Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

to greater physical and mental health, and anthropological evidence that magicians, shamans, and the kings who use them have more power and win more copulations, thus spreading their genes for magical thinking.
2. Spandrel: The magical thinking part of the Belief Engine is also a spandrel—Stephen Jay Gould's and Richard Lewontin's metaphor for a necessary by-product of an evolved mechanism. In their influential 1979 paper, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme" (Proceedings of the Royal Society, V. B205: 581-598), Gould and Lewontin explain that in architecture a spandrel is "the tapering triangular spaces formed by the intersection of two rounded arches at right angle." This leftover space in medieval churches is filled with elaborate, beautiful designs so purposeful looking "that we are tempted to view it as the starting point of any analysis, as the cause in some sense of the surrounding architecture. But this would invert the proper path of analysis." To ask "what is the purpose of the spandrel" is to ask the wrong question. It would be like asking "why do males have nipples?" The correct question is "why do females have nipples?" The answer is that females need them to nurture their babies, and males and females are built on the same architectural frame. It was simply easier for nature to construct males with worthless nipples rather than reconfigure the underlying genetic architecture.

    In this sense the magical thinking component of the Belief Engine is a spandrel. We think magically because we have to think causally. We make Type 1 and 2 Errors because we need to make Type 1 and 2 Hits. We have magical thinking and superstitions because we need critical thinking and pattern-finding. The two cannot be separated. Magical thinking is a necessary by-product of the evolved mechanism of causal thinking. In my next book, Why People Believe in God, can be found an expanded version of this theory in which I present abundant historical and anthropological evidence, but here I will allow the "weird things" written about in this book to serve as examples of such ancestral magical thinking in fully modern humans. Believers in UFOs, alien abductions, ESP, and psychic phenomena have committed a Type 1 Error in thinking: they are believing a falsehood. Creationists and Holocaust deniers have made a Type 2 Error in thinking: they are rejecting a truth. It is not that these folks are ignorant or uninformed; they are intelligent but misinformed. Their thinking has gone wrong. Type 1 and 2 Errors are squelching Type 1 and 2 Hits. Fortunately there is an abundance of evidence that the Belief Engine is malleable. Critical thinking can be taught. Skepticism is learnable. Type 1 and 2 Errors are tractable. I know. I became a skeptic after being a sucker for a lot of these beliefs (recounted in detail in this book). I am a born-again skeptic, as it were.
    Having offered this deeper answer to the "why" question, allow me to close with the final exchange in an interview I had with Georgea Kovanis, in the Detroit Free Press (May 2, 1997), who understood the bigger skeptical picture when she printed my two-word answer to her final question: "Why should we believe anything you say?" My response: "You shouldn't."

    Cogita tute —think for yourself.
    A Note on the Revised and Expanded Edition
    For years skeptics have been asked by detractors and the media: "What's the harm in believing in UFOs, ESP, astrology, and pseudoscience in general? Aren't you skeptics just taking the fun out of people's lives?" A striking answer by way of example was provided by the Heaven's Gate UFO cult on March 27, 1997, when the mass suicide story broke and a media feeding frenzy lasting two full days flooded the Skeptics Society office. One week later the first edition of Why People Believe Weird Things was released, so the publicity tour for the book was heavily slanted toward explaining how such