Can we, just occasionally, refrain from attaching a woo-woo explanation to everything?
I make this plea because of a recent study, headed by David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia's Department of Classics and Ancient History. Kennedy and his team studied a curious set of structures called "geoglyphs" - patterns on the ground that are so large that their overall shape can only be seen from the air. The most famous geoglyphs are the Nazca Lines of southern Peru, which from above can be resolved into enormous drawings of lizards, monkeys, and abstract designs, and whose purpose is still unknown today.
The geoglyphs in Kennedy's study are in the Middle East, and can be found from Syria down to Saudi Arabia. From the air, they resolve into wheels with multiple spokes, diamond-shaped patterns nicknamed "kites," and long, narrow patterns ("pendants"). (You can see a gallery of their photographs here.) Kennedy and his team have mapped out the geoglyphs and are working on a paper describing their extent, and speculating on their age and possible uses. He suggests that some of them may have had completely practical purposes, such as penning cattle.
Then the woo-woos got involved.
You got your ancient gods, especially once someone noticed that one of the geoglyphs looks a little like the Eye of Ra from Egyptian art. You got your alien landing sites. You got your super-powerful civilization that was connected to Atlantis. You got your ley lines. You got your structures that concentrate magical forces.
You even got your coded messages related to December 21, 2012, although how in the hell the Mayans got to Saudi Arabia is a mystery to me.
C'mon, folks. Can't we just once allow something to have a prosaic explanation, and just let it sit there? What, aren't cattle pens good enough for you people? You have to wonder how the woo-woos ten thousand years from now will interpret, for instance, Yankee Stadium.
"Yes, you can clearly see from the fact that it was open to the air, that it had something to do with the worship of the sky, perhaps an ancient astrological observatory... it is teardrop shaped, with the point toward the west, representing the tears wept by the Sun God... It has many seats for the observance of rituals... It is symbolized by a letter N, which stands for 'nature', intersected by a stylized person with his arms upraised, yearning for the gods to return...It is a place of great power and magic, visited regularly by our noble and mystical ancestors."
It's not, as I've had more than one reason to explain in the last week, because I immediately discount weird explanations; as a biologist, I'm fully aware that nature is sometimes bizarre and counter-intuitive. It's more that rushing to outlandish theories is lazy. It doesn't require any particular hard work or deep thought; hell, it doesn't even require any evidence. You just notice something, and immediately attribute it to magic, aliens, spirits, whatever, and your job is done.
So could the Middle Eastern geoglyphs be alien landing sites? I suppose it's possible. With astronomers' recent discovery of hundreds of extrasolar planets, many of them with Earth-like characteristics, I think the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe is nearly 100%, and the likelihood of intelligent life probably nearly that high. But if you claim they've come here, and that some structure or another is an alien staging platform, you better have something more going for your theory than "it must be, because you can only see their overall shapes from the air."
With no further evidence provided, I'm going with cattle pens, myself.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Friday, September 16, 2011
The guiding stones
It is virtually self-evident that belief in an odd idea can propel you to do odd things.
Of the many odd things I've run into, however, the Georgia Guidestones definitely come near the top of the list. Built of polished granite and standing sixteen feet tall, the Guidestones are arranged on the top of a treeless hill in Elbert County, Georgia. They are so imposing (and so mysterious) that they've been compared to Stonehenge, or to the weird black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
(photo courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)
Not the least mystery about them is who commissioned them, and why. They were erected, under mysterious circumstances, in June of 1979. The land on which they stand is owned by Elbert County, and was deeded to them by a "Robert C. Christian," who had purchased the land from a Wayne Mullenix. I put "Robert C. Christian" in quotes because this almost certainly is a pseudonym -- curious researchers have tried, unsuccessfully, to identify who he is (or was). (There is apparently persuasive, if circumstantial, evidence that R. C. Christian is Ted Turner.)
The message on the Guidestones is a series of (if you will) Ten Commandments, evidently intended to help the survivors create a better society once the apocalypse knocks off the rest of us. These pronouncements are presented in twelve different languages -- English, Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Swahili, Hindi, Spanish, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Babylonian Cuneiform, and Egyptian Hieroglyphics. These last four, I suppose, are there in case the apocalypse spares some (for example) Ancient Sumerians.
The Guidestones themselves have various notches and holes cut into them, apparently in an effort to make them line up with the position of the sun, moon, and stars at various times of year. The overall effect is to deepen the mystery, and perhaps heighten perception of the structure as resembling Stonehenge.
Given the time and effort someone put into all of this, and how seriously he seems to take himself (I'm assuming that R. C. Christian is a man, given the male pseudonym), I find it a little disappointing how generally inane the Guidestones' "Ten Commandments" are. Some of them aren't bad ideas, but are hardly earthshattering ("Protect People And Nations With Fair Laws And Just Courts"), while others seem a little pie-in-the-sky ("Unite Humanity With A Living New Language.") I have to admit to some disappointment upon reading what they said. Given all of the mystery, and all the expense someone obviously went to, I was expecting something a little more profound. (You can read the entire message on the Guidestones here.)
What I find even more baffling about this whole thing is how people have responded to them. New Age types mostly think they're great. Yoko Ono, for example, says they are "a stirring call to rational thinking." Some prominent Christian thinkers, predictably, disagree, one Evangelical minister calling them "The Ten Commandments of the Antichrist." An Atlanta psychic, Naunie Batchelder, predicted as far back as 1981 that they were of alien origin, and their purpose would be revealed "within thirty years." (The aliens had better get on that, as they've only got three and a half months left.)
Conspiracy theorists, of course, think they're just the bee's knees. Mark Dice, whose favorite topics are the Illuminati and the New World Order, believes that they are of "deep Satanic origin," and has demanded that they be "smashed into a million pieces." Dice thinks that somehow the Bilderburg Group were involved with the funding and construction of the Guidestones. A researcher named Van Smith has done some numerological analysis of the Guidestones and claims that they are somehow connected to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest building -- and believes that the dimensions of the Guidestones, when properly manipulated, predicted the date of death of Dubai's emir, Sheik Maktoum bin Rashid al Maktoum. Noted wingnut Alex Jones thinks the Rosicrucians are responsible.
All we need is to somehow get the Knights Templar involved, and we'll have a full house of bizarre explanations.
And, of course, all of these folks have followers, and those followers are happy to take action, when they're not picking at the straps of their straitjackets with their teeth. Chickens have more than once been sacrificed in front of the Guidestones. They are a frequent meeting site for a coven of Wiccans from Atlanta. The Guidestones themselves have been repeatedly defaced, most recently by spray-painted graffiti stating "Death to the New World Order" and "Jesus will beat u satanist." There has been more than one attempt to topple the Guidestones, but given that each of the stone blocks weighs twenty tons, those efforts have been thus far unsuccessful.
So, that's today's little dose of weirdness. Next time I'm in Georgia, I'm going to make an effort to go see these things. Not that I particularly think their message is all that profound -- but just to have had a chance to see, first-hand, what all the fuss is about. And since one of the Guidestones' rules says, "Rule Passion - Faith - Tradition - And All Things With Tempered Reason," I figure I owe them at least that much.
Of the many odd things I've run into, however, the Georgia Guidestones definitely come near the top of the list. Built of polished granite and standing sixteen feet tall, the Guidestones are arranged on the top of a treeless hill in Elbert County, Georgia. They are so imposing (and so mysterious) that they've been compared to Stonehenge, or to the weird black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
(photo courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)
Not the least mystery about them is who commissioned them, and why. They were erected, under mysterious circumstances, in June of 1979. The land on which they stand is owned by Elbert County, and was deeded to them by a "Robert C. Christian," who had purchased the land from a Wayne Mullenix. I put "Robert C. Christian" in quotes because this almost certainly is a pseudonym -- curious researchers have tried, unsuccessfully, to identify who he is (or was). (There is apparently persuasive, if circumstantial, evidence that R. C. Christian is Ted Turner.)
The message on the Guidestones is a series of (if you will) Ten Commandments, evidently intended to help the survivors create a better society once the apocalypse knocks off the rest of us. These pronouncements are presented in twelve different languages -- English, Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Swahili, Hindi, Spanish, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Babylonian Cuneiform, and Egyptian Hieroglyphics. These last four, I suppose, are there in case the apocalypse spares some (for example) Ancient Sumerians.
The Guidestones themselves have various notches and holes cut into them, apparently in an effort to make them line up with the position of the sun, moon, and stars at various times of year. The overall effect is to deepen the mystery, and perhaps heighten perception of the structure as resembling Stonehenge.
Given the time and effort someone put into all of this, and how seriously he seems to take himself (I'm assuming that R. C. Christian is a man, given the male pseudonym), I find it a little disappointing how generally inane the Guidestones' "Ten Commandments" are. Some of them aren't bad ideas, but are hardly earthshattering ("Protect People And Nations With Fair Laws And Just Courts"), while others seem a little pie-in-the-sky ("Unite Humanity With A Living New Language.") I have to admit to some disappointment upon reading what they said. Given all of the mystery, and all the expense someone obviously went to, I was expecting something a little more profound. (You can read the entire message on the Guidestones here.)
What I find even more baffling about this whole thing is how people have responded to them. New Age types mostly think they're great. Yoko Ono, for example, says they are "a stirring call to rational thinking." Some prominent Christian thinkers, predictably, disagree, one Evangelical minister calling them "The Ten Commandments of the Antichrist." An Atlanta psychic, Naunie Batchelder, predicted as far back as 1981 that they were of alien origin, and their purpose would be revealed "within thirty years." (The aliens had better get on that, as they've only got three and a half months left.)
Conspiracy theorists, of course, think they're just the bee's knees. Mark Dice, whose favorite topics are the Illuminati and the New World Order, believes that they are of "deep Satanic origin," and has demanded that they be "smashed into a million pieces." Dice thinks that somehow the Bilderburg Group were involved with the funding and construction of the Guidestones. A researcher named Van Smith has done some numerological analysis of the Guidestones and claims that they are somehow connected to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest building -- and believes that the dimensions of the Guidestones, when properly manipulated, predicted the date of death of Dubai's emir, Sheik Maktoum bin Rashid al Maktoum. Noted wingnut Alex Jones thinks the Rosicrucians are responsible.
All we need is to somehow get the Knights Templar involved, and we'll have a full house of bizarre explanations.
And, of course, all of these folks have followers, and those followers are happy to take action, when they're not picking at the straps of their straitjackets with their teeth. Chickens have more than once been sacrificed in front of the Guidestones. They are a frequent meeting site for a coven of Wiccans from Atlanta. The Guidestones themselves have been repeatedly defaced, most recently by spray-painted graffiti stating "Death to the New World Order" and "Jesus will beat u satanist." There has been more than one attempt to topple the Guidestones, but given that each of the stone blocks weighs twenty tons, those efforts have been thus far unsuccessful.
So, that's today's little dose of weirdness. Next time I'm in Georgia, I'm going to make an effort to go see these things. Not that I particularly think their message is all that profound -- but just to have had a chance to see, first-hand, what all the fuss is about. And since one of the Guidestones' rules says, "Rule Passion - Faith - Tradition - And All Things With Tempered Reason," I figure I owe them at least that much.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
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:
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.
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.)
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.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
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.
"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.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, September 12, 2011
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:
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.
I'm not making this up. Here's the advertisement:
SO YOU WANT TO BE A GHOSTHUNTER?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:
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!
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.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
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.
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.
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