Clancy’s area of primary interest is not skeptical investigation of paranormal claims, but false memory. To perform an ”honest broker” service as thorough and reliable guides to the evidence on paranormal topics, skeptical investigators are ethically obliged to seriously consider the (unlikely) possibility of paranormal phenomena. In her own work with abductees, Clancy’s obligations were different. She felt justified in taking it pretty much for granted that her subjects had not been kidnapped by space aliens. Abductees were, for Clancy, a proxy group to allow her to examine questions related to a separate population’s “recovered” memories of childhood sexual abuse.

Research into abuse is of course very complicated—and ethically fraught. It is surrounded by tension and the potential for harm for the simple reason that abuse really happens. By contrast, Clancy wrote,

…alien abductees were people who had developed memories of a traumatic event that I could be fairly certain had never occurred. A major problem with my research on false-memory creation by victims of alleged sexual abuse was the fact that it was almost impossible to determine whether they had, in fact, been abused. I needed to repeat the study with a population that I could be sure had ‘recovered’ false memories. Alien abductions seemed to fit the bill.¹

I won’t comment on Clancy’s research in regard to sexual abuse—it is not my area of expertise, and I have not read Clancy’s book on that topic—but I was very struck by her sympathy for abductees.

Throughout the book, she took pains to emphasize that alien abductees have ordinary mental health (with “little evidence that this was a particularly psychopathological group”²) and that their beliefs are fundamentally understandable—given the information they have to work with.

The disconnect between these experiencers and their critics is that only one group has access to what appears to abductees to be the key information in their own cases: the overwhelming subjective reality of their personal, visceral experiences. So real are abduction memories to those who hold them, in fact, that this subjective reality can in some sense be quantified.

And we don’t have to accept only the abductees’ word for it when they say they feel powerful emotions as they remember their abductions. Laboratory data confirm it. My colleagues and I…recorded the heart rate, sweating, breathing, and muscle tone of abductees while they recalled their abduction memories. Not only were the physiological reactions of abductees similar to those of documented trauma victims, such as combat vets and rape victims; in some cases, they were even more extreme.³

Think about that one for a moment.

However, abductees do not start with such overwhelmingly persuasive memories. As Clancy explained, “coming to believe one has been abducted by aliens doesn’t happen overnight. It progresses in fits and starts, through many stages, in which the possibility comes to seem more and more believable.”⁴ Victims first have an experience or series of experiences they find odd or difficult to explain; then they begin to assemble this strange data into a pattern, using the best explanatory framework available to them; eventually they may wind up in the hands of a hypnotherapist specializing in recovered memories of alien abduction; and then, finally, abduction memories emerge under the influence of hypnosis.

Recovered memory is a murky, complex area—too murky to explore in detail in a blog post. For today, I would like to focus on the period in an abductee’s development before vivid abduction memories are recovered—the period before they become part of a therapy relationship or support structure that may generate traumatic memories. In this early period, “abducted by aliens” is not a permanently cemented subjective reality for an abductee, but a suspicion or inference. Once one can literally remember being abducted, belief is essentially guaranteed. But how do people come to suspect that they might have been abducted? That is, for skeptics, a more interesting and fruitful question.

Everybody I spoke with had one thing in common: they’d begun to wonder if they’d been abducted only after they experienced things they felt were anomalous—weird, abnormal, unusual things. The experiences varied from person to person. They ranged from specific events (“I’ve wondered why my pajamas were on the floor when I woke up”) to symptoms (“I’ve been having so many nosebleeds—I never have nosebleeds”) to marks on the body (“I wondered where I got the coin-shaped bruises on my back”) to more or less fixed personality traits (“I feel different from other people, a loner—like I’m always on the outside looking in”). Sometimes they included all of the above. Though widely varied, the experiences resulted in the same general question: “What could be the cause?” In short, it appears that coming to believe you’ve been abducted by aliens is part of an attribution process. Alien-abduction beliefs reflect attempts to explain odd, unusual, and perplexing experiences.⁵ 

In many cases the original seed for later, hypnosis-recovered memories may be well-understood but frightening natural phenomena such as sleep paralysis (a sleep disruption in which awareness of surroundings returns before the dreaming and immobility of sleep are complete). According to Clancy, abductees with recovered memories find the sleep paralysis explanation “stunningly unpersuasive. After all, they’re the ones who were abducted—the ones who experienced the fear and the horror. And when you pit the cold, remote virtues of scientific data against the immediacy of personal experience, science is bound to lose.”⁶ 

At earlier stages, however, abductees have no such certainty. What they have are increasingly troubling questions that they need answered.

Consider an experiencer of sleep paralysis—any of countless millions. Paralyzed, hallucinating, terrified, perhaps sensing or seeing a presence in the room. How do people cope with the aftermath of such an unexpected and seemingly inexplicable experience? Well, they’re humans. They’re smart. They try on a range of explanations, and try to reason it out. But here’s the problem: everybody knows about ghosts and demons and aliens and gods, but only a few people know about the normal brain functioning that can mimic those phenomena. As Clancy put it,

When you are looking for the cause of an anomalous experience, your search is limited to the set of explanations you’ve actually heard of. For most of us, the set of possible explanations is far from complete. We’re unaware of the prevalence of sleep paralysis, sexual dysfunction, anxiety disorders, perceptual aberrations, chemical imbalances, memory lapses, and psychosomatic pain. But our set of possible explanations does include alien abduction, because everyone knows about aliens and their modus operandi (they come in the night, fill you with terror, kidnap you and erase your memories).⁷ 

Once people begin to try out the culturally available scripts (“Was it a ghost?” perhaps, or “Could I have been abducted?”) they find more and more pieces that seem to fit. The reason abductees endorse abduction, Clancy discovered, “is actually quite scientific: it is the best fit for their data—their personal experiences.”⁸  It is exactly their reasoning powers, their human legacy as puzzle-solvers, that leads them into that trap. And belief is a trap: once you start on that path, it’s very difficult to turn back.

But what might they do with more complete information—with an alternate explanatory framework—at an earlier point in their investigations? My personal, anecdotal experience is that this is one of the most powerful interventions that skeptics ever get the chance to perform: simply telling puzzled people that sleep paralysis (for example) is a thing. It’s a conversation I’ve had many times as people have described their sense of a ghostly presence at the foot of the bed, their terror at the blankets pulled back through supernatural influence, or other frightening classic experiences. “Well, I don’t know what happened to you. I wasn’t there, and I didn’t share your experience. But have you heard of something called ‘sleep paralysis’? It’s a normal event that can create experiences similar to the one you describe.” I’ve had strangers latch onto that like a drowning person grabs a rope, because, no, they hadn’t heard of that. They hadn’t heard any viable explanation except “I was attacked by a ghost” or “I am a lunatic.”

So the question I’ll leave you with today is this: what can skeptics do to ensure that our forums and media and comment threads and public presentations are welcoming to those people who most need reliable information about paranormal topics? What can we do to make the skeptics movement a safe place for vulnerable people who need our help—a safe place for people who (for example) think they were probably abducted by aliens?

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

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

—Henry Adams

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

—Jacques Barzun

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

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

And then there are those cases where you can never imagine how far your influence extends. I remember the first time I met one of our new students, Jingmai O’Connor, over ten years ago. She came to us from La Canada High School, one of the best in the state, with a fabulous grades, SATs, and lots of AP credits. When I first met her, she was a bit shy and timid (she still insists on calling me “Professor” even when most students are on a first-name basis with me), but also very motivated. She’s half-Chinese, half-Irish (hence the unique name), and her mother is a geologist affiliated with USC and teaching at Pasadena City College, so she knew about geology and was sure she wanted to be a volcanologist. I told her about the research opportunities in that direction, but as a frosh I suggested that she should take some more classes and see what else interested her.

Then she was in my “Evolution of the Earth” class and beat everyone for the highest grade. The same thing happened in Sedimentary Geology. But when she took Paleontology, I could see that she was really catching fire. Before the class was over, she came to tell me that she was much more interested in paleontology than in volcanology and wanted to do research with me.

This is always the challenging part. Because they are undergrads with only limited experience in paleontology, I can’t just make a suggestion and leave them alone to sink or swim as a Ph.D. student is expected to do. I want them to do as much of the work themselves as possible (given their backgrounds), but  I don’t want to give them a project that is too challenging for students of their level so they require me to most of the heavy lifting. Luckily, she asked if there were opportunities to work in China and use her ability to speak Mandarin, so I thought of my friend and colleague Dr. Xiaoming Wang at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. I emailed him for ideas, then we went to visit him, where he showed us this recently discovered mustelid jaw from Mongolia that was from a genus, Sthenictis, previously only known from North America. He had it in his collections but hadn’t worked on it yet, so he let Jingmai make it  her project. At my suggestion, she applied and won a Richter Fellowship to send her to China that summer, and then Dr. Wang took her with his crew to Inner Mongolia, where they collected paleomagnetic samples of the Pliocene Gaotege beds for dating in our lab. Since I  had lots of NSF and PRF grant money that year, I took her (and 2 other students) with me to New  York for a full week of work  in the American Museum of Natural History, where they each pursued different projects on the fossils there. Jingmai was able to compare her Mongolian specimen to every important Sthenictis specimen in North America (they were all in the American Museum, as they often are), and it was the foundation for her senior honors project the following year (eventually published with additional coauthors—Tseng et al., 2009). Meanwhile, she analzyed her Mongolian paleomagnetic samples in our Oxy Paleomagnetics Laboratory (one of the five best labs in the world), and we published the results (O’Connor et al., 2008). She did additional field work with me and 4 other students in my field crew in May 2003, when I gave them the grand tour of classic paleontological sites from New Mexico to the Big Badlands, all while collecting paleomagnetic samples for numerous projects for them all to work on (all of which have since been published). My favorite memory of her from that field trip was when it was her turn to drive, she’d play obnoxious Asian  techno-dance-pop on the CD player, even though she didn’t understand a word of what they were saying in Korean or Japanese.

Jingmai finished her senior honors comps project and graduated in just three years (she had a lot of AP credits). She had numerous choices for grad school, but decided to work with Dr. Luis Chiappe of the L.A. Natural History Museum on the earliest birds from the Cretaceous of China. Chiappe soon had her paid for doing research in Beijing for months at a time, studying all the crucial specimens that only the Chinese workers knew about. In only 5 years, she completed all her grad school requirements and defended her dissertation in 2009, so she went from high school to Ph.D. in only 8 years. She already has a number of papers published on Chinese enantiornithine birds (she’s the world’s expert on them now). She has spent two more years on postdocs in Beijing, continuing this research while trying to find a position in the horrible job market for paleontologists that they all must face.

So it is with great pride that I saw the latest bulletin over the science internet web pages: Jingmai’s latest project has just been published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and is all the rage in the science media right now. Among the many cool specimens she worked on in China is one of the peculiar feathered non-avian dinosaur Microraptor gui (the one with wing feathers on its legs as well as on its hands) with a smaller bird inside its stomach. This is not only proof that these feathered dinosaurs ate birds, but they probably were arboreal and good fliers if they did so.  There are all sorts of cool implications of this study, not only about the biology of feathered non-avian dinosaurs, but also about their behavior. Indeed, specimens with another fossil in their stomach contents are relatively rare, but are indisputable proof of prehistoric behavior, something we rarely get to see. I’m sure she’s swamped with the usual swarm of reporters trying to get interviews and stories from  her, and she’ll handle it very well. It’s a nice problem to have to face!

And as I read the stories on line, I think back to that day when she first came to my office and said she liked paleontology more than volcanology….

REFERENCES

O’Connor, J., Prothero, D.R., Wang, X., Li, Q., and Qiu, Z. 2008. Magnetic stratigraphy of the Pliocene Gaotege beds, Inner Mongolia. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 44:431-436.

Tseng, Z.J., O’Connor, J.K., Wang, X., and Prothero, D.R. 2009. The first Old World occurrence of the North American mustelid Sthenictis (Carnivora, Mammalia). Geodiversitas 31(4): 743-751.

The terrifying fortress headquarters of the "Evil Empire"

After finishing my research on the fossils, I  had a bit of spare time, so on invitation from Steve Newton and Josh Rosenau (who attended my Bay Area Skeptics talk), I decided to pay a visit to another cultural landmark: the headquarters of the National Center for Science Education. This is the chief non-profit organization in the U.S. that helps local school boards and scientists and teachers when creationism threatens their classrooms. If you read the creationists’ literature and the posts on the ID creationist Discovery Institute’s (DI) website, the NCSE is this monstrous organization which exerts mind-control over every scientist in the country, and forces them to robotically chant “I accept evolution.” According to the creationists, the NCSE is pure evil, suppressing the creationism message with its enormous staff and budget and power over all of U.S. science. In Ben Stein’s crappy little creationist propaganda film Expelled, Ben pays a visit to the gleaming  headquarters of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which occupies a vast amount of floor space in a brand-new office building downtown, and has a huge staff. Over and over again the DI staffers complain about how they scientific establishment is against them, and how the NCSE has so much more power, money, and influence than they do.

So it’s surprising to actually visit the headquarters of the NCSE and get an abrupt reality check. This bête noire of creationism occupies a small, rundown, poorly ventilated commercial space in a rough part of Oakland, surrounded by fundamentalist churches. Their tiny staff is paid a pittance compared to most academic or business salaries, and they occupy cramped cubicles cluttered with piles of work. About the only way you could tell it was not any other kind of typical non-profit organization was the decoration: creationist and evolutionary posters and “timelines of creation”, casts of famous hominid fossils and prehistoric animal models,  dolls and posters and bobble-heads of Charles Darwin, clever signs from many different school board protests, and over the staff calendar and status board, “You  are not in Kansas any more.”

The minions of the NCSE plot to overthrow creationism in these dungeon-like offices

Their “archive” is the garage next door, where they have stored the records of nearly every creationist outbreak of the past 40 years, as well as thousands of cassettes and VHS tapes of debates and creationist propaganda films, and copies of many classic works of creationism. They have file drawer after file drawer of nearly every major “outbreak” of the creationism flu over the years, so when another one occurs, they have the old records and the local contact information of the activists who fought the battle last time. I even got to see a copy of “Dr. Dino” Kent Hovind’s legendary “doctoral dissertation” (bought from a diploma mill), which was written at barely high school level. The highlight of the whole place is the one tiny bathroom that they all share: its walls are lined with hilarious (mostly misspelled and incoherent) creationist hate mail and kooky and creepy things from creationist cranks that arrive by the boxload every year.

So this is the headquarters of the “Evil Empire,” the “Mordor” that creationists fear above all others? This tiny organization is allegedly brainwashing the entire scientific community, and is capable of suppression and censorship on a massive scale? This tiny office is the monster that the DI people in Ben Stein’s movie feared most? If so, then the NCSE is a David against a Goliath of creationist organizations. According to their tax forms, the budget of the DI in Seattle is nearly five times the budget of the NCSE. The DI is a huge organization which is one of the loudest and most powerful in the creationist community, along with Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis megachurch and “museum” in Kentucky—both are many times richer and more powerful than the threadbare NCSE. The budgets of most of the fundamentalist megachurches and schools like Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University or the Seventh-Day Adventist schools dwarf even these. Yet all these mighty, rich organizations, with their TV shows on cable, and gigantic base of followers, fear the NCSE? The NCSE must be doing something right!

The stairway to the upper level of Mordor, um, the attic offices. It is decorated with an inflatable globe, a phylogeny poster, a geologic time scale running upstairs, and classic creationist posters.

What the NCSE demonstrates so beautifully is how a little well-targeted effort to spread the truth goes a long way. They don’t have the giant staff or budget to tackle every single creationist infection themselves, so they serve as a coordination center and clearinghouse, contacting the local scientists and teachers and activists and helping them organize, providing them with important information about the political aspects of fighting each particular battle, and helping them with arguments or documents which they can distribute to school boards or to citizens who get up to speak at a board meeting. Their staff is familiar with every political and scientific aspect of the evolution-creation wars. Their coordinators, like Josh Rosenau, are expert at getting the the local community to organize effectively, recruit allies, and make sure that they use their resources strategically in keeping school boards from making big mistakes. And they are led by the indefatigable Road Warrior, Dr. Eugenie Scott, who makes hundreds of appearances each year talking about creationism and science, and testifying before many different groups, all with her unshakably friendly, non-threatening, grandmotherly manner that gets people to listen and drop their hostility.

Despite the polls showing that about 40% of Americans agree with the major tenets of creationism, and the fact that there are many creationist organizations which are larger and more powerful, the NCSE has two key weapons: the law and reality. Fundamentalist ministers may be able to bamboozle their flocks with lies about evolution, but in the marketplace of scientific ideas, there is no longer any doubt that evolution is the way the world actually works.  Creationists may try to gussy up their ideas as “intelligent design” or hide behind the “teach the controversy” tactic, but the myths of illiterate Bronze Age shepherds are still a narrow religious dogma believed by only a minority of Americans. And that’s the ultimate line of defense: no matter what a local school board or state government does, if they leave ANY trail of their religious motivations for their acts (which is why the NCSE archive is crucial for detecting this), they run up against the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution, and ultimately the law is (at least in this case) on the side of scientific reality.

But it’s a never-ending struggle in this country. Creationists may not do any real science, or never learn any new arguments, or never concede that their old arguments were long ago debunked, but they are dedicated and well-funded and never give up. So the job of the NCSE never seems to end, and these hardworking underpaid staffers will never see  an empty “hot board map” showing no towns with current infections. Back in 1982, I was one of the original members of the Committees of Correspondence, Stanley Weinberg’s first effort to combat creationism in the Midwest, which evolved into the current NCSE. I’ve debated Gish and Meyer and Sternberg and a bunch of guys from ICR and DI, and written a book debunking their ideas about evolution and fossils. So I do what I can, but I don’t have the patience or time to do the job that the NCSE does. For that, I’m very grateful that they are there, fighting the good fight in the trenches, and manning the barricades that few scientists or teachers have time to deal with. We members of the skeptical and scientific community should all honor them for doing an essential job in trying to preserve the scientific integrity of our educational system, and fighting back against the untiring never-ending hordes of the forces of darkness, all while showing the patience of Job. And if you’re not already a member of NCSE, you should join, because they are doing this important job for all of us!

Still, personally, I had a hard time enjoying the circus. It seemed ghoulish to crack wise when so many hopes and dreams — and lives — hung in the balance. Belief, as we skeptics know all too well, cuts across lines. Beliefs unite the clever and the dull, the young and the old, the righteous and the wicked. Camping’s fear-mongering meant good people sold homes, quit jobs, broke up families, or spent the college money on apocalyptic billboards. I worried especially about the kids lying awake that week waiting for the end of the world, just as I worry about the kids suffering artificial, unnecessary terror over 2012.

Horrifyingly, we know we have reason to fear for those kids. In California, one woman cut her children’s throats with a box cutter in order to protect them from Camping’s predicted “tribulation.” She wasn’t the only one to take drastic measures.

My sense is that these deep human stakes were not lost on anyone, not really. For all their gallows humor, many of the skeptics and nontheists cracking jokes simultaneously empathized with Camping’s followers, and with all those who were disturbed by his $100-million scare campaign — a campaign funded in significant part by the life savings of those same followers.

It’s just that, what are you going to do in the face of something like that? Especially when, as was the case for most skeptics, word of the “Rapture” reached our ears just weeks or days before the scheduled event?

This got me thinking: could a situation like this be skepticism’s own “ticking bomb” scenario? With lives in the balance and no window for the slower, more effective techniques of education, does ridicule become the option of last resort?

Ridicule

I’ve long encouraged skeptics to avoid ridicule, empathize with believers, and craft our communications in as careful and ethical a way as we are able. Against this rather staid view of skepticism, I’ve considered an often (mis)quoted comment from one of skepticism’s founding spokespersons, the late, great Martin Gardner: “One horse laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.”

I’m a fan of Gardner’s, so this argument has long echoed for me. It feels right, truthful. But it’s important to realize that Gardner did not mean mockery should be the skeptic’s first response. In a rather grouchy passage from the introduction of Science: Good Bad and Bogus, Gardner explains that ridicule is a response he reserves for “extremes of unorthodoxy” — a response to a subset of committed ideologues. (Commenting on this, Paul Kurtz cautioned, “one horse-laugh in its appropriate setting may be worth a dozen scholarly papers, though never at the price of the latter.”¹)

Gardner borrowed the horse-laugh line (which Michael Shermer calls “Mencken’s Maxim”) from social critic H.L. Mencken. Some readers may not realize that it was part of a rant against the concept of “constructive criticism” itself:

Of a piece with the absurd pedagogical demand for so-called constructive criticism is the doctrine that an iconoclast is a hollow and evil fellow unless he can prove his case. Why, indeed, should he prove it? Is he judge, jury, prosecuting officer, hangman? He proves enough, indeed, when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing — that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts. The fact is enormously significant; it indicates that instinct has somehow risen superior to the shallowness of logic, the refuge of fools. The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians — and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse. The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by such learned dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe — that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.²

Here Mencken recommends this “heaving dead cats”-style protest instead of persuasion, rejecting any obligation to “prove his case.” I’ve long argued the opposite: that skeptics should voluntarily take up our own burden of proof, on the basis that, “Doubt is cheap. Finding out is hard.” After all, if we don’t care about solving mysteries or educating the public, why have skeptics at all? People can not believe stuff just fine on their own.

Mencken was uncomfortable with the very idea of pedagogy (“a sort of puerile magic, a thing of preposterous secrets, a grotesque compound of false premises and illogical conclusions”), and he seems to have caught Gardner — one of skepticism’s great teachers — on a bad day. Echoing Mencken’s elitism, Gardner argued,

Those who are in agreement do not need to be educated about such trivial matters, and trying to enlighten those who disagree is like trying to write on water. People are not persuaded by arguments to give up childish beliefs; either they never give them up or they outgrow them.³

Last Resort?

I don’t have much time for the “skeptics are smart, everyone else is a dunderhead” argument. Truth is, we’re all at the mercy of our sources, at the mercy of the things we are taught. No one is born knowing science or critical thinking.

But it is clearly possible to learn our way into a deep, deep hole. We can be taught that scaffolding concepts such as “ask for evidence” are vices rather than foundational virtues. We can be taught to hear skeptical language as violent, as necessarily pregnant with harsh meanings the speaker may not intend.

Once we find ourselves buried in those sorts of assumptions, it’s a difficult, slow process to dig ourselves out. It takes time. Sometimes more time than we have.

Which brings us back to the Rapture. I believe there are extremely compelling reasons to avoid mockery: it hinders education when tested (despite Mencken’s intuition) and it raises serious ethical problems as well.

But what of the “ticking bomb” scenario: lives in the balance, little time for education? I’m often told that there’s a proper time and place for ridicule. Could “end of the world” panics be that time? I don’t think I can accept that — but I open the question to you.

It’s a good idea, in my opinion, but executed in a, well, pretty thin way. I wanted to like these books a lot (as an anime fan), and they’re OK. The thing is that relativity and all its funky cool effects (time dilation, changes in mass, etc.) can make great plot points. I’d expect these stories to be action adventures, where the physics of what’s happening play active roles in the story, and the characters need to understand and predict what’s going on. Learning on the fly, with millions of lives at stake!

Too much to ask for, I guess. It’s the frustrated screenwriter in me thinking out loud. Like the others, the plot of this book centers around a character needing to learn something for a class, or for work, or for some mundane purpose. The information is thus delivered by talking heads, not really getting much more exciting than the odd demonstration or two. If you’re looking for explosions, aliens, universes at stake, and the ubiquitous manga love triangles, the Manga Guides may fall short of expectations.

But for what they are, they are still quite serviceable. They’re indexed so you can look things up; each section ends with a few textbook-style summary pages; and they give a pretty thorough overview of the subject. And, what the heck; it lends a certain amount of nerd cred to have these on your shelf.

Renmark North School, Grade 2, 1956. South Australia. Photo provided by Bonnie Poulter

[This week, I'd like to share a story excerpted from my recent LogiCON keynote. The speech is a bit on the personal side, as I'm sure you'll be able to tell. Much of it has to do with my own childhood. —Daniel]

My father has always been a wonderful storyteller.

When my brothers and I were little, my Dad would tuck us into our beds, “bristle” our cheeks with his stubble, and tell us stories or poems. We loved Australian bush poetry (we must have heard “Mulga Bill’s Bicycle” and “The Man From Ironbark” a thousand times), but our favorites were tales of his own childhood, growing up poor on the edge of the desert in South Australia. His Tom Sawyer-like childhood sounded magical to us: racing horses bareback over red sand, plucking oranges from the trees of his family’s tiny fruit farm, catching yabbies in the hidden backwaters of the River Murray.

Many of these stories had a subversive edge to them, I realize now. Many were direct lessons in skepticism.

I’d like to tell you one of those, as I remember it 30 years later — exactly the same way I recently told it to my own son.

The Elephant Story

My Dad as a scruffy school kid. 1956

Once upon a time, your Grandpa Farmer was a little boy like you. He had a mother and a father, and six brothers and sisters. They were very poor, and did not have the toys and treats that I had growing up, or that you have today. They trapped rabbits for food for their family (which was bad for the rabbits, but good for Australia). Every day, the kids would run barefoot over the burning sand to their schoolhouse, uphill both ways.

One day, my Dad’s mother came home with a rare and special treat — something almost too precious to believe.

It was a chocolate bar! The children gathered around in amazement. Their mouths watered. Their eyes sparkled. As their mother unwrapped the foil, the chocolate seemed to glow with deliciousness. It seemed to sing.

Carefully, carefully, their mother broke the bar into seven equal pieces: two sweet, small squares for each child. These she put into the children’s lunches.

That day my father ran to school. He could hardly believe his good fortune. All day he dreamed of the chocolate. It felt to him like lunchtime would never come.

But lunchtime did come, in the fullness of time. Trembling, my father took out his small chocolatey treasure….

“Watchagotthere, mate? Candy?” It was one of the bigger kids.

“Yes,” said my father. “It’s a special treat.”

“Can I have some?”

My father held the chocolate a little closer. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t have very much.”

The other boy considered this. “What about a trade?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” my father replied. “What have you got?”

“I’ll tell you what,” the older boy offered. “If you give me your chocolate, I’ll let you have a ride on my elephant.” He beamed with his own generosity.

“I… wait, what? You don’t really have an elephant. Do you?”

“Sure we do!” assured the big kid. “My father got him from a circus. We use him on the farm for plowing and stuff. He’s stronger than a team of bullocks, but he’s tame as a kitten! Also, he can jump over a tree. We ride him all the time. I could bring him to school with me tomorrow.”

Now, my father hardly knew what to do. He loved chocolate, but what kid could pass up a chance to ride on top of a real, live elephant? Swiftly the deal was made. They shook hands — and then the bigger boy woofed up that chocolate in two seconds flat.

That night my father could hardly sleep. He raced through his breakfast the next day, and practically flew across the sand to his school. He turned breathless into the schoolyard, and saw… no elephant. Puzzled, he went and found the older boy.

“Sorry about that!” said the boy. “My folks needed the elephant home on the farm today. I’ll bring him tomorrow.”

The next day my father was twice as excited, and ran to school twice as fast. But again, no elephant.

“Yes, sorry,” the older boy told him. “He needed a washing today. Big job to wash an elephant! I’ll bring him tomorrow.”

But the next day, the elephant was missing once more.

“Sore foot today! I’ll bring the elephant tomorrow for sure….”

At this point, I stopped and asked my own little boy, “What do you suppose happened next? Did Grandpa Farmer ever get his ride on the elephant?”

My son frowned, his eyes deadly serious. “No,” he said, his voice tense with the knowledge of injustice. “That other boy was lying.”

Daniel Loxton Keynote Address at LogiCON 2011. Photo by Mark Iocchelli

Last weekend I was honored to deliver the keynote address at LogiCON, a skeptical event held at Edmonton’s Telus World of Science. It’s an amazing facility, and it was an inspiring event.

LogiCON

Organized by the Greater Edmonton Skeptics Society, LogiCON 2011 was a curated sequel to (and departure from) a successful 2010 event built on the open SkeptiCamp model.

Billed as “Critical Thinking for Everyone,” LogiCON was explicitly conceived and promoted as a science outreach event rather than as a rally for self-identified skeptics. Though it incidentally did bring together Edmonton’s skeptical community, it was designed first and foremost to introduce the public to science-based approaches to evidence in general — and to many paranormal claims in particular.

As the organizers described it,

outreach is something that skepticism is sorely lacking. Here in Edmonton we have a fantastic team, a strong skeptical community, and a wider community that appears quite happy to show up and learn a little something about science. We saw the opportunity to make the outreach event that we wished already existed elsewhere, so we got to work.

In keeping with that introductory mission, LogiCON offered three tracks: a “Beginner” track, an “Advanced” track — and another full-day track of programming for children!

All programming was open at no additional cost for anyone who paid the admission price to the World of Science. This put the cost for the conference at a very accessible 17 bucks per adult (including a substantial lunch for pre-registered attendees).

For members of the public who were already visiting the World of Science that day, LogiCON was free.

Impressions

Barbara Drescher's "Advanced" track lecture about causal inference

This outreach approach clearly paid off. Turnout was substantial (I’d guess 150 adults). Even by the radically altered demographics of skeptical events in the wake of skepticism’s digital renaissance, LogiCON skewed young. I’d bet that the average age of attendees was about 30. (I saw a few grey beards, but just as many children attending the adult lectures!)

I’ve never seen that before.

As well, my sense is that both the speakers and the audience had a roughly even balance of men and women.

I’ve never seen that before, either.

And, finally, thanks to the welcoming, science-based philosophy of the event, actual educational outreach occurred. I took questions from paranormal believers. In one introductory lecture I watched, a speaker took a show of hands asking who in the audience had ever heard the phrase “cognitive bias.” Some hands went up — but many did not.

Organization

LogiCON speakers Marie-Claire Shanahan and Desiree Schell

Logicon was a large, complicated, first-time-event organized by a regional skeptics organization. When I accepted the keynote spot, I anticipated a certain amount of chaos.

Boy, was I impressed! I’m sure the event had the normal share of panic and mistakes behind the scenes; but, speaking as a member of the audience, the whole thing looked flawless. From signage, to audio-visual preparation, to speaker wrangling, LogiCON unfolded like clockwork. Everyone had a role, everything a place.

I extend my thanks to the organizers for the long hours and sleepless nights it must have taken to achieve that.

Location, location…

LogiCON organizer Rachelle Saunders. Photo by Forrest Caissie

The collaboration with the World of Science was key to the success of the project. Not only did the center and its individual staffers contribute lectures, scientific content, credibility, and a simply extraordinary facility (go there!) but the location also underlined the traditional, science-based skepticism the Greater Edmonton Skeptics Society emphasizes.

The result was a conference devoted to brass tacks scientific skepticism, distinct from other rationalist projects — and almost free from metaphysical speculation. (I heard only one reference to atheism or religion all day!)

“The Reasonableness of Weird Things”

Photo by Marc-Julien Objois

Speaking from the center stage of the planetarium was an astonishing, humbling experience.

I’m pleased to say that my talk enjoyed encouraging advance press, and a friendly reception upon its delivery. It was a very personal talk about my own childhood, so I’m grateful for the kind words shared by members of the audience.

(Plans are afoot to make the talk available online — stand by for that.)

Thank you!

I’d like to thank the Greater Edmonton Skeptics Society for hosting me, and for making me feel so welcome.

And especially, I’d like to thank the many bright kids and proud relations who took the time to speak to me about Evolution or Junior Skeptic. You guys made my trip!

Thanks, Edmonton!

There’s even a free lunch for those who pre-register. Now that’s outreach! (Lunch registration is limited.)

Regular readers will have noticed that I haven’t been blogging as much as I would like. That’s because I’ve been up to my eyeballs in exciting (grueling) book projects. For that same reason, I’ve been reluctantly turning down some wonderful speaking engagements in favor of staying on task with my book research.

But when Skeptically Speaking’s Desiree Schell asked me to keynote LogiCON, I knew this was one event to which I couldn’t say “No.” After all, I discovered the joy of skepticism (a “love at first sight” moment, if ever there was one) at another small Canadian conference, at a panel led by Canada’s own Barry Beyerstein.

It brings me great happiness to see this golden age for skeptical events continue to expand in the Canadian scene. We’ve enjoyed a boom in successful SkeptiCamp events (notably the now-annual Vancouver SkeptiCamp), local and regional groups, Skeptics in the Pub, and other inspiring developments. I even hear tell of a new Canadian event based on the model of Atlanta Dragon*Con’s thriving Skeptrack. Fun!

But even by those standards, LogiCON feels to me like something that could be very special. To begin with, it is positioned closely to science, which speaks to the best of the skeptical tradition. Taking place at the World of Science underlines that explicitly. (So do expert speakers like Barbara Drescher, who teaches research methods and cognitive psychology at California State University, Northridge.) As well, it’s designed to live up to its promise of “Critical Thinking for Everyone.” It’s cheap, and focused on introductory outreach. There’s a Beginner Track (“a jargon-free zone designed to get you thinking about how logic and the scientific method can be applied to everyday life”) and even a track for kids!

And that’s just the place for me. I’ll be speaking about my own experiences—as a paranormal believer, and as a skeptical investigator later in life — and explaining that no one owns critical thinking. Skepticism and paranormal belief are not necessarily opposites. After all, my parents taught me both.

At the end of the day, reality can be as weird as it likes. It all comes down to science: the tricks for finding out what’s true, and the love of finding things out.

I hope to see you there!

Each year, the Ontario Library Association showcases selected titles for its Forest of Reading® program — a heavily-promoted recreational reading initiative, widely supported throughout Ontario’s public schools and public libraries. Among the 250,000 participating young readers, kids who read a minimum of five of the 10 books in their reading category will become eligible to vote for the award in that category.

The Forest of Reading program runs throughout the Spring, culminating with award ceremonies in front of an audience of several thousand at Canada’s largest literary event for younger readers: the Festival of Trees™ at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto (May 11 and 12, 2011).

Last year’s Silver Birch Fiction Award winner describes the experience:

I’ve never seen anything like it. More to the point, I’ve never seen thousands of kids screaming — like really screaming – about books.

Which is not to say I wasn’t warned beforehand. The organizers, as well as other writers who had attended the ceremony in the past, all told me what to expect. The massive stage. The lights. The screaming (did I mention the screaming?) children. “It’s like being a rock star for a day,” they told me.

Nomination is the Victory

Also competing for the Silver Birch: this skeptical book from my kids' science colleagues at Yes Mag

Also competing for the Silver Birch: a book written by veteran author Valerie Wyatt — my esteemed editor on Evolution!

For my own part, I’ve been walking around in a sort of daze this weekend — not because Evolution could perhaps win (competition in my category is stiff, including two other books from my own publisher, Kids Can Press) but because it’s already achieved more than I could have hoped. This nomination means that the topic of evolution will be massively promoted to grade school kids throughout Canada’s largest public school system.

Thanks to my colleagues at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, my related Portuguese-language book Evolução was distributed for free to thousands of public school students in Portugal in 2009. But despite recommendations from the (US) National Science Teachers Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and National Center for Science Education, the nomination to Ontario’s Forest of Reading program is Evolution’s first major breakthrough into English-speaking schools.

This matters, in outreach terms. Ontario’s educational system in particular has struggled (and sometimes failed) to give any reasonable coverage to the topic of evolution. As recently as 2000, Ontario curricula omitted evolution entirely. Even today, the central organizing principle of biology is taught only as a component of Biology 11. That seems insufficient for a province where only 59% of adults agree that “Human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years” (Angus Reid 2008 — PDF).

More to the point, biological evolution is not mentioned at all in Grades 1 through 10! (See the current Grade 1 – 8 Science and Technology curriculum PDF and current Grade 9 – 10 Science curriculum PDF.)

No matter how I think about this, it only becomes more humbling and incredible: this Spring, for many thousands of grade school kids, my book will be the only class-supported exposure to the subject of evolution.

Postscript

This project was a long road: years of nights-and-weekends work, out of pocket expense (for me, and for producer Pat Linse), and knocking on the doors of publishers who found fundamental biology too controversial.

I knew all that had paid off in the deepest possible way the moment parents started writing to tell me, “another month has passed, and she’s still having me read the book to her in the tub.” That’s what this is all about. The book has reached a lot of youngsters, and it ain’t done yet. (A Slovenian translation is on sale now, and a Korean edition is on its way.)

Looking at this project as a science outreach success, I’m reminded of the heat it took from hardline atheists. At issue was my brief passage explaining, “Science is our most reliable method for sorting out how the natural world functions, but it can’’t tell us what those discoveries mean in a spiritual sense.” (See long comment threads at this post and this followup post). Critics argued that my children’s book about the history of life should either have attacked theism, or else ignored one of the most common student questions about evolution.

That tiny subsection remains my honest answer. I would not, with the benefit of hindsight, do more than tweak it today. Still, in light of the criticism and the book’s success, it’s interesting to reflect: would Evolution have reached so many kids if I’d approached that topic in some other way? I suppose we’ll never know.

A lot happened. For a detailed discussion of TAM8, check out my roundtable chat with Tim Farley (What’s the Harm?), Blake Smith (MonsterTalk), and Derek & Swoopy on Skepticality. There’s been a lot to talk about.

Most especially, people have been talking about Phil Plait’s powerful talk, now known to the blogosphere as the “Don’t be a dick” speech (after Wheaton’s Law, an internet maxim that provided the theme of Phil’s presentation). In his talk, Phil argued that skeptics who have outreach goals should get serious about communication:

In times of war, we need warriors. But this isn’t a war. You might try to say it is, but it’s not a war. We aren’t trying to kill an enemy. We’re trying to persuade other humans. And at times like that, we don’t need warriors. What we need are diplomats.

Phil Plait argues passionately at TAM8. Photo by Marc-Julien Objois

You may not be surprised to hear that I loved this speech. I think it was an important moment in recent skeptical history, and it meant a lot to me personally. “Be nice to people” is a drum I’ve been beating for a long time. I was moved more than I could express to hear someone of Phil’s stature make that case so forcefully from the big stage at skepticism’s big event.

No matter how you look at it, he is of course right: there many excellent reasons to tend toward treating people with respect and courtesy. It’s morally bad to be cruel (and usually unnecessary); it’s contrary to scientific and journalistic ethics (and the search for truth) to shout down legitimate alternate views; it blinds us to flaws in our own reasoning if we fail to seriously consider viewpoints we don’t like. Most importantly (this was the theme of Phil’s talk) science communication is more effective when it starts with warmth and respect.

Those are all excellent topics for further exploration, but my aim today is smaller. I’d like to add one more footnote to the other arguments for civility, which is this:

Many people have quite good reasons for believing in the paranormal.

Lines Through The World

Individual skeptics sometimes form an impression that paranormal beliefs are held by strange people for inexplicable reasons — but not by our kind of people. Speaking personally, I’ll confess that I’m sometimes taken off guard when someone I know turns out to believe some bizarre paranormal thing, even though I know by now to expect it.

But a simple survey of our friends, family and co-workers will often put paid to the notion that paranormal belief is uncommon or unusual. Try it. Gently ask around. If you’re like me, it’s likely that most of the people you know accept some paranormal claim: perhaps alien visitation, or ghosts, or dowsing, or psychic powers, or some form of alternative medicine. The paranormal is everywhere: in labs, in schools, in hospitals, and at your Christmas dinner table.

Faced with the ubiquitousness of such beliefs, a few skeptics are tempted to think there must be something special about those who don’t believe. That conceit hardly seems worthy of dwelling upon, and yet people have actually tried to convince me on this basis that it’s not worth teaching critical thinking. “The smart people already get it,” I’ve been told, “and the stupid people never will. Don’t waste your time.”

I suppose it’s human to want to draw these lines through the world: on this side, the good smart people; on the other side, the bad dumb people. But the world is not nearly so simple.

Raising My Hand

One of the interesting things Phil Plait did during his challenging TAM8 speech was to ask the 1300 skeptics in the room this question:

How many of you here today used to believe in something — used to, past tense — whether it was flying saucers, psychic powers, religion, anything like that? You can raise your hand if you want to.

I was one of the majority of people who raised their hands. If I could have, I would have raised my hand dozens of times for all the dozens of paranormal claims I used to accept.

Does this mean that most of the people at TAM are stupid? Of course not, and I don’t think anyone would make that argument. And yet, I quite often hear skeptics talk about “the woos” as though “they” (in practice, our own friends and neighbors) belong to some alien species.

The Reasonableness of Weird Things

But here’s the thing: most pseudoscientific beliefs are not stupid. They’re just wrong.

Consider two people, Ada and Bee. Both consider themselves critical thinkers. Both walk into a pharmacy looking for headache medication. Ada buys Tylenol, because it has been recommended by people she trusts, because she knows from experience that it works for her, and because she thinks most of alternative medicine is hogwash. By contrast, Bee buys a homeopathic remedy — because it has been recommended by people she trusts, because she knows from experience that it works for her, and because she thinks most of mainstream medicine is hogwash.

In this case, neither the “skeptical” Ada nor the “credulous” Bee has any medical training. Neither has direct knowledge of the primary medical literature about acetaminophen, nor of the primary skeptical literature on homeopathy. I submit that neither Ada nor Bee should be much applauded or scorned for their beliefs. They’re both just regular folks making regular decisions based on the best information they have.

In my experience, the top reasons people believe weird things are not only understandable, but identical to the reasons most skeptics believe things: they are persuaded by personal experiences (or by the experiences of a loved one); or, they are persuaded by the sources they have consulted.

For example, I know several people who believe in ghosts for the perfectly straightforward reason that they personally saw a ghost. They’re willing to consider alternate explanations, but c’mon: of course their personal ghost encounter leans heavily on the scales of evidence. Science may say it’s wise for Ebenezer Scrooge to suppose Marley’s specter “may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard,” but Christmas Carol audiences understand that ghost belief would be pretty reasonable under the circumstances. (And, when ghost witnesses are critical-minded enough to dig into some books or online research, the sources they find authoritatively argue that ghosts are probably real.)

This pattern comes up again and again, from the woman who shyly speaks about her alien abduction experience, to the friends who enthuse about dowsing rods, to the family members who swear by alternative medicine: “My personal experience confirms that this is true.”

Yes, reasoning from visceral experience is a recipe for false belief. Obscure research tells me that my friend is extremely unlikely to have been abducted by aliens. But she was there, and I wasn’t. I don’t know what she saw, not for sure — and I can’t deny that her experience of seeing it could make a pretty compelling basis for personal belief.

Now, I want to be clear here: I’m not suggesting that personal experience is an adequate basis for accepting paranormal claims (it isn’t) or that these claims are true (so far as science can tell, they’re not). I’m saying that, given their information and tools, many paranormalists have understandable reasons for belief.

The Difference Between Believers and Skeptics?

However we label ourselves or others, we come up against the fact that people are complicated. Generalizations are doomed to inadequacy. But, I will suggest that the differences between skeptics and paranormal believers have less to do with innate credulity, and more to do with training and resources.

When I was a scruffy young boy, I found a Bigfoot footprint in the wilderness of British Columbia. Devouring every sasquatch book I could find (there were several in my elementary school library), I learned the persuasive facts that many, many people had found footprints or reported encounters with Bigfoot, and that sasquatch photographs had even been taken. Therefore, I believed in Bigfoot.

What I did not have was any understanding of how those many witnesses could all be wrong (myself included), or how on Earth hoaxing could account for most prints. I didn’t have any access to the skeptical books or magazines (still rare today, but then vanishingly so) that could have explained it to me. And, most importantly, I did not know what I did not know. I had to be taught to ask counter-intuitive questions, and I had to be taught how to find the best answers.

I wasn’t born knowing that stuff. Nobody is. As Phil Plait’s speech put it, “Skepticism is hard.” It’s hard, and it has to be taught. And that is how it can be that several hundred thoughtful skeptics at the The Amazing Meeting 8 used to believe in magic.