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

by Michael Shermer

  The essential tension in dealing with "weird things" is between being so skeptical that revolutionary ideas pass you by and being so open-minded that flimflam artists take you in. Balance can be found by answering a few basic questions: What is the quality of the evidence for the claim? What are the background and credentials of the person making the claim? Does the thing work as claimed? As I discovered during my personal odyssey in the world of alternative health and fitness therapies and gadgets, often the evidence is weak, the background and credentials of the claimants are questionable, and the therapy or gadget almost never does what it is supposed to.

  This last point may well be the crucial one. I regularly receive calls about astrology. Callers usually want to know about the theory behind astrology. They are wondering whether the alignment of planetary bodies can significantly influence human destiny. The answer is no, but the more important point is that one need not understand gravity and the laws governing the motion of the planets to evaluate astrology. All one needs to do is ask, Does it work? That is, do astrologers accurately and specifically predict human destiny from the alignment of the planets? No, they do not. Not one astrologer predicted the crash of TWA flight #800; not one astrologer predicted the Northridge earthquake. Thus, the theory behind astrology is irrelevant, because astrology simply does not do what astrologers claim it can do. It vanishes hand-in-hand with the hundredth monkey.

  The Tool of the Mind

  Vincent Dethier, in his discussion of the rewards of science, runs through a pantheon of the obvious ones—money, security, honor—as well as the transcendent: "a passport to the world, a feeling of belonging to one race, a feeling that transcends political boundaries and ideologies, religions, and languages." But he brushes all these aside for one "more lofty and more subtle"—the natural curiosity of humans:

  One of the characteristics that sets man apart from all the other animals (and animal he indubitably is) is a need for knowledge for its own sake. Many animals are curious, but in them curiosity is a facet of adaptation. Man has a hunger to know. And to many a man, being endowed with the capacity to know, he has a duty to know. All knowledge, however small, however irrelevant to progress and well-being, is a part of the whole. It is of this the scientist partakes. To know the fly is to share a bit in the sublimity of Knowledge. That is the challenge and the joy of science. (1962, pp. 118-119)

  At its most basic level, curiosity about how things work is what science is all about. As Feynman observed, "I've been caught, so to speak—like someone who was given something wonderful when he was a child, and he's always looking for it again. I'm always looking, like a child, for the wonders I know I'm going to find—maybe not every time, but every once in a while" (1988, p. 16). The most important question in education, then, is this: What tools are children given to help them explore, enjoy, and understand the world? Of the various tools taught in school, science and thinking skeptically about all claims should be near the top.

  Children are born with the ability to perceive cause-effect relations. Our brains are natural machines for piecing together events that may be related and for solving problems that require our attention. We can envision an ancient hominid from Africa chipping and grinding and shaping a rock into a sharp tool for carving up a large mammalian carcass. Or perhaps we can imagine the first individual who discovered that knocking flint would create a spark that would light a fire. The wheel, the lever, the bow and arrow, the plow—inventions intended to allow us to shape our environment rather than be shaped by it—started us down a path that led to our modern scientific and technological world.

  On the most basic level, we must think to remain alive. To think is the most essential human characteristic. Over three centuries ago, the French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes, after one of the most thorough and skeptical purges in intellectual history, concluded that he knew one thing for certain: "Cogito ergo sum—I think therefore I am." But to be human is to think. To reverse Descartes, "Sum ergo cogito—I am therefore I think."

  2

  The Most Precious Thing We Have

  The Difference Between Science and Pseudoscience

  The part of the world known as the Industrial West could, in its entirety, be seen as a monument to the Scientific Revolution, begun over 400 years ago and succinctly captured in a single phrase by one of its initiators, Francis Bacon: "Knowledge itself is power." We live in an age of science and technology. Thirty years ago, historian of science Derek J. De Solla Price observed that "using any reasonable definition of a scientist, we can say that 80 to 90 percent of all the scientists that have ever lived are alive now. Alternatively, any young scientist, starting now and looking back at the end of his career upon a normal life span, will find that 80 to 90 percent of all scientific work achieved by the end of the period will have taken place before his very eyes, and that only 10 to 20 percent will antedate his experience" (1963, pp. 1-2).

  There are now, for example, more than six million articles published in well over 100,000 scientific journals each year. The Dewey Decimal Classification now lists more than a thousand different classifications under the heading "Pure Science," and within each of these classifications are dozens of specialty journals. Figure 1 depicts the growth in the number of scientific journals, from the founding of the Royal Society in 1662 when there were two, to the present.

  Virtually every field of learning shows such an exponential growth curve. As the number of individuals working in a field grows, so too does the amount of knowledge, which creates more jobs, attracts more people, and so on. The membership growth curves for the American Mathematical Society (founded in 1888) and the Mathematical Association of America (founded in 1915), which are shown in figure 2, dramatically demonstrate this phenomenon. In 1965, observing the accelerating rate at which individuals were entering the sciences, the junior minister of science and education of Great Britain concluded, "For more than 200 years scientists everywhere were a significant minority of the population. In Britain today they outnumber the clergy and the officers of the armed forces. If the rate of progress which has been maintained ever since the time of Sir Isaac Newton were to continue for another 200 years, every man, woman and child on Earth would be a scientist, and so would every horse, cow, dog, and mule" (in Hardison 1988, p. 14).

  Transportation speed has also shown geometric progression, with most of the change being made in the last 1 percent of human history. French historian Fernand Braudel tells us, for example, that "Napoleon moved no faster than Julius Caesar" (1981, p. 429). But in the twentieth century the speed of transportation has increased astronomically (figuratively and literally), as the following list shows:

  1784 Stagecoach

  10 mph

  1825 Steam Locomotive

  13 mph

  1870 Bicycle

  17 mph

  1880 Steam-powered Train

  100 mph

  1906 Steam-powered Automobile

  127 mph

  1919 Early aircraft

  164 mph

  1938 Airplane

  400 mph

  1945 Combat airplane

  606 mph

  1947 Bell X-1 rocket-plane

  769 mph

  1960 Rocket

  4,000 mph

  1985 Space shuttle

  18,000 mph

  2000 TAU deep-space probe

  225,000 mph

  One final example of technological change based on scientific research will serve to drive the point home. Timing devices in various forms—dials, watches, and clocks—have improved exponentially in accuracy, as illustrated in figure 3.

  If we are living in the Age of Science, then why do so many pseudo-scientific and nonscientific beliefs abound? Religions, myths, superstitions, mysticisms, cults, New Age ideas, and nonsense of all sorts have penetrated every nook and cranny of both popular and high culture. A 1990 Gallup poll of 1,236 adult Americans showed percentages of belief in the paranormal that are alarming (Gallup and Newport 1991
, pp. 137-146).

  Astrology

  52%

  Extrasensory perception

  46%

  Witches

  19%

  Aliens have landed on Earth

  22%

  The lost continent of Atlantis

  33%

  Dinosaurs and humans lived simultaneously

  41%

  Noah’s flood

  65%

  Communication with the dead

  42%

  Ghosts

  35%

  Actually had a psychic experience

  67%

  Other popular ideas of our time that have little to no scientific support include dowsing, the Bermuda Triangle, poltergeists, biorhythms, creationism, levitation, psychokinesis, astrology, ghosts, psychic detectives, UFOs, remote viewing, Kirlian auras, emotions in plants, life after death, monsters, graphology, crypto-zoology, clairvoyance, mediums, pyramid power, faith healing, Big Foot, psychic prospecting, haunted houses, perpetual motion machines, antigravity locations, and, amusingly, astrological birth control. Belief in these phenomena is not limited to a quirky handful on the lunatic fringe. It is more pervasive than most of us like to think, and this is curious considering how far science has come since the Middle Ages. Shouldn't we know by now that ghosts cannot exist unless the laws of science are faulty or incomplete?

  Pirsig's Paradox

  There is a priceless dialogue between father and son in Robert Pirsig's classic 1974 intellectual adventure story, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that takes place during a cross-country motorcycle tour that included many late-night discussions. The father tells his son that he does not believe in ghosts because "they are unscientific. They contain no matter and have no energy and therefore according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people's minds. Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds. It's best to refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science." The son, now confused, wonders if his father has wandered off into nihilism (1974, pp. 38-39):

  "So you don't believe in ghosts or science?"

  "No, I do believe in ghosts." "What?"

  "The laws of physics and logic, the number system, the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real. For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravity existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity."

  "Of course."

  "So, before the beginning of the Earth, before people, etc., the law of gravity existed. Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy, and not existing in anyone's mind."

  "Right."

  "Then what has a thing to do to be nonexistent? It has just passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that the law of gravity didn't have, or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. I predict that if you think about it long enough, you will go round and round until you realize that the law of gravity did not exist before Isaac Newton. So the law of gravity exists nowhere except in people's heads. It is a ghost!"

  This is what I call Pirsig's Paradox. One of the knottier problems for historians and philosophers of science over the past three decades has been resolving the tension between the view of science as a progressive, culturally independent, objective quest for Truth and the view of science as a nonprogressive, socially constructed, subjective creation of knowledge. Philosophers of science label these two approaches internalist and externalist, respectively. The internalist focuses on the internal workings of science independent of its larger cultural context: the development of ideas, hypotheses, theories, and laws, and the internal logic within and between them. The Belgian-American George Sarton, one of the founders of the history of science field, launched the internalist view. Sarton's discussion of the internalist approach may be summarized as follows:

  1. The study of the history of science is only justified by its relevance to present and future science. Therefore, historians must understand present science in order to see how past science has shaped its development.

  2. Science is "systematized positive knowledge," and "the acquisition and systematization of positive knowledge are the only human activities which are truly cumulative and progressive" (Sarton 1936, p. 5). Therefore, the historian should consider each historical step in terms of progressive or regressive effects.

  3. Although science is embedded in culture, it is not influenced by culture to any significant degree. Thus, the historian need not worry about external context and should concentrate on the internal workings of science.

  4. Science, because it is positive, cumulative, and progressive, is the most important contribution to the history of humanity. Therefore, it is the most important thing a historian can study. Doing so will help prevent wars and build bridges between peoples and cultures.

  By contrast, the externalist concentrates on placing science within the larger cultural context of religion, politics, economics, and ideologies and considers the effect these have on the development of scientific ideas, hypotheses, theories, and laws. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn began the externalist tradition in 1962, with the publication of his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In this book, he introduced the concepts of scientific paradigms and paradigm shifts. Reflecting upon the internalist tradition, Kuhn concluded, "Historians of science owe the late George Sarton an immense debt for his role in establishing their profession, but the image of their specialty which he propagated continues to do much harm even though it has long since been rejected" (1977, p. 148).

  Science historian Richard Olson, who switched from physics to the history of science, strikes a balance between these positions. Olson opens his 1991 book, Science Deified and Science Defied, with a quotation from psychologist B. F. Skinner that succinctly states the internalist position: "No theory changes what it's a theory about." Olson goes on to reject such strict internalism: "There is a serious question about whether such a statement can be interpreted in a way that could be true even if the objects of the theory were inanimate; but there is no question that it is false when it is applied to humans and other living organisms." A more balanced position, says Olson, is seeing science as both product and producer of culture: "In many ways science has merely justified the successive substitutions of more modern myths for obsolete ones as the basis for our understanding of the world. Scientific theory itself arises only out of and under the influence of its social and intellectual milieu; that is, it is a product as well as a determinant of culture" (p. 3). Such a balance is required because strict internalism is impossible but if all knowledge is socially constructed and a product of culture, the externalist position is subject to itself and must then collapse. The belief that all knowledge is culturally determined and therefore lacks certainty is largely the product of an uncertain cultural milieu.

  Extreme externalism (sometimes called strong relativism) cannot be right. Yet those of us trained by Olson's generation of historians (Olson was one of my thesis advisers) know all too well that social phenomena and cultural traditions do influence theories, which, in turn, determine how facts are interpreted; the facts then reinforce theories, and round and round we go until, for some reason, a paradigm shifts. Yet if culture determines science—if ghosts and the laws of nature exist nowhere but in people's minds— then is science no better than pseudoscience? Is there no difference between ghosts and the laws of science?

  We can get out of this circle of questions by recognizing this about science: despite being influenced by culture, science can be considered cumulative and progressive when these terms are used in a precise and nonjudgmental way. Scientific progress is the cumulative growth of a system of knowledge over time, in which useful features are retained and nonuseful features are abandoned, based on the rejection or confirmation of testable knowl
edge. By this definition, science (and technology by extension) are the only cultural traditions that are progressive, not in any moralistic or hierarchical way but in an actual and definable manner. Whether it is deified or defied, science is progressive in this cumulative sense. This is what sets science apart from all other traditions, especially pseudoscience.

  Resolution of the internalist-externalist problem—Pirsig's Paradox— follows from semantic precision and study of historical examples. One example will serve to illustrate the fascinating connections between science and politics. Most political theoreticians regard Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) as one of the most important political tracts of the modern age. Most do not realize, however, how much Hobbes' politics built upon the scientific ideas of his time. Hobbes, in fact, fancied himself as the Galileo Galilei and William Harvey of the science of society. The dedicatory letter to his De Corpore Politico (1644) has to be one of the most immodest statements in the history of science: "Galileus . . . was the first that opened to us the gate of natural philosophy universal, which is the knowledge of the nature of motion. ... The science of man's body, the most profitable part of natural science, was first discovered with admirable sagacity by our countryman, Doctor Harvey. Natural philosophy is therefore but young; but civil philosophy is yet much younger, as being no older . .. than my own de Cive"(1839-1845, vol. 1, pp. vii-ix).