"A collective delusion is the term most commonly used by social scientists to describe the relatively spontaneous spread of false beliefs that do not occur in an organized, institutionalized or ritualistic fashion.

Most readily fall into the four categories outlined below:

Immediate community threats involve exaggerated feelings of danger persisting from a few weeks to several months, and often recur in waves. Participants are likely to express excitement and concern, but not flee. ...

A second type involves community flight panics where residents attempt to flee an imaginary threat. Most episodes last a few hours to several days or weeks, subsiding when it is realized that the harmful agent did not materialize. Perhaps the best known example is the panic which ensued in the United States on Halloween eve in 1938 following the realistic radio re-enactment of H.G. Wells’ book, War of the Worlds, by the CBS Mercury Theater. Spontaneous mass flights from the city of London have occurred over the centuries in response to prophesies of its destruction by a great flood in 1524, the Day of Judgment in 1736, and an earthquake in 1761.

Symbolic community scares typically endure in a waxing and waning fashion for years, often encompassing entire countries or continents. There is less of an immediate concern for safety and welfare, and more of a general long-term threat. These moral panics consist of generalized fear over the exaggerated erosion of traditional values, and are characterized by stereotypes of ethnic minorities and social deviants who are wrongfully indicted for evil deeds, having much in common with the continental European witch persecutions of 1400 to 1650. ...

Collective wish-fulfillment involves similar processes that give rise to community threats and moral panics, except the object of interest is esteemed and satisfies psychological needs. Episodes often involve the subconscious desire for the existence of an agent that can perform extraordinary feats, such as Virgin Mary appearances ... and “UFO” sightings worldwide since 1947. In the case of UFOs, many people hope that aliens are visiting earth because if they are real, their advanced technology may eradicate disease or make us immortal."

Paleontologist Dr Matt Wedel is interviewed for an "infotainment""documentary" on dinosaurs. He mentions and old, discredited hypothesis on dinosaur anatomy and physiology, but the finished documentary makes it appear that he supports this theory.

"... what the heck is the point of bringing on scientific advisors if you're then going to ignore the stuff they tell you? ... Sorry, paleontologists, you'll be fielding questions about these newly invented "facts" for the next decade at least. ...

I was explaining why an old idea was WRONG and they cut away the frame and left me presenting the discredited idea like it's hot new science. How freaking unethical is that?"

Dr Wedel examines the transcript of the interview.

"There it is in black and white. I was very clearly explaining why a misconception is no longer held, and they edited the tape to make me regurgitate the misconception as if it was not just a commonly accepted fact, but a fact that I accepted. That is beyond quote-mining, it is the most blatantly dishonest thing that you can do with someone's recorded words. ...

This is not a joke and it is not a minor infringement. This is the broadest publicity that I have ever gotten or may ever get .... This is my professional competence and reputation on the line. This is not just careless editing, this is (the production company) deliberately making a liar out of me in front of millions of people.This is intolerable. ...

(The production company) turned my words around 180 degrees because they had to 'accommodate the needs of the audience' and 'hold everyone's attention'. This shows stunning contempt for the audience, for the scientists who appeared on the show, and for the truth. Coming from a company that makes documentaries, I think it's about the most damning statement possible"

"Great news! I just got off the phone with someone at the Discovery Channel. He asked not to be named, but he has responsibility for Clash of the Dinosaurs and the authority to do what he promised, which is to fix the "second brain" segment exactly as I asked in the previous post! ...

Many thanks to the folks at the Discovery Channel for taking responsibility and doing the right thing here. ...

In the past few days I have been contacted privately by several scientists who have worked or are working on documentaries, and most of them had the same complaint: although some individuals or teams of people at the production companies really care about getting things right, the show is almost always forced to follow a predetermined script or at least hit on certain predetermined points, and it is essentially impossible for the scientific advisors to change the courses of these things. ... I can verify that this is how things are done routinely.

... I know these companies are in business to make money, not to serve as some kind of selfless science dole. I disagree violently with the suggestion that commercial concerns force them to make bad documentaries, or that there is any necessary conflict between accuracy and entertainment. The real stories are more interesting and more exciting anyway. Exhibit A: David Attenborough's entire career. ...

... (Biologist Dr) John Hutchinson came through with a boatload of good advice in a comment below. I didn't want it to be overlooked, so I'm just going to repost it here.

"... let's look at the potential audience out there in the USA. First take a look at this 2006 survey from National Geographic. Only 14% of adults think that evolution is "definitely true" -- if you're a paleontologist that means that 86% of your potential audience doesn't think at all like you. 33% of them reject the whole concept of evolution outright. And don't start laughing, molecular biologists, because the same survey revealed that fewer than half of American adults can provide a minimal definition of DNA.

Next, let's take a look at what Americans do believe, courtesy of this 2005 Harris Poll (Cache here). I guess the fact that 82% of American adults believe in some form of God is not a surprise. The 73% that believe in miracles, or the 70% that believe that the soul survives after death are also not that surprising either. But how about belief in ghosts (40%), UFOs (34%), witches (28%), or astrology (25%)? A quarter of American adults believe that their destiny is in some way controlled by the movement of the stars and planets. ...

How about some more statistics? The 2006 American Community Survey of the US Census Bureau reveals that only 23% of the population has a bachelor's degree or higher qualification. Even when you add in students who never finished their degrees, or were awarded associate degrees, barely 50% of the population has set foot in tertiary education of any sort.

There is also a bunch of statistics available on attention spans -- see here for a rather nice digest of some of them -- and while they differ quite significantly according to how you define "attention span", none of them suggest that the U.S. Cable audience is ready for science programs that carefully weigh up competing hypotheses and then conclude that there is no outright winner.

The reason that I'm hammering through all these statistics is because I'd like my fellow paleontologists to take a long hard look at an assumption that many scientists make -- namely that the best person to communicate the excitement and enthusiasm of science is someone who actually does science. Consider how totally unlike you the majority of your audience is. As far as most of them are concerned, you might as well come from another planet."

"According to a poll done by Harris Interactive in December 2005, the number of those who believe in the existence of God is down to just 82%. Eight percent definitely don't believe in any gods and 10% aren't sure. The numbers of theists is still high, obviously, but this is quite a drop from just a couple of years ago."

"... in time we started to realize that she still wasn't speaking even after allowing for some extra time. ... The inability to communicate lead to temperament issues and the all out tantrums were both common and severe. ... looking at the pace of other kids, we slowly realized that Bean was behind the curve. ...

In time we got child therapists. ... We have a speech therapist, an occupational therapist (not what it sounds like, the OC helps her negotiate new and different tactile senses), and a therapist to help with her social interactions. ... We also took Bean to a developmental psychologist. ...

(In the) beginning of October ... Bean got her flu vaccination. It had thimerisol and everything. She had absolutely no physical reactions to it whatsoever: no fever, no swelling, no pain. However since the shot there have been some huge changes in her.

Bean was able to start school since then. She can be in a group of 7 kids in good comfort. This is totally amazing. She has been really fun to be around, really explorative, points out lots of new things here at home, at school and at our weekend house. She can talk well enough that we generally understand what she wants to say although there is still some baby talk that comes out that is hard to understand. She laughs at funny stories or when we joke around. She still has tantrums when she doesn't get her way, but they are rarely for random or unintelligible reasons anymore. Basically it feels like ever since we got the flu shot for her, she has become a normal child for her age. ...

I know its not the flu vaccination, of course it isn't, because there is no reason to think that it is, just like the other way. Just because something happens hours, days or weeks after a vaccination doesn't necessarily mean that it was because of the vaccination itself."

"It is not possible for anyone to understand every policy-important aspect of scientific knowledge at the level of detail necessary to accept that knowledge as valid, or to defend it against the evil anti-science denialists. So what is a skeptic to do?

Real science happens at the very edge of knowledge. If you go do real science for a while ... a few weeks ... then go back to science geek land where you normally live (and I know you live there because you are reading this blog) and read about the same topic you were exploring in real science land, you will see two different worlds. When a scientist doing actual scientific research is at work, and she gazes into a microscope, or a matrix of data from the latest sample run, or the profile just exposed by an ongoing excavation, she may be looking into an unordered mess of great potential or deep disappointment that does not yet fit into what she knows. If she is lucky, it never will fit. It will reshape what she already knows in a slightly uncomfortable way, or tie up a lose end while slicing open another, or something. Or, it just won't work, and it will turn out that the sample is messed up or the trench was dug in the wrong place.

Most importantly, for her to understand the meaning of the newly observed data, she will have to have a great deal of expertise. Some of this expertise will be based on her own education, some from her experience with the particular problem she is working on, some garnered from colleagues with whom she consults, some from the generally available literature, some from in-house reports and other documents. ...

There is a vast gulf between the science of complex natural systems and the level of understanding of that science among those involved in public discourse and important policy making. This gulf is one of the most significant problems we face in modern society. When an entire political party in the US devotes much of its energy to stand between scientific knowledge and policy making (see: The Republican War on Science), and our population becomes increasingly distant from understanding even basic science (see: Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future), we are in trouble.

Two very important defenses against the collapse of civilization owing to ignorance (see: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed) are the science geek and the skeptic. Often but not always they are the same person. These are the people who will vote correctly and encourage others to do so. (This is perhaps not the most felicitous phrasing, as, in political discussion, voting or otherwise behaving "correctly" often has the connotation of "hewing to the party line irrespective of whether it is in fact objectively correct or beneficial". I think that this is pretty much the opposite of Laden's meaning here, which would be along the lines of "voting in a well-informed and pragmatic manner".) These are the people who will not let utterly stupid [comments] pass by in conversations at family gatherings, parties, in classrooms, at bus stops, and on the Internet, without a critical comment."

"The first microscopes were a lot better than they are usually given credit for. That's the claim of microscopist Brian Ford, a specialist in the history and development of these instruments based at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Ford says it is often suggested that the microscopes used by seventeenth-century pioneers such as Robert Hooke and Antony van Leeuwenhoek gave a blurry view of biological structures such as cells and microorganisms. ...

Inept modern reconstructions have given seventeenth-century instruments a bad name, says Ford. In contrast to the hazy images shown in some museums and television documentaries, the right lighting and focusing can produce micrographs of startling clarity using original microscopes or modern replicas."