From: lippard@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu (James J. Lippard)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: CSICOP Conference Summary, 1/2
Date: 12 Nov 92 20:09:00 GMT
Distribution: world,local
Organization: University of Arizona
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The following is planned for publication over the next two
issues of The Arizona Skeptic (Nov/Dec 92 and Jan/Feb 93).
Any comments, criticisms, suggestions for more detail, etc. are
welcomed.  If anybody attended the qi gong session and would like
to write up a brief summary, I would be pleased.

Report on the 1992 CSICOP Conference
By Jim Lippard
"Fairness, Fraud, and Feminism: Culture Confronts Science" was the 
name of this year's annual conference of the Committee for the 
Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, publisher of 
the _Skeptical Inquirer_.  The conference was hosted by the North 
Texas Skeptics at the Harvey Hotel near the Dallas-Fort Worth 
Airport on the weekend of October 16-18.  The conference featured 
five panel sessions on multicultural approaches to science, gender 
issues in science and pseudoscience, fraud in science, crashed 
saucers, and the paranormal in China.
	The conference began on Friday morning with opening remarks 
by CSICOP chairman Paul Kurtz, who spoke briefly about various 
meanings of the term "skepticism."  He distinguished the "total 
negative skepticism and unbelief" of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus 
from the "mitigated skepticism" of David Hume and "the new 
skepticism" which emphasizes inquiry rather than doubt.  (Not 
coincidentally, Kurtz's new book from Prometheus is titled _The 
New Skepticism_.)  He commented on the fact that this conference, 
like the Berkeley conference last year and other CSICOP 
conferences before that, is addressing issues which are not 
directly connected with pseudoscience and the paranormal.  The 
CSICOP Executive Council has debated "how far afield" it is 
appropriate for the conferences to go.

Multicultural Approaches to Science
The first panel of the day, "Multicultural Approaches to Science: 
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," was moderated by Eugenie Scott 
of the National Center for Science Education, who began the 
session by stating that "I believe in objective reality.  I 
believe that you exist even if I never saw you. ... I believe the 
nominalist/realist debate is irrelevant outside freshman 
philosophy."1  She began with these statements because there are 
those who disagree, who maintain that consequences of ideas are 
more important than their content and that any idea is as valid as 
any other.  She gave some examples from some materials criticizing 
textbooks for lack of an appropriate multicultural stance which 
have influenced textbook decisions in Berkeley, California.  These 
materials consist of an excerpt from a textbook, followed by a 
comment, a format which Scott compared to the textbook critiques 
of fundamentalists Mel and Norma Gabler of Texas.  Scott gave two 
examples from this material.  The first criticized a textbook for 
claiming that the first people in the Americas arrived over a land 
bridge, characterizing this claim as "unsubstantiated theories of 
white anthropologists" and pointing out that "Natives believe they 
have always been here."  The second example questioned a 
textbook's claim that horses were brought to the Americas by the 
Spanish, arguing that horses may have always been in America or 
have been brought over by Persians in the 12th century.
	The first speaker, Diana Marinez, professor of biochemistry 
at Michigan State University and member of the National Academy of 
Science's Committee on Standards, commented on "the good."  
Marinez maintained that multicultural education is important even 
in science classes because science and what scientists do is 
influenced by culture.  Science is normally taught as something 
isolated from reality, in such a way that students come away 
knowing only collections of facts.  By learning science from a 
familiar cultural base, students can recognize the importance of 
science in their lives, become scientifically literate, and become 
motivated towards science as a career.  Marinez gave statistics 
showing the paucity of minorities in scientific fields and argued 
that this is a problem which multicultural approaches to science 
education can correct.  She then gave some examples of how this 
might be done using Mayan math and astronomy, American Indian food 
plants and nutrition, and Diego Rivera murals.
	The second speaker, Joseph Dunbar, a professor of 
endocrinology at Wayne State University, addressed "the bad."  His 
talk, titled "Myths of Melanin," described the claims of the so-
called "melanin scholars" that dark-skinned humans have special 
abilities in virtue of magical properties of the melanin in their 
skin.  Dunbar described different kinds of melanin in skin pigment 
(eumelanin and pheomelanin) and how they differ from melatonin 
(secreted by the pineal gland) and neuromelanin.  The "melanin 
scholars" do not distinguish these things, and use studies 
relating to the latter two substances to support their claims that 
melanin improves reaction time, allows communication with plants, 
protects DNA, converts sunlight into knowledge, and numerous other 
outrageous claims.2
	Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, an anthropologist at Wayne State 
University (with a Ph.D. in organic chemistry), spoke on "the 
ugly."  (Eugenie Scott introduced him with the comment that 
"bringing critical thinking to multiculturalism is 'the task of de 
Montellano,'" with due apologies to Edgar Allan Poe.)  Ortiz de 
Montellano, who has written two articles on multicultural 
pseudoscience for the _Skeptical Inquirer_ and one for 
_Creation/Evolution_, discussed the _African-American Baseline 
Essays_ (also known as the _Portland Baseline Essays_).3  This was 
published in 1987 by the Portland, Oregon school district and has 
been distributed to schools around the country as a resource for 
setting up a multicultural curriculum.  Detroit, Boston, Atlanta, 
Indianapolis, and other school districts have had seminars on this 
material, but it is unknown how many are actually using the 
material in the classroom.  This material claims that Egypt is the 
source of all civilization, that religion and paranormal abilities 
are important aspects of scientific methodology, that Egyptians 
flew for travel and recreation, and many other ridiculous claims.  
The material on science claims that the ancient Egyptians used 
"Maat," religion as a scientific paradigm, according to which (1) 
there is a supreme consciousness or creator; (2) the universe came 
into existence via divine self-organization; (3) the universe is 
alive, all parts of it are related and are living; (4) man and 
life itself is a mystery; (5) there are material and transmaterial 
causes and effects.  Ortiz de Montellano looked at some of the 
specific claims made in the science essay of the _Baseline 
Essays_, showing that the purported evidence for each was weak to 
nonexistent (or, in some cases, actually evidence to the contrary, 
as was the case with the alleged Egyptian "glider" model, whose 
dimensions were such that it could not possibly be flown).

Unofficial Session on Faith Healing
During lunch time, the North Texas Skeptics arranged for Christian 
critic of televangelists Ole Anthony to speak at the Excell Inn 
next door to the Harvey Hotel.  Anthony was one of the prime 
movers behind PrimeTime Live's expos of Robert Tilton, Larry Lea, 
and W.V. Grant.  Anthony recounted the various legal tactics 
Tilton has been using against him and stated that his group will 
be filing a lawsuit against the television stations that air 
Tilton's program around the country.  Tilton has sued Anthony for 
conspiracy to deprive him of his Constitutional rights under the 
First Amendment.  At least one of Tilton's claims was dropped, 
regarding remarks Anthony made about his faith healing abilities, 
when the court ruled that, as part of the discovery process, 
Anthony was entitled to obtain the names and addresses of people 
Tilton claims to have healed.
	Anthony stated that he wants to get FCC rules changed to say 
that claims made by a living person on a television or radio 
broadcast must be verifiable.  When asked how that fits with the 
First Amendment, Anthony became angry at the questioner and stated 
that fraud is not protected by the Constitution.  (Anthony did not 
bother to explain how the FCC would determine what is and what is 
not verifiable, nor how this would affect broadcast of such things 
as fiction, opinion, discussions of art, or religious broadcasts 
of any kind.  The proposal seemed to me to be quite ill thought 
out.)
	A fact sheet on Anthony's organization, the Trinity 
Foundation, Inc. (P.O. Box 33, Dallas, TX 75221, (214) 827-2625) 
states that the group was founded in 1972 and "sponsors several 
non-denominational home church groups with the goal of recapturing 
the First-Century Christian experience."  The same fact sheet says 
that the group assisted in the production of a Canadian television 
documentary titled "Adolph Hitler, The New Age Messiah," which 
"shows how New Age philosophy inevitably leads to fascism."  This 
and the FCC proposal lead me to question the reliability and 
objectivity of this organization, but it has apparently been 
effective in getting media scrutiny on a few televangelists.

Gender Issues
The afternoon session was on "Gender Issues in Science and 
Pseudoscience" and was moderated by York University psychologist 
and CSICOP Executive Council member James Alcock.  Before the 
session began, Lee Nisbet, the conference chairman, gave what were 
supposed to have been his introductory remarks before the first 
session.  They turned out to be as appropriate for this session as 
for the earlier one.  He spoke briefly on "The Consequences of 
Inquiry"--how the process of discovery can destroy old ideas, 
giving Darwin as an example.  He stated that our prior likes and 
dislikes should not determine what we think is true.
	Alcock began by briefly describing the role of women in 
spiritualism (e.g., the Fox sisters, Eusapia Palladino, and the 
girls involved in the Cottingley fairies hoax).  He asked why 
women were so prominent in spiritualism, why they are more likely 
to follow horoscopes, why they are less represented at CSICOP 
conferences than men.
	The first panelist, social psychologist and CSICOP Fellow 
Carol Tavris, the author of _The Mismeasure of Woman_, began with 
a word of annoyance about the title of the conference.  "There are 
loony feminists, but they are not the whole of feminism," she 
said.  She went on to discuss the role of gender biases in 
science.  "Notice how easy it is to see the bias in 'feminist 
science,' but not in the name of normal science?" she asked, 
suggesting that "chauvinist science" might be appropriate for 
science with a masculine bias.  She discussed how research on 
sexual selection has assumed active males and passive females, and 
how women entering the field have made new discoveries by 
neglecting that assumption.  Many bird species, for example, have 
now been found to have promiscuous females.  When the male leader 
of a harem of birds was vasectomized, all of the females still 
conceived.
	Tavris next discussed studies of sex differences in humans.  
She described two sources of bias in current opposition theories 
of bias:  (1) normal (chauvinist) bias, or the "women as problem" 
view; and (2) feminist bias, or the "women as solution" view.  The 
first view asks questions of the form "Why aren't women as _____ 
as men?", filling in the blank with such words as "moral," 
"rational," "intelligent," "aggressive," etc.  The second view 
says that women are different from men--they're better.  To 
illustrate the point, she described a series of hypothetical study 
results from the point of view of each.  With a normal bias, 
studies might conclude that women have lower self-esteem, are more 
gullible, less self-confident, or have trouble developing 
autonomy.  With a feminist bias, the same studies with the same 
results might conclude that men are more conceited, too inflexible 
about their beliefs, overvalue their work, and so forth.
	Tavris gave as a specific example of these interpretive 
biases an experiment with babies who could pull a cord to reveal a 
(Halloween?) mask.  After the mask was removed, boys would 
continue pulling the cord longer than girls would, which a male 
researcher concluded showed that they show more courage, 
fortitude, etc. than girls.  A female researcher replied, "no, 
girls learn faster."
	Tavris also pointed out that there is a psychiatric disorder 
in diagnostic manuals called self-defeating personality disorder 
which is based on "chauvinist bias."  When some female 
psychologists suggested adding the male converse counterpart, 
"delusional domineering personality disorder," they were told that 
"there is no rich psychiatric tradition for such a disorder."
	Tavris did maintain that there is one clear difference 
between males and females:  that men are more violent.  She did, 
however, qualify this by stating that women have been just as 
active in wartime as men, "to the extent culture permits," and 
that they are just as likely as men to regard enemies as beasts.
	She also discussed one area where women are treated as the 
normal sex and men treated as deficient--studies of love.  For 
women, according to Tavris, love is the "feeling of squichiness" 
when the object of love is present, while for men love is 
behavior, doing things for the loved one.  Studies of intimacy 
assume that what is important is the ability to talk about 
feelings, while ignoring behavior.
	Tavris rejected studies of biological differences between the 
sexes, pointing out that an article in _Science_ arguing for sex 
differences in the brain cited a paper on rat brains for evidence 
of differently sized corpus callosi in men and women.  The 
_Science_ paper meanwhile cited another study of 500 fetal brains 
for another purpose, overlooking the fact that that study found no 
sex differences.  Tavris stated that not only did _Science_ refuse 
to publish letters pointing this out, it has refused to publish 
any papers which argue that there are no sex differences in the 
brain.  Many studies, she said, are not finding the results 
reported in headlines in periodicals such as _Time_, _Newsweek_, 
and _Elle_.
	Finally, Tavris pointed out that when you look at actual 
behavior, gender is not a fixed category.  People act in different 
ways in different contexts, and we do not need to attribute 
differences to static properties of persons.  For example, people 
in the subordinate role in a relationship exhibit "female 
intuition," no matter what their sex.
	CSICOP Executive Council member Susan Blackmore began her 
talk by asking the question, "Why are so few of us here women?"  
She examined and rejected a few possible explanations:  (1) It's 
general to all of science.  No, the situation is worse in CSICOP 
than in science in general.  (2) Women are more likely to believe 
in the paranormal.  Blackmore put up a slide with various quotes 
to this effect, including one from Zusne and Jones' _Anomalistic 
Psychology_ (1982, Lawrence Erlbaum, p. 189):  believers are 
characterized as "female, unintelligent, misinformed, poorly 
educated, authoritarian, and emotionally unstable."4  She then 
reviewed the literature on paranormal experiences and belief, 
including some of her own studies.  Only two studies found 
significant sex differences in paranormal experiences and only one 
study of sex differences in belief attempted to control for other 
factors.  The latter study found no sex differences; the primary 
correlates of belief in the paranormal were "paranormal" 
experiences, belief in life after death, and practicing dream 
interpretation.  So Blackmore rejected this explanation.  (3) The 
kind of science that CSICOP is involved in is not attractive to 
women.  This seemed to be Blackmore's favored explanation.
	She next put up a slide contrasting features of "masculine" 
science with those of "feminine" science, according to feminist 
philosopher of science Sandra Harding.5  The contrasting terms 
were conquest/discovery, objective knowledge/subjective knowledge, 
control/participation, prediction/understanding, 
dichotomous/continuous, right-wrong/deeper understanding, fight 
and win/progress together.  Blackmore did not come out and endorse 
this picture, but instead pointed out that it is itself a (false?) 
dichotomy.
	She then shifted gears and described how, in 1982 at the 
100th anniversary conference of the Society for Psychical 
Research, she criticized parapsychology for accomplishing nothing 
in a century.  Parapsychology, she argued, makes no progress, does 
not build on past finding, has findings which disappear with 
better methods, does no prospective design of experiments, and has 
no repeatable experiments.  She proposed doing psychical research 
without the psi hypothesis.  Since asking the question "Does psi 
exist?" has not been successful, parapsychologists should try 
taking the experiences seriously and trying to understand them.  
Psi is only one possible explanation.6
	Blackmore discussed the Ray Hyman/Charles Honorton "debate" 
over the ganzfeld database of parapsychology experiments, Helmut 
Schmidt's psychokinesis studies, meta-analysis of random number 
generator experiments, and other recent studies in parapsychology 
which have had positive results, with the emphasis on Honorton's 
ganzfeld experiments.  In response to Hyman's criticisms, Honorton 
developed an automated ganzfeld experiment which he repeated 
numerous times, reporting his results in "Psi Communication in the 
Ganzfeld," _Journal of Parapsychology_ vol. 54, no. 2, June 1990, 
pp. 99-139.  Blackmore asked, "What has been the response from 
CSICOP?  Where is the panel on meta-analysis? ... It's not here."  
She described how the Italian skeptics asked three of the best 
known skeptics and three of the best known parapsychologists to 
write about the future of parapsychology, with commentaries on all 
six contributions by Honorton and Blackmore.  The result?  The 
skeptics repeated the same old arguments from the past.  None 
mentioned Honorton's 1990 paper.  Two mentioned meta-analysis, 
only to dismiss it briefly (one rudely, according to Blackmore).  
In other words, the skeptics are now exhibiting the failings which 
she criticized the parapsychologists for in 1982.
	The problem, according to Blackmore, is that the dichotomy--
psi or not--puts enormous pressure on both sides not to change 
their views.  The solution, according to Blackmore, is to get rid 
of our antipathy towards negative evidence, to stop setting 
ourselves up as "on one side" or another.
	The third panelist, Steven Goldberg, chair of the sociology 
department at the City College of New York, began by disagreeing 
sharply with Tavris.  Goldberg stated that most of what she talked 
about was not about science _per se_, but about politics or social 
life.  Bias, according to Goldberg, is only relevant when it leads 
to error.
	Almost without exception, scientific results in studies of 
sex differences are statistical.  "Men are taller" doesn't mean 
"all men are taller than all women."  Heights of men and women are 
overlapping bell curves with close means, but to conclude that the 
difference is therefore not important is wrong.  A small mean 
difference can be a big difference at the extremes.  Almost 
everyone over 6'8" is male.
	Goldberg noted (in response to Tavris) that the studies which 
don't find sex differences do not cancel out the studies that do.  
The experimenter might be using a different method and be looking 
at the wrong thing.
	Goldberg described how he came to be involved in these 
issues.  In 1971 he was writing a paper in which he stated that 
all sex differences are environmental, which he took to be common 
knowledge.  He decided, however, to get a citation from the 
anthropological literature to support it, but was unable to find 
anything which held up under scrutiny.  He found, on the contrary, 
that in every society males are stereotypically aggressive and 
females are stereotypically nurturing.  You never hear a 
stereotype that's totally false, said Goldberg.  You never hear 
anyone say that "those damn Jews are dominating the National 
Football League."
	Hierarchies are dominated by males, everywhere in all 
societies at all times.  Whatever is viewed in a society as having 
the highest status is more closely associated with males, whatever 
it happens to be.  Men seek it out.
	Social attitudes can sometimes be the crucial determinants of 
behavior, according to Goldberg, such as in the prevalence of 
premarital sex (maybe, he said).  But for tendency to dominance, 
social attitudes are not the crucial determinant, he claimed.  He 
appealed to hormonal sex differences that can be hormonally 
reversed as evidence of biological differences between the sexes.  
Feminists who have argued against him on this point, said 
Goldberg, typically refute a straw man (brain hemisphere studies) 
while ignoring the hormone studies.
	Goldberg went on to claim that socialization cannot explain 
the tendency of male dominance, because it begs the question--why 
are males socialized to be dominant, and not females?  On the 
contrary, he argued, societies attempt to fit with the 
characteristics they observe in the sexes, and so, for instance, 
men tend to do the heavy lifting.
	Goldberg concluded his talk by pointing out that he was not 
arguing that males should dominate, but only that they do.  You 
can't derive what should be the case from what is the case.  How 
things work is a scientific question, while how they should work 
is not.

Keynote Address:  "Viruses of the Mind"
On Friday evening, after a fundraising dinner for the Center for 
Inquiry titled "The Price of Reason," Oxford zoologist Richard 
Dawkins spoke on the subject of memes.  Children are programmed by 
evolution to absorb culture and language, but a side effect of 
this absorbency is a tendency to gullibility--making children 
"easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists, and nuns."  All of our 
genes our parasites of each other, said Dawkins, and the only 
differences between viral DNA and ordinary DNA is the way it's 
passed on.
	He compared DNA and computer viruses.  Both are "copy me" 
programs which, in order to be most effective, are not too 
virulent and don't wipe out everything immediately.  Lethal genes 
for young organisms don't reproduce.
	Are there any other "humming paradises of code replication?" 
Dawkins asked.  "Minds," he answered.  Information is exchanged 
between minds through language, body movement, etc.  In human 
beings is a readiness to replicate ideas and a readiness to obey 
what has been replicated.  As examples, he pointed to the fact 
that most people are religious and follow the religions of their 
parents, to crazes that sweep through schools with similar pattern 
to measles epidemics, and the worldwide epidemic of wearing 
baseball caps reversed.
	"What would it feel like from the inside if one's mind were 
inflicted with a mental parasite, a mind virus?" Dawkins asked 
next.  An effective mental virus in the "neurosphere," Dawkins 
asserted, would be good at coexisting with other viruses and 
disguising the fact that it had been picked up.  A medical 
textbook diagnosis of such an infection might read that:  (1) The 
patient is impelled by deep inner conviction that something is 
true, compelling, and convincing, without any evidence.  (2)  The 
patient makes virtue of beliefs not having evidence, and may even 
think that the less evidence, the more virtuous the belief.  "Lack 
of evidence is a virtue" is itself a self-supporting mental virus.  
(3) The patient thinks that mystery is a good thing.  We should 
enjoy mysteries, and revel in their insolubility.  (As an example, 
Dawkins gave the Catholic doctrine of transsubstantiation--that 
wine literally becomes the blood of Christ; the appearance of wine 
that remains is "an accidental property that inheres in no 
substance."  Dawkins repeated philosopher Anthony Kenny's 
observation that if this doctrine makes sense, then "for all I can 
tell, my typewriter might be Benjamin Disraeli" and referred to 
author Douglas Adams' "electric monk" who does your believing for 
you and is capable of believing "things they have trouble 
believing in Salt Lake City."7)
	Dawkins enumerated several additional symptoms, such as an 
eagerness to be deceived by religious leaders ("Send me your money 
so that I can use it to convince other suckers to send me their 
money, too").  He was particularly repelled by the view 
promulgated by some televangelists that the more difficult it is 
to give, the more God likes it.


Jim Lippard              Lippard@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU
Dept. of Philosophy      Lippard@ARIZVMS.BITNET
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721