produced a demonstrable impairment in our national health. Consumer skepticism makes quality products. This may be why governments and churches and school systems do not exhibit unseemly zeal in encouraging critical thought. They know they themselves are vulnerable.
Professional scientists generally have to make a choice in their research goals. There are some objectives that would be very important if achieved, but that promise so small a likelihood of success that no one is willing to pursue them. (For many years this was the case in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The situation has changed mainly because advances in radio technology now permit us to construct enormous radio telescopes with sensitive receivers to pick up any messages that might be sent our way. Never before in human history was this possible.) There are other scientific objectives that are perfectly tractable but of entirely trivial significance. Most scientists choose a middle course. As a result, very few scientists actually plunge into the murky waters of testing or challenging borderline or pseudo-scientific beliefs. The chance of finding out something really interesting-except about human nature-seems small, and the amount of time required seems large. I believe that scientists should spend more time in discussing these issues, but the fact that a given contention lacks vigorous scientific opposition in no way implies that scientists think it is reasonable.
There are many cases where the belief system is so absurd that scientists dismiss it instantly but never commit their arguments to print. I believe this is a mistake. Science, especially today, depends upon public support. Because most people have, unfortunately, a very inadequate knowledge of science and technology, intelligent decision making on scientific issues is difficult. Some pseudoscience is a profitable enterprise, and there are proponents who not only are strongly identified with the issue in question but also make large amounts of money from it. They are willing to commit major resources to defending their contentions. Some scientists seem unwilling to engage in public confrontations on borderline science issues because of the effort required and the possibility that they will be perceived to lose a public debate. But it is an excellent opportunity to show how science works at its murkier borders, and also a way to convey something of its power as well as its pleasures.
There is stodgy immobility on both sides of the borders of the scientific enterprise. Scientific aloofness and opposition to novelty are as much a problem as public gullibility. A distinguished scientist once threatened to sic then Vice President Spiro T. Agnew on me if I persisted in organizing a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which both proponents and opponents of the extraterrestrial-spacecraft hypothesis of UFO origins would be permitted to speak. Scientists offended by the conclusions of Immanuel Velikovsky’s
But these symposia were held, the audiences seemed to find them interesting, the proceedings were published, and now youngsters in Duluth or Fresno can find some books presenting the other side of the issue in their libraries. (See Chapter 5.) If science is presented poorly in schools and the media, perhaps some interest can be aroused by well-prepared, comprehensible public discussions at the edge of science. Astrology can be used for discussions of astronomy; alchemy for chemistry; Velikovskian catastrophism and lost continents such as Atlantis for geology; and spiritualism and Scientology for a wide range of issues in psychology and psychiatry.
There are still many people in the United States who believe that if a thing appears in print it must be true. Since so much undemonstrated speculation and rampant nonsense appears in books, a curiously distorted view of what is true emerges. I was amused to read-in the furor that followed the premature newspaper release of the contents of a book by H. R. Haldeman, a former presidential assistant and convicted felon-what the editor in chief of one of the largest publishing companies in the world had to say: “We believe a publisher has an obligation to check out the accuracy of certain controversial non-fiction works. Our procedure is to send the book out for an objective reading by an independent authority in the field.” This is by an editor whose firm has in fact published some of the most egregious pseudoscience of recent decades. But books presenting the other side of the story are now becoming available, and in the section below I have listed a few of the more prominent pseudoscientific doctrines and recent attempts at their scientific refutation. One of the contentions criticized-that plants have emotional lives and musical preferences-had a brief flurry of interest a few years ago, including weeks of conversations with vegetables in Gary Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” comic strip. As an epigraph to this chapter (on the death struggle of the snapdragon) shows, it is an old contention. Perhaps the only encouraging point is that it is being greeted more skeptically today than it was in 1926.
While many recent borderline doctrines are widely promoted, skeptical discussion and dissection of their fatal flaws are not so widely known. This table is a guide to some of these critiques.
Bermuda Triangle::
Laurence Kusche, Harper & Row,1975
Spiritualism::
1976
Uri Geller::
Atlantis and other “lost continents”::
UFOs::
Carl Sagan and Thornton Page, eds.,
Norton, 1973
Ancient Astronauts::
Ronald Story, Harper & Row, 1976
L. Sprague de Camp, Ballantine, 1973
Velikovsky:::
University Press, 1977
The Emotional Lives of Plants::“Plant ‘Primary Perception,’ ”
K. A. Horowitz and others,
189: 478-480 (1975)
A FEW YEARS AGO a committee of scientists, magicians and others was organized to provide some focus for skepticism on the border of science. This nonprofit organization is called “The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal” and is at 923 Kensington Avenue, Buffalo, N.Y. 14215. It is beginning to do some useful work, including in its publications the latest news on the confrontation between the rational and the irrational-a debate that goes back to the encounters between Alexander the Oracle-Monger and the Epicureans, who were the rationalists of his day. The committee has also made official protests to the networks and the Federal Communications Commission about television programs on pseudoscience that are particularly uncritical. An interesting debate has gone on within the committee between those who think that all doctrines that smell of pseudoscience should be combated and those who believe that each issue should be judged on its own merits, but that the burden of proof should fall squarely on those who make the proposals. I find myself very much in the latter camp. I believe that the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
