How to distinguish a real scientist from a charlatan? How are delusions born? How to draw the line between science and pseudoscience? Do you believe in the paranormal? Why have the aliens still not contacted? Is time travel real? Is cryopreservation possible? How to treat cloning? Can we live forever? What is happiness and can it be measured? Does God exist? Well-known popularizer of science Michael Shermer answers these questions in his book "The Skeptic: A Rational View of the World." The book was published in Russian by the publishing house "Alpina non-fiction". "Lenta.ru" publishes a fragment of the text.
Show me the body. So-called eyewitness accounts of Bigfoot, Nessie, and Ogopogo ignite our imaginations. But you can't do science on bikes alone
In 1895, the French novelist Anatole France expressed the opinion: "An accident is a pseudonym for God when he does not want to sign his own name." Perhaps it is, but as another connoisseur of human souls observed, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Therefore, although they say that celebrities go into another world in three, this is certainly a coincidence - the loss in January 2003 of the authors of two famous biomystifications, Douglas Herrick, the father of the ridiculous rabbit (half-rabbit, half-deer), and Ray Wallace, the ancestor of the less absurd Bigfoot (stories about which are often taken at face value).
The rabbit amuses us with cheap tricks - shooting licenses sold only to owners of IQs from 50 to 72, bottles of unique rabbit milk, and such variations as krollepand. Bigfoot, although sometimes caustic, is much more believable for a simple evolutionary reason: large hairy great apes live in African forests today, and at least one species of giant apes - Gigantopithecus - lived several hundred thousand years ago side by side with our ancestors.
The Wallace family after his death admitted that the tireless joker was playing a trick on us, but can it happen that Bigfoot really exists? Indisputably. After all, while Bigfoot proponents do not dispute the fact that Wallace walked on giant-sized wooden blocks, they quite rightly note that tales of a giant yeti in the Himalayas and Indian legends of a sasquatch roaming the northeastern Pacific coast appeared much before Wallace's 1958 draw.
In fact, for most of the 20th century, there was every reason to reason and look for Bigfoot, and along with it the inhabitants of Loch Ness, Champlain and Okanagan (respectively, Nessie, Champy and Ogopogo) and even aliens. Science deals with the explainable, so our limited research resources were not spent on crawling, but on these creatures at one time they could well. Why don't they deserve it now?
The study of animals whose existence has yet to be confirmed is called cryptozoology. The term was coined by Belgian zoologist Bernard Evelmans in the late 1950s. Cryptids, or "hidden animals", begin life as footprints in the mud, blurry photographs, low-resolution videos, and countless tales of dull footfall at night. There are many types of cryptids: the aforementioned giant monkeys and lake monsters, sea dragons, huge octopus snakes, birds and even surviving dinosaurs (the most famous of which is the mokele mbembe, which, according to legend, is hiding in the lakes of West Africa).
Promotional video:
Yeti "photography"
Cryptids are worthy of our attention already because scientists have made many successful discoveries, relying on folklore and tales - so we cannot deny all such stories in advance. Among the most famous examples are the gorilla in 1847 (and the mountain gorilla in 1902), the giant panda in 1869, the Komodo dragon in 1912, the bonobos (or pygmy chimpanzee) in 1929, the bigmouth shark in 1976, the giant gecko in 1984, beaked whale in 1991, Vietnamese bovine Saola bull in 1992. Cryptozoologists are especially proud of the 1938 capture of coelacanth, an ancient fish that was thought to be extinct in the Cretaceous.
Although reports of the discovery of new species of beetles and bacteria are regularly published in biological chronicles, these examples are striking in their novelty, size and similarity with the aforementioned cousins-cryptids - Bigfoot, Nessie, etc. However, note that all these examples have something in common: material body! To recognize a new species, you need to have a holotype - a sample of this species, which can be used to compose a detailed description, take photographs, sculpt models and publish professional scientific analysis.
It is good to start research with tales, but by themselves they are not the basis for the recognition of a new species. According to Frank Sulloway, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley (in a words that should be raised as a principle), “Science does not make stories. A dozen tales is no better than one, and a hundred is no better than a dozen."
Every time I encounter Bigfoot hunters, Nessie seekers, or alien abduction victims, I apply Sulloway's rule. These are all exciting stories, not credible science. After centuries of searching for chimeras, it is most appropriate to remain skeptical until the body is shown to you.
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Let's deal with the dead. "Transition" to exposing the tricks of popular mediums
Man is a storytelling creature looking for patterns. Like all other animals, we evolved under the influence of events in nature, feeling for patterns that are important for our survival. However, unlike animals, we tell stories about patterns found. Sometimes these patterns are real, sometimes they are illusory.
One of the illusions of meaningful regularity, based on anecdotal evidence and giving rise to countless stories, is the ability attributed to mediums to communicate with the dead. The most famous medium of our time is former ballroom dance instructor John Edward, host of the hit Sci Fi Network show Transition and author of the New York Times bestselling book One Last Time. His show is so popular that he will soon begin competing with Oprah for daytime TV viewers.
What does Edward's communication with the dead look like? In a nutshell, it's a hoax. He starts by picking a section of the audience with about 20 people and says something like, “I feel like George is here. I don’t know who it is. Maybe George recently died, or he is here in the hall, or it is someone you know. " Of course, such general words inevitably "hit the mark." Now that he has identified his passenger (the street scammer's word for the intended victim), the "reading" begins using three methods:
1. Cold reading, where you literally "read" someone "cold", that is, knowing nothing about the person. You ask tons of questions, make tons of statements, and look for leads. "So, I can feel the name on P, please, who is it?", "He shows me something red, please, what is it?" and so on. Most of the statements are wrong. If the participants have enough time, they shake their heads - no. But Edward speaks so quickly that they only have time to confirm hits. As B. Skinner has shown in experiments demonstrating superstitious behavior, it is enough to occasionally give reinforcement so that the participants remain confident in the existence of a pattern (there are enough rare winnings so that people do not stick to slot machines). A journalistic investigation I conducted for the New York radio station WABC showedthat Edward made about one statement per second in the first minute of his speech, as he sprinkled names, dates, descriptions, illnesses, relatives, and the like. You had to stop recording and rewind to keep up with him.
2. A warm reading that uses psychological principles that apply to almost anyone. Survivors of the death of a loved one often wear some kind of accessory that reminds of this person. For example, Katie Couric wore a deceased husband's ring on a chain on the Today TV show. Mediums know about such elements of mourning and ask: "Do you have a ring or some kind of jewelry?" Edward also casually assesses the cause of death by concentrating on the chest or head area and then clarifying whether the death was slow or unexpected. “He's telling me something about chest pain,” Edward says and, if there is a positive nod, continues. - He had cancer, right? I see slow death. " If he gets a nod, it's a hit. If subject hesitates, Edward hastily switches to a heart attack. If it's a headhe will first assume a stroke or head injury from a fall or car accident.
Frame: the film "Exorcist"
3. Hot reading, when the medium obtains information about the subject in advance. One of the participants, who received an interpretation in Edward's TV program, says: “While we were waiting for the opening of the studio,“assistant producers”were constantly spinning around us. They told us to be quiet and must have overheard a lot. I think it's all stuffed with bugs. All this time we talked about those deceased relatives with whom we hoped to communicate. And it all happened in the midst of hanging microphones and switched on cameras."
But in most cases, mediums do not need to eavesdrop. They achieve success because they touch on a topic that can hardly be more tragic and irrevocable - death. Sooner or later, everyone is faced with this inevitability, and we are most vulnerable at such times. Deep thought about this reality makes even the most rational and reserved of us succumb to emotions.
This is the reason for the danger and immorality of mediums. They hunt for the experiences of people facing loss. And as bereavement therapists know, the best way to cope with death is to face it. Death is part of life, and imagining that the dead gather in a New York studio to scratch tongues with a former ballroom dance teacher is a mockery of the mind and human feelings of the living.
The drift of parapsychology. Why most scientists don't believe in extrasensory perception and telepathy
In the first half of the 19th century, the theory of evolution wandered in speculation until Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace gathered enough facts and discovered the driving mechanism of the evolutionary machine - natural selection.
In the first half of the 20th century, the theory of continental drift, proposed in 1915 by the German scientist Alfred Wegener, loomed on the outskirts of scientific knowledge until the 1960s, when mid-ocean ridges were discovered, geomagnetic changes corresponding to the movements of continental plates, and most importantly - tectonics plates as an engine of continents.
Facts and theory. Evidence and mechanism. These are the two pillars of real science. If there are no facts and evidence, the theory and mechanism are not needed to explain. If there is no theory and mechanism, facts and evidence drift aimlessly in the endless sea.
For more than a century they have been talking about the existence of parapsychological phenomena. At the end of the 19th century, organizations like the Society for Parapsychological Research emerged to study these phenomena using a rigorous scientific method, they were supported by many world-class scientists, including even Wallace (Darwin was skeptical). In the twentieth century, parapsychology periodically seeped into serious academic research programs, from the experiments of Joseph Rhine at Duke University in the 1920s to the research of Daryl Bem at Cornell University in the 1990s.
For example, in January 1994, Boehm and his late fellow parapsychologist at the University of Edinburgh, Charles Honorton, published the article “Does Telepathy Exist? Reproducible Evidence of Anomalous Communication”in the prestigious peer-reviewed Psychological Bulletin. Based on a meta-analysis of 40 published experiments, the authors concluded that "the reproducibility and effect sizes achieved using a particular experimental method - the ganzfeld procedure - are sufficient to present this data to the entire psychological community." (Meta-analysis is a statistical approach that combines results from multiple studies to see the overall effect, even if the individual studies were not statistically significant. In the Ganzfeld procedure, the “receiver” is in the same room under conditions of sensory isolation with halves of ping-pong balls in front of his eyes, with white noise in his headphones, while the “sender” telepathically transmits images or video from another room.)
Despite the found evidence of telepathy (subjects gave correct answers 35% of the time versus 25%, as expected by random guessing), Boehm and Honorton complained: “Most academic psychologists still do not recognize the existence of parapsychological phenomena, abnormal processes of transmission of energy or information (telepathy or other types of extrasensory perception), which today have no explanation in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms."
Why don't scientists recognize parapsychology? Daryl Boehm has a brilliant reputation for being a meticulous experimenter, and he has presented us with statistically significant results. Shouldn't scientists be open-minded and ready to change their minds when new data and evidence emerge? The reason for skepticism is that we need both reproducible data and a viable theory, and in parapsychological research there is neither.
"Photograph" of the Loch Ness Monster
Data. Both meta-analysis and the ganzfeld technique raise big questions. Ray Hyman of the University of Oregon found inconsistencies in the experimental procedures of various Ganzfeld experiments (which were heaped together in Boehm's meta-analysis as if the procedures were the same), and Boehm's statistical test (Stouffer's Z-score) was not suitable for such a heterogeneous dataset … Hyman also found flaws in the randomization of the target image that led to a biased choice: “All correct hits occur on the second and subsequent appearance of the image. If you take hits at the first appearance of images, the result is no different from a random one. Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire conducted a meta-analysis of another 30 Ganzfeld experiments and found no evidence of telepathy, from which he concluded,that telepathic data is irreproducible. Boehm responded with a dozen additional statistically significant, in his opinion, ganzfeld experiments and prepared the results of new studies for publication. In general, there is an endless debate about data.
Theory. The deeper reason for scientific skepticism about parapsychology - which will not disappear even if statistically more significant data emerges - is that there is no theory to explain how it works. Until parapsychologists can explain how thoughts generated by neurons in the sender's brain can penetrate the skull into the recipient's brain, skepticism is a normal reaction. So it was with evolution without natural selection, and with continental drift without plate tectonics. If the facts speak of the existence of the phenomenon of telepathy (and I'm not sure that this is so), this requires an explanation, and we need a causal mechanism.
Parapsychology is destined to drift on the fringes of science until it finds its Darwin.
Translation by Anna Petrova
