The Spirit Science



The Spirit Science is a website created by Jordan Duchnycz (who also goes by Jordan David Pearce ), a native of Winnipeg, Canada.

The Spirit Science promotes a wide range of New Age woo including but not limited to astral projection, chakras, crystal woo, orgone energy, quantum woo and sacred geometry, generally bearing a lot of resemblance to theosophy.

The Spirit Science endorses many "classic" pseudoscientific and pseudohistorical themes, which are in turn based on claims from cranks, willful ignorance or completely made-up ideas. It would likely be easier to list the crank beliefs the Spirit Science does not perpetuate.

Jordan also operates a number of YouTube channels loaded with the same bullshit. A defining Spirit Science piece of crap is the hour-long animated "documentary" titled The Human History Movie — better known under its changed clickbait title, Our history is not what we think!, which is a baffling mess of insane New Age pseudohistory, all with no sources, of course.

The Spirit Science propagates a dangerously ignorant ideology — a reptilian hybrid between the Law of Attraction and the Bobby McFerrin song "Don't Worry, be Happy". What the Spirit Science suggests is that you shouldn't try to solve the problems that negatively affect your life, but instead try not to think about them (Jordan once claimed that if you get sick it's because you made it happen with the power of your own negative thoughts!) and pretend you're not bothered — thus, getting rid of the problem.

The videos themselves are presented in a style that is an obvious rip-off of Extra Credits, a much better series discussing video game design, history, and science fiction. Seriously. Watch them. Much better.

Spirit Quest
Jordan also has another YouTube channel. One of its playlists is called "Spirit Quest", which is some sort of diary Jordan uses to comment on his travel through the USA in 45 videos. Number 18 is particularly remarkable, where Jordan goes into a hospital, wears some scrubs and records a surgical operation only to later complain about modern hospitals using 'technology' instead of crystals to cure people. If unauthorized, he could have been arrested for taking hospital material, getting into a surgery room with God knows what hygienic conditions and recording an operation.

This what he put in the description:

Many people were outraged by this, pointing out how negligent it was from his part to get into a surgery room without permission. However, Jordan humbly apologized by calling his concerned viewers assholes in an edit made in the video's description.

Alchemy
Alchemy has been deemed as a valid science in numerous occasions by Jordan. For example, the Emerald Tablets, pseudohistorical gemstone recordings of Atlantis, were created through alchemical transmutation. They cannot be broken down or attacked chemically. Needless to say, these tablets violate many laws of chemistry and physics. First of all, elemental transformation is only possible through nuclear reactions. Alchemy tried to transmute common metals into precious ones through mere chemical reactions, something impossible since both atomic mass and number remain invariant. Secondly, being made of emerald would make them vulnerable anyway. Emerald's Mohs hardness is between 7.5 and 8, and can be scratched with harder minerals such as corundum (hardness 9). Being a crystal, emerald can chip and shatter with impacts and brutal temperature changes.

Aspartame
Aspartame is incorrectly referred over and over again as an artificial sugar, when actually is a peptide (an artificial sweetener). Despite its being approved by the FDA and in over 90 countries, Spirit Science does not approve of it, since not consuming it decalcifies your pineal gland. No studies supporting the claim are provided.

Astrology
The belief that the relative position of astronomical bodies in the sky can cause involuntary changes in human behavior is widely promoted. To a certain degree, there are no problems with this. Absence of sunlight can be depressive to many people (see vitamin D) and moonlight might have altered people's sleep cycles in the past, and thus their behavior. Essentially, light's effects upon the instead soul-tormenting magic. The problem arises when claiming that celestial bodies that are hard to see can affect our behavior, such as Mars or Saturn, not reflecting enough light to affect sleep cycles.

Backster Effect
The Backster effect, biocommunication or plant perception, is the idea that non-sentient beings are sentient. CIA interrogator Cleve Backster reported that plants showed responses towards him thinking of harming them that his invention, the polygraph, could record. Rather than to accept how utterly useless his machine is, Backster deduced that plants (and later, other non-sentient life) could experience distress, despite their biological limitations. A Spirit Science video proposed that this was possible because life could communicate with each other using the mysterious "field" described by David Wilcock. Jordan claimed that the evidence is both ignored by the scientific community and the media (while also showing a drawing of the Illuminati as one of the reasons). He also "addressed" skeptics and scientists who made new trials that failed to show Backster's result through this "enlightening" phrase.

First, Mythbusters did not consider such possibility because it is absurd to the highest degree. From logic and common sense, there is no reason as to why reality should care just because you want something to turn out according to your desires. It is more likely, for the mere fact of being simpler, that a trial shows no connection, rather than to assume that there is mysterious one but it's being suppressed by a conspiracy.

Chakras
In Hinduism, chakras are many points in the human body of immeasurable energy and human emotion. Jordan goes one step further and claims that they both absorb and radiate electromagnetic radiation such as visible light and microwaves. This claim is beyond idiocy, because if chakras were radiating visible light, then we would as a consequence be glowing creatures. Besides, even if they only absorbed other forms of electromagnetic radiation, their existence would have been revealed long ago. For example, inexplicable dark spots would appear in an X-ray radiography.

Channeling
Channeling is a form of telepathic communication based on a complex set of sensory feelings. While not being obvious at first, it is nonetheless the basis of Spirit Science. Most information comes from Drunvalo Melchizedek, who claims to have channeled information from Thoth, an immortal Atlantean leader. In other words, a great deal of the site's veracity is based on the belief that Drunvalo is not making sh*t up. Apparently, all sentient beings are able to channel, but its efficiency depends on the receptor's neurological capabilities. If this were true, we would expect channeling to be the easiest among humans, compared to other terrestrial creatures. However, telepathy experiments such as those of Ganzfeld have shown flawed methodology been non-demonstrative of telepathy.

Chemtrails
They are used for geoengineering. Allegedly, its sources come from the website "Stop Spraying California!", which in turns claims that chemtrails contain pollutants such as uranium and "Human white blood Cells-A."

Crystals
It is repeatedly claimed that crystals are alive, possess magical properties and can heal people. Even though Jordan himself admits that they lack reproductive capabilities or human sapience, they are nonetheless alive and have willpower. Crystals can get tired of their owner and jump out of their pocket whenever they want.

Another problem comes with the issue of healing properties. It does not work unless the person believes that it will, thereby making crystals a mere placebo. And placebos cannot cure anything, relieving some symptoms instead. Anyway, crystals supposedly heal people by increasing the frequency of their auras. As these forms of energy are undetectable by technology, this claim is neither falsifiable nor scientific.

Conspiracy theories
Did you know that the CIA killed President John F. Kennedy? He had demanded information about a UFO he had sighted and the CIA assassinated him to prevent the truth about aliens coming to light.

DNA activation
Not even deoxyribonucleic acid is safe from New Age woo. Junk DNA has magical powers which can be unleashed through a process called 'activation'. Firstly, "junk DNA" or more appropriately, non-coding DNA, refers to parts of the genome which do not synthesize proteins, but synthesize transfer, ribosomal and regulatory RNAs for example. Secondly, in biochemistry, activation refers to reactions such as peptide hydrolysis and phosphorylation that change the polypeptide sequence and protein conformation, thus altering enzymatic (catalytic) properties. For example, a hydrolytic protein is phosphorylated in the rough endoplasmic reticulum to incapacitate it from digesting other cell components. It is later activated through instantaneous dephosphorylation when arriving towards a more acidic environment such as lysosome, where it is needed. The important idea here is that biochemical activation cannot be controlled at will. Furthermore, Spirit Science states that our DNA has a triple-helix still to be identified. This is also false since we know its structure through X-ray crystallography. A third polynucleotide strand very rarely appears in cells, because of its instability.

Edgar Cayce
Edgar Cayce was provided with data by beings from higher dimensions, along with being a respected figure within the scientific community. Both statements are highly disputable.

Energy woo
Energy is synonymous with "free-floating" emotions and thoughts.

Evolution
Not a hot topic, since evolution is acknowledged as factual. But it is mixed with a lot of New Age lore, usually referring to spiritual progress when it is brought up.

Extraterrestrials
Many species depicted in ufology are believed to exist, such as Sirians, Pleiadians, greys and Martians.

Sirians and Pleiadians are benevolent beings keen at channeling (telepathic communication). In reality, intelligent life simply cannot exist around the and  group of stars. None of these stars is older than 200 million years and a large portion of their light is ultraviolet radiation, ionizing macromolecules necessary for life on any neighboring planet. With that said, even unicellular life would have trouble arising around these stars in the first place.

Regarding grey aliens, apparently they nearly conquered us in 1989. Luckily, humankind was saved by a very good-natured Peruvian woman who gained control of a magical airship which made the aliens sick and forced them to leave Earth. How this real-life Independence Day went unnoticed by the global population is never explained.

See section “Mars and Martians” for more information about another fictional species.

Fluoride
Despite having poor knowledge of chemistry, the levels of fluoride in water are "outrageous" for Spirit Science.

Free energy
Many claims are inconsistent with thermodynamics. Back to real life, the reasons are much deeper than that. The first law of thermodynamics states that the energy within a closed system stays constant and is always conserved. Since no inexhaustible power source exists, no machine can operate indefinitely.

Jordan apparently goes along with the views of the movie Thrive, in which free energy is depicted as a mechanism for exploiting. Although vacuum energy actually exists and is the result of particles that are due to Heisenberg's energy-time uncertainty principle, there is no mechanism, even hypothetically, that could exploit this phenomenon. For this reason, an interpretation of vacuum energy as a property of empty space rather than capability might be more accurate for understanding it.

Giants
They did exist, including the Nephilim, which will be discussed in the future. Yes, this implies that there's going to be a sequel to the Human History movie. Apparently, how tall a human being is is related to his or her spiritual enlightenment and chromosome count. We're currently on the second "spiritual level", with 46 chromosomes. Our predecessors used to be a little bit shorter and had 44 chromosomes. The pinnacle of this enlightening process is becoming 50-foot- tall beings with 52 chromosomes. In reality, there is no evidence that our human ancestors, or the most recent members of the Homo genus for that matter, had fewer chromosomes. Indeed, the second pair in the human karyotype is the result of the fusion of two pre-existing chromosomes, so in the past we used to have 48. The presence of telomere-like sequences (such as a repeated TTAGGG sequence) near the centre indicate this. But looking at the bright side, Spirit Science made a falsifiable prediction, without appealing to its "frequency" non-sense. A Chinese man was born with a diploid count of 44, due to the fusion of the 14th and 15th chromosomes. Since neither essential genes were lost nor harmful ones added overall, the man was born healthy, free of shortness or some kind of "spiritual retardation". So, prediction disproven.

GMOs
With the site’s adamant appeal to nature, demonization of transgenic crops is inevitable. Spirit Science whines about GMOs not being natural, but ignores that the so-called "organic food" consists of crops that have been modified through selective breeding.

History
The people of The Spirit "Science" believe that Martians came to Atlantis and began ruling the human population of Atlantis. They also believe that a part of the pyramids is a space "warship" that was used in 1989 to make all the greys get sick causing them to flee earth, and that there is a giant underground city under Egypt near the ship, à la Roland Emmerich's Stargate franchise. Jesus Christ went to Tibet to become a Buddhist and return as a wise man and spiritual leader. Also, his birth was planned by the Egyptian god (though he wasn't actually an Egyptian god, but the King of Atlantis according to their rather exotic additions to the ) in order for humanity to achieve "Christ Consciousness" in 13,000 years, whatever that means.

A tunnel in Romania goes to Egypt. And there are 13 families that are descendants of the Martians that invaded Atlantis and are now secretly controlling the world and are essentially the Illuminati, except that the Illuminati are no longer the true (good, human) Illuminati, but actually a Catholic corruption of the Illuminati. And that Jews are aliens from the future, but good aliens. The bad aliens are not Jews &mdash; kind of how David Icke believes in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but thinks they refer to actual shape-shifting lizard people, not that the Jews are evil alien overlords. So, apparently neither Spirit Science (despite the unfortunate abbreviation possibility…) or Icke are anti-Semites, just batshit crazy and fractally wrong. No, really.

Homeopathy
It is supported like almost any other alternative medicine.

Hollow Earth
Spirit Science does not support the hollow Earth model as it is popularly known. Cross-sections of the Earth are depicted with a molten core and a rocky mantle. However, in parallel realms with different laws of physics coexisting with our own, the Earth might be hollow. Jordan says that the toroidal shape of the Earth's magnetic field, with its lines entering and exiting through the planet, might have something to do with this. In actuality however, he fails to understand how magnetic fields work. When an electric charge moves, it generates a magnetic field perpendicular to the vector of its movement. If it does so circling around something (such as the axis of the Earth as the electrically-charged core rotates) the resulting magnetic field will have a toroidal shape. The shape of magnetic fields is nothing more than the result of the laws of physics within our universe.

Jesus
The Human History movie hijacked the central figure of Christianity. Though there is no problem in believing that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person who has been mystified, Spirit Science essentially claims that Jesus was psychic, as if it were more believeable than claiming he was son of God. He was conceived through the "spiritual mating" of an Atlantean couple of survivors, all of which was Thoth's plan to guide humanity to an enlightened future. Jesus went to Tibet and lived there for 18 years to become an enlightened Buddhist guru. This was possibly ripped off from Christopher Moore's Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, but more likely some second- or third-hand regurgitation of 19th century ideas that were fringe even back then and stemmed from a mixture of Euhemerism, Orientalism, spiritualism, and "hoaxism" similar to the stuff found in the ideas about a Great White Brotherhood. By what means did a poor person travel thousands of kilometers is never explained, in the same way that no reliable evidence other a pseudohistory book is presented to back up this.

Jews
The Human History movie claims that the ancient Hebrews were aliens who traveled back in time from an unknown location in the future to ancient Earth. They are not humans, and that is why Moses tried to free his people. Whether this is antisemitism or just stupidity is for you to decide, though probably the latter given his statement in the same breath, "They knew a lot of things that we didn't know yet."

Martians
According to the imaginative "Human History" movie, Martians were red humanoids with a thriving civilization on Mars less than a million years ago, when it was very Earth-like. However, they screwed everything up when an experiment altered their mindset, making them amoral, greedy and power-hungry. The resulting wars ultimately blew up their atmosphere, forcing them to seek a better neighborhood to live, Earth. If anything of this fantasy was true, and Martians literally "blew up" their atmosphere, its surface wouldn't only be plenty of fossils, but mummified corpses as well. Instantaneous exposure to near-vacuum would have boiled away water from the body of any living being, thereby preserving them. The destruction of the Martian atmosphere would not have resulted in the end of all life either. Apart from certain species of bacteria, an extremophile lichen was able to survive in Martian conditions. Anyway, back to our story. The surviving Martian population settled on Earth. Gravity is 2.5 times stronger here, which would make walking problematic and falling fatal for the alien refugees. Last but not least ludicrous, Martians not only survived Earth's punishing gravity, but also managed to successfully mate with humans. It is not only improbable for aliens to look like us, but cross-breeding is genetically impossible. Besides, those Atlantians were presumably very, very open-minded to have sex with aliens.

Medicine
As a New Age site, Spirit Science is eager to talk about how flawed modern medicine is, while ignoring the downsides of alternatives. Apparently, doctors do not learn even the most basic facts about nutrition, despite the fact that a degree in medicine does contain subjects about it. Further, what we eat is so important that there are degrees in nutrition. To say that health organizations are in cahoots with pharmaceutical corporations to make the public see little value in nutrition is also false.

Occam's razor
In a video response to Martymer81, Jordan exposed his lack of awareness about Occam's razor (also known as the law of parsimony). This method of problem solving states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be chosen. For example if there is no evidence of Atlantis, the appropriate explanation is that it simply does not exist, instead of saying that it vibrated at a higher frequency and hence didn't leave any physical clue of its existence. In the aforementioned video, Jordan implied that it is a method for simplifying things, when explaining to Martymer81 how he could have expressed his skepticism.

Palmistry
Because why not? Palmistry faces the same problem as astrology, lack of a plausible method to work. It is a placebo at best, invented for making people feel better about their struggles in life.

Pineal gland
The pineal gland has hidden parapsychological powers that can be unleashed.

Psychedelic drugs
The benefits are praised, while the risks are ignored.

Reiki
A master can open your chakras.

Sacred geometry
Drunvalo Melchizedek's Flower of Life is brought up ad nauseam.

The Moon
On December 25th, 2015, Jordan made a video named "Secrets of the Moon" along with his friend the "Atlantis King", where he misrepresents lunar science in an attempt to make his particular case for intelligent design.

Thoth
Perhaps one of the wackiest claims is that of the existence of Thoth. In the infamous Human History movie, it is "revealed" that Thoth wasn't actually an Egyptian god, but the Priest King of Atlantis.

What is Thoth? A man with a bird beak, according to his cartoon depictions. Nothing is stated about his mother or wife, but his father was one the founders of Atlantis named Thome, and Thoth had a son named Tat. Even more, Tat has a secret brotherhood named after him that has been protecting sacred places to this day.

When a cataclysmic event was coming, Thoth and two of his friends traveled to the land of Khem, currently the Gizah plateau, and built the pyramids through their supernatural prowess. (Never mind contemporary records and archeological evidence that it was a big construction project in Ancient Egypt.) Since the destruction of Atlantis, Thoth is a disembodied immortal spirit that some decades ago decided to pass all his knowledge that humanity had forgotten into a single man, Drunvalo Melchizedek. Instead of revealing himself simultaneously to hundreds of respected figures within political, scientific and academic circles, this incredibly wise being decided that giving that knowledge to a single individual that nobody had heard about was the best option.

Time travel
There are occurrences of this. This can be achieved both technologically or spiritually using the Merkaba.

Vibration
Everything can be seen as being a vibration of something according the site, with quantum mechanics backing this up. Everything has a 'frequency', and changing it phases something out of existence. Having different frequencies is SS's ticket for unfalsifiable claims. For example, there is no evidence for Atlantis because its events along with the continent itself, existed at a much higher frequency. DNA has more than two strands undetectable by technology for the same reason.

Water
In October 13, 2012 a video named "Spirit Science 20 ~ Water" was subbed.

Stupidity Spirit Science rejects
Don't get us wrong. There's stuff that is just not accepted.

Biblical literalism
In the FAQ page, when responding to question number 9, Jordan says:

However, he has no problem in believing in the Exodus narrative, as shown in the Human History movie. Jordan basically rejects all the parts in religious scriptures that are inconvenient for his belief system.

Moon landing hoax
According to the Moon video, NASA did have the technical capabilities to send vehicles to the Moon.

Young Earth Creationism
It's incredible, but Spirit Science is not into it. That doesn't imply that its other claims aren't as wrong as those of fundamentalists though. The Human History movie indicates that the world is much older than six millennia. Sadly though, it incorrectly states that modern humans and the Sphinx have been around for much longer than what is generally agreed.

In response to criticism
The show already preemptively instructs to "neither believe nor disbelieve" its claims. The followers usually quote this when criticism arises. But smashing your rational capabilities so that you form no conclusions about the likelihood of claims is itself a problem, and it is also clear that these followers do believe the claims, often defending them.

The show has responded to another YouTube channel that voiced criticism. The response went on and on about how "I understand what you are going through" and stuff, without actually stating what that was. It was a kind of "horoscope"-style response to criticism, vague enough that the followers could imagine that it was on point.

Jordan, along with his website, is hypocritical, i.e. expects standards from others that doesn't himself adhere to. He accuses "mainstream" science of being dogmatic and asks people to have an open mind about his ideas, while he himself won't refrain from deleting a comment pointing out all the bullshit he says in a video.