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34. The only scholarly paper ever done on the Mattoon story was by Donald Johnson, “The ‘Phantom Anesthetist’ of Mattoon,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 40 (1945): 175–86. Willy Smith has written a skeptical analysis of Johnson’s thesis and concludes that it was not a case of mass hysteria; rather, it was more likely a prankster and/or journalistic scam. “The Mattoon Phantom Gasser: The Definitive Analysis 50 Years Later,” Skeptic 3, no. 1 (1994). Other works that document the rise and fall of social movements in the pattern modeled in this paper include: Philip Jenkins, Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992); and James Richardson, Joel Best, and David Bromley, eds., The Satanism Scare (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1991).

35. Quoted in Philipp Frank, Philosophy of Science: The Link Between Science and Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1957).

36. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,1964), pp. 135–36.

10. What If?

1. Michael Shermer, “The Chaos of History,” Nonlinear Science Today 2, no. 4 (1993): 1–13.

2. Michael Shermer, “The Crooked Timber of History,” Complexity 2, no. 6 (1997): 23–29.

3. Michael Shermer, Denying History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

4. R. J. Van Pelt and D. Dwork, Auschwitz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

5. R. J. Van Pelt, “A Site in Search of a Mission,” in Y. Gutman and M. Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

6. Ibid., p. 94.

7. Van Pelt and Dwork, Auschwitz, p. 11.

8. Ibid., pp. 150–51.

9. Ibid., p. 11.

10. J. Bulhof, “What If? Modality and History,” History & Theory 38, no. 2 (1999): 145–68.

11. D. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Knopf, 1996).

12. Michael Shermer, “We Are the World: A Review of Nonzero by Robert Wright,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 6, 2000.

13. Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Pantheon, 2000).

14. Ibid., p. 317.

15. Ibid., p. 7.

16. Ibid., p. 291.

17. Ibid., p. 292.

18. Ibid., pp. 292–93.

19. R. G. Klein, The Human Career (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 367–493.

20. Ibid., p. 477.

21. Richard Leakey, The Origin of Humankind (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 134.

22. Klein, Human Career, pp. 441–42.

23. C. Wills, Children of Prometheus (Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1998), pp. 143–45.

24. Michael Shermer, How We Believe (New York: W H. Freeman, 1999).

25. Klein, Human Career, p. 469.

26. Ian Tattersall, “Once We Were Not Alone,” Scientific American (January 2000): 56–62.

27. Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 212.

28. Leakey, Origin of Humankind, p. 132.

29. Ibid., p. 138.

30. Ibid., p. 20.

31. Tattersall, Fossil Trail, p. 246.

32. Ibid., p. 62.

33. N. Roberts, The Holocene (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

34. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: W W Norton, 1997).

35. Ibid., pp. 424–25.

36. Michael Shermer, “Humans, History, and Environments: An Interview with Jared Diamond,” Skeptic 8, no. 3 (2000): 41–47.

14. This View of Science

1. John Brockman, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

2. William Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), pp. 261–62. Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life (New York: Wiley, 1999), pp. 331–33.

3. Cited on the National Science Foundation Web site: http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/seind00access/c8/c8s4.htm. The relevant text reads: “One of the most frequently cited reasons for scientists’reluctance to talk to the press is the so-called Carl Sagan effect, that is, renowned scientist Carl Sagan was criticized by his fellow scientists who assumed that because Sagan was spending so much time communicating with the public, he must not have