I will Believe the Book of Mormon as history when...

[_antishock8]

Yes, yes... The Fat Man's "research" will be rediscovered by secular anthropologists in 50 years, and he'll be hailed as a visionary, a man ahead of the times. *rawlzing*

[_Daniel Peterson]

One of the most important and reliable laws of the history of literature, scholarship, and science is that “experts know what to pay attention to and what to ignore" -- a law that, in honor of its discoverer, might justly be called the “Pal Joey Principle.”

Excellent illustrations of the Pal Joey Principle can, as we’ve already noted, be found in the lives and careers of Lord Byron, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Gregor Mendel, but another superb example is that of the notorious Hungarian pseudoscientist and scam artist Ignaz Semmelweis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

[_Trevor]

but another superb example is that of the notorious Hungarian pseudoscientist and scam artist Ignaz Semmelweis...

Well, you should be committed to an asylum and beaten to death for even suggesting such a thing!

[_Daniel Peterson]

In contemplating the Pal Joey Principle, I can’t help but think of a comment made by the eminent early-twentieth-century British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead:

“When I was a young man in the University of Cambridge,” Whitehead once remarked, “I was taught science and mathematics by brilliant men and I did well in them; since the turn of the century I have lived to see every one of the basic assumptions of both set aside; not, indeed, discarded, but of use as qualifying clauses instead of as major propositions; and all this in one life-span—the most fundamental assumptions of supposedly exact sciences set aside. And yet, in the face of that, the discoverers of the new hypotheses in science are declaring, "Now at last, we have certitude." (Cited in in Charles P. Curtis, Jr., and Ferris Greenslet, comps., The Practical Cogitator, or the Thinker's Anthology [Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1945], 112.)

[_beastie]

In regards to the Book of Mormon’s setting in ancient Mesoamerica, it is not true that scholars reject it simply because they’re unaware of it. Michael Coe has commented extensively on this issue, and his comments reveal an understanding of modern Book of Mormon apologia as well as understanding the Book of Mormon story itself. For example:

From the PBS interview

Well, the Book of Mormon is a migration story, similar to the idea of the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament, except there are three migrations involved in this: an early one [involving a people] called the Jaredites, who landed in the New World at a very early date, thousands of years ago -- these people disappeared; and then a great one, and the most important one to the Mormons, which are the Nephites' passage across the ocean in boats with cattle, Old World domestic plants, with metallurgy and so forth. And after a while, of course, ... it starts to fall to pieces, as all civilizations usually do, and a faction called the Lamanites wins out. These people are the ones that are cursed by God, with dark skins. They're not at all beloved by God, and these are the ancestors of the American Indians today.
So it's a triple migration story. The job, according to a lot of Mormon archaeologists, their job is to find that this is a true story: that all these things actually existed in this place that is described in the Book of Mormon, which in this case would have to be in Guatemala and the neighboring Mexican state of Chiapas. This is what they have been after for 50 years, and unfortunately they've never found anything that would back it up. They have excavated all kinds of sites and, unfortunately, they have never found anything that would back it up. ...

The Book of Mormon is very explicit about what the Nephites brought with them to this land: domestic animals, domestic crops, all of Old World origin; metallurgy, the compass, things like that. Just take domestic animals, for example. I mentioned horses and cattle. Nobody has ever found the bones of horses and cattle in these archaeological sites. Horses were already in the New World, all right, but were wiped out about 7000 B.C. by people coming in from Asia. They never found horse bones in these early sites between the prime period, which is 500 B.C. to A.D. 200.; never found cattle bones there; never found wheat or rye and these other things that they grow in the Middle East. Plenty of evidence for all kinds of other things that are Native American, but nothing there. And that's the problem: They simply haven't shown up. ...

To make Book of Mormon archaeology at all kind of believable, my friend John Sorenson has gone this route: He has compared, in a general way, the civilizations of Mexico and Mesoamerica with the civilizations of the western part of the Old World, and he has made a study of how diffusion happens, really very good diffusion studies. He's tried to build a reasonable picture that these two civilizations weren't all that different from each other. Well, this is true of all civilizations, actually; there's nothing new under the sun.
So he has built up what he hopes is a convincing background in which you can put Book of Mormon archaeology, and he's a very serious, bright guy. But I'm sorry to say that I don't really buy more than a part of this. I don't really think you can argue, no matter how bright you are, that what's said in the Book of Mormon applies to the peoples that we study in Mexico and Central America. That's one way of doing it -- to build up a kind of convincing background, a kind of stage set to this -- but there's no actors. That's the problem. ...

There's a lot of biblical archaeology, of course, and everybody who is a believing Jew or Christian is always hoping that hard evidence is going to show up for one thing or the other. And there is a lot of evidence that events in the Bible really did happen. I mean, there really is a Jericho; there really is Jerusalem to be excavated. And of course the Romans did know about Christ; there's no doubt about that. ...
In the case of the Book of Mormon, you've got a much bigger problem. You really do. We have another part of the world where the archaeology is really very well known now; we know a lot about people like the Maya and their predecessors. So to try to find unlikely evidence in an unlikely spot, you've got a problem. And of course none of the finds that biblical archaeologists are rightly proud about, no finds on that level have ever come up for Mormon archaeologists, which makes it a big problem.
How do they cope with this? I'll be the first to admit I don't know; I really don't. I don't really know how my friends that are Mormon archaeologists cope with this non-evidence, the fact that the evidence really hasn't shown up -- how they make the jump from the data to faith or from faith back to the data, because the data and the faith are two different worlds. There's simply no way to bring them together. ...

How would you describe the attitude of most professional historians to orthodox Mormon archaeology? ...
One might wonder how my profession in general, the profession of archaeology, has used Book of Mormon archaeology -- or let's say archaeology done by Mormons; I always separate these two things out. I think that for the Book of Mormon, even though they don't know much about the Book of Mormon or Mormonism, they take the whole thing as a complete fantasy, that this is a big waste of time. Nothing can ever come out of it because it's just impossible that this could have happened, because we know what happened to these people. We can read their writings: They're not in reformed Egyptian; they're in Maya.
On the other hand, there are the archaeologists who are Mormons, and I think there's a huge amount of respect among my colleagues -- there certainly is with myself -- for the work that they have done and the work they're continuing to do. They're really great, whether they're from BYU or other institutions. They're doing a wonderful job; they're telling us about the American Indian past, the past of Native American civilizations. And they've made a unique contribution, I think, to the study of New World cultures. ...

Coe has also revealed a basic understanding of apologia in the article This Is Not the Place

The cumulative effect of all these minute examples would seem to deal a deathblow to the whole enterprise of Mormon archaeology. Yet BYU scholars like Sorensen have found all sorts of exotic rationales to circumnavigate these issues. Sorenson has gone so far as to postulate that the Book may actually have been referring to a tapir or a deer when Joseph Smith copied down the word "horse," although on the face of it, the idea of soldiers riding tapirs into battle seems ludicrously impractical. Sorenson has also suggested in his books and essays that the "chariots" referred to in the Book weren't what we think of as chariots, but some considerably more primitive conveyance without wheels more akin to a sled or a sledge, or even a nuptial bed.
Other Mormon scholars have been less willing to trowel over these apparent inconsistencies. In at least one public forum, BYU archaeologist Ray Matheny has been surprisingly blunt about the serious dilemmas posed by these rather glaring holes in the archaeological record. "I'd say this is a fairly king-sized problem," Matheny observed at a tape-recorded symposium in 1984 in Salt Lake City. "Mormons, in particular, have been grasping at straws for a very long time, trying to thread together all of these little esoteric finds that are out of context. If I were doing it cold, I would say in reviewuating the Book of Mormon that it had no place in the New World whatsoever. It just doesn't seem to fit anything that I have been taught in my discipline in anthropology. It seems like these are anachronisms:' Matheny concluded his talk with a sockdolager: "As an archaeologist," he said, "what [can] I say . . . that might be positive for the Book of Mormon? Well, really very little." Several Mormon archaeologists told me that Matheny's remarks caused considerable stir within church circles and came close to costing him his tenured position at BYU. Matheny has since carefully refrained from further public commentary on this subject, and he declined to be interviewed for this story.
Yet in 1993 Matheny's wife, Deanne G. Matheny, also a Mesoamerican anthropologist, echoed her husband's remarks in an essay entitled "Does the Shoe Fit? A Critique of the Limited Tehuantepec Geography." In taking Sorenson's elaborate apologetics to task, she wrote, "There are too many areas where one must either assume that evidence exists but has not yet been found or that something other than the words actually used [in the Book of Mormon] were intended . . . . Too much sidestepping of this sort can lead to the absurd." With Sorenson's elastic style of argumentation setting the overall tone, there is about FARMS a dizzying buzz of intellectual energy, with scholars investigating every imaginable cranny of inquiry, from hermeneutics to meteorology, from animal husbandry to the prevailing currents of the oceans. Yale's Michael Coe likes to talk about what he calls "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness," the tendency among Mormon theorists like Sorenson to keep the discussion trained on all sorts of extraneous subtopics (like tapirs and nuptial beds) while avoiding what is most obvious: that Joseph Smith probably meant "horse" when he wrote down the word "horse," and that all the archaeology in the world is not likely to change the fact that horses as we know them weren't around until the Spaniards arrived on American shores.
"They're always going after the nitty-gritty things," Coe told me. "Let's look at this specific hill. Let's look at that specific tree. It's exhausting to follow all these mind-numbing leads. It keeps the focus off the fact that it's all in the service of a completely phony history. Where are the languages? Where are the cities? Where are the artifacts? Look here, they'll say. Here's an elephant. Well, that's fine, but elephants were wiped out in the New World around 8,000 B.C. by hunters. There were no elephants!"
Another eminent Mormon archaeologist of Mesoamerica, Gareth Lowe, has come down hard on Sorenson's attempts to, as he puts it, "explain the unexplainable." "A lot of Mormon 'science' is just talking the loudest and the longest," says Lowe. "That's what Sorenson is about, out-talking everyone else. He's an intelligent man, but he's applied his intelligence toward questionable ends."

And, of course, his article in Dialogue:

"The bare facts of the matter are that nothing, absolutely nothing, has even shown up in any New World excavation which would suggest to a dispassionate observer that the Book of Mormon, as claimed by Joseph Smith, is a historical document relating to the history of early migrants to our hemisphere." (Michael Coe, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Summer 1973, pp. 42, 46)

Coe affirmed, over twenty years later, in a letter to Bill McKeever that his opinion remained unchanged:

“I haven’t changed my views about the Book of Mormon since my 1973 article. I have seen no archaeological evidence before or since that date which would convince me that it is anything but a fanciful creation by an unusually gifted individual living in upstate New York in the early nineteenth century.”

In addition to Coe’s informed comments, we have John Clark’s statement from the Q/A period after his BYU devotional talk "Archaeology, Relics, and Book of Mormon Belief"

[John Clark:] Those who choose not to believe it [i.e., the Book of Mormon] will never believe it; those who choose to believe it already do. ...
But I'm, I would never tell anybody to try to prove the Book of Mormon is true through physical evidence, just because of the way metaphysics and epistemology work—it's not possible. And so, you have to get the testimony some other way, and then the evidence will become very clear. If you're on the opposing side you can say we basically just, ah, brained washed ourselves (one or two words inaudible). You're free to think that—we're not doing anybody any harm.
[Mp3 Time: c. 26 mins.]
[John Clark:] And, no, I can't convince any of my archeology colleagues that the evidence proves the BoMor is true. They have read it, but they just read it like they're reading an archeology book, and that's not going to go anywhere.
[Mp3 Time: c. 41 mins.]

It is certainly possible to prove that other ancients texts do or do not originate in ancient Mesoamerica (see Grolier codex), so Clark is not making a generalization about the impossibility of proving or disproving the origins of other texts. So apparently the Book of Mormon is in a special category. To be able to see the clear evidence, you must already believe. And his archaeology colleagues haven’t been convinced by reading it “like they’re reading an archaeology book”. Again, the Book of Mormon is in a special category.

Michael Coe has long been the preeminent expert in ancient Mesoamerica. His credentials are impeccable in that regard. He asserts that we ‘know a lot about the Maya and their predecessors’. This contradicts the assertions of MAD folks whom I think of as the “know nuttin’s”, who assert that due to the fact that the Spaniards destroyed the vast amount of Maya literature, that we “can’t really know” anything about ancient Mesoamerica with any degree of certainty. Other than the fact that this ignores the fact that the written word is not necessarily the most reliable transmitter of reliable historical information, and that “dirt information” provides quite a bit of information to those who know how to read it, it also ignores what experts like Coe say: we do know quite a bit about ancient Mesoamerica.

Since Coe’s Mesoamerican credentials are impeccable, apologists focus on asserting that he doesn’t really understand Book of Mormon apologia or the Book of Mormon, and hence, is still unqualified to judge. Yet Coe’s comments make it clear that he has a basic familiarity with modern Book of Mormon apologia – concepts like horses = tapir, for example.

The truth is that it will never matter what any expert in the field has to say on the subject. Apologists and other defenders of the faith do not believe because of experts or evidence – they believe because they have a testimony, and all their subsequent information and rationalizations are simply reasons given for believing what they already believe for reasons that have nothing to do with academics, scholars, and evidence.

[_beastie]

Your error is more than obvious. My impression is that Peterson can easily answer anything anyone here has ever thrown at him. The issue is not capability, rather, desireability. Surely a vast difference.

No. He cannot answer. I’m not saying he cannot answer due to lack of adequate background knowledge. Although I’ve never had the impression DCP has engaged in a focus study of ancient Mesoamerica, I do believe he’s probably picked up enough information from Brant and others over the years to compensate, although I could be wrong. So the reason he cannot answer is not due to lack of knowledge – it is due to realizing that there is no answer that will help build the case of an ancient Mesoamerican setting for the Book of Mormon.

To understand why this is so, you do need some background understanding of ancient Mesoamerica, which, frankly, I doubt you possess. I do not believe you’ve read one book by Michael Coe, for example, or any of the other fine scholars who have devoted their lives to that study. It would help you to read my two essays found
here and
here, but I don’t expect you to do that, either. So very briefly, here’s the deal:

Ancient Mesoamerica’s politics and culture were entirely enmeshed within their regional religious worldview. It is not possible to separate these issues. The most powerful polities in Mesoamerica were the polities that led the way for the others, who attached themselves to the ideologies of the powerful. If the Book of Mormon polity were significant and powerful enough to capture the attention of Teotihuacan (as the Journey of Faith dvd states), then it would have been a powerful and significant polity in the entire region. In addition, the social complexity described in the Book of Mormon is at a high level, probably at the level of a state. If the Nephite polity was that powerful, it would have been one of the most influential ones in the area – a polity that other polities would attach themselves to and imitate. Since the Nephite polity was Judeo-Christian, that means that the Judeo-Christian ideology would have spread throughout Mesoamerica. It didn’t. Period. Even the most ardent Book of Mormon defenders would not argue against the point that the Judeo-Christian worldview did not spread throughout Mesoamerica.

So the “right” answer must be that, contrary to the dvd, the Nephite polity was actually not a significant or powerful polity, but a rather minor one. This is often what Brant Gardner argues (at least in past conversations with me), although he can contradict himself on this point at will. So the problem now is twofold:

1) Why does the dvd present the Nephite polity as a powerful and significant polity that would capture the attention of Teoitihuacan?
2) How can the Nephite polity not be a powerful and significant one when the Book of Mormon text clearly describes a very complex society, with layers of bureaucracy and extended political control?

[_Daniel Peterson]

Undergirding the Pal Joey Principle is the important discovery that, while science and scholarship were certainly fallible in the past, they aren’t fallible any more. The scientific, literary, and scholarly consensuses of our time, unlike those of previous times, are reliable. Absolutely reliable. Work dissenting from the consensus, even if it has largely been left unread, can confidently be dismissed as without merit.

This wonderful state of affairs should not be projected too far back into the past, however. As is demonstrated by the case of peptic ulcers, gastritis, and bacteria, it has only been true for (at most) the past twenty-four years:

Although stress and spicy foods were, for many decades, almost universally agreed to be the main causes of peptic ulcers, and although physicians’ advice for those suffering from ulcers was based upon that largely unchallenged assumption, doctors now know that the cause of most ulcers is, in fact, the corkscrew-shaped bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori).

The bacterium was rediscovered in 1979 by the Australian pathologist Robin Warren, who did further research on it with the Australian physician Barry Marshall beginning in 1981; they isolated the organisms from mucosal material from human stomachs and were the first to successfully culture them. In a June 1984 paper (B. J. Marshall and J. R. Warren, “Unidentified curved bacilli in the stomach of patients with gastritis and peptic ulceration,” Lancet 1 [8390]: 1311–5), Warren and Marshall argued that most stomach ulcers and gastritis were caused by infection by H. pylori and not by stress or by spicy food.

Although there was some initial skepticism, within several years numerous research groups had verified the association of H. pylori with gastritis and, to a lesser extent, with ulcers. In a dramatic move reminiscent of the notorious Hungarian charlatan Ignaz Semmelweis, whose work on childbed fever was forever discredited by its failure to gain acceptance during his lifetime, Marshall drank a beaker of H. pylori in order to demonstrate that the bacterium caused gastritis and was not merely an accidental bystander. He became ill several days later with nausea and vomiting, and an endoscopy ten days after inoculation revealed signs of gastritis and the presence of H. pylori. These results proved that H. pylori was indeed the causative agent of gastritis.

Marshall and Warren went on to show that antibiotics are effective in the treatment of many cases of gastritis. In 1994, the National Institutes of Health (USA) declared that most recurrent duodenal and gastric ulcers were caused by H. pylori and recommended that antibiotics be included in the treatment regimen. Warren and Marshall were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005 for their work on H. pylori.

[_JustMe]

beastie

I do not believe you’ve read one book by Michael Coe, for example, or any of the other fine scholars who have devoted their lives to that study. It would help you to read my two essays found

Your amateur articles and attempts pale in comparison to what I have read, and that's not even counting Michael D. Coe's materials either!

[_JustMe]

beastie

He cannot answer.

You overstate your own ability to know what Daniel Peterson can and cannot do, of course........

[_beastie]

Since it is a hallmark of pseudoscience to refer to past renegade ideas that eventually won out, it is useful to remind ourselves
How To Distinguish between Science and Pseudoscience

(note: I’m choosing the elements that are pertinent to Book of Mormon apologia)

The word "pseudo" means fake. The surest way to spot a fake is to know as much as possible about the real thing—in this case, about science itself. Knowing science does not mean simply knowing scientific facts (such as the distance from earth to sun, the age of the earth, the distinction between mammal and reptile, etc.) It means understanding the nature of science—the criteria of evidence, the design of meaningful experiments, the weighing of possibilities, the testing of hypotheses, the establishment of theories, the many aspects of scientific methods that make it possible to draw reliable conclusions about the physical universe.

Because the media bombard us with nonsense, it is useful to consider the earmarks of pseudoscience. The presence of even one of these should arouse great suspicion. On the other hand, material displaying none of these flaws might still be pseudoscience, because its adherents invent new ways to fool themselves every day.

Pseudoscience displays an indifference to facts.
Instead of bothering to consult reference works or investigating directly, its advocates simply spout bogus "facts" where needed. These fictions are often central to the pseudoscientist's argument and conclusions. Moreover, pseudoscientists rarely revise. The first edition of a pseudoscience book is almost always the last, even though the book remains in print for decades or even centuries. Even books with obvious mistakes, errors, and misprints on every page may be reprinted as is, over and over. Compare this to science textbooks that see a new edition every few years because of the rapid accumulation of new facts and insights.

Example: The Journey of Faith dvd’s assertion that the Lehites “would have found horses there.”
Second example: relying on very dated sources and ignoring updates that contradict the early, dated sources

Pseudoscience "research" is invariably sloppy.
Pseudoscientists clip newspaper reports, collect hearsay, cite other pseudoscience books, and pore over ancient religious or mythological works. They rarely or never make an independent investigation to check their sources.

Example: Wisconsin horse skull

Pseudoscience begins with a hypothesis—usually one which is appealing emotionally, and spectacularly implausible—and then looks only for items which appear to support it.

Conflicting evidence is ignored. Generally speaking, the aim of pseudoscience is to rationalize strongly held beliefs, rather than to investigate or to test alternative possibilities. Pseudoscience specializes in jumping to "congenial conclusions," grinding ideological axes, appealing to preconceived ideas and to widespread misunderstandings.

Example: Book of Mormon apologia begins with the assumption that the Book of Mormon is true, due to testimony

Pseudoscience is indifferent to criteria of valid evidence.
The emphasis is not on meaningful, controlled, repeatable scientific experiments. Instead it is on unverifiable eyewitness testimony, stories and tall tales, hearsay, rumor, and dubious anecdotes. Genuine scientific literature is either ignored or misinterpreted.

Example: We can’t possibly know enough about ancient Mesoamerica to judge whether or not the Book of Mormon is an ancient Mesoamerican document because there is sparse written evidence.

Pseudoscience relies heavily on subjective validation.

Example: testimony

Pseudoscience always avoids putting its claims to a meaningful test.

Example: Evidence connecting ancient Mesoamerica to an immigrant Judeo-Christian culture, or evidence demonstrating the Book of Mormon is an incredible find – a massive Mesoamerican written document – are not presented to peer Mesoamerican scholars for review.

Pseudoscience often contradicts itself, even in its own terms.

Example: Loose translation versus tight translation.

Pseudoscience attempts to persuade with rhetoric, propaganda, and misrepresentation rather than valid evidence (which presumably does not exist).

Example: “What would a Nephite pot look like, anyway?”

Pseudoscience argues from ignorance, an elementary fallacy.
Many pseudoscientists base their claims on incompleteness of information about nature, rather than on what is known at present. But no claim can possibly be supported by lack of information.

Example: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Pseudoscience appeals to false authority, to emotion,
sentiment, or distrust of established fact.

Example: Look at how many degrees FARMS apologists possess! Look at all their scholarly material (nonBoM related, of course)! Archaeologists would never be interested in the Book of Mormon because it’s a religious document!

Pseudoscience makes extraordinary claims and advances fantastic theories that contradict what is known about nature.

Example: Tight like a dish.

Pseudoscience appeals to the truth-criteria of scientific
methodology while simultaneously denying their validity.

Example: We can’t really know enough about ancient Mesoamerica to judge, but look at all this evidence Sorenson provides, anyway!

Pseudoscience claims that the phenomena it studies are "jealous."

The phenomena appear only under certain vaguely specified but vital conditions (such as when no doubters or skeptics are present; when no experts are present; when nobody is watching; when the "vibes" are right; or only once in human history.) Science holds that genuine phenomena must be capable of study by anyone with the proper equipment and that all procedurally valid studies must give consistent results. No genuine phenomenon is "jealous" in this way. There is no way to construct a TV set or a radio that will function only when no skeptics are present! A man who claims to be a concert-class violinist, but does not appear to have ever owned a violin and who refuses to play when anyone is around who might hear him, is most likely lying about his ability to play the violin.

Example: Clark: “But I'm, I would never tell anybody to try to prove the Book of Mormon is true through physical evidence, just because of the way metaphysics and epistemology work—it's not possible. And so, you have to get the testimony some other way, and then the evidence will become very clear.”

Additional observations from article:

Convinces by appeal to faith and belief. Pseudoscience has a strong quasi-religious element: it tries to convert, not to convince. You are to believe in spite of the facts, not because of them. The original idea is never abandoned, whatever the evidence.

This table could be greatly expanded, because science and pseudoscience are precisely opposed ways of viewing nature. Science relies on—and insists on—self-questioning, testing and analytical thinking that make it hard to fool yourself or to avoid facing facts. Pseudoscience, on the other hand, preserves the ancient, natural, irrational, unobjective modes of thought that are hundreds of thousands of years older than science—thought processes that have given rise to superstitions and other fanciful and mistaken ideas about man and nature—from voodoo to racism; from the flat earth to the house-shaped universe with God in the attic, Satan in the cellar and man on the ground floor; from doing rain dances to torturing and brutalizing the mentally ill to drive out the demons that possess them. Pseudoscience encourages people to believe anything they want. It supplies specious "arguments" for fooling yourself into thinking that any and all beliefs are equally valid. Science begins by saying, let's forget about what we believe to be so, and try by investigation to find out what actually is so. These roads don't cross; they lead in completely opposite directions.

Some confusion on this point is caused by what we might call "crossover." "Science" is not an honorary badge you wear, it's an activity you do. Whenever you cease that activity, you cease being a scientist. A distressing amount of pseudoscience is generated by scientists who are well trained in one field but plunge into another field of which they are ignorant. A physicist who claims to have found a new principle of biology—or a biologist who claims to have found a new principle of physics—is almost invariably doing pseudoscience. And so are those who forge data, or suppresses data that clash with their preconceptions, or refuse to let others see their data for independent evaluation. Science is like a high peak of intellectual integrity, fairness, and rationality. The peak is slippery and smooth. It requires a tremendous effort to remain near it. Slacking of effort carries one away and into pseudoscience. Some pseudoscience is generated by individuals with a small amount of specialized scientific or technical training who are not professional scientists and do not comprehend the nature of the scientific enterprise—yet think of themselves as "scientists."

One might wonder if there are not examples of "crossovers" in the other direction; that is people who have been thought by scientists to be doing pseudoscience, who eventually were accepted as doing valid science, and whose ideas were ultimately accepted by scientists. From what we have just outlined, one would expect this to happen extremely rarely, if ever. In fact, neither I nor any informed colleague I have ever asked about this, knows of any single case in which this has happened during the hundreds of years the full scientific method has been known to and used by scientists. There are many cases in which a scientist has been thought wrong by colleagues but later—when new information comes in—is shown to be correct. Like anyone else, scientists can get hunches that something is possible without having enough evidence to convince their associates that they are correct. Such people do not become pseudoscientists, unless they continue to maintain that their ideas are correct when contradictory evidence piles up. Being wrong or mistaken is unavoidable; we are all human, and we all commit errors and blunders. True scientists, however, are alert to the possibility of blunder and are quick to correct mistakes. Pseudoscientists do not. In fact, a short definition of pseudoscience is "a method for excusing, defending, and preserving errors."