14 Evolution and the Fossil Record
with the unknown or with dead loved ones, humans readily suspend these skeptical filters
and will believe (and pay for) almost anything, as long as it makes them feel better. That’s
when we are marks to be swindled. The world is full of con artists who will take your money
and violate your trust by appealing to your gullibility—if you let them.
Thus, even though American citizens benefit from one of the highest standards of liv-
ing and one of the best educational systems in the world, poll after poll shows that a high
percentage of Americans still believe in UFOs, in ESP, in astrology, in Bigfoot and Nessie and
the Yeti, in psychic phenomena, in palm reading and tarot cards, and so on. It doesn’t seem
to matter that the evidence for UFOs or astrology or psychic powers has been debunked
and discredited over and over again. As humans, we apparently have a need to believe such
things. It is understandable how a “psychic” who claims to be able to talk to your dead rela-
tives or an astrology column that predicts your future has a deep-seated appeal to people
who would otherwise not believe such drivel. But it is harder to understand why people
are sucked into belief systems, such as the anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers, who claim that
the Holocaust never happened or did not actually kill 6 million Jews and many more Poles,
Gypsies, and other groups; or the beliefs in UFOs and alien abductions, which sound bizarre
when we hear them, yet many people still accept that these phenomena are real; or the wide-
spread acceptance of cryptozoology and its weird and nonbiological catalogue of beasts that
have never been adequately documented, from the Loch Ness monster to Bigfoot to the Yeti.
It may be that we have a need for things that are mystical and unexplained by the mundane,
naturalistic process of science, but how anti-Semitism, UFOs, and the Loch Ness monster fill
that need is beyond me.
If we want to avoid deception and try to determine what is likely to be true and what
is clearly baloney (the magicians and entertainers Penn & Teller used the more direct term
“bullshit” in their TV series of the same name), we need a set of “baloney filters” to enhance
our skeptical screening of all the ideas we hear about, good, bad, and indifferent. Carl Sagan
(1996:10) gives a list of tools for his “baloney detection kit,” and Michael Shermer (1997:48)
provides an interesting list of many of the common fallacies of reasoning employed by pseu-
doscience, so it is not necessary to repeat those lists here. However, there are several more
important principles that we all need to remember to avoid being duped by pseudoscience.
- Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence
This simple statement by Carl Sagan (a paraphrase of earlier versions of the same statement)
makes an important point. Everyday science produces hundreds of small hypotheses that
only require a small extension of what is already known to test their validity. But crack-
pots, fringe scientists, and pseudoscientists are well known for making extraordinary claims
about the world and arguing that they are true. These include the many believers in UFOs
and aliens, whose evidence is flimsy at best, but they are firmly convinced (as are a major-
ity of Americans, according to polls) that such UFOs have landed here repeatedly and that
aliens have interacted with humans. Never mind the fact that such “aliens” seem only to
make themselves known to gullible individuals with no other witnesses present or that the
“physical evidence” for aliens landing in Area 51 in Nevada or in Roswell, New Mexico, has
long ago been explained as caused by secret military experiments. Just think for a moment: If
you were part of a superior alien culture and able to travel between galaxies, would you only
pick up a few isolated individuals out in the boonies, or would you contact the heads of the
governments on this planet and let your existence be known? Think about our extraordinary