I've got your number

An inevitable side-effect of writing six times a week here at Skeptophilia is that I get some weird gifts sometimes.

This explains why I am the proud owner of:

• a cardboard-cutout Bigfoot that you can dress up with various stickers (he's currently wearing a kilt and a jaunty-looking tam-o'shanter)
• a certificate insuring my dog in case of alien abduction
• a very creepy-looking ritual mask from the Ivory Coast
• a book entitled UFOs: How to See Them
• a deck of steampunk Tarot cards
• a drawing of a scowling alien with a speech bubble saying "Nonbelievers Will Be Vaporized"
• a car air freshener shaped like a Sasquatch (fortunately, it doesn't smell like one)
• the poster made famous from Fox Mulder's office, with a UFO and the caption "I Want To Believe"

The latest addition to my collection comes to me from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  I got a surprise package from him in the mail, and when I opened it up, it turned out to be a book called...

... Mysteries and Secrets of Numerology.

This book, by Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe, is a complete analysis of the practice of numerology across the world, as viewed through the critical lens of believing every bit of it without question.  I checked out how it has fared on Amazon, and found that it has thus far received two reviews:

1: This book is full of wonderful information regarding numerology.  I got a copy from the library, but I will be buying my own to keep as a reference for numerology and sacred geometry.  Well Done!... and:

2: Fine.  This purchase was for some research I was doing and I came away amazed that anyone can take this entire subject matter area seriously.  The book drones on forever and that makes it great bedtime reading...  Yes, I did work the examples on my own set of numbers as well as those other family members and it didn't help me understand them any better than I did before.  They're still boring.  I put this book in the same category as those purporting to provide proof of alien abductions happening every day, all over planet earth.  If you really must find something in which to believe to give your life purpose, or help you amaze your friends, this book is for you.

So it's gotten a fairly mixed reception so far.

Undeterred by the second review, I read through it.  I will admit that I skimmed past the parts of it where the authors calculate numerological values for everyone from Hippocrates to Alexander Graham Bell.  I did note that the authors concluded that the "dark side of his numerological 1" for the famous British murderer Hawley Crippen "may have been what drove him to the rash and impetuous murder" of his second wife, Cora.  Which seems like a stretch, as from pure statistics one out of every nine people on Earth are "numerological 1s," and as far as I can tell, very few of them murder their second wives.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The practice of numerology goes back a long way.  The whole thing seems to have begun with the mystical practice called gematria, which basically assigned numbers to damn near everything -- and woe be unto you if your number turned out to be bad.  The whole 666 being the Number of the Beast thing comes from gematria; and there's a lot of equating one thing for another because they "have the same number."  Here's an example from the Third Book of Baruch, one of the biblical apocrypha, as explained in the above-linked Wikipedia article:

A snake is stated to consume a cubit of ocean every day, but is unable to ever finish consuming it, because the oceans are also refilled by 360 rivers.  The number 360 is given because the numerical value of the Greek word for snake, δράκων, when transliterated to Hebrew (דרקון) is 360.

Makes perfect sense to me.

In any case, back to the Fanthorpes' book.  The last section, while no less ridiculous, was at least kind of interesting.  We're told therein that because all sorts of factors can contribute to a person acting a particular way, or an action having a particular outcome, there's no reason not to believe that "numbers can exert invisible and unsuspected influences just as powerful."  We're then instructed that we should all pay more attention to the numbers in our lives, and especially look for the good influences of the numbers 1 (which, I note, didn't help Crippen much), 3, 6, 7, and 9.  Only in the second-to-last paragraph do the Fanthorpes bring up the central problem with the whole thing: "These attempts to use numbers as influences to attract good things and to protect against negative things are very interesting, but are open to the question of whether -- when they seem to work -- they are actually self-fulfilling prophecies."

Well, yeah.  The whole book is basically Confirmation Bias "R" Us.

So I'm sure you're all dying to know what my number is.  The book gives detailed instructions on how to calculate your number, although it does say there are different ways of doing so.  "Therefore," the authors write, "two equally well-qualified and experienced numerologists working with slightly different systems could reach very different conclusions."  (Which to me, is just a fancy way of saying, "we admit this is bullshit.")

I used what they say the "simplest way" is -- writing out the English alphabet underneath the numbers 1-9, starting with A=1, B=2, and so on; after you reach I=9, you start over with J=1.  Following this protocol, my whole name adds up to 76.  You're then supposed to add the digits (giving 13) and then add those (giving a final answer of 4).

So my number is 4, which unfortunately is not one of the "auspicious numbers" mentioned above.  Four, apparently, means "a foundation, the implementation of order, a struggle against limits, and steady growth."

I suppose it could be worse.

In any case, I'm not going to lose any sleep over the fact that I didn't get "9" (the number of "immense creativity").  Nor am I going to do what the authors say some folks have done, which is change their name to one that has a better number.

It might be worth getting a second opinion, however. Maybe I should see what the "steampunk Tarot cards" have to say on the matter.  That should be illuminating.

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It's not in the cards

When I was in college I went through a period of messing around with Tarot cards.  They were cool-looking, and the book I got that explained their meanings was steeped with arcane and mystical terminology.  The whole thing seemed ancient and magical and terribly attractive.  The fact that I was still living at home, in a staunchly religious Roman Catholic family which disapproved of anything smacking of witchcraft, only gave it that much more of a frisson.

So yes, True Confessions time: at one point in my life, I experimented with woo-woo-ism.  But don't worry, I didn't inhale.

What eventually pulled the plug on all of it was that when I talked about it with my friends, I started sounding ridiculous to myself.  I had to explain (when I was doing a Tarot reading for someone) that I was selecting a card to represent them based on their gender and appearance, and that this would establish a psychic connection between them and seventy-eight pieces of glossy card stock with weird designs that I'd bought for ten bucks in a local bookstore.  And in the back of my mind was this constant mantra of, "How the fuck could that actually work?"  I was able to shout the voice down for a while, but sooner or later, I had to admit that Tarot cards were nothing more than a pretty fiction, and any accurate readings I did could be attributed to a combination of chance, my prior knowledge of the person being "read," and dart-thrower's bias.

I still, however, own six Tarot card decks, including the one I got when I was in college.  The coolest is an Art Nouveau deck that is actually quite beautiful, with designs that remind me of one of my favorite artists, Maxfield Parrish.  I also have "The Original Dog Tarot" in which -- I shit you not -- the four suits are Bowls, Biscuits, Leashes, and Bones, and the Major Arcana include The Hydrant, The Dogcatcher, The Cat, and The Couch.

Purists would probably be pissed off about a Tarot deck that is clearly made up, but let's face it; it's all made up.  The infamous "wickedest man on Earth" Aleister Crowley claimed that the Tarot traces its origins back to an ancient Egyptian text called The Book of Thoth, but there's one awkward problem with this, which is that The Book of Thoth appears not to exist.  Undeterred, Crowley wrote his own Book of Thoth, because after all, as long as we're making shit up, we may as well do the job ourselves and not waste our time learning how to read actual Ancient Egyptian texts that might not even say what we were hoping they'd say.

Actually, the earliest Tarot cards come from some time around the fifteenth century, but at the time they seem to have mostly been used for playing games.  The first use of the cards for divination -- what's been called cartomancy -- isn't until around 1750, which seems awfully late for a practice that claims to be Esoteric Secrets From Antiquity.  The surge in popularity the practice had in the late eighteenth century was largely due to one man, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who went by the extremely subtle and creative pseudonym Etteilla.  Alliette was an occultist who had a huge following amongst the nobility, and wrote a manual called Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarots (A Method for Recreating Yourself Using the Cards Called Tarots) which is the basis of all the "Tarot cards interpreted" books you see today.  Modern card decks, including the famous Rider-Waite deck, all derive from the standardization of the cards and suits by Alliette.

Lately, though, things have gone a bit off the rails, and I don't just mean obvious spoofs like my Original Dog Tarot.  If you search on Amazon for "Tarot cards" you'll find dozens (probably hundreds) of different decks, and a great many of them don't have the traditional suits, with fifty-six Minor and twenty-two Major Arcana.  There are divine feminine and divine masculine decks (some of which are highly NSFW), decks that are allegedly Norse or Celtic or Native American or Chinese or Japanese, decks centered around plants or animals or crystals or astronomical objects, queer decks and warrior decks and steampunk decks.

And -- if I haven't already made a strenuous enough point about this -- all of these were made up, most of them in the last fifty years or so.  None of them have the least thing to do with actual ancient wisdom passed down through the ages.

So there you are.  It hardly bears mention that I think divination simply doesn't work; much as it's a beguiling idea, there's nothing mysterious going on with Tarot card readers except how they manage to persuade so many people to fork over twenty bucks for a session.  Be that as it may, I'm gonna keep my decks.  For one thing, they're cool to look at.  For another, maybe I can do a reading for my dogs.  If the Ten of Bones turns up, they'll be thrilled.  That's a lot of bones.

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Alchemy class

Frequently, when I'm asked why I'm opposed to science teachers being required to teach "alternate explanations" along with teaching evolution, I respond, "It's interesting that no one is asking teachers to present 'alternate explanations' in other areas of science.  No one, for example, expects chemistry teachers to advocate alchemy as an 'alternate explanation.'"

By now, you'd think I'd know better than to use the phrase "no one" in a statement about belief in some crackpot idea.

Meet Jay Weidner, film director responsible for such masterpieces as Timewave 2013, Infinity: The Ultimate Trip, and (most significantly, for our purposes) The Secrets of Alchemy: The Great Cross and the End of Time.  On his website, Weidner outlines his three laws of the universe, which are poised to oust Newton's Laws as fundamental rules governing nature:

• Weidner's First Law: "Whatever ideas are the most suppressed are the most likely to be the closest to the truth."
• Weidner's Second Law: "If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a symbol is worth a thousand pictures."
• Weidner's Third Law: "The only people who call conspiracies 'theories' are the conspirators."

The First Law would seem to suggest that we should go back the Four Humors Theory of Medicine (all illnesses are caused by an imbalance between the Four Bodily Humors -- blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile), as that was suppressed back when they noticed that patients treated according to the recommendations of this theory usually died.  The Second Law means -- never mind, I don't know what the fuck the Second Law means.  But the Third Law would seem to indicate that I'm a conspirator.  I guess that given that I call most conspiracies "theories," and worse still, ridicule them frequently in my blog, I'm not only a conspirator, but I'm really high up in the hierarchy of the conspiracy because I'm so determined to convince everyone that it isn't real.

How about that?  I'm in such a high echelon in a top-secret conspiracy that the fact was secret even from me.  Now that's what I call a secret conspiracy.

In any case, Weidner is a big believer in alchemy, especially as it pertains to the production of the Philosopher's Stone, a substance that can give eternal life.  I thought that Dumbledore had destroyed the Philosopher's Stone way back in the first book of Harry Potter, but Weidner disagrees; he said he has discovered a book that shows you how to produce it, using "materials costing less than a thousand dollars," and he illustrates this on his website using a picture of Aquarius, symbolized by a guy with a Fabio hairstyle, huge pecs and biceps, a six-pack, and almost no clothes, pouring water out of a jar, wearing an expression that seems to say, "Hey, baby, you wanna partake of my Elixir of Life?"

Now there's a symbol that's worth a thousand pictures.

Anyway, the book that describes the process for making the Philosopher's Stone is available for free here.  Weidner cautions us all to download the book before the Evil Conspirators find out that it's available and "hit the internet kill switch."  Because we all know how much the people who run the internet care about the presence of wacky, absurd ideas out there online.  We can't have that.

Curious, I took a look at the book (The Book of Aquarius), since it's free.  When you go to the "Read Online" page, you get a set of chapter headings, and not wanting to slog through the pages of quasi-metaphysical bullshit, I decided to cut to the chase, and skipped to Chapter 14: What Is It Made Of?  And I found out that, to my great shock, the Philosopher's Stone is only made from one ingredient.  And that ingredient is...

... wait for it...

Urine.

Yes, you read that right.  I know, because I had to read it several times before I was convinced that I was reading it correctly myself.  And I thought, "Well, at least Weidner was right when he said that you can get the ingredients for less than a thousand dollars."  Here's the relevant passage from the book:

I must explain that the Stone could in theory be made from anything, since everything contains the life-energy to some degree, which is the active ingredient of the Stone.  Urine contains this life-energy in high concentration, due to the fact that it has just come out of you, and you, as a living animal, are full of life-energy...  From the urine we will need to extract a distillate (water) and a salt.  The life-energy is in the water, and since the life-energy is so volatile it will remain with the water even when the water is distilled (evaporated and condensed).  Our bodies do not want to reject the life-energy in the urine, but have no choice since the life-energy is attached to the water.  Secondly, urine is the perfect ingredient because it is as of yet undetermined.  That is, it has been well filtered, broken down and purified.  It contains all kinds of different minerals, but in minute particles not yet assigned to any purpose.

At this point, I had to stop reading, mostly because it's hard to read the computer screen when your forehead is on your desk.

Anyhow, I encourage you to peruse Weidner's site (I especially recommend the stuff about Stanley Kubrick faking the moon landing) and The Book of Aquarius.  But if you succeed in making the Philosopher's Stone, please don't tell me about it.  I don't want to know.  For one thing, it will mean that you'll have been playing around with your own urine, or, god forbid, someone else's, and that's just nasty.  For another, at that point you'll have discovered the Secret of Eternal Life, and being that I'm one of the Conspirators, I'd be duty-bound to kill you.  That'd just be unfortunate for a variety of reasons, the most important one of which is that I need all the readers I can get, and if I went around killing them it might discourage people from following my blog.

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Inventing Glastonbury

It must come as a shock to woo-woos to find out that some of their favorite wooful phenomena were actually invented by humans for purely down-to-earth reasons.

Take, for example, the Ouija board.  A lot of paranormal enthusiasts claim that the Ouija board is some kind of portal to the spirit world -- and an equal number of religious types think it's the gateway to hell.  Using it, they say, is just asking to be possessed by an evil demon.  Unfortunately for both contentions, the Ouija board was invented as a parlor game by a toy manufacturer named Elijah Bond in 1890.  Even the name is made up -- Bond stuck together the French and German words for "yes" and decided it would make a catchy name.  Which it is.  Better than the words for "no," anyhow, because "Nonnein" sounds kind of silly.

So finding out that the Ouija board was invented purely to make money is a little deflating to those who think it's some kind of tool for accessing the supernatural.  Which makes me wonder how the woo-woos are going to deal with the claim by archaeologists that the hype over Glastonbury is a 12th-century fabrication.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons IDS.photos from Tiverton, UK, Remains of Glastonbury Abbey, Glastonbury, Somerset (3049676967), CC BY-SA 2.0]

If you're not up to date with woo-woo mysticism and don't know what the deal is over Glastonbury, it's a town in England that is considered to be one of the most "spiritual" places in the world, right up there with Ayers Rock in Australia, Sedona, Arizona, and Salem, Massachusetts.  Supposedly, Glastonbury is the place where Joseph of Arimathea fled after Jesus's crucifixion, and when he got there he thrust his walking stick into the ground, where it took root and now flowers every Christmas.

The problem is, the Glastonbury Thorn doesn't flower at Christmas, it flowers in the spring, like most hawthorns.  No, the faithful say; that's because the current thorn isn't the real thing, which was cut down as an idolatrous image during the Puritan era following the English Civil War.  Even so, there are people who take the whole thing awfully seriously, which is why the current tree (planted in 1951) has been repeatedly vandalized.

Then there's the King Arthur connection, because Glastonbury Abbey is supposedly where the Once and Future King was buried after his death at the hands of his cousin Mordred in the Battle of Salisbury Plain.  There's even an inscription on a stone cross in the Abbey that allegedly has an inscription dating back to the fifth century, and which mentions King Arthur by name.

In addition to all this, or perhaps because of it, Glastonbury (or more specifically the hill Glastonbury Tor that stands nearby) has been identified as being the world's most powerful convergence of "ley lines," lines of spiritual force that allegedly encircle the globe.  "[T]he landscape as a whole," we're told, "is imbued with a beauty, mystique and numinescence which has made it well loved over many centuries, and the haunt of many advanced souls."

So with all of this romantic folklore surrounding the spot, it's no wonder that people make pilgrimages to Glastonbury every year.  Which makes a paper published by a group of archaeologists at the University of Reading all the more devastating.

Because the study has shown that all of the mystical trappings surrounding the place were the invention of some twelfth-century monks who were trying to find a way to raise money when their monastery burned down.

Archaeologist Roberta Gilchrist and her team have spent years looking at both the documents and the structures that supposedly play into the legend.  And she has concluded that after the fire, which occurred in 1184, some enterprising monks decided to cash in on the increasing popularity of the Arthurian mythology (Geoffrey of Monmouth's seminal Historia Regum Brittaniae had only been completed some 46 years earlier, and was still immensely influential).  So they started a rumor that Glastonbury was where Arthur was buried, and that he'd been buried there because it was where Joseph of Arimathea planted his walking stick.  "Look!" they said.  "There's a hawthorn tree up on that hill!  That's the ticket!"

And thus the legend of the Holy Thorn was begun.

[Nota bene: yes, I know twelfth-century monks wouldn't have used the phrase "that's the ticket."  However, considering that they would also have been speaking Early Middle English, I think I'm allowed some poetic license, here.]

Anyway, Gilchrist and her team said that the stone cross was also the product of the same enterprising brothers, and had been fabricated to resemble earlier Anglo-Saxon and Celtic stone crosses, with the clever addition of an inscription mentioning Arthur by name.  And when they rebuilt the monastery, they made sure to make it of materials, and in a style, that made it look far older than it actually was, so the pilgrims (and the profits) kept rolling in.

As they still do, lo unto this very day.

It's kind of unfortunate, really.  I've always loved the Arthurian legends -- I grew up with tales of Merlin and Gawain and Morgan le Fay and the rest of them, not to mention my discovery during my teen years of Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, which led to Much Rejoicing.  The idea that the whole thing might be some twelfth-century hoax is kind of sad.

You have to wonder how all the woo-woos will respond.  My guess is, they won't.  They'll ignore the current study just like they've avoided anything remotely factual in the past, and keep on claiming that ley lines and the rest are real.  They haven't based anything on evidence yet, so why start now?

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As a biologist, I've usually thought of myself as immune to being grossed out.  But I have to admit I was a little shocked to find out that the human microbiome -- the collection of bacteria and fungi that live in and on us -- outnumber actual human cells by a factor of ten.

You read that right: if you counted up all the cells in and on the surface of your body, for every one human cell with human DNA, there'd be ten cells of microorganisms, coming from over a thousand different species.

And that's in healthy humans.  This idea that "bacteria = bad" is profoundly wrong; not only do a lot of bacteria perform useful functions, producing products like yogurt, cheese, and the familiar flavor and aroma of chocolate, they directly contribute to good health.  Anyone who has been on an antibiotic long-term knows that wiping out the beneficial bacteria in your gut can lead to some pretty unpleasant side effects; most current treatments for bacterial infections kill the good guys along with the bad, leading to an imbalance in your microbiome that can persist for months afterward.

In The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life, microbiologist Rodney Dietert shows how a lot of debilitating diseases, from asthma to allergies to irritable bowel syndrome to the inflammation that is at the root of heart disease, might be attributable to disturbances in the body's microbiome.  His contention is that restoring the normal microbiome should be the first line of treatment for these diseases, not the medications that often throw the microbiome further out of whack.

His book is fascinating and controversial, but his reasoning (and the experimental research he draws upon) is stellar.  If you're interested in health-related topics, you should read The Human Superorganism.  You'll never look at your own body the same way again.

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

Reality vs. allegory

When I was about twenty, I stumbled upon the book The Dancing Wu-Li Masters by Gary Zukav.  The book provides a non-mathematical introduction to the concepts of quantum mechanics, which is good, I suppose; but then it attempts to tie it to Eastern mysticism, which is troubling to anyone who actually understands the science.

But as a twenty-year-old -- even a twenty-year-old physics major -- I was captivated.  I went from there to Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, which pushes further into the alleged link between modern physics and the wisdom of the ancients. In an editorial review of the book, we read:

First published in 1975, The Tao of Physics rode the wave of fascination in exotic East Asian philosophies.  Decades later, it still stands up to scrutiny, explicating not only Eastern philosophies but also how modern physics forces us into conceptions that have remarkable parallels...  (T)he big picture is enough to see the value in them of experiential knowledge, the limits of objectivity, the absence of foundational matter, the interrelation of all things and events, and the fact that process is primary, not things.  Capra finds the same notions in modern physics.

In part, I'm sure my positive reaction to these books was because I was in the middle of actually taking a class in quantum mechanics, and it was, to put not too fine a point on it, really fucking hard.  I had thought of myself all along as quick at math, but the math required for this class was brain-bendingly difficult.  It was a relief to escape into the less rigorous world of Capra and Zukav.

To get a feel for the difference, first read a quote from the Wikipedia article on quantum electrodynamics, chosen because it was one of the easier ones to understand:

(B)eing closed loops, (they) imply the presence of diverging integrals having no mathematical meaning.  To overcome this difficulty, a technique called renormalization has been devised, producing finite results in very close agreement with experiments.  It is important to note that a criterion for theory being meaningful after renormalization is that the number of diverging diagrams is finite. In this case the theory is said to be renormalizable.  The reason for this is that to get observables renormalized one needs a finite number of constants to maintain the predictive value of the theory untouched.  This is exactly the case of quantum electrodynamics displaying just three diverging diagrams.  This procedure gives observables in very close agreement with experiment as seen, e.g. for electron gyromagnetic ratio.

Compare that to Capra's take on things, in a quote from The Tao of Physics:

Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction.  The dance of Shiva is the dancing universe, the ceaseless flow of energy going through an infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another. For the modern physicists, then Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter.  As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomenon.  Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes.  In our times, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Arpad Horvath, CERN shiva, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It all sounds nice, doesn't it?  No need for hard words like "renormalization" and "gyromagnetic ratio," no messy mathematics.  Just imagining particles dancing, waving around their four little quantum arms, just like Shiva.

The problem here, though, isn't just laziness; and I've commented on the laziness inherent in the woo-woo movement often enough that I don't need to write about it further.  But there's a second issue, one often overlooked by laypeople, and that is "mistaking analogy for reality."

Okay, I'll go so far as to say that the verbal descriptions of quantum mechanics sound like some of the "everything that happens influences everyone and everything, all the time" stuff from Buddhism and Hinduism -- the interconnectedness of all, a concept that is explained in the beautiful allegory of "Indra's Net:"

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions.  In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number.  There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold.  If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number.  Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.  [Francis Cook, Hua-Yen Buddhism, 1977]

But does this mean what some have claimed, that the Hindus discovered the underlying tenets of quantum mechanics millennia ago?

Hardly.  Just because two ideas have some similarities doesn't mean that they are, at their basis, saying the same thing.  You could say that Hinduism has some parallels to quantum mechanics -- parallels that I would argue are accidental, and not really all that persuasive when you dig into them more deeply.  But those parallels don't mean that Hinduism as a whole is true, or that the mystics who devised it were somehow prescient.

In a way, we science teachers are at fault for this, because so many of us teach by analogy.  I did it all the time: antibodies are like cellular trash tags; enzyme/substrate interactions are like keys and locks; the Krebs cycle is like a merry-go-round where two kids get on and two kids get off at each turn.  But hopefully, our analogies are transparent enough that no one comes away with the impression that they are describing what is really happening.  Fortunately, I can say that I never saw a student begin an essay on the Krebs cycle by talking about merry-go-rounds and children.

The line gets blurred, though, when the reality is so odd, and the actual description of it (i.e. the mathematics) so abstruse, that most non-scientists can't really wrap their brain around it.  Then there is a real danger of substituting a metaphor for the truth.  It's not helped by persuasive, charismatic writers like Capra and Zukav, nor the efforts of True Believers to cast the science as supporting their religious ideas, because it helps to prop up their own worldview (you can read an especially egregious example of this here).

After a time in my twenties when I was seduced by pretty allegories, I finally came to the conclusion that the reality was better -- and, in its own way, breathtakingly beautiful (albeit still really fucking hard).  Take the time to learn what the science actually says, and I think you'll find it a damnsight more interesting and elegant than Shiva and Indra and the rest of 'em.  And best of all: it's actually true.

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These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

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

Falling in line

What amazes me about so many crazy claims is that you get the impression that the people making them didn't even try to find a natural explanation.

It's one thing to speculate wildly about a phenomenon for which science is still searching for explanations.  Déjà vu, for example, is one experience that virtually everyone shares, and for which no convincing explanation has yet been found.  It's no wonder that it's fertile ground for people who prefer to ascribe such occurrences to the paranormal.

But in other cases, there is such a simple, convincing natural explanation that you have to wonder why the claimant isn't going there.  Such, for example, is the suggestion over at the phenomenally bizarre quasi-religious site The Watchman's Cry that geographical locations on the Earth that have been the sites of disasters (natural or manmade) fall along connecting lines, making some sort of mystical, meaningful pattern.

The article starts out with a bang, with the phrase, "Several months ago, I had four prophetic dreams which took place on the same night."  Four precognitive dreams is pretty impressive, I have to say, especially since most skeptics don't think precognition occurs at all.  Be that as it may, these dreams involved train wrecks, which is ironic, because that is what the rest of the site turns out to be.

Both literally and figuratively.

The site goes into great detail about various train derailments, and how if you connect them by lines (great circles, to be more precise), those lines then go around the Earth and connect to other sites that have had bad things happen.  These then intersect other such great circles, which go other interesting places, and so on.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's just ley lines all over again, isn't it?  If your search parameters are wide enough -- basically, "anywhere that anything bad has happened in the past two centuries" -- you can find great circles that link them up.  Which is entirely unsurprising. I could draw a great circle anywhere on Earth and pretty much guarantee that I'll find three or more sites near it that had some kind of natural or manmade calamity in the past two centuries.  The Earth is a big place, and there are lots of calamities to choose from.

So this whole thing is an excellent example of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, the choosing of data points favorable to your hypothesis after the fact.  The name comes from a folk story:

A traveler through Texas passed a barn that had a bullseye painted on the side, with three bullet holes near the dead center of the target.  There were two old-timers leaning on a fence nearby, and the visitor slowed down his car and said, "That's some pretty good shooting, right there."

One of the old-timers grins, and says, "Why, thank you."

The other one scowls.  "Don't pay any attention to him.  He just got drunk one night and shot the side of his barn, then the next morning painted a bullseye around the bullet holes."

Anyhow, what gets me most about the claim in The Watchman's Cry is that they don't even seem to understand that given the fact that the Earth is a sphere (an oblate spheroid, to be precise, but let's not get technical), a given point on Earth has an infinite number of great circles passing through it.  Just as two points on a plane define a line, two points on a sphere define a great circle.  And his lack of grasp of simple geometry becomes apparent when he tells us that it's amazing that two intersecting great circles (ones connecting Houston, Texas to train derailment sites in Rosedale, Maryland and Bear Creek, Alabama, respectively) were "only 900 feet apart."

How can you say that two intersecting lines are any specific distance apart?  If they intersect, they are (at that point) zero feet apart.  Farther from the intersection, they are farther apart.  Because that's how intersection works.

But the author of this site trumpets this statement as if it were some kind of epiphany.  It's like being excited because you found a triangle that had three sides.

I'll leave you to explore the site on your own, if you're curious to see more of this false-pattern malarkey, but suffice it to say that there's nothing at all mystical going on here.  He's adding geometry to coincidence and finding meaning, and it's no great surprise that it turns out to be the meaning he already believed going into it.

So like the ley lines people, this guy doesn't seem to be trying very hard to see if there's a natural explanation that sufficiently accounts for all of the facts, a tendency I have a hard time comprehending.  Why are people attracted to this kind of hokum?  Science itself is a grand, soaring vision, telling us that we are capable of understanding how the universe works, from the realm of the enormous to the realm of the unimaginably small.  With a little work, you can find out the rules that govern everything from galaxies to quarks.

But that, apparently, isn't enough for some people.

************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one -- George Zaidan's Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put In Us and On Us.  Springboarding off the loony recommendations that have been rampant in the last few years -- fad diets, alarmist warnings about everything from vaccines to sunscreen, the pros and cons of processed food, substances that seem to be good for us one week and bad for us the next, Zaidan goes through the reality behind the hype, taking apart the claims in a way that is both factually accurate and laugh-out-loud funny.

And high time.  Bogus health claims, fueled by such sites as Natural News, are potentially dangerous.  Zaidan's book holds a lens up to the chemicals we ingest, inhale, and put on our skin -- and will help you sort the fact from the fiction.

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

Drawing the line

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a YouTube video for my facepalming pleasure a couple of days ago, and being a generous sort, I wanted to share the experience will all of you.  The video is called "Nazca Lines Finally Solved!  The Answer is Amazing!", and is well worth watching in its entirety.  But if you understandably don't want to spend seven minutes of your life watching the video that you will never, ever get back, I'll provide you with a capsule summary and some editorial commentary from Yours Truly.

The Nazca Lines, you probably know, are a series of geoglyphs in southern Peru, which are large enough that their overall shape really can't be discerned except from the air.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The relative impossibility of seeing the pattern except from above has led to wingnuts such as Erich von Däniken (of Chariots of the Gods fame) to propose that they were made to signal aliens visiting Earth from other planets.  Why aliens would be impressed by our drawing a giant monkey on the ground, I have no idea.  It also bears mention that Nazca is hardly the only place in the world that has geoglyphs, and none of them have much to do with flying saucers.  There's the Cerne Abbas Giant of Dorsetshire, England, for example, who is really really glad to see you:

Be that as it may, the guy in the video, one Damon T. Berry, thinks the Nazca lines are trying to tell us something.  What?  Well, he starts out with a bang by saying that "the universal language is constellations."  Whatever the fuck that means.  Given that the constellations are random assemblages of stars that would look completely different from another vantage point in space, it's hard to imagine anything "universal" about them except that they're, by default, part of the universe.

What Berry tells us then is that each of the glyphs has a code that points at a particular destination.  He starts with the glyph shaped like a bird, and then talks about birds representing flight (okay, I'm with you so far), and some of the glyphs being runways for flying machines (why the hell you'd make a runway shaped like a monkey, I have no idea), and then goes into a long part about how it's significant that the bird has four toes on one foot and five on the other.

"It is a bird," Berry says.  "It appears to be a bird.  But think like an alien.  Look closer at its feet."

I'm not sure why thinking like an alien involves looking at feet.  Maybe the aliens have some kind of weird foot fetish.  I dunno.

Anyhow, what does the fact of its having nine toes mean?  It means, Berry says, that "this is not a bird.  This is a constellation."  In fact, it's the constellation Aquila, a grouping of stars in the northern hemisphere which evidently looked like an eagle to some ancient Greeks who had just polished off their second bottle of retsina.  The nine toes correspond to the nine brightest stars in the constellation, he says.

Then he moves on to another bird glyph, this one of a hummingbird.  Berry tells us in astonished tones that this bird has the same number of toes on each foot, as if that was an unusual condition or something.  He then says, and this is a direct quote:  "The clue lies elsewhere... in the wings.  And the elongated wings are meant to draw your attention... to the wings."

I had to pause the video at this point to give myself a chance to stop guffawing.

We're then directed to count the feathers, and he comes up with eleven.  He includes the tail, but I'm not going to quibble about that because otherwise we'll be here all day.  He says that the number eleven can only mean one thing: the glyph points to the "constellation Columbia."

For the record, the constellation is actually Columba, not Columbia.  Cf. my comment about not quibbling.

The fact that Columba "has eleven stars" means there's an obvious correspondence.  Well, I have two things to say about that.

1. Do you really think that there's nothing else in the universe that is made up of eleven parts?
2. There are way more than eleven stars in Columba, it's just that the shape of the constellation (identified as a dove by the aforementioned retsina-soaked Greeks) is generally outlined using the brightest eleven stars, just as Aquila was with the nine brightest as earlier described.

He then goes on to analyze the monkey glyph, and once again makes a big deal about the number of fingers and toes, which add to fifteen.  This points to the "constellation of the monkey," which he draws for us.  It's fortunate that he does, because as I do not need to point out to any astronomy buffs out there, there is no constellation of the monkey.  As far as I can tell, he just took some random dots and connected them with straight lines to look vaguely like a monkey.

Whether retsina was involved, I don't know.

He finishes up by basically saying that aliens are out there and will be coming to visit us from those constellations.  At this point, I started shouting at my computer, "You can't be 'from a constellation!'  The stars in a constellation have nothing to do with one another!"  This caused my hound, Lena, to come into my office and give me the Canine Head Tilt of Puzzlement, meant to communicate the one concept she's capable of hosting in her brain ("Derp?").  I reassured her that I wasn't mad at her, that I was mad at the silly man on YouTube, and she accepted that and loped off to interact with something on her intellectual level, like a dust bunny.

Anyhow.  At the end we're told we can learn more if we just watch his longer and more in-depth production, available on Amazon Prime, but I don't think I'm gonna.  I've heard enough.  Me, I'll go back to trying to figure things out through science instead of pulling random correspondences out of my ass.  Call me narrow-minded, but it seems in general like a better way to understand the universe, even if it doesn't involve counting an animal's toes and acting like it means something significant.

Tall tales of Don Juan

When I was in eleventh grade, I took a semester-long class called Introduction to Psychology.  The teacher was Dr. Loren Farmer -- I never found out if he actually had a Ph.D., or if people simple called him "Dr." Farmer because of the air of erudition he had.

The class was taught in an unorthodox fashion, to say the least.  Dr. Farmer was pretty counterculture, especially considering that this was Louisiana in the 1970s.  He stood on no ceremony at all; we were allowed to sit wherever we liked (my favorite perch was on a wide bookcase by the window), and class was more of a free-roaming discussion than it was the usual chalk/talk typical of high school back then.  Even his tests were odd; we had a choice on his final exam of ten or so short-answer/essay questions from which we were to answer seven, and I recall that one of them was "Draw and interpret three mandalas."  (I elected not to do this one.  My ability to sling the arcane-sounding bullshit was and is highly developed, but my artistic ability pretty much stalled out in third grade, and I didn't think I could pull that one off.)

Some time around the middle of the semester, he instructed us to go buy a copy of a book that would be assigned reading over the following few weeks.  The book was The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda.  I had never heard of it, but I dutifully purchased the book.

I was nothing short of astonished when it turned out to be about the use of hallucinogenic drugs.  Castaneda tells the story of his apprenticeship to Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui native from Mexico, wherein he was given peyote, Psilocybe mushrooms, and Datura (Jimson weed), inducing wild visions that Don Juan said weren't hallucinations; they were glimpses of an "alternate reality" that sorcerers could use to gain power and knowledge.  Castaneda starts out doubtful, but eventually goes all-in -- and in fact, wrote one sequel after another describing his journey deeper and deeper into the world of the brujo.

I was captivated by Castaneda's story.  I read the sequel to Teachings, A Separate Reality.  The third one, Journey to Ixtlan, was even better.  Then I got to the fourth one, Tales of Power, and I began to go, "Hmmm."  Something about the story seemed off to me, as if he'd gone from recounting his real experiences to simply making shit up.  I made it through book five, The Second Ring of Power, and the feeling intensified.  About two chapters into book six, The Eagle's Gift, I gave the whole thing up as a bad job.

But something about the stories continued to fascinate me.  The best parts -- especially his terrifying vision of a bridge to another world in the fog at night in A Separate Reality, and his witnessing a battle of power in Journey to Ixtlan -- have a mythic quality that is compelling.  But the sense that even apart from any supernatural aspects, which I predictably don't buy, the books were the product of a guy trying to pull a fast one on his readers left me simultaneously angry and disgusted.

I discovered that I'm not alone in that reaction.  Richard de Mille (son of Cecil), an anthropologist and writer, wrote a pair of analyses of Castaneda's books, Castaneda's Journey and The Don Juan Papers, that I just finished reading a few days ago, explaining my resurgence of interest in the subject.  De Mille pounced on something that had been in the back of my mind ever since reading Journey to Ixtlan -- that it would be instructive to compare the timeline of the first three books, as Ixtlan overlaps the years covered by the first two, Teachings and A Separate Reality.

And what de Mille found is that the books are full of subtle internal contradictions that one would never discover without doing what he did, which is to lay out all of the carefully-dated supposed journal entries Castaneda gives us in the first three books.  Among the more glaring errors is that Castaneda is introduced for the first time to a major character, the brujo Don Genaro, twice -- over five years apart.   Also separated by years are events in which Castaneda saw (the word in italics is used by Castaneda to describe a mystical sort of vision in which everything looks different -- humans, for instance, look like bundles of fibers made of light) and in which Don Juan tells his apprentice "you still have never seen."

Worse still is the fact that Ixtlan recounts a dozen or so mind-blowing experiences that allegedly occurred during the same time period as Teachings -- and yet which Castaneda didn't think were important enough to include in his first account.  Add to that the point de Mille makes in The Don Juan Papers that not only do the Yaqui not make use of hallucinogens in their rituals, Don Juan himself never tells Castaneda a single Yaqui name -- not one -- for any plant, animal, place, or thing they see.  Then there's the difficulty pointed out by anthropologist Hans Sebald, of Arizona State University, that Castaneda claims that he and Don Juan went blithely wandering around in the Sonoran desert in midsummer, often with little in the way of food or water, never once making mention any discomfort from temperatures that would have hovered around 110 F at midday.

The conclusion of de Mille and others is that Castaneda made the whole thing up from start to finish, and the books are the combination of scraps of esoteric lore he'd picked up in the library at UCLA and his own imagination.  There was no Don Juan, no Don Genaro, no glow-in-the-dark coyote that spoke to the author at the end of Ixtlan.  Distressing, then, that de Mille's rebuttals -- which were published in 1976 and 1980, respectively -- didn't stop Castaneda from amassing a huge, and devoted, following.  He founded a cult called "Tensegrity" which alleged to teach the acolyte the secrets of how to see Don Juan's alternate reality.  He surrounded himself with a group of women called "the nagual women" (unkinder observers called them the "five witches") who did his bidding -- Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, Patricia Partin,  Amalia Marquez, and Kylie Lundahl -- all of whom vanished shortly after Castaneda died of liver cancer in 1998.  There's been no trace discovered of any of them except for Partin, whose skeleton was discovered in Death Valley in 2006, but it's thought that all five committed suicide after their leader died.

So what began as a hoax ended up as a dangerous cult.  Castaneda seems to have started the story as a way of pulling the wool over the eyes of his advisers in the anthropology department at UCLA (it worked, given that Journey to Ixtlan is essentially identical to his doctoral dissertation), but as so often happens, fame went to his head and he moved from telling tall tales about an alleged Yaqui shaman to using the people who bought into his philosophy as a way to get money, sex, and power.

And it can be imagined how pissed off this makes actual Native Americans.  Castaneda hijacked and mangled their beliefs into something unrecognizable -- placing his books in with Seven Arrows as yet another way that non-Natives have appropriated and misrepresented Native culture.  (If you've not heard about Seven Arrows, by Hyemeyohsts Storm, it's a mystical mishmash containing about 10% actual facts about the Cheyenne, and 90% made-up gobbledygook.  Storm himself -- his actual name is Arthur -- claims to be half Cheyenne and to have grown up on the reservation, but the Cheyenne tribal authorities say they've never heard of him.)

What's saddest about all of this is that Castaneda could have simply written "fiction" after the title of his books, and they'd have lost nothing in impact.  It's not that fiction has nothing to teach us, gives us no inspiration, doesn't consider the profound.  In fact, I would argue that some of the most poignant lessons we learn come from the subtexts of the fiction we read.  (I have tried to weave that into my own writing, especially my novel Sephirot, which is about one man's Hero's Journey placed in the context of Jewish mystical lore.)

But instead Castaneda lied to his readers.  There's no kinder way to put it.  He told us that it was all real.  Not content with writing an excellent work of inspirational fiction, he instead is relegated to the ignominious ranks of clever hoaxers.  (Or at least should be; de Mille says there are still lots of college classes in which Castaneda's books are required reading, and not as an example of an anthropological hoax, but as real field work in ethnology and belief.)

So however entertaining, and even inspiring, his books are, the whole thing leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.  In short, truth matters.  And the fact is, Carlos Castaneda was nothing more than a sly and charismatic liar.

I've got your number

An inevitable side-effect of writing six times a week here at Skeptophilia is that I get some weird gifts sometimes.

This explains why I am the proud owner of:

• a cardboard-cutout Bigfoot that you can dress up with various stickers (he's currently wearing a kilt and a jaunty-looking tam-o'shanter)
• a very creepy-looking ritual mask from the Ivory Coast
• a book entitled UFOs: How to See Them
• a deck of steampunk Tarot cards
• a drawing of a scowling alien with a speech bubble saying "Nonbelievers Will Be Vaporized"
• a car air freshener shaped like a Sasquatch (fortunately, it doesn't smell like one)
• the poster made famous from Fox Mulder's office, with a UFO and the caption "I Want To Believe"

The latest addition to my collection comes to me from someone who is not only a loyal reader of Skeptophilia but is one of my best buds -- writer and blogger Andrew Butters (who writes over at Potato Chip Math, an awesome blog you should all check out on a regular basis).  Recently I got a package from Andrew, and when I opened it up, it turned out to be a book called...

... Mysteries and Secrets of Numerology.

This book, by Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe, is a complete analysis of the practice of numerology across the world, as viewed through the critical lens of believing every bit of it without question.  I checked out how it has fared on Amazon, and found that it has thus far received two reviews:

1: This book is full of wonderful information regarding numerology.  I got a copy from the library, but I will be buying my own to keep as a reference for numerology and sacred geometry.  Well Done!

... and:

2: Fine. This purchase was for some research I was doing and I came away amazed that anyone can take this entire subject matter area seriously.  The book drones on forever and that makes it great bedtime reading. 

Yes, I did work the examples on my own set of numbers as well as those other family members and it didn't help me understand them any better than I did before.  They're still boring.  I put this book in the same category as those purporting to provide proof of alien abductions happening every day, all over planet earth.  If you really must find something in which to believe to give your life purpose, or help you amaze your friends, this book is for you.

So it's gotten a fairly mixed reception so far.  

Undeterred by the second review, I read through it.  I will admit that I skimmed past the parts of it where the authors calculate numerological values for everyone from Hippocrates to Alexander Graham Bell.  (I did note that the authors concluded that the "dark side of his numerological 1" for the famous British murderer Hawley Crippen "may have been what drove him to the rash and impetuous murder" of his second wife, Cora.  Which seems like a stretch, as from pure statistics one out of every nine people on Earth are "numerological 1s," and as far as I can tell, very few of them murder their second wives.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The last section was the most interesting, however.  We're told therein that because all sorts of factors can contribute to a person acting a particular way, or an action having a particular outcome, there's no reason not to believe that "numbers can exert invisible and unsuspected influences just as powerful."  We're then instructed that we should all pay more attention to the numbers in our lives, and especially look for the good influences of the numbers 1 (which, I note, didn't help Crippen much), 3, 6, 7, and 9.  Only in the second-to-last paragraph do the Fanthorpes bring up the central problem with the whole thing: "These attempts to use numbers as influences to attract good things and to protect against negative things are very interesting, but are open to the question of whether -- when they seem to work -- they are actually self-fulfilling prophecies."

Well, yeah.  The whole book is basically Confirmation Bias "R" Us.

So I'm sure you're all dying to know what my number is.  The book gives detailed instructions on how to calculate your number, although it does say there are different ways of doing so.  "Therefore," the authors write, "two equally well-qualified and experienced numerologists working with slightly different systems could reach very different conclusions."  (Which to me, is just a fancy way of saying, "this is bullshit.")

I used what they say the "simplest way" is -- writing out the English alphabet underneath the numbers 1-9, starting with A=1, B=2, and so on; after you reach I=9, you start over with J=1.  Following this protocol, my whole name adds up to 76.  You're then supposed to add the digits (giving 13) and then add those (giving a final answer of 4).

So my number apparently is 4, which unfortunately is not one of the "auspicious numbers" mentioned above.  Four, apparently, means "a foundation, the implementation of order, a struggle against limits, and steady growth."

I suppose it could be worse.

In any case, I'm not going to lose any sleep over the fact that I didn't get "9" (the number of "immense creativity").  Nor am I going to do what the authors say some folks have done, which is change their name to one that has a better number.

It might be worth getting a second opinion, however.  Maybe I should see what the "steampunk Tarot cards" have to say on the matter.  That should be illuminating.

Deconstructing Wah!

Yesterday, I received a mailing from The Omega Institute, of Rhinebeck, New York, suggesting that I might be interested in taking some of their classes.

Frankly, I suspect that I'd last six hours there before security guards escorted me off the premises for guffawing at the staff.  I first started receiving mailings from them because I was interested in their writing intensives, but (as I found out on my first perusal of their catalog) at least half of their offerings are seriously woo-woo.  One I particularly enjoyed reading about is the use of music in healing, taught by a woman named Wah! (The exclamation point is not me being emphatic; it's part of her name.)  What would possess someone to change her name to Wah! is a mystery in and of itself, but I did go to her website and listen to some of her music, and what I heard seemed to fall into the Overwrought, Therapy-Session-Gone-Horribly-Wrong School of Music.  I didn't find it particularly healing, myself, but maybe the point was that it was healing to her -- I don't honestly know.

A more interesting example, however, are the workshops offered by a fellow named John Perkins that claim to teach you how to shape-shift.  From the description of one of these workshops:

We have entered a time prophesied by many cultures for shapeshifting into higher consciousness.  Polynesian shamans shapeshift through oceans, Amazon warriors transform into anacondas, and Andean birdpeople and Tibetan monks bilocate across mountains.  These shamans have taught John Perkins that shapeshifting - the ability to alter form at will - can be used to create positive change.

Well, okay. I'm willing to accept that some Amazonian shamans believed that they could become anacondas.  I'm also all too willing to accept that certain other, fairly gullible, Amazonian natives believed that the shamans were becoming anacondas.  

But this demands the question, doesn't it, of whether they actually are becoming anacondas.  Some of the disciples of the woo-woo will respond with something like, "reality is what you think it is."  Which works just fine until reality in the form of a baseball bat wallops you in the forehead, at which point you can think it doesn't exist, you can in fact think that you're an Andean birdperson, but what you really will be is a confused, non-Andean, ordinary person with a concussion and a big old dent in your head.

It is amazing the lengths to which the woo-woos of the world will go to support their beliefs.  My wife Carol, in her nursing program, had to take a course in "alternatives to traditional medicine."  Her own take on this was that if it had been about the role of belief in the efficacy of medicine, that would have been fine; but they didn't stop there.  They started out with therapies for which there is at least some experimental support (such as acupuncture) and from there took a flying leap out into the void, landing amongst such ridiculous and discredited ideas as homeopathy, chakras, and healing through crystal energies.  This last one led to a spectacle that was (according to Carol) acutely embarrassing to watch, wherein the teacher held a crystal hanging from a string over a volunteer's head, to show that the crystal could pick up the volunteer's "life energy" and begin to swing of its own volition.  There was no response from the crystal (surprise!!!) for some minutes, while the volunteer (who was probably seriously regretting raising his hand) and the students in the audience sat fidgeting and looking at each other.  Then, after about ten minutes, the crystal moved.  Hallelujah!  The theory is vindicated!

All of which once again brings up the subject of confirmation bias, a cognitive bias that we here at Skeptophilia have seen all too often.  Basically, if you've already decided on your conclusion, you only pay attention to any evidence (however minuscule) that confirms your idea, and everything else is ignored.  Any movement of the crystal had to be due to the subject's "energy field" -- other hypotheses (such as that the teacher's arm was getting a bit tired after holding the crystal up there for ten minutes, and he moved his hand a little, causing the crystal to swing) are not even acknowledged.

You see what you want to see.  And, if you're lucky, you get to make a bunch of poor college students sit there while you're doing it.

So far, I am sounding awfully self-confident, as I have a tendency to do.  But if I'm being totally honest, I have to look at my own ideas in the same light.  One of the great myths of the last hundred years is, I think, that somehow everyone is biased except for the scientists -- that the scientists have this blinding clarity of vision, that they are objective and unbiased and therefore have cornered the market on truth.  

While there are probably scientists who believe this, the truth of the matter is that most scientists are well aware of their biases.  We skeptics, too, see what we want to see.  

First, we have to believe that the scientific way of knowing leads us closer to the truth -- which statement, of course, you can't prove.  Furthermore, if you're a researcher, you're not approaching a question with a completely open mind; you already have (at least to some extent) figured out what you think is going on, and so when you design your measurement equipment and your experimental protocol, you do so in a way to find what you think it is that you're going to find.  If there's something else going on, you might not even see it unless you're extraordinarily lucky.  Perhaps that's why serious paradigm shifts have so often happened because of some random piece of evidence, from an unexpected source, that someone (often by accident) notices.  It's how Kepler found out that planetary orbits are elliptical; it's how plate tectonics was discovered; it's how penicillin was discovered.

Science doesn't proceed by clear, logical little steps, by people adding brick after brick to an edifice whose plan is already well known and laid out on the table.  Like most of the other things in this world, it proceeds by jerky fits and starts, false turns, and backtracking.  The "scientific method" no more explains how we've accrued the knowledge we have than "life energies" explain the movement of a crystal hanging from a string.

So then, why am I a skeptic?  Why don't I just go and join Wah! and John Perkins?  (Just think, I could come up with a pretentious single syllable name with a punctuation mark, too!  I think I'd be "Huh?")  For me, the single strength of science as a world view is its ability to self-correct.  You claim that plate tectonics exists?  Okay -- anyone with the equipment, time, and inclination can go out there and verify the evidence themselves.  If an experiment is not found to be repeatable (such as the "cold fusion" debacle), it's not explained away with some foolishness like "the energy fields were being interfered with by the chakras of your aura" -- the whole idea is simply abandoned.  The procedures, equipment, and outcomes are out there for peer review, and if they are found wanting, the theory is modified, altered, or scrapped entirely.

Try that with the healing energy of music.  I bet if several of you were sick, and I played some of Wah!'s music for you, some of you would get better.  Some of you might get sicker.  (I suspect I'd be in the latter category.)  And for those of you who got well, how could we be certain that it was the music that was responsible?  Because Wah! says so?  Because the idea that music could have a healing energy appeals to you?  If I've learned anything in my fifty-five years on this planet, it's that there seems to be no connection between ideas I find appealing and ideas that are true.

If anything, the opposite seems to be the case.  I know I'd love it if Bigfoot and aliens were real, faster-than-light travel was not only possible but easy, and I could do magic à la Harry Potter.  Unfortunately, thus far I'm batting zero on all that stuff.

Anyhow, as usual, I've probably pissed off large quantities of people who are into homeopathy, crystal energies, numerology, astrology, faith healing, and so on.  But I'm reminded of a quote from (of all people) C. S. Lewis, whose wonderful character Mr. MacPhee said in That Hideous Strength, "If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I'll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

To which I say, "hear, hear."  On the other hand, if I get visited tonight by an anaconda, I suppose it will serve me right.