Weird Earth

Debunking Strange Ideas About Our Planet

Donald R. Prothero

• Publisher: Red Lightning Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781684351237
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Saggi scientifici

"A breath of intellectual fresh air... [an] amusing look at how to dispel endemic pseudoscience and conspiracy theories through rational thinking." — Publishers Weekly Aliens. Ley lines. Water dowsing. Conspiracies and myths captivate imaginations and promise mystery and magic. Whether it's arguing about the moon landing hoax or a Frisbee-like Earth drifting through space, when held up to science and critical thinking, these ideas fall flat. In Weird Earth: Debunking Strange Ideas About Our Planet, Donald R. Prothero demystifies these conspiracies and offers answers to some of humanity's most outlandish questions. Applying his extensive scientific knowledge, Prothero corrects misinformation that con artists and quacks use to hoodwink others about geology—hollow earth, expanding earth, and bizarre earthquakes—and mystical and paranormal happenings—healing crystals, alien landings, and the gates of hell. By deconstructing wild claims such as prophesies of imminent natural disasters, Prothero provides a way for everyone to recognize dubious assertions. Prothero answers these claims with facts, offering historical and scientific context in a light-hearted manner that is accessible to everyone, no matter their background. With a careful layering of evidence in geology, archaeology, and biblical and historical records, Prothero's Weird Earth examines each conspiracy and myth and leaves no question unanswered. Weird Earth is about the facts and the people who don't believe them. Don Prothero describes the process of science—and the process of not accepting it. If you're wondering if humans walked on the Moon, if you've wondered where the lost City of Atlantis went, or if you're wondering what your cat will do before an earthquake, check out Weird Earth." —Bill Nye

Science and Critical Thinking

The Science of the Earth

Like it or not, we all live in an age of science and technology. Science has utterly transformed the lives and fates not just of humans but of all organisms on the planet. Just look at what science has given us. Only 150 years ago, most children died in childbirth or through incurable childhood diseases. Today, thanks to modern medicine, nearly all children in the developed world survive their birth and early years. We take for granted that most of us carry a device in our pocket that is more powerful than a room-sized computer from only fifty years ago; it also performs as a phone, pager, clock, calculator, and video and audio player and has many other functions. Until the invention of the steam locomotive and then even faster transports, no human could travel any faster than a horse could run. Now we all routinely travel at 65 miles per hour on highways, and many people have flown and traveled faster than sound. Our lives are so completely dependent on the miracles of science and technology that we don’t even think about them anymore. We are aware of our dependence on them only when we lose them, such as during a power outage or an earthquake or other natural disaster.

Likewise, over the past two hundred years, the scientific method has been applied to the study of the earth, and its progress has led to great discoveries. We now know of millions of extinct animals that lived long before humans ever appeared. We can date rocks with high precision and can estimate the age of the origin of the earth and solar system at 4.56 billion years. We know what shapes the surface of the earth, what is beneath the surface, and how continents move around the earth’s surface. Instead of viewing earthquakes as a sign of the wrath of the gods, we understand what causes them and have made enormous strides in understanding and preparing for them, if not predicting them. Modern society runs on coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium, as well as valuable materials like gold, silver, copper, and platinum, and it depends on resources like steel, stone, and concrete. These discoveries and technologies were made possible only by the application of the scientific method to earth sciences by scientists curious to know how the earth worked.

We are completely and utterly dependent on science and technology for our survival, yet we find that even in the most developed countries of the world, a significant number of people reject some aspect of science because it conflicts with deeply held beliefs. They love what science gives them (such as health, technology, and wealth) but reject science when it tells them something they don’t want to hear. But we don’t get to make that choice. Science is not a restaurant menu that you can pick and choose from. As science educator Bill Nye said, “The natural world is a package deal; you don’t get to select the facts you like and which you don’t.”¹ Or as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “When different experiments give you the same result, it is no longer subject to your opinion. That’s the great thing about science. It’s true, whether or not you believe in it. That’s why it works.”²

This is particularly true when science finds out something that goes against what we want to believe—what Al Gore aptly called “inconvenient truths.” Scientists don’t get to pick and choose what they want to believe when they are doing research. They are obligated by their training as scientists to report their results, no matter how much it might go against what they wish to be true. Science tells us that we are a product of evolution and that we are closely related to the apes, that humans are insignificant on the scale of the cosmos or in the framework of geologic time, and that humans are destroying the planet through pollution and especially climate change. These things are not comfortable or easy to live with and may be a blow to our notions of cosmic importance—but they are true because that’s what the evidence shows.

Scientists are not spoilsports or killjoys, and we don’t take pleasure in shattering illusions. Despite what some science deniers claim, there’s no incentive for scientists to tell you bad news. We don’t get more grant dollars for telling you the grim truth about climate change or discovering more evidence of your close relationship to the apes. If a scientist tells you an “inconvenient truth,” it is because a scientist must do so as a part of honest, objective reporting of what the data show. An amusing online cartoon shows a variety of scientists speaking inconvenient truths and being punished for it—from Archimedes being killed by the Roman soldier as he did his geometry, to Bruno being burned at the stake for saying the earth is not the center of the universe, to Darwinian evolution, to Einsteinian relativity. The final panel says, “Science: if you ain’t pissin’ people off, you ain’t doing it right.”³

What Is Science?

Science is essential to our daily lives now, but very few people actually understand what it is or how it works. The media feed us a diet of stereotypes, especially the classic “mad scientist” trope, complete with the white lab coat, the sparking apparatuses and bubbling beakers, wild hair, and maniacal laugh. But most scientists don’t wear white lab coats. I haven’t worn one since I took chemistry lab in college, and the only scientists who need them are those who work with stuff that might splash on their clothes, such as chemists and medical personnel. No, scientists aren’t defined by the color of the coat they wear or the gizmos they work with. They are defined by what is in their heads and how they think.

Science is a way of thinking about the world, not how you dress or what toys you play with. Science is thinking critically about phenomena in the natural world and trying to find ways to test hypotheses, or preliminary explanations, about how the world works. As the philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.”⁴ All science is about testing hypotheses and finding out their validity by further observations and experiments. Scientists generally aren’t trying to prove their hypotheses but to disprove them. As British philosopher Sir Karl Popper pointed out many years ago, it’s far easier to prove a hypothesis wrong (falsify it) than it is to prove it right (verify it). The famous example is the classic philosophical statement “All swans are white.” No number of white swans proves that statement true, but a single nonwhite swan proves it false. Indeed, there are black swans in Australia (fig. 1.1). If your hypothesis has been tested and found false, you must abandon it and move on to another explanation—perhaps one suggested by your previous failure. Popper titled one of his books Conjectures and Refutations, a nice summary of the scientific method in a single phrase.

This idea surprises a lot of people, but it is true. Strictly speaking, science is about proving ideas wrong and moving on, not proving them right. Scientists are not looking for “final truth” or proving something “absolutely true.” Scientific explanations must always be open to further scrutiny and testing; they are tentative and must be capable of being rejected. As the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote, “It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.”⁵ Whether religious, political, or social, ideas that cannot be tested are not scientific; they are dogma. This immediately distinguishes science from many other areas of human thought. For example, we might say that “Zeus caused the lightning and thunder,” but this is a religious belief. It is not a testable scientific idea. Marxism and many other dogmatic worldviews also make broad statements about the world that cannot be tested but are articles of faith among the believers, so nothing would ever prove them false. When dogmatists (religious or otherwise) have their sacrosanct ideas challenged, they will not admit that the idea has been falsified. They stubbornly insist they are right, or they find some dodge to salvage at least some of their false notions.

Figure 1.1. Not all swans are white. This is the Australian black swan. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Thus, science is very different from what most people think it is. When scientists speak to each other, they are not after “truth.” They are careful not to use the words true or fact, and strictly speaking, we don’t “prove things true.” Instead, scientists are trying to test and falsify, and test again, until an idea is well corroborated (not “proven true”). What most people would call a “fact” is an “extremely well-supported explanation.” To a scientist, the highest form of a corroborated hypothesis is a theory, a group of interrelated and well-corroborated hypotheses and observations that have received widespread acceptance because they explain so much.

Sadly, the public uses these words and concepts very differently. In everyday usage, theory means a wild speculative idea, like “theories of why JFK was assassinated.” Creationists take advantage of the confusion and exploit this meaning of the word by denigrating evolution as “just a theory.” Well, gravity is just a theory too, but the objects around you are not floating around in the air. Thanks to the germ theory of disease, we believe that bacteria and viruses are the major causes of diseases, not some sort of “ill humor” in your blood that your doctor would remove by bleeding you with leeches.

Likewise, in the public debate about scientific topics, science deniers will put down an idea they oppose (like climate change) by saying that it’s not “proven true” or “100 percent true.” Nothing in science is “proven true,” and everything has probabilities associated with it. I can’t say that I can “prove” you would die if you jumped off a twenty-story building, but I can say that it’s likely to happen with a 99 percent probability—and most nonsuicidal people will not take that less than 1 percent chance that they won’t die.

As Carl Sagan said, “Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.”⁶ Science is basically applied skepticism. We try to be skeptical of all ideas until they have been tested and corroborated again and again, and then we only give our provisional assent. We don’t believe in an idea; we accept it based on evidence. (Believe is a religious and cultural word, not a scientific one.) Most humans are cautious of people trying to sell them worthless junk or politicians making impractical promises or swindlers trying to con them into believing something or buying something. We all know that advertising is exaggerated or deceptive or distorted, and in many cases, it is an outright lie. We try to look for good products and avoid junk when we are shopping, and we employ the old Latin maxim caveat emptor, “let the buyer beware.” Yet many people won’t employ the same skepticism to outlandish claims about religious miracles or UFOs or Bigfoot or a wide variety of paranormal ideas that sucker people every day. Most of the ideas in this book fall within the realm of outlandish and even bizarre, but there are plenty of believers. Yet these same people are skeptical elsewhere in their lives and won’t fall for a deceptive ad on TV or the internet or a telemarketer trying to sell them something.

Scientists are humans too, and although they try to be hard-boiled skeptics, they cannot avoid falling for the traps in thinking and sometimes embrace ideas that fit what they want to believe rather than what is. As Carl Sagan wrote, “There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right; they’re the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.”⁷ For this reason, there is an important quality control mechanism built into the fabric of science: peer review. This is very different from the internet, which is a giant cesspool of garbage and bad ideas with no fact-checking, and it is very different from partisan media outlets, which have given up reporting anything “fair and balanced” but churn out nonstop propaganda.

Scientists, on the other hand, must submit their ideas to the harsh review and scrutiny of other scientists before they can be published. Usually these reviews are anonymous, and they can be sent to any qualified scientist, including your worst critic. If your idea is rejected, you can give up, or you can try to do a better job of supporting your hypothesis and submit it again. Peer review weeds out the bad ideas in science, and after a harsh round of review before publication, and an even harsher scrutiny in the years after publication, most ideas in science that have survived many years are probably true and have passed quality control.

Peer review is particularly important in evaluating our own ideas, since we are inclined to think our own ideas are right and cannot judge them critically. As the Nobel Prize–winning Caltech physicist Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”⁸ Many scientific experiments are run by the double-blind method, in which neither the subjects of the experiments nor the investigators know what is in sample A or sample B. In a double-blind experiment, the samples are coded so that no one knows what is in each sample, and only after the experiment is over do the scientists find out whether the results agree with their expectations or not. As Feynman said, “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”⁹ Ultimately, bad ideas are weeded out, and good ones survive to become the established framework of scientific theory that all scientists build upon.

The mad scientist stereotype that prevails in nearly all media is completely wrong not just because of the clothing, behavior, and apparatuses that are shown. It’s wrong because the “mad scientist” is not testing hypotheses about nature or experimenting to find out what is really true. A cartoon on the internet shows someone interrogating a classic mad scientist. The interrogator asks, “Why did you build a death ray?” The mad scientist says, “To take over the world.” “No, I mean what hypothesis are you testing? Are you just making mad observations?” The mad scientist responds, “Look, I’m just trying to take over the world. That’s all.” The interrogator continues, “You at least are going to have some of the world as a mad control group, right?”

As the cartoon suggests, he’s really not a scientist at all; he’s just a “mad engineer.” (Engineers may understand science, but their goal is not to discover truths about nature but to apply science to make inventions or practical devices.)

Science, Intuition, and Common Sense

Common sense is that which tells us the world is flat.

—Stuart Chase, quoted in S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action

Common sense is the very antipodes of science.

—Edward Bradford Titchener, Systematic Psychology: Prolegomena

We’re living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilization but we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That’s dangerous.

—E. O. Wilson, quoted in New Scientist

The great biologist (and defender of Darwin) Thomas Henry Huxley wrote, “Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.”¹⁰ Scientists and philosophers often claim that science is based on common sense. But at a more fundamental level, much of what we have learned from scientific 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, o...