Pity the plight of the poor scientist in today’s society. Portrayed in popular culture as either an out-of-touch misanthrope or a power-hungry madman, scientists can’t help but feel a little unappreciated. Members of the Skeptics Society and its quarterly journal, Skeptic, are attempting to return science to what they believe is its rightful place, as the most trustworthy judge regarding claims made about the natural world. Even more than that, skeptics are using the scientific method to test beliefs that do not lie in the traditional domain of science, such as the claims of Holocaust deniers or the validity of various conspiracy theories. As long as a claim is testable with the scientific method, it is fair game for skeptics. I think we’ve all heard of the scientific method. You probably even had to write it out for a homework assignment or exam in fifth- or sixth-grade science class. It’s usually presented something like this:
Step 1 - Form a hypothesis to explain some natural phenomenon.
Step 2 - Design an experiment to test your hypothesis, determining beforehand what your hypothesis predicts will be the result of the experiment.
Step 3 - Perform the experiment.
Step 4 - Determine if the results of the experiment match the predictions of your hypothesis. If not, then your hypothesis is incorrect. If the results do match, then your hypothesis may be correct, pending future experiments.

We always suspected that real scientists’ method of working wasn’t anything close to the scientific method. What real scientists actually did was a mystery, but it seemed to involve test tubes and Bunsen burners and white lab coats and protective eyewear. We never imagined those scientists saying, “OK, the experiment is over, check to see if the results agree with the hypothesis.” Since I have grown up to become a real-life, honest-to-goodness scientist, or at least a real-life, honest-to-goodness graduate student in the field of science, I can let you in on the secret: sometimes the work I do pretty closes resembles the standard model of the scientific method, but often it doesn’t. A feedback loop is a better model of science, with theories proposed which can be tested by experiments, which then return results which aren’t quite in agreement with the theories, so the theories are refined to agree with the experimental results, and then further experiments require further refinement of the theories, and so on and so forth. In my field, ion-surface interactions, too little is known of the interactions to formulate a priori an adequate model to explain what might happen in an experiment, so each experiment serves to test and add variables onto a basic model so that the model will eventually incorporate the full complexity of what happens at a surface.

Though many members of the Skeptics Society are practicing scientists (confession - I am a member of the Skeptics Society), in the Society’s popular publications, namely its website and journal, it tackles subjects that are more accessible than, say, ion-surface interactions. So that, for example, recent issues of Skeptic have featured stories debunking the Roswell UFO crash story, examining creationist critiques of the theory of evolution, and speculating that Jesus may have suffered from epilepsy.

Michael Shermer is the founder and president of the Skeptics Society and is also publisher and editor-in-chief of Skeptic. His latest contribution to the skepticism opus is The Borderlands of Science, Where Sense Meets Nonsense. The title makes a promise that unfortunately the book does not fulfill. One of the problems that anyone who is writing such a book nowadays will encounter is that the terrain of skepticism is heavily-traveled ground. In addition to the quarterly journal Skeptic, Carl Sagan in 1996 wrote the New York Time’s bestseller The Demon-Haunted World, a tribute to science and skepticism; fellow science and skepticism advocate Stephen Jay Gould wrote several books; old-school skeptic Martin Gardner has been writing on the subject since the 1950, and Shermer himself has two previous books on skepticism. Borderlands, however, promised to be about something that I have not yet seen treated in book-length form: those topics which do not exactly lay in the jurisdiction of science or skeptical inquiry but at the same time do warrant a critical examination of some kind. Examples of such topics are the morality of human cloning, the analysis of our nation’s economic data to formulate effective domestic policy, the effect of video games and movies and television on children. All of these are what I would consider to be borderlands topics, and they deserve more sober (i.e. non-ideological) attention than they have received. While Shermer does briefly touch on several of these topics in the first part of his three-part book, discussing such things as the safety of nuclear power plants, the aforementioned human cloning controversy, and theories on racial differences, the last two-thirds of his book is an interminable analysis of the characteristics that make specific scientists more or less accepting of revolutionary theories, and extended personality and biographical profiles of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, the two founders of the theory of evolution and natural selection (as the book discusses in great detail, because Darwin’s working out of the theory was considerably more comprehensive and because Darwin was the more established scientist, he was given main credit for the theory of evolution among his contemporaries, and today is usually thought of as the sole founder of the theory, though in fact his and Wallace’s papers on evolution were both presented at the same scientific meeting, with Darwin’s coming first merely because the papers were presented in alphabetical order by last name). Shermer’s point in this analysis seems to be to show that while the judgments of individual scientists are highly subjective and the mechanisms by which individual scientists decide to accept a theory or research a certain topic are highly dependent on their backgrounds, scientific theories that are sound and that can withstand the test of the scientific method will prevail, though there might be great initial resistance to them. The statistical information that Shermer presents in the second section, about the factors that most determine which scientists will support new, controversial theories and which scientists won’t accept such theories, was enlightening. Particularly surprising was the fact that age is not a good indicator for predicting the open-mindedness of a scientist to new theories. Paradigm shifts in science are not a question of the young Turks vs. the old fogeys. The birth order of a scientist is by far the better predictor. Scientists who are first-born tend to be considerably more conservative in their scientific beliefs compared to later-born scientists. Who would have guessed? Not me. But, while this is interesting stuff, it’s not why I bought the book. Extended sections in Part II on Darwin and Wallace, and then a return to them in Part III, left me wondering if Shermer just had surplus of material on the two scientists that he wanted to put in a book, whether or not it was germane to the subject under discussion.

The borderlands of science is an area that is ripe for discussion. Not all scientists wear lab coats and use test tubes and Bunsen burners, and not all scientific questions can be answered in the lab. Read Part I of Shermer’s book for an introduction to the topic. Read Parts II and III only if you yearn for information about Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.