Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

—Thomas H. Huxley

There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly alright; they’re the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.

—Carl Sagan

Before we discuss evolution and the fossil record in detail, we must clear up a number of misconceptions about what science is—and isn’t. Many people get their image of science from Hollywood stereotypes of the “mad scientist,” fiendishly plotting some diabolical creation with a room full of bubbling beakers and sparking electrical apparatuses. Invariably, the plot concludes with some sort of “Frankenstein” message that it’s not nice for science to mess with Mother Nature. Even the positive stereotypes are not much better, with nerdy characters like Jimmy Neutron and Poindexter (always wearing glasses and the obligatory white lab coat) using the same bubbling beakers and sparking equipment but trying to invent something new or good.

In reality, scientists are just people like you and me. Most of us don’t wear lab coats (I don’t) or work with bubbling beakers or sparking Van de Graaff generators (unless they are chemists or physicists who actually work with that equipment). Most scientists are not geniuses either. It is true that, on average, scientists tend to be better educated than the typical person on the street, but that education is a necessity to learn all the information that allows a scientist to make discoveries. Still, there are geniuses, like Thomas Edison, who had minimal formal education (he only attended school for a few months) but a natural instinct for invention. So education is not always required if you have talent to compensate. Scientists are not inherently good or evil; nor are they trying to create Frankensteins, invent the next superweapon, or tamper with the operations of nature. Most are ordinary people who have the interest and curiosity to solve some problem in nature, and rarely do they discover anything that might threaten humanity.

Scientists are not characterized by who they are or what they wear, but what they do and how they do it. As Carl Sagan put it, “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” Scientists are defined not by their lab equipment but by the tools and assumptions they use to understand nature—the scientific method. The scientific method is mentioned even in elementary school science classes, yet most of the public still doesn’t understand it (possibly because the mad scientist Hollywood stereotype is more powerful than the bland material from school). The scientific method involves making observations about the natural world, then coming up with ideas or insights (hypotheses) to explain them. In that regard, the scientific method is similar to many other human endeavors, such as mythology and folk medicine, which observe something and try to come up with a story for it. But the big difference is that scientists must then test their hypotheses. They must try to find some additional observations or experiments that shoot their idea down (falsify it) or support it (corroborate it). If the observations falsify the hypothesis, then scientists must start over again with a new hypothesis or recheck their observations and make sure that the falsification is correct. If the observations are consistent with the hypothesis, then it is corroborated, but it is not proven true. Instead, the scientific community must continue to keep looking for more observations to test the hypothesis further (fig. 1.1).

FIGURE 1.1. Scientists cannot revert to supernaturalism and invoke miracles, or their explanations will lead nowhere. (Cartoon courtesy Sidney Harris)

This is where the public most misunderstands the scientific method. As many philosophers of science (such as Karl Popper) have shown, this cycle of setting up, testing, and falsifying hypotheses is unending. Scientific hypotheses must always be tentative and subject to further testing and can never be regarded as finally true or proven. Science is not about finding final truth, only about testing and refining better and better hypotheses so these hypotheses approach what we think is true about the world. Anytime scientists stop testing and trying to falsify their hypotheses, they also stop doing science.

One of the reasons for this is the nature of testing hypotheses. Lots of people think that science is purely inductive, making observation after observation until some general scientific law can be inferred. It is true that scientists must start with observations, but they do not arrive at scientific principles from induction. As Charles Darwin himself put it in 1861,

About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service! (1903, 1:195)

Darwin correctly points out that all useful observations must be made in the framework of a hypothesis. What data are needed to test the hypothesis? How will they be useful in falsifying or corroborating it? Instead of inducing general principles of nature, most science is about deductive reasoning: we set up (deduce) a hypothesis, then try to test it. Philosophers use the cumbersome term “hypothetico-deductive method” to describe this process, but it is simple when you think about it.

The difference between inductive generalization and deductive hypothesis testing is easy to illustrate. Suppose we make the inductive statement that “all swans are white.” We could observe thousands of swans for many years but never prove that statement true. All it takes is one nonwhite swan and we can easily falsify this hypothesis. Indeed, there are black swans (fig. 1.2) in Australia and elsewhere, so the statement has been falsified. As Karl Popper pointed out, there is an asymmetry between verification and falsification. It is easy to falsify something; all we need is one well-supported observation that proves the hypothesis wrong. But we can never prove something true (verify it). Additional corroborating observations may support the hypothesis but never finally prove it true. As Popper put it in the title of a book, science is about conjectures and refutations.

FIGURE 1.2. Not all swans are white. This is the Australian black swan. (Photo by the author)

Most people think that science is about finding the final truth about the world and are surprised to find that science never proves something finally true. But that’s the way the scientific method works, as philosophers of science have long ago demonstrated about the logic of the scientific method. Science is not about final truth or “facts”; it is only about continually testing and trying to falsify our hypotheses until they are extremely well supported. At that point, the hypothesis becomes a theory (as scientists use the term), which is a well-corroborated set of hypotheses that explain a larger part of our observations about the world. Some well-known and widely accepted theories are the theory of gravitation, the theory of relativity, the germ theory of disease, and of course, the theory of evolution.

As people, scientists must use common speech as well. An observation or explanation that is extremely well supported is a fact in everyday language (even though we technically cannot use the term within science). As we will discuss below, the evidence supporting the hypothesis that life has evolved (and is still evolving now) is so overwhelming that it is a fact in popular parlance. But the bigger problem is the different usages of the word “theory.” As we just explained, to a scientist, a theory is an extremely well-supported framework of hypotheses that explains a large part of nature. But the public uses the word entirely differently to describe some sort of wild idea or harebrained guess or conjecture, such as theories of how and why John F. Kennedy was assassinated, or how aliens landed in Area 51 in Nevada or Roswell, New Mexico, and the entire episode was covered up by the U.S. government.

This confusion between the scientific and vernacular use of the same word has been a common problem with misunderstanding what evolution is about. As Isaac Asimov put it, “Creationists make it sound as though a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.” For example, then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan (speaking about evolution during his 1980 campaign) said, “Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science—that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was.” Reagan (perhaps playing to his fundamentalist audience) was voicing the common confusion in the public mind about the two uses of the word “theory.” To scientists, a theory is extremely well supported, has survived hundreds of tests and potential falsifications, and is accepted as a valid explanation of the world. But Reagan is confusing that meaning with the everyday meaning of theory as a “wild harebrained scheme.” He is also showing his ignorance of another aspect of science. Science is always about challenging hypotheses and trying to test them and never reaches a point where a scientific idea is “believed” or is “infallible.” These are words used in dogmatic belief systems, not in science. If scientists stop challenging theories and hypotheses, they stop doing science.

There is also another public confusion embedded in this quote: the confusion between the fact of evolution and the theory of evolution. The idea that life has evolved (and we can still see it evolving) is as much a descriptive fact about nature as the fact that the sky is blue. This was already established long before Darwin and represents an empirical observation about nature, and it is no longer disputed within the scientific community. What Darwin provided was a theory that included a mechanism for evolution he called natural selection. There has always been debate within the biological sciences about whether that mechanism is sufficient to explain the fact that life has evolved and is evolving. Argument and dispute is good in science; it’s a sign that dogmas are being challenged and that no hypothesis is being accepted without question. But even if Darwin’s mechanism, the theory of natural selection, were to be rejected by scientists, it would not change the fact that life has evolved. It is comparable to the theory of gravitation. We still do not have a full understanding of the mechanism by which gravity works, but that does not change the fact that objects fall to the ground.

Science and Belief Systems

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.

—Carl Sagan

Humans have many systems of understanding and explaining the world besides science. In most cultures, religious beliefs provide the role of explaining how and why things work (“the gods did it”), and until the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, these beliefs tried to explain the physical and biological world. In some parts of the world, Marxism is the official “state religion,” and every aspect of life is subjected to “dialectical materialism” and viewed through a Marxist filter. Likewise, there are many organizations (some would call them “cults”) that explain the world through unusual perspectives, such as claiming that aliens are responsible for most of what we don’t understand. These belief systems are not necessarily good or bad, but they are not science, because they are not testable and their main ideas cannot be falsified. Whenever a religious or Marxist dogma is challenged by some observation, that inconvenient fact is explained away or dismissed or ignored altogether, because maintaining the belief system is more important than allowing any inconvenient facts to undermine it. Many people find great comfort in such belief systems. That’s fine, as long as they don’t call these ideas “scientific.” People around the world believe a wide variety of things, and they are entitled to do so. As long as they don’t endanger themselves or others, that’s OK.

The main exception, of course, is when a belief system is detrimental to the believers or to other people. There are cults of “snake handlers” in the Appalachians who caress poisonous rattlesnakes and copperheads during their religious ceremonies with the conviction that God will protect them from snakebite—and they are regularly bitten and killed (70 of these snake handlers have died from snakebites in the past 80 years, including the founder of the cult). In Darwinian terms, this belief system is so hazardous to the believers that they will eventually die out, and a harsh form of natural selection will weed out this self-destructive religion. There are cults that commit ritual suicide, such as Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple, whose members drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in the Guyana jungle, killing 913 people in 1978, or the Heaven’s Gate cult, with 39 people committing ritual suicide in 1997 at the urging of their leader, believing that aliens were about to take them to heaven. Likewise, there are ascetic monks who starve themselves to death or stare into the sun in search of enlightenment until they are blind; they, too, are harming themselves and endangering their own survival. Some would say that religious wars, such as the continual battles among Christians, Muslims, and Jews that have plagued the Middle East for over 1,000 years, or the Catholic-Protestant warfare in Ireland, or over much of Europe since the Reformation, or the horrors of the Inquisition, or the Muslim-Hindu wars in India since before Pakistan split away, are arguments that religious belief systems can be murderous and detrimental to the believers.

Many people who have strong belief systems that seem to conflict with science want it both ways. They accept their belief system in explaining most aspects of the world but still accept scientific explanations and advances where and when they need them. Some people in the Western world depend on modern scientific medicine for their improved health and chances of survival, yet they refuse to accept important aspects of science (fig. 1.3) that are a part of that great improvement in medicine (such as the rapid evolutionary change that makes viruses and bacteria dangerous to us each year). As Carl Sagan (1996:30) put it, “If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate.” Extreme fundamentalists push a strange model of the earth (discussed in chapter 3); they call it “flood geology”—yet, if they had any firsthand practical experience with real geology and accepted the results, they would see the absurdity of flood geology. More importantly, they would not benefit from the oil, coal, and natural gas that modern geology has provided all of us, and which flood geology would have no chance of discovering.

FIGURE 1.3. This Doonesbury cartoon eloquently expresses the inherent hypocrisy of the creationists, who try to have it both ways. They reject science and evolution, except when it benefits them. (Cartoon by Garry Trudeau, by permission of Universal Press Syndicate)

This is the strange situation in which we find ourselves. The modern world runs on science and technology, and our future economic and social well-being rely on continuing to make scientific and technological advances. Yet when extremists learn something from science that they don’t want to hear (like evolution), they reject the very system that has made their lives better and that they willingly accept in most other circumstances. As science educator Bill Nye the Science Guy put it, “The natural world is a package deal; you don’t get to select the facts which you like and which you don’t.” Or as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “When different experiments give you the same result, it is no longer subject to your opinion. That’s the good thing about science. It’s true, whether or not you believe in it. That’s why it works.”

There are a whole range of ideas that might be considered what Al Gore very aptly called “inconvenient truths”—scientific evidence that conflicts with our belief systems, whether it be climate change or evolution. But scientists have nothing to gain by telling us what we don’t want to hear, and they don’t win grant funds or societal approval by bearing bad news. Scientists are not killjoys or spoilsports by nature. Instead, they are obligated by the scientific method to report what the data tell them, no matter whether we like it or not. Instead, the incentives for most people is to tell you good news you want to hear, so if a scientist tells you an inconvenient truth, it is almost certainly because the scientist must do so. A very amusing web cartoon shows this through a series of panels that depict scientific advances that society did not appreciate, from Archimedes being killed by a Roman soldier, to Giordano Bruno being burned at the stake for saying the earth revolves around the sun, to Darwinian evolution, to Einsteinian relativity. The final panel says it best: “Science: if you ain’t pissin’ people off, you ain’t doing it right.”

Science is not perfect, of course. Scientists are human, and as humans, we do make mistakes or may develop things that could harm us (like releasing the gases that have led to the ozone hole, among other things). But without science, we would be back in the Dark Ages. The next time you hear a fundamentalist preaching about the “evils of science and evolution,” think hard: Would you rather go back to a world just a century or two ago (and still prevailing in many underdeveloped countries) when most children died before age two and many mothers died in childbirth; where the life expectancy was very short because many diseases were incurable; and where we had no conveniences like electricity, automobiles, airplanes, plastics, and telephones? For better or for worse, we now live in a scientific age, and most of us would not want to turn back time and renounce all the benefits that science has brought us.

Belly Buttons and Testability

What did Adam and Eve never have, yet they gave two of them to each of their children? Answer: parents.

—Old children’s riddle

A classic example of an untestable theory to explain nature was the Omphalos hypothesis of Philip Henry Gosse. He was a well-respected naturalist in early nineteenth-century England who had written best-selling books about natural history. He was also a very devout member of a Puritanical sect called the Plymouth Brethren. As a good naturalist, Gosse was finding more and more evidence that life had evolved, but as a biblical literalist, he was obligated to follow creationism. Gosse resolved his problems by publishing Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot in 1857, just two years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published. The curious term Omphalos means “belly button” or “navel” in Greek and refers to the common theological conundrum of the day: If Adam and Eve were specially created and did not have human parents (and therefore no umbilical cord), did they have navels or belly buttons? Many religious artists avoided this issue by painting Adam and Eve with a fig leaf not only over their genitalia but also over their midriffs. Gosse’s answer was yes, of course, Adam and Eve had navels. According to Gosse, God created nature to look as if it had a history, to look as if it had evolved, but in reality, nature was created quite recently. In order for the world to be “functional,” God would have created the earth with mountains and canyons, with trees that have growth rings, and with Adam and Eve with navels. No evidence that indicates the presumed age of the earth or events in the past can be taken at face value. In this manner, Gosse felt that he had solved his own dilemmas about the fact that nature appears to have evolved and that the earth was very old, and this solution allowed him to retain his creationist beliefs.

Naturally, an idea as bizarre as this didn’t go over very well with most religious people of the time, because it implies that God created a fake world and makes God into a deceiver, not a benevolent deity. Gosse’s son, Edmund Gosse, wrote in Father and Son (1907:92), “He offered it, with a glowing gesture, to atheists and Christians alike…. But alas! Atheists and Christians alike looked at it and laughed, and threw it away…even Charles Kingsley, for whom my father had expected the most instant appreciation, wrote that he could not…‘believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie.’ ”

More importantly, it is a classic example of a completely unfalsifiable theory of the world. No observation could ever prove it wrong, because everything looks as if it evolved, but it was just created to look that way! As described by Martin Gardner (1952:126), “Not the least of its remarkable virtues is that while it won not a single convert, it presented a theory so logically perfect, and so in accordance with geologic facts that no amount of scientific evidence will ever be able to refute it.” Some philosophers have argued that all of reality is an illusion, and it is perfectly logical to suggest that the world was created a few minutes ago, with everyone having memories of a past that doesn’t exist. Any memories you might have of the past were created in your head when you were created, just as the fossils were placed in the rocks to look as if they were from the ancient past. This idea is nicknamed “Last Thursdayism” by the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, as in “the world might have been created last Thursday—how would we know the difference?” Of course, this idea is just as untestable as Gosse’s original hypothesis.

Gosse had high hopes that his ideas would resolve the growing divide between natural history and religion, but he was ignored or ridiculed. Just two years later, Darwin’s book came out and made his ideas irrelevant. Gosse ended up an embittered old man whose natural history books were no longer important in a Darwinian world. His troubled later years were vividly described by his son, whose famous biography Father and Son (1907) is considered a classic of its genre.

One would think that such a bizarre and untestable idea, which was rejected and ridiculed even by the religious and devout in the days before Darwin, would never be revived. But modern creationists have brought in their own versions of the Omphalos hypothesis. When young-earth creationists are confronted with evidence that shows that galaxies are millions of light-years away and that their light is just reaching us after millions of years, they say that God created the universe as it is with the light from those galaxies already on the way! This seems like an extreme form of pretzel logic to explain away an inconvenient fact and salvage their cherished hypothesis.

The Omphalos story, however, raises an important point about our models of the world. If we want them to make sense and not violate what we have learned about nature, we have to be true to the conclusions to which nature leads us. We cannot twist and bend our explanations into pretzels like the Omphalos hypothesis just to save some cherished belief. We will discuss how some creationists have done just this by giving strange and contorted explanations for things that are most simply explained by evolution.

Natural and Supernatural

For all the controversies over these issues, however, there is a basic philosophical point on which the evolutionary biologists all agree. Some say new mechanisms have to be introduced and others say the old mechanisms are adequate, but nobody with a reputation to lose proposes to invoke a supernatural creator or a mystical “life force” to help out with the difficulties. The theory in question is a theory of naturalistic evolution, which means that it absolutely rules out any miraculous or supernatural intervention at any point. Everything is conclusively presumed to have happened through purely material mechanisms that are in principle accessible to scientific investigation, whether they have yet been discovered or not.

—Phillip Johnson

Another issue in the philosophy of science has come up as a result of the creationism controversy. Berkeley lawyer (not a scientist or a theologian or a philosopher of science) Phillip Johnson criticizes science because it makes the “naturalistic assumption.” In other words, science assumes only natural, not supernatural, processes in the attempt to understand nature. To Johnson, this is unfair; if science excludes the supernatural even before the debate can begin, then it excludes the possibility of any conclusion but evolution. In his book Darwin on Trial, Johnson writes, “Naturalism assumes the entire realm of nature to be a closed system of material causes and effects, which cannot be influenced by anything from ‘outside.’ Naturalism does not explicitly deny the mere existence of God, but it does deny that a supernatural being could in any way influence natural events, such as evolution, or communicate with natural creatures like ourselves” (Johnson 1991:114–115). Johnson’s attack concludes by arguing that if supernatural causes were allowed, other conclusions besides evolution (such as creationism) might be reached.

This argument is so confused and disingenuous that it almost doesn’t require rebuttal. As Pennock (1999:190) points out, Johnson has conflated two entirely different naturalistic concepts. Ontological or metaphysical naturalism (the kind mentioned in the Johnson quotes above) makes the bold claim that the natural is all that exists and that there is no supernatural. That is an interesting philosophical issue, but that does not reflect what scientists are doing. Instead, scientists practice methodological naturalism, where they use naturalistic assumptions to understand the world but make no philosophical commitment as to whether the supernatural exists or not. Scientists don’t exclude God from their hypotheses because they are inherently atheistic or unwilling to consider the existence of God; they simply cannot consider supernatural events in their hypotheses. Why not? Because, as we saw with Gosse’s Omphalos hypothesis, once you introduce the supernatural to a scientific hypothesis, there is no way to falsify or test it. Once you introduce the untestable supernatural explanation, you are no longer doing science—it’s a “science stopper.” We might want to say, “It is this way because God willed it so” or “And then a miracle occurs” (fig. 1.1), and for some religious people, that is all that need be said. But scientists are not allowed to do this, because it is completely untestable and therefore outside the realm of science. If scientists do offer evidence that falsifies the statement that “God did it this way,” do you think that fundamentalists would accept the evidence? As we will demonstrate throughout this book, the evidence for evolution supplies just such a falsification, but creationists must deny it to salvage their untestable hypotheses. Ironically, Johnson spends a whole chapter (chapter 5) in Darwin on Trial talking about Karl Popper and the falsifiability criterion, but he completely misses the point as to why it requires methodological naturalism for science to work in the first place.

In fact, there have been many scientific tests of supernatural and paranormal explanations of things, including parapsychology, ESP, divination, prophecy, and astrology. All of these nonscientific ideas have been falsified when subjected to the scrutiny of scientific investigation (see Isaak 2006; also 2002 for a review). Johnson loudly complains that the supernatural has been unfairly excluded from the debate, but this is clearly not true. Every time the supernatural has been investigated by scientific methods, it has failed the test.

As Isaak (2002) put it,

Indeed, many supernatural explanations are rejected not because they are supernatural but because they cannot or do not lead anywhere. It is possible to come up with any number of possible explanations for anything—lost socks could be caused by extradimensional vortices which our observations prevent from forming; hiccups could be caused by evil spirits inside us trying to escape; stock market fluctuations could be caused by the secret manipulations of powerful extraterrestrials. Scientists reject such claims on the grounds of parsimony. All of those claims are possible, but they require adding complicated entities which there is no adequate evidence for. To make matters worse, the nature of those entities effectively prevents investigation of them, and the impossibility of investigation prevents us from learning anything new about them. We cannot conclude that any of those explanations are wrong. But from a scientific standpoint, they are worse than wrong; they are useless.

Johnson also shows that he has not read much about the history or philosophy of science (which is odd, considering that the whole debate is about a central point in the philosophy of science). Methodological naturalism arose out of necessity more than 400 years ago when early scientists tried to make sense of their universe and realized that as long as the prevailing attitude was “God did it this way—end of story,” our scientific understanding of nature would go nowhere. Yet all of these early scientists were religious men, not atheists trying to dispose of God. Indeed, Isaac Newton is probably more responsible for scientific naturalism than anyone. Newtonian physics showed how the universe could function completely without supernatural intervention. Yet Newton spent far more of his time and energy exploring religious questions than doing physics! In the centuries that followed, methodological naturalism became ingrained in science. When the great mathematician and astronomer Pierre Laplace presented a copy of his 1799 book on celestial mechanics to Napoleon, who asked where God fit in, Laplace replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis.” He wasn’t saying that he was an atheist—only that supernatural intervention did nothing to help us understand the motion of the heavenly bodies and that the entire enterprise would become unscientific if supernaturalism were introduced.

Finally, Johnson makes another assumption that reveals his bigotry and lack of understanding of religion. He writes (1991:115) that “scientific naturalism makes the same point by starting with the assumption that science, which studies only the natural, is our only reliable path to knowledge. God who can never do anything that makes a difference, and of whom we can have no reliable knowledge, is of no importance to us.” As Pennock (1999:192) points out, this may describe the fundamentalist deity who is constantly intervening in nature and performing miracles, but not the deity of theistic evolutionists who are willing to say God used evolution as his tool to modify nature. Nor does it jibe with the Deistic view (the religious attitude of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and the Founding Fathers that the fundamentalists like to quote), which claims that God created the universe long ago but no longer interferes with his creation. In addition, many religious believers (including many Christians) view God as a universal life force or mystical unity, not an omniscient, omnipotent old man with a beard who constantly meddles with the universe. To Johnson, all these people (including the Founding Fathers) are virtual atheists. Apparently, if they don’t believe in an activist deity, they don’t qualify as being religious!

Science, Pseudoscience, and Baloney Detection

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

—Carl Sagan

There’s a sucker born every minute.

—Phineas T. Barnum

Science may provide some of the most powerful explanations of the universe we have and may have provided humans with the benefits of modern civilization, but people still have an ambivalent attitude toward science. They readily accept most of its benefits, but they are easily suckered into believing “weird things,” or what is known as pseudoscience, as well. Pseudoscience tries to masquerade as science (knowing the prestige that we now attach to scientific things), but when you examine the claims closely, they do not hold up to scientific scrutiny. Humans appreciate many of the advantages of living in the scientific age, but apparently they also have a deep-felt need for answers to questions that science cannot answer, but for which pseudoscience will willingly sell them an answer. Sometimes these beliefs are harmless, but often they involve the pseudoscience practitioner swindling the gullible victims out of valuable things, such as their time, energy, and money. Some pseudoscientists are clearly con artists, while others truly believe in their lies, but they will take your money just the same. Unfortunately, there are aspects of pseudoscience that are not just expensive but deadly to the follower. These parasites prey on people in all cultures and all walks of life, feeding the need for the mystical and miraculous, yet causing more harm than the little bit of psychological good feeling and reassurance that they may temporarily provide.

Ironically, most humans are already equipped with a skeptical filter for such con artists in many parts of life. When we bargain for items, or negotiate a price or a contract, we expect the bargaining to be somewhat adversarial and tricky. We are constantly on the lookout for someone who might cheat or shortchange us. We are bombarded with commercials everywhere we go, yet our skeptical filters tend to screen out most commercial appeals, just like a good spam filter on our computer keeps our email from being overwhelmed by junk. Caveat emptor—“let the buyer beware”—is a slogan we normally live by in such negotiations. Yet when it comes to claims that appeal to our sense of mystery, or to our need to connect with the unknown or with dead loved ones, humans readily suspend these skeptical filters and will believe (and pay for) almost anything, as long as it makes them feel better. That’s when we are marks to be swindled. The world is full of con artists who will take your money and violate your trust by appealing to your gullibility—if you let them.

Thus, even though American citizens benefit from one of the highest standards of living and one of the best educational systems in the world, poll after poll shows that a high percentage of Americans still believe in UFOs, in ESP, in astrology, in Bigfoot and Nessie and the Yeti, in psychic phenomena, in palm reading and tarot cards, and so on. It doesn’t seem to matter that the evidence for UFOs or astrology or psychic powers has been debunked and discredited over and over again. As humans, we apparently have a need to believe such things. It is understandable how a “psychic” who claims to be able to talk to your dead relatives or an astrology column that predicts your future has a deep-seated appeal to people who would otherwise not believe such drivel. But it is harder to understand why people are sucked into belief systems, such as the anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers, who claim that the Holocaust never happened or did not actually kill 6 million Jews and many more Poles, Gypsies, and other groups; or the beliefs in UFOs and alien abductions, which sound bizarre when we hear them, yet many people still accept that these phenomena are real; or the widespread acceptance of cryptozoology and its weird and nonbiological catalogue of beasts that have never been adequately documented, from the Loch Ness monster to Bigfoot to the Yeti. It may be that we have a need for things that are mystical and unexplained by the mundane, naturalistic process of science, but how anti-Semitism, UFOs, and the Loch Ness monster fill that need is beyond me.

If we want to avoid deception and try to determine what is likely to be true and what is clearly baloney (the magicians and entertainers Penn & Teller used the more direct term “bullshit” in their TV series of the same name), we need a set of “baloney filters” to enhance our skeptical screening of all the ideas we hear about, good, bad, and indifferent. Carl Sagan (1996:10) gives a list of tools for his “baloney detection kit,” and Michael Shermer (1997:48) provides an interesting list of many of the common fallacies of reasoning employed by pseudoscience, so it is not necessary to repeat those lists here. However, there are several more important principles that we all need to remember to avoid being duped by pseudoscience.

1. Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

This simple statement by Carl Sagan (a paraphrase of earlier versions of the same statement) makes an important point. Everyday science produces hundreds of small hypotheses that only require a small extension of what is already known to test their validity. But crackpots, fringe scientists, and pseudoscientists are well known for making extraordinary claims about the world and arguing that they are true. These include the many believers in UFOs and aliens, whose evidence is flimsy at best, but they are firmly convinced (as are a majority of Americans, according to polls) that such UFOs have landed here repeatedly and that aliens have interacted with humans. Never mind the fact that such “aliens” seem only to make themselves known to gullible individuals with no other witnesses present or that the “physical evidence” for aliens landing in Area 51 in Nevada or in Roswell, New Mexico, has long ago been explained as caused by secret military experiments. Just think for a moment: If you were part of a superior alien culture and able to travel between galaxies, would you only pick up a few isolated individuals out in the boonies, or would you contact the heads of the governments on this planet and let your existence be known? Think about our extraordinary network of satellites and radar; we can detect virtually anything moving in the skies anywhere in the world now—yet we have never received a reliable indication of a UFO, only these unverifiable claims made by random plane or ground observers and photos that have been documented as fakes. Nearly everyone carries a cell phone camera with them at all times nowadays, yet there are no better photos than before—in fact, the quality of the evidence is getting worse now that everyone has a camera. Certainly, it is possible that aliens have visited us, but such an extraordinary claim requires higher levels of proof than ordinary science, and the evidence provided so far is pretty flimsy.

Likewise, the claim that odd “monsters” live in remote places and have escaped scientific attention (cryptozoology) is an extraordinary claim that requires more than the usual level of documentation required to describe a new species of insect. Take, for example, the Loch Ness monster. We give great credence to a few blurry photos (most of which have now turned out to be frauds) or to eyewitness accounts (which only show how easily the human mind is deceived), but every thorough study of Loch Ness has failed to produce anything conclusive. No one seems willing to answer the harder questions: If there is a plesiosaur or similar beast living in Loch Ness, how does it survive alone? Large beasts like the “monster” that have supposedly lived for centuries would require a whole population of such beasts, yet there is no conclusive evidence that even one exists. The believers also ignore another inconvenient geologic fact: Loch Ness is a glacial valley that was filled with ice 20,000 years ago and only now has water in it during our current interglacial period. So where did the monster live before it became trapped in Loch Ness? And if there were enough of them to form a population, why have they never been found in any other body of water anywhere in the world?

2. Burden of Proof

3. Anecdotes Do Not Make Science

As storytelling animals, humans are prone to believe accounts told as stories by “witnesses.” The telemarketers know that if they get a handful of celebrities or sincere-sounding customers (or actors) to praise their products, we will believe these people and go out and buy their merchandise, even if there have been no careful scientific studies or FDA approvals to back up their claims. One or two anecdotes may sound convincing, and the experience of your back-fence neighbor may be interesting, but to truly evaluate claims made in science (and elsewhere), you need a detailed study with dozens or hundreds of cases. In addition, there must be a “control” group that does not receive the treatment but a placebo instead, yet think that they did get the real medicine (so the power of suggestion is not responsible for the alleged benefit). Anything approved by the FDA has met this standard; most stuff sold in the “new age” or “health food” stores has not been so carefully studied. When it has been analyzed, there usually turn out to be either marginal benefits or none at all. (The con artists and snake oil salesmen will take your money all the same.) If you listen closely to the language of the ads for some of these “medicines,” it carefully avoids the terminology of medicine and pharmacology, and instead uses phrases likes “supports thyroid health” or “promotes healthy bladder function.” These phrases are not true medicinal claims, and so they are not subject to FDA regulations. Nonetheless, the great majority of these products that have been scientifically analyzed turn out to be worthless and a waste of money, and every once in a while, they turn out to be harmful or even deadly.

4. Arguments from Authority and Credential Mongering

Many people try to win arguments by quoting some “authority” on the subject in an attempt to intimidate and silence their opponents. Sometimes they are accurately quoting people who really are experts in a subject, but more often than not the quotation is out of context and does not support their point at all, or the authority is really not that authoritative. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, this is the usual problem with creationist “quote mining”: when you go back and look at the source, the quote is out of context, and means just the opposite of what they claim, or the source itself is outdated or not very credible. As Carl Sagan puts it, there are no true authorities; there are people with expertise in certain areas, but nobody is an authority in more than a narrow range of human knowledge.

One of the principal symbols of authority in scholarship and science is the Ph.D. But you don’t need a Ph.D. to do good science, and not all people who have Ph.D.s are good scientists either. As those of us who have gone through the ordeal know, a Ph.D. only proves that you can survive a grueling test of endurance in doing research and writing a dissertation on a very narrow topic. It doesn’t prove that you are smarter than anyone else or more qualified to render an opinion than anyone else. Because earning a Ph.D. requires enormous focus on a specific area, many people with that degree have actually lost a lot of their scholarly breadth and knowledge of other fields in the process of focusing on their theses.

In particular, it is common for people making extraordinary claims (like creationism or alien abductions or psychic powers) to wear a Ph.D. (if they have one) like a badge, advertise it prominently on their book covers, and feature it in their biographies. They know that it will impress and awe the listener or reader into thinking they are smarter than anyone else or more qualified to pronounce on a topic. Nonsense! Unless the claimant has earned a Ph.D. in the subject being discussed, the degree is entirely irrelevant to the controversy. For example, leading creationists include the late Duane Gish, who had a doctorate in biochemistry, and the late Henry Morris, who had a doctorate in hydraulic engineering. However, they both earned their degrees almost 50 years ago, so they were not up-to-date in these rapidly changing fields that they have not practiced in decades. If they stuck to discussing just those topics, they might be halfway believable, but all of their criticisms focus on the fossil record, geology, thermodynamics, and so on—topics in which they have absolutely no firsthand experience, published research, or training. Their entire knowledge of these fields (vividly demonstrated by reading their books) consists of skimming and misquoting popular books by real experts in those fields who did the actual work, not going out and doing the research themselves or publishing in peer-reviewed journals. They are no more qualified to comment on paleontology or geology, based on their irrelevant degrees, than they are qualified to fix a car or critique music theory! Yet they always flaunt their Ph.D.s to awe the masses and try to intimidate their opponents. The same goes for creationists like Jonathan Sarfati (physical chemistry), Michael Behe (biochemistry), and Jonathan Wells (cell biology)—none of those subjects gives them any background in fossils or paleontology, and none of these scientists has published in any peer-reviewed paleontological journals, so they are complete amateurs when it comes to fossils.

5. Bold Statements and Scientific-Sounding Language Do Not Make It Science

People who want to promote their radical ideas are prone to exaggeration and famous for making amazing pronouncements, such as “a milestone in human history” or “the greatest discovery since Copernicus” or “a revolution in human thinking.” Our baloney detection alarms should go off automatically when we hear politicians or actors try to hype policies or movies that turn out to be much less than claimed. They should also scream in alarm when we hear people making claims about human knowledge or science that seem overblown.

Another strategy to make a wild idea acceptable to the mainstream is to cloak it in the language of science. This cashes in on the goodwill and credibility that science has in our culture and attempts to make outrageous ideas more believable. For example, when the creationists realized that they could not pass off their religious beliefs in public school science classrooms as science, they began calling themselves “creation-scientists” and eliminating the overt references to God in their public school textbooks (but the religious motivation and source of the ideas is still transparently obvious). Several churches (including Christian Science and Scientology) appropriate the aura of scientific authority by using the word “science” in their names, even though they are not falsifiable and do not fit the criteria of science as discussed here. Similarly, the snake oils and nostrums peddled by the telemarketers and by the “New Age” alternative medicine fanatics are often described in what appears to be scientific lingo, but when you examine it closely, they are not actually following scientific protocols or the scientific method. The are the famous examples of television commercials that show an actor in a white lab coat, often with a stethoscope around his neck, saying, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV” and then promoting a product that he has no medical training to analyze. However, just the appearance of scientific and medical authority is sufficient to sway people to buy his product.

6. Correlation Is Not Causation

Human beings are programmed by our genes to see patterns in nature and to recognize connections between things. Yet sometimes these instincts lead us astray. We wear a particular item of clothing one day, and our team wins; we forget to do it once, and they lose. Then we are convinced that wearing that item is “lucky” for the team, and we wear it every time, no matter whether the team wins or loses. We cannot shake this superstition, and no amount of falsification from future failed predictions will change it. Many people believe in “earthquake weather,” because they recall one or two very strong earthquakes that happened to occur on hot mornings. They are not dissuaded when you point out that the daily temperature fluctuation due to weather is not felt more than a few feet underground, while earthquakes come from faults that are many miles underground. One or two coincidences are enough to reinforce this “urban myth.” Seismologists have done rigorous statistical analysis again and again and have shown conclusively that earthquakes of all sizes occur in any weather and at any time of day or night. The most common form of this superstition is known as the post hoc, ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because of this”) fallacy.

Scientists are also prone to believe that there is some connection when they see one or two positive results in a row. But as scientists, we are trained early in our careers to study the mathematics of probability and statistics, so that we can analyze in a rigorous way whether an apparent connection between events is truly significant or still could be due to chance. Although scientists still use hunches and intuition to guess that phenomena might be related, once they try to publish their ideas in a peer-reviewed journal, they had better do the appropriate statistics, or their article will be quickly rejected!

A good example of this was the furor caused in the 1980s, when paleontologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski (1984, 1986) made the claim that there were mass extinction events every 26 million years and that some of them were caused by impacts of asteroids from space. Astronomers quickly jumped on the bandwagon even before the data were published, with “explanations” for this extinction “periodicity” that ranged from a mysterious Planet X to an undetected companion star to the sun called “Nemesis” to the motions of the solar system within the galactic plane to periodic pulses of mantle overturn triggering global volcanism. But, as the original data were scrutinized more closely, the correlation began to fall apart. Several statistical analyses showed that there was no correlation at all; many of the “extinction peaks” turned out not to be real or were millions of years too early or too late to have been part of a regular astronomical cycle; and most were found not to have any evidence of an extraterrestrial impact (see Prothero 1994a). Sepkoski (1989) made one last valiant attempt to answer the critics and salvage the hypothesis, but Stanley (1990) gave a much simpler explanation that better fits the data. In a truly gigantic mass extinction, there are so few survivors living in the aftermath that the world is populated with opportunistic “weed-like” species, ecological generalists that thrive in disturbed habitats with little or no competition. Eventually, however, more complicated, specialized species and ecosystems re-evolve and replace those that the mass extinction wiped out. It apparently takes about 20 million years or more for the planet to recover from a mass extinction and for all these extinction-prone specialized species to evolve again. If some great disturbance happens only a million years after a mass extinction, you would never see it, because there are few species that are vulnerable to extinction. Only after enough time has passed do they evolve; this is why the mass extinctions described by Raup and Sepkoski were spaced roughly 20–30 million years apart, but no shorter.

7. The World Is Not Black and White, but Shades of Gray

Also known as the “either-or” fallacy or the “false dilemma,” this is a common strategy in which the arguer tries to present his or her case as a choice between one extreme and another. This thought is reflected in the famous slogans “If you are not with us, you’re agin’ us” or “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.” By dichotomizing their world into only two positions, they create the false dilemma that evidence against one point of view is evidence for another. This is the principal tactic of the creationists, who try to create the false dilemma that they are the only true Christians, and anyone who does not agree with them is an atheist.

But as mature adults know, most matters in life are not black and white but shades of gray. Arguments against one position do not necessarily support the opposite position. Creationism is not the only form of Christianity, and there are many Christian evolutionists. Indeed, there is a wide spectrum of beliefs, from literalistic young-earth creationists to “day-age creationists,” who allow the “days” in Genesis to be geologic ages, to theistic evolutionists and so on. As in any other aspect of life, there are many possible answers or possible viewpoints, and we should not be suckered into the dilemma of believing that there are only two alternatives.

A corollary of the “false dilemma” principle is what Shermer (1997:52) calls “the unexplained is not inexplicable.” Many people (such as the “intelligent design” creationists discussed in the next chapter) argue that if they cannot explain something, then nobody can. This is not only arrogant, but it is built on the false “either-or” premise that if no explanation is currently available, then the phenomenon will never be explained. But just because we don’t have an explanation now doesn’t mean that we won’t find one someday. In the meantime, we do science and knowledge a disservice by defaulting to supernatural explanations simply because we still have an unsolved mystery in front of us. Scientists are used to dealing with uncertainty and realizing that their answers are tentative and subject to change, but the general public seems to prefer the comfort of any kind of answer (even if it is wrong) to the insecurity of living with the uncertain and unknown. As H. L. Mencken put it, “For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

8. Special Pleading and Ad Hoc Hypotheses

In science, when an observation comes up that appears to falsify your hypothesis, it is a good idea to examine the observation closely or run the experiment again, to be sure that it is real. If the contradictory data are sound, then the original hypothesis is falsified, dead, kaput. It is time to throw it out and come up with a new, possibly better hypothesis.

In the case of many nonscientific belief systems, from religions to mysticism to Marxism, it does not work this way. Belief systems often have a profound emotional and mystical significance for people. They exist in spite of contradictory observations, and people refuse to let rationality or the facts shake them. As Tertullian put it, “I believe because it is incredible.” Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, wrote, “To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see is black, if the Church so decides it.” That’s fine, if you are willing to accept that system and suspend disbelief of some of their claims for a more important benefit of emotional and mystical connections.

If you pass off your belief system as science, however, you must play by the rules of science. When con artists try to sell you snake oil, and someone points out an inconvenient fact about it, the con artists will try to attack this fact or explain it away with an “after the fact” or ad hoc (Latin for “for this purpose”) explanation. If the snake oil fails to work, they might say “you didn’t use it right” or “it doesn’t work on days when the moon is full.” If the séance fails to contact the dead, the medium might scold the skeptic by saying, “you didn’t believe in it sufficiently” or “the room wasn’t dark enough” or “the spirits just don’t feel like talking today.” If we point out that there are millions of species on earth that could not have fit into the biblical Noah’s ark, the creationist tries to salvage their hypothesis by saying “only the created kinds were on board” or “insects and fish don’t count” or “God miraculously crammed all these animals into this tiny space, where they lived in harmony for 40 days and 40 nights” or some similar garbage.

As we shall see in the chapters that follow, ad hoc hypotheses are common when the conclusion is already accepted and the believer must find any explanation to wiggle out of inconvenient contradictory facts. But they are not acceptable in science. If the conclusion is a given and cannot be rejected or falsified, then it is no longer scientific.

9. Not All “Persecuted Geniuses” Are Right

People trying to promote wild ideas that seem crazy to us will often point to the persecution of Galileo (arrested and tried for advocating Copernican astronomy) or Alfred Wegener (ridiculed for his ideas about continental drift) and take solace in how these geniuses were eventually proven right. But as Carl Sagan (1996:64) put it, “The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” The annals of science are full of wild and crackpot notions that didn’t survive testing and were eventually abandoned, and they far outnumber those of the handful of “misunderstood geniuses” who were vindicated in the end.

These misunderstood geniuses often turn to Schopenhauer, who wrote, “All truths pass through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.” But Schopenhauer is wrong. Many revolutionary and radical ideas (such as Einstein’s theory of relativity) were never ridiculed or violently opposed. In the case of Einstein, his theories were mostly ignored as interesting but untested until scientific observations made in 1919 corroborated them.

Science is open to all sorts of ideas, from the conventional to the wacky. It doesn’t matter where they came from, but they all have to pass muster. If your ideology has failed the test of science, you can’t just claim you’re a misunderstood genius—it is more likely that your cherished hypothesis is just plain wrong. Scientists are too busy, and there are too many worthwhile and important scientific goals for them to pursue for them to waste their time testing and evaluating every wild scheme that comes along. The fringe element might wail that they are persecuted and misunderstood geniuses. But if they want to be taken seriously, they must play by the rules of science: get to know other scientists, exchange ideas, be willing to change your own ideas, present your results at scientific conferences, and submit them to the scrutiny of peer-reviewed journals and books. If your ideas can survive this rigorous gantlet, then they will get the attention of scientists that they deserve.

The list of logical and scientific fallacies goes on and on (see Sagan 1996:210–217; Shermer 1997:44–61), so I will not try to cover all of them here. As we review the scientific evidence discussed in the latter part of this book, we should always have in the back of our minds questions such as: How do we test this hypothesis? Is it falsifiable or unfalsifiable? Is the evidence strong enough to support an extraordinary claim? Is the claim supported by multiple cases and statistical testing, or is it just anecdotal? Does the arguer use quotations out of context or flaunt their credentials? Does the arguer present a false dilemma? Does the arguer attempt to rescue their failing belief system with special pleading and ad hoc hypotheses, or are they willing to accept that their conclusions might be wrong?

Follow the Evidence Wherever It May Lead

Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

—Thomas Henry Huxley

Belief systems are so powerful that many people have difficulty when the evidence begins to accumulate against them. As we just discussed, it’s human nature to cling to a cherished idea and not reject a belief system in the face of new evidence but to explain it away with ad hoc rationalizations. To many people, the comfort of the belief system is more important than the self-deception they are willing to employ to salvage it. Most of the time, we don’t worry about people who have their own beliefs, as long as they don’t try to impose them on us, or as long as their belief systems don’t lead to dangerous actions, such as flying airplanes into buildings.

It’s another thing when people reject scientific evidence because of their belief systems, yet keep claiming to be scientists. The American creationist movement is a good example of this. Proponents try to find as many members of their group as possible who have advanced degrees and then advertise these people prominently, as if the fact that a few of them passed through to the Ph.D. level of education makes them experts on everything. As we already discussed, the Ph.D. is irrelevant unless it is in the field of study that is being argued. Likewise, these creationist “authorities” almost always freely admit that they are driven by their fundamentalist religious views and reject evolution because their predetermined belief system forced them to. For example, in Ashton’s 2000 book, In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation, the “scientists” interviewed confess that they started out as fundamentalists, then wrestled with the evidence of evolution (usually not to any great depth), and then came back to their original belief system. I know of absolutely no scientists who rejected evolution on purely scientific evidence without the powerful force of religious fundamentalism operating behind the scenes. Instead, these creationist “scientists” all came to their conclusions because their religious beliefs demanded it, and afterward began to take seriously the phony “evidence” against evolution that we’ll discuss in the rest of the book.

By contrast, true scientists must reject a cherished belief if enough evidence goes against it. A classic example was the revolutionary idea of continental drift and plate tectonics, which swept through geology in the 1950s and 1960s, and by 1970 was as well established as any idea in science. The reactions of the geologic community say a lot about the sociology of science. The “Old Guard” who had a lot of time and research invested in fixed continents tended to be skeptical the longest, and many held out until the evidence became overwhelming. Eventually, they all had to concede their cherished beliefs were wrong. In contrast, the first to accept the new ideas were the “Young Turks,” mostly younger scientists (especially graduate students) who did not have emotional connections to the old ways of thinking and were more willing to try out new concepts.

One of the bravest examples of this process was the famous geologist Marshall Kay, who passed away just before I arrived at Columbia University to take classes from him. He had spent his entire life explaining the complexities of geology based on the assumption that continents did not move; he even published a major book in 1951 that detailed the nature of the thick sedimentary basins, assuming fixed continents. Yet when the evidence for plate tectonics and continental drift became overwhelming in the 1960s, he wholeheartedly embraced plate tectonics. Even though he was near retirement age, he began redoing his life’s work using the new concepts. Such intellectual honesty and bravery is an admirable and rare trait in humans. How many people do you know nearing retirement age who are willing to redo their entire life’s work because they’ve realized that the assumptions they followed for 50 years were wrong?

Richard Dawkins (2006) points to another admirable example. In his words,

It does happen. I have previously told the story of a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an undergraduate. For years he had passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artifact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said—with passion—“My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal—unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat.

Contrast this with the way in which creationists operate. Those who have actually looked closely at the overwhelming abundance of evidence for evolution have several choices: they can close their eyes and stop looking; they can wrestle with it and eventually deny what is self-evident to salvage their beliefs; they can distort it to fit their preconceptions; or they can face reality. A good example is Kurt Wise, who is famous as one of the few young-earth creationists with a legitimate background in paleontology; he actually got his Ph.D. at Harvard. But his advanced training did not lead him to creationism. In fact, he was raised with a fundamentalist background and describes in his autobiography (in the Ashton book cited above) how he wrestled with the inherent contradictions between paleontology and his fundamentalist beliefs in high school. He still had those doubts through his undergraduate days at the University of Chicago. He entered Harvard as a student of Stephen Jay Gould but apparently did not reveal his creationism to Gould or Harvard when he was admitted. I am not aware of what Gould thought when he found out that he had a creationist among his students, but several former Gould students have told me that their advisor was very fair minded and open to challenges. They speculate that Gould must either have thought that Wise would eventually see the problems with his creationist viewpoint or accepted him as a grand experiment in intellectual freedom. According to some of Gould’s students who knew Wise in graduate school, he was polite and participated in discussions (although he was considered very arrogant and standoffish), but he was clearly only going through the motions and was not really learning anything new or opening his mind to new ideas. Instead, as he told one of his fellow graduate students, he was treating his Harvard experience as a sort of “Monopoly” game, playing the part of paleontologist to get his degree but not taking any of it very seriously or really absorbing the implications of what he was studying—any more than “Monopoly” players are really bankers or landowners or go to jail.

What’s the point of going through the long ordeal of obtaining a Ph.D. if you’re never going to learn something new or be challenged and think hard about your beliefs? More importantly, if you’re doing all this work to obtain the degree but don’t believe in any of the stuff you said or wrote, isn’t that dishonest and fraudulent? Science is a social network based on trust and reputation, and nobody has time to constantly check the work of most other scientists to see if it was done honestly or if it is corrupted by biases and fraud. If someone like Kurt Wise is just going through the motions, how can other scientists trust whether he biased his data collection or analysis or whether he just made it up in order to fit his preconceptions? We will see elsewhere in this book how this kind of dishonest science is common among other creationists whose backgrounds are irrelevant to the stuff they are promoting, but the question is now relevant even with Harvard-trained scientists like Wise.

Armed with his Harvard Ph.D., Wise has become the most prominent creationist who actually has seen and studied real fossils and geology. But is he really a scientist by the standards we have just discussed? Apparently, his Harvard experience never caused him to truly examine his beliefs. In his autobiography, he freely admits that his entire creationist viewpoint comes from the literalistic interpretation of the Bible, not from actual scientific evidence, and that his belief system forces him to reject whatever he doesn’t want to accept. As he wrote in his autobiography (in Ashton 2000):

I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turned against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate.

No amount of evidence could ever turn him away from creationism? What kind of real scientist talks like this? If Marshall Kay and the Oxford professor mentioned above could learn from new evidence and reject their old beliefs (as good scientists are supposed to do), why can’t Kurt Wise?

I have no problem with his belief system. He’s entitled to believe whatever he wants. But when he completely rejects the data and methods of science in order to follow his rigid belief system, he’s not acting as a scientist anymore—he’s just another preacher. If he labeled his ideas as religiously inspired, that would be fine. But he continues to pretend that he is following the rules of science; he wears the label of scientist and promotes his particular brand of “science” to unsuspecting people who are impressed with his Harvard Ph.D. but don’t realize that he admits that he stopped doing science a long time ago.

As Dawkins (2006:323) puts it,