Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? Discourses on Reflexology, Numerology, Urine Therapy, and Other Dubious Subjects.(Review)

Martin Gardner Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? Discourses on Reflexology, Numerology, Urine Therapy, and Other Dubious Subjects. W. W. Norton, 336 pages; $26.95

I find it difficult to speak temperately about Martin Gardner because I owe him so much. As a child in England, my keenest intellectual pleasure was reading Gardner's monthly "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American. Along with a handful of books like Kasner and Newman's Mathematics and the Imagination and George Gamow's One Two Three Infinity, Gardner's columns opened for me the doors of mathematics, leading me forward to a lifetime of pleasure and instruction from that most elegant and challenging of all disciplines. Later I read Gardner's book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, which, along with its British equivalent, Patrick Moore's Can You Speak Venusian?, inoculated me forever against any temptation to waste my time and money believing in astrology, homeopathy, spoon-bending, mind-reading, UFOS, acupuncture, or any other kind of pseudoscientific flapdoodle.

I am, of course, not alone in my debt to this wonderful man. Nobody alive has done more than Gardner to spread the understanding and appreciation of mathematics, and to dispel superstition. Nobody has worked harder or more steadily to defend and enlarge this little firelit clearing we hold in the dark chittering forest of unreason. If Gardner were British, he would long since have been the recipient of one of our national honors--a Commander of the British Empire, perhaps, or even, like Patrick Moore, a knight. It is a pity the United States has no parallel system. Egalitarianism can be taken too far. In that spirit of whimsy that Gardner himself has often amused us with, I hereby, in loco Reginae, award him the rank he has earned. For the duration of this review I shall, as a mark of sincere respect, and with--I am sure it is clear--no facetious intent, refer to him as Sir Martin.

In 1976, Sir Martin was one of the founder members of the group that became CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. The volume under review consists of twenty-seven of the columns Sir Martin has written for Skeptical Inquirer, the bimonthly official organ of CSICOP, together with one more piece that he wrote for Free Inquiry. The topics range very widely, from the nearer fringes of respectable science to the furthest, wildest shores of preposterosity.

Since Sir Martin's first venture into this territory in Fads and Fallacies forty-eight years ago, entire new species of poppycock have come up to offer themselves to his machete: reflexology, Carlos Castaneda, Bible codes, Afrocentrism, alien abduction, and the "channeling" techniques of Jean Houston (used by Hillary Clinton to make contact with Eleanor Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi). Often it is only the prominence of the fad that is new: many depend on the resuscitation of ideas that have been around for decades, that in fact have their origin in the golden age of twaddle, the few decades that ended around 1920. Reflexology--the relief of bodily ills by massaging the feet--seems to be in this category, descended from the "zone therapy" popular in the late nineteenth century.

The most vexing topics of Sir Martin's inquiry are those that touch on religion. I would argue, and I believe Sir Martin would agree, that a practical dedication to reason involves some judgment about its effective scope, and about the limits of our understanding. "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen" is all very well, but our deepest feelings about ourselves, and about this ...