 The next speaker is Eugenie Scott, the incredible Eugenie Scott. If you look at your program, there's a little bit of a typo. It should be playing with deception. It should be playing with deception. That's what it should be. It should be playing with deception. So here's the limerick for this one. The typo left out the P, so it didn't say playing, you see. The misprint was implying that if you are lying, you should do it while making whoopee. Please welcome to the stage Eugenie Scott. Yeah, it was a little surprising seeing that title, but it was sorted out pretty well. Well, as some of you know, I just returned. I just arrived at the conference late, and I'm sorry because there were wonderful things going on yesterday, but I blew in late yesterday afternoon from the National Center for Science Education's Grand Canyon trip, and there actually are three people from that trip in this audience that I know of from this year's trip, and I suspect there are some others from previous trips, so just for the fun of it, if you've ever been on NCSE's Grand Canyon rafting trip, raise your hand. Okay, talk to those people. It's really fun. I was talking to one of the rafters who was saying, well, what's this conference you're going to after we get back to civilization, and I explained that it was a skeptics conference, and that skeptics are people who are interested in science and critical thinking and testing what Carl Sagan called extraordinary claims. As examples, I mentioned various deceptive activities that skeptics have investigated, psychic detectives who make fact claims about a missing person, or a medical provider who is putting forth treatments that are of no utility, or a medium who claims to be in touch with someone's dead relatives. These types of deception can be very injurious to people, either physically or psychologically, and skeptics are interested in them. But there's something of a continuum of deceptive practices that I thought would be interesting to talk about today. On a rather fun site called museumofhoaxes.com, there's a column distinguishing among frauds, hoaxes, pranks, and urban legends. Now, in all of these, there is deception, but the intent, the scale, and the consequences of the deception are all somewhat different if overlapping. Urban legends are popular stories that are widely believed, and this is a type of folklore. They're spread from person to person. The friend of a friend had this experience. In virtually every case they're false, although at some point there might have been a grain of truth that later became embellished. There's a plausibility to urban legends that make them believable, but at the same time they're striking, they're shocking, they're exciting, they appeal to the emotions like all good narratives. The term urban legend comes from works by the folklorist, Jan Brunwald, beginning with his 1981 book, The Vanishing Hitchhiker. The wonderful thing about being at TAM, or any skeptics conferences, you don't have to define urban legends. How many of you know the Vanishing Hitchhiker story? Okay, test skeptics. The Mexican pet, how many of you know the Mexican pet? The choking Doberman, anybody choking Doberman fans? The teenager cooked by the tanning bed? Don't you love urban legends? They're just marvelous. The thing about urban legends, though, is that there's no intention to deceive. In fact, people spread urban legends because they believe they're true, not because they're trying to fool you. If they're trying to fool you, it's one of the other categories. It's a prank, a hoax, or a fraud. Now a prank is a playful act performed between or among people who are acquainted with one another. April Fool jokes in the office, for example. Last year I said, don't try to read this. Okay, promise me you will not try to read this. Major eye strain, you'll all have to go to the optometrist. Last year I sent a letter to the NCSE staff on April 1. I'm very happy to inform you that the board has decided on a new director for NCSE. This decision was made after very careful consideration and with the best interests of both staff and NCSE in mind. Kent Hovind is expected to receive consideration of his more or less good behavior in prison by having his appeal for early release granted. He would be available to head up NCSE and take over management in approximately 2014. You will all be pleased to hear that he intends to apply the same creative approach to accounting of salaries and wages that he used for his previous corporation, which will result in immediate increase in salary. For all of you, his taxes will no longer need to be deducted, and it sort of goes on in the space. Okay, this is an example of a prank. It's intended to deceive but in a playful manner with no long-term consequences. Staff pretty much figured this out by the third paragraph. But the distinction between a prank and a hoax is subtle and not always easy to define. So what's a hoax and how does it differ from a prank? First of all, a prank is usually a private activity, whereas the Museum of Hoaxes defines a hoax as a deliberately deceptive act that has succeeded in capturing the attention of the public. So hoaxes are public in this particular taxonomy. Like a prank, a hoax can be something just for fun or it can be something that's very elaborate. But classically, a hoax goes beyond acquaintances and is visited on the public. In 1999, on an unlabeled website, a German graduate student named Stefan in broken English reported on an early hominid fossil found in New Mexico. Now, that would be pretty amazing in and of itself, except that this hominid was found in the jaws of an allosaurus. Stefan was excavating under the direction of Professor Heinzschfogel of Heidelberg University and when they discovered the fossils, some shadowy figures from the government came out and took away all the bones, notes, and most of Stefan's photos. Clearly, there is a cover-up going on. The sign on the truck says New Mexico State Resources Paleo Division. The initials are NMSR, which just also happens to be the initials of the New Mexicans for science and reason. Any NMSR guys here today? You guys rock. You really do. Well, is this a prank or a hoax? Well, it's very elaborate and it was public, certainly, so it grades more into the hoax side of things. It was in any event great fun and the NMSR hoax did in fact generate a lot of discussion on creationist websites, some at least for a while anyway, taking the hoax seriously. Now, hoaxes can sometimes be similar to tall tales. Again, the definition is not as important as the seriousness of the intent to deceive as well as the consequences. In Australia, you may encounter stories of the drop bear, the range of which is presented in red and the web page of the Australian Museum in Sydney. The drop bear is described as a carnivorous marsupial about the size of a leopard. The genus name is phylactose, species plumitus. Rather, elaborate descriptions can be found of its feeding preferences and tendency to attack unexpectedly. The danger to humans is high and first aid recommendations are given. There are some suggested folk remedies that are said to act as a repellent to drop bears. These include having forks in the hair or a Vegemite behind the ears. There is no evidence to suggest that any such repellents work. And you can see more at the Australian site. Now, you really should go to the site because the drop bear is great fun. The tall tales get spun even higher of course, including accounts of having been attacked by drop bears and the rest. And naturally the meme has spread widely. With new modifications, we need to inform tourists to Australia of the danger of the drop bear. And there's even a rating scale as sometimes the drop bear danger is extreme and even catastrophic. And in response, of course, there has become a drop bear preservation society. So here is an example of a hoax that's just good clean fun, verging clearly into tall tale territory. But you know, everybody can enjoy the drop bear, even if you might have been fooled initially. Now in pranks, hoaxes and frauds, there's an intent to deceive, but there is some distinction among them. Due to the extent of the prank or the hoax, the public or non-public, public nature of the activity, and shall we say the spirit in which it is offered. Frauds, on the other hand, are a criminal form of deception. Someone gets hurt. One of the founders of the Bay Area Skeptics, let's hear it for Bay Area Skeptics, was the late Robert Steiner, a magician and skeptic who wrote this book on scams and frauds, which has been used and may still be being used by police departments to try to train their staffs. With fraud, there's damage. The damage may be financial. Ponzi schemes are a classic example of this, as are the sorts of things that are described in Bob's book. Confidence games like the pigeon drop and the rest. And everybody has received at least one, if not more, Nigerian letters. Someone gets hurt and someone is trying to gain. Now here's an interesting story. Is it a hoax or a fraud? Was there a hybrid human chimpanzee? Oliver was captured as a young chimp about six years old in West Africa and brought to the United States by some animal trainers, Janet and Frank Berger. As too often happens with chimps, they get too big and powerful. You really don't want an animal that's about twice as strong as you with the emotional control of a toddler. Eventually most pet chimps are handed off to other people and so was Oliver. He made his way through several private owners to companies that provide chimps for research to finally ending out his days at a chimp refuge in Texas where he definitely had a better quality of life than a five foot by seven foot cage in a laboratory. He died in 2012 at age approximately 55. What made people speculate that Oliver was a human zee? Well, he had a suite of rather odd characteristics. He was bald. He had a smaller head in proportion to his body. He had funny ears that were set high up on his head. He has freckles and he had a much, much flatter face than is typical of most chimpanzees. He was also really personable, very, very friendly to humans, which is not unusual in hand-reared chimps. Often hand-reared chimps are not very well socialized when it comes to being a chimp. He acted like a hand-reared chimp. He drank from cups. He used silverware, not very well. They're just not adept enough with pre-ensility. He smoked cigars. He drank liquor. He was quite human in his behavior. He also tended to walk erect, which is a very odd thing for chimpanzees. Most chimpanzees are knuckle walkers. They walk with their forepart of their body weight on the knuckles of their hands. And his gait was pretty unusual. Most chimpanzees, when they do walk bipedally, which is part of the locomotive repertory, they have this kind of funny, choppy side-to-side gait. He didn't have a stride, but he was better at it than most chimpanzees. So, skeptics, how would we test whether this strange creature is a human zee, is a hybrid between a human and a chimpanzee? Well, one way would be to compare his chromosomes. Most apes have 48 chromosomes. Humans have 46. If Oliver were a human zee, he might have an intermediate number of chromosomes. This is often the case with hybridization. There's something in between. And if you could check his DNA further, you might find out if there are more similarities between his DNA in humans or his DNA in chimps. Eventually, long after Oliver's life as an exhibit of the human zee, so to speak, this was done. Oliver has 48 chromosomes, just like a chimp. Panthroglatates. The investigators compared Oliver's chromosomal banding and mitochondrial DNA as well and found that when Oliver's mitochondrial DNA was compared to chimps and bonobos in humans, he was most similar to West African chimps. And among West African chimps, those from Gabon were the most similar to him. So, Oliver is a regular panthroglatates, not a human chimp cross, not a bonobo cross, or even a mutant chimp. So, what explains his appearance and behavior then? Well, you can train a chimp to walk upright. It's part of their locomotor repertory, and a cattle prod can do many wonderful things when it comes to negative reinforcement. This is a macaque. This is a monkey that's much more of an obligate quadruped than a chimp, and it's walking pretty erect. Although it's rare, it's possible to make a non-human primate walk bipedally. And some chimps and some monkeys are going to be better at it than others. What about his flatter face? What about the reduced prognathism, as we say in the physical anthropology biz? The fact that the lower portion of Oliver's face sticks out very... A normal chimpanzee lower face sticks out very far from a line drawn under the orbits, which is more physical anthropology than you need to know. This is what a normal adult chimp mouth looks like. Stay away from it. It has very big front teeth, and the bone around the teeth, the alveolar bone that support these big incisors and canines, is very thick and very strong. Of course, it reflects the size of the teeth. It makes the chimp have a very protruding lower facial area, both the maxilla and the mandible. One of the differences between chimps and early humans is that when you first start seeing this flattening out of the face in the early hominid record, that's when you're seeing the hominization, the HOMO component of our ancestry rather than the Australopithecine component of our ancestry. We don't have the big incisors and canine teeth, we don't have the big supporting jaws. Here is a picture of Oliver in a still that I took from a YouTube video from a BBC program. I apologize that it's blurry, but that's the nature of things. It was the best thing that was available. Someone pulled out all his front teeth. I don't know when this happened, but I hypothesized that it was very early in the game. So is Oliver a fraud? Well, certainly in the past. He brought his chimps teeth, shaved his head and made him walk on two legs. Certainly in the past, several people tried to spread the meme that this creature was a chimp human hybrid. Was there an intent to deceive? Probably. At least on the part of some who promoted the human Z. But harm is also a criterion of fraud. So who is harmed? The various people who paid money for Oliver thinking he was a human Z. Here is Oliver in retirement. At the chimp sanctuary in Texas before he died. Almost blind, arthritic, with his upper jaw resorbed almost back to his nose. I'd say that to mutilate an intelligent, self-conscious, socially and psychologically sensitive creature easily meets the criterion of harm. Oliver's handlers perpetuated a fraud. Returning to our basic outline, frauds, hoaxes and pranks are based on deliberate deception and pranks are based on deliberate deception. The perpetrator knows that he or she is being deceitful. But not all falsehood is the result of deception. One can be wrong and sincere as well as wrong and fraudulent. Creationists believe that because all creatures were created at the same time, humans lived with dinosaurs. This means we should find the remains of humans and dinosaurs together. So it's a lot of interest among young earth creationists to find evidence, for example, human and dinosaur footprints together. The Pilexie River in Texas is a favorite of creationists and they have long claimed to be able to find human and dinosaur footprints together. There are track ways of dinosaur footprints in the Pilexie River area. There's even a really nice little state park museum where you can see them. And sometimes you see these kind of lozens shaped features that superficially look like footprints. Back in the depression, locals used to dig out dinosaur tracks and sell them to tourists. They found that human footprints sold better. So they began to carve out human prints instead of digging out dinosaur ones. Now clearly these were fraudulent. There was an intent to deceive and the person purchasing these prints was cheated. But there are also phenomena at Pilexie that clearly aren't carved and some creationists point out dinosaur and human coexistence. Now I assure you there are alternative explanations for these prints. They could be scour marks or eroded dinosaur tracks or any of a number of natural explanations. And if you want to know more, go to NCSE's website where this is discussed in a great deal of detail. But more to the point today, very sincere individuals who believe that there truly are human tracks at Pilexie are not knowingly perpetuating a falsehood. Being wrong is not the same as being fraudulent. Now just because you sincerely believe something doesn't make you less wrong. Someone who believes the Pilexie River Mantrax are real is just as wrong as someone back in the Depression who carved a foot out of limestone and sold it to a tourist. But I think there's a difference. First of all, sincerely misinformed people are capable of changing their minds with evidence. The cameras don't bother because they have a vested interest. A geologist, Glenn Kubin, has come up with some plausible explanations of the more realistic appearing tracks. And interestingly, he has found general acceptance for his views among creationists. Now consider the structure of a typical tridactyl dinosaur leg. Dinosaurs walk on the balls of their feet kind of like dogs. Under some circumstances dinosaurs walk on the balls of their feet. The arrow there is pointing to the metatarsals. These are the major bones of the foot. Generally the metatarsals or in the hands, metacarpals don't touch the ground. They don't touch the surface. It's like a dog. They walk along on the pad so to speak. When such a print is made the weight of the animal, but sometimes the surface is very slippery or in mud or some uneven kind of surface sometimes a quadrupedal animal who has this kind of metatarsal structure will sort of squat down on the metatarsals rather than staying up on the balls of the feet. And when this happens the weight of the animal is in the middle of the metatarsals as you would expect and the toes make much less deep prints. The toe marks are going to be shallower, more likely to be infilled with other sediment and more difficult to see. Now at a later time, when the prints are exposed, sometimes you can see these toe prints and then clearly this lozenge shaped man-track as they are called is really just an eroded dinosaur track. And this is apparently what happened in the mid-1980s when Kubin and Hastings examined this tailor site which I showed you a picture of which had been considered man-tracks. After some erosion some of the tracks were more like three-toed dinosaur tracks. The toes were appearing at the front where they hadn't been obvious in earlier years. Now what's remarkable about this not just that it's good science and action so to speak was that John Morris geologist from the Institute for Creation Research went out with Kubin, was shown the tracks and has gone on record as saying that these tracks cannot be considered evidence for human and dinosaur tracks coexisting. Now Morris has not given up on the idea that humans and dinosaurs coexist. I assure you of that. But he and the Institute for Creation Research no longer promote the Pilexie tracks as evidence for humans and dinosaurs living together. Now of course things are never quite as simple as they sound. Part of the reason why this turnaround at ICR happened is that Glenn Kubin is himself an evangelical Christian. Although clearly his views on science differ greatly from those of the Morris's and ICR. But he had the credibility for John Morris to go out there and say I'm a trustworthy person look at these tracks this is an eroded dinosaur track it is not a man track. So to finish up let's enjoy our urban legends and even our pranks. Let's be wary of hoaxes and let's especially be wary of frauds. One can have fun, tell tall tales and be playfully deceptive without hurting people. And let's also be cognizant that not everything that is erroneous is necessarily fraudulent. There is an old expression. There is a difference between ignorance and stupidity. Ignorance is curable. Similarly there is a difference between being wrong and perpetuating a fraud. Being wrong is curable. From being wrong is to get their trust and show them convincing evidence presented in a persuasive and logical manner. That's what my colleagues at NCSE do when it comes to evolution and climate change and I think that's what all of a skeptic should be trying to do. When we are trying to help the public understand how exciting science is and what a cool thing it is and how wonderful it is to be better able to understand the natural world. Which of course the next speaker has done brilliantly throughout his whole career and I cannot wait to hear how he will enlighten us once again. If you want more information on this kind of thing may I recommend the NCSE websites, the main website we have a YouTube site there's also a Facebook site. Please avail yourself of these wonderful resources on evolution and climate change. Speaking of Facebook, if you want to correspond with me I'm going to ask you to come over here for one second. There's someone who would like to say a few words to you to recognize your potential and your potential. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks to you. Thanks to you to recognize your continued excellence and I think I can recognize him as well. Ladies and gentlemen, once again James Randy. I have known iced op for many many years now. It's always been a pleasure to speak with her and to have her attend us so many times she has. It is my distinct pleasure to present James Randy Award for Skepticism in the Public Interest. It's presented to Dr. Eugene Scott with gratitude for her steadfast advocacy work in support of scientific skepticism and in defense of science education. Let's hear it. Yeah, we're gonna need, oh, yeah. Just a minute. Oh my goodness, look at all of this. Sit down, sit down, please. So Randy says, say a few words and I'm saying, come on guys, you're already running late. Everybody wants to hear Bill anyway, so thank you. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking. I won't. Thank you very much, James Randy Educational Foundation, a wonderful organization that I hope you support. And I will treasure this. Thank you so much. Eugene Scott, Eugene Scott, one of the heroes, one of the real actual heroes.