The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

The Glare of Other Suns
An inside look at how astronomers
are searching for extrasolar planets

by Apurva Narechania

The main road on Palomar Mountain ends at a cottage called the Monastery. The Monastery houses sleeping astronomers during the day so they can look into the sky at night. Opening a Monastery blackout shade in midday is like emerging from a matinée. The light of Southern California hurts when training to bear the night.

At around 4 pm on a clear day in December, I rolled out of bed to eat an early dinner prepared by Dipali Crosse, an earnest woman who makes tasty food from the kind of enormous boxes and cans that weigh down the shelves at Costco. Her food is fit for lumberjacks. This is our one good meal of the day. At the oak table, astronomers are already sitting shoulder to shoulder, some chairs angled around inconvenient corners. The Monastery has 12 rooms. On a normal observing run, only a few are occupied. But this week, the place is full. A few even had to shack up at the reservation casino a couple thousand feet down Palomar Mountain. Everyone is in town to see planets. Around stars hundreds of light years away, we now know there are other worlds. But they are impossibly faint, ghosts around the already dim suns that sustain them. On this trip, the light of those stars will be collected and then pared to find the planets in their orbit.

I had first seen the instrument that does the paring at Ben Oppenheimer’s lab at the American Museum of Natural History (I also work at the AMNH as a biologist in the Genomics Department). Oppenheimer is an astrophysicist and his is one of only three ground-based systems designed to visualize extrasolar planets. With its cover off nearly 19 optical surfaces sat exposed, each beaming light to another, and ultimately to a coronograph, a device that functions as an occulter, and is at the heart of any astronomical instrument designed to see things other than stars. Oppenheimer and his colleagues have been working on this instrument for nearly six years. Dubbed Project 1640, the technology uses adaptive optics to calm the distortions inflicted by atmospheric turbulence, and speckle suppression to dampen the residual diffractive light that remains from the star even after it has been occulted. Twentythree computers automate the synergy of nearly 4,000 movable parts. On a five night observing run on the 200-inch Hale telescope—the largest at Palomar and one of the largest in the world—the detector will collect 500GB of data. But most of the data, most of the light, is useless. The instrument must cut through the glare of the nighttime sky to image shy planets. Light from a star saturates its satellites. The starlight itself is extraneous, annoying even. “Once you’ve taken the best picture your technology will allow,” said Oppenheimer, “you have to delete it.” One photon in ten million comes from the world Oppenheimer most wants to see. It’s like staring into the light of a thousand suns or searching for Venus at noon. Oppenheimer deletes his way to clarity.

We end dinner with obscene amounts of coffee, and head to the telescope at dusk. Sasha Hinkley, a postdoc in astrophysics at Caltech and one of Oppenheimer’s former students, is already there, suspended from the end of the telescope in the Cassegrain cage. The cage is a metal enclosure that cradles the fivemeter mirror, forming a giant cup with access to the Hale’s key optics and Project 1640’s instrument. The telescope dwarfs the cage. It rises nearly 13 stories wrapped in a white dome of precious steel borrowed from the industrial machine of WWII America. On the outside about three quarters of the way up, a catwalk skirts the dome and moves as the telescope slews so that astronomers catching a quick smoke might see the lights of Temecula give way to the steady glow of LA County without lifting a foot. The dome is otherworldly whether you’re in it, on it, or looking at it in full moonlight as I did on my first night. Against the dark sky it stands in blanched relief, a functional monument, every part of its interior and exterior curvature accessible and working. Climbing around the telescope, I realized how reassuring corners are. There are no right angles at Palomar. The dome, the mirror, the ingenuity of out-of-the-box people past and present: it’s a giant bowl of light and thought.

I climbed into the cage with Hinkley a fraction of a second after being invited. The telescope was parked, its mirror facing straight up and its body at a right angle to the ground. We were resting on our backs against the cage’s metal, suspended a dozen feet above the ground. Around us in the semi-darkness, cables spilled out of instruments like vines from a metal canopy. Almost immediately above us, the primary mirror lies in its steel bed and the telescope extends as if from our bellies, hundreds of feet up. The mirror is a monolithic piece of glass polished to near flatness, never deviating more than two millionths of an inch. It pivots on a horseshoe mount and glides along oil pads so frictionless that a 1.5 horsepower motor turns its vast bulk. If you’re alone in the dome at night while the telescope slews, it can feel like sharing a cave with a careful giant. Though the Hale telescope has been called the Big Eye, nobody looks directly at the light it collects. A few stories up, towards the crowning secondary mirror, there is a snug, one-man compartment with controls like the cockpit of an old fighter. Its single leather seat is cracked and the spongy cushion cratered. Astronomers used to sit there alone, at prime focus, looking into the galaxy though an eyepiece. Now the Big Eye directs all its light to the instruments that hang above us, open, with their delicate optics exposed. After an hour against the cage, its pattern was etched into our skin even through sweaters and jackets.

Hinkley was trying to focus the instrument using an artificial white light source, moving mirrors and lenses back and forth a few microns at a time. He would tighten a bolt with a twenty-degree turn of an Allen wrench and Oppenheimer would yell at him for going the wrong way or not going far enough. “You ever try to put a Christmas tree up with your wife?” asked Hinkley. His voice went up a register. “‘Rotate it’, she says. ‘Which way? Clockwise. No, wait, counter-clockwise. Don’t put that ornament there! What are you doing?’ ” A wrench in his mouth and another in his hands, he said, “Well this is kind of like that.” The work put the notion of manual focus in entirely new perspective. Modern astronomy is as much about instrumentation as observation, as much an engineer’s field as a scientist’s. “In our engineering, we do things just well enough. Out here things are never going to be perfect,” said Oppenheimer. Observational astronomers are mechanics. No one else could know how to fix their singular machines. “Ben, do you want to come out here and take a look?” asked Hinkley. “In astronomy we have to build this stuff from scratch.”

Oppenheimer joined us. He found a tight spot and squatted in a pile of cable that had collected in the cage. The adaptive optics system alone has nearly 600 pounds of the stuff, snaking around your ankles, coiled against most of the walls. “Cable management if done properly can save you many days of sitting on your ass undoing other people’s knots,” said Oppenheimer, twisting a nut. “I think that should do it. Let’s go check.” As we climbed down the ladder to head into the control room, he caught sight of his knuckles. They were bleeding. In the dry mountain air, most people slough their skin and shrivel, but Oppenheimer, his hands constantly in tight spaces threading metal edges, bleeds. “You bleed into these things. You put your life into them. Look at my knuckle. I don’t know how that happened.”

***

51 Pegasi B was the first exoplanet discovered around a main sequence star. Before its announcement, exoplanetary science was an astronomical backwater. Cosmology, with its emphasis on the origins of the universe, its boundaries and the constancy of its physical laws, still dominated astrophysical research. 51 Pegasi B brought exoplanets into focus. It’s enormous, nearly 150 times the size of the Earth, about half the size of Jupiter. But unlike Jupiter, 51 Pegasi B orbits its star at distances that would set your hair on fire. Imagine a planet of that size whipping around the sun inside the orbit of Mercury. 51 Pegasi B screams around its star completing one full orbit in four careening days. It’s a Hot Jupiter: a gaseous planet with a scalding surface. Its period of rotation mirrors its period of revolution, so only one side faces its star, an arrangement astronomers call tidal locking or synchronous rotation. Some artists’ renditions situate the planet at the flaring edge of its star’s corona: a giant world of baked gas unfurling in its speed. Prior to its discovery, most theorists thought that gaseous planets could exist only in the farthest orbits of stars. 51 Pegasi B probably did form in the further reaches, but then migrated inward, stopping just short of falling into its sun. In 1995, when 51 Pegasi B was discovered, the only planets known were those in our solar system, where gas giants operate in distant orbits. 51 Pegasi B turned planetary science on its head.

The last ten years of exoplanetary study have outstripped any narrative. There are planets believed to be the consistency of Styrofoam, ocean worlds with nitrogenous atmospheres, carbonaceous planets that might be studded with diamonds. Planets that circle two suns, and rogue planets presumably flung from their parent stars to wander the galaxy alone. And we are on the cusp of detecting planets that sit in their star’s habitable zone where liquid water and a shielding atmosphere coexist to perhaps nest extraterrestrial organics. Science like this buries science fiction. When 51 Pegasi B was first discovered, it inspired a renewed wave of thinking about our place in the universe. Exoplanetary science was clearly no longer the soft pocket of astrophysics, filled with careless futurists and their philosophers. It was real. If there are planets and we can detect these planets, how many are there and are there others with Earth’s chemistry? The notion of life elsewhere went from whimsy to hypothesis. SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, garnered a bit more cachet. NASA formalized its Astrobiology program. Astronomers dedicated more telescope time to the search for giant planets. A Time magazine cover ran with the headline, “Is Anybody Out There?” For science and astronomy magazines, the question is a trope that never fails to pique its core, warp-powered audience. But because there was finally data, young scientists were listening. Oppenheimer’s early work as a graduate student at Caltech was juiced by these discoveries. 51 Pegasi B was remarkable not because it existed, but because it was so exotic, so unexpected in its size, composition, and proximity to its star. Theorists build models on what they know, but space is vast and the configurations of things unseen are manifold. We just don’t know what to expect. So why not expect life to be out there? And why not look for it?

51 Pegasi B is located only fifty-one light years from Earth, a next-door neighbor. In comparison, the Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter. The light we now see from its opposite edge was first emitted as modern humans were leaving Africa. That’s old light, but at least we have a chance to see it. The universe is large on another scale altogether. Light from events in its past may never reach us. Astronomers call this the past horizon, a limit on the most distant objects we can see. In the same way, light from us may never reach its outer rim. This is called the future horizon. Bound by horizons past and future, we occupy a corner of the universe we can observe and affect, and there are things about it we can never know. But it’s this sense of vastness that is most compelling to exoplanetary scientists. The universe is likely filled with as many if not more planets than stars. And because planets are cool and exist at various distances from their suns, their chemistries are more complex. If you know a star’s mass and composition, you can predict its lifespan and its life’s work. Planets are the dark horses of the universe. Its art resides within them. The question is, just how creative has the universe been?

***

I first met Ben Oppenheimer at his office in AMNH. He sat at a neat desk in front of a wall bathed in bluish-purple light, as if peeking out from a nebula. I introduced myself as a fellow scientist completely naïve to astronomy, but fascinated by early life on this planet and the possibility of life on others. Try making this admission in an astrophysicist’s office. I knew that Oppenheimer was a new breed of astrophysicist who no longer thinks exoplanetary science and habitability is fantasy. But it’s still hard to shake the self-consciousness inherent in legitimizing your Sci-Fi childhood. I timidly suggested that any article on his work should deal with the search for habitable planets. I must have sounded apologetic because he looked amused. “I think the issue of life is, in the end, where this is all going. It has to. I think people want to know. If there is an earthlike planet out there, what is it like?” His eyes flickered beneath stylishly framed glasses. I asked him if we could ever hope to perceive, let alone conceive, life as we don’t know it. “It’s important to keep the parameter space for whatever you’re doing as open as you can,” he said. Translation: I have no idea, but be openminded and prepared. “I think this is one of the deepest philosophical questions people have had for ages. Is there anything else out there?”

But what do you look for? How do you start? At a glance, through any telescope, 51 Pegasi B and its star, 51 Pegasi are a single body. The planet is in so close an orbit that its own light is blanched. But you can still infer its existence. Almost every exoplanet discovered so far has been detected through inference. 51 Pegasi B exerts a gravitational effect on 51 Pegasi causing the star to either inch toward or away from an observer. This quiver is detectable as shifts in the color of the star’s light. The effect is Doppler in nature. An approaching object either shines or sounds with quickening frequency. That same object’s frequency abates as it recedes. The technique is called radial velocity: the change in velocity of the star given its planet’s gravitational influence. Jupiter causes a 12.7 m/s change in the sun’s radial velocity. 51 Pegasi B clocked in at 70 m/s. Earth causes a 9 cm change, a number that puts into perspective our galactic insignificance.

But Oppenheimer believes that inference is not enough. The problem with inferential techniques like radial velocity is that they are information poor. You can get a sense of the mass of a planet and its orbit, but if you can’t see it, if you can’t gather any light from it, you are blind to its true nature. Still, inferential techniques are mature and proven. Radial velocity is only one in an arsenal of inferential methods. The fabulously successful Kepler mission has uncovered more planets in the last year than had ever been detected before. So far, 2300 planet candidates have accumulated in its three years of operation. Kepler is a space-based telescope tasked with staring at the same set of 100,000 stars for seven and a half years. If a solar system is arrayed edgewise with respect to Kepler, any planets that cross in front of the system’s star would register as diminished starlight. Like the radial velocity technique, the change is beyond subtle. A typical planet might reduce the light of its star by 1 to 10 parts in a million. Signals are so faint, and the opportunities for observation so erratic and evanescent, even firm observations are never infallible. An Earth-like planet would produce this weak signature once a year. Kepler requires at least three such passes before elevating the observation to a planet candidate. If a given star’s dimming is due to a planet, the change will be periodic, revealing size and trajectory. But many of the finer details of the planet remain a mystery.

Figure 1: Three large planets (b, d, and c) around the star HR 8799. (Science. November 28th 2008. Volume 322, Page 1348.)

Exactly thirteen years after the existence of 51 Pegasi B was published, a new technique called direct observation yielded its first success: three large planets around the star HR 8799. Direct observation dispenses with inferential data. Instead, light from planets is separated from the star and concentrated with long exposures. The known system is shown in Figure 1 (to the right).

In this image, the planets are nearly 100,000 times fainter than the star. Without starlight suppression, the entire frame would render as a block of impenetrable light. The remnants of the star are visible as a collection of iridescent speckles, and around this ball of muted light orbit three small, red dots: HR 8799 b, c and d. Speckles are such a notorious problem in optics of this kind that a whole subfield has been spawned to invent ways to contain them. Fortunately, HR8799 has a giant solar system with distant planets that aren’t consumed by the speckles. Our own system would sit squarely within the cluster. Neptune is about as far out as HR8799 d. The most distant planet in the HR 8799 system is 68 astronomical units away from its star, or 68 times the distance of the Earth from our Sun. It takes 450 years to complete one orbit.

HR8799 is a young star. It’s so young that its visible planets are still hot and generate their own light. Earth-based direct observation can only detect hot planets. The imaging technology is not yet capable of detecting reflected light. It’s too faint. But a spacebased telescope could do the job. In May of 2002 NASA funded a feasibility study for the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), a proposed orbital telescope devoted to planetary imaging and the cancellation of starlight. The TPF’s angular resolution would make detecting a Jupiter-like planet a cinch and an Earthsized planet a genuine possibility. In 2004, the TPF’s architecture was approved for construction at a cost that engineers estimated at $10 billion. By 2009, after the dramatic depths of the recession had worked its way through the budget, NASA’s share had shriveled and the TPF’s completed schematics were bound and shelved, a worked but unrealized solution. Oppenheimer has no patience for the government’s misallocation. “NASA’s budget in the scheme of things is ridiculous. It’s like a drop in the bucket. We could choose to do so much more, but we don’t,” said Oppenheimer. “If you want to understand the Earth, you need something to compare it to.”

HR8799’s currently visible planets could never sustain Earth-type life. But rocky worlds in its habitable zone may be buried in the morass of speckles. While transiting and radial velocity excel at the detection of Hot Jupiters and planetary bodies close in on their stars, ground-based direct observation is limited to the detection of gas giants at glacial distances. Coronography has succeeded in making the light of distant planets accessible, but starlight is a pesky thing. It diffracts around the optical stop, it leaves ghosts of its deleted self. The speckles can be dimmed but never removed. The exoplanetary sweet spot, the habitable zone, a narrow ring around each star, is ironically the most elusive band for detection of any kind.

The technical challenge is immense. Project 1640 consists of four homegrown instruments that relay light from the sky to a computer screen. The optics are so complex that only 10% of the non-occulted, impinging light survives the process. First, the adaptive optics system compensates for the atmosphere. The coronograph then tempers the target star’s light. An integral field spectrograph, which Oppenheimer simply calls the science camera, records 30 images of the star across 30 different colors simultaneously. A calibration wavefront sensor (CAL) measures and compensates for the defects in the optics. Images from the science camera are stacked, one slice per color. Oppenheimer calls this 3D image The Cube. It’s not three-dimensional in space. The image of the star is flat. Here, depth is devoted to color. The location of a speckle is dependent on the color observed. If you trace a single speckle through the cube, you’ll notice that it radiates out from the star’s center. The cube is the star’s pop-up book, telling its story in three dimensions with slices through the electromagnetic spectrum. The images are beautiful when animated, as if the star were a multi-chromatic geyser of its own occulted remnants. Planets are points of light that drill through the cube, motionless through every section as the speckles scatter.

Of all the instruments currently used at the Hale telescope, project 1640 is the most complex. In all, the project has one hundred nights of observing time. When the sun goes down, a clock starts ticking in Oppenheimer’s head. If it rains, if it’s cloudy, if the seeing is lost in swirls of misbehaving air, he goes home with nothing. There are no allowances for bad luck. The Monastery has a guest book where scientists and visitors can formalize their paeans to Palomar. When Oppenheimer signed this book four years ago, he did not mince his ambition with customary homage. Instead he wrote a declaration. “June 24th, 2008. Project 1640 has arrived from NYC. We shall see whether it works in short order.”

***

Three and a half years later, Tom Lockhart was sitting on the toilet seat in the control room’s bathroom. The temperature in the dome had dipped below freezing, unusually cold even for December on the mountain. Lockhart designs and runs the software controlling the CAL system. He wore a hat with earflaps and was warming a motherboard against the radiant coils of an old heater. “I don’t know. The thing just started beeping,” he said. Computer hardware fails when it’s hot. Everyone knows that. But the motherboard in the CAL started talking to Lockhart when it got too cold. “It slowed to a fraction of its normal speed and then told me it was shutting itself off. You ever hear of anything like that?”

The telescope was pointed at HR 8799. Oppenheimer wanted to see whether the new instrument could pick up known planets. “Can you people please clam down? Where’s Tom?” Oppenheimer asked.

“He’s in the bathroom having a good time with the CAL’s processor,” Gautam Vasisht said. Vasisht is the CAL’s hardware designer. He and Oppenheimer shared an office when they were graduate students at Caltech. Vasisht is the small, ironic subtext to Oppenheimer’s volubility. “So much for the romance of astronomy.”

“I feel like I’m doing the same thing over and over again. Like I’m in some kind of nightmare,” Oppenheimer said. Trouble with the CAL’s processor meant less time on sky. “In a way, it’s good there’s bad seeing.” The stars were translucent behind a high, thin sheet of clouds. “Where the fuck is Tom? Seriously. Is the CAL going to work? It might clear any second.”

The room was filled with physicists. Mike Shao, honored with the 2010 Michelson prize for his pioneering work on ground and space based interferometers, asked if there was a resistor lying around. “If we plug in a resistor and put it directly on the computer’s enclosure, would that heat it up enough?”

Shao’s suggestion was like asking an astronaut whether duct tape could hold together a splintering spacecraft (which worked for Apollo 13!). After years of engineering precision starlight control, in unanticipated cold, the resistor was the kind of kluge you have to dig deep for: high school physics rounding out the rough edges on Palomar Mountain.

“There might be something downstairs. Hold on,” said Kajsa Peffer, one of the telescope operators.

Lockhart stood up, turned off the bathroom heater, and closed the door behind him. Satisfied with the roasting he gave the CAL’s motherboard, he went into the dome to reinstall it. He took with him some duct tape and the resistor Kajsa had dug up from the spare parts room. Lockhart strapped the resistor to the instrument, and turned off the computer’s cooling fans, so the work of imaging other worlds could proceed

“We’ve tried to image this system eight times and the conditions have been bad every time,” said Oppenheimer. “Now the conditions are bad and all the instruments are screwed up. It’s like the aliens are trying to hide their planet from us.”

“Imaging exoplanets: an exercise in fucking futility,” said Vasisht.

“Seriously man. I hate this fucking star. We haven’t recorded a single science frame tonight. This star hates this project. Kajsa, how long can we stay on this piece of shit?” asked Oppenheimer of the telescope’s operator.

“Two hours.”

“Two more hours? Oh god. You people need to calm down.”

When you can get it, light from a planet is a rich source of information. A few collected photons can betray an entire atmosphere’s chemistry. Chemical species absorb particular frequencies of light leading to dips in reflectance along certain points in the spectrum. In 1961, James Lovelock, an independent scientist and inventor, was contracted by NASA to determine what could be seen from a planet’s light, from these spectra. Lovelock reasoned that if a planet were alive, its atmosphere would contain highly reactive compounds—oxygen, methane, hydrogen— at high concentrations despite their tendency to react with one another. From afar, a spectrum of our planet’s atmosphere would betray chemical disequilibrium. Oxygen and ozone cooccur with methane. Water vapor lubes the mix. On a dead planet, molecular oxygen and fully reduced carbon (like methane) would be unlikely to co-exist. Life keeps these biosignatures at high concentrations as raw material for our fundamental processes: respiration and growth.

We only know of one planet with life. With this in mind, Carl Sagan devised an experiment to peek at Earth from space. In the early 1990s, as the Galileo spacecraft swung around Earth in a gravitational shot towards Jupiter, Sagan turned its camera back towards our planet. In the paper describing this effort (Nature 365, 715–721, 21 October 1993), Sagan imagined the Earth was extraterrestrial, deriving “conclusions from Galileo data based on first principles alone. He found an “abundance of gaseous oxygen” and “atmospheric methane in extreme thermodynamic disequilibrium.” The spectrum also highlighted a “widely distributed surface pigment with a sharp absorption edge in the red part of the visible spectrum.” Chlorophyll: plants. Of course, the experiment was a conceit. The light Sagan collected, its luminosity and detail, is a pipe dream given the scraps Oppenheimer collects from other worlds. The question is what would Earth look like if you could only scavenge a few photons? What would it look like well beyond our solar system?

It turns out you can look back at the Earth, as if from deep space, while standing on your roof. Our planet is reflected back to us every night by the moon. During its crescent phase, the moon’s brilliant edge cradles an ashy wisp of the rest of its body. The crescent reflects the Sun while the darker whole reflects the Earth. This phenomenon is known as earthshine: our light returning to us from our moon. Because the moon is an imperfect reflector, the Earth’s light is homogenized, mimicking its appearance from great distances well beyond our solar system, even from neighboring stars. Earthshine is our best guess at what the light from a living, breathing planet might look like when viewed from other parts of the galaxy. Above is a picture of Earth from the moon, our proxy for light years away (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Measuring earthshine as reflected by the Moon is our best guess at what the light from a living, breathing planet might look like. (Redrawn from The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 644, Issue 1, pp. 551–559.)

This is a spectrum. The x-axis plots a narrow section of wavelengths in the visible and near infrared. The y-axis is an index of reflectivity: lower reflectivity at a given wavelength implies an absorbing entity, a molecule cutting into the light. The signatures of life on this planet are coded into the peaks and dips of this graph: the oxygen respired by animals, the carbon dioxide absorbed by plants, the methane emitted from geological activity like volcanoes and biological activity like flatulent cows, the ozone that protects DNA from ultraviolet radiation, the water that supplies electrons for building complex sugars in plants, and the signature of pigments used by the light-harvesting biomolecular machines that energize this planet. A living planet’s vitality informs its chemical constituency and life is dissolved into an atmosphere of its own creation. This thin shell of gas is a message from the planet; light can signal whether it’s alive or dead. Pictures like these are what Oppenheimer and the Project 1640 crew want from faraway worlds. But the spectra will be fingerprints, detailed, distinct. If it exists, life elsewhere will likely be very different, but still optically and chemically accessible.

The CAL’s processor was back up and only one hour remained before HR8799 would set. Now that everything was finally working, the stars hid behind a new set of thin clouds. “Of course that would happen,” Oppenheimer said. “It’s like we can’t win with this crap. Why don’t we do something easy like banking? We’d make a lot more money.”

“In Monopoly, my daughter’s realized that if she’s the banker, she always wins,” Vasisht said.

“If I wanted to make money then I wouldn’t be here,” said Douglass Brenner, a programmer, physicist, and Oppenheimer’s right hand for the last five years. The group refers to him as The Doug. The Doug thinks he looks like Steven Spielberg with long hair. The Doug likes to talk about Peak Oil and signal processing.

Postdocs Justin Crepp, Laurent Pueyo, Sasha Hinkley, and myself were also in the control room, a safe distance from the actual controls. Crepp wrote the software that achieves speckle reduction. It’s a work in progress known as the Justin Program. “At my Caltech reunion all my old classmates had hedge funds,” Vasisht said. “They have a lot more money then me. One of them asked me to invest so I put in a hundred.”

“A hundred what?” The Doug asked.

Pueyo was listening in. “Banking? Well, at least we’re not bored.”

The sky was sealed. Crepp fiddled with the Justin program. Hinkley read papers. Pueyo skyped with his Mom in France about his upcoming wedding in San Francisco. By the time the clouds cleared HR8799 was gone, so the telescope was trained on anther star, FU Ori in the constellation Orion.

Oppenheimer set the instrument to take fiveminute exposures before heading to the catwalk. With every iteration, a woman’s voice would mark data capture. “Image processing complete. Awaiting instructions.” The voice is sultry, receptive, and almost expectant. Oppenheimer had programmed her as a joke. She sounds like HAL’s humanizing mate. But unlike Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL, whose creepy conversation betrays progressive hints of malfunction, the woman’s words are unchanged even as Oppenheimer’s system faults in subtle ways, even as everyone’s head is buried in their hands. At one point earlier in the evening, sometime after the CAL’s hardware had warmed and before its software had failed, Oppenheimer lost his cool. He is intense, but rarely out of control. The night’s failures were too much. “There’s no tomorrow in optical astronomy,” he said. “The rotation of the Earth doesn’t care about your apologies.” He said it to no one in particular. He might as well have said it to himself. Project 1640 is a lose conglomeration of parts that barely fit, and people that fit together almost too well.

At 5am our brains were fried. I looked around and saw the same blank look in everyone’s eyes. Night lunches were strewn about. A Christmas tree was edging off its table. The smell of stale coffee rose from a dozen cups. The long night had removed key modules from our heads. As dawn lightened the sky and bodies felt the abuse of sleepless exhaustion, I could almost hear HAL in my head: “I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you. But my mind is going. I can feel it.”

***

The Drake equation looks like this: N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L

Where N is the number of civilizations in the galaxy with which we might communicate. N is directly proportional to R*, the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy because, presumably, any habitable world will need a parent star. Then there are the whittling terms. What fraction of those stars have planets (fp)? How many of those planets are similar to earth (ne)? What fraction of these demonstrate signatures of life regardless of complexity (fl)? What fraction of the planets with life generate intelligent life, self aware and capable of formulating long, inscrutable equations (fi)? What fraction of planets with such beings communicate the signals of their technology in ways we can detect (fc)? And how long do these civilizations persist before they go extinct (L)? The Drake equation is like a confident man who stands tall before he is cut down to size. There are billions of stars in the galaxy, but successive fractionation can make astronomical numbers seem terrestrial. Frank Drake conceived the equation in 1960 after making the first attempts at detecting radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. Shortly thereafter, Drake organized a meeting on the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence, which ultimately seeded SETI. The equation was devised as talking points for an agenda. “I wrote down all the things you needed to know to predict how hard it’s going to be to detect extraterrestrial life.” Drake factorized each hurdle.

Some of the scientists on Project 1640 are shy about this notion of life on other planets. Others won’t shut up about it. If their willingness to speak on the subject were itself a spectrum, Oppenheimer would anchor the forthcoming believers. Mike Shao is far more reticent. When I asked him his thoughts on habitability, I pushed him on the potential momentousness of such a discovery. With a faint grin, he deflected my enthusiasm without being mean or unsupportive. “Yes, finding planets that can support life is a little bit different than finding a normal planet.” Really? A little bit different? Gauthum Vasisht is similarly evasive. “Frankly, I’m more interested in the architecture of planets. Fools like me get excited by any little thing. I guess some people are better at looking at the big picture.” Shao and Vasisht deployed the measured tones of science to diffuse the science fiction. The Doug, a self-anointed skeptic, was less willing to let a journalist run away with the idea of life on other worlds. “Astrobiology is a complete waste of time. The habitable zone is just a way to keep the public interested. There’s so much out there. We really don’t have a clue. I think it’s more bullshit than poetry.” Against the cynic, many of the students stood out in optimistic relief albeit tempered by their first few tastes of fiscal reality. At one point, while in the cage talking to Sasha Hinkley he got into a fit about our nation’s commitment to science. We were in the dark turning Allen wrenches a few millimeters one-way, and a few less back. “Americans spent $500 billion on gambling last year. Do you know how many more candidates we could generate with that kind of cash? It’s a real shame, man.”

Perhaps the most balanced of the astronomers I met was Charles Beichman, the Executive Director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech. Chas, as he’s known to everyone on Project 1640, has been instrumental to the development of direct observation and isn’t shy about the work’s implications or its difficulties. “Astrobiology is part of the program. Biologists are part of our program. What do we mean by life? How much is specific to Earth, how much is based on universal principles? I’ll bet that life is abundant, but the thing is, I’ll probably never have to make good on that bet.” Beichman illustrated how far he was willing to go by hopping along the Drake equation. “We have an estimate for the number of stars in our galaxy, we know that each star has at least one planet, and we’re starting to get spectra that may nail down the fraction of these that are habitable.” But Beichman won’t touch the later terms. “The search for intelligent life is a search for electrical engineers.” If SETI is successful, we will know of at least one technological civilization capable of communication, but the discovery is not a quantity that can be factored back into the Drake. It’s one instance, one world with no statistical heft. It might be the most important discovery ever, but it would draw a line between two technological civilizations and dispense no clues as to whether the line is just one strand in a larger web.

Oppenheimer believes we have to look for life, simple or otherwise. In a review he wrote detailing the state of direct observation, Oppenheimer concluded with an impassioned mission statement, the kind you don’t see in the scientific literature. “Given the immensely compelling nature of the science involved in detecting places that might host life outside our Solar System, there is no question that, barring the annihilation of Homo sapiens, people will, and in some sense must, conduct such missions. We know how to do them now” (Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 47, pages 253–289). The passage is both a goad and an admonition: Get on it! Why haven’t we done it yet? It’s a directive, a call to arms. I’m surprised he got away with it.

Oppenheimer’s personality is often in conflict with the inherent passivity of his craft. Astronomy is almost wholly observational. We are not in conversation with the cosmos, and it is this unidirectional flow of information that makes astronomy our purest and in some ways, most frustrating science. We cannot affect the product. The universe just sort of happens to us. You wait for light and it arrives with a message from the past, long after the source emitted it, perhaps long after the source has died. We have no capacity to affect the universe in any significant way. And because astronomy is so much a science of soaking things in, of waiting for information to come to you, we have built larger and larger telescopes to make sure nothing is missed of the light the universe bathes us in. The reward is deep astronomical vision.

But not yet deep enough. If we want to image other Earths, we need to do it from space. We can’t sift the light the way it needs to be sifted from the ground. The Terrestrial Planet Finder would have at least had a chance. “When you first think of a new idea, it’s like digging in topsoil, but with each technique you end up hitting bedrock,” said Beichman. The bedrock could be the limits of our technology or current understanding, it could be the realization of an engineering nightmare, or it could be political unwillingness. “So you get another shovel and dig somewhere else.” We live in a nation more attuned to our terrestrial messes than our larger place in the cosmos. We’re all about warming ice, warped economies, and war. To a dreamer with the long view on space and time, quotidian upkeep of our planet is both an afterthought and a black hole—so minor in the grand scheme but a sink for all of our collective energy.

***

Shortly before our trip to Palomar, Oppenheimer and I had lunch around the corner from the museum. While we were walking back, the sky opened over the Upper West Side and it began to pour. Stuck on Columbus Avenue, we ducked under an awning and stood around for a bit, waiting for the worst of it to pass. “Do you like rain?” Oppenheimer asked. We had been walking in silence for a few seconds, and I was asking all the questions, so I was a bit startled. I told him I didn’t mind as long as I wasn’t caught without my umbrella. His eyes lit up. “I prefer the rain,” he replied. “The sun can be so brilliant it blocks all the color.” I had never thought of color in this way. Everything seems so much more radiant in the sun. But to Oppenheimer the sun has a dulling effect. “I can see so much more clearly when it isn’t out.”

Whether it’s this planet or one 50 light years away, Oppenheimer quenches the glare of suns. Our exchange got me to thinking more about coronography. Project 1640 blocks starlight using a physical occulter and digital subtraction. But there are more fantastic, space-based notions as well. Mike Shao told me that when you build a one of a kind machine in space, “the cost is what the person writing the check is willing to pay.” So imagine a space-based telescope trained on a star whose planets are thought to be rocky and in close orbit, like our own. Now imagine that this telescope is equipped with its own shade, a giant piece of circular material two football fields in diameter that unfurls between the star and the telescope’s aperture. The edges of the shade gently oscillate around its center, the projection of a sunflower in interstellar space (Nature 2006 442(7098): 51–53). The star shade blocks a sun’s light before it enters the telescope. All that remains are the tiny specks around it, now in relief, amplified.

The dream is of amplitude. In both the astronomical and figurative sense, amplitude is what we want from these great eyes to the sky. We want to brighten the dim and we want to see with greater depth planets within the horizons of our perception. In one of our earliest conversations, Oppenheimer told me that when he sits down to think, all he has is the light. This insight is so clean and exhilarating. Light rains into a million backyard telescopes and a handful of engineering monuments. The universe transmits information in tight little beams. There’s nothing else. Large mirrors collect this information with great acuity. Large shades block the most obvious rays. But in the end all we want is the light from what we know must be there—hope is there—but can’t yet see.

Paul Kurtz & the Virtue of Skepticism
How a Thoughtful, Inquiring, Watchman
Provided a Mark to Aim at

by Michael Shermer

Skepticism dates back to the ancient Greeks, well captured in Socrates’ famous quip that all he knows is that he knows nothing. Skepticism as nihilism, however, gets us nowhere and, thankfully, almost no one embraces it. The word “skeptic,” in fact, comes from the Greek skeptikos, for “thoughtful”—far from modern misconceptions of the word as meaning “cynical” or “nihilistic.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “skeptical” has also been used to mean “inquiring,” “reflective,” and, with variations in the ancient Greek, “watchman” or “mark to aim at.” What a glorious meaning for what we do! We are thoughtful, inquiring, and reflective, and in a way we are the watchmen who guard against bad ideas, consumer advocates of good thinking who, through the guidelines of science, establish a mark at which to aim. Paul Kurtz, who died this week at the age of 86, was one of the founders of the modern skeptical movement, and he embodied the principle of skepticism as thoughtful inquiry. He truly was a watchman that provided a mark at which we skeptics may all aim.

Since the time of the Greeks, skepticism (in its various carnations) has evolved along with other epistemologies and their accompanying social activists. The Enlightenment, on one level, was a century-long skeptical movement, for there were no beliefs or institutions that did not come under the critical scrutiny of such thinkers as Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Locke, Jefferson, and many others. Immanuel Kant in Germany and David Hume in Scotland were skeptics’ skeptics in an age of skepticism, and their influence continues unabated to this day (at least in academic philosophy and skepticism). Closer to our time, Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley were skeptics par excellence, not only for the revolution they launched and carried on (respectively) against the dogma of creationism, but also for their stand against the burgeoning spiritualism movement that was sweeping across America, England, and the continent. Although Darwin was quiet about his spiritual skepticism and worked behind the scenes, Huxley railed publicly against the movement, bemoaning in one of the great one-liners in the history of skepticism: “Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a ‘medium’ hired at a guinea a séance.” In the twentieth century Bertrand Russell and Harry Houdini stand out as representatives of skeptical thinkers and doers (respectively) of the first half, and skepticism in the second half of the century was marked by Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, launching what we think of today as “the skeptics movement,” which Kurtz so courageously organized and led.

There has been some debate (and much quibbling) about who gets what amount of credit for the founding of the modern skeptical movement through the organization Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and its journal Skeptical Inquirer (much of this history has been outlined in the pages of my own magazine, Skeptic, in interviews with the leading lights of the skeptical movement). This is not the place to present a definitive history of the movement, but from what I have gleaned from first- and second-hand sources is that science writer Martin Gardner, magician James Randi, psychologist Ray Hyman, and philosopher Paul Kurtz played primary roles in the foundation and planning of the organization and the subsequent movement.

Regardless of who might be considered the “father” of the modern skeptical movement, everyone I have spoken to (including the other founders) agrees that it was Paul Kurtz more than anyone else who actually made it happen. All successful social movements have someone who has the organizational skills and social intelligence to get things done. Paul Kurtz is that man. When he founded the organization that launched the modern skeptical movement, I was a graduate student in experimental psychology. About this time (the mid 1970s) Uri Geller entered my radar screen. I recall Psychology Today and other popular magazines published glowing stories about him, and reports were afloat that experimental psychologists had tested the Israeli psychic and determined that he was genuine. My advisor—a strictly reductionistic Skinnerian behavioral psychologist named Doug Navarick—didn’t believe a word of it, but I figured there might be something to it, especially in light of all the other interesting research being conducted on altered states of consciousness, hypnosis, dreams, sensory deprivation, dolphin communication, and the like. I took a course in anthropology from Marlene Dobkin de Rios, whose research was on shamans of South America and their use of mind-altering plants. It all seemed entirely plausible to me and, being personally interested in the subject (the Ouija board consistently blew my mind), I figured that this was rapidly becoming a legitimate subfield of psychological research. After all, Thelma Moss had a research laboratory devoted to studying the paranormal, and it was at UCLA no less, one of the most highly regarded psychology programs in the country.

With the support and encouragement of Kurtz, Martin Gardner, Ray Hyman, and especially James “the Amazing” Randi entered the public sphere through popular and technical publications debunking such nonsense, and Randi went on television to reveal how the psychics actually do their tricks. It was, in fact, on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show that Randi demonstrated how to levitate tables, bend spoons, and perform psychic surgeries. Randi didn’t convince me to become a full-fledged skeptic overnight, but it got me thinking that if some of these psychics were fakes, perhaps they all were (and if not fakes, at least self-deceived). Herein lies an important lesson.

There is little to no chance that we can convince True Believers of the errors of their thinking. Our purpose is to reach that vast middle ground between hard-core skeptics and dogmatic believers—people like me who thought that there might be something to these claims but had simply never heard a good counter explanation. There are many reasons why people believe weird things, but certainly one of the most pervasive is simply that most people have never heard a good explanation for the weird things they hear and read about. Short of a good explanation, they accept the bad explanation that is typically proffered. This alone justifies all the hard work performed by skeptics toward the cause of science and critical thinking. It does make a difference.

For 20 years now I have been at the head of the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine, and as such as much as I admire Randi, Gardner, and the other public faces of skepticism, I have come to respect more than ever before what Paul Kurtz has done for our movement. He may not be as prolific and famous a writer as Martin Gardner, or as public and visible an activist as James Randi, but in terms of the day-to-day grind of keeping a movement afloat through the constant battering and assaults that come from variegated sources, there are few that can be compared with Paul Kurtz. So I close this brief remembrance with several excerpts from what I still consider to be his finest work, The Transcendental Temptation, that should be mandatory reading for all graduates of a Skepticism 101 course.

The temptation, says Kurtz, “lurks deep within the human breast. It is ever-present, tempting humans by the lure of transcendental realities, subverting the power of their critical intelligence, enabling them to accept unproven and unfounded myth systems.” Specifically, Kurtz argues that myths, religions, and claims of the paranormal are lures tempting us beyond rational, critical, and scientific thinking, for the very reason that they touch something in us that is sacred and important—life and immortality: “This impulse is so strong that it has inspired the great religions and paranormal movements of the past and the present and goaded otherwise sensible men and women to swallow patently false myths and to repeat them constantly as articles of faith.” What drives this temptation? The answer Kurtz provides is both insightful and elegant:

Let us reflect on the human situation: all of our plans will fail in the long run, if not in the short. The homes we have built and lovingly furnished, the loves we have enjoyed, the careers we have dedicated ourselves to will all disappear in time. The monuments we have erected to memorialize our aspirations and achievements, if we are fortunate, may last a few hundred years, perhaps a millennium or two or three—like the stark and splendid ruins of Rome and Greece, Egypt and Judea, which have been recovered and treasured by later civilizations. But all the works of human beings disappear and are forgotten in short order. In the immediate future the beautiful clothing that we adorn ourselves with, eventually even our cherished children and grandchildren, and all of our possessions will be dissipated. Many of our poems and books, our paintings and statues will be forgotten, buried on some library shelf or in a museum, read or seen by some future scholars curious about the past, and eventually eaten by worms and molds, or perhaps consumed by fire. Even the things that we prize the most, human intelligence and love, democratic values, the quest for truth, will in time be replaced by unknown values and institutions—if the human species survives, and even that is uncertain. Were we to compile a pessimist’s handbook, we could easily fill it to overflowing with notations of false hopes and lost dreams, a catalogue of human suffering and pain, of ignominious conflict, betrayal, and defeat throughout the ages.

Although Kurtz sounds like a pessimist, he’s actually a realist, occasionally even an optimist:

Were I to take an inventory of the sum of goods in human life, they would far outweigh the banalities of evil. I would outdo the pessimist by cataloguing laughter and joy, devotion and sympathy, discovery and creativity, excellence and grandeur. The mark made upon the world by every person and by the race in general would be impressive. How wonderful it has all been. The pessimist points to Caligula, Attila, Cesare Borgia, Beria, or Himmler with horror and disgust; but I would counter with Aristotle, Pericles, da Vinci, Einstein, Beethoven, Mark Twain, Margaret Sanger, and Madame Curie. The pessimist points to duplicity and cruelty in the world; I am impressed by the sympathy, honesty, and kindness that are manifested. The pessimist reminds us of ignorance and stupidity; I, of the continue growth of human knowledge and understanding. The pessimist emphasizes the failures and defeats; I, the successes and victories in all their glory.

The most important point Kurtz makes in The Transcendental Temptation comes toward the end in his discussion of the meaning and goals of skepticism. It is an admonition we should all bear in mind, a passage to be read once a year:

The skeptic is not passionately intent on converting mankind to his or her point of view and surely is not interested in imposing it on others, though he may be deeply concerned with raising the level of education and critical inquiry in society. Still, if there are any lessons to be learned from history, it is that we should be skeptical of all points of view, including those of the skeptics. No one is infallible, and no one can claim a monopoly on truth or virtue. It would be contradictory for skepticism to seek to translate itself into a new faith. One must view with caution the promises of any new secular priest who might emerge promising a brave new world—if only his path to clarity and truth is followed. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to temper the intemperate and to tame the perverse temptation that lurks within.

R.I.P. Paul Kurtz. We all owe you a great debt of gratitude for making the world a better place. You will be missed.

A Flood of Nonsense!
The Myth of a Universal flood Myth

by Tim Callahan

One of the programs of the (so-called) History Channel that is particularly galling to me as a skeptic is their Ancient Aliens series, where Erich von Daniken, Zecharia Sitchen, Georgio Tsoukalos and David Childress, among others, advance the pseudo-scientific theory that extraterrestrials both created us through biological engineering and gave us our ancient civilizations. In the process of advancing their dogma, they spout blatant falsehoods that go utterly unchallenged. The History Channel, shamefully, makes no attempt whatsoever to offer any rebuttal to these spurious claims. Rather, as is their policy with any program dealing with the historicity of anything from the Bible, their policy toward ancient astronaut theorists is one of shameless pandering, a strategy most probably determined by favoring profits over proof and ratings over reason. Fortunately, filmmaker Chris White has addressed this imbalance, putting the lie to these claims thoroughly in his three-hour documentary Ancient Aliens Debunked, recently posted on Skeptic.com.

Unfortunately, in one area in particular Mr. White has stumbled badly in his assertion that the biblical story of the flood is not derived from Sumerian flood stories (whose connection to the ancient alien series is thin in any case) and instead claims that both biblical and Sumerian flood stories reflect an actual worldwide flood and are not the result of cultural diffusion from some earlier myth. According to White, all over the world there is a universal myth of a worldwide flood in which only a few people, usually about eight, are saved by entering a boat, while the rest of humanity is drowned. White argues that, of course, one great drawback to such an assertion is that science in no way supports such a universal flood. Geology and the fossil record and genetics all militate strongly against any historical validity of a worldwide flood. Thus, comparative mythology is his only evidence on the offing.

Are flood myths universal? No. At least, not one in which a worldwide flood wipes out all of the human race but for a couple or a single family. Consider the case of China. Does this large country with an unbroken history going back to ancient times have a flood myth, replete with a boat on which a few survivors escape, from thence to reestablish the human race? It does, however that particular flood myth comes from an ethnic minority called the Miao. They speak a language similar to Thai and appear to have immigrated to China from Southeast Asia. The only other flood myth from China involves annual flooding from rivers and the need for people to work together to prevent such destruction. It involves no ark and no destruction of all life on the planet.

Consider also an Egyptian flood myth. Surely this one should be similar to those of the Bible and Mesopotamia if the flood were, in fact, historical. In this myth the gods, suspecting mortal treachery against them, dispatch the goddess Hat-hor to take vengeance on the human race. However, her blood lust gets out of hand and threatens to utterly annihilate humanity. Since this is not the aim of the gods, they pour out upon Egypt a flood of beer brewed from mandrake root, which has soporific properties. Hat-hor, setting out on her daily rampage, looks down at the flooded land of Egypt, sees her own beautiful visage reflected in the beer and bends down to kiss it. She begins to drink the mandrake root beer and drinks so much of it that she forgets the plan of destruction and instead staggers off to bed. Thus, in the Egyptian flood story, the flood saves the human race.

Yet another flood story that differs significantly from the biblical one is found in Norse myth. Odin and his two brothers, Villi and Ve, kill the frost giant, Ymir, and make the world out of his body. His blood creates a flood that drowns most of the other frost giants. All this happens before the creation of the human race.

There is no native Celtic flood myth. I have to stress the word “native” since the Celtic myths, like those of the Teutonic peoples were written down by Christian monks, who harmonized them with myths from the Bible. Here is yet another problem with the vaunted universality of flood myths: Many of them appear courtesy of cultural contamination by Christian and, in some cases, Muslim, missionaries.

Diffusion of flood myths is also a factor. While there are differences between earlier Mesopotamian myths and the story of Noah’s ark, and while there is not a literary descent from the earlier material to the later, there is a cultural continuity. Thus, the Akkadian flood epic, Atrahasis, gave rise to later flood tales, not only the story of Noah in the Bible, but, as well, that of Deucalion and Pyrrha in Greek mythology. We do not find, nor would we expect to find, any great literary correspondence between an Akkadian epic, written on preserved tablets dating from ca. 1650 BCE and the biblical flood myth, the earliest version of which probably dates from ca. 850 BCE.

In his defense of the biblical flood story as history, White also falls back on an old canard, to whit, that the scribal transcription of the biblical text is so precise that it is far more accurate and less open to corrupting changes than any other ancient document. Certainly this might have been true of their transcription once the documents in question were seen as holy writ. However, varying versions of biblical tales were still being written perhaps as late as the Babylonian Captivity (587–538 BCE). That the biblical text is of late compilation is further attested to by its many anachronisms. Consider, as an example, what Genesis says of the place of origin of Abrahm, that is, Abraham (Gen. 11:31 emphasis added):

Tereh took Abrahm his son and Lot, the son of Haran, his grandson and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abrahm’s wife, and he went forth from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran they settled there.

While this test purports to be from the hand of Moses, written sometime between 1400 and 1200 BCE, the Chaldeans did not occupy Ur until ca. 800 BCE. Hence, this document’s reference to Ur as “Ur of the Chaldeans” dates it as having been written after that time.

Chris White would do a great service to the cause of critical thinking, and to himself as well, were he to excise the flood material from his otherwise exemplary documentary.

The Not-So-Skeptical Buddhist

a book review by Mike Moran

Brad Warner does not promise you enlightenment. He will not be opening your mind to any kind of psychic third eye. Want to find out from whom you have been reincarnated? Don’t ask Brad. His writings won’t even put you in that kind of blissful relaxed state other Zen books seem costum designed for.

For this Ohioan punk rocker, monster movie enthusiast and Soto Zen Priest, Buddhism is a simple “philosophy of action” done for the goal of achieving real world joy and existential clarity. His writings are an immensely readable mix of blunt honesty and down to Earth light-heartedness that make the admittedly boring practice of Zazen (sitting still) surprisingly alluring. Brad’s humorous Zen-tinged anecdotes and alternative pop culture references will appeal especially to ageing Generation Xers with the troublesome duality of skeptical minds and spiritual needs. You might say Brad Warner is the Chuck Klosterman of sitting quietly in the lotus position.

Brad’s latest offering, Hardcore Zen Strikes Again, is a collection of his first attempts at Buddhist writings, many from decade old (or more) blog posts. Somewhat different in tone than his last few releases where he focused more on the application of Zen to specific areas of life (sex, divorce, death in the family), Hardcore Zen Strikes Again has a refreshingly back-to-basics feel, reminding old readers and enlightening new ones on the hows and whys of Brad’s preferred brand of Buddhism called Zen Soto, a Buddhist sect based primarily around the 13th century teachings of Dogen Zengi.

The Buddhism vs. religion theme is prominent in Hardcore Zen Strikes Again; no big surprise, as much of the content originates from the years following 9/11. Early 2000s Brad is quick to make the distinction in the first chapter declaring “Religion is what got us into this mess (9/11 and the subsequent war) and I want no part of it” and, on page 70, “it’s stupid to go against science.” Though statements like these are fulfilling enough for the incredulous Buddhist, they also serve to highlight Brad’s oft-reiterated point: that Zen is all about making the best of reality and not to, as Brad points out in the chapter on Past Life Regression, “promote a dreamy fantasy state that distracts us from seeing what our life is right now.”

This spirit of realism and what-Buddhism-is-not, pervades the majority of Hardcore Zen Strikes Again. The book goes on to address most of the other usual suspects you would want to talk to a hip, plainspoken, Buddhist about. Some great quotes (that you would never find in other books in the Buddhist section) are dropped along the way:

On enlightenment: “The only real enlightenment is to realize you’re a complete phony.”

On reincarnation: “We die all the time. Every moment of everyday we die. Look at a picture of yourself when you were ten years old. Where is that person now?”

And On the “All is One” thing: “It takes a great deal of effort to sustain the illusion that you are something eternally separate from the rest of the universe.”

Order the book from Amazon
Order the Kindle Edition

Hardcore Zen Strikes Again takes a sudden and awkward shift in tone in its final three chapters. Brad delves uncharacteristically into new agey pseudoscience in the chapter “The Whole Vegetarian Thing,” declaring that things like “meat makes a person feel more aggressive (because when animals are slaughtered they) tense up and…This highly agitated state is passed on to the person who eats the meat.” He even concedes hypocrisy for his vegetarianism as “cabbage, potatoes, and carrots are alive too…and there is considerable evidence that they have a kind of primitive survival instinct. Mmm-Hmm. The not-so-skeptical Buddhist appears here as well I’m afraid.

Chapter 15 feels off putting for different reasons as Brad discusses his views on writing, eventually veering off the subject of Buddhism completely. Though his tips will be enjoyable for writers (like me), most readers will find them as pointless as the final chapter that (and Brad acknowledges this) goes completely off course for a Zen-less discussion of the monster movie industry. Brad is a good enough writer to pull off non-Buddhist writings but these last three destinations aren’t exactly what was promised in the brochure.

“I find some of my early writings uncomfortable to read” admits modern-day Brad in the introduction to Hardcore Zen Strikes Again as, in keeping in the realism spirit of reincarnation merely being the natural changing in personality over the course of a life time, Brad critiques his younger self’s writings throughout the book.

Despite his misgivings and a questionable third act, 2012 Brad Warner can relax. If Hardcore Zen Strikes Again feels like a collection of old demo songs—as he suggests on page 59—it is still as engaging as any studio album, and is just a fine a place as any for new readers outside of Brad’s established fan base to jump into his catalog.

Foundation of a Founder of Evo-Devo

a book review by Donald R. Prothero

Autobiography is a popular genre in the publishing industry, but most are accounts of famous actors or politicians or other public figures. There are relatively few good examples of autobiographic accounts by important scientists (both past and present). Most scientists tend not to write autobiographical accounts of themselves, whether it be because they are too modest, too busy, or whether the ego-denying, self-effacing scientific culture which suppresses the first-person pronouns and the active voice (“the experiment was conducted by so-and-so’s lab”) makes us less than willing to talk about ourselves.

When an autobiographical account of a prominent scientist appears, it gives us important insights into the questions of how great scientists are made, as well as how they made their discoveries. Reading Darwin’s autobiography (even if he did modify some details) has been an important source regarding events and ideas led to his discovery of evolution by natural selection. Feynman’s autobiographical books (especially Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!) are laugh-out-loud funny as this brilliant misfit gives us his quirky view of the world, amazing his professors and colleagues, and playing tricks on Army security when he was working on the Atom Bomb in Los Alamos. E.O. Wilson’s autobiography Naturalist shows how his childhood love of collecting bugs in Alabama blossomed not only into a career as a world famous ant expert, but also to his insights about ecological biogeography and sociobiology. For historians of science, as well as people who want to understand what makes a great scientist, such rare first-person accounts are highly valuable.

Into this tradition comes Rudy Raff’s Once We All Had Gills: Growing Up Evolutionist in an Evolving World. For those who don’t recognize the name, Raff has been one of the leading figures in the fields of embryology, developmental biology, and their connection to evolution for the past 50 years. Spending most of his career at Indiana University in Bloomington, Raff made it into a center for research of the exploding field of evolutionary development (“evo-devo”), one of the hottest and fastest-growing areas in all of science. He is currently the James H. Rudy Professor of Biology at Indiana, Director of the Indiana Molecular Biology Institute, editor of the journal Evolution & Development, and also a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and winner of the 2004 Sewall Wright award. He is the author of many books, including three classics that laid the modern foundation for evo-devo. More importantly, Raff entered the field of evolutionary biology when it had become the neglected discipline of evolutionary theory, overshadowed by fruit-fly genetics during the birth of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis during the 1940s and 1950s. Due to the efforts of Raff and just a few others, embryology emerged from decades of being on the sidelines to become the cutting-edge field of science. Now the steady drumbeat of new discoveries about regulatory genes, homeoboxes, and many other major breakthroughs overshadow just about any other branch of biology.

Like many other scientists, Raff’s roots were affected by one of the key events in the history of science: Hitler’s persecution of Jewish scientists and other intellectuals, leading many of them (including Albert Einstein, Max Born, Hans Krebs, Erwin Schrödinger, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, Max Perutz, and many others) to flee to other countries. Germany was the leading scientific power of the early 20th century, with the most Nobel Prizes in science, but that status was reversed by a huge “brain drain” triggered by Hitler’s actions. Raff’s father, Rudolf August Victor Raff, had a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Vienna, but fled Austria in 1938 as the Anschluss loomed. He emigrated to Quebec, Canada, because he spoke better French than English, and got a temporary job with a Canadian chemical company. There he met a French-Canadian doctor’s daughter, Therese Dufresne, and they were married in 1939, which saved the Austrian refugee from being interned during the war.

Order the book from Amazon
Order the Kindle Edition

The author describes his early childhood among his Dufresne relatives on Lac Souris near Shawinigan, Quebec, where he was a young child in the 1940s. He recalls at length his explorations of nature around the lake country of northern Quebec, where he acquired his love of natural history and a curiosity about animals and plants that never left him. Then in 1949 his father got a job at a chemical company in Pittsburgh, and young Rudy became enamored of the amazing dinosaur halls at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, where he got to hang out in the halls and mingle with the curators. Meanwhile, he was pursuing a serious interest in natural history in western Pennsylvania, especially focusing on salamanders, spiders, and dragonflies, as well as collecting fossils in the region. He finished a major in chemistry at Penn State (B.A., 1963), then on to Duke where he got his doctorate in Biochemistry in 1967. He also met his wife Beth at Penn State during a visit there on break from Duke, and they were married in 1965. Raff recounts some of his many scientific expeditions to discover new species of animals, especially in Chiapas, Mexico, and makes it clear that he is more than a lab scientist, but a true naturalist.

In the late 1960s, Raff began doing post-doctoral work on sea urchin embryos in Paul Gross’ lab at MIT, where he was to make groundbreaking discoveries about development and embryos. In 1971, he was hired at Indiana, which was already a cutting-edge institution in molecular biology at that time. Over the following 40 years, his lab was at the center of the “evo-devo” revolution. Many of his former grad students and post-docs are now prominent scientists in their own right, carrying on the latest research. Raff himself not only participated in this research, but wrote three very influential books that summarized the understanding of development and evolution at the time they were written. These books introduced many generations of biologists to the importance of development and epigenetic change in evolution.

Throughout his lively account of his field exploits as a naturalist, and his lab discoveries as an embryologist, Raff also maintains a narrative of the political background that framed his career, from his early days as a child in Quebec during World War II to growing up in the U.S. during in the Cold War (he even did a short stint in the military, but they used his talents in radiation biology), to living in Cambridge during the height of the student revolt of the late 1960s. But the main underlying theme of the book is evolution, and Raff’s long career documenting how it occurs. Even though his primary training was in molecular biology, he maintained his interest in fossils, and often participated in important paleontological discoveries, or integrated their implications into his own research. His final chapters discuss the problem of American creationism, and its damaging effects on American science education and culture in general. In his own passionate way, he recounts the development of creationism, the events leading up to the 2005 Dover “intelligent design” trial, and then debunks many of the standard creationist arguments in his own unique way. Like many of my fellow scientific colleagues, it is a great mystery and a distressing fact to him that the myths of primitive Bronze Age shepherds can still retard scientific advances in a country that still leads the world in many areas of science—but almost 50% of its own population believes pure nonsense. His final chapter, “Evolution Matters,” is a rousing call to arms for scientists and educated Americans to stand up against the forces of creationism and science denialism, and not allow the United States to slide backwards and become a scientific backwater, as Hitler did to Germany in the 1930s.

The book has a wonderful cover painting of the “fishibian” Acanthostega climbing out of the water (painted by Raul Martin), which reminds us of the title: Once we all had gills. As biologists know, that title has two levels of meaning. Not only are we descended from gilled amphibians like Acanthostega and even earlier fish-like ancestors, but as embryos, we all had gill slits about 5 weeks after conception that we eventually lost. Both are pieces of our evolutionary past that remind us how important evolution is to understanding our origins.

Raff’s book is thus both a fascinating story of how a young boy interested in natural history became a scientist at the founding of the “evo-devo” revolution, and also a polemic arguing about the importance of science and its defense against the powers of ignorance. It is a lively read, no matter how much background you might have in biology, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in these topics, as well as those interested in scientific biography.

About the Author of this Review

DR. DONALD R. PROTHERO was Professor of Geology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and Lecturer in Geobiology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He earned M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in geological sciences from Columbia University in 1982, and a B.A. in geology and biology (highest honors, Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of California, Riverside. He is currently the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of 32 books and over 250 scientific papers, including five leading geology textbooks and five trade books as well as edited symposium volumes and other technical works. He is on the editorial board of Skeptic magazine, and in the past has served as an associate or technical editor for Geology, Paleobiology and Journal of Paleontology. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, the Paleontological Society, and the Linnaean Society of London, and has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Science Foundation. He has served as the President and Vice President of the Pacific Section of SEPM (Society of Sedimentary Geology), and five years as the Program Chair for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. In 1991, he received the Schuchert Award of the Paleontological Society for the outstanding paleontologist under the age of 40. He has also been featured on several television documentaries, including episodes of Paleoworld (BBC), Prehistoric Monsters Revealed (History Channel), Entelodon and Hyaenodon (National Geographic Channel) and Walking with Prehistoric Beasts (BBC). His website is: www.donaldprothero.com. Check out Donald Prothero’s page at Shop Skeptic.

The Devil’s Finest Trick,
The Human Mind’s Worst

a book review by Frank Miele

Charles Baudelaire was a major innovator in French literature (among those he influenced, fellow poets Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, composer Claude Debussy)—and the higher artistic regard given the works of Edgar Allan Poe in his country than in Poe’s may in large part be due to Baudelaire’s translations. (As may also be true for those of K. D. Balmont and V. Y. Bryusov in Tsarist Russia). A contemporary, colloquial translation of his above bòn mót was used most memorably in the cult classic neo-noire film, The Usual Suspects.

Baudelaire and Keyser Söze (ranked #48 on the American Film Industries list of all-time movie villains) notwithstanding, the devil’s greatest trick may be to convince us that he does exist. Because if he does, he certainly can’t be us or what we believe in. Therefore he must be some other person, group, nation, or belief. And since it’s the devil we’re after, no ways or means can be spared in routing him out and keeping him caged until the apocalyptic “final showdown” when Ultimate Good gives Ultimate Evil its final Smack Down.

The point to be made is that without some form of existential (d)evil, existential fear of an apocalypse is at a minimum diminished and at maximum rendered meaningless. But if accepted, apocalypticism can be downright dangerous. And that’s the take home lesson and significant contribution of The Last Myth. Authors Gross and Giles entertainingly and informatively, if at times breezily, explain why what they term “apocalyptic thinking,” which they define as “a pattern of thought that assumes that end of our way of life (if not physically the end of the world itself) is imminent” (pp. 11–12) has undermined “our ability to gauge the magnitude of the global challenges rushing towards us” (p. 28). In supporting their thesis, they document that “apocalypticism” is neither “built into the human brain,” nor has it been present always and everywhere, and that even where well rooted (notably the United States from the outset) it has waxed and waned depending on other factors.

In making their case, the authors compare and contrast the optimistic decade of the 1990s, kicked off and epitomized by Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 article, “The End of History,” which argued that with the fall of Soviet communism all political questions had been solved and so liberal democracy would reign peacefully throughout the world, with what they term, “The Apocalyptic Decade” which exploded from lower Manhattan to worldwide cable TV news on September 11, 2001 and, in the minds of many, will end in a worldwide catastrophe at the end of the Mayan long cycle on December 21, 2012 or thereabouts. (They review the evidence, also covered in Skeptic magazine 15.2, that this is a misinterpretation of the Mayan “long cycle”; my own favorite hypothesis is that MesoAmericans simply ran out of stone.)

Among the most interesting items covered in The Last Myth is Todd Strandberg’s Rapture Index. An Air Force retiree and born-again Christian, Strandberg developed the Index in the 1980s, not to specify when the Rapture is coming, since “no man knows the day or the hour” (Matthew 24:36) and an endless string of pseudo-exegetes have turned out to be super-stupid trying, but what is the trajectory of events portending the Tribulation (“the tumultuous days prophesied in the Bible that would precede the return of Christ”). Is it accelerating, decelerating, or remaining the same?

Order the paperback from Amazon
Order the Kindle Edition

And what really are the signs of the end times? Among those considered for the Rapture Index are such obvious markers straight out of the of the Book of Revelation: False Christs, the Occult, Satanism, Apostasy, False Prophets, Gog (read Russia), Persia (read Iran), the Kings of the East, the Mark of the Beast, Beast Government, and, of course, The Antichrist, as well as Anti-Semitism and Israel (though these had somewhat different valence and interpretation among Bible Belters not that long ago); but also some more often associated with the Wall Street Journal such as Unemployment, Inflation, Interest Rates, and Oil Price; or the Weather Channel such as: Volcanoes, Earthquakes, “Wild Weather,” Famine, Drought, Climate, and Floods.

Giles and Gross note that Strandberg became frustrated because the various apocalyptic timekeepers gave “wild and wildly varying interpretations…to the daily news” and couldn’t even agree whether “earthquakes were increasing or decreasing in frequency.” They note his consternation upon realizing that, “If people can’t even count something as simple as tectonic movements of the earth, what yardstick would they possibly use to measure something like apostasy?” (pp. 29, 217, n. 14).

For all its virtues, the authors of The Last Myth fall victim to the very sort of thinking they warn against, perhaps understandably so given that, like all authors, they want to sell their book. They too easily divide time periods (decades, even centuries), authors, and worldviews into neat, little pigeonholes of Apocalypticism versus Pragmatism. In discussing Francis Fukuyama and his landmark article, ‘the End of History’ they write, “it’s important to remember the earnestness of the delusion that we had escaped history—a delusion that spread from Washington to the NASDAQ to the Top 40 charts—for it represents the starting point in our bipolar shift in consciousness toward apocalyptic despair. Our exuberant optimism would soon boomerang back at us. From the highest hopes come the deepest disappointments” (p.23). Then they go on that, “Indeed, Y2K established the tone for the decade to follow” (p. 28).

No. Widespread apocalypticism did not undermine the greater society’s ability to gauge the magnitude of that “oncoming challenge.” It’s true that media evangelists did churn out booklets with titles like Y2K = 666? (note the escape hatch question mark) which implied that a worldwide crash of communications and computer systems could be the start of the end, and they made real money selling them to their believers. But at the same time real businesses, from Fortune 500 corporations down, with real interests made the necessary changes to software and documentation that prevented even the slightest glitch—and many of us in IT made real money implementing them.

Further, in the interests of being evenhanded, Gross and Gilles stretch their hands a bit too far. They criticize not only the Doomsday Sayers of the Religious Right, but also Nobel Laureate and former Vice President Al Gore and Jared Diamond for their works on climate change and ecology. Nor is sufficient attention given to the demographics of Apocalypticism. What are the age, race, religious, educational, sexual, political, and marital characteristics of those who believe versus those that do not.

With those reservations, however, The Last Myth is still worth reading, especially for those wanting to begin taking a skeptical look at a subject that fully deserves one.

Is Magical Thinking Good?

a book review by Kevin J. McCaffree

Matthew Hutson sets high goals for himself in his book, The Seven Laws of Magical Thinking. His mission, stated in the introduction, is to convince readers that even the most skeptical among us are, at base, subject to magical thinking and that this very process is both necessary and beneficial for navigating life. Such an argument would be difficult for any smart science writer to make, especially one not openly writing a work of apologetics—Hutson is an unabashedly committed naturalist. Though he sets for himself an upward climb, Hutson’s wit and incisive research is, for the most part, up to the difficult task.

Hutson defines “magical thinking” as the process of confusing objectivity and subjectivity, blurring properties of mind (intentions, desires) with properties of the material and physical world. He borrows late 19th and early 20th century anthropologist James George Frazer’s categorization of magical thought to organize his own examples. Frazer divided “magical” thought into two forms, contagion and similarity. Frazer’s “law of contagion” was meant to denote empirical regularities in how people view material objects. He noted that people often infuse such objects with characteristics or essences usually reserved for human beings, based on the proximity of those objects with certain people. To illustrate the law of contagion, Hutson describes the cross-country tour of John Lennon’s personal piano and the profound emotional experience fans describe after spending some time with it. Sure, it’s just a piano, but it is also the piano on which “Imagine” was composed. From a magical thinking perspective, Lennon’s spirit was so contagious that his own piano was a lucky beneficiary. For countless fans, a real part of who Lennon was now lives on in the form of a piano.

Hutson also makes use of Frazer’s “law of similarity,” which describes the human tendency to assume that like causes like. This helps, in large part, to explain why nations of people tend to get flustered at the thought of their flag being burned. Sure, it is just a flaming lump of nylon and polyester. Yet, flags are also symbolic of an entire country of human beings. It isn’t the burning of the flag that engenders hostility, it’s the implicit attempt to burn the people which the flag represents—like causes like. There is, as with all biases in psychology, a social dimension to this magical thinking as well. The same quirk that produces your hesitation in eating a French fry off the floor (dirty floors cause dirty French fries) also produces the most agonizing and asinine disregard for those who suffer most in society (dire, dirty living conditions cause impure, dirty people).

The book subsequently expands on the “laws” of contagion and similarity to explore other forms of magical thinking. Indeed, Hutson does not present seven “laws” as such; rather, he describes five subsequently overlapping forms or manifestations of the laws of contagion and similarity. Nowhere in the book are seven “laws” listed or summarized; most of the book after the first two chapters is a litany of examples of magical thinking, organized by type and categorized based on their kinship to the laws of similarity and contagion. Chapters thus cover superstitious thinking (which piggybacks on the law of similarity—whistling is said to encourage storms, probably because breath is equated with wind), mind/body dualism (the general tendency to view the material brain as an immaterial “mind”), immortality and reincarnation (viewing a material body as comprised of an immaterial essence), anthropomorphism (law of similarity) and karma (law of similarity—good brings good, bad brings bad).

Hutson does more than just discuss these various topics; an unusually good case is made for the general benefits of magical thinking. A particularly shining example is that of “metaphor therapy,” or therapy that uses symbolic ritual actions to aid people in major life transitions and decisions. Suppose you’ve just been the victim of a particularly bad breakup (or loss of a family member) and you’re finding it difficult to move on. Metaphor therapy might recommend taking a small token of your affection for that person, meditating over it and spending a day driving to your favorite beach (let’s say) and solemnly burying said memento in the sand. This ritualistic activity actually rides on the coattails of magical thinking and, Hutson suggests, can actually improve our lives. Burying that small token of affection in the sand might not have any logical purpose, but it speaks to our magical mind. Through the law of contagion, that memento still harbors the essences and intricacies of a now lost relationship. Ceremoniously burying the object might well signify, in a deeply emotional sense, the positive side of beginning a new life without that essence.

Order the hardback from Amazon
Order the paperback from Amazon
Order the Kindle Edition

In general, the book is well-researched, up-to-date and highly accessible for those who are new to this subject matter. Unfortunately, his “seven laws” are more accurately characterized as a largely undifferentiated, yet colorful, lump of psychological biases. Nevertheless, in the hands of a writer as accessible as Hutson, it is easy to overlook these more general organizational and theoretical issues.

I submit, however, that writing a book about cognitive biases and showing that they increase self-esteem and confidence is still a long way from showing that magical thought is both necessary and beneficial. In my estimation, Hutson falls short for not taking more of an interest in the long-term consequences of believing falsities about reality. I have no doubt that believing falsities in the short term might well raise your sense of control over your environment. Yet, what will the consequences of that sense of control be? Will you write the great American novel with the help of your newfound ability to magnetize ideas to yourself? Or will you just end up confidently wasting your hard earned cash on New Age crystals and candles? At the end of the day, a simple boost in confidence won’t tell us—we must know something more about our life trajectory, goals and intentions. A self-confident Hitler is a qualitatively different case from a self-confident Nelson Mandela. It is not clear to me that Hutson has made a case that systematically believing false things is beneficial, on balance, in the modern world.

Perhaps most people, much of the time, think in a way that might be loosely categorized as “magical.” Yet key to Hutson’s argument is that all of us—atheist, skeptic and evangelical alike—possess magical beliefs. In an effort to show that everyone (yes, everyone) believes in magic, Hutson relays an anecdote about Richard Dawkins, wherein the famed atheist fawns over an early edition of Darwin’s classic work On the Origin of Species because, “this is the most precious book in my collection.” Because Dawkins is imbuing a bound collection of paper with some measure of sacredness, he is, in Hutson’s view, thinking magically. Yet, Dawkins knows that his copy of On the Origin of Species isn’t actually special or unique. The book is simply symbolic of something that is—the ideas behind evolution by natural selection. I seriously doubt that Dawkins would fail to see this distinction. Not everyone can see it or does see it, though. Indeed, perhaps most people in possession of a book they consider special, magical or sacred really believe the book is special, magic or sacred in some supernatural sense—consider the attitudes of millions towards their holy books.

The difference and the distinction to make here is whether or not people have a dispassionate, third order belief about the behavior in which they are engaging. Dawkins probably feels enchanted and awed in the presence of an early edition of Darwin’s book. He may even feel that he is in the presence of the sacred. Yet, he also is capable, as a function of his education and erudition, of seeing his actions as subjective and overdrawn, a simple consequence of our near-instinctual emotional lunging towards that which we value. Dawkins understands the mind and how it works, so when he indulges a bit of syrupy, foggy sacredness, he understands dispassionately, on a fundamental level, what he is doing. This level of understanding isn’t available to everyone and it therefore marks a deep conceptual difficulty with the simple argument that, “everyone thinks magically.” Some people think of magical thought as an open invitation to unrestrained supernatural indulgence while others think of magical thought as a subjectively enjoyable cognitive illusion with numerous undesirable side effects. This difference isn’t trivial and it isn’t addressed by Hutson.

All told, Matthew Hutson has produced a well-written, and well-researched book with an extremely difficult mission: to show the irrational to be beneficial and the beneficial to be, at least in some respects, irrational. Further, he wants to convince you that even the most skeptical among us is a magical thinker. While I appreciated the review of the literature he provides, and I enjoyed his voice as a writer, my mind remains unchanged. Hutson remarks towards the end of the book that his desire in writing it was to, “unite my allegiance to critical thinking with my celebration of enchantment.” Unfortunately, Hutson’s definition of “enchantment” is inappropriately broad enough to include both a beautiful sunset and the scientifically false assertions of New Age gurus. Because both sunsets and psychics can be loosely understood as “enchanting” or “magical,” they must both be valuable aspects of subjective human experience, right? Not as far as I can see.

Of Miracles and Magisteria

a book review by Richard Morrock

Physicist Victor Stenger is renowned in skeptical circles as a hard-core atheist, and in his latest book, he targets organized religion as well as the quantum spiritualism of Deepak Chopra and the accommodationist position taken towards religion by adherents of Stephen Jay Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). This book is clearly a must-read for anyone interested in the role of religion in society today, and it also provides an easy-to-understand explanation of quantum theory, showing that it lends no support to “New Age” spiritualism.

Stenger discusses everything from the origin of the universe to the 2012 elections. Even where one might disagree with his conclusions, he is still thought-provoking. Stenger demolishes the theist argument that science is no less based on faith than religion. He draws a firm line between faith and trust. We have faith in supernatural entities, whose actions we cannot experience directly, or in political or religious leaders whose sincerity has yet to be tested, but we trust science—or a reliable friend, or our auto mechanic—based on our experience. To believe in something in the absence of evidence is, in Stenger’s estimation, foolish, and it would be hard to disagree.

Many scientists, following the logic of NOMA, have concluded that science has nothing to say about the supernatural. Stenger points out that scientists have looked into near-death experiences and the effectiveness of prayer on the sick, finding nothing but trickery and self-deception. Why should angels, demons or God himself be considered off limits?

In fact, scientists had better hope that the supernatural doesn’t exist, because if it did, all scientific experiments could be invalidated. How would we know that a positive result was caused by the phenomenon the scientists were investigating, or by some lab worker who silently prayed for the outcome, or by an invisible imp lurking in the corner? Should scientists call Ghostbusters to sweep their labs before each experiment? What, then, about spooky action at a distance?

Stenger is right when he points out the hypocrisy of religious leaders who preach morality to their followers while leading depraved lives in private. And he has fun with the Catholic doctrine that we are all sinners and must suffer the tortures of purgatory before we are admitted, if even then, to heaven. We are still waiting for a priest to say to the grieving relatives at a funeral, “Your beloved husband and father is now burning in the fires of purgatory for a thousand years because he did some bad things in his life.” Instead, they invariably remind us that the departed are looking down on us from heaven.

Stenger says that the Vatican never excommunicated a Nazi leader. This is incorrect. Hitler and Goebbels were both excommunicated, but not because of their role in World War II or the Holocaust. Prior to the war, Goebbels married a Protestant woman without agreeing to raise their children—whom the couple murdered during the last days of the Third Reich—as Roman Catholics. Hitler was best man at the wedding. It’s not that the Vatican didn’t oppose Hitler—they thought he was too tolerant of other religions!

The theistic argument has always been that if the universe exists, it must have had a creator, who can only be God, whatever characteristics one ascribes to Him. This raises the question of who created God. Theists invariably respond that God always existed, to which Bertrand Russell replied that if God could always exist without being created, so could the universe.

That was before the Big Bang Theory (the cosmological event, not the TV show). Scientists accept the idea that the universe had a beginning 13.7 billion years ago. Even though this is consistent with the biblical account (“Let there be light”), fundamentalists in Kansas banned the Big Bang theory from the schools along with Darwinian evolution. Fundamentalists are opposed to science in principle, not only where it contradicts the Bible. Ironically, while the Big Bang theory does not prove the existence of God, it at least leaves open the possibility.

If the universe was created by a Big Bang, what caused the Big Bang? Perhaps a purple-robed patriarch? Stenger gives us a number of alternative scenarios, all of which leave out supernatural entities. One of these is the two-sided universe. One side is ours, and the other is a mirror image in which time runs backwards. Each side begins with a Big Bang and ends with a Big Crunch, causing the Big Bang on the other side. There, since the arrow of time runs in reverse, ashes burst into flame and turn into wood, water runs uphill, and predators regurgitate their prey, which then comes to life, and the two run off backwards with the predator in the lead.

Another scenario Stenger presents is the Multiverse, which holds that our universe is the result of a black hole created in a much larger universe, which in turn came from an even bigger one, and so on forever. This seems to contradict Stenger’s own claim that there are no infinities in nature, which, if true, would narrow down the number of possible scenarios for the origin of the universe. Furthermore, it overlooks the likelihood that each “daughter” universe would be far smaller than its “mother,” ultimately leading to mini-universes too small to create any new ones. And it hands the theists the argument that God must have created the Multiverse, since what else could have started it? In any case, we have no more evidence for other universes than we have for God, and this theory violates Occam’s razor by postulating a vast number of unproven entities. Also, how could scientists verify the existence of black holes, if they are in other universes?

Order the paperback from Amazon Order the Kindle Edition

Stenger is a reductionist, arguing that reality is “particles all the way up.” He dismisses the theory that there are different levels of reality, with new laws emerging at each level, claiming that this is supposed to lead to God controlling everything. Not necessarily. What he terms the emergentist (I prefer “interactionist”) position is just as compatible with atheism as it is with theism. The different laws that emerge at various levels—physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, history, philosophy—coexist with, rather than replace, the laws at the lower levels. After all, you cannot understand a football game simply by knowing the laws of physics; you also have to understand the rules of football, even if the players and the ball are ultimately made up of particles. Sometimes events at one level of reality cause events at another level, typically higher but occasionally lower. Stenger denies the possibility of such “top-down causality.” But examples of this would be someone suffering a heart attack (biological) after receiving distressing news (psychological), or the public getting angry (psychological) over something a politician said or did (historical). This has nothing to do with any supernatural creator.

Gould’s argument for NOMA, which Stenger rejects, was never intended to be a description of reality, but rather a prescription for it. NOMA reduces the Bible and other holy books to works of literature, often set in historical context, but no more literally true than Doctor Zhivago or Saving Private Ryan. These works have something to tell us, even though we recognize them as fiction. Just as we should learn to distinguish between faith and trust, as Stenger informs us, so should we distinguish between knowledge, derived from science and involving facts, and wisdom, which is supposed to be provided by religion, and which involves values. To be sure, we have pretty much mined the Bible for whatever wisdom it contains, and there is no shortage of pious but unwise people.

Science does not know everything, but if there are things we do not know, or may never know, there are others we can now be sure of. The supernatural does not exist; the laws governing the universe are immutable, and do not change because of our prayers; we don’t go to heaven or hell, or get reincarnated when we die; there is no inherent purpose to anything in the universe, except for our own lives and what we make of them. If the public can be educated to accept this, it hardly matters whether or not they call the laws of nature “God.”

God cannot yet be disproved, but at least we can dismiss angels, demons, ghosts and Santa Claus. And if miracles were real, far from proving the existence of God, they would actually disprove it. After all, if the laws of nature do not always apply—if the dead return from the grave—then anything is possible and no God is required to maintain the order of the universe, because there isn’t any order.

Religious people will not abandon their beliefs in the face of Stenger’s arguments. But they might revise them. Take away the supernatural elements from religion, which can be disproven, and the difference between the religious and scientific camps become little more than a matter of semantics.

Engaging the Anti-vaxxers

a book review by Christian Orlic

On May 14, 1796, Edward Jenner developed and tested the first vaccine. He was able to protect people from smallpox by inoculating them with cowpox. Two centuries later vaccines have eradicated diseases and are often described as one of public health’s greatest achievements. According to the CDC vaccines have been highly successful and by 1996 there was 97.8% decrease in the incidence of rubella, diphtheria, haemophilus influenza type b, measles, mumps, pertussis, polio and tetanus (20).

Nevertheless, American parents appear to be more anxious than ever about vaccinating their children. Currently, American children receive at least 36 vaccinations before their sixth birthday. Some vaccines protect children and people against devastating communicable diseases that if when left unvaccinated would result in epidemics within communities. Nowadays about 40% of American parents chose to delay or refuse vaccinations for their children (15). Most of the children who have received no vaccines have slipped through the cracks: they are poor and have no insurance (20–40% of unvaccinated children). About 11.5% of American parents have “consciously refused” vaccines recommended by pediatricians, and about 23% have delayed some vaccines (32). Currently, all U.S. states allow vaccine exemptions for medical reasons, 48 states also allow children to be exempt for religious reasons, and some have even begun accepting philosophical objections.

Mark A. Largent is a historian of biology and director of Science, Technology, Environment, Public Policy (STEPPS) at Michigan State University. Largent’s previous book, Breeding Contempt, deals with the history of coerced sterilization in the United States. In Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America, Largent couples historical scholarship, keen cultural observations, and personal experiences in order to explore the American debate surrounding vaccination. Largent’s provocative but compelling argument suggests that the debate about the science, safety and efficacy of vaccination is a proxy for a set of unaddressed underlying anxieties regarding vaccines; therefore, science is not enough to resolve it, “no scientific finding and no agreement among physicians and scientists can possibly bring it [the debate] to an end” (173).

Order the book from Amazon
Order the Kindle Edition

The book sets out to explore these anxieties and understand where and how they originated. Largent’s insightful observations provide ways in which the debate can be moved forward by addressing the anxieties parents have directly, rather than bickering about “simplistic stand-ins” (1). The anxieties that motivate the debate are over the number of vaccinations required, the diseases for which we vaccinate, the contents of vaccines, a perception that pharmaceutical companies care more about profits than safety, recent public health emergencies, fears over the long term effects of vaccinations, a belief that natural is better, as well as an overall frustration with the state of medical care. These underlying anxieties, Largent argues, must be addressed in order to continue enjoying high levels of vaccine compliance: “our continuing success in vaccinating children depends on whether the public has confidence in the scientists, doctors, and policy makers (including industry) who shape these programs” (136).

The current debate surrounding vaccinations is bipartisan, and those who oppose vaccines use both liberal and conservative arguments. The anti-vaccine movement was influenced by alternative medicine and recent events. For example, when AIDS was first described, Eva Lee Snead claimed it was linked to the polio vaccine (52). Some concerns about vaccines are and have been legitimate. When polio vaccines were first developed, kidney tissue from chimpanzees was used. In fact, this process was unsafe, and tens of millions of people were unintentionally infected with SV40 (53). The fears expressed by Snead were thus not unwarranted; if one virus could make the cross-species jump, others could too. Since then, however, studies have disproven the link between the polio inoculations and HIV. Likewise, the alleged link between Gulf War Syndrome and vaccines given to soldiers is now debunked. Largent concludes that both of these public health emergencies fed suspicions about the safety of vaccines.

The claim that vaccines were linked to autism emerged at the same time in the U.S. and in the UK. These claims could only emerge because “modern concerns about vaccines were already in place” (67). Largent may come off as too sympathetic to Dr. Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy, “the iconic vaccine-anxious parent” (139); however, I submit, that this is required for both good history and understanding. By at least momentarily embracing the views of those who opposed vaccination, we come to understand why they hold these views and how they developed them. Chapter 3 and 4 of Largent’s book explore how Wakefield and McCarthy came to believe that vaccines cause autism and how they became spokespeople for an already anxious community. Their rapid rise to celebrity within their community supports the assertion that British and American parents were already anxious. Therefore, it should not surprise observers “how easily they adopted an explanation that was critical of the modern vaccine schedule” (73). The alleged link between thimerosal and autism, as well as that of the MMR vaccine with digestive problems resulting in developmental problems, provided “a ready-made venue for discussing their concerns about vaccines within a group of like-minded advocates”(12). While Largent recognizes that there is no evidence to support either Wakefield or McCarthy claims, he thinks that their outright dismissal is detrimental to maintaining high levels of vaccine compliance.

Largent argues that by ignoring the underlying anxieties, public health officials and vaccine advocates have misconstrued the reasons parents chose not to vaccinate, or to delay vaccination. Secondly, public health officials prefer to discuss the efficacy and safety of vaccines because this is within their professional realm. Vaccine advocates often claim that ignorance is one of the reasons parents are anxious about vaccinating their children. They claim that this refusal to vaccinate is predicated by an ignorance of the severity of the diseases for which vaccines protect. Whereas, data demonstrates that the more educated parents are the more likely they are to have reservations about the recommended vaccine schedule (34). These parents for the most part are making conscious, non-religious, decisions to refuse or delay vaccinating their children. Further antagonizing them rather than addressing underlying anxieties is likely to reduce vaccine compliance.

Order the paperback from Amazon
Order the harback from Amazon

One of the most important observations made by Largent is that not all vaccines are the same. Some vaccines protect against devastating diseases (MMR, DPT), others protect against dangerous ones (Hep A, Hep B, Hib, rotavirus, PCV) but the likelihood that an infant may be exposed to these is low, and other vaccinations provide protection against diseases with extremely low mortality rates (chickenpox). The distinction between the diseases each vaccine protects from are often forgotten. For example, Largent argues that some of the diseases we vaccinate newly born babies against may be unnecessary, such as HepB, a disease that an infant could only “contract by having sex with an infected person or by sharing contaminated needles with an infected drug addict” could wait (2). Public health officials should keep in mind that it is preferable for children to be under vaccinated than not vaccinated at all. Unfortunately, the vaccine debate is polarized. Amanda Peet, who supports vaccination, referred to the parents of unvaccinated children as “parasites” (she later apologized). Recognizing that not all vaccines are equal could sooth the rhetoric of the debate and allow for a more fruitful discussion. Otherwise, parents who are anxious about the amount of vaccines or one specific vaccine may be pushed not to vaccinate at all. Failing to recognize the differences between different inoculations results in an all or nothing approach (167).