The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts us all at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World

by David Robert Grimes

To circumvent confusion, we’ll categorise this class of informals as arguments from nature. But it’s important to note here that ‘nature’ itself is a somewhat malleable term, allowing all manner of moving goalposts to be spirited around under its cloak.

Philosopher Anthony Flew envisioned a now-classic example of this type of equivocal reasoning: Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the ‘Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again’. Hamish is shocked and declares that ‘No Scotsman would do such a thing.’ The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again; and, this time, finds an article about an Aberdeen (Scotland) man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion, but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says: ‘No true Scotsman would do such a thing.’ This is what has come to be known as the No True Scotsman (NTS) fallacy.25

NTS arises when the groups involved are invoking some nebulous set of characteristics that are not necessarily vital to membership of that group. Yet if the characteristics in question are integral to membership and can be objectively defined, then it might be extremely relevant.

Intimately related to this school of reasoning is the fallacy of appeal to nature. In such rhetorical tactics, a thing is asserted to be inherently good because it is ‘natural’ or bad because it is ‘unnatural’.

The most destructive variation of the argument from nature is the ever-popular argumentum ad hominem (‘arguing against the man’). An ad hominem argument is essentially a personal attack, aimed at the speaker or the speaker’s credibility rather than addressing the argument they posit.

The name Simplicio for the geocentrist was a thinly disguised insult. Ostensibly named after sixth-century philosopher Simplicius of Cilicia, the connotation with ‘simpleton’ was apparent and deliberate. In an artistic flourish, Galileo modelled aspects of the disagreeable and dull-witted Simplicio after his biggest detractor, conservative philosopher Lodovico delle Colombe, leader of a Florentine contingent of Galileo’s opponents, derisorily referred to by Galileo and his friends as the ‘pigeon league’.

Need to check on the names mentioned.

A variation of the ad hominem fallacy manifest can be found in tu quoque (‘you too’) exchanges, where the retort to an argument is to accuse the speaker of engaging in the same behaviour. This might be evidence to establish the speaker as a hypocrite, but it does not necessarily diminish the validity of their argument.

A related tactic is ‘poisoning the well’, where unfavourable information about an individual (real or fabricated) is used pre-emptively to discredit a speaker, even if that information has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

Humans are prone to what social psychologists refer to as the fundamental attribution error. This is the observation that we place undue emphasis on personal characteristics (intention and character) for the actions of others, rather than contemplate external or situational factors.

After all, if you want to justify treating someone as subhuman, the assertion of some intrinsic failing is a powerful way to dehumanise them.

When confronted with ideas or situations, we must strive to avoid guilt by association with preconceived prejudices. We must assess ideas on their own merits and avoid tarring them with the same brush when it’s not appropriate. Otherwise we reduce complex issues to pantomime farce, and people with all their nuances to two-dimensional heroes or villains. If nothing else, this might be the impetus to be kinder to each other in a world with multitudinous people and divergent views.

Owen’s devious tactic of distorting Darwin’s argument is an archetypal example of a strawman argument. This gambit at its most basic is a ‘bait-and-switch’ tactic, pivoting on the impression of refuting an opponent’s argument while relying on an easily defeated substitute in its stead. The strawman gambit is particularly well named, conjuring up the evocative image of a sword-fighter demonstrating his prowess on a hay-stuffed mock-up in lieu of an opponent capable of parrying his blows. While there is no challenge in defeating an effigy, this style of argument can seem rather convincing if the switched proposition bears some superficial likeness to the real argument. This isn’t always malicious in origin – a strawman attack might arise from ineptitude, if one mistakenly conflates two different ideas. The great mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell alluded to this frequent problem, wearily observing that ‘a stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand’.

On the fringes of devout religiosity unconcerned with objective fact, falsehoods persist with wild abandon. In 2007, evangelists Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron dumbfounded the scientific community when they insisted evolution must be wrong because no one had found the fossilised skeleton of a hybrid like the croco-duck, holding aloft a poorly photoshopped crocodile-duck hybrid. As attempts to undermine evolutionary theory go, this must rank among the stupidest imaginable, lending weight to Russell’s dictum on the fundamental inaccuracy of ‘a stupid man’s report of what a clever man says’. The great evolutionary biologist and science writer Richard Dawkins’s exasperated reply to such foolishness was understandable and perfectly cutting – in correspondence with me he said: ‘If your understanding of evolution is so warped that you think we should expect to see a fronkey and a croco-duck, you should also wax sarcastic about the absence of a doggypotamus and an elephanzee . . . plus a billion other misshapen chimeras, every living species combined with every other living species.’

The famous crocko-duck

This is quite transparently a poor argument, as the speaker is essentially beginning with their conclusion to justify their conclusion. Such fatuous reasoning is known as circular reasoning.

This is frequently seen in a related fallacy known as begging the question.29 In question-begging, the conclusion whose proof is being attempted is contained in the premises of the argument, rendering the entire statement an exercise in tautology. On deep-seated ideological issues, it can be readily abused as the begged question often aligns with the views being courted.

It bears the hallmarks of an all-too-human psychological error known as motivated reasoning, where – instead of evidence being evaluated critically – it is deliberately interpreted in such a way as to reaffirm a pre-existing belief. It is an emotionally driven, and inherently biased, form of decision-making. It demands impossibly stringent standards for any evidence contrary to one’s beliefs, while accepting uncritically even the flimsiest evidence for any ideas that suit one’s needs. Rather than rationally evaluate evidence that might confirm or deny a belief, motivated reasoning uses our biases to look only at evidence that fits what we already believe and to dismiss that which unsettles us.

Motivated reasoning is closely related to confirmation bias, our tendency to seek, remember and frame information in a way that agrees with our preconceived beliefs and world-views, while minimising contradictory information.

This question captured the attention of pioneering psychologist Leon Festinger, who postulated that simultaneously holding two or more contradictory beliefs on a topic might lead to a form of mental agitation. He termed this ‘cognitive dissonance’, the discomfort a person feels when they encounter information or actions that conflict with those they already hold. When confronted with clashing information, we endeavour to quell this discomfort. We might accept that our preconceived notions may be flawed or incomplete, and – like an ideal scientist – refine our views in light of new evidence. But to alter our ideological leanings is cognitively expensive; an easier option is simply to deny reality in order to preserve our beliefs. In Festinger’s paradigm, motivated reasoning is a mechanism to stave off discomfort from conflicting information, ‘motivating’ us to accept soothing falsehood over challenging realities.

Festinger summed all this up later with the pithy observation that ‘a man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic, and he fails to see your point.’ This is not solely a failing that afflicts the religious; the needless controversy over climate change is underpinned by a similar rationale.

Perhaps most egregiously, Republican President Donald Trump insisted that climate change was a conspiracy by the Chinese to hobble American industry.

What did ou expect from that utter incompetent idiot?

The role of ideology in acceptance or denial of climate science has been a persistent research interest of Stephan Lewandowsky and his colleagues. In their fantastically titled study, ‘NASA Faked the Moon Landing – Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science’, they found that subjects subscribing to conspiracist thought tended to reject all scientific propositions they encountered, while those with strong traits of conservatism or pronounced free-market world-views only tended to reject scientific findings with regulatory implications – namely, climate science.

Need to read that book/study

Kahan’s body of research lays waste to the idea that an information deficit is the reason for disagreement on issues of science and technology, or of policy and evidence. Rather, it suggests that ideological motivations skew our very ability to reason. But why might this be the case? Kahan’s theory is that people have a propensity to engage in identity-protective cognition: ‘As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.’ We do not separate our beliefs from ourselves – to some extent our beliefs define us. Accordingly, it is a major psychological imperative to protect this idea of who we are, and our relationships with those who share the same ideas and world-views as us. We find it immensely difficult to differentiate our ideas from our sense of self – and too often, this condemns us to clutch at wrong-headed positions with dogmatic zeal, unwilling to countenance alternatives lest they threaten our very identity.

we need to be able to evaluate the available information critically without the distorting lens of ideology colouring our perception. While we may hold incredibly strong personal convictions, reality doesn’t care one iota for what we believe. And if we persist in choosing ideology over evidence, we endanger ourselves and others.

Conformity of memory is one such phenomenon, where an individual’s report of a memory influences the recall of another.

The psychological rationale for this is apophenia, or the perception of patterns in random data.

Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon of perceiving a known pattern in a stimulus when none in fact exists. As innately social creatures, we’re predisposed to seeing faces and figures.

There is a crucial point to all this. We tend to place a heavy emphasis on our personal experience, often to the exclusion of other possibilities. Yet the stark reality is that neither our memories nor our perceptions are always trustworthy. Even with the best of intentions, we are unreliable narrators of our own experiences. As we’ve seen previously, we place great stock in personal stories – but though we may have no intention to mislead, the reality of flawed perceptions means we must rule out alternative explanations first. The truth is that no one’s account is immune to subversion by the influence of the world around us – including our own.

Forer effect, the observation that people tend to give high ratings for personality descriptions they believe are specific to them, even though they are sufficiently vague to apply to a great multitude of people. These kinds of open-ended statements are known as Barnum statements, after the legendary circus promoter and hoaxer P. T. Barnum.40

Perhaps the most pervasive example is the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test beloved by many institutions. This purports to measure psychological styles in how people make decisions and is used to measure aptitude for jobs, personal training and even marriage counselling. But despite the enthusiasm with which MBTI has long been deployed, studies to date indicate that it has very poor validity and fails to measure what it claims to. Were this not enough, it has low reproducibility, and the same subject can yield radically different personality results even a few days apart. Much of the criticism of these tests has focused on the vague nature of the testing questions, which lend themselves to the Forer bias of assigning a high rating to positive descriptions. The defects of this test prompted psychometric specialist Robert Hogan to opine that ‘most personality psychologists regard the MBTI as little more than an elaborate Chinese fortune cookie’.

The placebo effect may underpin some perceived benefit from a host of inactive treatments. But can the effect occur in reverse? Could one be convinced that a given intervention is harmful, even if it is completely benign? The answer is yes – if one is sufficiently swayed to believe that something is detrimental, then by the same psychological mechanism one is inclined to display negative reactions to the inert agent. This inverted cousin of placebo is known as the nocebo effect, and it is arguably even more potent.

In a wonderfully titled 1999 paper, ‘Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognising One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments’, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger observed how those with low ability or expertise in a given subject mistakenly assess their cognitive ability or knowledge as vastly greater than it actually is.

Dunning-Kruger effect

Bertrand Russell’s dictum that ‘the fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt’. This is perhaps a substantial reason why absolutists and fundamentalists of every ilk hold disproportionate sway over public perception. In reality, total objectivity is an ideal that we seldom reach. Our expectations invariably shape perceptions and reactions. Our affinity for fortunetellers and horoscopes is a product of our need for validation, and the mere suggestion of an effect – whether positive or ill – is often in itself enough to prompt a visceral reaction.

Of course, we live in the age of data, and numbers have a tangible effect on our perceptions. We’re bombarded daily by numbers, statistics and trends from which we are supposed to make sense of the world. While this is vital to our well-being, we are collectively rather numerophobic, and sometimes even seemingly obvious trends hide trapdoors that confound us. Just how important is this influence, and how can it drive us towards dangerously error-strewn conclusions? That is a complex but important question – and one we will tackle in the next few chapters.

The mantra that ‘correlation does not imply causation’ must not be forgotten.

This was felt by the local administration to be too distasteful for the public to comprehend, demonstrating the long-standing and depressingly consistent habit of politicians through the ages to care more about public opinion than good evidence, often to the detriment of that very public.

A result is deemed statistically significant when it is considered unlikely to have arisen by chance, implying that the result is a real one.

In 2005, John Ioannidis published the provocatively titled paper ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’, which drew some arresting conclusions. In medical fields, many significant results are simply artefacts of poor trial design, underpowered studies, or groups with too few participants to draw meaningful conclusions. In his work, Ioannidis outlined six indicators that should be remembered when evaluating the veracity of any claim: 1. The smaller the studies conducted in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. If the sample is small, the chances of the group being representative is lower and the rate of false positives increases. This is precisely the kind of studies that advocates of naturopathy cling to, with small sample groups and poor-quality construction. 2. The smaller the effect sizes in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Correlation itself is important, but effect size matters too. Effect size is a measure of how strong the phenomenon is, useful for determining whether the observed relationship is mere chance or something more substantial. If the effect size is tiny, effects may be nothing more than chance. 3. The greater the number and the lesser the selection of tested relationships in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Simply put, if an experiment generates lots of possible relationships, then by chance alone some of these might be false po...

false balance. This occurs when one tries to treat two opposing positions as equally supported by evidence, when they are not. It frequently transpires when a shared trait between two subjects is wrongly taken to imply equivalence.

False balance arises when one attempts to present opposing views as being more equal than the evidence allows. However, if the evidence for a position is virtually incontrovertible, it is profoundly mistaken to treat a conflicting view as equally legitimate and worthy of consideration.

This exploitation of false balance is the archetypal example of a manufactured controversy, a contrived disagreement to create uncertainty over issues where there is no real scientific dispute.

Ideas that are not testable are not science and those that fail to withstand the trials of investigation should be dismissed. But with pseudoscience, believers often resort to special pleading and anecdote to explain away the weaknesses and failures of their convictions. Faith certainly plays a role.

But, while picking apart science from non-science is not an easy task, there are some vital things we can consider when confronted with anything purporting to be science. A non-exhaustive list might include: • Quality of evidence: Scientific claims are underpinned by supporting data and clear description of the methodology used. If, however, a claim relies largely on anecdote and testimonial, it should be considered suspect. • Authority: Scientific claims don’t derive their authority by virtue of coming from scientists. A scientific claim’s acceptance stems from the weight of the evidence behind it. By contrast, pseudoscientific claims often focus around ostensible experts or gurus rather than evidence. • Logic: If an argument is presented, every link in the chain must connect, not just a few. Non sequiturs suggest dubious conclusions. Overly reductive claims that suggest single causes or cures for complex situations or conditions should also be treated sceptically. • Testable claims: Falsifiability is paramount to gauging the validity of a claim. If it cannot be proven wrong, then it is not scientific. Similarly, science pivots on reproducibility. That which cannot be verified by independent investigation is likely to be pseudoscience. • Totality of evidence: The hypothesis must consider all the evidence and not just cherry-pick only collaborating evidence. If the claim is consistent and compatible with all the evidence to date, then it is usually reasonabl...

way of analogy, Feynman coined the term cargo-cult science to describe phenomena that ape the theatre of science yet are completely insulated from the realities of the scientific method. He noted that meaningful science must be underpinned by ‘scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty – a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid – not only what you think is right about it.’

Nuclear energy in isolation is, of course, not a panacea. It has intrinsic complexity and waste must be carefully contained. Nevertheless, by any objective metric, it is clean, safe and hugely efficient.

If we are to survive and thrive, our opinions and beliefs must evolve with the facts. We can discuss and disagree on what the optimal solutions to our problems might be and how to achieve them, but we cannot get to that point if we insist on ignoring reality and substituting our own delusions instead. We are entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts. It would be bad enough were it only issues of science and health on which we are misled. But, as we have seen plenty of times already, dubious claims pollute political discourse, online and offline. Many of us dwell within the comfort of our echo chambers, seeking out sources that confirm rather than challenge our prejudices. As we become more starkly polarised than ever before, distinguishing fact from fiction is no easy undertaking. It’s enough to drive anyone to apathy and cynicism. But apathy is the enemy; under its spell, we are dangerously pliable.

To answer the difficult questions we’re faced with, we need to make use of the concept of scientific scepticism. At its core, this means asking the relevant questions to determine whether what we’re presented with is reasonable or not. The word ‘scepticism’ itself stems from the Greek skeptomai – to consider carefully. Philosopher Paul Kurtz defined a sceptic as ‘one who is willing to question any claim to truth, asking for clarity in definition, consistency in logic and adequacy of evidence. The use of scepticism is thus an essential part of objective scientific inquiry and the search for reliable knowledge.’

Scepticism is implicit in the scientific method, the very lens we use to interrogate the universe. But it’s every bit as fundamental to our political and societal health too. Without it, we cannot hope to question the assertions of those in power or those seeking power. If we do not know to ask for evidence or what constitutes reliable information, we are powerless against the whims of the demagogues, dictators and charlatans who would seek to exploit us. Without healthy scepticism, we are malleable to manipulation, weaponised to dire ends. Bereft of the protection against fanaticism that analytical thought brings, we are vulnerable to those who would deceive us. Our history is littered with reminders of just how terrible the consequences of this can be.

• Reasoning: Do the premises lead to the conclusion presented or is something askew in the reasoning? To be valid, every link in the chain of argument must connect seamlessly to the others. A lurking non sequitur suggests something amiss. Similarly, if following the argument through to its logical conclusions yields contradictions or absurdity, it’s a warning to be cautious. The premises themselves are vital too; are they reasonable and well supported or do they disintegrate under interrogation? If the premises wither in the light of enquiry, the conclusion that stems from them can usually be dismissed. • Rhetoric: What kind of argument is being made? Authority alone is no substitute for evidence; if an authority is cited, it must provide evidence for the claims made. Narratives that reduce complex situations down to a simple cause ought to be considered with caution, as should those that force a complicated spectrum of views into an artificial binary. Attempts to misrepresent the position of others should be dismissed out of hand. The onus to prove a claim is always on the one asserting it, and approaches that rely solely on denigrating or smearing an opponent prove nothing. • Human factors: What biases might be at play in different accounts? None of us is immune to instances of motivated reasoning or confirmation bias. Determining whether a position is reasoned or ideologically driven is imperative. Is the argument put forward based on cherry-picked information to...

This is a useful set of questions to ask when confronted with a new idea. The most important ideas we critique, however, are our own. To think like scientists, we must be willing to be guided by evidence and reason, to admit when we’re wrong and rectify it. This means accepting that all conclusions and positions are provisional, and subject to change in the light of new information. This isn’t easy for us – as we’ve seen, we are deeply attached to our beliefs, to the point where we often interpret a challenge to them as an attack on ourselves. But this is a flaw we must strive to confront.

The first step to combatting this starts with us. Our sense of identity is so entangled with our values and convictions that we can overlook something vital: we are not our ideas. We are not defined by beliefs, but by our ability to think. To be human is to err, blessed with the capacity to correct ourselves. There is no shame in being wrong, only in refusing to rectify our mistakes. We must be willing to adapt in the face of new information, to jettison wrong-headed beliefs when required, and to embrace truth even when unpleasant.