You can also watch the debate on ABCNews.

FAST-FORWARD TO THE YEAR 2100. Computers, writes physicist and futurist Michio Kaku in Physics of the Future (Doubleday, 2011), will have humanlike intelligence, the Internet will be accessible via contact lenses, nanobots will eliminate cancers, space tourism will be cheap and popular, and we’ll be colonizing Mars. We will be a planetary civilization capable of consuming the 1017 watts of solar energy falling on Earth to meet our energy needs, with the Internet as a worldwide telephone system; English and Chinese as the contenders for a planetary language; a unified culture of common foods, fashions and films; and a truly global economy with many more international trading blocs such as we see today in the European Union and NAFTA.

Kaku’s vision of how the exchange of science, technology and ideas among all peoples will create a global civilization with greatly weakened nation-states and almost no war is epic in its scope and heroic in its inspiration. Many have felt similar hope for a united, peaceful future through globalization. Indeed, I evoked a similar image in my book The Mind of the Market (Holt, 2009), and I was inspired in part by Thomas Friedman’s wildly popular The World Is Flat (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), in which he argues for “a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even language.”

The problem for Kaku, Friedman, me and other globalization proponents (and even opponents) is that such a future may be unattainable because of our evolved tribal natures. In fact, this is all a bunch of “globaloney,” says Pankaj Ghemawat, professor of strategic management and Anselmo Rubiralta Chair of Global Strategy at IESE Business School at the University of Navarra in Barcelona, in his new book World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011). According to Ghemawat, only 10 to 25 percent of economic activity is international (and most of that is regional rather than global). Consider the following percentages (of the total in each category): international mail: 1; international telephone calling minutes: less than 2; international Internet tra!c: 17 to 18; foreign-owned patents: 15; exports as a percentage of GDP: 26; stock-market equity owned by foreign investors: 20; first-generation immigrants: 3. As Ghemawat starkly notes, 90 percent of the world’s people will never leave their birth country. Some flattened globe.

The problem, Ghemawat says, is that globalization theories fail to account for the very real distance factors (geographic and cultural). He crunches these factors into a distance coefficient akin to Newton’s law of gravitation. For example, he computes, “a 1 percent increase in the geographic distance between two locations leads to about a 1 percent decrease in trade between them,” a distance sensitivity of –1. Or, he calculates, “U.S. trade with Chile is only 6 percent of what it would be if Chile were as close to the United States as Canada.” Likewise, “two countries with a common language trade 42 percent more on average than a similar pair of countries that lack that link. Countries sharing membership in a trade bloc (e.g., NAFTA) trade 47 percent more than otherwise similar countries that lack such shared membership. A common currency (like the euro) increases trade by 114 percent.”

That analysis actually sounds encouraging to me if we use Kaku’s projected time frame of 2100. But Ghemawat reminds us of our deeply ingrained tendencies to want to interact with our kin and kind and to retain our local customs and culture, which may forever balkanize any globalized scheme. Even as the E.U. expands, for instance, an average of “Eurobarometer” surveys of residents of 16 E.U. countries between 1970 and 1995 made in 2004 by researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that 48 percent trust their fellow nationals “a lot,” 22 percent trust citizens of other E.U.-16 countries a lot and only 12 percent trust people in certain other countries a lot. Human nature’s constitution dictates the constitution of human society. In this sense, the world we make very much depends on the world we inherit.

When I was in a psychology graduate program in the late 1970s, the nature v. nurture debate was in full-throated either-or mode, with crudely conceived experiments and data sets marshaled to defend one side or the other, as if asking whether π or r² is more important in calculating the area of a circle. (Thankfully this debate today has morphed into much more sophisticated research by behavioral geneticists and others to understand how nature and nurture interact, well summarized in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate and Matt Ridley’s Nature via Nurture.) In addition to the studies examining twins separated at birth and raised in separate environments, I recall that raising chimpanzees in a human environment and trying to teach them sign language garnered considerable media attention as pioneering research into understanding the nature of human (and primate) nature, along with language and cognition. These were heady times of bold experimentation, the most prominent being Project Nim, initiated and monitored by Columbia University psychologist Herbert Terrace. Terrace in particular wanted to test MIT linguist Noam Chomsky’s then controversial theory that there is an inherited universal grammar that is the basis to language and unique to humans, by teaching our closest primate cousin American Sign Language (ASL). Terrace, however, did a turnabout, concluding that the signs Nim Chimpsky (a cheeky nod to Noam Chomsky) learned from his human companions and trainers amounted to little more than animal begging, more sophisticated perhaps than Skinner’s rats and pigeons pressing bars and pecking keys, but in principle not so different from what dogs and cats do to beg for food, be let outside, etc.—a “Clever Hans” effect in primates. His 1979 book, Nim, outlines the project and his assessment of its results. There have been many evaluations and critiques since that time, most recently by Elizabeth Hess in her 2008 book, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human (Bantam Books), which is the basis of the new documentary film, Project Nim, by James Marsh (whose previous film, Man on Wire, is portrays the tightrope walker Philippe Petit).

Project Nim is a dramatic and disturbing critique of Terrace’s research and the treatment of Nim that also serves as something of an indictment of the entire enterprise of animal behavioral research. Having worked in an animal lab for two years training rats and pigeons in Skinner boxes, I was deeply moved by the perspective several decades have brought to what we were doing to animals back then in the name of science. There is, however, next to no science presented in this film, and perhaps that is the way it should be because how that data was collected was, by today’s standard, so sloppy as to be virtually worthless, or at the very least morally questionable.

It is with some irony that Nim spent the remainder of his post-experimental life at the Black Beauty Ranch in Texas, because Project Nim is, on one level, presented from his perspective, through the eyes (often tearing up) and voices (often cracking) of his trainers and handlers. Nim was ripped from the arms of his mother at only a few weeks old. As he was the seventh of her children to be so seized she had to be tranquilized and grabbed quickly so that she did not accidentally smother her baby that she clutched to her chest in motherly love and protection, as she collapsed on the floor. Stop right there. Five minutes into the film and I’m already wondering what science tells us about the effects on a mother of having her seven children stolen from her arms.

Marsh’s film shuttles between talking-head interviews with all the major players in the project (including Terrace himself) and original footage shot throughout the experiment. Nim began his childhood in an upper west side brownstone New York apartment surrounded by human siblings in the mildly dysfunctional LaFarge family spearheaded by Stephanie, who breast-fed Nim and, as he got older, allowed him to explore her nakedness even as he put himself between his adopted mother and her poet husband in an Oedipal scene right out of Freud. Just as Nim grew into his new family, surrounded by fun-loving human siblings and days filled with games and hugs, Terrace realized that scientists were not going to take him seriously because there was next to no science going on in this free-love home. (According to one of the trainers, there were no lab manuals, no diaries, no data sheets, no recordings of progress, and no one in the family even knew how to sign ASL!) So for a second time in his young life Nim was wrenched from his mother and placed into a more controlled environment in the form of a sprawling home owned by Columbia University. There a string of trainers carefully monitored Nim’s progress in learning ASL, making daily trips to a lab at the university where Terrace could control all intervening variables in a manner not dissimilar to a Skinner box. There some halting progress was made, but Nim was clearly not enamored at being shuttled back and forth between the Disneylandesque environment of home and the sterile environment of the lab, and it is unclear whether his lack of significant progress was the result of cognitive shortcomings or simian protest.

In due time Nim grew into his teenage years, and as most testosterone-fueled male primates are wont to do, he became more assertive, then aggressive, then potentially dangerous in his evolved propensity to test his fellow primates for hierarchical status in the social pecking order. The problem is that adult chimpanzees are 5-10 times stronger than humans. In other words, Nim became a threat. As one of the trainers said while pointing to a scar on her arm that required 37 stitches: “You can’t give human nurturing to an animal that could kill you.” After several of these biting incidents that sent trainers and handlers to the hospital, including one woman who had part of her cheek ripped open, Terrace pulled the plug on the experiment and therewith shipped Nim back to the research lab in Oklahoma from whence he came. Tranquilized into unconsciousness, Nim went to sleep surrounded by loving human caretakers on a sprawling estate in New York and awoke in a grey-bar cold steel cage in Oklahoma.

Having never seen another member of his species Nim was understandably anxious and scared at the sight of grunting, hooting male chimps eager to let the youngster know his place in the pecking order. I imagined that it must have been something like being tossed into a maximum-security prison with muscle-bound, tattoo-hardened murderers and rapists looking at you like fresh meat to be pounded on. As a result, Nim slipped into a deep depression, losing weight and refusing to eat. A year later Terrace visited Nim, who greeted him eagerly and expressed himself in a manner that Terrace himself described as signaling to get him out of this hell hole. Instead, Terrace took off the next day for home and Nim slid back into a depression. Some time later he was sold to a pharmaceutical animal-testing laboratory managed by New York University where Hepatitis B vaccinations were tested on our nearest primate relatives. Footage of a tranquilized chimp being pulled out of and stuffed back into a steel-barred cage barely big enough to turn around was sickening to watch. The emotional impact of the visual imagery left me to imagine what Nim would have signed to Professor Terrace had his vocabulary developed into fully human with the necessary colorful language for emotional expression appropriate for the situation: “Screw you Herb Terrace, you traitorous back-stabbing, low-life scumbag. You took me from my mother and my species. You robbed me of my simian childhood. You gave me a new mother then took her away from me just as I grew attached. You used me and abused me in the name of bogus science to further your own career, and when I protested you sold me off like so much raw meat. How about we put you into this hell-hole environment, lock you up behind bars, feed you crappy food, and make you sleep in your own piss and shit and see how you like it?”

In reality, no chimp has such verbal language, but violent incidents between chimps and humans and research on chimpanzees in the wild enables us to imagine what Nim would have done to Terrace given the opportunity and awareness of his ultimate responsibility for Nim’s fate: Nim would likely have torn off his face, ripped open his neck, eaten his genitals, and left him for dead in seconds. At least that is what this film evokes in emotional desire for revenge on Nim’s behalf. To be fair, the trainers and handlers come across as caring, loving people who did the best they could under the circumstances, but they had little say in the long-term course of Nim’s existence. Terrace, by contrast, who ran the show and called the shots, comes across as an almost psychopathic manipulator, an alpha male egotist who, in his own words on camera, spoke of Nim’s suffering in cold clinical language, saw absolutely nothing scientifically objectionable to employing mostly young nubile graduate students, most of whom he bedded during the research project then dispensed with before moving on to the next conquest. I realize that this was the free-love 1970s in which professors and students often conducted research between the sheets, but even by those standards Terrace appears to be the very embodiment of moral turpitude.

Momentarily, Terrace partially redeemed himself in my eyes when he admitted that the data he collected changed his mind on the nature-nurture debate—since Nim did not even remotely approach the complexity of language or cognition of humans, Chomsky was probably right. What a rare treat to hear a scientist say, “I was wrong.” But after thinking about it for a day I came to the conclusion that even this might have been nothing more than a way of reducing cognitive dissonance for how Nim’s life turned out. If Nim is human like, then the subhuman treatment of him becomes criminal. But if Nim is little more than a rat or pigeon, merely begging for food and favors like a lowly dog, then shipping him off to a research lab to live out his life in a cold steel cage perhaps doesn’t seem so deplorable. Sadly, there was no Shawshank redemption for Nim. But thanks to this film we can at least put flowers on his metaphorical grave.

WAS PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA BORN IN HAWAII? I find the question so absurd, not to mention possibly racist in its motivation, that when I am confronted with “birthers” who believe otherwise, I find it diffcult to even focus on their arguments about the difference between a birth certificate and a certificate of live birth. The reason is because once I formed an opinion on the subject, it became a belief, subject to a host of cognitive biases to ensure its verisimilitude. Am I being irrational? Possibly. In fact, this is how most belief systems work for most of us most of the time.

We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, emotional and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture and society at large. After forming our beliefs, we then defend, justify and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments and rational explanations. Beliefs come first; explanations for beliefs follow. In my new book The Believing Brain (Holt, 2011), I call this process, wherein our perceptions about reality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about it, belief-dependent realism. Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends on the beliefs we hold at any given time.

I patterned belief-dependent realism after model-dependent realism, presented by physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their book The Grand Design (Bantam Books, 2011). There they argue that because no one model is adequate to explain reality, “one cannot be said to be more real than the other.” When these models are coupled to theories, they form entire worldviews.

Once we form beliefs and make commitments to them, we maintain and reinforce them through a number of powerful cognitive biases that distort our percepts to fit belief concepts. Among them are:

ANCHORING BIAS: relying too heavily on one reference anchor or piece of information when making decisions.

AUTHORITY BIAS: valuing the opinions of an authority, especially in the evaluation of something we know little about.

BELIEF BIAS: evaluating the strength of an argument based on the believability of its conclusion.

CONFIRMATION BIAS: seeking and finding confirming evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignoring or reinterpreting disconfirming evidence.

On top of all these biases, there is the in-group bias, in which we place more value on the beliefs of those whom we perceive to be fellow members of our group and less on the beliefs of those from different groups. This is a result of our evolved tribal brains that lead us not only to place such value judgment on beliefs but also to demonize and dismiss them as nonsense or evil, or both.

Belief-dependent realism is driven even deeper by a meta bias called the bias blind spot, or the tendency to recognize the power of cognitive biases in other people but to be blind to their influence on our own beliefs. Even scientists are not immune, subject to experimenter-expectation bias, or the tendency for observers to notice, select and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment and to ignore, discard or disbelieve data that do not.

This dependency on belief and its host of psychological biases is why, in science, we have built-in self-correcting machinery. Strict double-blind controls are required, in which neither the subjects nor the experimenters know the conditions during data collection. Collaboration with colleagues is vital. Results are vetted at conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Research is replicated in other laboratories. Disconfirming evidence and contradictory interpretations of data are included in the analysis. If you don’t seek data and arguments against your theory, someone else will, usually with great glee and in a public forum. This is why skepticism is a sine qua non of science, the only escape we have from the belief-dependent realism trap created by our believing brains.

On Friday, June 17, a film crew came by the Skeptics Society office to interview me for a documentary that I was told was on arguments for and against God. The producer of the film, Alan Shaikhin, sent me the following email, which I reprint here in its entirety so that readers can see that there is not a hint of what was to come in what turned out to be an attempted ambush interview with me about Islam, the Quran, and the number 19:

Dear Michael!

I am the director of a film crew hired by a non-profit organization, Izgi Amal, from Kazakhstan, which has no connection with the American brat, Borat. We have been working on a documentary film on modern philosophical and scientific arguments for and against God for almost a year. We have been taking shots and interviewed theologians, philosophers and scientists in England, Netherlands, USA, Turkey, and Egypt.

We are planning to finish the film by the end of this year and participate in major film festivals, including Cannes. We will allocate some of the funds to distribute thousands of copies of the film for free, especially to libraries and colleges.

Our crew will once again visit the United States and will spend the rest of June interviewing various people, from layman to artists, from academicians to activists.

Though we are far out there, we know your work and we think that it contributes greatly to the quality of this perpetual philosophical debate. We would like to include perspective and voice in this discussion. We would appreciate if you let us know what days in JUNE would be the best dates to meet you and interview you for this engaging and fascinating documentary film.

Since we are planning to interview about 10 scholars and experts of diverse positions such as atheism, agnosticism, deism, monotheism, and polytheism, it is important to learn all available days in this month of June.

Please feel free to contact us via email or our cell phone numbers, below. If you respond via email and please let us know the best phone number and times to reach you.

Peace,
Alan Shaikhi

In hindsight perhaps I should have picked up on his admission that “we are far out there,” which in fact they turned out to be. Present were Mr. Shaikhin, another gentleman named Edip Yuksel, a couple of film crew hands, and a woman videographer who was setting up all the lighting and equipment. Before we began Shaikhin explained that they were actually filming two projects, and that his colleague (Mr. Yuksel) would be interviewing me after he, Shaikhin, was finished. Yuksel, in fact, was very fidgety and throughout the interview with Shaikhin I could see him out of the corner of my eye feverishly taking notes and fiddling around with books whose titles I could not see.

Shaikhin’s interview, in fact, included mostly standard faire questions for such documentaries: Do I think there’s a conflict between science and religion?, What do I think about this and that argument for God’s existence?, Why do I think people believe in God?, etc. He was unfailingly polite and professional. Toward the end he did make some vague reference to Islam and our cover story of Skeptic on myths about the Islamic religion (the myth of the Middle East Madman, the myth of the 72 virgins, etc.), but I begged off answering anything about Islam because I haven’t studied it much nor have I read the Quran.

My first clue that the interview was about to take a sharp right turn came when Shaikhin acted shocked that I would edit an issue of Skeptic on Islam without myself having read the Quran. I explained that I write very few articles in Skeptic and that my job as editor is to find writers who are experts on a subject, which was, in fact, the case with this issue when our Senior Editor Frank Miele interviewed the University of California at Santa Barbara Islamic scholar R. Stephen Humphreys. Nonetheless, Shaikhin continued to act surprised, repeating “you mean to tell me that you edited a special issue of Skeptic on Islam and haven’t read the Quran?” I again explained that editors of magazines are not always (or ever) the world’s leading expert on the topics they publish, which is the very reason for contracting with experts to write the articles for magazines.

With this first part of the interview completed, Edip Yuksel leaped up out of his chair like a WWF wrestler charging into the ring for his big match. He grabbed a chair and pulled it over next to mine, asked for a bottle of water for the match, and instructed the videographer to widen the shot to include him in the interview. Only it wasn’t an interview. It was a monologue, with Yuksel launching into a mini-history of how he wrote Carl Sagan back in 1992 about the number 19 (he didn’t say if Sagan ever wrote back), how Carl had written about the deep significance of the number π (pi) in his science fiction novel Contact, how he is a philosopher and a college professor who teaches his students how to think critically, and that he is a great admirer of my work. However (you knew this was coming, right?), there is one thing we should not be skeptical about, and that is the remarkable properties of the number 19 and the Quran.

At this point I had a vague flashback memory of the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. and Louis Farrakhan’s musings about the magical properties of the number 19. The transcript from that speech confirmed my memory. Here are a few of the numerological observations by Farrakhan that day in October, 1995:

There, in the middle of this mall is the Washington Monument, 555 feet high. But if we put a one in front of that 555 feet, we get 1555, the year that our first fathers landed on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia as slaves.

In the background is the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorial, each one of these monuments is 19 feet high.

Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president. Thomas Jefferson, the third president, and 16 and three make 19 again. What is so deep about this number 19? Why are we standing on the Capitol steps today? That number 19—when you have a nine you have a womb that is pregnant. And when you have a one standing by the nine, it means that there’s something secret that has to be unfolded.

I want to take one last look at the word atonement.

The first four letters of the word form the foundation; “a-t-o-n” … “a-ton”, “a-ton”. Since this obelisk in front of us is representative of Egypt. In the 18th dynasty, a Pharaoh named Akhenaton, was the first man of this history period to destroy the pantheon of many gods and bring the people to the worship of one god. And that one god was symboled by a sun disk with 19 rays coming out of that sun with hands holding the Egyptian Ankh – the cross of life. A-ton. The name for the one god in ancient Egypt. A-ton, the one god. 19 rays.

This is a splendid example of what I call patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. And Edip Yuksel launched into a nonstop example of patternicity when he pulled out his book entitled Nineteen: God’s Signature in Nature and Scripture (2011, Brainbow Press; see also www.19.org) and began to quote from it. To wit…

• The number of Arabic letters in the opening statement of the Quran, BiSMi ALLaĤi AL-RaĤMaNi AL-RaĤYM (1:1) 19
• Every word in Bismillah… is found in the Quran in multiples of 19
• The frequency of the first word, Name (Ism) 19
• The frequency of the second word, God (Allah) 19 x 142
• The frequency of the third word, Gracious (Raĥman) 19 x 3
• The fourth word, Compassionate (Raĥym) 19 x 6
• Out of more than hundred attributes of God, only four has numerical values of multiple of 19
• The number of chapters in the Quran 19 x 6
• Despite its conspicuous absence from Chapter 9, Bismillah occurs twice in Chapter 27, making its frequency in the Quran 19 x 6
• Number of chapters from the missing Ch. 9 to the extra in Ch. 27. 19 x 1
• The total number of all verses in the Quran, including the 112 unnumbered Bismillah 19 x 334
• Frequency of the letter Q in two chapters it initializes 19 x 6
• The number of all different numbers mentioned in the Quran 19 x 2
• The number of all numbers repeated in the Quran 19 x 16
• The sum of all whole numbers mentioned in the Quran 19 x 8534

This goes on and on for 620 pages which, when divided by the number of chapters in the book (31) equals 20, which is one more than 19; since 1 is the cosmic number for unity, the first nonzero natural number, and according to the rock group Three Dog Night the loneliest number, we subtract 1 from 20 to once again see the power of 19. In fact, 19 is a prime number, it is the atomic number for potassium (flip that “p” to the left and you get a 9), in the Baha’i faith there were 19 disciples of Baha’u’llah and their calendar year consists of 19 months of 19 days each (361 days), and it’s the last year you can be a teenager and the last hole in golf that is actually the clubhouse bar. In point of fact we can find meaningful patterns with almost any number:

• 99: names of Allah; atomic number for Einsteinium; Agent 99 on TV series Get Smart
• 40: 40 days and 40 nights of rain; Hebrews lived 40 years in the desert, Muhammad’s age when he received the first revelation from the Archangel Gabriel and the number of days he spent in the desert and days he spent fasting in a cave
• 23: The 23 enigma: the belief that most incidents and events are directly connected to the number 23
• 11: sunspot cycle in years, the number of Jesus’s disciples after Judas defected
• 7: 7 deadly sins and 7 heavenly virtues; Shakespeare’s 7 ages of man, Harry Potter’s most magical number
• 3: number of dimensions; number of sides of a triangle, the 3 of clubs—the forced pick in one of Penn & Teller’s favorite card tricks
• 1: unity; the first non-zero natural number, it’s own factorial and it’s own square; the atomic number of hydrogen; the most abundant element in the universe; Three Dog Night’s song about the loneliest number
• π (pi): a mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, or 3.14159…. Make of this what you will, but Carl Sagan did elevate π to significance at the end of Contact:

The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle—another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.

At this point in the filming process I interrupted Yuksel and told Shaikhin that the interview was over, that he could use the footage from the first part of the interview but not this monologue mini-lecture that was an undisguised attempt to convince me of the miraculous properties of the number 19. I didn’t sign any waiver or permission to use any of the footage shot that day, but just in case I was relieved when the videographer came to me in private to apologize and explain that she had nothing to do with the rest of the crew, that she was just hired to do the filming, and that after I had put an end to the interview she stopped filming.

At some point I asked Edip why he felt so compelled to convince me of the meaningfulness of the number 19 in the Quran, when I told him that I haven’t read the Quran and hold that all such numerological searches are nothing more than patternicity. The impression I got was that if he could convince a professional skeptic then there must be something to the claim. I asked him what other Islamic scholars who have read the Quran think of his claims for the number 19, and he told me that they consider him a heretic. He said it as a point of pride, as if to say “the fact that the experts denounce me means that I must be on to something.”

P.S. Edip Yuksel did strike me as a likable enough fellow who seemed genuinely passionate about his beliefs, but there was something a bit off about him that I couldn’t quite place until I was escorting him out of the office and he said, “I see you are a very athletic fellow. Can I show you something that I learned in a Turkish prison?” With scenes from Midnight Express flashing through my mind, I muttered “Uhhhhhh… No.”

Patternicity Challenge to Readers

As a test—of sorts—I would like to hereby issue a challenge to all readers to employ their own patternicity skills at finding meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise with such numbers and numerical relationships, both serious and lighthearted, related to the number 19 or any other number that strikes your fancy. Post them here and we shall publish them in a later feature-length article I shall write on this topic.

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According to a 2009 Harris Poll of 2,303 adult Americans, when people are asked to “Please indicate for each one if you believe in it, or not,” the following results were revealing:¹

• 82% believe in God
• 76% believe in miracles
• 75% believe in Heaven
• 73% believe in Jesus is God
  or the Son of God
• 72% believe in angels
• 71% believe in survival
  of the soul after death
• 70% believe in the
  resurrection of Jesus Christ
• 61% believe in hell
• 61% believe in
  the virgin birth (of Jesus)
• 60% believe in the devil
• 45% believe in Darwin’s
  Theory of Evolution
• 42% believe in ghosts
• 40% believe in creationism
• 32% believe in UFOs
• 26% believe in astrology
• 23% believe in witches
• 20% believe in reincarnation

Wow. More people believe in angels and the devil than believe in the theory of evolution. That’s disturbing. And yet, such results should not surprise us as they match similar survey findings for belief in the paranormal conducted over the past several decades.² And it is not just Americans. The percentages of Canadians and Britons who hold such beliefs are nearly identical to those of Americans.³ For example, a 2006 Readers Digest survey of 1,006 adult Britons reported that 43 percent said that they can read other people’s thoughts or have their thoughts read, more than half said that they have had a dream or premonition of an event that then occurred, more than two-thirds said they could feel when someone was looking at them, 26 percent said they had sensed when a loved-one was ill or in trouble, and 62 percent said that they could tell who was calling before they picked up the phone. In addition, a fifth said they had seen a ghost and nearly a third said they believe that Near-Death Experiences are evidence for an afterlife.⁴

Although the specific percentages of belief in the supernatural and the paranormal across countries and decades varies slightly, the numbers remain fairly consistent that the majority of people hold some form of paranormal or supernatural belief.⁵ Alarmed by such figures, and concerned about the dismal state of science education and its role in fostering belief in the paranormal, the National Science Foundation (NSF) conducted its own extensive survey of beliefs in both the paranormal and pseudoscience, concluding with a plausible culprit in the creation of such beliefs:

Belief in pseudoscience, including astrology, extrasensory perception (ESP), and alien abductions, is relatively widespread and growing. For example, in response to the 2001 NSF survey, a sizable minority (41 percent) of the public said that astrology was at least somewhat scientific, and a solid majority (60 percent) agreed with the statement “some people possess psychic powers or ESP.” Gallup polls show substantial gains in almost every category of pseudoscience during the past decade. Such beliefs may sometimes be fueled by the media’s miscommunication of science and the scientific process.⁶

I too would like to lay the blame at the feet of the media, or science education in general, because the fix then seems straightforward—just improve how we communicate and educate science. But that’s too easy. In any case, the NSF’s own data do not support it. Although belief in ESP decreased from 65% among high school graduates to 60% among college graduates, and belief in magnetic therapy dropped from 71% among high school graduates to 55% among college graduates, that still leaves over half of educated people fully endorsing such claims! And for embracing alternative medicine, the percentages actually increased, from 89% for high school grads to 92% for college grads.

Perhaps a deeper cause may be found in another statistic: 70% of Americans still do not understand the scientific process, defined in the NSF study as grasping probability, the experimental method, and hypothesis testing. So one solution here is teaching how science works in addition to the rote memorization of scientific facts. A 2002 article in Skeptic magazine entitled “Science Education is No Guarantee of Skepticism,” presented the results of a study that found no correlation between science knowledge (facts about the world) and paranormal beliefs. The authors, W. Richard Walker, Steven J. Hoekstra, and Rodney J. Vogl, concluded: “Students that scored well on these [science knowledge] tests were no more or less skeptical of pseudoscientific claims than students that scored very poorly. Apparently, the students were not able to apply their scientific knowledge to evaluate these pseudoscientific claims. We suggest that this inability stems in part from the way that science is traditionally presented to students: Students are taught what to think but not how to think.”⁷ The scientific method is a teachable concept, as evidenced in the NSF study that found that 53% of Americans with a high level of science education (nine or more high school and college science/math courses) understand the scientific process, compared to 38% with a middle level (six to eight such courses) of science education, and 17% with a low level (less than five such courses) of science education. So maybe the key to attenuating superstition and belief in the supernatural is in teaching how science works, not just what science has discovered. I have believed this myself for my entire career in science and education. If I didn’t believe it I might not have gone into the business of teaching, writing, and editing science in the first place.

Alas, I have come to the conclusion that belief is largely immune to attack by direct educational tools, at least for those who are not ready to hear it. Belief change comes from a combination of personal psychological readiness and a deeper social and cultural shift in the underlying zeitgeist of the times, which is affected in part by education, but is more the product of larger and harder-to-define political, economic, religious, and social changes.

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On Thursday, March 31, Deepak Chopra and I squared off for a second time in person in a public venue, this time accompanied by the physicist Leonard Mlodinow on my side and Stuart Hameroff on his side (along with other panelists). The question on the table was this:

“Is there an Ultimate Reality?” and if yes, “Can it be accounted for by science such as mathematics, biology and physics?”

My answers: YES and YES

I explained that I am a Materialist and a Monist. I do not believe that there is a body and a soul, there is just a body. There is no brain and mind, just brain. The mind is just a word we use to describe what the brain does. I said, “you know I’m right” (which got a surprising laugh from the audience) because of the evidence from strokes, tumors, brain damage, senility, dementia, and Alzheimer’s, all of which kill brain cells, and along with the loss of brain comes the loss of mind. I asked Deepak and Stuart where Aunt Millie’s mind goes when her brain slowly disappears from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.

I noted that consciousness is just a word we use to describe our inner thoughts about the workings of the brain, and that our “soul” is just a pattern of information stored in our genes and our brains. Consciousness is just an emergent property of integrated brain modules and patterned firing of neural networks.

By contrast, I believe that Deepak’s use of the word “consciousness” is very anthropocentric, once again returning humans to a central place in the cosmos as the “observers” who, in quantum mechanics, brings things into existence. If Deepak is right then the moon doesn’t exist unless it is observed, and yet, quoting that great scientist Bill O’Reilly, “times come in, tides go out—never a missed communication—and they would do so whether or not humans, or any other conscious (or unconscious) being existed.

In fact, I said, Deepak’s quantum consciousness is not holistic but reductionistic in the extreme. We don’t need to go down that far. Quantum mechanics is not needed to explain brain functions: the neuron is the individual unit of thought, the “atom” of mind. I then worked in a little joke I wrote earlier in the day:

Quantum mechanics is spooky and weird.
Consciousness is spooky and weird.
So what? Charlie Sheen is spooky and weird, but we don’t need quantum mechanics to explain his behavior. His “tiger blood” theory works just fine.

Haha.

In Deepak’s worldview, everything is conscious, which means that there is no way to distinguish between consciousness and unconsciousness, which is how I often feel when I listen to Deepak.

Thought Experiment:

• If humans went extinct instead of Neanderthals, how does that effect the universe?
• What if the Earth were suddenly demolished by a rogue planet (as in 2012)? Would that mean the end of the universe because observers would disappear?
• Are whales, dolphins, gorillas and chimps conscious and therefore integral to the universe?
• What can it possibly mean to say that the universe is conscious? If you will pardon the nerd science pun, that is such a vacuous concept!

Before the debate Deepak asked me to read a paper by himself and Menas Kafatos and Rudolph Tanzi published in the Journal of Cosmology, entitled: “How Consciousness Becomes the Physical Universe.” Deepak asked me to comment on it, which I did in the second half of the debate. I noted that given the prominence of “consciousness” to the central theme of the paper that one might expect it to be defined with semantic precision. Nope. Here is what the authors write:

“We will sidestep any precise definition of consciousness, limiting ourselves for now to willful actions on the part of the observer.”

What can it possibly mean for the universe to be conscious in the sense of having willful actions? The universe behaves with willful action? The universe is an observer? As well, quantum mechanics only requires an observation of any kind: an electron microscope will do. Is an electron microscope willful? Does an electron microscope take action? The authors of this paper write:

Werner Heisenberg concluded that the atom “has no immediate and direct physical properties at all.” If the universe’s basic building block isn’t physical, then the same must hold true in some way for the whole. The universe was doing a vanishing act in Heisenberg’s day, and it certainly hasn’t become more solid since. And Heisenberg again: “The atoms or elementary particles themselves … form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”

No, sorry, these are different levels of analysis. To prove it I challenge Deepak to climb to the top of this building and jump off and see if the ground is a potentiality or a thing! They also write:

Heisenberg: “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Reality, it seems, shifts according to the observer’s conscious intent.

Once again, NO! This would imply that anyone’s method of questioning is just as valid as anyone else’s, which would mean that the way astrologers question the universe is just as valid as that of astronomers. I concluded by saying that if you want to get a spacecraft to Mars the questions that astronomers ask are absolutely objectively really better than those of astrologers. Q.E.D.!

In Deepak’s rebuttal, in discussing quantum mechanics, he actually used the phrase “the womb of creation.” Nice. It’s that sort of precise language that makes people all gushy and mushy about science. I pressed him for a definition of consciousness, which he gave me as “consciousness is the ground of existence.” I replied that this sounded tautological to me: since reality needs consciousness to come into existence, this means that reality = consciousness = existence; or existence = existence. A is A. Very Aristotelian. But what does that really tell us?

In the end I pressed both Deepak and Stuart Hameroff for an answer as to where Aunt Millie’s mind goes during the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease. Stuart’s answer was so rapid fire and jargon laden (something about the collapse of the wave function inside the microtubules in the neurons inside Aunt Millie’s brain) that I couldn’t quite get an answer, so Deepak clarified it for me later: Aunt Millie’s mind is in the matrix. Okay, I asked, how does poor Aunt Millie access the matrix. “We’re working on that,” was the reply. Okay, fine, and if our memories really are stored somewhere outside of our brains, then that would indeed be one of the greatest discoveries ever made in the history of science: Nobel worthy. But, until that is proven, I remain … skeptical.

Post Script

I am often asked if I believe that Deepak believes what he says, with an underlying assumption behind the question that Deepak is knowingly selling snake oil and doesn’t really believe his public patter. Having gotten to know Deepak over the years I can assure you that he absolutely positively believes what he says, and that while he may make a lot of money in the process of writing books, giving lectures, hosting radio and television shows, and running his various business enterprises (but, hey, that’s not exactly something anathema in America), this fact is quite orthogonal to his deeper mission in life: to shift the Western worldview Eastward.

I had never met Stuart Hameroff before, but I liked him as well, sharing a beer after the debate while watching a Laker game and schmoozing about science. Although I do not accept his theory of consciousness (most neuroscientists are skeptical as well), it would be fun to engage him again in a spirited debate over the brain and the mind.

On Friday, January 14, 2011, the spirit of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) was enacted as TEDxCaltech, one of many independent lecture series that have spontaneously emerged from the bottom up by what I call “ideas entrepreneurs,” creative individuals who want to change the world by spreading ideas in the format modeled after the annual event now held in Long Beach (albeit at a fraction of the cost: $85 versus $6000). The theme of TEDxCaltech was “Feynman’s Vision: The Next 50 Years,” celebrating Richard Feynman’s famous 1959 lecture, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” which helped launch the field of nanotechnology. As Feynman said, “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”

Feynman was famous for telling stories, so first up on the morning program was Feynman’s daughter Michelle, who recounted what it was like to hear bedtime stories from her famous father. Michelle then introduced Christopher Sykes, the British documentary film maker who cast Feynman’s stories into filmic narrative in his famous film The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (the phrase inspired by a Feynman quip about why he does science—not to change the world or discover some grand unifying theory of everything, but just for the pleasure of finding things out). Sykes recounted how intimidating it was to initially approach the normally reclusive Feynman with the idea of sitting him down in front of a camera, but Feynman agreed, perhaps because he knew his life was coming to an end because of cancer, or perhaps because Sykes is such a warm and engaging man. Whatever the reason, the world is a better place with Feynman’s voice still engaging us two decades after his death (you can watch excerpts from the film on YouTube).

The talks throughout the day were peppered by video clips of Feynman, plus musical performances inspired by Feynman’s passion for drumming. But the meat of the day was in the lectures by scientists, grad students, and even undergrad students who have carried on Feynman’s vision in various fields. To wit, Curtis Wong, a Principal Researcher in eScience at Microsoft introduced us to WorldWideTelescope.org, “a free interactive storytelling and virtual learning environment providing the highest resolution multispectral imagery of the universe.” It is a 3D tour of the universe, inspired by Feynman’s creative genius in visualizing data in a manner that enhances understanding.

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The afternoon sessions of heavy-duty science and technology talks were broken up with some seriously geeky humor when Caltech cosmologists Kip Thorne (whom I posed with in the picture) and John Preskill played a science-geek version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, complete with the music, rotating spot lights between questions, and slides projecting the question and four-answer options on the screen. Since TEDxCaltech was a tribute to Feynman, all questions pertained to things that Feynman said or did, so of course the correct answer to every question was “Richard Feynman.” Nevertheless, Thorne and Preskill could not seem to agree on an answer so they had to use their three lifelines: 50/50, poll-the-audience, and phone-a-friend. The first question was:

“Who said ‘If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’?”

Answer choices:

• George W. Bush
• Lady Gaga
• Albert Einstein
• Richard Feynman

For this question Thorne and Preskill used their 50/50 lifeline and narrowed it down to Einstein or Feynman, and they correctly guess the latter because the former never fully accepted quantum mechanics, much less understood it.

The next two questions went the same way, forcing Thorne and Preskill to poll the audience (we got it right: “Richard Feynman”) and, finally, to phone-a-friend. For the latter, Thorne and Preskill deduced that the answer was either Stephen Hawking or Richard Feynman, so they chose to phone no less an expert than Stephen Hawking, who not only answered his phone, but when Thorne asked him to please come to Caltech to answer the question, there he was, wheeling down the aisle of Beckman Auditorium at Caltech and up onto the stage, where he promptly answered, “Richard Feynman. That’s my final answer.”

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The day wrapped up with speakers discussing Feynman diagrams, the squiggly lines that help particle physicists visualize what interacting subatomic particles are doing when they collide in atom smashers. Even though Feynman diagrams are so useful that they appear on blackboards in physics departments around the world—and even on the side of Feynman’s van—additional discussions noted how difficult it is to actually compute mathematically what is really happened in even the simplest of particle interactions depicted in such diagrams. Nonetheless, Feynman’s vision, and his legacy lives on.

The media once again scrambled this past week to find the deep underlying causes of shocking events. We saw it in the rush to explain the tragic murder of six people in a shopping center in Tucson. And we saw it in the rush of stories about mass die offs of birds and fish around the country.

In the case of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at a shopping center in Tucson, attention has turned to the motives of the shooter, 22-year old Jared Loughner, whose political ramblings about returning to the gold standard and about excessive control by the government have sent the media searching for answers in the vitriol of right-wing talk radio, the rhetoric of the Tea Party movement, and the bellicose divide between Democrats and Republicans in Congress and elsewhere.

The mass die offs of fish and birds has spurred a number of deep causal theories, including suggestions that the apocalypse is near and that secret government experiments were to blame, such as HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Alaska that studies the ionosophere that is run by DARPA, the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which admittedly does sound like something concocted by the writers for the television series X-Files.

We live in a causal universe, so all effects do have causes, but before we turn to grand overarching causal theories such as political rhetoric or government experiments, we must always remember the clustering effect of randomness and how our brains tend to look for and find deeper meaningful patterns even where none exist. Toss a handful of pennies into the air and you will notice that they do not land randomly on the ground. They cluster into apparently nonrandom patterns in which some are closer and others are farther apart. There is nothing inherently hidden in such a clustering effect—no concealed forces under the ground causes the pennies to fall as they do. It’s just chance. But our brains abhor randomness and always seek meaning.

The National Institutes of Mental Health estimates that about 1% of the population suffers from schizophrenia, and that more than 25% of us have some kind of diagnosable mental disorder. As well, psychologists estimate that 1–3 percent of the U.S. population suffers from psychopathy, or the inability to feel empathy and an almost complete lack of moral conduct. Using the conservative figure of 1% and a U.S. population of 300 million people, this means that some 3 million people with either psychosis or psychopathy are walking among us, as well as tens of millions more whose mental health is askew in some way. And many of those who need it aren’t receiving treatment. Given these statistics, events such as the shooting in Tucson are bound to happen, no matter how nicely politicians talk to one another on the campaign trail or in Congress, no matter how extreme Tea Party slogans are about killing government programs, and no matter how stiff or loose gun controls laws are in this or that state. By chance—and nothing more—there will always be people such as Jared Loughner who do the unthinkable.

According to Audubon Society biologist Melanie Driscoll, about 5 billion birds die each year in the United States from a variety of causes. Because of the clustering effect of randomness it is inevitable that some of those billions of birds will die in apparent nonrandom clusters. The 5,000 red-winged blackbirds that died in Arkansas, for example, looks like an ominous cluster when scattered about the ground, but there are over 200 million red-winged blackbirds in the U.S., and according to Driscoll they fly in flocks of 100,000 to 2 million. Although 5,000 birds falling dead out of the sky sounds positively apocalyptic, it represents a scant 0.0025% of the total population.

Of course there are specific causes for specific events. We will, in time, learn of the particular personal and social conditions behind Jared Loughner’s heinous act. And biologists are already identifying the causes of each fish and bird die off. The Arkansas blackbirds, for example, died during a New Year’s eve fireworks display, which may have been a contributing factor. Biologist Driscoll notes that “they cannot see well in the dark and we know they were seen crashing into buildings and cars and poles. Necropsies show blunt force trauma to brain and breast.” Others died near power lines that are thin and hard to see at night. The American Bird Conservancy notes that of the 5 billion annual bird deaths, about 1 billion birds are killed each year in collisions with buildings, communication towers, windmills, and other human-made structures. We just never hear about them unless such deaths happen in clusters and are reported in the media, thereby triggering a type of mass hysteria that leads to conspiratorial thinking and what I call patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.

Patternicity is what our brains do. We can’t help it. We see those clusters of events and naturally seek out deep causal meaning in some grand overarching theory. But as often as not events in life turn on chance, randomness, and statistical probabilities that are largely beyond our control. So calls for “an end to all overt and implied appeals to violence in American politics”—such as that just issued by MoveOn.org—may make us feel better but they will do nothing to alter the inevitability of such one-off events in the future.