Children of the sun

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may remember that a few years ago, I did a piece on the "Indigo Children" -- kids who are the "next step in evolution," as evidenced by the fact that they're sensitive, have paranormal abilities, and indigo-colored auras.  But these woo-woo ideas tend to become passé pretty quickly; before you knew it, every other family in your neighborhood claimed that their offspring was an "Indigo Child."

So there was no way the woo-woos were going to have their kids labeled with something so common and pedestrian.  They came up with the next level, which were the "Crystal Children" -- who you could recognize because they had "large eyes and an intense stare" and were able to "function as a group consciousness rather than as individuals."  Which was clearly much more special than those dumb Indigo Children were, even though it makes them sound like the scary kids in Children of the Corn.

But that wasn't enough, either.  So -- I shit you not -- they've leveled up again.  And this one's a doozy.

Meet... the "Sun Children."

Here's a little bit about the "Sun Children:"

It has been scientifically proven that the new children, being born since 2007, have been born with 13-strand DNA, which means that they will have far greater abilities than we have ever had.

So plain old two-stranded DNA's not enough?  I've taught genetics for thirty years, and I never knew about the principle of "the more strands, the better."

These children are volunteer souls, who are now being born, to become the New Leaders, who will be leading the world, from 2050 and onwards. By then the New Golden Age will have been anchored in by the Indigo, Crystal and Rainbow children, who have incarnated after the World War II. 

A lot of the Indigo, Crystal, and Rainbow children were COSMIC souls, from other galaxies and star systems, who were involved with the CREATION of this planet, when it was birthed.

Well, hell.  I missed the "Rainbow Children."  I wonder how many strands their DNA has?  Probably nine or so, I would expect, if you kind of split the difference.

And hey, I was born after World War II myself!  I wonder what kind of child I was?  My parents would probably have answered that question "a pain in the ass," but maybe they didn't know how to see auras.

It is of great IMPORTANCE, for the PARENTS of these new SUN children, to understand, that what worked for them and their parents, will simply not work for these children! 

Fact is, because of their 13 strand DNA, they will have all 12 chakras fully activated: - which means that they HAVE THEIR STELLAR GATEWAY WIDE OPEN!  This means they are EXTREMELY SENSITIVE TO LIGHT, TO SOUND VIBRATIONS, TO FREQUENCIES, AND MOST OF ALL, TO THE UNSEEN WORLD - WHICH TO US IS NOT REAL - BUT TO THEM IT IS.  THIS MAKES THEM HIGHLY PSYCHIC, WITH ABILITIES THAT WE HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO USE: TELEPORTATION, KENESIS [sic], TELEPATHY, SHAPE-SHIFTING, MOVING OBJECTS, HEARING WHAT IS SAID IN OTHER ROOMS, ABLE TO REMOTE VIEW, ETC.

I'd be satisfied if they had the ability to turn off their caps lock.

But man, that's a lot of abilities, isn't it?  Makes me kind of glad I'm not in the planning-for-a-family stage of things.  My two sons were hard enough to handle as toddlers; I can't imagine how life would have been if they'd been able to teleport, shape-shift, and hurl heavy objects around with their minds. They kind of fought with each other constantly as children, being personality types so different from each other that it's hard to comprehend how they came from the same gene pool, and if they'd been able to fight using telekinesis, I'm seriously in doubt that there'd have been any survivors, and that includes our house.  They did enough damage hitting each other with stuff the ordinary, non-Sun-Children way.

So I'm a little mystified as to how all of those would be good things.

Oh, and about the wide-open stellar gateway (whatever the fuck that means) and the sensitivity to stuff, she has more to say:

THIS MEANS THAT THESE CHILDREN WILL HAVE TO BE KEPT AWAY FROM ELECTRONIC DEVICES WHICH ARE JAMMING THEIR FREQUENCIES: Television sets, computers, mobile phones etc.  They will be fascinated with it, but beware: some of the members of a certain group of people on this planet, KNOW THIS, and are PURPOSEFULLY JAMMING THE FREQUENCY WAVES OF CHILDREN AND ADULTS, VIA SATELLITE COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AND THIS IS DONE AT SUCH A FREQUENCY, THAT WE ARE NOT EVEN AWARE THAT WE ARE BEING HELD HOSTAGE.  This is ESPECIALLY TRUE FOR VIDEO GAMES, PLAYSTATIONS, etc. for all of it is attempting to DE-ACTIVATE these children, so that the planet will not be able to move forward and into the New Age.

Man, it would suck to go through life with jammed frequencies.  I want my frequencies to be all hangy-loosey, you know?  On the other hand, I tend to agree about television, but mostly from the standpoint that 99.8% of television content is blatantly idiotic.  So mostly what it seems to de-activate is people's critical thinking faculty.

Which, if you believe in "Sun Children," must not be that highly developed in the first place.

Anyhow, I'll leave you to check out what else she has to say.  And she does have a lot to say, most of it in all caps.  As for me, I'm wondering what the next incarnation of even more special children will be.  Maybe "Star Children."  Or hell, go big or go home, right?  "GALAXY Children."  Or if we go with the whole frequency thing, "Hypersonic Children."  I know the high-pitched whining ability of many little kids seems to bore a hole directly into my skull, so maybe that's the most accurate one of all.

Meet the "Crystal Children"

Last year I wrote a piece on the phenomenon of people labeling themselves or their kids "Indigo Children."  An "Indigo Child," it's said, is empathetic, sensitive, creative, and tends not to fit in well with regards to other people's expectations.  They are highly intelligent, and are especially gifted in areas that require thinking outside the box.

Oh, yeah.  They also have "indigo-colored auras."

So what we have here is yet another example of people trying to find an explanation and a label for something that really is best classified under the heading "People Are All Different."  Even, apparently, with respect to the color of their auras.

But "Indigo" is becoming passé, apparently.  As C. S. Lewis observed, "Fashions come and go... but mostly they go."  "Indigo Children" are now a dime a dozen.  So we have to move on to a new designation, an even more special kind of person.  One that shows up those silly Indigos for the bush-league posers that they are.

Now, we have "Crystal Children."

I'm not making this up.  In an opening passage that should win some kind of award for New Age Doublespeak, we read that the "empathetic and sensitive" Indigos better just step aside:

After discovering more about Indigo Children and the (often misunderstood) gifts that they possess, the question arose: now what?  The answer came in the form of the Crystal Children. 

The Crystal Children are the generation following the Indigo Children. Still thought to be relatively young, they have begun to be born from around 2000, though there is some speculation that they arrived earlier, around 1995.  Similar to their Indigo counterparts, these children are thought to be extremely powerful, with a main purpose to take humanity to the next level in our evolution and reveal to us our inner power and divinity.  Some things that make them unique from Indigo Children are that they function as a group consciousness rather than as individuals, and they live by the law that we are all one.  However, they are still are a powerful force for love and peace on the planet.

Yes, I have to say that when I read about the Indigo Children, my response was to shake my head and say, "Now what?"  But I don't think I meant it the same way.

And my goodness, those "Crystal Children!"  They're going to "take humanity to the next level in our evolution and reveal to us our inner power and divinity!"  Who could resist that?

We're then told the twenty-three ways to recognize a "Crystal Child," beginning with the first, that "Crystal Children" possess "large eyes with an intense stare."  I don't know about you, but that sounds vaguely terrifying to me.  If a large-eyed child was staring at me intensely, I wouldn't suspect that I was dealing with a child who was trying to "bring out my inner power and divinity," I would suspect that I was in an episode of The X Files and was about to have all of my blood removed via my eye sockets.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The rest of the ways that you tell if your kid is a "Crystal Child" are suspiciously like the rules for detecting "Indigo Children;" empathy, sensitivity, intelligence, creativity, and so on.  So once again this seems to me to be a way for gullible parents to find a way to feel better about having a child who might be experiencing trouble fitting in in school.  Not that this isn't an understandable goal; my younger son had a rough time in middle school, as many do, and it was a struggle sometimes as a parent to find ways to get him through the experience with his confidence and spirit intact.

But I'm just not convinced that making up a goofy label, and appending to it all sorts of pseudoscientific bosh, is the way to go about it.  Some good old-fashioned coping strategies are usually what's called for, not sticking a wacky name tag on your kid.  The latter, I'd think, would make it more likely the kid wouldn't fit in, especially if (s)he starts babbling to peers that they'd better be nice because you never know how a "Crystal Child" will react when provoked.

So that's our swim in the deep end for today.  I've got to wrap this up so I can go try and teach all of the various types of actual children out there.  I'll make sure to check out their auras.  That's bound to give me some valuable information about how to get them to understand science.

Scientific names, Indigo Children, and Alpha Thinkers

Most people are, by nature, categorizers.  We like to put labels on things, sort the world into neat little boxes.  For many of us, this drive is integral to our understanding of the world.

An example from my own field is the concept of species.  The definition seems simple enough: a group of morphologically similar individuals that are capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring.  It seems, on the surface, that given this definition, it should be trivial to determine whether two individuals are, or are not, members of the same species.

The problem is, the world is messy, and doesn't often acquiesce to our desire to paste labels on various bits of it.  The word species is actually one of the hardest to pin down definitions in biology.  Ring species, fertile hybrids, morphologically distinct populations that can interbreed, morphologically identical populations that cannot, and so on, all point up that we're trying to draw firm distinctions in a realm where those distinctions probably don't exist.  As my long-ago vertebrate zoology professor once said, "The only reason that humans came up with the concept of 'species' is that Homo sapiens has no near relatives."

It's funny how serious taxonomists get about this, however.  There are fierce arguments over whether species should be "lumped" or "split" (particularly contentious amongst birdwatchers, who often bump up their lists with no hard work if what was once a single species gets divided into two or more).  There are endless arguments even about what names species should be given, and every month taxonomic oversight groups publish lists of name changes, to the chagrin of biologists who then have to go back and alter their records.

The same urge to divide a messy reality into neat compartments pervades a lot of other fields, too, and the results are sometimes more pernicious than the biologist's need to decide whether some plant or another is a new species.  In psychology, for example, it has driven the use of diagnostic labels on groups of behaviors that might not actually be conditions in the clinical sense.  ADD and ADHD, for example, are diagnoses that even the experts can't agree upon -- whether or not they are actual medical conditions, how (or if) cases should be medicated, and inconsistencies in how they are diagnosed have all led to significant controversy.  (There's a nice overview of the arguments here.)

Then, there's the urge to relabel in order to give a previously stigmatized group a more positive spin.  The adoption of the word "gay" to mean "homosexual" in the 20th century was, in part, to find a positive word to identify people who have throughout history been the targets of the worst sorts of epithets.  In the 1990s, a group of atheists tried the same kind of rebranding, and settled on calling themselves "The Brights" -- a move that to many people, including myself, seemed so self-congratulatory as to be cringeworthy.

More recently, there have been two rather interesting examples of this same sort of thing.  One is the idea of "Indigo Children," which is an increasingly popular label given to kids who are "empathetic, sensitive, intelligent, and don't fit in well."  I can understand the difficulties that parents of sensitive children face -- one of my own sons certainly could be described by those words, and he had a hell of a time making it through the teasing and bullying that seem to be an entrenched part of middle school culture.  But labeling these kids, even with a positive term, doesn't help the situation, and might even make it worse if the label makes the child feel even more different and isolated.  Add to that a pseudoscientific twist that you often see on "Indigo Child" websites -- that "Indigo Children" frequently have paranormal abilities -- and you have a fairly ugly combination of a non-evidence-based false diagnosis with a heaping helping of New-Agey condescension.  (For a particularly egregious example of this, go here -- and note that the article begins with a statement that the easiest way to identify "Indigo Children" is that they have "indigo-colored auras.")

Just yesterday, I found another good example of this -- the idea of the "Alpha Thinker."  Eric Schulke, who wrote the article I linked and who works for the "Movement for Indefinite Life Extension," tells us that Alpha Thinkers "... are creatives, innovators, pioneers. They acutely and agilely navigate an abundance of diverse, fallacy aware thinking. The alpha thinker can’t bring themselves to live at the last outpost and not venture further. They cannot resist poking their finger through the realm of subatomic particles. They can’t stay on this side of the atmosphere. They look into biology and the elements. They want to know why we are here, why the universe and all of existence is here, how far it goes, what is out there, what the hell is going on. Alpha thinkers are the universe’s way of creating the devises [sic] needed to help bring out all of the potential in its elements."

Well, that's just fine and dandy, but how do you know if someone is an "Alpha Thinker?"  It turns out that you more or less have to wait for them to do something smart:  "It is not a college degree that signifies the alpha thinker. As the alpha thinker knows, its [sic] an abundance of fallacy-aware thinking that signifies it...  Alpha thinkers control the elements. They are cosmic titans, the leaders of humankind, the explorers of the universe setting sail with fierce urgency."

Spinoza, Newton, and Thomas Paine, we are told, were "Alpha Thinkers," which strikes me as kind of an odd trio to choose, but I guess there's no denying these three men were bright guys.  Then, we are given two curious pieces of information: (1) whether or not you are an "Alpha Thinker" can be determined by an electroencephalogram; and (2) from "historical times" until now the ratio of "Alpha Thinkers" to ordinary folks has increased from 1 in 99 to 1 in 6.

So, I'm thinking: how can you know that's true, given that the EEG machine was only invented in 1924, and most people in the world will never have an EEG done during their lifetimes?  It seems to me that the label "Alpha Thinker" is just a new way to say "smart person," and Schulke is pulling made-up statistics out of his ass in order to support his point that there's something inherently different about them.  Further evidence of this comes at the end of the article, where Schulke gives the whole thing a New Age twist by saying that "Alpha Thinkers" are here to guide us into the next stage, the "Transhuman Revolution."

Oh, and of course, throughout the article Schulke makes it clear that he's an "Alpha Thinker."  As if there were any doubt of that.

So, there you are.  Today's musings about human nature.  I suspect that all of the above really, in the long haul, does minimal damage, with the possible exception of the misdiagnosis of individuals who are actually mentally ill and who don't receive treatment because they are labeled "Indigo Children" or "Alpha Thinkers," or whatever.  But it is a curious tendency, isn't it?  I think I'll wrap this up here, because I need to go update the database of my birdwatching sightings and see if any of the scientific names have changed.