How are science and skepticism related? Is skepticism a part of science, or is science a tool of skepticism? Dr. Eugenie C. Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, discusses these questions, and explores the importance of teaching both science and skepticism.
Bio
Eugenie C. Scott
Eugenie Scott, a former university professor, is the Executive Director of NCSE. She has been both a researcher and an activist in the creationism/evolution controversy for over twenty-five years, and can address many components of this controversy, including educational, legal, scientific, religious, and social issues.
She has received national recognition for her NCSE activities, including awards from scientific societies, educational societies, skeptics groups, and humanist groups. She holds six honorary degrees from McGill, Rutgers, Mt. Holyoke, the University of New Mexico, Ohio State, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. A dynamic speaker, she offers stimulating and thought-provoking as well as entertaining lectures and workshops.
Scott is the author of Evolution vs Creationism and co-editor, with Glenn Branch, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools.
Philosophical doubting of knowledge claims in various areas. From ancient to modern times, skeptics have challenged accepted views in metaphysics, science, morals, and religion. Pyrrhon of Elis (c. 360–272 BC) sought mental peace by avoiding commitment to any particular view; his approach gave rise in the lst century BC to Pyrrhonism, proponents of which sought to achieve suspension of judgment by systematically opposing various knowledge claims. One of its later leaders, Sextus Empiricus (2nd or 3rd century AD), strove for a state of imperturbability. Modern skeptical philosophers include Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Bayle, and David Hume.
Right. Since I don't have the discipline and resources to respond to the information in the articles, I wrote to Dr. Cremo. He sent me back some of the rebuttal to the 2 articles posted above. I don't think there's enough room in this response, so I'll post two of the point that had seemed to me, a non-science trained person, as being obviously wrong in the critique.
1- "In the very first paragraph of your review, you say, "Sometimes the book develops a dishonesty theory--evidence is said to be 'carefully edited' (p. 150) by scientists so that younger investigators do not see evidence that invalidates the theory of human evolution."
This is a dishonest caricature of what is actually said on page 150 of Forbidden Archeology. After documenting some cases of archeological discoveries no longer found in current texts, my coauthor and I said: "These discoveries are not well known, having been forgotten by science over the course of many decades or in many cases eliminated by a biased process of knowledge filtration. The result is that modern students of paleoanthropology are not in possession of the complete range of scientific evidence concerning human origins and antiquity. Rather most people, including professional scientists, are exposed to only a carefully edited selection of evidence supporting the currently accepted theory."
2- "You say (p. 13) that Forbidden Archeology "abandons the testing of simpler hypotheses before the more complex and sensationalistic ones." The example you give of this is FA's treatment of the Laetoli footprints. Here you are clearly wrong.
The Laetoli prints are anatomically modern in all details. My coauthor and I, after considering other alternatives, therefore suggested they could be taken, in the context of other evidence documented in Forbidden Archeology, as consistent with the presence of anatomically modern humans existing 3.6 million years ago in Africa.
You maintain it is easy to understand, from evolutionary theory, how an early hominid could have developed modern feet that were carried unchanged to the present. And then you say, "So far this seems to be the simplest explanation. Forbidden Archeology has not offered an alternative that falsifies this concept nor proposed a better one." There are several things wrong with your statements.
First, you indicate we did not even consider the "simpler" possibility you mentioned--that the footprints were made by a primitive hominid with advanced feet. That is not true. Either you were very careless in your reading of our work, or you deliberately misrepresented it to your readers. On page xxiii of the introduction to Forbidden Archeology, I wrote: "In 1979, researchers at the Laetoli, Tanzania, site in East Africa discovered footprints in volcanic ash deposits over 3.6 million years old. Mary Leakey and others said the prints were indistinguishable from those of modern human beings. To these scientists, this meant only that the human ancestors of 3.6 million years ago had remarkably modern feet." The same observation about a primitive hominid with modern feet is made on page 742, in the detailed discussion of the Laetoli case. It is obvious from both statements that these humanlike feet would be carried forward unchanged in the evolutionary process from the presumed Laetoli hominid to the modern human type. That possibility was considered and rejected by us, for very good reasons described in the book (and summarized below)."
Dr. Cremo's letter goes on to tackle many more other examples of "dishonest" criticism in the article, which, in essence, ridicules the book and prevents other scientifically incline people from reading it themselves.
After pointing out that the article in question is not from a science journal he writes:
"Nonscientific, or pseudoscientific, works are seldom given serious reviews in academic journals. But Forbidden Archeology has drawn full reviews from American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Geoarchaeology, L'Homme, L'Anthropologie, British Journal for the History of Science, Social Studies of Science, and Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution, and notices in Journal of Field Archeology, Antiquity, and other publications. And while none of the reviewers have renounced the standard Darwinian views of human evolution, or endorsed Forbidden Archeology (quite the opposite), most have treated the book as one of genuine scholarship, even if inspired by Vedic writings and representing a knowledge tradition distinct from that of modern science."
I still think Fora should invite him to do a talk.
"It is important to remember that there is no essential difference between Amazon tribesman and the Oxford academic."
Really? I thought the difference was around thirty years of constant learning and the ability to access libraries with millions of volumes of books containing information gathered by hundreds of thousands of other people over the course of two or three thousand years.
But essentially, you are right. If we subject the Amazon tribesman to the same learning regimen as our Oxford (or any other) academic and we make the same information available to him (or her), he or she will make just as good a scientist as our Oxford fellow.
Nature does not care about race or background. She gives her secrets to anyone who wants to know. And she also stays dark to everyone who doesn't.
All would be well if the blind faith Dr. Scott has on scientific process was true, but as Dr. Michael Cremo has demonstrated in "Forbidden Archeology" there IS a scientific orthodoxy that filters out well documented evidence that does not fit with the current scientific narrative. His book illustrates many hundreds of cases and it has made a great impact in the academic world.
Can't comment on the video, as I cannot view it. There are serious problems with your website.
1) Site says it wants "at least Flashplayer 9": I have the latest version, which is 11. Website Flashplayer version detection is incorrect. This error occurs in a linked page, see below.
2) JavaScript error when I tried to start the video: "TypeError: a is undefined". Another error in a linked page.
3) I checked the page's code at validator.w3.org. It reports 186 errors, and 90 warnings. This includes the linked pages, but I did not bother to dig deeper. That's your job.
4) I also use NoScript (on Firefox), so that I can and do selectively allow the linked pages. You have far too many of those. The most serious issue is that the videos are not hosted on your main page, but on somebody else's. Any errors they make will of course make your site look bad, and they do make errors. Eg, the Flashplayer and JS errors occur in linked pages.
The internet link that she shows at the top of the screen, at about 30:30, for the Australians debunking water-witching has been updated. See these two links instead: this one, which links to more than one video on water-witching, and this one, which seems not to have a video associated but rather a detailed description of water-witching experiments performed by a member of the Society.
member. 
