Creatures from the alongside

In C. S. Lewis's novel Perelandra, the protagonist, Elwin Ransom, goes to the planet Venus.  In Lewis's fictional universe Venus isn't the scorched, acid-soaked hell we now know it to be; it's a water world, with floating islands of lush vegetation, tame animals, and a climate like something out of paradise.

In fact, to Lewis, it is paradise; a world that hasn't fallen (in the biblical sense).  Ransom runs into a woman who appears to be the planet's only humanoid inhabitant, and she exhibits a combination of high intelligence and innocent naïveté that is Lewis's expression of the Edenic state.  Eventually another Earth person arrives -- the scientist Weston, who is (more or less) the delegate of the Evil One, playing here the role of the Serpent.  And Weston tells the woman about humanity's love for telling stories:

"That is a strange thing," she said.  "To think abut what will never happen."

"Nay, in our world we do it all the time.  We put words together to mean things that have never happened and places that never were: beautiful words, well put together.  And then we tell them to one another.  We call it stories or poetry...  It is for mirth and wonder and wisdom."

"What is the wisdom in it?"

"Because the world is made up not only of what is but of what might be.  Maleldil [God] knows both and wants us to know both."

"This is more than I ever thought of.  The other [Ransom] has already told me things which made me feel like a tree whose branches were growing wider and wider apart.  But this goes beyond all.  Stepping out of what is into what might be, and talking and making things out there, alongside the world...  This is a strange and great thing you are telling me."

It's more than a little ironic -- and given Lewis's impish sense of humor, I'm quite sure it was deliberate -- that a man whose fame came primarily from writing fictional stories identifies fictional stories as coming from the devil, within one of his fictional stories.  Me, I'm more inclined to agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."

Our propensity for telling stories is curious, and it's likely that it goes a long way back.  Considering the ubiquity of tales about gods and heroes, it seems certain that saying "Once upon a time..." has been going on since before we had written language.  It's so familiar that we lose sight of how peculiar it is; as far as we know, we are alone amongst the nine-million-odd species in Kingdom Animalia in inventing entertaining falsehoods and sharing them with the members of our tribe.

The topic of storytelling comes up because quite by accident I stumbled on Wikipedia's page called "Lists of Legendary Creatures."  It's long enough that they have individual pages for each letter of the alphabet.  It launched me down a rabbit hole that I didn't emerge from for hours. 

And there are some pretty fanciful denizens of the "alongside world."  Here are just a few examples I thought were particularly interesting:

• The Alp-luachra of Ireland.  This creature looks like a newt, and waits for someone to fall asleep by the side of the stream where it lives, then it crawls into his/her mouth and takes up residence in the stomach.  There it absorbs the "quintessence" of the food, causing the person to lose weight and have no energy.
• The Popobawa of Zanzibar, a one-eyed shadowy humanoid with a sulfurous odor and wings.  It visits houses at night where it looks for people (either gender) to ravish.
• The Erchitu, a were...ox.  In Sardinia, people who commit crimes and don't receive the more traditional forms of justice turn on the night of the full Moon into huge oxen, which then get chased around the place being poked with skewers by demons.  This is one tale I wish was true, because full Moon days in the White House and United States Congress would be really entertaining.
• The Nekomata, a cat with multiple tails that lives in the mountains regions of Japan and tricks unwary solo travelers, pretending at first to be playful and then leading them into the wilds and either losing them or else attacking them.  They apparently are quite talented musicians, though.

Nekomata (猫又) from the Hyakkai-Zukan (百怪図巻) by Sawaki Suushi (1707) [Image is in the Public Domain]

• The Gwyllgi, one of many "big evil black dog" creatures, this one from Wales.  The Gwyllgi is powerfully-built and smells bad.  If you added "has no respect for personal space" and "will chase a tennis ball for hours," this would be a decent description of my dog Guinness, but Guinness comes from Pennsylvania, not Wales, so maybe that's not a match.
• The Sânziană of Romania, who is a fairy that looks like a beautiful young woman.  Traditionally they dance in clearings in the forest each year on June 24, and are a danger to young men who see them -- any guy who spies the Sânziene will go mad with desire (and stay that way, apparently).
• The Ao-Ao, from the legends of the Guarani people of Paraguay.  The Ao-Ao is a creature that looks kind of like a sheep, but has fangs and claws, and eats people.  It is, in fact, a real baa-dass.

A statue of an Ao-Ao by Paraguayan sculptor Ramón Elias [Image is in the Public Domain]

• The Tlahuelpuchi, of the Nahua people of central Mexico.  The Tlahuelpuchi is a vampire, a human who is cursed to suck the blood of others (apparently it's very fond of babies).  When it appears, it sometimes looks human but has an eerie glow; other times, it leaves its legs behind and turns into a bird.  Either way, it's one seriously creepy legend.
• The Dokkaebi, a goblin-like creature from Korea.  It has bulging eyes and a huge, grinning mouth filled with lots of teeth, and if it meets you it challenges you to a wrestling match.  They're very powerful, but apparently they are weak on the right side, so remember that if you're ever in a wrestling match with a goblin in Korea.

So that's just the merest sampling of the creatures in the list.  I encourage you to do a deeper dive.  And myself, I think the whole thing is pretty cool -- a tribute to the inventiveness and creativity of the human mind.  I understand why (in the context of the novel) C. S. Lewis attributed storytelling to the devil, but honestly, I can't see anything wrong with it unless you're trying to convince someone it's all true.

I mean, consider a world without stories.  How impoverished would that be?  So keep telling tales.  It's part of what it means to be human.

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

Well, actually...

American economist Thomas Sowell famously said, "Endless repetition does not make something true."

I used to run into examples of this principle all the time when I was a teacher -- widely-accepted, and rarely-questioned, incorrect statements that still somehow classified as "stuff everyone knows."  One that immediately pops to mind, and that I had to debunk just about every year, was that daddy-longlegs (also called "harvestmen"), those familiar arachnids in just about everyone's cellars and attics, are "actually deadly poisonous but their fangs are too small to pierce human skin."  There's no truth to this whatsoever; they don't even have poison glands, and their chelicerae ("fangs") aren't hollow like a spider's.  They are, in fact, entirely harmless.

In the interest of making at least a minuscule inroad into ridding the public consciousness of some of the most egregious of these, today I present to you an extremely incomplete list of commonly-accepted falsehoods that have spread by word-of-mouth and now become ubiquitous.

The Latest Gossip by François Brunery (ca. 1900) [Image is in the Public Domain]

How many of these have you heard -- and how many did you believe?

1. Turkey meat is not high in the amino acid tryptophan -- or at least, no higher than any other protein source.  Tryptophan isn't why you're sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner; it's much more likely to be overeating, consumption of wine, and the general energetic letdown we all experience after a big event.
2. The pronunciation of words with an s, c, or z in Castilian Spanish, where the usual sibilant is sometimes replaced by a coronal fricative /θ/ (usually written in English as "th"), did not occur because there was a king who lisped and all of his fawning courtiers wanted to make him feel better by imitating him.  In fact, the phonetic shift seems to have been gradual, spreading across the region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and may have been driven by the need to differentiate words (like siento "I feel" and ciento "one hundred") that otherwise would have been pronounced identically.
3. The seasons are not caused by the Earth being closer to the Sun in summer; in fact, during the Northern Hemisphere's summer the Earth is actually farther away from the Sun than it is in winter.  The seasonal changes in temperature are almost all due to the twenty-three degree axial tilt of the Earth.  Nor is it true, as I've seen claimed in some hyper-religious posts, that "if the Earth was only a few feet closer or farther away from the Sun than it is, it would be boiled or frozen" -- so, goes the claim, God placed the Earth in exactly the right spot, and can I get a hallelujah?  In fact, the Earth's orbit is elliptical enough that it's about five million kilometers closer to the Sun at perihelion than it is at aphelion, and we neither roast at one nor are flash-frozen at the other.  So you may well think that God directs the universe, but if that's your proof, you might want to reconsider.
4. Despite what you may have learned from such historical documents as Hagar the Horrible, Vikings did not go into battle wearing horned helmets.  Horns (or antlers) on headgear would have been a serious hindrance to fighting, and the Vikings were way smarter than to do anything that slowed down the highly lucrative plunder and pillage.  Extant horned or antlered headgear seems to have been mostly ceremonial in use, probably by shamans to invoke animal spirits.
5. Lemmings don't engage in mass suicide by diving off cliffs or swimming out into lakes and drowning when they get overcrowded.  This complete fabrication became a popular belief because of a 1958 Disney movie called White Wilderness which depicted it happening; it turns out that the scene was filmed using lemmings that had been purchased from Inuit children for a quarter a piece, and the unfortunate rodents were shoved off a cliff repeatedly to get enough footage for the film.
6. Albert Einstein did not fail high school mathematics; in fact, by fifteen he had mastered both differential and integral calculus.  He did fail his first entrance exam for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School, but this was probably because he was two years younger than most of the rest of the students who attempted it.  (He did really well on the science and math portions.)  He did, however, as an adult say to a frustrated physics student, "Do not worry about your difficulties with mathematics; I can assure you that mine are far worse," but this was more overly modest of the great man than it was accurate.
7. Apologies to Pink Floyd, but there is no permanently dark side of the Moon.  Because the Moon is tidally locked, the same side faces the Earth all the time; put another way, its periods of rotation and revolution are the same.  Any given spot on the Moon is (like the Earth) in sunlight at some times and in darkness at others, and what length of time it spends in each depends on latitude and where the Moon is in its orbit.
8. There is absolutely no mention that Mary Magdalene in the Bible was a prostitute (reformed or otherwise), nor that she was the same person as the unnamed woman who anointed Jesus's feet in Luke chapter 7, or the adulterer whom Jesus saved from being stoned in John chapter 8.
9. People don't "use only ten percent of their brain."  There's no way evolution would have favored the production of a huge, complex organ like the brain, and then we only ever get to use ten percent of it.  In fact, over the course of your life you use pretty much the whole thing, even if at any given time only a fraction of the neurons are firing.  If you could get your whole brain to fire at once, the result wouldn't be superpowers, it'd be a body-wide and probably fatal seizure.
10. Sharks can, in fact, get cancer.  The mistaken belief that they never do was popularized in a book by William Lane and Linda Comac with the creative title Sharks Don't Get Cancer, and was used as part of a campaign to sell shark cartilage capsules as a cure-all.
11. Speaking of fish, three South American fish with scary reputations are pretty close to harmless.  Piranhas rarely attack humans, and while they'll bite, there are no recorded incidents of people (or other large animals) being "skeletonized" by them, Vashta Nerada-style.  The strong-jawed pacu fish do not wait for male skinnydippers and bite off their testicles; that claim started as a joke when a biologist commented that the pacu has grinding teeth capable of chewing (tree) nuts.  Last, the infamous candiru catfish of the Amazon does not swim up people's urethras and get lodged there.  They parasitize other fish, hooking onto the gills, but (like most parasites) are very host-specific.  The likelihood of having a candiru go up your urethra, even if you were urinating while submerged in a stream where candiru live, is (according to American marine biologist Stephen Spotte) "about the same as being struck by lightning while simultaneously being eaten by a shark."
12. Catherine the Great, empress of Russia in the eighteenth century, did not die while attempting to have sex with a horse.  Admittedly, she was apparently very fond of sex, but with people.  She died at age 67 of what was clearly a stroke.  The rumor started because of some attempts to discredit her (and Russians in general) published in Germany, and there's no truth to it whatsoever.
13. Cracking your knuckles doesn't cause arthritis.  Like any repetitive motion, it can cause inflammation if you do it compulsively, but done occasionally, it's completely harmless.
14. The word crap did not originate as back-formation from the name of nineteenth-century businessman Thomas Crapper, who improved the design of (but did not invent) the flush toilet.  Crap traces its origins to medieval Latin; and Crapper's name is actually an altered version of cropper, meaning farmer.
15. Somewhat along the same lines: fuck is not an acronym for either "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" or "Fornication Under Consent of the King."  The former is supposedly what was written above the heads of adulterers confined to the stocks; the latter, what was allegedly stamped on marriage documents, giving a couple the right to lawfully do the deed.  Neither is even close to true.  Nor does "fuck you" originate as a corruption of "pluck yew," supposedly an expression meaning to draw a longbow made of yew-wood.  And while we're at it, the middle finger as a sign of contempt has nothing to do with archery, either, despite the story that Welsh bowmen captured by the English supposedly had their index fingers cut off so they couldn't draw, but showed those Silly English Types-uh by drawing their bows using only their middle fingers.  In fact, "fuck" is a good old Indo-European root with a very long history (from the reconstructed word *peuk, meaning "to prick" or "to jab", and therefore a cognate to words like "poke," "point," "punch," and "pugnacious").  The middle finger has been used as a rude gesture at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, where it meant -- as it still does today -- "fuck you" or "stick it up your ass."

So there you have it.  Only a drop in the bucket, I'm quite sure -- as James Randi put it, the reason we need debunkers is because there's so much bunk out there.  But perhaps this cleared up a few things?

One can only hope.

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

Creating the Rake

It's seldom that we can pinpoint the exact moment of origin of an urban legend.  Much more commonly, they start out from a campfire tale that spreads and changes, as if the people passing it along were participating in a giant, freewheeling game of Telephone, until somehow just about everyone knows some version of it and no one really has any idea where it started.

"The Rake" is one of the exceptions.  Like Slender Man, Ben Drowned, and the Black-eyed Children, the Rake began as creepypasta -- scary, allegedly true, first-person accounts that were created and shared online.  The Rake first appeared in 2013, with the following post at 4Chan:

Here’s what we’ve got so far: Humanoid, about six feet tall when standing, but usually crouches and walks on all fours.  It has very pale skin.  The face is blank.  As in, no nose, no mouth.  However, it has three solid green eyes, one in the middle of its forehead, and the other two on either side of its head, towards the back.  Usually seen in front yards in suburban areas.  Usually just watches the observer, but will stand up and attack if approached.  When it attacks, a mouth opens up, as if a hinged skull that opens at the chin.  Reveals many tiny, but dull teeth.

So yeah.  As an Official Paranormal Researcher (at least according to the stoned guy I met in the haunted underpass a few days ago), I can confidently say that if I saw anything like this, I would respond by looking the monster straight in the eyes (all three of them), and then proceed to piss my pants and have a stroke.  Because I may be a Paranormal Researcher, but I am also a great big coward.

Be that as it may, the Rake spread around the internet at a high rate of speed, once again showing the accuracy of Charles Haddon Spurgeon's quip that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots."  To be fair, a lot of people sharing stories of the Rake knew they were fiction and never claimed otherwise; but pretty soon, it started to slip over into that foggy boundary region where the story ends with "... and my cousin's best friend's aunt swears she actually saw it happen."

One of the most common photographs associated with the Rake, although this thing seems to have the standard number of eyes and other facial features.  For what it's worth, I remember seeing this photo maybe twenty years ago -- where it was claimed to have been a monster someone caught on a hunting trailcam in my home state of Louisiana.

From a post that everyone knew was fiction, to an urban legend at least some folks were trying to claim was real, the Rake has now arrived at full-blown cryptid status, where there are YouTube clips wherein it supposedly was captured on video:

Okay, I have to admit a couple of those clips are pretty freaky, and make me glad that (1) it's daytime, and (2) my dog Guinness is right here by my side.  Although it bears mention that Guinness is a bigger scaredy-cat than I am, so I'm not sure how much help he'd be if the Rake actually showed up in my front yard, especially given that our yard is not so much "suburban" as "in the middle of abso-fucking-lutely nowhere."

But I digress.

Where it gets even funnier is that people who talk about how the Rake is real, when confronted with the very certain date of its creation, say, basically, "yeah, we know, but it's still real."  They say that the Rake is a tulpa -- a fictional creature that became real because so many people were putting their creativity and mental energy into imagining it.  Aficionados of The X Files may remember the simultaneously hilarious and terrifying episode "Arcadia," where Mulder and Scully find themselves battling a tulpa created to keep people in an upscale gated community from breaking their homeowners' agreement about things like putting up cutesy garden statues and whimsical house adornments.  Even more grim than that is the claim that Lovecraft's evil pantheon are tulpas -- that so many people are obsessed with Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth and Tsathoggua and the rest of the gang that the Elder Gods are now out there, ready to kill you in various eldritch ways, especially if you live in an accursèd house in Providence with a gambrel roof.

Sorry to bear the bad news if you just moved into one of those.  I don't make the rules.

In any case, I don't think we have much to worry about, with regards to the Rake.  It pretty clearly didn't exist even in fiction prior to 2013, despite any back-dated video footage to the contrary.  The worst I'm expecting to see if I look out into my yard are chipmunks, rabbits, and the occasional fox.  That I'll bring Guinness along if I go out at night is purely for the purpose of giving him some companionship. 

Really it is.

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

Lost beneath the waves

Ever heard of the Kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod?

If not, I hadn't either. Those of you with a linguistic bent might surmise from the name that the kingdom had something to do with Wales, and you'd be right.  The sad tale of the lost Kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod is one of the dozens of inundation myths (although using that last word may be inappropriate, as you'll see in a moment), including the Breton city of Ys and the Arthurian legend of the Kingdom of Lyonesse.  Both were allegedly destroyed for their wickedness by drowning in the ocean.  If this puts you in mind of J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional land of Númenor, that's no coincidence; Ys and Lyonesse were part of the inspiration for Tolkien's doomed kingdom of the Second Age of Middle Earth.

The less-famous Kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod has some striking parallels.  Originally made up of a broad, fertile valley west of Wales, the land was swallowed up by the sea and now lies beneath Cardigan Bay.  Instead of the sinfulness that did in Ys, Lyonesse, and Númenor, Cantre'r Gwaelod was supposedly destroyed by negligence; in the Black Book of Carmarthen, a thirteenth-century document that is the earliest surviving manuscript written entirely in Welsh, the unfortunate kingdom met its doom because a maiden named Mererid who had been tasked with tending a well fell asleep, and the well overflowed and flooded the entire land.

What, exactly, Mererid was supposed to do about a well that was flowing so fast that it could inundate a whole country while someone was taking an afternoon nap is uncertain.  But in the legend, the poor girl got the blame, and so the matter has stood.

But what separates Cantre'r Gwaelod from other lost-lands myths, including the most famous one -- Atlantis -- is that the Welsh version may actually have some basis in fact.

The Gough Map [Image is in the Public Domain]

Two researchers, Simon Haslett, Professor of Physical Geography at Swansea University, and David Willis, Professor of Celtic History at the University of Oxford, found evidence on one of the earliest maps of Great Britain of two low-lying islands in what is now Cardigan Bay.  The document, called the Gough Map after its last owner prior to its donation to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, dates back to the fourteenth century, although many historians believe it to be a copy of an earlier map.  And it indicates that parts of Cardigan Bay were once dry land, and further, that the contours and terrain of these islands are reminiscent of the descriptions of Cantre'r Gwaelod from the Black Book of Carmarthen:

This study investigates historical sources, alongside geological and bathymetric evidence, and proposes a model of post-glacial coastal evolution that provides an explanation for the ‘lost’ islands and a hypothetical framework for future research: (1) during the Pleistocene, Irish Sea ice occupied the area from the north and west, and Welsh ice from the east, (2) a landscape of unconsolidated Pleistocene deposits developed seaward of a relict pre-Quaternary cliffline with a land surface up to ca. 30 m above present sea-level, (3) erosion proceeded along the lines of a template provided by a retreating shoreline affected by Holocene sea-level rise, shore-normal rivers, and surface run-off from the relict cliffline and interfluves, (4) dissection established islands occupying cores of the depositional landscape, and (5) continued down-wearing, marginal erosion and marine inundation(s) removed the two remaining islands by the 16th century.  Literary evidence and folklore traditions provide support in that Cardigan Bay is associated with the ‘lost’ lowland of Cantre’r Gwaelod.

So it looks like we may have here another example of a legend with some basis in fact.  A good many of the inundation myths -- including, very possibly, the Great Flood in the Bible -- might have come from the fact that at the end of the last Ice Age, the seas were rising, and previously dry land such as Beringia (between Russia and Alaska) and Doggerland (between England and continental Europe) were drowned.  Cantre'r Gwaelod, perhaps, was a victim of the same sea level rise -- but unlike the others, we appear to have a map showing exactly where it lay.

And maybe once and for all we can absolve poor Mererid of any responsibility for its demise.

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

The eyes have it

A friend of mine has characterized the teaching of science in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college as follows:

1. Elementary school: Here's how it works!  There are a couple of simple rules.
2. Middle school: Okay, it's not quite that simple.  Here are a few exceptions to the simple rules.
3. High school: Those exceptions aren't actually exceptions, it's just that there are a bunch more rules.
4. College: Here are papers written studying each of those "rules," and it turns out some are probably wrong, and analysis of the others has raised dozens of other questions.

This is pretty close to spot-on. The universe is a complicated place, and it's inevitable that to introduce children to science you have to simplify it considerably.  A seventh grader could probably understand and be able to apply F = ma, but you wouldn't get very far if you started out the with the equations of quantum electrodynamics.

But there are good ways to do this and bad ways.  Simplifying concepts and omitting messy complications is one thing; telling students something that is out-and-out false because it's familiar and sounds reasonable is quite another.  And there is no example of this that pisses me off more than the intro-to-genetics standard that brown eye color in humans is a Mendelian dominant allele, and the blue-eyed allele is recessive.

How many of you had your first introduction to Mendel's laws from a diagram like this one?

This is one of those ideas that isn't so much an oversimplification as it is ridiculously wrong.  Any reasonably intelligent seventh-grader would see this and immediately realize that not only do different people's brown and blue eyes vary in hue and darkness, there are hazel eyes, green eyes, gray eyes, and various combos -- hazel eyes with green flecks, for example.  Then there's heterochromia -- far more common in dogs than in humans -- where the iris of the right eye has a dramatically different color than the left.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons AWeith, Sled dog on Svalbard with heterochromia, CC BY-SA 4.0]

When I taught genetics, I found that the first thing I usually had to get my students to do was to unlearn the things they'd been taught wrong, with eye color inheritance at the top of the list.  (Others were that right-handedness is dominant -- in fact, we have no idea how handedness is inherited; that red hair is caused by a recessive allele; and that dark skin color is dominant.)  In fact, even some traits that sorta-kinda-almost follow a Mendelian pattern, such as hitchhiker's thumb, cleft chin, and attached earlobes, aren't as simple as they might seem.

But there's nowhere that the typical middle-school approach to genetics misses the mark quite as badly as it does with eye color.  While it's clearly genetic in origin -- most physical traits are -- the actual mechanism should rightly be put in that unfortunate catch-all stuffed away in the science attic:

"Complex and poorly understood."

The good news, though, and what prompted me to write this, is a paper this week in Science Advances that might at least deal with some of the "poorly understood" part.  A broad-ranging study of people from across Europe and Asia found that eye color in the people studied was caused by no fewer than sixty-one different gene loci.  Each of these controls some part of pigment creation and/or deposition, and the variation in these loci from population to population is why the variation in eye appearance seems virtually infinite.

The authors write:

Human eye color is highly heritable, but its genetic architecture is not yet fully understood.   We report the results of the largest genome-wide association study for eye color to date, involving up to 192,986 European participants from 10 populations.  We identify 124 independent associations arising from 61 discrete genomic regions, including 50 previously unidentified.  We find evidence for genes involved in melanin pigmentation, but we also find associations with genes involved in iris morphology and structure.  Further analyses in 1636 Asian participants from two populations suggest that iris pigmentation variation in Asians is genetically similar to Europeans, albeit with smaller effect sizes.  Our findings collectively explain 53.2% (95% confidence interval, 45.4 to 61.0%) of eye color variation using common single-nucleotide polymorphisms.  Overall, our study outcomes demonstrate that the genetic complexity of human eye color considerably exceeds previous knowledge and expectations, highlighting eye color as a genetically highly complex human trait.

And note that even this analysis only explained a little more than half of the observed variation in human eye color.

Like I said, it's not that middle-school teachers should start their students off with a paper from Science Advances.  I usually began with a few easily-observable traits from the sorta-kinda-Mendelian list, like tongue rolling and hitchhiker's thumb.  These aren't quite as simple as they're usually portrayed, but at least calling them Mendelian isn't so ridiculously wrong that when students find out the correct model -- most often in college -- they could accuse their teachers of lying outright.

Eye color, though.  That one isn't even Mendelian on a superficial level.  Teaching it that way is a little akin to teaching elementary students that 2+2=5 and figuring that's close enough for now and can be refined later.  So to teachers who still use brown vs. blue eye color as their canonical example of a dominant and recessive allele:

Please find a different one.

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

Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week was about the ethical issues raised by gene modification; this week's is about the person who made CRISPR technology possible -- Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna.

In The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, author Walter Isaacson describes the discovery of how the bacterial enzyme complex called CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to edit genes of other species with pinpoint precision.  Doudna herself has been fascinated with scientific inquiry in general, and genetics in particular, since her father gave her a copy of The Double Helix and she was caught up in what Richard Feynman called "the joy of finding things out."  The story of how she and fellow laureate Emmanuelle Charpentier developed the technique that promises to revolutionize our ability to treat genetic disorders is a fascinating exploration of the drive to understand -- and a cautionary note about the responsibility of scientists to do their utmost to make certain their research is used ethically and responsibly.

If you like biographies, are interested in genetics, or both, check out The Code Breaker, and find out how far we've come into the science-fiction world of curing genetic disease, altering DNA, and creating "designer children," and keep in mind that whatever happens, this is only the beginning.

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

He sees you when you're sleeping

Dear Readers,

I'll be taking next week off to spend some time with family, so there'll be a brief hiatus here at Skeptophilia HQ.  Posts will resume Monday, December 31, but I'll still be happy to receive any suggestions for topics while I'm on break!

So happy holidays to all who celebrate.  See you on New Year's Eve.

cheers,

Gordon

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

Ever heard of a tulpa?

I wrote about this (alleged) phenomenon a while back, so long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that it is when a bunch of people believe in a fictional character with sufficient fervor that said character becomes real.

Well, in some sense.  Even most true believers don't think they end up as flesh-and-blood, more that they can appear in spirit form (whatever that means when applied to a character that is fictional in the first place).  It all sounds like a lot of wishful thinking to me, although as a fiction writer, I can say with some certainty that I would very much rather the characters in my books not come to life.  There are a few I'd like to have a beer with, sure.  But most of them?

They can stay safely in the realm of the unreal, thank you very much.

Be that as it may, apparently there are now people who think that there's a tulpa who is around mostly at this time of year.  So I'm sure you can predict that who I'm talking about is...

... Santa Claus.

No, I'm not making this up.  In an article over at Mysterious Universe, Brent Swancer tells us about a number of alleged sightings of Jolly Old Saint Nick.  And not to beat the point unto death, these people do not believe that they're seeing someone dressed up as Santa Claus; they think they've actually had a close encounter with the real guy.

The word real, of course, being used advisedly.  I don't want to steal Swancer's thunder, because his article is well worth reading in its entirety, but here's one such account, just so you can get the flavor of it.  A woman named Ana says she saw Santa when she was five years old, and the encounter was not exactly heartwarming:

He must have felt my presence because he turned around and looked at me.  He didn’t look jolly or kind and happy like you would expect Santa Claus to look.  He looked kind of eerie like he was staring into my soul.  Automatically, I ran into my parents’ room and hid under the covers.  I don’t know why I was so scared at the time, but I wrote it off as a dream for a while before I forgot about it completely.  Years later, I remembered it.  I thought it could have been a burglar, but when I asked my parents, nothing was ever missing from that apartment.  The only time we were ever robbed was when we moved later on.  The only explanation I have now is that it was some kind of apparition.

Of course, that's not the only explanation, but you knew I'd say that.

His eyes, how they twinkled!  His dimples, how merry!  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jackie, Evil clown Santa Claus, CC BY 2.0]

Loyd Auerbach, a "professor of parapsychology" over at Atlantic University, used the same verbiage to describe the accounts:

I’ve never even heard of people seeing Santa.  The Grim Reaper, yes, but not Santa.  The only possibility of this being real is if it’s an alien or a ghost pretending to be Santa.  We can’t investigate that.  There’s nothing we can do with that.

Um.  We could investigate it if it was the Grim Reaper, but not if it's Santa?  Or if it's not actually Santa, our only options are that it's an alien or a ghost impersonating Santa?

 I think these people need to review the concept of "only possibility."

So anyhow, I think the main issue here is that if it were true, it doesn't exactly paint a reassuring picture of Santa Claus.  In fact, it gives kind of sinister overtones to lines like "He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake," not to mention, "I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus."  It also gives me pause when I hear the stanza from "Up on the Housetop" that goes:

Next comes the stocking of Little Will
Oh, just see what a glorious fill
Here is a hammer and lots of tacks
Also a ball and a whip that cracks.

Is it just me, or does it sound like Little Will made his Christmas list to fill out the equipment in his My Very Own Li'l Tots S & M Dungeon?

Myself, I find the whole thing vaguely terrifying.  It's a good thing I think it's all a myth.  On the other hand, even if Sinister Santa is a real thing, he's still better than Krampus or the Giant Icelandic Christmas Cat, the Jólakötturinn, who comes out on Christmas Eve and eats bad children.

Which, for the record, I didn't make up.

So a lovely Christmas to all who celebrate, and best of luck avoiding evil Santas or humongous child-eating cats.  Also the Grim Reaper, for what it's worth.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Impossible.  Kaku takes a look at the science and technology that is usually considered to be in the realm of science fiction -- things like invisibility cloaks, replicators, matter transporters, faster-than-light travel, medical devices like Star Trek's "tricorders" -- and considers whether they're possible given what we know of scientific law, and if so, what it would take to develop them.  In his signature lucid, humorous style, Kaku differentiates between what's merely a matter of figuring out the technology (such as invisibility) and what's probably impossible in a a real and final sense (such as, sadly, faster-than-light travel).  It's a wonderful excursion into the power of the human imagination -- and the power to make at least some of it happen.

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