Skeptical Shrink

Today I feel the need to respond publicly to a letter that appeared in what passes for an actual local newspaper on Long Island, namely Newsday. Roger Waters is scheduled to appear in concert at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum (which everyone conveniently but irreverently calls "Nassau Coliseum"). It is an outmoded arena constructed in the early 1970s to accommodate the then-new New York Islanders NHL franchise. The Islanders have since left for hipper but perhaps not greener pastures in Brooklyn, while Nassau County (which owns the Coliseum) responded by shrinking the number of seats, slapping on an ugly facade, and jacking up the parking fee. So here's the thing: Waters is an ultra-left activist who has been sharply critical of Israel's policies towards the Palestinians living in the occupied territories. This has prompted some on Long Island to demand that county officials and the Coliseum management step in and cancel their contract with Waters' promot...

A political columnist wrote that liberals should stop asking how poor whites in Middle America could keep voting against their own economic interests because it's the wrong question. "People don't vote with their wallets," he observed. "They vote for their values." And those values presumably have something to do with more guns, fewer immigrants, and no gays marrying each other. I'm not so sure that people never vote with their wallets. One sure way to pick up votes is to promise to lower taxes. But if you promise that, you'd better deliver. Just ask George HW Bush, who won after promising no new taxes, then lost re-election when he reneged on that promise. Then there is the question of the evangelicals. Where did they stash their "Christian values" when they came out overwhelmingly in support of the pussy-grabbing, twice-divorced Donald Trump? It's been suggested that they were just being practical -- that they saw a chance to fill...

One of the common objections to evolution from people who don't understand evolution is that humans, with their superior intellect, could not have "come from apes." This stems in part from the oft-copied but erroneous meme we're all used to seeing -- that of a single-file procession from early primate to monkey to ape to early hominid to Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon, concluding with modern human. In fact, evolution has never claimed that humans descended in a straight line from apes; the evolution of modern humans places us on one branch of the primate bough of the mammalian tree, with humans and modern apes sharing a common ancestor many millions of years ago. Thus, the Creationist's challenge, "If humans came from apes, why are there still apes?" becomes just so much more ignorant nonsense. If you still doubt that our closest living relatives are the chimpanzees, here's a striking recollection of mine from a black-and-white primate research film I s...

I am, first and foremost, a skeptic. My lack of belief in deities or the supernatural is a product of my demand for evidence: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." But too often I've heard believers in a god or the immaterial assert that "atheism is just another religion," or that "skeptics have turned science into their religion." They're likely to try to attempt to wrap up discussions on the subject with, "You believe what you want, and I'll believe what I want." A few days ago, I departed New York City's Garment District after having attended an annual four-day conference known as NECSS -- the North East Conference on Science and Skepticism. Produced by the New York City Skeptics (of which I am a member), it brings together some of the finest minds in science and rationality, and attracts freethinkers and skeptics from all over the globe. At this year's conference, I had the pleasure of spending time with...