 the
Skeptic's Dictionary
Newsletter 49
November 21, 2004
"A recent Gallup poll found that nearly half
of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form, with a
mere 13 percent saying God played no part in the process of human
development."--news
item
"Americans are three times as likely to
believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in evolution (28
percent)." --news
item
"Can a people that believes more fervently in
the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?"
--Gary Wills
In this issue:
several updates, a few revisions, and one new entry;
a page for stats lovers;
some feedback on Penn & Teller;
new DVDs on Ghosts and UFOs
from Unsolved Mysteries;
a Hungarian translation of The
Skeptic's Dictionary; and
Consegrity quackery.
What's New in the Skeptic's
Dictionary & Refuge
I've added some
comments on
the Dover School Board in York, PA. They're the first public school
district in the nation to add
intelligent design (ID) to the biology curriculum.
Not long after the move in York, the Grantsburg, Wisconsin, school
board
revised its science curriculum to allow the teaching of
creationism.
Also on the
ID front, we're still waiting for the decision by U.S. District Judge
Clarence Cooper who heard arguments in a lawsuit challenging a disclaimer
inserted into Cobb County, GA, science textbooks that says evolution is "a
theory, not a fact."
These events should be most gratifying to the
Discovery Institute, which has been
the main force pushing ID as an alternative scientific theory to natural
selection. Never mind that ID is no more a serious threat to natural
selection than is the Raelian theory or
Sitchinian theory that we were designed by
aliens. I posted some
comments on
the assistance the ID folks are getting from journalists and added a link
to an
article by Chris Mooney on the role of the media in promoting fringe
ideas. To be fair, not all journalists are falling for the "fair and
balanced" argument, e.g., York journalist
Mike Argento.
I favor Ken Miller's comment on ID: "the struggles of the intelligent
design movement are best understood as clamorous and disappointing double
failures – rejected by science because they do not fit the facts, and
having failed religion because they think too little of God."*
R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, favors the Discovery Institute position.
I posted my
comments on Mohler's argument and explain why I favor Miller's
argument regarding ID.
***
I added another item to the
"What's the
Harm?" page: beware of psychics claiming they need to take your money
or valuables for a cleansing ritual (translation: you will be
cleaned out).
***
Psychic detectives (PDs) are getting
quite a bit of play from
Court TV
lately, which has brought in
Dr.
Katherine Ramsland to provide an
online mini-book defending the use of psychics by police departments.
It would be impossible as well as pointless to try to explain away each
anecdote brought forth in support of the effectiveness of PDs. My own take
on stories about psychic detectives is that the best explanation is in
terms of apophenia and
subjective validation. For
example, here is a case put forth by Dr. Ramsland:
Police needed a body, but he [i.e., the confessed killer] wouldn't
reveal the information, so they turned to a psychic, Greta Alexander. She
said that a body had been dumped where there was a dog barking. The letter
"s" would play an important role and there was hair separated from the
body. She felt certain the body was in a specific area, although searchers
found only a dead animal. She asked to see a palm print of the suspect—her
specialty—and the detective brought one. She said that a man with a bad
hand would find the body. Then searchers found a headless corpse, with the
head and a wig nearby. The man who found it had a deformed left hand.
There was water nearby.*
One interpretation is that Alexander got psychic impressions from some
sort of other dimension (supernatural or paranormal) by some sort of
mysterious process. Another interpretation is that the psychic, the
detectives, and anyone else who connects the dots and gives significance
and meaning to these facts is subjectively validating the psychic
hypothesis in exactly the same way a sitter might validate John Edward's
impressions of "father figure, big H, small dog, broken ashtray" as
indicating communication from a dead uncle. The believers are seeing
patterns where none exist, except the ones they create in their own minds.
They aren't bothered by the stretch it takes to get from "hair separated
from the body" (which covers a multitude of possible scenes) to "headless
corpse, with the head and wig nearby." Certainly, head and wig near the
body may be seen as a denotatum of the expression hair separated
from the body. But so can a million other things.
One reason many believers don't accept this explanation is because they
are impressed by the specific nature of some of the claims, which,
they think, eliminates guessing or luck as a reasonable explanation for
alleged accuracy. (See Gary Schwartz's Afterlife Experiments, for
example.) "Deformed left hand" is not a vague generalization that could be
true of many people, unlike the letter 's' or the claim that a body will
be found in a shallow grave or near water. True. But "bad hand" is
ambiguous. Thus, while it is possible that Alexander has
clairvoyant powers and somehow peered into
the future and saw something rather trivial (that the hand of the person
who would find the body would be "bad"), it is also true that having a
deformed left hand is just one of many thousands of items that would count
as having "a bad hand."
In any case, I posted some
comments
about the Oxford, Ohio, police's inviting Noreen Renier to help them solve
a missing-person case. Yes, this is the same Noreen Renier who predicted
that President Jimmy Carter would be reelected in 1980 and assassinated on
the White House lawn. Nobody's perfect, I know.
***
 I
updated the pareidolia
page to include a link to an
article about the eBay
auction of a 10-year-old toasted cheese sandwich with the Virgin Mary's
visage (or is it Madelyn Kahn?).
Joe Nickell was called upon to explain to the world how it is that
people can see the Virgin Mary in the discolorations of a sandwich.
Some character now has a piece of toast with the image of Elvis for
sale on eBay.
***
I updated the Satan
page to include a link to a BBC article about
Satanism and the Royal
Navy. I also updated the
Satanic ritual abuse
page to include reference to an NBC Dateline program that interviewed
several adults who, as children, had been coerced into testifying that
they had been abused by their parents. They now tell the court that they
lied as kids. It was clear from watching them that they most certainly had
been abused--by social workers, law enforcement interviewers, and
prosecutors. The program noted that while the media focused on the
McMartin preschool trial in Los Angeles, a much more extensive witch-hunt
was going on in Bakersfield, California. In the 1980s, the office of
District Attorney Ed Jagels prosecuted 46 people in eight alleged
molestation rings. Twenty-two of thirty convictions were later reversed.
Eight had the charges dropped and eight plea bargained to keep them from
doing time in prison. One of those convicted died in prison. The rest
served out their sentences. The last of the accused, John Stoll, served 20
years in prison before his conviction was overturned last May
(AP News).
***
I updated the electromagnetic
fields (EMFs) entry to include
reference to a new Swedish study that "suggests that people who use a
mobile phone for at least 10 years might increase their risk of developing
a rare benign tumor along a nerve on the side of the head where they hold
the phone." It's not an alarming study, but in the interest of fairness, I
thought I ought to include reference to it. The scientific consensus still
is that there is no convincing evidence that EMFs cause cancer.
***
I updated the Transcendental
Meditation page to include a link to an
article
by David S. Holmes about a study which concluded that "there is no
evidence that meditation is more effective for reducing somatic arousal
than is simple rest." In other words, if you are trying to relax, resting
works as well as meditation.
***
I revised the cold
reading entry and added an entry on
hot reading. The
revision consists of an extensive concluding section on cold reading
and contacting the dead. I was inspired to add this section to the
entry after studying Gary Schwartz's Afterlife Experiments. In my
view, Schwartz has been misled into thinking that all cold reading
involves fishing for facts, finding cues and clues in interpersonal
communication, guessing, or making vague statements that might be true of
many people. He does not give serious enough consideration to the role of
apophenia/subjective validation in cold reading. He is not alone in this
common misunderstanding of how cold reading works.
***
I posted some
comments on a test done by some CSICOP fellows on Natasha Demkina, the
Russian teenager said to have X-ray diagnostic vision. The testers are
called Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health and they have
posted a report of the test.
Andrew Skolnik, who was involved in the test, explained to me that there
were many difficulties the committee faced in examining Natasha's alleged
skill. These problems don't come out in the posted report. He tells me
that he and Ray Hyman will be publishing a detailed account of the test
and what they found out about Demkina for the Jan/Feb 2005 issue of
Skeptical Inquirer. I'll say no more then.
***
I posted some
comments
about some questionable research done on behalf of the U.S. Air Force,
which paid $25,000 for a report that calls for $7.5 million to be spent on
psychic teleportation
experiments.
***
I updated my vitamin
supplements page to include a link to an
article about
the potential dangers of taking too much vitamin E.
***
I posted a note
about contradictory studies regarding a link between working at an IBM
microprocessor plant and cancer.
***
I updated the astrology
page to include a link to an
article proclaiming that 3 of 4 leading astrologers in India predicted
a Kerry victory.
***
I updated the Atlantis
page to include yet another explorer who claims to have found the
fictional lost continent. Robert Sarmast claims that Atlantis is to be
found off the coast of Cyprus. Others have found Atlantis in Crete, Cuba,
the Andes, the Azores, the Caribbean and Ireland. Some think it is in
Mexico, Nigeria, Sweden, or the Sahara. Maybe Atlantis is a state of mind.
***
I posted a
comment on Sylvia Browne's revelation on the Montel Williams show to
the mother of a girl who was almost 17 when she failed to come home after
work one day two years ago. Said
Brown: "She's not alive, honey."
***
Finally, I updated the
chupacabra page to include an
article about some sick coyotes in Texas that are being maligned as
chupacabras.
New Statistics Page
Speaking of chupacabras...the little goat suckers page is the most
popular SD entry for the third week in a row. I've restored the weekly
What's Hot! page, listing
the ten most popular pages. We're averaging about 1.5 million page views
by about half a million visitors a month on all our pages (over one
thousand). Uri Geller must have been in the news last week. He jumped from
#34 to #2. For those who are interested in a more detailed look at what
pages are popular, take a look at the
WebLog Express report
generated for the week.
Feedback
Richard writes
I just found your website and am really
glad it's there. Thanks! We need rational thinking more than ever these
days. Who would have thought scientific thought would be considered a
controversial world view in the 21st Century?
A question: Having been inundated by
pseudoscience and manipulated reasoning from alternative medicine
providers, ufologists, creation scientists, and the like, I was very
disappointed to find the Penn & Teller show using equally specious fake
science to back up their point of view. I did a little digging and found
their Cato Institute
connection, which explained a lot.
Any opinion on this topic? I think it's
important that the anti-superstitious, analytical point of view not be
co-opted by equally questionable reasoning (often in support of ideology
or corporate funders) that presents itself as 'skepticism.' Your piece on
the 'Junk
Science' page is exactly the kind of work we need.
What's your take on Penn & Teller? They
are probably the best-known 'skeptics' out there today, and I'm concerned
about where this might be taking the whole movement (if that's not too
grand a term.) Any thoughts?
P & T might be the inner child or the
primal scream of the skeptical movement. I was in the
Bullshit!
episode on
creationism (series one) and thought it was put together in a pretty
sophomoric way, using ridicule and insult to demean the opposition. But,
having used insult and ridicule myself on occasion to dismiss a particularly
obnoxious opponent, I can hardly justify criticizing them for it.
P & T were
publicly criticized at Randi's Amazing Meeting 2 for their shoddy research
on the secondhand smoke episode. [I HAVE RETRACTED
THE FOLLOWING CLAIMS ABOUT THE EPA REPORT (SEE
NEWSLETTER 41). I NOW BELIEVE IT
IS BASED ON GOOD SCIENCE AND PROPER STANDARDS. THE STANDARDS USED BY P & T'S
RESEARCHERS ARE THOSE DEVISED BY THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY AND THEIR REPUBLICAN
CRONIES. THE CATO INSTITUTE IS AN ALLY IN THE ORWELLIAN WAR ON SCIENCE (SEE
SILENCING SCIENCE), WHERE "SOUND SCIENCE" MEANS JUNK SCIENCE AND
"JUNK SCIENCE" MEANS SOUND SCIENCE. SEE
CHRIS MOONEY'S THE
REPUBLICAN WAR ON SCIENCE.] I investigated their claims and found that
P & T were
right about the claim that Environmental Protection Agency report
in 1993, which is used by many people to defend the claim that passive smoking
causes 3,000 lung cancer deaths a year, was tainted and didn't justify the
conclusion regarding the dangers of secondhand smoke and lung cancer.
However, it is clear that P & T focused rather narrowly on a single issue
and a single study. They did not address secondhand smoke in all its
aspects, such as any connections with other diseases or
the effects on children.
Their rant on secondhand smoke fits with their libertarian
politics and their Cato
Institute affiliation. Personally, I don't see any necessary connection
between their skepticism about John Edward's claim to get messages from the
dead and their libertarian political views. I don't see how this gives
skepticism a bad name or has any effect on whatever skeptical movement might
be going on, any more than being lousy magicians would wreck the efforts of
skeptics. (I'm not saying they are lousy magicians, by the way.)
WHAT MAY GIVE SKEPTICISM A BAD NAME IS BEING DUPED
AS I WAS, AND AS P & T WERE, BY POWERFUL LOBBIES THAT HAVE INSTITUTED
UNREALISTIC STANDARDS FOR SCIENCE AIMED MORE AT DEREGULATING INDUSTRIES THAN
AT PUBLIC HEALTH AND SAFETY. WE'VE BEEN BETRAYED BY OUR LEADERS.
I understand they did an episode in their current series which featured
Bjřrn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State
of the World as providing good arguments against various environmental
groups. Others have written about this and their views are worth looking at
(A Skeptical
Blog). (THIS BLOG DOES MORE THAN CHIDE P & T
FOR BEING DUPES. IT ACCUSES THEM OF BEING SELECTIVE IN THEIR PRESENTATION OF
DATA AS WELL.) Anyway, P & T are big boys and can defend themselves. They don't
pretend to do serious scholarly work. They're entertainers. And they sure
didn't do it for the money. They've got a bully pulpit and they're using it.
I don't think they care one way or the other what you or I think about the
series. Nobody is likely to mistake them for the voice of learned
scholarship, though
there are moments of poignant lucidity in some of the shows. For example,
exposing the methods of Rosemary Althea and the lengthy contract required by
James Van Praagh of his audience not to tell anybody what goes on at his
shows provide some powerful evidence about the genuineness of these psychic
@#$%^&s.
But by and large they make fun
of people and what they think are stupid ideas. For example, in the
ESP episode
they go after some lame pet psychic and her clients, a guy who charges $300
to get people to draw silly pictures in the hopes that they are using
psychic powers, and a very odd guy who invites people into his home to bend
cutlery in the name of PK. They don't go after the very litigious Uri
Geller, however. In some ways they're like
the proverbial bull in the china shop. As long as we're not on the receiving
end of their horns, they provide a good belly laugh while debunking pet
psychics, "grief counselors," and dentists who do past life regression
therapy. I don't think their libertarian work has a significant effect on what
most people think about their work as debunkers of paranormal or
supernatural claims. When you back a lot of
different horses, you're bound to back some winners and some losers. In any
case, there is so little media that is skeptical of anything paranormal or
occult, I don't think we should worry about what other kinds of ideas or
arguments skeptics like Penn & Teller or John Stossel (another libertarian
skeptic) are making. By the way, the Showtime folks must think the P & T
show is okay: they've signed them up for a third season.
***
And this from John Renish regarding the passing of Betty Hill:
Something none of the recent articles mention is that Hill was white, her
husband black, it was the early 1960s, and they were childless--the fact
that the abductors were child-sized and gray--and carrying out apparent
fertility studies--certainly seems to be a bit of wish-fulfillment.
The Times (of London) did mention that Barney was black. They write
that Betty Hill "was also an active member of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People and a founding member of Rockingham
Community Action. Her marriage to her black husband Barney was highly
unusual America in its day. He died of a brain haemorrhage in 1969. In the
last years of her life Hill became far more interested in tracing her
ancestry than in UFOs."
Unsolved Mysteries
As an example of what the mainstream media is likely to do with a subject
like UFOs or Ghosts, one need go no further than the television series
Unsolved Mysteries and host Robert Stack. I was recently sent review
copies of two collections of shows on these topics that have been released
on DVD:
Unsolved Mysteries - Ghosts and
Unsolved Mysteries - UFOs. The DVDs cover some of the more
interesting stories on these topics, but they are covered primarily from the
non-skeptical point-of-view. In the UFO series, the vast majority of time is
spent making the case for the event happening as reported by believers. A
small amount of time is given to a skeptic to offer alternative
explanations. Actual skeptics appear in several episodes, but eventually no
skeptic appears and Stack simply notes something to the effect that "of
course skeptics think otherwise." In the ghost stories, most episodes
either have no skeptical moments or a token comment by Stack, usually in the
form of a question: could it be explained by the power of suggestion or
an overactive imagination? In short, the stories are heavily weighted
in favor of the believers, with little effort being made to seek out
alternative explanations. Frankly, I prefer the P & T episode on ghosts
(which is a bonus episode on their
DVD). They do a thorough investigation of two ghost
hunters who authenticate a hoax ghost sighting in a parking lot. The Robert
Stack volume on ghosts has more interesting and complex stories, but minimal
effort at skeptical analysis.
***
Szkeptikus szótár magyar nyelven
A Szkeptikus szótár a skepdic.com címen elérhető Skeptic's Dictionary
magyar nyelvű változata. A szótár Robert T. Caroll szellemi tulajdona, és
szerzői jogokkal védett.
I have no idea what that says, either, but it comes
from the computer of Lovasi Péter, who has volunteered to translate The
Skeptic's Dictionary into Hungarian. Besides English, this will make
eleven languages for the SD online. A twelfth language, Russian, will be
available in a print version only. For those of you who understand
Hungarian, take a look at Lovasi's effort.
At last check, he had over 50 entries translated.
Quackery of the Minute
Consegrity is this
minute's winner. This is the brainchild of a retired physician, Mary A.
Lynch, M.D., and Debra Harrison, a massage therapist. Lynch is a graduate of
Georgetown University Medical School who specialized in orthopedics and
Sports Medicine. Harrison is a graduate of the Myotherapy Institute of Utah.
In case you're wondering,
myotherapy is a method for relaxing muscle spasm, improving
circulation, and alleviating pain. The therapist applies finger pressure to
“trigger points,” usually in the muscle tissue or area surrounding joints.
The success of this method, developed by Bonnie Prudden in 1976, depends on
the use of specific corrective exercise of the freed muscles."
Anyway, the folks from Consegrity tell us that this is a new word that
"encapsulates" CONsciousness awareness; tenSEGRITY
of the body — the ability to withstand tension and pressure; and CONsilience
— "the ALL KNOWING aspect of us." They have a very lofty mission:
We choose to create an opportunity to provide personal growth,
performance and expansion of Awareness that we are all ONE. By observing
what works and letting go of that which no longer serves us, we can, each
and everyone, bring Order to Chaos, Unity to Mind/Body/Spirit and awaken to
a planet reborn through remembering Who We Really Are.
You might think they are just a bunch of pragmatists hiding behind some
mumbo jumbo, but you'd be wrong. What they have found by observation is that
what works is believing that our trillions of cells will repair and rebuild
themselves forever "if the environment around the cell stays clean and
clear."
However, as we live life, our cells are exposed to physical, emotional,
spiritual, inherited and/or environmental trauma. Between the two cells (see
picture ), you can see the energy of accumulative trauma represented by
the dots. When this energy satiates the cell to a certain point,
communication is lost, tension builds and the cell undergoes a loss
of tensegrity (the ability to balance tension and compression)....If the
accumulative energy in the connective tissue is removed, the cell reverts to
normal, the DNA unlocks and healing occurs. Clearing this extraneous energy
is what Consegrity supports.
What we need to live forever, I guess, is to clear out "extraneous
energy" that is trapped between our cells. I get it. Consegrity is another
form of energy medicine!
I'll have to revise
my article on the
topic to include it. Consegrity looks more promising that chakra healing
because the dots in the picture prove there is something real to this energy
trapped between cells. Plus, they have
testimonials. Who
needs more evidence than that? It works. And you can become a
certified Consegretist
by taking a six-day course for $1,500. Maybe they are pragmatists
after all.
[thanks to Daniel Tsadok]
***
You can purchase your copy of
The Skeptic's Dictionary
online from
Amazon.com or from your local bookseller.
The perfect Thanksgiving gift!
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