COMMENTS ON JOE NICKELL  ARTICLE

From comments written by Raymond Schneider to about 80 Shroud of Turin researchers following the publication of Joe Nickell's article in Skeptical Inquirer entitled "Claims of Invalid “Shroud” Radiocarbon Date Cut from Whole Cloth."

Dr. Schneider (PE, Ph.D.) is Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Bridgewater College in Bridgewater, Virginia. Curia Vitae.

These comments are republished with Ray Schneider's permission.

You may wish to open Joe Nickell's article in a separate window to compare the text with the comments that follow.

Nickell has produced a marvelous piece of rhetoric, but not anything particularly substantive.  One can go through his piece which I read at csicop.org/specialarticles/shroud.html, and react to the various assertions.  I'm going to do this from memory, since to do it properly would take so long -- so if I make some mistakes those with more expertise than I may wish to correct me.  I'm going to list Nickell's paragraphs by number and react:  

1. Nickell starts by poisoning the well -- He cites Rogers as a "Shroud of Turin devotee", implies the shroud is painted by using "equivalent of a watercolor paint" and characterizes the shroud as "the alleged burial cloth of Jesus" -- Roger's logic is minimalized before it is actually mentioned as "torturous logic and selective evidence".  Rogers is characterized as a follower of other shroud defenders.  So in paragraph 1, Nickell  is already attacking the person, the community and the competence of the finding which he has not yet so much as described. 

2.  In the second paragraph which is a bit more sane -- Nickell calls what Rogers does "claims" and characterizes what the C14 dating labs did proof.  This prejudges the paper, without describing what it contains except in very global terms.  

3.  Nickell attacks the provenance of the sample as being "two little threads allegedly left over from the sampling" together with segments taken from an adjacent area (the Raes threads I suppose).  In Nickell's world, anyone who studies the shroud who is not Walter McCrone is "pro-authenticity" and "guesses" -- which is an unfair and dishonest characterization of the work of Benford and Marino.  Then Nickell quotes Rogers "Unlikely as it seems" out of context with the effect of making Rogers sound incoherent. In fact the citation, if honestly used, points out that Rogers initially began the study with a skeptical frame of mind and was led to agreement by the evidence.  

Nickell, however, is anything but honest.  I think the reasons cited for the sample site are also distorted.  We have heard that the site was selected for expediency, a site that was adjacent to a site already disturbed, and not because it was away from patches and seams.  Indeed, if I am not mistaken a major seam is quite close to the site.  

4.  Rogers findings comparing threads to other shroud sites is said to be "claiming to find differences" and the words "prove" the radio sample "was not part of the original cloth"  both are phrased to cast doubt on what are simply matters of objective fact as reported by Rogers.  The only issue is whether the materials are what they are said to be, not the differences.  But Nickell is all but asserting that the findings are contrived and that the differences don't prove anything before he has even described what they are.  In fact he never does a very good job of saying what they are.  

5.  Here Nickell does a barely adequate job of summarizing observations about the threads -- he puts the word "suggests" in quotes -- which was used by Rogers to indicate, I would guess, that there are other materials that could give the same test, but which Nickell instead uses to imply uncertainty of the result of the test.  He also says that Rogers "insists" that it is a medieval repair and I can't quite imagine Rogers doing any such thing.  I think what Ray did was point out that the findings were consistent with that interpretation.  Note that Nickell has not in his summary given the full case, or anything like it, that Ray Rogers presented in his paper.  In effect he implies that Ray found a painted fiber and tries to explain it away and that is simply dishonest on Nickell's part.  

6.  Now Nickell, before presenting the full case, begins debunking what he has framed as the case.  He says that cotton and madder have been found elsewhere on the shroud and cites McCrone.  The first problem with this is that McCrone never examined anything that could be called a thread -- he examined sticky tape samples under a microscope.  His samples were much smaller than the threads that Ray studied and the kinds of things he found were measured in micrograms, individual small crystals of things which, by the way, he classified not by chemical tests but by visual characteristics so it is not even clear that McCrone's classifications are accurate, and then he generalized from this extraordinarily limited sample to global assertions about the shroud.  

The characterization Nickell gives of the STURP requirements are dishonest and inaccurate.  In fact it is unclear (to me at least) whether McCrone was actually part of STURP, I think that has been challenged.  Nickell here implies that STURP was keeping secrets, when in fact it was only trying to arrive at consensus before publication rather than rush to judgment, which is exactly what McCrone did in his own little newsletter publication which was an organ of his business and never a peer reviewed journal.  I might also add that if McCrone had signed the protocol and then violated it, then it was an act of dishonesty.   

Nickell claims that being on the executive committee of the Holy Shroud Guild is evidence of a pro-authenticity bias.  I suppose that means that Nickell himself who is affiliated with the Skeptical Inquirer therefore has an anti-authenticity bias.  The fact is that being on an executive committee is usually evidence that one has been asked and agreed to serve.  It implies, I might add, that Nickell thinks that a scientist sells his objectivity to serve on boards.  Nickell's objectivity may be for sale at such a low price, else why does he imagine that the objectivity of others is. 

7.  Nickell mentions "occasional" (in quotes) fibers of cotton were found on the shroud which is not exactly true --  (first of all nothing McCrone cites is found on the shroud -- it is found on the sticky tapes which were touched to the shroud by researchers using cotton gloves and McCrone himself attributed the cotton to those gloves).    

McCrone never even saw the shroud until many years later.  So Nickell is being rather cute here.  The difference is very small things on the sticky tape versus quite macroscopic threads (real threads) used by Rogers.  Nickell cites speculation about cotton as if it is hard evidence and finally mentions the gloves -- but that is simply incoherent relative to a thread that was interwoven with cotton.  So this whole paragraph is patent nonsense which confuses and does not clarify and its intended function appears to be to cast doubt.  McCrone was in no doubt that the cotton he observed was from the gloves of the tape sample takers and none of his observations imply cotton interwoven with linen.   Nickell certainly knows that.  To imply that the two instances of cotton are similar or could be confused is dishonest. 

8.  This paragraph is essentially a litany of detrius that McCrone claims to have found.  What is not mentioned is that these findings were of extraordinarily tiny isolated bits and were consistent with what amounts to the cracking off of small crystals of paint from artists' work that had been pressed against the shroud so that the work would become a tertiary relic.  A side effect of this process is that tiny, tiny fragments are left on the shroud.  The madder which Rogers is talking about is on a relatively large thread and was used to tint the thread.  The length of Nickell's list is a rhetorical technique to make the findings sound comprehensive and authoritative, but in fact they still refer to nothing but micrograms of detrius while what Rogers is talking about is a whole thread dyed to match the linen -- quite a different thing. 

9.  This is a one sentence paragraph that says that not mentioning McCrone's work is a defect -- "Astonishingly" says Nickell in fact -- when McCrone's work has simply nothing to do, despite Nickell's posturing, with this work of Ray Rogers. 

10.  Building on paragraph 9 Nickell now attempts to contrast Rogers and McCrone as if one can compare a real scientist retired emeritus from a large and prestigious government laboratory like Los Alamos with a private microscope gazer.  McCrone is essentially a very competent microscopist -- but that doesn't make him a scientist.  In fact I don't think McCrone's general practices would qualify him anywhere as a scientist.  He never showed anything but total distain for any other discipline and did not seem to think that his "evidence" needed to be coherent with other evidence (hardly a scientific attitude). -- citing McCrone on incompetence of others is like citing the electrical technicians who often criticize the electronics engineers -- there may be something in it.  Technicians typically solder better than engineers, and no doubt McCrone saw more through a microscope than most people -- he made much of that fact, but he also ignored any findings outside of his own which were limited to looking through a microscope at detrius and then making unwarranted generalizations about what he saw.  He only rarely did corroborative testing and he simply denied the results of others could be relevant if they disagreed with his results.  That's not the behavior of a scientist.  Rogers' findings cannot be reasonable criticized by quoting McCrone who is dead, who was speaking about some distant event in the past in an attempt to cast aspersions on all of STURP and perhaps on Rogers in particular.  That is simply a gross ad hominem, in fact it is a second degree ad hominem since the critic is dead and was criticizing some undescribed event from the past, supposedly committed by member of a group for which the critic had a vendetta.  Talk about lack of objectivity!  

11.   Finally Nickell gets around to mentioning the vanillin but only to lampoon it without presenting it fairly.  I think the vanillin observations are in fact among the most important that Rogers made, and just because there are limitations, does not mean that the findings are not very interesting and helpful.  Nickell I might add has absolutely no credentials on which to judge the vanillin work.  I might add that he is inconsistent since if the reason that the shroud has no vanillin was due to the fire of 1532, then where did the vanillin come from in Rogers' sample?  Nickell is not a chemist and in fact is not a scientist.  I really doubt if he understands the equations presented by Ray Rogers.  But he also doesn't understand that his own speculations involve fundamental contradictions. 

12. Nickell casts doubt on the antiquity of the cloth based on its state of preservation.  This criticism has been addressed elsewhere and is invalid.  The mention of the lack of herringbone weave ignores the existence of herringbone weaves in wool which do exist from the period of Christ, demonstrating that the idea was known.  He mentions Jewish burial practices and a separate cloth for the face but does not mention the cloth of Oviedo which would I think at least partly answer that criticism, which in any case turns on very little data.  Most burials apparently involved bodies which were laid out until the body had rotted and then the bones were transferred to ossuaries or so I have read.  

13. Paragraph thirteen is a potpourri of innuendo by listing all kinds of things which have been answered in the wider shroud literature -- mid-14th century provenance, dealt with by the identification of the shroud with the image of Edessa (substantially bolstered by texts from Constantinople and the Prey codex), the claim of an artist having painted it, without any mention of the Besancon shroud which was indeed painted, a copy of the Turin shroud, and the lack of perspective in the painting of the times so that it could not have been painted even if it were a painting by any contemporary painter, the resemblance to medieval depictions of Jesus -- but it also resembles 7th century depictions (he obviously has either not read or doesn't see Ian Wilson's work as worth mentioning in this area despite referencing one of Wilson's books.  The red blood, ignoring Adler's explanation and analytical work.  I'm not sure what he is referring to when he says it failed a battery of sophisticated tests by forensic serologists -- could someone give me some help here?   I know McCrone did one test using a test that Adler characterized as too insensitive to test for blood in the amounts that McCrone had available.  

14. Finally he makes unfounded assertions summing up and begging the question since he asserts what he needs to prove and makes the claim, unfounded, that Rogers (by implication) started with the desired conclusion and worked backwards to the evidence -- and Nickell puts the words "shroud science" in quotes.  This entire piece shows willful ignorance of the literature of shroud studies.  It misrepresents the work of both McCrone, Nickell's hero, and Ray Rogers.  Nickell himself does not have the credentials to even understand the work Rogers presents, much less make a critical assessment of it.  

The remainder of the Nickell's column is notes and references which are themselves rather laughable.  I especially like note 3 where he says Rogers acknowledges that the claims that the blood is type AB are nonsense -- I corresponded with Al Adler about that very issue and the reason is not that the blood isn't blood, but that the compounds that allow blood to be typed as AB are both in the cell walls so that when the blood becomes very old and decomposes, the typing tests are no longer reliable.  Nickell is attempting to use Rogers’ observation, which he no doubt does not understand, as evidence that the claims that the blood is blood are unfounded.  

The balance of the references are pretty vanilla, but it is interesting that they are so selectively used.  Nickell only selectively quotes from Wilson for example, and had he really been a seeker of truth much of the material in this piece would already have been answered. 

This is about what I've come to expect from Nickell since I first heard him in person back in Elizabethtown around 1985 -- unsubstantive rhetoric.  What I don't understand really, is how strident he tends to be.  Why is that do you suppose? 

Ray Schneider, PE, Ph.D.