And yet when we hear of contemporary world leaders or their family members seeking the balm of such promised security, the more sophisticated of us often stand amazed. For example recently we have become aware that Cherie Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, consults psychics, and that Senator Hillary Clinton, when she was First Lady, sought similar spiritual guidance. And, of course, we all remember that Nancy Reagan as First Lady had a regular personal astrologer. So why won’t this vestige of the Age of Aquarius go away?

It is true that occult belief systems have from the very origins of Western civilization long guided and justified personal and political hopes, fears and desires. Traditionally they were the hopes, fears and desires of pharaohs, caesars, and fuhrers (and their spouses) who could afford to keep private seers on hand for immediate consultation, on military campaigns, treaties, marriages, and so forth. But while the concerns of the common folk for their own lives were of course no less pressing to them, it was not until the Renaissance, the printing press, literacy, and an expanded middle class that more widespread and detailed familiarity with divination systems like astrology became possible, and then popular.

Despite three hundred years of science and rationalism, the impulse to divination remains with us today, though this is at least partially understandable. After all, the world still appears to many of us no less uncertain and dangerous. In fact we ourselves seem to add new technological and ecological numbers to the roulette wheel of potential human disasters at an increasing rate. In this way, at least, the “Aquarian” proliferation of mystical beliefs in the 1960s and 1970s can be perceived as a normal social phenomenon in response to anxious times. The novelty, if there was one, lay in the sheer speed of the proliferation of these beliefs, facilitated by unprecedented media resources, and the media’s own commercial interest in the baby boomers’ every quirk.

Taken in its more gauzy and rosy colored aspects, the 1960s Age of Aquarius can be abstracted sociologically as a popular mass delusion, a psychological denial or a retreat from the harsh geopolitical realities of the new and frightening nuclear age, the cold war, and the Vietnam War. However, it need not be seen only as that.

From a political perspective, it was much more than merely a characteristic escapist response to an uncomfortable human condition. Then as now, the thrust of the so-called New Age philosophies reflected a very deliberate purpose or will on the part of many of their adherents. That purpose was to urge a more benign and humane set of priorities upon the specifically manmade political sphere of things, the sphere ostensibly over which we can have some measure of control.

When, in the 1967 musical Hair, lyricists Gerome Ragni and James Rado wrote: “When the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars,” many of us, including those who had no personal interest or faith at all in astrology per se, wholeheartedly hummed along with these celestial events very much aware that this was a metaphorical call for better alignment of more mundane social forces down here on Earth.

It is of course ironic that President Reagan, who as governor of California back in the 1960s was a prominent representative of the conservative “establishment” in reaction to which the Aquarian Age arose, should ultimately be revealed as influenced by astrology in whatever indirect or minuscule way through his wife Nancy. But after all, Nancy Reagan’s interest then, and Cherie Blair’s flirtation now, with the supernatural merely returns such beliefs to their traditional function as psychological comfort for national leaders and their families, in their need to formulate or rationalize difficult and stressful decisions.

By the way, President Bush, being born on July 6, 1946, astrologically happens to be a Cancer. That probably means 2003 will be a momentous year for him, one abounding with “both great opportunities and grave dangers.” And that means it will be for us too.

According to press reports, some of the victims were clubbed to death based on their confession while others were killed simply because of suspicion by their relatives.

The killing of suspected witches started after some members of the Christian Pentecostal churches accused their congregation’s parents and relatives of allegedly practicing witchcraft and being responsible for poverty, diseases, business failure, infertility, and other calamities.

As a result, some children attacked their parents and other relatives to elicit confessions for their alleged participation in witchcraft. In one of the communities, Itam, there was so much chaos and confusion that the village head had to shut down churches accused of making anti-witchcraft prophecies and pronouncements. Reacting to the whole incident, the governor of Akwa Ibom state, Obong Victor Atta, denounced the belief in witchcraft as superstitious and without rational or scientific basis.

Witchcraft is a common belief in Nigeria and throughout Africa; cases of witchkilling have been reported in other counties including Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Democratic People’s Republic of the Congo.

When Darwin and Wallace proposed the processes of evolution in 1858, including common descent, speciation, and natural selection, they were making extraordinary claims. This required extraordinary evidence, and Darwin provided that in the data he had gathered on the voyage of the Beagle. Furthermore, the theory was eminently falsifiable!

While the falsification criterion is no longer considered adequate for defining good science, it certainly remains an important indicator. This is especially the case when a theory makes a highly risky prediction that strongly contradicts existing knowledge. Natural selection not only clashed with common religious beliefs based on scripture, it also implied a deep disagreement with basic physics.

At the time of Darwin and Wallace, most people believed that the age of Earth was about 6,000 years, as estimated by Bishop Ussher in the seventeenth century from his reading of the Bible. Geologists were just beginning to gather evidence for a much older Earth, and this knowledge had a great influence on Darwin, who took Charles Lyell’s classic Principles of Geology with him on the voyage of the Beagle.

In the first edition of On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, Darwin made a crude estimate of Earth’s age, based on geology, of several hundred million years. This, he suspected, was sufficiently long for the processes of natural selection to take place and produce the wide range of species on Earth.

The great physicist William Thomson, later to become Lord Kelvin, disputed Darwin’s estimate, arguing that Earth was much younger. Thomson had made major contributions to thermodynamics, formulating the second law of thermodynamics and establishing the absolute temperature (Kelvin) scale. At the time, the only known sources of energy that could account for solar radiation were chemical and gravitational. Thomson calculated the age of the Sun for each mechanism and found that gravity gave the largest value, of a few tens of millions of years. Earth could not be older than the Sun, and this age was a factor of ten lower than Darwin’s estimate of the age of Earth. Using thermodynamics, Kelvin also calculated that the temperature of Earth would have been too high even as recently as a million years ago to allow for life.

Thus, based on the best physics knowledge of Darwin’s day, evolution by natural selection was highly suspect. Darwin admitted as much in a letter to Wallace: “Thomson’s views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.” If Thomson’s conclusions had been correct, evolution by natural selection would have been falsified.

But Thomson’s conclusions were wrong, and Darwin’s theory was not falsified. Thomson cannot be faulted, for he used the best information available at the time. With the discovery of nuclear energy early in the twentieth century, a new source of energy became known that was far more efficient than either gravity or chemical reactions. This provided a mechanism for a much longer-lived sun. Furthermore, the natural nuclear radioactivity of Earth generates significant heat and upsets Thomson’s calculation for the rate of cooling of Earth.

By mid-twentieth century, the nuclear processes that fuel the Sun were well established and described by theory. By the end of the century, the observation of neutrinos from the Sun (including an observation in which I participated) had directly confirmed the validity of a nuclear source of energy for the Sun and a potential lifetime on the order of ten billion years. Prior to this, radioactive dating also had verified that Earth is several billions of years old and paleontologists have found signs of life going back almost that far.

Evolution by natural selection ranks as one of the greatest scientific advances of all time. It was extraordinary and risky, and not just in regard to biology. It implied that Earth was far older than anyone expected. Although no one stated it so explicitly at the time, Darwinism can be said, in hindsight, to have “predicted” the discovery of a new force in nature to account for the Sun’s energy. If no such force had been been found to exist, Darwinian evolution would have been disproved.

This story should be more widely told in textbooks and other science literature because it is a great example of good science in action. Here we have a revolutionary new idea clashing with older knowledge at several levels and requiring another dramatic discovery in a seemingly unrelated field in order to survive. When the new idea does survive, as happened with evolution, we gain additional confidence that science truly relates to an objective reality that is really out there.