The Great Hantavirus Pandemic Conspiracy

Since we were talking about conspiracies yesterday, I thought I'd continue in the same vein by taking a look at the recent hantavirus outbreak in Yosemite National Park.

Here are the facts -- not that those tend to matter to conspiracy theorists.

Hantavirus is an RNA virus that is carried by deer mice, and is present in their urine, droppings, and saliva.  When deer mice come into contact with human -- e.g. in cabins -- the mouse droppings dry out, and the resultant dust can be inhaled, carrying the virus into the human respiratory system.  Once a human is infected, the disease progresses rapidly, beginning with flulike symptoms, and eventually causing pneumonia and acute respiratory distress.  There is no treatment, and even with medical care, about half of infected patients die.  (Source)

The recent outbreak in Yosemite National Park, in the "Signature Tent Cabins," led to 10,000 people being exposed.  Note that this is simply the number who occupied the cabins this summer; it is unknown how many of them actually came in contact with the virus.  As of right now, six people have been confirmed to have contracted the disease, and two of the infected have died.  (Source)  The cabins were closed on August 24, and as hantavirus has an incubation period of two to four weeks, it is likely that there will be few other cases amongst the people who visited the park.

So, anyway, that's the situation.  Scary for those exposed, sad for those who have actually contracted the disease, and otherwise, it's pretty much over.  Hantavirus has never been shown to be transmissible from human to human, so that's it for the epidemic (if I can call an outbreak that sickened six people that).

But try telling your average conspiracy theorist that.

Here are a few direct quotes from conspiracy sites.  I am including only a few, because after reading these, I felt my cerebral cortex turning to cream of wheat, and I had to stop.  (Spelling and punctuation has been left intact, because that improves the overall effect.)

• This could be the new Pandemic, the worldwide killer that wipes out mankind ,in the 14th century the Black Death wiped out 25 million people and this was before planes and easy travel throughout the world, if that many people died in the 14th century imagine the destruction and devestation in the modern world where you can jump on a plane tomorrow and end up in Timbuktoo ,25 million would be like chicken feed ,make no mistake this has no cure and if it goes airborne and can be transmitted through handshakes ,coughs and sneezes ,the world will have no need to be worried about any asteroid hitting or Yellowstone erupting in 2012.

•  Remember the big rig that spilled 600 25# bags of sulfur near the entrance to Yosemite in April?  Anyone wondering if that stuff was really sulfur?  It closed the roads nearby.  Was this just an excuse to close everything up so they could spray the park with deadly hantavirus?  Just in time for summer vacations...

•  Its another false flag operation to draw attention away from what's going on at the Democratic National Convention.  Like we can't see through what their doing.

• Obama and his cronies are hiding their role in this.  Start a deadly pandemic in an election year, so that it gives you something to claim you're fighting against.  And while millions are dying, they get into office permanently.  Watch for it, sheeple.  You'll be living in a fascist dictatorship before you know it... if you're one of the survivors.

• There are now 12000 people sick with this right now and that's the ones we know about, how many more, are we being told the total truth about this, in less than a week thousands more infected, imagine a month, a year, 5 yrs from now planet earth could be the corpse planet, maybe this is why their looking at other planets that could support life.

Oh, okay!  And maybe all of these are true!  At the same time!  It's a pandemic, millions are sick and we aren't being told, because President Obama ordered the National Park Service to spray deer mice in Yosemite with hantavirus and release them in the cabins so that vacationing people would get ill during the Democratic National Convention, allowing the delegates to appoint him Supreme Dictator of the Earth without anyone noticing, and now that this has happened he will take his cronies on a spaceship to another habitable planet, leaving the rest of the Earth's population to die in agony.

Hey, it could happen.

What blows my mind about all of this is how fact-resistant these people are.  Show them press releases from the National Institute of Health, explaining that hantavirus doesn't seem to be communicable from one human to another, and stating that only six people have so far been sickened?  It's all part of the government's disinformation plan.  Tell them that the sulfur spill in April was just an accident, and was cleaned up quickly, and had nothing to do with the outbreak?  Riiiight.  Sure it was an accident.  *wink, wink*  Explain that hantavirus was already present in deer mouse populations, and there would be no need for anyone to "spray the park with the virus," even if someone wanted to do so, which no one does?  Ha.  So you say.  You poor, deluded fool, you.

You get the feeling these people love it when bad things happen, so they can have more things to blame the government for.  They don't seem to have any sense that being that we live in the natural world, bad stuff sometimes just happens.  Storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods... and disease outbreaks.  No human agency is necessary for any of this stuff, much as they would like that to be the case.

And finally, don't these conspiracy theorists give you the impression that they think that the government is a lot more powerful, and efficient, than it actually is?  My own sense is that our elected officials look more like the Keystone Kops than they do like the Men in Black.  If they even knew how to create a catastrophe, I doubt they could successfully pull it off, much less keep it quiet.

But maybe that's the point.  The people who believe in conspiracy theories find it weirdly comforting that someone is in charge, even if that someone has evil intentions.  The idea that hantavirus has shown up in Yosemite because the Evil Government put it there is easier to live with, somehow, than the idea that bad stuff just happens sometimes, because life is a risky chaotic jumble, and there is no pattern, no Grand Reason That Things Happen.

Or maybe they're just batshit crazy.

Storms, consipiracies, and divine retribution

Last night the remnants of Hurricane Isaac swept through upstate New York, bringing electrical storms and some much-needed rain to our area, and doing little damage except for scaring the absolute hell out of my neurotic border collie, Doolin, who seems to think that thunder is the Footsteps Of Monsters Who Eat Dogs.  So other than straightening up the things she knocked over in trying to get Somewhere Safe, we actually were rather fortunate.

Sadly, the residents of southern Mississippi and southeastern Louisiana (especially Plaquemines Parish) weren't so lucky, and there are thousands that are still flooded out, and tens of thousands without electricity.  The prediction that it would make landfall as "only a Category 1" storm turned out to be correct, but a Category 1 storm turns out to be capable of a lot of damage, especially if it moves slowly, as Isaac did.

The science of predicting hurricane tracks has improved vastly, but it's still a highly complex business, dependent on a great many variables that can be hard to measure.  Still, we're better off than we were in 1900, when a hurricane slammed into Galveston, Texas with very little warning, claiming an estimated 8,000 lives.

Of course, that hasn't stopped the crazies from claiming that hurricanes are not controlled by such prosaic variables as air moisture, sea surface temperature, shear, and steering currents.  Big storms being due to purely natural causes?  No, that would be way too simple.

First, we have noted meteorologist Rush Limbaugh, who claimed that the folks over at NOAA were predicting the storm's path based upon their desire to disrupt the Republican National Convention:

So this whole thing has been politicized, as the Democrats politicize everything, and that's why we are talking about it. Now, I want to remind you: All last week... And, no, at no time here am I alleging a conspiracy. At no time. With none of this am I alleging conspiracy. All last week what was the target? Tampa. What was going on in Tampa this week?

The Republican National Convention. A pretty important one, too. Introducing the nominee, Mitt Romney. It's only after the convention that Romney can actually start spending all of this money that he's raised, so this convention is very important. It's a chance to introduce Romney to a lot of people who don't know him yet. And I noticed that the hurricane center's track is -- and I'm not alleging conspiracies here. The hurricane center is the regime; the hurricane center is the Commerce Department.

It's the government.

It's Obama.

Oh, right!  Okay!  That's perfectly believable, as long as you have a single kernel of Kettle Corn where most of us have a brain.  The hurricane is Obama!  Barreling toward the Republican National Convention!  With the destructive Winds of Liberalism!  I'm certain that the storm itself cared deeply about who wins the presidential election, because, you know, that's how weather works.

Of course, Limbaugh is bush-league crazy compared to Joe Kovacs over at WorldNetDaily, who claims that god sent Hurricane Isaac toward New Orleans deliberately to screw up Southern Decadence, an annual gay pride festival:

New Orleans is still hosting Southern Decadence with open homosexuality manifesting in the streets of the city. It could be that God is putting an end to this city and its wickedness. The timing of Hurricane Isaac with Southern Decadence is a sign that God’s patience with America’s sin is coming to an end. … Let’s all watch this very closely, because if New Orleans is destroyed, it is a sure sign that the final judgment for the national sin of America has arrived.

And as additional proof, we have a quote from Alabama Senator Hank Erwin, showing that government officials are only as intelligent as the people who elected them:

America has been moving away from God.  The Lord is sending appeals to us.  As harsh as it may sound, those hurricanes do say that God is real, and we have to realize sin has consequences.

No, Senator, what those hurricanes say is that low pressure centers form over the eastern Atlantic during the summer, increase in strength during conditions of warm surface waters and low shear, and get pushed toward the Caribbean and the southern United States by the prevailing winds.  Homosexuality really has very little to do with it.

Even this doesn't end the litany of wackos who have weighed in on the cause of hurricanes.  Over at Chemtrail Planet, we hear that the path of the storm was determined by Evil Government Officials putting chemicals in jet fuel, so that the exhaust contrails could change the weather:

High on the list of suspects for deployment of “chembombs” is the fleet of Evergreen Air B-747 tankers equipped with Evergreen’s own patented aerosol deployment system capable of spraying a wide variety of aerosols depending on the mission.

The huge 20,000 gallon system was originally promoted as a new technology for fighting wildfires even though the patent claims equal capability at releasing aerosols for the purpose of "weather modofication" [sic].

Suspicions are growing that Evergreen’s fire-fighting promotion was a decoy to hide their primary mission of covert climate modification.

This is accompanied by a highly informative YouTube video that made me weep softly while banging my head against my computer keyboard.

And last, our parade of wingnuts would not be complete without a salvo from Alex Jones, who as you might expect posted a YouTube video claiming that Hurricane Isaac was created by the US government using their magical superpowers, better known as HAARP.  "We would be weird to not say it could be government-created as some type of disaster for the election," Jones said.  "That’s not outside the realm of possibility."

Which is true only in the sense that earthquakes being caused by the leaping about of Giant Subterranean Bunnies is also, technically, not outside the realm of possibility.

What always puzzles me about this sort of thing is the fact that people listen to, or read, this stuff, and at least someone must find it plausible.  In fact, in the case of Limbaugh and Jones, the evidence is that a lot of people find what they say plausible, despite the fact that much of it is blatant horse waste.  Why, I wonder, don't people look folks like this in the eye when they make their ridiculous pronouncements, and say, "May I please see your Ph.D. in meteorology or climate science?  Or, in fact, any kind of science at all?  Oh, you don't have one?  Then SHUT THE HELL UP."

But people never do, for some reason.

The return of the Baltic Sea Anomaly

So, the Ocean X Explorer Team and the Baltic Sea Anomaly are back in the news, and not because anyone has much in the way of new information about it.

Natalie Wolchover, writer at Life's Little Mysteries, has written an article (here) that claims that the "Anomaly" is a glacial deposit.  Or, to put it more bluntly, a bunch of rocks, which is what I suspected it was right from the get-go.  The most interesting thing about her article is the part that describes how Peter Lindberg, leader of the Ocean X team, contacted Volker Brüchert, an associate professor of geology at Stockholm University, and supposedly got Brüchert to agree that the "Anomaly" was unexplainable as a natural formation.

Lindberg only released one quote from his interview with Brüchert, following Lindberg's providing Brüchert with a black rock from the "Anomaly" site to study.  "I was surprised when I researched the material, I found a great black stone that could be a volcanic rock," Brüchert told Lindberg.  "My hypothesis is that this object, this structure was formed during the Ice Age many thousands of years ago."

Implying, of course, that the "Anomaly" can't be explained by science, and therefore must be (1) a crashed UFO site, (2) a sunken Nazi superweapon, (3) a remnant of the lost civilization of Atlantis, or (4) any of the other bizarre suggestions that people associated with researching the "Anomaly" have made.

Of course, it turns out that Brüchert never meant to imply any such thing.  Reporters at Life's Little Mysteries took the expedient of contacting Brüchert, and asking him in more detail what he thought.

"It's good to hear critical voices about this 'Baltic Sea mystery,'" Brüchert responded in an email.  "What has been generously ignored by the Ocean-X team is that most of the samples they have brought up from the sea bottom are granites and gneisses and sandstones."  He then goes on to state that this is exactly what you'd expect to see if the "Anomaly" is a glacial deposit, which would be no surprise given that the Baltic Sea was largely carved out by glaciers.

"Because the whole northern Baltic region is so heavily influenced by glacial thawing processes, both the feature and the rock samples are likely to have formed in connection with glacial and postglacial processes," he wrote.  "Possibly these rocks were transported there by glaciers."

So, an expert has weighed in on the subject, and has a perfectly conventional explanation, as I suspected.

The problem is, I did what I should never do, and scrolled to the bottom of the article and looked at the "Comments" section.  A sampling:

• Who's to say stories like Atlantis and the Biblical Flood aren't merely memories of such a widespread calamity?
• Being a skeptic requires no knowledge and no investigation of evidence or facts. Anyone can be a skeptic. Congrats Natalie, you are ordinary.
• What in the hell are you people trying to hide? This needs to be explored much more deeply and we need to be told what this thing really is, how it got there, and why it is still there. Frankly, we just need the truth and "glacial deposit" is certainly not it. It is plain this thing has been manufactured by someone, at someplace, at some time. It's not just a fluke of nature.
• Probably some sort of space ship the "authorities" don't wan't [sic] anyone to know about!
• This report is very misleading. The object was never ID.  People only gave an explaination [sic] how it end up there.  We still don't know what it is and where it come from !!!!
• Well if this is an accurate depiction than it has to be a design from an intelligent source man made or what ever.  There are to [sic] many perfect geometric shapes and lines, a glacier or volcanic deposit I think not.

Well, Natalie, I think we can all agree that they told you, can't we?

It's not that I don't sympathize with the sentiment that it would be cool if the "Anomaly" was something beyond what science currently can explain.  No one would be more thrilled than me if it was a downed spacecraft, or a remnant of a hitherto-unknown human civilization.  And if there really was evidence of something like that, real scientists -- the people whose day-to-day lives are spent pushing the boundaries of what we know, who live for opportunities to study things that haven't yet been explained -- would be tripping over themselves to analyze it.  The fact that a real, working geologist has taken a look at the hard evidence (a sample of the "Anomaly") and said, basically, "Meh," is pretty indicative of the likelihood that there isn't anything much there to study.

And now, I really have said all I have to say on the subject, unless Lindberg and his team unearth something a lot more earthshattering than they have done so far.  As I've said before: I am perfectly ready to eat crow and print a retraction if it turns out that there really is something weird down there.  Until that time, I'm siding with Brüchert.  Oh, and one other thing: I really need to stop reading the "Comments" sections on articles, because I don't need any further reasons to faceplant directly onto my keyboard.

Rhetoric, politics, and the freedom to remain silent

Allow me to go on record as saying that I can't wait for this presidential election to be over.

It's only the beginning of September, and already I am sick unto death of the nasty political rhetoric.  Not the stuff coming from the candidates and their sponsors; I've come to expect that, given our money-driven, whatever-it-takes-to-get-elected system.  What makes me ill, on almost a daily basis, is the ugly invective you hear and see from ordinary citizens and voters.

That sort of thing has become easier to broadcast in the past few decades.  When I was young, if you had a message (nasty or otherwise), your only free choice was to write a letter to the editor.  Otherwise, you had to purchase radio or television time, or rent a billboard.  Now, the entire internet (especially social network sites like Facebook and Twitter) have become the sounding boards for anyone with something they'd like the whole world to hear.  And in an election year, what a lot of people have to say is (1) irrational, (2) rife with overgeneralizations, and (3) just generally unpleasant.

Let me give you just the briefest sampling, from my Facebook page.  Note that the vitriol is coming from both sides of the aisle:

• The top slogan of the Democratic Party is "Bitterly Clinging To Taxes and Abortions."
• Republicans have consistently cut disaster relief in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and for big corporations.
• Please don't vote us out!  None of us can do real jobs!
• The only way you could vote Republican is if you lack a heart, lack a brain, or both.  So which are you?  The Scarecrow or the Tin Man?
• You lost a debate to a conservative? Time to yell "racism" and blame Fox News.
• The conservative agenda is to make government smaller so that the big corporations have room to move in.
• Democrats want to stick around in America just long enough to see how it ends.
• The Republican Party has no interest in protecting the rights of anyone who isn't an entitled, wealthy, white, heterosexual Christian man.

I usually try to stay out of political discussions -- it's almost always frustrating and almost never accomplishes anything -- so I generally don't respond when people post this stuff.  But I broke my own rule a few days ago, and I responded to one of the above (which one is irrelevant; they're all equally ridiculous) by saying, "Oh, come now.  This is a bit much.  You really think that 50% of the United States actually believes this?"  Within five minutes, there were three responses, to wit:

• Sounds about right to me.
• I love the sarcasm and the parody -- and the point.  This is awesome.
• This is great.  Sharing.

To which I responded:  "I give up."

I honestly do not understand the motivation that drives this stuff.  Yes, both the Democratic and the Republican Parties have a few people who are extremists, whose views are pretty clearly in the "nutjob" category.  Both have elected officials who have broken the law, who have taken bribes, who have committed sexual indiscretions.  But the vast majority of the actual voters -- the people who are the Democratic and Republican Parties, not just the officials they elect to represent them -- are ordinary people, who want the things that all of us want.  A home, a job, security, a safe place to raise their children, food on the table, the freedoms guaranteed them by the Constitution.  Most of them are decent human beings, who would be interesting to sit down and have a beer and a bull session with.  Damn few of them on either side want to "tear down America" or "sell the US to the corporations" or "turn the United States into the Soviet Union" or any of the thousand other things that the purveyors of toxic rhetoric would like you to believe.

Of course, everyone is entitled to state his or her opinion.  That is one of those "freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution" I mentioned earlier.  However, just because you're free to do something doesn't mean that you should.  You are also free not to speak when it does more harm than good, a freedom that more of us should exercise.  The poisonous messages currently flooding social media do nothing but drive people apart, break down dialogue, and spread the message that if you don't agree with me, you must be either deluded or evil.  I fail to see what positive end any of this could possibly accomplish.

Now, don't get me wrong.  By saying, "why can't we just get along?" I'm not saying, "why can't we all agree?"  Liberals and conservatives do differ, if not in what their basic goals are, in how best to achieve those goals.  There are very real points of debate on issues that deserve time, energy, and effort to resolve.  But ugly invective is not debate, and it muddies the water rather than clearing it.  So to those people who share this stuff, and thus keep it alive online, I am respectfully asking you to knock it off.

Woo-woo workshop weekends

A frequent reader and contributor to Skeptophilia sent me a note asking if I'd heard about the Exeter (New Hampshire) UFO Festival happening this weekend.  I hadn't, and (unfortunately) can't attend because I have other plans, but I thought I'd check out the website.

The home page promised great things, with a banner header showing photographs and drawings of UFOs, aliens, and prominent images of Betty and Barney Hill, famous as the first well-publicized UFO abductees.  In fact, it is certainly the Hills that explains the location; Exeter is in the same county as Portsmouth, the Hills' home at the time of the incident.

The conference itself looks like it will be awesome, if by awesome you mean "weird."  Which I suppose is to be expected.  Here is a sampler of the talks that will be given:

• Extraterrestrials: They are Here Now.  It's not just Interesting.  It's Important.
• Remote Viewing and Accessing Higher Consciousness
• UFOs for the 21st Century Mind
• ET Contact: Implications for Post-Contact Advancements in Science and Technology

So you can see that I'd fit right in, except for the fact that I'd probably get thrown out for guffawing, especially at the Remote Viewing workshop.

But I needn't be upset at missing the festival; a brief search turned up a whole host of other events I could attend.  If any of these are near enough to you, and strike your fancy, I encourage you to go and then report back here what happened:

The Atoka (Oklahoma) Cryptid Fest, on September 8.  It's being held at McGee Creek State Park, and will feature an appearance of the "professionals from the cast of The History Channel's Monster Quest."  There will be "Bigfoot excursions throughout the day."  And if anyone shows up at the event and sneaks around the grounds in a ghillie suit, it was definitely not my idea.

A Certification Course in Mayan Shamanic Healing and Crystal Therapy, on September 21-23.  It's being held at the Aquarian Book Shop in Richmond, Virginia.  Here we will be taught the "Mayan Healing Modality" wherein we will learn how to do the following:

• Cleanse your crystals properly.
• Use obsidian arrows for healing.
• Activate quartz crystals to restore health.
• Lay jade stones on the body.
• Use rose quartz for heart or emotional healing.
• Work with 20 major energy centers on the body healing.
• Do a basic diagnosis of the client.
• Stand in simple shamanic animal postures for healing

We will also learn a variety of important principles, such as Polarity As An Axis Of Energy And Manifestation.  Whatever that means.  We are also told that in preparation for the event, the shop is offering a "10% discount on pendulums."

Oh, goodie.

For my readers in the UK, you might consider The Psychic Fair and Pamper Day, on Saturday, September 29 in Colchester (Essex).  There will be ghost hunts at the beginning and end of the fair, on Friday evening and again on Saturday evening after the fair closes, and tickets for those are £ 40, but otherwise the fair itself is free.  There will be a great many booths offering services and items for sale, including:

• Angel Therapy
• Aromatherapy 
• Astrology 
• Aura Photography
• Crystal Healing
• I Ching
• Iridology
• Numerology
• Psychic Artist
• Psychic Medium Readings
• Rune Reader
• Tarot Readings
• Theta Healing

Besides this sounding like a table of contents for the New Age Nonsense category of The Skeptic's Dictionary,  this one might be well worth attending because (1) it will represent an amazing assortment of goofy stuff, and (2) it's free.  I'd definitely attend if I was in England.

So, that gives you some choices as consolation prizes if you've missed, like I have, the Exeter UFO Festival.  And that was just from September.  The availability of woo-woo workshops is limited only by your time, money, and tolerance for bizarre ideas -- and, as we've seen over and over in this blog, some people seem to be overly endowed with all three.

Chinese alien research station

New from the "Harmless If It Amuses You" department, today we have a story about a retired Chinese military man who has built what he calls an "alien research station" in his back yard.  (Source)

Xiang Kuansong, 79, of Mayang, Hunan province, has worked 17 years on the project, which shows if nothing else amazing determination.  He said he was told to build it by two aliens, who said, "Don't be afraid.  We are not ghosts or god.  We are people from another planet who want to help you."  So Xiang decided to create a site that would memorialize the encounter.  The aliens, he said, are from the planet "Dongsheng," are 1.95 meters tall, and wear clothing that makes them invisible to everyone else but him.  They've been back to talk with him many times, and requested that he build this "way station" so they would have a place to rest on their intergalactic travels.

He has hung a sign over the door saying, "The Harmonious Way to a Foreign Planet," and has stones marking the places that the aliens have appeared.  Otherwise, the place looks, according to the source, more like a temple than a research station; there is a model of a spaceship, presumably to make the aliens feel at home, but there is no scientific equipment.  Xiang evidently doesn't need to rely on clunky radio telescopes for his extraterrestrial contact; they simply come to him, which I have to say is pretty convenient.

What immediately jumped out at me about this story, being of a linguistic bent, is that the planet has a Chinese name.  Doesn't that strike Xiang as kind of unlikely?  You'd think that whatever language an alien race might speak on their home planet, it wouldn't be Chinese (or English or Lithuanian or Swahili or any other language found on Earth).  And just like when two human cultures have been in contact, the things that tend to retain their original morphology the longest are personal names and place names, you'd think that the name of the planet would be more... well, alien-sounding.  Of course, the same thing happens with contactees from other cultures.  I think it's a bit of a coincidence that when English speakers are contacted by aliens, they (and their planets) always seem to follow the Star Trek naming convention of ending in either -us or -a depending on whether the name in question is masculine or feminine, a morphological constraint adopted from Latin.  (Without even trying hard, I found accounts online of contacts with aliens called Tibus, Mytria, Manus, Vertra, Boratus, Lorcus, and Bellatria.)  Of course, there are exceptions.  This website, which (sadly) does not appear to be a parody, tells of contact with aliens called Quetzal, Semiase, Sfath, and Ptaah, and then has pencil sketches of three very human men and one woman who supposedly are inhabitants of the Pleiades.  (Yes, yes, I know.  The Pleiades is a star cluster, and you can't inhabit a star cluster.  Just play along, okay?)

So even though the names sound marginally less human (you have to wonder about Quetzal, however, given that it's the first half of the name of a Central American god), here the aliens themselves are clearly three middle-aged guys with  beards, and a sexy young woman with a seriously come-hither expression.  The whole thing seems pretty suspect to me.

Of course, your alien abduction devotee would probably object that the aliens, being superintelligent, converse with their human contacts in the language the contact speaks, and in a form that wouldn't immediately scare the contact into having a brain aneurysm.  So this explains why people always hear the aliens speaking, and using names, clearly derived from human languages familiar to the speaker, and take (more-or-less) human form when appearing to us.

Me, I think if there are intelligent aliens out there, any languages they speak are much more likely to sound like the guy in my favorite clip from Men in Black (watch it here) in which Will Smith talks to an alien masquerading as a postal worker.  (How they filmed that scene without laughing is beyond me.)  Our languages evolved to be speakable, and comprehensible, based on our biology, and there's no reason to suppose that an intelligent species with a different biology will have languages at all analogous to ours -- or perhaps, even readily recognizable as language at all.

So, anyway, that's our story for today.  I wish the retired Chinese soldier best of luck with his alien research station, and hope he gets lots of visits from "Dongsheng."  As for me, I think I'm going to sit here and practice making the sounds that guy made in Men in Black.  I'd like to be able to do that.

Species, types, and the No True Scotsman fallacy

One of the most frustrating of logical fallacies is the No True Scotsman fallacy.  It gets its name from an almost certainly apocryphal story, in which a serial rapist and killer is being pursued by the police in Glasgow, and a Scottish MP encourages the police to search amongst the immigrant population of the city.  "No Scotsman would do such a thing," the MP said.

When the criminal was caught, and turned out to be 100% Scottish, the MP was challenged about his remark.

"Well," he said, drawing himself up, "no true Scotsman would have done such a thing!"

The crux of this fallacy is that if you make a statement that turns out, in view of evidence, to be false, all you do is shift your ground -- redefine the terms so as to make your original point unassailable.

Very few other fallacies have such a capacity for making me want to smack my forehead into a wall as this one.  Someone who commits this fallacy can't be pinned down, can't be backed into a corner, can't receive his comeuppance from the most reasoned argument, the most solidly incontrovertible evidence.  The dancing skills of a master of the No True Scotsman fallacy are Dancing With The Stars quality.

All of this comes up because of an online discussion that I read, and (yes) participated in, a couple of days ago, on the topic of the demonstrability of evolution.  Someone, ostensibly a supporter of evolution but seemingly not terribly well-read on the subject, was using such evidence as the fossil record as a support for the idea.  A creationist responded, "The fossil record, and fossil dating, are inaccurate.  You evolutionists always think that bringing us a bunch of bones and shells proves your point, but it doesn't, because no one can really prove how old they were, and none of them show one species turning into another.  You can't show a single example, from the present, of one species becoming another, and yet you want us to believe in your discredited theory."

Well, of course, I couldn't let a comment like that just sit there, so I responded, "Well, actually, yes, I can.  I know about a dozen examples of speciation (one species becoming another) occurring within a human lifetime."

Challenged to produce examples, I gave a few, including the ones that I described in an earlier post (Grass, gulls, mosquitoes, and mice, February 9, 2012), and then sat back on my haunches with a satisfied snort, thinking "Ha.  That sure showed him."

Well.  I should have known better.  His response, which I quote verbatim:  "All you did was show that one grass can become another grass, or a mosquito can become another mosquito.  If you could show me a mosquito that turned into a bird, or something, I might believe you."

Now, wait just a second, here.  You asked me for one thing -- to show one species turning into a different species, in the period of a few decades.  I did so, adhering to the canonical definition of the word species.  And now you're saying that wasn't what you wanted after all -- you want me to show one phylum turning into a different one, in one generation?

So I sat there, sputtering and swearing, and not sure how to answer.  So I said something to the effect that he'd pulled a No True Scotsman on me, and had changed the terms of the question once he saw I could answer it, and he'd damned well better play fair.  He humphed back at me that we evolutionists couldn't really support our points, and we both left the discussion as I suspect most people leave discussions on the internet -- unconvinced and frustrated.  So I was pondering the whole thing, and after taking my blood pressure medications I had a sudden realization of where the confusion was coming from.  It was from the idea of a type of organism.

Most people who aren't educated in the biological sciences (and I'm not including just formal education, here; there are many people who have never taken a single biology class and know plenty about the subject) really don't understand the concept of species.  They think in types.  A bird is one type of thing; a bug is a different one.  If you pressed them, they might admit that there were a few types of birds that seemed inherently different; you have your big birds (ostriches), your medium-sized birds (robins), and your little birds (hummingbirds).  I've had students that have thought this way, and when they hear I'm a birdwatcher, they seem incredulous that this could be a lifelong avocation.  Wouldn't I run out of new birds to see pretty quickly?  When I tell them that there are over 10,000 unique species of birds, they seem not so much awed as uncomprehending.

I suspect that the source of this misapprehension is the same as the source of the general misapprehension regarding the antiquity of the Earth and the origins of life: the bible.  In Leviticus 11, where they go through the whole unclean-foods thing that eventually would be codified as the Kosher Law, they split up the natural world in only the broadest-brush terms; you have your animals that have hooves and chew the cud, various combinations of ones that don't, creatures that have fins and scales and ones that don't, insects that jump and ones that don't, and a few different classes of birds (which, to my eternal amusement, included bats).  And that's pretty much it.  Plants were sorted out into ones that had edible parts (wheat, figs, olives), ones that had useful wood (boxwood, cedar, acacia), and ones that had neither of the above (thorn bushes).  And these distinctions worked perfectly well for a Bronze-Age society; it kept you from eating stuff that was bad for you, told you what you could build stuff from, and so on.  But as a scientific concept, the idea of "types of living things" is pretty ridiculous.  And yet it still seems to live on in people's minds, lo unto this very day.

So, anyway, that was my brief excursion into that least useful of endeavors, the Online Argument.  It gave me a nice example of the No True Scotsman fallacy to tell my Critical Thinking classes about, when we hit that topic in a few weeks.  And it really didn't affect my blood pressure all that much, but it did make me roll my eyes.  Which seems to happen frequently when I get into conversations with creationists.