Skeptiko
This podcast is a leading source for intelligent, hard-nosed skeptic vs. believer debate on science and spirituality. Each episode features lively discussion with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics.
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May 8th, 2012 Alex
Interview with Cornell University Professor Emeritus Dr. Daryl Bem looks at the reaction to his groundbreaking parapsychology experiments.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with noted psychology professor Dr. Daryl Bem. During the interview Bem discusses the reaction to his research among parapsychology opponents:
Alex Tsakiris: What do you think is going to happen with this latest round of debunking? The skeptics have risen up and it seems like a very well-organized, concerted effort to knock down your research. What do you think their game plan is? What do you think is going to happen?
Dr. Daryl Bem: Well, I think the flurry of activity in the popular media will just sort of die down. When I look at Google News on it there are still four or five articles that pop up in which it just shows how successful Wiseman is at getting his point of view out. I have been replying to people who’ve asked me to reply to blogs and things of that sort.
Without accusing him of actually being dishonest, he has now published the three studies that he and French and Ritchie tried to get published in several journals that rejected it. I replied with a comment on that. If there’s anything dishonest there, it’s when you publish an article, even if it’s of your own three experiments—they did three experiments that failed trying to replicate one of my experiments—you always have a literature review section where you talk about all the previous research and known research on the topic before you present your own data.
What Wiseman never tells people is in Ritchie, Wiseman and French is that his online registry where he asked everyone to register, first of all he provided a deadline date. I don’t know of any serious researcher working on their own stuff who is going to drop everything and immediately do a replication… anyway, he and Ritchie and French published these three studies. Well, they knew that there were three other studies that had been submitted and completed and two of the three showed statistically significant results replicating my results. But you don’t know that from reading his article. That borders on dishonesty.
Dr. Daryl Bem’s Website
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Today we welcome Dr. Daryl Bem to Skeptiko. Dr. Bem is a very highly regarded social psychologist and Professor Emeritus from Cornell who created quite a stir last year with his paper, “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect.”
Alex Tsakiris: Dr. Bem, it’s a great pleasure to have you on Skeptiko. Thanks for joining me.
Dr. Daryl Bem: Good to be here. Read the rest of this entry »
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May 1st, 2012 Alex
Interview with biblical scholar Dr. Mike Heiser examines how many Christians approach paranormal claims from curiously skeptical perspective.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with biblical scholar and author Dr. Michael Heiser. During the interview Heiser discusses his understanding of ghosts from a Christian perspective:
Alex Tsakiris: What did you mean when you said, “Christians aren’t as open to the supernatural as they think they”, and that they, “think like skeptics.” What did you mean?
Dr. Mike Heiser: …there are a lot of people who basically go through life thinking that unless their pastor or priest brought it up it’s either not true or it can’t be reported.
I’ve had preachers and pastors tell me about doing a funeral service where they or somebody they known and trust saw the deceased person just sort of standing there for a moment. Well, you start saying things like that and right away our reaction is , “well, maybe you were overcome by grief… maybe you need a physical… maybe you didn’t take your meds that day.”
We tend to think like moderns in that we are very hesitant to accept anything that’s outside the material reality.
Alex Tsakiris: Okay, I’m right there with you, Mike. But what do we do with those encounters? What do we do with the deathbed visions, the near-death experiences, the ghostly encounters? How do we approach them?
Dr. Mike Heiser: Well, I tend to think that these sorts of things are not either/or sorts of categories. I think there are a number of things that ought to be given equal weight. I believe in the supernatural. I don’t really like that term, but basically I believe in a non-human world. Since I do believe in that I’m not a philosophical Materialist. I’m willing to consider the possibility that the experience at a funeral was real. I’m willing to consider that this was really a point of intersection between our world and that other reality plane.
Dr. Mike Heiser’s Website
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Today we welcome Biblical scholar and author, Dr. Michael Heiser, to Skeptiko. Mike has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Biblical languages and a master’s in ancient history from Penn. He’s a frequent guest on a number of radio programs such as Coast to Coast AM. He’s also the author of a paranormal thriller, The Façade. Mike, thanks so much for joining me today on Skeptiko.
Dr. Mike Heiser: Thank you very much for inviting me. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 24th, 2012 Alex
Interview with Rollins College professor of philosophy examines what parapsychology research in other cultures tells us about consciousness.
Join Skeptiko guest host Dr. Richard Grego for an interview with Dr. Hoyt Edge, author of, A Constructive Postmodern Perspective on Self and Community. During the interview Edge discusses his forst exposure to cultures with a vastly different view of consciousness and personhood:
Hoyt Edge: I remember an epiphanial moment hearing about the Aboriginal worldview, the “dream time.” All of the sudden I began to say, here’s an entirely different vocabulary. Here’s an entirely different way of looking at the world. And, it’s been around for forty or fifty thousand years. As a pragmatist — it works.
Guest Host: Dr. Richard Grego
Who is Dr. Hoyt Edge?
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April 17th, 2012 Alex
Interview with alternative media investigative journalist James Corbett examines how we know what we think we know.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with James Corbett, host of, The Corbett Report. During the interview Corbett discusses the believability of the 2011 Osama Bin Laden raid:
Alex Tsakiris: I find myself in this debate with folks who are on my side of these issues about paradigm change — is it coming? Is it imminent? But both in your world of politics, and my world of science, we’re living in a bubble and underestimating how hard it is to bring people over.
Let’s say you wanted to make the case that the government is lying about the death of Osama Bin Laden. Maybe you can give people a thumbnail sketch of what that evidence is—not that you know specifically what happened because that’s a trap, but just make a case that the government is lying.
James Corbett: Well, that is a particularly interesting example. It’s black and white that there were various aspects of the Osama Bin Laden raid that were demonstrable lies coming out in the hours after that raid.
So for example, it occurred on the 1st of May, 2011 and immediately there was a narrative created that was bolstered in no small part by the image of Obama and Clinton and others in the White House taking a look at presumably the live video footage of the raid itself. But that was contradicted just three days later on the 4th of May by the fact that there was a blackout during the time of the raid. So there was no visual footage. The initial indication was that Osama had fought back, that there was some sort of running gunfight, but as it turns out there really was no gunfight at all. There was the initial indication that he was using his wife as a human shield, etc., but eventually they had to admit that didn’t happen. There was the entire saga of the helicopter crash, etc. So there are all sorts of things related to that story that we know that the initial reports that were coming out were, in fact, demonstrably untrue.
But it was interesting for me to watch how people—even people whose opinions I respect and who I think are genuinely quite cautious about the way that they approach these types of situations and disinformation—just immediately took it on faith. “Okay, this is it. This is a raid. They got Osama.” The way that I try to be with most events is, “Okay, that’s interesting. Let’s see the data. If politicians can come out and say X, Y, Z and we’ll just take it as an article of faith, then I think that’s a sign of a very, very unhealthy democracy, isn’t it?
The Corbett Report Website
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Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome alternative media investigative journalist James Corbett to Skeptiko. James is the host of The Corbett Report and a popular guest on a variety of alternative news outlets. James, welcome to Skeptiko. Thanks for joining me.
James Corbett: Thank you for having me here today. It’s a pleasure to be here. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 3rd, 2012 Alex
Interview with U.S. Army Remote Viewer Joe McMoneagle explains how his near-death experience led to being selected for the government’s psychic spy program.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Joe McMoneagle, author of, Memoirs of a Psychic Spy. During the interview McMoneagle discusses the origins of the government’s psychic spy program:
Joe McMoneagle: We heard rumors and picked up some details about the Russians using psychics to spy on America. It was impossible, for obvious reasons, to get an actual agent inside their program; so when faced with the possibility that our enemy is doing something that we have no ability to judge, the best way to find what their capability is, or the limits of their capability, is to emulate them.
So the initial intention was to just spend three years doing that–selecting people, targeting our own people at the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, that sort of thing.
That didn’t work very long because we were able to successfully recruit six people and they turned out to be very, very good at doing what we thought the Russians were doing. They were good enough that people felt that it should be operational immediately.
Alex Tsakiris: Tell us about your trips to Russia and your meeting with your Russian counterparts. Were they really spying on us with psychic spies?
Joe McMoneagle: In actuality, they were. They were using spies, psychic spies, to target us and target many of our agencies. In my trips to Russia and the time I spent with the directors of their program and their actual remote viewers—I call them remote viewers. They probably shouldn’t be called remote viewers because they use nothing like our protocols. They displayed some interesting capacities in many of the things that they were doing but they did things completely differently than us. They did a lot of things that we didn’t do in terms of their attempts to manipulate the paranormal area, anyway. For instance, there were some efforts I know that they spent a great deal of time in trying to manipulate or affect the decision-making of some American politicians and that sort of thing.
Joe McMoneagle’s Website
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Alex Tsakiris: Today we’re joined by one of the world’s leading experts on remote viewing. Joe McMoneagle was psychic spy #001 for the U.S.’s Stargate Project that began at the Stanford Research Institute in the ‘70s. Joe was also a near-death experiencer and author of several books, including Mind Trek: Exploring Consciousness, Time and Space Through Remote Viewing, and Memoirs of a Psychic Spy: The Remarkable Life of U.S. Remote Viewer 001.
Welcome, Joe, and thanks for joining me today on Skeptiko.
Joe McMoneagle: I’m glad to be here. Thank you. Read the rest of this entry »
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March 20th, 2012 Alex
Interview with Parapsychology researcher Dr. Caroline Watt explains why, despite criticism, she maintains, “there is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences.”
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with University of Edinburgh professor Dr. Caroline Watt, co-author of, There is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences: how neuroscience can explain seeing bright lights, meeting the dead, or being convinced you are one of them. During the interview Watt discusses her research into near-death experiences:
Alex Tsakiris: The other thing that upset me about the paper was the way it was picked up by so many science publications; Scientific America, NPR, BBC, Discovery, Discovery News. It’s not a strong paper. Yet, it gets echoed back through the mainstream science media as some kind of breakthrough about near-death experiences. Even though it directly contradicts all the leading researchers in the NDE field.
Dr. Caroline Watt: The leading researchers in the NDE field may publish their papers and have them reported as well. It’s an open forum. If it says something interesting, then it will be reported. Everybody can have a say. It’s not like I have some kind of privileged access.
Alex Tsakiris: I’m not suggesting that. I’m saying that what gets picked up and perpetuated through the science media is reflective of the current position, even if that position isn’t supported by the best data.
I’m saying your paper got traction even though there’s not a lot behind it. I’m saying you cited references incorrectly. And you referenced skeptics like Dr. Susan Blackmore who admits to not being current in the field.
Dr. Caroline Watt: As I said, it was intended to be a provocative piece. It’s not claiming to be balanced. The paper, if it wasn’t limited to two or three pages, I could have dealt more thoroughly with many different aspects because there’s more to near-death experiences then the dying brain hypothesis. It would have been a longer and more in-depth paper, but that wasn’t the paper that we wrote.
Dr. Caroline Watt
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Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Dr. Caroline Watt to Skeptiko. Dr. Watt is a founding member of the Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and has taught and researched parapsychology for 25 years. She is well published in the field, many peer review journals, and is also the author of the most popular textbook in parapsychology, An Introduction to Parapsychology. If we can add to all that, we can also mention that she has also served as a president and board member of the Parapsychological Association.
Dr. Watt, it’s a great pleasure to have you on Skeptiko. Thanks for joining me today.
Dr. Caroline Watt: Thanks, very much, for inviting me Alex.
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March 13th, 2012 Alex
Interview with NDE researcher Dr. Jan Holden unravels the claim, “there is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences.”
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with University of North Texas professor, Dr. Jan Holden, co-author of, The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences. During the interview Holden discusses her research into near-death experiences:
Alex Tsakiris: I wanted you to help me work through this paper titled, “There is Nothing Paranormal About Near-Death Experiences.”
Let me start out with the first question, what are they reporting on here? What’s the news? Have they done any original research in this paper?
Dr. Holden: I didn’t see any original research. What I saw was a compilation of theories and results that have been published for quite some time, and have been answered in—you mentioned The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences.
What I noticed about this article is that it’s citing a lot of old sources that have been responded to, and they did not even mention, let alone respond to, those responses.
Alex Tsakiris: Let’s get to the meat of their paper—I’ll give you this quote: “Contrary to popular belief, research suggests that there is nothing paranormal about these experiences. Instead, near-death experiences are the manifestation of normal brain function gone awry.”
I know from your continuing education course on near-death experience science there are at least 10 prospective NDE studies with in-hospitals patients. I don’t think one of them would support this conclusion. What research are they citing to support their claim?
Dr. Holden: I don’t know. The material that’s out there actually supports a different conclusion. To quote my colleague Bruce Greyson, “If you ignore everything paranormal about NDEs then it’s easy to conclude that there is nothing paranormal about them.”
And that’s what they have done.
Dr. Jan Holden
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Alex Tsakiris: Today we’re joined by Dr. Jan Holden from the University of North Texas, who is one of the contributors and one of the editors of The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation.
Welcome, Jan. Thanks for joining me today on Skeptiko.
Dr. Holden: Thank you, Alex, I’m happy to be here. Read the rest of this entry »
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March 6th, 2012 Alex
Interview with London physician Dr. Ian Rubenstein reveals how one doctor’s encounter with psychic phenomena led to Spiritualist Church mediumship. 
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Ian Rubenstein author of, CONSULTING SPIRIT: A Doctor’s Experience with Practical Mediumship. During the interview Rubenstein discusses how he struggled to understand his psychic abilities:
Alex Tsakiris: What you seem to be contrasting is a materialistic, medical paradigm that says there is none of this; this cannot happen. There is no way that the consciousness survives death. There is no way that spirits can influence us. That, I think, is what you’re really butting up against, and yet you seem to give that a lot more weight then I think it deserves in this case, especially given, (1) your personal experience and, (2) the research that you’ve done to see that there’s data to support it. Why do we have to stay with the materialistic paradigm? It doesn’t seem to work.
Dr. Ian Rubenstein: I think you’re looking at a guy struggling with this. I don’t come from a religious background at all. I’m a non-practicing, left-wing, Jewish background. All my family was, you could say, very anti-religious. I’m not a religious guy. Spirituality is not new to me. I’m as affected by new-age stuff as much as everybody else, but it’s not native to my culture and background, and certainly not to my education. Western rationalist education is all pervading; it colors the way you see the world. It’s there, and I’m dealing with this every day. At medical school, you were taught how to think. You have to think critically. You do not trust your instinct. Every doctor knows that instinct is very important, and you get a feel for it, but you’re not trained in this. One of the things I develop in my book is that I found that training as a medium, having had all these experiences and then ending up sitting in a spiritualist circle, I actually found that you can train your intuition, that you can to some extent trust it, and it’s very useful. I now use it much more in my consultations. Of course, a skeptic would say, “You know, Ian, you’re an experienced doctor. You’ve been a family physician for 28 years. You’ve been a doctor for 34 years. Maybe this is just ordinary stuff.” I don’t know.
Ian’s book: Consulting Spirit
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Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Dr. Ian Rubenstein to Skeptiko. Dr. Rubenstein is a general practitioner in London who’s written a fascinating book titled, Consulting Spirit: A Doctor’s Experience with Practical Mediumship. Welcome to Skeptiko, Ian, and thanks for joining me.
Dr. Ian Rubenstein: Thanks, Alex. Read the rest of this entry »
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February 21st, 2012 Alex
Interview with historian and Alfred Russell Wallace scholar challenges evolutionary biologist, Dr. Jerry Coyne.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Professor Michael Flannery, author of, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life. During the interview Flannery discusses Wallace’s contributions to the theory of evolution:
Alex Tsakiris: During the last episode of Skeptiko we were talking to Dr. Jerry Coyne and he had a number of things to say concerning the history of the theory of evolution and the relationship between Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. In particular, Jerry was emphatic in claiming Alfred Russel Wallace never connected biogeography to evolution, “Wallace did not use biogeography as evidence of evolution. I mean, never!”
That’s not how I remember this history, so I decided to check with Wallace biographer Professor Michael Flannery.
Professor Flannery: Well, he seems to really be unfamiliar with Wallace’s body of writing on that topic. The famous paleontologist and geologist, Henry Fairfield Osborn, he’s sort of an icon in the field, referred to Wallace’s Sarawak Law Paper as “A very strong argument for the Theory of Descent and a bold declaration from a strong and fearless Evolutionist.”
And actually if you’d like sort of an icing on the cake reference, Ian McCalman, who has written a pretty good book recently called Darwin’s Armada, refers to Wallace’s Sarawak Law paper as, “The first ever British scientific paper to claim that animals had descended from a common ancestor and then produced closely similar variations which have evolved into distinct species.”
Alex Tsakiris: All this might seem like a lot of minor detail that no one cares about, but this little bit of history is actually quite important in the culture war debate over the theory of evolution. Why does an otherwise smart guy like Dr. Jerry Coyne say these things which are so obviously incorrect? What’s the real agenda here?
Professor Flannery: Well, my guess is that he is either just unfamiliar with Wallace’s work, although that’s kind of hard to believe… I actually think that it just doesn’t serve his purpose. When you look at his book, Why Evolution is True, one of the things he’s writing against is Intelligent Design. To bring Wallace into the picture becomes problematic for him because Wallace himself came to view evolution as being guided.
Professor Michael Flannery’s Alfred Russel Wallace Website
Reply to Dr. Jerry Coyne on Biogeography
Roy Davies: In terms of biogeography Coyne doesn’t know what he is talking about
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Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode of Skeptiko I have a short follow-up interview with Professor Michael Flannery from the University of Alabama, Birmingham. He’s the author of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life.
Now you’ll recall that at the end of the last episode of Skeptiko I told you I was going to do this interview because when we were talking to Dr. Jerry Coyne during the last interview, he had a number of things to say about this relationship between Darwin and Wallace, and in particular about whether or not Alfred Russel Wallace ever connected biogeography to evolution. This sounds like a little bit of inside baseball and detail-oriented stuff that you may not care about in the bigger picture of science, but it turns out to be pretty central to this culture war debate surrounding the theory of evolution.
Here’s my interview with Professor Michael Flannery:
Alex Tsakiris: So I’ve managed to get Professor Mike Flannery on the phone here and Professor Flannery was nice enough to actually review the interview that we had with Jerry Coyne when I sent it to him. I thought there were some kind of direct points about the Darwin versus Wallace thing that he certainly knows a lot better than I do. I thought we’d have Professor Flannery back on here. Mike, thanks for joining me.
Professor Flannery: Sure. Read the rest of this entry »
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February 14th, 2012 Alex
Interview with University of Chicago professor and author of, Why Evolution is True, Dr. Jerry Coyne.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Jerry Coyne, author of, Why Evolution is True. During the interview Dr. Coyne discusses the connection between free will and the theory of evolution:
Dr. Jerry Coyne: My interest in free will did not really grow out of evolution. It’s just something I’ve been interested in lately trying to ponder human behavior.
Alex Tsakiris: Okay, but I think it is pretty important when we talk about what are the agencies of evolution. One of the articles that I sent you was on the research of Jeffrey Schwartz at UCLA. He studied Obsessive-compulsive disorder and found that self-directing thought could actually rewire their brain, something called neuroplasticity.
This research fits into this broad category of research that shows that intention, mental thought, can actually change the physical. Doesn’t that have an impact on the overall picture of evolution?
Dr. Jerry Coyne: I’d have to be convinced by reading this article that brains can change themselves without any external inputs from either the other parts of the body or the environment.
Alex Tsakiris: But it sounds like you are open to the idea that that would be directly relevant to evolutionary theory?
Dr. Jerry Coyne: No, I’m not. Again, I don’t understand why you keep trying to connect evolution with free will. Free will is, I believe, an illusion that we have that we can somehow affect the workings of our brain and free them from the laws of physics. My answer to that is no, we can’t arrange the subject of the laws of physics because they’re material entities.
The feeling that we have free will, which of course we all have, we all have that feeling of agency. Whether or not that’s proactive evolution or whether it’s an epiphenomena or anything like that is something that I don’t know. None of us know the answer to that question.
Jerry Coyne’s Website
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Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode of Skeptiko we’re going to dig into evolutionary biology.
I have to tell you, I’ve never been that interested in really exploring evolutionary biology. The reason is from the very beginning I saw the issues of consciousness being much more central to these core big picture science questions that we want to talk about. I mean, consciousness trumps evolution when we want to ask the questions of who are we really, where did we come from, what happens to us after we die? Consciousness more directly gets to those questions.
The people who are on the cutting edge of consciousness research really, I think, have a lot more to say about these things. For example, when we look at former guests like Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and his Morphic Resonance theory, his idea that somehow there is a habit that’s formed in this field of consciousness that we have and it drives us in a certain direction. He has some pretty interesting experiments that he’s put together that establish that that may in fact be happening.
When you look at what the impact of a theory like morphic resonance is on evolutionary biology, it kind of relegates evolutionary biology to a mere sideshow in this larger question of how did we come to be who we are?
The same can be said for a lot of the guests that we’ve had on Skeptiko. Dean Radin, for example, and his presentiment work. What might it mean if our actions right now are somehow influenced by the future? And then there’s the larger question of mind equals brain. Are we just biological robots? Again, Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne will tell you that you don’t have to look any further than evolutionary biology to answer those questions.
But it just seems obvious to me that we want to ask those questions more directly and look at direct evidence, for example, the near-death experience science that we’ve looked at on this show. I think anyone would have to acknowledge that it certainly is more direct in getting to that question of whether or not our mind is something more than just this biological brain that we have.
So these are the connections I was trying to make when I set up this interview with Jerry Coyne. These were the topics around evolutionary biology that I think are most interesting and I wanted to ask him about. But as you’ll see, we never quite got there. Here’s my interview with Dr. Jerry Coyne:
Today’s guest is one of the leading authorities on evolutionary genetics and speciation. Dr. Jerry Coyne is a professor at the University of Chicago. He’s published many popular as well as many scholarly articles on the Theory of Evolution, free will, science and religion, and Atheism. He’s also penned several popular science books including, Why Evolution is True. Dr. Coyne, welcome to Skeptiko. Thanks so much for joining me.
Dr. Jerry Coyne: My pleasure. Read the rest of this entry »
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Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with noted psychology professor Dr. Daryl Bem. During the interview Bem discusses the reaction to his research among parapsychology opponents:
