by Guy Lyon Playfair
Part 1: Birth of a Movement CSICOP came into existence at the 1976 convention of the American Humanist Association (AHA) held in Buffalo, NY, from 30 April to 2 May. Its two principal begetters, Professors Marcello Truzzi (sociology, Eastern Michigan University) and Paul Kurtz (philosophy, State University of New York) were both resolute sceptics with good track records as campaigners against the rapid spread of interest in occult and paranormal subjects that took place in the early 1970s following the publication of Colin Wilson’s best-seller The Occult (1971) and the dramatic appearance on the scene of Uri Geller.
In 1972, Truzzi had begun to publish an occasional newsletter, Explorations, renamed The Zetetic in 1974, and the following year he announced the formation of RSEP - Resources for the Scientific Evaluation of the Paranormal. “I never really got off the ground beyond the announcement,” he would recall later, “because of what happened next.”
This was an offer from Kurtz, whom he had not yet met, to collaborate on a major new venture. Kurtz, editor of the American Humanist Association (AHA) journal The Humanist, had published a strongly worded manifesto Objections to Astrology (1974) signed by 186 scientists including an impressive total of 18 Nobel laureates, copies of the document being sent to every newspaper and magazine in the U.S.A. and Canada. Kurtz clearly knew and approved of Truzzi’s fledgling journal and RSEP, and asked him to become co-chairman of CSICOP and first editor of The Zetetic as the official CSICOP journal. Truzzi accepted the offer.
So far, so good. Following the highly successful Buffalo meeting, CSICOP was up and running fast in all directions, especially towards the media which generally gave it favourable coverage. Then things began to go badly wrong.
It soon became evident that Truzzi and Kurtz did not see eye to eye on ways of combatting the rising tide of occultism. As Truzzi put it later, “the problem with CSICOP is that it has made debunking more important than impartial inquiry” (personal communication, 25 June 1987) and it seemed clear right from the start that while Truzzi was all in favour of impartial inquiry, Kurtz wasn’t. There were already signs that CSICOP was becoming what Robert Anton Wilson called The New Inquisition in his book (1986) of that name. There were even genuine sceptics like the astronomer Carl Sagan who refused to sign the anti-astrology manfesto on the grounds that
“statements contradicting borderline, folk or pseudoscience that appear to have an authoritarian tone can do more harm than good”.
http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/obs...0yearswar_1.htmPart 2: The Gauquelin Effect The aim of CSICOP. as spelled out by Paul Kurtz in the May-June issue of The Humanist, which he then edited, was ‘the critical investigation of paranormal and fringe science claims from a responsible, scientific point of view [and the dissemination of] factual information about the results of such enquiries to the scientific community and the public’. This will sound familiar to the members of the Society for Psychical Research, the stated aim of which on its founding nearly 100 years before CSICOP (in 1882) was ‘to examine without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognised hypothesis’. (That is, what we would now call paranormal).
The obvious difference between the ways in which these stated aims have been put into practice is that while the SPR investigates phenomena such as telepathy, psychokinesis and precognition, CSICOP investigates claims that such phenomena exist strongly implying - and as we shall see even admitting openly - that they can’t and therefore don’t. While the SPR’s journal regularly publishes articles (peer reviewed) both for and against the validity of what it investigates in the laboratory and in the field, one searches in vain the pages (not peer reviewed) of The Skeptical Inquirer (successor to The Zetetic) for suggestions that there might be any truth in any claim for anything not explicable in materialistic terms.
Before CSICOP was founded an extraordinary claim had been made that called for thorough examination, since if true it would have far-reaching implications. This was that the position of a planet at the moment of birth had an influence on the future development of the baby. Sports champions, for example, tended to be born when Mars was at certain points in the sky far more often than chance would predict. The claimants, French psychologist, statistician and, ironically, debunker of many features of traditional pop astrology Michel Gauquelin and his wife Françoise, also a psychologist, had studied the birth data of more than 2,000 champions (and many times that number of non-champions), finding that 22 percent of the champions had been born with Mars ‘rising’ or ‘transiting’ when chance would only predict 17 percent - the exact figure for the non-champions. The size of the sample made the result highly significant statistically. Moreover, their findings had been replicated by a group of Belgian sceptics known as the Comité Para.
When the Gauquelins’ claim was mentioned by a contributor to The Humanist, Kurtz could hardly ignore it. This, surely, was just the kind of claim that his committee had been set up to investigate? He particularly wanted to debunk a claim involving astrology, having alleged that it had led to no less than 200 suicides and even had somewhing to do with the rise of fascism. And so followed CSICOP’s first attempt to replicate a paranormal claim according to accepted scientific practice. It was also to be its last.
It was a total disaster. The percentages in the large control sample studied by a CSICOP team turned out to be the same as those of the Gauquelins. The whole story of what followed was told in great detail in a 31-page article in Fate (October l982) with this editorial comment:
They call themselves the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. In fact, they are a group of would-be debunkers who bungled their major investigation, falsified the results, covered up their errors and gave the boot to a colleague who threatened to tell the truth.
http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/obs...0yearswar_2.htm
Has CSICOP Lost the 30 Years' War?
Sep 7 2006, 01:21 PM
Yeah baby, I can always count on you for great feedback on the sceptics thread! 
