if it were not for Saunders promoting GSoW on The Skeptic Zone, I may never have found my own path to skeptical activism. One thing is for sure: I certainly wouldn’t have had the opportunity to interview Richard Saunders for Skeptical Inquirer!

Science is broad; it consists of many components and sub-components. Discussions regarding science are sometimes short-circuited by discussing a single component. These types of discussions oversimplify the wide range of science, its development, and implications. A full appreciation of science requires much more than a focus on a singular element. Skepticism is an element of a scientific attitude and is important, but a skeptical attitude alone—without other cognitive skills and knowledge—doesn’t make one a scientific thinker. Science is all about skepticism, so say the popularizers of science. Skepticism is important, but without the knowledge and appropriate skills, this characteristic will not make one a scientific thinker. Science is hard. In the words of Albert Einstein, “Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.”

Science, although fallible, is the great reality detector. Science is a systematic approach to knowledge. Proper use of scientific processes leads to rationalism (basing conclusion on intellect, logic, and evidence). Science is a safeguard against dogmatism (adherence to doctrine over rational and enlightened inquiry or basing conclusion on authority rather than evidence) and provides a better understanding of the world. Scientific processes and methods are unmistakably the most successful processes available for describing, predicting, and explaining phenomena in the observable universe. If an understanding of reality (or at least an approximation of reality) is the objective, science is the road best traveled. Of course, even those that claim there isn't a reality or those that hold a multiplist view of knowledge (suggesting there’s no right or wrong just different opinions), act as if there is a reality most of the time; they have no choice, as it is required for everyday functioning.

The general scientific approach to knowledge is based on systematic empiricism (Stanovich, 2007). Observation itself is necessary in acquiring scientific knowledge, but unstructured observation of the natural world does not lead to an increased understanding of the world: “Write down every observation you make from the time you get up in the morning to the time you go to bed on a given day. When you finish, you will have a great number of facts, but you will not have a greater understanding of the world” (Stanovich and Stanovich 2003, p. 12).

Scientific Literacy and Scientific Cognition

Discussions involving scientific literacy are ubiquitous. Scientific literacy is conceptualized and operationalized in various ways. Examples used in defining scientific literacy include: understanding science and its applications, knowledge of what counts as science, general scientific knowledge, knowledge of risks and benefits of science, making informed decisions regarding science and technology, etcetera (DeBoer 2000; Brennan 1992). A precise, standard conceptualization of scientific literacy has not been demonstrated since the origin of the concept (DeBoer 2000). In the context of this article, scientific literacy is synonymous with general scientific knowledge. Scientific literacy in this form involves remembering scientific facts, theories, principles, and so on—products of scientific inquiry. This form of literacy is sometimes referred to as a form of derived scientific literacy. Scientific literacy is important, however other science related concepts are just as important. Scientific cognition is not the same as scientific literacy.

Scientific cognition (thinking) involves complex cognitive mechanisms. Scientific cognition involves much more than general scientific knowledge, procedural skills to conduct research, attaching "science says" to your statements, a science degree, perpetuating views of popular science figures, identifying yourself as evidence based, asking for evidence, being skeptical, etc.Scientific thinking involves an array of components and can be used in everyday, out of the lab, thinking. Scientific thinking is broad and should be used in an array of contexts. Deanna Kuhn asserts that the essence of scientific thinking is coordinating belief with evidence (2011). At the very least scientific cognition involves philosophy of science, scientific methodology, quantitative reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, and elements of logic. Various scales have been developed to measure scientific thinking. Kahan developed the Ordinary Science Intelligence Scale (OSI 2.0, Kahan 2014), and Drummond and Fischhoff (2015) developed the Scientific Reasoning Scale (SRS). Drummond and Fischhoff found that scientific reasoning were distinct from measures of scientific literacy, even though there was a positive association to measures of scientific literacy.

Myself and colleagues investigated the association between scientific literacy and scientific cognition, and whether or not there were gender differences for total scores for each scale (Hale, Sloss, and Lawson 2017). The scientific literacy and scientific cognition assessment consisted of mostly questions derived from measuring devices used in the past. The assessments were administered as part of an online survey. The sample consisted of 202 university students and the study was approved by the university's Institutional Review Board. The results indicate a positive association, of moderate strength (r = +.33), between scientific literacy and scientific cognition, and no gender differences for total scores from the scales. An important finding from our study is that students confused science with pseudoscience. The majority of students (79 percent) in the study report that astrology is scientific or is at least partly scientific. Only 21 percent of participants in the study answered the following question correctly: “Which of the following statements are true? A) Astrology is not at all scientific B) Astrology is partly scientific C) Astrology is a legitimate field of scientific study."The correct answer is A. The astrology question is an item from the scientific literacy assessment. A detailed discussion on the results are beyond the scope here.

Learning Science

The cognitive processes foundational to scientific cognition are important and can be extended to various conditions. To reiterate, scientific cognition is about much more that remembering scientific theories, laws, and principles. Scientific cognition is essentially analytical thinking that can be used, and should be used, broadly. At the very least, in an effort to develop better scientific cognition, students should be educated in the areas of the philosophy of science, research methodology, quantitative reasoning (probabilistic reasoning), and logic. Science educators and the media do a disservice when they promote science and its relevant concepts as “just” being able to remember scientifically derived information or promoting science as if it is all about a just having a sense of wonder.

Being able to recollect scientific facts, being skeptical, and having a sense of wonder is important regarding science, but those qualities alone do not ensure high levels of scientific thinking. Assessment tools may help predict scientific eminence and be used as screening tools when hiring or considering admissions to college programs. More research needs to be done regarding scientific literacy and scientific cognition. Both of these concepts involve related cognitive mechanisms, and being knowledgeable in these areas will have positive consequences. Society is heavily dependent on science and technology, and these complex endeavors require complex thinking. We would like to see future research indicating a stronger positive association, between scientific cognition and scientific literacy, than the association found in our study; both are important are for understanding the development and comprehensive implications of science.

A sense of skepticism is a great starting point in an effort to better scientific thinking skills. Scientific realism projects a worldview indicating that science reflects reality (approximation of reality, best we can do with our limited sensory structures); reality is a view best seen through the scope of science.

• Brennan, R.P. 1992. Dictionary of Scientific Literacy. New York, N.Y.: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• DeBoer, G.E. 2000. Scientific Literacy: Another look at its historical and contemporary meanings and its relationship to science education reform. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 37, 582–601.
• Drummond, C., and B. Fischhoff. 2015. Development and Validation of the Scientific Reasoning Scale. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. doi: 10.1002/bdm.1906.
• Hale, J., G. Sloss, and A. Lawson. 2017. Association Between Scientific Cognition and Scientific Literacy (Brief Review). Knowledge Summit. Retrieved on June. 12, 2018 from http://jamiehalesblog.blogspot.com/2017/10/association-between-scientific.html.
• Kahan, D. 2016. “Ordinary science intelligence”: A science-comprehension measure for study of risk and science communication, with notes on evolution and climate change. Journal of Risk Research, 1–22, doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2016.1148067.
• Kuhn, D. 2011. What is scientific thinking and how does it develop? In U. Goswami (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development 2nd Edition, 497–523, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Stanovich, K. 2007. How To Think Straight About Psychology 8th Edition. New York, N.Y.: Pearson.
• Stanovich, P., and K. Stanovich. 2003. Using Research and Reason in Education: How Teachers Can Use Scientifically Based Research to Make Curricular & Instructional Decisions. National Institute of Literacy.

A highly variable neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social and communication challenges and restricted repetitive behavior and interests, the range of conditions classified as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is thought to affect 1-3% of the population. In just the past century, autism has progressed from poorly grasped—what was considered “autism” in the 1950s was then blamed on psychological harm inflicted by mothers— to better defined as a spectrum of disorders caused by a complex interaction of genetics and environment. But our understanding of the complexities of ASD and its causes remains in flux, and there is no known single cause. Like any area of health study with substantial unknowns, the gaps in knowledge are ripe for exploitation.

A frightening spectre to many a parent, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that all children be screened specifically for ASD at their regular 18- and 24-month-old well-child visits. Adding to parents’ worries is the commonly-held misconception that rates of autism are skyrocketing— often referred to as an “epidemic”—which maintains the myth that the cause must be environmental toxins. Recent CDC data suggesting that prevalence has increased from 1 in 150 in 2007, to 1 in 68 in 2014, to 1 in 59 today can seem alarming, but it isn’t actually evidence of an “epidemic.” Rather, the changing numbers are thought to most likely represent increased surveillance, improved diagnosis, changes in diagnostic criteria, increased awareness and educational support, and reduction in stigma, so that more of the population falls under the ASD umbrella (even as controversy continues to brew over DSM-5 autism criteria, the elimination of Asperger’s syndrome from the criteria, and whether the latest criteria could do a disservice to girls.) It’s also important to note that slow progress with racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare have also contributed to perceived changes in ASD prevalence, with diagnosis among black and hispanic children improving with better surveillance. Once these factors are accounted for, it becomes clear that the prevalence of autism as we define it today is not actually increasing, let alone skyrocketing.

Although our understanding of autism is changing at a rapid pace—the DSM changed its nomenclature from “infantile autism” to three unique autism disorders in 1987, and again to one umbrella diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder in 2013—there remains an iceberg of unanswered questions beneath what we understand about the condition.

For one, distinguishing the subtypes of autism across the spectrum poses an ongoing challenge for researchers, especially with regard to mode of inheritance and type of genetic variation. The body of evidence overwhelmingly points to autism being influenced by a complex interaction of inherited variations distributed across the genome, with some autistic people carrying a strong acting de novo (arising in a germ cell or fertilized egg) variant. These genetic variants are thought to interact with environmental factors to influence autism phenotypes. Environmental risk factors associated with ASD include advanced parental age at conception, having a sibling with ASD, low birth weight, premature birth, certain prescription drugs taken during pregnancy, and certain viral infections during pregnancy, although causal relationships have not been established. The most convincing association between viral infection and ASD is with congenital rubella.

Despite the powerful, popular narrative that vaccines cause autism, rooted in the discredited, fraudulent, retracted paper by Andrew Wakefield linking the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to the disorder, any links between vaccines and ASD, including thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used to prevent contamination of multidose vials, have been thoroughly discredited. Wakefield was stripped of his medical license in 2010 after The Lancet retracted the paper, discovered to be an elaborate and deliberate fraud.

Given that ASD has no single cause, there is also no existing cure and no treatment that helps everyone. According to Mayo Clinic:

“Treatment options may include:

• Behavior and communication therapies. Many programs address the range of social, language and behavioral difficulties associated with autism spectrum disorder. Some programs focus on reducing problem behaviors and teaching new skills. Other programs focus on teaching children how to act in social situations or communicate better with others. Applied behavior analysis (ABA) can help children learn new skills and generalize these skills to multiple situations through a reward-based motivation system.
• Educational therapies. Children with autism spectrum disorder often respond well to highly structured educational programs. Successful programs typically include a team of specialists and a variety of activities to improve social skills, communication and behavior. Preschool children who receive intensive, individualized behavioral interventions often show good progress.
• Family therapies. Parents and other family members can learn how to play and interact with their children in ways that promote social interaction skills, manage problem behaviors, and teach daily living skills and communication.
• Other therapies. Depending on your child's needs, speech therapy to improve communication skills, occupational therapy to teach activities of daily living, and physical therapy to improve movement and balance may be beneficial. A psychologist can recommend ways to address problem behavior.
• Medications. No medication can improve the core signs of autism spectrum disorder, but specific medications can help control symptoms. For example, certain medications may be prescribed if your child is hyperactive; antipsychotic drugs are sometimes used to treat severe behavioral problems; and antidepressants may be prescribed for anxiety. Keep all health care providers updated on any medications or supplements your child is taking. Some medications and supplements can interact, causing dangerous side effects.”

Early intervention for children less than 3 years of age, aimed heavily at training parents or caregivers, has been shown to have long-term effects on social communication and “severity” of autism symptoms. Considered a primary intervention, Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) (which has applications outside of autism) involves up to 40 hours a week of a therapist working one-on-one with a child to develop social, language, and other skills, and is the most widely used therapy for ASD. ABA is controversial, however—critics say the drills are cruel and force autistic people to hide who they truly are.

It’s important to note that a growing movement calls for autism acceptance, rather than awareness, toward an equitable, neurodiverse society. In his Neurotribes blog, science writer Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, explains that awareness isn’t enough, and includes the ideas of a group of self-advocates, parents, and teachers, posing the question, “Obviously, even a month of acceptance will not be enough to dramatically improve the lives of people on the spectrum. What could be done to make the world a more comfortable, respectful, and nurturing place for millions of autistic kids and adults—now, starting today?”

As with other emerging bodies of science, the gaps in knowledge on ASD have allowed profiteers to creep in. It’s not surprising that vulnerable parents of autistic kids want simple solutions to complex problems, even though scientists largely believe that there will never be a definitive “cure” for autism. As the science streams in, a number of organizations, movements and leaders have encroached, promoting the ideology that autistic children and adults are somehow defective and must be fixed. While research on interventions for ASD continues, these so-called “cures,” unsubstantiated therapeutic interventions, and supplements that we can safely chalk up to woo have thrived. Part 1 of this column will examine DAN! protocol, chlorine dioxide, secretin, chelation therapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, lupron, GcMAF, and stem cell therapy, all of which have been purported to treat or even cure autism.

DAN! protocol

A project of the Autism Research Institute (ARI), a nonprofit organization founded in 1967 by Bernard Rimland, Ph.D. (1928-2006), Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!)—the most broad school of ASD cure thought, with several discredited and harmful interventions under its umbrella—was launched in 2005 and shut down in 2011. Based on the belief that autism is caused by lowered immune response, external toxins from vaccines and other sources, and problems caused by certain foods, proponents claimed that the treatments were “a way of addressing individuality in the context of an epidemic that has environmental causes." Dubbed “the father of modern autism,” Rimland is credited with overturning the once accepted “refrigerator mother” theory— that uncaring mothers’ lack of warmth triggers the onset of the condition—ultimately helping end that specific form of mother-blaming for autism. But that does little to undo the damage that DAN! inflicted, including the administering of harmful treatments, including chelation, nutritional interventions, and hyperbaric oxygen treatments (described later in this article). Despite DAN! being suspended in 2011, a quick Google search turns up several practitioners offering the protocol.

Retired psychiatrist and Stephen Barrett, co-founder of the National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) and founder of Quackwatch wrote in a 2015 critical look at DAN!:

“To determine effectiveness, variables must be isolated and tested in controlled experiments. The DAN! protocol" as a whole was never validated or even tested, and was untestable. It was derived from observations that were not structured to determine effectiveness. It was a hodgepodge of everything DAN!'s founders speculated might be useful. Many of its promoters seem to believe that:

If a child improves or is reported to have improved following the administration of a treatment, that outcome would support the diagnosis, the treatment, and the alleged underlying theory.

If enough reports are pooled, they will reveal what works—so try lots of things and and attribute any improvement to what you tried rather than other things such as a good teacher or the natural tendency of children to mature over time.

Even though well-designed studies might demonstrate that something (such as chelation or secretin) doesn't work, these studies can be ignored because each child is an individual and may still respond positively to any intervention.

I do not believe that science works that way. And neither should you.”

David Gorski, surgical oncologist and Managing Editor of Science Based Medicineaddressed DAN! in his Orac blog:

“[I]t is big business to be bilking the parents of autistic children of considerable sums of money to use pseudoscientific “treatments” based largely on the scientifically discredited idea that autism is some form of “vaccine injury” or “toxicity” due to a combination of vaccines and environmental “toxins” (almost always vaguely defined or completely undefined). As a result, children are subjected to potentially dangerous treatments like chelation therapy, which can kill when it goes wrong, designed to “detoxify” the heavy metals that are supposedly causing the child’s autism.”

Chlorine Dioxide (CD/MMS)

Often called Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS) or CD Protocol, the impetus for administering active ingredient chlorine dioxide is the belief that autism is caused by parasites which can be eradicated by these glorified bleach enemas, oral solutions, and baths. Made by mixing sodium chlorite and citric acid, parents who administer MMS to their autistic kids often share photographs of the “parasites” that they believe they’ve removed from their children’s bodies. The heartbreaking fact is that the images actually depict the lining of the intestines sloughing off from the bleach.

In 2010, Health Canada issued a warning “that using this product as directed may cause serious health problems” and that consumers should stop using it immediately.

The U.S Food and Drug Administration issued a safety alert on MMS in 2010, since removed from its website (but with excerpts published in several news articles) stating that:

"The product, when used as directed, produces an industrial bleach that can cause serious harm to health. The product instructs consumers to mix the 28 percent sodium chlorite solution with an acid such as citrus juice. This mixture produces chlorine dioxide, a potent bleach used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment. High oral doses of this bleach, such as those recommended in the labeling, can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and symptoms of severe dehydration."

Thought to now reside in Mexico, Kerri Rivera, one of the leading proponents of MMS as an autism cure, was brought to task by the state of Illinois in 2015, which barred her from selling it to Illinois residents or speaking at conferences in the state.

As of publication, online video consultations with Rivera may be purchased through the CD Autism Shop website at $120, with follow up consultations running $70.

In a 2012 post in Science Based Medicine, Gorski wrote:

“[W]e’re seeing quacks douse autistic children in bleach, pump their colons full of it, and feed it to them until they start to have fevers and diarrhea, believing that the diarrhea and fever are evidence that the bleach is working to reverse autism. The diarrhea and fever might well be working to do something, but reversing autism is not part of that something. Making children sick is.”

Barrett covered CD/MMS in a Quackwatch article updated in 2016:

“MMS contains a 28% solution of sodium chlorite. which, when mixed with an acid such as citrus juice, produces chlorine dioxide (ClO2), a potent bleach used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment. High oral doses, such as those recommended in MMS labeling, can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and symptoms of severe dehydration. Sodium chlorite is not legal to sell for human consumption, and legitimate suppliers of the chemical include a warning sheet stating that it can cause potentially fatal side effects if swallowed. MMS's discovery is attributed to Jim Humble, a former "research engineer."”

Neuroscientist and blogger Alison Bernstein admonished readers in a 2015 post at the It’s Momsense blog:

“Parents who are carrying out this protocol share their stories online. They share stories about their children crying in pain as they are held down and an industrial strength bleaching agent is forced into their rectums. They share pictures of the lining of their children’s intestines falling out, toenails falling off, and hair falling out. They share that their children stop showing emotion and have a loss of appetite. These are all signs of chronic poisoning and chronic abuse, but in these groups parents are congratulated for “curing” their children of autism. When parents post about disturbing symptoms their children are having in response to this “treatment”, the answer from the leaders is always – give more enemas. These children are in pain but children trust their parents. This is an utter betrayal of that trust.”

Secretin

A digestive system hormone that regulates the secretion of digestive fluids from the stomach, pancreas, and liver, secretin caused a buzz and generated false hope after three autistic children reportedly improved significantly after taking the hormone in the late 90s. As Spectrum News reported in a 2016 feature:

It’s difficult enough to separate placebo from drug effects when participants report their own experiences, says Karin Jensen, a placebo researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, but it’s nearly impossible when other people are in the mix. The excitement in the media and the autism community over the secretin trials is a perfect example of this phenomenon, she says. “Most of [autism research] is based on subjective ratings,” she says. “Expectations were sky high, and so that was transferred to patients via parents and caretakers.”

Subsequent studies, including a 2012 Cochrane review of 16 studies of secretin administered intravenously to a total of 900 children with ASD concluded that “[t]here is no evidence that single or multiple dose intravenous secretin is effective and as such currently it should not be recommended or administered as a treatment for ASD. Further experimental assessment of secretin's effectiveness for ASD can only be justified if there is new high-quality and replicated scientific evidence that either finds that secretin has a role in neurotransmission in a way that could benefit all children with ASD or identifies important subgroups of children with ASD who could benefit from secretin because of a proven link between the action of secretin and the known cause of their ASD, or the type of problems they are experiencing.”

Chelation therapy

Rooted in the thoroughly-refuted notion that mercury exposure from vaccines causes autism, proponents of chelation for ASD purport that this treatment strips the element, along with other heavy metals, from the body. Chelation therapy involves intravenous or orally-administered chelating agents like EDTA and DMSA, which bind to metals, allowing them to be excreted in urine. It’s approved for use exclusively by prescription for true cases of heavy metal poisoning only. The FDA warns consumers against the use of OTC chelation products:

“These companies marketing unapproved OTC chelation products commonly target patients with serious and incurable diseases who may have limited treatment options. Two common conditions that these products claim to treat are autism spectrum disorders and heart (cardiovascular) conditions, including treatment of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, clogged arteries, angina, prevention of heart attack or stroke, and even as an alternative to coronary bypass surgery. Some companies also claim their products can prevent or treat Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, complications of diabetes, and many more diseases and health conditions that may be unrelated to one another.

FDA is concerned that patients will delay seeking proven, sometimes essential medical care, when relying on unproven OTC chelation products to treat serious conditions such as heart and blood vessel disease. FDA is also concerned that chelation can result in serious side effects such as dehydration, kidney failure, and death.”

Though the theory that thimerosal—a mercury-containing compound used as a preservative in some vaccines—causes autism has been thoroughly refuted, data suggest that around 7% of individuals with ASD have received this treatment. A 2015 Cochrane systematic review concluded that “no clinical trial evidence was found to suggest that pharmaceutical chelation is an effective intervention for ASD. Given prior reports of serious adverse events, such as hypocalcaemia, renal impairment and reported death, the risks of using chelation for ASD currently outweigh proven benefits. Before further trials are conducted, evidence that supports a causal link between heavy metals and autism and methods that ensure the safety of participants are needed.”

Quackwatch features information on inappropriate testing, clinical studies, lawsuits, and regulatory actions, explaining that:

“Chelation therapy is a series of intravenous infusions containing EDTA and various other substances. It is falsely claimed to be effective against cardiovascular disease, autism, and many other diseases and conditions. Because chelation has valid use in some cases of heavy metal poisoning, many practitioners falsely diagnose lead, mercury, or other heavy metal toxicity to trick patients into undergoing chelation. The articles linked from this page explain why doctors who advocate the general use of chelation therapy should be avoided.”

Writing for the Mayo Clinic website, pediatrician Jay L. Hoecker described chelation therapy:

“Chelation therapy is not an effective autism treatment, and it may be dangerous.

Some doctors and parents have considered chelation therapy as a potential autism treatment. Proponents believe that autism is caused by mercury exposure, such as from childhood vaccines. Chelation therapy supposedly removes mercury from the body, which chelation supporters say cures autism — but there's no evidence of a link between mercury exposure and autism. In addition, chelation therapy can be associated with serious side effects, including potentially deadly kidney damage.

The subject of exposure to environmental toxic agents — such as mercury, lead and a host of other toxins — and links to autism spectrum disorder is complex and the quality of studies varies considerably. That's in part because of all the many variables, such as geography, genetic factors, metabolism differences in individuals and sampling sources. Studies show conflicting results with no reproducible proof.”

Clinical neurologist Steven Novella wrote at Science Based Medicine:

“Chelation therapy has a long history of quackery – not for its intended use but for other uses for which there is no evidence. The classic example of this is the use of chelation therapy to treat atherosclerosis to prevent heart disease. This claim persists despite the utter lack of evidence for efficacy and the fact that all proposed mechanisms have been shown to be flawed or false.

In the last decade the belief that mercury in some vaccines (mercury-containing thimerosal was removed from routine childhood vaccines in the US by 2002) might be linked to autism. The scientific evidence clearly shows this is not the case (as I have discussed in many previous posts). But belief persists despite the evidence, mostly among anti-vaccinationist ideologues. But many earnest parents, just wanting to help their autistic children, have been caught up in the pseudoscience and conspiracy-mongering.”

Hyperbaric oxygen (HBOT/HBO2)

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy involves breathing pure oxygen in a pressurized chamber, and is FDA approved for only 13 conditions, including “treatment of air or gas embolism (dangerous "bubbles" in the bloodstream that obstruct circulation), carbon monoxide poisoning, decompression sickness (often known by divers as "the bends"), and thermal burns (caused by heat or fire).” Proposed mechanisms by which HBOT helps autistic people include the reduction in inflammation thought to restrict blood flow to regions of the brain, and improvement in the brain’s ability to absorb oxygen.

A 2015 review found that the “evidence is weak for the use of HBO2 in ASD, with only one, likely flawed, randomized control study showing treatment benefit.” Steven Novella discussed the lone 2009 study that showed limited benefit, and his critiques boil down to four main points, summed up at Exposing Autism One:

1. Inadequate blinding of subjects and parents: “The primary weakness, in my opinion, is that the parents of the children being studied were allowed in the chamber with their children. The two groups in the study either received 24% oxygen in 1.3 atmospheres, or 21% oxygen in 1.03 atmospheres. It’s probable that many of the parents knew if they were getting increased pressure or not, and this therefore could have unblinded the study.”
2. Small size of the study: “The study is also on the small side, with 62 children total. However, the clinical effects were very robust.”
3. Potential conflicts of interest: More than one author of the study has a potential financial conflict of interest. Rossignol and Usman offer HBOT in their practice and Usman’s husband sells the hyperbaric chambers used for HBOT. “While such conflicts are important to expose, I think they are trumped by a well-enough controlled study. The whole point of a well-designed study is to eliminate the effects of bias. But given that this study was poorly blinded, and bias was present, it certainly diminishes its impact.”
4. Only measured short term outcomes: It therefore did not test if the effect of hyperbaric treatment survives much beyond the treatment itself. Even if the effect in this study is real, it may represent only a temporary symptomatic benefit – not altering the course of autism itself. Therefore longer followup studies are needed as well.

Novella concluded that “It is not impossible that hyperbaric oxygen may have some benefit in some children with autism. Although there is no established mechanism at this time, and proposed mechanisms (like the notion that hyperbaric O2 decreases inflammation) are largely speculative. But a physiological effect is not implausible. The treatment is also fairly safe. Therefore it is reasonable to study it further.

The biggest risk of the treatment now is that it is expensive—costing 150-900 dollars per treatment or 14-17 thousand dollars for a chamber. It also diverts energy and emotions away from possibly more productive treatments.”

In a warning for consumers, the FDA says, “[n]o, hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) has not been clinically proven to cure or be effective in the treatment of cancer, autism, or diabetes. But do a quick search on the Internet, and you'll see all kinds of claims for these and other diseases for which the device has not been cleared or approved by FDA.”

Possible side effects and complications include oxygen toxicity, fluid buildup in the ears, sinus damage, and vision changes.

Chemical castration

Perhaps best known for its use in chemical castration of sexual offenders, Lupron (Leuprorelin, also known as leuprolide), the synthetic version of gonadotropin releasing hormone, is also used in the treatment of advanced prostate cancer, endometriosis, some breast cancers, and to delay the early onset of puberty. “Lupron Protocol” as an autism treatment originated with a 2005 paper by father son duo Mark and David Geier (Mark’s medical license has been revoked or suspended in all states since 2011) in Medical Hypotheses, a non-peer reviewed journal aiming “to give novel, radical new ideas and speculations in medicine open-minded consideration, opening the field to radical hypotheses which would be rejected by most conventional journals.” The proposed mode of action is based on the thoroughly debunked notion that mercury in vaccines causes autism—mercury binds to testosterone, so Lupron’s action in lowering testosterone levels also helps the body eliminate mercury, or so the misguided hypothesis goes.

Despite no plausible mechanism for Lupron to treat autism, hundreds of parents began using it following the Geiers development of the protocol, as reported by the Chicago Tribune in 2009.

“Four of the world's top pediatric endocrinologists told the Tribune that the Lupron protocol is baseless, supported only by junk science. More than two dozen prominent endocrinologists dismissed the treatment earlier this year in a paper published online by the journal Pediatrics.

Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge in England and director of the Autism Research Center in Cambridge, said it is irresponsible to treat autistic children with Lupron.

"The idea of using it with vulnerable children with autism, who do not have a life-threatening disease and pose no danger to anyone, without a careful trial to determine the unwanted side effects or indeed any benefits, fills me with horror," he said.

Experts in childhood hormones warn that Lupron can disrupt normal development, interfering with natural puberty and potentially putting children's heart and bones at risk. The treatment also means subjecting children to daily injections, including painful shots deep into muscle every other week.”

In the 8-part in depth series “Why Not Just Castrate Them,” which followed the Geier saga and examined chemical castration as a treatment for autism, David Gorski wrote:

“[T]he parents of Geiers’ patients are largely self-selected to believe the woo and have a serious incentive, after sinking thousands of dollars into it, to believe it’s working. And they do provide [testimonials]. Heck, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of them are even true. If you shut down a child or teen’s testosterone production, they will become more docile and have a decreased sex drive. That doesn’t mean the drug is doing anything at all for the teen’s autistic symptoms.”

In 2009, Steven Novella pointed out of the Lupron protocol that, there is a “huge psychological incentive to perceive an improvement even where one does not exist. The more radical, risky, and expensive a treatment is, the more parents feel the need to justify their decision by perceiving a benefit. Plus parents want their children to improve. I have seen this result in parents (and also patients themselves) reporting a clear improvement when objective measures showed no improvement at all.”

GcMAF

Promoted as a cure for cancer, HIV, autism, and other conditions, GcMAF (Gc protein-derived macrophage activating factor) is a protein that occurs naturally in the blood of healthy people, with activity affecting immune system function. Infamous physician James Jeffrey Bradstreet, who believed that vaccines cause autism, treated thousands of patients around the world with quack treatments including GcMAF, which was extracted from human blood plasma, concentrated, and injected. The vials were often ordered on the internet and injected without oversight. The day before Bradstreet died in a likely suicide, more than 10,000 vials of GcMAF were seized in a raid of his facility over contamination concerns following the deaths of at least five individuals who received the treatment. The FDA and physicians made statements to the Washington Post following Bradstreet’s death:

“GcMAF treatments are considered investigational, and none are approved or licensed for use by the FDA in the U.S.,” the agency said in a statement sent to The Washington Post.

Nearly all doctors agree.

“Given there is no evidence that modulating the immune system would have any benefit for children with autism spectrum disorder – especially given ASD’s genetic or epigenetic basis – I am not sure why Dr. Bradstreet would want to use this for ASD,” Peter Jay Hotez, dean of Baylor’s National School of Tropical Medicine, told The Post in an e-mail.

It’s not even clear if GcMAF injections are safe. An initial “safety study” — the first of its kind — is still trying to recruit participants.”

“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is clear: GcMAF is not a recognized treatment for autism.

There are still no results published for the referenced non-randomized clinical trial, which recruited a total of 24 patients.

In a blog post for Science Based Medicine, David Gorski wrote, “it’s clear that Jeff Bradstreet’s many years of applying his quackery to autistic children had finally—finally—caught up with him. I’m actually sorry that he killed himself, both for the pain it caused his family, but also because it means that Bradstreet ultimately escaped justice. It means he will never face a judge and jury for the many years he victimized autistic children with a wide variety of quackery. That saddens me, but I can still hope that Bradstreet’s co-conspirators face the justice he eluded.”

Stem cell therapies

Where there is a poorly understood condition, it’s certain that there are charlatans peddling stem cells to cure it, and it’s no different with autism. A phase I study out of Duke University tested the safety of administering a single intravenous infusion of autologous umbilical cord blood, despite well-placed skepticism due to lack of preclinical data to support it. Nevertheless, the phase II study has forged ahead, with treatment and placebo arms, to evaluate the efficacy of treating autistic children with their own cord blood. Meanwhile, the media has offered up unsubstantiated hope.

Unregulated, unsafe stem cell treatments for autism existed well before the Duke study, though, and are still being sold despite warnings against them. As of publication, a search for “stem cell therapy autism” yields over 33,000 videos on YouTube, the bulk of them discussing results of stem cell treatments obtained in Panama, Mexico, China, India, and the United States.

And even with the Duke study underway, some parents who want stem cell treatments for their autistic kids are unwilling to participate, in part because they don’t want to end up in the placebo arm of the trial. Parents discuss stem cell treatments and results in posts in the “Stem Cell Therapy for Autism” Facebook group, with over 6400 members. The group started with Sarah Collins, who credits adult stem cell injections administered in Panama City, Panama, with the “recovery” of her older son and improvement in her younger son, both of whom were diagnosed with autism, as she explained to The Atlantic in 2016. But as with other unregulated treatments for autism, testimonials for stem cell concoctions don’t mean that they’ve worked, as Gorski explained:

“The reason testimonials, which are, let’s face it, simply anecdotes about one person (i.e., and N of 1) in which there are rarely any objective, properly done clinical results examine, seem so compelling to the average person is because most people don’t realize two things about the diseases and conditions for which testimonials are common. First, it’s not a coincidence that most conditions for which testimonials are used are conditions that either have a wide degree of biological variability (i.e., breast cancer) or a course that frequently varies (i.e., autism). In the case of cancer, the difference between primary treatment and adjuvant treatment is often misunderstood, wherein people who had curative surgery for their tumors are presented as though whatever quackery they tried after surgery cured them, even though it was the surgery that cured them. In the case of a condition like autism, there is often the underlying assumption that the child will never develop–would never have developed–without whatever intervention the parents subjected him to. As I’ve pointed out many times, that assumption is erroneous; autistic children can and do develop, often in fits and starts, just like other children, and sometimes they can even develop to the point of no longer meeting the criteria for autistic spectum disorders. Not surprisingly, these are the children who are often presented as “cured.””

***Up next, part two of this column will examine CEASE therapy, facilitated communication, and a slew of dietary treatments that profiteers continue to administer, even though they’ve been thoroughly discredited ...

Susan Gerbic: We are going to be talking about this viral video that proposes to have the cure for cancer. You must watch this two-minute video (Dr. Tarjany and the Miracle Cancer Cure) first for the rest of this conversation to make any sense. And you must watch the entire video before commenting.

Jonathan Jarry: Let me make some popcorn first.

Gerbic: I would like to introduce you to Jonathan Jarry from the McGill Office for Science and Society (OSS). Jarry interviewed me about GSoW at CSICon 2017. You are brand new to the OSS but not new to scientific skepticism. He also is the cohost of the podcast The Body of Evidence. Jarry is on Twitter @CrackedScience. Jonathan, please tell people more about yourself.

Jarry: I'm a science communicator, and I don't think it would be too far-fetched to say I am essentially a professional skeptic at this point. I studied molecular biology and human genetics, and my experiences in grad school really opened my eyes to important problems in scientific research, such as reproducibility and statistical illiteracy. So much of the published research is subpar and uninformative, but it's not always easy to tell rigorous science apart from sloppy research, and this is something that pseudoscientists can easily exploit by publishing their half-baked experiments and benefiting from the veneer of legitimacy a publication confers.

I've been involved with the skeptical community for nearly a decade, organizing a slew of events (like a variety show focused on critical thinking), hosting podcasts, blogging, and making videos. The fact that I can now apply all these skills in the context of a proper job at McGill is an incredible opportunity and one that too few people get.

Gerbic: GSoW has become associated with the OSS lately since we rewrote Joe Schwarcz’s Wikipedia page in preparation for CSICon 2017. We were so impressed with Schwarcz’s lecture at CSICon that one of my editors, Robin Cantin, who lives in Montreal, took notice. Cantin wrote Wikipedia pages for several of the OSS founders and for the OSS itself, all in English and French. We are honored to learn of all the great work happening there.

Jarry: I always wondered if most American skeptics don't know we exist because we're located north of the Great Geographical Divide, beyond the veil of perception. But seriously, our office has officially existed for nearly twenty years. Dr. Joe Schwarcz, our director, has been fighting against chemophobia and pseudoscience on the public stage for forty years now. Our office's mandate is to separate sense from nonsense for the public, which means providing basic science education but also investigating and denouncing pseudoscience and outright quackery. We do it through articles, videos, and a healthy presence in the mainstream media. One of my proudest contributions to the office is a biweekly YouTube series in the vein of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver called Cracked Science, which tackles topics like the genetics of intelligence and DNA compatibility testing for couples, topics that are often smothered in hype, misinformation, and sometimes controversy.

Our office also hosts the Trottier Public Science Symposium every year, which has featured speakers like James Randi, Dr. Harriet Hall, Dr. Edzard Ernst, Dr. Paul Offit, and many more. We are finalizing the line-up for 2018's symposium on October 29 and 30, and I am really excited about our speakers!

Gerbic: Now on to the topic at hand: the Tarjany video. Hopefully everyone has watched it by now. If not, stop reading and watch the two-minute video. You wrote to me a week ago and said that the OSS was producing a video that you wanted downloaded and shared on social media on June 30, 2018. You were giving various people the video who have big social media presences. By the way, thank you for including me in that world.On June 30, you sent me a message with a link to a Dropbox account with the video. You said to download it, upload it to social media, and write on the post some kind of comment that this is nonsense. That is what I did, and only hours after its release I knew I had to talk to you about it. Tell me more about the video and the reasoning behind handling it this way. You could have simply uploaded it yourself to the OSS channel and asked for it to be shared, but you didn’t.

Jarry: I didn't want to first share it through our official channels because a) we don't have hundreds of thousands of followers and b) the words "McGill" and "science" might have tipped our hand. The video came about mainly through frustration (a great and underrated source of inspiration). A former coworker of mine sent me a video very much like this, asking me if there was anything to it. The video had received millions of views. This is a feeling we skeptics are all too familiar with: we lack the appeal of the fear-mongers and conspiracists and thus don't reach as many people. So my goal was to create a Trojan horse, a video that would look exactly like those viral, anti-pharmaceutical, conspiracy-exposing clips but that would shatter your expectations halfway through, point out how you were taken in by blatant misinformation, and convey an all-too-timely message: be skeptical. We approached over seventy-five different people and Facebook pages, asking them to post the video natively. Five of those actually did it, including the host of HQ Trivia, Scott Rogowski, and the reach has been absolutely incredible.

Gerbic: It’s been almost five hours since I uploaded it to my Facebook page and already it is over 12K views and has been shared 878 times. And that is only from my post. What numbers are you seeing already? How are you tracking this when there are so many other people sharing the video?

Jarry: We're now twenty-four hours into our subversive campaign, and the video has reached a grand total of a quarter of a million views! I had to go back to our list of seventy-five people, check their accounts one by one, and compile the numbers. Our little video has been shared 6,000 times. I definitely did not expect for it to take off like it did.

[NOTE from Gerbic: As I write this about thirty-six hours after uploading the video to my Facebook page, it has hit 290,868 views, 6,275 shares, and over 1.1 Facebook “reactions”—and this is just my page. Looking back at being excited with 12K views seems silly now. One very odd thing that has happened is that I’m getting a lot of Facebook friend requests. I normally see about three requests a day, but in the past thirty-six hours I think I’ve received about fifty requests. I’m not going to accept them, but it is really interesting. I think Facebook’s algorithms have added me to a list of “You Should Really Friend this Person.”] 

I would like to introduce you to Jonathan Jarry from the McGill Office for Science and Society (OSS) and hyperlink to their website... https://mcgill.ca/oss/
Jonathan says that across all the places it was shared it has 7.2 million views
I personally have 841,967 views and 12,787 shares

Gerbic: I’m fascinated by the response from the skeptic community. I shared it to my personal Facebook page and then shared it from there to about thirty skeptic groups I belong to internationally. I was flooded with notifications instantly. Some were laughing emojis; others were angry emojis. The comments were mixed; about three-fourths were positive comments. They got that it is a skeptical video aiming to teach a lesson. But one-fourth from what I could tell were from people who were upset by the video. Two people asked for the research to prove what they were seeing on the video. Many people said they stopped watching seconds into the video calling it nonsense. Lots of those negative comments were pointing out the various flaws in the statements made on the video, like how DNA was not discovered until much later than the video claimed. One woman sent me a private message saying that she searched for Dr. Tarjay and he does not exist, but she found the moss.

Jarry: The setup in the video was purposefully made to contain a number of mistakes that a savvy viewer might spot. Tarjany is represented not by one but two older white men, and you can tell by the quality of the pictures that they are from different eras. Also, in 1816, there basically were no photographs. The earliest surviving photograph dates back to ten years later, and it wasn't exactly a crisp portrait. We also didn't know about DNA at the time, and we certainly didn't know its structure was helical.

Gerbic: On each negative post, other posters responded, “watch till the end” and then the angry person would say “Oh, I get it now.” One man was obviously posting comments as he watched it, as he was calling the claims out as nonsense as he watched the video. Then about his fourth comment he said “Oh, I should have watched it to the end before commenting. Now I feel silly.”What really interests me is what the reaction tells us about our community. Are we so quick to call BS on everything before really listening to the other side? It’s hard to tell as the video was making some pretty crazy claims right at the beginning. What do you think?

Jarry: I really enjoyed reading the comments on the video. The number of times the phrase "watch until the end" came up as a reprimand of sorts to a commenter was gold. To be fair, the video was not aimed at self-identified skeptics. We wanted to reach the kinds of people who are tempted by these videos, whose health has made them desperate, who haven't been exposed to critical thinking and who don't have a biomedical background. So I certainly can't chastise the skeptics who stopped watching after five seconds and called the whole thing bunk: I'm sure I would have done the same. These shortcuts or heuristics are helpful because we are overwhelmed with information and must find a way to classify it fast.

Gerbic: I did get a message from a woman who said “I absolutely got someone with that cancer cure video. Exactly the sort of gullible person I wanted to influence :-).”

I’m also really impressed with the quality of the video. You hit all the buttons—even a happy woman dancing in silhouette. I want to be happy like her! My favorite part was the “peew peew!” line; not sure where that came from, but it made me laugh. As you say in the video, no one seemed to notice that the photos of the men were two different people.I’m sure this took a lot of time to produce, but probably very little money if anything at all. The message is really strong, and we need to get this and other videos like it beyond our little choir. And from what I understand it is already on its way to doing just that. What can we learn?

Jarry: The "peew peew" line (a reference to the music and a tip of the hat to Laura Dern's recent role) is your first indication that there's something incongruous with the video. Your expectations start to break down. The narrator is gaining sentience. And then you realize you've been taken in.

The video didn't take long to make: a day and a half. And three of us spent about a day putting together a list of people and pages to approach for it. If we want our message of self-defense for the mind (as one local skeptic likes to call it) to reach people, we need to get off our butts and do something. Too often I have seen skeptics who are content to be passive and apathetic and wonder out loud why more isn't done by other people. Activism doesn't thrive by passing the buck. We can all do something. We can share skeptical content online; we can volunteer for preexisting organizations and create new ones if they prove themselves to be cemented in lethargy; we can organize local events; we can make videos, podcasts, blogs. I would love to see the feverish passion that animates many religious believers, or some form of it, to make its way to our community. I don't think we need to be preachy about it or fall prey to a blind scientism. But we can be more productive.

Gerbic: Well you know I totally agree. We aren’t going to make any headway combatting nonsense if we just sit around complaining that “they” should do something. Sometimes “they” is “us.” I’m super happy you thought to include me in on this. It was a lot of fun and I’ve been really enjoying the comments and watching the numbers rise. And I’ve learned a lot about making viral videos. I’ve been doing everything wrong all these years. One of my big pet peeves with our community is that we don’t reach out to each other enough. We should know more about what others are doing so we can learn and maybe even help out. The other issue I have is that we need to report back to the community when we work on a project and not only when it is a success but show our failures. We can learn from that also.

I’m looking forward to what OSS does in the future. This video was a resounding success, and I think you all are on the right track. Please keep me in the loop on future endeavors, and I hope to do a lecture tour in Eastern Canada in the next year. Keep in touch!

On November 16, 1990, Home Alone was released in theaters and quickly became the highest-grossing live action comedy film of all time in the United States, until The Hangover Part II took the title in 2011. Home Alone spent twelve weeks at the box office and remains the highest grossing Christmas movie of all time (Thompson 2016). It tells the story of eight-year old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) who is accidently left behind when his family heads to Paris for a Christmas vacation. At first, Kevin is having a blast being home alone, watching old movies while having an entire pizza all to himself. But then two burglars show up in the neighborhood, played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. Much mayhem and shenanigans follow as Kevin constructs ingenious booby traps all over the house.

The film spawned several sequels as well as dozens of conspiracy theories. A few of the fan theories include Kevin’s dad was actually trying to kill him by throwing Kevin’s plane ticket in the trash, Kevin growing up to become John "Jigsaw" Kramer in the Saw movie franchise, and even old man Marley—the neighbor with the shovel—is a time traveler and is actually future Kevin who came back to fix the past mistakes (u/spookycookies 2013). However, there’s one particular conspiracy theory that caught my attention: Elvis Presley secretly played an extra in the film.

The “Elvis” scene takes place when Kate McCallister (Kevin’s mother played by Catherine O'Hara) is desperately trying to haggle with a ticket agent to get a seat on the next possible flight home to her abandoned son. The film places the airport in Scranton, Pennsylvania, but was actually filmed at Meigs Field Airport terminal in Chicago, Illinois (1). Two people can be seen in line behind Kate, the second being a man wearing a black turtleneck and either a tan or grey jacket. He’s got jet black hair, a matching thick beard and looks a bit annoyed at being held up. This man, many believe, is Elvis Presley—despite that fact that Elvis passed away thirteen years earlier, in 1977.

Screen capture from Home Alone showing the airport scene. The man to the right of Catherine O'Hara in the back of the line is believed by conspiracy theorists to be Elvis Presley, alive and well.

I heard of the “Elvis in Home Alone” theory before, but I never gave it much thought. That changed when it was brought up on an episode of the podcast Squaring the Strange (STS) (Ep. 62 2018); a friend had contacted me and said I needed to listen to the latest episode because I had apparently been challenged to solve a mystery. The podcast, cohosted by Ben Radford, Pascual Romero, and Celestia Ward, focuses on applying science and critical thinking to various claims. The topic of this particular episode was movie myths.

Radford had been asked by a gentleman about the Elvis theory a while back and related many details that would refute the idea, offering nuggets of information such as “How is it that Elvis Presley could have been on set and no one noticed?” A major point the commenter focused on, all other issues aside, was “Who was the actor if not Elvis?”—a detail that (understandably) wasn’t known by Radford. “Elvis” was, after all, an extra with no speaking lines, so he wouldn’t be listed in the credits of the film. A detailed account of Radford’s exchange can be found in the January/February issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine (Radford 2018).

At the end of the segment the STS cohosts, Romero in particular, discussed the possibility of looking into the identity of the actor. However, Radford says “maybe Kenny Biddle will jump on it and get it done before this episode is out!” Oh, challenge accepted, my friend.

While still listening to the episode, I began my hunt. A Google search on “Elvis in Home Alone” returned about seventeen million results—a bit more than I wanted to explore, but I had to start somewhere. The myth was even brought up on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, when Macaulay Culkin appeared as a guest (Fallon 2018). Although the “Elvis” myth was mentioned, it wasn’t actually addressed by the actor. I eventually came across a YouTube video entitled “Elvis Presley in Home Alone DEBUNKED” (Stiller 2017), that claimed to have done just that … debunked the myth. John Stiller, who created the video, points to a comment made on the website Behind the Curtain, a weekly blog by conspiracy fiction author C.R. Berry. The comment, posted by Kathryn Rydz, states “Sorry I knew this extra and still friends with his ex. We laughed about this. This is Gary Grott. Unfortunately he passed away recently” (Rydz 2016).

I followed the work Stiller referenced and found the Facebook page of Gary Grott. I searched through his public photos and although there were none that dated to 1990, it seemed to be the same man that appeared in Home Alone. I compared several images side-by-side with a screenshot of “Home Alone Elvis.” Although several years older, the facial features, hair style, and thick beard matched up. I had little doubt I was looking at the same man.

Comparing “Elvis” to a later photograph of Gary Grott.

I went back through some of the comments on Stiller’s debunking video, and found one from a user that claimed to be Gary Grott’s wife. It stated “Yes, sorry, guys, this is my deceased husband Gary Grott. I didn’t want to ruin your hope.” Many of the comments in response to this and the other post were downright nasty. One such comment, directed at Rydz, said “You are wrong, stop spreading this stupid propaganda. You are a disgusting excuse for a person” (Lachlan 2016). I have never understood this type of uncalled for, hateful response.

I decided to track down Gary’s family and attempt to confirm whether or not he was the mysteriously famous actor believed to be Elvis. I found his son, Roman, through social media and reached out to him. I explained what I was doing and that my research had led to his father most likely being the actor. I expressed my hope they could give me some confirmation either way. I was delighted when Roman responded to me the next day and was enthusiastic to talk about his father. After a short text conversation, we made arrangements to speak later that night.

I called Roman, introduced myself, and explained I was investigating this conspiracy theory and, if my conclusion proved true, wanted to give credit to the man who was at the center of this famous movie myth. Roman told me, “Since he is no longer with us and since you’ve somehow deduced that it was he who appeared in the scene, after consulting with my mom, I feel comfortable confirming your theory for you. My dad, Gary Richard Grott, was indeed the extra in the airport scene of Home Alone. He knew [director] Chris Columbus personally and Columbus used him in a number of his movies as an extra, most notably in Home Alone.”

I asked about how the two first met. Roman said “He was literally walking along the street one day and all of a sudden this car pulled over and this guy jumped out of the car. He was kinda haggard-looking, wearing dirty clothes. [Grott] was almost threatened by him ... this haggard, dirty man. He came up to him [Grott] and said ‘I’m the director, Christopher Columbus. You have this look; I want to use you as an extra one of these days.’ My dad didn’t literally believe him at first, and responded ‘Yeah, right.’ However, later on he saw an advertisement in the paper for extras in a movie by Columbus. Grott was intrigued and showed up at Meigs Field for filming. Columbus called him a few times over the years for various ‘extra’ roles, very small roles. Home Alone was the one that he made it in.”

Roman said that his father didn’t even mention being in the film to anyone, and he even expected the scene to be cut from the film. When the movie came out, the family was all gathered together at Christmas time watching the film. His sister suddenly cries out “Hey, that’s Gary! That’s him!” After a closer look, sure enough, it was Roman’s dad. Grott didn’t even know he was in the film until the family called him to inform him he was in the movie! In talking about doing the scene, Roman told me his father said “Chris told me to act frustrated with the wait caused by Kevin’s mom in the scene. By the eighth take, though, I was no longer acting.”

Roman was familiar with the Elvis conspiracy theory that accompanied his father’s appearance. He told me that “a few years back someone had sent one of the sensationalist YouTube videos about the theory to my dad. He was extremely amused and my mom thought it was hysterical. My dad was perplexed, but intrigued that he'd become a bit of an online phenomenon and it often came up at family gatherings.” Roman and his mother asked him if he was going to comment on the videos and the conspiracy blogs and reveal his identity, but he refused. He said “Let people have their hope that Elvis survived; I’m not gonna take that from them, everyone needs something to believe in.”

In support of Grott being the man behind the (unintended) Elvis impersonation, Roman offered a piece of evidence: a poster from Home Alone featuring a photograph of his father inserted next to Macaulay Culkin. The image of Grott shows him fully facing the camera, looking straight into the lens, and is lit by flash from the front. He’s also wearing the same jacket and black turtleneck from the film. The image is most likely what is referred to as a “wardrobe continuity photo,” which at the time would have been taken with a Polaroid camera. They are used by the film crew and often given to cast members to keep as a memento of the shoot. The image of Grott certainly matches what would be expected of this type of shot. I sent the image of the poster to Pascual Romero, who has experience in the film industry. After checking with a colleague, he agreed it looked like a continuity photo, with a neutral expression and flash lighting (Romero 2018).

A Home Alone poster featuring Gary Grott and Macaulay Culkin that has been on the wall of Grott’s home for years.

Sadly, Gary passed away from a heart attack in February 2016.I asked Roman to tell me about his father, about what kind of man he was. “My dad was the greatest and most selfless man I’ve even known. He was an amazing husband and father. He worked probably eighty hours a week at a job he hated, so he could support me.” Roman went on to explain that Grott adopted him when he married his mother. Roman was eight years old at the time. “To take someone into their family and under their wing like that, so fully and selflessly … he was really an amazing man.” In an online post Roman stated “He taught me everything I know, and helped me become the man I am today.”

Roman spoke with great admiration and love about his father, which was also reflected in the many comments from Grott’s friends. I read all of the comments on Grott’s Facebook page after it was announced he had passed. They spoke of a loyal friend, a devoted husband, and loving father. He was a fan of the White Sox, loved playing golf, and reading the work of Ian Fleming. He was described as a friend that was only a phone call away, no matter what you needed. And to add to his wonderful legacy, he was also the little known extra at the center of one of the most famous movie myths of all time.

To bring this investigation full circle I sent my findings to Ben Radford, who reached out to Dan, the person who originally started us looking into this conspiracy theory. We were unsure of what Dan’s reaction would be; conspiracy theorists in my experience usually resist any evidence that debunks their deeply-held beliefs about what “really” happened. However, I am pleased to report the response was quite positive! He wrote back: “Ben. Thank you and Kenny Biddle for getting to the bottom of this. I am now convinced.”

Thanks to teamwork, good investigation methodology, and a loving family, the challenge to solve a mystery was not only completed, but the conclusion also satisfied all parties involved. That’s a win for all of us!

Research assistance from Benjamin Radford and Pascual Romero. Special thanks to the family of Gary Grott for speaking with me and sharing Gary’s story with all of us.

Note: All of the filming locations sites, as well as the conspiracy theory sites, claimed the airport scene was filmed in Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, including IMDb. However, I was informed by Gary Grott's wife that this particular scene was shot at Meigs Field Airport terminal. When I looked into this, I did find photographs of the terminal that exactly match the location in the film.

References

• Berry, Christopher. 2015. “Home Alone” has the proof that Elvis is alive. December 3. Accessed on June 17, 2018. Available online at https://crberryauthor.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/home-alone-has-the-proof-that-elvis-is-alive/.
• IMDb. 2018. Home Alone (1990) Filming & Production. Accessed on June 23, 2018. Available online at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099785/locations.
• Kransnitsky, Roman. 2018. Personal phone interview.
• Radford, Benjamin. 2018. Is Elvis Presley in Home Alone? Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 42 No. 1. January/February.
• 
  Romero, Pascual. 2018. Personal conversation.
• Rydz, Kathryn. 2016. Available online at https://crberryauthor.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/home-alone-has-the-proof-that-elvis-is-alive/.
• Squaring the Strange. 2018. Episode 62 - Movie Myths and More. Available online at http://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/id/6707300/tdest_id/607796.
• Stiller, John. 2017. Elvis Presley in Home Alone DEBUNKED. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQIS8j1Tvo8.
• The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. 2018. Macaulay Culkin Responds to Home Alone Conspiracy Theories. Accessed on June 19, 2018. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx54quy9tDQ.
• Thompson, Simon. 2016. The 25 Highest-Grossing Christmas Movies Of All Time At The U.S. Box Office. Forbes.com. Accessed on June 18, 2018. Available online at https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonthompson/2016/11/27/the-25-highest-grossing-christmas-movies-of-all-time-at-the-u-s-box-office/#1a66a48813b3.
• u/spookycookies. 2013. In Home Alone, Old man Marley is actually Kevin from the future. Reddit.com. Accessed on June 18, 2018. Available online at https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/155n98/in_home_alone_old_man_marley_is_actually_kevin/.

Over the past week several news reports appeared regarding a “time-warp” allegedly discovered by paranormal investigator Joshua P. Warren on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Are we really looking at what Warren had dubbed the “Vegas Interstate Time Anomaly” or could there be a more rational explanation? 

In examining the story first reported by Las Vegas Fox affiliate, Fox5 KVVU-TV (1), a fairly basic error that Warren has made accounts for his reading and a much deeper fundamental misunderstanding of how science is done, and what represents a significant finding.

Warren’s Instrumental Error

Warren’s tale has now been picked up and reported quite widely across news media. Most of the articles and reports use the same format and repeat the same information. As such it’s useful to repeat the story exactly as it is being shared: “LAS VEGAS (FOX5) -A paranormal researcher said he’s the first person to ever discover a time warp, and that he found it on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Joshua Warren has been measuring the rate of time all over Southern Nevada, and he said, last week he found that time had slowed down.” The report continues “He said he measured multiple places between Las Vegas and Area 51, but the only place he got a reading was in the desert just north of the city between I-15 and Route 93.” “The weird thing, the real holy grail here, was what we picked up with this brand-new piece of technology,” Warren said on Fox5 KVVU-TV.

Above is the piece of equipment that Warren is referring to in the article, the DT or Differential Time meter, which retails for $219 on eBay. The listing proudly proclaims that it will help owners detect UFOs in their vicinity (the promotional material cheekily suggests that for optimal results customers should buy two and place them at right angles). The meter sends a signal from one end of the system to the other and then back again. It measures the time it takes for the signal to complete its journey and then compares the expected time it takes for the signal to complete its journey to the actual time. If there is a difference between the expected time and the received time, the monitor displays it.

“That signal is always supposed to travel at the same rate of time at any particular place. The only way that could change is if a black hole approached earth or something like that, which is never supposed to happen,” Warren said. “At this spot, on June 18 of 2018, I actually measured for the first and only time, time itself slowing down for 20 microseconds.”

The claim that the equipment would only display a variation in signal speed as the result of a black hole approaching Earth is taken directly from the website selling the DT meter. But Warren doesn’t go into the other factors the website states can also cause a discrepancy. The kind of uncertainty that Warren is describing would more refer to a laser interferometer of the kind made famous by the Michaelson-Morley experiment and currently employed at LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory).

Figure 2: A schematic of the laser Interferometer employed at LIGO

A laser interferometer can be sensitive enough to detect changes in space-time down to many parts per billion because of the invariance of the speed of light in a vacuum and the act that the lasers are directed through tunnels in which extremely precise conditions are maintained (3). These are not the kind of precise conditions that can be maintained in a cable draped across a desert floor.

“Warren said that should not happen, according to the laws of physics,” he said on Fox5 KVVU-TV. This claim interests me particularly, as it simply isn’t true. In fact, Warren himself refers to events in space-time that can affect time. The reason an approaching black hole would affect time is a result of a phenomenon known as time dilation. It’s an established facet of general relativity that proximity to gravitational sources can cause time to “run slow.” This means that time would be slower at the bottom of a tall tower rather than the top. As the cable is only 100 meters long (and it seems Warren placed it horizontally) this wouldn't be a factor in this case.

What is most interesting here though is Warren is, in my opinion, focusing on the wrong aspect of his experiment. The device he is using doesn't actually measure time; it measures how long it takes for an electromagnetic signal to travel from one end of the system to the other. It's really measuring speed of the signal and cross-referencing it against the distance travelled.

In the case of this device, the signal is travelling through a cable. It's pretty safe to assume that the speed of the signal doesn't change too much under normal conditions, probably remaining about 2c/3 (two-thirds the speed of light). But the conditions in which Warren has employed the DT meter seem far from normal. Even if the signal speed was invariant it doesn't necessarily mean that if we see a variation between expected travel time and measured travel time of the signal, space-time itself has changed.

A quick recollection of the speed/distance/time triangle you were probably taught in your first year of high school science gives you an indication of the answer to this conundrum. What if it wasn't the speed of the signal that altered, but the distance the signal had to travel?

In the case of the laser interferometer that indicates a change in the space in which the laser travels through, but in the case of the DT meter the signal isn’t travelling through space. It’s travelling through a cable. I think the abnormal reading that Warren received in the desert that day was very likely the result of thermal expansion of the cable carrying the signal. The signal is confined to the cable. If the cable expands the signal obviously must travel farther. A warping of space-time really isn't needed. The effect of the hot Nevada desert on a cable, whether optical or electrical, will do just fine. The heat wouldn't just expand the material in one direction but in three, meaning that any change would be cubed. That's how even a small change in temperature could lead to a large error in the reading.

Experimental Error and Noise

Below is an image of a typical reading from a DT meter reproduced from the device’s promotional material. You'll notice from the display that the device doesn't sit at a reading of 0.000000000. There is, as should be expected, a little bit of noise caused by an expected amount of interference that causes the clock not to be perfectly synchronized. Noise is defined as anything that alters the sensitivity of a piece of measuring equipment. In the case of this device it’s our experimental error (4).

The creator of the DT meter, Ron Heath, states that the average noise should be +/- 4 or 5 milliseconds (2). Displayed on the meter screen as 0.000005 s/s. Warren recorded an abnormal reading of 20 milliseconds, way above the noise under normal conditions. That would appear on the meter as 0.00002 s/s.

The catch comes when we consider what the sources of the noise are as defined by the DT meter's creator. He states on the device's promotional website and in its instruction manual (5) that “A 1:1 time rate where the two rates of time are the same will read 0.00000XXX where the XXX is noise and temperature drift that defines the limits of the meter sensitivity."

It’s interesting he'd specifically mention temperature as a likely cause of noise. When we consider that Warren is using the device in a desert where temperatures often reach well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, shouldn't we expect the thermal contribution to the noise to be much greater?

Heath seems to be aware of this potential fault in the system. His website advises that the DT meter should be used away from direct sunlight and extreme heat. He also advises that the cable element should be buried. As was pointed out to me by Nick Stone, it would also seem from this recommendation that, aside from the effect of temperature and direct sunlight, the system isn't designed to be carried around harsh terrain.

It probably hasn't escaped your attention that this entire claim can be debunked by reading the instruction manual of the device that Warren used. Another thing that we must consider is that the difference in time that is displayed is an average of the differences measured over a period of five seconds. This is significant because if the system fails to send a signal or fails to register a received signal then this would presumably cause an extremely large difference in the average travel times. The anomaly Warren recorded could simply be a result of a system failure. Perhaps a momentary drop in power, or exposure to an unusually strong magnetic field. 

How Science Deals with Uncertainty

Of course, these kinds of faults are present with all forms of scientific equipment, so how do scientists account for this kind of anomaly? The answer is they take lots of measurements. Then they try to control for other factors that could have caused the measurements. Then they see if other people can get the same measurements. These are things that separate science from pseudoscience: the attempt to eliminate fluke readings or measurements.

These are things that Warren has failed to do. He's registered one anomalous result and based his belief in a time-warp based on this. This is what investigator Kenny Biddle calls “anomaly hunting.” I'm not sure that the term has ever fit better than in this case. In fact, Warren even specifically tells us he was in the desert to “hunt for anomalies,” and it would seem he found one and immediately called the local news before he even attempted to confirm it or replicate it.

Sharon Hill of Doubtful News left a comment on the Fox5 news report that alludes to this point. It was also pointed out by Celestia Ward of the Squaring the Strange podcast to the news organization in question just how poor this finding is. Those were just two notable examples of many comments on the story trying to highlight to Warren that his results shouldn't be singular in nature and should be reproducible by others. Warren could've responded to this criticism by releasing further results and showing his methodology.

He didn't. Instead he responded by producing a seventeen-minute podcast (6) telling others how to “handle criticism.” On the show, he suggests his critics don't understand science and refers to the anomalous measurements that led to the discovery of the Gulf Stream. The problem is, those measurements were reproduced. If reproduction had failed, the idea would have never been developed.

Warren needs to realize that if he wants his findings to be considered scientific he must follow the strictures of that discipline, and this means you publish your findings and you submit to peer review. If you're found to have made a mistake, you should accept it and move on. Most importantly, you don't present your work based on one single result, and you certainly shouldn’t contact the news before you’ve confirmed your result in some fashion. I reached out to Joshua P. Warren for more complete data from his investigations and the methodology he employed. He has yet to respond.

References

1. http://www.fox5vegas.com/story/38515977/time-warp-discovered-by-paranormal-investigator-outside-of-las-vegas
2. http://www.rhwebco.com/DT-Meter_Blurb.html
3. https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts
4. http://www2.ece.rochester.edu/courses/ECE111/error_uncertainty.pdf
5. http://www.rhwebco.com/DT-Meter_Manual.pdf
6. www.buzzsprout.com/127013/738279-joshua-p-warren-daily-dealing-with-criticism

Annika Merkelbach: Hello, Dr. Zakrisson, or Doctor Anna, as most of your Facebook fans know you. Thanks for taking time for this interview. Would you shortly introduce yourself?

Dr. Anna speaking at SkepKon 2018 in Cologne

Dr. Anna Zakrisson: A pleasure! The short version is that I’m an enthusiastic biologist and skeptic who has never ceased to be amazed by this world in all its incredible complexity. I think people miss out on a lot of cool stuff when they buy into conspiracy theories and quick fixes.

I also have an almost ridiculous impulse to share my enthusiasm for science, which has led me to found my platform Doctor Anna’s Imaginarium where I expose my followers to a mix of science, comedy, and serious questions. We often discuss topics that are indirectly or directly related to science such as the anti-GMO or vaccine movements. I have been known to discuss homeopathy as well.

Merkelbach: Thanks! So, as I understand it, you grew up in Sweden, and you live in Berlin, right? Can you tell us more about your childhood? Did you always know you wanted to be a biologist?

Zakrisson: I have always been mesmerized by the natural world, particularly plants. I mean, who can’t be impressed by green giants living off CO₂ and sunlight!?!

My father was a hydrologist, and my mum is a medical doctor, so the nerd factor has always been quite high in my family. I want to be clear that I use the word nerd in the most positive and loving way possible. In my ears, being a nerd means that you never lost the wonder of the world around you. Anything else is plainly tedious.

After my father passed away from cancer, I moved to a small steel worker’s town in mid-Sweden where being a nerd was slightly more challenging than it was in the big city of Stockholm. Luckily, my father had taught me not only about science but also about judo. My attitude of “attack being the best defense” paid off and I was never bullied, though never wholly accepted.

Merkelbach: After some time abroad you wrote your PhD, moved from Sweden to Berlin, and worked for Charité. Was this already the time you decided to work with your science communication abilities and founded Dr. Anna’s Imaginarium?

Zakrisson:I began my studies at Cambridge University and was tremendously excited and set on pursuing an academic career. It was during those years when I still hadn't figured out the reality of the academic life such as the difficulty in getting permanent positions.

My enthusiasm was slightly dampened in the years to come and after having been at Max-Planck Institute, Stockholm University, Leibniz institute, and finally Charité I concluded that I had sampled enough institutions to know that I didn’t want to stay in academia.

To be clear: most of my colleagues have been great and the research is fantastic. The system, however, sucks. Somehow, I think it’s built to remove all that wonder and childish enthusiasm that, in my opinion, should be the foundation of science. But, let’s chat about that another day before I go on an uncontrolled rant.

Merkelbach: For somebody who is active in Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia, I’m particularly interested in science communication. What would you say are five easy tips for anybody who wants to leave their filter bubbles and communicate about skepticism and critical thinking?

Zakrisson:I always recommend people spend a week browsing social media sites dedicated to things that make them angry. For me, this can be anti-vaccine sites. Anger is a good sign that you are outside your echo chamber and exposed to things that you usually would avoid.

Don’t interact. Don’t get involved in arguments. Just observe. Make notes. This simple exercise enables you to do some essential groundwork for effective science communication:

• By not interacting you allow a therapeutic distance, which means that you invest less emotion into the matter and can see things more clearly.
• You can spot patterns in the lines of argumentation, which enables you to prepare replies to critical points.
• You get to know the people with whom you would like to communicate. This is the most critical part and also the most difficult one. Communication is a partnership. Never forget that.

An example case: if you shove facts down the throats of scared and worried parents of neurodivergent children who honestly believe that vaccinations have caused their children not to develop neurotypically, you may come across as a monster (from their perspective). I can’t repeat this too many times: know your communication partner and be empathetic to their situation.

You can be angry with them that they have bought into pseudoscience or mad with them for not accepting their neurodivergent child, but that’s your problem in this case. Focus on the matter you want to communicate and understand their position and way of thinking. A change of perspective is rarely achieved with force.

• You learn the signals when to back off; for example, trolling or individuals that can be dangerous or just are a waste of your time (yes, they do exist).
• Learn to communicate emotionally and engagingly while at the same time keeping emotions out of your argument. Think marketing. Use images, short sentences, short paragraphs.

Merkelbach: If you’re not working on your growing science communication platform, what are you doing in the meantime?

Zakrisson:I do this full time now, actually. I started freelancing June 1 this year as a science communication consultant and performer. I give lectures and courses—my absolutely favorite audience are those consisting of “science virgins” with no background whatsoever in science. To see those faces light up in sudden understanding of some aspects of their bodies or the world around them is fantastic and rewarding beyond belief. 

Dr. Anna (on the left) with all the female visitors of SkepKon 2018

I also do science performances together with artists such as opera singers, fakirs, video artists, dancers, etc. On July 6, we have the premiere of our piece Eight Songs for a Mad King—A Man Hanged, which is a crazy combination of all of the above. It starts with a performative science lecture on the biological background of the madness of King George III. It then transforms into an opera performance (written by Maxwell Davies), sung by Joa Helgesson, and ends with a body suspension (hook suspension). We have built biophysical instruments for this performance, so I’m slowly getting quite good at soldering. As we have gotten quite some attention for this piece, I’m personally hoping that this will open the door for more unconventional science communication that is able to reach people we otherwise rarely reach.

Merkelbach: Living in Germany, having grown up in Sweden, what are your main concerns about pseudoscience, homeopathy, and the anti-vaxx movement in Europe?

Zakrisson:My primary concern is the antivaccine movement as it leaves bodies in its wake. It is an extremely dangerous movement, and I am hoping that not too many need to die before people come to their senses. The most upsetting part is that it is those who cannot decide themselves who are the most at risk: young children. It is simply upsetting. I struggle every day to keep my emotions out of the discussion. It isn’t easy.

Homeopathy, I mostly saw as comedy relief, until they started giving out homeopathic remedies as “treatments” for Ebola and HIV. Then, it wasn’t funny anymore.

Merkelbach: You now live in Berlin, Germany. The German soccer team played against Sweden in the soccer World Cup. Who did you root for?

Zakrisson: Of course, I was for Sweden, but when I realized that I’d get free drinks if Sweden lost, I might have had a slight change of heart. Also, I think Germany played better so they deserved to win. Also, I see Germany as my home, even more so than Sweden. But, first and foremost, I’m a European, which allows for a flexible perspective when it comes to football.

Merkelbach: I am now going to address the elephant in the room. From reading your work or listening to your podcast I know that you as a woman in science have been disregarded at times, just for being a woman. I don’t want to ask the “How is it, being a woman?” question, because we both know that this question in itself can already be seen as being sexist. In my opinion it’s so important for young girls and women to be represented in science and science communication, so what would you say to young skeptics or young women interested in science? What has to change in science and society?

Zakrisson: I think it’s important for young female scientists to be able to see the diversity of women who do science; that they don’t need to conform and dress or be a certain way in order to be taken seriously. It is a responsibility of the older scientists to show this.

However, I must add that most of the people who have acted badly, actively sabotaged, or worked against me during my career, have been other women. Having said that, of course, I’ve experienced my share of butt-grabbing male douchebags. This shows how complex this issue is. I think that there are assholes of all genders and colors, but I have a hunch that many of the women who have acted badly would not have done so had they not felt threatened in their position. They might have had to work very hard to get where they are and might have developed a certain negative and problematic jargon and behavior along the way in order to elbow their way up between the male ranks. Who knows. It is sad that the situation is like this, but I have a feeling that it is changing, which makes me happy.

On social media the situation is somewhat similar. From males, I mostly get called “whore” or “prostitute” or they attack my appearance. The women (most anti-vaccine activists seem to be women) are more focused on that “I should go die” and that I’m “the worst mother ever” etc. It’s very predictable and tedious.

Merkelbach: As you might know, Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia only has two German native editors. We also don’t really have enough Swedish editors. Can you as an insider maybe think about a reason why? Is GSoW just not known enough or is it maybe harder to work in the grown structures of Europe?

Zakrisson: I think this is a matter of not being known. This should be of interest to the Swedes. I think we need to reach the right people. You should get in contact with Vetenskap och Folkbildning, the Swedish skeptics society (where I’m also a member) and write an entry on their very active Facebook group with the same name. I think there are many societies and groups you could contact. Maybe, we can have a little chat about that at a later point.

Merkelbach: You spoke at this year’s SkepKon in Cologne. What was your impression of German Skeptics?

Zakrisson: The German skeptics are fantastic! SkepKon was a warm and welcoming event with a lot of fascinating talks. I also met some great people with whom I have stayed in contact.

Merkelbach: Cool! So what are your plans for the rest of 2018? Will I see you at SkepKon 2019, at QED this year, or maybe at a European Skeptics Conference?

(left to right) Dr. Anna with Axel Ebert, Lydia Benecke, Bernd Harder, Natalie Grams, Norbert Aust, Rouven Schäfer and Ralf Neugebauer of GWUP and Informationsnetzwerk Homöopathie.

Zakrisson: I will definitely try to participate in SkepKon next year. It’s a great event!

I currently have not planned skeptics conferences for this year, but that could change depending on my schedule. My next big convention is BMX.net, a tattoo and body suspension meeting in Essen, Germany. I’m very much looking forward to that.

Merkelbach: Thank you so much for sharing this. I am looking forward to meeting you again at a conference!

Note: All photography by Hans-Ludwig Reischmann used with his permission.