Pseudoscience and Superstition: Things I Don't Believe In

At the borders of science lurks a range of ideas that are appealing, but that have not been conscientiously worked over with a baloney detection kit: the notion, say, that the Earth's surface is on the inside, not the outside, of a sphere; or claims that you can levitate yourself by meditating and that ballet dancers and basketball players routinely get up so high by levitating; or the proposition that I have something called a soul, made not of matter or energy, but of something else for which there is no other evidence, and which after my death might return to animate a cow or a worm.

Typical offerings of pseudoscience and superstition are: 

• acupuncture
• alchemy
• alien abductions
• astrology
• demons
• dowsing
• the Bermuda Triangle
• biblical scientific foresight
• "Big Foot" and the Loch Ness monster
• ghosts
• homeopathy
• "lucky" numbers
• extrasensory perception (ESP), such as telepathy and "remote viewing" of distant places
• creation science and theories such as intelligent design
• the belief that 13 is an "unlucky" number (because of which many office buildings and hotels in America pass directly from the 12th to the 14th floors -- why take chances?)
• bleeding statues
• crop circles
• transcendental meditation feats
• the conviction that carrying the severed foot of a rabbit around with you brings good luck
• the belief that razor blades stay sharper when kept inside small cardboard pyramids, and other tenets of "pyramidology"
• phone calls (none of them collect) from the dead
• the alleged discovery that untrained flatworms can learn a task by eating the ground-up remains of other, better educated flatworms
• "sensitives" who, when carelessly blindfolded, read books with their fingertips
• the prophecies of Nostradamus
• the notion that more crimes are committed when the Moon is full
• palmistry
• tarot reading
• numerology
• "photography" of past events, such as the crucifixion of Jesus
• Edgar Cayce (who predicted that in the 1960s the "lost" continent of Atlantis would "rise") and other "prophets," sleeping and awake
• Ouija boards
• water remembering what molecules used to be dissolved in it
• telling character from facial features or bumps on the head
• the "hundredth monkey" confusion and other claims that whatever a small fraction of us wants to be true really is true
• UFOs
• dianetics and scientology
• faith healers
• haunted houses
• magic waters
• reincarnation
• human beings spontaneously bursting into flame and being burned to a crisp
• perpetual motion machines, promising unlimited supplies of energy
• the systematically inept predictions of Jeane Dixon (who "predicted" a 1953 Soviet invasion of Iran and in 1965 that the USSR would beat the U.S. to put the first human on the Moon) and other professional "psychics"
• parapsychology
• the Jehovah's Witnesses' prediction that the world would end in 1917, and many similar prophecies
• psychic spoon benders
• Carlos Castaneda and "sorcery"
• Anatoly Kashpirovsky -- a faith healer who remotely cures diseases ranging from hernias to AIDS by glaring at you out of your television
• claims of finding the remains of Noah's Ark
• accounts of a small brontosaurus crashing through the rain forests of the Congo Republic in our time

Some claims are hard to test -- for example, if an expedition fails to find the ghost or the brontosaurus, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Others are easier -- for example, flatworm cannibalistic learning. A few -- for example, perpetual motion machines -- can be excluded on grounds of fundamental physics.

The question, as always, is how good is the evidence? The burden of proof surely rests on the shoulders of those who advance such claims. Some people hold that skepticism is a liability, that true science is investigated without skepticism. They are perhaps halfway there. But halfway doesn't do it.

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