It was a quiet morning on June 30, 1908. The event occurred in a remote location of heavily-forested Siberia, in the Russian Federation.

Instead of leaping ahead to the finale and just saying “kaboom”, we’ll make this a little more dramatic. So get ready.

A rustling is heard as a brown bear lumbers forward and stops. It drops its head and sniffs, poking its thick snout through green leafy undergrowth. It smells an appetizer.

The bear stops, and lifts its massive head. It again sniffs the air, confused. The bear has good eyesight, but trusts its nose over any other sense. It smells nothing out of the ordinary, though, yet knows something is wrong.

What is it? The bear shuffles, and swings its head to scan around. It catches a glimmer of something, something bright and shining far above the trees.

Massive muscles flex, and the bear hoists itself up a tree for a better view. A blue light shines far above, like a second sun.

The bear snorts, and drops heavily to earth. It doesn’t care about what’s up in the air. It’s more concerned with stuff on the ground, and what part of that stuff is edible.

Then the world explodes. A roaring wall of noise slams into the bear. All surrounding trees lean away, as if flinching in unison against a terrifying power. In the next moment, everything bursts into flames. The bear spends his last living moments roaring at this new enemy, this massive invader from the sky.

It takes only a few more seconds to raze 80 million trees over 800 square miles. Everything is destroyed. Everything burns.

This overly-dramatic-yet-plausible story is about the Tunguska explosion. No one positively knows what happened that day, and what caused such devastation. The Tunguska event was so destructive and so complete, it made later analysis difficult.

Here are some known facts about the Tunguska explosion:

The blast analysis tells us the explosion occurred a few miles above the earth - perhaps between three and six miles.

The blast force was ten to fifteen megatons - that’s roughly a thousand times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb.

To put this in a better perspective, some scientists think that a similar meteor impact 66 million years ago was the cosmic sledgehammer that wiped out the dinosaurs.

What happened here? Many theories have been raised over the years. These include an antimatter explosion, a miniature black hole tearing through the Earth, a natural gas explosion, and the accidental crash of an alien spacecraft.

According to RIA Novosti, a Russian-language news site, researchers have found evidence of acid rain in the epicenter of the explosion. This acid was presumably formed by the ill-fated meteorite screaming through the Earth’s atmosphere. Atmospheric oxygen combined with nitrogen. Mix in some incredibly high temperatures, and you get nitrogen oxides. These oxides are found where the explosion is thought to have occurred.

Diamond-graphite rock formations have been found at the scene. These tiny, super-hard granules are created by taking a bunch of carbon, and subjecting it to massive pressure, like, for example, what you might get from the detonation of a thousand atomic bombs.

Almost twenty years after the Tunguska explosion, witnesses were interviewed (note that the time delay was due to arguably more important things, like an impending World War I and the Russian Revolution). Their testimonies include descriptions of what you would expect from a huge explosion, like violent earthquakes, massive heat and blinding light. One interviewee seems to have seen the meteor itself, saying:

“…the peasants saw to the North-West, rather high above the horizon, some strangely bright (impossible to look at) bluish-white heavenly body, which for 10 minutes moved downwards. The body appeared as a “pipe”, i.e. a cylinder. The sky was cloudless, only a small dark cloud was observed in the general direction of the bright body. It was hot and dry. As the body neared the ground (forest), the bright body seemed to smudge, and then turned into a giant billow of black smoke, and a loud knocking (not thunder) was heard, as if large stones were falling, or artillery was fired. All buildings shook. At the same time the cloud began emitting flames of uncertain shapes. All villagers were stricken with panic and took to the streets, women cried, thinking it was the end of the world.”

To the frustration of the credulous, we are getting closer and closer to a definite answer about the Tunguska mystery. While we can’t say for sure the explosion was caused by a meteor, the probability is high.

While exciting, impressive, and initially perplexing, the Tunguska mystery is becoming less and less of a mystery. It’s now just another natural event illuminated clearly by the light of advanced science. Some may see this as depriving the world of wonder. I see it as walking in the dark, and finally seeing the light.

Walk into any supermarket, drug store, or health food store and you will find a wide variety of nutritional supplements.  People use these as an alternative to “western” or “conventional” medicine.  Unfortunately, when taking nutritional supplements, you aren’t treating your disease or keeping yourself healthy. You are using yourself as a human guinea pig in a poorly designed experiment, the results of which will be thrown away.

There are two kinds of assumptions, those which can be proven to be true by experiment and those that are inherently not provable.  One can argue that God’s existence is not provable, and so we should just accept his existence on faith (an argument I disagree with. For more detail see the article If you can’t prove God doesn’t exist, why not believe?). However, the claim that a particular plant product can cure cancer is testable.  We can give the product to some people with cancer and give others an alternative treatment or a placebo.  We can see, objectively, whether the product works.  While no process is perfect, a drug needs to be shown to be safe and effective in a well controlled series of trials (usually double-blind placebo-controlled) to be approved by the FDA.  Nutritional supplements are rarely if ever tested in this manner.

Since a nutritional supplement’s active ingredients and its formulations haven’t been tested, you are using yourself as a guinea pig, though nobody is monitoring the result of that particular experiment.  However, that’s only the beginning. Unlike drugs, the FDA does not monitor or regulate the composition of nutritional supplements.  So, even if a nutritional supplement had been previously tested, the producer can reformulate the product at any time without testing, product safety constraints or warning.

The biggest concern is that of the unregulated nature of the supplement market. There is no guarantee that what the label says about those pills is actually what’s inside those pills.  Nor are there guarantees about ingredients or impurities not listed on the label.

Unfortunately, these concerns are not theoretical.  When independently tested, nutritional supplements are often found to be contaminated or not to contain the correct amount of the active ingredient. In some cases, they contain none of the active ingredient.  For example, a recent independent test of ten red yeast rice supplements by consumerlab.com found that “levels of cholesterol-lowering statin compounds vary by more than one-hundred-fold across products - with some containing large amounts but others having hardly any”. When testing twenty-three iron supplements they found “a potential toxin, citrinin, was found in four of the products.” They also found that “one ‘high potency’ iron supplement contained only 37% of its claimed iron. A second supplement was contaminated with lead.”  Even within a brand the level of the active ingredient often fluctuates wildly from batch to batch.

If you are taking a nutritional supplement to try to treat or manage a disease, you are taking something that could have been tested rigorously but probably wasn’t. If it was tested, it probably wasn’t in the formulation that you’re getting. If it was tested using the formulation that you are taking, there is nothing stopping the manufacturer from reformulating it. The product may contain more or less of the active ingredient than indicated on the label. It may be contaminated with toxins.  Nobody is systematically monitoring the effect of the supplement on you or on any other guinea pig.  Is it worth taking a pill with unknown contents that may or may not work better than a placebo?

Remember what you’re gambling with: your health.

When my local skeptic’s organization (Science & Reason in Hampton Roads) announced a field trip to Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach, I was eager to attend.  We planned a full afternoon at the A.R.E. First, an ESP demonstration, and then an educational film about Mr. Cayce, ending with a tour of the Association building.  I knew very little about Mr. Cayce before our field trip, and I opted not to do any preparatory research, deciding instead to let the A.R.E. itself serve as Mr. Cayce’s monument.

I arrived at the Association for Research and Enlightenment before the rest of my group and decided to wait in the bookstore.  Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of books for sale - turns out there are hundreds of books by or about Mr. Cayce, and most of them are available for sale at the A.R.E.  In addition to the books, there was a large display of alternative medicine supplies.  There were ear candles, homeopathic remedies and - rather perplexingly - bottles of castor oil in several convenient sizes.  Also for sale was an assortment of New Age tchotchkes - suncatchers, dreamcatchers, windchimes, mad varieties of religious statuary, and crystals, crystals, crystals.  A pretty pair of crystal earrings caught my eye.  But my group had arrived, so I made a mental note to stop in at the bookstore after the tour and buy them.

The ESP demonstration

The ESP demonstration took place in one of the classrooms near the bookstore.  As we filed into the classroom, a cheerful and attractive docent handed each of us a sealed manila envelope, a pencil and a form for the ESP test.  There was a large dry-erase board at the front of the room covered with handwritten information about ESP.  I was surprised to see that Mr. Cayce’s name was misspelled.  This did not make me feel optimistic about our docent’s fact-checking abilities.  Sure enough, her ESP presentation was characterized by credulity of the most extreme kind.  She explained to us that we actually have six senses, not five, and that ESP is our sixth sense.  ESP can take several forms, she explained: telepathy (mind reading), precognition (seeing the future), retrocognition (seeing into past lives), and clairvoyance (gaining information without using any of the standard five senses).  Edgar Cayce, she told us earnestly, was gifted in all four forms of ESP.  This was presented as absolute fact, with no question of controversy: ESP is a sixth sense, it does take these four forms, and Edgar Cayce was gifted in all of them.  Period.

Her ‘proofs’ of ESP were also very credulously presented.  For instance, when explaining retrocognition, she told us about a trip to Rome which she had taken with her husband. They had visited the Coliseum and, while there, she had been swept by a wave of sadness and despair.  To our docent, this was proof of a past life.  No other possibility was presented.  It is not unusual that a person should feel sad when visiting a place where she knew sad events took place.  But no - to our docent, the fact that she was sad at the Coliseum was proof that - in a past life - she had been a lion’s lunch.

Having explained ESP to her satisfaction, our docent moved on to the demonstration.  She called our attention to the forms which she had passed out.  Each form had several columns with 25 blank spaces.  Across the top, there was a row of 5 symbols; a circle, a plus sign, three wavy lines, a square and a star. Then she showed us a deck of large cards, each of which had one of these symbols on it.  She explained that she would hold the cards with their backs to us, and look at each symbol for a moment.  We were to try to retrieve that symbol from her mind and write it down on our forms.  An exact match would count as a ‘hit’ for telepathy; a diagonal match to the previous card would count as a ‘hit’ for retrocognition; and a diagonal match to the next card would count as a ‘hit’ for precognition. The docent was enthusiastic about our scores, announcing that some of us ‘probably’ had telepathic gifts.  However, when asked, she did not know what the level of pure chance was given the number of possible hits or misses. 

[Below is a scan of the results from Ms. Buchli's test. Click the image to view a larger size.]

On to the clairvoyance test.  For this test we got out the sealed manila envelopes which we had been given when we entered the room.  The docent told us that each envelope contained a magazine page with a large picture on one side.  It was that picture we were supposed to try to ‘read.’  She instructed us to concentrate on our envelopes for a moment, then write the results onto the outside of the envelope before opening it.  I grabbed at a random thought and wrote that down.  I wrote ‘Sicily,’ probably because the earlier discussion about the Coliseum had reminded me of my own visit to Rome, which took place while I was stationed in Sicily with the Navy.   When I opened the envelope, though, my picture was revealed to be one of a group of Fiji islanders rowing a canoe.  The docent suggested that this was a partial hit - after all, Sicily and Fiji are both islands! 

The film about Edgar Cayce

I was eager to see the film about Edgar Cayce’s life.  As I said before, I knew very little about him and had done no preliminary research.  According to the film, our docent was correct - Mr. Cayce was gifted in all forms of ESP.  In addition to his ESP powers, he was also a healer.  He healed himself after a bout of muteness, and he healed his wife of tuberculosis.  He would put himself into a trance, and then answer questions put to him in person, or read from letters which people sent to him.  These trances gained him his nickname as “the Sleeping Prophet.”   More than 14,000 of these readings have been recorded and saved at the A.R.E., and they form the core of his body of work, which includes prophecies, medical advice, dream interpretations and past life readings. 

It came as no surprise to discover that the film treated this information about Mr. Cayce as absolutely true and above reproach.  Watching the film, I found myself with plenty of questions. Was his wife undergoing any conventional treatment when he healed her?  Was her diagnosis firm, or was it possible she was suffering from a less serious disease that merely looked like tuberculosis?  What about those trances?  Was Mr. Cayce ever tested to be sure he was really unconscious?  And his prophecies?  Were any of them correctly interpreted before the events they foretold took place?  Or were they all retrofitted after the fact?  None of these questions were answered (or even raised) by the film.

The last word in the film was given to Mr. Cayce, with a quote from his autobiography: “I have nothing to sell and am seeking only to be of help.”  A lovely sentiment, which was only slightly dented by the fact that our docent, as soon as the film ended, began a  pitch for paid membership to the A.R.E., which is indeed for sale and costs around $50 a year.

The tour of the Association for Research and Enlightenment

Our field trip was winding down; all that remained was the tour, which began with a stop at the A.R.E. Health Center and Spa.  The Health Center and Spa features such typical day-spa offerings as facials and massages, as well as more metaphysical selections such as Dream Counseling, Inner Life Coaching and Therapeutic Touch.  Several of the offerings included castor oil packs.  This cleared up a lingering mystery for me - earlier, at the bookstore, I had wondered what was up with the bottles of castor oil I’d seen for sale.  Turns out, Mr. Cayce’s health care recommendations frequently require castor oil.  As we continued the tour, our docent pointed out that A.R.E. members would receive discounts on spa services.

Our next stop was to a very special exhibit: the uncomfortable-looking daybed on which Mr. Cayce had reclined while doing his readings.   We also visited several classrooms in this section of the building.  Our docent was careful to tell us that a paid membership with the A.R.E. would allow us to attend classes on a variety of metaphysical subjects taught by A.R.E. experts, and would entitle us to a discount on any A.R.E. conferences we would like to attend. 

Then we proceeded upstairs to the Meditation Room, a large, peaceful room with an almost aggressively ecumenical mix of god and goddess iconography, and a terrific view of Virginia Beach.  Our docent remarked that paid membership would allow us unlimited use of the Meditation Room and access to the free meditation classes given there.

As we moved through the building, sampling these delights, our docent kept tossing out bits of information loaded with the sort of credulity we had come to expect from her.  As we passed a series of framed pencil drawings she told us that they were drawings of Lemuria, by one of their “Lemurian experts.”  She spoke of Lemuria as if it was San Francisco or Cincinnati, instead of a legendary lost continent with even less credibility than Atlantis.  Later, as we passed a number of wooden desks with boxes on top, she pointed out that these were ESP testing boxes used in the “famous Duke University ESP study.”  She did not mention that the A.R.E. has access to these boxes because academic interest in parapsychology has been waning since the 1980s.  Duke University halted its PSI experiments in 1965.  As a rider to this, she told us that the A.R.E. had found that Indigo Children were particularly gifted at ESP, speaking as if the existence of ‘Indigo children’ were a recognized psychological phenomenon instead of an unproved New Age trend with no scientific validity.

The A.R.E. library and Edgar Cayce’s readings

The last stop on our tour was the library, which features one of the largest collections of metaphysical literature in the world.  The core of the collection, our docent told us, was Mr. Cayce’s personal library, augmented over the years by other collections willed or donated to the A.R.E.  Our docent said that members of the A.R.E. were allowed to borrow books from the collection as from a lending library.

Finally, we approached the cherry on the A.R.E. sundae: Edgar Cayce’s actual readings.  These are collected into an impressive number of loose-leaf binders, indexed and cross referenced.  Along a nearby wall, our docent pointed out a large filing cabinet.  In this cabinet, she told us, were copies of all of the readings which pertained to health.  She showed us an index which listed, by condition or disorder, all of the health-related readings.  If you wanted to find information about a particular condition, you could look it up in the index and find all of the readings about that condition collected in a single folder in the cabinet.  Thinking of my daughter, who has Cerebral Palsy, I wondered aloud whether or not Mr. Cayce had done any readings on Cerebral Palsy.  Someone passed me the index and I looked it up.  There were, indeed, several readings under Cerebral Palsy, subcategorized under “Abnormal Children.”

It was right then that I stopped having fun.

I was not offended by the terminology - Mr. Cayce died in 1945 and I could not fault him for using language which would have been common in his day.  No, the fun stopped because I suddenly realized that each of those 14,000 readings represented an actual person.  This was a person with a disabled child, an illness or some type of problem.  This was a person who chose to spend their money, time and resources to seek help from Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet, who was almost certainly 100% unqualified to help them.  And because they spent their money, time and resources on Mr. Cayce, they would have had less money, time and resources to devote to things which might actually have been of some benefit.

It was almost as depressing as a visit to the Coliseum.

Fortunately for me, the tour was over.  Our docent - still as chipper and pleasant as ever - thanked us for coming and invited us to explore the library before we left.  Usually this would have been an attractive prospect to me - I’m generally happy to explore a library of any kind.  But on this day, I just wanted to go home.

As I left the building, I passed the bookstore and thought briefly of the crystal earrings I had coveted.

I didn’t stop to buy them.

Additional resources:

Edgar Cayce’s A.R.E.: http://www.edgarcayce.org/

A critical look at Edgar Cayce: http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mcayce.html

Detail on the continent of Lemuria: http://www.randi.org/encyclopedia/Lemuria.html

More information on Parapsychology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology

More information on the “indigo children”: http://skepdic.com/indigo.html

If you can’t disprove the existence of God, why not believe in Him?  This is a question often posed to atheists by believers.  The basic answer is that there are a lot of improbable things that I can’t disprove, but believing in them leads to a distorted view of the world.  These range from things that nobody else believes, such as the belief that there is an invisible snorg (an alien from outer space) sitting on my shoulder, to things that many believe - as an example, pick the mythology of any religion.

Bertrand Russell gave a rather famous example of an idea that can not be disproved which nobody would seriously ask an atheist to believe called Russell’s Teapot or the Celestial Teapot.  Here’s his original description:

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”

Many believers counter Russell’s argument with a list of good things that religion encourages: charity, forgiveness, and social order to name a few.  So, unlike the teapot or the snorg, they argue that religious belief is a positive and therefore should be encouraged.  There is an element of truth to that argument, but religion has also been used to justify war, the Inquisition, the suppression of ideas (think of Galileo), and slavery.  Who can ever really know if religion does more harm than good?

Expanding on Russell’s idea, Richard Dawkins used the teapot analogy and listed a host of problems caused by religious belief in his book A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love. The list - amusing though not comprehensive - can be found here. 

I believe that both Dawkins and most believers neglect the most fundamental problem with belief in religious tenets that can’t be disproved; the loss of intellectual curiosity and honesty.  Faith - which is belief even in the face of evidence that your belief may be wrong - is used as a crutch for those who do not want to do the hard work of thinking through tough moral and intellectual issues.  This includes opposing scientific inquiry from heliocentrism to stem cell research.

I recently experienced an example of the closed-minded approach to the world engendered by religion.  A fundamentalist Christian friend wore a pro-life t-shirt to our house and I challenged her to tell me just how much she did to protect human life.  The list was impressive.  She had protested for Terri Schiavo and at clinics, sent money to various groups, and so on.  I then asked her how many people died because of inadequate health insurance, smoking, and pollution.  She didn’t know.  “Why,” I asked, “do you only protest for those who can no longer think or have never been able to think - the quality that makes us most human - when the same level of effort could save many more who are living, thinking human beings?” 

Her response: “I never thought about it.”

One frequent objection that creationists use about evolution is to question how a complex structure could evolve - what good is half an eye?  What possible evolutionary path could there be that would lead to such a complex structure?

So, how would an eye evolve?  Start with simple organisms that don’t have an eye.  In my fish tank I have a Tridacna maxima which is a saltwater clam.  It has no eyes, but if I move my hand between the light and the water in a way that makes a shadow pass over the clam, it will close its shell.  The clam has no eyes but is able to avoid predators by being able to sense light and dark.  It is easy to see how this example of something that isn’t even half an eye results in a competitive advantage.  Many organisms, not just clams, have the ability to sense light and dark.

So, how do we get from being able to sense light all the way to a human eye?  The next step is eyespots (these are light-sensitive areas that may or may not be attached to a nervous system).  Flatworms are a great example of eyespots. According to Wikipedia:

“Flatworms do have a bilateral nervous system; they are the simplest animals to have one. Two cordlike nerves branch repeatedly in an array resembling a ladder. The head end of some species even has a collection of ganglia acting as a rudimentary brain to integrate signals from sensory organs such as eyespots.”

Once we have eyespots, it is pretty easy to see how forming a dimple below the eyespot would help the animal.  Since light from the side would hit only one side of the depression, the deeper the dimple the better the animal would be able to sense direction.  Some flatworms and the nautilus have deepened these depressions enough to create a design like a pinhole camera, allowing the eye to focus without a lens.

Getting a lens over the eye to protect it and better focus the light is an easy step and one from which nature gives us many examples.

Some creationists will object to the idea that the thousands of varying eye designs represent steps in an evolutionary change. From photosensitivity, to eyespots, to dimpled eyespots, to lensless eyes, to the eyes of an eagle, they argue that the small advantage conferred by any single step wouldn’t be enough to make sure that the change persisted in the population.  They ask for an example of a small, inefficient design evolving into a more refined form in a laboratory setting.  Since most laboratories are far smaller than the entire planet, and have been operating for a far shorter time than Earth itself, it is difficult to recreate examples of most evolutionary events.

Nevertheless, there is a tantalizing example of what is probably an inefficient mechanism evolving and then being refined into an efficient adaptation in a carefully controlled laboratory setting.  It occurred in a lab at Michigan State University, which has been growing 12 populations of E. coli since 1988.  I’ve discussed this experiment in detail in a previous article titled Macro-evolution observed in the laboratory. This is our example of macro-evolution under carefully controlled laboratory conditions. 

In this experiment, we saw the ability to use citrate under oxic conditions evolve in E. coli.  It took about 30,000 generations and only happened in one of the 12 populations studied.  Just like the eye, the wing, or any other complex trait, it evolved first as a very inefficient mechanism and then got better.  In fact, in this experiment the Cit- population almost out-competed the inefficient Cit+ population before the Cit+ population became more efficient.  From the paper:

“No Cit+ cells were found in the samples taken at 30,000, 30,500, or 31,000 generations. Cit+ cells constituted 0.5% of the population at generation 31,500, then 15% and 19% in the next two samples, but only 1.1% at generation 33,000. It appears that the first Cit+ variant emerged between 31,000 and 31,500 generations, although we cannot exclude an earlier origin. The precipitous decline in the frequency of Cit+ cells just before the massive population expansion suggests clonal interference, whereby the Cit- subpopulation produced a beneficial mutant that out- competed the emerging Cit+ subpopulation until the latter evolved some other beneficial mutation that finally ensured its persistence. The hypothesis of clonal interference implies that the early Cit+ cells were very poor at using citrate [emphasis added], such that a mutation that improved competition for glucose could have provided a greater advantage than did marginal exploitation of the unused citrate.”

So, as you can see, half an eye, an eye that sees half as well, half a wing, or even an inefficient way to use citrate can all confer reproductive advantage. This lays the groundwork for the evolution of a more complex mechanism.

Mentalism is a form of performance magic that simulates the paranormal, most commonly mind-reading, predicting the future and psychokinesis.  Magicians get involved in skepticism because much of the time the so-called real psychics are doing very standard magic tricks.  But what makes the difference between appearing to be a magician and appearing to be the real deal?  Here I present a few rules for any half-decent magicians who would like to throw away their morals, break all the mirrors in their houses so they don’t have to look at themselves anymore, and most importantly, start making some real money by making the jump to pseudo-miracle worker.  Being a cold reader, for example, has an excellent profit margin!  Think of it this way:  you can charge the same prices per ticket as David Copperfield, or a world-famous rock band, and you don’t even have all that heavy stuff to carry around!  It’s just you on a stage.  That’s profit!

For many audience members, the worlds of entertainer and genuine psychic are separated only by the inclusion - or omission - of a straight-forward disclaimer.  As many mentalists will attest, some people only believe what you’re doing is real if you make an explicit statement that you’re not using tricks.  Others are the opposite and will believe it is all real unless you explicitly state you are doing tricks.  Some people will believe your ability is real, even after you’ve said you’re using trickery!  Once you’ve decided what disclaimer you are going to use, here are the four main rules of changing from magician to real psychic.

Rule 1: Have only one trick

This is the most important rule.  Diversity in the psychic trade will kill you.  Find one trick you can do quite well, and milk the hell out of it.  Do it to death.  Psychics with more than three tricks rarely make it big!  Consider the most famous names of psychic history:

The Fox Sisters:  These girls started the whole spirit summoning phenomenon in the mid-1800s, and their trick was simple.  They made ghost rapping noises by cracking their toes, and tying an apple to a string and banging it on the floor.  Their home in New York was swarmed by people wanting to speak to the spirits, and the girls would gladly repeat this trick for anyone who asked.

Henry Slade:  After the Fox sisters made spiritualism big and the craze made its way to Europe, Henry Slade provided physical evidence from beyond.  Slade’s trick involved two chalk board slates, the kind school kids used to write on.  The participant would be asked to think of a question for the spirits.  The slates would be placed together, some scratching sounds would be heard, the slates would be separated and a suitably vague magic-8-ball style answer would be written on the slates in chalk.  Though a well known magic trick nowadays, this made Slade a small fortune.  Slade was eventually arrested for fraud and tried at London’s Old Bailey, England’s central criminal court.  Bizarrely, Charles Darwin contributed a great deal of money towards Slade’s prosecution.  Even more bizarrely, Alfred Russell Wallace, the man who developed the theory of evolution alongside Darwin, appeared as a witness for Slade’s defense.

Uri Geller:  Spoon-bending, spoon-bending, and more spoon-bending. And occasionally he’d duplicate a sealed-up picture for you.

James Hydrick:  Hydrick shot to fame in the early 1980s with an eerie psychic ability to move pencils along a table with his mind.  He would then psycho-kinetically turn the pages of a phone book. It’s pretty clear to any beginning magician how he moved these items - he blew on them.  James Randi eventually busted Hydrick, exposing his one trick.  In fairness though, Hydrick could do this trick really, really well.

The Great Carlos:  The Great Carlos was a creation of James Randi, designed to test the credulous media.  Randi taught young artist Jose Alvarez the old pulse stopping trick to add some flavour to his claims of channeling a spirit named “Carlos”.  A simple ball squeezed under the arm stopped the flow of blood, and convinced whoever was taking Alvarez’s pulse his heart had stopped.  Again, Alvarez did this trick really, really well.

So pull out an old magic book, find a trick, and do that trick over and over again till someone believes it’s real.  When choosing a trick for you though, pay attention to the next rule…

Rule 2: Much, much less, is much, much more

“If it goes up, it’s a trick.  If it goes across, it’s real.” This is an old adage concerning psychic tricks.  Basically it means the more impressive a trick looks, the less convinced most people will be that it’s real.  For example, if a magician makes a crumpled ball of paper float up a metre in to the air, do somersaults and then float back down, there is obviously invisible thread or some other nefarious gimmick in use.  If however, a psychic stares at the crumpled up paper ball for two minutes, and then finally it moves three inches across the table, they must be using real psychic powers.  Now, this thinking is of course bad.  According to the laws of science as we know them, if Uri Geller makes a spoon bend one inch with psychic powers,  that is equally as impossible as making the Statue of Liberty disappear.  If James Hydrick had made the pencil move, then float, then dance a jig, not a single person would have believed him (hopefully I’m being very optimistic here).  This is based on a principal of magic called “the too perfect theory”.  It means deliberately weakening a trick to make it more believable.  For example, if a magician is going to predict three headlines that will appear in the next day’s newspaper, then seal the predictions in an envelope to be revealed after the events, they will almost always deliberately get one wrong.  Even if the trick allows them to get all three headlines correct, predicting only two of the three correctly makes them seem suitably psychic and amazing, whilst not crossing the boundary that screams a trick.  So remember, less is more when it comes to trying to appear psychic.

Rule 3: Have at least a couple of methods for pulling off your trick

Okay, so you’ve got your one trick and you’ve made sure it doesn’t stretch credibility too far.  This is the trick you’ll be taking around the world.  Eventually if you get famous enough someone will try and bust you on it.  So be ready to throw them off by changing paths.  Have one main way for doing your trick, the one that looks the best and is the most deceptive.  However, have a Plan B.  Usually when debunking a psychic, a skeptic will explain the method the psychic most often uses.  This is good for the psychic, because to use a gambling term, the skeptic is now “half-smart”, meaning they will be primed and ready to be fooled with a method different from the one they are so diligently looking for.  For example, when James Hydrick went on the That’s Incredible television show in 1981, the host was sure he had caught on to Hydrick’s method, and he had.  He knew Hydrick was blowing on the pencil.  So then Hydrick offered to do the trick again, with the host’s hand positioned over his mouth.  From there, Hydrick simply repositioned the pencil right on the edge of the table, and used the air from the movement of his hands as they passed over the pencil to move it.  Still a very simple method, but because it was not the one the host was looking for, Hydrick completely befuddled him, to the point that the show declared Hydrick genuine. They were awarded a bent spoon from James Randi.

When skeptics explain spoon bending, they’ll usually just explain one method.  This is perfect for someone like Uri Geller, because he has several methods, some weaker than others, some using misdirection and some using gimmicked spoons.  He fools people with any of these methods.  Slade had a couple techniques for making the writing appear on his slates.  To my knowledge, there are at least half a dozen methods for appearing to have stopped your pulse.  Steve Shaw is one of the magicians James Randi sent undercover to fool scientists. Shaw says, it’s better to teach someone they can be fooled rather than how the trick is done.  Until an audience learns this lesson, you can use people’s knowledge against them.

Rule number 4:  “It’s not about me, it’s about all of us!”

To make it big as a psychic, you have to give people the message that your abilities are within everyone, and you are just able to harness them a bit more.  This will be really tough for most magicians.  Most magicians are, dare I say it, quite insecure people, and would like to make it clear that any powers demonstrated belong to them and them alone, making them a very special person worthy of worship and admiration.  You can’t afford to do that in the psychic game.  You’ll get much further if you say anyone can do what you do (especially if you sell a pricey book telling them how).  And show some concern for your fellow charlatans!  You are supposed to be opening up a gateway for a warped belief system, sowing the seeds of vulnerability that others in your trade will then be able to exploit.  Pretending these powers are exclusive to you is very selfish to your fellow scam artists!  Remember, even if you’ve decided to read tarot cards for someone for twenty bucks, you’re setting that person up for a later visit to a medium who charges $700 per session when the victim has lost a loved one.  So help spread the takings!

These are the four main rules.  But be warned.  If you are a magician and present what you’re doing as real, not only will you be seen by other magicians as morally reprehensible, you will also be viewed as artistically lazy.  Magicians think performers choose to present their tricks as real because they are afraid they wouldn’t be entertaining or interesting enough otherwise.  Magician Penn Jillette explains:

If I say I have supernatural powers, I can read your mind, then you simply have about three choices.  You can assume that I’m insane.  You can assume that I’m a liar that’s trying to dupe you.  Or you can believe it.  And those are your only three choices.  There aren’t even really very many shades of that.  You just believe it or you don’t.  If I say I can’t read your mind but there’s ways that I can fake it, all of a sudden the bit is automatically political.  You’re automatically talking about propaganda.  You’re automatically talking about love.  You’re automatically talking about buying a used car.  So instead of just going “We went to see this nut who thought he had powers”, or “We went to see this evil guy who lied to us”, you have this whole rainbow of other choices.

However if you just want to make a quick buck and get a short-cut to fame, follow these four golden rules.  There won’t be any shortage of media knocking at your door and if in the end you get found out, then just pull out the old card reading, “I’ve always been an entertainer - I can’t help it if people believed I was real”.  If nothing else, there’ll always be a place for you next to other B-grade celebrities on really dodgy reality TV shows.

Everybody has a story, and most people are eager to share their stories with anyone who will listen.  A problem is that some like to use their stories as scientific evidence.  Alternative medicine advocates, in particular, love to use anecdotes in order to justify the efficacy of their wares.  After all, if something seems to work, it’s pretty easy to make the claim that it actually is working.  The problem, of course, is that anecdotal evidence can be deceptive.

My daughter, now 21 years old, is disabled with cerebral palsy.  She was diagnosed at 8 months old, and her level of disability is fairly severe.  I soon discovered that having a disabled child made us attractive to people attempting to sell alternative cures.  This was particularly obvious after we got our first home computer. Typing ‘cerebral palsy‘ into a search engine unleashed a deluge of snake oil salesmen, each of whom urged us to buy their product or service and offered a long list of satisfied customers as proof that they could help our daughter.  We chose instead to limit our daughter’s medical care to therapies which had been vetted by science.  But still… sometimes those alternative therapies seemed mighty attractive - some of these things did seem to work for some people.  Were we wrong not to take the chance that some of these cures might help our daughter?  Finally, though, an event occurred which convinced me of the error of using anecdotal evidence as the sole claim for the efficacy of a treatment or therapy.  This is our story - what I like to call anecdotal evidence against anecdotal evidence.

When our daughter was nine years old, she had a major orthopedic surgery on her legs.  This was her second such surgery and her recovery was slow and difficult, as is common with repeat orthopedic surgeries.  She was in a body cast for six weeks, and then underwent extensive physical therapy for a year after the cast was removed.  The results of the surgery were somewhat disappointing - one year after the surgery, she seemed no better off than she had been before it.  He legs were straighter and her posture better, but functionally she was about the same.  She could use crutches to a limited degree in our home, but used a wheelchair to and from school and everywhere else.  We assumed that she had simply found her level; we stopped the physical therapy and life went on.

Eight months later, however, something happened.  Our daughter suddenly started to improve.  We later discovered that bursts of spontaneous improvement are not uncommon in children with cerebral palsy.  But at the time, her progress seemed almost miraculous to us.  Within just a few months time, she made major, noticeable advances in almost every aspect of her physicality.  Her balance, strength and muscle tone improved; as did her posture and gait.  She started using her crutches exclusively, and learned to walk with one crutch instead of two.  Within a year, her wheelchair was relegated to the attic.  And all these changes took place despite a complete lack of any kind of therapeutic intervention.

Now, what if during the year immediately following her difficult surgery, we had become discouraged and turned to craniosacral therapy, or biofeedback, or hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy?  What if we had sold the dog and a kidney apiece to finance a trip to Poland for Adeli Suit therapy, or to Lourdes for a faith healing?   Then those things would have gotten the credit for her improvement, even though they would clearly have had nothing to do with it.

That’s the problem with using anecdotes as evidence - they are stories, not facts.  Stories are fun to tell and fun to hear, but they don’t prove anything on their own.  Anecdotal evidence can be useful as a starting point for research, but it has to be backed up with randomized, controlled clinical trials if it is to have any real value.

Evolution can easily be observed in the laboratory and in the world around us.  We can see moths evolve their coloring to match the color of soot that covers their habitat, watch bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance in hospitals, and my favorite variety of grapefruit (that’s Rio Star) was made by scientists who exposed seeds to radiation to increase the mutation rate.  In the face of such overwhelming evidence - including knowing the exact DNA changes effecting such change - it is impossible for the creationists to deny evolution with a straight face.

To get around the problem, creationists often try to separate evolution into two types, micro-evolution and macro-evolution. They argue that micro-evolution can make minor changes, but can¹t build new structures or make other major changes to organisms. Although “the attempt to differentiate between micro-evolution and macro-evolution is considered to have no scientific basis by any mainstream scientific organization” (according to Wikipedia), creationists often claim that a chain of small micro-evolutionary steps can¹t add up to a macro-evolutionary step. 

Indeed, it’s hard to simulate our planet’s biodiversity in a laboratory, because all laboratories are much smaller than the planet and have been operating for a far shorter period of time.  Nevertheless, we can now say that macro-evolution has been observed in the laboratory under carefully controlled conditions, and that the results can be replicated.  The results are described in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences titled Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli.

In 1988, scientists at Michigan State University created twelve population lines of E. coli so that they could watch them evolve.  Since then, the bacteria have been growing under carefully controlled conditions in a culture containing low concentrations of glucose and high concentrations of citrate.  Under oxic conditions (that is, when oxygen is present), E. coli cannot grow on citrate and “that inability has long been viewed as a defining characteristic of this important, diverse, and widespread species.”  Many traits were observed changing over time. Creationists dismissed these changes as micro-evolution.  For over 30,000 generations, the E. coli in the experiment did not evolve the ability to grow on citrate. Finally, one of the populations evolved, and gained this ability.

Each population experienced billions of mutations in the first 30,000 generations. Since every possible point mutation was tried many times, scientists were either looking at a rare mutation (such as a large piece of DNA inverting) or a mutation made possible by the cumulative mutation history of prior generations.  If this was just a rare mutation, then a sample of bacteria taken just before the trait first appeared would be no more likely to evolve the trait again than a sample taken from the other populations at the same point in time.  However, if the ability to use citrate was from an accumulation of “micro-evolutionary” changes, then a sample from earlier generations of the E. coli would be able to evolve the ability to use citrate again.

Fortunately, the scientists had frozen samples of each population every 500 generations.  Sure enough, when they revived earlier samples, they watched the citrate-growing ability evolve in the “micro-evolutionary” line, but not from samples taken from other lines.

We know that in one population, a series of changes that happened between the 15,000^th and 20,000^th generations laid the groundwork for a major evolutionary advance. Here we have a clear example of macro-evolution under carefully controlled laboratory conditions.

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal made a famous argument, today called “Pascal’s Wager“. It says: A person cannot prove God’s existence through reason. Since by believing in God you have nothing to lose - and potentially everything to gain - you should behave and believe as if that God exists.

Nevertheless, I’m wagering against the existence of the God of evangelical Christianity, and here’s why.

The God of evangelical Christianity is allegedly omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent.  We are supposed to believe that this God fathered a human child with a woman who was already engaged to a carpenter in Bethlehem about 2000 years ago.

So, if I lose nothing by believing this story, why do I choose not to? First, the logic is wrong.  If the only choices were believing in Christ or not believing in Christ the argument might hold, but those are not the only choices. Perhaps by believing in Christ and not believing in Allah or some other god, I’m still condemning myself to eternal damnation. Perhaps - for some perverse reason beyond my comprehension - there’s a God who rewards atheists and punishes believers.  Making an informed wager means having a realistic set of odds that each god exists and knowing how jealous each god is.

Many religions have a concept of an afterlife where you’re rewarded based on what you did while alive. The problem is that there are different requirements for different religions. In some you must be baptized (some religions, such as Mormonism, allow you to be baptized after death) in others you must confess your sins to a priest, in some you must accept that Mohamed is the prophet. You can’t believe everything and fulfill all of the requirements.

Wagering that the Christian god exists might lull me into a false sense of security, believing that I’ll go to heaven. That may result in my behaving a little more badly and therefore being reincarnated as an untouchable in India.

However, there is an even stronger argument against wagering with Pascal. An omnibenevolent God would not create a world in which thinking moral beings are presented with religious choices given such flimsy evidence to support them, and they are then punished for picking the wrong set of beliefs. If God knows what is in my mind, then he knows that I try to behave morally. Were he omnibenevolent and omnipotent, he would need to provide unambiguous evidence, such as mile high burning letters in the night sky saying, “You must be a Roman Catholic for salvation”.  To do less implies an arbitrary capriciousness that at best is a serious moral lapse on the part of God.

Some Christians might argue that I am not being punished for my actions, but for the original sin of Adam and Eve eating the apple in the Garden of Eden. Holding me accountable for the sins of my most distant ancestors is not omnibenevolent or moral. It’s less.

Intelligent Design has come to Michigan. Michigan is my home state, so this gives me motivation to get off my big fat brain and do some research. And I have a child who will be entering the Michigan school system soon. That gives me motivation to write.

According to Michigan House Bill 6027 - sponsored by Republican John Moolenaar - Michigan is now the recipient of a so-called “academic freedom“. campaign. This bill uses language recommended by the religiously-motivated Discovery Institute.  Here’s the text of the original Michigan bill 6027. It’s subtitled with “academic freedom to teach evidence regarding controversial scientific subjects“. Here’s recommended bill text from the Discovery Institute. Compare the two and you’ll find connections, including word-for-word similarities.

The bill attempts to open the science classroom for contrasting opinions. This is termed “academic freedom”, so presumably those who have a dissenting opinion on how the world works can have a chance to say it, and those teachers with dissenting opinions on how the world works can have a chance to teach it.

A criticism raised by proponents of such language is something like this: ”Teach the controversy. Why would you oppose academic freedom?” I agree. Teach it. But since that specific controversy is religion-based, put it where it belongs, in religion class. By all means, teach creationism, or Intelligent Design, or whatever it’s currently called. And do it in a religious studies classroom. But if you’re sitting in a science class, the only religious education you should get is an explanation of why it doesn’t belong there.

Science is a body of knowledge, and a process. It’s based on testable theories and observable evidence. A science class teaches the scientific method, how to postulate and test theories, and how to critically examine evidence. Religion does not do these things. Religion is not part of a science education.

If Intelligent Design proponents truly believe that their case stands up to scientific scrutiny, what do you think is the honest way to present it:

Option 1: Force school boards to teach these beliefs

Option 2: Publish the case in a legitimately scientific way, and convince other scientists with data and evidence

Option 1 is what ID proponents use today. Science, unfortunately, demands Option 2. If you want to play in the scientific sandbox, you’ve got to play by the rules. Granted, option 2 is not used by proponents, because it can’t be. When you start examining such things from a scientific viewpoint, the proposition gets reclassified as a religion.

Intelligent Design proponents can’t fight their battle head-on. Instead of trying to prove their own point, they would rather subvert science and sneak their way into a school curriculum. They want to legitimize themselves in the science classroom without following any of the scientific method.

Intelligent Design is a theory that can’t be tested. This is not science. It doesn’t belong in a science classroom. Unless we take the argument to its logical conclusion, and start teaching so called “alternative” beliefs everywhere. When you teach astronomy, don’t forget to teach astrology. When you teach biology, don’t forget to teach phrenology. When you teach geology, don’t forget to teach Young Earth creationism. And the big reverse whammo: when you teach religion, don’t forget to teach atheism! Hey, ID proponent, if it’s so important to insist on teaching the controversy in science, you wouldn’t mind if we taught about religious controversy, right? Even forget about atheism: I’ve got 1.5 billion Muslims that would like representation in your Christian studies class, so they can present their alternative viewpoint.

Hopefully you can see what topics don’t belong in what classroom, and why.

This brings us back to Michigan. My home state is currently known for its horrible economy and depressing auto industry. Do we really need to make things worse? Degrading the quality of education teaches our children incorrect information, and endorses living life without critical thinking. That’s dangerous. That hurts Michigan. That hurts our children. That hurts our future.

To contact state representative John Moolenaar:

S-1287 House Office Building
P.O. Box 30014
Lansing, MI  48933

Phone: (517) 373-1791
Toll Free: (800) 626-8887

johnmoolenaar@house.mi.gov

Since becoming a dedicated and pro-active skeptic, I have observed some troubling trends. One is the under-representation of women. I submit that all of my data on this issue is anecdotal. But some of my anecdotes are pretty compelling. In the Dallas-Fort Worth area where I live, I’m a member of the local skeptic group, the North Texas Skeptics. I’m also the president of a skeptical club at my university. In these two areas I have seen about 1 woman for every 10 men.

This could just be Dallas-Fort Worth, but I also asked Alison Smith. She coordinates the James Randi Educational Foundation’s million dollar challenge, directs SAPS, a skeptical ghost hunting organization, and is an all-around skeptical hero. I asked her what her experience has been, and she readily acknowledges that skepticism does seem to be a sausage party.

One cannot have an honest discussion of gender and skepticism without acknowledging the important work of skepchick.org. This is a skeptical blog with a predominantly female writing staff and a legendary skeptical pin-up calendar. I bring up Skepchick mostly to acknowledge its existence, but it’s an anomaly in the unfortunately male world of skepticism.

The trend is that skepticism is predominately male.

I have heard various explanations for this.

One is that women are just gullible. That’s right, women are naturally more inclined to be believers, and there is just nothing that can be done about it. I usually get this reason from female skeptics.

I would beg to differ on one point: the data seems to suggest that humans are just gullible. If one looks at the more ridiculous movements - like the New Age movement, the UFO movement, the psychic movement, the Faith Healer movement and others - men are extremely well-represented as victims of all these frauds. One does not see the audience of victims groups as being almost exclusively female, while all the males sit lonely at their local skeptic club wondering where all the women are.

Rebecca Watson, founder of skepchick.org, and co-host of The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast, has observed that women’s magazines don’t seem to emphasize critical thinking, and that they are riddled with ads for woo nonsense.

She has a point there. But I don’t think it’s much worse than your average men’s magazine, which will offer its fair share of scams. They may be more of the pyramid scheme, martial arts magic variety, but one never sees articles celebrating the virtue of critical thinking in publications such as GQ, or Maxim. Don’t even get me started on Men’s Health.

Yet women are under-represented in the Skeptical movement.

What must skeptics do?

I think what would be ideal is a study. It doesn’t have to be a formal academic one, but instead simply be a survey for women in Skeptic Magazine or Skeptical Inquirer magazine. With a little networking and coordination, it could even find itself in the newsletters of smaller local skeptical organizations. This survey should ask women why they think women are under-represented in skepticism; ask them why skeptical activism is important to them, and if it’s not, then why not.

The men who subscribe to these magazines could go the distance, and even ask their wives to fill in this survey, and we could get some data from women who aren’t active in the skeptical movement.

Once a year the JREF holds a skeptical convention called The Amazing Meeting, or TAM. I am told women are more than a little scarce at TAM.

Are skeptical males just unusually inept in attracting women?

Are homosexual males over-represented in the skeptical movement?

If the answer to the above questions is “no,” then why don’t we see male skeptic’s female romantic partners?

Is it because skeptical men think their wives and girlfriends wouldn’t enjoy an activity that they have found worth doing?

Is it because they have asked their wives and girlfriends, and have been met with rejections due to the counsel of the Horoscope section in Cosmo, which is followed by them running off and crying and putting on makeup, and playing with Barbies?

Perhaps, a hard question worth asking, it is because our female romantic partners are at home doing work keeping our homes and families going so that we fellas can go and debunk nonsense?

This is what my wife suggests is going on. She says, “You don’t see any women because