SGU Episode 97

This episode needs: transcription, time stamps, formatting, links, 'Today I Learned' list, categories, segment redirects. Please help out by contributing!

How to Contribute

SGU Episode 97
30th May 2007
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 96                      SGU 98
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
P: Perry DeAngelis
Quote of the Week
What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say 'I know' instead of 'I am learning,' and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.
George Bernard Shaw
Links
Download Podcast
SGU Podcast archive
Forum Discussion

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, May 30^th 2007, and this is your host Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. Joining me this evening are Bob Novella,

B: Hey everybody.

S: Perry DeAngelis,

P: Hello.

S: Jay Novella,

J: Hey, whaddya read?

S: and Evan Bernstein.

E: And to all our listeners in Peru, a very happy National Potato Day.

S: (laughs) National Potato Day in Peru.

J: You figure they'd have potato day in Ireland, not in Peru.

E: They have it in Peru.

S: Rebecca Watson is not with us this evening unfortunately, she's having technical difficulties. Actually -

P: (derisively) With her Mac.

S: With her, with her...computer.

E: She can't find the ON switch.

J: Steve, half our listeners just shut the podcast off, probably.

S: Yeah, it's true. She has been having some technical difficulties the last couple of weeks. You know, if you may have noticed she has been unusually quiet. It was just because she was having troubles with the recordings.

P: She had some technical difficulties...with her Mac!

J: She had a bad Mac attack.

S: (affirming) She had a bad Mac attack.

P: So what she did was, she went out, and bought another Mac!

(laughing)

S: But apparently it's not up and running yet, so we plan on having her with us again next week.

P: But wait a minute, I see the commercials, they're effortless. You press a button and they're on.

E: Yeah, they make no effort to work.

P: Yeah...

J: Perry why? Do you relate to the fat guy in those commercials?

P: The fat guy is me. That’s how I make a little side income.

(laughing)

P: I certainly don’t do it doing this.

News Items

Item 1 (1:42)

S: The first news item this week is about the creation museum opening in Kentucky.

E: Booo

J: Oh…

S: Yeah.

P: This is a long time a coming.

S: Long time a coming. We’ve had a lot of emails about this. A lot of people wanted to make sure we knew about this. So this is the product of Ken Ham who is a young-earth creationist. The museum cost I think about $25 million, so these people do have money.

J: It’s too bad God didn’t just create the museum for ‘em you know?

S: Yeah, could have just miracled the museum into existence.

E: In six days.

S: Yup, no that costs money. And it’s basically a complete abomination of science and education, pretty much as bad as it gets. Actually, you can go through like a little walk-through of all the different displays they have, and it’s really more of a Genesis museum, you know, just basically goes over the story of Genesis and sort of the very Christian view of the arc of history. They make a couple of sideswipes at science and evolution. There’s one they have, a mock-up of a fossilized dinosaur allegedly from the Grand Canyon called the Grand Canyon Wall, and on the web site the caption of this display is

“Gape at the towering face of Grand Canyon, along the front wall, while bones of dreadful dinosaurs hint of catastrophe."

That’s right, a catastrophe caused the Grand Canyon, not millions of years of erosion.

J: What kind of catastrophe?

E: Some sort of sudden event.

S: Some sort of flood or something.

B: Steve, it could have been a very slow catastrophe, couldn’t it?

S: (chuckles) Right, the kind you don’t even notice.

P: Does it have pictures of biblical guys walking around with dinosaurs? They claim the Leviathan mentioned in the bible is dinosaurs, I’ve seen those pictures. (chuckles) Some guy in a biblical dress petting a Brontosaurus.

J: I wonder what kind of attendance they’re getting.

E: Well it just opened.

B: I think they’ll be pretty busy for a while, you know, until –

E: The novelty wears off?

B: I hope.

P: Yeah.

B: I hope it just totally goes under after, you know, a year or two.

S: That’d be nice. Here’s another one, they have a fossil display called “Them Dry Bones – one set of bones, two interpretations. How can two paleontologists digging the same dinosaur fossil in the field reach opposite conclusions?”

B: Have any of you guys ever heard of a young-earth paleontologist?

S: No.

E: I haven’t, no

B: I mean, what -

P: That’s an oxy-mo-ron.

B: - What two paleontologists is he talking about?

S: Right right, these are hypothetical paleontologists.

B: Oooh.

P: (laughing)

S: (continuing quote) “The answer? starting points. Fossils don’t come with labels, we must begin with assumptions, but which is correct?” And how could we possibly which interpretation is correct? As if there doesn’t exist anything called, oh I don’t know, science-

P: (chuckling)

S: -research

E: (singing) What a fool believes.

S: You see bones and you slap your interpretation on there, from whatever your starting point was. Well I guess they are accurately describing their process. So that’s basically the quality of stuff that you’re going to get in the creation museum.

P: I wonder what the fine is for urinating on the exhibits in a museum.

S: I don’t know. Maybe we’ll find out.

J: I wonder how it feels to bask in my stupidity.

S: (chuckles) It’s basically one long apology for the nonsense of creation.

P: I’ve always liked your stupidity, Jay.

J: (sincerely) Thanks Perry.

B: Speaking of stupidity Steve, the web site that you have linked here, and I assume you’ll also have it on the notes page, –

S: Yes.

B: - has this nice little – interactive – it’s a blueprint of the museum, and you click on various sections of them, and it shows you a little picture with a little description of what’s going on.

S: Yeah, that’s what I’m reading.

B: It is, yeah, so but one of these that I pulled out, one of these quotes said that “Everyone who rejects "His", capital H, history, including six-day creation and Noah’s flood is willfully ignorant.

S: mmhmm

B: Hello?. Pot – kettle – black –

P: (laughs)

B: - willfully ignorant? Oh my God.

S: Ken Ham is the poster child for willful ignorance. That is true. The science blogger community is all over it already. I’ll have a link on the notes page to Pharyngula, which is a very popular science blog, which basically links to dozens and dozens of science blogs completely trashing the museum. So if you’d like to read scientific criticism of this, there’s plenty to go around, and there are some gems in there. One blogger points out how utterly childish the entire display is, I mean, it really is – it insults the intelligence of a 5-year old, that’s how lame the whole thing is. It’s really incredible.

P: Well there’s another little entry here on their site, has a picture of people exiting, and it says “Visitors report an average loss of 20 points of IQ per visit.”

(laughing)

B: Wow, I thought it’d be more than that.

S: And that’s an underestimate I’m sure, that’s self-reporting.

P: (laughing) Can you imagine?

B: That mega-blog, Steve, that you linked to here from the LA Times, and they were talking about, you know, the state of Americans saying that 3 of the – 3 men seeking to lead the last superpower on Earth, referring to the last Republican Presidential debates, reject the scientific consensus on cosmology, thermonuclear dynamics, geology and biology, believing instead that Bam-bam and Dino played together.

S: (chuckles) Right.

B: That was a funny quote from the LA Times. I was very disappointed with a quote from the New York Times, very wishy-washy –

(murmured agreement)

B: - and very disappointing. I was surprised, I mean, Steve were you surprised that a quote like that came from -?

S: I was, you know, the mainstream media, except for a couple of exceptions like the LA Times, the mainstream was very wishy-washy on reporting on the creation museum, as if they were trying to be politically correct or (sarcastic) balanced, you know, it was terrible. I mean the journalists totally failed to put this in its proper perspective. That this is, you know, an affront to science; it is a very narrow-minded childish display that is completely rejected by the mainstream scientific community. They really completely failed to put this in the proper perspective. So this is, again, one of the most glaring recent failures of the mainstream media to deal with these types of issues.

J: How can they slip that up? I mean, how could they not report correctly on this?

B: Well the New York Times didn’t even send their science writer to write the story –

S: Yeah, that’s the problem.

B: - I mean come on.

S: It is the general decrease in the number of science writers, science journalists, and basically all purpose journalists covering science issues, and they give us this misplaced sense of balance in journalism, the notion that you have to balance every issue, even when the issues themselves are inherently unbalanced, like creation nonsense vs. the consensus of scientific opinion. These are not balanced sides of the controversy.

E: (mock news report) Two plus two, is it really four? Let’s ask the experts. "I think it’s four", "I don’t think it’s four".

S: (sarcastic) Well there we go, we got both sides.

P: How can two mathematicians come to a different conclusion? Well, one of them is a dick.

(extended laughter)

B: Steve, there was a, quickly, there was a link to the National Center for Science Education, they mentioned that have been a lot of petitions being signed against this – against this museum. They mentioned over 800 scientists in three states surrounding the museum, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, have signed a statement sponsored by the NCSE. And I mean that’s all well and good but I’m thinking wait, 3 states and they only got 800 scientists to sign it? That just seems like a low number to me.

S: What’s the statement? It’s just a condemnation, I mean there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s a privately owned museum, what can you do?

B: Well, but I expect there should be five thousand names on this –

S: Ah, give ‘em time.

E: Maybe over time they can get more.

P: After this podcast there will be.

S: (chuckles) Right. Yeah, all we can do is ridicule it -

B: Right.

S: – I mean there’s nothing legally that can be done -

B: (acknowledgment) Oh yeah.

S: - that wouldn’t be basically censorship. This is definitely a free speech issue, and they have the right to do that and we have the right to ridicule them for doing it.

Item 2 (9:43)

S: The next issue is very similar actually, speaking about free speech, and this is a follow-up to our Philadelphia banning psychics piece that we’ve done in the last couples of weeks. This one comes from Salem, Massachusetts. And this one is – Salem is considering passing a law to test psychics for licensure, which is interesting because that’s the idea that Rebecca came up with when we were talking about the Philadelphia situation and I basically ridiculed her for that suggestion, (chuckles) and it’s too bad she’s not here to talk about it tonight. But basically, actually the article, in my opinion, reinforces what I was saying, which is that testing psychics as a prerequisite to licensure and licensing psychics in order for them to be able to set-up shop, is really just a way for psychics to protect their monopoly, to protect their business and to squelch competition. It really isn’t a mechanism for protecting the public from fraud. In fact, I say that because the people who are really pushing for licensure and for testing of psychics are, the psychics who are already embedded in Salem, those are the ones who want it.

B: Right.

S: Right, obviously that wouldn’t be the -

P: It’s called dollars and cents.

S: - right, that wouldn’t be the case if this was going to protect the public from frauds, cause they’re all frauds, so they’re doing it to prevent competition from coming into the city because Salem is a Mecca, because of the history there, of the witch trials, is a Mecca for this kind of stuff. One of the quote-unquote witches or psychics who has been in Salem for a long time told of how she got her license, she was tested by a police officer, and she wrote “…[he] sat down with me, I did a psychic reading, he was pleased with the reading, and I got my license.” And that was said by a woman by the name of Cabot. So, and that’s what we said, that if the testing is not adequate and scientific, if it’s in the hands of, you know, bureaucrats, it’s not going to serve the function that we would like it to serve which is protecting the public from fraud and/or false claims, whether it’s conscious or –

E: Should we offer our services to be the arbiters?

B: Well that’s what you would need. Steve, it’s even worse – it’s even worse than you’re saying. When I read the title of this - ”Psychics may have to pass test to practice in Salem” – at first blush I was like, oh that’s great, you get a good test going, and you’re all set. But you read the article and it’s really pathetic –

S: Yeah.

B: - what this testing consists of. A lot of the local – a lot of the city counselors, their recommendations were - we’ve got to do a criminal background check, require psychics to submit a five-year employment history and their educational background - and then even the psychics' ideas were even lamer. First of all, no one in their twenties should be doing the readings, that was one stipulation that they’re considering. They also want to create a committee that would screen prospective psychics and some psychic at a pyramid bookshop wants candidates to show their experience and training before becoming licensed. That’s it!? I mean those are the tests that they would go through?

S: It’s all about eliminating competition -

B: Absolutely -

S: - that’s it.

B: - that’s all it is.

S: It’s about eliminating competition –

B: That’s all it is.

S: - it’s not about quality control. The whole concept of licensing fortune tellers is ridiculous. When you give a license to pseudoscience, you give it legitimacy it doesn’t deserve, and it doesn’t ever serve the purpose that is originally sold, which is quality control, it only serves the purpose of squelching competition.

B: Right.

J: The way that the article reads, it reads as if everybody believes that psychics exist, it would be like –

B: That’s a given.

J: - you know, a taxicab driver driving without a license. The fact is, taxicab driving exists, this is the supposition this article takes, and I have to read one thing out of here that really got me. The person says “One woman paid more than $2000 for a reading at a Salem shop where she was told she had a black aura around her” –

B: (spooky) Ooooo.

J: - according to Zafransky, “then one day she came into my shop crying”, Zafransky told city counselors, “I said, you don’t have a black aura, sit down and I’ll show you your aura on my machine, and it was blue and wonderful." What!?

(laughing)

E: Blue and wonderful, Jay.

S: She has an aura machine, huh?

P: Well, you know, if you're gonna do this, right? If you're gonna license fortune telling, then you have to define it, in a legal way, and they do at the bottom of this piece. I want to read this, bear with me for a second. Ok, this is how the city council is going to define fortune telling. "The telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cardomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrine, coins, sticks, dice, sand, coffee grounds, crystal gazing or other such reading or through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augery, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mind-reading, telepathy, or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnitism, magnitized article or substance or by any such similar things."

E: But not voodoo.

J: No poop-smelling?

(laughing)

P: That's it.

J: Yeah, what about voodoo?

E: I'm insulted, all the voodoo people in Salem are up in arms.

J: They left out so much on that list. Those guys are crackpots.

S: What about thaumaturgy? How could you leave out thaumaturgy?

E: Yeah, duh.

B: Yeah.

S: I mean, come on, all the thaumaturges are going to be up in arms now.

J: Somebody sat down and made that list.

P: They did.

S: That's a lawyer. It's a legal - the purpose of the list was to be all-inclusive. That's what -

P: I know! I know, I understand that, but we've already come up with some things not on the list.

S: Jay, well, yeah but the list says "and any such similar thing". Right, so it means everything.

P: (chuckles) Right.

S: Jay, you're right, the article totally takes for granted that it's legitimate, that's it's a real -

P: So does the definition.

S: Right.

P: I think it does.

J: Perry, you did a good job reading that because that sums it all up right there, there it is.

P: It's outrageous, I mean it's just so stupid. We really should test - it says they're going to revisit the topic. We should -

E: We should send a letter.

Announcements ()

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at www.theskepticsguide.org. Please send us your questions, suggestions, and other feedback; you can use the "Contact Us" page on our website, or you can send us an email to info@theskepticsguide.org'. 'Theorem' is produced by Kineto and is used with permission.

References