Articles on the Activities of Dogmatic Skeptics
Bertrand Russell and Mnemic Causation
by Ted Dace “It often turns out important to the progress of science,” writes Bertrand Russell, “to remember hypotheses which have previously seemed improbable.”1 If only he’d been true to his word. On the brink of a genuinely scientific account of the mind, he cobbled together a straw-man substitute and promptly set it alight. His...
The Anti-Sheldrake Phenomenon
Attacking Morphic Resonance By Ted Dace, February 2010 By devising a testable hypothesis of natural memory, Rupert Sheldrake has established himself as the world’s central figure in the evolutionary theory of existence. Heir to the lineage of Darwin, Peirce, Bergson, Elsasser and Bohm, Sheldrake bears on his shoulders the weight of their worldview. Attacks on...
JREF’s “Amazing Meeting” Not so Amazing
By Ted Dace The Amazing Conference, Las Vegas, January 13-16, 2005 The theme of the Amazing Conference, sponsored by the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), was succinctly expressed by keynote speaker and Skeptic magazine editor, Michael Shermer: “We’re selling science.” From the get-go, the 500-plus participants at the conference, held at the Stardust Hotel in...
National Geographic TV’s ‘Is It Real?’
By Ted Dace In the battle between scientism and pseudoscience real science gets squeezed out. You would never know, watching National Geographic’s “Is It Real?” television series, that anomalies abound wherever we look in this fundamentally chaotic and baffling world. For every flying saucer report that’s debunked, another remains completely inexplicable. For every ghost story...