The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe
 

Skepticast #29: February 8th 2006 (Download MP3)



Topics:

Issue #1. News Items

Issue #2. Featured Website: Two sites on Science Myths

Issue #3. Feynman on Education and Textbooks

Issue #4. Your E-mail and Questions

Issue #5. Science or Fiction

Issue #6. Going beyond science?





Issue #1. News Items


T. rex's great-grandfather unearthed in China
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8698

Low-fat diet may not reduce cancer and heart risks
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8697



 

Issue #2. Featured Website: Two sites on Science Myths

Modern Myths Taught As Science
 http://www.geocities.com/kfuller2001/tmyths.htm#myth1

"Science Myths" in K-6 Textbooks and Popular culture
http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/miscon/miscon.html

 

Issue #3. Feynman on Education and Textbook

http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm



 

Issue #4. Your E-mail and Questions

Hi,
I stumbled across your podcasts webpage a few weeks back, and am addicted.

Congratulations to you & the podcast crew on a job well done.
(I come from) a town called Stellenbosch, near Cape Town, South Africa.

Curious minds need to know these things - how are you related to the other Novellas? (I guess calling you a trilogy wouldn't be a novel joke to you...)

Regards, Auke

 

Issue #5. Science or Fiction

Each week our host will come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine, one fictitious. He will challenge our panel of skeptics to sniff out the fake – and you can play along.

Theme this week: Animals

Item #1 – A recent study shows that large numbers of coyotes infest American cities, hunting at night largely undetected.
Item #2 – Scientists have discovered that animals can infect another animal with cancer through their bite.
Item #3 – A new species of lizard was discovered in the jungles of New Guinea that gives birth to live young.




Answers Below









Answers
Item #1 – Science:
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/060105_coyotefrm.htm

Item #2 – Science:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/02/01/tasmanian.devils.reut/index.html

Item #3 – Fiction

 

Issue #6. Going beyond science

Inner Awareness : Science isn’t only source of truth

First posted 00:30am (Mla time) Jan 24, 2006
By Jaime Licauco
Inquirer
Editor's Note: Published on Page C3 of the January 24, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
I was a guest recently in a television show on ANC hosted by Ces Drilon. The topic was “Astrology and Science” and the other two guests were a geologist from the University of the Philippines and a well-known political astrologer.

The scientist said we should rely only on scientific knowledge in predicting what was to come, because it was proven and therefore highly reliable. Other sources of information not based on science could not be relied upon.

The astrologer, on the other hand, said the positions of planets and other heavenly configurations influenced events and the behavior of people, and could also be fairly reliable predictors of things to come.

I held a middle position. I saw no incompatibility in the various sources of knowledge because “truth is one, and cannot contradict itself.” Whether information came from science, astrology or the devil himself, if it was true, it could not contradict other true information.

The scientist said India had man The scientist said India had many astrologers and fortunetellers, but it was not as progressive as some western countries that relied on science in making political and economic decisions.

“Why are we not afraid to ride an airplane or spaceship?” he asked. “Because we know it is scientifically made and can be relied upon to fly and land us safely.”

He continued, “The problem with this country is that science is not given the importance it deserves. To make progress, we have to spend more on scientific research.”

He pointed out that even sixth graders could not do simple addition and subtraction. “If we do not even have knowledge of the fundamentals of science, how can we build a really strong scientific culture?”

I said I did not think there was any question about the need for a strong scientific education. I was all for scientific knowledge. One could not argue against the need for scientific proof and validation of things we knew. We should have more science in the curriculum.

The problem was we often failed to realize that science did not cover the whole of reality. The scientific method was devised to study only physical reality. Within that realm, the scientific method was perfect. We could not improve on it.

To prove something was physically true, it should follow strict scientific methodology. I agreed completely with this.

But what if we were dealing with nonphysical reality, for example ghosts, astral projection, paranormal phenomena—things clearly outside the scope of science? How could we rely on science to guide us? It could not, not because it was wrong but because it was not meant to tackle these areas.

Not having any principles to deal with nonphysical reality, science could not say these realities did not exist. Just because one could not prove the astral body in the laboratory did not mean it was not true.

As the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard pointed out, “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t so. The other is to refuse to believe what is so.”


Incomplete
 The problem I have with science or with the scientific method is not that it is wrong but that it is incomplete. It does not and cannot go beyond what can be seen, heard, felt, weighed, smelled and tasted, or quantified in some way.
But there are other ways of looking at reality aside from the scientific paradigm. The big problem with critics of these other paradigms is that they have never bothered to look at proofs presented in support of these other ways. There are thousands of them.

The scientist guest on that TV interview said he never heard of any. That’s the problem, I said. I told him that, in the 1940s, Dr. J.B. Rhine of Duke University in North Carolina, United States, proved under strict laboratory-controlled conditions that psychic powers like telepathy and clairvoyance really existed.

It was Dr. Rhine who coined the term “extra sensory perception” (ESP) to refer to that ability that seemed to go beyond the five senses, a kind of sixth sense. Though the work of Dr. Rhine had many detractors in the scientific community, no one ever proved that his conclusions were not valid.

More recently, in the ’70s, Dr. Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute proved human awareness could be projected to a specific location, which a person had never visited before, allowing him/her to describe it accurately. Both scientists have Ph.D.’s in physics.

At Princeton University’s Anomalous Phenomena Department, Dr. Robert Jahne, who has a Ph.D. in Engineering, and psychologist Brenda Dunne validated, after years of meticulous study, the ability of the human mind to influence, through telekinesis, the fall of the dice in a roulette game.

Many other scientific studies in this field were done in Russia and other Eastern European countries. To say there is no scientific proof of psychic phenomena is to betray one’s ignorance of this very important field of knowledge.