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Science Education and Skeptical Inquiry

Institutional science stands accused of thwarting the search for new knowledge, obstructing challenges to the status quo, and even oppressing those whose ideas depart from the mainstream. American culture has a long and colorful history of hostility toward scientific endeavor as it is popularly conceived. Are scientists nothing more than the high priests of the 21st century?

Scientific literacy has become a major issue in public education. Rationality seems to be a quaint relic of a myopic enlightenment as tales of bigfoot, UFO abductions, psychic detectives and spirit mediums pervade the media. Evolution, the cornerstone of biology and anthropology, is depicted as a theoretically bankrupt idea from creationists and postmodernists alike. Scientific evaluations of these claims suggest overactive imagination is a more likely culprit than a goblin universe rife with supernatural interventions, yet such studies seldom reach the public eye. Academic institutions have a responsibility to enhance public awareness of the research and accomplishments that emerge from a scientific perspective that is empirically grounded.

"Oliver" is a habitually bipedal ape that has captured the imagination of both laypeople and scientists. He has been touted as a relict australopithecine, a bigfoot, or even the result of a clandestine human-chimp hybridization experiment. After years of lively debate, Oliver's DNA was sampled to settle the issue and perhaps provide us with a breathing version of the missing link. The results are in...and, alas, Oliver is just a standard-issue chimpanzee with a penchant for walking. See Ely et al. (Am J. Phys. Anthropol. 105:395-403) for the full story.

Representative Publications

Daegling, D.J. and Schmitt, D.O. (1999) Bigfoot's Screen Test. Skeptical Inquirer 23 (3): 20-25.