Though people might disagree on how to solve a problem, they can at least agree that the problem exists. Or can they? A new study finds that deeply held beliefs can undermine rationality: When confronted with solutions that challenge deeply held values, people may be inclined to disbelieve the problem.
Psychologists tested hundreds of American adults on their beliefs about climate change and violent crime after proposing solutions involving, respectively, government regulations and gun ownership. Spooked by legally mandated fossil fuel restrictions, conservatives were less likely to accept the best scientific estimates on global temperature changes. Conversely, after being told that looser gun control laws reduced violent crime, liberals were less likely to believe that crime is a problem.
Solution aversion, as the researchers call it, seems to know no partisan bounds. “In any issue where people’s cherished beliefs and identities are in play, you’re probably going to see some amount of solution aversion,” said Troy Campbell, a consumer behavior researcher at Duke University’s business school. “We alter our view of reality to be as flattering as possible.”
The field’s origins lay not in political thinking, but personal—for example, the tendency of people to accept or challenge medical diagnoses. But the political implications are seductive, particularly regarding the conundrum of human-caused climate change, an issue on which the essential details are uncontested among scientists but remain a matter of partisan divide among the public.
In the first of several experiments, they asked 72 men and 117 women, equally split between self-identified Democrats and Republicans, whether they agreed with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s assessment that human-induced climate change would raise Earth’s temperature by 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit during the 21st century. As expected, there was a strong party-line divide; and among Republicans, the strength of disbelief tracked with expectations that fixing the problem would cause economic harm.
Republicans who thought preventing climate change would be an inconvenience were more likely to accept that warming would occur, but just by a couple degrees. If they expected the solution to result in economic catastrophe, they’d be more likely to say Earth wouldn’t warm at all.
In the next of their experiments, Kay and Campbell asked a different group of 121 adults to read one of two passages describing possible responses to climate change: one a free-market approach that emphasized the economic boon of green technologies, the other a regulatory proscription of energy cuts.
Proportion of Democrats (left) and Republicans (right) who agreed with the scientific consensus on climate change after reading about a free-market solution (light shading) or government regulation (dark shading). Campbell and Kay/Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Democrats were slightly less likely to accept climate change after reading about the free-market solution. Among Republicans, however, the aversion was much more pronounced: whereas after reading about regulations just 22 percent said Earth’s temperatures would rise by at least 3 degrees, that number leaped to 55 percent after reading about free markets.
The findings support the idea “that Republicans’ skepticism toward climate change science is linked to beliefs about the policy solutions,” wrote Kay and Campbell. But conservatives don’t have a monopoly on solution aversion. In their next experiment, the researchers changed topics, to gun control and crime. When test participants who favored tight gun control laws, a politically liberal stance, read that expanded gun access reduced violent home invasions, they suddenly became less likely to think invasions were a widespread problem.
“This is a general phenomenon, and liberals do it, too,” said psychologist Peter Ditto of University of California, Irvine, an expert in motivated reasoning who was not involved in the new study. “What we’ve got is this contest of moral visions that has become a factual fight because of this tendency of people to change their factual beliefs to fit their moral inclinations,” said Ditto of America’s political landscape. One of Ditto’s own studies involved capital punishment: reading about its inherent morality or immorality affected what people thought about its costs.
Campbell and Kay say solution aversion complements two existing, non-exclusive explanations of motivated reasoning. The first, called system justification theory, describes how people want to believe, and subconsciously try to convince themselves, that existing social systems are essentially good. The other, moral coherence, is a subset of what’s known as cognitive coherence theory: we want our beliefs to fit nicely together.
'If you don't want the solution to happen, then you deny that the problem exists.'
“If you feel really negatively about the solution, if you don’t want the solution to happen, then you deny that the problem exists,” said Campbell. “Then there will be coherence in your belief systems.”
Caveats do apply. The new findings involve just one set of experiments, as yet unreplicated, involving people answering online questionnaires rather than questions in real-life situations. And Campbell stressed that, even if solution aversion does exist, it’s not going to provide an all-encompassing explanation for factual disagreements.
Neither is solution aversion deterministic, Campbell says. Rather, it’s one influence among many, a gentle—or maybe not-so-gentle when an issue bears directly on foundational beliefs and identities—push on the gears of cognition.
If the findings seem pessimistic, predicting that facts are often dictated by belief and reason clouded in self-serving ways, they also suggest ways of mitigating solution aversion, said Campbell. Problems might be framed with aversion in mind: regarding climate change, a liberal might emphasize those free-market solutions. Of course, if people feel they’re being manipulated, that could backfire; a more durable strategy, if also a more difficult one, involves making open-mindedness a personal and social virtue.
“It’s important to some people to second-guess themselves. It’s important to who they are,” Campbell said. New York Times column by David Brooks the same point when he wrote about what he called the “mental virtues” of a willingness to challenge oneself, to be humble about one’s own understanding and open to the knowledge of others.
If that’s not always easy, and if we can’t always avoid solution aversion, said Ditto, we can at least be more self-aware. “People can recognize the bias and try to work with it,” he said. “What you see in politics now is this massive lack of self-awareness.”
Air pollutants will likely become increasingly dangerous as temperatures continue to rise. (Image: Flickr/Senor Codo)
The dangers of a warming climate are frequently presented through an economic or an existential lens, either as a financial gamble whose costs may ultimately outweigh the short-term benefits, or a foreboding reflection of our unwise proclivity toward planetary engineering. But to Howard Frumkin, Dean and Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington, it’s a lot more concrete than all that: climate change, he believes, is “the biggest health challenge in the coming century.”
In addition to anticipated death tolls from more frequent and more intense severe weather events, many chronic issues are coming to the fore. Air pollutants – most notably lung-busting ozone and particulates – increase with heightened temperatures. Ozone forms from nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons through atmospheric chemical reactions that speed up with heat, while particulates nucleate around liquid droplets and can penetrate deeply into the lungs. Both pollutants can cause problematic respiratory responses, and as Frumkin notes, “in the aggregate, the air quality in some areas rivals what you’d see being downwind from a big wildfire.”
Rapid warming impinges on the biosphere in complicated ways, and while the Anthropocene may well be causing the sixth extinction, it also is opening up new habitats to some species and altering the growth patterns of others. More abundant allergens were “something that nobody really expected,” says Frumkin, but pollen-generating plants like ragweed tend to do well in warmer, higher-CO2 conditions. Poison ivy also appears to be spreading, and its toxin becoming more virulent. Frumkin points to a somewhat paradoxical finding that even as plant growth increases with more carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere, the nutritional value of the resulting primary production is lowered. Flooded with carbon, crops can become deficient in other elements, resulting in a 10-20% decrease in protein levels and anemic iron and zinc concentrations.
Shifting biomes alter the ranges of infectious diseases. Tropical diseases are, after all, linked with warm, humid regions of the globe, and as such climate regimes spread toward higher latitudes, so too will associated vector-borne diseases like malaria, West Nile virus, or Chikungunya. (Some equatorial regions may experience more drought, which, though linked with its own set of challenges, would curtail mosquito growth and minimize tropical disease breeding grounds.)
Less reported but equally real, mental health could suffer for a number of direct and indirect reasons. Anxiety, depression, and PTSD can haunt victims of severe weather events for years: studies found that hundreds of thousands of people experienced such problems for years after hurricane Katrina. “In the aggregate,” explains Frumkin, “these mental health aspects can eclipse the acute injuries and fatalities” linked to extreme weather events. There also seem to be correlations between temperature and behavioral issues like impulse control or psychotropic medication side effects. Violence tends to spike with heat waves, and deaths linked to psychotropic drugs increase as body temperature regulation is short-circuited.
Despite the litany of dangers, Frumkin somehow manages to maintain glass-half-full optimism. “There’s a very good story here of co-benefits,” he explains. “The things that we have to do to tackle climate change and improve health go together, and don’t mean adopting miserable, deprived lifestyles at all.” For example, eating less meat minimizes a carbon-intensive form of food production and lowers risks associated with a high-meat diet. Greening cities reduces urban heat island effects and emissions, but also reduces stress. “Climate change is both a threat and very much an opportunity,” Frumkin maintains; “life could be better in a lot of ways.”
On April 5, 2011, 41-year-old John Gass received a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. The letter informed Gass that his driver’s license had been revoked and that he should stop driving, effective immediately. The only problem was that, as a conscientious driver who had not received so much as a traffic violation in years, Gass had no idea why it had been sent.
After several frantic phone calls, followed up by a hearing with Registry officials, he learned the reason: his image had been automatically flagged by a facial-recognition algorithm designed to scan through a database of millions of state driver’s licenses looking for potential criminal false identities. The algorithm had determined that Gass looked sufficiently like another Massachusetts driver that foul play was likely involved—and the automated letter from the Registry of Motor Vehicles was the end result.
The RMV itself was unsympathetic, claiming that it was the accused individual’s “burden” to clear his or her name in the event of any mistakes, and arguing that the pros of protecting the public far outweighed the inconvenience to the wrongly targeted few.
John Gass is hardly alone in being a victim of algorithms gone awry. In 2007, a glitch in the California Department of Health Services’ new automated computer system terminated the benefits of thousands of low-income seniors and people with disabilities. Without their premiums paid, Medicare canceled those citizens’ health care coverage.
Where the previous system had notified people considered no longer eligible for benefits by sending them a letter through the mail, the replacement CalWIN software was designed to cut them off without notice, unless they manually logged in and prevented this from happening. As a result, a large number of those whose premiums were discontinued did not realize what had happened until they started receiving expensive medical bills through the mail. Even then, many lacked the necessary English skills to be able to navigate the online health care system to find out what had gone wrong.
Excerpted from The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems—and Create More
Similar faults have seen voters expunged from electoral rolls without notice, small businesses labeled as ineligible for government contracts, and individuals mistakenly identified as “deadbeat” parents. In a notable example of the latter, 56-year-old mechanic Walter Vollmer was incorrectly targeted by the Federal Parent Locator Service and issued a child-support bill for the sum of $206,000. Vollmer’s wife of 32 years became suicidal in the aftermath, believing that her husband had been leading a secret life for much of their marriage.
Equally alarming is the possibility that an algorithm may falsely profile an individual as a terrorist: a fate that befalls roughly 1,500 unlucky airline travelers each week. Those fingered in the past as the result of data-matching errors include former Army majors, a four-year-old boy, and an American Airlines pilot—who was detained 80 times over the course of a single year.
Many of these problems are the result of the new roles algorithms play in law enforcement. As slashed budgets lead to increased staff cuts, automated systems have moved from simple administrative tools to become primary decision-makers.
In a number of cases, the problem is about more than simply finding the right algorithm for the job, but about the problematic nature of believing that any and all tasks can be automated to begin with. Take the subject of using data-mining to uncover terrorist plots, for instance. With such attacks statistically rare and not conforming to well-defined profiles in the way that, for example, Amazon purchases do, individual travelers end up surrendering large amounts of personal privacy to data-mining algorithms, with little but false alarms to show for it. As renowned computer security expert Bruce Schneier has noted:
Finding terrorism plots . . . is a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and throwing more hay on the pile doesn’t make that problem any easier. We’d be far better off putting people in charge of investigating potential plots and letting them direct the computers, instead of putting the computers in charge and letting them decide who should be investigated.
While it is clear why such emotive subjects would be considered ripe for The Formula, the central problem once again comes down to the spectral promise of algorithmic objectivity. “We are all so scared of human bias and inconsistency,” says Danielle Citron, professor of law at the University of Maryland. “At the same time, we are overconfident about what it is that computers can do.”
The mistake, Citron suggests, is that we “trust algorithms, because we think of them as objective, whereas the reality is that humans craft those algorithms and can embed in them all sorts of biases and perspectives.” To put it another way, a computer algorithm might be unbiased in its execution, but, as noted, this does not mean that there is not bias encoded within it.
Implicit or explicit biases might be the work of one or two human programmers, or else come down to technological difficulties. For example, algorithms used in facial recognition technology have in the past shown higher identification rates for men than for women, and for individuals of non-white origin than for whites.
An algorithm might not target an African-American male for reasons of overt prejudice, but the fact that it is more likely to do this than it is to target a white female means that the end result is no different. Biases can also come in the abstract patterns hidden within a dataset’s chaos of correlations.
Consider the story of African-American Harvard University PhD Latanya Sweeney, for instance. Searching on Google one day, Sweeney was shocked to notice that her search results were accompanied by ads asking, “Have you ever been arrested?” These ads did not appear for her white colleagues. Sweeney began a study that ultimately demonstrated that the machine-learning tools behind Google’s search were being inadvertently racist, by linking names more commonly given to black people to ads relating to arrest records.
A similar revelation is the fact that Google Play’s recommender system suggests users who download Grindr, a location-based social-networking tool for gay men, also download a sex-offender location-tracking app. In both of these cases, are we to assume that the algorithm has made an error, or that they are revealing inbuilt prejudice on the part of their makers? Or, as is more likely, are they revealing distasteful large-scale cultural associations between—in the former case—black people and criminal behavior and—in the latter—homosexuality and predatory behavior?
Regardless of the reason, no matter how reprehensible these codified links might be, they demonstrate another part of algorithmic culture. A single human showing explicit bias can only ever affect a finite number of people. An algorithm, on the other hand, has the potential to impact the lives of exponentially more.
The unicorn, perhaps the most famous of legendary medieval beasts, here in the embrace of a maiden who's like "Oh looks like you've got a little boo-boo back here." Rochester Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
The unicorn, perhaps the most famous of legendary medieval beasts, here in the embrace of a maiden who's like "Oh looks like you've got a little boo-boo back here."
It was said that the crocodile, while a menace to humanity, has its own mortal enemy: the serpent. As the crocodile lazes on a shore with its mouth agape, the serpent crawls in, enters the stomach, and gnaws its way out. Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
It was said that the crocodile, while a menace to humanity, has its own mortal enemy: the serpent. As the crocodile lazes on a shore with its mouth agape, the serpent crawls in, enters the stomach, and gnaws its way out.
Pliny the Elder, on how to get your hands on a tiger cub: Snatch a bunch from a den, set off on a swift horse, and wait for the mother to approach, "upon which the hunter throws down one of the whelps; this she snatches up with her teeth" and returns to her lair. She'll set out again and again, "until the hunter has reached his vessel, while the animal vainly vents her fury upon the shore.” Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
Pliny the Elder, on how to get your hands on a tiger cub: Snatch a bunch from a den, set off on a swift horse, and wait for the mother to approach, "upon which the hunter throws down one of the whelps; this she snatches up with her teeth" and returns to her lair. She'll set out again and again, "until the hunter has reached his vessel, while the animal vainly vents her fury upon the shore.”
Zounds, the devilish salamander! Lore once claimed that the salamander is fireproof, and indeed born from flames. It is also highly poisonous, climbing into trees to muck up the fruits and falling into wells and thus tainting them. Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
Zounds, the devilish salamander! Lore once claimed that the salamander is fireproof, and indeed born from flames. It is also highly poisonous, climbing into trees to muck up the fruits and falling into wells and thus tainting them.
It may not look much like it, but that’s a beaver...chewing off its own testicles. For quite some time, this was a pervasive belief: When pursued for its valuable gonads, the beaver---knowing the aim of the hunter---chews them off and throws them at the guy. Turns out that in reality those little bumps aren’t testicles, they’re the castor glands. Funny story, though. Rochester Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
It may not look much like it, but that’s a beaver...chewing off its own testicles. For quite some time, this was a pervasive belief: When pursued for its valuable gonads, the beaver---knowing the aim of the hunter---chews them off and throws them at the guy. Turns out that in reality those little bumps aren’t testicles, they’re the castor glands. Funny story, though.
Baby pelicans supposedly get all uppity as they grow up and begin poking their parents in the face. The parents retaliate, naturally, killing their young. The mother then pecks at her own chest, spilling blood on the dead babies and reviving them. Unsurprisingly, in bestiaries this represented Christ’s crucifixion, and perhaps the authors' deep-seated familial psychoses. Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
Baby pelicans supposedly get all uppity as they grow up and begin poking their parents in the face. The parents retaliate, naturally, killing their young. The mother then pecks at her own chest, spilling blood on the dead babies and reviving them. Unsurprisingly, in bestiaries this represented Christ’s crucifixion, and perhaps the authors' deep-seated familial psychoses.
The elephant has a long history of being hilariously misunderstood. Here, it battles its mortal enemy, the dragon (likely based on a constrictor). As the dragon squeezes it to death, the elephant topples over, crushing its murderer. Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
The elephant has a long history of being hilariously misunderstood. Here, it battles its mortal enemy, the dragon (likely based on a constrictor). As the dragon squeezes it to death, the elephant topples over, crushing its murderer.
The notorious manticore. Says T. H. White: “It has a threefold row of teeth meeting alternately; the face of a man, with gleaming, blood-red eyes; a lion’s body; a tail like the sting of a scorpion, and a shrill voice which is so sibilant that it resembles the notes of flutes.” Like Jethro Tull, only with a bit less hair and sweat. Rochester Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
The notorious manticore. Says T. H. White: “It has a threefold row of teeth meeting alternately; the face of a man, with gleaming, blood-red eyes; a lion’s body; a tail like the sting of a scorpion, and a shrill voice which is so sibilant that it resembles the notes of flutes.” Like Jethro Tull, only with a bit less hair and sweat.
A doting bear with her cubs. So doting, in fact, that she must lick them into shape (indeed, it's the origin of the saying). The young are born quite hopeless, really just a lump of flesh without eyes, and their mother’s licks are what form them. Rochester Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
A doting bear with her cubs. So doting, in fact, that she must lick them into shape (indeed, it's the origin of the saying). The young are born quite hopeless, really just a lump of flesh without eyes, and their mother’s licks are what form them.
The caladrius, whose dung will for some reason cure you of eye trouble, according to the Physiologus, the mother of all bestiaries. It also moonlights as a soothsayer. If you're laid up with an illness, invite the caladrius in. If it looks away from you, you are fated to die. If you can be cured, it stares you straight in the eye, absorbing your sickness before flying into the sun, not unlike modern doctors. Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
The caladrius, whose dung will for some reason cure you of eye trouble, according to the Physiologus, the mother of all bestiaries. It also moonlights as a soothsayer. If you're laid up with an illness, invite the caladrius in. If it looks away from you, you are fated to die. If you can be cured, it stares you straight in the eye, absorbing your sickness before flying into the sun, not unlike modern doctors.
The crane at right holds a stone while others sleep. Explains St. Anthony of Padua: “They divide the night into watches, so that there may be a diligent care over all. Those that watch hold a weight in one of their claws, so that, if they happen to sleep, it falls on the ground and makes a noise,” thus waking everyone up. Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
The crane at right holds a stone while others sleep. Explains St. Anthony of Padua: “They divide the night into watches, so that there may be a diligent care over all. Those that watch hold a weight in one of their claws, so that, if they happen to sleep, it falls on the ground and makes a noise,” thus waking everyone up.
Unicorns may be magical, majestic, beautiful, etc., but they have a serious weakness: virgin women. Indeed, ancient lore says that using a maiden as bait is the only way to snag yourself one of these elusive beasts. When the unicorn falls asleep in her lap, you can capture it, or if you’re feeling particularly plucky, run it through with a spear.
That was far from mere fantasy back in the Middle Ages, though. The story was one of the more famous passages in what are known as bestiaries, gorgeous compendiums of creatures both real and imagined that sold like mad—second only to the Bible itself. While they were passed off as solid knowledge, bestiaries were almost always wildly wrong about the natural world. Nonetheless, these charming tomes were indispensable to the beginnings of modern science, helping lay the groundwork for the field of zoology as we know it.
Unicorn murder notwithstanding, bestiaries tended to hold a certain reverence for the natural world, ascribing the cleverness, not to mention vices, of humans to various animals. The beaver, for instance, was said to chew its own testicles off when pursued by hunters. And the asp could resist the snake charmer’s song by putting one ear against the ground and plugging the other with its tail.
Adorable little hedgehogs roll around on fruit to stick them to their quills. They’ll then store them in their den for the lean times. Rochester Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
Each creature usually was explained in just a few paragraphs, followed by an often lengthy moral tale to relate its biology or behavior to human beings. So in casting off its testicles and throwing them in the hunter’s face, the beaver thus relieves himself of vice and tosses it right back at the devil. By plugging its ears, the asp is unwisely resisting the word of Christ.
A few more examples of fantastical bestiary critters, which you can see in the gallery at top:
• To steal a tiger cub, a hunter must grab a bunch at once and make off on a swift horse. As their furious mother closes in on him, he drops a single cub, which the mother snatches up and takes back to her den. She thus returns to the hunter for one cub at a time, until he escapes on a ship, ideally with at least one left.
• The magical salamander was said to be fireproof as well as extremely poisonous, tainting wells and even fruit on trees. Indeed, when a salamander got into a river that Alexander the Great’s army drank from, 4,000 men and 2,000 horses supposedly grew sick and, no doubt weakened by the embarrassment of being bested by a salamander, keeled over.
• Crocodiles may be jerks, but they’re far from invincible. As they sun themselves on the shore, mouths agape, the serpent will crawl in and make its way into the crocodile’s guts, eventually bursting through the poor reptile.
For all of the popularity of bestiaries in the Middle Ages, strangely enough one wasn’t translated into English (most were written in Latin) until 1954: T. H. White’s seminal Book of Beasts. In it, White goes to lengths to emphasize that while bestiaries were wildly wrong nearly all of the time, they were in fact quite compassionate works, painting animals as creatures to be not only respected, but revered.
The fox was said to roll itself in red mud to appear blood-stained, then flop over on its back and hold its breath. The scavenging birds that come to investigate it are thus bamboozled (read: devoured). Rochester Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
Now, it’d be an understatement to say there was a bit of an illiteracy problem in the Middle Ages. Consequently, bestiaries featured incredibly vivid, lively illustrations that spelled out the behaviors of the various creatures. Above, for instance, is a fox, a “fraudulent and ingenious animal” that was said to play dead to attract and attack birds. A medieval illiterate peasant would have heard such a cautionary tale in church, for the devil metaphorically works in much the same way on humans. Thus was the bestiary a work of universal accessibility.
Such symbolism was so important in the Middle Ages, according to White, “that it did not matter whether certain animals existed”—the part man, part lion, part scorpion with probably some identity issues known as the manticore, for instance—but “what did matter was what they meant.” It was an era of intense faith that a higher power had created every creature with a meaning to be decoded by man, or in the case of plants, a clue that the species was meant to treat a certain organ. Known as the doctrine of signatures, this held that a walnut, for instance, could treat brain problems because it looks an awful lot like a brain itself.
The bestiaries can all trace their lineage to one masterwork: the Physiologus, whose anonymous author probably lived in Alexandria in the first few centuries AD. He or she dug deep into the animal lore of the ancients, combining thoughts of Aristotle, who was arguably the first true scientist (if you haven’t yet picked up Armand Marie Leroi’s fantastic new bookThe Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science, do so immediately), as well as Pliny the Elder, who in compiling an encyclopedia of all Roman knowledge was sure to include epically fantastical animal “facts,” I guess just in case they turned out to be true.
Not only is the asp exceedingly deadly to humans, it’s far from easy to charm. When snake charmers try to lure it out of its hiding place, the asp will press one ear against the ground and plug the other with its tail. White’s bestiary translation notes: “Apart from men, asps are the only other creatures which do such a thing, namely, refuse to listen.” Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
The Physiologus was a huge hit. It was translated into everything from Syriac to Latin to Icelandic, spreading all over Europe and the Middle East and Africa. And when a scribe got his hands on it, according to White there was no reason he “should not expand his copy with interpolations” from later authorities. Thus the bestiary “began to grow like a living tree.” Later authors grabbed older bestiaries and tacked on extra bits. They cut things here and there. In the words of White, the bestiary was “a kind of naturalist’s scrapbook, which has grown with the additions of several hands.”
This went on throughout the Middle Ages until the 16th century rolled around, and naturalists started growing suspicious of the bestiaries’ claims. Then came along British polymath Sir Thomas Browne, science’s most accomplished party pooper, whose work Vulgar Errors ripped the bestiary’s many bizarre claims to pieces. Elephants do indeed have knees, he assured his readers, and beavers aren’t anywhere close to being capable of chewing off their own testicles. And in busting these myths, according to White, Browne “began to raise the subject of biology to a scientific level for the first time since Aristotle.”
Generations of natural historians followed Browne, trusting not in the strange moral tales of their forebears, but in direct observation. And in 1859, the science of biology tallied what is arguably its ultimate triumph with Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species. Far from the fanciful speculations of the bestiaries, science could now explain not only the deep biology of animals, but how and why they got that way.
So today we find ourselves owing an unlikely debt to some of history’s most erroneous works. Plus, the next time you come across a unicorn, you’ll know exactly what to do.
Check yourself into rehab immediately.
Browse the full Fantastically Wrong archive here. Have a crazy theory or myth you want me to cover? Email matthew_simon@wired.com or ping me on Twitter at @mrMattSimon.
Rochester Bestiary/
