Skepticblog

Dana Ullman, a notorious homeopathy apologist, actually has a regular blog over at HuffPo. For those of use who follow such things, the start of his blog there marked the point of no return for the Huffington Post – clearly the editors had decided to go the path of Saruman and “abandon reason for madness.” They gave up any pretense of caring about scientific integrity and became a rag of pseudoscience.

Ullman’s recent blog post is typical of his style – it is the braggadocio of homeopathy. I am sure others will skeptically dissect his piece so I won’t go into every point here. I want to focus on Ullman’s claim that the clinical and basic science research supports homeopathy. Here is the paragraph on which I want to focus:

Most clinical research conducted on homeopathic medicines that has been published in peer-review journals have shown positive clinical results,(3, 4) especially in the treatment of respiratory allergies (5, 6), influenza, (7) fibromyalgia, (8, 9) rheumatoid arthritis, (10) childhood diarrhea, (11) post-surgical abdominal surgery recovery, (12) attention deficit disorder, (13) and reduction in the side effects of conventional cancer treatments. (14) In addition to clinical trials, several hundred basic science studies have confirmed the biological activity of homeopathic medicines. One type of basic science trials, called in vitro studies, found 67 experiments (1/3 of them replications) and nearly 3/4 of all replications were positive. (15, 16)

Those numbers are references that allegedly support his claims – 14 papers (they are not all studies, some are reviews) that allegedly make the case that homeopathy works. Most reader do not independently check references to see if they say what the author claims. Some may foolishly assume that the editors at the HuffPo have done that already.

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This week’s Skeptoid episode was on Scientology, the notorious “religion” created in the 1950s by sci-fi author L. Ron Hubbard.

After I was finished researching and writing it, I had second thoughts, and decided for a few days that I would shelve it and not produce it, and said so on Twitter. Predictably, lots of people expressed their desire for me to reverse that decision, or that I had decided I was too afraid of Scientology suing me.

In fact, the reverse was true. I was afraid that the episode came out sounding too soft on Scientology. I did not want to be perceived as the pro-Scientology guy, and the episode turned out being less interesting than I’d hoped. But I eventually said “What the heck” and produced it anyway. (continue reading…)

TEDxCaltech Celebrates the Vision of Richard Feynman

On Friday, January 14, 2011, the spirit of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) was enacted as TEDxCaltech, one of many independent lecture series that have spontaneously emerged from the bottom up by what I call “ideas entrepreneurs,” creative individuals who want to change the world by spreading ideas in the format modeled after the annual event now held in Long Beach (albeit at a fraction of the cost: $85 versus $6000). The theme of TEDxCaltech was “Feynman’s Vision: The Next 50 Years,” celebrating Richard Feynman’s famous 1959 lecture, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” which helped launch the field of nanotechnology. As Feynman said, “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”

Feynman was famous for telling stories, so first up on the morning program was Feynman’s daughter Michelle, who recounted what it was like to hear bedtime stories from her famous father. Michelle then introduced Christopher Sykes, the British documentary film maker who cast Feynman’s stories into filmic narrative in his famous film The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (the phrase inspired by a Feynman quip about why he does science—not to change the world or discover some grand unifying theory of everything, but just for the pleasure of finding things out). Sykes recounted how intimidating it was to initially approach the normally reclusive Feynman with the idea of sitting him down in front of a camera, but Feynman agreed, perhaps because he knew his life was coming to an end because of cancer, or perhaps because Sykes is such a warm and engaging man. Whatever the reason, the world is a better place with Feynman’s voice still engaging us two decades after his death (you can watch excerpts from the film on YouTube). (continue reading…)

I was recently asked about the creationist “proof” of a young earth that the moon is too close to the earth. Specifically I was asked to comment on the arguments of Dr. Richard Kent, a UK creationist. On his evolution- debunking site he claims:

Observation demonstrates that the Moon is getting farther from the Earth by two inches every year. This indicates that the Moon used to be closer.

This causes very serious problems to the Evolutionists, because the proximity of the Moon to planet Earth controls the height of the tides.

Kent’s arguments are bad, even for a creationist. It made me wonder if UK creationists are not as experienced or sophisticated as their American counterparts. Kent argues that 4 billion years ago the tides would have been so large that life would not have been possible. However, life was restricted to the ocean until about 500 million years ago – it is not clear by large tides would have been a problem for bacteria living in the ocean. In fact, the high tides were perhaps a boon to ocean life as they scoured the land and deposited minerals into the oceans.

Kent also has this gem:

- The magnetic forces of attraction between the Moon and the Earth become very slightly weaker every year, so that, in general, tides become slightly lower on average.

I love it when cranks get basic scientific facts wrong, because it so clearly exposes their intellectual laziness and scientific illiteracy. The tides are caused by the gravitational forces between the earth and moon, not magnetic forces.

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The other day I was talking with Desiree Schell about activist stunts. What makes one stunt an effective protest action, and another a placebo protest (in Tribal Science author Mike McRae’s memorably pointed  phrase)?

This 68-page PDF brings together 13 leading skeptics for a panel-format discussion of skeptical activism

As skeptics consider skeptical activism (perhaps using some of the ideas described in this 68-page PDF panel discussion, or this point form version), what steps can we take to maximize the impact of our hard work? How can we make the best use of our limited resources? And, how can we avoid the trap McRae describes: “outreach efforts that have no real prior goal other than a vague sense of improvement in the public’s awareness of how silly something sounds and how sensible science must be.” (I give more weight to awareness campaigns than does McRae, but his point about goals is well taken.)

Desiree Schell is the person to ask. She’s well known as the host of Skeptically Speaking (a live radio talk show carried on dozens of stations, also released as a podcast), but it’s her day job that makes her a relevant expert: Desiree is a professional union organizer. Not only has she organized dozens of marches, rallies, protests, and other direct actions, but she literally teaches courses instructing other labour organizers about effective direct action strategies.
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Yes, I know I have been writing about homeopathy a lot recently. I am consciously making this one of my main topics of interest for 2011. Homeopathy is one phenomenon where the disconnect between public and official acceptance and the level of pseudoscience is greatest. It is also an area where acceptance is often based upon simply not understanding what homeopathy really is. If scientists keep beating the drum about how unscientific homeopathy is, perhaps we can have some effect on public belief and policy. Perhaps this is just wishful thinking, but then so is all activism.

Today I have some good news to report. The Canadian program, Marketplace, did an excellent piece on homeopathy. (You view it on YouTube in two parts: part I and part II.) Usually such mainstream media attention to homeopathy and similar topics falls into the trap of false balance – telling both sides and letting the audience decide. This is a reasonable journalistic default for political and social topics, but not for science. In science there is a level of objectivity and the logic and evidence is not always balanced on two sides of an issue. We don’t need to “balance” the opinions of an astronomer with the illogical ravings of an astrologer.

Fortunately, the Marketplace program did not default to the false balance mode.  Rather they took the far more appropriate consumer protection angle – which is the format of this particular show. I was especially happy about this because I have been saying for years that consumer protection advocates need to realize that fake medicine (so-called complementary and alternative medicine or CAM) is a huge consumer protection issue. Regulations meant to protect consumers from fraud and harm are being systematically weakened in the favor of product manufacturers and distributors and practitioners. It is a scandal worse than anything Ralph Nader has taken on in the past, and yet he seems to be nowhere on this topic.

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After making sport of Daniel Loxton and calling him a big pansy on Twitter for his fear of flying, I thought I should make amends by admitting my own fear of heights… or what to me seems to be some kind of related phobia, because it’s not really a fear of being in a high place.

Proper acrophobia is the irrational fear of falling, and I probably have this. I’m as skittish as anyone gets when it comes to being someplace from where one might possibly fall. I was the only one in the group in Sydney who refused to attempt climbing up the Harbor Bridge, and I can barely watch the infamous YouTube video (shown below) about climbing the 1768-foot radio tower. (continue reading…)

The following is an op-ed originally published in the Los Angeles Times, Tuesday January 11, 2011 (under a different title and slightly shorter).

The media once again scrambled this past week to find the deep underlying causes of shocking events. We saw it in the rush to explain the tragic murder of six people in a shopping center in Tucson. And we saw it in the rush of stories about mass die offs of birds and fish around the country.

In the case of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at a shopping center in Tucson, attention has turned to the motives of the shooter, 22-year old Jared Loughner, whose political ramblings about returning to the gold standard and about excessive control by the government have sent the media searching for answers in the vitriol of right-wing talk radio, the rhetoric of the Tea Party movement, and the bellicose divide between Democrats and Republicans in Congress and elsewhere.

The mass die offs of fish and birds has spurred a number of deep causal theories, including suggestions that the apocalypse is near and that secret government experiments were to blame, such as HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Alaska that studies the ionosophere that is run by DARPA, the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which admittedly does sound like something concocted by the writers for the television series X-Files. (continue reading…)

I’m very happy to announce that my newest book, Pirates, Pyramids, and Papyrus is now available in paperback and e-book editions.

With a foreword by Richard Saunders and illustrations by Nathan Bebb, this is the third in my series of books based on selected Skeptoid episodes adapted for print. Pirates, Pyramids, and Papyrus answers some of those questions you always wondered about, such as:

• Can frogs and fish really fall out of the sky?
• Is a vast pirate treasure buried in an elaborately engineered Money Pit on an island in Nova Scotia?
• Did an angel save the British Expeditionary Force from the Germans in WWI?
• Do the world’s elite secretly govern from the Bohemian Grove?
• Is the world’s largest ancient pyramid located in Bosnia?
• Does the Min Min Light actually chase travelers through the Australian outback?

If you have a friend or family member you’ve been wanting to introduce to critical thinking, Pirates, Pyramids and Papyrus may be just the way to do it. I hope you enjoy it. Get it here.

Recent studies demonstrate that babies 12-18 months old have similar activity in their brains in response to spoken words as do adults, a fact that tells us a lot about the development of language function.

In the typical adult brain language function is primarily carried out in highly specialized parts of the brain – Wernicke’s area (in the dominant, usually left, superior temporal lobe) processes words into concepts and concepts into words, while Broca’s area (in the dominant posterior-inferior frontal lobe) controls speech output. The two areas are connected by the arcuate fasciculus and are fed by both auditory and visual input. Taken as a whole this part of the brain functions as the language cortex. A stroke or other damage to this area in an adult results in loss of one ore more aspects of speech, depending on the extent of damage.

Damage to this part of the brain in babies, however, does not have the same effect. When such children grow up they are able to develop essentially normal language function. There are two prevailing theories to explain this. The first is that language function is more widely distributed in infants than in adults, perhaps also involving the same structures on the non-dominant side of the brain. As the brain matures language function becomes confined to the primary language cortex.

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