Michael Brant Shermer was born on September 8, 1954 in Los Angeles. An only child, he was raised in Southern California, primarily in the La Canada Flintridge area. His parents divorced when he was four and later remarried, his mother to a man with three children, who became Shermer's step-sister and two step-brothers, and his father to a woman with whom he had two daughters, Shermer's half-sisters. His father died of a heart attack in 1986, and his mother of brain cancer in 2000.

While cycling, Shermer taught Psychology 101 during the evenings at Glendale Community College, a two-year college. Wanting to teach at a four-year university, he decided to earn his PhD. Because Shermer's interests lay in behaviorism and he did not believe he could make a difference in the world by working in a lab with Skinner boxes, he lost interest in psychology and switched to studying the history of science, earning his PhD at Claremont Graduate University in 1991. His dissertation was titled Heretic-Scientist: Alfred Russel Wallace and the Evolution of Man: A Study on the Nature of Historical Change. Shermer later based a full-length book on his dissertation; the book, titled In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History, was published in August 2002. Earlier that year, in his book The Borderlands of Science, Shermer rated several noted scientists for gullibility toward "pseudo" or "borderland" ideas, using a rating version, developed by psychologist Frank Sulloway, of the Big Five model of personality. Shermer rated Wallace extremely high (99th percentile) on agreeableness/accommodation and argued that this was the key trait in distinguishing Wallace from scientists who give less credence to fringe ideas. Shermer then became an adjunct professor of the history of science at Occidental College, California. In 2007, Shermer took a position as a senior research fellow at Claremont Graduate University. In 2011, he took a position as an adjunct professor at Chapman University, and was later made a Presidential Fellow. At Chapman, he teaches a yearly critical thinking course called Skepticism 101, in which he tries out new ideas on students.

Where did he earn his PhD?
at Claremont Graduate University