Scattered to the winds

One of the more puzzling aspects of evolutionary theory is the phenomenon of peripheral isolates.

This term refers to widely-separated populations of seemingly closely-related organisms.  One of the first times I ran into this phenomenon came to my attention because of my obsession with birdwatching.  There's a tropical family of birds called trogons, forest-dwelling fruit-eaters that are prized by birdwatchers for their brilliant colors.  There are trogons in three places in the world... Central and South America (27 species), central Africa (3 species), and southern Asia (11 species).

These are very far apart.  But take a look at three representatives from each group -- it doesn't take an ornithologist to see that they've got to be closely related:

The Elegant Trogon (Trogon elegans) of Central America [Image licensed under the Creative Commons dominic sherony, Elegant Trogon, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The Narina Trogon (Apaloderma narina) of central Africa [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Derek Keats from Johannesburg, South Africa, Narina Trogon, Apaloderma narina MALE at Lekgalameetse Provincial Reserve, Limpopo, South Africa (14654439002), CC BY 2.0]

The Red-headed Trogon (Harpactes erythrocephalus) of southeast Asia [Image licensed under the Creative Commons JJ Harrison (jjharrison89@facebook.com), Harpactes erythrocephalus - Khao Yai, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I know, I've gone on and on in previous posts about how misleading morphology/appearance can be in determining relationships, but you have to admit these are some pretty convincing similarities.

The question, of course, is how did this happen?  Where did the group originate, and how did members end up so widely separated?  To add to the puzzle, the fossil record for the group indicates that in the Eocene Epoch, fifty-ish million years ago, there were trogons in Europe -- fossils have been found in Denmark and Germany -- and the earliest fossil trogons from South America come from the Pleistocene Epoch, only two million years ago.

So are these the remnants of what was a much larger and more widespread group, whose northern members perhaps succumbed due to one of the ice ages?  Did they start in one of their homelands and move from there?

And if that's true, why are there no examples of trogons from all the places in between?

Another example of this is the order of mammals we belong to (Primata).  Primates pretty clearly originated in Africa and spread from there; the earliest clear primates were in the Paleocene Epoch, on the order of sixty million years ago, but the ancestor of all primates was probably at least twenty million years before that, preceding the Cretaceous Extinction by fourteen million years.  From their start in east Africa they seem to have spread both east and west, reaching southeast Asia around fifty million years ago.  Some of the earliest members to split were the lorises and tarsiers, along with the lemurs of Madagascar.

But the next group to diverge -- and the reason the whole topic of peripheral isolates came up -- are the "New World monkeys," the "platyrhines" of Central and South America.  It looks like this split happened during the Oligocene Epoch, around thirty million years ago... but how?

At that point, Africa was separated from South America by nine hundred miles of ocean -- narrower than the Atlantic is today, but still a formidable barrier.  But a paper in Science describes recently-discovered evidence from Peru of some fossilized primate teeth from right around the time the New World/Old World monkey split happened.

What this discovery suggests is staggering; all of the New World monkeys, from the spider monkey to the black howler monkey to the Amazonian pygmy marmoset, are descended from a single group that survived a crossing of the Atlantic, probably on a vegetation raft torn loose in a storm, only a little over thirty million years ago.

"This is a completely unique discovery," said Erik Seiffert, the study's lead author and Professor of Clinical Integrative Anatomical Sciences at Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, in an interview with Science Daily.  "We're suggesting that this group might have made it over to South America right around what we call the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary, a time period between two geological epochs, when the Antarctic ice sheet started to build up and the sea level fell.  That might have played a role in making it a bit easier for these primates to actually get across the Atlantic Ocean."

So here we have a possible explanation for one of the long-standing puzzles of evolutionary biology.  Note that these puzzles aren't a weakness of the theory; saying "we still have some things left to explain" isn't the same as saying "the theory can't explain this."  There will always be pieces to add and odd bits of data to account for, but I have one hundred percent confidence that the evolutionary model is up to the task.

Now, I wish it could just come with an explanation for the trogons, because for some reason that really bothers me.

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Real mythology

Being in the midst of the holiday season, I'm seeing a lot of people posting about various traditions and rituals and celebrations.  But inevitably, this means that there are also people denigrating other people's traditions.  Like the person I saw on social media going on an extended rant about Kwanzaa, the main gist of which was "it's completely made up."

I threw gasoline on the fire by commenting, "Boy, do I have bad news for you about every single other holiday."

Feeling like your own beliefs are the right and true and reasonable ones, and those of the other eight-billion-odd people in the world aren't, raises arrogance to the level of performance art, but a lot of people don't seem to see it that way.  Apropos of others' beliefs, I tend to fall back on the tried-and-true rule of "don't be a dick."  Because, after all, 99% of what people believe has absolutely zero effect on me personally, nor, for that matter, on anyone I care about.  You want to pray to a deity on Saturday?  Fine by me.  You choose not to eat meat on Fridays?  Okay.  You think there are dozens of different gods, and not just one?  Cool.  Or no god at all?  Equally fine.

As long as you're not demanding that other people believe the same way, trying to force them to live by your rules, or (worse) running around killing people who don't, I've got no quarrel with you.

It does create a problem for the anthropologists, however, who are trying their hardest to understand it all.  Belief is an extremely powerful motivator to behavior, and in my egalitarian, "An it harm none, do what thou wilt" approach, it's hard to see what actually constitutes a belief system.  How do you categorize something when there are eight billion different versions?

The problem comes into even sharper focus when you try to pin down whether something is even a belief or not.  There's a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to pseudomythology, which are myths that aren't real (differentiating them, apparently, from the myths that are real).  For example, this became a significant problem when anthropologists tried to study the beliefs of pre-Christians in the Slavic and Baltic regions, because prior to Christianity most of those folks had no written tradition.  Jan Łasicki, a Polish historian and theologian who in 1615 published a book with the rather self-righteous title Concerning the Gods of Samagitians and Other Sarmatians and False Christians, gave the names of seventy-eight gods supposedly worshipped in what is now Lithuania.  The consensus is now that Łasicki wrote down pretty much whatever anyone told him without question, meaning that it included deities who were the informants' personal invisible friends, and undoubtedly a few that were the result of of "There's this wingnut named Łasicki asking around, make sure to tell him the tallest tale you can think of -- he'll believe anything."  Worse, some seem to have been made up by Łasicki himself, to pad his numbers.

Mythical Creatures by Friederich Justin Bertuch (1806) [Image is in the Public Domain]

But the same sort of thing is still happening today.  In 2013, a poll found that the seventh-largest claimed religion in England is "Jediism."  Yes, Jedi, as in Star Wars.  In 2016, a guy who makes magic wands made the news because he wouldn't sell them to Harry Potter fans, because he says his wands really can cast magic spells, and he didn't want to cheapen his own reputation.  There's apparently a sizable crowd who think that The Lord of the Rings is actual history, and The Silmarillion is basically their answer to the Bible.  Don't even get me started about people like Carlos Castaneda, who fabricated an entire religion that he (falsely) claimed represented Indigenous beliefs from Mexico, and now -- almost thirty years after his death -- there are still people who teach his books as if they were real religious texts, and believe his "non-ordinary reality" is actually true.  I would be remiss in not including Scientology on the list.  Strangest of all, there are people who think that H. P. Lovecraft's books should be shelved on the non-fiction aisle, and are one hundred percent certain that Cthulhu and Tsathoggua and Yog-Sothoth and the rest of the gang are actually out there bubbling in the loathsome slime of eldritch primordial chaos, waiting for the humans to chant magic words with lots of apostrophes and zero vowels, which will let them back in.

Me, I find this last one a little hard to fathom.  I mean, at least the others I mentioned aren't actively trying to destroy the entire universe.  But having read a lot of what Lovecraft wrote, mostly what I remember is that even the people who were on the side of Azathoth et al. always ended up getting their limbs pulled off and their eyeballs melted.  I find it difficult to understand why people like Wilbur Whateley were always so eager to bring back the Elder Gods.  Me, I'd do everything I could to keep them out there in the nethermost wastes of infinite cosmic darkness where they belong.

If I actually believed in them, which brings us back to my original point.  What does it take for something to be looked upon as an "actual belief system," whatever that means?  Consider, for example, "Neo-Druidism," which took off in England, Scotland, and Wales in the eighteenth century.  People took it totally seriously (and some still do), dressing up in robes and taking part in magic rituals and whatnot, because they claimed they were resurrecting the beliefs of the ancient Celts even though we honestly have almost no idea what the ancient Celts actually believed.  Evidently even Paul Bunyan was never actually a "folk hero" that people in the upper Midwest told stories about; he was the invention of a guy named William Laughead, who wrote stories and claimed they were retellings of folklore, and bunches of people believed it.  This phenomenon is so common the anthropologists have even come up with a name for it.

They call it "fakelore."

So where do you draw the line?  Or do we even need to?  A lot of this seems to be driven by our desperate need to categorize things, the same as our artificial (and awkward) definition of the word species in science reflects not an actual reality about the biological world but an interesting facet of our own psychology.

I don't know if I have an answer to any of this.  Most of the time I tend not to worry about it.  Like I said before, my general approach is that you can believe in whatever you want.  As far as I'm concerned, you can believe that the universe is under the control of a Giant Green Bunny From The Andromeda Galaxy if you like.  As long as you don't run around swinging machetes at non-Bunnyists, or demanding that Intelligent Design Bunnyology be taught in public schools, then knock yourself out.

I guess the bottom line here is really tolerance.  It's a hard old world, full of strife and difficulty and grief, and we should be doing whatever we can not to make it harder.  If you've landed on a model for Life, the Universe, and Everything that brings you peace and comfort, that is awesome.  I've often wished I could find one.  So much of what I see of human behavior just strikes me as baffling.  I've felt, pretty much all my life -- to borrow Oliver Sacks's pithy phrase -- "like an anthropologist on Mars."  I'm still searching for something to make sense of it all.

In any case, I hope you're enjoying the holiday season, whatever form that takes for you.  As long as it doesn't involve waking Cthulhu up.  I may be tolerant, but I draw the line there.

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Return of the Gootans

Some days, I wave the banner of critical thinking proudly and boldly, confident that we humans are capable of rational thought and decision-making, of recognizing fallacious arguments, of sorting fact from fiction.

Some days I wonder why I bothered to get out of bed.

That I'm falling into the latter category today is the fault of a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  Not because of any deficiencies in his own intellectual capacity -- he's a really bright guy -- but because of what he stumbled across, and then felt duty-bound to tell me about.  The whole thing springboarded off Friday's post, about self-styled alien coverup whistleblower David Grusch, and my increasingly irritated demand that people like Grusch fish or cut bait.

"I don't know about Grusch," my friend said, in an email.  "But I think you have to admit this guy has some serious credibility."

What This Guy was claiming goes back to a story that appeared all the way back in 2012 in The Korea Times.  The article said that people at NASA and SETI and HAARP and various other acronyms had detected an alien spaceship on its way into the Solar System, and it was going to attack the Earth in November.  It quoted one "John Malley of SETI" as saying, "Three giant spaceships are heading toward Earth.  The largest one of them is two hundred miles wide.  Two others are slightly smaller.  At present, the objects are just moving past Jupiter.  Judging by their speed, they should be on Earth by the fall of 2012."

The spaceships, they said, were "from the planet Gootan."

Well, if you'll cast your mind back to 2012, what will probably stand out most in your memory is not being attacked by aliens.  In fact, January 1, 2013 dawned without either alien attacks or Mayan apocalypses, which as you may recall was also on the menu at the time.  What had happened, apparently, was that someone at The Korea Times had made a mistake that anyone might make, provided that the person in question has the IQ of a bowl of Spaghetti-Os; (s)he had found a story in another news source, thought it was factual, and reprinted it without looking into its accuracy.

That other news source, unfortunately, turned out to be The Weekly World News.

This caused a flurry of backpedaling over at The Korea Times, and a retraction saying that nothing in the claim had been real.  And, it's to be hoped, the reporter who committed the flub being demoted to cleaning toilets.

Since that time, though, the Gootans have been frequent flyers over at the WWN.  Almost as frequent as Bat Boy, who (according to a time traveler from the future) will win the 2032 U.S. presidential election.  (My favorite part is they refer to him throughout the article as "President Boy.")  My feeling about that is: Bring On Bat Boy.  He couldn't be any worse than Don Snoreleone and his evil sidekick, Cabbage Patch Satan.  In fact, why wait till 2032?  If Bat Boy runs in 2028, he's got my vote.

Make America Scream Again, amirite?

But I digress.

In any case, the Gootans have made regular appearances in the thirteen years since their debut, such as the following:

Honestly, I'm more worried about all the motorists having sex while driving.  I mean, wouldn't that be kind of distracting?  Myself, I prefer to give my full attention to whichever of those I'm engaging in at the time.  I'd think telling your partner "Hang on a moment until I get through this roundabout" might be a bit of a buzzkill.

On the other hand, if they really did make a ballet based on Plan Nine from Outer Space, I am so there.  And I don't even like ballet.

But back to the Gootans.  Apparently the whole thing was settling back down into the side alleys of lunacy until someone found a Wikipedia article on a (real) group of people called the "Gutians."  The Gutians were a tribe that gave the Sumerians some trouble in the third millennium B.C.E., and in fact swept in from somewhere and ruled the place for over a hundred years.  So far, nothing too unusual, considering the fact that in ancient times conquering and oppressing and overthrowing were their version of team sports.  But then, someone found that there's a Sumerian document called "The Curse of Akkad" that describes the Gutians thusly:

The god Enlil brought out of the mountains those who do not resemble other people, who are not reckoned as part of the Land, the Gutians, an unbridled people, with human intelligence but canine instincts and monkeys' features.  Like small birds they swooped on the ground in great flocks.  Because of Enlil, they stretched their arms out across the plain like a net for animals.  Nothing escaped their clutches, no one left their grasp.  Messengers no longer traveled the highways, the courier's boat no longer passed along the rivers.  The Gutians drove the trusty (?) goats of Enlil out of their folds and compelled their herdsmen to follow them, they drove the cows out of their pens and compelled their cowherds to follow them.  Prisoners manned the watch.  Brigands occupied the highways.  The doors of the city gates of the Land lay dislodged in mud, and all the foreign lands uttered bitter cries from the walls of their cities.  They established gardens for themselves within the cities, and not as usual on the wide plain outside.  As if it had been before the time when cities were built and founded, the large arable tracts yielded no grain, the inundated tracts yielded no fish, the irrigated orchards yielded no syrup or wine, the thick clouds (?) did not rain, the macgurum plant did not grow.

First of all, I think we can all agree that disturbing the trusty goats and preventing the macgurum plant from growing is pretty nasty business.

But more to the point, this passage made people go "Aha!"  Surely this peculiar description -- monkeys' features, swooping around like birds, etc. -- was an indication that the Gutians were, in fact, aliens.  And were, in fact, the same as the Gootans, who famously failed to mount a savage and bloodthirsty attack on humanity in 2012.  This was coupled with a few paragraphs that I can summarize as "something something something Annunaki something something Babylonians and ancient astronauts something something."

 It's a pretty airtight argument, I have to admit.

I mean, c'mon, people.  You're making David Grusch look like the pinnacle of scientific plausibility, here.

Can I start with the fact that in linguistics, you can't just take a passing similarity between two names, and say, "Hey, they sound kinda alike!  Must be the same!"  And this goes double if one of the names came from the fucking Weekly World News.

Because, if you'll recall from the beginning of this post, it was people over at The Weekly World News who made up the Gootans in the first place.

Anyhow, if anyone needs me, I'll be over here weeping softly and banging my forehead on my desk.  Maybe the Gutians and/or Gootans will take pity on me and sweep on down and pick me up in their two-hundred-mile-wide flying saucer.  At this point, I'd consider it a rescue mission.

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The cost of beauty

I have a great admiration for poets.

They have an amazing way of collapsing a tremendous amount of punch into a small space.  The best poets use language in vivid and surprising ways, often contravening the laws of grammar to evoke powerful images and emotions.  Consider, for example, Peter Viereck's striking poem "The Lyricism of the Weak:"

I sit here with the wind is in my hair;

I huddle like the sun is in my eyes;

I am (I wished you'd contact me) alone.

A fat lot you'd wear crape if I was dead.

It figures, who I heard there when I phoned you;

It figures, when I came there, who has went.

Dogs laugh at me, folks bark at me since then;

"She is," they say, "no better than she ought to";

I love you irregardless how they talk.

You should of done it (which it is no crime)

With me you should of done it, what they say.

I sit here with the wind is in my hair.

Viereck's twisted syntax and use of questionable forms like "irregardless" and "should of" might be wrong -- more about that in a moment -- but man, they work.

In my opinion, though, no one used language in more startling and creative ways than e. e. cummings.  He's the name I come up with whenever I'm asked, "Who is your favorite poet?"  He uses words the way a skilled Impressionist painter uses color.  Some of his best -- from paeans to joy and love like "if everything happens that can't be done" to emotional sucker punches like "me up at does" and "anyone lived in a pretty how town" actually use ungrammaticality as a tool.

This is why I was of two minds when I read an interesting paper by Thom Scott-Phillips of Central Europe University called, "Why Do Humans Have Linguistic Intuition?"  Why, for example, do we intuitively recognize that the sentence in English "I don't want to go to the cinema" is okay but "I don't want going to the cinema" is not?  Why, in Viereck's poem, did the word "is" in the first line sound like a linguistic hiccup?

Scott-Phillips's contention is that our expectation is that the speaker (or writer) is expressing him/herself using the "principle of optimal relevance:"

Informally, "optimally relevant" means "efficient use of cognitive resources."  More formally, the relevance of a stimulus is the trade off between the cognitive costs and the cognitive benefits created by attending to and processing the stimulus; and stimuli are optimally relevant if and only if neither costs not [sic] benefits can be improved without making the other worse off.  Cognitive costs are, in the most general sense, the opportunity costs of attention; and in the specific context of communication this effectively means audience processing costs.  Cognitive benefits are, in the most general sense, the impact that attention has on future decision making; and in the specific context of communication this effectively means accurate enough identification of the communicator’s intended meaning.  Putting all this together, the Communicative Principle of Relevance implies that when interpreting communicative stimuli, audiences presume that no alternative stimulus could suggest the same (or a very similar) meaning at lower processing cost for the audience.

He compares our sense of sentences that "feel wrong" to our immediate (and intuitive) recognition of the weirdness of "impossible objects:"

[Image is in the Public Domain]

He further states that our linguistic alarm bells go off in one of three situations:

• The sentence appears to have no plausible cognitive benefits in the first place (i.e. no meaning can be determined), such that there is no possible trade off of costs and benefits (i.e. no relevance).
• The sentence deviates from conventional use without any plausible change in interpretation, however small or nuanced.  Such sentences raise the cognitive costs of interpretation with no plausible change in benefits. 
• There are mutual contradictions between the functions of two (or more) constructions within a sentence, rendering the optimisation of cognitive costs and cognitive benefits impossible.

Well, okay, but.

I can accept this in the case of technical communication, or even (most) common conversation, where the main goal is simply being understood.  (Although given how often misunderstandings take place, perhaps "simply" is itself the wrong choice of words.)  But what about language being used to evoke emotion?  In Viereck's poem, the non-standard grammar was a mirror of the disordered thoughts of the jilted lover he was writing about, and in context works brilliantly.  I mean, try straightening out the sentence structure and "correcting" the wording -- what you'll have left is an empty complaint you probably wouldn't remember five minutes from now.

On the other hand, I first ran into "The Lyricism of the Weak" when I was in college, something like forty-five years ago -- and it popped into my mind immediately when I read Scott-Phillips's paper.

My point is, strange and unexpected syntax -- ungrammatical usage -- might have "no plausible cognitive benefits" in a scientific paper, a news report, or a conversation with your significant other.  But in poetry, and in beautifully-written prose fiction as well, the cognitive costs are worth it.  Consider the epic smackdown King Théoden of Rohan gave to Saruman in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Two Towers:

"We will have peace, " said Théoden at last thickly and with an effort.  Several of the Riders cried out gladly.  Théoden held up his hand.  "Yes, we will have peace," he said, now in a clear voice, "we will have peace, when you and all of your works have perished -- and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us.  You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter of men's hearts.  You hold out your hand to me, and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor.  Cruel and cold!  Even if your war on me was just -- as it was not, for were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired -- even so, what will you say of your torches in Westfold and the children that lie dead there?  And they hewed Háma's body before the gates of the Hornburg, after he was dead.  When you hang from a gibbet at your window for the sport of your own crows, I will have peace with you and Orthanc.  So much for the House of Eorl.  A lesser son of great sires am I, but I do not need to lick your fingers.  Turn elsewhither.  But I fear your voice has lost its charm."

There's some non-standard grammar in there, and a few words (like "elsewhither") that wouldn't show up in common vocabulary.  It's not written simply -- with "optimal relevance" -- but wow.  I defy you to find a single word you could change in that passage without lessening its impact.

Honestly, I suspect that Scott-Phillips wouldn't disagree; he did, after all, say that the problem arose when a sentence "deviates from conventional use without any plausible change in interpretation, however small or nuanced," and it's that nuance that I'm talking about here.  But I think sometimes a strange, even jarring, turn of phrase can be preferable to more straightforward diction.  Think of your own favorite example of evocative writing (and feel free to post some examples in the comments!), and consider the damage if some grammar prescriptivist insisted that it all be written according to "the rules."

For me, the cognitive cost of reading something beautiful is one I'm willing, even eager, to pay.

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The boy who cried wolf

I'm all for keeping an open mind, but there comes a point where my attitude is, "Produce some hard evidence or shut the hell up."

I've reached that point with David Grusch, who two years ago made headlines as a whistleblower, saying there was a systematic X Files-style coverup of alien spaceships, technology, and even "biological materials" (i.e. bodies) by the United States military.  Much was made of Grusch's antecedents, with one person he worked with calling him "beyond reproach" and another saying he is "an officer with the strongest possible moral compass."

Well, that may well be, be at this stage of things, my patience (and the patience of many of us with skeptical natures) is wearing a little thin.  In the two years since he launched himself into center stage, he's done whatever he can to remain in the limelight, including claiming he was being persecuted for coming forward, and had even had his life threatened.  Just this week, he proved yet again that he's not ready to let the whole thing rest by appearing on Fox News, followed up by an article in The Daily Mail Fail, thus linking together two of the least reliable media sources on the entire planet.

Grusch is now claiming that Donald Trump has been fully briefed on the alien situation, and that Trump is poised to become "the most consequential leader in Earth's history" by doing a full disclosure of everything we know about extraterrestrial species and their visits to our planet.  "Members of this current administration are very well aware of this reality," Grusch said.  "Certainly, the current president is very knowledgeable on this subject."

If that weren't enough, we're also told that Trump and his senior advisors have been briefed on the "alien-human hybrids" walking amongst us.  These are apparently the product of a level of human/ET spicy encounters that Captain James T. Kirk could only dream of, and has produced the "Nordics" -- fair-haired, light-skinned, dazzlingly handsome hybrids that now have infiltrated human society.  

Kind of Alexander Skarsgård in space, is how I think of them.

Of course, even Grusch admits that if the hybrids look just like humans, there'd be no way to tell them apart.  So barring skewering their heads with one of those spring-loaded stiletto things and seeing if they dissolve into a puddle of goo, it seems like there's not much we can do with this allegation.

Then there's the piece in The Liberation Times saying that we're "headed toward massive disclosure," but that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been coy about pinning down when that'll happen or what exactly will be revealed.  The whistleblowers, Rubio said, "are either lying, crazy, or telling the truth," which certainly seem like the only options I can think of.  They also suggest that Rubio may be shying away from dealing with this right now because he's got other things on his plate, and making a big statement about UFOs would diminish his credibility.

Once again, can't argue with that.  Of course, Rubio's credibility is already so low that maybe he should just throw caution to the wind and go for it.

If I'm sounding a little snippy about this whole thing, well... I think I'm justified.  How many times have we heard from people like Grusch and Luis Elizondo that we're on the threshold of having hard evidence made public?  And every damn time, it's the same old grainy photos, blurred video, and first-hand "but I really saw it!" accounts.  As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "Bring me something of alien manufacture that I can analyze in my lab, and then we can talk...  What I've seen thus far doesn't meet the minimum standard for what we consider reliable evidence in science."

Oh, but the government is covering it up, for security reasons!  Really?  If so, they're doing a piss-poor job of it, with leaks and whistleblowers being interviewed by Sean Hannity and broadcast worldwide every couple of weeks.  And conveniently, there's still not one single piece of hard evidence.  Nada.

So that's why my attitude now is: until you can show us the goods -- Just.  Stop.  Talking.

Hank Green said, "It's never aliens until it is," which is true -- and entirely appropriate.  Our default should be "it's something explainable using known science," because thus far it always has been.  We shouldn't close ourselves off to the possibility of alien visitation, but -- given the technological hurdles that an alien spacecraft would have to overcome to get here (repeatedly) -- to accept that explanation requires more than just "I saw it."  It requires evidence that leaves no room for alternate interpretations.

At least if you're adhering to the methods of rational, skeptical science.

So anyway, that's my rather ill-tempered take on the current situation.  More talk about how "disclosure is coming soon," that almost certainly will come to absolutely nothing -- until the glow fades, and the main players break back into the news cycle saying "disclosure is coming soon, no really we mean it this time," rinse and repeat.  I'm getting tired of seeing people falling for the Boy Who Cried Wolf over and over, and increasingly that's what Grusch is looking like.

Are there really alien spacecraft that have visited the Earth?  Maybe.  Unlikely, I think, but... maybe.  But until someone brings one out into the public view, and allows an independent team of scientists to examine it, I'm kind of done with the hype.

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Burning down the house

It's always thin ice to make too many assumptions about why our distant ancestors did what they did.

Most of the time, all we have is the traces of what they made to go by, and that only gets you so far.  Imagine some future archaeologist got a hold of some of the artifacts from our civilization.  These kinds of remains are always fragmentary; like fossilization, the preservation of human-made objects is largely a matter of chance, and the vast majority of them don't survive.  So... suppose a future archaeologist found a bent, rusted hand-cranked can opener.

What would (s)he make of that?

Unless there was the fortuitous survival of a can of beans nearby, they might never figure out what it was used for.

So it would very likely be placed in a museum with a card saying "Probably used in rituals."

I'm not meaning to cast aspersions on the archaeologists, here.  To their credit, they are unhesitating in saying "we're not sure" -- something every good scientist should be willing to do.  We humans are just endlessly curious, and we want solutions to mysteries.  Leaving the question open might be the most honest thing for a skeptic to do, but it's also profoundly unsatisfying.

Especially when we have lots of evidence.  Like, for example, the strange case of the "Burned House Horizon" -- the layers of accumulated archaeological evidence (horizons) in a large part of eastern Europe showing evidence of entire settlements being repeatedly burned to the ground.

For over two and a half millennia.

The earliest evidence we have of the practice is from the the Starčevo–Körös–Criş Culture, which spanned from what is now Serbia all the way to eastern Bulgaria, and dates to around 5,900 B.C.E.  The latest is from the Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture, which is found from Romania to western Ukraine, in 3,200 B.C.E.  How the behavior spread is uncertain -- whether one culture learned it from the other, or one culture descended from the other, is unknown.  Unfortunately, it's usually impossible to differentiate between cultural (learned) transmission and genetic transmission, barring (even more) fortuitous survival of adequate human remains from which to extract DNA.

So we don't know how it spread, or why.  Some anthropologists believe that it didn't spread as a behavior; there are a few who claim the Burned House Horizon is simply preserving a record of accidental house fires, tribal violence, or both.

A lot of others disagree, however.  Mirjana Stevanović of the University of California - Berkeley, writing in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, makes a persuasive argument that a simple house fire of a wattle-and-daub, thatched-roof structure -- whether accidental or deliberately set -- wouldn't cause temperatures sufficient to produce the kind of vitrification of clay that is seen all through the Burned House Horizon.  In fact, Stevanović, along with archaeologists Arthur Bankoff and Frederick Winter, actually built a house using the techniques known to have been utilized by cultures in Neolithic eastern Europe, then burned it down:

[Image credit: Stevanović et al., 1997]

They found the only way they could get the clay to vitrify was to pile up enormous amounts of brush, straw, and other burnables against the foundation of the house.

In other words, the houses seem to have been burned deliberately, and regularly, by their owners.  But why?

Hypotheses vary from the practical to the bizarre.  Some suggest that it was a way of destroying the habitats of disease-carrying pests during the regular epidemics our forebears were prey to.  Others think that because wattle-and-daub structures eventually become dilapidated, it was a way of getting rid of them so their owners could rebuild -- using the convenient fired clay bricks produced by the burning.  Some have even suggested that it was a religious ritual they've called domicide -- the symbolic killing of the houses in an entire settlement, followed by another cycle of "birth."  (The adherents of this model point out that in the Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture, the one we know the most about, the complete burning of houses in a settlement happened on average every 75-80 years -- back then, pretty much the upper bound of a human lifespan.  Coincidence?)

The thing is, though, all we have is the evidence, which amounts to 2,500 years' worth of burned rubble, distributed over a (very) wide geographical region.  The reason why this happened could be any of the above, or a combination, or one thing during one period and something else during another, or an entirely different reason we haven't yet dreamed up.  It's a puzzle.

But then, so is much of our history.  If you're interested in the past, you have to get used to that.  Even during periods when there were written records, the sad fact is that a great many of those documents didn't survive to the present, and whatever was contained within them is gone forever.  But in non-literate cultures, we have even less -- just broken remnants of what they did.

Why they did these things, and in fact who those people were, will always remain in the realm of informed speculation.

So that's this morning's rather unsatisfying conclusion.  Burned houses, ancient cultures, and the persistence of mystery.  It's the way of things in science, though, isn't it?  As Richard Feynman put it, "I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."

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Coded messages

Did you know that there are illegal numbers?

I didn't, at least not until yesterday.  It turns out, of course, that the issue isn't the number itself, but the information it contains (or makes reference to). Numbers by themselves, as simple mathematical symbols, are pretty devoid of meaning -- although to the suspicious-minded, it sometimes doesn't look that way.  While physicist Richard Feynman was doing highly classified work at Los Alamos, he repeatedly got in trouble, and was accused of sending encoded information to his wife.  He recounts the following experience in his autobiography, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!:

Anyway, one day I'm piddling around with the computing machine, and I notice something very peculiar.  If you take 1 divided by 243 you get .004115226337...  It's quite cute.  It goes a little cockeyed after 559 when you're carrying but it soon straightens itself out and repeats itself nicely.  I thought it was kind of amusing.

Well, I put that in the mail, and it comes back to me.  It doesn't go through, and there's a little note: "Look at Paragraph 17B."  I look at Paragraph 17B.  It says, "Letters are to be written only in English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, German, and so forth.  Permission to use any other language must be obtained in writing."  And then it said, "No codes."

So I wrote back to the censor a little note included in my letter which said that I feel that of course this cannot be a code, because if you actually do divide 1 by 243, you do, in fact, get all that, and therefore there's no more information in the number .004115226337... than there is in the number 243, which is hardly any information at all.  And so forth.  I therefore had to ask permission to use Arabic numerals in my letters.

The thing is, Feynman is being a little disingenuous, here.  Numbers can mean more than just a bare symbolic representation of a mathematical quantity.  After all, using a number in two different ways -- both to represent a quantity, and to encode a meaningful mathematical statement -- is the trick behind the proof of the brilliant Gödel Incompleteness Theorem, something I'm certain Feynman knew.

It's not always that deep, of course.  Sometimes what they mean is banal.  A good example is the current idiotic "6-7" thing that apparently is rampant amongst teenagers, and which makes me glad I retired from teaching high school when I did.  

In any case, it's evident that implicit meaning is just as important to people as the explicit one.  To take one infamous example, consider 666, supposedly the "Number of the Beast" in the Book of Revelation.  Some people take that one extremely seriously.  Ronald and Nancy Reagan lived in a house in Los Angeles, on 666 St. Cloud Road, until they petitioned the city (successfully) to change it to 668.  There was a highway named U. S. Route 666 in New Mexico, until in 2003 it was changed to U. S. Route 491 -- prompting a spokesperson to say, "The devil's outta here, and we say goodbye and good riddance."  (I bet the priest in The Exorcist wishes he'd known it was that easy.)  In 2013, a maintenance worker in a metal manufacturing plant in Clarksville, Tennessee quit his job when he was assigned an ID badge ending in 666, and the company refused to change it.  "I cannot accept that number," he told ABC News.  "If you accept that number, you sell your soul to the devil."

What's wryly amusing about all this is that some scholars believe the identification of the Number of the Beast as 666 is a scribal or translation error, and the actual Number of the Beast is 616, because if you transliterate "Nero Caesar" into Hebrew and then use the rules of gematria to turn it into a number, you get 616.  

Somehow, though, I doubt that's gonna catch on.  The biblical literalists seem pretty set on 666.

So forbidden numbers have a long history.  These days, they seem mostly to center around one of three things; trade secrets, classified information, and code for suppressed (or oppressive) ideologies.  Because you can encode information in a string of digits, that string then becomes more than just the bare mathematical representation.  It even goes beyond that, though, because afterward, any pattern can be made to stand for numbers, if only you know the correspondence.  There was a legal case centering around a pattern of colors on a flag:

It turns out if you write down the hex code for each of the colors in the stripes, it gives you a string of digits that corresponds to an encryption key that will allow you to (illegally) copy high-definition DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.  The Advanced Access Content System, the organization that controls such matters, sent a cease-and-desist letter to the guy who developed the flag, and that triggered a Streisand Effect avalanche of the flag being spread around the internet, until the AACS basically gave up and wrote a software patch to prevent people from using the code.

Sometimes, numbers can be labeled as illegal in certain contexts, usually when there's some external meaning that's been attached to them.  In 2012, there was a report that internet search engines in China were blocking any searches containing the numbers 4, 6, and 89 -- because the Tiananmen Square Massacre happened on June 4, 1989.  The numbers 14 and 88 are associated with white supremacy -- a well-known slogan by white supremacist David Lane has fourteen words, and 88 is code for "Heil Hitler" (H is the eighth letter of the alphabet).  88 regularly shows up in neo-Nazi tattoos -- and far-right Slovak politician Marian Kotleba was criminally charged for donating €1,488 to various charities.  He was found guilty of "supporting and propagating a movement whose aim is the repression of human rights and freedoms," and sentenced to six months in prison, although on appeal the sentence was suspended.

They take these things seriously in Slovakia.  Not like in another nation I can think of, where being a white supremacist with sketchy tattoos gets you appointed as Secretary of Defense.

So sometimes, numbers can mean a lot more than the seem to at first, and making them illegal -- or at least, illegal in some contexts -- makes better sense than it might appear at first.

I do have to agree with Feynman, though, that pointing out an interesting pattern in the decimal expansion of a fraction is pretty unlikely to be a way of giving away the nation's nuclear codes.  Doubt that'd work even if you made a flag out of it.

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