Skepticblog

Although not as well publicized as Bigfoot, Nessie, or the Yeti, the legends of Mokele Mbembe, the alleged dinosaur in the Congo, have a long history. The name is from the Lingala language, and translates to “one who stops the flow of rivers”. It is most often reported in the upper reaches of the Congo Basin in Congo, Zambia, and Cameroon, and in Lake Tele and surrounding regions. Most accounts describe it to be the size of an elephant with a long neck, hairless, with a tail five to ten feet long, although the descriptions are highly discrepant between different sources. The color has been described as reddish-brown, brown, or gray, depending upon the account. It is said to live in deeper water of the lakes in the Congo Basin, and in the deep channels in the cutbanks of the rivers as well. Some descriptions suggest it has pillar-like legs and leaves tracks with a three-clawed foot impression, although other accounts differ about its trackways.

The history of accounts and descriptions of the beast from both native peoples and missionaries goes back to at least 1776, with a book by the French missionary Abbe Lievain Bonaventure, who reported huge footprints a meter in diameter with claw prints. In 1909 Lt. Paul Gratz collected legendary accounts of a creature from Zambia known to the locals as Nsanga and Lake Bangweulu, the first account that describes it as dinosaur-like. As detailed by Mackal, numerous other accounts have accumulated over the years, although they differ greatly in details, and are highly inconsistent about many important features. Most of the accounts come from a variety of native peoples, and it is hard to tell how much of their description is based on actual experience, and how much is legend that has been passed down and distorted through retelling. A few westerners (mostly missionaries) claim to have caught brief glimpses the creature, but their accounts are also highly inconsistent and hard to interpret. Every attempt to obtain reliable photographs, film, or footprint casts of this alleged beast has failed to show anything conclusive. The 1985 shots by Rory Nugent were too blurry to be interpreted. The film shot by zoologist Marcellin Agnagna in 1983 was also useless. Agnagna first claimed it was because he failed to remove the lens cap, but later claimed it was because the camera was set at macro-focus rather than telephoto. (continue reading…)

An attempted ambush interview turns
into a lesson in patternicity and numerology

On Friday, June 17, a film crew came by the Skeptics Society office to interview me for a documentary that I was told was on arguments for and against God. The producer of the film, Alan Shaikhin, sent me the following email, which I reprint here in its entirety so that readers can see that there is not a hint of what was to come in what turned out to be an attempted ambush interview with me about Islam, the Quran, and the number 19:

Dear Michael!

I am the director of a film crew hired by a non-profit organization, Izgi Amal, from Kazakhstan, which has no connection with the American brat, Borat. We have been working on a documentary film on modern philosophical and scientific arguments for and against God for almost a year. We have been taking shots and interviewed theologians, philosophers and scientists in England, Netherlands, USA, Turkey, and Egypt.

We are planning to finish the film by the end of this year and participate in major film festivals, including Cannes. We will allocate some of the funds to distribute thousands of copies of the film for free, especially to libraries and colleges.

Our crew will once again visit the United States and will spend the rest of June interviewing various people, from layman to artists, from academicians to activists.

Though we are far out there, we know your work and we think that it contributes greatly to the quality of this perpetual philosophical debate. We would like to include perspective and voice in this discussion. We would appreciate if you let us know what days in JUNE would be the best dates to meet you and interview you for this engaging and fascinating documentary film.

Since we are planning to interview about 10 scholars and experts of diverse positions such as atheism, agnosticism, deism, monotheism, and polytheism, it is important to learn all available days in this month of June.

Please feel free to contact us via email or our cell phone numbers, below. If you respond via email and please let us know the best phone number and times to reach you.

Peace,
Alan Shaikhi

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Remember Michael Egnor – the creationist neurosurgeon who made a second career out of embarrassing himself with nonsensical blog posts over at the DiscoTute’s blog, Evolution News and Views? His crowning achievement on this score, in my opinion, was his argument that if evolution were true brain cancer should result in improvements in the brain.

I haven’t heard from Egnor in a while, but now I learn that he has his own blog, called “Egnorance.” The name is a nice touch on his part – some bloggers have been using the term “egnorance” to refer to Egnor’s particular brand of nonsense. It is sometimes successful to take a term meant to be derisive and adopt it as your own in order to turn it around. At the least it can take the wind out of the sails of your critics. Unfortunately, the content of the blog is a bad as ever.

This came to my attention because Egnor wrote a blog post responding to my recent post about Michele Bachmann’s creationist stance. Egnor (true to his style) thought he could get a blog post out of my use of the term “creationist” by projecting his own intellectual dishonesty. Egnor does provide an excellent example of the apologist form – exploiting any vagueness in meaning to create confusion and the appearance of sinister intent on the part of those with whom he disagrees.

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John Edward Bingo Cards

There’s not much I can say to add to the brilliant ploy that The Granite State Skeptics devised and put to work last Tuesday night. I applaud them heartily for their efforts. (continue reading…)

For some reason I ended up on the mailing list of David L. Wilner, an attorney in (where else) Northern California, who promotes the idea that the new smart meters are hazardous to your health. Smart meters have been getting rolled out by utility companies for a few years now. They transmit the meter data to public utilities. Not only does this reduce the need for meter readers to physically travel to your home to read the meter, it also provides the utility with more granular data, for example, hourly usage instead of one total number for the month. Hourly data lets the utility do things like reward individual customers with lower rates for off-peak usage. In my neighborhood (Southern California) our smart meters make it possible to monitor my hourly usage online. Smart meters can be used for electric, natural gas, or water usage. (continue reading…)

Late in 2008, I got an email requesting my participation in a program of the cable TV show MonsterQuest. Like many of the newer “reality” shows on formerly scientific cable stations like the Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel, it is a typical piece of pseudoscientific tabloid journalism: lots of moody music and dark foreboding camera shots promoting one kind of legendary monster or another, with dubious “eyewitness” testimony and sketchy “evidence” but nothing concrete like an actual body or bones. Normally, I ignore such programs as a waste of time, and focus my energies on trying to make real science documentaries better. However, this one concerned the alleged dinosaur in the Congo, Mokele Mbembe. As a vertebrate paleontologist with some experience with dinosaurs, I was qualified to speak to at least some of the usual claims made about the creature. I knew I would be only the token skeptic on a largely credulous program, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have at least one skeptic in the show—otherwise, it would be entirely pseudoscientific garbage.

In January 2009, a two-man crew came over to my department to do their filming. I’ve done a lot of documentaries about prehistoric animals, so I know what these filmmakers like. It was during winter break at my college, so I set up a classroom that was quiet with controlled lighting, so they could have an undisturbed setting to film. I pulled out a bunch of our real dinosaur specimens and casts to use as props or to fill the background of their shots. They set up my “talking-head” interviews in front of our big duckbill dinosaur skull cast, and they also filmed me moving our teaching fossils around on the tables, and rolling the dinosaur cast around our hallways on a cart. Most of the questions were relatively straightforward, and I gave them the answers that are found in the broadcast (continue reading…)

Watch Phil Plait's 2010 "DBAD" speech (on Vimeo)

“The Amazing Meeting 9″ conference — organized skepticism’s biggest, broadest, and most important meeting of the minds — is almost upon us. It seems a good moment to look back at the most widely discussed presentation at last year’s TAM: astronomer Phil Plait’s “Don’t be a Dick” speech (video) calling for less name-calling¹ and more civility in skeptical outreach:

The best idea ever thought of in the history of humanity is useless unless someone communicates it. It will die in the test tube. And in our case, what we’re communicating here to people is not necessarily something they want to hear. And so, our demeanor — how we deliver this message — takes on crucial, crucial importance.

As some readers may know, Plait’s “DBAD” speech touched off an online firestorm that smolders to this day.

I explore the ethics of skepticism quite often² (it’s one of the main reasons I blog in addition to writing books and Skeptic magazine articles) but today I’d like to look at something simpler and more concrete. Let’s explore a straightforward historical question:

Was Plait’s call for civility something new for skepticism?

It happens that the answer is, “No, not even a little bit.” (Please note: this is a long article, running over 4500 words.)

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The Republican primary season is already starting, and we are in for another round of candidates saying embarrassing things about science. To be fair (this is not a political blog so I want to make sure I don’t come off as partisan) bad science is not limited to the Republican party. But there are some issues where they definitely take the lead – and evolution/creationism is one. In some states creationism is on the Republican party platform. Last election cycle 4 of 10 Republican primary candidates endorsed creationism over evolution when asked directly in a debate.

This cycle we have Michele Bachmann, congresswoman from Minnesota, who is already on record as supporting creationism. In 2006 she stated:

“there is a controversy among scientists about whether evolution is a fact… hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel prizes, believe in intelligent design.”

Now, following a speech to Republicans in New Orleans, she said to reporters:

“I support intelligent design. What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don’t think it’s a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides.”

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Skeptoid @ Google

Google has a reputation for hiring really smart people. (I will burst your bubble on one small point: the urban legend that all prospective hires have to take a really hard test is untrue.) So I was pretty excited to give a talk there through their Authors@Google program. It’s always fun to have a really challenging audience. The San Francisco bay area is one of the world’s Woo Central headquarters too; it’s the home of alternative everything, and the all-natural fallacy is nowhere more deeply embedded. Combine that with a super-smart audience, and a skeptical speaker is sure to have a wild time. (continue reading…)

Order the book from shop.skeptic.com

The national news is dominated by yet another set of extraordinary tornadoes in the southern and central United States. The last month brought enormous twisters, including the May 22 tornado that wiped out Joplin, Missouri, and paved a path of destruction in Oklahoma and Kansas as well. It has killed at least 144 people (so far), making it the deadliest single tornado since the April 9, 1947, event that killed 181 in Woodward, Oklahoma. Back on April 27, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was devastated, with a death toll that is still unknown as searchers comb through the debris. But on that date alone, over 327 tornadoes were reported, causing at least 344 deaths (149 of those in Alabama), with significant damage and deaths from Arkansas to Mississippi and on up into Tennessee and Georgia. The death toll from these storms exceeds the more than 300 killed in the legendary April 3–4, 1974, “Super Outbreak”, which caused death and destruction from Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio to Alabama and Georgia. These recent storms follow closely on the heels of major tornado outbreaks all over the Midwest and Southeast in February, March, and early April.

What is happening? We understand the fundamentals of tornadoes pretty well. Usually there is warm moist air mass rising from the Gulf of Mexico that moves north and meets cooler, drier air from the northern Plains and the Rockies. When these collide, a strong front develops which causes a big horizontal cylindrical vortex to form. The warm air rises up as it meets the cold air and thunderheads grow. If there is also strong shear from the jet stream, the horizontal cylindrical spiral of air will tilt into a vertical funnel. If it continues to grow, it will touch the ground and become a tornado. (continue reading…)