Looking Glass (The Naturalist, #2)

by Andrew Mayne

When no amount of evidence can convince you that your worldview might be inaccurate, then we’ve exited the realm of reason and entered religious territory. This is why I laugh at the notion of reconciling faith and science. Science is based on the premise that logic and reason can tell us the true nature of reality. Religion is based on the idea that when logic and reason don’t support a predetermined view of reality, they are at fault. The next time you get into a political discussion, stop and ask yourself what amount of evidence would change your mind. If the answer is none, then realize you’re actually in a religious discussion, one more zealot arguing with another.

“Just a warning. Park is pretty pissed at you. He was ranting earlier about how you interact with clients.” “Clients?” I reply. “We’re not an advertising agency. We’re a quasi-legal consulting group given far too much power by people looking for an excuse to pull a trigger. I’m pretty sure Cavenaugh’s not going to give us a bad Yelp review, if that’s what he’s afraid of.” She drops into an empty chair and slides next to me. “He’s afraid you’ll take Cavenaugh up on his offer. Park knows that DIA knows you’re the one that’s making this work.”

It’s a tempting thought, to be sure, but I’m still not ready to throw away my moral compass, even if I can’t read it.

He doesn’t realize that brilliance is a kind of binary thing. You either got it or you don’t. If you do, a 130 IQ and a 170 aren’t that different, so long as you know how to apply what you got. Richard Feynman, my personal hero and one of the greatest physicists who ever lived, scored a 128 on his army IQ test. That wouldn’t have gotten him into Mensa. Meanwhile, the guy with the highest IQ on record is a bouncer at a nightclub and spends his free time reading fantasy novels. Tell me that guy is smarter than the man who corrected Stephen Hawking’s science papers.

I’ve realized that all those empty compartments aren’t so empty. They’re filled with rage.

I suspect I could build a computer profile that could guess your occupation with a better-than-random outcome based upon posture and eye gaze. Doctors tend to look around you, kind of like a farmer sizing up a heifer. Scientists look into the space next to you as they think about your words or, more likely, their own precious thoughts. Cops look right at you. They don’t look away when you make eye contact. They maintain the dominance stare because they’ve got a gun and a license from society to intimidate you. If you stare back and threaten that dominance, they’re only one radio call from a bunch more cops with guns.

Mathis isn’t like you or me. He’s a particular kind of sociopath. The kind that makes a great politician. He makes you think he loves you until you stand in his way. And then when he does something to fuck you over, he makes you think it’s your fault.”

There are even genes that correlate with charisma. Some of them overcompensate for a lack of internal empathy. They make you feel like they care more than anyone else while you’re nothing to them.”

“You’re one cold motherfucker. At least Mathis doesn’t make you feel like shit.” “That’s so you don’t see the knife coming. I’m honest. I never met your kid, but everything you told me about him makes me like him.

At least half of the files were from households that appeared to be filled with illegal aliens. I get a chill thinking about how many cases of abducted children go unreported because the families are too afraid to talk to the authorities. I can’t even fathom what kind of nightmare it is to be too afraid to go to the police in a situation like that.

“The light comes on and . . . Holy shit.” Artice closes his eyes. “Mr. Toy Man is standing there buck-ass naked in front of me. The first thing I notice are all these scars on his body. Fucked-up shit. Then I see he’s got a knife. A big-ass OJ knife. Worse thing, though, was the look on his face. Scariest thing I ever seen. He’s always been this smiling, happy guy. This was like a demon took over.

prison somewhere else.” “So you think he’s still in the area?” I give her a small shrug. “Depends on the size of the area we’re talking about. I’ve been comparing maps of possible incidents with some other data and discovered something interesting.” “Of course you have,” she replies. “Don’t make me spank you.” “Don’t tease. What did the brilliant Dr. Cray discover?—asks the breathless grad student in the tight sweater and short miniskirt.” She sees how this distracts me and starts to laugh. “How did you ever teach?” “For one, they didn’t dress like that. They looked like homeless people. Second, never mind.

As William turns the corner, I roll down my window and toss my french fries into the yard next to the Wimbledon house. “You’re killing me. Those smelled amazing.” “That’s the point,” I reply. “The cooking oil they use sets off our olfactory senses designed to seek out foods with high fat. We’re programmed to be addicted. Add in salt and the fructose in ketchup, and it’s the perfect food—if you’re a Neolithic caveman getting all his other nutrients by eating gallbladders and animal intestines.” “Your girlfriend must love your pillow talk,” William says, shaking his head. “I’m not allowed to use any words with more than two syllables after midnight,” I joke.

“Go fuck yourself, Karlin.” “I have to. There’s no one man enough in this town to do it right.” She presses the “End Call” button.

I’m reminded of one of the gifts of science: when you discover a new truth, you also gain a new way of looking at things that can change your perspective.

As my hero Richard Feynman would say, “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is; it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”

But a great deal of what we call voodoo is actual African belief systems in places other than Africa. “Most belief systems that don’t have a central text like the Koran or the Old Testament become extremely pragmatic, adopting whatever else is around if it fits. New Orleans voodoo has a lot of French Catholicism embedded in it, while Brazilian forms have incorporated some of the indigenous beliefs from there.

How can someone this smart be this stupid?” “It’s a daily struggle,” I reply.

Neuroscientists say they can predict an action our mind has decided to take moments before our conscious mind has even decided what we think we’re going to do. The function of consciousness, they argue, isn’t to make decisions, but to rationalize them after the fact. It’s our brain’s way of explaining why we did things—a kind of public-relations office that turns our id into a rational actor and not some lizard monkey acting out of fear.