Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time Read online

  The precept: "Judge not, that ye be not judged" is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself. There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims. The moral principle to adopt is: "Judge, and be prepared to be judged."

  Actually, what Jesus says in full is:

  Judge not, that ye be not judged.

  For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

  And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but consid-erest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

  Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

  Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. (Matthew 7:1-5)

  Rand has completely misread Jesus. The principle he extols is not moral neutrality or a moral blank check, but a warning against self-righteous severity and a "rush to judgment." There is a long tradition of this line of thinking found in the Talmudic collection of commentary on Jewish custom and law called the Mishnah: "Do not judge your fellow until you are in his position" (Aboth 2:5); "When you judge any man weight the scales in his favor" (Aboth 1:6). (See The Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 7, pp. 324 -326, for a lengthy discussion of this issue.) Jesus wants us to be cautious not to cross the line between legitimate and hypocritical moral judgment. The "mote" and "beam" metaphor is purposeful hyperbole. The man who lacks virtue feels morally smug in judging the virtue of his neighbor. The "hypocrite" is the critic who disguises his own failings by focusing attention on the failings of others. Jesus is, perhaps, offering insight into human psychology where, for example, the adulterer is obsessed with judging other peoples' sexual offenses, the homophobe secretly wonders about his own sexuality, or, perhaps, the accuser of libel is himself guilty of the charge.

  As insightful as this experience was for me, my exchange with the Objectivists was just one avenue of what I consider to be a form of data collection to discover more about why people believe weird things. Writing first the book, later doing hundreds of radio, newspaper, and television interviews, and reading the hundreds of reviews and letters in response to it has given me the opportunity to get a fair sampling of what interests people and what sets them off. It has been a magical mystery tour.

  Why People Believe Weird Things was reviewed in most major publications with mostly minor criticisms, and some readers were kind enough to point out a handful of spelling, grammatical, and other minute errors that managed to slip past the otherwise outstanding editors at my publisher (and so corrected in this edition). But a few reviewers had more substantive critical comments that are worth noting because they help us refine our thinking about the many controversies in this book. So in the spirit of healthy acceptance of criticism, it is worth examining a few of these critiques.

  Perhaps the most worthwhile criticism in terms of self-review came from the Toronto Globe and Mail (June 28, 1997). The reviewer brought up an important problem for all skeptics and scientists to ponder. After first observing that "rational reflection does not end with the tenets of the scientific method, themselves subject to various forms of weird belief now and then," he concludes: "Skepticism of the aggressively debunking sort sometimes has a tendency to become a cult of its own, a kind of fascistic scientism, even when it is undertaken for the best of rational motives." Excusing the exaggerated rhetoric (I have never encountered a fellow skeptic who would qualify as a cultist or a fascist), he does have a point that there are limitations to science (which I do not deny) and that occasionally skepticism has its witchhunts. This is why I emphasize in this book, and in virtually every public lecture I give, that skepticism is not a position; skepticism is an approach to claims, in the same way that science is not a subject but a method.

  In a very intelligent and thoughtful review, Reason magazine (November, 1997) took me to task for the statement that it is our job "to investigate and refute bogus claims." That is wrong: we should not go into an investigation with the preconceived idea that we are going to refute a given claim, but rather "investigate claims to discover if they are bogus" (as the text has now been corrected). After examining the evidence, one may be skeptical of the claim, or skeptical of the skeptics. The creationists are skeptical of the theory of evolution. Holocaust "revisionists" are skeptical of the traditional historiography of the Holocaust. I am skeptical of these skeptics. In other cases, such as recovered memories or alien abductions, I am skeptical of the claims themselves. It is the evidence that matters, and as limited as it may be, the scientific method is the best tool we have for determining which claims are true and which are false (or at least offering probabilities of the likelihood of a claim being true or false).

  The reviewer in The New York Times (August 4, 1997) was himself skeptical of the Gallup Poll data I present in Chapter 2 about percentages of Americans who believe in astrology, ESP, ghosts, etc., and wondered "how this alarming poll was conducted and whether it measured real conviction or a casual flirtation with notions of the invisible." Actually, I too have wondered about this and other such polls, and I am concerned with the phrasing of some questions, as well as with the potential shortcomings of such surveys to measure the level of commitment someone has to a particular claim. But self-report data can be reliable when it is corroborated with other independent polls, and these figures of belief have been consistent over many decades by many pollsters. Our own informal polls conducted through Skeptic magazine also confirm these statistics as being alarmingly high. Depending on the claims, anywhere from one out of four to three out of four Americans believes in the paranormal. Although our society is a lot less superstitious than, say, that of medieval Europe, we obviously have a long, long way to go before publications like Skeptic become obsolete.

  Of all the reviews, I got the biggest laugh out of Ev Cochrane's opening paragraph in the November, 1997 edition of Aeon, a "Journal of Myth, Science, and Ancient History." It is amusing not only because of his analogy but also because if there were a journal one might consider the antithesis of Skeptic, it is Aeon. Nevertheless, Cochrane concluded: "For me to praise Michael Shermer's new book is a bit like O.J. Simpson applauding the closing statement of Marcia Clark, inasmuch as the author would probably include the Saturn-thesis, to which I subscribe, amongst the pseudosciences he revels in exposing. Yet praise it I must, for this is a damned entertaining and provocative book." Praise from Brutus indeed, yet Cochrane, along with other reviewers and numerous correspondents (some good friends), have taken me to task for my chapter on The Bell Curve (15).

  Some accused me of indulging in ad hominem assaults in my analysis of Wycliffe Draper, founder of the Pioneer Fund, an agency that, since 1937, has funded research into the heritability and racial differences in IQ. In this chapter I show the historical connection between racial theories of IQ (that blacks' lower IQs are largely inherited and thus immutable) and racial theories of history (the Holocaust is Jewish propaganda) through the Pioneer Fund that also has a direct connection to Willis Carto, one of the founders of the modern Holocaust denial movement. However, I am by training a psychologist and a historian of science, so I am interested in extra scientific issues like who does the funding and therefore what biases might be created in one's research. In other words, I am not only interested in examining data, I am interested in exploring the motives and biases that go into data collection and interpretation. So, the question is, how can one explore this interesting and (I think) important aspect of science without being accused of the ad hominem attack?

  In the end, however, this chapter is about race, not IQ, nor Charles Murray and Ric
hard Herrnstein's controversial book The Bell Curve. The subject is similar to what is known as the "demarcation problem" in discriminating between science and pseudoscience, physics and metaphysics: Where do we draw the line in the gray areas? Similarly, where does one race begin and another leave off? Any formal definition must be arbitrary in the sense that there is no "correct" answer. I am willing to concede that races might be thought of as "fuzzy sets," where my colleagues can (and do) say "come on Shermer, you can't tell the difference between a white, black, Asian, and Native American?" Okay, often, in some general way, I can, as long as the individual in question falls squarely in the middle, between the fuzzy boundaries. But it seems to me that the fuzzy boundaries of the numerous sets (and no one agrees on how many there are) are becoming so broad and overlapping that this distinction is mostly dictated by cultural factors and not biological ones. What race is Tiger Woods? Today we may view him as an unusual blending of ethnic backgrounds, but a thousand years from now all humans may look like this, and historians will look back upon this brief period of racial segregation as a tiny blip on the screen of the human career spanning hundreds of thousands of years.

  If the "Out of Africa" theory holds true, then it appears a single race migrated out of Africa (probably "black") that then branched out into geographically isolated populations and races with unique features to each, and finally merged back into a single race with the onset of global exploration and colonization beginning in the late fifteenth century. From the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries the racial sets became fuzzier through interracial marriages and other forms of sexual interaction, and some time over the next millennium the fuzzy boundaries will be so blurred that we will have to abandon race altogether as a means of discrimination (in both uses of the word). Unfortunately, the human mind is so good at finding patterns that other criteria for dividing people will no doubt find their way into our lexicon.

  One of the more interesting developments since Why People Believe Weird Things was first published is the rise of what might be called the "New Creationism" (to be distinguished from the old creationism that dates back centuries that I discuss in the book). New Creationism comes in two parts:

  1. Intelligent Design Creationism: arguments made by those on the conservative religious right, where they believe that the "irreducible complexity" of life indicates it was created by an intelligent designer, i.e., God.

  2. Cognitive Behavioral Creationism: arguments made by those on the liberal, multicultural left, where they believe that the theory of evolution cannot or should not be applied to human thought and behavior.

  Imagine that: the marriage of the conservative right and liberal left. How did this come about?

  In Chapter 11, I outline the three major strategies of the creationists in the twentieth century, including banning the teaching of evolution, the demand that Genesis get equal time as Darwin, and the demand that "creation-science" and "evolution-science" also get equal time, the former being an attempt to skirt the First Amendment by labeling their religious doctrines as "science," as if the name alone will make it so. All three of these strategies were defeated in court cases, starting with the famed Scopes "Monkey Trial" in 1925, and ending with the Louisiana trial that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court and was defeated in 1987 by a vote of 7 to 2. This ended what I have called the "top down" strategies of the creationists to legislate their beliefs into culture through public schools. This New Creationism, regardless of how long it lasts before it mutates into another form, is supportive of my claim that the creationists are not going to go away and that scientists cannot afford to ignore them.

  1. Intelligent Design Creationism. With these defeats the creationists have turned to "bottom up" strategies of mass mailings of creationist literature to schools, debates at schools and colleges, and enlisting the aid of people like University of California, Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson, biochemist Michael Behe, and even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley, who hosted a PBS Firing Line debate in December, 1997, where it was resolved: "Evolutionists should acknowledge creation." The "newness" of this creationism is really in the language, where creationists now talk about "intelligent design," i.e. where life had to have been created by an intelligent designer because it shows "irreducible complexity." A favorite example is the human eye, a very complex organ where, so the argument goes, all the parts must be working at the same time or vision is not possible. The eye, we are told, is irreducibly complex: take out any one part and the whole collapses. How could natural selection have created the human eye when none of the individual parts themselves have any adaptive significance?

  First of all, it is not true that the human eye is irreducibly complex such that the removal of any part results in blindness. Any form of light detection is better than none, and lots of people are visually impaired with a variety of different diseases and injuries to the eyes, yet they are able to function reasonably well and lead a full life. (This argument falls into the "either-or fallacy" discussed in Chapter 3 on how thinking goes wrong.) But the deeper answer to the argument is that natural selection did not create the human eye out of a warehouse of used parts laying around with nothing to do, any more than Boeing created the 747 without the ten million halting steps and jerks and starts from the Wright Brothers to the present. Natural selection simply does not work that way. The human eye is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years to a simple eyespot where a handful of light sensitive cells provide information to the organism about an important source of the light—the sun; to a recessed eyespot where a small surface indentation filled with light sensitive cells provides additional data in the form of direction; to a deep recession eyespot where additional cells at greater depth provide more accurate information about the environment; to a pinhole camera eye that is actually able to focus an image on the back of a deeply recessed layer of light-sensitive cells; to a pinhole lens eye that is actually able to focus the image; to a complex eye found in such modern mammals as humans. In addition, the eye has evolved independently a dozen different times through its own unique pathways, so this alone tells us that no creator had a single, master plan.

  The "Intelligent Design" argument also suffers from another serious flaw: the world is simply not always so intelligently designed! We can even use the human eye as an example. The configuration of the retina is in three layers, with the light-sensitive rods and cones at the bottom, facing away from the light, and underneath a layer of bipolar, horizontal, and amacrine cells, themselves underneath a layer of ganglion cells that help carry the signal from the eye to the brain. And this entire structure sits beneath a layer of blood vessels. For optimal vision why would an intelligent designer have built an eye backwards and upside down? Because an intelligent designer did not build the eye from scratch. Natural selection built the eye from simple to complex using whatever materials were available, and in the particular configuration of the ancestral organism.

  2. Cognitive Behavioral Creationism. The aberrant marriage between the conservative right and liberal left comes in this odd new form of creationism that accepts evolutionary theory for everything below the human head. The idea that our thoughts and behaviors might be influenced by our evolutionary past is politically and ideologically unacceptable to many on the left who fear (admittedly with some justification) the misuse of the theory in the past in a form known as Social Darwinism. The eugenics programs that led to everything from sterilizations in America to mass exterminations in Nazi Germany have, understandably, put off many thoughtful people from exploring how natural selection, in addition to selecting for eyes, also selected for brains and behavior. These evolutionary critics argue that the theory is nothing more than a socially-constructed ideology meant to suppress the poor and marginalized and justify the status quo of those in power. Social Darwinism is the ultimate confirmation of Hume's naturalistic "is-i ought fallacy": whatever is ought to be. If nature has granted certa
in races or a certain sex with "superior" genes, then so should society be structured.

  But in their understandable zeal, these critics go too far. One can find to the literature such ideological terms as "oppressive," "sexist," "imperialist," "capitalist," "control," and "order" being attached to physical concepts as DNA, genetics, biochemistry, and evolution. The nadir of this secular form of creationism came at a 1997 interdisciplinary conference in which a psychologist was defending science against a beating by science critics by praising the advances in modern genetics, beginning with the 1953 discovery of DNA, He was asked rhetorically: "You believe in DNA?"

  Certainly this is about as ridiculous as it gets, yet I can understand the concerns of the left, given the checkered history of abuse of evolutionary theory in general, and eugenics in particular. I am equally horrified at how some people have used Darwin to control, subjugate, or even destroy others. One of the underlying motives for William Jennings Bryan to take up the anti-evolution cause in the Scopes trial was the application of Social Darwinism by the German militia during the First World War to justify their militarism. The public recognition of the misuses of science is a valuable enterprise which I endorse and participate in (see Chapters 15 and 16). But here again the creationists are succumbing to the "either-or fallacy" where, because of occasional errors, biases, and even gross misuses of science, the entire enterprise must be abandoned. Babies and bathwater comes to mind.

  It may prove useful to wrap up this introduction with an example of what I think is proper and cautious application of evolutionary theory to human behavior. Specifically, I wish to inquire why people believe weird things from an evolutionary perspective.