The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe
Podcast: June 29th 2005 (Download MP3)
Topics:
Issue #1. Science or Fiction
Issue #2. Special guest: Michael Shermer
Issue #1. Science or Fiction
Each week our host will come up with three science news items, two genuine, one fictitious. He will challenge our panel of skeptics to sniff out the fake – and you can play along.
Follow up from last week:
Theme for this week – amazing animal facts
Topic 1 – Koala bears never drink
Topic 2 – The Sooty Tern remains continually aloft for 3 to 10 years as a sub adult before returning to land to breed? IT NEVER LANDS during this time! It eats, drinks, and even sleeps on the wing.
Topic 3 – chimpanzees have been observed communicating with each other in written symbols
So...which one is false? Follow this link to find out.
Issue #2. guest: Michael Shermer, PhD
Dr. Michael Shermer
• Author:
The Science of Good and Evil (Times Books);
In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace (Oxford University Press);
The Borderlands of Science:
Where Sense Meets Nonsense (Oxford University Press),
Denying History (Univ. of Ca Press),
How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God (W. H. Freeman),
Why People Believe Weird Things (W. H. Freeman).
• Founding Publisher Skeptic Magazine; Director, Skeptics Society
• Contributing Editor and Monthly Columnist, Scientific American
• Host, Skeptics Caltech Lecture Series
• Co-Producer and Co-Host, Exploring the Unknown, 13-Hour Series on the Fox Family Channel, aired in 2000.
• Science Correspondent, KPCC radio, NPR affiliate for Southern California
• Fellow, Linnean Society of London
• Ph.D., History of Science, Claremont Graduate School
• M.S., Experimental Psychology, California State University, Fullerton
• Featured interviews on 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Tom Snyder, Politically Incorrect, Donahue, Oprah, Sally, Lezza, Unsolved Mysteries, A & E, Discovery, The History Channel, and The Learning Channel.
Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Lecture Series at Caltech, and the co-host and producer of the 13-hour Fox Family television series, Exploring the Unknown. He is the author of In Darwin's Shadow, about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy land between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of historical distortion. His book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God. He is also the author of Why People Believe Weird Things, a book that was widely and positively reviewed and landed on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list as well as the New Sciences science books bestseller list in England. Dr. Shermer is also the author of Teach Your Child Science and co-authored Teach Your Child Math and Mathemagics.
According to Stephen Jay Gould (from his Foreword to Why People Believe Weird Things): "Michael Shermer, as head of one of America's leading skeptic organizations, and as a powerful activist and essayist in the service of this operational form of reason, is an important figure in American public life."
Dr. Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State Univesity, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate School. Since his creation of the Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, and the Skeptics Lecture Series at Caltech, he has appeared on such shows as 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Tom Snyder, Donahue, Oprah, Sally, Lezza, Unsolved Mysteries, and other shows as a skeptic of weird and extraordinary claims, as well as on documentaries aired on A & E, Discovery, and The Learning Channel
The Skeptics Society: http://www.skeptic.com
Article about Holocaust Denial
Article about Shermer
Skeptic’s writings challenge ‘baloney’
Reviewed by George Scialabba June 12, 2005
“Science,” Michael Shermer writes, “is a great Baloney Detection Kit.”
Founder of the Skeptics Society, publisher of Skeptic magazine, columnist for Scientific American, editor of “The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience” and author of “Why People Believe Weird Things,” Shermer is a veteran baloney detector.
Fortunately, that is not all science is, or Shermer is. There is plenty of – of “cold (i.e., debunking in his new collection of essays, “Science Friction” psychic) reading,” “sports science,” recent scandals in anthropology and especially of “intelligent design” theory as a competitor to evolutionary adaptationism. But there are also meaty accounts of such interesting problems as counterfactuality and complexity in history and of recent controversies in evolutionary theory, entertaining discussions of the most famous episode of “Star Trek” and the causes of the mutiny on the Bounty, along with the author’s personal accounts of caring for his dying mother (very affecting) and of his life as a professional skeptic (less so).
One of the most contentious episodes in recent scientific history was occasioned by journalist Patrick Tierney’s book “Darkness in El Dorado,” which accused eminent anthropologists of misrepresenting, and perhaps even disrupting, the culture of Amazonian aborigines. Some of contemporary anthropology’s premier reputations were built on studies of the “fierce people,” the Yanomamo of Amazonia. A second generation of researchers raised questions about these studies, and Tierney spent 11 years, mostly in the bush, probing the story. He emerged skeptical, but mainstream anthropologists strenuously defended their profession. Shermer not only ably lays out the dispute but also shows how differences in anthropological interpretation are possible, even inevitable, given that both researchers and subjects have personalities, not merely theories.
Shermer is less patiently evenhanded on the subject of intelligent design. It rouses the full-throated skeptic in him. His chapter called “The New New Creationism” aims to blow intelligent design theory out of the water, and, in this reviewer’s opinion, it succeeds. With the exception of Pope John Paul II’s 1996 encyclical “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth,” conservative Christians’ hostility to evolution has been unremitting. They have therefore championed (Shermer would say concocted) intelligent-design theory, according to which evolution’s chief explanatory mechanism, natural selection, is unable in principle to account for irreducibly complex phenomena. (An irreducibly complex phenomenon, like the eye, is a system of interacting parts, every one of which is essential to successful functioning.)
Very few scientists, Christian or non-Christian, have been persuaded by this argument. Shermer thoroughly explains why and offers a more tentative but still useful account of scientists’ best current answer to the question of how life originated. “The answer can be found in the properties of self-organization and ... As a emergence that arise out of what are known as complex adaptive systems. complex adaptive system the cosmos intelligently designs itself. It is one giant autocatalytic (self-driving) feedback loop that generates emergent properties, one of which is life.” That may not be immediately intelligible, but non-scientists who want to understand the natural or social world had better get used to hearing about complex adaptive systems.
In previous books Shermer has advocated a newly popular style of argument called “fuzzy thinking,” which recognizes that either/or thinking is sometimes misleading or inefficient. Sometimes the sky is neither blue nor not-blue. Shermer applies this probabilistic terminology to assessing a handful of – challenges to prevailing scientific common sense. “heresies”
– we’ve all read and perhaps even repeated “The universe is all there is” this sentence. But cosmology marches on. It now appears that there may be baby – at present only intriguing universes, bubble universes, parallel universes mathematical quirks, though with new instruments like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories looking out for faint gravitational ripples in the ether, who knows?
Shermer assigns the existence of alternate universes a “fuzzy factor,” or probability, of 0.7.
Here are some other heresies noted by Shermer, who weighs and allots a fuzzy factor to each: time travel is possible, human evolution is a fluke, oil is not a fossil fuel, cancer is an infectious disease, brain and spinal cord regeneration will someday succeed.
The intersection of science and history fascinates Shermer. There’s a (perhaps unintentionally) amusing chapter tracing the mutiny on the Bounty to evolutionary causes: status competition between alpha males Christian and Bligh, added to oxytocin-mediated affective bonding between the mutineers and their Tahitian consorts, gets summed up in this resounding semi-banality: “Proximate causes of the mutiny on the Bounty may have been missing coconuts and lost tempers, but the ultimate cause was evolutionarily adaptive emotions expressed non-adaptively in the wrong place at the wrong time, with irreversible consequences.”
More illuminating is “Exorcising Laplace’s Demon,” a chapter on the recent rapprochement of scientific and historical models of explanation. Contingency, – all standard features of historical path dependency and narrative form – are complicating the linear, “covering law” model that has up to now writing been standard in science. Shermer’s familiarity with philosophy and intellectual history, abundantly evident in his earlier books, serves his readers well here.
– as he would be the first to admit, Gould Shermer is no Stephen Jay Gould being one of his heroes and the subject of a handsome appreciation in “Science Friction.” Gould’s literary flair, analytic panache and vast erudition are the gold standard for science writers. But even the lesser precious metals are well worth having.