The dangers of pseudoarchaeology

One of my ongoing peeves is that so many people put more faith in popular media claims than in what the scientists themselves are saying.

This can take many forms.  We have the straw-man approach, usually done with some agenda in mind, where someone will completely mischaracterize the science in order to convince people of a particular claim, and for some reason said people never think to find out what the scientists actually have to say on the matter.  (One example that especially sets my teeth on edge is the young-Earth creationists who say that the Big Bang model means "nothing exploded and created everything" and forthwith dismiss it as nonsense.)

An even more common form this takes is the current passion many people have for shows like Monster Quest and Ancient Aliens and Ghost Hunters, which aim to convince viewers that there is strong evidence for claims when there is actually little or none at all.  This kind of thing is remarkably hard to fight; when you have a charismatic figure who is trying to convince you that the Norse gods were actually superpowerful extraterrestrial visitors, and supporting that claim with evidence that is cherry-picked at best and entirely fabricated at worst, non-scientists can be suckered remarkably easily.

But "hard to fight" doesn't mean "give up," at least to archaeologist David Anderson of Radford University (Virginia).  Because he has absolutely had it with goofy claims that misrepresent the actual evidence, and is publicly calling out the people who do it.

Anderson's quest started in February, when a claim was made on The Joe Rogan Experience that a famous piece of Mayan art, from the sarcophagus of Mayan King K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, who died in 683 C.E., showed him ascending into the skies in a spaceship:

It's one of the favorite pieces of evidence from the "Ancient Aliens" crowd.  But the problem is, it's wrong -- not only from the standpoint that there almost certainly were no "Ancient Aliens."  They evidently never bothered to ask an actual expert in Mayan archaeology, because that's not even what the art is trying to depict. Anderson was infuriated enough that he responded to Rogan in a tweet: "Dear @joerogan… [the piece of Mayan art you mentioned] depicts [Pakal] falling into the underworld at the moment of his death."  The "rocket" beneath the king's body, Anderson explains, is a depiction of the underworld, and the rest of the "spaceship" is a "world tree" -- a common image in Mayan art, not to mention art from other cultures.

Rogan, to his credit, thanked Anderson for the correction, but some of his fans weren't so thrilled, and railed against Anderson as being a "mainstream archaeologist" (because that's bad, apparently) who was actively trying to suppress the truth about ancient aliens for some reason.  Anderson, for his part, is adamant that archaeologists and other scientists need to be better at calling out pseudoscience and the people who are promoting it.  He cites a study done at Chapman University (California) showing that 57% of Americans polled in 2018 believe in Atlantis (up from 40% in 2016) and 41% believe that aliens visited the Earth in antiquity and made contact with early human civilizations (up from 27%).

Anderson says, and I agree, that this is a serious problem, not only because of how high the raw numbers are, but because of the trend.  I know it's not really a scientist's job to make sure the public understands his/her research, but given the amount of bullshit out there (not to mention the general anti-science bent of the current administration), it's increasingly important.

You may wonder why I'm so passionate about this, and be thinking, "Okay, I see the problem with people doubting climate science, but what's the harm of people believing in ancient aliens?  It's harmless."  Which is true, up to a point.  But the problem is, once you've decided that evidence -- and the amount and quality thereof -- is no longer the sine qua non for support of a claim, you've gone onto some seriously thin ice.  Taking a leap into pseudoscience in one realm makes it all that much easier to jump into other unsupported craziness.  Consider, for example, the study that came out of the University of Queensland that found a strong correlation between being an anti-vaxxer and accepting conspiracy theories such as the ones surrounding the JFK assassination.

So learning some science and critical thinking are insulation against being suckered by counterfactual nonsense of all kinds.  Which is why yes, I do care that people are making false claims about a piece of Mayan artwork... and so should you.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one; Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton.  The book is based upon a website of the same name that looks at curious, beautiful, bizarre, frightening, or fascinating places in the world -- the sorts of off-the-beaten-path destinations that you might pass by without ever knowing they exist.  (Recent entries are an astronomical observatory in Zweibrücken, Germany that has been painted to look like R2-D2; the town of Story, Indiana that is for sale for a cool $3.8 million; and the Michelin-rated kitchen run by Lewis Georgiades -- at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station, which only gets a food delivery once a year.)

This book collects the best of the Atlas Obscura sites, organizes them by continent, and tells you about their history.  It's a must-read for anyone who likes to travel -- preferably before you plan your next vacation.

(If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!)

Confidence, impacts, and ice ages

One of the most common misunderstandings about science by laypeople centers around the concept of degree of confidence.

This misunderstanding can be summed up that "all unproven hypotheses are equally likely."  You hear it with lots of loopy ideas -- that (for example) because we don't have strong evidence one way or the other regarding the existence of an afterlife, it's on the same footing as other phenomena for which we have no direct evidence, such as dark matter, time travel, and the claim we've been visited by extraterrestrials.

Another way this shows up is the dismissive, "all of this could be proven wrong tomorrow" attitude toward science.  The fact that new discoveries have on occasion overturned what we thought we understood is taken as evidence that all of science is on thin ice, that it's all equally tentative.  But this rests on a serious misapprehension about the reliability of evidence.  It's true that, as Einstein allegedly put it, "one experiment could prove wrong" either the Second Law of Thermodynamics or our understanding of the mechanisms of quantum entanglement; but the first is extremely unlikely (the Second Law is one of the most extensively-tested scientific principles known, and there has never been a single exception found to it) while even the physicists would admit the second is a possibility (we're still elucidating the idea of quantum entanglement, and new and intriguing data is being added to our understanding on nearly a daily basis).

This frustrates people who like to have certainty, or at least like to be able to say with confidence that something isn't possible.  I ran into an especially good example of this just yesterday when I was reading an article about the Younger Dryas, a mysterious climatological reversal that occurred 12,900 years ago and lasted only 1,200 years -- a mere blip on the geological time scale.  What happened was that during a period when the Earth was warming, in only a few decades the average temperature of the Earth dropped by an average of four degrees Celsius, enough to put most of the Northern Hemisphere back in the deep freeze.  (The event is named after a plant, Dryas octopetala, which only grows in extremely cold places, and which became common across Europe and North America through the duration of the temperature drop.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Opioła jerzy, Dryas octopetala a4, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Of course, presented with such a conundrum, the first question that comes up is "Why did this happen?"  There are three main hypotheses:

• As the Earth was warming up after the last major glaciation, a huge freshwater lake that had piled up behind an ice dam was suddenly emptied when the dam collapsed.  This lake, nicknamed "Lake Agassiz," emptied out through what are now the St. Lawrence and Mackenzie Rivers, and caused a slowdown (or complete cessation) of the thermohaline circulation.  Put simply, this is the engine that powers the Gulf Stream, which brings warm water northward and keeps the northeastern United States and most of western Europe relatively temperate.  When the flood occurred, the north end of the thermohaline circulation became too fresh to sink, and the whole system ground to a halt, propelling us into another ice age.  It was only after a thousand years had passed, and the lake water had adequately mixed with the ocean water, that the circulation rebooted and things warmed back up.
• 12,900 years ago, the Earth was hit by an object from space -- probably either a comet or a meteorite -- and that collision flash-burned a significant fraction of the vegetation in northern North America.  The debris and ash blocked sunlight, cooling down the surface of the Earth and halting the warm-up we'd been experiencing in its tracks.  Eventually the ash settled out, the forests regrew, and the climate restabilized, but that took several centuries.
• A supernova in the constellation of Vela created a burst of radiation that destroyed the Earth's ozone layer and killed most of the Earth's megafauna, including mammoths, mastodons, dire wolves, and several species of temperate-climate camels, rhinos, and hippos.  The gamma radiation striking the atmosphere caused a cascade of chemical reactions that disrupted the balance of nitrogen-containing compounds (such as nitrous oxide and nitrogen dioxide), and this caused a sudden and drastic temperature drop.

Each has some points in its favor.  The ice-dam proponents argue that the temperature drop wasn't as fast as you'd expect from something catastrophic like a collision or supernova, and that in fact the extinctions that occurred were in species that had already been declining for millennia.  Scientists supporting the impact hypothesis were buoyed by the discovery of a previously-unknown crater in Greenland -- but they've been unable to pinpoint its age any more accurately than "some time between three million and twelve thousand years ago."  The supernova enthusiasts point to the existence of "black mats" -- thin layers of the remnants of anaerobic organisms -- as evidence that something drastic happened to the atmosphere at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, and samples taken from it do seem to have skewed nitrogen content.  (This same evidence is considered support for the impact hypothesis, because there have been "microspherules" -- tiny spheres of melted and refrozen metal -- found in some of those boundary layers.)  But the black mats in different locations seem to date from different time periods, with only three of the thirteen studied being coincident with the Younger Dryas event.  And most of the black mats studied don't contain microspherules.

So the argument is still out there.  As far as my own opinion, I can only say that I'm neither a paleoclimatologist nor an astrophysicist, so am unqualified to weigh in (and my opinion wouldn't mean much anyway).  It seems like the dam collapse model is the one that currently has the most support, but -- like all science -- new information could tilt us toward one of the others.

Why does this come up with regards to our confidence in scientific models?  Not only because it's a great example of competing explanations and the fact that good scientists are willing to entertain the possibility of alternate solutions to the conundrums they study.  The idea for this post came to me because of another twist on the Younger Dryas -- this one from noted wingnut Graham Hancock, who says that the Younger Dryas event not only inconvenienced the camels and dire wolves, it also wiped out an advanced technological civilization...

... which gave rise to the myth of Atlantis.

So this is what I mean about levels of confidence.  No, we haven't been able to rule out two of the three models for the cause of the Younger Dryas with any real certainty.  But the fourth idea -- that whatever caused the event also destroyed Atlantis -- has nothing, not a shred of evidence, to support it.  As the brilliant skeptic Jason Colavito put it:

[R]egardless of whether a comet hit, the existence (or non-existence) of the comet implies nothing about the existence of Atlantis any more than it would unicorns or leprechauns. 

It remains a point of astonishment that the bones of megafauna that supposedly died in the comet strike turn up with regularity, but every human being and all of the buildings, tools, and material possessions of the lost Atlantis-like civilization were blasted clean off the face of the Earth, without a single trace remaining.  I have trouble imagining that a sloth can manage to have its bones preserved for all time, but not a single outpost of Atlantis had even a single bolt or screw remain.

As do I.  All unproven assertions are not on an equal footing.  And that's really the point of Ockham's Razor, isn't it?  The fastest way to winnow down competing ideas is to see which ones require you to make the most ad hoc assumptions.  And I'd put any of the three scientific explanations I mentioned above ahead of Hancock's assertion that the Younger Dryas event destroyed the lost civilization of Atlantis.

I'm perfectly willing to stay in uncertainty, indefinitely if need be, in the absence of convincing evidence one way or the other.  But in the case of explanations that require us to stretch credulity to the snapping point, I have no problem saying, "Nope.  That one isn't true."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an entertaining one -- Bad Astronomy by astronomer and blogger Phil Plait.  Covering everything from Moon landing "hoax" claims to astrology, Plait takes a look at how credulity and wishful thinking have given rise to loony ideas about the universe we live in, and how those ideas simply refuse to die.

Along the way, Plait makes sure to teach some good astronomy, explaining why you can't hear sounds in space, why stars twinkle but planets don't, and how we've used indirect evidence to create a persuasive explanation for how the universe began.  His lucid style is both informative and entertaining, and although you'll sometimes laugh at how goofy the human race can be, you'll come away impressed by how much we've figured out.

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

Drowned cities and drowning mythology

Yesterday, I was listening to one of my favorite pieces by Claude Debussy, The Drowned Cathedral, and I started to wonder what legend had given rise to the piece.  After a little bit of digging, I found out that Debussy got his inspiration from the Breton legend of the mythical city of Ys, built on the coast of Brittany behind a seawall.  Princess Dahut the Wicked tempted fate by engaging in all sorts of depravity therein, despite the warnings of Saint Winwaloe that God was watching and would smite the ever-loving shit out of her if she didn't mend her ways.  (Okay, I'm paraphrasing a bit, here, but that's the gist.)  Anyhow, Dahut wouldn't listen, and one night a storm rose and broke through the seawall, and the ocean flowed in over the city.  Dahut's father, King Gradion, escaped on a magical horse with Dahut riding behind him, but Winwaloe shouted at him, "Push back the demon riding with you!"

So Gradion did what any good father would do, namely, he shoved his daughter into the sea, which "swallowed her up."  The sea also swallowed the rest of Ys, which kind of sucked for the inhabitants, given that it wasn't really their fault that the princess was a little morally challenged.  As for Princess Dahut herself, she became a mermaid, and is still hanging around to tempt sailors into jumping into the ocean to their deaths.  And according to legend, on windy days, you can still hear the bells of the drowned cathedral of Ys if you stand along the shore of Douarnenez Bay.

The Flight of King Gradion, by Évariste-Vital Luminais, 1884 (in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, Brittany, France) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Kind of a cool story, in a ruthless, Grimm's Fairy Tales sort of way, even if Winwaloe and Gradion, not to mention God, do come across as pro-patriarchy assholes.  And whatever else you think, you have to admit that Debussy's piece is gorgeous (go back and give a listen to the recording of it I linked above, if you haven't already done so).

What I haven't told you, yet, though, is the other thing I found out while looking up the Legend of the Drowned City of Ys...

... which is that he über-Christians are now using the story to support creationism.

I'm not making this up.  If you don't believe me, check out the page called "Submerged Ruins" at the site Genesis Veracity Foundation.  Here's how they launch the idea:

Have you ever seen a map showing the bronze age port cities of the world? You certainly have not, because the darwinists will tell you sea level at circa 2000 B.C. was little different than today, yet the presence of hundreds of submerged ruins’ sites from the Gulf of Chambay to Bimini, and from Cornwall to Nan Madol, certainly belie that notion, with most of the submerged ruins worldwide in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, right where you’d expect them to be, where Sidon, Peleg, Javan, Tarshish, and Atlas plied the waters, building their port facilities, now submerged since the end of the Ice Age.  Here is a partial list of the submerged ruins worldwide, with pictures where available, to be soon updated as more photos will undoubtedly roll-in from interested “submergie” aficionados, so help out if you can, hard as it may be for a darwinist to do, but certainly not for a soon-to-be ex-darwinist, we shall see.

Well, I've never known a "Darwinist" to make any definitive statement regarding the sea level staying the same.  Most "Darwinists" are pretty well-versed in science, meaning they know all about ice ages and interglacial periods and sea level fluctuations, as opposed to creationists, who think that the entire world was flooded and that afterwards the water just "went away," presumably through some kind of giant floor drain in the Marianas Trench.

Anyhow, we soon get to the legend of Ys, in a single-sentence paragraph that should win some kind of Olympic gold medal in the Comma Splice Event:

Submerged ruins have been reported off Cornwall’s Isles of Scilly, in Cardigan Bay, off Tory Island, and off the Brittany coast of the Kingdom of Ys, also known as Keris, all these submerged ruins part of Atland as it’s called in the ancient book Oera Linda of the Frisians, that empire was also known as Atalan, don’t bet against Avalon, the story adapted two thousand years later.

What on earth does this have to do with the bible, you may be asking?  Well, the writer is happy to explain with another single sentence:

So the popular notion that the empire of Atlantis was some continent-sized island now submerged way out in the Atlantic ocean is proven ridiculous, because that empire was demonstrably a vast ice age maritime empire of the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic coastlines, which comports with the biblical timeline, that the Ice Age ended circa 1500 b.c. at the time of the Exodus of the Jews out of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, their patriarch having been Canaan, the father of Sidon (Posidon).

So, I was thinking, "Wait.  Is he talking about Poseidon?  Like, the Greek god?  Because, you know, polytheism doesn't exactly square with the traditional interpretation of the bible, right?"  But in fact, yes, that's who he's talking about... and he claims that Poseidon was mentioned in the bible:

Plato wrote that Posidon [sic] (Canaan’s son Sidon, Genesis 10:15) bestowed ten districts of atlantean empire governorship to his sons, one son Atlas having gained the kingship of the district of the concentric canal ringed city of Atlantis, his namesake (along with the Atlantic ocean and the Atlas mountains), that legendary capital city of Atlantis where the worship of Posidon [sic] was centered and practiced for perhaps forty generations until the Ice Age ended (when the sea level rose to consume 25 million square miles of coastal real estate worldwide).

Except that in the bible, Sidon was Noah's great-grandson, and was born after the Flood.

Oops.

But creationists never let a little thing like facts stand in the way of their conclusions.  He finishes up his explanation, if I can dignify it by that name, thusly:

Very important to remember is that Noah’s Flood did not cover today’s mountain ranges (contrary to what the bibliophobes mockingly insist), because the global flood of Noah’s day totally covered and obliterated the low mountains of the pre-flood supercontinent Pangea [sic], those mountains not having been formed by tectonic plates crashing together by runaway plate tectonics as was the case for the orogenies of our current mountains ranges formed at the close of Noah’s Flood.  So now when skeptics come to comprehend the solid science confirming the global flood vividly described in the book of Genesis, solid science here http://detectingdesign.com/fossilrecord.html, the reasons to believe all of the Bible become even more apparent, much to the darwinists’ woe.

Yup, I have to admit that reading this made me experience some significant woe, but not for the reason he probably thinks.

Is it just me, or do the creationists seem increasingly desperate lately?  The evidence for evolution, the antiquity of the Earth, and the accuracy of paleontology just keeps mounting, and yet they continue to flail around, like a drowning citizen of Ys trying to cling to anything in order to stay afloat.  They've shifted their tactics from "The Bible Says It, I Believe It, and That Settles It" -- which is an inherently unarguable position -- to looking at the actual evidence.  And that moves the game solidly onto our turf, because evaluating evidence is what scientists do.

So I suppose sites like this, however they are kind of an embarrassment to read, are actually a good thing, because it means that on some level, the biblical literalists are sensing that they're losing.

And in celebration, let's indulge in a little more Debussy, shall we?  How about his orchestral work, The Sea?  That seems a fitting way to end this discussion, doesn't it?

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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

Intransigence

If there's one thing I find discouraging, it's how resistant crazy beliefs are to eradication.

You'd think that as we know more about how the universe actually works through science, the remaining spaces would become smaller and smaller, forcing woo-woos to cede ever greater amount of territory to the rationalists.  The parts we can't explain would be all they'd have left to fill up with wacky claims.

"Crap of the gaps," is kind of how I think of it.

In practice, of course, this isn't true.  Crazy ideas like astrology are as popular as ever.  And if we needed further evidence of this rather dismal tendency, we got it this week with the release of the Chapman University Survey of American Fears.

In this survey, they looked at a representative sampling of 2,500 Americans, and asked them whether they believed in a variety of claims.  You want to feel depressed?  Consider the following:

• The percentage of Americans who believe in Atlantis (63%) exceeds the percentage who think that vaccines are safe and effective (53%).
• The belief that "Satan causes most of the evil in the world" is held by a greater number of people (46%) than is belief in anthropogenic climate change (33%).
• More people believe that UFOs are alien spaceships (41%) than believe that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old (27%).
• People are far more likely to believe in ghosts and hauntings (54%) than evolution (31%).
• Almost exactly the same percentage of people believe in Bigfoot as believe in the Big Bang (21%).

There are a lot of reasons for this, of course.  One has only to turn on the This Really Isn't History Channel or Imaginary Animal Planet or the Discovery of Things That Don't Exist Channel to see one of them.  When shows like Ancient Aliens get a longer run than shows like Cosmos, we have a problem as a culture.

Glitzy, hyped woo-woo -- Monster Quest and Ghost Hunters and Finding Bigfoot and The Unexplained -- has soared in popularity.  To be fair, it's not that I don't see the draw; I love a good scary story, myself, and still consider The X Files to be the pinnacle of television to date.

But The X Files was marketed as fiction, for fuck's sake.  This stuff is being broadcast with the premise that it's true.  And because we don't really put a premium on critical thinking, in public schools or pretty much anywhere else, lots of people are just swallowing it hook, line, and sinker.

Of course, that's not all.  There's also some more insidious forces at work, ones that really aren't about the profit motive.  You only have to consider the influence of evangelical religion to understand why evolution and the antiquity of the Earth and the Big Bang scored so low.  And for the vaccines thing, look at Jenny McCarthy (Not Directly!  Always Use Eye Protection!)  Why so many people consider an actress a more credible source of information on medical science than an actual medical researcher is a minor mystery.  We still tend, as a society, to buy into the whole "cult of ignorance" -- that the scientists are out-of-touch ivory tower intellectuals, who could just as well be evil as be good, and that we're better off trusting good ol' boys who talk plain English.

Or, as the case may be, Playboy models who are college dropouts.

I live in hope that we're still making progress, even despite Chapman University's rather discouraging findings.  After all, if I didn't think humans were educable, my raison d'être for being both a science writer and a science teacher would be gone.  And as Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world who would exploit your ignorance."

But the poll results indicate that we still have a long, long way to go in fighting intransigence.

Drowned cities and drowning mythologies

Yesterday, I was listening to one of my favorite pieces by Claude Debussy, The Drowned Cathedral, and I started to wonder what legend had given rise to the piece.  After a little bit of digging, I found out that Debussy got his inspiration from the Breton legend of the mythical city of Ys, built on the coast of Brittany behind a seawall.  Princess Dahut the Wicked tempted fate by engaging in all sorts of depravity therein, despite the warnings of Saint Winwaloe that god was watching and would smite the crap out of her if she didn't mend her ways.  (Okay, I'm paraphrasing a bit, here, but that's the gist.)  Anyhow, Dahut wouldn't listen, and one night a storm rose and broke through the seawall, and the ocean flowed in over the city.  Dahut's father, King Gradion, escaped on a magical horse with Dahut riding behind him, but Winwaloe shouted at him, "Push back the demon riding with you!"

So Gradion did what any good father would do, namely, shove his daughter into the sea, which "swallowed her up."  The sea also swallowed the rest of Ys, which kind of sucked for the inhabitants, given that it wasn't really their fault that the princess was a little morally challenged.  As for Princess Dahut herself, she became a mermaid, and is still hanging around to tempt sailors into jumping into the ocean to their deaths.  And according to legend, on windy days, you can still hear the bells of the drowned cathedral of Ys if you stand along the shore of Douarnenez Bay.

The Flight of King Gradion, by Évariste-Vital Luminais, 1884 (in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, Brittany, France)

Kind of a cool story, in a ruthless, Grimm's Fairy Tales sort of way.  And whatever else you think, you have to admit that Debussy's piece is gorgeous (go back and give a listen to the recording of it I linked above, if you haven't already done so).

What I haven't told you, yet, though, is the other thing I found out while looking up the Legend of the Drowned City of Ys...

... which is that he über-Christians are now using the story to support creationism.

I'm not making this up.  If you don't believe me, check out the page called "Submerged Ruins" at the site Genesis Veracity Foundation.   Here's how they launch the idea:

Have you ever seen a map showing the bronze age port cities of the world? You certainly have not, because the darwinists will tell you sea level at circa 2000 B.C. was little different than today, yet the presence of hundreds of submerged ruins’ sites from the Gulf of Chambay to Bimini, and from Cornwall to Nan Madol, certainly belie that notion, with most of the submerged ruins worldwide in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, right where you’d expect them to be, where Sidon, Peleg, Javan, Tarshish, and Atlas plied the waters, building their port facilities, now submerged since the end of the Ice Age. Here is a partial list of the submerged ruins worldwide, with pictures where available, to be soon updated as more photos will undoubtedly roll-in from interested “submergie” aficionados, so help out if you can, hard as it may be for a darwinist to do, but certainly not for a soon-to-be ex-darwinist, we shall see.

Well, I've never known a "Darwinist" to make any definitive statement regarding the sea level staying the same.  Most "Darwinists" are pretty well-versed in science, meaning they know all about ice ages and interglacial periods and sea level fluctuations, as opposed to creationists, who think that the entire world was flooded and that afterwards the water just "went away," presumably through some kind of giant floor drain in the Marianas Trench.

Anyhow, we soon get to the legend of Ys, in a single-sentence paragraph that should win some kind of Olympic gold medal in the Comma Splice Event:

Submerged ruins have been reported off Cornwall’s Isles of Scilly, in Cardigan Bay, off Tory Island, and off the Brittany coast of the Kingdom of Ys, also known as Keris, all these submerged ruins part of Atland as it’s called in the ancient book Oera Linda of the Frisians, that empire was also known as Atalan, don’t bet against Avalon, the story adapted two thousand years later.

What on earth does this have to do with the bible, you may be asking?  Well, the writer is happy to explain with another single sentence:

So the popular notion that the empire of Atlantis was some continent-sized island now submerged way out in the Atlantic ocean is proven ridiculous, because that empire was demonstrably a vast ice age maritime empire of the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic coastlines, which comports with the biblical timeline, that the Ice Age ended circa 1500 b.c. at the time of the Exodus of the Jews out of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, their patriarch having been Canaan, the father of Sidon (Posidon).

So, I was thinking, "Wait.  Is he talking about Poseidon?  Like, the Greek god?  Because, you know, polytheism doesn't exactly square with the traditional interpretation of the bible, right?"  But in fact, yes, that's who he's talking about... and he claims that Poseidon was mentioned in the bible:

Plato wrote that Posidon (Canaan’s son Sidon, Genesis 10:15) bestowed ten districts of atlantean empire governorship to his sons, one son Atlas having gained the kingship of the district of the concentric canal ringed city of Atlantis, his namesake (along with the Atlantic ocean and the Atlas mountains), that legendary capital city of Atlantis where the worship of Posidon was centered and practiced for perhaps forty generations until the Ice Age ended (when the sea level rose to consume 25 million square miles of coastal real estate worldwide).

Except that in the bible, Sidon was Noah's great-grandson, and was born after the Flood.

Oops.

But creationists never let a little thing like facts stand in the way of their conclusions.  He finishes up his explanation, if I can dignify it by that name, thusly:

Very important to remember is that Noah’s Flood did not cover today’s mountain ranges (contrary to what the bibliophobes mockingly insist), because the global flood of Noah’s day totally covered and obliterated the low mountains of the pre-flood supercontinent Pangea, those mountains not having been formed by tectonic plates crashing together by runaway plate tectonics as was the case for the orogenies of our current mountains ranges formed at the close of Noah’s Flood. So now when skeptics come to comprehend the solid science confirming the global flood vividly described in the book of Genesis, solid science here http://detectingdesign.com/fossilrecord.html, the reasons to believe all of the Bible become even more apparent, much to the darwinists’ woe.

Yup, I have to admit that reading this made me experience some significant woe, but not for the reason he probably thinks.

Is it just me, or do the creationists seem increasingly desperate lately?  The evidence for evolution, the antiquity of the Earth, and the accuracy of paleontology just keeps mounting, and yet they continue to flail around, like a drowning citizen of Ys trying to cling to anything in order to stay afloat.  They've shifted their tactics from "The Bible Says It, I Believe It, and That Settles It" -- which is an inherently unarguable position -- to looking at the actual evidence.  And that moves the game solidly onto our turf, because evaluating evidence is what scientists do.

So I suppose sites like this, however they are kind of an embarrassment to read, are actually a good thing, because it means that on some level, the biblical literalists are sensing that they're losing. 

And in celebration, let's indulge in a little more Debussy, shall we?  How about his orchestral work, The Sea?  That seems a fitting way to end this discussion, doesn't it?

Breaking news: scientists once again don't discover Atlantis

Geology buffs probably heard about the announcement last week of the discovery off the coast of Brazil of a large slab of granite.  It's a geological anomaly; granite doesn't form in the deep ocean.  It's associated with silica-rich magma that cooled slowly, underground.  Granite forms the most abundant "basement rock" of continents, and most of it is very, very old.  This piece seems to have been left behind as Africa and South America split when the Atlantic Ocean opened 160 million years ago, and was completely covered with water ten million years ago.

So far, a story that would be of interest only to those intrigued by oddities of plate tectonics.  So, of course, the media can't report it that way.  Let's see... block of rock off the coast of South America, once above water, now not...

I know!  Let's report that the scientists have discovered Atlantis!

Don't believe me?  Check out how HuffPost's Meredith Bennett-Smith trashed this story, opening with the following highly scientific paragraph:

Nearly 2,600 years after Greek philosopher Plato wrote about the fabled metropolis of Atlantis, vanished forever beneath the sea, a Japanese-manned submersible has discovered rock structures that may be evidence of a continent that similarly disappeared beneath the Atlantic Ocean many, many years ago.

Yes, Ms. Bennett-Smith, 2,600 years and ten million years are both many, many years.  How very astute of you.  But let me clarify something for you: this is not Atlantis.  I know this for sure, because Atlantis was fictional.

RT went even further, heading their article with the following image:

Two of the scientists, Shinichi Kawakami and Roberto Ventura Santos, put fuel on the fire by referring to the block of rock as "Atlantis" when they spoke to reporters.  Santos evidently felt some trepidation about this (which he should have), and added, "We speak of Atlantis more in terms of symbolism.  Obviously, we don’t expect to find a lost city in the middle of the Atlantic."

Really, Dr. Santos?  Then don't refer to the damn thing as Atlantis.

So, of course, now all of the woo-woos are having multiple orgasms over this "scientific proof" that Atlantis existed, as advertised, complete with cities and people and everything else described in Plato.  By this morning, we have ha-ha-we-told-you-so articles appearing in The Truthseeker,  The Controversial Files, Before It's News, The Hollow Earth Insider, and Godlike Productions, not to mention hundreds of theoretically more reliable news sources.  Although a handful of them mentioned Santos' wishy-washy disclaimer, most of them burbled on and on about Plato and the fabled island of the philosopher-kings, because that's clearly more valid than the actual science.

Let's get this straight.  Ten million years ago, when the last bit of this continent went beneath the Atlantic Ocean, our nearest ancestors were chimp-like anthropoid apes somewhere in Africa.  The earliest Australopithecenes didn't evolve until about four million years ago, and considering their brainpower, I'm doubtful that even they were "philosopher-kings."  And by that time, this block of continental granite had already been sunk for six million years.

This isn't Atlantis.  Atlantis never existed.  It's a folk tale, a myth, a legend with no basis whatsoever in fact.

Of course, I don't expect this to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced.  Especially because they have pictures.

Okay, I'll stop now, because my forehead hurts from all of the headdesks I did while researching this post.  I've got to chill out a little, because if I keep digging into this stuff I'll run across someone who claims that they found Shangri-La in Nepal and the remains of Minas Tirith in Bulgaria, and at that point I'll just take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

The Higgs boson visits Atlantis

Well, the Higgs boson is apparently a reality, a finding that had one CERN researcher stating to reporters, "A lot of bets are going to be settled up today."  The likelihood that the particle observed in two separate experiments, CMS and ATLAS, was the Higgs was placed at 99.9999%, which seems like pretty good odds to me.  (Source)

The finding is a major vindication for the Standard Model, the theory that describes how particles interact, generating fields, forces, and a variety of other phenomena, and will surely be the springboard to launch a whole new set of experiments designed to expand what we know about physics.

Unfortunately, it has already been the springboard for a variety of Non-Standard Models by woo-woos who take the Higgs boson's nickname ("The God Particle") far too literally.  And it didn't help that within the past few weeks we have had announcements from two other fields, Mayan archaeology (the discovery of a text that allegedly confirms the calendar "end date" of December 21, 2012) and paleoclimatology/geology (a seafloor survey that describes the topography of "Doggerland," the land mass that spanned what is now the southern North Sea between Britain and Denmark when the sea level was lower, during the last ice age).

Maybe you'll see where this is going when I tell you that the media has already nicknamed Doggerland "Atlantis."  (Sources here and here)

So.  Yeah.  Higgs boson + Mayans + Atlantis = WHOA.  And if you add the Easter Island statues into the mix, we just have a coalescence of woo-woo-ness that makes you wonder why we don't just have a Celestial Convergence right here in our living rooms, just from reading about it.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia will not be surprised that the assembly of these four unrelated topics together into some kind of Cosmic Hash is the brainchild of frequent flyer Diane Tessman, who has written about it here.  Ms. Tessman starts off with a little bit of self-congratulation:

It’s been a week of exciting, dynamic 2012 events! I made a prediction back in the early 1990s that archeological discoveries in the final phase of the Change Times would be landmark events that would answer long-unanswered questions.

I predicted that not only these landmarks were significant in themselves but they would be a catalyst for UFO disclosure, alien landings, and a change in reality-perception (level of consciousness) for all humankind.

Maybe my predictions expect too much to manifest from these pivotal archeological discoveries but this is not the time to be a skeptic, because after all, I was right about the astounding discoveries. We shall see about the rest of my predictions in the future.

Yup.  That we shall.

She then goes on to describe (1) how the discovery of mammoth bones, human artifacts, and terrestrial features like river beds on the North Sea floor shows that Atlantis is real, (2) the discovery that the Easter Island moai statues have bodies shows that UFOs are real, (3) the discovery of the new Mayan text shows that the whole Mayan prophecy nonsense is real, and (4) the discovery of the Higgs boson shows that God/Celestial Consciousness is real.  Or something like that.  With Diane Tessman, it's hard to tell, sometimes.  Here's what she had to say about the Higgs:

So, science has confirmed what spiritual people knew all along: There is a God Spark, a God particle. Of course many people feel “it” (he/she/it) is within us, not out there in the universe of physics. Truth might be, it is everywhere, just as sub-atomic particles are everywhere and just as consciousness itself is everywhere. The universe is consciousness!

Yup, I'm sure that's what the physicists at CERN are saying today.  "Wow, I'm glad we showed that the Higgs exists.  But after all, I felt it all around me, all the time, because, you know, consciousness.  And god.  And everything.  So we really didn't need to do that experiment, we could have just experienced the Higgs."

I get kind of hot under the collar when people who don't understand science hijack discoveries made by actual trained, working scientists for their own silly purposes.  It misleads, it muddies the water, and (worst) it cheapens the years of work done by the people who are some of the clearest thinkers in the world.  I'll be the first to admit that I understand only the vaguest, shallowest bits of the Standard Model and how the Higgs boson fits into it; but then, I don't go pontificating to my readers about what it all means as if I were a physicist.

Okay.  I should just calm down a little, because (after all) it's not like the scientists at CERN (or the geologists who are studying Doggerland, or any other working researchers) are losing much sleep over Ms. Tessman and her ilk.  So, I guess, let her have her spiritual quantum-physics-powered UFOs from Atlantis, or whatever the hell it is she believes in.  Me, I'm just going to have another cup of coffee and read some more press releases from the physicists, because however you interpret it, you have to admit that this stuff about the Higgs boson is pretty freakin' cool.

The Cosmic Glass Pyramids of Doom

In yet another example of a fact-free, zero-evidence claim spinning its way around the internet, we now have a story about giant glass pyramids being discovered on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.  (Source)

These "strange underwater structures... 200 meters high, made of a crystal-like substance" were allegedly discovered from sonar surveying done by a "Dr. Verlag Meyer."  This sent up a red flag immediately, because "Verlag" isn't a first name, it's a German word meaning "publishing house."  But sometimes people have weird names, so I decided to do a quick look, and I could find no scientist named "Verlag Meyer," much less one with any credible links to oceanographic research.  "Dr. Verlag Meyer" seems to be as unreal as the glass pyramids he allegedly discovered.

That hasn't stopped the claim from circulating, of course.  What I find most annoying, however, is the way the sources on this topic pretend that there is all sorts of buzz going on in scientific circles about this non-story:

There are several Western scholars who argue that the pyramid on the seabed may have been initially made on the mainland, after which a devastating earthquake struck and changed the landscape completely. Other scientists argue that a few hundred years ago the waters of the Bermuda Triangle area may have as one of the cornerstone activities of the people of Atlantis, and Pyramids on the sea floor may be a supply warehouse for them. Perhaps it is related to the underwater race of humanoids discovered in Washington State in 2004 - the so called "aquatic ape" beings?

Oh, yeah, all the scientists I know spend their time researching Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, and "aquatic ape beings."

And a complete lack of evidence never seems to bother these people.  They're content to blather on as if what they were talking about actually made sense:

There is also a suspicion that the Bermuda triangle and the area where this pyramid was supposedly located may be some sort of "holy grounds" that is being protected by the fabled Atlanteans - that whatever crosses over the location is considered an offering... Others hypothesize that the pyramid can attract and collect cosmic rays, from the so called "energy field" or "quantum vacuum"  and that this may have been used as an Atlantean power plant (or whoever was around at the time). With the mystery still surrounding the Egyptian pyramids and the fact that the pyramidal structures seems to be found in almost all ancient cultures - its going to be hard to tell for certain the origin of this structure or if it truly exists (we haven't been down there yet so...).

Reading this made me shout at my computer, "Do you even understand what a cosmic ray is, you nimrod?"  My computer didn't answer, which I'm taking as a "no."  They have no more understanding of cosmic rays than did the writers of the amazingly abysmal 1960s science fiction show Lost In Space, who appended the word "cosmic" to things to make them seem, well, cosmic.  Like when the wind would blow, knocking over styrofoam rocks and spray-painted cardboard models of scientific apparatus, and Will and Dr. Smith and The Robot would run around waving their arms wildly and yelling, "It's a cosmic storm!  We have to take cover!"  But it never worked, because in the midst of the cosmic storm there would be a cosmic noise ("bwooooyoyoyoyoyoy") and an alien would always appear out of nowhere.  These aliens included a pirate with an electronic parrot, a motorcycle gang, some space hillbillies, a group of alien teenage hippies, and in one extremely memorable episode, Brunhilde (complete with a horned helmet and a cosmic horse).

But I digress.

The pièce de resistance of the glass pyramids article, of course, has to be the illustrations, such as the following:

  Nowhere does it say that these illustrations are "artist's renditions," so a less-than-careful reader might be led to the conclusion that this was an actual underwater photograph of a crystal pyramid.  Of course, a later illustration might give a critical clue to unwary readers that they weren't looking at photographs:

I rather like this one, although the inevitable question of "where is the water going?" does come to mind.  But given that another woo-woo claim is that the Earth is hollow, I'd guess they'd have a ready answer for that one, too.

So, that's our dip in the deep end of the pool for today.  And just to reiterate: there is no credible evidence whatsoever that there are pyramids of any kind, much less glass ones, on the floor of the Atlantic.  Pyramids don't concentrate Cosmic Quantum Vacuum Vibration Frequencies, either, despite what you might have read from such luminaries of the scientific world as Richard C. Hoagland, who also (as you may remember) thinks there are crop circles on Saturn.  I'd like to think that this will put an end to the discussion, and also to people forwarding this around the Internet, although that might be a forlorn hope given that the source article I looked at had been linked, forwarded, and Facebook-liked a total of close to 10,000 times as of the point I found it.  So my feeble efforts are probably going to be as ineffectual as if the cruise ship captain in the above Scientific Photograph shouted "Reverse Engines!"

The Google Earth Atlantis conspiracy

New from the "You Can't Win With These People" department, we have news that Google Earth did not, in fact, discover Atlantis in 2009.

Or, as the Atlanteans would have you believe, they are covering up the fact that they found Atlantis for their own nefarious reasons.

You may remember the news from two years ago, when the newly-launched Google Ocean began to add imaging data on the topography of the ocean floor.  You could, if you wanted to, view the mysterious and inaccessible contours of the abyssal plains and mid-ocean ridges.  It was all very cool, a real triumph of science and technology.

Until, that is, they posted the following, from off the coast of Africa:

After all the woo-woos stopped having multiple orgasms, and actually stopped to think about it, at least some of them realized that it couldn't be what it looked like, because the scale was all wrong.  If this was the remnants of a sunken city, the streets of the city (presumably the apparent grooves in the photograph) would have had to be over a half a mile across.  Google Earth, for their part, immediately recognized what was going on, and said that the "grid lines" didn't exist, that they were a sensor artifact produced by using overlapping data sets that didn't quite line up.

So, last week they released a new image, with the problem compensated for, and lo and behold, the "sunken city" disappears:

So you'd think that at that point, all of the Atlanteans would sort of go, "Oh.  Okay.  I see now.  What a bunch of nimrods we were," and go home.

You'd be wrong.

Sites have started springing up all over that Google Earth is participating in a giant coverup, that they slipped up in letting the original image become public, and now they're trying to cover their tracks.  (For one particularly funny example, watch this short YouTube video from one of the conspiracy-theory wingnuts.)  The new image, they say, has deliberately erased evidence of the existence of Atlantis -- it was the original image that was correct.

What I find the funniest about all this is that none of them seem to stop to consider what possible motive Google Earth would have for eliminating the evidence of a ruined city on the sea floor.  If the thing exists, it would only be of interest to archaeologists -- it's not like there's anything down there that is worthy of all of the effort.  If anything, you'd think that the scientists working on Google Earth would be excited if it were true -- scientists tend to get that way when they come across new and unexpected findings, because that's how you make your name in the scientific world, and (more importantly) that's how you get grant money.

Not that any of this will convince the conspiracy theorists, because as I've commented before, you can't convince a conspiracy theorist.  Mere logic and evidence don't do it, and in fact usually lead the conspiracy theorist to decide that the wielder of said logic and evidence is just part of the conspiracy.  The whole thing is more than a little maddening.

So anyway, I'd like to end with a picture of what's really down there.  You know, what Google Earth et al. are covering up.

Yes, I know that Google Earth didn't show any statues with spears.  That's because they systematically removed all evidence of them from their maps.  But they're down there, because Plato said so.  And when it comes to evidence, who are we going to trust - a Greek philosopher from 2,500 years ago, or a bunch of silly old stick-in-the-mud Ph.D.s in science?

Yeah.  I thought so.