Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

At a second level, FC quickly became a much more sinister procedure. Before it was widely accepted that FC was invalid, a number of children reported, through facilitated typing or pointing, that they had been physically and/or sexually abused by parents or caregivers. According to Jacobson, Mulick, and Swartz (1995), these sorts of charges occurred “at an undetermined, although socially significant frequency (Levine, Shane, and Wharton 1994)” (p. 756). As of 1994, there were at least sixty such cases (Margolin, 1994, cited in Jacobson, Mulick, and Swartz 1995). Happily, all but two were dropped early in the proceedings. But this does not mean that the accused did not suffer great torment from simply being accused.

Another important issue with regard to FC is the role of the facilitator in producing the messages that were thought to be coming from the patients. Most caregivers were almost certainly not aware that they were, in fact, the source of the messages. This finding adds FC to a list of other “nonconscious movements” (Spitz 1997) that have been taken as evidence for things paranormal throughout the ages. The muscle movements the facilitators were using to guide the patients’ hands to the right letters to spell out their answers were to small to register consciously and so the facilitators were genuinely unaware that they were the source of those answers. Such nonconscious movements are also responsible for various spiritualist phenomena such as table turning and the Ouija board (pp. 46–47) as well as dowsing (pp. 418–22).

In their review of FC, Jacobson, Mulick, and Schwartz (1995) attribute the sudden rise in FC to, in part, a distrust of science and antiscience attitude on the part of many in the educational community from which FC gained so much support. They make the point that proponents of any new therapy have an ethical obligation to see that the therapy works—that it really works, not just that they think it works—before subjecting patients to what may be, at best, a waste of time and money and, at worst, a therapy that can cause real damage.

Creationism is a pseudoscience that is much in the public eye. Creationists around the country are pressing their demands that something they call “creation science” be taught in the public schools along with the Darwinian theory of evolution. The United States Supreme Court decided by a seven-to-two margin on June 19, 1987, that a Louisiana law that would have required the teaching of creation science along with the theory of evolution in biology classes was unconstitutional ( Edwards v. Aguillard, No. 85–1513).

Creation science holds that there is scientific evidence to support the biblical story of creation and to show that theories of evolution (whether strictly Darwinian or not) are wrong. A major piece of evidence cited for years in this regard was the claimed co-occurrence of human and dinosaur tracks in limestone along the Paluxy River in Texas. The coexistence of humans and dinosaurs was said to be proven by these tracks, thereby showing that both were created at the same time and, further, that evolution of humankind never occurred but rather that humankind was created and did not evolve. In actuality, the supposedly human tracks are those of a small dinosaur (Kuban 1986; Godfrey and Cole 1986). Discovered many years ago, the tracks in the limestone along the river did resemble, to the untrained eye, crude human footprints. After years of exposure, the softer rock inside the track has weathered away, leaving a much clearer imprint of the foot of a small, three-toed dinosaur. The improvement in definition of a fossilized footprint due to weathering is a well-known phenomenon in paleontology (Thulbom 1986). Other “man tracks” are the result of the overactive imagination of creationists, who see a human footprint in nearly every small depression in the rocks caused by natural processes of erosion. Finally, blatantly fake human footprints, actually carved in rock, are displayed in creationist museums and offered for sale in the Paluxy River area (Godfrey and Cole 1986).

A common tack of creationists is to point to the complexity of some feature of some species and state that such a specialized feature could not have come about through evolution; thus, evolution is false and creationism is true. A classic example of this tactic concerns the bombardier beetle. Weber (1980) has “exploded” the creationists’ use of this interesting beetle as support for creationism. The beetle protects itself from predators in an unusual way: It expels an extremely hot liquid from sacs in its abdomen at any attacker. According to Duane Gish (1977) of the Institute for Creation Research in El Cajon, California, the chemicals that make up the active ingredients of the beetles’ defensive fluid, hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone, are explosive when mixed together. To prevent itself from being blown up, the beetle adds another chemical, a so-called inhibitor, to the mixture to prevent an explosion. When the beetle needs to use its defensive weapon, a fourth chemical, an antiinhibitor, is added and the explosive mixture is immediately squirted at the attacker. Gish’s point is that this complex system could not have evolved through any intermediate steps because the apparatus to make hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone would have had to evolve before the ability to produce the inhibitor and antiinhibitor. But if the ability to produce hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone evolved first, then the beetle would have blown itself up when the two mixed, so the inhibitor and antiinhibitor would never have had the chance to evolve. Therefore, Gish and other creationists conclude, the whole system must have been created at the same time.

Gish’s (1977) argument might be impressive if it were based on the actual physiology of the bombardier beetle. But he, like many other creationists, gets his facts wrong when discussing scientific evidence. First, hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone do not explode when mixed. Second, Gish’s description of the biochemistry of the production of the fluid that the beetle emits is wrong. Since the two chemicals that make up most of the fluid do not explode when mixed, there is no need for any “inhibitor” and, not suprisingly, the beetle produces no such chemical. What does happen is that the beetle adds an enzyme to the mixture that produces an “explosive” transformation of the chemicals into oxygen, quinone, and water (Weber 1980). Thus, Gish mistakes the details of the actual physiological process that underlies the beetles’ defense mechanism. Where did the hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone come from in the first place? The former is found in insects as a normal product of physiological reactions. The latter helps to make insects’ cuticle hard and, further, “tastes bad to predators and is the chemical that makes stink bugs stink” (p. 5). Given this, it is easy to understand why these two chemicals would evolve separately in an insect.

Weber (1980) notes that although Gish was informed in 1978 of the errors in his presentation of the bombardier beetle, he continued to use it two years later. Creationists often don’t let accuracy stand in the way of a good argument against evolution.

A creationist technique related to that used by Gish, as described above, is to present some specific feature of some creature and demand an explanation of how that feature evolved. If no such explanation is immediately forthcoming, it is assumed that the feature must have been created and, therefore, that creationism is correct. On logical grounds this is precisely the same as the argument of the proponents of UFOs as extraterrestrial craft: that if skeptics can’t explain away every single UFO sighting, then UFOs must be extraterrestrial in nature. This is a fundamental logical error. In the case of evolution, it will probably never be possible to explain how every feature of every species evolved. We will never have a time machine with which to go back and observe the selection pressures that brought about each feature. The fact that evolutionary theory can explain so many features across numerous species is extremely powerful evidence in its favor.