The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

Note from the editor: Every once in awhile it is necessary and desirable to expose extreme ideologies for what they are by carrying out their arguments and rhetoric to their logical and absurd conclusion, which is why we are proud to publish this expose of a hoaxed article published in a peer-reviewed journal today. Its ramifications are unknown but one hopes it will help rein in extremism in this and related areas.
—Michael Shermer

“The conceptual penis as a social construct” is a Sokal-style hoax on gender studies. Follow the authors @peterboghossian and @GodDoesnt.

The Hoax

The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.

That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.

This paper should never have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.” As if to prove philosopher David Hume’s claim that there is a deep gap between what is and what ought to be, our should-never-have-been-published paper was published in the open-access (meaning that articles are freely accessible and not behind a paywall), peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences. (In case the PDF is removed, we’ve archived it.)

Assuming the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” actually means. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could CONTINUE READING THIS POST…

In this remote Science Salon, Michael Shermer talks with Derren Brown, a British magician and writer.

His TV show Derren Brown: Mind Control received immediate success after airing in 2000. His specials include Russian Roulette, Seance, The Heist, Hero at 30,000 Feet, How to Predict the Lottery, and Apocalypse. His live shows Something Wicked This Way Comes and Svengali have won him two Olivier Awards. He garnered the 2012 BAFTA for Best Entertainment for Derren Brown: The Experiments. He has also penned the books Tricks of the Mind and Confessions of a Conjuror, which have sold over 700,000 copies worldwide.

His latest book is Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine. Derren is currently in the US for his off-Broadway show Secret (April 21st – June 25th, 2017), which has already sold out and has been extended with additional dates.

Derren Brown makes his American theatrical debut in this world premiere production at Atlantic Theater Company. New York audiences can experience Derren’s unique blend of mind-reading, suggestion and psychological illusion in a brand new theatrical experience.

In September of 2015, scientists at the University of Witwatersrand, led by Dr. Lee Berger, made a bombshell announcement. Not only had a new species of hominin been discovered, but the find contained more than 1500 fossils from at least 15 individuals. The remains were found all in one place, a deep dark cave in South Africa. This was, by far, the largest number of fossils ever found in one place in the history of paleoanthropology. In one fell swoop, Homo naledi went from being completely unknown to science to being one of the most fully described hominins ever. Although no age was given to the fossils at the time, speculation was rampant.

Over the last few months, the paleoanthropology community has been abuzz with rumors that more H. naledi fossils had been found and that the age of the fossils had been determined. On May 9th, a large team of scientists, again led by Berger, confirmed the rumors and made two big announcements regarding this enigmatic species. First, a second cave had been found harboring more H. naledi skeletal remains. Second, and even more dramatically, the dating effort from the original fossil find revealed that the fossils are much younger than previously thought, a mere 300,000 years old.

The results are released in three papers in the journal eLife, published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which was also the venue for the first publication of Homo naledi in 2015. Both of these announcements have astounding and far-reaching implications. A couple days before the press conference, I caught up with Lee Berger to ask him what all this means.

The Second Cave

The second cavern, called the Lesedi chamber, is a mere 80 lateral meters from the now-famous Dinaledi chamber, which housed the treasure trove of fossils announced in 2015. That find remains the largest hominin discovery in history with enough fossils to nearly recreate the entire skeleton. Both the Dinaledi and Lesedi chambers are within the Rising Star cave system in the UNESCO World Heritage Site called The Cradle of Humanity.

The Lesedi chamber. (Illustration by Pat Linse, adapted from a drawing on washington.edu.) Click image to enlarge.

The Lesedi chamber contains fewer fossils than were in Dinaledi. However, while the Dinaledi fossils were all mixed in together, Lesedi harbored CONTINUE READING THIS POST…

The Bell Curve and the many commentaries on it have brought several issues into an often uncomfortably sharp focus. Though race is by no means the most important of these, the historical baggage the term carries and the reality it symbolizes, require us to get past it before we are able to deal with more substantive matters. Yet that same baggage and those same realities often raise emotional barriers so powerful that they defy facts, reason, and logic.

Many commentators would have us believe that The Bell Curve is obsessed with race, and thereby provide a prime exemplar of pots, kettles, and blackness, evidenced in the following quote from the sociologist Alan Wolfe: “Murray and Herrnstein may not be racists, but they are obsessed by race. They see the world in group terms and must have data on group membership.” This is an interesting charge, says Charles Krauthammer (1994), “given the fact that for the last two decades it is the very liberals who so vehemently denounce Murray who have been obsessed by race, insisting that every institution—universities, fire departments, Alaskan canneries—must have data on group membership.”

We can begin this trip out of political correctness by noting that on genetic grounds alone there can be no doubt of the existence of a substantial number of human races. Races are, if you wish, fuzzy sets.

It is the liberals who have oppressively insisted that we measure ethnic “over-” and “underrepresentation” in every possible field of human endeavor. Here is a liberal establishment forcing racial testing for every conceivable activity, and when a study comes along which does exactly that CONTINUE READING THIS POST…

Photo by Max S. Gerber

Why do we catch colds? What causes seasons to change? And if you fire a bullet from a gun and drop one from your hand, which bullet hits the ground first? In a pinch we almost always get these questions wrong. Worse, we regularly misconstrue fundamental qualities of the world around us. In Scienceblind, cognitive and developmental psychologist Dr. Andrew Shtulman, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Occidental College, where he directs the Thinking Lab, shows that the root of our misconceptions lies in the theories about the world we develop as children. They’re not only wrong, they close our minds to ideas inconsistent with them, making us unable to learn science later in life.

So how do we get the world right? We must dismantle our intuitive theories and rebuild our knowledge from its foundations. The reward won’t just be a truer picture of the world, but clearer solutions to many controversies—around vaccines, climate change, or evolution—that plague our politics today.

Order Scienceblind: Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World Are So Often Wrong from Amazon.

I’ve been writing about and teaching critical thinking for more than two decades. “Form beliefs on the basis of the evidence,” was my mantra, and I taught tens of thousands of students how to do just that. Why, then did people leave my classroom with the same preposterous beliefs as when they entered—from alternative medicine to alien abductions to Obama being a Muslim? Because I had been doing it wrong.

The problem is that everyone thinks they form their beliefs on the basis of evidence. That’s one of the issues, for example, with fake news. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, or just surfing Google, people read and share stories either that they want to believe or that comport with what they already believe—then they point to those stories as evidence for their beliefs. Beliefs are used as evidence for beliefs, with fake news just providing fodder.

Teaching people to formulate beliefs on the basis of evidence may, ironically, trap them in false views of reality. Doing so increases their confidence in the truth of a belief because they think they’re believing as good critical thinkers would, but they’re actually digging themselves into a cognitive sinkhole. The more intelligent one is, the deeper the hole. As Michael Shermer famously stated, “Smarter people are better at rationalizing bad ideas.” That is, smarter people are better at making inferences and using data to support their belief, independent of the truth of that belief.

What, then, can we skeptics do? Here’s my recommendation: Instead of telling people to form beliefs on the basis of evidence, encourage them to seek out something, anything, that could potentially undermine their confidence in a particular belief. (Not something that will, but something that could. Phrased this way it’s less threatening.) This makes thinking critical.

Here’s an example of how to accomplish that: Jessica believes Obama is a Muslim. Ask her, on a scale from 1–10, how confident she is in that belief. Once she’s articulated a number, say 9, ask her what evidence she could encounter that would undermine her confidence. For example, what would it take to lower her confidence from 9 to 8, or even 6? CONTINUE READING THIS POST…

As I read The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray I was reminded of a cartoon from the popular children’s television show Sesame Street. As regular viewers of Sesame Street already know, every episode is brought to you courtesy of a number and letter. On those days when the star of the show is the letter “I,” we are shown a group of hard-working cartoon characters whose job it is to polish a giant letter “I” until it glistens like an expensive jewel in the sunlight. In fact, this small army of letter polishers spend their entire day polishing the letter “I” because it is such an Important and Interesting letter. In a similar manner, Herrnstein and Murray also polish their “I”—Intelligence—and its related measure, IQ, which assume the spotlight as the best predictors of socioeconomic class and a diverse range of variables that cover the rest of the alphabet from Abusive relationships to Xenophobia and Zealotry.

Commenting on The Bell Curve is a lot like CONTINUE READING THIS POST…

I was deeply disappointed that PBS chose to air the documentary film, The Last Days of Jesus, which was more suited to the spurious sensationalism of the so-called History Channel than the high quality we’ve come to expect from public television. Among other problems with this program was its lack of any sort of objectivity. It supports an elaborate conspiracy theory for which there is virtually no serious supporting data. In airing this film PBS gave tacit support of and lent respectability to what is essentially a fringe theory advanced by Simcha Jacobovici and James Tabor.

Among the many problems with this show and the theory it expounds is that it portrays John the Baptist and Jesus as cousins involved in a plot to make John a High Priest and Jesus a Davidic king. Yet, it is only in the Gospel of Luke that they are represented as cousins. In Matthew 11:2–3 the gospel writer has John, while in prison, send two of his disciples to ask of Jesus, “Are you he who should come, or shall we look for another?” This is a rather odd question for John the Baptist to ask Jesus if he and Jesus were cousins and involved together in a revolutionary plot. It is also interesting to note that Josephus, who devotes a long paragraph to John the Baptist, does not mention Jesus in conjunction with John and, in fact, only alludes to Jesus indirectly in reference to the execution of James, who he characterizes as, “the brother of Jesus, who was called the Christ” (Antiquities of the Jews, Book 20, chapter 9, item 1).

Tabor and Jacobovici also seem to be ignorant of what Josephus had to say about the reason why Herod Antipas executed John. Instead, they base their account on Mark 6, the story of Salome, daughter of Herodias, dancing for Herod Antipas on his birthday and him offering her anything she wanted and her asking for the head of John the Baptist. This is a fictional story trope known as “the rash vow,” in which a central character makes an excessive vow that results in someone’s death. It is known from the story of Jephthah having to sacrifice his daughter (Judges 11:30–40), Saul vowing death to anyone in his army who tasted food before evening and nearly having to sacrifice his son Jonathan (1 Samuel 14:24–45), and in classical mythology from the story of Idomeneus having to lose the kingship of Crete when he fails to CONTINUE READING THIS POST…

For a class project, a pair of 11th grade physics students created the infographic shown below, inspired by Michael Shermer’s Baloney Detection Kit: a 16-page booklet 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, and a how-to guide for developing a class in critical thinking.

Click to enlarge and scroll

Many years ago, as I was sitting in a courtroom waiting to testify as an expert witness in a case involving junk psychology, I observed a child custody case ahead of ours. A social worker was arguing that the mother in question should not be granted custody of her children, full or even shared. True, the mother had never hit or otherwise physically abused them; but, said the social worker with certainty, the mother had herself been abused as a child and it was virtually certain that she would in the future repeat the crimes of her parents. Psychologists have called this common idea the “cycle of abuse.” It seems to affirm our intuitions that abused children would grow up to become abusive parents themselves, given that all children imitate so much of what they observe at home. But new evidence shows that once again our intuitions have led us astray.

Most people take it for granted that the path from childhood to adulthood is a fairly straight one. We think of the embedded attitudes, habits, and values our parents taught us—some of which we are still trying to eradicate. Many people, as legions of memoirists remind us, carry with them the psychological scars of wounds they suffered at the hands of cruel, violent, alcoholic, unloving or neglectful parents. Longitudinal studies repeatedly find that children abused in these ways are more likely than other children to develop emotional problems, become violent or depressed, attempt suicide, commit crimes, drop out of school, and develop chronic stress-related illnesses. Adults imprisoned for violent acts and child abuse report high rates of their own victimization as children.

The belief in a cycle of violence was clinically popular but empirically unsupported, emerging from accounts by psychotherapists and social workers whose perspective was understandably onesided…

Yet…what is missing from this picture? The group we don’t see: children who were abused but who proved to be resilient, growing into healthy adults determined not to revisit on their own children what they had suffered. We aren’t aware of them because they aren’t in therapy or prison, telling their stories to sympathetic listeners and researchers. I once had a brilliant freshman student who described his life as CONTINUE READING THIS POST…

If you want to study sexual behavior, choose the fruit fly. Its behavior is not nearly as obvious as you might think, and you aren’t likely to raise a storm of protest from opponents of sex research or from advocates of the fruit fly.

If you want to study human sexuality, though, watch out. Just about every aspect of sexuality evokes powerful beliefs and prejudices, causing people to scrutinize research findings through the prisms of their own sexual behavior, their political and social ideologies, and wishful thinking. Add to this Congress’s antediluvian attitudes toward sex and sex research (Congress apparently acts on the theory that “if we don’t study it, no one will do it”), and no wonder it’s so difficult for science and skepticism to even get their foot in the bedroom door. And if your interest is sexual orientation —its causes, expression, variations, development— you’ll have to steer a course between the Scylla of conservatives who know that same-sex orientation is a sinful, psychologically determined “life-style choice” and the Charybdis of liberals who know that it is biologically determined and no more “chosen” than eye color.

The view that sexual orientation is biologically determined through the action of genes or hormones was an important weapon in the struggle for gay and lesbian rights. But what if it’s more complicated than that? What if that causal dichotomy (“biological v. learned”) is oversimplified? And so what, anyway? If sexual orientation proves to be far more complex and varied than we thought, why should that have anything at all do with extending rights to any group? If a person wants to be mono-sexual, bisexual, or, hell, trisexual, whose business is it? As the great screenwriter William Goldman famously said about filmmaking in Hollywood, “nobody knows anything.” When it comes to understanding sexual orientation, that’s a pretty close assessment. Consider this fascinating array of controversies and findings:

Is sexual orientation a matter of categories—straight, gay, bi—or is it a continuum?

Eminent sexologists differ. In their extensive review of the research for the eminent journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, J. Michael Bailey and his colleagues argue for the category view.¹ But sexologist Ritch Savin- Williams holds with Alfred Kinsey’s original assertion that “Males do not represent two distinct populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats.” Savin-Williams, drawing on a study of some 71,000 men and 118,000 women, argues for a five-point continuum that includes CONTINUE READING THIS POST…