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| Introduction: Blurry Lines and Fuzzy Sets: The Boundary Detection Problem in the Borderlands of Science | 1 | (36) | |||
| Part I: Borderlands Theories | |||||
|
37 | (13) | |||
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50 | (16) | |||
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66 | (14) | |||
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80 | (17) | |||
|
97 | (32) | |||
| Part II: Borderlands People | |||||
|
129 | (30) | |||
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159 | (20) | |||
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179 | (20) | |||
|
199 | (16) | |||
|
215 | (26) | |||
| Part III: Borderlands History | |||||
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241 | (21) | |||
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262 | (21) | |||
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283 | (24) | |||
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307 | (14) | |||
| Notes | 321 | (18) | |||
| Bibliography | 339 | (14) | |||
| About the Author | 353 | (2) | |||
| Index | 355 |
The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
Chapter One
THE KNOWLEDGE FILTER
Reality Must Take Precedence in
the Search for Truth
Martha: Truth and illusion George; you don't know the difference.
George: No; but we must carry on as though we did.
Martha: Amen.
-- Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
WITHIN HOURS OF THE TRAGIC DEATH of Princess Diana, theories about what really happened to her began to proliferate via the Internet. One posting admonished readers: "Anyone who doesn't know that the order to murder Diana came from the Hanover/Windsor power structure is lacking an understanding of world affairs." Another explained: "A car wreck can very easily be engineered." The conspirators, it seems, were "acting on papal orders and financed by Du Pont." Within days the BBC reported that Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi told his followers in a televised speech that the "accident" was a combined French and British conspiracy "because they were annoyed that an Arab man might marry a British princess."
By the time of the funeral, dozens of theories were ripe for the picking, including: Diana was murdered, but Dodi was an innocent victim; the driver was a "Manchurian Candidate" programmed to self-destruct at the right moment; Trevor Rees-Jones was in on the murder as a secret service agent; either M.I.5, the British Domestic Intelligence Agency, or M.I.6, the British Secret Service, orchestrated the murder; Diana's murder came about because of her stand against land mines--the arms industry was not going to put up with this attack on one of their major profit centers; Diana was three months pregnant and the monarchy was not going to allow any half-Arab child to become a part of the British Empire. The most bizarre conspiracy theory of all revealed that Diana was supposed to move to America and marry Bill Clinton, with Hillary either murdered or stepping out of the picture. Son William (the heir) would remain in England to become king, while second son Harry (the spare) moves to America, becoming a U.S. senator. By controlling both American and British banking and politics, the Rockefellers (who orchestrated the conspiracy), would rule the world and finally better their archrivals, the Rothschilds. The problem, we are informed, is that Princess Di wouldn't marry Clinton, so she needed to be eliminated. Perhaps he was too preoccupied with Monica to notice Diana.
The mythologist Joseph Campbell once observed: "Why should it be that whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination." That's not quite right. Thinking is a combination of imagination and facts (and pseudo "factoids"). For example, what evidence do these cyber-conspiratorialists offer for their theories? They begin with the "fact" that everyone knows that the Rothschilds and Rockefellers have been competing to take over the world. Then they note that in July, 1996, Amschel Rothschild was "murdered" in Paris, on the anniversary of the "murder" of John D. Rockefeller III. In February 1997, Pamela Harriman, U.S. ambassador to France and a major financial supporter of Al Gore (controlled by the Rothschilds), was "murdered" in Paris. Di was "murdered" on a sacred section of the Paris highway called Pont de l'Alma, from which is derived the word "Pontiff," or "Pope," and is also an ancient site dating back to the time of the Merovingian kings in the sixth and seventh centuries. Before this, Pont de l'Alma had been a pagan sacrificial site. One translation has it meaning "bridge of the soul," another as "passage of nourishment." Since all true European royalty is descended from the Merovingians, themselves descendants from Christ (see, for example, the book The Hanover Plot by Hugh Schonfield), the tunnel in which Princess Di was murdered is spectacularly well connected to history. Oh, and don't forget, TWA Flight 800 was Paris-bound before it was "shot down," and among its victims were 60 French nationals and eight members of the French Secret Police.
TRUTH AND ILLUSION
Okay, so most of us don't buy into such wild speculations about cabalistic plots to take over the world, but why not? Because we have a knowledge filter that, unlike George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wool? , helps us discriminate between truth and illusion. Most of the time the knowledge filter works quite well. We can tell the difference between truth and illusion, and when we can't there is usually a good reason for it--a magician is trying to fool us, or we choose to be fooled. Think of the knowledge filter as a mental module that screens incoming ideas for their veracity. It works by comparing new facts and ideas with what we already know from previous experiences.
Society too has knowledge filters. Newspapers, magazines, radio, and television networks have journalistic standards and ethics that ask the same sorts of questions our personal knowledge filters ask. You rarely see an unopposed guest on Nightline , for example. There is always another perspective to a story, a point-counterpoint to most assertions. Medicine and science have a built-in knowledge filter called the peer-review system. In order to get a paper published in a medical or scientific journal it must be read by several of your colleagues. Rarely is a paper immediately accepted for publication. Most are rejected on first submission, and those that are published usually go through numerous resubmissions, or are published in journals of lower reputation. Errors are weeded out, faulty reasoning is exposed, inappropriate conclusions are rebuffed. And since the reviewers remain anonymous, the critiques can sometimes be quite harsh. This is no place for the thin-skinned.
But after centuries of constructing knowledge filters in the various fields of information dispersal, something has gone terribly wrong. Ideas are doing end-runs around the normal channels of communication, via what promises to be the most powerful source of knowledge diffusion in history--the Internet. Good ideas, bad ideas, interesting ideas, and wacky ideas stream through cyberspace into our computers at breathtaking speed. On one level that's good. Recall what the printing press did for the accelerating rate of knowledge growth. In religion it made everyone his or her own priest; in science it made everyone his or her own scholar. The Protestant Reformation and Scientific Revolution were the result. The telegraph, telephone, radio, and television had similar impacts. The problem is that it takes time for the knowledge filters to be implemented. There are no standards on the Internet, no peer review, and no editors fact-checking a story before publication. Matt Drudge's Internet gossip column is a case in point. This "Walter Winchell" of the Web is considered by many to be the king of cybergossip -- post first and ask questions later. Sometimes he scoops the big boys with breaking stories that turn out true, other times he receives letters from attorneys threatening libel suits. Drudge summed it up with a statement to USA Today : "I don't give a damn what the bureau chief's going to think. I don't have one." And that's the point.
The result of this new everyone-their-own publisher is a mind-blurring potpourri of factoids and theory-mongering for the choosing. But how do we choose? I don't have time to check out all the sources and evidence for these ideas, do you? How do you know the government isn't hiding the bodies of aliens from another planet, or that the CIA did not smuggle drugs into the streets of Los Angeles, or that a secret branch of the government didn't invent AIDS to decimate the gay and black populations? After all, the government has lied to us so often in the past (and who knows how much more they haven't admitted) that it sometimes seems like anything is possible. Maybe Kurt Cobain was murdered. Maybe the Du Pont family maneuvered Congress to make marijuana illegal for fear that cannabis would supplant many of their own manufactured chemicals. Maybe the KKK really does run Snapple (see the "slave" ship on its label). I'm skeptical of all of these claims, but short of conducting my own investigations into each and every case, how can I know for sure?
HOW THE KNOWLEDGE FILTER WORKS
Let's begin with a simple example of how one's knowledge filter works where truth and illusion overlap--dreams. When we are asleep the knowledge filter is off and dreams seem as real as our waking experiences. When we first wake up and our minds are in a fog, the line between truth and illusion is blurry. But with time it clears and we can reflect with amusement about what once seemed so real. We can discriminate between truth and illusion with dreams because our knowledge filter compares them with reality. For some people, however, their knowledge filters never engage and their dreams become reality, as in a significant percentage of alien abduction claims.
While we are awake our knowledge filters are hard at work comparing new images in the world with old images in memory. When you do a doubletake of someone's face, your knowledge filter is making lightning-fast comparisons of specific features of that face with all the faces in your memory. The knowledge filter then declares "match" or "no match." Ideas are treated much the same way. Recall the last time you encountered a get-rich scheme that seemed to good to be true. It probably was, but until you get burned the knowledge filter has no database from which to compare. Thus, most of us fall for such schemes at least once. Someone recently sent me a plan on how I can make beaucoup bucks in the Asian stock market through a company called "Financial Astrology." It seems that the forecasts of a professional "Financial Astrologer" were 71 percent and 74 percent accurate for the past two quarters respectively. For "only" $395 I can get her next picks. So why don't I mail my check or credit card number in their postage-paid return envelope? Because my knowledge filter has heard of schemes like this before--predict the rise or fall of eight stocks that will generate a possible 256 different outcomes (2 8 ). Mail these 256 outcomes to a large database, keeping track of who gets what combination. Assuming a stock has an equal chance of going up or down, for every group of 256 recipients, one person on average will get a letter with all predictions correct, 7 people will have 7 of the 8 correct and 28 will have 6 out of 8 correct. Mail letters to those who have received only your correct picks and ask them to send in their money. Clever, huh?
TRUTH AND ILLUSION IN MEDICINE
Things get more complicated with medical and scientific ideas. Answers to our knowledge filter's questions are not always obvious. The facts do not just speak for themselves. Experts disagree. How are nonexperts to know what to think? Is coffee bad for you or not? Do breast implants cause degenerative tissue disease or don't they? Should we use air bags or shouldn't we? Is the hole in the ozone caused by pollution or isn't it? Is there a greenhouse effect warming the earth, or is this warming trend just part of the ongoing variation in global temperatures? Just what is the carrying capacity of the earth--are we already past it and on our way to doomsday, or are we nowhere near it and able to handle another ten billion souls?
If traditional medicine controversies befog our knowledge filters, then alternative medicine claims cause them to cloud over altogether. If you want to experience the alternative medical movement at its epicenter attend a Whole Life Expo. Cures for everything from AIDS and cancer to baldness and impotency are offered, along with massages, chiropractic adjustments, acupuncture, acupressure, iridology, yoga, dowsing, channeling, aura readings, homeopathy, hypnosis, herbalism, aromatherapy, oxygen therapy, past-life regression therapy, and even future life progression therapy. Seminars at a recent Los Angeles convention included "How to Improve Your Eyesight Without Glasses, Contact Lenses, or Surgery," "Healing with Sound," "Your Aura Colors--What They Say About You," "How Your Past Lives Are Influencing You Now," "Channeled Insights From the Dolphins," and "Cosmic Orgasm for Enlightenment," where you will "learn how to have orgasms so intense, so cosmic that with each climax you come back a new, better, happier person." Beam me up Scotty!
Do people really go for this stuff?. They do, to the tame of billions of dollars a year. Why? Because traditional medicine, as marvelous as it is, is still incapable of curing AIDS, cancer, and many other life-threatening diseases. Traditional medicine doesn't offer "whole" human experiences involving one's psychological being or "spiritual" needs. Even when successful, many traditional medical practices are harsh, expensive, and delivered like automotive repair. Alternative services proliferate when the mainstream products fail to meet the needs of customers. No one knows this better than Deepak Chopra, a traditional medical doctor turned alternative medical guru (and author, novelist, poet, screenplay writer, lecturer, CD-ROM producer, and regular talk show guest). His success may be attributed to any number of factors--his medical credentials, his seeming polymathic mastery of such abstruse sciences as quantum mechanics, his Indian accent, his marketing acumen--the most important being that he meets an apparently unfulfilled need in millions of people that is not being met by traditional medicine. Take a trip to his Center for Well Being, nestled in a cozy corner of old town La Jolla that hugs the jagged cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and you'll see what I mean. Wholesomely attractive women in California casual wear greet you at the welcome desk. An organic juice and salad bar invites you to first pass through the bookstore that is nothing short of a Chopra Shrine offering all manner of nostrums not to be found on the shelves of your local pharmacy. Incense and massage oil call forth primal memories of smells and feelings that shut out real-world stresses and anxieties. Books on love and life and lust bring a sense that here is to be found Something Special. I don't recall getting these same feelings at my local Kaiser. When was the last time your HMO told you "Bring your mind into balance and your body will follow." Can Western medicine claim "the 5,000 year old healing traditions of Ayurveda which address the full range of human experience"? Have you ever seen a medical brochure with anything resembling the following offer?: "This mind body connection holds the potential for not only freedom from disease, but a higher state of health. By enlivening our inner healer, balance, wholeness, and well being can be restored." This is feel-good medicine. Large, multistoried hospitals with computers, instruments, and faceless physicians who grudgingly give you eight minutes of their time (the average doctor visit) amounts to feel-bad medicine.
Something is amiss here. A recent survey of the nation's 126 medical schools found that 34 of them offer course electives in alternative medicine. In 1991, the National Institutes of Health established an Office of Alternative Medicine to test such claims. Why don't we have an Office of Alternative Airlines, where they test planes with one wing? Because regular airlines' success rate is so remarkably high compared to other forms of transportation that there is no public demand for it. Modern medicine cannot claim such success rates. Frankly, there is no way I would ever go to Doc Chopra before I would go to Doc Kaiser, and all of the alternative medical claims I have taken the time to investigate turned out to be total bunk. But I can understand why those who have been let down by the medical establishment, or who face certain death from a disease on which their doctors simply put a doomsday clock are tempted by such alluring offers. Our personal knowledge filters are simply not equipped to deal with such complex medical claims. That's why we need more and better science.
PUTTING THE SCIENCE KNOWLEDGE FILTER TO THE TEST
The best knowledge filter ever invented is science. Flawed as it is at times, the methods developed over the past four centuries were specifically designed to help us avoid errors in our thinking. As an example of how the science knowledge filter works in a very simple and straight-forward manner (as a demonstration, not as a controlled experiment), on Monday, November 9, 1998, James Randi and I tested a Chinese psychic healer named Dr. Kam Yuen from Shaolin West International (in Canoga Park, California), an "Institute of Martial Arts and Natural Medicine." According to his card, Yuen is a doctor of "Chinese Energetic Medicine, Chiropractic, Homeopathic Medicine," as well as a "Nutritional Consultant."
Dr. Yuen's organization contacted Randi in order to be tested for the million-dollar challenge the James Ranch Educational Foundation offers. The test was arranged through the NBC television show Extra! . Randi was the principal investigator in the experiment. Dr. Fleishman was the attending physician who would monitor the patients for pain, while my role was to monitor Dr. Fleishman and the other people involved to ensure that proper experimental controls were employed.
The claim was that Dr. Yuen can heal people, in a matter of seconds, of intense pain and illness of virtually any kind. He stands or sits in front of the person, stares at them intensely, waves his hands and fingers around in a ersatz-Kung Fu style for a few seconds, and, chango presto, the healing is completed. Patients, we are told, suddenly feel better. How do you test such a claim?
With the help of a glitzy health club on Los Angeles' trendy west side, Extra! arranged to find, with the assistance of Dr. Fleishman, five people who had noticeable and constant pain of a kind that could be easily recognized if there were any changes. Two alternates were requested. One was supplied and utilized. Each of the six subjects (five for the test and one alternate) were screened before the test by Dr. Fleishman and myself, with Randi and cameras present. Each subject selected a number that they then attached to their clothing.
#1. Mary had lower back pain caused by scoliosis. She had pain to the touch that went down her right leg. On a scale of 1-10, she rated her pain as a 4 or 5.
#2. Gary had neuropathy-caused pain in his feet, especially the left foot, causing numbness in his toes and pain and a burning sensation in the ankle. He rated his pain as a 4.
#3. Nadine had carpel tunnel syndrome that causes a tingling sensation and numbness in the fingers after about five seconds of pressure applied to the wrist.
#4. Paula had an inflamed tendon and adjacent nerve that, when pressed, caused pain rated as a 7 to the touch.
#5. Don had severe pain in his right knee, which he rated as a 10 when Dr. Fleishman pressed on a particularly tender spot.
#6. (Alternate #1). Miranda had lower back and hip pain, tender to the touch, which she rated as a 5.
For the test, Dr. Yuen was brought in and introduced to the five subjects seated in front of him. He sat in a chair about five feet away. Each of them informed Dr. Yuen of their problem and pain. The subjects were seated very close to each other--only about an inch apart, but he claimed it would not matter and that he could heal each person individually. The subjects were numbered 1-5 from left to right. All five were blindfolded using a Randi-approved blindfold called the "Mindfold Relaxation Mask," that prevented the subjects from knowing which one Dr. Yuen would be healing.
Dr. Yuen then selected a number from an envelope to determine which subject he would heal for that trial. By chance alone he then would have a 20 percent probability of a match between his healing attempt and a blindfolded subject's reporting that they felt better. Of course, this protocol was not as tight as we would have liked it to be, since it was entirely possible that more or less than one each time would report a change, and that the change could be better or worse. But Dr. Yuen made it quite clear that he could isolate a single patient, cause a reduction in pain, and that he could do this five out of five times. So that was the test we were running as a preliminary to try for the million dollars.
Trial One . Mary, #1, reported a reduction in her lower back pain, from a 4/5 to a 2, and Nadine, #3, reported a dramatic improvement in the numbness in her fingers, from five seconds to the onset of symptoms in the pre-exam, to 30 seconds in this trial, and the numbness was significantly less. Dr. Yuen had selected Paula, #4, to work on. She reported no change at all and her pain remained the same at 7. This ended the formal test since Dr. Yuen claimed he could get five out of five, and he failed the first trial.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE BORDERLANDS OF SCIENCE by MICHAEL SHERMER. Copyright © 2001 by Michael Shermer. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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