(11) Sun 27 Apr 97 13:58 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: X-Filing of America 1/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:27aa 229b6f40 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00133696 Science vs. fiction Aliens, auras, and the lost continent of Atlantis -- they're all part of pop culture these days. But scientists are fighting what's been called the X- Filing of America. 04/13/97 The Boston Globe The title seemed innocuous enough: The Mysterious Origins of Man. It could have been a National Geographic special. Or a solemnly narrated Nova espisode on PBS. But Mysterious Origins, which aired twice last year on NBC, was a smoothly produced documentary that aimed instead to subvert mainstream science. Hosted by Charlton Heston, the show speculated that modern humans lived at the time of the dinosaurs, argued that the lost continent of Atlantis might be hidden beneath the ice of Antarctica, hinted that ancient civilizations possessed astounding scientific knowledge -- and suggested that the scientific establishment was suppressing all of this information because it was too explosive to be released to the general public. So far, that shouldn't shock you. This is normal TV fare. But Mysterious Origins did something that bothered many sober-thinking scientists. It attacked the most continuously controversial scientific theory of the past two centuries: evolution. Imbedded in the show was deep skepticism about the standard view that humans evolved over the eons from more primitive beings. According to one of the show's sources, Richard Milton, a Briton who is author of The Facts of Life: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, "There is no conclusive proof of Darwinism. The evidence seems solid, but when you begin to examine it, it simply melts away." In other words, Mysterious Origins crossed the line -- from hokey fringe- science infotainment to what many scientists consider dangerous antiscience. And what really raised scientists' hackles was that the show was doing all this on network TV. "Want to see our e-mail?" asks John Cheshire, who helped produce the show. He places a 3-inch-thick binder on the kitchen table in the Manhattan loft where he and his two partners, Bill and Carol Cote, work. The binder is filled with messages sent to them by anthropologists, paleontologists, archeologists, and biologists. "Have you no shame?" one asks. Another calls their show a "national embarrassment." Other messages use these terms: a "steamy pile of rodent remains," "hooey," "claptrap," "drivel." The Cotes and Cheshire are called "greedheads," "disgusting panderers," and "ratings whores." Standing near a window he has cracked open to smoke a cigarette, Cheshire shakes his head and asks, "Why would one hour-long show on NBC create such a furor?" He knows why. If Mysterious Origins had aired on Fox or UPN, or late at night at the upper end of the cable spectrum, few scientists would have fired off angry e-mail. But Mysterious Origins was carried by the leading commercial network, NBC, in prime time, and it pulled an estimated 20 million viewers the first time out, winning it second place after CBS's durable 60 Minutes. It did almost as well when it was rebroadcast five months later. "I'm sure that's why so many scientists are mad at us," Cheshire says. But neither he nor his partners have been deterred by the criticism. They are hard at work on similar documentaries. They know what a lot of TV producers know: The public is fascinated with the kind of subject matter Mysterious Origins dealt with. The paranormal, extraterrestrial, and inexplicable are as common on the cable dial as are cop shows and home shopping. The rise of such programs is often called the X-Filing of America, after the popular Fox-TV drama in which FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigate paranormal events. The X-Files and its spawn (Millennium and Dark Skies are the most prominent), however, reside safely within the realm of fiction. They draw on centuries of literary tradition in which ghosts, fairies, magic, and superstition are used to dramatic effect. Scientists have little problem with such drama. But there is a new genre that has emerged alongside The X-Files. It is a hybrid of fact and fiction that can be seen in such documentarylike shows as Unsolved Mysteries, The Unexplained, Paranormal Borderlands, Sightings, and The Psi Factor -- as well as in onetime, Mysterious Origins-type specials dealing with ancient prophecies, astrology, psychic powers, angels, even with an "alien" allegedly killed in a 1947 UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico. Such shows draw on themes familiar from The X-Files: mysterious evidence of something weird and spooky; a crusading, antiestablishment point of view; and strong suspicions that someone, somewhere, is covering up something. But unlike The X-Files, these shows present their findings as nonfiction. Depending on your point of view, the genre is considered daring alternative science, junky pseudoscience, or outright antiscience. What is clear, say media watchers, is that late-20th-century America is a place where the paranormal has bloomed, has come to be accepted as normal -- where terms like "Roswell" and "telekinesis" are as much a part of the vernacular as "Watergate" and "microchip." They are touchstones in what some social observers call the "alternative history" of paranormal America. "You see it all over TV and the movies," says Thomas Doherty, chairman of the Brandeis University film studies department. "The broad embrace of the supernatural in entertainment seems to reflect deep public confusion about science and the inability of science to provide them with a nurturing, sustaining sense of the world." Science itself, meanwhile, is more and more portrayed on TV as either neutral or nefarious in our lives. At best, says William Evans, a Georgia State University communications professor who has studied science and the media, rational, scientific thinking is seen as a "coconspirator in large conspiracy theories." What does all of this mean for science? That's the question that has scientists worried. It's one thing to watch The X-Files for fun. But if irrationality, paranoia, and superstition come to dominate public discourse, we are facing a fundamental shift in the way we understand the universe. Depending on where you stand, that shift is either the dawning of a New Age of holistic, intuitive thinking, freed of the rigidity of an outmoded science, or the tragically wrongheaded entry into a new dark age. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.4/M 10 Beta * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 12/12 24/888 102/2 106/2000 109/7 124/1 130/1 1008 133/2 140/23 SEEN-BY: 143/1 147/34 2021 154/222 167/166 170/400 202/777 1207 1919 SEEN-BY: 213/213 218/2 801 890 900 901 907 244/1500 267/200 270/101 275/429 SEEN-BY: 280/1 169 282/1 62 310/666 323/107 343/600 346/250 356/18 371/42 SEEN-BY: 377/86 380/64 382/92 396/1 45 690/660 730/2 732/10 2401/0 2442/0 SEEN-BY: 3603/420 3606/10 3612/41 3615/50 3619/25 3632/21 3651/9 3652/1 SEEN-BY: 3667/1 3674/1 3828/2 5100/8 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 396/1 218/907 801 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (12) Sun 27 Apr 97 13:58 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: X-Filing of America 2/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:275a 229b6f40 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00133698 The increasing public mistrust of science has complex roots, and they're not always easy to tease apart. Some would argue that science itself is to blame: that scientists have been too arrogant, have too easily assumed they were entitled to public support and funding. This has been aggravated by the rosy-scenario problem, in which scientists tout the future benefits of their research -- Cheap nuclear power! Practical electric cars! Vacations on Mars! - - but reality proves disappointingly elusive. Other science watchers believe that public alienation from science has been fostered by such broad cultural shifts as the rise of the religious right, the growth of leftist academic skepticism of science, and a media landscape in which television networks are more interested in profiting from entertainment than in providing serious news. Fringe science is nothing new. It is as old as shamanism and lucky shamrocks. What is new is how respectable it has become. The migration of fringe science toward the media mainstream, according to some science historians and sociologists, may be due to the very success of scientific thinking over the past two centuries. For there is no doubt that the steady march of scientific discoveries has challenged traditional religion -- and in some cases, usurped it. "Science has had a way of disrupting the truth claims of religion and folklore," says Raymond Eve, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Arlington and coauthor of Cult Archaeology & Creationism: Understanding Pseudoscientific Beliefs About the Past. "Some people think of science as an alternative religion, but science never intended to be that, and it couldn't become that. Science is a way of looking at the world, not a metaphysical system. So science, in effect, destroyed one religion but didn't provide an alternative." In particular, the huge, persuasive body of evidence supporting the million-year evolution of humans into our present form -- beginning with Darwin's theory and extending through all branches of science today, in particular, biology and anthropology -- effectively undermined many people's belief in God. But it did not stop humans from craving an answer to metaphysical questions. Today, many people are finding their answers in fundamentalism, which stubbornly hews to the biblical view of creation, or in the kind of New Age neo-folklore being cobbled together by freelancers like the producers of Mysterious Origins. There's more to the rise of antiscientific thinking, though, than a need for something to believe in. While modern America is the most scientifically and technologically sophisticated civilization in history, many Americans are also, increasingly, ignorant of the scientific principles that underlie their way of life. Last year, the National Science Foundation published a multiyear survey of what American adults know about science, the scientific method, and the history of our planet. Fewer than one in 10 adults in this country can define a molecule, the survey found. Only one in five can give a minimally acceptable definition of DNA, despite the frequency with which the term popped up during the O. J. Simpson trial and is bandied about on TV crime shows. Only 49 percent of Americans, according to this survey, know that Earth revolves around the sun once a year. On the plus side, 85 percent of Americans know that oxygen comes from plants, and 80 percent know that the center of the earth is hot. But then, says the National Science Foundation report, "despite this promising level of understanding of these basic biological and geological concepts, less than half of adult Americans agree that human beings evolved from earlier species and developed millions of years after the death of the dinosaurs." On the face of it, science should be just as fascinating to the general public as pseudoscience. Pick up any science magazine or tune in to the Discovery Channel, and you will find a rich stream of thought-provoking reports dealing with breakthroughs in biology, new theories about the structure of matter, discoveries of the fossilized remains of bizarre dinosaurs. But, as with all science, there is a lot of hedging involved in these reports. A new theory may prove true -- or maybe not. New research may confirm a previous theory or could undercut it. Nothing is certain in science. Take "life on Mars," which seemed to be the stunning news announced at the White House last fall. Scientists had detected stromatolites, the footprint of ancient microbes, in meteorite material believed to have originated on the red planet. It wasn't big, exciting bug-eyed life these scientists thought they had found, but it was enough to encourage many people in the belief that Earth may not be the only outpost of life in the cosmos. Within weeks, however, other scientists cast doubt on the finding, arguing that similar microscopic structures can occur through purely chemical and mechanical processes. Then, in March, still other scientists found evidence that undermined the underminers. What's the truth about life on Mars? Uncertain. And amid such uncertainty about niggling forms of life, speculation flourishes. That "face on Mars" that appears periodically in supermarket tabloids was never seriously threatened by the stromatolites. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.4/M 10 Beta * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 12/12 24/888 102/2 106/2000 109/7 124/1 130/1 1008 133/2 140/23 SEEN-BY: 143/1 147/34 2021 154/222 167/166 170/400 202/777 1207 1919 SEEN-BY: 213/213 218/2 801 890 900 901 907 244/1500 267/200 270/101 275/429 SEEN-BY: 280/1 169 282/1 62 310/666 323/107 343/600 346/250 356/18 371/42 SEEN-BY: 377/86 380/64 382/92 396/1 45 690/660 730/2 732/10 2401/0 2442/0 SEEN-BY: 3603/420 3606/10 3612/41 3615/50 3619/25 3632/21 3651/9 3652/1 SEEN-BY: 3667/1 3674/1 3828/2 5100/8 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 396/1 218/907 801 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (13) Sun 27 Apr 97 13:58 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: X-Filing of America 3/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:e70b 229b6f40 @MSGID: 1:278/15 0013369b Science seldom produces "wow" headlines -- and when it does, popular belief is usually far ahead of it. The cloning of Dolly the ewe, in Scotland, rated a wow, but human cloning is by now a shopworn theme of science fiction. Twenty years ago, it figured in the movie The Boys from Brazil. If teleportation and warp drive come to pass in the next few centuries, they will seem passe to a public reared on many generations of Star Trek. Nevertheless, scientists themselves remain universally convinced that trying to find the truth about the universe, as excruciatingly slow as the task may be, is exciting work. But scientists also recognize that this super- careful, bit-by-bit attempt to get at the truth is unsatisfying to most of the general public. "Most people's lives are fairly boring and predictable," says the physicist Carl Bender, of Washington University, in St. Louis. "They need things that are not true, to give color to their lives. Things that are true are really marvelous -- how geysers work, the structure of atomic particles, biological processes -- but people don't expose themselves to these things. They seek excitement in things that are not true." What's more, the increasing sophistication of science in the late 20th century has distanced it from the general public. At one level, the atomic bomb, nuclear power, supercomputers, and other massively complex, potentially destructive devices have made science seem chilling. At a consumer level, meanwhile, technology has become less and less accessible. With microchips at the heart of modern appliances and automobiles, weekend troubleshooters, no matter how good they are with their socket wrenches, increasingly become stymied by basic repairs. And a generally educated person -- one who might have mastered Newton's laws in high school physics -- is almost certainly stumped by the fine points of quantum mechanics, chaos theory, or the wilder shores of current cosmology. As a result, to many people, science has become just one more kind of magic. As the National Science Foundation survey put it, most American adults now carry around "a mix of correct and incorrect scientific understanding that is not integrated into a broader level of systemic thinking." There's one more factor at work here: cultural relativism, an academic philosophy that holds that there is no real truth, that we all manufacture our own truths. By this reasoning, science, which is supposed to be the way to find truth, is itself merely a cultural construct of the old white-male world and is no better than any other way of looking at the world. At almost every university in the United States and Europe, cultural relativism is a major school of thought. It is found in disciplines as far apart as history and biology, and its influence has begun to seep down into secondary education through gender and ethnic studies. Theodore Schick Jr., a professor of philosophy at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and the author of How to Think About Weird Things, is not alone in seeing cultural relativism as the "largest cause of the loss of support of science today" because it is being taught to future teachers and other opinion leaders. Schick adds, "The problem is that most people never learn the difference between a good explanation and a bad one. Consequently, they come to believe all sorts of weird things, for no good reason." Unless the educational system focuses on science as a way of teaching people how to think, Schick warns, "our populace will become increasingly credulous." That prospect is what has scientists worried, and it's what they're fighting. At the heart of their counterattack is a rejection of cultural relativism. Science, they point out, is not just a possible way of thinking about the world. While philosophers of science constantly argue over what precisely the scientific method is, there is general agreement on its essence: building theories that enhance our understanding of nature and subjecting those theories to rigorous logical, empirical testing. Where critics of science contend that scientists refuse to open their minds to new ideas, scientists reply that they're willing to believe anything -- once it has been proved. Until then, it's just speculation. But that kind of distinction, many scientists fear, is precisely what schools are failing to teach today's students. Paul Gross, coauthor of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science and onetime director of the Marine Biological Laboratory, in Woods Hole, is concerned that American schools are turning out graduates who have only marginal knowledge of science and little in the way of skeptical critical-thinking skills. This makes it likely that the rising generation will ingest information in an untested manner from TV and the Internet. Gross believes that schools have given up teaching students to discriminate between good ideas and bad ones, choosing instead to let all manner of beliefs -- from Native American wisdom to Afrocentrism -- share equal time with Thomas Jefferson and Louis Pasteur. "Relativism will have very important consequences for civilization," he warns, because when distinctions between sound ideas and speculative ones blur, "you've lost the only avenue for imparting to the next generation the discoveries of the past 3,000 years." Scientists and science teachers are trying to boost science studies in the classroom -- and, through science fairs and innovative teaching, to interest young people in the scientific method. But it is slow going. In universities, according to recent surveys, almost half of all students who start out as science majors get frustrated and quit. And for most high school kids, keeping a log of the population distribution of tadpoles in an aquarium doesn't hold a candle to checking out UFO sites on the Internet. Besides calling for improvements in scientific education -- in particular, more emphasis on teaching as opposed to pure research -- scientists alarmed by the decline in scientific literacy are hoping to turn the tide by drawing attention to what they see as the media's distortion of science and scientific ideas. Paul Kurtz, a philosophy professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the founder of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, says the media have now "virtually replaced the schools, colleges, and universities as the main source of information for the general public" and have been busy "distorting science -- in particular, presenting pseudoscience as genuine science." -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.4/M 10 Beta * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 12/12 24/888 102/2 106/2000 109/7 124/1 130/1 1008 133/2 140/23 SEEN-BY: 143/1 147/34 2021 154/222 167/166 170/400 202/777 1207 1919 SEEN-BY: 213/213 218/2 801 890 900 901 907 244/1500 267/200 270/101 275/429 SEEN-BY: 280/1 169 282/1 62 310/666 323/107 343/600 346/250 356/18 371/42 SEEN-BY: 377/86 380/64 382/92 396/1 45 690/660 730/2 732/10 2401/0 2442/0 SEEN-BY: 3603/420 3606/10 3612/41 3615/50 3619/25 3632/21 3651/9 3652/1 SEEN-BY: 3667/1 3674/1 3828/2 5100/8 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 396/1 218/907 801