Here is the line up for this coming week's show:
1. Sixth Sense: Is it psychic or magic? Psychic/magic sleuth, Joe Nickel, one of the greatest skeptical investigators of our time, shows what's really going on with the so-called "sixth sense," as portrayed in the hit film. BTW, James Van Praagh, in a recent People magazine cover story on the film and subject (that also featured our own skeptics James Randi and Kari Coleman), is claiming that the film was based on his childhood, but that he wasn't planning on suing the producers. Perhaps this is because NBC is planning on making their own television biography of JVP. Ka-ching!
2. Bee Sting: Is there anything to the claims that bee stings can cure people of what ails them? Dr. Steve Novella from the New England Skeptics Society and the New England Journal of Skepticism, debunks this alternative medicine myth.
3. Ouija Board: This is a really fun piece, show the fascinating effect of the ideomotor response where any of us are quite capable of pushing the little plastic piece around the board unconsciously, where the thought directs the movement. (The great magician Banachek does something similar to this in one of his routines that involves muscle reading.)
4. Handwriting Analysis and Graphoanalysis: Your trusty skeptical correspondent goes exploring the unknown mystery of handwriting analysis and discovers, to no one's surprise on this list, that it's pure bunk. But here's the amazine part of this story. The graphoanalysis expert and believer that I had the show producers call to interview for the segment, James O'Malley, has since he and I first corresponded a couple of years ago, converted to a skeptic and now also thinks handwriting analysis is pure bunk. This is really unusual. What happened was that he had written to me and I wrote him back. From my signature he wrote an analysis of my personality--you know, stuff like how he could tell that I'm a man of action, decisive, good communicator, intelligent, thoughtful, sense of humor, etc., all the stuff that everyone would like to hear about themselves. So I wrote him back and rewrote his analysis but just the opposite: that I am slow to take action, indecisive, a poor communicator, no sense of humor, thoughtless, etc. Of course, no one is going to rate that reading as accurate. And I pointed out that these personality traits are thrown out by the reader without specification of how much and in what contest, etc. Unbeknownest to me, O'Malley called his graphoanalysis mentor and asks him about all this and just how he (the mentor) knows that this letter loop or that word gap means this trait or that trait. And the mentor tells him that we know because it is listed in graphoanalysis books! Well, O'Malley wonders, how did those authors know? Because they got it from older books. O'Malley, to his considerable credit for having intellectual honesty, saw through this ruse and quit the business. Now that is as close to a miracle as we skeptics can get!
In the segment we also test a handwriting analyst. Naturally the subjects love hearing all the compliments about their personality, but we showed them analyses of MY personality, not theirs! The best one was this athlete who is ranked #1 in the world in high hurdles. We showed him the expert's analysis of my handwriting which, since it was reasonably positive, he thought was accurate, but then we showed him his, and this one had him as tentative, indecisive, unsure of his goals, etc. Yeah, right, the greatest track and field athlete in his event in the world who is going to the 2000 Olympic games cannot decide what he wants to do with his future. It was hilarious!
Happy viewing!
Here's a great article about scientists in Michigan fighting back against creationists who are trying to infiltrate public schools. It includes at the end quotes from our very own Dr. Greg Forbes, a member of the advisory board of Skeptic magazine, and his (in my opinion) correct attitude toward religion that it belongs in the religion department or philosophy department, but definetly not in science departments.
http://www.detroitnews.com/1999/schools/9910/22/10220165.htm
Friday, October 22, 1999
Teachers of evolution fight back
New assault on Darwinism has Metro Detroit roots
Robin Buckson / The Detroit News
Books critical of and challenging Darwin's evolution theory share the science shelves at Melvindale's high school and middle school libraries.
By George Bullard and Kevin Lynch / The Detroit News
DETROIT -- Melvindale started the new assault on evolution.
Kansas followed up.
Kentucky chimed in.
And today, some 3,000 science teachers are at Cobo Center, seven miles from Melvindale, to fight back.
They can't believe that evolution is on defense like it was during the Scopes Monkey trial of 1925. Evolution critics are asking teachers to defend the theory and to incorporate recent science that questions it. In short, evolution is no longer gospel.
"It's with utter amazement that I watched what they did," teacher Kathy Higgins-Luthman said of recent attacks on the science pegged to Charles Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species.
"Evolution is the basis of biology," said Higgins-Luthman, who teaches biology at Divine Child High School in Dearborn and is attending this week's convention of the National Science Teachers Association at Cobo.
But Rachel Lee, 15, a 10th-grader at Melvindale High School, favors de-emphasizing evolution in the public school curriculum.
"Evolution contradicts what other people believe. If they don't believe it, why should they have to learn about it?" she said. "If they say that creationism is just a theory, and so is evolution, then they should teach them both."
In February, Melvindale pioneered a way around the problem. The school board ordered that pro-creationism books be placed on school library shelves and made available to students.
Among them are Darwin's Black Box, a book in which biochemist Michael Behe says molecular science, developed since Darwin, shows some biological systems hard to explain under Darwinism. Behe, a professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, lifted the debate to science vs. science, rather than science vs. religion.
After the Melvindale action, the Kansas Board of Education passed new student testing standards, minimizing the importance of evolution.
And this month, Kentucky's Education Department deleted the word "evolution" from its curriculum standards, replacing it with "change over time."
Science teachers worried
That, say people who favor such changes, describes a process rather than a theory they say has become a "religion" among scientists.
The attacks amaze science teachers. "One of my students gave a presentation about evolution last week," Higgins-Luthman said. "He started it off by saying, 'Now, I know this is just a theory.'
"I wanted to bang my head against a wall."
Higgins-Luthman said even though she teaches at a private school, votes like the ones taken in Kansas still could affect her and her students.
The Kansas State Board of Education recently voted 6-4 in favor of removing all questions about evolution from its standardized testing, which is similar to the Michigan Education Assessment Test, or MEAP.
MEAP scores are important to teachers because they are looked to by many as a way of evaluating the performance of individual schools. They recently became more important to students because they are a criterion for getting $2,500 scholarships available from the state.
Critics of the Kansas decisions fear that removing evolution questions from standard tests will remove any incentive for teachers to cover the subject in class, which they are still allowed to do.
"I'm a little bit privileged, because I teach in a Catholic school system," Higgins-Luthman said. "But we have a MEAP test that our students can take to get those $2,500 scholarships."
Convention's purpose
Organizers at the science teachers convention are hoping to offer their ranks practical advice on what they can do to prevent a repeat of the Kansas votes that have drawn so much controversy.
To that end, Grand Rapids Community College Biology professor Greg Forbes will talk about what teachers can do locally to keep evolution strong in their classrooms. Forbes is also the director of a new state-funded program called the Michigan Scientific Evolution Education Initiative.
The initiative just received a $60,000 grant from the state to retrain high school biology teachers in evolution teaching. Many teachers want to teach evolution, Forbes said, but don't know how because it's such a controversial topic.
"This is a statewide initiative," Forbes said. "Here in Michigan, we're saying we don't want a Kansas here. We're trying to nip it in the bud here. It may already be happening here, but let's rectify this.
"There's nothing wrong with religion. But it's a separate form of human inquiry that's separate from science. Just do it across the hall in religion department or the philosophy department. It has its place, but it's not in the science classroom." Detroit News Staff Writer Nicole Bondi contributed to this report. Copyright 1999, The Detroit News
Speaking of James Van Praagh, last Thursday night I was on WCCO Minneapolis, MN, with the host Patty Petersen. It was only suppose to be a one-hour interview, but it was going well so she had me stay on another hour. She is really a terrific high energy host, but things seemed to chill a bit when she found out I debunked Van Praagh in my book. Turns out she had him on twice and he was, she said, "very accurate."
Well, by chance on the way over to the studio my driver was telling me a little about Petersen, including that she is 44, on her second marriage, her current husband is Jewish, and she's got a birthday coming up soon. So after the Van Praagh love fest I started in on her on the breaks, doing a "psychic" reading, and I really hammed it up: "you know, you are I are really bonding here, almost like we're soul mates or something ... I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I think you're about my age, in fact, I think you were born the same year as me in 1954. Do you have a birthday coming up in November please?" Her jaw hit the table. It was great. Then in another conversation she mentioned she was raised Catholic, so I did a bit about how I found that odd because I was really picking up something very strong about Judaism in her life now. So she blurted out that her husband is Jewish. Then later she mention her children, so I did yet another "reading" and "got" that her first three kids were from a first husband, but that the forth kid was from her second husband. Close. Two and two. But she was very impressed nonetheless (psychics say that it is actually better to miss now and then so it doesn't seem too put on). So I told her that all this was nothing more than what James Van Praagh does. It didn't seem to shake her faith in James, but I think I at least got her to think.
"Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other peoples business. The religious right wants to tell people how to live. I live by the golden rule: Treat others as you'd want them to treat you." -- Jesse Ventura
I stand corrected on the Jesse Ventura quote analysis. He didn't say that religion is for "weak-willed" people, but weak-minded people, which could be something different than the personality dimensions that are associated with will, such as self-esteem, self-confidence, etc. No way to know what Jesse meant unless he clarifies what he means by "weak-minded," so I'll withhold judgment. (Except to point out that I really like the guy and if he ran for Pres. I'd vote for him. But we need to consider each claim individually.) And I do agree that Jesse is absolutely correct in his assessment of the religious right. That is precisely what they wish to do. Make no mistake about it, they don't want "equal time," they want all of the time. THIS is what we must fight. Finally, I'm sure we all agree that there is no moral principle more fundamental than the golden rule, but this not only predates Judaism, it predates all of civilization and was most likely a part of our evolutionary past. It is called recipricol altruism (if you scratch my back I'll scratch yours) and is part of the overall evolutionary analysis called inclusive fitness.
A Sense of the Senate resolution attached to the Labor, HHS Appropriations Bill calls on NIH to investigate the validity of the polygraph as a screening tool. A 1983 study by the Office of Technology Assessment found little evidence to support such applications. A letter from Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)to NIH Director Harold Varmus notes that polygraphy is based on theories of psychophysiological phenomena that are "within the technical expertise of the NIH." NIH is asked to initiate and support a study by the National Academy of Sciences updating the 1983 OTA study. Meanwhile, DOE Secretary Bill Richardson, feeling the heat from the labs, has scaled back the testing plan from some 5,000 weapons scientists to about 1,000 people in sensitive jobs. However, if the polygraph doesn't work, no one should be tested.