It’s kind of become a tradition (can I claim tradition after just three years?) that I do my Top 10 science stories of the year in this column in the Christmas and New Year’s editions. For 2015, though, I thought I might give it a bit of a twist, so, here are, in no particular order, the last five of my Top 10 pseudoscience newsmakers of 2015.
The Internet
I thought about putting Mike Adams and/or Dr. Joseph Mercola on this list, but realized they are a symptom of a much bigger problem. Mass, instant, electronic communication allows a lot of misinformation to be passed around very quickly without any sort of vetting whatsoever.
Web sites such as Adams’ Natural News and Mercola’s mercola.com are virtual storehouses of dubious claims and utter nonsense. It’s easy, however, for them to look credible with slick programming and snazzy graphics.
Furthermore, the way search engines work, sites are not ranked by veracity. You often have to sort through pages of results before you get to anything resembling credible. A search for ‘supplements’ for example brings up dozens of commercial sites where you can buy them before you get to the latest research about their dubious benefits.
And of course, it is hard to know whether people like Adams, Mercola and others who made the list, such as “The Food Babe” and Dr. Oz are true believers or just in it to make a buck. These people are making millions of dollars selling junk. The Internet is a marketer’s dream.
Oprah
It would be easy enough to leave Oprah off the 2015 list simply because she does not have the same personal profile since she stopped doing her network show.
Unfortunately, she is still the head of one of the biggest media empires in the world and her legacy of providing a forum for every kind of quackery and woo lives on with the Oprah Winfry Network (OWN) and O (The Oprah Magazine). OWN is available to 81.9 million household in the U.S. and O has an average paid circulation of close to three million copies.
In short, she remains incredibly influential despite exhibiting little or no capacity for critical thinking.
Texas State Board of Education
The Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) once again created controversy with its new social studies curriculum this year. New textbooks question the legal doctrine of separation of church and state, gloss over slavery and segregation, propagandize American capitalism and justify McCarthyism.
Of course, this is not the first time the SBOE has been accused of distorting information with social conservative bias. Thousands of Texas public school students are already using textbooks that call the fossil record “sketchy” that evolution is “dogma” and an “unproved theory” and that “leading scientists” dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age of the Earth. These things are not mere distortions, they are outright lies that are being taught to children.
Furthermore, as the second largest buyer of textbooks in the United States, Texas has a marked influence on publishers and these flawed materials are already making their way into other states.
The Government of Ontario
This year the Ontario government passed The Ontario Homeopathy Act giving homeopaths a mechanism for self-regulation like real doctors and nurses.
Homeopathy has been extensively studied and disproven beyond any shadow of a doubt. By passing this law, the Ontario government is basically legitimizing something that simply does not work.
There really is very little more to say except shame on legislators in Canada’s most populace province.
The public
Everybody on this list, from Donald Trump to Oprah, have one thing in common. They could not do what they do, if not for a credulous audience.
I struggle all the time to understand why human beings are so prone to believe in nonsense. It must serve some kind of evolutionary purpose. Certainly, there is a biological imperative to fit in. Whether it is religion or country or sports teams, we tend to organize ourselves into groups based on common attributes or preferences.
It is unfortunate.
