Science and the public: summing up thirty years of the Skeptical Inquirer

This issue of the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER arks the thirtieth year of publication of e official magazine of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal--which had been founded six months before the first issue was published in Fall/Winter 1976 as The Zetetic (meaning 'skeptical seeker"), under the editorship of Marcello Truzzi. The name was changed to the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER the following year, and Kendrick Frazier was appointed the new editor, a position he has served with brilliant virtuosity and distinction ever since. Ken had been the editor of Science News. and during his tenure at the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER he also worked full time at Sandia National Laboratories for 23 years until his retirement from there this past April. He has kept abreast of the many breakthroughs on the frontiers of the sciences and is eminently qualified to interpret the sciences for the general public; hence he continues to be a perfect fit for the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER.

In preparation for this overview, I reviewed the entire corpus published in the past thirty years, which will soon be available on CD-ROM. What impressed me greatly was the wide range of topics and the distinguished authors that Ken has attracted to its pages. I can highlight only some of these in this article. I wish to use this occasion to focus on what I believe we have accomplished in the past three decades and to speculate as to what directions our magazine might rake in future decades. Today, many threats to science come from disparate quarters--as Ken points out in his editorial, "In Defense of the Higher Values." in the July/August 2006 issue of the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER. These include efforts to undermine the integrity of science and freedom of research, and we are continually confronted by irrational antiscientific forces rooted in fundamentalist religion and ideology. Given these challenges, no doubt skeptical inquiry will continue to be necessary in the future.

The original name of CSICOP was the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and Other Phenomena, but this mouthful was deemed too long--and the acronym would have been CSICOPOP--so we shortened it! It is clear that the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER was never intended to confine itself solely to paranormal issues: and the topics it has dealt with have been truly wide-ranging. The subtitle that was eventually developed and now appears on every issue is "The Magazine for Science and Reason, which states succinctly what it is all about. It has encouraged "the critical investigation of paranormal and fringe-science claims," but "it also promotes science and scientific inquiry, critical thinking, science education, and the use of reason."

I.

The enduring contribution of the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER in its first three decades, I submit, has been its persistent efforts to raise the level of the public understanding of science. No nation or region can cope with the challenges of the global marketplace and compete effectively unless it provides a steady stream of highly educated scientific practitioners. This is true of the developing world, which wishes to catch up with the advanced industrial and informational economies; but it is true of those latter nations as well. Today, China and India have embarked upon massive efforts to increase the number of scientists in their countries--China graduates anywhere from 350,000 to 600,000 engineers annually, compared to 70,000 to 120,000 in the United States, of which some 30,000 are foreign born. Alas, we still have a tremendous task, for U.S. students rank only twenty-fourth in scientific knowledge out of the twenty-nine industrialized countries. Only 40 percent of twelfth graders tested had any comprehension of the basic concepts and methods of science. Presumably, even fewer political figures in Washington have the requisite comprehension!

The long-standing policy of CSICOP has been four-fold: (1) to criticize claims of the paranormal and pseudoscience, (2) to explicate the methods of scientific inquiry and the nature of the scientific outlook, (3) to seek a balanced view of science in the mass media, and (4) to teach critical thinking in the schools. Unfortunately, the constant attacks on science, the rejection of evolution by creationists and intelligent design advocates (some thirty-seven states have proposed programs to teach ID and creationism in the schools), the limiting of stem-cell research by the federal government, and the refusal to accept scientific findings about global warming vividly demonstrate the uphill battle that the United States faces unless it improves the public appreciation of scientific research.

Clearly, the major focus of the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, especially in its first two decades, was on the paranormal; for there was tremendous public fascination with this area of human interest, which was heavily promoted and sensationalized by an often irresponsible media. Our interest was not simply in the paranormal curiosity shop but to increase an understanding among the general public of how science works.