The problem is that there’s no baloney detection module in the brain that says, “That’s a true pattern; that’s a false pattern” with some consistent algorithm that helps us discriminate those. We tend to assume all patterns are real and that they’re infused with intentional agency. And that’s where I think the belief in spirits and ghosts and souls and gods and God and conspiracy theories and so forth comes in.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t hidden agents and predators and conspiracies out there. There are. But, yet again, we only have our intuitions from evolution. In many ways, it is adaptive, in terms of forming beliefs — we have to form beliefs — and to that extent, those adaptations are still vital to survival. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of bogus nonsense out there, and we’re susceptible to believing that as well. And that’s where it’s nonadaptive.

It’s a two-edged sword. If we got rid of all weird beliefs, it would mean, really, that we’re getting rid of all beliefs. I wrote a book called Why People Believe Weird Things. Well, why do people believe weird things? Because they have to believe things, and the weird things go right along with them. In that sense, I’ll always have job security. There will always be people believing these things.

Now, I do think that mass education and the age of science and all that does make a difference, compared with, say, 500 years ago. People are a lot less superstitious than they were then. But, nevertheless, people still harbor all kinds of goofy, weird beliefs. For example: 9/11 was a conspiracy by the Bush administration, flying these planes with remote control devices after the passengers were taken off and whisked away to Canada to be gassed. That’s just the tip of the goofiest part of that particular conspiracy. How could anybody believe that? But they do — lots of people do. So it’s still around. Roughly a third to a half of Americans believe in astrology and tarot cards and psychics that can talk to the dead and UFOs and aliens and Bigfoot. The percentages are striking. Still, it’s not 90 percent. It’s better than it used to be.

This article was originally published on Science and Religion Today.

These are stirring sentiments, to be sure, and once in a great while they may even be true. But for most human endeavors, moderation is a virtue and extremism is a vice. The reason is clear: all extremists think they are defending liberty and pursuing justice, from Timothy McVeigh and the 9/11 terrorists to Torquemada and abortion clinic bombers. One country’s terrorist is another country’s freedom fighter.

Extreme environmentalists are a case in point. Members of environmentalist groups who vandalize Hummer dealerships, destroy logging equipment, or torch scientific laboratories see themselves not as the terrorists that they are, but as environmental freedom fighters. And environmental groups who paint doom and gloom scenarios and exaggerate, distort, or even fabricate claims in order to keep the donations flowing only hurt their cause in the long run when doomsday comes and goes without incident or the claims turn out to be baseless.

As an undergraduate in the early 1970s, we were told that overpopulation would lead to worldwide hunger and starvation, oil depletion, precious mineral exhaustion, and rainforest extinction by the 1990s, predictions that have all failed utterly. Scientists like Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist have, in my opinion, properly nailed environmental extremists for these exaggerated scenarios. And his book is where I entered the debate.

In 2001, Cambridge University Press published Lomborg’s book which, given the similarity between its title (The Skeptical Environmentalist) and that of the magazine that I publish (Skeptic), his publicist thought it would be a perfect topic for the Skeptics Society’s public science lecture series at the California Institute of Technology, which I host. Given the highly debatable nature of many of Lomborg’s claims, however, I only agreed to host him if it could be a debate. Lomborg agreed at once to debate anyone, and this is where the trouble began — I could not find anyone to debate Lomborg. I contacted all of the top environmental organizations, and to a one they all refused to participate. “There is no debate,” one told me. “We don’t want to dignify that book,” said another. One leading environmentalist warned me that my reputation would be irreparably harmed if I went through with it. So of course I did. My own Senior Editor, Frank Miele, who is an expert on evolutionary biology and biodiversity (and is one of the fastest and most facile researchers I’ve ever known), challenged Lomborg on several of the chapters in his book, and we had a lively and successful debate.

My experience is symptomatic of deep problems that have long plagued the environmental movement, and for a time the political pollution of the science turned me into an environmental skeptic. That alone would be meaningless, given that I have only ever written one article on the subject, but I believe that the extremists had a similar effect on millions of others who remain skeptical in the teeth of what I now believe to be overwhelming evidence for anthropogenic global warming. The tragedy of this inappropriate conflation of politics and science is that world-class scientists and science communicators like David Suzuki have been warning us about this problem for decades, and doing so in a systematic and reasonable manner that so many of us failed to hear because of the extremists’ claims.

What turned me around on the global warming issue was a convergence of evidence from numerous sources. My attention was piqued on February 8, 2006, when 86 leading evangelical Christians — the last cohort I expected to get on the environmental bandwagon — issued the Evangelical Climate Initiative calling for “national legislation requiring economy-wide reductions” in carbon emissions. After attending a 2002 Oxford conference on the science of global warming, the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, the Reverend Richard Cizik, described his experience as “a conversion … not unlike my conversion to Christ.”

Later that month I attended the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in Monterey, California, where former Vice President Al Gore delivered the single finest summation of the evidence for global warming I have ever heard, based on the 2006 documentary film about his work in this area, An Inconvenient Truth. Because we are primates with such visually dominant sensory systems, we need to see the evidence to believe it, and the striking visuals of countless graphs and charts, and especially the before-and-after photographs showing the disappearance of glaciers around the world, shocked me viscerally and knocked me out my skepticism.

Four recent books on the subject then took me to the flipping point. Archaeologist Brian Fagan’s The Long Summer (Basic, 2004) documents how civilization is the gift of a temporary period of mild climate. Geographer Jared Diamond’s Collapse (Viking, 2005) demonstrates how natural and human-caused environmental catastrophes led to the collapse of civilizations. Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe (Simon and Schuster, 2006) is a page-turning account of her journeys around the world with environmental scientists who are documenting species extinction and climate change that are unmistakably linked to human action. And biologist Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006) reveals how he went from being a skeptical environmentalist to a believing activist as incontrovertible data linking the increase of carbon dioxide, CO₂, to global warming accumulated the last decade.

It is a matter of CO₂ Goldilocks. In the last ice age CO₂ levels were 180 parts per million (ppm) — too cold. Between the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution CO₂ levels rose to 280 ppm — just right. Today CO₂ levels are at 380 ppm and are projected to reach 450 to 550 ppm by the end of the century — too warm. Like a kettle of water that transforms from liquid to steam when it changes from 211 to 212 degrees F, the environment itself is about to make a CO₂–driven flip.

According to Flannery, even if we reduce our CO₂ emissions by 70 percent by 2050 average global temperatures will increase between 2 to 9 degrees C by 2100. This rise could lead to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which the March 24 issue of Science reports is already shrinking at a rate of 224 ±41 cubic kilometers per year, double the rate measured in 1996 (Los Angeles uses 1 cubic kilometer of water per year). If it and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melt, sea levels will rise 5 to 10 meters, displacing half a billion inhabitants of coastal communities.

I mentioned above that I have only ever published one article about the environment, and that was recounting my conversion from global warming skeptic to believer in my monthly column in Scientific American. In that column I closed with this sentence: “Because of the complexity of the problem environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.”

What I meant by that final clause is that it is time to do something about the problem. I did not specify what we should do, but in my opinion we have time to fix the problem without drastic and draconian governmental intervention. For example, I believe that if we start the transition now, we can make the shift from burning fossil fuels to alternative fuels through normal market channels. The market for hybrid automobiles, for example, will continue growing at a breakneck pace such that within two decades the vast majority of cars will be hybrids and the transition to purely electric cars (or cars that run on some other combination of electricity and a cleaner alternative fuel), will be successful. In other words, I would much prefer to see governments establishing pollution standards and carbon dioxide levels that the marketplace is then free to work around in its usually efficient manner (more efficient, in any case, than most government programs are capable of achieving).

In response to my Scientific American column, I received thousands of letters and emails. A few were surprised that it took me so long to come around. For example:

Michael Shermer announces that “it is time to flip from skepticism to activism” with respect to anthropogenic global warming. Well, gosh, Shermer, welcome to the party. Where the heck have you been? No offense, but most of your readers realized it was “time to flip” years ago. Maybe the shocked and horrified response (“there is no debate”) that you got when trying to promote skepticism about global warming was not, as you assume, “symptomatic of deep problems that have long plagued the environmental movement,” but was, rather, indicative of how far off the rails of rationality you had gone. After all, as you observe, even the evangelical Christians abandoned the skeptical position before you did! It might be worthwhile to devote a little time and introspection to exactly why you stuck to a dangerously irrational point of view for so long; because the sand you buried your head in is exactly the same sand that we need to get the average American’s head out of. If it took four books and a lecture by Al Gore to change your mind, I despair that we will ever change the minds of the people who really matter: the voters.

— Ben Haller, Menlo Park, CA

Indeed, my correspondent is right, the vast majority of letters that I received were skeptical of my loss of skepticism. That is, in spite of what I now see as overwhelming evidence for anthropogenic global warming, there are still plenty of skeptics out there, and I believe that they are primarily motivated for the same reason that I was — they got burned by environmental extremists. Here is a small sampling.

Michael Shermer sure has ‘flipped’! He quotes Flannery as saying that “even if we reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 70% by 2050, average global temperatures will increase between two and nine degrees by 2050.” Could it be that global warming is caused, in the main, by forces beyond our control?

— Robert Schnepp, Port Hueneme, CA

I was disappointed to see that Mr. Shermer has surrendered his skepticism on anthropogenic global warming in the June 2006 issue of “Scientific American.” His “flipping point” seems to be the demonstrated reduction in some of the world’s glaciers. I suggest he enroll in a freshman course in historical geology. There he will learn that glaciers have come and gone many times in the recent history of the earth (geologically speaking). The most recent episodes of glaciation are referred to as the Pleistocene era. I think his change of heart will turn out to be as wrong as his stated belief in the 1970s that starvation and depletion of resources would plague the earth by the 1990s.

—Howard Sahl, Longmont, CO

Very appropriate Michael. I have always looked somewhat askance at Scientific American’s views on environmental matters. Shame on you for following their editorial dictates. I will never again read my Skeptic magazine (I am a subscriber) in the same open minded way that I have previously. You have joined the philistines. The blunt, highlighted in red, comment: “Reducing our CO₂ emissions by 70% by 2050 will not be enough.” shows a ‘grab’ at a statement that would put even the most rabid environmental group to shame. Prove it!

—Ivor Davies, Oakville, Ontario, Canada

Before you jump on the idiotic bandwagon and irreparably destroy your reputation, you ought to talk to John Brignell of www.numberwatch.co.uk and Michael Fumento of www.fumento.com and most importantly Steve Milloy at www.junkscience.com. Keep in mind:

1. Climate changes no matter what we do.
2. The single greatest heat source is … THE SUN, variations in its output will cause variations in our temperature.
3. The trouble with people presenting evidence is that they like to present the stuff the supports their premise, but ignore all the rest. You can show 50 glaciers that are receding and ignore the 50 that are growing. You can show the ice shelf breaking off but ignore the fact that it is getting colder in antarctica.

The greatest danger we face on this planet is the Eco Freaks. The climate will change no matter what we do. If the Freaks have their way, we will not be able to combat it, because we will have squandered resources trying to stop a hurricane instead of getting out of the way. I like your work, but you are scaring me now.

—Brad Tittle, Senior Systems Analyst, Trainnow.net

I too, am a skeptic. I am particularly skeptical of conventional wisdom that reeks of left wing politics and uses none other than Al Gore as a reference. Look up Malthusian economic theory so that you understand what it means when I accuse you of having a Malthusian mind. Several months ago there was an excellent greenhouse gas article printed in your publication using thousands of years of ice core data as its basis. This data showed quite convincingly that the glacial cycles, most probably brought on by the precession of the earth in its orbit around the sun, are accompanied by increases and decreases in greenhouse gases. It also showed that the most recent interglacial warm period should have begun to cool off and green house gases should have begun declining about 6000 years ago. They have not. They have, instead, increased. The scientist who did this study pointed out that about the only possible variable to explain this change in these cycles would be the rapid expansion of human population accompanied by farming, irrigation and raising of domestic live stock. Greenhouse gases have been going up when they should have been going down for 6000 years. There were no SUV’s back then. The answer to the dilemma you fear was also in the data from that article. The two largest plagues of the last two thousand years actually showed up in the ice core data as reductions in greenhouse gases. You want a 70% reduction in greenhouse gases you’d better plan a plague, a big one. The fact is that if anything can be proven as cause and effect, the only thing one might be able to say with some certainty is that the mere existence and growth of the human population has delayed a glaciation, which the aforementioned data indicated should have begun about 2000 years ago. Probably this is a GOOD thing!

—Jim Gampetro, Buffalo, WY

It seems the primary reason for the Skeptic’s “flipping” is the change in carbon dioxide levels from 180ppm (ice age), 280ppm (industrial revolution), 380ppm (today), and then the projections. So what about the previous 4.5 million years? What were carbon dioxide levels BEFORE the last ice age? The time frame for which we have data is so small compared to the history of the earth (which has endured numerous hot and cold periods), that forecasts based on that data are unscientific. Kinda like calling an elephant long and skinny based on a feel of it’s tail. I’m not ready to “flip” yet.

—John Guimont

I well remember watching television programs about the environment hosted by David Suzuki. They were visually stunning and brilliantly presented. But my mind had already been hardened by the failed predictions of the extremists, and so I watched and listened, but I did not see or hear. But you were right, David, and for many decades of tireless work on behalf of this pale blue dot and its inhabitants, we all owe you a debt of gratitude.

This article was first published in an edited volume as a Festschrift
for David Suzuki by Greystone Books, Canada.

Hello, Jews. We are anonymous. Over the years, we have been watching you. Your campaigns of misinformation; suppression of dissent; your litigious nature, all of these things have caught our eye… Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed. For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind — for the laughs — we shall expel you … and systematically dismantle Judaism in its present form…

The rantings of crazed neo-Nazis, right? No. Substitute “Jews” and “Judaism” with “Scientologists” and “Church of Scientology” and you are reading from a statement issued by a group of anti-Scientologists calling themselves “Anonymous.” This statement was released Jan. 21 (read in a YouTube video by a Stephen Hawking-like computerized voice). It was followed by another on Sunday Feb. 10 that coincided with demonstrations at Scientology centers around the world at which protesters donned masks (the Guy Fawkes variety from the movie “V for Vendetta”) and waved posters that read, among other things, “Honk if you hate Scientology.”

Again, imagine if that sign read “Honk if you hate Jews.” How innocuous would such a protest be in that case?

And yet this latest turn against the organization founded in 1954 by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard has an air of farcical comedy to it. Why? Why aren’t civil-rights organizations and antihate-speech activists pouncing on these protesters? The reason, I suspect, is that most of us do not consider Scientology a religion, at least not a religion that resembles in the slightest the world’s major faiths.

One clue to this interpretation can be seen in other protesters’ signs: “Religion is Free, Scientology is Not” and “Trade Secrets are for Business, Not Religion.” I’m a scientist who studies belief systems for a living, so take it from me: Scientology is unlike any other religion in history. Although the Church of Scientology is recognized by the IRS as a tax-exempt religion (despite years of litigation by the IRS to collect taxes on its income), no other religion I know of considers theological doctrines and core religious tenets to be intellectual property accessible only for a fee.

Envision converting to Judaism but having to pay to learn the story of Abraham and Isaac, Noah and the flood, or Moses and the Ten Commandments. Or imagine joining the Catholic Church but not being told about the crucifixion and the resurrection until you have reached Operating Theological Level III, which takes many years and many tens of thousands of dollars.

That is, in essence, how the Church of Scientology dispenses its theology, leading ex-members, critics and journalists to divulge Scientology’s sacred myth all over the internet, and in such national publications as the New York Times and Rolling Stone magazine, and even on the animated TV series “South Park.” The story centers on Xenu the galactic warlord, who 75 million years ago was in charge of 76 overpopulated planets. Xenu brought trillions of these alien beings to Earth (called Teegeeack) on spaceships that resembled DC-9 planes, and placed them in select volcanoes. He then vaporized them with hydrogen bombs, scattering to the winds their souls, called thetans, which were then rounded up in electronic traps and implanted with false ideas. These corrupted thetans attach themselves to people today, leading to drug and alcohol abuse, addiction, depression and other psychological and social ailments that only Scientology classes and “auditing” employing “e-meters” can cure. Paying customers, by the way, do not get to hear this story until they reach Operating Thetan Level III.

This peculiar story helps explain, in part, the often inexplicable Tom Cruise, whom we’ve all seen renouncing the evils of psychiatry and the drug industry on the Today show and more recently in a viral YouTube video. There’s nothing wrong with being skeptical of psychiatry — I publish Skeptic magazine, which recently included an article by a psychiatrist who took his colleagues to task for overmedication and for overlabeling as diseases what may just be unusual behavior. As well, self-help gurus such as Anthony Robbins have developed techniques that may very well surpass psychiatry in helping people. But psychiatrists, drug companies and motivational speakers pay taxes on their products and services; they do not masquerade as religious leaders. This is yet another aspect of Scientology that provokes the type of animosity we are seeing in these recent attacks.

Humans are by nature tribal and xenophobic. We evolved a natural tendency to look askance at those who are different from us, and especially to be suspicious of activities beyond our purview. Transparency and fairness are the key to trust, and trust is the social glue that binds a diverse society such as ours. This is why we insist on so many checks and balances in government, so many rules and regulations in markets, and equal treatment under the law.

The reason people are suspicious of Scientology is because of its cult-like secrecy, its overly aggressive response to and legal attacks against critics, and especially the hypocrisy of comporting itself as a faux religion in a society willing to reward corporate success but not religious greed.

This article was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

In his magnum opus on the power of free markets, Human Action, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises noted: “The truth is that capitalism has not only multiplied population figures but at the same time improved the people’s standard of living in an unprecedented way. Neither economic thinking nor historical experience suggest that any other social system could be as beneficial to the masses as capitalism. The results speak for themselves. The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph in St. Paul’s: Si monumentum requires, circumspice.” If you seek his monument, look around.

Capitalism may not need apologists and propagandists, but it does need a vigorous scientific and rational defense as evidenced by the fact that so many people still distrust free markets. Market solutions to social problems are generally received with skepticism. Businessmen are distrusted, corporations looked at askance, and there is a well-known resentment against those who have most benefited from markets. (As one New Yorker cartoon featuring two people in conversation reads: “I hated Bill Gates before it became so fashionable.”) Why do people distrust free markets?

Part of the answer can be found in our history. Because we lived for so long in small groups of a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred people in hunter-gatherer communities in which everyone was either genetically related or knew one another intimately, most resources were shared, wealth accumulation was almost unheard of, and excessive greed and avarice was punished. Thus, we naturally respond to a free market system in which conspicuous wealth is paraded as a sign of success with envy and anger. Call it evolutionary egalitarianism.

Throughout most of the history of civilization as well, economic inequalities were not the result of natural differences in drive and talent between members of a society equally free to pursue their right to prosperity; instead, a handful of chiefs, kings, nobles, and priests exploited an unfair and rigged social system to achieve gains best described as ill gotten.

People also have a remarkably low tolerance for economic ambiguity. Free markets are chaotic and uncertain, uncontrollable and unpredictable. Most of us have little tolerance for such environments, and we have learned to expect that social institutions such as the government will bring a level of certainty to society. People who cannot afford (or who choose not to purchase) insurance against acts of God typically expect acts of government to save them.

As well, there is well-documented liberal bias in the academy and the media against free markets. A 2005 study by the George Mason University economist Daniel Klein, for example, found that at two of America’s leading institutes of higher learning Democrats outnumbered Republicans among the faculty by a staggering ratio of 10 to 1 at the University of California, Berkeley and by 7.6 to 1 at Stanford University. Measuring political attitudes through voter registrations among faculty in twenty different departments, in the humanities and social sciences the ratio was 16 to 1 at both campuses (30 to 1 among assistant and associate professors), and in some departments, such as anthropology and journalism, there wasn’t a single Republican to be found.

In another 2005 study on “Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty,” Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte discovered that only 15 percent of those teaching at American colleges and universities describe themselves as conservative while 72 percent said they were liberal, and that figure climbed to 80 percent in such departments as English literature, philosophy, political science, and religious studies, with only five percent labeling themselves as conservative. In a 2005 publication in the Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern Law Professor John McGinnis reviewed the faculties of the top 21 law schools rated by the 2002 U.S. News & World Report graduate-school rankings and found that politically active professors at these top law schools overwhelmingly tend to be Democrats — 81 percent contributed “wholly or predominantly” to Democratic campaigns while just 15 percent did the same for Republicans.

In a manner and potency matching academia, the bias in the media is against free market economics. A comprehensive 2005 study conducted by UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose and University of Missouri economist Jeffrey Milyo, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, measured media bias by counting the times that a particular media outlet cited various think tanks and policy groups, and then compared this with the number of times that members of Congress cited the same groups. “Our results show a strong liberal bias: all of the news outlets we examine, except Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times, received scores to the left of the average member of Congress.” Not surprisingly, the authors discovered that CBS Evening News and the New York Times “received scores far to the left of center” and that “the most centrist media outlets were PBS NewsHour, CNN’s Newsnight, and ABC’s Good Morning America.” Interestingly, USA Today — that ne plus ultra of pop print media — was closest to political center of all newspapers.

The strongest reason for skepticism of capitalism, however, is a myth commonly found in objections to both the theory of evolution and free market economics, and that is that they are based on the presumption that animals and humans are inherently selfish, and that the economy is like Tennyson’s memorable description of nature: “red in tooth and claw.” After Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published in 1859, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer immortalized natural selection in the phrase “survival of the fittest,” one of the most misleading descriptions in the history of science and one that has been embraced by social Darwinists ever since, applying it inappropriately to racial theory, national politics, and economic doctrines. Even Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, reinforced what he called this “gladiatorial” view of life in a series of essays, describing nature “whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day.”

If biological evolution in nature, and market capitalism in society, were really founded on and sustained by nothing more than a winner-take-all strategy, life on earth would have been snuffed out hundreds of millions of years ago and market capitalism would have collapsed centuries ago. This is, in fact, why WorldCom and Enron type disasters still make headlines. If they didn’t — if such corporate catastrophes caused by egregious ethical lapses were so common that they were not even worth covering on the nightly news — free market capitalism would implode. Instead it thrives, but just as eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, so too must it be for free markets, since both are inextricably bound together.

The 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat expressed a principle applicable in the 21st century: “Where goods do not cross frontiers, armies will.”

In my new book, The Mind of the Market, I describe in detail how in the modern world of nation states, economic sanctions are among the first steps taken by one nation against another when political diplomacy fails, as when the United States enforced them on Japan after its invasion of China in the 1930s, and these became a prelude (among other factors) to Japan’s retaliatory bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and our involvement in the greatest war in history. More recently, economic sanctions were imposed by the U.S. and Japan on India following its 1998 nuclear tests, and more recently by the U.S. on Cuba, Iran, and North Korea.

Economic sanctions send this message: if you do not change your behavior we will no longer trade with you. And by Bastiat’s Principle, where our goods do not cross your frontiers, our armies will. Not inevitably, of course, but often enough in history that the principle retains its veracity. Economic sanctions are not a necessary or sufficient cause of war, but they are almost always a prelude to war, whether you are a consumer-trader or a hunter-gatherer. Consider the Yanomamö people of the Amazon, sometimes called the “fierce” people. There is good reason for the moniker because warfare has long been a part of Yanomamö life. As the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon discovered, however, the Yanomamö are also sophisticated traders, and the more they trade the less they fight. The reason is that trade creates alliances. One village cannot go to another village and announce that they are worried about being conquered by a third, more powerful village, since this would reveal weakness. Instead, they mask the real motives for alliance through trade and feasting, and as a result not only gain military protection but insure inter-village peace. Most interestingly, even though each Yanomamö group could produce its own goods for survival, in fact they don’t; they set up a division of labor and system of trade. They do this not because they are nascent capitalists, but because they want to form political alliances with other groups, and trade is an effective means of so doing. The end result is that when goods cross Yanomamö frontiers, Yanomamö armies do not.

The cooperation that goes into making trade successful accentuates amity and attenuates enmity between strangers and can even be seen at work in brain scans. Scientists at Emory University had 36 subjects play an exchange game while undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan. They found that the areas of the brains of cooperators that lit up were the same areas activated in response to such stimuli as desserts, money, cocaine, attractive faces, and other basic pleasures. Specifically, there were two broad areas dense in neurons that responded, both rich in dopamine (a neurochemical related to addictive behaviors): the anteroventral striatum in the middle of the brain (the so-called “pleasure center”), and the orbitofrontal cortex just above the eyes, related to impulse control and the processing of rewards. Tellingly, the cooperative subjects reported increased feelings of trust toward and camaraderie with their game partners.

How does trust translate to trade? At the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, Paul Zak has demonstrated the relationship between trust, trade, and economic prosperity. He shows, for example, how trust is directly related to neurological chemicals such as oxytocin, a hormone synthesized in the hypothalamus and secreted into the blood by the pituitary. In women, oxytocin stimulates birth contractions, lactation, and maternal bonding with a nursing infant. In both women and men, it increases during sex and surges at orgasm, playing a role in pair bonding, an evolutionary adaptation for the long-term care of helpless infants. In exchange games, the more subjects are behaving in trusting ways, the more money they exchange and the higher the levels of oxytocin that are released by the brain. To find out if cooperating and trust lead to the release of oxytocin or if increased levels of oxytocin lead to more cooperation and trust, Zak infused oxytocin into subjects’ brains through a nose spray that is quickly absorbed by the body and discovered that it causes them to act more cooperatively.

Although there may be legitimate political reasons for imposing trade embargoes on nations behaving badly, there are economic consequences that lead directly to a breakdown of trust. By contrast, free trade makes people more trusting and trustworthy, which makes them more inclined to trade, which increases trust … creating a self-enforcing cycle of trust, trade, freedom, and prosperity.

With the stock market off to its worst first week of the year in history, investors are scrambling to decide whether or not to get out of the market. In my new book, The Mind of the Market, I describe the problem this way: our decisions about buying or selling things we value are heavily weighted by three psychological phenomena: the endowment effect, the sunk cost fallacy, and loss aversion. Understanding these will help you decide what to do with your investments.

Consider the following thought experiment. If you owned a coffee mug valued at $6 what is the lowest price you would accept to sell it? By contrast, if you were a potential buyer of a coffee mug of the same value, how much would you be willing to pay for it? In an experiment in which subjects were given this choice, the average price owners of the mug were willing to sell it for was $5.25, whereas the average price potential buyers were will to pay was only $2.75. Why the striking difference of nearly double the perceived value? Because of a psychological phenomenon called the endowment effect, in which ownership endows value by its own virtue, and nature designed us to hold dear what is ours.

This is one of countless studies in the new sciences of behavioral economics and evolutionary economics that has revealed how irrational and emotional we can be when it comes to money, investments, and especially stocks. Once we invest in stocks, especially in companies whose products we may value in personal use, we exaggerate the value of the stock simply by virtue of owning it. In our evolutionary past this makes perfect sense. Before humans domesticated other species, they had to forage and hunt, sometimes in conditions of severe scarcity, or the threat of it, in order to survive. Those who survived most likely exhibited a strong predilection for hoarding as well. Nature endowed us with the desire to value, and dearly hold on to, what is ours. Of course, by putting so much value on what we already have, we can also overvalue it — to the point that the cost sunk into it blinds us to the value of future losses that we will sustain if we do not switch to something that we do not already have.

This is another peculiar psychological effect known as the sunk cost fallacy and it can be a serious impediment toward our thinking clearly about whether to hold or sell stocks. For example, imagine that your child’s private school tuition bill of $20,000 is due and the only source you have for paying it is selling some of your stock holdings. Fortunately, you invested in Apple before the iPod boom, purchasing 200 shares at $50 each, for a total investment of $20,000. The stock is now at $200 a share. Should you realize your net gain by selling half of your Apple stock and paying off your bill? Or, should you sell off that loser Ford stock you purchased ages ago for $40,000, at its current value of $20,000?

Most of us would sell the Apple stock and hang on to the Ford stock in hopes of recovering our losses. Financially, this would be the wrong strategy. Why would we sell shares in a company whose stock is on the rise and hang on to shares in a company whose stock is in the dumpster? Because of another psychological effect called loss aversion, in which our brains are wired to pay more attention to losses than to gains. In fact, it turns out that losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good.

For example, imagine that I gave you $100 and a choice between (A) a guaranteed gain of $50 and (B) a coin flip in which heads gets you another $100 and tails gets you nothing. Do you want A or B? Now imagine that I gave you $200 and a choice between (A) a guaranteed loss of $50 and (B) a coin flip in which heads guarantees you lose $100 and tails you lose nothing. Do you want A or B? The final outcome for both options A and B in both scenarios is the same, so rationally it does not matter which option you choose, so people should choose both equally. According to “Rational Choice Theory,” which forms the foundation of a species of human known as Homo economicus, we maximize our utility when we make decisions. That is, when faced with a choice, we consider the value of the outcome and make a rational decision about the most efficient course to take to get to that end.

But loss aversion leads most people to choose A in the first scenario (a sure gain of $50) and B in the second scenario (an even chance to lose $100 or nothing). Even though there is no difference between having $100 and a sure or potential gain of $50 and having $200 and a sure or potential loss of $50, emotionally there is a difference, a big difference, between the two choices.

Research in these new sciences demonstrates precisely how risk averse we are — on average most people will reject the prospect of a 50/50 probability of gaining or losing money, unless the amount to be gained is at least double the amount to be lost. That is, most of us will accept a 50/50 chance to gain $100 if the risk of losing money does not exceed $50. When the potential payoff is more than double the potential loss, most of us will take the gamble.

So the next time you are thinking about holding or selling some of your stocks, remind yourself of the endowment effect, the sunk cost fallacy, and loss aversion before making your decision, because none of us are nearly as rational in our choices as we like to think we are.

As the presidential candidates bounce from primary to primary, with some surging and others falling back, it is appropriate to ask if there is something going on here more than simply political preferences and perceived positions on issues. There is. In my latest book, The Mind of the Market, I discuss a phenomenon called the Matthew Effect. It is a disturbing disruption of what we think of as democratic fairness. Here’s how it works.

In Jesus’ Parable of the Talents, recounted in Matthew 25:14–29, the gospel author recalls the messiah as saying in the final verse: “For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away.” Out of context this hardly sounds like the wisdom of the prophet who proclaimed that the meek shall inherit the earth, but in context, Jesus’ point was that properly investing one’s money (as measured in “talents”) generates even more wealth. The servant who was given five talents invested it and gave his master ten talents in return. The servant who was given two talents invested it and gave his master four talents in return. But the servant who was given one talent buried it in the ground and gave his master back just the one talent. The master then ordered his risk-averse servant to give the one talent to the servant who had doubled his investment of five talents, and so he who earned the most was rewarded with even more. And thus it is that the rich get richer.

Jesus probably had in mind something more than an economic allegory about selecting the right investment tool for your money, but the story is a parable about how people and products can gain an unfair advantage in the marketplace. In the 1960s, the sociologist of science Robert K. Merton conducted an extensive study of how scientific ideas are discovered and credited in the marketplace of ideas and discovered that eminent scientists typically receive more credit than they deserve simply by dint of having a big name, while their junior colleagues and graduate students, who usually do most of the work, go largely unnoticed. A similar well-known effect can be seen in how both innovative ideas and clever quotes gravitate up and are given credit to the most famous person associated with them.

Merton called this the Matthew Effect. Marketers know it as Cumulative Advantage. Once a product gets a head-start in sales it signals to consumers that other people want that product and therefore it must be good, thereby causing them to desire it as well, which leads even more people to purchase the product, sending more signals to other consumers that they too must have it, and so it climbs up the bestseller list. Everyone in business knows about the effect, which is why authors and publishers, for example, try so fervently to land their book on the New York Times bestseller list. Once you are on the list bookstores move your title to the “bestseller” bookcase (sometimes even labeled “New York Times Bestseller List”) and to the front of the store where copies of the book are stacked like cordwood. This sends a signal to potential book buyers entering the store that this must be a good read, triggering an increase in sales that gets reported to the New York Times book review editors, who bump the title up the list, sending another signal to bookstore buyers to order even more copies, which secures the title more time in the bestseller list that increases sales even further, and round and round the feedback loop goes as the richest authors get even richer.

To find out if the Bestseller Effect is real, the Columbia University sociologist Duncan Watts and his collaborators Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds tested it in a web-based experiment in which 14,000 participants registered at a website where they had the opportunity to listen to, rate, and download songs by unknown bands. One group of registrants were only given the names of the songs and bands, while a second group of registrants were also shown how many times the song had been downloaded. The researchers called this the “social influence” condition, because they wanted to know if seeing how many people had downloaded a song would influence subjects’ decision on whether or not to download it. Predictably, the web participants in the social influence condition were influenced by the download rate figures: songs with a higher download number were more likely to be downloaded by new participants, whereas subjects in the independent group who saw no download rates, revealed dramatically different song preferences. This is not to deny that the quality of a song or a book or any other product does not matter. Of course it does, and this too is measurable. But it turns out that subjective consumer preferences grounded in relative rankings by other consumers can and often does wash out the effects of more objective ratings of product quality.

Markets that traffic in rankings, ratings, and bestseller lists seem to operate on their own volition, seemingly beyond the control of the forces within. Thinking of the political landscape as a market and the candidates as competing products, we can see how polls and media coverage confer the Matthew Effect upon certain candidates, thereby shifting voter preferences and loyalties like so many brands in the supermarket. The moment Barack Obama won the Iowa caucus the Matthew Effect kicked into high gear, generating immediate media attention, driving political pundits to shift their focus, and creating a positive feedback loop in which the media-rich candidate got even richer.

So in addition to the actual value of a political product, our shifting brand political preferences often have more to do with this peculiar social phenomenon than it does what we like to think of as democratic fairness.

Surprisingly — stunningly, in fact — research shows that the majority of people select the first option; they would rather make twice as much as others even if that meant earning half as much as they could otherwise have. How irrational is that?

This result is one among thousands of experiments in behavioral economics, neuroeconomics and evolutionary economics conclusively demonstrating that we are every bit as irrational when it comes to money as we are in most other aspects of our lives. In this case, relative social ranking trumps absolute financial status. Here’s a related thought experiment. Would you rather be A or B?

A is waiting in line at a movie theater. When he gets to the ticket window, he is told that as he is the 100,000th customer of the theater, he has just won $100.

B is waiting in line at a different theater. The man in front of him wins $1,000 for being the 1-millionth customer of the theater. Mr. B wins $150.

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Amazingly, most people said that they would prefer to be A. In other words, they would rather forgo $50 in order to alleviate the feeling of regret that comes with not winning the thousand bucks. Essentially, they were willing to pay $50 for regret therapy.

Regret falls under a psychological effect known as loss aversion. Research shows that before we risk an investment, we need to feel assured that the potential gain is twice what the possible loss might be because a loss feels twice as bad as a gain feels good. That’s weird and irrational, but it’s the way it is.

Human as it sounds, loss aversion appears to be a trait we’ve inherited genetically because it is found in other primates, such as capuchin monkeys. In a 2006 experiment, these small primates were given 12 tokens that they were allowed to trade with the experimenters for either apple slices or grapes. In a preliminary trial, the monkeys were given the opportunity to trade tokens with one experimenter for a grape and with another experimenter for apple slices. One capuchin monkey in the experiment, for example, traded seven tokens for grapes and five tokens for apple slices. A baseline like this was established for each monkey so that the scientists knew each monkey’s preferences.

The experimenters then changed the conditions. In a second trial, the monkeys were given additional tokens to trade for food, only to discover that the price of one of the food items had doubled. According to the law of supply and demand, the monkeys should now purchase more of the relatively cheap food and less of the relatively expensive food, and that is precisely what they did. So far, so rational. But in another trial in which the experimental conditions were manipulated in such a way that the monkeys had a choice of a 50% chance of a bonus or a 50% chance of a loss, the monkeys were twice as averse to the loss as they were motivated by the gain.

Remarkable! Monkeys show the same sensitivity to changes in supply and demand and prices as people do, as well as displaying one of the most powerful effects in all of human behavior: loss aversion. It is extremely unlikely that this common trait would have evolved independently and in parallel between multiple primate species at different times and different places around the world. Instead, there is an early evolutionary origin for such preferences and biases, and these traits evolved in a common ancestor to monkeys, apes and humans and was then passed down through the generations.

If there are behavioral analogies between humans and other primates, the underlying brain mechanism driving the choice preferences most certainly dates back to a common ancestor more than 10 million years ago. Think about that: Millions of years ago, the psychology of relative social ranking, supply and demand and economic loss aversion evolved in the earliest primate traders.

This research goes a long way toward debunking one of the biggest myths in all of psychology and economics, known as “Homo economicus.” This is the theory that “economic man” is rational, self-maximizing and efficient in making choices. But why should this be so? Given what we now know about how irrational and emotional people are in all other aspects of life, why would we suddenly become rational and logical when shopping or investing?

Consider one more experimental example to prove the point: the ultimatum game. You are given $100 to split between yourself and your game partner. Whatever division of the money you propose, if your partner accepts it, you each get to keep your share. If, however, your partner rejects it, neither of you gets any money.

How much should you offer? Why not suggest a $90-$10 split? If your game partner is a rational, self-interested money-maximizer — the very embodiment of Homo economicus — he isn’t going to turn down a free 10 bucks, is he? He is. Research shows that proposals that offer much less than a $70-$30 split are usually rejected.

Why? Because they aren’t fair. Says who? Says the moral emotion of “reciprocal altruism,” which evolved over the Paleolithic eons to demand fairness on the part of our potential exchange partners. “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine” only works if I know you will respond with something approaching parity. The moral sense of fairness is hard-wired into our brains and is an emotion shared by most people and primates tested for it, including people from non-Western cultures and those living close to how our Paleolithic ancestors lived.

When it comes to money, as in most other aspects of life, reason and rationality are trumped by emotions and feelings.

This opinion editorial was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

The “they” here is presumably the government, which has, despite its intrusion into just about every other aspect of our lives, thankfully stayed out of the parenting business. Nevertheless, the observation is a cogent one because when you become a parent there are no required courses on how to do it. I became a parent the same way just about everyone else has: by stumbling into it without any planning whatsoever. I hadn’t given it much thought until it happened. But when it did, I learned how to parent the same way as everyone else: on the job in real time. Fifteen years later I’m still learning.

I wish I would have had a book like Parenting Beyond Belief when I was starting out on this endless (and endlessly fulfilling) journey. It is choc-a-block full of advice, tips, suggestions, recommendations, anecdotes, and moving (and often funny) stories from a remarkably diverse range of authors who make you laugh and cry at the same time. This is the first book that I know of on parenting without religion. It is almost a given in our society that kids should be raised with religion, because if they aren’t they will grow up to be juvenile delinquents, right? Wrong. Wronger than wrong. Not even wrong. The assumption is so bigoted and breathtakingly inane that it doesn’t deserve a debunking, but it gets one nonetheless in this volume, from nonbelievers of all stripes, who show how and why raising children without religion is not only a loving and ethical approach to parenthood, it is an honorable one.

My wife and I are raising our daughter, Devin, without religion. There was no conscious decision to do so, no formal plan. We don’t believe in God and so the subject just never comes up. Since I am a social scientist, I am well aware of the powerful influence parents can have on the religious, political, and social attitudes of their children, so if I took any proactive steps in the parenting of my daughter in this regard, it was not to be proactive in influencing her too strongly in any one direction. As I told her in a letter that I gave her on the occasion of her transitioning from Middle School to High School:

Our beliefs about people, society, politics, economics, religion, and everything else are shaped by our parents and family, friends and peers, teachers and mentors, books and newspapers, television and the Internet, and culture at large. It is impossible for any of us to hold beliefs of any kind that are not significantly influenced by all these different sources. Up until about the age you are now — early teens — your beliefs have been primarily shaped by your parents. And since I am in the business of researching and writing about beliefs, as well as expressing them in public forums, I fear that my own rather strongly-held beliefs may have had an undue influence on you; that is, my hope is that whatever it is you decide to believe about whatever subject, you have thought through carefully each of those beliefs and at least tried to make sure that they are your beliefs and not those of your parents. It matters less to me what your specific beliefs are than that you have carefully arrived at your beliefs through reason and evidence and thoughtful reflection.

We all do the best we can as parents, which was the central message of Parenthood, as evidenced in the scene where Steve Martin’s character, Gil Buckman, has a nightmare in which his son has grown up maladjusted and is now holed up in a college bell tower shooting students. The college Dean exclaims, “It’s Kevin Buckman. His father totally screwed him up.” Kevin yells down at his father: “You made me play second base.” Gil’s plaintive plea could be said by any parent: “Son, I’m sorry. I did the best I could.” Here I am reminded of Robin Williams’ riff on parenting, in which he recalls two dreams: in one, his son proclaims “I’d like to thank the Nobel Academy for this great honor,” and in the other his son says “ya want fries with that?”

Nobel Prize or Supersize fries — either way (or anything in between) I shall always love Devin and attempt to teach her the fundamental principles of a moral life. These principles are important whether there is a god or not, but especially if not. If this is all there is, and if there is no one out there keeping score, then parenthood is elevated to transcendency.

This article appeared as the Foreword to Parenting Beyond Belief.

I have come to the conclusion that what’s fair is fair, and that the creationists have a good point. After all, isn’t education all about hearing both sides of an issue? And they are correct, no one was there to witness the creation, so any ideas about who or what caused the creation can only be speculative theories and therefore never provable.

Therefore, I am certain that Ministers, Priests, Rabbis, and religious leaders of all sects will be pleased to read the following disclaimer to their respective congregations every Sunday morning, or before any sermon delivered:

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, God bless and welcome to [fill in the name of your church, temple, mosque, or center of worship here].
This morning we are going to talk about the creation of the universe and the origins of life on Earth. According to the Bible, Genesis 1:1–3: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

Now, it is important for us to understand that no one was actually present at the creation so we don’t really know what happened. Genesis 1:1–3 is only a theory, and as such cannot be treated as fact. And it is only fair that I share with you that there are other theories of the creation.

For example, some Sumerians and Babylonians, Gilbert Islanders, Koreans, and Greeks believed that the world was created from the parts of a slain monster; some Zuni Indians, Cook Islanders, and Tahitians have a theory that the world was created by the interaction of primordial parents; and some Japanese, Samoan, Persian, Chinese, and Hindu have a theory that the world was generated from an egg.” And, of course, there is that dogma being foisted upon us by the liberal media and intelligentsia, the theory of evolution.

As for the origins of human life, that is spelled out in Genesis 1:27: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Of course, not only was no one present to witness this act — except for Adam and Eve after they were created — I should point out that this theory has a counter theory in Genesis 2:7, where “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” In this theory Adam is all alone without a mate, so in Genesis 2:21–22 “the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.”

Since everyone here was blessed by the almighty with a brain that thinks, I will allow you to decide which theory is the correct theory of the creation of humans, Genesis 1 or Genesis 2. Weigh the evidence and decide for yourselves. You be the judge.

Oh, there is one other minor detail. Adam and Eve begat Cain and Abel, and as you all know Cain — as firstborns are wont to do to their laterborn siblings who compete for the limited parental resources — slew him. That left Adam, Eve, and Cain as the only humans on the entire Earth. But in Genesis 4:17 we read that “Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch.” Now, I don’t mean to burden you with more of the liberal media’s fascination with smut and porn, but I think as created beings endowed with intelligence and critical thinking skills blessed to us by the good Lord, it might be reasonable to ask just who it was that Cain “knew.” Unless Adam was himself blessed with both types of reproductive organs, or Cain was capable of parthenogenesis, then we are left with the theory that Cain “knew” his mother. But that’s just a theory, and as we all know, theories are just wild guesses and should not be taken seriously.

This opinion editorial was first published here.