Michael's Picks

* An absolutely hilarious SNL clip featuring The Devil commenting on the recent abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

* An informative, if not thought-provoking review of Paul Berman's new book, "The Flight of the Intellectuals."

* A mosque/Islamic cultural center is going up near Ground Zero, and it's causing quite a stir.

* Diana Butler Bass has an interesting liberal religionist's take on faith, Democrats, and the 2010 elections.

* In response to criticism, Chris Mooney outlines "The Reasons for Science Communication Training."

* CFI's Ron Lindsay chimes in on the debate over whether secular advocacy groups should organize charitable relief.

* Wajahat Ali writes over at Slate that "France's proposed ban on the burqa is a hypocritical and self-serving justification that betrays its triptych motto of 'liberty, equality, fraternity.'"

* What happened when three men in the 1950s who considered themselves to be Jesus Christ were forced to live together in a mental hospital? Here's an essay (or more of a review of an out-of-print book) answering that question and dealing with the implications of such a psychological study.

Why do libertarians deny climate change?

Okay, not all libertarians deny the reality of partially human-caused climate change (I know personally at least one who doesn’t), but the trend is hard to miss. The libertarian think tank CATO Institute has been waging a media war against the very notion for years, and even prominent skeptics with libertarian leanings have pronounced themselves negatively on the matter (most famously Penn & Teller, and initially even Michael Shermer, though both — I count P&T as one — lately have taken a few steps back from their initial positions).

The question that I want to address is not whether climate change is real or not. It is, according to the best science available. Yes, even the best science can be wrong, but frankly the only people who can tell with any degree of reasonability are those belonging to the relevant community of experts, in this case climate scientists — certainly not magicians. (And please don’t get started with the recent hoopla about “climate gate”. That episode simply shows that individual scientists can be just as human as anyone else, meaning a bit petty and self-centered; it doesn’t in the least invalidate the overwhelming evidence for climate change.)

The question is particularly pertinent to libertarians and the ideologically close allied group of “objectivists,” i.e. followers of Ayn Rand (though there are significant differences between the two groups, as I mentioned before). These people often claim to be friends of science (as opposed to many radical conservatives like Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla), who called global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” (perpetrated by whom? And to what end?)), and in the case of objectivists, whose whole approach to politics is allegedly based on rational considerations of the facts.

Well, then, since by far the best interpretation of said facts is that human beings have contributed significantly to climate change, and that such change is already substantially and negatively affecting the world’s ecosystem as well as human welfare, why are so many libertarians/objectivists dead set against the notion of global warming?

I mean, one would think that libertarians could make a distinction between evidence-based interpretation of reality (global warming is happening), and whatever policies we might want to enact to avoid catastrophe. Qua libertarians, they would obviously resist any government-led effort at clean up, especially if internationally coordinated, preferring instead a coalition of the willing within the private sector because — they claim — “the markets” will take care of pretty much everything, if we just leave them alone.

I think the latter contention is nonsense on stilts, something that ought to be painfully obvious given the recent BP-caused oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and particularly given the inane remarks of BP’s CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg. But whatever, there certainly is plenty of room for reasonable discussions and disagreements about how best to proceed in confronting the problem. On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be much room for reasonable disagreement about the very existence of the problem itself. So, what gives, my dear libertarians?

I suspect the answer lies along two parallel lines. In the case of major libertarian outlets, like the CATO Institute think tank, the rather unglamorous answer may simply be that they are in the pockets of the oil industry. A large amount of the funding for CATO comes from private corporations with obvious political agendas including, you guessed it, Exxon-Mobil (remember the Valdez?). No wonder CATO people trump the party line on this one.

The second reason, however, is more personal and widespread: libertarianism is committed to the high moral value of private enterprise, just read pretty much anything that Ayn Rand wrote if you have any doubt. Given that, it follows naturally (if irrationally) that libertarians cannot admit to themselves, and even less to the world at large, that the much vaunted private sector may be responsible — out of both greed and downright incompetence — for a major environmental catastrophe of planetary proportions. The industry is the good guy in their movie, how then could they possibly have done something so horrible?

That’s the problem with ideology in general (be it left, right, or libertarian), it provides us with thick blinders that very effectively shield us from reality. Of course, no one is actually free of bias, yours truly included. But a core principle of skepticism and critical thinking is that we do our best to be aware (and minimize) our own biases, and that we ought to open ourselves to honest criticism from different parties, in pursuit of the best approximation to the truth that we can muster. How about it, my libertarian friends?

On Gardner and Immortality

It's particularly poignant reading thoughts on death from someone who has just died.

Martin Gardner, who introduced multiple generations to skepticism and the joys of "recreational math" through his columns for Scientific American and Skeptical Inquirer, and through the over 70 books he published on math, philosophy and skepticism, died last Saturday at the age of 95.

I date my love of paradoxes and puzzles back to the afternoons I spent as a kid poring over my dad's copies of Gardner's Aha! Gotcha and Aha! Insight, two delightful collections of conundrums that seem impossible until your mind shifts in just the right way, and then: "Aha!" It's a feeling which I can only imagine is akin to what it must feel like to be a Flatlander popping for the first time into the third dimension, and which would convince even the biggest mathophobe that the phrase "recreational math" really isn't an oxymoron.

But as I thought about the best way to commemorate him, I remembered that Gardner once told an interviewer that, out of all his books, the one he was most proud to have written was The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, a collection of his musings on life's hard questions. So, curious and wistful at the news of Gardner's death, I picked up a copy.

My wistfulness deepened upon discovering that a lot of the book is devoted to Gardner's contemplation of the prospect of his death, and what might follow it. A bit of an odd man out among public skeptics, Gardner was as empirically-minded as ever when it came to debunking woo, but also a believer in a higher power and in life after death. In a comment-thread discussion about this subject on Discover Magazine's obituary for Gardner on Sunday, Gardner's old friend James Randi explained, "When I questioned him on the subject he told me that he had no really good evidence to support his belief, but that it simply made him feel better to adopt it. He said that I — and other curmudgeons — had far better evidence for our convictions, but that he just felt more secure in his acceptance."

Reading Whys, it's clear that Gardner's choice to believe in immortality was undergirded by horror at the thought of a truly final death. And he confessed that he could not relate to people who felt differently: "I do not understand those men who tell me that the prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them," he writes.

I'm one of those people. Sure, I feel a twinge of angst when I contemplate the process of dying, because I am a pathetic wuss about pain, or when I contemplate the effect that my death would have on friends and family. But to the idea of not-existing itself, I am as indifferent as Gardner was dismayed. On this point I'm with Epicurus, who famously wrote, "All good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation... [Death] does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more."

Although I have as much trouble emotionally understanding Gardner's attitude towards not-existing as he had understanding mine, I'll admit that I'm not sure which attitude is really more rational. I don't know, for instance, how to square my intuitive sense that death doesn't harm you (since there's no longer a "you" there to be harmed) with my other intuitive sense that if life has positive value, you're better off with more of it than less of it. The only way I can see to reconcile those two intuitions is to conclude that an event (death) can retroactively harm someone who used to exist -- a conclusion that I find just as unsatisfying as the original contradiction it was intended to resolve. (For a good introduction to the headaches this question causes, check out Thomas Nagel's 1979 essay, "Death.")

But there is one point on which Gardner and I wholeheartedly agree: the utter lameness of people's attempts to redefine "immortality" into existence. You'll often hear it claimed that someone isn't "really" dead because he lives on through his work. (As Woody Allen says, and Gardner quotes approvingly: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.") I've also heard people argue that we're all "immortal" because our matter and energy are preserved. And then there's the notion that we're "immortal" in the sense that our existence can never be erased from the record of space-time.

In Whys, Gardner mentions all these arguments, and quotes a verse from poet Arthur Hugh Clough: "It fortifies my soul to know/ That, though I perish, Truth is so." Gardner witheringly responds, "Thank you, Arthur Hugh Clough, for this vapid thought." He then says:

"It does not fortify my soul in the least to know that after I die all unmarried men will still be bachelors, that 37 will still be a prime number, that the stars will continue to shine, and that forever I will have been just what I am now. Away with these fake immortalities! They mean nothing to the heart."

Amen, Gardner.

Whatever your philosophical outlook on how one should think about one's own death, Gardner's absence is an indisputable loss for all the rest of us. This week I'll be consoling myself by re-reading the Aha! books, and I encourage you to pick them up if you've never had the pleasure of puzzling through them. Gardner may have found the thought of literary immortality to be small consolation, but it's far more than most of us get, and no less than he deserves.

Podcast Teaser: Nonsense on Stilts

Okay, okay, this time we are being a bit self-indulgent. Our next podcast will focus on my new book, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk. You can find an e-version here. (Meanwhile, you can check out our latest episode, on the Anthropic Principle.) Still, the topic is interesting, and it will surely generate stimulating discussions on our blog.

The book, broadly speaking, is about what philosopher Karl Popper famously called the demarcation problem: how do we tell the difference among science, non-science and pseudoscience? Popper’s answer was his criterion of falsification, the idea that a hypothesis, in order to count as scientific, has to be falsifiable in principle.

As I explain at the beginning of the book, however, this didn’t quite work, because there are plenty of examples in the history of science where hypotheses had apparently been falsified by the available data, and yet they were retained for the time being because they were sufficiently promising, elegant, pragmatic, or what not (examples include the Copernican theory, which initially didn’t do much better than Ptolemy’s, and of course Newtonian mechanics, which apparently failed to explain the anomalies in the orbit of Uranus, and then definitely failed at a similar task where Mercury was concerned — in the first case the reason was the existence of the then unknown Neptune, in the second case that Mercury is close enough to the sun that relativistic effects become relevant).

A large part of the book then explores what I consider to be the much more complex relationship among science, non-science and pseudoscience, ranging from solid science like fundamental physics and evolutionary biology to definite pseudosciences of astrology and creationism. In the middle are the more interesting borderline areas that include the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, and even superstring theory, to name but a few.

Nonsense on Stilts also investigates some of the major players that mediate public understanding of science: experts, think tanks, and of course the media broadly construed. Think tanks, for instance, are rather curious organizations, originally conceived as “universities without students,” independent research groups having the goal of advising the government on complex policy issues. But many (though not all) of them are now clearly ideological outlets that don’t do research as much as start out with pre-determined positions that are then backed up by ad hoc sifting through the available evidence.

I also get into the whole issue of expertise, which plays such an important role especially in media presentations of issues such as evolution, climate change, HIV-AIDS, or the alleged connection between vaccines and autism. What makes someone an expert, exactly, and how is the non-technical public supposed to arrive at an informed opinion when two people with PhD’s seem to be seeing the same problem from entirely antithetical and mutually incompatible points of view?

More to the point: why do we care? Because, I argue in Nonsense on Stilts, nonsense hurts and kills. It hurts the environment, if we keep denying climate change, and it kills people who don’t take anti-HIV drugs because they believe conspiracy theories that blame the American government and Big Pharma for the epidemics. Or at the very least, as Stephen Jay Gould once put it: “Skepticism or debunking often receives the bad rap reserved for activities — like garbage disposal — that absolutely must be done for a safe and sane life, but seem either unglamorous or unworthy of overt celebration.” I’d say, let’s celebrate the disposal of pseudo-intellectual garbage!

The Concerns of Morality: Well-Being and Flourishing

Sam Harris' new book isn't out until October, but his new arguments have already hit the public -- as outlined in his TED talk and ensuing articles (1 and 2) -- and are creating quite a stir. From the likes of our very own Massimo Pigliucci to physicist Sean Carroll (1 and 2), Harris has received two main criticisms: first, that he has not overcome Hume’s "is-ought" obstacle, and second, that the terms he employs to define his morality, "well-being" and "flourishing," are too vague to form the basis of any universal or objective morality.

This essay will not address the supposed "is-ought" problem. It will also not build universal definitions of "well-being" and "flourishing," or an objective secular morality (note: this is not an argument for moral relativism). Rather, this essay will discuss the universal understanding of morality. People might not agree on the meaning of terms like "well-being" and "flourishing," but perhaps they can agree that these concepts, however they are used, are the very concern of morality itself in its broadest sense.

The argument is that morality, and moral contemplation, is the domain of concerns for the well-being (generally, happiness and/or health) and flourishing (generally, the amount to which one is thriving, prospering, succeeding) of sentient and conscious beings. Morality is an expression of the desire for happiness and a good life. People promote their moral views because they want to live in what they think is a fair and civil society, for the benefit of themselves and others.

This is not meant as an exhaustive sampling, but consider some of the various moral systems. Many believe morality concerns doing what God commands people to do. Consequentialists or utilitarians, believe morality should be a function of weighing the outcome of a belief, decision, or action, for the greatest good. Virtue ethicists, put central focus on the moral character of a person, while promoting certain values. Still others, deontologists, follow a moral system that sets certain principles and guidelines to follow (1). More generally, ask the man or woman on the street, and many will say that morality is about goodness for one's self and for others.

Now consider that even religious believers think humans should follow God commandments because they think it is best for humanity. Consequentialists aim to ensure the happiness and well-being for the most beings that can experience such. Virtue ethicists focus on moral character, and certain values, because they think this is the best way to foster a reasonable, just, and civil society, which they believe produces well-being for all. Deontologists argue that guidelines are necessary for a morally good society. Even someone like Kant, with his categorical imperative, had to believe his moral ideas were in the service of a more moral world. In sum, all moral systems, beliefs, and values -- religious or secular -- are generally about how to best treat other beings and how to form a better society.

This argument may not be convincing to you. As it is, there are three quality objections lurking around the corner that must be reconciled before this writer himself can be convinced.

The first objection is that morality is about truth. People don’t necessarily want well-being, but they think they are right, and will follow their beliefs regardless of the outcome. For instance, secular philosophers would not posit that society should embrace belief in God even if it was proven that it made society collectively happier or more civil (it doesn’t). Others might argue that religious believers are carrying out God’s will because they actually believe God wants them to do it, not because they think it is best for humanity.

But doesn't everyone think truth is the best path to take? Both groups in the above examples would be acting in such a way because of their belief that society is always better off for picking truth over superstition. We all believe we are right to believe what we believe. This is just how belief works. Nobody knowingly deceives himself or herself about their beliefs or asks others to do the same for the mere pleasure of the experience. Indeed, almost all people promote that the best way to believe is to base beliefs on evidence and reason. If faith were truly faith, theology would not exist. Indeed, even supporters of fideism employ reason to support faith.

The second objection is that morality is about power and control. This camp argues that many, or even most systems of morality have been created, sustained, and/or hijacked and used in the interest of maintaining power and influence over others. Creators of these moralities haven’t had in mind well-being or flourishing for anyone but themselves. Morality, thus, is a tool used by the powerful to control others.

There is no doubt this observation is true. But that does not mean morality cannot be accepted and used differently by the majority of those who adopt it. Far fewer people make, create or hijack moral systems than follow moral systems. Even if a handful of people can use morality to their own ends, why do the masses accept such morality? Because they believe it enhances their own well-being.

The third objection is that morality is more about sustaining community and identity. Morality, in this view, has been used to keep people of certain tribes together by way of common rituals and customs. Morality surely includes such things. But preservation of one's community and identity is in the very service of promoting well-being and flourishing for one's society and one's self. Identities are arrived at via a determination of the beliefs and values involved. By choosing certain ideas and traditions, one thinks he or she is doing better for themselves and their community.

Exceptions for these objections would do no harm to the thesis. Remember that the argument is about morality in its most universal sense. That people hold their moral views because they think they are correct in doing so in no way undermines this thesis, because being correct is at the core of well-being and flourishing for all sane people. That some people have created or hijacked morality for their narrow benefit does not suggest that the majority of people do not follow or use morality for different purposes, such as living a good life and helping others do the same. Morality might even be about well-being at a number of different levels for different people, from one person, to local tribes, and the global community. But this does not mean that in some sense people are not concerned with the well-being of a certain society and its members.

One more lingering objection helps bring this essay to a close. Some argue that moral contemplation, or what we call ethics, is more extensive than stated. This position argues that moral contemplation asks "what ought we do?" Well-being and flourishing, then, become axioms which one might want to define and work toward. Others might choose different axioms.

Yet moral contemplation does not usually weigh such questions as: "what ought we do about lunch, turkey or ham?" or "what ought we do tonight?" or "what ought we do about the car, which needs fixing?" Even if such questions were posed in the moral sense, they would involve the potential happiness and suffering of beings who are involved in those questions. The focus and concerns of moral conversation entail "what ought we do in regard to the well-being and flourishing of creatures that might experience pain and happiness?" All the different axioms one can select are in the service of working toward greater well-being and flourishing, however one defines those terms.

An over-abundance of subjectivity might bother some, but it needn't worry us here. Well-being and flourishing are surely defined differently by different people, and many systems of morality seem misguided and horrid to us. Yet, even though people have different conceptions of how to achieve well-being and flourishing, achieving these things is their moral goal. Further, just as the idea of secular moral philosophy does not fall because there are various conceptions of the best secular moral system, morality itself does not fall because people come to the table with different ideas and definitions about what a good moral system looks like. Remember, this is not a conversation about objective standards for moral beliefs and values, but instead, for a somewhat objective view of morality's broadest concerns and purpose.

Morality and moral debate must have parameters. A frame for our moral conversations will make clear what participants' moral beliefs and values, and reasons and justifications for such, should concern. Accepting that morality and moral contemplation centrally focus on the well-being and flourishing of (at least potentially) sentient and conscious creatures would at least get public discussion about morality between all the groups in our pluralistic society on some firmer, shared ground. From there, one could apply his or her objective standards. But without first setting a frame, people cannot engage in the defined, quality public dialogue that might lead to more objective moral truths.

Notes:

(1). One need not pick from only these moral philosophies; one can consider them collectively. But many people find themselves more in one camp than another.

Julia's Picks

* This is one of the trickiest paradoxes I've ever heard. (Link goes to the standard version of the problem, but here's a more precisely formulated version.)

* Episode 8 of the Rationally Speaking podcast, "The Anthropic Principle."

* Slate's got a promising new blog called The Wrong Stuff, by Kathryn Shulz, author of the forthcoming Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margins of Error. As you all know, this is a favorite subject of mine. This week, she interviews Alan Dershowitz on being wrong.

* The New York Times magazine on the moral life of babies.

* Whoa, it's already 2 PM and I have yet to mock philosophy today! I'm slipping. Here, have a dinosaur comic. 

* The brouhaha over South Park's attempt to depict Muhammad inspired a student group to protest by chalking stick figures on campus walkways and labeling them "Muhammad." That sparked another brouhaha, including a Huffington Post editorial arguing that depictions of Muhammad are offensive in the same way a swastika is offensive. My brother Jesse Galef wrote a post for Friendly Atheist disagreeing. Incidentally, for what it's worth, here's my contribution: ("Muhammad": O-|-<)

* An oldie but goodie: "The Last Question," by Isaac Asimov.

Podcast Teaser: When smart people endorse pseudoscience

So, it’s very easy to make fun of not-so-educated people who reject evolution, but what happens when one of the most prominent contemporary philosophers writes a book about “What Darwin Got Wrong”? (See my review of that bit of nonsense in Nature magazine.)

Similarly, we can dismiss extreme right wing Republicans like Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who thinks global warming is a worldwide conspiracy of crazy scientists bent on destroying the American way of life. But what happens when two icons of the skeptic movement, Penn & Teller, do a whole show in which they behave as little more than the mouthpieces (well, piece, since Teller never talks) of the libertarian CATO Institute?

And of course it is easy to laugh at Jenny McCarthy, the kook who claims (with Oprah Winfrey’s support) that she “just knows” that vaccines cause autism. But, what happens when a savvy political progressive and atheist like Bill Maher says that people who get flu shots are “idiots”?

This is the topic of our next Rationally Speaking podcast: why is it that smart people who make it a point of being skeptical and of promoting critical thinking fall for notions that are barely more defensible than astrology (vaccines causing autism), or criticize established scientific notions that are no more “controversial” than the theory of continental drift (climate change, evolution)?

Michael's Picks

Note: Apologies for the delay in posting a new essay, but I'm currently wrapping up my master's thesis. I should have a new piece up soon.

* Sam Harris has a new (and long) essay up on The Huffington Post, titled "Toward a Science of Morality," in which he defends his thesis that science can answer moral questions. 

* An interesting piece that argues the National Day of Prayer does exactly the opposite of what its supporters claim it does, dividing instead of uniting.

* Not that the above, or the fact the NDP has been ruled unconstitutional, really matters: South Carolina lawmakers are trying to create a State Day of Prayer. 

* Where does Obama's Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan stand on church and state?

* Richard Dawkins performed admirably in a recent panel discussion on ABC Australia that essentially featured Dawkins against five others, including one creationist. I suggest watching the entire 60 minutes. 

* A Polish pop star is facing charges in her home country for stating the Bible is full of "unbelievable tales" that are hard to accept because "it's hard to believe in something written down by someone drunk on wine and smoking some kind of herbs."

* Sarah Palin doesn't know the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. 

* Controversial new Oklahoma abortion legislation has been temporarily blocked. 

* A proposed federal workplace religious freedom bill, which would "revise and strengthen the existing requirements imposed on employers to accommodate the religious practices of their employees," is receiving renewed interest. 

* Christopher Hitchens on France and the burqa. 

* Kate Fridkis says atheists can be unreasonable, too, citing a conversation she had with the leader of an atheist organization in New York City (there's only one atheist organization in NYC, you do the math).

Massimo's Picks

* Well, someone has to care for all those pets that will be left behind by the Rupture. How about we atheists?

* Friendly Atheist publishes an exclusive excerpt of my book, Nonsense on Stilts. It's rather controversial...

* Bill Maher is a kook when it comes to alternative medicine, but on politics and religion he's absolutely brilliant.

* My review of Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics." A must read if you are curious about string and loop quantum theories.

* Apparently, early Homo sapiens shagged with Neanderthals...

* Scottish schools just like American ones: they are producing a generation of science illiterates.

* The Pope almost endorses the Shroud of Turin. Anything to get people's attention away from his moral responsibilities, eh?

Insane Clown Posse and the miracles of nature

A couple weeks ago a music video called "Miracles" went viral. It was produced by a hip-hop duo named Insane Clown Posse, heretofore best known for their face-paint and such classic songs as "I stab you" (and a follow-up song: "Still stabbin'.") "Miracles" rode to fame on a wave of the kind of bemused buzz that tends to follow things like two dudes named Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope rapping about rainbows and giraffes.

The song features lines like "Plant a little seed and nature grows!" and is either profound or profoundly stupid, depending on whether or not you think they're in on the joke. I honestly can't tell -- others have speculated -- but it doesn't really matter for our purposes. Whether they know it or not, Violent and Shaggy have something important to teach us about science, so listen up.

At first, "Miracles" sounds like a paean to scientific curiosity, urging us to appreciate the wonders all around us instead of dismissing the natural world as prosaic and mooning over the imaginary supernatural. I wholeheartedly agree with this. The "magic" we marvel over in stories is not inherently any more marvelous than what already exists in our world -- it just seems that way because we're so used to the real stuff. After all, are dragons and wizards really any more amazing than real things like -- well, let me hand the mike to Shaggy and Violent: "The sun and the moon, even Mars! The Milky Way! F-ckin' shooting stars!" Well said. Thanks guys.

There's a fun thought experiment you can do to bring this fact into clearer focus. Just pick something ubiquitous, something you take for granted because you're so familiar with it, and imagine how you would react if it didn't exist and you were reading about it in a fantasy tale. Eliezer Yudkowsky over at Less Wrong demonstrates: "For example, suppose that instead of one eye, you possessed a magical second eye embedded in your forehead. And this second eye enabled you to see into the third dimension - so that you could somehow tell how far away things were - where an ordinary eye would see only a two-dimensional shadow of the true world. Only the possessors of this ability can accurately aim the legendary distance-weapons that kill at ranges far beyond a sword, or use to their fullest potential the shells of ultrafast machinery called 'cars'."

This is something I really do think is important to keep in mind, because getting excited only by the supernatural isn't simply unjustified, it's also a recipe for unhappiness. "Sooner or later you're going to be disappointed in everything," Yudkowsky writes. "Either it will turn out not to exist, or even worse, it will turn out to be real."

Okay, so far, so good. I am cheering on Violent and Shaggy as they wonder about the world around them ( "F-ckin' magnets, how do they work?"), and I'm chair-dancing to the catchy hook ("Do you notice and appreciate miracles, miracles, miracles...").

But then I hear two lines that completely change the meaning of the song: "And I don't wanna talk to a scientist/ y'all motherf-ckers lyin' and getting me pissed." Wait, what? So they're wondering about how rainbows and shooting stars and magnets work, but they don't want to hear the explanation? Now I get it: this song isn't an ode to investigating mysteries. It's an ode to mystery for the sake of mystery.

Once I realize what the song is really about, I'm reminded of a poem I learned in high school English class, which I remember hating even then:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

-When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomers, by Walt Whitman

Man, just copying and pasting that poem is setting my teeth on edge again. Look at how the lines get longer and clunkier, and the language duller, when you're with the scientist. Then once you leave that tedious ol' lecture-room, the language finally starts sounding poetic, with words like gliding, and mystical, and the meter evolves out of shapelessness into a lyrical iambic pentameter.

Whitman was one of many Romantic poets who wrote breathlessly about the natural world but found science's attempts at explanation to be a buzzkill. Keats and Blake are two other well-known examples. Blake complained, "Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things," and Keats famously blamed science for "unweaving the rainbow." Clearly, Insane Clown Posse's stance is nothing new. It's just the anti-science attitude of the 19th-century Romantics all over again, albeit with a little extra synthesizer and "motherf-cker"s.

Charismatic science popularizers like Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson have argued again and again that understanding the world scientifically should increase our sense of wonder, not decrease it. And listening to them waxing rhapsodic about the universe, it's hard not to ask yourself, "How can people think there's no poetry in science?" Or as Richard Feynman put it, "What men are poets who may speak of Jupiter if he is a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

But I've been making an effort recently not to get stuck on the rhetorical question, "How can people think that?" and instead push onward to the earnest question, "Why do people think that?" If a belief is widespread, even if it's a mistaken belief, it cries out for some explanation. Hence, I ask: why are so many people with an innate curiosity about the natural world so uninterested in, even hostile to, scientific explanation?

Part of the problem is that grasping scientific explanations well enough to feel awed by them can require some pretty abstract thinking, the sort our brains aren't built for. It frequently requires a better sense of relative scale than we naturally have to appreciate how big the universe really is, how hot the sun is, or how dense a neutron star is. Our brains react pretty much the same to "million" as they do to "trillion." Being awed by the universe also often requires some familiarity with mathematical equations, in order to appreciate how elegant they are and to feel your breath catch in your throat at the knowledge that the universe follows those laws. And as Neil deGrasse Tyson describes in Death by Black Hole, scientific explanations can require multiple layers of abstraction, each of which takes people successively farther away from the immediacy of the phenomenon. "[To] explain how we know the speed of a receding star requires five nested levels of abstraction," Tyson writes:

Level 0: Star

Level 1: Picture of a star

Level 2: Light from the picture of a star

Level 3: Spectrum from the light from the picture of a star

Level 4: Patterns of lines lacing the spectrum from the light from the picture of a star

Level 5: Shifts in the patterns of lines lacing the spectrum from the light from the picture of a star

... by the time your explanation reaches level 5, the audience is either befuddled or just fast asleep," he laments.

Another obstacle scientific explanations face is that for many people, "poetry" and "romance" require some kind of emotion or human feeling they can identify with. It's understandable; our brains are wired to be excited by human narratives, and it's harder to feel moved by the world if we can't anthropomorphize it. Immense spinning spheres of methane and ammonia can't be proud, or angry, or despairing. Yudkowsky makes this point too: "So one can see why John 'Unweave a rainbow' Keats might feel something had been lost, on being told that the rainbow was sunlight scattered from raindrops... The Biblical story of the rainbow is a tale of bloodthirsty murder and smiling insanity. How could anything about raindrops and refraction properly replace that? Raindrops don't scream when they die."

And as for the hostility that some people feel towards scientific explanations, that might have something to do with the fact that unlike magic, science doesn't allow humans to be special. The anti-materialist notion that the universe is shaped around us, or that our thoughts and feelings can produce tangible effects in the world has a particular kind of romance to it that people find appealing. Scientific explanations, for all their objective beauty, take that away from us.

Nevertheless, I think the perfect quote to close with is this one, from 18th-century bishop Samuel Horsley: "Wonder, connected with a principle of rational curiosity, is the source of all knowledge and discovery... but wonder which ends in wonder, and is satisfied with wonder, is the quality of an idiot." A great quote, and one I would wholeheartedly endorse, except for that fact that I'm a little skittish about calling Violent and Shaggy idiots. I hear they stab people.

The Mozart non-effect

Remember the Mozart effect? That was the idea that if we only expose our infants and young children to a bit of music, specifically Mozart’s (and particularly his Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major), the little ones will receive a big boost in intelligence. What parent could possibly be against that? Indeed, the States of Georgia and Florida at one point enacted legislation to take advantage of the Mozart effect. In 1998 Georgia paid for the distribution of classical music CDs to the mothers of newborns, and Florida required state-funded day care centers to play the music daily.

I was reminded of this debacle of uncritical thinking recently, while reading Richard Wiseman’s 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot, which debunks a lot of self-help notions, while introducing people to actual research in cognitive science that can help their lives.

The Mozart effect craze got started with a single paper published in 1993 by a group at the University of California who found — on the basis of studying just 36 college students (divided into three experimental treatments, which means that the actual sample size was a mere 13 individuals) — that people who had listened to Mozart’s Sonata did significantly better on standard intelligence tests when compared to people who had listened to a relaxation tape and to people who had just sat in silence for a bit.

Now, the authors did note that the effect was only temporary (lasting about ten minutes), and when they repeated the experiment two years later they found partially contradictory results, since the Mozart effect was about the same magnitude as the “just sit in silence” effect when compared to listening to trance music.

The media, however, jumped on the story, and the notion of the Mozart effect rapidly became an established scientific truth in the minds of many, even though no study had actually been performed on children. Worse yet, a more recent analysis of multiple studies of the same type revealed that either there was no effect at all or that its magnitude was very very small. And of course, whenever the effect was detected it actually had nothing to do with Mozart per se, much less with the Sonata in D Major specifically. Indeed, it seems that listening to anything that the subjects find pleasant or relaxing — including a story by Stephen King — temporarily (and slightly) boosts their IQ, while listening to unpleasant or depressing music results in lower scores on intelligence tests. The Mozart effect qua Mozart effect doesn’t exist, but what is true is that mood has an effect on how people perform on difficult tasks. Duh.

The whole episode looks a lot like Murder on the Orient Express, the Agatha Christie mystery (spoiler alert!) where it turns out that every single one of the suspects had actually committed the murder. Similarly, in the case of the Mozart effect we have the following full spectrum of suspects to blame: the scientists who published a paper based on an incredibly simplistic experimental design and on a minute sample size of a very non-random population; the journalists who uncritically wrote about the story and single-handedly made it a rapidly spreading piece of “common knowledge”; the politicians (in Georgia and Florida) who quickly committed public money to something that simply should have sounded much too good to be true; and of course the public itself, always ready to criticize and dismiss solid science (think evolution, global warming, vaccines, or anti-HIV drugs) and yet eager to take advantage of the latest “silver bullet” that would save us all the trouble of actually being responsible parents, consumers, patients, voters, and so on.

Of course, the Mozart effect debacle was simply a drop in the bucket in the large ocean of pseudoscientific nonsense. It was certainly not as costly as US Government programs to use telepathy to defeat the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and not as lethal as people failing to vaccinate their kids, or to take anti-HIV drugs — not to mention of course the colossal costs, both financial and ecological, of dismissing climate change.

Nonetheless, the Mozart effect story strikes me as a quintessential example of why it is so difficult to achieve that most elusive goal of a more rational society where we make our decisions in a thoughtful and empirically informed way. What’s next? A pill that magically lifts your mood, allows you to see the world more optimistically, and instantly makes you a functional — if somewhat dull — member of society? Oh, right, that one has been around for some time...

Massimo's Picks

* My book, Nonsense on Stilts, slammed in the Chronicle! Except that the reviewer is a supporter of Intelligent Design, not to mention that he obviously hasn't read the book very carefully...

* Here is a response to the Chronicle's review, over at Gotham Skeptic.

* And you know you've made it when you are criticized by the National Review!

* My other new book (co-edited with Gerd Muller), on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, is out!

* Chris Edwards on why Robert Pirsig (he of "Zen and motorcycles" fame) is still wrong, after all these years.

* Fear of death is not a unique human attribute.

* Religions are not "all about the same basic truths," contrary to popular lore.

* Surely you didn't miss this: the Skepchicks on boobs myths!

* Who knew? Good genes are not enough. To be smart you need good teachers too!

* McCain, of all people, introduces a bill that would allow indefinite detention of American citizens at the whim of the President. WTF??

* The latest young conservative woman with a reality-challenged brain and a cavalier attitude toward facts: S.E. Cupp.

* How and why we should teach philosophy to young kids.

* The Anthony Flew debacle: the guy really ought to have known better.