The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

In this week’s eSkeptic, Sam Mackintosh reviews Terrence Deacon’s book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Sharon Hill reviews Benjamin Radford’s latest book, Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore. The book was nominated as a Finalist for the 2011 ForeWord Reviews’ Book of the Year Award in the social science category, and was a Finalist for the New Mexico Book Awards.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Ueli Rutishauser reviews Christof Koch’s latest book entitled, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist .

In this week’s eSkeptic, Matthew Ainsworth reviews Stephen Greenblatt’s book: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Donald R. Prothero reviews Richard Milner’s new book, Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time.

Rapidly advancing technologies may have the potential not only to spread information but to solve some of humanity’s most vexing problems. In this week’s eSkeptic, Michael Shermer reviews a just-released book called Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Robert L. Martone reviews Nicholas Humphrey’s book Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness (University Press, 2011, ISBN: 978-0691138626). Martone is a research scientist and is the Neuroscience Therapeutic Area Lead for the Covance Biomarker Center of Excellence. He has extensive experience in neuropharmacology research, having led neuroscience drug discovery and technology teams through all phases of drug discovery from target identification through clinical trials with expertise in both small molecule and protein therapeutics. He also has…

In this week’s eSkeptic, Michael Shermer reviews Margaret Wertheim’s Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything. This book review first appeared in the Wall Street Journal on December 10, 2011.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Michael Shermer reviews Lisa Randall’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World (Ecco, 2011), a book in which Randall attempts “the herculean task of explaining to us uninitiated the daunting science of theoretical particle physics.” This review was originally published in the November 2011 issue of Science magazine.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Tim Callahan reviews Alvin Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (2011, Oxford University Press).

In this week’s eSkeptic, Tim Callahan reviews Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are by Bart D. Ehrman.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Tim Callahan reviews Derek Murphy’s book Jesus Potter Harry Christ.

Into the trenches of a rousing, blood-flecked battle in the ongoing war between good science and bad science, a new book reminds us that the stakes of the game have always been nothing less than life and death. In this week’s eSkeptic, Stephen Beckner reviews Douglas Starr’s new book, The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science.

In a soon-to-be-published controversial paper entitled “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect,” Daryl Bem claims to have found significant statistical data in support of precognition in various situations through a series of nine experiments. Nicolas Gauvrit presents several analyses critiquing the methodology and statistical data presented in Bem’s study.

In this week’s eSkeptic, James N. Gardner reviews Brian Greenes’s book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Jason Colavito reviews Scott Sigler’s book Ancestor and follows up by interviewing the author.

Barry Rein reviews Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It by Gary Taubes (Knopf, 2011, ISBN-13: 978-0307272706).

In this week’s eSkeptic, Barry Rein reviews Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It by Gary Taubes (Knopf, 2011, ISBN-13: 978-0307272706)

In the tradition of making end-of-the-year lists of the “Top 10 X” Michael Shermer presents his personal picks for the Top 10 Science Books of 2010.

In this week’s eSkeptic, S. James Killings reviews AGORA, distributed by Focus Features, produced by Fernando Bovaira and Álvaro Augustin, directed by Alejandro Amenábar, written by Amenábar and Mateo Gil, starring Rachel Weisz.