Bunch of Amateurs (29 page)

Two other errors make the case for Kennewick look absolutely solid. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy takes its name from someone shooting up the side of a barn before drawing a circle around the most clustered shots and then bragging about his bull’s-eye aim. For Kennewick, it’s roughly like finding a bone needle leagues away from the skeleton and concluding that the “explorer/trapper” must have worn “tailored” pants.

Most people believe that we are born into a world of illusion but grow out of it as adults. When we are kids, sure, we might believe the explanations of the
Just So Stories
, or that little men live in TV sets, or that tiny fairies dwell in a realm beneath the toadstools. But then a time comes when we matriculate to a view of the world that’s more sophisticated. Culturally, we mark this coming of age in certain ways—the revelation of Santa Claus or the outing of the tooth fairy.

And then we are welcomed into the Cartesian world of adulthood, where we foolishly think we have entered a realm of logic and rational choice, a place where individuals make reasoned judgments about the world around them. What scientists are showing us is that while the common adult view of reality might be more empirically precise than a five-year-old’s—it’s not as precise as we want to believe.
Academics have a name for the sloppy habits most adults have in their way of knowing the world, their epistemology. They call it a “makes sense epistemology.” That is, most of us, once we determine a cause for something that “makes sense,” rarely take the next step of a scientist—expose that idea to a test of some kind to see if we’re off.

Academics have numerous ways of trying to look around our flawed biases. Regression analysis is a form of statistics that uses large collections of data regarding many individuals’ actions to reveal the true movement of our hive, rather than relying on the august sentiments of elders. Now the Internet has organically developed several ways that group dynamics are performing a similar function.

The wiki—a technological platform that allows for a collective narrative to be written—has revealed all kinds of new or faster truths. It, too, has been derided as an assault on the very book of elder wisdom (
Encyclopedia Britannica
). Another more recent invention is the betting market. It turns out that creating a place where people with inside knowledge about events can win money by betting on that knowledge (think of the Iowa Electronic Markets, Intrade, NewsFutures) is another brilliant way to see past our prejudices and reveal the kinds of knowledge typically kept out of view. The attempt by the Bush administration to create a terrorism market—where terrorists could make money by revealing the most likely next targets—was canceled when people were offended by the possibility of rewarding terrorists in any way, even though the end result might be advance warning of another hit.

The oldest method to shake us out of our conceived universe is laughter. Needless to say, this has been studied! Solemnity and gravitas, while looking great on the face of an ancient professor, turn out to be a form of intellectual prison. Let’s go to the experiment: Give someone a corkboard on a wall, a box of thumbtacks, and a candle—then tell them to fasten the candle to the board. Overwhelmingly, most people will try to tack the candle to the board or light the
candle and use hot wax to affix it. But neither works. Now show a similar group a Laurel and Hardy movie before the assignment, and creativity increases. Many of them will empty the tack box, pin the box to the board, and put the candle in it.

Other studies have confirmed just how solemnity (and its partner, overconfidence) in one’s knowledge is deeply related to being correct in one’s views. But it’s an inverse relationship. The more confident one is in one’s views, the more likely one is to be flat wrong. An in-depth survey of pundits on television charted two elements of their presentation—their accuracy in prediction and the display of confidence in their opinions. Perhaps it will come as no surprise that survival in the pundit mosh pit on television is linked directly to the pundit’s level of blowhardiness. The more absolutely certain a pundit was in couching a view, however, the more likely that opinion was found to be wrong. All pundits, in this way, bear a strong resemblance to Michael Gary Scott of
The Office
. Yet, all that said, the bubble of television information thrives on the “confidence bias”—our own flawed preference for blustery self-assurance in the present tense rather than spot-on accuracy down the road.

All these cognitive biases, from the fundamental attribution error to the confidence bias, come together at the end of this story in what’s known as an informational cascade. Typically the term describes how the same choice repeated by others just bandwagons without anyone pausing to make an independent judgment. In the Kennewick cascade, though, there were tiny tweaks all along the way—from the assembly of the skull to the detonation of the word-esque substance “Caucasoid-like” to the numerous stories about Kennewick’s “family” fleeing the savage “hordes.” The accumulation of errors gathered and increased, forming a cascade of faux evidence that for many, many people constituted a perfect proof.

Despite all the distortion involved in trying to see the world for what it is and in creating new ideas that are real enough to be repeated
by others, there do emerge a set of rules from the best amateur pursuits. First, start at the beginning. All the assumptions of even the best experts are infected with their own prejudices and biases. If you are Steven Jobs in a garage in Cupertino in 1976, then you don’t need to know or listen to the wisdom of, say, IBM chief Watson, who once cockily said: “I think there is a world market for about five computers.”

Second, enter your literal or metaphorical garage in a sense of play. It almost doesn’t bear saying: The garage is a place of play, both when we are kids and as middle-aged grown-ups desperate to escape the bills and solemnity and tedium of “the house.” The garage is an outpost of joy, love, and freedom, which is why it long ago achieved mythic status as the fountainhead of amateur American creativity. But it’s that playful, supple state of mind that’s key. Why else do corporations spend so much time putting their executives on six-person bicycles or sending them off on retreats to smash the tedium of familiar thinking? Getting people into a state of playfulness is almost impossible. Amateurs enjoy the luxury of starting there.

Finally, there has to be an outside world of peers that you connect to who can keep you from getting sidetracked by your own or your culture’s biases. Scientists operating at the professional level do this through peer review. Amateurs can accomplish the same by joining weekend hobbyist groups, like the old robot clubs, where folks show off their latest creations and get critiques from friendly peers who want to make it better. Or perhaps you join a newsletter or subscribe to
Make
magazine or sign on with a DIY group or contribute along with others to a wiki devoted to your pursuit.

However one gets all the way back to the beginning of an idea, banishes crushing solemnity, and creates a small-scale community to keep it honest, you have to get there. Otherwise, you may find yourself looking at the
Rashomon
shape of a skull and seeing an itinerant European wandering the estuaries of the Pacific Northwest.

The question of just when we became human gets answered in our popular press all the time. Was it when we assembled the first rudimentary tool kit or grunted out the few phonemes of complex language? Was it when we made those paintings in Altamira and Lascaux, or when we left off being knuckle-dragging ape-like critters and stood up? Was the aquatic ape somehow involved? It’s one of those lines that doesn’t exist as a moment in time, but as an idea it does exist, and various scientists routinely make claims. Not long ago, a British scholar named Jonathan Kingdon laid out a new theory—about why we stood up—in his book
Lowly Origin
.

“Standing up” has been a particularly fertile field for this kind of musing, with theories ranging from cooling off to intimidating other species or freeing the hands. I’d always heard that we abandoned squatting because we wanted to see over the top of the grass on the African savannahs. One early 1980s theory was that standing evolved for “phallic display directed at females.” (Were this the case, every creature in nature, down to the ameoba, would stand, and the great outdoors would be a very animated place.)

Kingdon plods through a different argument. It’s dense and slow. Standing up, he says, probably had a lot to do with getting food and happened in undramatic stages, first by straightening the back while squatting and later extending the legs—all of this happening over vast swaths of time in tiny incremental stages. As theories go, that’s not nearly as fun as “seeing over the grass,” but it has the ring of truth to it, a ring that, let’s face it, never will endear such an idea to writers
of newsweekly cover lines or green-lighters of movies of the week. Which is also why you’ve never heard of Jonathan Kingdon.

Scientists like to invoke Occam’s Razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is often the most truthful. The principle was born during the Age of Reason when logical thought was trying to cut through the intellectual encrustation accrued after millennia of seeing nature through both Holy Scripture and the blowhardiness of intellectuals trying to impress one another with their sesquipedalianismo.

These days we have a different, almost opposite problem. Pop thinkers tend to oversimplify in a way meant to attract attention. The first time I ever got a whiff of this was when I was a teenager reading Desmond Morris’s book
The Naked Ape
. Morris theorized that the reason human females had big breasts (as opposed to the tiny sagging dugs of other primates) was because we had discovered love. In doing so, we switched from copulating doggie style to the more romantic missionary position. But all those millennia of looking at the round globes of the female’s buttocks from behind had also developed into the image stimulus required for the maintenance of erections during intercourse. Morris argued that the male still needed large rounded visual cues so, according to the rules of Darwin, we were rewarded with great big hooters.

Even as a kid, I remember thinking, Excellent, but really? Morris’s simplicity makes monstrous assumptions that just so happen to yield a theory pre-edited for the short, punchy demands of modern mass media. A hook, if you will. (Not that it didn’t work: Thirty years after reading that book, the only detail I can remember is the boob theory.) Morris’s theory has little to do with truth and everything to do with selling books. Perhaps it’s time to set aside Occam’s Razor and pick up Morris’s Razor, which shuns any theory that might excite a cable television producer while simultaneously elevating the plodding theory that makes a kind of dull, honest sense.

Apply Morris’s Razor to Kennewick Man and here’s what you
might get: Chances are Adovasio and his colleagues are right about the basic assertion of an ancient arrival of
Homo sapiens
to this continent. For instance, the archaeological record in Australia is redundant with proof that aboriginals arrived there at least fifty thousand years ago. That journey would have required boating some eighty miles, many believe. So there’s nothing extraordinary about there possibly being multiple entries to the American continent, with at least one crew, probably Asians like the Ainu, lugging their haplogroup X into North America some twenty to thirty thousand years ago, giving them plenty of time to leave some pre-Clovis fossils.

Sure.

That’s one story, a very Kingdon-like theory, all very probable but not a very good cable special or science magazine cover story. The Morris Razor, though, discards the other bits where the First American is of an ancient tribe (that just happens to physically resemble the very scientists making the claim) whose sad end came after a genocidal campaign between superior but outnumbered Caucasoids and hordes of Mongoloid “Stone Age peoples.” This epic extrapolation is drawn from one single Cascade point, a leap about as likely as a Martian anthropologist staring at a scrap of gray wool, an Enfield bullet, and a dinged canteen and then successfully imagining the states’ rights debate of the Civil War.

The same Martian anthropologist might also quarrel with the view that the Kennewick battle is a latter-day clash between science and religion—the Indians with their childishly mythic stories of origin and the scientists with their lithics and their scientific dates, 8700 ± 50 years. In an editorial a while back, the
Seattle Times
captured half the fight perfectly. Kennewick had “held onto his secrets for more than 9,000 years and now, finally, scientists will get a chance to be his voice.”

Why assume the scientists’ narrative in this case is closer to the empirical truth? In fact, if you know the history of archaeology, you know that there are times when one can find more objective, hard
factual truth in the local oral narratives than in the scientists’ analysis. This may well be one of those times. The Indians make the argument that their creationist stories are the truth that they believe in. Every culture had its founding stories. Those myths can sometimes be decoded to reveal the nuggets of ancient journalistic truth that set them in play, just as Helge Ingstad’s devotion to finding the truth buried in the Viking sagas eventually led to the confirming archaeological digs at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.