— Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
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A foreign publisher of my first book confessed that he could not sleep for three nights after reading it, so troubled was he by what he saw as its cold, bleak message. Others have asked me how I can bear to get up in the mornings. – Page 5
But such very proper purging of saccharine false purpose; such laudable tough-mindedness in the debunking of cosmic sentimentality must not be confused with a loss of personal hope. – Page 5
I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic. – Page 8
The genes of a species can be thought of as a description of ancestral worlds, a ‘Genetic Book of the Dead’. – Page 8
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. – Page 12
The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. In other words, it is overwhelmingly probable that you are dead. In spite of these odds, you will notice that you are, as a matter of fact, alive. – Page 14
before, the idea that thoughts do not reside in particular places in the brain but are shifting patterns of activity over its surface, units which recruit neighbouring units into populations becoming the same thought, competing in Darwinian fashion with rival populations thinking alternative thoughts. – Page 20
The Krebs cycle, the 9-toothed cogwheel that is largely responsible for making energy available to us, turns over at up to 100 revolutions per second, duplicated thousands of times in every cell. – Page 21
The impulses to awe, reverence and wonder which led Blake to mysticism (and lesser figures to paranormal superstition, as we shall see) are precisely those that lead others of us to science. Our interpretation is different but what excites us is the same. The mystic is content to bask in the wonder and revel in a mystery that we were not ‘meant’ to understand. The scientist feels the same wonder but is restless, not content; recognizes the mystery as profound, then adds, ‘But we’re working on it.’ – Page 30
Carl Sagan, – Page 30
A voguish fad sees science as only one of many cultural myths, no more true nor valid than the myths of any other culture. – Page 31
Perhaps the best policy for the archaeologists would be to declare themselves a religion, with DNA fingerprints their sacramental totem. – Page 33
Science fiction may tinker with the laws of nature, advisedly and preferably one law at a time, but it cannot abolish lawfulness itself and remain good science fiction. – Page 44
Science progresses by correcting its mistakes, and makes no secret of what it still does not understand. – Page 47
In fact, you can learn to be an expert connoisseur of music without being able to play a note on any instrument. Of course, music would come to a halt if nobody ever learned to play it. But if everybody grew up thinking that music was synonymous with playing it, think how relatively impoverished many lives would be. Couldn’t we learn to think of science in the same way? – Page 53
David Deutsch’s astonishing and disturbing book, The Fabric of Reality – Page 69
It is possible to demonstrate that the apparently single tone of a particular instrument is a rewoven construct of the brain, summing up sine waves. The demonstration works as follows. – Page 94
The entire set of vibrations sums up into a single wiggly line on the graph of air pressure against time, as recorded by your eardrum. – Page 95
The song is not informing the female but manipulating her. It is not so much changing what the female knows as directly changing the internal physiological state of her brain. It is acting like a drug. – Page 104
This is not only because scientists value reaching the truth above winning a case. Judges, and decision-takers in general, might be better decision-takers if they were more adept in the arts of statistical reasoning and probability assessment. – Page 145
Note, accordingly, how little it means to say something like ‘Neptune moves into Aquarius’. Aquarius is a miscellaneous set of stars all at different distances from us which are unconnected with each other except that they constitute a (meaningless) pattern when seen from a certain (not particularly special) place in the galaxy (here). A constellation is not an entity at all, and so not the kind of thing that Neptune, or anything else, can sensibly be said to ‘move into’. The shape of a constellation, moreover, is ephemeral. A million years ago our Homo erectus ancestors gazed out nightly (no light pollution then, unless it came from that species’ brilliant innovation, the camp fire) at a set of very different constellations. A million years hence, our descendants will see yet other shapes in the sky and we already know exactly how these will look. This is the sort of detailed prediction that astronomers, but not astrologers, can make. And-again by contrast with astrological predictions-it will be correct. – Page 148
The stars have larger agendas in which the preoccupations of human pettiness do not figure. – Page 149
If you think about it for a moment, isn’t this a form of discriminatory labelling rather like the cultural stereotypes which many of us nowadays find objectionable? I can imagine a Monty Python sketch in which a newspaper publishes a daily column something like this: Germans: It is in your nature to be hard-working and methodical, which should serve you well at work today. In your personal relationships, especially this evening, you will need to curb your natural tendency to obey orders. – Page 152
both kinds of discrimination encourage prejudiced handling of people as types rather than as individuals. – Page 152
There is no known physical mechanism whereby the position of distant heavenly bodies at the moment of your birth could exert any causal influence on your nature or your destiny. – Page 154
First, the forecasts, or character-readings, are so bland, vague and general that they fit almost anybody and any circumstance. People normally read only their own horoscope in the newspaper. If they forced themselves to read the other ones they’d be far less impressed with the accuracy of their own. Second, people remember the hits and overlook the misses. If there is one sentence in a paragraph-long horoscope which seems to strike home, you notice that particular sentence while your eye skims unseeingly over all the other sentences. Even if people do notice a strikingly wrong forecast, it is quite likely to be chalked up as an interesting exception or anomaly rather than as an indication that the whole thing might be baloney. – Page 157
If a paranormalist could really give a properly researched demonstration of telepathy (precognition, psychokinesis, reincarnation, perpetual motion, whatever it is) he would be the discoverer of a totally new principle, unknown to physical science. The discoverer of the new energy field that links mind to mind in telepathy, or of the new fundamental force that moves objects without trickery around a table-top, deserves a Nobel Prize, and would probably get one. – Page 162
Clarke’s Third Law does not work in reverse. Given that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’, it does not follow that any magical claim that anybody may make at any time is indistinguishable from a technological advance that will come in the future.’ – Page 167
To put it mildly, the hypothesis that he was a liar (or a lunatic, or a hallucinating fantasist, or that he was researching the credulity of Oxford dons) seemed more probable than the alternative hypothesis that all three of his far-fetched stories were true. – Page 168
Scottish philosopher David Hume, which seems to me unassailable: … no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish. – Page 169
Fraud, illusion, trickery, hallucination, honest mistake or outright lies-the combination adds up to such a probable alternative that I shall always doubt casual observations or secondhand stories that seem to suggest the catastrophic overthrow of existing science. Existing science will undoubtedly be overthrown; not, however, by casual anecdotes or performances on television, but by rigorous research, repeated, dissected and repeated again. – Page 171
It is easy to see why natural selection-the survival of the fittest-might penalize an experimental and sceptical turn of mind and favour simple credulity in children. – Page 176
Human children need to be credulous for a similar reason. They are information caterpillars. – Page 177
An active readiness to be deceived can be called childish because it is common-and defensible-among children. I suspect that its persistence in adults stems from a hankering after, indeed a pining for, the lost securities and comforts of childhood. The point was well put in 1986 by that great writer of popular science and science fiction Isaac Asimov: ‘Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.’ – Page 179
The adult world may seem a cold and empty place, with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels-guardian or garden variety. But there are also no devils, no hellfire, no wicked witches, no ghosts, no haunted houses, no daemonic possession, no bogeymen or ogres. Yes, Teddy and Dolly turn out not to be really alive. But there are warm, live, speaking, thinking, adult bedfellows to hold, and many of us find it a more rewarding kind of love than the childish affection for stuffed toys, however soft and cuddly they may be. Not to grow up properly is to retain our ‘caterpillar’ quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). – Page 179
The quality of childhood that I am trying to pin down is not pure gullibility but a complex combination of gullibility coupled with its opposite-stubborn persistence in a belief, once acquired. The full recipe, then, is extreme early gullibility followed by equally obstinate subsequent unshakeability. – Page 182
The quantity to keep bearing in mind is the number of opportunities for coincidence that would have been thought, if they had occurred, just as remarkable as the one that actually did occur. – Page 198
Each one of us, though only a single person, none the less amounts to a very large population of opportunities for coincidence. – Page 200
But the negative occurrences, the failures to coincide, are not noticed and not reported. – Page 201
As a Darwinian, I want to suggest that our willingness to be impressed at apparently uncanny coincidence (which is a case of our willingness to see pattern where there is none) is related to the typical population size of our ancestors and the relative poverty of their everyday experience. – Page 222
Medawar also calls attention to the notorious fondness of mystics for ‘energy’ and ‘vibrations’, technical terms misused to create the illusion of scientific content where there is no content of any kind. – Page 232
And no, reason and logic are not masculine instruments of oppression. To suggest that they are is an insult to women, as Steven Pinker has said: Among the claims of ‘difference feminists’ are that women do not engage in abstract linear reasoning, that they do not treat ideas with skepticism or evaluate them through rigorous debate, that they do not argue from general moral principles, and other insults. – Page 239
Within each of those separate gene pools, natural selection favours those genes that cooperate within their own gene pool, as we have seen. But it also favours those genes that are good at surviving alongside the consequences of the other gene pools in the rainforest-the trees, vines, monkeys, dung beetles, wood lice and soil bacteria. In the long run this may make the whole forest look like a single harmonious whole, with each unit pulling for the benefit of all, every tree and every soil mite, even every predator and every parasite, playing its part in one big, happy family. Once again, this is a tempting way of looking at it. Once again, it is lazy-bad poetic science. A much truer vision, still poetic science but (it is the purpose of this chapter to persuade you) good poetic science, sees the forest as an anarchistic federation of selfish genes, each selected as being good at surviving within its own gene pool against the background of the environment provided by all the others. – Page 274
the opposition ‘combat versus cooperation’ is the wrong dichotomy to stress. There is fundamental conflict at the level of the genes. But since the environments of genes are dominated by each other, cooperation and ‘networking’ arise automatically as a favoured manifestation of that conflict. – Page 279
Unlike Moore’s law for computers, there is no particular reason to think that the human brain will go on swelling. In order for this to happen, large-brained individuals have to have more children than small-brained individuals. It isn’t obvious that this is now happening. It must have happened during our ancestral past, otherwise our brains would not have grown as they did. – Page 354
I’ll give the clearest example I can come up with of the kind of thing it might have been, without for a moment committing myself to the view that this was the actual one that inaugurated the spiral. My clear example is language. – Page 361
The individual organism is not exactly an illusion. It is too concrete for that. But it is a secondary, derived phenomenon, cobbled together as a consequence of the actions of fundamentally separate, even warring, agents. I shan’t develop the idea but just float, following Dennett and Blackmore, the idea of a comparison with memes. Perhaps the subjective ‘I’, the person that I feel myself to be, is the same kind of semi-illusion. The mind is a collection of fundamentally independent, even warring, agents. – Page 377
In his 1844 essay ‘The Poet’, the philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘Language is fossil poetry.’ If not all of our words, certainly a great number of them, began as metaphors. Lewis mentions ‘attend’ as having once meant ‘stretch’. If I attend to you, I stretch my ears towards you. I ‘grasp’ your meaning as you ‘cover’ your topic and ‘drive home’ your ‘point’. We ‘go into’ a subject, ‘open up’ a ‘line’ of thought. I have deliberately chosen cases whose metaphoric ancestry is recent and therefore accessible. Philological scholars will delve deeper (see what I mean?) and show that even words whose origins are less obvious were once metaphors, perhaps in a dead (get it?) language. The word language itself comes from the Latin for tongue. – Page 379
In English we use the word ‘mammoth’ as an adjective, synonymous with very large. Could our ancestors’ breakthrough into semantics have come when some pre-sapient poetic genius, struggling to convey the idea of ‘large’ in some quite different context hit upon the idea of imitating, or drawing, a mammoth? Could that have been the kind of software advance that nudged humanity into an explosion of software/ hardware co-evolution? – Page 380