EDGE: What about the role of email?

SHERMER: I don't think the book will ever be dead, nor our magazine ­ but obviously you've got to be online. With e-skeptic, I reach, 12,000 people once or twice a week; it's a great resource and part of the future.

Perhaps instead of Skeptic we should call it "Ideas, the Magazine." The original Greek meaning of skepticism is thoughtful inquiry, which is really a part of science. True, the name is provocative, it has some negative connotations and people think that you're nihilists, or cynics, or whatever. But on the positive side, the name generates interest and grabs people's attention. It's something different.

EDGE: But you don't get invited to appear on major television shows if you are only talking about ideas. The general public like confrontation.

SHERMER: The best you can hope for is getting in three or four points. Like with Larry King — he constantly interrupts his guests. So I just said, right off the bat, well, Larry there's three points to this answer, one... Now he can't interrupt because the guy's got to make his three points. He tried, but I made my three points anyway. It's like being a politician who's trained to stay on message. I have my message and I'm going to get it across, even if I only have two minutes to do it. And the message is that science is the way that we find out about the world, and that all kinds of other stuff is anecdotal and fun and interesting, but it doesn't get us any closer to understanding reality; for that, we have to use science.

Why Oprah is so much more successful than PBS shows; people want a quick fix, the simple answer, how they can improve their love lives and their health. Health, money, love and career; that's the big four. We're not in that business. Science and ideas are ultimately much more important. One's whole life is grounded in ideas. Our mission then, instead of complaining and whining about it, is to make those ideas more interesting. To market it better. We're simply selling people that these ideas are actually more important than the little self-help stuff.

In terms of getting the word out, we just have to sell publishers on the idea that it is really important that they publish this kind of work, much more important in fact than doing other books. One of the things that will motivate them to do that the bigger advances for books by scientists, which in turn forces the publishers economically to do something about it. This development has been is one of the most important things that's happened to science in a long time.

It's possible to influence people's decision-making process. That's what marketing and advertising is all about. Now scientists, instead of looking at popular books as a necessary evil or something to do on the side, are considering it one of the most important things that they can do. If you look at the history of science, with few exceptions, revolutions and change have been triggered by books. Not journal articles. Books have done far more than anything else. Think of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, NEWTON'S PRINCIPIA, etc.; the entire evolutionary synthesis came about through a number of important books.

Scientists need to take writing seriously. It's a skill, like anything else they've already developed. It's an art and a craft that takes practice. It's not just throwing down ideas, you have to do it in a way that's appealing. You have to market ideas. A few scientists can do it: Gould is great at it and Dawkins is an elegant writer. But hardly any others are like that. More scientists need to read those kind of books and work their own writing. Some of the books that come down the pipeline are just awful. It's like they were penned it in two nights or something as if it wasn't important. I've got news for you: it's the most important thing they can do. If you're not writing to get the ideas out to everybody, then it's just a waste of time.

EDGE: Let's talk about the evolutionary wars.

SHERMER: We're currently witnessing one of the great intellectual debates of the last two centuries in the evolutionary wars. I mean Darwin and Wallace got the big prize; they figured out how it works. But now everything becomes contentious because of the possible applications to human society.

I think Gould's right. We have not fully experienced the implications of the Darwinian revolution, the pedestal-shattering implications have not yet been realized, in the sense that there still is, I think, a propensity among many evolutionary biologists to look for trends in the evolutionary record that somehow show that we aren't special and different. That yes it's true there is no God, and yes it's true the universe wasn't designed for us. However we still are special. If you rewound the tape and played it back we'd appear again and again. Maybe not exactly us, but some consciousness, a language- and tool-using species that would eventually have a World Wide Web and go into Space. That would happen over and over. Somehow that makes you feel that life is meaningful and special. I think we are exceptionally unique.

EDGE: What happens when a new technology comes along and we revisit our ideas about who and what we are, because of the technology?