Top Ten Myths
of Popular Psychology

Virtually every day, the news media, television shows, films, and Internet bombard us with claims regarding a host of psychological topics: psychics, out of body experiences, recovered memories, and lie detection, to name a few. Even a casual stroll through our neighborhood bookstore reveals dozens of self-help, relationship, recovery, and addiction books that serve up generous portions of advice for steering our paths along life’s rocky road. Yet many popular psychology sources are rife with misconceptions. Indeed, in today’s fast-paced world of information overload, misinformation about psychology is at least as widespread as accurate information. Self-help gurus, television talk show hosts, and self-proclaimed mental health experts routinely dispense psychological advice that is a bewildering mix of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods. Without a dependable tour guide for sorting out psychological myth from reality, we’re at risk for becoming lost in a jungle of “psychomythology.”

In our new book, 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions About Human Nature, we examine in depth 50 widespread myths in popular psychology (along with approximately 250 other myths and “mini-myths”), present research evidence demonstrating that these beliefs are fictional, explore their ramifications in popular culture and everyday life, and trace their psychological and sociological origins. Here, pace David Letterman, we present (in no particular order) our own candidates for the top 10 myths of popular psychology.

Myth #1: We Only Use 10% of our Brains

Whenever those of us who study the brain venture outside the Ivory Tower to give public lectures, one of the questions we’re most likely to encounter is, “Is it true that we only use 10% of our brains?” The look of disappointment that usually follows when we respond, “Sorry, I’m afraid not,” suggests that the 10% myth is one of those hopeful truisms that refuses to die because it would be so nice if it were true. In one study, when asked “About what percentage of their potential brain power do you think most people use?,” a third of psychology majors answered 10%.1 Remarkably, one survey revealed that even 6% of neuroscientists agreed with this claim!2 The pop psychology industry has played a big role in keeping this myth alive. For example, in his book, How to be Twice as Smart, Scott Witt wrote that “If you’re like most people, you’re using only ten percent of your brainpower.”3

There are several reasons to doubt that 90% of our brains lie silent. At a mere 2–3% of our body weight, our brain consumes over 20% of the oxygen we breathe. It’s implausible that evolution would have permitted the squandering of resources on a scale necessary to build and maintain such a massively underutilized organ. Moreover, losing far less than 90% of the brain to accident or disease almost always has catastrophic consequences.4 Likewise, electrical stimulation of sites in the brain during neurosurgery has failed to uncover any “silent areas.”

How did the 10% myth get started? One clue leads back about a century to psychologist William James, who once wrote that he doubted that average persons achieve more than about 10% of their intellectual potential. Although James talked in terms of underdeveloped potential, a slew of positive thinking gurus transformed “10% of our capacity” into “10% of our brain.”5 In addition, in calling a huge percentage of the human brain “silent cortex,” early investigators may have fostered the mistaken impression that what scientists now call “association cortex” — which is vitally important for language and abstract thinking — had no function. In a similar vein, early researchers’ admissions that they didn’t know what 90% of the brain did probably fueled the myth that it does nothing. Finally, although one frequently hears claims that Albert Einstein once explained his own brilliance by reference to 10% myth, there’s no evidence that he ever uttered such a statement.

Myth #2: It’s Better to Express Anger Than to Hold it in

If you’re like most people, you believe that releasing anger is healthier than bottling it up. In one survey, 66% of undergraduates agreed that expressing pent-up anger — sometimes called “catharsis” — is an effective means of reducing one’s risk for aggression.6 A host of films stoke the idea that we can tame our anger by “letting off steam” or “getting things off our chest.” In the 2003 film Anger Management, after the meek hero (Adam Sandler) is falsely accused of “air rage” on a flight, a judge orders him to attend an anger management group run by Dr. Buddy Rydell (Jack Nicholson). At Rydell’s suggestion, Sandler’s character plays dodgeball with schoolchildren and throws golf clubs. Dr. Rydell’s advice echoes the counsel of many self-help authors. John Lee suggested that rather than “holding in poisonous anger,” it’s better to “Punch a pillow or a punching bag.”7 Some psychotherapies encourage clients to scream or throw balls against walls when they become angry.8 Proponents of “primal scream therapy” believe that psychologically troubled adults must release the emotional pain produced by infant trauma by discharging it, often by yelling at the top of their lungs.9

Yet more than 40 years of research reveals that expressing anger directly toward another person or indirectly toward an object actually turns up the heat on aggression.10 In an early study, people who pounded nails after someone insulted them were more critical of that person.11 Moreover, playing aggressive sports like football results in increases in aggression,12 and playing violent videogames like Manhunt, in which participants rate bloody assassinations on a 5-point scale, is associated with heightened aggression.13 Research suggests that expressing anger is helpful only when it’s accompanied by constructive problem-solving designed to address the source of the anger.14

Why is this myth so popular? In all likelihood, people often mistakenly attribute the fact that they feel better after they express anger to catharsis, rather than to the fact that anger usually subsides on its own after awhile.15

Myth #3: Low Self-Esteem is a Major Cause of Psychological Problems

Many popular psychologists have long maintained that low self-esteem is a prime culprit in generating unhealthy behaviors, including violence, depression, anxiety, and alcoholism. From Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking onward, self-help books proclaiming the virtues of self-esteem have become regular fixtures in bookstores. In his best-seller, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Nathaniel Branden insisted that one “cannot think of a single psychological problem — from anxiety and depression, to fear of intimacy or of success, to spouse battery or child molestation — that is not traceable to the problem of low self-esteem.”16

The self-esteem movement has found its way into mainstream educational practices. Some athletic leagues award trophies to all schoolchildren to avoid making losing competitors feel inferior.17 One elementary school in California prohibited children from playing tag because the “children weren’t feeling good about it.”18 Moreover, the Internet is chock full of educational products intended to boost children’s self-esteem. One book, Self-Esteem Games, contains 300 activities to help children feel good about themselves, such as repeating positive affirmations emphasizing their uniqueness.19

But there’s a fly in the ointment: Research shows that low self esteem isn’t strongly associated with poor mental health. In a comprehensive review, Roy Baumeister and his colleagues canvassed over 15,000 studies linking self-esteem to just about every conceivable psychological variable. They found that self-esteem is minimally related to interpersonal success, and not consistently related to alcohol or drug abuse. Moreover, they discovered that although self-esteem is positively associated with school performance, better school performance appears to contribute to high self-esteem rather than the other way around. Perhaps most surprising of all, they found that “low self-esteem is neither necessary nor sufficient for depression.”20

Myth #4: Human Memory Works like a Video Camera

Despite the sometimes all-too-obvious failings of everyday memory, surveys show that many people believe that their memories operate very much like videotape recorders. About 36% of us believe that our brains preserve perfect records of everything we’ve experienced.21 In one survey of undergraduates, 27% agreed that memory operates like a tape recorder.22 Even most psychotherapists agree that memories are fixed more or less permanently in the mind.23

It’s true that we often recall extremely emotional events, sometimes called flashbulb memories because they seem to have a photographic quality.24 Nevertheless, research shows that even these memories wither over time and are prone to distortions.25 Consider an example from Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch’s study of memories regarding the disintegration of the space shuttle Challenger.26 A student at Emory University provided the first description 24 hours after the disaster, and the second account two and a half years later.

Description 1. “I was in my religion class and some people walked in and started talking about [it]. I didn’t know any details except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher’s students had all been watching which I thought was so sad. Then after class I went to my room and watched the TV program talking about it and I got all the details from that.”

Description 2. “When I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV. It came on a news flash and we were both totally shocked. I was really upset and I went upstairs to talk to a friend of mine and then I called my parents.”

Clearly, there are striking discrepancies between the two memories. Neisser and Harsch found that about one-third of students’ reports contained large differences across the two time points. Similarly, Heike Schmolck and colleagues compared participants’ ability to recall the 1995 acquittal of former football star O. J. Simpson 3 days after the verdict, and after many months.27 After 32 months, 40% of the memory reports contained “major distortions.”

Today, there’s broad consensus among psychologists that memory isn’t reproductive — it doesn’t duplicate precisely what we’ve experienced — but reconstructive. What we recall is often a blurry mixture of accurate and inaccurate recollections, along with what jells with our beliefs and hunches. Indeed, researchers have created memories of events that never happened. In the “shopping mall study,” Elizabeth Loftus created a false memory in Chris, a 14-year-old boy. Loftus instructed Chris’s older brother to present Chris with a false story of being lost in a shopping mall at age 5, and she instructed Chris to write down everything he remembered. Initially, Chris reported very little about the false event, but over a two week period, he constructed a detailed memory of it.28 A flood of similar studies followed, showing that in 18-37% of participants, researchers can implant false memories of such events as serious animal attacks, knocking over a punchbowl at a wedding, getting one’s fingers caught in a mousetrap as a child, witnessing a demonic possession, and riding in a hot air balloon with one’s family.29

Myth #5: Hypnosis is a Unique “Trance” State Differing
in Kind from Wakefulness

Popular movies and books portray the hypnotic trance state as so powerful that otherwise normal people will commit an assassination (The Manchurian Candidate); commit suicide (The Garden Murders); perceive only a person’s internal beauty (Shallow Hal); and (our favorite) fall victim to brainwashing by alien preachers who use messages embedded in sermons (Invasion of the Space Preachers). Survey data show that public opinion resonates with these media portrayals: 77% of college students endorsed the statement that “hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness, quite different from normal waking consciousness,” and 44% agreed that “A deeply hypnotized person is robot-like and goes along automatically with whatever the hypnotist suggests.”30

But research shows that hypnotized people can resist and even oppose hypnotic suggestions, and won’t do things that are out of character, like harming people they dislike.31 In addition, hypnosis bears no more than a superficial resemblance to sleep: Brain wave studies reveal that hypnotized people are wide awake. What’s more, individuals can be just as responsive to suggestions administered while they’re exercising on a stationary bicycle as they are following suggestions for sleep and relaxation.32 In the laboratory, we can reproduce all of the phenomena that laypersons associate with hypnosis (such as hallucinations and insensitivity to pain) using suggestions alone, with no mention of hypnosis. Evidence of a distinct trance unique to hypnosis would require physiological markers of subjects’ responses to suggestions to enter a trance. Yet no consistent evidence of this sort has emerged.33

Hypnosis appears to be only one procedure among many for increasing people’s responses to suggestions.

Myth #6: The Polygraph Test is an Accurate Means
of Detecting Lies

Have you ever told a lie? If you answered “no,” you’re lying. College students admit to lying in about one in every three social interactions and people in the community about one in every five interactions.34 Not surprisingly, investigators have long sought out foolproof means of detecting falsehoods. In the 1920s, psychologist William Moulton Marston invented the first polygraph or so-called “lie detector” test, which measured systolic blood pressure to detect deception. He later created one of the first female cartoon superheroes, Wonder Woman, who could compel villains to tell the truth by ensnaring them in a magic lasso. For Marston, the polygraph was the equivalent of Wonder Woman’s lasso: an infallible detector of the truth.35

A polygraph machine plots physiological activity — such as skin conductance, blood pressure, and respiration — on a continuously running chart. Contrary to the impression conveyed in such movies as Meet the Parents, the machine isn’t a quick fix for telling whether someone is lying, although the public’s desire for such a fix almost surely contributes to the polygraph’s popularity. In one survey of introductory psychology students, 45% believed that the polygraph “can accurately identify attempts to deceive.”36 Yet interpreting a polygraph chart is notoriously difficult.

For starters, there are large differences among people in their levels of physiological activity. An honest examinee who tends to sweat a lot might mistakenly appear deceptive, whereas a deceptive examinee who tends to sweat very little might mistakenly appear truthful. Moreover, as David Lykken noted, there’s no evidence for a Pinocchio response,37 such as an emotional or physiological reaction uniquely indicative of deception.38 If a polygraph chart shows more physiological activity when the examinee responds to questions about a crime than to irrelevant questions, at most this difference tells us that the examinee was more nervous at those moments. Yet this difference could be due to actual guilt, indignation or shock at being unjustly accused, or the realization that one’s responses to questions about the crime could lead to being fired, fined, or imprisoned.39 Thus, polygraph tests suffer from a high rate of “false positives” — innocent people whom the test deems guilty.40 As a consequence, the “lie detector” test is misnamed: It’s really an arousal detector.41 Conversely, some individuals who are guilty may not experience anxiety when telling lies. For example, psychopaths are notoriously immune to fear and may be able to “beat” the test in high pressure situations, although the research evidence for this possibility is mixed.42

Were he still alive, William Moulton Marston might be disappointed to learn that researchers have yet to develop the psychological equivalent of Wonder Woman’s magic lasso. For at least the foreseeable future, the promise of a perfect lie detector remains the stuff of comic book fantasy.

Myth #7: Opposites Attract

The notion that “opposites attract” is a standard part of our cultural landscape. Films, novels, and TV sitcoms overflow with stories of diametrical opposites falling passionately in love. The 2007 smash hit comedy, Knocked Up, is perhaps Hollywood’s latest installment in it’s seemingly never-ending parade of wildly mismatched romantic pairings. Most of us are convinced that people who are opposite from each other in their personalities, beliefs, and looks tend to be attracted to each other. Lynn McCutcheon found that 77% of undergraduates agreed that opposites attract in relationships.43 This belief is also widespread in pockets of the Internet dating community. On one site called “Soulmatch,” Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. (described as a “relationships expert”) states that “It’s been my experience that only opposites attract because that’s the nature of reality. The great myth in our culture is that compatibility is the grounds for a relationship — actually, compatibility is grounds for boredom.”

On the contrary, research suggests that Hendrix has gotten his myths precisely backward. When it comes to interpersonal relationships, opposites don’t attract. Dozens of studies demonstrate that people with similar personality traits are more likely to be attracted to and hang out with each other than people with dissimilar personality traits. For example, people with a Type A personality style, who are hard-driving, competitive, and time-conscious, prefer dating partners who have a Type A personality.44 Similarity in personality traits predicts not only initial attraction, but marital stability and happiness.45 Similarity on the personality trait of conscientiousness seems to be especially important for marital satisfaction.46 So if you’re a hopelessly messy person, you’re best off finding someone who isn’t a total neat freak. The “like attracts like” conclusion also extends to our attitudes and values. The more similar someone’s attitudes (for example, political views) are to ours, the more we tend to like that person.47

Myth #8: People with Schizophrenia Have Multiple Personalities

A prevalent misconception is that schizophrenia is the same thing as “split personality” or “multiple personality disorder.” A popular bumper sticker, for example, reads: “I was schizophrenic once, but we’re better now.” The schizophrenia-multiple personality misconception is widespread. In one survey, 77% of introductory psychology students agreed that “a schizophrenic is someone with a split personality.”48 The 2000 comedy film, Me, Myself, and Irene, starring Jim Carrey, features a man supposedly suffering from schizophrenia. Yet he actually suffers from a split personality, with one personality who’s mellow and another who’s aggressive.

In fact, Schizophrenia differs sharply from the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID), once called multiple personality disorder. Unlike people with schizophrenia, people with DID supposedly harbor two or more distinct “alters” — personalities or personality states — within them at the same time. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is probably the best known illustration of multiple personality in popular literature. Nevertheless, many psychologists find the assertion that DID patients possess distinct and fully formed personalities to be doubtful.49 It’s far more likely that these patients are displaying different, but exaggerated, aspects of a single personality.

The schizophrenia-DID myth probably stems in part from confusion in terminology. Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined the term “schizophrenia,” meaning “split mind,” in the early 20th century, and many writers soon misinterpreted Bleuler’s definition. By schizophrenia, Bleuler meant that people suffer from a “splitting” within and between their psychological functions, especially emotion and thinking.50 For most of us, what we feel and think at one moment corresponds to what we feel and think at the next. Yet in the severe psychotic disorder of schizophrenia, these linkages are ruptured. As Bleuler observed, people with schizophrenia don’t harbor more than one co-existing personality; they possess a single personality that’s been shattered.51

Regrettably, many people in the general public don’t appreciate the fact that schizophrenia is often a profoundly disabling condition associated with a heightened risk for suicide, clinical depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, unemployment, and homelessness. As Irving Gottesman noted, “everyday misuse of the terms schizophrenia or schizophrenic to refer to the foreign policy of the United States, the stock market, or any other disconfirmation of one’s expectations does an injustice to the enormity of the public health problems and profound suffering associated with this most puzzling disorder of the human mind.”52

Myth #9: Full Moons Cause Crimes and Craziness

Once every 29.53 days on average, an event of rather trivial astronomical significance occurs. But according to some writers, it’s an event of enormous psychological significance. What is it? A full moon. Over the decades, authors have linked the full moon to a host of phenomena: strange behaviors, psychiatric hospital admissions, suicides, traffic accidents, crimes, heavy drinking, dog bites, births, crisis calls to emergency rooms, violence by hockey players…the list goes on and on.53

The word “lunatic” derives from the Latin term luna, or moon. Legends of werewolves and vampires, terrifying creatures that supposedly often emerged during full moons, date back at least to the ancient Greeks, and were popular in Europe during much of the Middle Ages.54 In 19th-century England, some lawyers used a “not guilty by reason of the full moon” defense to acquit clients of crimes committed during full moons.

Even today, the notion that the full moon is tied to strange occurrences — the “Lunar Effect” or “Transylvania Effect” — is deeply embedded in popular culture. One study revealed that up to 81% of mental health professionals believe in the lunar effect,55 and a study of nurses demonstrated that 69% believe that full moons are associated with increase in patient admissions.56 In 2007, Brighton, England instituted a policy to place more police officers on the beat during full moon nights.57

Psychiatrist Arnold Lieber popularized the idea of a correlation between the full moon and behavior.58 For Lieber, the lunar effect stems mostly from the fact that the human body is four-fifths water. Because the moon affects the tides of the earth, it’s plausible that the moon would also affect the brain, which is, after all, part of the body. Yet as astronomer George Abell noted, a mosquito sitting on your arm would exert a more powerful gravitational force on your body than would the moon.59 Furthermore, the moon’s tides are influenced not by its phase — that is, by how much of it’s visible on earth — but by its distance from earth.60 Indeed, during a “new moon,” the phase at which the moon is invisible to us on earth, it exerts just as much gravitational influence as it does during a full moon.

In 1985, two psychologists reviewed all available research evidence on the lunar effect, and found no evidence that the full moon is related to much of anything — crimes, suicides, psychiatric problems, psychiatric hospital admissions, or calls to crisis centers.61 Later investigators examined whether the full moon is linked to suicides,62 psychiatric hospital admissions,63 dog bites,64 or emergency room visits,65 and came up empty-handed.

What psychologists term the “fallacy of positive” instances may help to explain the persisting popularity of belief in the lunar effect. When an event confirms our hunches, we tend to take special note of it and recall it.66 In contrast, when an event disconfirms our hunches, we tend to ignore or reinterpret it. So, when there’s a full moon and something out of the ordinary, say, a surge of admissions to our local psychiatric hospital, happens, we’re likely to remember it and tell others about it. In contrast, when there’s a full moon and nothing unusual happens, we typically overlook or discount it. In one study, psychiatric hospital nurses who believed in the lunar effect wrote more notes about patients’ strange behavior during a full moon than did nurses who didn’t believe in the lunar effect.67 The nurses attended more to events that confirmed their hunches, which in turn probably bolstered these hunches.

Myth #10: A Large Proportion of Criminals Successfully
Use the Insanity Defense

After giving a speech on the morning of March 30th, 1981, President Ronald Reagan emerged from the Washington Hilton hotel. Seconds later, six shots rang out. One hit a secret service agent, one hit a police officer, another hit the President’s press secretary James Brady, and another hit the President himself. The would-be assassin was a delusional 26 year-old man named John Hinckley, who had fallen in love from a distance with actress Jodie Foster and become convinced that by killing the President he could make Foster reciprocate his feelings for her. In 1982, following a trial featuring dueling psychiatric experts, the jury found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury’s decision triggered an enormous public outcry; an ABC News poll revealed that 76% of Americans objected to the verdict.

Surveys show that most Americans believe that criminals often use the insanity defense as a loophole to escape punishment. One study revealed that the average layperson believes that the insanity defense is used in 37% of felony cases, and that this defense is successful 44% of the time. This survey also demonstrated that the average layperson believes that 26% of insanity acquittees are set free, and that these acquittees spend only about 22 months in a mental hospital following their trials.68 Many politicians share these perceptions. One study revealed that politicians in Wyoming believed that 21% of accused felons had used the insanity defense, and that they were successful 40% of the time.69 In 1973, President Richard Nixon made the abolition of the insanity defense the centerpiece of his effort to fight crime.

Yet these perceptions of the insanity defense are wildly inaccurate. Data indicate that this defense is raised in less than 1% of criminal trials and that it’s successful only about 25% of the time.70 For example, in the state of Wyoming between 1970 and 1972, a grand total of 1 (!) accused felon successfully pled insanity. Members of the general public also overestimate how many insanity acquittees are set free; the true proportion is only about 15%. Moreover, the average insanity acquittee spends between 32 and 33 months in a psychiatric hospital, considerably longer than the public estimates. In fact, criminals acquitted on the basis of an insanity verdict typically spend at least as long in an institution (such as a psychiatric hospital) as criminals who are convicted.71

How did these misperceptions of the insanity defense arise? We Americans live increasingly in a “courtroom culture.” Between Court TV, CSI, Law and Order, and CNN’s Nancy Grace, we’re continually inundated with information about the legal system. Nevertheless, this information can be deceptive, because the media devotes considerably more coverage to legal cases in which the insanity defense is successful, like Hinckley’s, than to those in which it isn’t.72 As is so often the case, the best antidote to public misperception is accurate knowledge. Lynn and Lauren McCutcheon found that a brief fact-based report on the insanity defense, compared with a news program on crime featuring this defense, produced a significant decrease in undergraduates’ misconceptions concerning this defense.73 These findings give us cause for hope, as they suggest that it may take only a small bit of information to overcome misinformation.

We can all be fooled by psychomythology, largely because so many popular misconceptions dovetail with our intuitive hunches. As a consequence, we must turn to scientific reasoning, which is a set of safeguards against the tendency to confirm our initial beliefs, to evaluate whether the claims of the pop psychology industry pass muster.74 The good news is that by continually scrutinizng and questioning popular psychology claims with scientific thinking and scientific evidence, we can come to a better understanding of our mental worlds and make better everyday life decisions.

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Wiccans v. Creationists
An Empirical Study of How Two Systems of Belief Differ

by Raymond A. Eve

In a 1991 book entitled The Creationist Movement in Modern America,¹ Frank Harrold and I ran through the gamut of explanations for why people believe in special creationism, or the belief that the Earth and life were created about 10,000 years ago. (About 40% of Americans believe in both creation and evolution — that evolution was guided by God and that the process took billions of years. These people are sometimes called theistic evolutionists, or old earth creationists, and contrast sharply with young earth creationists.²) When I use the term creationists, it is in reference to the special, or young earth creationists.

Initial explanations attributed creationists’ beliefs to some sort of pathology. For example, in the aftermath of a 1974 controversy in Kanawha, West Virginia, triggered by the introduction of a new series of Language Arts books for use in the public schools (that included evolution “presented as a fact”), the headmaster of the new reading program, James Moffitt, rendered his opinion. In a book he authored on the incident,³ Moffitt attributed the source of anti-evolutionism to “authoritarian personalities.”⁴ Another popular explanation is that creationists are ill-educated ignoramuses, or backwoods bumpkins.

However, even if it were true that some creationists display a higher proportion of pathological traits than one would expect by chance, this not an adequate explanation. Frank Harrold and I, for example, collected a mass of survey information from a multitude of sources in which the data clearly demonstrated that explanations based on personal pathology could not account for a plurality of creationists. Instead, most of them appeared adequately-to-well educated, and generally seemed to be no more pathological than the rest of us. It may be that academic social scientists (who typically lean toward being politically liberal) are too quick to assign negative personality traits to adherents of conservative beliefs.⁵

Cultural Traditionalists, Modernists, and Postmodernists

An important sociological understanding of the origins of creationism was presented in 1978 by Ann Page and Donald Clelland, who suggested that conflicts such as the one that occured in Kanawha County could best be understood as a group-level phenomenon rather than a purely individual matter, and that these differences of opinion reflect conflicting worldviews held by each groups.

Page and Clelland labeled one such aggregate “cultural fundamentalists,” or what I prefer to call cultural traditionalists — those who tend to employ a literal reading of scripture. (I prefer this label because Harrold and I found many creationists who live outside of the so-called “fundamentalist” religious denominations.) For cultural traditionalists what is good or evil is not up to humans to decide — God’s revealed commandments uniquely serve that purpose. Additionally, cultural traditionalists see the purpose of life as to serve and glorify God, even if this means one must submit one’s own being to hardship and toil. A second aggregate, termed “cultural modernists” by Page and Clelland, is described as being the paradigmatic descendants of the Enlightenment and secular empiricism. As such, cultural modernists are said to believe that the road to truth lies in gathering data with which to test hypotheses, and then let the philosophical chips fall where they may.

As an example of the conflict of these two groups, consider the question “What is to be done about AIDS?” Cultural traditionalists sometimes see AIDS as God’s will. (For example, in the opinion of many traditionalists, AIDS is weeding out drug-users, homosexuals, and prostitutes from society at large). Even at its most liberal, however, cultural fundamentalism would “hate the sin and love the sinner.” In either case, traditionalists would say that the cure for AIDS would be to return to greater piety and commitment to biblical values and injunctions. Contrast this perspective with that of cultural modernists, who argue that the cure for AIDS involves conducting epidemiological studies to find its cause, and preventitative methods such as condoms and sterilized needles as part of a development of a technology-based cure.

Compared to modernists, cultural traditionalists have been shown to be a fairly homogenous group — specifically, they are more rural, older, white, and Protestant. In contrast, cultural modernists seem to have arisen in part, out of necessities brought about by urbanization and widespread migration. For example, cultural modernists seem to accept the idea that different people from different backgrounds are likely to be crowded together in today’s societies, and that cosmopolitan values and multicultural acceptance are therefore necessary in order to avoid mass crime and bloodshed. However, this view also leads them to speak of homosexuality and women priests as “alternative lifestyles.” Cultural traditionalists would answer that there is nothing “alternative” about lifestyles, which they believe God condemns.

In general, for cultural modernists, truth claims are assessed in light of data, hypothesis testing, and logical reasoning. For cultural traditionalists, truth claims are strictly evaluated in terms of tradition, authority, and scriptural demands. (In the words of one of our respondents, echoing a popular bumper sticker among conservative Christians, “God said it, I believe it. That’s the end of the argument!”)

Into the mix we can add a third orientation to assessing claims — postmodernism, which encompasses a broad array of subtypes, from holistic health followers, to New Age believers, to many academicians. Despite this range of diversity, postmodernists are largely defined by what they are not — they are not traditionalist, nor are they modernist. In other words, they can be grouped by their rejection of the other two common paradigms of our times. But they can also be classified as believing that “grand narratives” have no validity. Grand narratives represent all encompassing accounts of human existence, typically a single great Truth that exists external to any individual. Grand narratives can be political or psychological theories (such as Marxism or Freudianism), or they can be the specific doctrinal tenets of the world’s major religions. The key point is that for postmodernists, all such grand narratives are to be rejected in favor of the belief that the truth, to the extent that it even exists, is highly individualistic, subjective, and to be found largely within each person.

Wiccans as a Control Group

Creationists believe in their version of origins because they are cultural traditionalists. But traditional compared to what? To test this hypothesis I needed a control group. I chose the Wiccans — contemporary followers of so-called “Goddess” religions.⁶ Wiccans typically reject Christianity and other mainstream religions as being too patriarchal in nature.⁷ A high proportion of neopagans in general, and Wiccans in particular, assert that excessive masculinity led to the ecological rape of the planet. Wiccans see Christianity as a religion that originated from the myths of ancient Hebrew pastoral tribes. Such tribes were notoriously patriarchal, and Wiccans believe this patriarchy is still deeply embedded within modern Christianity.⁸

Wiccans argue that Christianity has either purposely or inadvertently supported Sir Francis Bacon’s views of science and technology. (Unfortunately, Bacon occasionally used language that could be construed as sexist by today’s standards. For example, he spoke of nature being in need of “unveiling” and “penetration.”) Wiccans also suggest that the language and imagery of the Bible places women into a subservient category, and this is due at least in part to Eve being blamed for humanity’s fall from Paradise.

Wiccans have tried to remedy such ills by restoring a sense of the divine to femininity.⁹,¹⁰ They see themselves as returning to the practice of “white magic” (that they believe existed before the rise of modern Christianity). According to one of the initial literary treatises of Wicca, entitled The Spiral Dance,¹¹ Wiccans practice magic for the good of individuals and the community, and they base their religious rituals upon the cycle of the seasons.

Many outside observers have labeled neopagans as “New-Agers.” Wiccans, however, prefer to consider themselves of the “Old Age,” by which they mean they are returning to ancient religious and spiritual practices which they believe allow them to tap into subtle but powerful natural forces. They assert that there are forces of nature that are susceptible to manipulation by magic. However, they believe that the conditions of modernism have seperated us from nature so that we have lost our abilities to perceive and manipulate these Old Age powers. I label Wicca as a postmodern religion primarily because of its contention that deity is within each of us, and that truth is different and subjective for each practitioner. For example, Wicca allows a follower to be anything else they wish to be religiously, and still be a Wiccan. We can also argue that Wicca’s emphasis on rituals dedicated to restoring ecological balance, and emphasis on gender equality,¹² are consistent with postmodernism as it is widely defined.

Testing Creationists and Wiccans

In confronting the challenges of modern life, how do the members of each of our three groups cope? Cultural traditionalists tend to seek God’s favor by advocating a return to older norms and values, most especially to greater Christian piety. Cultural modernists employ empirical data and scientific inquiry, plus rationalized planning, production, and administration. Postmodernists (at least those outside of academia) attempt to empower themselves through “technologies” largely derived from pre-Christian practices and non-Christian worldviews (such as psychic healing, soul travel, crystal powers, etc.).¹³

Before conducting my study, I predicted that cultural traditionalists would be the respondents most likely to support religiously- and politicallyconservative worldviews and social agendas (because of their faith in tradition and authority). I also predicted that postmodernists were likely to hold beliefs that skeptics would consider to be pseudoscience. For many postmodernists, psychic powers, astral projection, and communication with spirits are believed to be useful “technologies,” and hence a means of empowerment.¹⁴ It is precisely this latter concept that is intended by the term “witchcraft” in anthropology. That is, in cross-cultural studies, witchcraft has little to do with the Devil, but instead has everything to do with trying to use a “metaphysical technology” to bring about desired outcomes.¹⁵

In order to test these predictions, two sets of data were collected. For the first, anonymous questionnaires were distributed to 328 people who attended a “Creationism Fair” in Glen Rose, Texas, during a weekend in 1995. The site was largely chosen because of its proximity to Texas’ Dinosaur State Park. (The significance of the park is that it is the home of the famous “Paluxy River Man Tracks,” indentations in the bottom of a limestone streambed that lie next to fossilized dinosaur tracks that are claimed by some creationists to be human footprints.) Just outside the main entrance to the park is the home of “Dr.” Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum,¹⁶ well known to creationists for its extensive set of exhibits intended to demonstrate scientific legitimacy for creationist claims, including a 10,000-year old Earth. Ironically, it was Baugh and Don Patton who distributed the questionnaires (Don Patton was, at the time, the President of the Metroplex Institute for Origins Studies, another creationist organization).¹⁷,¹⁸

Data from a second sample were collected late in 1995 at a “Magic Arts Convention” just outside of Austin, Texas. At that event there was a gathering of nearly 300 neo-pagans, primarily Wiccans. They held religious rituals, shared a sense of community, and sold various pagan and New Age wares to each other. A total of 215 people who identified themselves as Wiccans completed the questionnaire.¹⁹,²⁰

Data Differences Between Creationists and Wiccans

Demography. In this dataset, creationists were older than Wiccans, with 56% percent over 40 years of age, compared to 22% of the Wiccans. No Wiccan was over 60 years old. Creationists tended to be more likely to have grown up in small towns and rural places, whereas Wiccans came from more urban environments. The education levels for Creationists and Wiccans were roughly the same (47% and 46%, respectively, attending college), although there were differences in parental education levels. Creationists’ fathers’ modal educational attainment level was high school. In contrast, the mode for the fathers of Wiccans was a college education (with more than one out of five of the fathers having attended graduate school, compared to about one of ten for the creationists; the same general pattern held for respondents’ mothers). For both creationists and Wiccans, there was a tendency for their parents to have been Protestants more than any other affiliation, but this was especially true of the creationists. Wiccans from non- Protestant families were more likely to report that their parents were Catholics, non-religious, or of fairly uncommon religious persuasions.²¹ Surprisingly, the proportion of female Wiccans (51%) was roughly the same as female creationists (48%).

Civil Religion. Civil religion is the belief that Americans as a people are bound together by sacred ideals, sacred character, and that God has blessed the nation with a special place in world history. Creationists, as predicted, show strong support for civil religion. For example, when asked if “Everyone should support this country,” 38% of creationists strongly disagreed, compared to 59% of Wiccans. Similarly, when both groups were asked if “The schools should require students to say the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States,” 85% of creationists supported this, compared to only 14% of Wiccans. For creationists, there is relatively little distinction made between scriptural religion and civil religion.

Social conservatism. The tendency for creationists to enforce tradition extends far beyond civil religion. For example, when asked if “Human nature requires strong laws,” 61% of creationists felt this was so, but only 3% of Wiccans held that view. Similarly, only 35% of creationists strongly disagreed that “Interracial mixing is wrong,” but 84% of the Wiccans rejected the same statement. The creationist preference for orthodoxy extended to the matter of gender roles as well. When asked if “Men and women have different roles in society,” 87% of creationists agreed, but only 16% of Wiccans agreed. Most strikingly, when asked if “Homosexuality is clearly wrong,” 95% of the creationists agreed, compared to a mere 2% of Wiccans. It seems safe to conclude that Wiccans are more likely to approve of “alternative lifestyles,” whereas creationists appear to believe that literal biblical strictures concerning proper behavior are ignored at great peril.

Paranormal Beliefs. If, as is clear from the data, we can classify creationists as enforcers of tradition, we might predict that they would eschew unconventional paranormal beliefs when compared to Wiccans. This is, indeed, what the data show. When asked if astrology is an accurate predictor of human behavior, 93% of creationists disagreed, compared to only 25% of Wiccans. Although both groups have around half of their members who aren’t sure if “Bigfoot roams the woods of the Pacific Northwest,” 35% of creationists completely reject the idea, compared to only 14% of Wiccans. When asked if “The Loch Ness monster is real,” creationists rejected the existence of the creature 29% of the time, but Wiccans did so only 14% of the time. When asked if it is true that “Psychics can accurately predict the future,” 58% of Wiccans strongly agreed, compared to only 5% of creationists. A similar result was obtained when member of both groups were asked if “Séances can communicate with the dead.” 68% of creationists strongly disagreed such a thing was possible, but only 1% of the Wiccans strongly disagreed. Asked if “UFOs are actual spacecraft from other planets,” 61% of creationists strongly disagreed, compared to only about 7% of Wiccans.²²

Social and Science Attitudes. I have written elsewhere about the existence in literature of what I like to call “cautionary tales,” or writings that warn of the dangers of recent breakthroughs in science, or warn us about the use of new technologies. Frankenstein is the holotype in this genre. As cultural traditionalists, creationists, I predicted, should view science with caution more often than Wiccans. When both groups were asked if “Cloning embryos should not be allowed,” 75% of creationists strongly agreed, compared to 25% of Wiccans. A similar response pattern can be seen in the statement “Genetic engineering should not be encouraged.” 37% of creationists strongly agreed, compared to 7% of Wiccans. Most striking, but not surprising, when asked if “Abortion is always against God’s will,” three-fourths of creationists agreed strongly, compare to less than one percent of Wiccans! When asked if “Transplanting fetal tissue is against God’s will,” we find few respondents in the middle categories for either sample — the vast majority of creationists strongly agreed with the statement, while an equally vast majority of Wiccans disagreed. The same pattern is found for the question “Euthanasia is against God’s will” — nearly all the creationists agreed, nearly all the Wiccans disagreed.

Science and Religion Attitudes. Recall that we began with the question of whether pseudoscientific beliefs are the result of ignorance and mental aberration, or are they the end product of a way of thinking embedded in a worldview? The data here support the latter. When asked if “It’s God’s word, not science, that defines the truth,” 91% of creationists agreed, while only about 20% of Wiccans agreed, and half of them strongly so. Insight into Wiccans’ worldview can be seen when asked if “Both science and religion fail to provide us with the answers to the important questions facing us today.”

80% of Wiccans agreed that neither could be counted on for solid guidance, whereas creationists rejected the same statement two-thirds of the time. Here, Wiccans’ response was consistent with the earlier suggestion that Wicca, while preferring to think of itself as “pre-modern,” actually fits the paradigm of postmodernism rather well.²³ In other words, Wiccans do appear to believe that truth is largely a matter of individual processes internal to each person, and one is free to pick and choose the bits of theology that work for them.

Additional support for the suggestion that Wicca is a postmodern religion comes from the chart in Figure 4 where both groups were asked if it is true that “There is not enough individualism today.” Almost half of Wiccans strongly agreed, and this was a considerably higher proportion than among creationists. It would appear we are safe in concluding that instead of adhering to an external code based on authority, tradition, and revelation (as chosen by creationists), Wiccans instead place more emphasis on their “One Commandment” that says “And if it harms none, do as thou wilt.”²⁴

Summary and Conclusions

What can we conclude from these survey data? First, we are left with the understanding that the origin of paranormal beliefs often arises through normal group dynamics and is not simply the result of ignorance or mental pathology. Singer and Benassi,²⁵ among others, have suggested multiple origins for paranormal beliefs, for example, common errors in human reasoning, poor science education, sensationalistic media coverage of science, and sociocultural factors. This study strongly supports the latter causal variable.

Rapid rates of social change in the U.S. seem to have left multiple (but frequently incompatible) sets of rules for assessing the nature of reality. Once one understands the set of rules associated with each worldview, many paranormal beliefs logically follow. However, we should realize that it is not clear that these worldviews are always congruent with specific groups. Surely some aggregates, such as creationists and Wiccans, are likely to be fairly homogenous in outlook. However, we need to be mindful that these two groups were deliberately chosen with the expectation that they would be both extreme and diametrically opposed in their choices of epistemological rules for knowing.

In general, it may be better to argue that these differences are not so much about aggregates as they are about different ways of understanding reality that are available in the culture to all of us. Rapid social change has spun off several sets of heuristics within mere decades. This might help to explain, for example, why a student might be a cultural modernist in a biology lab, but a cultural traditionalist a few hours later upon returning to a rural hometown for the holidays. Most of us, in other words, may subconsciously switch among these worldviews, and we may oft-times do so without conscious awareness.

References

1. Eve, Raymond A., and B. Harrold Francis. 1991. The Creationist Movement in Modern America. Boston: Twayne Press.
2. Special creationists derive their dates for human origins from Irish Archbishop Usher who, in the first half of the 17th century, concluded from a literal reading of the Old Testament that the world was created in 4004 B.C.
3. Moffett, J. 1988. Storm in the Mountains. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
4. In case the reader is unfamiliar with the origin of the idea of the authoritarian personality, further information can be found on the following website: http://tinyurl.com/23fyy4c
5. It was for this reason that social psychologist Milton Rokeach developed his wellknown dogmatism scale. Rokeach hypothesized that liberals were often as rigid in their beliefs as conservatives. There is a study in the online journal of the Creation Social Science and Humanities Society, that appears to demonstrate that creationist students are no more dogmatic than their noncreationist counterparts. See: www.creationism.org/csshs/v04n3p15.htm
6. “Wicca” comes from the ancient Gaelic term for “the craft,” meaning witchcraft.
7. Stone, Merlin. 1976. When God was a Woman. New York: Dial Press. Note that a number of scholars such as religious historians and anthropologists (including some female authors) have pointed out there probably never was a time in antiquity when “God” would have been an individual female entity. Instead, in ancient times, just as male monotheism did not exist, neither did female monotheism. See: Allen, Charlotte. 2001. “The Scholars and the Goddess.” The Atlantic Monthly. January. 18–22.
8. Berger, Helen A. 1999. A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-paganism and Witchcraft in the United States. University of South Carolina Press.
9. Although much is made in the media of Wicca as a “Goddess religion,” in reality Wiccan theology officially calls for the worship of both the Great Goddess and the male Horned God (not to be confused with Satan). These are both seen as necessary and complementary (such as Yin and Yang). All traditions of Wicca (there are several) believe that the correct image of the Divine must comprise both male and female. For Wiccans, to worship either sexual aspect alone would create imbalance, and much of Wicca revolves around ritual attempts to balance the forces of nature as well as one’s personal life.
10. Adler, Margot. 1997. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and other Pagans in America Today. New York: Penguin.
11. Starhawk. 1979. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
12. Orion, Loretta. 1995. Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revived. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press.
13. We will focus here primarily upon postmodernists outside of academe. As a point of interest, academic postmodernists seem less interested in empowering themselves than in disempowering the rhetoric of modernists through the “deconstruction” of the modernist’s rhetoric or “text.” Curiously, almost no deconstructionism of this type is directed at cultural traditionalists.
14. These tools for empowerment have the added advantage of not requiring years of difficult and competitive study of physics, chemistry, mathematics, anthropology, and so forth.
15. A good example of what is meant here by metaphysical technology can be seen in Malinowski’s famous study of the Trobriand Islanders. These islanders made their living largely by fishing. Malinowski noted they did not perform magic in protected lagoons, but only when they first paddled out into the open ocean, which sometimes threatened to overwhelm their small boats. The lesson seems obvious: humans invoke their gods when the physical technology seems inadequate to the task at hand. How tempting, then, to employ a metaphysical technology to attempt to control the uncontrollable. See: www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Anthro/Anth206/malinowski.htm
16. Dr. Baugh’s terminal degree appears to have been granted from a lone-standing frame house in Dallas. For more on this, and a skeptical perspective on the Museum, see: www.ntskeptics.org/2000/2000january/january2000.htm. You can also find information about the Creation Evidences Museum at their web page: www.creationevidence.org/cemframes.html
17. When they learned of interest by researchers from a University they welcomed the chance to help in the data collection. They seemed secure in their belief that the results would advance the creationist cause. Large numbers of Fair attendees were ushered into an enclosure to view a film on creationism. At the end of the film, Dr. Baugh or Mr. Patton distributed the questionnaires and exhorted those receiving them to cooperate in the study. We hope, of course, that this largely eliminated any bias that might have occurred if university researchers had distributed the surveys.
18. I would like to thank Mr. John Taylor, who was at that time a graduate student working with me, for much of the actual labor of collecting, coding, and performing computer analyses on the creationist data.
19. It is worth noting that both in Glen Rose and in Austin, respondents appeared eager to fill out questionnaires. Both groups seemed to feel a need to put their views before a wider audience, and welcomed the chance to do so.
20. I would like to thank Ms. Ladorna Goff, at that time an outstanding undergraduate, for much of the actual labor of collecting, coding, and performing computer analyses on the Wiccan data.
21. The demographic profiles of creationists differed from that of Wiccans in ways that many previous studies have found to be typical. For example, Joseph Gusfield found that members of the 19th-century Temperance and Prohibition movements fit the pattern of being older, more rural, and less educated. Louis Zurcher found a similar profile when he examined anti-pornography crusaders during the 1960s. Other research since then has generally found the same pattern among adherents of conservative social movements, such as those in favor of prayer in school, or against school sex education, or against gay rights, abortion, and the legalization of marijuana. Creationism appears to be as much about defending or promoting a certain lifestyle, as it is a matter of good scientific evidence. See: Gusfield, Joseph R. 1963. Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Zurcher, L. A. 1971. “The Anti-Pornography Campaign: A Symbolic Crusade.” Social Problems, 19: 217–38.
22. Similarly, when asked if “UFOs built the pyramids,” only one-third of Wiccans strongly rejected the idea, but 86% of the creationists strongly disagreed.
23. This individualism is sometimes called “Sheilaism.” Robert Bellah and colleagues, in their book, Habits of the Heart, tell of a young nurse, Sheila Larson, who, when asked about her faith, replied that she was religious but seldom went to church, and apparently preferred a sort of “mix-andmatch” amalgam of bits and pieces of various theological stances. Famous scholar of religion and author Wade Clark Roof said this is representative of a trend where “self and deity become fused into one. Americans generally, it seems, have grown more individualistic and subjectivistic in their faiths in the post-1960s period.” See, www.esmhe.org/Plumbline/v1n1/roof.html
24. For further information on the One Commandment, see: www.religioustolerance.org/wic_term.htm
25. Singer, Barry and Victor Benassi. 1981. “Occult beliefs.”American Scientist, 69:49–55.

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A Cornucopia of Darwinian Gems

a book review by Dr. Donald R. Prothero

In 1990, Richard Milner published The Encyclopedia of Evolution: Humanity’s Search for its Origins (Facts-on-File Publications, New York, 481 pp.) With a charming foreword by his childhood friend and classmate Stephen Jay Gould, the book was a smorgasbord of delightful anecdotes and stories about not only science and evolutionism, but also a startling array of other related topics as well. It was organized in an encyclopedia format, with separate topics arranged in alphabetical, rather than thematic order, so it was ideal for browsing. Its quirky but engaging approach was unique among all the books about evolution, most of which are more scholarly tomes that march through only serious topics in a natural, logical order. As such, it was sui generis, a book unlike any other, reflecting both Milner’s erudition and also his love of pop culture as well as science. In 1990, it was named by Choice “the best reference book of the year.”

Now, some 19 years later, Milner has revised and expanded his former book, with a new title and publisher. Many of the original articles are retained but updated. The original cover was a striking photo pastiche of an array of natural history objects, from fossils to snakes to a gorilla’s hand to a can of Chef Boyardee dinosaur macaroni. It has been replaced by a striking computer painting by Rosamond and Dennis Purcell of natural history objects and slogans decorating a colonnade of the historic Jaipur Palace (that Rosamond photographed in 1984 while visiting India with her friend Stephen Jay Gould). It was adapted from an illustration the Purcells created as a tribute to Gould in Natural History Magazine, except that Darwin appears in the foreground as the artist, painting Haeckel’s famous “tree of life”). In addition to Gould’s original preface (unchanged since Gould died in 2002), the new book has a foreword by American Museum anthropologist Ian Tattersall.

Milner’s professional training was in anthropology, and he served for many years as the senior editor of Natural History Magazine, the official popular publication of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Milner is famous for his one-man show, “Charles Darwin: Live and In Concert,” which he has performed in many venues. For this show, Milner wrote all the songs and lyrics, and does quick costume changes to portray one character after another. (The lyrics to two of his songs have been printed at the end of the new book). Both the old and new books reflect Milner’s broad training in evolutionary biology, paleontology, anthropology, and history of science, as well as his fascination with the bizarre and trivial phenomena of pop culture that impinge on evolution and humanity’s place in nature.

Milner’s new book preserves much of the charm and scholarship of the original, but contains many new entries that bring the original book up-to-date. Many of the illustrations have been replaced or updated, often with equally quaint images from archival sources. The image quality in this edition is much better than the muddy reproductions of the first version. There are articles on the recent discoveries of Flores man, the “Toumai skull”, “Kennewick Man”, the “Iceman”, and all the other entries on fossil hominids are updated. The other new articles reflect the developments of the past two decades. These include such topics as: “Evo-Devo”, “Biological Exuberance: the kingdom of gay animals”, “Caveman”, the Kentucky Creation Museum, the “Darwin Fish”, “Darwinian Medicine”, “Richard Dawkins: Darwin’s Rottweiler”, “Feathered Dinosaurs”, “Intelligent Design: Creationism’s Trojan Horse”, “Flint Jack: Greatest faker of prehistoric tools,” the “Fox-Farm Experiments,” “Frankenfood”, “Genographics,” “Ghost species,” the “Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon, “ “Jurassic Park”, “Kary Mullis: Irrepressible Prince of PCR,” the “Naturalistic Fallacy,” the “Pillars of Pozzuoli”, “Coprolite Industry: How Dino Dung Saved England,” “Sulfur-based ecosystems,” and the moth whose existence Darwin predicted (Xanthopan morganii praedicta). The Scopes Trial and “Scopes II” (the 1981 Arkansas creation trial) both retain their long articles, but it would have been nice to see an article on the historic 2005 Dover, Pennsylvania, trial of “intelligent design” creationism as well.

Other entries about dated and largely forgotten ideas have been dropped, as have many of the more obscure biographical entries. These include Elaine Morgan’s “aquatic ape” theory, the “Biometrician-Mendelism controversy”, the “Cambrian-Silurian controversy,” the invalid primate taxon “Ramapithecus,” Robert Ardrey’s “African Genesis” hypothesis, the “clay theory” of the origin of life, the “Paintpot Problem”, “Sperm Competition,” the falsified “Turnover Pulse” hypothesis, the “Y-5 dental pattern,” the outdated “Dinosaur Heresies”, the antiquated “Dollo’s Principle”, Ronald Reagan and his bizarre ideas about evolution, or the discredited Alvarez theory and Nemesis Star theory of dinosaur extinction, as well as the faddish “Pleistocene Overkill hypothesis” of Ice Age extinctions. Reading through the list of both new entries and deleted topics is like a trip through memory lane for me, since over the past 40 years I have seen many of the ideas that were faddish when I was a student vanish from the scene, and so many other new ideas and discoveries take their place.

Naturally, a book covering such a wide range of topics and multiple fields of expertise cannot avoid a few mistakes. For example, the article on “Nebraska Man” (in both the old and new versions) claims that the fossil that formed the basis of Osborn’s mistaken hominid reconstruction was the tooth of a pig. Actually, it is a tooth of a peccary, a New World family (Tayassuidae) of pig-like mammals that is only distantly related to the exclusively Old World family Suidae, the pigs. This is the same mistake that creationists make when they crow over Osborn’s error, so it is unfortunate that Milner doesn’t know the zoological difference between them. In addition, some typos and misspellings persist, such as spelling “ontogeny” in different ways in the cross-referencing, but correctly in the full article.

Milner has retained most of the quirky gems that made the original book such a surprise and joy to read. Some of these include the “evolution of cuteness”, P.T. Barnum’s fossil frauds, the “Flat-Earth Creationists,” the “Man in the Monkey House”, the “Clever Hans” phenomenon, the “Happy Family” of animals living together in peace, the “Iguanodon Dinner,” “Piltdown Man”, the “Sunday League,” “Tarzan,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and of course, “King Kong” and “Disney’s Fantasia.” As many of the reviewers on the book’s Amazon.com webpage commented, it is the perfect “coffee table book” — large and beautifully produced, and full of short articles which can be read whenever the fancy strikes. There is a little something here for everyone, from the scholar and scientist to the lay reader just interested in the connection between evolution and pop culture.

More importantly, the book seems to reach a readership that might never touch any other book on evolution, because it is so charming and entertaining as well as informative. It presents evolution in a non-threatening manner by luring the reader in with popular topics such as King Kong and Tarzan and “Jurassic Park”. Once the reader finishes these articles, they cannot help but browse further in the book, to find beautiful short summaries of serious scientific topics. Milner reports the facts and the failures of the creationist attacks on science without preaching. In this regard, this book is a valuable addition to the popular science bookshelf, since it reaches people sitting on the fence of evolution vs. creationism by entertaining and amusing them as it gently instructs them. In this regard, Milner achieves the same goal in popularizing science as did his late friend and classmate, Stephen Jay Gould.

Perhaps the best evidence of the book’s appeal is the reviews on its Amazon.com site. Not only do the lay readers all rave about how fun and accessible Milner’s book is, but it receives the ultimate accolade: a string of 10 perfect five-star reviews, with no dissenters or creationist critics. Such unanimous praise is unknown for books on controversial topics like evolution, and show that Milner has truly managed to reach an audience that most of us could never reach.

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Broadcasting from the Great Beyond

a book review by Donna Harris

What happens to us when we die? This has to be one of humanity’s greatest questions. After all, once you find out, there’s no way to let anyone else in on the answer.

Pim van Lommel is a cardiologist from the Netherlands. During his long career, he has resuscitated untold numbers of cardiac arrest survivors, and became intrigued by their stories of Near Death Experiences (NDEs). In addition to reviewing the available literature and past studies, in 2001 van Lommel’s interest drove him to lead his own larger study of cardiac arrest patients. While that study was published in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet, and van Pommel has published scientific papers and authored chapters in other medical works, this is his first book.

The book itself is readable and organized. We’re led deeper into the subject, as the author first establishes a historical foundation by recounting a description of the NDE phenomenon, then lays the groundwork for his theory, which essentially applies quantum physics to biological systems. The early chapters on the actual reported contents of NDEs are an entertaining primer through these experiences.

It’s easy to agree with his observation that NDEs occur when the brain is essentially stopped. If there is no blood flow, and no electrical activity, how can the cells in the brain continue to register visual and auditory input?

Van Lommel’s answer is that consciousness is not just located in the brain, but is a result of electro-magnetic fields that hold experiences and are non-local and possibly eternal. He asserts the analogy that much like a TV or radio station continues to broadcast even when we have no receiver to pick up the station, our consciousness continues to function after the death of the body and brain.

As the reader progresses through the book, there are questions not addressed that detract from the author’s message. The fact that all the research is far from gold-standard double-blind studies, but is instead based on self-reported surveys and interviews — in many cases years after the initial event — casts serious doubt on the accuracy of those memories.

Van Lommel also mentions an increase in “psychic” or intuitive abilities by NDErs, without even blinking a skeptical eye. Since any type of paranormal or intuitive power remains unproven, it is troubling that the author doesn’t question these abilities, and just includes them as accepted facts.

Van Lommel’s theories of the origins of consciousness are based on theories in quantum physics and the role of DNA. The lay reader can only assume that van Lommel is interpreting the theories correctly, since he himself is not a physicist or an evolutionary biologist, but a medical doctor. But they make for interesting, if not challenging, reading. Be prepared for your brain to hurt, and some readers may want to review these sections more than once.

Another area that deserves further exploration involves the differences between survivors. In his own study, van Lommel reports that of 344 cardiac arrest survivors, 62 patients (18%) reported a Near Death Experience. However, that still leaves 82% (282 patients) who didn’t. And there were no striking differences between the two groups, such as duration of arrest, medication used, etc. If van Lommel’s theory is correct, what accounts for the different experiences? Why were the radio stations of the non-NDE patients not broadcasting?

Despite the fact that Van Lommel fails to convince skeptical readers that his ideas and theories are correct, the author remains sympathetic in that he doesn’t take an aggressive, “here’s my magic answer” approach. He clearly states that he is presenting a hypothesis and, as far as the lay reader can tell, it appears to be worthy of more exploration and consideration, even though some may argue the whole idea lacks plausibility.

Overall, the book is an interesting exploration of the phenomenon of the near death experience, and worth the read if you wish to think and be challenged. But in the end he did not convince this skeptic.

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Distorting Darwin

a film review by Jonathan Lowe

IN A RECENT DOCUMENTARY FILM produced by Creation Ministries and Fathom Media, Charles Darwin is first admired as a curious and meticulous observer before his conclusions are then explained away. The movie has high production values, with live actors in period costumes, and impressive graphics. Subtitles appear in 18 languages. There is an air of authority about the docudrama, with the producer boasting that it “matches or exceeds” the quality produced by Hollywood films. Even the dismissal of Darwin’s theories comes on gradually, and is not hammered home, but rather casually discussed. Yet the conclusion is that modern science has since shown that Darwin erred, particularly about the length of time for geologic and biologic processes. The producers never consider, as most Christian scientists now accept, that the universe began with the Big Bang billions of years ago. Instead, a literal interpretation of Genesis is assumed, along with a young Earth. So several examples of localized glacial floods that Darwin somehow “missed” are cited in support of the Genesis account of a worldwide flood. Much is implied, since actual discussion would reveal no direct link in logic.

Just as the producers of Ben Stein’s film Expelled deceived interview subjects by not disclosing the true nature of the project, Fathom Media failed to inform three professional historians of science that this film about the subject of their professional study was actually an anti-evolution creationist tract. The three historians are noted Darwin scholars: Peter Bowler, James Moore, and Adrian Desmond. Not only did the producers not deny the charge, they admitted it was true. According to the CEO of Creation Ministries UK, Phil Bell, they established a “front company” called Fathom Media in order to convince experts such as Peter Bowler, who otherwise would not likely have agreed to be interviewed if they knew the film was an “overtly Creationist” production: “At the end of the day, [when] people see ‘Creationist’, instantly the shutters go up and that would have shut us off from talking to the sort of experts, such as Professor Bowler, that we wanted to get to.” Distinguishing between lies of commission and lies of omission, Bell explained that the interview deception was more of the latter: “Well, it could be called deceptive. But I think, at the end of the day … more people are concerned about how we’ve made a documentary, that’s a world-class documentary, clearly with wonderful footage, with excellent interviews, and balanced open discussion,” and that he had not violated the 9th commandment of bearing false witness against the historians because “Nobody was told any lies.” Right.

What follows are claims made in the film, followed by responses from scientists that I interviewed. Responding to the claims are John R. Hutchinson, Brian Charlesworth, and Nick Matzke. Dr. Brian Charlesworth is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He obtained his Ph.D. in genetics at Cambridge, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. He received the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 2000, and the Darwin-Wallace Medal of the Linnean Society in 2010. His research interests include population genetics, molecular evolution and genome evolution, and he has published over 200 research papers and three books. Dr. John Hutchinson holds a Ph.D. in Integrative Biology at the University of California, and earned a National Science Foundation bioinformatics Post Doc at the Biomechanical Engineering Division of Stanford University. He lectures in Evolutionary Biomechanics, and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Theoretical Biology. Nick Matzke is a graduate student instructor in Integrative Biology and Evolutionary Biology at Berkeley, and holds degrees in biology, chemistry, and geography. He is former Public Information Director at the National Center for Science Education.

Claim: The chance of the four bar mechanisms of the human knee joint occurring by evolution is zero. There are too many changes that have to occur simultaneously.

John R. Hutchinson: “This ‘irreducible complexity’ argument makes numerous fatal flaws. An important one is that evolution proceeds by using old structures for new functions. It is thus a logical fallacy that the changes must occur simultaneously. Furthermore, the “four bar linkage” system of the “human” knee is seen (with subtle or striking variations) in virtually all land-dwelling four-limbed vertebrates (tetrapods), and so it is not an exclusively human feature. Our system shows subtle modifications of the general tetrapod theme that are specializations for bipedalism from a more primitive system of ligaments, but still reveals the community of descent in its common structure. Considering the similar (but varying according to function) morphological patterns in these ligaments, this is actually strong evidence for evolution.”

Claim: Darwin was influenced by books on geology postulating a long, slow process of deep time, and so he overlooked evidence that geological processes occur rapidly. He also transferred his pre-conception of deep time to geology. Today he would be disappointed by the evidence for his theory.

Hutchinson: “Of course some geological processes proceed swiftly but others, like continental drift (which Darwin didn’t know about but is important for evolutionary science today), have been proven (as much as science can prove things) to be painfully slow. To allege that Darwin would be unhappy about the current state of the evidence presupposes the assumption that all geological processes are fast. Thousands of expert geologists today would not agree with that statement, which would give Darwin succor, not lament.”

Claim: Darwin’s famous finches can be explained by climate changes with cycles longer than the short time of his observations. Finches’ beaks get bigger and smaller in reaction to climate over tens of years, not tens of millions.

Hutchinson: “Peter and Rosemary Grant’s studies since the 1960s of the finch populations have shown some slow and some “fast” changes as a result of (or correlated with) the local environment, but this in itself was not surprising. It is exactly what evolutionary theory predicts: rates will vary depending on environmental conditions. The recorded changes within finch species have been small relative to the changes that are inferred to have happened over thousands or millions of years between finches. Hence, observations have strengthened, not weakened, evolutionary theory.”

Claim: The genomes of plants and animals show much redundancy. This goes against the idea of randomness. There is an abundance of information that is utilized for adaptation, and this is unexplained by any selective mechanism.

Hutchinson: “This is a total non sequitur. Some redundancy is understood as gene duplication, which is a rather random event. Some makes sense as building safety factors against the loss of critical genes by genetic damage or error. It is not unexplained. It is completely reasonable in a modern evolutionary sense. Things that can be ‘utilized for adaptation’ cannot be ‘unexplained by any selective mechanism’ because the very process of adaptation involves selection.”

Matzke: “The genomes of animals and plants, at least those with large genomes like humans, are mostly junk. And whatever you’ve heard from creationists, or even certain poorly-informed scientists, saying that ‘junk DNA’ isn’t junk is mostly wrong. The fundamental fact supporting the idea that most DNA is basically junk is the fact that genome size in complex multicellular plants and animals varies hugely (~100 times smaller to ~100 times larger than the human genome), and doesn’t correlate with organismal complexity. Some ferns and salamanders have genomes dozens of times bigger than the human genome. Some fish are 10 times smaller. They all have roughly the same number and type of genes, and roughly equivalent complexity.”

Claim: The beauty of the peacock’s tail worried Darwin because it serves no function as camouflage, and a huge amount of genetic information went into creating the tail’s intricate structure. Darwin created the theory of sexual selection to explain why the tail feathers are so beautiful, but experiments have shown that females cannot detect some of the features, and none have any real effect on selection.

Hutchinson: “This is misconstruing a large body of research on sexual selection. As in any field of science some ideas have changed over two centuries, but sexual selection is still heavily favored as a major evolutionary mechanism. In some cases the targets of selection are counterintuitive, and females may choose traits that are not obvious or are indirectly correlated with obvious traits. But that is not a fatal flaw for sexual selection. It has just modified it. That evolutionary biologists and not creationists have discovered this information is rather telling. Creationists have contributed nothing to this area.”

Charlesworth: “There is indeed a large body of research confirming that female animals do favour males with ornaments such as the peacock’s tail, just as Darwin postulated. Sexual selection is one of the best documented phenomena in evolutionary biology.”

Claim: Darwin made the mistake of believing that layers of sediment and lava occurred in long ages in the Andes, when in fact the lava was injected in much more recent volcanic activity. Liquid rock was injected as parallel silt in preexisting soft sediment, negating the need for deep time.

Hutchinson: “Intrusions of volcanic material can enter into many younger/older rocks and confuse dating, but that does not pose any significant problem for the theory of deep time. It is just a methodological challenge for determining precise ages. A vast body of astronomical, paleontological, geological, chemical/physical, and other evidence overwhelmingly shows that the universe is billions of years old and the Earth about 4.7 billion years old. There is no convincingly contrary scientific evidence.”

Claim: Darwin believed that some races were inferior to the white race, which predisposed him to believe that some humans did not come from the same source.

Hutchinson: “This was the predominant view of many people worldwide at the time and probably since the dawn of human culture. It is a classic historiographic error to judge people of the past by today’s standards and not the standards of their time. It is thus no surprise that Darwin had some views that some today might consider racist. But compared against the cultural norm of the time Darwin was actually progressive, e.g. in disfavoring slavery.”

Charlesworth: “Darwin in fact proposed that all humans originated in Africa from a common ancestor with chimps and gorillas. Modern research in paleontology and genetics has confirmed this view, with many fossil intermediates between apes and humans, and a high degree of DNA sequence similarity among modern humans that shows that they shared a common ancestor much more recently than their common ancestor with apes. Given the record of racism and slave-ownership among creationist Christians in the U.S. and elsewhere, it is unfair to point to some remarks of Darwin about inferior races. In his autobiography, Darwin mentions his friendship with a black taxidermist in Edinburgh, whom he describes as an intelligent and pleasant person, and of course he abhorred slavery.”

Claim: The argument for evolution is circular, and full of errors. Naturalism is a paradigm of philosophy and there is no quarrel between religion and science — the quarrel is between naturalism and science.

Hutchinson: “This trots out some old chestnuts of creationism that have been thoroughly demolished in the past by scientists and philosophers. Evolution is descent with modification. That is not circular. The claim is idle semantics at best. Science does not work except in a naturalistic paradigm, so the two are inseparable. What happens between religion and science/naturalism is up to the individual to decide.”

Charlesworth: “Biologists study evolution in exactly the same way as other scientists deal with historical phenomena. They examine the available facts concerning what contemporary processes could operate to explain them on the assumption that these would have operated in much the same way in the past as in the present (just as we all assume the sun will rise tomorrow), and see how well they explain the historical patterns. This works amazingly well. In the Origin of Species, Darwin provided a whole series of facts about biology that make perfect sense in the light of evolution — descent with modification. Subsequent research has thrown up a huge number of others. Any of these can of course be explained as an arbitrary whim of a Creator, so creationism can never be falsified, in contrast to evolutionary hypotheses. In addition, the mechanism of evolution by random mutation and natural selection (and some other processes unknown to Darwin) is a typical scientific theory, which has been receiving ever-increasing support over the 150 years since Darwin. Any good book on evolution lays this out. The creationists disparage evolutionary biology because it conflicts with their religious beliefs, and they are simply not prepared to face up to the evidence. While there are plenty of open questions, and the accepted interpretations of many specific phenomena have changed over the years, this is true of even the most solidly established sciences such as physics. Science would grind to a halt if we had complete explanations of everything. Appealing to non-natural processes to explain away difficulties simply means you are not doing science.”

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Was Hypatia of Alexandria a Scientist?

a film review by S. James Killings

THE FILM AGORA, RELEASED IN THEATRES IN LATE 2009 in Spain and this summer in the United States, portrays an unlikely heroine for the popular American audience — the ancient mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, played by Rachel Weisz. Although renowned as a Neo-Platonic philosopher during her lifetime, she is remembered more often for her death than for her life. In 415 AD the pagan Hypatia was caught up in the political and religious violence that routinely swept Alexandria and murdered by a group of fanatical Christian monks who were intent on making an example of her. One of her colleagues, the Syrian Damascius, placed the blame squarely on the Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria and his Christian followers.

In the 18th century, the Enlightenment thinkers John Toland and particularly Voltaire seized on Damascius’ story of Hypatia’s death as symbolic of the antagonistic nature the Christian religion had toward the freedom of inquiry. They imagined her as a martyred symbol of free thought who was destroyed by the irrational dogmas of the growing ecclesiastical patriarchy. Her death, according to her blossoming legend, set back free inquiry a thousand years and ended the scientific hopes of the Hellenistic Age. This image of Hypatia as an Enlightenment symbol was to have far-reaching influence well into the 20th century, as Maria Dzielska explains in her book, Hypatia of Alexandria, so much so that it has become difficult now to untangle the historical Hypatia from her literary legend. Amenábar’s Hypatia, also apparently influenced by Carl Sagan’s portrayal of her in his documentary film Cosmos, appears to be another cultural product of this Enlightenment legend.

The intersections of religion and science and rising concerns over religious fundamentalism have gripped the news in recent years, so it is no wonder Amenábar has resurrected Voltaire’s Enlightenment emblem again. But Hypatia’s portrayal as scientific heroine in the movie deserves some scrutiny not the least to separate her legend from history for those who have not studied ancient philosophy, but also to give credit where credit is due for the advancement of scientific reasoning.

The historical life of Hypatia is shrouded in the mists of the past. She was the daughter of the mathematician Theon, who was known to have been associated with the Museion of Alexandria in the 4th century. What we know of her mathematical work (and much of her life) comes from a Byzantine history, the Suda, compiled five centuries after her death. She is thought to have written commentaries on the conics of Apollonius and the Arithmetica of Diophantus, along with an introduction to astronomical treatises, none of which have survived. It has been argued that she contributed a not insignificant part to her father’s editions of Euclid and Ptolemy, and perhaps all of her commentaries were collaborations with her father. She taught at the Neo-Platonic School in Alexandria, an institution separate from the Museion. As a teacher of Plato and Aristotle, according to the Suda, she became famous throughout Alexandria. She has often been associated with the invention of the hydrometer, a tool used to measure the density of liquids, but the wording of the evidence — Synesius of Cyrene’s letter to her — casts doubt on that score.

Although we cannot be completely certain of the nature of Hypatia’s mathematical work, the commentaries and work attributed to her in the Suda do suggest that she was interested in astronomy. Apollonius described the eccentric movements of the planets, their epicycles and deferents and described the mathematical properties of the ellipse, hyperbola and parabola. Ptolemy builds on Apollonius’ work to construct his geocentric model of the planets. Diophantus’ Arithmetica provides examples of quadratic equations that are necessary to determine the properties of curves. Because of her association with the Neo-Platonic school in the 4th century Near-East, her work may have had something to do with the Plotine criticism of astrology. Plotinus, the founder of the Neo-Platonic school, was highly skeptical of astrological divination, and so we would expect was Hypatia.

Confused by the irrational properties given by astrologers to this or that planet as it moved through the Zodiac, Plotinus asked: “What is the comprehensive principle of coordination [of the movements of the planets]? Establish this and we have a reasonable basis for divination.…” Plotinus believed the planets were living beings that paradoxically had no will but were bound to follow a set course through the heavens. In her studies of conics and curves, Hypatia may have thought to determine the “comprehensive principle of coordination” of these heavenly beings in order to make divination more rational. We may never know. But of the Neo-Platonists of her era — Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, Damascius — Hypatia appears to have been unique in her focus on astronomy and this may have contributed to her popularity (and animosity toward her) in the superstitious culture of Egyptian Alexandria.

The scientific subplot of the movie has Hypatia questioning the geocentric theory of the planets as espoused by Aristotle and then Ptolemy. Amenábar’s Hypatia engages in physics and mathematics in her pursuit. Her empirical experiment with the falling grain sack aboard the ship proves that gravity has the same effect on falling objects whether moving forward or standing still. She excitedly concludes that the Earth could be moving forward in the heavens and we could be unaware of it (the logic of her conclusion is not explained in the film). This notion of a moving, non-stationary Earth, is in contravention to the Aristotelian idea of gravity which held that earth, as one of the four elements, was drawn to its natural place at the centre of the spherical universe, which also comprised the other three elements, water, air and lastly fire. Nonetheless, her experiment aboard the ship opens her up to questioning Ptolemy’s geocentric planetary model of celestial spheres and epicycles. Using her knowledge of Apollonian conics, mathematics, and a clinometer, she at length correctly deduces the elliptical orbits of the planets (Kepler’s first law of planetary motion) in a helio-centric (Copernican) system, a pair of discoveries that would have been 1200 years before their time.

The kind of reasoning that Amenábar’s Hypatia engages in, with the falling grain sack and the theoretical knowledge drawn from observation and experiment, is known as empiricism. It is a logical method so fundamental to our modern approach to science, especially astronomy, that it is difficult, if not impossible, for us to comprehend any useful scientific enterprise without it. But empiricism is the product of a long history of philosophers beginning principally with Avicenna in the 11th century and practiced by the likes of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler in the cause of astronomy in the 16th century. It was developed into a philosophical practice through the Enlightenment principally by John Locke and David Hume. This mode of thought would have been completely alien to the real Hypatia of Alexandria, not because her mind was not equipped for such paths, but because she, her colleagues, her father, and their predecessors had no experience in nor knowledge of such logical methods. Moreover, as a 4th century Platonist, Hypatia likely mistrusted physical observation altogether and believed, like her mentor Plotinus, that she could uncover the mysteries of the universe by ratiocination alone.

The story of her menstrual rags in the Suda was meant to illustrate this point: as a female philosopher, Hypatia was not interested in the physical, only the metaphysical. To employ empiricism to call into question Aristotle she would have had to first call into question her entire metaphysical philosophical tradition and invent almost ex nihilo a whole new and mature method of reasoning. In other words, the real Hypatia would have been more likely to attribute the physical properties of the falling grain sack to the god Seraphis, than to the possibility that it meant the Earth was moving in the heavens in contradiction to Aristotle. She simply had no body of evidence nor rational means to conclude otherwise. It would take another millennia and considerable advances in other scientific areas — especially in logic, argumentation, mathematics, instrumentation and observation — before thinkers could begin to accurately describe the motions of the planets and the workings of the heavens.

Without these logical methods and evidence, and as a Neo-Platonist, Hypatia’s astronomical study of conics and curves would have been a purely philosophical and mathematical pursuit, exercised in the cloistered confines of the Alexandrian Library, divorced from empirical observation. Nowadays, it is strange to contemplate astronomy without empiricism, but the Platonic philosopher Hypatia would have reveled in it. If we must give her a modern scientific title by which she can be recognized, it would be more accurate to describe her as a mathematician in the purest sense.

We ought not to diminish nor elevate Hypatia’s contribution to science. Making too much of her legend does great disservice to the multitude of men and women throughout history who have made modern science possible. If any great credit is due to the advancement of scientific reasoning and the birth of the Modern Age it is not to a rediscovered Hypatia, but to the many thinkers and philosophers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment who, after more than two millennia, first put into words and practice a revolution in our understanding of the universe. Amenábar has seemingly made Hypatia into a symbol of the modern scientific method. Voltaire would have approved.

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Waterworld
A review of The Flooded Earth:
Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps

review by James N. Gardner

IS ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING the cataclysmic threat that Al Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change proclaim it to be? Or do powerful natural forces like variable solar output, plate tectonics, and volcanic activity dwarf the climate impact of human-generated greenhouse gases?

That is the deep question that lurks beneath the surface of a fascinating new book — The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps — by University of Washington scientist Peter D. Ward. Ward, co-author of the highly acclaimed Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, is at his best when he provides snapshots of the climate extremes our planet has experienced over the billions of years of its existence. Here is his description of ancient episodes of global warming that make the dire warnings of current climate prognosticators seem almost benign:

Long before humans were even a gleam in nature’s eye, the convergence of geological forces repeatedly caused the planet to heat up. Such events, however rare, hugely altered life and its evolution. The warming had resulted from enormous volumes of carbon dioxide that emanated from the flood basalts, creating atmospheric greenhouse conditions that quickly heated the planet to a point that the poles were nearly as warm as the equator, leading the normal winds and ocean currents to diminish and in some cases totally stop. A stilled ocean, eventually even on its surface regions, loses oxygen. The apparent result was a series of nasty events, such as oceanwide “dead zones” … where conditions of eutrophication — where a body of water first warms and then loses its oxygen as its enclosed life dies and then rots — have eliminated all the life-giving oxygen in the water.

If nature is capable of this level of environmental catastrophe on its own, just how much can we feeble humans really influence the future evolution of the vast, complex global climate system? The optimistic answer, favored by Ward, is that humankind is now firmly in the driver’s seat of climate change:

As I give talks around the country about a newly discovered phenomenon of the deep past greenhouse extinctions, people always ask about the relevance of these studies to the present and near future. That question is simple to answer, at least for me: what happened in the past can and will happen again if we continue to heat the planet at present rates.

Ward’s implication is that if we humans will only cease our global warming malefactions, the violent climatic oscillations he so colorfully documents — oscillations that predate by millions of years humanity’s evolutionary emergence on the savannahs of Africa — will be brought under tolerable control.

The pessimist would argue that the mountain of geological evidence assembled and expertly presented by Ward points to precisely the opposite conclusion — that what happened in the past can and will happen again regardless of what human beings do.

What seems incontrovertible from Ward’s compelling narrative is that, irrespective of the precise causal interplay of human-induced and natural factors, the Earth’s deep history offers ample evidence that the atmospheric conditions on this planet are likely to continue to fluctuate dramatically, with potentially dire consequences for the biosphere. From the mysterious Permian extinction 250 million years ago, in which 96% of all marine species went extinct, to the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years which killed off the dinosaurs, the story of our planet’s long environmental history is a tale of repeated episodes of dramatic change that have threatened the very survival of complex life.

In the face of this overwhelming evidentiary record, only a cock-eyed optimist would contend that what is past is not prologue.

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How Much Does Being Right Matter?

by Dr. David H. Voelker

THE MARKET FOR BOOKS about how ordinary people make thinking mistakes being fairly saturated (Predictably Irrational, Sway, Nudge), it makes sense that someone would turn the spotlight on a group that’s supposed to mess up less than the rest: experts. Journalist David Freedman walks us through an impressive list of false and conflicting claims made by experts in a variety of fields that really drives home the dubiousness of much — if not most — of what passes for expert wisdom. The book is worth this carefully assembled and annotated collection of dueling truth claims alone.

There’s plenty of blame for our expert misinformation to go around, says Freedman. From respected scientists to financial wizards to self-appointed relationship gurus, people whom we credit with specialized knowledge conduct sloppy research, suppress disconfirming data, and leap to unwarranted conclusions. Journalists oversimplify and misrepresent study findings. Bad advice thrives in part because the public demands easy fixes that are “resonant, provocative and colorful.”

We would expect Wrong to cover famous cases of expert fraud like the South Korean human embryo cloning scandal, and it does. Most of the expert errors documented here, however, are not intentional, but originate in the cognitive biases to which everyone is prone. Like the rest of us, experts have sharper eyes for data that supports their hypotheses, claim to have started out looking for what they eventually found, and play to their employers’ metrics (research funding agencies). Nor are peer review and other forms of self-regulation much of a remedy: Thomas Kuhn showed some fifty years ago how the practices of scientific communities reinforce and perpetuate prevailing paradigms.

It would be unremarkable to learn that experts sometimes make mistakes, but if Wrong is right, the magnitude of the problem is much greater than most people suspect. The findings of two out of every three published medical studies fail to hold up. When you consider that the truth claims of less highly-educated and credentialed experts like the inventor of the latest diet or management fad are on average even less reliable, you realize we’re awash in untrustworthy advice.

Books written to hammer a single point are vulnerable to overstating their case, and Freedman’s expert targets are sometimes damned if they do and damned if they don’t. For example, he criticizes mainstream scientific research for careless procedures and small, unrepresentative samples but later defends junk science because, even though its procedural rigor and signal to noise ratio are typically even lower, it occasionally stumbles upon a nugget missed by the pros. That’s having it both ways. Similarly, he fails to take his own advice against retrospective sense-making when he says the warning signs in a famous case of scientific fraud were “glaringly obvious” when looked back upon.

Freedman knows his task leaves him open to the charge of begging the question: the same lack of certainty he says accompanies expert judgments must also apply to his own assumptions that particular expert claims are wrong. I agree with his defense that, though any individual claim may be mistaken, accumulating and pooling evidence allows us to converge on the truth. A historical progression of geographic maps provides an example: early maps of the world are wildly discrepant, but the shapes of the continents and details in their coastlines gradually converge and stabilize across cartographers over time.

So common are the serious errors catalogued in Wrong by even the most eminent researchers and institutions, though, and so influential are false claims in directing the flow of dollars and in propping up whole industries and reputations, that by the time you reach the simple guidelines at the end of the book for knowing when to suspect that an expert opinion might be wrong, it feels the equivalent of being advised to move a foot inland from the beach to protect against tsunamis.

Wrong’s abundant examples of how experts fail us demonstrate how complex the world is. The contingencies of cause-and-effect relationships can be many and difficult to trace, and good advice in one situation can lead to disastrous results in another.

Unfortunately, directing experts (or the middlemen who report their work) to qualify their truth claims with all of the ways they could be wrong, and publicizing negative findings as well as positive ones, are no solution. That just adds to the pile of stuff we have to sift through, and makes it harder for our brains to fulfill what is perhaps their most important function, and is the main reason we rely on experts in the first place: information reduction; sorting through the noise for the signal. The best we can hope to do (whether expert or layman) is narrow the confidence intervals of our predictions a little, and be wrong a little less often.

On the surface, Wrong is about the untrustworthiness of expert advice, but it has much deeper implications. As William James observed a century ago: “Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.”

Even though experts might eventually converge on the truth about specific clearly defined causal relationships, across the multitude of main effects and complex interactions that each of us experiences in a typical lifetime, the saying, “the truth will out,” is false. At any given time, a substantial number of our individual and shared beliefs about the causes of those effects are simply wrong. We’re guaranteed to take to our graves false conclusions about why this diet did or didn’t work for us, why that relationship went sour, or whether our grown child wouldn’t have committed spousal abuse if only we’d spared the rod.

The degree to which the truth doesn’t “out” is the latitude that experts — and anyone, for that matter — have to construct social realities with impunity. For the objectively false claims described in Wrong and others we hear every day to have the power they do to launch movements, sell products, determine government policy and distribute social rewards, being right doesn’t matter as much as being accepted.

That, I think, is the real lesson of Wrong.

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If you don’t understand evolutionary biology, don’t write a book about it!

by Donald R. Prothero

THE DARWIN CELEBRATIONS OF 2009 led to a glut of books about evolution, which took a wide variety of approaches. Most books were written by biologists, paleontologists, or historians trained in the subject; others were written by the creationists trying to counter all the Darwin publicity. Yet there are books that fall into neither of these categories. What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini (abbreviated FPP hereafter) is a wrongheaded effort by a philosopher and a cognitive scientist (neither of whom has any firsthand research experience relevant to evolutionary biology) to critique natural selection.

The confusion begins with the title. The authors state up front that they are both atheists, accept the fact that life has evolved, and do not agree with creationism or “intelligent design”—yet they used a title that is bound to boost sales by giving creationists the impression that this is a serious scientific critique of evolutionary biology. In particular, the use of Darwin’s name in the title (talking about “Darwinism” rather than modern evolutionary biology, or even 1950s-style “Neo-Darwinism”) is a classic creationist tactic. In fact, modern evolutionary biology only vaguely resembles what Darwin thought 150 years ago. So what if Darwin got a few things wrong? We’ve learned a lot in the past century and a half! What is remarkable is how much Darwin got right despite the fact that he knew nothing about genetics, and very little about the fossil record. Throughout the book, FPP resurrect some of the hoariest discredited creationist arguments (such as “natural selection is tautological”), showing that they have not only failed to acquire any relevant training in evolutionary biology, but also have not understood the standard responses to these creationist canards.

Since FPP don’t deny that life has evolved, or that all life is related by a patterns of ancestry and descent (the chief issue that bothers creationists), FPP’s entire convoluted argument is against Darwin’s main mechanism for evolution, natural selection. There are some evolutionary biologists who have argued that natural selection is not the exclusive explanation for all aspects of life’s evolution, from Stuart Kauffman’s emphasis on natural self-organizing systems, to Stephen Jay Gould’s push to recognize contingency and hierarchy in evolutionary biology. But none of these scientists questions the idea that natural selection is real, or that it has a very important role to play in the evolution of new species. FPP review many of the recent developments in evolutionary biology, from neutralism to group selection to self-organizing systems to jumping genes to evo-devo. These important scientific discoveries have certainly broadened our understanding of how evolution works, but none of the people who made these discoveries doubt that natural selection still plays an important role in the process of evolution.

In effect, what FPP are suggesting is that each time we learn more about the evolutionary process, all of what we knew before must have been wrong! There are some instances (known as “scientific revolutions”) where scientific discoveries have radically changed the foundation of a field and thrown out the entire paradigm, but none of the examples the FPP discuss are of that nature. They are simply challenges to a narrow and restrictive form of Neo-Darwinism, not to the basic premise that natural selection is a very important (if not the most important) component of evolutionary change.

Much of the book consists of beating dead horses and straw men as if biology has learned nothing since the 1950s. FPP talk about gene linkages and “free rides” of one gene upon another, about the laws of form and Fibonacci series in organisms, and about endogenous factors affecting form and development despite the fact that biologists have been working hard for many years to understand and explain these phenomena. If FPP bothered to read any of the recent literature on these subjects over the past 30 years, they would have found that these phenomena are pretty well understood. They do not force us to throw out the baby of natural selection with the bathwater of the failed ideas that evolutionary biology has rejected.

To FPP, the fundamental problem is this: how do we decide which features are selected for, and which ones are “free riders” invisible to natural selection? In their approach, if most of evolution is about “free riders” that are not selected for or against, then natural selection is irrelevant. They discuss the classic 1979 paper by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.” In that paper, Gould and Lewontin were criticizing the then-prevalent naïve form of extreme panselectionism in which every tiny aspect of an organism was presumed to be subject to natural selection in some way, even if we can’t detect it. Gould and Lewontin rightly pointed out that (like the spandrels which are functional byproducts of two arches meeting), many features of organisms are due to structural or functional constraints, and we should not assume that such features are fine-tuned by natural selection. Most evolutionary biologists have taken the Gould and Lewontin (1979) paper in the spirit in which it was intended, and there is plenty of research now into functional/ structural constraints. When I attend professional meetings, I find very little of the naïve panselectionism that I encountered in my evolution classes and textbooks of the 1970s.

Yet FPP take the Gould/Lewontin critique too far, and make the absurd claim that because some features are possibly constrained and not fine-tuned by natural selection, we cannot assume that natural selection works anywhere. What about all those studies that demonstrate tight correlations of cause and effect between a feature and the selective response that occurs when nature intervenes? According to FPP, these are not conclusive enough. Therefore, whenever we have a large data set that shows a strong correlation between say, obesity and heart disease, or increases in carbon dioxide and global warming, we cannot even begin to suggest that there might be a causal connection. If this is the angle that FPP are pushing, then they have a dispute with almost all of science, not just evolutionary biology.

Their claim is that if we see an apparent feature of an organism, and then determine what natural selection does to organisms which possess this feature, we cannot rule out the possibility that there was some unknown, invisible characteristic of the organism that caused differential survival, rather than the obvious conclusion that it was due to natural selection on the features we can study. This is false on several counts. First of all, there are many experiments (not acknowledged by FPP) that have done careful work with controls and minimizing the variables that conclusively show natural selection to be the only reasonable explanation for the results. And secondly, what are these alleged “invisible forces” that might explain survival better than natural selection? How the heck do we evaluate them? In FPP’s view, natural selection is a fine-tuned discriminator that can tell the difference between all these arbitrary categories that philosophers with no experience in biology can imagine. In reality, natural selection is a coarse filter. Some features of an organism appear to make a difference, and others are indeed free riders. But the overwhelming evidence of 30 years’ worth of natural and laboratory experiments show that natural selection indeed works, and there is no practical reason to worry about “invisible” (and untestable) causes when a clear cause-and-effect chain has been established.

If you found the previous discussion confusing and hard to follow, it is no accident. The thinking and writing of FPP are so muddled and verbose and confusing that most people (including most evolutionary biologists who reviewed it) couldn’t make much sense of the book, either. In fact, FPP raise points that amount to philosophical hair-splitting and make no real difference to practicing biologists.

There are many instances of where philosophers can contribute insights to the activities of others. But in the philosophy of science, it is much trickier. Some philosophers have built whole careers out of trying to explain what scientists should do, without any regard to the reality of what scientists actually do. Yet scientists keep on making big discoveries and changing our world, oblivious to philosophers who waste time arguing about idealized views of science. Here we see another examples of outsiders like FPP who would be well advised to spend some time doing real evolutionary biology, and becoming familiar with the recent research and debates, instead of beating dead horses (such as 1960s–1970s panselectionism) and strawmen arguments from 40 years ago.

Even more annoying is the fact that FPP don’t give evolutionary biologists much credit for understanding what they do, modifying their approaches as new fields such as evo-devo have appeared, and being careful and self-critical not to overextend their conclusions. Most biologists are very cautious about asserting cause and effect relationships between some feature and natural selection unless they have done all the necessary controls and dealt with all the variables; otherwise, their work would not pass peer review and be published. As their confusion and errors clearly demonstrate, FPP are outsiders with a distorted, mistaken view of the entire field who don’t understand the field well enough to level valid criticisms. When they have done their homework and acquired the relevant training, then the evolutionary biology community might take them seriously.

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