Caught in the sea's net

The specter of climate change is getting difficult to ignore.  While you still can't point at a particular event and say "that happened because of anthropogenic climate change" -- as I said about a million times to my students, "climate isn't the same as weather" -- we've had enough anomalous heat waves, droughts, floods, and storms in the past ten years that it's getting harder and harder to deny unless you go around with blinders on or are just plain stupid.  (The latest being the catastrophic tornadoes that tore through Kentucky a couple of weeks ago, despite it being December, usually a low point in tornado occurrence and intensity.)

There are signs that even the science deniers are beginning to have some traces of second thoughts about the whole thing.  A study in Nature Scientific Reports a few weeks ago found that "climate contrarians" have of late begun to shift their ground, from outright denial that it's happening to attacking the researchers' integrities and the solutions they propose.  While this is still maddening to those of us who can actually read and understand a scientific paper, it's at least a tentative step in the right direction.  "I don't like the people who are saying this" and "the solutions won't work/are too expensive" are better than "this isn't happening" and "la la la la la la la not listening."

But the evidence that the situation is perilous keeps piling up.  One of the consequences of climate change most people don't think a lot about is sea level rise, mostly because the numbers seem insignificant; for example, a recent study showed that in the twenty-seven years between 1993 and 2020, the average sea level rose by a centimeter, and the rate of rise in the past ten years is triple what it was in the twentieth century.

It's easy to say, "a centimeter?  That's hardly anything."  But that ignores a couple of things.  First, that's an average; because of patterns of melt water, and sea and wind currents, some places have seen an increase of up to twenty centimeters, easily enough to cause devastating coastal flooding and infiltration of fresh-water aquifers with salt.  Second, there's geological evidence that when the sea level rises, it can happen in fits-and-starts, as ice shelves (primarily in Greenland and Antarctica) collapse.  Given how many people live in low-lying coastal areas, it wouldn't take much to cause a humanitarian catastrophe.

Another pair of studies that came out just last week have illustrated how vulnerable coastal communities have been -- and still are -- to changes in sea level.  Archaeologists uncovered evidence from two millennia ago in southern Brazil indicating that a drop in sea level due to increases in polar ice exposed shellfish beds that the coastal indigenous people depended on, and led to wide abandonment of settlements in the area.  The opposite happened in Greenland in the fourteenth century -- coastal communities that had been settled by Vikings three centuries earlier got swamped, eradicating coastline and driving the settlers up against uninhabitable glacial regions.  They were caught between the rising seas and the rising ice, trapped in an ever-shrinking strip of land that eventually disappeared completely.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jensbn, Greenland scenery, CC BY-SA 3.0]

My initial reaction to the latter paper was puzzlement; the fourteenth century was the height of the Little Ice Age, so you'd think the freeze-up would have lowered sea level, not raised it.  But I was failing to take into account isostasy, which is the phenomenon caused by the fact that the continents are literally floating in the magma of the mantle.  Just like adding weight to a boat causes it to ride lower in the water, adding weight to a continent causes it to sink a little into the mantle.  So when the ice sheets built up on Greenland, it pushed it downward, submerging habitable coastline.  (The opposite has happened as the glaciers have melted; in fact, it's still happening in Scandinavia, Canada, and Scotland, the latter of which is still undergoing isostatic rebound at a rate of ten centimeters of uplift per century.)

The deniers are right about one thing; the Earth has certainly experienced climatic ups and downs throughout its long history.  What's terrifying right now is the rate at which it's happening.  A study from the International Panel on Climate Change found persuasive evidence that the rate of temperature increase we're seeing is higher than it's been since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, over fifty million years ago.

If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what would.

It's the humanitarian cost that's been on my mind lately, not just because of today's climate change, but the changes that have occurred historically.  I was so captivated by the tragedy of the disappearance of the Norse settlements in Greenland that years ago, it inspired me to write a poem -- one of the few I've ever written.  What would it be like to be the last person alive in a place, knowing no one would come to rescue you?  I can only hope humanity's fate won't be so bleak -- but whenever I think about our reckless attitude toward the environment, this haunting image comes to mind, and I thought it would be a fitting way to end this post.

Greenland Colony 1375

He goes down to the sea each day and walks the shore.
Each day the gray sea ice is closer, and fewer gulls come.
He wanders up toward the village, past the empty and ruined rectory.
The churchyard behind it has stone cairns.  His wife lies beneath one,
And there is one for Thórvald, his son,
Though Thórvald's bones do not rest there; he and three others
Were gathered ten years ago in the sea's net
And came not home.

Since building his son's cairn,
He had buried one by one the last four villagers.
Each time he prayed in the in the stone church on Sunday
That he would be next,
And not left alone to watch the ice closing in.

In his father's time ships had come.  The last one came
Fifty years ago.
Storms and ice made it easy for captains to forget
The village existed.  For a time he prayed each Sunday
For a ship to come and take him to Iceland or Norway or anywhere.
None came.  Ship-prayers died with the last villager,
Three years ago.  He still prayed in the stone church on Sunday,
For other things; until last winter,
When the church roof collapsed in a storm.
The next Sunday he stayed home and prayed for other things there.

Now even the gulls are going,
Riding the thin winds to other shores.  Soon they will all be gone.
He will walk the shore, looking out to sea for ships that will never come,
And see only the gray sea ice, closer each day.

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I remember when I first learned about the tragedy of how much classical literature has been lost.  Take, for example, Sophocles, which anyone who's taken a college lit class probably knows because of his plays Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus.  He was the author of at least 120 plays, of which only seven have survived.  While we consider him to be one of the most brilliant ancient Greek playwrights, we don't even have ten percent of the literature he wrote.  As Carl Sagan put it, it's as if all we had of Shakespeare was Timon of Athens, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline, and were judging his talent based upon that.

The same is true of just about every classical Greek and Roman writer.  Little to nothing of their work survives; some are only known because of references to their writing in other authors.  Some of what we do have was saved by fortunate chance; this is the subject of Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful book The Swerve, which is about how a fifteenth-century book collector, Poggio Bracciolini, discovered in a monastic library what might well have been the sole remaining copy of Lucretius's masterwork De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which was one of the first pieces of writing to take seriously Democritus's idea that all matter is made of atoms.

The Swerve looks at the history of Lucretius's work (and its origin in the philosophy of Epicurus) and the monastic tradition that allowed it to survive, as well as Poggio's own life and times and how his discovery altered the course of our pursuit of natural history.  (This is the "swerve" referenced in the title.)  It's a fascinating read for anyone who enjoys history or science (or the history of science).  His writing is clear, lucid, and quick-paced, about as far from the stereotype of historical writing being dry and boring as you could get.  You definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

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

Explorer, scientist... and hoaxer

Ever heard of André Thevet?

Born around 1516 in Angoulême, France, he was educated in the convent school of that city, although his teachers recorded that as a child he was "more interested in reading books than he was in religion," which seems like a reasonable choice to me.  Be that as it may, he evidently decided religion was worth studying after all, because at the age of twenty he took his vows and became a Franciscan priest.

[All the images in the post are in the Public Domain]

He led a life that was pretty remarkable, especially as compared to most of the people of his day (even the well-educated ones).  With the blessing of Jean de Bar-le-Duc, Cardinal of Lorraine, he visited Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and Palestine -- and in 1555 set out with Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, a French naval officer, to cross the Atlantic and explore the eastern coast of South America.

Now, keep in mind when all this was happening.  This is fifty years before the founding of Jamestown, Virginia.  It's ten years before the founding of St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest continuously-occupied city founded by Europeans in North America.

So no one in Europe knew much about the Americas at that point other than (1) they existed, (2) they were big, and (3) they were inhabited by people who weren't really all that receptive to a bunch of white guys showing up and saying "this is ours now."

But that didn't stop Thevet and de Villegaignon, who ended up in what is now Brazil, with their base of operations as the tiny settlement that ultimately would become Rio de Janeiro.  And this is where the story gets interesting.

Thevet was a self-styled naturalist, and he set about to document, describe, and draw all the interesting new plants and animals he found.  But the problem was, Thevet was also apparently a dedicated spinner of wild yarns.  So his book, Les singularités du France-Antarctique, has a few at least marginally accurate bits, like the sloth:

And this toucan:

But then, for reasons unknown, Thevet threw in some things like the succarath of Patagonia:

Which looks like he could use a good meal or two.  Then there's the camphruch, a sort of weird water unicorn thing (notice the webbed hind feet):

And the aloés, a sort of fish-goose mashup:

The yuanat, which apparently is the bastard child of a cat and an iguana:

And worst of all, the licorne-de-mer, which looks a bit like a giant fish with a chainsaw protruding from its forehead:

What strikes me about all of this is that I've been to South America (twice), and there's enough weird and fascinating wildlife there that you have to wonder what Thevet's possible motivation was for inventing all of this.  (I'm aware that some of this may have been quick glimpses followed by filling in the blanks in his memory with whatever came to mind.  I already noted the yuanat's resemblance to an iguana, and the saw-horn of the licorne-de-mer looks like the flat, toothed snout of a sawfish.  But still, a lot of it seems to have been spun from whole cloth.)

It's a question I've asked before -- what does a hoaxer get out of hoaxing?  Assuming there's not some obvious motivation like money?  Profit doesn't seem to be the issue here.  Thevet would likely have had precisely the same number of sales of his book, once he got back to France, with illustrations of real animals and plants as he did with all of this fanciful stuff that he'd clearly made up as he went along.  I mean, you don't need to exaggerate anything to see how bizarre the Pink Fairy Armadillo is:

Or the White-faced Saki:

Or the South American Tapir:

My guess is that he just got lazy, and decided it was more fun to sit on board ship and sip brandy and make up fanciful animals than it was tromping around the rain forest trying to see what was actually out there.

Thevet was hardly the only one who did this, of course.  The early days of European exploration were rife with examples of people coming back from ship voyages with bizarre tales of human tribes with their faces in the middle of their chests, people who had dogs' heads, people whose feet pointed backwards so their tracks would confuse anyone trying to follow them, a tribe whose members had enormous, pendulous elephant ears, and one-legged men with a single enormous foot that they used as a parasol on hot days (a legend used for wonderfully humorous effect in C. S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader).  I guess "yeah, we had a good trip and saw some cool people who looked basically like us only with darker skin" just wasn't good enough.

As amusing as all this may seem, I find this tendency maddening.  It's hard enough to figure out what's real and what's not under ordinary circumstances, but hoaxers complicate matters, and for no good reason other than a desire for notoriety.  So as much as I can chuckle at Thevet's duck/lion/unicorn, people like him set back the actual science of natural history significantly with their fairy stories.

I'd like to say that all of this is a thing of the past, but it's the same thing that motivates a lot of claims of cryptid-hunters, isn't it?  Now, I hasten to say that this doesn't invalidate all cryptid claims; as I've said many times before, there may really be something weird and unknown to biology out there lurking in the woods, lakes, or oceans.  But we have enough trouble dealing with the inevitable tendency of people (especially under high-adrenaline conditions) to exaggerate or misinterpret what they see and hear without the added complication of hoaxers making shit up.

So I encourage you to go to South America, which is a wonderful, diverse, fascinating, and huge place to explore.  It's home to over 300 species of hummingbirds (the eastern United States has a grand total of one), and countless other birds, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, insects, and assorted miscellany.  If you go there, though, watch out for cat-iguanas.  I hear they pack a nasty bite.

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Last week's Skeptophilia book recommendation was a fun book about math; this week's is a fun book about science.

In The Canon, New York Times and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Natalie Angier takes on a huge problem in the United States (and, I suspect, elsewhere), and does it with her signature clarity and sparkling humor: science illiteracy.

Angier worked with scientists from a variety of different fields -- physics, geology, biology, chemistry, meteorology/climatology, and others -- to come up with a compendium of what informed people should, at minimum, know about science.  In each of the sections of her book she looks at the basics of a different field, and explains concepts using analogies and examples that will have you smiling -- and understanding.

This is one of those books that should be required reading in every high school science curriculum.  As Angier points out, part of the reason we're in the environmental mess we currently face is because people either didn't know enough science to make smart decisions, or else knew it and set it aside for political and financial short-term expediency.  Whatever the cause, though, she's right that only education can cure it, and if that's going to succeed we need to counter the rote, dull, vocabulary-intense way science is usually taught in public schools.  We need to recapture the excitement of science -- that understanding stuff is fun.  

Angier's book takes a long stride in that direction.  I recommend it to everyone, layperson and science geek alike.  It's a whirlwind that will leave you laughing, and also marveling at just how cool the universe is.

The tipping point

There's a common comment from climate change deniers that I'm sick unto death of, and it usually takes the form of something like "the Earth's climate has had ups and downs in the past, and life has gone along just fine."

First, it's the pure ignorance of this attitude that gets me.  If you did ten minutes' worth of research online, you'd find that a number of these "ups and downs" coincided with mass extinctions.  Life survived, yes, but dramatic losses in biodiversity and overall population numbers hardly constitutes "getting along just fine."  (In fact, the largest mass extinction ever -- the Permian-Triassic Extinction, which wiped out an estimated 96% of marine species and 65% of terrestrial species -- was coincident with a huge spike in temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide, thought to have been triggered by a colossal volcanic eruption.)

But second, and honestly worse, is the blithe attitude that we can continue doing whatever we want to the environment and face no consequences whatsoever.  This raises entitlement to the level of an art form; apparently, we humans occupy such an exalted niche that no matter what we do, the rest of nature is magically going to make sure we not only survive, but thrive.

Even the most diehard deniers, however, are getting some serious hints that their determination to ignore science is not working out so well.  First of all, we have the fires in the Amazon, which have reached unprecedented levels in Brazil, with 74,000 acres burned to the ground already.  The cause is twofold -- the natural dry season, and the incomprehensible policy by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro of recommending large-scale slash-and-burn to "encourage agriculture."  The problem is larger in scale than just South America, however.  Environmental scientist Jonathan Foley explained why in an interview with Science News:

Some computer models... show a hypothetical scenario that when we clear rainforest, it starts to almost immediately warm up and dry out the atmosphere nearby.  When we stand in a forest, it feels cool and moist.  But when you clear-cut large areas of the forest, the air right around you gets hotter and drier, and it affects even rainfall patterns.  The worry is if you start clear-cutting more of the Amazon, in theory, a tipping point could be reached where the rest of the forest dries out, too. 

If that happens, the idea is that the Amazon could flip suddenly from being a rainforest to being a dry savanna-like ecosystem.  We’re not absolutely certain about it, but even that theoretical possibility is kind of terrifying...  Globally, about 10 to 15 percent of our CO2 emissions comes from deforestation.  If this is going back up again in Brazil, that’s going to make climate change even worse.

The only amendment that needs to be made to Foley's statement is his use of the word "if" in the last sentence.

Smoke from the 2019 Amazonian wildfires [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA]

The other piece of alarming information this week comes from some research done at Stockholm University that firmed up a link between the salinity of the North Atlantic and climate throughout the world.  The team, made up of David K. Hutchinson, Helen K. Coxall, Matt OʹRegan, Johan Nilsson, Rodrigo Caballero, and Agatha M. de Boer, were studying the Eocene-Oligocene Transition (EOT), which occurred 34 million years ago and involved a shift from a "hothouse" to "icehouse" climate.  

The authors write:

The Eocene–Oligocene transition (EOT), ~34 Ma ago, marked a major shift in global climate towards colder and drier conditions and the formation of the first Antarctic ice sheets.  A gradual decrease in CO2 is thought to be the primary driver of the transition, causing long-term cooling and increasing seasonality through the Eocene, culminating in the glaciation of Antarctica.  Deep water circulation proxies suggest that the EOT, including the preceding 1 Myr, also marked either the onset or strengthening of an Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC).

Catch that?  An event occurring the North Atlantic is the probable trigger for the formation of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, and a radical change in Earth's climate -- and, unsurprisingly, a massive extinction that wiped out 20% of the Earth's species (large mammals were the hardest hit).

What Hutchinson and his team showed is that the likely cause of this transition was the closing of a oceanic channel between the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic.  The Arctic Ocean at that time had very low salinity (something the team demonstrated using the species of algae that show up in the fossil record from that time and place).  As long as the channel was open, fresh water flooded into the North Atlantic, keeping the salinity of the surface water low.  When the channel closed due to tectonic movement, the salinity of the surface of the North Atlantic spiked.  Saline water is more dense than fresh water, so this surface water began to sink, kicking off the "North Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation" and (more germane to our discussion here) drawing down dissolved carbon dioxide by the metric ton.

The result: a drastic drop in temperature, Antarctica becoming an ice-covered wasteland, and a mass extinction worldwide.

How anyone can read this and not be freaking out over the spike in carbon dioxide we've seen in the last hundred years -- that appears to be the fastest carbon dioxide concentration change anywhere in the geological record -- is beyond me.  There's no doubt that there's a tipping point, as the Eocene-Oligocene Transition shows.  The only question is where that tipping point is -- and whether we've already passed it.

What's driving it all is money.  Altering our lifestyle, protecting the rain forests, and divesting ourselves from fossil fuels all require that we make sacrifices ourselves, but more importantly, that we end the chokehold the fossil fuels industry has on our elected officials.  Of course the politicians don't want anyone to understand and accept climate science, because that would mean cutting off one of their biggest sources of donations -- the petrochemical industry.

It is fitting to end with a quote from Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."  The problem is, here what we're jeopardizing is not simply someone's salary, but the long-term habitability of the Earth.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to my heart; the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life.  In The Three-Body Problem, Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu takes an interesting angle on this question; if intelligent life were discovered in the universe -- maybe if it even gave us a visit -- how would humans react?

Liu examines the impact of finding we're not alone in the cosmos from political, social, and religious perspectives, and doesn't engage in any pollyanna-ish assumptions that we'll all be hunky-dory and ascend to the next plane of existence.  What he does think might happen, though, makes for fascinating reading, and leaves you pondering our place in the universe for days after you turn over the last page.

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

Space suits and straw men

Before you jump to a wild explanation for something, it's a good idea to rule out prosaic explanations first.

Take, for example, the strange deity Bep Kororoti, worshiped by the Kaiapo tribe of Brazil.  Erich von Däniken and his ilk just love this god, and when you see a photograph of someone wearing a Bep Kororoti suit, you'll understand why:

In his book Gold of the Gods, von Däniken says that this is clear evidence of contact with an alien wearing a space suit:

João Americo Peret, one of our outstanding Indian scholars, recently published some photographs of Kaiapo Indians in ritual clothing that he took as long ago as 1952, long before Gagarin's first space flight...  I feel that it is important to reemphasize that Peret took these photographs in 1952 at a time when the clothing and equipment of astronauts were still not familiar to all us Europeans, let alone these wild Indians!...  Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth in his spaceship Vostok I for the first time on April 1961...  The Kaiapos in their straw imitation spacesuits need no commentary apart from the remark that these 'ritual garments' have been worn by the Indian men of this tribe on festive occasions since time immemorial, according to Peret...

Nope.  No commentary needed.  No questions, either.  Consider how this shows up on the dubiously credible site Message to Eagle:

The inhabitants of the Amazon jungle, the Indians Kaiapo [sic] settled in the State of Pará in northern Brazil, have detailed legends of sky visitors, who gave their people wisdom and knowledge. 

The Kaiapo Indians worshipped in particular one of these heavenly teachers. His name was Bep Kororoti, which in Kayapo [sic] language, means "Warrior of the Universe"... It is said that his weapons were so powerful that they could turn trees and stones into dust. 

Not surprisingly, his aggressive warrior manners terrified the primitive natives, who at the beginning even tried to fight against the alien intruder. 

However, their resistance was useless. 

Every time their weapons touched Bep Kororoti's clothes, the people fell down to the ground.

Eventually Bep calmed down, we find out, and began to teach the Kaiapo all sorts of stuff.  He also had lots of sex with Native women, apparently while still wearing his space suit, and today's Kaiapo claim descent from him.

The whole thing has become part of the "Ancient Aliens" canon, and even was featured on the show of the same name (narrated, of course, by the amazingly-coiffed Giorgio Tsoukalos).

So anyway.  The whole thing boils down to the usual stuff.  You have a god coming down from the sky, dispensing knowledge (and various other special offers) to the Natives, then returning from whence he came.   Evidence, they say, that the Kaiapo were visited by an alien race in ages past.

All of this, however, conveniently omits one little fact.  Probably deliberately, because once you point this out, the whole thing becomes abundantly clear.  Writer and skeptic Jason Colavito found out that not only did Bep Kororoti live in the sky and come visit the Kaiapo...

... he was the protector spirit of beekeepers.

For reference, here's a drawing of some traditional beekeepers, done by Pieter Brueghel the Elder in 1568:

Notice a similarity? Yeah, me too.

I know we all have our biases and our favorite explanations for things.  But when you deliberately sidestep a rational, Earth-based explanation for one that claims that damn near every anthropological find is evidence of ancient astronauts, you've abandoned any right to be taken seriously.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a look at one of the most peculiar historical mysteries known: the unsolved puzzle of Kaspar Hauser.

In 1828, a sixteen-year-old boy walked into a military station in the city of Ansbach, Germany.  He was largely unable to communicate, but had a piece of paper that said he was being sent to join the cavalry -- and that if that wasn't possible, whoever was in charge should simply have him hanged.

The boy called himself Kaspar Hauser, and he was housed above the jail.  After months of coaxing and training, he became able to speak enough to tell a peculiar story.  He'd been kept captive, he said, in a small room where he was never allowed to see another human being.  He was fed by a man who sometimes talked to him through a slot in the door.  Sometimes, he said, the water he was given tasted bitter, and he would sleep soundly -- and wake up to find his hair and nails cut.

But locals began to question the story when it was found that Hauser was a pathological liar, and not to be trusted with anything.  No one was ever able to corroborate his story, and his death from a stab wound in 1833 in Ansbach was equally enigmatic -- he was found clutching a note that said he'd been killed so he couldn't identify his captor, who signed his name "M. L. O."  But from the angle of the wound, and the handwriting on the note, it seemed likely that both were the work of Hauser himself.

The mystery endures, and in the book Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson looks at the various guesses that people have made to explain the boy's origins and bizarre death.  It makes for a fascinating read -- even if truthfully, we may never be certain of the actual explanation.

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

Nature walk

Mark Twain once said, "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable."

I ran across a particularly good example of that yesterday over at the site Mysterious Universe.  It's the story of one Katherine Brewster, a 27-year-old woman from England, who was visiting Brazil.  On the morning of March 26, she went for a walk down a trail in the jungle... and didn't return.

I've been to the jungle -- specifically, the Amazon lowlands of Ecuador and the Taman Negara region of Malaysia -- and I can say from personal experience that they are not places where you'd want to get lost.  The jungle abounds in plants with various kinds of toxins, not to mention sharp spines.  Many of the animals there specifically want to kill you in unpleasant ways.  Because of the high biodiversity and extreme competition for niches, the organisms there have evolved some pretty terrifying adaptations -- venom, talons, and big, nasty, pointy teeth to name three.  In Malaysia, I found out that they even had terrestrial leeches -- bloodsucking critters who hide in the leaf litter and then crawl up your leg to find a nice spot to fasten on.

I'm not normally squeamish, but these guys skeeved me out so much that I took to dousing my boots daily in a repellent containing DEET.  It worked, but if I ever throw those boots away, I'm going to have to file an Environmental Impact Statement.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So getting lost there would be a seriously bad idea, which is why Katherine Brewster's friends and family were in a panic.  When a search party found no trace, and two, then three days went by, everyone feared the worst.  But then five days later she walked out the jungle, covered with cuts, bruises, and insect stings, saying that a "divine voice" had told her to trek into the wilderness, and while she was there she learned to talk with the plants, who had taught her how to perform photosynthesis.

At this juncture, I feel obliged to tell my readers that I'm not making this up.

Besides becoming photosynthetic, Brewster also said the plants told her about this thing called the "morphogenetic field."  Here's her explanation:

[C]onsciousness within form connects everything. We have access to the whole universe, all we need to do is to detach ourselves from the material.  We are thus the intrinsic consciousness of the universe.

Whatever that means.  As far as how she avoided starving, she said that the plants themselves told her which ones were safe to eat:

The plants were taking to me, telling me which ones I could eat, which ones I could make tea with, or to heal a wound with.  The messages would come in words. It was more like having a conversation with the plants.

I'm not entirely sure that even if plants could talk, I'd believe what they said.  My sense is that the multiflora rose currently taking over my entire back yard, for example, is actively evil.  It's constantly doing things like sitting there, looking innocuous, then when I get a little too close, or worse, come at it with a pair of clippers, it reaches out and skewers me with thorns as sharp as hypodermic needles.  My son, who sometimes has more good intentions than sense, once attacked a multiflora rose bush with a machete.  He was successful at hacking it back some, but came out of the encounter looking like he'd been mauled by a jaguar.

Brewster, on the other hand, seemed to view everything she encountered on her little impromptu nature walk as being benevolent.  She even said she came to an understanding with the insects -- specifically, that they could bite her or sting her if they wanted to.  She said that she needed to "learn from the experience," which doesn't to me sound like an "understanding" so much as a statement of "fuck it, I give up."  I'm not sure what you could learn from a wasp sting other than "It hurts like hell," but for some reason she felt the need to let the bugs know that she meant them no harm.

My guess is that the wasps all went back to their nests and told their friends where she was.  "Go sting this chick," they probably said, in Wasp.  "She just kind of stands there with this bemused smile on her face."

Wasps are a little like multiflora rose in that respect.

So anyway, Brewster said she learned a lot from her experience, most strikingly how to synthesize her own food using sunlight as an energy source.  Myself, I didn't think that's something that could be taught.  I thought you needed all these enzyme systems and subcellular structures and so on in order to photosynthesize.  But I'm just a biologist.  What do I know about morphogenetic fields, and whatnot?

Amazingly, Brewster also says she's ready to go back in and do another Back-to-Nature trek again.  I guess the plants haven't taught her enough yet.  Maybe this time she'll learn how to make flowers come out of her ass, or something.  I dunno.  But one thing I'm sure of: the wasps are probably already preparing their welcome.

The final word on Zika

One of the posts that earned me the most hate mail was one I did a while back on the Zika virus, wherein I suggested that what the scientists were telling us -- namely, that the Zika virus was the cause of the recent upsurge in microcephaly in infants -- was the truth.

The alternate hypotheses -- that the birth defect was due to exposure to the insecticide pyriproxyfen, widely used to control the Aedes aegypti mosquito (which is the vector not only for Zika, but for chikungunya, yellow fever, and dengue fever), or even more outlandish, that the condition was caused by being bitten by genetically-modified Aedes mosquitoes -- I suggested were scientifically unsound and extremely unlikely borderline conspiracy theories.  The genetically-modified Aedes, in fact, were released as a method for reducing mosquito populations and therefore the spread of the diseases they carry, but that carried little weight with the people for whom "GMO" means "tool of the evil scientific establishment and Big Pharma for killing people and/or turning them into mindless automata."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Well.  You'd have thought I was suggesting carpet bombing Fern Gully or something.  I was called credulous and brainwashed, and those were the generous responses.  Others suggested I was a stooge of the scientific establishment or a shill for Big Pharma, and was deliberately spreading misinformation to fool the general public into thinking that the scientists actually care about humanity.  As such, I was complicit in any damage they did, which according to some people who wrote to me, might include the extinction of the human race.

I didn't bother trying to disabuse my detractors of these opinions.  For one thing, I've found that people who believe something that fervently are seldom convinced by rational discourse.  All my objections would have done is convince them that they were onto something, despite the fact that recent trips to my mailbox have turned up zero Shill Payments to me from Big Pharma.

But time passed and the furor died down, and the more rabid of my readers went on to find other things about me to criticize.  But I just stumbled a couple of days ago across an article in the online science magazine Stat to the effect that, lo and behold...

... a recent exhaustive study has shown that microcephaly is due not to insecticides or GMO mosquitoes, but to the Zika virus itself.

Look, it's not like I wouldn't admit it if I was wrong.  It's been known to happen, and as much as it isn't exactly pleasant, I'll be up front about it and eat crow if necessary.  But here, the new study, conducted by a team of fourteen Brazilian doctors and scientists and published in the highly respected British medical journal The Lancet, is unequivocal.  The authors write:

We screened neonates born between Jan 15 and Nov 30, 2016, and prospectively recruited 91 cases and 173 controls.  In 32 (35%) cases, congenital Zika virus infection was confirmed by laboratory tests and no controls had confirmed Zika virus infections.  69 (83%) of 83 cases with known birthweight were small for gestational age, compared with eight (5%) of 173 controls.  The overall matched odds ratio was 73·1 (95% CI 13·0–∞) for microcephaly and Zika virus infection after adjustments.  Neither vaccination during pregnancy or use of the larvicide pyriproxyfen was associated with microcephaly.  Results of laboratory tests for Zika virus and brain imaging results were available for 79 (87%) cases; within these cases, ten were positive for Zika virus and had cerebral abnormalities, 13 were positive for Zika infection but had no cerebral abnormalities, and 11 were negative for Zika virus but had cerebral abnormalities...  We provide evidence of the absence of an effect of other potential factors, such as exposure to pyriproxyfen or vaccines (tetanus, diphtheria, and acellular pertussis, measles and rubella, or measles, mumps, and rubella) during pregnancy, confirming the findings of an ecological study of pyriproxyfen in Pernambuco and previous studies on the safety of Tdap vaccine administration during pregnancy.

"Importantly, this article provides the first evidence that exposure to the insecticide pyriproxyfen and vaccines administered during pregnancy were not associated with an increased risk of microcephaly," wrote Federico Costa and Albert Ko (of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute and Yale University School of Public Health, respectively) about the recent study.  "The biological plausibility of these two rumored causes was always weak in any case."

So that should be that, but of course you know it won't be.  Studies like this one don't convince the naysayers and conspiracy theorists; all they do is move the scientists who conducted it into the "evil and untrustworthy" column.  You have to wonder what would convince these people.  My guess is nothing.  As I've so often commented, you can't logic your way out of a position you didn't logic your way into.

I'm already bracing myself for another tsunami of hate mail, but hell, that's why I do what I do, right?  As punk rocker John Lydon put it, "If you're pissing people off, you know you're doing something right."

The disappearance of Bruno

UFO enthusiasts are currently in a tizzy over the disappearance last week of a university student from Rio Branco, Brazil, who left behind a bizarre video about 16th century philosopher, scientist, and theologian Giordano Bruno and a room whose walls are covered with esoteric symbols.

The student's name is Bruno Borges (I wondered if his first name was in honor of Giordano, or whether it was a coincidence; of course, in the minds of the UFO conspiracy theorists, nothing is a coincidence).  He apparently had a reputation as being a bit of an odd duck even prior to his disappearance.  He was obsessed with aliens, and his fascination with the earlier Bruno came from the fact that the Italian philosopher/scientist was one of the first to speculate that other planets -- even planets around other stars -- might harbor life.  Borges hinted that Bruno's execution at the hands of the Inquisition was to keep him silent about the reality of aliens, when in reality it was just your average charges of heresy.  The church made eight accusations, claiming that Bruno was guilty of:

• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith and speaking against it and its ministers
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about the Trinity, divinity of Christ, and Incarnation
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith pertaining to Jesus as Christ
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith regarding the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about both Transubstantiation and Mass
• claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity
• believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes
• dealing in magics and divination

Given the intolerance of the time, any one of these would be sufficient, but the Catholic Church is nothing if not thorough.  Bruno was sentenced to be burned at the stake, and supposedly upon hearing his fate made a rude gesture at the judges and said, "Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam" ("Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it"), which ranks right up there with Galileo's "Eppur si muove" as one of the most elegant "fuck you" statements ever delivered.

I suppose it's understandable that Borges thought Bruno was a pretty cool guy.  A lot of us science types do, although that admiration might be misplaced.  Hank Campbell writes over at The Federalist:

Bruno only agreed with Copernicus because he worshiped the Egyptian God Thoth and believed in Hermetism and its adoration of the sun as the center of the universe.  Both Hermes and Thoth were gods of…magic. 

The church and science did not agree with Bruno that pygmies came from a “second Adam” or that Native Americans had no souls, but they were also not going to kill him over it.  There is no evidence his “science” came up at any time.  He was imprisoned for a decade because the church wanted him to just recant his claims that Hermetism was the one true religion and then they could send him on his way.  When he spent a decade insisting it was fact, he was convicted of Arianism and occult practices, not advocating science.

So right off, we're on shaky ground, not that this was ever in doubt.  In any case, between Borges's devotion to Bruno and his fascination with aliens, he apparently went a little off the deep end.  He left behind over a dozen bound books, mostly written in code, and only a few of which have been deciphered.  Here's a sample passage from one of the ones that has been decrypted:

It is easy to accept what you have been taught since childhood and what is wrong.  It is difficult, as an adult, to understand that you were wrongly taught what you suspected was correct since you were a child.  In other words, if you fit into the system, your behaviour will be determined, making you at the mercy of beliefs already provided and well established in dogmas and rituals, with the masses.

Which is standard conspiracy theory fare.  He wouldn't tell his parents or his sister what he was up to, only that he was working on fourteen books that would "change mankind in a good way."  Besides the symbols painted on his walls, he also had a portrait of himself next to an alien:

Borges's apartment wall, showing the symbols, writing, and the portrait of him with a friend

Borges has now been missing for over a week, and his family is understandably frantic.  The UFO/conspiracy world is also freaking out, but for a different reason; they think that Borges knew too much (in this view of the world, people are always "finding out too much" and having to be dealt with), and either the people who don't want us to know about aliens, or else the aliens themselves, have kidnapped him.

But the whole thing sounds to me like the story of a delusional young man whose disappearance is a matter for the police, not for Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.  It's sad, but I'm guessing that aliens had nothing to do with it.  Of course, try to tell that to the folks over at the r/conspiracy subreddit, where such a statement simply confirms that I'm one of "the two s's" -- sheeple (dupe) or shill (complicit).  I'll leave it to wiser heads than mine to determine which is most likely in my case.

The voices of the dead

This week I ran into a couple of claims of a type I'd never heard of before -- and considering how long I've been in the game of analyzing the world of woo-woo, that came as kind of a surprise, especially when I found out that this sort of thing has apparently been going on for a while.

Turns out that there are people out there who say not only that they can contact the spirits of the dead,  but that they are acting as the ghost's locum.  In other words, they are guided by the not-quite-departed spirit to perform acts that the spirit itself would have done, if only it still had a body with which to do so.

Which becomes even more extraordinary when you find out that the ghosts are those of people like Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Victor Hugo.

If you're thinking, "Wait... so that means...  No, they can't really be saying that" -- yes, that's exactly what they're saying.  These "mediums" write novels, create art, write music, and then claim that the works came from the minds of the Great Masters, who were just hanging around looking for someone through which to channel talents frustrated by the inconvenience of being dead.

First we have Rosemary Brown, a British housewife who in the 1970s catapulted to fame by going public with the story that she had written music -- or more accurately, written down music -- that had been dictated to her by Debussy, Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, and Bach.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Some people have been impressed with her work to the extent that it was actually performed and recorded in a collection called A Musical Séance.  Pianist Elene Gusch, who wrote a biography of Brown, said, "It would have been difficult for even a very able and well-trained composer to come up with them all, especially to produce them at the speed with which they came through."

André Previn, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, was less effusive. "If the newfound compositions are genuine," he said, "they would best have been left on the shelf."

Brown died in 2001, still claiming that the pieces she wrote were actually compositions of long-dead composers.  She even described them; Debussy was a "hippie type" who "wore very bizarre clothes," Beethoven no longer had "that crabby look" because he'd regained his hearing, and Schubert tried to sing compositions to her but "he doesn't have a very good voice."

Skeptics, of course, point out that none of Brown's music goes much beyond the simpler and less technical compositions the composers created when they were alive, which is odd, especially since some of them had had hundreds of years to come up with new pieces.  But she's still considered by true believers to be one of the best pieces of spirit survival out there.

Then we've got Brazilian artist Valdelice Da Silva Dias Salum, who makes a similar claim, but about painting -- that when her hand holds the brush, she's being guided by Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Matisse, Monet, and Van Gogh.  She actually signs her paintings not with her own name, but with the name of the artist who (she says) was doing the actual work.

"I grew up poor and illiterate," Salum told Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, the reporter for NPR who wrote the story.  "I didn't even know who these painters were.  I had no artistic talent.  But the spirits selected me."

Garcia-Navarro included in her story a drawing of a girl that Salum signed "Renoir."  To my admittedly untrained eye, it looks a bit like the attempts high school art students make to copy the style of the grand masters; there's nothing about it that has that luminous beauty that distinguishes a genuine Renoir.

But what do I know?  Apparently when Garcia-Navarro was researching for her story, she also found a writer named Divaldo Franco who is apparently producing new works by Victor Hugo, and another named Sandra Guedes Marques Carneiro, who has sold over 250,000 copies of romances she says are dictated to her from the spirit world by love-starved dead people.

No wonder they need to get their frustrations out.  When Rosemary Brown was on Johnny Carson, she apparently revealed that according to her sources, there was no sex in heaven, which is pretty damned disappointing.

Not that I'd probably be heading there even in the best-case scenario.

My general feeling about all of this is that as evidence for life after death goes, it's pretty thin.  Once again, we have the spirits of the dead communicating to the living things that don't really reveal to us much we didn't already know.  I find Rosemary Brown the most interesting of the lot -- I have to admit that some of her compositions aren't bad.  But there's nothing about them that jumps out at me and says, "Oh, this is definitely J. S. Bach at work."

The upshot is, as a writer, I'm going to continue to work on getting everything I can written while I'm alive.  It'd be nice if after I'm dead I could continue to dream up stories and upload them to the literal Cloud.  But I'm not counting on that opportunity.

So if you'd like to read something I've written (other than Skeptophilia, obviously), there's a selection at the right to choose from, and my next novel, Lock & Key, is scheduled to be on bookshelves in November.  Because once I've gone to my eternal reward (or just deserts, as the case may be), my general impression is that will be that.

Space suits and straw men

Before you jump to a wild explanation for something, it's a good idea to rule out prosaic explanations first.

Take, for example, the strange deity Bep Kororoti, worshiped by the Kaiapo tribe of Brazil.  Erich von Däniken and his ilk just love this god, and when you see a photograph of someone wearing a Bep Kororoti suit, you'll understand why:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In his book Gold of the Gods, von Däniken says that this is clear evidence of contact with an alien wearing a space suit:

João Americo Peret, one of our outstanding Indian scholars, recently published some photographs of Kaiapo Indians in ritual clothing that he took as long ago as 1952, long before Gagarin's first space flight... ...I feel that it is important to reemphasize that Peret took these photographs in 1952 at a time when the clothing and equipment of astronauts were still not familiar to all us Europeans, let alone thse wild Indians!... Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth in his spaceship Vostok I for the first time on April 1961... The Kaiapos in their straw imitation spacesuits need no commentary apart from the remark that these 'ritual garments' have been worn by the Indian men of this tribe on festive occasions since time immemorial, according to Peret...

Nope.  No commentary needed.  No questions, either.  Consider how this shows up on the dubiously credible site Message to Eagle:

The inhabitants of the Amazon jungle, the Indians Kaiapo [sic] settled in the State of Pará in northern Brazil, have detailed legends of sky visitors, who gave their people wisdom and knowledge. 

The Kaiapo Indians worshipped in particular one of these heavenly teachers.  His name was Bep Kororoti, which in Kayapo [sic] language, means "Warrior of the Universe"...  It is said that his weapons were so powerful that they could turn trees and stones into dust. 

Not surprisingly, his aggressive warrior manners terrified the primitive natives, who at the beginning even tried to fight against the alien intruder. 

However, their resistance was useless. 

Every time their weapons touched Bep Kororoti's clothes, the people fell down to the ground.

Eventually Bep calmed down, we find out, and began to teach the Kaiapo all sorts of stuff.  He also had lots of sex with Native women, apparently while still wearing his space suit, and today's Kaiapo claim descent from him.

The whole thing has become part of the "Ancient Aliens" canon, and even was featured on the show of the same name (narrated, of course, by the amazingly-coiffed Giorgio Tsoukalos).

So anyway.  The whole thing boils down to the usual stuff.  You have a god coming down from the sky, dispensing knowledge (and various other special offers) to the Natives, then returning from whence he came.  Evidence, they say, that the Kaiapo were visited by an alien race in ages past.

All of this, however, conveniently omits one little fact.  Probably deliberately, because once you point this out, the whole thing becomes abundantly clear.  Writer and skeptic Jason Colavito found out that not only did Bep Kororoti live in the sky and come visit the Kaiapo...

... he was the protector spirit of beekeepers.

For reference, here's a drawing of some traditional beekeepers, done by Pieter Brueghel the Elder in 1568:

Notice a similarity?  Yeah, me too.

I know we all have our biases and our favorite explanations for things.  But when you deliberately sidestep a rational, Earth-based explanation for one that claims that damn near every anthropological find is evidence of ancient astronauts, you've abandoned any right to be taken seriously.

Brazilian werewolf alert

Every once in a while, I'll run into a story that just gives me the shudders, despite my generally rationalistic approach.  All this does, of course, is to highlight a truism about the human condition; when it comes to a fight between logic and emotion, emotion usually wins.  We like to flatter ourselves, and think that our highly-developed prefrontal cortices make us smarter than our non-human cousins, but when it comes to a real throw-down match between the parts of the brain, I'm putting my money on the limbic system every time -- the part of the brain that, along with the hypothalamus, governs the "four F's" of behavior: feeding, fighting, flight, and... mating.

A story this week out of Brazil highlights the third "F" -- which stands for the flight response.  It could also stand for "fear," because that's what usually motivates an animal running away.  The story, which comes out of the town of São Gonçalo de Campos, near Feira de Santana, in the state of Bahia, is about a rather terrifying cryptid that has been sighted more than once in local neighborhoods.

Even the government officials are taking it seriously.  Apparently, for the last two weeks there's been a curfew in the town; no one is to be outside after 9 PM.  It started when a man identified only as "Pingo" described seeing a five-foot-tall black monster, which ran at him; Pingo turned and fled, escaping (he said) only by the narrowest of margins.  At first, the other villagers made fun of him -- until others had similar encounters.  Locals are calling it a "werewolf."

All of this would have been nothing more than another tale of "I saw something real, really I did" if it hadn't been for the footage captured on a home security camera.  Watch it for yourself:

Here's a still:

Okay, yes, I know.  There are no such things as werewolves.  There's no reason why this couldn't have been faked.  It probably is a guy in dark clothes jumping around in front of the homeowner's security camera, in order to keep the whole scare going.  Who knows?  Maybe it's even "Pingo," who dreamed the story up to have his fifteen minutes (or in this case, more like two weeks) of fame.

But I have to admit that watching this video gave me some very irrational shudders right up the spine.  There's something about the way the creature moved that just doesn't look... human.  I'm probably being suggestible, I realize that; our fight-or-flight responses have been programmed through millions of years of evolution to shriek at us, whenever we see a shadowy shape in the dark, "DEAR GOD IT'S A PREDATOR RUN FOR YOUR LIFE OR YOU WILL BE MESSILY DEVOURED."  The chances of it being anything other than a hoaxing human are very small.

Even so, if I lived in São Gonçalo de Campos, I would definitely abide by the curfew.  I probably would also deadbolt my doors shut at night.  Maybe it is only Pingo playing a prank; that's what my prefrontal cortex is telling me.  But if I lived anywhere near where this thing had been seen, my limbic system would outshout my prefrontal cortex without even breaking a sweat.

The power of prayer vs. the power of litigation

Today we have a rather ironic story out of Brazil.

Cabaret owner Tarcilia Bezerra, in the city of Fortaleza, wanted to expand his business.  He had experienced great success with his liquor-and-dancing-girls enterprise, and thought it was time to make the place bigger.  So he applied for, and got, a building permit, and construction began.

The local church, however, didn't think that was such a hot idea.  All of that skin showing and alcohol flowing was just sinful; the idea that the godly folks of Fortaleza had to put up with Bezerra crowing about how well he was doing, and making the place bigger and better, was just naughty in god's sight.  So the pastor (who was unnamed in the story) encouraged his flock to pray that god would intervene and smite Bezerra and his unholy Temple of Tawdriness.  Prayer sessions were organized morning, noon, and night for weeks, as the construction went on.

And then, only a week before the grand reopening, lightning struck the cabaret, destroying most of the roof and almost all of the new construction.

The pastor was overjoyed, as were the members of his congregation.  The pastor spoke in a sermon the following Sunday about this demonstration of "the great power of prayer."  The church members bragged all over town that their petitions to god had been heard, and that the lightning had been sent by god himself to strike down the wicked cabaret.

So Bezerra sued the church.

His lawsuit read, in part, that the church and its members "were responsible for the end of my building and my business, using divine intervention, direct or indirect, as the actions or means."

The pastor, of course, was appalled, but was forced to respond to the lawsuit.  His response, predictably, was to deny "all responsibility or any connection with the end of the building."

Now, wait a minute: isn't this backwards?  The cabaret owner is the one who believes that praying works, and the church pastor doesn't?

The judge in the case, which has yet to be decided in court, evidently agrees.  In his opening statement, he said, "I do not know how I'm going to decide this case, but one thing is evident in the records. Here we have an owner of a cabaret who firmly believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church declaring that prayers are worthless."

It all, somehow, makes me wonder how much folks really believe what they're saying.  I remember, during the Cold War, Americans praying for the destruction of the Soviet Union.  How would they have reacted if Moscow had been struck by a giant meteorite, causing millions of deaths?  People pray for political candidates, and sometimes sports teams, to win.  What if it actually happened, as per biblical miracles, with the losing candidate (or sports team) being eaten by a lion, contracting leprosy, or being "swallowed up by the earth?"  Each Sunday, there are thousands of prayers given asking for Jesus' return.  What if he just showed up, and said, "You rang, here I am!  Okay, leave behind your comfy house and all of your stuff.  Give everything away to the poor, like I told you to.  What, weren't you listening?"

Oh, I'm sure that there are some people who would be thrilled if this happened.  The members of the Westboro Baptist Church, for example.  But I'll bet that most ordinary churchgoing folks would freak out so badly that they might never freak back in.

I suppose the take-home message, here, is "be careful what you pray for, because due to random chance, it might actually happen, and then you'll have to admit that you honestly didn't think anyone was listening."