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Skeptic Magazine, Volume 20 Number 3
Table of Contents

Skeptic magazine, vol 20, no 3 (cover)

Reviews

What Good Can We Do?
A Review of The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically, by Peter Singer.
reviewed by Jim Davies
Is the Universe Mathematical?
A review of Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, by Max Tegmark.
reviewed by George Michael
The Times, They are a Changin’
A Review of Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions, by Phil Zuckerman.
reviewed by Donald Prothero
Food Faiths and Diet Religions
A Review of The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What You Eat, by Alan Levinovitz.
reviewed by Harriet Hall, M.D.
Scientology’s Worst Abuses Against a Journalist Revealed
A Review of The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology Tried to Destroy Paulette Cooper, by Tony Ortega.
reviewed by Jim Lippard

Junior Skeptic

Bat-People On the Moon!

In this issue we’ll be talking about bat-people. And sheep. And unicorns. On the Moon! What’s that you say? The Moon obviously can’t have unicorns because it doesn’t even have air to breathe? Well, sure, that’s a good point. But what if I told you the world’s most popular newspaper once announced the discovery of these and many other fantastical lunar lifeforms? Moreover, people believed those claims. How on Earth were New York City newspaper readers taken in by a far-fetched fantasy about flying Moon-bats? Find out in this issue of Junior Skeptic!

by Daniel Loxton

Special Section: Alfred Russel Wallace

ON THE COVER: Alfred Russel Wallace and the flying tree frog named after him. Illustration by Pat Linse.
Alfred Russel Wallace—Species Seeker Extraordinaire
by Richard Conniff
The Consilient Mr. Wallace
How He and Darwin Independently Used the Same Method to Arrive at Natural Selection
by James T. Costa
Demolishing Wallace’s “White Picket Fence” Around Human Cognition
by Lee Dugatkin
Wallace, Darwin, and the Spiritualism Scandal of 1876
When a Young Scientist Prosecuted a “Psychic” Fraudster, the Co-Founders of Evolutionary Biology Took Opposing Sides
by Richard Milner
Wallace and the Flat Earthers
Charles Lyell Counseled Charles Darwin to Avoid Public Controversies, while Encouraging Alfred Wallace to Lock Horns with a Malicious Crackpot
by Richard Milner and Michael Shermer
Heretic Scientist
Why Alfred Russel Wallace Got Involved In So Many Heretical Ideas
by Michael Shermer

Columns

The Gadfly
An Internet Story
for Our Time

by Carol Tavris
The SkepDoc
Evidence: “It Worked for My Aunt Tillie” is Not Enough
by Harriet Hall, M.D.

Articles

The Innocent Moon
Using Math to Debunk
the Lunar Effect
by John D. Van Dyke
The Non-Fine-Tuned Universe
The Astronomical Failure of the Cosmological Argument for Theism
by Jérémie Harris
and Edouard Harris
The “God” Construct
A Testable Hypothesis for Unifying Science and Theology
by Douglas J. Navarick
Commentary on “Why is Critical Thinking so Hard to Teach?”
by John E. Buckner V & Rebecca A. Buckner
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