Skepticblog

Model Claire L. of Australia poses under difficult lighting conditions. Photo by Daniel Loxton

When I was in art school, I thought seriously of doing paintings for a show I called, “The Art I Wanted to Make.”

The concept would have been to build an ambitious gallery show around fantasy and sci-fi sketches from, y’know, my elementary school duotangs and high school sketchbooks. Alongside these sketches would be re-makes of those pieces, each executed as a full-blown, heroic scale fantasy painting.

I never got around to that show, but having heard about it you’ll be able to guess what fun I have doing art for Skeptic magazine — especially the covers. What comic art nerd would not give his New Mutants Special Edition for a chance to blow up the Earth, or crash a saucer at Roswell for a major magazine?

And if those were fabulous opportunities, what about the chance to have another run at the fairy art to which I devoted so much watercolor work in junior high school? Fun stuff indeed! (continue reading…)

First there were several species of humans, at least from the perspective of some Western naturalists who considered Africans a separate species. But it soon became apparent to biologists that all people of the earth are one species. Darwin raised the possibility that we evolved from other species, and this was apparently confirmed with the discovery of Neanderthal man. It turns out Neanderthals are our cousins, not our ancestors, but with them there have been at least two species that can be called “human” on this planet.

And that was the status of things for a while. Homo erectus and Homo habilis extended the number of species in our genus (it’s debatable whether habilis should really be an Australopithecus), but they are not close enough to us to be considered human cousins. More recently several species have been identified at the root of humans and neanderthals. Homo heidelbergensis is probably our direct ancestor from about 650,000 years ago. But there is also Homo antecessor, which (along with heidelbergensis) likely evolved from Homo ergaster in Africa.

Then a third recent close human cousin was discovered – Homo floresiensis, or the Hobbit. This is still controversial, but the data is leaning in the direction of concluding that a diminutive species of human lived until about 12,000 years ago on the island of Flores. We missed by a geological hair’s breath there being as many as three distinct human species occupying the earth. Given the problems we have had with race relations, I have often wondered how our society would deal with an actual distinct species.

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Everyone Who is an Atheist, Raise Your Hand...

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I’ve been a Scientific American reader ever since I picked one up in my twenties at the home of my girlfriend’s parents (now my wife’s), as her dad was an exec at Hughes Space Systems and a top expert in photovoltaics. But I have to say, lately they’ve run a few opinion articles that I can’t completely agree with, focusing on energy. They seem to have adopted a clearly anti-nuclear bias (anyone who listens to my podcast knows that I’m a big nuclear fan), and are even critical of fusion research. The April 2010 issue features an article by Bill McKibben, scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and from what I can tell, something of a Luddite, not that there’s anything wrong with that. It smacks of a disturbing trend I see a lot of lately, where anticorporatism (which is as worthy a philosophy as any) is greenwashed with a supposedly environmental, scientific agenda (which is dishonest and does a disservice). We should not make science decisions that promote our favorite philosophies, we should make science decisions that best serve our planet and our people. They may coincide in many cases, but they don’t always. Here is a snip from a sidebar in McKibben’s article:

Job one, on almost anybody’s list, is conservation. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimated in 2008 that existing technologies could cut world energy demand 20 percent by 2020. For supply, it makes financial sense to generate power close to home. Most communities spend 10 percent of their money for fuel, and almost all of it disappears, off to Saudi Arabia or Exxon. Yet in 2008 the Institute for Local Self-Reliance showed that nearly half of all American States could meet their energy needs entirely within their borders, “and the vast majority could meet a significant percentage.” Wind turbines and rooftop solar could provide 81 percent of New York’s power, for instance, and almost one third of Ohio’s.

I’ll begin by stating that McKibben and I agree in principal almost entirely. We do need to completely replace our fossil fuel driven power grid, and as quickly as possible. With that said, I disagree with virtually every single point he makes. Let’s go one by one: (continue reading…)

With all the religious nutbaggery going on in the US of A, it’s sometime easy to forget that there’s a whole planet of wackiness out there.

The outspoken and hard-working Indian rationalist Sanal Edamaruku had enough. When the "guru" Pandit Surender Sharma claimed he could kill a man using nothing but magic powers, Edamaruku challenged Sharma to kill him on live TV in India.

For some reason, Sharma eventually agreed, and what played out on the air is pretty funny to watch:

Gee, this would’ve looked silly without the dramatic music.
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In my last True/Slant post I explained why it is that quantum effects do not apply to the macro world because of the size difference between sub-atomic particles and (say) chemical reactions inside the neurons in your head, concluding:

During the debate Deepak claimed that the moon is nothing more than a soup of teaming quantum uncertainty. No. Subatomic particles may be altered when they are observed, but the moon is there even if no one looks at it.

Deepak wrote a thoughtful response to this blog (on his Blackberry while running on a treadmill with his agile thumbs no less!): (continue reading…)

Something does not seem quite right. The most powerful man in the world, John F. Kennedy, was taken out by a lone nutjob of no previous consequence? A jet flies into the pentagon and yet the expected debris is not visible. And why can’t I see stars in the NASA Apollo moon landing photos?

Some hidden agent must be at work, conspiring to deceive and carry out some sinister plot.

At least that is how our brains are hardwired to think, and some of us more than others. This tendency has been termed the “hyperactive (or hypersensitive) agency detection device” -  HADD – coined by Justin Barrett. Understanding that HADD is an intrinsic part of human nature is part of the core knowledge base of the skeptic.

As a neurologist and a skeptic I am particularly interested in how brain function relates to human intellectual strengths and weaknesses and how knowledge of such helps us to avoid common mental pitfalls. In other words, knowledge of how the human brain works helps us think better – to be more skeptical and avoid error.

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New Fledgeling Skeptic: Maria Myrback

On the heels of my last blog about how many practitioners of woo are beginning to see the light of skepticism, last week’s Amazing Cruise was not only a complete blast, the likes of which many of us on board had never seen, it also provided another powerful testimony. We are making big strides. (continue reading…)

Yeah, yeah, I know the Ray Comfort graffiti version of Darwin’s Origin of Species is old news. But this has been sitting in my folder of blog topics forever and if I don’t get it out now, I probably never will. The topic, to be more specific, has to do with a characteristic of the book that you don’t hear talked about very often: the font size.

For the few of you who have been on board the International Space Station and haven’t yet heard the news, the 150th anniversary of Origin of Species came along last year and some Young Earthers saw a chance to leverage this into propaganda. Since the copyright is long expired, the text is in the public domain, and any Joe Blow is free to publish it. This particular Joe Blow came in the person of evangelist Ray Comfort, who vomited a “Special Introduction” intended to discredit evolutionary biology into the front of Origin. He then published it inside a cover giving every indication that it was a legitimate copy of the seminal work. Regardless of whether he admits it or not, the whole charade was a deliberate attempt to trick students into reading Ray’s own mental diarrhea instead of the book they thought they were buying, and hopefully win over a few converts. (continue reading…)

A wave of reports is coming in from the town of Euclid, Ohio, from folks there who are seeing a mysterious light hovering over Lake Erie and Cleveland. The light, they say, is very bright, lasts for a couple of hours, stays near the horizon, changes colors, and keeps coming back to the same spot night after night.

Here’s an MSNBC report about it:

Could it be an alien visitor from another world?
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