NOTHING EVOLVES:

Why Do We Continue to Believe Bizarre Things? (Michael Fumento, 5/13/10, AOL News)

Why in an age saturated with information, do we believe such bizarre things? Things like crop circles, alien abductions, and 9/11 conspiracy theories? Why do we believe wild Toyota stories like the 94 mph "runaway Prius"? The gearbox allowed shifting into neutral by merely reaching out a finger, but the driver told credulous reporters he was afraid to do so because he needed to keep both hands on the steering wheel. And regarding that cell phone in his hand?

Why a steady stream of mass hysterias, like swine flu?

We believe bizarre things for many reasons, but at the core is that despite our computers and communications devices and other gadgets, and despite all the scientific discoveries made, we still have pretty much the same brains as Paleolithic man some 40,000 years ago.

Being the sophisticates we are, magic belongs to other times and other cultures! Not hardly.

We fear what we don't understand, so when lacking an explanation that suits us, we simply assign one. With Paleolithic man, because he understood so little, most things were magic. Thunder and lightning, the appearance of game, illness. The Ancient Greeks and Romans simply assigned all unexplained phenomenon to "the gods." During the Middle Ages, black magic came into its own and a crop failure could mean a hot time for a an ugly old crone in the village.

Because we are so heavily wired to accept magic as an explanation, most of us at best think Occam's razor -- a 14th century principle that says the simplest and most likely explanation is probably the best -- is the latest product from Gillette. At worst we actually employ the opposite, skipping over the likely and latching onto the bizarre. Minor things like physical impossibility are ignored.

The false sense of sophistication is the key. On the one hand, it makes people refuse to accept that most of these syndromes are just psychosomatic. On the other, it has created a belief that Man is so powerful that we must be altering Creation in such fundamental ways that it creates catastrophes, health risks, etc. And, finally, the faith that Reason would reveal the inner workings of the entire Universe to us leaves us so frustrated at the stuff we can't explain that people would rather invoke hoodoo than admit ignorance.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 16, 2010 7:38 AM