The conference started with an informal Friday evening of magic by Steven Valenti, cheese and drinks, Pat Linse's original cover artwork for Skeptic Magazine and plenty of sociable skeptics. The Science Gap can be pictured as the difference between the people using scientific methods for discovering reliable knowledge and the people who don't. In his summing up he said that skepticism involved tentativeness, tolerance, humility and responsibility. Ever since postulating the common ancestor of man and apes to be a chimp-like creature existing about 5 million years ago, professor of anthropology Vincent Sarich has taken delight in stirring controversy and he was in no different mood today. His challenges included the negative correlation between belief in free will and mental disease, the existence of incest avoidance behaviour in evolution and the meaning of racial differences in humans.
Controversy is part and parcel of science and skepticism as a way of resolving it.
Sarich did not, however, have an easy time getting his points accepted, as one or two of his questioners indicated. One of the major conference themes was the question of whether history can be a science. Frank Miele had shown how much history you can do without statistics and Vince Sarich both the ease and the difficulty of interpreting the statistics when you have them. Michael Shermer went on to discuss two fundamentally conflicting views of history -being either an exact science much like physics where the historian's viewpoint is inerrant truth or just a collection of personal opinions biased by the historian's greater environment and no indication of what really happened. Having announced the inception of the James Randi Educational Foundation at last year's conference, Randi was back reporting on how it has been developing in the meantime.