Category: News & Comment

The Center for Inquiry (CFI) has filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against Boiron, Inc., one of the largest manufacturers of homeopathic products in the world, for deceiving vulnerable consumers with useless products dressed up to look like real medicine. CFI, which fights on behalf of consumers against pseudoscience, says Boiron routinely makes false claims about what …

In August 2021, I was contacted by an editor at Kunsht (https://kunsht.com.ua/), a Ukrainian media group that covers science and technology “to promote critical thinking among Ukrainian youth.” Kunsht interviewed me for a podcast series on magical thinking in relation to astrology and numerology, and although doing the interview over Skype was a very enjoyable …

The Center for Inquiry has established a new arm in its battle against quackery, bringing all its efforts in this arena together under one proverbial roof. On April 15, CFI announced the launch of its Office of Consumer Protection from Pseudoscience. It will bring legal action, issue warning letters, and seek to educate and inform …

“This is the way science works and should work,” said Kurt Kjær, a geologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and codiscoverer of the Hiawatha Crater under the Greenland Ice Sheet. He and colleagues recently determined the crater is 58 million years old, far older than proponents of a controversial hypothesis had hoped (Science, …

My lead article in our seven-page memorial section for the late biologist and CSI Fellow E.O. Wilson (May/June 2022) included a long paragraph about recent accusations of racism against Wilson due to a letter he once wrote in support of controversial Canadian psychologist J. Philippe Rushton. I ended, “Of course Wilson is no longer here …

A panic circulated in schools and online in early April 2022, but it was no April Fool’s Day prank. The fear was over a thin, towering, cartoonish, fluffy blue figure with a gaping maw and terrifying teeth named Huggy Wuggy. As to what, exactly, the threat was, it depended on what version of the story …

A lengthy profile of CSI Fellow Elizabeth Loftus, “one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century,” has won its author a major magazine award. New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv won an “Ellie” in the Profile Writing category for what the magazine called her “nuanced” portrait of Loftus, one of the world’s leading …

Michael Mann is set to leave Pennsylvania State University, where he is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science, and on September 1 assume a new position at the University of Pennsylvania. According to a University of Pennsylvania news release, Mann, a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, will become a Presidential Distinguished Professor in the …

Talk about the unsinkable rubber duck! Believers in QAnon, what SI contributor Stephanie Kemmerer called “the ultimate conspiracy—the mothership; the umbrella; the ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’ saucerful of secrets and codes” (SI, March/April 2021), are at it again. Undeterred by their beloved Donald Trump losing the 2020 election, and thus failing to fulfill the mysterious Q’s prophesy, supporters …

The long-gestating skeptical media literacy film Science Friction has recently been released. The documentary, produced by Brian Dunning (of Skeptoid) and directed by Emery Emery (The Aristocrats), exposes the truth about how science experts are mischaracterized in media. Many people are aware that television documentaries often distort events and take experts out of context, but …

For several months in late 2021, a panic swept through the United Kingdom after dozens of people reported having been attacked by needle-wielding criminals in bars and nightclubs. As Adela Suliman of The Washington Post reported on October 23: There have been multiple reports of “needle spiking”—which involves an injection being administered to someone without …

It is not just an artifact of media coverage. Political polarization in attitudes toward science has greatly increased. That is the result found by an analysis issued in late January 2022 of the 2021 General Social Science Survey (GSS) data by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago. The …

As a scientist and former clean-energy CEO elected to Congress on a protect-our-climate platform, Sean Casten is something of an anomaly in the U.S. House of Representatives. But he has gained the respect of colleagues for his command of energy issues and his willingness to listen. Casten is a second-term Democrat first elected in 2018 …

Zixin Lin, a strong fighter for safeguarding scientific rationality and promoting scientific spirit, died on December 26, 2021, in Beijing at the age of ninety-three. Mr. Lin was a colleague to the Center for Inquiry (CFI), a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and an honorary chairman of Center for Inquiry China (CFIC). Born …

The public’s trust in science and scientists is on the rise, both around the world and in the United States, according to a pair of multinational surveys. The importance of science and scientists in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be a plausible explanation. The 3M State of Science Index conducted surveys in fall 2019 …

The results of the Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project, a twelve-year study by Australian Skeptics, have revealed that so-called psychics’ predictions are right only 11 percent of the time. And when something momentous or infamous happens, they are unlikely to have foreseen it. In fact, most of what happened was not predicted, and most of …

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) is pleased to announce the election of fourteen new fellows to the Committee, chosen for their outstanding contributions to science and skepticism. This year’s electees are from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Argentina, Germany, and Australia, as well as the United States. Their fields include physics, psychology, biology, and medicine. …

Every year, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI)—a program of the Center for Inquiry and publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer—honors the creators of the published work that best communicates the importance of skepticism and empirical science with the Robert P. Balles Annual Prize in Critical Thinking. Normally, the $2,500 award is presented at the Committee’s …

Dutch microbiologist Elisabeth Bik had quite a conclusion to 2021. For the past seven years, Bik has actively investigated questionable practices in scientific publications, and in 2019 she announced she was taking a year off work to do so full time. She is now best known for her work detecting photo manipulation in scientific papers …

Our Precautionary UFO “Tips”: Back in June 2021 at the height of the most recent UFO craze, we issued our “Tips for Media in Covering UFO/UAP Claims.” It went out widely to the media. We also published it in our special issue “UFOs (or UAP) Hit the News,” SI, September/October 2021. But it sure didn’t …

In early October 2021, a mob of several hundred people attacked nurses providing COVID-19 vaccinations and held them hostage. Though details are sparse, the incident happened in the rural Guatemalan village of Maguilá in Alta Verapaz province near Quetzaltenango. One vehicle was rendered inoperable through vandalism, and a cooler used to keep the vaccines effective …

Science is alive and thriving, thank you, and so assertions of its impending demise are noticeably premature. Yes, there are major issues in which people shun findings of science that conflict with their beliefs, but to deal with that problem we first have to properly diagnose it. Those were the two key themes of science …

Can famous celebrity scientists help shape the public’s view on evolution? And how do public perceptions about them change that? In today’s media-saturated world, the public often comes to understand scientific ideas through how they are embodied by famous individuals. Declan Fahy wrote about that in his 2015 book The New Celebrity Scientists and in …

Tim Minchin has delighted and enlightened audiences around the world with his music and comedy. For two decades, he has used his remarkable talents to not only entertain but to open minds to the wonders of science, open hearts to the power of compassion, and expose the folly of pseudoscience and superstition. For inspiring millions …

Lewis Jones died on September 9, 2021. He would have been ninety-seven in November. He will be best known by skeptics for writing eighty-four articles for his column “Inklings” in the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry newsletter, Skeptical Briefs. I first met Lewis in 1980 when I represented Prometheus Books in Europe. Lewis telephoned me to …

In early September 2021, the Center for Inquiry (CFI) announced an initiative to respond to the humanitarian catastrophe that was unfolding in Afghanistan: the Afghan Rescue Fund. Coordinating with David Cowan, a CFI board member and producer of the documentary film Afghan Dreamers, CFI asked the secular and skeptic communities to help with the safe …

The level of public acceptance of evolution in the United States is now solidly above the halfway mark, according to a new study based on a series of national public opinion surveys conducted over the past thirty-five years. “From 1985 to 2010, there was a statistical dead heat between acceptance and rejection of evolution,” commented …

Climate Change 2021, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), provides a more clear, precise, and dire view of the Earth’s warming climate than the IPCC’s most recent previous assessment in 2013. During that time, multiple lines of evidence have led to improved understanding of human influences on the climate, including …

Given this year’s UFO flap (see the “UFOs Hit the News” special section in our September/October 2021 issue), it is hardly surprising that the latest Gallup Poll shows belief that UFOs involve alien spacecraft from other planets is up markedly from 2019. Nevertheless, half of Americans remain skeptical. News media throughout the spring and early …

Steven Weinberg, an American theoretical physicist, Nobel laureate (1979), and member of the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) died on July 23, 2021, at the age of eighty-eight. Weinberg was a highly regarded scientist with principal contributions to astrophysics and high energy physics throughout his career. He was honored through …

The world has lost a towering figure of American freethought, a man who was both on the cutting edge of secular humanist thought as well as the foremost caretaker of its rich history. The entire Center for Inquiry (CFI) family is anguished by the sudden and unexpected death of our colleague, teacher, and friend Tom …

A lawsuit recently filed in the Supreme Court of Ghana seeks to ban the teaching in the Ghanaian public schools not only of evolution but also of the idea that Earth is in motion. Filed on November 24, 2020, the lawsuit apparently received no public attention until March 20, 2021, when Emmanuel Ebo Hawkson covered …

In a brisk seventy-five minutes, Neil deGrasse Tyson wasn’t able to cover all the biggest questions about the universe, as he does in his new book Cosmic Queries, or scores of popular topics that intrigue the public, as he does in Letters to an Astrophysicist, but nevertheless he did pretty well. In his Skeptical Inquirer …

Psychology professors Ivan W. Kelly and Don H. Saklofske have written and published online a new major critique of Western astrology. Their fifty-six-page paper, “Contemporary Western Astrology: A Philosophical Critique 2021,” is a thorough critical examination of the concepts and assumptions underlying most astrologers in the contemporary Western world (Europe and North America). Its focus …

Noted astronomer and skeptic Cornelis (Kees) de Jager died on May 27, 2021, at the age of 100. He was cofounder of the Dutch skeptical organization Skepsis and its first chairman from 1987 to 1997. He was a longtime fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. When Paul Kurtz spoke on January 12, 1987, with …

The free, online, open-source, introductory textbook Astronomy, published by the nonprofit OpenStax project at Rice University, has recently reached the milestone of having been read by over half a million students since it was published in 2017. The book was written by astronomers Andrew Fraknoi, David Morrison, and Sidney Wolff, with the help of about …

Look up “natural” ant repellents online, and you are bound to find cucumber listed as an easy home remedy to ant infestation. Is there any truth to this? A National Taiwan University entomologist, Prof. Matan Shelomi, discovered that there was no actual scientific evidence for or against this claim, so he decided to test it …

The Aspen Institute Science & Society Program (based in New York City) and the Instituto Questão de Ciência (Question of Science Institute, based in São Paulo, Brazil) cosponsored the first Global Congress on Scientific Thinking and Action March 17–20, 2021. It was originally planned to take place in Rome but was conducted over Zoom due …

In April 2021, dozens of viral videos circulated on the social media platform TikTok, shared by young women offering dire warnings about abductions at Target stores. The videos, typically hashtagged with phrases such as #sextraffickingawareness, were seen tens of millions of times.  “If you’re seeing this—stop scrolling, especially if you’re a female!” one video began. …

A group of advocates working to oppose the use of a discredited communication technique used with autistic children have launched http://www.facilitatedcommunication.org. The site provides information about facilitated communication (FC) and resources for parents, educators, and members of the media. There are links to the available research on FC and its spin-offs, rapid prompting method and …