Future historians will recognize that the cultural hegemony of science came seriously into question in the second half of the 20th century, with maniforld consequences.
Knowledge about and understanding of the natural world had begun to make staggering advances from about the 17th century, when there came inot being an international, self-regulated free market of curious investigators. By the end of the 20th century, that had morphed into a thightly organized research-&-development colossus in which commercial, political, social, and personal financial interests had largely taken over science for their own ends. Now there prevails Science in the Private Interest [1] instead of for the public good, and knowledge monopolies and research cartels [2] in lieu of a curiosity-driven free market.
This progressive change was most rapid and obvious in the second half of the 20th century, and reactions to or against it had a myriad aspects, among them the rebellious Sixties, the New Age, and anomalistics -- a search for valid knowledge among scientific and medical heresies. Popular fascination with these heresies was often too gullible and thereby counter-productive; to bring intellectual order to this burgeoning interest, some scholars and scientists brought into being such ventures as the Center for UFO Studies and the International Society of Cryptozoology, which one might view as a sort of intellectual "Left Wing" by contrast to the reactionary groups on the "Right" who misappropriated the label "skeptical" in order to pooh-pooh any suggestion that science might be seriously wrong on any major issue [3].
The Society for Scientific Exploration aims to be neither "Left" nor "Right"; and may largely succeed, since it has at times attracted criticism from both sides. My sense of the wider cultural and historiacal significance of the Society underlies what I once called our "History Project", to document for the benefit of future students what was happening in anomalistics during this fin de siècle of "modern science". In this vein, the Journal has featured descriptions of such resources as the Mary Evans Picture Library [4] and the Bakken Museum of Electricity and Life [5]; of cullings and assessments of scientific literature by the Sourcebook Project [6], and of fringe literature as in an Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology [7]; of the PEAR Lab, pre-eminent for decades in innovative mind-matter research [8]; and of the nurturing of our own Journal [9].
The recipients of the Dinsdale Award, and published reviews of their work, are another resource for future historians [10]. But I have been keenly conscious that the passing of time is robbing us of the personal recollections of central players in this era, which has been rich with future promise as well as in current stress. The Journal's obituaries remind us of the memoirs that should have been written and were not: in the last few years we have lost several outstanding contributors -- Marcello Truzzi and Robert Morris, to name just a couple.
So I continue to beg for essays and memoirs from people who have lived through these interesting times and have contributed to their interest. I'm delighted to have in this issue a contribution from Jerome Clark. He is one among a very small number of people who have been truly active in anomalistics and who have at the same time commanded the intellectual distance and objectivity to provide us with rigorous assessments and reliable scholarly resources on these matters. Thank you, Jerry!
These remarks may serve as a reminder that the Society for Scientific Exploration and its Journal cast a wide net. The Society's founders were most immediately concerned over the neglect by science of the "Big Three" anomalistic topics of parapsychology, ufology, and cryptozoology, but they were clear that this was the tip of an iceberg: the mainstream organizations of science were not fostering the exercise of genuine creativity, the dissemination of new ideas, and the birth of new ventures, in large part because of the bureaucratic nature of their control of funding and publication.. Twenty-five years ago, the recipient of an award from the National Science Foundation revealed what was to every practicing scientist an open secret: grant proposals were written dishonestly, because genuinely exploratory and innovativev research did not get funded [11]. That has not changed, rather it has only become worse. So what will become the science of the future is at the moment largely bootlegged; and the very existence of these innovations and embryonic new disciplines is not generally known. The Journal of Scientific Exploration will seek to inform its readers about these matters with the help of Charles Eisenstein, who has agreed to become Editor-at-Large. Charles intends to
Gainesville was Charles's first SSE meeting, but he has been a reader of the Journal for many years. At that meeting he gave a widely appreciated talk whose written version appeared in the Journal's previous issue. His professional background is varied indeed. Currently on the faculty of Penn State's Department of Science, Technology, and Society, he was formerly an English-Chinese translator, literary magazine editor, and professional yogi. He is the author of two books: The Yoga of Eating (2003), and The Ascent of Humanity (an unorthodox history of science and civilization to be published in 2006). While his academic background is in mathematics and philosophy (Yale University), he is a generalist broadly familiar with major fields of mainstream and unconventional science.
When David Deming submitted a book review of Michael Crichton's State of Fear, we recognized it as better suited to an essay format, and Deming re-wrote it accordingly. It seems to fit squarely the mission of the Society for Scientific Exploration and the Journal of Scientific Exploration, to provide a forum for views that tend to be excluded from mainstream publications.
My editorial had acknowledged that the topic of global warming tends to arouse controversy, and I was not disappointed. I think we should steer an editorial tightrope on this subject. On the one hand, I am not sure that the Journal of Scientific Exploration should provide space for a full-fledged debate between those who are sure that human actions are contributing to global warming and those who deny it; if we did, it would have to be with appropriately invited major reviews from several viewpoints -- using only unsolicited pieces could not cover the existing range of views. On the other hand,, this controversy bears comparison in several respects with arguments over anomalies, and those aspects certainly deserve space and attention. So I am pleased to have for this issue, commentaries pointing to two important and perennial issues: one, the influence of pressures external to purely scientific onese -- in this case largely along political lines; and two, the question of where lies the burden of proof on a controversial matter. Larry Dossey points out that political interests color both sides of the global-warming debate; similarly with scientific anomalies, non-scientific interests may bias both sides. Dean DeHarpporte and I exchanged some usefully clarifying letters that led to his commentary focussing on burden of proof, which is a central issue in every argument.
The essay-review by Michael Swords expresses in substance as well as passion my own long-standing frustration over the public prominence of views like thos of Richard Dawkins ("with him as a proponent, evolution needs no enemies to portray its views as unpalatable; Dawkins is a God-send for the anti-Darwinist" [12]). As to the substance of the debate itself, a recent e-mail discussion produced this fine reminder from John Green (28 August 2005):
Creationism, Intervention, Darwinism, Intelligent Design etc. are all attempts by mere humans to explain things that are beyond human comprehension. If there is or was a creator or intelligent designer, where did they come from? If there was intervention, how were the interveners created? (If there was a "big bang", where did the material that went bang come from?) None of those theories does anything more than push the required explanation one generation farther away. It seems obvious to me that the actual explanation can not be anything within human understanding.
Sword's plea that science can be fun recalls Barzun's admonition that science is properly regarded as a glorious entertainment [13]. Sword's references to what SSE and its members stand for is somewhat corollary to that and bears emphasis. The high prestige science came to enjoy was coupled with a view of science that has become less and less realistic as three centuries have passed, as modern (and Western) science has been progressively transformed from its roots in amateurs seeking disinterestedly to understand the natural world -- for many of them, as a way of appreciating even more fully, the wonders God had beneficently wrought. The Society for Scientific Exploration mimics in some respects the amateur scientific societies before science became a career, let alone an instrument of governments and of international bureaucracies. In this connection, Sword's admission of naiveté might well be a rallying cry: the naïve faith should be more widespread, that human beings are capable of dedication to curiosity and intellectual interest, and that children could fruitfully be educated to foster those.
In truth and in practice, though, I fear that there is as little chance of the scientific community reining in the Dawkinses as there is of Muslim communities reining in their terrorists.
HIV/AIDS is no less touchy a subject than global warming. For more than two decades, competent experts have argued that the official view is wrong or at least not proven. According to that official view, the human immune deficiency virus (HIV) is trasnmitted sexually and via blood. Antibodies to it, detected by "HIV tests", indicate a permanent infection by the virus that will sooner or later (but on average after 10 years) produce symptoms of AIDS, the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. HIV is presumed to have arrived around 1970 in several large US cities, notably New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and to have led to the outbreaks of AIDS there around 1980.
After twenty years of argument, one would hardly expect to find that the issue could be decisively settled on the basis of already existing data; yet that turns out to be the case. Moreover, no detailed technical understanding of virology or molecular biology is needed to understand the proof. It is really quite simple. Results are available from tens of millions of HIV tests, chiefly on groups at no obvious risk of AIDS. Between a quarter and a half of the population of the United States has been tested at least once; and large groups of people, including blood donors and military cohorts, have been tested every year.
Do those data illustrate the officially potulated spread of HIV from the AIDS epicenters, over time and over distance?
NO!
Details are set out in my review article in this issue. All the data are from official publications and peer-reviewed journals. The conclusions are clear. How and why the mainstream could be so wrong for so long is worth much discussion; but it is not a valid rhetorical question to discredit the plain conclusions.
I thought hard about what to do with this review. I asked advice of many people. Several simply did not respond, even though we had been on somewhat familiar and congenial terms. That, together with reactions to my talk about this at the Annual Meeting in Gainesville in May, made me realize that it is asking a great deal of people even to consider the possibility that the conventional view might be wrong; that view, after all, is reinforced incessantly in the media by the refrain of "HIV, the virus that causes AIDS", and by public-service announcements about getting tested and practicing safe sex, and by HIV/AIDS charities sponsored by Princess Diana, Arthur Ashe, Nelson Mandela, Elton John, and many other celebrities.
Severla knowledgeable people of whoom I asked advice assured me that there was no chance that such a manuscript would even be sent out for review by a mainstream journal. Far more distinguished and relevantly expert people than I am, have had rejected anything that questions whether HIV causes AIDS. Members of the National Academy of Sciences (Peter Duesberg long ago, Serge Lang more recently) have been refused publication of such material in their own Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
I sent a précis to researchers who had published some of the data, people at the Army HIV Research Office and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Despite a follow-up note, I received no acknowledgement from the Army. From the CDC I received a polite note (cited in my review): my data are correct, the regularities and trends I note are really there, but they believe a behavioral explanation to be adequate. That surprised me. I had expected contradictions of my take on the data, because the conclusions follow ineluctably from them. But quickly I understood: the note was not a seriously thought-out response to the data, it was a courteous brush-off of an obvious crank. (I could recognize the genre since, I confess, I have written in similar vein to those who submit crank-type material to the Journal of Scientific Exploration.) When I followed up by sending the CDC a preprint of the article in this isue, I received no acknowledgement; but a few weeks later I received in the mail a list of available CDC publications, without a covering note or any explanation of which publications are supposed to be relevant.
So I am publishing in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. The piece certainly mets our criterion of something excluded from mainstream publication. The issue of peer review is touchy when the author is also the editor and anonymity is impossible. I did solicit comments from a wide variety of peopple, on several drafts, and benefitted from many suggestions, including from epidemiologists, clinicians, and statisticians. Of course only I am responsible for the content. My pledge is that the data all come from peer-reviewed mainstream journals and from official reports, and that I have not cited selectively, I included everypertinent item I have so far located. Everyone is freeto check that I report those data correctly, and to look for other pertinent data. Indeed, I wish devoutly that many people will do so; it was only constant immersion in the data that convinced me that the virtually incredible is really true -- the official view is convincingly negated by the data in official publications.
Every researcher knows how satisfying it si when freshly uncovered evidence supports a hypothesis. I had that experience several times as I analyzed the HIV data, and it happened yet again after this issue had gone to press. Early on I had realized that HIV and AIDS numbers could not be compared directly because the dignostic definition of "AIDS" has changed several times over the years; so I virtually stopped looking at AIDS statistics and concentrated on HIV. But just now I came across CDC figures for the relative percentages of Black and of White Americans among reported AIDS cases. The rationof Black to White among AIDS patients has increased steadily from 0.43 in 1981 to 1.32 in 2000; yet the relative incidence of positive HIV tests among Black Americans and White Americans has remained the same over those years. That's as smoking a gun as I can imagine, to demonstrate that a positive HIV-test does not presage AIDS.
Of course, I can also imagine, or rather, predict, what the mainstream response will be -- if any at all, that is: "Aha! White Americans have been getting anti-retroviral treatment that holds off AIDS, but Black Americans have not"; and that will be said without a shread of supporting evidence for any such disparity, nor any evidence that anti-retroviral treatment actually works. As Mike Swords comments in this issue, we anomalists enjoy a healthy, well earned paranoia.
The willingness to use racial stereotypes without benefit of evidence has been prominent in the HIV/AIDS affair. Already in the 1980s, a detailed analysis was given of how prominent racial bias was in the search for the origin of HIV and AIDS in Africa [14].)