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Mass extinction is box office, a darling of the popular press, the subject of cover stories and television documentaries, many books, even a rock song…At the end of 1989, the Associated Press designated mass extinction as one of the “Top 10 Scientific Advances of the Decade.” Everybody has weighed in, from the economist to National Geographic.

—David Raup, 1991

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

—H.L. Mencken

The great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

—Thomas Henry Huxley

I vividly remember running into my good friend, Jim Kennett (now retired from the University of California, Santa Barbara), at the 2007 meeting of the Geological Society of America. Kennett is still one of the giants and pioneers of the fields of marine geology and paleoceanography and climate change, with a career that goes back to the early 1970s when the Deep Sea Drilling Project began to revolutionize our understanding of oceans and climate. As a co-author on the paper, Jim was excited about this hot new idea that an impact had struck about 12,900 years ago and was responsible for the extinction of the Ice Age mega-mammals—one of the most interesting and controversial events in earth history. I tried to sound enthusiastic, but I’d seen many versions of the impact hypotheses for other mass extinctions crash and burn, so I didn’t want to pronounce judgment yet.

This idea is the most recent entry in the scientific bandwagon that impacts caused all mass extinctions. Firestone et al. (2007) claimed that the extinction of the Ice Age “megamammals” (large mammals over 40 kg in weight) was due to the impact of an extraterrestrial object about 12,900 years ago. Naturally, when this idea was first proposed, the media had a field day, and almost no dissenters or critics were heard at all. Some geology textbooks even inserted this untested idea into their new editions without waiting to see if it would pan out or not. And just like every other half-baked idea from the impact advocates, the “late Pleistocene impact” scenario has been shot down by a whole range of observations.

The late Pleistocene impact hypothesis was born from observations that there was a distinctive “black mat” organic layer in several localities across the southwestern U.S., immediately above the last appearance of Ice Age megamammal fossils. These include not only the huge mammoths and mastodonts, but also ground sloths, horses, camels, two genera of peccaries, giant beavers, plus predators such as short-faced bears, dire wolves, and sabertoothed cats—but not bison, deer, pronghorns, and a number of other large mammals still found in North America today. The “black mat” is also above the first known artifacts of the Clovis culture, which were thought to be the first human arrivals from Eurasia, and allegedly responsible for overhunting the megamammals to extinction. Firestone et al. (2007) also claimed to have found “nanodiamonds”, iridium, helium-3, “buckyballs,” and a number of other geochemical and mineralogical “impact indicators” in the “black mat” layer, and then painted a variety of different (and conflicting) scenarios about the impacting object (they are not consistent as to whether it is a comet or an asteroid) hitting near the Carolina Bays region. This supposedly affected the Laurentide ice sheet in the northeastern part of North America and triggered the Younger Dryas cooling event at 12,900 years ago.

The entire scenario has been completely demolished by a number of lines of evidence. As Pinter and Ishman (2008) showed, there is no evidence that there was an impact in the Carolina Bays, and most of the alleged “impact evidence” is questionable when analyzed by other labs. Firestone et al. (2007) argued that the impact was an airburst, since there is no crater, no tektites, no shocked quartz or other high-pressure minerals, which are the best indicators of a true impact. Most of the material that was allegedly impact derived (nanodiamonds, iridium, helium-3, “buckyballs”, and so on) is also consistent with the normal rain of micrometeorites, and not abundant enough to be good evidence of an impact.

The claim that the “black mat” was an impact layer has also been debunked. It is more likely an indicator of a high water table and wetter conditions associated with the abrupt Younger Dryas cooling event (Haynes, 2008). The supposed “instantaneous” extinction of megamammals at this horizon has also been debunked, since the extinctions were scattered across a wide geographic area with different genera going out locally at different times (Grayson and Meltzer, 2003; Fiedel, 2008; Scott, 2010). Mammoths, mastodons, giant deer (“Irish elk”), ground sloths, and many other megamammals did not die out at 12,900 years ago, but survived in most cases to 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. This is fatal to the idea that a single impact killed them all off. In fact, none of the well-dated extinctions occur at 12,900 years ago. Most of the extinctions are either significantly younger than that interval, or there are no good final dates for their last appearance—but very little appears to happen to the megamammals at precisely 12,900 years ago.

Particularly striking is the persistence of mammoths and ground sloths well into the Holocene (as young as only 6000 years ago), and of course, the bison, deer, grizzly bear, cougars, peccaries, and pronghorns that are still with us, while elk and moose came to North America at this time (rather than being wiped out). In fact, studies of DNA trapped in soils from the Canadian Arctic shows that many of these “extinct” Ice Age mammals persisted well into the Holocene, even though there are no bones preserved in beds that young. The impact hypothesis does nothing to explain the selectivity of this extinction. In addition, the South American, Australian, and Eurasian-African megafaunal extinctions are not synchronous with the alleged “impact,” so it does nothing to explain their demise.

The claim that the “impact” had a severe effect on human cultures has been completely shot down as well (Buchanan et al., 2008), since there is no evidence whatsoever that human cultures changed dramatically at this time, or that there was a major population decline. Clovis culture was gradually transformed into Folsom, Dalton, and Eastern U.S. Paleoindian cultures, and they apparently spread widely at this time, rather than declining. And just before my 2011 Catastrophes! book came out, Jacquelyn Gill of the University of Wisconsin presented a paper at the Ecological Society of America meeting analyzing the details of lake sediments from the northeast, which preserve a high-fidelity record of that time. She found no evidence of the impact debris that was supposed to be common—and her data were gathered even closer to the alleged impact site than the evidence garnered from the western U.S. Nor was there any great shift in vegetation, pollen, spores, or any other biotic signal that would be consistent with the impact hypothesis.

Finally, if the authors of the Pleistocene impact scenario had paid any attention to the past decade of research on impacts and extinctions, they would have realized that the “impacts cause extinction” notion is passé. As I discussed in Chapter 11 of my new book Catastrophes!, none of the great extinctions of past (except possibly the end-Cretaceous event) are associated with impacts.  It feels like the Firestone et al. (2007) impact scenario is a bad rehash of the debates from the 1980s. Apparently, the authors are still stuck on a bandwagon that has long since ground to a halt—except in the popular media. As Barnosky et al. (2004) showed, the causes of the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions are complicated, and probably involve a combination of both human overhunting and climatic change. One thing that doesn’t seem to be relevant is an impact.

Like many other trendy ideas in science, it made a big splash when it first came out in 2007, and some textbooks even jumped the gun and featured it in their new editions. But eventually the scientific review process works through all the hot ideas that have made it past the first level of peer reviews. After 2-3 years, the majority of these faddish proposals die a quiet death as they are debunked, one claim after another. Yet the public and press only remember the splashy coverage when the idea was first proposed, and don’t realize that it has been quietly discredited in the scientific community.

1) In an earlier post, I discussed the decline in attendance and loss of money from Ken Ham’s “creation museum” in Kentucky. Now even they must pay attention to the problem, since the declining attendance has put a crimp in their budget and brought the fundraising for their “Ark encounter” to a standstill. Their problem, as I outlined before, is that their exhibit is 5 years old now and has not changed, so most of the local yokels who might want to visit it have done so. There’s no point to making the long trip and seeing the expensive “museum” again if there’s nothing new to see. (Unlike real science museums, which must change exhibits constantly not only to boost repeat attendance, but to reflect the changes in scientific thinking). As Mark Joseph Stern wrote on Slate.com:

There could be another explanation, though. A spectacle like the Creation Museum has a pretty limited audience. Sure, 46 percent of Americans profess to believe in creationism, but how many are enthusiastic enough to venture to Kentucky to spend nearly $30 per person to see a diorama of a little boy palling around with a vegetarian dinosaur? The museum’s target demographic might not be eager to lay down that much money: Belief in creationism correlates to less education, and less education correlates to lower income. Plus, there’s the possibility of just getting bored: After two pilgrimages to the museum, a family of four would have spent $260 to see the same human-made exhibits and Bible quote placards. Surely even the most devoted creationists would consider switching attractions for their next vacation. A visit to the Grand Canyon could potentially be much cheaper—even though it is tens of millions of years old.

So how did they deal with the attendance dilemma? Did they open some new galleries with “latest breakthroughs in creation research”? (No, that’s not possible because they don’t do research or learn anything new). No, they opted for the cheap and silly: make it into an amusement park with zip lines. Apparently, flying through the air for a few seconds suspended from a cable is the latest fad in amusements, so the Creation “Museum” has to have one to draw the crowds—and hope they can suck in a few visitors to blow $30 a head or more to see their stale old exhibits as well. Expect that by next year they’ll be a full-fledged amusement park with roller coasters and Tilt-a-whirls, just like so many other “Biblelands” do across the Deep South.

And what do ziplines have to do with creationism? As usual, they have a glib and non-responsive answer:

Zovath’s response to the museums critics who wonder how zip lining fits with their message?

“No matter what exhibit we add, the message stays the same,” Zovath said. “It’s all about God’s word and the authority of God’s word and showing that all of these things, whether it’s bugs, dinosaurs or dragons – it all fits with God’s word.”

I was hoping for something more imaginative and relevant, like “zip lines make you feel like an angel flying down from heaven.”

2) Our old friends at the Discovery Institute in Seattle (the main organization which once promoted the “intelligent design” argument until it died in court in 2005) are doing some very shady fundraising and bookkeeping. Their site is constantly beating the bushes to get religionists to contribute to them, and they have extensive funding from a number of right-wing foundations that want to promote religion in public society and get around the 1st Amendment separation of church and state. They have a budget that is ten times the size of what their main opponent, the tiny National Center for Science Education, has to spend. They claim to be a tax-exempt non-profit, yet they also claim not to be a religious organization.

So on what basis are they tax exempt? Are they really a charity which spends most of its funds on social welfare? The website Cenlamar.com dug into the 990 tax forms for the Discovery Institute, and found some remarkable things. Almost 90% of the money they raise goes to salaries of their “research fellows,” plus lawyers, lobbyists, administrators, overhead, and expenses. No more than 13% could go to what could charitably be called “research,” although they don’t actually publish ANY peer-reviewed research, only stuff for their own house journals, and PR documents to push their cause. As their founding document, the “Wedge Strategy”, pointed out at the beginning, their motive isn’t to discover new science; it is conduct a PR campaign to get their viewpoint equal time in public schools and elsewhere in the media and public discourse, and skip the hard, complicated process of doing the scientific research that might support their position. As Cenlamar.com points out, however, 90% spending on overhead and salaries is WAY out of line for a non-profit charity. By contrast, organizations like the BBB Wise Giving Allowance or American Institute of Philanthropy spend no more than 35-40% on the same thing, and the United Way spends only 20%. This is typical of most non-profit charities, and clearly the Discovery Institute is not following the normal guidelines for non-profts.

So how do they get away with it? They use a clever sleight-of-hand to dodge the IRS guidelines for tax-exempt charities. They make “grants” to something called the “Biologic Institute”, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Discovery Institute. Then the Biologic Institute spends this “grant” money for more salaries and overhead. Even though they claim to the IRS that they are funding grants, they are essentially sending the grant money to themselves to dodge the tax structure. I’m not familiar with the tax laws, but this sounds like a pretty shady deal which clearly violates the spirit if not the letter of the tax laws. As Cenlamar.com shows, it’s a “con-profit”, not a real non-profit. It’s a great con job which allows them to essentially spend all their money on their PR campaign and their staffers, with no obligation to do actual research, or to send money outside their own building.

So much for the honesty of these “Christian” creationists….

In this article I linked to a piece in the popular press about the treatment, in the Denver Post by a sports writer, Adrian Dater. Dater thought I was being unfair in my criticism of his piece, and so wrote a response on his blog.  The exchange and the comments have exposed many of the problems with journalism in general and science journalism in particular, that I would like to explore further here.

First I have to say that there are many excellent journalists and science journalists out there. I am not implying that that there are no good journalists. I do find, however, that the baseline quality of science journalism is lacking and, if anything, getting worse. Part of the problem is the evaporating infrastructure for full-time journalists. Many outlets no longer maintain specialist journalists, and use generalists (including editors) to cover science news stories.

What follows can be seen as a quick primer, or at least a list of helpful suggestions, to journalists who wish to cover science topics. I will primarily use examples from the recent exchange over the GyroStim.

Think About the Narrative

Almost all news stories have a clear narrative. The facts of the story are presented in a way to create a meaningful story. Even if all the facts are individually correct, the choice of which facts to present, in what balance, and in which order affect the bottom line impression left by the article. The choice of headline is also important, and I know for big news outlets the article author is often not the headline writer, but that doesn’t mean the headlines don’t matter also – they tend to frame the article.

For example, Dater defended his article by claiming that he got all the facts right, that he included “balance” (more on that below) by indicating the Gyrostim is not FDA approved and quoting a doctor saying more evidence is needed, and that he did not directly endorse the treatment.

My criticism, however, was based on the narrative that he blatantly created. I find it interesting that he seems to be unaware of this narrative or its effects.

The story was framed as a touching account of a father who is an engineer who decided to build a machine to cure his daughter of cerebral palsy. Right out of the gate the reader is rooting for this machine to work. The pull-out quotes include, “Spinning stimulates the brain,” and “Miracles almost every day.” He also ended with a hopeful anecdote:

“The machine is amazing, it really is,” said Hishon, who played nine games for the Lake Erie Monsters this season after nearly two years of concussion symptoms. “It just seemed to wake something up in my brain. I can’t explain it, but it definitely worked wonders with me.”

The fact that there is some token skepticism tucked in the middle is just part of the narrative – every story needs a villain, right?  Dater may not have intended the skeptics to be the villain of his narrative, but that is the role he assigned them. On the one hand you have a loving father, hope, the device is being researched, you have excited practitioners, and many patients who are thrilled with their results, and on the other side some talking-head canned skepticism – “more evidence is needed, not FDA approved, blah, blah.”

It seems to me that many journalists don’t even think about the narrative – it just emerges as a default story format. Start with a human interest angle to draw in the reader, then just report what both sides are saying, be sue to include plenty of anecdotes, and then end on a hopeful note.

What many non-science journalists don’t seem to get is that this is not a proper narrative for a science story. Further – all journalists need to decide what their narrative is before writing the story (although hopefully after they have researched it – often journalists decide on their narrative first then just backfill the facts and anecdotes).

Here are some other narratives that journalists covering science stories might consider:

- The allure and harm of false hope, and the exploitation of false hope by dubious practitioners and companies.

- A cautionary tale about getting excited prematurely by some newfangled treatment before it is adequately tested, given that most new treatments do not pan out.

- Is new and high tech always better – does this machine that costs tens of thousands of dollars work better than a $20 device that has a similar function?

Put the Story Into Context

The most challenging part of science reporting is putting a new story into a deeper scientific context. This requires background research and talking to a variety of experts – and asking the right questions and really listening to what they say. This context includes:

- What is the plausibility of the new claim? Does it confirm or contradict what is currently believed to be true?

- Does the new device, treatment, product resemble anything that has come before? Is it truly new, or just a rebranding of an old concept – and if the latter, how have previous incarnations fared?

- What is the current consensus, if any, on this new claim? Is it truly controversial, or very one-sided with the majority of scientists taking one position and only a few outliers disagreeing with the consensus?

- What are the credentials and backgrounds of the experts on which you are relying. Is their degree generally recognized as valid? Do they have a history of making other dubious or controversial claims? Do they have a history of fraud?

- Overall, how does the new discover, claim, treatment, etc. fit into existing evidence and scientific theories?

- What are the implications of all this for the current stance one should have toward the claim – should it be considered experimental, should it be taught in public science classes, should it be legal, etc. ?

- What steps are needed in the future? What questions need to be resolved?

Adding the above context is exactly what we do at Science-Based Medicine, and at many other “skeptical” blogs. Good science journalists also do this. This is the real story, not the fluff narrative that is better suited to covering the local dog show.

False Balance and Token Skepticism

The balance of the article should generally reflect that balance of scientific acceptance.  If 95% of the scientific community accepts one consensus, then that is what the bulk of the article should reflect. If you feel the other 5% deserves a mention, then it should be given appropriate space, and also put into context (as above).

Stories about politics and social issues requires obsessive balance, because these are mostly based on value-judgments and opinions. For these stories a journalist needs to get the facts right, and make sure that all credible sides have their say.

Science does not work like that. In science, some opinions are objectively better than others. Science stories are about the evidence and the process of science – about finding the best current answer. Science articles need to reflect that.

As soon as you put a pseudoscientist up against a genuine and respected scientist, you have elevated the pseudoscientist to a stature they likely do not deserve. You have framed the story in a very deceptive way that does not reflect the reality.

Bad science journalism generally falls into one of three categories in this regard. Some stories have false balance, where a pseudocontroversy is presented as if it is a real scientific controversy. This is  the false-balance fallacy.

Other stories have what we call token skepticism – most of the article dedicated to giving a forum to the crank and glowing anecdotes, with scant mention of doubt and/or quick commentary by a real scientist. Dater’s article fell into this category.

The third is when even token skepticism is lacking – the story is presented without a hint of skepticism or actual investigation.

Conclusion

Good science journalism requires putting a science news story into a proper context, making sure the narrative that emerges is fair and appropriate to the actual story, and properly balancing different points of view to the scientific consensus and to scientific legitimacy.

This is not easy. It requires, in my opinion, at least a baseline of scientific literacy. It also requires significant background research into the topic, and into any experts upon which the journalist relies.

What we have from Adrian Dater is an excellent example of what happens when a non-science journalist thinks they can dabble in science reporting, without understanding any of the special requirements of competent science reporting. Even more telling that the article itself is Dater’s defense of his journalism. As is often the case with defensive overreaction, he just dug himself in deeper and deeper.

The exchange also highlights for me the new role that science blogs are playing in the reporting of science news. Journalists who write bad science news stories now have to contend with the second wave of science blog analysis. Now actual scientists, or at least dedicated science journalists, can add the missing context, deconstruct a misleading narrative, and rebalance a science news story.

Journalists, like Dater, who encounter this science-blog pushback when they write a naive and misleading piece would be better off if they embrace the criticism and try to learn from it, rather than get into an online fight with someone who actually knows what they are talking about.

Today, TAM attendance hovers between one and two thousand curious, upbeat minds. The energy is incredible. The whole place hums, vibrates. I come out of every single TAM vibrating myself—buzzing with ideas, new connections, new energy for the year ahead.

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I’m tremendously excited that I’ll be back at TAM this year (despite having to fly) after my schedule compelled me to miss last year. It’s a hoot to follow the fun from afar on the Twitter hashtag (#TAM2013) but it’s not the same. I’ll be at TAM to help represent the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine—the Official Magazine of The Amazing Meeting!—and to reveal some details about my newest book, Abominable Science, co-authored with Skepticblog’s own Don Prothero (in stores August 6, available now for pre-order from Amazon). I hope I’ll see many of you there! There’s still time to register today (save $25 with promo code SKEPTICMAGAZINE). And, especially, there’s still time to register for the additional workshops,** including the Thursday event I’m moderating, Workshop 4B: Preserving Skeptic History (2:30–4 pm, July 11)! With the recently added participation of skeptical luminary Ray Hyman—a co-founder and architect of the modern skeptical movement—it’s going to be a workshop panel to remember.

Workshop 4B: Discover Skepticism’s Vital Heart Through History

Science and scholarship advance by building on the work of the past, and by remembering the hard-won lessons of those who have toiled in each field before us. Skepticism is no exception. But how can legacy knowledge be transmitted to new generations of skeptics? This question lies at the heart of fierce debates about the scope and mission of scientific skepticism, its practices, and even its ethical responsibilities. Moreover, many paranormal and fringe claims are actually claims about history, from the origins of the sea serpent, to the events of 9/11, to alleged crashes of flying saucers. (Abominable Science, for example, is to a very large extent a book of historical investigation.)

This workshop will dig down to the roots of the modern skeptical movement and its paranormal counterparts, with the help of people who were there. Participants will gain tools for conducting their own research into the history of skepticism and paranormal claims, and learn how to share that historical understanding with the public.

For my contribution, I will describe the practical tools and techniques of my own skeptical historical sleuthing for Junior Skeptic, Abominable Science, Why Is There a Skeptical Movement? and other projects. Expert UFOlogy critic Robert Sheaffer will speak from his more than thirty years as a Skeptical inquirer columnist to explore how skepticism unfolded in response to seemingly-credible paranormal claims that required very specific and knowledgeable refutations—not mere general statements about the burden of proof. Psychologist and CSI (CSICOP) co-founder Ray Hyman will discuss longstanding, unresolved questions about skeptical practice, arguing that instead of paying lip service to science, we skeptics should use science to measure our successes and failures. Tim Farley, creator of the What’s the Harm? website and the Today in Skeptic History app, will explore the astonishing growth and trend lines of skeptical events over the decades. And, Guerrilla Skepticism‘s Susan Gerbic will teach you how to put your historical understanding to work for the public good through one of the world’s most consulted resources—Wikipedia.

**Remember that the TAM workshops are offered in addition to the basic TAM attendance, and require specific additional registration.

REGISTER for TAM today!

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As Daniel Loxton and I worked on our magnum opus about cryptozoology (due out in mid-July at TAM), we wrestled with the issues of book length, since our exhaustive research on cryptids like Bigfoot, Nessie, and the Yeti were much longer and more comprehensive than even we imagined at first. We ended up leaving out a few cryptids (like the other lake monsters, and the Chupacabra) that have received excellent book-length debunkings by Ben Radford, Joe Nickell, and others. But even in our wildest imaginations, we never thought we needed to put in a chapter (or even a sentence) about mermaids!

Yet mermaids have just become the hottest new cryptid in the media and cryptozoology community. A year ago, the Animal Planet channel ran a hokey “documentary” on mermaids called “Mermaids: The Body Found”, and got a lot of coverage (and outrage) at the obviously faked “documentary” that was not promoted as fiction. Brian Switek gave it the best assessment: it “embodied the rotting carcass of science TV.” Clearly, however, ratings speak louder than the outrage of skeptics and experts, because last week they did another “documentary” on the same topic. Entitled “Mermaids: The New Evidence,”  it wasted a perfectly good 2 hours of airtime on Animal Planet on Sunday night, May 26. It was just like the first program: a lot of moody, dark, poorly lit shots of vague forms and backgrounds, a lot of CG reconstructions of “mermaids”, “re-enactments” shot like the “Blair Witch Project” and presented as real events, but no actual physical or photographic evidence of any kind. The “video footage” was all so poor and blurry that it proved nothing except the incompetence of the videographer. The “money shot” is a distant telephoto image of something on a Greenland ice floe that could just as easily be a seal (and probably was). The entire two hours was filled with this fluff and fakery.

Just as in the first program, they had lots of speculation about cave drawings or images from ancient cultures that might represent mermaids. Since when did we start taking ancient mythologies as evidence of biological reality? Do we believe that Osiris and Isis and Ra and Nut are real because the Egyptians drew them on their tombs and temples? There is a bit about the cultural mythology about mermaids over the centuries, but it is extremely superficial and keeps implying that if people believed these myths, then they must be based on some truth. Again, they mentioned P.T. Barnum and his famous faked “FeeJee mermaid” (which they admit was a hoax made by combining several specimens using taxidermy), but claimed that Barnum had a real mermaid that he could never show anyone. Really? Barnum had no qualms about making a buck off of any hoax or fake, no matter how ridiculous. Given Barnum’s track record, why would we believe ANY evidence he produced? Of course, the fact that Barnum never showed his “specimen” is all chalked up to conspiracies and outside forces which are trying to suppress the truth, a theme which runs throughout both shows. In short, nearly everything about the show follows the same old tired formula of the crappy shows about Bigfoot and other cryptids, or UFOs, that have proliferated on many of these formerly “scientific” cable channels. All of these shows peddle pure nonsense, and they know that it’s garbage. Just like P.T. Barnum, however, they don’t care as long as people watch. As P.T. himself said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

The bulk of the program’s overlong presentation was padded (as was the first show) by the ridiculous “aquatic ape” hypothesis made famous by Elaine Morgan, which is pop anthropology at its worst. First making the best-seller list back in the 1970s, it was completely debunked back then, and virtually forgotten as a footnote from the archives of long-debunked ridiculous ideas that crop up in anthropology off and on. But that was almost 50 years ago, and no one remembers that we beat this horse to death the first time—so it pops back into the public consciousness again, ready to dupe a whole new generation of credulous people who are too young to recall why it was abandoned the first time around. For those who don’t know the story, the “aquatic ape” hypothesis argues that our hairlessness and a few other anatomical features are due to our past history of being aquatic creatures, so we lost our long body hair as have dolphins and whales. (Not explained is how our entire lower bodies evolved into a fish-like tail in just a few million years).  It’s a classic “just-so” story—cherry-pick a few features that seem to suggest one idea, then ignore the vast majority of data that doesn’t—and then peddle it to the masses with a best-selling book to cash in before the scientific community catches up. The list of problems with the idea are summarized here and here, so I won’t belabor the point further.

The fakery goes even deeper than just the blurry footage and conspiracy-mongering. Just as in the first show, they have several “experts” on camera such as “Dr. Paul Robertson of NOAA”, who is actually an actor named Andre Weidemann, with no affiliation with NOAA. There’s even an IMDB page for the show which gives the complete cast of actors who pretended being “scientists” and “experts” and “witnesses”. Meanwhile, NOAA was deluged with mail and emails demanding that they release this evidence that they have been suppressing, and reinforcing the conspiratorial thinking of the show’s audience. NOAA was obliged to waste their time with a statement that affirmed that indeed, mermaids don’t exist—not that it will convince the type of viewer that believes this bunk in the first place.

Unlike many of the shows on Bigfoot, UFOs, and other fakes, this one actually admits that the entire program is fictional—but only  in the end, in a disclaimer in the fine print in the closing credits! How many people will stick around long enough even watch the closing credits, let alone read the tiny boilerplate text at the end that admits the entire work is fiction? The press release for both shows admits the work is fiction, but who reads press releases? Anyone who does the simplest search will find out that it is all a fraud. But most people who watch such shows are not warned during the bulk of the two hours that it’s all fiction. Typically, they’re not the kind of people who tend to doubt what they see on TV, or check to see if it’s real.

As Jim Vorel commented on his review of the original show:

Aside from “certain events in this film are fictional,” (which means “as much of it as we want”) that sounds like standard legal boilerplate. But in this case, the line about “actual persons” is even more significant, because get this—the two main characters appearing on screen to give “their story” throughout the entire program? They don’t exist. As in, they’re not real human beings. The person presented as “Dr. Paul Robertson” is an actor named Andre Weideman, and at no point does the program make any admission of this. He says he was a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration? Lies. He says his team’s data was confiscated by the government? Lies. And how do they get away with saying all of this? By small-print, tacit admissions to anyone in actual authority that “Look, we’re just making something for entertainment, nobody is going to take it seriously.”

The problem is of course that the general public can’t be bothered to verify any of this information, and plenty simply take it at face value. They do take it seriously. If you go on Google and go searching around for discussion of the program, the stuff you find will blow your mind, as people find reasons to believe a two-hour television special on the secret existence of mermaids. Look a little longer and you’ll run across all sorts of cryptozoological believers. My favorites are the ones who shoot down each other’s theories as ridiculous and then offer even crazier opinions. “You’re a fool for believing the aquatic ape theory! Anyone with half a brain knows that mermaids are the direct descendents of ‘nephilim,’ the gigantic early ancestors of man that existed before the flood of Noah!” The statement to the left is an actual opinion that I read last night. I am not making this up—unlike the filmmakers.

One of the best touches is the website for “Dr. Paul Robertson,” which bears a realistic-looking message saying that it was “seized by Homeland Security.” Good evidence of a cover-up, right? The government doesn’t want you to know the truth! Or at least this would be good evidence, if it hadn’t been put together by the film’s creators themselves to make their case look legitimate. You need look no further than the vagueness claiming that a warrant was issued by “a United States District Court.” In an actual web seizure like this one at a sports streaming website, the specific court is always listed. See the additional detail? Unfortunately, this simply distraction is all a conspiracy theorist needs to leap into action. It’s classic confirmation bias.

This is a disgusting amount of effort for a group of filmmakers to go to, just in order to make a quick buck by sensationalizing their film and trying to cause a stir by portraying it as “banned” or suppressed by the government. A web-savvy community in 2012 shouldn’t be able to be taken in by something so stupid. We’re supposed to be smarter than this. And shame on a network like The Discovery Channel for airing “documentaries” that are entirely fictional accounts of nonexistent creatures. Shows like “A Haunting,” “Ghost Lab” and their faked reality series “The Colony” are bad enough. But mermaids?

Vorel makes the larger point that cleverly produced fakes like this have an even worse effect: they are

damaging to the overall public perception of reality, imbuing those with no desire to question the “evidence” they are given with a false sense of being “in the know,” which is of course one of the major appeals of any conspiracy. It doesn’t even matter that immediately after airing, all the claims of the show are debunked, because many of the people who watch these programs will spend the next decade of their life walking around, telling other people they meet that mermaids are “totally real, it was on the Discovery Channel, man.” Don’t believe that people are that foolish? There are still people debating an 11-year-old moon landing hoax special that aired on FOX, even though it was complete malarkey. There are human beings walking the face of the Earth right now who believe that this planet is flat. That’s the nature of rumors about secret knowledge—we really want to believe them, because they confirm our biases and make us feel informed.

Marine biologist David Schiffman commented on another pernicious effect of such programming: it gives people a completely misleading notion about the oceans. The seas are dying off due to global warming, the coral reefs of the world are vanishing due to bleaching caused by heat and too much carbon dioxide, and fish populations around the world are crashing due to overexploitation. Even sharks are being hunted to extinction due to irrational fears caused by sensationalist shows on cable TV and the huge appetite for shark-fin soup in Chinese culture. Even more importantly, the sea is full of wonders that are real, and could make great entertaining programming—if only the TV producers cared about reality more than ratings. Instead, as deep-sea ecologist Andrew David Thaler (in the Schiffman article) said:

the ocean is a vast, unexplored frontier. The deep sea is Earth’s last great wilderness. When we do venture into the abyss, we find creatures more diverse and incredible that our relatively limited imaginations can conceive. Don’t insult that wonder with something as utterly mundane as ‘human with fish tail.’ ”

But do the TV producers care? Not likely. This latest piece of pseudoscientific garbage garnered record ratings of 3.6 million viewers for Animal Planet, and a huge buzz in Twitter and elsewhere of people who were taken in and are now true believers. Are the producers at all concerned that they just peddled one of the worst frauds on the public in TV history? I doubt it. Just like Liberace (whose own sordid biography was exploited in the same week on a different channel) famously said, they probably “cried all the way to the bank.”

For the average consumer my advice is to completely ignore NaturalNews and Mike Adams. He is, among other things, an anti-vaccine crank. This article is written by staff writer Ethan Huff.  Let’s take a close look  and see if it lives up to the site’s reputation.

He writes:

While the medical, pharmaceutical, and vaccine industries are busy pushing new vaccines for practically every condition under the sun, a new study published in the journal Immunity completely deconstructs the entire vaccination theory. It turns out that the body’s natural immune systems, comprised of both innate and adaptive components, work together to ward off disease without the need for antibody-producing vaccines.

He opens with a bit of hyperbole – medical science is developing vaccines for infectious diseases that respond to vaccines, not “practically every condition under the sun.” Further, his word choice marks his piece as propaganda, referring to the medical “industry” rather than medical “science.”

He takes a nose dive, however, in his next sentence – he claims that one study (already a dubious claim) deconstructs the entire vaccine theory, which is built upon thousands of studies over decades of research. The study in question: B cell maintenance of subcapsular sinus macrophages protects against a fatal viral infection independent of adaptive immunity, is not even a study of vaccines.

He claims that the study shows that the immune system does not need antibodies. One should wonder why the immune system evolved such an elaborate system of antibody production, and why it expends so much energy doing so. Further, there are antibody-mediated autoimmune diseases, a tradeoff that only makes sense if antibodies serve some purpose.

He continues:

But the new research highlights the fact that innate immunity plays a significant role in fighting infections, and is perhaps more important than adaptive immunity at preventing or fighting infections. In tests, adaptive immune system antibodies were shown unable to fight infection by themselves, which in essence debunks the theory that vaccine-induced antibodies serve any legitimate function in preventing or fighting off infection

Without even looking at the study it can be seen that Huff’s logic is fatally flawed. Even if the study showed what he claims (it doesn’t), that antibodies cannot fight infections by themselves, that does not mean that antibodies serve no purpose, or that vaccines cannot work by stimulating the production of antibodies.

Before I dissect Huff’s nonsense further, here is a quick overview of the immune system. The immune system is actually very complicated. It has different components that are more effective at fighting off different kinds of infections in different parts of the body. There is humoral immunity, which is based upon antibody production (antibodies are proteins that bind to anything foreign to target the immune system against it), and there is cellular immunity, which is essentially white blood cells and macrophages, which are large cells that eat foreign material or dead cells.

You can also characterize different parts of the immune system as passive, or innate, vs adaptive. The innate immune system keeps out invaders and fights them off nonspecifically. The adaptive immune system remembers foreign bodies through the stimulation of B-cells, and can then mount a quicker and more vigorous immune response over time.

Adaptive immunity is how vaccines work – they expose the immune system to a weak infection, or to viral or bacterial elements, that then trigger the production of memory B-cells so that the next time the body is exposed a more rapid immune response can fight off the infection before it takes hold.

The importance of cellular vs antibody-mediated immunity and the various parts of the immune system differ with different infectious and foreign agents. What this study shows is that for a particular virus, which is a very small virus, the neurotropic vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), mice that have B-cells but do not produce antibodies were able to fight off the infection. The authors conclude that this means that B-cells are necessary to stimulate macrophages, which ultimately kill the virus, independent of adaptive immunity.

Huff’s primary illogic is in concluding that this study, which involved one particular type of virus, can be extrapolated to all infections. Given what we already know, this is absolutely not true.

For example, there are many types of disorders of immunodeficiency, including those who cannot make antibodies for themselves. They are highly susceptible to infections, and are treated by giving regular infusions of intravenous immunoglobulins (antibodies).

There is also all the evidence that vaccines actually work.

What Huff is doing is taking one study with very narrow implications, and then completely misinterpreting it. He ignores the vast scientific literature on the immune system, infectious diseases, and vaccines, and the complexity of the immune system to make very simplistic and wrong conclusions.

In short, this article is pure propaganda, not serious science. It is only evidence that NaturalNews is a crank website whose advice is best completely ignored.

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As the largest land mammal that has ever lived, there is much fascination with maximum body size and weight estimates for extinct indricotheres. Most often you see sources parroting each other around a common estimate of 20 metric tonnes (20,000 kg), although Alexander (1989) estimated 34 tonnes and Savage and Long (1986) quoted 30 tonnes. Prothero and Schoch (2002) followed Alexander (1989) and used the number of 34 tonnes, and there have been a wide range of estimates all over this range. As Fortelius and Kappelman (1993) showed, these estimates came from some questionable assumptions and extrapolations by Osborn, Granger, and Gregory based on their partial skeleton. That skeletal reconstruction is a composite, a chimaera based on bones from individuals of at least four different size classes, so it is not a very reliable source for the body size of an actual animal.

Most of the weight estimates are based on the combined head and body length (HBL) of the animal, which may be exaggerated if Granger and Gregory’s (1935, 1936) reconstruction drawn by Helen Ziska is inaccurate. As Fortelius and Kappelman (1993, Table 1) showed, different authors estimated a wide range of HBL values, from Gromova’s estimate of 740 cm, to Granger and Gregory’s (1936) maximum of 870 cm, which drops to 621 cm if you use just the smallest individuals. Using the weight equations of Damuth (1990) for converting HBL to mass, this gives weight estimates from as low as 8.4 tonnes (in the smallest specimens) to 24 tonnes in the largest specimens.

Fortelius and Kappelman (1993, Table 2) looked at a spectrum of other methods to estimate body size, based on measurements of the skull. The measurements of skull dimensions gave a range of masses form 7-16 tonnes, with a single high estimate of 19.8 tonnes, which is probably an overestimate based on the creatures on which this estimate is based. Using the teeth as an estimator gives values in the range of 5-15 tonnes, although indricothere teeth seem unusually small compared to the size of their skulls and bodies. Estimates based on upper limb bones (humeri and femora) gave a range of 5 to 15 tonnes. Overall, their estimates placed most specimens of indricotheres in the 9-15 tonne range, with only a few specimens giving values as high as 20-24 tonnes.

Gingerich (1990) developed his own method of estimating body mass based on various limb bone measurements. He obtained weight estimates of about 9 tonnes for smaller indricotheres, and about 14-15 tonnes for the largest specimens. As he pointed out, however, there are serious problems with any of these estimates. Not only is it difficult to get accurate predictions based on just a few bones from four different size classes, but indricotheres had very differently proportioned limbs compared to any other living mammal.

Once we drop the outrageous overestimates of the 30 tonne range and use a more realistic 15-20 tonne estimate for the biggest indricotheres, the huge difference in size between indricotheres and elephants vanishes. Rather than “weighing as much as five elephants” as is often quoted, indricotheres were typically in the size range of the largest elephants and mammoths. The largest living elephant specimen ever measured was bull elephant killed in Angola in 1955 and now on display in the Smithsonian, which weighed 10 tonnes, but most elephants weigh about 5-6 tonnes (Prothero and Schoch, 2002, pp. 182-183). However, Fortelius and Kappelman (1993) pointed to examples of limbs of the mammoth Mammuthus trogontherii and the Deinotherium (with its downward-flexed tusks) that suggest weights of 13 tonnes to possibly as high 20 tonnes (Christiansen, 2004). Saarinen (pers. commun., 2011) looked at limb bones of Deinotherium from European museums, and estimated range of weights  of 7.4-17.4 tonnes, with a mean of 11.2 tonnes. Most fossil proboscideans give weight ranges between 3-10 tonnes, which would make them somewhat lighter than indricotheres. Thus, we should be cautious about calling indricotheres the “largest land mammals that ever lived.” They were certainly taller than modern elephants or other living mammals, but their mass was roughly equivalent to the largest mammoths and deinotheres.

These weight estimates are not just a piece of trivia to pop into a textbook, but have implications as well. A number of ecologists and physiologists have speculated on the maximum body size that mammals can obtain, based on constraints due to metabolic factors. Economos (1981) was the first to do this, using mathematical estimates of the metabolic costs of gravity. Based on this method, he concluded that a land mammal cannot theoretically reach sizes of much greater than 20 tonnes, which seems to correspond to our upper limit for largest indricotheres and mammoths. Clauss et al. (2003) looked at the nutritional constraints of large body size, particularly in contrasting the relatively efficient foregut-fermenting ruminants (which tend not to grow to huge sizes) versus the inefficient hindgut fermenters like elephants, rhinos and hippos. Based on these constraints, they found that Fortelius and Kappelman’s (1993) estimate of 11-15 tonnes for indricotheres was more consistent with digestive constraints than the higher estimates of 20 tonnes or greater.

Thus, we must be careful when quoting old numbers from early authors about the weights of extinct creatures. Indricotheres probably weighed only in the 10-15 tonne range, and maxed out at 20 tonnes on the largest individuals. It is very unlikely that there were any in the 30-35 tonne range, as is so often cited.

References

• Alexander, R. M. 1989. Dynamics of Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Giants. Columbia University Press, New York, New York.
• Christiansen, P. 2004. Body size in proboscideans, with notes on elephant metabolism. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 140:523–549.
• Clauss, M., R. Frey, B. Kiefer, M. Lechner-Doll, W. Loehlein, C. Polster, G. E. Rössner, and W. J. Streich. 2003. The maximum attainable body size of herbivorous mammals: morphophysiological constraints on foregut, and adaptations of hindgut fermenters. Oecologia 136:14–27.
• Damuth, J. 1990. Problems in estimating body masses of archaic ungulates using dental measurements, pp. 229–253, in Damuth, J., and B. J. MacFadden, (eds.), Body Size in Mammalian Paleobiology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Economos, A. C. 1981. The largest land mammal. Journal of Theoretical Biology 89:211–215.
• Fortelius, M., and J. Kappelman. 1993. The largest land mammal ever imagined. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 108(1):85–101.
• Granger, W., and W. K. Gregory. 1935. A revised restoration of the skeleton of Baluchitherium, gigantic fossil rhinoceros of central Asia. American Museum Novitates 787:1–4.
• Granger, W., and W. K. Gregory. 1936. Further notes on the gigantic extinct rhinoceros Baluchitherium from the Oligocene of Mongolia. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 72:1–73.
• Prothero, D. R., and R. M. Schoch. 2002. Horns, Tusks, and Flippers: The Evolution of Hoofed Mammals. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, 309 pp.
• Savage, R. J. G., and M. R. Long. 1986. Mammal Evolution: An Illustrated Guide. Facts on File Publications, New York, New York.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom
—Isaac Asimov

A few weeks ago, we heard in the news the chilling and alarming statement that Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chair of the House Science and Technology Committee, wants to subject all the scientific research grants of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to political scrutiny. No longer was it sufficient that the NSF conduct peer review of grants by experts in the field to determine whether they are worthy of funding. No, the House Committee has decided that they are better judges of good science that the scientific community itself, and they ought to be able to override the decisions of scientists who work in the field.

We’ve seen this kind of political interference in science before, but never at such a high level. Even more disturbing, the GOP members of the House Science and Technology Committee are not the kind of people that most of us would want judging the quality of science. They are nearly all science deniers of one sort or another. This committee includes such luminaries as Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia (an M.D., even!), who said (in a recent speech at the Liberty Baptist Church Sportsman’s Banquet):

“God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior. There’s a lot of scientific data that I found out as a scientist [note: Broun is NOT a real scientist] that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I believe that the Earth is about 9,000 years old. I believe that it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says. And what I’ve come to learn is that it’s the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually. How to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all our public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason, as your congressman, I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that.”

In addition to several other creationists on the panel, they also include Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner from Wisconsin. He’s one of the loudest climate-deniers in Congress, with a list of quotes showing he’s absorbed nearly every lie from the climate denier lobby. Or how about Congressman Ralph Hall from Texas, who

was asked about climate change and said, “I don’t think we can control what God controls.” He also said he agrees with Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) that climate scientists are involved in a conspiracy to receive research funding. When the reporter noted that a survey published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 97 percent of climate-science researchers agree that human activities have contributed to global warming, Hall responded, “And they get $5,000 for every report like that they give out,” adding, “I don’t have any proof of that. But I don’t believe ‘em.”

Or take Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, who still chatters on about the debunked idea that scientists were predicting global cooling in the 1970s. Or Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, from an extremely conservative district in southern California. He has said in recent months that

an earlier period of global warming may have been caused by “dinosaur flatulence.” Last year, after coming under fire for seeming to suggest that if global warming is real it could be addressed by cutting down trees (when in fact forests reduce global warming by absorbing atmospheric carbon), he issued a statement saying, “I do not believe that CO2 is a cause of global warming.”

These statements of scientific illiteracy and science denialism are appalling enough by themselves, but even scarier is the thought that they come from the members of the House Science and Technology Committee! Lamar Smith (another climate change denier) is the Chair, Rohrabacher is the Vice-Chair, and Hall, Sensenbrenner, Broun, and Brooks are all prominent members. Previous members included the infamous Missouri Republican Todd Akin, a creationist with rather peculiar views on human reproduction. How is it that the House Committee with the greatest influence over science funding and policy in this country is dominated by people with demonstrably false views about science? How is is that the clowns are being allowed to take over the circus?

[It's no surprise that most of these guys are climate deniers. In addition to climate denial being a party platform of the GOP, most of them received a major share of their campaign funds from the oil and gas industry. Lamar Smith received over $83,000 in 2012 alone from the oil industry, and over $342,000 from all energy industries since 1999. Ralph Hall's largest contributor by far was oil and gas, with $59,000 in the last year alone. Broun received $10,000 from oil and gas, even though he represents a district in Georgia with no oil resources. You can go to the website www.opensecrets.org to find a rundown on how many of the climate deniers in Congress are heavily subsidized by the energy industry.]

This is not the first time we’ve heard politicians making appallingly ignorant statements about the value of science. Last year, Sarah Palin made a fool of herself attacking fruit fly research that was actually essential to prevention of an infestation of important crops in the U.S. Or take the recent attacks on a project doing research on snails, which sounded trivial at first until the important benefits were explained. Nearly every time politicians target one specific proposal (usually amounting only a trivial cost), they are quickly schooled on the fundamentals of the science, and why the project was deemed worthy of support by people who actually know science (as opposed to the science deniers and science illiterates on the House Science Committee).

Perversely using the Orwellian name “High-Quality Science Act,” Smith and the other members of that committee are now proposing new criteria for decisions about funding NSF grants, specifically that they “advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science.” However, we already spend a huge part of our federal budget on national defense, and health is funded by the NIH, so there’s no need for the NSF (which funds pure, non-defense related, non-health related, non-commercial science) to do the same. Besides, NSF grants already have that criterion built into them. When I wrote my last few grant proposals, “intellectual merit” was no longer sole criterion for funding, but we also had to discuss the “broader impacts” to the scientific community and society in our grants. When I served on NSF panels that looked at all the reviews and made the recommendations for funding, those “broader impacts” on society made a lot of difference on what grants actually get funded. That’s not a trivial task, since most branches of the NSF fund at most 20% to 30% of the proposals they receive, and lots of excellent, world-famous scientists get turned down routinely.

But this raises a larger question: how are we to know which research will advance society? As I pointed out in a previous post, “pure” science which follows curiosity and doesn’t need to justify its benefit to society is where nearly all the great breakthroughs in science occur. Many of the greatest discoveries are made by accident, by serendipity, and cannot be predicted or anticipated by the researcher trying to justify their work in a grant proposal. When we fund pure research, we make unanticipated discoveries that have been shown to pay off at least 20 times as much as they cost. If we clamp down on pure research and only fund projects which have obvious practical societal benefits, we will choke all the creativity and sense of exploration from science, and guarantee that we will no longer be the ones who make the next great, unanticipated discovery or breakthrough. Members of the scientific community who do the grant review process know this—but its clear from their track record that politicians don’t.

In a Slate blog, “Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait put it clearly:

This is not a joke. Smith wants politics to trump science at the National Science Foundation. This prompted a brilliantly indignant letter from Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), who calls this idea “destructive” to science. She’s right. What Smith is doing strongly reminds me of Lysenkoism, when the Soviet government suppressed science on genetics and evolution that didn’t toe the party line. In these attacks on the NSF, a few lines of research have been highlighted that sound silly out of context. We’ve seen this before from those on the far right who attack science, from Sarah Palin to the Wall Street Journal. But when you look more deeply into the research you usually find it’s actually quite important, leading to new insights in biology, medicine, and more. While government funds science and should have oversight to make sure that funding is fairly granted, the best people to make the decisions about what constitutes good science are the scientists themselves, not agenda- and ideologically-driven politicians. And there’s a bigger picture here as well. The entire endeavor of science must be allowed the freedom to pursue ideas wherever they lead, and must have the flexibility to pursue ideas that may not pan out. From a financial view, the ones that work invariably subsidize the ones that don’t. We can’t know in advance what lines of research will yield results, but the ones that do succeed benefit us, increasing our knowledge vastly and leading to a better understanding of the world. That’s a critical human endeavor, even ignoring the vast, overwhelming material benefit we get from scientific advances. And the huge return on investment we get as well. What Smith is advocating is incredibly dangerous. When a society’s government starts dictating what can and cannot be investigated, scientific and creative progress stalls. Lysenko’s work, advocated by Stalin, led to the USSR falling almost irretrievably behind other, more progressive countries; ones like the United States. That was a hard-won lesson in history for the Soviets, but apparently lost on many current American politicians.

This, of course, does not mean that the consensus must be correct, but (along with other data) it makes it unreasonable to claim that there is no consensus, or that there is significant scientific controversy on this topic. In fact, the 97% figure exactly matches prior surveys. Many scientific organizations have also officially endorsed this consensus.

One of the common methods of deniers is to pretend as if there is a raging scientific controversy when in fact there is a solid consensus. Creationists, for example are constantly trying to portray evolution as a “theory in crisis,” when in fact it is doing quite well, thank you.

The study employed an interesting methods. They reviewed 12,000 peer-reviewed published papers on topics relevant to climate change. They then tabulated, for those papers in which the researchers expressed a clear opinion about climate change, whether or not they supported the conclusion of anthropogenic global warming. In over 97% of cases they did.

From the abstract:

We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.

No survey is ever perfect – whenever you evaluate a subset of people in order to draw conclusions about the larger group, there is the possibility of selection bias. In this case one might argue that scientists who reject anthropogenic global warming are less likely to express those views in a peer-reviewed paper, or to have such views published.

This method, however, is reasonable. They also backed this up with another phase of the study in which they invited authors to rate their own research and opinions, and 97.2% endorsed the consensus of global warming. While it’s possible to quibble about this number, given the strong agreements among various methods around the 97% figure, it’s difficult to argue that the true figure is significantly different.

Why do we care about the consensus? Isn’t this just an argument from authority? Well, yes and no.

It seems reasonable, especially for those who consider themselves skeptics, to argue that facts and logic should determine a scientific question, not authority. Or that we should “let the facts speak for themselves.”

Unfortunately, facts cannot speak for themselves. Scientific evidence needs to be examined, rated for quality, interpreted, and put into a broader context. There is often no simple connect from facts to conclusions in science – background knowledge, knowledge of the processes of science, familiarity with critical thinking, logical pitfalls, and the effects of bias on interpretation are all necessary to come to a reliable conclusion about what those facts are telling us.

Different individuals are likely to have different biases and knowledge bases, and therefore may come to different conclusions about the same set of data. No individual, therefore, can be the ultimate authority on any scientific question.

The power of consensus is that individual quirks and biases will tend to average out. The consensus of scientific opinion, therefore, is a way to gauge the agreement and power of the scientific evidence.

The only other alternative is to evaluate all the scientific evidence first hand and come to your own conclusion. The potential pitfall here, however, is that individuals who are not experts in the relevant field believe that they can do this by examining secondary sources, such as popular writings on the topic. This is naive, however.

In order to really understand the evidence base for any scientific question you need to be able to read the technical literature first hand, and have a reasonable working knowledge of this literature. You then need to challenge your understanding of the evidence by discussing it with other experts, who may be familiar with evidence you missed, or have a perspective you do not. In other words – you have to engage intimately and extensively with the evidence and with the community.

In order to do this you pretty much have to be a full-time scientist focusing on the relevant area of study.

It seems absurd, when you really look at it, to substitute your own opinion based upon reading a smattering of simplified popular writings for that of the consensus of scientific experts who live and breathe the science.

What typically happens is that individuals who reject the consensus often come to the conclusion that science itself is broken. They reject science and the institutions of science, in order to justify their rejection of the particular consensus on which they disagree. Scientists, they believe, are therefore closed-minded, corrupt, or mindlessly follow the herd.

This is little more than ad-hoc special pleading, however (they are just making it up). Anyone who works with actual scientists would find such statements to be hopelessly out of sync with reality. Sure, there are individual scientists who are corrupt or closed-minded, but most vigorously defend their own intellectual independence.

Conclusion

For the average person (someone who is not a working expert in a particular field) the consensus of scientific opinion must be taken very seriously, and should not be casually tossed aside. In grappling with any scientific question, you should first try to understand what the scientific consensus is, how confident are scientists, is there any significant and viable minority view, and why scientists have come to that conclusion.

Humility and reason dictate that the consensus view should be given appropriate respect. I am not discouraging anyone from trying to understand the evidence first hand, in fact I recommend it. Learn and understand the primary evidence as much as your interest, time, and ability take you. Just be extremely cautious before you believe your opinions trump those of hundreds or thousands of working scientists.

With respect to anthropogenic global warming, there is a solid and confident consensus. You should be especially cautious of rejecting this consensus because it does not agree with your political world view.

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When I started my graduate career at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1976, I soon realized that I had stumbled upon an incredible opportunity. In addition to the world-famous fossil halls that have amazed generations of visitors, there are at least a hundred times as many fossils stored in research collections for study by qualified scientists. This is where the real work of paleontology takes place: specialists dedicated to the study of one group of organisms spending weeks to months to years examining every fossil in the collection, trying to reconstruct their anatomy, determine their relationships, and decipher what is the correct taxonomic name for any group of specimens. Without this fundamental work determining which species are valid, and when and where they lived, all other work in paleontology (especially computer models which are based on counting taxa studied by others and compiling them into databases) is “garbage in, garbage out.”

The American Museum is particularly important for such research, because it has the original collections of pioneering paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, collected from the 1870s and 1880s, plus the huge numbers of fossils accumulated by its legendary paleontologists from 1895-1935 (Henry Fairfield Osborn, William Diller Matthew, Walter Granger, and others), as well as later collections obtained by the most brilliant paleontologist of the twentieth century, George Gaylord Simpson. The collections of dinosaurs, other reptiles, birds, amphibians, fish, and other vertebrates huge, but they are all outstripped by the gigantic collection of (mainly North American) fossil mammals. In the 1920s, the millionaire Childs Frick (son of the robber baron Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie’s partner) became interested in the origin of the mammals he used to shoot on big-game hunts. Starting about 1930 and for the next 35 years he used his wealth to pay for field crews to work year-round in the important fossil beds of the western United States, making giant collections from key localities and finding many more localities. Consequently, where we used to have just isolated teeth and jaws and maybe a skull of most mammals, the Frick Collection usually has many complete skulls or skeletons. This allows a paleontologist to see the complete anatomy of a particular mammal, examine variability within a population, and determine a much more informed and modern classification of names that had been based on isolated scraps of teeth described a century ago. Thus, most of the major groups of North American fossil mammals have to be completely restudied using the huge Frick Collection before we can make any conclusions about how many species existed, and when and where they lived.

To give you a sense of the size of the collection, there is a separate wing to house just the fossil mammals, built in an interior courtyard so it is invisible to the public. The fundraising and construction was started after Frick died in 1965, and not completed until shortly before I arrived in 1976. The Frick Wing has 10 floors altogether: an entire floor of rhinos, an entire floor of camels, an entire floor of horses, an entire floor of mastodonts and mammoths, three more floors of other groups of mammals, and the top three floors are the prep lab, the offices, classrooms, library, teaching collections, and other essential spaces. The horse floor is largely studied and published, but almost nothing has been done on the camel floor or the mastodont floor. When I arrived in 1976, the Museum’s curatorial assistant Dr. Earl Manning took me under his wing and introduced me to the study of North American rhinos, which had been neglected since the 1920s. At first we worked on projects together, but after he left in 1980, I continued working on the rhinos for another 25 years, finally publishing my comprehensive book-length monograph on them in 2005. Where once rhinos were a mess of invalid species, outdated names, mistaken identifications, and uncertain relationships, now they are one of the best-documented groups of North American mammals. Using my book, you can identify any bone of any North America rhino to genus and species.

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In addition to the North American rhinos, I spent a lot of time looking at the gigantic specimens of the huge hornless Asian rhinos known as indricotheres. The American Museum has the best collection of them outside Beijing and Moscow, acquired by the legendary Central Asiatic Expeditions to Mongolia in the 1920s. After my 2005 North American rhino book, I thought it might be fun to write about these amazing creatures, which weighed as much as 20 metric tonnes, larger than the largest elephant or mammoth. When I had a sabbatical in late 2011, I finally had a chance to sit down and write a book about them, and the book has just appeared.

The first thing to realize is that much about what you see about extinct animals on TV documentaries is artistic guesswork, not based on any hard evidence. In the case of indricotheres, we have only the bones, and only partial skeletons at that. There is no direct information about the color of the animal, skin texture, what it ate, how it walked or how it behaved or sounded. All of this information, so often a crucial part of the CG animations that now dominate most documentaries about prehistoric life, are entirely conjectural and cannot be determined directly from the bones. The usual approach is to model indricotheres on the basis of living rhinos, with thick gray hairless skins with numerous folds, although we have no skin impressions or mummified specimens to test this idea, one way or another. The behavior and colors and sounds of the animals in these CG animations (such as in the documentary “Walking with Prehistoric Beasts”) are completely imaginary, and have no basis in any real-world data. Although most scientists are aware of this, a surprising number of people who watch these TV shows are stunned when they find out that so much of the show is pure fiction for entertainment, rather than science. The only real science in these shows is the interviews of expert paleontologists, and the pictures of bones and fossil localities.

Although most of the stuff you see in CG animations of prehistoric beasts (including the indricotheres) is mostly guesswork, there are living analogues that can give us some guidance about indricothere biology. The best models might be elephants, which approach indricotheres in body size. There are certain constraints about life at such large body size for elephants that must also apply to the indricotheres:

Thermoregulation: Elephants have a huge body volume and mass compared to their surface area (remember, volume increases as a cube while area only increases as a square). As the debate about hot-blooded dinosaurs back in the 1980s revealed, such huge animals with an endothermic physiology (that is, they generate their own body heat from metabolism) have a severe problem getting rid of excess body heat, especially if they live in warm climates. Living elephants have huge ears as radiators to shed excess body heat from their bloodstream, and it is reasonable to infer that indricotheres did too. African elephants and rhinos and hippos spend much of their daytime resting in the shade or wallowing in waterholes and mud puddles to cool down, and so must have the indricotheres. Elephants, rhinos and hippos feed and move mainly at night, as indricotheres must have done. Elephants and rhinos both have largely naked skin since hair holds in body heat, which is why such elephant-like naked gray skin seems appropriate for indricotheres. Large-bodied endothermic mammals are in a constant battle to dump body heat and avoid overheating.

Digestion: There are certain other constraints for large-bodied herbivores as well. All herbivores eat large amounts of cellulose in their diets, which is a relatively indigestible carbohydrate. Most plant eaters must use some kind of specialized gut bacterium in their digestive tract to break down the cellulose and release the nutrients. Such a breakdown requires fermentation, and takes time to absorb the nutrients from the fermentation process into the lining of the intestines. There are two basic types of herbivore digestion: foregut fermenters and hindgut fermenters.

The only living foregut fermenters are the ruminant artiodactyls (camels, cattle, sheep, goats, antelopes, deer, and pronghorns), which do this by “ruminating” using a four-chambered stomach. The first chamber, the rumen, is a digestive vat full of bacteria, so that when they swallow a bite of partially chewed plant material, it goes immediately into the rumen where it begins bacterial breakdown. Later, when they are resting, ruminants regurgitate some of the contents of their rumen back into their mouths, where they can “chew their cud” and break the material down further, before swallowing it again. By the time the food reaches the lining of their intestines, it is highly broken down into nutrients and easily absorbed. Thus, ruminants use nearly every bit of their food efficiently, and can survive on relatively small amounts of good-quality vegetation. But if they eat too much high-quality vegetation, they can become bloated and their rumen can swell and even rupture and kill them with all the gas released from the rapid bacterial fermentation.

The remaining herbivorous mammals are hindgut fermenters. These include the perissodactyls (odd-toed hoofed mammals, today including the horses, tapirs and rhinos), the elephants, the non-ruminant artiodactyls (pigs, peccaries, and hippos), and other herbivores such as rabbits and some primates. Instead of a highly specialized foregut with a rumen, they have the normal mammalian digestive tract, with an esophagus, acid-filled stomach, and then intestines for absorption. Most have a pouch off the intestine called a caecum that is the primary location of bacterial fermentation.  Lacking a rumen, the hindgut fermenters pass the mostly undigested cellulose through the digestive tract until it reaches the caecum, but bacterial fermentation only just starts in the caecum before the food goes through the remaining intestines and is then excreted. Consequently, they get relatively little nutrition out of each bite of fodder, and must eat much larger volumes of mostly low-quality food (especially grasses) to get enough to live on. Most hindgut fermenters, like horses, rhinos, and elephants, are by necessity be high-volume low-efficiency eaters, and eat huge volumes of material just to survive, since they are so poor at extracting the nutrients. When you see the feces of these animals (like the “road apples” of horses), they are typically full of undigested plant matter compared to the “cowpies” of a ruminant, or the tiny pellets of a deer or pronghorn. Rabbits are a special case. If you have ever kept rabbits in a hutch, you will notice that they eat their own feces. This gives them a chance to run the food through their gut a second time after the bacterial fermentation has had time to work, and get more nutrition this way.

For these reasons, there are certain things we can say with confidence about indricothere feeding dynamics. Because they were not ruminant artiodactyls, they had to be hindgut fermenters, like horses, other rhinos, and elephants, so they must have consumed and processed huge amounts of food in a day, just as elephants do now. Their feces would have been full of undigested plant material, just like those of a horse or an elephant. Like almost all large herbivores, they must have had a big part of their abdomen occupied by their large digestive tract, giving them a large bulging “gut” like that of an elephant. The fermentation in their gut, by the way, creates additional body heat, which exacerbates the problems they have of producing excess body heat to begin with.

Locomotion and Home Range: As an animal increases in body size, the stresses on their limb bones increases even more because of the power of three expansion of volume and the corresponding mass increase. Models of the dynamics of large dinosaurs show that they could not have run very fast, or their limbs would break. Modern elephants also cannot run very fast compared to true specialized runners like antelopes, horses or cheetahs. Their maximum speed in an all-out charge clocked at only 18 mph (29 kph), but their normal walking speed is about 6-12 mph (10-19 kph). Remember, they have an advantage in their speed because they have much longer limbs and strides than any other animal. Given that indricotheres were just slightly larger than modern elephants, we can predict that they too would have not been fast runners, but ambled along at a moderate pace like that of an elephant.

However, African elephants are capable to moving enormous distances (typically 20 miles or 32 km) in the course of a day, migrating from one food source to another. To support their food needs of about 300 pounds (140 kg) of food they consume in the 16 hours of each day they eat, elephants need huge home ranges of 300-600 square miles (750-1500 square km). Consequently, huge home ranges and long migrations would be expected of indricotheres as well, especially if they lived in a harsh desert scrub setting with scarce food sources that were easily wiped out. A similar model has been proposed for the large sauropod dinosaurs, which lived in a scrubby, semi-arid habitat in the Late Jurassic time (Morrison Formation), and probably roamed in small herds from one patch of trees to another.

Predators and Life Habits: Certain other ecological parameters are also dictated by the giant body sizes of elephants and indricotheres. Once they reach a large enough body size, healthy modern elephants have no natural predators—not even lions or tigers are foolish enough to tackle them. (This has all changed now with human poaching, which has nearly wiped out elephants in the wild). Only the babies and young calves are vulnerable to predators, and in elephant herds, there is a strong matriarchal hierarchy so that every calf is closely protected not only by its mother, but also by its sisters, grandmother, aunts, great-aunts, and other close female relatives. All non-human predation of elephants in the wild occurs when predators catch vulnerable calves.  Almost a quarter of the calves born to Asian elephants are lost to tigers before they reach their first birthday. If indricotheres maintained small herds in the elephant mode, such freedom from predation except for the young would also be true. However, in the Bugti beds there are gigantic crocodiles (Crocodylus bugtiensis) that are 10-11 m (33-36 feet) long! These would have been large enough to attack almost any indricothere that might be at the edge of the river to drink. Indeed, many of the specimens from the Bugti beds have crocodile tooth marks on them.

There is also a well-known relationship between the gestation period, size of the litter, and body size. Elephants have the longest gestation period of any land creature (22-24 months, or about two years). The females do not reach sexual maturity until they are ten years old, and may produce a single calf every three to four years, the slowest reproductive rate of any mammal. Such could be expected of indricotheres as well, since growing to such large body sizes, and having such large calves, is very similar to the constraints on elephant reproduction. Like elephants, indricotheres would be expected to grow quickly at first, then grow relatively slowly once they reached maturity.

There is also a strong relationship between body size, metabolic rate, and blood pressure. An elephant has a relatively slow metabolic rate. Its heart beats only 30 times per minute, while humans have a pulse of 60 beats per minute, and hamsters have a pulse rate of over 450 beats per minute! The indricothere heart would have had a pulse rate close to that of an elephant, but probably a bit higher. This is because it must have also been able to exert a blood pressure close to the 300 mm Hg that giraffes produce (humans typically have a blood pressure of 120) to be able to lift its head so far above the ground without fainting.

Finally, there is also a well-known scaling of longevity with body size, with larger animals (and their slower heart rates) living longer. A rodent typically lives no longer than 3-5 years, a cat or a goat about 15 years, pig or monkey about 20-25 years, and a cow or giraffe about 25-30 years. Elephants typically live 35-50 years in the wild (at least they did until recent years, when poaching has nearly wiped them out), and the record is 71 years. Similar lifespans could be expected of indricotheres as well.