It happens with disgusting regularity. You will flip through the various basic cable channels which are nominally “science oriented” (often grouped together on the dial if they feature scientific topics) and come up with nothing but junk, pseudoscience, and worse. “Reality shows” about subjects with little or no science content, tons of paranormal and pseudoscientific shows promoting ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, and creationism—all fill the airwaves for channels like Discovery, The  Learning Channel, History Channel, and even the Science Channel and National Geographic Channel. We watch a few minutes of these with complaints to anyone within earshot, then (usually) move on—or occasionally we get sucked in to watch the whole thing, like gawkers at a car crash. The cartoon at the top (from the great website PhdComics) says it all: four channels that used to be largely documentaries on science and history are now dominated  by guns, explosions, dangerous occupations and other “reality” TV. Their shows have  buzz words in the titles like “biggest”, “wildest”, “monsters” or “killers”, and plain old junk fill up most of their air time.

I’ve seen it from both sides. I’ve appeared in prehistoric animal documentaries that have aired on all four channels (and keep re-appearing years after I made them, so I feel like Dorian Gray, with my younger self perpetually preserved in documentary limbo). Almost all these documentaries are made by small independent film outfits that are searching for any sexy topic that they can sell to the major cable networks, so they are under great pressure to come up with something flashy, noisy, scary, and/or mysterious. If I  have any chance to review the script, I try my best to tone down the excessive hyperbole, but they usually ignore me. As I film segments with them, I try to be as dynamic and entertaining as a “talking head” can be, but they are always pushing me to oversimplify and exaggerate to make the spiel more colorful (but less scientifically accurate). And then when I see the final product, most of what I did ends up on the cutting room floor, with only a few seconds left of many hours of filming. Even worse, I’ve put in many  hours on projects that never got picked up at all. Documentary filmmaking is a high-risk, low-reward proposition—you have better odds of making big money in Vegas.

So we all complain about the changes in our basic cable channels, and wonder why such dreck can make it on the air, but seldom think hard about the process. But the excellent website TVTropes does a very nice job analyzing what happens to TV networks over time. To no one’s surprise, it comes down to one simple factor: ratings (and therefore money from advertisers), largely driven by the effort to woo those big-spending trend-setting 18-31 male viewers who already dictate the movie industry’s bottom line (although movies aim even lower to reach teenage boys, the biggest-spending and most loyal movie audience). As TVTropes points out (and those of us old enough to remember can attest to), it wasn’t always this bad on cable TV. When the laws changed and the opportunity to create hundreds of basic cable channels first emerged in the 1980s, the channels were initially set up to fill specific programming niches, from the Golf Channel to the Game Show Network and so on. In the early 1980s, all these new niche-driven cable channels were very distinct and more or less true to their niche description. But since these are commercial channels that must sell ads based on numbers of viewers, the same factors that affect every other commercial enterprise came into play: keep tweaking it and give the customer whatever sells the most. (This dynamic does not apply to non-commercial stations like PBS in the U.S., or the BBC in Britain, which can program what they feel is in the public interest).

As TVTropes documents, nearly all these niche-defined networks have undergone “network decay” since they were founded in the 1980s, as their programming shifts to find hit shows. Because they are nearly all chasing nearly the same demographic of 18-31 year old males, they end up programming a lot of the same kinds of things (or even the same shows). Their original mission and distinctive programming is lost in a sea of reality shows and junk that keeps you in your seat, whether it be explosions or dangerous occupations or whatever. Another factor has been the expansion of media conglomerates, so that these multiple cable channels are owned by just a few corporations, and the CEO of each channel must answer to corporate bosses who are only interested in their profitability, not any abstract “mission” to air certain types of programming. So much for the high-minded idealism that drove the deregulation of the airwaves in the 1970s and 1980s, with the intent of offering us dozens of distinct choices. Instead, they all “decay” to a lowest-common-denominator of “if it bleeds, it leads” bottom-line mentality, negating whatever real advantages that dozens of distinctive niche cable channels once offered. As TVTropes points out, the decisions are made by network execs worried only about their ratings and bottom lines, not any high-minded ideal like “quality television” that PBS brags so loudly about. They could (and did) notice that professional “wrestling” is popular with their 18-31 male demographic, and see no problem with programming the WWE next to a show about science.

TVTropes offers as a classic example the pioneering channel MTV, which single-handedly changed the music business in the early 1980s and made telegenic pop artists into big stars (e.g., Michael Jackson, Madonna) while ending the careers of less telegenic musicians (e.g., Christopher Cross). But soon MTV found it was more profitable to offer reality shows, cartoons, game shows, and many other kinds of programming until the original music videos that it pioneered have vanished altogether.  TVTropes analyzed the decay of the cable channels in various categories. Under “Total Abandonment” (of their original mission) they list not only MTV, A&E, G4, CMT, Biography, and The Learning Channel (TLC). In their words:

TLC, originally focusing around science and nature documentaries in the style of the Discovery Channel, drifted toward almost nothing but “home makeover”-style reality shows. In a somewhat confusing (in these days of internet porn) play at grabbing the all-important 18-30 male demographic, TLC acquired the rights to air the Miss America pageant. After sufficient decay, one would never guess that TLC used to be called The Learning Channel and was once co-owned by NASA.

One need only check here to see how far TLC has drifted away from “learning” and into the realm of bizarre sensationalism, or this hilarious send-up of their programming.

Under the category “Slipped”, we find The History Channel. As TVTrope comments:

[Their] programming now consists of roughneck-focused reality shows (Ice Road Truckers, Ax Men) and conspiracy theory “documentaries” about UFOs, the Bible Code, ghosts, Atlantis, Nostradamus, and the end of the world, earning the network the derisive nickname “The Hysterical Channel”. Heck, at least the “Hitler Channel,” as they used to be known (back when everything was about either World War II, Nazis or The American Civil War), was actual history.

Their analysis of Discovery Channel is even more hilarious:

The Discovery Channel still shows plenty of actual documentary material, despite having been decaying for almost as long as MTV has. In the late 80s the lineup was mostly serious documentaries, the most famous of which was Wings (no relation to the sitcom except for a focus on aircraft) but which also included classy repackaged BBC imports like Making of a Continent — and once a year there was Shark Week, which was just what you’d expect. By the mid-1990s, they showed an obscene amount of home improvement shows and cooking shows aimed at stay-at-home moms (enough to spawn the spin-off Discovery Home & Leisure Channel, now Planet Green) and Wings had proven so popular it had been farmed out to its own spin-off, Discovery Wings Channel (now Military Channel). Now, they’re being swamped with “guys building and/or blowing things up” shows in the vein of Mythbusters and Monster Garage. And about four different shows about credulous idiots with no critical thinking skills ghost hunters. In 2005, Discovery debuted Cash Cab, a game show that takes place in the back of a cab, leaving one unsure whether it even has a theme beyond “non-fiction”. It gets weird when you realize that they’re knocking some of their own shows off, especially Mythbusters into Smash Lab (with a focus on safety measures) and How It’s Made into Some Assembly Required. The latter has almost only done products featured in the former (though How It’s Made has been on for just about ten years, so it’s hard to find something they haven’t done). The Discovery Channel also used to contain a lot of nature, which is where the now-classic Shark Week (which they still air regularly) originated from. But it seems that explosions have taken the place of tigers ripping stuff to pieces. Most of the nature shows have since been relegated to Animal Planet.

Finally, the Science Channel and National Geographic Channel are the only two that still run mostly science documentaries with little junk, yet National Geographic still has “The Bounty Hunter,” “Is it Real?”, and “The Dog Whisperer.”  Science Channel has begun airing sci-fi programming, including “Firefly” and “Dark Matters: Twisted but True,” so they are running pop-pseudoscience garbage that now pollutes The History Channel.

Frankly, I don’t see any light at the end of this tunnel. As long as these are commercial TV channels, they are driven by ratings and lowest-common-denominator programming aimed at 18-31 men. Only PBS and other non-commercial stations can escape this “network decay”—but then they compensate by annoying pledge drives that rerun old shows with sentimental value so that viewers will tune in and hopefully donate. Maybe the BBC, with its government support of top-quality science and drama programming (which the U.S. market then borrows or rips off) seems immune, although there are BBC channels that are lowbr0w as well. After all, Benny Hill reruns have done well on American TV for years….

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In my October 26 post, I discussed the efforts of creationists to run “stealth” field trips at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver in 2010. There were no such attempts at the Minneapolis meeting on Oct. 9-12 that I attended last month, but instead they did something  they often do at professional meetings like GSA: stealth abstracts. I saw a bunch of posters from people at Cedarville University, a fundamentalist Baptist institution in Ohio. These posters pretended to be legitimate research about the deposition of the Permian dune sand unit, the Coconino Sandstone. This famous unit in the upper part of the Grand Canyon is clearly formed in wind-blown dunes and not a deposit of  Noah’s flood (or of any kind of fluid other than wind). Since their dogma insists that the entire sequence in the Grand Canyon is laid down by Noah’s flood, the Coconino is a particular problem for them, and they focus their attention on it. (See the evidence and discussion in Chapter 3 in my book Evolution).

The posters were stuck in a session with a bunch of other posters presenting more conventional research into sandstones, and they looked professional enough that no one would notice. Other than their Cedarville affiliation, there was no clue about their creationist agenda, and there was no mention at the end of the abstract, or the conclusions section of the poster, that they were shilling for anti-scientific creationist views. I repeatedly walked past both posters during the day they were up, but never once found the authors defending it, even during the time that the GSA demands that “Authors will be present”.

Both posters were authored by Cedarville faculty member John H. Whitmore, with other “sock puppet” students as coauthors or senior authors so he could get more than one poster into the program. (There is a limit of one senior-authored presentation per meeting). So far as I can tell, Whitmore came and put up both posters, and none of his “sock-puppet” student co-authors made the trip. Whitmore is the only full-time “geology” faculty member at Cedarville, which recently bragged about instituting a new geology program and being the only Christian college in the country with a creationist geology department. They have two other creationist adjuncts in this tiny department. One is Steve Austin, a long-time ICR member who claims to be doing “flood geology.” Their website also takes pride in their fundamentalist literalist doctrines and how every faculty member is sworn to follow them (shades of the ICR).

Whitmore himself got his B.A. in 1985 at Kent State University. I talked to one of his former professors, paleontologist Dr. Rodney Feldmann, about him. Rod  told me that Whitmore hid his creationist leanings until the day before the defense of his senior thesis, then “came out” in private to Feldmann. Whitmore then defended his thesis the next day, lying about his attitudes toward evolution and geologic time, and the committee had no clue as to his true motives. He then got his “advanced degrees” from the Institute of Creation “Research” (M.A.) and his “doctorate” from Loma Linda (run by the creationist Seventh-Day Adventists, so there is no room for conventional geology there). All of his “publications” are in creationist media and journals, with not one that passed peer review in a legitimate scientific journal. Many are co-authored with other familiar faces of the creationist anti-science crusade, including Kurt Wise (who learned legitimate paleontology from Stephen Jay Gould but never gave up his creationism), John Woodmorappe of the ICR, and of course, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis. Whitmore brags that he organized the first “Creationist Geology Conference” at Cedarville in 2007 (where he gave at least 5 talks himself, almost a quarter of the program). The program for this annual conference (the fifth of which was held in Rapid City, SD, in July 2011) is the usual bizarre special pleading of all creationist attempts to shoehorn Genesis into science, given by just a handful of the usual suspects from ICR and other creationist institutions over and over again, preaching to the converted.

So how do creationists sneak their pseudoscientific ideas into a legitimate science meeting? Their strategy is a common one of pseudoscientists: question one little piece of the scientific orthodoxy on the premise that if this little factoid is wrong, the entire edifice of science will come tumbling down. All of their posters were subtly trying to question the clearcut evidence for dune deposition of the Coconino, usually by pointing to something they think is inconsistent with the dune deposition model. Then they leave the question as an “unsolved mystery”, as many scientists do when new research challenges some old assumption or idea. Nothing in the poster identified their true motive—trying to explain every rock on earth as a flood deposit.

In one poster, Whitmore made a big fuss about the angles of cross-bedding (formed at the sheltered back side of a dune due to avalanching sand) in the Coconino. He claimed that the angles are too shallow to be caused by wind deposition. I studied this poster closely, and its flaws were immediately apparent: he only used a small sample of modern dunes for comparison, and in the real world, sand dunes have an enormous range of dip angles that he conveniently ignored. He tried to rule out compaction for the flattening of the dip angle, but there again he fails to take into account that in real dune sand, the volume is largely air, and you would not see any of the usual compaction indicators from deep burial and high pressures in a rock that had just settled a bit from its original state.

The other poster was just as bizarrely unbalanced and illogical. He had some outcrop photos from Coconino that seemed to show soft-sediment deformation folds and a few other structures that are not typically formed in dunes. His subtle point behind this is that they appeared to be water-laid to his eyes, and therefore all the unit is water-laid. But this is a geological non sequitur. Soft-sediment folding and other features are known to occur on avalanching dune faces. Even if these structures were water-laid (which is possible, since real dune deposits are often interbedded with deposits from adjacent playa lake beds and other aqueous environments), it does not follow that all the formation is laid down in water. Most real rock formations are a mix of several sedimentary facies which change over time and space and not a single homogeneous type of rock. The presence of possibly water-laid deposits in one part of the Coconino is not proof of Noah’s flood. If these deposits are indeed water-laid, it is only evidence about part of the formation, and irrelevant to the sand-dune explanation for the giant cross-beds of the bulk of the Coconino.

My good friend Dr. Samantha Hopkins of the University of Oregon managed to catch the authors at the posters, and she found out just how slimy and frustrating arguing with these pseudoscientists can be. She described her encounters with them in an email as follows:

It was interesting, because even when you pressed them about what made the structures, they would continue to fabricate data about structures indicative of water, but then they wouldn’t actually make the inference that it was Noah’s flood. They kept retreating to “we don’t know what it is…what do you think?” and “we’re trying to find out.” They didn’t, of course, actually want to find out.  This is also where they seem to depart science. They’re constructing data to fit an inference, but refusing to make the inference themselves.  They want us to say it, so they can say “famous geologist says it’s deposited in water”.

Throughout both posters is the same strategy: question or challenge one tiny problem in a conventional geologic explanation of something, then leave the reader hanging with no solution offered, nor even a suggestion as to a better explanation. Of course, they dare not give their answer to the mystery, because then they’d have to come out of the creationist closet, and real geologists would have a field day tearing them apart. Instead, as P.Z. Myers pointed out, they are liars and cowards. They attend legitimate professional meetings to brag to their creationist followers and the uninformed church members that they are doing real research and their ideas are accepted by mainstream science. But their actual presence in the meeting is purely through stealth without mentioning their true motives, because they are afraid of being revealed as the scientific frauds they are when scientists who do know some geology scrutinize their ideas (as happens if they submitted papers to peer review). Because abstracts are not reviewed (see my previous SkepticBlog post) and there is almost no rejection of abstracts (especially since they don’t reveal their creationist motives), it’s easy to get on the program and pretend to be a real scientist.

As I studied the posters, two thoughts struck me. One was that right next to Whitmore’s cross-bedding poster was one by Dr. David Loope of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, one of the world’s experts on ancient sand dune deposits. I was dying to catch up with him and find out what he thought of his neighbor’s poster, but I never did see  him at that busy meeting. He’d tear it to shreds if Whitmore had shown up and had faced him (unless he decided it was a waste of his time battling creationism, as I  have come to realize).

The other thought was more disturbing. Here is a creationist submitting two tiny posters on two tiny mysteries about one formation among thousands of formations. This is during a meeting of 6000 real geologists presenting at least 4000 other posters and talks that largely falsify every aspect of creationist “flood geology”. How does he deal with the cognitive dissonance? How does he manage to miss the forest for the trees? As I discussed in Chapter 3 of my evolution book, this is a particular problem of “flood geology”—they focus on the Grand Canyon and a few other examples, and ignore the other 99% of geology that can’t be so easily twisted and misinterpreted to fit their preconceptions. I’m sure he’s convinced that he is on God’s mission, and that all other 6000 geologists at the meeting are deluded by the Devil (despite the fact that many are actually quite religious; they just don’t fit the real world into the myths of illiterate Bronze Age shepherds). But surely he must notice that all of these eager, excited scientists are working hard to discover the real truth about the world, and not one of them has found that the real geologic record leads to “flood geology”? Surely it must strike him that his opinion is so contrary to every line of evidence presented at that meeting that there might be something wrong with it? After all, he is conscious enough of its unscientific nature to hide his own motives and resort to stealth tactics, so he knows exactly what he is doing. But how can he live with that lie? As I argued in my 2007 evolution book, this is a point about creationists in general: they deliberately and knowingly lie and deceive people to push their agenda, yet they can somehow live with this decidedly immoral and un-Biblical behavior and still think of themselves as honest people. How they manage this level of cognitive dissonance is a mystery to me….

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I’ve posted frequently (see my July 24 post) on the religious kooks who insist that Galileo and Copernicus and all later astronomers were wrong  and that the earth, not the sun, is the center of the solar system. They base this weird notion on their own version of biblical literalism, since there are many passages in the Bible (e.g., Isaiah 11: 12, 40:22, 44:24; Joshua 10:12-14) which clearly present a geocentric world viewpoint (as was widely held in almost all ancient cultures and not overturned until the 1500s). Many are actually renegade Catholics who not only insist that Galileo was wrong and that the Church was right, but what the Inquisition did to Galileo was justified. Naturally, the Catholic Church is not too happy about these revisionists, since it has long come to terms with Galileo and scientific reality, and even apologized for its treatment of him. They don’t spend a lot of unnecessary time trying to repudiate or excommunicate these renegades who want to drag us back to the 14th century. I guess the Church is busy with other problems….

Recently, the Los Angeles Times ran an article on the latest version of the Catholic geocentrist movement. The article says:

“I have no idea who these people are,” said Brother Guy Consolmagno, curator of meteorites and spokesman for the Vatican Observatory. “Are they sincere, or is this a clever bit of theater?”

Those promoting geocentrism argue that heliocentrism, or the centuries-old consensus among scientists that Earth revolves around the sun, is a conspiracy to squelch the church’s influence.

“Heliocentrism becomes dangerous if it is being propped up as the true system when, in fact, it is a false system,” said Robert Sungenis, leader of a budding movement to get scientists to reconsider. “False information leads to false ideas, and false ideas lead to illicit and immoral actions — thus the state of the world today.… Prior to Galileo, the church was in full command of the world, and governments and academia were subservient to her.”

Sungenis is no Don Quixote. Hundreds of curiosity seekers, skeptics and supporters attended a conference last fall titled “Galileo Was Wrong. The Church Was Right” near the University of Notre Dame campus inSouth Bend, Ind.

Astrophysicists at Notre Dame didn’t appreciate the group hitching its wagon to America’s flagship Catholic university and resurrecting a concept that’s extinct for a reason.

“It’s an idea whose time has come and gone,” astrophysics professor Peter Garnavich said. “There are some people who want to move the world back to the 1950s when it seemed like a better time. These are people who want to move the world back to the 1250s.”

After consulting with the neo-geocentrists and the Vatican observatory, the reporter next went to a logical additional source associated with biblical literalism: the loudest and more prominent creationist in the U.S., Ken  Ham, of the Answers in Genesis organization and the creation “museum” in Petersburg, Kentucky. This is the same guy who insists that every word of the Bible must be interpreted literally or faith is meaningless, and who spends huge numbers of hours and dollars pushing biblical literalism and excoriating anyone who suggests that the Genesis creation story is metaphor or myth, not literally true.

And what do you think he said? Did he stick to his principles and defend geocentrism, which is found in many places in the Bible? No, he turned out to be a cafeteria Christian after all. As the Times reported:

“There’s a big difference between looking at the origin of the planets, the solar system and the universe and looking at presently how they move and how they are interrelated,” Ham said. “The Bible is neither geocentric or heliocentric. It does not give any specific information about the structure of the solar system.”

Ummm… sorry, Ken, but the Bible is actually MORE specific and detailed in its support of geocentrism than it is of your creation myth. What’s the matter, Ken? You can’t accept any deviation from literalism except when you decide the Bible isn’t clear or it’s metaphorical?

So what explains this inconsistency and flip-flopping in a man who insists on inerrancy, and won’t let anyone interpret the Bible metaphorically? Could it be that if he preached geocentrism, even his loyal fundie followers would laugh at him? If we pressed Pat Robertson or Oral Roberts or Mike Huckabee or the GOP presidential candidates who promote creationism, would they also agree with geocentrism? Somehow, I think not. The geocentrism vs. heliocentrism debate was over more 500 years ago, and only kooks and cranks are still waging it (along with creationists who insist the earth is flat, another idea found in the Bible). By contrast, over 150 years since Darwin’s book was published, a substantial percentage of people in the U.S. (but NOT in most European industrialized countries, nor in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China, or other developed Asian countries) have still not rejected the equally outdated notions of creationism and come to terms with evolution. Apparently, 500 years is more than enough to get cultures to reject crazy religious notions, but 150 years are not enough (at least in the U.S.).

So, does this mean we still need to wait up to 350 years for creationism to finally die its long overdue death in the U.S.?

Under the title, “This event is not for skeptics”, Rick Rojas of the Los Angeles Times reported on the convention and its audience. As he describes it, many of the attendees reported having “alien abductions”, and some think they are alien-human hybrids. Many of them view aliens as godlike, benign omnipotent protectors who beckon to them in the night using bright lights. Typical of them is 61-year-old Cynthia Crawford, who

sold sculptures of aliens, said there was no reason to fear contact by extraterrestrials. She said she has a spiritual connection to her alien guides who have made medical ailments disappear and once manifested a crisp $20 bill. She told others they should experience the same. “Send the light and the unconditional love, and they will come to you,” she told one young man. “When you start seeing our star family—oh my God—you’ll love it”.Another topic discussed at the convention was human-extraterrestrial hybrids. Crawford, who lives near the Superstition Mountains in Arizona, said that she is one of them. The hybrids, she said, often have high foreheads and thin faces with long, skinny noses. Crawford, however, has a round face framed by thick blond hair. “I think I look human,” she said. She turned her head and widened her eyes. “Do you think I look human?”

As the article reports, the UFO fans were particularly intent on being taken seriously by scientists, aping scientific methods with their own “certified field investigator” program (including a genuine MUFON badge!) that required them to carry recording devices, Geiger counters, and a respirator. Thus, as the “certified investigator” David MacDonald is quoted as saying, “We all want to believe, we all want to believe bad [sic], but you’ve got to look at the evidence. You’ve got to come at this like a scientific researcher.” Just like the Bigfooters and other cryptozoologists that Daniel Loxton and I have been researching, they have a huge chip on their shoulder about scientists not taking them seriously—but have a distorted, superficial idea of how science is really done. According to psychotherapist Barbara Lamb who works with “experiencers” (people claiming alien contact), “We do have what we consider evidence, but the scientific community doesn’t want to consider that as evidence. There’s a kind of booga-booga about ETs and UFOs.” According to author and UFO “researcher” Richard Dolan, “Just below that level of snicker, snicker is fear.”

That may be a comforting thought to the UFO fanatics, blaming our skepticism on fear that they might be right. But the answer is much simpler: to be taken seriously by scientists, they can’t just imitate the scientific method, they must actually follow the scientific method. As Loxton and I point out in our upcoming book on cryptozoology, the prescription for being taken seriously as scientists includes:

1. Stick to testable evidence and scientific hypotheses. If the evidence is against what you want to believe, you must reject your hypothesis, not the evidence. As Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

2. Toss out nearly all the evidence from personal experience and “eyewitnesses“. As Michael Shermer has pointed out in his books, most of the accounts of “alien encounters” are clearly example of tricks of the mind, from normal dreams to waking dreams to hallucinations. And as Elizabeth Loftus has pointed out many times, “eyewitness testimony” is virtually useless in science since human brains are so easily fooled into believing something they didn’t actually see, or enhancing their memories of an event after it is over.

3. Focus on tangible physical evidence that might stand the test of scientific scrutiny. Of course, no such evidence exists, so they fall back on ad hoc rationalizations about why various conspiracies of governments or powerful individuals or scientists have suppressed and destroyed the evidence.

4. If you want to be taken seriously by scientists, subject your best evidence to peer review for publication in reputable journals. However, since they have no solid evidence, they fall back on the usual strategy of creationists, cryptozoologists, and other pseudoscientists: hide from the scientific community and preach to the converted, then blame their situation on scientific persecution—even though they never bother to submit their ideas in the first place.

Of course, I don’t expect them to follow any of this advice, since these belief systems are deeply ingrained and give them a quasi-religious sense of comfort and meaning in their lives. In such circumstances, no amount of evidence or rational explanations for their beliefs will make a difference.

But while we may laugh at the people who would spend big money to attend an entire weekend at a hotel in Irvine listening to other true believers, there is some disconcerting news about the population in general. As Bader et al. (2010) pointed out in their book Paranormal America, the Baylor Religion Survey found that 47% of Americans in the survey said that extraterrestrials absolutely exist (12%) or probably exist (35%). Similar statistics have been obtained by other surveys, showing that belief in UFOs is held by roughly half of the American population. Bader et al. (2010) showed that the paranormal is the norm, since more than half  of the American population holds some sort of paranormal beliefs, whether they be ghosts, psychics, UFOs, Bigfoot, astrology, or whatever. This population has been fed a non-stop diet of UFO support from Spielberg movies to dozens of pseudo-documentaries on formerly scientific TV channels like Discovery Channel and TLC. Meanwhile, how much do they hear or read about the evidence against UFOs? Aside from a handful of books, there is almost no UFO debunking in the movies, TV or other pop culture. Criticizing UFOs is not sexy and doesn’t sell tickets or entice viewers but promoting UFOs has a guaranteed audience. Nor is there much effort to teach critical thinking, or to expose people to the fallacies of arguments, or to the ways in which human “experience” can be false or misleading. In light of the non-stop diet of “woo” fed to the American public and the lack of any counter-programming, it’s surprising that the number isn’t even more balanced toward the “woo” than it already is!

In light of this depressing state of affairs, I think I’ll go to a movie this afternoon as a distraction. Perhaps Cowboys and Aliens….

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Whenever I read about the conventions held by creationists, it is always staggering to see so much ignorance of science and scholarship on display. If you read through one of their programs or peruse the abstracts, your mind is boggled at the bizarre thinking and intellectual contortions these people must attempt, from weird ideas of how to fit all living thing into Noah’s ark to odd explanations of where the flood waters came from and where they went, to even weirder ideas of why the universe appears to be 13.7 billion years old (but is only really 6000 years old), or why radiometric dating doesn’t work or how to explain the complex geologic history of the earth with Bronze Age myths of superstitious shepherds. One paper after another is replete with special pleading, ad hoc and supernatural “explanations”, none of which would pass muster in even an introductory physics or geology class. As I discussed in my book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, these people are profoundly ignorant of real science and proud of it, because their faith comes first. Sadly, they have about 40% or so of the American public believing their anti-scientific view of the world.

No matter how weird their ideas seem to the outsider, we can at least understand their motivation. To the fundamentalist creationist, a literal interpretation of their version of the Bible is a life-or-death, salvation-or-damnation matter, which is why they invest so much energy confusing people with their distorted ideas about sciences like evolution, geology, anthropology, and astronomy.  If one truly believes that Darwinism will lead you to hell’s door, we can see what makes them think this way, no matter how wrong it seems to us. But, as we smugly assert, they are just fringe religious fanatics, and they are only fighting the most recent scientific battle over evolution (that still rages 152 years later). Surely, the great victories of science, such as the Copernican system of astronomy and the Einsteinian revolution in physics, are no longer disputed and even religious fanatics accept them. Right?

There you would be wrong. Literal interpretation of the Bible is not only inconsistent with evolution, but it also extends to other claims about the world as well. Google the term “Flat Earth Society” and you’ll find websites describing small but sincere groups of believers who are convinced that the earth is not a sphere but a flat disk. When confronted with photographs of the earth from space, they always claim that these images are fraudulent or doctored in some way. When the topic of the Moon landings is brought, up they claim it was all a NASA hoax filmed in a sound stage. Their insistence on a flat earth and a geocentric view of the world (with the earth, not the sun, at the center of the solar system) is based on biblical literalism. There are many verses in the Bible (e.g., Isaiah 11: 12, 40:22, 44:24) that say so, and they believe the Bible must be literally true. Most people find these people and their ideas amusing and silly, but their belief system is just as strongly held as the beliefs of many of their audience. Nevertheless, if you read their screeds, you find they are deadly serious and fanatical about their dogmas. The passage below from the Sept. 1988 issue of their journal (complete with their own bad grammar and spellings, and odd use of ALL CAPS) is typical:

“IN USA today, as in Russia in ’20s and NAZI Germany in ’40s full scale campaign to create USA ALSO A BEAST NATION… no God… no right no wrong no up no down 2 added to 2 is whatever scientists say it is… Adults today either jailed or shot down… at own homes for even teaching their own children… GOD EXISTS and Right and Wrong exists (State of Utah)… bells have been tolling for so long… for the helpless pitiful innocent ‘animals’ as they are tortured to death by priests of the State Religion ‘GREASE BALL SCIENCE’… now … 1988 … no use, too late… to send to see for whom the bell tolls… THE BELL TOLLS FOR THEE!”

Likewise, there is an entire group of religious fanatics who still believe that Copernicus and Galileo (and every astronomer since then) was wrong and the Church was right in insisting the earth was the center of the universe. They held a conference in November 2010, with dozens of speakers with impressive-sounding credentials (but none with any true scientific training in astronomy). If you look at the list of talk titles, they are a mix of weird science, paranoid conspiracy theories that claim the shots of earth from space are hoaxed, and apologists for the literal interpretation of the Bible (which does indeed claim the earth is the center of the universe, as all ancient cultures believed). Ironically, the Catholic Church has long ago apologized for its persecution of Galileo by the Inquisition, and for its long rejection of the heliocentric system, so clearly they do not endorse these views by “Catholics” who don’t follow their own Church’s teachings.

The latest convention of crackpots and crazies occurred on the weekend of July 6-9, 2011, when the “Natural Philosophy Alliance” held their 18th Annual Conference at the University of Maryland, claiming 269 participants with 138 abstracts. The term “Natural Philosophy” in the title is a clue, because that’s what people used to call investigations of nature (usually in the context of studying God’s handiwork) before the term “science” came along with its secular influences and emphasis on experiment and testability. The entire world of “natural philosophy” faded away slowly in the mid-nineteenth century as truly scientific ideas like evolution, modern chemistry and physics, and uniformitarian geology drove out the old-fashioned religion-based approach to the natural world.

So who are these “natural philosophers” in the 21st century world of modern science? If you scan down the list of named “scientists”, you’ll find a lot of writers, “independent researchers,” engineers, artists, film makers, a dairy farmer—but hardly any real scientists. Some claim the title “Dr.” in their biographies, but when you look closer, their “doctorates” are questionable ones from diploma mills. If their credentials are legit, their doctorate is in a field far from what they were talking about at the conference, such as philosophy or religion, not science. Almost none with doctorates seem to have ever held an academic position, so they were seldom exposed to the continuous challenge of skepticism, peer review, and scientific give and take that real scientists must continually deal with. Instead, most seem to have made their living outside of science where their ideas are not challenged.Their entire output seems to be abstracts for conferences like this one, or publications in their own journals, or self-published books. Clearly they are afraid of peer review by real scientists. A good indicator of the disreputable nature of the meeting is the large number of abstracts published “in absentia” with no speaker to deliver the paper or defend the abstract. This is not tolerated at real scientific meetings, where you are supposed to designate a backup speaker if you can’t attend, or withdraw your abstract. No hiding from your peers is allowed!

But let’s not resort to an ad hominem argument—maybe these people is actually on to something that scientists have missed. Unfortunately, a scan through their abstracts is even more discouraging. The program is a veritable smorgasbord of nearly every discredited idea that ended up on the scientific trash heap over the past 200 years. Most are attempts to restore “intuitive” notions about physics against the counter-intuitive world of modern physics and cosmology, from many attacks on Einstein and relativity (complete with “Neo-Newtonian theory”, even though we still use good old Newtonian mechanics in most everyday matters), to weird ideas about gravity and electromagnetism, to attempts to deny heliocentrism or the nature of the universe. The long-extinct concept of “ether” (debunked a century ago) makes its reappearance, which seems truly odd to anyone who is raised in modern science and has only heard of it as an historical mistake. Several of these presentations are actually modern versions of Velikovsky’s crackpot notions of planets violating the laws of physics as an attempt to explain biblical miracles. There were a handful of geological talks proclaiming weird ideas about the earth that no one has taken seriously in a century, and showing just how ignorant the speaker is about modern geology. Apparently, these folks don’t discuss biology much here, so the meeting focuses mostly on attacking modern physics, not evolutionary biology.

So what is going on here? If you read the abstracts carefully, you’ll find that a few of the authors reveal religious motivations or attempts to square reality with the Bible (as Velikovsky tried to do). But most seem to be old-fashioned Luddites, battling against modern physics and cosmology because it is counter-intuitive and not easy to understand without advanced training in physics and mathematics (which most of the speakers apparently lack). In contrast to a convention of creationists twisting the science to fit the Bible, most of these guys (almost none are women) are just old-fashioned cranks who think they have a great idea—but are unwilling to listen to any legitimate scientists who might prove them wrong. Thus, they preach to the converted and speak to conventions of other fringe scientists and crackpots, publish their non-peer-reviewed abstracts, and pad their “credentials” as if this would make their ideas any more credible or scientific.

We laugh at them and go on with our lives, thinking that their pathetic “convention” is of no consequence. But there are serious issues here. First, why was the University of Maryland renting out its space to crackpot pseudoscientists? There are lots of convention centers and hotels that will host meetings of any size regardless of affiliation—so why does a major research university allow these pseudoscientists on campus? I realize that state universities are desperate for money these days, but this is scandalous. Are they just selling out to the highest bidder to use their empty buildings in the summer? If so, they might as well rent their buildings to Neo-Nazis or con artists or fundamentalists doing revival meetings. Don’t they realize that each time a legitimate research university sells its soul to pseudoscientists for a few bucks, they are giving the cranks the appearance of legitimacy—and sullying their own reputation?

But there’s an even larger question. We may laugh at this gathering of 269 crazies once a year (or 2143 “scientists” their website claims for the “World Science Database”) as inconsequential. Yet there are a lot more of them out there. The office of the Skeptic Society gets letters and phone calls and emails from cranks several times a day, all claiming to have the latest “great idea” that they want Skeptic to publish. But even though they are not as numerous as the creationists, who hold 40% of the American population in the their thrall, these pseudoscientists are a clear example of why science has to stand up against nonsense, not ignore it. The creationists’ current favorite political tactic is “teach the controversy”, where their garbage is given “equal time” with legitimate science—and a large percentage of politicians and the American public agree with this and think it is only fair. What happens when a state with “equal time” legislation on the books (like Louisiana) decides to teach “the controversy” about geocentrism, ether, Velikovsky’s ideas, and attempts to discredit Einsteinian relativity and modern physics in their classes instead of teaching real physics?  All these anti-scientists need do is point to the “Natural Philosophy Association” and their many “published abstracts” and meetings, or get one of their “scientists” to testify—and then our students would be just as misled about physics or chemistry or geology as they currently are about modern biology.

We’ve all heard stories about crackpots like this—but they are much more numerous than you realize, and no longer isolated, but meeting at their own conventions and “publishing abstracts” so that a layperson wouldn’t know the difference between them and real scientists. That is no laughing matter.

Skeptoid has a long-standing tradition of making every 50th episode a lavish musical production. This tradition began last year at episode 150, which established the lavish musical employing a host of talented professionals; and crumbled all to hell this week at episode 200, when I applied my own unassisted imbecility toward the construction of a musical piece. The result is a parody of marketing efforts from purveyors of pseudoscience in the form of a song entitled Buy It!

–>> Click here to listen now (3 minutes) <<–

Being an experienced non-musician, and quite impressively talented on no musical instruments, I elected to make this piece an a cappella. This allowed me to leverage my deep gifts for not singing. Critics have already praised the performance as one of the great voices made for blogging.

My background in not composing music helped to cunningly construct chord progressions as provocative and complex as those from The Wiggles.

And so armed with the needed talents, I proceeded. Among those talents are not the abilities to count beats, keep rhythm, or hold a note, so I had to cheat a bit. Contrary to suppositions I’ve already heard, no sampling or pitch correction was used in Buy It! But there is a lot of looping. This meant I had to record each loop, usually 4 measures long, in the correct pitch and timing. So I played each vocal part separately on a keyboard into Garageband, each on its own track. I listened to each track solo, as a guide, as I sang each line. There are thirteen separate vocal tracks, plus ten handclap tracks and one finger snap track. Put them all together, mute out the keyboard guide tracks, and presto, we have a multitrack vocal performance that’s actually in sync and reasonably close to being on key. Pretty good, I thought, for someone who has no clue and little hope of ever obtaining a clue.

Yes, I know there is some clipping in a couple parts. The clipping provoked much colorful language. It’s not in the original recordings, so perhaps some future engineering will get rid of it.

The crowd-shouted “Buy it!” line caused a lot of headaches. Richard Saunders gathered a crew together in Australia and did some takes. I thought it would be fun to make this a bi-continental piece, but unfortunately I ended up being unable to use that clip; it just didn’t sound right when I mixed it in. I also gathered my family around the mic and we all shouted it too, but it came out unintelligible. So I ended up reverting to my original concept of a Village People style chorus: a combination of basses and falsettos. I doubt any listeners were able to divine that inspiration, but that’s what I was going for. Regardless, it was the only one of my three options that worked.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. It was fun to make, and I think its message is a worthy addition to the Skeptoid body of work.

I have a laundry list of retorts to this challenge, from the value of living in a rational world that is based in reality to tales of people who have died from discredited medical practices, such as “Attachment Therapy” — in April, 2000, 10-year old Candace Newmaker was smothered to death in blankets by therapists who were helping “rebirth” her so that she could properly attach to her adopted parents. Death by theory. (I wrote about this in Scientific American.)

What’s the harm? Ask the victims of the anti-Government nutter Joseph Stack, who flew his plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas. It is one thing to be skeptical of excessive government intervention into private lives and businesses, it is quite another to take matters into your own hands, especially if those hands hold a gun.

John Patrick Bedell, Pentagon Gunman

Witness one John Patrick Bedell, the gunman who attacked guards at the entrance of the Pentagon yesterday (March 4), who now appears to have been a right wing extremist and 9/11 “truther,” who in an internet posting under the user name JpatrickBedell said that he intended to expose the truth behind the 9/11 “demolitions.” Apparently the delusional Bedell intended to shoot his way into the Pentagon to find out what really happened on 9/11.

Death by conspiracy.

More specifically, Bedell picked up the conspiracy theory about the alleged “murder” in 1991 of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in his California home in 1991. The police ruled it a suicide, but right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists have suggested that he was murdered and that the case is a coverup by the federal government. Bedell posted that exposing the truth behind the Sabow case would be “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolition.”

9/11 Truthers believe the WTC buildings were “demolished” by explosive devices. What’s that thing on the left about to hit the building?

Who is John Patrick Bedell? He was a 36-year old computer programmer from Hollister, California, a graduate of U.C. Santa Cruz (physics) who also attended San Jose State University (biochemistry). So he was a smart guy. As I’ve said before: intelligence is no prophylactic against magical thinking. If anything, smart people believe weird things because they are better at rationalizing beliefs that they’ve arrived at for nonsmart reasons.

Somewhere along the line — perhaps after his arrest for cultivating cannabis and resisting a police officer — Bedell decided that he wanted to expose “the truth of events such as the 9/11 demolitions and institutions such as the coup regime of 1963 that maintains itself in power through the global drug trade, financial corruption, and murder, among other crimes.”

The “coup regime of 1963”? Yes, you know, the coup d’état that overthrew the U.S. government and replaced it with another government. You missed that one? Watch Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Lyndon Johnson and his cronies (Castro, the Russians, the CIA, the FBI, the mafia, et al.) had Kennedy assassinated.

Bedell continued in an Internet rant from 2006 associated with him:

Oliver Stone's fiction became fact for conspiracy theorists.

The sheer size of the United States economy … makes the United States government a tempting prize for any organisation or collection of bandits ruthless and clever enough to seize it. A criminal organisation able to conduct its activities from within the centre of power of the United States government would have powerful advantages over other criminal groups … This organisation … would see the sacrifice of thousands of its citizens, in an event such as the September 11 attacks, as a small cost in order to perpetuate its barbaric control. This collection of gangsters would find it in their interest to foment conflict and initiate wars throughout the world, in order to divert attention from their misconduct and criminality… This seizure of the United States government by an international criminal conspiracy is a long-established reality.

What's the Harm? Beliefs drive behaviors.

Whose reality is this? Right wing militias. Back in the 1990s there was a surge in militias and extremists groups, which waned in the final years of the decade, but are now apparently making a comeback. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who tracks such groups, there were 42 paramilitary militias in 2008 and 127 in 2009. So-called “Patriot” groups also increased, from 149 in 2008 to 512 in 2009. According to an April 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security, the current anti-government climate “parallels” what federal officials saw in the 1990s: “Rightwing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda, but they have not yet turned to attack planning.”

Not yet is the key phrase here.

What’s the harm? Now you know the answer.

The concept was a musical version of a secret meeting of the Illuminati, ruing the fact that the population has discovered alternative and faith-based everything, and thus profits are down.

It’s all well and good to make a plan like that, but how does one accomplish such a feat when one has no musical background or ability? One opens one’s rolodex. If you’ve seen my short film Here Be Dragons, you’ve heard the work of my friend, film composer Lee Sanders (visit him on Facebook or check out his web site). Lee recently won his second BMI Music Award for reality television with his work on The Amazing Race. He knows how to turn an idea into music, so I sprang my proposition on him at one of our OC Skeptics in the Pub nights a few months ago.

What followed was primarily weeks and weeks of minimal progress, mostly me waiting for Lee to give me a melody so I could write lyrics that match it, and Lee waiting for me to give him lyrics so he could write a melody to match them. Lavish broadway musicals require casts of hundreds, so I put out a few calls on Twitter and Facebook for any skeptical friends who can sing and who wanted to donate their time and talents to a fun project. Three replied: Peter Zachos (also a talented film composer), Gus Dunn, and Chris Humphreys. But three does not a cast of hundreds make, so Lee called up his friend Eric Santiestevan (yet another film composer, these guys are like weeds), and Eric managed to wrangle in a bunch of hired hands, bringing our total vocal strength to 19. And then, to put it over the top, Lee also hired a Votox programmer. It’s a synthesized symphonic choir which, properly mixed in the background, made our 19 sound like the Mormon Tabernacle.

Pieces all in place, recording began. I recorded my part separately at Lee’s studio, aptly named The Gulag. (People have complimented me on my singing, but it wasn’t really singing. It was really just a lot of shouting and whining, not unlike my normal daily routine.) The choir was recorded at a studio in Los Angeles, with Lee conducting, which was pretty damn fun to watch.

I didn’t want to be only one to have fun watching them, so I brought along my camcorder to tape as much of it as I could. And I now present for you as much of the footage as I was able to cobble together: The Making of “Screwed!”, Skeptoid Episode #150. Click the HD button if you have good bandwidth:

Troupe of Proboscis monkeys

The purpose of the trip was to attend my high-school class of 1969 40th reunion. In addition to meeting up with classmates who stayed and made their lives in Malaysia, I met up with classmates from Canada, Australia, Singapore and the U.S.  A few of us made our way (45 min. flight, 5 hr. drive and 45 min. up river by boat) to the interior of Borneo and spend a few nights in the Kinabatangan valley to see for ourselves what was left of the virgin primary forest – and communed with orangutans, horn bills, proboscis monkeys and even a pygmy Borneo elephant.
This is the area where Alfred Russell Wallace spent two years (1854-56) collecting specimens, many of which were sent to Charles Darwin. His book “The Malay Archipelago” (dedicated to Charles Darwin) was prominently on display and for sale in many local craft shops and book stores. I had to get a copy and ended up reading it on the plane on the way home. (Ok, he was a collector of specimens not a conservationist so he shot 17 orangutans within a month of getting there and sent skin samples and skeletons to England! Yikes!)

The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace

One of our classmates Robert Chong owns and operates the Kinabatangan Jungle Camp which has been written up in many eco-travel guides as the place to go for a taste of the real jungle.  In addition to a generous classmate discount, he threw in all the beer and wine we can drink in the 3 days and 2 nights.  I hope we didn’t scare away too many orangutans with our giggling and howling all night!  Robert has served as the expert guide for many naturalists and birdwatchers who came from all over the world to this forest still teaming with wild life, so to be reintroduced to the wilds of our old Borneo by one of our own was an especially moving experience.

Kota Kinabalu (KK) has changed a lot since I left in 1970. Its claim to fame of course was from the TV Reality Show “Survivor.” The first season in 2000 was filmed on Pulau Tiga, just off the coast of KK. Except for Season 1, Survivor Borneo, the show has not been shown on local TV since then – but local tourism officials still recall fondly the time when the American TV crews bought up all the rooms in the only 5-star resorts in town! When I left KK (1970 pop. – 30,000), there was not even television broadcast yet! Today, this city of half a million is a striving modern metropolis with direct flight from Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Manila, and Taipei, four 5-star resorts, wall-to-wall malls and with Starbucks, KFC’s, Pizza Huts and McDonalds in every other block!

While all the malls are very modern and quite similar to any malls you will find in Anytown, U.S., there is one significant difference – the ubiquitous “health centres” on every level.  Woo is alive and well in KK shopping malls.  Every floor of every mall has their share of “health centres” which are actually facial and reflexology businesses.

“Facial” is not just for the face – it’s “skin care” woos of every description. Name any skin care and “youth restoration” product you ever saw on late night infomercial in the U.S. and they have it – and more. Other than the usual hype of different concoctions for different types of skin, they have specialties for different blood types, skin and facial treatments for different “time of the month” and time of the year (even though KK has no seasons and has average temp of 81 deg. and 90% humidity all year round.) For many of my female classmates, anecdotal evidence that their weekly visits to these parlors for their herbal/placenta wrap and botox/collagen cream treatment works was unfortunately reinforce by comparison with a few returnees’ foreign (read “white”) wives with their prematurely wrinkled and sun blotched skin (from over-enthusiastic sun tanning in their youth before SP30 sunscreen was deemed necessary!) True believers that they are, my suggestion that their good complexion may not be all due to their treatments at these facial salons devoid of any dermatological expertise was heresy. I suggested that they have such good complexion in their late 50′s should probably be credited to their Asiatic ancestor who endowed them with good genes and cultural taboo against being darken by the sun when they were young (every school girl walked under an umbrella when we were growing up.)

Reflexology centers are all adorned with anatomy posters on the wall with well-annotated “chi” lines and acupressure points.  But in reality, what is offered in these mall stores is nothing more than just hard pressure massage, and is offered for every combination and permutation of body parts. All my classmates, male and female, local to KK swear by them – a quick stop at one of these mall heath centers

Ear Candles - Made in Germany is the selling point!

on the way home after a hard days work is a must to be “rejuvenated” for the evening! Many of the health and facial centers like to attach the word “homeopathy” to their names. Upon questioning the “health professionals” in these centers, it became quite obvious that they have absolutely no idea what the term

What the heck is Homeopathy Reflexology?

“homeopath” really refers to. I think they confused “natural” or even “organic” with “homeopathy.” So, a “homeopathy reflexology centre” will use only organic oils and creams. Ear-Candling is big too – and European imported ear candles are all the rage.  Ear-Candling is included in most “package” deals you get from one of these health centers. My wife had to try the reflexology massage but definitely passed on the ear candling.

One of the Facial Rejuvenation centers advertise a “Breast Firming and Hot Mask” treatment which sounded very intriguing. In the interest of science and research, I tried to persuade my wife to find out what it was all about – I was going to pay for the RM$40 (about US$11.) But she was quite offended that the thought that her breasts needed firming would even crossed my mind. So, on that front, I have nothing to report!

Advise to husbands - do NOT suggest wife try last item!