Hogwarts lite

Yesterday, we had the story of a Louisiana charter school whose textbooks use the Loch Ness Monster to "disprove evolution."  Today, we have a school in Montana that claims to be the world's "first real school of wizardry."  (Sources here and here.)

The Grey School of Wizardry, run by warlock-and-witch team Oberon and Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, is based in Helena, Montana.  Oberon states that the school's classes are mostly conducted online at the moment, with periodic weekend and summer workshops, but he currently has a bid in on a "castle in Helena" where he hopes to have a "real, complete educational facility, just like Hogwarts."

Now, lest you think that this is just a fanciful twist on a magnet school -- sorting kids into "houses," and throwing in a few magical trappings, but otherwise providing a conventional curriculum -- I hasten to correct your misapprehension.  These people are serious.  Let's look at a blurb on the Grey School of Wizardry's website, describing The Grimoire, one of the textbooks they use:

This essential handbook contains everything an aspiring Wizard needs to know. It is illustrated with original art by Oberon and friends, as well as hundreds of woodcuts from medieval manuscripts and alchemical texts, charts, tables, and diagrams. It also contains biographies of famous Wizards in history and legend; detailed descriptions of magickal tools and regalia (with full instructions for making them); spells and workings for a better life; rites and rituals for special occasions; a bestiary of mythical creatures; systems of divination; the Laws of Magick; myths and stories of gods and heroes; lore and legends of the stars and constellations; and instructions for performing amazing illusions, special effects, and many other wonders of the magickal multiverse.

I'd often made the comment that the zealots who want biology teachers to "present all sides of the controversy" over evolution never want chemistry teachers to do the same regarding alchemy.

I stand corrected.

On the site, which you should definitely peruse when you have time and a few brain cells that you don't mind losing, you will find:

• A full description of the program, including majors and minors and so on.  How'd you like to put that on your college application -- "in my school, I majored in Charms with a minor in Potions."  I bet that colleges would just knock themselves out to give you a scholarship!
• A complete faculty list, which includes people named "Alferian MacLir," "Willow Silverhawk," and "Rainbow Stonetalker."
• A description of the Grey Council, which governs the school.  The Grey Council is a "legendary Council of Wizards, Mages & Sages which has been a recurring theme through many tales and histories of Magick and Wizardry."  So don't even let it cross your mind that these are a bunch of delusional posers who think they can do magic.  Excuse me, magick.
• The Colors of Magick -- describing the properties of each color.  My favorite one was "clear" -- "clear is the color of numbers and mathemagicks, reflecting the transparency with which all creation is suffused with magickal formulae."  Whatever the hell that means.

So, if you have a child between the ages of 11 and 18, you can sign him/her up for classes, and soon, you might even be able to pack him/her on a train (boarding at platform 9-3/4, of course) for Helena!  What an opportunity for a quality education!

Okay, so maybe not.  Maybe these people are just as wrong-headed as our fundamentalist chums from yesterday, who think that teaching kids mythology is the best way to educate them about how the world really works.  It's easy to laugh at the presumptive witches and wizards of the Grey School of Wizardry, especially given that they (unlike the fundamentalists) aren't trying to foist their delusions on the rest of the country.  But if these people somehow get a charter, and turn the Grey School into an actual, accredited educational facility -- I think I'm just going to sit down and have a nice long cry.

Breaking news: The Loch Ness Monster disproves evolution!

Will Rogers once said, "If you find you've dug yourself into a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging."

This is a lesson that has apparently yet to sink in for some young-earth creationists who decided to get together and write a science textbook -- an endeavor that, in so many ways, resembles a bunch of ten-year-olds trying to stage a Broadway musical in their back yard.  (Source)

This particular crew turned out a book called Biology for Accelerated Christian Education, Incorporated, and (of course) the book harps continuously on the ideas that evolution is a great big lie, and that the Earth is only six thousand years old.  The consensus of thousands of trained research scientists is irrelevant in the face of the revealed truth of Genesis; in fact, there are hints of a huge anti-Christian conspiracy, funded by the secular left and (once again, of course) backed by Satan himself.  So far, all of this is fairly yawn-inducing, but for two things.

One of them is the new twist of using the Loch Ness Monster to disprove evolution.

I couldn't possibly make anything this bizarre up.  Here's the relevant passage, which I present here verbatim:

Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the 'Loch Ness Monster' in Scotland? 'Nessie' for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.

In another lesson, the writers mention that a Japanese whaling vessel "caught what appears to be a small aquatic dinosaur."

So, what we have here is one mythological view of the world being used to prove another mythological view of the world, which would be funny except for the second thing: ACE-sponsored textbooks, including this one, are being used in some charter schools in Louisiana, which means that government-funded vouchers are being used to pay for this curriculum, and to teach it to children -- if you can call this teaching.  There you have it, folks: your tax dollars at work.

One thing that I was unclear on, however, was how Nessie (if she does exist) bears any kind of relevance to the truth of young-earth creationism.  Suppose dinosaurs did survive until the modern era; why does that mean that evolution is false?  Here's how it's explained by Jonny Scaramanga, an anti-fundamentalist activist who was subjected to an ACE curriculum as a child but fortunately came out with enough of his brain intact to be able to escape: "The 'Nessie claim' is presented as evidence that evolution couldn't have happened. The reason for that is they're saying if Noah's flood only happened 4000 years ago, which they believe literally happened, then possibly a sea monster survived.  If it was millions of years ago then that would be ridiculous. That's their logic. It's a common thing among creationists to believe in sea monsters."

Unsurprising, given what else they believe.  But as tortuous logic goes, this one beats anything else I've heard.  Having dug themselves into one hole -- abandoning the principles of scientific induction in favor of a Bronze-Age mythology for which there is absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever -- they continued to dig until they reached the further substratum of cryptozoology.  The horrifying thing is the number of people who are happily willing to join them in the pit, the government officials who are eager to fund the digging process -- and the thousands of children who are being dragged down there involuntarily in the name of "choice in education."

Imaginary beasts and made-to-order worlds

One general tendency I see amongst woo-woos of all types is a sense that the world has to be a certain way because it "feels like it must be so."  It goes beyond wishful thinking; it's not just a Pollyanna-ish "everything will turn out for the best."  It's more that they espouse an idea because it appeals to them on an emotional or intuitive level -- not because it lines up with what is scientifically demonstrable (and sometimes, despite the idea in question being demonstrably wrong).

I ran into an amusing example of this just yesterday, from the desk of the always-entertaining Nick Redfern.  Redfern, you might recall, is a frequent writer for Cryptomundo and Mysterious Universe, and is a particular aficionado of Bigfoot and other cryptids.  You'd think that eventually, cryptid-hunters would tire of the hunt after repeatedly bagging zero cryptids, and would give up and say, "Well, I guess we were wrong, after all."  But no: they keep at it, coming up with progressively more abstruse explanations about why the cryptids aren't showing up.  We have Linda Jo Martin's idea, that Bigfoot can avoid us because he's telepathic; Erich Kuersten, instead, makes the claim that Bigfoots are aliens, and when they hear us coming they escape in their spaceships.  But if you think those are wacky ideas, you haven't heard nothin' yet. Wait until you hear what Redfern has in store for us!

He thinks that we can't catch any cryptids, because they are created by our overactive imaginations.

Well, okay, you may be saying; isn't that what you've been telling us all along?  A bunch of cryptid hunters go out a-squatchin', and they see a shadow and hear a noise in the woods, and their overactive imaginations turn it into a Bigfoot?  No, that isn't what Redfern is saying at all; when I said he thinks that cryptids are "created by our overactive imaginations," I meant it in its most literal sense -- that we generate these beasts from our minds, and then they become real, real enough for other people to see.

"Could it be that just like Mothra and the saga of the The Mothman Prophecies," Redfern writes,  "The Valley of Gwangi unconsciously inspired people to muse upon the possibility of real flying reptiles in and around the Texas-Mexico border? And, as a result, did phantom-forms of such beasts step right out of the human imagination and achieve a form of ethereal existence in the real world? Granted, it’s a highly controversial theory, but it’s one that parallels very well with the theories pertaining to so-called Tulpas and thought-forms."

Well, I'm sorry, if you start out your argument by citing Mothra, you've lost some credibility points right from the get-go.  And someone really ought to sit down the entire seven billion human inhabitants of the Earth and clarify for them all, simultaneously, what the definition of the word "theory" is, because I'm getting sick and tired of doing it piecemeal.  A "theory" doesn't mean "some damnfool idea I just dreamed up."  It also doesn't mean "an idea that could just as easily be wrong as right," such as the way it's used in the young-earth creationist's favorite mantra, "Evolution is just a theory."  A theory is a scientific model that is well-supported by evidence, and has (thus far) stood the test of experiment.  So, therefore, Redfern's "theory" about actual flying reptiles coming from the minds people reading a novel about pterosaurs surviving until modern time is not a theory, it's a loony idea with no scientific backing whatsoever.

But that's not my main point, here; what I find the most curious about all of this is that Redfern et al. seem to have the idea that just because some bizarre version of reality is appealing to them on an emotional level, that means that the world must work that way.  The universe, then, is somehow made-to-order, constructed to fit what we want, need, or expect the universe to be.  I find this an odd stance, because (plentiful as my other faults are) this is never something I've fallen prey to.  It seemed abundantly clear to me, from as soon as I was old enough to consider the point, that there was no special reason why my desires that the world be a certain way would have any bearing at all on the way the world actually is.  "Wishin'," as my grandma use to say, "don't make it so."

Or, to quote (of all people!) Carlos Castañeda, from Journey to Ixtlan, "Why should the world be only as you think it is? Who gave you the authority to say so?" And if my ending my discussion of this topic with a quote from Castañeda doesn't introduce enough cognitive dissonance into your day to rock your Monday, I don't know what more I could do.

Order out of chaos

One of the consistent criticisms I hear of the evolutionary model, as embodied in the principle of natural selection, is that it claims that order has appeared out of an essentially random process.

"You admit that mutations are random," the critic says.  "And then in the same breath, you say that these random mutations have driven evolution to create all of the complexity of life around us.  How is that possible?  Chaos can only create more chaos, never order.  For order, there must be a Designer."

Now, Professor Armand Leroi, of the Imperial College of London, has teamed up with musician Brian Eno to demonstrate that this view is profoundly incorrect, because it misses 2/3 of what is necessary for evolution to occur.  Not only do you need mutations -- random changes in the code -- you also need two other things: a replication mechanism, and something external acting as a selecting agent.

In order to show how quickly order can come from chaos, Leroi and Eno created a piece of electronic "music" that was just a jumble of random notes and chords.  They then allowed 7,000 internet volunteers to rate various bits of the string of notes for how pleasant they sounded.  The sum total of these votes was used by a computer program to create a second generation of the tune (replication), making a few changes each time (mutation), and then choosing to retain segments that were the most popular (selection).  Then the whole process was repeated.

After 3,000 generations, a pleasant, and relatively complex, melodic riff was created -- with interlocking phrases and an interesting and steady rhythm.  It's not exactly what the rather hyperbolic headline in The Telegraph says it is -- "the perfect pop song" -- but for something that bootstrapped itself upwards out of chaos, it's not bad.  (Listen to an audio clip that outlines the progression of the piece from random notes to listenable music here.)

The analogy to evolution isn't perfect, in that human judges with an end product in mind (modern western music) were picking the sound combinations that matched that goal the best.  In that respect, it more closely resembles artificial selection -- in which naturally-occurring mutations result in changes to a population, and humans act to select the ones they think are the most useful.  It is in this way that virtually every breed of domestic animal has been created, most of them in the past thousand years.

But still, as a first-order approximation, it's not bad, and certainly gives a nice answer to people who think that chaos can never give rise to order without the hand of a Designer.  It turns out that no Designer is necessary, as long as you have something acting as a selecting mechanism -- even if that something is as simple as 7,000 people on the internet giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to tiny fragments of a musical passage.  In the natural world, with the powerful dual selectors of survival and reproduction, and two billion years to work, it suddenly ceases to be surprising that the Earth has millions of different and diverse life forms -- although that fact is, and always will be, a source of wonderment and awe for me even so.

The psychic and the murder accusation

What will it take for people to stop believing in psychics?

Most big-name psychics -- James van Praagh, "Psychic Sally" Morgan, Sylvia Browne, Uri Geller, John Edward -- have come under fire from skeptics, and many of them have been caught cheating (in the case of Morgan, more than once).  Each time it happens, I think, "Maybe this will be it.  Maybe people will stop listening, stop going to their shows, stop sending them thousands of dollars for bogus 'readings.'"

And I keep being wrong.  Each time, no matter how plausible the accusation, no matter how well supported the criticism, they bounce back.  "... (W)e (psychics) are here to heal people and to help people grow," van Praagh said in an interview on Larry King Live.  "(S)keptics... they're just here to destroy people.  They're not here to encourage people, to enlighten people.  They're here to destroy people."

And their fans, bleating softly, come right back, and the money starts flowing in again.

A recent story illustrates this brilliantly -- and has me once again thinking, probably wrongly, that this will be the time people will sit back and say, "Okay, that's it.  We're done with you charlatans."  (Sources here and here.)

This is a tale about a psychic who calls herself "Angel" and a couple in Liberty County, Texas, north of Houston.  "Angel," whose real name has yet to be released, called the Liberty County Sheriff's Office in June of last year, to report that there were 25 to 30 dismembered bodies buried on a piece of property.  She directed them to the home of Joe Bankson and Gena Charlton, where she said the bodies were, and told them she'd received the information in communication directly from an actual angel.

The Sheriff's Office, astonishingly, didn't guffaw directly at "Angel" and hang up on her; they went and investigated, and in fact dug holes all over Bankson and Charlton's property looking for the alleged bodies.  Meanwhile, the story of the mass burial site was picked up by local news services, and it spread -- first to Houston-based KPRC-TV, then to ABC News, and finally to Reuters, CNN, and The New York Times.  All of this, based on (1) a tip from a "psychic" who heard it from an "angel," and (2) zero actual dismembered bodies.

Well, finally the police gave up, but not before Bankson and Charlton's property looked like a minefield, and the couple themselves had to defend themselves against accusations of being serial killers.  As far as "Angel," the Houston Chronicle said, "The 48-year-old woman, who asked to only be identified by her nickname of Angel, said she never wanted any attention and fears the worldwide interest in the case will destroy her life if her identity is known publicly." And about her failed psychic tip, she defends herself thusly, in an interview with KHOU News of Houston:

I didn’t file a false report.  If they make it to be false, that’s up to them, you know. ... I did what I was told to do.  I followed what Jesus and the angels told me to do.  It’s up to them from there. ...  They [the police] up front asked me how I got the information, and I am a reverend.  I am a prophet and I get my information from Jesus and the angels, and I told them that I had 32 angels with me and they were giving me the information.

So now she's bringing in the big guns: Jesus and no less than 32 angels.  Because that obviously makes it all right.

Well, predictably, Bankson and Charlton aren't buying it.  They're suing "Angel," the news outlets, and the Liberty County Sheriff's Office for defamation.  Now, I'm not a huge believer in lawsuits, but this is one I'm behind 100% -- and in a fair world, it should be a slam dunk for the attorney representing Bankson and Charlton, Andrew Sommerman of Dallas.  In fact, I think that Bankson and Charlton should not only win monetary damages, I think that "Angel," the Sheriff of Liberty County, and the CEOs of all of the news agencies that reported the story as legitimate news should be forced to completely re-landscape Bankson and Charlton's property using only hand tools.

But, of course, it's not a fair world.  Nor is it a rational one.  I don't think their lawsuit is a sure thing at all -- superstition, ignorance, and irrationality still rule the day all too often.  People are sadly prone to wishful thinking, clinging to a counterfactual view of the world that still for some reason gives them comfort, and their memories are short.  And if "Angel" is acquitted -- which I think is all too likely -- it wouldn't surprise me to hear that she puts her shingle back out, and will be back to passing along messages from Jesus and the angels in no time at all.

Alien footprints, leprechauns, and truth in advertising

Here at Skeptophilia headquarters, we're closely following three stories, all of which leave us saying "What the hell?" or some stronger variant.

In the first, we have a story from Kentucky, about a man who claims that his family is being terrorized by a bunch of cave-dwelling three-toed aliens.  (Source)

The man, who for obvious reasons didn't want his name released and is going by the pseudonym "David," stated that for the past nine months, his property has been repeatedly visited by alien beings "the size and stature of a small child, devoid of any facial features save for large, oily eyes and lipless mouths."

In an email that he sent to Ghost Hunters, Incorporated last year, he describes his first encounter with the aliens:

Standing in the flower bed just to the bottom left of my window was a small, humanoid figure, with sickly pale skin, completely hairless, standing roughly 4′. It was looking in the direction of the shadows, and had clearly come from around the left side of the house opposite the porch and had not noticed me as far as I could tell. It’s face was devoid of features, save for large round eyes, very reminiscent in shape and color of a bird’s eye. It had no nose to speak of, and only a small slit for a mouth. It didn’t appear to move it’s mouth as it chirped, sounding more as if the noises originated from it’s throat. It was most certainly not a “wild animal” and even more certainly not a child. I was too terrified to move, and watched as the creature hopped to the others, and together they scrambled into the woods on the right side of my property. It was clear that there were at least five in the group.

Ghost Hunters, Incorporated sent some folks out to investigate, and they went and poked around in an abandoned mine on "David's" property where he said the aliens lived, but they didn't find anything.

But "David" says the visitations have continued, and even his kids have seen the aliens, peering in their bedroom windows at night.  And now, "David" says that he now has proof of the visitations: a footprint.  Because obviously that couldn't be faked.  And he says that if nobody will take action, he will:

Though I’m armed, I’m afraid that I’m far too frightened to enter the mine by my lonesome, and cannot convince any sympathetic friends to accompany me, though I cannot blame them. I am convinced that the only answer is to collapse the mine.

So he's planning on blowing up the mine.  And I can't imagine how that could end badly, can you?


Actually, perhaps "David" should count his blessings; at least he didn't get beaten up by a pack of leprechauns.  (Source)

This past weekend, Seattle police got a report of a fight on Bell Street, near the Alaskan Way Viaduct.  Arriving at the scene at 1:55 AM, they found a "bruised and bloodied" man who was "holding his head and screaming in pain."

The police questioned the man, and were astonished when the man told them that his assailants were leprechauns, who were mad at him because he was "dancing with a girl."

Myself, I always thought that leprechauns were pro-dancing, as long as you didn't dance anywhere near their pots of gold.  Maybe the victim and his girlfriend were attempting to do a Riverdance-style Irish step dance, and doing it badly, and the leprechauns felt the need to defend Ireland's honor.  Or maybe his assailants just happened to be short guys dressed in green.

Whichever it was, the police did a brief search of the area, and were unable to find any leprechauns, so the victim was taken to Harborview Medical Center, where he was treated for his injuries and then released.


It's perhaps fortunate for him that the assault didn't take place in England, where the Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that a Christian group's website can include a page that encourages sick people to seek out healing through prayer alone, because "God heals everything." (Source)

Healing on the Streets (HOTS), a British evangelical group which supports faith healing, was told by the ASA last year that it had to take down a page on its website because it was making false medical claims, to wit:

Need Healing?  God can heal today!  Do you suffer from Back Pain, Arthritis, MS, Addiction ... Ulcers, Depression, Allergies, Fibromyalgia, Asthma, Paralysis, Crippling Disease, Phobias, Sleeping disorders or any other sickness?  We'd love to pray for your healing right now!  We're Christian from churches in Bath and we pray in the name of Jesus.  We believe that God loves you and can heal you from any sickness.

You have to wonder, if all of this is true, why Christians get illnesses just as often as the rest of us do.  Shouldn't there at least be some kind of statistically significant difference between the rates of serious disease in the faithful, as compared to the rest of us slobs?  So myself, I think that the ASA was exactly right in stating that HOTS was making "false medical claims," and endangering the lives of the credulous by discouraging them from seeking out conventional care when they are ill.

But the ASA was bombarded by letters from irate Christians, claiming that they were treading on the Toes of the Divine, and the ASA reversed their ruling.  "We acknowledged that HOTS volunteers believed that prayer could treat illness and medical conditions, and that therefore the ads did not promote false hope," they stated, in the revised decision.

No?  What, then, do you call it when some poor deluded person with MS is told that all that's necessary for a cure is prayer in the name of Jesus?  I think the whole thing is despicable, and that the ASA should be ashamed of themselves for not sticking to their guns.


So that's our news from the world of woo-woo for today; cave-dwelling aliens in Kentucky, leprechauns in Seattle, and faith healing in England.  As always, our motto here is: Fighting Gullibility With Sarcasm.

Erich Kuersten, Penn Yan, and the quality of evidence

A recent post by noted wingnut Erich Kuersten, "The Zealots of Doubt: Why Skeptics Are The New Cranks" made me feel like I had to clear up a few things.

Kuersten's screed levies a charge at people of my general outlook, one that I've heard many times:

...skepticism no longer means curious or open to new input and has instead become the refuge of the bitter and attention-seeking...  A true skeptic is not swayed either by science or religion or firsthand experience, they are not suckers but neither are they fundamentalist zealots, BUT when you deny any evidence, even if it's just firsthand accounts, because it doesn't fit your paradigm, then you are not a skeptic, you are exactly what you're seeking to expose, a religious nut, only for science instead of God. You're an anti-zealotry zealot.

He gives a few examples of what we skeptics would disbelieve in, if we were just honest and consistent with our approach:

They claim they'll believe in aliens when they can meet one in person, yet the believe in George Washington based purely on anecdotal evidence, at best, firsthand witness reports filtered down through the ages, some sketchy portraits. And if they haven't been to Morocco, how do they even find the courage to trust it's there?

So like I said, I'd heard this sort of thing before, although never from this source.  Kuersten usually spends more of his time demonstrating evidence of his curiosity and openness to new input by claiming that Bigfoots are actually telepathic proto-hominids who were slaves to the ruling aliens prior to the Great Flood of Noah.  (See my post on his ideas here.)  So I'm perhaps to be forgiven for entertaining some doubts about his reliability right from the get-go.

Let's look past that, however, and (as befits a true skeptic) look at his criticisms honestly, with no consideration of what else he's claimed.  Is he right?  Does my general disbelief in ghosts and ESP and the Loch Ness Monster mean that, if I was to apply the same principles to everything, I would also disbelieve in Morocco and George Washington?  Am I, in his words, an anti-zealotry zealot?

Well, predictably, I don't think so, and the reason has to do with quality of evidence.

Let me give you an example.

There's a town in New York called Penn Yan.  Penn Yan isn't very far from where I live, but as it so happens, I've never been to Penn Yan.  I hear it's a nice place, from friends who've visited.  I've seen photographs, and it's in my road atlas, and also on Google Maps, MapQuest, and so on.  Now, let's consider two rival hypotheses:

1)  Penn Yan exists, as advertised.
2)  Penn Yan is a giant hoax designed to hoodwink credulous travelers.

I do not have direct, first-hand evidence for either of these.  Which of these hypotheses, however, would (if true) force the greatest revision of our current understanding of how the world works?  Clearly, if hypothesis #2 is correct, and Penn Yan does not exist, it leaves unanswered several questions, to wit:

What is actually in the place where I had previously assumed Penn Yan was?  A giant hole?
What earthly motive do all of the people who created the Great Penn Yan Hoax have for doing this?
How do you explain all of the photographs, maps, and other "artifacts" that attest to Penn Yan's existence?

It doesn't take much of a stretch to see that that we need a vastly higher quality of evidence to accept hypothesis #2 than we do to accept hypothesis #1.

Kuersten's problem is that he seems to think that skepticism (if only we would be fair about the whole thing) should start out as a blank slate, when in fact the skeptical, rational approach has already given us a rock-solid framework within which to understand the world.  This framework is called science.  We already know a great deal about physics, biology, and chemistry -- so when a psychic claims to be able to bend spoons with his mind, scientists aren't going to begin from the standpoint that this is as likely to be true as not.  We have a fine understanding of forces and energy; we also have a good (although less complete) grasp of how the human brain works.  Neither of these is sufficient to explain how someone could perform telekinesis.  Therefore, if you claim that you can perform mental spoon-bending, you'd better have a far higher quality of evidence than my null-hypothesis ("you're not doing any such thing") would require.  (This concept is at the heart of both Ockham's Razor and the ECREE principle, two models of critical thinking that serve as excellent rules of thumb.)

Kuersten wants to throw every idea -- however counter it is to our current understanding -- into the same pot:

Science admits it's barely begun to explore the 'other' 90% of the brain, all while ridiculing any conjecture about what the unknown 90% may consist of. Telepathy is ridiculous (why? They can't be bothered to ask their superiors for fear of being branded a kook); science admits they've catalogued less than 20% of all the creatures that exist in the ocean, but sea serpents are ridiculous.

Well, first, I'm not sure what "other 90% of the brain" he's talking about, but even allowing that he's speaking metaphorically, all he's doing here is relying on a logical fallacy called "the argument from ignorance."  "We don't know what is out there in deep space, so it could be aliens: therefore aliens exist."  "We don't know if there is an afterlife: therefore ghosts exist."  The problem with all of these claims is that skeptics need something more than the argument from ignorance, especially given that most of the claims of woo-woos like Kuersten fly in the face of one or more established, tested scientific principles.

But nevertheless: could I (and other skeptics like me) be wrong?  Of course.  As I've said over and over in this blog, I will happily revise my views on any or all of the ideas that I've poked fun at over the years.  All I need is solid evidence.  You think sea-serpents exist?  Show me a bone that we can DNA test.  You think telepathy exists?  Prove it in a controlled study.  I'm not going to say that your views are impossible, but thus far, the quality of evidence is insufficient to support them.  And in view of that, the accepted paradigm is a great deal more likely to be true.  And I'd be willing to wager my next month's salary that if I were to get on Highway 14 and head west, Penn Yan would be right there, where the map said it was.