Michael Brant Shermer (born September 8, 1954) is an American science writer, historian of science, executive director of The Skeptics Society, and founding publisher[1] of Skeptic magazine, a publication focused on investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims.[2] The author of over a dozen books, Shermer is known for engaging in debates on pseudoscience and religion in which he emphasizes scientific skepticism.
Shermer was the co-producer and co-host of Exploring the Unknown,[3][4] a 13-hour Fox Family television series broadcast in 1999. From April 2001 to January 2019,[5] he contributed a monthly Skeptic column to Scientific American magazine.
Michael Brant Shermer was born on September 8, 1954, in Los Angeles, California.[18][19] He is partly of Greek and German ancestry.[20] Shermer was raised in Southern California, primarily in the La Cañada Flintridge area.[21][22][23] His parents divorced when he was four and later remarried.[22] He has a step-sister, two step-brothers, and two half-sisters.[21][24]
Shermer attended Sunday school but said he was otherwise raised in a non religious household. He began his senior year of high school in 1971, when the evangelical movement in the United States was growing in popularity. At the behest of a friend, Shermer embraced Christianity. He attended the Presbyterian Church in Glendale, California and observed a sermon delivered by a "dynamic and histrionic preacher" who encouraged him to come forward to be saved. For seven years, Shermer evangelized door-to-door.[21][24] He also attended an informal Christian fellowship at "The Barn" in La Crescenta, California, where he described enjoying the social aspects of religion, especially the theological debates.[21]
In 1972, he graduated from Crescenta Valley High School[23] and enrolled at Pepperdine University, intending to pursue Christian theology.[21] Shermer changed majors to psychology once he learned that a doctorate in theology required proficiency in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Aramaic.[21][23][25] He completed his BA in psychology at Pepperdine in 1976.[26]
Shermer went on to study experimental psychology at California State University, Fullerton. Discussions with his professors,[27] along with studies in the natural and social sciences, led him to question his religious beliefs.[24][27] Fueled by what he perceived to be the intolerance generated by the absolute morality taught in his religious studies; the hypocrisy in what many believers preached and what they practiced; and a growing awareness of other religious beliefs that were determined by the temporal, geographic, and cultural circumstances in which their adherents were born, he abandoned his religious views halfway through graduate school.[24][27]
Shermer attributed the paralysis of his college girlfriend as a key point when he lost faith. After she was in an automobile accident that broke her back and rendered her paralyzed from the waist down, Shermer relayed, "If anyone deserved to be healed it was her, and nothing happened, so I just thought there was probably no God at all."[10]
After earning his MA in experimental psychology in 1978, Shermer worked as a writer for a bicycle magazine in Irvine, California. He took up bicycle racing after his first assignment, a Cycles Peugeot press conference,[21][28] He completed a century ride (100 miles) and started to ride hundreds of miles a week.[21]
Shermer began competitive cycling in 1979 and rode professionally for ten years, primarily in long distance ultramarathon road racing. He is a founding member of the Ultra Cycling Hall of Fame.[29]
Shermer worked with cycling technologists in developing better products for the sport. During his association with Bell Helmets, a bicycle-race sponsor, he advised them on design issues regarding expanded-polystyrene for use in cycling helmets, which would absorb greater impact than the old leather "hairnet" helmets used by bicyclists for decades. Shermer advised them that if their helmets looked too much like motorcycle helmets, in which polystyrene was already being used, and not like the old hairnet helmets, no serious cyclists or amateur would use them. This suggestion led to their model, the V1 Pro, which looked like a black leather hairnet, but functioned on the inside like a motorcycle helmet. In 1982, he worked with Wayman Spence, whose small supply company, Spenco Medical, adapted the gel technology Spence developed for bedridden patients with pressure sores into cycling gloves and saddles to alleviate the carpal tunnel syndrome and saddle sores suffered by cyclists.[30]
While a long distance racer, he helped to found the 3,000-mile nonstop transcontinental bicycle Race Across America (known as "RAAM", along with Lon Haldeman and John Marino), in which he competed five times (1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1989), was an assistant race director for six years, and the executive race director for seven years.[21][31] An acute medical condition is named for him: "Shermer's Neck" is pain in and extreme weakness of the neck muscles found among long-distance bicyclists. Shermer suffered the condition about 2,000 miles into the 1983 Race Across America.[32] Shermer's embrace of scientific skepticism crystallized during his time as a cyclist, explaining, "I became a skeptic on Saturday, August 6, 1983, on the long climbing road to Loveland Pass, Colorado", after months of training under the guidance of a "nutritionist" with an unaccredited PhD. After years of practicing acupuncture, chiropractic, massage therapy, negative ions, rolfing, pyramid power, and fundamentalist Christianity to improve his life and training, Shermer stopped rationalizing the failure of these practices.[33]
Shermer participated in the Furnace Creek 508 in October 2011, a qualifying race for RAAM, finishing second in the four man team category.[25][34]
Shermer has written on the subject of pervasive doping in competitive cycling and a game theoretic view of the dynamics driving the problem in several sports. He covered r-EPO doping and described it as widespread and well known within the sport, which was later shown to be instrumental in the doping scandal surrounding Lance Armstrong in 2010.[35][36][37]
Teaching
While cycling, Shermer taught Psychology 101 during the evenings at Glendale Community College, a two-year college. Wanting to teach at a four-year university, he decided to earn his PhD. He lost interest in psychology and switched to studying the history of science,[21] earning his PhD at Claremont Graduate University in 1991. His dissertation was titled Heretic-Scientist: Alfred Russel Wallace and the Evolution of Man: A Study on the Nature of Historical Change.[38]
Shermer then became an adjunct professor of the history of science at Occidental College, California. In 2007, Shermer became a senior research fellow at Claremont Graduate University. In 2011, he worked as an adjunct professor at Chapman University,[39][40] and was later made a Presidential Fellow.[41] At Chapman, he taught a yearly critical thinking course called Skepticism 101.[21]
Skeptics Society
In 1991, Shermer and Pat Linse co-founded[42][43] the Skeptics Society in Los Angeles with the assistance of Kim Ziel Shermer.[44] The Skeptics Society is a non-profit organization that promotes scientific skepticism and seeks to debunk pseudoscience and irrational beliefs. It started off as a garage hobby but eventually grew into a full-time occupation. The Skeptics Society publishes the magazine Skeptic, organizes the Caltech Lecture Series, and as of 2017, it had over 50,000 members.[10]
Shermer’s early writing covered cycling, followed by math and science education for children which included several collaborations with Arthur Benjamin.[25]
From April 2001 to January 2019, he wrote the monthly Skeptic column for Scientific American.[5] He has also contributed to Time magazine.[46]
He is the author of a series of books that attempt to explain the ubiquity of irrational or poorly substantiated beliefs, including UFOs, Bigfoot, and paranormal claims.[1][47] Writing in Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (1997), Shermer refers to "patternicity", his term for pareidolia and apophenia or the willing suspension of disbelief.[48] He writes in the Introduction:
So we are left with the legacy of two types of thinking errors: Type 1 Error: believing a falsehood and Type 2 Error: rejecting a truth. ... Believers in UFOs, alien abductions, ESP, and psychic phenomena have committed a Type 1 Error in thinking: they are believing a falsehood. ... It's not that these folks are ignorant or uninformed; they are intelligent but misinformed. Their thinking has gone wrong.
In How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science (2000), Shermer explored the psychology behind the belief in God.[citation needed]
In February 2002, he characterized the position that "God had no part in the process [of the evolution of mankind]" as the "standard scientific theory".[49] This statement was criticized in January 2006 by the scientist Eugenie Scott, who commented that science makes no claim about God one way or the other.[50]
Shermer's book In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History (2002) was based on his dissertation.[51][52][53]
In his book The Borderlands of Science, (2001) Shermer rated several noted scientists for gullibility toward "pseudo" or "borderland" ideas, using a rating version, developed by psychologist Frank Sulloway, of the Big Five model of personality. Shermer rated Wallace extremely high (99th percentile) on agreeableness/accommodation and argued that this was the key trait in distinguishing Wallace from scientists who give less credence to fringe ideas.[54][clarification needed]
In The Mind of The Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (2007), Shermer reported on the findings of multiple behavioral and biochemical studies that address evolutionary explanations for modern behavior. It garnered several critical reviews from academics, with skeptic Robert T. Carroll saying: "He has been blinded by his libertarianism and seduced by the allure of evolutionary psychology to explain everything, including ethics and economics."[55][56][57]
In May 2011, Shermer published The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths.[58][59][60] In a review for Commonweal, writer Joseph Bottum described Shermer as more of a popularizer of science and stated, "science emerges from The Believing Brain as a full-blown ideology, lifted out of its proper realm and applied to all the puzzles of the world."[47]
Writing for Society in 2017, Eugene Goodheart noted that Shermer identified skepticism with scientism and observed that in his book Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Skeptical Eye (2016) Shermer was a "vivid and lucid" writer who imported his "political convictions into his advocacy of evolutionary theory, compromising his objectivity as a defender of science."[62]
Harriet Hall said of Shermer's 2018 publication, Heavens on Earth, that "the topics of Heavens on Earth are usually relegated to the spheres of philosophy and religion, but Shermer approaches them through science, looking for evidence – or lack thereof."[63]
In 2020, Shermer launched Giving the Devil His Due, a series of 30 reflections on essays that he had published the previous 15 years.[64]
Media appearances and lectures
Shermer giving a talk at FreedomFest in Las Vegas, Nevada, in July 2016
In 1994 and 1995, Shermer made several appearances on NBC's daytime paranormal-themed show The Other Side. He proposed a skepticism-oriented reality show to the producers but it did not move forward. Several years later Fox Family Channel, picked up the series.[65] In 1999, Shermer co-produced and co-hosted the Fox Family TV series Exploring the Unknown.[3] Budgeted at approximately $200,000 per episode, the series was viewed by Shermer as a direct extension of the work done at the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine, with a neutral title chosen to broaden viewership.[65]
Shermer made a guest appearance in a 2004 episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit!, in which he argued that events in the Bible constitute "mythic storytelling", rather than events described literally. His stance was supported by the show's hosts, who have expressed their own atheism. The episode in question, The Bible: Fact or Fiction?, sought to debunk the notion that the Bible is an empirically reliable historical record. Opposing Shermer was Paul L. Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University.[66]
Shermer presented at the three Beyond Belief events from 2006 to 2008. He has presented at several TED conferences with "Why people believe strange things" in 2006,[67] "The pattern behind self-deception" in 2010,[68] and "Reasonable Doubt" in 2015.[69][70]
In 2012, Shermer was one of three guest speakers[74] at the first Reason Rally in Washington, D.C., an event attended by thousands of atheists,[75] where he gave a talk titled "The Moral Arc of Reason."[76] That same year, Shermer participated in an Intelligence Squared debate titled "Science Refutes God" paired with Lawrence Krauss, and opposing Dinesh D'Souza and Ian Hutchinson.[77]
In 2013, blogger PZ Myers published an anonymous account of a woman who said that Shermer had raped her at a conference. Subsequently, he was accused of sexual harassment by two other women.[81] Shermer has denied these allegations.[81][82] In 2019, Illinois Wesleyan University canceled Shermer’s visit for the President’s Convocation at that institution after it learned of the sexual assault allegations.[83]
Personal life
Shermer married Kim Ziel. They had one daughter together[29] and later divorced. On June 25, 2014 he married Jennifer Graf, a native of Cologne, Germany.[84]
Shermer is a self-described libertarian.[85][86] In a 2015 interview, Shermer stated that he preferred to talk about individual issues after previous experience with people refusing to listen to him after learning he held libertarian views.[87]
In 2000, Shermer voted for libertarian Harry Browne, on the assumption that the winner of the Al Gore – George W. Bush contest would be irrelevant. He later regretted this decision, believing that Bush's foreign policy made the world more dangerous. He voted for John Kerry in 2004. Shermer named Thomas Jefferson as his favorite president, for his championing of liberty and his application of scientific thinking to the political, economic, and social spheres.[88][89]
In June 2006, Shermer, who formerly expressed skepticism regarding the mainstream scientific views on global warming, wrote in Scientific American magazine that, in the light of the accumulation of evidence, the position of denying global warming is no longer tenable.[90]
Gun control
Shermer supports some measures to reduce gun-related violence.[87] He once opposed most gun control measures, primarily because of his beliefs in the principles of increasing individual freedom and decreasing government intervention, and also because he has owned guns for most of his life. As an adult, he owned a .357 Magnumpistol for a quarter of a century for protection, although he eventually took it out of the house, and then got rid of it entirely. Though he no longer owns guns, he continues to support the right to own guns to protect one's family.[91] However, by 2013, the data on gun homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings convinced him that some modest gun control measures might be necessary.[92]
Shermer, Michael (2022). Conspiracy – Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN978-1421444451.
Related Research Articles
Agnosticism is the view or belief that the existence of God, the divine, or the supernatural is either unknowable in principle or unknown in fact. It can also mean an apathy towards such religious belief and refer to personal limitations rather than a worldview. Another definition is the view that "human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify either the belief that God exists or the belief that God does not exist."
Environmental skepticism is the belief that statements by environmentalists, and the environmental scientists who support them, are false or exaggerated. The term is also applied to those who are critical of environmentalism in general. It can additionally be defined as doubt about the authenticity or severity of environmental degradation. Environmental skepticism is closely linked with anti-environmentalism and climate change denial. Environmental skepticism can also be the result of cultural and lived experiences.
Skepticism, also spelled scepticism in British English, is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma. For example, if a person is skeptical about claims made by their government about an ongoing war then the person doubts that these claims are accurate. In such cases, skeptics normally recommend not disbelief but suspension of belief, i.e. maintaining a neutral attitude that neither affirms nor denies the claim. This attitude is often motivated by the impression that the available evidence is insufficient to support the claim. Formally, skepticism is a topic of interest in philosophy, particularly epistemology.
The Skeptic's Dictionary is a collection of cross-referenced skeptical essays by Robert Todd Carroll, published on his website skepdic.com and in a printed book. The skepdic.com site was launched in 1994 and the book was published in 2003 with nearly 400 entries. As of January 2011 the website has over 700 entries. A comprehensive single-volume guides to skeptical information on pseudoscientific, paranormal, and occult topics, the bibliography contains some seven hundred references for more detailed information. According to the back cover of the book, the on-line version receives approximately 500,000 hits per month.
Susan Jane Blackmore is a British writer, lecturer, sceptic, broadcaster, and a visiting professor at the University of Plymouth. Her fields of research include memetics, parapsychology, consciousness, and she is best known for her book The Meme Machine. She has written or contributed to over 40 books and 60 scholarly articles and is a contributor to The Guardian newspaper.
Philosophical skepticism is a family of philosophical views that question the possibility of knowledge. It differs from other forms of skepticism in that it even rejects very plausible knowledge claims that belong to basic common sense. Philosophical skeptics are often classified into two general categories: Those who deny all possibility of knowledge, and those who advocate for the suspension of judgment due to the inadequacy of evidence. This distinction is modeled after the differences between the Academic skeptics and the Pyrrhonian skeptics in ancient Greek philosophy. Pyrrhonian skepticism is a practice of suspending judgement, and skepticism in this sense is understood as a way of life that helps the practitioner achieve inner peace. Some types of philosophical skepticism reject all forms of knowledge while others limit this rejection to certain fields, for example, knowledge about moral doctrines or about the external world. Some theorists criticize philosophical skepticism based on the claim that it is a self-refuting idea since its proponents seem to claim to know that there is no knowledge. Other objections focus on its implausibility and distance from regular life.
Scientific skepticism or rational skepticism, sometimes referred to as skeptical inquiry, is a position in which one questions the veracity of claims lacking empirical evidence. In practice, the term most commonly refers to the examination of claims and theories that appear to be beyond mainstream science, rather than the routine discussions and challenges among scientists. Scientific skepticism differs from philosophical skepticism, which questions humans' ability to claim any knowledge about the nature of the world and how they perceive it, and the similar but distinct methodological skepticism, which is a systematic process of being skeptical about the truth of one's beliefs.
A debunker is a person or organization that exposes or discredits claims believed to be false, exaggerated, or pretentious. The term is often associated with skeptical investigation of controversial topics such as UFOs, claimed paranormal phenomena, cryptids, conspiracy theories, alternative medicine, religion, exploratory or fringe areas of scientific, or pseudoscientific research.
The Skeptics Society is a nonprofit, member-supported organization devoted to promoting scientific skepticism and resisting the spread of pseudoscience, superstition, and irrational beliefs. The Skeptics Society was co-founded by Michael Shermer and Pat Linse as a Los Angeles-area skeptical group to replace the defunct Southern California Skeptics. After the success of its Skeptic magazine, introduced in early 1992, it became a national and then international organization. Their stated mission "is the investigation of science and pseudoscience controversies, and the promotion of critical thinking."
Skeptic, colloquially known as Skeptic magazine, is a quarterly science education and science advocacy magazine published internationally by The Skeptics Society, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting scientific skepticism and resisting the spread of pseudoscience, superstition, and irrational beliefs. First published in 1992, the magazine had a circulation of over 40,000 subscribers in 2000.
Religious skepticism is a type of skepticism relating to religion. Religious skeptics question religious authority and are not necessarily anti-religious but rather are skeptical of either specific or all religious beliefs and/or practices. Socrates was one of the most prominent and first religious skeptics of whom there are records; he questioned the legitimacy of the beliefs of his time in the existence of the Greek gods. Religious skepticism is not the same as atheism or agnosticism, and some religious skeptics are deists.
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James E. Alcock is Professor emeritus (Psychology) at York University (Canada). Alcock is a noted critic of parapsychology and a Fellow and Member of the Executive Council for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a member of the Editorial Board of The Skeptical Inquirer, and a frequent contributor to the magazine. He has also been a columnist for Humanist Perspectives Magazine. In 1999, a panel of skeptics named him among the two dozen most outstanding skeptics of the 20th century. In May 2004, CSICOP awarded Alcock CSI's highest honor, the In Praise of Reason Award. The author of several books and peer reviewed journal articles, Alcock is also an amateur magician and a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.
Kylie Sturgess is a past President of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, an award-winning blogger, author and independent podcast host of The Token Skeptic Podcast. A Philosophy and Religious Education teacher with over ten years experience in education, Sturgess has lectured on teaching critical thinking, feminism, new media and anomalistic beliefs worldwide. She is a Member of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) Education Advisory Panel and regularly writes editorial for numerous publications, and has spoken at The Amazing Meeting Las Vegas, Dragon*Con (US), QED Con (UK). She was a presenter and Master of Ceremonies for the 2010 Global Atheist Convention and returned to the role in 2012. Her most recent book The Scope of Skepticism was released in 2012. She is a presenter at Perth's community radio station RTRFM, and a winner at the 2018 CBAA Community Radio Awards in the category of Talks, with the show Talk the Talk In 2020 she was in the final eight in the Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) Asia-Pacific virtual showcase.
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Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there is a 2011 book about the paranormal by psychologist and magician Richard Wiseman. Wiseman argues that paranormal phenomena such as psychics, telepathy, ghosts, out-of-body experiences, prophesy and more do not exist, and explores why people continue to believe, and what that tells us about human behavior and the way the brain functions. Wiseman uses QR codes throughout the book, which link to YouTube videos as examples and as experiments the reader can participate in to further explain the phenomena. Because of a cautious American publishing market, it was only available in America through Kindle. Paranormality was awarded the Center for Inquiry's Robert P. Balles award for 2011.
Taner Edis is a Turkish American physicist and skeptic. He is a professor of physics at Truman State University. He received his B.S. from Boğaziçi University in Turkey and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Edis is the author of several books on creationism, religion and science. He is a scientific and technical consultant for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
↑ Shermer, Michael (2007). The Mind of The Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics. Holt Paperbacks. pp. 59–61 ISBN978-0-8050-7832-9
↑ Shermer, Michael Brant (1991). Heretic-scientist: Alfred Russel Wallace and the evolution of man: a study on the nature of historical change (Thesis/dissertation, Manuscript). Claremont Graduate School. OCLC26379537.
↑ Ibold, Hans (November 13, 2000). "L.A.'s Own Ghostbuster". Los Angeles Business Journal. 22 (46). Pat Linse, co-founder of the Skeptic Society in Pasadena.
↑ Loxton, Daniel (November 2009). "The Paradoxical Future of Skepticism". Skeptical Inquirer. 33 (6). Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
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