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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQS);faqs.101



3.7.2:  Are crop circles made by hoaxers?
-----------------------------------------

Of course.  Although most people have heard only of two, Doug Bower and
Dave Chorley of England, many others have been caught, not only in
Britain but in other countries such as Canada.  Their methods range
from inscribed circles with a pole and a length of rope to more complex
systems involving chains, rollers, planks and measuring devices.

And as a further note: just because you can't prove a crop circle was
made by a hoaxer, you should not assume aliens were involved.  Remember
Occam's Razor (Section 1.6).

3.7.3:   Are crop circles radioactive?
--------------------------------------

This is a claim that has received wide circulation in UFO/cerealogy
circles (pardon the pun).  It is also untrue.  Examination of the data
from spectral analyses of soil taken from crop circles has shown that
there were no readings above the normal background levels.  The
proponents of this claim are debating this, however.

3.7.4:   What about cellular changes in plants within crop circles?
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Yes, what about the changes?  Although this is another claim that is
widely circulated among ufologists and cerealogists, the evidence is
simply not very good.  A few photographs of alleged changes in the
"crystalline structure" of wheat stems were published in some
magazines and UFO publications.  The method used was spagyrical
analysis.  This is a technique involving crystallization of the
residue of organic material after harsh processing, invented three
centuries ago and popularized by Sir Kenelm Digby. Digby is known for
other wonderful inventions like condensation of sunlight and the
development of sword salve (which you had to put on the weapon rather
than on the wound, in order to cure the wound).  The fact that this
technique was tried at all casts serious doubts on the "researchers"
involved.

3.8: Have people been abducted by UFOs?
---------------------------------------

While the number of people who believe themselves to have been
abducted by flying saucer aliens must number at least many thousands,
not one of them has produced any physical evidence to establish the
reality of their claim. On the contrary, a number of factors clearly
point to a subjective basis for the "UFO abduction" phenomenon.
Probably the strongest factor is that of the cultural dependence of
such claims.  Such claims were virtually unknown until the famous
abduction story of Betty and Barney Hill received widespread publicity
in the late 1960s.  Also, the appearance and behavior of supposed UFO
occupants varies greatly with location and year. UFO abduction claims
are made much less frequently outside North America, especially in
non-English-speaking countries, although foreign reports have started
to catch up since the publication of Whitley Strieber's "Communion".
Furthermore, the descriptions of supposed UFO aliens contain clear
cultural dependencies; in North America large-headed grey aliens
predominate, while in Britain abducting aliens are mostly tall, blond,
and Nordic. Aliens that are claimed to steal sperm, eggs, and fetuses,
or make scars or body implants on those supposedly abducted, were
practically unknown before the publication of Budd Hopkins' books.
This particularly alarming type of abduction seems to be quite rare
outside North America.

Clear "borrowings" from popular science fiction stories can be traced
in certain major "UFO abductions."  Barney Hill's description of his
supposed abductors' "wraparound eyes" (an extreme rarity in science
fiction films), first described and drawn during a hypnosis session on
Feb. 22, 1964, comes just twelve days after the first broadcast of an
episode of "The Outer Limits" featuring an alien of this quite unique
description. Many other elements of the Hill story can be traced to
the 1953 film "Invaders from Mars," including aliens having "Jimmy
Durante" noses, an alien medical examination, something done to her
eyes to relax her, being probed with a needle, a star map hanging on a
wall, a notebook offered as a remembrance, even the imagery of a
needle in the navel. Other "abductees" borrowed other ideas from
"Invaders From Mars," including brain implants, aliens drilling into a
human skull, and aliens seeking to revitalize a dying world.

Originally, stories of UFO abductions were obtainable solely by
hypnotic regression of the claimant, although in recent years the
subject of "UFO abductions" has become so generally known that some
subjects claim to remember their "abduction" without hypnosis.
Hypnosis is a NOT a reliable method for extracting so- called "hidden
memories", and its use in this manner is likely to lead to fabrication
and error. Moreover, if it is suggested to a hypnotized person that
fictitious events have occurred, the subject himself may come to
believe this (See the article "Hypnosis" in the 1974 "Encyclopedia
Brittanica" by Martin Orne).


3.9: What is causing the strange cattle deaths?
-----------------------------------------------

The only information I have on these is a long file which came to me
via Len Bucuvalas <[e-mail]> from ParaNet.  The
gist is that cattle and other animals have been found dead with
strange mutilations.  Organs, especially genitals, have been removed
but no blood appears to have been lost.  These events are also
sometimes associated with reports of alien encounters and UFOs.

The best source of information on cattle mutilations is the
book Mute Evidence by Ian Summers and Daniel Kagan, a couple
of investigative journalists who started out believing that
something mysterious was happening, but ended up skeptics.
SI has published James Stewart's "Cattle Mutilations: An Episode
of Collective Delusion" (way back in vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 55-66).
Stewart is a sociologist who examined the pattern of reports and
found that new reports were inspired by previous media coverage.
It came in "waves" or "flaps".

3.10: What is the face on Mars?
-------------------------------

One of the Mars orbiters took a photograph of a part of Mars (Cydonia)
when the sun was very low on the horizon.  The picture shows a "face"
and some nearby pyramids.  Both these structures are seen more by
their shadows than their actual shape.  The pyramid shadows appear
regular because their size is close to the limit of resolution of the
camera, and the "face" is just a chance arrangement of shadow over a
couple of hills.  The human brain is very good at picking out familiar
patterns in random noise, so it is not surprising that a couple of
Martian surface features (out of thousands photographed) vaugely
resemble a face when seen in the right light.

Richard Hoagland has championed the idea that the Face is artificial,
intended to resemble a human, and erected by an extraterrestrial
civilization. Most other analysts concede that the resemblance is most
likely accidental. Other Viking images show a smiley-faced crater and
a lava flow resembling Kermit the Frog elsewhere on Mars. There exists
a Mars Anomalies Research Society (sorry, don't know the address) to
study the Face.

The Mars Observe spacecraft, scheduled for launch September 25 has a
camera that can give 1.5m per pixel resolution.  More details of the
Cydonia formations should become available when it arrives.

Anyone who wants to learn some more about this should look up "Image
Processing", volume 4 issue 3, which includes enhanced images of the
"face".  Hoagland has written "The Monuments of Mars: A City on the
Edge of Forever", North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, USA,
1987.

[Some of this is from the sci.space FAQs]

3.11: Did Ezekiel See a Flying Saucer?
--------------------------------------

The chapter in question is Ezekiel 1:4-28.  This vision is a early
example of apocalyptic writing that is common in the centuries before
and after Christ.  (Good examples are chapters 2 and 7-12 of Daniel
and the book of Revelation.)  Apocalyptic literature is often
difficult to interpret because the language is deliberately symbolic
and figurative.  In some cases, however, the writer will tell the
reader just what is meant by the symbols.  This is the case for
Ezekiel's wheels within wheels vision.  Verse 28 identifies the vision
as, "This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the
LORD."  Also the wheels are explicitly described as appearing in a
*vision*.  In other words this was a message from God (or a
hallucination) rather than a physical event.

Faith Healing and Alternative Therapies
=======================================

Disclaimer: I am not medically qualified.  If you have a medical
        problem then I strongly recommend that you go to a
        qualified medical practitioner.  Asking the Net for
        specific medical advice is always a bad idea.

4.1: Isn't western medicine reductionistic and alternatives holistic?
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Practitioners of alternative therapies often put forward the idea that
modern scientific medicine is reductionistic: it concentrates on those
parts of the body that are not working properly, and in so doing it
reduces the patient to a collection of organs.  Alternative therapies
try to consider the patient as a whole (a holistic approach).

This is a fine piece of rhetoric, but it's wrong.  It is
true that modern medicine looks at the details of diseases, trying to
find out exactly what is going wrong and what is causing it.  But it
also looks at the life of the patient, and tries to understand how the
patient interacts with his/her environment and how this interaction
can be improved.  For instance, smoking is known to cause a wide
variety of medical problems.  Hence doctors advise patients to give up
smoking as well as treating the individual illnesses which it causes.
When a patient presents with an illness then the doctor will not only
treat the illness but also try to understand how this illness was
caused in order to avoid a recurrence.

4.2: What is a double-blind trial?  What is a placebo?
------------------------------------------------------

A double-blind trial is the standard method for deciding whether or
not a treatment has any "real" effect.

A placebo is a "treatment" which has no effect except through the mind
of the patient.  The usual form is a pill containing a little lactose
(milk-sugar), although a bitter-tasting liquid or injections of 1cc
saline can be used instead.

The "placebo effect" is the observed tendency for patients to display
the symptoms they are told to expect.

The problem is that the state of mind of a patient is often a
significant factor in the effect of a course of treatment.  All
doctors know this; it is why "bedside manner" is considered so
important.  In statistical tests of new treatments it is even more
important, since even a small effect from the state of mind of a small
fraction of the patients in the trial can have a significant effect
on the results.  Hence new medicines are tested against a placebo.
The patients in the trial are randomly divided into two groups.  One
of these groups is given the real medicine, the other is given the
placebo.  Neither group knows which they have been given.  Hence the
state of mind for both groups will be similar, and any difference
between the two groups must be due to the drug.  This is a blind trial.

It has been found that patients can be unconciously affected by the
attitude and expectations of the doctor supplying the drug, even if
the doctor does not explicitly tell them what to expect.  Hence it is
usual for the doctor to be equally unaware which group is which.  This
is a "double blind" trial.  The job of remembering which group is
which is given to some administrative person who does not normally
come into contact with patients.

This causes problems for many alternative therapies because they do
something to the patient which is difficult to do in a placebo-like
manner.  For instance, a treatment involving the laying-on of hands
cannot be done in such a way that both patient and practitioner are
unaware as to whether a "real" laying on of hands has taken place.
There are partial solutions to this.  For instance one study employed
a three-way test of drug placebo, counseling and alternative therapy.

4.3: Why should scientific criteria apply to alternative therapies?
-------------------------------------------------------------------

So that we can tell if they work or not.  If you take an patient
and give them treatment then one of three things will happen: the
patient will get better, will get worse, or will not change.  And this
is true whether the treatment is a course of drugs chosen by a doctor,
an alternative therapy, or just counting to ten.

Many alternative therapies depend on "anecdotal evidence" where
particular cases got better after the therapy was applied.  Almost any
therapy will have some such cases, even if it actually harms the
patients.  And so anecdotal evidence of Mrs X who was cured of cancer
by this wonderful new treatment is not useful in deciding whether the
treatment is any good.

The only way to tell for sure whether or not an alternative treatment
works is to use a double-blind trial, or as near to it as you can get.
See the previous question.

4.4: What is homeopathy?
------------------------

Homeopathy is sometimes confused with herbalism.  A herbalist
prescribes herbs with known medicinal effects.  Two well known
examples are foxglove flowers (which contain digitalin) and willow
bark (which contains aspirin).  Folk remedies are now being studied
extensively in order to winnow the wheat from the chaff.

Homeopathists believe that if a drug produces symptoms similar to
certain disease then a highly diluted form of the same drug will cure
the disease.  The greater the dilution, the stronger this curative
effect will be (this is known as the law of Arndt-Schulz).  Great
importance is also attatched to the way in which the diluted solution
is shaken during the dilution.

People are skeptical about homeopathy because:

1: There is no known mechanism by which it can work.  Many homeopathic
   treatments are so diluted that not one molecule of the original
   substance is contained in the final dose.

2: The indicator symptoms are highly subjective.  Some substances have
   hundreds of trivial indicators.

3: Almost no clinical tests have been done.

4: It is not clear why trace impurities in the dilutants are not also
   fortified by the dilution mechanism.

Reports of one scientific trial that seemed to provide evidence for
homeopathy until a double-blind trial was set up can be found in
Nature vol 333, p.816 and further, and the few issues of Nature
following that, about until November of that year (1988).

SI ran a good article on the origins and claims of homeopathy:
Stephen Barrett, M.D., "Homeopathy: Is It Medicine?", SI,
vol. 12, no. 1, Fall 1987, pp. 56-62.

4.5: What is aromatherapy?
--------------------------

A belief that the essential oils of various flowers have therapeutic
effects.  [Does anyone know more? PAJ]

4.6: What is reflexology?  What is iridology?
---------------------------------------------

Reflexology is an alternative therapy based on massage of the feet.
The idea is that parts of the body can be mapped onto areas of the
feet.  There is no known mechanism by which massaging the feet can
affect other parts of the body (other than the simple soothing and
relaxing effect that any massage gives) and no evidence that it
actually works.

Iridology is a remarkably similar notion.  Diseases are detected and
diagnosed by examining the iris of the eye.  A good critique of
iridology: Russell S. Worrall, "Iridology: Diagnosis or Delusion?",
SI, vol. 7 no. 3, pp. 23-35.

4.7: Does acupuncture work?
----------------------------

[I don't know.  I have heard of a few studies.  Does anyone have more
information, especially references? PAJ]

[Various people have responded to this question asserting that
accupuncture does not work beyond a placebo effect, but no-one has
sent in a reference to a clinical trial.]

4.8: What about psychic surgery?
--------------------------------

Psychic surgeons have claimed to be able to make magical incisions,
remove cancers and perform other miracles.  To date, no investigation
of a psychic surgeon has ever found real paranormal ability.  Instead
they have found one of two things:

 1: Simple conjuring tricks.  The "surgeons" in these cases are
    confidence tricksters who prey on the desperate and the foolish.

 2: Delusions of grandeur.  These people are even more dangerous than
    the first catagory, as their treatments may actually cause harm in
    addition to whatever was wrong with the patient in the first
    place.

4.9: What is Crystal Healing?
-----------------------------

The belief that carrying a small quartz crystal will make you a
healthier person.  People selling these crystals use phrases like "the
body's natural energy fields" and "tuning into the right vibrational
frequencies".  All this sounds vaguely scientific but means absolutely
nothing.  Crystal Healing is mostly a New Age idea.  See the section
on the New Age below for more information.

4.10: Does religious healing work?
----------------------------------

Miraculous healing is often put forward as a proof of the existance
and approval of God.  The Catholic and Christian Scientist churches in
particular often claim that believers have been healed, none of
these healings have stood up to careful scrutiny, although it should
be noted that the Catholic church does investigate alledged miracles.

One famous "healing" which has been carefully investigated is the case
of Mrs Jean Neil.  Many people have seen the video of her getting out
of a wheel-chair and running around the stadium at meeting led by the
German evangalist Reinhard Bonnke.  This was investigated by Dr. Peter
May, a GP and member of the General Synod of the Church of England.
His findings were reported in the Skeptic (organ of the UK Skeptics).
Here is a summary of the report.  [Any errors are mine.  PAJ].

May found that Mrs. Neil was helpful and enthusiastic when he
contacted her, and there is little doubt that her quality of life has
improved greatly since the "healing".  However May was unable to find
any physical changes.  His report lists each of the illnesses claimed
by Mrs. Neil, and he found that they were either not recorded by
doctors previous to the healing or that no physical change had taken
place.  It seems that the only change in Mrs. Neil was in her mental
state.  Before the healing she was depressed and introverted.
Afterwards she became happy and outgoing.

A more sinister aspect of the story is the presentation of the Neil
case in a video promoted by CfaN Productions.  This represented Mrs.
Neil before the healing as a "hopeless case", implied that she had a
single serious illness rather than a series of less major ones, and
included the false statement that she had been confined to a
wheelchair for 25 years (in fact Mrs. Neil had used a wheelchair for
about 15 months and could still walk, although with great difficulty).
A report on her spine was carefully edited to include statements about
her new pain-free movement but to exclude the statement that there was
no evidence of physical changes.

For the full report, see "The Skeptic" p9, vol 5, no 5, Sept 91.  Back
issues are available from "The Skeptic (Dept. B), P.O. Box 475,
Manchester, M60 2TH, U.K.  Price UKL 2.10 for UK, UKL 2.70 elsewhere.

The video is entitled "Something to Shout About --- The Documentation
of a Miracle".  May does not say where this can be obtained.  [Does
anyone know?]

Of course, this does not disprove the existance of miraculous healing.
Even Mrs. Neil's improvement could have been due to divine
intervention rather than a sub-consious decision to get better (as
most skeptics would conclude, although the May report carefully
refrains from doing so).  I include this summary here because the Neil
case is often cited by evangelical Christians as an undeniable
miracle.  In fact the case demonstrates that even such dramatic events
as a cripple getting up and running may not be so very inexplicable.

For more general coverage of this topic, see James Randi's book, The
Faith Healers.  Free Inquiry magazine has also run exposes on
fraudulent faith healers like Peter Popoff and W.V. Grant.

4.11: What harm does it do anyway?
----------------------------------

People have died when alternative practitioners told them to stop
taking conventional treatment.  Children have died when their parents
refused to give them conventional treatment.  These issues matter.

Most alternative treatments are harmless, so the "complementary
medicine" approach where conventional and alternative therapies
proceed in parallel will not hurt anyone physically (although it is a
waste of time and money).


Creation versus Evolution
=========================

5.1: Is the Bible evidence of anything?
---------------------------------------

Apart from the beliefs of those who wrote it, no.  It is true that
most Christians take the truth of at least some parts of the bible as
an article of faith, but non-Christians are not so constrained.
Quoting the bible to such a person as "evidence" will simply cause
them to question the accuracy of the bible.  See the alt.atheism FAQ
for more details.

Some things in the bible are demonstrably true, but this does not make
the bible evidence, since there are also things in the bible that are
demonstrably false.

5.2: Could the Universe have been created old?
----------------------------------------------

An argument is sometimes put forwards along the following lines:

    We know from biblical evidence (see above) that the Universe
    is about 6,000 years old.  Therefore God created it 6,000
    years ago with fossils in the ground and light on its way from
    distant stars, so that there is no way of telling the real age
    of the Universe simply by looking at it.

This hypothesis is unfalsifiable, and therefore not a scientific one
(see the section on the scientific method).  It could also be made for
any date in the past (like last Tuesday).  Finally it requires that
God, who is alleged to speak to us through His Works, should be lying
to us by setting up a misleading Creation.  This seems to be rather
inconsistent with Biblical claims of God being the source of all
truth.

5.3: What about Carbon-14 dating?
---------------------------------

Isotope dating takes advantage of that radioactive materials break
down at a rate independent of their environment. Any solid object that
formed containing radioactive materials therefore steadily loses them
to decay. If it is possible to compare the amount of radioactive
material currently present with the amount originally present, one can
deduce how long ago the object was formed. The amount originally
present cannot, of course, be observed directly, but can be determined
by indirect means, such as identifying the decay products.

C-14 dating uses an unstable isotope of carbon that is constantly
being produced in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays. This process is
assumed to be in equilibrium with the decay of C-14 throughout the
biosphere, so the proportion of carbon that is C-14 as opposed to the
stable C-12 and C-13 isotopes is essentially constant in any living
organism.  When an organism dies, it stops taking up new carbon from
its environment, but the C-14 in its body continues to decay. By
measuring the amount of C-14 left in organic remains, one can
establish how long ago the organism they came from died. Because C-14
has a half-life of only a few thousand years, C-14 dating can only be
used for remains less than a few tens of thousands of years old--
after that, the C-14 is entirely gone, to all practical purposes.
Other isotopic dating techniques, such as potassium-argon dating, use
much longer-lived radionuclides and can reliably measure dates
billions of years in the past.

Actually the production rate isn't all that constant, so the amount of
C-14 in the biosphere varies somewhat with time.  You also need to be
sure that the only source of carbon for the organism was atmospheric
carbon (via plants).  The nominal date from a C-14 reading, based on
the present concentration, therefore has to be corrected to get the
real date --- but once the correction has been calculated using an
independent dating tool like dendrochronology (see below), it can be
applied to any sample.

While it is true that there *may* be unknown errors in some dating
methods (see the note in section 0 about science "proving" things)
this assertion cannot be used to write off isotope dating as evidence
of an ancient Earth.  This is because:

o There are several independent ways of dating objects, including
  radio-isotopes, dendrochronology, position in rock strata etc.
  These all give a consistent picture.

o Dating methods all point to an *old* Earth, about *half a million*
  times older than the Creationists claim.  This requires dating
  methods which are accurate up to 6,000 years ago and then suddenly
  start to give completely wrong (but still consistent) answers.  Even
  if our dating methods are out by a factor of 10 or 100, the earth is
  still thousands of times older than Creationists claim.

5.4: What is dendrochronology?
------------------------------

The science of dating wood by a study of annual rings.

[These figures and references come from a longer summary emailed to me
by <[e-mail]>.  Any mistakes are mine.  PAJ]

Everyone knows that when you cut down a tree the cut surface shows a
series of concentric rings, and that one of these rings is added each
year as the tree grows.  The lighter part of the ring is the summer
growth and the darker part is the winter growth.  Hence you can date a
tree by counting the rings.

But the rings are not evenly spaced.  Some rings are wider than
others.  These correspond to good and poor growing seasons.  So if you
have a piece of wood cut down a few thousand years ago, you can date
it by comparing the pattern of rings in your sample to known patterns
in recently cut trees (Bristlecone pines exist which are over 4600
years old, and core samples allow ring counting without killing the
tree).

Now for the clever bit.  The tree from which your sample came may have
been old before any trees now alive were even saplings.  So you can
extend the known pattern of rings back even further, and hence date
samples of wood which are even older.  By lining up samples of wood in
this way, dendrochronologists have been able to produce a continous
pattern of rings going back around 9,900 years.  This easily refutes
the chronology of Bishop Usher, who calculated from dates and ages
given in the Bible that the Earth was created in 4004 BC.

Dendrochronology is also valuable in providing calibration data for
C14 and other isotope dating methods.  See the previous question for
more details.

References:

    "Dendrochronology of the Bristlecone Pine....."
    by C. W. Ferguson, 1970.  Published in a book called
    "Radiocarbon Variations and Absolute Chronology"

This takes the record back 7484 years.  I am told that more recent
work published in Nature in 1991 [exact reference anyone?] has pushed
this back to the 9,900 years I mentioned above.

5.5: What is evolution?  Where can I find out more?
---------------------------------------------------

Many creationist "refutations" of evolution are based on a straw-man
argument.  The technique is to misrepresent the theory of evolution,
putting forward an absurd theory as "what scientists claim".  The
absurdity of this pseudo-evolution theory is then ridiculed.

Debunking all these refutations would take a lot of space.  Instead I
suggest that anyone interested should go and read the FAQ lists over
on talk.origins.  These contain good explanations of what evolution is
(and isn't).  I can also recommend books and essays on the subject by
Stephen Jay Gould.

[Perhaps the FAQ lists on talk.origins could be cross-posted?]

5.6: "The second law of thermodynamics says....
-----------------------------------------------

...that entropy is always increasing.  Entropy is a measure of the
randomness in a system.  So the universe is getting more and more
disordered.  But if this is so, how can life happen, since
evolutionists claim essentially that life is a system that becomes
more ordered with time?"