john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

pseudoscience

  • Massive courses: massive opportunity or massive problem?

    Sat, 2013-04-06 11:42 -- John Hawks

    Dan Ariely is an economist at Duke University who has been teaching a massive open online course on behavioral economics to 140,000 students, titled "A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior". He recently sat down with the PBS NewsHour to answer questions and share perspectives about the MOOC: "The Plusses and Pitfalls of Teaching Online". It is a long piece with many useful parts, here's a sample:

    there's a great deal of room for variance once you have over 140,000 students in a class. There's a substantial probability that at least some students will be engaged, knowledgeable, thoughtful, and passionate about the class. And indeed, the discussion boards for my online class show just this -- a select group of students truly stand out as motivated individuals who are taking the content seriously and thinking critically about how ideas can be developed and applied to the real world.

    In this regard, the diversity of backgrounds is also a huge benefit in online classes that are available internationally. We hear from students of different ages from around the globe who have so much to contribute. And they not only contribute by sharing their perspectives with their professor and teaching staff, but also with their fellow students.

    Ariely also discusses some of the negatives of a very large student sample: the greater likelihood of disgruntled students looking to draw attention in a public forum, for example.

    This is a really concern for me as I prepare my course, "Human Evolution: Past and Future" (which I announced here earlier this week). A fraction of my students may have goals that include promoting creationist or fringe ideas, for example.

    We are working on some strategies in both the design of the course and the materials that will help to focus students of all backgrounds on the science, while hitting their learning level appropriately. That aspect of the course will really be an important target of our assessment and research efforts. Can we engage this diverse audience productively, increasing science and evolution literacy while stemming possible attempts to derail the process?

    Tags: 
    MOOCs
    Human Evolution: Past and Future
    online learning
    education
    pseudoscience

  • Pseudoscience and TED

    Sat, 2012-12-08 11:08 -- John Hawks

    Phil Plait discusses ("TEDx Talks: Some Ideas Are Not Worth Spreading") a public letter from the TED organizers to their derivative TEDx community: "A letter to the TEDx community on TEDx and bad science". I have criticized TED in the past for promoting Elaine Morgan, who gave a TED talk on her ideas regarding the aquatic origins of human adaptations. Although TED provides a platform that has enabled some scientists to bring valuable work to a broader public, many TED talks have promoted ideas that have either quickly proven wrong (bacteria making DNA from arsenic) or are dismissed for good reasons.

    Plait shares his personal experience and gives a good accounting of how skeptics should approach untested ideas:

    GOOD: “It makes claims that can be tested and verified,” and “It is backed up by experiments that have generated enough data to convince other experts of its legitimacy.”

    BAD: “Has failed to convince many mainstream scientists of its truth,” and “Comes from overconfident fringe experts.”

    These are then followed by a series of “red flag” topics and behaviors that, again, should serve as a warning that what the speaker is saying may not be legit: They are selling a product, they claim to have privileged knowledge, they demand TEDx presents “both sides of an issue.” (That last one is a biggie: In many cases there aren’t two sides unless one side is “reality” and the other is “nonsense.”)

    I don't know if TED will be able to resist the allure of pseudoscientific pitch artists in the future. After all, it is not a "science" conference, and many of the "ideas worth spreading" seem uniquely to appeal to a certain group of woo believers. But this letter is helpful and gives the hope that they will be careful in the talks outside their main conference that they choose to promote more broadly. Now, if only we could get the History Channel to adopt a similar attitude...

    Tags: 
    public engagement
    science communication
    pseudoscience

  • Don't sound like a kook

    Mon, 2012-11-19 10:52 -- John Hawks

    Larry Moran describes a lecture by Michael Behe, an advocate of intelligent design arguments: "Michael Behe in Toronto, Part 1". Moran didn't care for the lecture. I wanted to react to this comment:

    This is one of the distinguishing characteristics of kooks. If you have to defend your views by pointing out that many great scientific ideas were initially rejected by the scientific community then you've already lost the battle. No legitimate scientist does this.

    Some scientists unfortunately do do this. Especially in paleoanthropology. As in, "They all scoffed at Dart, too". Or, "They all said Neandertals were just pathological modern humans, too". Yes, former paleoanthropologists faced challenges in having their ideas accepted. It is the nature of science. It doesn't follow that your ideas are correct.

    I think paleoanthropologists should take Moran's words seriously. Great scientists overcome challenges. Kooky scientists try to make their own trivial challenges sound like the great intellectual battles of history.

    Tags: 
    pseudoscience
    creationism

  • Mailbag: New Age wackos

    Wed, 2011-11-23 08:52 -- John Hawks

    While looking for something else on youtube I stumbled on a video by a New Age wacko named [name redacted]. Part of his schtick is the claim that human DNA is changing rapidly and building up to some kind of big transformation in Dec 2012. I suppose it is inevitable that one's work can be used by anyone, but I thought you might like to know that yours is being invoked by this charlatan.

    Thank you so much, I appreciate it. You're right, many, many people are out there finding ways to misappropriate our work -- used to be mainly creationists but lately I have more and more New Age-types.

    Tags: 
    mailbag
    pseudoscience

  • Bigfoot movies and pseudoscience TV

    Tue, 2011-06-28 13:10 -- John Hawks

    One of the people responsible for the Blair Witch Project is now making a movie about Sasquatch:

    Titled Exists, the movie is described as following “a group of twentysomethings who take a trip to a cabin deep in the wooded wilderness and are methodically hunted by a Bigfoot-like beast.” Produced by Amber films and written by Sanchez and frequent collaborator Jamie Nash, he said that this is the first movie in a trilogy “exploring and reinventing the Bigfoot myth.”

    A trilogy! Like in the second one, the people could find the video from the first one? Or maybe, it's like "Bride of Bigfoot"?

    Personally, I'd like to see something more along the lines of that Animal Planet show gone horribly wrong. You know, Finding Bigfoot:

    From small towns in the South to remote areas of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, four eccentric but passionate members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) embark on one single-minded mission: to find the elusive "creature" known as Bigfoot or the Sasquatch.

    It would be awesomely bad television if Finding Bigfoot just turned out to be a setup for a fictional ending where the principals get smashed up by Sasquatch in a Blair Witch-like way.

    Because as it is, Finding Bigfoot is just plain bad television. Last week, the show informed us that "skunk apes" (a southern U.S. term for Sasquatch) get their smell by absorbing methane as they hide in underground alligator dens.

    I kid you not. It's not even good camp. It's rotten, absorbing-methane-from-the-alligator-dens camp.

    Pseudoscience TV programs like Ghost Hunters and movies like Paranormal Activity are basically using the same cinematic vocabulary to tell fictional stories. All of them draw on Blair Witch as a forerunner of the genre. I remember before Blair Witch was being shown in theaters, parts of it were actually run on local-access cable channels. I think it was some kind of viral marketing scheme. Like, "Who are these scared kids running around in the woods?" Today's shows are just capitalizing on the same approach.

    There's more to it than playing on the assumption that shaky and grainy video are "raw" and "unedited." That's not enough in today's reality-infused TV spectrum. The pseudoscience programs draw from the timing and visual angles from horror movies, much of it grifted from classic Hitchcock. There's humor -- another Hitchcock element. Every one of these shows has a cocky "team leader" who might be a casting double for one of Steven Spielberg's casting doubles of the classic Hitchcock characters. Especially the perfect archetype of the genre: Jimmy Stewart's droll photojournalist from Rear Window. Several pseudoscience programs have a cast of young "apprentice" hunters, whose fumbling with the equipment helps explain the imperfect nature of the "evidence", and whose portrayal of fear allows the program to portray suspense while maintaining the apparent authority of the "experienced" hunters.

    What freedom they've unleashed! They've trashed the usual conceit that some "rogue scientists" are going against the mainstream consensus.

    I think that tells us quite a lot about the media environment. Ten years ago, the pseudoscience TV scene was dominated by programs that used a traditional documentary approach. Talk to "experts", go on at great length about "mysterious evidence" such as grainy photographs, bring in document analysts and authors of "investigative books". Above all, no main character, only a disembodied narrator holding the story together.

    That kind of storytelling is intrinsically dull. I write that with some sadness, because this boring "high documentary" model is what passes for mainstream science documentary filmmaking. The style was designed to sell Polident and Depends to an aging audience who tuned in to the History Channel for Hitler documentaries. Probably the style was at apex when NBC was doing Noah's Ark documentaries on prime time broadcast TV in the mid-1990's. Today, the "high documentary" can still get ratings in the pseudoscience TV world -- History Channel's Ancient Aliens is one prominent example, National Geographic's recent Bigfoot film is another.

    But beginning in the early 2000's, a more reality-TV-influenced style of pseudoscience programming started to show up, first in late night syndication and later as regular prime-time cable network offerings. Now it's dominant: Get a crew of nobodies together, call one of them the "leader" to uphold some Ghostbusters-derived evidentiary standard, and shoot video in a dark place. Don't run cheap ads for Polident and commemorative coins, instead run expensive ads for movies and internet dating services.

    I still think it would be genius if one of these shows actually followed through by becoming a scripted horror program. Mainly, I'd like to see Sasquatch smashing these punks like the evil gorillas from Congo.

    Tags: 
    movies
    tv
    Bigfoot
    pseudoscience
    Synopsis: 
    Why can't they make a Bigfoot program where the "investigators" are in real jeopardy?

  • Houdini and Doyle

    Thu, 2011-03-31 08:20 -- John Hawks

    John Rennie wrote last week on the occasion of Houdini's birthday about the great magician's efforts to disabuse the spiritualist beliefs of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creater of Sherlock Holmes ("How did Houdini trick Conan Doyle?"). Rennie briefly describes the setup, which ends poorly:

    Houdini then explained that he had done the whole thing through simple trickery and implored Conan Doyle to give up his spiritualist beliefs. Alas, he failed: not only did Conan Doyle continue to believe in mediums but he suspected that Houdini knowingly or unknowingly used his own supernatural gifts in the performance of his escape acts.

    Not so surprising. As of yet, none of the commenters have worked out just how Houdini may have managed the trick that so convinced Conan Doyle of his psychic powers, involving magic writing of a secret message on a slate.

    Tags: 
    Houdini
    skepticism
    pseudoscience

  • Kaku cockup

    Thu, 2011-02-17 00:16 -- John Hawks

    I can't bear to watch it again, and I don't see why I should tolerate anyone else having to watch it. But I can't sit quietly while physicist Michio Kaku tells us how human evolution has stopped.

    I'm telling you, don't go watch it. DON'T DO IT!

    Oh, heck, how did that get there?

    Don't press play, whatever you do. I'm warning you.

    Kaku wants to tell you all about how life in the forest used to make us run fast, but now we don't have to do that anymore. He says that life on isolated island continents, like Australia, would rapidly accelerate our evolution. But today jet planes will spread your genes across the world, so our evolution has stopped.

    Or, no, it's not all our evolution that's stopped -- Kaku says that's still going on because our molecules can change. No, it's gross evolution that has stopped. You know, like making our brains twice as big -- that would be gross.

    What about genetic engineering, you ask? Well, Kaku says that changing genes is very painful. And we can't make pigs with wings, so why would we bother? No, many decades from now, humans will look pretty much the way they do now.

    Well, you can't say I didn't warn you. That's today's "Big Think" for you -- timely news you can use. But no flying pigs.

    DERP!

    (via Pharyngula)

    Tags: 
    acceleration
    media
    pseudoscience
    humor
    physics

  • "Are you the spirit of an ancient king?"

    Thu, 2010-09-16 23:20 -- John Hawks

    I enjoy "Destination Truth" and "Ghost Hunters". Of course, they're totally fake.

    Like tonight, for example, the "Destination Truth" team is walking around Angkor at night. Well, logically it's always at night, because otherwise how could you use the FLIR camera? And in their typical way, they're asking if any spirits are present.

    "Is someone here?"

    "Are you the spirit of an ancient king?"

    These are intended to get "paranormal evidence" down on the EVP -- that's "electronic voice phenomenon" -- recorder. Evidence frequently emerges, almost-voices saying almost-words, that sound really not very much like words even when the team primes viewers with an interpretation.

    There's really only one thing I keep wondering. Why are these ancient Khmer ghosts supposed to speak English?

    This is especially irritating to Gretchen, who notices how often the producers put subtitles so that we Americans can understand the accented speech of their local guides. I guess the dead must have better language training than the living!

    Tags: 
    pseudoscience
    tv

  • "Ancient satnav"

    Tue, 2010-01-19 07:30 -- John Hawks

    Ben Goldacre's "Bad science" column in The Guardian features an example of coincidence and the overactive imagination run loose on a map of prehistoric British monuments:

    [Tom] Brooks has proved, he explains, that there were keen mathematicians here 5,000 years ago, millennia before the Greeks invented geometry: "Such is the mathematical precision, it is inconceivable that this work could have been carried out by the primitive indigenous culture we have always associated with such structures … all this suggests a culture existing in these islands in the past quite outside our expectation and experience today." He does not rule out extra terrestrial help.

    ...

    Matt Parker, [Brooks'] nemesis, is based in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London. He has applied the same techniques used by Brooks to another mysterious and lost civilisation.

    "We know so little about the ancient Woolworths stores," he explains...

    From there follows an inspired illustration of coincidences in large sets of spatial data.

    (via Why Evolution Is True)

    Tags: 
    pseudoscience

  • Ready for birdcage lining

    Wed, 2010-01-13 21:03 -- John Hawks

    What we're up against:

    His 13 books, with names like “Genesis Revisited” and “The Earth Chronicles,” have sold millions of copies and been translated into 25 languages.

    ...

    The planet’s inhabitants were technologically advanced humanlike beings, Mr. Sitchin said, standing about nine feet tall. Some 450,000 years ago, they detected reserves of gold in southeast Africa and made a colonial expedition to Earth, splashing down in what is now the Persian Gulf.

    Mr. Sitchin said these Nibiru-ites recruited laborers from Earth’s erect primates to build eight great cities. Enki, who became the Sumerians’ god of science, bestowed some of the Nibiru-ites’ advanced genetic makeup upon these bipeds so they could work as miners.

    This is how Mr. Sitchin explains what scientists attribute to evolution.

    That's in the NY Times today.

    Tags: 
    pseudoscience
    cult archaeology

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Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.