Donald R. Prothero's Blog, page 7

An educated citizenry is the only safe repository for democratic values.

— Thomas Jefferson

My previous post on “Shark Week” ended up on a thread about American science literacy, so I thought I’d follow up on this topic, which is the subject of the last chapter of my new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future. We’ve heard a lot about the abysmal ignorance of Americans, especially their lack of knowledge of their own culture as well as any culture outside the U.S. This video is particularly hilarious and appalling. Apparently, Americans don’t even know a triangle has 3 sides, or who Tony Blair is, or that Australia is not North Korea.

For many years, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno  produced short comedy segments called “Jay Walking.” Jay and his small camera crew would stroll the streets of Hollywood or Universal Citywalk or Burbank, and ask “the man on the street” simple questions about current events, culture, history, government, science, and so on. Invariably the interviewees would respond with astounding demonstrations of their ignorance of basic facts about the world, most of which they should have learned in high school or much earlier. They ranged from people thinking Abraham Lincoln was the first president, to not knowing the color of the White House or where the Panama Canal is located. Their ignorant responses reminds one of the famous Groucho Marx gag, “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” The displays of misinformation and lack of knowledge were so appalling they made the both the TV viewer and the studio audience laugh with scorn (and a bit of uncomfortable self-recognition). Of course, the Jay and the camera crew taped plenty of people that DID know the correct answers, and they edited out all but the funniest displays of ignorance. In fact, my wife and I witnessed Jay and his crew taping at segment at the Americana on Brand in Glendale, Calfornia, in early 2011. Very little of what we heard (mostly non-entertaining responses) ended up on the show that night.

      Even though “Jay Walking” is entertainment and not a scientific poll, many rigorous studies confirm the general ignorance and lack of cultural knowledge of the American public, despite the fact that 85% of Americans complete high school (up from only 25% in 1940), and almost 30% get a college education. A recent poll was conducted by the American Revolution Center of 1001 US adults. Over 89% were confident they could pass it, but 83% actually failed. They found that:

“• More Americans could identify Michael Jackson as the composer of “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” than could identify the Bill of Rights as a body of amendments to the Constitution.

• More than 50 percent of respondents attributed the quote “From each according to his ability to each according to his needs” to either Thomas Paine, George Washington or President Obama. The quote is from Karl Marx, author of “The Communist Manifesto.”

• More than a third did not know the century in which the American Revolution took place, and half of respondents believed than either the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation or the War of 1812 occurred before the American Revolution.

• With a political movement now claiming the mantle of the Revolutionary-era Tea Party, more than half of respondents misidentified the outcome of the 18th-century agitation as a repeal of taxes, rather than as a key mobilization of popular resistance to British colonial rule.

• A third mistakenly believed that the Bill of Rights does not guarantee a right to a trial by jury, while 40 percent mistakenly thought that it did secure the right to vote.

• More than half misidentified the system of government established in the Constitution as a direct democracy, rather than a republic-a question that must be answered correctly by immigrants qualifying for U.S. citizenship.”

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found that over 80% of Americans could not name a single Supreme Court justice, and some of the people they named (Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter) had left the Court. In 2011, Newsweek gave 1000 Americans the standard test that immigrants must pass to earn the U.S. citizenship. Over 38% of native-born Americans failed a simple test about American history and civics that they were all taught in 8th grade and again in high school. Among the questions: 29% couldn’t name the Vice-President (and Joe Biden hasn’t really been hiding in the shadows like some VPs); 73% couldn’t explain why we fought the Cold War; 44% could not define the Bill of Rights; 6% couldn’t even identify Independence Day on the calendar. Even more alarming was the general level of ignorance about world events compared to just about any other developed nation, which scored far higher than US citizens. For example, Europeans were far more literate about the world: 68% of Danes, 75% of Brits, 76% of Finns could identify the Taliban, but only 58% of Americans can—even though we’re fighting them right now in Afghanistan (and the other nations aren’t). Maybe a century ago, such ignorance of the outside world and isolationism might have not been a problem, but now the U.S. is the sole remaining military superpower in the world, and we’re constantly facing threats from not only the wars Bush dragged us into (Iraq, Afghanistan) but just about nearly every other conflict (e.g., Libya in 2011).

Other polls show that American ignorance of their own government and its processes leads to all sorts of myths that politicians can manipulate. A 2010 World Public Opinion survey found that most voters have no clue what the Federal government actually spends money on. We hear one party constantly raising the cry of “cut Federal spending” but nearly all the Federal budget is tied up in categories (servicing our debts, military expenses in the time of war, plus Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare) that no politician dares to touch (the same poll said that 81% opposed cuts to Medicare, 78% opposed cuts to Social Security, and 70% opposed cuts to Medicaid). Instead, politicians attack budget categories like NPR or the NEA or Planned Parenthood that are a miniscule fraction of 1% of the total Federal budget. The poll showed that Americans wanted to cut foreign aid and spending, from 27% to 13% they thought it represented; it is actually less than 1% of the Federal budget. A study done by Stanford professor James Fishkin showed that people, when polled about the issues blind and then given the facts of the situation, tended to make rational choices on budget issues. The problem, is he sees it, is not that Americans are stupid about budgetary issues, but simply ignorant or misinformed, so that they are easily misled by politicians.

Such news stories pop up every few months, further underlining not only the general factual ignorance of Americans, especially their lack of curiosity about the world around them. The reporters telling these stories typically wring their hands in shame and shock that “more people know who (name a pop star or actor) is than (important political figure, like Speaker of the House or Supreme Court Justice)”. The general American ignorance of political and important cultural matters is indeed appalling. It explains why much of the current political debate about “obeying the Constitution” (which Teabaggers claim to believe in) is followed by false and ignorant statements about the Constitution (such as claiming that the Constitution eliminated slavery, or that the Founding Fathers tried to establish a Christian nation) or by cries for actions that are blatantly unconstitutional (such as their frequent attempts to eliminate the separation of church and state).

If the general ignorance of Americans is not shocking enough, their ignorance of science is even more staggering. Study after study over the years shows a virtually unchanging and an abysmally poor understanding of how the world really works. These include such howlers as:

• Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun

• Only 59% of adults know that dinosaurs and humans never co-existed (the “Flinstones model of prehistory”)

• Only 47% of adults can guess correctly the percentage of the Earth’s surface covered by water

• Only 21% of adults answered all three of these questions correctly

• And a surprisingly large number of American adults still think the sun revolves around the earth! This is not just the crackpot fanatics from the “Galileo was wrong” site but people who think this out of pure ignorance. No one knows how many American adults even think the earth is flat, but it’s probably a lot more than just the crazies who are part of the Flat Earth creationist movement.

There are shockingly large numbers of adults do not know which is larger, an electron or an atom. Most adults cannot give simple definitions of concepts like the cell, the molecule, or DNA. Only about 33% of adults agree with the notion that more than half of human genes are identical to those of mice, and only 38% of adults recognize that humans have almost 98% of their genes in common with chimpanzees. Only 35% think the Big Bang describes the early history of our universe. Carl Sagan (1996) estimated that 95% of American adults were scientifically illiterate. Sagan was thinking of a far higher level of science literacy than these simple middle-school level science knowledge questions we have just mentioned, and judging from numbers we have just cited, he is not far off.

If American adults are so appallingly illiterate in science, what about teenagers who are still supposed to be taking science classes in school? Sadly, the numbers are just as depressing. Most kids of high school age know about the same amount of science or less than adults who haven’t sat in a high-school science class for years. According to a study by Jon Miller of Northwestern University (an expert on science literacy who has studied it for years), U.S. high school students are “below average and below most European countries” on virtually every academic achievement test administered in the past 30 years. Miller found that exposure to a college science course, on the other hand, made significant improvements on science literacy, but only as measured against a baseline of almost total ignorance. Currently, scholars are studying the concept of “civic science literacy”, which is more than just knowledge of science facts, but understanding science well enough to apply to their everyday lives. Here again, the results are equally depressing. Although the numbers are slowly rising, Miller (in a 2007 study) found that the “civic science literacy” of Americans was still less than 30%. As Miller put it, “We should take no pride in a finding that 70 percent of Americans cannot read and understand the science section of the New York Times”.

Another way to frame the question is to ask how we stack up against other countries. Study after study has shown that the U.S. is near the bottom of industrialized nations in science literacy. One recent study found that among 15-year-olds, the U.S. ranked 29th among the nations of the world. At the top of the list was Finland, followed by a number of other northern European countries (the other Scandinavian countries, Germany, France, the UK, plus developed or developing Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and China). Nearly every other ranking in recent years gives similar results, although the exact order of the Top 10 countries might be shuffled a bit—but the U.S. always comes out near the bottom along with countries like Turkey and Cyprus that have a fraction of our wealth and our spending on education. That alone is a mark of disgrace for our society—that we can spend so much money per child, and yet end up with such miserable results, and nearly every other industrialized country does far better than we do. What does that say for our future economic well being when we’re near the bottom on crucial things like understanding science?

Even the PISA (Program for International Scientific Assessment) reports, which focus on overall science literacy rather than factual knowledge, rank the U.S. 15-year-olds 14th in the world in overall science literacy in 2010, identical to their rank in 2000. A close look at the questions in the PISA results shows that they tend to exclude a lot of material that might be influenced by creationist beliefs, which as I have argued before, is one place where the American literacy rate differs radically from most other developed nations in Europe and Asia, as well as Canada. The PISA results (15th place) aren’t as depressing as the other results (29th place), but still nothing to brag about, and clearly not as high as they should be given our national wealth and compulsory education.  Another point apparent in the PISA results is the breakdown by racial and ethnic groups, with whites doing better than Latinos and African-Americans. This is not surprising, given how the quality of education in any subject in school is strongly affected by issues of poverty and language barriers. But then the question arises: if even the white students in our best schools have much more spent on their science education than in most other countries, why aren’t they nearer the top of the list? Once again, we are reminded of the appalling influence of creationism on the education of the conservative, church-going white population, which closes their minds to the bulk of scientific knowledge, no matter how hard we try to educate them.

Some people would point out that ignorance and disinterest in the world around them is the norm for much of human history. After all, most humans in the past and even now have lived in non-democratic societies, where they had no real political voice, and thus no real interest in something they cannot change.  These people argue that only if a national issue directly affects their lives do people emerge from their little cocoons of trash TV, video games, and local town gossip to engage the bigger world around them. All most people care about is how to eke out a living, how to spend time with their family and follow their favorite pastimes, and the rest of what happens at the state, national, or international level doesn’t engage them until there is a direct effect on their lives. (I know a lot of people who spend all their spare time playing computer games and have no interest in anything outside this hobby—and many other pastimes fit this description as well).  Maybe in a non-democratic society where the average individual has no voice in their governance, this might be excusable. But as the Jefferson quote at the top points out, in our democratic society we cannot afford to be ignorant of politics and world affairs, since we are expected to vote on these issues. Nor can we afford to be so poorly informed in science in a society where scientific issues affect our everyday lives, and frequently become part of the political discussion as well.

So why are we so scientifically illiterate? Everyone has a favorite culprit. Certainly the media share a lot of the blame, filling the airwaves and print and internet with mountains of useless reality TV and pseudoscience and celebrity gossip. Even the science they do present is watered down and oversimplified, often to the point of being distorted or just plain wrong. That was the point of last week’s blog about the lies perpetrated by Discovery Channel’s fake documentary. This is apparently where most scientists feel the blame lies. There are many who blame our educational system, and argue that students need to be turned on to science early and provided with hands-on experiments and active learning. This is probably also true, but unrealistic in this age when education budgets are being slashed to meet politician’s needs to cut costs without raising taxes. I know many high school science teachers personally, and they are at wit’s end. To them, the issue is not just the problem of small budgets, inadequate supplies and equipment, and huge classes. They battle an almost impossible uphill struggle to keep the interest and attention of the average American teenager, filled with raging hormones and interests in cars, pop culture, video games, and the opposite sex, and to get them to pay much attention to science classes, no matter how wonderful and inspiring the teachers try to make it.

As I pointed out in my 2009 book Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs, one need only watch the transformation in children’s programming to track the changes in kids’ interests. For the preschooler and pre-teens, many of the shows are highly educational and filled with dinosaurs and astronomy and other real science. Science is clearly “cool.” Switch channels to the programs that cater to teens and tweens: it’s all about boy-girl relationships and getting along and being “cool” with your peers, along with lots of teen celebrity gossip and pop music marketed just for teeny-boppers. Science is no longer “cool” but “nerdy”; the “popular” kids try to avoid looking like they might enjoy it, even if they do. (Although teenagers do love computers and technology, if only to better communicate with their friends and catch the latest music or video or movie or game). About the only factor that explains this change is adolescence.

So how do the European countries and developed Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and China keep their teenagers (with their own raging hormones) on track while American kids lose interest? Most systematic surveys on this topic suggest that these countries have far more rigorous and demanding educational systems that expect more of their students, and have high cultural expectations of academic achievement (especially within the family). No matter how many social and hormonal and cultural distractions there are for teenagers, these Asian and European students do much better than do American students.

In recent years, people have noticed that Finland has consistently achieved the best results in education, including science education. How do they do it? One study showed:

“In the 1970s, reports Darling-Hammond, Finland’s student achievement was low. But in the decades since, they have steadily upgraded their education system until now they’ve reached the top. What’s more, they took what was once a wide achievement gap between rich and poor, and reduced it until it’s now smaller than in nearly all other wealthy nations. Here’s how:

* They got rid of the mandated standardized testing that used to tie teachers’ hands.

* They provide social supports for students including a free daily meal and free health care.

* They upgraded the teaching profession. Teachers now take a three-year graduate school preparation program, free and with a stipend for living expenses. In Finland, you don’t go into debt to become a teacher.

* The stress on top-quality teaching continues after teachers walk into their schools. Teachers spend nearly half of their time in school in high-level professional development, collaborative planning, and working with parents.

These changes have attracted more people to the teaching profession—so many that only 15 percent of applicants are accepted.

The Finns trust their teachers, Darling-Hammond reports. They used to have prescriptive curriculum guides running over 700 pages. Now the national math curriculum is under 10 pages.

With the support of the knowledge-based business community (think Nokia), Finnish schools focus on 21st century skills like creative problem-solving, not test prep.”

Next post: Why does it matter?

In previous posts, I’ve written about how basic cable channels like TLC, The History Channel, and the Discovery Channel have undergone “network creep”. As TVtropes.com explains it, when they were initially founded in the late 80s during the deregulation of the airwaves, these channels all had clear programming goals as described in their names. But since they are purely commercial channels that are all trying to appeal to the 18-31 year-old male audience that advertisers craves, they’ve all gravitated to have almost the same kind of programming: junk reality shows about hillbillies and truckers and storage locker vultures, with occasional bright lights like Mythbusters or River Monsters. They run pseudoscience shows almost every night: Bigfoot, UFOs, ghosts are their bread and butter. They’ve almost completely given up on any pretense of educational programming, although at one time they at least tried to maintain a facade of science in their documentaries.

One of Discovery Channel’s last bastions of respectability was Shark Week, when they run every program in their vault having anything to do with sharks. Well, that is no more. They opened Shark Week this Sunday with a two-hour “documentary” about the giant extinct great white shark, Carcharocles megalodon, that was entirely phony: fake footage of a monster shark attacking a boat, fake footage of a whale supposed bitten by one, with all the roles played by actors, not real scientists. If this sounds familiar, it is: just a few months ago, Animal Planet ran an entirely fictional “documentary” about mermaids, and huge numbers of people are STILL convinced that mermaids are real! But this Discovery Channel program didn’t even have the decency to claim in their closing credits or their publicity that the program was fictional; their only disclaimer reads:

None of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film are affiliated with it in any way, nor have approved its contents. Though certain events and characters in this film have been dramatized, sightings of “Submarine” continue to this day. Megalodon was a real shark. Legends of giant sharks persist all over the world. There is still a debate about what they may be.

BULLSHIT! There is no evidence that C. megalodon survives today. The fossil record clearly shows they died out millions of years ago, and (despite all the fakery of the “documentary”), no evidence that anything this large still lives in the ocean or hunts whales, and no “legends” or sightings that weren’t made out out of thin air for this show—not even in the credulous cryptozoological literature. Certainly, there are deep-sea creatures that live in submarine canyons (like vampire squid) or the abyssal depths, but great white sharks are not such creatures. Nearly all sharks live in relatively shallow waters where the oxygen content is high enough to support their bodies, and where there is abundant food. This is especially true of great white sharks, and is apparent from the fossil deposits where C. megalodon are found that they lived in shallow, nearshore waters, and would have been spotted long ago if they were still alive. There is absolutely no scientific basis for thinking that such animals are still alive in the world’s oceans. And that quote that 98% of the oceans are still unexplored? BULLSHIT!

What is sad about this “documentary” is that the REAL story of C. megalodon is spectacular enough without having to corrupt it with fakery. As marine biologist Christie Wilcox wrote:

Their hand-sized dental records are some of the only fossilized evidence we have of these gigantic predators, which lived from ~50 million years ago to around 2 million years ago. Based on their size, scientists have estimated these sharks grew to upwards of 60 feet long with a bite force anywhere between 10 and 18 tons, and from scarred fossils we know they likely dined on the giant whales of their time. Here’s what I don’t get, Discovery: Megalodons were real, incredible, fascinating sharks. There’s a ton of actual science about them that is well worth a two hour special. We’vediscovered their nursery grounds off the coast of Panama, for example. Their bite is thought to be the strongest of all time—strong enough to smash an automobile—beating out even the most monstrous dinosaurs. The real science of these animals should have been more than enough to inspire Discovery Channel viewers. But it’s as if you don’t care anymore about presenting the truth or reality. You chose, instead, to mislead your viewers with 120 minutes of bullshit. And the sad part is, you are so well trusted by your audience that you actually convinced them: according to your poll, upwards of 70% of your viewing public fell for the ruse and now believes that Megalodon isn’t extinct. Megalodon: The Monster Shark That Lives was not just a disservice to your genuinely curious audience. It was a lie. You used your reputation to deceive your viewers, and you didn’t even apologize for it.

An entirely fictional scene: the fish-reptiles known as ichthyosaurs were extinct 80 m.y. before any large great white sharks evolved.

The entire “documentary” is filled with errors mixed with fact so that the audience can’t tell which is which. Later in the program, they committed an even worse faux pas, suggesting that C. megalodon could have beaten one of the marine reptiles known as ichthyosaurs. Just one problem: ichthyosaurs were extinct over 100 m.y. ago, at least 80 million years before the giant great white shark evolved. This is as screwy as the “Flintstones model of prehistory” where humans and dinosaurs are shown to co-exist, even though they were separated by 60 million years.

In fact, the sloppy loose way they butcher the facts in the program extends even to the proper name of the fish. Its genus is Carcharocles, is species is C. megalodon. In science, it is FORBIDDEN to use the species (“trivial”) name alone, because it is meaningless unless it is attached to its genus, any more than we speak of “sapiens” when we mean “Homo sapiens“. Yet the show throws the name “Megalodon” around without its genus as a sort of short-hand, not realizing that by doing so, they are talking about something entirely different: an extinct genus of giant clam named Megalodon. And I don’t think they had clams in mind—except for the millions of clams they made throwing this bullshit together for TV.

Numerous other bloggers attacked Discovery Channel along the same vein. Actor and blogger Wil Wheaton wrote a passionate post, as did Brian Switek. But again, Wilcox said it best:

Part of me is furious with you, Discovery, for doing this. But mostly, I’m just deeply saddened. It’s inexplicably depressing that you’ve gone from “the world’s #1 nonfiction media company” to peddling lies and faking stories for ratings. You’ve compromised your integrity so completely with this special, and that breaks my heart. I loved you, Discovery, ever since I was a child. I grew up watching you. It was partly because of you that I became transfixed by the natural world and pursued a career in science. I once dreamed of having my own Discovery Channel special, following in the footsteps of people like Jeff Corwin. Not anymore. This is inexcusable. You have an obligation to your viewers to hold to your non-fiction claims. You used to expose the beautiful, magical, wonderful sides of the world around us. Now, you just make shit up for profit. It’s depressing. It’s disgusting. It’s wrong.

A Review of Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Lines,

by Jason Rosenhouse

(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, 256 pp.)

I’ve spent over 40 years of my life wrestling with the problem of creationism, while trying to maintain my research career, keep up with book deadlines, teach my classes, and take care of my family. As I described in my 2007 book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, battling the evolution deniers seems to be a thankless, never-ending task because no amount of effort in science education or good science in the media seems to make any difference. Their numbers (around 40% of Americans) have remained constant in the polls over many decades, no matter what approaches are tried. This is an endless source of frustration for many of us, since creationism is like the many-headed Hydra in the labors of Hercules: every time you cut off one head, it grows back two more. Science never seems to make any progress in blunting their efforts to contaminate schools with their religious dogma. At the end of my 2007 book, I tried my best to delve into the psychology and motivation of creationists, and to understand why they can deny obvious reality and tell outright lies over and over again without any guilt or self-awareness.

But I rarely spend much of my precious time reading their literature any more (I’ve read much of it over 40 years, and it never changes), let alone paying my hard-earned money to hear them speak day after day. Listening to the way they lie and distort the facts, and call professional scientists evil, is too much for me to sit through without getting upset. But Jason Rosenhouse has a much stronger stomach for their garbage than I. He attended one creation conference after another, calmly listening to their preaching and talking to the attendees while maintaining his cool. For that alone, I am in awe of him.

Rosenhouse is Associate Professor of Mathematics at James Madison University in Virginia, having previously taught at Kansas State University, so he is close to the epicenters of much of the creationist movement in this country. He regularly discusses the topic on his EvolutionBlog. As he describes, he is culturally Jewish but became an atheist, yet he has the patience of Job to sit through days and days of creationist drivel and read their atrocious books without getting angry. He is genuinely interested in understanding who they are and what motivates them, and why they can shut themselves out of so much of scientific reality and believe so much that is patently false.

Rosenhouse’s approach in this book is to recount vignettes and anecdotes of his experiences at various creationist conferences and venues, intermingled with his dispassionate and extremely lucid dissection of the logical, philosophical, and scientific issues raised by creationism. He went, among other places, to the Creation Mega-Conference at Liberty University, the Darwin vs. Design Conference in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. He’s a mathematician by training, so he is personally offended when he hears creationists abuse math or statistics, just as I am when they lie about paleontology and fossils. In his words, “I am not saying that creationists had interesting points to make, but had misunderstood some difficult, technical detail. I am talking instead about errors indicative of a total incomprehension of the subject.” For a mathematician, his level of philosophical sophistication is very advanced. In chapter after chapter, he runs circles around many of the specious arguments used by creationists and theistic evolutionists who try to squirm out of the problem with special pleading. It comes as no surprise that he is also a ranked chess champion as well—he sounds like someone who is brilliant, cool, analytical, and dispassionate. Through all of his sacrifices spending time listening to the creationists, he is still honestly seeking answers to who these people are and what motivates them.

I found the motivation part of the book particularly revealing, because he has the patience to listen to them carefully, and analyze how their thinking works. It turns out that the answer in pretty clear and something we’ve known for a long time: creationists place their religious beliefs first, and anything else that science or culture tells them must conform or be twisted to fit their worldview. These beliefs include the idea that God watches over them, that there is a heaven, that humans are the purpose and goal of the universe, and that their religion provides the only source of meaning and morality in life. With such a strong belief filter in place, it’s no wonder that science such a threat to their worldview. They reject not only the idea that humans are related to the rest of the animal kingdom, but any science (geochronology, cosmology) which places humans at the very end of billions of years geologic history or away from the center of the universe. As they say over and over again, they view “Darwinism” as “reducing us to animals,” in their minds denying our “special relation to God” as well as “reducing morality to survival of the fittest” (the common confusion between evolutionary biology and social Darwinism). No wonder they reject not only the biological and paleontological evidence of our evolutionary relationships with other organisms, but also most of astronomy, geology, anthropology, and any other field that does not conform to this narrow but comforting perspective.

Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi, in his book The Great Derangement (2009), describes going undercover in an evangelical church for many months. He found that creationists live in a very cloistered cultish subculture, where they read only what their church elders tell them to read, attend many church meetings and intensive weekend retreats to receive constant reinforcement, and avoid listening to or reading any outside sources that might challenge their worldview. No wonder they never bother to learn about the actual facts of science or evolution, but instead they get a distorted view of science from their creationist leaders. Such cult-like isolation from the real world explains why no amount of presenting science to them in an appealing manner will ever reach them. As long as the conclusions of science threaten their cherished worldview, they are not going to change their minds or learn to distinguish real science from creationist bunk. Instead, as Rosenhouse details again and again, they are easily swayed by shallow intuitive arguments that sound good when you don’t think hard about them. But for a true skeptic like Rosenhouse, these arguments are very simplistic and unsatisfying, since he weighs evidence and looks at the totality of the argument from a much broader, less dogmatic perspective than do the creationists.

Among the Creationists is a very insightful book that allows the skeptic and scientist alike to better appreciate the forces that we are up against in the United States. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the creation-evolution wars as a valuable resource for dealing with the never-ending battle with the forces that deny science.

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The rumor mill had been buzzing for days. Then last week, as many of us were at The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas, it was confirmed:  former Playboy Playmate, has-been actor, and anti-vaxx leader Jenny McCarthy will join the cast of “The View” this fall. A number of Amazing Meeting speakers commented on it. The media were full of statements of shock and anger, not only from the prominent skeptics and bloggers like Phil Plait and Sharon Hill, but even from the mainstream media, who uniformly saw this as a bad move. The ABC network released a lame statement from “The View” founder Barbara Walters, “Jenny brings us intelligence as well as warmth and humor. She can be serious and outrageous. She has connected with our audience and offers a fresh point of view.”

I’ve seen McCarthy’s previous TV and movie appearances, and the best that can be said for them was they were outrageous. Whether her past efforts demonstrate  ”intelligence,” “humor,” and “seriousness” is debatable. Most people found her humor (especially in her disastrous movie “Dirty Love”, often ranked as one of the worst movies ever made) stupid, lowbrow and gross. None of her TV efforts showed she was any more intelligent than any other Hollywood celeb who is promoted  for their good looks. Over the last 8 years, she has been  the principal spokesperson for the  anti-vaxxer movement, lending her celebrity (and that of her once-boyfriend, Jim Carrey) to spread and legitimize her deadly ideas. She is such a symbol of the movement that one of the leading sites criticizing her is called “JennyMcCarthyBodyCount.com” and keeps a constant tally of the number of unnecessary deaths and illnesses caused by the anti-vaxxers.

This is not to say that I have any illusions that most TV is anything other than a vast wasteland, driven by advertising to put on pure garbage that appeals to the lowest common denominator of viewers who don’t discriminate, and can be lured to watch anything that goes on the air. We’ve all seen the pseudoscience constantly broadcast on some of the major cable channels, from UFOs to Bigfoot to ghosts to mermaids, all promoted as real and scientifically supported. Oprah had an even bigger audience than “The View,” yet she routinely programmed all sorts of woo, especially “New Age” healing and quack medicine, as well as con men like Deepak Chopra—and Jenny McCarthy, promoting anti-vaxxer ideas. Thankfully, Oprah’s show is off the air, and her eponymous network has nowhere the same reach as her network show once did.

Nor is “The View” itself a paragon of reason and critical thinking and intelligence. It currently has 3.1 million viewers daily, the highest ratings on daytime TV, but the numbers have been sliding since 2009. There have been relatively well informed, well educated, intelligent members of the cast before, such as previously departed Meredith Vieira and Lisa Ling, and now-departing Joy Behar (whom McCarthy is replacing). But they also featured the embarrassingly ignorant Sherri Shepard, who wasn’t sure that the world is round, believed in creationism, and thought Christianity preceded the Greeks and Romans. Or there was the now-departed Elizabeth Hasselbeck, who supported creationism and climate denial nonsense. She is now headed for a much more congenial setting: Fox News.

As I detailed in my new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future, the anti-vaxx movement began with a single fraudulent 1998 study by British doctor Andrew Wakefield. He faked data to allege a connection between the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine and autism-spectrum disorders (ASD) in order to promote his own vaccine. He was also paid by a lawyer secretly working with him to generate lawsuits against the MMR vaccine. This study  has since been repudiated by its coauthors, withdrawn by the journal that published it, and led to Wakefield being barred from practicing medicine in the UK. Nevertheless, it caused widespread and unnecessary fear and panic about vaccines, both in the UK and in the US. Large numbers of parents, frightened of vaccines because of the false claim that they triggered ASD, left their kids unvaccinated. The reason for the panic (besides the fraudulent Wakefield claim) is that the symptoms of ASD begin to show up at about the same age when the MMR vaccine is given. Given the emotional devastation that an ASD diagnosis can do to a family, and fed lies by the internet, parents were quick to believe this false correlation between two events that just happen to coincide in time. The medical community did hundreds of studies, using thousands of patients, investigating the claim. All have consistently shown that there is no connection between vaccination (or any ingredient in the vaccines, such as thimerosal) and ASD—but real data and facts don’t easily overcome emotional overreactions by distraught parents. Although there are many possible causes, the latest research shows that  ASD disorders are largely genetic in origin (especially common in male children of older fathers), so nothing  the parents could have done (shots, any other environmental factors) made any difference—it was probably in their genetic makeup and unaffected by what happened after the child was born.

The results of the scare have been horrendous: herd immunity has dropped so low in many places that there is a significant pool of unvaccinated kids, and  diseases can spread. In fact,  in many areas the once-rare diseases are now rampant. These infections that we vaccinate against are not just inconvenient, but deadly. The irony is that few of these anti-vaxx parents are old enough to remember the frightening days when polio, measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, and whooping cough routinely sickened large number of kids and killed a significant percentage of the infected population. But my generation, and especially my parent’s generation, remembers them well. I was deathly ill with the mumps, measles and chicken pox as a child, and my own mother was stricken by polio and barely survived. These  diseases now spread rapidly in this age of air travel, when a  virus from the underdeveloped world can jump across the world in hours, and infect a population in the developed world in a few days.

The biggest problem is not just the kids of anti-vaxx parents, who through their parents’ ignorance and false beliefs are at risk by remaining unvaccinated. Even greater is the risk to babies and toddlers too young for their first shots, with their immature developing immune systems. If exposed to an older child with a deadly virus, they have a much higher risk of getting very sick and dying. Anti-vaxx parents assert that they have the right to determine their own child’s health care—but when they infect other kids too young for shots, then they are a public health menace. They have no right to expose other people’s kids to deadly viruses—any more that someone has the right (under free speech) to shout “Fire” in a crowded movie theater.

As Time magazine said:

ABC might argue that hiring McCarthy does not mean endorsing her vaccine beliefs. Maybe not—in a way, it may be more dangerous, muddying a vital question of public health by framing it as a “controversy” that you can hash out in a roundtable before interviewing Bruce Willis about Red 2. Maybe ABC sees McCarthy as a lateral swap for Hasselbeck—another outspoken, blonde woman around the same age. But medical science is not a matter of “views” and “opinion.” It’s not like believing that capital gains taxes should be lowered or gay marriage permitted. Things cause disease or they don’t. Even if The View never airs McCarthy’s beliefs about vaccines—or, conversely, if every other panelist argues against them every day—by giving her implicit credibility the show has already suggested that her scaremongering is up for debate. She says one thing, Whoopi says something else—hey, you decide! People are talking! We must be doing something right! And there’s the bigger problem. To say that you can simply shrug off differences about medical fact as “outrageousness” or “controversy” is to feed the belief that science in general, be it vaccines or climate change or evolution, is simply subjective: you have your truth and I have mine. But we don’t. The Earth didn’t revolve around the sun only for Galileo. The problem with treating factual matters of science like opinion debates is that as soon as you do that, anti-science has already won. Let The View on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand as many hot-button social issues it wants. A virus doesn’t have two hands.

McCarthy’s anti-vaxx career started in 2005, when she claimed that her son Evan showed signs of ASD (although most medical experts doubt this diagnosis, and say he has Landau-Kleffner syndrome). She immediately latched on to the growing anti-vaxx movement, and became its leading celebrity spokesperson. She claimed to have “cured” her son of ASD through all sorts of quack medicines, including a gluten-free diet and risky “chelation therapy” (using toxic copper compounds in the body). In reality there is still no “cure” for ASD, since it a complex of disorders, probably with multiple causes. If it is a largely genetic disorder, there is little likelihood that it will ever be a single, simple cure. Don’t get me wrong: I feel her pain. I was probably an Asperger’s child (years before it was ever defined or diagnosed) and  two of my own children have Asperger’s syndrome. But I’m not adopting quack medicine treatments or preaching discredited ideas from the internet, but following the best science-based medicine to treat them and help make their lives better.  I don’t blame vaccines or anything else, because I probably passed the gene on to my sons as an older father with ASD and a member of a high-risk category.

As journalist Michael Specter (author of Denialism) wrote in The New Yorker:

Jenny McCarthy, who will join “The View” in September, will be the show’s first co-host whose dangerous views on childhood vaccination may—if only indirectly—have contributed to the sickness and death of people throughout the Western world. McCarthy, who is savvy, telegenic, and pulchritudinous, is also the person most visibly associated with the deadly and authoritatively discredited anti-vaccine movement in the United States. She is not subtle: McCarthy once essentially threatened the actress Amanda Peet, who has often spoken out about the obvious benefits of childhood vaccinations, by warning Peet that she had an angry mob on her side. When people disagree with her views on television, McCarthy has been known to refute scientific data by shouting “bullshit.”

McCarthy’s false ideas are more than just another idiot talking head blathering on about stuff they don’t understand on TV. As the leading celebrity spokesperson for the anti-vaxx movement, she is a symbol of this form of virulent anti-science, and everything she says (even if she never speaks a word about anti-vaxx on the show) is colored by that perception. It is akin to hiring any other leading figure of an anti-reality movement to such a prominent platform on TV. Take, for example,  Dr. Peter Duesberg, who more than anyone gave legitimacy to the false notion that HIV does not cause AIDS. He doomed at least 300,000 people when the South African Mbeki regime rejected modern medicine, treated AIDS with witch-doctor remedies like beetroot, and refused to tell their people to take precautions against HIV. Or instead of McCarthy or Duesberg, they could have hired a Holocaust denier like David Irving, or Ken Ham, the leading creationist in the US (except he and most evangelists have an even larger audience on their religious networks). Or how about the clownish climate-denier, “Lord” Christopher Monckton?

For all its faults, TV is the most powerful medium in the popular culture. People really do believe what they see and hear on TV, whether it be a faked show about mermaids, or bad medical advice on “Oprah.”  TV executives may only care what their advertisers think, but they are also using public airwaves to spout dangerous nonsense that kills innocent children. We can’t censor most of what TV broadcasts—but we shouldn’t be encouraging deadly pseudoscience by giving Jenny McCarthy a platform on the highest-rated show on daytime TV, either. The lives of the babies and toddlers who died needlessly because of the anti-vaxxers demand no less.

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The “soundstage” of Mr. Deity: cameras and lights crammed into the kitchen, shooting into the living room

Almost two months ago, I had the opportunity to be part of the latest episode of the hit YouTube series, “Mr. Deity”. For those who have not seen this hilarious series of 3-minute episodes before, you can go to MrDeity.com, and most of the previous 5 seasons are freely available on line. The entire production is the brainchild of one man, Brian Keith Dalton. Brian writes the scripts, plays the main role as “Mr. Deity” (of which religion he does not specify), films all the episodes by himself with minimal help, then edits all the digital files to produce a tight, funny, fast-paced mockery of the sillier aspects of religion. As Brian has explained, the use of humor and gentle satire can be much more effective tool to get people to examine the absurdities of their religious dogmas than angry confrontational approaches. The “Mr. Deity” character is no awesome Jehovah, but instead a sloppy, feckless, distracted deity who doesn’t worry about details, and gets mad when humans misinterpret him. He constantly finds himself entangled in the complex web of confusion and contradiction that is the essence of religious dogma. After watching a few episodes, you will find that Brian’s scripts are uniformly laugh-out-loud funny as he and the other characters wrestle with this messed-up world of religion. The cast often includes Amy Rohren as “Lucy”, or Lucifer the Devil; Sean Douglas as  “Jesse” or Jesus; several other minions of Heaven, such as filmmaker Jimbo Marshall as “Larry”, the manager, who do the dirty work that Mr. Deity has no time for; and noted skeptic Jarrett Lennon Kaufman as Timmy the Tech Advisor. There is often a guest skeptic who plays a straight man for Mr. Deity’s sendup of the inanity of each religious idea. Some of these past guests have included Michael Shermer of the Skeptic Society, P.Z. Myers of the Pharyngula blog, skeptic and magician Jamy Ian Swiss, Carrie Poppy of the “OhNo, It’s Ross and Carrie” podcast, and a number of other skeptics and non-believers.

I got to know Brian during a Skeptic Society field trip in January 2012, and he said that he wanted me to be part of a future episode. After some illnesses, and trying to get our busy schedules coordinated, we finally managed to film in May 2013. He sent me the script, and I tried memorizing the lines and learning how to act them. Though I’ve memorized scripts before, I haven’t performed in a play since I was 12 years old. I’ve always been a good memorizer, yet I found it surprisingly hard to master my lines, despite days of rehearsal. Most of my past appearances on camera were to give academic lectures or appear on prehistoric animal documentaries, where I ad lib the lines rather than memorize them.

Brian’s microbudget production process is a model of efficiency. Brian has long been a free-lance videographer and documentary producer, so he has a complete set of professional-grade equipment. Instead of a studio, he sets up his two digital videocameras on tripods in the kitchen. They shoot at a white background in the adjacent living room, lit by a number of movie lights. There is a boom mike just above the frame of the shot, and each actor has a small Lavalliere mike on the belt or in a pocket, picking up the sound.

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The “soundstage” for Mr. Deity: a white background crammed into the small living room with lights and equipment. There is barely room for the actors to stand.

I arrived dressed in my “costume,” my actual field gear that I wear when I do research (although you can barely see the rock hammer, pouches, and canteen on my belt). Brian and I did a few rehearsals until we had the rhythm of the lines pretty well down, and Brian gave me some direction about how he wanted the lines delivered (simple and minimalistic, with no overacting). For the entire morning, and again in the afternoon, Brian had me rocking side to side as if on board a ship—which had me very tired by the end of the day’s recording. After rehearsals, we spent the rest of morning recording my lines, with the cameras shooting over Brian’s shoulder to give his POV (point of view). Except for his stepson Lukas, who turned the cameras on and off with each take, and gave us lines when we forgot them, Brian did all the lighting, camera, and sound setup.

After lunch, Brian only needed to change the lights and camera a tiny bit, then I stood with my back to the camera reciting my lines, while we filmed Brian’s segments. At the end of a single day, we had dozens of takes of each part of the script, half shot from my POV and half shot from his POV. There were small glitches (like forgetting to turn one of the lights back on after a stoppage, or not spotting the boom mike in some of the shots), but the biggest challenge was frequent interruptions due to background noises. You quickly realize why filmmakers prefer to work in a soundproof studio. Even in his quiet neighborhood with nearly everyone away at work, there were constant interruptions and ruined takes from the noises outside. Low-flying aircraft, lawn mowers and leaf blowers, motorcycles and cars with no mufflers—it’s amazing how much noise there is in a “quiet” neighborhood. After a few more weeks of editing the best takes of each scene so that the pace and timing was as fast as a screwball comedy, Brian had the new episode up on YouTube. The episode really rocks—literally. In addition to our own rocking side-to-side during the recording, Brian modified the final cut with a software routine that makes the entire frame appear to rock back and forth like a ship.

Apparently, it’s a big hit in the YouTube world, because it has over 16,000 views and over 1000 comments in just 4 weeks after its release. Almost all the comments were positive, mostly praising Brian for his funny script, loaded with word play and gags about water and geology. About the only negative comments pointed out that I’m not a great actor, but that’s not news to me. After all, I’m supposed to be a straight man to Brian’s top banana, feeding him the lines and reactions to make his script even funnier. I have no plans to drop all my professional research and writing and become a full-time actor, anyway.

What I found even more amazing is that the Mr. Deity series has a huge number of permanent subscribers who willingly donate to Brian’s budget, even though most of the videos are free on YouTube. Because the production of these shows is not free (despite his small budgets), he ends every episode with a “begging segment”, which are often just as clever and witty as the original scripts. Without the funds of these volunteer donors who treasure his work, he would not be able to continue doing it. In the spectrum of worthy causes deserving support, Mr. Deity is high on my list!

Hope you like it!

Order the book from Amazon

I’m on my way to The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas as this posts, but I wanted to write this as an addendum to our just-published book on cryptozoology, Abominable Science! (available at TAM this weekend, and on Amazon.com). Daniel Loxton and I will both be at TAM if you want to get a copy autographed by both authors.

Last February, the news and blogosphere was buzzing with excitement. Someone had claimed that they had sequenced the DNA of Bigfoot! Naturally, such a sensational story was reported all over the internet and even the mainstream media as if it were solid, confirmed research. If there was any skepticism displayed, it was at the very end of a story that mostly gave the claim uncritical coverage. A number of mainstream scientists and skeptics wrote critical blogs and articles about the way the discovery was announced and the fact that it was announced without a publication backing it up, but everyone had to reserve judgment until the paper was actually published—and even more importantly, when the results were double-checked by an independent lab.

There were lots of reason for doubting the reality of the report. To start with, the researcher, Dr. Melba Ketchum (a long-term Bigfoot advocate, so she is no neutral  party) did one of the worst possible things to convince scientists: she put out a press release before any peer-reviewed scientific publication of results. This always makes scientists suspicious, because it is a common strategy among less reputable researchers to get the press to cover substandard or even ridiculous research before scientists could weigh in.

Then the red flags kept on coming. Her lab, which mostly does DNA analysis for veterinarians, was given an “F” rating with the Better Business Bureau. When the paper finally appeared, it was not in a peer-reviewed journal that scientists trust, but in some unknown source called “DeNovo Scientific Journal“. It was the only paper in this online journal, another suspicious aspect of the research. And it took only a little bit of digging to find out that that Melba Ketchum had bought the journal itself and had no independent editorial board, so the research was completely self-published with no neutral peer review or quality control. Even Bigfoot advocate  Jeff Meldrum found this suspicious:

“To make an end-run around the process by erecting a facade in the form of a so-called new journal and allege that it is edited and reviewed, without providing any of that information on the public web page, it appears that she has undertaken an effort to self-publish, just to get it out there,” Meldrum told The Huffington Post. “And, to boot, she’s charging $30 a pop for a copy of the paper. Meldrum said he doesn’t think any credible scientific journal would shy away from the topic simply because of its controversial nature. ”I wouldn’t rule it out entirely. There are certainly politics involved in the selection of papers. If it’s solid work, this is the discovery of the century, if not the millennium,” Meldrum said. ”Any journal, if they were confident in the results and in the expertise of their reviewers, and it came down positive —I would think they would clamor for the opportunity to have that on the front cover of their journal.”

Throughout the long wait for the paper to appear, rumors were flying. There were lots of conflicting stories about whether it was under review or not, and a Russian co-author leaked all sorts of information that was not consistent with what Ketchum’s lab was saying. The press release and other announcements claimed that all the mitochondrial DNA was human (no surprise), and come from normal human hair which has mitochondrial DNA but no nuclear DNA. The nuclear DNA largely matches human samples as well, along with an “unknown component” that Ketchum prematurely attributes to Bigfoot. As our own Steve Novella put it:

Let me offer a preliminary alternate hypothesis. The hair samples that contain only human mtDNA are from a human. The samples from which the nuDNA is isolated are also from humans but with some contaminants or some other animal source mixed in. That seems to be a more parsimonious interpretation. I would like to know more about the source of the DNA, but I guess that will have to wait for the full details to be published. The fact that the human DNA is modern human (hence the need for the alleged hybridization to have occurred so recently in the past) is most easily explained as the source simply being modern humans. Let us also consider the scenario that Ketchum is suggesting—in the very recent past (less than 15,000 years) an unknown primate bred with modern human females (mtDNA comes almost exclusively from the female line) producing the creature we now know as bigfoot. What, then, must the original unknown primate looked like? The result of this pairing then produced fertile offspring, enough to generate a new stable population of bigfeet. It is highly doubtful that the offspring of a creature that looks like bigfoot and a human would be fertile. They would almost certainly be as sterile as mules. Humans could not breed with our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, or any living ape. It is probable that we could produce fertile young with Neanderthals, but it gets doubtful the further back in our evolutionary history we go – and how far back would we have to go to reach a common ancestor with bigfoot? The bottom line is this—human DNA plus some anomalies or unknowns does not equal an impossible human-ape hybrid. It equals human DNA plus some anomalies.

One of the first people to get an advance peek at the paper, geneticist John Timmer of the online journal Ars Technica, reported:

At this point, we get into some actual biology with enough details to analyze. And the details appear to point in the exact opposite direction of the authors’ conclusions that bigfoot represents a recent hybridization between modern humans and an unknown species of primate. To begin with, the mitochondrial DNA of the samples (when it can be isolated) clusters with that of modern humans. That isn’t itself a problem if we assume that those doing the interbreeding were human females, but the DNA sequences come from a variety of different humans—16 in total. And most of these were “European or Middle Eastern in origin” with a few “African and American Indian haplotypes.” Given the timing of the interbreeding, we should only be seeing Native American sequences here. The authors speculate that some humans may have walked across the ice through Greenland during the last glaciation, but there’s absolutely no evidence for that. The best explanation here is contamination.As far as the nuclear genome is concerned, the results are a mess. Sometimes the tests picked up human DNA. Other times, they didn’t. Sometimes the tests failed entirely. The products of the DNA amplifications performed on the samples look about like what you’d expect when the reaction didn’t amplify the intended sequence. And electron micrographs of the DNA isolated from these samples show patches of double- and single-stranded DNA intermixed. This is what you might expect if two distantly related species had their DNA mixed—the protein-coding sequences would hybridize, and the intervening sections wouldn’t. All of this suggests modern human DNA intermingled with some other contaminant.

When the paper was finally available, it was accessible only behind a paywall that had a $30 charge for one paper. It is common in these commercial journals to charge a small amount for an individual paper, but a fee this large, going directly to the pockets of the author who owns the journal, suggests that she was milking the site for money from dedicated Bigfoot believers, and discouraging most scientists (who are not interested enough in the issue to waste $30) from accessing it. Others have suggested that since her company got the “F” ranking from Better Business Bureau and is tanking, she dreamed the whole thing up as a scheme to raise money from the Bigfooters.

I finally got a look at the paper for myself. Most of it reads like a conventional DNA paper, and the results don’t look that oddball since they are presented in a normal fashion. (By contrast, many crackpot papers have bizarre writing and structure, often presented in a weird font like Comic Sans). There is a section claiming that they eliminated questionable hair samples by comparing their samples to reference samples of hairs of humans and other common North American mammals. Only hairs which had a “novel visual structure” (p. 3) were said to have been used in the study.

Then there were other samples that included “toenail, tissue, blood, mucus, scratched tree bark and saliva claimed by submitters to be from an unknown and previously undescribed hominin”. They came from 14 states and 2 Canadian provinces. “Samples were subjected to a preliminary screening by utilizing eyewitness interview information, visual and histological examination, and DNA testing.” What?? This is the key issue that screams out for further investigation. Her samples were collected by people who claimed to witness Bigfoot, yet there is no identification of the source, where it came from, and how they know it came from Bigfoot—an inexcusable gap in the essential data allowing us to assess the reliability of the collecting procedures. More significantly, not one of them was able to get a photograph of Bigfoot as it left tissues behind. I find that very  hard to believe in a day when nearly everyone carries a cell phone camera in their pocket. Surely a photo would provide much more convincing evidence that the sample allegedly derived from Bigfoot. There are accounts of how the “blood sample” was obtained when Bigfoot cut its lip sucking on a sharp rain gutter. If the witness saw that much up close, why are there no pictures? This doesn’t give us any confidence that these “eyewitnesses” actually saw a Bigfoot leave the sample behind. Instead, it suggests that sampling is much less rigorous and second-hand, as indicated by the story that some of her samples came from a blueberry bagel left out in a Michigan back yard that is claimed to be frequented by Bigfoot.

This cartoon says it all (from http://xkcd.com/1235/)

And this begs an even larger question: if we have an unknown DNA sample, how do we know it’s from Bigfoot? We cannot just assume that if it doesn’t come from a known North American mammal, it’s automatically from Bigfoot. Without already having Bigfoot in captivity to sample from, all we can say about an unknown DNA sample is that it’s from an unknown source! This a common problem with cryptozoologists and pseudoscientists: if there is some phenomenon that is not yet easily explained by science, they assume that it must be caused by Bigfoot or ghosts or UFOs or some other supernatural cause. The proper scientific assumption is that if the cause is not yet known,  we don’t jump to supernatural conclusions—we just don’t know the cause yet.

Well, the verdict is in. Ketchum sent  reporter Eric Berger of The Houston Chronicle  her samples so he could get them tested by a reputable independent geneticist. The result? Mostly just regular human DNA, with contamination by a number of critters, including an opossum! Ketchum describes her lab procedures in detail in the paper, and claims she had samples of other North American mammals to rule out their input. Apparently she forgot to include one of the most widespread mammals in all of North America, Didelphis virginiana—the American opossum.

Geneticist John Timmer of Ars Technica has done a post-mortem on the entire Bigfoot DNA fiasco. He dissects what went wrong with her methods, her analysis, and her interpretation of the results. It all boils down to the fact that Ketchum was a “true believer” who wanted to find Bigfoot DNA so much that it distorted her perspective and she overlooked huge problems in the sampling, in the lab techniques, and in the obvious implications of the results. She was utterly convinced that the samples were not contaminated, yet in her methods section she admits to screening out hairs and other tissues that were from non-hominin mammals.  Again and again, she got warning signs that the samples were contaminated, that most of the DNA was just from modern humans. It was clear that there was a mixture of a bunch of North American mammals in it that she refused to think about, but she let the software blindly crunch the DNA sequences without throwing other mammals in the mix, and so on. Especially when she got the mix of both single and double-stranded DNA, she should have known she had a lot of different mammals in the sample. As Timmer explains, she was so sure it had to be Bigfoot DNA that every contradiction or warning sign was completely ignored, and she constructed a bizarrely implausible story about Bigfeet interbreeding with humans only 13,000 years ago. It was also clear that this type of analysis was beyond the level of training and competence of a person like Ketchum. As Timmer and several others have explained, she jumped to the wrong conclusions or used the wrong methods when she encountered results that were not in her background or training. As Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

I can just see the gags and cartoons out there now: Bigfoot in the “opossum death pose”; Bigfoot hanging upside down from a tree like an opossum….

 

A Review of My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs

by Brian Switek

(Scientific American/Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 256 pp., 2013)

The dino-bug is now pervasive in American culture, so that kids between the ages of 4 and 12 are nearly all bitten by it. Most kids can name dozens of those tongue-twisting dinosaur names, and are full of all sorts of dino-trivia and tidbits. Dino-mania is a huge business, with millions of dollars being made in marketing books, toys, geegaws, and all sorts of dino-paraphernalia (none of that money, by the way, goes to support paleontology or dinosaur research). It was not always so: when I grew up in the 1950s, there was very little interest in dinosaurs, very few decent books or toys, and I was considered a freak in my elementary school because I knew so much about prehistoric life.

However, when those hormones kick in and the teen years begin, most kids lose their interest in dinosaurs or science, and move to interests in the opposite sex, along with being cool and hip to the trappings of teen culture. Some, like myself and most vertebrate paleontologists I know, never outgrow our love of dinosaurs, and were determined to become paleontologists. Most did not survive the brutal job market, where fewer than 20% of the Ph.D.s in paleontology get any kind of job remotely related to their training (mostly teaching in small colleges, or in medical school anatomy posts). Very few get to occupy the prime positions in the major museums and top universities (there are no more than 50 such jobs in the entire United States, and they are vanishing).

Brian Switek found a different path to parlaying his own childhood fascination with dinosaurs into a career. Instead of gambling on the glutted job market for Ph.D.s, Switek has become a successful free-lance science writer. His original blog Laelaps has now expanded into regular blogs and columns for Scientific American, Smithsonian, National Geographic, and other media that cater to popularizing science. His first book, Written in Stone, sold remarkably well for a layman’s introduction to the history of thought in paleontology and geology. But his new book, My Beloved Brontosaurus, does a wonderful job of explaining the latest research and thinking in dinosaur paleontology to a layman’s audience. Switek knows just enough of the technical side of paleontology to read and interpret the original research literature, yet he has never lost touch with thinking and writing at the popular level.

The overarching theme of the book is how much our understanding of dinosaurs has changed in just his own lifetime, from the slow, sluggish swamp-dwelling drab-colored cold-blooded reptiles of his youth (and of mine), to the “Dinosaur Renaissance” of the 1970s and 1980s. During that period, nearly all the old ideas about dinosaurs were demolished by new thinking, new specimens, and especially by new techniques to analyze specimens, from detailed bone histology to CAT scans of fossils, to deciphering ancient pathology, and so on. In each chapter, Switek explores a different major theme, such as why taxonomic name must change as new discoveries and interpretations are made. Thus, he explains why the name “Brontosaurus” hasn’t been valid since 1903, but is correctly called Apatosaurus; why Triceratops is not being abolished or sunk into Torosaurus (the reverse might be true); and why the “Velociraptor” of the Crichton books and Spielberg Jurassic Park movies is actually Deinonychus. He discusses the evidence of why birds are dinosaurs and why most dinosaurs much have had some sort of fuzzy downy covering, and some had full-fledged feathers. He goes over the stories behind the legendary dinosaur finds, such as the Cleveland-Lloyd Allosaurus quarry in central Utah, and the evidence for dinosaur sociality, predation, cannibalism, growth, behavior, and sex. He summarizes at a basic level what bone histology tells us not only about how dinosaurs grew, but whether they were male or female, and all sorts of other mysteries. He looks at the evidence gleaned from trackways, bite marks, diseased specimens, and many other recent discoveries of the past 30 years of dinosaur research, all explained clearly enough that any adult or high-schooler can understand it. He even tackles the controversial topic of the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous. Fortunately, he reflects the opinion of the vast majority of vertebrate paleontologists that the asteroid impact hypothesis is not the entire story, rather than going with the simplistic impact-only notion that most media present.

Most of his summaries of dino research is correctly interpreted and up-to-date. He spends a considerable number of pages talking about dinosaur physiology, but backs away from discussing the dinosaur endothermy controversy in much detail. I thought he could have explained the differences between endothermy vs. ectothermy, and homeothermy vs. poikilothermy without losing his audience. In particular, he doesn’t really delve into the implications of inertial homeothermy, or gigantothermy, which would give the largest dinosaurs (especially the large sauropods) high constant body temperature in a Mesozoic greenhouse climate without the need for endothermic physiology. In fact, as numerous paleophysiologists have pointed out, any dinosaur larger than an elephant almost certainly had to be ectothermic, because they had insufficient surface area compared to their huge body mass to dump excess heat that would be generated by endothermic burning of their food for energy.

All of these vignettes about dinosaur biology are wrapped in his own personal odyssey to understand them. They range from anecdotes about tagging along with all sorts of paleontological expeditions to help find more specimens and learn about their world, to stories from his childhood about what he once believed has been overturned by the new evidence. In fact, he has put his money where his mouth is: he and his wife moved from their boring jobs and their childhood homes in New Jersey to Utah, where they can be closer to the major dinosaur-bearing beds and join expeditions more easily, and volunteer at the museum in Salt Lake City in their spare time. Indeed, such is the nature of free-lance writing and blogging these days that you don’t need to be affiliated with a major museum or work in major collections. You only need good wifi and access to on-line journals from a university research library and you can write almost anywhere. And you need to be talented, engaging writer, which Switek clearly is, and most other people are not.

In short, if you want to catch up with the latest ideas in dinosaur biology, Switek’s book is the best single source you can read. This applies to anyone, whether just as a casually interested reader, or the professional paleontologist who needs a quick summary of all the surprising new developments (all fully cited at the end) that we’re too busy to keep up with. The level of writing is a little advanced for the sub-teen crowd that still loves dinosaurs, but then they have lots of dinosaur books written at their level. This is the book for those of us who still are interested in dinosaurs after age 12.

One of several graphs showing that people who know little (as revealed by tests) still think they know a lot.

“I know one thing: that I know nothing”

—Socrates

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”

—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt”

—Bertrand Russell

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”

—William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

—Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion

Most of the readers of this blog are familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect (even if we don’t always know what the name means). Although the idea is an old one, going back at least as far as Socrates and Shakespeare, it was first formally named only 14 years ago by Cornell University psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning (not the Brian Dunning of this blog). Their title said it all: “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.” In other words, ignorant or unskilled people tend to overestimate their level of competence and expertise, while those who are truly expert sometimes underestimate their true level of expertise. Since its proposal and naming, it has become a well-known effect in cognitive psychology, and people have become even more aware of it in recent years due to non-experts trying to shout down people with expertise, or demagogues using the label of “elitism” to push their policies as they ridicule the experts who challenge them.

Since the original paper came out in 1999, there has been a lot of research into why the Dunning-Kruger effect is so common and what drives it. It mostly boils down to a cognitive bias related to confirmation bias (seeing only what we want to see, and ignoring the misses). In the case of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the bias is one where we cannot believe that we are wrong or less intelligent than others, so we have an artificially inflated sense of self-esteem. (And this effect is an ancient human foible, so it can’t be blamed on recent efforts to boost the self-esteem of young people, even at the expense of telling them the truth about their level of competence and intelligence).

Most of us can identify many recent examples of incompetents who don’t recognize their incompetence, often shouting out their inanities and attempting to drown out their expert critics. Some of my favorite examples include:

—Deepak Chopra and other woo-meisters misappropriating the ideas of quantum physics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to give their mystical ideas a false scientific veneer. When challenged by a physicist (such as Leonard Mlodinow) who DOES understand quantum physics (as I’ve seen during debates hosted by the Skeptic Society), Chopra weasels out of the fact that physics does not support his woo, and uses rhetorical tricks to cover his ignorance of the subject. Then, in front of the next friendly audience, he goes right back to misleading his followers into thinking he’s an expert on quantum physics.
—Creationists like Duane Gish and their ilk who have absolutely no training or firsthand experience in fossils or paleontology writing whole books about fossils as if they actually had studied them. As I showed in my 2007 book on evolution, when a real paleontologist goes through their writings, it is painfully obvious they don’t know one bone from another, but are just parroting stuff they’ve read in kiddie books, and quote-mining real paleontologists to sound like they don’t support the idea of evolution.
—The follies of the Bush Administration, when they openly mocked the qualified experts who warned them about their disastrous policies (from chasing the non-existent WMDs in Iraq to their economic ideas, to their denial of climate science and evolution). Bush himself bragged about not thinking through things too much or using reason, but making decisions “from the gut”—and spawned a whole industry of experts who revealed that “gut-level” decisions are usually wrong, as well as comedians like Stephen Colbert whose character avoids using logic and reason and data, but makes decisions based on their “truthiness.”
—The purveyors of quack medicines who blather on about the great benefits of their untested snake oil, and then demonize the FDA and the scientists who rigorously test their products to determine if they really work (and vigorously attack doctors like our own Steven Novella or David Gorski or Harriett Hall when these scientists point out that their “medicine” is pure snake oil).
—The various global climate change deniers who have absolutely no training in climate science (including TV weathermen, who do not actually work on climate), who jump on the climate denial bandwagon and nitpick details in the scientific literature that they didn’t work on, and don’t understand enough about to critique it.


—The comically incompetent efforts of Andrew Schlafly (son of right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly) to rewrite science to fit conservative Christian ideology on his Conservapedia website. As I pointed out in

previous post

, this includes his uninformed and ignorant attacks on evolution, climate science, geology, astronomy and cosmology, and other areas of science that creationists try to deny. But his most hilarious efforts are his attempt to deny Einsteinian relativity because he confuses it with the philosophical idea of relativism, because Barack Obama once talked about relativism, and because it’s not in the Bible! Then he shows his complete inability to understand it by bumbling through mathematical equations that prove nothing except that he doesn’t understand physics.

These examples can be multiplied endlessly, so I won’t continue them here, but let the commenters add their own personal favorites.

Order the book from Amazon.com

Mass extinction is box office, a darling of the popular press, the subject of cover stories and television documentaries, many books, even a rock song…At the end of 1989, the Associated Press designated mass extinction as one of the “Top 10 Scientific Advances of the Decade.” Everybody has weighed in, from the economist to National Geographic.

—David Raup, 1991

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

—H.L. Mencken

The great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

—Thomas Henry Huxley

I vividly remember running into my good friend, Jim Kennett (now retired from the University of California, Santa Barbara), at the 2007 meeting of the Geological Society of America. Kennett is still one of the giants and pioneers of the fields of marine geology and paleoceanography and climate change, with a career that goes back to the early 1970s when the Deep Sea Drilling Project began to revolutionize our understanding of oceans and climate. As a co-author on the paper, Jim was excited about this hot new idea that an impact had struck about 12,900 years ago and was responsible for the extinction of the Ice Age mega-mammals—one of the most interesting and controversial events in earth history. I tried to sound enthusiastic, but I’d seen many versions of the impact hypotheses for other mass extinctions crash and burn, so I didn’t want to pronounce judgment yet.

This idea is the most recent entry in the scientific bandwagon that impacts caused all mass extinctions. Firestone et al. (2007) claimed that the extinction of the Ice Age “megamammals” (large mammals over 40 kg in weight) was due to the impact of an extraterrestrial object about 12,900 years ago. Naturally, when this idea was first proposed, the media had a field day, and almost no dissenters or critics were heard at all. Some geology textbooks even inserted this untested idea into their new editions without waiting to see if it would pan out or not. And just like every other half-baked idea from the impact advocates, the “late Pleistocene impact” scenario has been shot down by a whole range of observations.

The late Pleistocene impact hypothesis was born from observations that there was a distinctive “black mat” organic layer in several localities across the southwestern U.S., immediately above the last appearance of Ice Age megamammal fossils. These include not only the huge mammoths and mastodonts, but also ground sloths, horses, camels, two genera of peccaries, giant beavers, plus predators such as short-faced bears, dire wolves, and sabertoothed cats—but not bison, deer, pronghorns, and a number of other large mammals still found in North America today. The “black mat” is also above the first known artifacts of the Clovis culture, which were thought to be the first human arrivals from Eurasia, and allegedly responsible for overhunting the megamammals to extinction. Firestone et al. (2007) also claimed to have found “nanodiamonds”, iridium, helium-3, “buckyballs,” and a number of other geochemical and mineralogical “impact indicators” in the “black mat” layer, and then painted a variety of different (and conflicting) scenarios about the impacting object (they are not consistent as to whether it is a comet or an asteroid) hitting near the Carolina Bays region. This supposedly affected the Laurentide ice sheet in the northeastern part of North America and triggered the Younger Dryas cooling event at 12,900 years ago.

The entire scenario has been completely demolished by a number of lines of evidence. As Pinter and Ishman (2008) showed, there is no evidence that there was an impact in the Carolina Bays, and most of the alleged “impact evidence” is questionable when analyzed by other labs. Firestone et al. (2007) argued that the impact was an airburst, since there is no crater, no tektites, no shocked quartz or other high-pressure minerals, which are the best indicators of a true impact. Most of the material that was allegedly impact derived (nanodiamonds, iridium, helium-3, “buckyballs”, and so on) is also consistent with the normal rain of micrometeorites, and not abundant enough to be good evidence of an impact.

The claim that the “black mat” was an impact layer has also been debunked. It is more likely an indicator of a high water table and wetter conditions associated with the abrupt Younger Dryas cooling event (Haynes, 2008). The supposed “instantaneous” extinction of megamammals at this horizon has also been debunked, since the extinctions were scattered across a wide geographic area with different genera going out locally at different times (Grayson and Meltzer, 2003; Fiedel, 2008; Scott, 2010). Mammoths, mastodons, giant deer (“Irish elk”), ground sloths, and many other megamammals did not die out at 12,900 years ago, but survived in most cases to 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. This is fatal to the idea that a single impact killed them all off. In fact, none of the well-dated extinctions occur at 12,900 years ago. Most of the extinctions are either significantly younger than that interval, or there are no good final dates for their last appearance—but very little appears to happen to the megamammals at precisely 12,900 years ago.

Particularly striking is the persistence of mammoths and ground sloths well into the Holocene (as young as only 6000 years ago), and of course, the bison, deer, grizzly bear, cougars, peccaries, and pronghorns that are still with us, while elk and moose came to North America at this time (rather than being wiped out). In fact, studies of DNA trapped in soils from the Canadian Arctic shows that many of these “extinct” Ice Age mammals persisted well into the Holocene, even though there are no bones preserved in beds that young. The impact hypothesis does nothing to explain the selectivity of this extinction. In addition, the South American, Australian, and Eurasian-African megafaunal extinctions are not synchronous with the alleged “impact,” so it does nothing to explain their demise.

The claim that the “impact” had a severe effect on human cultures has been completely shot down as well (Buchanan et al., 2008), since there is no evidence whatsoever that human cultures changed dramatically at this time, or that there was a major population decline. Clovis culture was gradually transformed into Folsom, Dalton, and Eastern U.S. Paleoindian cultures, and they apparently spread widely at this time, rather than declining. And just before my 2011 Catastrophes! book came out, Jacquelyn Gill of the University of Wisconsin presented a paper at the Ecological Society of America meeting analyzing the details of lake sediments from the northeast, which preserve a high-fidelity record of that time. She found no evidence of the impact debris that was supposed to be common—and her data were gathered even closer to the alleged impact site than the evidence garnered from the western U.S. Nor was there any great shift in vegetation, pollen, spores, or any other biotic signal that would be consistent with the impact hypothesis.

Finally, if the authors of the Pleistocene impact scenario had paid any attention to the past decade of research on impacts and extinctions, they would have realized that the “impacts cause extinction” notion is passé. As I discussed in Chapter 11 of my new book Catastrophes!, none of the great extinctions of past (except possibly the end-Cretaceous event) are associated with impacts.  It feels like the Firestone et al. (2007) impact scenario is a bad rehash of the debates from the 1980s. Apparently, the authors are still stuck on a bandwagon that has long since ground to a halt—except in the popular media. As Barnosky et al. (2004) showed, the causes of the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions are complicated, and probably involve a combination of both human overhunting and climatic change. One thing that doesn’t seem to be relevant is an impact.

Like many other trendy ideas in science, it made a big splash when it first came out in 2007, and some textbooks even jumped the gun and featured it in their new editions. But eventually the scientific review process works through all the hot ideas that have made it past the first level of peer reviews. After 2-3 years, the majority of these faddish proposals die a quiet death as they are debunked, one claim after another. Yet the public and press only remember the splashy coverage when the idea was first proposed, and don’t realize that it has been quietly discredited in the scientific community.

References

Barnosky, A.D., P.L. Koch, R.S. Feranec, S.L. Wing, and A.B. Shabel. 2004. Assessing the causes of late Pleistocene extinctions on the continents. Science 306: 70–75.
Buchanan, B., M. Collard, and K. Edinborough. 2008. Paleoindian demography and the extraterrestrial impact hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105:11651–11654.
Fiedel, S. 2009. Sudden deaths: the chronology of terminal Pleistocene megafaunal extinction, in Haynes, G. (Ed.), American Megafaunal Extinctions at the End of the Pleistocene. New York: Springer, pp. 21–38.
Firestone, R.B., and 25 others. 2007. Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,000 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, 16016-16021.
Grayson, D.K., and Meltzer, D.J. 2003. A requiem for North American overkill. Journal of Archeological Science 30:585–593.
Haynes, G. 2009. Estimates of Clovis-era megafaunal populations and their extinction risk, in Haynes, G. (Ed.), American Megafaunal Extinctions at the End of the Pleistocene. New York: Springer, pp. 39–54.
Pinter, N., and Ishman, S.E. (2008) Impacts, mega-tsunami, and other extraordinary claims. GSA Today, 18(1):37–38.
Scott, E. 2010. Extinctions, scenarios, and assumptions: changes in latest Pleistocene herbivore abundance and distribution in western North America. Quaternary International 217:225–239.

This week brings news from several different parts of the creationist battlefront. Even as Louisiana failed to overturn its recent law allowing the teaching of creationism in public schools (despite nationwide pressure led by student Zack Kopplin), there was some more revealing news from the two biggest creationist organizations in America:

1) In an earlier post, I discussed the decline in attendance and loss of money from Ken Ham’s “creation museum” in Kentucky. Now even they must pay attention to the problem, since the declining attendance has put a crimp in their budget and brought the fundraising for their “Ark encounter” to a standstill. Their problem, as I outlined before, is that their exhibit is 5 years old now and has not changed, so most of the local yokels who might want to visit it have done so. There’s no point to making the long trip and seeing the expensive “museum” again if there’s nothing new to see. (Unlike real science museums, which must change exhibits constantly not only to boost repeat attendance, but to reflect the changes in scientific thinking). As Mark Joseph Stern wrote on Slate.com:

There could be another explanation, though. A spectacle like the Creation Museum has a pretty limited audience. Sure, 46 percent of Americans profess to believe in creationism, but how many are enthusiastic enough to venture to Kentucky to spend nearly $30 per person to see a diorama of a little boy palling around with a vegetarian dinosaur? The museum’s target demographic might not be eager to lay down that much money: Belief in creationism correlates to less education, and less education correlates to lower income. Plus, there’s the possibility of just getting bored: After two pilgrimages to the museum, a family of four would have spent $260 to see the same human-made exhibits and Bible quote placards. Surely even the most devoted creationists would consider switching attractions for their next vacation. A visit to the Grand Canyon could potentially be much cheaper—even though it is tens of millions of years old.

So how did they deal with the attendance dilemma? Did they open some new galleries with “latest breakthroughs in creation research”? (No, that’s not possible because they don’t do research or learn anything new). No, they opted for the cheap and silly: make it into an amusement park with zip lines. Apparently, flying through the air for a few seconds suspended from a cable is the latest fad in amusements, so the Creation “Museum” has to have one to draw the crowds—and hope they can suck in a few visitors to blow $30 a head or more to see their stale old exhibits as well. Expect that by next year they’ll be a full-fledged amusement park with roller coasters and Tilt-a-whirls, just like so many other “Biblelands” do across the Deep South.

And what do ziplines have to do with creationism? As usual, they have a glib and non-responsive answer:

Zovath’s response to the museums critics who wonder how zip lining fits with their message?

“No matter what exhibit we add, the message stays the same,” Zovath said. “It’s all about God’s word and the authority of God’s word and showing that all of these things, whether it’s bugs, dinosaurs or dragons – it all fits with God’s word.”

I was hoping for something more imaginative and relevant, like “zip lines make you feel like an angel flying down from heaven.”

2) Our old friends at the Discovery Institute in Seattle (the main organization which once promoted the “intelligent design” argument until it died in court in 2005) are doing some very shady fundraising and bookkeeping. Their site is constantly beating the bushes to get religionists to contribute to them, and they have extensive funding from a number of right-wing foundations that want to promote religion in public society and get around the 1st Amendment separation of church and state. They have a budget that is ten times the size of what their main opponent, the tiny National Center for Science Education, has to spend. They claim to be a tax-exempt non-profit, yet they also claim not to be a religious organization.

So on what basis are they tax exempt? Are they really a charity which spends most of its funds on social welfare? The website Cenlamar.com dug into the 990 tax forms for the Discovery Institute, and found some remarkable things. Almost 90% of the money they raise goes to salaries of their “research fellows,” plus lawyers, lobbyists, administrators, overhead, and expenses. No more than 13% could go to what could charitably be called “research,” although they don’t actually publish ANY peer-reviewed research, only stuff for their own house journals, and PR documents to push their cause. As their founding document, the “Wedge Strategy”, pointed out at the beginning, their motive isn’t to discover new science; it is conduct a PR campaign to get their viewpoint equal time in public schools and elsewhere in the media and public discourse, and skip the hard, complicated process of doing the scientific research that might support their position. As Cenlamar.com points out, however, 90% spending on overhead and salaries is WAY out of line for a non-profit charity. By contrast, organizations like the BBB Wise Giving Allowance or American Institute of Philanthropy spend no more than 35-40% on the same thing, and the United Way spends only 20%. This is typical of most non-profit charities, and clearly the Discovery Institute is not following the normal guidelines for non-profts.

So how do they get away with it? They use a clever sleight-of-hand to dodge the IRS guidelines for tax-exempt charities. They make “grants” to something called the “Biologic Institute”, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Discovery Institute. Then the Biologic Institute spends this “grant” money for more salaries and overhead. Even though they claim to the IRS that they are funding grants, they are essentially sending the grant money to themselves to dodge the tax structure. I’m not familiar with the tax laws, but this sounds like a pretty shady deal which clearly violates the spirit if not the letter of the tax laws. As Cenlamar.com shows, it’s a “con-profit”, not a real non-profit. It’s a great con job which allows them to essentially spend all their money on their PR campaign and their staffers, with no obligation to do actual research, or to send money outside their own building.

So much for the honesty of these “Christian” creationists….