The Rise of Semi-Science

by
Dave Palmer
January 1996



The magazine article opens with the story of a Brooklyn attorney trying to decide if she should rent the videotape "Barney's Imagination Island" for her daughter. The learned counselor takes a small pendulum from her purse, suspends it over the tape, and says, "All right, now please tell me how much little Aliza would benefit from watching this tape, how much it would raise her social awareness, brighten her chakras, elevate her chi energy, and like that. And please let's try to be a little quicker about it." The pendulum begins to swing, indicating a rating scale of 1-100. Sadly for Barney, the pendulum only gives the tape a 12.

An article from some angel-eyed New Age rag? Perhaps a wacky satire in MAD Magazine? No such luck: it's from the January, 1996 issue of Smithsonian, a respected science and culture monthly published by the Smithsonian Institution. The article, "Urban New Agers have taken over the art of dowsing," actually goes downhill from there, running on for seven pages, with scarcely a hint that a skeptical viewpoint even exists. Worse, it's not an isolated incident, but part of a disturbing trend: pseudoscience is beginning to creep into heretofore respectable publications.

Visiting a bookstore or newsstand is getting to be a disheartening experience for the scientifically-minded. First we saw the flood of printed nonsense overflow the occult section and grow into sizable New Age racks, and from there, to the rest of the store. These days, when there is a science section at all, it frequently contains books about the `Monuments of Mars' or some creationist twaddle. Non-fiction sections are bulging with books on angels and alien abductions. A Canadian correspondent to SKEPTIC magazine recently reported that he saw a sign in a bookstore that read "new age section moved to science section."

The magazine racks are overflowing with not only outright pseudoscience, but also with an increasing number of `semi-science' periodicals, magazines that mix legitimate science writing with questionable science and outright junk. OMNI is the king of such publications, but others, such as Discover, are playing catch-up.

But now, it seems that we are starting to lose ground even in the few genuine sources of science journalism available to the general public. Respected, mainstream publications, such as Smithsonian, are slowly starting to slip credulous, pseudoscientific pieces in, where they acquire status by association.

The Smithsonian article mentioned above goes on to describe the phenomenon of "new dowsing," which employs not only dowsing rods, but also pendulums to pick videotapes, find lost people and possessions, locate "noxious rays," screen potential mates, and even communicate with animals. Most of the claims made are so patently absurd that the article says even `real' dowsers reject them.

A more disturbing article on dowsing appeared as a cover story, no less, in the August 15, 1995 issue of Science News, a highly-regarded science news weekly. The article, "Dowsing Expectations," ran for two pages, quite a lot in this slim newsletter. The claims made for dowsing were nowhere near as outrageous as the Smithsonian's article, and more of the skeptical viewpoint was presented. Overall, however, the subject was presented as if it were a genuine scientific controversy, on the order of classical Darwinism versus punctuated equilibrium. The skeptics were generally depicted as dismissing the concept more or less simply because it was unpalatable. The recollections of Robert Humphris, a dowser, found early in the article, illustrate the scientific rigor of the piece: after watching his son using coat hangers to dowse water pipes under their driveway, Humphris "...told him that he knew where the pipes entered the house... so it wasn't a fair test. But he said, try it yourself. I did. And lo and behold, my [coat hangers] crossed. After that, I was hooked."


Mainstream, big-city newspapers have never exactly been shining beacons of science literacy, but are now beginning to follow the profitable path of their more profligate cousins, the supermarket tabloids. Hardly a month goes by when the Los Angeles Times doesn't publish a large credulous article on alien encounters, ghosts, Bigfoot, `alternate medicine,' or ESP. For example, a front page story in the Jan 21, 1996 LA Times bore the headline "Science is Hot on the Heels of Bigfoot Legend," but contained very little of what might be termed `science.' It was the typical uncritical "with all those reports, it MUST be true" type of story, with barely a hint of a skeptical viewpoint. A fairly large amount of space was dedicated to an alleged Bigfoot sighting during an expedition that was led by Paul Freeman, an alleged Bigfoot hoaxer, who has admitted to trying to fake Bigfoot tracks in the past. Freeman's past pranks were dismissed with the statement by other expedition members that Freeman "could not have faked what they saw," but with no discussion of what made these people experts in such matters. When placed side-by-side with more legitimate stories, such articles become indistinguishable from `real news' by many readers.

Even genuine science journalism is becoming so riddled with basic errors that it's clear the authors have no real understanding of the subject. A couple of examples:

-The Dec 10, 1995 LA Times carried an article about the first reception of probe data from the Galileo mission to Jupiter. Although there are two previous references in the article to the ones and zeroes of the binary code used to transmit the data, late in the article, we find the paragraph: "Unlike the decimal system, based on the 10 fingers of human beings, the [Galileo] computers count with 16 digits." This is apparently a muddled reference to the hexadecimal, or base 16 numbering system, which engineers use as a convenience in displaying digital information in a compact form. All modern digital computers do all their work in binary, or base two numbering, which uses only two digits, zero and one. The presence of this paragraph in the story suggests that the writer did not understand this.

-The Jan 21, 1996 LA Times carried another article about planetary probes, this time an examination of NASA's change in philosophy toward smaller, cheaper missions. The opening paragraph of the article described a hypothetical future lipstick-sized probe on Mars, searching for "traces of frozen water that once might have formed CANALS." (emphasis mine) How these tiny probes would deduce the existence of presumably artificial waterways from a sliver of ice was not explained.


Scientific errors in science books are even more distressing. At least with errors in TV and newspapers, editors can claim the crush of deadline pressure for not always getting it right. In book publishing, the deadlines are measured in months rather than hours, so one should expect more quality control. This doesn't seem to be the case, however. Kenneth Davis' geography book "Don't Know Much About Geography" lives up to its title by presenting us with such information as: "Since it takes the Moon a little more than a day to orbit the Earth, there are two cycles of tides in roughly every 25 hours." Davis' earlier book, "Don't Know Much About History," contained similar howlers. The book "The Physics of Star Trek," written by Lawrence Krauss, physics department chairman at Case Western Reserve University, is aimed at a general audience, and explains the science speculations behind the popular TV show. The book contains at least four basic science errors, including the assertion that raindrops falling to Earth take on a tear shape because of gravity. In fact, falling drops are nearly spherical, and gravity has almost no effect on their shape.


It seems pointless to even mention science on television, what with the growing plague of shows depicting alien autopsies and hauntings. Nonetheless, there are a few shows, almost all of them on PBS or cable channels, which seem to be legitimate science. These too are starting to slip into the realm of semi-science. We're seeing more shows where some wide-eyed `researcher' like Alan Alda stares slack-jawed at a chimpanzee apparently making the sign language signs for "cookie now me fast," then declares that apes use human language. PBS recently aired a program about swimming with dolphins, hosted by the eminent marine biologist Robin Williams, who at one point referred to the dolphins as "fish." Although presented in the style of a legitimate science show, the program seemed to have no other purpose than to show Williams bothering some dolphins, then cracking jokes about it.

The cable TV Discovery Channel seems to be an entire channel devoted to semi-science. Both well-produced and mediocre shows on science and technology are tossed in willy-nilly with questionable programs and trash `mystical powers' shows.

CNN produces a weekly program called Science and Technology Week, but apparently can only find enough science and technology news to fill about 20 minutes a week...and that's before commercials. This is even AFTER stuffing the show with happy talk, cute animals, and the occasional extremely dubious story. Last year, they aired a lengthy piece about a couple of psychologists who claim their parrot understands human speech, and can even talk back, answering questions about the color of objects and so forth. Hey Polly, can you say "Clever Hans?"


The implications of all this are disturbing. The danger here is that when formerly respectable sources publish legitimate science articles with egregious errors, or credulous articles on unscientific trash like dowsing and alien abductions, the subjects acquire status and credibility by association. Less-sophisticated readers will assume that `if it's in this glossy science magazine, it MUST be true.' More scientifically literate readers are left at a loss wondering what ELSE in the story or the publication might be bogus.

There seems to be no obvious escape from this downward spiral. Editors and publishers, who are rarely scientifically literate, argue that they're only `giving the public what it wants,' and usually end up treating complaints about such articles with the same attitude they use for political discussions, that `there are two sides to every story.' Other writers have warned of the dangers of a widening gap between the informational haves and have-nots in our data-driven age. I think that misses the real issue somewhat: it is not the AMOUNT of information that is available, but its quality, that is most important. While just about everyone in the industrialized world is drowning in a flood of information, there are fewer and fewer people who can tell the difference between genuine science and junk...and the junk is driving out the quality. We may, indeed see the day soon when good science writing is ONLY available to those who know where to look and how to tell the good from the bad.


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