Science, semi-science and nonsense

But yet political science is a borderlands science? It doesn't fall into the category of nonscience?

No. Political systems are testable. We can learn lessons from history and treat history as a science. We should. We can take the 75-year Soviet experiment and learn, well, they had to kill 40 million people to make this work. That can't be good. Let's scrap that and try something else.

All things that are now considered science were once nonscience or borderlands science. Does that hang over your head when you're thinking about new ideas?

Sure, I always wonder if what I believe is going to be bunk next year. But "I was wrong" is a big part of science. Those are three really important words. I would be totally shocked if some things turned out not to be true -- like the theory of evolution. Big bang is now pretty solid as the origin of the universe. I'm much shakier in the social sciences. What ever happened to [B.F.] Skinner and behaviorism and Leon Festinger and cognitive dissonance?

They're in Psych 101.

Well, nothing really happened, they didn't get debunked, they just kind of went away and something else came in. The social sciences are mushier.

What does it take for something to get locked down in the science category of things?

For example, when Alfred Wegener first proposed continental drift in the 1920s, he had a lot of interesting evidence. You could see that Africa and South America fit together like pieces of a puzzle. He marshaled quite a bit of data, but no one believed him. How the hell would continents move? Come on, they're huge! They're heavy and hugely big! Then, in the 1960s, geologists discovered plate tectonics -- continents sit on massive plates that are driven from underneath by these big vortices of moving lava.

If we asked, what would it take for me to believe in ESP? Would it take a single experiment? How about 10 statistically significant experiments in which the guy picked the right playing card? That still wouldn't quite do it because there's no way to understand how this could possibly happen in the brain. We understand how neurons and brain centers work but we don't know how something would transmit through space out of your skull into somebody else's skull. So those guys need to come up with some mechanism to explain it.

That brings to mind the passage about hypnosis. That seems pretty hard to pin down as science, yet you have been hypnotized.

Yes, hypnosis is one of those great examples because there's much dispute about what it is. In my mind, there's clearly something going on. Enough experiments lead me to believe that there are different levels of consciousness or layers of subconscious. That will remain a borderlands science until we understand how the brain works. We just don't know. I was with a bunch of neuroscientists this weekend at this scientific conference in Seattle. These were the big experts, and I was pumping them for information. They only know, just to pick a figure, something like 10 percent of how the brain works. There are a lot of gaps to fill in about the brain.

They did have one experiment that was illuminating the mechanism in the brain that might enable hypnosis, right?

Yes, the brain scan stuff is really interesting because it's starting to show things lighting up. One big problem is that there are brain centers that light up when you read. People who have brain damage to these areas can't read, but they can talk and listen to words and process language. The reason why this is perplexing is that in an evolutionary model there hasn't been enough time -- reading is only 5,000 years old -- for there to have been a selective advantage for some populations to survive because they can read while others cannot. We know this hasn't happened. Reading and writing has to be close to something else that evolved in the brain for some other reason.

When considering the impact of science and humans on the environment, what is dangerous about the idea that Europeans ruined some long-lost Utopian paradise?

If we want to understand and save our environment, we have to understand that all humans destroy their environment. The evidence is now even more overwhelming that all the megafaunal extinctions throughout the last 50,000 years were human-caused or human-triggered. In the North American invasion by Native Americans, there were at least a dozen mammal groups hunted to extinction. You can track it in Papua New Guinea and New Zealand and Australia too. The danger is to think that some groups live in harmony and maybe if we adopt their lifestyle we'd be better off. No. All humans are self-centered and short-term thinking. We need to be aware of that and cautious of what the consequences are of our actions.

Next Page: "The genome is not where the action is"

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