SkepticBlog is a collaboration among some of the most recognized names in promoting science, critical thinking, and skepticism. It also features the cast and producers of The Skeptologists, a pilot skeptical reality show.
READ the introductory post
READ the comment policy
VISIT The Skeptologists website
My laptop's power adapter hovers right around the temperature needed to kill acne bacteria
Amazing new all-natural acne treatment! Just get out your credit card, and…
Oh, wait, no. You don’t need a credit card for this. In fact, you can be treating your pimples (assuming you have some) in the next five minutes, and you don’t have to buy anything. The application of a little home science is all you need. (continue reading…)
Two weeks ago, I did a whirlwind 39-hour trip to the Bay Area to give two different talks (one to the Bay Area Skeptics in their Chilean restaurant hangout) and also to study some fossils at the University of California Museum of Paleontology for my ongoing peccary research. It was great hanging out in the People’s Republic of Berkeley again, enjoying the incredible ambiance of Telegraph Avenue, the colorful characters on Shattuck, the amazing array of ethnic restaurants block after block, the classic “woo” of all the Eastern mystic temples, and palmistry and naturopathy and New Age shops, the chirping cross-walk warnings, and PC reminders everywhere—and seeing all the homeless people rooting through the garbage. It’s like a time warp for me, reminding me of when I first visited as a student in the 1970s—except that the hippies are still here, a bit older and grayer, but now becoming psychedelic relics. Many parts of town still have the spirit of the “Summer of Love” while others are punk or goth or hip-hop. It’s eye-opening to see the sign at the city limits proclaiming Berkeley a “nuke-free zone”(not that it matters, since there are no nuclear reactors or military bases there, and the nuclear physics is done out at Lawrence-Livermore lab). Every time I go to one these college towns where the Sixties never ended and lots of hippies have gone to live (not only Berkeley, but also Eugene, Boulder, and Santa Cruz), I have an incredible rush of memories of that time, and the dreams my generation fought for. As a Boomer myself and child of the Sixties, it’s great to see that not every aspect of it has been forgotten or dismissed (especially not the music, of course, which has remarkable resilience).
The terrifying fortress headquarters of the "Evil Empire"
After finishing my research on the fossils, I had a bit of spare time, so on invitation from Steve Newton and Josh Rosenau (who attended my Bay Area Skeptics talk), I decided to pay a visit to another cultural landmark: the headquarters of the National Center for Science Education. This is the chief non-profit organization in the U.S. that helps local school boards and scientists and teachers when creationism threatens their classrooms. If you read the creationists’ literature and the posts on the ID creationist Discovery Institute’s (DI) website, the NCSE is this monstrous organization which exerts mind-control over every scientist in the country, and forces them to robotically chant “I accept evolution.” According to the creationists, the NCSE is pure evil, suppressing the creationism message with its enormous staff and budget and power over all of U.S. science. In Ben Stein’s crappy little creationist propaganda film Expelled, Ben pays a visit to the gleaming headquarters of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which occupies a vast amount of floor space in a brand-new office building downtown, and has a huge staff. Over and over again the DI staffers complain about how they scientific establishment is against them, and how the NCSE has so much more power, money, and influence than they do.
This is a review of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker
(October 2011, Viking. 771 pages. ISBN 978-0-670-02295-3). Originally published in the Autumn issue of The American Scholar as “Getting Better All the Time.”
In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Ford’s classic 1962 film, a clash of moral codes unfolds in the wild-west frontier town of Shinbone, Arizona. I call these moral codes the Cowboy Code, where disputes are settled and justice is served between individuals who have taken the law into their own hands, and the Law Code, where disputes are settled and justice is served between all members of the society who, by virtue of living there, have tacitly agreed to obey the rules. The Cowboy Code is represented by John Wayne’s character, Tom Doniphon, a fiercely loyal and deeply honest gunslinger duty-bound to enforce justice on his own terms through the power of his presence backed by the gun on his hip. The Law Code is embodied by Jimmy Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard, an attorney hell bent on seeing his beloved Shinbone make the transition from cowboy justice to the rule of law. Lee Marvin’s Liberty Valance is a coarse highwayman who respects only one man, Tom Doniphon, because they share the Cowboy Code that men settle their disputes between themselves. Despite Valance’s constant taunting of the law, Stoddard holds to his belief that until Valance is caught doing something illegal there can be no justice. When Doniphon tells Stoddard “You better start pack’n a handgun,” Stoddard rejoins, “I don’t want to kill him. I just want to put him in jail.” At long last, however, Stoddard decides to take Doniphon’s advice that “out here a man settles his own problems,” and turns to him for gun-fighting lessons. When Valance challenges Stoddard to a dual, the overconfident naïf accepts and a late-night showdown ensues. In a darkened street, the two men square off. Stoddard is trembling in fear while Valance mocks and scorns him, shooting first too high and then too low. When Valance takes aim to kill, Stoddard shakily draws his weapon and discharges it. Valance collapses in a heap. Having felled one of the toughest guns in the west Stoddard goes on to become a local hero, building that image into political capital and working his way up from local politics to a distinguished career as a United States Senator. (continue reading…)
Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC) is one of those classic pseudosciences that have been around for a long time – like astrology, Big foot, and the Bermuda Triangle. I put it in the same category as the myth that we only use about 10% of our brain capacity; it’s widely believed, but no one really cares that much. It’s just something people hear about and have no reason to doubt, so they lazily accept it. I did when I was younger (in my pre-skeptical days), you hear about it on TV and think, “Huh, isn’t that interesting.”
It’s therefore a good opportunity to teach critical thinking skills. People’s brains are clogged with myths and false information, spread by rumor and the media, and accepted due to a lack of having the proper critical thinking filters in place. It’s disappointing, however, when people who should know better, or whose job it is to know better, fall for such myths.
Recently an Irish coroner concluded that a man died from SHC, and it is reported:
The West Galway coroner, Ciaran McLoughlin, said there was no other adequate explanation for the death of Michael Faherty, 76, also known as Micheal O Fatharta.
and
The coroner said: “This fire was thoroughly investigated and I’m left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation.”
Two weekends ago, the country was absorbed in remembering the events of September 11, 2001, but September 10 was another anniversary: the 70th birthday of Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, historian of science, Harvard professor, prolific writer and columnist, and probably one of the most influential public scientists of the 20th century. A number of prominent evolutionary biologists and bloggers paid tribute to him, including P.Z. Myers, Jerry Coyne, and others. Even though Steve lived to the age of 60 and passed away on May 20, 2002, most of us were shocked when he was stricken so suddenly by cancer and wasted away to nothing in a matter of weeks. In spite of his rapid decline in health, during his final semester he gamely kept traveling up from his New York apartment to Harvard to teach his classes, even though he was so weak he could barely stand. Though he accomplished more in his lifetime than any other scientist of his generation (books, essays, research, scientific papers, etc.), most of us felt that his death at 60 was premature and that he had so much more to offer us had he lived his fullness of years.
Yours truly (right) with Gould (left) and Michael Shermer (center) at Mount Wilson Observatory, 2001.
I should explain to the reader of my personal perspective in this matter. Although I was never formally his student, Stephen Jay Gould was a friend and mentor to me while I was at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) as a graduate student from 1976-1982. When I arrived at the Columbia/AMNH program, all the grad students heard the legends of Steve when he was a grad student in the same program two generations earlier. Each year, the stories got more and more amazing: how he outshone all the other students with his brilliance, published his first paper early in grad school, wrote entire papers in a few hours of work, wrote his entire dissertation in a few hours/days/weeks when his advisor Dr. Norman Newell thought he should finish and defend, and so on. His were enormous shoes to fill, and we all felt his shadow when we were being evaluated as students. I saw him on numerous occasions when I was a grad student, not only at professional meetings, but also when he came down to Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory to see for himself the work that Dave Lazarus and I (Lazarus et al. 1982) were doing on gradual evolution in plankton (he was more open-minded that you would expect), or when fellow student Paul Sereno and I paid a visit to him at Harvard while we were working on a project on allometry and dwarfing in mammals (Prothero and Sereno 1982). Subsequently, he was extremely supportive to me during my professional career, recommending me for a Guggenheim Fellowship (which I got, thanks to him), plugging my work in his Natural History columns several times, and graciously replying to my letters whenever I had an idea that truly required his attention. When my job and my department at Knox College were about to be eliminated in 1983-1984, he spoke out not only in front of the audience at the GSA meeting, but also wrote letters on our behalf to try to reverse the decision. Thus, I cannot claim to be impartial about Steve, but I do speak from personal experience and from watching paleontology change over the past 40 years.
The rather provocative title of this post refers to the at home science game, Foldit. The game essentially involves figuring out how to fold proteins in three dimensions. This is an extremely difficult problem, even for computers. The Foldit game is a way of harnessing the brain power of video game players to help find solutions.
The game has been available for a while, and now (apparently for the first time) has been used to solve a specific puzzle of protein structure. Scientists have been trying for 10 years to solve the structure of retroviral protease, a protein-cutting enzyme found it HIV-like viruses. So, they put the problem to Foldit gamers, and they solved the structure in one week.
The reason these types of problems are so difficult is that the number of possible ways in which a large protein can fold is staggering large. This is, fact, called an NP-problem (non-deterministic polynomial). The classic example of this is the traveling salesman who wishes to map the minimum route to a set of cities he wishes to visit. Such problems are impossible to solve by computational brute force (the number of possibilities to check quickly becomes greater than the number of atoms in the universe), and there is no mathematical way to derive the answer quickly.
Wow—what a couple of days! I’m very proud to be able to say that my Junior Skeptic-based children’s book Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be took home the national Lane Anderson Award as the best Canadian science book for young readers at an award dinner in Toronto last night. The win was reported today by the National Post, the Vancouver Sun, Quill & Quire, the Canadian Children’s Book Center and other media.
This is an astonishing honor, for which I express my deepest thanks to the Fitzhenry Family Foundation. I cannot possibly express how much this means to me, and to everyone at the Skeptics Society. As an educational nonprofit organization, the Skeptics Society gathers folks who care—really care in our marrow—about sharing our love of science. With the creation of Junior Skeptic over 10 years ago, the Skeptics Society made a sustained commitment to science and critical thinking outreach for children—a commitment in which the Skeptics Society remains a trailblazer among skeptical organizations.
Drilling natural gas in Pennsylvania's Marcellus shale (Photo credit: Wikimedia)
This week my Skeptoid episode was about fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, the controversial mining technique for deep natural gas deposits. The shock doc Gasland put fracking into the public eye, and not in a very complimentary way. Gasland blamed fracking for putting flammable methane into tap water, for mysterious illnesses caused by its “toxic” fluids, contaminating ground water with poisons, and killing animals, in addition to a host of political conspiracy charges. If you’re wondering why this decades-old practice did not seem to cause any problems before Gasland came out, it’s because Gasland was largely fictional. Most of its charges are based on real phenomena, but fracking itself rarely has anything to do with them. That’s not to say there are no environmental concerns about the practice. There are, to be sure; and the EPA is in the midst of a major study to find out how serious these concerns are. Some of these were discussed in my episode. One, in particular, I omitted: the question of whether fracking causes earthquakes. (continue reading…)
A few weeks ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry made the news by not only topping the field of GOP Presidential candidates in denying climate change, but upping the ante, and blaming it on greedy scientists. Many of the other GOP candidates have claimed that scientists are trying to scam the public for nefarious purposes:
Texas Gov. Rick Perry took his skepticism about climate change one step further on Wednesday, telling a New Hampshire business crowd that scientists have cooked up the data on global warming for the cash.
In his stump speech, Perry referenced “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects.”
“We’re seeing weekly, or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what’s causing the climate to change,” Perry said. “Yes, our climates change. They’ve been changing ever since the earth was formed.”
It isn’t the first time Perry has accused climate scientists of fibbing. ThinkProgress’ Brad Johnson reported on Monday that in Perry’s book, Fed Up!, the governor calls climate science a “contrived phony mess.”
Among his fellow GOP presidential contenders, however, Perry’s views are not so extreme.
Herman Cain has called the very premise of climate change “a scam,” while former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has referred to it as nothing more than a “trend,” accusing the left of “taking advantage” of it by creating “a beautifully concocted scheme because they know that the earth is gonna cool and warm.”
Back in 2009, meanwhile, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) argued on the House floor that the very concept of global warming is faulty because “carbon dioxide is a natural byproduct of nature!”
Rick Perry even managed to further emphasize his ignorance of science when in a recent debate that he said he admired Galileo and how he “was outvoted for a while.” Bad analogy, Rick! If Perry actually knew any science, he would realize that Galileo was championing an unpopular scientific idea (heliocentric solar system) that was “outvoted” by the conservative power of that time, the Church and the Inquisition. Eventually, scientific truth won out, not the political delusions of the conservatives.
Only Jon Huntsman, who is hopelessly behind and unlikely to get the nomination in a party dominated by anti-science extremists, sounded sane. In an interview with ABC News in late August, he said:
“When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science has said about what is causing climate change and man’s contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.”
But the rest of these candidates, one of whom could potentially hold the presidency for the next four years, should worry us with not only their rejection of science, but the even more alarming tactic of using ad hominem attacks and “shoot the messenger” tactics to try to discredit the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists around the world (as I discussed in my post of Aug. 24). Not only are their charges and fantasies patently absurd, but they remind us of how other demagogues, from Hitler and Stalin to Joe McCarthy, used name-calling and intimidation to threaten and suppress ideas of people who challenged their world viewpoint. (continue reading…)
In the 2010 documentary film, The Tillman Story, the story of Pat Tillman and his tragic death at the hands of “friendly fire” is retold. Tillman was the NFL star who gave it all up to join the military cause in Afghanistan after being inspired by 9/11 to do something for his country. He did not do it for the glory or publicity, and gave up a lucrative football career for what he perceived to be a worthy cause. After his death the U.S. government implemented a publicity campaign to use Tillman’s death as a tool to promote the war as a cause so worthy that even a highly-paid NFL star believed it to be worth the sacrifice. What the government failed to mention is that Tillman was killed at the hands of his fellow soldiers during a “fog of war” incident in a steep and narrow slot canyon in which there was much confusion about where enemy fire was originating. It’s a very disturbing film to watch—infuriating in fact—and Jon Krakauer’s book, Where Men Win Glory, presents the story in excruciating detail in a compelling narrative.
Pat Tillman was an atheist. At his funeral his younger brother Richard got up to speak, visibly upset, noticeably inebriated, and with beer in hand proceeded to thank everyone for their warm sentiments, but upbraided those like Maria Shriver and Senator John McCain who made religious overtones in their sentiments, noting about his brother Pat: “He’s not with God, he’s fucking dead. He’s not religious. Thanks for your thoughts, but he’s fucking dead.” (continue reading…)
