Photo courtesy of James Randi Educational Foundation CC BY-SA 3.0
James "The Amazing" Randi died on October 20, 2002, at the age of 92, according to The New York Times (October 21, 2020), which described him as a "magician who turned his formidable savvy to investigating claims of spoon bending, mind reading, fortunetelling, ghost whispering, water dowsing, faith healing, U.F.O. spotting and sundry varieties of bamboozlement, bunco, chicanery, flimflam, flummery, humbuggery, mountebankery, pettifoggery and out-and-out quacksalvery." A good friend of NCSE, he supported the organization both personally and through the James Randi Educational Foundation.
Among the humbuggery that Randi opposed was creationism. Writing in Skeptic magazine in 2014, for example, he observed, "The well-established fact of biological evolution is being increasingly and frantically denied in the USA by creationists, and as I write this, a public opinion poll has announced that some 46% of the U.S. public identify themselves as creationists. According to a recent study carried out at Michigan State University [coauthored by NCSE's Eugenie C. Scott], acceptance of evolution by Americans declined from 45% in 1985 — already a shameful statistic — to 40% in 2005."
Randi continued, "Not accepting the reality of biological evolution is equivalent to not accepting the stark fact of gravity. You can deny gravity, or claim that Earth is flat, but such simple denials do not in any way prove a point. Evolution is the single, unifying scientific explanation for the diversity of life on Earth, and the foundation upon which the biological sciences are built. The scientific theory of evolution is accepted by an overwhelming majority of scientists around the world as the cornerstone of biology. To deny the reality of evolution is to deny the foundation upon which modern medicine and related biological sciences are built."
Randi was born (as Randall James Zwinge) in Toronto, Canada, on August 7, 1928. His career as a professional stage magician and escape artist stretched from 1946 to 1988. At the same time, he investigated and debunked a host of putative psychics, faith-healers, and pseudoscientists, including Uri Geller and Peter Popoff. He wrote ten books, including Flim-Flam! (1982) and The Faith Healers (1987), and established the James Randi Educational Foundation in 1996. His honors include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1986, a Distinguished Skeptic Award from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in 1996, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Humanist Association in 2012.
