2026 Ockham Awards: The Best & Worst of Skepticism

Awards season is upon us once more, and while last year my thoughts at this time were almost entirely dominated by my friends and foes across the Pond, this year I have pretty much written them off as a lost cause and turned my attention to concerns closer to home. The last 12 months have seen a disproportionate media pile-on driven by race-pseudoscience hounding a Cambridge professor right up to his death, the ramblings of a so-called modern Nostradamus taken all too seriously, Great Replacement rhetoric graduating from fringe conspiracy theory to a national broadcaster, and far-right populism only slightly dented by the best efforts of an intergalactic space warrior. And so, as I sit down to draw up my nominations for the Ockham Awards 2026, there is once again plenty to take issue with but also something to celebrate. Here, assuming extraterrestrial political candidates are ineligible, are my choices...

The Award for Skeptical Activism is presented to an individual or organisation who has done outstanding work to promote critical thinking within the last 12 months. Winners are chosen based on their impact, reach and relevance. Last year the award went to Dr Cyriac Abby Philips for challenging the harms of alternative medicine in India despite legal threats and intimidation, while previous winners include Dr Flint Dibble (2024), Knowledge Fight (2023), the BBC’s Disinformation Unit (2022), Dr Elisabeth Bik (2021), Dr Natália Pasternak (2020) and Michael Marshall (2018).

Prof Christopher Marquis, my nominee this year, has received increasing recognition for his academic work at Cambridge Judge Business School and growing public outreach, including a finalist placing for the 2026 George R. Terry Book Award and a coveted appearance on the Cambridge Skeptics stage. He is best known for examining the gap between what companies say about their social and environmental responsibilities and what they actually do, from greenwashing and hidden environmental costs to the useful habit of privatising profits while passing the costs on to everyone else. He has also examined the B Corp movement and efforts to make companies prove, rather than merely advertise, their social and environmental credentials, with some of those ideas brought closer to home through Cambridge Judge Executive Education gaining B Corp certification and the launch of B Local Cambridgeshire. Over the past year, his outreach in these areas has included the Regenerative Insights newsletter, Journey to Regeneration podcast, articles for TIME, The Guardian, Project Syndicate and Jacobin, and teaching case studies for the Financial Times. Most importantly, the copy he gave of his book revealed just how shockingly cheaply an Ockham nomination can be bought.

Honourable mentions for other Cambridge Skeptics guest speakers who could have won my nomination for what seems relatively little outlay include Dr John Cook, Prof Sander van der Linden and Dr Jon Roozenbeek, whose attempts to inoculate us against misinformation range from Cook’s Cranky Uncle Vaccine trials across six countries to van der Linden and Roozenbeek’s Instagram study reaching 375,597 users; Dr David Miles, for Sneeze and a busy year communicating the science of colds and vaccines; Dr Christopher Labos, whose Body of Evidence continues to apply critical thinking to medical claims and misinformation; and Ian Ridpath, whose decades-long dismantling of the Rendlesham Forest UFO story may have reached its coda with a brief return to the SITP circuit, major treatment in The Guardian and his well-earned intention to retire from this UFO business and get back to real astronomy.

The Rusty Razor is presented to an individual or organisation who has been the most prominent promoter of unscientific ideas in the last 12 months. Recipients are chosen based on the level of pseudoscience, the reach they’ve achieved, the harm they’ve done and their relevance this year. Last year the award went to Reform UK for its embrace of climate change denialism, anti-vaccine claims and conspiracy theories. The year before it went to Elon Musk for his extremification of x.com, with pseudoscience-promoting BBC Dragon Steven Bartlett a close runner-up. Previous winners include Dr Aseem Malhotra (2023), the Global Warming Policy Foundation (2022), Dr Mike Yeadon (2021), Dr Didier Raoult (2020), Andrew Wakefield (2018), and Gwyneth Paltrow (2017).

Dr Nathan Cofnas, my nominee this year, is a former Cambridge researcher and current (for now at least) Ghent University postdoctoral researcher whose contentious work on race, intelligence and genetics has attracted expert criticism as “more than provocative, less than scientific”. A two-part fact-check of his April Ghent lecture by the university’s student newspaper challenged his defence of genetic explanations for racial differences in IQ and the highly disputed Cold Winter Theory (the hypothesis that cold climates selected for higher intelligence), as well as his claims about intelligence and racial disparities in crime and the extent of expert agreement on racial differences in IQ. His profile rose spectacularly in August through his allegations against Prof Jason Arday, where some genuine problems became the basis for sweeping claims of plagiarism, fabrication, incompetence and institutional cover-up that the publicly available evidence could not establish, helping propel the affair into a major media controversy. Ironically, his appointment at Ghent itself came under scrutiny later that month, with his own department questioning whether he had the relevant expertise for the post and reporting widespread suspicion that the appointment had been ideologically motivated. At the time of writing, he is working remotely and barred from teaching for three months while a preliminary disciplinary inquiry continues. Taken together, that seems quite enough for a worthy nomination, and I really don't want a free book from him.

A close runner-up for my nomination was “Professor” Jiang, who went viral in 2026 as the “Chinese Nostradamus”, and whose Predictive History is presented as turning historical analogy, recurring patterns and game theory into something approaching a predictive science. An independent tracker now contains hundreds of his forecasts, but only a small fraction have actually resolved, with much of his overstated success concentrated around variants of the same Iran conflict. That celebrated prediction of a US-Iran war also came packaged with a 2027 ground-invasion scenario that reads rather more like a poor writer’s pastiche of the Iraq War than a demonstration of predictive science. Loose historical analogy, ambiguous variables, selective choice of cases and little in the way of formal modelling make the scientific label rather more ambitious than the method. More worryingly, 2024 Ockham winner Dr Flint Dibble has warned that Jiang is “especially dangerous” because his online profile makes him appear as an educator and he is increasingly being invited onto mainstream shows, before describing him as an “antisemitic conspiracy theorist who believes he is channeling a higher power”. As such I'll happily pay for a book to shut this self-described serial failure and frustrated fiction writer up.

Other dishonourable mentions go to Steven Bartlett, runner-up for the Rusty Razor two years ago, whose Diary of a CEO has since responded to criticism with on-screen fact-checking while continuing to give an enormous audience to dubious health claims, with health journalist Eve Simmons logging more than 100 examples across just ten recent episodes; Toby Young, whose Daily Sceptic and Climate Skeptic have turned climate contrarianism into something approaching a publishing schedule, even through the UK’s hottest summer on record, including claims that the Met Office's records of that heatwave were based on “junk stations” (supposedly unreliable or badly sited weather stations); and British émigré Thomas Corbett-Dillon, who four years after introducing himself to us with “a million made-up things” turned up on GB News to claim that immigration amounted to a “genocide” of white people in England.

Make your official nominations by completing the 2026 nomination form before nominations close at 11.59pm on October 3rd. Winners, chosen by the editorial board of The Skeptic, will be announced at the European Skeptics Congress in Liverpool on October 17th.