Feature Article | Skeptical Inquirer (original) (raw)
Science over Party: Five Tips for the Left and Right
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 6
November/December 2024
Timothy J. Redmond
Democrats and Republicans have accused each other of waging a “war on science” (Mooney 2006; Stossel 2018). Unfortunately, they both have a point. Mistrusting science is often a bipartisan endeavor. Democrats and Republicans are routinely at odds. Each party’s members have distinct views on everything from public policy and candidate evaluations to food and entertainment …
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Is Science Progressive or Conservative?
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 6
November/December 2024
Mathieu Beau
In our modern world, we consider science to naturally go hand in hand with progress.1 These two concepts are almost perceived as synonyms. Science is progress; I believe in science as I believe in progress. We then consider ourselves progressive, as supporters of progress, “moving forward” in the etymological sense of the word. Progress is …
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Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 6
November/December 2024
Daniel Meyer
Some moviegoers, during intense scenes of horror, dig their fingernails into the armrest of their seats and then nearly leap from those seats when the slasher or monster suddenly lunges from the darkness—but do they pay the slightest attention to sensationalist claims that connect horror to actual history? Or are outrageous assertions more cringeworthy than …
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When Silence Speaks: The Harmful Pseudoscience of Facilitated Communication
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 6
November/December 2024
Stuart Vyse
The new Netflix documentary Tell Them You Love Me represents a much-needed return to reality in a world largely inhabited by stories of miraculously discovered literacy among nonspeaking people. Early reviews have described the film as “bizarre,” “chilling,” and “painful”—appropriate reactions given its content. The documentary offers a rare look into the dangers of a long-discredited method …
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The Truth about Sallie Winchester and the Mystery House That Never Was
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 5
September/October 2024
Adrienne Hill
Editor’s note: The Winchester Mystery House has appeared in Skeptical Inquirer a few times over the years. Most notably, Joe Nickell (2002) and Karen Stollznow (2011) previously corrected misperceptions about the house and its most famous owner. Our cover story shows how earlier SI reporting combined with other valuable sources (e.g., the Skeptoid podcast) help …
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Mysterious Mastermind: Conspiracy Theories and Taylor Swift
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 5
September/October 2024
David Hahn
Editor’s note: There are hidden Easter eggs in this article. See something that looks “wrong” typographically? It might be a clue. See if you can find them all. This isn’t an article about Taylor Swift specifically—at least, the point isn’t to discuss her. This is an article about conspiracy theories and a musician in her …
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Dark Turn in a Thrift Store Urn: A Serial Killer’s Ashes?
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 5
September/October 2024
Kenny Biddle
In my years of investigating extraordinary claims of alleged paranormal activity, I’ve come across my share of hoaxes. From the Dibbuk Box (Biddle 2019) to spirits moving a table (Biddle 2022) to a dancing Cabbage Patch doll (Biddle 2021), I’ve seen people try to pass off all manner of deception to gain fame, fortune, or …
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Is Belief in Improbable Theories Ever Warranted? A Fortune Teller’s Own Death Card
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 5
September/October 2024
Lee McIntyre
For years, I have been fascinated by the irrationality of science denial. When people typically engage in science denial, the problem is not simply that they deny well-tested empirical theories for which there is ample evidence but that they also usually subscribe to an alternative belief for which there is little to no evidence. Of …
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Eye Movement Therapies, Purple Hats, and the Sagan Standard
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 5
September/October 2024
Gerald M. Rosen and Loren Pankratz
Editor’s note: Gerald Rosen and Gerald Davison coined the term purple hat therapy as a metaphor for treatment packages such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) that combine essential elements (cognitive and behavioral techniques) and nonessential elements (eye movements). Wikipedia now has a page dedicated to this concept. In the 1980s, several novel psychotherapeutic …
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From Gods to Gurus: The Evolution of Olympic Superstition and Pseudoscience
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 4
July/August 2024
Nick Tiller
Milo of Croton once outwrestled a lion. On another occasion, he tied a cord around his head and snapped the band using only the bulging veins in his temples. He drank ox blood for fuel and ate raw flesh to scare his rivals. Born in the sixth century BCE (no prizes for guessing where) and …
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Curing with Charm: Folkloric Faith Healing and the Power of Belief
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 4
July/August 2024
Daniel A. Reed
Faith healing and other “gifts” allegedly bestowed upon the faithful through preternatural means have long been examined by the skeptical community. For example, in his book The Faith Healers (1989), James Randi provides a comprehensive examination of faith healing and offers several keen insights into the subject. While skeptics have uncovered fraud and deception in …
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The Meg: Myth of the Modern Megalodon
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 4
July/August 2024
Brett Taylor
Carcharocles megalodon (or, more recently, Otodus megalodon) was a carnivorous shark that made today’s largest great whites look puny. The notion that the mighty megalodon shark might be alive today is a popular one, as shown by the success of the 2018 movie The Meg and its recent sequel, Meg 2: The Trench. This idea …
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Should Schools Dedicate Time to Grit and Growth Mindset?
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 4
July/August 2024
Katharine Beals
Besides the pandemic’s academic toll—seen, for example, in math and reading scores that have dropped to the lowest levels in decades (Mervosh 2022; Goldstein 2023)—there’s also the psychological toll. Surveys suggest that high numbers of students are anxious and depressed and that many have fallen behind in emotional development (see, e.g., Miller and Pallaro 2022; Richtel 2022; …
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Serpopards or Sauropods? ‘Dead Varmint Vision’ Makes Cats Look Like Dinosaurs
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 4
July/August 2024
Philip J. Senter
Archaeologists use the term serpopard to denote a cat with an exaggerated neck, a motif that appears occasionally on ancient Sumerian and Egyptian artifacts. The term combines the words serpent and leopard. The former is a reference to the snake-like neck, and the latter acknowledges that apart from the neck, the animal is one of …
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Looking for the Bright Side of the AI Apocalypse
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 3
May/June 2024
Guy P. Harrison
Rumors of impending artificial intelligence (AI) doom got you down? Take heart, there may be light at the end of this tunnel—and not all of it from the headlight of a self-driving locomotive. No, sorry, you can’t be sure that a precocious bundle of algorithms won’t take your job (Cao 2023; Georgieva 2024). There is …
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Analyzing Conspiracies through Folklore, Epidemiology, and Artificial Intelligence
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 3
May/June 2024
Benjamin Radford
Digital disinformation is becoming a widely recognized threat—especially to public health—with unprecedented amounts of misinformation available online. In his first advisory, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy (2021) issued a stark warning that “Health misinformation is a serious threat to public health … we can and must confront it together.” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus (2020) concurred: …
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Alternative Therapies for Menstrual Pain
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 3
May/June 2024
Dr. Jen Gunter
Editor’s note: This article is a slightly revised excerpt from Dr. Jen Gunter’s new book, Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation. While this excerpt focuses on alternative therapies, the rest of the book highlights evidence-based information. Thank you to Dr. Gunter and Citadel Press for granting permission. Pain, as defined by the International …
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Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 3
May/June 2024
Autumn Sword, Kenny Biddle
In 1971, years before both the bestselling novel and film The Amityville Horror thrilled the public with one of the most well-known “true stories” of a haunted house, NBC News aired a short, six-minute clip documenting the exorcism of the allegedly haunted Chicago couple Edwin and Marsha Becker. Decades later, Edwin Becker self-published an account …
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Stories That Should Be Handled with Care: The Subjects of Pseudoscience
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 2
March/April 2024
Kendrick Frazier
Editor’s Note: This article includes two excerpts from chapter 5 (titled “The Subjects of Pseudoscience”) of Kendrick Frazier’s fantastic new book Shadows of Science (2024). The first excerpt is the beginning of the chapter, and the second excerpt is the last three paragraphs of the chapter. We are grateful to Ruth Frazier and Prometheus Books for …
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Prophet of Oppenheimer’s Atomic Bomb
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 2
March/April 2024
Brett Taylor
Did a hillbilly prophet foretell the development of the atomic bomb? John Hendrix lived twenty miles from Knoxville, Tennessee, and the nearest established communities were Scarboro and Robertsville, both of which were small. He did not become a prophet until he was nearly fifty years old, at the turn of the twentieth century, when he …
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Fitspiration, Pseudo-Healthcare Professions, and the First Amendment
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 2
March/April 2024
Katie Suleta and Emily Hemendinger
There have been a handful of recent court cases against people operating in healthcare despite dubious qualifications and defending themselves by asserting their right to free speech. The case of Heather Kokesch Del Castillo, who was a self-identified nutritionist and health coach in Florida, was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court (Saunders 2022). Florida protects …
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Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 1
January/February 2024
Benjamin Radford
Twenty years ago, in this magazine I wrote an overview of the evidence for Bigfoot. Titled “Bigfoot at 50: A Half-Century of Bigfoot Evidence,” it was meant to give skeptics and layfolk alike a concise overview of the variety and quality of evidence proffered to date for the existence of the elusive bipedal creature said …
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Brain Training: Is There Evidence to Support the Claims?
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 1
January/February 2024
M.J. Schneider and Indre V. Viskontas
The brain training industry is now well-established, and most people are familiar with claims that brain fitness is akin to physical fitness—do these exercises daily and your mind will sharpen up! But is there evidence that supports these claims? Can we distinguish apps that work from those that do not? What criteria should we consider …
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A Skeptical Approach to Guilt and Innocence in the Judicial Realm
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 1
January/February 2024
Matthew J. Sharps, Kyle Villarama, Frankie Rios, and Jana L. Price-Sharps
The criminal justice system, in theory, must be impartial. The only admissible considerations within the system, in theory, are intended to derive from a dispassionate weighing of facts in evidence. This dispassionate, logical approach—deriving in many ways from Enlightenment philosophy—is frequently taken for granted, at least implicitly. Yet the realm of criminal justice is fraught …
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War on Cancer: An Updated Progress Report for Skeptics
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 1
January/February 2024
Reynold Spector
In 1971, President Richard Nixon and the U.S. Congress declared war on cancer. In 2016, President Barack Obama launched the Cancer Moonshot, a program to reduce cancer mortality and improve the lives of people with cancer. In 2010, I reviewed the progress of cancer therapy: its costs, efficacy, and adverse side effects (Spector 2010). I …
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Science Does Not Have All the Answers—and This Is Not a Problem
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 48, No. 1
January/February 2024
Guilherme Brambatti Guzzo and Gabriel Dall’Alba
Both in and outside the classroom, science educators are often confronted with a great range of questions about science. Usually, these questions are about scientific products (What is evolution by natural selection?) or scientific processes (How did Darwin conclude that species evolve by natural selection?). Other questions, however, may be more challenging; they address the …
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The Rorschach Inkblot Test: We See an Unsinkable Rubber Ducky
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 47, No. 6
November/December 2023
James M. Wood, M. Teresa Nezworski, and Howard N. Garb
Editor’s Note: In August 2023, the Daily Mail ran a story titled “Inkblot Test Will Reveal If You’re Unable to Move on from the Past and Ever Be Happy,” indicating that the test “can be used to reveal info about your personality.” This story was based on a video from a TikTok content creator and …
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Inoculating Students against Misinformation by Having Them Create It
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 47, No. 6
November/December 2023
Melanie Trecek-King
We are drowning in misinformation. From wellness influencers making wildly inaccurate and baseless nutrition claims to fringe medical “professionals” selling pseudoscientific “treatments” online to conspiracy theorists enticing followers down the rabbit hole on YouTube, it’s nearly impossible to avoid exposure. The spread of misinformation has gotten so out-of-control that experts are calling it an “infodemic.” …
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Communities of Inquiry as a Tool to Foster Critical Thinking
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 47, No. 6
November/December 2023
Guilherme Brambatti Guzzo
Critical thinking is widely regarded as one of the most important aims of education. Despite not being something new—we have great examples of critical thinking in action since at least the dialogues of Socrates—the literature on the topic was developed during the twentieth century. One of the pioneers of this effort was John Dewey. In …
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Adolf Hitler’s Personal Charlatan
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 47, No. 6
November/December 2023
Edzard Ernst
For treating his numerous ailments, Adolf Hitler would have, of course, been able to consult Germany’s foremost medical experts of his time. For his personal doctor, however, Hitler chose a relatively poorly qualified, alternative physician of doubtful repute. Theodor Morell was born on July 22, 1886, as the second son of a schoolteacher in a …
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Persuasive Bullshitters and the Insidious Bullshit Hypothesis
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 47, No. 5
September/October 2023
John V. Petrocelli
Claptrap, baloney, buffoonery, codswallop, empty-talk, garbage, hogwash, nonsense, poppycock, flapdoodle, flim-flam, flummery—and often better referenced as bullshit—our world appears to be full of it. Yet what exactly is bullshit? Bullshit is what emerges when people communicate with little to no regard for the truth, established knowledge, or genuine evidence (Frankfurt 1986; Petrocelli 2018; Petrocelli 2021a). …
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Who Believes Unsubstantiated Claims?
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 47, No. 5
September/October 2023
D. Alan Bensley and Cody T. Watkins
The variety of claims that people accept with little or no high-quality support is truly astounding. In the realm of religion, Hindus pray to Ganesha, a god with the head of an elephant who can, nevertheless, understand their requests as if they were talking to a human. Catholics believe that the bread and wine they …
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The Rise and Fall of ‘Havana Syndrome’
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 47, No. 5
September/October 2023
Robert Bartholomew and Robert W. Baloh
On Wednesday afternoon of August 9, 2017, State Department Spokeswoman Heather Nauert walked into a press briefing and announced to the world that there had been a series of health incidents among American diplomats in Cuba. They had experienced a wide range of symptoms, from headaches and dizziness to brain fog and memory loss. As …
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Abraham-Hicks: Motivational Speaking Spirits
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 47, No. 5
September/October 2023
Adrienne Hill
In October 2022, my husband and I were fortunate to be able to embark on a Mediterranean cruise, twice canceled because of COVID-19. We were surprised to encounter more pseudoscience than we had previously experienced on cruises. There were the usual spa offerings, including acupuncture and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop-inspired products and therapies. But we also …
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How to Talk to a Science Denier
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 47, No. 5
September/October 2023
Lee McIntyre
The best way to defend science from science deniers is by giving scientists and science communicators some better tools to push back. Of course, what could be a better tool than scientific evidence? But here’s the problem: You don’t convince someone who doesn’t hold their beliefs based on evidence by giving them more evidence. This …
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Who Betrayed Anne Frank? A Cold Case Study
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 47, No. 5
September/October 2023
Joe Nickell
Anne Frank was born Annelies Marie Frank on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany. A Jewish victim of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously when her narrative, The Diary of a Young Girl, became one of the world’s most celebrated books. It is essentially her account of two years in hiding (with her family and …
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Holy Honey: Bad Research and the Dangerous Promotion of Honey for Diabetics
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 47, No. 5
September/October 2023
Omar Meriwani
Does anyone think that honey is good for diabetes or that it has a hypoglycemic effect? Believe it or not, some “studies” suggest just that. Some are more careful in describing the effects of honey on diabetes, but they’re still contradictory and misleading. Most research publications about honey and diabetes have sensational titles, though their …
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The Ideological Subversion of Biology
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 47, No. 4
July/August 2023
Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja
SUMMARY: Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students …
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The Rise and Fall of the Mpemba Effect
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 47, No. 4
July/August 2023
Martin Bier
Thirteen-year-old Erasto Mpemba was in high school when he observed that a mixture of milk and sugar froze faster if placed in a freezer while it was hot. This happened in 1963 in what is now Tanzania. When Mpemba followed up on what he had found, his physics teachers told him it was nonsense. Local …
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On the Origin of the Post-it Note: Intelligently Designed?
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 47, No. 4
July/August 2023
Edward A. Wasserman
“Who knows more about making things stick than 3M?” At first blush, this catchy slogan seems especially ironic when applied to one of 3M Company’s most popular products, the Post-it note (Wilkof 2010). Unlike Scotch Tape—the firm’s other cherished adhesive product that firmly and permanently holds papers together—the Post-it note appears to have been brilliantly …
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