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Panpsychism revived, in James Bridle’s “Ways of Being”
Ways of Being – Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence – James Bridle, Penguin July 2022 Ways of Being – Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence...
View ArticleZero Hour for climate change: the time is now to back the Climate and Nature...
How do we know climate change is happening? How do we know species are evolving? There was, and remains in some places, strong denial of the latter. The same kinds of responses have emerged to deny...
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The evidence from plant neurobiology for the sentience of plants is far from...
Images by Georgy Kurakin, via Flickr For a long time, plants have been considered simple and indolent creatures only able to photosynthesise and grow. But, in recent years, that opinion has radically...
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Toby Young’s Daily Sceptic and Free Speech Union are no allies of critical...
Free speech, and where (if anywhere) there should be limits on free speech, is a subject that skeptics spend a lot of time thinking about. It’s a subject that seems straightforward on the surface, but...
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Hotels and houseplants: why we should doubt Ellen Langer’s mind-over-matter...
In a previous article for The Skeptic from January 2022, we discussed a paper titled ‘Mind-set matters: exercise and the placebo effect,’ which proposed that merely believing their work was good...
View ArticleThe supernormal confronts the supernatural in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s prophetic...
On 19 May 2024, the Vatican released a new ruling on miracles. Since 1978, the veracity of visions and weeping statues has been determined by local dioceses, but that call now resides with the...
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What does the recent UK election mean for skepticism and pseudoscience?
This month has seen an election in the UK, and a change in government. And while it’s true that skepticism as a toolset should remain politically neutral, that isn’t to say there is no role for a...
View ArticleSpirituality, sacredness, and positive thinking will not save us from the...
This story was originally written in Portuguese, and published to the website of Revista Questão de Ciência. It appears here with permission. On March 11th, I participated in the Roda Viva program on...
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What does p-hacking really mean, and why is it a problem?
The expression “p-hacking” is relatively new to the science lexicon, but has caught on quickly. It is a label for various manipulations of data or analysis to achieve statistical significance when...
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The 2024 UK General Election came with lessons that skeptics should listen to
Note: this article was written in late July 2024, the week prior to race riots powered by misinformation that swept across England and Belfast in Northern Ireland. Pseudoscientific, conspiratorial,...
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We shouldn’t fear a “zombie fungus”, like The Last of Us… but a threat from...
The Last of Us has become one of the most popular and widely discussed TV series of the last two years. Its post-apocalyptic horror and references to a pandemic event turned up just at the right...
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From the archives: Hypnosis and the Occult
This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 4, Issue 1, from 1990. Please note, as an archive article, some of the positions espoused here have been superseded by the evidence, and the...
View ArticleRacism is a real phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean that the idea of...
This story was originally written in Portuguese, and published to the website of Jornal O Globo, Brazil. It appears here with permission. There is a well-established scientific consensus that the...
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Overly simplistic headlines muddy the water around placebo effects and...
Science communication is often about relating complex ideas in a clear and concise way. Unfortunately, the discourse around the placebo effect is anything but. The term ‘placebo effect’ is often used...
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Are ‘gacha’ games and loot boxes merely gambling in disguise?
Have you ever willingly paid for… nothing? Or at least, something completely useless? And no, I’m not talking about buyer’s regret – I’m talking about buying something that you know you would have...
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Beware of commercial microbiome tests: how at-home testing can mislead consumers
This story was originally written in Portuguese, and published to the website of Revista Questão de Ciência. It appears here with permission. In recent years, more and more research has pointed to the...
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Comparing misinformation to a virus is neither accurate nor useful in...
In recent years, there has been a surge in public discourse and academic research on misinformation. A search for the term “misinformation” on Google Ngram Viewer – a tool that tracks the occurrence...
View ArticleDoes the colour of a pill really influence what kind of placebo effect you’ll...
Interest in homeopathy seems to be on the wane, but maybe that’s just my bias. While homeopathy is naked pseudoscience, it nevertheless yields occasional positive results in clinical trials. For...
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Could AI help fix the issues of ineffective alternative medicine regulation?
As I have covered in the pages of this magazine previously, the official regulation of alternative medicine in the UK is far from straightforward. The General Chiropractic Council (GCC) and General...
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The Sullivanians, psychoanalysis, and the worst therapy in the world
Note – contains references to sexual assaults This story was originally written in Portuguese, and published to the website of Revista Questão de Ciência. It appears here with permission. Between the...
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