EDGE: How is this implemented in your public communications?

SHERMER: We do two different things at Skeptic. We are social activists who don't believe that intellectuals should just remain cloistered in their ivory towers (though those who want to do so certainly can). And we believe in Darwin's dictum, as I like to call it, that all observations must be for or against some view if they are to be of any service. To take it even further, what are you going to do with those observations? You must communicate it to people. If there's no communication to the general public, then doing science or anything else is an utter waste of time. So I'm very discouraged and disheartened when I hear scientists disparage science writing or fall into the trap of propagating the pecking order, with physics and mathematics at the top and the social sciences at the bottom, if present at all. I think that such infighting is unnecessary.

The debunking stuff that we do is, as Stephen Jay Gould said, like trash collecting, a dirty job but somebody's got to do it. That's our job. But to me, that's secondary. It's not particularly interesting to know and to expose phony psychics. In general, the exposé of out and out fraud is not that interesting, because it's just somebody lying. What's more interesting is self-deception; how leaders of cults come to believe that they can actually do what they think they can do. How does someone believe in cold fusion or zero point energy, or any of those wildly speculative alternative energy theories? Obviously there's pretty good room for skepticism on a lot of these claims yet these people really believe that this stuff is there. How do they become such fervent believers? Scientists of course do the same thing, they are passionate believers in their theories, and the interesting question is why? Thus, the second thing we study is why people believe weird things, have certain belief systems and how those systems work. Including in science.

The one thing we've learned from the last three decades of research is that science is socially and culturally embedded and thus biased. Still, it's the best system we have for understanding causality in all realms, in all fields. So despite the fact that it's loaded with biases, there is a real world out there that we can know and the best way to know it is through science. The reason for that is because there's at least a method, an attempt to corroborate one's own subjective perceptions. There's a way to find out if you and I are seeing the same colors when we see red. There's actually a way to test these things, or at least try to get at them. That's what separates science from everything else.

EDGE: Why the increase in Darwinism, which seems to have happened in the last 10-15 years?

SHERMER: First, Darwin was right. In the realist sense, he is the only one of the big three — Darwin, Marx and Freud — who is still alive. Marxism has shown itself not to work and Freud was wrong about much of his ideas. Modern evolutionary biology, on the other hand, is showing that Darwin was right. Culturally and socially, the nature-nurture pendulum is swinging back and forth and I think that ever since Wilson's sociobiology, it's become acceptable to construct evolutionary models to explain human behavior and society. I think evolutionary psychology folks, with a few extreme exceptions who are telling just-so stories, have it right. Since their research is pretty good, the combination of good science and cultural trends goes a long way towards explaining the recent popularity of Darwin.

EDGE: Can you explain what you mean by just-so stories?

SHERMER: As examples or over-reaching, the just-so stories, sometimes the reconstruction of what life would have been like in the paleolithic era, in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, or EEA, will focus on why the particular thing that you're studying would have been advantageous. A good example of this was in a recent book in which the author was talking about how the origins of religion came about when men were on the hunt; at some point, they realized that life was completely meaningless. They had an existential crisis and realized there was no point to life at all, and that whether they were successful or not in the hunt didn't make any difference in the long run. So they created God, to sort of snow everybody else into realizing that there is a meaning and purpose to life.

Well that's a nice story; now prove it. How do you prove that? There's no possible evidence of this phenomena. That's a typical just-so story that the critics of evolutionary psychology would justly nail them for. The harder thing to do is to find ways to test very specific claims. That's why the research that Pinker is doing is so good; he's very narrow and focused, and takes just one particular thing and tries to test it. It isn't the big questions which are of interest, why are humans the way they are, why is or isn't there a God or whatever ­ but very specific things. That's where the good research is.

EDGE: Let's talk about Skeptics.

SHERMER: If we're going to accomplish our goals of science literacy, which is one of the primary goals of the Skeptic Society, you have to reach as many people as you can. You do it through print, the magazine and books, plus mass communication, television and the radio. You absolutely have to do it, and that's what we do.