Skepticblog

People love to touch old objects and feel a connection to the past, whether it be the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, ancient ruins in China or India or Egypt or Europe, pieces of fossil bone on display in a museum, or the oldest objects known, the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorites. Each time I travel to do research in historic old museum collections, it feels a bit like time travel. In my field, the original specimens first described by the founders of my profession, 19th-century paleontologists like Edward Drinker Cope, O.C. Marsh, and Joseph Leidy, are still essential parts of our research. We must examine these “type specimens” to determine whether fossil species these people named and described over 100 years ago are still valid today, when we have much better and more complete and abundant specimens. When I visit the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, I can examine type specimens first named by Leidy in the 1850s. At Yale, nearly every specimen I looked at was first studied by Marsh in the 1870s and 1880s. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, I worked not only on fossils first studied by Cope in the 1870s and 1880s, but the Osborn Research Library in the Department of Paleontology even has Cope’s  geology pick where any visiting scientist can touch it, or one can sit down at Cope’s original desk. Cope’s skull (donated to science, along with his entire skeleton) has floated around various museums, and many paleontologists have handled it as well (with lots of jokes about the odd situation).

Vertebrate paleontology is also such a small profession with so few practitioners in its mere 150 years of existence that we’re all connected by our graduate advisors to just a handful of men who founded the profession over a century ago. When I was a student, I shook the hand of Ned Colbert, who was Henry Fairfield Osborn’s assistant in the 1920s, and Osborn bragged that he had shaken both Darwin’s and Huxley’s hand when he did post-graduate study in Europe. So I’m only 3 degrees of separation from Darwin himself. (I also have a friend who was in the cast of the original “Footloose”, so I’m 2 degrees from Kevin Bacon).

When I visited the American Museum this fall to continue my research on fossil peccaries or javelinas (American pig-like creatures only distantly related to Old World pigs), I was keeping a close watch for one specimen in particular. Everyone who has fought in the evolution-creation wars has heard of it, and I wanted to finally see and touch the specimen for myself. It is the tooth that caused a sensation in the 1920s, and has since become something that creationists harp on excessively, even though their version of the story is full of lies and myths. It is the tooth known as Hesperopithecus haroldcooki (“Harold Cook’s western ape”). (continue reading…)

Here we go again. Over the past few years there have been a number of cases in which a crank, quack, or charlatan has attempted to silence legitimate criticism of their claims and behavior by threatening legal action, either shutting down their site through the ISP or suing for libel. I guess they feel that a lone blogger would be easy to intimidate. They are not part of a large media outlet with lawyers on the payroll to defend them. Defending against even a frivolous suit can be ruinous to a lone blogger.

The goal, however, is not to really sue but to threaten the blogger into silence. It is intellectual thuggery, meant to defend a charlatan who cannot defend themselves with science and evidence.

However, it is not accurate to describe bloggers who expose charlatans as “lone” – they are part of an informal web of science and skeptical bloggers who are all trying to expose fraud and pseudoscience. When one of us is threatened we have banded together to create what is knows as the Streisand effect – try to silence one blogger and a hundred voices will rise up, having the exact opposite effect that you intend.

Recently a person calling himself Marc Stephens wrote a very threatening letter to Andy Lewis who wrote a critical post about the cancer clinic of Stanislaw Burzynski called The False Hope of the Burzynki Clinic. Stephens tried to make the letter sound legal and official, even though he does not appear to be a lawyer. The letter says, in part:

(continue reading…)

JIngmai O'Connor '04 collecting fossils in the Triassic Ichigualasto Formation, Argentina

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

—Henry Adams

In teaching you cannot see the fruits of a day’s work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for 20 years.

—Jacques Barzun

Having taught at small liberal arts colleges (first Vassar, then Knox College in Illinois, now Occidental College in Los Angeles and also Caltech in Pasadena) for over 30 years now, I’ve experienced all sorts of highs and lows. Sure, there are the bored unmotivated students, the nasty administrators and colleagues, the grind of teaching all my own labs with no help, and teaching the same intro courses year after year, the low pay for long hours with no support for research, the difficulty of getting any time off from teaching to attend essential professional meetings. But there are also the pluses: flexibility of schedule, freedom to teach what I want to teach with minimal interference from above, the small classes where I really get to know the students, and can make sure they understand the material,

But the best benefit of all is the outstanding students who want to do research as undergrads. Since we have no grad program, for years I’ve been treating undergrads as grad students and getting them involved in research. I include them in my field crews or museum research trips (where they find their own projects), help them attend professional meetings and do their own presentations, and help them publish their research. I’ve had many such students over the years, including over 50 different student coauthors on quite a few of my papers. Some, like John Foster ’89, have made it professionally (he’s Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of Western Colorado), and many others are working in environmental or energy firms, earning twice what I make. One never knows how you change the lives of your students when you work closely with them. Of the recent grads, Linda Donohoo-Hurley ’00 finished her Ph.D. at Univ. New Mexico—and I inadvertently introduced her to her future husband, John Hurley, when she presented  our research at a Penrose Conference I organized. Others are about to finish their doctorates. These include Jonathan Hoffman ’03, who came specifically to study with me (M.A. at Florida, nearly done with his Ph.D. at Wyoming);  Josh Ludtke ’04. who took care of my eldest son at times (M.S. at San Diego State, finishing his Ph.D. at Univ. Calgary); and Kristina Raymond ’08, just finishing her master’s at ETSU. Our program is small (only 3-7 graduating geology seniors each year, yet we have 5 full-time tenured faculty), but we turn out a lot of good grad students per capita.

(continue reading…)

On November 4, the Los Angeles Times published my Opinion Editorial entitled “What’s God Got to do With it?” (which I also posted on Skepticblog) about Congress reaffirming our national motto “In God We Trust.” I argued that trust does not come from God but from very specific social, political, and economic institutions.

Chuck Colson, the one-time special counsel for President Richard Nixon, one of the Watergate Seven who also pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in his attempt to defame the Pentagon Papers defendant Daniel Ellsberg, and the man who found God and Jesus just in time for his jail sentence in federal prison, now blogs on political and social issues from a Christian perspective and has attempted a smack-down of my Op-Ed by arguing that “God Has a Lot to Do With It.”

His argument is summarized in his own words thusly: (continue reading…)

Twenty years ago this past October, I discovered the skeptical literature at a panel discussion featuring BC Skeptics spokesperson Barry Beyerstein (a CSICOP Fellow, and psychopharmacologist at Simon Fraser University). In 2008, a year after Barry’s death, I took the opportunity to write about his influence upon me at the fledgling BC Skeptics blog site. Today, the BC Skeptics have largely faded from the stage, and I recently discovered that my tribute to Barry is no longer live. Happily, I am able to re-post it here now (with some minor revisions). For your interest, I have also talked about Beyerstein’s influence on my work on other, more recent occasions, including this eSkeptic article and my 2011 LogiCon keynote address (available on YouTube.)

(continue reading…)

Umm….Yes. Yes it does.

This is one of those stories that immediately makes me think that there must be a deeper issue that the press is missing. Recently the European Food Safety Authority was asked to evaluate and approve the following statement:

“Regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration and of concomitant decrease of performance.”

After three years of investigation the EFSA concluded:

The Panel considers that the proposed claim does not comply with the requirements for a disease risk reduction claim pursuant to Article 14 of Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006

This decision has been immediately and widely criticized as absurd – the EFSA is saying that water does not prevent dehydration. It’s surreal. It right out of Brazil, a dark comedic dystopian totalitarian nightmare. Or perhaps it’s just abject stupidity.

(continue reading…)

Many readers of this blog will recognize the name of Rolling Stone writer and journalist Matt Taibbi. A gonzo investigative journalist in the style of Hunter Thompson, he was a regular correspondent on Real Time with Bill Maher during the 2008 election. He routinely cracked up the panel with his witty and savage comments, and has also appeared frequently on The Rachel Maddow Show. Famous for his lacerating political commentary and analysis, he has a long track record covering not only U.S. politics, but also he was embedded with the troops in Iraq (described in the book reviewed here), spent a number of years in Moscow as a correspondent, and has worked all over the world as a journalist. He even played professional baseball in Moscow and professional basketball in Mongolia, and had to flee Uzkbekistan after offending the president.

Even though it is now a few years old, I finally got the chance to read his 2008 book The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics and Religion, which spent many weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. The events described in the book occurred from about 2005-2008, so they seem a bit dated in the perspective of what has happened since the 2008 elections. But in most respects the same groups are saying and doing the same things, and in some cases, the actions of people and the events since 2008 are even more deranged and unhinged than they were when  he wrote his book, so his wickedly funny analysis is even more apropos.

(continue reading…)

He may be invoked in the national motto, but God has nothing to do with why Americans are free and secure

This op-ed was originally published in the Los Angeles Times, Friday November 4, 2011.

The House of Representatives voted last week by a margin of 396–9 to reaffirm as the national motto the phrase “In God We Trust,” and encouraged its pronouncement on public buildings and continued printing on the coin of the realm. The motto was made official in 1956 during the height of Cold War hysteria over godless communism and—in the words of Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s and Peter Sellers’ 1964 classic antiwar film Dr. Strangelove—“Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”

As risible a reason as this was for knocking out a few bricks in the wall separating state and church, it was at least understandable in the context of the times. But today, with no communist threats and belief in God or a universal spirit among Americans still holding strong at about 90%, according to a 2011 Gallup Poll, what is the point of having this motto? The answer is in the wording of the resolution voted on: “Whereas if religion and morality are taken out of the marketplace of ideas, the very freedom on which the United States was founded cannot be secured.” (continue reading…)

The diagnosis of coma, specifically persistent vegetative state (PVS), is not as straightforward as it might seem. The current standard of care is to perform a thorough neurological exam in order to assess function. The limitation here, however, is that we are inferring brain functioning from what the patient can do. Some parts of the neurological exam are straightforward, like pupillary reflexes. Reflexes are a more direct way of interrogating the nervous system because the examiner is able to see the response, and therefore the integrity, of one specific pathway.  This is very useful in determining which parts of the nervous system are working and which are damaged.

Coma, however, is a condition of impaired consciousness – so we also need to determine, to the best of our ability, the exact level of consciousness of a patient. This is where it can get a little tricky. The parts of the exam that are most useful for determining level of consciousness are response to various types of stimuli and the ability to follow commands. If I say to a patient (without any non-verbal cues), “show me two fingers on your right hand,” and they then raise two fingers on their right hand, that tells me a lot about their function. They can hear, they can understand language sufficiently to understand the command, they are aware enough to make sense of the command and the context of the exam (they know I want them to do something), and they have the motor pathways necessary to move their fingers on the right hand.

The flip side of that, however, is that if the patient is unable to show me two fingers it could mean that they are deaf, aphasic (impaired language), delirious, or paralyzed in that hand. I cannot know for sure that their lack of response is due to impaired level of consciousness. We can compensate for this somewhat by giving various commands – using various body parts, language that is easiest to understand, and as loud as possible to be heard. But this is only a partial compensation. A patient who is locked-in, for example (conscious but paralyzed below the eyes), would give the same lack of response as someone who is in a PVS.

(continue reading…)

Pitcairn Island (Photo: NOAA)

The year was 1808, and men of the American trading ship Topaz landed on Pitcairn Island, thus becoming the first to contact the colony founded by the infamous mutineers of the Bounty.

They found a tiny but prosperous village consisting of one remaining mutineer, a number of Tahitian women, and dozens of children. Life was well ordered; homes were clean and well built, the sabbath was observed, the log was meticulously maintained, and the calendar was wrong.

By one day. (continue reading…)