At first, I must admit I was disappointed that Dr. Stapor's promises that people would get quite animated, agitated, excited, and that we may see shouting matches, books being thrown against the ground and perhaps people will storm from the lecture hall, didn't come true; in retrospect I think it was better that they didn't storm.
Michael Shermer was the most diplomatic skeptic I have seen. His speech disarmed those who may have come to dispute creationism, or intelligent design - he wasn't waging an open war against them. In that lies the beauty of his presentation. It was reminiscent of many examples I read in Sagan's Demon Haunted World, but with a twist of Penn and Teller (friends of Shermers).
Throughout an hour and a half discourse on how we make up our minds and perceive the world with bias he convinced us how foolish we can be by such methods as humor, stage magic, and psychology. His methods were superior to what I expected, which would have only galvanized the camps as for or against him. What he did was a to gently coax the pseudo-scientists, creationists, and lay-folk, even even those among us who are already critical, to be more skeptical.
http://www.tntech.edu/publicaffairs/rel/2006/nov06/shermer.html
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