Abominable Science

by Daniel Loxton

  A recent headline from CNN reads, “China Shoots Up Rankings as Science Power, Study Finds.”124 As the article summarizes, a study conducted by the Royal Society, the world’s oldest and foremost scientific organization, found that although the United States is still the dominant scientific power in terms of scientific publications, China has experienced a “meteoric rise” in scientific publications and new research.125 In 2003, fewer than 5 percent of scientific articles were published in China. By 2008, 10 percent were, putting China second only to the United States. Meanwhile, the American share of scientific publications dropped from 26 to 21 percent. According to Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, chair of the advisory group for the study:

  The scientific world is changing and new players are fast appearing. Beyond the emergence of China, we see the rise of South-East Asian, Middle Eastern, North African and other nations. The increase in scientific research and collaboration, which can help us to find solutions to the global challenges we now face, is very welcome. However, no historically dominant nation can afford to rest on its laurels if it wants to retain the competitive economic advantage that being a scientific leader brings.126

  China is shooting up in many rankings, making it the second-largest economic power as well. Seemingly unencumbered by global-warming deniers, stem-cell-research antagonists, or creationists who interfere with science policy, China is making huge investments in new technologies for a world that is facing the consequences of global warming and limited oil,127 while the United States and the United Kingdom slip down the rankings of countries investing in green technology.128 Germany and several Scandinavian countries have long led the world in their investments in green technology and their commitment to lowering energy use and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions—yet their economies are stronger than those of the United States and most of the nations in southern Europe.129

  Americans still hold the lion’s share of Nobel Prizes in the sciences and have since 1956, when the effect of Germany’s experiment with Hitler, descent into anti-Semitism, and instigation of World War II caused a “brain drain” of scientists from Germany to the United States and other countries and ended German supremacy in science.130 But how long can the American preeminence in science last when the pernicious influences of creationism, paranormalism, and dedicated anti-science lobbies continue to erode the scientific culture?

  Some people deny that the United States, the dominant world power since 1945, could ever cede its place to another country. But dominance is tied to innovation, which is tied to science. As historians have pointed out, many other powerful societies with enormous economic reach and once-flourishing arts and sciences have declined. Only 150 years ago, the British Empire of Queen Victoria spanned the globe, but now Great Britain is a relatively minor player among international powers, as it lost most of its economic dominance and colonial empire during and after World Wars I and II. The once-mighty Soviet Union fell in just a few years in the 1990s, along with the regimes of the nations it controlled. For ten years, the United States has been wasting trillions of dollars on wars that have cost thousands of American lives, while running up huge budget deficits in a time of economic recession. Americans like to think of their country as exceptional, but that is not the lesson that history teaches.

  Widespread paranormal and pseudoscientific thinking ought not to be dismissed as charming eccentricity; nor is the endless conveyor belt of monster media merely innocent entertainment. Paranormal hype makes money for its purveyors, but that easy profitability comes at the shared cost of encouraging anti-scientific and anti-rational thinking. Such thinking can be directly harmful, especially when it intersects with public health; moreover, the erosion of scientific understanding robs us of opportunities for success and understanding that we wish for our children. For these reasons, leading American scientists have asked us for decades to reach for higher standards, and asked us to care more deeply about truth. This stuff matters. As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explains:

  If you are scientifically literate the world looks very different to you. It’s not just a lot of mysterious things happening. There is a lot we understand out there. And that understanding empowers you to, first, not be taken advantage of by others who do understand it. And second there are issues that confront society that have science as their foundation. If you are scientifically illiterate, in a way, you are disenfranchising yourself from the democratic process, and you don’t even know it.131

  Carl Sagan was even more blunt: “We’ve arranged a global civilization in which the most critical elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.”132

  NOTES

  1. CRYPTOZOOLOGY

  1 “Americans ‘Find Body of Bigfoot,’” August 15, 2008, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7564635.stm; “CNN—Has Bigfoot Been Found?” August 17, 2008, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMrKrphWAEk&feature=related; Ki Mae Heussner, “Legend of Bigfoot: Discovery? Try Hoax,” August 15, 2008, ABC News, http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=5583488&page=1; “Bigfoot Body Found in Georgia!!!!” August 14, 2008, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NzB5xfTSDY (all accessed October 10, 2011).

  2 “Georgia Bigfoot Tracker,” August 14, 2008, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_zFoCo_Tnc (accessed October 10, 2011).

  3 Writing about the collaboration between “fast-talking Tom Biscardi” and Bigfoot hoaxer Ivan Marx, reporter Richard Harris was already asking in 1973 whether the for-profit team was composed of “adventurers or con-men” (“The Bigfoot: Fact, Fiction, or Flim-Flam?” Eureka [Calif.] Times-Standard, June 8, 1973, 13).

  4 Matthew Moneymaker, “The 2008 Dead Bigfoot Hoax from Georgia,” Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, http://www.bfro.net/hoax.asp#biscardi (accessed October 10, 2011).

  5 “HOAX! Georgia Bigfoot Body Press Conference,” August 15, 2008, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEinriwAPnQ (accessed October 10, 2011).

  6 The image is available at “Georgia Gorilla: Bigfoot Body’s First Photo,” August 12, 2008, CryptoMundo, http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/ga-gorilla-pic/ (accessed October 10, 2011).

  7 “Alleged ‘Bigfoot’ Finders: Costume Was Filled with Roadkill,” August 20, 2008, WSBTV, http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/alleged-bigfoot-finders-costume-was-filled-with-ro/nFBhF/ (accessed February 7, 2012).

  8 Quoted in Paul Wagenseil, “Bigfoot Body Revealed to Be Halloween Costume,” August 20, 2008, Fox News, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,406101,00.html (accessed October 10, 2011).

  9 “Bigfoot Hoaxers Say It Was Just ‘a Big Joke,’” August 21, 2008, CNN, http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/08/21/bigfoot.hoax/ (accessed February 7, 2012).

  10 Quoted in Steve Bass, “NGCSU Prof Shed Light on Bigfoot Hoax,” November 6, 2008, The Saint: The Online Student Newspaper for North Georgia College and State University, http://www.ngcsuthesaint.com/2008/11/ngcsu-prof-shed-light-on-bigfoot-hoax/ (accessed October 10, 2011).

  11 For an excellent essay on the way science is practiced and the way creationists subvert these processes, see Stephen Jay Gould, “An Essay on a Pig Roast,” Natural History, January 1989, 14–25, reprinted in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1991), 432–447.

  12 Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Darkness (New York: Ballantine, 1996), 30.

  13 Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (New York: Holt, 2011).

  14 Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York: Freeman, 1997), 48; Sagan, Demon-Haunted World, 10.

  15 “Carl Sagan on Alien Abduction,” Nova, February 27, 1996, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/sagan-alien-abduction.html (accessed December 22, 2011); Marcello Truzzi, “On the Extraordinary: An Att
empt at Clarification,” Zetetic Scholar 1 (1978): 11.

  16 National Center for Science Education, “Project Steve,” October 17, 2008, http://ncse.com/taking-action/project-steve (accessed October 10, 2011).

  17 Cryptozoological Realms, “Cryptozoology Biographies,” http://www.cryptozoology.net/english/biographies/biographies_index.html (accessed October 10, 2011).

  18 See, for example, John Bindernagel, North America’s Great Ape: The Sasquatch (Courtenay, B.C.: Beachcomber Books, 1998), x.

  19 Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark, Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature (New York: Simon and Schuster / Fireside, 1999), 102.

  20 See, for example, British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, “Mokele Mbembe,” http://bcscc.ca/mokele.htm (accessed January 28, 2012).

  21 Daniel Loxton asked the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (the regional accreditation body for degree-granting higher-education institutions in Georgia and other southern states) whether Immanuel Baptist College has ever been accredited to grant academic degrees in Georgia. A representative responded, “Immanuel Baptist College has never been accredited by SACSCOC” (Terri Latimer, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, February 15, 2012).

  22 In the Matter of Warnborough College, Docket Nos. 95-164-ST and 96-60-SF, United States Department of Education, August 9, 1996, http://oha.ed.gov/cases/1995-164st.html (accessed February 5, 2012).

  23 Sarah Lyall, “Americans Say a College Near Oxford Duped Them,” New York Times, October 2, 1995, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE1D91531F931A35753C1A963958260 (accessed February 5, 2012).

  24 Ben S. Roesch and John L. Moore, “Cryptozoology,” in The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience, ed. Michael Shermer (New York: ABC-Clio, 2002), 1:71–78.

  25 Darren Naish, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, February 5, 2012.

  26 Matt Cartmill, reviews of Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America’s Enduring Legend, by David J. Daegling, and Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, by Jeff Meldrum, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 135, no. 1 (2008): 117–118; David J. Daegling, Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America’s Enduring Legend (Lanham, Md.: Altamira Press, 2004).

  27 Thomas Henry Huxley, “Biogenesis and Abiogenesis” (1870), in Critiques and Addresses (London: Macmillan, 1873), 229.

  28 Quoted in Michael Shermer, “Show Me the Body,” Scientific American, May 2003, http://www.michaelshermer.com/2003/05/show-me-the-body/ (accessed October 10, 2011).

  29 Elizabeth F. Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness, and the Expert Who Put Memory on Trial (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Austin Cline, “Eyewitness Testimony and Memory,” About.com, http://atheism.about.com/od/parapsychology/a/eyewitness.htm (accessed October 10, 2011).

  30 Daniel Simons, “Selective Attention Test,” March 10, 2010, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo (accessed October 10, 2011).

  31 A. Leo Levin and Harold Kramer, Trial Advocacy Problems and Materials (Mineola, N.Y.: Foundation Press, 1968), 269.

  32 Elizabeth F. Loftus, Memory: Surprising New Insights into How We Remember and Why We Forget (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1980), 37.

  33 Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell, Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World’s Most Elusive Creatures (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 160–163.

  34 Quoted in Elsbeth Bothe, “Facing the Beltway Snipers, Profilers Were Dead Wrong,” Baltimore Sun, December 15, 2002, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2002–12–15/entertainment/0212160297_1_van-zandt-serial-killers-snipers (accessed October 10, 2011).

  35 David Rennie, “Sniper Police Deny “White Man in White Van” Theory Hampered Search,” Telegraph, October 28, 2002, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1411536/Sniper-police-deny-white-man-in-white-van-theory-hampered-search.html (accessed November 21, 2012).

  36 Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things, 88–89.

  37 Ibid., 89–91.

  38 Susan A. Clancy, Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 33.

  39 The search for the cryptid Mokele Mbembe provides a stark example: the interrogation of Congolese villagers by Roy Mackal’s armed party in 1981. When local informants denied knowledge of the creature, Mackal “confronted” them with “a barrage of information” until they became “visibly disturbed, and some, in their confusion, admitted to a great deal more knowledge” (A Living Dinosaur? In Search of Mokele-Mbembe [Leiden: Brill, 1987], 160).

  40 See, for example, Loren Coleman, “The Meaning of Cryptozoology: Who Invented the Term Cryptozoology?” 2003, The Cryptozoologist, www.lorencoleman.com/cryptozoology_faq.html (accessed February 12, 2011), and “Cryptozoology’s Fathers,” June 19, 2010, CryptoMundo, http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/czfather/ (accessed May 5, 2012).

  41 Bernard Heuvelmans, Sur la piste des bêtes ignorées (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1955); Lucien Blancou, Géographie cynégétique du monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959).

  42 Bernard Heuvelmans, In the Wake of the Sea Serpents, trans. Richard Garnett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 508.

  43 The word “cryptozoological” appears at a line break and so is hyphenated: “cryptozoological.” It is unknown if the reviewer intended the word to have a hyphen, but he used it in much the same way that writers use it today. See Ralph Thompson, review of The Lungfish and the Unicorn, by Willy Ley, New York Times, April 22, 1941, 19; and Willy Ley, The Lungfish and the Unicorn: An Excursion into Romantic Zoology (New York: Modern Age Books, 1941).

  44 A. C. Oudemans, The Great Sea-serpent: An Historical and Critical Treatise. With the Reports of 187 Appearances … the Suppositions and Suggestions of Scientific and Non-scientific Persons, and the Author’s Conclusions (Leiden: Brill, 1892).

  45 Coleman and Clark, Cryptozoology A to Z.

  46 Darren Naish, “Monster Hunting? Well, No. No,” October 10, 2007, Tetrapod Zoology, http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2007/10/monster_hunting_well_no_no.php (accessed October 10, 2011).

  47 Bernard Heuvelmans, “How Many Animal Species Remain to Be Discovered?” Cryptozoology 2 (1983): 5.

  48 Bernard Heuvelmans, “Annotated Checklist of Apparently Unknown Animals with Which Cryptozoology Is Concerned,” Cryptozoology 5 (1986): 1–26.

  49 Naish, “Monster Hunting?”

  50 Darren Naish, “Multiple New Species of Large Living Mammal,” June 1, 2007, Tetrapod Zoology, http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2007/06/multiple_new_species_of_large.php (accessed October 10, 2011).

  51 Ralph M. Wetzel, Robert E. Dubos, Robert L. Martin, and Philip Myers, “Catagonus, an ‘Extinct’ Peccary, Alive in Paraguay,” Science 189 (1975): 379–381.

  52 N. F. Goldsmith and I. Yanai-Inbar, “Coelacanthid in Israel’s Early Miocene? Latimeria Tests Schaeffer’s Theory,” Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 17, supplement 3 (1997): 49A; T. Ørvig, “A Vertebrate Bone from the Swedish Paleocene,” Geologiska Föreningens i Stockholm Förhandlingar 108 (1986): 139–141.

  53 Michael A. Woodley, Darren Naish, and Hugh P. Shanahan, “How Many Extant Pinniped Species Remain to Be Described?” Historical Biology 20 (2008): 225–235.

  54 Darren Naish, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, April 30, 2012.

  55 Andrew R. Solow and Woollcott K. Smith, “On Estimating the Number of Species from the Discovery Record,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 272 (2005): 285–287.

  56 So devastating has the beetle infestation become in the new global-warming climate regime that British Columbia’s forest industry currently depends on the logging of dead trees that were killed five or ten years ago by beetles. With the looming exhaustion of these stands of dead trees as a result of urgent harvesting, fires, and rot, the province faces such a catastrophic shortage of trees that its government has considered opening up the remaining protected
areas of forest for logging—not to save the industry, but simply to delay the predicted loss of 11,000 forestry jobs. See, for example, “Confidential Pine Beetle Report Warns of ‘Economic and Social’ Havoc,” April 18, 2012, CBC News, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/04/18/bc-timber-supply-mpb.html (accessed April 28, 2012).

  57 James H. Brown and Brian A. Maurer, “Macroecology: The Division of Food and Space Among Species on Continents,” Science 243 (1989): 1145–1150. Other important publications include James H. Brown, Pablo A. Marquet, and Mark L. Taper, “Evolution of Body Size: Consequences of an Energetic Definition of Fitness,” American Naturalist 142 (1993): 573–584; James H. Brown and Brian A. Maurer, “Evolution of Species Assemblages: Effects of Energetic Constraints and Species Dynamics on the Diversification of the North American Avifauna,” American Naturalist 130 (1987): 1–17; James H. Brown and Paul F. Nicoletto, “Spatial Scaling of Species Composition: Body Masses of North American Land Mammals,” American Naturalist 138 (1991): 1478–1512; William A. Calder III, Size, Function, and Life History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); John Damuth, “Home Range, Home Range Overlap, and Species Energy Use Among Herbivorous Mammals,” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 15 (1981): 185–193; A. S. Harestad and F. L. Bunnell, “Home Range and Body Weight—A Reevaluation,” Ecology 60 (1979): 389–402; Stan L. Linstedt, Brian J. Miller, and Steven W. Buskirk, “Home Range, Time, and Body Size in Mammals,” Ecology 67 (1986): 413–418; Brian K. McNab, “Bioenergetics and the Determination of Home Range Size,” American Naturalist 47 (1963): 133–140; Robert Henry Peters, The Ecological Implications of Body Size (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Michael Reiss, “Scaling of Home Range Size: Body Size, Metabolic Needs and Ecology,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 3 (1988): 85–86; Marina Silva and John A. Downing, “The Allometric Scaling of Density and Body Mass: A Nonlinear Relationship for Terrestrial Mammals,” American Naturalist 145 (1995): 704–727; and Robert K. Swihart, Norman A. Slade, and Bradley J. Bergstrom, “Relating Body Size to the Rate of Home Range Use in Mammals,” Ecology 69 (1988): 393–399.