It featured a dozen symposia on everything from conspiracy theories and UFOs to evolution versus creationism and skepticism in the media; special talks by skeptical luminaries; an awards banquet; and a host of social and entertainment events. The latter included a “Smarti Gras” parade and New Orleans Halloween Party Saturday evening at a French Quarter bar after the special conference address by Bill Nye “The Science Guy.”

Read more about CSICon and register for 2012’s CSICon Nashville at the CSICon website.

Like its earlier CSICOP conference predecessors, CSICon New Orleans 2011 was rich with provocative ideas, good science, critical thinking, informed analysis, and penetrating criticism of claims poorly supported by scientific evidence. It was also filled with fun social events that allowed plenty of opportunity for interactions with fellow skeptics and to enjoy the camaraderie shared by those who defend good science and expose shams, frauds, and unsupported claims.

It began on a Thursday afternoon with opening remarks by Center for Inquiry President Ronald A. Lindsay, CSI Executive Director Barry Karr, and me, and ended on Sunday afternoon with a “Houdini Séance” conducted by Joe Nickell, Ray Hyman, and Massimo Polidoro. The sessions provided quite an intellectual feast for science-minded skeptics of every stripe.

Some of the many highlights for me included:

• Bill Nye “The Science Guy’s” special conference address, informative and in­spiring. He provided a cosmic perspective on human curiosity and exploration and a sterling defense of the need for good science and math education for a science-literate citizenry. He ended with a backlit photo from the Cassini mission of a close-up Saturn seen from outside its orbit inward, the planet Earth a tiny dot barely visible through its rings.

Lawrence Krauss delivers a special luncheon address. (Photo: Brian D. Engler)

• Chemistry Nobel laureate (and CSI Fellow) Sir Harry Kroto’s talk “Educa­tion as the New Dark Age Ap­proaches.” It excoriated parents who allow their religions to teach hatred toward others religions, lamented the rise of ideological-oriented nonsense (rather than common sense), and extolled natural philosophy (“the only philosophy we have devised to determine the truth with any degree of reality”). Kroto also called for more recognition of “true heroes” (those from the world of science, like Einstein, Darwin, Chandrasekhar, Maxwell, and Rosa­lind Franklin) and emphasized the importance of learning algebra and calculus (“the universe doesn’t speak any other language”).

• Chris Mooney’s talk (in a session on science and public policy) on the science of denial. He emphasized (as we have reported several other times recently) that corrections don’t change people’s false beliefs; in fact, they cause people to hold them all the more strongly, “doubling down” on them. Studies of “motivated reasoning,” the updated view of cognitive dissonance, show that we are not conscious of the vast majority of what our brains are doing and that our emotional reactions drive our memory retrieval. “By the time we are conscious of it we are defending ourselves—acting like law­yers.... This is how people work. We spin out all of the old rationalizations ... and create new ones.” And then there’s what he called the “smart idiot” effect, in which people who know more are more capable of showing bias and more skilled at coming up with arguments to defend their biased views. Thus things always polarize, a situation we now find endemic in political discourse.

• Indre Viskontas (neuroscientist and TV’s Miracle Detectives scientist; see the interview with her in our Novem­ber/December 2011 issue) on why we love stories and on using narratives to promote science. Why stories? Because we find them compelling. Stories or testimonials usually trump dry statistics because they are more easily remembered than facts. Likewise, stories become personal. Storytelling thus is a powerful tool for any message, including that of science and skepticism. In her role on the show, Viskontas says, “My job is to reframe the [claimed miracle] event in a way compatible with science. Some people might call me a skeptic.”

Phil Plait is dubious of Armageddon’s presentation of asteroids. (Photo: Brian D. Engler)

• Biologist and famed blogger PZ Myers’s passionate paean to the power of narrative storytelling (in stated strong agreement with Vis­kontas). Myers’s Myth Number One is that we “people of reason” are “soulless robots who don’t know how to communicate.” He rattled off a long list of scientist-atheists who are first-rate scientists and communicators. “This is a golden age of science writing,” he said. His Myth Number Two: “If you are credible or gullible you are so much better at stories.” The Bible, often extolled by even skeptics as at least full of good stories, got no praise from Myers. “Genesis is crap. It’s crazy town.... There was no global flood. This story makes no sense.” As for those who give it a pass by saying that Genesis is just a metaphor, he said, “Tell that to the people at Answers in Genesis.” Said Myers, “Our side has the good story,” and it has both truth and beauty, two values often ignored. He provided a sample story, a fossil find showing a mammoth bone carefully (and lovingly?) placed in the mouth of a fossil dog, “the best present you could give a dog” and a strong clue that “dogs have been our partners for thousands of years.” Another compelling story is that around 50,000 to 70,000 years ago a catastrophe of some sort reduced the entire world’s population to only about 1,200 people, including only about 500 in Africa. “We were close to extinction.... This is the story that science can tell you. It is underappreciated.” As he said, “Our stories are not only beautiful, they are true.”

• Investigator Massimo Polidoro’s “A Recipe for Testing Psychics” and his five rules: 1. Exactly define a claim (in writing). 2. Agree on a shared protocol. 3. Have the psychic perform a demonstration (which should be 100 percent successful, since there are no controls). 4. Add the control. 5. See what happens ... “and wait for the excuses.” In his twenty years experience, “only once has a person admitted [they were] wrong.”

Eugenie C. Scott addresses the banquet crowd before presenting Bill Nye with CSI’s In Praise of Reason Award. (Photo: Brian D. Engler)

• Physician Paul Offit’s stirring advocacy of vaccinations and condemnation of anti-vaccination campaigns, which undermine public health and endanger others. Offit, author of Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threat­ens Us All, said a lot of progress is being made, pointing out how the media came down hard on would-be presidential candidate Michele Bach­mann when she made an outlandish claim about the HPV vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer. At his hospital in Phila­delphia, the flu vaccine is mandatory for all employees. He said the measles vaccine will get some public attention when unvaccinated people start dying of that disease.

• The symposium “Sleight of Mind” by neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde and science journalist Sandra Blakeslee (coauthors of a recent book of the same title), plus James Randi on the neuroscience of magic. Macknik and Martinez-Conde have been studying how the world’s great magicians employ ancient principles that can now be explained using the latest discoveries of cognitive neuroscience. Illusions dissociate perception from reality and reflect what the brain is actually doing. The scientists described numerous cognitive illusions, demonstrated the power of manipulated awareness, and showed that different effects are due to different circuits of the brain. Randi, the hero of his fellow skeptics, worked with the authors in their studies and followed their joint talk with his own personal views on the subject. “Magicians have to be aware of how they themselves think,” he said, lamenting that “some magicians don’t know at base how their tricks work.” As for why he and other magicians don’t tell you how their tricks are done, he gave his stock answer: “I want you to leave here knowing that you can be deceived.” That is an invaluable lesson, he said. He called Macknik and Martinez-Conde pioneers in their field and “heroes” of his.

The X-Files’s William B. Davis presents on skepticism in the media. (Photo: Brian D. Engler)

• The symposium on alternative medical claims featuring physician/skeptic luminaries Steven Novella, Har­riet Hall, and Edzard Ernst. Hall punctured the acu­puncture myth, including the widespread belief that acupuncture is an ancient practice (“current practices developed in the twentieth century”) and showing that sham acupuncture works just as well. Novella ardently advocated science-based medicine and described a litany of biases that contribute to self-deception among patients and practitioners as well. Physi­cians themselves are susceptible to such clinical pitfalls as pattern recognition, relying on personal experience, elevating experience over evidence, failing to consider alternatives, be­coming confused by nonspecific symptoms, and falling prey to confirmation bias (“I’ve seen it work”). Throw in problems with re­search such as publication bias, research bias, the decline effect, and the fact that preliminary studies are not as rigorous, and it is no wonder that, as medical re­searcher John Ionnidis has written, the majority of medical studies are wrong. Ernst has published a thousand papers in peer-reviewed journals, including 300 systematic reviews. “Many of these publications have disappointed en­thusiasts of alternative medicine,” he noted. “Some were outraged.” He and his colleagues have examined studies funded by NCCAM, the National Center for Comple­men­tary and Al­tern­ative Medi­cine, and (as did authors of our January/February 2012 cover article on the topic) found many highly questionable. Re­gard­ing their studies of chiropractic, he found “questionable whether such research is worthwhile.” Rigorous studies of “energy medicine” were negative, hardly surprising since they were testing “implausible treatments.” When Prince Charles, an advocate of alternative medicine, complained about Ernst to the chancellor of his university, Ernst lost most of his funding and team. Ernst defended himself successfully but at high cost. He said his work has “generated substantial bodies of evidence,” much of it undermining assertions of alternative medicine, and made him “some friends, lots of enemies.”

CSI’s Barry Karr gives welcoming remarks. (Photo: Brian D. Engler)

This is just a brief taste of the sessions that made CSICon New Orleans 2011 such a treat. There were also lively sessions on “The Investigators” (Joe Nickell, Massimo Polidoro, Karen Stollznow, and Ben Radford), “Death from the Skies” (Phil Plait, David Morrison, and Seth Shostak), “Science and Public Policy” (Chris Mooney and Ron Lindsay), “Feeling the Future” (Ray Hyman and James Alcock), “Evo­lu­tion and Creationism” (Eugenie Scott and Barbara Forrest), “Skepti­cism and the Media” (Indre Viskontas, San­dra Blake­slee, and William B. Davis), “Super­stitions and Hauntings” (Amar­deo Sarma, Stuart Vyse, and Joe Nickell), “UFO Claims” (Robert Sheaf­fer and James McGaha), “Con­spiracy Theories” (David Thomas, Robert Blaskiewicz, and Ted Goert­zel), “Inde­pendent In­vestigation Groups,” “Grass­roots Activ­ism and Outreach,” “Educating the Next Genera­tion,” and a characteristically mind-bending lunch talk about frontiers of modern physics by physicist Lawrence Krauss.

It was exhausting but exhilarating, and we can hope there will be many more CSICons to come.

Is the “Arab Spring” that is sweeping nations across northern Africa and the Middle East a liberating force for science and open inquiry?

The links among democracy, freedom, openness, and science were frequent themes at the recent World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar, as prominent scientists and science policy leaders spoke to 700 of the globe’s assembled science journalists.

“What happened in Egypt on January 25 has extended the geopolitical boundaries of Tahrir Square to every corner of the Arab world,” Mohammad Saoud, president of the Qatar Foundation, said in his welcoming words. He affirmed “strong support to what happened in Egypt” and its connections to “freedom throughout the whole Arab world.”

That the conference was being held in Qatar was a direct result of the events in Cairo. The 2011 conference was to have been in Cairo. Planning had been under way for two years by organizers in Egypt, the United States, and the Arab world. But the public uprising in January that ousted the Mubarek government and opened a new sense of freedom and possibility also created instabilities and uncertainties not resolved in time to ensure the conference could safely go ahead there. Qatar, a small, modern country on the Arabian Peninsula, and its well-funded Qatar Foundation, which supports science, education, and community development, offered the conference a home in Doha, its capital city. So the conference quickly gained a second home, and the long-sought goal of holding it for the first time in the Arab world was met. Journalists from ninety countries attended.

Arab nations are proud of the fact that Muslim and Arab scientists are credited with keeping alive learning and scholarship from the ninth through the twelfth centuries CE. The subsequent decline and loss of that role is painful to them. But in their view, something similar has begun to happen in the past fifteen years, as a burgeoning sense of possibility sweeps the more progressive parts of the Arab world. Renewed research programs are underway, said Saoud, to “regain some of what we offered the world.”

“There is no ceiling to our aspirations,” he said, referring to the foundation’s intention to bring to Qatar some of the best minds from all over the world. “We want to reverse the brain drain. We want to achieve a ‘brain gain’ in Qatar and across the Arab world.… We want to play a leading role in that Renaissance.”

In fact, the Qatar Foundation’s newspaper shortly before the conference headlined the goal bluntly: “QF Leads Drive to Revive Arab Golden Age of Science.”

Core to that purpose, Saoud said, is “the wisdom to support a genuine and sustainable research community.” The Foundation is pursuing a practical model based on attracting international partners from top institutions throughout the world. (Campuses of Carnegie Mellon and Georgetown Universities, located within sprawling modern multicomplexes of the Foundation outside of Doha, were sites of some conference social sessions. Four other U.S. universities also have campuses there.)

Saoud referred to quality of programs, students, environment, and facilities as key ingredients of a vision that is “bold and far-reaching.” He foresees having “20,000 scientists partnering with us or relocating to Qatar.”

“Diffusing access to science and technology will help people become responsible citizens,” Professor Abdelhamid El-Zoheiry of Egypt’s Ministry of Scientific Research and Technology told the conference attendees. Science is being liberated in Egypt, he said, referring to a new law being drafted there to encourage research. “The Arab Spring promises a gentle rain of change for science and technology.”

Egypt has its own science Nobel laureate. Egypt and the whole Arab scientific world are proud of Ahmad Zewail, who received the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy. Zewail is the Linus Pauling chairman of chemistry at Caltech, from where he also serves on the President’s Council on Science and Technology. A member of the Qatar Foundation’s board, he was the conference’s opening keynote speaker. He is dedicated to the transfer to democracy in the Arab world.

He offered his own reflections on science and society. Science has witnessed revolutions, he said reeling off a list: visualizing and controlling matter at the level of atoms, deciphering the genetic codes, using stem cells to make new organisms, building precision labs to land on Mars. He noted our level of ignorance as well: “The amount of the unknown in [the] universe exceeds by far the known.” Ninety percent of the universe is “dark”; we don’t know how to unify the forces of nature, and we don’t understand what makes consciousness from atoms and molecules. “We have absolutely no idea.”

Challenges face the world of science and media, Zewail noted, including the rise of the infotainment culture. “Entertainment at the expense of education—it’s a serious problem.” He noted that five hundred television channels are now available in the Arab world. “Is this good for education? … Information doesn’t make useful knowledge. We need new knowledge.” He lamented sensationalism in the public media and that anything deemed bland or boring is expunged.

But he also spoke movingly of the burgeoning Arab Spring. He himself was involved in the Egyptian revolution. For four weeks he was there at the heart of it. “This revolution was unique in the history of mankind,” he said. All communications were through social networking; the media played a significant, positive role; and there was a change of perception of Arabs about the value of a “civil” uprising. “They want the country to be a better place.”

Zewail also insisted that Islam is not in conflict with progress. “One small group [is made up of] fanatics,” he said. Such fanatics “exist in all faiths.” Said Zewail: “There are Muslim fundamentalists. But you have fundamentalists in America too.”

Zewail said he sees “no physics”—nothing validly foundational—in calling what’s been happening a conflict of cultures. It is simpler than that: “People want liberty and good lives to live.”

“There is nothing fundamental in Islam against science…. Let’s go beyond the past and forge ahead to the future. Our focus should be on the future,” he advised.

Zewail’s native country of Egypt is establishing a new city of science and technology outside of Cairo. The goal is to affect basic knowledge. The new city was referred to multiple times at the conference. Zewail modestly noted that “they were kind enough to name it after me.”

“We are working hard to reclaim this glorious past,” Zewail assured the conference audience.

Whether the so-called Arab Spring fulfills all the promises that bring such a feeling of burgeoning hope to the Arab world’s scientists and thinkers is a question that will probably remain open for some time. But the aspirations are certainly there, and that is an essential start. The Western world and the Arab world together can benefit only if at least some of these high ambitions come to fruition.

This is the second of several reports by SKEPTICAL INQUIRER Editor Kendrick Frazier from the World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar. The first dealt with conference subthemes of pseudoscience, mythbusting, and evolution.

That is not altogether surprising, considering that science journalists, as the intermediaries between scientists and the public, encounter the same kinds of public misunderstanding and misperceptions (plus outright distortions) about science and the natural world that skeptics combat.

More than 700 science journalists from ninety countries—half of them from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, an intentional push by the main U.S. and Arab science journalism professional organizations to encourage science journalists from developing countries—are meeting in a new sprawling university/academic/research complex of the Qatari Foundation on the outskirts of Doha to consider all the issues they encounter in their professional lives. Among them: dealing with contradictory medical studies, the burgeoning digital media forums and whether science bloggers are science journalists, bioethical issues, reporting about risks when perceptions of risk are distorted, ethical issues facing science reporters, secret science, managing the transitions of science magazines to the digital age, journalism in the age of denial, and on and on.

I participated in a first morning session on “Investigating Pseudoscience,” together with skeptics and science journalists from Russia (moderator Tatiana Puchigina and Alexander Sageev, who emphasized cases in which pseudoscience can be a criminal activity), Hungary (István Vágó, former head of the Hungarian skeptics group and a prominent Hungarian television host), and Argentina (freelancer and skeptic Alejandro Agostinelli). We all outlined some of the characteristics of pseudoscience and gave some of our experiences battling it, and then we answered questions from other journalists about how best to deal with pseudoscience.

That breakout session was followed by a related one in the afternoon bearing the intriguing title “Warriors Against Claptrap: Are Myth-Busters the New Generation of Civic Scientist?” New myth-busting groups and efforts are springing up all over. The session addressed such questions as, Should we all confront bad science? Will that create public skepticism or cynicism? That panel addressed the impact of some widely publicized myth-busting campaigns that have captured the public imagination. The popular U.S. television show MythBusters (which U.S. President Barack Obama recently appeared on) was just one of the forums described. Julia Wilson and Leonor Sierra of Sense About Science, a U.K. group that promotes public myth-busting by young people, headed that fascinating discussion along with science journalists Ylann Schemm of the Netherlands, Alaa Ibrahim of American University in Cairo, and Pallab Ghosh of the BBC in the United Kingdom. Wilson described an effort in which a group of young people in the United Kingdom decided to challenge companies’ claims about “de-toxing.” They asked what evidence supported the de-tox claims. When the companies had to admit they had none, the group publicized that fact (with transcripts of the responses) and gained wide attention. Veteran BBC science broadcaster Ghosh concluded with some good points of wisdom. Among them: Science journalists’ prime responsibility is to act in the interests of their audience, that sometimes one needs to brave and take on important stories, and that they have a role and responsibility to bust myths. He called it “kick-ass journalism.”

And that session was followed by a plenary on “Evolution and the Evolving World of Science Journalism.” Scientific American Editor Mariette DeChristina, representing the National Association of Science Writers, moderated a panel that included participants from South Africa, Argentina, and the United States. But the lead talk was by our Committee for Skeptical Inquiry colleague Eugenie C. Scott of the National Center for Science Education, who began by noting how the journalistic principle of “balance” can be a problem in reporting on evolution. As she says, fairness and balance applies to opinion. “It is not an opinion that the Earth goes around the sun…. It is not a matter of opinion that living things have ancient ancestors.” (The “balance” problem is well understood by science journalists, but it remains a serious issue in general journalism, in which non-expert reporters frequently feel they must give creationist views equal weight to the long accepted scientific facts of evolution.)

Scott is an anthropologist, not a science journalist, but she is widely respected by science journalists for her efforts in helping them deal responsibly with the evolution/creation issue.

She forthrightly condemned a case in 2009 in which a noted science magazine, the British weekly New Scientist, published a cover announcing in large print, “DARWIN WAS WRONG.” (The article itself was about horizontal gene transfer and, says Scott, wasn’t the real problem.)

“The New Scientist cover is simply wrong,” Scott bluntly told the assembled journalists. “This cover was extremely irresponsible.” She noted that just two days later opponents of evolution on the Texas Board of Education cited the cover as evidence that evolution is wrong. New Scientist Editor Roger Highfield lamely responded at the time that he knew creationists would probably “take it out of context,” hardly any surprise to Scott, who wondered why he then did it. “Cover the science,” she said, “but don’t make it easy for creationists to take it out of context.”

So in the Qatari Foundation’s cool, modern facilities (video camera booms roam overhead, live radio interview programs are underway down the hall) surrounded by the blazing hot desert winds of Doha, science and skepticism was a prominent early theme as this largest ever world conference of science journalists—and the first ever held in the Middle East—got underway.

One day back in 1974, when I was editor of Science News in Washington, DC, the mail brought a letter from Martin Gardner. I knew of him, of course, as the “Mathematical Games” columnist in Scientific American and as author of the seminal work about pseudoscience and crackpots, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. I’d had a copy of that fascinating book since a friend gave it to me as a gift in graduate school. I loved it. Martin’s letter gently but firmly criticized us for a series of three articles we had run over a period of months dealing with some fringe science matters: Uri Geller, Kirlian photography, and Transcendental Meditation. Readers had requested the articles. This was the heyday of Geller’s then-rising popularity, and Geller had some (naive) scientists vouching for his powers. The other two subjects were likewise attracting a lot of media and popular interest. We had done our best to treat them carefully and with some skepticism, but except for the one on Geller, Martin didn’t think we’d done a particularly good job and was worried we’d put aside our usual scientific standards by writing about them at all.

I wasn’t at all offended by his criticism; in fact, I welcomed it. I wrote him back. I told him science writers and editors like me had few resources for checking the validity of these kinds of claims. I told him we needed people like him who had the necessary critical perspective and information to help us. Some sort of group of scientific experts was needed to give us that kind of help.

So it was perhaps not surprising that in the spring of 1976 I found myself covering for Science News an unusual conference on “The New Irrationalisms: Pseudoscience and Anti-Science” at the brand new SUNY Buffalo campus, at which philosopher Paul Kurtz announced the creation of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. It was exactly what I had asked for. My subsequent article for Science News—our cover pictured a small knight-like skeptic with only a sword of reason challenging a giant multi-headed dragon of pseudoscience (May 29, 1976)—stimulated more reader response than any other subject we had ever written about, which told me that this was a rich topic meriting much further examination. The nicest and most unexpected letter I received—I just now rediscovered it in my archives of those early events—was from Martin Gardner. He thanked me for the article, praised its accuracy, and called it a “wind of fresh air, long overdue.”

One year later I was an invited guest and speaker at the first meeting of the CSICOP Executive Council, held at the old Biltmore Hotel in New York City with Paul Kurtz, Ray Hyman, Phil Klass, and others including Martin Gardner himself, to my delight. The next day I was asked to join the organization as editor of its new magazine (then called The Zetetic, renamed the Skeptical Inquirer the next year). So Martin Gardner was not only my introduction to any kind of systematic skepticism and one of my early encouragers, but he was also there when I actually joined the effort.

Over the ensuing three-plus decades, it was my—and our readers’—pleasure to have Martin Gardner write regularly for SI. At first he wrote only occasional short articles and reviews. When he retired his Scientific American column after thirty years, I wrote and asked if he’d like to consider writing a regular column for SI on pseudoscience and fringe science. I was delighted when he agreed. Let’s give it a try, he answered, and see how it goes. That column (“Notes of a Psi-Watcher,” which he and I later renamed “Notes of a Fringe Watcher”) appeared in every issue of SI from Summer 1983 to January/February 2002. He recently resumed it on an irregular basis, and his last one, mailed to me May 12, ten days before his death, appears on page 10.

Martin was an editor’s delight. His columns always arrived early, usually weeks ahead of deadline. Sometimes he would check with me in advance about a possible subject; more typically he just mailed in a new column, surprising me with the topic. A new one’s arrival was always the high point of my day. They were clear, concise, involving, revealing, knowledgeable, relevant, and usually witty—the product of a lively, extraordinarily well-informed, unique mind. His columns were substantive but at the same time eminently readable. He typed them double-spaced on an electric typewriter, and the newspaperman in him (which he had once been for awhile after studying philosophy at the University of Chicago) carefully corrected any typos or made short word changes with black ballpoint pen. Also in the newspaper tradition, he revised sections by cutting and pasting, which was always done impeccably. I seldom had to do any real editing.

Over the years his columns covered everyone from Russell Targ, Margaret Mead, Shirley MacLaine, Arthur Koestler, Rupert Sheldrake, Marianne Williamson, Jean Houston, Doug Henning, and Phillip Johnson to maverick Cornell astronomer Tommy Gold (twice); and everything from James Randi’s Project Alpha (his first SI topic) to weird water, fuzzy logic, reflexology, urine therapy, psychic astronomy, the Klingon language, and the humorous yet profound question of whether Adam and Eve had navels. Every few years he would collect the SI columns, together with a few reviews and essays published elsewhere, in a new book. The first were The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher and On the Wild Side. The latest three are Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries? (2003), The Jinn from Hyperspace (2008), and When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish (2009).

On September 11, 2001 (yes, that same terrible day), I opened a letter from Martin that I had dreaded receiving. His beloved wife, Charlotte, had died earlier of a stroke, and he was getting two columns to me quickly because he knew he would soon go into a depression over her loss and be unable to write any more. And, besides, he was eighty-seven. “I’ve had a long run,” he ended, “and doing the column has been a great pleasure.” It was a sad day for all of us. But in 2005 I saw a new book review he had published elsewhere, and I wrote and invited him to once again write for SI if he felt he could. His first was a two-article series on “The Memory Wars.” We published it in our January/February and March/April 2006 issues. The first part appears in our latest SI anthology, Science Under Siege (Prometheus, 2009).

He was prolific to the end. We had two columns from him during the production of our March/April 2010 issue. So we published the shorter one (about fatal sweat lodge guru James Arthur Ray) as his regular column and the longer one (about Oprah Winfrey and her gullibility on pseudo-medical matters) as an article.

Perhaps surprising for such a towering intellect, Martin was a modest and unassuming man. Kindly, I would say. Obviously highly intelligent and a supremely clear thinker, he showed no sign of ego. A somewhat shy person, he never attended conferences or spoke at public gatherings. Although this was a disappointment to his myriad fans, I think he felt his time was better spent doing his own kind of research, reading up on the latest claims of nonsense and crackpottery and buffoonery, and giving his unique critical perspective in clear, concise prose. But he was a wonderful correspondent. Any letter to Martin drew an almost immediate typewritten response. That was true of my experience, and I have heard the same from others. His letters were always friendly, direct, relevant, useful, and concise. He never wasted words. I have quite a collection of such short letters from Martin and will always treasure them.

Martin Gardner was—among many other things—a brilliant and essentially self-taught intellectual who had the respect of the world’s greatest scientists and academics. The grandfather of the modern skeptical movement, he was an extraordinarily knowledgeable skeptic with a uniquely whimsical and easily amused mind who never took himself over-seriously, a great teacher through example of what skepticism and skeptical inquiry are all about, a clear writer and thinker, a peerless critic of nonsense, and a steadfast advocate of science and reason—in short, a national treasure. No; make that a world treasure.

This is terrible news about Steve Schneider. Steve was one of the best, probably the most articulate, and among the most outspoken of the climate scientists. He was a wonderful, first-rate scientist who didn't mind being active in the public arena. In fact, he seemed to relish it. He was a steadfast defender of good science and opponent of ideological-based climate contrarians. He was an excellent writer and communicator. And if the facts changed, he changed his scientific view. For more I recommend reading Andrew Revkin's blog today.

Steve was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a MacArthur Fellow. He was active on the IPCC. A few months ago I had quietly nominated him to become a Fellow of our Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in our next election round, and he had told me he would accept. He was proud of what we were doing in SI.

I knew Steve way back in the '70s before and after I was at Science News and he was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Of his many climate books I have two he personally inscribed to me, The Primordial Bond (1981) and The Co-Evolution of Climate and Life (1984). He wrote Global Warming in 1989 (and many other book since). We then lost contact for years and renewed acquaintances at the 2009 AAAS meeting in Chicago, where he spoke (and again at the 2010 meeting on a panel with Eugenie Scott on climate-science deniers and evolution deniers). Since that 2009 meeting he had served as an informal consultant and guide to me on our climate coverage in SI. He was very wise about the media and media dynamics and often spoke to science journalism groups, where he was highly respected. He even had a regular blog site about that, mediarology, which I highly recommend. There's also a chapter on that topic in his latest book, Science as a Contact Sport (National Geographic, 2009). The book details in a personal first-person style his involvement in the rough-and-tumble climate wars over the past 40 years. It is very readable.

In memory of Steve, I'd like to reprint here the short item "Climate Change: Skeptics vs. Deniers" I asked him to write for our May/June 2009 issue's coverage of that year's AAAS meeting in February. He'd spoken on this topic at the meeting. I think he says it all, very succinctly.

Kendrick Frazier
Editor,
SKEPTICAL INQUIRER

Climate Change: Skeptics vs. Deniers

Stephen H. Schneider is a climatologist whose first book about climate and world problems was published way back in 1976 when he was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He is now professor for interdisciplinary studies and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. He has long been active in climate policy issues. At this year's AAAS meeting, he was the invited discussant at the session on media coverage of climate change (see main article). The SKEPTICAL INQUIRER invited him to elaborate briefly on thoughts he expressed there about skeptics vs. deniers.

All good scientists are skeptical: I changed my mind from cooling to warming in 1974 when the preponderance of evidence shifted—and is now well established. I changed my views on nuclear winter to "nuclear autumn" in 1984, incurring the wrath of the peace movement— again because the preponderance of evidence shifted with study. That is a skeptic, what all scientists should be. But real skeptics still accept a preponderance of carefully examined evidence even when some elements of a complex systems problem remain unresolved, and they do not pretend that when there are loose ends some well-established preponderances don't exist—that is beyond skepticism to denial—or often political convenience. So a skeptic questions everything but accepts what the preponderance of evidence is, and a denier falsely claims that until all aspects are resolved we know nothing and should do nothing—often motivated by the latter. If you deny a clear preponderance of evidence, you have crossed the line from legitimate skeptic to ideological denier.

STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER

Stephen Schneider is partly responsible for my career-long focus on profitably reducing greenhouse gases, and happily, I was able to share this with him about a year ago. In 1975, my assignment from Cummins Engine Company's CFO, was to spend a year looking at the issues facing a global industrial enterprise over the next 25 years, and advise the then 40 year old top management team of long-range threats. This was shortly after the Club of Rome and Dennis and Donella Meadows had published ‘Limits to Growth' raising concerns about population growth, industrialization, pollution, and other areas. The work examined whether mankind would ‘overshoot' natural systems and end up with an irrevocably damaged planet.

While I examined the whole range of industrial pollution, I turned to Stephen Schneider for insights into global warming, and he generously gave me his time and answered my questions, plus steered me to the then relatively limited literature. The other major influence was the writing of René Dubos, who felt humans could invent good ways to deal with most pollution, which has proven prescient, but that carbon dioxide was a completely different pollutant. Different because it is the natural product of releasing ancient sunlight from fossil fuel, different because its volume is about fifty times the total of all other pollutant emissions from burning fossil fuel, and different because, as Dubos noted, there were not even theoretically ways of converting the carbon dioxide back to carbon and oxygen that did not require more energy than had been liberated from burning fossil fuel.

Thirty five years later, companies I have led have deployed $2.0 billion of capital in over 260 projects that avoid 5 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year versus conventional generation. Best of all, the hosts of these projects save about $500 million per year, with no investment on their part. This is their share of the savings in fossil fuel purchases from the doubled efficiency these projects obtain by producing two products – heat and power – from one fire. Of particular note, the net savings, after capital recovery and all costs, is about $100 per ton of avoided carbon. The unproven assumption that reducing carbon will raise the cost of energy services causes fear in many, including much of the Republican party, and helps explain their steadfast denial of the climate change problem. They fear that acknowledging the problem will lead to mandates that then lower our standard of living.

Thanks to Stephen Schneider's kind and thoughtful help many years ago, we have at least 260 case studies of profitably reducing carbon dioxide. Thank you Stephen.

Thomas R. Casten, Chair
Recycled Energy Development LLC
640 Quail Ridge Drive Westmont, Il 60559

If you are anything like me, reading is an essential part of life itself. For my generation, newspapers, books, and magazines are so intertwined with who we are and what we do that we almost can’t imagine a world without them.

In junior high and high school I hid paperback science-fiction novels behind my textbooks; in boring parts of class, I’d fly off in imaginative excursions through the universe. My parents belonged to the Book of the Month Club, and every four weeks some new enticing brochure describing novels and nonfiction books arrived with literate little essays to let us know what the club’s editors thought every intelligent family should be reading. My mother ordered lots of those books. And at least some of them we read. They were hardback—this was well before the era of trade paperbacks.

Our northern Colorado farm town’s little public library was a place of magic. Go up one flight of stairs above the town hall, and you entered a place so wondrous that I still remember the smells and sounds today. That wonderful new-book smell, there’s nothing like it, and the sounds of our shoes crackling on those varnished hardwood floors. All the new young person’s adventure novels awaited me, in their stylish, plastic-covered covers. There wasn’t a book I wanted that I couldn’t find. (I’m sure by all modern standards that was a very small library, and its quantity of books couldn’t have been very great. But at the time it seemed all I needed.)

I was also a newspaper junkie from early on. By ninth grade, we had a journalism class with another in high school taught by a fine teacher. I wrote the editorials for our high school newspaper, which was typeset, laid out, and published every Thursday as a well-read page in our town’s weekly newspaper. It was quite a heady experience to see your words in print every week, for every person in town to read. Every single person you knew.

So it is no wonder that after a brief flirtation with physics as a major, I ended up in journalism school (with a science emphasis but still a hard-news disposition). I worked three summers on newspapers, then a full year as a working newsman in the Denver bureau of UPI, and then went on to graduate school in journalism in New York at Columbia.

When I started at Columbia (fall of 1965), New York City had six daily newspapers. Then there was a major newspaper strike. It went on for a long time, as I recall, a sobering circumstance when you are studying to become a newspaperman. By the time I graduated, or at least shortly thereafter, New York had only four daily newspapers. The Journal-American and the Herald-Tribune, the latter a very fine newspaper, had fallen victim to harsh economics.

Newspapers have been under economic pressures from television since the ’50s, but their rapid decline now—in this new Internet age—is unprecedented. And sad. I am still a newspaper junkie. We get the Sunday New York Times delivered before sunrise on Sunday mornings to our house in Albuquerque—nearly two thousand miles from New York. We read it throughout the week. All other mornings I spend at least forty-five minutes with our local morning newspaper. I like the feel of the newspaper in my hand or on the table. Up until this past year, my wife Ruth and I had similar rituals in the early evening, often over dinner or a TV program, reading our local afternoon Scripps-Howard newspaper. It died last summer. We are no longer a two-newspaper city.

Kids these days don’t read newspapers. They barely know what they are. I know that. I’ve seen it. I worry about it. It is terrible for newspapers and those who love them. It may be terrible for education and for democracy. But I have to realize that I—and maybe all of us of our age group—are looking at the matter through our own generations’ prism. We may need to look through a newer, more high-tech prism to find signs of hope there. I think we might.

Recently we had some of our family over for dinner. Thinking about this article, I asked our grandson, Tenzin (who in December turned eighteen): “I know you don’t read newspapers or watch the evening television network news like we do, but do you nevertheless consider yourself well-informed? And exactly where do you get your information?” I think I kind of knew the answer, because he’s very computer-literate, but I wanted to hear it from him. He’s a smart young man, bright, studious, well-read (he reads books, lots of books; that’s another story), aware, already in college. Perhaps not altogether typical of most young people but still a youngster of his generation (in most ways).

“I think I am fairly well-informed,” he began thoughtfully. He explained that he gets his news off a variety of Internet sites. And then he said something about himself and his peers that to those of us in publishing is chilling but no longer unexpected: “We don’t think we should have to pay for information.”

There. He said it. That’s what the current debate is all about. Information should be free, on the Internet. Free is good, as the editor of Wired maintains. But Tenzin quickly added, in constructive fashion: “Newspapers and magazines just have to get a new business model. We may not think we should pay for information, but we don’t mind wading through ads to get to it.”

There, in a one young family member’s microcosm, was the core essence of the debate. I’ve seen this debate played out endlessly in heart-felt discussions about the future of newspapers and magazines in blogs, the Columbia Journalism Review, other magazines, and newspapers themselves.

We in publishing know we have to embrace the modern electronic information age, and most all of us are doing so in various ways; but how do we make it pay? Not pay in order to make a profit—because most of us aren’t really in this work for profit—just in order to stay in business at all. In order to research, report, write, edit, making a whole bunch of professional judgments along the way, and then get that encapsulated information out to the world that needs it. What in the world is the business model based on “free is good”? The debates are ongoing, and they are endless. No one, I think it is fair to say, really yet knows the answer. We don’t yet know how this is going to play out, which is very unsettling.

The tools of delivery are rapidly changing, and that’s where all the stress and worry comes in. But we must remember that most other industries in the corporate world have also undergone stresses and changes in recent years and decades; how well they responded to and adapted to those changing circumstances helps determine whether they’ll survive or not. (Plus an occasional ten-billion or so government subsidy—something those of us in the media can’t quite expect.)

In publishing we cling emotionally to the physical printed books, newspapers, and magazines we love so much—a history going back more than 500 years now. It’s no wonder. We do love them, and we should. But it is what goes into them that counts, not the exact physical output. It is their product of the human brain, heart, and imagination that we seek, and what form it happens to get to us in is less important. Isn’t it? I think that may be true anyway. Intellectually, I say so.

It is hard for me, though, living as I do in a large house with at least five of its rooms (two of them Skeptical Inquirer offices) lined with books. Bookcases everywhere. Many thousands of books over all. They are everywhere. I love their look, their feel. Their variety, their design, their content, the way they represent our wide-ranging interests and values. They are a part of my identity. (Ruth’s too, I think. She reads books far more than even I do.) With newspapers on the counter. With magazines of every type and description on display. I keep some in magazine file boxes to refer to in the event that becomes necessary. (Yet even I now am more likely to go immediately to the Web to do my research.)

I mentioned that newspaper and other publishers are struggling with these matters as we speak. On November 1, the New York Times’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, wrote (again) about some of these painful problems. Although the Times has the largest newsroom of any American newspaper, Clark reported that the Times was about to cut 100 newsroom people (of their 1,250 reporters, editors, photographers, columnists, graphic artists, videographers, and more) through voluntary buyouts and, if needed, make layoffs in the weeks before Christmas. It is hardly alone. The Baltimore Sun is down from 400 journalists to 150; the Los Angeles Times news staff has been cut by more than half. Most large newspapers have closed or drastically curtailed their foreign bureaus. The Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau. The Associated Press may have to enact layoffs to get payroll down 10 percent.

Since the Times and all other publications have enlarged their online presence dramatically, the new question is: Can you charge for that online access? Hoyt says many readers are suggesting the Times do so, and they are willing to get out their credit cards. Times executives are still studying that issue. But Bill Keller, the Times executive editor expresses caution: “It’s a much tougher, more complicated decision than it seems to all the armchair experts. There is no clear consensus on the right way to go.”

The paradox is that newspaper circulations are declining, rapidly, while in many cases newspaper readership is up. Many readers prefer reading their newspaper reports on the Web. But making that pay—again, that is the key dilemma. No one has yet found a reliable way.

Magazines are in similar situations, under tremendous cost/circulation pressures. Sixteen thousand titles are published in the U.S., but every month notable ones drop by the wayside. Many others are struggling. You would think that magazines with unique niches, the Skeptical Inquirer among them, would have some advantage over general-interest ones. Perhaps they do, but the flight to the Internet is debilitating for all.

My view is that for most periodicals the subscriptions should include both the printed and electronic version (or an option of one or the other). Thus subscribers (but not nonsubscribers) would have full access to the entire publication online. Most scientific journals have already gone that way. But I realize implementing that kind of action for more public periodicals is difficult and fraught with uncertainties.

But let’s get beyond economics and questions of the survival of media outlets and whole media industries. There are even larger issues: reading and literacy. They are essential to modern democratic civilization. Is the Internet age decreasing or reducing reading and literacy? I don’t know for sure. It is easy for us oldsters to condemn the newer generation for their addictions to texting, twittering, chat-rooming, social networking, blogging—and the incredible handheld devices that make all this possible anywhere, anytime, twenty-four hours a day. But I think we have to be careful. Our own prism may be obscured.

I am tentatively encouraged by the view of Stanford University professor of writing and rhetoric Andrea Lunsford. She has organized a huge project collecting more than 14,000 student writing samples—in-class assignments, formal essays to be sure, but also e-mails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions, reported in a recent column in Wired by Clive Thompson called “The New Literacy” (September 2009) are worth thinking about seriously:

“I think we are in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford [Thompson reports], technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions. The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. . . .It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment.

The question arises: is this explosion of writing good on a technical level? Thompson argues that the answer is yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to get their point across. Says Thompson: “The modern world of online writing. . .is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago. The fact that students today almost always write for an audience….gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing.”

I am not totally convinced, and I am sure you are not either. But perhaps it is a glimmer of hope.

Here’s what my computer-literate oldest grandson e-mailed me when I shared a draft of this essay:

I’ve read the Wired article you mentioned (online, for free :p), and I believe that in many ways the author is absolutely correct. Knowing your audience and conveying tone is especially important in online communications, not only because vocal cues cannot be relied upon, but also because the quality of writing is often used to judge the merit of a claim where other tools are not available. Writing like a middle schooler gives the message the weight of a middle-schooler’s opinion. It’s also, as the article mentioned, a fundamentally different form of communication than an essay.

As far as sheer volume goes, I have written far, far more for the Internet’s consumption than I have for school. Over the last three weeks, I’ve almost six thousand lines worth of irc communication (a form of instant messaging/chatroom), and have read many times that amount. That’s in addition to many dozen of forum posts, ranging in length from a single sentence to a mini essay. I may be atypical, but our generation certainly does communicate in large part via text.

So, if his experience is at all typical, perhaps there is way more than a glimmer of hope. We must embrace the new technology, use it ourselves to the degree we’re comfortable, and encourage the newer, younger generation to use it in every way possible for all constructive purposes.

My title mentions the New Skepticism. Here’s one thing I mean. All these new tools allow us to go out there and assess and investigate claims and assertions like never before. Those who use them now have tools to access information that we could only have hoped for in our student and early adult years. Inquirers can now quickly call up ten sources on the Web and cross-compare them for inconsistencies and discrepancies, and therefore begin to sift likely correct statements from possibly incorrect ones.

Earlier this year, at the Center for Inquiry conference in Bethesda, Maryland, we had a late-afternoon special section on the New Skepticism. It was filled with a lot of the newer generation of eager young people with great new ideas and energy to devote to the skeptical movement.

They didn’t need me, but here’s a little of what I told them anyway, at the beginning:

What a revolution that has been over the past two decades!

There is no point lamenting what has been lost—instead we must capitalize on what has been gained and become adept at using all the new tools that the Internet and other modern electronic communications have made possible.

All this to better communicate among ourselves and present to the millions worldwide the differences between bad science and good science, sense and nonsense, reason and unreason—in general and in specific case after case—and the rewards and unfettered joy of science and skeptical inquiry.

Use these new tools. . . . The next generation, and the one after that, find these new tools natural and should not be held back by our old allegiances to the print media and central broadcast media.

The November/December 2009 special issue of the Skeptical Inquirer, guest edited by our managing editor Ben Radford, was devoted to just these issues. It’s titled “Skepticism 2.0: What’s Next?” A dozen invited representatives of the new generation of skeptics write provocatively and passionately about their view of the new skepticism. Because they work in a decentralized way and use so many different electronic media, their viewpoint may differ from the classic skeptical movement founded by Paul Kurtz, Martin Gardner, James Randi, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Philip Klass, Ray Human, and the others a third of a century ago. Many are well aware of CSI and SI and the pioneering efforts of these early heroes of skepticism, and the history of the movement. But others aren’t; they’re just out there doing their skeptical thing. On their own. And in many cases, remarkably well. And that’s mostly a good thing.

I highly commend that entire issue of SI for a refreshingly different view of the skeptical movement as it draws in younger people and embraces all the modern technologies now available.

Conventional books and magazines will continue to struggle, with electronic distribution of books coming rapidly to the fore and more newspapers and magazines succumbing or going online only. The losses are dreadful. The reflective judgments their editors bring to the editorial content may be sorely missed. Future readers may never know the tactile delight, that almost visceral feel, of a book or a newspaper in the hand. But they will read, in some form, in some way, the thoughts and ideas and collected wisdom authors convey and the important information people (and search engines) compile. The communications tools have changed and multiplied, and, as realists and rationalists, we must recognize and apply their enormous new power and promise.

Everyone seemed to enjoy it. The day afterward, CFI founder and chairman Paul Kurtz called the congress “exhilarating.” As he said, “The responses of our readers and supporters were overwhelmingly positive. What a stunning response that we received from them!” Ron Lindsay, CFI’s CEO and president, likewise called the conference very successful and said many attendees commented favorably to him “that they noticed the skeptical/scientific side of our organization was on display more than usual, which they appreciated.”

That’s true, I think. Many people in the audience told me at various times how much they appreciate and value the Skeptical Inquirer. SI and its articles and the work of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry got a lot of public mention, too, in the talks, intros, and sessions.

Here are a few highlights for me:

• The opening session on Darwin and Lincoln, evolution, ID and creationism, and legal challenges of church-state separation involving the latter. Civil rights lawyer and CFI board member Edward Tabash emphasized repeatedly that in opposing creationism, we are “fighting not religious belief but the infusion of religious doctrine into public policy.” Philosopher/historian Barbara Forrest updated developments in the intelligent design wars since the Dover decision in 2005, including the latest troubling activities of antievolutionists in Texas and Louisiana. And Lincoln/Darwin historian David Contosta said: “I am convinced Lincoln was a deist. He did not believe in the divinity of Christ. He was not baptized. He questioned miracles of the Bible. He liked to tell jokes about preachers.... He probably couldn’t get elected today.”
• Former twelve-term U.S. Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder’s rousing talk defending good science against political indifference and, worse, interference. Her lively title tells the story:“The United States, a Former Global Leader in Science, Apologizes for the 2001–2008 Service Outage.” In her current job she represents textbook publishers for grades K–12. She warned that only a handful of people pick the textbooks your children use. “They are not teachers, usually. They are scary people, some of them.” She lamented that just the previous week in Texas opponents of evolution in textbooks declared an “insufficiency of evidence” for natural selection.
• Author Susan Jacoby’s (The Age of American Unreason) litany of “anti-intellectualism and sheer intellectual laziness” in America over the past forty years. “We are in serious intellectual trouble. We don’t value knowledge enough.” She gave a long series of examples of what she calls “junk thought,” ideas that are “impervious to evidence.” She also defended the virtues of reading, a practice much marginalized in today’s hectic age of instant electronic communications.
• Paul Kurtz’s luncheon address on the planetary perspective. He said humanism includes genuine caring for others and a respect for the dignity and value of every person on the planet. “We have common ground with all members of the human family.” He said we need a new planetary ethic that mitigates human suffering and increases the sum of human good and happiness. “As skeptics and rationalists, we need to cultivate a new planetary ethic. We need to be concerned with the planet Earth. It seems to me that is the positive statement of humanism.”
• Astrophysicist John Mather’s (the first NASA scientist to win the Nobel Prize) beautifully illustrated talk on the entire history and future of the universe, from its origin in the “Horrendous Space Kablooey” (as he calls the Big Bang) 13.7 billion years ago to the time when the Sun goes out 7.6 billion years from now ... and beyond.  He reported on the 1998 discovery that the cosmic expansion is accelerating, the mystery of dark energy, the plans for the next big space telescope to be launched in 2013 (the James Webb Space Telescope), and the quest to directly observe more exoplanets. Cosmology may have no practical benefits, he said, but space science sure does. People often forget that their weather reports, GPS devices, telephones, and television all “depend on things out there in space.”
• NASA climatologist Drew Shindell’s full report on “The Science of Climate Change.” He noted that our knowledge of climate change comes from detailed scientific observations, and he reviewed the interplay and repeated testing that goes on between scientific observations and computer models of climate. Some conclusions: the planet is getting warmer, natural forcings (solar variation, volcanoes, etc.) have been flat in recent years, the twentieth-century warming is largely caused by greenhouse gas increases, and the rate of future warming is likely to increase. He noted that apathy and resistance to change in this area goes back to the 1840s when a smokestack-cleaning technology for ships of the Royal Navy was squelched by industry.
• James Randi’s lively participation in many sessions, hallway discussions, and his own late afternoon talk about how easily we all can be fooled. “I know the art of deception. I know how people are fooled. And I know how to do that.” He described repeated examples of very smart people being fooled by trickery. “You can be fooled as well,” he said. It’s the conjuror’s warning not to take at face value any proclaimed evidence of psychic powers. At the end, Randi announced that his famous one-million-dollar challenge to claimants for proof of paranormal powers under controlled test conditions, which was to end, will in fact be renewed. “It was going to terminate in 2012,” he said, “but now it will continue.”
• Major awards to Paul Kurtz, Randi, and Lawrence Krauss.
• A session I moderated on Skepticism and Science seemed well received (due especially to the presentations by the witty and lively Richard Wiseman, with lots of video demos on perception and misperception, and equally so Elizabeth Loftus, with her research demonstrating false memory, plus Joe Nickell, on investigating rather than just debunking, and Armadeo Sarma, on alternative medicine fads in Germany and the rest of Europe).
• A small lunch given by Paul Kurtz for international participants in the congress, including the Chinese delegation (where we were able to renew acquaintances with several of the Chinese colleagues we met in Beijing in October 2007) and those from the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, and Senegal.
• A lively audience-participation, packed-house session at the end of the afternoon Saturday on The Future of Skepticism. Run by Ben Radford and myself, I gave some introductory comments. Barry Karr and James Underdown also participated. Sean McCabe of the James Randi Educational Foundation (he also writes a skeptical blog for the general public at www.weirdthings.com) emphasized the positive messages of skepticism, noting that there are now nine network TV shows featuring scientists or science oriented. Proclaimed McCabe: “Skepticism is cool ... and it’s getting cooler.” We then opened it to the audience. A lot of good ideas and discussion came out of the session.
• A sobering presentation by Pakistani nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy on the very recent Talibanization of Pakistan, even in Islamabad, where he teaches at a university. It has become very dangerous, he said. Terrible things have begun happening there in just the past several months. (The day after the conference ended, news organizations reported the imposition of Islamic law by the Taliban in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. Further Taliban inroads have prompted subsequent military action.)
• The Saturday evening awards banquet featured a live oratorio of composer Richard Einhorn’s new original composition (personally introduced by Einhorn) “The Origin,” a celebration of the life and work of Darwin based on Darwin’s own words in On the Origin of Species.
• Awards banquet speaker Lawrence Krauss’s (a CSI fellow and Arizona State University physicist and author) talk on “Science and Public Policy: An Oxymoron.” He concluded with the call, “We must all become evangelists for science. We cannot tolerate unambiguous nonsense in a democracy.”

The Nobel foundation obliquely acknowledged that situation by saying the prize went for the discovery of the virus, not for detection of the link between the virus and the AIDS disease (SI News and Comment, January/February 2009).

Biomedical scientists (106 in all) from seventeen countries have published a letter in a prominent scientific journal saying Gallo deserves equal credit. And a major event is planned in May honoring Gallo on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his co-discovery.

In a letter titled “Unsung Hero Robert C. Gallo” (Science, 323: 206, 2009), the international group of scientists say that while Nobel Prize recipients Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier “fully deserve the award, it is equally important to recognize” Gallo’s contributions.

“Gallo definitely proved HIV-1 as the cause of AIDS through the successful isolation and long-term cultivation of HIV-1 and developed a diagnostic kit that prevented new infections and saved thousands of lives. These contributions . . . warrant equal recognition. . . .”

The letter continues: “Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier isolated a virus but . . . could not establish whether it was the AIDS virus, an achievement accomplished by Gallo and colleagues just one year later. Gallo . . . learned to grow the virus and, furthermore, discovered its role, saved the blood supply, and opened the way for drug and vaccine development. Without Gallo’s contributions, the relevance of the virus to AIDS might not have been recognized and many thousands more lives would have been lost. Given the enormous impact of these developments on the lives of countless thousands globally, Gallo’s contributions should not go unrecognized.”

Gallo also has been outspoken against those who try to deny that HIV is the cause of AIDS (“AIDS: Denialism vs. Science,” September/October 2007).

An endnote to the Science letter says the letter-writing initiative was done independently of Gallo’s influence. The coordinator of the letter effort is Guido Poli, head of the AIDS Immunopathogenesis Unit at San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan, Italy.

Poli says he and the letter writers, many of them leaders in the HIV field, felt the Nobel committee had an unfortunate anti-Gallo bias. Poli worked at the National Institutes of Health for seven years and witnessed the development of AIDS research during its first years.

He told the Skeptical Inquirer he hadn’t heard from Gallo directly, “although people in his staff told me that he was happy about the letter.”

May 4, 2009, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gallo’s paper in Science reporting his findings identifying the AIDS virus. To commemorate the discovery, the University of Maryland School of Medicine is hosting a three-day celebratory event in Baltimore May 9–11. It includes a gala honoring Gallo, “Celebrating a Visionary’s Quest for Discovery,” and a symposium, “25 Years After Discovering HIV as the Cause of AIDS.” The National Cancer Institute, where Gallo did his research, is co-sponsor.

Poli told SI he has been invited as a speaker to the celebration. “I interpret that as a way to say ‘thanks!’”

Concerns by some parents have kept alive the idea of some link, which has not been supported by the scientific literature (see “The Anti-Vaccination Movement,” SI November/December 2007).

Jeffrey S. Gerber and Paul A. Offit of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia published a review in the February 15 (2009) Clinical Infectious Diseases (48:456–61) of twenty peer-reviewed scientific studies published between 1999 and 2004. The studies show no connection.

The authors examined three specific claims some have proposed: the combination measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism by damaging the intestinal lining; the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal, formerly in some vaccines, is toxic to the central nervous system; and the simultaneous administration of multiple vaccines overwhelms or weakens the nervous system.

They reviewed the relevant epidemiological evidence and found no support for these claims. In one study, for instance, researchers in England evaluated 498 autistic children born from 1979 through 1992. No change in the rates of autism diagnoses after the 1987 introduction of the MMR vaccine was observed. A study in Denmark compared the incidence of autism in children who had received two different levels of thimerosal or no thimerosal at all. There was no relationship between thimerosal exposure and autism. On the third claim, they note that vaccines “do not overwhelm the immune system . . . even conservative estimates predict the capacity to respond to thousands of vaccines simultaneously.”

“Twenty epidemiologic studies have shown that neither thimerosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism,” conclude Gerber and Offit. “These studies have been performed in several countries by many different investigators who have employed a multitude of epidemiologic and statistical methods. The large size of the studied populations has afforded a level of statistical power sufficient to detect even rare associations.

“These studies, in concert with the biological implausibility that vaccines overwhelm a child’s immune system, have effectively dismissed the notion that vaccines cause autism. Further studies on the cause or causes of autism should focus on more-promising leads.”

The new Italian peer-reviewed study was carried out over a ten-year period and published in the February issue of Pediatrics. Thousands of healthy Italian babies in the early 1990s were given two different amounts of thimerosal as part of their routine vaccinations. Ten years later, 1,403 of those children were identified and given a battery of brain-function tests. Researchers found small differences in only two of twenty-four measurements, and “they might be attributable to chance,” they said. Only one case of autism was found, and that was in the group with the lower thimerosal.

“Put together with the evidence of all the other studies,” said the study’s lead author, Alberto Tozzi of Bambino Gesu Hospital in Rome, “this tells us there is no reason to worry about the effect of thimerosal in vaccines.”