The following is an op-ed originally published in the Los Angeles Times, Tuesday January 11, 2011 (under a different title and slightly shorter).

The media once again scrambled this past week to find the deep underlying causes of shocking events. We saw it in the rush to explain the tragic murder of six people in a shopping center in Tucson. And we saw it in the rush of stories about mass die offs of birds and fish around the country.

In the case of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at a shopping center in Tucson, attention has turned to the motives of the shooter, 22-year old Jared Loughner, whose political ramblings about returning to the gold standard and about excessive control by the government have sent the media searching for answers in the vitriol of right-wing talk radio, the rhetoric of the Tea Party movement, and the bellicose divide between Democrats and Republicans in Congress and elsewhere.

The mass die offs of fish and birds has spurred a number of deep causal theories, including suggestions that the apocalypse is near and that secret government experiments were to blame, such as HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Alaska that studies the ionosophere that is run by DARPA, the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which admittedly does sound like something concocted by the writers for the television series X-Files.

We live in a causal universe, so all effects do have causes, but before we turn to grand overarching causal theories such as political rhetoric or government experiments, we must always remember the clustering effect of randomness and how our brains tend to look for and find deeper meaningful patterns even where none exist. Toss a handful of pennies into the air and you will notice that they do not land randomly on the ground. They cluster into apparently nonrandom patterns in which some are closer and others are farther apart. There is nothing inherently hidden in such a clustering effect—no concealed forces under the ground causes the pennies to fall as they do. It’s just chance. But our brains abhor randomness and always seek meaning.

The National Institutes of Mental Health estimates that about 1% of the population suffers from schizophrenia, and that more than 25% of us have some kind of diagnosable mental disorder. As well, psychologists estimate that 1–3 percent of the U.S. population suffers from psychopathy, or the inability to feel empathy and an almost complete lack of moral conduct. Using the conservative figure of 1% and a U.S. population of 300 million people, this means that some 3 million people with either psychosis or psychopathy are walking among us, as well as tens of millions more whose mental health is askew in some way. And many of those who need it aren’t receiving treatment. Given these statistics, events such as the shooting in Tucson are bound to happen, no matter how nicely politicians talk to one another on the campaign trail or in Congress, no matter how extreme Tea Party slogans are about killing government programs, and no matter how stiff or loose gun controls laws are in this or that state. By chance—and nothing more—there will always be people such as Jared Loughner who do the unthinkable.

According to Audubon Society biologist Melanie Driscoll, about 5 billion birds die each year in the United States from a variety of causes. Because of the clustering effect of randomness it is inevitable that some of those billions of birds will die in apparent nonrandom clusters. The 5,000 red-winged blackbirds that died in Arkansas, for example, looks like an ominous cluster when scattered about the ground, but there are over 200 million red-winged blackbirds in the U.S., and according to Driscoll they fly in flocks of 100,000 to 2 million. Although 5,000 birds falling dead out of the sky sounds positively apocalyptic, it represents a scant 0.0025% of the total population.

Of course there are specific causes for specific events. We will, in time, learn of the particular personal and social conditions behind Jared Loughner’s heinous act. And biologists are already identifying the causes of each fish and bird die off. The Arkansas blackbirds, for example, died during a New Year’s eve fireworks display, which may have been a contributing factor. Biologist Driscoll notes that “they cannot see well in the dark and we know they were seen crashing into buildings and cars and poles. Necropsies show blunt force trauma to brain and breast.” Others died near power lines that are thin and hard to see at night. The American Bird Conservancy notes that of the 5 billion annual bird deaths, about 1 billion birds are killed each year in collisions with buildings, communication towers, windmills, and other human-made structures. We just never hear about them unless such deaths happen in clusters and are reported in the media, thereby triggering a type of mass hysteria that leads to conspiratorial thinking and what I call patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.

Patternicity is what our brains do. We can’t help it. We see those clusters of events and naturally seek out deep causal meaning in some grand overarching theory. But as often as not events in life turn on chance, randomness, and statistical probabilities that are largely beyond our control. So calls for “an end to all overt and implied appeals to violence in American politics”—such as that just issued by MoveOn.org—may make us feel better but they will do nothing to alter the inevitability of such one-off events in the future.

In 2009, after speaking at a conference in Santiago on the occasion of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday celebration, I had the opportunity to visit the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile. My host was Professor Massimo Tarenghi, who orchestrated the design, construction, first light, and full operation of the VLT (Very Large Telescope), which houses four 8.2 meter telescopes and four smaller meter-size telescopes, plus the architectural-award winning hotel, restaurant, and living quarters for the astronomers, staff, and guests, featured in the latest James Bond film, Quantum of Solace. After my appointed rounds in Santiago, Massimo and I flew two hours north to the dusty coastal town of Antofagasta, then drove two hours inland through the Atacama desert, one of the driest places on Earth, turning off the main (actually only) highway cutting north-south through this narrow strip of a country and onto the road that snakes up the mountain to this stunning cluster of buildings and domes. The long drive to and from Paranal gave us ample opportunity for reflective conversation.

When Massimo was fourteen he had a thriving stamp collection for which he was so dedicated that his grades collapsed, so his mom put the collection away and gave Massimo a book to read and told him it was time to get serious about learning. The book was on astronomy and he’s never looked back, coursing through his education at the University of Milan with a doctoral degree in theoretical astrophysics, completing his dissertation on gamma radiation from the core of the Milky Way galaxy. He then moved to Arizona where he participated in the first attempts to map the large-scale distribution of galaxies throughout the universe—those spidery/soap bubbly models of galaxy distribution you’ve seen on countless science shows. Massimo then returned to Europe to co-found the European Organization for Astronomy in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO) and began scouting for a location high enough and dry enough to look at the heavens.

Astronomers need height to get above atmospheric interference from wind, dust, smog, and pollutants, and especially water vapor, but it interferes with millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum. This is important because half the stars in galaxies are hidden behind intergalactic dust that makes them invisible to optical telescopes, all but blinding us to half the universe, plus organic molecules such as carbon and sugar are only detectable in the submillimeter wavelength, and it is here where the origins of life in space may occur. Enter Chile and the Atacama desert, the highest desert in the world where humidity hovers around 5% and it never rains. This place is truly in the middle of nowhere. It looks exactly like Mars, except it has a blue sky and a paved road. (Just Google Earth “Paranal Observatory” and you’ll see what I mean…or watch Quantum of Solace.)

How technologically sophisticated are these telescopes? The astronomers are not even allowed in the domes at night! These telescopes are so technically complicated that they are run by engineers trained to do nothing else. (Analogy: observing a solar eclipse from a Boeing 747 does not qualify you to fly a 747.) These telescopes are at least as complicated as a jumbo jet, with hundreds of computers that micro-adjust the mirrors and coordinate one, two, three, or even all four of the 8.2-meter telescopes at once. How big are these mirrors? The Hooker telescope at Mt. Wilson where Edwin Hubble discovered that the Milky Way galaxy is just one of billions of galaxies that are all expanding away from one another from a Big Bang origin is 100 inches in diameter. Each of the VLT mirrors are 8.2 meters, or 322.8 inches, over three times the size of the Hooker (increasing the resolution power of each one by orders of magnitude over what Hubble could see), and there’s four of them!

The photographs taken by these monsters are Saganesque in cosmic stir-worthiness. There are no eyepieces on these telescopes—the photons of light collected by the mirrors are focused on and collected by spectroscopes, CCD cameras, and other devices for analyzing the data that is then downloaded onto computers and reviewed by the astronomers in the warmth of a heated control room adjacent to the domes. But if they did put an eyepiece on one of these telescopes, and you pointed it at the moon where Apollo 11 landed 40 years ago, just before you were blinded by the light you would be able to see the bottom of the lunar landing module. Now that’s a telescope!

Since the man who organized, designed, implemented, and built this staggeringly marvelous monument to human reason, logic, and ingenuity was sitting next to me in the car during our hours of isolation traversing this Martian-like landscape, given my propensity to ask anyone and everyone the Big Questions in Life our conversation soon turned to matters theological. Before I knew it Professor Massimo Tarenghi—the very embodiment of a scientifically-savvy, rationally-calculating, steely-eyed logician—was telling me that he believes in God. And not just the gossamer-fleeting pantheist-like god of Einstein and Spinoza found in the wonders of the workings of nature, but Yahweh, the God of Abraham, and his son Jesus, who was, mysteriously, fully God and fully human, whom Professor Tarenghi believes came to earth to atone for our sins, was crucified and resurrected, and will one day return. Why would a man so solidly grounded in the material world of math, science, engineering, and technology also believe in something that is seemingly the very antithesis of scientism? Given his profession Massimo’s initial answer did not surprise me: as a professional astronomer he has been continually struck by the remarkable beauty and magnificent grandeur of the cosmos that, he confessed, both his reason and his intuition tell him could not have come about through natural forces alone. It was Immanuel Kant’s “starry heaves above” argument, which for Massimo consists primarily in the origins of the universe and the finely tuned properties of the laws of nature that give rise to stars, planets, life, and intelligence. (The Kant quote is inscribed on his tomb and comes from his section on The Moral Law in his 1788 book Critique of Practical Reason:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not merely conjecture them and seek them as though obscured in darkness or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon: I see them before me, and I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence.

Since we had got on so well to this point I thought it not too impertinent to counter with the multiverse argument, noting that perhaps our bubble universe is just one among a near infinite number of bubble universes all with varying laws of nature, and thus by chance and the law of large numbers some will have properties that give rise to stars, planets, life and even intelligence. (Interestingly, Massimo is convinced that virtually every star we will be studying with the upcoming space-based and ground-based telescopes will have planets, and thus there is very likely intelligent life elsewhere in our galaxy; however, contrary to many of his fellow religionists, he does not believe that this will pose a threat to traditional theology or religion.) But Massimo was quick on the draw to gun down my riposte as pure speculation, barely distinguishable from his own assumption that a God outside of our space-time created our universe and the laws that gave rise to us.

Round and round we went until we arrived back to where we began (which is how most such debates go), with the conversation ending as all such conversations should, with two friends finding mutual respect for differing positions, agreeing to disagree because life is too short for anything less than an amicable dénouement. Oh, and by the way, at some point during our drive—probably when I asked him—Massimo mentioned that he was raised Catholic and is still a devout Catholic. Um.

In the tradition of making end-of-the-year lists of the “Top 10 X” I present my personal picks for the Top 10 Science Books of 2010. Most of these books are available in audio format as well as the old-school ink-on-bound-paper format, and I highly recommend Audible.com as the go-to source for easy listening to these selections while driving or riding your bike from your MP3 player or iPhone/iPod (use one ear bud instead of two so you can hear on-coming traffic, ambulances, etc.).

In reverse order I give you my Top 10 Science Books of 2010:

10Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

Oreskes and Conway tell an important story about the misuse of science to mislead the public on matters ranging from the risks of smoking to the reality of global warming. The people the authors accuse are themselves scientists—mostly physicists, former cold warriors who now serve a conservative agenda, and vested interests like the tobacco industry. And they name names, documenting their involvement in such issues as acid rain, the dangers of smoking and secondhand smoke, the ozone hole, global warming, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the banning of DDT. These scientists aimed to sow seeds of public doubt on matters of settled science by casting aspersions on the science and the scientists who produce it. Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at U.C. San Diego and science writer Conway also emphasize how journalists and Internet bloggers uncritically repeat these charges.

Order the book from Amazon.com
Order the Conway lecture from Skeptic.com

click to enlarge photo

This past weekend, December 17–19, 2010, I joined paleontologists Donald Prothero from Occidental College and John Long from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County on a fossil hunting, rock hopping, geology viewing, petroglyph scanning excursion through the Mojave Desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Through the entire trip I kept thinking “I wish the creationists and Intelligent Design theorists would try their hand at some actual field work because then they would see (and hear and smell and especially touch) what nature is really like and what the history of life reveals in the rocks, instead of sitting in an air-conditioned or heated office in some think tank building or school of theology department, trolling through published papers by real scientists who do this field work, trying to find some little gap that must be filled by the creating designer.

At this site (see photograph above), for example—a trilobite bed east of Amboy near Cadiz smack dab in the middle of nowhere (see what I mean on Google Maps)—we sat for hours with our hammers and collecting bags sifting through thousands upon thousands of shale pieces looking for that fossil gem, and finding a few here and there. These are 550 million year old creatures who once roamed through shallow seas but are now swimming in stone (in the elegant phrase of John Long, whose book by this title is a magnificent testimony to the power and beauty of paleontology). There is simply no denying evolution when you see it raw in the rocks (see especially Don Prothero’s book on proving evolution through the fossil record.

We also visited the coolest slot canyon I’ve ever seen, north of Las Vegas, off of Highway 168 (between Highway 93 and Interstate 15), down this miles-long dirt road that required four-wheel drive. This is Arrow Canyon, and the slot cut exposes a kilometer-thick Carboniferous to lower Permian succession, the upper part of a much thicker Paleozoic section ranging back to the Cambrian. The outcrop is nearly 100% exposed due to the arid conditions and sparse desert vegetation, enabling documentation of facies cyclicity and allowing beds to be traced laterally for hundreds of meters. (If you like it when I talk dirty this way I’m afraid that the credit goes to Don Prothero, whom I am quoting in this last sentence from his field guide for this trip!)

Check out the photo of our expedition group in the slot canyon, along with the photo of the tilted geological beds. There is simply no way that this slot canyon could have been cut through this hard rock in a flash (Noahian) flood, nor could these beds be laid down from ancient seas, compacted under extreme pressure and heat into layered beds, and then uplifted by slow geological forces into what we see today, all in only a few years of biblical times.

In the slot canyon, by the way, there were petroglyphs. Sadly, as you will see, some pinheads managed to find the canyon and decided to leave their mark on or around these ancient pictograms, thereby ruining them forever:

click the photo above to see both petroglyph images in this gallery

I did find something for the creationists to crow about. Check out the photograph (below) of a very ancient rock formation on the hike into that slot canyon. Here, embedded solidly on that rock, is a clear and unmistakable footprint with a clear demarcated heal! (I estimate about a men’s size 13.)

click to enlarge image

So there you go creationists, get in your four-wheel drive and head for Arrow Canyon, find that rock (it’s on the right side going into the canyon, about half way to the petroglyphs), photograph it, write up a paper about it, then submit it to the Journal of Young Earth Creationism. Alternatively, if Erich Von Daniken happens to be reading this, you can do the same thing but claim that it is evidence for alien visitation hundreds of millions of years ago. I think it was a Bruno Magli shoe. Adam (or Alien) had expensive taste.

If you are interested in geology tours, you won’t want to miss the Skeptics Society’s 7-day Alaskan Glacier Cruise. If you can’t make it to that tour, sign up to receive advance notification of future tours.

On Tuesday, December 7, I walked through and around Dealey Plaza in Dallas where JFK was assassinated by a lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO). Or was he? A lone assassin, that is? Yes, he was, but that is not what anyone giving informal tours of the plaza will have you believe if you give them a few minutes (and a few bucks).

I was in town filming a documentary for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The subject was conspiracy theories, so it was with some irony that we happened to be filming on December 7 because there are many conspiracy theories surrounding that date as well, a date that will live in infamy, as Franklin Roosevelt so crowned that fateful day in 1941, because he supposedly either helped orchestrate the attack on Pearl Harbor or else he knew about the attack and allowed it to happen in order to galvanize the American public into supporting England against the Nazis and getting the United States into the war.

There is no more to the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory than there is that President Bush helped orchestrate 9/11 or knew about the pending attack and allowed it to happen in order to unite the American public into supporting his wars of aggression in the Middle East. Nevertheless, there is something particularly appealing to conspiracy theorists when they describe “what really happened” in their alternative universe of events. You can see it in their eyes when they begin to talk about what “they” want or don’t want you to know about said event.

This was certainly the case for me when I interviewed several conspiracy theorists hanging around Dealey Plaza that day. Their eye light up and they grow ever more animated (and even agitated) as their story grows in complexity about all the different people, elements, and events that almost miraculously (it would be a miracle in most re-tellings) came together to assassinate JFK. One fellow had so many people involved in the assassination that they would have needed a small sports arena to meet to plan out the day. This improbability seems to bother conspiracy theorists not one tiny bit, as they spin out their narratives, drawing you down their causal pathway that resulted in the end of Camelot.

The most striking thing about being in Dealey Plaza for me was how small it is. Perhaps because the assassination itself was bigger than life we expect the geography to match the eventuality, but that is certainly not the case here. Two X’s on the street mark where JFK was hit: first in the throat causing his arms to move up and splay out, and second where the bullet found its cranial mark and literally blew his brains out (and, according to one conspiricist there, sent the skull cap flying across the street and onto the adjacent lawn). What is astounding is how close both X’s are to the sniper’s nest in the Book Depository building. Both from the street level looking up and from the window looking down (there is a museum on the sixth floor from which you can gain the perspective of the assassin), it seems clear that Oswald could hardly have missed. Given the fact that he was designated a sharpshooter by the Marines during his time in the service, and the fact that Kennedy’s car was traveling less than 10 miles per hour after making the sharp left turn onto Elm street, one is left whispering under one’s breath, “Kennedy was a sitting duck.”

Look at the two photographs (at the top of this post), each taken from one of the X’s on the street (I tried to snap a pic from the sniper’s nest, but this must be a problem for the museum because in addition to “No Photography” signs there is a guard standing there the entire time). The window from which Oswald fired is the square window on the far right of the building, second from the top.

Is it really necessary to invent additional assassins when it is obvious that one could have done the job? No. LHO acted alone in killing JFK. QED.