Mark Wilson

Welcome! My name is Mark A. Wilson and I am the Lewis M. and Marian Senter Nixon Emeritus Professor of Natural Sciences and Geology at The College of […]

Our last week! If I don’t get a chance to tell you after the presentations, you’ve been a superb class.

Student speakers on Monday —
Charlie: MK Ultra and CIA Mind Control Experiments
Linah: Is Malala […]

Speakers today are —
Chris M.: The UFO Conspiracy about the 1942 Battle of Los Angeles
Griffin: Big Pharma and What They’re Hiding
Riley: Bigfoot: The Elusive Great Ape of North American Folklore
Enjoy the T […]

The top student choices for our topics this week are Area 51 and the Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Theories. Classics of our genre! I like these because I’ve done geological fieldwork near Area 51, and I […]

This week we use our skeptical tool kits to examine the pseudoscience and nonsense afflicting our health and medical systems. First up will be that venerable field of homeopathy, a billions-of-dollars industry […]

This week is devoted to advising in preparation for next week’s epic course registration. Make sure you know where you are on our Advising Week schedule. Linked here is a useful Wooster video to give you a […]

We intentionally kept this week unscheduled so we could catch up on any topics we need more time for. We also wanted to wait until we see the full range of research and conspiracy topics you chose to study. Watch […]

This is going to be a disturbing week. Our topic covers various “denial” movements and their arguments. Our most prominent subject will be Holocaust Denial and its advocates. To understand it, we must have basic […]

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the term “fake news” now has its own Wikipedia page. At first it meant hoaxed news items, but in the Age of Trump it has taken on the role of a pejorative to throw at news you don’t […]

The United States has a long tradition of anti-evolution activism, almost all of it based in fundamentalist Christianity. Welcome to my world. I’ve been teaching and studying evolution all my professional life and […]

This is a building week because I’m gone until Wednesday evening. I will be in Phoenix at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America giving this presentation. Here’s our schedule for the week […]

Our topic this week is a popular one: psychic phenomena. Let’s start with a review of the whole psychic thing with a Wikipedia summary. Note that the concept is very broad, from self-proclaimed prophets to […]

We will start our week with the last half of the Behind the Curve documentary, finish our discussions of the framework for distinguishing science from pseudoscience, and then launch into conspiracy […]

The delightful month of September is upon us. Fall is coming — you’ll feel it in the cool mornings. We’ll start your first class of the month with a brief discussion of your experiences writing (and submitting) […]

Now we start assembling our tools for critical analysis of fringe ideas. I find a chart of logical fallacies to be useful when sorting out the philosophical underpinnings of arguments:

There are plenty of […]

I call this a course on “nonsense” for a reason: I am a skeptic by personality and my scientific profession. I support explanations of natural and historical events that are the simplest and best fit the available […]

Welcome! There is such wonderful paleontological material on the Web. Come here often! I’ll assume from the start that you all know the Geologic Time Scale, which will be critical to all that we do in this course. […]