A review of Pope Brock’s Charlatan. America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam.

Human cognition has a problem — anecdotal thinking comes naturally whereas scientific thinking does not. The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism illustrates this barrier. On the one side are scientists who have been unable to find any causal link between the symptoms of autism and the vaccine’s ingredients. On the other are parents who noticed that shortly after having their children vaccinated autistic symptoms appeared. Anecdotal associations are so powerful that they cause people to ignore contrary evidence. In the vaccination case the imagined culprit for autism’s cause is the preservative thimerosal, yet it breaks down into ethylmercury that is expelled from the body too quickly to have a damaging effect (plus autism continues to be diagnosed in children born after thimerosal was removed from vaccines). The story holds power despite the contrary facts.

The reason for our cognitive disconnect is that the brain evolved to be cautious. We favor anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool. Our brains are `belief engines’ that seek connections.

Even in the age of modern science, our faith in anecdotes can make us easy to exploit. Any medical huckster promising that A will cure B has only to advertise a handful of successful testimonials. Enter John R. Brinkley, one of the most notorious medical quacks of the first half of the twentieth century, and his nemesis Morris Fishbein, the quackbusting editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Their long struggle throughout the 1920s and 1930s, wonderfully retold in a gripping narrative by Pope Brock, brings to life this tension between folk and scientific medicine.

As Brock ably demonstrates, Brinkley came of age on the tail end of the freewheeling patent remedy era in which con-men hawked their wares out of the side of wagons:

They usually performed at night. A platform was unfolded and torches placed at each corner as the audience gathered, drawn by handbills and word of mouth. First a fiddler or a dancer got the crowd warmed up. A short morality play followed, in which a noble head-of-house or ringleted female died pathetically for lack of a miracle tonic, identified by name. Finally the physician himself (Brinkley) shot onstage in a dinner-plate hat, cutaway coat, and pious pants that buttoned up the sides, theeing and thousing, singing and selling, waving a bottle of Ayer’s Cathartic Pills. Or maybe Burdock Blood Bitters or Aunt Fanny’s Worm Candy. One thing was for sure, whatever it was cured whatever you had.

What many men had, Brinkley discovered as he honed his scam, was a lack of sexual vitality, and he developed a surgical technique that offered the type of firm results that his male clientele so desperately sought: goat testis sewn right into the patient’s scrotum, which he likened to “embedding a marble in an apple.” Come one, come all. And they did, to the tune of $750 per surgery, advertised widely in newspapers (a study revealed that over half of all newspaper advertising at the time was for patent medicines) and the new fangled technology, radio, which Brinkley took to like an evangelist to television. It made him a rich man, but as his business grew he got careless, performing operations both before and after happy hour, and fobbing off work to assistants whose medical credentials were even shadier than his own (Brinkley graduated from the unaccredited and improbably named Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City). “As a result dozens of patients died over the years, either in the operating room or shortly after their return home,” Brock explains. “Many others were permanently maimed.”

This attracted the attention of the ambitious Morris Fishbein, whose career coincided with the rise of the American Medical Association’s attempt to reign in flimflamery through accrediting medical colleges and licensing practitioners. Fishbein made his public mark in 1923 when the Chicago Daily News sent him to investigate the “Hot Girl of Escanaba” (Michigan), a woman who suffered from a temperature of 115 degrees for two weeks. Fishbein exposed her as a “hysterical malingerer” when he discovered that a flesh colored hot water bottle was employed to elevate rectal thermometer readings. “Along with making him famous as a fraud buster extraordinaire,” Brock notes, “the case fixed him in a role he would revel in for years to come: the face, the popularizer, the lord high priest of the AMA.” For the next two decades Fishbein pursued the country’s “most daring and dangerous” swindler, as he called Brinkley, until he finally brought him down in a decisive courtroom confrontation that reads like a Hollywood film script.

Stripped of his license to practice medicine and embroiled in lawsuits, Brinkley eventually moved to Mexico where he dispensed pseudo-medical twaddle over the airways through a “border blasting” radio station that could be heard all the way to Canada. When the Mexican government shut him down in 1941 — in part because of his public sympathies for the Nazis — he was a broken man. “My health is gone. I am ready for the bed and out…” he wrote his wife three days before a heart attack terminated his tenure of 56 years.

Fishbein’s promotion of science-based medicine was heroic in his day, but medical flapdoodle flourishes today on the internet so every medical association and journal needs a quackbusting Fishbein on its staff, for without such eternal vigilance, folk medicine will trump scientific medicine in the minds of patients.

(New York, 2008, ISBN 978-0307339881)
This review was originally published in Nature.

A review of George Basalla’s Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials.

On February 8, 2000, the New York Times science section featured a newly published book, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe¹ by the paleontologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee, who were called radicals for daring to challenge the orthodox assumption that the cosmos is probably teaming with complex life. “Now, two prominent scientists say the conventional wisdom is wrong.”²

How did the belief in the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) change from the heresy it was in the early 1960s when Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, and others took up the search, to “conventional wisdom” by the late 1990s? It certainly was not due to any new empirical data for the existence of ETIs, since this continues to be a science without a subject. A compelling answer may be found in George Basalla’s critically important new book, Civilized Life in the Universe, the best treatment on the history and science of the subject since Steven Dick’s magisterial two volumes, Plurality of Worlds and The Biological Universe.³

Basalla’s tightly-woven and highly readable narrative begins with an epigraph from the theoretical physicist Paul Davies: “What I am more concerned with is the extent to which the modern search for aliens is, at rock-bottom, part of an ancient religious quest” (p. 3). That is precisely what it is, says Basalla, who precedes to outline three assumptions underlying the thinking about extra-terrestrial intelligence from antiquity to the present:

1. the universe is very large or infinite,
2. there are other inhabited worlds,
3. these other complex and intelligent beings are vastly superior to us.

Modern cosmology has confirmed the first assumption. We live in an accelerating expanding universe some 13.7 billion years old, which contains several hundred billion galaxies each of which houses several hundred billion stars. And modern astronomy is in the process of confirming half of the second assumption: there are a great many worlds circling those hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. Whether they are inhabited or not, of course, remains to be seen.

As for the third assumption, if we did make contact with an ETI, they would have to be vastly superior to us (since we just recently mastered radio and space-flight). On an evolutionary time scale, an ETI species only slightly ahead of us biologically could be millions of years ahead of us technologically. Pace Arthur C. Clarke, I have called this Shermer’s Last Law: “Any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.”⁴

This is actually an ancient belief, says Basalla.

The idea of the superiority of celestial beings is neither new nor scientific. It is a widespread and old belief in religious thought. Aristotle divided his universe into two distinct regions, the superior celestial realm and the inferior terrestrial realm.

The incorporation of Aristotle into Christian theology carried this belief into the Middle Ages. “Christians populated the celestial regions with God, the saints, angelic beings of varying ranks, and the souls of the dead. These immortal celestial beings were superior to mortals, who inhabited the inferior terrestrial realm” (p. 10). Even though the Copernican revolution overturned Aristotelian cosmology, “the belief that creatures living on a distant planet were superior to the human species” hung on into the modern age, and that “religious elements continue to adhere to the perception of extraterrestrial life even as we study it in the twenty-first century” (p. 12).

As I demonstrated in an analysis I conducted on the SETI pioneers,⁵ most were once religious but became either atheists or agnostics as adults. Radio astronomer Frank Drake — creator of the canonical “Drake Equation” for estimating the number of ETIs inhabiting the galaxy — was raised Baptist, and later reflected: “A strong influence on me, and I think on a lot of SETI people, was the extensive exposure to fundamentalist religion.”⁶ In his book on the subject, Drake suggested that “immortality may be quite common among extraterrestrials.”⁷ Carl Sagan — who did more than anyone to conventionalize SETI — was raised Jewish and became agnostic, later writing of SETI’s importance: “It touches deeply into myth, folklore, religion, mythology; and every human culture in some way or another has wondered about that type of question.”⁸ ETIs are secular Gods. Deities for atheists.

Why should so many people — theists and atheists, theologians and scientists — believe in the existence of superior celestial beings, be they angels or aliens? Basalla’s answer is twofold:

1. the psychologist Robert Plank suggests that humans have an emotional need to believe in imaginary beings.⁹ “Despite all their scientific trappings,” Basalla writes, “the extraterrestrials discussed by scientists are as imaginary as the spirits and gods of religion or myth” (p. 14);
2. the historian of science Steven Dick thinks that when the Newtonian mechanical universe displaced the spiritual world of the Middle Ages it left a vast and lifeless void, which was filled by modern science with ETIs. Consider Sagan’s vision of alien intelligences, says Basalla. “Sagan was certain that these creatures were benevolent. They would help us solve current problems, like the spread of nuclear weapons and environmental pollution, by sharing their advanced knowledge with us” (p. 13).

Basalla is also highly critical of the anthropomorphism inherent in SETI science. Although Sagan identified a number of chauvinisms (oxygen, carbon, temperature, etc.) that cloud scientific thinking on this subject, Basalla thinks that he didn’t go far enough. The chauvinism that ETIs will communicate via radio signals, that their intelligence will take a form similar to ours, and especially that they are social beings who live in civilizations are anthropomorphisms that have no basis whatsoever in reality. We cannot even communicate with terrestrial intelligences such as apes and dolphins, Basalla notes, “how can we hope to decode complex messages sent by superior extraterrestrial ones?” (p. 200).

Nevertheless, if we do make contact with intelligent celestial beings, all of this speculation and conjecture will fall by the wayside in favor of real science. So in the spirit of scientific inquiry, the search must go on. Ad astra!

References & Notes

1. Ward, P. D. and D. Brownlee. 2000. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe. New York: Copernicus Books.
2. Broad, W. J. 2000. “Maybe We Are Alone in the Universe, After All.” New York Times, February 8.
3. Dick, Steven J. 1982. Plurality of Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1996. The Biological Universe. New York: Cambridge University press.
4. Shermer, Michael. 2002. “Shermer’s Last Law.” Scientific American, January, p. 33.
5. Shermer, Michael. 2001. The Borderlands of Science. New York: Oxford University Press.
6. Swift, D. 1990. SETI Pioneers: Scientists Talk About Their Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, p. 57.
7. Drake, Frank and Dava Sobel. 1992. Is Anyone Out There? New York: Delacorte, p. 160.
8. Swift, D. 1990, p. 219.
9. Plank, Robert. 1968. The Emotional Significance of Imaginary Beings. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas.

(Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 0195171810)
This review was originally published in Science.

A review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking.

Anyone who does a lot of public speaking knows there are certain questions that inevitably arise from the audience in a Q&A session. In my case, lecturing on pseudoscience and the paranormal, I am almost always asked: What is my position on the afterlife? (“I’m for it”), have I ever encountered a mystery that science cannot explain? (“Paris Hilton”), and have I ever been skeptical of something that turned out to be real? For this final question I have a serious answer: intuition.

As a skeptical scientist, I have always treated with disdain the notion that one can intuit a truth about reality. Scientists should employ the logic of Mr. Spock, the deductive reasoning of Mr. Holmes, and the rational calculus of Mr. Data. Hunches, guesses, insights, feelings, and intuitions lead to misdirection and error. Thinking things through rationally and systematically is the royal road to reality.

Well, I was wrong. It turns out there’s a lot more to thinking than meets the experimental eye, and Malcolm Gladwell has penned an absolutely delightful summary of all the important research in the study of intuition. His title, Blink, is apt, for we humans have a remarkable — and heretofore unproven — capacity for making judgments in the metaphorical blink of an eye that are often superior to those we might have made had we taken the time to assess all possible variables.

Gladwell begins with the fascinating story of how the Getty Museum got taken by a forged Kouros, a sculpture of a youth allegedly carved in 6th-century B.C. Greece. Despite an intuitive hunch many of its experts had that there was something about the piece that was not quite right, there was no smoking gun of fakery any one could identify. So the artwork was purchased, and only later was it exposed as a fake. The best assessment of whether a work of art is a forgery, it turns out, is the first impression an art expert has on seeing it, not necessarily a battery of scientific tests. For example, one of the art experts — Thomas Hoving, the former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art — later recalled that the first word that popped into his mind when he saw the Kouros was “fresh.” Although he could not say precisely what about the statue was fresh, it was a general feeling he had about it. “I had dug in Sicily where we found bits and pieces of these things. They just don’t come out looking like that. The Kouros looked like it had been dipped in the very best café au lait from Starbucks.”

What is happening here is nonrational (not irrational) analysis at a level below conscious awareness. Students who view three 10-second video clips of a professor, for example, give roughly the same ratings of that professor’s effectiveness as those students who actually took the course. (This may also mean that student evaluations are actually based on first impressions rather than extensive analysis.) The same effect — called “thin slicing” — can be seen in dating, where first impressions are everything, as is well known by those who have tried “speed dating,” a trendy way to meet people, in which each of multiple “dates” in one evening lasts only six minutes. Thin slicing is intuitive thinking, “thinking without thinking” as Gladwell puts it. That’s not quite right, however, as I suspect it is more of a subtle, unconscious (or subconscious) form of thinking that we just don’t know that much about as yet. We are collecting data about a person or situation, and that data is being analyzed somewhere in the brain. How precisely that is being done remains a mystery.

Evaluating whether someone is trustworthy or not, or whether someone is lying or telling the truth, is more accurately done by intuitive “feel” in a brief interaction than by subjecting them to a polygraph test. The best predictor of how well a psychotherapist or marriage counselor will work for you is the impression you have of that person in the first five minutes of the first session. University of Washington psychologist and marriage counselor John Gottman, who has reversed the process, can predict with 95% accuracy whether a marriage will last or not after observing the couple for only one hour. Contempt for one’s spouse, for example, is a powerful predictor of a doomed marriage, and rolling one’s eyes when one’s spouse is speaking, is a proxy for contempt. A lot can be read in the blink of an eye.

We are especially good at snap judgments when it comes to human relations, because we evolved as a social primate species living in small tribes in which social relations were extremely important. We needed (and still need) to know whom we can trust and whom we cannot trust; in the prehistoric world of our Paleolithic environment we had only our wits and intuitions, the “sense” or “feeling” we had for someone’s trustworthiness, to rely on. The social calculus was not the slow and systematic logic of analysis; it was (and is) the subtle and fast feeling of a felt emotion. That “feeling” is the expression of an internal computation whose consequences are important.

This explains the interesting results of an experiment conducted by the psychologist Samuel Gosling. He rated 80 subjects on the “Big Five” personality scale (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience). He found a high correlation with similar ratings of the subjects done by their best friends — no surprise. But then he sent total strangers into the dorm rooms of the subjects and gave them 15 minutes to answer questions about the person who lived there. The strangers were not as good as the best friends in evaluating extraversion and agreeableness, but on conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience, the strangers knew the subjects better than their best friends!

Some of the research findings on what might be called “the blink effect,” so well encapsulated by Gladwell, are startling. The best predictor of whether a physician will be sued for malpractice is not the doctor’s training, credentials, or track record, but a subjective evaluation by observers of short clips of conversation between doctor and patient. Physicians who seem warm and empathetic — traits that can be sensed in a blink — are less likely to be sued by their patients, regardless of the number of errors they commit. As one lawyer explained it, “In all the years I’ve been in this business, I’ve never had a potential client walk in and say, ‘I really like this doctor, and I feel terrible about doing it, but I want to sue him.’ We’ve had people come in saying they want to sue some specialist, and we’ll say, ‘We don’t think that doctor was negligent. We think it’s your primary care doctor who was at fault.’ And the client will say, ‘I don’t care what she did. I love her, and I’m not suing her.’”

Unfortunately, in what Gladwell calls “the dark side of blink,” we sometimes make snap assessments of people based on inappropriate criteria, such as their gender or race. Research with the Implicit Association Test has shown that we form connections between things faster when there is already an association, such as between “female” and “laundry,” “home,” “kitchen,” “housework,” and “babies”; and between “male” and “professional,” “merchant,” “capitalist,” “corporation,” and “entrepreneur. Even more sinister are the associations of African-American or European-American with such adjectives as “hurt,” “evil,” “glorious,” and “wonderful.” “It turns out that over 80 percent of all those who have ever taken the test end up having pro-white associations,” Gladwell explains, “meaning that it takes them measurably longer to complete the test when they are required to link good things with black people than when they are required to link bad things with black people.”

Gladwell took the test and was rated as having “moderate automatic preference for whites”; “but then again, I’m half black,” he points out. Meaning what? “What it means,” he concludes, “is that our attitudes towards things like race or gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have conscious attitudes. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately.” The IAT, on the other hand, measures “our racial attitudes on an unconscious level — the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we’ve even had time to think. We live in North America, where we are surrounded every day by cultural messages linking white with good.”

Blink is packed with examples of such intuitive processes, a thoughtful and thought-provoking look into both the light tunnel and the dark well of our minds. But I wish to praise it on another plane as well.

There are, roughly speaking, three levels of science writing in our culture: (1) technical (peer-reviewed papers, monographs, and university press books written by and for professional scientists); (2) popular professional (essays and articles in popular magazines and trade press books written by scientists for both scientists and moderately informed general readers — Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Jared Diamond come to mind); (3) popular general (essays, articles, and books by journalists and science writers for completely uninformed readers).

We live in the Age of Science, and all three levels are vital for the dispersal of scientific knowledge to an educated democracy. Sadly, too many professional scientists think level one is the only legitimate form of science writing, and that anything else is simply “dumbing down.” For his presentation of science to hundreds of millions of people, the astronomer Carl Sagan was slammed by his peers, denied tenure at Harvard, and rejected by the National Academy of Science. Yet he never stopped producing peer-reviewed articles, averaging one a month for his entire career.

Gladwell is presenting science at level three, where it is most needed, and where good writing is most vital. He has the ability to synthesize a large body of scientific data into a highly readable, page-turning narrative, and to convert the raw numbers of research and statistics into meaningful facts for our personal lives. I thought he did this brilliantly with The Tipping Point, and I think he does it even better in Blink. For this feat all of us in the scientific community should be grateful, because the craft of writing good science is just as important as the skill of producing good science.

(Little, Brown & Company, 2005, ISBN 0316172324)
This review was originally published in New York Sun.

A review of Michael Ruse’s Darwin and Design: Does Evolution have a Purpose?.

Psalms 19:1 declares: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” The divine design inference is not confined to the ancient Hebrews.

In 1999 social scientist Frank J. Sulloway and I conducted a national survey, asking Americans why they believe in God. The most common reason offered was the good design, natural beauty, and complexity of the world. One subject wrote: “To say that the universe was created by the Big Bang theory is to say that you can create Webster’s Dictionary by throwing a bomb in a printing shop and the resulting explosion results in the dictionary.” He is not alone. A 2001 Gallup poll found that 45 percent of Americans believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” 37 percent believe that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,” while only 12 percent believe that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”

The reason people think that a designer created the world is because, well, it looks designed, and philosopher and Darwinian defender Michael Ruse thinks that it’s high time we quit tiptoeing around this inference. This he does in Darwin and Design, the comprehensive, scholarly, and highly accessible third volume in his trilogy on the history and impact of evolutionary thought that began with Monad to Man (on progress in evolution), and continued with Mystery of Mysteries (on evolution as a social construction). Ruse has done as much as any scholar of the past century to explicate the social and cultural meanings engendered by the theory of evolution, and to identify clearly when scientists step out of their roles as objective observers of nature to speculate on the higher and deeper implications of their theories (compare, for example, Edward O. Wilson’s technical book The Ants with his general work attempting to unify the sciences in Consilience). In this third volume Ruse asks whether the apparent design of nature implies not only a designer, but a purpose.

Let’s admit right from the start, says Ruse, that life looks designed because it was … from the bottom up by evolution. Purpose follows. “There is nothing very mysterious about purpose in evolution,” Ruse explains. The purpose is functional adaptation: “At the heart of modern evolutionary biology is the metaphor of design, and for this reason function-talk is appropriate. Organisms give the appearance of being designed, and thanks to Charles Darwin’s discovery of natural selection we know why this is true. Natural selection produces artifact-like features, not by chance but because if they were not artifact-like they would not work and serve their possessors’ needs” (273). More cautious evolutionary theorists like Ernst Mayr worry that “the use of terms like purposive or goal-directed seemed to imply the transfer of human qualities, such as intent, purpose, planning, deliberation, or consciousness, to organic structures and to subhuman forms of life.” To which Ruse replies: “Well, yes it does!” So what? At the heart of science is metaphor — Ruse notes that physicists talk of force, pressure, attraction, repulsion, work, charm, and resistance, all quite useful metaphors — and the metaphors of design and purpose work well as long as we stick to natural explanations for nature and understand that natural selection (another metaphor) is the primary mechanism for generating design and purpose, from the bottom up.

What role, then, is there for a top-down designer? If you are one of those 37 percent who believe that God guided the process of evolution then, on one level, Ruse has no truck with you, and he is in good company. In his 1996 Encyclical Truth Cannot Contradict Truth, Pope John Paul II told a billion Catholics that, in essence, evolution happened — deal with it: “It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.” Since both the Bible and the theory of evolution are true (and truth cannot contradict truth), John Paul II reconciled theological dualism with scientific monism by arguing that evolution produced our bodies while God granted us our souls.

This conciliatory position is fine as far as it goes, but Ruse shows through a rich and variegated historical recapitulation of design arguments that many thinkers are not content to keep the magisteria of science and religion separate. They want empirical data to prove faith tenets, and it is here where Ruse steps out of his role as historian and philosopher and becomes an evolutionary activist, debunking in no uncertain terms the claims of the latest species (some would call them mutants) of creationists: Intelligent Design Theorists, or William Paley redux. Paley was the 18th century natural theologian whose “watchmaker” argument became the foundation of all modern design arguments. IDers recast Paley in modern jargon with new and more sophisticated biological examples (such as bacterial flagellum and blood clotting agents). But as Darwin showed — and a century and a half of research has proven — the designer is (in Richard Dawkins’ apposite phrase) a blind watchmaker. Complex structures can and do arise out of simple systems through blind variation, selection, and adaptation. This is an inevitable outcome of Darwinism which, says Ruse, “Whether we like it or not, we are stuck with it. The Darwinian revolution is over, and Darwin won” (330).

It would appear that this leaves us with a worldview shared by only 12 percent of the American public. This will not do, so Ruse closes his volume with an intriguing plea: “What I am arguing for is a theology of nature … where the focus is back on adaptation. A theology of nature that sees and appreciates the complex, adaptive glory of the living world, rejoices in it, and trembles before it. I argue for this even though the people who reveal it to us today in its fullest majesty may be people for whom Christianity evokes emotions ranging from bored indifference to outright hostility. This is irrelevant, especially to those of us who know professional Darwinian evolutionists. As Ernst Mayr once said to me: ‘People forget that it is possible to be intensely religious in the entire absence of theological belief.’ Theologians working on the science/religion relationship, few of whom have actually had hands-on experience with nature, let the hostility of atheists like Dawkins, or their embarrassment with the Intelligent Design enthusiasts, blind them to the genuine love and joy with which today’s professional evolutionists respond to their subjects” (335).

Ruse’s poetically courageous proposal will no doubt generate cries that the theory of evolution is a religion, but the fact is that as pattern-seeking, storytelling primates who need origin myths, the theory of evolution fulfills that need for us and has the added advantage that, unlike most origin myths, it is very probably true.

(Harvard University Press, 2003, ISBN 0674016319)
This review was originally published in the New York Times.

The following book review of Mark Oppenheimer’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture (Yale University Press, 2003), (originally published in the Los Angeles Times) ran in the Los Angeles Times Book Review (4/1/04). I used the book review to further support the group selection thesis proffered by David Sloan Wilson in his book Darwin’s Cathedral, as well as my own analysis in The Science of Good and Evil, to explain the success of religion. It was published as Countering the Counterculture. My original title better describes my thesis and what the book is about. But it is an unalterable law of nature that all book review and opinion editorial editors must change the author’s original title or else they will go to editorial hades.

In April, 1993, in his address to the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Pope John Paul II acquitted Galileo for his heretical belief that the earth goes around the sun, explaining that “the theologian must keep informed about the results achieved by the natural sciences.” Three years later, in his October, 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, this same Pope avered that Darwin was right because the theory of evolution is “more than a hypothesis,” and assured believers that it is possible to be both a Christian and an evolutionist because “truth cannot contradict truth.”

Scientists who perceive religion as a dinosaurian relic incapable of adapting to an ever-changing cultural landscape should take note. Religion is inescapably Darwinian, evolving to fill empty niches and mutating to compete with cultural competitors. No where is this adaptability more apparent than in America, where the separation of church and state has forced religion to compete with other cultural traditions and social institutions for the minds, souls, and dollars of consumers. A spiritual free market has produced a mélange of cults, sects, and religions, from Mormons and Moonies to Scientologists and Southern Baptists, all of whom have adopted the uniquely American style of advertising and marketing their products and services.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the secularization of society, mandatory public education, and the rise of modern science, over the past century Americans have become more religious than ever before. Pundits who call for America to return to the good ol’ days of our Christian foundation have their history bass-ackwards. Historians and sociologists have demonstrated that belief in God, religiosity, and church attendance have all steadily increased over the past two centuries. This is the American religious paradox, resolved if we think of religions in Darwinian terms as social organisms competing for limited resources to try to pass on their ideological genes to the next generation.

A splendid test of this theory is how religion faired in the turbulent 1960s, the subject of Mark Oppenheimer’s insightful and charming cultural history in Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture. In Europe, where religion and government are inextricably intertwined, change comes about glacially, if at all. “The Lutheran Church in Sweden is not much affected by rebellious youth culture or the fall of foreign governments; the Church of England is anemic whether the radio is playing the Beatles or Oasis,” Oppenheimer asserts. “But American religions must constantly sell themselves, and the ones that last are the ones that discover ways to exert imaginative sway.”

Busting the myth that mainstream religions suffered irreversible blows from their 1960’s countercultural competitors, Oppenheimer demonstrates that, for example, Catholics, Mormons, and Pentecostal groups such as the Assemblies of God saw their membership rolls swell. From 1963 to 1976 the Southern Baptist Convention grew by 2.5 million members, while Unitarians saw their ranks bulge by 30 percent (from 147,000 to 191,000 members), and Catholics by 15 percent (from 43 million to 49.5 million). The perception of the 60s as an era in which Americans dropped out of mainstream religion in order to hitch rides “on the paisley bus of religious experimentation” (in one of Oppenheimer’s many clever phrases that break up copious statistics) such as TM, EST, and Silva Mind Control, is simply wrong. Americans may have experimented with alternative religions, but they did not inhale.

In a 1973 study conducted in San Francisco, for example, only one percent said they knew a lot about Hare Krishna while 61 percent knew nothing; three percent knew a lot about Zen Buddhism, 27 percent knew a little, and 70 percent knew nothing; only 8 percent had participated in yoga, 5.3 percent in TM, and 2.6 percent in Zen. “In other words,” Oppenheimer deduces, “in a famously liberal, iconoclastic city, a random sampling of the population revealed low, even minuscule, levels of familiarity with prominent alternative religions.”

What did happen in the 60s (itself something of a myth, Oppenheimer argues, since the decade of social and cultural turmoil is more like 1967 to 1976) is that traditional religions evolved to remain “the spiritual homes for most Americans.” Although “many people pass through periods of religious seeking, often shopping at different churches, they finally settle into membership at one.” Oppenheimer defines religion, in fact, as “a sacrificial system whose adherents do not ascribe to another religion.” It is one thing to be titillated by alternative belief systems (and maybe even briefly sample one or two), it is quite another to tithe a percentage of your hard-earned income to one. Oppenheimer defines counterculture as “a self-sustaining alternative model of culture.” Alternative religious movements were not truly countercultural because, for the most part, they did not displace mainstream religions. Instead, what happened is that traditional religious cultures evolved just enough to survive and outlive their would-be competitors (whatever happened to Silva Mind Control?)

Unitarians and Gay rights, Roman Catholics and the folk mass, Jews and communal worship, Episcopalians and feminism, and Southern Baptists and Vietnam War protestors are Oppenheimer’s case studies in how remarkably adaptable religions are even in the most turbulent times. Oppenheimer chose these five religions because they are well established enough that, in his pragmatic definition of mainstream, “adherents can run for office without having to explain their religion.” How each of them adapted to these challenges to their orthodoxy determined, in part, how well they survived into the post-60s world. Unitarians (so called because they reject the trinity), for example, with a history of liberal support for progressive causes, took well to feminist, antiwar, and civil rights movements, such that an openly Gay minister would quickly find succor in most Unitarian churches (with feeble resistance from southern and midwest congregations). As a cultural species, Unitarians were already well-adapted for the countercultural challenges and thus they passed through the crisis unscathed.

As did the Jews, who had already undergone profound changes earlier in the century under Reform Judaism, and whose essence was more cultural than religious. “Jews are Jews because of descent,” Oppenheimer opined, “they don’t have to be under a synagogue roof, in communion with other Jews, or in good standing with a religious hierarch. They were always freer to experiment outside the established religious bodies.” Which they did with the havurah, a counterculture movement of small communities who gathered to study or worship outside a synagogue and away from the rabbi. As an example of religious plasticity, even in what constitutes religion per se, Oppenheimer notes: “Jews could be profoundly, traditionally Jewish while rebuking Jewish institutions.” This is how to survive a cultural crisis.

Episcopalians and Southern Baptists were not nearly as liberal as Unitarians and Jews, so the feminist movement for the former and Vietnam War protestors for the latter were not so easily incorporated. Yet in these case studies one can find in religion a certain controlled tolerance, even if it is implemented for the purpose of preserving power and control (in the former) and gaining additional members (in the latter). The Catholic Church is a case in point when it abandoned the Latin Mass in 1967 in order stop the bleeding of weekly Mass attendance, which was declining an average of two percentage points a year throughout the decade. Both Catholic school enrollment and conversion rates were dropping, along with vocations to the priesthood. Pope John XXIII’s call for aggiornamento, or updating, of the church came none too soon. Vatican II was the result. Mass would be celebrated in the vernacular rather than in Latin, the priest would face the congregation, and dry Gregorian chants would be replaced by the innovative sounds of the electric guitar.

Rock of ages.

(Vail-Baillou Press, 2003, ISBN 0300100248)
This review was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

A review of Robin Waterfield’s Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis.

In the early 1980s I began a personal odyssey into altered states of consciousness. Because I thought I might like to use my brain again, I eschewed mind-altering substances and instead opted for a sensory-deprivation tank (a sound- and light-proof container of warm salt water), sleep deprivation (once enduring 83 straight hours), and even undergoing a series of sessions with a professional hypnotherapist who trained me to go in and out of alpha-wave land at will.

In the water tank I experienced only modest visual hallucinations — dim blotches of color — but nothing to rival the reputed effects of LSD. By contrast, my sleep-deprived brain — the result of racing a bicycle nonstop from Santa Monica to Nebraska as part of the 3,000-mile transcontinental Race Across America — became convinced that the members of my support crew were aliens from another planet attempting to abduct me into their spacecraft. And for a television segment on my preparations for the race with my hypnotherapist, I was so far “under” that she could not bring me out with the usual “awake” command, causing a moment of concern for an anxious Wide World of Sports camera crew.

What does it mean to be “under” in hypnosis? The standard answer — an altered state of consciousness — explains little for a simple reason: we don’t really know what consciousness is, making it difficult to explain what an altered state of it means. Of all the methods of plumbing the depths of consciousness by altering its normal awake state, hypnosis has the longest and most checkered history, with a correspondingly massive and confusing body of literature. Hidden Depths, by British scholar and writer Robin Waterfield, masterfully encapsulates that history and literature through a delightful work of reportage and successfully navigates the treacherous straits between acolyte sycophancy and dogmatic skepticism.

To explain what hypnosis is, Waterfield begins with a discussion of what it is not. Hypnosis is not a state of sleep or unconsciousness. It is not like meditating or being in “flow.” It is not a paranormal or satanic phenomenon. It is not limited to weak-willed or gullible people. It is not a lie detector or memory retriever. It cannot cure disease or guarantee weight loss. It cannot turn people into assassins (ala the Manchurian Candidate) or make them commit acts they would not normally perform (hypnotizing someone to engage in sex). Through a judicious use of history and breezy storytelling, Waterfield demonstrates that it is easier to show what hypnosis is not than what it is. Since Franz Anton Mesmer popularized hypnosis as “animal magnetism” in mid-eighteenth-century France, it has been variously described as monoideism (single focused thought), a form of sleep, passive suggestibility, active selective attention with reduced planning, hysteria, dissociation, Oedipal love of the hypnotherapist (Freud’s theory, of course), a state of inhibition between sleep and wakefulness, task-motivation, imaginative response to test-suggestions, goal-directed fantasy role-playing, and activation of the implicit memory system.

With this obfuscating potpourri of theory, and no definitive experimental test to lead us to a singular consensus, Waterfield wisely concludes: “All of the current theories may be wrong, or none of them may be wrong, while all giving a partial picture.” Even the theory that hypnosis doesn’t exist compels because “no one really knows what hypnosis is.” In the end, “Faced with this welter of definitions, it has to be borne in mind that nothing about hypnosis is uncontroversial, and that these various definitions depend on various theories of what is going on, psychologically and neurologically, and these in turn depend on the approach taken by the particular researchers.”

Still, one cannot write a book about nothing (or everything), so Waterfield offers his readers this concise definition: “Hypnotism or hypnosis is the deliberate inducement or facilitation by one person in another person or a number of people of a trance state … in which a person’s usual means of orienting himself in reality have faded, so that the boundaries between the external world and the inner world of thoughts, feelings, memories and imagination begin to dissolve.”

It is in that borderland between reality and fantasy where the power and mystery of hypnosis lies. Although Waterfield remains relatively neutral in his summary of the various theories and recapitulation of their fascinating histories, he does conclude that hypnosis — whatever it is — is real and serves as empirical evidence of something called mind, distinct from the brain. Here he will find support from many, but skepticism from those of us who believe that mind is nothing more than a product of neuronal activity. The notion of the “ghost in the machine” (the mind in the body) is a chimera, a product of scientific ignorance on par with 19th-century philosophers speculating there was a homunculus (little man) in a sperm cell.

Waterfield contends, for example, that “inexplicable things happen in everyone’s lives” (true enough) and thus it is a fact that “we have all experienced telepathy” means that “anyone with an open mind” should “pause before dismissing the whole domain as fantasy and rubbish.” Wrong. Just because we do not yet have an adequate neurophysiological model to explain hypnosis, or other mental mysteries such as apparent telepathic events, does not mean they are inexplicable, or that they represent metaphysical entities. Here Waterfield distinguishes between paranormal powers (such as ESP, of which he is mostly skeptical but not completely) and supernormal powers (such as the power of hypnosis to attenuate or eliminate pain). “We all have supernormal powers locked up inside our minds; we are all capable of miracles.”

This is sloppy thinking in an otherwise careful analysis. Calling unexplained mysteries supernormal or miraculous explains nothing. In point of fact, there is no paranormal or supernormal, or even supernatural; there is only the normal and the natural and mysteries we have yet to explain. Hypnosis is one of those mysteries that, while real, remains elusive for predatory scientists bent on capturing all mentality in a scientistic net. And we are closing in. Brain scans of hypnotized and unhypnotized subjects, for example, show distinctly different patterns when performing the same task. What this means is not precisely clear, and thus far no specific brain module has been found that regulates the hypnotic state. Nevertheless, at the end of the day neuroscience is where an adequate theory of hypnosis will be found.

It is with hypnosis in particular that I depart ways from many of my skeptical colleagues who argue that it is nothing more than fantasy role-playing, or worse, pure fakery. From my personal experiences with altered states of consciousness, whatever they are, their effects are dramatic and real. The aliens really did speak to me in my sleep-deprived state of mind, an experience as real as the voices of suggestion while in a hypnotic altered state. There are natural explanations for these apparently supernatural phenomena, of course, but that does not in any way attenuate the reality of the experience, even if that reality exists only in the mind.

(Brunner-Routledge, 2003, ISBN 041594791X)
This review was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

A review of David G. Myers’ Intuition: It’s Powers and Perils.

Imagine yourself a contestant on the classic television game show Let’s Make a Deal. You must choose one of three doors, behind one of which is a brand new automobile (while the other two harbor goats). You choose door number one. Host Monty Hall, who knows what is behind all the doors, shows you what’s behind door number two, a goat, then inquires: would you like keep the door you chose or switch? It’s 50/50 so it doesn’t matter, right?

Wrong. You had a one in three chance to start, but now that Monty has shown you one of the losing doors, you have a 2/3rds chance of winning by switching doors. Think of it this way: There are 10 doors; you choose door number one and Monty shows you door numbers 2 through 9, all losers. Now you would switch because your chances increase from 1/10 to 9/10. This is a counterintuitive problem that drives people batty, including mathematicians, and is just one of numerous examples presented by Hope College psychologist David G. Myers in his latest book on the “powers and perils” of intuition.

The perils are legion. Gamblers’ intuitions, for example, are notoriously flawed (to the profitable delight of casino operators). You’ve hit five reds in a row on the roulette wheel. Should you stay with red because you are on a “hot streak” or should you switch because black is “due”? It doesn’t matter because the roulette wheel has no memory, but try telling that to the happy gambler whose pile of chips grows before his eyes.

What about hot streaks in sports? Intuitively don’t we just know that when Kobe’s hot he can’t miss? Intuitively yes, but Myers presents the findings of a fascinating 1985 study of “hot hands” in basketball by Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky, who analyzed every basket shot by the Philadelphia 76ers for an entire season. They discovered that the probability of a player hitting a second shot did not increase following an initial successful basket (beyond what one would expect by chance and the average shooting percentage of the player). What they found is so counter-intuitive that it is jarring to the sensibilities: the number of streaks, or successful baskets in sequence, did not exceed the predictions of a statistical coin-flip model. That is, if you conduct a coin flipping experiment and record heads or tails, you will shortly encounter streaks. On average and in the long run, you will flip five heads or tails in a row once in every 32 sequences of five tosses. (Since we are dealing with professional basketball players instead of coins, adjustments have to be made. If a player’s shooting percentage is 60 percent, for example, we would expect, by chance, that he will sink six baskets in a row once for every 20 sequences of six shots attempted.) Players may feel “hot” when they have games that fall into the high range of chance expectations, but science shows that this intuition is an illusion.

Myers systematically catalogues the countless ways our intuitions about the world lead us astray: we rewrite our past to fit present beliefs and moods, we badly misinterpret the source and meaning of our emotions, we are subject to the hindsight bias where we falsely surmise that we knew it all along, we succumb to the self-serving bias where we think we are far more important than we really are, we see illusory correlations that do not exist (superstitions), and we fall for the confirmation bias, where we look for and find evidence for what we already believe.

Since I’m a scientist and skeptic Myers’ demonstration that intuition cannot be trusted triggered my own confirmation bias — everyone knows that intuition is just mushy new age nonsense. But as Myers demonstrates through countless well-documented experiments, our intuitions about intuition may be wrong. There is something else going on in the brain. That something else, for lack of a better word (and I do wish there were a better word), is intuition, or what Myers defines as “our capacity for direct knowledge, for immediate insight without observation or reason.”

Consider the research by Harvard’s Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, who discovered that the evaluation of teachers by students who saw a mere 30-second video of the teacher were remarkably similar to those of students who had taken the course. Even three two-second video clips of the teacher yielded a striking .72 correlation with the course student evaluations!

Occasionally the staccato pacing of Myers’ scientific analysis is jarringly punctuated with such sentimental expressions as “What the conscious mind cannot understand, the heart knows,” and a few too many pithy and over-familiar witticisms of writers and poets. But these are easily overlooked by the hundreds of studies presented to make his case that intuition is a fruitful field of scientific analysis. For example, I was stunned by, and still do not quite know what to make of the experiments by researchers on how unattended stimuli can subtly affect us. Scientists flashed emotionally positive scenes (kitten, romantic couple) or negative scenes (werewolf, dead body) for 47 milliseconds before subjects viewed slides of people. Although subjects reported seeing only a flash of light for the initial emotionally-linked scenes, they gave more positive ratings to people whose photos had been associated with the positive scenes. Something registered somewhere in the brain beneath awareness.

This effect is most striking in brain-damaged patients. Myers describes a woman who is unable to recognize her own hand, and when asked to use her thumb and forefinger to estimate the size of an object was unable to do it. Yet when she reached for the object her thumb and forefinger were correctly placed. Another study revealed that stroke patients who have lost a portion of their visual cortex may be consciously blind in part of their field of vision. When shown a series of sticks they report seeing nothing, yet unerringly identify whether the unseen sticks are vertical or horizontal. That’s weird.

Even for us non brain-damaged folks, subtle perception and learning is ongoing, especially in the social sphere where, Myers speculates, evolution would have designed our brains to be finely tuned to important relationships. The best predictor of how well a psychotherapist will work out for you, for example, is your initial reaction in the first five minutes of the first session (not unlike the first impression on a first date). And research supports another intuition we have that women are more intuitively sensitive to subtle cues: women are better lie detectors than men, are superior in discerning which of two people in a photo was the other’s supervisor, and were more able to tell whether a male-female couple in a photograph is a genuine romantic relationship or a posed phony one.

What is going on here is not fully understood, and I worry that such research will be used to bolster belief in psychic power. Before we say something is out of this world we must first establish that it is not in this world. That has yet to be done with intuition. Intuition is not subliminal perception; it is subtle perception and learning — knowing without knowing that you know. A full scientific explanation is still forthcoming because this is a relatively new field of inquiry, but Myers’s book brilliantly establishes intuition as a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry.

(Yale University Press, 2004, ISBN 0300095317)
This review was originally published in Los Angeles Times.

A review of Daniel C. Dennett’s Freedom Evolves.

Next to the question of God’s existence there is arguably no greater conundrum in Western thought than the problem of free will and determinism, and the two are inextricably interdigitated. God’s omniscience and omnipotence means that the future is foreordained and predetermined, which precludes free will. If we are volitional beings then God is limited in knowledge, power, or both.

The French philosopher René Descartes suggested this way out: “We will be free from these embarrassments if we recollect that our mind is limited while the power of God, by which he not only knew from all eternity what is or can be, but also willed and preordained it, is infinite. It thus happens that we possess sufficient intelligence to know clearly and distinctly that this power is in God, but not enough to comprehend how he leaves the free actions of men indeterminate.”

The English author C.S. Lewis simply placed God outside of time: “All the days are ‘Now’ for Him. He doesn’t remember you doing things yesterday; he simply sees you doing them, because, though you’ve lost yesterday, He has not. He doesn’t foresee you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing.”

Removing God does not produce a resolution. By the nineteenth century the Newtonian/Cartesian mechanistic world-view was codified by the French mathematician Marquis de Laplace and has since become known as Laplace’s demon: “Let us imagine an Intelligence who would know at a given instant of time all forces acting in nature and the position of all things of which the world consists; let us assume, further, that this Intelligence would be capable of subjecting all these data to mathematical analysis. Then it could derive a result that would embrace in one and the same formula the motion of the largest bodies in the universe and of the lightest atoms. Nothing would be uncertain for this Intelligence. The past and the future would be present to its eyes.” By the twentieth century science undertook to become that demon, casting a wide “causal net” linking causes to effects throughout the past and into the future and encompassing all phenomena throughout the cosmos from atoms to galaxies. God and nature are deterministically indistinguishable.

Why, then, do we feel free? What non-theological solutions have been proposed to slay the demon of determinism? The simplest is also the most subjectively appealing: I have free will and you don’t. This useful fiction serves us well in daily life and most of us act as if it is true, but it is philosophically unsatisfying. At the other extreme is the claim that the problem is an unsoluble one — a “mysterian” mystery — where we are smart enough to conceive of the problem but not smart enough to solve it. Science writer and mysterian philosopher Martin Gardner, for example, says that asking Is there free will? is like asking What is time? “Like time, with which it is linked, free will is best left — indeed, I believe we cannot do otherwise — an impenetrable mystery. Ask not how it works because no one on earth can tell you.” For such mysteries pragmatist philosophers like William James and Charles Peirce argue that (1) in issues of extreme importance to human existence, (2) when the evidence is inconclusive one way or the other, and (3) you must make a choice, it is acceptable to take a leap of faith (for example, that there is a God or there is free will). But here we are back to free will as a useful fiction.

A popular solution of late appeals to quantum indeterminacy. Perhaps the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the various indeterminant effects associated with quantum mechanics provide a crack in the deterministic armor for free will to emerge. It doesn’t, for two reasons: (1) quantum effects cancel each other out at the macro level in which everyday phenomena (including free will) occur, and (2) even if it could be established that quantum uncertainties lead to random neuronal firings this does not spawn free will; it just adds another deterministic causal factor, only this one is random instead of nonrandom.

This second critique was brilliantly outlined by the Tuft’s University philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in his highly-regarded 1984 book on the subject entitled Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Dennett correctly notes that neither too much free will nor too much determinism works. If our actions are completely determined or completely random then we are not responsible for them. Where is the balance to be found? In evolutionary theory, argues Dennett in his new book Freedom Evolves. The author of the materialistic defense of consciousness as a product of nothing more than neuronal activity in Consciousness Explained, and of undiluted Darwinian theory in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, has now turned his methodological naturalism to extrapolating free will out of neural complexity and evolutionary theory.

Dennett strives, with some success, at being the scientist’s philosopher, an embodiment of the consilient approach promulgated by evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, through a “jumping together” of data and theory from disperate fields. Thus, although he leans heavily on the philosopher’s stock in trade of logic, linguistics, and thought experiments (that, while cleverly presented occasionally bogs down in convoluted reasoning), Dennett’s quiver includes evolutionary biology, game theory, the computer game of life, cognitive neuroscience, genetic engineering, meme theory, and more. Dennett’s thesis can be summarized as follows: (1) humans are evolved animals without a soul but with free will; (2) we are the only species with free will because we have a “self,” a sense of being self-aware, and even aware that others are self-aware, because (3) we have symbolic language that allows us to communicate the fact that we are aware and self-aware, and (4) we have extremely complex neural circuitry and many degrees of behavioral freedom (a jellyfish, like a hot-air balloon, for example, has one degree of freedom: up and down; we have many more), and (5) we have a theory of mind about other selves who are also (6) moral animals in the sense of having evolved moral sentiments, or feelings of making right or wrong choices as members of a social species, and with symbolic language we have the representational power to reason with each other about what we ought to do, therefore (7) free will emerges out of our deterministic world from the fact that we can weigh the consequences of the many courses of action available to us, that we are aware that we (and others) make these choices, and we hold ourselves and them accountable.

In Dennett’s materialistic philosophy free will is located in the brain, of course, but where? In the “self,” a metaphor for an adaptation our brains evolved for monitoring what is happening in our own and others’ brains. But where is the self located? The answer is not clear and Dennett’s brilliant summary of the neuroscience in trying to further clarify the neurophysiology of selfhood shows that wherever it is, it is not in one location. Reaction-time experiments that monitor different parts of the brain indicate that there is no “Self-contained You.” Instead, “all the work done by the imagined homunculus in the Cartesian Theater has to be broken up and distributed in space and time in the brain” (238).

Neuroscience research shows that we have a functional “layer” of decision-making power that no other species has (this is not a brain layer, but what Dennett calls “a virtual layer” found “in the micro-details of the brain’s anatomy”). For example, “a male baboon can ‘ask’ a nearby female for some grooming, but neither of them can discuss the likely outcome of compliance with this request, which might have serious consequences for both of them, especially if the male is not the alpha male of the troop. We human beings not only can do things when requested to do them; we can answer inquires about what we are doing and why. It is this kind of asking, which we can also direct to ourselves, that creates the special category of voluntary actions that sets us apart” (251).

Dan Dennett is one of the most original thinkers of our time, and this book brings a fresh perspective to an ancient problem. But is it true? Will future commentaries on free will be mere footnotes to Dennett? I doubt it. First, many general readers will not embrace Dennett’s tenets, especially humans as soulless evolved animals and consciousness as nothing more than neuronal activity. Second, many philosophers prefer a free will that is either a form of indeterminism or a cognitive illusion because although it is hard to deny its subjective reality it is equally hard to prove its existence. Finally, although I accept the first six of Dennett’s points (above) and agree that he has thoroughly debunked the indeterminism argument, I remain unconvinced that free will can ever be derived from determinism. I think the best we can do is pseudo-freedom. In the complex world of human beings and social systems the causes are so numerous and interconnected that it is difficult — nigh impossible — to get our minds around the causal net in its entirety. The enormity of this complexity leads us to feel and act free, even if we are actually determined. Since no cause or set of causes we select as the determiners of human action can be complete, freedom arises out of this ignorance of causes.

(The Penguin Group, 2003, ISBN 0142003840)
This review was originally published in Science.

A review of Stephen Jay Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.

We live in the Age of Science. Scientism is our worldview, our mythic story about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. As such, scientists are our preeminent storytellers, the mythmakers of our epoch. Prominent among them are such cosmologists and evolutionary theorists as Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, whose books are read by professionals and the public alike, with spectacular advances and (hopefully) matching sales that reflect the rise of a scientistic literati, where it is now chic to have read (or at least to have on your coffee table) their works.

Stephen Jay Gould has been a highly successful product and producer of this salubrious arrangement between scientists, agents, publishers, and readers. Stretching to 1,433 pages and weighing in at 5.5 pounds, Gould’s magisterial The Structure of Evolutionary Theory is destined to go down in the annals of this genre alongside the works of Galileo, Darwin, Huxley, Freud, Mayr, and others who write for the ages, as changing forever both colleagues and cultures. His critics — and there are plenty — may weep and gnash their teeth at such an assessment, but they ignore Gould at their — and our — peril. This man has something important to say about the preeminent origin myth of our age — evolutionary theory — and he has said it in this magnificent work.

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory is an elegant blend of science and history that revises both Darwin’s original 19th-century theory and the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the mid-20th century. Over the past four decades — during which he penned over 500 scientific papers, 300 essays, and 21 other books — Gould has systematically built upon Darwin’s cathedral, an apt metaphor as his tome begins with an architectural analysis of the Duomo (Cathedral) of Milan, showing how the original 14th century foundational structure was appended over the centuries with spires and pinnacles, such that we can legitimately say a core structure remains intact while the finished building represents a far richer compendium of historical additions. Gould’s mission is not to raze the Darwinian Gothic structure, or to tear down the neo-Darwinian Baroque facades, but to revise, refine, reinforce, and reconstruct those portions of Darwin’s Duomo that have begun to crumble under the weathering effects of a century and a half of scientific research.

The foundation of Darwin’s Duomo rests upon three theoretical pillars (or, in the visual metaphor that graces the cover of this handsomely-produced volume, a three-pronged fossil coral, whose foundational trunk gives rise to three branches). All three pillars are needed to prevent the theory from toppling over, which it might do, says Gould, unless necessary retrofittings and revisions are implemented. There are three theoretical pillars.

Agency, or the level at which evolutionary change occurs. For Darwin, it is individual organisms alone that are being selected for or against. Gould proposes a multi-tiered theory of evolution where change (and selection) occurs at a number of different levels — genes, cell-lineages, organisms, demes, species, and clades.

Efficacy, or the mechanism of evolutionary change. For Darwin it was natural selection (and its handmaiden sexual selection) alone that drives organisms to evolve. Gould does not deny the power of natural selection, but wishes to emphasize that in the three billion-year history of the earth’s rich panoply of life, there is so much more to the story. On top of the substratum of microevolution Gould adds macroevolution — long-term changes caused by mass extinctions and other large-scale forces of change. To the bottom floor of adaptationism Gould attaches exaptationism — structures subsumed for later uses and whose original adaptive purposes are now lost to history.

Scope, or the range of effects wrought by natural selection. For Darwin, gradual and systematic change extrapolated over geological expanses of time is all that is needed to account for life’s diversity. For Gould, slow and steady sometimes wins the race, but more often than not life is punctuated with catastrophic contingencies that fall in the realm of unique historical narratives rather than predictable natural laws. History, not physics, should be evolutionary theory’s model of science.

Revisions to these three branches (while the main Darwinian trunk retains its theoretical power), says Gould, produces a “distinct theoretical architecture, offering renewed pride in Darwin’s vision and in the power of persistent critiques — a reconstitution and an improvement.” Some of those critiques, however, have been aimed not at Darwin’s Duomo, but at Gould’s Pinnacles. To his credit, Gould unhesitatingly allows his critics to speak, but the price they pay is facing the buzz saw of his rhetorical brilliance (and literary erudition), as in this maximally insulting cut of one critic when he quotes Schiller: “Mit Dummheit kämpfen die Götter selbst vergebens” (“even the gods cannot fight with stupidity”).

One persistent misunderstanding about Gould’s remodeling of Darwin’ Duomo stems from what I call (in my book The Borderlands of Science) the “paradigm paradox.” How can the paradigms of Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, and Gouldian Darwinism co-exist peacefully? Doesn’t one paradigm displace another in a way that makes them incompatable? No. Paradigms can build upon one another and cohabit the same scientific niche. Just as the Newtonian paradigm has been reconstituted to include the paradigms of relativity and quantum mechanics, the overarching Darwinian paradigm has been improved by, for example, the subsidiary punctuated equilibrium paradigm, that constitutes an improved reading of the herky-jerky fossil record whose numerous gaps so embarrassed Darwin. (The gaps, say Gould and his co-theorist Niles Eldredge, represent data of a speciational process that happens so rapidly that few “transitional” fossils are left in the historical record.) Both Darwinian gradualism and Gouldian punctuationism constitute paradigm shifts, with each filling a theoretical ecosystem that allows disperate forms of data to be properly interpreted.

Think of species not as billiard balls being knocked about the table of nature willy nilly, but as polyhedrons, or multi-faceted structures (think of an eight-sided die) that sit on a side until nudged by a potent force, and whose internal properties, Gould writes, “‘push back’ against external selection, thereby rendering evolution as a dialectic of inside and outside.” Without discounting the outside, Gould wants us to look again inward (as so many evolutionary theorists did in Darwin’s own day), where the restricting channels of both nature and history direct the selective forces in particular directions. Copious examples and eye-blurring data from numerous fields flesh out the scientific portions of this book, which critics and students alike will have to address if they want to take Gould seriously, either for or against.

Most of the theoretical themata that Gould presents (theory–data, time’s arrow — time’s cycle, adaptationism–nonadaptationism, punctuationism–gradualism, contingency–necessity) have been played out on the historical stage before, and therefore much of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory resurrects the thoughts and ideas of the great evolutionary theorists of the past two centuries. Gould may have an ego to match the Brobdingnagian proportions of this book, but he generously offers credit to the founding fathers of the field and lovingly brings their ideas back to life. Here we see Gould the humanistic historian, living up to the assessment made by the eminent science historian Ronald Numbers when he remarked to me: “I can’t say much about Gould’s strengths as a scientist, but for a long time I’ve regarded him as the second most influential historian of science (next to Thomas Kuhn).”

So, even if you disagree with Gould’s science, his historiography is stellar, although a modicum of effort will be required of readers as Gould does have a tendency to lard his narrative with 19th-century style paragraph-length sentences (analogous, he likes to say, to the “riffing” of Jazz musicians). But for those who enjoy the music — professionals and public alike — The Structure of Evolutionary Theory will leave a lasting imprint (literally and figuratively) on all who dare to take the challenge.

(Harvard University Press, 2002, ISBN 0674006135)
This review was originally published in Washington Post Book World.

A review of Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili, and Vince Rause’s Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief.

About ten years ago I began research on the question of why people believe in God, I asked a colleague in a religious studies program to recommend the latest path-breaking scientific work in this area. “William James’s 1890 Varieties of Religious Experience” he responded sardonically, explaining that in his opinion the field was largely moribund.

That’s an exaggeration, of course, but his point was that with the exception of a handful of psychologists teaching at theological seminaries, mainstream social and cognitive scientists had largely ignored the question. This has changed dramatically in the past decade, as the renewed debate on the relationship of science and religion has exploded onto the cultural landscape and scientists from a variety of fields have jumped into the fray. Enter Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, both M.D.s, with Newberg holding joint appointments in radiology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and D’Aquili, now deceased, a professor of psychiatry at Penn. (Rause is a free lance writer.)

God won’t go away, the authors argue in this breezy and speculative book written for general readers (but with enough new material, especially on the neurophysiology of mystical experiences, to hold the interest of professional scientists) because the religious impulse is rooted in the biology of the brain. When Buddhist monks meditate and Franciscan nuns pray, for example, their single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scans indicate strikingly low activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, a bundle of neurons the authors have dubbed the OAA, or Orientation Association Area, whose job it is to orient the body in physical space (people with damage to this area have a hard time negotiating their way around a house). When the OAA is booted up and running smoothly there is a sharp distinction between self and non-self. When OAA is in sleep mode — as in deep meditation and prayer — that division breaks down, leading to a blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy. Is this what happens to monks who feel a oneness with the universe, or with nuns who feel the presence of God?

Yes, say the authors, who believe they have “uncovered solid evidence that the mystical experiences of our subjects — the altered states of mind they described as the absorption of the self into something larger — were not the result of emotional mistakes or simple wishful thinking, but were associated instead with a series of observable neurological events … ” It is an odd distinction to make, which the authors do throughout the book. “A skeptic might suggest that a biological origin to all spiritual longings and experiences, including the universal human yearning to connect with something divine, could be explained as a delusion caused by the chemical misfirings of a bundle of nerve cells.”

Indeed, I am one such skeptic, but I fail to see the difference (outside a minor linguistic distinction) between a delusion and a decrease in OAA activity. Delusion is simply a description of what happens when the OAA shuts down and the brain loses the ability to distinguish self from non-self. It’s still all in the brain. Unless, of course, you believe that these neurologically triggered mystical experiences actually serve as a conduit to a real spiritual world where God (or what the authors call “Absolute Unitary Being”) resides. That is, in fact, what they believe: “ … our research has left us no choice but to conclude that the mystics may be on to something, that the mind’s machinery of transcendence may in fact be a window through which we can glimpse the ultimate realness of something that is truly divine.” Thankfully they are honest enough to admit that this conclusion “is a terrifically unscientific idea” and that to accept it “we must second-guess all our assumptions about material reality.” In the final chapters they do just that.

The strength of Why God Won’t Go Away lies in the original research conducted by the authors, and the brain correlates of mystical states they have identified, that together go a long way toward explicating the experiences of religious mystics. For the billions of believers who have never had a mystical experience, however, explanations for their faith are more likely grounded in the psychology and sociology of belief where, for example, the number one predictor of anyone’s religious faith is that of their parents, modified by siblings and peer groups, mentors, education, age, cultural experiences, and other variables. This is not a critique, since the authors focused their attention on the neurological correlates of belief only, but the book does unravel when they seek an evolutionary origin for religion.

As compelling as such evolutionary explanations are — and surely this must be where the ultimate reason for belief lies — much of the authors’ case depends on explanation in the just-so storytelling mode (critics of sociobiology will find much fodder for their cannons here) where, for example, we are told that religion alleviated the “existential gloom” facing our paleolithic ancestors who were “taken off their game by the soul-sapping notion that no matter how hard they struggled, how skillfully they hunted, how fiercely they battled, or how creatively they thought, death was always waiting, and that their lives added up to nothing in the end. The promises of religion protected early humans from such self-defeating fatalism, and allowed them to struggle tirelessly but optimistically for survival.” That’s interesting. Prove it.

The authors also fall into the trap of thinking of human evolution as almost entirely centered around men on the hunt, a paradigm abandoned decades ago in favor of more sophisticated models of social evolution that stress the importance of relationships, hierarchy, dominance, cooperation, reciprocal altruism, and various forms of social exchange. It is out of this paradigm, in conjunction with psycho-social models, that a fuller explanation for why God won’t go away is to be found.

(The Ballantine Publishing Group, 2002, ISBN 034544034X)
This review was originally published in Science.