I am happy to report that the online Skeptics Society store is now open. Thanks to my internet web meister Dr. Nick Gerlich (author of numerous Skeptic mag articles on conspiracy theories), like amazon.com we now have skeptic.com, where you can shop online for Skeptic magazine back issues, books, videos, and apparel. Check it out. Go to www.skeptic.com and click your way into the store. All back issues of Skeptic are available, from Vol. 1, #1 to Vol. 6, #3 (the most recent). Plus we've got lots of great books, and video tapes from our Caltech lecture series and annual conferences. I have hired one of my students to help us with Xmas orders which we can rush to you ASAP in time for Newton's birthday next Friday.

While I've got your attention let me share with you an amusing conjuncture of events. Tuesday morning I was on a radio show called "Lowell Ponte Live," a nationally-syndicated program. Lowell told me about a magazine that was published out of Santa Barbara, CA in the 1970s, also entitled SKEPTIC, but long since out of business. I asked him to send me an issue. He did. It was the May/June, 1974 issue, with a special theme on, are you ready for this? IMPEACHMENT! It featured articles by Eugene JcCarthy, I.F. Sone, William F. Buckley, Clare Boothe Luce, George McGovern, George Will, and Lowell Ponte. The cover statements included: "Should the President be Impeached?" "Understanding Impeachment." and "What Impeachment Could Mean for America." Good timing, uh?!

Finally, allow me to give you a heads-up on avoiding a book that looks promising but turns out to be utter rubbish: It is entitled THE ALPHABET VS. THE GODDESS, by Dr. Leonard Shlain. He explains that he came to write the book after a vacation with his wife in the Mediterranean where he was wowed by all the old ruins they saw. He says he is qualified to write a book on ancient history and the brain because as a neurosurgeon he has seen that the two sides of the brain are different (wow, how keenly observant). His thesis is that the invention of the alphabet and writing, and the subsequent increase in literacy rates, triggered the historical downfall of women because--drum roll please--a facility for written language is controlled by the left brain and men are left-brain dominant. Women, with their right brain dominance, who previously shared equal status with men, took a back seat for 4,000 years. But now, with the rise of visual communication--films, television, photography, art, and other right-brained means of communication, feminism is on the rise. As my friend the archaeologist Ken Feder said, "I get it: Men do DOS, Women do Windows."

I had Shlain on my radio show a couple of weeks ago. He's a complete crack pot. He's a brain surgeon, but he's still a crack pot. He has no idea how history or archaeology are done, not a clue. If he practiced brain surgery like he practices history and archaeology he would lose his license to practice medicine. There is absolutely nothing to it. He's even wrong about the invention of the alphabet, so from page 1 on he's blown it (he's off by about 1500 years). This book is a waste of trees.

I pointed out to Shlain, as politely as I could, that the test of a theory is how it does with exceptions. For example, I noted that the Yamamano of Brazil and many tribes of the Papau New Guineans, with no alphabet and completely illiterate (and thus, presumably, not left brain dominant as a culture), routinely beat, kill, and enslave their women. Jared Diamond tells me the tribe in New Guinea he studies regularly swap wives for pigs and cows. Shlain's response: All of these pre-literate people have been contaminated by anthropologists, who rewired their left-hemispheres by virtue of being present. (I'm not kidding--that was his answer!)

This is what we might call the "Gods Must be Crazy" theory of contamination. Napoleon Chagnon tells me that his critics have accused him of teaching the Yamamano people to be violent by virtue of his presence among them as a western, patriarchal male.

The exception, says Shlain, is the people who DO treat their women equally--they apparently have not been contaminated. Where are these people, I inquired? He said they were in the PAST and we know them from archaeological digs. And what about the Nazis, I suggested, given their heavy emphasis on visual mediums like film, dance, art, photography, etc. They were not exactly known for their egalitarianism, with their heavy emphasis on German women as breeding machines for the thousand year Reich. Ah, but the GERMANS are so well read and their left brains are SO dominant that they wash out those right- brain influences! And so it went for half an hour on the air.

I threw out another half dozen examples of disconfirming evdience, at which point he said "I'm not claiming a causal connection here. I cannot prove that literacy CAUSES patriarchy. I am merely saying that it is interesting that there is this correlation between the rise of literacy and the rise of patriarchy." I said: "Yes, it is interesting that the rise of hem-lines in women's skirts is correlated with the rise of the stock market, but who would write a book about it?" He was not amused. Our book-review editor, Tim Callahan, was listening to the show and was chomping at the bit to review the book in Skeptic. So you will see the complete analysis soon.