I am terrified about the recent talk about poles reversing and 2012. Do I need to prepare myself and accept this?

In late December 2012, three planets will line up correct? And the earth will pass next to the black hole in orion’s belt, and turn our planet upside down. My question is, will the earth’s gravity withstand it and hold us up and the oceans from going wild?

According to NASA scientists, the earth will stand still for about three days and then, in one hour, rotate a full 90 degrees (the geographical pole shift) during which time winds will be an average of 200 miles per hour. Every volcano on earth will erupt and of course there will be many earthquakes, so two thirds of earth’s population will die in that one hour. Is this true??

How can an astrobiologist have anything to say scientifically about nibiru, the Shumerian planet? With scientists around the world finding facts in the existing scriptures on everything else, including Pluto, then why would we not believe them about nibiru? How can we say nibiru doesn’t exist if science is only in the past few decades catching up with a science that has existed before civilized man?

There are various recent pictures and videos of an unidentified object that is beside the sun. If it is not Planet X what is it? I myself took a picture of the sun and have also captured the same object.

I am a legal administrative assistant and, having done my share of investigation, I find that the fact that the sun will pass in front of the earth and roughly eclipse the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way on Dec 21, 2012 decidedly compelling. There seems to be so much real evidence supporting the fact that something extraordinary is happening or going to happen, that I cannot simply dismiss it.

If Nibiru is a hoax, please explain to me why have you not tried to confirm this with the media to at least drain some fear out of the many people who are falling for this hoax.

Someone has said that the Nibiru can be visible by our eyes since 15th May 2009 in south hemisphere. Someone also said that you, NASA have known this planet X, Nibiru since 1983. I really feel afraid of the end of world. Please tell me the truth!!

Why NASA is hiding facts about nibiru? It really exists beyond pluto. There is photo proof for that. It seems to me that you and NASA hide something big.

I am from Pakistan, and here the propaganda of 2012 is rising day by day. A lot of people is doing business from 2012. My question is why is NASA not condemning these hoax?

Why doesn’t you and your government put a ban on the TV shows and report telecasting about Nibiru? If US can step to protect the world physically from terrorism, why can’t it protect us mentally from these news, if they are hoax?

If you claim that the nibiru planet is a hoax why is there actual footage from the nasa stating that the planet exists?

I am a Russian journalist. We in this country have many people who are anxious about problem Nibiru. I know that serious scientists including in the USA do not accept Nibiru theory of Zecharia Sitchin. But tell, please, who from the scientific USA does not support even the existence of Nibiru?

I don’t believe NASA. Nibiru will throw modern-day science as we know it for a loop. NASA knows it’s there, but all will be revealed soon. . . . So why are you not telling the truth? Please answer me, I’m a boy, and I’m 16 years old.

If Nibiru is such a hoax then why was it on the History Channel and why don’t you guys have censors for such “hoaxes” then? I have four little babies and I think all of the human race deserves to know the truth from you “experts”. If it’s real then do the right thing; if not quit letting these hoaxes confuse true issues please.

The execution was new, but the scare was not. The media has been reporting for years on alleged links between cell-phone usage and brain tumors, and alarmist headlines continue to excite the public regardless of the facts. As far back as 2000, spoof videos were being created of eggs being cooked by cell-phone power. The creator of the first of these, electronics expert Charlie Ivermee, created his video to poke fun at media scare stories but was surprised when it was taken seriously. As an early viral, which in those days were mostly circulated by e-mail, it accidentally exploited a powerful stimulus: fear. Despite the creator’s satirical intention, he had underestimated the public’s willingness to demonize new technology and find cancer around every corner.

Fast forward to 2008 when YouTube videos imply that cell phones emit enough radiation to cook popcorn. The viewer is left to assume that it’s true, although a moment’s thought about the temperature needed to pop a kernel of corn—150 degrees Fahrenheit—might give even the average YouTube viewer pause. If your cell phone reached that temperature, you’d very probably notice. It’s not hot enough to melt plastic, but it’s hot enough to burn skin.

So who would benefit from pandering to public concerns about health and cancer? Satirists, certainly, who are then free to expose their mockery of scaremongering. But the brains behind the popcorn video had another motive: profit. Cardo Systems describe themselves as “an established world leader in the field of wireless Bluetooth communications.” In other words, they make the wireless headsets that help you avoid putting your mobile phone to your ear. Useful for hands-free chatting while driving, but perhaps a horrible fiery death in a car wreck wasn’t considered appropriate material for a viral video. The creative team at Cardo who created the popcorn videos exploited existing concerns about cell-phone radiation and made them legend. The “anonymous” videos were viewed nearly 10 million times in just two weeks before Cardo stepped forward to take credit, although not, initially, to debunk the pseudoscience. Cardo claims that traffic to its Web site doubled in the days the videos were active, and although no figures have been supplied to show an increase in headset sales, it would be unusual for such a viral hit to have no commercial impact.

For those wondering, the secret of the video is mundane. Popped kernels were dropped onto the table as the phones rang, and the unpopped kernels were simply edited out. It is a simple trick that any media student could achieve in a few hours, but Cardo created an urban myth so instantly popular it attracted international media and a place of honor at the urban legend Web site Snopes.com.

Cardo seemed unconcerned about potential accusations of scaremongering; at the time it claimed openly that its headsets reduce the amount of RF power going to users’ ears but did not explain why that’s a benefit. The popcorn video viewers may have their own motives for purchasing a headset, but if reducing cancer risk is one of them they should perhaps consider themselves misled.

“By December 1941 American cryptology was a system that was stretched to the limit and pushed in too many directions,” they write. The American intelligence people had “conflicting missions” and too “few resources.” The ordersto monitor commercial Japanese broadcasts for a Winds execute message was just one more burden—“one more apple of chaos tossed into an already turbulent crisis.”

“The result of this skewed emphasis was that many messages encrypted in cryptographic systems other than Purple [Japan’s high-level cipher machine used for diplomatic traffic] usually took days, even weeks, to get processed to the point where a translation could be produced. After Pearl Harbor, when American codebreakers got around to decoding and translating some of the pre-attack diplomatic traffic, they discovered that many messages carried important details about the Japanese intentions.”

An example was a Tokyo message sent December 6 to its diplomats in Bangkok. It noted that “X-Day,” or “Declaration Day,” was set for Sunday, December 7 (December 8 in Tokyo). “Notice” was to be given on that date. That message was translated on December 8.

This “X-Day” was never mentioned in any Purple messages to Washington intercepted and worked by the Americans.

The report is filled with many other examples of how potentially critical intelligence was missed due to delays in translation.

Without his knowing it, as I am sure he did for countless others, Clarke shaped and guided my professional life and interests. I remember as a school kid in the ’50s coming across in our school library the newsletter of the British Interplanetary Society, which he then headed. That was so cool! Here we hadn’t even gotten into space yet, and already there was an “interplanetary” society. Science and space seemed to be the future, and we wanted to be part of it.

His science fiction, like Heinlein’s and Bradbury’s and Asimov’s, let loose our imaginations. We may have lived in small, isolated towns, but our minds were free to roam the universe. His writings, fiction and fact, were always a combination of clear-thinking, science-informed intellect, and soaring creativity expressed in prose of absolute clarity. What a rare and wonderful combination!

His books influenced generations of us. A glance over my own shelves finds these volumes, a mere sampling of his tremendous output: (Nonfiction) Interplanetary Flight, The Exploration of Space, The Coming of the Space Age, Profiles of the Future, Report on Planet Three, and the aforementioned Carbon-Based Bipeds; (short story collections) The Nine Billion Names of God; (novels) Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama, The Songs of Distant Earth, Fountains of Paradise, and of course the 2001 novel series: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001: The Final Odyssey. I am now rereading my copy of The Lost Worlds of 2001, Clarke’s account of the writing of his novel and the screenplay with Stanley Kubrick, combined with never-used “outtake” chapters he wrote for the novel. These were fully developed alternative scenarios written and discarded as Clarke’s and Kubrick’s ideas clashed and evolved. Interesting reading still today.

I heard him speak in person only twice, in my Washington days, once at the Smithsonian Institution (where he inscribed my copy of Profiles of the Future to my wife and me) and once at the National Geographic Society. But his novels and nonfiction works were all freely available, and with new books coming out regularly, we didn’t have to talk with him to benefit from his inspiration. Shortly after becoming editor of the Skeptical Inquirer, I was delighted one day to receive a humorous letter to the editor from him intriguingly titled “Martian Technology,” inspired by our Viking landings on Mars and whimsically suggesting we must have found a way to camouflage the Martian canals (I published it in our Winter 1978 issue; I’m sure you all still have your copies!).

Over the ensuing years, we corresponded congenially from time to time. He was such a firm exemplar of reason and rationality, we could always count him as a friend and colleague.

In my 2000 review of Carbon-Based Bipeds, I took appreciative note of his included essay “Credo,” which stated his decidedly skeptical views about religion, and lamented that I hadn’t known of it to include in our then most recent Science and Religion issue, in 1999. We rectified that. With Sir Arthur’s kind permission, it appeared in our September/October 2001 Science and Religion special issue.

In his later years he was quite ill and friends didn’t want to bother him too often. But my one regret is that I didn’t try to engage him in discussion of a question that I think is important to our times: How disillusioned was he that we hadn’t maintained the promise and momentum of the Apollo years in pushing outward into space? The first moon landing of 1969 came almost as early as anyone could possibly have envisioned. But Clarke and most other enthusiasts thought that would be just the beginning. The year 2001 was still a long way off, and routine manned trips to the moon and beyond by the early twenty-first century seemed fully credible. How disappointing that since Apollo 17 in 1972 we haven’t even ventured beyond Earth’s orbit.

Yes, cheaper and safer unmanned spacecraft have been doing the exploring for us to wonderful effect, but no one back then thought the manned space program, once it got going, would soon become so circumscribed. Instead, it was the microelectronics revolution that took off geometrically, with Moore’s law accurately describing its enormous growth and progress. That’s what Clarke and others thought would happen with human spaceflight. What happened?

Clarke’s innate technological optimism may have gone out of style in these more cynical and economically challenged times (I hope that optimism someday will return in a more sustainable form), and his full life of ninety years has now concluded. But he will live on in our memories forever. His work will certainly endure, continually being rediscovered by new generations of inquirers, and in that way he will continue to influence and shape the future.

My acquaintance with Arthur, and my correspondence with him, arose from a mutual interest in recreational mathematics. The wall in Clarke’s early story “The Wall of Darkness” is a one-sided Moebius band. He was so intrigued by my Scientific American column on pentominoes that he wrote an article titled “Help! I’m a Pentomino Addict!” The twelve shapes played a role in one of his novels as a model of life’s endless combinatorial possibilities.

Sir Arthur not only will be remembered for his popular science fiction but also for the accuracy of his many predictions and for two memorable remarks:

“A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and, “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

Less well known, but my favorite, is the following: “I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.”

I would particularly like to acknowledge Clarke’s contribution to my own field of understanding and protecting the Earth against cosmic impacts. I chaired the first scientific study of cosmic impact hazard, responding to a 1990 request from Congress to NASA. Our team proposed a “Spaceguard Survey” of near-Earth asteroids, and we called ourselves the Spaceguard Working Group. The name “Spaceguard” had been coined in Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama, in which it described a future system to detect any incoming asteroids or comets in time to protect the Earth from a catastrophic impact. Clarke graciously endorsed our use of the term, which has become synonymous with asteroid surveys. He supported our efforts to initiate this survey and was pleased to have his name associated with such a worthy endeavor.

Partly inspired by the new attention to the impact hazard, Clarke wrote a novel in 1994 on this theme: Hammer of God. The plot concerns efforts to deflect a large comet on a collision course with Earth. This novel was acquired by a Hollywood studio and became the basis for the 1998 film Deep Impact, although Clarke himself did not write the script. Deep Impact was an intelligent film, realistically depicting the impact threat and the ways we might respond if faced with such a calamity. Unfortunately it was released at the same time as the blockbuster film Armageddon, which made no effort toward accuracy, either scientific or political. If your memory of these two impact films is dominated by the antics of Bruce Willis in Armageddon, I recommend you watch Deep Impact again. Also well worth reading is Clarke’s New York Times op-ed of August 14, 1994, entitled “Killer Comets Are Out There. Now What?” for an articulate defense of the importance of the Spaceguard Survey and future efforts to develop a defense against cosmic impacts. (The New York Times reprinted this 1994 op-ed on March 23, 2008).

All of us who have been entertained and inspired by Sir Arthur Clarke mourn his passing.

Arthur facilitated our visit, and I recall that when we arrived at the airport and announced who our host was, we were instantly moved through immigration and customs and escorted outside to our waiting transportation; this man was highly respected in his new home and once commented to me that he found it far more agreeable to be a large fish in a small pond than any other configuration of those elements that he could imagine.

Over the years, I ran into Arthur C. Clarke several more times and once had the pleasure of hearing him speak at the United Nations. His thought process was evident from his speaking manner. As in his writing, everything he delivered was clear, concise, and effective.

I was an invited guest in New York City at the premiere of the Kubrick film 2001, and I saw Arthur in tears when he began to realize just how Kubrick had ignored the subtleties of the original story; we were both dismayed by the erroneous interpretations members of the audience offered as explanations of the “psychedelic” sequences in the film. I suggest that readers examine his short story “The Sentinel” —upon which that film was based—and The Lost Worlds of 2001, then see the film again for a better understanding of what it should have shown.

Arthur was a delight. Yes, I grieve at his passing, but—much more important—I celebrate his existence. If you want to see him at his very best, look up the short story titled “The Nine Billion Names of God.” When you get to the last line, if you don’t gasp, Arthur might have bored you….

Gell-Mann spoke at the China conference opening plenary session on “Is Nature Conformable to Itself?” But before launching into that topic, he fired some arrows at certain enemies of science. He cited “a number of tendencies” toward “hostility to science” among fundamentalists, governments, and postmodern scholars. As for the latter, he said, “I call them ‘post-rational’ or ‘post-intelligent.’”

The laws of physics “are out there,” Gell-Mann emphasized. “These laws are not just created by the human mind.”
It is scientists’ job to discover them, and beauty, he said, as did Einstein, is a guide to truth. “What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.”

What do we mean by beauty or elegance? “A theory appears beautiful or elegant—or simple, if you prefer—when it can be expressed concisely in terms of mathematics we already have.”

Inherent in this discussion is the search for a basic law that would take the form of a unified field theory of all the fundamental forces and all the elementary particles. Yet Gell-Mann scorned the often-used phrase “theory of everything.” He said such a basic law would predict possibilities, but it can’t predict everything because contingency plays a heavy role.

“The basic law cannot be ‘a theory of everything’ because it doesn’t include these zillions of accidents that along with basic law determine the history of the universe. We should never use that term ‘theory of everything.’”

Life and mind can emerge from the laws of physics and chemistry, he said, but all scientific fields must be studied and valued at their own levels. “Reductionism is not wrong, but it is impractical.”

“It does not detract from achievements of humans to know that our intelligence and self-awareness have emerged from the laws of physics and biology, plus accidents.”

What does he mean by nature being conformable to itself? Gell-Mann began with the old analogy of peeling away an onion to discover more and more layers of reality. As we go to higher and higher energies, he said, “the next onion skin resembles the previous one to some extent. There is a self-similarity.” He said Isaac Newton even noticed this in the inverse law effect.

“Even more important than educating the young about science is to educate them about religion,” he said. He proposed educating all children about all religions, including origins, history, myths, and contradictions.

“Toxic religions depend on enforced ignorance of the young,” he said. “I propose we teach them about the facts of their own religion their elders don’t want them to know.” The goal: “So they will not be victimized by their parents’ religion. I think we should open the floodgates. Teach children about the world’s religions.”

Paul Kurtz, in his own closing comments, referred to and reinforced Dennett’s remarks. The CFI founder and chairman said among the rights of children is the right not to be indoctrinated into their parents’ religion. Instead, they should be exposed to the growing knowledge of the world. “Parents do not ‘own’ children,” said Kurtz. “We should teach children creative thinking and moral understanding and moral principles. That is the best way to bring us all into the twenty-first century.”

The conference, which had its opening ceremonies June 6 and proceedings all day June 7, was the first meeting of the new Rational Feminist Alliance of CSICOP. The Alliance was founded last year to explore issues arising from the irrational impulses of feminism.

The conference was also the first official event sponsored by the new Center for Inquiry-Rockies, a new regional center of CSICOP. (Cosponsors were the Rocky Mountain Skeptics, the UC Boulder anthropology department, and CSICOP.) This Center will be under the directorship of Bela Scheiber, founder of the Rocky Mountain Skeptics and a member of CSICOP’s Executive Council, and Carla Selby, proven skeptical activist. Scheiber and Selby also served as conference co-chairs. The Center for Inquiry-Rockies joins other regional centers in Los Angeles and Kansas City, as well as the CSICOP headquarters in Amherst, New York (Center for Inquiry-International), and a center in Moscow, Russia. The primary objective of the new Rockies center will be to actively promote critical thinking and rationality in the region through conferences, informal meetings, workshops, and interaction with the media.

Opening remarks were made by Barbara Vorheis, chair of the UC Boulder anthropology department, and Paul Kurtz, CSICOP founder and chairman, whose address was read in his absence. Kurtz applauded the efforts of the conference organizers for bringing the topic of gender politics and the relationship between feminism and science into an open forum for discussion. He expressed his agreement with the basic feminist critique of society, but also bemoaned the “frontal assault on science” of many radical feminists. Kurtz said we cannot lose sight of the “rigorous and objective standards” of the scientific methodology — standards that transcend gender — and that men and women must work together to extend the frontiers of knowledge.

The first session addressed “Misuses of Therapy.” Gina Green, a behavior analyst specializing in autism and other developmental disabilities and Director of Research at the New England Center for Children, spoke on the “disability politics” of facilitated communication (FC). FC is the controversial technique whereby a child with a severe communication disability is held at the hand or arm by a person called the “facilitator” and, with the facilitator, points to sequences of letters to spell out messages that are supposedly the child’s own.

Green said that, despite its utter failure in controlled tests and having been dubbed a “classic example of pseudoscience,” FC has succeeded as a “social movement.” Proponents of FC claim that autistic people don't actually have cognitive and communication deficits and are “trapped inside uncooperative bodies.” Those who are critical of FC are seen as “negative” and “narrow-minded” and as denying impaired persons their “right to communication.”

Debbie Nathan, a freelance journalist based in El Paso, Texas, and coauthor of Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, spoke on the cultural assumptions behind the phenomenon of false ritual sexual abuse accusations.

In our culture, said Nathan, it is assumed that children are innocent, pure, asexual; that sex is evil; that the worst thing that could happen to a child is to be defiled by sex; and that children don't have adult motivations, such as revenge, for false accusations. Thus, a child who is questioned about sex is incapable of lying about it. Nathan claims that empirical studies of childhood behavior have shown these assumptions about innocence and asexuality to be false. Also, sexual abuse is assumed to be much more horrific than physical abuse and emotional neglect, but the latter are, in fact, far more prevalent and have more devastating long-term effects. By focusing on the sexual abuse component, researchers often ignore other variables in abuse cases, such as emotional neglect, physical abuse, general family dysfunction, and poverty.

Nathan speculated that feminists have supported paranoid sexual-abuse social movements because such problems as wife beating and rape are harder to get attention and outrage for. They have linked themselves to these causes to get support for less popular women’s issues. Child sex abuse, said Nathan, “stands for an array of feminine complaints.”

Barbara Eisenstadt, psychologist, clinician, and international trainer in the fields of addiction, women’s treatment, and group therapy, spoke about our “culture of addiction.” She warned that society is programming people to become addicted and promoting addictive behavior. She believes this is politically based because of the money to be made in keeping people addicted and convincing them they need treatment for their addiction. Many psychologists are furthering this by labeling people and pathologizing all kinds of behavior.

Archaeologist Linda Cordell, professor of anthropology at UC Boulder and director of the University Museum, opened the second session, devoted to the “Misuse of Archaeology.” Cordell gave an example of the often subtle gender biases that can exist in archaeological research. She showed how research into gender roles in past cultures has actually revealed, in at least one case, certain gender biases and possible political agendas on the part of the archaeologists, men and women alike, doing the research.

Carla Selby’s talk was rooted in her personal experiences as a graduate student in anthropology in the late 1960s at UCLA, working under the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. Gimbutas advanced the notion of an ancient, all-encompassing, goddess-worshipping, matrifocal culture, extending throughout the entire continent of Europe from 40,000 years ago up to Greek and Roman times. Selby said that in the mid to late 1960s, Gimbutas’s myth of the all-encompassing goddess culture served as a powerful rationale for women’s empowerment and gave “the emerging feminist movement a mythological underpinning without peer.”

Speakers Bernard Ortiz de Montellano and Hazel Barnes. (Photo: Huntley Ingalls)

Speaking on multiculturalism in archaeology, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, professor of anthropology at Wayne State University and author of Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition, examined the theory accepted by many African-Americans, that black Nubian rulers of the twenty-fifth dynasty in Egypt came to the New World in 700 B.C. and were responsible for most of the great cultural achievements in Mesoamerica, including the calendar, mummification, pyramids, crops, and arithmetic.

This theory, claims Ortiz de Montellano, is being taught in schools, particularly in urban areas with high African-American populations, despite the fact that not one genuine African or Egyptian artifact has ever been found in the New World and that the arguments and evidence of its proponents are seriously flawed. Ortiz de Montellano sees the theory as politically motivated by the desire to establish a black presence of influence in the early history of the New World.

Conference speakers Carol Tavris, left, and Eugenie Scott. (Photo: Huntley Ingalls)

Carol Tavris, a social psychologist, CSICOP fellow, and author of the book The Mismeasure of Woman, delivered the keynote address with a unique combination of wit and incisiveness.

Tavris said that in the early days of the feminist movement, the politics of feminism was not at odds with science. In psychology, for example, feminists wanted to achieve equality for women in the profession and in society, and to correct the pervasive male bias that existed in the field — in its methods, theory, and findings. These goals served the aims of science.

Before long, however, science and feminist politics began to conflict and two trends emerged: cultural feminism, which claims that women are not just different from men, but better; and the rise of antiscientific attitudes and “subjective ways of knowing.”

The appeal of the “woman as superior” stereotype is understandable, said Tavris, for anyone who has experienced the “woman as inferior” stereotype. (She related the story of a female friend who entered college in 1970 in physiological psychology. On the first day of class, her male professor announced, “I will not teach this course with a pair of ovaries in the room,” and left.) But studies of actual men and women show that human qualities, bad and good, are evenly distributed across the sexes. She sees the antiscience trend as the result of a misunderstanding of the original feminist critique of science. From the fact that there were biases in science, many feminists jumped to the conclusion that science is altogether biased and must be thrown out wholesale as a way of obtaining knowledge.

According to Tavris, the grassroots feminist therapy movement, which began as a corrective to male biases in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, has become, in some quarters at least, a “vested interest with its own unmistakable female bias.” And in the name of feminist therapy, “the scientifically illiterate perpetrators” of satanic ritual abuse and recovered memory syndrome, for example, have become “just as tyrannical as any of the males they have overthrown.”

Kicking off the third session, Elizabeth Loftus, professor of psychology and adjunct professor of law at the University of Washington, Seattle, spoke on the repressed/recovered memory controversy. Loftus, who has testified in numerous court cases as to the malleability of memory, described the general repressed/recovered memory scenario. Typically, a woman goes to a therapist with a set of symptoms. She is told by the therapist that everyone he or she has seen with those symptoms has had a history of sexual abuse, and “I wonder if you do too.” The therapist proceeds to “ferret out” the past abuse.

The victims of false “recovered” memories are many, said Loftus. Patients are diverted from their real problems and real solutions, families are torn apart, the reputation of the mental health field is hurt, and large sums of money are spent. Finally, false accusers trivialize the experiences of real victims and cause them greater suffering.

Bela Scheiber presented on therapeutic touch (TT), which he said grew out of the “human caring” movement among nurses in the 1970s. Nurses at that time felt they were being marginalized in the health care profession and becoming obsolete. They sought to create a profession with “its own truths.” In opposition to scientific medicine, which was cold and impersonal, the theory of human caring emerged as nursing’s own unique contribution to the health industry.

TT is the one element of the human caring paradigm that “presents itself as scientific,” said Scheiber. He warned that if TT is established as “scientific,” it will open the door for other forms of alternative medicine predicated on “energy fields” to gain public approval, and “causality can be thrown out.”

In the final session of the conference, Paul Shankman, associate professor of anthropology at UC Boulder, spoke about cultural relativism and its evolution from a powerful anthropological research tool, which asked researchers to temporarily suspend moral judgment in order to understand cultures on their own terms, to its “lapse into moral relativism and epistemological relativism.” If each culture has its own way of knowing and its own completely unique set of values that others cannot understand, cross-cultural understanding is rendered impossible, said Shankman. Also, extreme relativism overly romanticizes culture and assumes that all cultural practices deserve respect simply because they are “out there.”

“Used properly,” concluded Shankman, “relativism can lead to better understanding and possibly greater objectivity. Misused, it can lead to moral paralysis and an end to a rational approach to cultural differences and similarities.”

Eugenie Scott, physical anthropologist and director of National Center for Science Education, as well as a CSICOP fellow and Executive Council member, addressed the audience on the misuse of scientific evidence by creation scientists. An expert on the creation/evolution controversy, Scott said her concern is not with religious beliefs per se, but rather when people involve science to support their beliefs and misuse science in doing so. Then, scientists must speak out.

Creation scientists often use old, out-of-date scientific facts that "support” their theories, ignoring new evidence that has come since. And they use selective facts, taking them out of context. For creation scientists, concluded Scott, ideology is considered superior to evidence.

After dinner, Hazel Barnes addressed conference attendees. Barnes is a professor emerita of classics at UC Boulder and noted translator of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.

Barnes stated that, male or female, we are all human, and human and humanity are meaningful terms. In the midst of gender battles, we must remember our humanity — but not in the sense of a predetermined human nature, but in Sartre’s sense of “humanity making itself.” She also cautioned skeptical inquirers to remember to keep the “inquiry” part right, saying we want to “install reason where there is irrationality,” but not to reject truth because it is embedded in a context that we feel is not truth.

If one complaint could be made about the conference, it is that many of the topics (at least half) did not deal with the stated theme: “the gender politics of science.” There were talks on disability politics, multiculturalism, creation/evolution politics, and others, which, while important, fascinating, and thoroughly enjoyed by conference participants, were far off from the stated purpose. Anyone looking specifically to discuss gender politics in science may have been, at the very least, a bit confused. However, this did not seem to concern either participants or speakers. In fact, “complaints” were practically nonexistent. The first conference of the Rational Feminist Alliance of CSICOP was deemed by all to be a success, with many participants and speakers standing up at the final open forum session to testify to their satisfaction and their commitment to attend future conferences.