Back to Africa

I was kind of tickled, when I got my "23 & Me" results back a couple of years ago, to find out that I had 284 identified Neanderthal markers, identifying me as having more Neanderthal ancestry than 60% of the samples tested.

The reason I was happy about this is not because it gave me an explanation for why I like my steaks rare and have a general aversion to wearing clothes.  It was more because I find the Neanderthals a fascinating bunch.  Far from the low-intelligence cave trolls a lot of us picture them as -- witness the use of their name as an insult -- by the end they actually had larger brains than your average modern Homo sapiens.  They had culture; they anointed and buried their dead, seem to have had music (if the archaeologists are correct about the origin of the Divje Babe flute), and might even have had language -- they had the same variant of the FOX-P2 gene that we do, which is instrumental to our ability to understand and produce spoken language.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Clemens Vasters, Neanderthal in a business suit, CC BY 2.0]

It also wasn't terribly surprising in my own case, as Europeans generally have more Neanderthal ancestry than any other group, and my test results showed me to be -- also unsurprising, given what I know of my family tree -- nearly 100% of European origin, mainly French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English.  The Neanderthals themselves are named after the Neander Valley of Germany, where archaeologists found the first fossils of the species (or subspecies, depending on who you believe).  So once it was determined that they had interbred with early modern Homo sapiens, their geographical distribution led to a (correct) surmise that Europeans would have more Neanderthal ancestry than other ethnic groups, for the same reason that southeast Asians and Native Australians have more Denisovan ancestry than the rest of us.

That's why a paper in Cell two weeks ago came as such a shock.  In it, a team led by Lu Chen of Princeton University found that a number of African ethnic groups, especially those in northern and western Africa, have a lot more Neanderthal ancestry than anyone realized.

Because it's still not as much as the Europeans have, and the African Neanderthal genes identified are variants usually found in Europe, the guess is that some of the European Homo sapiens/Neanderthal hybrids made their way across (or around) the Mediterranean in a "back-to-Africa" migration, injecting Neanderthal genes into groups that previously had little to no Neanderthal ancestry.

It also means that geneticists may be underestimating the number of Neanderthal markers in the rest of us.  Because those estimates were made using comparison between sample DNA and that of people thought to have no Neanderthal ancestry at all -- such as the Yoruba of Nigeria -- if those African groups did have ancestry that was the result of a back-to-Africa migration by European hybrids, then that revises the baseline upward.  The former estimates of 1.7-1.8% Neanderthal DNA for your average person of European descent might be on the low side.

"Our work highlights how humans and Neanderthals interacted for hundreds of thousands of years, with populations dispersing out of and back into Africa," said study co-author Joshua Akey in an interview with Science News.  "Remnants of Neanderthal DNA survive in every modern human population studied to date."

I find it fascinating how DNA is now being used to track relationships and migratory patterns not only of other animal species, but of humans.  And it's gotten pretty accurate.  It picked up my Ashkenazic ancestry, identifying it at 6% -- just about right based on my one great-great-grandfather, Solomon Meyer-Lévy of Dauendorf, Alsace, who emigrated from his birthplace and joined a small community of French-speaking Jews in Donaldsonville, Louisiana in around 1850.  The other interesting result in my own DNA that made sense was a smattering of Italian ancestry, undoubtedly because my father's paternal line ancestor, Jacques-Esprit Ariey-Bonnet, was born in a little town in the French Alps, quite close to the border of Italy.

So the amount we can learn about our own past from our genes is staggering, and I'm sure there are other surprises in store for us.  It informs us not only of our physical makeup but our history, a millions-of-years-long trail leading back to our most distant hominid ancestors on the savannas of Kenya and Tanzania.

Although it still doesn't explain the rare steaks and nudity thing.

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This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Death... with big, nasty, pointy teeth

Today I'm going to write about a piece of research that isn't controversial, or deeply thought-provoking, or politically relevant, but because it's just plain awesome.

It's from the realm of paleontology, and is about a gigantic carnivore, which is part of its appeal.  Have you noticed how the little-kid fascination with dinosaurs usually revolves around carnivorous ones like Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus rex?  They're seldom as impressed by herbivores like Pachycephalosaurus, which also has the disadvantage of meaning "thick-headed lizard," so it's kind of unimpressive right from the get-go.  Velociraptor, though?  "Swift hunter?"  Now that's cool.  You can bet that those wicked pack-hunters would never have put up with being given a humiliating name.  I bet if the paleontologists had decided to name them Brocchodentidorkosaurus ("buck-toothed dorky lizard"), the raptors would have eaten them for lunch, and that's even considering the fact that they've been extinct for seventy million years.

The dinosaurs, not the paleontologists.

But I digress.

The subject of today's post is a mammal called Simbakubwa kutokaafrika, which means "humongous lion from Africa" in Swahili (speaking of impressive names), even though it wasn't a lion at all.  It was a hyaenodont, a predatory group of mammals that are in Order Creodonta, a group only distantly related to modern Order Carnivora (i.e., cats, dogs, bears, weasels, seals, and a few other families).  The creodonts are an interesting group, at least to evolutionary biologists, because there's still a major argument going on regarding how to assemble their family tree.  Some paleontologists believe they're monophyletic -- all descended from a single common ancestor -- while others say they're polyphyletic, with different groups of creodonts coming from different ancestors that were further apart on the mammalian clade.

Whichever it is, they've now been shown through detailed skeletal analysis to have a closer connection to the bizarre pangolins than they do to today's carnivores -- yet another example of how common sense can lead to the wrong answer.

Reconstruction of a hyaenodont by Heinrich Harder [Image is in the Public Domain]

In any case, Simbakubwa was discovered recently by Duke University paleontologist Matt Borths, who was going through some fossils in the back rooms of the Nairobi National Museum when he found something that made him sit up and take notice:

The remains of a carnivorous mammal that was an estimated 1.2 meters tall at the shoulder, 2.4 meters from tip to tail, weighed an estimated five hundred kilograms, had canine teeth the size of bananas, and had three sets of incisors, two of which were big, nasty, and pointy.

That, my friends, is one serious carnivore.  That's a carnivore that could have turned your average African lion into an African lion meatloaf.

Simbakubwa is estimated to have lived around 23 million years ago, placing it in the early Miocene, but the creodonts as a group were apex carnivores for a lot longer than that.  They originated in the Paleocene (the epoch that began with the K-T extinction, 66 million years ago), and made it to the mid-Miocene (14 million years ago).  Modern(ish) true carnivores (i.e. Order Carnivora) first showed up 42 million years ago (the mid-Eocene epoch), and only reached Africa around 22 million years ago -- right around the time Simbakubwa was lumbering around the place.  So no wonder the true carnivores only began to diversify in Africa after the hyaenodonts were safely out of the way, eight million years later.

All of this highlights two things -- first, what amazing discoveries might be lurking on dusty museum shelves, forgotten and unstudied; and second, that we honestly don't know very much about what critters were out there in prehistoric times.  The conditions required for generating a fossil are thought to be mighty uncommon -- most animals don't leave any traces at all, only a few years after they die, so it's likely that the vast majority of the living things that have ever existed aren't represented in today's fossil record.

So the number of species we know about are far outnumbered by the ones we don't know about.  Meaning that as bizarre, fascinating, and wonderful as are the prehistoric animals we've classified, if we were to time-travel back to whatever epoch you choose, we'd find ones more bizarre still.  And that's even including a banana-fanged predator the size of a polar bear.

All of which puts me in mind of the last sentence of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, which seems a fitting way to end:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

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Monday's post, about the institutionalized sexism in scientific research, prompted me to decide that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Evelyn Fox Keller's brilliant biography of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism.

McClintock worked for years to prove her claim that bits of genetic material that she called transposons or transposable elements could move around in the genome, with the result of switching on or switching off genes.  Her research was largely ignored, mostly because of the attitudes toward female scientists back in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades during which she discovered transposition.  Her male colleagues laughingly labeled her claim "jumping genes" and forthwith forgot all about it.

Undeterred, McClintock kept at it, finally amassing such a mountain of evidence that she couldn't be ignored.  Other scientists, some willingly and some begrudgingly, replicated her experiments, and support finally fell in line behind her.  She was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine -- and remains to this day the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel in that category.

Her biography is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting, but in the end, the uplift wins -- her work demonstrates the power of perseverance and the delightful outcome of the protagonist winning in the end.  Keller's look at McClintock's life and personal struggles, and ultimate triumph, is a must-read for anyone interested in science -- or the role that sexism has played in scientific research.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Send in the clones

I'm not sure if it's heartening or discouraging to find out that the United States hasn't cornered the market on counterfactual lunacy.

I mean, that's the way it seems lately.  All I have to do is read the news -- something I've been trying not to do often, because it was having horrible effects on my mood -- and I see dozens of examples of people from my country who fervently believe stuff despite, or in some cases because of, there being no evidence whatsoever.

Or sometimes, even if there's powerful evidence supporting the opposing claim.  Amazing how squalling "fake news" has allowed people to resist even looking at opinions that they'd very much like not to be true.

But I guess people fall for loony claims the world over.  If I had any doubts of that, they were eradicated by a story sent to me by a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, which tells about how apparently there are a large number of people in Nigeria who think their president is an evil clone.

I'm not making this up.  President Muhammadu Buhari, who has been the leader of Nigeria since 2015, is gearing up for re-election in 2019, and this seems to have kicked into high gear a claim that Buhari isn't Buhari.  The fact that he was in London for treatment for an undisclosed illness last year was enough to convince a significant number of people that while he was overseas, Buhari was killed and swapped out for either a Sudanese lookalike named Jubril, or an evil laboratory-created clone who has nothing but wicked intent for the people of Nigeria.

President Muhammadu Buhari, or at least so he says [Image is in the Public Domain]

Of course, Buhari claims it's all nonsense.  Also of course, it's had no effect whatsoever.  "It’s the real me, I assure you,” Buhari said in a press conference last Sunday in Poland, where he was attending a United Nations climate conference.  "I will soon celebrate my 76th birthday and I will still go strong."

Which, you have to admit, is exactly what either a Sudanese duplicate or an evil superintelligent clone would say.

The flames were then fueled by Buhari's enemies, who had nothing to lose and a lot to gain by trashing Buhari's credibility.  Nnamdi Kanu, who belongs to a group called Indigenous People of Biafra, has trumpeted the claim on his pirate radio station, Radio Biafra.  And the more Kanu and Buhari's other rivals spread the rumor around, the harder it is for Buhari to say, "Oh, for fuck's sake, are you people serious?" and have anyone listen.

He's still in there swinging, though.  At his news conference, he said, "One of the questions that came up today in my meeting with Nigerians in Poland was on the issue of whether I’ve been cloned or not.  The ignorant rumors are not surprising — when I was away on medical vacation last year a lot of people hoped I was dead."

Well, hoping someone's dead is not really the same thing as thinking he's a laboratory-created clone.  But the fact is, Buhari hasn't really been all that popular, and he's been accused of giving favors to people of his own ethnic group (the Fulani) and ignoring the plight of other groups, especially Christian ones.  Worse, his detractors say he's turned a blind eye to the depredations of Boko Haram, which is still terrorizing the northern part of the country.  The economy has pretty much tanked, with estimates of the ranks of the unemployed up around the ten million mark.

So it's not like Buhari's rivals don't have ammunition enough for criticizing his rule.  Which is probably why there are no fewer than 79 people running in the election, which even exceeds the electoral chaos we typically have here in the United States.  The problem is, it's not like his opponents are squeaky-clean, either; one of the favorites in the election is former vice president Atiku Abubakar, whose motto seems to be "help people when it's expedient and kick 'em in the balls when it isn't."  Abubakar's reputation for the carrot-and-stick approach is evident in the fact that Olosegun Obasanjo, who was himself president of Nigeria from 1999 to 2007, went from saying "If I support Atiku for anything, God will not forgive me" in August and singing his praises last week.

Which makes perfect sense, considering Abubakar's likelihood of winning the election and his penchant for taking revenge on people who criticize him.

So the whole thing is a mess, and is not being helped by the wacky claims about Buhari, or Evil Clone of Buhari, or Jubril of Sudan, depending on which version you went for earlier.

And you know, maybe that would explain a lot about our own political mess.  These elected officials aren't really human beings.  They're holograms that have been sent in by a race of aliens determined to bring down our civilization by making our leaders appear to have lost their marbles.  The problem -- from the aliens' point of view, anyhow -- is that it doesn't seem to be working.  Every time some person in government says something completely outlandish, or idiotic, or outright false, a good third of Americans say, "Exactly right!  You tell 'em!"

So maybe it's my fellow citizens who are holograms.  I just don't know any more.  At this point, I'm ready to throw in the towel and welcome our Alien Overlords.  Can't be any worse that what we've been enduring.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker.  This book is, in my opinion, the most lucid and readable exposition of the evolutionary model ever written, and along the way takes down the arguments for Intelligent Design a piece at a time.  I realize Dawkins is a controversial figure, given his no-quarter-given approach to religious claims, but even if you don't accept the scientific model yourself, you owe it to yourself to see what the evolutionary biologists are actually saying.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Down the hole

By now, everyone has certainly heard that Donald Trump allegedly referred to a variety of Third-World countries, and the entire continent of Africa, as "shithole countries."

I append the word "allegedly" to this statement not because there's any particular doubt that this is how he looks at the world.  I'm just trying to be as even-handed as possible, given that Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina said yes, Trump said that, while Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia said no, he didn't.  Trump, of course, denies it categorically, but given that Trump could say something on-air in front of millions of viewers, and five minutes later state with a straight face that he never said it, and his diehard supporters would believe him both times, I'm not inclined to put him either in the "yes" or "no" column.

What I want to address here, though, is a response that I saw posted on social media shortly after the whole incident hit the media.  The initial post I saw showed photographs of slums in Nigeria and Haiti -- two of the particular "shitholes" Trump referred to -- with a text basically saying, "See, he was right."

Of course, the problem here is that if you're selective, you can do that with anywhere.  For example [all images in this post courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons with the exception of the last two, which were taken by me], take a look at the following:

Figure 1: The United States of America 

Or this one:

Figure 2: Also The United States of America 

Or this one:

Figure 3: Yup, This Is The United States Too

And before you get your dander up, I'm not using these to prove that the USA is a horrible place, only that if you cherry pick your data points, you can prove damn near anything.  (If you're curious, the first photo is from Detroit, the second from Camden, New Jersey, and the third from Rand, West Virginia.)

What really torqued me about the social media post, however, was one of the responses to it.  "Far as I've seen, it hasn't been proven that [Trump] actually said that," the comment went.  "But if he did, he's right."

It blows me away how quick people are to use some idiotic internet meme as incontrovertible support of what they already believed.  It's like taking confirmation bias and raising it to an art form.

But really, think about what that person is saying.  That the continent of Africa -- which is the size of the continental United States, China, India, and Europe combined -- can be lumped together under one derogatory epithet and summarily dismissed.  A continent that contains places like this:

Pretoria, South Africa

And this:

Point Lenana, Mount Kenya, Kenya

And this:

The Cape of Good Hope

And this:

Waterfalls in Angola

And has faces like this:

Woman from Gambia

Yes, I know there's terrible poverty and corruption in Africa.  The thing is, there's terrible poverty and corruption everywhere.  By looking at the United States as some kind of pinnacle -- and by claiming that what Trump and his cronies are doing is "making America great again" (merciful heavens, I am sick unto death of that phrase) -- you are ignoring both the beauty in other parts of the world and the problems we have right here in our own back yard.

So for cryin' in the sink, before you throw your opinion in with a guy who is an unashamed racist (yes, I said the word), try breaking out of your own comfortable little bubble of smug certainty and travel to some of these countries that Trump and his supporters have dismissed with a single word.  You see, I have.  I've been in places like Belize and Ecuador and Trinidad and Malaysia.  Yes, I saw poverty, and I saw some people in terrible living conditions.  But I also saw this:

Pacha Quindi, Ecuador

And this:

Fraser's Hill, Malaysia

So my advice: stop falling for comforting overgeneralizations.  Get up off your ass and travel to some of the "shithole countries," talk to the people who live there, and realize that the rest of the world is just as varied -- both in good and bad ways -- as the United States.  Listen to Mark Twain, who said, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

After that come back and we'll talk.

Abstinence-only failure

At what point do we admit that something is a failure, and stop supporting it with our time and money?

Because that time has come for abstinence-only sex education.  Actually, that time came and went a few years ago, when the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) published a fact sheet with the damning information that not only does it not decrease rates of teen pregnancy and STD transmission, that the states that pushed abstinence-only sex education had increased rates of both.  Additionally, SIECUS stated that:

In early November 2007, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy released Emerging Answers 2007, a report authored by Dr. Douglas Kirby, a leading sexual health researcher, discussing what programs work in preventing teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.  The report found strong evidence that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs do not have any impact on teen sexual behavior. 

The study found that no evidence to support the continued investment of public funds: 

“In sum, studies of abstinence programs have not produced sufficient evidence to justify their widespread dissemination…Only when strong evidence demonstrates that particular programs are effective should they be disseminated more widely.” 

The study also found that, to date, no abstinence-only-until-marriage program that is of the type to be eligible for funding by the federal government has been found in methodologically rigorous study to positively impact teen sexual behavior: 

“At present, there does not exist any strong evidence that any abstinence program delays the initiation of sex, hastens the return to abstinence, or reduces the number of sexual partners. In addition, there is strong evidence from multiple randomized trials demonstrating that some abstinence programs chosen for evaluation because they were believed to be promising actually had no impact on teen sexual behavior.”

$1.5 billion later, that's pretty unequivocal.  Our determination to stick with this obvious failure has to do with two things, I think; the desperation of some people to demonize sexual behavior and therefore legislate sexual morality, and the sunk-cost fallacy -- if we've already put a lot of money into something, we have to keep forging ahead out of some crazy sense that doing so will justify the amount of money we've already spent.

In other words, continue to blow money on a losing proposition because to admit defeat and reverse course would make it obvious that we've been wrong from the outset.

[image courtesy of photographer Bruce Blaus and the Wikimedia Commons]

In any case, the word is finally getting out that the only way to reduce the incidence of teen pregnancy is to have candid, fact-based sex education, and cheap, available birth control.  So what's an arbiter of morality to do?

Export the same failed plan to other countries, of course.

Starting in 2004, Congress has allocated $1.4 billion to fund abstinence-only sex education in sub-Saharan Africa, ostensibly to slow down the transmission of HIV, but driven by the same sex-equals-bad morality that generated similar programs here in the United States.  And to no one's particular surprise, methodologies that didn't work in one place don't work anywhere else.  According to a paper  by Christine Gorman published this week in Scientific American:

A rigorous comparison of national data from countries that received abstinence funding under the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) with those that got none of the funding showed no difference in the age of first sexual experience or in the number of sexual partners or teenage pregnancies—all aspects of behaviors that have been linked to a higher risk of becoming infected with HIV.

Who could have predicted that?

What the study also showed was that the single factor that correlated best with low HIV transmission rates and decreased risk of pregnancy outside of marriage was educational opportunities for women.  Give women opportunities for education and career, and they are less likely to engage in behaviors that might jeopardize their goals for a better life.

It seems like common sense to me.  Education, especially for young women.  Teach children about sexuality and responsibility and how their own bodies work.  Given that most teenagers think about sex pretty much 24/7, make sure they understand the importance of birth control and know how to use it, and make contraceptives widely available and cheap.

And fer cryin' in the sink, stop pretending that abstinence-only sex education works.  We've wasted enough money, and worse -- stood by while thousands of young women got pregnant when those pregnancies might have been prevented through sex education that is actually effective.

Skin deep

We were talking in my AP Biology class yesterday about the potential for skin damage from exposure to ultraviolet light.  Later in the day,  a student sent me a YouTube video called "How the Sun Sees You" that uses a UV-sensitive camera to see the sun damage on people's skin (and also illustrates that sunscreen does work, given that it looks an opaque black when filmed in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum).

All of which is well and good, but then I scrolled down to the comments section, which I know I should never do, and I found the following.  Spelling and grammar are as written, so I don't use up my "sic" allotment all in one go:

First off everyone has to stop believing that Melanin a.k.a. Carbon protects us from u.v. rays.  Carbon in the skin actually absorbs ultraviolet rays in a process that is now being called Ultrafast Internal Conversion.  Not one person has mentioned this..  The Elemental Compound for C Carbon is 666.  6 Electrons 6 Neutrons 6 Protons.  The origins of the 666.  The Catholics call It "the mark of beast" which is code for "mark of the our destroyers"  We all know that Carbon is the building blocks of life.  Carbon defines life therefore us Moors who are incorrectly referred to as "Black People" are the building blocks for Human life and biology.  This is true because no one else on the planet possesses the levels of Carbon in the body and brain quite like The Moors. (remember a moor is a black man or women)  In other words, us "Black people" are and forever will be The genetic template for the Human being.  Black ppl we are Human In it's truest form.  Of course there are plenty lies circulating the damn truth.  All non black people are merely human hybrids.  All races were genetically engineered from the supreme Human.  Clones much?  DARK POWER!!

So naturally I thought, "Well, that's a viewpoint I've never run into before."  (I also thought, "I hope this person is on medication" and "this is what it looks like when someone fails high school biology.")  But I did some research, and I found out that this is not the claim of a lone wacko.  This is the claim of a large number of wackos.  There's a whole school of thought (although I hesitate to use either word in this context) that revolves around the contention that people of African descent are superior because they have lots more carbon in them.

Take, for example, the page "Carbon & Melanin Secret of Secrets" over at the amazingly wacky site Godlike Productions.  In it, we find a wall of text that can be summarized as follows:

• Carbon is some seriously mystical stuff.  Besides the 6-6-6 thing mentioned above, it has four bonds that are shaped like a swastika.
• It also has something to do with the Buddhist "om," the Christian cross, and the Greek letters alpha and omega.
• Melanin is dark.  So is carbon.  Therefore melanin is carbon.
• Melanin is the "key to life" and is the "organizing molecule for living systems."
• Melanin is an ordinary conductor, a semiconductor, and a superconductor.  Don't ask me how it can be all three at the same time.
• Satan and Saturn are the same thing.
• Because the symbol for carbon is C, and the symbol for cytosine (one of the nitrogenous bases in DNA) is C, they're the same thing.  It couldn't be because in English, both of them have names that start with "c."
• Some other weird stuff about DMT and alchemy and prophecies that frankly I couldn't read because my eyes were spinning.

I read this whole thing with an expression like this:

What bothers me most about all of this is not that crazy people are making shit up.  That's what crazy people do, after all.  What bothers me is that apparently this claim has gotten some traction amongst people who want justification for believing that dark-skinned humans are intrinsically better than light-skinned humans, and who cannot even be bothered to take a look at the Wikipedia page for melanin, wherein we find that melanin isn't carbon.  It contains carbon, but after all, so does chalk, which last I looked was white.

The ironic thing is that when you talk to actual anthropologists and geneticists, most of 'em will tell you that the biological basis for race is tenuous at best.  Race is a cultural phenomenon, not a genetic one.  If you want your mind blown on this topic, consider the following quote from Alan Goodman:

Richard Lewontin did an amazing piece of work which he published in 1972, in a famous article called "The Apportionment of Human Variation." Literally what he tried to do was see how much genetic variation showed up at three different levels. 

One level was the variation that showed up among or between purported races. And the conventional idea is that quite a bit of variation would show up at that level. And then he also explored two other levels at the same time. How much variation occurred within a race, but between or among sub-groups within that purported race. 

So, for instance, in Europe, how much variation would there be between the Germans, the Finns and the Spanish? Or how much variation could we call local variation, occurring within an ethnicity such as the Navaho or Hopi or the Chatua? 

And the amazing result was that, on average, about 85% of the variation occurred within any given group. The vast majority of that variation was found at a local level. In fact, groups like the Finns are not homogeneous - they actually contain, I guess one could literally say, 85% of the genetic diversity of the world. 

Secondly, of that remaining 15%, about half of that, seven and a half percent or so, was found to be still within the continent, but just between local populations; between the Germans and the Finns and the Spanish. So, now we're over 90%, something like 93% of variation actually occurs within any given continental group. And only about 6-7% of that variation occurs between "races," leaving one to say that race actually explains very little of human variation...

But, for the most part, you know that the basic human plan is really the basic human plan, and is found almost anywhere in the world. Most variation is found locally within any group. Why don't we believe that? Because we happen to ascribe great significance to skin color, and a few other physical cues... And, in fact, though, these may happen to be a few of the things that do widely vary from place to place. But, that's not true under the skin. Rather, quite another story is told by looking at genes under the skin.

Which should really inform us about how we treat people who don't look like us, shouldn't it?  We're all human.  We have a vast overlap in our genetics, even if you choose two people who look very different from each other.  And at our cores, most of us want the same things -- food, shelter, love, security, compassion.  When we start claiming that people of different ethnicities deserve different levels of privilege, we're engaging in a mindset that is not only destructive, it's counterfactual.

And that applies to all racists equally, whether they're neo-nazis or cranks who claim that anyone without much melanin in their skin is an evil hybrid clone.

Signs and portents

What would it take to convince you that you were wrong?

It was the question that was asked to Ken Ham and Bill Nye in their famous debate, and significantly, Ham replied, "Nothing would."  Any evidence, any argument, the best data available, would be insufficient.  In other words: his worldview is invulnerable.  Which is why the Nye/Ham debate was, at its most fundamental level, not a debate at all.

That inviolability is an all-too-common aspect of the belief system of the devout, where "unshakeable faith" is considered a cardinal virtue.  Even as a child, going every Sunday with my parents to the Catholic church, this attitude struck me as awry.  I remember asking my catechism class teacher, "If you're supposed to have faith no matter what, how could you tell if you were wrong?"

My teacher responded, "But we're not wrong."

Circular reasoning at it's best.  How do we know our beliefs are correct?  Because they're correct.  q.e.d.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There was a tragic, but vivid, demonstration of this approach to understanding in Lagos, Nigeria this week.  Evangelist T. B. Joshua, the faith healer and self-styled "prophet" whose revival meetings attract thousands from all over Africa, had some 'splainin' to do after a guesthouse owned by Joshua collapsed, killing eighty of his followers, some of whom had come from as far away as South Africa to hear him preach and take part in his "healing ministry."

Turns out Joshua's people had been doing some major renovations, and apparently didn't notice that the floors they were renovating were occupied.  So the whole building collapsed like a house of cards.

After this, Joshua had three possible responses:

1. Shoddy construction, not to mention doing work on the weight-bearing walls of a building while people are living in it, is likely to result in said building falling down and bunches of people dying.  My bad.
2. God is sending me a sign that I'm misleading people and ripping them off.  I better discontinue my revival meetings forthwith.
3. The building collapse was Satan's work.  The fact that the devil is after me and my followers just means that I'm hot on the devil's trail!  Go me!

Three guesses as to which was Joshua's response.

"The church views this tragedy as part of an attack on The Synagogue Church Of All Nations," a church spokesperson said in a press release.  "In due course, God will reveal the perpetrators."  The collapse was due to "demonic forces" that were determined to destroy Joshua, who is a "man of God."  As a result, church members have become even more devoted than ever to Joshua's message.  The collapse, apparently, has activated the rally-around-the-flag response.  "You think you'll get away with this, Satan?" they seem to be saying.  "We'll pray at you even harder!"

All of which supports a contention I've had for some time, to wit: you can't argue with these people.  The devout are coming at understanding from a completely non-evidence-based angle, so there's  no evidence that would be convincing.  It puts me in mind of the quote, variously attributed, that "you can't logic your way out of a stance that you didn't logic your way into."

But I must say that the whole approach is foreign to me.  On a fundamental level, I've never understood this attitude, which is why my stay in the Catholic Church was largely an exercise in frustration both for me and for the priests and nuns who tried to get me to see it their way.  I know that faith is a great comfort to people who have it, but I can't for the life of me comprehend how anyone could get there from the outside.  It boils down to "believe because you believe," as far as I can see, a summation I saw clearly when I was still in grade school.

And forty-odd years later, I still don't see how anyone could find that a reasonable approach to understanding the universe.

The cat people

I find myself wondering, sometimes, how people can hear claims without the "Oh, come on, now" reaction kicking in.

The thought occurs to me pretty much any time I turn on the History or Discovery channels, these days, what with their dubious editorial decision to jettison actual history and science in favor of Ancient Aliens, Squatch-Chasing, and the Prophecies of Nostradamus.  In fact, I want to say, "Oh, come on, now," to Giorgio Tsoukalos before he even opens his mouth.

But evidently, that reaction doesn't occur in everyone.  I'm not certain why the World of Woo-Woo, with its pseudoscience and crazy claims and superstition, appeals so strongly to some folks.  I've always preferred science over guesswork and wishful thinking, but I appear to be amongst the minority.

Take, for example, the bizarre little story that appeared in the West African Daily Post, which claimed -- with all apparent seriousness -- that a local warlock was changing children into cats.

[image courtesy of photographer Nicolas Suzor and the Wikimedia Commons]

"Detectives at the Rumuolumeni Divisional Police Station in Port Harcourt, Rivers State are investigating a case involving three persons who allegedly transformed to cats," the story begins, which at least made me glad about the fact that they used the word "allegedly."

The police at Rumuolumeni Station apparently noticed that a particular cat kept running in front of the police station, as cats are wont to do.  But for some reason, they thought this was odd, so they "lay in ambush" for the cat.

Must have been a slow crime day, there at Rumuolumeni Station.

Be that as it may, they caught the cat and decided to kill it, but before they could do so, "it mysteriously transformed into... a twelve-year-old boy."

The remainder of the story is best told in the words of the reporter who wrote the article:

The twelve year old boy later confessed that he was initiated by one aged man named Womadi, adding that there are many of his kind in Port Harcourt, and their mission was to suck human blood and inflict their victims with diseases. 

The paramount ruler of Rumuolumeni in Oibio-Akpor Local Government Area of Rivers State, Eze Ndubueze Wobo confirmed the transformation of three members of his community into cats. 

Eze Wobo told the Daily Post that one of the men, who is popularly called Papa, confessed to him at the police station that he initiated the people to suck human blood and inflict their victims with diseases. 

Wobo said the victim listed some items which would be used to cleanse initiated children, some which include native alligator pepper, Local gin, Local kola nut and so on.

"Papa" later told police that he had initiated the children using a "packaged beef roll."  About which initiation I was glad the article gave no further details.

I find it amazing, and troubling, that people could read this without their thinking at some point, "This can't be true."  (For me, it happened halfway through the first sentence.)  But they don't, for some reason.

And the darker side of all of this is the rise of a violent strain of Pentecostalism in this part of the world, which was already home to one of the most viciously fanatical religious groups in the world, the Boko Haram movement of Islam.  So we can laugh at these superstitious folks, over here in our safe homes in the industrialized world, but over there, an accusation of witchcraft is a life-or-death matter.

Poster for a Pentecostal revival meeting in Nigeria two years ago [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I sometimes get asked why I rant about what seem like "harmless superstitions," and why I'm so insistent that rationalism and evidence-based understanding are the best ways of approaching the world.

My answer is that superstitions are seldom harmless.  They teach you that the world is a fearful place, behaving by rules that are fluid and mystical, with competing powers that are dangerous, perhaps deadly.  Superstitions lead some people to give their money to charlatans, which on one level falls under the rule of caveat emptor; but worse than that, it causes people to cede their personal power and responsibility to individuals and causes that have little regard for human life and dignity.

On that basis alone, there is no reason to tolerate superstitious belief.  And that includes its being given serious reporting in a national newspaper.

No miracles for the Ivy League

I suppose that I'm an optimist at heart.

I always live in hope that people will see reason.  Regardless of what illogical and counterfactual thinking they've been guilty of in the past, I try to keep focused on the fact that they could, eventually, recognize that what they're saying is nonsense, and subscribe to a more reasoned approach.

It's what I'd hoped of Pat Robertson.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I know, I know.  Pat Robertson has proven, over and over, that he's a raving lunatic.  As I described in a previous post, he's the one who said that Katrina and the Haitian earthquake were the wrath of god, that martial arts were evil because they required you to "inhale demon spirits" prior to practice, and that good Christian children shouldn't participate in Halloween because the candy could have been cursed by witches.  I think I can say without fear of contradiction that these are not the pronouncements of a sane man.

But then, last month,  he said something... reasonable.  Like, really reasonable.  It was shortly after the Ken Ham/Bill Nye debate, and Pat said on his show, The 700 Club, that Ham had better give up trying to defend the young-Earth creationist stance:

Let’s face it.  There was a Bishop [Ussher] who added up the dates listed in Genesis and he came up with the world had been around for 6,000 years.  There ain’t no way that’s possible.  To say that it all came about in 6,000 years is just nonsense and I think it’s time we come off of that stuff and say this isn’t possible.

Let’s be real, let’s not make a joke of ourselves.

We’ve got to be realistic, and admit that the dating of Bishop Ussher just doesn’t comport with anything that is found in science, and you can’t just totally deny the geological formations that are out there.

Well... um... yeah.  Exactly.

The creationists, of course, were not going to take that lying down, especially given that Pat is one of their own and is still widely listened-to in the evangelical world.  Paul Taylor, who along with Eric Hovind is the host of Creation Today, took serious umbrage with Pat's pronouncements.  "Pat Robertson is claiming, then, that 6,000 years comes from Ussher’s book and not the Bible," Taylor said.  "The point is, where did Ussher get his figure of 6,000 years?...  Now, then, Pat Robertson, are you claiming the Bible is not [divinely] inspired when the Bible clearly tells us that the world is 6,000 years old?"

Which, I guess, was a fair enough criticism, given Taylor's assumptions about both the inerrancy of the bible and Pat Robertson's opinion thereof.  But as for me, I was heartened.  Maybe there's hope after all, I thought.  If someone like Pat Robertson could be convinced of the antiquity of the Earth, then there's hope for converting others to a more scientific view of the universe.

Optimism, sometimes, is a losing proposition.

I say this because of a story that popped up yesterday that described another proclamation Pat made on The 700 Club, this one just this past Monday.  A listener called in and asked Pat why the incidence of miracles was so much higher in "places like Africa" (the listener's words, not mine, allow me to point out) than it is here in the U.S.  Why don't we see miracles happening every day, like in biblical times, when it seemed like every other day there was a talking snake or a burning bush or a dude getting the crap smitten out of him for blasphemy or a dead guy coming back to life?  Why, the listener asked, don't we see stuff in the U.S. like prayer restoring sight in the blind and the ability to walk in the lame?

Ah, yes, that, Pat said.  It's because...

... god doesn't like us because we're too smart:

People overseas didn’t go to Ivy League schools.  We’re so sophisticated, we think we’ve got everything figured out.  We know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that says God isn’t real.

We have been inundated with skepticism and secularism.  And overseas, they’re simple, humble.  You tell ‘em God loves ‘em and they say, ‘Okay, he loves me.’  You say God will do miracles and they say, ‘Okay, we believe him.’

And that’s what God’s looking for.  That’s why they have miracles.

Well, even overlooking the blatant white-privilege attitude that would cause someone to label an entire freakin' continent with the word "simple," this strikes me as a completely baffling attitude.  Let's put you in god's shoes (size 12 loafers).  Now say you've got two people that you're considering doing a miracle for.  And you're not just considering doing your garden-variety miracle like hitting all of the stoplights green or finding two perfectly ripe avocados at the grocery store or hearing something that's true on the History Channel.  No, this is going to be something big, like regrowing a lost limb or having your dog start talking to you to tell you that you need to repent your evil ways and return Unto The Lord.

Now, both of the people you're thinking about granting a miracle to are unbelievers.  But one is a dirt-poor, uneducated farmer from Senegal.  The other is a highly influential, wealthy, Ivy League academic from Boston.

Logically, which one should you choose?

Well, if god is trying to reach the maximum number of people -- which, presumably, he is -- the obvious choice is the Bostonian academic.  No offense to our Senegalese farmer, but if he was suddenly converted via a divine message spoken by his dog, he might tell three or four people, maybe a couple of dozen, at most, and that would be it.  The Bostonian?  Especially if he could prove that something miraculous had happened, like hard evidence that he had regrown a lost finger, or something?

You're talking a reach of millions.

So either (1) god doesn't see things that way, and doesn't understand the concept of "biggest bang for the buck," or (2) I was wrong about Pat Robertson, and he actually is crazy as a bedbug.

Sadly, I'm putting my money on the latter.

Magic in the water

It's always struck me as baffling to see people how much people will pay for woo-woo stuff.  Not so much the alt-med stuff like homeopathy, because there, the recipient has been bamboozled (usually via some science-y sounding nonsense about vibrations and energies and quantum signatures) into thinking that the remedy being sold actually does something that has been verified experimentally.  (i.e., they have been lied to.)

On the other hand, it's less understandable to see someone buying something that doesn't even come with any sort of rational explanation -- when the item being sold falls into the Magic, Pure & Simple department.  It's probably narrow-minded of me, but whenever I hear about this sort of thing, I always think, "How on earth do people expect this to work?"

For example, there's Temitope Balogun Joshua, the Ghanaian pastor of the Synagogue Church of All Nations in Accra.  Joshua, a charismatic figure who attracts huge crowds in Ghana, Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, goes about preaching the gospel and selling stuff, including "new anointing water."  "New anointing water" has been blessed by Reverend Joshua and has been credited with miraculous cures of diseases, and the relieving of stress and anxiety.  It usually sells for 80 cedis (about $40) per bottle -- a sizable sum in West Africa.

Well, unfortunately, a radio station announced last Saturday that Reverend Joshua would be giving away bottles of "new anointing water" for free at the service on Sunday.  Crowds began to form at two in the morning.  So many people showed up that it "brought traffic in large parts of Accra to a standstill."  And then, when the doors opened, there was a stampede, which killed four and injured thirty.

Joshua himself was apparently upset by how the whole thing turned out, and he's promised to pay the hospital expenses of the ones who were injured.  This shouldn't be a hardship...

... because apparently his net worth exceeds $15 million.  That, my friends, is a crapload of bottles of water.

Now, it's not that I think this kind of magical thinking is uncommon, mind you.  After outlaw John Dillinger was gunned down, bystanders soaked handkerchiefs and the hems of skirts in his blood.  Earlier, men and women who met their end by losing their heads had their spilled blood treated the same way -- notable examples were Anne Boleyn and King Louis XVI.  The idea of magic (of various kinds) clinging to a substance, be it water, blood, or something else, is as old as humanity.

But still.  How, precisely, do these folks think Reverend Joshua's bottles of miracle water can work?  I know I'm approaching this from my squared-off, show-me-the-goods rationalism, and that the mystical worldview allows for all sorts of other stuff going on.  But try as I might, I just can't see how this guy's magic potions and preaching have made him worth $15 million, despite his hawking his wares in some of the poorest countries in the world.

Magical thinking, apparently, is big business, even if you don't resort to science-y words.

On a more hopeful note, though, is a second story, this one from Spain.

Another idea that is hardly new is the love spell -- magic cast to make the target of your amorous feelings fall in love with you, or (more prosaically) at least willing to have sex with you.  Like Reverend Joshua's magic water, this one is still with us today, and is still as ineffective as ever -- as Zaragoza businessman José Laparra found out.

Laparra, the owner of Spanish football team Club Deportivo Castellon, had his eye on a woman who evidently was resistant to his advances.  Frustrated, he went to a psychic, Lucia Martin, who said she would help him -- if he paid her $210,000.

Now that is desperation.

Be that as it may, Martin said she knew the very spell, and she took Laparra's money, and proceeded to do her magical stuff.  To no avail; Laparra was no more successful than before.  So he went to Martin, and demanded his money back.

Only fair, I suppose, but according to the source, the psychic "foresaw his arrival" and tried to prevent him from entering.  She called the police, who came in, and found the money wrapped up in a newspaper -- and promptly arrested Laparra, because he'd apparently paid the psychic by embezzling the money from the funds belonging to his football club.

Laparra, for his part, proceeded to have an "anxiety attack," which is hardly a surprise, considering the circumstances.  Maybe someone should have gotten him some "new anointing water."

Sneak thievery

Having dealt with such issues in recent posts as the ethics of resurrecting extinct animal species, and the difficulty of addressing the problems with the American educational system, I want to look today at an even more serious problem: penis theft.

At this point, you are probably thinking, "Did I just read what I think I just read?"  I know that's what I thought when I came across the article on AlterNet entitled "Penis Snatching On the Rise -- Africa's Genital-Stealing Crime Wave Hits the Countryside."  So, yes: you did just read that.  And yes, it's what it sounds like.

Well, sort of.  My first guess would have been that for some reason, better left un-thought-about, there was a cult of some sort that was stealing the body parts off of corpses.  If that's all it had been, it would have merited little more than a quick retch before moving on.  But no, it's weirder than that.  These people believe that somehow, guys are being relieved of their favorite body part magically, while they're still alive.

For example, the author of the article, Louisa Lombard, tells of a Sudanese traveler going through the Central African Republic town of Tiringoulou.  The traveler stopped for a cup of tea, and after receiving it, shook hands with the tea seller.  The unfortunate tea seller felt "an electric tingling," and at that point realized that "his penis had shrunk to a size similar to that of a baby's."  There was an outcry from the alleged victim, which led to a small-scale riot, during which a second man fell prey to the same fate.

Kind of gives new meaning to the phrase "going off half-cocked," doesn't it?

Anyhow, it'd be nice to think that there would be at least one voice of rationality in the crowd who would demand that the two supposed targets drop trou and prove that they had been de-privated, but I guess no one thought of that.  Everyone just sort of said, "Oh, okay.  That makes sense."  And alas for the poor traveler, he was subjected to a "harsh interrogation" and was eventually shot to death for his magical crimes.  And as far as the leader of the armed rebel group who governs the town, and who oversaw the traveler's execution, he tells a different story; he said that the man wasn't killed, that he "mysteriously vanished from his holding cell."

And lest you think that this weird belief is confined to central Africa, allow me to point out that Singapore has had outbreaks of, um, dewangification as well.  Check out, if you dare, this article, entitled, "The Great Singapore Penis Panic and American Mass Hysteria," which is about an epidemic of "koro," a condition in which men suffer "a catastrophic loss of yang energy," causing their penises to shrivel away.

Well, needless to say, there's no such thing as any of this stuff.  So, for any of you guys in my readership who has read this post hunched over in a protective half-crouch, and with a horrified expression on your face, fear not.  There's only one thing I know of that can cause a similar effect:

And fortunately, it's temporary and reversible.

What I find astonishing about all of this is how credulous people are, and how seldom it ever occurs to anyone to say, "Prove it."  You claim that you're a psychic, and can accurately predict the future?  Prove it.  You claim that you can communicate with the spirits of the dead?  Prove it.  You claim that someone magically caused your willie to shrink?  Prove it.  The burden of proof lies with the person making the outrageous claim -- not, as in the case of the poor Sudanese traveler, with the one trying to defend himself from it.

But, apparently, such an approach is sadly uncommon in the world, and not only in such undeveloped, poverty-stricken areas as the Central African Republic, but in the urban First World streets of Singapore.  As always, there's just one solution to all of this, and that's education in science -- the only thing I know of that is successful at eradicating myth, irrationality, and superstition.  But given that here in the United States we still have a significant percentage of the population who believe in horoscopes, homeopathy, and young-earth creationism, maybe I shouldn't point fingers.  After all, none of those ideas is any more scientifically supported than the claim that someone can magically steal a guy's penis by shaking his hand.