Skepticblog

One of my earlier posts on SkepticBlog was Ten Major Flaws in Evolution: A Refutation, published two years ago. This continues to be a popular post, and has wracked up 238 comments. Occasionally a creationist shows up to snipe at the post, like this one:

i read this and found it funny. It supposedly gives a scientific refutation, but it is full of more bias than fox news, and a lot of emotion as well.

here’s a scientific case by an actual scientists, you know, one with a ph. D, and he uses statements by some of your favorite evolutionary scientists to insist evolution doesn’t exist.

i challenge you to write a refutation on this one.

http://www.icr.org/home/resources/resources_tracts_scientificcaseagainstevolution/

Challenge accepted.

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I was most gratified when somebody finally asked the question that we all really wanted to know: What would happen to your hand if you stuck it into the proton beam at the Large Hadron Collider? Last September, our friends at Sixty Symbols (a collaboration between The University of Nottingham School of Physics and Astronomy and video journalist Brady Haran) asked precisely this of a number of high energy physicists. What was their answer?

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Over the three-day weekend of January 15–17, the Skeptics Society sponsored a geology tour organized and hosted by the Occidental College and Caltech paleontologist and geologist Donald Prothero and his Whittier College professor wife Teresa LeVelle. Around 50 skeptics departed Pasadena on a bus bound for our first stop, the Mt. Palomar observatory, home of the famous 200-inch Hale telescope, once the largest in the world and from which numerous important observations about the universe were made, including the discovery of quasars. No less an astronomical giant than Edwin Hubble was given the honor of being the first astronomer to use the telescope. They don’t build ‘em like this any longer: big and beefy!

In this limited space I cannot republish Prothero’s 30-page geological guidebook. Suffice it to say that Prothero is a brilliant lecturer who in the course of days packed in a 14-week semester’s worth of geological science as we wended our way around Southern California with it’s countless faults, uplifts, basins, and ranges. I’ll let a few photographs do the talking here, but this is no substitute for joining us on a future trip with Don Prothero, whom I call Protheropedia for his encyclopedic knowledge of seemingly everything under and including the sun. Join us, for example, on our next big trip to see the glaciers of Alaska. (continue reading…)

One of the critical bits of wisdom central to a skeptical outlook is the realization that our brains are not objective perceivers of reality. Not even close. What we perceive as reality is constructed in an active process that is rife with assumptions and flaws. Everything you take for granted about what you experience as yourself and the outside world is actively constructed by specific brain processes.

There are some assumptions that are so fundamental to your construct of reality that you take them for granted – you are not even aware they are happening. We only know about them from cases where these mechanisms break down. For example, there is specific brain processing that makes you feel as if you are separate from the rest of the universe. If this processing breaks down, you will have the sense of feeling merged or one with the universe. Most people who experience this, usually as a consequence of psychoactive chemicals, feel that they have had a profound experience. In a way they have – they have had a “for the world is hollow and I have touched the sky” moment. They have peeked behind the curtain of their brain’s function and have experienced what it is like to have their brains construct reality in a different manner from what they are used to.

In essence they have had a profound internal experience. Many people however will interpret this as an external experience – that in some meaningful way they have touched the universe or experienced God or something similar. It is no surprise that many cultures have traditions that involve the use of psychoactive drugs in order to induce profound spiritual experiences.

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Recently I did a Skeptoid episode on Scientology, and followed it up with a post here on SkepticBlog to further explain my position. And this was, very much, a position piece… whereas normally with Skeptoid, I compare science to pseudoscience; but as there’s really no science behind Scientology, it was more “Brian’s personal opinion of Scientology”.

To sum up the criticism, it was overwhelmingly that I was too soft on it.

And then, interestingly, one commenter pointed out something I said in a really early Skeptoid episode, way back in 2006:

My dream is to start a church and become fabulously wealthy, with the world’s happiest customers. These customers are people who are already believers, whose minds are not about to be changed by a few skeptics. They are going to buy these services: and if they don’t buy them from me, they’re going to buy them from the psychic next door.

In other words, “Hey it’s OK to start a church and take people’s money, because otherwise they’re just going to give it to someone else.” It sounds like it’s not too different from something L. Ron Hubbard might have said. And here’s the kicker: That Skeptoid episode was about ethics.

When I read this comment, I’d completely forgotten about my old remark, and I’ll admit it was pretty eye-opening to have it pointed out. I was like, “Wow, am I really similar to L. Ron Hubbard? Is that why my Scientology episode was so soft?” (continue reading…)

Ghastly Beyond Belief, Neil Gaiman and Kim Newman’s wonderfully weird book of science fiction quotations, relates an amusing anecdote involving skeptic Isaac Asimov.

Asimov once penned a novelization of the sci-fi flick Fantastic Voyage (the story of a submarine miniaturized for a mission inside a human body). He recalled his daughter’s reaction to the film’s ending, in which the crew members escape from the patient’s body and return to their normal sizes, leaving their vehicle behind.

“Won’t the ship now expand and kill the man, Daddy?”

“Yes, Robyn,” I explained, “but you see that because you’re smarter than the average Hollywood producer. After all, you’re eleven.”¹

Funny how kids sometimes see straight to the heart of things. I notice this often when talking with my five-year-old son.
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A recent study, presented as a poster at the American Stroke Association International Stroke Conference, found a 61% increase in risk of stroke and cardiovascular disease among survey respondents who reported drinking diet soda compared to those who drank no soda. The study has resulted in a round of reporting from the media, and in turn I have received many questions about the study.

Frequent readers of this blog should have no problem seeing the potential flaws in such a study. First – it is an observational study based upon self-reporting. At best such a study could show correlation, but by itself cannot build a convincing case for causation. Perhaps people who are at higher risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke, for whatever reason, are more likely to choose diet sodas because they are trying to avoid unnecessary calories. Questions that should immediately come to mind – what factors were controlled for and how was the information gathered? According to an ABC report:

The researchers used data obtained though the multi-ethnic, population-based Northern Manhattan Study to examine risk factors for stroke, heart attack and other vascular events such as blood clots in the limbs. While 901 participants reported drinking no soda at the start of the study, 163 said they drank one or more diet sodas per day.

The study also controlled for “smoking, physical activity, alcohol consumption and calories consumed per day.”

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By all homeopathic standards, I should have been dead for five days now. But no, I’m alive and never felt better thanks. As a part of the worldwide Ten23 Homeopathy There’s Nothing in It campaign, Susan Gerbic and I set up an overdose scenario and did our best to do something about this blatant fraud. Homeopathy is an unscientific and absurd pseudoscience, which persists today as an accepted form of complementary medicine, despite there never having been any reliable scientific evidence that it works. Consumers should be able to trust their local drug store to sell products that will help them, and not deny them the facts about products that are known to be useless. If there is nothing in it, it can’t do any harm, right? Wrong! Journalist and science writer Simon Singh MBE explains why homeopathy harms. (continue reading…)

One of China's "ghost cities"

Be skeptical of what you read on the Internet.

I’ll give you a moment to stop reeling from that shocking warning and collect yourself. The news is that China is building “ghost cities”, vast megalopoli (cool word) that have nobody living in them. Some of these cities are even built in the middle of nowhere: Mongolia, for example (no offense to our Mongolian readers). Conspiracy theorists have all sorts of speculations about this. Is China planning to forcibly relocate millions of people? It is China; certainly they must have something nefarious up their sleeve.

Much of the speculation is in line with the FEMA Prison Camp conspiracy theorists, who honestly believe that Obama is actively herding millions of law-abiding Americans into remote prison camps for systematic execution. (continue reading…)

Erich Pontoppidan

Steve Novella’s discussion of gullibility about fictional tree octopi reminded me of the curious case of the “Tree Geese” investigated by the Right Revered Erich Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen in Norway from 1747 to 1754.

Skeptical history (dimly) remembers Pontoppidan as a pivotal early proponent of the “Great Sea Serpent” of the North Atlantic. Although he was perhaps the person most responsible for moving sea serpents out of the realm of mythology and into what we would now call cryptozoology,¹ Pontoppidan is largely eclipsed by more recent sea monster authors (Oudemans in particular). When he is remembered at all, Pontoppidan carries a reputation for credulity. His two-volume Natural History of Norway, translated from Danish to English in 1755, promoted not only the “great Sea snake, of several hundred feet long” but also the Kraken. He even argued for the existence of mermaids!

We’ll come back to sea monsters at another time. Today I’d like to look at Pontoppidan himself. It’s perhaps understandable if some suppose that a creationist mermaid-believer might be a lightweight. Luckily (for skeptical researchers love nothing more than seeing our assumptions turned on their heads) Pontoppidan turns out to have been much more complicated than his place in cryptozoological history suggests.

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