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

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"This sparkling book romps over the range of science and anti-science." --Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel

Revised and Expanded Edition.

In this age of supposed scientific enlightenment, many people still believe in mind reading, past-life regression theory, New Age hokum, and alien abduction. A no-holds-barred assault on popular superstitions and prejudices, with more than 80,000 copies in print, Why People Believe Weird Things debunks these nonsensical claims and explores the very human reasons people find otherworldly phenomena, conspiracy theories, and cults so appealing. In an entirely new chapter, "Why Smart People Believe in Weird Things," Michael Shermer takes on science luminaries like physicist Frank Tippler and others, who hide their spiritual beliefs behind the trappings of science.

Shermer, science historian and true crusader, also reveals the more dangerous side of such illogical thinking, including Holocaust denial, the recovered-memory movement, the satanic ritual abuse scare, and other modern crazes. Why People Believe Strange Things is an eye-opening resource for the most gullible among us and those who want to protect them.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 1, 2002
ISBN9781429996761
Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
Author

Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer (born September 8, 1954) is an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor-in-chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The Skeptics Society currently has over 55,000 members. Shermer engages in debates on topics pertaining to pseudoscience and religion in which he emphasizes scientific skepticism. Shermer is producer and co-host of the 13-hour Fox Family television series Exploring the Unknown which was broadcast in 1999. From April 2001 to January 2019, he was a monthly contributor to Scientific American magazine with his Skeptic column. He is also a scientific advisor to the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). Shermer was once a fundamentalist Christian, but ceased to believe in the existence of God during his graduate studies. He also describes himself as an advocate for humanist philosophy as well as the science of morality.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A very good introduction to critical thinking by the editor of Skeptic magazine. Instead of spending his time just discussing what people believe, and why its weird, he delves into our evolutionary past and our psychology to explain why we continue to believe weird things, even in an era of increasing scientific knowledge.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A book that shouldn't be necessary but which is. I fear the tidal wave of growing "weird" ideas and convictions. I hope that we are not entering the Age of Unreason.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An older book, so the data is a bit out of date. However, an interesting review of some of the biggest conspiracy theories and hoaxes of our day, including holocaust denial and creationism
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sometimes is repetitive, but apart from that, a very useful book written in a very easy to read way.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This seems to be a very rational examination of possible causes for people to believe in ideas that many others generally think are weird. The author does not resort to denegrating the people that hold those beliefs and in fact points out many positive traits of many of the people that he feels believe in ideas that meet his definition of weird (which is clearly explained within the book). The author even describes several examples of his own belief in ideas that he later determined are at least somewhat weird.

    I recommend this to anyone that seeks to keep their view of the world grounded in rational explanations, but it may upset some people who have beliefs that meet the definition in the book of being weird. For myself, I can accept that an idea I believe is considered weird by some people without being offended that they think that and I can share meaningful dialogue with them without necessarily changing my beliefs or theirs.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book includes a wide-ranging series of topics that touch on individuals’ and groups’ unusual beliefs. The summaries address issues such as philosophy of science, social-cognitive psychology, and popular psychology, but with several hard-to-classify outliers. My interest in the topics varied, and I could seldom read more than a few pages at a time before turning to something else.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I wonder if Michael Shermer’s book should have been titled “Why Do People Believe Weird Things” because it is more an exploration than an exposition. Well-researched and documented, the extensive bibliography alone is worth a look. There is no one answer for all in these pages, because the range of weird beliefs encompasses the gamut of paranormal, alien abduction, religion, etc., each of which must be addressed in a different way. It is important to understand two things about Shermer’s approach in this book: he defines a “weird thing” as “(1) a claim unaccepted by most people in that particular field of study, (2) a claim that is either logically impossible or highly unlikely, and/or (3) a claim for which the evidence is largely anecdotal and uncorroborated”, and he pointedly writes in several places that he is not trying to belittle the person or beliefs, but trying to understand. Shermer is an accomplished skeptic, but more important than that, he is a scientist and science historian and brings that research background to the matter at hand.

    I am always amazed at Shermer’s prodigious reading capacity and diagnostic skills. Shermer distills tremendous amounts of information into usable bites. In one chapter, he describes preparing for a debate with Duane Gish (of creationist movement fame) by reading all of Gish’s published material as well as re-reading the entire Bible. I don’t know that I could stomach more than one of Gish’s books. It is interesting to note Dawkins and Gould both would have tried to dissuade Shermer from agreeing to the debate, not because they were afraid he’d lose, but they refuse to put non-science on the same stage as science. By debating, they feel that at least one someone in the audience would take away from the event the idea that creationists and IDers actually had a right to sit at the table of science. Shermer debated many of the "weird" in the late 80s and early 90s; I'm not sure if he still does.

    The book opens with a discussion of the importance of science and skepticism and provides a list of 25 reasons {why we may be wrong about things}. Subsequent sections and chapters address specific “weird” beliefs. [list]. The Holocaust denial discussion is a good example of how to refute that which most of us feel shouldn’t need refutation. History is a particularly challenging body of knowledge, for rarely, if ever, is it recorded without prejudice. Still, rational reasoning can be applied. He explains the principle arguments posed by the deniers, and spends an entire chapter illustrating convergence of data to support the commonly understood accounting of the events of the Holocaust.

    Another good section addresses the most common creationist/IDer counter-arguments to evolution and the fallacies… While neither exhaustive nor particularly detailed, it nonetheless does give cocktail party talking points.

    Shermer’s original conclusion as to why people believe weird things was in itself unsatisfying to me. He gives four broad reasons, and the one that makes the most sense, yet is the least defensible is “because they want to”. In the second edition of the book (the one I read), Shermer adds a chapter on why smart people believe weird things. I don’t think he really answers that question. He does explain that smart people are better at defending the beliefs they arrived at in a non-standard fashion. Further, smart people view their own beliefs as being based in logic and reason, yet they attribute the same beliefs in others to emotion. Telling. It is amusing to see and hear pedigreed scientists decry the pseudosciences and yet not see their own errors.

    Shermer continues his study in two follow on books: How We Belive and The Science of Good and Evil.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Generally speaking, if you skipped every book with the word "weird" in the title, you wouldn't be missing much. This is an exception. Michael Shermer teaches the history of science at Occidental College in Eagle Rock, California and, as Editor of Skeptic Magazine, is a prominent and eloquent proponent of the skeptical viewpoint. In this book, he provides a lively, humorous yet serious, and often personal commentary on many of the mass follies of our time. Get your students to read this book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I feel that I should take this opportunity to point out that my user-defined category 'bathroom books' is meant to describe just this sort of book: a collection of well-written and provocative essays or chapters that can be easily digested one-at-a-time in five to ten minute readings. To be sure, the category may inspire snickering or the belief that such literature is trite and intellectually incoherent. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is nothing pejorative or evaluative about bathroom books; they serve a definite purpose and I challenge you to find a bathroom without reading material. Indeed, we should embrace the concept of the 'bathroom book' and share our recommendations more freely. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some "business reading" to attend to.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    There were flashes of okayness, but mostly I was pretty annoyed by this book. Shermer's a lot less condescending than a lot of skeptics, but he still has that attitude of "if I've explained it to you and you still don't agree with me, you're stupid."

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Having spent a fair amount of time on my spiritual path believing things that at best had no evidence and at times were quite outrageous, I’ve become very interested in the question that forms the title of this book. A former born-again Christian who is now head of the Skeptic society, Michael Shermer has written a very readable and compelling exploration of the cognitive thinking errors humans regularly make that support belief in ideas that can often be very detrimental to our overall well-being. Shermer is a good storyteller and his discussions of subjects including the alien abduction phenomenon, the personality cult of Ayn Rand, and the tactics “creation scientists” use to try to discredit the theory of evolution make for compelling reading. Perhaps most importantly, Shermer eloquently argues that being a skeptic is not the same thing as being a cynic. In his description of the scientific process, it becomes clear that maintaining a sense of awe and wonder at the universe is not only compatible with science, it can actually be enhanced by the willingness to remain in the unknown as evidence is being gathered and examined. In addition, a maintaining a healthy skepticism can go a long way towards preserving both one’s sanity and one’s cash in the alternative spiritual realm.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I remember when I first realized that people believed weird things—religions, superstitions, questionable medicinal remedies, astrology, etc.—I was astonished to say the least. What causes this magical thinking? Why is it so pervasive? And perhaps most troubling of all, what weird things did I believe but didn't realize it? Michael Shermer's aptly titled Why People Believe Weird Things is a skeptical, and yet kind, exploration of this subject.Shermer's writing is scientific while still being succinct. The book I'm reviewing is slightly out of date though I can see there's an updated edition. I recommend either because a healthy skepticism is timeless. One chapter in particular is especially useful: "How Thing Goes Wrong: Twenty-five Fallacies That Lead Us to Believe Weird Things." It's a critical thinking 101 class summed up in less than twenty pages.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I think, perhaps, that this book was not quite what I thought it was going to be. What I wanted - and this is no fault of the author's - was a book debunking specific "weird things". While I got a decent amount of that in the (fascinating) chapter on Holocaust deniers, by and large it was more about the psychological and emotional reasons people believe things that don't make any sense. Which is fine, as far as that goes, but it seemed to keep returning to the same few theories each time. I guess you could say he was making his case with additional evidence, but I got a sort of "okay, I got it, move on" feeling about the whole thing. In short, it's an interesting read but probably something you'd more enjoy reading a chapter here and there rather than straight through,
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A very good introduction to critical thinking by the editor of Skeptic magazine. Instead of spending his time just discussing what people believe, and why its weird, he delves into our evolutionary past and our psychology to explain why we continue to believe weird things, even in an era of increasing scientific knowledge.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Possibly better titled as "Some of the Weird Stuff People Believe". It is a good read but while Shermer does attempt to answer the "why?" question; often the best he can do is explain what they believe and provide the reasons their belief is scientifically or factually wrong. A well researched book that explains what skepticism really means and how science works both at the theoretical level and more practical real world level to ensure that incorrect ideas are weeded out. He the looks at Creationism, Aliens, Cults, Holocaust denial and and other area were skeptics and science should have won out with the fact. He does explain the psychology of why people find it hard to change their beliefs and in some case just how they come to dominate their lives (particularly those "abducted by aliens" and holocaust deniers). The book is worth the time to read but probably does not really explain the why people believe for all the issue looked at.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fascinating stuff! Interesting thing this book taught me today - according to a 1990 Gallup poll, 19% of adult Americans claim to believe in witches. Witches! WTF?!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Interesting trip through skeptical thought, with extensive chapters on how to argue with creationists, and even more on Holocaust deniers. Sagan's 'Demon Haunted World' is a better read, with a more complete integration of all these forms of strange belief coming together into a more unified 'why we want this stuff to be true, and isn't religion another form of UFO's' kind of thing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book was quite interesting. Several varied topics to keep you interested ranging from Creation-science, Holocaust Deniers, Fire Walking, and more. I was slightly disappointed because the book didn't really tackle Why People Believe until the last chapter where Mr. Shermer summed it up...People believe in weird things because they want to. It feels good, it's comforting.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I was a bit disappointed in this book. I have heard Shermer many times before and liked him. This book was dull. It could perhaps be that I have come across this information before. The book did not answer the questions I had when I picked it up. I thought there would be more empirical evidence from a diverse range of sciences. He didn't seem to deliver the knock out blow in the end.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not so much about "Why people believe weird things", but rather using the tools of science and skepticism to debunk the weird things people believe.The first chapter on the scientific method is quite good. I was hoping for more explanations of the neurobiological and evolutionary reasons for why people believe weird things, but there is only hints of such in the particular book.It is more about a set of weird things people believe and how a skeptic can debunk these beliefs using the scientific method.Some of the examples seem "dated" to me, and thankfully so! It appears that some of the weird beliefs are either dying out or diminishing. (Perhaps, sadly, only to be replaced by new weird things.)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Michael Shermer is probably best known as Scientific American's resident sceptic - a man who has what seems the wickedly enjoyable job of going around finding fault with other people's beliefs - a sort of modern day court jester without (presumably - I've never seen him) the funny costume and bells. In this classic, originally published in 1997 but reviewed in a new UK edition, he gives a powerful argument for taking the sceptical viewpoint.Although along the same lines as Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World, this book works alongside Sagan's masterpiece, rather than competing with it. It focuses more on why we believe strange things, and also very usefully expands out from the paranormal and pseudoscience to include pseudohistory, a topic I hadn't even realized existed.Shermer is something of a convert to scepticism, so has a convert's fervour, but none of the unpleasant aggressiveness of the likes of Randi and Dawkins. Instead he gently shows us how strange beliefs come into being, and why they have such a strong hold. Inevitably strong on the paranormal and UFOs, he is particularly good when looking at the likes of modern accusations of satanic rituals, and the remarkable cult of Ayn Rand. The section on creationism is a little weaker, partly because it isn't quite up-to-date enough, and also because there has been so much material going into this in more depth (see, for example, Scientists Confront...)In some ways I was most impressed by the next section on pseudohistory, in part, I suspect, because of not having really thought about this as a concept before. The chapters on holocaust denial were fascinating, and perhaps even more surprising was the self-deception of the 'all ideas originated in Africa' movement (again new to me).The only reason that this book doesn't get 5 stars is that I found the last section before getting to the summaries, on a scientific idea that its originator says gives a mechanism for a form of eternal life, irritating. It just isn't the same sort of problem as the other topics covered in the book. Here someone is speculating wildly based on extrapolating scientific theories to the extreme - but that's a very different game to having an unshakable belief in concepts with no support in evidence, and I think Shermer does himself and the reader a disservice by confusing the two. However, the book doesn't entirely end on this mistake, as there are a couple of short chapters pulling together the whys and wherefores of belief in weird things, so this small glitch doesn't destroy the flow, and certainly shouldn't detract from the fact that overall this is a book, alongside Sagan's, that ought to be on every thinking person's shelf.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I came across this book at Barnes and Noble many years ago. It was on a display stand, and caught my eye. I devoured it in a day.It was not until I read this book that I realized there were other people who believed as I did, and we had a name - skeptic. I won't say this book changed my life, but it lead me on a path that certainly did.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I read this book for a book club that I'm in, so it wasn't my choice. However, I found this book fairly interesting. It had some points, but it seemed to gloss over topics such as ghosts and psychics. It had a really large section on the Holocaust deniers, which didn't interest me. And he never answered the question in the title of the book: why people believe weird things. He focused more on debunking superstitions, and not on the psychology behind them.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the few books that goes straight to the heart of this subject & proceeds to kick ass and take names. Intelligent while remaining accessible. And pretty convincing in many ways.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    excellent book! Some of the "extended" material in the new version was just so so.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I first read this book in college for a Psychology of Superstition course. I devoured it. It is written in an informative and friendly way, and the subject mattter is fascinating. Years later I plucked it from my bookshelf again, and was just as rivetted as I was the first time I had read it. In fact, I was so taken with it, that it prompted me to begin purchasing the entire Michael Shermer library and to branch out to learn more about science and skepticism. I highly recommend this treatise on how humans believe all kinds of wacky things. Its a great way to get to know your own thinking process.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A good wide coverage of both strange beliefs and the people behind them. He works methodically through such topics as holocaust denial, witch hunts and creationism.Some surprising conclusions (which I won't spoil for you) as he tries to come up with the answer to the title of the book.His style is simple and straightforward, matter of fact, and self revealing both in terms of his own past beliefs and by sharing situations where he was particularly ineffective in the face of believers. He also shows you the human side of alien abductees and holocaust deniers alike - yes honestly.If you are human then this book will tell you something about yourself as well. Believing in weird things goes with the territory and has some positive evolutionary advantages - so try to figure out what yours are. Enjoyable.

Book preview

Why People Believe Weird Things - Michael Shermer

INTRODUCTION

Magical Mystery Tour

The Whys and Wherefores of Weird Things

The bane of hypocrisy is not its visibility to others, it is its invisibility to the practitioner. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus pointed out both the problem and the solution:

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

While winding down a national publicity tour in the summer of 1997 for the hardcover edition of this book, I witnessed just such an example. I was scheduled to appear on a radio program hosted by Ayn Rand’s handpicked intellectual heir, Leonard Peikoff, the Objectivist philosopher who, like a medieval monk, has carried on Rand’s flame of Truth through books, articles, and now his own radio show. We were told that Peikoff was interested in having me on because I had written a book praising the value of reason, the highest virtue in Objectivist philosophy. I assumed I was actually booked because I had written a chapter (8) critical of Ayn Rand, and that Peikoff did not intend to allow this critique to go unchallenged. Frankly, I was a bit nervous about the appearance because, although I know Rand’s philosophy fairly well (I have read all her major works and most of her minor ones) Peikoff is a bright, acerbic man who knows Rand’s works chapter and verse and can quote them from memory. I have seen him reduce debate opponents to intellectual mush through wit and steel-cold logic. But I wrote what I wrote so I figured I would buck up and take it like a man.

Imagine my surprise, then, when my publicist informed me that the interview had been canceled because they took exception to my criticism of Rand’s personality, movement, and followers, they objected to my classification of them as a cult, and they would not acknowledge a book that contains libelous statements about Ms. Rand. Obviously, someone from the show had finally gotten around to reading the book. They said they would be happy to debate me on the metaphysics of absolute morality (they believe there is such a thing and that Rand discovered it), but not in a forum that would give recognition to my libelous book. The real irony of all this is that my chapter on Rand focuses on showing how one of the telltale signs of a cult is its inability or unwillingness to consider criticisms of the leader or the leader’s beliefs. So, while denying they are a cult, Peikoff and his Ayn Rand Institute did precisely what a cult would do by squelching criticism.

Amazed that anyone could be this blind to such obvious hypocrisy, I called the producer myself and pointed out to him the two important caveats I included in that chapter: One, criticism of the founder or followers of a philosophy does not, by itself, constitute a negation of any part of the philosophy. Two, criticism of part of a philosophy does not gainsay the whole. I explained to him that on many levels I have great respect for Rand. She is the embodiment of rugged individualism and unsullied rationalism. I embrace many of her economic philosophies. In a pluralistic age in search of nontraditional heroes, she stands out as one of the few women in a field dominated by men. I told him that I even have a picture of her on my wall. This got his attention for a moment so I asked him for a specific example of libel, since this is a mighty strong word that implies purposeful defamation. "Everything in the chapter is a libel of Ms. Rand, he concluded. Give me just one example, I insisted. Did she not cuckold her husband? Did she not excommunicate followers who breached her absolute morality, even over such trivial matters as choice of music? He replied that he would have to reread the chapter. He never called back. (It is only fair to note that a very reasonable group of scholars at The Institute for Objectivist Studies, headed by David Kelly, are very open to criticism of Rand and do not hold her in worshipful esteem as the greatest human being who ever lived," in the words of an earlier intellectual heir, Nathaniel Branden.)

Ayn Rand seems to generate strong emotions in anyone who encounters her work, both for and against. In addition to libel, I was accused of presenting nothing more than an ad hominem attack on Rand. I meant to do neither. I wanted merely to write a chapter on cults. So much has already been written on cults in general, and on specific cults such as the Church of Scientology or the Branch Davidians, that I did not wish to repeat the work of others. At one time I considered myself an Objectivist and an enthusiastic follower of Ayn Rand. To put it bluntly she was something of a hero, or at least the characters in her novels were, especially those in Atlas Shrugged. Thus, it was somewhat painful for me to examine my hero through the lens of skepticism, and to apply a cultic analysis to a group I would have never considered as such. However, like my other forays into Christianity, New Age claims, and other belief systems (recounted in these pages), as time offered distance and perspective I recognized in Objectivism the type of certainty and Truth claims typically found in cults and religions, including and especially the veneration, inerrancy, and omniscience of the leader, and the belief one has absolute truth, particularly with regard to moral questions. These are the characteristics of a cult as defined by most cult experts, not me; I simply examined the Objectivist movement to see how well it fit these criteria. After reading this chapter you be the judge.

Judgment is the appropriate word here. I purposefully chose to open this Introduction with an excerpt on hypocrisy from the Sermon on the Mount, because that chapter in Matthew (7) begins as such: Judge not, that ye be not judged. Nathaniel Branden begins his memoirs of his years with Rand, appropriately titled Judgment Day, with this same quote as well as an analysis from Ayn Rand:

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

Actually, what Jesus says in full is:

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

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

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Humans are pattern-seeking animals. We search for meaning in a complex, quirky, and contingent world. But we are also storytelling animals, and for thousands of years our myths and religions have sustained us with stories of meaningful patterns—of gods and God, of supernatural beings and mystical forces, of the relationship between humans with other humans and their creators, and of our place in the cosmos. One of the reasons why humans continue thinking magically is that the modern, scientific way of thinking is a couple of hundred years old, whereas humanity has existed for a couple of hundred thousand years. What were we doing all those long gone millennia? How did our brains evolve to cope with the problems in that radically different world?

This is a problem tackled by evolutionary psychologists—scientists who study brain and behavior from an evolutionary perspective. They make the very reasonable argument that the brain (and along with it the mind and behavior) evolved over a period of two million years from the small fist-sized brain of the Australopithecine to the melon-sized brain of modern Homo sapiens. Since civilization arose only about 13,000 years ago with the domestication of plants and animals, 99.99% of human evolution took place in our ancestral environment (called the EEA—environment of evolutionary adaptation). The conditions of that environment are what shaped our brains, not what happened over the past thirteen millennia. Evolution does not work that fast. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Co-Directors of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have summarized the field this way in a 1994 descriptive brochure:

Evolutionary psychology is based on the recognition that the human brain consists of a large collection of functionally specialized computational devices that evolved to solve the adaptive problems regularly encountered by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Because humans share a universal evolved architecture, all ordinary individuals reliably develop a distinctively human set of preferences, motives, shared conceptual frameworks, emotion programs, content-specific reasoning procedures, and specialized interpretation systems—programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability, and whose designs constitute a precise definition of human nature.

In his new book, How the Mind Works (W. W Norton, 1997), Steven Pinker describes these specialized computational devices as mental modules. The module is a metaphor, and is not necessarily located in a single spot in the brain, and should not be confused with the nineteenth century notion of phrenologists who allocated specific bumps on the head for specific brain functions. A module, says Pinker, may be broken into regions that are interconnected by fibers that make the regions act as a unit. A bundle of neurons here connected to another bundle of neurons there, sprawling messily over the bulges and crevasses of the brain might form a module (pp. 27—31). Their interconnectedness is the key to the module’s function, not its location.

While most mental modules are thought of as quite specific, however, evolutionary psychologists argue about mental modules being domain-specific vs. domain—general. Tooby, Cosmides, and Pinker, for example, reject the idea of a domain-general processor, whereas many psychologists accept the notion of a global intelligence, called g. Archaeologist Steven Mithen, in his book The Prehistory of the Mind (Thames and Hudson, 1996) goes so far as to say that it is a domain-general processor that makes us modern humans: The critical step in the evolution of the modern mind was the switch from a mind designed like a Swiss army knife to one with cognitive fluidity, from a specialized to a generalized type of mentality. This enabled people to design complex tools, to create art and believe in religious ideologies. Moreover, the potential for other types of thought which are critical to the modern world can be laid at the door of cognitive fluidity (p. 163).

Instead of the metaphor of a module, then, I would like to suggest that we evolved a more general Belief Engine, which is Janus-faced—under certain conditions it leads to magical thinking—a Magic Belief Engine; under different circumstances it leads to scientific thinking. We might think of the Belief Engine as the central processor that sits beneath more specific modules. Allow me to explain.

We evolved to be skilled, pattern-seeking, causal-finding creatures. Those who were best at finding patterns (standing upwind of game animals is bad for the hunt, cow manure is good for the crops) left behind the most offspring. We are their descendants. The problem in seeking and finding patterns is knowing which ones are meaningful and which ones are not. Unfortunately our brains are not always good at determining the difference. The reason is that discovering a meaningless pattern (painting animals on a cave wall before a hunt) usually does no harm and may even do some good in reducing anxiety in uncertain situations. So we are left with the legacy of two types of thinking errors: Type 1 Error: believing a falsehood and Type 2 Error: rejecting a truth. Since these errors will not necessarily get us killed, they persist. The Belief Engine has evolved as a mechanism for helping us to survive because in addition to committing Type 1 and Type 2 Errors, we also commit what we might call a Type 1 Hit: not believing a false-hood and a Type 2 Hit: believing a

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