Skeptic

Prayer and Pregnancy; Shooting Ufo Photos

[...] the Los Angeles Superior Court has finally thrown out the major defamation lawsuit that Korean fertility specialist Kwang Yul Cha filed against Dr. Flamm, a California physician who had published several articles questioning the validity of the report. Cha's mysterious study was designed and allegedly conducted by a man who turned out to be a criminal with a 20-year history of fraud; a criminal who steals the identities of dead children to obtain bank loans and passports is not a trust...

What Is a Skeptic?

Like the decaying subatomic particle, pure skepticism uncoils and spins off the viewing screen of our intellectual cloud chamber. Other claims, such as hypnosis or the origins of language, have been tested but results are inconclusive so we must continue formulating and testing hypotheses and theories until we can reach a provisional conclusion.

The Phoenix Lights Explained (Again)

The 10 pm lights fell in front of the mountain range, so they couldn't be flares dropped in the distance by military planes (Videotapes taken by observers from higher elevations in the Valley saw the flares for a longer period of time than those who were in lower places, confirming that the flares dropped behind the Estrellas.) Perhaps it's a good thing that NBC has now declared this the numero uno UFO sighting of all time.

Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)

Following service as a radar instructor and technician with the Royal Air Force in the second World War, he honed his scientific acumen working as an editor for the academic journal Physics Abstracts, while earning a first-class degree in mathematics and physics at King's College London. [...] many were concerned at the prospect of nuclear conflict (the United States proposed international regulation of nuclear weapons, but the Soviet Union refused to be drawn in), but few had foreseen the f...

Socratic Skepticism

SKEPTIC magazine itself makes this claim in its self-defining article at the front matter of the magazine, What is a Skeptic? It uses this quote to justify a long historical tradition for skepticism, but it then castigates Socrates for making it, saying: This pure position is sterile and unproductive and held by virtually no one. The Delphic oracle has a reputation for speaking in riddles that require interpretation, so Socrates sets out to discover what the oracle really means. It is the S...

Near Death Experiences and the Medical Literature

The Princess Bride IN A RECENT ISSUE OF SKEPTIC (Vol. 13, No. 4), in the debate between Michael Shermer and Deepak Chopra about life after death, both authors refer to an article in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet about Near Death Experiences (NDEs). Here there are many criteria: the patient has to have no clinical evidence of brain function by physical examination, including no response to pain and a variety of nerve reflexes that do not work: cranial nerve, pupillary respons...

How Skeptics Confronted 9/11 Conspiracy Advocates

A tragedy on a scale comparable to Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination was bound to inspire a conspiracy subculture, but the takeoff success of the viral Internet documentary Loose Change and the movement it created was unprecedented.

Correction

Global Warming Forum

While informative, William Calvin's compendium of would-be cures for global warming, "Turning Around by 2020," (SKETIC Vol 14, No. 1)ignores the most obvious and most effective means of them all: stopping population growth. If global warming is anthropogenic, the most straightforward method of arresting it is to reduce, or at least stabilize, the number of humans on the planet. At the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1700s, there were fewer than 1 billion people. World population...

Predicting Evolution

Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, that creatures with approximately human-level intelligence were bound to appear in the evolution of life on Earth-and elsewhere.3 He bases much of his argument on the concept of convergent evolution, which on this planet has indeed resulted in several cases of multiple appearances of "nearly" identical adaptations. The philosopher Bertrand Russell spoke to the absurdity of holding human intelligence as a probably evolutionary outcome when he wrote: If ...

The Myth of the Stages of Dying, Death and Grief

The lessons Kübler-Ross learned from those dying people, coupled with her compassionate regard for them, became a focal point of the emergent Hospice movement. Medical and mental health professionals and the general public accepted the theory without ever investigating its provenance or validity. On February 21, 2007, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published the results of the Yale Bereavement Study (YBS): An Empirical Examination of the Stage Theory of Grief.

The Chain of Accidents and the Rule of Law

The SETI Optimists Astrobiologists and SETI astronomers base their optimism on numbers that they plug into the well known Drake equation, proposed in 1961 by the radio astronomer Frank Drake for estimating the number of technological civilizations that reside in our galaxy: N = Rf^sub p^n^sub e^f^sub l^f^sub i^f^sub c^L Where N = the number of communicative civilizations, R = the rate of star formation in the galley per year, f^sub p^ = the fraction of those stars with planets, n^sub e^ = the...

Criminal Profiling

When CP was originally popularized by the FBI, a profile consisted primarily of a list of very basic characteristics (e.g., age, previous convictions) that were likely to be possessed by the unknown offender of the crime(s) under consideration.1 Profiles were generally used to narrow a list of potential suspects, focus investigations, and construct interview strategies.2 In more recent years, the potential forms that a profile can take and the ways in which it can be used within a criminal in...

The Curious Case of Freeman Dyson and the Paranormal

IN A 2007 ARTICLE POSTED ON EDGE (www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07_index.html), a prestigious web page where scientists debate controversial issues, the famous theoretical physicist and raconteur Freeman Dyson stated once again that he is proud to be a heretic in regard to "fashionable scientific dogmas." Dyson expressed his love of scientific heresy earlier in a 2006 New York Review of Books essay entitled "The Scientist as Rebel," which is littered with skepticism for fashionable scientif...

Ben Stein's Blunder

[...] what qualified Sternberg' Perhaps it was his position as a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, which promotes Intelligent Design, along with being on the editorial board of the Occasional Papers of the Baraminology Study Group, a creationism journal committed to the literal interpretation of Genesis. If an Intelligent Designer did create the Cambrian life forms, it took 80 million years of gradual evolution to do it.\n Stanford University biolog...

Expelled, and the Trouble Ahead for American Science

Never mind that according to a study published in the prestigious journal Science, 40% of the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the country's largest scientific organization, profess a belief in a personal God. Never mind those belt buckles worn by members of the S.S. and other Nazi officials proclaiming Gott mit uns (God is with us), the toxic anti-Semitism of Martin Luther, the ghettoes and murderous pogroms in Christian Europe centuries before Darw...

Evolution in Our Genes

The best explanation for the GBA scenario is, first, that the functional gene was duplicated in the common ancestor of apes and humans following the split between the monkey and ape lineages, and, second, that the younger copy mutated into a pseudogene in the lineage leading to gorillas, chimps, and humans after those species had diverged from the lineage leading to orangutans.

Read This Book!

Penicillin works by well-understood scientific principles, while much of alternative medicine is based on "entire physiologic systems or physical forces that the average high school science teacher already knew didn't exist." What all this amounts to is that advocates can point to plenty of "snake oil" science that apparently supports various CAM treatments; but when examined critically, the entire body of evidence is compatible with the hypothesis that no CAM method works any better than a ...

Between Scientism and Postmodernism

In a nutshell, scientism is the ideological position that makes science the ultimate arbiter and explanatory venue, not just for questions about the natural world, but also for all aspects of human culture, including moral values.

Gimme That Old-Time Irreligion

Somehow that tradition died away by stages in the Cold War era, so much so that by the turn of the new millennium the George W. Bush administration brought religion back into the White House, and in the run up to the 2008 presidential election, a loony fundamentalist preacher like Mike Huckabee was taken seriously as a presidential candidate, while the others in both parties fell into line, sincerely or otherwise, to demonstrate that their own piety was at least minimally acceptable.

The Facts About the 'Expelled' Scientists in Expelled

Science and Religion On the Rack

It comes with an impressive list of prepublication praise from a wide range of individuals, including five Nobel laureates and a number of spiritual leaders. The author's church, the United Church of Christ, is on the decline just like many liberal, mainline Protestant churches.

The Ghost in the Machine

The authors mention Buddhist meditators, but fail to give an account of their interpretation of the Religious Experience: "The scope of the present book does not permit a wide-ranging assessment of all types of contemplative states, so we will consider only the study of the Franciscan nuns." A recent study (performed at Johns Hopkins University under neuroscientist Roland Griffiths) involving the inducement of mystical experiences by means of psilocybin (the psychoactive component in "magic"...

Cam Scam

In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), excess Qi was sometimes attributed to having had sexual intercourse with ghosts; this diagnosis is no longer popular. Diet supplements and herbal remedies are not subject to the same quality controls as medications, and they are frequently contaminated.\n" One homeopath revealingly reported, "the more I explored the meaning of illness, the more I found patients would tell me their whole story.

Fundamental Truths

[...] the Bible claims that the army of Sennacherib, King of Assyria, which was besieging Jerusalem, was miraculously annihilated by the angel of the Lord in a single night and that King Hezekiah triumphed over the Assyrians (2 Kings 19:35-37).\n Gold goes on to point out other examples of virulent Orthodox rage against any opposition, making an excellent case for the comparison of these rabbis and their followers to Muslim theocrats. Definition is involved in another way in the conviction o...

Junior Skeptic

Like Indy, Mitchell-Hedges was a rough-and tumble traveler who lived through exciting times in the early part of the 20th century, visiting exotic places and bringing back artifacts for museums. AN ERA OF FAKES Our story begins not long after the end of the American Civil War, around the time that outlaws like Jesse James and Billy the Kid were terrorizing the Wild West. In Mexico and the tropical countries further south, archaeologists, adventurers, and looters were hard to tell apart: all...

Forum

More Words On Consciousness

The psychologist Merlin Donald offers no shortage of mental behaviors that suggest "the presence of consciousness," including but not limited to the following capacities: forming a mental model of the world, perceiving complex objects, solving tricky problems, delaying a response to the environment, adapting flexibly, focusing attention selectively, updating memory, and exhibiting social intelligence, especially as it relates to theory of mind, that is, the ability to presume what a conspedfi...

Cosmic Jackpot Journalism Supernatural Beliefs Animal Rights

Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life (SKEPTIC, Vol. 14, No. 1) and its statement that Davies 'veers dangerously dose to invoking "intelligent design [ID] in biology" give the strong impression that Cosmic Jackpot may be just another ID book. Philosopher and sociologist of science, Michael Polanyi, observes that even physicists make personal appraisals about the sincerity and validity of verbal claims made by their colleagues concerning their research results, sometimes ignoring "facts."

Book Reviews

The Matrix of the Brain

ISBN 100393062139 IN THE 1999 SCIENCE-FANTASY FILM The Matrix, people were plugged into a giant computer that created a virtual reality that was both pleasing and plausible. By three quarters of the way through the book, the reader is yearning for a return to blissful ignorance, as there seems to be no escape from what Fine calls "our innate lack of scientific rigor."

Skepdoc

Popular Medical Fallacies

Ancient Wisdom * It Works for Me * Natural is Good ADVOCATES OF SO-CALLED alternative medicine (i.e., unproven treatments) don't always use the best critical thinking skills. Some time in the distant past someone observed that sometimes people got better after they lost blood (this is still a treatment for iron overload in hemochromatosis and it certainly lowers blood pressure). Eventually a small number of women were found to have valvular heart disease connected with Fen-phen, and it was ...