Free Inquiry Forum

From Ubyssey Online:

Running from hell
Growing up in America’s most hated family

The mattock, a close cousin of the pickaxe, is used to dig through tough, earthy surfaces—it loosens soil, breaks rock, and tears through knotted grass. Its handle is a three-foot wooden shaft, twice the density of a baseball bat and its dual-sided iron head is comprised of a chisel and a pick. It was Pastor Fred Phelps’s weapon of choice when beating his children according to his son, Nate Phelps.

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From Newsweek blog:

Let’s not kid ourselves: an endorsement by scientists is unlikely to sway many voters next week. But the decision by 76 American Nobel laureates—including all three of the Americans who won one of the science prizes this year—is notable for one thing: if you think ordinary Americans believe the last eight years have been a nightmare, you should see how scientists feel. As documented over and over, especially by Rep. Henry Waxman’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the politicization of science by this administration has set records. Scientists are furious and can’t wait for it to end.

The letter by the 76 Nobelists (only 47 endorsed John Kerry in 2004) argues that the nation needs “a visionary leader who can ensure the future of our traditional strengths in science and technology and who can harness those strengths to address many of our greatest problems: energy, disease, climate change, security, and economic competitiveness,” concluding that “Barack Obama is such a leader.” The scientists are particularly dismayed that, under Bush, America’s “once dominant position in the scientific world has been shaken and our prosperity has been placed at risk. We have lost time critical for the development of new ways to provide energy, treat disease, reverse climate change, strengthen our security, and improve our economy.”

I have spoken at a couple events recently where scientists asked me why scientific issues—stem cells, research spending and the like—have played such a small role (make that “no role”) in the 2008 campaign. I am always sorry to tell them that science issues hardly matter to most Americans, especially compared to the imploding economy. It would be foolish to think that scientists’ view on politics carries any weight with most Americans either. But the letter, organized by Scientists and Engineers for America, underscores one thing. For much of what ails this country, from international competitiveness to energy independence (by which I mean independent not only of OPEC but of fossil fuels), science is the key to a solution.

From Newsweek:

Why We Believe
Belief in the paranormal reflects normal brain activity carried to an extreme.

It wasn’t immediately obvious to Walter Semkiw that he was the reincarnation of John Adams. Adams was a lawyer and rabble-rouser who helped overthrow a government; Semkiw is a doctor who has never so much as challenged a parking ticket. The second president was balding and wore a powdered wig; Semkiw has a full head of hair. But in 1984, a psychic told the then medical resident and psychiatrist-in-training that he is the reincarnation of a major figure of the Revolution, possibly Adams. Once Semkiw got over his skepticism—as a student of the human mind, he was of course familiar with “how people get misled and believe something that might not be true,” he recalls—he wasn’t going to let superficial dissimilarities dissuade him so easily. As he researched Adams’s life, Semkiw began finding many tantalizing details. For instance, Adams described his handwriting as “tight-fisted and concise”—”just like mine,” Semkiw realized. He also saw an echo of himself in Adams’s dedication to the cause of independence from England. “I can be very passionate,” Semkiw says. The details accumulated and, after much deliberation, Semkiw went with his scientific side, dismissing the reincarnation idea.

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From Newsweek:

The Ghosts We Think We See
Normal brain functions, such as seeing patterns, make us more likely to believe in the supernatural.

Bruce Hood usually conducts experiments under much more rigorous conditions than this, but since he had a large audience one recent evening in London, the University of Bristol psychology professor figured he’d seize the opportunity. Holding up an old cardigan, he asked if anyone would be willing to wear it if he paid them £20 (about $40). Every hand shot up. Then Hood added that the sweater had been worn by a notorious murderer. All but a couple of hands disappeared. “People view evil as something physical, even tangible, and able to infect the sweater” as easily as lice, Hood says. That idea helps explain a number of supernatural beliefs, he argues: “The idea of spirits and souls appearing in this world becomes more plausible if we believe in general that the nonphysical can transfer over to the physical world.”

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From Seedmagazine.com:

Barack Obama for President
An endorsement from the editors of Seed.

Our world is more complex, dynamic, and interdependent than at any time in recent history. Financial markets are in turmoil, geopolitical conflicts abound, and our pale blue dot is in serious peril. Yet these are also times for great optimism — about what can be known and what can be accomplished, about our potential to discover and innovate. To navigate this new reality, to realize opportunity within this massive change, we need a new approach to governance and problem solving; we need a new way of looking at the world and a new set of values founded on the conviction that knowledge is good; and we need leaders who have the courage and wisdom to change their mind in the face of new evidence. Today we stand at an inflection point in modern history, and America, still inarguably and essentially the world’s beacon, will chart the way forward next Tuesday. At this critical moment, we offer an endorsement and a perspective that we hope informs the decision of our American readers.

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From Slate.com:

Sarah Palin’s War on Science
The GOP ticket’s appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.
By Christopher Hitchens

In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn’t seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”

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From The New Yorker:

Red Sex, Blue Sex
Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?
by Margaret Talbot

In early September, when Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor of the Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news. A delegate from Louisiana told CBS News, “Like so many other American families who are in the same situation, I think it’s great that she instilled in her daughter the values to have the child and not to sneak off someplace and have an abortion.” A Mississippi delegate claimed that “even though young children are making that decision to become pregnant, they’ve also decided to take responsibility for their actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child.” Palin’s family drama, delegates said, was similar to the experience of many socially conservative Christian families. As Marlys Popma, the head of evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign, told National Review, “There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of situation.” In fact, it was Popma’s own “crisis pregnancy” that had brought her into the movement in the first place.

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The Information Paradox has more.

From the Skeptic Dictionary Newsletter - Volume 7 No. 10 - October 21, 2008:

Priming, pareidolia, apophenia, and The German New Medicine
I’m often asked “what’s the difference between priming, pareidolia, and apophenia?” (Actually, nobody’s ever asked me this, but it seemed like a nice hook.)

A good example of priming comes from backmasking. What at first sounds like gibberish becomes a clear message after somebody tells you what to listen for. You’ve been primed to hear the message. Another example of priming comes from allegedly outraged parents and a talking doll: “Little Mommy Real Loving Baby Cuddle and Coo” doll from Fisher-Price. Some folks swear the doll mumbles “Satan is king” and “Islam is the light.” Some might even hear “Palin is a terrorist who is perpetrating voter fraud.”

An example of apophenia came to us from the Bible wingnuts who interpreted the Dow Jones dropping 777.68 points in a single day on the eve of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) as a message from YHWH. The nutters round this number down to 777 instead of up to 778, as any normal person or journalist would. They (the nutters) think 777 is “God’s number” and the message was “repent” or something equally profound.

Finally, pareidolia, like hearing clear messages in gibberish, can occur with priming, but it isn’t necessary. In pareidolia, some vague or ambiguous stimulus, like a stain on a wall or reflection from a light, is seen as a clear image, such as the Virgin Mary or Elvis. If the vague stimulus is then imbued with significance or meaning, as when it is seen as a sign from another dimension, pareidolia slips into apophenia. Some investigators might divide pareidolia into types: visual and auditory. One might even speak of tactile pareidolia, as when a man misinterprets a woman’s accidental touch to mean she wants to know him in a Biblical way. This might also be called wishful thinking.

When one nutter leads another to interpret a vague stimulus as a clear image sent from another dimension to convey an important message, all three phenomena occur in what might be called the unholy wingnut trinity.

The above message has been brought to you for no particular reason and should not be taken too seriously except by those who have no sense of humor. On the other hand, it might be noted that the aberrations we mention here are clearly related to the very important human trait of detecting patterns. The examples we’ve given are small-scale wrong turns on the path of life. There are numerous examples of grand-scale wrong turns described in The Skeptic’s Dictionary. There are many more wrong turns that neither I nor any other skeptic will ever have the time to completely catalogue, but one that deserves to be mentioned is The German New Medicine.

Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer went from suspecting a causal link between his wife’s death and his own cancer with the shooting and eventual death of their son, Dirk, to a full-blown practice of medical quackery that claims all diseases are due to conflict and shock. From there he went on to invent a treatment for cancer and other diseases called conflictolysis. It is reported by critics that over 140 cancer patients have died despite this treatment and nobody has been cured. Also, you won’t find anything in the scientific literature in the way of controlled studies or other scientific methods of testing and evaluating Hamer’s claims. Scientific tests evolved in the evidence-based world and are a way of avoiding self-deception and of determining whether apparent patterns are illusory.

Read the full newsletter here.

From the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

Now that you prepare to take office, I write to remind you about one of the largest, and yet unspoken challenges facing your administration.

Americans are living in a conundrum. When asked, most citizens express a confidence that science and technology will fix all the challenges facing our immediate future. Here in Florida, we fully anticipate that meteorologists will figure out how to accurately predict (and perhaps even eliminate) hurricanes; that construction engineers will design hurricane-safe buildings; that marine biologists will solve red tide; that ecologists will eradicate our invasive pythons and fire ants; that hydrologists will solve our water conservation problems; and that medical researchers will cure any infectious diseases that sneak across our borders.

Yet we have witnessed significant declines relative to other countries in scientific research and development under the last eight years of national leadership. So how will your executive team weigh in on science?

I imagine it is easy to overlook the importance of science as key to solving most of our important security and economic issues. And it is even easier to cheer-lead the American public using words like terrorism, gasoline prices, and other fear factors.

But we are tired of hearing about fear and fighting — we need inspiration and innovation to return America to its global leadership of decades past. Given the declining supplies of natural resources and the increasing number of people squeezed into a finite planet, science offers objective solutions through experiments, technologies, modeling, and a unique combination of inspiration and perspiration.

We are on the cusp of significant advances in energy, agriculture and health; yet science seemed relegated to last place on the agenda during your campaign. This was perhaps not surprising, given the economic turbulence during your last weeks of campaigning, but nonetheless your administration’s approach to science will likely determine our ability to retain America’s global leadership.

I humbly offer some thoughts about six critical science issues: energy, education, agriculture, health, climate change, and security.

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