Weird Earth. Donald R. Prothero
observations and experiments goes against common sense or what we intuitively feel is true.
Think, for example, of how people have viewed the world until just very recently. From our perspective, the sun and moon and stars appear to move around us, and we are the center of everything. From our perspective, the earth looks flat. It takes a lot of early childhood education to train people to perceive the earth as a spherical ball rotating on its axis and revolving around the sun, because that’s not what our senses tell us. Our intuition tells us that a heavier or larger object will fall to the ground faster than a smaller or lighter one, and that dogma was carried on from ancient times to the writings of Aristotle and into the Middle Ages. Then Galileo did his famous experiment dropping two different-sized cannonballs off the Leaning Tower of Pisa and showed it was false.
Newton’s concept of gravity as attraction between bodies is much less intuitive than the older idea of objects falling to the ground because they had “weight” and everything wanted to move to its “natural place.” Even more counterintuitive is thinking about any “solid” object as a collection of tiny nuclei with enormous volumes of space around them, only partially filled with clouds of electromagnetic energy we call electrons. Grasping the enormity of geologic time, with its millions and billions of years, is extremely hard for most people, even with the best analogies and illustrations. Our common sense was evolved when we were small African apes and was not designed to grasp the extremely tiny or the extremely distant.
As Sunil Laxman writes,
This wiring is very deep within us, and starts very early in life. The resistance is not merely limited to viewing some science suspiciously, but for many new ideas that challenge what is apparent. It begins very early in life, with what kids know and learn either by observation and mimicry, or active instruction. Children, even babies, “know” a lot by learning things themselves through observation. They know that solid objects will fall to the ground, for example, or that people have different emotions. Now suppose a child knows that any unsupported object will fall to the ground, it is difficult for this child to imagine or comprehend that the world is round. That is because they have observed that things will always fall off round objects. At a young age, a child cannot comprehend relative scales of the earth (and themselves), and relate it to the concept of gravity. It is just as counter intuitive at that age for a child to believe that a larger object will not fall faster than a smaller object of the same mass, when dropped from the same height. Many of us see that it takes many years for children to be able to accurately draw out the earth as a rounded globe. In essence, people reject scientific ideas because it appears to be counter-intuitive. A level of resistance to science comes from cultural factors. In every culture, some information is specifically asserted or defined. For example, the resistance to understanding evolution is prominent in some parts of America, in certain religious groups. This is because it has been specifically asserted otherwise. Not everyone is qualified to study or understand all scientific principles of a subject (like string theory). Therefore, it’s typical for people to believe in what they are told by people they trust. Interestingly, many studies now show that children do the same thing, and will only believe things that are told to them by people they trust. These could be parents, teachers or peers. More importantly, when some data or explanation is contradicting when coming from different sources, children will believe an explanation provided by the people they trust and not the data itself.11
The often counterintuitive and difficult-to-grasp nature of science is behind many of the weird ideas about the earth that are discussed in this book. Certainly, flat-earthers and geocentrists are influenced by what they see and intuitively feel, rather than what science tells us. It takes a lot of training to undo natural, “common sense,” intuitive perceptions about the world and to grasp the weird, counterintuitive (but correct) views that science has given us.
Baloney Detection
So what are the general principles of science and critical thinking that we need to follow if we wish to separate fact from fiction? How can “deep thoughts … be winnowed from deep nonsense?” Many of these were outlined in Carl Sagan’s 1996 book, The Demon-Haunted World, and Michael Shermer’s 1997 book, Why People Believe Weird Things. To decipher fact from fiction, some of the most important principles include the following.
1. Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence
This simple statement by Carl Sagan (or the similar “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” by Marcello Truzzi) makes an important point. Every day, science produces hundreds of small hypotheses, which 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 insisting that they are true. These include the many believers in UFOs and aliens, for whom evidence is flimsy at best but who 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. (For further discussion, see UFOs, Chemtrails and Aliens: What Science Says, by me and Tim Callahan.)
Just think for a moment: If you were part of a superior alien culture, able to travel between galaxies, would you only interact with a few isolated individuals out in the boonies, or would you contact the head of the governments on this planet and let your existence be known? Think about our extraordinary network of satellites and radar that makes it possible for us to detect virtually anything moving in the skies anywhere in the world. Even with this capability, we have never gotten a reliable detection of a UFO, only unverifiable claims made by random plane or ground observers and photos that have been documented as fakes. Certainly, it is possible that aliens have visited us, but such an extraordinary claim requires higher levels of proof than ordinary science, and so far, the evidence provided is pretty flimsy.
As we shall see in this book, most of the weird ideas about the earth are really extreme. They are not obviously false in the way that they are constructed or presented, but in order for us to take them seriously, there must be an extraordinary amount of evidence to support them and to shoot down the evidence of the scientific view. For this reason, most of these ideas are quickly dismissed by real scientists, because there is no evidence for them and lots of evidence against them.
2. Burden of Proof
Related to this first principle is the idea of burden of proof. In a court of law, one side (usually the prosecution or plaintiff) is assigned the task of proving their case “beyond a reasonable doubt” in a criminal case and “based on a preponderance of the evidence” in a civil case. The defense often needs to do nothing if the other side has not met this burden of proof. Similarly, for extraordinary claims that appear to overthrow a large body of knowledge, the burden of proof is also correspondingly greater. In 1859, the idea of evolution was controversial, and the burden of proof was on Darwin to show that evolution had occurred. By now, the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, so the burden of proof on the antievolutionists is much larger; they must show that creationism is right by overwhelming evidence, not point out a few inconsistencies or problems with evolutionary theory. Likewise, the evidence that the Holocaust occurred is overwhelming (many eyewitnesses and victims are still alive, and many Nazi documents describe what they did), so the Holocaust denier has to provide overwhelming evidence to prove that it did not occur.
3. Anecdotes Do Not Make Science
As storytelling animals, humans are prone to believe accounts told by witnesses. Marketers know that if they get a handful of celebrities or sincere-sounding customers to praise their product, 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 often must be a “control”