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A Look Back at Discovery’s Mermaids Hoaxes
This look back at Discovery’s 2012 and 2013 mermaids hoaxes is an excerpt from Junior Skeptic 48 (published in 2013 inside Skeptic magazine Vol. 18, No. 3). The damage done to English-language...
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Seeing Mermaids
“The Vision of Columbus” after de Bry, as it appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine No. 389, October 1882. (Daniel Loxton’s collection.) Mermaids—the topic of my Junior Skeptic 48 story bound inside...
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The American Medical Association and the Fight Against Quackery
A detail from the cover of the second edition of Nostrums and Quackery (1912), from the American Medical Association. Browse the first edition online at Archive.org. “The American Medical Association...
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It Coulda Been a Contender: A Paleontologist Reviews Jurassic World
Ever since Jurassic World (watch trailer) came out two weeks ago (and is now the fastest movie ever to make a billion dollars), people have been asking me again and again what I thought of the movie...
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What the Heck is a Biostratigrapher?
Jason Loxton during a 2010 research trip to study graptolites in China. What is “biostratigraphy,” and what on Earth does it have to do with sharks…or with pancakes? Listen to biostratigrapher Jason...
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The Odds Must Be Crazy?
Anna Maltese (left) presents Daniel Loxton with a bizarre coincidence after his talk at The Amazing Meeting 2014, while his wife Cheryl Hebert looks on. (Photograph by David Patton. Used with...
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A History of Life’s Vital Essence (Part 1): Fire and Gods
This post begins a three-part series exploring the history of vitalism. Continue on to Part 2 and Part 3. One of biology’s longest standing mysteries was explaining how complex life emerged from...
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A History of Life’s Vital Essence (Part 2): Vital Thinking
This post continues a three-part series exploring the history of vitalism. Read Part 1 and continue on to Part 3. A depiction of Paracelsus. This image was copied from a lost original which may have...
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A History of Life’s Vital Essence (Part 3): The Twilight of Vitalism
This post concludes a three-part series exploring the history of vitalism. Read Part 1 and Part 2. Image by Daniel Loxton and Jim W. W. Smith. Vitalism died a death of a thousand cuts. There was no...
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Why Smart Doesn’t Guarantee Rational, Part III
This is the third post in a three-part series. Read the previous two installments, “Why Smart People Are Not Always Rational” and “More On Why Smart People Are Not Always Rational.” This post is the...
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Science Affirmers
Order the book from Shop Skeptic In this blog and in my book Reality Check, I’ve frequently complained about science-denying politicians pushing policies which are in direct conflict with scientific...
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A New Ice Age? No, Bad Journalism Run Amok
Order the book from shop.skeptic.com A few weeks ago, the internet was abuzz with claims that scientists were predicting a “new Ice Age” around 2030. Many media outlets ran misleading pictures of...
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New Facts Concerning Goddard Squadron Photo
This post continues Blake’s exploration of the “Goddard’s Squadron Ghost” photo. Read his first post on the topic, “Should Goddard’s Squadron Drop Dead Fred?” (published February 2, 2015). Squadron...
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Pilgrimage to Bigfoot Country
Order the hardcover from Shop Skeptic Order the hardcover from Amazon Order the Kindle Edition Order the Apple iBook Last month I was doing geologic field work in northern California, and I had the...
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One Toke Over The Line, Sweet Shakespeare
So stoned he doesn’t realize his quill is nowhere near the paper. There is brand new evidence that Shakespeare was a pothead! This exciting story has appeared on the websites of TIME, the Los Angeles...
View ArticleResolving Conflicts in Findings: Vaccine Promotion is Tricky
A few months ago I wrote about the psychology of vaccine denial. In the post I discussed two publications, one of which (Nyhan, et al.) found: Corrective information reduced misperceptions about the...
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The Problematic Process of Cryptozoologification
How did the traditional character of the cannibal ogress Dzunuk’wa come to be claimed by cryptozoologists as a depiction of their hypothesized “Bigfoot” cryptid species? (Kwakwaka’wakw heraldic pole....
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A Rope of Sand
If my explorations of skeptical history have revealed an overall theme, it is that things don’t change that much. Always there are scoundrels, scams, and misapprehensions; always there are those who...
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The “Mandela Effect”
Former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa met with US President George W. Bush in the Oval Office in 2005—and yet, according to some people’s memories, Mandela died two decades earlier. (White...
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Tony Ortega’s Scientology Book Tour
(Photo credit: Jim Veihdeffer) Tony Ortega returned to his former stomping grounds in Phoenix on his book tour for The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology Tried to Destroy Paulette...
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