Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (46 page)

Wallace fell into hyper-adaptationism because he believed evolution should have created the best possible organisms in this best of all possible worlds. Since it had not, there had to be another active agent—a higher intelligence. Ironically, the natural theologians whose beliefs Wallace's evolutionary theories helped to overturn made a similar argument, the most famous of which is William Paley's 1802
Natural Theology,
which opens with this passage:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever.... But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given—that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? For this reason, and for no other, viz. that, when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose.

For Paley, a watch is purposeful and thus must have been created by a being with a purpose. A watch needs a watchmaker, just as a world needs a world-maker—God. Yet both Wallace and Paley might have heeded the lesson from Voltaire's
Candide
(1759), in which Dr. Pangloss, a professor of "metaphysico-theology-cosmolonigology," through reason, logic, and analogy "proved" that this is the best of all possible worlds: '"Tis demonstrated that things cannot be otherwise; for, since everything is made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end. Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches" (1985, p. 238). The absurdity of this argument was intended on the part of the author, for Voltaire firmly rejected the Panglossian paradigm that all is best in the best of all possible worlds. Nature is not perfectly designed, nor is this the best of all possible worlds. It is simply the world we have, quirky, contingent, and flawed as it may be.

For most people, hope springs eternal that if this is not the best of all possible worlds, it soon will be. That hope is the wellspring of religions, myths, superstitions, and New Age beliefs. We are not surprised to find such hopes at large in the world, of course, but we expect science to rise above wish fulfillment. But should we? After all, science is done by human scientists, complete with their own hopes, beliefs, and wishes. As much as I admire Alfred Russel Wallace, with hindsight it is easy to see where his hopes for a better world biased his science. But surely science has progressed since then? Nope. A plethora of books, mostly by physicists and cosmologists, testifies to the fact that hope continues to spring eternal in science as well as religion. Fritjof Capra's
The Tao of Physics
(1975) and especially
The Turning Point
(1982) unabashedly root for the blending of science and spirituality and hope for a better world.
The Faith of a Physicist
(1994) by the Cambridge University theoretical physicist turned Anglican priest, John Polkinghorne, argues that physics proves the Nicene Creed, which is based on a fourth-century formula of Christian faith. In 1995, physicist Paul Davies won the $1 million Templeton Prize for the advancement of religion, in part for his 1991 book,
The Mind of God.
The nod for the most serious attempts, however, has to go to John Barrow and Frank Tipler's 1986
Anthropic Cosmological Principle
and Frank Tipler's 1994
The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead.
In the first book, the authors claim to prove that the universe was intelligently designed and thus there is an intelligent designer (God); in the second, Tipler hopes to convince readers that they and everyone else will be resurrected in the future by a supercomputer. These attempts provide a case study in how hope shapes belief, even in the most sophisticated science.

As I read
The Physics of Immortality
and talked with its author, I was struck by the parallels between Tipler, Wallace, and Paley. Tipler, I came to realize, is Dr. Pangloss in disguise. He is a modern hyper-adaptationist, a twentieth-century natural theologian. (Upon hearing this analogy, Tipler admitted to being a "progressive" Panglossian.) Tipler's highly tutored mind has brought him full circle to Alexander Pope's Indian in his
Essay on Man
(see the epigraph on the opening page of Part 5), although Tipler finds God not only in the clouds and wind but also on his own solar walk through the cosmos in pursuit of not a humbler heaven but a vainglorious one.

What in Tipler's background might explain his Panglossian tendencies— his need to make this the best of all possible worlds? From his youth, Tipler was sold on the DuPont motto, "Better living through chemistry," and all that it stood for—unalloyed progress through science. Fascinated by the Redstone rocket program and the possibility of sending a man to the moon, for instance, at age eight Tipler wrote a letter to the great German rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun. "The attitude of unlimited technological progress is what drove Wernher von Braun and it is what has motivated me all my life" (1995).

Raised in the small rural town of Andalusia, Alabama, where he graduated from high school in 1965 as class valedictorian, Tipler intended to speak out in his graduation speech against segregation—not a popular position to take in the Deep South of the mid-1960s, especially for a youth of seventeen. Tipler's father, an attorney who routinely represented individuals against large corporations and who also opposed segregation, insisted that Frank not go public with such a controversial position since the family had to continue living in the town after Frank went away to college. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he was raised a Southern Baptist with a strong fundamentalist influence, Tipler says he was an agnostic by the age of sixteen. Brought up in an upper-middle-class environment by a politically liberal father and apolitical mother, Tipler is a firstborn with one brother four years his junior.

What difference does birth order make? Frank Sulloway (1996) has conducted a multivariate correlational study, examining the tendency toward rejection of or receptivity to heretical theories based on such variables as "date of conversion to the new theory, age, sex, nationality, socioeconomic class, sibship size, degree of previous contact with the leaders of the new theory, religious and political attitudes, fields of scientific specialization, previous awards and honors, three independent measures of eminence, religious denomination, conflict with parents, travel, education attainment, physical handicaps, and parents' ages at birth." Using multiple regression models, Sulloway discovered, in analyzing over one million data points, that birth order was the strongest factor in intellectual receptivity to innovation in science.

Consulting over a hundred historians of science, Sulloway had them evaluate the stances taken by 3,892 participants in twenty-eight disparate scientific controversies dating from 1543 to 1967. Sulloway, himself a later-born, found that the likelihood of accepting a revolutionary idea is 3.1 times greater for laterborns than firstborns; for radical revolutions, the likelihood is 4.7 times higher. Sulloway noted that "the likelihood of this happening by chance is virtually nil." Historically, this indicates that "laterborns have indeed generally introduced and supported other major conceptual transformations over the protests of their firstborn colleagues. Even when the principal leaders of the new theory occasionally turn out to be firstborns— as was the case with Newton, Einstein, and Lavoisier—the opponents as a whole are still predominantly firstborns, and the converts continue to be mostly laterborns" (p. 6). As a "control group" of sorts, Sulloway examined data from only children and found only children wedged between firstborns and laterborns in their support for radical theories.

Why are firstborns more conservative and influenced by authority? Why are laterborns more liberal and receptive to ideological change? What is the connection between birth order and personality? Firstborns, being first, receive considerably more attention from their parents than laterborns, who tend to receive greater freedom and less indoctrination into the ideologies of and obedience to authorities. Firstborns generally have greater responsibilities, including the care of younger siblings, and thus become surrogate parents. Laterborns are frequently a step removed from parental authority, and thus less inclined to obey and adopt the beliefs of the higher authority. Sulloway has taken this a step further by applying a Darwinian sibling-competition model in which children must compete for limited parental resources and recognition. Firstborns are larger, faster, and older, and so receive the lion's share of the goodies. Laterborns, in order to maximize parental benefits, diversify into new areas. This explains why firstborns tend to go into more traditional careers, whereas laterborns seek out less traditional ones.

Developmental psychologists J. S. Turner and D. B. Helms noted that "usually, firstborns become their parents' center of attraction and monopolize their time. The parents of firstborns are usually not only young and eager to romp with their children but also spend considerable time talking to them and sharing their activities. This tends to strengthen bonds of attachment between the two" (1987, p. 175). Quite obviously, this attention would include more rewards and punishment, thus reinforcing obedience to authority and controlled acceptance of the "right way" to think. R. Adams and B. Phillips (1972) and J. S. Kidwell (1981) report that this distribution of attention causes firstborns to strive harder for approval than laterborns, and H. Markus (1981) concluded that firstborns tend to be more anxious, dependent, and conforming than laterborns. I. Hilton (1967), in a mother-child interactive experiment with twenty firstborn, twenty laterborn, and twenty only children, found that at four years of age firstborns were significantly more dependent on and asked more frequently for help or reassurance from their mothers than the laterborn or only children. In addition, mothers were most likely to interfere with a firstborn child's task (constructing a puzzle). Finally, R. Nisbett (1968) showed that laterborns are far more likely to participate in relatively dangerous sports than firstborns, which is linked to risk taking and thus to "heretical" thinking.

Sulloway is not suggesting that birth order alone determines receptivity to radical ideas. Far from it, in fact, as he notes that "birth order is hypothesized to be the occasion for psychologically formative influences operating within the family" (p. 12). In other words, birth order is a predisposing variable that sets the stage for numerous other variables, such as age, sex, and social class, to influence receptivity. Not all scientific theories are equally radical, of course, and in taking this into consideration, Sulloway discovered a correlation between laterborns and the degree of "liberal or radical leanings" of the controversy. He noted that laterborns tended "to prefer statistical or probabilistic views of the world (Darwinian natural selection and quantum mechanics, for example) to a worldview premised on predictability and order." By contrast, he found that when firstborns did accept new theories, they were typically theories of the most conservative type, "theories that typically reaffirm the social, religious, and political status quo and that also emphasize hierarchy, order, and the possibility of complete scientific certainty" (p. 10).

Frank Tipler's theory, far from being the radical idea he thinks it is, is actually ultra-conservative, reaffirming a hierarchical, ordered worldview and the ultimate religious status quo of God and immortality. Tipler may have rejected God at sixteen, but as he approaches fifty, he is arguing with all his scientific acumen for the existence of Paley's Divine Watchmaker and Wallace's Over-ruling Intelligence. "It's a return to the great chain of being," Tipler asserted. "The difference is that it is a temporal chain." Even his physics is conservative:

My theory is very conservative from the physics point of view. What I say is take the standard equations—the old traditional equations of quantum mechanics and general relativity—and all we have to do is change the boundary conditions from the past to the future to understand the universe. It is counter-intuitive because we human beings always move from past to present to future, so we tacitly assume that the universe has to work the same way. What I'm saying is that there is no reason the universe should work in our way. Once you take the point of view of the future, the universe becomes much more comprehensible to physicists, just as the solar system did when looked at from the sun's point of view. (1995)

The firstborn son is using his advanced science to conserve his parents' religion. "My father always vaguely believed in God, and since he has always been a rationalist himself and he likes a rational foundation for religious belief, he naturally liked the book. And my mother was happy because it defends, in many ways, the traditional view of Christianity" (1995). Indeed, Tipler's fundamentalist background shines through in his continued literal use of "God," "heaven," "hell," and "resurrection," despite the fact that many of his fellow physicists advised him to avoid using such terms (1994, p. xiv). But what are the chances that modern physics
really
describes Judeo-Christian doctrines? Pretty good, says Tipler: "If you look back and think about all the possible explanations there are for things like a soul, for instance, there aren't very many. A soul is either a pattern in matter or a mysterious soul substance. That's about it. Plato took the position that the soul consists of this soul substance, whereas Thomas Aquinas took the attitude that resurrection was going to be reproducing the pattern, which is what I argue in my book. With only two possibilities someone is bound to get it right" (1995). There is, of course, a third possibility, that there is
no
soul, if by soul one means something that survives the physical body. If this is the case, then no one "got it right" because there is nothing to get right. (Tipler says if "soul" is defined like this, then he agrees that there is no soul. But he claims the ancients defined "soul" operationally as that which makes a living being different from a corpse, and then argues only two choices exist. But this is not what most contemporary theologians mean by soul.)