Fighting the Peril of Silly Science

The East Coast has its Bermuda Triangle, where curious phenomena occur in a vortex of mystery.

We have the Bemused Triangle, where curious phenomena get scientifically sliced and diced, titrated and microtomed, to determine whether what emerges at the other end is anything but baloney.

The Bemused Triangle is anchored at Caltech. From there, it takes a scalene turn to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, then zigs over to its apex, an Altadena garage where three people and a dog named Darwin publish a magazine that stands against silly science, pseudo-science and humbug.

The magazine is named Skeptic. Every three months, 25,000 people buy it. Its editorial board includes Carl Sagan, entertainer Steve Allen and psychologist Carol Tavris. Every month, its Skeptics Society packs a Caltech auditorium with lecture topics like “Quantum Quackery” and “Afrocentrism, Racism and Other Myths.”

Publishing Skeptic magazine here is akin to setting up an NRA booth at a gun control convention. Virtually every -ism and -ology and -osophy that could find rent space out here flourished. Southern California was “a circus without a tent,” wrote historian Carey McWilliams--ground zero for crackpots, necromancers and quacks who, like the local geraniums, “grow large, rank and garish.”

Ours is no lock on the market, in either time or space. Witchcraft in Salem, mesmerism in France, the “face” on Mars, and telephone hotlines staffed by “licensed” psychics. To these, Skeptic magazine comes like a worried nurse to an epidemic, bearing doses of “show me” vaccine.

In the service of science, Skeptic publisher Michael Shermer, his wife, Kim Ziel Shermer, and artist Pat Linse walked through a bed of hot coals right there in Altadena, to demonstrate that the secret is physics, not mystics.

Skepticism is a method, Shermer repeats, not a position. Skeptic is small-d democratic and small-c catholic in its appetite. In the latest issue, Louis Farrakhan and a hooded militiaman, twinned at opposite ends of the same conspiracy spectrum, pose as the dour couple in “American Gothic.” Recovered memory syndrome, leftist science, creationist science, the satanic numerology of a VISA card, the bell curve IQ theory, cryonics, AIDS conspiracies, Noah’s Ark hoaxes, paranormality, and the cult of Freud--it’s all up for the axing.

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Every day the mail brings the plaintive, the absurd, the vehement.

Shermer keeps a “theory of everything” file of articles--by “the world’s most controversial author” whom they had never heard of, by people “disproving” gravity, by unsung geniuses declaring “‘Hawking’s wrong, Einstein’s wrong, Newton’s wrong, but I’ve got it right.”’

Shermer jams the fat file into a drawer of other fat files. “These people aren’t stupid. It’s not ignorance. But the feeling among many is that there’s a conspiracy in science to cover up radical ideas, and particularly theirs.”

With science and technology now the single strongest cultural force, Shermer says, “pseudo-science attempts to look like science. It’s why fundamentalists call themselves creationist scientists, why New Age holistic health vendors talk about their ‘double-blind studies’ showing that extract of seaweed cures cancer.” It’s why cosmetic vendors in department stores wear lab coats, and the word “proof” puts a scientific imprimatur on the silliest notion.

But real science is a demanding lab partner; “I think” doesn’t cut it in calculus. “Science can be complex; it has to be mastered in a way, not necessarily your way.”

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But professor Shermer! (He teaches the history of science at Occidental College.) This stuff can be fun! Scanning the tabloids. A palm reading. Earthquake weather. JFK assassination theorizing. It’s easy, and you can try it at home, which can’t be said of, say, carbon-dating the Shroud of Turin.

The appeal of such fun--immediate, simple, obvious--is also its danger. A Canadian reader sent Shermer a sign from a bookstore: “NEW AGE SECTION MOVED TO SCIENCE SECTION” That, he wrote, “is the vilest embodiment of what you’re up against.”

When the fun turns to gullibility, when the fake supplants the real, when “The X-Files” becomes the standard for critical thinking, when, like Gresham’s law of money, bad science crowds out good--there’s the harm.

Shermer, who was once a born-again, understands human longing for mystery, for Something Else. His magazine keeps a distance from religion, except when religion nuzzles up to science to prove its points, like creationism; “to us, that’s fair game.”

But reassuringly, this credulous stuff only goes so far. “People might go to an alternative health care provider, but they wouldn’t go to an alternative airline--’Hey, let’s try this with two left wings!’ ”

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Social notes: By a Catholic bishop’s biblical calculation, the earth was created on a fall morning in 4004 BC, and thus is 6,000 years old this fall. Skeptic won’t be throwing the birthday party.