Okay, so Skeptiko doesn't really have a studio, and we don't have a production assistant either, so let me try that again.

So I came downstairs into my office, and my teenage son was sitting there checking his MySpace page. And we had, well we had a moment, a special moment. You see I told him about Skeptiko, how I'd started this thing a year ago because I really wanted to find the truth. How on the one side there were these scientists who are saying these pretty wacko sounding things like “hey maybe we really do survive death” and “maybe there really is something like telepathy”. And I told him about how on the other side there were these really confident sounding skeptics who are convinced that this is all just a fantasy. I told him how I had investigated this over the last year, how I had interviewed these researchers, and how impressed I was by their work, and their perseverance in the face of some criticism that's really, really hard to take. I told him how I had interviewed some of the leading skeptics, and how smart they seemed at first, but how a lot of their arguments just fell apart when you really looked into it.

So then I asked him, I asked Zach what he thought about this. Whether he thought there was any way these new discoveries about human consciousness could break through the traffic jam of atheist skeptics on the one side and fundamental Christians on the other. And without even looking up from his iMac, he said “iunno”, yes, “iunno”. As if the wisdom and social consciousness of Homer Simpson had penetrated deep into his young mind and summed up the collective response of all those who would rather not think too much about stuff that we don't really have any good answers for.

But as an optimist, as a romantic idealist who thinks it really is possible to change the world, I saw that “iunno” as a call for just one thing... a second season of Skeptiko!

Stay with us! Coming up, we dig into academic snobbery. I have an interview with a “I am a hard-core skeptic” (clip, Dr. Clive Wynne), and a distinguished academic that edits a much maligned scientific journal. I will also update you on the experiments we're doing, the one with the telepathic dogs, dogs that know when their owners are coming home, and our medium demonstration over with the folks at The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. So stick around, more Skeptiko to follow!

Over the last few weeks I've had some very interesting interviews. As usual I've talked to folks that run the gambit from hardcore skeptics to folks that you might call believers. But all of them serious folks, researchers, scientists, and those interviews are going to make their way into several of the upcoming episodes of Skeptiko. But on today's show I want to dip in and give you a sample of one of the debates that's now been festering for a while in the background in Skeptiko, and that's this issue of academic snobbery and what journals matter, what papers matter, what research matters.

Last week I had the opportunity to talk to Dr. Clive Wynne of the University of Florida. Dr. Wynne is a well respected animal behaviorist, and ah as that clip earlier will let you know, he considers himself a hardcore skeptic. And we had a very enjoyable chat, he's a very interesting guy to talk to. And as we got going, one of the subjects that we touched on was of course these experiments done by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake on dogs that know when their owners are coming home. And the topic came up of which journals have these articles appeared in, and I pointed out that Dr. Sheldrake is published in Nature, and that he's a well qualified researcher. But Dr. Wynne really wanted to focus in on, where has he published this work? So together, while we were talking, we went online and looked at Sheldrake's papers and where they are published. And here's the first citation that Dr. Wynne came across:

Dr. Clive Wynne:
The Journal of Scientific Exploration. That is not in fact a scientific journal.

Alex Tsakiris:
Well this is a bit of a hot button for me, and I used to subscribe to this journal and I really enjoyed it. The articles are great, they're serious, they seem to be well written, well researched, and it seems like whenever I talk to skeptics they have this knee jerk reaction to... I think that the title of the journal 'Journal for Scientific Exploration', and they immediately dismiss it. I think they have no idea of who's behind it and what's involved. So I went onto the internet, googled, 'Journal for Scientific Exploration'. Okay, here's the page, International Journal of Scientific Exploration was established in 1987 to provide a professional forum for the presentation, scrutiny and criticism of scientific research outside the topics of mainstream science. Okay, let's look at the editorial board. University of Paris, the Sorbonne, Naval Observatory, Institute of Psychiatry in London, Cornell University, Princeton University, University of Texas, Harvard Medical School. It seemed to have all the right names. Okay but who's the editor? Okay here he is, Dr. Peter A. Sturrock, Professor Emeritus, Applied Physics, Stanford University. That sounds pretty impressive, let's look at his Wiki page. Cambridge University PhD, director of the Center for Space Science and Astrophysics, mm sounds pretty good! Chairman of the Plasma Physics Division and the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society, I don't know what that is but it sounds pretty good! He sounds like a serious scientist, sounds like a researcher, sounds like someone who might know a little bit more about what science is than, lets say, some skeptic teaching junior college kids 'Intro to Science'. I mean lets get a little bit of balance here, is he qualified? Yeah I think he passes the minimum requirements! But I want to take it one step further, I want to talk to Dr. Sturrock and get his view on this. So I called him up and asked him, “Is the Journal for Scientific Exploration for real?”

Dr. Peter Sturrock:
(laughter) Well, this depends on whether we think that science is all worked out or whether it's, let's say, an ongoing process. If we think that scientists know all there is to know, then there is no need for the, the Journal for Scientific Exploration, but if we think that ah science is an ongoing process that has many, a lot of problems to, to work through and work out, and some of which are ignored by mainstream science, and many of which are of interest to the public, then there's a real need for JSE and the SSE.

Next: Part 2 -Marc Bekoff on the double standard faced by controversial research

Return to the Podcast: Academic Snobbery and the Journal of Scientific Exploration

About Skeptiko
Explore controversial science with leading researchers and their critics. click for more

What I've Learned From Skeptics Michael Shermer, Steven Novella, James Alcock and James Randi Can Dogs "Know"?