Committee for Skeptical Inquiry

Volume 25, Number 6, July August

• Buy this back issue
• A Critique of Schwartz et al.'s After-Death Communication Studies
• Magical Thinking in Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Investigative Files; John Edward: Hustling the Bereaved
• Psychic Vibrations: Conspire This!

Articles

A Critique of Schwartz et al.'s After-Death Communication Studies
Studies with mediums by Gary Schwartz and colleagues have been widely reported in the media as scientific proof of life after death. But their experiments did not employ blind judging, used an inappropriate control group, and had insufficient safeguards against sensory leakage.
Richard Wiseman and Ciaran O'Keeffe

Magical Thinking in Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Homeopathy and other popular therapies demonstrate ancient and universal principles of magical thinking, which some recent research suggests are fundamental to human cognition, even rooted in neurobiology.
Phillips Stevens, Jr.

Educational Malpractice
Why Do So Many Biology Teachers Endorse Creationism?
We often blame the poor state of evolution education on factors such as political pressure and weak science-education standards. However, there is an additional, and simpler, explanation: the surprisingly high percentage of biology teachers who endorse creationism.
Randy Moore

Philosophers and Psychics: The Vandy Episode
A modern philosopher has proposed that various well- documented instances of postmortem communications have a "naturalistic explanation" involving psychical transmissions and premature burial. The present discussion critically examines these claims.
Kenneth Oldfield

CSICOP's 25th Anniversary

The Origins and Evolution of CSICOP
Science Is Too Important to Be Left to Scientists
Lee Nisbet

Never a Dull Moment
Barry Karr

A Quarter Century of Skeptical Inquirer

Columns

Editor's Note

News And Comment

• Accreditation Commission Approves Astrology School
• Astrology in Seattle: Kepler College Looks to the Stars, But It Is Not Accredited
• Was the 'Rare Earth' Hypothesis Influenced by a Creationist?
• Bogus Nostradamus Prophecies Circulate Following Terrorism
• Hardly a Prayer on ABC's 'Downtown'
• 'Psychic Flies' Feed on Levy Disappearance
• Nothing But Trouble in Miss Cleo's Tarot Cards

Notes of a Fringe-Watcher
Ernest Hemingway and Jane
Martin Gardner

Investigative files
John Edward: Hustling the Bereaved
Joe Nickell

Psychic Vibrations
Conspire This!
Robert Sheaffer

New Books

Science Best Sellers

Articles of Note

Commentary

• When Scientific Evidence Is the Enemy
  Elizabeth Loftus

• The Shield of the Open Mind
  Garrett G. Fagan

Book Reviews

The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers
By Daniel L. Schacter
Terence Hines
[Shop for this Book]

Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally
By Robyn M. Dawes
Joachim Krueger
[Shop for this Book]

From the Wandering Jew to William F. Buckley, Jr.: On Science, Literature, and Religion
By Martin Gardner
Mark Durm
[Shop for this Book]

The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved
By Colin Wilson and Damon Wilson
Benjamin Radford
[Shop for this Book]

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