Stories by Michael Shermer

Talking to the dead is easy. Getting the dead to talk back is hard. Why not phone them?

The remake of this 1951 sci-fi classic delivers a modern warning wrapped in an ancient myth

Why the brain believes something is real when it is not

From the stages of grief to the stages of moral development, stage theories have little evidentiary support

Colorful scans have lulled us into an oversimplified conception of the brain as a modular machine

Part two of a series of articles on the neuroscience of chance

Part one of a series of articles on the neuroscience of chance

Purported sightings of Bigfoot, Nessie and Ogopogo fire our imaginations. But anecdotes alone do not make a science

Why subjective anecdotes often trump objective data

Can emergence break the spell of reductionism and put spirituality back into nature?

A film challenging evolution by game show host and financial analyst Ben Stein is a case study in antiscience propaganda

Metaphors, modules and brain-scan pseudoscience

In a new documentary film, actor, game show host and financial columnist Ben Stein falls for the pseudoscience of intelligent design

Emotions are as much a product of our evolutionary heritage as they are our environmental circumstances

Game theory helps to explain the pervasive abuse of drugs in cycling, baseball and other sports

Belief, disbelief and uncertainty generate different neural pathways in the brain

Evolutionary economics explains why irrational financial choices were once rational

Enron, Google and the evolutionary psychology of corporate environments

Evolution and economics are both examples of a larger mysterious phenomenon

Journal article explanations of how science works often differ from the actual process