Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (10 page)

Dr. ben-Jochannan was unable to answer the question, and said that he resented the tone of the inquiry. Several students came up to me after the lecture and accused me of racism, suggesting that I had been brainwashed by white historians. . . .

. . . As if that were not disturbing enough in itself, there was also the strange silence on the part of many of my faculty colleagues. Several of them were well aware that what Dr. ben-Jochannan was saying was factually wrong. One of them said later that she found the lecture so "hopeless" that she decided to say nothing. . . . When I went to the then dean of the college to explain that there was no factual evidence behind some Afrocentric claims about ancient history, she replied that each of us had a different but equally valid view of history. . . .

. . . When I stated at a faculty meeting that Aristotle could not have stolen his philosophy from the library of Alexandria in Egypt, because that library had not been built until after his death, another colleague responded, "I don't care who stole what from whom." (1996, pp. 2, 3, 4)

Therein lies the problem. Each of us may have a different view of history, but they are not all equally valid. Some are historical, and some are pseudohistorical, namely,
without supporting evidence and plausibility and presented primarily for political or ideological purposes.

A variety of sources independently attest to the life span of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) and to the earliest date for the library of Alexandria (after 323 B.C.E.). It is a fact that Aristotle died before the library of Alexandria was built. One would have to posit a massive and widespread campaign of denial and fabrication to change this fact, which is exactly what extreme Afrocentrists do. True, humans are capable of almost anything and historical inferences have been wrong. Nonetheless, as Lefkowitz points out, "There is no reason why claims of conspiracy should be credited, if no real evidence can be produced to support it" (p. 8). Which brings us to another important point: pseudohistorians and historians do not treat their audiences equally and they use data differently. If Dr. ben-Jochannan wanted to argue that Aristotle was influenced by or acquainted with certain ideas circulating between Greece and Africa, he could examine the evidence for and against such a theory. Indeed, Lefkowitz does just that. But Dr. ben-Jochannan is not as interested in historical facts as he is in historical flavoring, not as interested in teaching the nuances of historiography as he is in instilling an Afrocentrist agenda. He takes a valid point about the influence of ideology on knowledge, stirs in the ignorance or apathy of an audience about historical events, adds a few historical facts and series of eccentric inferences about the past, and makes pseudohistory.

The historical sciences are rooted in the rich array of data from the past that, while nonreplicable, are nevertheless valid as sources of information for piecing together specific events and confirming general hypotheses. The inability to actually observe past events or set up controlled experiments is no obstacle to a sound science of paleontology or geology, so why should it be for a sound science of human history? The key is the ability to test one's hypothesis. Based on data from the past the historian tentatively constructs a hypothesis, then checks it against "new" data uncovered from the historical source.

Here is an example of this. I once had the opportunity to dig up a dinosaur with Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. In
Digging Dinosaurs,
Homer reflected on the historical process in describing the two phases of the famous dig in which he exposed the first dinosaur eggs found in North America. The initial stage was "getting the fossils out of the ground; the second was to look at the fossils, study them, make hypotheses based on what we saw and try to prove or disprove them" (Horner and Gorman 1988, p. 168). The first phase of unsheathing the bones from the surrounding stone is backbreak-ing work. As you move from jack hammers and pickaxes to dental tools and small brushes, however, the historical interpretation accelerates as a function of the rate of bone unearthed, as does one's enthusiasm to keep digging. "Paleontology is not an experimental science; it's an historical science," Horner explained. "This means that paleontologists are seldom able to test their hypotheses by laboratory experiments, but they can still test them" (p. 168). How?

In 1981 Horner discovered a site in Montana that contained approximately thirty million fossil fragments of
Maiasaur
bones, from which he concluded "at a conservative estimate, we had discovered the tomb of ten thousand dinosaurs" (p. 128). Horner and his team did not dig up thirty million fossil fragments. Rather, they extrapolated from selected exposed areas how many bones there were in the 1.25 by 0.25 mile bed. The hypothesizing began with a question: "What could such a deposit represent?" (p. 129). There was no evidence that predators had chewed the bones, yet many were broken in half, lengthwise. Further, the bones were all arranged from east to west—the long dimension of the bone deposit. Small bones had been separated from bigger bones, and there were no bones of baby
Maiasaurs,
just those of
Maiasaurs
between nine and twenty-three feet long. The find revealed more questions than answers. What would cause the bones to splinter lengthwise? Why would the small bones be separated from the big bones? Was this one giant herd, all killed at the same time, or was it a dying ground over many years?

An early hypothesis that a mudflow buried the herd alive was rejected as "it didn't make sense that even the most powerful flow of mud could break bones lengthwise ... nor did it make sense that a herd of living animals buried in mud would end up with all their skeletons disarticulated." Applying the hypothetico-deductive method, Horner formulated a second hypothesis: "It seemed that there had to be a twofold event, the dinosaurs dying in one incident and the bones being swept away in another." Since there was a layer of volcanic ash a foot and a half above the bone bed, volcanic activity was implicated in the death of the herd. Deduction: because the fossil bones split only lengthwise, the damage to the bones came long after the event that caused death, which might have been a volcanic eruption, especially since volcanoes "were a dime a dozen in the Rockies back in the late Cretaceous." Conclusion: "A herd of
Maiasaura
were killed by the gases, smoke and ash of a volcanic eruption. And if a huge eruption killed them all at once, then it might have also killed everything else around," including scavengers or predators. Then perhaps there was a flood, maybe from a breached lake, that carried the rotting bodies downstream, separated the big bones from the small bones (which are lighter), and gave them a uniform orientation. "Finally the ash, being light, would have risen to the top in this slurry, as it settled, just as the bones sank to the bottom." What about the baby
Maiasaurs?
"Perhaps the babies of that year were still in the egg or in nests when the volcano erupted, or perhaps nesting had not even begun." But what about babies from the previous season who would now be juveniles? Horner admits "that nobody knows for sure that these dinosaurs would have produced young each year" (pp. 129-133).

Even in the first stage of a dig while fossils are being released from their rocky shroud, the hypothetico-deductive method is constantly applied. When I arrived at Horner's camp, I expected to find the busy director of a fully sponsored dig barking out orders to his staff. I was surprised to come upon a patient historical scientist sitting cross-legged before a cervical vertebra from a 140-million-year-old
Apatosaurus
and wondering just what to make of it. Soon a reporter from a local paper arrived (apparently a common occurrence as no one took notice) and inquired of Horner what this discovery meant for the history of dinosaurs. Did it change any of his theories? Where was the head? Was there more than one body at this site? And so on. Horner's answers were consistent with those of the cautious scientist: "I don't know yet." "Beats me." "We need more evidence." "We'll have to wait and see."

This was historical science at its best. For example, after two long days of exposing nothing but solid rock and my own ineptness at seeing bone within stone, one of the preparators pointed out that the rock I was about to toss was a piece of bone that appeared to be part of a rib. if it was a rib,
then
the bone should retain its rib-like shape as more of the overburden was chipped away. This it did for about a foot, until it suddenly flared to the right. Was it a rib or something else? Jack moved in to check. "It could be part of the pelvis," he suggested, if it was part of the pelvis,
then
it should also flare out to the left when more was uncovered. Sure enough, Jack's prediction was verified by further empirical evidence. And so it went day after day. The whole dig depends on such hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In a sense, historical science becomes experimental when predictions based on initial evidence are verified or rejected by later evidence. The digging up of history, whether bones or letters, is the experimental procedure of the historical scientist interested in putting a hypothesis to the test.

I should note that there are differences between paleontological evidence and human historical evidence. The former is mostly first-order evidence—strictly physical, natural, and interpreted by extrapolating how natural laws apply now and in the past. The latter typically is second-order evidence—documents written by highly selective humans who add, delete, and alter the evidence. Historians have learned to treat historical evidence differently from archeological or paleontological evidence, to acknowledge that the gaps in historical evidence often have something to do with the fact that humans write about what interests them and what they think is important at the time. Nature does not delete the record of the socially marginalized. Still, as historian of science Frank Sulloway has shown in his controversial 1996 book,
Born to Rebel,
historical hypotheses can be tested (see chapter 16 for discussion of Sulloway's model). For the past hundred years, for example, historians have hypothesized that social class and social class conflict have been the driving forces behind revolutions, both political and scientific. Sulloway has tested this Marxian hypothesis by coding thousands of individuals in dozens of revolutions for their social class and then doing statistical analyses to see whether there really are significant differences in social class on opposing sides in revolutions. It turns out there is not. Marx was wrong, but it took a historian trained in the sciences to discover this fact by running a simple historical experiment.

How Science Changes

Science is different from pseudoscience, and history is different from pseudohistory, not only in evidence and plausibility but in how they change. Science and history are cumulative and progressive in that they continue to improve and refine knowledge of our world and our past based on new observations and interpretations. Pseudohistory and pseudo-science, if they change at all, change primarily for personal, political, or ideological reasons. But
how
do science and history change?

One of the most useful theories of how science changes is Thomas Kuhn's (1962) concept of "paradigm shift." The paradigm defines the "normal science" of an age—as accepted by the majority of the practicing scientists in a field—and a shift (or revolution) may occur when enough renegade and heretical scientists gain enough evidence and enough power to overthrow the existing paradigm. "Power" is made visible in the social and political aspects of science: research and professorial positions at major universities, influence within funding agencies, control of journals and conferences, prestigious books, and so forth. I define a paradigm as
a model shared by most but not all members of a scientific community, designed to describe and interpret observed or inferred phenomena, past or present, and aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation.
In other words, a paradigm captures the scientific thinking of the majority but most of the time it coexists with competing paradigms—as is necessary if new paradigms are to displace old paradigms.

Philosopher of science Michael Ruse, in
The Darwinian Paradigm
(1989), identified at least four usages of the word.

1. 
Sociological,
focusing on "a group of people who come together, feeling themselves as having a shared outlook (whether they do really, or not), and to an extent separating themselves off from other scientists" (pp. 124-125). Freudian psychoanalysts within psychology are a good example of science guided by a sociological paradigm.

2. 
Psychological,
where individuals within the paradigm literally see the world differently from those outside the paradigm. We have all seen the reversible figures in perceptual experiments, such as the old woman/young woman shifting figure where the perception of one precludes the perception of the other. In this particular perceptual experiment, presenting subjects with a strong "young woman" image followed by the ambiguous figure always produces the perception of the young woman, while presenting a strong "old woman" image followed by the ambiguous figure produces the perception of the old woman 95 percent of the time (Leeper 1935).

Similarly, some researchers view aggression in humans primarily as biologically innate and essential, while others view it primarily as culturally induced and dispensable. Those who focus their research on proving one or the other of these views would be doing science guided by a psychological paradigm: both views have support, but the choice of which to believe more is influenced by psychological factors.

3. 
Epistemological,
where "one's ways of doing science are bound up with the paradigm" because the research techniques, problems, and solutions are determined by the hypotheses, theories, and models. A theory of phrenology that leads to the development of phrenological equipment for measuring bumps on the skull would be an example of science guided by an epistemological paradigm.