The Indiana Jones Of Tennessee
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- Written by Dr. Romeo Vitelli
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After some hemming-and-hawing, I have finally decided to attend this year’s CSICON in Nashville, Tennessee (I hear the world is coming to an end in December of this year so I might not get another chance). Since this will be my first visit to the Volunteer State, giving this post a Tennessee theme seemed a natural enough idea. The only problem was picking out what to write about considering that state has more than its fair share of, er, eccentrics. In the end, I decided to write this post about the amazing Ronald Eldon Wyatt, archaeologist/explorer/fundamentalist extraordinaire.
Born in 1933 in Tennessee, he was raised as a Seventh - day Adventist and grew up with an ironclad belief that the Bible was literally correct in every detail. Though trained as an anesthetic nurse, Wyatt’s real career began in 1960 when he first saw a picture of the Duripinar site in Life magazine. A large aggregate structure located 18 miles from Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, the boat-shaped geological formation was proclaimed by many creationists to be the original Noah’s Ark since it was first discovered in 1948. Although extensive scientific investigations turned up no evidence of human artifacts and concluded that it was a purely natural structure, that was before Ronald Wyatt got involved.
The JREF Grieves At The Loss of Paul Kurtz
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- Written by JREF Staff
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The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) mourns the passing this weekend of Paul Kurtz, a very important figure in the history of the worldwide skeptics movement. In 1976, Dr. Kurtz co-founded the first national U.S. skeptics organization, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (now called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), along with James Randi, Ray Hyman, Martin Gardner, and others. He also supported and inspired the founding of a number of skeptics organizations in other countries around the world.
Dr. Kurtz’ dedication to fighting superstition and paranormal scams was surpassed only by his devotion to advancing secular humanism as a worldwide nonreligious social justice movement. In addition to co-founding CSICOP, he founded the Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry, and spent the last years of his life focused on his important new organization, The Institute for Science and Human Values. Dr. Kurtz was known for publishing and contributing over decades to The Zetetic Scholar (now Skeptical Inquirer), a science periodical primarily devoted to examining paranormal, supernatural and fringe science claims from a scientific viewpoint, as well as to Free Inquiry, a secular humanist journal. He was also founder of the influential independent publisher Prometheus Books.
Public intellectual, skeptic and magician James Randi, founder of the JREF and a co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, had this to say: “Along with my colleagues in the community of skeptics and rationalists, I will deeply miss Paul and our frequent exchanges over the decades. When our small group met in the 1970s to start the organized skeptics movement, little could we have predicted its worldwide growth. We largely have Paul’s genius to thank for that. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but I’ve always admired his vision. This is a sad day.”
“Paul Kurtz was not only my dear friend, but an inspiration,” said D.J. Grothe, president of the JREF and formerly a colleague of Kurtz’ for over a decade. “His humanity, his passion, his creativity and his organizational skills were the bedrock of a number of international organizations, and he worked tirelessly to grow the worldwide skeptics and humanist movements. In this respect, his impact remains unrivaled. His death is deeply felt and he will be sorely missed.”
For more details on Dr. Kurtz’ life, see the obituary released jointly by his family and publishing company.
Photo: Paul Kurtz receives a Lifetime Achievement Award from the James Randi Educational Foundation for advancing skepticism in the public interest. 2010.
Last Week At Science-Based Medicine
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- Written by Dr. Harriet Hall
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Mortality and lack of health insurance (David Gorski) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/health-insurance-and-mortality/ Apart from the political questions surrounding the Affordable Care Act, science can look objectively at the impact of insurance on health. A rigorous body of scientific evidence shows that not having insurance is associated with worse health outcomes by many measures, including higher mortality rates.
Sports Physicals, Sudden Death, and Chiropractors (Harriet Hall) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/sports-physicals-sudden-death-and-chiropractors/ Chiropractors want authorization to do sports physicals, but they are not qualified. The whole rationale for sports physicals is reviewed, especially the goal of preventing sudden death in young athletes. In practice, these physicals are not very effective in preventing injury or death, even when done by MDs.
What You Can Do to Fight Woo (in 5 minutes or less)
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- Written by Carrie Poppy
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If you follow the JREF on Facebook, you're already enjoying our day-by-day posts of news stories around the world showing both how unfounded beliefs hurt people (and animals) and how skepticism is gaining ground, fighting superstition and exploitation. But you may still be wondering what you can do to advance skepticism and reason. Here are a few ideas from recent headlines.
Former TV News Reporter Claims He Can Tell the Future
What's Happening: You know those times you predict a hurricane in the Philippines and you have nothing to prove it, and you think "Damn, if only I'd texted myself beforehand about this, I could be the talk of the town!"? Well, UK-based former TV reporter John Thomson is one step ahead of you. Claiming that he can predict the future, Thomson started texting himself his predictions and now claims he has a backlog of accurate predictions to rival any alleged psychic (shall we make a "predictive text" joke? No? Okay, we'll move on). The only problem is, Mr. Thomson has been collecting the texts for well over a year, giving him plenty of time to send thousands of texts to himself, and delete the predictions which didn't come true. Is he really foreseeing catastrophic world events, or just a really patient (and bored) texter? I'm suspicious.
What You Can Do: If John Thomson is all he claims to be, there's a million dollars waiting for him. Tweet at John and ask him to take the JREF's million dollar challenge. As always, be brief and polite.
Read more: What You Can Do to Fight Woo (in 5 minutes or less)
No Benefit from Routine Checkups
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- Written by Dr. Steven Novella
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The result sound counterintuitive - a recent Cochrane systematic review of studies looking at the benefits of routine health checks found that there weren't any. How can that be? Screening for medical conditions that can be treated, where treatment is known to improve outcome, must be beneficial, right?
This result is a little surprising, but not much. There are two broad explanations for the negative outcome of this review: that the studies were not able to detect a real benefit, or that there is no real benefit.
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