Al Seckel - Freethought Movement

Freethought Movement

Throughout the 1980s, Al Seckel was active in the freethought movement. In this capacity he authored a number of articles and pamphlets. He also edited two books on the English rationalist philosopher Bertrand Russell. In 1983, Seckel and John Edwards co-created the Darwin fish design, which was first sold as a bumper sticker and on T-shirts in 1983-84 by a southern California group called Atheists United. Chris Gilman, a Hollywood prop maker, manufactured the first plastic car ornaments in 1990, and licensed the design to Evolution Design of Austin, Texas. When the emblem evolved into a million-dollar business, Evolution Design began threatening to sue distributors of look-alike and derivative products (like a Jewish "gefilte" fish). Seckel in turn sued Evolution Design for copyright infringement. Seckel did not seek royalties, but wanted Evolution Design to allow free use of the design by anyone authorized by him. Although Seckel was able to produce examples of the design that predated Gilman's claimed 1990 copyright date, the suit was settled when it became apparent that Seckel and Edwards had allowed the design to fall into public domain.

In 1984, Seckel started the Southern California Skeptics (SCS), and became a spokesperson for science and its relationship to the paranormal. SCS co-sponsored and produced a monthly series of lectures held monthly at the California Institute of Technology, other meetings were also held on the campus of Cal State Fullerton, that explained alleged paranormal phenomena such as Extra-sensory perception and firewalking. Seckel also wrote about investigating various supernatural claims from the scientific perspective. One such investigation, led by James Randi, concerned faith healer Peter Popoff, who used a hearing transmitter to give the impression that he was psychic and hearing private information from God. Seckel also wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times and the Santa Monica Monthly News from 1987–1989, explaining apparently amazing or paranormal phenomena in scientific terms.

In 1987, SCS and Seckel helped sponsor an amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Edwards v. Aguillard, challenging the constitutionality of a Louisiana law calling for the classroom inclusion of creation science. The brief was written by a group of attorneys led by Jeffrey Lehman (later president of Cornell University), and SCS board member and Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann recruited the signatures of 72 Nobel Laureates, 17 State Academies of Science, and 7 other scientific organizations. It argued that "creation science" was counter not only to the study of evolution, but to all sciences. The court decided a 7-2 vote that so-called "creation-science" was in fact, religion disguised as science, deliberately construed as such in order to circumvent the consititutional prohibitions of keeping Church and State separate, especially in the public science classroom. All of the opinions cited the brief, including the dissents.

In late 1990, due to a sudden onset of leukemia, Seckel had to enter the hospital, where his health quickly deteriorated. The Southern California Skeptics folded. In 1991, Michael Shermer started a new Los Angeles-area skeptical group called The Skeptics Society, using SCS's mailing list and involving many of its original board members. Seckel started to recover from his illness in 1994, turning his full attention to studying the human brain, specifically vision and how it relates to perception.