Michael Shermer

If telekinesis and telepathy don’t yet exist, they surely will, as technology enables us to get more of what we want … Our great-grandchildren will send messages by thinking them…. The first few generations will know about the machinery in the walls that executes these desires. Will later generations take it all for granted?

I confess sharing some of my colleagues’ hostility… toward the whole notion of parapsychology. Not because I think it’s a Great Big Threat To Rational Thinking or that a few crackpot dreamers will bring the house of science crashing down. (What panicky silliness!)

Altogether too much of the so-called New Age has a nauseatingly similar agenda — to flatter believers that they are special, loftier than others, because of some quality deep within that a very few possess.

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• feature article: Why Skeptics Should Embrace the Supernatural on TV

Do depictions of the supernatural on television and in movies lead to belief in pseudoscience and the paranormal? Or, is there something more subtle happening within these shows that we should pay attention to? In this week’s eSkeptic, Jason Colavito tells us why skeptics should embrace the supernatural on television.

Jason Colavito is a freelance writer based in Albany, NY. His most recent book is Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre.

Oh, the Horror!
Why Skeptics Should Embrace
the Supernatural on Television

by Jason Colavito

For as long as there have been stories of the supernatural, some who heard them believed that the menacing creatures depicted in them really existed. There have also always been skeptics who doubted the reality of the supernatural monsters. Mythological creatures like satyrs and centaurs were once thought to live in the uncharted forests beyond civilization’s reach. Ghosts have been a continuous presence in humanity’s imaginary lives, and even today fictional creatures like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and space aliens in flying saucers have their die-hard adherents.

These stories were told and retold as non-fiction, but at the end of the Enlightenment a new type of fiction emerged: the tale of supernatural terror. Unlike the purveyors of myths and legends, the authors of these stories knew they were writing fiction. Critics, though, claimed such stories were dangerous, especially for women and children, who may come to believe in superstitious claims. In 1833 one writer claimed:

Those fictious [sic] narratives so commonly told in nurseries, called ghost stories, or other horrible recitals of the same kind, are decidedly injurious under all circumstances. I know that children in the habit of hearing these follies, grow up fearful, and in some measure in want of moral courage; they become more or less superstitious, and lack resolution; a person, however strong in mind naturally, cannot wholly divest himself of the paralyzing effect of these injurious influences inculcated in his youthful days, even when he attains mature age.¹

This righteous indignation continues today, with skeptics and scientists arguing that depictions of the supernatural on television and in movies lead to belief in pseudoscience and the paranormal. For example, Skeptic Dictionary editor Robert Todd Carroll attributes the prevalence of the belief that ghosts communicate through tape recorders, radios, and televisions to the 2005 movie White Noise. Science writer Chris Mooney complained that television programs with supernatural themes “shill for religion and the paranormal,” while science journalist Matt Nisbet argued that science fiction and fantasy films “attack reason, sell transcendental fantasies, and undermine appreciation for science and progress.” There is frequent concern for the welfare of children, as when the science communication expert Glenn Sparks reported that supernatural-themed television was especially dangerous for teenagers.²

The horror genre, however, is more than a vehicle for reproducing superstition. A brief examination of the origins and development of the horror genre before World War II demonstrates that supernatural horror transcends simple-minded repudiations of science and is, in fact, a subtle and important critique of science and rationalism, one that skeptics can benefit from by approaching it with an open mind.

Origins

Gothic horror is the name usually given to a group of novels and stories composed between 1764 and 1820 that used supernatural elements and spooky settings to generate an atmosphere of terror. The first Gothic novel was Horace Walpole’s 1764 The Castle of Otranto, the story of a usurper whose control of his domain is undone by the appearance of a powerful ghost. Other well-known works of Gothic horror include Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 The Mysteries of Udolpho, Matthew Lewis’s 1796 The Monk, and of course the 1818 classic by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.

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These novels, and countless others like them, were products of the Romantic Movement, the great backlash against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Gothic writers turned to the supernatural as a critique of rationalism and an expression of the emotional truths the Romantics sought to explore. However, Gothic horror had a suitably rational basis, provided by the statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke. In his widely read and influential 1756 work A Philosophic Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke had laid down the aesthetic basis for the horror genre, arguing that fear was the quickest and most direct way of experiencing the sublime:

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. … Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terrour be endued with greatness of dimensions or not. … Indeed, terrour is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.³

For writers like Walpole or Lewis, the supernatural was a way of reaching the sublime by purposely employing concepts that could serve no other useful purpose. When critics attacked Lewis’s ghostly 1797 play The Castle Spectre for depicting a ghost where the common folk could see it, Lewis responded with an angry afterward to the published text of the play:

Against my Spectre many objections have been urged: one of them I think rather curious. She ought not to appear, because the belief in Ghosts no longer exists! In my opinion, that is the very reason why she may be produced without danger; for there is now no fear of increasing the influence of superstition, or strengthening the prejudices of the weak-minded.⁴

In other words, educated audiences knew ghosts are not real, so their use was to represent the irrational and the emotional — to be symbols, and to be fun. Ann Radcliffe took a different path and ended her works with a revelation that the alleged “ghost” in the story was the product of human or natural agency. However, as belief in ghosts and the supernatural became more widespread among the middle and upper classes during the 19th century, horror fiction responded in ways interesting and relevant to skeptics and historians of science.

Skeptics & Believers in Fact & Fiction

During the 19th century, many scholars and critics agreed that belief in ghosts was widespread and something needed to be done about it. In 1823 the publisher Rudolph Ackermann produced a series of didactic short stories under the title Ghost Stories: Collected with Particular View to Counteract the Vulgar Belief in Ghosts and Apparitions, and to Promote a Rational Estimate of the Nature of Phenomena Commonly Considered as Supernatural. These stories revealed natural or human explanations for the ghosts, as Ackermann explained:

The best way to dissipate the inbred horror of supernatural phantoms, which almost all persons derive from nursery tales or other sources of causeless terror in early life, is to show by example how possible it is to impress upon ignorant or credulous persons the firm belief that they behold a ghost, when in point of fact no ghost is there.⁵

Two decades later, Catherine Crowe’s 1848 The Night-Side of Nature did just the reverse, presenting ghost stories of dubious quality as true-life accounts of the supernatural. The book is frequently credited with helping spark the rage for Spiritualism, the belief that the shades of the dead can be contacted by mediums who communicate with the spirit realm. Scientists and believers clashed over the reality of the supernatural, and the debate extended into horror fiction.

One of the earliest examples of this was Sir Walter Scott’s 1828 “The Tapestried Chamber,” which became the template for the Victorian ghost story. In it, a “complete sceptic” puts up a soldier in a haunted room, where the soldier experiences an apparition of the ghost, converting the skeptic to belief in the supernatural when faced with this evidence.

From this story forward, few ghost stories, or horror stories of any kind, would be complete without the requisite skeptic who stood by, ready for conversion, or what the satirical magazine Punch once called the “the Inquiring, Sceptical, Incredulous Noodle” who “must never be absent from the dramatis personæ” of the horror story.⁶ Such Noodles could be found everywhere: in Fitz-James O’Brien’s 1859 “What Was It?,” Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula, in Robert Hichens’s 1900 “How Love Came to Professor Guildea,” and in the scientist-scholar heroes of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and H. P. Lovecraft.

Though it goes without saying that in these tales of horror the skeptic is confronted with supernatural or other entities that extend beyond the limits of known science, it is not a foregone conclusion that these stories promote belief in the supernatural, as a cursory reading might suggest. Instead, there is something more subtle happening here, as a few examples will show.

In many stories, the character of the skeptic represents close-minded dogmatism rather than true scientific inquiry, the truth of which is taken for granted. In Dracula, Dr. John Seward is a man of science, but he is powerless before the forces of the title vampire because his materialist philosophy has blinded him to the evidence of the reality of the supernatural. By contrast, his mentor, Prof. Abraham Van Helsing, pursues the evidence where it leads, even into the darkened corners of the apparent supernatural. Far from repudiating science, Dracula supports the workings of science as Van Helsing struggles to understand the new phenomenon (the vampire), test theories, and reach conclusions. Only this non-dogmatic, open science can stop the vampire menace via free inquiry and experimentation.

Similarly, in “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” the skeptical scientist Guildea comes to embrace the supernatural — but not because he has been indoctrinated by Spiritualist true-believers. The story tells of a man of science besieged by an unseen entity that drives him to madness and death. His belief in the ghost, though, stems from scientific observation of one living in his own house, the reality of which he proves by ruling out all possible naturalistic explanations. Here, though, the story’s author, Robert Hichens, offers a special critique of science. While Guildea is a rational, emotionless scientist, the ghost is that of a mentally-impaired individual, devoid of reason and possessed only of emotion. In other words, symbolically Victorian science was being haunted by the Romantic irrational.

The scientist-scholars found in H. P. Lovecraft’s body of short stories and novellas (the so-called “Cthulhu Mythos”) represent the apex of the horror story’s battle between skeptic and believer. In Lovecraft, skeptics doubt the existence of the “Old Ones,” titanic, monstrous gods from prehistory which devoted cults still worship in secret. The heroes dismiss the old legends as ignorant hearsay and myth, but they discover the ultimate reality of these beings, which are in fact extraterrestrials who came to earth billions of years ago, part and parcel of a materialist, mindless cosmos both grander and more indifferent to humanity than anyone could imagine. Once again, the implicit critique of science is not opposition to its methods but to the perception of science as dogmatism and doctrine.

Conclusion

Of course, a great deal of supernatural fiction is and has always been hackwork, but as I have tried to show, a significant portion of it offers a critique (not a repudiation) of science. Once seen in this light, horror literature takes on new meanings for skeptics and scientists. The message is not always what we skeptics want to hear, but we would do well to actively engage in a deeper reading of the themes and symbols present in supernatural fiction before attacking it for “injurious influences” on its audience.

References

1. Rendle, W. 1833. “On the Moral Education of Youth.” The Imperial Magazine, May, 219.

2. Carroll, Robert Todd. 2007. “Electronic Voice Phenomenon.” Skeptic’s Dictionary. Online article: www.skepdic.com/evp.html;

   Mooney, Chris 2005. “Less Than Miraculous,” CSICOP Online, May 25. Online article: www.csicop.org/doubtandabout/paratv/;

   Nisbet, Matt. 1999. “The Phantom Menace of Superstition in Film and Television,” SI Digest, May 27. Online article: www.csicop.org/articles/19990527-starwars/;

   “Professor: TV Shows May Tune Our Belief in the Supernatural.” 2005. AScribe Newswire, September 6. Online article: www.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/behold.pl?ascribeid=20050906.135843&time=14%2034%20PDT&year=2005&public=1.

3. Burke, Edmund. 1834. The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke. vol. 1. London: Holdsworth and Ball, 38.
4. Lewis, Matthew Gregory. 2000. “Postscript to The Castle Spectre.” In Clery, E. J. and Miles, Robert (eds.), Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 198.
5. Ackermann, Rudolph. 1846. Ghost Stories: Collected with Particular View to Counteract the Vulgar Belief in Ghosts and Apparitions. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 6.
6. B. W., Baron de. 1897. “Our Booking Office.” Punch, June 26, 327.

• Skepticality and MonsterTalk: Santas and Chupacabras
• feature article: The Case Against Ball Lightning
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In this week’s eSkeptic, Steuart Campbell discusses the evidence (or lack thereof) of the phenomenon known as ball lightning. Steuart Campbell is a Scottish science writer born in 1937. Originally an architect, he has a degree in science and applied mathematics. He is the author of many skeptical articles on unsual phenomena and mysteries. In particular he is the author of The UFO Mystery Solved, The Rise and Fall of Jesus and The Loch Ness Monster: The Evidence.

The Case Against Ball Lightning

by Steuart Campbell

Ball lightning (BL) is popularly described as a slowly-moving luminous ball not more than twelve inches (30 cm) in diameter occasionally seen at ground level during a thunderstorm. Scientists usually understand it as an electrical discharge phenomenon somehow associated with normal lightning.

The existence of BL is controversial with opinions and explanations changing over time. While many theories have been advanced to explain it, none of them account for all the reported characteristics, Further, it has not been created in laboratory conditions with all these characteristics, and reliable accounts of it are rare and often suspect. Because of perceptual and memory problems, anecdotal evidence is of doubtful value. There is no photograph, film or video recording that can be accepted unreservedly as showing BL. Many forget the null hypothesis, which has explained many postulated phenomena, such as phlogiston and the ether, that turn out to be nonexistent. The null hypothesis may also explains BL, which could be a chimera, a pseudo-phenomenon.

Skepticism regarding the existence of BL goes back at least to Michael Faraday and Francois Arago in the nineteenth century. In 1839 Faraday, while allowing that balls of fire might appear in the atmosphere, doubted that they had anything to do with lightning or atmospheric electricity (Barry, p.133). More recently, Karl Berger reported that, in over 20 years of study as a meteorologist and lightning investigator, he had never observed BL. He concluded that it did not exist (Barry, p.133). Other scientists have reached the same conclusion. James Lovelock put tales of BL in the same category as those of spontaneous human combustion and crop circles (Lovelock, p. 86). Even Barry allows that unbiased examination of reports leads to the conclusion that a great percentage are highly questionable and could be interpreted in several ways (op. cit. p.134). Among those ways is the persistence of vision theory proposed by Lord Kelvin in 1888. He claimed that the uniform size reported in many cases was ascribed to an illusion associated with the blind spot in the eye (Singer, p.19). Lovelock reported such a case after a lightning flash (p. 86). Other sources of deception proposed have been will-o’-the-wisp and owls with luminous wings, but the existence of both of these is itself doubtful. In recent years, some scientists have accepted the existence of BL, but with little evidence.

Reports of BL suffer from defects inherent in the human perceptual and memory systems. Because both perception and memory are reconstructive processes, what we perceive is not necessarily what the sense organs receive. This is demonstrated by various well-known optical illusions, such as the moon illusion. Distant stationary lights are subject to several movement illusions, all of which attribute movement to the light. The most famous is the autokinetic illusion, in which a stationary light (usually a star) will appear to move about at random.

The size or distance of an unknown object cannot be determined by observers without additional information. Observers usually make a guess about either the size or distance of an object and then determine the other parameter from their guess. In fact both can be wrong. The size of distant objects seen near the horizon can be exaggerated (the moon illusion), as can an object’s altitude (angle above the horizon). Nor can observers usually distinguish between change in size of an object and change in its distance, usually interpreting a change in size as a change in distance. A phenomenon called size constancy can interfere with size perception. Even estimates of time-span are unreliable; fascination tends to shorten it. Estimates of brightness are meaningless (it is a relative term) and observers tend to make false associations, drawing unwarranted conclusions from what they perceive. They may associate effects with the wrong cause. In the case of anomalous luminous phenomena, observers try to identify them by reference to the models they carry in their minds. Clearly they can only identify a phenomenon as BL if they have heard of it. Conversely they are likely to identify an anomalous object as BL simply because they have heard of it.

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Nor is memory much more reliable than perception. People who report BL and who have heard about other reports may, inadvertently, draw on these previous reports for their own report. Tests show that reliability decreases with time and it is strongly suspected that observers attempt to make facts fit theory.

Consequently, genuine anecdotal reports of BL must be regarded with suspicion. Observers are mostly unaware of the distortions involved in perception and memory. Worse still, asking people if they have seen BL begs the question of its existence and ignores their inability to distinguish it (if it exists) from other phenomena. The question plants a concept in the mind which will distort the memory of any genuine perception. Such a question should not be asked and surveys based on it are worthless.

The contradictory results obtained from reports were noted by an early investigator, F. von Lepel (Singer, p. 62). According to reports, BL occurs in any type of weather, not just storms; it can be any color; it can be motionless or moving at any speed, often against the wind; it can disappear violently or silently; it may follow wires or edges or travel independently; it may be outside or inside; its life time varies from a fraction of a second to several minutes; its shape can be spherical or pear-shaped; it is either silent or noisy; etc.

In other words, the phenomenon exhibits no consistent characteristics and appears to be all things to all observers. One investigator commented that there are very few natural phenomena that observation makes more difficult to explain (Singer, p. 62). However such contradictions might be explained if the observers are reporting many different phenomena, none of which are actually BL. Among the objects mistaken for BL are bright astronomical objects at low altitude, sometimes seen in mirage (Campbell 1988a).

Because anecdotal reports are unreliable, so are illustrations based on these reports. However, it is more difficult to explain reports of physical damage and photographic evidence. It is sometimes alleged that BL can penetrate closed windows and the literature contains several alleged examples. When a mysterious hole appeared in a window of his department during a storm, a professor of meteorology in Edinburgh concluded that BL was the cause. However later investigation showed a simpler explanation—mechanical damage (Campbell 1981a). Almost circular cracks can appear in sheet glass when subjected to the appropriate sudden stress.

Reports of extensive damage such as fires or explosions may more easily be explained as the result of ordinary lightning strikes. Such reports are not clarified by the popular belief that lightning strikes are the result of something called a ‘thunderbolt’.

Barry demonstrated that a long-lived luminous ball phenomenon can be produced by spark-initiated combustion of low-density hydrocarbon gas at atmospheric pressure (p.108). This may explain the 1975 report from a housewife in Smethwick (English Midlands) that BL appeared over her gas cooker (Campbell 1988b). Normal lightning may ignite hydrocarbon gases in the atmosphere, producing similar phenomena, but this is not what is understood as BL.

Photographs alleged to show BL are as suspect as anecdotal reports and sketches. The camera cannot lie, but what it shows can be misinterpreted and the photographer can lie. Until the early 1970s, a photograph taken in 1961 at Castleford (Yorkshire, England) had been interpreted as showing the path of BL. Even New Scientist magazine described it as the ‘Path of a Thunderbolt’. But a decade later it was claimed that it showed the pulsed trace from a street lamp (Davies and Standler) and a decade after that it was demonstrated that this was correct (Campbell 1981b): the photographer incautiously moved the camera while the shutter was still open. A Russian photograph taken in 1957 had the same explanation, but not before a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences endorsed the picture on the basis of similar pictures he had seen in a 1939 US journal (Campbell 1987). He did not know that the pictures were all produced by lamps, presumably as hoaxes.

Many alleged pictures of BL are deliberate fakes. They appear to include the picture produced in 1966 by a former Canadian Air Force pilot, which misled the American editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology, who used it on the cover of his skeptical books on UFOs (Campbell 1988c).

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Although it is fairly easy to take a photograph, or to fake one, which many mistakenly interpret as showing BL, it should be less easy to produce a film or video sequence that could fool anyone. However, in 1973 a film appeared that was claimed to show BL traveling slowly across the horizon near Aylesbury (England). It shows a bright ball of light moving on a steady horizontal course for twenty-three seconds until it suddenly vanishes. Because it was reported initially as a UFO, the film has been shown many times at UFO conferences and has featured in a BBC TV program about UFOs. But it was also thought that it showed BL. Later it was demonstrated that the ‘ball’ was burning fuel being dumped from a damaged US fighter-bomber; the aircraft itself, nearly four miles (6 km) away, was not visible beside the fireball and too far away to be heard (Campbell 1991).

In 1989 a TV station in south-east England screened a video of a smudgy spherical object with a hole which was captured accidentally as the videographer attempted to video normal lightning; he had not seen anything unusual during the recording. The videographer thought it might show BL and this explanation was initially endorsed by Professor Roger Jennison of the University of Kent (he has himself reported seeing BL). However, it was later demonstrated that the object in the sequence was a combination of an artifact of the camera itself and a distant street light (Bergstrom and Campbell).

References

1. Bergstrom, Arne and Steuart Campbell. 1991. “The Ashford ‘Ball Lightning’ Video Explained.” pp. 185–190 in J. Meteorology, UK. Vol. 16, No. 160.
2. Barry, James Dale. 1980. Ball Lightning and Bead Lightning: Extreme Forms of Atmospheric Electricity. New York: Plenum Press.
3. Campbell, Steuart. 1981a. “Not Lightning Damage.” pp. 66–71 in Weather, Vol. 36, No. 3.
4. ___. 1981b. “How Not to Photograph Ball Lightning.” pp. 1096–1097/1105 in Brit. J. of Photography, Vol. 128, No. 6326.
5. ___. 1987. “Ball Lightning Exposed! Another Picture puzzle…” pp. 1537–1538 in Brit. J. of Photography. Vol. 134, No. 6645.
6. ___. 1988a. “Russian accounts of ball lightning.” pp. 126–128 in J. of Meteorology, UK. Vol. 13, No. 128.
7. ___. 1988b. “The Smethwick Ball Lightning Report.” pp. 391–393 in J. of Meteorology, UK. Vol.13, No. 134.
8. ___. 1988c. “The Childerhose UFO: fact or fiction?” P. 72 in Brit. J. of Photography, Vol. 135, No. 6686.
9. ___. 1991. “Fireball by Day.” pp. 22–23 in Brit. J. of Photography, Vol. 138, No. 6814.
10. Davies, D.W. and R.B. Standler. 1972. “Ball lightning.” P. 144 in Nature, 240 (17 November).
11. Lovelock, J. 2001 Homage to Gaia. Oxford University Press, USA
12. Singer, Stanley. 1971. The Nature of Ball Lightning. New York: Plenum Press.

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In this week’s eSkeptic, we return to a controversy that raged throughout the 1990s in the anthropology world over whether or not Margaret Mead was hoaxed by her Samoan hosts during her research there while earning her Ph.D. under Franz Boaz. When we last left the controversy in the late 90s, it appeared that the jury was in that Mead was duped, but since that time anthropologists have weighed in after careful consideration and concluded that her accuser may not have had the proof he claimed.

The following is an excerpt from The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy by Paul Shankman. Used by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press.

Paul Shankman is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado-Boulder who has done fieldwork in Samoa and authored a number of publications on the Mead-Freeman controversy.

The Trashing of Margaret Mead
How Derek Freeman Fooled Us All
on an Alleged Hoax

excerpt from Paul Shankman’s book

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman orchestrated a tireless campaign against Margaret Mead, claiming that the American anthropologist had been hoaxed by her Samoan subjects when she conducted her research there as a young graduate student. And for many years Freeman seemed to convince the majority of professional anthropologists and a good deal of general readers that Mead had indeed been duped, her susceptibility due to the powerful influence of her doctoral mentor, Franz Boas, and the potent sway of cultural relativists who believed that behavior is mostly the product of environment, not genes. Thus, it came to be believed by Mead, Boas, and their school of cultural anthropology that the relaxed sexual conduct of the native Samoans was the result of a radically different environment from the sexually stultifying environment of the Industrial West.

Freeman’s claims ranged from his very general observation that Mead may have been misled by Samoans,¹ to his unequivocal assertion that Mead was “grossly hoaxed” by two very specific women on the night of March 13, 1926.² This was not a minor point for Freeman but one of great intellectual significance:

We are here dealing with one of the most spectacular events of the intellectual history of the twentieth century. Margaret Mead, as we know, was grossly hoaxed by her Samoan informants, and Mead in her turn, by convincing others of the “genuineness” of her account of Samoa, completely misinformed and misled virtually the entire anthropological establishment, as well as the intelligentsia at large…. That a Polynesian prank should have produced such a result in centers of higher learning throughout the Western world is deeply comic. But behind the comedy there is a chastening reality. It is now apparent that for decade after decade in countless textbooks, and in university and college lecture rooms throughout the Western world, students were misinformed about an issue of fundamental human importance, by professors who by placing credence in Mead’s conclusion of 1928 had themselves become cognitively deluded. Never can giggly fibs have had such far-reaching consequences in the groves of Academe.³

These allegations about Mead have been repeated so often that they have become conventional wisdom. Martin Gardner, the noted science watcher, found Freeman’s hoaxing argument “irrefutable.” Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, biologist Richard Dawkins, evolutionary psychologist David Buss, science writer Matt Ridley, classicist Mary Lefkowitz, and many other intelligent people have endorsed the idea that Mead was hoaxed and have deplored her naïvité. Freeman stated the hoaxing argument so boldly and convincingly — after all, it was vouched for by the sworn testimony of one of the women who allegedly hoaxed Mead — that almost no one looked at the testimony itself. People thought the hoaxing argument was completely plausible and the evidence unassailable based on Freeman’s word.

In fact, the hoaxing argument is easily challenged using Freeman’s own unpublished interviews with the Samoan woman on whose testimony Freeman so heavily relied.

The Testimony of Fa’apua’a

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In 1989, Freeman identified two Samoan women who he believed had joked with Mead about their private lives. In March of 1926, six months into her fieldwork, Mead was a member of a traveling party that included Fa’apua’a Fa’amu and Fofoa, both of whom were unmarried and somewhat older than Mead herself. It was during her time with these two women that Freeman believed the hoaxing took place.

Over 60 years later, Freeman learned that Fa’apua’a was still alive and well. In 1987 she was interviewed for the documentary film Margaret Mead and Samoa. In that interview, she testified that Mead had asked her and Fofoa embarrassing questions about what they did at night. In response, the two women innocently joked that they spent their nights “out with boys”. According to Freeman, Mead believed these innocent lies as the truth and published them in her classic 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa, never realizing her error.

Fa’apua’a’s testimony took the controversy over Mead’s Samoan fieldwork in a new direction and became the centerpiece of Freeman’s critique of Mead. In his 1983 book, Margaret Mead and Samoa: the Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, Freeman attempted to show that Mead was wrong about Samoa and that there were reasons to suspect that she was vulnerable to Samoan joking. After the interview with Fa’apua’a in 1987, Freeman focused his attention primarily on how Mead got Samoa wrong because now he had eyewitness evidence from a Samoan, a woman, and the person who was supposedly Mead’s closest Samoan informant. For Freeman, the interview with Fa’apua’a was beyond anything he had dreamed of in his investigation of Mead. Immediately after the interview, he stated privately that this was the most significant moment of his life.⁴ The interview became the basis for Freeman’s second book in 1999, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, as well as for a number of articles.

Unpublished Interviews with Fa’apua’a

To his credit, Freeman recognized that the brief and largely unpublished 1987 interview with Fa’apua’a could benefit from additional corroboration and that she might be able to provide more detailed information about Mead’s fieldwork in Samoa. So, in 1988 and again in 1993, he commissioned lengthy interviews with her at her home in American Samoa conducted by Samoan anthropologist Unasa L. F. Va’a.⁵ Although Freeman himself was not present during these interviews, each lasting several hours and conducted in Samoan, he composed the dozens of very detailed questions and provided them to Unasa who, following the interviews, returned the questions and answers to Freeman at his home in Australia.

In his second book on Mead, Freeman cited these two interviews as indisputable support for the hoaxing hypothesis, stating that Fa’apua’a’s “sworn testimony is of the sort that could be presented in a court of law.”⁶ Since Fa’apua’a was 87 in the 1988 interview and 92 in the 1993 interview, Freeman posed questions that checked the accuracy of her memory, and he determined that there was “quite definite evidence that Fa’apua’a, in 1993, as in 1988, had substantially accurate memories of Manu’a in 1926.”⁷ However, these interviews with Fa’apua’a were not published and did not become available until after Freeman’s death in 2001. What they demonstrate is that Fa’apu’a’s testimony is sometimes contradictory or unclear, and that it does not support Freeman’s hoaxing argument on key issues.

Freeman maintained that the interviews laid to rest concerns about Fa’apua’a’s memory. He wrote that even at age 92, Unasa had found Fa’apua’a still “lucid” and “still able to remember well.”⁸ On a number of matters, this was certainly true, but on other matters, Fa’apua’a seemed to be losing her memory. So, according to Unasa, in 1993 Fa’apua’a had forgotten that Mead had died, expressing her sorrow when Unasa reminded her of it; she had learned of Mead’s death six years earlier and had grieved then.⁹ In another instance, when asked if elopement occurred in Samoa in the 1920s, Fa’apua’a replied that she had not heard of any cases, although this was the most common form of marriage at that time.¹⁰ Nor could she remember any cases of boys surreptitiously visiting their girlfriends, illegitimate children, adultery, or rape. These responses seemed so improbable to Freeman that, in notes to himself on the interview transcripts, he placed question marks next to Fa’apua’a’s answers concerning elopement, surreptitious visits, and illegitimate children.¹¹ They did not conform to what Freeman knew about Samoa in the 1920s. Nevertheless, he affirmed the “historical reliability” of her testimony.¹²

At times during the unpublished interviews, Fa’apua’a offered differing answers to key questions. Although identified by Freeman as Mead’s main informant, Fa’apua’a herself was unclear about this role. In the 1988 interview, she was asked if she was Mead’s “closest Samoan friend and informant,” to which she replied, “Yes.”¹³ But later in the same interview, she was asked if she actually worked with Mead as an informant at the house where Mead resided, to which she replied, “Only once.”¹⁴ When asked what kinds of questions Mead posed at that time, Fa’apua’a said that she did not remember. In his notes on the interview transcript, Unasa commented parenthetically, “[Fa’apua’a] Fa’amu gives the impression that she was not a good informant for Mead. If she did not know anything, she told Makerita [Mead] so, and encouraged her to ask others.”¹⁵

Fa’apua’a also offered different accounts of Mead’s language proficiency in Samoan. In one published interview, she stated that Mead spoke “very little” Samoan and that a translator was “always” used in their conversations.¹⁶ But in the unpublished interviews, Fa’apua’a stated that Mead understood Samoan well, that no one else was present at the time of the alleged hoaxing, that she asked Fa’apua’a and Fofoa questions in Samoan, and that Fa’apua’a “always” spoke to Mead in Samoan since she did not speak English well.¹⁷

In another instance of differing answers, Fa’apua’a was asked to recall the chronological sequence of the hoaxing in more detail. Freeman stated that it occurred on the specific night of March 13, 1926, and that he was able to use Fa’apua’a’s testimony to corroborate this date. But in the unpublished 1993 interview, Fa’apua’a actually stated that she and Fofoa had joked about sex with Mead over an “extended period” of time.¹⁸ Unasa commented parenthetically that, “What Fa’apua’a is saying is that there was no one specific time when she and Fofoa misled Mead about Samoan sexual mores.”¹⁹ Moreover, even the geographic location of the hoaxing is unclear from the interviews.

There were clearly problems with Fa’apua’a’s testimony in the unpublished interviews. Fa’apua’a was not a key informant for Mead on adolescent sexuality, a point that anthropologist Martin Orans and sociologist James Cote have independently established.²⁰ And without agreement on when and where the hoaxing took place and in what language it took place, the most basic facts about it were, at best, ambiguous. Given these problems, Freeman’s continuing reliance on Fa’apua’a’s testimony and the hoaxing hypothesis is puzzling. He could have addressed them. Instead, he filed the interviews away and continued to promote the hoaxing hypothesis as if Fa’apua’a was Mead’s main informant and as if there were no inconsistencies, no ambiguities, no contradictions in the interviews, and no lapses in Fa’apua’a’s memory.

To Good To Be True

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Freeman went to great lengths to convince a broad audience that Mead had been hoaxed. But the “hoaxing” argument was implausible because the interviews that Freeman used did not support his hypothesis. It is also unnecessary, for Mead’s interpretation of Samoa as a sexually permissive society was not due to her alleged “hoaxing” by Fa’apua’a and Fofoa, but rather the data that she collected from Samoan adolescent girls and from other Samoan men and women, her comparison of Samoa and America in the mid-1920s, and the social agenda that she advocated given her own personal background and interests.

Mead was a competent fieldworker who spoke Samoan with a degree of fluency and who understood Samoan joking. Nevertheless, Freeman argued that the unpublished interviews with Fa’apua’a’ were of “exceptional historical significance” and of “quite fundamental importance” because they demonstrated Mead’s gullibility and naivite.²¹ Moreover, he believed that the interviews absolved Mead from engaging in the deliberate misrepresentation of Samoan culture, finding instead that she was fatefully “misled” by Fa’apua’a and Fofoa.²² That is, Mead was the unwitting victim of her own inexperience and prior beliefs rather than the conscious perpetrator of ethnographic fraud. In his words, Mead was in “a chronic state of cognitive delusion.”²³ For Freeman, Mead was not intentional cheat — just a foolish young woman. In this way, Freeman believed that he salvaged Mead’s reputation and brought the controversy to an end. It was an ingenious argument. It was also an intellectual house of cards.

Freeman stated his argument so boldly and presented it with such certainty that it seemed believable. In fact, it seemed foolish not to believe him. Almost no one thought that it might be a good idea to look at the actual interviews with Fa’apua’a and to ask if Freeman’s certitudes about the value of her testimony were warranted. These unpublished interviews with her demonstrate that there is no compelling evidence that Mead was hoaxed. It was a good story — a story that many people wanted to believe. Alas, it was a story that was too good to be true.

References

1. Freeman, Derek. 1983. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 289–90.
2. Freeman, Derek. 1997. “Paradigms in Collision: Margaret Mead’s Mistake and What It Has Done to Anthropology. Skeptic. Vol. 5, No. 3, 68.
3. Ibid.
4. Oxley, Peter. 2006. “Tales From the Jungle: Margaret Mead.” BBC documentary.
5. Unasa L.F Va’a. 1988 and 1993. “Research Materials.” Derek Freeman Papers. Mandeville Special Collections. Geisel Library. University of California at San Diego.
6. Freeman, Derek 1999. The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 13.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Unasa, 1993. Research Materials, 6.
10. Ibid, 1988, 33b.
11. Ibid, 1988, B.
12. Freeman, 1999, 13.
13. Unasa, 1988, 25.
14. Ibid., 67.
15. Ibid., 68.
16. Gartentsein, Larry. 1991. “Sex, Lies, Margaret Mead, and Samoa.” GEO. Vol. 13, No. 6, 23.
17. Unasa 1993, 44.
18. Ibid., 43.
19. Ibid., 42.
20. Orans, Martin. 1996. Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and The Samoans. Novato, CA: Chandler & Sharp, 90–100. Cote, James. 1998. “Much Ado About Nothing: The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead.” Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 22, No. 6, 29–34.
21. Freeman, Derek. 1999. The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 4.
22. Ibid, 12.
23. Freeman, Derek. 1991. “There’s Tricks I’ th’ World: An Historical Analysis of the Samoan Researches of Margaret Mead.” Visual Anthropology Review. Vol. 7, No.1, 115–116.

Evolutionary Medicine (Part Two)

Dr. William Meller

Insomnia; depression; attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder; sexual infidelity. Most of us have dealt with at least one of these issues in our lives, and no wonder — so did our ancient ancestors.

This week on Skepticality, Swoopy welcomes back Dr. Willam Meller for a second round of discussion based on his book Evolution RX. How do the adaptations of early humans affect our emotions, behaviors and modern daily lives? Evolutionary medicine looks at those very questions.

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The crux of the Intelligent Design argument is that the theory of evolution is in serious trouble, that the evidence for evolution is weak, the gaps in the theory are huge, and that these flaws should be taught to students. In this brilliant synthesis of scientific data and theory, Occidental College geologist, paleontologist, and evolutionary theorist Dr. Donald Prothero will present the best evidence we have that evolution happened, why Darwin’s theory still matters, and what the real controversies are in evolutionary biology.

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In this week’s eSkeptic, P.J. Rooks reviews Robert Wright’s book The Evolution of God.

P.J. Rooks is a freelance writer and researcher in Overland Park, Kansas. In addition to her regular contributions to Best-Childrens-Books.com, she has also been published in The Kansas City Star and The Best Times.

God is Love

by P.J. Rooks

God is love. The god of the twentieth century, that is. The god of colored Easter eggs and reasons for the season, intercultural naivety, rampant xenophobia and rose-tinted salvation lies, and according to many scientists on the deathbed of his twilight years, a burnt offering on the altar of progress.

Or is God merely evolving? From the days of religion’s infancy when primitive shamans stepped forward to answer questions such as “What is going on when we dream?” or “Why do bad things happen?” right up to the modern era of globalization and the waning idea of a personal savior, Robert Wright asserts in his new book, The Evolution of God, that religion acts as something of a mirror to social Darwinism, reflecting not only our personal bonds with the all-powerful, but also the relationships of our communities to one another through such mediums as trade and conquest. As he did in his previous bestselling book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Wright brings game theory and economic principles to bear on our tattered human history and finds that what unfolds is the childhood of an evolving god taking the next step on the road to maturity.

You Got Your Chocolate in My Peanut Butter…

Back in the day, says Wright, religion wasn’t about the pursuit of a moral good, the establishment of a communal value system, or the hope of personal salvation; religion’s first steps primarily involved explaining the unexplainable, with thunderstorms, natural disasters, and disease ranking high on the list of metaphysical concerns.

The social order grew, however, and the sphere of the divine shrank as skirmishes and syncretism led the way toward a snowballing monotheism. Once-distant tribes and communities faced one another and, with each encounter, they wrangled with the question: friend or foe? The beauty of polytheism was that since there was no One True God, many societies — when it came to celestial figureheads — were happy to mix and match. Sometimes the results were delicious, sometimes not.

Israel’s tragic adoption of a step-god, according to Wright, provides an early example of the political acrobatics that defined the times. In a marriage arranged by their fathers, the union of Jezebel and Ahab mutually benefited both sides through increased Phoenician port access for Israel (Ahab’s side of the equation) and increased trade opportunities for Phoenicia (Jezebel’s side). The trouble was that back then the kingdoms of the wedding party didn’t just lose a royal son or daughter, they gained a whole new menagerie of gods. Wright speculates that while the marriage probably hiked the gross national product of each country, the increased competition was bad news for the Israeli merchants and Jezebel’s Canaanite god-head, Baal, carried the burden of blame. What followed was a bloody showdown in which Baal and some 450 of his followers were summarily (or in Baal’s case, metaphorically) executed.

Sometimes, however, it was better to make nice with the new neighbors. Close encounters among nations might bring business opportunities and those looking to capitalize were quick to erect monuments to the new gods and even to merge the deities. It was a convincing way of saying, “See, we’re not so different, you and I — and hey, while you’re here, wanna buy a widget?” It even worked well for conquering empires who wanted to rapidly bury the hatchet with their conquerees — not to mention that the newly oppressed were less likely to incite rebellion when they were allowed, at least, to keep their own gods.

“People are more likely to be open to foreign gods when they see themselves playing a non-zero-sum game with foreigners — see their fortunes as positively correlated with the foreigners’ fortunes, see themselves and the foreigners as, to some extent, in the same boat,” explains Wright. Shunning the obvious cynicism here, he also points out that it’s pretty standard for most people to be more critical of enemies and more forgiving of friends, so treating new nations similarly is no big leap. “The link between self-interest and tolerance needn’t be a matter of conscious calculation,” Wright continues. “The law of religious tolerance grows organically out of human nature.”

And for Those Who Cannot Rule or Trade, Vengeance

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Or to put it more simply, “Our god’s on his way and boy, are you gonna get it!” The history of Israel is long on strife, slavery, and submission. Wright quotes Second Isaiah, who savagely drafts the due solace of the nationally humbled with, “I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh, and they shall be drunk with their own blood as with wine. Then all flesh shall know that I am the Lord your Savior, and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.” Amusingly, Wright calls this fearsome big brother the “empire-wielding god of reprimand,” and points out the “ironic logic that the more massively your nation is menaced, the more powerful your god must be.”

Then, as now, prophesies of doom and glory served the downtrodden, and Jesus, an apocalyptic Jew and street preacher, picked up the “Our god’s bigger than your god” message where the Old Testament left off. He believed that the end times were nigh and that the kingdom would be arriving on earth any time soon, like next Tuesday. Packing your spiritual bags was a good bit of advice for the faithful and the saved, which, by the way, only included Israelites. Although most of his teaching was based on writings already in place, Wright points out that what Jesus may have done differently was to take a message intended to be applied on the international stage — that Israel will rule while neighboring empires grovel and fall — and spin it toward personal justice. The idea that the last will be first which had, prior to Jesus, always meant “among nations,” now took on the new meaning of “among Israelites,” giving the earliest hints of the personal salvation and brotherly love concepts that Paul would later muscle into a widespread Christian mission.

Any God Will Do

As the years went by, though, and the kingdom of God’s arrival on earth became increasingly tardy, followers began to express concerns. Like, for example, what about those who died before God’s return? How were they to be saved? Explanations emerged in later gospels, particularly Luke, who, according to Wright, may have leaned heavily on the tales of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the underworld, and placed Jesus in a heavenly position of judging the living and the dead. Throw in Paul’s brotherly love, which backhandedly invoked personal morality as a method of social control during a period of massive population influx, and all things came together for a moral code that acted as a one-way ticket to end-times salvation. Sin quickly came to be the word for any activity that detracted from the health and happiness of the group or individual, and in theorizing that Jesus died in forgiveness of sin, Paul tidily explained why any father worth his salt would have allowed his son to be murdered (a loophole which had plagued Christian proselytizers for years) and paved the way for worldwide expansion with a savior who loved his earthbound flock and offered infinite time off for good behavior.

Yet in spite of Paul’s efforts (or perhaps because of them), Christians weren’t terribly popular in the first 300 years or so of the post-Jesus Roman empire. It was not until the polytheistic Constantine carried the cross into battle on a whim and won, that his sympathetic attitude toward Christians became pivotal in the movement away from the pagan gods of the Roman empire and toward what would become the Christianity we know.

According to Wright, however, this probably would have happened anyway because the progress of the world was poised to embrace a new social order and Christianity filled that role. Other versions of the Jesus movement were in place that could just have easily stepped forward if not for Christianity having suddenly found itself with a celebrity spokesperson in Constantine.

As Christianity grew, so too did the advantages of membership. What economists today cool-headedly call positive network advantages, merchants of Roman times called trade organizations. Wright says that in the era of blossoming Christianity, there were still numerous religious cults. It was business as usual for merchants and craftsmen, however, to align their industries with one or two and to tolerate their god as a cost of doing business. Mergers among these groups were a common practice for businesses looking to expand their client base and eventually, as Christianity grew, its sheer size made it the guild of choice for many.

God is Love … Still

Building from his previous work in The Moral Animal, Wright concludes The Evolution of God with an interesting afterword in which he sets out to illustrate how basic empathy — our ability to understand one another as a means of social survival — evolved into a very human sort of love that pings off every far-flung corner of our rapidly globalizing planet. That so many cultures have written upon the pages of Christianity, and that humanity, through the survival of its fittest ideas, grows and improves as it moves forward, is where Wright finds meaning in the mayhem. For him, the evidence of a higher purpose is not so much in the fading image of a personified, Santa-like god, but in the epic coalescence of human struggle and human beauty that may, in its own right, be reason for awe and wonder. Needless to say, Wright’s opinion here is bound to make strange bedfellows of both the believing and the skeptically inclined, uniting the two in mutual offense.

Tracking our immortals from the days of whittling rocks to the days of trading stocks, The Evolution of God rides a razor’s edge between perfectionism and pathology. Wright’s dizzying and sometimes tangled succession of historical abstractions may, at times, feel like an extended mathematical proof. His noble, albeit lengthy, pursuit of complete understanding, however, unveils the historic tale of a beloved spiritual ideal. An ambitious work that eventually nails its target with panache, The Evolution of God is an extraordinary tour of our shared human heritage.

They Came From Outer Space!

Dr. Phil Plait

Are creatures from other planets visiting the earth, trampling our crops to create cryptic messages, violating people in their sleep, and doing terrible things to our livestock? How plausible is it that we are being visited by intelligent beings from beyond Earth, or that we’ve been visited in the distant past?

This week on MonsterTalk, astronomer Dr. Phil Plait, author of Death from the Skies! joins us to talk about monsters — from outer space!

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A Death Valley Adventure
a three-day tour of the great basin, led by Dr. Donald Prothero

Saturday January 16 – Monday January 18, 2010

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Redrock Canyon

Hello fellow Geo-Trekkers,

Join us for a 3-day, 2-night tour of the beautiful scenery and natural history of the Mojave desert and western great basin. We will visit spectacular geological sites such as Death Valley, Kelso Dunes, and Pinnacles National Natural Landmark, with trilobite collecting in the Nopah Range, and a tour of the fossil beds at Redrock Canyon State Park. Some of our stops in Death Valley will include sinuous Mosaic Canyon, the dunes at Stovepipe Wells, the old borax works, the salt flats at Devil’s Golf Course, the lowest point in North America, and the spectacular vistas from Zabriskie Point and Dante’s View.

The Devil’s Golf Course

Each night we stay in highly-rated hotels (breakfast included), and there will be picnic lunches all three days. The guides will also provide information about the geology and natural history of the whole route, and access to sites normally not open to the general public. There will be a detailed guidebook included as part of the tour. Tour package includes charter bus, breakfast, lunch, lectures, museums, park fees, fossil collecting, a guide booklet and hotels. Your trip fee also includes a $100 donation to the Skeptics Society. Seats are limited, so make your reservations soon!

Hope to see you in January,
Teresa LeVelle & Donald Prothero

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Mind of the Market

Shermer explains how evolution shaped the modern economy and why people are so irrational about money. How did we make the leap from ancient hunter-gatherers to modern consumers and traders? Why do people get so emotional and irrational about bottom-line financial and business decisions? In this eye-opening exploration, Shermer uncovers the evolutionary roots of our economic behavior. Order the book

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Before the Bible was the Bible it was a lot of little books written by many writers with many different viewpoints. If you open up the Bible and read it straight through, you will notice two things that should not be true if it had been written as a coherent whole and with a single purpose. First, the Bible is quite repetitious; second, the Bible frequently seems to contradict itself. Randel Helms discusses these contradictions by looking at the cultural and historical factors that produced them.
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Evolutionary Medicine

Bill Meller

Water bottles, hand sanitizer, antibacterial soap, antibiotics — ancient humans had none of these things. How did our ancestors adapt to their environment? Given the vastly different diet, exercise, and hygiene of modern humans, what impact do those ancient adaptations have today?

This ancestral health legacy is illuminated by the field of evolutionary medicine. On Skepticality this week, Swoopy talks with Dr. William Meller, MD about his book Evolution RX. He delves into the latest research in genetics, biology, and early human history to understand a wide array of human health conditions — and the ways in which our bodies have evolved to combat them.

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lecture this Sunday…

Dr. Donald Prothero will lecture on
Sunday, Dec. 6, 2009 at 2 pm

Greenhouse of
the Dinosaurs
Evolution, Extinction,
and the Future of Our Planet

with Dr. Donald Prothero

Sunday, Dec. 6, 2009 at 2 pm
Baxter Lecture Hall, Caltech
Pasadena, California

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Spread a little skeptic cheer this year! Giving gifts on December 25, Sir Isaac Newton’s birthday, has long been a tradition amongst skeptics, so here are a few gems we’ve hand-selected from our catalogue that we think your friends and family will enjoy receiving (it’s okay to buy yourself a gift too!).

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The Demon-Haunted World
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The Mind of the Market
(abridged audiobook)
by Michael Shermer

Is the capitalist marketplace a sort of Darwinian organism, evolved through natural selection as the fittest way to satisfy our needs? In this eye-opening exploration, Shermer uncovers the evolutionary roots of our economic behavior.
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For Young Readers (and the Young at Heart)

$15   now only $11.25

The Magic Detectives
by Joe Nickell

30 mysteries encourage readers to think for themselves before the solution is offered, including: ghosts, mummy’s curses, alien creatures, Lock Ness, and more. Recommended for ages 9–14).
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$16   now only $12

Maybe Yes, Maybe No:
A Guide for Young Skeptics
by Dan Barker

Join Andrea on her cartoon-strip-style skeptical adventures and learn what tools and rules scientists use to check things out. Recommended for ages 7–10.
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$20   now only $15

Test Your Science IQ
by Charles J. Cazeau

This addictive book contains hundreds of questions and answers on science and pseudoscience, with an emphasis on why science is important. Sophisticated enough for adults, this book is recommended for ages 12 and up.
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$12.95   now only $9.71

Secrets of Mental Math
by Arthur Benjamin
& Michael Shermer

The Mathemagician’s Guide to Lightning Calculation & Amazing Math Tricks will have you thinking like a math genius in no time. Amaze others — and yourself!
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Reflections on Religion

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Letting Go of God
by Julia Sweeney

Julia Sweeney (of Saturday Night Live fame, 1989–1994) delivers one of her best-ever comedy routines, praised as brave, hilarious, and “a gale-force breathe of fresh air into a mostly polemic dialogue about religion in our time” by the Los Angeles Times.
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$19.95   now only $14.96

Letting Go of God
by Julia Sweeney

“…the single most popular story we’ve ever put on our show in over ten years on the air. We were deluged with email … Somehow, against all common sense, Julia is making something funny that has no business being funny.”
—This American Life.

“While she scores flawlessly deadpan laughs at the expense of Mormonism, Deepak Chopra, Astrology and Catholicism (the tradition she was happily raised in), Sweeney is after much bigger game — challenging and disarming believers of all stripes and intensities…” —Los Angeles Times
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Root of All Evil?
The Original Program
by Richard Dawkins

In this two-part documentary, Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins examines how religious faith is gaining ground in the face of rational, scientific truth. Dawkins meets with religious leaders and their followers, as well as scientists and skeptics to examine the power of religion.
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$24.95   now only $18.71

Root of All Evil?
The Uncut Interviews
by Richard Dawkins

This 3-DVD collection showcases eight raw and uncut interviews from the original Root of All Evil? tapes, allowing the viewer a rare vantage point into these revealing exchanges.
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• free temporary download: How to Debate a Creationist
• feature article: Turning a Biology Curriculum Upside Down
• MonsterTalk: Horrifying Hybrids
• latest from Michael Shermer: Michael Shermer’s New Blog,
  Daniel Loxton joins Skepticblog
• upcoming lecture: Evolution, Extinction, and the Future of Our Planet

FREE DOWNLOAD (one week only!)

How to Debate a Creationist

In honor of the 150 anniversary (this month) of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and in the face of opposition to modern biology, we are pleased to offer one of our top selling resources as a free PDF download for one week only.

This 22-page handout edition includes: 25 evolutionist answers to 25 creationist arguments, and 10 answers to Intelligent Design creationist arguments.

DOWNLOAD the FREE
22-page PDF handout edition

ORDER the full 27-page printed booklet for only $5 from Shop Skeptic

In this week’s eSkeptic, Clark Lindgren recounts the birth of Bio 150 — An Introduction to Biological Inquiry. By turning the curriculum on its head, the Biology Department at Grinnell College has created opportunities for students to perform actual scientific research from the get-go. Results suggest that students are getting just what they need to confirm their interest in biology and get an early start developing their skills as young scientists.

Clark Lindgren, Ph.D. is Professor of Biology at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. Professor Lindgren received his doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in Physiology and was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University in Neurophysiology. He teaches courses in Animal Physiology, Neuroscience, and Introductory Biology and has published numerous research articles on the process of synaptic transmission at the neuromuscular junction.

Teaching by Doing
Turning a Biology Curriculum Upside Down

by Clark Lindgren, Ph.D.

Try to imagine the following scenario. Tommy always wanted to be a professional tuba player. He didn’t have many opportunities to do serious tuba playing in high school so was thrilled when a college with a “world renowned” tuba program accepted him. He couldn’t wait to begin. Unfortunately, tuba school wasn’t quite what Tommy had imagined. His first class, Tuba 101, was held in a large lecture room with over 100 students and dutifully reviewed the history of the tuba. Tuba 102 the following semester focused on the theory of the tuba. Although these large Intro classes had weekly “labs” that were much more practical than the lectures, Tommy didn’t actually play the tuba at all during his first year. He got to experiment with the mouthpiece once and had a few great labs exploring the valves (he even learned how to make one); however, that was as close as he got to the real thing. His second and third years were better. The classes were smaller and the lab exercises more realistic, but it wasn’t until his senior year that he finally had the necessary prerequisites to sign up for Tuba 395: Independent Study. This is what he had come to college for. He would be given a tuba for the entire semester and allowed to play some music that his instructor was working on.

At this point there are several directions this scenario might go. Tommy might have a great time in his independent study, go off to Tuba graduate school and become the professional tuba player he had long dreamed of becoming. Alternatively, Tommy might have discovered in Tuba 395 that he really wasn’t very good at playing the tuba or, worse yet, he didn’t enjoy playing it as much as he thought he would. Regardless of the direction Tommy’s tuba career takes, all of the scenarios are absurd. Who would defend a curriculum that asks students to wait until their senior year in college to actually do what they came to do? How many college students have the patience or insight to put up with this? How many potentially great tuba players would we lose using this strategy?

Yes, the scenario is absurd and fortunately for the world of tuba players, this is not how most people become professional tuba players. However, anyone who has been a science major in college will recognize the “tuba curriculum.” We pack students into large lecture halls and teach them about science. Yes, we talk about how science is done, especially in the second and third years of our curricula. We teach labs in which students are taught parts of the process. They learn techniques and are asked to make careful measurements and/or observations, but only rarely are students involved in an actual scientific study — that is, an inquiry in which the answer is not known by anyone (including the instructor). The opportunity for students to actually do real science is reserved for much later in the curriculum and, many times, this is reserved for a subset of students who demonstrate exceptional promise for science (i.e. they passed their courses with high marks).

Several years ago my colleagues and I in the Biology Department at Grinnell College began worrying about our own “tuba curriculum.” Even though we were a small private liberal arts college, we were still introducing our students to biology the way it had been done at most colleges and universities for decades. Students were first paraded through a multi-course introductory sequence in which we passed on to them the biology canon. Only then could they take courses that more closely approximated real science. Much to our dismay, this delay was becoming longer and longer. Over the previous ten years, our introduction to biology had grown from two, to three, and then to a four-course sequence as we, along with every other Biology Department in the world, had been trying to accommodate the dizzying growth in biological knowledge. Yet, even with four courses that extended through their second year of college, we were still feeling hard pressed to give our students a complete introduction to biology. Somehow, five “Intro” courses just seemed too much. In the context of this deep curricular soul-searching, we began to entertain a very novel idea. What if we turned our curriculum upside down? What if we just bypassed the traditional Intro courses and had students do research, real research, first and then filled them in on the details/big picture later?

Although it seemed strange at first, the more we thought about an upside down curriculum, the more sense it made. First, it would prevent the bad Tommy Tuba scenario where Tommy didn’t discover until his senior year that with regard to real tuba playing he was either inept or apathetic. Students would discover right up front whether their love for biology was genuine and worth pursing further. Second, some students might discover a love for science they didn’t know they had. These are the students who do not thrive in a traditional curriculum, but possess the skills and mettle to be first-class scientists. (How many biographies of famous scientists begin that way?) Finally, this upside down curriculum would be better for the many students who take biology as part of their general education. These are the future lawyers, business leaders and artists who have no intention of becoming scientists but are taking biology to round out their liberal arts experience. We couldn’t imagine an introduction to biology would be more useful to these future leaders than the one we were contemplating.

EDUCATIONAL BOOKLET

This 16-page booklet is designed to hone your critical thinking skills. It includes suggestions on what questions to ask, what traps to avoid, specific examples of how the scientific method is used to test pseudoscience and paranormal claims, a how-to guide for developing a class in critical thinking, and MORE!

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With fear and trepidation we began planning a one-semester course called Bio 150: Introduction to Biological Inquiry. Each of us in the department would design a section of Bio 150 that focused on a specific research area. Each section would teach students the bare minimum needed to get started on a real scientific question. The students would be shown how to perform a few techniques, how to search for and read scientific articles, and how to distinguish a good scientific question from a not-so-good question. Finally, working in groups of three (we had previously discovered that three was the magic number for group work), the students would choose a question, design and carry-out experiments to answer the question, and then present their results and an interpretation of their results in formats appropriate for the discipline.

Our first set of Bio 150 sections were announced in the fall of 2000. Students could choose one (and only one) of the following seven sections: “Building an Animal,” “Prairie restoration,” “The Language of Neurons,” “Biological Responses to Stress,” “Emerging and Re-emerging Pathogens,” “The Effects of Climate Change on Organisms,” and “What Does it Mean to be a Plant?” Since then, we have added a few more sections to our repertoire, including “Sex Life of Plants,” “Plant Genetics and the Environment,” “Survivor,” “Cell Fate: Calvin or Hobbes,” “Genes, Drugs and Toxins,” and “Animal Locomotion.”

This year will be the tenth time we have offered Bio 150. Despite some initial reticence to try such a bold curricular experiment, none of us would choose to return to the “old ways.” Why? Because Bio 150 is challenging, interesting and fun — all of the reasons we became biologists in the first place. And, it is working. It is accomplishing just what we had hoped and then some. Students who arrive in Bio 150 gung-ho about biology (i.e. the Tommy Tubas) generally love it. It is just what they needed to confirm their interest and get an early start developing their skills as young scientists. After taking Bio 150, students who want to go on in biology take a more traditional two-course sequence to round out their background and fill in the gaps in their biological knowledge. However, unlike in the past, our students are more sophisticated now. They understand why a Molecular Biologist needs to know something about ecology or why an Evolutionary Biologist must understand some physiology. It is impossible to answer even the narrowest question without help from other subfields in biology, not to mention chemistry, physics and math. Our students now appreciate, if not enjoy, the broader exposure to biology because they understand why it is necessary.

But this isn’t the experience of all of our students. Some simply do not like Bio 150. Although teachers do not usually like it when students do not enjoy their course, the reasons students offer for their displeasure with Bio 150 suggest that even these are “successes.” A few years after we began teaching Bio 150 one of my advisees announced that she didn’t want to continue in biology. She was a good student and had not done poorly in Bio 150; she just didn’t think she liked biology. Had a student reported this to me in the pre Bio 150 era I would have encouraged her to stick it out a little longer. “Maybe you will enjoy the subject matter that comes later in the sequence.”

This was common advice from me since the course content that related most directly to my specialty came at the end of our four-course Intro sequence. However, in this case my response was “tell me why you didn’t like Bio 150.” Her answer was stunning. “I hate the ambiguity in biology! Even when you design the perfect experiment and perform it perfectly, there is still uncertainty. I understand why this is, I just don’t like it.” When I asked her what subjects she liked, her response was immediate. “I love Math! It is precise, defined and unambiguous.” I was speechless. This first year college student with only one course in biology could articulate the epistemological distinction between an experimental science like biology and a field such as mathematics. (I suspect some professional biologists do not understand this as well as she did!) My response to the student was to congratulate her on her insight and wish her well in her mathematics courses. Not surprisingly, she graduated three years later with a math major.

Our success at dissuading certain students from pursuing biology might be a unique benefit of our new curriculum; however, has Bio 150 persuaded others to embrace the field of study we all love? We think the numbers answer that question. Enrollment in Bio 150 and our other biology courses has seen steady growth over the past ten years. However, an outcome that we interpret as even more significant is the large growth in the number of students who want to do research with us. We have a long history of working with students on our research, mostly in the summer, but in the past few years student interest has grown far beyond our capacity to accommodate. We regularly have four times the number of applicants for our summer research program than we have positions available and these applicants are all our own students! The increased interest in our courses and opportunities for research suggest we have sparked some authentic enthusiasm for biology. At least we have more than compensated for those who have been “enlightened” to leave biology for another calling.

But how authentic is Bio 150? Are we succeeding in giving our students a genuine scientific experience? Are the English and Sociology majors who only take one course in biology getting what they need to be knowledgeable participants in 21st century life? The projects students carry out in Bio 150 are seldom complete, as in having been sufficiently replicated to stand alone as a scientific finding, but some have been incorporated into larger studies and published in the scientific literature. However, most of the projects have not seen the light of day. Some of the student research has contradicted previous research, both published research and research carried out in a previous year’s Bio 150. None of the student research has been ground-breaking or earth-shattering. In comparison to what we experienced as graduate students, post-docs and now faculty, well, er, uh … yes, Bio 150 research looks exactly like real research. What students discover is that the scientific method is demanding, frustrating, and quite often tedious. Biology textbooks often give the mistaken impression that science progresses in a logical manner. In hindsight, science always appears to move in the “forward” direction. What our students experience is much more like real science. They learn that science often moves in more than one path at a time and sometimes even reverses direction. And, when it moves forward, it almost always moves at an excruciatingly slow pace. Yes, Bio 150 is painfully authentic. In the words of one student “Anyone who takes Bio 150 and still wants more is either crazy, born to be a biologist, or both.” I think Tommy would be very happy.

Dr. Steven Jones

Horrifying Hybrids

In this episode, MonsterTalk examines monsters that genetically blend humans with the other. Hosts Blake Smith, Ben Radford, and Dr. Karen Stollznow explore the plausibility of alien-human hybridizations, dig into the real science of genetics — and consider the ethical questions involved.

Weighing in on these issues is Dr. Steven Jones — noted geneticist, teacher, and television presenter. (He is also the author of many books including Darwin’s Ghost, Introducing Genetics, Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise.)

Did Stalin really want to build an army of gorilla-human hybrids? Is the upright-walking chimp called Oliver really some kind of chimpanzee-human mix? The plausibility of such creatures may surprise you…

READ this episode’s extended show notes at skeptic.com.

LISTEN to this episode

our final lecture of the season…

Dr. Donald Prothero will lecture on
Sunday, Dec. 6, 2009 at 2 pm

Greenhouse of
the Dinosaurs
Evolution, Extinction,
and the Future of Our Planet

with Dr. Donald Prothero

Sunday, Dec. 6, 2009 at 2 pm
Baxter Lecture Hall, Caltech
Pasadena, California

Bringing his trademark style to an increasingly relevant subject of concern, Prothero links the climate changes that have occurred over the past 200 million years to their effects on plants and animals, especially contrasting the extinctions that ended the Cretaceous period, which wiped out the dinosaurs, with those of the later Eocene and Oligocene epochs…

READ MORE about this lecture >
VIEW all past lectures from various speakers>

Important ticket information

Tickets are first come first served at the door. Sorry, no advance ticket sales. Seating is limited. $8 Skeptics Society members & Caltech/JPL Community; $10 General Public.

Recent lectures now available on DVD…

Dr. Alison Gopnik on the topic of
The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love & the Meaning of Life

Dr. Robert Park on the topic of Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science

Dr. Alan Boss on the topic of
The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets

Carl Zimmer on the topic of H1N1
The Evolution of a Deadly Virus. What Diseases Tell Us About Evolution