Naked dead guy money pants

Writing a blog like this one, the usual gist of which is that people believe bizarre things, means that I get the oddest emails sometimes.

Like yesterday, when I got a one-line email, to wit:

Once worn, the scrotum of the necropants would never empty of coins so long as the original coin remains.

That was it.  No explanation.  So I responded, understandably:

... what?

And in short order received the response:

You heard me.

So I was mystified.  Was this some kind of code?  If I responded, "The doberman barks at midnight," would I be allowed into the Sanctum Sanctorum of some secret society?  Or was the person who sent the email simply loony?  I finally decided on the direct approach, and responded:

Yes, I did, and am no closer to having the slightest idea of what you are talking about.

At this point, the emailer decided to stop playing coy, and sent me a link to a page of the website The Cult of Weird called "Macabre Icelandic Traditions: Necropants."  On the website we are told that "necropants" are a bizarre, and probably illegal, way to make money through black magic:

The Strandagaldur Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft in Holmavik tells the story of seventeen people burned at the stake in the 17th century for occult practices. The museum’s claim to fame is an exhibit showcasing the macabre legend of Necropants, or nábrók... 

According to legend, necropants could produce an endless flow of coins if done correctly.

To begin with, one would need to get permission from a living man to use his skin upon his death. After burial, the sorcerer would then have to dig up the body and skin it in one piece from the waist down. A coin stolen from a poor widow must then be placed in the scrotum, along with a magic sign called nábrókarstafur scrawled on paper.

Once worn, the scrotum of the necropants would never empty of coins so long as the original coin remains.

The website has a photograph of some (presumably real) necropants, or at least a fairly convincing facsimile thereof, which I would have posted here except for the fact that it looks basically like the lower half of a naked guy and I don't want to offend anyone.  So if you want to see it for some reason (and I may need several months of therapy after having looked at it myself), you can just go to the original website and take a look.

Of course, what this makes me wonder is two things: (1) how did anyone ever come up with this idea?  (2) And once they tried it, and it didn't work, how on earth did the tradition continue?  You'd think that once you'd gone to all of that trouble, and no gold coins dropped from the dead guy's naughty bits, you'd sort of go, "Well, there's another great idea that didn't work.  What a bunch of goobers we are," and go back to herding sheep, or whatever the hell they did for a living in 17th century Iceland.

But no.  Apparently enough people thought that this was a good idea that it somehow became a common practice, or at least sufficiently widespread to merit a bunch of people getting burned at the stake, and later, a display in a museum.  The whole thing leaves me a little flabbergasted, frankly.

But the person who originally emailed me actually had an interesting point (other than grossing me out completely) -- which was that a lot of these magic spells and so on have similar characteristics to the claims people now circulate on the internet.  "But before we had the internet you had to come up with something that people would actually repeat, for it to get around," he said, with regard to the Naked Dead Guy Money Pants.  "So it had to be something either too vague in its effects to be sure whether it was working, or too much trouble for people to actually do, as in this case."

Which explains it, I guess.  Me, I'm still a little perplexed at how someone could come up with the idea in the first place.  But when you think about it, it's not really that much weirder than (for example) Scientology.

Maybe back in 17th century Iceland, some guy made a bet with another guy in a bar that he could convince people that they could make money skinning corpses.  It's as good an explanation as any, and hey -- it worked for L. Ron Hubbard.

Obi-wan... has taught you well.

Try and guess what the seventh-largest claimed religion in England is.

Go ahead, try.  I bet you'll be wrong.

Ready for the answer?  It's "Jediism."

Yes, you read that right.  Jedi.  As in Star Wars.  People around the world are, in increasing numbers, claiming to be Jedi Knights.

(photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

According to a recent investigation by Details' Benjamin Svetkey, there are now Jedi training camps springing up around the world.  He knows because he visited one, in Norris, Texas, where he witnessed a "knighting" of a former "padawon" named Ally Thompson.  Thompson, a 28-year-old Iraqi war veteran, has been studying for years to achieve her knighthood.

"No, we don't worship Yoda," she told Svetkey.  "And telekinesis is not something that we necessarily do - at least not like in the movies.  But I won't deny that the Force is very present in our teachings. Some people call it magic.  Some call it Ashe.  The scientific community calls it energy.  But it's everywhere.  You can find it in the Bible.  When Moses parted the Red Sea - how did he do that?  With energy.  With the Force."

According to Svetkey, there are 175,000 self-proclaimed Jedi in England, making it the seventh-largest religion in the country.  There are 15,000 Jedi in the Czech Republic, 9,000 in Canada, and 65,000 in Australia.

Oddly, given our penchant for embracing bizarre belief systems, there are only 5,000 Jedi in the United States.  I'm not sure if I should be happy or upset about that.  But I will say that one of the most popular training programs for Jedi, The Temple of the Jedi Order, is located in Beaumont, Texas.

If you visit their website (which I highly recommend), you can learn what they're about.  Their mission statement (as it were) runs as follows:

Jedi Believe:

In the Force, and in the inherent worth of all life within it.
In the sanctity of the human person. We oppose the use of torture and cruel or unusual punishment, including the death penalty.
In a society governed by laws grounded in reason and compassion, not in fear or prejudice.
In a society that does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or circumstances of birth such as gender, ethnicity and national origin.
In the ethic of reciprocity, and how moral concepts are not absolute but vary by culture, religion, and over time.
In the positive influence of spiritual growth and awareness on society.
In the importance of freedom of conscience and self-determination within religious, political and other structures.
In the separation of religion and government and the freedoms of speech, association, and expression.

And I can't honestly argue with any of that.  Frankly, I'd be willing to accept a belief in the Force in exchange for everybody in the world abiding by those rules.

Still, I can't help but find the whole thing a little... silly.  It's kind of like what happens when Civil War reenactors and members of the Society for Creative Anachronism let their fantasy life take over.  I mean, the people who created Star Wars were up front that it was fiction -- not just the story, but the Jedi Order and the religious trappings and all.  So sorry, but I don't think I'll be donning brown robes and trying to learn how to handle a light saber any time soon.

On the other hand, it's not the first time that a religion has sprung from science fiction.  I'm lookin' at you, Scientologists.  And I'll take the Jedis over those wackos in a heartbeat, given the latter's history of coercion, secrecy, abuse, and fraud.  (And lest you think I'm overstating my case by the use of the last word, the French government delivered a serious blow to the Church of Scientology just last week, when a court upheld a 2009 fraud conviction for victimizing vulnerable followers.)

And since I'm an atheist, it's no surprise that I pretty much have the attitude that all religions were, originally, human inventions, so honestly, Jediism is no worse than the rest of 'em (and a damn site better than a good many). 

So my general response is: let the Jedis have their fun.  It doesn't seem to be harming anyone.  And who knows?  If a Death Star shows up one day and a deep, booming voice threatens to vaporize planet Earth, the Jedis may well be Our Only Hope.

Publicity stunts and "Aura Babies"

Ordinarily I don't pay any attention to celebrities.

Part of it comes from not having a working television connection.  I live too far out in the middle of nowhere for cable, and I'm too cheap to get a satellite dish.  Besides, if I did have satellite, I'd just spend hours watching The Weather Channel and updating my wife about weather systems in North Dakota, and she has to put up with enough of this kind of thing already, given that my internet browser's homepage is the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

So there's the lack of access, but a big part of it also comes from a lack of caring.  My general impression is that a lot of celebrities are talentless hacks who will do anything to remain in the public eye, and I just don't have a lot of patience for that sort of thing.  But when Sharon Hill, over at the wonderful site Doubtful News, posted a story on a couple of "reality" television stars, I thought, "If Hill thinks it's worth paying attention to, I should probably see what it's all about."

Turns out it was worth the effort.  Because that's how I found out that plastic-surgery-queen Heidi Montag and her partner, Spencer Pratt, are trying to conceive...

... an "aura baby."

(photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

I'm not making this up.  And in the time-honored fashion of couples everywhere, she posted details about what she and Pratt were doing, on Twitter.  Here was the first tweet:

1 reason we're trying to get fit is Spencer & I are trying to conceive #speidishow

But she hastily followed it up with additional tweets, that they weren't just trying to have a regular old boring baby, but an "aura baby."  What is an "aura baby," you might ask?  Do you conceive one from having aural sex?  No, but Montag has the answer:

An Aura Baby is a product of the soul born out of the bio-chemistry of the universe! #speidishow

Oh!  Okay!  Because that clears it right up!  But fear not, she went on with a more detailed explanation:

An Aura Baby isn't the child of your fame, not YOUR Aura & NOT Aura like when they say a  painting has an Aura #speidishow

I...  what?

An Aura Baby is born of 1 thing – the love of 2 people channeled & focused to go out to the whole world!  #speidishow

 Just... stop...

Since i beat @spencerpratt in yoga he's carrying our aurababy! #speidishow

And so forth and so on.

Now, I'm aware that this is just a publicity stunt.  A weird publicity stunt, but a publicity stunt.   But apparently some of Montag's fans don't.  I looked at her Twitter feed, and while there were a few people who seemed to react with disdain (including more than one who questioned Montag's sanity), most people who responded seemed ostensibly to think that she was somehow talking about reality.  One woman, in fact, said she was "Soooo excited" about the upcoming happy cosmic event, and hoped that they would "televise the delivery" when Pratt gives birth to his new little astral offspring.

Okay, that could be an example of Poe's Law, but given some of the other insane things people believe, I'm not entirely sure.

So, that's the news from Hollywood these days.  Further reinforcing my determination not to watch television, which in my opinion went into a tailspin, quality-wise, the day The X Files went off the air.  I'll just stick with my online news reports of weather systems in North Dakota, which at least have a basis in reality.

WiFi woes

A clever, although questionably ethical, marketing technique is to create a problem in people's minds, and then sell them a solution to the (nonexistent) problem.

I first saw this happen with the invention of "cellulite" in the 1970s.  Cellulite, supposedly, was some kind of special, hard-to-get-rid-of fat, predominantly on the upper legs of women, where it manifests as dimples and bumps.  Almost instantaneously that it was named (and identified as "difficult to treat"), various diets, exercises, and supplements appeared that were specifically intended to "flush cellulite from the body."

Sad to say, but cellulite is just plain old fat.  No different than fat anywhere in the body.  It only appears different on the upper legs because of the presence of fibrous connective tissue there.  And you can't get rid of it except the same way you'd get rid of any fat, i.e., to eat less and exercise more -- and because of skin wrinkling with age, older people probably won't ever be able to rid themselves of it entirely.

A similar kind of thing is going on today, in a completely different area -- this one with regards to the safety of WiFi networks.

Somewhere along the line, someone got the idea that the radiation emitted by WiFi networks was dangerous, leading to sites like the EMF Safety Network, which acts as a clearinghouse for all sorts of links on the subject.  On the "Welcome" page, we're given a taste of how seriously they take all of this with a quote from Dr. Robert O. Becker, who was "twice nominated for the Nobel Prize:"

I have no doubt in my mind that at the present time, the greatest polluting element in the earth’s environment is the proliferation of electromagnetic fields. I consider that to be far greater on a global scale than warming, and the increase in chemical elements in the environment.

Well, that's just terrifying, but allow me to point out that (1) anyone can be nominated for a Nobel Prize, (2) Becker's work with the role of electricity in disease and healing has been found to be unsupported, and (3) he thought that telepathy was real and caused by "low-frequency electromagnetic waves."

Be that as it may, there is now all sorts of scare-literature out there about how we should protect our children from the dangers of WiFi.  The general consensus by scientists, of course, is that this is nonsense -- the radiation from WiFi networks is non-ionizing (i.e., sufficiently low in energy that it cannot break chemical bonds) and of very low intensity.  A public statement by Princeton University identifies the dangers of WiFi as what they are (minimal):

(A) newly published paper entitled “Radiofrequency Exposure from Wireless LANS Utilizing Wi-Fi Technology” discusses a study in which measurements were conducted at 55 sites in four countries, and measurements were conducted under conditions that would result in the higher end of exposures from such systems. An excerpt from the abstract states “.…In all cases, the measured Wi-Fi signal levels were very far below international exposure limits (IEEE C95.1-2005 and ICNIRP) and in nearly all cases far below other RF signals in the same environments.”

Dr. Steven Novella, in SkepticBlog, also addresses the claims of certain individuals who believe they are "electromagnetic hypersensitives:"

What about electromagnetic hypersensitivity – the reporting of common non-specific symptoms, such as headache, fatigue, dizziness, and confusion, while being exposed to EMF? Well, the same review also summarizes this research, which finds that under blinded conditions there is no such hypersensitivity syndrome. Even with people who consistently report symptoms with exposure to EMF, in blinded conditions they cannot reliably tell if they are being exposed to EMF.

This hasn't stopped the claims from flying, and dozens of cases of parents petitioning school boards to have WiFi networks removed from schools to "protect the children" -- in some cases, successfully.  Novella concludes,

What we have here are the seeds of yet another grassroots movement that is disconnected from science and hostile to authority. This is a scenario we have seen played out many times before, and no doubt we will see it many times again.

And, of course, wherever you have panic over risk, you'll have some shrewd marketer who decides to capitalize upon the fear.

Take, for example, EarthCalm, which purports to shield you from the dangers of the nasty WiFi waves.  Here's their sales pitch:

Concerned about WiFi radiation dangers?  You have reason to be.

WiFi uses hazardous radiation to send its signals through walls.  If you have WiFi, you are receiving massive amounts of radiation that may be causing you and your family health problems.

WiFi Health Risks:

• headaches
• fatigue
• sleep disorders
• digestive problems
• brain fog and memory loss
• depression and anxiety
• dizziness

Research on WiFi Radiation Dangers:
There's a great deal of research that's been done on the non-thermal kind of radiation that WiFi emits.

One comprehensive report is the Bioinitiative Report.  Written by 29 scientists, researchers, and health policy professionals from 10 different countries, this report documents clear evidence that numerous health issues, including DNA breakage and risk of cancer, are created by exposure to radiation from cell phones, cell towers, power lines, and WiFi.

They must define "massive amounts" differently than I do, given that the Princeton study (cited above) found that the levels of low-frequency radiation given off by WiFi networks was so small as to be nearly indistinguishable from the background noise.

However, don't let little things like "facts" stand in the way of your sales pitch.  Because the EarthCalm people aren't just saying to give in; no, they're saying that they want you to purchase a "shield" -- the "EarthCalm WiFi Pak" -- that "eliminates WiFi health risks by transforming the hazardous cloud of radiation into a calming field of protection throughout your home."

For only $457.

And I'm sure they're selling like hotcakes, given the current scare tactics being used by the anti-WiFi cadre.  Same, actually, as the scare tactics used by the chemtrails people, the anti-GMO folks, and the anti-vaxxers.

Wouldn't surprise me if there was a significant overlap between those four groups, actually, because the conclusions they've reached come from the same source -- fear, distrust, and a poor understanding of the science.

Now, don't misunderstand me; I know there have been times that people have thought something was safe, sometimes for decades, and then it turns out not to be.  It's just that I don't think this is one of those cases.  The science, here, is well understood; the whole thing has been tested to a fare-thee-well; and the claims of the people who disagree virtually entirely rest on anecdote and poorly-controlled "studies" that wouldn't pass peer review even if there were hefty bribes involved.

So, in my mind, it's case closed.  But I'm sure that doesn't mean the controversy will go away, nor the clever salespeople trying to capitalize on it.  Because one thing hasn't changed since P. T. Barnum's time; there's still a sucker born every minute.

Mob brain

I told myself that I wouldn't blog about the government shutdown.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a very political person.  To my untrained ear, most politics seems to fall into one of two categories; (1) arguing about things that are blatantly obvious (such as whether gays should have the same rights that straight people do), and (2) arguing about things that are so impossibly complex that a reasonable solution is probably impossible (such as how to balance the federal budget).  Given that impression, it's no wonder that most political wrangling leaves me a little baffled.

So, any opinion I might have on the government shutdown, or what to do about it, wouldn't be worth much.  But I did hear one commentary on the shutdown, and President Obama's role in it, that left me feeling like I had to respond.  It came from one Larry Klayman, the attorney who founded the right-wing organization Freedom Watch:

I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Qu'ran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.

This unusually stupid statement was made at an event called the "Million Vet March on the Memorials," which was an accurate name only if you believe the mathematical equation 200 = 1,000,000, but which did attract noted wingnuts Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz.  And when Klayman made his wacky pronouncement, the crowd went wild with glee and waved their anti-government flags they'd brought along for the occasion.

My thought was, "Are you serious?  You people still think President Obama is a Muslim?"  I thought that had finally been laid to rest along with the whole birth certificate nonsense and the question of whether Donald Trump is wearing a toupée or if a raccoon had simply crawled on top of his head and died.

But no, the whole thing is still a burning issue with these people.  Klayman apparently arrived at the position using the following logic:

1.  I don't like Barack Obama.
2.  I don't like Muslims.
Therefore:  Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Possibly augmented with a second airtight argument, to wit:

1.  Muslims have funny names.
2.  Barack Obama is a funny name.
Therefore:  Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Logicians describe two basic kinds of one-step reasoning, the modus ponens and the modus tollens.  The first is when you have an implication, and can show that the first part is true, and deduce that the second must be true ("If today is Wednesday, then tomorrow must be Thursday.  I know today is Wednesday.  Therefore I know that tomorrow will be Thursday.")  The second is the converse; if I have an implication, and the second part is false, the first must be false as well ("If it's July, the weather is warm.  It's not warm this morning.  Therefore I know it must not be July.")

Klayman appears to have invented a third mode of reasoning, the modus morons.  I guess I need to revise my notes next time I teach logic in my Critical Thinking classes.

But what gets me most about all of this is how ridiculous it is from another standpoint, which is to consider how President Obama would act if he were a Muslim.  Let's look around us at Muslim-dominated countries in the world, and see if we can see some commonalities.  Here are a few:

• Religion is overtly present pretty much everywhere you go.
• Religion drives law, policy, and jurisprudence.
• School curricula incorporate religious principles, and schools that are predominantly religious in nature are fully supported by the government.
• The holy book of the dominant religion is to be considered as literal fact.
• Women are subjected to subordinate roles, and any kind of reproductive rights issues are completely off the table.
• Homosexuality is condemned; acceptance of homosexuality is considered a sign of moral decay, to be eradicated by any means.
• Obedience to authority is one of the most fundamental virtues.
• The death penalty is justified for a variety of crimes.

So, really, folks; who does that sound more like, the Democrats or the Republicans?

I mean, okay.  Even if you think that Klayman and his idiot friends are right, and that President Obama is a Muslim, you have to admit that he's a really lousy Muslim.  I think that if he is a Muslim, he should turn in his membership card, because he's acting like...

... well, like a liberal American.  Go figure.

And even so, when Klayman said his piece about the President "putting down his Qu'ran," the people listening didn't seem to react that way.  They applauded.  They yelled for more.  Instead of doing what I would have done -- which was to laugh directly in Klayman's face and take away his microphone -- they cheered him on.

There's something, I think, that happens to people's brains when they're in mobs.  Somehow, being part of a mob makes you incapable of thinking rationally.  So maybe that's all that happened here -- one fool got up and babbled foolish stuff to the crowd, and the crowd simply agreed, because that's what crowds do.  It's like the inimitable Terry Pratchett said: "The IQ of a mob is equal to the IQ of the stupidest person in the mob, divided by the number of people in the mob."

Considering that this particular mob contained Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, and Larry Klayman, I think this formula results in a small number indeed.

COPE, Kansas, and the battle over evolution (again)

It's with a sense of "Oy, here we go again" that I must tell you that a group of parents in Kansas calling themselves COPE (Citizens for Objective Public Education) have sued the Kansas State Board of Education for adopting the Next Generation Science Standards, which explicitly endorse the teaching of evolution.

Here's the gist of the suit:

The Plaintiffs, consisting of students, parents and Kansas resident taxpayers, and a representative organization, complain that the adoption by the Defendant State Board of Education on June 11, 2013 of Next Generation Science Standards, dated April 2013 (the Standards; http://www.nextgenscience.org/) and the related Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Core Ideas, (2012;
(http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13165#), incorporated therein by reference (the "Framework" with the Framework and Standards referred to herein as the “F&S”) will have the effect of causing Kansas public schools to establish and endorse a non-theistic religious worldview (the “Worldview”) in violation of the Establishment, Free Exercise, and Speech Clauses of the First Amendment, and the Equal Protection Clauses of the 14th Amendment.

So it's pretty much same old, same old.  They never get tired of the game, somehow, despite their repeated defeats, most tellingly the stinging slapdown they got in the Kitzmiller vs. the Dover Area School Board decision of 2005, which read, in part:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID [Intelligent Design] arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community...  It is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research. Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena...  ID's backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.

So, yeah.  Ouchie-wawa.  But if you're on a Holy Crusade, you never accept defeat.  So they're back at it again, with (one hopes) the same results in store for them.

What makes this more interesting, though, is a piece on the subject by the eminent neurologist, writer, and skeptic Steven Novella, in his wonderful blog NeuroLogica.  The post, entitled "Kansas Citizens Vote to Reject Science," is (of course) a thorough rebuke of the motives and rationality of COPE and any members of the judiciary who might agree with them, but it contained a passage that made me frown a little:

Science does not require non-theism. It does not even require naturalism. Science merely proceeds as if the world is naturalistic, that there is cause and effect and nothing magical that violates cause and effect. This is called methodological naturalism – science is a set of methods that work within a naturalistic framework of cause and effect.

Science is officially agnostic, however, toward any deeper philosophical conclusions about whether or not anything supernatural actual exists. It simply relegates such questions outside the sphere of science.

This does not mean that philosophers cannot rely on empirical evidence and scientific notions to argue for a naturalistic universe. That is my personal belief – the simplest explanation for why we cannot know about anything supernatural, and why science works within the assumption of naturalism, is because naturalism is actually true. But science does not require that belief.

While I agree with him insofar as his views speak of religion in general, I disagree entirely when they are applied to specific religions.  And, after all, almost no one belongs to a "religion in general."  There are religions that see no conflict whatsoever between science and a belief in god (the Unitarians, for example).  There are others which very much do.  So it's all very well to say that "science is officially agnostic... about whether or not anything supernatural exists," but when push comes to shove and science runs headlong into religion, a Southern Baptist (for example) is going to have to decide where (s)he stands on the matter.

It's a little disingenuous, I think, for Dr. Novella (however much I respect him and approve of his views) to say that mandating the teaching of evolution in public schools is outside of the purview of religion, just as religion is outside of the purview of science.  But if part of your religious belief is that god created the world in six days, six-thousand-odd years ago, then my saying that the Earth is six or so billion years old, that organisms have evolved into the forms we have today, that there was no Great Flood, and so on, certainly has religious implications.  By stating that the latter are to be taught in science classes -- and I believe, of course, that they should be -- I am stating, not so subtly, that your religion is wrong on those points.

You can surely see how both viewpoints can't be true.

So, however much we'd like to accept the Stephen Jay Gould idea of non-overlapping magisteria -- that science and religion both have their places, and those places do not intersect -- there is a significant percentage of Americans who don't see it that way.  Young-Earth creationists, in particular, are completely correct in seeing scientific statements as affecting, and in many cases negating, their religious claims.

To them, scientific statements are religious statements.  Not that science and religion have the same methods; in fact, precisely because they don't.  They have accepted the religious way of knowing as the ultimate truth -- anything that comes into conflict with that, then, must be false and evil.

Now don't get me wrong; I think the members of COPE are a bunch of irrational nitwits.  Their stance about evolution is demonstrably incorrect.  However, that doesn't mean that their claim -- that teaching their children evolution is a practice that carries with it an intrinsic statement about their religion -- is false as well.

So as much as I wish we would stop pussyfooting around and playing nice with these people, the Establishment clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."  At first glance, this would clearly seem to place religion in the context of a personal practice -- making any public mandate of a religious point of view illegal.  But what if, as in this case, kids are being made to learn, and to treat as truth, a viewpoint that directly contradicts their religious beliefs?

How is that itself not a religious statement?

I dunno.  Makes me glad I'm not a judge.  Despite my inclination to tell the members of COPE, "Hey, y'all just get yourselves back to the 17th century where you belong, I'm sure there are some witches y'all need to take care of back there," I'm not sure it's that easy.  I hope that this latest lawsuit goes the way of Kitzmiller vs. Dover, but however it's decided, I don't think the war is over quite yet.

Peter Gariaev, wave genetics, and the problem of being a dilettante

There's an inherent problem with skepticism, and the heart of it is that you can't be an expert in everything.

There are, in fact, damn few things that I do consider myself an expert in.  Judging by my ability to read technical, peer-reviewed papers, I can handle myself decently in the fields of evolutionary biology and population genetics (which I focused on in college, and which I teach every year) and historical linguistics (the subject of my master's degree).  Outside of that... well, I'm a dilettante.  So despite my B.S. in physics, research papers in Science on just about any topic in physics lose me after the first two sentences.  Even in biology -- a subject I've taught with (I think) at least some degree of competence for 27 years -- I am instantaneously lost in the details in scholarly papers on a variety of topics, including (but not limited to) cellular biology, physiology, ecosystem dynamics, and most of biochemistry.

Now, let me say up front that there's nothing inherently wrong about being a dilettante.  Dilettantes make good high school teachers, and my opinion is that it's more fun to be a generalist than a specialist.  Dilettantism was positively celebrated in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it was the sport of gentlemen (and more than a few gentlewomen) -- some of whom have some significant and far-reaching research to their credit.

But being a generalist does bring with it a problem, and that is that it leaves you unqualified to weigh in on topics where specialized knowledge would be required to know if the person in question was even making sense.  And the specialists aren't much better off -- because even they are out of their element in all but their chosen field.

So how, as skeptics, do we make a decision about whether someone is a groundbreaking pioneer or a spouter of bullshit -- when the field in which they are making their pronouncements is less than familiar to you?

I ran into an especially good example of this a couple of days ago, when a friend asked me what I thought about Dr. Peter Gariaev.  I hadn't heard of Dr. Gariaev's research, so I did a little digging.  And what I found left me with the same impression my friend had -- his comment was that it "sounded like a bunch of woo."

But let's face it, relativity sounded like a "bunch of woo" when it was first proposed.  So did quantum mechanics.  So, honestly, did the germ theory of disease.  None of these ideas were particularly intuitive; none gained instant acceptance; all three seemed, for a while, to be blatant nonsense.  So let's look at some of Gariaev's writing, and see if he's an Einstein or a Schrödinger -- or a David Icke or a Richard C. Hoagland.

Here are a few paragraphs from Gariaev's own website about his theory, called "Wave Genetics:"

The quintessence of the wave genome theory may be represented as following: genome of the highest organisms is considered to be a bio-computer which forms the space-time grid framework of a bio-systems.

In that bio-system, as the carriers of a field epi-gene-matrix - wave fronts are being used, which are assigned by gene-holograms and so-called solitons on DNA – distinct type of acoustic and electromagnetic fields, produced by biogenetic apparatus of the organism/bio-system under consideration and being a medium of strategic regulatory data/information exchange between cells, tissues and organs of the bio-system.

It is also vital to note that the holographic grids/frameworks, which are also the elements of fluctuating structures of solitons, are, in fact, discrete simplest cases of code-originated information, anchored in chromosome continuum of an organism...


A group of scientists headed by P P Gariaev and M U Maslov, developed a theory of so called fractal representation of natural (human) and genetical languages. Within the confines of this theory it is said that the quasi-speech of DNA possesses potentially inexhaustible “supply of words” and, moreover, what had been a sentence on the scales of DNA–“texts” “phrases” or a “sentence” becomes/turns into a word or a letter on the other scale. Genetical apparatus can be viewed as the triunity of its structure-functional organization consisting of holographic, soliton and fractal structures.

This theory allows a refined quantitative comparison of symbolic structure of any texts including genetical. Thereby a possibility has been wide open to approach a deciphering of a lexicon of one’s own gene-code, and accordingly, more accurate composition of algorithms of addressing a genome of a human with an aim of potentially any type of programming of one’s vital activity such as treatment, increasing one’s life expectancy and so on and so forth.

Empirical tests of wave genetic theory in the light of “speech” characteristics of DNA demonstrate strategically correct stance and direction of the research.

Made it through all that?  There's lots more, but it all pretty much sounds like what you just read.  Lots of use of words like "holographic" and "fractal" and "soliton;" not much in the way of data.  As far as his qualifications, Gariaev himself apparently has a Ph.D., even though nowhere could I find any mention of where it's from.  To be fair, this may just be that his biographical details aren't widely known outside of his native Russia.  So given that, is there a way we can parse his research, despite not being molecular biologists ourselves?  (Well, maybe some of my readers are, but I'm not.) 

When I run across something like this, the first thing I look for is to see where he's been published.  And when you look at his publications list, an interesting pattern emerges.  Back in the early 1990s, Gariaev was publishing in what seem to be reputable, peer-reviewed journals -- the Journal of the Society of Optical Engineering and Laser Physics, for example.  Even back then, though, you could see what appears to be a trend toward oddball interpretations of science, with his solo paper "DNA as source of new kind of God 'knowledge'" (published in the Act and Facts/Impact series, N12, pp. 7-11).  I'm just going off the title, here -- I wasn't able to find the paper itself -- but unless he was using the term "God knowledge" metaphorically, which doesn't seem very likely in a scholarly paper, I think this one already shows that he'd gone off the beam.

Since then, though, he's not had a single publication in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, with the exception of a 2002 paper in the International Journal of Computing Anticipatory Systems.  His other publications have appeared in places like the Journal of Non-Locality and Remote Mental Interactions (and lest you think that I'm being too harsh, here, a quick survey of other articles they'd published include one having to do with using "Qigong" to treat cancer, one trying to use quantum mechanics to explain telepathy, and one called "A Scientific Validation of Planetary Consciousness"). 

Other papers by Gariaev have appeared in DNA Decipher Journal -- which just this summer published a paper called "Quantum Intelligent Design in Contrast to Mindless Materialists' Evolution."

Mercy me.

So, if Gariaev is the next Einstein, why no papers in Nature or Science?

Why, too, is he cited all over -- but only in places of highly dubious reputation, like Above Top Secret and Godlike Productions?

And don't start with me about how he is a Maverick and a Pioneer and the other scientists hate him and are suppressing his work because it is too revolutionary.  C'mon, now.  How many careers were made based on the ground broken by the likes of Einstein and Schrödinger?  Peter Higgs just won the Nobel Prize, for fuck's sake.

I may not be an expert in biophysics; but I do know that if Gariaev really had shown (as he has claimed) that "genetic traits can be changed, activated and disactivated by use of resonant waves, beamed at the DNA" and that this was going to allow humans "to regrow vital internal organs, in vivo, without the requirement of difficult, dangerous and expensive surgical procedures," then he'd be elbowing Higgs out of the way to get to Stockholm.

So we can, as generalists (or as specialists outside our particular specialty) still use the principles of skepticism to come to some sort of judgment about what we read.  Fortunate for me; a dilettante I always have been, and (I'm afraid) a dilettante I always will be.  If it weren't possible for us to think through such situations, we'd fall prey to just about every crazy claim that came along.

Some of us still do, of course -- which is why it's absolutely critical to train your brain to be, well, absolutely critical.