Introduction
Michael Shermer is mainly interested in understanding how science works as a system of
thought, as a social system and as a psychology of beliefs. His general field of study is
in the social sciences, and particularly how belief systems work. As the man behind
SKEPTIC Magazine, and Director of the Skeptics Society, he notes that his "engagement
with the paranormal, pseudoscience, fringe groups, cults and all sorts of wacky, X-files
stuff is not just to debunk, but to understand belief systems on the fringes work, in
order to understand how science works, and how mainstream beliefs work. Shermer works the
edges, the fringes, what he calls " the borderlands and the nonsense stuff."
In 1992 he founded Skeptic Magazine with a circulation 1,000, and now it's up to about
40,000. Ultimately Shermer wants to reach half a million readers, like Scientific
American, but, he notes, "that's a bit of a reach because selling ideas is much
harder than selling personalities and celebrities".
— JB
MICHAEL SHERMER is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Director of the
Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics
Lecture Series at Caltech, and the co host and producer of the 13-hour Fox Family
television series, Exploring the Unknown.
Shermer is the author of How We Believe: The Search For God In An Age Of Science; Why
People Believe Weird Things; and Teach Your Child Science. He is the coauthor of Denying
History: Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? and Teach Your
Child Math And Mathemagics.
He has appeared on such shows as 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Tom Snyder, Donahue,
Oprah, Sally, Lezza, Unsolved Mysteries, and other shows, as well as on documentaries
aired on A & E, Discovery, and The Learning Channel.
LINK: The Skeptics Society
Click Here for
Michael Shermer's Bio Page
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SCIENCE AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BELIEFS
EDGE: Why are you playing the edges; why bother to debunk, why spend your time exposing
people that are outright frauds, phonies, or who are merely self deluded?
MICHAEL SHERMER: Because it gives us better insight into Karl Popper's discussion of the
demarcation problem; that is, where do we draw the line between science and non- or
pseudoscience?
It turns out that it's a very complex problem. Popper's answer to that question was that
of false viability, what is the result when you put something to an empirical test? Well
that's nice, but what do you do with string theory then? It's never been tested, probably
can't be tested, yet it's mathematically elegant and theoretically beautiful. Is that
science? How about consciousness research? The kind of thing that people like Dan Dennett
and Pat and Paul Churchland do — is that philosophy, metaphysics, or science? That
kind of research is in a gray, borderland area. How about hypnosis? There's a whole range
of claims that people don't really question as to what they are and analyzing those claims
helps us gain insight into how science works.
EDGE: How is this implemented in your public communications?
SHERMER: We do two different things at Skeptic. We are social activists who don't believe
that intellectuals should just remain cloistered in their ivory towers (though those who
want to do so certainly can). And we believe in Darwin's dictum, as I like to call it,
that all observations must be for or against some view if they are to be of any service.
To take it even further, what are you going to do with those observations? You must
communicate it to people. If there's no communication to the general public, then doing
science or anything else is an utter waste of time. So I'm very discouraged and
disheartened when I hear scientists disparage science writing or fall into the trap of
propagating the pecking order, with physics and mathematics at the top and the social
sciences at the bottom, if present at all. I think that such infighting is unnecessary.
The debunking stuff that we do is, as Stephen Jay Gould said, like trash collecting, a
dirty job but somebody's got to do it. That's our job. But to me, that's secondary. It's
not particularly interesting to know and to expose phony psychics. In general, the exposé
of out and out fraud is not that interesting, because it's just somebody lying. What's
more interesting is self-deception; how leaders of cults come to believe that they can
actually do what they think they can do. How does someone believe in cold fusion or zero
point energy, or any of those wildly speculative alternative energy theories? Obviously
there's pretty good room for skepticism on a lot of these claims yet these people really
believe that this stuff is there. How do they become such fervent believers? Scientists of
course do the same thing, they are passionate believers in their theories, and the
interesting question is why? Thus, the second thing we study is why people believe weird
things, have certain belief systems and how those systems work. Including in science.
The one thing we've learned from the last three decades of research is that science is
socially and culturally embedded and thus biased. Still, it's the best system we have for
understanding causality in all realms, in all fields. So despite the fact that it's loaded
with biases, there is a real world out there that we can know and the best way to know it
is through science. The reason for that is because there's at least a method, an attempt
to corroborate one's own subjective perceptions. There's a way to find out if you and I
are seeing the same colors when we see red. There's actually a way to test these things,
or at least try to get at them. That's what separates science from everything else.
EDGE: Why the increase in Darwinism, which seems to have happened in the last 10-15 years?
SHERMER: First, Darwin was right. In the realist sense, he is the only one of the big
three — Darwin, Marx and Freud — who is still alive. Marxism has shown itself
not to work and Freud was wrong about much of his ideas. Modern evolutionary biology, on
the other hand, is showing that Darwin was right. Culturally and socially, the
nature-nurture pendulum is swinging back and forth and I think that ever since Wilson's
sociobiology, it's become acceptable to construct evolutionary models to explain human
behavior and society. I think evolutionary psychology folks, with a few extreme exceptions
who are telling just-so stories, have it right. Since their research is pretty good, the
combination of good science and cultural trends goes a long way towards explaining the
recent popularity of Darwin.
EDGE: Can you explain what you mean by just-so stories?
SHERMER: As examples or over-reaching, the just-so stories, sometimes the reconstruction
of what life would have been like in the paleolithic era, in the environment of
evolutionary adaptation, or EEA, will focus on why the particular thing that you're
studying would have been advantageous. A good example of this was in a recent book in
which the author was talking about how the origins of religion came about when men were on
the hunt; at some point, they realized that life was completely meaningless. They had an
existential crisis and realized there was no point to life at all, and that whether they
were successful or not in the hunt didn't make any difference in the long run. So they
created God, to sort of snow everybody else into realizing that there is a meaning and
purpose to life.
Well that's a nice story; now prove it. How do you prove that? There's no possible
evidence of this phenomena. That's a typical just-so story that the critics of
evolutionary psychology would justly nail them for. The harder thing to do is to find ways
to test very specific claims. That's why the research that Pinker is doing is so good;
he's very narrow and focused, and takes just one particular thing and tries to test it. It
isn't the big questions which are of interest, why are humans the way they are, why is or
isn't there a God or whatever but very specific things. That's where the good research
is.
EDGE: Let's talk about Skeptics.
SHERMER: If we're going to accomplish our goals of science literacy, which is one of the
primary goals of the Skeptic Society, you have to reach as many people as you can. You do
it through print, the magazine and books, plus mass communication, television and the
radio. You absolutely have to do it, and that's what we do.
EDGE: What about the role of email?
SHERMER: I don't think the book will ever be dead, nor our magazine but obviously
you've got to be online. With e-skeptic, I reach, 12,000 people once or twice a week; it's
a great resource and part of the future.
Perhaps instead of Skeptic we should call it "Ideas, the Magazine." The original
Greek meaning of skepticism is thoughtful inquiry, which is really a part of science.
True, the name is provocative, it has some negative connotations and people think that
you're nihilists, or cynics, or whatever. But on the positive side, the name generates
interest and grabs people's attention. It's something different.
EDGE: But you don't get invited to appear on major television shows if you are only
talking about ideas. The general public like confrontation.
SHERMER: The best you can hope for is getting in three or four points. Like with Larry
King — he constantly interrupts his guests. So I just said, right off the bat, well,
Larry there's three points to this answer, one... Now he can't interrupt because the guy's
got to make his three points. He tried, but I made my three points anyway. It's like being
a politician who's trained to stay on message. I have my message and I'm going to get it
across, even if I only have two minutes to do it. And the message is that science is the
way that we find out about the world, and that all kinds of other stuff is anecdotal and
fun and interesting, but it doesn't get us any closer to understanding reality; for that,
we have to use science.
Why Oprah is so much more successful than PBS shows; people want a quick fix, the simple
answer, how they can improve their love lives and their health. Health, money, love and
career; that's the big four. We're not in that business. Science and ideas are ultimately
much more important. One's whole life is grounded in ideas. Our mission then, instead of
complaining and whining about it, is to make those ideas more interesting. To market it
better. We're simply selling people that these ideas are actually more important than the
little self-help stuff.
In terms of getting the word out, we just have to sell publishers on the idea that it is
really important that they publish this kind of work, much more important in fact than
doing other books. One of the things that will motivate them to do that the bigger
advances for books by scientists, which in turn forces the publishers economically to do
something about it. This development has been is one of the most important things that's
happened to science in a long time.
It's possible to influence people's decision-making process. That's what marketing and
advertising is all about. Now scientists, instead of looking at popular books as a
necessary evil or something to do on the side, are considering it one of the most
important things that they can do. If you look at the history of science, with few
exceptions, revolutions and change have been triggered by books. Not journal articles.
Books have done far more than anything else. Think of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, NEWTON'S
PRINCIPIA, etc.; the entire evolutionary synthesis came about through a number of
important books.
Scientists need to take writing seriously. It's a skill, like anything else they've
already developed. It's an art and a craft that takes practice. It's not just throwing
down ideas, you have to do it in a way that's appealing. You have to market ideas. A few
scientists can do it: Gould is great at it and Dawkins is an elegant writer. But hardly
any others are like that. More scientists need to read those kind of books and work their
own writing. Some of the books that come down the pipeline are just awful. It's like they
were penned it in two nights or something as if it wasn't important. I've got news for
you: it's the most important thing they can do. If you're not writing to get the ideas out
to everybody, then it's just a waste of time.
EDGE: Let's talk about the evolutionary wars.
SHERMER: We're currently witnessing one of the great intellectual debates of the last two
centuries in the evolutionary wars. I mean Darwin and Wallace got the big prize; they
figured out how it works. But now everything becomes contentious because of the possible
applications to human society.
I think Gould's right. We have not fully experienced the implications of the Darwinian
revolution, the pedestal-shattering implications have not yet been realized, in the sense
that there still is, I think, a propensity among many evolutionary biologists to look for
trends in the evolutionary record that somehow show that we aren't special and different.
That yes it's true there is no God, and yes it's true the universe wasn't designed for us.
However we still are special. If you rewound the tape and played it back we'd appear again
and again. Maybe not exactly us, but some consciousness, a language- and tool-using
species that would eventually have a World Wide Web and go into Space. That would happen
over and over. Somehow that makes you feel that life is meaningful and special. I think we
are exceptionally unique.
EDGE: What happens when a new technology comes along and we revisit our ideas about who
and what we are, because of the technology?
SHERMER: Newton made analogies with tennis balls, Maxwell made analogies of these little
machines that light pass through, how they're ether and like little wheels and cogs. Right
now we don't have the right metaphor to under stand how neurons generate consciousness. At
the moment, one of the limitations of understanding consciousness and how it arises is
that we're using computer metaphors but our computers aren't sophisticated enough to
figure out how to get this sort of self-organized complexity out of neurons . How do you
get consciousness?
It's not working, that's the problem.
We're going to have to swap metaphors at some point. I mean consciousness is really still
studied as much by philosophers as by cognitive scientists, and that tells you we're still
in that borderlands area. We haven't figured it out yet.
EDGE: John Lilly had a fail-safe, foolproof method of changing consciousness: hit someone
over the head with a baseball bat.
SHERMER: Things like hypnosis won't be explained until we understand how all these
different modules are coordinated and how they interact. I think the explanation for
hypnosis will be a dissociation theory of the mind where some modules are operating and
some are suppressed. Like, for example, in Buddhist monks, part of the parietal lobes are
suppressed which makes it more difficult for the individual to tell self from non self,
and that's why people feel at one with the universe when they meditate. The whole brain's
going to be like that, it's going to be a series of modules turning off and on, being
suppressed and being stimulated, but there's still something else going on. There's a
central processor underneath that runs it, because we do have pretty good data on G, or
general intelligence. There is some general thing that's coordinating the whole thing.
EDGE: Are you still working on your biography of Wallace?
SHERMER: Yes. Alfred Russell Wallace is an interesting study because he's one of these
borderlands scientists in the sense that he fooled around with fringe movements and
beliefs, such as phrenology, spiritualism, land nationalization, anti-vaccination and
women's rights. Some of these movements we might fully accept or reject, but in his time
it wasn't clear. Again, it helps us understand a little bit better what science is when we
look at movements during a historical period when it wasn't clear whether such ideas were
science or nonsense.
For some people, like Darwin and Huxley, this spiritualism stuff was just plain nonsense,
but Wallace actually had a number of prominent supporters who were completely in his
league. Prominent physicists, physiologists, crooks, and others who founded a society for
psychical research. Now we look back on it and it seems like pretty silly stuff, but a
hundred years ago it wasn't. So how is it that these movement change? What happens to
them? I think what happens is that data and theory interact within the context of a
society. At some point, when there's not enough data to support it, the movement goes
away, leaving only a handful of true believers. You can see that today. Cold fusion is a
great example. About the same time cold fusion came out, same time superconductivity was
taking off. Now superconductivity is still practiced, because the data ended up supporting
it. However the data didn't support cold fusion, and now it's left to a handful of people
who are the true believers and everybody else has given up. So that's how science works.
Wallace is interesting because of his co-discovery of natural selection with Darwin. The
story is that it was not quite simultaneous but independent discovery. Wallace is younger
than Darwin; Darwin was born in 1809, Wallace in 1823. When Wallace was in the Malay
archipelago, he reasoned out that geographic isolation of species lead varieties to become
permanently separated from their original kind.
He had a great moment in the archipelago, when he was on a little island called Arru and
discovered there a variety of butterfly that has two green patches on the rear half of its
wing with three black dots on the green patches. A nearly identical butterfly existed on
Borneo but it had two black spots, and there was another one exactly like it on Papua New
Guinea, but it had four black spots. His had three black spots. He writes all this down,
he's reasoning his way through. Now if the Creator created one particular kind, then
what's with these varieties? Clearly a creator would not create all these varieties;
nature is doing that. Therefore, if nature can create these different varieties, why
couldn't it create a new species, which is only just a little bit more different still?
That's when he realizes that through natural selection, geographic isolation over time
leads to permanent separation. So he pens this all down it's a great story in
February 1858 in an essay on the steamer and probably on March 9th, he sends it to Darwin.
Darwin gets it, and remember he had been working on the same problem for over twenty
years, but he's very cautious, because of all the controversy over Robert Chambers' book
The Vestiges, which was considered just theoretical and speculative with no supporting
data. Darwin had been compiling blocks of data when he got the paper and so he was
encouraged to publish right away.
The strange thing about all of this is that Darwin was very thorough. He kept virtually
every letter anyone ever wrote him and he had copies of all the letters he wrote back,
some 16,000 letters in all. And that particular letter and paper are missing. They're gone
which lead some people to speculate that Darwin had not actually finished figuring out
natural selection — maybe he didn't understand diversity or geographic isolation
— and he got it from Wallace when he saw the paper. I don't think that's true.
However, it's an interesting mystery in the history of science. What happened to this
paper and this letter? We have everything Wallace every wrote himexcept for that one
item. It's rather strange.
So that's how Wallace and Darwin connect and they soon departed because Wallace became a
hyper-selectionist, that is, he reasoned that if natural selection can't explain
everything and there is no other mechanism in nature to account for it, then there must be
an intelligent designer. This is what he ended up talking about regarding the mind.
There's no reason why a human should have a brain that's any bigger than say 800 cc's, the
size of a large gorilla's brain. Why would you need a 1500 cc brain? There's no reason for
it in the natural environment. Ergo some intelligent designer created this big brain and
mind. Darwin, of course, was a strict materialist and didn't accept this, and this was
when Wallace and Darwin parted ways.
EDGE: Why is it that someone who is total nonspecialist like myself knows a lot about
Darwin and barely anything about Wallace?
SHERMER: Because Darwin was really the first big thinker to synthesize the whole thing and
put it in a book. See? You've got to write a book.
EDGE: Wallace didn't write a book?
SHERMER: No, he only wrote the paper. And as we discussed, people don't read papers.
You've got to write a book that's readable. The Origin of Species is very readable.
Granted a hundred fifty years later, it's a little dry as it's written in 19th century
prose. Still it's quite readable by anybody.Technical papers, on the other hand, are so
boring that no one reads them. That's why you have to write books. Also Darwin set out a
whole research program, whereas Wallace never did. A research program creates other
scientists who then get into the program, and then they create graduate students who
become professors who have graduate students, and the program perpetuates.
EDGE: What do you hope to accomplish with this biography?
SHERMER: First, to put Wallace back on the map because he's an important thinker, but more
importantly, to try and tease out the Wallace's influences the way a psychologist would.
Wallace was heavily influenced by Herbert Spencer and the socialist, Robert Owen, and my
own approach to biology is to use a lot of modern psychology, such as our understanding of
family dynamics, sibling rivalry, peer group influence and the influence of mentors, to
understand why people believe the things they do.
EDGE: How does Spencer fit into the picture?
SHERMER: Wallace was pretty much self-taught since he dropped out at the end of grammar
school. His father died when he was 13, and he went away to London to live with his
brother. In London there were night schools and mechanics institutes, which were like the
modern-day equivalent of community college night programs for adults who want to get back
to college. There he heard lectures about the radical writings of Owen and Spencer, the
socialist movement, phrenology and all kinds of other heretical material. Now why would
Wallace be so open to that while other people aren't? That's personality, temperament,
openness to experience. That's being less skeptical and more credulous. Ultimately I think
a person's acceptance or rejection of heretical ideas is really a personality thing. We
have to understand human personality and temperament to get to the core of how science
works. Because it ultimately comes down to the support of a single individual and as often
as not, psychological factors are as important as empirical data.
EDGE: What have you learned in writing the book?
SHERMER: The approach I'm taking is to look at how Wallace as an individual attempted to
synthesize all of his ideas into a grand theory. In reality none of us start off in our
late teens or early 20s with the final goal in mind because we don't know what that's
going to be. Later in life, you can look back and reconstruct how the ideas came to you.
This is an interesting process because in science when a paper gets published, it's always
done in a linear way: first this happened, then this, then this, it's like some sort of
polished, inductive process. First I collected the data, then I formulated the theory,
etc. In reality, it never happens like that, the process is usually messy, and in the case
of Darwin and Wallace discovering natural selection it wasn't linear at all.
In fact Darwin did not discover natural selection and have his epiphany in the Galapagos.
It never happened that way. He actually pieced it all together when he was back in London
a year and a half later. He had to go to Fitzroy and some of his other shipmates to
reconstruct how it happened. Later, though, we have this myth of science that it all works
in a linear fashion when it actually doesn't.
That's the interesting thing about Wallace; he lived to be ninety, almost ninety-one
years. From 1823 to 1913, from the end of the Napoleonic era to World War I: that's a long
lifespan. Late in life, he's writing autobiographies and piecing it all together, but in
reality it didn't happen that way. It's been fun for me to try to reconstruct how his
ideas did develop, and how they were heavily influenced by all these social and
psychological forces, like the fact that he was the eight born or that his father died
young. I'm applying many of Frank Sulloway's models on family dynamics and birth order,
for example, being later-born makes you more radical, because you have to diversify to
find new ways of doing things in your competition with siblings for parental attention.
Wallace is a perfect case for this. In fact, according to Sulloway's model, Wallace had a
96% probability of accepting the theory of evolution. In actuality, even though he
reconstructs it to make it look like the data led him to the theory of evolution, Wallace
was already converted to evolution before he ever left for his very first voyage to the
Amazon. He took two major voyages: four years in the Amazon, and eight years in the Malay
archipelago, twelve years in total. But before he even stepped off the boat, he was
already an evolutionist.
EDGE: What does one do for eight years in an archipelago?
SHERMER: You collect data. It's a brutal life. It's hot, it's humid, it's teeming with
insects, the transportation by steamship is slow. You spend a lot of time waiting, writing
lots of letters, but also sorting and collecting specimens. Now Darwin had money but
Wallace never did. He actually had an agent in London, a guy named Stephens, to whom he
would ship his collections. Stephens sold them to museums and private collectors, and
mailed Wallace the money. It's a great case of a self-made man — he's going from
island to island, waiting for his shipment to arrive and the money to come back so he can
keep going. Without that, he would never have made it. So he's completely self-made. It's
an admirable story.
EDGE: Was he alone?
SHERMER: In the Amazon he was with Bates of the famous Batesean mimicry, a prime example
of which is in moths that mimic each other's protective coloration. In the Malay
archipelago he had a couple of young assistants, but mostly he was by himself. It's hard
for us to imagine that. It would be lonely and boring, but it seemed to suit his
temperament.
EDGE: We can glibly say eight years, but try to think about that...Was there any social
life or love interests?
SHERMER: There's not a shred of evidence in anything he ever wrote about women or his love
life until he got home. So I don't know what he did.
EDGE: Was there a human population?
SHERMER: There were some indigenous people that he studied. Before anthropology really
became solidified as a science, Wallace was an anthropologist, writing ethnographies of
the local people. There's whole sections in his books on birds and travelogues and about
the people. Many of the people he encountered had hardly ever seen a white man before, if
ever, and he was tall, over six feet, and very gangly, so you can imagine this sort of
tall, gangly, white bearded Englishman amongst these short, dark natives. He writes about
this, how he'd come around a corner, and they'd scream and run. This was in Borneo, Java,
Papua New guinea, and so on.
Wallace is probably most famous for founding the science of biogeography. What Edward O.
Wilson does is what Wallace created. The idea of studying island biogeography is one of
the most important things you can use to understand evolutionary biology and evolutionary
trends, because islands are little self contained communities separated by water. Water
becomes a geographic isolating mechanism. Varieties that are separated long enough can't
reconnect to their original gene pools. They become different enough through mutation and
genetic drift that when they are reintroduced, they do not interbreed for whatever reason,
or if they do, they don't have viable offspring. That constitutes a new species. Really
it's Wallace who founded that field, not Darwin. Darwin gets more credit than Wallace for
the overall program, but it's Wallace's biogeography that really lays the groundwork for
understanding evolution.
EDGE: How does this fit in with the work of Jared Diamond?
SHERMER: Jared knows all about this stuff because he has retraced, just by chance, much of
Wallace's route. Jared's new book with biologist Ernst Mayr about the birds of Papua New
Guinea is exactly island biogeography. They're doing what Wallace did for eight years. By
doing that you understand the evolutionary process, you understand the impact of changing
an environment for a species. The reason why what Jared and Ernst are doing now is so
important is because it's a form of environmental monitoring. We can look back at what
certain species were like a century ago and half a century ago and today, and look at how
the environment has been altered by humans and how that's mucking up the future of life.
EDGE: So there's a direct line from Wallace?
SHERMER: It's a perfect segue from Wallace, because Mayr bridges us from Wallace to today.
Wallace died in 1911, and Ernst was born in 1904. So he was alive when Wallace was alive,
which is incredible. Ernst, of course, is still going strong, and really, in a sense, he
took the work of Wallace and Darwin and synthesized it. Mayr is one of the grand
synthesizers of the 30s and 40s and his definition of a species is actually derived from
Wallace's notion of biogeography. We've all had to memorize it: a species is a group of
actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, reproductively isolated from
other such populations.
That's what a species is, which is not a linguistic artifact of human classification; it's
real. The natives of Papua New Guinea identify the same organisms in the same way that
Ernst and Jared do, almost without exception. They don't call them species, but whatever
they do call them, they consider them to be different groups. The test is whether or not
they interbreed. If they don't, they're separate species.
Overall, writing the biography of Wallace has proved to be one of the most interesting
projects on which I have ever worked. I have learned so much about life — human and
otherwise — and most importantly, about how science works.
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