Point of Inquiry

Tim Farley is a computer software engineer, skeptic, and creator of the popular website What's the Harm? His site answers this salient question with over 670,000 stories of people who have indeed been harmed, damaged, injured, or even killed by pseudoscience and the paranormal What's the Harm's catchphrase is: "368,379 people killed, 306,096 injured and over $2,815,931,000 in economic damages." However, these statistics are calculated from randomly-caught, modern cases documented in English-speaking countries. Many stories are left untold. How much bigger could the problem be? In this interview with Karen Stollznow, Tim reveals the real-life dangers, and the hidden dangers, of these beliefs and practices. He treats the lack of regulatory bodies for these industries, and what recourse can be taken when harm is done. Tim talks about the question "What's the Harm?" as used in defense of pseudoscience and the paranormal, and why this is wielded as a "checkmate" argument. He discusses the power of anecdotal evidence, and whether people are influenced by cautionary tales, or more persuaded by their own personal experiences. Tim is a prominent activist and a frequent speaker at events including Skeptics in the Pub, Skepticamp, and the James Randi Educational Foundation's Amazing Meetings. An expert in computer security and reverse engineering, he is at the forefront of the Skepticism 2.0 movement. He talks about finding your own "niche" as an online activist, how you don't need to be a magician or have a PhD to be a skeptic, and how we all have our own expertise to bring to the skeptical movement.

This week's guest is Naomi Oreskes, co-author with historian Eric Conway of the new book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Through extensive archival research, Oreskes and Conway have managed to connect the dots between a large number of seemingly separate anti-science campaigns that have unfolded over the years. It all began with Big Tobacco, and the famous internal memo declaring, "Doubt is our Product." Then came the attacks on the science of acid rain and ozone depletion, and the flimsy defenses of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" program. And the same strategies have continued up to the present, with the battle over climate change. Throughout this saga, several key scientific actors appear repeatedly—leaping across issues, fighting against the facts again and again. Now, Oreskes and Conway have given us a new and unprecedented glimpse behind the anti-science curtain. Naomi Oreskes (Ph.D., Stanford, 1990) is Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on the historical development of scientific knowledge, methods, and practices in the earth and environmental sciences, and on understanding scientific consensus and dissent. She is the author of numerous noted books and papers, including a 2004 essay in Science entitled "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," which was widely cited, debated, and referenced in Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth."

S. T. Joshi is a leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, and other writers, mostly in the realms of supernatural and fantasy fiction. He has edited corrected editions of the works of Lovecraft, several annotated editions of Bierce and Mencken, and has written such critical studies as The Weird Tale and The Modern Weird Tale. His award-winning biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, has already become a collector's item. But critical, biographical, and editorial work on weird fiction is only one aspect of Joshi's multifaceted output. A prominent atheist, Joshi has published the anthology Atheism: A Reader and the anti-religious polemic, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong. He has also compiled an important anthology on race relations, Documents of American Prejudice. In this episode of Point of Inquiry, Robert M. Price talks with Joshi about Lovecraft and how his writings were an impetus toward Joshi's atheism. Along with discussing Lovecraft's views on religion, Joshi shares his own views on the subject. He reveals his thoughts on religious writers as well as the "new atheism." He explains what horror and fantasy literature have to offer the non-religious, and how it can in some ways take the place of religious writings.

This week, we learned that J. Craig Venter has at long last created a synthetic organism—a simple life form constructed, for the first time, by man. Let the controversy begin—and if New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter is correct, the denial of science will be riding hard alongside it. In his recent book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, Specter charts how our resistance to vaccination and genetically modified foods, and our wild embrace of questionable health remedies, are the latest hallmarks of an all-too-trendy form of fuzzy thinking--one that exists just as much on the political left as on the right. And it’s not just on current science-based issues that denialism occurs. The phenomenon also threatens our ability to handle emerging science policy problems—over the development of personalized medicine, for instance, or of synthetic biology. How can we make good decisions when again and again, much of the public resists inconvenient facts, statistical thinking, and the sensible balancing of risks? Michael Specter has been a New Yorker staff writer since 1998. Before that, he was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the national science reporter for the Washington Post. At the New Yorker, Specter has covered the global AIDS epidemic, avian flu, malaria, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, synthetic biology and the debate over our carbon footprint. He has also published many profiles of subjects including Lance Armstrong, ethicist Peter Singer, and Sean (P. Diddy) Combs. In 2002, Specter received the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Science Journalism Award for his article “Rethinking the Brain,” about the scientific basis of how we learn.

George Hrab is a composer, professional musician, singer, songwriter, podcaster, and skeptic. George is the Host and Producer of the Geologic Podcast, a popular weekly show about music, comedy, science, and skepticism. The drummer in the band Philadelphia Funk Authority, he is a successful multi-instrumentalist musician who has performed on-stage with Elton John, and given a performance in the White House for Bill Clinton. For the past fifteen years he has also been a solo artist, releasing his music independently. George’s songs tackle science, the paranormal and pseudoscience, from the Occasional Songs for the Periodic Table in which he sings to each element, to an ode to the coelacanth. George’s latest album Trebuchet includes the songs God is Not Great, Everything Alive will Die Someday, and Death From the Skies, featuring “Bad Astronomer” Dr. Phil Plait. In this episode of Point of Inquiry, Karen Stollznow speaks with George about the “intersection” of music and skepticism, and how music fits into critical thinking. With eclectic influences from Frank Zappa to Carl Sagan, George describes how he infuses skepticism into his own music. A successful activist in the skeptical community, George not only speaks-out against a lack of critical thinking in society, but he also “sings-out” against this issue, promoting skepticism through song. This “nice guy of skepticism” discusses the image of the skeptical movement, and what we can do to popularize skepticism. He explains that he reaches people “through their funny bones and dance shoes” as an effective way to communicate skepticism to the public, and tells us how music and comedy can make converts to critical thinking. George’s music brings a new audience to skepticism, and provides theme songs for skeptics. In many ways, George’s music has become the soundtrack to skepticism.

It’s hard to think of an issue more contentious these days than the relationship between faith and science. If you have any doubt, just flip over to the science blogosphere: You’ll see the argument everywhere. In the scholarly arena, meanwhile, the topic has been approached from a number of angles: by historians of science, for example, and philosophers. However, relatively little data from the social sciences has been available concerning what today’s scientists actually think about faith. Today’s Point of Inquiry guest, sociologist Dr. Elaine Ecklund of Rice University, is changing that. Over the past four years, she has undertaken a massive survey of the religious beliefs of elite American scientists at 21 top universities. It’s all reported in her new book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think. Ecklund’s findings are pretty surprising. The scientists in her survey are much less religious than the American public, of course—but they’re also much more religious, and more “spiritual,” than you might expect. For those interested in debating the relationship between science and religion, it seems safe to say that her new data will be hard to ignore. Elaine Howard Ecklund is a member of the sociology faculty at Rice University, where she is also Director of the Program on Religion and Public Life at the Institute for Urban Research. Her research centrally focuses on the ways science and religion intersect with other life spheres, and it has been prominently covered in USA Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and other prominent news media outlets. Ecklund is also the author of two books published by Oxford University Press: Korean American Evangelicals: New Models for Civic Life (2008), and more recently the new book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think (2010).

Lois Schadewald's interest in both science and pseudoscience rubbed off on her from her brilliant brother Robert J. Schadewald, a prolific author and debater. When Bob died a decade ago he left behind a legacy of published essays and book chapters, as well as much unpublished material including a complete manuscript on the history of the Flat Earth movement. Lois has seen to the publication of many of these pieces in the collection Worlds of their Own: A Brief History of Misguided Ideas; Creationism, Flat-Earthism, Energy Scams, and the Velikovsky Affair. In this episode of Point of Inquiry, Robert M. Price asks Lois to outline some of her brother's research in Flat Earth and Hollow Earth "science" as well as to relate some stories of his association with important "alternative science" figures like catastrophist Immanuel Velikovsky. Schadewald talks about her brother's unique approach to dealing with promoters of pseudoscience, and what he gained from it. She discusses the timeline of Bob's research interests and how he eventually made his way to studying creationism. Lois Schadewald is Professor of Chemistry at Normandale Community College in Minnesota, where she is also active with the Minnesota Atheists. Robert J. Schadewald (1943-2000) was a widely published science writer. His articles dealing with unorthodoxies of science and scholarship appeared in Science 80, Smithsonian, Technology Illustrated, and Skeptical Inquirer among others. He was a contributing author to six books, including The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia (Garland Publishing, 2000). From 1986 until the mid-1990s, he served on the board of directors of the National Center for Science Education, including two years as president. He attended seven national creationism conferences, interviewed Immanuel Velikovsky, investigated perpetual motion machines, and was thrown out of the Flat Earth Society for having spherical tendencies. Bob was nationally recognized as an expert on creationism, perpetual motion, and flat Earthism.

For many of us, chemistry is something we remember with groans from high school. Periodic Table of the Elements—what a pain to memorize, and what was the point, anyway? So how do you take a subject like chemistry and make it exciting, intriguing, and compelling? With her new book The Poisoner’s Handbook, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Deb Blum has done just that. Blum takes a page from the "CSI" franchise, and moves that familiar narrative of crime, intrigue, and high tech bad-guy catching back into the early days of the 20th century. There, in jazz age New York, she chronicles the birth of forensic chemistry at the hands of two scientific and public health pioneers—the city’s chief medical examiner Charles Norris, and his chemistry whiz side-kick Alexander Gettler. And while chronicling their poison-sleuthing careers, Blum also teaches quite a bit of science. Her book is a case study in science popularization, and one we should all be paying close attention to. Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer and has been a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1997. Prior to that, she spent over a decade working as a science writer for the Sacramento Bee, where her series on ethical issues in primate research, “The Monkey Wars,” won the 1992 Pulitzer. The Monkey Wars also became a book, and since then Blum has written numerous others: A Field Guide for Science Writers, Sex on the Brain, Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection, and Ghost Hunters: William James and the Scientific Search for Life After Death. Blum has also written for numerous publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times. She was president of the National Association of Science Writers from 2002-2004, and currently serves on advisory boards to the Council for Advancement of Science Writing and the World Federation of Science Journalists.

Dr. Robert Todd Carroll is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and author of The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions. He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Sacramento City College, where he taught Logic and Critical Reasoning, Critical Thinking about the Paranormal, Law, Justice and Punishment, and World Religions. He is also author of the textbook Becoming a Critical Thinker. Bob is the creator of the popular website Skepdic.com, which features numerous essays and book reviews, and the Skeptimedia blog where he provides a commentary of media coverage of pseudoscience and the paranormal. But the focus of the site is the original online version of the Skeptic's Dictionary, containing hundreds of entries on topics ranging from "abracadabra to zombies". This is the resource for defining skepticism. In this episode, Karen Stollznow talks with Bob about the importance of defining the topics of which we are skeptical. They discuss the inadequacies of existing definitions of paranormal and pseudoscientific subjects, and why it is necessary to counter uncritical bias with explanations that are skeptical. However, the damning evidence (or lack-thereof) usually speaks for itself. Bob reveals the top searches to his site, uncovering the themes that should be of particular concern to skeptics. He explains that his online book is reader-driven, and that user feedback and assistance has molded the shape of this dynamic resource. Even with 600 current entries in this encyclopedia-like dictionary, this is a work-in-progress that will never be finished. Bob discusses skeptical activism, becoming a skeptic, and how to invent your own pseudoscience to learn critical thinking. As a life-long teacher of this topic, Bob explains that critical thinking needs to be taught, but also needs to be learned critically. We discuss how much critical thinking can or should be taught, and how much is a process of self-learning.

For two decades now, we’ve failed to seriously address climate change. So the planet just keeps warming—and it could get very bad. Picture major droughts, calving of gigantic ice sheets, increasingly dramatic sea level rise, and much more. Against this backdrop, the idea of a technological fix to solve the problem—like seeding the stratosphere with reflective sulfur particles, so as to reduce sunlight—starts to sound pretty attractive. Interest in so-called “geoengineering” is growing, and so is media attention to the idea. There are even conspiracy theorists who think a secret government plan to geoengineer the planet is already afoot. Leading scientists, meanwhile, have begun to seriously study our geoengineering options—not necessarily because they want to, but because they fear there may be no other choice. This week's episode of Point of Inquiry with host Chris Mooney features Eli Kintisch, who has followed these scientists’ endeavors—and their ethical quandaries—like perhaps no other journalist. He has broken stories about Bill Gates’ funding of geoengineering research, DARPA’s exploration of the idea, and recently attended the historic scientific meeting in Asilomar, California, where researchers gathered to discuss how to establish guidelines for geoengineering research. And now, the full story is related in Kintisch’s new book Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope—or Worst Nightmare—for Averting Climate Catastrophe. Eli Kintisch is a staff writer for Science magazine, and has also written for Slate, Discover, Technology Review, and The New Republic. He has worked as a Washington correspondent for the Forward and a science reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 2005 he won the Space Journalism prize for a series of articles on private spaceflight. He lives in Washington, D.C.