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is less common among bigger-brained mammals because replacing neurons means replacing memories, which are critical for higher complex thought. Even if true, however, I am optimistic that stem cells are the key to an artificial form of human neurogenesis. It will probably be many more years—decades more likely—before Christopher Reeve can don his Superman cape and leap tall buildings in a single bound, and perhaps there is an element of wishful thinking on my part after nursing a paraplegic girlfriend through years of rehab that still resulted in paralysis, but the remarkable progress made in neuronal growth factors, spinal cord regeneration in higher mammals, and especially in stem cell research leads me to give this heresy a fuzzy factor of .7.

Heretics and Skeptics

From our perspective in the twenty-first century, it is easy to look back to the time of Copernicus or Darwin and think, “How could they have not realized that the earth goes around the sun and that life evolved?” And yet the pre-Copernican and pre-Darwinian worldviews were as real for those folks as our scientific worldviews are for us. Can we really afford the smug self-aggrandizement that wells up whenever we lose our historical perspective when, four centuries from now, our descendants may laugh at the risible notions we accept as factual today?

Whether these heresies float or sink upon the turbulent waters of scientific debate is not the deeper message in this exercise in skepticism. Science, if we think of it as a set of methods to answer questions about nature instead of a body of facts to be dogmatically distilled, is intimately dependent upon its heretics and skeptics who have the courage and insight to challenge the status quo. Most heresies in science do not survive—for every Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein who shattered the pillars of knowledge there are a thousand long-forgotten names whose creative speculations tanked. But those that triumph give us a whole new way of looking at the world, and offer a completely different set of questions to answer. All revolutions in science stem from heretics and skeptics, and thus even though most of them are probably wrong most of the time, we must keep an open mind because one never knows where and when the universe will once again explode in revolutionary change.

4

The Virtues of Skepticism

A Way of Thinking and a Way of Life

ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 9, 2000, I appeared as a guest on Boston’s WTKK, 96.9 FM talk radio, hosted by a genial but verbose woman named Jeanine Graf. The interview was set up by my publicist at the University of California Press to promote my just-released book on Holocaust denial, Denying History, but since presidential candidate Al Gore had just selected the Orthodox Jewish senator Joseph Lieberman as his vice presidential running mate, the subject everyone wanted to discuss was politics and religion.

Most callers were impressed and pleased with Gore’s choice, many extolling the virtues of biblical ethics and how it is good that our politicians not only endorse their favorite biblical characters (Bush identified Jesus as the philosopher who most influenced his life, while Gore called himself a born-again Christian whose deep faith sustains him), but that they actually reintroduce biblical ethics into politics. To one caller I responded: “Oh, do you mean such biblical ethical practices as stoning to death disobedient children?” The caller promptly challenged me to produce the said passage. As I was nowhere near a Bible, he said that if I could post it to the Skeptics Society Web page (www.skeptic.com) within the next twenty-four hours he would donate $100. If I could not produce the passage, then I had to donate $100 to his favorite charity, a Jewish organization called Jews for the Protection of Firearm Ownership.

The host of the show took the caller’s phone number and insisted that we actually play out this little bet, and that she would have the two of us on the show the next night to settle it. The next morning I phoned the religion editor of Skeptic magazine, Tim