Michael Shermer

Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown is a 2004 book by Michael Shermer, a historian of science and founder of The Skeptics Society. It contains thirteen essays about "personal barriers and biases that plague and propel science, especially when scientists push against the unknown. What do we know, and …

Virtually unknown today, Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-discoverer of natural selection with Charles Darwin and an eminent scientist who stood out among his Victorian peers as a man of formidable mind and equally outsized personality. Now Michael Shermer rescues Wallace from the shadow of Darwin in this landmark …

One hundred years ago social scientists predicted that belief in God would decrease by the year 2000. "In fact ... the opposite is has occurred," Shermer writes in his introduction. "Never in history have so many, and such a high percentage of the population, believed in God. Not only is God not dead as Nietzche …