Stars, science, and Cherokee rattlesnake prophecies

It is an inevitable consequence of writing daily on this blog that I get a lot of emails, some of them from people I've pissed off.

Although none of them could quite live up to the three-page screed I got last year from a young-earth creationist who ended by calling me a "worthless wanker," one I got this week comes close -- if not in passion, at least in general disconnect from reality.

The writer, who signed off as "Eva," took me to task for filing astrology, Tarot, divination, Mayan prophecies, and so on under the collective heading of "woo-woo" (and summarily dismissing the lot).

"In your close mindedness," Eva writes, "you are missing the fact that modern astrologers and students of the mystical have learned from the approach of your beloved scientists, not only has our precision become better, we now combine many different fields of study, using each one to carefully check our predictions.  We then only make public the statements that can be verified by this comparative process.  Divination has only a short way to go to truly become a science."

Well, now.  Where do I start?

My first response was to express some incredulity that she was really comparing what scientists do -- to take one example, the use of data and measurements from chemistry, physics, and geology to develop the theory of plate tectonics -- to what astrologers do.  Does she really think that if an astrologer predicts that your Star Signs say that you're going to fall down the stairs and break your leg next Tuesday, and a Tarot card reader does a reading for you and says the same thing, that this is some sort of independent corroboration of the method?  But of course, that really is what she thinks.  The lack of a mechanism by which astrology could possibly work, not to mention the lack of evidence that it does work, never seems to bother her.

But as the infomercials always say, "Wait!  There's MORE!":

"Although we differ in our beliefs, I don't want you to consider this a criticism of you as a person.  I'm sure you're trying in your own way to reach enlightenment, we all are, it's all a process and we're all on our own spiritual paths, I am just trying to encourage you to open your mind that there could be other possibilities than the narrow view of the world that science has produced is."

I showed a friend of mine Eva's email, and her response was, "Wow, she really is the Queen of the Comma Splice, isn't she?"  Not to mention the last clause, which (despite my MA in linguistics) completely defeated me when I attempted to parse it.  But any structural editing concerns aside, I have to admit that Eva is showing a good bit more kindness and tolerance than a lot of my other critics have, and for that I'm grateful.  I did take issue with the "narrow view" comment, but I guess that's to be expected.

"I would encourage you to take a look at a website that I think is one of the best out there, it will demonstrate for you that there are many approaches to knowledge that bring fruitfulness and enlightenment, and embody that scientific approach I mentioned, I hope you can view it with an open mind and not dismiss it as 'woo-woo' without giving it some thought, not just with your mind but with your heart too.

"Walking together in light and love, Eva."

And she ended with a link to a webpage called DarkAstrology, of which I will quote only the first paragraph:

The 2012 Astrology Forecast is very interesting because this year has been much anticipated due to Mayan and other predictions. There are actually a great deal of extremely significant astrological aspects and eclipses to back up all the excitement. Uranus square Pluto is a very big deal, responsible for the growing financial turmoil and revolutions. There is a rare Transit of Venus, a total solar eclipse in the Pleiades Star Cluster of Taurus, and finally a Jupiter Yod in the Bulls Eye of Taurus.

Oh, my, yes, this does convince me.  A Jupiter Yod in the Bull's Eye of Taurus.  That has to mean, um, something important, I'm sure.  And later on, when it does some Highly Scientific Corroboration by looking at other fields of study -- Sumerian oracle stars and Cherokee rattlesnake prophecies seem to be two of the most important ones -- it just adds up to all kinds of Enlightenment Beyond The Narrow View Of Science.

I'm sorry if I'm coming across as snarky, because Eva really was quite nice, and seemed like she was trying to reach out to me in my closed-mindedness.  Sadly, DarkAstrology just isn't doing it for me.  Science isn't about making stuff up, and then checking to see if you're right by talking to other people who have made stuff up to see if they agree with you.  It's based on this pesky little thing called evidence, and unfortunately for the "science of divination," there isn't any.

All of this makes me feel kind of mean-spirited, really, after Eva wished me love and enlightenment and so on.  Maybe I am a worthless wanker after all.  Oh, well, perhaps that's just where I currently am on my "spiritual path."

The critics of critical thinking

I fear for the future of education.

I am about tennish-or-so years from retirement, depending on whether New York State decides in the interim to offer any retirement incentives to get us old guys out, and also whether there's any money to pay for my pension by the time I get there.  Be that as it may, I do find myself wondering sometimes how much longer I'll be able to do this job in this increasingly hostile climate.  Teachers are, more and more, being treated with distrust by the people charged with their governance, and are micromanaged to a fare-thee-well.  As of next school year, New York teachers are going to be given a numerical grade at the end of the year -- the school year starts in two months and the state has yet to determine the formula by which this grade will be calculated.

The worst part, though, is the increasingly intense effort by legislators to control what we teach, despite the fact that they're not the ones who have training in pedagogy (or, necessarily, any expertise in educational policy).  And I'm not just talking here about the repeated attempts by fundamentalist elected officials to mandate the teaching of creationism in biology classrooms; I'm talking about something far scarier, and further reaching. 

Yesterday, a friend of mine who lives in Texas sent me a link to the Texas GOP website, which contains a summary of their official platform.  (The platform itself is a pdf, so here's a link to a webpage where you can access it if interested.)  And on page 13, under "Educating Our Children," we find the following:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

This was one of those "I can't be reading that correctly" moments for me; I read it three times, and finally said, with some incredulity, "Nope, that's what it actually says."  They're against critical thinking?  They're against values clarification?  Education should never challenge a student's fixed beliefs?

I'm sorry, Texas GOP.  That's not just wrong, it's dangerously wrong.  Might I remind you that the the most successful historical example of what you're proposing was the Hitler Youth program in Nazi Germany?

Even the word education, at its origin, doesn't mean "shut up and memorize this;" the word comes from the Latin verb educare, which means "to draw out."  The idea is to give students ownership and pride in their own learning, to encourage them to draw out from their own minds creative solutions to problems and novel syntheses of the facts they've learned.  In order to accomplish this, critical thinking is... well, critical.  Great innovation does not come from blindly accepting the fixed beliefs and authority of your parents' generation -- it comes from questioning your own assumptions, and putting what you know together in a new, unexpected way.

And for me personally, I'm not going to stop challenging.  In fact, I teach a semester-long elective class called Critical Thinking that is one of the most popular electives in the school, and on the first day of class, I walk in and say, "Hi, class.  My name is Mr. Bonnet.  Why should you believe anything I say?"

After a moment's stunned silence, someone usually says, "Because you're a teacher."  (Every once in a while some wag will shout, "We don't!"  To which I respond, "Good!  You're on the right track.")  To those who say, "Because you're a teacher," I say, "Why does that matter?  Could a teacher be wrong?  Could a teacher lie?"

Of course, they acquiesce (some of them with a bit of discomfort).  So then I repeat my question; why would you believe what I'm saying?

This starts us off on an exploration of how you tell truth from lies; how you detect spin, marketing, bias, and half-truth; how to recognize logical fallacies; how to think critically in the realm of ethics and morals; and we end by taking apart the educational system, to give a thoughtful look at its successes and failures.  And (importantly!) I never once interject my own beliefs; I needle everyone equally.  When a student presses me to tell the class what I believe on a particular subject, my stock response is, "What I believe is irrelevant.  My job is to challenge you to examine your own beliefs, not to superimpose mine."

And this sort of thing is, apparently, what the Texas GOP would like to see eliminated from schools.  We mustn't have kids doubting the wisdom of the Powers-That-Be.  We must keep education in the realm of the vocabulary list and worksheet packet.  We mustn't challenge the status quo.  (And the darker, more suspicious side of my brain adds, "And we mustn't have the younger generation recognizing it when they're being lied to or misled.")

Well, I'm sorry.  You're wrong.  What you're suggesting is the very antithesis of education.  And the day I'm told that I can't do this any more -- that my teaching can't provoke, can't knock kids' preconceived notions off balance, can't ask the all-important question "Why do you think that?" -- that will be my last day in the classroom, because there won't be any place left in education for teachers like me.

Responding to the Wow Signal

On August 15, 1977, Jerry Ehrman, a scientist working on the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Project, was doing some research using the "Big Ear" Radio Telescope at Ohio Wesleyan University's Perkins Observatory -- and something astonishing happened.

For 72 seconds, a high intensity, narrow-band signal, at a frequency of 1420 MHz, was detected by the telescope.  The origin of the signal was near the Chi Sagittarii star group.  The signal was so strong, and so unexpected, that Ehrman wrote the single word, "Wow!" next to it -- and it has been thereafter called the "Wow Signal."

Despite many efforts to account for the Wow Signal, there have been no convincing explanations regarding its origins.  Ehrman himself, while initially doubtful that it was of extraterrestrial origin -- his first thought was that it was a terrestrial signal that had reflected from the surface of space debris -- has backed off from that position, given that (1) the frequency of the signal, 1420 MHz, is a "protected" frequency, because it is precisely the frequency at which hydrogen (the most common element in the universe) emits, and is reserved for astronomical research; and (2) the "space debris" postulated in Ehrman's initial explanation would have to have "significant and unrealistic constraints on its size and movement" in order to account for the signal.

The Wow Signal, a plot of intensity as a function of time

Repeated attempts to relocate the signal have failed.  Whatever it was, it seems to have been a one-time occurrence -- or we haven't had our radio telescopes aimed that way when it's happened again.

Now, however, we're about to try to produce our own version of Wow -- via Twitter.  (Source)

The ChasingUFO project is aiming to create a large, focused signal, aimed at Chi Sagittarii -- composed of thousands of Tweets.  The National Geographic Channel, as a publicity stunt to celebrate the launch of its new series Chasing UFOs, is sponsoring a mass Twitter event this Friday, June 29, starting at 8 PM Eastern Time and ending at midnight Pacific Time.  Any tweets sent during that time with the hashtag #ChasingUFOs will be rolled together and beamed into space, aiming at the spot where Wow was detected.

Me, I'm psyched.  I've always been fascinated with Wow -- okay, yeah, maybe there's a conventional explanation for it, but I'm damned if I can see what it might be.  Even the frequency is suspicious -- given that 1420 MHz corresponds to one of the main spectral lines of the hydrogen atom, it makes sense that if you were an intelligent alien, you'd have your radio telescope tuned to that frequency -- and also, that if you were sending a signal, you'd choose that frequency because it would be likely to be detected.  So my feeling is -- and it is just a feeling -- the Wow signal is the best candidate we currently have for a communiqué from an extraterrestrial intelligence.

So I'm trying to decide what I'm gonna say.  I'm thinking that "Hi aliens! We love you! Please don't come here and vaporize us with laser pistols!" might be a little disingenuous.  Maybe a simple, "We're curious about you.  If you're curious, too, please respond," is more in the spirit of the thing.  In any case, I welcome you to join in.  Let's give those aliens a great big shout -- and maybe make them sit back on their heels (or tentacles, or whatever), and say, "Wow!"

Hogwarts lite

Yesterday, we had the story of a Louisiana charter school whose textbooks use the Loch Ness Monster to "disprove evolution."  Today, we have a school in Montana that claims to be the world's "first real school of wizardry."  (Sources here and here.)

The Grey School of Wizardry, run by warlock-and-witch team Oberon and Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, is based in Helena, Montana.  Oberon states that the school's classes are mostly conducted online at the moment, with periodic weekend and summer workshops, but he currently has a bid in on a "castle in Helena" where he hopes to have a "real, complete educational facility, just like Hogwarts."

Now, lest you think that this is just a fanciful twist on a magnet school -- sorting kids into "houses," and throwing in a few magical trappings, but otherwise providing a conventional curriculum -- I hasten to correct your misapprehension.  These people are serious.  Let's look at a blurb on the Grey School of Wizardry's website, describing The Grimoire, one of the textbooks they use:

This essential handbook contains everything an aspiring Wizard needs to know. It is illustrated with original art by Oberon and friends, as well as hundreds of woodcuts from medieval manuscripts and alchemical texts, charts, tables, and diagrams. It also contains biographies of famous Wizards in history and legend; detailed descriptions of magickal tools and regalia (with full instructions for making them); spells and workings for a better life; rites and rituals for special occasions; a bestiary of mythical creatures; systems of divination; the Laws of Magick; myths and stories of gods and heroes; lore and legends of the stars and constellations; and instructions for performing amazing illusions, special effects, and many other wonders of the magickal multiverse.

I'd often made the comment that the zealots who want biology teachers to "present all sides of the controversy" over evolution never want chemistry teachers to do the same regarding alchemy.

I stand corrected.

On the site, which you should definitely peruse when you have time and a few brain cells that you don't mind losing, you will find:

• A full description of the program, including majors and minors and so on.  How'd you like to put that on your college application -- "in my school, I majored in Charms with a minor in Potions."  I bet that colleges would just knock themselves out to give you a scholarship!
• A complete faculty list, which includes people named "Alferian MacLir," "Willow Silverhawk," and "Rainbow Stonetalker."
• A description of the Grey Council, which governs the school.  The Grey Council is a "legendary Council of Wizards, Mages & Sages which has been a recurring theme through many tales and histories of Magick and Wizardry."  So don't even let it cross your mind that these are a bunch of delusional posers who think they can do magic.  Excuse me, magick.
• The Colors of Magick -- describing the properties of each color.  My favorite one was "clear" -- "clear is the color of numbers and mathemagicks, reflecting the transparency with which all creation is suffused with magickal formulae."  Whatever the hell that means.

So, if you have a child between the ages of 11 and 18, you can sign him/her up for classes, and soon, you might even be able to pack him/her on a train (boarding at platform 9-3/4, of course) for Helena!  What an opportunity for a quality education!

Okay, so maybe not.  Maybe these people are just as wrong-headed as our fundamentalist chums from yesterday, who think that teaching kids mythology is the best way to educate them about how the world really works.  It's easy to laugh at the presumptive witches and wizards of the Grey School of Wizardry, especially given that they (unlike the fundamentalists) aren't trying to foist their delusions on the rest of the country.  But if these people somehow get a charter, and turn the Grey School into an actual, accredited educational facility -- I think I'm just going to sit down and have a nice long cry.

Breaking news: The Loch Ness Monster disproves evolution!

Will Rogers once said, "If you find you've dug yourself into a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging."

This is a lesson that has apparently yet to sink in for some young-earth creationists who decided to get together and write a science textbook -- an endeavor that, in so many ways, resembles a bunch of ten-year-olds trying to stage a Broadway musical in their back yard.  (Source)

This particular crew turned out a book called Biology for Accelerated Christian Education, Incorporated, and (of course) the book harps continuously on the ideas that evolution is a great big lie, and that the Earth is only six thousand years old.  The consensus of thousands of trained research scientists is irrelevant in the face of the revealed truth of Genesis; in fact, there are hints of a huge anti-Christian conspiracy, funded by the secular left and (once again, of course) backed by Satan himself.  So far, all of this is fairly yawn-inducing, but for two things.

One of them is the new twist of using the Loch Ness Monster to disprove evolution.

I couldn't possibly make anything this bizarre up.  Here's the relevant passage, which I present here verbatim:

Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the 'Loch Ness Monster' in Scotland? 'Nessie' for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.

In another lesson, the writers mention that a Japanese whaling vessel "caught what appears to be a small aquatic dinosaur."

So, what we have here is one mythological view of the world being used to prove another mythological view of the world, which would be funny except for the second thing: ACE-sponsored textbooks, including this one, are being used in some charter schools in Louisiana, which means that government-funded vouchers are being used to pay for this curriculum, and to teach it to children -- if you can call this teaching.  There you have it, folks: your tax dollars at work.

One thing that I was unclear on, however, was how Nessie (if she does exist) bears any kind of relevance to the truth of young-earth creationism.  Suppose dinosaurs did survive until the modern era; why does that mean that evolution is false?  Here's how it's explained by Jonny Scaramanga, an anti-fundamentalist activist who was subjected to an ACE curriculum as a child but fortunately came out with enough of his brain intact to be able to escape: "The 'Nessie claim' is presented as evidence that evolution couldn't have happened. The reason for that is they're saying if Noah's flood only happened 4000 years ago, which they believe literally happened, then possibly a sea monster survived.  If it was millions of years ago then that would be ridiculous. That's their logic. It's a common thing among creationists to believe in sea monsters."

Unsurprising, given what else they believe.  But as tortuous logic goes, this one beats anything else I've heard.  Having dug themselves into one hole -- abandoning the principles of scientific induction in favor of a Bronze-Age mythology for which there is absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever -- they continued to dig until they reached the further substratum of cryptozoology.  The horrifying thing is the number of people who are happily willing to join them in the pit, the government officials who are eager to fund the digging process -- and the thousands of children who are being dragged down there involuntarily in the name of "choice in education."

Imaginary beasts and made-to-order worlds

One general tendency I see amongst woo-woos of all types is a sense that the world has to be a certain way because it "feels like it must be so."  It goes beyond wishful thinking; it's not just a Pollyanna-ish "everything will turn out for the best."  It's more that they espouse an idea because it appeals to them on an emotional or intuitive level -- not because it lines up with what is scientifically demonstrable (and sometimes, despite the idea in question being demonstrably wrong).

I ran into an amusing example of this just yesterday, from the desk of the always-entertaining Nick Redfern.  Redfern, you might recall, is a frequent writer for Cryptomundo and Mysterious Universe, and is a particular aficionado of Bigfoot and other cryptids.  You'd think that eventually, cryptid-hunters would tire of the hunt after repeatedly bagging zero cryptids, and would give up and say, "Well, I guess we were wrong, after all."  But no: they keep at it, coming up with progressively more abstruse explanations about why the cryptids aren't showing up.  We have Linda Jo Martin's idea, that Bigfoot can avoid us because he's telepathic; Erich Kuersten, instead, makes the claim that Bigfoots are aliens, and when they hear us coming they escape in their spaceships.  But if you think those are wacky ideas, you haven't heard nothin' yet. Wait until you hear what Redfern has in store for us!

He thinks that we can't catch any cryptids, because they are created by our overactive imaginations.

Well, okay, you may be saying; isn't that what you've been telling us all along?  A bunch of cryptid hunters go out a-squatchin', and they see a shadow and hear a noise in the woods, and their overactive imaginations turn it into a Bigfoot?  No, that isn't what Redfern is saying at all; when I said he thinks that cryptids are "created by our overactive imaginations," I meant it in its most literal sense -- that we generate these beasts from our minds, and then they become real, real enough for other people to see.

"Could it be that just like Mothra and the saga of the The Mothman Prophecies," Redfern writes,  "The Valley of Gwangi unconsciously inspired people to muse upon the possibility of real flying reptiles in and around the Texas-Mexico border? And, as a result, did phantom-forms of such beasts step right out of the human imagination and achieve a form of ethereal existence in the real world? Granted, it’s a highly controversial theory, but it’s one that parallels very well with the theories pertaining to so-called Tulpas and thought-forms."

Well, I'm sorry, if you start out your argument by citing Mothra, you've lost some credibility points right from the get-go.  And someone really ought to sit down the entire seven billion human inhabitants of the Earth and clarify for them all, simultaneously, what the definition of the word "theory" is, because I'm getting sick and tired of doing it piecemeal.  A "theory" doesn't mean "some damnfool idea I just dreamed up."  It also doesn't mean "an idea that could just as easily be wrong as right," such as the way it's used in the young-earth creationist's favorite mantra, "Evolution is just a theory."  A theory is a scientific model that is well-supported by evidence, and has (thus far) stood the test of experiment.  So, therefore, Redfern's "theory" about actual flying reptiles coming from the minds people reading a novel about pterosaurs surviving until modern time is not a theory, it's a loony idea with no scientific backing whatsoever.

But that's not my main point, here; what I find the most curious about all of this is that Redfern et al. seem to have the idea that just because some bizarre version of reality is appealing to them on an emotional level, that means that the world must work that way.  The universe, then, is somehow made-to-order, constructed to fit what we want, need, or expect the universe to be.  I find this an odd stance, because (plentiful as my other faults are) this is never something I've fallen prey to.  It seemed abundantly clear to me, from as soon as I was old enough to consider the point, that there was no special reason why my desires that the world be a certain way would have any bearing at all on the way the world actually is.  "Wishin'," as my grandma use to say, "don't make it so."

Or, to quote (of all people!) Carlos Castañeda, from Journey to Ixtlan, "Why should the world be only as you think it is? Who gave you the authority to say so?" And if my ending my discussion of this topic with a quote from Castañeda doesn't introduce enough cognitive dissonance into your day to rock your Monday, I don't know what more I could do.

Order out of chaos

One of the consistent criticisms I hear of the evolutionary model, as embodied in the principle of natural selection, is that it claims that order has appeared out of an essentially random process.

"You admit that mutations are random," the critic says.  "And then in the same breath, you say that these random mutations have driven evolution to create all of the complexity of life around us.  How is that possible?  Chaos can only create more chaos, never order.  For order, there must be a Designer."

Now, Professor Armand Leroi, of the Imperial College of London, has teamed up with musician Brian Eno to demonstrate that this view is profoundly incorrect, because it misses 2/3 of what is necessary for evolution to occur.  Not only do you need mutations -- random changes in the code -- you also need two other things: a replication mechanism, and something external acting as a selecting agent.

In order to show how quickly order can come from chaos, Leroi and Eno created a piece of electronic "music" that was just a jumble of random notes and chords.  They then allowed 7,000 internet volunteers to rate various bits of the string of notes for how pleasant they sounded.  The sum total of these votes was used by a computer program to create a second generation of the tune (replication), making a few changes each time (mutation), and then choosing to retain segments that were the most popular (selection).  Then the whole process was repeated.

After 3,000 generations, a pleasant, and relatively complex, melodic riff was created -- with interlocking phrases and an interesting and steady rhythm.  It's not exactly what the rather hyperbolic headline in The Telegraph says it is -- "the perfect pop song" -- but for something that bootstrapped itself upwards out of chaos, it's not bad.  (Listen to an audio clip that outlines the progression of the piece from random notes to listenable music here.)

The analogy to evolution isn't perfect, in that human judges with an end product in mind (modern western music) were picking the sound combinations that matched that goal the best.  In that respect, it more closely resembles artificial selection -- in which naturally-occurring mutations result in changes to a population, and humans act to select the ones they think are the most useful.  It is in this way that virtually every breed of domestic animal has been created, most of them in the past thousand years.

But still, as a first-order approximation, it's not bad, and certainly gives a nice answer to people who think that chaos can never give rise to order without the hand of a Designer.  It turns out that no Designer is necessary, as long as you have something acting as a selecting mechanism -- even if that something is as simple as 7,000 people on the internet giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to tiny fragments of a musical passage.  In the natural world, with the powerful dual selectors of survival and reproduction, and two billion years to work, it suddenly ceases to be surprising that the Earth has millions of different and diverse life forms -- although that fact is, and always will be, a source of wonderment and awe for me even so.