50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True

by Harrison, Guy P.

  Science is imperfect and based largely on failure. It advances by riding on the backs of mistakes. Scientists make errors and then try to learn from those failures. The first thing that happens when a new discovery is made public or a new theory proposed is that scientists around the world try to figure out how they can tear it down. Unfortunately, this process of error correction might take decades, even centuries. Therefore, we have to be on guard and always give only conditional loyalty. Science is a brutal and unforgiving gauntlet that answers have to run into and come out of alive before gaining acceptance. Actually, nothing ever escapes that gauntlet because nothing is ever really proven “true” in the final sense. In science, everything is left open to correction forever. If it's found to be wrong tomorrow or one thousand years from now, then the answer is amended. Nothing is sacred or untouchable. No scientist is infallible or beyond challenge. At least that is how it's supposed to work.

  Science produces the goods over and over for a number of reasons. First of all, real science is not based on majority vote or popularity. The influence of politics, ego, and money may exist, but in the end evidence and experiments determine what is real. And there is no trusting anyone when it comes to important matters of science. Evidence must be available for scrutiny by other scientists, and experiments must be reproduced by others if the idea is to stick. Another great feature of science is that anyone can do it. While it may be impossible to land a prestigious professorship at Harvard without the right credentials and connections, it's not difficult at all to demolish an incorrect theory and establish a correct one, no matter what credentials you have. If you really do have the goods and can prove it, then the world's scientists will listen and accept the new reality staring them in the face. This is where many of those who push the creationism/intelligent design agenda show themselves to be blatantly dishonest. If it were real science, then it would be established in the scientific community first with discoveries, evidence, and experiments—openly documented in respected journals—for all to analyze. Only then would it filter down to high school classrooms. Proponents of creationism/intelligent design apparently know that it will never happen this way because it's not real science. So they focus on marketing, political campaigning, and legal cases. Their actions speak louder than words. Real science—for all its faults, mistakes, frauds, and failures—works. It confirms reality while weeding out false claims and bad ideas, which is probably why so many paranormal and pseudoscience peddlers fear to go anywhere near the scientific method.

  While professional scientists do tend to be very smart people with high levels of education, of course, they certainly should not be viewed as some sort of inerrant demigods among us. In the same way that many highly intelligent people can believe in unlikely things such as psychics and ghosts, scientists can have downright kooky ideas bouncing around in their skulls as well. For example:1

  Aristotle thought the brain's primary purpose was to cool the blood.

  Astronomer Percival Lowell believed Martians built irrigation canals on Mars.

  Nuclear physicist Edward Teller thought we should use nuclear bombs to excavate a new harbor in Alaska and to crack open the Moon in order to study its interior.

  Nobel laureate Linus Pauling was convinced that megadoses of vitamin C could cure cancer.

  Not only can scientists be wrong, they also can be bad, very bad. The infamous “Tuskegee experiment” was a forty-year study of nearly four hundred Alabama men who had syphilis. Even when treatment became available for these men, researchers made the decision to continue the study without telling them that penicillin could help them. This decision was not only devastating for the men but also for their wives and children.

  In 2010 it was revealed that scientists in the 1940s infected Guatemalan prisoners, prostitutes, and others with venereal diseases in order to study them. The Pan American Health Organization knew about the experiments, according to Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom.2

  I suspect that I will be haunted forever by the interview I conducted with Eva Mozes Kor. As a young girl imprisoned at Auschwitz, she had to endure a series of painful scientific experiments conducted by Dr. Josef Mengele. Several years ago I interviewed “the Father of the H-bomb,” Edward Teller. I recall feeling uncomfortable when he defended his prominent role in developing weapons many times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. He declared that I would be speaking Russian if not for American nuclear weapons. This may have been a fair point, but I was disappointed that he did not seem to recognize the great danger that some scientists have imposed on all of us by creating weapons capable of destroying civilization.

  It is important to understand and remember that science is a tool that can be used for good or bad. As much as I love science and admire many scientists, I never forget that there is nothing inherently good or safe about science. Yes, it is the source of lifesaving vaccines and it brings us those stirring images of distant galaxies, but it is also where napalm and weaponized anthrax come from, too. Apart from the rules and standards we decide to impose on it, science cannot be counted on to be a force for good only. This is why I stop well short of idolizing all scientists and adopting science as my ersatz religion. I've been a science lecturer and I continue to do my best to popularize and explain science to others through my writing. But I never suggest that it's perfect, safe, or a risk-free path to utopia. Science may give us that wonderful Star Trek future, or it may deliver doomsday.

  I love that good scientists openly admit that they can give us only a tentative version of reality and truth. They don't keep it a secret that everything is up for revision, correction, or rejection in science. Unlike politicians and religious leaders, scientists change their minds and rewrite the textbooks all the time. They do this because they believe in science not as a permanent, fixed set of laws written into stone, but rather as an ongoing process of discovery. I have no doubts that a number of scientific facts that I think are correct today will turn out to be incorrect in the future. This is why I have always made sure to include disclaimers when giving science lectures to students: “According to the best current evidence” punctuates many of my statements. I want people, especially younger students, to know that science is nowhere near finished, that there is plenty of work left to do. No one should think of scientists as another priesthood that possesses some ultimate truth. A good scientist is one who wallows in failure and is never quite 100 percent sure of anything.

  Science has been able to give us so much because it relies on evidence and experiments to make discoveries and answer questions. Scientists are able to do great work because they accept failures and learn from them. Do not allow yourself to be fooled; there is no perfection here, no purity, and no safety from evil. But in science there is always another wonderful and important discovery waiting just around the corner. It's also the best way we have of determing what is real and what is probably not real. It's the best thing we have to help us navigate through our mysterious, complex, and often-dangerous existence. Never forget that what is most important about science is not who made the big discoveries, but how they did it.

  GO DEEPER…

  Brockman, John. What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Today's Leading Thinkers Rethink Everything. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.

  Brooks, Michael. Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science. London: Profile Books, 2011.

  Brooks, Michael. 13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time. New York: Vintage, 2009.

  Hanlon, Michael. 10 Questions Science Can't Answer (Yet): A Guide to the Scientific Wilderness. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

  Marks, Jonathan. Why I Am Not a Scientist. Berkley: University of California Press, 2009.

  Those sent to a camp associated with an industrial plant run by the SS economic branch were usually worked to a state of enfeeblement before being sent to the gas chambers, though the old, the weak, and the young might be gass
ed immediately. Auschwitz, the large camp in Poland, served both purposes. Those sent to the extermination camps, like Treblinka and Sobibor, were gassed on arrival. In this way, by the end of 1943, about 40 percent of the world's Jewish population, some six million people, had been put to death.

  —John Keegan, The Second World War

  If five to six million Jews were not killed, where did all those people go?

  —Michael Shermer

  I have always been deeply troubled by the Holocaust. Any mass killing is a horrible event, of course, but the manner in which Hitler's “Final Solution” was undertaken seems to damn us all. The efficiency and creative use of technology made it more than just another one of history's bloodbaths. It was the industrialization of murder, so disturbingly modern in its planning and execution. I suspect I may process the Holocaust differently than most. I'm not a Jew but I feel pain and loss; I am not a Nazi but I feel shame and guilt. The world calls it genocide. But I see it as suicide. Take a peek over our false walls, the ones built of manufactured divisions called race, nations, and religions, and you will see too that it was people killing people, one more episode of a dysfunctional species cutting its own throat.

  During a visit to Jerusalem, I spent an afternoon at the Yad Veshem Holocaust History Museum. It was a miserably hot day. Appropriate, I figured. Comfort would be rude in that place. I remember draining the last drops from my water bottle and thinking, it was good that the Holocaust will never be forgotten. I only wished that the murdered Native Americans of the Americas and the Caribbean had a memorial somewhere as impressive as this one. The Africans who were shipped to the New World as cargo should be remembered in this way too. Every shameful chapter of history, every bloodbath, ought to have a prominent monument and museum somewhere in the world. Yes, it would take up a lot of real estate, but maybe the sight of so many tangible reminders of our worst failures would shock us into confronting our depraved past and finally resolving to mature and do better.

  The architecture, landscaping, photos, artifacts, statues, and somber silence blend seamlessly to great effect at Yad Veshem. Together they annihilate ignorance and indifference. I was imprisoned for several minutes by the black-and-white photograph of an adorable little child who never got to grow up because he was born on the wrong side of Hitler. Looking back on my visit, it's difficult to imagine anyone not being moved by the weight of the place. But, of course, there are millions of people around the world today who would equate Yad Veshem to Disney World. For them it's a fantasyland for propaganda and profit. These people are known as Holocaust deniers, and they accuse mainstream historians of stupidity at best, complicity with fraud at worst. It's all a hoax, they say, perpetrated by Jews upon the world for political and economic gain. This is a staggering claim. Given the evidence for the Holocaust and all the pain attached to it, this makes the Moon-landing-hoax claim seem almost reasonable. The Holocaust never happened? Hitler wasn't trying to eliminate Jews from Europe? Six million Jews never died? All those dead bodies never piled up in pits and gas chambers? Nazi prison camps were not murder factories? Are the deniers serious?

  While no one person can bear witness to an event that spanned several years and multiple countries, a collection of voices is difficult to deny. I have personally spoken to several people who lived through key events in World War II. They certainly have no doubts about the reality of the Holocaust. Carwood Lipton saw more combat than most as a sergeant in Easy Company of the 101st Airborne Division. He enjoyed a bit of fame as a prominent character in the Tom Hanks/HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. Lipton told me that during the war he arrived at Landsberg prison camp in Germany, shortly after another group of US soldiers had liberated it. What he saw horrified him, and the experience never completely released its grip on him. I asked him what he thinks about people who deny that the Holocaust happened.

  “Oh…[long pause] it was absolutely terrible. They [Holocaust deniers] should have been there to see it. The smell was terrible. I can still remember the smell.”1

  Lipton and other Easy Company veterans attended special private screenings of Band of Brothers episodes in 2001. He chose not to watch episode nine, however. That was the one about the horrors discovered at Landsberg. “I just didn't want to bring back those memories,” he explained.

  In 2002, I interviewed Armin Lehmann, a member of the Hitler Youth in Germany who won the Iron Cross for bravery in combat against the Russians. At age sixteen he served as Hitler's personal courier in the Berlin bunker during the final days of the war in Europe. Lehmann described to me a disturbing childhood in which young schoolchildren had their heads measured to confirm the Nazi ideology of racial superiority. He and his classmates were taught propaganda designed to make them fear and despise Jews. “Jews were presented as evil people who were out to destroy the world,” he said.2

  Lehmann told me that he feels the percentage of Germans who knew about the Holocaust while it was happening is “debatable.”

  “Most say they did not know,” he said. “But in retrospect, all of the signs and signals were there. I think more should have known than admit it.”

  Barbara LeDermann was a childhood friend of Anne Frank. In 1943, the Germans began rounding up all Jews in Amsterdam for transport to “labor camps.” Barbara had heard, however, that these were in reality places where Jews go to be killed, so she made the bold decision to go into hiding. But she didn't do it the way Anne Frank did. Barbara decided to hide in plain sight by changing her last name and pretending to be a non-Jewish German girl. It worked. She was able to live with non-Jewish friends and avoid the fate of her parents and younger sister—all of whom died in prison camps. Years later, Barbara was recognized as a hero by many for her role with the Jewish underground. During the war, she had risked her life to deliver food and newspapers to Jewish families in hiding.

  “I never knew about gas chambers back then,” Barbara said. “If people told me about things like that I wouldn't believe it. It is beyond comprehension. Who could believe that there were people who could do that to innocent people? After the war I used to go to the railway station, hoping to see my family. But they were never there. It took me a long time to accept that they were never coming back.”3

  Finally, there is Eva Mozes Kor. I don't usually cry during interviews, but I teared up as this little woman described how the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele injected her with toxins and germs as part of cruel experiments he conducted on twins at Auschwitz. Eva was ten years old.

  “The first night I was there [Auschwitz prison camp] I went to the latrine and found three dead children on the floor…. Mengele was the god of Auschwitz. We always knew that when he came in we would have to be very still and do whatever he needed us to do. He would come in, morning after morning, to count us and see how many guinea pigs he had.”4

  Eva said she was measured and examined for hours at a time. Sometimes the nurses would take so much blood from her that she would faint. She says she learned later this was part of a study to determine how much blood wounded soldiers could lose before dying.

  “They would inject me with a minimum of five injections, three times a week. Those were the deadly ones. The majority of twins died in these experiments. Once a twin was injected with a germ, the other twin would be kept nearby under surveillance. When the twin that had been injected with the germ died, the other twin would be killed so that Mengele could do comparative autopsies.”

  Eva and her sister survived the Holocaust. The rest of their family did not.

  It is important to understand that Holocaust deniers are not necessarily screaming neo-Nazi skinheads who show up at public rallies wearing SS uniforms. I have attended neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan meetings in Florida, and many of the people I saw who were cheering on the memory of Hitler and scoffing at every mention of the Holocaust did not look anything like the stereotypical foaming-at-the-mouth racist. Many of them could have passed me on the street and I never would have imagined that they were passionate Ho
locaust deniers. It turns out that most of the people who drive this movement by writing the books and speaking at conferences tend to present themselves in public as very polite and sophisticated people.

  Science historian and skeptic Michael Shermer researched the movement for a book and says the deniers are “relatively pleasant” in public.5 Who knows what is going on in the privacy of their minds, but most of them talk primarily about honoring the truth, checking facts, and doing proper history. While analyzing their process of reaching and defending their positions, Shermer recognized tactics nearly identical to those used by many creationists and intelligent design proponents in their battles against modern biology:6

  They concentrate on their opponents' weak points rather than strengthening their own position and focusing on it.

  They exploit errors by mainstream scholars and suggest that if some things are wrong, everything must be wrong.

  They take quotations out of context to bolster their position.

  They claim that debate among mainstream scholars on specific points suggests disagreement about the validity of the entire subject.

  They focus on the unknown and ignore what is known. They point to data that fit their claims and ignore data that do not fit.