Following on the heels of yesterday's post about Dr. Melba Ketchum and the maybe-perhaps-sort-of confirmation of Sasquatch DNA from a hair sample, we now have a story wherein the Brits (not to be outdone by a bunch of upstart Americans) are claiming their own Bigfoot-clone. [Source]
Nicknamed "The Beast of Tunbridge Wells," this cryptid is described as an eight-foot-tall beast, human-shaped but covered with hair, with "long arms" and "demonic red eyes." Some locals are afraid to go outside at night because there have been so many sightings in the past six months; but the story claims that the thing has been seen for seventy or more years, and describe a sighting that occurred in 1942 and was told to a "man named Graham S."
Well, far be it from me to doubt any anecdotal reports from "a man named Graham S.," but let me just interject a bit of a science lesson that may raise some questions in your mind.
There's a concept in ecology called "minimum viable population." This is the number of organisms needed in a population to assure that (assuming nothing changes) the birth rate equals or exceeds the death rate. It is quite difficult to estimate, and depends on a great many factors, including the number of offspring per mating, mortality in the young, dependency on available resources, size of the territory, and so on. To give two extreme examples that will illustrate this: the MVP for mosquitoes is probably pretty damn close to two, as long as one was male and one was female, and they were near enough to find each other and had a source of food and water. Mosquitoes can produce so many young from one mating that it's likely you could rebuild a sizable population in short order from those two survivors. Elephants, on the other hand, reproduce very slowly, and the young are slow to reach sexual maturity; in order to have a population large enough for the birth rate to equal or exceed the death rate (from natural causes, predators, poaching, and so on), you would need hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals in the population.
Get it? Now, let's consider how many Britsquatches we'd need to have a viable, sustainable population.
To get a handle on this, I referred to the paper "Estimates of Minimum Viable Population Sizes for Vertebrates and Factors Influencing Those Estimates," by David Reed, Julian O'Grady, Barry Brook, Jonathan Ballou, and Richard Frankham, which appeared in the Journal of Biological Conservation in 2003. The paper is lucidly written but relies on some rather specialized models and technical mathematics; if you want to give it a go, you can access it here. The main thing of interest for our purposes is in the Appendix, wherein Reed et al. use their techniques to make an upper and lower bound estimate for MVP; the lower bound is just using raw birth and death rates, the upper bound generated from a mathematical formula that estimates the number of individuals required to give a 99% likelihood of the population sustaining for forty generations. Interestingly, there is a large primate species listed -- the Mountain Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla beringei). And Reed et al. place the lower bound for MVP for the Mountain Gorilla at 849, and the upper bound at somewhat over 11,000 individuals.
So assuming the Tunbridge Britsquatch (Sasquatchius anglicus kentei) has a similar MVP, and has been wandering about the highways and byways of southeastern England since time immemorial (or at least since 1942), you can't just claim that there are two, or four, or even a dozen of them... you have to believe that there are thousands.
Maybe some of my readers live in southeastern England, and might be able to explain how there could be a thousand (or more) eight-foot-tall hairy hominids hiding out down there, doing all the things animals do -- feeding (and an animal that size would need a lot of food), making noise, sleeping, mating, dying, and so on -- and they've only been seen a handful of times near Tunbridge Wells. That such a thing could happen in the trackless woods of the Pacific Northwest, or the icy reaches of the Himalayas, I might be able to believe.
But Kent? Really?
I'm sorry, but this just sounds preposterous to me. As much as I'd love to see some cryptid discovered, and confirmed by science, I'm betting this won't be the one. In fact, I think what we should be doing is looking for some prankster in Tunbridge Wells with a gorilla suit.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Monday, November 26, 2012
Bigfoot exists!... or, how science is not done
Well, the cryptozoological world has been buzzing the last few days about a press release from (in)famous Dr. Melba Ketchum, who has announced that her team has proven that DNA from a hair sample is from a non-human hominin species:
This is, perhaps, the biggest misunderstanding about science on the part of the general public. People have this sense that scientists go out and make discoveries, write them up, and the next thing you know, it's all over the "Science" section of Time magazine. In fact, the first thing that should happen is peer review -- the data, methodology, and conclusions should be spread out for others in the field to take their best shots at. Were the techniques used appropriate to the study? Does the data unambiguously support the conclusion, or is there another conclusion (or more than one) that could be drawn? Were reasonable controls in place to guard against bias, false positives, or sample contamination?
At that point, assuming that all went well with the peer review process, you trumpet your results to the public. But not before. In fact, that's been the problem all along with this study; hints and allegations were being made almost a year ago that the team had found something amazing, but the hard facts -- the actual data -- were shrouded in secrecy. Months went by, and all we got were further teasers. The whole thing was handled so as to maximize public hype -- rather like the whole kerfuffle over the "Baltic Sea Anomaly" (and notice how we haven't heard anything more about this non-story?).
Now, I'm not saying they haven't discovered anything; Melba Ketchum is a geneticist of excellent credentials, apparently, and it's hard to fathom why a reputable scientist would risk her career if there wasn't something real here. (Although I am, reluctantly, reminded of the debacle over "cold fusion" that was handled in much the same way -- and the resultant irreparable damage done to the reputations of the two physicists responsible, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.) What I am saying is that what has been released thus far isn't going to convince anyone who holds support of scientific discoveries to any usual standard of rigor. So, predictably, the main ones who are greeting this press release with joyous shouts of acclamation are the ones who already believed Bigfoot was real before the study was even done. Most of the rest of us are still sitting here, saying, "Okay, Dr. Ketchum, that's nice. Now show us the goods."
This will, of course, earn more criticism for scientists and skeptics as being "closed-minded." Actually, closed-minded is exactly what we're not; we haven't made our minds up at all, not until we've seen how the conclusions were reached, and whether the data support them. It is to be hoped that Dr. Ketchum et al. will release more of their results into the peer-review system soon -- because until then, I'm afraid the response on the part of the rest of the scientific world will be lukewarm at best.
Our study has sequenced 20 whole mitochondrial genomes and utilized next generation sequencing to obtain 3 whole nuclear genomes from purported Sasquatch samples. The genome sequencing shows that Sasquatch mtDNA is identical to modern Homo sapiens, but Sasquatch nuDNA is a novel, unknown hominin related to Homo sapiens and other primate species. Our data indicate that the North American Sasquatch is a hybrid species, the result of males of an unknown hominin species crossing with female Homo sapiens.Well, that's just fine and dandy, but it's not really going to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced. Because this, unfortunately, is not how good science is published.
Hominins are members of the taxonomic grouping Hominini, which includes all members of the genus Homo. Genetic testing has already ruled out Homo neanderthalis and the Denisova hominin as contributors to Sasquatch mtDNA or nuDNA. The male progenitor that contributed the unknown sequence to this hybrid is unique as its DNA is more distantly removed from humans than other recently discovered hominins like the Denisovan individual.
Sasquatch nuclear DNA is incredibly novel and not at all what we had expected. While it has human nuclear DNA within its genome, there are also distinctly non-human, non-archaic hominin, and non-ape sequences. We describe it as a mosaic of human and novel non-human sequence. Further study is needed and is ongoing to better characterize and understand Sasquatch nuclear DNA.
This is, perhaps, the biggest misunderstanding about science on the part of the general public. People have this sense that scientists go out and make discoveries, write them up, and the next thing you know, it's all over the "Science" section of Time magazine. In fact, the first thing that should happen is peer review -- the data, methodology, and conclusions should be spread out for others in the field to take their best shots at. Were the techniques used appropriate to the study? Does the data unambiguously support the conclusion, or is there another conclusion (or more than one) that could be drawn? Were reasonable controls in place to guard against bias, false positives, or sample contamination?
At that point, assuming that all went well with the peer review process, you trumpet your results to the public. But not before. In fact, that's been the problem all along with this study; hints and allegations were being made almost a year ago that the team had found something amazing, but the hard facts -- the actual data -- were shrouded in secrecy. Months went by, and all we got were further teasers. The whole thing was handled so as to maximize public hype -- rather like the whole kerfuffle over the "Baltic Sea Anomaly" (and notice how we haven't heard anything more about this non-story?).
Now, I'm not saying they haven't discovered anything; Melba Ketchum is a geneticist of excellent credentials, apparently, and it's hard to fathom why a reputable scientist would risk her career if there wasn't something real here. (Although I am, reluctantly, reminded of the debacle over "cold fusion" that was handled in much the same way -- and the resultant irreparable damage done to the reputations of the two physicists responsible, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.) What I am saying is that what has been released thus far isn't going to convince anyone who holds support of scientific discoveries to any usual standard of rigor. So, predictably, the main ones who are greeting this press release with joyous shouts of acclamation are the ones who already believed Bigfoot was real before the study was even done. Most of the rest of us are still sitting here, saying, "Okay, Dr. Ketchum, that's nice. Now show us the goods."
This will, of course, earn more criticism for scientists and skeptics as being "closed-minded." Actually, closed-minded is exactly what we're not; we haven't made our minds up at all, not until we've seen how the conclusions were reached, and whether the data support them. It is to be hoped that Dr. Ketchum et al. will release more of their results into the peer-review system soon -- because until then, I'm afraid the response on the part of the rest of the scientific world will be lukewarm at best.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Franklin Graham, Islamic fundamentalists, and acting as God's mouthpiece
One of the (many) things I find mystifying about the very religious is their tendency to think that God agrees with them.
Not, mind you, that they agree with God. Once you've accepted that some deity's dictum is your ultimate guide to life (whether it be the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, or whatever), it isn't strange at all that you would then follow the rules to the best of your ability. So although I do wonder what could lead anyone to accept that a self-contradictory text that was pretty clearly written by people is the infallible, literal word of God, I see how (once you've done that) it becomes unassailable.
What is more curious is how many of the same people who think that God has spoken to humanity through a revelatory book then make the further leap that any other thing they believe must be God's opinion, too. I've commented before on the wild meanderings of Pat Robertson, who (for example) decided that the people of Haiti were sent the devastating earthquake of 2010 because of their history of practicing voodoo. The upshot of most of Reverend Pat's pronouncements is that God has decided opinions on what should be done about the wickedness of the world, and coincidentally, those agree exactly with what Reverend Pat himself would do, if he were God.
The latest in this long line of people who seem to feel like their whims must be God's whims as well is Franklin Graham, son of the iconic evangelical leader Reverend Billy Graham. Now, while I don't agree much with Billy Graham's philosophical and political positions, I've always thought he was a good man, who tempered his religious fervor with a genuine love for humanity and a sense that he should follow Jesus' command to render unto God what is God's and render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Billy's son Franklin, however, doesn't seem to be restrained by any such understanding, as was evidenced by a recent interview he granted to Newsmax.com, and which was summarized here.
"In the last four years, we have begun to turn our backs on God," Graham said, in an obvious shot at the Obama adminsitration. "We have taken God out of our education system. We have taken him out of government. You have lawyers that sue you every time you mention the name of Jesus Christ in any kind of a public forum." He went on to say, in a remarkable echo of Reverend Pat, that because of all of this God will visit upon America "a complete economic collapse" in order to bring us back to the "path to godliness."
I very much get the impression here that all of the fire-and-brimstone he's putting into God's mouth, and his prediction that God will smite the American economy with his Mighty Fist to teach us a valuable lesson, is not something he's abstracted from reading the Bible, but is what Franklin Graham would like to see happen because of his own particular bent toward Christian fundamentalism and political conservatism. It's peculiar to observe someone who has so identified himself with the holy writ that he feels that he has the duty to pronounce God's word to the people -- as if he had become the mouthpiece of the deity, as if every word he said must be God's opinion as well.
This is a completely baffling stance to me, and I say that not only because I'm a secular atheist, but because I know how often I get things wrong. I am far from infallible -- there are (many) topics about which I am partially or totally ignorant, I think illogically sometimes, I come to false conclusions. Human minds only take you so far; our task, as far as I can see, is to hone and train our brains insofar as is possible, and always remember that we might not be seeing the picture correctly. But what if you felt like you had, for one reason or another, a direct pipeline to the mind of God? You would no longer doubt anything that came into your brain; surely God put it there, right? You would lose that sense of perspective that keeps us all moving forward in our understanding of how the world actually works; and you would, scarily, have an instant justification for any action you took, any words you uttered. Franklin Graham, I think, has crossed that line -- and that puts him in the same category as the British Islamists who just yesterday announced a fatwa against Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai. [Source]
I find the whole thing bizarre and frightening. That anyone can stand up in a public forum, and say, "I know what God wants," without the entire audience simultaneously shouting, "How the hell do you know what God wants?" is deeply puzzling to me. But, oddly, that does not seem to be a very common reaction. Many people, for some reason, want a figure to act as God's spokesperson, and the question, "But what if he's got it wrong?" never seems to occur to them.
Not, mind you, that they agree with God. Once you've accepted that some deity's dictum is your ultimate guide to life (whether it be the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, or whatever), it isn't strange at all that you would then follow the rules to the best of your ability. So although I do wonder what could lead anyone to accept that a self-contradictory text that was pretty clearly written by people is the infallible, literal word of God, I see how (once you've done that) it becomes unassailable.
What is more curious is how many of the same people who think that God has spoken to humanity through a revelatory book then make the further leap that any other thing they believe must be God's opinion, too. I've commented before on the wild meanderings of Pat Robertson, who (for example) decided that the people of Haiti were sent the devastating earthquake of 2010 because of their history of practicing voodoo. The upshot of most of Reverend Pat's pronouncements is that God has decided opinions on what should be done about the wickedness of the world, and coincidentally, those agree exactly with what Reverend Pat himself would do, if he were God.
The latest in this long line of people who seem to feel like their whims must be God's whims as well is Franklin Graham, son of the iconic evangelical leader Reverend Billy Graham. Now, while I don't agree much with Billy Graham's philosophical and political positions, I've always thought he was a good man, who tempered his religious fervor with a genuine love for humanity and a sense that he should follow Jesus' command to render unto God what is God's and render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Billy's son Franklin, however, doesn't seem to be restrained by any such understanding, as was evidenced by a recent interview he granted to Newsmax.com, and which was summarized here.
"In the last four years, we have begun to turn our backs on God," Graham said, in an obvious shot at the Obama adminsitration. "We have taken God out of our education system. We have taken him out of government. You have lawyers that sue you every time you mention the name of Jesus Christ in any kind of a public forum." He went on to say, in a remarkable echo of Reverend Pat, that because of all of this God will visit upon America "a complete economic collapse" in order to bring us back to the "path to godliness."
I very much get the impression here that all of the fire-and-brimstone he's putting into God's mouth, and his prediction that God will smite the American economy with his Mighty Fist to teach us a valuable lesson, is not something he's abstracted from reading the Bible, but is what Franklin Graham would like to see happen because of his own particular bent toward Christian fundamentalism and political conservatism. It's peculiar to observe someone who has so identified himself with the holy writ that he feels that he has the duty to pronounce God's word to the people -- as if he had become the mouthpiece of the deity, as if every word he said must be God's opinion as well.
This is a completely baffling stance to me, and I say that not only because I'm a secular atheist, but because I know how often I get things wrong. I am far from infallible -- there are (many) topics about which I am partially or totally ignorant, I think illogically sometimes, I come to false conclusions. Human minds only take you so far; our task, as far as I can see, is to hone and train our brains insofar as is possible, and always remember that we might not be seeing the picture correctly. But what if you felt like you had, for one reason or another, a direct pipeline to the mind of God? You would no longer doubt anything that came into your brain; surely God put it there, right? You would lose that sense of perspective that keeps us all moving forward in our understanding of how the world actually works; and you would, scarily, have an instant justification for any action you took, any words you uttered. Franklin Graham, I think, has crossed that line -- and that puts him in the same category as the British Islamists who just yesterday announced a fatwa against Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai. [Source]
I find the whole thing bizarre and frightening. That anyone can stand up in a public forum, and say, "I know what God wants," without the entire audience simultaneously shouting, "How the hell do you know what God wants?" is deeply puzzling to me. But, oddly, that does not seem to be a very common reaction. Many people, for some reason, want a figure to act as God's spokesperson, and the question, "But what if he's got it wrong?" never seems to occur to them.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Neuroimaging the brains of psychics
A fascinating study has just been published by scientists working at the University of Pennsylvania. The methodology and results are described in this article, released last Friday, entitled "Neuroimaging During Trance State: A Contribution to the Study of Dissociation," but the gist is that that the team involved, headed by Julio Fernando Peres, has done PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans of alleged mediums who claimed to be in touch with the spirits of the dead.
These particular mediums say that they can perform psychography, which is when the spirit of a deceased person is working through the medium's body, controlling his/her hand to produce written text. Now, neuroscientists understand fairly well what is happening in the brain when a person speaks or writes; in particular, when someone writes complex text, several areas of the brain (including the left culmen, left hippocampus, left inferior occipital gyrus, left anterior cingulate, right superior temporal gyrus and right precentral gyrus) show higher levels of activity. The researchers compared the mediums' levels of brain activity when producing text in the ordinary fashion (i.e., when they claimed they were not being guided by a spirit, and were fully conscious and fully themselves) and when they were in a trance state. And when they were in a trance state, all of them showed consistently lowered activity in all of the brain areas that are typically higher during writing. Peres et al. state, "The fact that subjects produced complex content in a trance dissociative state suggests they were not merely relaxed, and relaxation seems an unlikely explanation for the underactivation of brain areas specifically related to the cognitive processing being carried out. This finding deserves further investigation both in terms of replication and explanatory hypotheses."
It's an interesting finding. The response of psychics to this article thus far can be summed up as, "Ha. We told you." And indeed, this result is exactly what you'd suspect if what the mediums claim is true -- that their hand was no longer under the sole control of their own brains, that someone else had taken over and was guiding their motions.
I am, however, not convinced that this is the only explanation, and I was glad to see that the authors weren't quite so eager to jump on the bandwagon -- their final statement that "this finding deserves further investigation... in terms of... explanatory hypotheses" is precisely right. We cannot rule out that there is control by a spirit; that hypothesis is consistent with the results. But before saying that this constitutes proof of psychic mediumship, other possible explanations must be ruled out.
I have to say, though, that these folks are going about this research in exactly the right way. If psychic phenomena of any kind exist, they should be testable, verifiable, and replicable under controlled conditions. The fact that these alleged mediums are showing anomalous brain activity is certainly suggestive that something worth studying is going on here -- and I hope that Peres et al. or other researchers in the field will pick up this study and run with it. If the results hold, we may be looking at the first step toward hard evidence for the existence of a spiritual realm, which would be an absolutely stunning result (although I have to say that if this proves to be the case, the number of retractions I'd have to write for scoffing statements in previous Skeptophilia posts would be equally stunning). My overall reaction: while I'm still in the doubters camp regarding what this study means, at least we finally have some folks who are approaching the question scientifically. And that is a step in the right direction.
These particular mediums say that they can perform psychography, which is when the spirit of a deceased person is working through the medium's body, controlling his/her hand to produce written text. Now, neuroscientists understand fairly well what is happening in the brain when a person speaks or writes; in particular, when someone writes complex text, several areas of the brain (including the left culmen, left hippocampus, left inferior occipital gyrus, left anterior cingulate, right superior temporal gyrus and right precentral gyrus) show higher levels of activity. The researchers compared the mediums' levels of brain activity when producing text in the ordinary fashion (i.e., when they claimed they were not being guided by a spirit, and were fully conscious and fully themselves) and when they were in a trance state. And when they were in a trance state, all of them showed consistently lowered activity in all of the brain areas that are typically higher during writing. Peres et al. state, "The fact that subjects produced complex content in a trance dissociative state suggests they were not merely relaxed, and relaxation seems an unlikely explanation for the underactivation of brain areas specifically related to the cognitive processing being carried out. This finding deserves further investigation both in terms of replication and explanatory hypotheses."
It's an interesting finding. The response of psychics to this article thus far can be summed up as, "Ha. We told you." And indeed, this result is exactly what you'd suspect if what the mediums claim is true -- that their hand was no longer under the sole control of their own brains, that someone else had taken over and was guiding their motions.
I am, however, not convinced that this is the only explanation, and I was glad to see that the authors weren't quite so eager to jump on the bandwagon -- their final statement that "this finding deserves further investigation... in terms of... explanatory hypotheses" is precisely right. We cannot rule out that there is control by a spirit; that hypothesis is consistent with the results. But before saying that this constitutes proof of psychic mediumship, other possible explanations must be ruled out.
I have to say, though, that these folks are going about this research in exactly the right way. If psychic phenomena of any kind exist, they should be testable, verifiable, and replicable under controlled conditions. The fact that these alleged mediums are showing anomalous brain activity is certainly suggestive that something worth studying is going on here -- and I hope that Peres et al. or other researchers in the field will pick up this study and run with it. If the results hold, we may be looking at the first step toward hard evidence for the existence of a spiritual realm, which would be an absolutely stunning result (although I have to say that if this proves to be the case, the number of retractions I'd have to write for scoffing statements in previous Skeptophilia posts would be equally stunning). My overall reaction: while I'm still in the doubters camp regarding what this study means, at least we finally have some folks who are approaching the question scientifically. And that is a step in the right direction.
Monday, November 19, 2012
France vs. the Mayans
Alarming news is coming out of France, where the true believers are heading to await the Mayan apocalypse that is due to occur in a little more than a month; the only safe spot in the world is being declared off-limits by the government. [Source]
In a move that is bound to cause consternation amongst that segment of humanity that has pancake batter where the rest of us have brains, local officials in the town of Bugarach, France have made the decision to seal off access to the nearby mountain, the Pic de Bugarach. Devotees of Mayan prophecy believe that on December 21, the top of the mountain will pop open, in the fashion of a jack-in-the-box, and an alien spaceship will rise out which will then save any people who happen to be in the area at the time. I hardly need to point out that there are some flaws in this scenario, the main one being that after intensive study, geologists have concluded that the rule "mountains are made of solid rock" is almost never broken. But true believers never let a little thing like science get in the way.
My feeling is that they also are unlikely to let official rules get in their way, and allow me to put any French officials who are reading this on notice: I have been studying woo-woos for some time now, and if there is a group that is less likely to completely ignore such a ban, I don't know what it is. Come December 20, I think you should prepare yourselves for an onslaught. These people fully expect the world to end, and there is no way in hell they are going to go back home and die when they could be climbing a mountain in France to wait for a spaceship just because you said "non."
It all brings up the question, though, of what all of them are going to do on December 22 when it becomes obvious that (1) the world didn't end, and (2) the mountain didn't pop open, and (3) the spaceship never showed. You'd think that this would induce them to say, "Wow, what goobers we've been," and to settle down and revise their worldviews into something more in line with common sense. But studies have shown that when nutjobs make prophecies, and those prophecies don't pan out, rather than causing the true believers to give up, it makes them believe even more strongly. Yes, you read that right; you spend the night huddled together, waiting for the Second Coming of Jesus, and midnight arrives and Jesus doesn't, and the next day, you still believe. It was just that (1) something was amiss with your prediction of the time, or (2) Jesus changed his mind and has now decided on a later date. It was not that your fundamental premise -- that Jesus was on his way -- was incorrect.
So what is the right approach, then? It's a tough question. Every once in a while, I'll have a woo-woo sign up for my Critical Thinking class. You'd think that given my solid reputation as a skeptic, they either wouldn't sign up for the course, or else would sign up and keep quiet about their beliefs, but I've found that these sorts inevitably want to argue, and they never give up. (The two most memorable examples were a girl who was an ardent believer in astrology, and a boy who belonged to the aliens-built-the-pyramids set.) They just can't take my scoffing lying down, and are determined to bring me to my senses. But given that this is also basically my approach toward them, I suppose it's only fair.
In any case, I hope that the police in Bugarach are ready for a riot, because that's what it's likely to come to. Myself, I wonder what the next Big Thing is going to be, once they realize that December 21 was a wash. Will they revise the date, in the fashion of Harold Camping? Or come up with a whole new prediction? Either way, it should be interesting, and I suggest you plan on monitoring woo-woo websites the week after the non-apocalypse. I can barely wait.
In a move that is bound to cause consternation amongst that segment of humanity that has pancake batter where the rest of us have brains, local officials in the town of Bugarach, France have made the decision to seal off access to the nearby mountain, the Pic de Bugarach. Devotees of Mayan prophecy believe that on December 21, the top of the mountain will pop open, in the fashion of a jack-in-the-box, and an alien spaceship will rise out which will then save any people who happen to be in the area at the time. I hardly need to point out that there are some flaws in this scenario, the main one being that after intensive study, geologists have concluded that the rule "mountains are made of solid rock" is almost never broken. But true believers never let a little thing like science get in the way.
My feeling is that they also are unlikely to let official rules get in their way, and allow me to put any French officials who are reading this on notice: I have been studying woo-woos for some time now, and if there is a group that is less likely to completely ignore such a ban, I don't know what it is. Come December 20, I think you should prepare yourselves for an onslaught. These people fully expect the world to end, and there is no way in hell they are going to go back home and die when they could be climbing a mountain in France to wait for a spaceship just because you said "non."
It all brings up the question, though, of what all of them are going to do on December 22 when it becomes obvious that (1) the world didn't end, and (2) the mountain didn't pop open, and (3) the spaceship never showed. You'd think that this would induce them to say, "Wow, what goobers we've been," and to settle down and revise their worldviews into something more in line with common sense. But studies have shown that when nutjobs make prophecies, and those prophecies don't pan out, rather than causing the true believers to give up, it makes them believe even more strongly. Yes, you read that right; you spend the night huddled together, waiting for the Second Coming of Jesus, and midnight arrives and Jesus doesn't, and the next day, you still believe. It was just that (1) something was amiss with your prediction of the time, or (2) Jesus changed his mind and has now decided on a later date. It was not that your fundamental premise -- that Jesus was on his way -- was incorrect.
So what is the right approach, then? It's a tough question. Every once in a while, I'll have a woo-woo sign up for my Critical Thinking class. You'd think that given my solid reputation as a skeptic, they either wouldn't sign up for the course, or else would sign up and keep quiet about their beliefs, but I've found that these sorts inevitably want to argue, and they never give up. (The two most memorable examples were a girl who was an ardent believer in astrology, and a boy who belonged to the aliens-built-the-pyramids set.) They just can't take my scoffing lying down, and are determined to bring me to my senses. But given that this is also basically my approach toward them, I suppose it's only fair.
In any case, I hope that the police in Bugarach are ready for a riot, because that's what it's likely to come to. Myself, I wonder what the next Big Thing is going to be, once they realize that December 21 was a wash. Will they revise the date, in the fashion of Harold Camping? Or come up with a whole new prediction? Either way, it should be interesting, and I suggest you plan on monitoring woo-woo websites the week after the non-apocalypse. I can barely wait.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
St. Paul's Letter to the Klingons
In an investigation of wasteful government spending, Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) has publicized the fact that the Pentagon sponsored a seminar (at the cost of $100,000) called "Did Jesus Die for Klingons, Too?"
I wish I was making this up, but if you don't believe me, here's the source. All of this rather undercuts Governor Romney's contention that we can't cut military spending without jeopardizing American national security, doesn't it? Especially given that the folks at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) that sponsored the event hired noted astrophysicists LeVar "Geordi LaForge" Burton and Nichelle "Uhura" Nichols as keynote speakers, and had a gala "Come As Your Favorite Alien" dinner party afterwards. One speaker, an unnamed philosophy professor who was called upon to address the topic brought up in the title of the event, concluded that Jesus only died for humans; the Klingons are on their own, sin-forgiveness-wise, not that they probably care. I suspect that any priest who was brave enough to tell Gowron he had to say ten Hail Marys and five Our Fathers because he'd told a fib last week would soon be missing important body parts, so it's probably just as well.
It is not the overall silliness of the workshop that I want to address here, nor the bloat in the Pentagon's budget. What I'd like to look at is the central contention of the workshop -- which is what would happen to organized religion if intelligent life were found elsewhere in the universe.
It's probably facile to say, "Nothing. There being life elsewhere wouldn't change belief in a deity here on Earth." But think about it; almost every major discovery that science has made in the past thousand years has had the effect of moving humanity further out of the center of the universe. From Copernicus (the Earth isn't at the center), to Kepler (the planets don't move in idealized perfect circles), to Darwin (humans evolve just like everything else), to Mendeleev (everything is made of the same set of elements), to Watson, Crick et al. (all organisms, including humans, encode genetic material the same way), everything we've found has led to the view that we're not really very special at all. Humans are just one more animal species, made of the same stuff and behaving the same way as other animals do, on a little spinning ball of rock around a quite ordinary star in a quite ordinary galaxy. The recent discovery of thousands of extrasolar planets, some of them fairly earthlike in characteristics, makes it seem like even what we have here on Earth may not be all that unusual.
Now, myself, I think all of this is wicked cool. I love it that our systems work the same way as other animals; not only does it explain so much about our behavior, it also means we're inextricably connected to the natural world. I think any blow to our species' ego is far outweighed by the fact that these discoveries are just downright fascinating.
But think about how antithetical that view is to the basic view of Christianity and the other major religions. The mainstream religious view -- and I realize that there are individual people, and probably sects of religions, who do not believe this -- sees humanity as something special, something unique in the history of the universe. In fact, Christianity's central tenet is that humanity is so special that the all-powerful, omniscient deity incarnated his son as one of us.
So, what would happen if we were to discover intelligent alien life? My sense is that a lot of folks with a strictly religious worldview would have a hard time incorporating it. If you remember the wonderful movie Contact, which looks at just such a situation, recall that the ultrareligious wingnut who had been harassing the main character did have exactly that reaction -- to the point that he sacrificed his own life (taking out a great many other people with him) to protect the purity of the religious message. While this movie is (of course) fiction, I don't think that such a thing is outside of the realm of possibility. The discovery of intelligent alien life would be, in a way, the ultimate pulling-out-of-center for the human race, and one that I think some worldviews couldn't handle.
On the whole, I think the question is an interesting one to consider. So even if DARPA probably shouldn't have spent 100 grand to throw their big Star Trek-themed party, it's an idea worth investigating. I would, however, be more interested to hear what Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku have to say on the matter than LeVar Burton and Nichelle Nichols.
I wish I was making this up, but if you don't believe me, here's the source. All of this rather undercuts Governor Romney's contention that we can't cut military spending without jeopardizing American national security, doesn't it? Especially given that the folks at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) that sponsored the event hired noted astrophysicists LeVar "Geordi LaForge" Burton and Nichelle "Uhura" Nichols as keynote speakers, and had a gala "Come As Your Favorite Alien" dinner party afterwards. One speaker, an unnamed philosophy professor who was called upon to address the topic brought up in the title of the event, concluded that Jesus only died for humans; the Klingons are on their own, sin-forgiveness-wise, not that they probably care. I suspect that any priest who was brave enough to tell Gowron he had to say ten Hail Marys and five Our Fathers because he'd told a fib last week would soon be missing important body parts, so it's probably just as well.
It is not the overall silliness of the workshop that I want to address here, nor the bloat in the Pentagon's budget. What I'd like to look at is the central contention of the workshop -- which is what would happen to organized religion if intelligent life were found elsewhere in the universe.
It's probably facile to say, "Nothing. There being life elsewhere wouldn't change belief in a deity here on Earth." But think about it; almost every major discovery that science has made in the past thousand years has had the effect of moving humanity further out of the center of the universe. From Copernicus (the Earth isn't at the center), to Kepler (the planets don't move in idealized perfect circles), to Darwin (humans evolve just like everything else), to Mendeleev (everything is made of the same set of elements), to Watson, Crick et al. (all organisms, including humans, encode genetic material the same way), everything we've found has led to the view that we're not really very special at all. Humans are just one more animal species, made of the same stuff and behaving the same way as other animals do, on a little spinning ball of rock around a quite ordinary star in a quite ordinary galaxy. The recent discovery of thousands of extrasolar planets, some of them fairly earthlike in characteristics, makes it seem like even what we have here on Earth may not be all that unusual.
Now, myself, I think all of this is wicked cool. I love it that our systems work the same way as other animals; not only does it explain so much about our behavior, it also means we're inextricably connected to the natural world. I think any blow to our species' ego is far outweighed by the fact that these discoveries are just downright fascinating.
But think about how antithetical that view is to the basic view of Christianity and the other major religions. The mainstream religious view -- and I realize that there are individual people, and probably sects of religions, who do not believe this -- sees humanity as something special, something unique in the history of the universe. In fact, Christianity's central tenet is that humanity is so special that the all-powerful, omniscient deity incarnated his son as one of us.
So, what would happen if we were to discover intelligent alien life? My sense is that a lot of folks with a strictly religious worldview would have a hard time incorporating it. If you remember the wonderful movie Contact, which looks at just such a situation, recall that the ultrareligious wingnut who had been harassing the main character did have exactly that reaction -- to the point that he sacrificed his own life (taking out a great many other people with him) to protect the purity of the religious message. While this movie is (of course) fiction, I don't think that such a thing is outside of the realm of possibility. The discovery of intelligent alien life would be, in a way, the ultimate pulling-out-of-center for the human race, and one that I think some worldviews couldn't handle.
On the whole, I think the question is an interesting one to consider. So even if DARPA probably shouldn't have spent 100 grand to throw their big Star Trek-themed party, it's an idea worth investigating. I would, however, be more interested to hear what Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku have to say on the matter than LeVar Burton and Nichelle Nichols.
Friday, November 16, 2012
Akashic fields forever
Yesterday, a student of mine asked me if I knew what an "Akashic Field" was.
I was tempted to say that it was a field that had no buckwheat in it, but that was a rather abstruse pun at best. So I told him that I didn't, but my intuition was that a term where the first word sounded vaguely Sanskrit and the second word was "field" was probably referring to something that didn't exist, and then I told him I'd look into it and get back to him.
It's nice when your intuition is correct.
A quick Google search brought me here, to the Linda Howe Center for Akashic Studies, wherein we learn that the "Akashic Field" is an energy matrix that allows you to access the "Akashic Record." The latter, according to the website, is defined thusly: "The Akashic Record is a dimension of consciousness that contains a vibrational record of every soul and its journey. It is completely available everywhere... The energy present in the Record is a very quick vibration with a great velocity. It is also full-bodied and rich. When opening the Record, a quickening occurs. The infusion of light accelerates everything in its path. In the presence of light, all darkness is seen and brightened. Individual conscious minds do not need to direct this light. Infinite wisdom of light goes where it is needed and received to fulfill its function."
Okay, now that we've successfully disabled any readers who have taken a college-level physics class, I'm sure the next question to ask is: how do I get access to this amazing source of wisdom?
"Working with the sacred prayer provides a reliable, deliberate way to move into and access the consciousness of the Record responsibly." Linda Howe tells us. We then are directed to take one of her classes ($300-500 for in-person classes if you live in the Chicago area, or happen to be near one of the places she's touring, and $25-40 an hour for online classes where you watch a video recording) so we can learn the "Pathway Prayer Process" to tap into the "Akashic Record" and "receive guidance."
Well, sorry, I'm not going to spend $25, much less $300, to find out more about something that sounds like a slightly reworked version of "The Force" from Star Wars. (Although other websites I looked at said that your access to the Akashic Record had something to do with the pineal gland, the Egyptian god Osiris, and the Orion Nebula, and that modern Americans were losing this ability because of fluoridation in water. The Nazis were also briefly mentioned.)
The problem is, the whole "Akashic Record" idea traces its origins not to Ancient Egypt or Ancient Babylon, or in fact Ancient Anywhere, but to the writings of noted early 20th century wingnut Edgar Cayce, whose mystical books are still immensely popular (and his followers say that he didn't write them, but "channeled" them). So let's see what Cayce himself has to say on the subject -- that's sure to be illuminating, right? "We have explained before that the intelligent infinity is brought into intelligent energy from eighth density or octave. The one sound vibratory complex called Edgar used this gateway to view the present, which is not the continuum you experience but the potential social memory complex of this planetary sphere."
Okay. Right. What?
The problem, of course, is that Cayce et al. seemed to have been really good at making stuff up, and they counted on (and in many cases found) the credulity of the vast majority of the public working in their favor. For an excellent skeptical look at the ideas of Cayce and other channelers of Mystical Knowledge of the Ages, take a look at this site, which shows that not only is the basic claim nonsense, but the writings that were produced from accessing the "Akashic Records" (such as Levi Dowling's famous The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ) are actually riddled with simple, and easily checked, factual errors.
A little hard to explain if you think, like Linda Howe, that the "Akashic Record" contains accurate information of "every soul and its journey," isn't it?
In any case, the whole thing smacks of wishful thinking to me. Until someone brings out an Akashic-o-meter and can show that this "Akashic Field" actually exists, and that it's not just someone going into a trance and deciding that she was Cleopatra in a previous life, I'm not buying it. Me, I'm going back to my previous definition of an "Akashic Field" as a field with no buckwheat, which, you have to admit, is kind of a kick-ass pun.
I was tempted to say that it was a field that had no buckwheat in it, but that was a rather abstruse pun at best. So I told him that I didn't, but my intuition was that a term where the first word sounded vaguely Sanskrit and the second word was "field" was probably referring to something that didn't exist, and then I told him I'd look into it and get back to him.
It's nice when your intuition is correct.
A quick Google search brought me here, to the Linda Howe Center for Akashic Studies, wherein we learn that the "Akashic Field" is an energy matrix that allows you to access the "Akashic Record." The latter, according to the website, is defined thusly: "The Akashic Record is a dimension of consciousness that contains a vibrational record of every soul and its journey. It is completely available everywhere... The energy present in the Record is a very quick vibration with a great velocity. It is also full-bodied and rich. When opening the Record, a quickening occurs. The infusion of light accelerates everything in its path. In the presence of light, all darkness is seen and brightened. Individual conscious minds do not need to direct this light. Infinite wisdom of light goes where it is needed and received to fulfill its function."
Okay, now that we've successfully disabled any readers who have taken a college-level physics class, I'm sure the next question to ask is: how do I get access to this amazing source of wisdom?
"Working with the sacred prayer provides a reliable, deliberate way to move into and access the consciousness of the Record responsibly." Linda Howe tells us. We then are directed to take one of her classes ($300-500 for in-person classes if you live in the Chicago area, or happen to be near one of the places she's touring, and $25-40 an hour for online classes where you watch a video recording) so we can learn the "Pathway Prayer Process" to tap into the "Akashic Record" and "receive guidance."
Well, sorry, I'm not going to spend $25, much less $300, to find out more about something that sounds like a slightly reworked version of "The Force" from Star Wars. (Although other websites I looked at said that your access to the Akashic Record had something to do with the pineal gland, the Egyptian god Osiris, and the Orion Nebula, and that modern Americans were losing this ability because of fluoridation in water. The Nazis were also briefly mentioned.)
The problem is, the whole "Akashic Record" idea traces its origins not to Ancient Egypt or Ancient Babylon, or in fact Ancient Anywhere, but to the writings of noted early 20th century wingnut Edgar Cayce, whose mystical books are still immensely popular (and his followers say that he didn't write them, but "channeled" them). So let's see what Cayce himself has to say on the subject -- that's sure to be illuminating, right? "We have explained before that the intelligent infinity is brought into intelligent energy from eighth density or octave. The one sound vibratory complex called Edgar used this gateway to view the present, which is not the continuum you experience but the potential social memory complex of this planetary sphere."
Okay. Right. What?
The problem, of course, is that Cayce et al. seemed to have been really good at making stuff up, and they counted on (and in many cases found) the credulity of the vast majority of the public working in their favor. For an excellent skeptical look at the ideas of Cayce and other channelers of Mystical Knowledge of the Ages, take a look at this site, which shows that not only is the basic claim nonsense, but the writings that were produced from accessing the "Akashic Records" (such as Levi Dowling's famous The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ) are actually riddled with simple, and easily checked, factual errors.
A little hard to explain if you think, like Linda Howe, that the "Akashic Record" contains accurate information of "every soul and its journey," isn't it?
In any case, the whole thing smacks of wishful thinking to me. Until someone brings out an Akashic-o-meter and can show that this "Akashic Field" actually exists, and that it's not just someone going into a trance and deciding that she was Cleopatra in a previous life, I'm not buying it. Me, I'm going back to my previous definition of an "Akashic Field" as a field with no buckwheat, which, you have to admit, is kind of a kick-ass pun.
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