Grace under pressure

In the 1992 Winter Olympics, there was an eighteen-year-old French figure skater named Laëtitia Hubert.  She was a wonderful skater, even by the stratospheric standards of the Olympics; she'd earned a silver medal at the French National Championships that year.  But 1992 was a year of hyperfocus, especially on the women's figure skating -- when there were such famous (and/or infamous) names as Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya Harding, Kristi Yamaguchi, Midori Ito, and Surya Bonaly competing.

What I remember best, though, is what happened to Laëtitia Hubert.  She went into the Short Program as a virtual unknown to just about everyone watching -- and skated a near-perfect program, rocketing her up to fifth place overall.  From her reaction afterward it seemed like she was more shocked at her fantastic performance than anyone.  It was one of those situations we've all had, where the stars align and everything goes way more brilliantly than expected -- only this was with the world watching, at one of the most publicized events of an already emotionally-fraught Winter Olympics.

This, of course, catapulted Hubert into competition with the Big Names.  She went into the Long Program up against skaters of world-wide fame.  And there, unlike the pure joy she showed during the Short Program, you could see the anxiety in her face even before she stated.

She completely fell apart.  She had four disastrous falls, and various other stumbles and missteps.  It is the one and only time I've ever seen the camera cut away from an athlete mid-performance -- as if even the media couldn't bear to watch.  She dropped to, and ended at, fifteenth place overall.

It was simply awful to watch.  I've always hated seeing people fail at something; witnessing embarrassing situations is almost physically painful to me.  I don't really follow the Olympics (or sports in general), but over thirty years later, I still remember that night.  (To be fair to Hubert -- and to end the story on a happy note -- she went on to have a successful career as a competitive skater, earning medals at several national and international events, and in fact in 1997 achieved a gold medal at the Trophée Lalique competition, bumping Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski into second place.)

I always think of Laëtitia Hubert whenever I think of the phenomenon of "choking under pressure."  It's a response that has been studied extensively by psychologists.  In fact, way back in 1908 a pair of psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson, noted the peculiar relationship between pressure and performance in what is now called the Yerkes-Dodson curve; performance improves with increasing pressure (what Yerkes and Dodson called "mental and physiological arousal"), but only up to a point.  Too much pressure, and performance tanks.  There have been a number of reasons suggested for this effect, one of which is that it's related to the level of a group of chemicals in the blood called glucocorticoids.  The level of glucocorticoids in a person's blood has been shown to be positively correlated with long-term memory formation -- but just as with Yerkes-Dodson, only up to a point.  When the levels get too high, memory formation and retention crumbles.  And glucocorticoid production has been found to rise in situations that have four characteristics -- those that are novel, unpredictable, contain social or emotional risks, and/or are largely outside of our capacity to control outcomes.

Which sounds like a pretty good description of the Olympics to me.

What's still mysterious about the Yerkes-Dodson curve, and the phenomenon of choking under pressure in general, is how it evolved.  How can a sudden drop in performance when the stress increases be selected for?  Seems like the more stressful and risky the situation, the better you should do.  You'd think the individuals who did choke when things got dangerous would be weeded out by (for example) hungry lions.

But what is curious -- and what brings the topic up today -- is that a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that humans aren't the only ones who choke under pressure.

So do monkeys.

In a clever set of experiments led by Adam Smoulder of Carnegie Mellon University, researchers found that giving monkeys a scaled set of rewards for completing tasks showed a positive correlation between reward level and performance, until they got to the point where success at a difficult task resulted in a huge payoff.  And just like with humans, at that point, the monkeys' performance fell apart.

The authors describe the experiments as follows:

Monkeys initiated trials by placing their hand so that a cursor (red circle) fell within the start target (pale blue circle).  The reach target then appeared (gray circle with orange shape) at one of two (Monkeys N and F) or eight (Monkey E) potential locations (dashed circles), where the inscribed shape’s form (Monkey N) or color (Monkeys F and E) indicated the potential reward available for a successful reach.  After a short, variable delay period, the start target vanished, cueing the animal to reach the peripheral target.  The animals had to quickly move the cursor into the reach target and hold for 400 ms before receiving the cued reward.

And when the color (or shape) cueing the level of the reward got to the highest level -- something that only occurred in five percent of the trials, so not only was the jackpot valuable, it was rare -- the monkeys' ability to succeed dropped through the floor.  What is most curious about this is that the effect didn't go away with practice; even the monkeys who had spent a lot of time mastering the skill still did poorly when the stakes were highest.

So the choking-under-pressure phenomenon isn't limited to humans, indicating it has a long evolutionary history.  This also suggests that it's not due to overthinking, something that I've heard as an explanation -- that our tendency to intellectualize gets in the way.  That always seemed to make some sense to me, given my experience with musical performance and stage fright.  My capacity for screwing up on stage always seemed to be (1) unrelated to how much I'd practiced a piece of music once I'd passed a certain level of familiarity with it, and (2) directly connected to my own awareness of how nervous I was.  I did eventually get over the worst of my stage fright, mostly from just doing it again and again without spontaneously bursting into flame.  But I definitely still have moments when I think, "Oh, no, we're gonna play 'Reel St. Antoine' next and it's really hard and I'm gonna fuck it up AAAAUUUGGGH," and sure enough, that's when I would fuck it up.  Those moments when I somehow prevented my brain from going into overthink-mode, and just enjoyed the music, were far more likely to go well, regardless of the difficulty of the piece.

 

One of my more nerve-wracking performances -- a duet with the amazing fiddler Deb Rifkin on a dizzyingly fast medley of Balkan dance tunes, in front of an audience of other musicians, including some big names (like the incomparable Bruce Molsky).  I have to add that (1) I didn't choke, and (2) Bruce, who may be famous but is also an awfully nice guy, came up afterward and told us how great we sounded.  I still haven't quite recovered from the high of that moment.

As an aside, a suggestion by a friend -- to take a shot of scotch before performing -- did not work.  Alcohol doesn't make me less nervous, it just makes me sloppier.  I have heard about professional musicians taking beta blockers before performing, but that's always seemed to me to be a little dicey, given that the mechanism by which beta blockers decrease anxiety is unknown, as is their long-term effects.  Also, I've heard more than one musician describe the playing of a performer on beta blockers as "soulless," as if the reduction in stress also takes away some of the intensity of emotional content we try to express in our playing.

Be that as it may, it's hard to imagine that a monkey's choking under pressure is due to the same kind of overthinking we tend to do.  They're smart animals, no question about it, but I've never thought of them as having the capacity for intellectualizing a situation we have (for better or worse).  So unless I'm wrong about that, and there's more self-reflection going on inside the monkey brain than I realize, there's something else going on here.

So that's our bit of curious psychological research of the day.  Monkeys also choke under pressure.  Now, it'd be nice to find a way to manage it that doesn't involve taking a mood-altering medication.  For me, it took years of exposure therapy to manage my stage fright, and I still have bouts of it sometimes even so.  It may be an evolutionarily-derived response that has a long history, and presumably some sort of beneficial function, but it certainly can be unpleasant at times.

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Mystic mountain

The brilliant composer Alan Hovhaness's haunting second symphony is called Mysterious Mountain -- named, he said, because "mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man's attempt to know God."  Having spent a lot of time in my twenties and thirties hiking in Washington State's Olympic and Cascade Ranges, I can attest to the fact that there's something otherworldly about the high peaks.  Subject to rapid and extreme weather changes, deep snowfall in the winter, and -- in some places -- having terrain so steep that no human has ever set foot there, it's no real wonder our ancestors revered mountains as the abode of the gods.

Hovhaness's symphony -- which I'm listening to as I write this -- captures that beautifully.  And consider how many stories of the fantastical are set in the mountains.  From Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth to Tolkien's Misty Mountains and Mines of Moria, the wild highlands (and what's beneath them) have a permanent place in our imagination.

Certain mountains have accrued, usually by virtue of their size, scale, or placement, more than the usual amount of awe.  Everest (of course), Denali, Mount Olympus, Vesuvius, Etna, Fujiyama, Mount Rainier, Kilimanjaro, Mount Shasta.  The last-mentioned has so many legends attached to it that the subject has its own Wikipedia page.  But none of the tales centering on Shasta has raised as many eyebrows amongst the modern aficionados of the paranormal as the strange story of J. C. Brown.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michael Zanger, Sunrise on Mount Shasta, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Brown was a British prospector, who in the early part of the twentieth century had been hired by the Lord Cowdray Mining Company of England to look for gold and other precious metals in northern California, which at the time was thousands of square miles of trackless and forested wilderness.  In 1904, Brown said, he was hiking on Mount Shasta, and discovered a cave.  Caves in the Cascades -- many of them lava tubes -- are not uncommon; two of my novels, Signal to Noise and Kill Switch (the latter is out of print, but hopefully will be back soon), feature unsuspecting people making discoveries in caves in the Cascades, near the Three Sisters and Mount Stuart, respectively.

Brown's cave, though, was different -- or so he said.  It was eleven miles long, and led into three chambers containing a king's ransom of gold, as well as 27 skeletons that looked human but were as much as three and a half meters tall.

Brown tried to drum up some interest in his story, but most people scoffed.  He apparently frequented bars in Sacramento and "told anyone who would listen."  But then a different crowd got involved, and suddenly he found his tale falling on receptive ears.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia might recall a post I did last year about Lemuria, which is kind of the Indian Ocean's answer to Atlantis.  Well, the occultists just loved Lemuria, especially the Skeptophilia frequent flyer Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy.  So in the 1920s, there was a sudden interest in vanished continents, as well as speculation about where all the inhabitants had gone when their homes sank beneath the waves.  ("They all drowned" was apparently not an acceptable answer.)

And one group said the Lemurians, who were quasi-angelic beings of huge stature and great intelligence, had vanished into underground lairs beneath the mountains.

In 1931, noted wingnut and prominent Rosicrucian -- but I repeat myself -- Harvey Spencer Lewis, using the pseudonym Wishar S[penley] Cerve (get it?  It's an anagram, sneaky sneaky), published a book called Lemuria, The Lost Continent of the Pacific (yes, I know Lemuria was supposed to be in the Indian Ocean; we haven't cared about facts so far, so why start now?) in which he claimed that the main home of the displaced Lemurians was a cave complex underneath Mount Shasta.  J. C. Brown read about this and said, more or less, "See?  I toldja so!"

And, astonishingly, people didn't think to ask (1) why no one had seen any Lemurians until now, and (2) why, if there was a cave with jewels and gold underneath the mountain, Brown hadn't gone back to get some of the goodies himself in the intervening almost-three decades.  Instead, they were like, "Hell yeah!  Sign me up!", and before you knew it Brown had eighty people volunteering to help him go back to his cave, which he said he could relocate with no difficulty.

There was a six-week planning period during which the volunteers got outfitted and prepared.  An interesting point here -- the relevance of which will become clear in a moment -- is that no one gave Brown any money; he'd made it clear he couldn't afford to equip anyone, so people were responsible for their own gear, lodging, food, and so on.  He was apparently enthusiastic that finally, finally, someone was listening to him, and he'd have a chance to go back to Shasta and prove all the scoffers wrong.

Then the day of the expedition arrived -- and Brown failed to show.

He was never seen or heard from again.

The June 19, 1934 front page of the Stockton Evening and Sunday Record [Image is in the Public Domain]

People seemed more concerned than miffed at Brown's disappearance.  Since, as I mentioned, Brown himself hadn't profited from the lead-up to the planned trek, there were no accusations that he'd swindled anyone.  A police report was filed, a search initiated -- but no trace of Brown was ever found.  It was as if he'd suddenly evaporated.

The superstitious speculated that the Lemurians (or their human agents) had done away with Brown because he was the only one who knew where the entrance to the cave was, and had to be stopped before he gave away the game.  The more pragmatic said that Brown had successfully painted himself into a corner with his tall tales, and couldn't face leading eighty people into the wilderness only to find bupkis.  The truth is, we don't know what happened to him, although being someone who generally casts a suspicious side-eye at claims of the supernatural, I'm a lot more likely to give credence to the latter than the former.  

I have to say, though, that it's pretty odd that the guy had hung around the area for thirty years saying, "You've got to come see this crazy cave I found!  It's amazing!  I'll show it to you!" and then when people finally said, "Okay," he noped his way right into the ether.

And weird stories about Mount Shasta and the Lemurians continue, lo unto this very day; it's no surprise that the main "power center" of the August 17, 1987 Harmonic Convergence, during which the planets were supposed to align and cause a "resonance" which would cause "a great shift in the earth’s energy from warlike to peaceful," was on Mount Shasta.

It's even less surprising that ever since August 18, 1987, people have gone on killing each other just like before.

So that's our strange tale for the day.  Now that Hovhaness's Mysterious Mountain is finishing up, I might cue up Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony, and Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Lake in the Mountains.  May as well keep the theme going for a while.

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The edges of knowledge

The brilliant British astrophysicist Becky Smethurst said, "The cutting edge of science is where all the unknowns are."  And far from being a bad thing, this is exciting.  When a scientist lands on something truly perplexing, that opens up fresh avenues for inquiry -- and, potentially, the discovery of something entirely new.

That's the situation we're in with our understanding of the evolution of the early universe.

You probably know that when you look out into space, you're looking back into time.  Light is the fastest information carrier we know of, and it travels at... well, the speed of light, just shy of three hundred thousand kilometers per second.  The farther away something is, the greater the distance the light had to cross to get to your eyes, so what you're seeing is an image of it when the light left its surface.  The Sun is a little over eight light minutes away; so if the Sun were to vanish -- not a likely eventuality, fortunately -- we would have no way to know it for eight minutes.  The nearest star other than the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away; the ever-intriguing star Betelgeuse, which I am so hoping goes supernova in my lifetime, is 642 light years away, so it might have blown up five hundred years ago and we'd still have another 142 years to wait for the information to get here.

This is true even of close objects, of course.  You never see anything as it is; you always see it as it was.  Because right now my sleeping puppy is a little closer to me than the rocking chair, I'm seeing the chair a little further in the past than I'm seeing him.  But the fact remains, neither of those images are of the instantaneous present; they're ghostly traces, launched at me by light reflecting off their surfaces a minuscule fraction of a second ago.

Now that we have a new and extremely powerful tool for collecting light -- the James Webb Space Telescope -- we have a way of looking at even fainter, more distant stars and galaxies.  And as Becky Smethurst put it, "In the past four years, JWST has been taking everything that we thought we knew about the early universe, and how galaxies evolve, and chucking it straight out of the window."

In a wonderful video that you all should watch, she identifies three discoveries JWST has made about the most distant reaches of the universe that still have yet to be explained: the fact that there are many more large, bright galaxies than our current model would predict are possible; that there is a much larger amount of heavy elements than expected; and the weird features called "little red dots" -- compact assemblages of cooler red stars that exhibit a strange spectrum of light and evidence of ionized hydrogen, something you generally only see in the vicinity hot, massive stars.

Well, she might have to add another one to the list.  Using data from LOFAR (the Low Frequency Array), a radio telescope array in Europe, astrophysicists have found bubbles of electromagnetic radiation surrounding some of the most distant galaxies, on the order of ten billion light years away.  This means we're seeing these galaxies (and their bubbles) when the universe was only one-quarter of its current age.  These radio emissions seem to be coming from a halo of highly-charged particles between, and surrounding, galaxy clusters, some of the largest structures ever studied.

[Image credit: Chandra X-ray Center (X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; Radio: ASTRON/LOFAR; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk)

"It's as if we've discovered a vast cosmic ocean, where entire galaxy clusters are constantly immersed in high-energy particles," said astrophysicist Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo of the Université de Montréal, who led the study.  "Galaxies appear to have been infused with these particles, and the electromagnetic radiation they emit, for billions of years longer than we realized...  We are just scratching the surface of how energetic the early Universe really was.  This discovery gives us a new window into how galaxy clusters grow and evolve, driven by both black holes and high-energy particle physics."

Every once in a while I'd have a student tell me, in some disdain, "I don't know why we have to learn science when it could all be proven wrong tomorrow."  My response to that is that science's ability to self-correct is a strength, not a weakness.  How is desperately hanging on to your prior understanding when you're presented with new evidence a good thing?   People like to be sure of everything, but really, are we ever?  Nothing is ever absolutely settled; we sometimes kid ourselves that we've found The Answer, but that's honestly a response born of a combination of insecurity and the desire not to think about the matter any more.

Richard Feynman, in his wonderful book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, summarized this brilliantly:

There is no learning without having to pose a question.  And a question requires doubt.  People search for certainty.  But there is no certainty.  People are terrified — how can you live and not know?  It is not odd at all.  You only think you know, as a matter of fact.  And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don't know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things.  It is possible to live and not know.

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News from Afar

I've written here before about the fact that the continents are in motion, something that is only not staggering because we've all known about it since ninth grade Earth Science class.  You can easily see why it took so long to accept.  First, the motion is so slow that it was, for most of human history, beyond the limitations of the technology available at the time to measure directly.  Second, it's just hard to imagine.

Continents?  Moving in solid rock?  What?

But move they do, and it's because if you go down far enough, the rock isn't solid.  Get into the upper mantle, and it's the consistency of taffy, so it flows, pushed by subterranean convection currents.  Those currents create drag forces on the undersides of the tectonic plates, shifting them around.  Although this is an oversimplification, in general, there are three ways that plates can move relative to each other:

• Convergent zones, where plates come together.  When thin, brittle oceanic plates are pushed toward each other, one usually bends and slides under the other at a thrust fault or subduction zone; the subducted plate and the sediment riding on it eventually melt, and the hot, water-rich magma rises to form chains of volcanoes parallel to the fault.  Examples are the Japan Trench and the Sumatra Trench.  When an oceanic plate collides with a thick, cold continental plate, you still get volcanoes boring their way up through the continent -- this is the origin of the Cascade Range.  If it's two continental plates colliding, the rock simply crumples up to form mountains -- such as what is happening in the Alps and Himalayas,
• Divergent zones, where plates move apart.  This is what's happening along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and is why the island of Iceland is volcanic -- the eastern and western halves of the island are moving apart, and new basaltic lave bubbling up to fill the gap.

A photograph I took at Meradalir Volcano in Iceland, August 2022

• Strike-slip faults, or transform faults, which occur when plates slide in opposite directions parallel to the fault.  Examples are the San Andreas, Hayward, and Elsinore Faults in California, and the Alpine Fault in New Zealand.

All of these movements can significantly transform the shapes and positions of the continents -- you probably know that 250 million years ago, most of the Earth's land masses were assembled into a giant supercontinent (Pangaea), and the seas into a massive superocean (Panthalassa), with huge consequences to the climate.  Fascinating to realize, though, that Pangaea was only the most recent of the supercontinents; geologists believe that the same lumping-it-all-together occurred at least three or four times before then.

And the reverse can happen, too, when a divergent zone forms underneath a continent, and it tears the land mass in two.  In fact, this is the reason the topic comes up today; a paper last week in Nature Geoscience about the Afar Triple Junction, the point where three faults meet at one point (the Red Sea Rift, the Aden Ridge, and the East African Rift).  Geologists have found that underneath this region, there's a mantle plume -- an upwelling of very hot magma -- that is pulsing like a giant beating heart, driving convection that will eventually tear Africa in two, shearing off a chunk from Ethiopia to Mozambique and driving it east into the Indian Ocean.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Val Rime, Tectonic African-Arabian Rift System, CC BY-SA 4.0]

"We have found that the evolution of deep mantle upwellings is intimately tied to the motion of the plates above," said Derek Keir, of the University of Southampton, who co-authored the study.  "This has profound implications for how we interpret surface volcanism, earthquake activity, and the process of continental breakup...  The work shows that deep mantle upwellings can flow beneath the base of tectonic plates and help to focus volcanic activity to where the tectonic plate is thinnest.  Follow on research includes understanding how and at what rate mantle flow occurs beneath plates."

The formation of a new sea -- and the consequent turning of much of east Africa into an island -- isn't exactly what I'd call "imminent;" it's predicted that the Red Sea will breach the Afar Highlands and flood the lowest points of the rift (much of which is already below sea level) in something like five million years.  The region will be highly tectonically active throughout the process, however, and there'll be enough volcanoes and earthquakes in the meantime to keep us interested.

It's a good reminder that although mountains and oceans have been a symbol of something eternal and unchanging, in reality everything is in flux.  It recalls to mind the lines from Percy Shelley's evocative poem "Mont Blanc," which seems a fitting way to end:

Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destin’d path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shatter’d stand; the rocks, drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaim’d.  The dwelling-place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost.  The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,
And their place is not known.  Below, vast caves
Shine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam,
Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling
Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,
The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever
Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,
Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.

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The Vril contagion

You ready for a twisted tale?

In 1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton published a novel called The Coming Race.  The plot is pretty wild, considering that science fiction/fantasy only really took off as a genre in the early twentieth century.  The story revolves around a young wealthy man who goes exploring with a friend, and they come upon what appears to be an abandoned mine shaft.  They descend into the opening using a rope, but the rope snaps and the two men fall.  The friend is killed; the narrator is stunned but largely uninjured, and finds himself in a complex of underground caves.

After blundering about for a while, he discovers -- or, more accurately, is discovered by -- a angelic humanoid who turns out to be (1) superintelligent, and (2) telepathic.  In short order they establish communication with each other.  The narrator learns that the people who live down in the caves belong to a race called the Vril-ya, that there are twelve thousand of them, and that they have harnessed an "all-permeating etheric fluid" called Vril that gives them their extraordinary powers.  The end of the story is rather predictable (although it certainly was innovative for its time).  The narrator falls in love with the Guide's daughter, Zee.  While the Guide was okay with the narrator living down there, he couldn't condone any kind of Vril-ya/human hanky-panky, so he orders his son Taë to kill the narrator.  Taë conspires to free the narrator, and Zee leads him to a tunnel that goes back to the surface.  But Zee warns him before he escapes to safety that it's only a matter of time before the Vril-ya run out of space and resources, and at that point they'll come above ground themselves -- with the purpose of conquering the surface of the planet.

The novel did quite well, and was even adapted into a successful stage play.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The whole thing reminds me of three other subterranean races -- H. G. Wells's Morlocks (from The Time Machine), the people of K'n-yan in the terrifying story by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop called "The Mound," and of course the Silurians from Doctor Who.  ("The Mound" is similar enough to Bulwer-Lytton's story that I have to wonder if the latter was the former's inspiration; but in the Lovecraft/Bishop story the narrator's lover meets with a gruesome fate because of her betrayal, because Lovecraft didn't even do equivocal endings, much less happy ones.)

Okay, so we have a strange and atmospheric novel by a nineteenth-century British author, which so far is only mildly interesting.  But of course the story doesn't end there.

Shortly after The Coming Race's publication, Bulwer-Lytton was shocked to find out that a significant number of people who read it apparently didn't know it was a work of fiction.  The first bunch were the members of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, one of the sub-branches of the Rosicrucians.  The Rosicrucians were an esoteric sect that, like many others, fell victim to squabbling and infighting that led to schisms, to the extent that at one point the number of Rosicrucian sects exceeded the number of actual Rosicrucians.  But this particular splinter group was going strong in the 1870s, and appointed Bulwer-Lytton as its "Grand Patron."  Bulwer-Lytton was horrified, and said, more or less, "But... look!  I made it all up!  See?  It says 'fiction' right here on the spine of the book!"  This, predictably, had zero effect on the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, who if they had a firm grasp on reality probably wouldn't have been Rosicrucians in the first place.

Then the whole concept of Vril got picked up and popularized by the infamous Madame Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy.  Blavatsky just loved the idea of Vril, and said that it was a real magical force that allowed for superior people to do supernatural stuff.  The underground people from Bulwer-Lytton's novel were real, too, she said; they were spiritual guides who you could get in touch with if you purchased and read all of her books and then tried hard enough.  Shortly afterward, the Scottish loony William Scott-Elliot got on board with the claim that the people of Atlantis had known all about Vril, and used it to power their aircraft.  Oh, and the Atlanteans were the ancestors of the Vril-ya, who were driven underground when Atlantis was destroyed.

Then like some weird contagion, the idea was picked up by the Thule Society, a proto-Nazi group of German occultists that flourished in Münich between World War I and World War II.  (Members included Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Julius Lehmann, Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart, and Karl Harrer.)  While the Thule Society -- at least what was left of them -- was disbanded after the end of World War II, the Vril concept, and its connection to a superior, super-powerful race, persists to this day in neo-Nazi circles, where it's been wound together with ideas gleaned from Norse mythology to create a poisonous, if bizarre, amalgam.

So Edward Bulwer-Lytton created a concept that, on one hand, succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and on the other generated a juggernaut that pretty much obliterated his original novel.  What's wryly amusing is that this isn't the only time he wrote something that people took literally; his story The Haunted and the Haunters bears an uncanny resemblance to the legend of 50 Berkeley Square, the "most haunted house in London," which still figures prominently on "ghost walks" and antiquarian tours of the city.

Even though as a novelist, I'm a little envious of his success -- I'd be thrilled if one of my books was still being talked about a century and a half later -- I'm forced to the conclusion that Bulwer-Lytton really should have been more careful about what he wrote into his stories.

Anyhow, what we have is a fictional concept about a fictional substance utilized by a fictional race, as described in a work of fiction (not to belabor the point unduly), which nonetheless inspired numerous people over the following 150 years to believe that it was one hundred percent true.  For me, it just reinforces my sense that I have no idea what makes most people tick.  It should have just taken someone saying, "Hey, lookit, the whole thing comes from a novel, here's a copy, check it out," for the Vril-believers to say, "Ha!  Wouldja look at that?  What a goober I am," and then to run off and believe something completely different and hopefully more plausible.

But even after pretty much everyone knew that Bulwer-Lytton had made the whole thing up, there were -- and still are -- people who think it's all real.

So there you have it.  Underground angels, telepathy, and Vril.  Me, I'm dubious, but if at some point the Vril-ya start coming up out of mine shafts and want to take over the world, I guess I'll have to admit I was wrong.  On the other hand, if they do, I'm all for giving them carte blanche.  The Vril-ya couldn't do much worse than the set of incompetent, amoral wingnuts we currently have in charge.

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The collapse

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the spike in atmospheric oxygen concentration -- by some estimates, rising to 35% -- during the Carboniferous Period, triggered by explosive growth of forests, and allowing arthropods like insects, arachnids, and millipedes to grow to enormous sixes.

The good times, though (for them at least), were not to last.  Around three hundred million years ago, there was a sudden drop in oxygen and rise in carbon dioxide.  This triggered rapid climatic shifts that resulted in the Late Carboniferous Rain Forest Collapse, which saw a major alteration from the swamp-dwelling plants and animals at the height of the period to species that could tolerate the dry heat that was to persist throughout the next period, the Permian.  (This set up the rise of reptiles, which would see their peak in the dinosaurs of the Mesozoic.)

Artist's depiction of the mid-Carboniferous swamps (ca. 1887) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The source of the excess carbon dioxide was very likely volcanic.  Besides the fact that lava can contain dissolved gases (mostly carbon and sulfur dioxide), the heat of the eruptions may have caused the oxidation of the plentiful limestone and coal deposits formed during the earlier lush, wet part of the period -- a precursor of the much bigger disaster that was in store fifty million years later, when at the end of the Permian, the Siberian Traps erupted and tore through a huge amount of the sequestered carbon, causing widespread global anoxia and climate change, and the largest mass extinction ever.

By some estimates, ninety percent of life on Earth died.

But the rain forest collapse at the end of the Carboniferous was bad enough.  A study that came out this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found the anoxia/hypoxia hit the oceans the hardest, where the oxygen levels rapidly dropped by between four and twelve percent, with a commensurate rise in dissolved carbon dioxide.  When carbon dioxide dissolves in water, it produces a weak acid -- carbonic acid -- lowering the pH.  Organisms that make their shells out of calcium carbonate, like mollusks, brachiopods, and corals, literally dissolved.

You ready for the kicker?

The study's estimate of the rate of carbon dioxide release during the Late Carboniferous Rain Forest Collapse is a hundred times smaller than the rate we're putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere today through burning fossil fuels.

"This is a huge discovery, because how do you take an ocean sitting under an atmosphere with much more oxygen than today and permit this?" said Isabel Montañez of the University of California - Davis, senior author of the study.  "The message for us is, 'Don't be so sure that we can't do this again with our current human-driven release of carbon dioxide.'"

The problem is, the current administration is in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry, and is doing their level best to pretend this isn't happening, and to discredit anyone who says it is.  Worse, actually; they've cancelled funding for any scientific research about climate.

Because apparently "la la la la la la not listening" is now considered wise political policy.  This, despite warning signals like the eastern half of the United States sweltering this past week under the most extreme heat wave we've had in over fifty years.

So I'm expecting studies like the one released this week by Montañez et al. to receive exactly zero attention from the people who actually could work toward addressing this situation.  It brings to mind a quote from Upton Sinclair, uttered almost a century ago: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

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The feral child

A point I've made before, but one I think is absolutely critical to skeptics, is that sometimes we simply don't have answers -- and are forced to admit that unless further information turns up, we might never have.

I get that it's intensely frustrating.  It seems to be hardwired into our brains that some conclusion, any conclusion, is better than remaining in doubt.  I recall once being asked by a student if I thought there was an afterlife.  My answer was, "I don't know."

"But what do you think?" the student said.

"I don't think anything.  The information we have from phenomena like near-death experiences is inconclusive.  And no one comes back to report from an actual death experience.  I'll find out for sure eventually, but at the moment, I don't have enough evidence to decide one way or the other.  So the answer is 'I don't know.'"

This obviously irritated the hell out of the student, and he said, "But you must have an opinion."

"Why?" I answered.  "If you want my opinion, it's that the world could do with a great many fewer opinions and a great many more facts."

The problem is, of course, that the intolerance for frustration stemming from a desperation to have the matter settled often drives us to unsupported speculation -- and these meanderings often end up passed along as fact.  (How many different The Jack the Ripper Mystery Solved! books have been written?  All equally confident, but all with different solutions?)  As a less-known but equally fascinating (and, reassuringly, less violent) example, let's consider the strange case of the Wild Boy of Aveyron.

In 1797, near the town of Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance in Aveyron département in southern France, three hunters came upon a boy of about nine.  He was completely naked, and ran from them, but they trapped him when he climbed a tree.  After capturing him -- and finding he couldn't (or wouldn't) speak, but didn't seem dangerous -- they brought him into the town, where he was taken in by an elderly widow who fed and clothed him.

Within a week, he disappeared -- leaving his clothes behind.

Over the next two years, he was spotted periodically in the woods, but always eluded capture.  Then -- in January of 1800 -- he came out of the forest on his own.  He eventually ended up in an orphanage in Rodez.  Upon examination, psychiatrist Philippe Pinel suggested he was mentally disabled, probably from birth; scars on his body suggested he'd spent most of his childhood in the wilderness.

Of course, the question arose of how a small child could survive in the forest, even in the relatively temperate south of France.  How he didn't die of exposure, from starvation, or from being attacked and eaten by wild animals, was a significant mystery.  Were his scars from the cuts and scrapes of living outdoors naked -- or were they from early abuse?  The physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who worked extensively with the boy (whom he christened "Victor") believed that the evidence supported that Victor had "lived in an absolute solitude from his fourth or fifth almost to his twelfth year, which is the age he may have been when he was taken in the Caune woods."

Lithograph of Victor of Aveyron, ca. 1800 [Image is in the Public Domain]

At this period, France was just emerging from the chaos and horror of the Reign of Terror, and the question was raised of whether he was a child whose parents had been imprisoned or executed.  Several couples were located in the region who had sons of the right age that had gone missing while they (the parents) were in jail -- but none of them recognized Victor.

Another curious twist is that one prominent philosophy amongst the intelligentsia at the time was the idea of the "Noble Savage" -- that taken away from the noise and filth and crowds of the city, placed in the tranquility of the forests and glades, humans would revert to some sort of pre-Adam-and-Eve-eating-the-apple blissful state of oneness with nature.  People like the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau tended to have a rather optimistic -- some might say unwarrantedly optimistic -- view of the potential of humanity and the natural world.  (Alfred Lord Tennyson's observation that "Nature is red in tooth and claw" came later.)  So Victor was studied intensively to see if he showed any signs of Edenic grace and innocence.

Not so much, it turned out.  He still didn't like wearing clothes -- although consented to do so when it was cold -- and was fond of doing what just about all teenage boys do at least once a day.  Other than being mute, and having peculiar eating habits (raw vegetables were by far his favorite food), he didn't seem to exhibit any sort of before-the-Fall chastity and sinlessness.  He did show some signs of what we would now probably classify as autistic behavior -- rocking back and forth or hugging himself when stressed -- and there's been speculation that this, along with his lack of speech, may have been why he was abandoned in the first place.

Victor never learned to speak, other than the words lait ("milk") and oh, Dieu ("oh, God").  But he was never violent, and in fact seemed predisposed to being gentle and caring.  When he was around eighteen, he went to stay with a Madame Guérin, with whom he lived for the rest of his life.  And when Madame Guérin's husband died, and she was sitting at her dinner table weeping, Victor startled her by going up and putting his arms around her and holding her while she cried.

Victor of Aveyron died in 1828 of pneumonia, at the age of somewhere around forty, and took to his grave whatever he knew about his origins.

The lack of information here is what facilitates wild speculation.  Much has been written about Victor -- some claiming that he was below average intelligence, others that he was of ordinary intelligence but autistic, others still that he was basically a normal young man and his early childhood trauma led him to hide the fact that he understood everything people were saying (and, perhaps, could speak as well, but simply refused to do so).

The truth, of course, is that we don't know who Victor was, what his mental capacity was, or where he came from.  There just isn't enough in the way of hard data, despite the extensive studies of the young man done by Itard and others.  So the correct conclusion is not to come to a conclusion at all.

It's frustrating, especially given such an intriguing story, but that's where we have to leave it.

Like I said, I get the human drive to understand, and how a mystery can nibble at your brain, keeping you puzzling over it.  And this can be a very good thing; two examples I can think of, from my own field of linguistics, that were finally solved due to someone's dogged tenacity and absolute refusal to give up are Jean-François Champollion's decoding of Egyptian hieroglyphics and the decipherment of the Linear B script of Crete by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

But sometimes -- there simply isn't enough information.  And at that point, we have to let it go, and hope that more turns up.

In the case of Victor of Aveyron, though, that's pretty unlikely.  So we're left with a mystery: a feral child showed up in late eighteenth-century France, eventually joined society (more or less), grew up, and finally died, and there is probably no way we'll ever know more.  Victor is, and shall almost certainly remain, a cipher.

However confounding that is to our natural intellectual curiosity.

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