Living in the USA one can become quite dispirited with the overall low standard of discourse regarding things that matter - this is a culture of sound-bites and name-calling. After completing my own tiny contribution to one aspect of evolutionary psychology I embarked on the next work which was to be a book examining the root causes of belief, superstition, and other self-centric notions of the world around us. I'd reached page 73 of my first draft when I happened to encounter a reference to Shermer's book in an online scientific journal. I'm delighted to say that this book basically saves me the trouble of writing my own. Moving from the basics (the nature of belief, the way the mind creates illusions of a continuous reality, the evolutionary cause of our prediliction for false-positives) he then illustrates various positions and points with anecdotes and stories. There are plenty of gems along the way, and his calm and reasoned approach means we're spared the diatribes that so often accompany writing about emotive subjects. He also avoids the infinitely-recursive dead-ends so prevalent in theology and epistemological philosophy, though he might have taken the time to explain the concept of category error - a useful notion that enables us to by-pass pointless excursions into meaningless questions. (For those who might care, a category error in this context is a type of question that while gramatically possible lacks formal meaning. For example, "why is green?" violates no major rule of grammar but is entirely content-free. Equally, "why are we here?" is a category-error question that has led far too many people down the garden path.)
Shermer spends quite a bit of time talking about the underlying mechanisms of the brain, which is very helpful for people who haven't kept up with neurophysiology, but I can't help feeling that unless the reader accepts the central premise, these sections don't add to the persuasiveness of his argument. Far more revealing - yet somewhat hastily covered - was the discovery that believing requires very little neural effort while critically evaluating information requires significantly more. In this tiny nugget lies perhaps the critical reason why so many people believe in gods and goblins and gouls and ghosts and all the rest of the magic-mind realm: it's much easier to believe than to think something through. That's why people who grow up in India believe in Shiva and Kali and Krishna and Ram, why people who grow up in Tennessee believe in Jesus, and why people who grow up in Arabia believe in Muhammed: it's simply the easiest mental option given the environment.
Also, Shermer doesn't really spend time showing how our brains are wired up for certain types of thought but not others. This lack of 360 thinking (because there were no environmental pressures to cause such thinking to be positively selected for over the eons) means we perpetually make simple logical blunders. For example, the statement "All birds have wings; crows have wings; therefore crows are birds" is generally accepted at first glance by most people. Yet it's a complete mistake (to see why, just substitute the word "bees" or "bats" in place of "crows" in the sentence). We make this type of mistake continually when we interact with the world around us. Coupled to what Shermer calls "agenticity" (the inference of some active agent behind a phenomenon, which results from the fact we're social animals and need to be attuned to what the other members of the group are feeling and thinking) we then make elimentary mistakes such as thinking that thunder is the outward sign of a deity's displeasure, or that rain is somehow signalling sadness. The powerful nature of such errors is still with us: just think of a horror movie in which thunder signals danger, or a romance movie in which rain invariably accompanies the post-breakup solitary walk.
Like many well-meaning people, Shermer tries to accommmodate religion, arguing that it's benign if it's something that helps people make it through life. Unfortunately religion (which is, formally, the organization of superstitions into a codex) may help some people "make it through life" but it's generally at the expense of others. Shermer signally fails to understand that religions are necessarily regressive because their core premise is that their holy book/rock scratchings/oral tales are supposedly "from the mouth of god(s)" and therefore infallible. Consequently the notions of discovery and progress are antithetical to religion. This is why, for example, the Catholic church systematically destroyed scientific advances by burning Giordano Bruno and threatening Galileo with instruments of torture. It's why contemporary Islam has more in common with stone-age societies than with any modern civilization. Oil-rich kingdoms may buy the products of advanced civilizations but they are incapable of creating anything for themselves because they are trapped in a pre-scientific mentality that is utterly unconducive to any kind of real-world accomplishments. Seen more clearly, religion is not merely a harmless psychological crutch: it's a profoundly divisive, restrictive, and discouragingly infantile cognitive error. It is an impediment to true civilization and to civilized behavior. Dawkins is far more accurate in his summation of religion than Shermer, who perhaps has insufficient exposure to the real impact of religious impulse across history and around the globe today. Shermer also makes the mistake of thinking that perhaps religion has adaptive benefits in terms of group cohesion, but there are two major flaws with this notion. The first is that group selection is impossible; the second is that for every "happy congregation" there's a Jonestown, a Waco, and of course the ever-popular Taliban.
The other things missing from Shermer's informative and entertaining book are (i) a discussion of how the human brain isn't wired up to perform consistency checking (e.g. if I believe A and I believe B, are they mutually consistent or mutually contradictory?) and (ii) how all superstitions and religions fail utterly to tell us anything meaningful about the real world. To elaborate: while all religions have their creation myths and their mummy gods and daddy gods, not a single one has ever revealed any underlying truth about the universe. No religion ever imparted knowledge of DNA or cosmology or chemistry or physics or anything else. They are all impoverished products of banal minds, repetitive in the extreme and entirely predictable. Once you've seen a representative sample of a few, you've seen them all. Only the clothes, rituals, and degree of violence may be slightly different. If there really was some kind of magical creature imparting wisdom to our species (which is quite funny to think about - imagine a person trying to teach a worm morality or quantum physics) then why, over all the millenia and over all the many different kinds of religion, has there never been a single example of a valid revelation? Oh, I forgot: "god moves in mysterious ways."
One final small criticism is that Shermer is very USA-centric. His examples of political and moral "positions" only make sense in a very limited American context. He automatically assumes what exists in the USA is generally found elsewhere, which is wildly untrue. His next book might benefit from time spent in equitorial Africa, the Scandinavian countries, the Amazon and somewhere like VietNam or Laos. And his penultimate chapter (on the origins of the universe) misses the key point which is simply this: religious people say "how did the universe get here if it wasn't made by god?" and then sit back as if this was some sort of actual logical argument. In reality, of course, it's totally empty because if you say, "OK, god made the universe" then the very next question is "so where did god come from?" To which religious people say something like "god always existed." Although this position demonstrates an infantile inability to reason at even the most basic level, the conclusion is evident: invoking "god" solves no problem whatsoever. It's merely a pointless regression, like the question of what was underneath the turtle that Atlas stood on while supporting the Earth on his shoulder. In his desire not to offend religious people, Shermer simply omits the conclusion altogether, preferring to meander off into multiverse theory which doesn't actually accomplish much more than another regression anyway.
Anyhow, aside from these minor criticisms, for anyone looking to understand why the vast majority of people believe in things for which there never has been the slightest shred of evidence, Shermer's book is an excellent primer and a useful compliment to the works of Richard Dawkins, who takes it as a priori that only an idiot would be a believer. Shermer shows, valuably, why intelligence and belief are two different things (back to the inability to do consistency checking) and therefore how American scientists, for example, can believe in magical creatures for which there is zero evidence yet at the same time continue to make contributions towards genuine real-world problems.
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About the author
The human brain evolved to find patterns and then infuse them with meaning
The human brain evolved to find patterns. We find them everywhere, from nature to nurture, from math to languages, from individual human behavior to group social dynamics. It is the reason why we say that history repeats itself and why we enjoy music so much. If you look for patterns, you will undoubtedly find them; the human brain has evolved to do so. Our species developed this pattern-detection software as a means of survival: recognizing patterns in the jungle alerted early humans to things like predators, prey, and weather changes. Recognizing the herding patterns of buffalo or the seasonal patterns of rain were paramount to surviving in a dangerous world. “Because we must make associations in order to survive and reproduce, natural selection favored all association-making strategies,” Shermer writes, “even those that resulted in false positives.” This is important, because while not recognizing a rustle in the leaves as a poisonous snake can lead us to be bitten and killed, recognizing a rustle in the leaves as a potential danger when there is no actual danger proves no harm. Our pattern recognition software is always running, regardless of whether the patterns detected are helpful or erroneous. In his book, Shermer defines two news vocabulary words. The first is patternicity, which he defines as “the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data.” Our rational brains have become exceedingly good at finding patterns everywhere, even when no real pattern actually exists Our modern world gives ample opportunity for this pattern detection system to operate. The second word that Shermer brings to his readers is agenticity, which he defines as “the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.” Again, this comes from our long evolution as a species. It is important when the sky changes color—incoming storm clouds means something. The problem we have today is when we place too much importance on our false-positive beliefs. When the leaves are rustling, and we believe there is a snake, we might take the longer path home, when in reality there is no snake and we are only making our own lives more difficult. “With this evolutionary perspective we can now understand that people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe non weird things.” Sadly, our human brains have only one neural network that is in charge of our beliefs, as opposed to two separate areas for belief and disbelief. This is importantly true, because if you believe that ‘torture is wrong’ and also that ‘2 plus 2 makes 4,’ these occur in the same place in the brain. This can cross our wires between ethics and science, because as far as the brain is concerned, both of these beliefs are similar. Couple this phenomenon with the philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s conjecture—that beliefs come quickly and naturally while skepticism is slow and unnatural—and we have a recipe for trouble. Our strongest held beliefs are oftentimes jumps to conclusions. “The scientific principle that a claim is untrue unless proven otherwise runs counter to our natural tendency to accept as true that which we comprehend quickly.” Science is the best tool we have devised for determining the validity of claims of belief, but it is one that we do not use ubiquitously enough. The only way we know to approach real truth is the scientific method: the experimentation of a hypothesis and the examination of the results. It doesn’t matter how strongly your belief is: if it disagrees with experiment and replicable outcomes, then it is lacking. Still, if you can come to a complete scientific agreement about a phenomenon, the sun being the center of the solar system, for example, the same part of your brain that believes this to be true also might believe that we should jail people for wearing open toed shoes in public. One human can believe both of these ideas, because they are reinforced by the same neural network. This bring us to the ultimate thesis of this book: human beings form beliefs first, and then rationally back them up second. We are the opposite of Spock from Star Trek, a character infamous for his cold hard logical thinking. We react to situations emotionally. We use our pattern-detection software to understand the world and to subsequently make guesses about how the future will play out, and then we rationalize these thoughts post-hoc. Obviously, this is not a great system for optimizing our potential. It also explains why so many people believe such wildly different (and often completely ridiculous) things. This further complicates society and our social interactions with one another because “our perceptions about reality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about it.” Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given time. If the wind is rustling the leaves a lot, we might believe the area is full of snakes, which could cause us to move our camp to another territory. The reality may be that our first spot was safer than our new one. If we believe that gun ownership is the reason why so many mass shootings occur, that will lead us to take different actions to curb the violence than if we believe that mental illness is the culprit. Each individual’s subjective (emotional and psychological) reasons for believing what causes mass shootings are influenced by their family, friends, and culture, and our pattern finding brains reinforce these beliefs and give them meaning. This is helpful when our patternicity and agenticity align with empirical reality (when there really is a snake in the grass), and harmful when it does not. It is also what makes democracy so difficult—everybody has their own solution to the problems we face, and we all believe ourselves to be accurate and everyone else to be wrong. Coming to a collective agreement can be exceedingly difficult. So, how do we change our beliefs? The first step is understanding how we come to them and that they are often faulty from the start. We have to recognize the role that our rationality plays in sustaining them, especially in the face of contradictory evidence. Oftentimes this is not enough, with true change only coming from deeper social and cultural shifts in the underlying zeitgeist. These changes are a product of “larger and harder-to-define political, economic, religious, and societal changes.” Nonetheless, a little more skepticism is a healthy thing—especially skepticism of ourselves and our own beliefs. It is important to occasionally hold your beliefs up in the mirror and ask yourself: are these actually, empirically, true?
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 31, 2013
Top reviews from other countries
- Mr. N. J. HouchinReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 18, 2012
Very comprehensive
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- Vincent HacheReviewed in France on May 1, 2013
Good beginning; a little disappointing towards the end
- Reid FindlayReviewed in Canada on October 13, 2021
A must read for our polarized times
