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In defence of pseudoscience

Believe it or not; pseudoscience provides the perfect launch pad for logical thought, says Dr Paul Willis.

Recently, I was watching an old MythBusters with my son. It was the one where they investigated the Hindenburg myth, that what caught fire was not the hydrogen but a thermite mixture in the paints used to dope the fabric covering of the behemoth airship. (They concluded that it was a mixture of both the thermite and the hydrogen).

Watching their models of the Hindenburg burn with varying intensities took me back to my high school days and a bout of paranormal fakery and investigations that developed my abilities to think rationally.

In hindsight I started out with hoaxes, pseudoscience and pulp-science as a training ground for rational investigation. And it hasn't surprised me that over the years as I've met thousands of scientists and science communicators, their ranks are filled with people who started thinking in the rational paradigms of science by dabbling in the pseudosciences.

It all started when a school mate whose name has long since been forgotten came to school one day with some colour photographs of the last minute of the Hindenburg as she crashed to the ground in that infamous fireball. We gathered around realising that there was something wrong — we'd never seen colour pics of the incident before and there was something about the pose that rang alarm bells in the backs of our minds.

They were, of course, hoaxes; he'd spent the weekend making a scale model of the airship then photographed it after setting it alight. But what he also ignited was a wave of hoaxing across the school that lasted for months. I got in on the craze hoaxing photos of UFOs and ghosts. It was all good fun and some of the results I remember were very convincing. But we were learning something important; that it is relatively easy to fake data and that the kudos of creating a convincing fake is intoxicating!

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Testing claims

Up until that point I had dabbled in all kinds of pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo from UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot, past life regressions, psychic abilities etc, etc. You name it and I was interested in it. But the hoaxing fad started me down the path of devising ways of testing the claims made by the paranormal, and questioning the evidence that had been put forward. I had already dispatched creationism as a corrupted belief system by conducting some simple investigations of the evidence for an old earth and the evolution of life that could be found all around me. And as I investigated all the other non-science and 'fringe' science that had held my attention to that point, one by one my interest in them dropped as they each revealed themselves to be based on bunkum, probable fraud and impossibilities.

I tested past life regressions by planting questions that could not have been answered by someone who was genuinely from another period ("You enter the room where you died in 1760, where is the light switch?" "On the left of the door").

I covered three identical buckets, only one with water in it, and got dowsers to tell me which one was full — they couldn't do it. I once taped a large quartz crystal under a chair that I got a crystal freak to sit on without knowing it; they detected nothing until I told them they were sitting on a crystal (I actually told them it was a garnet taped to the back of the chair and they started prattling on about how they could feel 'garnet energy' in their back and they were shocked that they were actually sitting on a large quartz crystal without realising it).

Conversely, I even had the science teacher at school convinced that his hand was tingling because of the radiation coming from a lump of uranium ore that a friend brought to school — the powers of suggestion!

Throughout my career as a scientist and science communicator I've been struck by how many of my colleagues also shared an early interest in the pseudosciences and how examining and testing those beliefs led them to appreciate rational thinking and dispatch the pseudosciences as implausibilities that are often riddled with fraud. In this way pseudoscience has been a scratching post for many young scientists upon which they can hone their logical abilities to investigate and test claims. In some cases this has been their introduction to science but often, as in my experience, I had a pre-existing interest in science and used the pseudosciences as a testing ground for my abilities as a budding rational thinker.

Thus I wish to praise the pseudosciences as useful in the ontogeny of so many of our scientific minds. Not as a constructive contribution to their knowledge but as a convenient foil to test their growing powers of reason.

About the author: Dr Paul Willis is the director of RiAus, Australia's unique national science hub, which showcases the importance of science in everyday life. The well-known palaeontologist and broadcaster previously worked for ABC TV's Catalyst program. This article was first published on the RiAus website.



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