Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (30 page)

In a 1989 article in the magazine
Natural History
, Steven Jay Gould offers some fascinating insights into our search for creation myths.
⁶
Gould draws a thoughtful analogy between our need to identify the starting point of our own species as well as that of baseball. This strikes me as important. It shows that ultimately the problem has nothing to do with religion, per se. We are hungry, even to the point of being blindly uncritical, for stories about where, when, and by whom things began. To be successful, these stories should offer precise dates, places, and protagonists (whether natural or supernatural). Gould is clear that if we make such demands in areas as mundane as baseball, we are certainly going to do it when the origin of our own species is concerned.

Gould’s point is that the quest for such information, even when it conflicts with reasonable evidence and common sense, is a driving force in our need to
know
or to bring order to the world around us. We are here; that much is certain. So is baseball. Surely, there must have been a time when neither we nor baseball were here. Somewhere between then and now, things changed. We need to know when, where, and how that happened. Preference will be given to accounts that provide a location, a causal agent, and a date. Whenever possible, this information should be specified in frames of reference or timescales we can readily understand. In this regard, the idea of a 5,000-year-old Earth is a lot easier to grasp than one that is 5 billion years old.

I will add a third example of our quest for origins that follows the same pattern. Because of my involvement in popular music, I often hear the question, “Where did rock ’n’ roll come from?” or “What was the first rock ’n’ roll record?” This question allows us to identify the artist (causal agent) and date. The premise is that rock ’n’ roll
started
with a particular record, whose details can be specified. Although the essential information about rock music’s origins is, like baseball’s, quite trivial when compared to the origin of our species, the mentality behind all three questions appears to be the same. They are drawn by our
need
to know as well as limitations in our
ability
to know. They all presume a discrete starting point as opposed to a gradual evolution. The latter, while often true, is simply harder to grasp and less satisfying.

If I, as a pop culture historian, am interviewed and asked for the name of the first rock ’n’ roll record, I can be a real crowd pleaser and answer, “Oh, that’s easy. It was Elvis Presley. His record of
That’s All Right
was released on Sun 209 in July 1954.”
⁷
In fact, if I really want to show off, I might instead select Jackie Brenston’s record
Rocket 88
, released on the Chess label and recorded in Memphis in 1951. My interviewer might reply, “That’s three years before Elvis,” to which I would respond, “Yes, but this record was made in the same location at Sun Records, 706 Union Avenue in Memphis.” This may all seem rather silly, but there are numerous books and articles in respectable magazines and journals that dwell on such matters in precisely this way. It is far easier to get one’s mind around an intuitively obvious time like the 1950s and a cultural hotbed of musical hybrids like Memphis. You may not have heard of Jackie Brenston, but at least you now have a name to put on the plaque that will no doubt commemorate the event and draw tourists and music fans to the spot. We’ve got the who, the when, and the where in terms that make closet creationists happy.

Consider the alternative: When asked to name the first rock ’n’ roll record, I might reply, “That’s really a very difficult question. In fact, there may not
be
any answer. Rock ’n’ roll evolved from many musical forms. It took decades to bring all the ingredients together into something that is recognizable as rock music. It was a slow, painstaking process that occurred over time in fits and spurts. There were many innovations. Some were dead ends; others were incorporated into what would eventually become ‘rock ’n’ roll.’ As such, there was no ‘first record,’ which means there is no single causal agent (singer/musician), no place, and no date. As we get closer to the rock ’n’ roll revolution that occurred around 1955, more and more records sounded similar to what we now recognize as rock ’n’ roll. It’s not always easy to see how the earlier versions are connected to the present form, but there are identifiable things about those early records that reveal the gradual evolution of the music. So, much as it makes life simpler to think of a clear starting point (name/date/place), it is more meaningful to think of musical styles as things that evolve slowly with no clear beginning point or end. No magic date, no street corner studio, and no first artist.”

Can you imagine the impact of such an answer? If pressed for specifics, I could mention a slew of 1940s titles in a related genre called “country boogie” that fed right into the 12-bar format that early rock ’n’ roll incorporated. I could even go back to the 1920s and 1930s and point to recordings by Jimmie Rodgers or Robert Johnson that influenced rock artists more than half a century later. And what about the emotional vocal styles of pre-rockers like Frankie Laine, Dean Martin, or Johnny Ray, whose performances influenced Elvis and, through him, a multitude of early rockers? Sam Cooke
⁸
came from the black gospel tradition, another genre that was co-opted by early rock ’n’ roll. Indeed, Cooke’s earliest records appeared on the Specialty label, which gave voice to Little Richard, an iconic figure in rock history. The lines weave, crosspollinate, and end in a hopeless tangle from which no clear starting point emerges. Just like any evolutionary account, this offers little comfort or satisfaction to those questing for clear origins. By now, the person interviewing me wishes he had never asked the question. His eyes have glazed over and the audience has probably changed the station.

Having drawn the analogy to music, let me briefly deliver Gould’s case against creation myths in baseball. Because baseball fans are also closet creationists operating with an imperfect human mind, they also want to know the who, when, and where of baseball’s origin. Although actual historical records clearly paint a very different picture, the plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame offers exactly what fans are looking for. Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. What could be tidier? The comfort of a creation myth speaks to our species far more convincingly than history, evolution, or paleontology. The idea that baseball
evolved
slowly from related bat and ball games played for centuries on different continents is more difficult to grasp and far less satisfying. As Stephen Jay Gould has argued, “Too few people are comfortable with evolutionary modes of explanation in any form.” Once more, the creationist
Poof!
is more compelling to our minds than the cumulative effects of slow change.

The June 18, 2007, issue of
Time
magazine featured an article by medical columnist Alice Park about what she called drug-resistant “bugs.”
⁹
The article outlines the usual litany of concerns about our excessive use of antibiotics and how this, in turn, ups the ante in our arms race with bacteria and viruses. The article concluded that our present practices might yield a new generation of microorganisms that are more resistant to our present arsenal of drugs. The article is peppered with Darwinian concepts like “selection,” “mutation,” and “extinction.” The casualness with which these ideas are introduced reminds us how intuitively appealing basic Darwinian concepts are. Few people seem threatened when they are applied to microorganisms, rather than to beings like ourselves. That in itself seems odd. Aren’t the fundamental principles of natural selection the same, regardless of whether they are acting on a porcupine, a paramecium, or a person? Are the laws of gravity different for your cousin or your cat?

In any case, what is particularly relevant to our concerns is that in order to communicate what’s happening out there at a molecular level, the entire natural selection process has been translated into language that makes it even easier to grasp. Unfortunately, that translation may distort what is really going on.

Park (or
Time
magazine’s editorial department) refers to the new generation of microorganisms (“bugs,” if you prefer) as being “smart.” This may be a dangerous choice of words. To many persons—myself included—
smart
suggests things like
mentally alert
or synonyms like
clever
,
bright
, or
witty
. Smart individuals can analyze the situations they encounter, sort through their existing options, and select or synthesize their best response in order to maximize success.

This gives a lot of credit to a single-celled organism. In fact, no such credit is due. While it is true that natural selection has resulted in the survival of mindless “bugs” that stand a better chance of making it through the defenses we throw at them, it has nothing whatsoever to do with their being smart in the sense that humans normally understand that term.

But it sure does make the biological arms race easy to understand. These bugs must be smart because they have beaten us at our own game, right? We can agree that in order for us to come up with the antibiotics, we had to be smart. We had to think, extrapolate, speculate, and do all those things that smart humans, especially scientists, do. But our opponents did not. They had merely to experience a differential survival rate in the face of what we threw at them. In other words, some survived and some did not. We don’t think of the viruses that died as “stupid.” Well, neither should we describe the ones that survived and reproduced as smart. The real process is a lot simpler than that. Some heritable differences made it through the filter we created. The survivors got to reproduce, thus creating more offspring that share the tiny genetic advantage that conferred immunity to our arsenal.

Maybe this is nitpicking. Perhaps most people who read that article in
Time
magazine will understand that “smart” is just a metaphor. But do those readers understand that, in place of glib metaphors like “smart,” there is a straightforward biological mechanism called natural selection that accounts for what happened? That this mechanism works all around them, to produce morphological changes and, eventually, new species? Perhaps some people do understand this, but in a nation where more than half the citizens (and their elected political leaders) claim not to “believe in evolution” or argue that it’s “just a theory,” it is not altogether clear that
Time
’s looseness of language is such a good idea. Authors like Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins (in books like
How the Mind Works
and
The Selfish Gene
) show that explanations can remain simple without sacrificing accuracy. It is one thing to suggest, for example, that bacteria act
as if
they have their own conscious agendas. It is quite another thing to suggest to an uncritical audience that bacteria
do
have agendas. In this sense, the
Time
article by Alice Park has squandered a golden opportunity to educate.

We are generally not a clever species when it comes to understanding probability. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written a widely acclaimed best seller about the massive impact of what he calls
Black Swans
, highly improbable and unpredictable events. Taleb believes that “you can’t be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically.” Yet he argues that when it comes to probabilities, so-called experts rarely are and, as consumers, most of us are “beyond suckers.” Steven Jay Gould concurs, noting that if we humans understood probabilities better, Las Vegas would still be a truck stop in the desert.

The problem seems to be that when confronted with partial or probabilistic information, we are hit by a cognitive one-two punch: Not only do our mental calculators fail to work accurately, but we have a battery of hair-trigger coincidence detectors waiting to jump in and wring fanciful conclusions about what lies before us. We saw ample evidence of this in chapter 3 in our discussion of Jung and synchronicity.

Here’s another example of a probability distortion. Let’s assume you and I decide to play a game that requires thirteen cards. I carefully shuffle the deck and deal us each a hand: thirteen randomly drawn cards from a normal deck of fifty-two. So far, so good. Open your hand slowly and examine it. Nothing special there—an assortment of high and low numbers, a few picture cards, maybe examples of all four suits. Pretty unremarkable. No magical/mystical event modules in your mind have been triggered yet. But wait—the probability of that hand, the very one you are holding, occurring by chance alone was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in 635,013,559,600. Why aren’t you jumping up and down?

In fact, why aren’t we jumping up and down every time a hand is dealt? We’ve just been handed a singular event that occurs by chance about once in every 635
billion
shuffles of the cosmic deck. You don’t believe it? Shuffle the deck and deal thirteen cards again. Did you get the same hand? Nope. How about next time? No again. In fact, if you did nothing for the rest of your life but receive shuffled hands of thirteen cards once a minute, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year for seventy-five years, it is virtually certain that you’d never see that hand again. That’s how improbable it was. You can even pass the franchise along to your heirs and let them continue to receive shuffled hands of thirteen cards at the rate of one per minute for the next ten thousand generations and they’d be unlikely to see that particular hand you just drew. That’s how many possible thirteen-card hands are in the deck and how rare your original hand actually was. But somehow, none of this impresses you very much. That hand sure didn’t look so special when it was dealt to you.

Imagine that I had dealt you all thirteen hearts in the deck.
Now
we have something to talk about! “Incredible!” you’ll say. “I bet the odds of that happening are low as hell.” And you’re absolutely right. They are in fact, 1 in 635,013,559,600. Does that number look familiar? The average person has to work hard to get his mind around that. How can those two probabilities be the same? One of those hands was totally
ordinary
and the other was unique! In fact, that hand full of hearts would probably get your Jungian synchronicity detector working. Maybe this is a good day to go out and buy a lottery ticket. You might be on a roll! The universe is sending you a message. Say yes to that Internet stock offer. Go ask that special person to marry you. Strike while the iron is hot!