Letters To The Editor - Brief Article

'Top 10 Skeptics' List Generates Controversy

The article "The 10 Outstanding Skeptics of the Twentieth Century" January/February 2000), includes Harry Houdini (1874-1926) but somehow omits one of his contemporaries, Clarence Darrow (1857-1938), who devoted so much of his time to exposing ignorance, including his cross-examination in the Scopes trial of 1925 in which fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan revealed the bigotry and lack of intelligence of the "true believers."

All due respects to Darrow, one of the greatest of all time was Col. Robert Green Ingersoll, who just missed the twentieth century as he died in 1899. Ingersoll's writings and books reveal a truly great man.

Patrick J. Leonard, Sr.

Braintree, Massachusetts

Missing from the list of outstanding skeptics of the twentieth century is Bergen Evans, author of two early skeptical books: The Natural History of Nonsense in 1946 and The Spoor of Spooks and other Nonsense in 1954, both published by Knopf. But Evans's influence far exceeded these two books.

In the late 1940s he taught the most famous course at Northwestern University. One did not take English Bl; one had the privilege of taking Bergen Evans along with more than 500 other students. His skeptical attitude toward people's foibles found a resonance in world literature, and with erudition and wit he enlivened literary works while instilling a questioning attitude in many students, including myself.

Some may remember Bergen Evans as the quizmaster on the early television show Down You Go, in which clues were presented as puns and other tricky devices. He chose to regard viewers as alert and intelligent.

Everyone may learn from Bergen Evans by referring to his valuable reference A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, co-authored with Cornelia Evans and published by Random House in 1957. The volume remains an authoritative, unpedantic resource to practical American usage that is informed by Evans's vast scholarship and enlivened by his wit.

Bruce Martin

Earlysville, Virginia

Shame on you narcissists! For the top ten skeptics of the twentieth century you choose seven of your own contemporaries, emblazon your cover with their pictures, and then patronize the past by naming a couple of famous figures. Not acceptable! Your panel should have done more homework on the history of skepticism.

How, for example, could you fail to include the Oxford-educated Perry Mason of serious spiritualistic debunking, Frank Podmore? His two-volume scholarly work on Modern Spiritualism (1902--yes, that's twentieth century) was seminal in getting the premier issue of the day in all of occultism before the public at a real crisis point. (See my Behind the Crystal Ball, pp. 198-200 for a brief account of his worthy contribution to your skeptical movement.)

Anthony F. Aveni

Professor of Astronomy and Anthropology

Colgate University

Hamilton, New York

[ldots] That list, intended to be CSICOP's celebration of "skepticism," turned out to be CSICOP's celebration of itself. It displays an appalling ignorance of the history of skepticism in this century.

To begin, seven of your "winners" (all CSICOP founders) were or are active in the final quarter of the century, and five are currently alive. Like the voters for the Academy Awards, who rarely select films released. early in the year. your voters had great difficulty casting their critical eyes back to the beginning of the century. Furthermore, all but two (the unavoidable Russell and Einstein) were or are Americans.

Your list is remarkable for its exclusions. Four of your "next ten" deserved better: Feynman, Mencken, Dawkins, and Gould. In addition, the following individuals come to mind, each worthy of a place at the top of the list: George Santayana (author of Skepticism and Animal Faith), Clarence Darrow the Positivists A.J. Ayer and Moritz Schlick, the Christian Skeptics James Robinson and James Pike, philosophers Antony Flew and Thomas Nagel, the existentialists J.P. Sartre and Albert Camus, activists Lincoln Steffens, Margaret Sanger, and Noam Chomsky, environmentalists Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, and Garrett Hardin. Among the Russians, one might consider Andrei Sakharov and Mikhail Gorbachev, or the writers of the samizdat political tracts such as Sinyavsky and Daniel, all of whom challenged Marxist dogma and practice and thus helped to overthrow Communism....

Ernest Patridge

Cedar Pines Park, California

"The Ten Outstanding Skeptics of the Twentieth Century" is a fatally flawed article lacking even the most basic information on its underlying survey, e.g., how many of the CSICOP Fellows and Scientific Consultants responded. Nor is the technique of combining the lists--some apparently consisting of the requested ten, some fat lengthier--included.

While "[t]he main interest here is not in ranking people in comparison with each other," there is no explanation of the sequence in which the names appear. What is clear from the four lists is that the customary way of avoiding implied rank, alphabetization, was not used.