50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True Part 6

Books Baym, Geoffrey. From Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News. New York: Paradigm, 2009.

Boorstin, Daniel J. Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage, 1992.

Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books, 2010.

Postman, Neil, and Steve Powers. How to Watch TV News. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Radford, Benjamin. Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003.

Shabo, Magedah E. Techniques of Propaganda and Persuasion. New York: Prestwick, 2008.

Other Sources Archaeology.

Cosmos.

Discover.

Focus.

National Geographic.

Nature.

New Scientist.

Popular Science.

Science.

Science Ill.u.s.trated.

Scientific American.

Smithsonian Air and s.p.a.ce.

The reality of human races is another commonsense "truth" destined to follow the flat Earth into oblivion.

-Jared Diamond The lay concept of race does not correspond to the variation that exists in nature.

-Joseph L. Graves Jr., The Emperor's New Clothes Race is a human invention....We made it, we can unmake it.

-Evelyn Hammonds Most people today believe with absolute confidence that humankind comes prepackaged as a collection of biologically sorted subgroups called "races." These categories, according to the views of most people around the world, are natural, obvious, and undeniable. They also are widely believed to have profound implications for intelligence, physical ability, and even moral behavior. These beliefs are destructive, deadly, unscientific, and just plain wrong. There is no such thing as races, no naturally occurring biological categories of humans that match popular racial categories such as "black," "white," "Asian," and so on. Race belief is one of the most important targets for skepticism because of the havoc it has wreaked throughout history and the great harm it continues to cause today.

Few people ever think to doubt the concept of race because it's considered to be common sense. For example, anyone can look at a dark-skinned African, a light-skinned European, and a typical Chinese person and recognize immediately that they belong in different biological groups or "races," right? If we can see races with our own eyes, then why question it? No one is going to confuse the African for the Asian, or the European for the African. They are different "kinds" of humans that fit into different biological categories. How can that be wrong? It's a n.o.brainer, right? Wrong; as we shall see in this chapter, it's very easy to dismantle that three-person lineup example and show why biological races are illogical, inconsistent, and nonexistent-except in our minds.

Before we plunge in and explore some of the problems with race belief, however, it is important to be clear that this chapter is not about racism. Race belief does often lead to racism, of course, but this is not a lecture on morality, fairness, or how to make friends. Nothing in this chapter has anything to do with liberal versus conservative, evil versus good, or any form of political correctness. This chapter is concerned only with the reality of our biological diversity and the delusion of biological race categories. It also is important for readers to understand that rejecting the race concept is not a denial of the real biological diversity that exists, nor is it a rejection of the existence of "races" entirely. Biological races may not exist but cultural races certainly do. Yes, there really are "black people" and "white people" in America, for example. But these are cultural groups of our own creation. They are much more like clubs or organizations than subspecies based on origin and kinship. What we mistakenly see as nature's divisions are instead canyons of our own creation. This is good news, however, for if we invented biological races, then we can certainly decide to move on from them and begin to view ourselves in a more honest and realistic way.

Aren't we different? Isn't biological diversity real? Don't people look differently and don't they have different colored skin, different facial features and hair types? Can't we often tell if someone is more or less related to other people? Of course; all that is true. But the key is that our biological diversity does not sensibly translate into our species being spilt into meaningful biological territories with firm borders around them. The more than one billion humans commonly referred to as "black people," for example, are so genetically diverse that placing them all into one category, defined by kinship and distinct from other groups, is laughable in the light of scientific facts. Biological races do not exist because our species is too young, too closely related or blended-and the blending continues every moment of every day. This means we cannot intelligently divide ourselves up into anything like the traditional notions of racial groups such as "black," "white" and "Asian." It's like trying to draw lines in flowing water. It just doesn't work.

After giving lectures about race and even writing a book on the subject, I have found that the most effective way to enable people to see why biological races are not real is to present them with simple thought experiments. Here are some that seem to work well: How many oceans are there? If you did well in middle school geography cla.s.s, you probably answered "five": Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Southern. But wait! That's not quite right. Five is the cultural answer, based on our twist of reality. The correct answer -nature's answer-is just one. Look at a globe if you don't believe me; we live on a one-ocean world. We made up five ocean names and attributed them to different regions of the same vast body of water. There may have been practical reasons for giving different names to different areas of water, but it doesn't give us an excuse to believe in the literal existence of five distinct oceans, as most people probably do. Any of this sound familiar?

Bad boxes. Imagine that you are some sort of a giant G.o.d, and you have decided to organize the little people scurrying about around your feet by tossing them into boxes. Let's say you have five boxes and you decide to sort the people by their skin color, or if you like, some other physical trait such as hair or nose width. You carefully place them into their respective boxes, but immediately you see a problem. The boxes aren't very good. They don't seem to have sides or tops and the people keep running back and forth to other boxes. To further complicate matters, many of the people you dropped into a specific box keep mating and having babies with people in different boxes. Soon you realize that your sorting is in vain. This is what biological race categories are like in the real world. They are boxes without sides or tops that have never done a good job of containing people and their genes.

That three-person lineup in your head. Remember the darkskinned African, the Chinese person, and the light-skinned European I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter? In the minds of many people, a mental image of three such different-looking people standing side by side wins the case for race. But it shouldn't, and here's why.

The human species cannot be fairly represented by a three-person lineup. It's a false and misleading example that fools us into thinking that we all fit neatly into a few distinct and obvious natural categories when in fact we do not. Consider what would happen if I presented you with a three-person lineup made up of an indigenous Fijian, an Ethiopian, and a Navajo Indian-all dressed in neutral clothes so no cultural or geographical clues were apparent. Most people would struggle to a.s.sign them to races. Race identification seems easy when we conveniently omit the billions of people who fit "in between" the members of that original three-person lineup.

Consider how silly it would be to present a seven-foot-tall man next to a five-foot-tall man and declare: "Behold, proof that our species consists of a 'tall' species and a 'short' species." We would laugh at that because we know immediately that there are a variety of heights in between the seven-footer and the five-footer. We should react the same way when we imagine a dark-skinned African standing next to lightskinned European or an Asian.

A long, unbroken chain of humanity. If we somehow could see humankind, all seven billion of us, in one glance we would might recognize the reality of our borderless diversity immediately. We would see that there is no such thing as "obvious" or "commonsense" racial categories based on superficial traits such as skin color, hair texture, and facial features. Imagine if every human in the world were lined up, shoulder to shoulder, from darkest to lightest. You could walk that line for ten thousand years and you would never find a breakpoint, a natural border, where one race ends and another begins. If you were determined to create races, you would have to just arbitrarily create divisions were none exist, which is essentially how we ended up with races today. We drew borders around groups of people and then pretended that nature did it.

How many races? If races are real and plain to see, then shouldn't we all be able to name them? So what are they? How many races are there? See, for all the talk, paperwork, and obsessing over race, there is no agreement on this most basic question. Ask ten random people to list "the races of humankind" and you are certain to get ten different lists. Why is this? For something that is supposed to be obvious and commonsense, race is awfully difficult to pin down. The reason for this is clear: races are make-believe. We could have from three races to one million races depending on whom you listen to, what criteria you decide to emphasize, and what criteria you decide to ignore.

Race against time. As human-made categories and not natural biological categories, races are created and defined by the whim of cultures. The rules of race-written, rewritten, and often unwritten-have never been logical or consistent throughout history and never will be. They never can be because races are not based on solid science or lucid logic. And nothing is more flexible than fantasy.

Let's imagine that we have a time machine and send a "white" Irishman back to the United States in 1820. Guess what? When he emerges at that time, he will still be Irish but he won't be "white" anymore. How can that be? It's because race rules change. Believe it or not, there was a time in US history when many Irish immigrants were viewed as nonwhite.

Magic above the clouds. Did you know that a person's race can change today simply by flying? I know people in the Cayman Islands, for example, who do not identify themselves as "black" and their culture does not identify them as "black." However, if they fly to the United States they somehow turn into "black" people upon landing. How does this amazing transformation occur at thirty-five thousand feet? Does something physically happen to their skin color, facial features, hair texture, DNA, blood, and ancestry? No, their race changes because race is a made-up game and different societies play the game with different rules.

I saw this firsthand during my university days when I knew a lightskinned Haitian student who was "black" while attending school in the United States but then became "white" whenever she returned to her home country. This bizarre flip-flop of race could only happen because races are imaginary and not based on anything logical or scientific. Her race changed because Haiti reverses the "one-drop rule" as it is known in America. In the United States, some small observable African ancestry has traditionally meant a person is "black." In Haiti, some small observable European ancestry traditionally means a person is "white." Neither country can be said to be right and the other wrong in the way it determines race labels. It's just the way it's done, and it's a good example of how racial categories are constructed by culture rather than by nature.

Genes versus races. For those who may think that the science of genetics will somehow validate the concept of race, think again. It certainly has not done so yet, and there is no good reason to think it ever will. If anything, it will continue to make it clear that the traditional race concept doesn't work. In 2010, a paper was published in Nature about the sequencing of sub-Saharan African genomes. One remarkable discovery to come out of that research was that the genetic distance between two bushmen who had lived their entire lives within walking distance of one other was greater than that between any one of them and a typical "white" European or j.a.panese Asian. Think about this: One of the South Africans and a random "white" European or j.a.panese Asian are more closely related than the two South Africans are to each other. Now, imagine if we made a police-style lineup with those two South African men, a "white" European, and a j.a.panese Asian. Which two would most people place into a race together? But while the two South Africans may look very similar on the outside, the biological reality beneath the surface tells a very different story.

The truth before us is clear if we choose to recognize it. Our species simply does not accommodate naturally occurring race borders between vast groups of people. Cultures have created and artificially imposed them. The fact that so much death, cruelty, suffering, and social inefficiency has been caused or facilitated by this delusion demands that we finally accept the reality of who we are and abandon race belief.

GO DEEPER...

Books Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

Graves, Joseph L. The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America. New York: Plume, 2005.

Harrison, Guy P. Race and Reality: What Everyone Should Know about Our Biological Diversity. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010.

Olson, Steve. Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins. New York: Mariner Books, 2003.

Other Sources "Race-The Power of an Illusion," www.pbs.org/race.

If you tell a Euro-American kid he can't play basketball because he cannot jump or an African American kid he can't swim because he can't float, you limit what they can become and further reinforce segregation. The message that genetically determined racial traits are responsible for athletic performances, as opposed to desire, coaching, and culture, reinforces racism. The effects of this racist ideology are felt far beyond the world of sports.

-Joseph L. Graves, The Race Myth The games we play may seem like a trivial sideshow, but they are far from that in reality. Sports not only account for many billions of dollars in the world economy and consume countless waking hours, they also have a profound influence on how we perceive the biological diversity of our species. As we saw in the previous chapter, common racial groups such as "black," "white," "Hispanic," and "Asian" are culturally created categories and do not hold up to scientific scrutiny as biological subsets of our species, which is what most people think they are. There are multiple reasons why belief in biological races continues to thrive even as many scientists reject it, but sports certainly is a major contributor to this misreading of our biological diversity. Even people who are not fans can't help but notice the barrage of suggestive images sports serve up to the world every day: once again, all the finalists in the men's Olympic 100-meter race are black; most college basketball and football coaches are white; white men own NFL teams and sit up in luxury boxes watching while their mostly black employees run around sweating and smashing into each other. Billions of people worldwide undoubtedly see confirmation of their biological race beliefs played out before them on the courts and playing fields of sports. But what they see confirms nothing of the sort.

The intersection of race and sports is a tragic illusion that has worked to solidify the incorrect and disastrous belief that races are genetic prisons of destiny for us all. People have long tried to portray sports as a deep and accurate reflection of greater society. They see it as an honest manifestation of the way our species naturally sorts itself out. If one race produces the most champions in this sport or that, it is because success was written upon that race's DNA. It's a notion that comes in handy as reinforcement for traditional race belief. How can the existence of races be an illusion or a cultural creation when we see racial divisions and hierarchies rise to the surface on the sporting stage for all to see? The racial layering of sport results proves that the racial layering in society is natural and not the result of unjust history, immoral choices, evil actions, or unfair laws. No need for anyone to feel bad about anything or try to change anything. People of different races do some things better or worse than other races. All of this is wrong, of course, because the racial categories themselves make no sense. A black East African is likely to be more closely related to a white European than she is to a black South African. The rules of race-who gets a.s.signed to which race-vary by culture today and they have varied over time. There is no logic or consistency to them. And, although race is believed to be all about kinship and ancestry, our popular race groups make a mockery of people's real kinship and ancestry. This alone makes it ridiculous to interpret the results of sports compet.i.tions through the lens of biological race.

There are many examples available to ill.u.s.trate how the misinterpretation of sports and race misleads people and unjustly validates in their minds an invalid concept. However, we will look at just one example that should make it clear just how wrong it is to believe that sports prove the existence of biological races and reveal inherent abilities of people based on race.

Track and field is a sport I once competed in and have followed closely since I was thirteen years old. As the sports editor for a newspaper several years ago, I interviewed numerous Olympic track and field gold medalists. I have photographed and written about the sport at every level, from school races on gra.s.s fields in the Caribbean, all the way up to the Olympic Games. For me, track and field is special, the most beautiful sport of all. It's performance art that shows off the human form in all its glory. Unfortunately, it's also a deep well of irrational race belief. Its results often are misinterpreted as evidence of inherited race-based talents and glaring justification for believing in biological races.

Ask anyone which racial group is the best at running and you are sure to hear that it is the black race, of course. It's a no-brainer. Just look who collects all the medals at the Olympics in track and field, right? Not so fast. Don't forget how superficial traits such as skin color can mislead us about the realities of our biological diversity. Sure, people with darker skin seem to win races more often than people with lighter skin. But what does this really mean?

First of all, we need to consider who is actually winning which events. In recent decades, runners from East Africa have had remarkable success in long-distance events. Kenyans and Ethiopians routinely sweep the top spots in major compet.i.tions. In the sprints, North American, European, and Caribbean athletes with at least some recent African ancestry have dominated. So, if all these winning groups are members of the black race doesn't it follow, then, that the black race is superior at running and has a race-based genetic advantage? No, and here's why: The "black race" everyone speaks of is a culturally created category that is absurdly vast and makes no sense in biological or genetic terms. Because race rules are determined by societies rather than nature, millions of people can watch athletes such as Daley Thompson, Dan O'Brien, and Bryan Clay win gold medals in the Olympic decathlon and then walk away believing they have seen further proof of innate black athletic superiority, ignoring or never knowing that all three men had a non-black parent. We cannot look at an athlete and then know for certain his or her ancestry and make sweeping a.s.sumptions about race-based abilities. Superficial features such as hair, skin color, and facial dimensions easily mislead us.

It is also worth noting that the widespread belief of black racial superiority in sports is not only wrong logically but also unfair to black athletes. To claim that Michael Jordan's greatness was linked primarily to him being black is to overlook or deny the intense work ethic, dedication, and focus he poured into his career. Many of Jordan's peers commented on how his capacity for work and his obsession to win were far above everyone else's.1 Biological race did not create Michael Jordan. He was born with individual talent, perhaps, but it seems clear that Jordan's success was owed mostly to his drive.

When he was nine or ten years old, Magic Johnson would practice basketball for an hour or two before his school bus picked him up on school mornings. If he was just a gifted black man born to play the game of basketball, then why did he have to work so hard for so many years in order to succeed? All those Kenyans you see winning marathons and track races don't just show up and win by default after showing their pa.s.sports. They don't coast to victory on golden DNA. No, they ran more miles in childhood-much of it over mountainous terrain and at high alt.i.tudes-than most serious runners ever do in adulthood. As adults, the best Kenyan runners log training loads that give average runners nightmares. Writing off Kenyan success to their membership in something called "the black race" is not only inaccurate, it also robs them of respect due for the investment of all their years of toil.

None of this is to suggest that there may not be some genetic advantages beyond those of the individual that benefit East African runners. However, we have to be clear about what those group-genetic advantages are-if indeed they do exist. This may surprise many sports fans, but not only is it unjustified to say black people are great runners, it is not even justified to claim that Kenyans and Ethiopians make great runners! The fact is, virtually all of the elite runners in those two nations come from very small populations within the respective countries. I recall a telling moment during a trip to the Great Rift Valley, the small region within Kenya where most of the running stars come from. My driver, a Kikiyu man from Nairobi, commented on how amazed he was by the running abilities of the Kelenjin, a small tribe that has produced most of Kenya's Olympic champions. Here was a dark-skinned Kenyan who was as in awe as much as I was of Kenyan runners and seemed to feel every bit as genetically distant from them as I, a light-skinned American, did.

WHY CAN'T AFRICANS SPRINT?.

Here's a fact that seems to escape the notice of most sports fans: there has never been a black African Olympic champion in the 100 meters, 200 meters or 400 meters. Isn't that interesting? According to the standard race-sports mythos, Africa is the source of the genes that fuel the fastest race of people on Earth. So why haven't Africans won anything in the Olympics shorter than 800 meters? It doesn't make sense. If black genes, African genes, are somehow the key to world-beating speed, then shouldn't the continent with the most African genes by far be the greatest source of sprinters and produce far more than the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Caribbean?

It seems clear that culture and possibly some smaller-group genetic advantages are behind whatever racial breakdown of sports we may see. If black men in America have the most success in basketball, it's most likely because so many black boys in America dream about making it to the NBA, believe they can do it, and then put in thousands of long, hard hours on the court trying to get there. This surely is the same reason we see mostly white men in professional ice hockey: the vast majority of kids dreaming about it and playing obsessively are white kids.

It is also important to be aware that it is foolhardy to look at something so fleeting as today's sports results and try to draw sweeping conclusions from them. So what if darker-skinned athletes have been winning most of the top-distance races over the last few decades? That's just not enough to conclude that the results are proof of some racial superiority at work. Just imagine if oil was discovered in the Great Rift Valley and the Kelenjin tribe was suddenly awash in cash. The Kelenjin children might decide they don't want to put in those ten-mile runs to school every day and prefer to have the family driver take them to school in the Range Rover. They also might put down the porridge and begin feasting on American-style junk food while watching television and playing video games. Several years of that, and we might not see as many Kenyan champions coming up as we are used to. And what if the United States plummeted into a full-scale depression? What if little white kids all across America had to run to school and back home every day? What if they had to make do on a diet of fruits and vegetables? A few decades down the road they might be winning all the gold medals.

Imaginary scenarios aside, I would not be surprised if at some point during this century a few Native American populations, perhaps high in the Andes, begin producing distance-running champions. It's certainly possible. It would take a perfect storm of opportunity, a spark of success, good coaching, desire, and then s...o...b..lling confidence-just like what we saw in East Africa in the latter decades of the last century. Of course, if such a shift in running success happened, sports fans would no doubt declare: "Native Americans are the superior running race. It's obvious, just look who always wins in the Olympics!"

I focused on track and field as a single example of why it doesn't make sense to believe in biological races as a determining factor in sports success but I could have done the same with any sport that race believers see as confirmation for their delusion. Do "Asians" dominate table tennis and badminton because of a biological race advantage? No. Do white Southerners rule NASCAR racing because their biological race gives them a head start? No. Do Canadians dominate curling in the Winter Olympics because of some racial superiority or because n.o.body else cares about curling? Nothing we see in sports confirms the notion that popular race categories biologically lift some athletes to victory while holding others down. Virtually everything we see in sports can be explained by the immense power of culture and environment in our lives, with their ability to activate or leave inactivated genes. In addition to that, we must always consider the unique and complex path every individual athlete travels.

GO DEEPER...

Harrison, Guy P. Race and Reality: What Everyone Should Know about Our Biological Diversity. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010.

Hoberman, John. Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. New York: Mariner Books, 1997.

Conspiracy theories result from a pattern-perception mechanism gone awry-they are cognitive versions of the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese.

-Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla Claims described as conspiracy theories can be a real challenge for skeptics because they tend to be built upon collections of minor and reasonable events, none of which is necessarily impossible or unlikely. It's the conclusion, the big evil plot, which overreaches and often requires a skeptical takedown. I usually give conspiracy theorists more time to make their cases because, unlike most of the other popular beliefs addressed in this book, many conspiracy theories don't require a violation of the laws physics or pseudoscientific delusions. There is no denying that people really do get together in secret to plan and execute weird and terrible things. For this reason, "conspiracy theories" really shouldn't be thought of as one distinct claim in the way Atlantis or ghosts are, for example. While someone may one day prove that ghosts are real, that can never happen with "conspiracy theories" because it's such a vague and loosely applied description. There is no doubt that while many are false, at least some are always going to turn out to be true. After all, there really was a conspiracy of Confederate loyalists behind the a.s.sa.s.sination of Abraham Lincoln. The Tuskegee experiment, in which medical researchers conspired to allow men with syphilis to suffer for decades, actually happened. There may not have been a conspiracy to cover up a crashed s.p.a.ceship at Roswell, but there was a secret cover-up to hide the truth about the Cold War activities of Project Mogul. I don't think extraterrestrials are kept at Area 51, but I have no doubt that the US Air Force and CIA do keep many secrets there. The Watergate conspiracy was real. There really was a 9/11 conspiracy. The overwhelming evidence points to al Qaeda and not an inside job by the Bush administration, of course, but it was still a conspiracy. Many conspiracy stories are true-just not all of them, as some people seem inclined to believe. Fortunately, there is an easy way to sort through them and avoid falling for every crackpot claim that comes along. Remember, that same brain that tempts us to fall for every story and connect every random dot we encounter is also capable of saving us from falling into irrational beliefs. We just have to use it.

Whenever someone asks me if I believe in conspiracies I am obligated to answer: "Of course I do. Conspiracies are real; they happen all the time." I quickly add, however, that I would never accept any major conspiracy claim that is not backed up with sufficient evidence. It's easy to point to unanswered questions, coincidences, and possible connections between different events or people. But none of that is proof. As a rule, it's wise to be very skeptical about any conspiracy theory that makes extraordinary claims but fails to produce extraordinary evidence.

The thing that has long intrigued me about unproven conspiracy theories is how they are able to snare bright minds. I know very intelligent and highly educated people who are convinced that one tiny secret club or another is running the world, for example. One told me about vast underground "cities" from which the world is governed. Another told me that every major US politician-including the president, all governors, and all of Congress-are either h.o.m.os.e.xuals or pedophiles and controlled by sinister people as a result. I've lost count of how many people have told me that the Moon landings were faked, and sometimes I suspect that I'm the last American who thinks Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Discussions with the more pa.s.sionate conspiracy believers can be fascinating. Their brains seem to work overtime at putting together the pieces of their imaginary puzzle. It's not that they are dumb or lazy. To the contrary, they work very hard to make sense of it all and then defend their conclusions at all costs. What I find to be a consistent problem is that smart conspiracy-theory believers behave just like most people do when clinging to any irrational belief: Their emotional investment is too great to give a fair hearing to contradictory ideas and evidence. And if anything does manage to creep under their defensive wall, the confirmation bias promptly dispatches it. This gets at the key difference between a hardcore conspiracy believer and a good skeptic. Maybe not all, but most devout conspiracy believers seem to find it very difficult, if not impossible, to change their minds no matter how strong the explanations and evidence are against their position. On the other hand, any sensible skeptic would jump on board with any conspiracy theory the moment someone provides proof for it. One mind-set is concerned with clinging to a specific belief above anything else while the other mind-set is concerned with the true story, whatever it may turn out to be.

Skeptics are often accused of having closed minds when it comes to conspiracy theories. That is nonsense. A mind that is unwilling to hear new ideas or change direction when the evidence demands it is the sort of mind I would never want to have. Thoughtful skeptics can and will believe in conspiracy theories-after they are shown proof. I, for example, don't believe that there was a vast and complex conspiracy to a.s.sa.s.sinate John F. Kennedy. It seems reasonable to me that Oswald did it and then the Warren Commission made mistakes in its report, which opened the door for lingering questions. However, I wasn't on the gra.s.sy knoll with binoculars that day, and it is possible that there was more to the JFK shooting than a lone a.s.sa.s.sin. My mind is open on the matter. If it ever turns out that there really was more to it, then I will accept it. Until then, however, I'm sticking with the Oswald explanation because that's where the best current evidence points.

It's no different with the 9/11 conspiracy theory. I've looked over the claims and remain unconvinced that the US government intentionally blew up the World Trade Center buildings with controlled detonations, killing thousands of its own citizens, in order to further some world domination or economic agenda. I suppose it could be true. But for now, it seems pretty clear that the only reasonable conclusion one can come to is that there was a 9/11 conspiracy but it involved Islamic terrorists, not George W. Bush and d.i.c.k Cheney. After all, Islamic terrorists had been saying for many years, loud and clear to anyone who would listen, that they were going to attack America. And it wasn't just talk. They had already detonated a truck bomb in the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six people. They blew up two US emba.s.sies in Africa in 1998 and attacked a US warship in 2000. There was an obvious series of events leading to 9/11, and the evidence links it to al Qaeda. I have interviewed one of the world's leading al Qaeda experts, Peter Bergen, twice and he certainly is convinced that Osama bin Laden and his followers were responsible for 9/11. It also seems reasonable to me-and more importantly to most engineering experts-that intense fires in the buildings weakened (not necessarily melted) the steel girders sufficiently to cause floors to pancake and the towers to collapse. But millions disagree. According to a 2006 Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll, more than one-third of Americans believe that the US government "a.s.sisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them."1

I recommend keeping the following points in mind when thinking about conspiracy theories:

Keep an open mind. Be careful about dismissing conspiracy theories in blanket fashion. Discounting one or two versions of a popular conspiracy theory does not necessarily mean there was not a conspiracy. For example, just because Lee Harvey Oswald probably didn't get help from the Cubans, the communists, the mafia, the military industrial complex, aliens, or Lyndon Johnson doesn't mean he couldn't possibly have been aided by somebody else. Don't make the mistake of closing your mind to possible realities just because one popular version of a conspiracy seems thoroughly unlikely to be true.

Sometimes big and important things happen for reasons that are unsatisfying or unknowable to us. When we are faced with these events it can be tempting to fill in the blanks prematurely in order to satisfy our curiosity or provide more meaning. But making up answers is a weak response that is unworthy of sensible and honest people. Resist the urge. Sometimes we have to be grown-ups and accept uncomfortable realities or the irritation of not knowing.

Beware of confirmation bias. Most conspiracy theories depend on it to acc.u.mulate believers. Do not embrace every bit of information that supports a particular conspiracy claim while rejecting everything that contradicts it. Remember that we are naturally drawn to explanations that fit with our prior conclusions and beliefs. You have to fight against this tendency if you want to think clearly and make rational decisions about what to believe.

The more unusual and complex a conspiracy claim is, the more good evidence you should expect to see before believing it.

GLORIFIED GOSSIP.

I suspect that the popularity of conspiracy theories also has a lot to do with our obsession with gossip as well. If you haven't been paying attention, take a good look the next time you pa.s.s a newsstand. Celebrity magazines, essentially vehicles for gossip, are booming. Gossip is big business because it's an integral part of human interactions. All those who say they can resist listening to or pa.s.sing on a juicy bit of gossip are lying-and we should call them liars behind their backs. To gossip is to be human. Anthropologically speaking, it probably helps us bond and helps us predict who we can trust and who we can't. Based on this, I think most conspiracy theories qualify as glorified gossip. The big ones are just like rumors about the neighbors or the new stranger in town, only multiplied and amplified a thousand times. If this is right, then conspiracy theories probably aren't going away anytime soon because some researchers think our brains are genetically or culturally predisposed to download and spread juicy information about others.2 Listening excitedly to the dirt on someone and then pa.s.sing it on to a friend the first chance we get is not abnormal behavior. It's who we are. It's what we do.

GO WHERE THE EVIDENCE LEADS.

Not all, but many conspiracy believers seem to have lost perspective. The more pa.s.sionate ones are locked into their conclusions more out of loyalty to a position than anything else. When they should be pursuing real evidence and true answers, no matter where the trail leads, they have instead dug in and refuse to budge no matter what evidence and counterarguments come along. This is not an intellectually respectable strategy, one I encourage them to reconsider. I certainly don't care about being lined up for or against any particular conspiracy theory. I just want to be aligned with the truth-no matter what that truth may be.

GO DEEPER...

Books Aaronovitch, David. Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

Goldwag, Arthur. Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, the Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, the New World Order, and Many, Many More. New York: Vintage, 2009.

Popular Mechanics editors. Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts. New York: Hearst, 2006.

Other Sources 911 myths, www.911myths.com.

Polidoro, Mossimo. "Facts and Fiction in the Kennedy a.s.sa.s.sination." Skeptical Inquirer 29, no. 1 (January/February 2005). www.csicop.org/si/show/facts_and_fiction_in_the_kennedy_a.s.sa.s.sination/.

Popular Mechanics editors. "Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report." Popular Mechanics, February 3, 2005. www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/news/1227842.

Radford, Benjamin. "Top Ten Conspiracy Theories." Live Science, May 19, 2008. www.livescience.com/11375-top-ten-conspiracy-theories-934.html.

There is a fundamental flaw that runs through virtually all reasoning about alternative medicine. It is simply this: the body is likely to heal itself in time, regardless of what you do. This means whatever you are doing at the time of this natural healing will receive undue credit for the improvement.

-Hank Davis, Caveman Logic Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded.

-The Buddha While any irrational belief may contain inherent risks, some are more dangerous than others. For example, believing in Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster is relatively harmless compared to believing in a real monster called alternative medicine. No amusing sideshow, this belief drains trillions of dollars from customers and sometimes even kills them. Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is a strange mix of safe, dangerous, effective, ineffective, and just plain weird treatments. Many CAM treatments do great harm to people directly or by leading people away from science-based treatments that might have helped them. In a later chapter on homeopathic medicine I include the story of a baby who died an agonizing death from septic shock. The child was treated with homeopathic medicines (magic water) all the way to the bitter end by parents who rejected medical science and put their faith in alternative medicine. A 2008 Harvard study estimated that more than 365,000 people suffered premature deaths from AIDS unnecessarily in South Africa between 2000 and 2005 because of government policies that rejected science-based treatments in favor of alternative treatments.1 According to the study, the South African government diverted attention away from antiretroviral drugs that were tested and proven to be effective and promoted unscientific remedies, such as lemon juice, beetroot, and garlic.2 Have no doubt; CAM kills.

It is important to define complementary and alternative medicine because I have found that many people have no idea what the terms refer to. It's just medicine and healthcare, some a.s.sume, no different from medical science. It's probably best to understand CAM for what it is not rather than what it is.

Alternative medicine differs from science-based medicine in one very important way: it has not been proven to work using scientific testing methods. CAM is outside of the system that produced the drugs and treatments that have extended life spans and improved the quality of life dramatically for so many people last century. This does not necessarily mean that all alternative medicines and treatments are ineffective. Some of them may work very well-but good luck figuring out which ones!

The problem is that we can't know for sure which drug or treatment works as promised until it is proven with proper scientific testing, but if an alternative medicine or treatment is shown to be effective by credible scientific testing, then it would become part of modern medical science and no longer be an alternative medicine or treatment. Therefore, alternative medicine in the context of healthcare really means nothing more than "unproven" by the standards of proper science. In order to be profitable and to survive in the marketplace, alternative medicines and treatments must rely, not on cold hard data, but rather on tradition, marketing, and anecdotal evidence (individual stories and word-of-mouth referrals).

None of this is meant to suggest that medical science and evidence-based healthcare get it right 100 percent of the time. Far from it. Some "tested and proven" medicines are not tested properly or well enough, are not prescribed safely, or were compromised by incompetence or profit/ethics issues and end up causing more problems than they solve. Every year, tens of thousands of people are injured or die of complications from evidence-based, tested, and regulated drugs and treatments. But this is not a sensible reason to reject medical science and turn to CAM. If anything, I would hope that one would view the very serious problems with modern medical science as only more reason to avoid the largely unregulated and fraud-riddled world of CAM. If we can't even trust tested, regulated, and scientific health treatments all the time, why would anyone choose to risk his or her safety with untested, unregulated, and pseudoscientific health treatments? It should be no surprise that medical science and mainstream healthcare fall far short of perfection. How could it not with humans involved? What is important to understand, however, is that there is at least a good chance, a reasonable hope, that a particular drug or treatment on the evidence-based side of healthcare was produced by a process based on science, was tested, and is more likely to be safe and effective. Across the border, over in the land of alternative medicine, the risks of a treatment being ineffective or dangerous skyrocket because anything goes.

I have always found the popular attraction to unproven and unregulated medicine odd. If more people understood what it means for a drug or a treatment to be outside of modern medical science, I suspect that CAM might lose a lot of fans. I wouldn't want to drive a car or eat a candy bar that wasn't tested and regulated in some way. I certainly don't want to put untested and unregulated medicine into my body when I'm sick. Yet millions of people are willing to trust mysterious pills and potions that could have just about anything in them and do just about anything to the human body. The popularity of this stuff is staggering. A national study found that 38.3 percent of adult Americans (83 million) and 11.8 percent of children (8.5 million under age eighteen) accounted for $33.9 billion out-of-pocket spending (not paid by insurance companies) for CAM treatments and consultations with pract.i.tioners in 2007.3 Nearly three billion dollars alone was spent on homeopathic medicines that many doctors and scientists view as nothing more than very expensive water.4 WHY PEOPLE TRUST ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE.

Natural. Alternative medicine is often touted as being "natural." The a.s.sumption being that this means they are safer and more in tune with your body than chemicals in plastic capsules that were manufactured in a grim, windowless factory somewhere. But the reality is that the claim of "natural" by itself means nothing in the context of medicine. "Natural" does not necessarily mean a treatment works or is safe for you. Rattle snake venom is natural, but I wouldn't want to drink it. Malaria is natural, still not much fun. Water is natural but it doesn't cure diabetes. One should also be aware that many of the top-selling CAM products are not exactly cooked up in grandma's kitchen using the finest natural ingredients. They come from big factories too.