Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience is a term often used by those describing themselves as skeptics
and attacking those who investigate new and anomalous phenomena.
I believe there are not one, but two kinds of pseudoscience, the first relatively
harmless, the second potentially very dangerous.
I was recently sent a "scientific paper" by an
author who bemoaned the fact that the scientific establishment was deliberately
ignoring his discoveries. The very first sentence of his paper announced "Gravity
is the strongest known force. . ." In fact, of the four forces so far
recognised by physics, gravity is the weakest. But no amount of pointing this
out could shake the author from his convictions.
This first kind of pseudoscience, the most common kind, is harmless, because it is
in the nature of scientific debate that bad science is driven out by good. It
doesn’t matter how many people think or claim that gravity is the strongest
force -- experiment will always show it to be the weakest and no-one who
acquaints himself with the facts will ever be misled.
The second kind of pseudoscience is far more dangerous because it is
promulgated by professional scientists who should and do know better, and hence
is likely (indeed is intended) to be widely believed by lay people.
This kind of pseudoscience usually involves statements and arguments that
employ scientific language and sound as if they are scientifically based but
actually are no more than opinions disguised as fact. It is when the opinions
are wrong that the pseudoscience becomes dangerous.
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In this section I give several recent examples of
professional Pseudoscience, that are highly misleading. The
first, from the world of parapsychology, the second from the study of evolution
as well as a representative selection of Scientific Urban Myths. I also examine the home of institutional
pseudoscience, CSICOP, and look more closely at the $1 million challenge to
psychics by James Randi. I examine bogus attempts to export Darwinian ideas to
other branches of science and look at a recent example of pseudoscience from a
surprising source, BBC TV's QED programme which attempted to debunk the subject
of spontaneous human combustion by dubious means. Finally, I look at what
skepticism should mean in science and what, too often, it actually does mean.
