"Doomsday Pessimism: Why People Think the World Is Falling Apart When It Is Getting Better with Michael Shermer. SD Skeptic Society is proud to present Michael Shermer to kick off the 2017 Lecture Series. Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. He is the author of The Moral Arc, The Believing Brain, Why People Believe Weird Things, Why Darwin Matters, The Mind of the Market, How We Believe, and The Science of Good and Evil. His two TED talks, viewed nearly 7 million times, were voted in the top 100 of the more than 2000 TED talks.

The San Diego Skeptic Society (formerly SDARI) is a community resource that hosts lectures on various topics (science, history, etc) and sponsors prizes in the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair every spring.