You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.
—ROBERT A. HEINLEIN, REVOLT IN 2100/METHUSELAH’S CHILDREN
Launched in 1982, the political talk show Crossfire aired on CNN for almost twenty-five years. The format was simple. Political pundits on the left squared off against their counterparts on the right. The show was lively and entertaining. At the heart of these political debates was whether Americans benefited from more or less government. The show was successful in large part because of its format—television thrives on controversies, especially ones that will never be resolved.
Science, on the other hand, isn’t politics. Once scientific truths have emerged, they aren’t debatable. Nonetheless, scientists are occasionally asked to debate them. In this chapter, using vaccines, evolution, homeopathy, and the Holocaust as examples, I’ll discuss whether these debates are worthwhile or whether they just provide another venue for people to express their ill-founded, disproven—and, in the case of Holocaust denialism—heinous beliefs.
••••
ON FEBRUARY 5, 2015, I WAS ASKED TO APPEAR ON A TELEVISION program called Democracy Now! hosted by Amy Goodman. Appearing with me were Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, and Mary Holland, a lawyer who contributes to the anti-vaccine blog Age of Autism and a co-editor of the book Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children. Needless to say, Mary Holland is not a big fan of vaccines.
Dorit Reiss was the first to be interviewed. She talked about how the legal system has tried to balance a parent’s right to act in the best interest of their child with the child’s right to a long life. She carefully and thoughtfully explained how states have worked to protect their citizens from outbreaks of preventable infections while at the same time allowing religious and philosophical exemptions to vaccination. I learned a lot from her.
Next up was Mary Holland, who proceeded to pepper the viewing audience with one misleading comment after another. Holland said that “vaccines [cause] severe injury, brain damage in particular.” (Vaccines don’t cause permanent brain damage. Some of the diseases that vaccines prevent can cause permanent brain damage.) Regarding vaccine makers, Holland said that “we now have an industry with high profits and exceedingly low litigation risks.” (If vaccines are so profitable, why have companies largely abandoned them? Today, only four companies make vaccines for America’s children. In 1955, twenty-seven companies made them. While mergers account for some of this attrition, most was caused by dropout.) Then Holland taught the viewing audience that “there’s no question that [vaccines] can compromise the immune system.” (Vaccines strengthen the immune system.) Holland said that the “MMR vaccine [causes] precipitous [developmental] regression.” (Seventeen studies have shown that it doesn’t.) Holland warned of a conspiracy by the federal government to hide the truth about vaccines: “Dr. William Thompson, in the CDC, has come forward and said that he colluded with other key scientists to mask a signal that vaccines and autism are linked.” (No, he hadn’t.) Then we learned that “boys, neonates, who received the hep. B vaccine were nine times more likely to end up in special education [and] three times more likely to have an autism diagnosis.” (And so the goalpost shifts. Now it’s not the MMR vaccine that causes autism; it’s the hepatitis B vaccine. Also untrue.) Holland then stated, “I’m not anti-vaccine.” (If you vilify vaccines with little regard for scientific accuracy, it’s fair to say you’re anti-vaccine.) We learned that “children are too young to be vaccinated because the risks of injury are so great.” (Young children are vaccinated because many of the diseases vaccines prevent occur in young children.) Next, we learned that “we don’t have herd immunity for measles. We don’t have herd immunity for any of these diseases.” (Measles was eliminated from the United States in 2000 even though less than 100 percent of the population had been vaccinated. That’s what herd immunity is.) Holland said, “We have not looked, either retrospectively or prospectively, at what is the health of children who have gotten the CDC-recommended schedule, what is the health of children who have gotten the state mandate, and what is the status of children who are unvaccinated. That’s a totally doable study.” (Two studies have examined children who either received vaccines according to the CDC schedule or whose parents had chosen to delay vaccines. Developmental outcomes were the same in both groups.) Holland then said, “The way that vaccines are tested, before they’re recommended and then mandated, is they’re tested individually. They’re not tested as part of a schedule.” (Before any new vaccine is licensed, the FDA requires manufacturers to prove that the vaccine doesn’t interfere with the safety or immunogenicity of existing vaccines and vice versa.) Finally, we learned that the “hepatitis B [virus] is sexually transmitted. What is the rationality of giving a baby a vaccine that will wear off by the time they’re sexually active?” (Before the hepatitis B vaccine was routinely given to newborns in 1991, every year about eight thousand children less than ten years of age contracted the infection from casual contact with relatives who didn’t know that they were infected. Also, the immunity induced by the hepatitis B vaccine lasts at least thirty years and probably a lifetime.)
It was hard for me to watch Amy Goodman and Mary Holland talking to each other in the Democracy Now! studio while I was sitting in Philadelphia, connected via remote video link. While waiting, I wrote down each of Holland’s misleading statements. When Amy Goodman welcomed me to the show, I started by saying, “I honestly think the last ten minutes of your program set a new record for consecutive statements that were incorrect.” (This is called endearing yourself to the host.)
To her credit, Goodman allowed me to address many of Holland’s statements. But when I took exception to the format of the show, she pushed back. “I mean, to be fair,” said Goodman, “we wanted to have both of you on together to have a conversation, because there are many in this country, and a growing movement of parents, who are deeply concerned. But you wanted to have this conversation separately—Mary Holland and you separately. So, it’s important, I think, [to] have this kind of dialogue on all of these issues.”
Again, Goodman gave me a chance to respond, so I gave her my opinion: “I think that it is not important to have a debate about the science with someone who clearly doesn’t know the science. I’m sorry. Ms. Holland misrepresented the science again and again and again. I don’t think that in any way helps your viewers. I don’t think it’s fair to have a debate where two sides are represented, when only one side is supported by the science. I’d like to think we’re beyond that.” I don’t know why I said that I thought that we’re beyond that. We’re not beyond that at all. The media loves controversy. Thrives on it. And while it’s fair to have debates about religion or philosophy or politics in which two sides of an issue can reasonably be debated, it’s not fair to the viewers to debate scientific issues when the science is settled. When you agree to do that, you’re agreeing, at least tacitly, that the issue is debatable. Five minutes into the program, no one remembers who the scientific expert is. And they remember the fight far more than the facts. Good for television; bad for science—and very bad for the viewers.
The three experts on Democracy Now! played different roles during this debate. Professor Reiss spoke on her training: the law. Mary Holland, another legal expert, followed Reiss. But instead of Holland challenging Reiss on the law, she talked about science, which wasn’t her training. By placing me in the position of responding to Holland, the show elevated Holland from someone with strong opinions on vaccines to someone with medical expertise in vaccines.
So my recommendation is to avoid these situations. But as you’ll see in the following stories, other scientists have successfully taken on science denialists while at the same time educating their listeners. So I think that my advice here might be wrong.
On February 5, 2014, Bill Nye (“the Science Guy”), a mechanical engineer and science educator, debated Ken Ham, the CEO of Answers in Genesis: a fundamentalist Christian organization that advocates for a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis. Many scientists have argued that Nye should never have agreed to do this. “Inevitably, when you turn down the invitation, you will be accused of cowardice or of an inability to defend your own beliefs,” wrote Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and popular author. “But that is better than supplying the creationists with what they crave: the oxygen of respectability in the world of science.”
The debate, titled “Is Creation a Viable Model of Origins?,” took place at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which is operated by Answers in Genesis. This museum features, among other impossibilities, a diorama of a dinosaur standing next to a small child. Dinosaurs became extinct about sixty-five million years ago. Homo sapiens (us) have been around for only about two hundred fifty thousand years. So dinosaurs and people were never alive together on this planet.
Nine hundred people attended the debate, three million viewed it live online, and ten million have since seen it on YouTube.
Ken Ham opened the discussion by claiming that everything we need to know about the creation of the Earth and humans can be found in Genesis, a book written more than two thousand years ago. Given what we know from Genesis, claimed Ham, Charles Darwin was wrong. Humans and all manner of life on the planet didn’t evolve from a common ancestor. Rather, God created humans and animals much as we see them today. Nye countered that to deny evolution meant that you had to ignore about two hundred fifty thousand years of fossil records. Ham countered that Nye couldn’t possibly know that because he wasn’t there to observe it, implying that the fossil records were probably fakes.
Ken Ham then claimed that the Earth was only six thousand years old: “From Adam to Abraham—you’ve got two thousand years; from Abraham to Christ, two thousand years; from Christ to the present, two thousand years. That’s how we reach six thousand years.”
Nye countered that carbon dating of rocks showed that Ham was off by about 4.5 billion years.
Ham countered that carbon dating methods were unreliable. “The only infallible dating method comes from the only witness who was there: God,” said Ham. “And his word is all that is reliable.”
There was, of course, no way that Bill Nye could have reasonably argued the existence of God. So he didn’t. Rather, he countered with several interesting facts. Nye said that ice cores in places like the North Pole show six hundred eighty thousand layers—which would have taken at least six hundred eighty thousand cycles of winter and summer to create. If Ham was correct in stating that the Earth was only a few thousand years old, then hundreds of winter–summer cycles would have had to have occurred every year, something that Nye thought people would have noticed. “If we accept that the Bible as translated into English serves as a science text,” said Nye, “it means that Mr. Ham’s interpretation of those words, which have been retranslated again and again over three millennia, is somehow to be more respected than what you can observe in nature, what you can observe literally in your own backyard here in Kentucky. It’s a troubling and unsettling point of view.”
Nye also took on Ham’s belief in the Great Flood and Noah’s Ark. He asked the audience whether they found it credible that eight men without any previous ship-building experience could have built a wooden boat five hundred feet long, knowing that no wooden boat that long has ever been built. And knowing that a wooden boat built to the parameters described in the Bible could never float. Indeed, the longest wooden boat ever built was about three hundred feet long: a six-masted schooner called the Wyoming, which sank soon after it was put to sea. Further, Noah’s Ark supposedly contained eight zookeepers and fourteen thousand animals. According to Ham, those fourteen thousand animals, paired male and female, represented seven thousand species. Given that there are sixteen million species of animals on the Earth today, Nye said this would mean that eleven new species would have had to have been created every day, when in fact species are being eliminated, not created.
Ham countered that Nye “can’t say that Noah couldn’t build the Ark because you never met Noah.” Again, Ham argued that Nye couldn’t comment on the past because he wasn’t there to observe it.
Continuing his attack on the credibility of the Great Flood, which supposedly occurred about four thousand years ago, Nye showed a series of trees currently on Earth that were more than six thousand years old, including one in Sweden that was more than nine thousand years old—impossible given the Great Flood’s timeline.
Nye also said that millions and millions of Christians alive today believe in evolution, which didn’t make them bad Christians. Ham countered that Nye, by supporting the fact of evolution, was committing an act against God. That God, not humanity, was the ultimate authority.
By teaching evolution, Ham said that Nye was “imposing an anti-God religion on a generation of unsuspecting students.”
The debate lasted for two and a half hours. Throughout the event, Nye was calm and respectful. At the end, however, his anger flashed, albeit briefly. “I just want to close by reminding everybody what’s at stake here,” he said. “If we abandon all that we’ve learned, our ancestors, what they’ve learned about nature and our place in it, if we abandon the process, if we let go of everything that we’ve learned before us, if we stop driving forward, stop looking for the next answer to the next question, we in the United States will be outcompeted by other countries, other economies. Now that would be OK, I guess. But I was born here. I’m a patriot. And so we have to embrace science education. To the voters and taxpayers who are watching, please keep that in mind. We have to keep science education in science classes. You don’t want to raise a generation of science students who don’t understand natural laws.”
During the question-and-answer period, an audience member asked Nye about the Big Bang theory. Nye explained that radio waves in space contain a static noise consistent with an earlier explosion and that the galaxies are constantly moving away from us in all directions. This, explained Nye, was the origin of the universe. The questioner wanted to know about the source of matter before the Big Bang. Nye loved the question. Excitedly, he said, “We don’t know!” But Nye reveled in the fact that the questioner wanted to know more. This, to Bill Nye, was the essence of science: curiosity leading to questions leading to new knowledge.
Ken Ham ended Nye’s excitement with a dull thud. “There’s a book out there that answers this question,” said Ham. “And it’s in the first sentence: ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.’”
“God,” concluded Ham, “was necessary for science.”
On November 26, 2012, Joe Schwarcz debated André Saine in front of a general audience at McGill University in Montreal. The title of the debate was “Homeopathy: Mere Placebo or Great Medicine?” Schwarcz, who earned his PhD in chemistry in the early 1970s, is now a professor of chemistry at McGill, as well as the director of McGill’s Office for Science and Society. The author of twelve books written for the general public about chemistry in daily life, Schwarcz has been a wonderful advocate for science. André Saine, a homeopath, was the president of the Quebec Society of Naturopathic Medicine. For more than twenty-five years, Saine had made it his mission to educate the press and the public about the wonders of homeopathy.
Early in the debate, we learned that homeopathy was the brainchild of Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician who had wearied of the cruel and destructive medical procedures of his day, like leeches, bloodletting, and scarification. In the late 1700s, Hahnemann had an epiphany. While chewing on a piece of cinchona bark, he developed a high fever. Hahnemann knew that cinchona bark was a treatment for malaria (because it contains quinine), and he also knew that high fevers were a symptom of malaria. So he invented the first pillar of homeopathy: like cures like. In other words, patients should be given emetics to cure vomiting and cathartics to cure diarrhea and pyretics to treat fever. (Homeopathy literally means “similar suffering.”) The obvious problem with this idea is that giving a medicine that causes vomiting to patients who are vomiting will only make them worse. So Hahnemann invented the second pillar of homeopathy: the law of infinitesimals. Instead of giving the patient an actual drug, Hahnemann diluted the drug in water or alcohol over and over again, shaking the vial vigorously with each dilution. When he was finished, not a single molecule of the original drug remained.
Joe Schwarcz mentioned one example of a modern-day homeopathic remedy called Oscillococcinum. Billed as “Nature’s #1 Flu Medicine,” Oscillococcinum is made by taking the liver and spleen of a duck (Anas barbariae), homogenizing it, diluting it to a ratio of 1:100 in water, then repeating the 1:100 dilution two hundred more times. The final dilution would then be 10−400. In other words, the duck is gone.
Modern-day homeopaths understand that their highly diluted preparations don’t contain the active ingredient. They argue, however, that the water in which the product was diluted remembers that the medicine had been there. (The Earth contains a limited amount of water. You don’t want it to remember where it’s been.)
André Saine opened the debate with a simple declaration: “Homeopathy works!” Saine argued that it works on cells and on plants and on animals and on people. He said that homeopathic remedies could treat attention deficit disorder or serve as adjunctive therapy for bacterial sepsis. He said that Joe Schwarcz was probably going to get up after him and tell the audience that randomized, placebo-controlled trials of homeopathy have shown that it doesn’t work any better than a placebo. But the problem with those trials, according to Saine, was that the homeopathic dosing in those studies hadn’t been individualized for each patient. Only homeopaths know exactly how much of each substance to give. And the studies showing that homeopathic remedies weren’t any better than a placebo hadn’t been performed by homeopaths; they’d been performed by conventional practitioners who obviously didn’t know what they were doing. Saine said that Samuel Hahnemann had been a rigorous, thoughtful, hard-working scientist who was admired in his time and should still be admired today. He said that although he agreed that homeopathic substances are diluted to the point that the active ingredient is gone, something strange happens—something he couldn’t quite explain. Something mysterious and otherworldly. Somehow the original substance still exerts an influence. Even more interesting, this effect appears to enhance over time. A miracle.
Joe Schwarcz sat patiently listening to Saine’s argument. When it was his turn to speak, he commented on the title of the program. “We’ve asked the wrong question,” he said. “The title ‘Homeopathy: Mere Placebo or Great Medicine?’ implies that placebos can’t be an effective medicine. In fact, they can be both.” Schwarcz explained the power of placebos, alluding to studies showing that people, thinking they’re getting a real medicine, can learn to release their body’s own pain-relieving chemicals (called endorphins), or gamma-interferon (which stimulates the immune system), or cortisol (which suppresses the immune system), or dopamine (which affects brain function). Schwarcz agreed that placebo medicine had a place. “There’s nothing wrong with having an effective placebo,” he said, “as long as it is honestly delivered and as long as the patient isn’t being tricked that something else is happening.”
Schwarcz made a number of other interesting points. He said that water molecules do indeed change in the presence of an active substance—but that this change lasts for only about one picosecond (one trillionth of a second). And he disparaged studies showing that homeopathic remedies could treat attention deficit disorder. Schwarcz said that science stood on several pillars: peer review, critical thinking, reproducibility, and plausibility. The weakest pillar was peer review. Schwarcz said that six thousand five hundred medical publications produced an average of four thousand papers a day! Not surprisingly, some papers are excellent, some are awful, and most are mediocre. In other words, it wasn’t hard to find some journal somewhere in the world that would publish a study supporting anything, no matter how inane or implausible. Saine, argued Schwarcz, was relying on those poorly constructed studies to support his claims. “I admit that these are anomalous findings,” said Schwarcz. “But that’s not the point. The point is, so what?”
Then Schwarcz took homeopathy to its illogical end, referring to a homeopathic product made from fragments of concrete obtained from the Berlin Wall to reduce anxiety. Homeopaths who used this product had reasoned that the Berlin Wall had caused much anxiety. Therefore, according to Hahnemann’s theories, dilute preparations of the Wall should reduce anxiety. Schwarcz said that he assumed that Saine didn’t buy into this particular hoax. Or into homeopathic products that claimed to “cure” people who were gay.
Only once during the debate did Schwarcz lose his temper. It was when he criticized homeopaths for claiming that their products cured malaria, AIDS, and cancer and that they prevented infections like HPV (homeopathic vaccines are called nosodes). Schwarcz argued that practitioners who offered homeopathic remedies for diseases for which actual treatments existed shouldn’t be tolerated. Rather, these homeopaths should be held accountable for profiting from a medical fraud. Schwarcz then told the story of an Australian woman with a treatable form of colon cancer who had died because she had chosen homeopathic remedies instead of lifesaving chemotherapy.
During the rebuttal stage of the debate, Saine became more animated, insistent. “Science is passing you by, Joe,” he said. “Serious scientists are supporting our point of view. In the future, all of us will be practicing homeopathy.”
Schwarcz countered by noting that throughout history, every new therapy has been met with skepticism. He argued that initially no one believed that vitamin C could cure scurvy, or that vitamin D could cure rickets, or that aspirin could reduce inflammation, or that the foxglove plant, which contains digitalis, could treat heart failure. But clinicians don’t debate these issues anymore because “the evidence has become overwhelming.” “Almost every new medicine in history has been opposed,” said Schwarcz. “New technology breeds criticism. But eventually the truth comes out. So why are we still arguing about something that we were arguing about two hundred and fifty years ago?”
Because it is biologically impossible, homeopathy is often the subject of parody. For example, a group called the Centre for Inquiry Canada created an ad promoting its anti-homeopathy stance, which showed two parents sitting among a group of eight of their children. “Homeopathic contraception,” the ad reads, “There’s still nothing in it.”
Comedians have also weighed in. In the United Kingdom, the comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb featured a segment titled “Homeopathic A&E” on their sketch show, That Mitchell and Webb Look (“A&E” referring to a hospital’s accident and emergency department). The sketch opens with a man severely injured in a car accident being wheeled into the “Homeopathic A&E” on a gurney. The doctor and nurse, seeing the severity of the man’s injuries, are frantic. “Give me a solution of arnica…one part in a million,” shouts the doctor.
“Are you sure?” asks the nurse. “It looks serious.”
“You’re right,” the doctor responds. “We need to strengthen the dose. One part in ten million.”
“Does anybody know what sort of car hit him?” the doctor implores. Once informed, he instructs the nurse, “Get me a bit of blue Ford Mondeo. Put it in water, shake it, dilute it, shake it again, dilute it again, do some more shaking, dilute it some more, then put three drops on his tongue.” He concludes, “If that doesn’t cure him, I don’t know what will.”
Despite their efforts, the patient sits up, looks quizzically at the doctor, and dies. “Time of death, 3:34—ish,” says the doctor, noting the sundial on the wall.
In the next scene, the doctor is sitting at a bar, comforting himself with a homeopathic beer (one drop of beer in a large stein of water). “Sometimes I think a trace solution of deadly nightshade or a statistically negligible quantity of arsenic just isn’t enough,” he laments to a colleague.
“That’s crazy talk, Simon,” says his friend. “OK, so you kill the odd patient with cancer or heart disease or bronchitis, flu, chicken pox, or measles. But when someone comes in with a vague sense of unease or a touch of the nerves or even just more money than sense, you’ll be there for them—with a bottle of basically just water in one hand and a huge invoice in the other.”
On November 17, 2013, Michael Shermer debated Mark Weber at the Institute for Historical Review in Newport Beach, California. At issue was whether the Holocaust actually happened. Twenty years earlier, Shermer had engaged in a similar debate on the Phil Donahue Show. Donahue was the first mainstream talk show host to give Holocaust deniers a voice. Donahue did it because, as he claimed on his show, a recent poll had shown that 22 percent of Americans believed it was possible that the Holocaust had never happened, and 12 percent said that they didn’t know. Although many of his fellow historians disagreed with him, Shermer argued that it was important to debate the issue of Holocaust denialism in public. “Not only is it defensible to respond to the Holocaust deniers,” he wrote, “it is, we believe, our duty. The Holocaust deniers have succeeded in spreading their beliefs in the media and in the academic world. They are featured on national and local TV and radio talk shows, are invited to speak on college campuses, and have succeeded in placing full-page paid advertisements in college and university newspapers, including those of Brandeis University, Pennsylvania State University, and Queens College. Some of these ads arguing that the Holocaust never happened ran without comment.”
Michael Shermer is a professor of history at Occidental College in Los Angeles, the founder of the Skeptics Society, and the editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine, a publication that promotes scientific literacy. Shermer is also the author of several books, the most popular of which is Why People Believe Weird Things.
Mark Weber was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He subsequently trained at the University of Munich, then Portland State University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in history, and finally Indiana University Bloomington, where he received his master’s degree. Weber has appeared on talk shows ranging from the Montel Williams Show to 60 Minutes. Currently, Weber heads the Institute for Historical Review. Founded in 1978 with a grant from Thomas Edison’s grandniece, Jean Edison-Farrel, the Institute is considered to be the international center for Holocaust denialism. Weber, the editor-in-chief of the Institute’s journal, the Journal of Historical Review, took over as director of the Institute in 1995.
The setting for the debate was the Institute’s annual conference, usually attended by about two hundred fifty people. Typically, the display table features books like Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (an essay claiming that Jewish elders had conspired to gain control of the world by fixing the price of gold), and Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic screed, The International Jew.
Greg Raven, the associate editor of the Journal of Historical Review, introduced the debate saying, “The Holocaust was one of the most emotion-laden and propagandized chapters in contemporary history.” He then offered Shermer a chance to call the coin flip to determine who would speak first. Shermer won, but elected to go second. Mark Weber began by laying out his three basic claims. First, no German policy or program ever existed to exterminate Europe’s Jews. Second, stories of mass killings and gas chambers are mythical; gas chambers were used for delousing clothing and blankets, not for killing Jews. Third, six million deaths is a vast over-exaggeration; only between three hundred thousand and two million Jews died in the camps.
While Weber agreed that Jews had been persecuted under the Nazi regime, he argued that the goal was to deport Jews and have them work in labor camps, not to kill them. Although Weber didn’t deny that many Jews died in those camps, he said that their deaths were not caused by state-sponsored killings; rather, they were caused by overwork, starvation, and diseases like typhus. Indeed, according to Weber, the Nazi commandants who ran the camps and the Nazi doctors charged with maintaining the health of their inmates were chastised by the German high command for not doing a better job of keeping inmates alive. Yes, the Jews had committed crimes against the Nazi regime. And yes, the Jews had been punished for those crimes by deportation. But Germans weren’t interested in killing Jews. Why would they be? The Germans needed the Jews as laborers to help with the war effort. Weber argued that the term Final Solution referred to mass deportations, not mass exterminations.
Weber went on to say that all of the statements made in books, films, and personal testimonials by survivors of Auschwitz were lies put forward by a propaganda machine run by the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish groups. Indeed, experts who have examined the remains of Auschwitz have stated that no gas chambers existed. Weber concluded, “The Holocaust is a flourishing business and even a kind of new religion for many Jews,” calling the unfounded phenomenon “Holocaust-mania.”
Then it was Michael Shermer’s turn. Shermer listed evidence for the systematic, state-sponsored genocide of Europe’s Jews. Although he was calm and reasoned, Shermer was clearly nervous, beginning his rebuttal by stating that he wasn’t Jewish. He also said that despite claims to the contrary, the Anti-Defamation League didn’t support his magazine, Skeptic. Shermer said that the Holocaust “was a known crime that no one doubts, except for you guys.”
Shermer read quotes from Hans Frank, the Nazi official principally responsible for instituting the reign of terror against Poland’s Jews. Frank had lamented to German officials that he “couldn’t kill all of Poland’s Jews in one year, but if you help me this end can be obtained.” Later Frank said, “We must annihilate the Jews, so rid yourself of pity.” Shermer argued that if the goal was merely to deport Jews, why would Frank use the word ausrotten (“to annihilate”), and why would he say that Germans should “rid themselves of pity”?
Shermer also read quotes from the diary of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, which stated, “Jews should be liquidated; otherwise they will infect the population of civilized nations.” Again Shermer argued that if the goal of the Nazis was deportation, why would Goebbels have used the word liquidated? Goebbels’s diary also referred to a meeting with Adolf Hitler during which Hitler voiced a desire “to remorselessly eliminate the Jews. We must accelerate the process with cold brutality while doing an inestimable service to humanity.” Goebbels’s diary also stated that the Nazis wanted to put 40 percent of Jews in concentration camps to work and to kill the remaining 60 percent. Given that there were about eleven million Jews in Europe at the time, the estimate of six million deaths is remarkably close to what the Nazis had hoped to achieve. Shermer argued that it wasn’t hard to figure out how many Jews had died during the Holocaust. Estimates, which range from 5.1 to 6.3 million, were derived by comparing the number of Jews reported to be living in Europe, the number transported to camps, the number liberated from camps, the number killed by the Einsatzgruppen (mobile police and SS units assigned to special missions in occupied territories), and the number alive after the war. Several historians have made these calculations, and all have come up with remarkably similar numbers.
Shermer then read from a speech given by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. Himmler lamented that several German citizens had come to him asking that certain German Jews be spared. “We can talk about this [among ourselves] in an open manner,” said Himmler, “but must never discuss this in public. I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews and to the extermination of the Jewish people. This is something that is easily said. The Jewish people will be exterminated, sings every [Nazi] party member. This is very obvious. It is in our program—elimination of the Jews. But eighty million Germans come to us and each one has his decent Jew [whom they want to spare]. It is obvious that the others are pigs but this particular one is a splendid Jew.” Again, argued Shermer, why did Himmler use the word extermination following evacuation?
Although Hitler never gave a direct order to kill Europe’s Jews, following the Wannsee Conference, during which the details of the Final Solution were hashed out, Hitler remarked to his adjutants, “The Jew must clear out of Europe. Otherwise, no understanding will be possible among Europeans. It’s the Jew who prevents everything. I restrict myself to telling them they must go away. But if they refuse to go voluntarily, I see no other solution but extermination.” Again, the word extermination.
Shermer further argued that many of the Nazi war criminals testifying at the Nuremberg Trials told identical stories. All talked about how the gas chambers had been constructed and how Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide) was introduced into the “showers” through chutes; they talked about the screaming, the piles of bodies with mouths hanging open, the difficulty of removing bodies from the chambers, and the particular revulsion some had about gassing women. Shermer also said that an inspection of the gas chambers, which had been located conveniently next to the crematoria, clearly revealed the chutes made for Zyklon B, the heating coils made to release the hydrogen cyanide gas, the “showers” with locks on the outside of doors rather than inside, and the ventilation system specifically designed to remove the gas after the killings had ended. Shermer talked about orders for large quantities of Zyklon B, photographs from Auschwitz of people being marched en masse to the gas chambers, photographs of Nazis burning bodies of the dead, and aerial photographs of images consistent with mass exterminations. What possible explanation could exist to explain all of this? Did the Holocaust deniers in the room believe that the Allies had constructed these chambers after they had liberated the camps?
Shermer said that while there was room for a revision of some of the smaller details about the concentration camps, there was no room for arguing whether the Holocaust happened. Shermer did, however, agree with Mark Weber on one point. The Nazis didn’t initially plan to kill all of Europe’s Jews; that plan evolved over time. When the Nazis found they could get away with depriving Jews of their citizenship, then prohibiting them from marrying non-Jewish Germans, then isolating them under intolerable conditions in ghettos, then killing them randomly on the streets, then deporting them against their will, they came to believe that they could get away with anything. That’s why Hitler never issued a direct order to kill all the Jews at the beginning of the Third Reich. He didn’t have to. “It doesn’t matter what the Nazis originally intended,” said Shermer. “It only matters what happened as the process went forward. They became bolder in their actions against the Jews. They did ‘x’ and found that they could get away with it. So now they could do ‘x, y, and z.’ Had it not gone that way, things might have been different.” In support of the argument that the Nazis’ actions evolved into mass extermination, Shermer cited the work of Robert Jan van Pelt, an architectural historian who had written a book about his examination of Auschwitz. In his book, van Pelt describes how Auschwitz had been retrofitted for mass killings after the goals of the camp had changed.
Mark Weber tried to rebut Shermer’s arguments, but couldn’t. Instead he went on what can only be considered an anti-Semitic rant. He labeled Holocaust education a “campaign” by groups like the Anti-Defamation League and federal governments, decrying the self-importance of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. He called the Jewish interest in preserving memory of the Holocaust arrogant and bigoted. Then he tried to make a moral equivalency argument. Did Jews not also realize that twenty million Chinese died during World War II following attacks by the Japanese? Did they not realize that “gypsies and homosexuals,” and other enemies of the German state had also died? Weber pointed his finger and raised his voice, clearly annoyed by Jewish people who regarded their lives as more important than those of other people. “We hear about the fate of one particular people during the war almost to the exclusion of everyone else,” he said, referring dismissively to “this gas chamber business.”
Shermer closed by saying that historic genocides were not unique to Germany, nor were they unique to Jews. But what made the Holocaust unique were the gas chambers, which were used in a systematic and calculated manner. Gas chambers next to crematoria next to mass graves—an assembly line of killing.
I learned a lot by watching Nye, Schwarcz, and Shermer debate the undebatable. For example, I didn’t know about the six hundred eighty thousand cycles of winter and summer, the nine-thousand-year-old tree in Sweden, or the different methods of carbon dating the Earth. If I ever had to confront an evolution denialist, Bill Nye had armed me with those facts. Joe Schwarcz also taught me some things I didn’t know—like that water changes its shape to conform to an active ingredient, but that this change doesn’t last longer than a trillionth of a second; and I didn’t know the number of medical and scientific journals published daily. Now, when I am asked to deal with patients and families who want to use homeopathic remedies, I am better informed. Finally, Michael Shermer revealed quotes from Hans Frank, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler that I hadn’t heard before. Also, I hadn’t realized that the Holocaust had evolved and that Auschwitz wasn’t initially constructed as a killing field.
What amazed me most about these three debates was how calm and reasoned Nye, Schwarcz, and Shermer had been—even under the most trying circumstances. Bill Nye had stood in front of hundreds of creationists at the Creation Museum. And Joe Schwarcz had been interrupted several times during his talk by audience members who were angry that he had challenged their beliefs about homeopathy. But the winner of the “Bravest Debater Award” goes to Michael Shermer, who stood in front of a group of old Holocaust deniers at an institute devoted to resurrecting the legacy of Adolf Hitler. Shermer must have felt like he was trapped in a scene from The Boys from Brazil. Also, each of these debaters had held their tempers for more than two hours. I, on the other hand, had expressed anger toward both the guest and the host during a television debate that had lasted only twenty minutes.
Nye, Schwarcz, and Shermer succeeded where I had failed because they weren’t trying to convince the people they were debating (who weren’t convincible) or the audience in front of them (who also weren’t convincible); rather, they were trying to convince anyone watching their debate on television or YouTube. In the case of Bill Nye, that meant millions of viewers, and in the cases of Joe Schwarcz and Michael Shermer, tens of thousands. I, on the other hand, couldn’t see beyond the two people in front of me, arguing with the guest that she had consistently misstated the facts, and with the host that she shouldn’t have aired the debate to begin with. I didn’t consider that some people watching the program might learn from some of the points I had made.
I offer one defense of my actions. I was myopic because I was angry. Every year several children are admitted to my hospital with severe infections that could have been prevented by vaccination. Invariably, this happens because parents had chosen not to vaccinate their children. And the reason they had made that choice was that they had read or heard bad information like that proffered by Mary Holland, who had been given a platform by Amy Goodman. Medicine is hard enough. There is much we don’t know. But one thing we do know is that specific germs cause specific diseases and that at least some of these diseases can be safely and effectively prevented by vaccination. For example, recently a child was admitted to my hospital with bacterial meningitis caused by a strain of pneumococcus that could have been prevented by the pneumococcal vaccine. The parents, however, had refused vaccination in part because of what they had seen on television and read on the internet. The child’s meningitis was so severe that her brain was pressing down on her brainstem, causing her to stop breathing. We intubated her and saved her life. But she will never see or walk or hear or speak again. That’s the image that I have in my mind during these debates. And that’s why I’m such a terrible debater.
So in the end, my advice is that debating the undebatable is worthwhile. But scientists (like me) need to take their focus off the host and the person they’re debating and even the people in the room and shift it onto the people who aren’t there. This is also true for debates on chat rooms and blogs on the internet. Don’t think of these opportunities as debates. Think of them as teachable moments. I, however, will have trouble following this advice. It’s just too emotional for me.