Skepticblog

Eager young VP students dance through the night at the after-meeting party. (Photo by R. Hunt-Foster).

Last November, the 73rd annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) was held here in Los Angeles. SVP is my professional society, since my primary training and research is fossil vertebrates (especially fossil mammals like rhinos, peccaries, camels, horses, and others). My first SVP  was the 1977 meeting, the last time it was held here in Los Angeles, when I was just a beginning graduate student. Since then,  I’ve been to every meeting of SVP, a streak of 36 years in a row. It’s my lifeline, and I wouldn’t consider missing it for anything. Once a year I get to see all my closest professional friends and colleagues, people I spent months in the field with, former officemates from grad school, and find out the latest news about people I’ve known for 30 years or more. I also present my own research (I always do at least one presentation, and sometimes my name is on several more by my students), and I usually get to see my former students as they grow and thrive in their own careers. For five years (1999-2004), I was the Program Chair, running the entire meeting and producing (editing, typesetting, etc.) the abstract volume with over 600 individual abstracts. At that point, I couldn’t miss the meeting for anything, including my brother’s wedding (I told him in advance NOT to schedule it to conflict with SVP).  Most importantly, I go each year to get some positive feedback and affirmation that my 40 years  of research and scholarship is valued and means something to people who appreciate it. This is  essential when you spend the other 51 weeks of the year in a hostile department where they don’t appreciate you and try to tear you down at every opportunity.

(continue reading…)

I write this post just a few hours after watching the Ham on Nye “debate” last night. I’m still mulling over the details, and checking on line to see the evolving reactions to the events, but it’s running through my head so much now that it’s time to write it down so I can get back to work. Fittingly, it will post on February 12, Darwin’s 205th birthday. It couldn’t be more appropriate.

Let me start at the beginning. I was at Michael Shermer’s New Year’s Eve party last December 31st.  This is not just your average New Year’s Eve party: it’s in Shermer’s magnificent glass-walled view house at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains with an amazing panorama of the lights of the city below.  He had his telescope out on the porch, and we all got a view of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter. The guests include Mr. Deity and “Lucy” (Brian Keith Dalton and Amy Rohren), D.J. Grothe of the James Randi Educational Foundation, lots of scientists including several JPL people, Shermer’s grad students—and Bill Nye. Late in the evening, Bill comes up to me and mentions that he had agreed to debate Ken Ham. He knew I’d beaten Duane Gish back in 1983, and that I was familiar with battling creationism over the past 35 years. After I talked to him and realized that the debate was set and he could not back out, I offered to help him prepare. Then about 3 weeks ago, he emailed me and we made arrangements. He spent a day in Oakland at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), where a bunch of their staff helped him analyze Ham’s past debates and arguments (they have archives of every creationist out there), and suggest strategies. Since Ham had voluntarily  set the debate topic to defend the scientific value and truth of the Bible, Bill was not in the usual dilemma of having to defend and explain complex topics of evolution. Normally, creationists employ the “Gish Gallop” to keep the scientist on the defensive, trying to undo the mistaken ideas and lies the creationist has just said, and replace it with a more complex explanation. Instead, the NCSE staffers  recommended that Bill use this to his advantage, and do a “reverse Gish Gallop”: pile on the examples one after another, so that Ham wouldn’t have time or ability to answer them all. (continue reading…)

For much of the past year I hoped to find the time to read and review UK science teacher Alom Shaha’s The Young Atheist’s Handbook, which had great buzz among softer atheist voices. Finally I found a moment last year to dig into the book. And loved it. It’s a brisk, wonderful read—and every bit as moving, and as laudably pluralistic, as its reputation suggested. It was an experience I really enjoyed. I wanted to tell people about it.

The question was, where?

As many readers know, I am an atheist in my personal life. At the same time, in my professional life I am an advocate for old school “scientific” skepticism (PDF). I regularly argue that the distinct and valuable tradition of scientific skepticism should be clearly distinguished from other parallel rationalist movements, and from the religious and political beliefs of individual skeptics—including my own. Skepticism is not an atheists only club. (continue reading…)

A plot showing the growth in number of Ph.D.’s (blue lines) versus the slow change in the academic job market (yellow lines) (From Schillebeeckx et al., 2013)

In my previous post, I talked about the dramatic differences between students and expectations in an elite four-year college vs. the two-year colleges. Implicit in the discussion was another topic that most of the public does not know about: the increasing use of underpaid adjunct faculty to teach courses throughout academia.

The topic finally broke through the media silence last fall when on September 1, Mary Margaret Vojtko, an adjunct professor of French at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh for 25 years, died of heart attack at age 83, completely penniless. The original story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette soon made the national and international media as the sordid details emerged. Vojtko slaved away tirelessly at Duquesne for all those years with excellent teaching evaluations and everything else that should have resulted in rewards from the university. Instead, she got an adjunct contract year after year, working for less than $25,000 a year with no benefits. She fell further and further into poverty living on those wages, until she could no longer afford a home, and was completely broke by the time she died. When caseworkers from Adult Protective Services were called in to investigate, they were shocked that she was a hard-working professor, not some sort of bum off the street, and could not imagine how someone with a Ph.D. could have fallen so low without the usual problems with drugs, alcohol, or mental illness. (continue reading…)

Tomorrow, as many of you know, Bill Nye “the Science Guy” will take the stage with Answers in Genesis frontman Ken Ham to debate the topic of evolution. For those of you interested, the event may be watched streaming for free, live at 7 PM Eastern on February 4, 2014.

Are such debates a good idea? As you might gather from the many divergent opinions on Nye’s choice, the answer is far from clear. Too much depends upon the circumstances, format, and participants of the “debate.” Also, it is often argued—and I tend to agree with this argument—that there are figures too cynical to be fruitfully engaged in any format. (My initial gut feeling was that Ham may not be a fair-minded opponent, and that this particular debate may not have been a wise decision for Nye for that reason—though Randy Olson has almost brought me around with this thoughtful post.)

But the wider meta-question is not a new one. I thought it might be interesting to share a decades-old argument in favor of public engagement with fringe ideas and their proponents by a pioneering voice for modern scientific skepticism: Carl Sagan. It reminds me that “debating pseudoscience” is, when you get down to it, what skeptics do.

In December of 1969, a symposium on the topic of UFOs was hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Organized by Sagan and Thornton Page, it almost didn’t happen at all. For over a year, the symposium faced passionate opposition from scientists who believed that hosting such an exchange would lend inappropriate legitimacy and stage time to the fringe, and all at the expense of the science. “A distinguished scientist once threatened to sic then Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew on me,” Sagan later recalled, “if I persisted in organizing a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which both proponents and opponents of the extraterrestrial-spacecraft hypothesis of UFO origins would be permitted to speak.”¹

(continue reading…)

Ever since I was a 4-year-old, hooked on dinosaurs, I knew that I wanted to study paleontology for the rest of my life. By the time I was in fourth grade, I was the only kid in my school who knew anything about dinosaurs (this was in the early 60s, before dinosaurs became cool for kids). I was asked to lecture about them to the sixth graders, and so I knew I liked to teach. Once I got into college and followed the normal route to a career in paleontology through my Ph.D. at Columbia University and the American Museum in Natural History in New York, I was committed to becoming a college professor. Starting with teaching at Columbia and Vassar, then at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and then 27 years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and at Caltech in Pasadena, I’ve been extremely fortunate in teaching at elite institutions with outstanding students every place I’ve worked. Most of my time has been spent in small private liberal arts colleges (Vassar, Knox, and Occidental), where the classes are small and full of dedicated, bright students who mostly want to learn and generally work very hard. I got to know every student in nearly every class very quickly, and got to be good at reading their faces to make sure they understand. I always challenged them without pushing them past their breaking point. I was  very proud of the mature, thoughtful scholarship our senior geology majors would produce after four years of the best teaching and opportunities. I’ve been nominated for teaching awards many times and won a few times, and I always have alumni and alumnae coming back and telling me how important my class was in opening their eyes or changing their lives. At small private colleges where the tuition is high, we give them their money’s worth with highly intensive, personalized education (I have involved hundreds of students in my research over the years, and about 45 students have more than 50 published scientific papers co-authored with me). We know immediately if a student is missing from class (it’s hard to hide in a class of eight, but even in a class of 32, I kept track). The college practically flipped out if a student missed 2-3 meetings in a row without contacting us—we were instructed to notify the Dean of Students for any student doing poorly on a test, or showing signs of slipping, since they don’t want anyone to drop out if they can help it. And we were proud of our high retention rate, and virtually all our students graduated in four years. (continue reading…)

Order the book from Shop Skeptic

Just after the beginning of the year, leading anti-vaxxer and former Playboy Playmate Jenny McCarthy was in the news again. Several years ago, she apparently told Time magazine that her son Evan didn’t have autism, but (as doctors have long suspected) Landau-Kleffner syndrome. Then in January, McCarthy made several angry denials of this old interview. Frankly, I doubt that a source like Time magazine misquoted her—I think she’s lying again. She now claims that Time magazine inaccurately reported the facts! I think my irony meter just broke. Jenny McCarthy was a washed-up actress with nothing but a series of low-brow movies and TV shows to her credit until she became the national spokeswoman for the anti-vaxxer movement—a movement which was,  in a form of supreme irony, legendary for an inaccurate grasp of the facts, then shifting the goal posts on their demands when the mercury was removed from the vaccines and there was still no effect on rates of autism. She rejects mainstream science, yet cites biomedical science in support of her claim that her son really has autism. I think we should reject her claim outright, because she (like many anti-vaxxers) have no clue what mainstream science and medicine are about.

Now she and her anti-vaxx cohort are demanding that medicine and drug companies should “green the vaccine”! What the heck do they think the FDA is for? All vaccines must pass rigorous testing and quality control through the FDA, which has one of the most stringent standards for drugs and medicine in the world. Fat chance that she and her fellow science-denying protesters are going to help the process in any way! Meanwhile, she’s now on The View every day, giving an air of legitimacy to her form of pseudoscience. And the movement she bolstered is causing huge numbers of kids to go unvaccinated, get sick and sometimes die of preventable diseases—and, even worse, spread those diseases to and often kill infants too young for vaccination (even if their parents do believe in modern medicine). (continue reading…)

Damaged parking garage at Cal State Northridge

Twenty years ago today, January 17, was an event I shall never forget: the Northridge earthquake of 1994. Born and raised in Southern California, I’ve lived through the 1971 Sylmar quake, the 1987 Whittier quake, and many, many smaller events that most people have forgotten. The events were traumatic to anyone who experienced it, even at great distances, and for years afterwards I could remind my students about how it felt, and how it changed Los Angeles. Unfortunately, time marches on, and now that it is 20 years ago, most of my college students either were too young to remember, or were not even born yet!

It struck at 4:31 in the morning, in total pre-dawn darkness, on a Monday that was the Martin Luther King holiday. Luckily, it meant that most people were sleeping and fewer than usual were headed to work, so the casualties were much less than if it had hit during the peak of rush hour. Even though it had a moment magnitude (Mw) of “only” 6.7, its upward acceleration of the ground motion was 1.8 g, much stronger than many quakes of the same size, and the highest ever recorded in an urban area in North America. It seemed to last a long time, although it actually lasted only 10-20 seconds. There was another Mw = 6.0 aftershock an hour later, and another 11 hours later. It was felt strongly as far as Las Vegas, an unusually long distance for southern California quakes (which tend not to propagate very far because of the shattered, highly faulted blocks in our crustal rocks don’t transfer energy well). Contrary to the name, its epicenter was not Northridge, but in Reseda, a town to the south—and both were very close to where I now teach at Pierce College in Woodland Hills. The initial reports of the magnitude as 6.6 and the epicenter at Northridge proved to be wrong once better seismic data came in a day later. (continue reading…)

I can just see it now: Mike Riley and his production team, veterans of previous “reality” TV  shows such as “Yukon Men,” “Cram”, “Tool Academy”, and many others, are brainstorming ideas for another new show. Several new Bigfoot shows have just aired on basic cable TV, so someone says “Why don’t we combine ‘Survivor’ with Bigfoot?”  I’m sure something along these lines occurred: take a classic “reality” TV format, the competition show between individuals or teams (such as “Survivor” or “The Amazing Race”), and give them a new pop-culture task to perform: finding Bigfoot. This, in a nutshell, is what Spike TV’s new show “The $10 Million Bigfoot Bounty” (first aired on Jan. 10) is all about.

Just like the format of other competition “reality” TV shows, they have 9 teams of 2 people told to perform a difficult task: seeking evidence of Bigfoot in the woods of Washington and California. Each week another team is eliminated for failing to come up with something, and the race gets tougher. If any contestant comes up with good evidence of Bigfoot, they win the $10 million prize. During each episode, they follow a standard format: some sort of competition to see if they have the “skills” to do the job, and then a night search for “evidence of Bigfoot”—plus the usual footage of the contestants at the beginning and end of each competition, and a final “elimination” segment when they milk the “who gets kicked out?” storyline for the maximum amount of drama. They follow all the stereotypical conventions of this genre: spooky music, lots of reaction shots of contestants under stress, big pause before they announce the loser then cut to a long commercial break before the reveal, etc. And, like any reality show, lots of footage of the contestants arguing and bickering with each other, saying stupid things, and just plain making fools of themselves in front of millions of viewers. (Word of advice: pre-record the show and watch it later with your remote control. Almost half the time is killed by obnoxious advertisements).

(continue reading…)

The U-2 spy plane, secretly built by Lockheed and the CIA and tested at Area 51

Come join the Skeptic Society for our trip to Area 51 and other alien landscapes, Martin Luther King weekend (January 18-20), 2014. We will spend 3 days exploring the “Extraterrestrial Highway” (with lunch at the Little A’Le’inn), collecting trilobites, and visiting the National Atomic Testing Museum and their UFO exhibit, as well as the alien landscape of Valley of Fire State Park and Calico Ghost Town. Both nights will be spent at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. For further details, see this link. Hurry! We’re down to our last few seats!

In the past few decades, this perfectly ordinary military base in the middle of the desert in southern Nevada has taken on mythic status. Most military bases have tight security, and only authorized military personnel and their contractors are allowed on base. This particular base is top secret, with much tighter security than most military land. Not only is it surrounded by a secured perimeter and motion detectors in the ground, but the guards travel the perimeter regularly, and have video security cameras monitoring everything that comes near the fence. It is also located in one of the most remote areas of sparsely populated Nevada, more than two hours of driving north out of Las Vegas. Because there is no way to see the base from the paved road, even from the highest peaks outside the base except Tikaboo Peak (a long hard desert hike), it can only be viewed from the air or from space. Naturally, that high level of secrecy has led to all sorts of speculation about what happens there, and an entire industry of books and movies and TV shows which need only mention the phrase “Area 51” and immediately their audience assumes that there are aliens or some kinds of weird government experiments going on there. (continue reading…)