Flowchart of how 'beliefs' work in the brain
© Roger M Tagg 2015
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Robert Park is a Physics professor at the University of Maryland. He often gets called in by major US Media (TV, newspapers etc) to put the 'a scientist's view on claims by various people to have had supernatural or magical experiences, or who are selling 'miracle cures'.
In spite having been brought up as a Methodist in Texas, he does not have very much time for such ideas, and is very critical of the line taken by both religious leaders and the non-thinking general public.
As well as the normal 'highlight' quotes, I have included at the end a table of 'would be leaders of opinion' ranked as 'Wanting to Believe' (in various superstitions), 'Foot in Both Camps' (wanting both science and magic), and 'Heroes of Rational Thinking'.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| 1 - | 2 | The Templeton Prize for research into 'Spiritual Realities' is continually upped in value so that it is worth more than a Nobel Prize. It was worth $1.5 million in 1978. |
| Purpose | 3-4 | Park asks whether "Convergence of Science and Religion" is really happening - as Templeton would like - or are they actually diverging? |
| of the Universe | 4 | "... with the rise of religion-inspired terrorism and anti-science fundamentalism around the world, antipathy towards religion among scientists has hardened into direct confrontation." |
| "Most religious scientists consciously partition their lives, relying on scientific reasoning on one side of the partition and revelation on the other." | ||
| "On the religion side, since Scripture provides the answers, he (Charles Townes) ends up redefining words to make the two views of the universe appear to be coming together." | ||
| 4-5 | "His phrase the purpose of the universe is rather scary ... Once people convince themselves that they have been put on earth as instruments in some divine plan, there seems no limit to the horrors they are willing to commit to carry out that plan." | |
| 5 | "... scientists, however, generally find a purposeless existence to be wonderfully liberating ..." | |
| "... science basically involves faith" but, of the two definitions given in the Oxford English Dictionary, it does not mean "strong belief in a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof" (OED). | ||
| 6 | "The religious use of 'faith' implies belief in a higher power that makes things happen independent of a physical cause. This defines superstition." | |
| 9-10 | "The Anthropic Principle" is the line "that the universe has been fine-tuned to make life possible". | |
| 10 | "The fundamental parameters of the universe are such as to permit the creation of observers within it." (Polkinghorne) | |
| 11 | "If the universe was designed for life, it must be said that it is a shockingly inefficient design." | |
| "The only thing that the Anthropic Principle makes clear is that we do not yet have a theory explaining why the fundamental constants are what they are." [RT: To say that God designed those constants is to risk a 'God of the Gaps' - which gaps might get closed some time in the future.] | ||
| 13 | Stephen Jay Gould "argued that although religion and science are both necessary to a full life, by their nature they cannot be reconciled". They are "non-overlapping magesteria", viewing "the world through different windows". | |
| "... but while Templeton's analogy of windows that give you different views of the same landscape, Gould's windows look out on totally different landscapes." | ||
| "Experiment is the window of science; the window of religion is revelation." | ||
| "The principle of non-overlapping magesteria is contrary to Townes' belief that science and religion are converging, and a denial of Templeton's dream that science will confirm his Christian beliefs." | ||
| 14 | "Although both Gould and Dawkins championed evolution, evolution deniers sought to use the dispute ('punctuated' versus 'gradualized' evolution) to argue that evolutionists couldn't even agree among themselves." | |
| 15 | Park asks: "... should the American Association for the Advancement of Science solicit or accept large gifts (like Templeton's) designated for purposes other than the advancement of science?" | |
| 17 | "... if every straw man set up by (CS) Lewis is an idiot, that's not evidence that Jesus was God." | |
| "That this brilliant scientist (Francis Collins) would not recognize his own religious experience as a hormone rush is evidence of the controlling power of our brain chemistry." | ||
| 18 | "It seems that hormones have the power not only to turn on your emotions, but to turn off your critical faculties at the same time." | |
| (Our hormonal responses) "evolved to aid survival in a Pleistocene wilderness. As members of a civilized society we have an obligation (to) try to understand our impulses and not follow them blindly." | ||
| "You are not conscious of smelling pheromones because the signal from your pheromone receptors is routed straight to the amygdalae, bypassing the cerebral cortex." Then all sorts of hormones kick in. | ||
| 19 | "Does all this raise questions of free will? Of course it does." | |
| (Francis Collins) "has chosen to compartmentalize his world, as religious scientists must." | ||
| 20-21 | Collins explained his conversion as due to 1) the Anthropic Principle and 2) that humans know the difference between right and wrong. | |
| 21 | "Even if you see the Anthropic Principle as implying the existence of a creator, it tells us nothing about that creator except perhaps that he wanted there to be life. The rest is all guesswork and merely tells us what our ancestors wanted their god to be like." | |
| "Unfortunately, this God [of the Christian Bible and the Western world] comes with a lot of baggage including a bunch of preposterous myths." | ||
| 2 - | 25 | "Homo sapiens is still evolving" (evidenced by the increase in lactose tolerance by a number of separate mutations). |
| Intelligent | 26 | "Intelligent Design is not a scientific concept." (John Marburger, Head of George W Bush's White House Office of Science and Technology) |
| Design | 28 | "Storytellers sat around the fire spinning imaginative tales to account for the world ... The most compelling of these stories were passed on to subsequent generations." |
| 29 | "Intelligent Design is merely a strategy, a tactic in a holy war fought to put God back in the classroom ..." | |
| 'Recognizing patterns' is a key part of [animal] development, including pleasure patterns. | ||
| 30 | "Apophenia" - seeing patterns where none exist - has been demonstrated in experiments. | |
| "Humans all seem to be on the verge of apophenia." [RT: I would say we have teetered over the edge already - we want to have patterns.] | ||
| Science is the "strategy needed to tell us which patterns are significant and which are merely a coincidence." | ||
| 31 | The 'supernatural' is one 'stopgap' pattern to account for events we don't understand. | |
| 32 | Science is "what we have learnt about how not to fool ourselves." (Richard Feynman) | |
| "the alternative ... is dogma." | ||
| "Much of the book of nature remains to be read." | ||
| 32-3 | In "the Enlightenment, educated people thought the most important benefit of science would be to free the world from superstition. Unfortunately, that did not happen." | |
| 35 | "We are living in an era of transition from the traditional worlview of the great religions to a modern worldview based on naturalism." | |
| "While educated people may accept the fact that the laws of nature govern the behaviour of material bodies, they are often reluctant to believe that the dreams and emotions that stir within themselves can be reduced to the laws of physics." | ||
| 38 | Phillip Johnson - an anti-Dawkins campaigner - championed Intelligent Design. | |
| 43 | "It is not the logic of evolution that concerned Johnson, however, so much as the self-indulgent behaviour he associated with people who don't believe they are accountable to God for their actions." | |
| 43-4 | "There is ... no evidence at all that the faithful lead more morally disciplined lives than the skeptics." | |
| 45-6 | Johnson's tactics were manifestly dishonest. | |
| 50 | "There is a strong motivation for people to compartmentalize their beliefs." [RT: not just 'foot-in-both-camps' scientists, all of us.] | |
| 52-5 | The case Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District resulted in a victory for parents who objected to a 'no evolution to be taught' rule. | |
| 3 - | 56 | "In war, both sides pray for victory." |
| Prayer | 57 | "But what is the evidence that prayer is any more effective than doing nothing?" |
| 59 | The hypothalamus, which triggers fight-or-flight response, outranks the conscious brain - and has done so in evolution well before humans appeared." | |
| 60-1 | While Prozac and Zoloft can ease stress, so can meditation and prayer. | |
| 61 | "It doesn't seem to matter how or to whom you pray, and it apparently works as well for non-believers as for the devout." | |
| People who found Herbert Benson's 'The Relaxation Response' offensive "aren't looking for self-treatment - they want a God that will intervene on their side and smite their enemies". | ||
| 65 | "Someday society will have to deal with defective genes." [RT: this is in connection with eugenics, now regarded as unacceptable] | |
| 70-71 | "The Columbia Prayer Study" involved trials set up by Daniel P Wirth (a known con-man). | |
| 74 | "... reality is not always consistent with a wise and loving God." | |
| 78 | "The consclusion of the (Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer) was that prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people undergoing heart surgery." | |
| "Even this study (Benson's) couldn't be regarded as scientific, because "prayer has no metric". | ||
| 4 - The 'Soul' | 82 | "Our personal identity - our 'soul' if you insist - keeps changing throughout life as we modify and add to what we believe about the world around us. This change comes not from our genes, but from our culture." |
| This is in contrast to Catholic doctrine, which says that God puts it in at the moment of conception [RT: not the sperm?] and it continues after death. | ||
| 83 | "... religious fundamentalists oppose the IVF procedure as 'unnatural'..." | |
| "George W Bush, who owed his narrow re-election victory to the solid support of the religious right, remained firmly opposed to the use of embryonic stem cells in research." But he could not stop it in private laboratories. | ||
| 87 | " . it would appear that most of the world's population prefers the concept of reincarnation to heaven." | |
| "Information, including memories, must physically reside somewhere or it ceases to exist." It could be in a computer, in writing, on a DNA molecule, or in connections between brain cells. | ||
| 88 | "Truth is rarely as appealing as well-told fiction." | |
| "Anecdotal evidence is simply not to be trusted, even when the anecdotes are our own. We must still test and verify." | ||
| 91 | This section addresses 'Astral Projection' - "being apart from your body". | |
| Scientists "are inclined to see out-of-body experiences as just another misperception of a brain that must reconcile a number of sensory inputs". [RT: The inputs might conflict. One example is a mirage in a desert.] | ||
| "... mild electrical stimulation of a region in the brain called the angular gyrus induced out-of-body experiences" (in 2 patients being examined for possible epilepsy surgery, by Dr Olaf Blanke in Geneva in 2006. | ||
| "One (of these patients) felt she was hanging from the ceiling." | ||
| 92 | "... the angular gyrus ... processes information from the primary senses to tell the brain where the body is positioned in space." | |
| Dr Blanke could also induce out-of-body experiences using "display goggles showing a video image of the person from a different perspective". | ||
| "But the spirit (or soul) divides rather than unites. Disputes over the soul remain unresolved because there are no facts, only unsupported beliefs." | ||
| 5 - Heaven | 97 | "... belief in an afterlife is almost universal" (according to surveys). But what about depth of conviction? How much would people "who profess to believe in Heaven be willing to wager on it?" |
| 99 | "The question of whether it (heaven) exists has been replaced by whether the Bible is the authority." | |
| 100 | "Why isn't there a stampede to buy tickets (to heaven)? In spite of all the pain and disappointment that comes with it, it's this life that people want." | |
| Ted Haggard "was certain that heaven is strictly for born-again Christians, while the would-be suicide bomber was just as certain that heaven is only for Muslims." | ||
| 101-2 | "We have a well-documented tendency to confound what we are seeing with what we remember ... When an image is obscured, the brain tends to fill in the picture with images stored in the memory." | |
| 103 | In 2007, (then pope) Joseph Ratzinger was not sure people really wanted eternal life. | |
| 6 - Suffering | 105-8 | In the face of the December 25/6 2004 tsunami, many religious spokesmen claimed it was God's punishment, either for sin going on at the time, or sins committed in previous lives - never mind the collateral death of innocents. |
| 106 | Pat Robertson says much the same things as fundamental moslems do, and even some Buddhists take the same line. | |
| 108-9 | Maimonides and Aquinas moved on in the 12th century, but many people still think in the old way, for example William Safire in the New York Times. | |
| 109-12 | Park thinks that in the bible story of Job, the implication that 'God was just testing him (Job) because of a wager with Satan' is just not good enough. A girl in the author's school class cried saying that this wasn't fair on Job. The author himself thought that it was even more unfair on Job's children, servants and livestock, presumably all innocent, but whose fortunes did not get restored in the end as Job's were. | |
| 112 | "Most of the population is convinced that the Bible is the inerrant word of God." [RT: I question this. They might say they think so in the USA.] | |
| 114 | Science knew where the earthquake (that caused the Boxing Day tsunami) originated, but communications were too slow to save those in peril. | |
| 115 | "This is the 21st century. No longer must we submit meekly to the blind forces of nature." | |
| 7 - | 116 | 'Adam Dremhealer' - he was a total quack, but people wanted to believe. |
| Miracle Cures | 119 | " 'Adam Dremhealer' never invokes God or angels, preferring instead to identify a big telepathic black bird as the supernatural source of his power. This is New Age spirituality; it avoids direct competition with the more conventional religious miracles of the faith healers." |
| 119-20 | [RT: I have attempted to present Park's model of 'belief' as it works in the human brain, in the diagram on the right side of the table at the end.] | |
| 120 | "Language makes vicarious experience the dominant source of belief, overwhelming personal experience." | |
| 121 | "Unfortunately, that which allows us to learn from others also exposes us to manipulation by them." | |
| "Such events (like shocks and surprises) are also the origin of personal superstitions, the little rituals we all perform to re-create the conditions we associate with some moment of high gratification, or to avoid those things we associate with unpleasantness." | ||
| Our beliefs are often flawed due to 'noise' on the input. | ||
| 122 | The brain tries to fill the gaps - subjects in an experiment imagined they had heard a signal when there was noise but no signal. | |
| 123 | "The brain ... operates electrochemically rather than electromagnetically, so it's not as fast as Google. | |
| 124 | "But what of those who are grounded in neither science nor religion? How do they decide what to believe? Simple - they join the New Age revolution and believe in everything." | |
| 124-6 | Rhonda Byrne's 'The Secret' was pushed by Oprah Winfrey. | |
| 125 | Gary Trudeau's 'Natural Cures' was another classic. | |
| 127 | Norman Vincent Peale's 'The Power of Positive Thinking' was a forerunner, and the source of much in Byrne's book. | |
| 128 | "New Age often claims to find confirmation in science, specifically the science of Quantum Physics." | |
| 8 - Psycho -kinesis | 132 | "Heisenberg pointed out that in observing the smallest parts of the world, the act of observation alters the thing observed." This might be what spurs New Age quacks to extend this idea and claim that "thoughts become things". |
| 137 | Robert Jahn started the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Lab (PEAR) to see if this could really happen. | |
| 138 | "Life in any organization is better if the boss is happy, and the staff is usually quick to figure out what it takes ..." | |
| 139 | "If Random Number Generators are affected by thoughts directed at them by the subject, could they also be responding to all the other traffic in the global consciousness field?" | |
| 140 | Jahn abruptly closed the project after 28 years. Some very small anomalies had been found here and there, but the experiments were very dependent on the human subjects, and no 'double blind' techniques were used. | |
| 141 | "Other physicists have used 'consciousness' in their descriptions. It's a sobering reminder that science has its own superstitions." | |
| 9 - Homeopathy | 144 | Repeated dilution in homeopathy takes the concentration to the point where there is almost zero chance that the preparation contains any of the active ingredient. The number of molecules in the preparation has a limit (Avogadro's number). |
| 146 | When the water cannot have any of the active ingredient left, some homeopathy supporters claim that "the water remembers". | |
| 151 | We have managed to phase out bleeding and purgatives. | |
| But some medical schools were still including homeopathy. But This was exposed by Abraham Flexner. | ||
| 152-7 | Park offered a test of the effectiveness of Jacques Benveniste's homeopathic claims - which he said could work even over the internet. Benveniste and his supporters kept putting off the test, and it has never happened - Benveniste died in 2004. | |
| 157 | "But while Hahneman (originator of Homeopathy) can be forgiven, his followers today cannot. They know Avogadro's number. | |
| "Desperate people will try anything, at any price - what have they got to lose?" | ||
| 158 | "Alternative medicine is not a separate field of medicine, it's a separate culture - a culture of credulity." | |
| 10 - | 170 | Much the same applies to Chinese medicine, including acupuncture. The slogan is "that's the way it has always been done". |
| Comple | 174 | We "will never be entirely free of the culture we absorb while we're learning our first language." |
| -mentary | 174-8 | Clinton agreed to having a White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine. |
| Medicine | 175 | Chairman was James Gordon - a follower of Bhagwan Sree Rajneesh. |
| 176 | All the member wanted was to have their pet therapies funded, and to be treated like mainstream medicine. | |
| 177 | Stephen Straus, director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, wanted all the therapies to be subjected to the same rigorous testing as scientific medicine. He asked the members to decide which therapies showed the most promise. | |
| 178 | They all failed the test - even Echinacea - except Acupuncture. | |
| 179 | Even with acupuncture, when testing on people who weren't familiar with where the needles should go, it didn't matter whether they were inserted in the time-honored right spot, or anywhere. | |
| 181 | Aspirin "works by blocking the body's production of prostoglandins, hormones that serve as pain messangers to let the brain know that someting needs attention". [RT: presumably it still needs attention, despite the pain being eased.] | |
| But what is the mechanism by which acupuncture works? (RT: Do we believe in 'Qi'?] It's the same with placebos which seem to show some positive effect. | ||
| 182 | "Whether or not acupuncture is good medicine, it is certainly a good placebo." | |
| "Does the placebo effect actually eliminate pain, or does it somehow trick the brain into not noticing the pain?" | ||
| 183 | R Barker Bausell, Professor of Biostatistics at the School of Nursing at the University of Maryland (where Park works) was recruited to evaluate Complementary and Alternative Medicine therapies. | |
| "It was soon found that the drug Naloxone also blocks endorphins (and) ... also seemed to block the placebo effect." | ||
| 184 | "Bausell's conclusion that the placebo effect causes the body's own 'poppy field' to supply pain relief was soon independently reinforced by fMRI studies in which a placebo was found to activate precisely the same places in the brain that are activated by endorphins and other opioids." | |
| It's also the same with Zoloft and Paxil. | ||
| 186 | " 'Qi' [the mysterious Chinese stuff that is meant to flow in 'meridians'] has no metric." [RT: One can't measure it, so one can't test anything.] | |
| 187 | "Superstitious belief can also be thought of as a natural condition of childhood [RT: to be dumped later, like Father Christmas, or like Lactose tolerance used to be.] | |
| "But why are some people able to shed their superstitions after puberty so much more easily than others? ... Is there a 'belief gene'? | ||
| "Is it supposed to turn off as we mature, but sometimes doesn't?" | ||
| 11 - Morality | 188-95 | This section is all about the Ten Commandments, which Thomas van Orden tried to get removed from a monument near the Texas Capitol in Austin - following the first amendment , which says 'no established religion, freedom to worship as one likes'. |
| 191 | After much legal action, the US Supreme Court voted 5-4 that the commandments didn't have to come down, as they weren't 'religious endorsement'. | |
| 192 | But for a similar case in Kentucky, the voting was 5-4 the other way. So who knows how things will swing in future. | |
| 193 | Park thought that a friend's defence of the 10 commandments as being "the standard by which we say which actions are good and which are evil" reflected a very "low opinion of his fellow humans". [RT: I would add that the 10 do not cover enough of today's situations.] | |
| 194 | "The first 4 (commandments) have nothing to do with being good - God is just letting everyone know who it is they are dealing with." | |
| 195 | "The source of our ethic of reciprocity, in fact, is just about the hottest research item in the newly-fashionable field of the evolution of human behaviour." | |
| 196 | Marc Hauser: "Our moral instincts are immune to explicitly articulated commandments handed down by religions and governments." | |
| "Crimes committed in the heat of passion are treated less severely than if they are premeditated ... Religion, however, makes no exceptions." | ||
| "Our instincts are often compassionate." | ||
| 196-7 | Jonathan Haidt proposes "five moral principles that evolved long before the invention of writing, and hence before civilization: 1) Empathy - the reciprocal ethic; 2) Loyalty to the group; 3) Respect for authority; 4) Protection of the weak; 5) Unifying rituals". | |
| 197 | "... the Ten Commandments are trumped by Haidt's five basic moral instincts." | |
| "There is a dark side. Carried to excess, our moral instincts have the potential to become destructive ... warfare ... dictators ... crazy sects ..." | ||
| 199 | "... we can't just go poking in people's brains." | |
| "Monkey 1 reacted to the sight of Monkey 2 picking up food as if it was picking up the food itself." That's apparently because of 'mirror neurons'. | ||
| 200 | We now have fMRI "functional magnetic resonance imaging". It can tell us which parts of the brain are being triggered. [RT: But not yet what the messages mean!] | |
| 201 | "If the subject being tested with fMRI is exposed to the sight of another person experiencing pain, it activates the pain area of the subject's brain - the subject is literally feeling the other person's pain." Seeing expressions on faces also works in this way. | |
| 6 - | 202-5 | This section is all about DDT wiping out butterflies. |
| The Future | 206 | In 'The Population Bomb', Paul Ehrlich argued that we have to practice birth control. "The end result is inevitable unless we overcome our religious objections to birth control. This is the point at which superstition goes from being a harmless indulgence to a threat to the human race." |
| 207-10 | Gerald K O'Neill, an advocate of space colonization on a satellite "Island One" really wanted to avoid having to have birth control. Some people - usually out of self-interest - got on this bandwagon; even NASA. But the numbers involved are really quite ridiculous. | |
| 212 | There are many population skeptics. | |
| 213 | "One corporate spokesman lamented that 'our social systems were predicated on growth - we can't afford not to grow'. If that's true, disaster is inevitable." | |
| Part of the problem is that women in many countries don't have a choice of whether they should have more children or not. | ||
| 215 | "We are, as we always have been, engaged in almost constant armed conflict, much of it over nothing more than cultural differences." | |
| "Even as science transforms their daily lives, most people refuse to believe that the dreams and emotions that stir within them can be reduced to the laws of physics." | ||
| "A hormone rush, induced by self hypnosis or a charismatic religious leader, may seem to some to be an encounter with the divine." | ||
| "Science is the only way of knowing - everything else is just superstition." |
The table below shows the names of people mentioned in the text with the pages on which they are first mentioned. Those in the 'believer' column are, in Park's opinion, people who desperately want to prove that there is a place in science for the supernatural, or to ensure for whatever reason that religion and the supernatural retain the upper hand. They are mainly non-scientists.
Those in the middle column, on the other hand, are mostly scientists, or lay persons who at least accept that science, with its evidence based and stepwise improvement approach, is here to stay. But they don't want to ditch their own religious feelings and upbringing, and so attempt to maintain a 'split' personality.
Those on the right are those who follow logic and accept wherever it leads. They are also unafraid to maintain their stance in the face of pressure from the likes of the Tea Party, the 'miracle cure' enthusiasts, the Bible Belt or any sort of religious fundamentalists. In some cases they have resigned their positions rather than accept a policy based on superstition or wishful thinking.
| Believer | page | Foot in Both Camps | page | Rational | page |
Flowchart of how 'beliefs' work in the brain |
| John Templeton | 2 | Charles Townes | 1 | Steven Weinberg | 5 | |
| Walt Ruloff | 20 | Ian Barbour | 7 | Timothy & Lydia McGrew | 11 | |
| Phillip Johnson | 38 | John Polkinghorne | 9 | Eric Vestrup | 11 | |
| Hal Puthoff | 68 | John Barrow | 10 | Richard Feynman | 32 | |
| Russell Targ | 68 | Frank Tipler | 10 | Tammy Kitzmiller | 52 | |
| Kwang Cha | 71 | Stephen Jay Gould | 13 | Richard Sloan | 62 | |
| Daniel P Wirth | 71 | Francis Collins | 16 | Bruce Flamm | 70 | |
| Lester Crawford | 79 | Herbert Benson | 61 | Susan Wood | 79 | |
| George W Bush* | 83 | Joseph Ratzinger ** | 103 | Olaf Blanke | 91 | |
| Ted Haggard | 100 | Robert Jahn | 137 | Abraham Flexner | 151 | |
| Pat Robertson | 106 | Stephen Straus | 177 | |||
| 'Adam Dreamhealer' | 116 | R Barker Bausell | 183 | |||
| Rhonda Byrne | 124 | Thomas van Orden | 188 | |||
| Gary Trudeau | 125 | Marc Hauser | 196 | |||
| Jacques Benveniste | 152 | Jonathan Haidt | 196 | |||
| Wayne Jones | 159 | Paul Ehrlich | 206 | |||
| James Gordon | 175 | |||||
| David Hager | 180 | |||||
| Brian Berman | 182 | |||||
| Gerald K O'Neill | 207 |
** I am similarly unsure how to classify the 'retired pope'. I sense someone of great intellect, but as with the minister of a church I once attended, he may have regarded his priority to serve those Catholics who want leadership in tune with their traditional beliefs.
Although the book is eminently readable, it does take a rather polemical line. It doesn't really suggest 'where do we go from here'. Those who choose to follow a religious tradition may feel on the defensive. And those desperate folks who will take a chance on any claimed remedy are unlikely to think differently, even if they kept on reading.
And we are unlikely to see the end of Astrology columns in newspapers and magazines.
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 19th November 2015
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .