Читать книгу Weird Earth - Donald R. Prothero - Страница 11

Science and Critical Thinking

The Science of the Earth

Like it or not, we all live in an age of science and technology. Science has utterly transformed the lives and fates not just of humans but of all organisms on the planet. Just look at what science has given us. Only 150 years ago, most children died in childbirth or through incurable childhood diseases. Today, thanks to modern medicine, nearly all children in the developed world survive their birth and early years. We take for granted that most of us carry a device in our pocket that is more powerful than a room-sized computer from only fifty years ago; it also performs as a phone, pager, clock, calculator, and video and audio player and has many other functions. Until the invention of the steam locomotive and then even faster transports, no human could travel any faster than a horse could run. Now we all routinely travel at 65 miles per hour on highways, and many people have flown and traveled faster than sound. Our lives are so completely dependent on the miracles of science and technology that we don’t even think about them anymore. We are aware of our dependence on them only when we lose them, such as during a power outage or an earthquake or other natural disaster.

Likewise, over the past two hundred years, the scientific method has been applied to the study of the earth, and its progress has led to great discoveries. We now know of millions of extinct animals that lived long before humans ever appeared. We can date rocks with high precision and can estimate the age of the origin of the earth and solar system at 4.56 billion years. We know what shapes the surface of the earth, what is beneath the surface, and how continents move around the earth’s surface. Instead of viewing earthquakes as a sign of the wrath of the gods, we understand what causes them and have made enormous strides in understanding and preparing for them, if not predicting them. Modern society runs on coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium, as well as valuable materials like gold, silver, copper, and platinum, and it depends on resources like steel, stone, and concrete. These discoveries and technologies were made possible only by the application of the scientific method to earth sciences by scientists curious to know how the earth worked.

We are completely and utterly dependent on science and technology for our survival, yet we find that even in the most developed countries of the world, a significant number of people reject some aspect of science because it conflicts with deeply held beliefs. They love what science gives them (such as health, technology, and wealth) but reject science when it tells them something they don’t want to hear. But we don’t get to make that choice. Science is not a restaurant menu that you can pick and choose from. As science educator Bill Nye said, “The natural world is a package deal; you don’t get to select the facts you like and which you don’t.”¹ Or as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “When different experiments give you the same result, it is no longer subject to your opinion. That’s the great thing about science. It’s true, whether or not you believe in it. That’s why it works.”²

This is particularly true when science finds out something that goes against what we want to believe—what Al Gore aptly called “inconvenient truths.” Scientists don’t get to pick and choose what they want to believe when they are doing research. They are obligated by their training as scientists to report their results, no matter how much it might go against what they wish to be true. Science tells us that we are a product of evolution and that we are closely related to the apes, that humans are insignificant on the scale of the cosmos or in the framework of geologic time, and that humans are destroying the planet through pollution and especially climate change. These things are not comfortable or easy to live with and may be a blow to our notions of cosmic importance—but they are true because that’s what the evidence shows.

Scientists are not spoilsports or killjoys, and we don’t take pleasure in shattering illusions. Despite what some science deniers claim, there’s no incentive for scientists to tell you bad news. We don’t get more grant dollars for telling you the grim truth about climate change or discovering more evidence of your close relationship to the apes. If a scientist tells you an “inconvenient truth,” it is because a scientist must do so as a part of honest, objective reporting of what the data show. An amusing online cartoon shows a variety of scientists speaking inconvenient truths and being punished for it—from Archimedes being killed by the Roman soldier as he did his geometry, to Bruno being burned at the stake for saying the earth is not the center of the universe, to Darwinian evolution, to Einsteinian relativity. The final panel says, “Science: if you ain’t pissin’ people off, you ain’t doing it right.”³

What Is Science?

Science is essential to our daily lives now, but very few people actually understand what it is or how it works. The media feed us a diet of stereotypes, especially the classic “mad scientist” trope, complete with the white lab coat, the sparking apparatuses and bubbling beakers, wild hair, and maniacal laugh. But most scientists don’t wear white lab coats. I haven’t worn one since I took chemistry lab in college, and the only scientists who need them are those who work with stuff that might splash on their clothes, such as chemists and medical personnel. No, scientists aren’t defined by the color of the coat they wear or the gizmos they work with. They are defined by what is in their heads and how they think.

Science is a way of thinking about the world, not how you dress or what toys you play with. Science is thinking critically about phenomena in the natural world and trying to find ways to test hypotheses, or preliminary explanations, about how the world works. As the philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.”⁴ All science is about testing hypotheses and finding out their validity by further observations and experiments. Scientists generally aren’t trying to prove their hypotheses but to disprove them. As British philosopher Sir Karl Popper pointed out many years ago, it’s far easier to prove a hypothesis wrong (falsify it) than it is to prove it right (verify it). The famous example is the classic philosophical statement “All swans are white.” No number of white swans proves that statement true, but a single nonwhite swan proves it false. Indeed, there are black swans in Australia (fig. 1.1). If your hypothesis has been tested and found false, you must abandon it and move on to another explanation—perhaps one suggested by your previous failure. Popper titled one of his books Conjectures and Refutations, a nice summary of the scientific method in a single phrase.

This idea surprises a lot of people, but it is true. Strictly speaking, science is about proving ideas wrong and moving on, not proving them right. Scientists are not looking for “final truth” or proving something “absolutely true.” Scientific explanations must always be open to further scrutiny and testing; they are tentative and must be capable of being rejected. As the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote, “It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.”⁵ Whether religious, political, or social, ideas that cannot be tested are not scientific; they are dogma. This immediately distinguishes science from many other areas of human thought. For example, we might say that “Zeus caused the lightning and thunder,” but this is a religious belief. It is not a testable scientific idea. Marxism and many other dogmatic worldviews also make broad statements about the world that cannot be tested but are articles of faith among the believers, so nothing would ever prove them false. When dogmatists (religious or otherwise) have their sacrosanct ideas challenged, they will not admit that the idea has been falsified. They stubbornly insist they are right, or they find some dodge to salvage at least some of their false notions.

Figure 1.1. Not all swans are white. This is the Australian black swan. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Thus, science is very different from what most people think it is. When scientists speak to each other, they are not after “truth.” They are careful not to use the words true or fact, and strictly speaking, we don’t “prove things true.” Instead, scientists are trying to test and falsify, and test again, until an idea is well corroborated (not “proven true”). What most people would call a “fact” is an “extremely well-supported explanation.” To a scientist, the highest form of a corroborated hypothesis is a theory, a group of interrelated and well-corroborated hypotheses and observations that have received widespread acceptance because they explain so much.

Sadly, the public uses these words and concepts very differently. In everyday usage, theory means a wild speculative idea, like “theories of why JFK was assassinated.” Creationists take advantage of the confusion and exploit this meaning of the word by denigrating evolution as “just a theory.” Well, gravity is just a theory too, but the objects around you are not floating around in the air. Thanks to the germ theory of disease, we believe that bacteria and viruses are the major causes of diseases, not some sort of “ill humor” in your blood that your doctor would remove by bleeding you with leeches.

Likewise, in the public debate about scientific topics, science deniers will put down an idea they oppose (like climate change) by saying that it’s not “proven true” or “100 percent true.” Nothing in science is “proven true,” and everything has probabilities associated with it. I can’t say that I can “prove” you would die if you jumped off a twenty-story building, but I can say that it’s likely to happen with a 99 percent probability—and most nonsuicidal people will not take that less than 1 percent chance that they won’t die.

As Carl Sagan said, “Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.”⁶ Science is basically applied skepticism. We try to be skeptical of all ideas until they have been tested and corroborated again and again, and then we only give our provisional assent. We don’t believe in an idea; we accept it based on evidence. (Believe is a religious and cultural word, not a scientific one.) Most humans are cautious of people trying to sell them worthless junk or politicians making impractical promises or swindlers trying to con them into believing something or buying something. We all know that advertising is exaggerated or deceptive or distorted, and in many cases, it is an outright lie. We try to look for good products and avoid junk when we are shopping, and we employ the old Latin maxim caveat emptor, “let the buyer beware.” Yet many people won’t employ the same skepticism to outlandish claims about religious miracles or UFOs or Bigfoot or a wide variety of paranormal ideas that sucker people every day. Most of the ideas in this book fall within the realm of outlandish and even bizarre, but there are plenty of believers. Yet these same people are skeptical elsewhere in their lives and won’t fall for a deceptive ad on TV or the internet or a telemarketer trying to sell them something.

Scientists are humans too, and although they try to be hard-boiled skeptics, they cannot avoid falling for the traps in thinking and sometimes embrace ideas that fit what they want to believe rather than what is. As Carl Sagan wrote, “There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right; they’re the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.”⁷ For this reason, there is an important quality control mechanism built into the fabric of science: peer review. This is very different from the internet, which is a giant cesspool of garbage and bad ideas with no fact-checking, and it is very different from partisan media outlets, which have given up reporting anything “fair and balanced” but churn out nonstop propaganda.

Scientists, on the other hand, must submit their ideas to the harsh review and scrutiny of other scientists before they can be published. Usually these reviews are anonymous, and they can be sent to any qualified scientist, including your worst critic. If your idea is rejected, you can give up, or you can try to do a better job of supporting your hypothesis and submit it again. Peer review weeds out the bad ideas in science, and after a harsh round of review before publication, and an even harsher scrutiny in the years after publication, most ideas in science that have survived many years are probably true and have passed quality control.

Peer review is particularly important in evaluating our own ideas, since we are inclined to think our own ideas are right and cannot judge them critically. As the Nobel Prize–winning Caltech physicist Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”⁸ Many scientific experiments are run by the double-blind method, in which neither the subjects of the experiments nor the investigators know what is in sample A or sample B. In a double-blind experiment, the samples are coded so that no one knows what is in each sample, and only after the experiment is over do the scientists find out whether the results agree with their expectations or not. As Feynman said, “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”⁹ Ultimately, bad ideas are weeded out, and good ones survive to become the established framework of scientific theory that all scientists build upon.

The mad scientist stereotype that prevails in nearly all media is completely wrong not just because of the clothing, behavior, and apparatuses that are shown. It’s wrong because the “mad scientist” is not testing hypotheses about nature or experimenting to find out what is really true. A cartoon on the internet shows someone interrogating a classic mad scientist. The interrogator asks, “Why did you build a death ray?” The mad scientist says, “To take over the world.” “No, I mean what hypothesis are you testing? Are you just making mad observations?” The mad scientist responds, “Look, I’m just trying to take over the world. That’s all.” The interrogator continues, “You at least are going to have some of the world as a mad control group, right?”

As the cartoon suggests, he’s really not a scientist at all; he’s just a “mad engineer.” (Engineers may understand science, but their goal is not to discover truths about nature but to apply science to make inventions or practical devices.)

Science, Intuition, and Common Sense

Common sense is that which tells us the world is flat.

—Stuart Chase, quoted in S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action

Common sense is the very antipodes of science.

—Edward Bradford Titchener, Systematic Psychology: Prolegomena

We’re living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilization but we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That’s dangerous.

—E. O. Wilson, quoted in New Scientist

The great biologist (and defender of Darwin) Thomas Henry Huxley wrote, “Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.”¹⁰ Scientists and philosophers often claim that science is based on common sense. But at a more fundamental level, much of what we have learned from scientific observations and experiments goes against common sense or what we intuitively feel is true.

Think, for example, of how people have viewed the world until just very recently. From our perspective, the sun and moon and stars appear to move around us, and we are the center of everything. From our perspective, the earth looks flat. It takes a lot of early childhood education to train people to perceive the earth as a spherical ball rotating on its axis and revolving around the sun, because that’s not what our senses tell us. Our intuition tells us that a heavier or larger object will fall to the ground faster than a smaller or lighter one, and that dogma was carried on from ancient times to the writings of Aristotle and into the Middle Ages. Then Galileo did his famous experiment dropping two different-sized cannonballs off the Leaning Tower of Pisa and showed it was false.

Newton’s concept of gravity as attraction between bodies is much less intuitive than the older idea of objects falling to the ground because they had “weight” and everything wanted to move to its “natural place.” Even more counterintuitive is thinking about any “solid” object as a collection of tiny nuclei with enormous volumes of space around them, only partially filled with clouds of electromagnetic energy we call electrons. Grasping the enormity of geologic time, with its millions and billions of years, is extremely hard for most people, even with the best analogies and illustrations. Our common sense was evolved when we were small African apes and was not designed to grasp the extremely tiny or the extremely distant.

As Sunil Laxman writes,

This wiring is very deep within us, and starts very early in life. The resistance is not merely limited to viewing some science suspiciously, but for many new ideas that challenge what is apparent. It begins very early in life, with what kids know and learn either by observation and mimicry, or active instruction. Children, even babies, “know” a lot by learning things themselves through observation. They know that solid objects will fall to the ground, for example, or that people have different emotions. Now suppose a child knows that any unsupported object will fall to the ground, it is difficult for this child to imagine or comprehend that the world is round. That is because they have observed that things will always fall off round objects. At a young age, a child cannot comprehend relative scales of the earth (and themselves), and relate it to the concept of gravity. It is just as counter intuitive at that age for a child to believe that a larger object will not fall faster than a smaller object of the same mass, when dropped from the same height. Many of us see that it takes many years for children to be able to accurately draw out the earth as a rounded globe. In essence, people reject scientific ideas because it appears to be counter-intuitive. A level of resistance to science comes from cultural factors. In every culture, some information is specifically asserted or defined. For example, the resistance to understanding evolution is prominent in some parts of America, in certain religious groups. This is because it has been specifically asserted otherwise. Not everyone is qualified to study or understand all scientific principles of a subject (like string theory). Therefore, it’s typical for people to believe in what they are told by people they trust. Interestingly, many studies now show that children do the same thing, and will only believe things that are told to them by people they trust. These could be parents, teachers or peers. More importantly, when some data or explanation is contradicting when coming from different sources, children will believe an explanation provided by the people they trust and not the data itself.¹¹

The often counterintuitive and difficult-to-grasp nature of science is behind many of the weird ideas about the earth that are discussed in this book. Certainly, flat-earthers and geocentrists are influenced by what they see and intuitively feel, rather than what science tells us. It takes a lot of training to undo natural, “common sense,” intuitive perceptions about the world and to grasp the weird, counterintuitive (but correct) views that science has given us.

Baloney Detection

So what are the general principles of science and critical thinking that we need to follow if we wish to separate fact from fiction? How can “deep thoughts … be winnowed from deep nonsense?” Many of these were outlined in Carl Sagan’s 1996 book, The Demon-Haunted World, and Michael Shermer’s 1997 book, Why People Believe Weird Things. To decipher fact from fiction, some of the most important principles include the following.

1. Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

This simple statement by Carl Sagan (or the similar “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” by Marcello Truzzi) makes an important point. Every day, science produces hundreds of small hypotheses, which only require a small extension of what is already known to test their validity. But crackpots, fringe scientists, and pseudoscientists are well known for making extraordinary claims about the world and insisting that they are true. These include the many believers in UFOs and aliens, for whom evidence is flimsy at best but who are firmly convinced (as are a majority of Americans, according to polls) that such UFOs have landed here repeatedly and that aliens have interacted with humans. Never mind the fact that such “aliens” seem only to make themselves known to gullible individuals with no other witnesses present or that the “physical evidence” for aliens landing in Area 51 in Nevada or in Roswell, New Mexico, has long ago been explained as caused by secret military experiments. (For further discussion, see UFOs, Chemtrails and Aliens: What Science Says, by me and Tim Callahan.)

Just think for a moment: If you were part of a superior alien culture, able to travel between galaxies, would you only interact with a few isolated individuals out in the boonies, or would you contact the head of the governments on this planet and let your existence be known? Think about our extraordinary network of satellites and radar that makes it possible for us to detect virtually anything moving in the skies anywhere in the world. Even with this capability, we have never gotten a reliable detection of a UFO, only unverifiable claims made by random plane or ground observers and photos that have been documented as fakes. Certainly, it is possible that aliens have visited us, but such an extraordinary claim requires higher levels of proof than ordinary science, and so far, the evidence provided is pretty flimsy.

As we shall see in this book, most of the weird ideas about the earth are really extreme. They are not obviously false in the way that they are constructed or presented, but in order for us to take them seriously, there must be an extraordinary amount of evidence to support them and to shoot down the evidence of the scientific view. For this reason, most of these ideas are quickly dismissed by real scientists, because there is no evidence for them and lots of evidence against them.

2. Burden of Proof

Related to this first principle is the idea of burden of proof. In a court of law, one side (usually the prosecution or plaintiff) is assigned the task of proving their case “beyond a reasonable doubt” in a criminal case and “based on a preponderance of the evidence” in a civil case. The defense often needs to do nothing if the other side has not met this burden of proof. Similarly, for extraordinary claims that appear to overthrow a large body of knowledge, the burden of proof is also correspondingly greater. In 1859, the idea of evolution was controversial, and the burden of proof was on Darwin to show that evolution had occurred. By now, the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, so the burden of proof on the antievolutionists is much larger; they must show that creationism is right by overwhelming evidence, not point out a few inconsistencies or problems with evolutionary theory. Likewise, the evidence that the Holocaust occurred is overwhelming (many eyewitnesses and victims are still alive, and many Nazi documents describe what they did), so the Holocaust denier has to provide overwhelming evidence to prove that it did not occur.

3. Anecdotes Do Not Make Science

As storytelling animals, humans are prone to believe accounts told by witnesses. Marketers know that if they get a handful of celebrities or sincere-sounding customers to praise their product, we will believe these people and go out and buy their merchandise—even if there have been no careful scientific studies or FDA approvals to back up their claims. One or two anecdotes may sound convincing, and the experience of your back-fence neighbor may be interesting, but to truly evaluate claims made in science (and elsewhere), you need a detailed study with dozens or hundreds of cases. In addition, there often must be a “control” group of individuals who receive a placebo rather than the treatment yet who think that they did get the real medicine, so that the power of suggestion cannot be seen as responsible for the alleged benefit.

Anything approved by the FDA has met this standard; most stuff sold in “New Age” or “health food” stores has not been so carefully studied. When such things have been analyzed, they have usually turned out to have either marginal benefits or none at all. (The stores will take your money all the same.) If you listen closely to the words promoting some of these “medicines,” they must carefully avoid the terminology of medicine and pharmacology and must instead use phrases like “supports thyroid health” or “promotes healthy bladder function.” These phrases are not true medicinal claims, and so they are not subject to FDA regulations. Nonetheless, the great majority of these products that have been scientifically analyzed turn out to be worthless and a waste of money, and every once in a while, they prove to be harmful or even deadly.

Similarly, the evidence for UFOs or alien abductions or Sasquatch sightings is largely anecdotal. One person, usually alone, is a witness to these extraordinary events and is convinced they are real. However, studies have shown again and again how easily people can hallucinate or be deceived by common natural phenomena into seeing something that really isn’t there. A handful of eyewitnesses means nothing in science when the claims are unusual; much more concrete evidence is needed.

4. Arguments from Authority and Credential Mongering

Many people try to win arguments by quoting some authority on the subject in an attempt to intimidate and silence their opponents. Sometimes they are accurately quoting people who really are expert in a subject, but more often than not, the quotation is out of context and does not support their point at all, or the authority is really not that authoritative. This is the usual problem with creationist quotes from authority: when you go back and look at the source, the quote is out of context and means the opposite of what they claim, or the source itself is outdated or not very credible. As Carl Sagan puts it, there are no true authorities; there are people with expertise in certain areas, but nobody is an authority in more than a narrow range of human knowledge.

One of the principal symbols of authority in scholarship and science is the PhD degree. But you don’t need a PhD to do good science, and not all people who have science PhDs are good scientists. As those of us who have gone through the ordeal know, a PhD only proves that you can survive a grueling test of endurance in doing research and writing a dissertation on a very narrow topic. It doesn’t prove that you are smarter than anyone else or more qualified to render an opinion than anyone else. Because earning a PhD requires enormous focus on one specific area, many people with that degree have actually lost a lot of their scholarly breadth and knowledge of other fields in the process of focusing on their thesis.

In particular, it is common for people making extraordinary claims (like creationism or alien abductions or psychic powers) to wear a PhD, if they have one, like a badge, advertise it prominently on their book covers, and feature it in their biographies. They know that it will impress and awe the listener or reader into thinking they are smarter than anyone else or more qualified to pronounce on a topic. Nonsense! Unless the claimant has earned a PhD and done research in the subject being discussed, the degree is entirely irrelevant to the controversy.

For example, many of the critics of the evidence for global climate change are physicists or other scientists with no actual research in climate science. Their degree may make them an expert in physics, but climate science is a completely different field with a different data set and different kind of training. They are presumptuous and arrogant to think that their physics degree makes them an expert in this very different field. Even worse are meteorologists who criticize climate science. Since I teach both subjects at the college level, I can tell you that their claims are ridiculous. Meteorology deals with the day-to-day weather, but climate science deals with climate, the long-term average of weather, based on ice cores, tree rings, deep-sea sediments, and other geological phenomena. A meteorologist has no qualification to critique climate data, so when you hear them spouting off about climate change in the news, they come off as rank amateurs. Unfortunately, the average person, who doesn’t know that climate is not the same as weather, is fooled nonetheless.

The “scientific” leaders of the creationist movement included a man with a doctorate in hydraulic engineering and another who was a biochemist but trained over seventy years ago. Neither had any training in fossils or in geology or any other field beyond their specializations, but they wrote endless false information about paleontology or geology or thermodynamics. Their doctoral degrees were completely irrelevant to those fields. Yet they always flaunted their PhDs to awe the masses and tried to intimidate their opponents. In all of these cases, a degree in an unrelated field does not make you an expert in any other field. My PhD and published research have made me expert in many areas of geology, paleontology, and climate science, but they don’t qualify me to write a symphony or fix a car.

Similarly, there are many fringe ideas in lots of fields, and the more “way out there” they are, the more likely the author has put “PhD” on the cover. By contrast, legitimate scientists do not put their degree on their book cover and seldom list their credentials on a scientific article either. If you doubt this, just look at the science shelves in your local bookstore. The quality of the research must stand by itself, not be propped up by an appeal to authority based on your level of education. To most scientists, credential mongering is a red-flag warning. If the author flaunts a PhD on the cover, beware of the stuff inside!

5. Bold Statements and Scientific-Sounding Language Do Not Make It Science

People who want to promote their radical ideas are prone to exaggeration and famous for making amazing pronouncements such as “a milestone in human history” or “the greatest discovery since Copernicus” or “a revolution in human thinking.” Our baloney-detection alarms should go off automatically when we hear politicians or actors hyping policies or movies that turn out to be much less than claimed. The alarms should also scream when we hear people making claims about human knowledge or science that seem overblown.

Another strategy for making a wild idea acceptable to the mainstream is to cloak it in the language of science. This cashes in on the goodwill and credibility that science has in our culture and attempts to make such outrageous ideas more believable. For example, when the creationists realized that they could not pass off their religious beliefs in public school classrooms as science, they began calling themselves “creation-scientists” and eliminating overt references to God in their public school textbooks (but the religious motivation and source of the ideas is still transparently obvious). Several religions (including Christian Science and Scientology) appropriate the aura of scientific authority by using the word in their name, even though the religions are not falsifiable and do not fit the criteria of science as discussed here.

Similarly, the snake oils and nostrums peddled by telemarketers and by New Age alternative-medicine advocates are often described in what appears to be scientific lingo, but when you examine it closely, the makers of the products do not actually follow scientific protocols or the scientific method. We all know examples of television commercials that show an actor in a white lab coat, often with a stethoscope around his or her neck, saying, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV,” and then promoting a product. The “doctor” has no medical training, but just the appearance of scientific and medical authority is sufficient to sway people to buy the product.

6. Special Pleading, Moving the Goalposts, and Ad Hoc Hypotheses

In science, when an observation comes up that appears to falsify your hypothesis, it is a good idea to examine the observation closely or to run the experiment again to be sure that it is real. But if the contradictory data are sound, then the original hypothesis is falsified, dead, kaput. It is time to throw it out and come up with a new, possibly better, hypothesis.

In the case of many nonscientific belief systems, from religions to mysticism to Marxism, it does not work this way. Belief systems often have a profound emotional and mystical attachment for people who hold these beliefs in spite of contradictory observations and refuse to let rationality or the facts shake them. As Tertullian put it, “I believe because it is incredible.”¹² St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, wrote, “To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see is black, if the Church so decides it.”¹³ That’s fine if you are willing to accept that system and suspend disbelief in favor of emotional and mystical connections.

If you pass off your belief system as science, however, you must play by the rules of science. When con artists try to sell you snake oil and someone points out an inconvenient fact about it, they will try to attack this fact or to explain it away with an after-the-fact or ad hoc (Latin for “for this purpose”) explanation. If the snake oil fails to work, they might say, “You didn’t use it right” or “It doesn’t work on days when the moon is full.” If the séance fails to contact the dead, the medium might scold the skeptic by saying, “You didn’t believe in it sufficiently” or “The room wasn’t dark enough” or “The spirits just don’t feel like talking today.” If we point out that there are millions of species on earth that could not have fit into the biblical Noah’s ark, the creationist tries to salvage their hypothesis by saying, “Only the created kinds were on board” or “Insects and fish don’t count” or “God miraculously crammed all these animals into this tiny space, where they lived in harmony for forty days and forty nights” or some similar dodge. Similarly, if you show a claim to be false, the believer may move the goalpost by changing how a falsification of their ideas would be determined.

As we shall see in the chapters that follow, ad hoc hypotheses are common when the conclusion is already accepted and the believer must find any explanation to wiggle out of inconvenient contradictory facts. But they are not acceptable in science. If the conclusion is a given and cannot be rejected or falsified, then it is no longer scientific.

7. Not All “Persecuted Geniuses” Are Right

People trying to promote wild ideas that seem crazy to us will often point to the persecution of Galileo (arrested and tried for advocating Copernican astronomy) or Alfred Wegener (ridiculed for his ideas about continental drift) and will take solace in how these geniuses were eventually proven right. But as Carl Sagan put it, “The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”¹⁴ The annals of science are full of wild and crackpot notions that didn’t survive testing and were eventually abandoned, and these ideas far outnumber the handful of misunderstood geniuses who were vindicated in the end.

These “misunderstood geniuses” often turn to Schopenhauer, who wrote, “All truths pass through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”¹⁵ But Schopenhauer was wrong. Many revolutionary and radical ideas (such as Einstein’s theory of relativity) were never ridiculed or violently opposed. In the case of Einstein, his theories were mostly ignored as interesting but untestable until scientific observations made in 1919 corroborated them.

Science is open to all sorts of ideas, from the conventional to the wacky. It doesn’t matter where the ideas come from, but they all have to pass muster. If your ideology has failed the test of science, you can’t just claim you’re a misunderstood genius; it is more likely that your cherished hypothesis is just plain wrong. Scientists are too busy, and there are too many worthwhile and important scientific goals for them to pursue, for them to waste their time testing and evaluating every wild scheme that comes along. People might wail that they are persecuted and misunderstood geniuses. But if you want to be taken seriously, you must play by the rules of science: get to know other scientists, exchange ideas, be willing to change your own ideas, present your results in scientific conferences, and submit them to the scrutiny of peer-reviewed journals and books. If your ideas can survive this rigorous gauntlet, then they will get the attention they deserve from scientists.

The Skeptic Society in Pasadena, California (I am a member of their editorial board) gets hundreds of letters each year by lone “geniuses” who claim to have made some great discovery, or debunked Einsteinian relativity or quantum physics, or discovered a working perpetual-motion machine or cold fusion or something equally startling. They demand that Skeptic magazine publish their “revolutionary” ideas. Most of the ideas are laughably bad and the people clearly crackpots, but every once in a while a somewhat legitimate-sounding idea will emerge, and I am often consulted to see whether it holds muster. But the real test of whether the idea is worthy is peer review. Find a legitimate place to publish your idea, and then let the scientific community test it. If your idea is truly groundbreaking or revolutionary, sooner or later scientists will find its merits and test it, and if it survives repeated scrutiny, scientists will begin to accept it and promote it. Grousing about how you are a misunderstood genius will get you nowhere. Nor will claiming that there is a great conspiracy among scientists to suppress your brilliant idea.

It’s a Conspiracy!

Conspiracy thinking, in particular, plays a huge part in weird ideas about the earth. Flat-earthers, geocentrists, moon-landing deniers, creationists, and many others we will discuss in this book insist that they are not taken seriously because a great conspiracy of scientists, or the world in general, is against their ideas. Lately, conspiracy thinking has become rife in society as whole segments of the population are taken in by media that cater to their need for conspiracies, especially shows like Alex Jones’s Infowars. As the political philosopher John Gray wrote, “Modern political religions may reject Christianity, but they cannot do without demonology. The Jacobins, the Bolsheviks and the Nazis all believed in vast conspiracies against them, as do radical Islamists today. It is never the flaws of human nature that stand in the way of Utopia. It is the workings of evil forces.”¹⁶

Conspiracy theories are everywhere in our culture, and lots of people indulge in them. Ever since President John F. Kennedy (JFK) was shot in 1963, there have been dozens of different conspiracy theories about who shot him and why. Conspiracies have been hatched around Princess Diana’s death. Others claim that the moon landing was a hoax (see chap. 6) or that climate change science is a hoax by the entire scientific community trying to destroy capitalism. Just days after the 9/11 terror attacks, a large number of 9/11 “Truthers” emerged to claim that it was all a conspiracy, an inside job by powerful forces—pick your favorite conspirator here—for unstated motives. Of course, the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy—by nineteen Muslim men who hijacked the planes according to a plan hatched by Al-Qaeda. But this is not what the 9/11 Truthers want to accept. It has to be something bigger and more sinister, usually planned by the Bush administration.

High percentages of Americans (on the order of 25–40%) believe in at least one or more conspiracy theory, and studies have shown that those who believe one conspiracy tend to accept many others. Sometimes they are not even consistent. As William Saletan wrote,

The appeal of these theories—the simplification of complex events to human agency and evil—overrides not just their cumulative implausibility (which, perversely, becomes cumulative plausibility as you buy into the premise) but also, in many cases, their incompatibility. Consider the 2003 survey in which Gallup asked 471 Americans about JFK’s death. Thirty-seven percent said the Mafia was involved, 34 percent said the CIA was involved, 18 percent blamed Vice President Johnson, 15 percent blamed the Soviets, and 15 percent blamed the Cubans. If you’re doing the math, you’ve figured out by now that many respondents named more than one culprit. In fact, 21 percent blamed two conspiring groups or individuals, and 12 percent blamed three. The CIA, the Mafia, the Cubans—somehow, they were all in on the plot.¹⁷

Two years ago, psychologists at the University of Kent led by Michael Wood, who blogs at a delightful website on conspiracy psychology, https://conspiracypsychology.com/author/disinfoagent/, escalated the challenge. They offered UK college students five conspiracy theories about Princess Diana: four in which she was deliberately killed and one in which she faked her death. In a second experiment, they brought up two more theories: Osama Bin Laden was still alive (contrary to reports of his death in a US raid earlier that year), and alternatively, he was already dead before the raid. Sure enough, “The more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered,” and “the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive.”¹⁸

Conspiracy thinking is strongly self-reinforcing. Polls show that those who accepted the JFK assassination conspiracy were twice as likely to believe that a UFO crashed at Roswell (32% believed, versus 16% for those who don’t accept any other conspiracy theories).¹⁹ The people who believed in Roswell UFO stories, in turn, were far more likely to believe that the CIA had distributed crack cocaine, that the government “knowingly allowed” the 9/11 attacks, and that the government added fluoride to our water for sinister reasons.

Psychological studies have shown that conspiracy thinking is all about the need for control and certainty in a random, frightening world where everything seems out of control. Conspiracies are nice simple explanations for scary phenomena that we don’t want to believe are simply due to random events. Conspiracy believers tend to be people who have high anxiety about their lives, their jobs, and their futures and who need someone to blame for their troubles and failures. Various psychological surveys have shown that believers have a very low level of trust in their fellow human beings or human institutions, tend to have a high degree of political cynicism, and believe the worst about other humans. In broader terms, they are people who focus on intention and agency rather than randomness and complexity.

At one time, conspiracy believers were isolated, and conspiracy thinking was treated as a form of paranoia and mental illness. They had little way of reaching each other, getting feedback from like-minded individuals, or finding lots of new conspiracies to read about and believe in. But now that the internet brings any conspiracy theory to you in the touch of a few keys and mouse clicks, they are proliferating at a rate that has never been seen before, because now they can feed on and reinforce each other. For example, a 2007 poll showed that more than 30 percent of Americans thought that “certain elements in the US government knew the [9/11] attacks were coming but consciously let them proceed for various political, military, and economic motives” or that these government elements “actively planned or assisted some aspects of the attacks.”²⁰ Thanks to relentless conspiracy mongering by the media, polls show that 51 percent of Americans think that a conspiracy was behind Kennedy’s assassination; only 25 percent agree with the demonstrated reality that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

One of the worst things about conspiracy theories is the fact they are nearly always airtight; they act like a religion or ideology that refuses to submit to testing and falsification. Every debunking piece of evidence against the conspiracy will be viewed as an attempt to “misinform the public,” and the lack of evidence for it is viewed as a government cover-up. In this sense, conspiracy theorists are very antiscientific, because they have the same closed view of the world that will not accept outside information that doesn’t fit their core beliefs as religions and cults do. Much about conspiracy groups resembles religious cults, including suspicion of the outside world, self-reinforcement with like-minded individuals, refusal to look at anything that does not fit their worldview, and an almost messianic devotion to the idea that they have the only truth and that everyone else is foolish or deceived or part of the conspiracy.

People have a much easier time believing that a huge operation of sinister forces is at work to do something they don’t like rather than accepting the idea that stuff happens. To a conspiracy theorist, the idea that evil forces are ruling the world is much more plausible than the reality that bad things just happen and we don’t really have much control over them. Conspiracy thinking is particularly prevalent among people with a deep hatred or distrust of the government, so it tends to be concentrated on the conservative fringe (as evidenced by Donald Trump and his embrace of a wide range of conspiracies and crazy ideas). There is also a strain in conspiracy thinking among leftists who view Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and so on as more powerful than they really are. We now know that Big Tobacco conspired to suppress antismoking research and that ExxonMobil and some other oil companies conspired to fund climate change deniers and suppress research, but they were not able to hide their conspiracy forever, and the truth came out eventually. As conspiracy thinking also declines slightly with more education, people who know more about how the world actually works tend not to believe in them as much.

So how do we know that the conspiracy believers are wrong and paranoid and that there is nothing really happening? The key flaw with conspiracy thinking is that it assumes a level of competence and secret keeping that has never happened in the history of humanity. People often get the idea from TV and the movies (from shows like The X-Files and hundreds of conspiracy-plotted movies, especially spy flicks) that secret government organizations are really powerful and very good at keeping secrets. But the opposite has been demonstrated over and over again. Watergate was a grand conspiracy, but eventually it was exposed. For fifty years, tobacco companies conspired to keep research about the death toll of tobacco under wraps. But whistle-blowers in the companies leaked their top-secret memos, and eventually they were indicted and brought to court and in front of Congress. Leaked documents have shown that ExxonMobil covered up its own climate change research and funded a wide range of front groups and climate-denier groups, using innocent-sounding names to hide their connection to energy companies. Lance Armstrong and just a handful of his closest friends among cyclists knew about his doping activities, but eventually even this tiny circle of silence was broken. And despite the fear of death for breaking the code of silence, or omertà, in the Mafia, sooner or later there is a weak link and the crime bosses go down.

Large secret government operations, like the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, never work as well as they are planned and eventually screw up and are exposed. The Iran-Contra affair was top secret, but eventually a bunch of people made mistakes and it was revealed and investigated. As Michael Shermer quips whenever a 9/11 Truther speaks, “You know how I know it’s not a big government conspiracy that’s been successfully kept secret for many years? Because it happened during the Bush Administration.” Conspiracy believers claimed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was going to operate concentration camps to keep opponents of the Obama administration under control—which is laughable, because FEMA did not have that capability, as shown by its botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Also, FEMA employees are not sworn to secrecy. Nearly everything FEMA does is completely open.

Conspiracy theorists claim that these top-secret organizations are capable of hiding everything, but as the Wikileaks and Edward Snowden examples show, sooner or later there is one weak link or leaker who talks or blows the whistle, and government secrets are secret no longer. Donald Trump tried to get away with extorting Ukraine for dirt on his opponent, but a whistleblower exposed that conspiracy and Trump was impeached for it. The Freedom of Information Act has given reporters the power to delve into almost any secret organization, especially governmental organizations, and no secret stays hidden long. The more people and more organizations are required to keep the entire thing hush-hush, the less likely it could actually happen.

On his HBO show Last Week Tonight, comedian John Oliver does a hilarious send-up of the entire conspiracy theory mind-set, especially crazy conspiracy YouTube videos. As he puts it, “Conspiracy theories: they’re just fairy tales adults tell each other on YouTube.” In three minutes, he parodies all the excesses of this way of thinking and “proves” the absurd idea that Cadbury Creme Eggs are a conspiracy by the Illuminati. I highly recommend you watch the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNS41ecOaAc, or use your browser to search for it.