When politicians insist that they’re “following the science”—as if it reveals impersonal, unquestionable truths—they promote a dangerous illusion. Evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer warns that, like traditional diviners reading horoscopes or entrails, leaders invoke “the science” to offload responsibility, avoid conflict, and cloak decisions in inevitability. But science is no oracle: it is a human process of debate, judgement and dissent. Framing it as divine revelation betrays science’s spirit. Divination’s ubiquity in traditional societies suggests it serves deep social functions, and that humans are wired to seek impersonal truths. But we must resist the urge to turn science into an oracle.

Truth is in the pebbles

How do you find out the truth? One recommended procedure, at least in some parts of the world, consists in throwing pebbles on the ground and studying the patterns they form—they provide a positive or negative answer to the question you asked before casting the stones. In other places, a specialist will help you find out the truth by throwing dice, monitoring the flight of birds, examining a sacrificed animal’s entrails, casting horoscopes or drawing cards from a pack.

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There is a subtle rationality here that we can elucidate if we examine how divination is actually used, and what makes it so useful in some circumstances.

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Divination is documented in the earliest historical records. It occurs on all continents and in all societies, from bands of foragers to industrial societies. People consult diviners, partly to discern the future but more often to figure out the present: Are the gods angry with me? Is someone using witchcraft to make me sick? Is my spouse cheating on me? Are my office colleagues conspiring against me? Or, as lovers intone as they pluck petals, does that special person love me or love me not?

People have derided such practices for a long time. Cicero composed a whole treatise, De Divinatione, to debunk what he called old ladies’ superstitions. Most of us would concur. How could small pebbles thrown in the sand, or the shapes of a goat’s intestines, tell you what grievances your relatives harbor against you?

But there is a subtle rationality here that we can elucidate if we examine how divination is actually used, and what makes it so useful in some circumstances.

The method in the apparent madness

Consider the kinds of situations in which people may use divination, situations that often occur in many small-scale, so-called “traditional” societies, including in the village where I did fieldwork in Central Africa. A man in the village has been sick for a while, feeling exhausted at all times. A married woman is worried because she has experienced several miscarriages and is still childless. They have both received help from Western-style physicians. Everyone understands that something in their bodies is not working properly. But the question is, why did that happen to them in particular, and why now? That is where witchcraft beliefs become relevant. Everybody in these communities assumes that some people out there (whether they are aware of it or not) can inflict some mystical harm on others—make them sick, weak or infertile, ruin their crops, start family disputes, etc.

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In a place where misfortune is often explained as the outcome of witchcraft, it is crucial to understand who in particular is responsible. In any small community, there will be individuals more likely than others to attract mistrust, and many people indeed harbor some suspicions. But even if one has such thoughts, one could hardly make them public. Accusing others of something as abhorrent as witchcraft is a risky proposition. First, people may well suspect that you, the accuser, have some interest in casting aspersions on a particular person, that you expect to gain from having them punished or shunned. Second, the alleged witch may have powerful allies, who might retaliate against you. Third, many in the audience may think that you seem suspiciously familiar with the matter at hand—doesn’t that fact itself suggest that you too might have been involved in the alleged witchery?

That is where divination comes in handy. In some places in Central Africa, a specialist plants sticks in the sand, each of which stands for one among the dramatis personae, but may also represent more abstract questions, such as “is there witchcraft here?” or “will this person get better?” He then drops a large spider in the middle of the sticks and covers the whole setup with a large calabash. In its frantic effort to escape, the spider knocks down some sticks but not others, and that gives you the elements of an answer—including who is most likely involved in witchery.

The technique is ingenious because, whatever divination says, nobody actually said it. Once we are told that the sick man and the infertile lady were actually under the spell of some mystical attack from a relative, no one thinks that it is the diviner himself who figured this out. Instead, people will report that “the spider said…” that such-and-such is the case. This is, in fact, a general feature of divination, which anthropologists have observed the world over. In people’s opinion, diviners do not report what they think happened; they are just translating and reporting “what the pebbles said,” “what the birds’ flight indicated,” “what the cards revealed.”

In some cultures, the diviner may say that the statement comes from the gods. But you do not need deities to have divination. In many places in the Western world, a medium will draw cards to reveal whether your spouse really likes you or whether your boss is planning to get rid of you—but no one thinks that God or gods or any supernatural beings are involved. In China, a specialist will draw your horoscope or use the old Book of Changes (Yijing) to answer such questions, and here, again, most people trust the divination to express the truth, without gods intervening.

Divination in general has five important features: a) It provides guaranteed information about situations that really matter; b) in such situations, people’s opinions about what happened or what should be done are all suspicious, as they may reflect special interests; c) also crucial, it is important for the community to agree on a consensual version of what the facts are, for coordination purposes, including the reduction of possible conflicts between people with diverging views; d) so people offload the discovery of the truth or the decision-making to an external procedure; and e) the results are seen by everyone as not just a possible interpretation of the facts, but the necessary conclusion to be drawn from the facts. Keep all this in mind—it will soon become relevant to an entirely different kind of situation.

Asking “the science” questions it will not answer

In industrial societies these days, popular opinion about the use of science in policy is torn between two conflicting beliefs. Most people accept that policy should be based on expertise, and preferably on scientific expertise. Second, a growing part of the population is extremely suspicious of claims made by experts and scientists on a whole variety of matters. The combination of these two beliefs engenders the oft-lamented “crisis of truth” or “end of expertise” as well as worrying claims that we live in a “post-truth age.”

All this came to a head during the years of the virus, a period during which governments in many nations tried to enforce all manner of rules and regulations, presenting them as directly derived from “the science.” It is now clear that some of these measures were pointless, damaging or counter-productive—see, for example, scientific reviews on masks or lockdowns. That, of course, did little to bolster the public’s trust in experts and “the science.” What further contributed to people’s distrust was the dog that did not bark, so to speak—the absence of official statements from any authorities about what they got wrong, to what extent, and how such errors could have happened.

This particular case of overreach points to more general difficulties that crop up as one tries to justify policy by appeals to science.

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Politicians tend to rely on and broadcast the view that science is an impersonal process that, once applied to a particular problem, mechanically yields a specific description and explanation. But actual scientific activity depends on the motivations of individual researchers.

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First, recent science—for example, about a newly mutated virus—is bound to be tentative. As a biology professor once told me, “Most of what’s in your textbook is true, and most of what’s in last year’s scientific papers is dubious.” But that difference is not obvious to the public, since most of the science people encounter in popular books or magazines, or learned in high school, is well established.

Second, science obviously does not answer normative questions. Breathing near a person affected with a respiratory virus increases your chances of catching it. But how near is too near? A typical scientific statement about such a question would specify the decay function that links distance and contagion likelihood. That function does not specify what would be a reasonable distance to separate people. That decision depends, not on the function itself, but on the subjective valuation of the costs and benefits involved.

And that points to a third issue, that the science used by politicians and administrations in this case only provided information about one aspect of the required decision-making. It did not quantify the social and economic costs of closing down places where people huddle together, like schools, small stores, theaters and restaurants, or of suspending all manner of “non-essential” economic activity. This lopsided perspective is partly a consequence of very general properties of human minds. Natural selection equipped human beings with entrenched intuitions about the hazards of contamination and contagion. The perception that someone might be sick triggers a strong, intuitive experience of disgust or aversion, as well as an equally strong motivation to avoid contact with that individual. By contrast, economic and social costs are diffuse, distant, and most likely to occur in the future, which makes them unintuitive, less grounded in emotion, and therefore less salient in the minds of politicians and the public.

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The cost of distorting the actual workings of science is not terribly high for the political personnel, as long as it conveniently hides the political nature of politics.

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The use of science as a way of constructing apparently indisputable policy recommendations distorts the actual working of science in yet another way. Politicians tend to rely on and broadcast the view that science is an impersonal process that, once applied to a particular problem, mechanically yields a specific description and explanation. But actual scientific activity depends on the motivations of individual researchers. These, beyond the desire to find out how things work, necessarily include the need to acquire or maintain one’s reputation; the need to have one’s work accepted by the community; the expected benefits of putting forth new, surprising results or conjectures; the inertia of established models and techniques; and many more such factors which explain why, in the words of John Tooby, actual science fails to move “at the speed of thought.”

Return to divination

If one had to invent a slogan for divination, it might be this: “What divination says is guaranteed to be true because no one in particular said it.” This suggests a parallel with “the science” and “the experts” as used by politicians.

Public policy is a matter of choices. One may have to decide to raise or lower taxes, interest rates, or welfare benefits. Any movement in either direction will harm some and benefit others. Politicians have to decide which side matters more. But they also have a vested interest in hiding this fundamental truth of public policy. So, they often present essentially political decisions as purely technical, implying that no weighing of competing costs and benefits took place, that all policy can be deduced from the situation itself, or from a technical source. That is why politicians are fond of invoking “the science” as much as possible. When people hide a spider under a calabash, they use an ingenious technique to avoid answering the direct question: Who amongst us believes that this person is a witch? Eschewing such questions is of enough value to human communities that divination techniques have been preserved or reinvented over millennia. In modern garb, the politician’s recourse to “the science” is rather similar, which is why we should expect it to endure. The cost of distorting the actual workings of science is not terribly high for the political personnel, as long as it conveniently hides the political nature of politics.