All of this started as far back as the mid-to-late 1800s, when science and Darwin conflicted directly with cherished religious views of fundamentalist Christians, especially in the southern United States. The more recent beginning of the brouhaha was in 2002, when the Cobb school board bowed partway to pressure from local fundamentalist activists and voted to paste a sticker into the front of certain specific science textbooks. The approved sticker did not say “Evolution should rightly be called ‘Evil-ution’ and is a communist plot.” It didn’t even say “Intelligent Design deserves careful consideration as a really swell alternative to Evolution.” What it did say seems at first glance remarkably innocuous and commonsensical. It ended with the language quoted above; it started with “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things.” The board-and the creationists who pressured them-no doubt thought, “Now who could argue with that?” No mention of religion or God. No attack on science. Just a bit of harmless pandering to the creationists.

Of course all these discordant, loud voices insisting that the sticker is properly educational or at least harmless are wrong. They ignore the facts:

• In science, unlike in common usage, a successful “theory” is an overarching explanation that takes into account all known facts, hypotheses, and observations.
• It is a fact, supported by millions of observations by thousands of scientists over at least 150 years, that life has evolved on this planet. This fact of evolution did not have a scientifically satisfactory overarching explanation-a theory-until Charles Darwin developed his complex ideas of “descent with modification,” as presented in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. His explanation rapidly convinced the scientific minds of his own age and of every generation since then.
• No scientifically supported theory of why life on this planet has evolved-changed over time from common origins-rivals the basic Darwinian theory. If there was a legitimate alternative, scientists would go to great lengths to win prestige by testing and developing the alternative.
• The surest evidence that the Cobb School Board was using the sticker to try to mollify a religious minority in the county (rather than to improve science education or open-mindedness or to encourage critical thinking) is the much better sticker they rejected. While no sticker at all is needed, the board was presented with one that encouraged students to reflect critically and thoughtfully on all scientific theories in all fields, and that acknowledged that, while most scientists realize that Darwinian theory is well supported, some people do not. The board rejected that broader (and more accurate) advice to students.
• Despite the claims of some, evolutionary theory is not the only part of science subject to religious dispute and controversy. The germ theory of disease, while overwhelmingly supported by scientists, as is evolutionary theory, is not accepted by Christian Scientists nor by some other religious people. The board did not put a sticker in high school health texts about this, for good reason.
• Tempting as the solution presented by a local letter to the editor may seem to some, avoiding all the controversy by not teaching about evolution at all, or only in elective courses, would seriously cheat our students. Almost everything in modern biology, and much of astronomy, geology, chemistry, and other scientific disciplines cannot be well understood except in light of evolutionary theory. Our young people would suffer greatly in colleges and universities, including most religious schools, if their education was so inadequate. Their understanding of life itself would be severely hampered.
• The case is not part of “the ongoing controversy between atheists and Christians.” Many scientists, including Wes McCoy, the Cobb high school science department chair and Kenneth Miller, the textbook author and Brown University professor, who both testified eloquently against the sticker, describe themselves as deeply religious. Some Christians may be threatened by science, but most are not.

As Judge Cooper himself mentioned in his ruling, “Whether the Sticker communicates a message of endorsement of religion is not really based on the Court’s factual findings but is ‘in large part a legal question to be answered on the basis of judicial interpretation of social facts.'” The reference to “social facts” has been quoted in the local press, supposedly to show that there really was no problem with the stickers and that the judge was engaged in judicial and social activism. Those who read all of Judge Cooper’s decision will find, however, that he was careful to explain the basis of his primary finding. He did not rule based on whether evolution is a theory or a fact, nor did he conclude that encouraging critical thinking is inappropriate. Indeed he found that the encouragement so offered was sincere, desirable, and met an appropriate secular purpose.

The court held that the sticker is unconstitutional because it “conveys an impermissible message of endorsement and tells some citizens that they are political outsiders while telling others that they are political insiders” and because it violates the Georgia constitutional provision regarding “Separation of Church and State.”

After fourteen years, the players have now put away their darts. In the end, the pros came out ahead, with an average investment gain of 10.2 per cent, while the darts players only managed 3.5 per cent. The really surprising thing is that the stock pickers actually gained an edge over random odds (although there is a suspicion that the pros’ selections may have influenced other people to buy the same stocks, and thus pushed up the price). Not that the pros had things all their own way by any means: there was one wonderful six-month spell in which the darts won six times in a row.

Randomness is of course well known as the psychic’s friend. Persuade people that you have access to the secret pattern in some random sequence, then sit back and wait for the cash to roll in. This has been called the Jeane Dixon Effect, in which the odd hit receives maximum publicity and the thousands of misses are ignored. The recipe is simple: forecast often and don’t keep records. This is a particular favorite of those psychics who claim to help the police by locating the bodies of murder victims.

Random results are also the ally of scammers who offer worthless health remedies. It’s easy to be tempted into thinking that highly surprising results can’t possibly be the result of chance. That’s why random events have been called effects in search of causes. Take Evelyn Adams, the woman who won the New Jersey lottery in 1985 and again in 1986. Not quite the one-in-a-trillion chance claimed by the New York Times. Statisticians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller put the odds that this would happen to someone, somewhere in America at 1 in 30. This is roughly the same chance as my guessing the playing card you’re thinking of after you've told me it’s a red card.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb held senior trading positions in New York and London before founding his own trading firm, and now specializes in the risks of rare events. He writes: “Outside of textbooks and casinos, probability almost never presents itself as a mathematical problem . . . (in the real world, one has to guess the problem more than the solution).”

He confesses that he once joined the hunt for the secret of entrepreneurs who became millionaires. He found that success simply depended on taking risks (he called these people crisis hunters). Then he realized that if he had done the same study on bankrupts, he would have come up with the same answer. “The first counter-intuitive point is that a population entirely composed of bad managers will produce a small amount of great track records.”

Thus, “if a twenty-five-year-old played Russian roulette, say, once a year, there would be a very slim possibility of him surviving until his fiftieth birthday-but, if there are enough players, say thousands of twenty-five-year-old players, we can expect to see a handful of (extremely rich) survivors (and a very large cemetery).”

After all, if talent were only a matter of good results, firms would go out of their way to hire people who had won the lottery. After listening to the O.J. Simpson trial, Taleb confessed to being truly scared of being arrested for no discernible reason. And “having to fight some glib lawyer in front of a randomness illiterate jury.”

Unfortunately, you can always find some sort of pattern in a random series if you look hard enough. When Carl Sagan studied the cancer cures resulting from a visit to Lourdes, he found that the cure rate was, if anything, lower than the one for spontaneous remission. It was lower than the average for those who didn’t go to Lourdes at all. (So does your chance of survival diminish after you visit the place?)

Sometimes a miss is so egregious that you just can’t hide it: the stock market crash of 1987, the Gulf War, the fall of communist East Berlin. The forecasters missed every one.

The American Meteorological Society has admitted that the limit for weather forecasting is between ten and fourteen days. But as business forecasting consultant William A. Sherden has pointed out, “Any farmer who bets his ranch on weather forecasts going out more than one or two days could just as well use a roulette wheel.” And those who imagine that tinkering with a gas such as carbon dioxide can significantly affect the planet’s climate can have little understanding of the complexity of the random fluctuations of the huge atmospheric engine.

As for money matters, you may recall the old joke: “Why did God create economists? To make weather forecasters look good.”

Alvin Toffler made himself an impressive reputation with such books as Future Shock, but practically all of his predictions have been dead wrong. Herman Kahn, Director of the Hudson Institute, made himself famous for an entire slew of planetary predictions: between 75 and 85 percent have been shown wrong. Professor of Demography Paul Ehrlich (with such books as The Population Bomb) confidently predicted war, pestilence, and famine for the planet, and (as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby ruefully showed) has been “richly rewarded for his almost perfect record of getting things wrong.”

Why rake over this old ground? Let H.L. Mencken provide an answer: “It seems to me that one of the prime jobs of the educated man on this earth is to denounce charlatans. New ones are always popping up, and the common run of idiots are always succumbing to them.”

De-ghosting The Amityville Horror

The story of The Amityville Horror, as with The Exorcist, begins with a best-selling novel. A book titled The Amityville Horror: A True Story, written by Jay Anson, was published in 1977 and quickly became a hit. Soon it was made into an equally successful horror film starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder. And, as with The Exorcist, several inferior sequels followed in its wake (including a 3-D version). The latest version is due out April 15. Anson was not a resident of the infamous possessed house, but a professional writer hired to pen a book based on “true events” that happened there several years earlier. . . .

The story behind the story began on November 13, 1974, when six members of an Amityville, New York, family were killed. The parents, Ronald and Louise DeFeo, were shot in bed while they slept, along with two sons and two daughters. The sole remaining family member, Ronald Jr. (“Butch”), was arrested for the crime and later sentenced to prison. With the family dead (and Butch in no position to inherit the place), the house went up for sale. The horrific nature of the massacre unnerved the otherwise quiet Long Island neighborhood, though no supernatural activity was associated with the house at 112 Ocean Avenue.

The following year, a new family, the Lutzes, moved into the house. George and Kathy Lutz, along with their three children, said that shortly after moving in, the six- bedroom abode became a hell house. It seemed that perhaps the demons that drove Butch to slaughter his family were not in his head but in the house. An unseen force ripped doors from hinges and slammed cabinets closed. Noxious green slime oozed from the ceilings. A biblical-scale swarm of insects attacked the family. A demonic face with glowing red eyes peered into their house at night, leaving cloven-hoofed footprints in the morning snow. A priest called upon to bless the house was driven back with painful blisters on his hands. And so on.

A local television crew did a segment on the house, bringing in several self-styled “ghost hunters” (including Ed and Lorraine Warren) and other alleged psychics. All agreed that a demonic spirit was in the house, and that an exorcism would be needed to stop the activity. The Lutzes left the house but took their terrifying tale with them, collaborating with Mr. Anson for their book. And, as William Peter Blatty did when he promoted The Exorcist, Anson vouched for the truthfulness of his fantastic tale: “There is simply too much independent corroboration of their narrative to support the speculation that [the Lutzes] either imagined or fabricated these events.”

Some people expressed doubts about the events in the house, and a few specific parts of it were even proven false. (For example, the Lutzes could not have found demonic hoofprints in the snow when they said they did, because weather records showed there had been no snowfall to leave prints in!) Still, the Lutzes stuck to their story, reaping tens of thousands of dollars from the book and film rights.

The truth behind The Amityville Horror was finally revealed when Butch DeFeo’s lawyer, William Weber, admitted that he, along with the Lutzes, “created this horror story over many bottles of wine.” The house was never really haunted; the horrific experiences they had claimed were simply made up. While the Lutzes profited handsomely from their story, Weber had planned to use the haunting to gain a new trial for his client. The Lutzes also later admitted that virtually everything they had said about the haunting-and everything in The Amityville Horror-was pure fiction.

Their account was likely influenced by another fictionalized story-that of The Exorcist. In fact, it is not much of a stretch to suggest that The Exorcist strongly influenced the Amityville story; The Exorcist came out in December 1973. Many of the myths surrounding The Exorcist film and “real story” came about because of “the mystic twaddle Blatty gave out to the press while pushing his book” (Kim Mohan quoted in his book Nightmare Movies, p. 43). Blatty had a career and book to promote, and was not above embellishing the story with partly (and wholly) fictional elements. Of course, the film was not a documentary, but Blatty strongly suggested that the film stuck more or less to reality. Demonic possession and hauntings were very much in the public’s mind when the Lutzes spun their stories of demonic activity a year or two later. The Lutzes must have had a good laugh at the expense of the mystery-mongering ghost hunters and self-proclaimed psychics, who reported their terrifying visions and verified the house’s (non-existent) demonic residents. Apparently, it was all their imaginations.

To this day, the fact that The Amityville Horror story was an admitted hoax is still not widely known; as they say, the truth never stands in the way of a good story.

Details for this article were taken from Joe Nickell’s fine investigative piece “Amityville: The Horror of It All,” in the January/February 2003 issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. See also Stephen and Roxanne Kaplan’s book The Amityville Horror Conspiracy and “The Amityville Horror Hoax” in the May 1978 Fate magazine by Rick Moran and Peter Jordan.