The Scottish queen's code

Despite the fact that she's been dead for over four hundred years, Mary, Queen of Scots remains a controversial and divisive figure amongst historians.

The only surviving child of King James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise, the younger Mary started off her reign much the same way her father had.  James's father, King James IV, died in 1542 at the disastrous (for the Scots, at least) Battle of Flodden Field, making James V the king in 1513 at the age of only seventeen months.  This put the kingdom in the hands of regents throughout the early years of the reign, which is seldom a recipe for stability.  After much jockeying about by regents and councillors eager to wield control, James V finally was able to throw off the shackles of the regency in 1528 following the Battle of Linlithgow Bridge.

His adult reign was turbulent.  James himself has been characterized as paranoid (unsurprising, really, considering that he'd been a virtual prisoner to his regents as a child), more interested in reading and playing the lute than in administering a kingdom.  He did have a great concern for the common folk, however, and actually spent time wandering amongst them in disguise, gaining him the nickname of "the Gudeman of Ballengeich" ("gudeman" is Scots dialect for "smallholder;" Ballengeich is one of his favorite haunts, near Stirling Castle).  Interestingly, there's a sweet Scottish country dance tune called "The Geud Man of Ballengigh" which I've known for years -- knew the tune, in fact, long before I ever knew the story behind it.

James V died in 1542, at the age of only thirty, probably of cholera -- only six days after the birth of his daughter Mary.  Mary was crowned, just like her father had been, as an infant.  This once again left Scotland in the hands of regents, headed by her mother, the smart, powerful Mary of Guise, who (unlike the regents James had endured) was determined to hang onto the throne on the behalf of her daughter.  Mary was sent off to France to be raised and educated, something that was to work against her later, as culturally she was seen as far more French than she was Scottish.  This was amplified in 1558 when she was married to King Francis II of France, but that marriage was ended by Francis's death in 1560 at age sixteen (whether of an infection or because he was poisoned is uncertain).  The marriage produced no children; some believe it was never consummated.

Then Mary of Guise died in 1560, at which point the younger Mary -- now widowed and old enough to rule Scotland in her own right -- returned to her home country, which she'd barely seen in her eighteen years.  But as with her father, she found that the powerful men who had run the country in her absence weren't eager to give up control.  Mary then showed signs of the recklessness that was to characterize the rest of her life.  She first married the wildly unpopular Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who was actually Mary's half first cousin (Mary's paternal grandmother, Margaret Tudor, daughter of English King Henry VII, had married twice -- first to King James IV of Scotland, and second to Archibald Douglas, Sixth Earl of Angus; those two marriages produced Mary's father, and Darnley's mother, respectively.)  The marriage, by all accounts, was miserable.  Despite being handsome and superficially charming, Darnley turned out to be a vain, arrogant, violent drunkard.  In fact, when Darnley was murdered by a group of noblemen led by James Hepburn, Fourth Earl of Boswell in 1567 -- only a year after the birth of Mary's and Darnley's only son, James (eventually King James VI of Scotland and James I of England), Mary turned around and married Hepburn a month later.

This outrage was the final straw.  Darnley had been unpopular, but the queen marrying his murderer was just too much.  There was a massive uprising, and Mary was forced to abdicate in favor of her infant son (making for three infant successions to the throne of Scotland in a row).  She fled to England, asking for asylum from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I (Elizabeth's father, King Henry VIII, was Mary's paternal grandmother's brother).  Elizabeth reluctantly agreed, but recognizing the fact that Mary was a direct descendant of King Henry VII and thus in line for the throne, she had her put under rather genteel house arrest.

Her caution is understandable.  Elizabeth's own path to the throne had been fraught, and for a while it looked likely that she herself was going to spend her life in close confinement (if not worse).  But when her two half-siblings, King Edward VI and Queen Mary I, both died without heirs, she succeeded to the throne for what would be one of the longest and most successful reigns of any monarch of England.

Mary, though, wasn't content to relax into what was honestly a fairly comfortable situation and give up her aspirations to rule.  In fact, she was of the opinion that Elizabeth's own reign wasn't valid; the marriage between Henry VIII and Elizabeth's mother, the unfortunate Anne Boleyn, had been annulled shortly before Anne lost her head on Tower Hill, making Elizabeth effectively an illegitimate child.  So Mary, ever the schemer, started writing letters to perceived supporters, trying to garner support to overthrow Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne of a combined England and Scotland.

It's those letters that are why the topic comes up; while some were written (unfortunately for Mary, as it turned out) in plain English, French, or Italian, some were written in code -- and until now, they'd been undeciphered.  But a team made up of George Lasry of Israel, Norbert Biermann of Germany, and Satoshi Tomokiyo of Japan have finally cracked Mary's cipher and allowed us to discover more about her plotting to do in her cousin -- a plot that, as I'm sure you know, ultimately failed spectacularly.

A portion of Mary's cipher

"[This marks] the most important new find on Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, for a hundred years," said historian John Guy.  "The letters show definitively that Mary, during the years of her captivity in England... closely observed and actively involved herself in political affairs in Scotland, England and France, and was in regular contact, either directly, or indirectly through de Castelnau [Michel de Castelnau Mauvissière, the French ambassador to England], with many of the leading political figures at Elizabeth I's court...  They prove that Mary was a shrewd and attentive analyst of international affairs."

"With our new decipherments, we provide evidence that such a secret channel was already in place as early as May 1578," the authors write.  "Also, while some details were already known, our new decipherments provide further insights into how this channel was operated, and on the people involved...  From time to time, she suggests enticing various people with financial rewards so that they would switch sides, or soften their attitude toward her.  She also asks for Castelnau's assistance in recruiting new spies and couriers, while sometimes she warns him – rightly – that some people working for her might be Walsingham's [Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's spymaster] agents."

So the new letters add to the picture of Mary as a schemer -- and someone who gives new meaning to the word "reckless."  Ultimately, of course, Elizabeth got fed up with this nonsense, and after finding serious evidence that Mary was plotting to have her assassinated, signed the death warrant.  Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded at Fotheringay Castle in 1586 at the age of forty-four -- and despite her moniker, had spent the vast majority of her life outside of Scotland, and had only been the queen in fact for seven years.

It's a story filled with intrigue and twists and turns, and further raises the question in my mind of why in the hell anyone in their right minds wanted to be in power back then.  It'd be interesting to see, just in the histories of England and Scotland alone, what percentage of the people who were kings, queens, heirs, counselors, and nobles came to bad ends.  My highly unscientific assessment is "must be really high."  While I wouldn't have wanted to be a peasant -- that had its own, quite different set of unpleasantness -- if I were to time travel back to the sixteenth century, I'd have been perfectly happy settling down to a nice placid life as a simple merchant-class guy.  Let the royals and nobles play their human chess games; any benefits from power and wealth would simply not be worth the risk.

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Scripts and mysteries

My fascination with languages goes back a very long way.  I was raised bilingual -- French was my mother's first language, and all of her older relatives spoke French more often than English.  They especially tended to switch over to French when they were talking about things they didn't want me to understand, which I have to admit provides a kid a hell of an incentive to learn a language.

Another thing I loved when I was young (and still do) is puzzles.  I have always resonated with what physicist Richard Feynman called "the joy of figuring things out."  That flash of insight that allows you to solve a riddle is a nice little dopamine rush.

The combo is probably why I pursued a master's degree in historical linguistics.  Piecing together the etymologies of words, and tracing how they change and move from place to place, is like a gigantic linguistic puzzle.  My own particular area was how the Scandinavian languages influenced Old English and Old Gaelic during the Viking invasions of Great Britain, but etymology is just generally fascinating to me (which is why I started doing my daily #AskLinguisticsGuy feature on TikTok -- if you're interested in word origins, you should follow me).

One area that is way outside my skill set, though, is decipherment.  I've written here before about the stupendous work of Alice Kober and Michael Ventris in deciphering the Linear B Script of Crete, for which not only was the sound-to-symbol correspondence unknown, but it wasn't known what language it represented.  At first, they couldn't even be certain if it was read left-to-right or right-to-left, or if -- perhaps -- it was a boustrophedonic script, which alternates being read left-to-right and right-to-left every line.  (The odd word boustrophedonic comes from Greek; it means "the turning of an ox," because the back-and-forth writing reminded linguists of the way an ox plows a field, turning at the end of each row.  Examples of boustrophedonic scripts are Etruscan and Sabaean.)

If you're curious, Linear B turned out to be written in an early form of Mycenaean Greek, and the script was a combination of a syllabic script -- like the Japanese hiragana -- and ideographs, such as are used in written Chinese.  It's read left-to-right -- just as modern Greek is today.

The amount of skill and sheer brainpower it would take to figure all that out that absolutely boggles my mind.

If any of you are looking for a challenge, though, there are still a lot of undeciphered scripts out there.  Here are a few examples of writing systems that have defied decipherment -- thus far:

• The Banpo symbols, from the fifth millennium B.C.E. in China.  They consist of twenty-two different symbols, and are always found on shards of pottery, leading some to speculate that they aren't writing, but are either just geometrical decorations or (possibly) what potters call a "chop," a mark or series of marks identifying the maker.  The fact that they're present on multiple pieces of pottery, in different orders, suggests that they might be written language, but no one knows for sure.

• The Dispilio Tablet, a wooden artifact with what seem to be written characters.  It was found in 1993 in western Greece, and the shapes of the characters drew comparisons to both Linear B and Linear A (another Cretan script that is, thus far, undeciphered).  But the comparisons didn't allow linguists to crack the code, and as of right now, the Dispilio script, like Linear A, is still a mystery.

• The Indus Valley script.  This is one of the most puzzling undeciphered scripts known, because it has been recorded from over four thousand inscriptions comprising strings of around four hundred different symbols, and has defied all attempts at decipherment.  Part of the problem is that we don't know what language was spoken by the people of the Harappan Civilization, which produced the writing and flourished in the Indus River Valley for two millennia, between 3300 B.C.E. and 1300 B.C.E.  At the end of that long period of dominance, their cities and farming communities were suddenly abandoned, and although climate change, disease, and invasion have been suggested as explanations, historians are at a loss to explain what actually happened.

A sequence in the Indus Valley script [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Siyajkak derivative work: Gregors (talk) 08:30, 31 March 2011 (UTC), The 'Ten Indus Scripts' discovered near the northen gateway of the citadel Dholavira, CC BY-SA 3.0]

• Proto-Elamite, a script used from around 3200 to 2700 B.C.E. in what is now western Iran.  Later, the Elamites adopted cuneiform, but their earlier writing system is still undeciphered.

• Southwestern Paleohispanic, a script used in southern Spain and Portugal from the eighth to sixth centuries B.C.E.  It's been associated with the Tartessian civilization, about which I've written here before, and which -- like the Harappans -- disappeared suddenly and inexplicably.  All attempts to link Southwestern Paleohispanic to Celtic, Etruscan, Latin, and Greek have been unsuccessful.

• Zapotec, a glyphic script (like Mayan) used in what is now Oaxaca, Mexico up until about 700 C.E.  It is probably a written representation of an early ancestor of the Oto-Manguean language family, a cluster of about fifty languages from Mesoamerica whose relationship to other language families is uncertain at best.

That's just six of the best-known.  There are literally hundreds of other scripts, some fragmentary in nature or only known from one or two artifacts, that have thus far resisted all attempts at decipherment.

And if the whole business wasn't already complicated enough, there are also examples of asemic writing, which is writing without meaning -- writing either created to simulate meaningful scripts for use as decoration (such as the delightful Codex Seraphinianus) or done deliberately to fool people (which is likely to be the explanation for the Voynich Manuscript).  So linguists studying some of these undeciphered scripts have to keep in mind that the reason they've defied decryption might be because they aren't meaningful in the first place.

But, as I said, figuring that out is above my pay grade, not to mention my IQ.  I can only sit back in amazement and appreciate the work that has gone into figuring out all the thousands of ways humans have communicated, by linguists whose ability to tackle unfathomable puzzles is nothing short of astonishing.

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The code breakers

I've always been in awe of cryptographers.

I've read a bit about the work British computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing did during World War II regarding breaking the "unbreakable" Enigma code used by the Germans -- a code that relied on a machine whose settings were changed daily.  And while I can follow a description of how Turing and his colleagues did what they did, I can't in my wildest dreams imagine I could do anything like that myself.

I had the same sense of awe when I read Margalit Fox's fantastic book The Riddle of the Labyrinth, which was about the work of linguists Alice Kober and Michael Ventris in successfully translating the Linear B script of Crete -- a writing system for which not only did they not initially know what the symbol-to-sound correspondence was, they didn't know if the symbols represented single sounds, syllables, or entire words -- nor what language the script represented!  (Turned out it was Mycenaean Greek.)

I don't know about you, but I'm nowhere near smart enough to do something like that.

Despite my sense that such endeavors are way outside of my wheelhouse, I've always been fascinated by people who do undertake such tasks.  Which is why I was so interested in a link a friend of mine sent me about the breaking of a code that had stumped cryptographers for centuries -- the one used by King Charles V of Spain back in the sixteenth century.

Charles was a bit paranoid, so his creation of a hitherto unbreakable code is definitely in character.  When the letter was written, in 1547, he was in a weak position -- he'd signed the Treaty of Crépy tentatively ending aggression with the French, but his ally King Henry VIII of England had just died and was succeeded by his son, the sickly King Edward VI.  Charles felt vulnerable...

... and in fact, when the letter was finally decrypted, it was found that it was about his fears of an assassination plot.

As it turned out, the fears were unfounded, and he went on to rule Spain and the Holy Roman Empire for another eleven years, finally dying of malaria at age 58.

His code remained unbroken until recently, however.  But the team of Cécile Pierrot-Inria and Camille Desenclos finally was able to decipher it, thanks to a lucky find -- another letter between Charles and his ambassador to France, Jean de St. Mauris, which had a partial key scribbled in the margin.  That hint included the vital information that nine of the symbols were meaningless, only thrown in to make it more difficult to break.  (Which worked.)

Even with the partial solution in hand, it was still a massive task.  As you can see from their solution, most of the consonants can be represented by two different symbols, and double letters are represented by yet another different (single) symbol.  There are single symbols that stand for specific people. 

But even with those difficulties, Pierrot-Inria and Desenclos managed to break the code.

All of this gives hope to linguists and cryptographers working on the remaining (long) list of writing systems that haven't been deciphered yet.  (Wikipedia has a list of scripts that are still not translated -- take a look, you'll be amazed at how many there are.)  I'm glad there are people still working on these puzzles.  Even if I don't have the brainpower to contribute to the effort, I'm in awe that there are researchers who are allowing us to read writing systems that before were a closed book.

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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.

New world hack

You've probably heard of the Bilderberg Group, which is an annual conference of a couple of hundred  "political elite, experts from industry, finance, academia, and the media" named after the first place they met (back in 1954), the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands.

They're also thought by some to be synonymous with, or at least a subcategory of, the Illuminati, and as such, the Bilderbergs are the evil, ultra-intelligent ruling elite of the New World Order who are controlling everything that goes on in all of the world's major governments, and who are so super-top-secret that they have a Wikipedia page saying where and when their next meeting is going to be held.  

Which is why I choked on my coffee yesterday morning when I read that the Bilderberg Group's site had been hacked, and a cryptic message left behind that has the conspiracy theorists experiencing multiple orgasms.  The message is the usual "we know who you are, you won't get away with this" kind of stuff, except for the fact that it has odd capitalization scattered throughout the message, leading the aforementioned so-and-sos hopping about making excited little squeaking noises about how it contains a secret encoded message.

The Hotel de Bilderberg, Oosterbeek, Netherlands [image courtesy of photographer Michiel M. Minderhoud and the Wikimedia Commons]

You can read the entire thing at the link posted in the preceding paragraph, but here's an excerpt so you can get the flavor:

Dear Bilderberg mEmBers, From NoW(), each OnE of you have 1 year (365 days) to truly work in faVor of HumaNs and not youR private interests
Each TopIc you disCuss or work you achieve thRough YoUr uber privAte meetinGs should from now benefit WORlD population and not X or Y groUp of people
OtHerWIse, we will FinD you and we Will hAck you
MiNd the cuRrent situation: We conTrol your expensive connected cars, we control your connecteD house security devices, we control your daughter laptop, we control your wife’s mobile,
we tape YoUR seCret meetings, we reAD your emaiLs, we control your faVoriTe eScort girl smartWatch, we ARe inside your beLoved banks and we Are reading YoUr assets
You wont be safe anywhere near electricty anyMore
We WiLL watch yOu, from NoW on you got to WoRk for Us, Humanity, the People

So that's pretty threatening, especially the part about controlling their favorite girl escorts.  You have to wonder how they'll do that.  Are the girl escorts remote-controlled robots?  Or do they have neural implants, so that when the Bilderberg members are in (as it were) mid-escort, the girls will suddenly start cackling in a maniacal fashion and demand passwords to their beLoved banks or they won't finish escorting them, leaving them in escortus interruptus?

But it's the potential for an encoded message that really has the conspiracy world humming.  One possible decoding of the message is included at the above website, which apparently involves conversion of the capitalized letters to hexadecimal and dividing by 3,600,000 and looking at it with your eyes squinched up, and gives you a latitude and longitude that's pretty close to the North Pole.

Which is incredibly significant, because before this, the location of the North Pole has been a highly-classified secret.  Just think of what would happen if WikiLeaks got a hold of this information, and put together the location of the North Pole with Pizzagate.  There would be massive uprisings.  Major world governments would fall.  Donald Trump would write several self-congratulatory tweets about it.

It would be, in a word, chaos.

So anyhow.  The whole thing is impressive mainly because of the fact that the Bilderberg website is probably pretty heavily protected, and the fact that hackers got into it is a little scary.  I mean, just think about it.  If they could do that, they could probably hack the sites of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.  And think of what effect that could have.

But as far as the message, I'm not convinced it contains anything of interest.  It will, however, give the conspiracy theorists something to worry at, which with luck will keep them out of trouble for a while.  And who knows?  Maybe it will induce the Bilderbergs to turn their attention to humanity's needs rather than personal gain.  Not a Bad oUtcome, You GOtta admit, RegarDless Of your opiNionS aBOut the ethics Of hacKS.

Holy genome, Batman!

In yesterday's post, we learned that the bible predicts that Babylon is the United States, and therefore we're all doomed.  A loyal reader of Skeptophilia read this and responded with an email that said, "I see your End Times prophecies, and raise you God's word showing up in your DNA."

He included a link to a site called Gostica: The Spiritual Path, in particular a post called "The Scientists Are Shocked: First Scientific Proof of God Found."  And in it, we hear that passages from the bible have shown up...

...in the genetic code.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm not making this up.  I would strongly recommend your taking a look at the actual site, but not while you're drinking anything, because I will not be responsible for coffee sprayed all over your computer screen.

The fun starts, in fact, with the very first phrase of the first sentence: "Linguistic professors at Bob Jones University, long noted for its intellectual rigor..."

Intellectual rigor?  The school that has been nicknamed "The Buckle on the Bible Belt?"  The school whose biology program description states, "One of the benefits of studying biology at BJU is that you’ll get a top-notch science education from a thoroughly Christian perspective.  In addition to strengthening your faith in the reliability of the Bible, this perspective will also help prepare you to understand modern secular interpretations of science and apply a biblical worldview to them."?

The school whose behavior code explicitly forbids its students to wear denim skirts, have "fauxhawks," access an "unfiltered internet," or listen to "Rock, Pop, Country, Jazz, Electronic/ Techno, Rap/Hip Hop or the fusion of any of these genres"?

And in any case, who the hell wears denim skirts anymore?

But I digress.

So the "intellectually rigorous scientists" from Bob Jones University started looking at pieces of DNA, including "transposons and retrotransposons" (Ooh!  Big words!), and this is what they found:

[They] began to attempt to translate the decoded segments that W.I.T. was providing. The structure was notably and demonstrably human in nature.  The coding language found, which utilized sequences of twenty-eight independent values, fell easily into the incidence range of known alphabets.  Sequences of independent connected values likewise mirrored the structure of word composition in human languages.  The Linguistic and Philology team at Bob Jones began an extensive comparison of the quizzical script found in the “Junk DNA” with the catalog of every recorded human language; hoping to find similar lingual threads so that they could begin to formulate translations of the message laying hidden in the DNA.  Professors were rocked with sheer awe when they found that one existent language, and one language alone, was a direct translatable match for the sequential DNA strands.

And guess what that language was, and what it said?  You'll never guess.

The Language in the “Junk DNA”, the DNA that scientists had for years discarded as useless, was indistinguishable from ancient Aramaic.  Even more amazingly, as linguists started to translate the code within the human genome, they found that parts of the script it contained were at times remarkably close in composition to verse found in the bible. And at times contained direct biblical quotes. 

On the human gene PYGB, Phosporomylase Glycogen, a non-coding transposon, holds a linguistic sequence that translates as “At first break of day, God formed sky and land.”  This bears a stunning similarity to Gen 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  Gene Bmp3 has a Retrotransposon sequence which translates to the well-known 1 Cor 6:19 “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?  You are not your own.”  This is repeated over and over throughout the entire sequence of human DNA: embedded equivalent genetic code of ancient Aramaic that seems to translate as the word of god to his people.

Righty-o.  Where do I start?

The first problem with this is that the "language" of DNA is composed of four letters (nitrogenous bases), A (adenine), G (guanine), C (cytosine), and T (thymine).  Perhaps what god is saying is something like "ACT TAG CAT GAG GAG GAG," although to my ears that sounds more like a pronouncement from Bill the Cat than it does like something the Divine Creator might say.  In any case, it's not really possible to spell out English using the DNA alphabet, much less ancient Aramaic.  Even if you make the allowance that maybe the "linguists" were using some kind of correspondence between the letters in Aramaic and the amino acid sequence coded for by a gene, you still only have twenty letters, not 28 as the article claims.

So what the amazingly rigorous researchers at BJU seem good at is making shit up and then lying to the media about it.  But this didn't stop them from shouting their findings from the rooftops:

Matthew Boulder, chief linguist for the project and professor of applied creation sciences at Bob Jones University, issued this statement: “As for the evidence- it is there and it is, to my view, undeniable.  The very word of God, elegantly weaved in and out of our very bodies and souls, as plain as day.  And the beauty of it, that God would lay down the words of truth in our very beings, shows his love and The Miracle.”

"Professor of applied creation science."  Which is right up there with "Professor of applied unicornology" in terms of scientific validity.

So to the reader who sent me the link, all I can say is thanks.  I did read the whole thing, and also the internal links that went to the BJU "research," so you can't say I didn't give it my all.  Throughout I was torn between guffawing and slamming my forehead repeatedly against my computer keyboard.  I hope that's the reaction you wanted.  But I do wonder what my own personal DNA spells out.  Maybe a passage from The God Delusion, you think?

Buddhism, anagrams, and amino acids

In today's news, we have a new revelation from noted wingnut Dan Green.  Dan Green, you might recall, is the one who smooshed together biblical prophecies, the Templars, the World Cup, and Lincoln Cathedral and found that if you looked at the resulting mash-up just right you found out that Britain was going to experience a devastating earthquake.

There was only one teensy problem with this theory, and that was that the earthquake never happened.  But such a lack of results never discourages people like Green.  "I will come up with something even more abstruse and ridiculous next time!" they always say.  "And this time, it will be right!  You'll see!"

So even if the earthquake refused to show up on schedule, Green has, coming out with this new outpouring of nonsense, which uses accidental similarities between various scientific words (such as the names of the amino acids) and words from ordinary English and words from the Buddhist tradition to claim that science is actually Buddhism in disguise.  Or vice versa.  Who the hell can tell?  Most of Green's claims are so outlandish that at first it is tempting to believe that he's joking; but he delivers it all with such ponderous gravity that I am very much afraid he's serious, that he thinks he's really on to something, here.  Here are a couple of examples:

This cosmic neurological connection continues. The original and enforcedly relinquished seat of power in the Tibetan hierarchy was held by the now exiled Dalai Lama, an actual throne at his now abandoned and empty exquisite Pothala Palace, also known as Summer Palace, in the capital city of Lhasa. Summer Palace is also called Norbulinka, and our code reveals it as an anagram containing 'Brain link'. We will find the Pothala hiding in the word 'Hypothalamus' - 'hy POTHALA mus', a tiny cluster of cells in the brain and an essential link between the brain and the pituitary gland, which is sometimes called the 'Master Gland', as in the Masters of both Tibetan and Indian Buddhism. 'Hypothalamus' also locates 'Summer Palace' - 'Hypothal AMUS .......''Amus' reversed as 'SUMA'.....'Hy P ot HAL am US'...'PHALUS' = phonetic 'Palace'. Furthermore we find more significance in this crucial word, the very origin of the High Lamas of Tibet.....again, 'Hypothalamus' - 'HY potha LAMUS' = phonetic 'High Lamas'.

Well, first of all, "palace" was not what I thought of when I saw "PHALUS."  But maybe I just have a dirty mind.  And further on:

The Four Noble Truths and the 8-Fold Path, in concise form are as follows;

Truth number one - Individualized existence is suffering,
Truth number two - The three poisons; ignorance, attachment and hatred are the cause of suffering,
Truth number three - Suffering ceases when desire ceases,
Truth number four - release can be reached by the 8-Fold Path :

1. Right Seeing
2. Right Thought
3. Right Speech
4. Right Action
5. Right Livelihood
6. Right Effort
7. Right Mindfulness
8. Right Contemplation.

1. Isoleucine = Right seeing
IS o LEUCINE to read as phonetic 'Eyes looking'

2. Leusine = Right thought
LEUS ine to read as phonetic 'Loose' i.e. lacking a sense of restraint or responsibility : also licentious, unchaste, immoral

3. Lysine = Right speech
LYS ine to be read as phonetic 'Lies', false statements or pieces of information deliberately presented as being true.

4. Methionine = Right action.
To conceal phonetics 'Me', 'Thee' (Thi) and 'Thine' (Thion). Concern for all, regarding our actions.

5. Phenylalanine = Right livelihood.
To be read as phonetic 'Penny' (Pheny) a line (L an INE). A penny, in UK currency, was a coin originally silver, later copper, bronze from 1860, formerly worth 1/240 of £1, now equal to a hundredth part of £1. There is also the term 'bread line', meaning to be living at subsistence level, a modern day epithet to describe the original state of Buddhist living. People living in the UK will be reminded of the weekly 'football pool coupon', a mainstay of British national existence primarily before the advent of the National Lottery, whereby nominal stakes to attempt to win a fortune were staked at a 'penny a line'.

6. Threonine = Right effort.
To be read as phonetic 'Thrown in' (THREON ine = Throne). To put quickly into use or place, the colloquialism to 'throw in' as in colloquialism 'throw in the towel', to accept personal defeat, to give in, to oppose selfish, incorrect effort.

7. Tryptophan = Right mindfulness.
Concealing phonetic 'tripped' (TRYPT), colloquialism to 'trip up', meaning a mistake, slip up or blunder, to go wrong.

8. Valine = Right contemplation.
From vulgar Latin 'Valiente' (VALIEN te), to be strong, to possess, act with or show valour.

These then, are the revealed references, the eight amino acids for healthy growth and their relationship with approved Buddhist thought, until now phonetically veiled in the 8-Fold Path by Prince Siddhartha....SIDDHA rtha

SIDDHA = AHSIDDS = phonetic 'acids'

Really, I'm torn between laughing and crying, here.  "AHSIDDS?"  And when he went on to say that a healthy diet was 2,500 calories because the Buddha was born in 2,500 B.C.E., and that if you took the last part of "carbohydrate" and rearranged it you got "bodhy trae," which sounds like "bodhi tree," the place where the Buddha obtained enlightenment, I gave up.

However, it crosses my mind that two can play at that game.  So, with a little help from the Internet Anagram Server, I came up with the following.

If you rearrange "Daniel Green," you get "eagle dinner."  The eagle is the national symbol of the United States, along with the Stars and Stripes.  The middle of "StarS AND STRIPes" says "sand strip," which is another name for a beach, such as the beach at Normandy where the Allied troops swarmed ashore during World War II, a move that proved to be the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler, whose name can be rearranged to spell "Harlot Field."  The Harlot is another name for the Scarlet Woman of Babylon in the prophesies of the Book of Revelation, and if you take letters from the phrase "sCARlet woMAN of BABYLon," you get "Car Man Babyl (babble)," a clear reference to Click and Clack, the guys on Car Talk.  Click and Clack are actually Tom and Ray Magliozzi, and if you rearrange "Tom and Ray Magliozzi" you get "dizzying amoral atom," which obviously is referring to nuclear weapons.  Therefore you'd better take Dan Green's prophecies seriously, because otherwise someone's gonna get nuked.

I could keep doing this all day, but I'd better not, because I'm afraid I'd start believing it.  That's the problem with this sort of thing, isn't it?  As the cynical book editors discovered in my all-time favorite novel, Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, there are seeming correspondences everywhere, and if you know enough you can make anything plausibly link to anything.  Well, "plausibly" if you're willing to suspend disbelief indefinitely -- cherry-picking your examples, and ignoring any data that doesn't fit.  And, of course, if you start from the belief that there is no such thing as meaningless coincidence.  With that as your foundation, you can fashion the world into whatever you please.