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I Had a Skeptic "Win"
View the video version of this discussion on YouTube. I had a skeptic “win.” That is, I produced content partially inspired by someone’s misconception; this same someone saw my content, and then...
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The 10 Percent Brain Myth
This is an excerpt from Junior Skeptic 37 (published in 2010 inside Skeptic magazine Vol. 15, No. 4), which is quick a ten-page of the “Top Ten Busted Myths.” Junior Skeptic is written for (older)...
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The Plane Truth: Noted Skeptic’s Newly Published (Posthumous) Book About Flat...
Explore Bob Schadewald’s final project, a book on the topic of his most specialized area of skeptical expertise: Flat Earth theories. I’m very pleased to learn that The Plane Truth, the unfinished...
View ArticleSo… Who ARE You Gonna Call?
Outside of Junior Skeptic (my primary ongoing project) a surprising amount of my professional output—most of my blogging, stage appearances, op-eds (PDF), and interviews—is given over to the oddly...
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I Don’t Know What You Mean
Painting by Daniel Loxton, c.1999. Acrylic on canvas. 24″x36″. The journal Judgment and Decision Making has stirred considerable interest with a recent paper titled “On the Reception and Detection of...
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Dark Matter and Periodic Mass Extinctions? Not So Fast!
The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. —Thomas Henry Huxley In recent weeks, physicist Lisa Randall has been promoting her new book, Dark Matter and the...
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Uncovering Archaeology Fantasies
When I started the podcast MonsterTalk, an official podcast of Skeptic Magazine, one of our earliest episodes was going to be about “giants.” I didn’t know what angle I wanted to take on the topic...
View ArticleIs It Irrational to Play the Lottery?
With the recent Powerball mania I thought it would be a good time to talk about how to tell a sucker bet from a fair bet, and whether playing the lottery is a rational behavior. Whenever the lottery...
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Good Grief, Skip! Murder, Mourning, or Anthropomorphism?
Giving Skippy human like expressions and agency was more fantasy than fact. If you’re over the age of thirty and grew up in Australia, there’s a good chance you know who Skippy is. This famous...
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Taking a Shot at the Boot Hill Ghost
In the online world of allegedly paranormal photos, you will find one referred to as the Boot Hill Ghost. In this modern photo (taken in 1996) a man in the foreground stands in Tombstone Arizona’s...
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Vikings Exhibition at Discovery Times Square: Setting History Straight-ish
Entrance to Vikings Exhibit, Field Museum. Last year, I had the opportunity to visit a Vikings exhibition at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. I had been invited to Chicago to give a...
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The Discovery of Richard III’s Grave and the Fallibility of Memory
Richard III’s tomb at Leicester Cathedral. Photo by Isananni One year ago, Richard III, one of England’s most notorious kings, was reburied at Leicester Cathedral after a series of celebrations and...
View ArticleBigfoot Versus the Quest for World Peace?
For the entire history of scientific skepticism, folks in our weird and wonderful little field have heard two criticisms offered with metronomic regularity from people who are “skeptical of the...
View ArticleFringe Claims: Unified by Neglect, Structural Similarity, and Direct...
A recent Scientific American blog post raised a very tedious and very old complaint about scientific skepticism—in essence, “Paranormal and pseudoscientific claims are trivial. Why don’t you do...
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The Complexity of Alien Abduction and the Multidisciplinary Nature of Fringe...
Image by Daniel Loxton with Jim W.W. Smith and Jason LoxtonIn my last post I explained that the teeming menagerie of seemingly dissimilar fringe claims studied by skeptics are unified by the neglect of...
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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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