Bridging the Science Gap 1997 by Lee Traynor, Rossdorf, Germany Permission to reprint is required.
Photographs are available from the author.
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.