Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
A point I've made here at Skeptophilia more than once is that I don't automatically disbelieve in anyone's claim of having a paranormal or religious experience, it's just that I'm doubtful. The reason for my doubt is that having a decent background in neurobiology, I know for a fact that our brains are (in astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's pithy phrase) "poor data-taking devices." We are swayed by our own biases -- put simply, what we expect to see or hear -- and are often overwhelmed by our own emotions, especially when they're powerful ones like fear or excitement.
What's alarming about this is that it doesn't honestly matter whether you're a skeptic or not; we're all prone to this. I heard a loud noise downstairs one evening -- it was, unfortunately, shortly after I'd been watching an episode of The X Files -- and as the Man of the House bravely volunteered to go investigate. I looked around for something with which to arm myself, and picked up a pair of fireplace tongs (prompting my wife to ask, "What're you gonna do, pinch the monster's belly fat?") By the time I actually went downstairs, I had worked myself up into a lather imagining what fearful denizens of the netherworld might have invaded our basement.
Turned out our cat had jumped up on the counter and knocked a ceramic mug onto the floor. I did not, for the record, pinch her belly fat with the tongs, although I certainly felt like she deserved it.
The thing is, we're all suggestible, and our imaginations make us prone both to seeing things that aren't there and misinterpreting the things that are there. It's why we have science; scientific tools don't get freaked out and imagine they've seen a ghost.
When I taught Critical Thinking, one of my assignments was for students to use PhotoShop (or an equivalent software) to create the best fake ghost, cryptid, or UFO photo they could. This was that year's winner. Pretty good, isn't it? [Image credit: Nathan Brewer, used with permission]
The reason this topic comes up is a pair of unrelated links I happened across within minutes of each other, that are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.
The first one is by "paranormal explorer, investigator, and researcher" Ashley Knibb. Knibb is a UK-based writer and ghost hunter who spends his time visiting sites of alleged hauntings with his team, then writing up their experiences. The one I stumbled across yesterday was about their recent investigation of Royal Gunpowder Mills, Waltham Abbey, Essex. The building, now a "Historical Site of Special Interest" maintained by the government, was (as you might guess from the name) originally an industrial complex for the manufacture of explosives. "Hundreds of lives had passed through these grounds; some of them cut short by the very materials that gave Britain its military edge," Knibb writes. "It’s no wonder the place has a reputation for being haunted... Nothing stirred, but there was an eerie sense that the building’s history had left an imprint. This was a place where weapons of war had been made, where accidents had claimed lives. Sometimes you don’t need voices; the atmosphere says enough."
The rest of the article, which is evocative and creepy, describes what Knibb and his assistants felt, saw, and heard during the night they spent in the Mills. One of them heard the name "Cooper" being spoken; another heard a faint "hello." They saw the sparkle of flashing lights that, upon arrival in the room where they seemed to originate, had no material source. More prosaic, one of their videocamera lights itself began to strobe. There were areas where the visitors experienced chills, and one of them had a profound experience of vertigo and nausea at one point. (To Knibb's credit, he recounts hearing a loud thud, which turned out to be the movement of a very-much-living staff member retrieving something from an upper room. "Ruling out," Knibb observes correctly, "is as important as ruling in.")
The second link is a paper in The Journal of the International Association for the Psychology of Religion, and is called "Sensing the Darkness: Dark Therapy, Authority, and Spiritual Experience." The gist of the paper is that there is a new trend called "Dark Therapy" where volunteers agree to spend a given amount of time in complete darkness, in search of numinous or otherwise enlightening experiences. Other senses are allowed; in fact, one of the purposes of being in the dark, proponents say, is to heighten your other sensory experiences. Some of these episodes are guided, and others not. The paper recounts the experiences of twelve participants who agreed to spend a block of time between seven and fourteen days in a well-furnished room that was completely dark.
Their responses are intriguing. The researchers (to their credit) do not weigh in on whether the experiences of the participants reflected an external truth, or were simply artifacts of the sensory deprivation and the workings of their minds. I would encourage you to read the original paper, but just to give you the flavor, here's what one person said after her stay in the dark room:
For the first time [in the dark] there was a lot of fear. Somehow like manifestation of fear that was coming, well, differently and sometimes it was like... sometimes sounds, sometimes some images, (. . .) some demonic visions (. . .) were appearing and finally I understood that this is all me, my projection, but that you have to go through it, but it was such realistic experiences, very realistic. (. . .) sometimes I heard something, or I had the feeling that somebody is there with me, and I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all.
What strikes me here is that like with ghost hunting, how much of what you experience is what you expected to experience? I don't doubt that Dark Therapy might be an interesting way to learn about your own mind, and how you cope with being deprived of one of your senses, and might even result in profound enlightenment. But there's a real danger with someone crossing over into believing that something like the "demonic visions" the volunteer experienced are manifestations of an external physical reality. We all come primed with our preconceived notions of what's out there; when in an unfamiliar situation where our emotions are ramped up, it'd be all to easy for those mental models to magnify into something that seems convincingly real.
Like I said, it's not that I'm saying I'm certain that Ashley Knibb's scary night at Royal Gunpowder Mills, or anyone else's experiences of the holy or the demonic or the supernatural, are one hundred percent imaginary. It's just that my generally skeptical outlook, and (especially) my training in neuroscience, makes me hesitant to accept personal anecdote as reality without any hard evidence. I'm convincible, but it takes more than "I saw it" (or, in the dark room, "I heard/felt it").
I might find your personal anecdote intriguing, or suggestive, or even worthy of further investigation. But to move from there into believing that some odd claim is true, I need more than that. The human mind is simply too frail, biased, and suggestible to trust without something more to back it up.
I'll end with a quote from John Adams, then a lawyer, later President of the United States: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
When I taught Critical Thinking in high school, one of the principles I harped on was "check your sources."
The difficulty is, I don't just mean "see where the claim is mentioned." You also need to do the work of seeing if the source that mentions it is itself reputable. But there's an additional complication that makes our job as skeptics way harder, and that's the handoff that occurs, one source to another, sometimes leaving a story light years from where it started.
Let's look at an example of this phenomenon, which is the strange claim that appeared in a 2023 paper in The Journal of World Science. The paper was entitled "Concept of Time Travel and the Different Theories Making it Possible and the Implications of Time Travel," and was by three authors, one from Pakistan and two from a university in Indonesia.
The paper opens with a bang:
In March 2003, the FBI arrested 44-year-old Andrew Carlssin. Newspapers reported that this man was so fortunate in the history of the Stock Market. He invested $800, and within two weeks, it turned into $350 million. The FBI suspected that he was running a scam. That he was an inside trader. When Andrew was questioned, he answered that he was a time traveler. He claimed that he was a traveler from 250 years in the future and that he knew how the stocks would perform, so he invested in them and got the extraordinary result. The FBI was convinced that he was lying, and when they investigated some more, they found that Before December 2002, there was no record of Carlssin. Even more surprising was that on 3rd April, Carlssin had to appear in court for his bail hearing, but he had disappeared, never to be found again. Was he a time traveler?
Well, first off, the odd diction, sentence fragments, and random capitalization should be a hint that something is amiss; reputable journals are usually pretty careful about this kind of thing. It could be that (given the fact that none of the authors come from a predominantly English-speaking country) that was the fault of the translator(s), however, so we'll let that slide for now.
But if you read a little further, you find that the weirdness only intensifies:
The first way is to get a glimpse of the past by Teleporting from one place of the universe to another distant place in the universe with instant travel and then; through any strong Telescope and then look back on the Earth through it then, we can able to see how many lights year before our earth looks like, how much in the past we can see is dependent on our distance from Earth the far we are the far we can see in the Past (Rabounski & Borissova, 2022). Because it takes a significant time for light to travel from one place to another, even with how fast light travels, if we talk about distance in light-years, it takes years for light to travel to some places. So, if we could get somewhere before the light reaches there and then look back at the approaching light, the light would be from the past. That is how we can see the past.
Simple! Get to a distant planet faster than light, and look back at Earth through a telescope! How come I didn't think of that?
But hey, it's in a scientific journal, right? With source citations and everything!
Someone shoulda told the Doctor. He could have ditched the TARDIS altogether.
There's a wee problem, here, though. The Andrew Carlssin story that started the paper, and which is repeatedly referred to throughout, ended up in The Journal of World Science after repeated handoffs wherein the claim incrementally worked its way up the ladder of credibility (and in fact, along the way showed up in a number of reasonably reliable news services, albeit usually in their "Odd Stories" or "Unsolved Mysteries" features). But if you trace the thread from its appearance in a science journal in 2023 all the way back to its origins in 2003, you find out that the whole thing started...
Yes, The Weekly World News, that wonderful tabloid famous for features about Taylor Swift secretly giving birth to Bigfoot's baby, and that a creature called Bat Boy is going to win the U. S. presidential election in 2032. (My feeling at the moment is President Boy wouldn't be any worse than our current excuse for a leader.)
My conclusion from this is that there should be some kind of skeptic's version of "All Roads Lead to Rome" that goes, "All Bullshit Ultimately Leads Back to The Weekly World News."
Despite its antecedents, since then, the Carlssin story has appeared all over the place, usually with no mention of its absurd roots. An example is a story in Medium that treats it as if it were one hundred percent real, and which along the way suggests that Greta Thunberg is also a time traveler. "Many [people] wonder," the author says, "if she possesses the power to bend time itself."
What I wonder is who those "many people" are. My thought is it's a little like how Trump says "I've heard from dozens of reputable sources..." immediately before he says something that amounts to "... this idiotic lie that I just now pulled out of my ass, and that you'd have to have the IQ of a bar of soap to believe."
To illustrate how this handoff can occur, I deliberately chose a ridiculous example that (I dearly hope) none of you would have believed regardless where you read it. But the same thing happens with more serious claims. You hear some statistic -- such as the claim that in the last eight months, U.S. policies have spurred seventeen trillion dollars of foreign investment into our country's industry -- and find it's quoted all over the place, including in reputable news services. In this case, if you're reasonably savvy you might pick up on the red flag that the claim is more than a little bit implausible; seventeen trillion dollars is around one-fifth of the total gross national product of every nation on Earth combined.
But then you start tracking it backward, and you find out that it traces its origins to yet another instance of Donald Trump plucking a random number out of thin air to make himself look good, and the few news sources who are willing to challenge him on anything have identified it as a flat-out unadulterated lie. The rest just passed it off as fact -- and then the handoff began, until the figure became so well-publicized that if you google "seventeen trillion dollars" the entire first page of hits is about the amazing windfall American businesses are receiving because of Trump's policies.
So it's not sufficient any more to say "I read it in The Wall Street Journal." To be honest, it probably never was. If you want to be certain of something, you have to figure out where the claim originated -- which can be difficult work. But the alternative is trusting the knowledge and good intentions of the media source you use.
These days, that is seriously thin ice.
If you want to be informed, which I hope all of you do, watch your sources. Find out where they got the information, and make sure the sort of twenty-year-long Game of Telephone that landed a time travel story from The Weekly World News in The Journal of World Science hasn't tempted you to believe something ludicrous.
In the course of writing Skeptophilia for nearly fifteen years, I thought I'd run into every purveyor of woo out there.
I was wrong.
Somehow, I missed a guy named Gregg Braden, but that error on my part was rectified by a long-time follower, who sent me a link to a YouTube video with the message, "Fasten your seatbelt."
What I needed, as it turns out, was not a seatbelt, but a pillow to cushion my forehead from the repeated faceplants I did while watching it. The video is a conversation between Braden and a woman called Theresa Bullard-Whyke of "Quantum Minds TV" that should win some kind of award for the Most Skillful Blend of Scientific Half-Truths With Complete Bullshit Ever Produced.
To take just one example, Braden and Bullard-Whyke describe a phenomenon called DNA packing, which is a well-studied feature of our genetic material. It's been estimated that each of us has enough DNA that if it were stretched out end to end, it would measure a hundred trillion meters -- about three hundred times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. So to put it mildly, the stuff has to be wrapped pretty tightly. There are a number of ways this is accomplished, but one of the main ones is that the DNA spools around a protein complex called histone, which assembles into a lattice that forms the scaffolding of our chromosomes.
Braden then goes into how this is one of the ways we control gene expression. We have an estimated twenty thousand protein-encoding genes in our genome (depending on exactly how you define the term, and whether you include sequences that up-regulate or down-regulate other genes), but less than one percent of them are active in any particular tissue at a given time. When DNA is tightly coiled up into what is called heterochromatin, it is effectively inactivated; the enzymes required for transcribing it into mRNA (the first step of protein production) simply can't get at it. Ergo: the genes in that region are shut off.
So far, so good.
But then Braden and Bullard-Whyke take that information, and run right off the cliff with it.
Braden seems to think this gene shutoff is a bad thing, and that we'd have "superpowers" (yes, he used that word) if we could somehow get all those closed-down genes to turn back on again. The reality, of course, is that in a healthy human, those switched-off genes are switched off for a reason; a lot of them are developmental genes that spur rapid cell division and are critical during early organ formation in embryos, but if turned back on would trigger cancer. (Some oncogenes -- cancer-promoting genes -- do their dirty work more or less by this mechanism.)
Then Braden goes into an inadvertently hilarious claim that positive emotions cause your DNA to relax, and negative ones make it tighten up. Experience positive emotions, he says, and your DNA will get all loosey-goosey and more of your genes will turn on. Negative emotions makes the DNA "get knotted up," and genes turn off. "It's influenced by your breath," he says.
Then he enthusiastically launched into describing an alleged experiment where some scientists (unnamed, of course) found that if you have photons in a vacuum, they are all random, but if you introduce DNA into the vacuum, they "all become aligned." "This experiment conclusively proves," Bullard-Whyke said, somehow maintaining a straight face the entire time, "that DNA informs the quantum vacuum."
Well, as someone who is reasonably conversant both in biology and in physics, allow me simply to say that of all the things in the history of the universe that never happened, this experiment is the one that never happened the most.
But that didn't stop Braden and Bullard-Whyke, who went on to make the highly logical argument that if (1) your emotions can turn on your DNA, and (2) DNA informs the photons in the quantum vacuum (whatever the fuck that even means), then (3) what you experience might activate not only your own DNA, but that of people around you.
"When we live in fear," Braden says, "we're tightening our chromatin, and it influences the gene expression not only in ourselves, but in those we come into contact with."
So I hereby wish to issue an apology to anyone who has had to deal with me when I was in a bad mood, and who experienced massive gene shut-down as a result. I will definitely try to improve how my biophotons are informing the quantum vacuum in the future.
What completely destroyed what little faith I have left in humanity's intellectual potential, though, was when I looked at the comments section for the video, and found stuff like this:
Once again, Gregg, you have gone above and beyond expectations in your discoveries and studies with our Humanity and Universe and how it is all connected within us. We are definitely in a beautiful shift as human beings. Thank you for all that you do and teach.
Outstanding content! The evolved healers shomons [sic] high level alchemy and the new yet the ancient! The connection between heart and brain and the conductor to everything else in the field!
The most awaited golden age is almost here meaning the light is turning off for humanity so that we can have access to our true self in this dimension & beyond! This is the time to care over being scare [sic]!
Yes, I know this to be true - and all the creation stories are true, and not myth as we have believed. I have known this for years. And now Gregg Braden has presented the scientific proof.
Apparently we can manifest our physical reality out of thin air, that's what I want to learn and unlock. Highly evolved beings throughout the universe can connect with the field that makes up the universe and travel great distances in the blink of an eye and manifest creations from thought through the field into physical being in an instant. If they can do it, the message I'm receiving is that we can too. Can someone please figure this out and make tutorial videos?
Yes, please do make some tutorials! I'll bring the snacks and a bottle of scotch. First person who teleports a great distance in the blink of an eye wins.
Oh, and I should mention that while looking into this guy, I found out he was recently on The Joe Rogan Experience (because of course he was), wherein he claimed that NASA is covering up evidence of a fifty-thousand-year-old human civilization on the Moon. He also apparently has written a book about how the name of God and the periodic table are both somehow encoded in the nucleotide sequence of our DNA.
So. Yeah. I don't know how I missed Gregg Braden, but he definitely is right up there with David Icke, Diane Tessman, and Richard C. Hoagland in the "I Make Up For In Confidence What I Lack In Accuracy" department. But for those of us in the studio audience, can I once again urge you to look into what the actual scientists are saying on a topic before you fall for people like this? I mean, if you're not up to reading technical journal articles on the topic -- which, let's face it, most of us aren't -- at least peruse the fucking Wikipedia page, okay?
Because seeing people praising this guy is making my photons go all higgledy-piggledy, and it's gonna shut all my wife's genes off. She gets really cranky when that happens.
While I know the charismatic megafauna like dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers and giant ground sloths garner most of the attention, I've always found ancient plants equally interesting. Part of that comes from my ongoing love of both gardening and wild plants, something I've experienced since I was about six and discovered F. Schuyler Mathews's Field Book of American Trees and Shrubs, with its hundreds of pages of descriptions and range maps and wonderful illustrations. I can't even begin to estimate the amount of time I spent poring over its pages (and I still own my copy of it).
Once I gained a passing knowledge of the trees and shrubs and wildflowers I saw every day, I was shocked to find out that if I were to go back a few million years, I'd find an entirely different assemblage of plant species. I know, it shouldn't have been a surprise; if the animals had changed, there's no reason the plants wouldn't have as well. But I still found it astonishing when I found out that (for example) at the moment, there is exactly one extant species of ginkgo (the familiar, and beautiful, Ginkgo biloba), but in the past there had been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of species in the family:
A sampler of now-extinct Jurassic ginkgo species [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Peter R. Crane, Pollyanna von Knorring, Fossil Ginkgoales, CC BY 4.0]
Riley Black does a masterful job of tracing the evolutionary history of plants from their origins to recent times, and her signature lucid writing style makes the subject completely captivating. One of the chapters deals with an odd period of Earth's history -- the Cretaceous Resinous Interval, a span of about fifty million years during which there was intense diversification amongst gymnosperms, a group that includes not only ginkgos, but the superficially palm-like cycads and the much more familiar conifers.
Anyone who has ever leaned up against a pine or spruce tree knows about their impossibly sticky, golden-brown, aromatic sap. This glop, so unfortunate for skin and clothing, evolved as a way of sealing wounds and preventing insect damage. So in a relatively short time, we see the evolution of hundreds of species of plants that produced the stuff -- and, when it met the right conditions, hardening into amber.
Most of the world's amber, whether from Burma or the Baltic region or the highlands of Ecuador and Peru, formed during this time. Amber has been popular for jewelry-making since the time of the ancient Greeks, and probably before; in fact, an interesting linguistic side-note is that the Greek name for amber, ἤλεκτρον, is where our words electron and electricity come from (due to amber's property of gaining a static charge when rubbed with a silk cloth). But amber really came into the popular consciousness because of Jurassic Park, wherein some scientists extract dinosaur blood from bloodsucking insects trapped in amber, and use it to clone dinosaurs, with predictable results.
[Nota bene: it's thought that the upper bound for the survival of DNA in amber, even with optimal conditions, is around a million years, not the hundreds of millions required by Jurassic Park. And even that is likely to be an overestimate. In 2013, scientists tried -- and failed -- to extract intact DNA from a bee trapped in ten thousand year old copal, an amber precursor.]
That doesn't mean it can't have phenomenal paleontological significance, however, even if we're unlikely to have velociraptors stalking us any time soon. The reason the topic comes up is a paper that appeared last week in Communications Earth about 112-million-year-old amber unearthed in an Ecuadorean quarry, which contained so many inclusions of insects, pollen, and seeds that it's being called a "Cretaceous time capsule."
A midge from the Ecuadorean amber. Check out how well preserved those compound eyes and antennae are! [Image credit: Mónica Solórzano-Kraemer]
The number of insect and arachnid taxa represented, as well as the pollen and other plant fossils discovered, paint a remarkably detailed picture of the ecosystem back then. The authors write:
The new palaeobotanical evidence suggests the presence of a diverse and humid, low-latitude forest in north-western Gondwana during the early Albian... The strata in this quarry reveal a vertical evolution of various palaeoenvironments, including proximal braided rivers, lacustrine systems, hyperpycnal [high-density, high-sediment] flows, and distal braided rivers during the Albian... Pollen and plant macrofossils show abundant ferns and fern-allies that likely grew in the understory and/or near water bodies, in a forest dominated by araucariacean resinous trees. The overall palynological and plant macrofossil association found in the Genoveva quarry, particularly the high diversity of pteridophytes and the presence of moderately thick coal seams in the stratigraphic sequence, indicates a humid environment, similar to previous reports in other but less studied north-western tropical South American sites.
The presence of relatively abundant chironomid flies and one trichopteran as bioinclusions—both insect groups with aquatic larval stages—further supports the interpretation of predominantly humid conditions during resin production and deposition.
Fascinating to think that if you went back there, in that thriving humid lowland forest, you wouldn't see a single modern plant species. Not one. Groups, sure -- we still have araucariacean trees around today (the most familiar being the Norfolk Island pine and the monkey-puzzle tree) -- but our modern forests, even in habitats with similar climates, have no species in common with those that produced the 112-million-year-old Genoveva amber.
Change is always the way of things, but still, it strikes me as sad that all those many forms most beautiful and most wonderful (to swipe Darwin's pithy phrase) are gone. Last week at the Tompkins County Friends of the Library Used Book Sale -- a twice-a-year, three week long, must-attend event for any bibliophiles within driving distance of Ithaca, New York, and which offers a quarter of a million used books each go round -- I picked up a real prize in a lovely illustrated paleobotany text, with drawings and fossil photographs representing over a thousand different species of plants no longer to be found anywhere on Earth.
I think this morning I'll spend some time flipping through its pages, and dream of wandering through the ghostly forests of prehistory.
To continue with this week's theme, which has mostly been about how completely baffling I find the behavior of my fellow humans a lot of the time, today we have: secret societies.
Which may be a misnomer. Most of these societies are so extremely secret that you'd never ever find out about them unless you happened to read the Wikipedia page entitled "Secret Societies." The problem is, if something was truly a secret society, we wouldn't know about it, kind of by definition. But this would defeat the purpose, because then it would have a membership list consisting of one person (the founder), and it wouldn't be a "society" so much as "a single delusional wingnut." So it's got to be secret (and also mystical and esoteric) enough to intrigue the absolute hell out of non-initiates, but also sufficiently well-advertised to attract a few select converts.
Which is a bit of a balancing act.
The Rose Cross symbol from the Order of the Golden Dawn [Image is in the Public Domain]
Anyhow, I did a little digging into what I could find out about the history of secret societies, and lord have mercy, there have been some doozies. And to obviate the need of saying this over and over, I swear I'm not making any of this up.
Let's start with one that was operative in eighteenth-century Germany, but when you hear about it, you will really wish it was still around today. It's called the Order of the Pug (German Mops-Orden), and seems to have been founded to circumvent a papal bull issued by Pope Clement XII in 1738 that forbade Catholics from being Freemasons. So some folks got together and decided to come up with a different secret society, and they definitely pulled out all the stops.
Amongst their beliefs was an emphasis on loyalty, trustworthiness, and steadfastness, none of which I can find fault with. But their rituals were... interesting. During initiation, prospective candidates had to wear a dog collar and gain admittance by scratching at the door and barking. At the climax of the ritual, the candidate had to kiss the ass of a porcelain pug statue. After that, they were taught the society's slogans, gestures, and hand signals, at which point they were allowed to wear the group's medallion (which of course featured the face of a pug).
The whole thing was blown wide open in 1745 when a book was published in Amsterdam entitled L'Ordre des Franc-Maçons Trahi et le Secret des Mopses Révélé (The Order of the Freemasons Betrayed and the Secret of the Pugs Revealed), which resulted in most people responding with nothing more than a puzzled head-tilt. After all, this wasn't the fifteenth century, when saying "I like pineapple on pizza" could get you burned as a witch. So even after their secrets were exposed, no one was all that impressed. The result was that the Pugs kind of fizzled, although apparently there was still an order practicing in Lyon in 1902.
Then we've got the Epsilon Team, which sounds like a Saturday morning superhero cartoon but isn't. This one originated in Greece, and is a mixed-up mishmash of Greek mythology and UFOs and conspiracy theories, with a nasty streak of anti-Semitism thrown in for good measure. The Epsilons were founded in the 1960s by a guy named George Lefkofrydis, who appears to have had a screw loose. He claimed that there's a coded message in Aristotle's work on logic, the Organon, which reveals that Aristotle was an alien from the planet Mu in the constellation Lepus. (The irony is not lost on me that a coded message that sounds like the result of heavy consumption of controlled substances was allegedly encrypted in a text on how to recognize fallacious arguments.)
Anyhow, Lefkofrydis's ideas somehow found favor with other Greeks who apparently spent their spare time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars, and their dogma expanded to include the following:
the Olympian gods were going to come back and initiate a cosmic war against the Jews, who are actually also aliens
ancient Peru was visited by the Greeks, who founded the Inca Empire
the letter E is a symbol of the society and its goals, so wherever it appears in other languages, it was planted there as a subliminal text by the ancient Greeks
This prompts me to point out two things.
First, my wife is Jewish, and thus far I haven't seen any sign of her being an alien. She has also yet to do battle with Zeus, Ares, Apollo, et al., but frankly, if it happens I'm putting my money on her. She's kind of a take-no-shit type, which I suspect would still be the case if she were up against scantily-clad lightning-bolt-hurling ancient deities.
Second, the "E" thing is kind of implausible, and as a linguist, I can say this with some authority. What, bfor th Grks wnt around and distributd thm to vrybody, did popl writ lik this? Sms kind of inconvnint.
Conspiracy theory researcher Tao Makeef writes, showing admirable restraint, that "even amongst Greek neopagans, these beliefs are generally ridiculed."
Next there's A∴A∴, not to be confused with AA, which can stand for Alcoholics Anonymous, American Airlines, the Automobile Association, or a specific bra size. A∴A∴ was founded by none other than Aleister Crowley, the self-styled "Wickedest Man on Earth," whose main interest seems to have been having sex with anyone of either gender who would hold still for long enough. This is not the only secret society that Crowley founded; in fact, he started so many of them that for a while the number of Crowley's secret societies exceeded the number of actual members. The meaning of A∴A∴ was deliberately left ambiguous -- it was said variously to stand for astrum argenteum (Latin for "silver star"), arcanum arcanorum (Latin for "secret of secrets"), Atlantean Adepts, or Angel and Abyss. In Robert Anton Wilson's and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy, though, they say it doesn't stand for anything; that the true adepts somehow intuit what it means, so anyone making a claim about what it stands for is just illustrating that they're not really a member.
That's how esoteric and secret A∴A∴ is.
To move your way up through the A∴A∴ ranks, you have to do stuff like "acquire perfect control of the body of light on the astral plane" and "learn the formula of the Rose Cross" and "cross the great gulf or void between the phenomenal world of manifestation and its noumenal source, that great spiritual wilderness." Which I think we can all agree sound impressive as hell.
Last, we have the Temple of Black Light, also called the Misanthropic Luciferian Order, founded in 1995 in Sweden by a guy named Shahin Khoshnood as an offshoot of a group called the True Satanist Horde, apparently because the latter weren't batshit crazy enough. The members of the Temple of Black Light believed in "Azerate," the extremely secret "hidden name of the eleven cosmic anti-gods," which became significantly less hidden when Khoshnood published a book about it. The central tenet of the Temple is the worship of chaos, and the claim that God regretted having created the universe with all its laws and scientific principles and whatnot, and wished he'd left well enough alone and stuck with the whole formless and void thing of Genesis 1:1. What we should all be doing, they say, is trying to get back to chaos, and I have to say that at the moment the Republican Party is doing a damn good job of it here in the United States.
Anyhow, the appeal is that unlike our boring old three-spatial-dimensions-plus-time universe, chaos is supposedly "an infinidimensional and pandimensional plane of possibilities." Whatever the fuck that means.
Ultimately, though, Khoshnood was discovered not only to be a wacko cult leader, but a homicidal maniac, and once he was arrested and charged with murder, very quickly the other members of the Temple noped their way right out of any association with him. So I guess we're going to have to put up with our current orderly universe for a while longer, such as it is.
Anyhow, those are just four of hundreds. I encourage you to peruse the Wikipedia page, especially if you want to significantly diminish your opinion of the intelligence of humanity as a whole.
Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go work on my anatomically-correct ceramic statue of a pug. Not for any reason in particular, mind you. I just... um... wanted to make one.
It amazes me the mental gymnastics the biblical fundamentalists will go through to use scientific studies to shore up their contention that the Bible is literally, word-for-word true.
We've seen this sort of pretzel logic here before, of course. Eleven years ago I did a piece about a cool scientific discovery that a mineral called ringwoodite, which contains about one percent (by mass) chemically-bound water, was abundant in the Earth's mantle, which prompted the biblical literalists to jump up and down yelling, "See? We told you. That's where all the water went after the Great Flood! Ha! Q.E.D." A few also pointed out that in Genesis 7:11 we read that God "broke up the fountains of the deep," so this could also have been the source of some of the flood waters as well.
Never mind that the ringwoodite is six hundred or more kilometers beneath the Earth's surface, and if God "broke up the fountains" to that extent, what would come out would not be water but superheated magma.
So more flood basalt than conventional flood, really. Not something you'd want to float your Ark on, especially if it was made of wood.
It was with only mild surprise that I saw similar reactions to a study that came out this week from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. You might recall that earlier this week I alluded to the Zanclean Flood -- the astonishing event that occurred about 5.3 million years ago, where plate movement temporarily closed off the Straits of Gibraltar, resulting in the Mediterranean Sea drying up almost completely. This was followed by a sudden re-opening of the gap and the creation of the Mother of All Waterfalls over the Gibraltar Sill, at its peak refilling the Mediterranean at a rate of an astonishing ten meters a day.
What I didn't know was that apparently a similar thing happened to the Red Sea. It shouldn't have been a surprise, really; the Red Sea is like the Mediterranean in having only a single narrow connection to the world's oceans (the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb), if you don't count the Suez Canal. It's also a tectonically-active region, with the Red Sea Rift underlying the entire thing lengthwise, terminating at its south end in the geologically complex Afar Triple Junction.
Well, the research found geological evidence of a similar scenario to the Zanclean Flood; a tectonic shift closing off the strait, followed by evaporation of nearly all of the water, followed by a second shift reopening the strait and refilling the sea. "Our findings show that the Red Sea basin records one of the most extreme environmental events on Earth, when it dried out completely and was then suddenly reflooded," said study lead author Tihana Pensa. "The flood transformed the basin, restored marine conditions, and established the Red Sea's lasting connection to the Indian Ocean."
I'm guessing y'all can see where this is going.
The fundamentalists are twisting themselves into knots saying, "See? We told you. Moses parting the Red Sea, Pharaoh's army, the waters rushing back! Ha! Q.E.D."
Well, needless to say -- or, more accurately, I wish it was needless to say -- there are a few holes in this claim.
First, the study at KAUST explicitly says that the transformation from salty desert back to a water-filled Red Sea was far slower than the Zanclean Flood, and is estimated to have taken a hundred thousand years. So Pharaoh's army must have been really slow on the uptake. If they couldn't get out of the way of a flood creeping along at that rate, they deserved everything they got.
Second, the biblical apologists also conveniently leave out that the study found the Red Sea flood happened 6.2 million years ago -- so almost a million years before the much bigger Zanclean Flood. At this point, there were no modern humans around, and wouldn't be for about another five million years. Our likely ancestor who would have been alive back then was Orrorin tugenensis, who has been reconstructed to look something like this:
I don't know about you, but when I picture the characters from the Old Testament, this isn't the image that comes to mind. Although I have to say, it would have made the movie The Ten Commandments a lot more entertaining:
Moses: Fear not! The Lord of Hosts will do battle for us!
Israelites: *excited hooting, one of them throws a femur into the air*
However, the people who can already twist their logical faculties around enough to believe that the Bible is the literal truth will also happily conclude that (1) the KAUST team got the chronology wrong by a factor of 1,000, and (2) the Red Sea could have filled a lot faster than that, because God.
Oh, and (3) why are there still monkeys?
You can not win with these people. Funny the confidence you can get from assuming your conclusion.
Anyhow. My general opinion is if you want to believe the Bible is the infallible Word of God, knock yourself out. As long as you don't try to get it taught as science in public schools, you can believe the universe was created by a Giant Green Bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy, as far as I care. But a word of advice -- when you start cherry-picking convenient bits of science to support Fundamentalist Bunnyology, and avoiding the much more numerous bits that contradict it, I reserve the right to make fun of you.
Not that I expect it to have any effect. The creationists, I've found, are as impervious as Noah's lava-proof Ark.
It seems like every day I'm forced to face the unfortunate fact that I don't seem to understand my fellow humans very well.
All I have to do is to get on social media or -- worse -- read the news, and over and over again I think, "Why in the hell would someone do that?" Or say that? Or think that? Now, I hasten to add that it's not that I believe everyone should think like me; far from it. It's more that a lot of the stuff people argue about are either (1) matters of fact, that have been settled by science years ago, or (2) matters of opinion -- taste in art, music, books, food, television and movies, and so forth -- despite the fact that "matters of opinion" kind of by definition means "there's no objectively right answer." In fact, at its basis, this penchant toward fighting endlessly over everything is a good first choice for "things I completely don't understand about people."
As an aside, this is why the thing I keep seeing on social media that goes, "What is your favorite _____, and why is it _____?" is so profoundly irritating. (The latest one I saw, just this morning: "What is your favorite science fiction novel, and why is it Dune?") I know it's meant to be funny, but (1) I've now seen it 873,915 times, and any humor value it might have started with is long gone, and (2) my reaction every time is to say, "Who the fuck do you think you are, telling me what my favorite anything is?"
So, okay, maybe I also need to lighten up a little.
Anyhow, this sense of mystification when I look around me goes all the way from the deeply important (e.g., how anyone can still think it's safe to smoke) to the entirely banal (e.g. people who start brawls when their favorite sports team loses). A lot of things fall somewhere in the middle, though, and that includes the article I ran into a couple of days ago showing that people will pay significantly more for a house if it's supposedly haunted.
[Image is in the Public Domain]
The data, which came from the British marketing firm InventoryBase, looked at the prices people were willing to pay to purchase a house with an alleged ghost (or one that has a "bad reputation"). And far from being a detriment to selling, a sketchy past or resident specter is a genuine selling point. Comparing sales prices to (1) the earlier purchase price for the same property, adjusted for inflation, and (2) the prices for comparable properties, InventoryBase found that the increase in value is significant. In fact, in some cases, it's freakin' huge.
The most extreme example is the house in Rhode Island featured in the supposedly-based-upon-a-true-story movie The Conjuring, which was purchased for $439,000 (pre-movie) and sold for $1.2 million (post-movie). It's hardly the only example. The house in London that was the site of The Conjuring 2 is valued at £431,000 -- £100,000 more than it was appraised for in 2016.
Doesn't take a movie to make the price go up. "The Cage," a house that was the site of a medieval prison in the village of St. Osyth in Essex, England, has been called one of the most haunted sites in Britain -- and is valued at 17% higher than comparable properties. Even more extreme is 39 DeGrey Street in Hull, which has a 53% higher appraisal value than comparables, despite the fact that the house has a reputation for such terrifying apparitions that "no one is willing to live in it."
InventoryBase found several examples of houses that were objectively worse than nearby similar homes -- badly in need of remodeling, problems with plumbing or wiring or even structure, general shabbiness -- but they still were selling for more money because they allegedly have supernatural residents.
I read this article with a sense of bafflement. Now, to be fair, I'd be thrilled if it turned out my house actually was haunted, primarily because it would mean that my current opinion about an afterlife was wrong. This would require a complete reframing of my worldview, something I think I would find a fascinating challenge. The problem is, at the same time I'm a great big coward, so the first time the ghost appeared I'd probably have a brain aneurysm, but at least then I could look forward to haunting the next resident, which could be kind of fun.
But if I was in the market for a house, it's hard for me to fathom spending tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars extra for the privilege of sharing my house with ghosts. No, for the privilege of supposedly sharing my house with ghosts; I'm guessing in the Disclosure Statement there's no requirement for anyone to prove their house is actually haunted. So I'd potentially be spending a year's worth of salary (or more) just for unsubstantiated bragging rights.
Anyhow, this brings me back to where I started, which is that I just don't understand my fellow humans. A great deal of their behavior is frankly baffling to me. Given how poorly I fit in with my blood relatives -- "black sheep of the family" doesn't even come close to describing it -- I've wondered for years if I might be a changeling. The problem with that hypothesis is that I look exactly like my dad, so any contention that I'm not really his son is doomed to be shipwrecked on the rocks of hard evidence.
And like I said, it's not that I think my own view of the world is sacrosanct, or something. I'm sure I'm just as weird as the next guy. It's just that the ways I'm weird seem to be pretty different from the ways a lot of people are weird.
So maybe I shouldn't point fingers. Other folks are weird; I'm weirdly weird. Weird to the weirdth power. This means that people are probably as mystified by my behavior as I am by theirs, which I guess is only fair.
