Nobody knows what happened to Little Albert. It is not clear who his parents were and why they would ever have agreed to such an experiment. Watson’s study was conducted in 1920; any scientist repeating that experiment today would be fired for unethical conduct. It turns out that Watson was indeed fired, but not for traumatizing Little Albert. In between sessions of terrorizing the baby, he had been conducting an affair with his collaborator. As a married man, his liaison with his graduate student Rosalie was considered too scandalous for the day and so he left academia and went on to earn a fortune in advertising.
The trouble with any learning explanation of phobias is that many patients have never had the sorts of early traumatizing experiences that both Little Albert and I had. For example, it cannot explain people with snake phobias in Ireland or New Zealand, where there are no snakes. Also, if early learning were the only explanation, you would have more cases of car phobias, electric socket phobias, and so on. We are much more likely to have a potentially life-threatening experience with today’s technology than with snakes and spiders. It is as if something in our evolutionary past has prepared us to learn these fears. The psychologist Martin Seligman first proposed this preparedness theory of phobias.19 He argues that humans are genetically wired to fear certain classes of things without the need for a lot of learning. Our species learned to be extra-sensitive to potential threats by natural selection. Maybe our prehistoric ancestors who were especially fearful of snakes and spiders passed that aspect of their personality on to their children through their genes. That would explain why the majority of phobias fit into a few categories that could have been sources or signals of potential danger, such as environments (open spaces, heights, dark places), animals (snakes, spiders), and animals that elicit disgust (rats, mice, maggots). There are few phobias of modern appliances because we simply have not had enough time to evolve wariness to threats like electric sockets.
So some fears seem to take root much more easily than others. Could this be true of other thoughts? Religious beliefs may be indoctrinated by associative learning in the same way phobias are, but like irrational fears, they may also build on our natural inclinations. This is because they fit well with our natural ways of thinking about the world – the mind design we have inherited through our genes. This may partly explain why supernatural beliefs are so easily accepted. They seem to fit with what we think is possible.
This idea of being prepared for the supernatural is one that the anthropologists Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran, who study the similarity of religious beliefs from around the world, have proposed.20 At first sight, individual religious beliefs seem to be extremely varied, but they all share properties that predict whether they will catch on as ideas. To begin, all religions have a supernatural component – beliefs that violate the natural laws of the world. When Boyer and Atran examined individual supernatural beliefs passed on from one individual to the next through storytelling, they found that these beliefs have a similar structure. First, they were transmitted best when the supernatural aspects were set within a normal mundane context. It was because Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding reception that the miracle was attention-grabbing and is remembered well. His ability to feed a crowd is not particularly surprising until you find out that there were five thousand people and he had only a few fish and loaves. If these supernatural acts had occurred in a much more fantastical context, they would not have had so great an impact. This is called a contrast effect: events are more striking when they suddenly depart from what you expect. That’s why horror movies lull you into a false sense of security before the monster jumps out at you. The contrast effect of storytelling has been demonstrated experimentally by showing that the bizarre is best remembered in the context of a normal story line.21 Completely fanciful stories do not provide such a strong contrast effect, and so they have less impact. Also, the events that violate just one fundamental principle, rather than commit multiple violations, are the most memorable. In other words, the story cannot be too outrageous and fantastical. A statue that speaks is judged to be more likely an example of a ‘real’ case of the supernatural than one that speaks, bleeds, hovers above the ground, and then vanishes into thin air. The fact that context and credibility are important in the transmission of ideas suggests that people filter stories for plausibility. If this is the case, our intuitive understanding of the world is going to be an important factor in what we believe.
INTUITIVE CREATIONISM
The recent atheist attack on religion has been welcomed by many who are alarmed by the apparent rise and influence of religious fundamentalism in the world. There are a number of reasons for this anti-religion attitude. It is partly a reaction to the perceived rise in the terrorist threat from Islamic fundamentalism around the world that was triggered by 9/11. The reaction is also a response to a corresponding strengthening of Christian fundamentalism and its increasing influence in policy decisions that affect the progress of science and how it is taught in our schools. The battle between science and religion is at its fiercest over the issue of the origins of life on earth, and currently that fight is most bitter in the United States.
The problem is that the majority of US adults believe that a supreme being, namely God, guided the origin and diversity of life on earth. They believe that in the beginning God created earth and all its life forms and that there has been no significant change since that day. This creationist view contrasts with the scientific theory of evolution, which states that life on earth is constantly changing to produce new life forms and that this process continues without purpose, guidance, or design. According to evolution, the diversity of life on the planet we see today is due to gradual changes accumulated over time. The reason this is a problem is that it highlights a paradox of modern America. The United States is one of the most scientifically and technologically advanced nations on the planet. It has produced more Nobel Prize winners than any other country. With the most successful space programme, it has ambitions to colonize neighbouring planets. The United States also has some of the most advanced medical knowledge and practice in the world. Yet less than half of the American population accept a comprehensive scientific theory that explains the origins and diversity of life on earth. When it comes to the general public’s acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the United States is second from the bottom of the list of the top thirty-four industrialized nations. Why is creationism so dominant and natural selection so weak in the United States?
There are two main reasons. First, Christian fundamentalism is politically strong in the United States. In some states, bills have been introduced to allow creationism to be taught as a valid alternative to evolution in the science curriculum. Ever since the famous Scopes monkey trials in 1925, in which a biology teacher was prosecuted for teaching Darwinism, there have been concerted efforts to curb the influence of the teaching of evolution by presenting creationism as a valid alternative. Even though two-thirds of US state science standards recommend the teaching of evolution, fewer than 40 per cent include humans as part of the curriculum. But strong Christian fundamentalism is only one part of the explanation. The other reason creationism is so successful is that there is something about Darwin’s theory of natural selection itself that makes it difficult for people to accept. When we see the diversity of life today, it is hard to believe that such complexity could arise spontaneously. Remember: our minds are designed to see order and structure in the world, and everything about life seems to be specially designed, as if by purpose. Darwin’s theory explains why this is an illusion. It is beautifully simple, but so alien to the way humans think. To most of us, Darwin’s theory of the origin of the species through natural selection is, well, unnatural.