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By Root 1171 0

Scientific aloofness and opposition to novelty are as much a problem as public gullibility. A distinguished scientist once threatened to sic then Vice President Spiro T. Agnew on me if I persisted in organizing a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which both proponents and opponents of the extraterrestrial-spacecraft hypothesis of UFO origins would be permitted to speak. Scientists offended by the conclusions of Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision and irritated by Velikovsky’s total ignorance of many well-established scientific facts successfully and shamefully pressured Velikovsky’s publisher to abandon the book—which was then put out by another firm, much to its profit—and when I arranged for a second AAAS symposium to discuss Velikovsky’s ideas, I was criticized by a different leading scientist who argued that any public attention, no matter how negative, could only aid Velikovsky’s cause.

But these symposia were held, the audiences seemed to find them interesting, the proceedings were published, and now youngsters in Duluth or Fresno can find some books presenting the other side of the issue in their libraries. (See this page.) If science is presented poorly in schools and the media, perhaps some interest can be aroused by well-prepared, comprehensible public discussions at the edge of science. Astrology can be used for discussions of astronomy; alchemy for chemistry; Velikovskian catastrophism and lost continents such as Atlantis for geology; and spiritualism and Scientology for a wide range of issues in psychology and psychiatry.

There are still many people in the United States who believe that if a thing appears in print it must be true. Since so much undemonstrated speculation and rampant nonsense appears in books, a curiously distorted view of what is true emerges. I was amused to read—in the furor that followed the premature newspaper release of the contents of a book by H. R. Haldeman, a former presidential assistant and convicted felon—what the editor in chief of one of the largest publishing companies in the world had to say: “We believe a publisher has an obligation to check out the accuracy of certain controversial non-fiction works. Our procedure is to send the book out for an objective reading by an independent authority in the field.” This is by an editor whose firm has in fact published some of the most egregious pseudoscience of recent decades. But books presenting the other side of the story are now becoming available, and in the section below I have listed a few of the more prominent pseudoscientific doctrines and recent attempts at their scientific refutation. One of the contentions criticized—that plants have emotional lives and musical preferences—had a brief flurry of interest a few years ago, including weeks of conversations with vegetables in Gary Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” comic strip. As an epigraph to this chapter (on the death struggle of the snapdragon) shows, it is an old contention. Perhaps the only encouraging point is that it is being greeted more skeptically today than it was in 1926.

SOME RECENT BORDERLINE DOCTRINES

AND THEIR CRITIQUES

While many recent borderline doctrines are widely promoted, skeptical discussion and dissection of their fatal flaws are not so widely known. This table is a guide to some of these critiques.

Bermuda Triangle The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—

Solved,

Laurence Kusche, Harper & Row,

1975

Spiritualism A Magician Among the Spirits,

Harry Houdini, Harper, 1924

The Psychic Mafia,

M. Lamar Keene, St. Martin’s Press,

1976

Uri Geller The Magic of Uri Geller,

James Randi, Ballantine, 1975

Atlantis and other

“lost continents” Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic

Origins,

Dorothy B. Vitaliano, Indiana University

Press, 1973

Lost Continents,

L. Sprague de Camp, Ballantine,

1975

UFOs UFOs Explained,

Philip Klass, Random House, 1974

UFOs: A Scientific Debate,

Carl Sagan and Thornton Page, eds.,

Norton, 1973

Ancient Astronauts The Space Gods Revealed: A Close

Look at the Theories of Erich von Däniken,