Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

The title quote is a popular one with skeptics, and is often attributed to Carl Sagan in his Cosmos series, though Wikipedia reckons that Marcello Truzzi and Pierre-Simon Laplace both said something pretty similar first. I think I prefer another assertion along the same lines, known as Hume‘s maxim, which states: That no testimony is [...]

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Is evolution “just a theory”?

(Spoiler alert: no.) One of the criticisms most often levelled at the theory of evolution is that it’s “just a theory”. The clue’s in the name, after all. So if we’re not really all that sure about it, some people tell us, we ought to at least consider some alternative ideas. If it’s “just a [...]

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Pareidolia

:-O Shock! Horror! Amazement! All obviously and immediately recognisable from two dots, a straight line, and a circle. Quite clearly, it’s a drawing of a human face. Except, honestly, it doesn’t look anything like an actual face. Nobody’s face remotely resembles that tiny and grossly simplistic handful of symbols. People’s eyes have curved edges surrounding [...]

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There are no coincidences

This doesn’t directly relate to any particular skeptical topic, but it seems to come up somewhat obliquely in reference to many different ideas, so I thought it’d be good to gather a few thoughts into one place. It’s a common mantra among some people that “There are no coincidences”. What this generally means is that, [...]

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