The conference started with an informal Friday evening of magic by Steven Valenti, cheese and drinks, Pat Linse's original cover artwork for Skeptic Magazine and plenty of sociable skeptics.
The Science Gap can be pictured as the difference between the people using scientific methods for discovering reliable knowledge and the people who don't. The main session the next morning began with Frank Miele, senior editor of Skeptic, taking up the question put by Pilate to Jesus "What is truth?" by examining the historical evidence for the existence of both Jesus and Pilate. He drew a distinction between instrumental truth, that is meaningful statements with testable consequences, and moral truth (that ought to be) and presented the classical case against Jesus (the interpolations in Josephus Flavius, lack of contemporary sources) and the most recent case for Pilate (inscription at Caesarea). In his summing up he said that skepticism involved tentativeness, tolerance, humility and responsibility.
The next speaker with his motto "Not to know what happened before one was born is to remain a child forever" was keen to disagree. Ever since postulating the common ancestor of man and apes to be a chimp-like creature existing about 5 million years ago, professor of anthropology Vincent Sarich has taken delight in stirring controversy and he was in no different mood today. His challenges included the negative correlation between belief in free will and mental disease, the existence of incest avoidance behaviour in evolution and the meaning of racial differences in humans. Controversy is part and parcel of science and skepticism as a way of resolving it. Sarich did not, however, have an easy time getting his points accepted, as one or two of his questioners indicated.
One of the major conference themes was the question of whether history can be a science. Frank Miele had shown how much history you can do without statistics and Vince Sarich both the ease and the difficulty of interpreting the statistics when you have them. Michael Shermer went on to discuss two fundamentally conflicting views of history -being either an exact science much like physics where the historian's viewpoint is inerrant truth or just a collection of personal opinions biased by the historian's greater environment and no indication of what really happened. He concluded with news of his book tour and the observation that science is viewed by the media as being just as interesting as anything paranormal (which might include a chicken imprinted on a duck). And he indicated how long a talk show likes its sound-bites: "What's the difference between a cult and a religion?" "About 100 years."
Having announced the inception of the James Randi Educational Foundation at last year's conference, Randi was back reporting on how it has been developing in the meantime. Offices have been occupied and work is underway -particularly in terms of electronic publishing -to provide skeptics all over the world with information resources. The sum of pledges offered by the 2000 Club has topped $1.1 million for anyone performing a paranormal feat under controlled conditions. Randi is also investigating -between June 2 and 4 it was to be -Therapeutic Touch, a pseudoscientific nursing practice with over 80,000 practitioners in the USA. Curiously, opposition to Randi's investigation has partly been on the grounds that TT sees itself as a feminist contribution to medical practice. One wonders about the reasons for this, as girls can and do become doctors in many societies nowadays. JREF is organising a conference in Florida from October 31 to November 2 this year. Finally, in view of the increasing number of professionally run skeptics organisations, Randi appealed to all concerned to work together to get the skeptics' message across.
Just what is a psychologist? Someone who does experiments in behaviour or a "therapist"? This question was addressed by Carol Tavris, one of the former. There are two areas in which psychologists proper can be of help to their fellow beings, one being cognitive behaviour modification and the other giving people advice in situations of moral dilemma or personal choice. Above and beyond these there is an unregulated market for psychotherapies in which anything goes, from practitioners' training and qualification to the methods used to validate hypotheses. As examples for "social science fiction" she gave Facilitated Communication ("no fundamental scientific methods") and projective testing (such as the Rorschach inkblot test: "no interpretation, not valid and not useful for diagnosis"). Emphasis was given to the role of "recovered" or, alternatively, "false" memories -even if they were to play a useful role in therapy doesn't mean that they are reliable as diagnoses.
One of the two highlights was historian of science Frank Sulloway's criticism of history as hitherto practised. Sulloway is perhaps best known for his book Born to Rebel in which he investigates factors influencing revolutionary behaviour (in science as well as in politics) and concludes that birth order is a more important factor than social class. By using statistical methods on the results that historians have come to as well as directly on historical material itself he is able to resolve apparently deadlocked debates. He listed an number of misassumptions in the methodology and goals of traditional history that have precluded the use of statistical methods until now and then showed how, by using such methods, Charles Darwin's Ornithological Notes can be dated by spelling variation to July 1836, how the authorship of the Federalist Papers can be determined by content analysis. Sulloway received the Skeptics Society Randi Award (Skeptic of the Year). Other award winners were astronomer John Mosley (Gardner Award for the Skeptical Critic), astrophysicist Tom McDonough (Spinoza Award for the Skeptical Scholar), and journalist Patt Morrison (Murrow Award for the Media Skeptic).
The awards session had been introduced by Randy Cassingham (of "This is True" fame) bestowing the Dumbth Award on the Microsoft Corporation for such pearls of wisdom in the form of the synonyms "civilized" for "western", "pervert" for "lesbian" and "man-eater" and "savage" for "indian" in its Spanish translations for the Microsoft Word dictionary.
The other highlight was physiologist Jared Diamond's very condensed history of why Europeans and Asians went out to conquer the rest of the world and not the other way around. The details can be found at more leisure in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies.
Several things about this conference could be remarked upon and I will mention just one -these skeptics' interest is not focused primarily on things that go bump on the dark. The paranormal has its place, of course. But the main thrust of this conference was questions with more than a marginal interest, questions like "Should anthropology ignore differences in human groups?", "Why should kind, helpful people like psychotherapists need academic training?", "Is it necessary to use statistics in order to understand history?". And these are questions that matter. No doubt we will see more of them being dealt with at future conferences of the Skeptics Society.