Sketchy science and magic rocks

A recurring problem with trying to sift through and evaluate claims, and sort the science from the pseudoscience, is the tendency of people to use scientific terms loosely (or incorrectly).  Throwing around fancy-sounding terminology gives an argument an unwarranted veneer of credibility, especially given that many of the people targeted in these claims lack the scientific background to discern when technical vocabulary is being used in a specious fashion.

The problem becomes even worse when the profit motive is involved, because the stakes become higher.  There often seems to be a deliberate intent on the part of the seller not to clarify matters, but to obfuscate further.  A confused buyer, apparently, is a confident buyer.

I was sent an especially good example of this yesterday, when a friend emailed me a link with the message, "Could there be any truth to any of this?"  On clicking the link, I was brought to the site "Shungite in a Nutshell," which explains the amazing properties of a rock found in Russia.

Shungite, we are told, is a carbonaceous deposit found near the village of Shung'a in the province of Karelia.  It contains large quantities of fullerenes, molecules made up of latticelike arrays of carbon atoms (buckyballs and carbon nanotubes are two types of fullerenes you might be familiar with).  Because of its high concentration of fullerenes, shungite has (according to the authors of the website) a variety of amazing properties:

• it can purify water and air
• it is a natural antioxidant
• it is an antibacterial
• it speeds up healing
• it stimulates the immune system
• it suppresses allergies
• it can act as a carrier for biologically-active molecules
• it can neutralize the negative effects of electromagnetic fields, including "anthropogenic high-frequency, solar, geopathogenic, (and) biofields"

Sounds like pretty amazing stuff, no?  Well, alarm bells went off immediately for me; any time someone says that one substance can cure all ills, it sets off my skepti-senses.  But here's where it gets interesting, because to support his/her claims, the writer starts throwing around some scientific terminology -- and gets a bunch of it wrong:

• "Shungite contains almost the entire periodic table" -- actually, if their first claim (that it's composed of fullerenes) is correct, this is about as wrong as you can get, because fullerenes are pure carbon, and therefore are made of only one element on the periodic table.  So the only way you could have less of the periodic table is if shungite was imaginary.  On the other hand, it's not necessarily a good thing to have lots of elements -- I'm rather happy, for example, that the vitamin tablets I take in the morning contain no arsenic or plutonium.
• Shungite is "a catalyst, which ensures decomposition of organic substances sorbed and restoration of the sorption properties" -- honestly, I'm not even sure what this is supposed to mean.  Catalysts are chemicals that alter the rates of chemical reactions, usually by changing the activation energy; and if shungite really does trigger the decomposition of organic substances, it would be a little on the dangerous side to consume, because our bodies are basically big blobs of organic substances.
• Shungite is an "electroconductive rock."  Well, lots of stuff is electroconductive, including the wiring in my house.  I'm not sure why this is relevant, but the writer sure seems to be impressed by it.
• The "presence of shungite materials close to the source of cellular frequency radiation significantly weakens their effect on the human body."  Once again, what the hell is this supposed to mean?  What is "cellular frequency radiation?"  I dunno, but it sure sounds bad, doesn't it?

And so on.  I tried to substantiate a few of these claims -- a couple of articles I found about shungite that seem reliable (if you're curious, here and here) support its use in water purification, but neither of them say the least thing about taking the stuff internally.  This article describes research into a novel cancer therapy using fullerenes and light to trigger cancer cell apoptosis (self-destruction), but as far as I can find the effect has only been observed in cell cultures, not in living organisms.  Otherwise, the best I could find regarding the biological effects of fullerenes is that the Wikipedia article says that they are "found in soot" and are "essentially non-toxic" -- not exactly a ringing endorsement of their health benefits.

So it sounds like what we have here is another example of someone trying to sell something useless to the credulous, and throwing around science-y terms to convince the layperson that what they have will cure damn near everything.  Once again, the best way to insulate yourself, and your pocketbook, against spurious claims is to learn a little science and apply the tools of critical thinking.  So, sad to say, but magic rocks that heal every illness known to man remain exactly what they sound like -- fiction.

Alpacas, flying humanoids, and bi-locating nuns

Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, we're keeping our eyes on two breaking cryptozoological stories.

First, we have a report in from West Berkshire in the UK, where a resident has called in a sighting of a mysterious creature that's been nicknamed "the Creature from Curridge."  [Source]

Spotted on October 3 by a businessman named Don Prater, Curry (you just know eventually that's what they'll call it, might as well start now) was described as being a gray, oddly-proportioned quadruped that was unlike anything Prater had ever seen.

Prater was out for an early-evening walk with his border collie, Bozzy, when he saw the bizarre creature.

"After the footpath bends left, about 25 yards ahead of us were two animals," Prater told reporters for Newbury Today.  "One of the animals looked like a domestic cat but the other one stunned me.  It was a dark or grey color.  The height of its head was about two foot but it had the head of a deer.  The neck was about eight to ten inches long and thin like a swan’s neck.  The body was a cross between a cat and a dog.  It had a bushy tail.  Everything about it was wrong."

"I hadn't been drinking," Prater helpfully added.

Prater went around the neighborhood, asking if anyone else had seen anything like it, but all he got were negatives.  He did provide reporters with a sketch of what he'd spotted:

 For comparison purposes, here's a photograph of an alpaca:

So I think we can all agree that we've got a pretty good match, here.


A little harder to fathom is a story that came to my attention through reports from several of my students.  "Have you heard about the Colorado... um, Mosquito Men?" one asked, and when I said, in some incredulity, "Mosquito Men?", he replied, "Well, not Mosquito Men.  But I'm pretty sure they fly."  So I did some searching for "Colorado Flying Men," and lo and behold, there have been a number of reports lately from the San Luis Valley of flying creatures that look like "a cross between Mothman and Dracula."  [Source]

Notwithstanding the fact that Mothman and Dracula share the characteristic of both being fictional, I began to do a bit of digging, and I found that the San Luis Valley is a hotspot of all sorts of weird stuff -- it has some of the USA's highest numbers of UFO sightings, reports of cattle mutilations, reports of cryptids, and reports of various other odd goings-on.  Besides the flying humanoids, there have been sightings of thunderbirds, and no, I'm not talking about the car:

In fact, so much bizarre stuff happens in the San Luis Valley that it's beginning to get a reputation as a magnet for wackos.  "When the going gets weird, the weird end up in Colorado's San Luis Valley," writes Christopher Weir in Metroactive.  "Hometowns are like families.  You always think yours is more bizarre or dysfunctional than the next.  Not so, of course...  As for hometowns, yours has nothing on Crestone and the surrounding San Luis Valley.  Wondrously depicted by self-appointed paranormal investigator and Crestone resident Christopher O'Brien, the San Luis Valley -- a breathtaking expanse that straddles southern Colorado and northern New Mexico -- is plagued by flying saucers, cow vandals, space guns, serial killers, spook lights, ghost trains, coma healers, prairie dragons and even something called a 'bi-locating nun.'"

So this led me to wonder what a "prairie dragon" was (I found out that they are semi-transparent reptiles that appear in groups and try to get into your home), and of course, any mention of a "bi-locating nun" was bound to stir my curiosity (turns out that this refers to a 17th century Spanish woman, Sister Marie de Jesus Agreda, who visited the San Luis Valley in spirit form, successfully converted some natives, and because of the claim narrowly escaped being executed by the Inquisition).

So, anyway, about the Flying Men.  Apparently, they've been seen by several people over the past two years, flapping along with huge membranous wings, and making "high-pitched hissing or screeching sounds."  Of course, no one has any hard evidence of this, or even any photographs, not that this would exactly count for evidence in these days of PhotoShop.  But the reports continue, and cryptozoologists worldwide are now excitedly turning their eyes toward the Rocky Mountains.

As usual, I wish them all luck.  Being a biologist, no one would be more thrilled than me if some of these reports of bizarre creatures, unknown to science, turned out to be true.  And if I were a betting man, I'd say that they'll have a greater chance of success searching around in the high deserts of Colorado than they would looking for Curry, the Wild Alpaca of West Berkshire.

Smell-o-therapy

I'd always wondered how "aromatherapy" was supposed to work.  I mean, I like nice-smelling things as much as the next guy, but treating diseases by having you smell something just always seemed a little weird to me.  But I'd never really looked into it.

And then a friend sent me this page, wherein we find that it all has to do with "frequencies."

I shoulda known.

Frequency is one of the most misused words in all of woo-woo.  So let's get the definition straight right from the get-go, okay?  Frequency is a measurement of the rate of vibration of anything that is exhibiting rotation, oscillation, vibration, or simple harmonic motion, and is measured by counting the number of cycles completed per second.  A hertz is the standard unit of frequency, and is equal to one cycle per second -- so in a pendulum clock that is keeping good time, the pendulum is swinging at exactly one hertz.  The frequency of sound waves audible to the human ear runs from about 20 hertz to about 18,000 hertz (18 kilohertz).  The electromagnetic spectrum has a much wider range, with the "low" end (radio waves) running all the way down to one hertz or lower, and the "high" end (gamma rays) up into the range of 10²⁴ hertz.  The bit of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes are sensitive to -- the familiar rainbow of visible light -- runs in the vicinity of 10¹⁴ hertz, with red having the lowest frequency (around 4 x 10¹⁴ hertz) and violet the highest (around 8 x 10¹⁴ hertz).

All right, thus endeth the science lesson for today.  Let's look at aromatherapy oils, okay?  Hold onto your hats, because we won't be re-entering the realm of science for a while.

The site I linked above begins thusly:

The effectiveness of aromatherapy essential oils cannot be fully understood without some discussion of their frequency or vibration. Frequency is a measurable rate of electrical energy that is constant between any two points. Every living thing has an electrical frequency. Robert O. Becker, M.D., documents the electrical frequency of the human body in his book, The Body Electric. A "frequency generator" was developed in the early 1020's [sic] by Royal Raymond Rife, M.D. He found that by using certain frequencies, he could destroy a cancer cell or virus. He found that these frequencies could prevent the development of disease, and others would destroy disease. Substances with higher frequency will destroy diseases of a lower frequency.

So, we already have:  (1) a typo that makes it sound like someone was developing electronic devices before the Norman Conquest of England; (2) a guy named "Royal Raymond Rife;" and (3) enough bullshit to fertilize a 50-acre cornfield.  Pretty good start for only one paragraph, don't you think?  But it gets better:

In one test, the frequency of two individuals – the first a 26 year old male and the second a 24 year old male – was measured at 66 MHz each. The first individual held a cup of coffee (without drinking any), and his frequency dropped to 58 MHz in 3 seconds. He put the coffee down and inhaled an aroma of essential oils. Within 21 seconds, his frequency had returned to 66 MHz. The second individual took a sip of coffee and his frequency dropped to 52 MHz in the same 3 seconds. However, no essential oils were used during the recovery time, and it took 3 days for his frequency to return to its initial 66 MHz. One surprising aspect of this study measured the influence that thoughts have on the body's electrical frequency.

Me, I usually vibrate faster after drinking coffee, especially given that I'm from Louisiana, where they don't consider it real coffee unless it's so strong you can stand a spoon upright in it.  I periodically have to replace my coffee mug because the coffee I make has eaten through the ceramic.

But I digress.

So what, then, is the "bioelectric frequency" of various familiar items?  I'm sure you wanted to know, and lo, they provide you with a handy chart:

Fundamental Frequencies of People and Things
(frequencies given in Megahertz)

• Healthy Human Brain...........................................................71-90
• Healthy Human Body (overall).............................................62-68
  • When you have cold symptoms........................................58
  • When you have flu symptoms...........................................57
  • When you have candida infection.....................................55
  • When you have Epstein Barr Syndrome...........................52
  • When you have cancer......................................................42
  • When one begins to die.....................................................25
• Processed or Canned Foods...........................................................0
• Fresh Produce (depending on how fresh)................................10-15
• Dry Herbs................................................................................12-22
• Fresh Herbs.............................................................................20-27
• Therapeutic Grade Essential Oils......................................52-320

So let's see -- canned tuna isn't vibrating at all, and infections of various sorts make you vibrate slower until finally you die when you reach 25 megahertz.  Presumably after you die you continue to decrease in vibration until you reach the canned-tuna stage.

And last, we find out two important things: (1) if you pray over your aromatherapy oils, they vibrate faster; and (2) exposing the body to the highest frequencies causes "spiritual changes."  Thus, I suppose irradiating yourself with gamma rays would just make you experience all sorts of spiritual growth, or possibly just turn you into The Incredible Hulk.  Which, now that I come to think of it, is a spiritual change of a rather impressive magnitude.

So once again, we have some people making unsubstantiated health claims that could potentially convince someone with a life-threatening disease to abandon conventional therapy for sitting around inhaling rose oil.  And despite the disclaimer at the bottom of the page -- "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.  These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease," it sounds like that is exactly what they are suggesting.  And when you read the bit that comes immediately before the disclaimer, it becomes even clearer:

The penetrating characteristic of essential oils greatly enhances their ability to be effective. Essential oils will penetrate into the body when applied to the skin. Placed on the foot they will be distributed to every cell in the body in 21 minutes. They will even penetrate a finger or toe nail to treat fungus underneath.

Essential oils stay in the body about 20 minutes to 2 hours and leave no residuals. The effects and frequency are accumulative when the mental attitude changes. We must have a desire to change and work on it or the old programming will keep coming back. Oils are a precursor to set up stage for action and a catalyst to do the work (the blood stream). Oils go where the need is present and are activated in that area. Testing on the thyroid, heart and pancreas showed that the oils reached these organs in 3 seconds! When layered, one oil applied over another, it is faster. The body absorbs the oils fastest by inhalation and second fastest by applying to the feet or ears. The oils also cross the blood brain barrier; they piggy-back the energy waves to get into the cells.

All the essential oils deliver cell wall penetrating oxygen, and it is the unhealthy cells that need the oxygen for the road back to health. When the cell wall thickens, oxygen can’t get in – life expectancy of a cell is 120 days to 4 months). Cells divide making 2 duplicate cells, and if it is diseased, it will make 2 new diseased cells. When we stop the mutation of the cells and create healthy cells, we stop the disease. Therapeutic grade essential oils can restore cells to normal in 7 seconds.

Do not wait until you have the “right” essential oil before administering to a symptom. You cannot be doing it wrong if you use any of the oils for any symptom! When an oil causes discomfort, it is because it is pulling toxins, chemical, heavy metals, poisons, parasites and mucus from the system. Either stop taking the oils for a short time to make sure your body isn’t eliminating too fast or dilute the oils with V-6 Mixing Oil until the body catches up with the releasing. These toxins go back into the system if they cannot be released. If a person does not like the smell of an oil, it is usually because of an acidic condition.

How is this not a claim to "diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent disease?"

Once again, I think the thing we need to cure first here is ignorance of biological science.  Given a basic background in biology -- I mean, come on, the sophomores in my Introductory Biology class could debunk this stuff -- anyone would be able to recognize the falsity of these claims.  And we wouldn't have to get the FDA involved, because no one would buy the "essential oils" unless they wanted to use them for the one purpose they have -- to make your house smell better.

Anecdotal evidence and restless coffins

As a kid, I loved scary stories.  Still do, really.  And one of the tales I remember reading in one of those books with names like True Tales of Terror was the famous story of the moving coffins of Barbados.

You might well have heard this one yourself, as it's made the rounds, and is often used to support the contention that Spirits and Mysterious Forces of the Supernatural actually exist.  Here's an abbreviated version; if you'd like to find out more, a little digging will turn up a more detailed, and undoubtedly scarier, description of the alleged facts of the case.

The Chase family of Barbados were wealthy plantation owners, and had a family vault carved out of stone in the churchyard of Christ Church Parish, in the town of Oistins.  The first person whose body was placed in the vault was a Mrs. Thomasina Goddard, in 1807.  Two-year-old Mary Ann Chase was laid to rest there in 1812, and her older sister Dorcas Chase in 1814.  A few weeks later, Dorcas and Mary Ann's father, Thomas Chase, died, and when the vault was opened to receive his coffin, the three coffins that had already been interred there were found moved -- none were in their original places.  The three coffins were put back where they should have been, and the Chase family patriarch's coffin added.  The family suspected that the disarray had been caused by an attempted grave robbery, and to foil further attacks they had a large stone cemented across the opening.

The Chase Vault, Christ Church Parish, Oistins, Barbados

When it was reopened four years later for the burial of eleven-year-old Charles Brewster Ames, the coffins were again found moved, even though the stone and its cement binding were undisturbed.  Even Thomas Chase's heavy, lead-lined coffin was out of place.  Fifty-two days later, it was again reopened for the burial of Samuel Brewster, and once again the coffins were in disarray, including one of them standing against the wall head-downward.

By this time, the story was becoming a well-known mystery across the island, and when it was opened again in 1819, and again found in a state of chaos, the governor of the island, Lord Combermere, ordered an investigation.  A layer of fine sand was spread on the floor of the vault, and the opening was sealed again, an insignia of the governor's pressed into the wet cement to prevent any trickery.  The governor ordered the vault reopened in 1820 -- and again, the same result.  The coffins were moved -- but the sand, and the seal, were undisturbed.

The governor ordered the coffins reburied elsewhere, which was promptly done.  The vault was abandoned, but is still in existence, and many people visit it yearly to see the site of such a chilling legend.

Now, of course, the first question for a skeptic is: what is the quality of the evidence?

The fact is: not very high.  The originator of the tale seems to be Reverend Thomas Orderson, Rector of Christ Church, who claimed to have been there at the various openings of the vault.  The problem is, the sources of the time, based on Orderson's recollections, all vary in their details -- the one I presented above is the one that has appeared in most recent publications.  But the earliest versions, such as the one that appeared in James Edward Alexander's Transatlantic Sketches in 1833, and other recountings of the story that were published in 1844 and 1860, disagree with each other considerably.

Add that to the fact that folklorist Andrew Lang went to Barbados, and combed through the registers of Christ Church Parish for anything that could substantiate the information contained in the story -- and found nothing.  Not even the newspapers of the time, which certainly would have published such a sensational story, had a hint of the wild goings on in the Chase vault.

Much has been said about the possible causes of the "restless coffins" incident -- seepage of water into the vault, earthquakes, and the more outlandish answers of vengeful ghosts, voodoo, or evil curses.  But in order even to have a need for an explanation, we have to establish first that there is something to explain -- and in the case of the Barbados coffins, it seems likely that the whole thing was spun from whole cloth, probably by Reverend Orderson himself.

Psychics and ghost-hunters often get impatient with skeptics for their tendency to turn a wry eye on anecdotal evidence, but the fact is, eyewitness accounts and recollections of events are notoriously unreliable.  Odd, isn't it, that eyewitness testimony is considered the highest level of reliability in a court of law, when in science, it's usually considered one of the lowest?  It is simply too easy to fool the human perceptual apparatus, to twist memory or engender memories that are entirely false, and (not to put too fine a point on it) to lie outright.  It may be that juries take eyewitnesses seriously, but in science, we need more than just someone saying, "I saw it happen myself, I remember it clearly."

A slice of pi

Sometimes you have to admire the woo-woos' dogged determination to fashion the universe into their own bizarre version of reality.

Most of us, I'd like to think, just see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe, and don't make such a big deal out of it.  If we want to believe in a Higher Power That Guides Everything, we do, and don't spend endless hours crafting abstruse proofs of the conjecture.  We're content to have a beer, watch a hockey game, and let god have some much-needed quiet time.

There are a few people, however, who just aren't content if they're not actively beating the matter into submission.  Such a person is Marty Leeds, Wisconsin-born writer, mystic, philosopher, and the origin of dozens of highly entertaining YouTube videos.

Just yesterday, I was sent a link to one of Leeds' creations, entitled, "The Holy Spirit, Pi, and the English Alphabet."  The link was accompanied by a message stating, and I quote: "Words cannot describe the level of derp in this video."  So of course I had to watch it.  And I wasn't disappointed.

If you're unwilling to sacrifice ten minutes of your precious time, and countless innocent cells in your prefrontal cortex that will die in agony, allow me to present to you the main points of Leeds' argument.

1)  There's this thing called gematria that was made up a while back by some Hebrew mystics who had overactive imaginations and too much free time.  The idea behind gematria is that each letter in the alphabet (whether Hebrew, English, or other) is assigned a number, and when you add up the numbers for a word or name, you get a number that "means something."

2)  You get to decide what the numbers mean.

3)  If two words add up to the same thing, they are mystically linked.  Leeds uses a form of gematria which takes the English alphabet, splits it into two lists of thirteen letters each (A-M, and N-Z), and numbers each list from 1 through 7 and then back down to 1.  So my first name, Gordon, would be 7+2+5+4+2+1 = 21.  "Sharp" is 6+6+1+5+3, which also adds up to 21.  So you can see that thus far, we have a pretty persuasive theory here.

4)  Leeds then does a gematria addition for four words or phrases.  We have "man" = 3, "woman" = 9, "Christian" = 39, and "The Holy Spirit" = 61.  Note that he had to add a "the" to the last one to make it work out the way he wanted.

5)  So, let's look at the first thirteen digits of pi.  He picked thirteen because we had split the alphabet into two groups of thirteen letters each, which seems like impeccable logic to me, given the obvious connection between pi and the English alphabet.  So, we have 3.141592653589.  It starts with 3 and ends with 9 -- giving you "39."  So right away, we can see that there's something wonderfully Christian about pi, not to mention having a man on one end and a woman on the other.  Also, 3+9 = 12, and 3x9 = 27, and 12+27 = 39.  So you get your 3 and 9 back, so "man + woman" + "man x woman" = "Christian."  Or something like that.

6)  Take the middle number in the sequence (2) and the two on either side (9 and 6).  Why?  Because tridents, that's why.  Stop asking questions.

7)  If you multiply 9x2x6, you get 108, which is a very holy and important number.  Myself, I just thought it was the most convenient way of getting from 107 to 109, but what do I know?  But the Hindus liked the number 108, and plus, it's the number of stitches on a baseball, so there you are.

8)  Now, take the remaining digits of pi, and basically draw a menorah under them.  You then put them together in pairs, flip 'em around, and add 'em together.  I really don't want to go into all of how he does that, because my cortical neurons are already whimpering for mercy, so you'll just have to either watch the video or else just accept on faith that somehow all of the numbers and flipped numbers and all add up to 352.  Then, you add that to the 2 and 6 from the trident bit, and you get 360, which is the number of degrees in a circle.  Get it?  Circle?  Pi?  Are you blown away?  (Okay, he left out the 9.  But still.)

9)  If you multiply the first through eighth digits of pi, you get 6,480.  If you multiply the eighth through the thirteenth digits, you get 32,400.  Subtract them, and you get 25,920, which he says is the number of years for the precession of the Earth's axis to complete one rotation.  Except that according to the Cornell University Astronomy Department's webpage on the precession of the Earth's axis, the length of the precession of the Earth is said to be "about 26,000 years" -- the imprecision being because a motion that slow is almost impossible to measure accurately.  But I think we call all agree that since we're using gematria as our jumping-off point, being off by eighty years or so is plenty accurate enough.

10)  Of course, like any good performer, he saves his most amazing bit for the end, wherein we find out that the first thirteen digits of pi add up to 61, which you will recall is the number of "The Holy Spirit."  So pi "encodes" (his word) The Holy Spirit and the precession of the equinoxes.

11)  Therefore god.  Q.E.D.


Well, I  hope you've enjoyed our little ramble through woo-woo arithmetic.  Me, I'm planning on watching some of Leeds' other videos when I have the time (two especially fascinating-sounding ones are "The Isis and Osiris Myth" and "The Holy 108").  However, I think next time I won't launch into this without something to insulate my poor brain against further damage.  I'm thinking that a double scotch might do the trick.

Menu planning by blood type

A few months ago, I wrote about the silly idea that in order to have a happy love life, you need to consider the compatibility of your blood type with that of your prospective romantic interest.  Additionally, your blood type predicts your personality, and what career your should pursue.  My general response:  "As if astrology wasn't ridiculous enough."  (Read my post about it here.) 

Now, to make matters worse, a major magazine has published an article that suggests that your blood type determines what you should eat for dinner.

Last month's issue of Men's Fitness had a piece, in amongst the usual fare featuring weight-lifting tips, bullet points about how to drive your woman crazy in bed, and photographs of shirtless guys with washboard abs, entitled "Eat According to Your Blood Type."  In the introduction to the article, the author, Lauren Passell, writes:

You feel like you’re doing everything right, health-wise. You eat salmon and quinoa, you exercise regularly, you even take the stairs. But if you're still plagued by midday lethargy, digestion issues or just can't lose weight, you might want to take something unorthodox into consideration—your blood type.

According to Dr. Peter J. D’Adamo, author of Eat Right 4 Your Type, whether you’re an A, B, AB or O, your blood type reveals eye-opening things about your personality and your body's needs. Here's what Dr. D'Adamo says about what foods and workouts will help you reach your blood type's fitness goals.

Myself, I think my midday lethargy has nothing to do with my blood type, but more to do with the fact that my dog likes to wake me up at three in the morning because he has an urgent need to play tug-of-war.  But let's see more of what D'Adamo has to say.

Type Os, he claims, are "descended from hunter-gatherers who relied mainly on animal protein to survive their strenuous lifestyles."  He also says that Type O is the "original blood type."

Well, right away, this sent up a couple of red flags.  Aren't we all descended from hunter-gatherers?  It's not like some of us come from proto-hominids in Africa, and others of us come from fruit bats.  And the thing about Type O being the "original blood type" is simply wrong.  The gene that codes for Type O blood is actually a mutated version of the Type A allele -- it has a single-base loss (frameshift mutation) that turns one of the functional codons into a stop code, causing the premature shutoff of translation of the gene and preventing the creation of a functional A antigen.  (The O allele, therefore, produces no functional gene product -- which is why it's recessive.)  The A allele is pretty clearly the oldest of the three ABO blood group alleles.

So this leads us to one important conclusion, to wit: don't make silly claims about genetics, because someone who actually knows something about genetics will call you out on it.

Let's move on, though, because I'm sure you other blood types will want to know what to plan for dinner.

Type As, D'Adamo says, gained the upper hand when agriculture was invented and the "hunter-gatherer Os started thinning out."  If you're Type A, you "have the digestive enzymes and bacteria it takes to digest grains and plants that other blood types might have a rough time breaking down."  Type As should limit red meat and fill their plates with vegetables; the best meal for a Type A is "tofu-pesto lasagna."  Type As also tend to have digestive upsets because they're "Type A personalities."  (I want you to appreciate how hard it was for me to write that last sentence without doing a faceplant directly into my keyboard.)

 Type Bs, on the other hand, "emerged when type Os moved to the Himalayas as nomads, domesticating animals and living on meat and dairy."  He did get one thing right, here, in the manner of a monkey pounding on a typewriter and eventually spelling out a real word; Type B blood has its peak frequency in India.  Otherwise, however, he's pretty much batting zero, because he says that Type Bs need lots of dairy products "because of a sugar present in milk," conveniently ignoring the fact that Type B is very common in East Asia, where the vast majority of people are also genetically lactose intolerant.

Oops.

Type ABs, "the newest blood type," combine the characteristics of A and B (no surprise).  Their "low stomach acid" makes them "store meat as fat," so they need to eat lots of eggs.    I swear, I didn't make that claim up.  Go to the article, which I've linked above, if you don't believe me.

What appalls me most about this is not that D'Adamo wrote a book.  In these days of e-publishing, any yahoo with a computer can write a book.  (Note my links on the right side of the page.)  What bothers me is that a major magazine actually published this article, never once asking the critical question, "What is your evidence for all of this?"  (Not to mention the more important question, "Where did you get your medical degree?  Online Diplomas 'R' Us?")  The problem is, a lot of people don't think of questioning something that is written by a guy with "Dr." in front of his name, especially those of us who don't have a great background in science.  After all, the target readership of Men's Fitness is not scientists; it's just guys who would like to tone up and slim down (and drive their women crazy in bed).  So I'm sure after this issue came out, you had loads of very earnest guys going through their fridges and making sure that their food was in line with their blood type, instead of doing the simple thing that all of us should do, which is to eat a balanced diet and get plenty of exercise.  But of course, "eat a balanced diet and get plenty of exercise" isn't the kind of advice that sells books, or lands your ideas a national forum in a men's health magazine.

So, the bottom line; D'Adamo's claims are total horse waste.  Myself, I'm glad, because I'm a Type A, and I'll be damned if I'm going to give up my t-bone steaks for "tofu-pesto lasagna."

Comas, the afterlife, and absolute proof

Just yesterday, I was telling my Critical Thinking class to be cautious whenever an argument includes, in its conclusion, the word "only."  A set of premises that is followed up by, "... and the only possible conclusion that can be drawn from this is..." is,  in my opinion, automatically suspect.  Even given the truth of the premises, is that really the only possible conclusion?  There isn't any other explanation that adequately fits what is known?

All of this is germane to a story that has been making the rounds of Christian and atheist websites, and has even hit mainstream media, which makes a fascinating claim -- that a doctor's experience of visions during a coma proves the existence of an afterlife.  The fullest accounts are to be had in Newsweek and in an online version over at The Daily Beast -- the latter article, called "Proof of Heaven: A Doctor's Experience With the Afterlife," details the experiences of Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon who contracted bacterial meningitis and was plunged into a coma that lasted seven days.  During those seven days, Alexander experienced a profound set of visions:

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

In that "larger dimension," Alexander experienced seeing flocks of "transparent, shimmering beings,"  felt a wind that was "like a divine breeze," and had a conversation with an angelic female being who, amongst other things, told him that he was loved and cherished, that he had nothing to fear, and that he could do nothing wrong.

From his experiences, Alexander says, there can only be one possible conclusion:

Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself.

But I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all: truth.

Okay, I will accept that this is one possible conclusion; but is it the only possible conclusion?

The commonalities between many Near-Death Experiences -- the tunnel of white light, the experience of being surrounded by love, the meetings with deceased friends and relatives -- might have as an explanation that there is an afterlife, where we are being eagerly awaited by those who loved us, and hosts of angels will sing at our arrival.  It might, of course, only be what some neurologists believe -- the common sensory experience of neural shutdown as our brains run out of oxygen.  It has been noted that many times NDEs are populated with experiences that follow the lines of what we expected to happen -- Christians, for example, tend to fill their NDEs with Christian imagery, Hindus with Hindu imagery, and so on.  This by itself makes me wonder.  (For the best exposition of the discrepancies and cultural dependency of NDEs I've come across, see this site.  It brings up a lot of questions that are hard to answer if you believe that NDEs are actually visions of an afterlife.)

Of course, my thoughts are also colored on this topic by the fact that a dear friend of mine, who is (like me) a devout atheist, spent not seven days but a full month in a deep coma following a botched surgery.  Alex has only just begun, after three years, to share with his friends what he experienced in that month during which he was effectively shut down, but the little has told me is mindboggling.  He had visions, he said, of whole other lives, spent years that somehow were collapsed into the space of less than a month.  He visited places he's never been, had relationships with people he's never met. 

Was all of this stuff that Alex experienced real?  I would never presume to answer this myself, having never experienced anything remotely similar; and I think that Alex himself is still struggling to settle on an answer in his own mind.  I think, however, that it is both premature and presumptuous to use the word only in any conclusion we draw from what we now know about NDEs, coma visions, and out-of-body experiences.  Could they be experiences of an afterlife, or at least a life beyond what we see?  It's possible.  Myself, I'd be thrilled at the prospect; I'm not fond of the idea of checking out, and if I knew that there was a happy world waiting for me filled with divine breezes and beautiful angelic women, no one would be happier than me.  Could these experiences be only byproducts of our dying brains, a byproduct of the flurry of electrical activity that occurs as our neurons run out of oxygen?  It's possible.  At the moment, I just don't see that there's enough evidence to decide either way.

Eben Alexander, whose memoir Proof of Heaven is soon to be released by Simon & Schuster, is absolutely convinced by what he saw and heard while he was in a coma.  For the rest of us, who have not shared his experiences, the fact of the matter is that we'll just have to wait until the end... and see what happens.