As human’s we love stories. We’re particularly good at coming up with stories to explain things we don’t understand. Apparently, this ability may have kept us alive in our evolutionary history. Those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors that heard a rustle in the bushes and ran away because they told themselves there was a dangerous animal lurking would survive to pass on this trait to their offspring. Even if the actual cause of the rustling was only sometimes a dangerous animal, this behaviour was protective. Those who didn’t run away would sometimes get eaten and be less likely to pass on this trait.
Now that we don’t typically worry about dangerous animals, this instinct has the potential to get in our way and we sometimes think there is danger in things that are benign.
I recently learned that there are many people who believe that the exhaust trails you sometimes see when an aircraft if flying overhead are made up of heavy metals and other dangerous chemicals for geoengineering (google chemtrails if you are interested).
How can we make sure the things we believe are true? Science. But, I’m not sure how to persuade you that you should believe in science if you don’t already. It makes sense to me if you say you are confused by what you hear about science in the news – this food is good for you one week but bad for you the next week. In a future post, I’ll try to put together my best sales pitch for science.
Normal is Boring 