I was genuinely surprised by a statement appearing in a LiveScience article about a recent study that found American conservatives have lost faith in science over the past four decades. In the 1970s, around half of all conservatives had a great deal of trust in science, while today only around a third of conservatives trust science. Liberals and moderates maintained a fairly steady trust level, at around 47% and 42% respectively. The findings appeared in the American Sociological Review in an article authored by UNC researcher Gordon Gaulet.
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Yesterday, I discussed Sarah Moran’s misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, and doing this made me think of something that I would like to share with my readers. Moran, as you’ll recall, had claimed that no trace of evolutionary theory existed before Darwin, just as the ancient astronaut theory sprang from Erich von Däniken’s mind like Athena from the head of Zeus. In both cases, she felt succeeding generations preserved the master’s theories unchanged and sacrosanct.
Obviously this caricature is fundamentally wrong. Scientists have added enormously to our understanding of evolution since Darwin’s day. But in the history of these two ideas, we can see how science comes ever closer to the truth while pseudoscience spins farther away from it. Evolutionary theories have been around in some form since at least Aristotle, who had suggested a form of natural selection in Physics (2.8.2). In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scholars like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin proposed theories that, while not the same as modern thought, took a close stab at the central concept of evolution. Lamarck had argued that evolution occurs through inheritance of traits gained during the life of the parent, but he had the central idea that change occurs through time. Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ grandfather, intuited both evolution and natural selection, though he did not have the evidence to prove them. Then, at the very same time Charles Darwin was developing his theory of evolution and providing the theoretical and evidential foundation for it, Alfred Russel Wallace developed the exact same theory, not because he was copying Darwin but because the evidence led him to an identical conclusion. Afterward, scientists around the world worked on evolutionary theory, gradually building up a body of ideas and concepts that merged into a shared body of theory—albeit one with areas of controversy that scholars still debate. As new evidence emerged—first genetics, then DNA—the new evidence fit into the older theory and enhanced it, providing more evidence for the theory’s essential truth. Now contrast that with the ancient astronaut theory. This theory was born of fraud when Helena Blavatsky, a fake medium, proposed that Venusians had inserted their souls in the people of Lemuria and gave humans civilization. Then, UFO theorists in Britain and the Soviet Union, developed, independently or not, fringe views that UFOs had visited earth in prehistory. Two French fantasists, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, synthesized these views into a speculative idea—with no original research—that aliens visited the ancient earth, and Erich von Däniken copied them (and Robert Charroux), and others copied him and rarely did any original research. From there, the various ancient astronaut theories (AATs) have branched out into a plethora of mutually-exclusive ideas. In some AATs, aliens visit humans who evolved on their own; in others, the aliens have sex with pre-humans to create mankind, while in still others they genetically engineer human beings. In some AATs, the aliens are human-like; in others they are amphibious space frogs or giants or lizard-like, or stereotypical “greys.” In some AATs, aliens build monuments like the pyramids; in others they merely direct their construction, while in still others monuments are human-built “signals” to the aliens. In some AATs, the aliens fly around on a rogue planet; in others, they travel in rocket-like ships, and in still others they teleport through wormholes. I could go on, but you get the idea. The point is that all of the scholars working across the centuries on evolution kept circling ever closer to a single idea. All the research in the field tends toward one consistent view (though, as with any data set, there are from time to time outlying data points that must be resolved) and this tendency has only grown stronger as more research is conducted. By contrast, the ancient astronaut theory spins ever farther away from its center, its claims growing more baroque, more contradictory, and more outlandish as more voices are added. “Research” in the field tends toward no single view; every researcher develops wildly diverging ideas from no single agreed-upon data set. Don’t believe me? Compare Zecharia Sitchin to Robert Temple, or either to David Hatcher Childress. Or, better still, try looking up the concept of the “world grid” and see if you can find any two proponents who share the same world grid, or identify the same set of ancient sites that supposedly sit upon its nodes. If there were any truth the ancient astronaut theory, then the facts of the aliens’ arrival, their deeds, and their mission should become clearer with more research, not more obscure. If there were any truth to the ancient astronaut theory, then the theorists working in the field should be gradually moving toward a single conception of the extraterrestrial visitation, one that comes ever closer to the truth. But this is not happening, which strongly suggests that the many ancient astronaut theories exist primarily in their creators’ minds, not in the facts they purport to explain. Since I have been covering Ancient Aliens for the past several months, I am unfortunately woefully behind in my other alternative/conspiracy programming. Today I turned on the Discovery Channel, and what should I behold but a day of programming devoted to the alleged 2012 apocalypse supposedly (but falsely) predicted by the Maya. In 2012 Apocalypse, multiple doomsday scenarios for next year were reviewed one after the other, including the supposed collision with Planet X, Charles Hapgood's earth crust displacement theory, the proposed Yellowstone super-volcano, etc. It seems the program was a movie tie in with last year's 2012, but I am not sure.
What set this particular documentary apart from others of its ilk is that all of the apocalyptic prophesies were presented by actual scientists, who described the effects of each scenario were it true before issuing a very short disclaimer at the end of each segment that the alternative theory is untrue. Strictly speaking, this documentary ought to have been perfect for me since it had a skeptical perspective on a very silly idea. (Quick: How many previous doomsday predictions have come true? Answer: We're still here, aren't we?) But it wasn't. The problem is that by having actual astrophysicists, geologists, and other scientists explaining these false theories and describing their potential effects in great detail, the program ended up giving greater weight to these flights of fancy than they otherwise deserved. On Ancient Aliens, it's easy to separate fact from fiction (if one is so inclined) because the conspiracy theories are presented by very obvious conspiracy theorists whose wackiness and flying leaps of (il)logic make their silliness manifest. By contrast, if the accidental viewer did not watch to the end of a segment in 2012 Apocalypse, that viewer would come away with the impression that serious scientists take the the theories very seriously--an impression reinforced when noticing that the scientific rebuttal was many times shorter than the drawn-out orgy of computer-generated illustrations of the devastation awaiting us in just twelve months' time. I can hardly wait for Apocalypse 2012 Revelations tonight. _John W. Hoopes of the University of Kansas passed along the exciting news of a new edited anthology (in which he has an article) covering the alleged 2012 Mayan apocalypse from an academic perspective. I'm looking forward to reading the book. Here's the press release: 2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse, edited by Joseph Gelfer, is the first book on the subject to be written for a primarily academic audience. It is available in both hardcover and paperback and is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate courses in several different disciplines. Description December 21, 2012 is believed to mark the end of the thirteenth B'ak'tun cycle in the Long Count of the Mayan calendar. A growing number of people believe this date to mark the end of the world or, at the very least, the end of the world as we know it: a shift to a new form of global consciousness.2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse brings together for the first time a range of scholarly analyses on the 2012 phenomena grounded in various disciplines including religious studies, anthropology, Mayan studies, cultural studies and the social sciences. 2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse will show readers how much of the 2012 phenomenon is based on the historical record, and how much is contemporary fiction. It will reveal to readers the landscape of the modern apocalyptic imagination, the economics of the spiritual marketplace, the commodification of countercultural values, and the cult of celebrity. This collection brings much-needed academic rigour and documentation to a subject of rapidly increasing interest to diverse religious and other communities in these crucial closing years before we experience what will be either a profound leap in the human story or, less dramatically, just another mark in time. Contents Preface - Michael D. Coe, Yale University
You can get your copy in Amazon.
The other day the New York Times published a profile of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, one of the leading voices arguing against religion in general and creationism in particular. Since Dawkins is one of the foremost proponents of evolution in the world, I was a bit taken aback by something he said at the end of the profile.
Dawkins told reporter Michael Powell that he is intrigued by physicist Freeman Dyson’s speculation that in the course of evolution human beings might evolve into super-powered, sentient energy. Powell asked whether these beings would be godlike. Dawkins replied: “Certainly. It’s highly plausible that in the universe there are God-like creatures. [But it’s] very important to understand that these Gods came into being by an explicable scientific progression of incremental evolution.” Though I am sure Prof. Dawkins did not mean it this way, the implications of this (obviously unproven) speculation are startling. If there are godlike super-beings in the universe, how can we discount the possibility that these godlike beings did not stream down from the stars millions of years ago to light the fires of the primordial soup—that, essentially, they did not set the evolutionary train in motion? Would it be possible to prove, therefore, that creationism is untrue if there is the possibility that aliens we would interpret as gods actually exist and are, theoretically, so advanced that their handiwork would be invisible to us since they would use scientific methods to achieve creationist ends? These bolts of conscious energy may not have rocket ships, but ancient astronauts they would still be. In his 2011 book Tracking the Chupacabra, Benjamin Radford says that "no serious researcher" would claim that Aristotle, writing in 350 BCE, had the chupacabra in mind when he described the creature known as the goatsucker (chupacabra is Spanish for goat sucker). While Radford is right that Aristotle's goatsucker is not the same as the Puerto Rican vampire monster, Radford's dismissal shut the door on a fascinating story of how a Greco-Roman legend about the imaginary vampire tendencies of a small bird joined with Native American legends about this same bird's supposedly demonic nature to inform the developing story of the chupacabra. Click to read my new article on "The Secret Prehistory of El Chupacabra."
Yesterday I examined a question of journalistic ethics surrounding Ancient Aliens, which purports to be a “documentary” series. The July 28 broadcast, “Aliens and the Old West,” featured a movie tie-in with Cowboys & Aliens from the History Channel’s corporate cousin, Universal Studios, but the program did not acknowledge this relationship or explain how closely the program’s producers and talking heads worked with the movie’s marketing campaign.
This raised questions about the objectivity of the program, and whether those involved purposely manipulated their supposedly scientific theories to work with the movie’s marketing machine. One piece of evidence in favor of that hypothesis is the program’s strange effort to reclassify Ohio and Illinois as “the Old West,” suggesting that producers purposely manipulated or altered a previously-planned program to conform to the movie’s theme. I would like to discuss this a little more. A few weeks ago, when Cowboys & Aliens was new in theaters, the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens devoted an hour to “Aliens and the Old West” on July 28. This was, in fact, the first episode of its third season. Not coincidentally, the show used clips from the movie as a springboard for some (very) tangentially related speculation about extraterrestrial visitation in the Old West, lands abutting the Old West, lands on the same continent as the Old West, and places that simply existed at the same time as the Old West. (I’ve never thought of Ohio as the Old West, but what do I know?)
This week, the killer-virus movie Contagion hit theaters, and—surprise of surprises--Ancient Aliens had an hour on aliens and, yes, killer viruses, speculating that extraterrestrials were behind a series of devastating ancient plagues. Needless to say, the hour was complete nonsense (the connection is that ancient people blamed the gods for disease, and the gods were “really” aliens, so aliens cause disease); however, that is merely par for the course with the sorry excuse for a “documentary” series. But unlike the earlier Cowboys-themed episode, the virus edition did not include promotional material for or scenes from the movie Contagion. The bigger question is this: How can we trust a program that is allegedly presenting serious truths when these supposedly nonfiction truths are carefully manipulated to coincide with Hollywood’s movie release schedule? I was trying to research Giorgio A. Tsoukalos’s Legendary Times magazine, the publication he uses as his sole credential for appearing as the primary talking head on Ancient Aliens. Unfortunately, Tsoukalos’s Legendary Times website stops indexing the magazine with the 2008 calendar year, and his Legendary Times Books online bookstore lists no issues published after volume 10 in 2009. I was unable to find any listings for issues published since then, or mentions of the publication either in the media or online except as Tsoukalos’s journalistic affiliation. WorldCat.com lists no libraries that hold the publication. As the privately-published newsletter of a private club, I suppose they wouldn't carry it; but is "publisher of a club newsletter" a serious, History Channel credential now?
In poking around the Legendary Times site, I found an article, “Paleo-SETI: Interdisciplinary and Popularized,” that contained some rather stunning statements that are a master class in obfuscation and circular reasoning. The current version attributes authorship only to the AAS-RA as a body, but the use of the first-person singular narrative voice (unusual for an organization) and the lack of any other author for articles hosted on the AAS-RA website strongly indicate Tsoukalos was the author. The article is endless, and I have space and the stomach to touch on only some of the scientific illiteracy in the piece. The article begins by suggesting that Ancient Astronaut Theorists uphold the highest levels of scientific rigor, leavened only by a surfeit of imagination: I wanted to offer a bit more detail on something I mentioned in my previous blog post where I discussed David Hatcher Childress’s shifting ideas and his attack on me. In that post, I did not get into the whole of Childress’s strange claims, and I wanted to be sure I set the record straight.
Let’s begin at the beginning. In the 1980s, Childress began writing a series of books on “lost cities,” mixing a frothy blend of Victorian pseudoscience, “alternative” history, and New Age mysticism derived from the Lemurian Fellowship, which believes in lost continents (Lemuria and Mu) and an origin of humanity from planes beyond the human. At the time, the original ancient astronaut craze of the 1970s was dying out, and Childress’s books found a new niche, preserving the mystery without the aliens by revisiting old lies about Atlantis and Lemuria and Mu. |
AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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