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2 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017

EDITORIAL / ADVISORY BOARD CONTENTS
Arthur Benjamin
Professor of Mathematics, COLUMNS Magicians of the Gods
Harvey Mudd College, Magician by Marc Defant
Roger Bingham
4 The SkepDoc
Science Author & Television Essayist Juicing for Health or Torture 42 Lost Civilizations and
Napoleon Chagnon
by Harriet Hall, M.D. Imaginative Conjectures
Professor of Anthropology, U.C. Santa Barbara An Analysis of the Myths and
6 The Gadfly
K.C. Cole
Our Angry Era History of Graham Hancock’s
Science Writer, Los Angeles Times
by Carol Tavris Magicians of the Gods
Richard Dawkins by Tim Callahan
Emeritus Professor, University of Oxford
64 Authors & Contributors
Jared Diamond
Professor of Geography &
Environmental Health Sciences, UCLA SPECIAL SECTION
Clayton J. Drees
ARTICLES AN ACADEMIC HOAX
Professor of History,Virginia Wesleyan College
8 Big News on 48 Failure to Communicate
Mark Edward Homo naledi
Professional Magician & Mentalist
Why We Published the
More Fossils “Conceptual Penis as a Social
Gregory Forbes
Professor of Biology,
and a Surprising Young Age Construct” Hoax Exposé
Grand Rapids Community College by Nathan H. Lents by Michael Shermer
John Gribbin
Astrophysicist & Science Writer
12 The Real Origin 49 The Conceptual Penis
William Jarvis
of UFOs and Aliens as a Social Construct
President, National Council Against Health How the Media Shaped Our Ideas A Sokal-Style Hoax
Fraud, Professor, Loma Linda University
About Extraterrestrials on Gender Studies
Lawrence M. Krauss by Tim Callahan by Peter Boghossian (aka Peter
Theoretical Physicist,
Arizona State University Boyle, Ed.D.) and James Lindsay
18 Publicly Funded
Christof Koch Stem Cell Research (aka, Jamie Lindsay, Ph.D.)
Professor of Cognitive & Behavioral Biology
California Institute of Technology California’s $3-Billion Experiment 54 More Fashionable Nonsense
in Public Science
William McComas Some thoughts on “The Conceptual
Director, project to advance Science Education by Raymond Barglow
University of Arkansas Penis as a Social Construct” Hoax
Bill Nye
22 How to Tame a Fox by Alan Sokal
Executive Director, The Planetary Society and Build a Dog
Leonard Mlodinow by Lee Dugatkin
Physicist, Caltech
and Lyudmila Trut JUNIOR SKEPTIC
Richard Olson
Professor of History of Science, Harvey 59 Science, Facts, and 65 Zombies
Mudd College, Claremont Graduate School
“Provisional” Knowledge The Gruesome True Story of Zombies
Donald Prothero by David Zeigler by Daniel Loxton
Professor of Geology, Cal Poly, Pomona

Nancy Segal
Professor of Psychology, CSU. Fullerton On the cover: Göbekli Tepe
COVER STORY: EVALUATING Illustration by Ástor Alexander.
Eugenie Scott LOST CIVILIZATION EVIDENCE
(Retired) Executive Director,
National Center for Science Education CORRECTION: In the last issue of SKEPTIC, Vol. 22,
26 Debating Science No. 2, we published an article titled “Area 51: What’s
Julia Sweeney
Writer, Actor, Comedian and Lost Civilizations Really Going on There?” by Donald Prothero. It was
credited as an excerpt from the forthcoming co-au-
My Experience thored volume by Prothero and Tim Callahan, titled
Frank Sulloway UFOs, Chemtrails, and Aliens: What Science Says (In-
Research Scholar, MIT on the Joe Rogan Experience diana University Press, August 2017), which it is. But
Carol Tavris
by Michael Shermer it was originally published in a book consisting of a
collection of articles edited by Karen Stollznow titled
Social Psychologist / Author
32 Conjuring Up Would You Believe It?: Mysterious Tales from People
You’d Least Expect (January, 2017) under the same
Stuart Vyse
Behavioral Scientist, Author a Lost Civilization title. This work should have been properly referenced
in the SKEPTIC issue. Our apologies to Karen Stollznow
An Analysis of the Claims Made and to our readers for this oversight.
by Graham Hancock In —Michael Shermer, Publisher

volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 3

 C O LUMN
The SkepDoc
Juicing for Health or Torture
BY HARRIET HAL L , M . D .
We are ingenious at finding new
ways to complicate our lives and torture
ourselves. One of those ways is adopting
fad diets in the quest for health. Juicing
is a big fad today. I find that hard to
comprehend. I recently endured two in-
terminable months on a liquid/pureed
diet while my fractured jaw healed. It
was miserable. If I were a prisoner being
interrogated, the promise of solid food
might have tempted me to tell all. It was
hard to maintain a nutritious diet and
find foods that could survive being
blenderized and still tempt the appetite.
The only “health benefit” was the loss of
a few pounds that I really didn’t need to
lose; it brought me down to a BMI of
18.8, close to the “underweight” range of
18.5 or less. Since that experience, I
cherish the pleasures of being able to
chew. We have teeth for a reason. The
idea of systematically taking delicious
solid fruits and vegetables and reducing
them to liquid strikes me as a truly re-
volting idea. I don’t object to the occa-
sional fruit juice, but celery without the
crunch? No thank you.
Health Claims for
Juicing: Detoxification
People juice for various reasons. One is
“detoxification,” a buzzword that is a
red flag for pseudoscience. My liver
and kidneys do an excellent job of re-
moving toxins from my body, thank you
very much. They don’t need any help,
except in the case of acute poisoning
with lead or other heavy metals. And
juices are useless in acute poisoning.
Several companies will sell you juices
for detoxification. Some examples:
Juice Served Here tells us “every-
day life contributes to the congestion
4 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
and buildup of harmful toxins in the
body from processed foods, pollutants
and stress.” They offer a Soft Cleanse,
a Semi Cleanse, and a Hard Cleanse:
25% off; originally $55 a day! When a
customer asked Juice Served Here to
specify the toxins he’d be flushing from
his system, the company answered
with this lame copout: “Unfortunately,
due to regulations by the FDA we are
unable to specify exact health claims
for our products.” Naturally.
Paleta offers a PURIFY Cleanse
that will “cleanse the toxins right out of
your system so you can experience a
more joyful and healthful life.” Bene-
fits? Lose weight, kick the caffeine
habit, reduce or stop smoking, detoxify
your liver, boost your metabolism, re-
fresh your mind and body, curb sugar
cravings, increase energy and stamina,
improve skin, hair and nails, sharpen
cognition and focus, reduce sensitivity
to allergens, and improve moods. The
full 10-day program costs $645. Gee, if
it really could do all that, it might be
worth that much.
Moon Juice offers “plant-sourced
alchemy to nourish and elevate body,
beauty and consciousness… Juice
cleansing enables the body to naturally
go into detox mode while flooding it
with live nutrients and enzymes…
Some signs that it is time to cleanse
are: a weakened immune system,
troubled skin, allergies, low moods or
anger, sleeplessness, poor digestion,
weight gain, low energy, feeling and
looking blah.” (I can relate to feeling
blah, but I’m not sure I understand
“troubled” skin.) They offer Rainbow,
Indigo, and Green cleanses that they
claim will “flood your system over the
course of the day with over 20 pounds
of certified organic, raw produce and
nuts or seeds. The only thing missing is
the fiber.”
Pure Pressed offers Green Cleanse,
Detox Cleanse, and Energizer Cleanse.
That’s enough examples. You get the idea.
Juicing for health
JuiceRecipes1 offers a long list of health
benefits and health conditions with
recipes for which fruits and vegetables
to juice for each. For Alzheimer’s pre-
vention: apple, orange, and celery. If
Alzheimer’s is already present: apple,
carrot, kale, red bell pepper, cilantro,
and collard greens. For colon cancer: co-
conut, orange, and peach. For detoxifi-
cation (only one of many reasons to
juice, not the reason as the aforemen-
tioned companies claim): apple, straw-
berry, and lime. For sore throat: tomato,
green bell pepper, celery, cilantro,
spring onion, garlic, cayenne pepper,
and Himalayan salt. And on and on, for
a long list of conditions that includes
everything from pain to weight loss,
from kidney stones to low libido, from
acne to leukemia.
 Is there any health condition that
juicing would not benefit? Would using
the wrong mix of ingredients for a con-
dition make things worse? How do you
suppose they determined which juices
are good for which conditions? Intu-
ition? Divine revelation? Gut feeling?
Dowsing with a pendulum? Shamanic
journeying? A dart board? They cer-
tainly didn’t use the only reliable
method: scientific testing.
Wheatgrass juice
To my mind, wheatgrass juice is one of
the worst fads. People brave enough to
drink that nasty green glop testify that
it tastes even more putrid than it looks.
It makes no sense: cows can digest
grass; humans can’t, even in juice form.
Proponents say it is a powerhouse of
nutrients and vitamins; but according
to the Jamba Juice website, it only con-
tains 7% DV (the recommended daily
allowance) of vitamin C, 10% DV of
iron, 1% DV of protein, and 0% of
everything else. The enzymes in wheat-
grass are highly touted, but they can’t
be used by the human body. I see no ra-
tional argument for consuming wheat-
grass. It contains only small amounts of
nutrients that we already get in larger
amounts from a healthy diet.
The health benefits claimed for
wheatgrass include:
• Strengthens heart and
arterial tissue
• Lowers blood fat
• Reduces inflammation
• Treats degenerative diseases
• Drains the lymphatic system
• Flushes out toxins
• Dissolves scars in the lungs
• Maintains youthfulness
by its enzyme content
• Normalizes high blood pressure
• Regenerates the liver
• Stimulates healing
• Works as a hangover cure
The evidence for those claims? None
whatsoever. Zilch. Nada.
Juicing for Weight Loss
To lose weight, the website Reboot
with Joe recommends juicing a mixture
of pineapple, kale, celery, lettuce, both
flat and curly parsley, lemon, ginger,
turmeric, and “chilli’s”. Substitutions
are permitted: pear and apple for
pineapple, spinach for kale, mint for
parsley, etc.2 It seems to me you could
substitute anything at all and it would
probably be just as effective. I’m sure
you will lose weight while drinking any
mixture of fruit and vegetable juices,
providing you also reduce your total
calorie intake and exercise.
Do-it-Yourself
The JuiceRecipes website helpfully tells
us “Juice is juiced with a juicer.” Juicers
sell for $30 to $1200. Or you can use a
blender and strain the result through
cheesecloth. You discard the pulp and
drink the juice. It retains the soluble
fiber but not the insoluble fiber.
Another option is to blenderize
your produce and keep the insoluble
fiber. Not as pleasant to drink.
Do-it-yourself proponents like Re-
boot with Joe3 argue that commercial
juices are processed and lacking in nutri-
tion while freshly juiced fruits and veg-
etables are loaded with an abundance of
vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients.
Processed juices are subjected to high
temperatures (pasteurization) and may
have added sugars. They may be supplied
in low quality plastic bottles that allow
harmful chemicals to seep into the juice.
They argue that commercial facilities
may not clean their equipment as thor-
oughly as you can do at home; and there
have been reports of contamination with
bacteria, which is particularly a danger
for pregnant women, children, and the
immunocompromised. When preparing
your own juice, you can wash your hands
and produce well and peel produce to re-
move pesticide residue. You can mix and
match. You can even save the pulp and
use it in baking, soups, veggie burgers,
healthy cookies, crackers and much
more.
There are some reports of reduced
amounts of certain nutrients (like an-
tioxidants and glutathione) in commer-
cially produced juices compared to
homemade juices; but the amounts are
probably not enough to make any sig-
volume 22 number 3 2017
nificant difference in nutritional value,
and there is no evidence of any de-
tectable difference in health outcomes.
Juice v. Whole Fruits
Whole fruits are unquestionably
healthier than juices, since the insolu-
ble fiber has not been removed. Insolu-
ble fiber helps prevent constipation
and diverticular disease and may re-
duce the risk of some cancers. A recent
study4 from the Harvard School of
Public Health found that eating more
whole fruits, especially blueberries,
grapes, and apples, was associated with
a lower risk of diabetes, while greater
consumption of fruit juices was associ-
ated with a higher risk of diabetes.
They estimated that swapping three
servings of juice a week for whole fruits
would result in a seven percent reduc-
tion in diabetes risk.
The only rational argument I have
heard for juicing is that some people
don’t eat enough servings of fruits and
vegetables. There could be many rea-
sons: they may not like the taste, they
may not have ready access to fresh pro-
duce, they may not be able to afford
them, they may not want to take the
time to prepare them, they may have dif-
ficulty chewing, or they may lack an ap-
petite. It is easier to get them to drink
juice than to eat more whole fruits and
vegetables. I guess that’s better than
nothing, but it would make far more
sense to just increase the intake of whole
foods. It’s a bit like saying people should
take a multivitamin as insurance to make
up for possible deficiencies in their diet:
that’s an ill-conceived band-aid measure
that may do more harm than good. Stud-
ies have shown5 that people who take
multivitamins are likely to die sooner
and to develop certain cancers.
The bottom line: juicing is a silly
fad that provides no special benefits for
people who eat a healthy diet.
REFERENCES
1. http://bit.ly/1C6HJ7A
2. http://bit.ly/2pXMzqf
3. http://bit.ly/1FMMaCC
4. http://bit.ly/OukX4b
5. http://nyti.ms/1cQVw5o
WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 5
 C O LUMN
The Gadfly
Our Angry Era
BY CAROL TAVRIS
How angry are you these days?
Me, too.
When my husband and I lived in
New York City, we frequented a local
Chinese restaurant. Over time, I could-
n’t help noticing I kept getting a theme
in the fortune cookies:
• Watch your temper. Short temper is a
loss of face.
• He that is slow to wrath is of great un-
derstanding.
• The greatest remedy for anger is
delay.
• Anger, like fog, often distorts the way.
• If you are patient in one moment of
anger, you will escape a hundred
days of sorrow.
I thought these fortunes elegant and
beautiful, and was struck by how differ-
ent they were from pop-psych advice
pervading American culture:
• Lose your temper. Expressing anger
shows your status.
• He that is quick to wrath understands
that others will knuckle under.
• The greatest remedy for anger is to
sound off now.
• Anger, like a flashlight, illuminates
the path.
• If you are patient in one moment of
anger, you will lose your place in
line.
At the time, for a book on anger, I
was learning how many of the wide-
spread American beliefs about anger—
it’s a normal biological instinct, it’s out
of our control, it’s healthy to express it,
it’s unhealthy to keep it in, I’m entitled
to say what I feel—are flat wrong.
Suppressing anger doesn’t cause ulcers;
6 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
H. pylori does. Expressing anger mostly
raises everyone’s temperature, inflames
rage and self-righteousness, and pro-
vokes counterattack. And whereas
human beings share with other species
a physiological disposition to become
angry when threatened or attacked, we
are unique in one crucial way: we are the
only species that can say “The more I
thought about it, the madder I got.” Your
beagle will respond in kind to snarls and
growls, but if you insult her mother, she’s
likely to just come over and lick you.
And right there is the problem, the
thorn in our nation’s psyche: What’s an
insult? The fact that people are not uni-
versally angered by the same perception
of an offense illuminates the role of cog-
nitions—and, in turn, ideology and
identity—in generating anger. The best
summation I ever found of the common
ingredient in anger is that it stems from
the violation of an ought: You ought to
have remembered my birthday. You
ought not to have stepped on my foot.
You ought to agree with me. You ought
to believe in God. You ought not to be-
lieve in God. You ought to do the laun-
dry more often. You ought to be on time,
like me. You ought not to have posted
such a stupid comment. You ought not
to be so stupid, period.
The “oughts” that generate anger
today—at an individual level and at the
level of politics and society—suggest
why we are living in an almost constant
state of polarizing rage.
Violations of Expectations
When people expect something and
don’t get it for reasons they believe are
outside of their control, they rarely say,
“ah, well, luck of the draw.” Rather, they
typically feel angry. Since World War II,
Americans have benefited from a world
of rising expectations—college for all,
work for all, expanding benefits and
opportunities for women and formerly
excluded minorities. The strongest pre-
dictor of depression—economic and
psychological—is lowered expectations,
which is where we are now thanks to
globalization, the shrinking or eradica-
tion of many thousands of jobs because
of automation and other technologies,
and the skyrocketing costs of college
and health care. It doesn’t help to hear
“but progress isn’t linear; things were
worse before the Middle Ages/Civil
War/Industrial Revolution/New Deal.”
People evaluate what they have now
against what they had recently and
what they feel entitled to in the future.
Self-justifying Interpretations
Here is a paradigmatic study of the
disconnect between events and emo-
tions: students had to describe their
thoughts and feelings before taking an
important test, and again after getting
their grades. The students’ emotions
were related not to their actual grades,
but to their appraisals of the reasons
for their grades. The students who got
poor grades but explained them by
saying “I should have studied harder”
or “my parents will kill me,” felt guilt.
The students who were thinking of the
impact of the grade on their future—
“What if I flunk out?”—reacted with
anxiety or panic. And the students
who interpreted the exam (or the in-
structor) as being unfair responded
with…anger.1 Needless to say, that’s
the explanation du jour. C. R. Snyder,
who studied the psychology of excuses,
worried about the transformation he
saw from people who make excuses to
those whose identities are the excuse.2
Instead of saying “I’m sorry I lost my
temper and said those awful things;
I have been under a lot of pressure
lately,” people are now more likely to
say, “I’m sorry I lost my temper and
said those awful things, but I can’t
help it—I’m an angry person.”
A Belief that an Event,
Decision, or Behavior is Unfair
Melvin Lerner’s classic studies of the
“just world phenomenon” explained
why it is difficult for many people to
accept evidence of an injustice that
threatens their delusional but com-
forting certainty that “life is fair.” Peo-
ple who can’t deny that this bad thing
happened to those people can decide
“those people” deserve what they got.
Lerner found that if two people work
equally hard on a task and—by a flip
of the coin—one gets a hefty reward
and the other gets nothing, most ob-
servers will rate the unlucky partner
as having worked less hard.3 And they
know it’s random!
Today, the anger generated by the
widening chasm of income inequality
stems less from the fact that some peo-
ple are enormously wealthy—it was
ever thus in the world—but from the
belief that their wealth was unfairly ac-
quired: unearned, stolen, insufficiently
taxed, or fraudulently created. Human
beings (and other species) have a fair-
ness bias that seems part of our evolu-
tionary heritage—monkeys and
toddlers alike will be distressed when
they perceive an unfair allotment of
treats or rewards.4 John Jost and his
colleagues have studied the phenome-
non they call system justification:
Many people who were born into great
wealth and power justify that position
by claiming they are entitled to it by
virtue of their superior abilities and na-
tive talent, whereas all those poor and
struggling people are unable or unmo-
tivated to succeed.5 As the football
coach Barry Switzer said, “Some people
are born on third base and go through
life thinking they hit a triple.” (Jim
Hightower made that great line fa-
mous, referring to George H.W. Bush.)
Anyone still trying to get on base at all
might understandably be angered by
that attitude.
A Failure of Empathy
There are two primary reasons to ex-
press anger: One is: “I’m pissed off, and
I want you to know it, and I want you
to feel as bad as I do, you son of a
bitch.” The other is that you want the
son of a bitch to change his mind, you
want her to change her behavior, you
want redress of your grievance, you
want justice. The former strategy is not
generally going to achieve the latter re-
sult, but it is easy to confound them—
as we see in the typically useless and
inarticulate explosions of fury on col-
lege campuses that seem to involve no
goals other than “end racism!”, “fire
that teacher!”, “disinvite that speaker!”
Anger draws attention to a problem,
but it’s the next step that is the hard
one—doing something about it. This is
why conversations across political lines
frequently devolve into exasperated ex-
plosions. Neither side wants to change
its mind or accept that the other side
might have a point.
These tributaries into the river of
rage in America today have always been
there; it’s just that the levees that once
kept them from overflowing have been
breaking down. For example, one of the
key conditions under which the expres-
sion of anger is likely to be cathartic
and beneficial (instead of backfiring
and making matters worse), is this:
your target doesn’t retaliate. When peo-
ple can roar and hurl insults and allega-
tions with no consequence, then, just
like the child who has learned that per-
sistent shrieking gets the cookie, that’s
just what they will keep doing. Après
nous, le déluge de l’internet.
I do often feel despairing and
angry as I survey the current cultural
and political landscape in this country.
I’ll do what I can to support my goals
and beliefs, and to learn what my side
is doing wrong as well as what the
other side believes. But day to day, I try
to live by the parable of the wolf.
volume 22 number 3 2017
A boy went to his grandfather to
complain about a friend who had done
him a great injustice; the boy was very
angry.
“Let me tell you a story,” said the
grandfather. “I too, at times, have felt a
great hatred for those that have taken so
much, with no sorrow for what they do.
But hate wears you down, and does not
hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison
and wishing your enemy would die. I
have struggled with these feelings many
times. It is as if there are two wolves in-
side me. One is good and does no harm.
He does not take offense when no offense
was intended. He will only fight when it
is right to do so, and in the right way. He
saves all his energy for the right fight.
“But the other wolf, ahhh! He is full of
anger. The littlest thing will set him into
a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all
the time, for no reason. He cannot think
because his anger and hatred are so
great. It is helpless anger, for his anger
will change nothing. Sometimes it is
hard to live with these two wolves inside
me, for both of them try to dominate my
spirit.”
The boy asked: “Which one wins,
Grandfather?”
The grandfather smiled and said,
“The one I feed.”
REFERENCES
1. Smith, C.A., & Ellsworth, P. 1987. Pat-
terns of appraisal and emotion related
to taking an exam. Journal of Person-
ality and Social Psychology, 52, 475-
488.
2. Snyder, C.R., Higgins, R. L., & Stucky,
R. J. 1983. Excuses: Masquerades in
search of grace. New York: Wiley-Inter-
science.
3. Lerner, M. 1980. The justice motive.
New York: Plenum. Also Montada, L., &
Lerner, M. 1996. Current societal
norms about justice. New York: Plenum.
4. Sloane, S., Baillargeon, R., & Premack,
David 2012. Do infants have a sense
of fairness? Psychological Science, 23,
196–204; Brosnan, S.F., & de Waal, F.
B. M. 2003. Monkeys reject unequal
pay. Nature, 425, 297–299.
5. Jost, J.T., Kay, A.C., & Thorisdottir, H.
(Eds.) 2009. Social and psychological
bases of ideology and system justifi-
cation. New York: Oxford.
WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 7
 AR TICLE
Big News on
Homo naledi
More Fossils and a Surprising Young Age
BY NATHAN H. LENTS
In September of 2015, scientists at the University
of Witwatersrand, led by Dr. Lee Berger, made a
bombshell announcement. Not only had a new
species of hominin been discovered, but the find con-
tained more than 1500 fossils from at least 15 individ-
uals. The remains were found all in one place, a deep
dark cave in South Africa. This was, by far, the largest
number of fossils ever found in one place in the his-
tory of paleoanthropology. In one fell swoop, Homo
naledi went from being completely unknown to sci-
ence to being one of the most fully described ho-
minins ever. Although no age was given to the fossils
at the time, speculation was rampant.
Over the last few months, the paleoanthropology
community has been abuzz with rumors that more H.
naledi fossils had been found and that the age of the
fossils had been determined. On May 9th, a large team
of scientists, again led by Berger, confirmed the rumors
and made two big announcements regarding this enig-
matic species. First, a second cave had been found har-
boring more H. naledi skeletal remains. That, and even
more dramatically, the dating effort from the original
fossil find revealed that the fossils are much younger
than previously thought, a mere 300,000 years old.
The results are released in three papers in the
journal eLife, published by the Howard Hughes Med-
ical Institute, which was also the venue for the first
publication of Homo naledi in 2015. Both of these an-
nouncements have astounding and far-reaching impli-
cations. A couple of days before the press conference, I
caught up with Lee Berger to ask him what all this
means.
The Second Cave
The second cavern, called the Lesedi chamber, is a
mere 80 lateral meters from the now-famous Di-
naledi chamber, which housed the treasure trove of
fossils announced in 2015. That find remains the
largest hominin discovery in history, with enough
fossils to nearly recreate the entire skeleton. Both
8 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
the Dinaledi and Lesedi chambers are within the
Rising Star cave system, located in the UNESCO
World Heritage Site called The Cradle of Humanity.
The Lesedi chamber contains fewer fossils than
were in Dinaledi. However, while the Dinaledi fossils
were all mixed in together, Lesedi harbored partial
skeletons corresponding to three distinct individuals,
two adults and an infant. One skeleton, called Neo, is
nearly as complete as the famous “Lucy” skeleton, the
type specimen of Australopithecus afarensis.
The remarkably complete skull of Neo adds addi-
tional information about the anterior skull and face.
For example, we now know that the nose and maxil-
lary area of H. naledi is flatter than previously
thought. “Hopefully this puts the argument that this
is Homo erectus to rest!” said Berger, a reference to the
small but vocal contingent of those that believe that
H. naledi is nothing more than an early H. erectus.
Both of these “burial chambers” are in the same
cave system and both are incredibly difficult to ac-
cess. All assumptions are that the hominins in both
chambers were contemporaries, but the age of the
new fossils is not yet known. Dating will require that
some fossils be destroyed in the process and Berger
insists on publishing the fossils first and making
them available to the community through Mor-
phosource before any of the samples are consumed
for the dating efforts. As I wrote in Skeptic last year,
the H. naledi team has displayed an unprecedented
commitment to transparency and the democratiza-
tion of science, believing that fossils belong to no one
and should be shared freely and widely.
A Surprising Young Age
When H. naledi was first announced, many assumed
that the fossils were between two and three million
years old. The unique and surprising combination of
older, ape-like and newer Homo-derived features
places this species at or near the base of the Homo fam-
ily tree. The tiny brain and curved fingers, for example,
 Nor thern
entrance

Rising Star
Cave System
3
as 7 inches
D (18 cm) wide
Lesedi
chamber Toilet bowl entrance

Main sur face

entrance

Dinaledi Figure 1 (left)

chamber The entire Rising Star cave
system with the Lesedi and
Dinaledi chambers marked.

Figure 2—(below)
The Lesedi chamber, site of
0 ft 50 newer hominid discoveries.
0m 10 20 30
Southern
entrance Figure 3—(below)
The Dinaledi chamber, site
of the original discoveries.

Figure 2—The Lesedi Chamber

To Dinaldi
Chamber

To
“Pinch and Punch” “Berger’s Box”—a 25 cm squeeze named for
passage 1m high climb Dr. Lee Berger after he was stuck there in 2014
through a 60 cm shaft

Skeleton location A Skeleton location C: second adult

Neo adult male
C
0 ft 50
Skeleton location B A
infant B 0m 10 20
Cake Icing Fracture

Entrance
Figure 3—The Dinaledi Chamber

39 foot (12 meter) vertical shaft Superman’s crawl—

averages 7.9 inches (20 cm) wide a passage as small
as 7 inches
Dinaledi (18 cm) wide
(1
chamber

0 ft 50 100
FOSSIL
FOSSSSIL
L Dragon’s
SITE
TE
SITE back 0m 10 20 30

volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 9

 H.
H. sapiens H. foresiensis neanderthalensis H.
TODAY heidelbergensis The Importance
of the Body Skeleton
1 MILLION
YEARS AGO
? H. naledi H. erectus
P. robustus
One of the most important
H. habilis lessons gleaned from the
H.
A. sediba rudolfensis bones of Homo naledi is that
2 MILLION
YEARS AGO A. garhi attempts to infer ancestry
P. boisei from isolated bones, frag-
3 MILLION A. afarensis O P.
aethiopicus ments, or dentition should

M
PUS
YEARS AGO “Lucy”

HO
O be taken with a grain of salt.
HR
4 MILLION
A. africanus
A. anamensis A NT The history of paleoanthro-
R
PA
YEARS AGO

Ar. amidus
pology is filled with tall tales
AU
5 MILLION
S TR woven from the fragments of
YEARS AGO AL a mandible, a single tooth, or
OP Orrorin
IT tugenensis a piece of skull. As Donald
Ar. kadabba
HE

6 MILLION
YEARS AGO
Sahelanthropus
Prothero told me when we
CUS

DIP ITH E CU tchadensis were discussing one of his

7 MILLION
AR S
books two years ago, “That
YEARS AGO
would never fly in any other
Homo naledi compared to other Hominin species. The boxes indicate the time the vari- field of Paleontology, but
ous species existed. Homo naledi could be nearly contemporary or much older. Redrawn
after a chart by S.V. Medaris, University of Wisconsin, Madison. when it comes to the ho-
minin fossil record, it’s us
that we’re talking about, so
are primitive characteristics within the hominin line- the rules get bent a little bit in our desperate desire
age, but the heel made for striding, the proximal femur, to understand our origins.”
and the shoulders are clearly derived features for the With these two big discoveries of H. naledi and
Homo clade. (A clade that needs some revision, by the other recent finds including H. floresiensis from In-
way.) donesia, the Dmanisi skulls from Georgia, and the
Based on the anatomical features, most agree Sima de los Huesos site in Spain, paleoanthropol-
that H. naledi is an early species of the Homo genus, so ogy has a lot more material on which to base its
the tender young age of 300,000 years is quite a sur- still-murky understanding of our evolutionary ori-
prise. While there are several possibilities, what seems gins. As Berger told me, “It used to be joked that
most likely is that this hominin was a long-persisting paleoanthropology had more practitioners than fos-
species. It evolved somewhere in Africa, possibly from sils, but finally that’s not true anymore!” The power
a common ancestor of H. habilis or even from habilis of having so many H. naledi fossils cannot be over-
itself. For comparison, H. erectus was also a long-per- stated. We now have an essentially complete
sisting species, but it had a larger brain and was more skeleton that harbors an interesting but confusing
fully bipedal than H. naledi, spread throughout Asia mosaic of primitive and derived characteristics.
but not much in Africa except its earliest beginnings, “The phylogeny works out very differently based
and showed a steady increase in brain size across the on which anatomy you consider,” says Berger, a point
evolutionary duration of the species. made very clear in an accompanying paper discussing
H. naledi seems to be more in the style of H. flore- how H. naledi fits into the rich hominin diversity of
siensis, the “hobbits” discovered in 2003 at Liang Bua subequatorialAfrica.Lookingonlyattheskull,H.naledi looks primitive in-
on the island of Flores in Indonesia, who maintained deed and this is why having the postcranial skeleton
an early hominin form until surprisingly recent times. is so important. In addition, by having so many indi-
The hobbits had the benefit of isolation on a Pa- viduals, we also gain a sense of the interpersonal vari-
cific island, however, while H. naledi lived in the aptly ation in their anatomy. From even just the first cave,
named cradle of humanity amidst several lineages of we now have more fossils of H. naledi than we do of
hominins, including our own. any other extinct hominin, except Neanderthal and
Whether or not H. naledi was long-persisting or H. erectus.
evolved more recently from some ancestor waiting to
be discovered, its discovery adds yet another lineage of Big Implications for Archaeology
hominins roaming through the Southern half of Africa When I inquired as to the largest impact that might
during the Pleistocene and late Pliocene epochs. not be immediately obvious, Berger replied, “The

10 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017

field that will be most impacted by the young age of
H. naledi may actually be archaeology!” This is be-
cause, previously, stone tools that were found any-
where in Southern Africa dating to the middle or late
Pleistocene were attributed to the coastal popula-
tions of archaic Homo sapiens. By the last half-million
years, there were no other hominins in Southern
Africa except our lineage. Or so we thought.
It is not known whether H. naledi crafted tools.
When asked if any artifacts had been found in the
caves, Berger demurred but did not issue a defini-
tive “no.” While the small brain of H. naledi might
make it seem unlikely to be a stone tool-maker, re-
call that two million-year old Homo habilis remains
are associated with simple stone tools and their
brains were only slightly bigger than those of H.
naledi. It is also worth noting that the long fingers
of H. naledi are ideal for fine handiwork.
Further still, size is only a crude measure of the
power of a brain. After all, our own brains have
shrunk by 10% since the last ice age. Analysis of the H.
naledi skull has provided evidence that their brains
may have undergone substantial organization and spe-
cialization like the brains of our immediate ancestors
did. Because of how energy-hungry brains are, adapta-
tions that allow greater efficiency and computing
power without growing larger would be heavily fa-
vored. With this in mind, it is wise not to underesti-
mate the brain power of the diminutive H. naledi.
More Evidence for Deliberate Body Disposal
Perhaps the most controversial and interesting
feature of the H. naledi discovery is the manner in
which the remains have been found. The two
caves contain homogeneous collections of this sin-
gle species. The only other fossilized remains are
those of an owl and a few small scavenger mam-
mals that found their way into the caves. Such
mono-specific collections of remains are most un-
usual in paleontology, even unheard of, except in
the case of a sudden catastrophe like a volcanic
eruption. In these two caves, there are many indi-
viduals of the same species, with no other species
present, collected in a tight space that is ex-
tremely inaccessible. This is remarkable and calls
out for an explanation.
From the first announcement of the Dinaledi
chamber in 2015, the possibility of intentional body
disposal has hung in the air. On the one hand, the evi-
dence is circumstantial and it may be impossible to
ever know for sure. On the other hand, no alternative
explanations supported by evidence have emerged in
the last 18 months, and surely not from lack of atten-
tion. “It’s getting harder and harder to deny that the
only reason we have a hard time accepting [the no-
tion of intentional body disposal] is because we just
don’t want to,” says Berger. Indeed, the idea that an
otherwise primitive hominin might have developed
enough social complexity to care about disposing of
their dead is jarring, to say the least.
Even among those who agree that deliberate
disposal is the most likely explanation, there is dis-
agreement about whether this implies great social
complexity. If a population was firmly rooted to a
specific location, disposal of decomposing bodies
could have become a simple “housekeeping” behav-
ior to keep the area free of decaying bodies. One
problem with this idea is that sedentary home-
steading is not a lifestyle found in any primates ex-
cept fully modern humans.
Further, the chambers are very far from the
cave opening. Even if simply tossing a dead body
down a hole doesn’t require much intelligence or
social complexity, that’s not what occurred with
these H. naledi collections. To reach either of the
caves, one must traverse 60-70 lateral meters and
descend almost as many vertical meters of treacher-
ous terrain, in complete darkness. Both caves re-
quire passage through gauntlets, extremely narrow
passages of 18cm and 25cm, respectively, at their
narrowest point. Most humans cannot fit through
these passages and Berger himself got stuck for
some time in 2014. Geologists are quite confident
that the caves were no more accessible 300,000
years ago than they are today. Whoever put those H.
naledi bodies in those caves went to great lengths to
do so. This makes little sense if the only goal was
getting rid of a rotting corpse.
Fire Lighting the Way
While most attention understandably focuses on
the body disposal itself, not to be forgotten is that
both chambers were well into the “dark zone”
where whoever deposited those H. naledi bodies was
working in the complete absence of light. This sug-
gests, though indirectly, that Homo naledi had mas-
tered the use of fire. How else but with torches
could they have navigated the twists, turns, drops,
and climbs of the rising star caves?
Acknowledging this probability, Berger con-
firmed that scientists are scouring the cave for signs
of fire use and any other artifacts that might give
clues as to how and why these remains ended up in
the chambers.
Something tells me that the Rising Star caves
haven’t given up all of their secrets yet.
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 11
 E XC ERPT
The Real Origin
of UFOs and Aliens
How the Media Shaped Our Ideas About Extraterrestrials
BY TIM CALLAHAN
On the evening of November 20, 1952, George
Adamski led two women and two couples out into the
California dessert in the hope that they might make
contact with space visitors. He asked his companions
to wait while he went on ahead. While alone he
claimed to have met a man from Venus named Orthon.
One of the women, Alice Wells, made a drawing of
Orthon, based on Adamski’s description. The drawing
is of a tall very human looking being wearing a jump
suit remarkably like that worn by the actor Michael
Rennie in the role of Klaatu, the benign alien who
came to warn the human race of the threat of nuclear
war in the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still.1
Were this the only example of a “close en-
counter” with aliens that reflected imagery and
themes previously appearing in films, television and
other media, the resemblance of Orthon to Klaatu
could by explained as mere coincidence. Likewise the
assertion that Adamski based Orthon on Klaatu could
be easily refuted as an example of the logical fallacy of
post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because
of this”). After all, Orthon’s shoulder length blond
hair is nothing like Klaatu’s fairly short dark hair.
However, every major trope of the modern UFO
mythos can be traced to previous media images and
themes. The three major types of aliens of UFO litera-
ture—Nordics, grays, and reptilians—can all be traced
to media prototypes, as can tales of alien abductions,
alien implants, and the imagery of flying saucers. The
chief media sources of these tropes are movies, televi-
sion, pulp magazines, and comic strips. But earlier lit-
erature and even ancient myths were also precursors
of the modern UFO myths. That this new mythology
came into being in the 20th century reflects the
greater emotional and visceral impact of film and tele-
vision compared to that of the written word. Particu-
larly in the 1950s, film and television focused primal
fears activated by the threats of nuclear war and brain-
washing through the medium of science fiction.
Excerpted from UFOs, Chemtrails, and Aliens: What Science Says (Indiana University Press, August 2017 by Don Prothero and Tim Callahan.
12 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
The Threat of Nuclear War
Klaatu, a wiser version of a human being representing
all that is noble in our species, landed on Earth to
warn humanity that if it failed to find a solution to the
threat of nuclear war, an interstellar robot police
force, over which Klaatu and his fellow advanced
aliens had no control, would annihilate the people of
Earth. The United States had destroyed Hiroshima
and Nagasaki with atomic bombs in August 1945 but
had then lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons when
the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in
1949, just two years before the release of The Day the
Earth Stood Still. Thus, the movie reflected the grow-
ing fears generated by the nuclear arms race.
On November 1, 1952, the United States deto-
nated its first large-scale thermonuclear weapon, or
hydrogen bomb, with an explosive yield of 10.4
megatons (million tons of TNT) at the Enewitok
Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific.
The results of the test were made public on Novem-
ber 16, and George Adamski claimed to have first
met Orthon on November 20. Coincidence?
Advent of the Flying Saucer
The benevolent Klaatu of The Day the Earth Stood
Still shared one thing in common with the malevo-
lent aliens of many other science fiction movies:
they all came to Earth in flying saucers. Supposedly,
the first sighting of flying saucers was by amateur
pilot Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947. However,
what Arnold actually reported was that the UFOs he
saw moved erratically, like saucers skipping
across water. He didn’t say they looked like saucers.
Here are Kenneth Arnold’s own words, from a 1950
telephone interview with Edward R. Murrow:
These objects more or less fluttered like they were, oh,
I’d say, boats on very rough water or very rough air of
some type, and when I described how they flew, I said
 that they flew like they take a saucer and throw it
across the water. Most of the newspapers misunder-
stood and misquoted that too. They said that I said
that they were saucer-like; I said that they flew in a Fashion for the 1950s Alien
saucer-like fashion.

Arnold initially said that what he saw looked

like the heel of a shoe, with the curved edge leading.
Eventually he described them as shaped like (Left) Orthon, November 20,
boomerangs. His own drawing and illustrations of 1952. George Adamski described
them actually look somewhat like crescents. But this visitor from Venus and
claimed that he met him in the
UPI reporter Bill Bequette mistakenly reported that California desert.
Arnold had described what he saw as flying saucers.3
From the time of this misquote, witnesses who saw
UFOs began to characterize what they saw as disc-
shaped. The fact that those who believe they’ve been
abducted by aliens derive the shape of the spaceships
from a media trope rather than from an actual expe-
rience is illustrated by their description of the alien
craft as the erroneously reported saucer-shape, rather
than the boomerang or crescent-shape actually de-
scribed by Kenneth Arnold.
However, it was not this error alone that was the
source of the disc-shaped craft. An even earlier image
of flying saucers is found on the cover of the Decem-
ber 1915 issue of The Electrical Experimenter as part of
a canal scene on Mars. Perhaps the original inventor
of this image, or at least its foremost popularizer, was
science-fiction illustrator Frank R. Paul. His illustra-
tion for the cover of the November 1929 issue of Sci-
ence Wonder Stories depicts a giant flying saucer using
metallic tentacles to carry off a skyscraper. This is but
one of several covers Paul painted that depict menac-
ing flying saucers. In one a saucer—acting like a giant
buzz saw—is shearing an airplane in two. In another
a flying saucer is pulling up a chunk of earth using tri-
angulating tractor beams.1
The term tractor beam was, incidentally, in-
vented in 1929 by science fiction author E. E. Smith
in his “Lensman” novels. Decades later Smith’s en-
ergy beam concept would fire the popular imagina-
tion when used in graphic 1950s film scenarios that
reflected cold war anxieties. In the 1955 film This
Island Earth tractor beams were used by a flying (Right) Klaatu, 1951.
saucer to capture the hero and heroine trying to In the science fiction film The
flee in their private airplane. The energy beam con- Day the Earth Stood Still the
cept had become a stock prop by the late 1960s in actor Michael Rennie played
Klaatu, a silver suited ambas-
science fiction TV series. Star Trek had been using
sador to Earth from a plane-
tractor beams for nearly a decade by the time Travis tary federation, who came to
Walton, exhibiting a paucity of imagination, warn the Earthlings against
claimed to have been sucked up in a beam of light the profligate build up of nu-
into an alien spaceship in 1975, and used his claims clear weapons.
to sell a book and movie rights.

volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 13

 Brainwashing Fears, Abduction and Implants
Another film dealing with the threat of annihilation
of the human race was the 1957 film, The 27th Day.
Although the alien in that film was benign, he did
not hesitate to abduct and transport the five hu-
mans to whom he gave deadly capsules by which
we might destroy ourselves. In the 1953 film In-
vaders from Mars, capture by malign Martians was
far creepier. Accompanied by an ominous droning,
the sand of a sand pit in which the Martian flying
saucer had buried itself was sucked down, and the
unlucky human walking over it was as well. This
was clearly patterned after the action of a buried
antlion larvae capturing and killing other insects.
Not only did Martians suck people under the
sand, but once they captured them they implanted
tiny mechanisms at the base of the people’s skulls
in order to control their minds—thereby turning
the loving parents of young David MacClean into
cold, heartless automatons, and turning a little girl
who is one of David’s friends into a creepy patho-
logical arsonist. The paranoia that pervades the film
is heightened when David tries to tell the police
what happened to his parents. He is interviewed by
the chief of police, but when the chief turns around
in his swivel chair to answer a phone, David sees
the telltale scab on the back of the man’s neck—he,
too, is under Martian thought control. After the
Martians have used their mind-controlled humans
for a given task, they do away with them by deto-
nating the implant, thereby causing a cerebral hem-
orrhage. When, toward the end of the film, David
and Dr. Patricia Blake are captured by the Martians,
David witnesses the unconscious Dr. Blake lying on
a glass table with the Martian implant being low-
ered toward the back of her neck.
Invaders from Mars was released in April 1953,
near the end of the Korean War (June 1950–July
1953) amid fears of brainwashing. Though claims of
rampant communist brainwashing were largely de-
bunked by later investigations, during the Korean
War and in its aftermath, many Americans believed
that people’s minds could be controlled through a
combination of torture and psychological subver-
sion. The control of people through tiny implants
lodged in their brains fed into such fears to make
the original Invaders from Mars a masterpiece of
paranoia.
Thus, the abductions of The 27th Day and This Is-
land Earth, plus the sand pit captures of Invaders from
Mars, had firmly implanted the motif of capture by
space aliens into the public imagination well before
the narrative of Barney and Betty Hill developed in
14 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
1964. Likewise, the mind control by implants into the
brain in Invaders from Mars focused the American
public’s fear of communist mind control and redi-
rected it toward insidious aliens well before implants
became a staple of alien abduction stories. It is also
interesting that so many claimed abductions followed
the Hills’ narrative, both in time and in content.
Abduction and Sexual Fantasies
Similar to the motif of alien implants is Betty Hill’s
claim, related while under hypnosis, that the gray
aliens inserted a needle into her navel, which has a
strong parallel in the vision of St. Teresa of Avila.
The piercing of the abdomen in both St. Teresa’s
vision and Betty Hill’s narrative is almost certainly
a form of sexual imagery. This is particularly borne
out in St. Teresa’s description of the sensations
caused by the angel piercing her body with a spear:
The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and
yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive
pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.4
In Gian Loranzo Bernini’s famous sculpture of the
ecstasy of St. Teresa, her face mirrors that of a
woman in the throes of orgasm.
Even leaving aside the imagery of piercing
related both by Betty Hill and St. Teresa, the ele-
ment of abduction is common in sexual fantasies.
The narrative of Antonio Villas Boas’ 1957 abduc-
tion was explicitly sexual. He was taken aboard a
spacecraft to impregnate a beautiful alien woman.
Abduction as part of sexual fantasy is a particularly
common theme in romance novels, as can be seen
by looking up “abduction in romance novels” on
the Internet and clicking on “images.” The idea of
loss of control is implicit in the sexual act, and ab-
duction in sexual fantasies removes the onus of vio-
lating sexual taboos. Those fantasizing needn’t
justify taking part in a forbidden act, because the
act is perpetrated against their will.
In Greek myth, abduction is common in tales of
gods having sexual relations with mortal women.
Two of those abductions are particularly promi-
nent—that of Zeus, in the form of a bull, carrying
Europa off to Crete and that of Hades carrying Perse-
phone off into the underworld. Thus, abduction as a
story trope with strong sexual overtones was well es-
tablished in ancient literature long before 20th cen-
tury alien abduction narratives mirrored it.
A more immediate and graphic source for alien
abduction scenarios, and one that is implicitly sex-
ual, appears in a Buck Rogers comic strip from 1930.
In the panels of this comic strip, Buck’s sexy girl-
friend is first shown being carried off in a giant
claw descending from an extraterrestrial spaceship. Early Prototypes for the Gray Alien
Later she is shown lying unconscious on an examin-
ing table, being scrutinized by catlike aliens.2 Thus
an ancient mythic and literary trope was empha- Left:
sized and made more graphic by comic strips and February 22, 1964
Sketch of an alien
movies in the 20th century. with wrap-around
eyes by Barney Hill.
Origin of the Gray Aliens
The gray aliens, so common in abduction narra-
tives, were first described and drawn by Barney Hill
while he was under hypnosis on February 22, 1964.
They do not appear in UFO/alien stories before this.
Tellingly, this was only 12 days after the science fic-
tion television program The Outer Limits aired the Below: February 10 1964. Two views of the
Bellero Shield alien. Thought to be the proto-
episode titled “The Bellero Shield” (February 10, type of the gray, this alien appeared in an
1964), which featured an alien that became the es- episode of The Outer Limits TV show, “The
sential prototype of all grays. An earlier depiction of Bellero Shield.”
stunted gray, seemingly sexless, aliens is, however,
found in the description of the Selenites in H. G.
Wells’s The First Men in the Moon:
There was no nose, and the thing had dull bulging
eyes at the side—in the silhouette I had supposed
they were ears. There were no ears…I have tried to
draw one of these heads, but I cannot. There was a
mouth, downwardly curved, like a human mouth in
a face that stared ferociously.5

It is conceivable that the alien from The Outer

Limits “The Bellero Shield” episode was based on
Wells’s Selenites. The idea that humans from the
future might be diminutive, have large heads,
and be physically weak is common in science fic-
tion. As skeptic Aaron Sakulich notes at his Iron
Skeptic website, small gray men with bulbous heads,
often depicted as what humans would look like in
the future, are found in fictional works going back
to 1891.6 It is a common, though unfounded, as-
sumption in many such works that an increase in
mental acuity leads to a decrease in physical vigor.
Thus, humans of the future are depicted as sickly.

Dying Races and Alien-Human Hybrids

This brings us to the myths of dying races and alien-
human hybrids. In many UFO narratives the gray
aliens want to create hybrids by interbreeding with
humans because they are a dying race and need
human genes to reinvigorate them. Dying planets Above: 1900-1901
are found in both the 1955 movie This Island Earth H.G. Well’s serial story “The First Man on the
Moon” first appeared The Stand magazine.
and the 1957 film The 27th Day. In This Island Earth, The story featured two adventurers who travel
Metaluna, home planet of the humanoid aliens who to the Moon and interact with a wide variety
have abducted the hero and heroine, is being de- of mostly insectoid Selenites.
stroyed by its enemies. The scientifically improbable

volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 15

 attempt of the grays to create hybrids with humans
partakes of two tropes. The first is the mythic motif
of gods siring heroes by mortal women. This was
elaborated in Jewish apocalyptic works, such as the
Book of Enoch, as the creation of a hybrid race, the
Nephilim, by rebellious angels having sex with mor-
tal women. The second trope is that of sexual fan-
tasy, one of the more common of these involving
women carried off and ravished by mysterious and
sexy strangers.
Although narratives of aliens mating with
Earth women or extracting sperm from human
males to create hybrid beings can be traced back to
Greek myth and to the Nephilim of Genesis 6:2-4,
such stories have a much more immediate source,
the 1960 movie Village of the Damned, based on the
1957 John Wyndham novel The Midwich Cuckoos.
In both the novel and the film, the people of the
English village of Midwich fall unconscious, as
does anyone entering the town, when a UFO flies
over it. Following that event, all the women in
Midwich become pregnant and give birth on the
same day seven months later, though the babies
aren’t premature. Their children, evenly divided
between boys and girls, all look alike, with pale
skin and fine blond hair, and are telepathic and
cold hearted. When a young man driving a car ac-
cidentally hits one of the children, injuring the
child’s hip, the others, taking control of his mind,
force him to drive into a wall, killing himself.
When the man’s brother tries to avenge him, the
children make him shoot himself. Eventually the
hero of the story blows himself up with the chil-
dren, ending the threat.
As folklorist Thomas Bullard notes, scenarios of
alien-human hybridization are wonderfully free of the
restrictions of biology, biochemistry, and genetics:
A hybrid-making program as the reason for abduc-
tions raises questions about how two species can
evolve worlds apart and still be genetically com-
patible. Popular wisdom sets aside this objection
by accepting that alien techno-magic can hybridize
anything with the push of a button. Yet this argument
self-destructs because of the same superiority. If
aliens are advanced enough to unite any genes, they
should be too advanced to practice hybridization at
all. Real aliens would need a kitchen rather than an
examination room, since they could simply create life
to their specifications from raw materials up.7
Bullard points out a strong connection be-
tween the hybrids and their alien forebears of mod-
ern UFO narratives, on the one hand, and
16 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
changelings and theirs (elves, witches, demons), on
the other, in a two-page comparative list. Among
the many striking parallels are the following, which
I have paraphrased (my numbering and italics):
(1.) Demons steal semen to breed children. Fairies
replenish their race with stolen human chil-
dren and interbreed with mortals. Aliens ex-
tract eggs and sperm to produce hybrids.
(2.) Changelings are more like their fairy or demon
parents than their human parents. Alien-human
hybrids are more alien than human.
(3.) Children of gods and humans or fairies and hu-
mans have special powers. Hybrids have special
powers.
Origin of the Reptilian Aliens
The main source of reptilian aliens is most likely the
1983 television miniseries V. In V, giant flying saucers
appear and hover over the major cities of Earth. Out
of these ships emerge aliens completely human in ap-
pearance, who say they wish to trade knowledge of
their advanced technology for Earth’s natural re-
sources. In reality, the aliens, called the “Visitors,” are
reptilian—their scaly green reptilian skin is hidden
under a covering of synthetic human-looking skin.
They also wear contact lenses to disguise their red-or-
ange eyes, whose pupils are vertical slits. That they
are disguised as humans is significant, because a
major tenet of theories involving reptilian aliens is
that they too disguise themselves as humans, often by
shape shifting. The Visitors’ real reason for coming to
Earth in V is to harvest human beings as food.
At a MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) website
listing reptilian alien encounters and abductions,
only three reports are from before 1983. The 11
other reptilian encounters are from 1983 or later.8
The main proponent of the theory that reptilian
aliens are heavily involved in human affairs is
David Icke. The reptilian aliens presented in his
1999 book The Biggest Secret have all the character-
istics of the Visitors of V. For example, they disguise
themselves as human beings:
The Windsors, like all the royal families (family) of
Europe are representatives of the Black Nobility
and Babylonian Brotherhood and related to
William of Orange. They are, as I shall be describ-
ing, shapeshifting reptilians.9
While Icke’s assertions seem patently absurd, ac-
cording to an April 7, 2016, article in the Guardian,
12 million Americans believe the reptilian conspir-
acy theory to be true.10
 * * *
Before the 20th century, there were almost no reports
of UFOs or aliens in the popular media. Instead, leg-
ends focused on mythical beings such as angels,
demons, incubi, and succubi. With the advent of the
modern age of secularism and science, angels and
demons have gone out of fashion. Instead, the origin
of every motif of UFO narratives can be traced to the
media of the time. These include flying saucers, which
were taken from comic strips and pulp magazine cov-
ers of the 1920s and 1930s but going back as far as
1915; alien implants, which came from the 1953 movie
Invaders from Mars; alien abductions, derived from the
Buck Rogers comic strip, Invaders from Mars, This Island
Earth, and The 27th Day; dying worlds, from This Island
Earth and The 27th Day; and interbreeding aliens with
humans, from both Village of the Damned and V. In ad-
dition, the main denizens of UFO literature derive
from movies and television: the Nordics from Klaatu
in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the grays from “The
Bellero Shield,” and the reptilians from V.
It is noteworthy that not only are the Nordics,
grays and reptilians humanoid in shape (because of
the budgetary restrictions of the films and television
shows that spawned them), UFO narratives also re-
flect the technology restrictions of their own time.
Consider, for example, the gray aliens’ piercing of
Betty Hill’s navel with a huge needle, which caused
her excruciating pain. By using the far less invasive
technology of the CT (computer tomography) scan
and that of MRI (magnetic resonance imagery), we
can learn much more about what goes on inside
the human body than by sticking a needle into it.
CT scans first became commercially available in
1971. The first clinically useful MRI was performed
in 1980. Thus Betty Hill had no knowledge of them
in the early 1960s, and her “memory” under hypno-
sis was limited to the technology she knew.
If, however, the grays were performing a
REFERENCES
1. Loxton, Daniel. 2015. “Space Brothers from
Venus?” JUNIOR SKEPTIC, 20, no. 4.
2. Arnold, Kenneth. 1984. “Transcript of Ed Murrow–
Kenneth Arnold Telephone Conversation.” CUFOS
Associate Newsletter, February/March, 3. http://
bit.ly/2niWi5G
3. Kottmeyer, Mar tin. 1993. “The Saucer Error.”
The REALL News 1, no. 4, May. http://bit.ly
/2oifyQc
4. Teresa of Avila ca. 1580. The Life of St. Teresa of
Jesus of the Order of Our Lady of Carmel. Ch. XXIX,
item 17 http://bit.ly/2mCWm3s
5. Wells, H. G. 1901/1970. The First Men in the
Reptilian
alien drawn
after those
on posters
featured on
David Icke’s
website.
(https://
www.david
icke.com.)
biopsy on some of Betty’s tissue, that procedure
would require a large needle. But when doctors
take biopsies, they administer local anesthesia to
reduce the trauma of the procedure. Thus, even if
they were taking a biopsy, these aliens should have
had at their disposal anesthetics and sedatives far
more sophisticated than any we now have.
Finally, considering the vagaries of evolution
occurring on another planet in another star system,
would we expect actual extraterrestrial visitors,
whether benign, malign, or indifferent, to repro-
duce the gray alien of “The Bellero Shield,” the rep-
tilians of V, or human beings of the Nordic type,
indistinguishable from Homo sapiens? The simplest
and most likely explanation for all of these motifs—
flying saucers, implants, abductions, Nordics, gray
aliens, and reptilians (all of which appeared in UFO
narratives only after first appearing in the media)—
is that they are the products of mental sets engen-
dered by literary, graphic art, motion picture, and
television tropes. They reflect a rich literary,
graphic, filmic, and mythic trove, one imprinted by
our own psychology. However, these narratives do
not reflect either the character or the motives of
beings from another star system.
Moon. New York: Berkley Highland Books, 73.
6. Sakulich, Aaron. 2005. “A Media History of Gray
Aliens,” The Triangle, May 20, http://bit.ly/2nj61cj
7. Bullard, Thomas. 2010. The Myth and Mystery of
UFOs. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 271.
8. “Reptilian Alien Reports.” 2015. MUFON Forum,
October 27, http://bit.ly/2nAGRbw
9. Icke, David The Biggest Secret: The Book that Will
Change the World, Scottsdale, AZ: Bridge of Love
Publications 1999, 127.
10. Oksman, Olga. 2016. “Conspiracy Craze: Why 12
Million Americans Believe Alien Lizards Rule Us,”
The Guardian, April 7.
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 17
 AR TICLE
Publicly Funded
Stem Cell Research
California’s $3-Billion Experiment in Public Science
BY RAYMOND BARG L O W
Twentieth century medicine has succeeded in
When Does
treating many infectious diseases very effectively. But
Personhood
against severe conditions of cell injury or loss such as
Begin?
Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, type one diabetes, and spinal
Does cord injury, the past century’s drugs and vaccines have
personhood
begin here? remained all but powerless. Hence the excitement in
1998 when embryonic stem cell lines were first de-
rived in James Thomson’s laboratory in Wisconsin.
Stem cells provide the building blocks of every tissue
type and might, it was anticipated, restore organs of
Fertilized egg the human body much as rebuilding a damaged foun-
(zygote) dation, wall, or roof rehabilitates a house.
The Federal Impasse
Since no one is exempt from severe illnesses, popular
support for medical research to find remedies is enor-
mous. At the same time, though, over the past half
century the very idea of government intervention to
improve human lives has been vigorously contested in
Blastocyst the U.S. Many functions of government, ranging from
Contains stem cells
that differentiate into education (charter schools) and incarceration (private
all the cell types of
the human body prisons) to fighting war (out-sourcing military opera-
tions to private firms) have been privatized. Scientific
research funding has been subject to privatization as
well. Mick Mulvaney, the former Congressman from
Virginia who is currently the Director of the U.S. Of-
fice of Management and Budget, asked in September
2016, “do we really need government funded research
at all?” Such doubt, voiced strongly by officials in the
current administration in Washington, is rekindling
Fetus
the perennial debate about public versus private sup-
port for science. Relevant to that debate is California’s
investment in stem cell research, which illustrates
both the advantages and the challenges of government
sponsorship of scientific enquiry.
A strong prima facie case can be made for such
sponsorship. Government-funded science is less con-
strained by patent and other proprietary barriers that
inhibit commercial, profit-driven scientific investiga-
Baby tion, and is therefore better able to encourage collabo-
18 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
ration and sharing of data, methods, and materials.
Government is also in a position to fund scientific
projects that would be too risky for private firms to un-
dertake. Hence a public science model should, in prin-
ciple, permit stem cell research to follow a trajectory
that begins with scientific discovery and culminates in
new, effective treatments.
However, this path forward for regenerative
medicine has been obstructed in the United States by
a number of political barriers, including religious op-
position to embryonic stem cell research on the
grounds that it is akin to abortion. Some religious be-
lievers hold that a human embryo is a full-fledged per-
son possessing a soul and a right to exist and develop.
This “pro-life” view is hostile to stem cell research,
since the conviction that a fertilized egg is a person
with legal and moral rights views a 5 day-old blasto-
cyst (which is a source of embryonic stem cells for sci-
entific experimentation) as sacred as a months-old
fetus or a new-born child. While it is true that re-
search that uses embryonic cells is only one form of
stem cell science, these cells remain essential for em-
pirical studies and therapeutic applications.
Since the trajectory from a fertilized egg to a
born child is a gradual one with no discernible sud-
den leap into personhood, a consistent “sanctity of
life” view is logically compelled to push the time of
incipient personhood all the way back to fertiliza-
tion. This view holds that embryonic stem stem cell
research, along with abortion at any stage of preg-
nancy, is unethical and should be outlawed.
In our moral deliberations, we often look for
sharply-defined boundaries so that we can clearly dis-
tinguish between ethically permissible and ethically
forbidden practices. But as Michael Shermer has writ-
ten, “Most moral problems are better conceived as
continuous rather than as categorical. The categoriza-
tion of the world into cleanly cleaved boxes is a useful
cognitive tool for some tasks, but it doesn’t always
serve us well in understanding social and moral
problems.” 1 Nature takes its time in forming a
human being and gives us no reason to believe that a
“right to life” is instantly bestowed upon an egg at the
moment of entry by a sperm.
Were personhood to begin instantly at concep-
tion, as the religious right maintains, that indeed
would make the extraction of stem cells that destroys
a blastocyst an act of murder. What is amiss with this
reasoning? To be sure, a fertilized egg does count bio-
logically as “human life.” But so does every living cell
in a human body. A single skin cell, for example, is
also “human life,” since it is both human (i.e., belongs
to a member of the human species) and alive. But a
skin cell does not have the status of a “person” with an
inviolable right to life.
Yet this “right to life” view has been very politi-
cally influential in the United States for over two
decades. In 1995, the U.S. Congress passed legislation
that prohibits federal funding for any research that
creates or destroys a human embryo. As defined by
this legislation, a 4-6 day-old blastocyst consisting of
about 100 cells, or even a just fertilized egg, counts as
an “embryo.” Speaking in favor of this prohibition,
Congressman Jay Dickey, a Christian conservative
from Arkansas, advanced the classical argument that
in subsequent years would be invoked time and again
in federal and state legislatures: embryonic stem cell
research “is an attack on the sanctity of life. It is an at-
tack on the moral conscience of our Nation…. There
are no spare embryos…these are lives.” This legisla-
tion remains in effect today and bars federally funded
stem cell scientists from using any of the hundreds of
thousands of unused embryos currently stored in IVF
(in-vitro fertilization) clinic freezers across the nation.
These excess embryos result from the imprecision of
IVF procedures and are routinely discarded. Lost on
the lawmakers is the manifest irrationality of legisla-
tion that permits the destruction of excess embryos in
IVF clinics as waste but rules out the use of those
same embryos for research that might lead to effective
treatments for many diseases.2
Enter California, in 2004:
Democratic, Public Science
The lack of federal support for stem cell research mo-
tivated patient advocates, health care providers, and
scientists in California to draft a state initiative allo-
cating $3 billion funding for the research and to
gather enough signatures to put it on the ballot in
2004. Proposition 71 was passed by the voters and es-
tablished the “California Institute for Regenerative
Medicine” (CIRM), which is mandated to work with
multiple stem cell sources, including blastocysts.
Those who supported this initiative responded to the Two Sources
“embryos are potential persons with rights” argu- of Stem Cells
ment, which had been so effective at the federal level,
by emphasizing the stories and the rights of the indi-
Extraction from
viduals whose several medical conditions cell-based 5-day old embryo
therapies might treat or cure.
However, even though the grassroots campaign
on behalf of Proposition 71 achieved a landslide vic-
tory in November 2004, the constitutionality of the
Reprograming
ballot measure was immediately challenged in court (Induced pluripotency)
by the Life Legal Defense Foundation, a “pro-life” law of mature somatic
cell (e.g. skin or hair)
firm that represents religious organizations. Although
this legal effort was ultimately defeated, it succeeded
in delaying financing for nearly three years. It was not
until October 2007 that state funds were released to
support the research.
Public science means, at a minimum, publicly
funded science, and the stem cell research institute es-
tablished in California by Proposition 71 is certainly Stem cells
public in that sense. But conceived more inclusively,
public science is science overseen and in some degree
directed by lay citizens. Proposition 71 does engage the
public in that deeper way. Sitting on the 29-member
governing board of the California Institute for Regen-
erative Medicine, along with scientific researchers and Pancreatic
(Islet cells)
biotech industry representatives, are 12 patient advo-
cates representing a wide variety of diseases. These ad-
vocates, many of whom have no formal scientific
training, have served as well on the three working Hemato-
poeietic
groups that determine CIRM policy on facilities devel- (blood cells)
opment, grants review, and ethical standards. This ex-
traordinary degree of citizen engagement rests on the
assumption that scientific enquiry is not the exclusive Cardiomyocytes
province of scientists: lay citizens can learn enough (heart cells)
about biology and medicine to participate rationally in
policy formation and ensure that scientific work ad-
vances effectively and ethically. Neurons
(brain cells)
Such citizen involvement is not unprecedented.
During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, patients and their
Hepatocytes
activist allies not only organized public support for re- (liver cells)
search funding to find effective therapies for the dis-
ease, but also often acquired enough expertise to
engage with scientists and doctors on science itself.
AIDS activists were especially influential in the do-
main of HIV/AIDS clinical trials, working with scien-
tists to set new safety standards and accelerate the
availability of new treatments.
CIRM’s democratic model of governance is de-
signed to counter irrational influences that distort de-
cision-making by scientists and lay stakeholders alike.
Scientists are expert at applying the logic and lan-
guage of science to evaluate a research hypothesis; Restoration of damaged
they know about evidence, probability, standard or destroyed tissue
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 19
 deviation, independent and dependent variables. But
scientists are by no means immune to the human
foibles of stubbornness, intolerance, blinkered vi-
sion, egoism, and confirmation bias. Lay citizens are,
of course, subject to these same influences, and may
form opinions not based on scientific evidence.
Driven by hope for medical solutions as soon as possi-
ble, they may, for example, underestimate the impor-
tance of scientific rigor in advancing the search for
cures.
In CIRM’s administrative meetings, the battles
of ideas and proposals are intense and sometimes ac-
rimonious. At the same time, though, the participants
share a commitment to advance the science and the
search for cures, and that principle of unity favors
compromise. Many of the patients involved in
CIRM’s governance, quite aware that their own per-
sonal illness may be too far advanced to be helped by
a stem cell therapy that will be developed during
their lifetime, hold out hope that others will be
spared the travail of that illness. Their engagement in
this cause motivates passionate dedication on the
part of everyone connected with the Institute—
CIRM staff and volunteers as well as the scientists
working in CIRM-sponsored laboratories and clinics.
The collaboration that CIRM encourages ex-
tends beyond the boundaries of its own funded
projects in California. The Institute has become the
hub of a global network that connects scientists and
their laboratories, and that facilitates the sharing of
methods, materials, and knowledge.
The “Valley of Death”
To what extent should CIRM rely upon private
sources of funding to develop clinical applications
of CIRM-funded scientific discoveries? The Insti-
tute is mandated to ensure that therapies resulting
from its sponsored research will be made available
inexpensively to low-income patients. However,
private companies are reluctant to embark on the
development of therapies that will be subject to
price controls. CIRM needs to attract private in-
vestment, but aims not to compromise its commit-
ment to improved health care for all.
The authors of Proposition 71 had anticipated
that the development of new medical treatments
would be too expensive for the Institute alone to
fund and would therefore be financed largely by
biotech and pharmaceutical firms possessing re-
sources sufficient to carry the research “from the
laboratory to the bedside.” Commercial firms, how-
ever, tend to be averse to such speculative, expen-
sive investment. As Alan Trounson, President of
20 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
CIRM from 2008 to 2014, acknowledged, “The av-
erage cost of delivery of a new biopharmaceutical
drug into medical practice has been estimated to be
$1.2-3.9 billion…. In the private sector, there are
currently too few investors and pharmaceutical or
biotechnology companies with sufficient resources
and interest in cell therapies to enable the full op-
portunity for clinical trials to occur.”
In the world of drug development there exists a
so-called “valley of death” between scientific discov-
ery and clinical translation that, because of the risk
of failure, turns away potential investors. Even if a
company is persuaded to embark on clinical trials of
an experimental therapy, it may still lack the deter-
mination to carry clinical development all the way to
FDA approval. In 2010, Geron Corporation began
the first clinical trial in the U.S. of a therapy based on
embryonic stem cell research. The therapy aimed to
heal spinal cord injury, and its trial was partly funded
by CIRM. One year later, however, Geron halted the
trial, not because of adverse results but because the
company deemed continuation too risky from a fi-
nancial perspective. Only two years later, in 2013,
was clinical development resumed, under new aus-
pices. The Geron termination, says Christopher
Thomas Scott, Director of the Stanford University
Program on Stem Cells in Society, exemplifies a cor-
porate weakness of the will: “Much longer and
deeper commitments from [commercial] founders
are needed to bring stem cell and other frontier ther-
apies to market.”
CIRM’s subsequent relationships with some
other corporate funders have also been disappointing.
In May 2015 the Institute funded Caladrius Bio-
sciences to research and develop a stem cell therapy
for a fatal form of skin cancer. But in January 2016 the
company terminated its late stage clinical trial, not be-
cause the underlying science had been disproved but
because of unfavorable economic circumstances. Sim-
ilarly, CIRM awarded a grant of $20 million to Im-
munoCellular Therapeutics, a small biotech company,
to conduct a stage III clinical trial of a cell-based treat-
ment for brain cancer. In June 2017, citing its shrink-
ing cash reserves, ImmunoCellular halted the trial.
CIRM’s experience with Geron, Caladrius,
Capricor, and other biomedical companies illustrates
a problem of reliance on private capital for the clini-
cal application of scientific discoveries: the profit-
making interest of these companies may conflict
with the interest of patients and taxpayers in the de-
velopment of effective, affordable stem cell thera-
pies. Responding to CIRM’s difficulty in attracting
private industry participation, the Institute’s “2.0
CIRM staff in the company of four
patients and families helped by treat-
ments based on CIRM-sponsored
research. Five-year old Evangelina
Padilla-Vaccaro, was cured of severe
immunodeficiency disease (SCID).
Jake Javier, in the wheelchair, is re-
gaining some motion in his arms and
hands, following a spinal cord injury.
Next to Javier on the right, Brendan
Whittaker, born with an immune disor-
der that almost killed him, was cured
by a stem cell treatment. Standing
behind Whittaker, Karl Trede, diag-
nosed with lung cancer, received an
anti-tumor therapy that has been ef-
fective so far (July 2017)
Strategy,” approved in 2015, has created a network of
so-called “alpha clinics” to apply CIRM-sponsored
discoveries. This network extends the public science
model into the clinical development and testing
phases of stem cell science, facilitating close cooper-
ation of researchers with physicians, nurses, patient
advocates, industry representatives, and experts on
clinical testing and regulation issues.
Progress to Date and Future Prospects
How well is CIRM’s public science model working?
Critics argue that California’s experiment in public
science has failed: CIRM-funded projects have not
yet yielded a single FDA-approved therapy. Advo-
cates reply that it typically requires about 12 years
for a drug to receive FDA approval—longer than
the Institute has been in operation. And they note
that the Institute has substantially advanced basic
stem cell science and has established a foundation
for future clinical applications. CIRM funding has
built 12 major research facilities in California and
has supported research resulting in more than
2,350 scientific publications. To date, 32 human
clinical trials arising from CIRM-funded discover-
ies are either in progress or completed. These trials
range from cancer and HIV/AIDS to Alzheimer’s
and Type One diabetes. There have been, prior to
completion of the rigorous FDA approval process,
significant successes in treating immune disorders,
eye diseases, and other illnesses. The Institute’s
Strategic Plan aims at 50 new clinical trials by
2020.
In response to critics who find these advances
insufficiently impressive, advocates for California’s
stem cell research program argue that its progress
has been held back by the Institute’s limited capac-
ity to adequately fund existing projects and to inau-
gurate promising new ones. California’s $3 billion
outlay for stem cell research seems ample but is ac-
tually quite modest, given the savings that will ac-
crue if the research proves successful in treating or
preventing debilitating diseases. Annual care in the
U.S. for patients with just one of these diseases,
Alzheimer’s, costs $259 billion, according to an
Alzheimer’s Association estimate.2
Clinical trials are beginning to fulfill CIRM’s
declared mission: “Accelerating stem cell treat-
ments to patients with unmet medical needs.”
However, the Institute will run out of government
money over the next three years. Those who believe
that California should continue to champion this
cause are likely to place a measure on the state bal-
lot in 2020 to renew funding. Voters will then de-
cide whether they believe this radical experiment
in public science merits their ongoing support.
REFERENCES
1 Shermer, M. 2015. The Moral Arc: How Science
Makes Us Better People. New York: Henry Holt, p.30.
2. Privately sponsored stem cell research is threat-
ened too. The Trump administration and Congress
are considering legislation that would define every
fertilized human egg, without exception, as a legal
person, thereby rendering illegal not only abortion
but also some methods of contraception as well as
embryonic stem cell research. “Personhood” legis-
lation passed at the federal level could halt embry-
onic stem cell research in California and
everywhere else in the United States.
3 It’s noteworthy as well that total federal investment in
medical research—$32.3 billion in the 2016 NIH
budget—is much less than investment in other areas,
military preparedness for example. The Pentagon es-
timates the cost of designing and building the F-35
fighter plane alone at $406.5 billion. Long-term oper-
ations and support costs are expected to drive this
figure up to $1.1 trillion.
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 21
 E XC ERPT
How to Tame a Fox
and Build a Dog
BY LEE DUGATKIN AND LYUDMILA TRUT
In 1959, Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut began one of
the longest-running experiments in biology. For the last 58
years they have been domesticating silver foxes in Novosibirsk,
Siberia, and studying evolution in real time to better under-
stand how dogs were domesticated from wolves. By 1974, after
about 15 generations during which they had selected the
calmest and tamest foxes to parent the next generation, Lyud-
mila and Dmitri had a population that was on the fast track to
domestication. These foxes were markedly tamer than the ones
that parented the first generation, and they were beginning to
not just behave like dogs, but to look eerily dog-like.
Right from the start Dmitri had predicted that even if
foxes were selected strictly based on tameness—how calm
they were when interacting with humans—he and Lyudmila
would see other traits appear in their domesticated foxes.
Many domesticated species share a common set of traits that
includes floppy ears, curly tails, and extended reproductive pe-
riods: together these traits are referred to as the domestication
syndrome. Dmitri had hypothesized that selection for tame-
ness was key to the domestication process and that the other
traits associated with the domestication syndrome were genet-
ically correlated (how, he was not sure) with tameness. Even a
casual glance at the foxes in 1974, with their floppy ears and
curly tails (wagging in joy as humans approached) provided
glaring support for this prediction. And the vaginal smears
that Lyudmila had taken since the early 1960s indicated that
that tame females had also extended their period of estrus.
While they were always looking for other traits associ-
ated with domestication to appear, no one on the fox re-
search team was a psychologist, and so initially they had not
given much thought to the effect that the process of domesti-
cation might have on intelligence. That would change, first
as a result of anecdotal observations Lyudmila would make,
and then later based on experimental work.
By 1974, Lyudmila felt her already intense bond with the
foxes strengthening. Deep inside, she knew that something was
different. The emotional changes, the depth of feeling that these
foxes began to express, and that they inspired in her, the care-
takers, and anyone who visited the experimental fox farm, could
not be ignored. She realized that this was an important finding
on its own, and surely part of the story of how dogs became so
strongly domesticated and so intensely loyal to humans.
22 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
What if, Lyudmila thought, I switch gears, and instead of
resisting the foxes’ increasing charms, allow myself to explore
just how far I can take these animals down the road of emo-
tional expressiveness?
For a long time now Lyudmila had pondered the limita-
tions of the careful scientific data she and her team collected
on the foxes; it was immensely important—the core of what
they were doing—but it would tell her only so much. If she re-
ally wanted to know just how much social and emotional depth
these tame foxes were capable of, she would have to give one of
them the opportunity to live in the rich social environment of a
home, with humans as its closest companions. Like dogs live.
Lyudmila made a bold proposal to Belyaev. There was a
little house off one corner of the experimental fox farm.
Lyudmila told him that she would like to move into that
house with one of the tamest of the foxes to see what bonds
might develop. Dmitri loved the idea and right away got her
the authorization to use the facility.
On March 28, 1974, Lyudmila moved into the little house
with a (pregnant) tame female fox named Pushinka (Russian
for “little ball of fuzz”). Lyudmila’s plan for living with
Pushinka was to spend most of her days and nights at the lit-
tle house with her, but so that she could also have some time
with her human family, she arranged for her longtime assis-
tant and friend, Tamara, along with a young graduate student,
to help out by taking over some days and nights. Whoever
was on shift would make detailed journal entries throughout
the day and evening about all aspects of Pushinka’s behavior.
During the years that Lyudmila lived with Pushinka she
remembers two incidents that hinted that perhaps selection for
tameness had produced more intelligent foxes. One was a sly
trick that Lyudmila saw Pushinka play on a crow—a trick
which fooled Lyudmila as well. One day when Lyudmila was on
her way back to the house from spending some time with the
foxes at the nearby experimental fox farm, she saw Pushinka
lying perfectly still in the grass in the backyard of the house.
She looked like she wasn’t breathing. Terrified, Lyudmila
rushed over to her, but Pushinka remained totally still, and
even with Lyudmila so close, showed no signs at all of breath-
ing. Lyudmila turned to rush to get the vet. Just as she turned,
she noticed a crow fly down onto the yard near Pushinka. In an
instant, Pushinka sprang to life and grabbed the crow. Did
Pushinka plan this? Lyudmila had no way of knowing, but if Pushinka had,
her trap had been set brilliantly.
Perhaps the most interesting instance of what seemed to be a kind of
inference by one of the domesticated foxes happened a few years later when
Marina, an assistant who had come to help at the house, sat down to smoke
a cigarette, as she did every day. Jacquelin, one of Pushinka’s descendants
who now lived with Lyudmila in the house, was especially taken by Marina
and the feelings were mutual. When Marina sat down for her smoke that
day, the ashtray that was usually on the table where she was sitting wasn’t
there. She asked Lyudmila and the others in the house whether they knew
where it was, and everyone started to search for it. Suddenly they heard
some noise from behind a cupboard in the room, and out came Jacquelin
pushing forward the lost ashtray. They were all amazed.
Perhaps it was sheer coincidence, and Jacquelin had simply stumbled on
the ashtray and was playing with it as if it were a toy. But it certainly seemed
that she had understood what Marina was looking for. Perhaps she had made
the connection by having observed Marina smoking so many times. Perhaps
not. Lyudmila knew isolated anecdotes don’t make science, and that people
are often quick to assume their pets are doing extraordinary things when
they aren’t, but Jacquelin’s behavior that day fueled the notion that perhaps
selection for tameness might have unexpected affects on intelligence.
Fast forward 25 years to the turn of the 21st century. Over that time,
animal behaviorists, psychologists, and anthropologists had done much
work on animal social cognition—the ability of nonhumans to evaluate
the social situation they are in; for example, the ways that dogs are so
adept at reading their owner’s moods.
In 2002, one of the leading contributors to this research on animal
social cognition was Brian Hare, who was working on a Ph.D. at Harvard
under the supervision of Richard Wrangham. Hare’s specialty was in com-
paring social cognition abilities across animal species, and he was focus-
ing on studying dogs and primates. He was particularly interested in
understanding how their social skills had evolved.
Hare’s own studies focused on social cognition in dogs and primates.
Work by others in the area of social cognition had shown that on one classic
social intelligence test—known as the object choice test—chimps came up
short compared to dogs, who performed supremely on it. Researchers found if
they placed two opaque containers on a table, and then, unknown to the
chimp, put food under one, that it was very difficult to provide a chimp with a
visual cue it could use to figure out where the food was. You could point at the
correct container, stare at it, touch it, or even place a marker like a wooden
block on it, and chimps just didn’t get it: they were no more likely to choose
the container with food than the one without it. Experiments had shown that
dogs, on the other hand, are virtual geniuses at this sort of object choice task,
and are able to cue in on what chimps seem oblivious to.
Hare had also conducted studies comparing the ability of chimps and
dogs and confirmed just how much smarter dogs were at this task. Then he
asked himself: why are dogs so good at this? Maybe it was because dogs
spend their whole lives with humans, and learn how to do this sort of
thing. Or it could be that all canids—dogs, wolves, and so on—were just
good at object choice tests, and that it had nothing to do with “dogginess”
per se. The only way to know was to design an experiment, so Hare tested
Photo credit top: Institute of Cytology and Genetics, Novosibirsk.
both wolves and dogs on this task. The dogs shined as always, and the Bottom: Dr. Lyudmila Trut who has been working with foxes for 58
wolves seemed clueless as to what was going on. Not all canids could do years holds one of her animmals. Photo by Vasily Kovaly.

volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 23


Photo credits—top: Irena Pivovarova, left: Irena Muchamedshina, right: Vladimir Novikov.
this. He also tested dog pups of different ages. They
all did just fine on the object choice test. He tested
dogs who had lots of interactions with humans, ver-
sus those with few interactions. They all did fine as
well. So, Hare deduced, it wasn’t the amount of time
with humans that made dogs so good at the task.
The obvious conclusion was that dogs seemed
to have an innate talent for it. That answers the
question at one level, but not another. Why, Hare
wondered, do dogs have this innate ability to solve
hard social cognition tasks whereas chimps don’t?
The answer, he surmised, probably had something to
do with the fact that dogs had been domesticated. “It
is likely,” Hare wrote in a 2002 Science paper, “that
individual dogs that were able to use social cues
more flexibly than could their last common wolf an-
cestor…were at a selective advantage.” During the
process of domestication, dogs that were smart
24 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
enough to pick up on social cues emitted by their hu-
mans would get more food because they could do the
things that humans wanted them to do, so humans
might toss them more scraps as a reward. They
might also be able to pick up on cues humans didn’t
necessarily want them to pick up on, and occasion-
ally scarf down some food not meant for them.
It made perfect sense. The skill in dogs was a
beautiful adaptation to their new life situation, se-
lected for by their new human masters. Hare, it
seemed, had come up with a tidy and beautiful ex-
planation for an important question: just the sort of
thing a young scientist dreams of.
His mentor, Wrangham, thought otherwise
about Hare’s findings. Yes, he told Hare, picking up
the skill must have something to do with domestica-
tion, but was his adaptationist tale—that animals that
were socially smarter were selected by humans—the
only possible explanation? Was it necessarily the case
that the amazing ability of dogs to pick up on human
social cues had been favored by selection? Wrangham
thought not. He proposed an alternative hypothesis.
Maybe, just maybe, this ability was simply an acciden-
tal byproduct of domestication. Picking up on human
social cues hadn’t been selected for, he proposed; it
just came along for the ride with other traits that had
been selected. Hare decided to take the challenge of
testing their competing ideas, and they placed a little
wager on who was right.
There was really only one place where Hare
could test this, and that was at the experimental fox
farm in Siberia. It was the only place in the world
where animals had been domesticated from scratch,
and where researchers knew exactly what sort of se-
lection pressures had been in place during domesti-
cation, and that selection for social intelligence, per
se, had not been applied. Hare knew that in addition
to the line of tame foxes, the Russian fox team, now
under the leadership of Lyudmila (Belyaev died in
1985), had a control line of foxes that had been se-
lected randomly with respect to their tameness. If
Hare was right, both the domesticated foxes and the
control foxes should fare poorly on the social intelli-
gence test, because the fox team had never selected
foxes based on their social intelligence per se. If
Richard was right, and social intelligence was indeed
a byproduct of domestication, then the domesticated
foxes should show social intelligence on par with
dogs, but the control foxes should not.
When Brian contacted Lyudmila through one
of her colleagues to ask if she would approve of him
conducting the study, she said she would love for
him to. After scraping together about $10,000 in
funding, Hare was off to Siberia. Lyudmila, the
Institute research staff, and the fox farm workers
gave him a warm reception, and he was thrilled at
how quickly he was accepted into their close-knit
circle. He even enjoyed the common mispronuncia-
tion of his name among the researchers, as “Brain.”
When Hare saw the tame foxes uncontrollably
wagging their tails at him, he immediately fell in
love with them, as everyone does. Getting down to
the task at hand, he decided that he should expand
on the object choice test done on dogs and wolves.
The test with the foxes would be done using two dif-
ferent experimental setups. In the first, which was
very similar to the test he had given to the dogs and
wolves, he would hide food under one of two cups
placed on a table that was about four feet in front of
a fox. One of the researchers working with him on
the study would point and gaze at the cup that had
the food under it, and then which cup, if either, the
fox preferred would be recorded. The second type of
test would not involve food. Instead, two identical
toys that the foxes knew and loved would be placed
on the right and left end of a table in front of a fox
pup in its home pen. Hare or his assistent would
then touch one of the toys.
Hare had the protocols all sketched out and
ready to go, when a series of unexpected problems
emerged. For one thing, he needed a table to place
the cups and toys on, which didn’t strike him as a
problem until he got a taste of some of the relics of
the managed economy that had been a hallmark of
life in the USSR. When he asked for a table, he was
told that one would be made for him. He was to be
provided not with any shoddy contraption, but with
a marvel of Russian engineering. The job order
went in, and two weeks later, the table arrived. “It
was the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen,”
Hare recalls fondly. “I dubbed it ‘Sputnik,’ which
everyone thought was hilarious.”
The second problem to be solved before the ex-
periments could begin was a bit trickier. For the
test to be fair, each fox had to be standing in the
middle of its pen at the start, not on the right or left
side. But how could he make sure they were? Some
on the fox team suggested he train them to stay in
the middle, which they assured him would be possi-
ble, but he didn’t have time for that, and what’s
more he wanted to avoid the training procedure as
an experimental confound. Instead he thought that
if he put a wood plank on the floor of each pen, in
the middle, the foxes might prefer to sit or stand on
it rather than the chicken wire on the pen’s floor.
Once again the Institute provided for his needs,
and after boards had been placed in the pen of each
fox to be tested, when Hare went to the farm the
next day, he remembers quite vividly that every sin-
gle fox was lying on the boards in the middle.
He tested 75 fox pups, each one many times.
The results were crystal clear. When tame pups
were compared to dog pups, they were just as smart
as the dogs. And when the tame pups were com-
pared to control fox pups, they were smarter—
much smarter—both at finding the hidden food in
the pointing and gazing task, and at touching the
same toy that Hare or his assistant had touched.
The results were completely in line with
Wrangham’s hypothesis. The control foxes were
clueless on the social cognition tasks, which the do-
mesticated foxes aced, performing even a little bet-
ter than dogs. Social intelligence was a byproduct
of domestication.
Suddenly, Hare saw the evolution of intelli-
gence, and the process of domestication also, very
differently. He had thought that early humans in-
tentionally breeding dogs to be smarter had led to
dogs’ social intelligence. But if the trait could
emerge, instead, from selection for tameness, then
that was evidence in support of the view that the
domestication of the wolf might have started with-
out breeding for social intelligence being involved.
Selection acting on tameness alone could have
brought wolves onto the path to domestication.
Lyudmila knew Dmitri would have been in-
trigued with Hare’s finding: selection for tameness
led not only to correlated changes like floppy ears,
curly, wagging tails, and extended periods of repro-
duction, but to better social cognition as well.
Reprinted (in modified form) with permission from How to Tame
a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of
Jump-Started Evolution, by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut,
published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2017 by Lee Alan
Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut. All rights reserved.
For much more on the
ongoing incredible silver
fox domestication exper-
iment (still being led by
Lyudmila Trut), see: How
to Tame a Fox (and Build
a Dog) by Lee Dugatkin
and Lyudmila Trut. Uni-
versity Of Chicago Press
2017. 240 pps $26. ISBN
-13: 978-0226444185
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 25
 AR TICLE
Debating Science
and Lost Civilizations
My Experience on the Joe Rogan Experience
BY MICHAEL SHERMER
On May 16, 2017, I appeared on the Joe Rogan
Experience (JRE) podcast (and YouTube videocast)
along with Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson,
plus our hand-selected “phone-a-friend” Skyped in
guests (geologist Marc Defant for me, planetary sci-
entist Malcolm LeCompte for Hancock and Carl-
son). It was a three-and-a-half hour marathon that
at the time of this writing, several million people
have heard or viewed on various platforms.
It was, in fact, my third appearance on the JRE,
one of the most popular podcasts in the world.
According to Joe, as of that week he was averaging
over 120 million downloads a month, putting him
on a par with the biggest talk show hosts on televi-
sion, either cable or broadcast. He has a huge and
diverse following, and for good reason—he’s a re-
markable conversationalist. My previous two ap-
pearances lasted for three hours each, without any
sense of time passing. Unlike most talkshow hosts I
have engaged with over the decades, a dialogue
with Joe Rogan is like talking to an old friend. He is
warm, receptive to all ideas, and allows the conver-
sation to advance organically without an agenda.
For my solo appearances he was as sympathetic to
my ideas as he was to those of Hancock and Carlson
in their prior appearances on his show.
It was, therefore, surprising to find myself
under something of a grilling from Rogan the mo-
ment I was given the opportunity to reply to a few
opening comments by Hancock. It soon went from
2-on-1 to 3-on-1, which a great many people noted
in comments on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and
other outlets during and after the show. Here are
just a few among hundreds:
xmikex902x
Ya I don’t think Joe did a good job as a moderator at
all. He should’ve remained neutral, but he almost
instantly turned this into a 3 on 1, and idc which
side “did better“ or w/e. It just wasn’t a very fair way
to handle this.
26 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
Alex Bones Jones
Joe was massively biased and it was 3-vs-1 for the
bulk of the podcast. He is the worst moderator I’ve
ever seen.
Tadas Galinauskis
That was not good moderating, that was 3vs1 most of
the time with lots of interuptions on Shummer and
then complaining that he doesn’t understand his
points.
Llama4 hours ago
Honestly embarrasing how joe and the other two
acted. I have never seen him like this, acting so unrea-
sonable and being so obnoxious to michael shermer.
Zack Duncan
Neither Graham nor Joe gave Michael the opportu-
nity to finish a complete thought. They just ping
ponged back and forth random citations and in-
credulity. If you don’t understand why he’s arguing
against something LET HIM EXPLAIN IT.
I wasn’t bothered by Joe’s siding with Hancock
as I’m used to being outnumbered. There was no
agreement ahead of time that Joe would act as a
neutral moderator; it is his show and he can do
whatever he wants. I saw it as more bandwidth for
me to explain how science works on the margins of
knowledge. In any case, there were far fewer com-
ments critical of Joe than of me and Hancock
(everyone seemed to love Carlson), which I esti-
mate to be split roughly 50/50. Here are a few com-
ments in support of Hancock and critical of me (out
of thousands):
Rusty Shackleford Jr
Graham sources all of his work. Michael and Mark
had to retract slanders… the skeptics got roasted.
Marty Marino
you’re a really smart man but you’ve lost your magic
as a human.
L O S T CIVILIZATIONS
Kris Rai
Oh dear Michael, oh dear.

City Strut
Respect to you Graham. I commend you greatly for
trying to seek answers and debate your findings.
You’re rad!

Tom Bunzel
I cannot believe how closed @Michaelshermer’s
mind is. Could not listen despite the amazing in-
sights of Graham and Randell

Joe
Fantastic as always mr hancock!

And here are a few comments in support of me and

critical of Hancock (out of thousands):
Clayton Reese Christian
Hi Michael, I’m a big Graham fan. I just wanted to
come over and say hi and thanks for doing the de-
bate/podcast. I really enjoyed it and you gave their
ideas really tough resistance. It takes a really special
mind to go up against three people with contradictory
world views in front of millions of people. I will be fol-
lowing your work :).

Andreas Ciecielski
What the hell was that Joe? Graham is a sanctimo-
nious ass and here you are constantly interrupting
Michael. Graham’s theories shrivel under the hot
lights of pear review for a reason; if you funnel data
to suite your theories, the stuff you leave out will get
noticed. Nice to see Michael keep an even keel
while being constantly interrupted.

George Koush
Michael you did a great job joe and graham were
acting like children. I love how everyone was ex-
pecting you to give them answers to their fantasy,
lol. ;)

Sven Bondessono
Painful to listen to. Shermer was too polite in his
fight for the scientific method. Joe was waaay to bi-
ased and makes for a horrible mediator. Hancock is
just making shit up and asking people to disprove
his theories, hack. Should have been another scien-
tist in the podcast for some balance.

LE0NSKA
I agree with shermer. 3D paintings on a 2D space is
more impressive than a 3D carving on a 3D space in
terms of cognitive function. you just have look at From top to bottom: Randall Carlson, Graham Hancock, Joe Rogan
some old regular paintings, their perspective is all and Michael Shermer on The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast pro-
fucked up. duced in Southern California.

volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 27

 From my notes for the show, here are the rea-
sons why alternative archaeologists in general, and
Hancock in particular, have failed to convince most
scientists and archaeologists to abandon the theory
about the timeline of civilization over the past
13,000 years in favor of an alternative theory of a
lost advanced civilization.
1. There isn’t just one “alternative” to mainstream
archaeology, there are hundreds of alternative theories.
To name a few:
—Lost tribes of Israel who colonized the Americas
(and other places).
—Mormon archaeology that the Native Americans
are descended from this lost tribe.
—Kensington Runestones of Minnesota claimed to
prove Nordic Viking peopling of the Americas.
—Black Egyptian Hypothesis: Ancient Egyptians
were predominantly Black.
—Piltdown Man.
—South American archaeology claiming Olmec
statues look African in origin.
—Erich von Däniken, Secharia Sitchin, and ancient
alien archaeology.
To take a line from skeptics of alternative med-
icine, do you know what you call alternative ar-
chaeology with evidence? Archaeology.
2. Cherry picking data, confirmation bias, and starting
with a conclusion and working backward through the
evidence to make it fit.
28 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
—Christian Fundamentalists start with the
assumption of the Flood and go in search of
Noah’s Ark and evidence of floods.
—Creationists begin with a belief in a young
Earth and instant creation in seven days, so
they reject the theory of evolution and look
for any anomaly in science that seems to go
against the findings that support a 4.6 billion
year old Earth.
—Hindu creationists believe in an exceptionally
ancient human lineage that dates back tens of
millions of years, and therefore accuse the scientific
establishment of suppressing the fossil evidence
of extreme human antiquity. The self-identified
“Vedic archaeologist” Michael Cremo, in his book
Forbidden Archaeology, believes his findings
support the story of humanity described in the
Hindu Vedas.
I can assure readers that these writers believe as
strongly in the truth and validity of their ideas as Gra-
ham Hancock does in his.
3. Patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful pat-
terns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.
—Matching the alignment of buildings on the
ground with stars in the sky.
—The comparison between disparate cultures of
artifacts and monuments from one society and
Illustrations in this article by Anna Maltese
highlighting similarities with those of another to
conclude a common source, when in fact they are
more likely explained by independent invention.
—Immanuel Velikovsky compared myths of
migrations and war gods in Mesoamerican
Aztec civilization, but was off by a millennium.
—John Taylor, in his 1859 book The Great Pyramid,
computed that if you divide the height of the
pyramid into twice the side of its base, you get a
number close to pi; he also thought he had
discovered the length of the ancient cubit as the
L O S T CIVILIZATIONS
division of the Earth’s axis by 400,000—both of
which Taylor found to be too incredible to be
coincidental. Other alternative archaeologists
“discovered” that the base of the Great Pyramid
divided by the width of a casing stone equals the
number of days in the year, and that the height of
the Great Pyramid multiplied by 109 approximately
equals the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
And so on.
In his classic 1952 book Fads and Fallacies in the
Name of Science, the science writer Martin Gardner
revealed the poignant problem with patternicity when
“just for fun” he analyzed the Washington Monument
and “discovered” the property of fiveness to it: “Its
height is 555 feet and 5 inches. The base is 55 feet
square, and the windows are set at 500 feet from the
base. If the base is multiplied by 60 (or 5 times the
number of months in a year) it gives 3,300, which is
the exact weight of the capstone in pounds. Also, the
word “Washington” has exactly 10 letters (2 times 5).
And if the weight of the capstone is multiplied by the
base, the result is 181,500—a fairly close approxima-
tion of the speed of light in miles per second. After
musing that “it should take an average mathematician
about 55 minutes to discover the above ‘truths,’” Gard-
ner concludes “how easy it is to work over an undi-
gested mass of data and emerge with a pattern, which
at first glance, is so intricately put together that it is
difficult to believe it is nothing more than the product
of a man’s brain.”
4. Alternative archaeologists disparage mainstream
archaeologists and accuse them of being closed-minded
dogmatists in a conspiracy to silence the truth.
This calumny is gainsaid by a paper published just
weeks before our debate in the prestigious journal Na-
ture, in which scientists put forth evidence that they
believe indicates humans (or possibly Neanderthals)
inhabited the San Diego area of Southern California
some 130,000 years ago, which is an order of magni-
tude earlier than mainstream archaeologists’ timeline
for the peopling of America. The evidence for this con-
jecture, however, is not as strong as the popular media
made it out to be in the considerable press coverage
this paper received. The “butchered” mammoth bones
may, in fact, have been broken in the excavation of a
road recently constructed at the site, and the “stone
tools” were nothing at all like the finely crafted Clovis
points found all over North America, and instead
might be just broken rocks. When I queried the
renowned scholar of human history and prehistory,
Jared Diamond, who has for half a century followed
the claims of pre-Clovis peoples populating the Ameri-
cas, he replied with this one-liner: “The latest semi-an-
nual new-paradigm pre-Clovis claim with a credibility
half-life of two days.”
5. Falsifiability, conjectures and refutations, and
the burden of proof.
During our debate I asked Hancock several times,
“What would it take to refute your hypothesis?” I never
received a reply. In his 1959 book, The Logic of Scientific
Discovery, the philosopher of science Karl Popper pro-
posed a solution to “the demarcation problem” of dis-
tinguishing science from pseudoscience: “The criterion
of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or
refutability, or testability.” In his 1963 book Conjectures
and Refutations, Popper outlined how scientists operate
by conjecturing ideas to their colleagues and consider-
ing the refutations in response. There’s nothing wrong
with making conjectures—it is the life blood of science
in fact—but since most ideas that scientists propose
are wrong, the constant dialogue with one’s fellow ex-
perts in a field through letters (and today emails),
phone calls, papers, books, conferences, and the like, is
crucial for determining if one has run off the rails. That
is why it is dangerous to work in isolation, which is an
inherent limitation of being an outsider to a field. It’s
not that outsiders can’t or don’t make contributions—
occasionally they do. But usually they don’t because
most of us most of the time are wrong about our con-
jectures, so refutations from colleagues is vital. I wrote
to Hancock a few days after our debate, in part to re-
spond to his annoyance over the publication of my col-
umn on his work in Scientific American (that by chance
was posted online the same day of the debate):
Dear Graham,
I get that you’re upset, and why, and I no doubt owe
a great deal to that fact by how and what I said and
wrote. To that end I am truly sorry that you feel I
“rubbished” your life’s work. That was certainly not
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 29
 my intention, and it goes against my philosophy of
giving people a fair hearing. Clearly I failed in that
regard. But there is nothing factual in my column
that I would change, even after our long dialogue.
To wit: you still have no evidence whatsoever for
the lost civilization. Not a single tool. No writing. Not
even any pottery. Even after nearly four hours in Joe’s
studio I still have no idea what you mean by “ad-
vanced”, despite my asking you repeatedly. Your com-
ments were filled with many modifiers like “perhaps”
“maybe” “possibly,” etc. It’s fine to speculate, and you
may even be right. But to overturn the mainstream
theory in any field you need to do more than that.
If mainstream archaeologists are all wrong about
how they define “advanced” (writing, metallurgy, pot-
tery, etc.) then it is incumbent on you to redefine it in a
way to convince them that the evidence points to your
claims. That they don’t accept your theory is simply
how most science in most fields works, a point I tried
(and mostly failed) to make in bringing up other exam-
ples. I realize these other theories have nothing to do
with you, but my point is that in the Popperian sense of
falsification science you need to explain how your the-
ory could be falsified. Maybe I missed it but I don’t
think I know how you would answer that question.
It’s the reason I brought up Lawrence Krauss.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is another example. They both
get weekly letters, articles, books, and the like from
people advancing alternative theories of physics. They
simply cannot address them all, but the burden of
proof is on the alternative physics people to show why
mainstream physics (Newton, Einstein, etc.) are
wrong and their theory is right. It’s possible that is the
case, but not likely given the failure rate of so many
who have already tried to do so over the centuries. So
Lawrence and Neil end up defending the mainstream,
not because they are hidebound dogmatists, but be-
cause the preponderance of evidence supports it.
I then recommended to Hancock that he read Jared
Diamond’s short essay in the January Edge.org issue
about this matter (http://bit.ly/2h7n95g):
The first well-attested settlement of the Americas
south of the Canada/U.S. border occurred around
13,000 years ago, as the ice sheets were melting. That
settlement is attested by the sudden appearance of
stone tools of the radiocarbon-dated Clovis culture,
named after the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where
the tools and their significance were first recognized.
Clovis tools have now been found over all of the
lower 48 U.S. states, south into Mexico. That sudden
appearance of a culture abundantly filling up the en-
tire landscape is what one expects and observes
30 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
whenever humans first colonize fertile empty lands.
But any claim by an archaeologist to have discov-
ered “the first X” is taken as a challenge by other ar-
chaeologists to discover an earlier X. In this case,
archaeologists feel challenged to discover pre-Clovis
sites, i.e., sites with different stone tools and dating to
before 13,000 years ago. Every year nowadays, new
claims of pre-Clovis sites in the U.S. and South Amer-
ica are advanced, and subjected to detailed scrutiny.
Eventually, it turns out that most of those claims are in-
validated by the equivalent of technical errors at step
37: e.g., the radiocarbon sample was contaminated with
older carbon, or the radiocarbon-dated material really
wasn’t associated with the stone tools. But, even after
complicated analyses and objections and rebuttals, a
few pre-Clovis claims have not yet been invalidated. At
present, the most widely discussed such claims are for
Chile’s Monte Verde site, Pennsylvania’s Meadowcroft
site, and one site each in Texas and in Oregon. As a re-
sult, the majority of American archaeologists currently
believe in the validity of pre-Clovis settlement.
To me, it seems instead that pre-Clovis believers
have fallen into the archaeological equivalent of Mr.
Bridgess’s fallacy. It’s absurd to suppose that the first
human settlers south of the Canada/U.S. border could
have been airlifted by non-stop flights to Chile, Penn-
sylvania, Oregon, and Texas, leaving no unequivocal
signs of their presence at intermediate sites. If there
really had been pre-Clovis settlement, we would al-
ready know it and would no longer be arguing about
it. That’s because there would now be hundreds of
undisputed pre-Clovis sites distributed everywhere
from the Canada/U.S. border south to Chile.
6. The dangers of reading the past from the present.
Before the JRE show I consulted the professional
L O S T CIVILIZATIONS
archaeologist and skeptic of alternative archaeol-
ogy, Ken Feder, about the symbolism found on the
monumental stone structures at Göbekli Tepe.
Hancock thinks they represent the constellations
or carry some deeper meaning about nature at
that time. Feder replied:
There appears to be a conceit on the part of mod-
ern people that all ancient art must in some way
be representational, depicting things the artists
actually saw and experienced. But we don’t insist
on that for modern artists. Their art requires no
concrete explanation. We allow them to be cre-
ative, imaginative, and to just make shit up be-
cause it’s cool or represents stuff they
hallucinated in trance and then interpreted
through the prism of religion.
Feder added that the paintings of Magritte, if
we took them literally, would represent the “pe-
riod when gravity was abolished, at least for men
in suits, and apples.” And “My favorite; there’s a
version of a Kokopelli that I’ve seen in Utah. Only
instead of being a hump-backed, flute-playing
man, it’s a bipedal bighorn sheep playing a flute.
This reflects a time when Ovis canadensis was far
more musically inclined. Probably because of the
comet.”
Satire aside, the point is that we must be ex-
tremely cautious about reading into the past our
own ideas, and the further back in time we go
the more dangerous it is to do so. The astronomer
Ed Krupp, Director of the Griffith Observatory in
Los Angeles, expert on archaic astronomy, and the
author of several books on when it is appropriate
(or not) to interpret archaeological sites as astro-
nomical in nature, offered these insights, includ-
ing the problem of employing astronomical
computer programs that allow one to see what
the night sky would have looked like to people
thousands of years ago. Here again we see the
problem of patternicity, or finding patterns that
exist only in the mind’s eye.
The broad account of the interpretation makes me
very skeptical. We have no dictionary for the sym-
bolic vocabulary of Göbekli Tepe imagery. This ap-
pears to start with the assumption [that] the figures
are recognized constellations (several problems
right there) and then goes back in time with plane-
tarium software in search of a fit. Starry Night and
Stellarium have a lot to answer for. They are danger-
ous weapons in the hands of amateurs.
Regarding the carving of a scorpion on one of the
T-shaped pillars at Göbekli Tepe, Krupp noted of
Hancock’s interpretation:
It all seems to rest on the Scorpion, which he argues
must be Scorpio [sic. He means “Scorpius”]. Then he
turns the other images, which have no known rela-
tionship to any known constellation imagery, into
constellations in the same territory. This gives him the
Milky Way in Sagittarius, although it is not depicted.
Then he takes the disk, calls it a sun symbol, and says
it is in the center of the Milky Way in Sagittarius, à la
the 2012 Maya Calendar End Times Follies. Because
the Maya calendar allegedly marked the start of a New
Age, he implies the Göbekli Tepe carving also marks
the start of a New Age (and the end of the earlier era).
That, in turn, is linked to the alleged Dryas impact. It
all appears to be contrived data of high order.
* * *
Of the many thousands of comments in response
to the JRE debate I have become painfully aware
that to roughly half I seemed hidebound and dog-
matically closed minded to the possibility of a
lost advanced civilization. As I told Hancock on
the show and in writing after, I’m not. Honestly.
I don’t have a dog in the fight. I haven’t written
anything on the subject save the Scientific Ameri-
can column. I would happily change my mind,
which I have on many other subjects (evolution,
climate change, gun control, the death penalty,
etc.). But the further back in time we push the
origins of civilization the more problematic the
dates become, and having followed this area
since the 1970s when I read the alternative ar-
chaeology of that time with wide eyed naiveté,
I’ve seen earlier date after earlier date not stand
up to scrutiny. An uncontested conjecture does
not a new civilization make.
Finally, as I said at the end of the debate, I
truly believe that science needs outsiders and
mavericks who poke and prod and push accepted
theories until they either collapse or are rein-
forced even more strongly. Of all the alternative
archaeology theories I’ve read I found Hancock’s
to be the most intriguing, in the romantic sense
of Golden Age myths and what they may mean
for us. But I don’t think he has convinced the
professionals in the field of the factual nature of
this particular story, and that’s how it usually
goes in science. Most ideas turn out to be wrong.
The standard timeline of how civilizations un-
folded over the past 13,000 years may be one of
them, but so far it has held up well.
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 31
 AR TICLE
Conjuring Up a
Lost Civilization
An Analysis of the Claims Made by
Graham Hancock in Magicians of the Gods
BY MARC DEFANT
Graham Hancock’s 2015 book Magicians of the
Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilization1
is something of a sequel and update to his 1995 inter-
national bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evi-
dence of Earth’s Lost Civilization,2 which was translated
into 27 languages and sold more than three million
copies.3 In Fingerprints, Hancock uses creation myths
in ancient texts and wild geological scenarios to sug-
gest that 12,450 years ago major crustal shifts moved
Antarctica to its present location. Portions of a sup-
posedly highly advanced unknown lost civilization
(none other than Atlantis) living on Antarctica at the
time were able to survive the destructive cataclysms
and go on to convey their knowledge to the builders
of the megalithic structures of Egypt, Maya, Babylon,
and other known great civilizations. He also claims
that the Mayan calendar portended world cataclysms
in 2012. In Magicians, Hancock now says he got it all
wrong—there was no crustal shift; instead he thinks
this advanced civilization was destroyed by a comet.
Magicians appears to be on its way to becoming
another bestseller for the British writer. Although
Hancock has few scientific credentials (an under-
graduate degree in sociology from Durham Univer-
sity),4 his early career as a journalist5 helped him
navigate through a wide range of scientific re-
search, but without benefit of specialized training
in astronomy, geology, history, archaeology, or com-
parative religion and mythology. Hancock is obvi-
ously bright, articulate, and a good writer and
storyteller who comes across as eminently reason-
able, which makes it all the more difficult to tease
apart fact from fiction in the many claims made in
his books, documentary films, and lectures.
Göbekli Tepe
The centerpiece of Hancock’s Magicians is a remark-
able archaeological site called Göbekli Tepe in Turkey
dated to 11,600 years ago. He contends Göbekli Tepe is
32 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
too advanced to have been built by hunter-gatherers
alone, and must therefore have been constructed with
the help of people from a more advanced civilization.
Unfortunately for Hancock these people left behind
no hard evidence for their existence, so he is forced to
allude to what he thinks is sophisticated architecture,
along with a few carved figures that he asserts repre-
sent astronomical constellations. From these specula-
tions Hancock concludes: “At the very least it [Göbekli
Tepe] would mean that some as yet unknown and
unidentified people somewhere in the world had al-
ready mastered all the arts and attributes of a high civ-
ilization more than twelve thousand years ago in the
depths of the last Ice Age and sent out emissaries
around the world to spread the benefits of their
knowledge.”
It’s a romantic notion, but not the conclusion
that the late great German archaeologist Klaus
Schmidt came to after excavating Göbekli Tepe for
more than two decades beginning in 1994. The site,
he says, was used from 11,600 to about 10,000 years
before the present. Lower sections were backfilled
giving way to new structures on top. The fill is re-
fuse containing sediment, hundreds of thousands of
broken animal bones, flint tools for carving the
structures within the site and for hunting game,
and the remains of cereals and other plant material,
and even a few human bones. There is no evidence
that the site was ever used as a residence, and the
megaliths found there (Schmidt called them “mon-
umental religious architecture”) along with carv-
ings and totems, imply ritual and feasting.
The main features of Göbekli Tepe are the T-
shaped 7- to 10-ton monolithic pillars cut and hauled
from crystalline limestone quarries on the tepe (hill)
and erected within 10- to 20- meter ring structures
made of rocks annealed by clay mortar that encircle
the pillars. The stone statues are clearly anthropomor-
phic—arms and hands can be seen on the sides of the

Figure 1—A T-shaped megalith with animal carvings
at Göbekli Tepe.
Figure 2—Hancock claims that the “teapot” asterism
of the constellation Sagittarius fits the vulture from
Göbekli Tepe better than the archer (Page 319).
Figure 4—The star pattern is from the day sky in 10,950 BCE (using the
astronomical computer program Stellarium) with the images from pillar 43
at Göbekli Tepe matched with the constellation as proposed by Sweatman
and Tsikritsis. I argue that the correlations are purely speculative.
Figure 3—Two interpretations of the
“teapot” asterism by the author: Uncle Sam
and a commando insignia. It is easy to find
matching patterns if you are motivated to do so.
Figure 5—The Scorpius star
asterism (far left) associated
with the scorpion is compared
to the carving of the scorpion
found at Göbekli Tepe (left).
We know constellations are
symbols not necessarily based
on matching patterns, as can
be seen from the lack of corre-
lation between either scorpion
and the asterism. This shows
the tenuous foundation of the
Sweatman and Tsikritsis argu-
ment. (Image on the far left
from the Stellarium astronomi-
cal computer program.)
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM

pillars reaching around to the front. A variety of animals, mostly
representing the wild animals found within the refuse, have
been carved on the pillars.6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Göbekli Tepe and other archaeological sites being studied
nearby have forced archaeologists to rethink the way the pre-
historic lifestyle of hunting, gathering, and foraging gave way to
a more domesticated lifestyle in northern Mesopotamia. Oliver
Dietrich, a colleague of Klaus Schmidt at the German Archaeo-
logical Institute, poignantly expressed the impact of these dis-
coveries: “These people must have had a highly complicated
mythology, including a capacity for abstraction. Following
these ideas, we now have more evidence that…social systems
changed before, not as a result of, the shift to farming.” 11 It also
shows that hunter-gatherers were capable of more than we pre-
viously thought, and that the origins of religion may have to be
pushed back by millennia.
But this is a far cry from Hancock’s proposal that the site
is a link to his lost civilization. In fact, archaeologists consider
Göbekli Tepe to be a pre-pottery Neolithic site. Not only is
clay pottery absent, the site contans no evidence of any metal
or metal workings. The obvious reason for this is that clay pot-
tery and metals are typical of more advanced cultures. Al-
though Hancock writes that “our ancestors are being initiated
into the secrets of metals, and how to make swords and
knives,” no such thing is found at any of the archaeological
sites he touts as being influenced by his highly advanced lost
civilization, not at Göbekli Tepe, nor in the non-Roman areas
of Baalbek, Easter Island, nor at any of the ancient Mayan sites
he discusses.
During an exchange with Michael Shermer on the Joe
Rogan Experience podcast, Hancock suggested that “perhaps,”
“maybe,” and “possibly” this lost civilization did not have metal
tools, writing, and other features of societies traditionally la-
beled as “advanced,” and that we need to reconfigure the main-
stream scientific timeline of what it means to be an advanced
S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
Figure 6—Excavators
uncover one of many
circular enclosures at
Göbekli Tepe. Two large
T-shaped pillars over 5m
(16 feet) high typically
stand in the middle of
the ring with smaller
pillars facing them.
Some of these stones
are decorated with re-
liefs of animals that
once lived in the area.
This area known as
Enclosure D features
birds, while others em-
phasize animals such
as snakes, foxes,
boars, or wildcats.
culture. Perhaps, he hinted, they communicated entirely
through the oral tradition, skipping writing. When Shermer
pressed him to explain what he means by “advanced” Hancock
replied: “I am saying that a group of people settled amongst the
hunter-gatherers and transferred some skills for them.” When I
came into the debate later and pushed him on this same issue
of how an allegedly advanced civilization could lack all the fea-
tures of other such societies, such as metallurgy, he demurred:
“I do not make that claim. I am reporting that this claim is
made in the Book of Enoch.” It is true that in his book Hancock
discusses the secrets of metals in the context of discussing the
Book of Enoch, but the entire chapter is in support of evidence
that a lost civilization had superior knowledge that included
the secrets of metal working. Such details are important be-
cause it gives us a glimpse into how Hancock infers one thing
when it is convenient in making his point, but then shifts to
claiming he is only reporting what other people say when the
implications stretch our credulity. For example, Hancock calls
these ancient peoples the “Watchers” (aka the “Magicians”) in
a section titled “Mystery of the Nephilim”:
The Watchers begin their development project in quite small
ways, teaching “charms and enchantments, and the cutting of
roots” to humans, and making them “acquainted with plants.”
This sounds fairly harmless; apart from a bit of “enchantment,”
it’s not really above and beyond the basic hunter-gatherer level of
skills. But pretty soon, as we saw earlier, our ancestors are being
initiated into the secrets of metals and how to make swords and
knives, and how to study the heavens.
Hancock may call this reporting, but Shermer was not
satisfied by such chicanery when he questioned Hancock on
why the hunter-gatherers at Göbekli Tepe were not taught the
“secrets of metal workings.” Hancock had no explanation as
to why the hunter-gatherers at Göbekli Tepe knew nothing
about metals, or even pottery, nor did he reply to Shermer’s
L O S T CIVILIZATIONS
numerous requests for a definition of an “advanced
civilization” that lacked writing, metallurgy, or
ceramics.
Schmidt and his colleagues have arduously docu-
mented the use of flint tools for the construction of
Göbekli Tepe, and none of the hundreds of thousands
of animal bones and cereals found in the backfill from
the lowest levels show any signs of domestication—
they are all wild species. In fact, the large abundance
of bones from wild animals found at the site allows
Schmidt to underscore the ability of the hunter-gath-
erers in the region to support the hundreds of workers
and stone cutters presumed necessary to create the
megaliths and other structures. Schmidt makes a
salient point almost as if he anticipated Hancock’s
book: “Fabulous or mythical creatures, such as cen-
taurs or the sphinx, winged bulls or horses, do not yet
occur in the iconography and therefore in the mythol-
ogy of the prehistoric times. They must be recognized
as creations of the high cultures which arose later.” 11
I would only add that unlike the Mesopotamian and
Egyptian civilizations where inscriptions made by lit-
erate societies have been well documented, not a sin-
gle inscription has been found at Göbekli Tepe.
Patterns in the Stars
Next consider Hancock’s assertion that the stone
carvings on the sides of the T-shaped pillars at
Göbekli Tepe represent constellations. Figure 49 on
page 319 of his book (Figure 2 in this article) em-
phasizes how virtually any figure could be matched
to star asterisms (clusters). In fact, Schmidt con-
cluded that the figures on the pillars mostly repre-
sent the wild animals whose bones were found in
the backfill from the site.
Recently Hancock’s thesis seemed to find sup-
port from two professors at the University of Edin-
burgh, Martin Sweatman and Dimitrios Tsikritsis,
whose paper reported that the “vulture stone,” a pillar
at Göbekli Tepe, is “a date stamp for 10950 BCE + –
250 yrs.” 13 I wrote Sweatman about the article prior
to our debate with Hancock on the Rogan show, and
he directed me to his website where he states:
Graham Hancock attempted to decode GT in his
book Magicians of the Gods using the ideas of Paul
Burley and the YD [Younger Dryas] context pro-
vided by [Andrew] Collins, but in our view his logic
takes a wrong turn early on, leading him to make
some erroneous conclusions. Especially we oppose
Graham’s contention that the Vulture Stone predicts
an impact 12,000 years into their future—around
2030 AD—this is, ocurse [sic] impossible.
That Sweatman distances himself from Han-
cock’s theory is telling, but in my decades of reading
scientific papers I have never come across an article
more speculative than this one. The entire paper rests
on the supposition that the authors can match “low
relief carvings” on a pillar of Göbekli Tepe to star as-
terisms in 10,950 BCE in the western sky at 4 seconds
after 1:01 PM on September 11 (Figure 4). Specifi-
cally, Sweatman and Tsikritsis use the carvings on pil-
lar 43. But why that one? There are many pillars both
unearthed (44) and still buried at Göbekli Tepe, so it
is not clear why pillar 43 has the significance they at-
tribute to it—drawings of animals decorate most of
the pillars. In any case, they start by assuming that
the scorpion at the bottom of pillar 43 is the same as
the modern-day constellation Scorpius. The assump-
tion that we can attribute 12,950 year-old patterns on
rocks to star asterisms is highly suspect. Here in the
U.S., for example, we call a set of stars in the constel-
lation Ursa Major the Big Dipper because to our eyes
it looks like a dipper. In the UK, however, they call
the same asterism the Plough. In Mayan culture it is
described as a parrot. In ancient Egypt it is the leg of a
bull. No doubt naming asterisms helped ancient peo-
ples remember star patterns, but the names were not
always chosen on the basis of a matching appearance
with the asterism. Such naming could be and often
was symbolic. There are many carved images of ani-
mals at Göbekli Tepe, and attributing even one to a
star pattern is more like astrology than science.
Here is the rub. Sweatman and Tsikritsis casu-
ally assume that because in the past a star asterism
was attributed to a scorpion (in this case Scorpius),
it makes perfect sense that ancient hunter-gather-
ers living 13,000 years ago saw the same pattern as
a scorpion. Look carefully at Figure 5 and compare
the scorpions to the star pattern we call Scorpius. I
think most would contend that almost any elon-
gated figure could be associated with the star aster-
ism and that matching of a scorpion to the pattern
takes a fertile imagination. Finally, the scorpion on
pillar 43 looks nothing like the star pattern.
The pattern correlation problem does not keep
Sweatman and Tsikritsis from matching figures on pil-
lar 43 in a roughly clockwise fashion to the asterisms
surrounding Scorpius in the day sky of 10,950 BCE. I
show the day sky with the location of the sun and im-
ages of the various animals below with arrows point-
ing to the constellations they supposedly match
(Figure 4).
Besides the obvious fact that the images have no
good correlation to the star patterns in the known
constellations displayed (e.g., look at the bird figure
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 33
 that has been matched with Libra), there are many
constellations that have been ignored, such as
Norma, Ara, Telescopium, Corona Australis, Scutum,
and Serpens. In addition, there is one bird-like fea-
ture that does not match to any star asterism and in
another case, for an unexplained reason, a crane-like
image is combined with a fish-like image to match
with Ophiuchus. Not only do Sweatman and Tsikrit-
sist claim their mapping of the images in the sky doc-
uments a date of 10950 BCE + – 250 years, but they go
on to conclude that the hunter-gatherers of Göbekli
Tepe must have been certifying the date of “the”
comet strike. (Even though that strike supposedly oc-
curred in North America). They try to bring their
point home by suggesting that a “belt buckle” with a
“nested U” has “an excellent likeness of the very spe-
cific bow shock wave of a hypersonic spherical ob-
ject.” Seriously? Without high speed photography
how does one see the bow shock wave of an object
traveling faster than the speed of sound?
If you wanted to convey the existence of a
comet strike to future generations, would it not be
prudent and obvious to carve the actual positions of
the stars along with the comet on a rock? Sweat-
man and Tsikritsis, along with Hancock, attribute
evolved astronomical knowledge to these hunter-
gatherers. So why don’t these ancients show off
their knowledge with star maps rather than with
figures that may or may not represent constella-
tions? I think the answer is obvious—the carvings
likely have nothing to do with asterisms.
Hancock has attempted to make the case that
the megalithic structures at Göbekli Tepe are so com-
plex that they had to involve assistance from his lost
advanced civilization when the hunter-gatherers built
them. But Schmidt found that the backfill that cov-
ered these structures had no signs of any advanced
technologies including domesticated animals or
crops. Shermer’s point about lack of technology be-
comes even more salient when you carefully examine
Hancock’s proposal—the Magicians supposedly
taught hunter-gatherers the secrets of asterisms (and
even how to predict the destruction of our planet
some 12,000 years in the future) but did not pass on
simpler technologies like domestication of plants and
crops or the use of metals and pottery? Not likely.
The Great Sphinx of Giza
Hancock’s formula used at Göbekli Tepe for inferring
a lost advanced civilization—speculation absent of
supporting data—is extended to other archaeological
sites. Arguably, the most egregious example of “fit-
ting” ancient structures into a lost civilization fan-
34 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
tasy occurs at the Great Sphinx of Giza and the
Sphinx and Valley temples.
The major evidence Hancock brings to the
table comes by way of the Sphinx water erosion hy-
pothesis proposed by Boston University professor
Robert Schoch. The hypothesis has never been pub-
lished in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but that
has not stopped Schoch from becoming the darling
of subscribers to the ancient lost civilization myth.
The argument posits that there is erosion on the
Great Sphinx that must have been caused by “thou-
sands of years of heavy rain” as Hancock puts it. He
continues: “this means it [the Great Sphinx] has to
be much older than 2500 BCE (the orthodox date,
when Egypt received no more rain than it does
today) and must originally have been carved around
the end of the Ice Age when the Nile valley was
subjected to a long period of intense precipitation.”
Recent dating that contradicts Hancock’s asser-
tion was published in 2015. University of the Aegean
physicist Ioannis Liritzis and his collaborator Asimina
Vafiadou published in the peer-reviewed Journal of
Cultural Heritage surface luminescence dates of the
Valley and Sphinx temples that match perfectly with
the time period that archaeologists have long ac-
cepted based on other dating techniques—the Great
Sphinx of Giza and associated temples were built dur-
ing the reign of Pharaoh Khafre (c. 2558-2532 BCE).14
Nevertheless, with a stiff upper lip Hancock spends
several pages in Magicians attempting to argue that
the dates come from what we are told “Schoch al-
ready regarded as restoration work.” I wrote Dr. Lir-
itzis and asked him to comment on the assertions
made by Hancock and Schoch. He told me he was
aware of Hancock’s “ideolipseis” and assured me that
the samples Hancock claims were from a coating
placed over the blocks to shield them from weather-
ing “were not shielded coatings…but derived from
the whole block in between a firm contact!” In other
words, the Sphinx and Temple Complex are evidence
of an ancient civilization that existed in the third mil-
lennium BCE, not thousands of years earlier.
During our debate, Hancock was keen to empha-
size that the dates are from the temples and not the
Sphinx. But a careful reading of both Fingerprints and
Magicians shows that he argues that the Sphinx and
associated temples were built in the same period,
which explains why he spends several pages in Magi-
cians attempting to undermine or explain away the
dates from the temples as noted above. And with
good reason, as the work of renowned Egyptologist
Mark Lehner shows. Lehner received his Ph.D. from
Yale and is currently the director of Ancient Egypt
L O S T CIVILIZATIONS
Research Associates. He wrote his dissertation on the
Sphinx and has spent the last 30 years working on the
approximately two-square miles of the Giza plateau,
making some remarkable discoveries. First, the
Sphinx is carved directly from an in situ limestone
mass. Lehner, together with geologist Tom Aigner,
demonstrated that the limestone used to construct
the temples has precisely the same fossil assemblage
as the limestone in the Great Sphinx, and therefore
must have come from the same source. Moreover,
they found that the walls of the Sphinx temple were
excavated from a trench surrounding the Sphinx.
Lehner and Aigner emphasized that the most likely
scenario was that the Sphinx temple was built while
they were carving the Great Sphinx.15
Hancock makes no mention of these aspects of
Lehner’s work, but he does tell us that “By virtue of
the distinctive weathering patterns on that monu-
ment’s [the Sphinx] flanks and on sections of the
trench that surrounds it—highlighted in the analysis
of geology professor Robert Schoch of Boston Univer-
sity—a proto Sphinx does appear to have existed
when heavy rains fell across Egypt at the end of the
Ice Age.” Attentive readers will notice that Hancock
links the weathering on the Sphinx with the weather-
ing in the trench from which the walls of the Sphinx
and Valley temples were extracted. In other words,
the weathering must have occurred after the walls
were excavated from the trench and placed in the
Sphinx temple—the very walls that have been dated
to approximately 2500 BCE by Liritzis and Vafiadou.
Further, in 1853 French Archaeologist Auguste
Mariette discovered a life-size statue made of
“black volcanic rock” of the Pharoah Khafre within
the Valley temple. He also unearthed a paved pro-
cessional causeway between the Valley temple and
a mortuary temple adjacent to Khafre’s pyramid. Is
it any surprise that professional archaeologists have
concluded that Khafre constructed the Sphinx, the
Valley and Sphinx temples, as well as his great pyra-
mid? Egyptian archaeologist and former Minister of
State for Antiquities Affairs of Egypt, Zahi Hawass,
wrote in 2006: “Most scholars believe, as I do, that
the Sphinx represents Khafre and forms an integral
part of the pyramid complex.” 16
Indeed, Lehner located the site where as many
as 2,000 laborers lived while constructing the Giza
complex near the Old Kingdom cemetery that
Hawass had uncovered nine years earlier. The ceme-
tery was the burial site of some of the directors of the
construction of Giza based on tomb inscriptions.
Lehner showed that the laborers were not slaves, but
the kingdoms hired hands—bone artifacts indicate
that their diet was mainly young cattle (prime beef!).
The makeup of the laborer community is important
because it appears they walked off the job before the
Giza complex was finished. As far back as 1978,
Hawass and Lehner discovered that stone blocks
were left abandoned as the Sphinx temple was being
built.17 Why?
That’s where German climatologists Rudolph
Kuper and Stefan Kröpelin come into the picture.
They published a study of climate changes in the
eastern Sahara in Science in 2006, based on copious
amounts of archaeological dating (more than 500
dates from over 150 excavations). Their conclusions
are telling: (1) A vast region including Egypt and
Sudan and parts of Libya and Chad were bone dry
from the last glacial maximum at 20,000 years ago
until about 8,500 years ago—not the advantageous
environment Hancock envisions for hunter-gather-
ers when they supposedly met up with his “magi-
cians” in 10,000 BCE to build the Great Sphinx. (2)
Monsoon rains beginning in 8,500 BCE transformed
the desert into a habitable environment for hunter-
gatherers who began settling in the region about
7000 BCE—no evidence of hunter-gatherers in the
lower Nile exists prior to this time, contrary to Han-
cock’s assertions. (3) By 1,500 BCE desiccation was
complete, leading Kuper and Kröpelin to conclude:
“The final desiccation of the Egyptian Sahara also
had an essential impact on the contemporaneous ori-
gin of the pharaonic civilization in the Nile valley.” 18
Lehner attributes the evidence of erosion on the
Sphinx and along the trenches from which the Valley
and Sphinx temple walls were excavated to the
monsoon rains that periodically fell in the region as
it became desiccated. Not only are there erosional
remnants on the Sphinx from rains during this pe-
riod, but Lehner found evidence of erosion within
the laborers’ camp. He postulates that by the later
years of the Old Kingdom, laborers refused to work
in the suffocating dry conditions and stopped the
construction of the Giza complex when food became
in short supply.19
It is also worth noting that Lehner has tied the
Giza complex together—including the Sphinx and
pyramids—through his careful mapping and research
of the structures. As Hancock has pointed out, the
Sphinx runs east-west, but not because the Egyptians
had help from magicians in aligning it with asterisms.
Swiss archaeologist Herbert Ricke noted in the 1960s
that the Sphinx temple walls encompass a courtyard
with 24 pillars—each pillar representing an hour of
the day as the sun crosses the sky from east to west.
Lehner recognized that at the equinoxes “the shadow
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 35

-25
Younger
Mean annual temperature (degrees C)
Holocene
Dryas
-30
-35
-40
Last Glacial
Maximum
-45
-50
-55
8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22
Age (thousands of years)
Figure 7—Temperature variations from Greenland ice cores over the
last 23,000 years (from climateshifts.org)
of the Sphinx and the shadow of the pyramid, both
symbols of the king, become merged silhouettes. The
Sphinx itself, it seems, symbolized the pharaoh pre-
senting offerings to the sun god in the court of the
temple.” Hawass agrees, reminding us that Khafre as
the royal falcon god “is giving offerings with his two
paws to his father, Khufu, incarnated as the sun god,
Ra, who rises and sets in that temple.” 20
The Younger Dryas and the Comet Strike
Next we will consider Hancock’s explanation for
why there is no direct evidence for his lost civiliza-
tion—it was completely wiped out by a comet im-
pact. Here’s the back story which involves a
mainstream scientific controversy that Hancock
has stepped into for his own unique reasons.
About 23,000 years ago Earth began to come
out of the last glacial deep freeze, marked by reced-
ing glaciers at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum
(see Figure 7). But rather dramatically, about 12,900
years ago temperatures plummeted and then did an
about face, warming again about 11,500 years ago—a
period of 1,400 years geologists call the Younger
Dryas (YD). The cause of the event has been a mat-
ter of considerable scientific debate for decades, but
consensus in the early 1990s centered on a paper by
Wally Broecker and his colleagues that proposed the
disruption of a large-scale ocean phenomenon called
the Thermohaline Circulation in the north Atlantic,
driven in part by the interaction of surface heat and
freshwater fluxes.21 Melt water from the massive
Laurentide Ice Sheet covering large swaths of north-
ern North America drained into ancient Lake Agas-
siz, itself formed by the retreat of the more than mile
thick glacier. Water then flowed south through the
36 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
Mississippi embayment to the ocean. Oxygen isotope
analyses along with 14C dating of planktonic shells
from the Gulf of Mexico reveals a decrease in the
flux of fresh water from about 11,100 until 10,000
years ago. The Broecker group postulated that the
compositional change in seawater related to a
change in the drainage through flooding from Lake
Agassiz toward the North Atlantic. The idea was that
an influx of freshwater into the North Atlantic di-
minished density-driven circulation of oceanic cur-
rents—the conveyor belt that brings warmth to the
northern climes—initiating worldwide cooling.
However, neither geomorphic evidence of
flooding from Lake Agassiz into either the Arctic or
Atlantic oceans, nor a drop in the water level in Lake
Agassiz could ever be found, causing even Broecker
to abandon the Lake Agassiz flooding hypothesis.22
That left the door open for another scenario, a comet
strike termed the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
(YDIH). The proponents of YDIH claim that the im-
pact not only caused the dramatic climate change,
but also triggered the demise of the Pleistocene
megafauna (the extinction of dozens of large North
American mammals more commonly attributed to
either overhunting by humans, gradual climate
change, or both) and the collapse of the Clovis cul-
ture in North America. The debate over what hap-
pened during the YD can only be described as a
scientific “dogfight” that may go on for decades. But
the reason the YDIH extraordinary claim has yet to
find consensus is that extraordinary evidence has yet
to emerge to support it. To be clear, the debate is not
over lost civilizations.
The firestorm began in 2007 when Richard
Firestone and numerous colleagues proposed that it
was a comet strike of “multiple ET [extraterrestrial]
airbursts along with surface impacts” that occurred
at 12,900 years ago that initiated the YD.” 23 The
paper was full of impressive evidence gathered from
10 sites where a carbon-rich layer (referred to as the
“black mat”) marked what they claimed was the end
of the Clovis culture in North America: “The in situ
bones of extinct Pleistocene megafaunas, along with
Clovis tool assemblages, occur below this black layer
but not within or above it.” They reported that sedi-
ments directly below the black mat were enriched in
magnetic grains, iridium, magnetic microspherules,
charcoal, soot, carbon spherules, glass-like carbon
containing nanodiamonds and fullerenes containing
extraterrestrial helium. They explained that the soot,
charcoal, spherules, etc. were the result of extensive
and intense forest fires initiated by the airbursts.
Melting of the Laurentide Ice Sheet would have
L O S T CIVILIZATIONS
Southwest Rocky Eastern
Calibrated radiocarbon years before present: Age (cal a BP)

United States Mountains Great Plains US

9000

10,000

11,000

12,000

13,000

14,000

15,000

16,000

17,000

18,000
Arlington Springs, CA
Naco, AZ
Wilcox PLaya, AZ
Huntington Canyon. UT
Sunshine Locality, NV
Gilcrease Spring, NV
Murray Springs, AZ
Chapo Ranch, AZ
Southern Great Basin, NV
MacHaffie, MT
Indian Creek, MT
Black Mountain, CO
Vermillion Lakes, Alberta
OTL Ridge, MT
Beacon Island, ND
Benz, ND
J.B. Spring, ND
Sewright, ND
Little MO Badlands, ND
Little MO Escarpment, ND
Flaming Arrow, ND
Lake Ilo/Bobtail Wolf, ND
Cow Catcher, ND
Streifel Gravel Pit, ND
Lange/Ferguson, SD
Chalk Rock, SD
Bram’s, SD
Jim Pitts, SD
South Whilock site, SD
Sheep Mtn Table Badlands, SD
Sister’s Hill, WY
Carter/Kerr-McGee, WY
Agate Basin, WY
Hell Gap, WY
Sheaman, WY
Jurgens, CO
Frazier, CO
Jones-Miller, CO
Lindenmeier, Co
Lamb Spring, CO
Ash Hollow, NE
Medicine Creek, NE
Kanorado, KS
Nall, OK
Domebo, OK
Bull Creek, OK
Lubbock Lake, TX
SHP draws, TX and NM
Clovis, NM
Pounds Playa, NM
Aubrey, TX
Wilson-Leonard, TX
Richard Beene, TX
Arc, NY
Hiscock, NY
Figure 8—Carbon 14 ranges from samples taken from “the Younger Dryas boundary” at various Clovis sites (one standard
deviation above and below the mean is shown as a vertical line). The gray region marks the YD. From Holliday et al.26

dumped copious quantities of melt water into the fect the entire continent.” 27 They also point out that
Atlantic, thereby disrupting the density currents and any comet strike large enough to affect an entire
bringing on the cooling. continent would leave a detectable crater even if it
Over the years, however, support for the YDIH struck the ice sheet. To get around this glaring prob-
has been undermined. Nearly every aspect of the lem, the Firestone group proposed that the comet
original evidence has been challenged by a host of broke up upon entry into earth’s atmosphere. But
scientists in various fields. Only one of the indicators, according to physicist Mark Boslough and his col-
iridium, has been commonly used as an impact leagues,28 that would produce “more than a million
marker, and the iridium data have not always been Meteor craters” (the size of the crater in central Ari-
reproducible. The iridium concentrations can also be zona) based on the comet size postulated by Fire-
explained by terrestrial origins.24, 25 Nor do nanodia- stone and his cohorts.29,30
monds require extraterrestrial events. The absence of While the Firestone group claims that the comet
any impact craters at the beginning of the YD world- strike was responsible for the disappearance of the 37
wide is the most disconcerting evidence against mammal megafauna genera specifically in North
YDIH, as is the lack of control for the age of sedi- America, extinctions occurred on other continents,
ments/black mat at or near the YD boundary. Figure most notably South America, where at least 52 mam-
8 above shows the range of 14 C dates from the YD mal genera disappeared. And not all those genera dis-
boundary at various Clovis sites. The gray region rep- appeared synchronously at the YD boundary! Instead,
resents the YD, and the dates emphasize the difficul- megafauna extinctions on continents and islands
ties in precisely defining the YD boundary at 12,900 seem to correlate with the arrival of humans. The
years ago. thinking goes that these huge megafauna would have
In addition to these arguments against the had no reason to fear humans, and were probably easy
YDIH, it is difficult to imagine how an airburst/im- pickings for the newly arriving hunter-gatherers. Sci-
pact could annihilate the North American mammal entists have also been a bit incredulous that a comet
megafauna and Clovis culture and initiate huge wild strike could wipe out all the megafauna as far south as
fires, without leaving any evidence in the way of Patagonia, while leaving mammoths alive and well on
massive flooding or impact features. Vance Holliday St. Paul Island, Alaska until 3,700 years ago.31
and his colleagues argue that “no physical mecha- There is, in fact, no need to hypothesize a cata-
nism is known to produce an airburst that would af- strophic event to explain the disappearance of the

volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 37

 megafauna and associated Clovis culture. The Clovis
culture in North America is known foremost for the
large fluted lanceolate projectile points found prima-
rily around 13,500 years ago. There are spectacular
mammoth kill sites associated with Clovis artifacts
with butchery marks on the mammoth bones. At the
Manis site in Washington, Dr. Carl Gustafson and his
team excavated a mastodon skeleton in the 1970s
with a long projectile point embedded in one of the
bones. Under the “overkill” scenario, the disappear-
ance of Clovis projectile points and other artifacts
does not require a catastrophic event. It probably
means that the human toolkit, originally developed to
kill the megafauna, was gradually replaced as the
megafauna were killed off.32 There is no evidence that
humans disappeared in North and South America
after the YD. How would a comet kill the megafauna
but leave humans virtually untouched?
In addition, contrary to what Hancock would
Figure 9—A typical have us believe, there is no evidence of catastrophic
Clovis projectile point. flooding. Recall that Broecker had to back off his Lake
https://en.wikipedia. Agassiz hypothesis because no evidence for cata-
org/wiki/Clovis_point
strophic flooding could be found. The glacial moraines
formed by the Laurentide Ice Sheet have been pre-
cisely mapped and they show a consistent retreat until
about 9,800 years ago.33 They would most assuredly
have been disrupted by the postulated massive floods.
Hancock claims that the “comet and asteroid
impacts not only cause floods but can also impose
huge stresses on the crust of the earth resulting in
increased earthquake and volcanic activity.” As a vol-
canologist, I would strongly argue that a strike would
not lead to volcanic activity, and beyond the initial
impact, it may not lead to earthquakes. Regardless,
Hancock can’t have it both ways—huge stresses can-
not happen to the earth’s crust without leaving iden-
tifiable scars on the land. Notably, Broecker and his
colleagues have most recently concluded that “there
is no need to call upon a one-time catastrophic event
to explain the YD. More likely, the YD was a neces-
sary part of the last termination…cold reversals
equivalent to the YD seem to be integral parts of
global switches from glacial to interglacial cli-
mate.” 34
I want to emphasize that although the YDIH
has lost acceptance within the scientific community
over the last decade, the debate proceeds in the
proper scientific manner (i.e., by publishing results
in peer-reviewed scientific journals). As Malcolm
LeCompte, one of the comet researchers, pointed
out in our debate on Joe Rogan’s show (he was
Hancock’s expert guest; I was Shermer’s), there are
four indicators at the YD boundary that may be due
38 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
to an extraterrestrial origin: nanodiamonds, mag-
netic sphericals, melt glass, and the platinum group
metals (reduced from the 10 or more originally pro-
posed by the Firestone group). But all of these can be
explained through terrestrial processes also, which
he acknowledged on the show.
A recently published paper has some intriguing
data. Moore et al.35 found platinum concentrations
above background levels within what they believe is
representative of the YD boundary. The problem, of
course, is that Pt concentrations are traditionally low
in ice-rich comets. LeCompte suggested that the Pt
concentrations could be indicative of an asteroid.
The story continues to evolve, and I am loathe to
comment further until the comet/asteroid group can
decide what the correct scenario is. While Pt con-
centrations do increase within the YD boundary, dat-
ing the event is difficult (see Figure 8). The debate
may take many years to be resolved. While I would
not rule out an extraterrestrial event at this point
there is virtually no evidence that an asteroid/comet
devastated the megafauna, caused massive flooding,
and destroyed the Clovis culture.
In any case, Hancock’s reliance on the YDIH is
problematic for a number of reasons. First, Hancock’s
white whale is what geologists call uniformitarian-
ism—the idea that the earth has been affected by
continuous, gradual, uniform processes. He claims
that scientists are so blindly wedded to this dogma to
the point that they cannot see the catastrophism be-
fore their eyes. This is disingenuous. As a practicing
geologist, I can assert in the strongest terms that al-
though uniformitarianism is a tool in geological re-
search, the importance of catastrophes has been
recognized since the early to middle 20th century,
thanks to work by Daniel Barringer and later Gene
Shoemaker on Meteor crater, J Harlen Bretz and J. T.
Pardee on the Scabland floods, and the documenta-
tion of massive volcanic eruptions, past tsunami
events, glaciation, plate tectonics, and many more ex-
amples. Far from being dogmatically closed minded,
our openness toward catastrophic events is precisely
what allowed Walter and Luis Alvarez to overcome an
initially doubting geologic community to accept the
idea that the dinosaurs had been wiped out by a me-
teor impact. Hancock implies conspiracy whenever
he runs into normal scientific skepticism (he actually
has sections of his book entitled “Conspiracy Corner”
and “Taking on the dogmatic uniformitarians”). This
allows him to deflect scientific criticism from his un-
likely ideas by painting himself as just one of many
that have run up against the supposed scientific jug-
gernaut of uniformitarianism.
L O S T CIVILIZATIONS
124° 122° 120° 118° 116° 114°

Co
LERAN ICE SHEET
CORDIL
Cordilleran Ice Sheet

nt i n
Glacial lakes TEN
AY ALBERTA
Lake Kootenay KOOO O D
FL
Flooded area Recessional

e
PU
Glacial Lake n
Kootenay ta

RC
BRITISH COLUMBIA

EL
49° CANADA

ER

l
L
TR
RIV
WASHINGTON UNITED STATES

EN
CH
A
C O LUMBI

D
Glacial
v

i
Lake id
LAKE A
Clark OUL
CO LUMBIA S S DSS
MFI FLLOOOOD

e
FLOOD

Glacier
Peak

BI
Glacial
Flathead

TT
Lake
Columbia Lake

ER
SEATTLE
SPOKANE MONTANA

O
(100m lower during Missoula floods)

O
T
47° Quincy
Basin Channeled

R
Scabland

A
N
PACIFIC OCEAN

Mount G
Rainier E
SNAK
E

E
ER
CO R IV Glacial Lake
NG

Pasco
LUM Ya k i m a
Va Basin Missoula
ll ey
BI

Mount Walla
A

St. Helens Walla

RA

Valley

RIVE R
IDAHO
y

PORTLAND
E
e
all

OREGON
AD
Willamette V

45°
SC

0 100 miles
CA

0 200 k

Figure 10—(Above) The distribution of Lake Missoula and the flooded areas. From Waitt.
Figure 11—(Below) The range in dates of the timing of the periodic flooding from Lake Missoula. From Waitt.

Hancock portrays himself as the modern-day J

Harlen Bretz, continually comparing the difficulties Zuffa 3 (deep sea)
After Missoula floods

Bretz had getting a skeptical scientific community to Fulton (southern B.C.)

accept the Scabland flooding hypothesis with his own ArchNW 2
helter-skelter conjecturing. Hancock insists that Battle Ground, WA
ArchNW 1
Bretz’s first claim that there was one major flood Gilmour 2
through the Scablands is correct. Bretz later changed Willamette Valley, OR)
Gilmour 1
his mind in favor of multiple periodic floods. Science Mullineaux Vancouver, WA
has moved on, not only eventually accepting Bretz’s
Within Missoula floods

Bunker
original evidence for flooding (Bretz would receive Benito 3
the coveted Penrose Medal for his work on the Scab- Waitt
lands), but carefully documenting the dates of specific Benito 2
floods through the Scablands. We now know with Atwater
some confidence that ice dams that formed ancient Lillquist
Lake Missoula broke periodically, pouring erosive Benito 1
water through a massive area of eastern Washington Zuffa 2 Early
(deep sea) Missoula
and northern Oregon (see Figures 10 and 11). Zuffa 1 floods?
(southern Before
At least 17 floods in the Scablands have been Claque B.C.) icesheet
documented by careful dating. But the most impor-
tant thing required to support Hancock’s theories is 24000 22000 20000 18000 16000 14000 12000
missing—no larger flood occurred in the Scablands at Calibrated date (cal BP)
the YD boundary. All the floods were clearly limited

volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 39

 in area and are consistent with the breaking of ice
dams formed by the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which
released water from ancient Lake Missoula. Hancock
admits that the periodic flooding occurred, but insists
that geologists have missed the evidence for an
apocalyptic flood at the YD boundary brought on by
a comet strike. This, in turn, is used as evidence for a
worldwide flood that wiped out his lost advanced
civilization. A flood of this scope is quite a contrast
to the limited area covered by the Scabland floods.
So what is his evidence for worldwide flooding?
Once again, he relies on flood mythologies, including
the Noachian flood, stating: “So although the floods
at the end of the Ice Age could never have carried
Noah and his Ark thousands of feet above present sea
level to the slopes of Mount Ararat, they were indeed
global in their extent and would have had devastating
consequences for humans living at the time.”
I asked Isaac Larsen at the University of Massa-
chusetts, one of the world’s experts on the Scabland
flooding, if there was any chance that the deluges could
be related to the YDIH, and if he had any thoughts on
the claims made by Hancock about a conspiracy to hide
evidence. (Larsen along with his colleague Michael
Lamb have just published a paper in Nature on “out-
burst flooding in the Scablands.”37) He did not mince
words in his response: “The scientific consensus is that
there was not one single catastrophic flood, but multi-
ple floods, and the occurrence of multiple floods is
hence not consistent with the comet impact pro-
posal…. Regarding conspiracies, I would say that the
scientific community is very open to new ideas, and
those ideas supported by data gain credence, whereas
ideas that lack compelling empirical or theoretical
basis fail to gain traction. Scientists are quite individu-
alistic, and getting thousands of them to subscribe to a
conspiracy isn’t something I can imagine happening.”
Neither can I.
The Lost Civilization Sends a Message
Magicians is admittedly a compelling read, and its
thesis a titillating one, invoking an advanced lost civi-
lization that reinforces the myth of a “Golden Age” of
humanity, but it is convoluted and twisted in its sub-
stance. Hancock is often vague, which makes it diffi-
cult to ferret out what he is trying to say. His book is
full of excerpts from mythology that he insists bear hid-
den truths. Not once are we told why the magicians
had to send their messages using obtuse metaphors.
But Hancock’s message is clear: a technologically ad-
vanced civilization—no less than the most famous lost
civilization in all fiction, Atlantis—was destroyed by
the YD comet strike, and it could happen to us!
40 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
Hancock informs us that emissaries from Atlantis
survived the destruction and carried their advanced
science and technology to Göbekli Tepe, the Maya,
Egypt, Baalbek—even Easter Island. Further, these
Magicians, these Seven Sages who Hancock says were
imbued “with mysterious ‘powers’” (so mysterious
that we are never told what these powers are)—set
about “wandering.” They also had a message for us—a
powerful message as deduced by Hancock. From the
inferred astrological signs and proposed alignments of
the megaliths, Hancock makes the following wild
leap: “The last time this grand celestial line-up of
earth, December-solstice sun and the galactic center
occurred was a full precessional cycle of 25,920 years
ago and the next time it will happen is a full preces-
sional cycle of 25,920 years in the future. We live, in
other words, in a very special, indeed rather unique,
moment in terms of cosmic astronomical symbolism.”
Spoiler alert! Hancock avers:
However improbable it may seem, therefore, we are
obliged to consider the possibility that in 9600 BC the
builders of Göbekli Tepe were already so advanced in
their knowledge of the recondite phenomenon of pre-
cession that they were able to calculate its effects for
thousands of years backward and forward in time in
order to produce an accurate symbolic picture of the
Sagittarius/winter solstice conjunction… Bearing in
mind that half a precessional cycle is 12,960 years… if
I understand the message correctly, we’re in the dan-
ger zone now and will be until 2040.
In other words, Hancock is seriously proposing
that we are being told by the Magicians that the comet
clusters that supposedly struck earth some 12,900 years
ago and led to the destruction of Atlantis, the North
American megafauna, the Clovis people, etc., will rain
death and destruction upon us sometime over the next
few decades. The extreme mental gymnastics Hancock
goes through to warn us of eminent doom fails in the
light of logic. (1) Hancock insists that the Mayans could
predict the future from celestial mechanics; (2) He
claims the Mayan calendar is based on a precession
that began with the “conjunction of the winter solstice
Sun and the center of the Milky Way galaxy” some
26,000 years ago. (3) The hunter-gatherers with their
magician watchers at Göbekli Tepe recognized, accord-
ing to Hancock, that the destruction of the lost civiliza-
tion was precisely at a midway point between the
precession 12,900 years ago when a supposed comet
struck; and (4) The Göbekli Tepe inhabitants generated
symbols indicating that this 26,000 year precession
cycle spells doom for our planet in the coming decades.
Remember, a 26,000 year precession cycle can be
L O S T CIVILIZATIONS
started at any time—there is nothing physically unique about conjecturing that a cycle
started when we were aligned “with the dark rift and nuclear bulge of the Milky Way” as
Hancock suggests. Nor is the alignment itself unusual. It happens every December.
Ignoring such mental gymnastics, the obvious flaw in Hancock’s scenario is the asso-
ciation of a precessional cycle with comet strikes. Precession relates to the “wobble” of
the earth on its axis over 26,000 year cycles (see Figure 12). Hancock has surmised that
the source of the comet that struck the earth 12,900 years ago came from the Taurid me-
teor shower. The belt or ring does indeed look like it was formed from the breakup of a
large comet (which does not imply that a comet struck the earth 12,900 years ago). The
earth passes through the Taurid belt in late October or early November and in June and
July of each year, which creates meteor showers. But what does this have to do with the
earth’s precession?
The earth wobbling on its axis over 26,000 years does not affect the earth’s orbit, so
why would we expect large comet strikes every 12,900 years from the precession of the
earth? I asked Hancock this question during our debate and he seemed dumbfounded by Figure 12—The wobble of the earth’s
axis during a 26,000 year precession
its implications. He never answered my question, probably because there is no answer. cycle is shown by the circle above
All I am left with is that Hancock has a wild imagination and romantic longing for a past the Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/
best described by myth, not science. wiki/Axial_precession

REFERENCES
1. Hancock, G., 2015. Magicians of the
Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s
Lost Civilization. St. Martin’s Press.
2. Hancock, G., 1995. Fingerprints of
the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s
Lost Civilization. Three Rivers Press.
3. “Fingerprints of the Gods,” Wikipedia,
http://bit.ly/2b1aSMC
4. I have no objection to Hancock’s lack
of scientific qualifications per se, but
his entire book continually refutes evi-
dence from experts in a plethora of
fields. Generalists with no qualifica-
tions run the risk of ruined reputations
by challenging experts who have dedi-
cated their careers to specific fields.
5. Graham Hancock, Wikipedia, http://
bit.ly/2jZbp5P
6. Schmidt, K., 2010. “Göbekli Tepe:
The stone age sanctuaries. New re-
sults of ongoing excavations with a
special focus on sculptures and high
reliefs.” Documenta Praehistorica, v.
37, 239-256.
7. Schmidt, K., 2003. “The 2003 Cam-
paign at Göbekli Tepe (Southeastern
Turkey).” Neo Lithics, 2/03, 3-8.
8. Curry, A., 2008. “Gobekli Tepe: The
World’s First Temple?” Smithsonian,
Nov.
9. Lang, C. et al., 2013. “Gazelle behav-
iour and Human Presence at Early Ne-
olithic Göbekli Tepe, South-eastern
Anatolia.” World Archaeology, v. 43,
410-429.
10. Peters, J. and Schmidt, K., 2004.“Ani-
mals in the Symbolic World of Pre-Pottery
Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, South-eastern
Turkey: a Preliminary Assessment.”
Anthropozoologica, v. 39, 179-218.
11. Dietrich, O., et al., 2012. “The Role of
Cult Feasting In the Emergence of Ne-
olithic Communities. New Evidence
from Göbekli Tepe, South-eastern
Turkey.” Antiquity, v. 86, 674-695.
12. Schmidt, K., 2008. “When Humanity
Began to Settle Down.” German Res.
v. 30, 10-13.
13. Sweatman, M. B. and Tsikritsis, D.,
2017. “Decoding Göbekli Tepe with Ar-
chaeoastronomy: What Does the Fox
Say?” Mediterranean Archaeology and
Archaeometry v. 17, 233-250.
14. Liritzis, I. and Vafiadou, A., 2015.
“Surface Luminescence Dating of
Some Egyptian Monuments” J. Cul-
tural Heritage, v. 16, 134-150.
15. Hadingham, E., 2010. “Uncovering
Secrets of the Sphinx.” Smithsonian:
http://bit.ly/2joGZWL
16. Hawass, Z., 2006, Mountain of the
Pharaohs. Doubleday, 224.
17. Hadingham, E., 2010, op cit.
18. Kuper, R. and Kröpelin, S., 2006. “Cli-
mate-Controlled Holocene Occupation
in the Sahara: Motor of Africa’s Evolu-
tion.” Science, v. 313, 803-807.
19. Hadingham, E., 2010, op cit.
20. Hadingham, E., 2010, op cit.
21. Broecker, W., et al. 1989. “Routing of
Meltwater from the Laurentide Ice
Sheet During the Younger Dryas Cold
Episode.” Nature, v. 341, 318-321.
22. Broecker, W., et al., 2010. “Putting the
Younger Dryas Cold Event Into Context.”
Quaternary Sci. Rev., v. 29, 1078-1081.
23. Firestone, R. B., et al., 2007. “Evi-
dence for an Extraterrestrial Impact
12,900 Years Ago that Contributed to
the Megafaunal Extinctions and the
Younger Dryas Cooling.” Proc. Natl.
Acad. Sci., v. 104, 16016-16021.
24. Paquay, F. S., et al. 2009. “Absence
of Geochemical Evidence for an Im-
pact Event at the Bølling–Allerød/
Younger Dryas Transition.” Proc. Natl.
Acad. Sci., v. 51, 21505-21510.
25. van Hoesel, A., et al., 2014. “The
Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis: a
Critical Review.” Quaternary Sci. Rev.,
v. 83, 95-114.
26. Holliday, V. T., et la., 2014. “The
Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis: a
Cosmic Catastrophe.” J. Quaternary
Sci., v. 29, 515-530.
27. Holliday, V. T., et al., 2014. op cit.
28. Boslough, M., et al., 2012. “Argu-
ments and Evidence Against a
Younger Dryas Impact Event. Cli-
mates, Landscapes, and Civilizations.
Geophysical Monograph Series 198.”
American Geophysical Union, 13-26.
29. Firestone, R. B., 2009. “The Case for
the Younger Dryas Extraterrestrial Im-
pact Event: Mammoth, Megafauna,
and Clovis Extinction, 12,900 Years
Ago.” J. Cosmology, v. 2, 256-285.
30. Firestone, R. B., et al., 2007. op cit.
31. Holliday, V. T., et al., 2014. op cit.
32. Hancock refers to the Clovis culture
as having a “sophisticated weapons
technology” which is simply not true.
33. Holliday, V. T., et al., 2014. op cit.
34. Broecker, W., et al., 2010. op cit.
35. Moore, C. R., et al., 2017. “Widespread
Platinum Anomaly Documented at the
Younger Dryas Onset in North American
Sedimentary Sequences.” Nature,
http://go.nature.com/2rmbCCs
36. Waitt, R. B., 2016. “Megafloods and
Clovis Cache at Wenatchee.” Quater-
nary Res., v. 85, 430-444.
37. Larsen, I. J. and Lamb, M. P., 2016.
“Progressive Incision of the Chan-
neled Scablands by Outburst Floods.”
Nature, v. 538, 229-232.

volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 41

 AR TICLE
Lost Civilizations
and Imaginative
Conjectures
An Analysis of Myth and History
in Graham Hancock’s Magicians of the Gods
BY TIM CALLAHAN
Few topics in science evoke more wonder than
the idea that there was once a great prehistoric civi-
lization now lost to history, whose scant remnants are
presented in breathtaking revelations by independent
scholars insightful and brave enough to think outside
the box of mainstream archaeology. Most prominent
among those who promote this view is Graham Han-
cock, author of The Message of the Sphinx, The Mars
Mystery, Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civiliza-
tion, The Divine Spark, Sign and the Seal: The Quest for
the Lost Ark of the Covenant, Fingerprints of the Gods, and
now, Magicians of the Gods. This latest work, at over
400 pages, expands upon his earlier books, all of
which are oriented around his belief that a worldwide
civilization existed more than 20,000 years before
present (BP).
What happened to this advanced culture? It was
wiped out by a planet-wide cataclysm that Hancock
now suggests was triggered by a comet strike on the
Earth, as evidenced by many geological features he
thinks have no better explanation than a massive flood
caused by the comet impact that erased nearly all
traces of this advanced civilization. This initiated the
Younger Dryas period of intense cold, ca.12,900-
11,700 BP, followed by a disrupting period of gradual
warming at the end of the last glacial maximum from
27,000-24,000 BP when, presumably, this ancient ad-
vanced civilization flourished. The Younger Dryas was
followed by extensive flooding of the continental shelf
land areas previously exposed due to falling sea levels
during the glaciations. The flooding was caused by
rapid warming of the entire planet at the end of the
Younger Dryas.
According to Hancock’s theory, flood myths
across the world record the history of this event in
42 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
mythic form, as does the myth of Atlantis. While the
Younger Dryas may well have had a sudden onset, pos-
sibly measured in a few decades, and the rise in sea
levels at the end of that period may also have been as
sudden, there is no evidence of any civilization devel-
oping before the Younger Dryas. As this issue of Skep-
tic includes an analysis of the astronomical and
geological aspects of the theory by geologist Marc De-
fant, I will here focus on myth and history as Hancock
presents them in Magicians and his other books.
Gunung Padang
To begin, according to Hancock, not all traces of this
advanced ancient civilization were destroyed. As he
has argued in previous works, for example, the Sphinx
needs to be redated to make it part of this much ear-
lier civilization, as does a pyramid buried at Gunung
Padang, a megalithic site in Java. Hancock praises the
work of geologist Danny Hillman Natawidjaja, who he
sees as persevering in the face of hidebound scientists
who want to stop his investigation because they fear
the “truth” about the past. According to Hancock, a
cabal of these dogmatic scientists petitioned to have
Natawidjaja’s work halted, until the president of In-
donesia heroically stepped in and put an end to their
machinations.
As is often the case, the truth is more complex
and less heroic. Dyna Rochmyaningsih notes in an ar-
ticle in Nature, the motives driving the excavations at
Gunung Padang are far from purely scientific:
Two high-profile projects suggest that the officials who
steer our national science policy are favouring ques-
tionable research that is likely to bring short-term head-
lines and “national pride,” rather than solid science
L O S T CIVILIZATIONS
that will result in true, long-term societal benefit.
The first of these projects is based on the claim
that ancient Indonesia could have been home to Earth’s
oldest civilization. Geological patterns discovered dur-
ing excavation of the Gunung Padang volcanic site in
West Java have been used to push the idea that an an-
cient pyramid is buried there that would predate the
historic ruins of ancient Egypt by thousands of years.
Many Indonesian people love the project and its ex-
traordinary claims, and the work has received backing
from the government. The Indonesian president visited
the site last year to proclaim it the cradle of civilization,
and military forces have been deployed to assist work
there.1
So, the project may be more about national pride and
less about science. But did closed-minded skeptics ac-
tually seek to block excavations because they are ene-
mies of the truth? A 2013 article in the Sydney Morning
Herald offers a different explanation for the scientists’
opposition to the project:
A petition signed in April by 34 Indonesian archaeolo-
gists and geologists and submitted to Yudhoyono [the
President of Indonesia] agrees that the upper part of
Gunung Padang is “the largest megalithic structure in
south-east Asia,” but the experts are deeply suspicious
of the Arif team’s methods and motives, and the geo-
logical flag-waving it is trying to invoke.
The petitioners do not like Arif’s “plans to involve
common people as volunteers to support the ‘the Red
and White Glory Operation in Gunung Padang’ which
they call ‘research’.” Red and white are the colours of
the Indonesian flag. “This activity is carried out with-
out scientific norms of conservation knowledge,” the
petitioners say. They believe the excavation threatens
the preservation of the existing site, and hint strongly
that archaeologists, as opposed to geologists, should be
involved. One of them, vulcanologist Sutikno Bronto,
says Gunung Padang is simply the neck of a nearby vol-
cano, not an ancient pyramid.
“Danny Hilman is not a vulcanologist. I am,”
he says. As for the carbon-dated cement between the
stones, on which Hilman relies for his claims about
the age of the site, Sutikno believes it is simply the
byproduct of a natural weathering process and “not
man-made.” 2
So, far from being hidebound naysayers trying to stifle
the truth, the scientists actually want the site pro-
tected and wish to exclude politics and nationalism
from what should be a purely scientific endeavor.
A video of the site, narrated by Andrew Collins,
another alternative theorist who has appeared with
Graham Hancock in documentary films, shows the
site at Gunung Padang as nothing more than a grassy
plateau littered with basalt columns, a natural, rather
than manmade feature.3 That Collins asks the blessing
of the “Weaver Princess,” along with other spirits to
help him find the truth about Gunung Padang does lit-
tle to inspire confidence in the scientific validity of his
investigation. Of course, if there were a pyramid
buried under the plateau, we wouldn’t expect it to
show at the surface. Danny Hilman’s claims that
ground-penetrating radar support his views on Gu-
nung Padang remain disputed by other scientists. Suf-
fice it to say the site is not the “smoking gun” that
Graham Hancock claims it to be.
Göbekli Tepe
A considerably more substantial site is Göbekli Tepe in
Turkey, just north of the Syrian border, a site that far
antedates Stonehenge and other such megalithic sites.
Animal bones associated with the site have been car-
bon dated to ca.11,000 BP. The site consists of a stone
circle about 300 meters (984 ft.) in diameter. Within
the circle are about 20 smaller circles that include
more than 200 massive T-shaped stone pillars. Each
pillar has a height of up to 6 meters (20 ft.) and a
weight of up to 20 tons. While other megalithic monu-
ments, such as Stonehenge, were erected by agricul-
turalists, Göbekli Tepe appears to have been erected by
Neolithic hunter-gatherers, who hadn’t yet even
learned how to make pottery (or at least none has
been found at the site). That hunter-gatherers could
erect such an edifice is remarkable, and Göbekli Tepe
certainly challenges accepted views on the types of so-
cieties that could organize a workforce sufficient to
build such megalithic structures, but that is a different
debate entirely than the one Hancock wants to have.
He suggests sages from an advanced lost civilization
taught the people at Göbekli Tepe how to build such
structures.
Hancock does not accept that hunter-gatherers
could have erected such a structure on their own. He
holds instead that people who survived the great catas-
trophe of the Younger Dryas and the flood that fol-
lowed it disseminated agriculture to indigenous
hunter-gatherers, and that:
The sudden, indeed completely unprecedented, ap-
pearance of giant stone circles at Göbekli Tepe, which
surely could only have been conceived and imple-
mented by people with extensive prior experience of
megalithic architecture, and the simultaneous “inven-
tion” of agriculture in the exact same locale, are, in my
view, highly suggestive of this possibility (p. 152).
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 43
 In other words, these primitive savages couldn’t have
built what seems to be a temple at Göbekli Tepe on
their own. In point of fact, primitive hunter-gatherers
can be quite inventive. Consider Sequoya, an early
19th century Native-American Cherokee crippled in
his youth in a hunting accident, and his invention of
the Cherokee alphabet (actually a syllabary). He sub-
mitted his invented writing system to the Cherokee
nation in 1821. It was approved, and by 1828 the
Cherokee were producing their own newspaper, the
Cherokee Phoenix, written in both Cherokee and Eng-
lish. Thus, the Cherokee went from a nonliterate peo-
ple to fully literate publishers in less than a decade.4
Hancock would probably argue that, after all, the
Cherokee learned of the existence of writing systems
from European settlers, but notice that in his quote
above he speaks of the appearance of agriculture in
the same area as Göbekli Tepe as occurring simultane-
ously with the building of the megalithic structure.
However, as Andrew Curry, writing in Smithsonian
Magazine has noted, the megalith was built before
these people had agriculture (emphasis added):
But, Peters and Schmidt say, Göbekli Tepe’s builders
were on the verge of a major change in how they lived,
thanks to an environment that held the raw materials
for farming. “They had wild sheep, wild grains that
could be domesticated—and the people with the po-
tential to do it,” Schmidt says. In fact, research at other
sites in the region has shown that within 1,000 years of
Göbekli Tepe’s construction, settlers had corralled
sheep, cattle and pigs. And, at a prehistoric village just
20 miles away, geneticists found evidence of the
world’s oldest domesticated strains of wheat; radiocar-
bon dating indicates agriculture developed there
around 10,500 years ago, or just five centuries after
Göbekli Tepe’s construction.5
That the building of Göbekli Tepe occurred 500 years
before its builders acquired agriculture completely un-
dermines Hancock’s argument. In any case, had sur-
vivors of a previous civilization taught the local
hunter-gatherers how to build a megalithic monu-
ment, they probably would not only have taught them
agriculture, as Hancock erroneously believes, but
some form of writing as well. And wouldn’t they have
also taught them now to make pottery?
Egypt as a “Sudden” Civilization
Hancock makes much the same argument as he
does for Göbekli Tepe regarding the “sudden” ap-
pearance of Egyptian civilization. Toward the be-
ginning of the book (p. 10) he quotes John Anthony
West’s statement from page 13 of his 1979 book Ser-
44 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
pent in the Sky, regarding this “sudden” appearance:
How does a complex civilization spring full-blown
into being? Look at a 1905 automobile and compare
it to a modern one. There is no mistaking the
process of “development.” But in Egypt there are no
parallels. Everything is right there at the start.
The answer to the mystery is, of course, obvious,
but, because it is repellent to the prevailing cast of
modern thinking it is seldom considered. Egyptian
civilization was not a “development,” it was a legacy.6
That the foreword to West’s book was written by the
late Peter Tompkins, author of The Secret Life of
Plants, which argues for the sentience of plants,
should give any reader pause as to the scientific valid-
ity of the work. Be that as it may, West’s—and Han-
cock’s—assertion the Egyptian civilization appeared
suddenly, without precursors, simply isn’t true. In
both Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt (i.e., the Nile
delta) archaeologists have unearthed a series of cul-
tures leading from simple Neolithic farming villages
to those of early Egyptian civilization, as follows7:
Lower Egypt
—Faiyum A culture 9,000-6,000 BCE, Neolithic.
—Merimde 5,000-4200 BCE.
—L Omrari near Cairo ca. 4000 BCE.
—Maadi contemporary of Naqada I and II
in Upper Egypt, copper tools.
Upper Egypt
—Tasian ca. 4,500 BCE.
—Badarian 4,400-4,000 BCE.
—Naqada I (4,000-3,500): first use of mud bricks.
—Naqada II (3,500-3,200 BCE): designs of ships
on pottery, cylinder seals (possibly introduced
from the early Sumerian Uruk culture),
Egyptian style houses.
—Naqada III (3,200-3,000 BCE): first
hieroglyphs, irrigation systems serekh (heraldic
crest, precursor of the cartouche), dead buried
in special houses, forerunners of mastabas.
—Dynasty “0” (3150-3050 BCE): semi-legendary
kings, Pharaohs “Scorpion” and Narmer.
—Dynasty 1 (3050-2890 BCE):
mastabas (forerunners of pyramids).
Hancock isn’t the only one to argue for the sud-
den appearance of a civilization. The late Zecharia
Sitchen, who claimed that space aliens came down
and started Sumerian civilization, also argued it ap-
peared suddenly, without any precursors. He was as
wrong as Hancock is in his claims (although Hancock
rejects Sitchen’s theories). As with ancient Egypt,
L O S T CIVILIZATIONS
Sumer is the culmination of a series of cultures, begin-
ning with simple Neolithic farming villages and grad-
ually developing the use of metallurgy, irrigation
systems, monumental architecture and the wheel. The
irony in this is that Hancock has taken some pains to
distance himself from supporters of the ancient astro-
naut thesis. He states the following on his website:
I am quite clear, however, having spent more than
[a] quarter of a century walking the walk across
many of the most intriguing ancient archaeologi-
cal sites on earth, and digging into ancient texts
and traditions from all around the world, that NO
ancient archaeological site and NO ancient text or
tradition that I have yet come across provides per-
suasive evidence for the “ancient astronaut hy-
pothesis.”
And I’m equally clear that in order to give the
impression that the sites and texts do support their
hypothesis, it is necessary for ancient astronaut the-
orists again and again to take the ancient texts out
of context, or to misquote them deliberately, rather
than to present them to readers in an honest and
transparent way.8
Despite excoriating Sitchen and other ancient
astronaut theorists, however, Hancock uses the
same erroneous argument to support his alternative
theory. Since I was easily able to find material on
the prehistoric predynastic cultures of Upper and
Lower Egypt that lead by gradual steps from Ne-
olithic villages to the earliest forms of Egyptian civi-
lization merely by surfing the web and looking into
a few books on the subject written for the layperson,
I have to conclude that Hancock either made his
assertion that Egyptian civilization appeared sud-
denly without bothering to do any research to back
it up, or simply ignored any sources that didn’t sup-
port his theory. Seeing as he is obviously an intelli-
gent and widely read man the latter explanation
would seem to be the likelier one.
Flood Myths and Atlantis
The idea that widespread (but by no means universal)
flood myths could hearken back to fairly rapid flood-
ing of continental shelves at the end of the Younger
Dryas is not an unreasonable one, particularly if one
considers the variety of flood myths. The main flood
myth of China, for example, doesn’t involve a sudden
flood that inundates the world. Rather, while the
flooding has a sudden onset, it goes on for genera-
tions. And there is no ark. The people take refuge on
mountain tops instead. Emperor Yao commissions a
courtier named Gun to solve the problem. He builds
dikes to keep the rivers from flooding and overflow-
ing, but this doesn’t work. Yao has Gun executed.
When Gun’s body is chopped in half, Yu emerges
from it as a dragon. He assumes human form and digs
canals to drain floodwaters into the sea.9 So, flood
myths of different types could be a mythic version of
an ancient history of the flooding of continental
shelves and the torrential rains that might have ac-
companied this. However, Hancock cherry picks
those that support the flood he needs to have wiped
out his ancient civilization.
Even more dramatically, Hancock indiscrimi-
nately uses Plato’s myth of Atlantis as support for his
theory. Unlike other flood myths, however, the story
of Atlantis is not a traditional story growing out of the
mythic traditions of a people. Rather, it is Plato’s own
and singular invention, despite claims made in the di-
alogues Critias and Timaeus that the Greek lawmaker
Solon (ca.638-ca.558 BCE) heard from Egyptian
priests. Hancock’s reasoning on the issue of the story’s
validity is rather odd. Referring to those who reject
any historical kernel for Atlantis he says (pp. 172, 173):
They “know” this not because of any hard evidence
which absolutely rules out the existence of an Atlantis
type civilization in the Upper Paleolithic, but rather
on the general principle that the result of less than
two hundred years of “scientific” archaeology is an
agreed timeline for civilization that sees our ancestors
smoothly out of the Upper Paleolithic, into the Ne-
olithic (both, by definition, Stone Age cultures) at
around 9600 BC.
Actually the burden of proof is on those advanc-
ing the idea of Atlantis as having a historical basis,
since it is difficult, if not impossible to prove a nega-
tive. Those who reject the historicity of Atlantis can
only point out that there is no evidence of its existence
and that Plato is its only original source (other ancient
writers on the subject come after Plato and all refer
back to him). If Hancock wants anyone to believe
there was an island civilization destroyed by flooding
at the end of the Younger Dryas that was the basis of
the Atlantis myth, he bears the burden of supporting
evidence for the claim.
As it turns out, Hancock does claim to have just
such evidence. He points to the Edfu temple texts
about an island of the gods destroyed by flood and
fire, and he states on page 170 that this story is an ob-
vious prototype of Plato’s Atlantis. The big problem
with this claim is that the Edfu temple of Horus was
built well after Plato lived (ca. 429-347 BCE), in the
Ptolemaic Period. Construction was begun on it in
237 BCE, and work continued on its site until 57
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 45
 Figure 1—Can we identify an ancient object based only on B.
A.
what it resembles in contemporary culture?
(A.) Mesopotamian civilization ca. 5000 –3500 BCE. In Assyrian
art, sacred figures hold a banddudû (bucket) along with a cone
shaped object, the mullilu (purifier). These two objects are
thought to be part of a blessing or purification ritual that
involved sprinkling water or pollen. If the figure was shown next
to a Tree of Life and the mullilu was a pine cone or the spathe of
a male palm, the ritual echoed the way date palms have been fertilized
by hand for millennia.
(B) Olmec culture ca. 1200–400 BCE, A relief sculpture
known as Monument 19 from La Venta, Tabasco, Mex-
ico. The figure here is shown with one of the first
known representations of the Feathered Ser-
pent deity.
(C.) Göbekli Tepe ca.11,000 BCE. Archeol-
ogists working at Göbekli Tepe suggest the
3 objects carved on the top of Pillar 43
(right) could represent the enclosures
found there, with arching roofs, each with
it’s representative tribal animal.10
C.

BCE. Thus, its texts could hardly have been a prototype of Plato’s
story. Hancock is aware of this, but asserts that these texts were
copies of much earlier texts. But there is no evidence of such
copying.
Hancock’s other supposed Egyptian source for Atlantis is
much earlier, a papyrus from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, 2040-
1780 BCE. It is called The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor and it
may well be a later copy of an earlier tale. However, it really says
little that could be construed to support an Egyptian (or earlier)
origin of the Atlantis myth. The sailor of the story is shipwrecked
on an island where he meets a fantastic serpent 30 cubits (45 ft.)
long, with scales of gold and eyebrows of lapis lazuli. The super-
natural snake tells the sailor he is the last of 75 such serpents.
The others perished when a star fell, and their island went up in
flames. Hancock apparently sees this star as the comet that
struck the earth, initiating the Younger Dryas. However, it’s quite
a stretch to make the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor work as an
early telling of the Atlantis myth. Thus, it would seem that At-
lantis remains a story that Plato made up out of whole cloth.
Oannes and Other Culture Heroes
Hancock particularly esteems the writings of Berossos, a Baby-
lonian priest of Bel-Marduk. His Babyloniaca was published ca.
290-280 BCE under the patronage of the Seleucid Emperor
Antiochus I (322-261 BCE). Berossos claimed the source of his
late writings were ancient Babylonian texts, lost to us today.
Berossos wrote of an ancient being, one of the seven sages or
Apkallu, who were the source of Mesopotamian culture, called
Oannes. Hancock correctly states that Oannes is a Hellenized
form of Uanna, itself derived from Uanna-Adapa, often referred
to simply as Adapa, meaning “wise.” Oannes/Adapa is often por-
trayed as a fish-man. The most famous image of him is derived
from an Assyrian relief from the Temple of Ninurta, dating
from the ninth century BCE, which now resides in the British
Museum (Figure A).
Hancock includes a drawing based on this relief (27). The
image shows a man wearing a fish headdress with the rest of the
fish forming a robe of sorts. In one hand he carries a basket or
bucket with a handle. Quetzalcoatl, culture hero of the Aztecs,
represented both as a man and as a plumed serpent, also carries
a basket/bucket with a handle (Figure B). Images that could be
of such a basket also adorn one of the pillars from Göbekli Tepe
(Figure C). This, of course, leads Hancock to assume they are all
representations of the same antediluvian sage from his hypo-
thetical pre-Younger Dryas universal civilization. However,
while Mesopotamian civilization began about 3,500 BCE,
Mesoamerican and Mexican civilizations only began with the
Olmecs about 1,200 BCE, and the Aztec civilization—whose
basket carrying culture hero was Quetzalcoatl—only appeared a
bit after 1300 CE. Apparently the great antediluvian sages didn’t
make it to the Western Hemisphere until thousands of years
after they arrived in Mesopotamia. The similarities between the
baskets or buckets carried by Uanna-Adapa and Quetzalcoatl,
then, seem to derive more from practical innovation rather than
common culture.
One fact that Hancock overlooks is that just about every
ancient people, regardless of their level of technology—from
preliterate stone age hunter-gatherers to civilized peoples with
writing and metallurgy—had a myth of a culture hero, a divine
or semi-divine person who gave them all their arts and usually
stole fire from the gods. For example, Prometheus in Greece,
Maui in Hawaii, and Raven in British Columbia all stole either
fire or light from selfish beings, often gods, who would not share
it with the rest of the world. Often these culture heroes are

46 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017

L O ST CIVILIZATIONS
tricksters, beings of prodigious sexual appetites and as mischie-
vous as they were beneficial. One of them was the Sumerian
Enki (literally, “Lord Earth”), who became the Akkadian god Ea.
Enki/Ea is the one god who saves a human family—that of the
Sumerian Ziusudra, or the Akkadian Atrahasis—against the
wishes of the other gods, who want to annihilate the human
race. So, is this history in mythic form? Perhaps the idea that
the gods are less than benign in their relations with the human
race is nothing more than a psychological understanding that
the world is not fair.
The Problems of Technology and Chronology
If these myths were actually the history of a great cataclysm that
destroyed a civilization that thrived prior to the Younger Dryas,
and of the survivors of that civilization who taught primitive
peoples their arts, thus recreating civilization, as Graham Han-
cock claims, we would expect a number of things to be true.
First, primary civilizations everywhere should have the
same basic technologies. These would include writing (and
that writing should be the same system everywhere) and uni-
versal metallurgy, the wheel, and agriculture. Animal hus-
bandry might vary according to the availability of animals that
could be domesticated, and agriculture might vary across the
globe according to what grains and legumes were native in dif-
ferent parts of the world, but there should be many similarities.
What we have is something else altogether. Egypt had a pic-
tographic writing system that first appeared about 3,250 BCE,
in which each symbol is a word. The Sumerians invented
cuneiform writing, a syllabary, i.e. each symbol standing for a syl-
lable—usually a consonant followed by a vowel—somewhat ear-
lier. The Indus river civilization produced yet another writing
system, which has yet to be deciphered, about 3,000 BCE. Chi-
nese civilization also produced a pictographic writing system—
but it was in no way related to Egyptian hieroglyphics. The earli-
est possible form of writing in Mesoamerica was produced by the
Olmecs, possibly as early as 900 BCE.11 All of these writing sys-
tems were invented independently, the Chinese and the Olmec
much later than those of Sumer, Egypt, and the Indus River Civi-
lization. The South American civilizations, beginning with the
city of Caral (so named by modern archaeologists) in Peru, dated
to as old as 2,600 BCE, and ending with the Inca Empire de-
stroyed by the Spaniards in the 1500s, had no writing systems.
The South American civilizations of the Andean region
did have bronze metallurgy, however, in common with the
early civilizations of the Eastern Hemisphere, which the
Mesoamerican civilizations lacked. Both the Mesoamerican
and Andean civilizations lacked the wheel, which all the origi-
nal civilizations of the Eastern Hemisphere had.
The commonality of pyramids to ancient Egypt and the
Americas seems to be more related to the logic of a common
rectilinear shape for a man-made mountain than commonality
of culture. Otherwise, we would expect the same or similar
writing systems and the same use of metallurgy and the wheel
volume 22 number 3 2017
in both locations. Pyramids appear in both Egypt and Caral in
Peru at about the same time, ca. 2,600 BCE, but the earliest ev-
idence of bronze metallurgy in South America is between 900
and 700 CE,12 over 3,000 years later, and the wheel never ap-
pears in any of the South American civilizations. It would seem
the ancient lost civilization people were selective in what they
passed on to each group.
Another oddity is that Mesoamerican civilizations, possibly
beginning with the Olmecs, while they lacked bronze metal-
lurgy and the wheel, did have the sophisticated concept of the
zero, a number that means nothing. Since the Sumerians, Egyp-
tians and early Chinese civilizations lacked such a concept, we
must assume the Mesoamerican civilizations invented it inde-
pendently. While this single fact doesn’t disprove Hancock’s the-
ory, it does point to the independent origin of these western
hemisphere civilizations.
That the civilizations of Mesoamerica and Mexico ap-
peared much later than those of Egypt and Sumer shows, as
previously noted with respect to the baskets or buckets carried
by Uanna-Adapa and Quetzalcoatl, that they could not have
been started by Hancock’s survivors of the antediluvian civiliza-
tion. Time, as well as technology disputes his theory.
In sum, Hancock’s theory fails due not only to lack of
evidence, but as well to failed chronology, and differences of
writing systems and technology among the primary civiliza-
tions, supposed common heirs to the legacy of his grand Ice
Age civilization.
REFERENCES
1. Rochmyaningsh, Dyna. 2015. “Don’t distort policy in the name
of national pride.” Nature 523, 257, July 16.
2. Bechelard, Michael and Rompies, Karuni. 2013. “Digging for
the truth at controversial megalithic site.” Sydney Morning Her-
ald, July 27; Dipa, Arya. 2014. “Archaeologists slam excavation
of Gunung Padang site.” The Jakarta Post, September 24.
3. Collins, Andrew. “Gunung Padang: Exploration of 20,000 year
old Hilltop Pyramid Site in Java.” http://bit.ly/2iFvnNv
4. Palmer, Rose A. 1949. North American Indians: The Smithsonian
Series, volume 4. Washington, D. C.: The Smithsonian Institution.
5. Curry, Andrew. 2008. “Gobekli Tepe: The World’s Oldest Tem-
ple.” Smithsonian Magazine, November.
6. West, John Anthony. 1979. Serpent in the Sky: The High Wis-
dom of Ancient Egypt. New York: Harper.
7. Clayton, Peter A. 1994. Chronicle of the Pharaohs. London:
Thames and Hudson Ltd.; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_
Egypt; Manley, Bill. 1996. The Penguin Historical Atlas of An-
cient Egypt. London: Penguin.
8. Hancock, Graham. “Aliens or a Lost Civilization.”
http://bit.ly/2jWX8Cs
9. Helft, Claude, Jiang Hong, Chen and Harton, Michael. 2007.
Chinese Mythology. Brooklyn, New York: Enchanted Lion
Press, 40-45.
10. https://tepetelegrams.wordpress.com/category/favourite-finds/
11. Wilford, John Noble. 2006. “Writing may be oldest in Western
Hemisphere” New York Times September 15.
http://bit.ly/2jwKVYh
12. Cook, Colin A., Abbot, Mark B. and Wolfe, Alexander P. “Metal-
lurgy in Southern South America.” http://bit.ly/2jwzcsB
WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 47
 I N TR O D U C TION
Failure to
Communicate
Why We Published the “Conceptual Penis
as a Social Construct” Hoax Exposé
BY MICHAEL SHERMER
In this issue we present a thoughtful reflection by Alan
Sokal on the latest academic hoax perpetrated by James Lindsay
and Peter Boghossian, who managed to get published in the peer-
reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences their nonsensical paper
“The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” (http://bit.ly/2rt
6FrF) On the day it was released online we published in eSkeptic
their exposé of the hoax (http://bit.ly/2qAaR8n). Why?
In their exposé Lindsay and Boghossian give two reasons for
their hoax: (1) the pretentious nonsense that often passes for
scholarship in postmodernism studies, and (2) the lax standards
of some peer-reviewed journals. Critics of the hoax pounced on
the second, claiming that since Cogent Social Sciences is a lower
tier journal the hoax was a failure. My motivation for publishing
the exposé focused on the first problem. To me, it wouldn’t have
mattered if the hoax were published in the Annals of Improbable
Research, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, or even the
Onion. For me the point was not to fool journal editors. As the ed-
itor of a national magazine and a monthly columnist for the oldest
continuously published monthly magazine in the world (Scientific
American), I am sympathetic to the overwhelming amount of
work it takes to produce a quality publication, particularly when
the remunerative rewards are so low for most writers and editors.
What agitates me is scholarship that passes for cogent argu-
mentation in support of a thesis that is, in fact, what Gordon
Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, and their colleagues call
“pseudo-profound bullshit,” in a paper published in the highly
respected peer-reviewed journal Judgment and Decision Making
(http://bit.ly/1PnJLJ3). Bullshit, they write, is language “con-
structed to impress upon the reader some sense of profundity at
the expense of a clear exposition of meaning or truth.” Bullshit is
meant to impress through obfuscation; that is, to say something
that sounds profound but may be nonsense. It may not be non-
sense, but if you can’t tell the difference then, to quote Strother
Martin’s character from the 1967 Paul Newman film Cool Hand
Luke, “what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
Compare, for example, any of the passages from the “Con-
ceptual Penis” hoax to the abstract for the 2016 paper published
in the peer-reviewed journal Progress in Human Geography ti-
tled “Glaciers, Gender, and Science” (http://bit.ly/2r0edQH):
48 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmen-
tal change. However, the relationships among gender, science,
and glaciers—particularly related to epistemological questions
about the production of glaciological knowledge—remain under-
studied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology frame-
work with four key components: (1) knowledge producers; (2)
gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domi-
nation; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging
feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecol-
ogy, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis
of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecologi-
cal systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science
and human-ice interactions.
When this paper was published I thought it was a hoax, so
I contacted the University of Oregon, the institution of the au-
thors, and confirmed it was real. And this is just one of count-
less examples, posted daily on Twitter @RealPeerReview and
retweeted all over the net to the amusement of readers who
cannot decipher what most of these articles are even about,
much less comprehending their arguments and gaining value
from their conclusions.
What matters to me is the truth about reality (lower t and
lower r), which science is best equipped to determine. Ever
since the 1980s there has been a movement afoot in academia
in which postmodernism has encroached on some of biology,
much of social science (especially cultural anthropology), and
most of history, literature, and the humanities, in which the
claim is made that there is no truth to be determined because
there is no reality to study. Nearly everything—from race and
gender to genes and brains—is socially constructed and lin-
guistically determined by our narratives. And the more obfus-
cating those narratives are about these socially constructed
non-realities, the better. This is the very opposite of how sci-
ence should be conducted and communicated, and it is, in
part, why we are currently witnessing the campus madness in-
volving student protests—and even views collide with the re-
ality of contradictory facts and opposing viewpoints. It’s time
we put a stop to the lunacy and demand critical thinking and
clear communication.

The Conceptual Penis
as a Social Construct
A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies
The Hoax
The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evi-
dence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is
considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.
We began with this preposterous sentence of a
“paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense
posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-re-
viewed academic journal in the social sciences ac-
cepted and published it. This paper should never
have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis
as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The
penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct.”
We argue that the conceptual penis is better under-
stood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-
performative, highly fluid social construct.” As if to
prove philosopher David Hume’s claim that there is
a deep gap between what is and what ought to be,
our should-never-have-been-published paper was
published in the open-access (meaning that articles
are freely accessible and not behind a paywall),
peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences.
Assuming the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and
“Peter Boyle,” and
writing for the ficti-
tious “Southeast In-
dependent Social
Research Group,” we
wrote an absurd
paper loosely com-
posed in the style of
post-structuralist
discursive gender
theory. The paper
was ridiculous by in-
tention, essentially
arguing that penises
shouldn’t be thought
of as male genital or-
AR TICLE
BY PETER BOGHOSSIAN (AKA PETER BOYLE, ED.D.)
AND JAMES LINDSAY (AKA, JAMIE LINDSAY, PH.D.)
gans but as damaging social constructions. We made
no attempt to find out what “post-structuralist dis-
cursive gender theory” actually means. We assumed
that if we were merely clear in our moral implica-
tions that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the
penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the
paper published in a respectable journal.
This already damning characterization of our
hoax understates our paper’s lack of fitness for ac-
ademic publication by orders of magnitude. We
didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we
stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “iso-
morphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermas-
culine men are both inside and outside of certain
discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like
“pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to
slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regard-
ing men (including referring to some men who
choose not to have children as being “unable to
coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated
that “manspreading,” a complaint levied against
men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is
“akin to raping the empty space around him”).
After completing
the paper, we read it
carefully to ensure
it didn’t say any-
thing meaningful,
and as neither one
of us could deter-
mine what it is actu-
ally about, we
deemed it a success.
By way of example,
here is a paragraph
from the conclu-
sion, which was
held in high regard
by both reviewers:
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 49
 We conclude that penises are not best understood as
the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive
organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that
is both damaging and problematic for society and
future generations. The conceptual penis presents
significant problems for gender identity and repro-
ductive identity within social and family dynamics, is
exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based
upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring
source of abuse for women and other gender-margin-
alized groups and individuals, is the universal perfor-
mative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver
behind much of climate change.
You read that right. We argued that climate change
is “conceptually” caused by penises. How do we de-
fend that assertion? Like this:
Destructive, unsustainable hegemonically male ap-
proaches to pressing environmental policy and action
are the predictable results of a raping of nature by a
male-dominated mindset. This mindset is best cap-
tured by recognizing the role of [sic] the conceptual
penis holds over masculine psychology. When it is ap-
plied to our natural environment, especially virgin
environments that can be cheaply despoiled for their
material resources and left dilapidated and dimin-
ished when our patriarchal approaches to economic
gain have stolen their inherent worth, the extrapola-
tion of the rape culture inherent in the conceptual
penis becomes clear.
And like this, which we claim follows from the
above by means of an algorithmically generated
nonsense quotation from a fictitious paper, which
we referenced and cited explicitly in the paper:
Toxic hypermasculinity derives its significance di-
rectly from the conceptual penis and applies itself to
supporting neocapitalist materialism, which is a fun-
damental driver of climate change, especially in the
rampant use of carbon-emitting fossil fuel technolo-
gies and careless domination of virgin natural envi-
ronments. We need not delve deeply into criticisms
of dialectic objectivism, or their relationships with
masculine tropes like the conceptual penis to make
effective criticism of (exclusionary) dialectic objec-
tivism. All perspectives matter.
If you’re having trouble understanding what
any of that means, there are two important points
to consider. First, we don’t understand it either.
Nobody does. This problem should have rendered it
unpublishable in all peer-reviewed, academic jour-
nals. Second, these examples are remarkably lucid
50 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
compared to much of the rest of the paper. Con-
sider another example:
Inasmuch as masculinity is essentially performative,
so too is the conceptual penis. The penis, in the
words of Judith Butler, “can only be understood
through reference to what is barred from the signifier
within the domain of corporeal legibility” (Butler,
1993). The penis should not be understood as an hon-
est expression of the performer’s intent should it be
presented in a performance of masculinity or hyper-
masculinity. Thus, the isomorphism between the con-
ceptual penis and what’s referred to throughout
discursive feminist literature as “toxic hypermas-
culinity,” is one defined upon a vector of male cul-
tural machismo braggadocio, with the conceptual
penis playing the roles of subject, object, and verb of
action. The result of this trichotomy of roles is to
place hypermasculine men both within and outside
of competing discourses whose dynamics, as seen via
post-structuralist discourse analysis, enact a system-
atic interplay of power in which hypermasculine men
use the conceptual penis to move themselves from
powerless subject positions to powerful ones (confer:
Foucault, 1972).
Not only is the text ridiculous, so are the refer-
ences, most of which are quotations from papers
and figures in the field that barely make sense in
the context of the text. Others were obtained by
searching keywords and grabbing papers that
sounded plausibly connected to words we cited. We
read exactly zero of the sources we cited, by inten-
tion, as part of the hoax. Some references cite the
Postmodern Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org
/journal/pomo), a website coded in the 1990s by An-
drew Bulhak featuring an algorithm, based on NYU
physicist Alan Sokal’s method of hoaxing a cultural
studies journal called Social Text, that returns a dif-
ferent fake postmodern “paper” every time the page
is reloaded. We cited and quoted from the Postmod-
ern Generator liberally; this includes nonsense quo-
tations incorporated in the body of the paper and
citing five different “papers” generated in the course
of a few minutes. Five references to fake papers in
journals that don’t exist is astonishing on its own,
but it’s incredible given that the original paper we
submitted had only 16 total references (20 now,
after a reviewer asked for more examples). Nearly a
third of our references in the original paper go to
fake sources from a website mocking the fact that
this kind of thing is brainlessly possible, particularly
in “academic” fields corrupted by postmodernism.
Two of the fake journals cited are Deconstructions
AC ADEMIC HOAX
from Elsewhere and And/Or Press (taken directly
from algorithmically generated fictitious citations
on the Postmodern Generator). Another cites the
fictitious researcher “S. Q. Scameron,” whose in-
vented name appears in the body of the paper sev-
eral times. In response, the reviewers noted that our
references are “sound,” even after an allegedly care-
ful cross-referencing check done in the final round
of editorial approval. No matter the effort put into
it, it appears one simply cannot jump Cogent Social
Sciences’ shark.
We didn’t originally go looking to hoax Cogent
Social Sciences, however. Had we, this story would
be only half as interesting and a tenth as apparently
damning. Cogent Social Sciences was recommended
to us by another journal, NORMA: International
Journal for Masculinity Studies, a Taylor and Francis
journal. NORMA rejected “The Conceptual Penis as a
Social Construct” but thought it a great fit for the Co-
gent Series, which operates independently under the
Taylor and Francis imprimatur. In their rejection let-
ter, the editors of NORMA wrote,
We feel that your manuscript would be well-suited
to our Cogent Series (www.cogentoa.com), a multi-
disciplinary, open journal platform for the rapid dis-
semination of peer-reviewed research across all
disciplines.
Transferring your manuscript:
—Saves you time because there is no need for you
to reformat or resubmit your work manually
—Provides faster publication because previous re-
views are transferred with your manuscript
To ensure all work is open to everyone, the
Cogent Series invites a “pay what you want” con-
tribution towards the costs of open access publish-
ing if your article is accepted for publication. This
can be paid by you as author or by your institution
or research funder. Many institutions and funders
now provide financial support for open access pub-
lishing.
We took them up on the transfer, and Cogent
Social Sciences eventually accepted “The Conceptual
Penis as a Social Construct.” The reviewers were
amazingly encouraging, giving us very high marks in
nearly every category. For example, one reviewer
graded our thesis statement “sound” and praised it
thusly, “It capturs [sic] the issue of hypermasculinity
through a multi-dimensional and nonlinear process”
(which we take to mean that it wanders aimlessly
through many layers of jargon and nonsense). The
other reviewer marked the thesis, along with the en-
tire paper, “outstanding” in every applicable cate-
gory. They didn’t accept the paper outright, however.
Cogent Social Sciences’ Reviewer #2 offered us a few
relatively easy fixes to make our paper “better.” We
effortlessly completed them in about two hours, put-
ting in a little more nonsense about “manspreading”
(which we alleged to be a cause of climate change)
and “dick-measuring contests.”
The publication of our hoax reveals two prob-
lems. One relates to the business model of pay-to-
publish, open-access journals. The other lies at the
heart of academic fields like gender studies.
The Pay-to-Publish,
Open-Access Journal Problem
According to their website
(https://cogentoa.com/journal/social-sciences):
Cogent Social Sciences is a multidisciplinary open
access journal offering high quality peer review
across the social sciences: from law to sociology,
politics to geography, and sport to communication
studies. Connect your research with a global audi-
ence for maximum readership and impact.
One of the biggest questions facing peer-re-
viewed publishing is, “Are pay-to-publish, open-ac-
cess journals the future of academic publishing?” We
seem to have answered that question with a large
red, “No!” with an asterisk. That is, the peer-review
process in pay-to-publish, open-access journals can-
not achieve quality assurance without extremely
stringent safeguards. There’s nothing necessarily or
intrinsically wrong with either open-access or pay-
to-publish journals, and they may ultimately prove
valuable. However, in the short term, pay-to-publish
may be a significant problem because of the inherent
tendencies toward conflicts of interest.
The pay-to-publish mechanism should not af-
fect the quality control standards of the peer-re-
view process. Cogent Open Access claims to
address this problem by using a blind review
process. Does it work? If our hoax is any indica-
tion, not always. Some pay-to-publish journals
happily exploit career-minded academicians and
will publish anything (cf: the famous Seinfeld
hoax paper1). Is that the case here? Gender stud-
ies scholars committed to the integrity of their
academic discipline should hope so, and they
have reason for suspecting it. For a minimal pay-
ment of $625, Cogent Social Sciences was ready
to publish, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social
Construct.”2
There seems to be a deeper problem here,
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 51
 however. Suspecting we may be dealing with a
predatory pay-to-publish outlet, we were surprised
that an otherwise apparently legitimate Taylor and
Francis journal directed us to contribute to the
Cogent Series. (Authors’ note: we leave it to the
reader to decide whether or not NORMA: Interna-
tional Journal for Masculinity Studies constitutes a
legitimate journal, but to all appearances it is run
by genuine academic experts in the field and is not
a predatory money mill.) The problem, then, may
rest not only with pay-to-publish journals, but also
with the infrastructure that supports them.
In sum, it’s difficult to place Cogent Social Sci-
ences on a spectrum ranging from a rigorous aca-
demic journal in gender studies to predatory
pay-to-publish money mill. First, Cogent Social Sci-
ences operates with the legitimizing imprimatur of
Taylor and Francis, with which it is clearly closely
partnered. Second, it’s held out as a high-quality
open-access journal by the Directory of Open Access
Journals (DOAJ), which is intended to be a reliable
list of such journals. In fact, it carries several more
affiliations with similar credentialing organizations.
These facts cast considerable doubt on the
facile defense that Cogent Social Sciences is a sham
journal that accepted “The Conceptual Penis as a
Social Construct” simply to make money. As a re-
sult, wherever Cogent Social Sciences belongs on
the spectrum just noted, there are significant rea-
sons to believe that much of the problem lies
within the very concept of any journal being a
“rigorous academic journal in gender studies.”
Postmodernism, Gender Studies,
and the Canon of Knowledge
In 1996, Alan Sokal, a Professor of Physics at NYU,
published the bogus paper, “Transgressing the
Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneu-
tics of Quantum Gravity,” in the preeminent cultural
studies journal Social Text, which is published by
Duke University Press. The publication of this non-
sense paper, in a prestigious journal with a strong
postmodernist orientation, delivered a devastating
blow to postmodernism’s intellectual legitimacy.
Subsequently, Sokal and the Belgian physicist
Jean Bricmont noted in their 1997 book, Fashion-
able Nonsense, that certain kinds of ideas can be-
come so fashionable that the critical faculties
required for the peer-review process are compro-
mised, allowing outright nonsense to be published,
so long as it looks or sounds a certain way, or pro-
motes certain values. It was standing upon Sokal’s
shoulders that we initiated our hoax, though we per-
52 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
ceived a slightly different need. Sokal’s aim was to
demonstrate that fashionable linguistic abuses (es-
pecially relying upon puns and wordplay related to
scientific terms), apparent scientific authority, con-
formity with certain leftist political norms, and flat-
tery of the academic preconceptions of an editorial
board would be sufficient to secure publication and
thus expose shoddy academic rigor on the part of
postmodernist scholarship and social commentary.
A primary target of Sokal’s hoax was the appro-
priation of mathematical and scientific terminology
that postmodernist “scholars” didn’t understand
and didn’t use correctly. (We included “isomor-
phism” and “vector” in our paper in subtle homage
to Sokal.) Fashionable Nonsense pays particular at-
tention to postmodernists’ abuses of mathematical
and scientific terminology. That is, Sokal took aim
at an academic abuse by postmodernists and hit his
target dead-center. His paper could only have been
published if the postmodernists who approved it ex-
hibited overwhelming political motivations and a
staggering lack of understanding of basic mathe-
matics and physics terminology.
The scientific community was exuberant that
Sokal burst the postmodern bubble because they
were fed up with postmodernists misusing scien-
tific and mathematical terms to produce jargon-
laden nonsense and bizarre social commentary
carrying the apparent gravitas of scientific termi-
nology. It appears that Social Text accepted Sokal’s
paper specifically because Sokal was a recognized
scientist who appeared to have seen the light.
Our hoax was similar, of course, but it aimed
to expose a more troubling bias. The most potent
among the human susceptibilities to corruption by
fashionable nonsense is the temptation to uncriti-
cally endorse morally fashionable nonsense. That
is, we assumed we could publish outright nonsense
provided it looked the part and portrayed a moraliz-
ing attitude that comported with the editors’ moral
convictions. Like any impostor, ours had to dress
the part, though we made our disguise as ridiculous
and caricatured as possible—not so much affixing
an obviously fake mustache to mask its true identity
as donning two of them as false eyebrows.
Sokal exposed an infatuation with academic
puffery that characterizes the entire project of aca-
demic postmodernism. Our aim was narrower yet
more pointed. We intended to test the hypothesis
that flattery of the academic Left’s moral architec-
ture in general, and of the moral orthodoxy in
gender studies in particular, is the overwhelming
determiner of publication in an academic journal
AC ADEMIC HOAX
in the field. That is, we sought to demonstrate that
a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be
validated could overcome the critical assessment
required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we
suspected that gender studies is crippled by an
overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is
the root of all evil. Our suspicion was justified.3
As a matter of deeper concern, there is unfor-
tunately some reason to believe that our hoax will
not break the relevant spell. First, Alan Sokal’s
hoax, now more than 20 years old, did not prevent
the continuation of bizarre postmodernist “schol-
arship.” In particular, it did not lead to a general
tightening of standards that would have blocked
our own hoax. Second, people rarely give up on
their moral attachments and ideological commit-
ments just because they’re shown to be out of
alignment with reality, as the psychologist Leon
Festinger discovered in the 1950s when he infil-
trated a small UFO cult known as the “Seekers.”
When the apocalyptic beliefs of the Seekers failed
to materialize as predicted, Festinger documented
that many cultists did not accept the possibility
that the facts upended their core beliefs but in-
stead rationalized them. He called this process
cognitive dissonance. Many Seekers adopted a
subsequent belief that they played a role in saving
the world with their fidelity; that is, they believed
the doomsday-bringing extraterrestrials were so
impressed by their faith that they decided not to
destroy the world after all!
It is therefore plausible that some gender stud-
ies scholars will argue that the “conceptual penis”
makes sense as we described it, that men do often
suffer from machismo braggadocio, and that there
is an isomorphism between these concepts via
some personal toxic hypermasculine conception of
their penises. We sincerely hope not.
Conclusion: A Two-Pronged
Problem for Academia
There are at least two deeply troublesome problems
damaging the credibility of the peer-review system in
fields such as gender studies: (1) the echo-chamber of
morally driven fashionable nonsense coming out of
the postmodernist social “sciences” in general, and
gender studies departments in particular, and (2) the
complex problem of pay-to-publish journals with lax
standards that cash in on the ultra-competitive pub-
lish-or-perish academic environment. At least one of
these sicknesses led to “The Conceptual Penis as a So-
cial Construct” being published as a legitimate
piece of academic scholarship, and we can expect
proponents of each to lay primary blame upon the
other. As we see it, gender studies in its current
form needs to do some serious housecleaning.
To be clear, no one is arguing, nor has any rea-
son to argue, that respectable journals like Nature
and countless others have adopted a peer-review
process that is fundamentally flawed or in any
meaningful way corrupt. Much of the peer-review
system remains the gold-standard for the advance-
ment of human knowledge. The problem lies
within a nebula of marginal journals, predatory
pay-to-publish journals, and, possibly to some de-
gree, open-access journals—although it may largely
be discipline-specific, as we had originally hoped to
discover. This is, after all, not the first time post-
modernist academia has fallen for a hoax.
The publish-or-perish academic environment
is its own poison that needs a remedy. It gives rise
to predatory profit-driven journals with few or no
academic standards that take advantage of legiti-
mate scholars pressured into publishing their work
at all costs, even if it is marginal or dubious. Many
of these scholars are victims both of a system that is
forcing them to publish more papers and to publish
them more often, to the detriment of research qual-
ity, and of the predatory journals that offer to sell
them the illusion of academic prestige. Certainly,
we have every reason to suspect that a majority of
the other academics who have published in Cogent
Social Sciences and other journals in the Cogent
Series are genuine scholars who have been cheated
by what may be a weak peer-review process with a
highly polished edifice. Our question about the fun-
damental integrity of fields such as gender studies
seems much more pressing nonetheless.
“The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct”
should not have been published on its merits be-
cause it has no merits whatsoever. The question
that now needs to be answered is, “How can we re-
store the reliability of the peer-review process?”
REFERENCES
1.
For more here, read about “Dr. Martin Van Nos-
trand’s” famous hoax paper http://www.snopes.
com/2017/04/13/science-journal-seinfeld-
episode/
2.
Portland State University has a fund dedicated to
paying fees for open access journals, and this par-
ticular journal qualified for disbursement. For ethi-
cal reasons, however, we did not apply for funding,
and we never paid the fee.
3.
Our suspicion arose from countless examples
documented on the anonymously run Twitter feed
@RealPeerReview.
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 53
 AR TICLE

More Fashionable
Nonsense
Some thoughts on “The Conceptual Penis
as a Social Construct” Hoax
BY ALAN SOKAL

Academic hoaxes are nothing new. In 1768, the
Baron d’Holbach published the Portable Theology,
or Brief Dictionary of the Christian Religion—slyly at-
tributing authorship to the Abbé Bernier—in which
he stoutly defended the prevailing Christian dogmas
with entries like
Doctrine: What every good Christian must believe
or else be burned, be it in this world or the next.
The dogmas of the Christian religion are immutable
decrees of God, who cannot change His mind except
when the Church does.1
Probably not very many people were taken in by the
hoax. But d’Holbach’s mordant satire was brilliant
nonetheless, and it circulated clandestinely for
decades.
In 1931, the physicist Hans Bethe and two col-
leagues published—while they were still postdoc-
toral fellows—a short article entitled “On the
quantum theory of the temperature of absolute
zero,” parodying speculative attempts to determine
the fundamental constants of nature by numerology,
in the journal Die Naturwissenschaften.2 Senior
physicists were not amused, and the authors were
forced to apologize.3
In 1943, the young Australian writers James
McAuley and Harold Stewart hoaxed the modernist
literary journal Angry Penguins into publishing 16
poems allegedly found among the papers of a recently
deceased—but, alas, fictitious—poet, Ern Malley:
We opened books at random, choosing a word or
phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove
them into nonsensical sentences. We misquoted and
made false allusions. We deliberately perpetrated
bad verse, and selected awkward rhymes from a Rip-
man’s Rhyming Dictionary.4
The hoax was quickly outed in the Australian press,
and the editor of Angry Penguins held up to ridicule.
But some critics nowadays claim that “Crazy as it
seems, the Malley poems do have merit.” 5
So there were precedents—most of which I
was unaware of at the time—for my parody article,
“Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a transfor-
mative hermeneutics of quantum gravity,” which
was published in the spring/summer 1996 issue of
the cultural-studies journal Social Text.6
But in the past few years, academic hoaxes
seem to have proliferated. In 2014, the French soci-
ologists Manuel Quinon and Arnaud Saint-Martin
hoaxed the journal Sociétés—edited at the time by
the very media-savvy French sociologist Michel
Maffesoli—into publishing a hilarious article gush-
ing over the Parisian rental car Autolib’ as
a privileged indicator of a macro-social dynamics un-
derlying the transition of a “modern” episteme to
“postmodern” episteme. Through the analysis of the
vehicle aesthetics (which is characterized here as poly-
identificatory) and its most salient functional features
(for instance, the connected electric car illustrates the
contemporary topos of “dynamic rootedness”), the ar-
ticle interprets the various socio-anthropological as-
pects of the “Autolib’” and finally emphasizes the fact
that this small car is, among other things, the prod-
uct/producer of a new “semantic basin”.7
In 2016, the French philosophers Anouk Bar-
berousse and Philippe Huneman hoaxed the journal
Badiou Studies—“a multi-lingual, peer-reviewed
journal dedicated to the philosophy and thought of
and surrounding the philosopher, playwright, nov-
elist and poet Alain Badiou” 8—into publishing an
article entitled “Ontology, neutrality and the strive
for (non-)being-queer” as part of the journal’s spe-
cial issue “Towards a Queer Badiousian Feminism.”
The abstract gives a bit of the flavor:

54 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017

AC ADEMIC HOAX
Since “gender” has been continually the name of a
dialectics of the continued institution of gender into
an ontological difference and the failure of gender-
ing, it is worth addressing the prospects of any
gender-neutral discourse through the tools of Ba-
diousian ontology. As established by Badiou in Being
and Event, mathematics—as set theory—is the ulti-
mate ontology. Sets are what gendering processes by
reactionary institutions intend to hold, in contradic-
tion to the status of the multiplicities proper to each
subject qua subject. This tension between subjectiv-
ity and gender comes to the fore through the lens of
the ‘count-as-one,’ the ontological operator identi-
fied by Badiou as the fluid mediator between set-be-
longing and set-existence.…9
And so on for 23 pages. (Curiously enough, Alain Ba-
diou himself is a member of the journal’s editorial
board. One is left to wonder: if the Master’s closest
disciples, and even the Master himself, are unable to
distinguish between his thought and an intentionally
nonsensical pastiche, who on earth can? 10 )
So it was a pleasure to read this year’s contribu-
tion to the genre, “The conceptual penis as a social
construct,” by Peter Boghossian and James Lind-
say.11 I’d like to offer a few brief thoughts, first about
the article itself, and secondly about what I think its
publication does and does not prove. For it seems to
me that this hoax, while both amusing and instruc-
tive, proves somewhat less than the authors have
claimed for it. The underlying theme of the arti-
cle—that “hypermasculine machismo braggadocio”
can have negative consequences for both men and
women—is not, in and of itself, ridiculous; on the
contrary, it is by now a commonplace, accepted
by almost everyone (including the authors of the
parody). So, beyond that platitude, what is novel in
this article that makes it worthy of publication in a
scholarly journal of sociology?
The answer, in my humble opinion, is: nothing.
The most telling parts of the article, I think,
are the passages in which the authors buttress their
claims by citing a provably meaningless article that
they had produced using the Postmodernism
Generator.12 For instance:
This tendency [to use the word “dick” as a verb] is
easily explained by extrapolation upon McElwaine
(1999), who demonstrates clearly that, “Sexual iden-
tity is fundamentally used in the service of hierarchy;
however, according to Werther (1977), it is not so
much sexual identity that is fundamentally used in
the service of hierarchy, but rather the dialectic, and
hence the defining characteristic, of sexual identity.
The subject is contextualised into a subcultural desit-
uationism that includes sexuality as a reality.”
The reference list cites five nonexistent articles by
nonexistent authors. Even the copy editors at Co-
gent Social Sciences, it seems, were asleep at the
wheel.
But not every sentence in the article is com-
pletely meaningless, and not every assertion is
made entirely without argument. Even the article’s
most amusingly outrageous claim—that “the con-
ceptual penis…is the conceptual driver behind
much of climate change”—is supported by some ar-
gumentation, however flimsy:
Destructive, unsustainable hegemonically male
approaches to pressing environmental policy and
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 55
 action are the predictable results of a raping of na-
ture by a male-dominated mindset. This mindset is
best captured by recognizing the role of [sic] the
conceptual penis holds over masculine psychology.
When it is applied to our natural environment, es-
pecially virgin environments that can be cheaply
despoiled for their material resources and left di-
lapidated and diminished when our patriarchal ap-
proaches to economic gain have stolen their inherent
worth, the extrapolation of the rape culture inherent
in the conceptual penis becomes clear.
Let me even go out on a limb: it is conceivable that
this sketch of an argument—on the connection be-
tween masculine psychology and environmental
destruction—could be transformed, by marshaling
additional evidence, into something halfway con-
vincing. But as it stands, this reasoning would
barely merit a C− in a freshman course.
So how did such a worthless article get pub-
lished? In their exposé published in Skeptic and
eSkeptic, Boghossian and Lindsay opine that
There are at least two deeply troublesome diseases
damaging the credibility of the peer-review system
in fields such as gender studies:
1. the echo-chamber of morally driven fashionable
nonsense coming out of the postmodernist social
“sciences” in general, and gender studies depart-
ments in particular; and
2. the complex problem of pay-to-publish journals
with lax standards that cash in on the ultra-competi-
tive publish-or-perish academic environment.
At least one of these sicknesses led to “The Concep-
tual Penis as a Social Construct” being published as
a legitimate piece of academic scholarship, and we
can expect proponents of each to lay primary blame
upon the other.13
This last prediction was astute, and it has been
amply borne out by the commentary thus far on the
hoax. But I would like to add some nuances con-
cerning the two “sicknesses” diagnosed by Boghoss-
ian and Lindsay, starting with the second.
Over the past decade there has been a phenom-
enal proliferation of pay-to-publish, open-access aca-
demic journals (and conferences), the worst of
which are pure moneymaking vehicles with zero
scholarly standards. This problem affects all aca-
demic disciplines, but it is probably worst in the sci-
ences and technology, simply because that is where
the money is. Several well-publicized hoaxes—such
as SCIgen14 and John Bohannon’s sting15—have re-
56 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
vealed the depth of the problem. University of Col-
orado librarian Jeffrey Beall has compiled a list of lit-
erally hundreds of scholarly journals that he
considers “predatory.” 16 (But the problem is not
confined to open-access journals: more than 120
SCIgen-generated papers have been detected in con-
ference proceedings published by Springer and the
IEEE.17)
So I took a closer look at Cogent Social Sciences,
which advertises itself as a “multidisciplinary open
access journal offering high quality peer review
across the social sciences: from law to sociology,
politics to geography, and sport to communication
studies.” 18 Here are the titles of some of their re-
cently published papers:
• Framing leadership: The social construction of leader-
ship within the academic field of communication
studies.
• Service delivery protests in South African municipali-
ties: An exploration using principal component re-
gression and 2013 data.
• The effect of single-tasks and dual-tasks on balance in
older adults.
• Poverty dynamics in Botswana: Policies, trends and
challenges.
• Death and taxes: The framing of the causes and policy
responses to the illicit tobacco trade in Canadian
newspapers.
• Professional methods of assessments in architectural
design projects: A focus on the relevant parametric
measures in selected Nigerian universities.
• A multivariate analysis of gun violence among urban
youth: The impact of direct victimization, indirect
victimization, and victimization among peers.
I then took a brief look at each of these papers. I
don’t feel qualified to judge these articles’ quality or
importance, but none of them seemed to be utter
nonsense. As far as I can tell, Cogent Social Sciences is
a run-of-the-mill lower-tier academic journal, not a
predatory publish-anything-if-they-pay outfit.
Did financial considerations nevertheless play
a role in lowering this journal’s academic stan-
dards? Without further evidence concerning the in-
ternal processes at Cogent Social Sciences, it is hard
to say. (For what it’s worth, Boghossian and Lindsay
apparently never even received an invoice for the
putative $625 minimum charge.) But at a more
general level, the dynamics of open access is clear:
the pay-to-publish model permits the existence of
very-low-tier academic journals that on the tradi-
tional publishing model would fail to attract
enough paid subscriptions to survive. (Cogent Social
AC ADEMIC HOAX
Sciences no doubt belongs to this category.) So, in
this sense, pay-to-publish probably does contribute
to a lowering of academic standards at the lowest
non-predatory tier: more marginal articles will get
published. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I
don’t really know. After all, any of the above-cited
articles from Cogent Social Sciences—even if they
are admittedly not earthshaking—could potentially
be of value to future workers on its specialized sub-
ject.
This leaves us with the first of Boghossian and
Lindsay’s “sicknesses” they outlined in their exposé
article:
The most potent among the human susceptibilities
to corruption by fashionable nonsense is the temptation
to uncritically endorse morally fashionable nonsense.…
[We conjectured that] we could publish outright non-
sense provided it looked the part and portrayed a moral-
izing attitude that comported with the editors’ moral
convictions.… We intended to test the hypothesis that
flattery of the academic Left’s moral architecture in gen-
eral, and of the moral orthodoxy in gender studies in par-
ticular, is the overwhelming determiner of publication in
an academic journal in the field. That is, we sought to
demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the
world to be validated could overcome the critical assess-
ment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we
suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by
an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the
root of all evil.
Do the results of their experiment vindicate
their conclusion that “our suspicion was justified”?
I would answer: yes and no, but mostly no.
It indeed seems likely that, at Cogent Social Sci-
ences, the flattery of the editors’ moral and ideologi-
cal preconceptions helped to dull their critical
faculties and smooth the way to publication of a
grossly deficient manuscript. To be sure, Boghoss-
ian and Lindsay did not carry out a controlled ex-
periment, but suppose that they had: imagine that
they had selected a sample of lower-tier sociology
or gender-studies journals and then sent, to a ran-
domly-chosen half of them, an article contending,
with equally flimsy arguments, that toxic hyperfem-
ininity is the conceptual driver behind much of cli-
mate change. For example:
Toxic hyperfemininity leads to rampant con-
sumerism and the profligate overconsumption of su-
perfluous luxury goods (for they are luxuries to the
overwhelming majority of humankind), principally
apparel, cosmetics and celebrity magazines. While
some of this excess is sustainably recycled via dona-
tions of last year’s fashion to charity shops, the vast
majority ends up unused in closets (to the annoy-
ance of male partners who urgently require the
space for sporting equipment and pornographic
magazines) or in landfills, or is exported to devel-
oping countries by predatory pseudo-charities,
undermining the local clothing manufacturers. Fur-
thermore, 30% of non-biodegradable waste in land-
fills is composed of disposable diapers, which are a
direct consequence of toxic hyperfemininity via its
exploitation of male sexual weakness. In all these
ways, the conceptual vagina—a performative social
construct that is isomorphic to an especially toxic
strain of femininity—is revealed as the conceptual
driver behind much of climate change.
Would a modified article along these lines have
fared as well as the original? I doubt it.
On the other hand, Boghossian and Lindsay’s
experiment also shows that flattery of the editors’
moral and ideological preconceptions is not always
sufficient to garner publication. After all, they origi-
nally submitted the article to NORMA: International
Journal for Masculinity Studies—a not-particularly-
prestigious journal of gender studies—which re-
jected it (apparently without review) as “unsuitable
for publication in NORMA”.19 By contrast, Cogent So-
cial Sciences—whatever one may conclude about its
overall merit—is a generalist social-sciences journal,
not a journal of gender studies.
Finally, it seems even less likely that this paper
would have been accepted at a more prestigious
gender-studies journal, such as Gender & Society,
Feminist Theory, Signs, Feminist Studies, or Men and
Masculinities. The bias towards articles presupposing
a particular moral and ideological orientation—and
the associated dulling of the editors’ capacities for
critical thinking—may well persist at this higher
tier, but its effects will be more subtle than a hoax
like this could demonstrate.
In assessing the conclusions to be drawn from
my Social Text hoax, I wrote that
From the mere fact of publication of my parody I
think that not much can be deduced. It doesn’t prove
that the whole field of cultural studies, or cultural
studies of science—much less sociology of science—
is nonsense. Nor does it prove that the intellectual
standards in these fields are generally lax. (This
might be the case, but it would have to be established
on other grounds.) It proves only that the editors of
one rather marginal journal were derelict in their in-
tellectual duty, by publishing an article on quantum
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 57
 physics that they admit they could not understand, without
bothering to get an opinion from anyone knowledgeable in
quantum physics, solely because it came from a “conveniently
credentialed ally” (as Social Text co-editor Bruce Robbins later
candidly admitted), flattered the editors’ ideological preconcep-
tions, and attacked their “enemies.” 20
REFERENCES
1. Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach. 1768. “La
Théologie Portative, ou Dictionnaire
Abrégé de la Religion Chrétienne.”
(CODA, Chécy/Paris, 2006). English
translation: Baron d’Holbach. 2010.
Portable Theology, translated by David
Holohan. Hodgson Press, Surbiton.
2. Beck, G., H. Bethe and W. Riezler.
1931. “Bemerkung zur Quantentheo-
rie der Nullpunktstemperatur.” Die
Naturwissenschaften 19, 39.
3. See: Schweber, Silvan S. 2012. Nu-
clear Forces: The Making of the Physi-
cist Hans Bethe. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 190–192.
4. “Ern Malley, Poet of Debunk: Full Story
From the Two Authors,” FACT, 25 June
1944, reprinted at
http://bit.ly/2qQ4OKs
5. Lehman, David. 2002. “The Ern Mal-
ley Poetry Hoax—Introduction”, Jacket
17, June, http://bit.ly/2qPJyVv See
also: Heyward, Michael. 1993. The
Ern Malley Affair. London: Faber and
Faber.
6. Sokal, Alan D. 1996. “Transgressing
the Boundaries: Towards a Transfor-
mative Hermeneutics of Quantum
Gravity.” Social Text 46/47, 217–252.
Reprinted with annotations in: Sokal,
Alan. 2008. Beyond the Hoax: Sci-
ence, Philosophy and Culture. New
York: Oxford University Press.
7. Tremblay, Jean-Pierre (pseud.). 2014.
“Automobilités Postmodernes: Quand
l’Autolib’ Fait Sensation à Paris”, So-
ciétés 126, 115–124; the article has
been deleted from the journal’s website
but is available at http://bit.ly/2sbElei
See also: Quinon, Manuel and Arnaud
Saint-Martin. 2015. “Le Maffesolisme,
une «Sociologie» en Roue Libre. Dé-
monstration par l’Absurde.” Carnet
Zilsel, 7 mars, http://bit.ly/2s9g74p
8. http://bit.ly/2sIWtJ1
9. Tripodi, Benedetta (pseud.). 2015. “On-
tology, Neutrality and the Strive for
(non-)Beingqueer,” Badiou Studies 4,
no. 1, 72–102; the article has been
deleted from the journal’s website but
is available at http://bit.ly/2rYIkv6 See
also: Barberousse, Anouk and Philippe
Huneman. 2016. “Un «Philosophe
Français» Label Rouge: Relecture tripo-
dienne d’Alain Badiou”, Carnet Zilsel,
1 avril (!), http://bit.ly/2qQ8r33; and:
“L’Ontologie Badiousienne Parodiée
58 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
It seems to me that a similar analysis applies, mutatis mutan-
dis, to the Boghossian–Lindsay hoax.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Peter Boghossian, Jerry Coyne, Rebecca
Goldstein, Philippe Huneman, Massimo Pigliucci and Arnaud Saint-Martin for
helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Of course, none of these peo-
ple are in any way responsible for what I have written.
par Benedetta Tripodi ou ce qu’il Fal-
lait Démonter,” Carnet Zilsel, 13 avril
2016, http://bit.ly/2qQhNf6
10. See also: Barberousse, Anouk,
Philippe Huneman, Manuel Quinon, Ar-
naud Saint-Martin and Alan Sokal.
2016. “Canulars Académiques, les
«Maîtres à Penser» Démasqués,”
Libération [Paris], 1 juin, 20–21.
11. Lindsay, Jamie and Peter Boyle
(pseud.). 2017. “The Conceptual
Penis as a Social Construct,” Cogent
Social Sciences 3, 1330439, 7; the
article has been deleted from the jour-
nal’s website but is available at http://
bit.ly/2rDrDSt
12. The Postmodernism Generator is a
computer program written in 1996 by
Andrew C. Bulhak of Monash University
and based on the Dada Engine, a sys-
tem for generating random text from re-
cursive grammars. See: Bulhak, Andrew
C. 1996. “On the simulation of post-
modernism and mental debility using
recursive transition networks.” Monash
University, Department of Computer
Science, Technical Report 96/264
(April 1), http://bit.ly/2s9IP55; see
also http://bit.ly/2svNHyO and
http://bit.ly/1fdbdmL and you get a
brand-new, never-before-seen article in
authentic postmodernist lingo, com-
plete with (fictitious) references.
Boghossian and Lindsay commit a
slight inaccuracy by saying that the
Postmodernism Generator was based
on my Social Text hoax. In fact, the
Postmodernism Generator was devel-
oped independently from my hoax, and
roughly contemporaneously.
13. Boghossian, Peter and James Lindsay.
2017. “The Conceptual Penis as a So-
cial Construct: A Sokal-style Hoax on
Gender Studies.” Published in eSkeptic
the same day as the hoax article was
released online: http://bit.ly/2qAaR8n
14. “SCIgen is a program that generates
random Computer Science research
papers” using a context-free grammar,
written by MIT graduate students Je-
remy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan
Aguayo. “One useful purpose for such
a program is to autogenerate submis-
sions to conferences that you suspect
might have very low submission stan-
dards.” See http://bit.ly/2svTtjW and
http://bit.ly/2qPLjSB for more details;
see also: Ball, Philip. 2005. “Com-
puter Conference Welcomes Gob-
bledegook Paper.” Nature 434, 946
(21 April).
15. Bohannon, John. 2013. “Who’s Afraid
of Peer Review?” Science 342
(6154), 60–65 (October 3).
16. Beall’s List of Predatory Journals and
Publishers, http://bit.ly/2sJdQJQ See
also: Butler, Declan. 2013. “Investi-
gating Journals: The Dark Side of Pub-
lishing.” Nature 495, 433–435 (28
March).
17. van Noorden, Richard. 2014. “Publish-
ers Withdraw More than 120 Gibber-
ish Papers.” Nature News (24
February).
18. http://bit.ly/2qQijK6
19. It would appear, at first sight, that the
editors of NORMA nevertheless felt no
qualms in passing the article on to
their sister journal Cogent Social Sci-
ences, one step down in the aca-
demic pecking order:
We feel that your manuscript would
be well-suited to our Cogent Series
(www.cogentoa.com), a multidiscipli-
nary, open journal platform for the
rapid dissemination of peer-reviewed
research across all disciplines.
The form-letter style of this referral to
Cogent suggests that this situation
arises frequently; one can only hope
that NORMA reserves it for articles
that they feel have some scholarly
value. But this seems not to be the
case: apparently all rejection letters
from NORMA contain this statement
about the manuscript being “well-
suited” to the Cogent Series. NORMA
co-editor-in-chief Ulf Mellström says
that he was unaware that their publish-
ers Taylor & Francis—which (surprise,
surprise) also owns Cogent—had in-
serted this paragraph into NORMA’s
standard rejection letter, and he prom-
ises to fix this in the future (Ulf Mell-
ström e-mail to Phil Torres, 24 May
2017, http://bit.ly/2qTgFvz).
20. Sokal, Alan. 1998. “What the Social
Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove.”
In: A House Built on Sand: Exposing
Postmodernist Myths about Science,
edited by Noretta Koertge. New York:
Oxford University Press, 9–22, quota-
tion at 11.
 AR TICLE

Science, Facts,
and “Provisional”
Knowledge
BY DAVID ZEIGLER

What drives us onward in the work of science is precisely the sense that there are truths out there to be discovered,
truths that once discovered will form a permanent part of human knowledge. —Steve Weinberg, 20011

…all scientific knowledge, however acquired, is inherently provisional. —Ian Tattersall, 2008 2

It is a fact that we are cousins of gorillas, kangaroos, starfish, and bacteria. Evolution is as much a fact as the heat
of the sun. It is not a theory, and for pity’s sake, let’s stop confusing the philosophically naïve by calling it so. Evolution
is a fact. —Richard Dawkins, 2005 3

Science is not about final truth or “facts”; it is only about continually testing and trying to falsify our hypotheses,
until they are extremely well-supported. —Donald P. Prothero, 2007 4

No one should suppose that objective truth is impossible to attain, even when the most committed philosophers
urge us to acknowledge that incapacity. —Edward O. Wilson, 1998 5

I could have easily doubled the number of
quotes that open this article by well-respected scien-
tists who respectively seem to be saying two dis-
tinctly different things. Either, science is able to
discover facts and truths concerning the physical
universe, or science can never discover lasting facts
or truths about the universe. Bertrand Russell wrote
that while religion lays claim to eternal and absolute
truth, “science is always tentative.” But later in the
same book he writes: “I cannot admit any method of
arriving at truth except that of science.” 6 Statements
like these can confuse even some scientists, and
surely they have the potential to greatly confuse the
general public—giving the impression that scientists
can’t agree on this important and basic point.
Such conflicting statements suggest an apparent
dualism in the scientific community. While we want
students and the public to know that scientists don’t
all agree on every topic and finding in science, I
doubt scientists really want people to think that most
scientists are not even “on the same page” on the
fundamental question of whether or not science can
discover facts about the universe. This situation does
not make for clear and effective communication be-
tween the scientific community and society. Fortu-
nately, essentially no modern scientist claims that all
scientific knowledge is factual, but unfortunately
many scientists do claim that none of the conclusions
science has arrived at are factual.
Whether there is a conflict or problem here
would seem to hinge on the definition of the term
fact, which is probably best defined by its meaning in
common usage. To have one meaning in the scientific
community and another in common usage (as we do
for the term theory) is certainly not desirable in this
case, and should arguably be avoided. Such inconsis-
tencies work against the professed need for increased
scientific literacy and for communication between
scientists and society. The misunderstandings that
have arisen around the scientific meaning of the term
“theory” and the layperson’s meaning has generated a
sizable problem. An outstanding example is the mis-
understanding over the theory of evolution. It is cer-
tainly desirable to avoid similar misunderstandings

volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 59

 over the simple term fact, especially since it is used
by the layperson far more frequently than the term
theory. According to the Oxford English Dictionary a
fact is: “something that has really occurred or is actu-
ally the case; truth attested by direct observation or
authentic testimony; reality; the truth with regard to
the subject under discussion.” Webster’s Dictionary of-
fers this: “Something that has actual existence; mani-
fest in experience or may be inferred with certainty; a
verified statement or proposition; an assertion or in-
formation purporting to contain something having
objective reality.”
When I looked up these definitions, for exam-
ple, I took it as fact that the dictionary I was hold-
ing existed, and I accept that facts exist by the
common and widespread meaning most people
take when they use the word. When communicat-
ing science to both students and society, scientists
should attempt to speak the same language and
avoid misunderstanding by reserving their own
special meanings for key words such as theory, fact,
provisional, etc. when attempting to teach or share
science with the public. The philosophy of science,
like most philosophical disciplines, tends to gener-
ate very complex and specialized terms and mean-
ings that its practitioners argue to be applicable to
science, even though most practicing scientists go
about their daily work unaware of these arguments
and terms. Although these are important distinc-
tions among philosophers of science, I contend that
most scientists share a fairly simple understanding
of the word fact that is in agreement with that of
the general public and of most dictionaries.
According to the renowned evolutionary biolo-
gist Ernst Mayr: “Practically all working scientists,
and indeed most people with an interest in science,
are convinced that we are making steady advances in
our understanding of nature, as successive genera-
tions of scientists fill in more and more parts of the
“true” story of how the world works.” 7 Evolutionary
theorist Randy Thornhill also noted: “The list of what
we know for sure is long and growing. Any view of
science that pretends we don’t know for sure that in-
sulin is produced in the islets of Langerhans, that bac-
teria and viruses can cause disease, that cells are the
building blocks of higher organisms, that natural se-
lection acts incessantly, that chromosomes house
genes, etc. is nonsense.” 8 These words, plus those of
Steve Weinberg in the epigrams, all speak to what is
sometimes referred to as the cumulative nature of sci-
ence. This idea refers to the rather obvious fact that
we know more and more about the workings of the
universe as more scientific knowledge accumulates,
60 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
and yes—this importantly includes the ongoing cor-
rections to our knowledge base, since science is al-
most unique among disciplines in being
self-correcting by nature.9 Modern doctors know
far more factual information about health and dis-
ease than did physicians of a century ago, not to men-
tion the ancient world. The cumulative nature of
science is especially obvious and straightforward in
the area of descriptive science, an area often ig-
nored by the philosophers of science. When the
planet Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Her-
shel, it was soon accepted as fact, and multiple obser-
vations since that time confirm that Uranus exists.
While some philosophers and individuals
subscribe strongly to the philosophies of idealism,
relativism, and similar views that hold reality to be
ambiguous, the majority of humankind takes the
same stance that most scientists profess: the world
and universe exist independently of our conscious
sensations, perceptions, and opinions—in short, the
universe is real and does not depend on our sensa-
tions of it for its existence. Accepting the reality of
the universe leads naturally to the implication that
there are factual particulars concerning this real uni-
verse that we either are, or are not, capable of ascer-
taining to the point of referring to these particulars as
facts. If asked to consider this point, a great many
people (including scientists) would answer in the af-
firmative—yes, facts do exist and can be elucidated.
Most butterflies can fly. This statement is certainly a
fact about which no scientist or knowledgeable per-
son should have any doubt.
In explaining scientific thinking to students in
the classroom, I often reference a large counter at
the front of the classroom. I state that I know the
counter exists because I can see it, I can feel it,
and I know that its surface is harder than my hand.
Because I and the students can see and feel the
counter, we empirically or objectively know the
counter exists, and we know that its other proper-
ties as just stated are correct—in short they are
facts by any standard definition of the term. While
these facts are not particularly interesting, and do
not support any hypothesis under study, they are as-
certained empirically in a manner roughly compara-
ble to the way most scientific data is acquired.
Thus, most would agree there is a strong argu-
ment that some facts do exist, and some (rationalists
in particular) would additionally claim that only
through empirical scientific methods can facts
beyond individual opinion and preference (e.g., I love
jazz and cheesecake) be known and agreed upon. Are
not the following examples statements of fact?
 • DNA is the molecule that contains the
primary genetic information that codes for
organismal structure.
• Life has evolved over Earth’s history.
• Our solar system resides within a galaxy we
have named the Milky Way, and there are a great
many other galaxies in the known universe.
• In terms of ecological trophic levels, leopards
function primarily as top-level carnivores.
• Steel is harder than copper.
This list could be extended to many thousands of
specific statements that would qualify as facts in the
minds of most scientists and knowledgeable laypeo-
ple. Though each item is an isolated scientific fact,
each is also part of a body of knowledge in one of the
several distinct scientific disciplines. What can possi-
bly be provisional in any useful sense of the term
about any of the statements above? The Earth orbits
the Sun. Though this was once unknown, it is now
well-known to be a fact. Surely, no rational person
anywhere thinks that perhaps some new data may
come to light tomorrow that would significantly alter
this known relationship of the Sun and the Earth.
Admittedly, many statements in science must be
given a bit less confidence, such as that trilobites are
extinct. Though there is no record of anyone ever col-
lecting or observing a living trilobite, the ocean floor
is still relatively unexplored. Almost every time a new
area of this vast dark ecosystem is explored new
species are discovered.10 So far no living trilobites
have turned up, but it would not be completely be-
yond belief if tomorrow some expedition to the deep
abyssal floor of the Indian Ocean discovered that a
few are still around (as was the case for the coela-
canth—believed to have been extinct for some 65
million years but discovered alive in the last century).
Though unlikely in the extreme (since trilobites are
believed to have all died out around 250 million years
ago), it is at least possible. Therefore, the statement
that trilobites are extinct is provisional. A great many
other examples of such “almost” certain findings exist
within science, but what is to be gained by adding a
statement about its provisional nature when saying
that trilobites are extinct? I have certainly never seen
scientific writing stating that provisionally we think
all trilobites are extinct. If we accepted that as neces-
sary, then a huge amount of the information pre-
sented in science textbooks and papers would have to
state that this statement or finding is provisional,
which would greatly reduce the confidence of the
reader in statements that scientists generally agree to.
Moving down a sliding scale of confidence, we
ask: did birds evolve from a line of theropod di-
nosaurs? Over the past couple of decades the evi-
dence supporting this conclusion has become
sufficient to convince the great majority of biologists
that this case is essentially closed. This conclusion is
perhaps not yet as certain as the conclusion that trilo-
bites are extinct, but nearly so. It is at best today only
slightly provisional, and some current explanations of
this topic still mention the alternative views of the re-
cent past on bird origins to show the provisional na-
ture of those previous views.11
There are many general statements in biology
that must be said to be provisional for the simple rea-
son that all the pertinent data are not in. Most zoology
textbooks state that all mammals have a four-cham-
bered heart and non-nucleated red blood cells. But
not all species of mammals have been discovered.
While it would be an exceedingly good bet that any
undiscovered mammal species would likewise have
four-chambered hearts and non-nucleated red blood
cells, there is at least the possibility that one might be
found to vary from those standard mammal bench-
marks. Still, no zoology textbooks I have ever seen in-
clude wording such as “so far, all known mammals
have four-chambered hearts and non-nucleated red
blood cells.” It seems unnecessary when we have no
evidence suggesting that these are not universal char-
acteristics of mammals. There are a great many other
examples of scientific conclusions that are taken as
firm by the scientific community, but in truth the pos-
sibility exists for them to be overturned or signifi-
cantly altered by new data or by a better interpretation
of existing data.
And then finally, yes—of course—in science
there are also many statements and hypotheses that
are still being tested and questioned by the scientific
community. In biology there is still a healthy ongoing
discussion as to the ultimate unit of selection in natu-
ral selection (the group, the individual, or the gene),
with some scientists currently coming down on one
or more sides of this complex question, and the an-
swer may even vary depending on the organisms
being examined. There are still multiple competing
hypotheses as to why sex evolved, and why it has
been maintained in so many lines of descent. There
is still no strong consensus on why sleep evolved, or
what its original and current functions might be.
More visible currently is the question of the relative
percent of the human genome that has useful func-
tionality. This important question is currently being
investigated by many workers and lab groups, with
disagreement among them as to what the answer
may be. It will take more research to approach a
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 61
 consensus answer on this very interesting question.
In the area of human evolution, much progress
has been made in elucidating our recent ancestry,
but full consensus as to whether Homo sapiens
evolved directly from Homo heidelbergensis has not
been achieved. Most current published accounts of
human evolution put Homo heidelbergensis as the
most likely ancestor of modern humans (Homo erec-
tus was previously believed to be our direct ances-
tor). Due to the incompleteness of the fossil record
and the fact that some subjectivity is involved in
making these determinations, this relationship will
likely never be an established fact in the same sense
that we know steel to be harder than copper.
There are many other open questions in biology
that remain unanswered such as how did the mod-
ern eukaryotic cell evolve? Though a great deal is
now known about this evolutionary process, there
are still important unanswered questions, and some
aspects of this complex issue will undoubtedly al-
ways remain provisional.
Most first-time scientific answers start out as ten-
tative or provisional, especially answers to complex
questions concerning complex phenomena. The idea
62 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 22 number 3 2017
of continental drift was viewed as laughable when first
proposed by Alfred Wegener due to lack of any known
mechanism or supporting data. Today continental
drift (plate tectonics) has been documented beyond
any reasonable doubt—though as with all such com-
plex and largescale processes, many of the smaller de-
tails are still being questioned and investigated.
Many in the sciences (current author included)
were drawn to science because scientific knowledge
is by and large more objectively confirmed, more
agreed upon, and usually more lasting than much of
the knowledge in many of the more human-centered
disciplines such as philosophy, art, fashion, econom-
ics, politics, business, etc. While there have certainly
been several significant paradigm shifts in science,
they are arguably becoming fewer and less inclusive
as time goes by. Physics is one area where the poten-
tial for major paradigm shifts (concerning the funda-
mental nature of matter and the universe) may exist
to a greater degree than is true for much of chem-
istry, geology, or biology. The majority of work in
most scientific disciplines is of the “normal” type,
which fills in the many details of the major accepted
concepts and theories.
Only a few decades ago the question was open
as to whether the Animal Kingdom was mono-
phyletic or polyphyletic, with sponges especially
being viewed as so weird and distinctive that they
may have had a separate origin from different pro-
tist ancestors. With modern genomic work, that
large question is now confidently answered—ani-
mals are indeed monophyletic, and sponges are
part of the animal clade. Now a question of interest
is the smaller one of whether sponges sit at the very
base of the animal tree, since some recent evidence
suggests that comb jellies or Placozoans may be the
more ancestral phylum.12 A firm answer to that
more specific question is still certainly provisional.
This pattern is true of much of science today—the
big paradigms and answers are largely settled, but
with a great many smaller questions and details yet
to be elucidated.
The evolution of life on Earth is a confirmed
fact, though a full and complete picture of Earth’s
evolutionary process as to exact evolutionary tracks,
timing, and mechanisms involved will surely never
be a finished body of work. This does not mean that
much of our evolutionary knowledge is not factual,
only that much still remains, and will continue to
remain unknown concerning the many details of
this large and encompassing paradigm.
Without belaboring the point, it seems clear
that science can discover what we should own up
to as facts (beyond reasonable doubt)—and as well,
to numerous conclusions that are only slightly pro-
visional. As has always been the case, science con-
tinues to deal with a number of hypotheses that
may be true, but are as yet very much provisional.
Indeed, some hypotheses may remain provisional,
or at least incomplete, far into the future. But just
because science can’t explain everything now does
not mean that it has not succeeded in explaining a
great deal of our physical universe in factual terms.
Standard dictionaries in defining the term pro-
visional usually include “temporary” as one of the
standard meanings. I would argue that we know a
great many scientific facts that are not considered
to be temporary by the scientific community. To
briefly add other examples, we know that some
plants depend on insects for pollination, the
Hawaiian island chain is volcanic in origin, Tyran-
nosaurus rex was a theropod dinosaur that lived dur-
ing the Cretaceous, oysters are filter feeders, and
the number of beetle species far exceeds that of
mammal species. All these statements are facts by
any reasonable and objective measure. What is re-
ally meant when some say that science is provi-
sional is that in science the door is always open to
new evidence on any subject.
In brief, science is open minded and continually
seeks new evidence and data on any tentative or fac-
tual knowledge. The “provisional” nature of science
does not mean, however, nor should it be taken to
mean, that scientists are not firmly convinced of a
great many factual points concerning the world as
science has elucidated it. Perhaps some scientists fear
that claiming the existence of scientific factual truths
would imply that science is not open to new evi-
dence—in short, that scientists are close minded on
some topics. However, concerning the idea that the
Earth orbits the Sun, scientists and most educated
people are convinced that this fact is now beyond
question. Still, if anyone should claim to have actual
objective evidence to the contrary, we should at least
give this evidence a hearing. Scientists often wield
the descriptor of close minded to denigrate the cre-
ationist community because they will not listen to, or
try to understand, the vast bodies of evidence that
support evolutionary theory. In that case, however,
there is an exuberant abundance of physical and in-
ferential evidence supporting the fact of the evolution
of life that the hardcore young-Earth creationists are
unwilling to examine with an open mind. This is not
the case when rational minds are completely con-
vinced that the Earth is roughly spherical, that DNA
is the genetic material of life, or that water ice is less
dense than liquid water. All the available empirical
evidence tells us clearly that these statements are
true. Perhaps a better and less philosophical wording
would be that scientists are fully confident about these
conclusions, since they are strongly supported by all
the available empirical evidence.
To simply say without qualification, and to say
repeatedly (as many have) that all scientific knowl-
edge is provisional or tentative dangerously feeds
into the postmodern deconstructionist philosophy
of recent times that claims knowledge of any type is
“only a construct,” and that the knowledge of sci-
ence is no more accurate or lasting than knowledge
from any other source such as philosophy or reli-
gion. Certainly the vast majority of scientists and
science educators reject this view, and many have
spoken out against it.
Saying that all scientific knowledge is provi-
sional is simply not portraying science accurately. If
we want to educate people to have confidence in
scientific knowledge and adopt rational views, we
should arguably refrain from making statements
implying that everything in science is provisional.
That would only be a true statement if we believe
that facts do not exist, if we believe that humans
are incapable of discovering facts, or if we chose to
retreat back to Descartes’ solitary item of knowl-
edge: “I think, therefore I am.”
REFERENCES
1. Weinberg, S. 2001. Facing Up. Cambridge MA: Har-
vard University Press.
2. Tattersall, I. 2008. “What’s So Special About Sci-
ence?” Evolution: Education & Outreach. 1 (1): 36-41.
3. Dawkins, R. 2005. “Darwin and Evolution.” Natural
History Magazine, November.
4. Prothero, D.R. 2007. Evolution: What the Fossils
Say and Why it Matters. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press.
5. Wilson, E.O. 1998. Consilience: the Unity of Knowl-
edge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
6. Russell, B. 1997. Religion and Science. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press.
7. Mayr, E. 1997. This is Biology. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
8. Thornhill, R. 1984. “Scientific Methodology in Ento-
mology.” FL Entomologist. 67(1): 74-96.
9. McComas, W.F. 2014. “Revisiting the Myths of Sci-
ence-Enhanced Science Teaching by Focusing on its
Nature.” Connecticut Journal of Science Education.
Vol. 5, No 1.
10. Crist, D.T., G. Scowcroft, & J.M. Harding. 2009.
World Ocean Census. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books.
11. Prothero, D.R. 2007, op cit.
12. Maldonado M. 2014. “Metazoans: The Rise of Early
Animals.” In: The Tree of Life. Vargas P. & Zardoya R.
(Eds). Sinauer Associates, Inc.
volume 22 number 3 2017 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 63
C O N TR I B U TORS
________________________
Ástor Alexander is a figura-
tive illustrator and painter.
He specializes in portraits
and he's a big fan of the
American illustrators of the
60s. His work can be seen
at behance.net/astor
alexander
________________________
Dr. Raymond Barglow ma-
jored in physics at Caltech
and received a Ph.D. in phi-
losophy at UC Berkeley. He
has taught at UC Berkeley
and Trinity College and writes
on science, ethics, and cul-
tural issues. He is interested
in the history and prospects
of participatory democracy in
the United States and
abroad.
_________________________
Peter Boghossian Dr. Peter
Boghossian is a full time fac-
ulty member in the Depart-
ment of Philosophy at
Portland State University.
He’s the author of A Manual
for Creating Atheists and the
creator of the Atheos app.
@peterboghossian
________________________
Tim Callahan is religion edi-
tor of SKEPTIC. His books in-
clude Secret Origins Of the Bible,
and Bible Prophecy: Failure or Ful-
fillment? both published by
Millennium Press. He has
also researched the environ-
mental movement, and his
article “Environmentalists
Cause Malaria! (and other
myths of the ‘Wise Use’
movement)” appeared in The
Humanist.
_________________________
Dr. Marc J. Defant is a Pro-
fessor of Geology at the Uni-
versity of South Florida. He
specializes in the study of
volcanoes—more specifi-
cally, the geochemistry of
volcanic rocks, the associ-
ated processes within the
mantle, and the origin of the
continental crust. He has
been funded by the National
Science Foundation, National
Geographic, the American
Chemical Society, and the
National Academy of Sci-
ences, and has published
in many internationally
renowned scientific journals
including Nature. He has
written a book entitled Voy-
64 S KE PTI C M AG AZ I N E
age of Discovery: From the
Big Bang to the Ice Age and
published several articles for
general readership maga-
zines such as Popular Sci-
ence. He has presented a
Tedx talk on “Why We are
Alone in the Galaxy”
(http://bit.ly/2jHxEtC) and
has written many essays on
his blog at www.marcde-
fant.com
_________________________
Dr. Lee Dugatkin is an evolu-
tionary biologist, historian of
science, and science writer
at The University of
Louisville. He is coauthor
with Lyudmila Trut of How To
Tame a Fox (and Build a
Dog) (2017, University of
Chicago Press)
_________________________
Dr. Nathan H. Lents is Pro-
fessor of Molecular Biology
at John Jay College of the
City University of New York,
where the s also the director
of the biology and cell and
molecular biology programs.
He also maintains The
Human Evolution Blog and is
the author of Not So Differ-
ent: Finding Human Nature
in Animals, which will be
published by Columbia Uni-
versity Press.
_________________________
Dr. James Lindsay holds a
doctorate in mathematics
and a degree in physics. He
is the author of four books,
including Everybody Is Wrong
About God and Life in Light
of Death. His essays have
appeared in many periodi-
cals, including Scientific
American, TIME, and The
Philosophers' Magazine.
_________________________
Anna Maltese is an artist
who spent most of her adult
life as an animator for the
Simpsons before she struck
out on her own as a free-
lance illustrator and digital
painter. When she’s not
drawing or painting, she can
be found coaching archery in
Pasadena or immersing her-
self in a book on history and
science.
_________________________
Dr. Alan Sokal is Professor of
Physics at New York University
and Professor of Mathematics
at University College London.
volume 22 number 3 2017
Besides his research in
mathematics and physics, he
is co-author with Jean
Bricmont of Fashionable
Nonsense: Postmodern
Intellectuals’ Abuse of
Science (1998) and author of
Beyond the Hoax: Science,
Philosophy and Culture
(2007).
_________________________
Dr. Lyudmila Trut is a profes-
sor of evolutionary genetics
at the Institute of Cytology
and Genetics, in Novosi-
birsk, Siberia. She has been
the lead researcher on the
silver fox domestication ex-
periment since 1959.The
New York Times Book Re-
view calls Dugatkin and
Trut’s recent book, How To
Tame a Fox (and Build a
Dog) (2017, University of
Chicago Press), a “Sparkling
new book...Part science,
part Russian fairy tale and
part spy thriller... It may
serve—particularly now—as
a parable of the lessons that
emerge from unfettered sci-
ence, if we have the courage
to let it unfold.”
_________________________
Dr. David Zeigler is a re-
cently retired professor of Bi-
ology. He has written a half
dozen earlier articles for
Skeptic. His latest book is
Evolution: Components &
Mechanisms, 2014, Aca-
demic Press. He has also
long been interested in the
basic nature of science.
REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS
_________________________
Dr. Harriet Hall, MD, the
SkepDoc, is a retired family
physician and Air Force
Colonel living in Puyallup,
WA. She writes about alter-
native medicine, pseudo-
science, quacker y, and
critical thinking. She is a
contributing editor to both
SKEPTIC and Skeptical In-
quirer, an advisor to the
Quackwatch website, and an
editor of Sciencebasedmed
icine.org, where she writes
an ar ticle ever y Tuesday.
She is author of Women
Aren’t Supposed to Fly: The
Memoirs of a Female Flight
Surgeon. Her website is
www.skepdoc.info.
_________________________
Pat Linse is an award win-
ning illustrator who special-
ized in film industry art
before becoming one of the
founders of the Skeptics So-
ciety, SKEPTIC, and the creator
of JUNIOR SKEPTIC magazine.
As Skeptic’s art director she
has created many illustra-
tions for both Skeptic and
JUNIOR SKEPTIC. She is co-edi-
tor of the Encyclopedia of
Pseudoscience.
_________________________
Daniel Loxton was a profes-
sional shepherd for nine
years before he became edi-
tor of JUNIOR SKEPTIC. He illus-
trates and authors most of
the current JUNIOR SKEPTIC ma-
terial. He wrote and illus-
trated the best selling
award-winning Evolution:
How All Living Things Came
to Be, and the award winning
children’s three book Tales
of Prehistoric Life Series.
_________________________
Dr. Michael Shermer is the
Publisher of SKEPTIC maga-
zine, a monthly columnist for
Scientific American, a regu-
lar contributor to Time.com,
and Presidential Fellow at
Chapman University. His new
book is The Moral Arc: How
Science and Reason Lead
Humanity Toward Truth, Jus-
tice, and Freedom. As a pub-
lic intellectual he regularly
contributes Opinion Editori-
als, book reviews, and es-
says to The Wall Street
Journal, The Los Angeles
Times, Science, Nature, and
other publications. He ap-
peared on such shows as
The Colbert Report, 20/20,
Dateline, Charlie Rose, and
Larry King Live (but, proudly,
never Jerry Springer!). His
two TED talks, seen by mil-
lions, were voted in the top
100 of the more than 1000
TED talks. He holds a Ph.D.
from Claremont Graduate
University in the history of
science.
_________________________
Dr. Carol Tavris is a social
psychologist and coauthor,
with Elliot Aronson, of Mis-
takes were made (but not by
ME).
PUBLISHER AND
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Pat Linse
CO-PUBLISHER
Michael Shermer
EDITOR AND WRITER
Daniel Loxton
The Gruesome True Story
Hello!
Our world has been conquered by hordes of zombies! They
CONTRIBUTORS: menace us in video games, comics, television, and movies. They
Pat Linse lurch gruesomely down city streets in “zombie walk” events.
is the creator of
and Editor in Chief After decades of zombie fiction, the walking dead are more pop-
of JUNIOR SKEPTIC. ular than ever. Mindless, moaning, hungry for human flesh, zombies
She wrote many of may be the ultimate modern monsters. They’ve spread like a virus
the early issues.
through tales of terror and horrified imaginings. But where did the
Daniel Loxton idea come from? Were zombies invented for fiction, or do they have
is the Editor of
JUNIOR SKEPTIC, a basis in legend—or perhaps even in reality? Could anything like fic-
and writes and tional movie zombies actually exist in the real world?
illustrates most is-
sues. Daniel is the
author of Evolu-
tion: How We and Let’s find out!
All Living Things
Came to Be. He il-
lustrated this
issue’s cover.
Monster Stories
Jim W. W. Smith
is a cartoonist
and CGI illustrator
who works People everywhere tell tales of creatures reaching as tales of vampires and were-
regularly with that stir in dark places, lurking ravenously wolves. But like those other creatures, zom-
Daniel Loxton for the unwary. Different cultures imagine a bies are imagined as transformed human
on JUNIOR SKEPTIC
and a variety of terrifying variety of monsters, but some beings. In that transformation,
book projects types tend to reappear in legends, fairy tales, all three creatures lose some
for kids. and horror stories told all essential part of what made
around the world. Dragon them human. Werewolves
and ogre stories turn up lose the restraint and reason
in many places, for exam- that make a person civilized.
ple. [See JUNIOR SKEPTIC They lose all memory of who
#30 for more on dragons.] they are. They become wild
Similarly, many cul- animals. Vampires often keep
tures imagine monsters their intelligence, but lose
that look like us. These their conscience (their “soul”
are often said to be humans in some stories). Other peo-
JUNIOR SKEPTIC No. 64 (2017)

who became monsters through
some horrifying process of trans-
formation. Countless cultures speak
of vampires—fiends who suck the
lifeblood from their victims. Werewolf legends
are also widespread and have been repeated for
thousands of years.
Zombie stories are not nearly so old or far-
ple are mere prey for the vampire’s
thirst.
Zombies lose even more: memories, intelli-
gence, purpose, a sense of self, everything that
makes a person more than just a body that
moves. A zombie is a human with everything
human taken out. Everything but hunger.

Prehistory of Zombies
Modern zombies vary from story to story. Most are slow, but
some are fast. Most are animated corpses; others become in-
fected or changed while they are still living. But zombies typ-
ically share three features: they’re mindless; they’re savagely
violent; and, they’re contagious.
In many stories zombies behave like a fast-spreading
plague. Zombies attack and bite humans. This turns their vic-
tims into more zombies. The infection spreads. Usually the
zombie hordes multiply so fast that soldiers, police, and gov-
ernments are totally overwhelmed. Civilization collapses.
Soon only a few desperate survivors remain to scav-
enge among the ruins of the old world.
Such “zombie apocalypse” stories are as famil-
iar today as superheroes, wizards, or space bat-
tles. Yet it was not always so. Where did the
modern zombie story come from? We can
find early roots for that story in much, much
older tales.
Reanimating the Dead
Flesh-eating zombies are modern mon-
sters, not creatures from ancient folklore.
But for thousands of years people have told
stories about the dead returning to life—not
just as ghosts but as physical bodies. Such sto- Ezekiel’s
ries were an easy leap of the imagination: if a dry bones
living person can change into a dead body,
could that process be somehow reversed?
For example, Greek myths tell of a healer named Asclepius
who was so skilled in medicine that he could even cure
death. Unfortunately, the gods did not want mortals to have
this divine power. Zeus angrily struck down Asclepius with a
thunderbolt. But in other Greek tales, the gods chose to re-
turn people to life themselves. Similarly, in the Bible’s Book
of Ezekiel, God miraculously restores life to dry bones scat-
tered across a valley. With “a rattling sound…the bones came
together, bone to bone…and tendons and flesh appeared on
them and skin covered them…and breath entered them; they
came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.” But the
reanimated people in these stories are nothing like zombies.
They’re fully alive again. The gods were said to have the
power to reverse death completely.
JUNIOR SKEPTIC No. 64 (2017)
Bloodthirsty Demons and the Rise of the Undead
Tales of the dead returning to life suggest one ancient root
for the modern zombie idea. Other tales provide other hints.
In Greek and Roman times, people spoke fearfully of beings
who ate the flesh and blood of human victims. These vam-
pire-like creatures appeared human, but they were not people
who returned from the dead. They were supernatural spirits
or demons who hid behind an attractive illusion. They dis-
guised themselves as beautiful women to lure the strong
young men they preferred for their food. Despite this grue-
some appetite, they don’t sound much like zombies!
Several centuries later, however, a new kind of legend
combined the elements of “returning from the dead” and
“feeding on humans” into a much more zombie-like mon-
ster: the vampire. During the Medieval Period, stories
abounded of corpses rising from the grave to menace the liv-
ing, often by drinking blood. Historian William of New-
burgh told some such tales in England during the 1100s. He
claimed there was “abundant testimony” to prove that the
dead sometimes rose to “wander about to the terror or de-
struction of the living” before returning to their
graves. When brave men dug up and destroyed
these undead horrors, they appeared like a
“leech filled with the blood of many persons.”
Early vampire tales also included another
element found in modern zombie stories:
the terror of contagious disease. In some
stories the wandering corpse contaminated
the air, killing even those who wisely shel-
tered behind locked doors at night. William
of Newburgh said one town “which but a
short time ago was populous” was “almost
deserted” because so many had either been
killed by the unnatural plague or fled “lest
they, too, should die.”
Plague Narratives
Of course, people didn’t need vampires to fear dis-
ease during the Medieval and Renaissance periods. The
Black Death was terrifying all on its own. The plague wiped
out roughly half the population of Europe—more in some
places. Millions more died in China and the Middle East.
And it kept coming back in wave after deadly wave.
Cities were so badly devastated by the Black Death that
they resembled modern visions of a zombie apocalypse. Peo-
ple cowered in their homes or abandoned their belongings
to flee into the countryside. So many died so quickly that the
rules of society broke down. Looters ransacked at will. There
was no one left to enforce the law, for the authorities, “like
other men, were all either dead or sick,” explained one
writer in the 1300s. Even the bonds of family began to un-
ravel. The plague struck “such terror to the hearts of all…
that brother forsook brother” and parents abandoned their
own children. No one knew what caused the plague. No one
could stop it. No one was safe. Rich or poor, good or bad—
the Black Death took everyone equally.
These horrifying, dramatic events inspired true and fic-
tional plague stories for centuries. Those stories are literary
ancestors to all modern thrillers about epidemics, including
tales about plagues of zombies.
65

The Monkey’s Paw
In ancient stories, the gods decided what was natural. If they
chose to restore a dead person to life, that was a good thing
—a miracle. This changed in Medieval vampire stories.
After all, it was hardly a miracle if bloodthirsty corpses
arose from their graves to hunt the living! Vampires
were thought to be raised by dark supernatural
powers. They were the work of the Devil.
Since then, modern horror writers have in-
vented countless imaginary ways to reanimate
the dead—magic, viruses, radiation, bizarre
medical experiments, and so on. But whatever
the details, modern stories usually agree with
Medieval legends: the dead are meant to stay
that way. To raise the dead is unwholesome,
unnatural, and unwise. Usually there is a ter-
rible price to pay.
Be Careful What You Wish For…
This is the theme of “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W. W. Ja-
cobs. Published in 1902, this short story is considered one of
the earliest zombie tales.
The main characters are an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs.
White, and their adult son Herbert. One cold wet night an
old friend visits their isolated cottage. He brings with him
tales of adventures in foreign lands, and also a small strange
object: a “little paw” from a monkey, “dried to a mummy.” He
explains that a sorcerer in India enchanted the paw to grant
three people three wishes each. It works, he says, white-
Lovecraft’s Reanimator
While “The Monkey’s Paw” left it to readers to imagine the
creature at the door, horror writer H. P. Lovecraft was happy
to reveal his own version of the undead in a series of rather
nasty short stories published in 1921–1922. “Herbert West—
Reanimator” is the saga of one doctor’s mad quest to dis-
cover a scientific process to bring the dead back to life. In a
series of “hideous experiments,” West injects chemical fluids
into bodies stolen from fresh graves. His secret tests suc-
ceed—at least partly. West brings corpses back to life after
the “deterioration of sensitive brain-cells” in death. This cre-
ates mindless monsters which repeatedly (and predictably)
escape to attack the living. Eventually the creatures destroy
their own deranged creator.
Though the word “zombie” was not yet part of the main-
stream English language, modern readers know a zombie
when they see one. Lovecraft described his reanimated
66
faced, but there is a catch. Those who interfere with fate do
so “to their sorrow.” He throws the shrivelled paw into the
fire, but Mr. White rescues it for himself. “If you keep it,”
warns the friend, “don’t blame me for what happens. Pitch it
on the fire like a sensible man.”
Instead, Mr. White laughingly wishes for a large sum
of money. Soon his wish does indeed come true—but in
the most horrifying way. The wished-for money is deliv-
ered by a lawyer as compensation for his son Herbert’s
grisly workplace death. “He was caught in the machin-
ery,” the lawyer explains.
After days of grief and despair, Mrs. White is suddenly
seized by a feverish realization: there are still two
wishes left! She demands that her husband fetch
the paw “and wish our boy alive again.” The old
man tries to reason with her. “He has been dead ten
days,” he stammers, and he was so mangled in the acci-
dent that he could only be recognized by his clothing. Mr.
White is gripped by a “horrible fear that the…wish might
bring his mutilated son before him,” but in the end he
obeys his wife’s desperate pleas. He grips the paw and utters
the words, “I wish my son alive again.”
Late that night there comes a knocking at the door, first
softly and then louder. “It’s my boy; it’s Herbert!” cries the
joyful Mrs. White as she struggles to unbolt the door. But
what undead horror waits on the other side? “For God’s sake
don’t let it in,” cries the terrified old man. As the risen thing
pounds on the door, he “found the monkey’s paw, and franti-
cally breathed his third and last wish.” He wishes his son back
to the grave.
corpses as pale, “glassy-eyed,” and savagely violent “automata”
(unthinking beings that behave mechanically, like robots).
JUNIOR SKEPTIC No. 64 (2017)
One such “frightful carnivorous thing” kills almost twenty
people before it is shot, captured, and locked up in an insane
asylum. The victims of this “voiceless, sadistic monster” and
West’s other reanimated creations are torn apart
“in a manner…too hideous for description,”
though Lovecraft gleefully provided plenty of
details too gruesome to quote in the pages of
JUNIOR SKEPTIC. One of those details
makes the “Herbert West—Rean-
imator” stories an especially
notable early step toward the
modern zombie. Lovecraft’s
reanimated monsters
aren’t just vio-
lent. They’re
also hungry.
 Birthplace of Zombies
Restless corpses had risen from the grave in vampire stories
for centuries. In more modern times, horror writers had
begun to explore terrifying new versions of the living dead.
But how did these early monsters evolve into the zombies we
know today? For that matter, where did the word “zombie”
come from? Our search for the origin of the zombie takes us
to the tropical Caribbean island country of Haiti.
History of Slavery and Violence
Located near the coast of Florida, Haiti is a small, impov-
erished nation with a turbulent history. Christopher Colum-
bus claimed the island for Spain in 1492, despite the
indigenous people who already lived there. It was the site of
the first European settlement in the Americas. Over the next
300 years the territory was ruled first by Spain, then by pi-
rates, and then as a colony of France.
Wealthy French plantation owners brought hundreds of
thousands of African-born slaves to toil in the sugar fields.
Thousands of slaves escaped into the mountains or fought
back against the brutal slave masters. Finally the white rulers
were overthrown after years of violent rebellion.
In 1804 Haiti became the first country ever to be ruled by
former slaves after a successful uprising. But Haiti’s troubles
weren’t over. After years of violence and centuries of slavery,
Haiti was poor, chaotic, and hated by slave owning nations.
The next century saw a series of revolts. Haitian rulers were
routinely killed or overthrown.
American Occupation
Haiti was collapsing into even deeper turmoil during the
early years of the 20th century. This threatened American
commercial and military interests. In 1915, the United States
military invaded Haiti and took over. American rule lasted
until 1934.
During two decades of military occupation, American
forces built roads and bridges, but also fought against Haitian
rebels and treated the local people badly. Racist attitudes
were common among the Americans in Haiti and at home.
Sensational books and news stories called the Haitian people
“savage” and accused Haiti’s Vodou (“Voodoo”) religion of
being black magic or a “form of Devil worship.” This helped
to justify American control of the country.
JUNIOR SKEPTIC No. 64 (2017)
Haitian Vodou
Vodou sounded ominous to American readers, but one
travel writer named William Seabrook was more open
minded. He lived in Haiti, talked to Haitians about their be-
liefs, and took part in their ceremonies. His bestselling 1929
travel book The Magic Island tried to describe Vodou beliefs
and practices more accurately. It also introduced the concept
Florida (USA)
Atlantic
Ocean
Haiti
Dominican
Republic
Cuba
of “zombies” to the American public.
Vodou grew from the spiritual beliefs that slaves brought
with them from West Africa. When these blended with
Christian beliefs taught by Catholic missionaries, the result
was a unique new religion. Vodou beliefs include many pow-
erful loa spirits in addition to a supreme God. Song, dance,
complex rituals, and animal sacrifices are used to seek the
help of the loa here on Earth and in the spirit realm. It is be-
lieved that the loa can take control of believers’ bodies dur-
ing Vodou rituals.
Seabrook was impressed by the Vodou faith. This “pro-
found and vitally alive religion” has nothing to do with Devil
worship, he explained to his readers. Furthermore, “Crimi-
nal sorcery, black magic, are incompatible with the spirit of
Voodoo as a ritual religion.”
However, many Haitian Vodouists do also have beliefs
about magic, in much the same way that American Chris-
tians may also have beliefs about psychics or alternative
medicine. Throughout the country, bokor sorcerers sell po-
tions, charms, herbal medicines, and rituals claimed to heal
sickness, protect from evil, harm enemies, attract love, or
other magical effects. These services offer “ample scope” for
“charlatanry and profitable fraud,” Seabrook noted. How-
ever, it was his opinion that “the majority of the bocors…be-
lieve…sincerely in their own powers.”
Rumors of Zombies
Seabrook also heard Haitian stories about werewolves
and vampires. These monsters struck Seabrook as “first
cousins to those we have at home,” but he was intrigued by
tales of another kind of creature that seemed unique to Hait-
ian folklore: the “zombie.” According to claims, bokor sor-
cerers have the power to reanimate the dead:
The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still
dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery
with a mechanical semblance of life—it is a dead body
which is made to walk and act and move as if it were
alive. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh
grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, gal-
vanize it into movement, and then make of it a servant
or slave….
67
Haitian Zombies
Seabrook was told that zombies are real, “not a matter of su-
perstition.” He learned that the belief in zombies was wide-
spread. According to stories, bokors stand over a recent
grave, capture the dead person’s soul in a magical jar, and
summon forth their corpse as a zombie. Grieving Haitians
sometimes guarded the graves of their loved ones to prevent
this. In a country founded by slaves, becoming a mindless
slave was a fate feared more than death.
It was claimed that “people who have stood by and seen
their own relatives buried have…months or years afterward,
found those relatives working as zombies” in the fields.
“There are only too many true cases,” claimed one of the au-
thor’s Haitian friends. “At this very moment…there are zom-
bies working on this island,” the man insisted.
Seabrook was skeptical. “The zombies in such cases may
have resembled the dead persons” but been cases of mistaken
identity, he suspected. But his friend said he could take
Seabrook to personally see “dead men working in the cane
fields.” According to The Magic Island, he was as good as his
word. Seabrook claimed he had the opportunity to meet and
examine “three supposed zombies” in broad daylight.
There was “something about them unnatural and
Zombies On Screen
Haitian-style zombies weren’t carnivores, but filmmakers
saw that they could be scary. Seabrook’s book inspired the
first zombie movie just three years later: White Zombie, re-
leased in 1932. The villain is an evil plantation owner and
sorcerer (played by Bela Lugosi, known for his portrayal of
Dracula). His workers are zombies under his magical con-
trol. His six silent bodyguards are the reanimated corpses of
his enemies. If these were to “regain their souls,” he admits
with amusement, “they would tear me to pieces.”
In the story, a young couple arrives in Haiti to be married.
However their wealthy host is obsessively in love with the
The sinister zombie master Bullets can’t stop zombies!
68
strange,” Seabrook said. They were working in silence, “plod-
ding like brutes, like automatons.” When touched, one zom-
bie stood up. Seabrook looked into his face, he said, with
“rather sickening shock.”
The eyes were the worst. … They were in truth like the
eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, un-
seeing. The whole face…was vacant, as if there was noth-
ing in it. It seemed not only expressionless, but incapable
of expression.
Seabrook said he momentarily almost believed in the un-
dead. But then he took one of the man’s calloused hands. It
felt completely human. Seabrook sadly concluded that “the
zombies were nothing but poor, ordinary demented human
beings, idiots, forced to toil in the fields.”
Despite this skepticism, Seabrook retold several zombie
tales in his book and in newspaper stories. This introduced
the undead zombie idea to the American public for the first
time, making the unfamiliar word a mainstream part of the
English language. These were the original zombies: mindless
corpses reanimated as slaves by Haitian magic. They were not
violent flesh eaters like modern zombies. (Indeed, according
to folklore, “zombies must never be permitted to taste salt or
meat.” Salt restores their memory, breaks the spell control-
ling them, and sends them back to their graves.)
bride himself. He plots with the sorcerer to poison her, steal
her from her grave, and transform her into a zombified slave.
When her body disappears, her grieving fiancé enlists the
help of a wise old man to investigate. They track her to a cas-
tle, where the young hero battles the zombies and defeats the
zombie master. The film ends with both villains dead, the
damsel’s life and soul restored, and the lovers reunited.
The zombies in this movie murder without emotion when-
ever their master commands. They’re strong and relentless.
Bullets can’t harm them. But the true horror is their puppet-
like loss of free will. In one chilling scene, the unblinking
zombie bride robotically plays the piano for the entertain-
ment of the man who murdered her. In another, the zombie
master commands her to stab her own fiancé.
The zombified damsel
JUNIOR SKEPTIC No. 64 (2017)

The Zombie Mystery
The Magic Island and White Zombie made a specific type of
zombie part of American culture. Zombies that appeared in
films, radio plays, comic books, and even dictionaries during
the 1930s–50s were of this type inspired by Haitian folklore.
Belief in zombies remains common in Haiti. Are they
merely a legend, or could there be some truth behind the sto-
ries? Seabrook claimed he saw “supposed zombies” with his
own eyes. But he is rumored to have exaggerated or made up
events in at least one of his books. If he did meet these three
silent workers as he claimed, there was no way for him to
know that they really were zombies—that’s just what he was
told. Their behavior could be explained in other ways.
A decade later, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston con-
firmed a “real and deep” fear of the “living dead” among the
people of Haiti. She became convinced that some people truly
had been “called back from the dead” because she “had the
rare opportunity to see and touch an authentic case.” This was
a hospitalized old woman had been identified as a woman
who died decades earlier. However, the doctor treating the
woman thought Hurston was very gullible to accept the
“Zombi pseudoscience.” The woman had been diseased and
mentally ill when she wandered into a random village, caus-
ing “mass hysteria,” the doctor said. Because the villagers al-
ready believed in zombies, they got carried away trying to
“identify her with various people who were known to be dead
long ago.” But X-rays proved the old woman was not the per-
son they convinced themselves she was.
There are many other cases in which someone was
either identified as a zombie by others, or claimed
themselves to be a person who previously died.
The most famous was a man who claimed to be
Clairvius Narcisse, who died 18 years before. The
man said he’d been enslaved as a zombie for years be-
fore regaining his memory. At the time there was no
scientific way to confirm his identity, but he did seem able to
answer questions the real Narcisse would have known. The
dead man’s family believed the man’s claims. So did one Hait-
ian psychiatrist and a small group of his colleagues in the
United States. They sent a writer and anthropologist named
Wade Davis to investigate how zombification could work.
Rational Explanation?
JUNIOR SKEPTIC No. 64 (2017)
It’s best to be sure that there really is a mystery before you
try to solve it. Zombification doesn’t need explaining if it isn’t
a real thing. Despite many claims and stories, there are no
confirmed cases in which a person died, was buried, was dug
up and enslaved as a zombie, and then was found alive at a
later date. Nevertheless, Davis tried to discover some way for
such a thing to happen in real life.
For over a century, zombie stories repeatedly suggested one
possible “rational explanation.” Bokor sorcerers were widely
believed to possess a secret poison able to cause the tempo-
rary appearance of death without actually killing the victim.
Haiti even passed laws based on this belief, Seabrook noted.
Use of any such poison was outlawed as attempted murder—
or murder if a poisoning victim was buried as a result. This
idea was part of the plot of the White Zombie movie. Zora
Neale Hurston agreed that “the semblance of death” could be
“induced by some drug known to a few.”
Davis wanted samples of this supposed zombie poison. He
paid bokors to make it for him. The sorcerers made powders
using human bones, magical rituals, and an inconsistent va-
riety of other ingredients. Often they included irritating
plants, poisonous toads, or spiders. Several also included a
surprising ingredient from the sea: puffer fish!
Controversial Hypothesis
Davis knew that the bodies of puffer fish sometimes con-
tain a powerful poison called tetrodotoxin. Eating puffer fish
can be deadly. In Japan, specialized chefs carefully prepare
the fish to be served safely as a delicacy. Even then, diners
are sometimes poisoned by accident. Depending how much
of the poison they eat, most victims either get mild poison-
ing or else quickly die. But in some rare cases, the exact right
dose of tetrodotoxin may temporarily paralyze victims with-
out killing them. They may appear dead, only to recover a
few hours later! Amazingly, they may even remain conscious
while unable to move.
If zombie poisons often contain puffer fish, they
must sometimes contain tetrodotoxin. (One
sample did.) If enough bokors poison enough
people with enough different doses of their
zombie powders, some victims should
eventually get a dose that might cause
them to fall into death-like paralysis be-
fore recovering. A few such rare cases
could be the origin of the Haitian belief in
zombies, Davis reasoned. Some victims
might even survive being buried for a short
time. If people who believe in zombies went through such an
experience, they might believe they are themselves zombies.
And if they were then kidnapped and drugged, as zombie
stories describe, they might accept becoming slaves.
Davis wrote two books arguing that he had solved the
mystery. But his puffer fish idea is highly controversial.
There’s no solid evidence that Haitian zombies exist, nor that
the process Davis describes actually ever happens. There are
a lot of “if”s in his hypothesis. It certainly would not be a reli-
able process for creating zombies.
Whatever its origin, Haitian folklore defined zombies for
decades. But writers went on spinning tales about other
types of monsters. Two of those non-zombie tales would
eventually help to inspire the zombie stories we know today.
69

Shambling Hordes of… Plants
One non-zombie story that later
helped to inspire modern zombie
apocalypse ideas was the 1951
novel The Day of the Triffids, by John
Wyndham. The story begins with a man who wakes up in a
hospital to discover that a global catastrophe has
taken place. Most of humanity has been struck blind
by mysterious green lights in the sky—a meteor
shower perhaps, or radiation from military satellites.
Society collapses. People turn on each other. The
scenes of disease, looting, and despera-
tion are similar to Medieval accounts
of the plague. But the survivors in Wyndham’s
novel face yet another threat: walking, predatory
plants called triffids that attack people with whip-
like poisonous stingers. With the end of civi-
lization, triffids begin multiplying and taking
over the English countryside.
Triffids move and behave much like modern
zombies. At one point, a small group of survivors
realize why hundreds of triffids keep gathering
against the fences they’ve built around a farm:
I watched the thing lurching slowly across a field. …
Legendary Beginning
But modern zombie stories owe an even bigger creative debt
to another monster story. Richard Matheson’s 1954 novella I
am Legend is the story of Robert Neville, who may be the last
human survivor of a vampire apocalypse. He lives a lonely,
brutal life. At night he shelters inside a house fortified with
boarded windows and wreaths of garlic, surrounded by
howling, taunting bloodsuckers. During the day he prowls
an empty city, searching for supplies and driving stakes into
vampires as they sleep.
These monsters are like zombies in several ways. They re-
turn from the dead. They gather in crowds. They hunger for
humans. And though some of the vampires are intelligent,
many are like ferocious animals. Neville wonders why the
vampires who gather outside each night never think to set
his house on fire:
It seemed such an obvious tactic. Was it possible they…
were just too stupid? After all, their brains could not be
so fully operative as they had been before. The change
from life to mobile death must have involved some tissue
deterioration.
Matheson’s story is told in a gritty, realistic style. It in-
70
“Now keep on watching it,” she said. She
fired the gun into the air. …
“See?… All the triffids that heard
it are coming this way now.”
Today’s zombie fans find the images
and themes of Wyndham’s novel very fa-
miliar. Survivors scavenging for supplies.
Abandoned cars littering empty city streets.
Blasting the tops off triffids with shotguns.
Hordes of mindless monsters breaking through
fences to get at the humans inside. One reason
this all sounds familiar is that zombie filmmak-
ers have borrowed ideas from the book. For
example, the writer of the 2002 zombie
movie 28 Days Later agreed that he was
inspired by Wyndham’s story. As he
said in one interview, “You could say,
‘Look, he’s ripped that off Day of the
Triffids…’ and I accept that and
say, ‘Sure I did.’” Most obvi-
ously, 28 Days Later begins
with a man who wakes up in a
hospital only to find that the
world has ended. The Walking Dead
television series also begins the same way.
cludes a believable-sounding explanation that would later be-
come common in zombie fiction: these monsters are literally
a plague, infected and animated by strange, contagious
germs. Neville discovers that the vampires’ bodies have been
taken over by a bacteria that keeps them alive after death, en-
larges their canine teeth, and makes them hungry for blood.
They are next to impossible to stop with bullets because the
bacteria quickly seal bullet holes.
I am Legend is (like The Day of the Triffids) full of feelings
and images we associate today with zombie apocalypse tales.
Panic, loneliness, and desperation. Silent cities. Empty build-
ings. The undead shrugging off gunfire. A survivor grimly
fighting through crowds of the walking dead to reach
safety, fighting grasping arms to close a door.
But I am Legend’s central image—a lonely house sur-
rounded by the undead—isn’t just familiar. This image
directly inspired the invention of the modern zombie story.
JUNIOR SKEPTIC No. 64 (2017)
Robert Neville spends most of I am Legend watching
through boarded windows, listening to the “murmur-
ings and…walkings about” of the “white-faced men
prowling around his house, looking ceaselessly for a
way to get in at him.” Reading this would soon inspire
one American filmmaker to create the most impor-
tant zombie movie of all time.
 Inventing the Modern Zombie
The first modern
zombie ever to
appear on screen
Zombies changed forever in 1968 with the release of a low
budget black and white horror film called Night of the Living
Dead. Directed by George A. Romero (who passed away in
July 2017) and written by Romero and John Russo, Night of the
Living Dead introduced audiences to a horde of flesh-eating
zombies for the very first time.
The story begins with an adult brother and sister who visit
a graveyard in the countryside. She finds the place eerie.
“They’re coming to get you, Barbara!” teases the brother—
only to find that’s true. A reanimated corpse attacks the
brother and chases Barbara to an isolated farmhouse. There
she finds a group of other survivors led by a brave, resourceful
African-American truck driver. As night falls, the survivors
find themselves trapped. The house is surrounded by the hun-
gry undead. They board up the windows, find weapons, and
argue about how to escape—or at least survive.
Sound familiar? “I ripped off the idea…from a Richard
Matheson novel called I Am Legend,” Romero explained in an
interview. He couldn’t copy the vampire novel exactly (I Am
Legend had already been made into a movie with Matheson’s
permission), so Romero invented a new kind of undead mon-
ster. In the film, a TV news reporter solemnly announces that
“the unburied dead are coming back to life and seeking
human victims” because of “mysterious high level radiation”
JUNIOR SKEPTIC No. 64 (2017)
The original
zombie horde
Survivors hide
in this lonely
farmhouse
from space. These “creatures who feast upon the flesh of
their victims” are slow and stupid, but they’re also relentless.
They just keep coming. Bullets can’t hurt them because
they’re already dead. The only way to stop them is to destroy
their reanimated brains—and there are too many to fight.
Romero had just invented the zombie apocalypse. But he
didn’t call his creatures “zombies.” After all, White Zombie
and other films had already defined zombies as robot-like
slaves reanimated by Haitian magic. Romero thought of his
flesh-eating corpses as “ghouls” instead. But movie reviewers
quickly connected the two types of mindless monster, calling
Romero’s creatures a “plague of zombies.”
Night of the Living Dead copied the bleakness of I Am Leg-
end, which was inspired by the hopelessness of Medieval
plague stories. No character is safe in Romero’s movie. The
brave and the good are just as doomed as the selfish and cow-
ardly. Survivors turn on each other. Zombies feel nothing
when they attack their own family members.
Audiences were shocked. There was “almost complete si-
lence” after the movie, said film reviewer Roger Ebert, ex-
cept for crying kids who should never have seen it. “The
movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway
through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying.”
Not even the
hero is safe…
71
The Popularity of Zombies
Night of the Living Dead started an undead invasion. Hundreds
of other zombie movies followed its example and added to
zombie mythology. (The notion that zombies hunger for
“braaaains!” comes from the 1985 horror-comedy Return of
the Living Dead, which was loosely based on a book by
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead co-writer.) Zombies have
shambled into games, comics, coloring books, and every
other corner of our culture. And in true zombie fashion, the
multiplying undead appear to be unstoppable. After 50
years, zombies are more popular than ever. But why?
Zombies are Terrifying, Yet Familiar
One obvious reason is that zombies are terrific monsters.
They’re simple, straightforward, and scary. And they’re great
for storytelling, because everyone knows the basic “rules” of
a zombie story. That allows writers to play with those rules
and invent creative variations without starting from scratch.
At their scariest, zombies embody deep and ancient fears.
Their decaying bodies remind us of old age and death. They
give a face to the terror of contagious disease. Zombie apoca-
lypse stories warn us that civilization could be fragile. They
imagine a world where everything we rely upon—police,
hospitals, food in grocery stores—suddenly stops working.
Zombies are perhaps the purest form of predatory mon-
ster. Usually they feel nothing except hunger—not love, not
pity, not pain, not even an instinct for self-preservation.
They can’t be reasoned with. They never tire.
No other monster is quite so personal and so impersonal
at the same time. We become them. Their only purpose is to
destroy us. And yet they’re also like a tsunami: a deadly
threat that feels nothing about the things it destroys. That’s a
scary combination.
But creepiness
isn’t the only rea-
son zombies are
so popular. Zombie
stories would not be
so common today if
not for two specific
things about
Night of the Liv-
ing Dead—one
really smart idea,
and one really big
mistake.
Zom-
bies
are
72
Cheap and Easy
George Romero and his friends had very little money
to make their movie, so they did something clever: they
invented monsters they could afford.
If you wanted to make a realistic film about, say, dragons
or an alien invasion, you’d need elaborate costumes, sets, and
special effects. That’s expensive. But zombies are cheap! All
you need for a zombie movie are a camera, some friends, and
Halloween make up. You could film in your own neighbor-
hood or even your own backyard. For this reason, countless
low budget zombie filmmakers have followed Night of the Liv-
ing Dead’s affordable example (not to mention those with
huge budgets to create armies of zombies and ruined cities).
But aren’t those other zombie filmmakers copying some-
one else’s work? Some zombie stories are more original than
others, but yes—they are. Many filmmakers use Romero-style
zombies without permission from the people who invented
them. And that’s because of a blunder in the way Night of the
Living Dead was released.
Zombies are in the Public Domain
Under the current laws of the United States, you automati-
cally own the “copyright” to any original piece of art that you
create. Whether you write a novel, create a painting, or film a
movie, people generally aren’t allowed to reproduce or imi-
tate your work without your permission. By the same token,
you need permission to copy ideas or characters owned by
someone else (such as Jedis or Captain America).
However, many ideas and artworks are too old to be under
copyright. Nobody owns dragons, wizards, or vampires for in-
stance—or rather, those ideas belong to everyone. They’re in
the “public domain.” Everyone is free to use them.
But Romero’s zombies were original and distinctive new
creatures when they terrified moviegoers in 1968.
Shouldn’t permission be required to use Romero-
style zombies in a project such as AMC’s popular
television series The Walking Dead?
That would be true if not for a momentous mistake.
Copyright was not automatic at the time when Night
of the Living Dead was released. Creators had to
publish their work with a copyright notice in
order to keep the rights to their work. Unfortu-
nately for Romero and his collaborators,
their movie was accidentally released with-
JUNIOR SKEPTIC No. 64 (2017)
out a copyright notice, which placed the
film and its ideas immediately into the
public domain. This was bad news for them.
They missed out on millions of dollars. But it turned
out great for zombie fans everywhere! It means
everyone is free to create stories about zombies.
Seems fitting that a simple accident unleashed
hordes of zombies to take over the world!
 So there are living “zombies” in nature. However, para-
Real Life Zombies? sites that manipulate their hosts’ behavior evolved over a
very long time to make specific animals do specific things.
Modern zombies are imaginary creatures invented by film- For example, the “zombie fungus” only infects ants of cer-
makers. They were partly inspired by Haitian folklore, and tain species. Humans are not at all closely related to ants,
partly by vampire legends. But people who grew up with real- and our brains are very different. It’s far-fetched to imagine
istic-looking zombie movies sometimes wonder whether that ant-specific fungus evolving the ability to infect and
there could be truth to the stories. In June 2012 for example, control human beings.
news reports about violent crimes inspired a huge increase in It’s controversial whether some viruses or parasites may
Google searches asking “are zombies real?” and about the have evolved some ability to influence human behaviors. But
idea of a “zombie apocalypse.” there are certainly no infections that control us to the de-
This public concern prompted a spokesperson from the gree that the fungus controls infected ants—and there are
U.S. Centers for Disease Control to explain to the media that no real infections that make humans behave like fictional
the “CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would zombies.
reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like
symptoms).” Zombie Preparedness
On the other hand, the idea
Undead Zombies Don’t Make Much Sense of zombies may be able to
Although zombie movies sometimes offer believable- change our behavior—and our
sounding pseudoscientific explanations such as a “zombie scientific understanding. At
virus,” the walking dead are not creatures that could exist in least, that’s what the Centers for
nature. It’s a purely magical idea to imagine rotting corpses Disease Control and other sci-
lurching up from the grave. Muscles can’t function without entists hope. The CDC has used
working lungs and circulating blood. Only in stories can “zombie preparedness” as a fun
zombies continue to move for years without food or water or way to encourage people to keep
oxygen, even when their internal organs are destroyed. a well stocked emergency kit in
If undead zombies did exist, they wouldn’t last long. Bacte- their homes.
ria would see to that. When living things die they begin to de- Zom-
compose. Zombies would be quickly rotted away by bacteria bies are a pretend threat, but it’s
or eaten by scavengers (especially insects). important for families to prepare
for real emergencies such as
But Living Zombies… earthquakes, hurricanes, or out-
breaks of disease. “Zombies can be used
Undead zombies aren’t realistic. But in some stories zom-
as a powerful tool” for educating the pub-
bies are infected with something that takes over their brains
lic about diseases such as rabies, argued
and changes their behavior while they are still alive. Could
the authors of a 2013 CDC
that really happen?
paper, “Zombies—A Pop Cul-
Amazingly, there are real viruses and parasites that do con- ture Resource for Public
trol their hosts’ brains and behaviors. For example, the rabies Health Awareness.” And the
virus acts a bit like a zombie virus for animals. It causes in- zombie apocalypse idea
fected animals to aggressively bite other animals, passing on can be useful for scien-
the virus through their saliva. A microscopic parasite called tists themselves. In
Toxoplasma gondii changes the behavior of rodents, making most stories zombies
rats and mice attracted to cats instead of frightened. When spread like a disease,
one of the fearless infected rodents gets eaten, the parasite so scientists have studied imaginary zombie
can complete its life cycle inside the body of a cat. plagues as a way to understand how to
JUNIOR SKEPTIC No. 64 (2017)

Ants infected with a fungus called Ophiocordyceps unilater- track and control real diseases.
alis are caused to climb up and clamp on to the underside of a So don’t worry about zombies
leaf. The fungus then kills the ant, consumes its body, and becoming real. But do plan for pos-
drops down spores to infect other ants. This “zombie fungus” sible emergencies. If five decades
was the inspiration for the 2013 video game The Last of Us. of zombie fiction have taught us
The game imagined that this real fungus mutated to use hu- anything, it’s that it’s best to be
mans as hosts instead of ants, bringing about a zombie apoca- prepared!
lypse.

73
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magv7n2-Cloning by F. Miele;
& by M. Shermer; Evolution by R.
Dawkins; Evo. Psych by K. Kon-
kola & G. Sunshine; Pop. Myths
by D. Henige; Richard Seed In-
terview; Evil by N. Thompson;
Medicine by H. Ziel; Humor by S.
Asma, D.Lease, Randi, J.George;.
JR. SKEPTIC: Urban Legends.
magv8n2 Religion: F. de Waal
Interview by Shermer; Agnostic by
Dawson; Faith? by Wildish; Scope’s
by Riniolo & Torrez; Bible Belt by
Sloan; Scientology by Martin; Bible/
Nature by Zerin; Life’s Meaning by
Naiditch; TV by Gibson; Personal
Gods by M. Pigliucci; Prayer Heals?
by Matthews;. JR. SK: Pyramids.
magv10n1-Roswell by B. D.
Gildenberg; Psychic by M. Sher-
mer; HAARP by D. Naiditch; Blind
Research by R. Sheldrake; Pet
Psychic by B. Farha; M. Shermer,
T.Dace; Time Travel by A. Bernar-
din; Skeptic Maxims by J. Hryny-
shyn, J. Gribbin, P. Molé; Homeop-
athy by Randi; Loxton’s Alien Life.
magv11n3-Catastrophe
by R.A. Posner; Collapse by J.
Diamond; Double-Blind by S.
Bratman; Electronic Myths by
E. Winer; Cholesterol by M. E.
Deutsch; Shakespeare by D.
Price; Memories Untrustworthy?
by D. Greenberg; Psychic Renier
by G. Posner; Randi; JR SKEPTIC:
Sasquatch II by D. Loxton
magv1n4-The Psych. of
Resistance to New Ideas:
Heretic/Saint by C. Drees; Spirits,
Witches & Science by R. Olson;
Resistance to Copernicus by M.
Shermer; Ideological Immune
System by J. Snelson; Edgar
Cayce Foundation v. Skeptics;
Religion by C. Brough; REVIEWS.
magv2n4-Holocaust Revi-
sionism, Afrocentrism: Miele
on Neo-Nazi/Free Speech; Fritze
on Goodbye Columbus?; Greeks,
Egyptians Black? by Lefkowitz;
Holocaust Denial by Siano; Holo-
caust Revisionism by Shermer;
Creationism/Racism by McIver;
Appiah on Race. REVIEWS.
magv4n1-Evolutionary
Psychology: S. J. Gould Inter-
view, L. Tiger, & R. Fox. by Miele;
Sociology as Alchemy by Salter;
Just-So Stories by Schlinge;.
Gould’s Idea by Shermer; Darwin
Dangerous? Creation museum;
by Ruse; Randi on Quadro tracker;
Scientology responds; REVIEWS.
magv5n1-Ecology: Econo-
mists v. Ecologists by Miele;
Scientists Warning; Julian
Simon Interview; Un-Wise Use
by Lindholdt; Population by Sh-
neour; Beautiful People by
Shermer; Modern Demonology
by Crews; Ancient Astronauts
by Wojciehowski; Dumbth
News. Randi’s Swift. REVIEWS.
magv6n3-Why Professors
Believe Weird Things: Sex/
Race/the New Left by N. Levitt;
Susan Blackmore Interview; Is
God Dead? by Shermer; Memes
by J. Polichak; Alt. Religion by S.
Kent & T. Krebs; Randi on Waco;
Facilitated Com. by B. Gorman;
Psychotherapy? byT. Dineen. JR. S.
magv7n3-Millennium: The
End by T.McIver; Prophesy by P.
Molé; Millennial Meanings by M.
Shermer; Frederick Crews Inter-
view; Immortality by A. Herd;
Randi; Myth by T. Callahan; Pol.
Extremism by L. Hyman. Humor
by R. Cassingham, S. Asma, D.
Lease. JR. SKEPTIC Halloween.
magv8n3-Chaos/Complexity:
J. Diamond Interview by Shermer;
Complex Systems by Lam; Contin-
gencies by Shermer; Cosmology
by Ebert; Chaos by Miele, & by
Pigliucci; Bumper Fish by Gibson;
Gould Festschrift; Reverse Speech
by Langstoni & Anderson; Cultural
Relativismby Bartholomew; Randi.
magv10n2-Wolfram’s Sci-
ence by D. Naiditch; Dumber? by
R. Ehlich; Smart People by M. Sher-
mer; Media/Science by H. N. Pollack;
Media Harm by S.Waxman; Psychics
/Grief by R. Freedman; Randi; Mys-
tery Balls by R.Saberi; John Edward
by B. Phelps, S. Pedersen E. Wogen;
Sylvia Brown by B. Farha. Yeti.
magv11n4-ID, Ernst Mayr:
Creationism by M. Perakh; I.D.
Peer-Reviewed by R. Weitzel; Su-
pernatural Test by S. Shuster;
Conspiratorial Thinking by G.
Case; Alien Faces by F. V. Malm-
strom; Mind Myth by H. D.
Schlinger; Randi: John Of God;
Race Debate; JR. SKEPTIC: Madman
of Magic, REVIEWS.
magv12n2-Artificial Intelli-
gence by P. Kassan; Dawkins on
ID; Dover ID Trial by B. Humburg &
E. Brayton; ID v. SETI by R. Camp;
Young Earthers by J. Rosenhouse;
ID Theories by D. Brin; Ted Serios
by C. Campbell; CoralCastle by W.
Stansfield. Omnitron by Randi; JR
SKEPTIC-Pyramid Power by Loxton.
magv13n3-Medicine: Psy- magv13n4-Quirkology by R. magv14n1-Global Warming:
chiatry by J.Sorboro; Research by Wiseman; Dawkins Wrong by D. S. G W:“Yes”by T.Schneider,“No”by
H.Hall; AIDS by B.Martin; Autism Wilson: Dawkins Replies; Chopra v. P. Frank; GW Solutions by Calvin;
by M.Normand, et al.; Cold Cures Shermer; Can Apes Talk? by C. Detox by H. Hall; Hydrogen by A.
by H.Hall; Animal Researchby Wynne; ET Myths by Tim Callahan; Kong/Nessie by Loxton; Friede-
N.Shanks, et al.; Smoking:S.Zion Franklin’s Kite by W. D. Stansfield; mann; Houdini by S. E. Rivkin;
v. H.Hall;Bonobos by F.de Waal; Mozart Effect by W. Dowd; Consci- Journalism byS.Salerno; Super-
Randi on Sam Harris; ID by A. ousness by H. Schlinger; Jr. Skep- naturalby C.T.Palmer,K.Coe, &
Pilpel; Aliens by Loxton tic: Alien Astronauts IIby Loxton. R.L.Wadley, Dragons by Loxton

magv14n2-Evolution of In- magv14n3-Revisionism by magv15n1-Christian Origins magv15n 4-Climate by D.

telligence; Grief Myth; Criminal
Profiling; Near Death Experiences;
Phoenix Lights; Expelled Film; 9/11
Conspiracy; Dyson’s Paranormal;
Medical Fallacies; Perceptual Dis-
tortion; Snake Oil; For God; Spirit-
ual Brain; Postmodernism; DNA
Evolution; JR.SKEPTIC: Crystal Skulls.
M. Shermer; Altruism by K. W. Matt Ridley Interview; Atheism a Brin; Cell Phones/Cancer; Dows-
Krause; Evo Psych by F. Miele; Religion?; H. Ross v. M. Shermer; ing Rod Bomb Detectors by
Out-of-Body by J. A. Cheyne; UFO Hoax; Orgone Energy; Randi on Randi; Fertility, Immune System;
Germ Theory Denial by H. Hall; Firewalking; Hall on Homeopathy, Longevity; Biology Curriculum;
Near Death Expereinces by S. Placebo Effect; Flawed Justice Magic in Class; Astrology & Sex;
Dieguez; ID’s Flagella Myth by M. System; Ape Language; Internet Million Dollar Challenge; Atheist
Perakh; Wolfram by G. Neske; JR. Matchmaking; Critical Thinking. Stigma; Non-religious by J. A.
SKEPTIC: Great Skeptics by Loxton. REVIEWS. JR. SKEPTIC: Scooby-Doo. Cheyne; Top 10 Myths

magv16n1-Happiness by S. magv16n2-Origin of Life magv16n3-Islam: Qur’anby magv16n4-UFOs by Simon;

Salerno; Zen by C. Edwards; Mars
Effect by A.Y.Panchin; Gardner by
Randi &Shermer; Genetic Tests by
Hall; Change Minds by M.J.Kane;
Think Tanksby M.Pigliucci; A. Flew
by K.Grubbs; Quantum Con by M.
Bier; Sports by S. Sniderman. JR.
SKEPTIC: Griffins by D. Loxton.
by Deisler, Jr; New Atheistsby Callahan; Humphreys Interview by Roswellby Borzellieri; Tornados
Dowd; Accents by Stollznow; Re- Miele; Muslim Creationism by by Prothero; Antioxidantsby Hall;
ligion by Purzycki/Gibson; Randi Carrier; Aspartame by Hall: Auto Randi’s $1M; D’Souzaby Dahlen;
On Science;Naturopathy by Hall; Writing by Stollznow; UFO Artifact W.L.Craig by Grubbs; Tuned Uni-
Kurzweil by Edwards; Ayurvedic by Linse & Harrison; Evolution by verse by Sirola; Sound Healing by
Med by Carrier; Universe by Zei- Shtulman; D.Bem’s Precognition Stollznow; Creationist Self Crit by
gler; 9/11 by Sommers; Stradi- by NGauvrit; Alien Contact by Barnes& Church; Precognition by
varius by Barclay; JR. SKEPTIC. Michael; Kraken! by D. Loxton. Wiseman. Fossil Fakes by Loxton.

magv17n2-Climate Q & A
by Prothero; Foo Fightersby Lindell;
Randi on Hitchens; Energy Medicine
by Hall; Krauss Interview by Williams;
Shroud of Turin by Loxton; Depres-
sion by Levine; Psychic by Stollznow;
Audio Hallucinations by Buckner V &
Buckner; Autism by Polenick/Flora;
Sleep Paralysisby Love. Moa!-Loxton.
magv17n3-Christian U.S.?
by Callahan; Fetus Myth by Dupuy;
Facilitated Com by Hagen; Science/
Democracy by Vroman; “Nothing” by
Sirola,& by Shermer; UFO Physics by
Gainer;Changing Minds by Prichard
& Christman; Planet Search by Nare-
chania; Genesis byCallahan ; Scien-
tific Models by Woronow;. Live Dinos.
magv17n 4-Cancer Cures
by Hall; Free Will by Stenger; Neu-
roethics by Pigliucci; Fact Check
by Halper; Jesus Married? by Call-
ahan; Exorcist by Stollznow; Earth
Grounding by Hall; Howard Bloom
Interview by Miele; Postmodern by
Davies; Glossolalia by Semenyna
/Schmaltz; Ancient Mythbusters.
magv18n 1-Mass Murder
by Hillshafer & by Shermer; Coral
Castle by Hancock; Expanding Earth
by Prothero; Poltergeist by Bartho-
lomew & Nickell; Creationist Dinos
by Senter; Sense of Being Stared
At Test by Lohr, et.al.; Electromag-
netic Sensitivity by Hall; Almanacs
by Stollznow. Ghostbuster Girls!

magv18n 2-Gender by H. Hall;
Gender Belief Stats by A.Saide; Sci-
entology by K.Stollznow; Skeptics
in Court II by Randi; Magnetic Field
Reversalby D.Prothero; The Soulby
S.Cave; Nothingby R.L.Kuhn; Film
Skepticsby R.Martoccia; Napoleon
Chagnon Interviewby F.Miele;
Witch Docs by J. Chapman. Aliens.
magv18n3-JFK Conspiracies magv18n 4-Ancient Aliens magv19n1-Did Jesus Exist?
by D.Reitzes; Paleolithic Science by C.White; Medical Uncertainty by by T. Callahan; Religion/Health by
Origin by L.Liebenberg; Science H.Hall; Astrology by Randi; Noah’s H. Hall; Faith Healing by D. White:
Denial Threat by D.Prothero; Hall, Floodby Callahan/Prothero; Psych. James Van Praagh by I. H. Smythe;
Randi,& K.Stollznow on Scien- DiagnosisbyLewis; Multiple Person- Sand Creek Ghosts by G.F.Michno;
tology; Sovereign Citizen Scam alities by Stern/McDonald; Bigfoot Whistleblowing by F.V. Malmstrom
by J. Tsidulko; Sylvia Browne by by J. Blais; Satanic Panic by Moran; & D. Mullin; James R. Flynn Inter-
I. H. Smythe; Radium Craze by Sean Carroll Interview by Trujillo; view by L.Traynor; M.M.O’Hair by
R. Sutera;. Mermaids by Loxton. Medical Errorsby Levitt. JS. M.Stephens. JS: Sagan by Loxton.

magv19n2-Boston Bombing Conspiracies
by G. Michael; Randi on M. Gardner; Faith Healing by
H. Hall; Voynich Manuscript by K. Stollznow; Science
of Memory by C. Tavris; Multiverse & God by R. Grigg:
Soft Theism by M. Jako; Evolving a Soul by J. Harris;
Mass Hysteria by R. E. Bartholomew; Probability
and Miracles by Alex Boklin; Artificial Intelligence
Optimism by B. Ferris; K. Sanders Cartoon. JR.
SKEPTIC: Ghost Photos, Part I by D. Loxton. REVIEWS.
magv20n1-Terrorism. Terrorism Guide by R.
E. Wackrow; Terrorism Myths by M. Shermer; Terrorism
and Religion by K. Krause; Colloidal Silver by Harriet
Hall, M.D.; Genius Myth by C. Tavris; Fake Rainmakers
by Peter Olausson; Clever Hans by T. E. Heinzen, S. O.
Lilienfeld, & S. A. Nolan; Testing for Demons by R. Am-
mirati, S. T. Hendrick, &S.O.Lilienfeld; Horror by S.T.
Asma; Cow tipping by P. Linse; Quantum Quackery by
J.Harris. JR. SKEPTIC: Hollow Earth by D.Loxton. REVIEWS.
magv20n2-Drug Myths: Carl Hart Interview by
F. Nogueira; Preventative Medicine by H. Hall; Raising
Kid’s I.Q.s by C.Tavris; Parenting Myths by S. Hupp & J.
Jewell; Calling E.T.by D.Brin; Do Emotions Effect Matter?
by N. Gauvrit & S.Francfort; Placebos by J.Brissonnet,
trans. by H. Hall; Diet & Heart Health by K. W. Krause;
Supernatural? by Shermer; Putin’s A. Dugin by R. Zubrin;
Near-Death by C. Markum; Pseudo-Math by E. C. Pric-
hard; JR. SKEPTIC: Hollow Earth II by D.Loxton. REVIEWS.

magv20n3-Alfred Russel Wallace: Species
by R. Conniff; Consilience by J.T. Costa; Human Cogni-
tion by L.Dugatkin; Spiritualism by R.Milner; Flat Earth
by R. Milner & M. Shermer; Heretic Scientist by M.Sher-
mer. Internet Civility by C.Tavris; Good Evidence; by H.
Hall; Full Moon Test by J.D. Van Dyke; Non-Fine-Tuned
Universe by J.Harris & E. Harris; Science/Theology by D.J.
Navarick; Critical Thinking by J. E. & R.A. Buckner.
JR. SKEPTIC: Bat-People Hoax by D. Loxton. REVIEWS.
magv21n2-Uploading the Mind: Plausible by
K. Hayworth; Implausible by P. Kassan; Mind-Body Prob-
lem by R. L. Kuhn. Flu Shots by H. Hall; Abuse Cycle? by
C. Tavris; Extremists & Idealism by T. Dupuy; Islamism by
P. Boghossian & J.A.Lindsay; Future Terrorism by P. Tor-
res; Homo naledi by N. H. Lents; HIV Goat Milk Cure by H.
Hall; Mass Hysteria by R. E. Bartholomew; St Paul by H.
White; Pro Anti-Science by H. Siegal; ID Declines by D.
Prothero; JR. SKEPTIC: Man-Eating Plants by Loxton
magv20n4-Robert Trivers: Photo Amnesia by
C.Tavris; Incidentalomas by H.Hall; Tanning Myths by A.
Becirevic & D.D.Reed; Magic Perception by D.Russell;
Moral Values: M. Hauser v.M. Shermer; Richard Paul
Tribute by G.Hart; Destiny? by D. Zeigler; Radiation by J.
A. Siegel &C. W. Pennington; Ben Carson’s Beliefs by
D. Prothero; Moving Tomb by G. J.van ‘t Land; Education
& Religion by N. M. Baker; God Debate: D. Navarick v.D.
Matson; Reviews. Adamski UFOs by D.Loxton. REVIEWS.
magv21n3-Internet Porn =Sexual Dysfunction?
“Yes” by P. Zimbardo, G. Wilson & N. Coulombe, “No” by
M. Klein. Herbal Hazard by H. Hall; Sex Orientation by C.
Tavris; Ancient Maya on Google by D.S. Anderson; Paleo
Diet by A.R.Johnson; Does AA Work? by C.J. Bogart; End-
Times by P. Torres; Neurophysiology of Bad Dreams by J.
A.Cheyne; EM Field Panic by J. Frantsve-Hawley; Poison
Gas Attack Myths by R. E. Bartholomew, S. Lockery, &
A. F. Najm;. REVIEWS. JR. SKEPTIC: Mammoths I by Loxton.
magv21n1-Cons by M. Konnikova. DSM-5 by H.
Hall; Defining Rape by C.Tavris; U.S. Stonehenge by G.J.
van‘t Land; ET Paradox by G.Michael; Volney by T.C.
Williams; Divine Hurricane Strikes by R.Warren et al;
Vaccine War by R. Barglow & M. Schaefer; Pretentious
Bullshit by J. A. Cheyne & G. Pennycook; Why Cops Kill by
D. DeLeon; Video Game Violence by J. Glynn; Morals De-
bate by S. Harris, M. Shermer & M. Hauser; Review. JR
SKEPTIC: Haunted Houses by D. Loxton
magv21n4-Cancer Care Industry by L. Kirk
Hagen; Aging Claims by H. Hall; Memory Training by C.
Tavris; Amityville by R.E.Bartholomew & J. Nickell; Alien
Skulls by D. Prothero, A. Bondarev, & T. Callahan; Nazca
Lines by D. Iammarino; Galactic Defense System by G.
Michael; Clown Panics by R. Bartholomew; Spirituality
Defined by D. Speed; Living in a Computer Simulation? by
Peter Kassan; Luck and the Mean by G. Smith; Political
Critical Thinking by T. J. Redmond. Reviews. JR. SKEPTIC.

magv22n1-Bill Nye Saves the World. inter-
view by M. Shermer; Functional Medicine by H. Hall;
Prejudice by C. Tavris; Miracle Zamzam Water by M.
Telias; Lone Wolf Terror by G. Michael; Torturing Data
by G. Smith; ET v. Earth Pathogens by T. Callahan;
Changing Minds by P. Boghossian; Shoddy Journalism
by R. E. Bartholomew; Multiverse Trouble by P. Kassan;
Football Playoff Science by M. J. Defant; REVIEWS;
JR. SKEPTIC: Baloney Detection for Kids by D. Loxton
magv22n2- Artificial Intelligence Danger
AI Concerns by M.Graves; Is AI an Existential Threat? by
M. Shermer; AI: Simulation or Synthesis by P. Kassan;
pH Med Myths by H. Hall; Racism Test? by C. Tavris; The
Alt-Right by G. Michael; “Tractor” Quack Device by
T. Hines; Area 51 by D.R.Prothero; Concept of Race by R.
Khan & B.B. Boutwell; 3 Kinds of Atheism by B. Page &
D.J.Navarick. REVIEWS: New Ideas; Men Age; Homo Deus;
Science Deniers; Cons. JR. SKEPTIC: Chemtrails by Loxton.
magv22n3- Hancock’s Lost Civilization:
Joe Rogan Debate by Shermer; Hancock’s Geological
Claims by M. Defant; Hancock’s Historical Claims by T.
Callahan. CONCEPTUAL PENIS HOAX: Why We Published It-
Shermer; The Hoax by Boghossian/Lindsay; On Hoaxes by
Alan Sokal. Juicing by Hall; Our Angry Era by C.Tavris; CA
Stem Cell Research by Barglow; Homo naledi News by
Lents; UFOs/Aliens by Callahan; Taming Foxes by Trut/
Dugatkin; Facts by D. Zeigler. JR SK Zombies by Loxton.
 For more books and more extensive descriptions go to SKEPTIC.COM
and click on “shop” on the home page menu and select “books”
Richard Dawkins
An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist
by Richard Dawkins. Cat.No.b167PB. ($15.99 paperback) A memoir
covering material from Dawkins’ childhood in colonial East Africa
through the publication of his world-changing bestselling book
The Selfish Gene. Told with frankness and eloquence, warmth and
humor. An entertaining and enlightening read.
The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins.
(b143PB $16.99 paperback) A fierce counterattack against Intelli-
gent Design. Rich layers of scientific evidence: living examples of
natural selection; fossils; natural clocks; developing embryos; plate
tectonics; molecular genetics—all make an airtight case for evolu-
tion by non-random selection. A master vision of life’s splendor.
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. (B113PB $15.95
paperback) Dawkins’ most important book to date, his definitive
statement on the God question, the origins of morality & religion,
the best arguments for and against God’s existence, the dangers
of religious extremism, and why science offers the best hope for
humanity.
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. (b123PB $15.95 pa-
perback) A classic. Changed the nature of the study of social biol-
ogy. This brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection
explains how the selfish gene revolves around savage competition
and exploitation—yet acts of apparent altruism do exist in nature.
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution
Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins.
(b087PB $15.95 paperback) Perhaps the most influential work on
evolution written in this century. Natural selection—the unconscious,
Award W
inner! automatic, blind, yet essentially nonrandom process—has no pur-
pose in mind. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in na-
ture, it is the blind watchmaker. Engaging and accessible.
The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins. (b092PB $16.95 pa-
perback) A masterwork: an exhilarating reverse tour through evolu-
tion, from present-day humans back to the microbial beginnings of
life. Entertaining, insightful stories. Sheds light on topics such as
speciation, sexual selection, and extinction. An essential education
in evolutionary theory and a riveting read.
A Devil’s Chaplin by Richard Dawkins. (b122PB $14.paper-
back) Diverse topics examined through the lens of natural selection:
education, ape rights, jury trials, the vindication of Darwinism;
memes; religion, academic obscurantism; Stephen Jay Gould;
Douglas Adams; pseudoscience; & his awe at the marvelous
complexity of the universe. Written with clarity & passion.
Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins. (b121PB
$16.95. paperback) The Mount Improbable metaphor symbolizes the
improbability that seemingly perfectly designed living things
evolved. In a breathtaking journey through the mountain’s passes
and up its many peaks, Dawkins demonstrates how the improbable
path to perfection merely takes time.
Daniel Loxton & Don Prothero
Abominable Science!: Origins of the Yeti,
Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids by Daniel Loxton
and Donald Prothero. (b150HB $29.95 hardback) An entertain-
ing, educational, and definitive text on cryptids, presenting the
arguments both for and against their existence. Takes on Big-
foot; the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, and its cross-cultural
incarnations; the Loch Ness monster; the evolution of the Great
Sea Serpent; and Mokele Mbembe, the Congo dinosaur. Analyses
Award W
inner!
the psychology behind the persistent belief in paranormal phe-
nomena, and discusses the cryptozoology subculture.
Sam Harris
The Moral Landscape: How Science Can
Determine Human Values by Sam Harris.
(b141HB $26.95 hardback) Views the experiences of con-
scious creatures as peaks and valleys on a “moral land-
scape.” Definite facts can be known about where we fall
on this landscape, so science can go beyond merely de-
scribing morality—it should be able to tell us what we
ought to do to live the best lives possible.
Waking Up by Sam Harris. Cat.No.b161HB-($20.
Hardback) A guide to spirituality without religion. Medi-
tation as a rational practice. Important truths from
Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and other saints
and sages. Waking Up is part memoir Only Harris—
a neuroscientist, philosopher, and famous skeptic—
could write it. AUTOGRAPHED.
Jared
Diamond
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution
and Future of the Human Animal
by Jared Diamond (b049PB $15. paperback)
The evolution of human sexuality and science
of adultery. How we pick our mates and sex
partners. Why do we grow old and die? The an-
imal origins of art. Why do we smoke, drink,
and use dangerous drugs? The golden age that never was.
Natural Experiments in History
(b138HB $29.95 hardback) Edited by Jared
Diamond and James Robinson. You can’t run
a controlled scientific experiment to discover
the economic consequences of military con-
quest or slavery. But you can use comparative
statistics from closely related societies to dis-
cover surprising reasons for far-reaching historical outcomes.
Why is Haiti, which shares an island with the Dominican Re-
public, so much poorer? Why did deforestation occur on
some Pacific islands and not others? Why did places con-
quered by Napoleon become wealthier than those that were
not? Also: world banking systems, India, the New World.
Collapse: How Societies Choose
to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond.
(88PB $18. paperback) What caused some
of the great civilizations of the past to
collapse into ruin, and what can we learn
from their fates? Diamond traces the fun-
damental patterns of social catastrophe.
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (b054PB $15.95
paperback) Why did Eurasians conquer Na-
tive Americans, Australians, & Africans, in-
stead of the reverse? Diamond dismisses
racially-based theories of human history by
revealing the environmental factors re-
PULITZ!ER sponsible for history’s broadest patterns. A
PRIZE work rich in dramatic revelations that chal-
lenges conventional wisdom.
Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World
(b045PB $15.95 paperback) by Carl Sagan. The
great astronomer and science writer challenges
New Agers & explains social phenomena like
UFOs, alien abductions, recovered memories,
satanic cults, witch crazes, hallucinations. How
to detect baloney. A classic!
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal
View of the Search for God
by Carl Sagan, Ed. by Ann Druyan. (B114PB $17.
paperback) Sagan’s prestigious Gifford Lec-
tures on Natural Theology. Considers: psychol-
ogy of belief; possible chemical nature of
transcendence; creationism & intelligent de-
sign; life on other planets; science as “in-
formed worship.” Humorous, wise, and at
times stunningly prophetic. Sagan at his best.
The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future
of Reason by Sam Harris. (b139PB $13.95 paperback). Harris’
first book was an instant bestseller because of its cogent argu-
ments & literary clarity, in which the author argues that because
of weapons of mass destruction the world can no longer tolerate
violent religions, & that in fact even moderate religious believers
only encourage extremists by enabling their supernatural beliefs.
Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. (b140HB
$12. hardback) In this tightly reasoned commentary on the state
of religion in America, Sam Harris pulls no punches in his argu-
ments to members of the Christian Right on all matters moral
and political, noting Old Testament law (death for adultery, ho-
mosexuality, disobedience to parents etc.), and contrasts this
with, for example, the complete non-violence of Jainism. Harris
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HOW TO DEBATE A CREATIONIST
PART I: BACKGROUND: Science on Evolution; Sci-
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EXCELLENT BOOKS NOW AVAILABLE ON SKEPTIC.COM…
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DR. ANDREW
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Scienceblind: Why Our Intuitive Theo-
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The Jazz of Physics: The Secret
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DR. JANNA LEVIN
Gravitational Waves, Black Holes,
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DR. SEAN B.
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DR. CAROL TAVRIS DR. ARTHUR

Mistakes Were Made BENJAMIN
(But Not by Me) The Magic of Math: Solving
for x and Figuring Out Why.
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DR. PRIYAMVADA MICHELLE

NATARAJAN FEYNMAN
Mapping the Heavens: the Radical Sci- The Quotable Feynman,
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What the F: What Swearing Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs:
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 SkepticS Society
iriSh GeoLoGy tour
July15 to August 2, 2018 • for more information go to skeptic.com/Ireland2018

Belfast

Galway Dublin

Waterford

Photo courtesy of theringofkerry.com

I reLAnd’S fAmed
Scenic LAndScApe
oweS itS breAthtAkinG
terrain to a dramatic 1.75 billion year
history of continental collisions, vol-
canoes, and glacial assault. Join us for
a 19-day immersive tour of the
deep history of the emerald isle,
while experiencing the music, hospi-
tality, and verdant beauty that make
ireland one of the world’s greatest
travel destinations.