Top Ten Myths
of Popular Psychology

Virtually every day, the news media, television shows, films, and Internet bombard us with claims regarding a host of psychological topics: psychics, out of body experiences, recovered memories, and lie detection, to name a few. Even a casual stroll through our neighborhood bookstore reveals dozens of self-help, relationship, recovery, and addiction books that serve up generous portions of advice for steering our paths along life’s rocky road. Yet many popular psychology sources are rife with misconceptions. Indeed, in today’s fast-paced world of information overload, misinformation about psychology is at least as widespread as accurate information. Self-help gurus, television talk show hosts, and self-proclaimed mental health experts routinely dispense psychological advice that is a bewildering mix of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods. Without a dependable tour guide for sorting out psychological myth from reality, we’re at risk for becoming lost in a jungle of “psychomythology.”

In our new book, 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions About Human Nature, we examine in depth 50 widespread myths in popular psychology (along with approximately 250 other myths and “mini-myths”), present research evidence demonstrating that these beliefs are fictional, explore their ramifications in popular culture and everyday life, and trace their psychological and sociological origins. Here, pace David Letterman, we present (in no particular order) our own candidates for the top 10 myths of popular psychology.

Myth #1: We Only Use 10% of our Brains

Whenever those of us who study the brain venture outside the Ivory Tower to give public lectures, one of the questions we’re most likely to encounter is, “Is it true that we only use 10% of our brains?” The look of disappointment that usually follows when we respond, “Sorry, I’m afraid not,” suggests that the 10% myth is one of those hopeful truisms that refuses to die because it would be so nice if it were true. In one study, when asked “About what percentage of their potential brain power do you think most people use?,” a third of psychology majors answered 10%.1 Remarkably, one survey revealed that even 6% of neuroscientists agreed with this claim!2 The pop psychology industry has played a big role in keeping this myth alive. For example, in his book, How to be Twice as Smart, Scott Witt wrote that “If you’re like most people, you’re using only ten percent of your brainpower.”3

There are several reasons to doubt that 90% of our brains lie silent. At a mere 2–3% of our body weight, our brain consumes over 20% of the oxygen we breathe. It’s implausible that evolution would have permitted the squandering of resources on a scale necessary to build and maintain such a massively underutilized organ. Moreover, losing far less than 90% of the brain to accident or disease almost always has catastrophic consequences.4 Likewise, electrical stimulation of sites in the brain during neurosurgery has failed to uncover any “silent areas.”

How did the 10% myth get started? One clue leads back about a century to psychologist William James, who once wrote that he doubted that average persons achieve more than about 10% of their intellectual potential. Although James talked in terms of underdeveloped potential, a slew of positive thinking gurus transformed “10% of our capacity” into “10% of our brain.”5 In addition, in calling a huge percentage of the human brain “silent cortex,” early investigators may have fostered the mistaken impression that what scientists now call “association cortex” — which is vitally important for language and abstract thinking — had no function. In a similar vein, early researchers’ admissions that they didn’t know what 90% of the brain did probably fueled the myth that it does nothing. Finally, although one frequently hears claims that Albert Einstein once explained his own brilliance by reference to 10% myth, there’s no evidence that he ever uttered such a statement.

Myth #2: It’s Better to Express Anger Than to Hold it in

If you’re like most people, you believe that releasing anger is healthier than bottling it up. In one survey, 66% of undergraduates agreed that expressing pent-up anger — sometimes called “catharsis” — is an effective means of reducing one’s risk for aggression.6 A host of films stoke the idea that we can tame our anger by “letting off steam” or “getting things off our chest.” In the 2003 film Anger Management, after the meek hero (Adam Sandler) is falsely accused of “air rage” on a flight, a judge orders him to attend an anger management group run by Dr. Buddy Rydell (Jack Nicholson). At Rydell’s suggestion, Sandler’s character plays dodgeball with schoolchildren and throws golf clubs. Dr. Rydell’s advice echoes the counsel of many self-help authors. John Lee suggested that rather than “holding in poisonous anger,” it’s better to “Punch a pillow or a punching bag.”7 Some psychotherapies encourage clients to scream or throw balls against walls when they become angry.8 Proponents of “primal scream therapy” believe that psychologically troubled adults must release the emotional pain produced by infant trauma by discharging it, often by yelling at the top of their lungs.9

Yet more than 40 years of research reveals that expressing anger directly toward another person or indirectly toward an object actually turns up the heat on aggression.10 In an early study, people who pounded nails after someone insulted them were more critical of that person.11 Moreover, playing aggressive sports like football results in increases in aggression,12 and playing violent videogames like Manhunt, in which participants rate bloody assassinations on a 5-point scale, is associated with heightened aggression.13 Research suggests that expressing anger is helpful only when it’s accompanied by constructive problem-solving designed to address the source of the anger.14

Why is this myth so popular? In all likelihood, people often mistakenly attribute the fact that they feel better after they express anger to catharsis, rather than to the fact that anger usually subsides on its own after awhile.15

Myth #3: Low Self-Esteem is a Major Cause of Psychological Problems

Many popular psychologists have long maintained that low self-esteem is a prime culprit in generating unhealthy behaviors, including violence, depression, anxiety, and alcoholism. From Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking onward, self-help books proclaiming the virtues of self-esteem have become regular fixtures in bookstores. In his best-seller, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Nathaniel Branden insisted that one “cannot think of a single psychological problem — from anxiety and depression, to fear of intimacy or of success, to spouse battery or child molestation — that is not traceable to the problem of low self-esteem.”16

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The self-esteem movement has found its way into mainstream educational practices. Some athletic leagues award trophies to all schoolchildren to avoid making losing competitors feel inferior.17 One elementary school in California prohibited children from playing tag because the “children weren’t feeling good about it.”18 Moreover, the Internet is chock full of educational products intended to boost children’s self-esteem. One book, Self-Esteem Games, contains 300 activities to help children feel good about themselves, such as repeating positive affirmations emphasizing their uniqueness.19

But there’s a fly in the ointment: Research shows that low self esteem isn’t strongly associated with poor mental health. In a comprehensive review, Roy Baumeister and his colleagues canvassed over 15,000 studies linking self-esteem to just about every conceivable psychological variable. They found that self-esteem is minimally related to interpersonal success, and not consistently related to alcohol or drug abuse. Moreover, they discovered that although self-esteem is positively associated with school performance, better school performance appears to contribute to high self-esteem rather than the other way around. Perhaps most surprising of all, they found that “low self-esteem is neither necessary nor sufficient for depression.”20

Myth #4: Human Memory Works like a Video Camera

Despite the sometimes all-too-obvious failings of everyday memory, surveys show that many people believe that their memories operate very much like videotape recorders. About 36% of us believe that our brains preserve perfect records of everything we’ve experienced.21 In one survey of undergraduates, 27% agreed that memory operates like a tape recorder.22 Even most psychotherapists agree that memories are fixed more or less permanently in the mind.23

It’s true that we often recall extremely emotional events, sometimes called flashbulb memories because they seem to have a photographic quality.24 Nevertheless, research shows that even these memories wither over time and are prone to distortions.25 Consider an example from Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch’s study of memories regarding the disintegration of the space shuttle Challenger.26 A student at Emory University provided the first description 24 hours after the disaster, and the second account two and a half years later.

Description 1. “I was in my religion class and some people walked in and started talking about [it]. I didn’t know any details except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher’s students had all been watching which I thought was so sad. Then after class I went to my room and watched the TV program talking about it and I got all the details from that.”

Description 2. “When I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV. It came on a news flash and we were both totally shocked. I was really upset and I went upstairs to talk to a friend of mine and then I called my parents.”

Clearly, there are striking discrepancies between the two memories. Neisser and Harsch found that about one-third of students’ reports contained large differences across the two time points. Similarly, Heike Schmolck and colleagues compared participants’ ability to recall the 1995 acquittal of former football star O. J. Simpson 3 days after the verdict, and after many months.27 After 32 months, 40% of the memory reports contained “major distortions.”

Today, there’s broad consensus among psychologists that memory isn’t reproductive — it doesn’t duplicate precisely what we’ve experienced — but reconstructive. What we recall is often a blurry mixture of accurate and inaccurate recollections, along with what jells with our beliefs and hunches. Indeed, researchers have created memories of events that never happened. In the “shopping mall study,” Elizabeth Loftus created a false memory in Chris, a 14-year-old boy. Loftus instructed Chris’s older brother to present Chris with a false story of being lost in a shopping mall at age 5, and she instructed Chris to write down everything he remembered. Initially, Chris reported very little about the false event, but over a two week period, he constructed a detailed memory of it.28 A flood of similar studies followed, showing that in 18-37% of participants, researchers can implant false memories of such events as serious animal attacks, knocking over a punchbowl at a wedding, getting one’s fingers caught in a mousetrap as a child, witnessing a demonic possession, and riding in a hot air balloon with one’s family.29

Myth #5: Hypnosis is a Unique “Trance” State Differing
in Kind from Wakefulness

Popular movies and books portray the hypnotic trance state as so powerful that otherwise normal people will commit an assassination (The Manchurian Candidate); commit suicide (The Garden Murders); perceive only a person’s internal beauty (Shallow Hal); and (our favorite) fall victim to brainwashing by alien preachers who use messages embedded in sermons (Invasion of the Space Preachers). Survey data show that public opinion resonates with these media portrayals: 77% of college students endorsed the statement that “hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness, quite different from normal waking consciousness,” and 44% agreed that “A deeply hypnotized person is robot-like and goes along automatically with whatever the hypnotist suggests.”30

But research shows that hypnotized people can resist and even oppose hypnotic suggestions, and won’t do things that are out of character, like harming people they dislike.31 In addition, hypnosis bears no more than a superficial resemblance to sleep: Brain wave studies reveal that hypnotized people are wide awake. What’s more, individuals can be just as responsive to suggestions administered while they’re exercising on a stationary bicycle as they are following suggestions for sleep and relaxation.32 In the laboratory, we can reproduce all of the phenomena that laypersons associate with hypnosis (such as hallucinations and insensitivity to pain) using suggestions alone, with no mention of hypnosis. Evidence of a distinct trance unique to hypnosis would require physiological markers of subjects’ responses to suggestions to enter a trance. Yet no consistent evidence of this sort has emerged.33

Hypnosis appears to be only one procedure among many for increasing people’s responses to suggestions.

Myth #6: The Polygraph Test is an Accurate Means
of Detecting Lies

Have you ever told a lie? If you answered “no,” you’re lying. College students admit to lying in about one in every three social interactions and people in the community about one in every five interactions.34 Not surprisingly, investigators have long sought out foolproof means of detecting falsehoods. In the 1920s, psychologist William Moulton Marston invented the first polygraph or so-called “lie detector” test, which measured systolic blood pressure to detect deception. He later created one of the first female cartoon superheroes, Wonder Woman, who could compel villains to tell the truth by ensnaring them in a magic lasso. For Marston, the polygraph was the equivalent of Wonder Woman’s lasso: an infallible detector of the truth.35

A polygraph machine plots physiological activity — such as skin conductance, blood pressure, and respiration — on a continuously running chart. Contrary to the impression conveyed in such movies as Meet the Parents, the machine isn’t a quick fix for telling whether someone is lying, although the public’s desire for such a fix almost surely contributes to the polygraph’s popularity. In one survey of introductory psychology students, 45% believed that the polygraph “can accurately identify attempts to deceive.”36 Yet interpreting a polygraph chart is notoriously difficult.

For starters, there are large differences among people in their levels of physiological activity. An honest examinee who tends to sweat a lot might mistakenly appear deceptive, whereas a deceptive examinee who tends to sweat very little might mistakenly appear truthful. Moreover, as David Lykken noted, there’s no evidence for a Pinocchio response,37 such as an emotional or physiological reaction uniquely indicative of deception.38 If a polygraph chart shows more physiological activity when the examinee responds to questions about a crime than to irrelevant questions, at most this difference tells us that the examinee was more nervous at those moments. Yet this difference could be due to actual guilt, indignation or shock at being unjustly accused, or the realization that one’s responses to questions about the crime could lead to being fired, fined, or imprisoned.39 Thus, polygraph tests suffer from a high rate of “false positives” — innocent people whom the test deems guilty.40 As a consequence, the “lie detector” test is misnamed: It’s really an arousal detector.41 Conversely, some individuals who are guilty may not experience anxiety when telling lies. For example, psychopaths are notoriously immune to fear and may be able to “beat” the test in high pressure situations, although the research evidence for this possibility is mixed.42

Were he still alive, William Moulton Marston might be disappointed to learn that researchers have yet to develop the psychological equivalent of Wonder Woman’s magic lasso. For at least the foreseeable future, the promise of a perfect lie detector remains the stuff of comic book fantasy.

Myth #7: Opposites Attract

The notion that “opposites attract” is a standard part of our cultural landscape. Films, novels, and TV sitcoms overflow with stories of diametrical opposites falling passionately in love. The 2007 smash hit comedy, Knocked Up, is perhaps Hollywood’s latest installment in it’s seemingly never-ending parade of wildly mismatched romantic pairings. Most of us are convinced that people who are opposite from each other in their personalities, beliefs, and looks tend to be attracted to each other. Lynn McCutcheon found that 77% of undergraduates agreed that opposites attract in relationships.43 This belief is also widespread in pockets of the Internet dating community. On one site called “Soulmatch,” Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. (described as a “relationships expert”) states that “It’s been my experience that only opposites attract because that’s the nature of reality. The great myth in our culture is that compatibility is the grounds for a relationship — actually, compatibility is grounds for boredom.”

On the contrary, research suggests that Hendrix has gotten his myths precisely backward. When it comes to interpersonal relationships, opposites don’t attract. Dozens of studies demonstrate that people with similar personality traits are more likely to be attracted to and hang out with each other than people with dissimilar personality traits. For example, people with a Type A personality style, who are hard-driving, competitive, and time-conscious, prefer dating partners who have a Type A personality.44 Similarity in personality traits predicts not only initial attraction, but marital stability and happiness.45 Similarity on the personality trait of conscientiousness seems to be especially important for marital satisfaction.46 So if you’re a hopelessly messy person, you’re best off finding someone who isn’t a total neat freak. The “like attracts like” conclusion also extends to our attitudes and values. The more similar someone’s attitudes (for example, political views) are to ours, the more we tend to like that person.47

Myth #8: People with Schizophrenia Have Multiple Personalities

A prevalent misconception is that schizophrenia is the same thing as “split personality” or “multiple personality disorder.” A popular bumper sticker, for example, reads: “I was schizophrenic once, but we’re better now.” The schizophrenia-multiple personality misconception is widespread. In one survey, 77% of introductory psychology students agreed that “a schizophrenic is someone with a split personality.”48 The 2000 comedy film, Me, Myself, and Irene, starring Jim Carrey, features a man supposedly suffering from schizophrenia. Yet he actually suffers from a split personality, with one personality who’s mellow and another who’s aggressive.

In fact, Schizophrenia differs sharply from the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID), once called multiple personality disorder. Unlike people with schizophrenia, people with DID supposedly harbor two or more distinct “alters” — personalities or personality states — within them at the same time. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is probably the best known illustration of multiple personality in popular literature. Nevertheless, many psychologists find the assertion that DID patients possess distinct and fully formed personalities to be doubtful.49 It’s far more likely that these patients are displaying different, but exaggerated, aspects of a single personality.

The schizophrenia-DID myth probably stems in part from confusion in terminology. Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined the term “schizophrenia,” meaning “split mind,” in the early 20th century, and many writers soon misinterpreted Bleuler’s definition. By schizophrenia, Bleuler meant that people suffer from a “splitting” within and between their psychological functions, especially emotion and thinking.50 For most of us, what we feel and think at one moment corresponds to what we feel and think at the next. Yet in the severe psychotic disorder of schizophrenia, these linkages are ruptured. As Bleuler observed, people with schizophrenia don’t harbor more than one co-existing personality; they possess a single personality that’s been shattered.51

Regrettably, many people in the general public don’t appreciate the fact that schizophrenia is often a profoundly disabling condition associated with a heightened risk for suicide, clinical depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, unemployment, and homelessness. As Irving Gottesman noted, “everyday misuse of the terms schizophrenia or schizophrenic to refer to the foreign policy of the United States, the stock market, or any other disconfirmation of one’s expectations does an injustice to the enormity of the public health problems and profound suffering associated with this most puzzling disorder of the human mind.”52

Myth #9: Full Moons Cause Crimes and Craziness

Once every 29.53 days on average, an event of rather trivial astronomical significance occurs. But according to some writers, it’s an event of enormous psychological significance. What is it? A full moon. Over the decades, authors have linked the full moon to a host of phenomena: strange behaviors, psychiatric hospital admissions, suicides, traffic accidents, crimes, heavy drinking, dog bites, births, crisis calls to emergency rooms, violence by hockey players…the list goes on and on.53

The word “lunatic” derives from the Latin term luna, or moon. Legends of werewolves and vampires, terrifying creatures that supposedly often emerged during full moons, date back at least to the ancient Greeks, and were popular in Europe during much of the Middle Ages.54 In 19th-century England, some lawyers used a “not guilty by reason of the full moon” defense to acquit clients of crimes committed during full moons.

Even today, the notion that the full moon is tied to strange occurrences — the “Lunar Effect” or “Transylvania Effect” — is deeply embedded in popular culture. One study revealed that up to 81% of mental health professionals believe in the lunar effect,55 and a study of nurses demonstrated that 69% believe that full moons are associated with increase in patient admissions.56 In 2007, Brighton, England instituted a policy to place more police officers on the beat during full moon nights.57

Psychiatrist Arnold Lieber popularized the idea of a correlation between the full moon and behavior.58 For Lieber, the lunar effect stems mostly from the fact that the human body is four-fifths water. Because the moon affects the tides of the earth, it’s plausible that the moon would also affect the brain, which is, after all, part of the body. Yet as astronomer George Abell noted, a mosquito sitting on your arm would exert a more powerful gravitational force on your body than would the moon.59 Furthermore, the moon’s tides are influenced not by its phase — that is, by how much of it’s visible on earth — but by its distance from earth.60 Indeed, during a “new moon,” the phase at which the moon is invisible to us on earth, it exerts just as much gravitational influence as it does during a full moon.

In 1985, two psychologists reviewed all available research evidence on the lunar effect, and found no evidence that the full moon is related to much of anything — crimes, suicides, psychiatric problems, psychiatric hospital admissions, or calls to crisis centers.61 Later investigators examined whether the full moon is linked to suicides,62 psychiatric hospital admissions,63 dog bites,64 or emergency room visits,65 and came up empty-handed.

What psychologists term the “fallacy of positive” instances may help to explain the persisting popularity of belief in the lunar effect. When an event confirms our hunches, we tend to take special note of it and recall it.66 In contrast, when an event disconfirms our hunches, we tend to ignore or reinterpret it. So, when there’s a full moon and something out of the ordinary, say, a surge of admissions to our local psychiatric hospital, happens, we’re likely to remember it and tell others about it. In contrast, when there’s a full moon and nothing unusual happens, we typically overlook or discount it. In one study, psychiatric hospital nurses who believed in the lunar effect wrote more notes about patients’ strange behavior during a full moon than did nurses who didn’t believe in the lunar effect.67 The nurses attended more to events that confirmed their hunches, which in turn probably bolstered these hunches.

Myth #10: A Large Proportion of Criminals Successfully
Use the Insanity Defense

After giving a speech on the morning of March 30th, 1981, President Ronald Reagan emerged from the Washington Hilton hotel. Seconds later, six shots rang out. One hit a secret service agent, one hit a police officer, another hit the President’s press secretary James Brady, and another hit the President himself. The would-be assassin was a delusional 26 year-old man named John Hinckley, who had fallen in love from a distance with actress Jodie Foster and become convinced that by killing the President he could make Foster reciprocate his feelings for her. In 1982, following a trial featuring dueling psychiatric experts, the jury found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury’s decision triggered an enormous public outcry; an ABC News poll revealed that 76% of Americans objected to the verdict.

Surveys show that most Americans believe that criminals often use the insanity defense as a loophole to escape punishment. One study revealed that the average layperson believes that the insanity defense is used in 37% of felony cases, and that this defense is successful 44% of the time. This survey also demonstrated that the average layperson believes that 26% of insanity acquittees are set free, and that these acquittees spend only about 22 months in a mental hospital following their trials.68 Many politicians share these perceptions. One study revealed that politicians in Wyoming believed that 21% of accused felons had used the insanity defense, and that they were successful 40% of the time.69 In 1973, President Richard Nixon made the abolition of the insanity defense the centerpiece of his effort to fight crime.

Yet these perceptions of the insanity defense are wildly inaccurate. Data indicate that this defense is raised in less than 1% of criminal trials and that it’s successful only about 25% of the time.70 For example, in the state of Wyoming between 1970 and 1972, a grand total of 1 (!) accused felon successfully pled insanity. Members of the general public also overestimate how many insanity acquittees are set free; the true proportion is only about 15%. Moreover, the average insanity acquittee spends between 32 and 33 months in a psychiatric hospital, considerably longer than the public estimates. In fact, criminals acquitted on the basis of an insanity verdict typically spend at least as long in an institution (such as a psychiatric hospital) as criminals who are convicted.71

How did these misperceptions of the insanity defense arise? We Americans live increasingly in a “courtroom culture.” Between Court TV, CSI, Law and Order, and CNN’s Nancy Grace, we’re continually inundated with information about the legal system. Nevertheless, this information can be deceptive, because the media devotes considerably more coverage to legal cases in which the insanity defense is successful, like Hinckley’s, than to those in which it isn’t.72 As is so often the case, the best antidote to public misperception is accurate knowledge. Lynn and Lauren McCutcheon found that a brief fact-based report on the insanity defense, compared with a news program on crime featuring this defense, produced a significant decrease in undergraduates’ misconceptions concerning this defense.73 These findings give us cause for hope, as they suggest that it may take only a small bit of information to overcome misinformation.

We can all be fooled by psychomythology, largely because so many popular misconceptions dovetail with our intuitive hunches. As a consequence, we must turn to scientific reasoning, which is a set of safeguards against the tendency to confirm our initial beliefs, to evaluate whether the claims of the pop psychology industry pass muster.74 The good news is that by continually scrutinizng and questioning popular psychology claims with scientific thinking and scientific evidence, we can come to a better understanding of our mental worlds and make better everyday life decisions.

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Wiccans v. Creationists
An Empirical Study of How Two Systems of Belief Differ

by Raymond A. Eve

In a 1991 book entitled The Creationist Movement in Modern America,¹ Frank Harrold and I ran through the gamut of explanations for why people believe in special creationism, or the belief that the Earth and life were created about 10,000 years ago. (About 40% of Americans believe in both creation and evolution — that evolution was guided by God and that the process took billions of years. These people are sometimes called theistic evolutionists, or old earth creationists, and contrast sharply with young earth creationists.²) When I use the term creationists, it is in reference to the special, or young earth creationists.

Initial explanations attributed creationists’ beliefs to some sort of pathology. For example, in the aftermath of a 1974 controversy in Kanawha, West Virginia, triggered by the introduction of a new series of Language Arts books for use in the public schools (that included evolution “presented as a fact”), the headmaster of the new reading program, James Moffitt, rendered his opinion. In a book he authored on the incident,³ Moffitt attributed the source of anti-evolutionism to “authoritarian personalities.”⁴ Another popular explanation is that creationists are ill-educated ignoramuses, or backwoods bumpkins.

However, even if it were true that some creationists display a higher proportion of pathological traits than one would expect by chance, this not an adequate explanation. Frank Harrold and I, for example, collected a mass of survey information from a multitude of sources in which the data clearly demonstrated that explanations based on personal pathology could not account for a plurality of creationists. Instead, most of them appeared adequately-to-well educated, and generally seemed to be no more pathological than the rest of us. It may be that academic social scientists (who typically lean toward being politically liberal) are too quick to assign negative personality traits to adherents of conservative beliefs.⁵

Cultural Traditionalists, Modernists, and Postmodernists

An important sociological understanding of the origins of creationism was presented in 1978 by Ann Page and Donald Clelland, who suggested that conflicts such as the one that occured in Kanawha County could best be understood as a group-level phenomenon rather than a purely individual matter, and that these differences of opinion reflect conflicting worldviews held by each groups.

Page and Clelland labeled one such aggregate “cultural fundamentalists,” or what I prefer to call cultural traditionalists — those who tend to employ a literal reading of scripture. (I prefer this label because Harrold and I found many creationists who live outside of the so-called “fundamentalist” religious denominations.) For cultural traditionalists what is good or evil is not up to humans to decide — God’s revealed commandments uniquely serve that purpose. Additionally, cultural traditionalists see the purpose of life as to serve and glorify God, even if this means one must submit one’s own being to hardship and toil. A second aggregate, termed “cultural modernists” by Page and Clelland, is described as being the paradigmatic descendants of the Enlightenment and secular empiricism. As such, cultural modernists are said to believe that the road to truth lies in gathering data with which to test hypotheses, and then let the philosophical chips fall where they may.

As an example of the conflict of these two groups, consider the question “What is to be done about AIDS?” Cultural traditionalists sometimes see AIDS as God’s will. (For example, in the opinion of many traditionalists, AIDS is weeding out drug-users, homosexuals, and prostitutes from society at large). Even at its most liberal, however, cultural fundamentalism would “hate the sin and love the sinner.” In either case, traditionalists would say that the cure for AIDS would be to return to greater piety and commitment to biblical values and injunctions. Contrast this perspective with that of cultural modernists, who argue that the cure for AIDS involves conducting epidemiological studies to find its cause, and preventitative methods such as condoms and sterilized needles as part of a development of a technology-based cure.

Compared to modernists, cultural traditionalists have been shown to be a fairly homogenous group — specifically, they are more rural, older, white, and Protestant. In contrast, cultural modernists seem to have arisen in part, out of necessities brought about by urbanization and widespread migration. For example, cultural modernists seem to accept the idea that different people from different backgrounds are likely to be crowded together in today’s societies, and that cosmopolitan values and multicultural acceptance are therefore necessary in order to avoid mass crime and bloodshed. However, this view also leads them to speak of homosexuality and women priests as “alternative lifestyles.” Cultural traditionalists would answer that there is nothing “alternative” about lifestyles, which they believe God condemns.

In general, for cultural modernists, truth claims are assessed in light of data, hypothesis testing, and logical reasoning. For cultural traditionalists, truth claims are strictly evaluated in terms of tradition, authority, and scriptural demands. (In the words of one of our respondents, echoing a popular bumper sticker among conservative Christians, “God said it, I believe it. That’s the end of the argument!”)

Into the mix we can add a third orientation to assessing claims — postmodernism, which encompasses a broad array of subtypes, from holistic health followers, to New Age believers, to many academicians. Despite this range of diversity, postmodernists are largely defined by what they are not — they are not traditionalist, nor are they modernist. In other words, they can be grouped by their rejection of the other two common paradigms of our times. But they can also be classified as believing that “grand narratives” have no validity. Grand narratives represent all encompassing accounts of human existence, typically a single great Truth that exists external to any individual. Grand narratives can be political or psychological theories (such as Marxism or Freudianism), or they can be the specific doctrinal tenets of the world’s major religions. The key point is that for postmodernists, all such grand narratives are to be rejected in favor of the belief that the truth, to the extent that it even exists, is highly individualistic, subjective, and to be found largely within each person.

Wiccans as a Control Group

Creationists believe in their version of origins because they are cultural traditionalists. But traditional compared to what? To test this hypothesis I needed a control group. I chose the Wiccans — contemporary followers of so-called “Goddess” religions.⁶ Wiccans typically reject Christianity and other mainstream religions as being too patriarchal in nature.⁷ A high proportion of neopagans in general, and Wiccans in particular, assert that excessive masculinity led to the ecological rape of the planet. Wiccans see Christianity as a religion that originated from the myths of ancient Hebrew pastoral tribes. Such tribes were notoriously patriarchal, and Wiccans believe this patriarchy is still deeply embedded within modern Christianity.⁸

Wiccans argue that Christianity has either purposely or inadvertently supported Sir Francis Bacon’s views of science and technology. (Unfortunately, Bacon occasionally used language that could be construed as sexist by today’s standards. For example, he spoke of nature being in need of “unveiling” and “penetration.”) Wiccans also suggest that the language and imagery of the Bible places women into a subservient category, and this is due at least in part to Eve being blamed for humanity’s fall from Paradise.

Wiccans have tried to remedy such ills by restoring a sense of the divine to femininity.⁹,¹⁰ They see themselves as returning to the practice of “white magic” (that they believe existed before the rise of modern Christianity). According to one of the initial literary treatises of Wicca, entitled The Spiral Dance,¹¹ Wiccans practice magic for the good of individuals and the community, and they base their religious rituals upon the cycle of the seasons.

Many outside observers have labeled neopagans as “New-Agers.” Wiccans, however, prefer to consider themselves of the “Old Age,” by which they mean they are returning to ancient religious and spiritual practices which they believe allow them to tap into subtle but powerful natural forces. They assert that there are forces of nature that are susceptible to manipulation by magic. However, they believe that the conditions of modernism have seperated us from nature so that we have lost our abilities to perceive and manipulate these Old Age powers. I label Wicca as a postmodern religion primarily because of its contention that deity is within each of us, and that truth is different and subjective for each practitioner. For example, Wicca allows a follower to be anything else they wish to be religiously, and still be a Wiccan. We can also argue that Wicca’s emphasis on rituals dedicated to restoring ecological balance, and emphasis on gender equality,¹² are consistent with postmodernism as it is widely defined.

Testing Creationists and Wiccans

In confronting the challenges of modern life, how do the members of each of our three groups cope? Cultural traditionalists tend to seek God’s favor by advocating a return to older norms and values, most especially to greater Christian piety. Cultural modernists employ empirical data and scientific inquiry, plus rationalized planning, production, and administration. Postmodernists (at least those outside of academia) attempt to empower themselves through “technologies” largely derived from pre-Christian practices and non-Christian worldviews (such as psychic healing, soul travel, crystal powers, etc.).¹³

Before conducting my study, I predicted that cultural traditionalists would be the respondents most likely to support religiously- and politicallyconservative worldviews and social agendas (because of their faith in tradition and authority). I also predicted that postmodernists were likely to hold beliefs that skeptics would consider to be pseudoscience. For many postmodernists, psychic powers, astral projection, and communication with spirits are believed to be useful “technologies,” and hence a means of empowerment.¹⁴ It is precisely this latter concept that is intended by the term “witchcraft” in anthropology. That is, in cross-cultural studies, witchcraft has little to do with the Devil, but instead has everything to do with trying to use a “metaphysical technology” to bring about desired outcomes.¹⁵

In order to test these predictions, two sets of data were collected. For the first, anonymous questionnaires were distributed to 328 people who attended a “Creationism Fair” in Glen Rose, Texas, during a weekend in 1995. The site was largely chosen because of its proximity to Texas’ Dinosaur State Park. (The significance of the park is that it is the home of the famous “Paluxy River Man Tracks,” indentations in the bottom of a limestone streambed that lie next to fossilized dinosaur tracks that are claimed by some creationists to be human footprints.) Just outside the main entrance to the park is the home of “Dr.” Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum,¹⁶ well known to creationists for its extensive set of exhibits intended to demonstrate scientific legitimacy for creationist claims, including a 10,000-year old Earth. Ironically, it was Baugh and Don Patton who distributed the questionnaires (Don Patton was, at the time, the President of the Metroplex Institute for Origins Studies, another creationist organization).¹⁷,¹⁸

Data from a second sample were collected late in 1995 at a “Magic Arts Convention” just outside of Austin, Texas. At that event there was a gathering of nearly 300 neo-pagans, primarily Wiccans. They held religious rituals, shared a sense of community, and sold various pagan and New Age wares to each other. A total of 215 people who identified themselves as Wiccans completed the questionnaire.¹⁹,²⁰

Figure 1: Social Conservatism
(click image to enlarge)

Data Differences Between Creationists and Wiccans

Demography. In this dataset, creationists were older than Wiccans, with 56% percent over 40 years of age, compared to 22% of the Wiccans. No Wiccan was over 60 years old. Creationists tended to be more likely to have grown up in small towns and rural places, whereas Wiccans came from more urban environments. The education levels for Creationists and Wiccans were roughly the same (47% and 46%, respectively, attending college), although there were differences in parental education levels. Creationists’ fathers’ modal educational attainment level was high school. In contrast, the mode for the fathers of Wiccans was a college education (with more than one out of five of the fathers having attended graduate school, compared to about one of ten for the creationists; the same general pattern held for respondents’ mothers). For both creationists and Wiccans, there was a tendency for their parents to have been Protestants more than any other affiliation, but this was especially true of the creationists. Wiccans from non- Protestant families were more likely to report that their parents were Catholics, non-religious, or of fairly uncommon religious persuasions.²¹ Surprisingly, the proportion of female Wiccans (51%) was roughly the same as female creationists (48%).

Civil Religion. Civil religion is the belief that Americans as a people are bound together by sacred ideals, sacred character, and that God has blessed the nation with a special place in world history. Creationists, as predicted, show strong support for civil religion. For example, when asked if “Everyone should support this country,” 38% of creationists strongly disagreed, compared to 59% of Wiccans. Similarly, when both groups were asked if “The schools should require students to say the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States,” 85% of creationists supported this, compared to only 14% of Wiccans. For creationists, there is relatively little distinction made between scriptural religion and civil religion.

Social conservatism. The tendency for creationists to enforce tradition extends far beyond civil religion. For example, when asked if “Human nature requires strong laws,” 61% of creationists felt this was so, but only 3% of Wiccans held that view. Similarly, only 35% of creationists strongly disagreed that “Interracial mixing is wrong,” but 84% of the Wiccans rejected the same statement. The creationist preference for orthodoxy extended to the matter of gender roles as well. When asked if “Men and women have different roles in society,” 87% of creationists agreed, but only 16% of Wiccans agreed. Most strikingly, when asked if “Homosexuality is clearly wrong,” 95% of the creationists agreed, compared to a mere 2% of Wiccans. It seems safe to conclude that Wiccans are more likely to approve of “alternative lifestyles,” whereas creationists appear to believe that literal biblical strictures concerning proper behavior are ignored at great peril.

Figure 2: Paranormal Beliefs
(click image to enlarge)

Paranormal Beliefs. If, as is clear from the data, we can classify creationists as enforcers of tradition, we might predict that they would eschew unconventional paranormal beliefs when compared to Wiccans. This is, indeed, what the data show. When asked if astrology is an accurate predictor of human behavior, 93% of creationists disagreed, compared to only 25% of Wiccans. Although both groups have around half of their members who aren’t sure if “Bigfoot roams the woods of the Pacific Northwest,” 35% of creationists completely reject the idea, compared to only 14% of Wiccans. When asked if “The Loch Ness monster is real,” creationists rejected the existence of the creature 29% of the time, but Wiccans did so only 14% of the time. When asked if it is true that “Psychics can accurately predict the future,” 58% of Wiccans strongly agreed, compared to only 5% of creationists. A similar result was obtained when member of both groups were asked if “Séances can communicate with the dead.” 68% of creationists strongly disagreed such a thing was possible, but only 1% of the Wiccans strongly disagreed. Asked if “UFOs are actual spacecraft from other planets,” 61% of creationists strongly disagreed, compared to only about 7% of Wiccans.²²

Figure 3: Social and Science Attitudes (click image to enlarge)

Social and Science Attitudes. I have written elsewhere about the existence in literature of what I like to call “cautionary tales,” or writings that warn of the dangers of recent breakthroughs in science, or warn us about the use of new technologies. Frankenstein is the holotype in this genre. As cultural traditionalists, creationists, I predicted, should view science with caution more often than Wiccans. When both groups were asked if “Cloning embryos should not be allowed,” 75% of creationists strongly agreed, compared to 25% of Wiccans. A similar response pattern can be seen in the statement “Genetic engineering should not be encouraged.” 37% of creationists strongly agreed, compared to 7% of Wiccans. Most striking, but not surprising, when asked if “Abortion is always against God’s will,” three-fourths of creationists agreed strongly, compare to less than one percent of Wiccans! When asked if “Transplanting fetal tissue is against God’s will,” we find few respondents in the middle categories for either sample — the vast majority of creationists strongly agreed with the statement, while an equally vast majority of Wiccans disagreed. The same pattern is found for the question “Euthanasia is against God’s will” — nearly all the creationists agreed, nearly all the Wiccans disagreed.

Figure 4: Science and Religious Attitudes (click image to enlarge)

Science and Religion Attitudes. Recall that we began with the question of whether pseudoscientific beliefs are the result of ignorance and mental aberration, or are they the end product of a way of thinking embedded in a worldview? The data here support the latter. When asked if “It’s God’s word, not science, that defines the truth,” 91% of creationists agreed, while only about 20% of Wiccans agreed, and half of them strongly so. Insight into Wiccans’ worldview can be seen when asked if “Both science and religion fail to provide us with the answers to the important questions facing us today.”

80% of Wiccans agreed that neither could be counted on for solid guidance, whereas creationists rejected the same statement two-thirds of the time. Here, Wiccans’ response was consistent with the earlier suggestion that Wicca, while preferring to think of itself as “pre-modern,” actually fits the paradigm of postmodernism rather well.²³ In other words, Wiccans do appear to believe that truth is largely a matter of individual processes internal to each person, and one is free to pick and choose the bits of theology that work for them.

Additional support for the suggestion that Wicca is a postmodern religion comes from the chart in Figure 4 where both groups were asked if it is true that “There is not enough individualism today.” Almost half of Wiccans strongly agreed, and this was a considerably higher proportion than among creationists. It would appear we are safe in concluding that instead of adhering to an external code based on authority, tradition, and revelation (as chosen by creationists), Wiccans instead place more emphasis on their “One Commandment” that says “And if it harms none, do as thou wilt.”²⁴

Summary and Conclusions

What can we conclude from these survey data? First, we are left with the understanding that the origin of paranormal beliefs often arises through normal group dynamics and is not simply the result of ignorance or mental pathology. Singer and Benassi,²⁵ among others, have suggested multiple origins for paranormal beliefs, for example, common errors in human reasoning, poor science education, sensationalistic media coverage of science, and sociocultural factors. This study strongly supports the latter causal variable.

Rapid rates of social change in the U.S. seem to have left multiple (but frequently incompatible) sets of rules for assessing the nature of reality. Once one understands the set of rules associated with each worldview, many paranormal beliefs logically follow. However, we should realize that it is not clear that these worldviews are always congruent with specific groups. Surely some aggregates, such as creationists and Wiccans, are likely to be fairly homogenous in outlook. However, we need to be mindful that these two groups were deliberately chosen with the expectation that they would be both extreme and diametrically opposed in their choices of epistemological rules for knowing.

In general, it may be better to argue that these differences are not so much about aggregates as they are about different ways of understanding reality that are available in the culture to all of us. Rapid social change has spun off several sets of heuristics within mere decades. This might help to explain, for example, why a student might be a cultural modernist in a biology lab, but a cultural traditionalist a few hours later upon returning to a rural hometown for the holidays. Most of us, in other words, may subconsciously switch among these worldviews, and we may oft-times do so without conscious awareness.

References

1. Eve, Raymond A., and B. Harrold Francis. 1991. The Creationist Movement in Modern America. Boston: Twayne Press.
2. Special creationists derive their dates for human origins from Irish Archbishop Usher who, in the first half of the 17th century, concluded from a literal reading of the Old Testament that the world was created in 4004 B.C.
3. Moffett, J. 1988. Storm in the Mountains. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
4. In case the reader is unfamiliar with the origin of the idea of the authoritarian personality, further information can be found on the following website: http://tinyurl.com/23fyy4c
5. It was for this reason that social psychologist Milton Rokeach developed his wellknown dogmatism scale. Rokeach hypothesized that liberals were often as rigid in their beliefs as conservatives. There is a study in the online journal of the Creation Social Science and Humanities Society, that appears to demonstrate that creationist students are no more dogmatic than their noncreationist counterparts. See: www.creationism.org/csshs/v04n3p15.htm
6. “Wicca” comes from the ancient Gaelic term for “the craft,” meaning witchcraft.
7. Stone, Merlin. 1976. When God was a Woman. New York: Dial Press. Note that a number of scholars such as religious historians and anthropologists (including some female authors) have pointed out there probably never was a time in antiquity when “God” would have been an individual female entity. Instead, in ancient times, just as male monotheism did not exist, neither did female monotheism. See: Allen, Charlotte. 2001. “The Scholars and the Goddess.” The Atlantic Monthly. January. 18–22.
8. Berger, Helen A. 1999. A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-paganism and Witchcraft in the United States. University of South Carolina Press.
9. Although much is made in the media of Wicca as a “Goddess religion,” in reality Wiccan theology officially calls for the worship of both the Great Goddess and the male Horned God (not to be confused with Satan). These are both seen as necessary and complementary (such as Yin and Yang). All traditions of Wicca (there are several) believe that the correct image of the Divine must comprise both male and female. For Wiccans, to worship either sexual aspect alone would create imbalance, and much of Wicca revolves around ritual attempts to balance the forces of nature as well as one’s personal life.
10. Adler, Margot. 1997. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and other Pagans in America Today. New York: Penguin.
11. Starhawk. 1979. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
12. Orion, Loretta. 1995. Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revived. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press.
13. We will focus here primarily upon postmodernists outside of academe. As a point of interest, academic postmodernists seem less interested in empowering themselves than in disempowering the rhetoric of modernists through the “deconstruction” of the modernist’s rhetoric or “text.” Curiously, almost no deconstructionism of this type is directed at cultural traditionalists.
14. These tools for empowerment have the added advantage of not requiring years of difficult and competitive study of physics, chemistry, mathematics, anthropology, and so forth.
15. A good example of what is meant here by metaphysical technology can be seen in Malinowski’s famous study of the Trobriand Islanders. These islanders made their living largely by fishing. Malinowski noted they did not perform magic in protected lagoons, but only when they first paddled out into the open ocean, which sometimes threatened to overwhelm their small boats. The lesson seems obvious: humans invoke their gods when the physical technology seems inadequate to the task at hand. How tempting, then, to employ a metaphysical technology to attempt to control the uncontrollable. See: www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Anthro/Anth206/malinowski.htm
16. Dr. Baugh’s terminal degree appears to have been granted from a lone-standing frame house in Dallas. For more on this, and a skeptical perspective on the Museum, see: www.ntskeptics.org/2000/2000january/january2000.htm. You can also find information about the Creation Evidences Museum at their web page: www.creationevidence.org/cemframes.html
17. When they learned of interest by researchers from a University they welcomed the chance to help in the data collection. They seemed secure in their belief that the results would advance the creationist cause. Large numbers of Fair attendees were ushered into an enclosure to view a film on creationism. At the end of the film, Dr. Baugh or Mr. Patton distributed the questionnaires and exhorted those receiving them to cooperate in the study. We hope, of course, that this largely eliminated any bias that might have occurred if university researchers had distributed the surveys.
18. I would like to thank Mr. John Taylor, who was at that time a graduate student working with me, for much of the actual labor of collecting, coding, and performing computer analyses on the creationist data.
19. It is worth noting that both in Glen Rose and in Austin, respondents appeared eager to fill out questionnaires. Both groups seemed to feel a need to put their views before a wider audience, and welcomed the chance to do so.
20. I would like to thank Ms. Ladorna Goff, at that time an outstanding undergraduate, for much of the actual labor of collecting, coding, and performing computer analyses on the Wiccan data.
21. The demographic profiles of creationists differed from that of Wiccans in ways that many previous studies have found to be typical. For example, Joseph Gusfield found that members of the 19th-century Temperance and Prohibition movements fit the pattern of being older, more rural, and less educated. Louis Zurcher found a similar profile when he examined anti-pornography crusaders during the 1960s. Other research since then has generally found the same pattern among adherents of conservative social movements, such as those in favor of prayer in school, or against school sex education, or against gay rights, abortion, and the legalization of marijuana. Creationism appears to be as much about defending or promoting a certain lifestyle, as it is a matter of good scientific evidence. See: Gusfield, Joseph R. 1963. Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Zurcher, L. A. 1971. “The Anti-Pornography Campaign: A Symbolic Crusade.” Social Problems, 19: 217–38.
22. Similarly, when asked if “UFOs built the pyramids,” only one-third of Wiccans strongly rejected the idea, but 86% of the creationists strongly disagreed.
23. This individualism is sometimes called “Sheilaism.” Robert Bellah and colleagues, in their book, Habits of the Heart, tell of a young nurse, Sheila Larson, who, when asked about her faith, replied that she was religious but seldom went to church, and apparently preferred a sort of “mix-andmatch” amalgam of bits and pieces of various theological stances. Famous scholar of religion and author Wade Clark Roof said this is representative of a trend where “self and deity become fused into one. Americans generally, it seems, have grown more individualistic and subjectivistic in their faiths in the post-1960s period.” See, www.esmhe.org/Plumbline/v1n1/roof.html
24. For further information on the One Commandment, see: www.religioustolerance.org/wic_term.htm
25. Singer, Barry and Victor Benassi. 1981. “Occult beliefs.”American Scientist, 69:49–55.

A Cornucopia of Darwinian Gems

a book review by Dr. Donald R. Prothero

In 1990, Richard Milner published The Encyclopedia of Evolution: Humanity’s Search for its Origins (Facts-on-File Publications, New York, 481 pp.) With a charming foreword by his childhood friend and classmate Stephen Jay Gould, the book was a smorgasbord of delightful anecdotes and stories about not only science and evolutionism, but also a startling array of other related topics as well. It was organized in an encyclopedia format, with separate topics arranged in alphabetical, rather than thematic order, so it was ideal for browsing. Its quirky but engaging approach was unique among all the books about evolution, most of which are more scholarly tomes that march through only serious topics in a natural, logical order. As such, it was sui generis, a book unlike any other, reflecting both Milner’s erudition and also his love of pop culture as well as science. In 1990, it was named by Choice “the best reference book of the year.”

Now, some 19 years later, Milner has revised and expanded his former book, with a new title and publisher. Many of the original articles are retained but updated. The original cover was a striking photo pastiche of an array of natural history objects, from fossils to snakes to a gorilla’s hand to a can of Chef Boyardee dinosaur macaroni. It has been replaced by a striking computer painting by Rosamond and Dennis Purcell of natural history objects and slogans decorating a colonnade of the historic Jaipur Palace (that Rosamond photographed in 1984 while visiting India with her friend Stephen Jay Gould). It was adapted from an illustration the Purcells created as a tribute to Gould in Natural History Magazine, except that Darwin appears in the foreground as the artist, painting Haeckel’s famous “tree of life”). In addition to Gould’s original preface (unchanged since Gould died in 2002), the new book has a foreword by American Museum anthropologist Ian Tattersall.

Milner’s professional training was in anthropology, and he served for many years as the senior editor of Natural History Magazine, the official popular publication of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Milner is famous for his one-man show, “Charles Darwin: Live and In Concert,” which he has performed in many venues. For this show, Milner wrote all the songs and lyrics, and does quick costume changes to portray one character after another. (The lyrics to two of his songs have been printed at the end of the new book). Both the old and new books reflect Milner’s broad training in evolutionary biology, paleontology, anthropology, and history of science, as well as his fascination with the bizarre and trivial phenomena of pop culture that impinge on evolution and humanity’s place in nature.

Milner’s new book preserves much of the charm and scholarship of the original, but contains many new entries that bring the original book up-to-date. Many of the illustrations have been replaced or updated, often with equally quaint images from archival sources. The image quality in this edition is much better than the muddy reproductions of the first version. There are articles on the recent discoveries of Flores man, the “Toumai skull”, “Kennewick Man”, the “Iceman”, and all the other entries on fossil hominids are updated. The other new articles reflect the developments of the past two decades. These include such topics as: “Evo-Devo”, “Biological Exuberance: the kingdom of gay animals”, “Caveman”, the Kentucky Creation Museum, the “Darwin Fish”, “Darwinian Medicine”, “Richard Dawkins: Darwin’s Rottweiler”, “Feathered Dinosaurs”, “Intelligent Design: Creationism’s Trojan Horse”, “Flint Jack: Greatest faker of prehistoric tools,” the “Fox-Farm Experiments,” “Frankenfood”, “Genographics,” “Ghost species,” the “Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon, “ “Jurassic Park”, “Kary Mullis: Irrepressible Prince of PCR,” the “Naturalistic Fallacy,” the “Pillars of Pozzuoli”, “Coprolite Industry: How Dino Dung Saved England,” “Sulfur-based ecosystems,” and the moth whose existence Darwin predicted (Xanthopan morganii praedicta). The Scopes Trial and “Scopes II” (the 1981 Arkansas creation trial) both retain their long articles, but it would have been nice to see an article on the historic 2005 Dover, Pennsylvania, trial of “intelligent design” creationism as well.

Other entries about dated and largely forgotten ideas have been dropped, as have many of the more obscure biographical entries. These include Elaine Morgan’s “aquatic ape” theory, the “Biometrician-Mendelism controversy”, the “Cambrian-Silurian controversy,” the invalid primate taxon “Ramapithecus,” Robert Ardrey’s “African Genesis” hypothesis, the “clay theory” of the origin of life, the “Paintpot Problem”, “Sperm Competition,” the falsified “Turnover Pulse” hypothesis, the “Y-5 dental pattern,” the outdated “Dinosaur Heresies”, the antiquated “Dollo’s Principle”, Ronald Reagan and his bizarre ideas about evolution, or the discredited Alvarez theory and Nemesis Star theory of dinosaur extinction, as well as the faddish “Pleistocene Overkill hypothesis” of Ice Age extinctions. Reading through the list of both new entries and deleted topics is like a trip through memory lane for me, since over the past 40 years I have seen many of the ideas that were faddish when I was a student vanish from the scene, and so many other new ideas and discoveries take their place.

Naturally, a book covering such a wide range of topics and multiple fields of expertise cannot avoid a few mistakes. For example, the article on “Nebraska Man” (in both the old and new versions) claims that the fossil that formed the basis of Osborn’s mistaken hominid reconstruction was the tooth of a pig. Actually, it is a tooth of a peccary, a New World family (Tayassuidae) of pig-like mammals that is only distantly related to the exclusively Old World family Suidae, the pigs. This is the same mistake that creationists make when they crow over Osborn’s error, so it is unfortunate that Milner doesn’t know the zoological difference between them. In addition, some typos and misspellings persist, such as spelling “ontogeny” in different ways in the cross-referencing, but correctly in the full article.

Milner has retained most of the quirky gems that made the original book such a surprise and joy to read. Some of these include the “evolution of cuteness”, P.T. Barnum’s fossil frauds, the “Flat-Earth Creationists,” the “Man in the Monkey House”, the “Clever Hans” phenomenon, the “Happy Family” of animals living together in peace, the “Iguanodon Dinner,” “Piltdown Man”, the “Sunday League,” “Tarzan,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and of course, “King Kong” and “Disney’s Fantasia.” As many of the reviewers on the book’s Amazon.com webpage commented, it is the perfect “coffee table book” — large and beautifully produced, and full of short articles which can be read whenever the fancy strikes. There is a little something here for everyone, from the scholar and scientist to the lay reader just interested in the connection between evolution and pop culture.

More importantly, the book seems to reach a readership that might never touch any other book on evolution, because it is so charming and entertaining as well as informative. It presents evolution in a non-threatening manner by luring the reader in with popular topics such as King Kong and Tarzan and “Jurassic Park”. Once the reader finishes these articles, they cannot help but browse further in the book, to find beautiful short summaries of serious scientific topics. Milner reports the facts and the failures of the creationist attacks on science without preaching. In this regard, this book is a valuable addition to the popular science bookshelf, since it reaches people sitting on the fence of evolution vs. creationism by entertaining and amusing them as it gently instructs them. In this regard, Milner achieves the same goal in popularizing science as did his late friend and classmate, Stephen Jay Gould.

Perhaps the best evidence of the book’s appeal is the reviews on its Amazon.com site. Not only do the lay readers all rave about how fun and accessible Milner’s book is, but it receives the ultimate accolade: a string of 10 perfect five-star reviews, with no dissenters or creationist critics. Such unanimous praise is unknown for books on controversial topics like evolution, and show that Milner has truly managed to reach an audience that most of us could never reach.

Broadcasting from the Great Beyond

a book review by Donna Harris