Vietnamese mystery rocks, and the fear of admitting ignorance

Yesterday I ran across a story that is mostly remarkable because of the last paragraph.

Entitled "Odd Rock Covered in Unidentified Hieroglyphics Rumored to Cast Spells," the article was written by Dana Newkirk, and appeared in an online compendium of "Forteana" called Who Forted?  (The "Fort" references, for those of you unfamiliar with this peculiar little slice of Americana, come from Charles Fort, an iconic figure in the investigation of the paranormal and "anomalous phenomena" in the early 20th century.)

Anyhow, the story starts off in an ordinary fashion, for this sort of thing.  We hear about a large rock in Vietnam, covered with carvings, that was donated to the Thuong Temple in Phu Tho in 2009.  Of course, as you might expect, it isn't the anthropological or linguistic significance of the artifact that is the point of interest here; there's got to be something weird going on with said rock, and in short order we find out that the residents of Phu Tho think the rock has "the ability to cast a strange enchantment," and are staying away from the temple because they're afraid of it.

As far as what the carvings mean -- or even how old they are -- that's unknown.  "Unfortunately not much else is known about the strange rock or the ancient symbols covering its entire surface," Newkirk writes.  "Currently the province is compiling a scientific committee with the intention of studying the strange rock with the hopes of finding some answers regarding where it came from and what the strange markings might mean."

Okay.  So far, we've got a mystery rock and some superstitious people in a remote country.  Neither one is a rare commodity, and would certainly not warrant a mention by themselves.  But here's how Newkirk wraps up her article:

So, what the heck is it? A star map? Some kind of tool? Or is it just some really bored guy [sic] a few hundred years ago? We want to know what you think! Share your thoughts with us on our Facebook page, tweet us @WhoForted, or leave a comment below!

I'm pretty sure she meant "was it really just made by some bored guy a few hundred years ago," not that the rock itself was a fossilized person, but even that's not the point.  When I read the last paragraph, my immediate response was, "Why on earth is what I think even remotely relevant?"  I know nothing whatsoever about the "odd rock" except what Newkirk just told me; I can't find any mention of it anywhere except in Who Forted?  I know zilch about Southeast Asian archaeology, history, and linguistics.  My opinion on this topic would be completely worthless.

And yet, I'm sure that Newkirk will be inundated with opinions from ignorant individuals like myself.  Because -- and I have the sense that this problem is especially bad here in the United States -- everyone thinks it's their god-given right to have an opinion about everything, and to trumpet that opinion from the rooftops, regardless of how little in the way of facts they might know about the issue at hand.

I find this whole thing intensely irritating, because I run into it almost on a daily basis.  For example, just a couple of weeks ago, I was asked by a friend, "What do you think the federal government should do about the sequester?"  I responded, "I have no idea.  I don't know nearly enough about economics or politics to weigh in."  My friend frowned and laughed at the same time and said, "Come on.  You must have some kind of opinion."

No, actually I don't.  And if I did, it wouldn't mean anything.  I'm pretty aware of the topics about which I am ignorant, and I try my hardest not to pretend I'm well-informed about them; and I don't have any particular problem with saying, even to my students, "I don't know the answer to that."  (In my classes, I usually follow it up with, "... but I'll look into it and see if I can find an answer for you.")  But I find that a lot of people are acutely uncomfortable with admitting ignorance, and feel the need to have an opinion on topics for which they should simply withhold judgment until they actually know what they're talking about.

I wonder if perhaps this is one of the negative outcomes of living in a representative democracy.  We have a "one person, one vote" system, in which my vote and the vote of the greatest genius in the country have exactly the same weight and the same effect on the outcome.  (Which, honestly, I am all in favor of.)  But this has the untoward consequence of giving people the impression that because every person's vote is worth the same amount, everyone's opinion is worth the same amount.  Which it clearly is not.  To make it even more obvious: if I were to talk to Stephen Hawking, and I were to say, "Professor Hawking, let me tell you what my views are on quantum physics," he would not be obliged to listen to me, and in fact would be well within his rights to tell me to piss off.  Democracy is a lovely model for governance,  but makes no sense at all when it comes to ideas.

Unfortunately, this whole thing pervades our thought processes all the way to the top, and is why we have people like Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Representative Paul Broun of Georgia blathering on about how evolution is "unproven" and "controversial," even though from their comments it's pretty evident that they haven't the vaguest idea what they're talking about.  And I find this especially appalling given that both men have reasonably decent science backgrounds -- Jindal has a B.S. in biology from Brown University, and Broun a medical degree from the Medical College of Georgia, so they should both know better.  Despite that, in the stories I linked (which you should definitely check out), Jindal says that creationism should be taught in public schools because we want kids exposed to "the best facts" and "the best science."  Broun was even more blunt, calling evolution "lies straight from the pit of hell."

Can anyone tell me why either of these men's opinions is in the least relevant, when they evidently have no knowledge about the topic upon which they are expounding?

So no, I won't tell you my opinion about the sequester, or about the Vietnamese mystery rock.  It wouldn't mean anything if I did.  And I might be prone to a lot of mistakes, but bloviating on a subject about which I am ignorant is one I try my best to avoid.

This always reminds me of the wonderful quote by Isaac Asimov, which seems a fitting way to end this post:

Silencing Alex Jones

Okay, I'm not going to beat around the bush, here.  Let's cut right to the chase.

Alex Jones needs to shut the hell up.

Before the dust even settled after Monday's horrific bombing at the Boston Marathon, Alex Jones and his wacko followers were claiming that the government had planted the bombs.  Here's a direct quote of his tweet from Monday, shortly after the story broke:

Our hearts go out to those that are hurt or killed #Boston marathon – but this thing stinks to high heaven #falseflag

And immediately afterwards, the following was making the rounds on Facebook:

Man, Jones et al. must think these conspirators are idiots.  Can't you imagine it?  Evil, Boris-and-Natasha types, but from our own government, concoct this big secret plan to blow up people at the Boston Marathon -- and then they slip up and post about it on the internet three days early.

Oopsie! 

How dumb would you have to be?  And yet... to Jones, these are the ultra-intelligent supervillains who are running everything.

Oh, and why do Jones and his knuckle-dragging True Believers think the government planted the bombs on Monday?  Because (1) it was Tax Day; and (2) so that the Transportation Safety Authority and other government agencies would have justification to clamp down and Deny Us Our Rights.

Same as the Newtown Massacre.  Same as Jared Loughner shooting up the crowd in Tucson, Arizona.  Same as the theater shootings in Aurora, Colorado.  Same as the shootings at Virginia Tech.

Same as 9/11.

In Jones' bizarro world, bad things don't sometimes just... happen.  Crazy people don't sometimes get hold of guns and kill people.  Religious extremists don't just slaughter innocents because of their warped view of what god wants them to do.  No; it all has to be the Big Bad Government, who in Jones' mythological view of the universe has replaced Satan as the root of all evil.

Look, it's not that I'm some sort of apologist for everything our government does.  I am well aware that we've pulled some really shady stuff, sometimes, and our projected self-image as the Global Good Guy is frequently unwarranted.  But using a tragedy like Monday's bombing as fodder for your delusional worldview, and then to trumpet that worldview publicly in order to make money, is a slap in the face to the people who survived the bombing (many of them with dreadful injuries), and to the families of the victims who died.

And it's time that we stand up and tell Alex Jones, as the leader of the pack, to shut up.

Toward that end: here is a list of the sixty AM and FM radio stations that carry his show.  Take a moment to look through the list, and then send a letter or an email to the stations of your choice and ask them to drop their sponsorship of this asshole.  He needs to have his forum taken away.

Of course, if it happens, he'll just claim that the government is trying to silence him.  But that won't matter much if no one is listening any more.

The stories we tell ourselves

Often, when I respond to a piece of art work, it's because of the stories that it evokes in my brain.

When I was in college, and took an art appreciation class, I fell in love with Édouard Manet's painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.  And it wasn't because of any knowledge of French Impressionism, and how Manet's work fit into the artistic movements of the time; nor was it really about the style, or the skill of the painter, although those certainly played a role in the capacity of the painting to touch me.  The whole thing was about emotion, and how it brought stories bubbling up from the depths of my brain.

Who is this girl with the despairing expression?  I imagined her as a country girl who'd come to the city, allured by its lights and excitement, and is having to support herself as a barmaid -- and now she's there, trapped and disillusioned, her mind and her heart a million miles away.  The painting struck me then as terribly sad.  And it still does.

All of this comes up because of a conversation I had with a friend who is working toward his Ph.D. in philosophy.  His dissertation is on the subject of phenomenological idealism, which is (as far as I understand it) the idea that the universe is a construct of the mind -- that reality is solely experiential, and may or may not have any external existence.  (Kant said that we "cannot approach the thing in itself" -- all we know is our experience of it, so that's what reality is.)

Anyhow, my friend told me a bit about what he's studying.  I did try my best to understand it, although I don't know how successful I was -- and it must be admitted that I am not entirely certain I have the brains required for such an esoteric subject.  But insofar as I understood him, I found myself disagreeing with him almost completely.

That said, I'm not going to try to craft an argument against idealism.  For one thing, I am wildly unqualified to do so.  My background in philosophy is thin at best, and my attempts at understanding classical philosophy in college were, on the whole, failures.  What interests me more is the immediate reaction I had to my friend's description of his philosophical stance.  It wasn't an argument; it was purely an emotional reaction that, if I put it into words, was simply, "Oh, now, come on.  That can't be right."

So I started thinking about why people respond the way they do to belief systems.  Why, apart from "I was taught that way growing up," does anyone believe in a particular view of the universe?  Why does a theistic model appeal to some, and others find it repellent?  Why do I find materialism "self-evident" (which it clearly is not -- from what my philosopher friend has told me, it's no more self-evident than any other view of the world)?  Why, within a particular religious worldview, do some of us gravitate toward viewing the deity as harsh and legalistic, and others as gentle, kind, and forgiving?

I suspect that it all comes down to the emotional reactions we have.  I'd bet that very few of us ever do the kind of analysis of our concept of the universe that my friend has done; for the vast bulk of humanity, "it feels right" is about as far as we get.

And I can lump myself in with that unthinking majority.  I'm drawn to the mechanistic, predictable, external reality of materialism, but not because I have any cogent arguments that that worldview is correct and the others are false.  I accept it because it's a solution to understanding the world that I can live with (and that's even considering the bizarre, non-intuitive bits, like quantum mechanics).  But for all that, I can't prove that this view is the right one.  Being locked inside my own skull, even the solipsist's answer -- that he, alone, in the world exists, and everything else is the product of his mind -- is irrefutable.  Why don't I believe that, then?  Because it doesn't "seem right."  Hardly a rigorous argument.

Now, I still think you can make mistakes; once you've accepted a rationalist view of the world (for example), you can still commit errors of logic, misevaluate evidence, come to erroneous conclusions.  But why is the rationalist worldview itself right?  You can't argue that it is, using logic -- because to accept that logic is valid, you already have to accept that rationalism works.  It's pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.   The only reason to accept rationalism is because it somehow, on a gut level, makes sense to you that this is the way the world works.

It's a little like my experience with art.  A Bar at the Folies-Bergère appeals to me because of the emotions that it evokes, and the tales I tell myself about it.  I wonder if the same is true in the larger sense -- that we are drawn to a worldview not because it is logically defensible, but simply because it allows us to sleep at night.  Beyond that, all we do is tell each other stories, and hope like hell that no one asks us too many questions.

The pharmaceutical greenhouse

Three hundred years ago, a lot of the medicines that were used to treat human conditions were identified using the "Doctrine of Signatures."  The idea was, if something -- especially a part of a plant -- looked like a human body part, it must be useful for treating diseases of that part.  It also gave a lot of plants their names; most of the plants that have names that end in "wort" (from the Old English wyrt meaning "herb") come from this idea, and it's why we have plants like lungwort, spleenwort, liverwort, ribwort, bladderwort, navelwort, and nipplewort.  And, for the record, I didn't make any of these up.  It's also why a lot of plants have scientific names that come from human body parts, such as the orchid.  Orchis is Greek for "testicle."

I didn't make that up, either.

I should probably mention at this juncture that a lot of the patients who were treated using the Doctrine of Signatures died.  It did lead to the discovery of some plants that did have important therapeutic use -- such as digitalis -- but more often than not, the various worts are useless, and some are actually toxic.  So it's a good thing for those doctors that they lived before the concept of "malpractice lawsuit" was invented.

The problem is, some purveyors of "natural medicines" are still using the same sort of argument today, and people are still falling for it.  Take the whole "pine pollen extract" thing that has been making the rounds lately.  Given that pollen is the male spore of a plant, and produces the sperm cells, guess what they say it's used for?  Yup!  Got it in one!

Raw pine pollen is the richest seedbed of testosterone derived from plants; since it is the male sperm of pine trees, it fosters plush growth in all living creatures, from trees and plants, to animals, to humans. Some experts claim that pine pollen is an ingredient in certain pharmaceuticals designed to treat low testosterone levels in both men and women.  [Source]

I'm not sure if I want to experience "plush growth," myself.  The whole thing reminds me way too much of the Moss Guy from the movie Creepshow.

Be that as it may, is there any evidence that pine pollen actually works to make you, um, Stiff Like The Mighty Pine Tree?  The answer seems to be "not much."  I did a fairly intensive search, and found one source that said that I should use it because my "manhood is grumbling with hunger... for nature's invincible transmitter of life energy;" another that said that pine pollen is "adaptogenic, so it will cater to exactly what your body needs and treat any area of distress;" and a third that said that after a pine pollen cocktail, you might radiate so many Sex Vibes that you'll end up having your leg humped for 45 minutes by a female dog.  Although why that's a selling point, I have no idea.

Then, of course, you have your anti-aging cream made from "raspberry plant stem cells," which works because "(p)lant stem cells are equipped with regenerative properties, and can 'self-renew.' They can either form a large reservoir of unspecialized cells, or upon stimulation grow into 'differentiated' plant elements and become a new root, leaf, flower or other part of the plant."  I'm assuming that they're talking in some vague way about parenchyma, the unspecialized tissue that all plants have (and which is usually used for starch storage, as "filler" cells in stems, and for regrowing damaged tissue).  The idea here being, I suppose, that if plants have cells that regenerate organs, if you smear those cells on your face, you'll regenerate youthful skin, or something.

It bears mention that I also looked for any peer-reviewed research that showed any results for either pine pollen or "raspberry plant stem cells," either for or against.  No luck.  My sense is that the people who are selling this stuff are making up the whole thing as they go along.  So, who knows?  Maybe the next big seller will be a kiwi fruit extract for male pattern baldness, I dunno.

So, anyway, that's our modern-day answer to the Doctrine of Signatures.  In today's litigious society, though, sellers of snake oil have to be a little more careful than the people who sold Decoction of Lungwort for bronchitis three hundred years ago.  This is why, on virtually all of these products, you'll see a tiny little label that says "Not intended to treat, cure, diagnose, or prevent any disease or ailment."  Which will protect their asses quite nicely.  No application of Salve of Buttockwort needed.

Okay, I did make that one up.

Opening your mind to mummified baby aliens

Well, the targeted ad software has done it again.

It's my own fault, really.  I shoulda known that having two posts in a row about aliens was a bad idea.  On the other hand, it'd be nice if the software that chooses ads for my blog would give the same weight to words like "bullshit," "nonsense," "foolishness," and "wingnut" as it does to "aliens," "UFOs," "psychics," and "ghosts."

In any case, almost as soon as I hit "Publish" on the second post, I began to get reports from friends who are regular readers, informing me of a couple of ads that keep popping up that are... interesting.

The first one is entitled "16 Powerful Extraterrestrials Message to Humanity," which tells us that having a conversation with an alien is easy:

What if it was possible to have a conversation with a highly advanced, benevolent extraterrestrial being? What kind of wisdom would this entity have for humanity?

Extraterrestrials do not need to land on your front lawn to share their wisdom. There are other, more subtle, yet far more effective ways to convey their very important messages.

Its been happening for quite some time. We invite you to open your mind…

My general feeling is that these folks' minds are so open that their brains fell out, but maybe I'm just not highly advanced enough to understand all this.

So, what if I was to open up my consciousness to aliens?  What would I learn?  Here's a sampler:

Many of these should resonate with you, here are a few:

• Consciousness creates matter.
• Each individual creates his or her own reality through thoughts, beliefs and expectations.
• There is no death. Consciousness exists forever.
• We all are one, from the same divine source.
• We are spiritual beings but have chosen to exist as physical humans.
• In this life there are no victims, only opportunities to evolve.
• We can control reality through the powers of the Universal Mind.
• Our spiritual purpose is to choose from selfishness or altruism.
• Souls reincarnate to eventually experience God-realization.
• Feelings & Intuition are more important as a source of guidance than intellect.
• We are here to remember what we already know.
• Physical reality is an illusion.
• Light cannot exist without the dark. One cannot understand one thing unless he or she understands its opposite.
• God is self-experiential, in that it is the nature of the Universe to experience itself.
• God is not fear-inducing or vengeful, only our parental projections onto God are.
• The very best way to maximize your evolution while on this planet is through regular meditation.

The extraterrestrials messages are amazing! It feels like I already naturally knew some of these.

Consciousness creates matter, and physical reality is an illusion, eh?  Let me just throw a rock at your head and see if you still believe that afterwards.

And the whole thing about "evolution" just torques the hell out of me.  Can we get one thing straight, here?  Thinking you are in contact with an alien isn't evolution, it's a symptom of a mild mental illness.

But if my obviously poorly-evolved reality doesn't convince you, you can buy what they're selling (of course they're selling something) -- "Equi-Sync Brain Wave Meditation Software."  Starting at only $58.  Heckuva deal.


The second ad was a promo for an upcoming film release for something called Sirius.  I didn't know about it, so I did some research, and found this.  It turns out that the premise of the film -- which alleges to be a documentary, i.e., true -- goes something like this:

UFOs have been in contact with humans throughout history.  The military knows all about this, and is trying to stop us from finding out about it because the aliens have promised us an unlimited source of free energy, and that would be bad for the military.  For some reason.  There's a baby alien that has been discovered, that looks like this:

Its DNA has been analyzed, and it has been shown to be extraterrestrial in origin.

Now, you'd think that'd be enough.  But no, there's more:

The director of the film, Amardeep Kaleka, made it public that he was raising funds for his show along with Steven Greer, of the UFO Disclosure Project -- and shortly after, Kaleka's father was killed in the Sikh Temple shooting near Milwaukee.  Was the government trying to shut Kaleka up by killing one of his family members?

*cue scary music*

In a word: no.  The killer, Michael Page, was a white supremacist.  End of story.  As far as the other claims: according to some skeptics who've looked at the photographs, the "baby alien" is almost certainly a mummified baby spider monkey; given that we have no alien DNA to compare it to, the assertion that a certain sample of DNA is "extraterrestrial in origin" is ridiculous; and there's no such thing as "free energy," as the Second Law of Thermodynamics is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions.

But of course, I predict that this won't affect the movie's success one little bit.  I predict that people will love Sirius, with the result that more "baby alien" websites will pop up everywhere, and I'll be hearing about it for the next ten years.

Anyhow, that's all I've got for today.  I encourage you to keep your eyes on the ads on my blog -- in my estimation, they've missed the target far more often than they've hit it.  Maybe one day they'll improve the software, and I'll start getting ads for books by Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson videos.  Now that I could "open my mind" to.

Welcome to the Earth! Now go home.

Given my habit of poking fun at the aliens-and-UFOs crowd, it may come as a surprise to you that I think it's very likely that there's intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.  I find the possibility breathtakingly cool -- to think that there are alien organisms out there, on a planet around another star, perhaps looking up into their night sky and wondering the same thing as we do, hoping that they're not alone in the universe.

It really seems pretty routine, forming life.  Many, perhaps most, stars have a planetary system of some kind, a significant fraction of those are small, rocky worlds like the Earth, and the basic building blocks of organic chemistry -- water, and compounds containing carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus -- appear to be abundant.  Once you have those, and some range of temperatures that allows water to be in the liquid state, organic compounds can be created, abiotically, in large quantities.  The first cell-like structures would probably appear post-haste once there are sufficient raw materials.

After that, evolution takes over, and it's only a matter of time.

The thing that fires the imagination most, of course, is contact with an alien race, a possibility that has driven science fiction writers for a hundred years.  The result has varied from the dreamy, benevolent, childlike aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the horrific killing machines of Alien and Starship Troopers, and everything in between.

The fact is, we don't know anything about what results evolution would have on a different planet.  A few features seem logical as drivers for any evolutionary lineage, anywhere -- having some means of propulsion; having a centralized information-processing organ; having sensory organs near the mouth, and basically pointed in the direction the organism is moving.  It's a little hard to imagine those not being common features for most species, no matter where they originated.

But other than that, they could look like damn near anything.  And how they might perceive the world, how they might think -- and more germane to our discussion, how they might look at us, should we run into one another -- is entirely uncertain.

This is why physicist Stephen Hawking raised some eyebrows a couple of years ago when he said that we should be afraid of alien contact.  In an interview, he said, "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.  I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet.  Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.  If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans."

Hawking isn't the only one who is worried.  In his wonderful book Bad Habits, humor writer Dave Barry also weighed in on the topic when he found out that we had sent what amounts to a welcome message on the exploratory spacecraft Pioneer 10:

 Dave Barry thinks that the plaque, which was the idea of the late great astronomer Carl Sagan, was a colossally bad idea:

(W)hen they decided to send up Pioneer 10, Carl sold the government on the idea that we should attach a plaque to it, so that if the aliens found it they'd be able to locate the Earth.  This is easily the stupidest idea a scientific genius ever sold to the government...  (I)t's all well and good for Carl Sagan to talk about how neat it would be to get in touch with the aliens, but I bet he'd change his mind pronto if they actually started oozing under his front door.  I bet he'd be whapping at them with his golf clubs just like the rest of us.

Dave Barry even thought the choice of the art work on the plaque was ill-advised:

(The plaque) features drawings of... a hydrogen atom and naked people.  To represent the entire Earth!  This is crazy!  Walk the streets of any town on the planet, and the two things you will almost never see are hydrogen atoms and naked people.  Plus, the man on the plaque is clearly deranged.  He's cheerfully waving his arm as if to say, 'Hi!  Look at me!  I'm naked as a jaybird!'  The woman is not waving, because she's clearly embarrassed.  She wishes she'd never let the man talk her into posing naked for this plaque.

Well, for those of you who agree with Stephen Hawking and Dave Barry, let me tell you about something that may allay your fears.

A new Kickstarter project has begun called Your Face in Space, which has as its goal (if they can raise sufficient funds) saving the Earth from alien invasion by launching a satellite into space with a bunch of pictures of people making angry faces.  It will be an "awesome scary satellite," the website proclaims.  "Something that will make aliens think twice about invading us."  They're asking people to send them money, and also jpegs of themselves making mean faces.  (The website has a selection of some of the best they've received thus far.)  Plus, they've reworked the Pioneer 10 plaque into something more, um, off-putting to potential alien conquistadors:

Yes, the woman is wearing a horned Viking helmet and is holding nunchucks, the man has a bandanna, a Rambo vest with no shirt, a machine gun, and a "flying-V" electric guitar, and they're standing on top of a bunch of dead aliens.

And the American eagle is taking down a spaceship by shooting laser beams out of its eyes.

Well, if that doesn't dissuade the aliens from invading Earth, I don't know what would.

So, anyway, as much as I would love to find evidence of alien life, and even have them contact humanity, have to admit that I sympathize with the worries that Hawking, Barry, and the originators of the Your Face in Space project have voiced.  While I would find it incredibly exciting to meet an alien race, I draw the line at letting them land their spaceship in my back yard and use their ray guns to vaporize my pets.  So maybe the Kickstarter project is a good idea.  In any case, I encourage you to donate to their project, or at least send them your photograph making a scary face.

You can't be too careful.

The alien genetic code, and the hazards of overconclusion

One type of scientific error I find my students frequently make is "overconclusion."  This is when you take data that supports a specific conclusion, and draw from it a far more general conclusion than is warranted.  As a simple example, if you have found that marigolds produce more flowers when given a high-nitrogen fertilizer, it is an overconclusion to claim that all plants will react that way.

Woo-woos, I find, are especially prone to this -- many "alternative medicine" therapies are good examples.  Acupuncture is reported by a friend of yours to have had success in reducing his pain from an injury, so you conclude that it must be good for everyone, regardless of the source of the pain, and also useful in treating everything from angina to warts.  Lycopene, an antioxidant found in tomatoes, is reported in some studies to reduce the incidence of cancer, so all antioxidants are cancer preventatives -- or cancer cures.  And so on.

The problem gets worse when the original data comes from a realm that hardly anyone really understands.  And I found an excellent example of that just yesterday, in a pair of articles -- one which uses an abstruse method on an unfamiliar data set to support a rather wild conclusion, and a second one that takes that conclusion and runs right off the cliff with it.

The first one, which was published on April Fool's Day but appears to be legitimate, is called "Is An Alien Message Embedded in Our Genetic Code?"  It describes the research of two Kazakh geneticists, Vladimir I. shCherbak and Maxim A. Makukov, who claim to have found in the human genome a "mathematical and semantic signal" that indicates the storage of non-functionally-based (i.e. not evolutionarily derived) information in our DNA.  "Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language," they wrote in the journal Icarus.  "Accurate and systematic, these underlying patterns appear as a product of precision logic and nontrivial computing."  This, they conclude, is because we are the product of panspermia -- our genetic code originated elsewhere in the universe, and this is the signature of the alien species that seeded our DNA here.

My first thought: wasn't that the whole idea behind the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase?"

Definitely one of the best episodes -- but I was under the impression that the entire series was fiction, weren't you?

Now, other than that, I am drastically unqualified to comment upon whether the scientists have really stumbled upon something astonishing.  This is despite my training in evolutionary genetics -- which, you would think, would be enough.  In order to determine if shCherbak and Makukov have actually found evidence of life's extraterrestrial origins, you have to be able to show, mathematically, that an apparent encoded signal is meaningful.  This is decidedly non-trivial.  As I've commented before, given a sufficiently long string of characters, you can always pull a meaningful pattern out as long as you mess about with it long enough and are willing to change the rules as you go (see my post on the alleged "Bible Code" here).  And three billion base pairs is a helluva long string.

So, the bottom line is: unless you are an expert in information theory and mathematics, you are unqualified to comment upon whether shCherbak and Makukov are on to something, or whether they have made the same mistake as the one made by the yo-yos who said that the bible predicted the 9/11 attacks.  But that, of course, hasn't stopped anyone from commenting, especially the UFO and alien crowd, once they finished having multiple orgasms over the idea that terrestrial life might come from the stars.

So, here's where the overconclusion comes in, starting with an article in News.Com.Au entitled, "WE ARE STAR PEOPLE: Scientific Proof We Were Created By Aliens."  And from them we find out that the Kazakh scientists didn't just show that terrestrial life might have a signature in its DNA that indicates its alien origins, they showed that humans specifically were created by a superintelligent alien race:

Scientists from Kazakhstan believe that human DNA was encoded with an extraterrestrial signal by an ancient alien civilisation...  In a nutshell, we're living, breathing vessels for some kind of alien message which is more easily used to detect extra terrestrial life than via radio transmission...   So if we are just vessels for alien communication, exactly what kind of secret message are we carrying in our DNA?  And if we were the creation of aliens, who created them?

Premature questions to ask, don't you think, given that the mathematicians haven't yet weighed in on whether shCherbak and Makumov are correct?  And if they're correct, what it actually means?  Man, I just can't wait to see what Diane Tessman and Dirk VanderPloeg are gonna do when they find out about this.

So, that's it for today.  It'll be interesting to see whether anyone sits down with this data and goes through the hard work of checking the paper's conclusion.  If I were a betting man, I'd be putting my money on a statistical analysis of the "message" showing that it is very likely to be random -- i.e., not a message at all, but an artifact of the algorithm they used.  As appealing as the idea in "The Chase" was, I always thought that it was more of a justification by the writers of Star Trek as to why all of the aliens, who had evolved on other worlds Where No One Had Gone Before, just looked like humans with rubber alien noses and strange accents.  If their idea pans out, it would be pretty earthshattering -- but even then, we'll have to figure out what the message actually means, both literally and figuratively.

Or, as Gul Ocett said in "The Chase," "As far as we know, it might just be a recipe for biscuits."