Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (35 page)

How had Conan Doyle failed the test of Holmesian thinking? What led such an obviously intelligent individual down a path to concluding that fairies existed simply because an expert had affirmed that the Cottingley photographs had not been faked?

Sir Arthur spent so much effort confirming the veracity of the photos that he never stopped to ask an obvious question: why, in all of the inquiries into whether the prints were genuine, did no one ask whether the fairies themselves might have been more easily manufactured? We can
easily agree with the logic that it would seem improbable for a ten-year-old and a sixteen-year-old to fabricate photographs that could confound the experts, but what about fabricating a fairy? Take a look at the pictures on the preceding pages. It seems obvious in retrospect that they can’t be real. Do those fairies look alive to you? Or do they more resemble paper cutouts, however artfully arranged? Why are they of such differing contrast? Why aren’t their wings moving? Why did no one stay with the girls to see the fairies in person?

Conan Doyle could—and should—have dug deeper when it came to the young ladies in question. Had he done so, he would have discovered, for one, that young Elsie was a gifted artist—and one who, it just so happened, had been employed by a photography studio. He may have also discovered a certain book, published in 1915, whose pictures bore an uncanny resemblance to the fairies that appeared on the camera in the original prints.

Holmes surely wouldn’t have been taken in so easily by the Cottingley photographs. Could the fairies have had human agents as well, agents who may have helped them get on camera, eased them into existence, so to speak? That would have been his first question. Something improbable is not yet impossible—but it requires a correspondingly large burden of proof. And that, it seems quite clear, was something Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not quite provide. Why? As we will see, when we really want to believe something, we become far less skeptical and inquisitive, letting evidence pass muster with far less scrutiny than we would ever admit for a phenomenon we
didn’t
want to believe. We don’t, in other words, require as large or diligent a burden of proof. And for Conan Doyle, the existence of fairies was just such an instance.

When we make a decision, we decide within the context of knowledge that is available to us in the moment and not in retrospect. And within that context, it can be difficult indeed to balance the requisite open-mindedness with what passes for rationality
given the context of the times.
We, too, can be fooled into believing that fairies—or our version thereof—are real. All it takes is the right environment and the right motivation. Think of that before you leap to judge Conan Doyle’s folly (something that, I hope, you will be less inclined to do before the chapter’s end).

Prisoners of Our Knowledge and Motivation

Close your eyes and picture a tiger. It’s lying on a patch of green grass, basking in the sun. It licks its paws. With a lazy yawn, it turns over onto its back. There’s a rustle off to the side. It might just be the wind, but the tiger tenses up. In an instant, he is crouching on all fours, back arched, head drawn in between his shoulders.

Can you see it? What does it look like? What color is its fur? Does it have stripes? What color are those? What about the eyes? The face (are there whiskers)? The texture of the fur? Did you see its teeth when it opened its mouth?

If you’re like most people, your tiger was a kind of orange, with dark black stripes lining its face and sides. Maybe you remembered to add the characteristic white spots to the face and underbelly, the tips of the paws and base of the neck. Maybe you didn’t and your tiger was more monochrome than most. Maybe your tiger’s eyes were black. Maybe they were blue. Both are certainly possible. Maybe you saw its incisors bared. Maybe you didn’t.

But one detail is constant for nearly everyone: one thing your tiger was
not
is any predominant color other than that burnt orange-red hue that seems something between fire and molasses. It probably wasn’t the rare white tiger, the albino-like creature whose white fur is caused by a double recessive gene that occurs so infrequently that experts estimate its natural incidence at only one out of approximately ten thousand tigers born in the wild. (Actually, they aren’t albinos at all. The condition is called
leucism
and it results in a reduction of all skin pigments, not just melanin.) Nor is it likely to have been a black tiger, otherwise known as a melanistic tiger. That particular coloration—no stripes, no gradation, just pure, jet-black fur—is caused by a polymorphism that results in a non-agouti mutation (the agouti gene, essentially, determines whether a coat will be banded, the usual process of coloring each individual hair, or solid, non-agouti). Neither kind is common. Neither kind seems to be the typical
tiger
that the word brings to mind. And yet, all three are members of the exact same species,
panthera tigris.

Now close your eyes and picture another animal: a mimic octopus.
It’s perched on the ocean floor, near some reefs. The water is a misty blue. Nearby, a school offish passes.

Stumped? Here’s some help. This octopus is about two feet long, and has brown and white stripes or spots—except when it doesn’t. You see, the mimic can copy over fifteen different sea animals. It can look like that jellyfish from “The Lion’s Mane” that claimed so many victims right under the nose of a baffled Holmes. It can take the shape of a banded sea snake, a leaf-shaped sole, or something resembling a furry turkey with human legs. It can change color, size, and geometry all at a moment’s notice. In other words, it’s almost impossible to imagine it as any one thing. It is myriad animals at once, and none that you can pinpoint at any one instant.

Now I’m going to tell you one more thing. One of those animals mentioned in the preceding paragraphs doesn’t actually exist. It may one day be real, but as of now it’s the stuff of legend. Which one do you think it is? The orange tiger? The white one? The black one? The mimic octopus?

Here’s the answer: the black tiger. While genetically it seems plausible—and what we know about the tiger’s patterns of inheritance and genome confirms that it remains a theoretical possibility—a true melanistic tiger has never been seen. There have been allegations. There have been pseudo-melanistic examples (whose stripes are so thick and close as to almost give off the impression of melanism). There have been brown tigers with dark stripes. There have been black tigers that ended up being black leopards—the most common source of confusion. But there hasn’t ever been a black tiger. Not one confirmed, verified case. Not ever.

And yet chances are you had little trouble believing in its existence. People have certainly wanted them to exist for centuries. The dark beasts figure in a Vietnamese legend; they’ve been the subject of numerous bounties; one was even presented as a gift to Napoleon from the king of Java (alas, it was a leopard). And they make sense. They fit in with the general pattern of animals that we expect to be real. And anyway, why ever not?

The mimic octopus, on the other hand, was indeed the stuff of legend until not too long ago. It was discovered only in 1998, by a group of fishermen off the coast of Indonesia. So strange was the report and so
seemingly implausible that it took hours of footage to convince skeptical scientists that the creature was for real. After all, while mimicry is fairly common in the animal kingdom, never before had a single species been able to take on
multiple
guises—and never before had an octopus actually assumed the appearance of another animal.

The point is that it’s easy to be fooled by seemingly scientific context into thinking something real when it’s not. The more numbers we are given, the more details we see, the more we read big, scientific-seeming words like
melanism
instead of
plain black
,
agouti
and
non-agouti
instead of
banded
or
solid
,
mutation
,
polymorphism
,
allele
,
genetics
, piling them on word after word, the more likely we are to believe that the thing described is real. Conversely, it’s all too easy to think that because something sounds implausible or out-there or discordant, because it has never before been seen and wasn’t even suspected, it must be nonexistent.

Imagine for a moment that the Cottingley photographs had instead depicted the young girls with a never-before-seen variety of insect. What if, for instance, the picture had been of the girls handling this creature instead.

A miniature dragon, no less. (Actually,
draco sumatranus
, a gliding lizard native to Indonesia—but would anyone in England during Conan Doyle’s time have been so wise?) Or this.

A creature of the deep, dark imagination, something out of a book of horrors, perhaps. But real? (Actually, the star-nosed mole,
condylura cristata
, is found in eastern Canada. Hardly common knowledge even in the pre-Internet days, let alone back in the Victorian era.)

Or indeed any number of animals that had seemed foreign and strange only decades earlier—and some that seem strange even today. Would they have been held to the same burden of proof—or would the lack of obvious fakery in the photograph have been enough?

What we believe about the world—and the burden of proof that we require to accept something as fact—is constantly shifting. These beliefs aren’t quite the information that’s in our brain attic, nor are they pure observation, but they are something that colors every step of the problem-solving process nevertheless. What we believe is possible or plausible shapes our basic assumptions in how we formulate and investigate questions. As we’ll see, Conan Doyle was predisposed to believe in the possibility of fairies. He wanted them to be real. The predisposition in turn shaped his intuition about the Cottingley photographs, and that made all the difference in his failure to see through them, even though he acted with what he thought was great rigor in trying to establish their veracity.

An intuition colors how we interpret data. Certain things “seem” more plausible than others, and on the flip side, certain things just “don’t make sense,” no matter how much evidence there may be to support them. It’s the confirmation bias (and many other biases at that: the illusion of validity and understanding, the law of small numbers, and anchoring and representativeness, all in one) all over again.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt summarizes the dilemma in
The Righteous Mind
, when he writes, “We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs.” It’s easy enough for most of us to spot the flaws in the fairies, because we have no emotional stake in their potential reality. But take something that touches us personally, where our very reputation might be on the line, and will it still be so simple?

It’s easy to tell our minds stories about what is, and equally easy to tell them stories about what is not. It depends deeply on our motivation. Even
still, we might think that fairies seem a far cry from a creature of the deep like the mimic octopus, no matter how hard it might be to fathom such a creature. After all, we know there are octopi. We know that new species of animals are discovered every day. We know some of them may seem a bit bizarre. Fairies, on the other hand, challenge every rational understanding we have of how the world works. And this is where context comes in.

A Recklessness of Mind?

Conan Doyle wasn’t altogether reckless in authenticating the Cottingley photos. Yes, he did not gather the same exacting proof he would doubtless have demanded of his detective. (And it bears remembering that Sir Arthur was no slouch when it came to that type of thing. He was instrumental, you’ll recall, in clearing the name of two falsely accused murder suspects, George Edalji and Oscar Slater.) But he did ask the best photography experts he knew. And he did try for replication—of a sort. And was it so difficult to believe that two girls of ten and sixteen would not be capable of the type of technical expertise that had been suggested as a means of falsifying the negatives?