The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

On Slates and Tweets: A Reply to David Sloan Wilson on Ancient Warfare and the Blank Slate

by Michael Shermer

On January 21, 2016 I posted a tweet that read:

Sorry blank slaters & Peace & Harmony Mafia: "Evidence of a prehistoric massacre extends the history of warfare." https://t.co/YsAgN2MmFB

— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) January 21, 2016

The reference is to those who adhere to the blank slate theory of human nature and those rather aggressive anthropologists who insist that war is a recent invention and that our ancestors lived in relative peace and harmony with one another and nature. The link is to a recent archaeological study that uncovered the fossilized remains of 27 prehistoric hunter-gatherers who were massacred around 10,000 years ago at a place called Nataruk near Lake Turkana in Kenya. Most of the skeletons showed signs of a violent death: blunt-force trauma to the head, broken hands (some of which were bound), shattered knees, cracked ribs and, most revealing, arrowhead projectile points in the skull and thorax and arrow lesions in the neck. The research team, headed by Dr. Marta Mirazon Lahr from Cambridge University, concluded that one band of people was most likely attacked by another band, explaining:

The deaths at Nataruk are testimony to the antiquity of inter-group violence and war. These human remains record the intentional killing of a small band of foragers with no deliberate burial, and provide unique evidence that warfare was part of the repertoire of inter-group relations among some prehistoric hunter-gatherers. […]

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The Negative Side of Positive Psychology

by Carol Tavris

In his book One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life, Mitch Horowitz reports with pride how he responded to a task assigned to him by the teacher of a spiritual group. For a winter camping trip, he had to find heart-shaped pink buckets for the female campers who didn’t want to venture into the icy woods at night to urinate. Round wouldn’t do; red wouldn’t do. He searched for days, annoying his wife, who wondered why he didn’t expend the same energy on household tasks. And then, incredibly, he found exactly the right buckets at a neighborhood grocery store. The moral, he says, is that when you “endeavor past all conventional effort, to the point where giving up seems like the only possible option,” you get “an emotional charge that no actuarial table can fully capture.”

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Your response to this story will probably predict your response to the positive-thinking movement in general. Are you thinking to yourself, “Talk about bucket lists! What a charming account of positive thinking and persistence in the face of unlikely success!” Or are you thinking, “Did anyone think about the female campers’ reaction to being given a stupid heart-shaped pink bucket? ‘Thanks, Mitch, but I’ll just use my pee shooter so I don’t have to smell a bucket of urine all night or knock it over when I stumble out in the morning.’ How about those household tasks he wasn’t doing—did his wife tell him to, well, piss off?”

Over the years I have grown quite grumpy about positive thinking. I don’t object to it as a general life strategy, of course; but the oversimplified litany of alleged benefits it produces is scientifically problematic. Over the years of constantly updating an introductory psychology textbook with my coauthor Carole Wade, new research obliges us to keep whittling away our previous discussions of positive psychology’s benefits. In our latest edition, positive psychology is barely a shadow of its former hulking self. […]

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All Sacred Cows

by Donald Prothero

Those of us who have read extensively in the field of comparative religion are pretty familiar with many of the bizarre beliefs and practices of religions and cultures all over the world. But most Americans are alarmingly insular and unaware of other cultures and religions, especially if they’ve been raised in a small rural town and taught to think only one way by their church. Even in the relatively liberal Presbyterian church where I was raised, serious discussions of other religions were taboo. It was not until high school church groups that I heard about other “cult” religions such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Christian Scientists, and Scientologists, and that exposure was simply to mock and condemn their belief systems, without any close examination of the absurdities we were expected to believe. Most Americans continue to grow up without thinking very deeply about other religions (other than mocking them on a superficial basis), and never question the assumptions of their own faith.

Seth Andrews came from such a background. Raised in a strict fundamentalist church and sheltered from exposure to any ideas about religion or science that might shake his faith, he went through life without questioning any of it until he was an adult. As he recounts in his previous autobiographical book Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason (which I reviewed), Andrews was making a living as a DJ on a Christian rock station, still deeply in the faith and insulated from doubt, until a series of events (deaths of beloved Christian rock musicians, 9/11, and switching to a secular radio station) opened his eyes and changed his perspective. Now he runs the very successful Thinking Atheist podcast and produces a number of outstanding videos for YouTube. Thus, Andrews comes to the study of comparative religions and cultures as a layman, rather than a scholar, with a background much like the rest of the fundamentalists in this country who are so vocal about pushing creationism in our schools and affecting our political process. […]

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Charlie Sheen’s HIV Goat Milk Doctor

by Harriet Hall, M.D.

On January 29, 2016, HBO Real Time host Bill Maher featured Samir Chachoua, a man who claims to have discovered a cure for HIV/AIDS, cancer, and a host of other illnesses. He is not licensed to practice medicine in the US; he operates out of Mexico where he charges rich visitors many thousands of dollars for treatment with his untested vaccines. Most of what he says on the program is unverifiable, demonstrably false, or frankly impossible.

Charlie Sheen: Failure, not a Success

The problem from the start is that Chachoua claims to have cured Charlie Sheen of HIV, and yet he admits that Charlie still has HIV. What gives? He says Charlie was dying from severe encephalitis, was incontinent, couldn’t tolerate daylight, and had severe liver failure. He claims to have “fixed” the liver, eliminated all the symptoms, and returned Charlie to vibrant health within a few hours of the first treatment. He claims that “within minutes” of starting his therapy, Charlie’s liver tests went to normal levels. That is simply not a believable claim, and no proof is on the offing. Damaged tissue takes time to heal. Recovery from chronic illness takes more than a matter of hours.

Charlie Sheen was also featured on a recent episode of Dr. Oz. There he described how Chachoua injected himself with Charlie’s blood. Bizarrely, he drew blood from some kind of lump on Charlie’s elbow rather than from a vein. Dr. Oz was appalled, as anyone would be. Not only was there a risk of HIV transmission, but there was a risk of transfusion reaction from mismatched blood that had not been typed and cross-matched. If the incident really occurred, it was nothing but a theatrical stunt demonstrating Chachoua’s overconfidence and poor judgment.

Sheen had been on antiretroviral medications that had reduced his viral load to undetectable levels. As with all such patients, this does not mean the virus had been eradicated from the entire body. When Sheen stopped taking the meds, the HIV titers (concentrations) remained undetectable for a while, but then started going back up, exactly as would be expected. Chachoua started treating him during the undetectable period and proclaimed Charlie cured. But then Charlie’s titers started rising again. He realized he was not cured and went right back on his antiretroviral medications on the plane home from Mexico.

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The Great ET Paradox: Why We are Likely to Find Them Before They Find Us

by George Michael

Despite over 50 years of effort, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) enterprise has yet to detect any telltale signs of sentient life beyond Earth. But exciting news of an anomalous star 1,400 light-years from Earth has raised new hopes that we are not alone in the galaxy after all. Using data collected by the Kepler space telescope, astronomers discovered that the distant star—KIC 8462852—flickers in an unusual way, as if some unknown celestial bodies were intermittently obscuring it. Of the roughly 150,000 stars within view of the Kepler telescope, KIC 8462852 is the only one that glimmers in this odd fashion.¹ Since it has been observed over the past few years, KIC 8462852 has dimmed dramatically, at times dropping in brightness as much as 22 percent.² Moreover, the recorded dips have not been regular, but uneven and unpredictable. Tabetha Boyajian announced these amazing findings that she and members of Planet Hunters—a citizen science program launched at Yale University—in a paper recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.³

A number of theories have been advanced to explain the anomalous activity of the star. Conceivably, the dips in light could be occasioned by an orbiting a planet, but even a Jupiter-sized planet would only dim this type of star by only 1 percent as it transited across. Furthermore, the irregular flickering associated with the star would not be consistent with a planet making a regular orbit, which would produce predictable dimming. Perhaps fragments from a planetary collision could be responsible for the dimming light, but such events are so rare that we would not expect Kepler to pick up such activity based on probabilities.⁴ Finally, the star could be surrounded by an accretion disk of dust and rubble that has not yet agglomerated into planets or been gobbled up by the star itself. Such an explanation would be convincing if the star was young, but KIC 8462852 appears to be mature. As Jason Wright, a professor of astronomy at Penn State University, noted, the star is moving too fast to have formed recently, as it fails to show any infrared signs of a big disk that would normally be associated with the material that could cause such dips in brightness.⁵

Because scientists have yet to advance a convincing natural explanation, attention has turned to more tantalizing possibilities. By far the most exciting is that an alien megastructure is responsible for blocking the light emitted by the star.⁶ After news of the star’s unusual features was released, SETI scientists quickly began using the Allen Telescope Array in California to examine radio emissions from the area of star for any signs of artificiality.

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Introduction: Skeptic
Viewing the World with a Rational Eye

by Michael Shermer

Ever since the early 1980s when I discovered the elegant and entertaining essays by the late Harvard evolutionary biologist and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould—initially through his early essay collections in books (Ever Since Darwin and The Panda’s Thumb) and subsequently in monthly form as they rolled off the presses for Natural History magazine—I have maintained a deep passion to write science for general audiences. Not “popular science” writing per se, but more along the lines of what Gould strove for in his essays: deeper truths within scientific discoveries. As he wrote in the Preface to a later collection of essays, The Lying Stones of Marrakech:

I have tried, as these essays developed over the years, to expand my humanistic ‘take’ upon science from a simple practical device…into a genuine emulsifier that might fuse the literary essay and the popular scientific article into something distinctive, something that might transcend our parochial disciplinary divisions for the benefit of both domains (science, because honorable personal expression by competent writers can’t ever hurt; and composition, because the thrill of nature’s factuality should not be excluded from the realm of our literary efforts).

Transdisciplinary doesn’t begin to describe the breadth and depth of Gould’s oeuvre, and it has been a mark at which I have aimed in my own writing.

In a 2002 paper published in the journal Social Studies of Science entitled “This View of Science,” I presented the results of a content analysis I conducted of all 300 essays Gould penned in his 25-year monthly streak, revealing five deeper themes that appeared in them: Data-Theory, Time’s Arrow-Time’s Cycle, Adaptationism-Nonadaptationism, Punctuationism-Gradualism, and Contingency-Necessity. The first theme on how data and theory interact interested me the most, inspired as I was by a quote Gould occasionally employed from his hero Charles Darwin: “How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!” The context for that quote, as I explicate in the first essay in this volume (in what I call “Darwin’s Dictim”), was that Darwin was challenged by his critics to just put his data forward and not to bother theorizing too much. But as the founder of evolutionary theory knew, the facts never just speak for themselves; they are always viewed through the lenses of theory. The two—observations and views, data and theory—are the conjoined twins of science.

That theme—the interplay of data and theory—is the central and unifying schemata in all of the essays in this volume. Gould completed his streak of 300 consecutive monthly essays in January of 2001. My first essay in Scientific American was in April of that year, but with a three month publication lead-time I actually penned the first one that January, close enough for an intellectual transition (if only in my mind). The 75 essays in this volume are from the first six and a quarter years of my own streak that—good health and fortune willing—will reach 300 in April of 2026, with several more essay volumes to come. I have grouped them into ten sections by topic within the larger data-theory schemata.

I. Science. In this section I set the tone of the entire series with Darwin’s Dictim in the first essay, giving examples of why data and theory are necessarily bound together, then move through essays whose themes related to general scientific principles and debates, such as what scientists should say when they’re wrong (“I was wrong” is a good start) and what it means to be wronger than wrong, scientism and why people look up to scientific superstars like Stephen Hawking, how to tell the difference between the ideas of a cutting edge scientist versus a cutting edge amateur, how to communicate science in both words and pictures, and the nature of scientific replication.

II. Skepticism. These essays range from classic skeptical debunkings (from the “faked” moon landing to 9/11 conspiracy theories) to the delicate balance between orthodoxy and heresy in science and when we should be skeptical of a heretical idea, and the fine art of baloney detection.

III. Pseudoscience and Quackery. There is also a difference between heresy and crazy, and the essays in this section explore why smart people fall for the latter, why being too open-minded is not always a good idea, why scams and cons work, and why bad ideas are dangerous to the point where they can kill.

IV. The Paranormal and the Supernatural. The essays in this section are about nothing. That is to say, there is no such thing as the paranormal and the supernatural; there is just the normal, the natural, and mysteries we have yet to explain. Talking to the dead, ESP and PSI, Bible codes, random electronic signals that sound like voices, and illusory patterns in Beatles’ albums, and what happens when a skeptic goes to the New Age capital of the world.

V. Aliens and UFOs. This is one of my favorite of all subjects in the skeptical pantheon of things to investigate, because there are really two different questions: Are aliens out there? and Have aliens come here? The answers to these two questions are “probably” and “probably not.” These essays consider what it means to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, and how we would know when we made contact, a good reason why we have not yet heard from ET, what time travel means for the search, and what it feels like to be abducted by aliens.

VI. Borderlands Science and Alternative Medicine. For my money the most interesting ideas are not those that are obviously right or wrong, but those that, if they are true, would be revolutionary. Nanotechnology and what it means for immortality, cryonics, cloning, and cures for the common cold, and other remedies that promise us the world but rarely deliver.

VII. Psychology and the Brain. I am by training a psychologist so I am always interested in how our brains work, especially how we can so easily be fooled and mistaken in believing things that are not true. The essays in this section explore the many facets of human psychology as it relates to our beliefs about the world, especially how and when our intuitions serve us well or lead us astray.

VIII. Human Nature. Fundamental to who we are and why we think and act as we do is our evolved biological nature, and the essays here consider a number of highly controversial scientific theories in this regard. For example, are we noble or ignoble savages? Are we biologically predisposed toward making love and war? Can we unweave the heart to understand love and attachment? And what is happiness, anyway, and can science measure it?

IX. Evolution and Creationism. Ever since I was in college this topic has periodically erupted on the political and cultural landscape as scientists hope creationism goes away while creationists continue to evolve new strategies to wedge their ideas into the minds of the public, including and especially students. These essays dip into that controversy from a number of different points ranging from science to politics.

X. Science, Religion, Miracles and God. Outside of the specific case of creationism, which focuses on evolution as a perceived threat to a narrow sect of religious belief, there is arguably no more contentious topic in all of science today than how it relates to religion, miracles, and God (most notably the latter’s existence—or not). It seems to be a perennial topic for scientists and philosophers of all stripes to ring in on, with new books landing on my desk almost weekly since I began this column a decade and a half ago. That’s a lot of ink spilled to solve a problem that may be insoluble. Is it? The essays in this final section consider that question, and others, in what is essentially a guide to how to think about science and religion, even while offering my own often strongly worded opinions.

Writing monthly essays for Scientific American has been one of the most consistent joys in my life. I look forward each month to exploring a new theme or topic, chosen based on a number of criteria partially shaped by the editorial policies of the magazine, which has been in print for over a century and a half (so they know what they’re doing). These include new and newsworthy findings, discoveries, experiments, surveys, articles, and books in science that people care about and—fitting with my data-theory schemata—in each essay I try to connect them to some deeper theoretical idea with some relevance for society and culture.

My pathway in this series has been navigated around many rocky shoals by the remarkable editors at Scientific American, including most notably John Rennie, Mariette DiChristina, and Fred Guterl, all of whom have struck the perfect balance of editorial hand, improving my prose without rewriting to the point of unrecognizability. And I would especially like to thank the fact checkers at Scientific American, most notably Aaron Shattuck, who has caught some potentially embarrassing whoppers before they went to press. In cycling we have a saying: there are only two types of cyclists—those who have crashed and those who are going to crash. Well, in literature there are only two types of writers—those who need editing and those who are going to need editing. The “Skeptic” column—and by extension this book—would not be possible without such supreme editing. I thank them, and the readers of Scientific American who have consistently supported my column, for this great honor.

A final note on length and content

To the original essays of this collected series I have, where appropriate, added updates that include corrections and addendums of new information that has come to light since the original publication dates. As well, I have included the slightly longer versions of the essays as I originally penned them for Scientific American; that is, my original published essay length was one page with an illustration, which delimits the word count to around 700. But I usually wrote around 800–1000 words and then started cutting, a painful process that I endured by promising myself that one day the full-length versions would come to light (the “director’s cut” as it were). It’s not that there was anything wrong with the original 700-word pieces, only that they breathe a little freer when I’m allowed to flesh out a thought or explain an idea with a few additional sentences as I attempt to view the world with a rational eye, the reading line for SKE?TIC.

Michael Shermer Discusses Some of Highlights of His Career with Scientific American

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Listen to the interview online, or on your radio. KPFA broadcasts on 94.1 FM and KPFB 89.3 FM, Berkeley, and KFCF 88.1 FM, Fresno, California. Or, get advance tickets online for $12 ($15 at door) and watch the live interview at St John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Avenue, Berkeley. Tickets are also available at Pegasus (3 sites), Moe’s, Walden Pond Bookstore, Diesel a Bookstore, Mrs. Dalloway’s, Modern Times (SF), or by calling 1-800-838-3006. More info.

Paleoanthropology Wars: The discovery of Homo naledi has generated considerable controversy in this scientific discipline

by Nathan H. Lents

News of the explosive discovery of Homo naledi in South Africa reverberated throughout the world in September 2015. The scientific, popular, and social media were equally abuzz with the truly breathtaking nature of the find: thousands of fossils, more than a dozen individuals, almost an entire skeleton reconstructed. Never in the 150-year history of paleoanthropology had so much been found at once. In one fell swoop, there are now more fossils of H. naledi than there are of more than half of the other named hominins that lived and died over the past seven million years. It was a one-of-a-kind discovery.

The find was different in another way as well. Lee Berger, the anthropologist leading the study, showed a staunch commitment to get the results of the team’s work, and the fossils themselves, out to the public as soon as possible. Within two years of their initial discovery, the first papers were published and the fossils were made available to the public, and not just in the traditional way of publishing a paper and placing precious fossils behind plate glass for the public to gawk at. Berger and another member of the team, John Hawks, completed extensive three-dimensional imaging of the fossils and provided the resulting data free of charge to anyone. With these data, one can 3D print your very own high-resolution casts of the original fossils. From anywhere in the world, one can obtain a facsimile of the highest possible quality, at no cost except for the materials for the printing. Even in our open-access era, this is an unheard of level of transparency and data sharing.

Despite this great excitement, it didn’t take long for some grumblings to be heard. Paleoanthropologist and National Academy of Science member Tim White, for example, stepped forward as the critic-in-chief. White has earned his place in the field’s hall of fame several times over and perhaps his biggest contribution is Ardi (Ardipithecus ramidus), one of the oldest known hominins. Nearly two million years older than “Lucy” (Australopithecus afarensis), Ardi brought deep insight into how and when the lineage that would give rise to humans diverged from our common ancestor with apes.

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Once Upon a Time: Re-Thinking the Fight Against Extremists

by Tina Dupuy

What does it mean to be radicalized? In a rare Oval Office address in the wake of the San Bernardino massacre, President Barack Obama described the killers as having “gone down the dark path of radicalization.” It used to be extremists. We were fighting extremists in the equally nebulous War on Terror. Then someone found a thesaurus and now we’re battling radicalization. “[It] is the responsibility of Muslims around the world to root out misguided ideas that lead to radicalization,” urged Obama. What are these ideas exactly?

Every group of radicals nee extremists—from ISIS to the Klan to the House GOP’s Freedom Caucus—all have the same lure: Today is chaotic, unpredictable and worse than it was, so we must return to a time when things were better. A well-proven formula for radicalization is to take the disorientated, disenfranchised and disappointed; add a universal yarn about the Good Ol’ Days and stir.

Let’s examine some backward reasoning about the past: “Back to basics,” you’ll hear. Back to the values of the founders! Original intent! Back to the peacefulness of ancient times. Back to the core of the Koran. Back to the tranquility of our ancestors! Paleo diet, anyone? Fundamentalists use this concept in their own moniker; they’re going back to fundamentals. Even New Agers peddle this idea. The site SacredEarth.com says, “Once upon a time—not too long ago, the ancient craft of midwifery and the art of herbal healing were intimately linked.” Yeah sure, back in the good old days when women had a 50/50 chance of dying during childbirth. Just a quick Google search of “alternative medicine” will land you in a sea of alternate history. As one site touting amber as a pain reliever puts it, “For many centuries since time began, people have used nature’s bounty for traditional medicine.”

Once, I went to the Brooklyn Flea Market and there was a ratty chair kept together by electrical tape. The price tag was a whopping $250! When I asked the seller if that was a typo, he responded “No,” shocked by the question. “It’s old.” Which is essentially what alternative medicine is saying. “Back when people only lived to 35, they knew better than us!” […]

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