Analyzing anomalous artifacts

When presented with an anomaly, it's pretty critical not to simply accept it as such, but to look more deeply -- and to try to find a scientific explanation if there is one.  It is regrettably common to see people jumping at paranormal explanations -- or even non-explanations, just statements of "Wow, that's so weird" -- when a bit of thought and research would have turned up a completely plausible, simple natural explanation.

This comes up because of an article I read about "Anomalous Artifacts."  The photograph below shows an imprint, alleged to be of a human shoe, in billion-year-old granite:

The print was discovered by a fellow named James Snyder in 2002, in Cleveland National Forest in California.  The article claims that it is "solid proof of time travel" -- the implication being that someone went back in time, wearing a nice pair of men's size 11 wing tips, and left his print in the rock.  Is it really a footprint?  We'll revisit this claim at the end of this post.

The presence of anomalous objects, prints, and human or animal remains is the subject of the wonderful site Bad Archaeology, which examines a whole host of such claims in a nicely skeptical fashion.  As befits critical thinkers, they are up front about the ones that are unexplained - such as the peculiar Nampa figurine, a representation of a human figure made in clay, which was discovered in Nampa, Idaho, in sedimentary strata from the late Pliocene era (2 million years ago), a time during which conventional archaeology suggests there were no hominids in North America.  The writers at Bad Archaeology give a variety of possible explanations for how it got there, but they admit that those are speculation.

A famous "anomaly" for which there is a completely convincing natural explanation is the "London hammer," which is an iron hammerhead attached to a broken piece of wooden handle, allegedly found encased in rock that dates to the Cretaceous era (100 to 65 million years ago).  Claims began to be made that this was evidence of (1) time travel, or (2) creationism, depending on what version of unscientific silliness you happened to favor.  In any case, Hammer Apologists believe that the artifact indicates that there were humans running about back then hammering things and trying to avoid being eaten by dinosaurs.  The hammer is now one of the prime exhibits at the Creation Evidence Museum, and in fact you can purchase a lovely replica at the museum's gift shop.

The London hammer was brilliantly debunked by Glen Kuban (read his paper here), and amongst the important points Kuban makes is that (1) carbon-14 tests on the wood from the handle conclusively show that the wood from the handle is under 700 years old, (2) the hammerhead design is identical with 19th century hammers used in the southern United States, and (3) the mineralization around it is consistent with sedimentation and cementation of material around the hammer at a relatively recent date.  The Creation Evidence Museum folks aren't backing down (of course), but if this is their evidence for the humans having been around back then, it's pretty thin.

Bad Archaeology examines many other claims for "anomalies," such as:

• The Ica stones of Peru, which show artistic depictions of people riding pterodactyls.  (Modern fake.)
• The Pliocene fossil shell from England, that has a carving of a human face.  (Almost certainly damage from natural processes that resulted in an accidental face-like pattern.)
• The "Coso artifact," supposedly a spark plug embedded in a 500,000 year old geode. (It turns out not to be a geode at all, but a clay concretion, and is probably from the 1920s.)
• The Dendera (Egypt) "technical drawings," which allegedly show an ancient Egyptian handling modern electronic devices such as Crookes tubes.  (Easily explainable if you read the hieroglyphic inscription below it, which states outright that the objects in question are a "sun barge," the boat in which the god Ra crosses the sky.)

And so on.  It all makes for highly entertaining reading, and I suggest you take a good look at Bad Archaeology's site -- it is a splendid example of critical thinking in a realm in which spurious thinking tends to run rampant.

Now, what about our human shoe print from California?  Well, the first thing that came to my mind was that granite was a pretty peculiar place to find a print of any kind.  Granite is an igneous rock, and at the point when the material from which it formed was plastic enough to accept a shoe print, it would have been hot enough to melt the shoe and burn its wearer to a crisp.  Further, granite does not form on the surface of the Earth -- its large crystals show evidence of slow cooling, and granite outcrops are typically exposed cores of magmatic rock that froze slowly and gradually, deep underground.

So, what is the shoe print, then?  I'd have to examine it to be certain, but my brain is just screaming out "Hoax!"  Given the impossibility of anyone ever leaving a shoe print in granite, it has to be something else -- either some sort of natural indentation in the rock that happens to resemble the outline of a shoe, or a groove carved into the rock by hoaxers.  Either way, I'm not buying that there were time-traveling humans a billion years ago, walking around on molten magma deep underground. 

Call me closed-minded, but there you are.

Sanitizing history

An online acquaintance of mine made an interesting statement a couple of days ago.

"The Europeans didn't just bring exploitation and disease to North America, they brought war.  The Native Americans didn't even fight wars until after the Europeans arrived."

I asked him how he knew this, and he said he'd read it in a book, and then posted a link from a Yahoo! Answers page.  I gave a verbal shrug, and sort of said, "Okay, then," and didn't push the topic any further.  But I've been thinking about it ever since.

Why do we need to have certain ethnic groups be characterized by a nearly mythical goodness?

How often have we heard that before the Europeans arrived, the Natives were "in touch with the land," that they respected the Great Spirit, asked animals' permission before hunting, never took more than their fair share of what nature had to offer?  And now, this gentleman claims that they also never made war on each other, until the Europeans arrived and taught them to do so.  I've heard similar claims made for other groups -- most commonly the Celts, who have also been mythologized to a fare-thee-well, to the point that since the mid-1800s there have been quasi-religious groups of "druids" who have tried to emulate what they think the Celts were doing back then.  More recently, the Afrocentrist movement has claimed that all good things came from Africa, and the extreme wing of that school of thought calls dark-skinned people "Sun People" and light-skinned people "Ice People" -- with all of the value judgments that those terms imply.

There are a couple of problems with all of this -- one of them academic, one of them common-sense.

The academic problem is that because all three of those groups left next to no tangible records, we really don't have all that clear a picture of what they were doing before they were contacted by societies who did write things down.  And when that contact occurred, the records left weren't exactly unbiased -- it's hard to know how much to believe of (for example) what the Romans wrote about the Celts.  Trying to piece together what was going on in the years prior to such contact is decidedly non-trivial, and has to be inferred from archaeological evidence and such indirect evidence as patterns of linguistic distribution.

In preparation for writing this, I tried to find out what was actually known to anthropologists about the nature of society in pre-Columbian North America, and the answer is: surprisingly little.  I'm no anthropologist myself, so am unqualified to make a firm judgment, but what did strike me about the papers I read is that they don't even necessarily agree with each other.  The tangible artifacts left behind by some groups (e.g. the Pueblo cultures of the US Southwest) seem to suggest a peaceful agricultural existence, but that, too, is a guess.  It seems fairly certain that the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tribes of the Northeastern US did a good bit of fighting with the Algonquian tribes of Eastern Canada -- those groups were "traditional enemies" and apparently were happily beating each other up long before the French and English arrived and made things worse.  Certainly the Aztecs, Maya, and Incas of Central and South America were not exactly what you might call peaceful by nature -- stone carvings show Aztec priests ripping the hearts from living sacrificial victims, and at least some of those victims appear from the carvings to have been prisoners of war.

My second objection is purely common sense; while some cultural values seem to me to be better than others, I just don't believe that whole groups of people were somehow "nicer" than others.  Consider what a future anthropologist might make of our current "warlike" American culture -- in the last century we have certainly fought a great many times in places around the globe, for a variety of purposes, and during that time have diverted a large percentage of our resources into weaponry and the military.  What does that mean about us as a people?  My general feeling is "not much."  If you look around you, you'll find mean people, nice people, aggressive people, gentle people, and pretty much the gamut of whatever pair of opposite traits you choose.  Sure, our militarism is connected to our citizenry -- the military decisions are made by our leaders, who are elected by us -- but a future mythologizer who came up with a concept of American People As Evil Bloodthirsty Imperialists would be missing the truth by a mile.  (As would a concept of Americans As Courageous, World-Saving Warriors.)

Please note that I am in no way trying to excuse what our, or any other culture's, militarism actually accomplished.  What the Europeans did to the Native Americans, what the British did to the Australian Natives, what the Romans (and later the English) did to the Celts, are tragedies.  But the cultures who were the victims of these atrocities were not themselves perfect.  It is easy, out of our pity for the losers, to make them into creatures of myth, as having lived in an Eden until the nasty aggressors came in and screwed it up.

As always, reality is complex and messy, and doesn't fit neatly into pigeonholes.  It might be appealing to believe that the Celts were the Mystical, Nature-Worshiping People of the Sacred Forest prior to their being beaten to a pulp by a whole succession of cultures.  But this is a myth, just like the Native American as Noble Protector of the Environment and the African cultures as warm-hearted, creative Sun People.  No culture is perfect, no ethnic group without flaws, and it is only our desire to have an ideal to espouse that makes us ascribe such characteristics to the inhabitants of the past.

Ghosthunters, redux

Today’s planned post is being pre-empted because of what happened yesterday.

Yesterday, you may recall, I wrote about some folks who are offering ghosthunting classes in England.  Toward the end of the post, in what I hoped was the spirit of goodwill, I mentioned what it would take to convince me (concrete evidence, with witnesses present), and actually recommended that people sign up for the workshops.

Well. You’d have thought I had written a post advocating kicking puppies, or something.

I have gotten, at last count, twelve emails, most of which suggest in no uncertain terms that I’m a moron.  I have had only three people post publicly – two were, I have to say, measured and thoughtful responses, but the third was written by someone whose opinion was that I wasn’t really a skeptic, had no credentials, and generally should just shut the hell up.

I paraphrase, but that’s the spirit of the thing.

Several of the emails asked (or demanded) what my own credentials were – why on earth I thought I had the right to write what I did – and after momentarily bristling, I thought, Okay, fair enough. That’s a legitimate question.

My credentials: I hold a bachelor’s degree in physics, a second major in biology (focus on population genetics and evolutionary biology), and a master’s degree in linguistics.   I’ve been a high school teacher for 25 years, and I teach various levels of biological science, from introductory to advanced, and also teach an introduction to logic course called Critical Thinking.  I’m not a researcher, and have never published in a peer-reviewed journal, but I’m well and widely read and consider myself a fairly smart guy.  I’m happy to say that the majority of the people who know me concur.

That said, I’m well aware that I don’t know everything.   In fact, to quote Socrates, “The more I know, the more I realize how little I know.”  Faced with greater knowledge than my own, I happily defer to those who know better (and print a retraction, if I’ve said something that was incorrect).

However… and it’s a big however…

I’m not going to accept something simply because you believe it.  I teach an intro to neurology course, and I know enough to realize how flawed the human perceptive systems are.  We are, unfortunately, easily fooled, and even with the best intentions we see things that aren’t there, don’t see things that are there, and (sometimes) see what we wanted or expected to see.  My skepticism is borne in part from a knowledge of how sketchy our own sensory apparatus is.   So, I’m sorry if it seems closed-minded, but I’m not just going to turn your story of lights in the sky into alien spacecraft, or your tale of seeing moving shadows in an empty house at night into ghosts.   I want more than that.

Hard evidence is the gold standard, of course; but even in the absence of hard evidence, a good, solid logical argument is at least sterling silver.  And, for crying out loud, learn the science before you start trying to sound scientific.   Don’t talk about energies and fields and forces, and expect me not to think you’re applying those words in the way a physicist would.  If something is an energy or field or force, it should be measurable.  If you want me to believe it, show me.

So, the bottom line; I’m convincible.  I’m not going to stand here and say that your favorite example of paranormality – be it Bigfoot, ghosts, aliens, telepathy, or whatever – doesn’t exist.  But I do believe that if you think those things are true, the burden of the proof is on you.  It comes back to the ECREE principle – Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.  It may not be a hard and fast scientific law, but as a general rule of thumb, it works pretty damn well.

So, I may be all of the things I’m being accused of – of being an “armchair skeptic” (whatever that is – other than The Amazing Randi, I don’t think there’s any other kind), of being a broad-brush non-specialist, of lacking publications and research credentials and whatnot, of being a bit of an arrogant ass at times.  Okay, guilty as charged.  But your pointing out any or all of those things doesn’t mean that your claims are true.  For that, it might be time for you to get up out of your own armchair and show me evidence that meets some kind of minimum scientific standard.  Until you can do that, I stand unmoved.

Ghost hunting season

So now, a couple of guys in England are offering workshops in how to hunt ghosts.

I'm not making this up.  Here's the advertisement:

SO YOU WANT TO BE A GHOSTHUNTER?

Unique study days for all those who have an interest in Ghost Hunting; whether seasoned veteran, beginner or sceptic. Run by two of the country's leading ghosthunter and parapsychology experts. Study days take place throughout the year at some of the most exciting haunted UK (and European) locations.

LIMITED PERIOD ONLY - BOOK 2 PLACES ON ANY SINGLE STUDY DAY AND GET A 3rd PLACE FOR FREE!

The two "parapsychology experts" in charge of this training opportunity are Steve Parsons and Ciaran O'Keeffe of the School of Parapsychology, and their contact information (should you wish to rush right over and take part in this) can be found on their Facebook page, here.   Amongst the unique workshops offered are:

1) Ghosts & Gadgets: equipment for the ghosthunter, including how to use devices for measuring temperature, electromagnetic fields, and "psychophysiology."

2)  Paracoustics:  using acoustical equipment to gather data on ghosts.

3)  Paravision:  using cameras (including UV and infrared) to take pictures and video footage of ghosts.

And, my favorite:

4)  Ghostology:  what is a ghost, and why should we investigate them?

I wonder how on earth you run a training session in how to do something, when you never get any results.  Of course, I'm discounting the possibility of Parsons and O'Keeffe being outright charlatans -- i.e., I am assuming that they don't fake evidence themselves to hoodwink their students.  Let's start from the charitable assumption that they're sincere and honest, and whatever evidence they garner from their gadgets and cameras and all is fairly obtained.

How, then, to explain to the students that they just spent twelve hours in a house at night running a digital recorder, and picked up... nothing?

I mean, consider if someone was a deer hunter, and was running a workshop on how to hunt deer.  Wouldn't their students begin to get a little suspicious if the people who ran the workshop went out week after week, and never once saw, much less shot, any deer?

Of course, by that time Parsons and O'Keeffe would have your £30 each, so it's likely they'd just say, "That's the breaks, dude.  Sometimes you see a ghost, sometimes you don't."  But you have to wonder how they could continue to pitch the workshops, which they sound awfully excited about.

Obviously, I'm starting from the perspective here that there isn't anything there to study, as I've never seen any evidence of ghosts that's convinced me personally.  All of the photographs, videos, and anecdotes I've come across have struck me as either (1) fakes, or (2) the recollections of someone who was misinterpreting what happened.  As I've mentioned before, the human brain and perceptual apparatus is simply too easily fooled for me to believe what someone thinks they saw or heard.  And all of the claims of ghostly presences registering on mechanical devices -- you can actually buy ghosthunting apps for your iPhone -- are too easily explained by said devices picking up interference from entirely natural, earthly sources.

What would convince me?  Hard to say.  Being a skeptic, I strive to keep an open mind.  A direct personal experience would probably go a long way in that direction, although I know that my own brain is just as easily tricked as the next guy's.  A personal experience, while accompanied by other unbiased observers, and a simultaneous measurement of something -- an EM signal, auditory signal, disturbance in The Force, whatever -- would do it, I think.  But that seems pretty unlikely, given that people have been hunting ghosts for ages, and no one's come up with much.

In any case, if you will be in England this fall, I encourage you to sign up.  Anyone who reads Skeptophilia would be an excellent choice for participating in this class.  You can consider yourself appointed to the position of Official Skeptophilia Field Reporter.  After all, Parsons and O'Keeffe need a few skeptics in their flock, just to keep them honest.  So if you're there and have the £30 to shell out, give it a shot -- and make sure and report back here to tell us what happened.

Elegy

Ten years ago at this time, I was getting ready for school.  Another ordinary day of teaching high school biology class.  Get notes together, prepare for a lab I was running that day.  My personal life had recently changed for the better -- after two years as a divorced single dad, I had a girlfriend, Carol, whom my kids loved, and I was spending every moment I could with her.  On that day ten years ago, however, I was thinking about the fact that I wouldn't be seeing her for a week, because she was at the airport, getting ready to board a plane for a business trip for her job at Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology.

It was during my second period class that I went back into my office to get something I'd forgotten, to see the other biology teacher, Susan, staring at her computer.  I'd often heard people say that someone was "white with shock," but I'd never actually seen it until that day.  I thought Susan was going to faint, or throw up.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"A plane just hit the World Trade Center," she said, in a thin voice.

I immediately pictured a small plane, something carrying six people or so.

"That's terrible," I said.  "Some amateur pilot lost control, or something?"

Susan turned toward me, wide-eyed.  "No," she said, and her usual eloquence failed her.  "A plane.  A jet.  A great big jet, full of people."

And then it happened again.  And again.  And again.  The other Tower was hit.  Reports came in from the Pentagon, from the field in Pennsylvania.  Four planes had been, apparently deliberately, turned into weapons.  For a time, no one knew which planes they were, nor where they had started from. 

And my girlfriend was flying that day.

It is the one and only time that I completely came unraveled in front of a class.  The principal came in, ran the rest of my second period class for me.  I had third period off (fortunately), and sat in my office, looking at the news as it unfolded online, and sobbing.

It was almost 11 o'clock when Carol called school to say she was safe.  Her plane, due to take off right around the time the first Tower was hit, had sat on the tarmac for nearly an hour, and finally turned around and everyone deplaned back into the airport -- and that was when she saw, on the televisions in the airport, what had happened.

The rest of the day went by in a surreal blur.  Crying students, crying teachers.  Finding out that one of our elementary school teachers had a brother who worked in the World Trade Center.  (It wasn't until several days passed that she learned that her brother had, indeed, died in the attack.)  My girlfriend coming over that night, and spending the evening just holding each other, feeling sick and dazed and still not really believing.

Ten years have passed, and that day still stands, along with the Challenger explosion, as one of those "where were you when...?" moments that I will never forget so long as I live.  Much has been made of 9/11 as a turning point -- how Americans will never see themselves the same way, that it was a moment of national unity, that it destroyed our complacency and our perception of being safe, that it brought the best out of the heroes who helped to save lives during the catastrophe (a sizable number of whom lost their lives themselves). 

I agree with all of those things, but I wonder about what we've actually learned in those ten years.  Partisan rancor still is the order of the day.  We continue, as a nation, to meddle in foreign affairs, drawing away billions of dollars that could be spent on our domestic needs of health care and education for our citizens.  We've become warier, but in a general, broad-brush fashion -- who among us hasn't boarded a plane, and seen a dark-skinned man traveling with a woman wearing a head scarf, and thought, "Could they be terrorists?"  We hear the warnings announced when we travel, and many of us laugh -- because there's a sense that if we get hit again, it will be once more in a way we never could have anticipated, for all of the TSA pornographic body scans and orange alerts and chemical swipes to detect explosives.  Deep down, we all know that we aren't safe, we never were safe, and you take a chance every time you step out of your front door.

Our lives changed forever ten years ago, but in some ways, we haven't changed much.  We still fly, we still go to the tops of skyscrapers, we still go about our lives without thinking about it much, except when anniversaries like this come along.  And tomorrow, once the anniversary is over, we'll once again lull our anxieties to sleep.

It's how humans are.  We can't live in perpetual fear; we're not built that way.  You think about it, you look at the photographs, you relive what you went through.  Then life picks up again, and we move on, doing what we do, repeating the same mistakes we've always made, being humans -- including the best and worst of what that word means.  And perhaps this is the best possible outcome, really, that when tragedy strikes; it doesn't, it can't really change the core of humanity.  Our resilience is perhaps our most remarkable trait.

So mark this day in whatever way seems appropriate -- a moment of silence, a church service, a gathering with friends, or (like me) a written elegy for that awful day of devastation ten years ago.  And then, tomorrow, we move forward, not because we've forgotten, but because even though catastrophes like this one leave their mark on us, they cannot destroy the fundamental center of who we are.

Funny you should say that.

Do coincidences mean anything?

This was the subject of one of my favorite movies -- "I 'Heart' Huckabee's."   If there is a coincidence -- maybe even what seems to be a wildly improbable, weird, eye-opening one -- does it have any meaning, in the Cosmic Sense?  Or is it, to quote one of my favorite songs -- Laurie Anderson's "The Monkey's Paw" -- "a twist of fate, a shot in the dark, a roll of the die, the big wheel, the big ride?"

One of my students has been paying more attention to the little coincidences lately, and his claim is that they happen way more than is attributable to chance.   The whole thing came up yesterday because in my AP Biology class we were talking about the low caloric content of celery -- giving rise to the claim that you use more calories chewing celery than you get from eating it.  He then told me that only two periods earlier, the same topic came up in a different class... and then went on to tell me, excitedly, how "that sort of thing is always happening to me!"

Of course, if he thought that I was going to be willing to attribute coincidences to some sort of Larger Purpose At Work, he was barking up the wrong tree.  My opinion is such things are simply the dart-thrower's bias -- we tend to notice the hits (in this case, the times when the same topic comes up twice) and ignore misses (all of the millions of things that don't get mentioned twice).  As a result, we tend to overestimate wildly how common such coincidences are.

That's not to say that there aren't some peculiar ones; I have had the experience myself of thinking about a song, turning on the radio, and the song is playing.  Take that minor mystery, and turn up the gain, and you get people whose dreams have come true, who have had premonitions of disaster and not taken the plane (or train or boat or whatever), and whose lives have been saved.   Is this true ESP, or the hand of god, or something more prosaic?

I'd opt for the latter, and I suspect that you knew I'd say that.   In my opinion, for there really to be something "going on" here, there'd have to be some cause for it, some discernible mechanism at work.  I'm willing to entertain the idea -- momentarily, anyway -- that some supreme being who honestly cares about us might wish to intervene on our part, and save us from calamity via a vision, premonition, or dream.  But that opens up the troubling question about why said deity didn't bother to let the 235 other people who died in the plane crash know, so that they, too, could escape death.  That a deity exists who selectively warns some folks about impending doom while allowing others to perish is a pretty scary idea, and such a deity would have to be capricious to the point of evil.

How about the more benign explanation, that some of us are simply more "in touch" with the sixth sense than others, and therefore all those folks who died simply weren't wired to be aware of the coming catastrophe?  Again, there's that pesky lack of a mechanism.  Not one experiment designed to detect ESP of various sorts has succeeded, which is (to say the least) a bit troublesome to those who believe in such things.  Some of those true believers respond that lab conditions, run (presumably) by skeptical scientists, are not conducive to the psychic energy field, and it's the lack of belief by the researchers that is interfering with the outcome. I respond; that's mighty convenient.  Sounds like special pleading to me.

So, we're left with the conclusion that coincidences happen just because -- they happen. Carl Sagan, in The Demon-Haunted World (which should be required reading in every public school science program in America), deals with such things -- he states that given that we dream every night, and daydream every day, and listen to radios and read newspapers and such pretty much constantly, coincidences are bound to happen, just by the statistics of large numbers.  It doesn't make them feel any less weird when they do occur; but sooner or later, you're going to dream something, and a few days or weeks later, it will more or less "come true."  There are only so many things we dream about, and only so many kinds of things that happen in our lives, and given a large enough time axis, eventually those two will coincide.

I hope -- honestly, I do -- that I haven't just taken the magic out of your perception of the world's weirdness.  My own view is that I'd much rather know the truth than to believe a pretty falsehood; and really, the idea of a god who selectively dabbles in the affairs of humans isn't even that pretty, when you think about it.  So if I've made the world seem a little more prosaic and dull, I sincerely apologize.  And if I get into my car in a half-hour or so, and turn on the radio, and hear Laurie Anderson's "The Monkey's Paw," it will serve me right.

We have met the aliens, and they are us

In all of the time I've thought about, read about, talked about, and written about the possibility of aliens having come to Earth, I have always looked at it from the prosaic standpoint of a technologically superior race visiting us, usually in some sort of spacecraft.  Controversy about this possibility usually revolves around the feasibility of anyone (however advanced) crossing the distances required, and that sticky little point called "hard evidence."

Little did I know that I might be asking the wrong question.  Maybe the aliens are already here.  Maybe they're...

... us.

This is the contention of those who believe in the bizarre idea of exogenesis.  Humans, they say -- and some of them believe that all living things -- are actually descended from alien life that colonized the Earth ages ago.  Exogenesis is kind of an elaboration of astronomer Fred Hoyle's idea of panspermia - that the earliest life, single-celled bacteria-like organisms, were brought to Earth in cosmic dust.  Exogenesis takes it one step further.  The colonization was done deliberately, by a superintelligent alien race, and we are the descendants of those alien-created life-forms.

*cue music from Star Trek: The Next Generation*

Yes, those of you who, like myself, are TNG geeks will recall that one of the best episodes ever ("The Chase") revolved around the idea of a highly advanced race seeding a multitude of planets with gene sequences that would then somehow guide the course of evolution to create species that resembled the original parent race.  It was a neat, if questionably scientific, way to explain why humans, Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans, and the rest all were basically bipedal, bilaterally symmetric primates, without having to admit that it was because having all the aliens shaped like humans made makeup and costumes way cheaper.

The problem, of course, is that Star Trek is fiction, while the people who believe in exogenesis are dead serious.  Check out this website.  Once you get past the fact that the layout looks like someone ate a Marvel comic book and then threw up on the screen, you will find that the author, one Andre Heath, claims that "scientific studies have proven that 97% of the human genome is extraterrestrial in origin."

Heath quotes a "prominent geneticist," Sam Chang, as saying that "... junk human DNA was created by an extraterrestrial 'programmer.'"

Chang goes on to say a great many other things, which I will leave you to read on your own, because when I got to the part about our DNA containing a "big code" and a "basic code" and that the "big code" was done in a "rush to create human life on Earth," and that this rush meant the job got done in a half-assed way and that's why we get cancer, my brain cells were crying for mercy.

As you would expect, while I was reading this stuff, I kept gesturing toward the photographs of Sam Chang and Andre Heath and screaming, "Where is your evidence?"  This accomplished nothing except for waking up my border collie and inducing her to slink around, looking extremely guilty.  Because of course, they don't have any evidence - we're simply supposed to believe them because Chang is "a prominent geneticist."

Well, I'm not buying it.  Our DNA is made of the same stuff, read the same way, as the DNA of every other life form on Earth, and the changes we see in it - including the so-called "junk DNA" - show a smooth continuum of evolutionary change, just as you would expect if we, and all the other species around us, evolved from common ancestry.  There is no evidence that we were any kind of "special creation," rush job or not. 

So, as appealing as it would be to have a universe in which something like "The Chase" could happen, I'm afraid that it'll have to remain in the realm of fiction.  And I'm calling bullshit on Chang and Heath.

And Andre, as one blogger to another, you really need to do something about your blog layout.  That would include getting rid of that drawing of what appears to be a radioactive President Obama.  Thanks.