Skepticblog

The “end of the world” allegedly predicted by the Mayan calendar in December 2012 may be a myth, but 2012 had no shortage of catastrophes. We had the warmest year in history in North America, with record-breaking heat waves through much of the summer, and drought conditions approaching those of the Dust Bowl years. A July heat wave melted 97% of the surface of the Greenland ice sheet, the worst melting since satellite monitoring began 30 years ago. Arctic sea ice cover in September was at an the all-time low, beating the record set only back in 2007. 2011 was not much better, with Hurricane Irene flooding the Northeast, a large number of killer tornadoes (including deadly storms in Missouri and Alabama), 500-year floods in Nashville and Duluth, and severe wildfires all over the parched Rocky Mountains. It seems that the news is full of one unprecedented weather event after another, and those jokes about snowy winters a few years ago seem lame when most of the U.S. population sweltered through the heat waves of 2012. (continue reading…)

Recently Skeptical Inquirer writer Benjamin Radford posted a question to the Facebook Group thread for Skeptic magazine’s cryptozoology-themed podcast MonsterTalk on the topic of the infamous Patterson-Gimlin film (purported to show a sasquatch striding across a sandbar in the woods). What are we to make, Radford wondered, of claims that the film cannot be duplicated because it would be too expensive, too difficult technically—or perhaps even impossible to recreate due to the anatomical limits of human actors? I responded to say that all such arguments are in my opinion baloney, but that this does not necessarily imply that attempts to recreate the film to the satisfaction of fair viewers actually ever will succeed. Even if the original was a crude hoax accomplished by cheap, simple means (as I suspect) it may still be the case that it can never be matched.

The reason goes well beyond Patterson or Bigfoot or cryptozoology, and right to the heart of artistic creation. It’s a truth I learned in painting and photography, a truth I live with every day in my work as as a writer and illustrator: sometimes you just get lucky. Sometimes things just work. There’s no great reason for it, no secret key you can turn a second time. Sometimes lightning strikes—and then it is gone. As an artist you seize those moments of magic, knowing you cannot get them back.

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UK UFO enthusiasts recently called a meeting to discuss the future of the UFO movement, specifically whether or not there is going to be one. Numbers of groups and members are plummeting as enthusiasm for talking about the latest Chinese lantern to be misidentified as a flying saucer is waning.

If history is any guide this is just a temporary generational downturn, and interest in UFOs will eventually rebound. It is possible, however, that the most recent decline is more than just the usual cycle. Perhaps the internet has changed the game, allowing for rapid turnaround of possible UFO stories. Before the ink would be dry on traditional print media, the new social media can debunk UFO stories and nip them in the bud.

Here is an excellent example: Mile High mystery: UFO sightings in sky over Denver. The beginning of the news report (it is just crappy local news, but it’s a Fox affiliate which means such stories can be picked up nationally) has all the red flags for sensational mystery mongering:

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Together at Last!

If you didn’t watch the Nov. 8th episode of “Inside Edition,” you missed an expose of “America’s favorite psychic” and star of the popular “Long Island Medium” television “reality” series, Theresa Caputo. (continue reading…)

It’s my favorite new logical fallacy, the “Appeal to Monsanto”, the world’s largest producer of biotech agriculture seeds. This is the logic that compels many anti-GMO activists to reply to any argument in support of biotech crops with “So you love Monsanto?”

It’s so wonderful because it combines many other logical fallacies into one, and is thus a great time saver. For example:

• It poisons the well (cloaks a viewpoint with negative weasel words) by associating the scary, evil word Monsanto.
• It’s a non-sequitur (a logical association that does not follow). IF (a) THEREFORE (b). IF (genes can be used to confer traits such as drought resistance) THEREFORE (I love Monsanto).
• It’s a straw man (misrepresenting what I said into something that’s easy to argue against). If I had actually said “I love Monsanto”, then plenty of rational arguments are available to show that’s a bad idea.
• It’s an ad hominem attack on my argument (the argument is wrong because of who the person is that made it). Whatever I said about biotech must be wrong since “I love Monsanto”.
• It’s a red herring (an irrelevancy to distract from the subject under discussion). Monsanto does not necessarily have anything to do with any given science-based discussion of the merits of what can and should be done with direct genetic manipulation. (continue reading…)

Last winter I received an email from a producer of a BBC reality series, “Conspiracy Road Trip.” The premise of the series is that the host (Andrew Maxwell, a British comedian) travels with five young believers in some crazy idea, taking them to key locations and putting them in front of evidence that challenges their beliefs. They had already done episodes on UFO nuts, the 7/7 bombings in London, and 9/11 Truthers, so naturally the next group of crazies in line were the creationists. The producer explained that he wanted me and a number of other scientists to meet at important locations (I was to film on the rim of the Grand Canyon) and show these creationists the actual scientific evidence, and let them squirm in front of the cameras. After I checked around to make sure it wasn’t some stealth creationist documentary like Ben Stein’s pathetic “Expelled” (which ambushed its subjects like Michael Shermer, Eugenie Scott, P.Z. Myers, and Richard Dawkins under false pretenses), I agreed to travel out there to meet them. Even though I’ve battled creationists in debates and TV panels before, and done documentaries in the field on prehistoric animals, I’d never done something that combined the two. I’ve written and argued enough with creationists to know them and their arguments (and the scientific reality) down pat. Still, I prepared for anything. I even brought along a bunch of real fossils to pass around, and put my key diagrams on a series of huge laminated flip charts.

So in mid-April 2012, they flew me out to Vegas, where the first glitch occurred: they told me to go to the wrong hotel, and it took until later that evening before I reached the right one. Once I did so, I went out to a late dinner with the producer, who looked over my materials, and walked me through his plans for filming. He wanted to hold off my confrontation with them until the cameras were rolling, so he asked me to try to avoid them at breakfast in our hotel that morning. This was nearly impossible since they were only group at breakfast, and one of them recognized me while we waited in the airport. Then we flew out of Henderson, Nevada, airport on small prop planes to see the entire Grand Canyon from the air (an amazing flight that I had never done before). The five creationists and Andrew Maxwell, plus the director and two cameramen were in one plane, while the producer and another camerawoman were in a smaller plane with me. After landing on the South Rim airport, the five creationists then rode in a mini-bus to lunch at Grand Canyon Village (where they tried to chat me up again), then we all went out to Lipan Point on the South Rim, one of the best places for an unobstructed view of the eastern Grand Canyon with no fences and almost no crowds or background noise. After they got a chance to glimpse over the rim, the film crew set me up back to the Canyon and began our first segment. (continue reading…)

Why there cannot be a deity beyond the natural world
that science can discover

Order the new paperback
from skeptic.com

On Saturday, November 3, 2012 I spoke at the big atheists’ conference in Mexico City on The Believing Brain, my latest book in which I develop a theory to explain not just why people believe weird things, but why people believe anything at all, including and especially god beliefs. (I don’t know if the talk will be posted Online but it is an expanded version of my TED talk or this longer version.

In the audience was the biologist Jerry Coyne, the author of one of the best defenses of evolutionary theory ever penned: Why Evolution is True. He posted a blog about my lecture in which, surprisingly (given his staunch militancy for atheism), he expressed a difference with me in the possibility of there being a God. He writes:

While I respect Shermer’s view that invoking aliens or some unknown explanation avoids a “god of the gaps” argument for unknown and miraculous or divine phenomena, I still feel as a scientist that the existence of a true supernatural god is a theoretical possibility, and that there is some possible evidence that could convince me of it. (I’ve described that evidence before; needless to say, none has been found.) Yes, such miraculous evidence for a god might eventually be found to be due to aliens or the like, but my acceptance of a god would always be a provisional one, subject to revision upon further evidence. (We might find aliens behind the whole thing.) After all, every scientific “truth” is provisional.

Jerry’s allusion to alien gods is in reference to my brief summary in the Q&A of what I originally proposed in a 2002 Scientific American column entitled “Shermer’s Last Law” (title written with tongue firmly in cheek because naming laws after oneself is a sure sign of crankdom (continue reading…)

Tomorrow (Tuesday November 6th) is election day in the US. The talk of the pundits generally focuses on the fact that this is a very close election and, despite rhetoric from both candidates about bipartisanship, the country seems to be extremely politically polarized. The consensus of opinion is that Democrats and Republicans over the last couple of decades have become more homogeneous, more tribal, and more extreme. (Meanwhile the number of people who identify as independents has increased.) For me political campaigns are a massive exercise in confirmation bias – watching both sides spin the same data in completely opposite directions.

There is no shortage of theories as to why this is the case, but there is also the separate question of what can be done to break, or at least moderate, this polarization. In a series of experiments psychologists have found that slowing down the process of evaluating a political question, and engaging people’s abstract thinking, moderates their political views.

In the first series of experiments Preston and Hernandez found that by giving subjects information in a hard to read font their opinions would be more thoughtful and moderate. They gave two groups a description of a defendant in a capital murder case. One description praised the defendant’s character while the other criticized it. They were then given “sketchy” evidence suggesting the defendant’s guilt. The two groups interpreted the ambiguous evidence differently, with those reading a positive description of the defendant’s character less often finding the evidence sufficient to convict.

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According to some estimates, on Halloween of last year (2011), the population of humans on this planet  passed the 7 billion threshold. Today, humans (along with their domesticated animals) are the most abundant large vertebrates on the planet, and the problem of human overpopulation (and its effects on the overexploitation of the planet’s resources) is one that vexes people worldwide. It’s hard to imagine the idea that humans have not always been so numerous, or that we have not always been the dominant large species on the planet. But it was not always so. As I describe in my recent book Catastrophes!, about 74,000 years ago a volcanic eruption occurred on Mt. Toba in Sumatra which caused a global “volcanic winter” that nearly wiped out humans completely.

Studies of the ash deposits in the adjacent ocean floor around Sumatra show that Toba ejected 2800 cubic km of material. It was believed to be the largest volcanic explosion in the last 25 million years. It released the energy equivalent of 1 gigaton of TNT, forty times larger than our largest nuclear bomb explosion, and about 3000 times as powerful as the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Toba injected so much ash into the stratosphere that the ash clouds blocked the sun’s radiation. It caused a “volcanic winter” that lasted almost 10 years, and caused global temperature to drop by 3-5°C (5-9°F), further amplifying the cold of the ongoing Ice Ages. The tree line and snow line dropped 3000 m (9000 feet) lower than today, making most high elevations uninhabitable. Global mean temperatures dropped to only 15°C after 3 years, and took a full decade to recover to pre-eruption temperatures. Ice cores from Greenland show the evidence of this dramatic cooling in the trapped ash and ancient air bubbles, although so far it has not been detected in Antarctic ice cores (Rampino and Self, 1993a, 1993b; Robock et al., 2009). (continue reading…)

Two Charlatans: Edward & Probst 2012

The Good News: We may have reached the tipping point with the tv talk show circus and their propensity for spreading woo and rediculous paranormal trash. With the likes of Witch Dr. Phil and Anderson Cooper continuing to give positive accolades to  mediums, psychic detectives and all manner of un-proven nonsense in their never ending quests for tabloid ratings success, a new face has emerged who just might have the balls to stand up and say enough to all the baloney. (continue reading…)