The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

In Science Salon # 148, Michael Shermer reflects on the recent resurrection of Jordan Peterson, the resurgent criticism of him and why so many people attack him, why similar such unwarranted attacks have been made against other public intellectuals.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Donald R. Prothero remembers Charles Darwin (on the occasion of what would have been his 203rd birthday this past Sunday). Prothero reminds us that it was 40 years ago this year that the most frequently cited paper in the history of paleontology was published: none other than the legendary 1972 article by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould which proposed the “punctuated equilibrium” hypothesis. Prothero also shares some insights from his own research.

In this interview with one of the pioneering women in the skeptical movement, Carol Tavris picks up where Stephen Jay Gould left off on his Mismeasure of Man with her mythbusting book The Mismeasure of Woman. Tavris uncovers a host of myths about women and shows what science actually tells us about gender difference with respect to cognition.

In this critical review of paleontologist Simon Conway Morris’s book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, paleontologist Donald Prothero deconstructs the myth of progress and evolution. Morris argues that convergent evolution means certain features will inevitably arise in nature such as eyes and ears, limbs and brains, and therefore these solutions become unavoidable and thus predictable.

In this week’s eSkeptic, to commemorate Ernst Mayr’s 100th birthday, we reprint an interview from Skeptic magazine, The Grand Old Man of Evolution: An Interview with Evolutionary Biologist Ernst Mayr.