Mokele-Mbembe, debate, and anecdotal evidence

A couple of days ago, a student and I were discussing the issue of how much weight should be given to purely anecdotal evidence.  It's an important question, not only in "fringe" fields like cryptozoology and UFOlogy, but in medicine and law -- because what, after all, is eyewitness testimony but anecdote?  In scientific circles, anecdote is usually considered the lowest tier of evidence, for the very good reason that it relies on the very unreliable human memory.  Anecdotal evidence is simply too prone to cherry-picking, misremembering, or outright lying to be given much credence in the absence of any more reliable support, even if you have lots of it.

As my student put it: "The plural of anecdote is not data."

I bring this up because of a debate that happened last week at Utah Valley University between paleontologist Paul Bybee and folklorist Danny Stewart, called "Surviving Dinosaurs in Africa."  The gist of it was to look at claims that there is a holdover from the Cretaceous Period still stomping around the Congo Basin, a fearsome beast called the Mokele-Mbembe.

(Image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

An excellent summary of the alleged sightings of this creature can be found here, wherein we can read accounts like the following:

In 1909, Lt. Paul Gratz, after hearing a number of natives describe the creature and having been shown a hide that purportedly came from Mokele-mbembe, became the first to describe the alleged creature as resembling a sauropod (which means lizard foot). In the same year, renowned big game hunter Carl Hagenbeck said that a number of independent, reputable sources familiar with the region reported a large animal that resembled a sauropod, and, as a result, stories about the cryptid became a popular media topic for a while afterward.

In 1913, a German officer, Captain Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz (try to say that while eating crackers), a surveyor of the German colonies in what is now Cameroon wrote of reports of a creature the size of an elephant or hippo with smooth brown/grey skin and a muscular tail like an alligator. He was shown a path that was said to be a Mokele-mbembe made trail, but because of the multitude of large game (elephant, hippo, etc.) tracks, there was no real, clear evidence to be found.

Despite (by some accounts) over 20,000 sightings of this giant animal, there is not one piece of hard evidence supporting its existence -- not one bone, tooth, or bit of skin.

But that doesn't stop silliness like last week's "debate," in which we get to hear statements like the following, from folklorist Stewart: "The scientific method has a hypothesis.  I see folklore, fantasy and mythology as synonyms of hypothesis."

Sorry, but this is one of the wackiest examples of the If-By-Whiskey fallacy I've ever heard -- simply altering the definition of a word to suit whatever point you were trying to argue.  "Hypothesis" in science has an extremely precise meaning -- a testable proposed explanation for a phenomenon (I actually rather detest the grade-school definition of "an educated guess" because it makes the whole thing sound far more random than it actually is).  "Folklore" isn't a synonym for "hypothesis;" "folklore" is a synonym for "people making shit up."

Now, I realize that sounds pretty harsh, and before all of the mythology buffs out there start throwing heavy objects in my general direction, allow me to point out two things.  First, I love mythology and folklore myself -- I have had a positive passion for it since childhood.  However, I have always been certain that the stories about Odin and Loki and Thor et al. were stories, and that however much I sometimes think the world could use a good dose of Ragnarök, it's not gonna happen.  (You might be interested, though, to read about a publicity campaign currently being run by the Jorvík Viking Museum in York, England, which claims that the Norse myths were all true, and that the world is gonna end in 100 days, on February 22, 2014 -- a date that coincidentally enough, marks the start of the annual Jorvík Viking Festival.)

But second, honesty demands that I point out that there have been times when folklore has proven true.  Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy is often cited as an example, although you might argue that The Iliad is more mythologized history than it is folklore -- similar, in that way, to Le Chanson de Roland and the bible.  *dodges heavy objects thrown by a whole different set of people*  There are other examples where folklore has a basis in fact, of course; one in my own field is the tradition, common in northern Germany and Denmark, that when a baby is born, the eldest woman in the family is to kiss the baby's forehead, and if she tastes salt, the baby is going to be sickly and die young.  A weird superstition, you might think, until you find out that in this area of Europe, the gene for cystic fibrosis is common -- and among its symptoms is producing very salty sweat.

But just because "some folklore has partial basis in truth" is a far cry from "all folklore deserves scientific investigation."  Every culture has its accounts of big horrible monsters, which in my mind stem more from a love of scary stories than they do from an accurate representation of reality.  And it bears mention that as anecdotal evidence builds up in the absence of hard evidence, the likeliness of the claim being true does not increase, it diminishes, as counterintuitive as that might seem.  If there really have been 20,000 sightings of Mokele-Mbembe in the Congo Basin, what is the likelihood that such an apparently large population of animals has never once left behind a corpse for someone to find, or even a Jurassic Park-style bunch of dinosaur poo?

So much as I'd love to see a "survival" like this, I'm of the opinion that it's nothing more than a wild tale.  And even Stewart, last week at Utah Valley University, admitted, "There's nothing to back this up, but it's a fun story," which makes me wonder why anyone thought that there was anything there to debate.

Anyhow, now that we've got that taken care of, maybe we can move on to other things, such as the claim by a guy from Antioch, Tennessee that there was a Bigfoot in his back yard, and he has a photograph to prove it, which looks exactly like Bigfoot would look if it was a large featureless black lump.  But he did say that he howled at the Bigfoot, and it howled back, which sounds promising.  I think we should definitely send someone down to investigate, preferably before Heimdall blows the Gjallarhorn and the Frost Giants attack.  You can see how that would put a damper on things.

Putting the brakes on the Common Core

If you want to get a near-violent response from 98% of current public school students, about 75% of teachers, and unknown (but probably large) percentage of parents, administrators, and various other folks associated with education, all you have to do is utter two words:

Common Core.

It's a funny thing, really.  On the surface, it seems like such a good idea -- creating a set of uniform standards, high ones, that establish what students at every level should know and should be able to do.  Of course, there's the immediate knee-jerk reaction from both the Right and the Left -- Right-Wingers resent the intrusion by the federal government into what rightfully should be state or local decision-making, and Left-Wingers hate the infringement that the new mandates will have on the freedom of teachers to teach as they see fit and as their students might need.

What I've found, though, is that lots of people from all sides, and (sadly) many of the people who comment the most loudly on the Common Core, are ignorant about what it really is -- and ignorant, too, about what deeper, more subtle problems this movement engenders.  So maybe it's time for some facts, before we get to the opinions (but don't worry, those'll come sooner or later).

The English and math standards -- the ones currently driving the changes we're seeing K-12 in 46 of the 50 states -- can be viewed here (links to the English and math overviews, which contain additional links to the complete standards).  And even a careful reading will probably leave you little room for disagreement with any of what the standards, in their most general framing, say.  As most of my readers know, I've been a vocal critic of current trends in public education, and have not hesitated to speak my mind on the subject -- but it's hard to see how could you argue against statements like the following, from the English standards:

Through reading a diverse array of classic and contemporary literature as well as challenging informational texts in a range of subjects, students are expected to build knowledge, gain insights, explore possibilities, and broaden their perspective. Because the standards are building blocks for successful classrooms, but recognize that teachers, school districts and states need to decide on appropriate curriculum, they intentionally do not offer a reading list. Instead, they offer numerous sample texts to help teachers prepare for the school year and allow parents and students to know what to expect at the beginning of the year.

Likewise, the math standards seem equally commendable:

The standards stress not only procedural skill but also conceptual understanding, to make sure students are learning and absorbing the critical information they need to succeed at higher levels - rather than the current practices by which many students learn enough to get by on the next test, but forget it shortly thereafter, only to review again the following year.

Aubrey Neihaus, a specialist in teacher professional development, has some gentle but firm words for the naysayers on her website, I Support the Common Core:

One thing that  frustrates me the most when I’m reading the mainstream media’s handling of the Common Core is conflation. Too often, well-intentioned journalists publish pieces that never explain that the “Common Core” is a set of learning standards (see the rest of the title of the document: “State Standards”). This inaccuracy (and perhaps ignorance) leads to a conflation of learning standards, curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Sometimes, teacher evaluation systems and data collection are also thrown in for good measure. We’ve all seen it, haven’t we? An article professing to be about the “Common Core” when it’s really about another element of education. 

But therein lies the problem, doesn't it?  As a veteran teacher -- 27 years in the classroom, and counting -- I have seen over and over again that you cannot unhook the standards from the curriculum, from the instructional methods, from the assessments, from how the data are used.  So however noble-minded Ms. Neihaus's wish is, that we evaluate the Common Core based on the standards alone and not on how they are being implemented, that is a fallacious approach (and may be impossible in practice).

Let me give you an example from my own classroom.  In my AP Biology classes, we are currently studying statistical genetics.  I teach this topic as a process -- typical problems involve calculating the likelihood of a trait showing up in the offspring, given a particular type of gene and certain information about the parents.  This decision (the standards for the topic) drives the instruction (how I present it), the assessment (how I design the problem sets and tests to see if the students have met the standards) and even the data (how I weight and score those assignments and tests).  If my standards were different -- if, for example, I valued the students learning large numbers of terms, and memorizing examples of each genetic inheritance pattern, every single part of instruction would be different because of that decision.

So you can't tease apart the standards from the other pieces of the puzzle, and something has got to drive the decision-making.  And the unfortunate bottom line is that in this case the assessments are the driver -- because the data they generate are being used not only to evaluate students, but to evaluate teachers, administrators, schools, and entire school districts.

Diane Ravitch, whose stance on education I greatly admire, has said that she cannot support the Common Core because it is foisting an untested schema of education on schools by fiat, with the Race to the Top money as a carrot (although it bears mention that my school district's share of the RTTT money was about $50,000 -- one year's salary for a first-year teacher, counting insurance and other benefits).  Much as I often agree with Ravitch, I think she doesn't go nearly far enough.  However the standards themselves sound good, the Common Core's implementation has been chaotic, with toxic effects on students, staff, and parents.  And lest you think that my including the parents is unjustified, a friend of mine with two daughters just last week sent a letter to her younger child's principal saying that she is calling halt to the time the girl spends on Common Core homework a night.  An hour after dinner, every night, just for the math homework, is excessive...

... especially if you're in third grade.

The National Center for Fair and Open Testing has summarized the reasons for their opposition to the Common Core standards, but by far the most damning is that the greater rigor in the standards has translated into unrealistic and poorly-constructed tests:

In New York, teachers witnessed students brought to tears (Hernandez & Baker, 2013), faced with confusing instructions and unfamiliar material on Common Core tests.  New York tests gave fifth graders questions written at an 8th grade level (Ravitch, 2013).  New York and Kentucky showed dramatic drops in proficiency and wider achievement gaps.  Poor results hammer students’ self-confidence and disengage them from learning. They also bolster misperceptions about public school failure, place urban schools in the cross hairs and lend ammunition to privatization schemes.  If a child struggles to clear the high bar at five feet, she will not become a "world class" jumper because someone raised the bar to six feet and yelled "jump higher," or if her “poor” performance is used to punish her coach.

The sad truth is that the powers-that-be have sold out the public education system to corporations like Pearson, Educational Testing Service, and CTB/McGraw-Hill, who have a long history of poor-quality products, scoring errors, and general incompetence.  The corporate test-designers are now making the decisions regarding what gets taught, and how -- and the teachers and their students get dragged along behind, with as much decision-making power as a leaf in a windstorm.

Lest you think that I'm overstating my case, here, I recall vividly the last time I went through a sea change like this one -- when then New York State Commissioner of Education Richard Mills launched his ill-conceived "Raise the Bar" revamping of the Regents Exams, the high school exit exams required for graduation.  One of the changes in my subject was that there were now four labs that were mandated -- labs that had to be performed, by every student studying biology across New York State.  The four "state labs" are uniformly poorly written, and one of them has glaring factual errors, a problem I brought to the attention of the science specialist at the New York State Department of Education.

This initiated an increasingly hostile exchange of emails, with her defending the labs and claiming that in any case I had missed the deadline for commenting on them, and my stating that I didn't care about deadlines but that I wasn't going to teach my students something that was scientifically wrong.  I enlisted the help of Dr. Rita Calvo, professor of Human Genetics at Cornell University, who was entirely in support of my position.  All of our efforts were fruitless.  Finally I became angry enough that I said to the science specialist, "Do I understand correctly that the bottom line here is that you are telling me that I have to do this lab, mistakes and all, for no pedagogically sound reason, but simply because you're in charge and you say so?"

And she wrote back one line:  "You got it."

This spirit of top-down micromanagement, and disdain for the opinions and experience of the rank-and-file teacher, is still in evidence today.  Just last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan created a firestorm when he responded to criticism of the Common Core with a dismissive, and rather insulting, claim:

It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary.  You’ve bet your house and where you live and everything on, ‘My child’s going to be prepared.’ That can be a punch in the gut.

The implication, of course, is that the only reason you could criticize the Common Core is if your own kid showed a drop in scores -- and the only reason for that is that your kid isn't as smart as you thought (s)he was.  Seriously, Mr. Duncan?  There couldn't be another reason that scores drop, such as that the test questions are poorly written, like the idiotic "talking pineapple question" on the 2012 New York State eighth-grade reading assessment?  There couldn't be another reason to criticize the standards, like the research of Tom Loveless, which found that the rigor of the standards has little effect on student achievement?

Loveless notes that there are three main arguments for having all public schools teach the same subjects at the same level of rigor and complexity. First, students will learn more if their learning targets are set higher. Second, students will learn more if the passing grade for state tests are set higher. Third, students will learn more if lesson plans and textbooks are all made more complex and rigorous through required high standards...

(N)one of those arguments holds enough validity to risk all that money and effort...  states with weak content standards, as judged by the American Federation of Teachers and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (not ideological bedfellows), had about the same average scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests as states with strong standards.

Schools will undoubtedly weather this chaos, as will teachers -- with the exception of the increasing number of teachers who, tired of the frustration and the atmosphere of distrust, are finding other jobs or retiring if they can.  But I fear for the students -- because, after all, we only get one shot at them.  They move through the system and out, and with luck, into careers and college and productive adult life, still with their curiosity and love for learning and enthusiasm intact.  The test-and-data driven model we are currently using is already showing signs of crushing those delicate mental constructs, of turning kids into anxious, think-inside-the-box exam bubblers who worry more about why they got an 84 instead of an 85 on the test than they do if they actually can apply what they learned -- or (amazing thought!) enjoyed learning it.

I can only hope that enough of us are getting angry about the whole thing that maybe, maybe we can stop the whole thing in its tracks.  Not throw it out, necessarily; as I said, the standards alone aren't necessarily bad.  But for crying out loud, let's see what's happening with implementation before we simply plunge on ahead.  Let's remember that all of us -- teachers, administrators, parents, and members of the state and federal departments of education -- are supposed to be on the same side.

The side of the children.

Fractal morphic energy fields of love

I'm happy to be the one to inform you that the woo-woos have added another word to their vocabulary, and that word is "fractal."

It's about time they come up with something new.  The old ones -- quantum, energy, field, dimension, vibration, flux, resonance, and frequency -- were getting kind of trite, frankly.  So it is with great joy that I bring you the latest in woo-woo silliness...

"Fractal Healing."

How can fractals have anything to do with healing, you might ask, given that a fractal is a mathematical construct, albeit a very useful one?  A fractal is a structure that is "self-similar" -- it shows an identical pattern (or at least a similar one) on small scales as large ones, and has a precise mathematical definition involving recursive functions (and for those of you who are calculus nerds, it is a function that is differentiable nowhere -- which I find kind of mind-blowing).  Fractal mathematics has been useful in various realms, including mapping, creating realistic computer animations of things like animal fur and leaves on trees moving in the wind, and studying natural phenomena such as lightning bolt paths, geologic faults, and coastlines.

But let's leave reality behind, as we so often have to do.  What about "fractal healing?"

As is usual in such cases, they start off well enough, with at least a modest understanding of what the word means.  Here's the description that they give of the concepts associated with the term:

A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals are images of dynamic systems - the pictures of Chaos. Geometrically, they exist in between our familiar dimensions. Fractal patterns are extremely familiar, since nature is full of fractals. For instance: trees, rivers, coastlines, mountains, clouds, seashells, hurricanes, etc. Abstract fractals - such as the Mandelbrot Set - can be generated by a computer calculating a simple equation over and over.

Okay, that's not bad, you have to admit.  Even if it's not what I'd call rigorous, at least it's within hailing distance of correct.  (Although calling fractals "pictures of Chaos" is kind of ridiculous, given that the whole idea is that it's a pattern that is infinitely deep -- the exact opposite of chaos.)

(Image of the Mandelbrot set courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

Of course, woo-woos never keep their eye on the ball, and ultimately end up having said ball zip right past them and shatter the Plate Glass Window of Reality, and this is no exception:

The fractal field is the coded field of the sacred geometry of nature.  It lies beyond the morphic field of energy and actually creates the morphic field...   The fractal field holds the geometry of the natural world.  By repairing, resetting, and upgrading the fractal codes within our fractal field, we can heal ourselves, enhance our life experience, and move our evolution forward, in ways never before known that are exponentially more powerful.

When our fractal field is returned to its original perfection, we return to our natural state of grace.  We perceive and manifest our reality through the knowing of our inner divinity and perfection.  We transcend all limitation and express and experience transcendent love in perfect human form in union with all.  This is our journey.

Predictably, what drives me crazy about this is that they're taking something that really is cool and weird and interesting (fractal mathematics, about which you can learn more here) and using a vague understanding of it to support whatever wacky view of the universe they happen to have.  The same is true of all of the other terms woo-woos use, though, isn't it?  If you actually bother to put in the hard work to learn about phenomena like quantum mechanics, resonance, energy dynamics, and so on, you are rewarded by opening your mind to some pretty amazing stuff, with the added benefit that it's real.

Here, though -- we have the usual New Age mushy philosophy about returning to our State of Transcendent Love and Grace and Perfection, and it's given undeserved credibility by appending a word to it that honestly has nothing to do with pop psychology.  All because it's easier to do that than it is actually to learn what fractals actually are.

So, that's our new woo-woo vocabulary word for today.  Watch out for it.  I predict it's gonna be popular.  They certainly have gotten enough mileage out of "quantum," after all.

The odds against creation

New from the Department of Specious Statistics, the owner of a biblical timeline business and self-proclaimed mathematician has stated that she has calculated the likelihood of the biblical creation story being wrong as "less than 1 in 479 million."

Margaret Hunter, who owns Bible Charts and Timelines of Duck, West Virginia, stated in an interview, "I realized the twelve items listed in the Genesis creation account are confirmed by scientists today as being in the correct order, starting with light being separated from darkness, plants coming before animals and ending with man.  Think of the problem like this.  Take a deck of cards.  Keep just one suit—let’s say hearts.  Toss out the ace.  Hand the remaining twelve cards to a one year old child.  Ask him/her to hand you the cards one at a time.  In order.  What are the chances said toddler will start with the two and give them all to you in order right up to the king?"

Not very high, Hunter correctly states.  "Being a mathematician, I like thinking about things like this," she says.  "Moses had less than one chance in 479 million of just correctly guessing [the sequence of the creation account].  To me, the simplest explanation is Moses got it straight from the Creator."

Righty-o.  This just brings up a few questions in my mind, to wit:

• Are you serious?
• Where did you get your degree in mathematics?  Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse?
• There's a town called "Duck, West Virginia?"

Of course, the major problem with all of this is that we can all take a look at the events in the biblical creation story, and see immediately that Moses didn't get them right.  Here, according to the site Christian Answers, is the order of creation:

• the Earth
• light
• day & night
• air
• water
• dry land
• seed-bearing plants with fruit
• the Sun, Moon, and stars
• water creatures
• birds
• land animals (presumably birds don't count)
• humans

One immediate problem I see is that there was day and night three days before the Sun was created, which seems problematic to me, as the following NASA photograph illustrates:

But of course, the problems don't end there.  Birds before the rest of "land animals?"  Plants before the Sun and Moon?  The plants are actually the ones on the list that are the most wildly out of order -- seed-bearing plants didn't evolve until the late Devonian, a long time after "water creatures" (the Devonian is sometimes called "the Age of Fish," after all), and an even longer time (about 4.5 billion years, to be precise) after the formation of the Sun.   Humans do come in the correct place, right there at the end, but the rest of it seems like kind of a hash.

So by Hunter's brilliant mathematics, if putting the twelve events of creation in the right order has a 1 in 479 million likelihood of happening by chance, then the likelihood of putting them in the wrong order by chance is 478,999,999 in 479 million.  Which is what happened.  Leading us to the inevitable conclusion, so well supported by the available hard evidence, that Moses was just making shit up.

You know, I really wish you creationists would stop even pretending that this nonsense is scientific.  Just stick with your "the bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it" approach, because every time you dabble your toes in the Great Ocean of Science, you end up getting knocked over by a wave and eating a mouthful of sand.  And it's becoming kind of embarrassing to watch, frankly.  Thank you.

Elf kidnapping

It's not often you get to be a witness to the birth of an urban legend.

Or not so urban, actually, as this one supposedly happened in rural Iceland.  Have you seen it?  It's making the rounds of social media -- a story about a Danish anthropologist, missing for seven years, who showed up last week, naked and confused, claiming that she'd been kidnapped and held hostage by elves.  As of now, I've been sent links to the story a total of six times, so chances are you've run across it, too.

The story is that an anthropologist, Kalena Søndergaard, went off in February of 2006, "seeking proof of elves," and vanished.  Searches for her, centered around the Álfarkirkjan -- the "Elf Church Rock" where she was last seen -- turned up no trace of the missing woman.  Then, last week, some hikers stumbled upon her, crouching on a rocky ledge, looking "more ape than human."  The article says:

Danish researcher Kalena Søndergaard was stark naked, covered by dust and babbling incoherently when rescuers found her outside a tiny opening in the famous Elf Rock, traditionally believed to house the underground dwelling place of mankind’s tiny cousins.

“She was crouching like an animal and spoke only in a language unrelated to any we know,” said Arnor Guðjohnsen of the National Rescue Service, which airlifted the 31-year-old survivor to a hospital by helicopter.

“The only word we could understand was ‘alfur,’ an old Icelandic word for elves. On her back were strange tattoos similar to those markings Viking explorers found on rock formations when they settled Iceland in 874, traditionally known as ‘elf writing.’ ”

When I hit the name of the gentleman from the National Rescue Service, I frowned a little, because "Guðjohnsen" isn't a properly formed Icelandic surname -- all surnames in Iceland, by mandate, are the father's first name, in genitive case, followed by "-son" if it's a boy and "-dottír" if it's a girl.  So Arnor should have been "Guðjohnsson," not "Guðjohnsen."  (A similar problem happened later in the story, with a "folklore expert" named "Eva Bryndísarson" -- she would have been "Eva Bryndísardottír.")

Those, of course, could have been typos or mistranscriptions, and in any case are minor compared to the other whoppers that occur in the story.  Let's start with the fact that Kalena Søndergaard apparently doesn't exist, at least by my attempts to research her name online in connection to any citations for anthropological research.  Then let's take the photograph that was posted to "prove" the claims in the story:

So, on the surface, it does seem to be a photograph of some guy rescuing a naked woman sitting on a rock, and how many situations like this can have happened?  Turns out, it only took one, and it had nothing to do with elves; in March of 2011 the Daily Mail reported on the story of a woman in San Diego who had gotten stranded on a rock ledge trying to climb down to a nude beach, and had to be rescued from above.  Besides the very photograph that was used for the elves-in-Iceland story, the Daily Mail article had a series of further photographs showing the hapless nude sunbather being lifted to safety.

Then, there's the photograph that's supposedly of Kalena Søndergaard, prior to her harrowing experience with the Little Folk:

The problem is, this girl isn't named Kalena Søndergaard, she's not Danish, and she isn't an anthropologist.  Sharon Hill of the wonderful site Doubtful News found out that the photograph was grabbed from a Russian dating site -- probably selected because the girl looks vaguely like the woman in the rescue photograph.

So, due to the wonders of the internet, the whole thing was debunked in short order.  But the problem is that with hoaxes like this, often people only see the first half -- the claim -- and never run into the story disproving it.  It's probably human nature, of course.  Crazy claims have much more cachet than dry-as-dust debunkings do; who is going to forward a link making the not-too-earthshattering claim, "Elves don't exist?"

Anyhow, that's the straight scoop regarding the kidnapped Danish anthropologist and her terrifying encounter with the huldufólk.  The story is no more legitimate than the Crystal Pyramids of Atlantis thing or the Alien Mass Burial in Uganda thing.  Not that I expect this will make it die down -- for apparently one of the characteristics of bullshit is that once created, it never, ever goes away.

The evolution of Little Red Riding Hood

Every once in a while, I'll run across a piece of scientific research that is so creative and clever that it just warms my heart, and I felt this way yesterday when I stumbled onto a link to the article in PLoS ONE called "The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood," by Jamshid Tehrani of the University of Bristol.

The reason I was delighted by Tehrani's paper is that it combines two subjects I love -- evolutionary biology and mythology and folklore.  The gist of what Tehrani did is to use a technique most commonly used to assemble species into "star diagrams" -- cladistic bootstrap analysis -- to analyze worldwide versions of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story to see to what degree a version in (for example) Senegal was related to one in Germany.

Cladistic bootstrap analysis generates something called a "star diagram" -- not, generally, a pedigree or family tree, because we don't know the exact identity of the common ancestor to all of the members of the tree, all we can tell is how closely related current individuals are.  Think, for example, of what it would look like if you assembled the living members of your family group this way -- you'd see clusters of close relatives linked together (you, your siblings, and your first cousins, for example) -- and further away would be other clusters, made up of more distant relatives grouped with their near family members.

So Tehrani did this with the "Little Red Riding Hood" story, by looking at the similarities and differences, from subtle to major, between the way the tale is told in different locations.  Apparently there are versions of it all over the world -- not only the Grimm Brothers Fairy Tales variety (the one I know the best), but from Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Korea, and Japan.  Oral transmission of stories is much like biological evolution; there are mutations (people change the story by misremembering it, dropping some pieces, embellishment, and so on) and there is selection (the best versions, told by the best storytellers, are more likely to be passed on).  And thus, the whole thing unfolds like an evolutionary lineage.

In Tehrani's analysis, he found three big branches -- the African branch (where the story is usually called "The Wolf and the Kids"), the East Asian branch ("Tiger Grandmother"), and the European/Middle Eastern Branch ("Little Red Riding Hood," "Catterinella," and "The Story of Grandmother").  (For the main differences in the different branches, which are fascinating but too long to be quoted here in full, check out the link to Tehrani's paper.)

Put all together, Tehrani came up with the following cladogram:

WK = "The Wolf and the Kids," TG = "Tiger Grandmother," "Catt" = "Catterinella," GM = "The Story of Grandmother," and RH = "Little Red Riding Hood;" the others are less common variations that Tehrani was able to place on his star diagram.

The whole thing just makes me very, very happy, and leaves me smiling with my big, sharp, wolflike teeth.

Pure research has been criticized by some as being pointless, and this is a stance that I absolutely abhor.  There is a completely practical reason to support, fund, and otherwise encourage pure research -- and that is, we have no idea yet what application some technique or discovery might have in the future.  A great deal of highly useful, human-centered science has been uncovered by scientists playing around in their labs with no other immediate goal than to study some small bit of the universe.  Further, the mere application of raw creativity to a problem -- using the tools of cladistics, say, to analyze a folk tale -- can act as an impetus to other minds, elsewhere, encouraging them to approach the problems we face in novel ways.

But I think it's more than that.  The fundamental truth here is that human mind needs to be exercised.  The "what good is it?" attitude is not only anti-science, it is anti-intellectual.  It devalues inquiry, curiosity, and creativity.  It asks the question "how does this benefit humanity?" in such a way as to imply that the sheer joy of comprehending deeply the world around us is not a benefit in and of itself.

It may be that Tehrani's jewel of a paper will have no lasting impact on humanity as a whole.  I'm perfectly okay with that, and I suspect Tehrani would be, as well.  We need to make our brains buckle down to the "important stuff," yes; but we also need to let them out to play sometimes, a lesson that the men and women currently overseeing our educational system need to learn.  In a quote that seems unusually apt, considering the subject of Tehrani's research, Albert Einstein said: "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge.  Knowledge is limited.  Imagination encircles the world."

Magic rock knowledge

The one thing I appreciate most about science is that it gives you a standard protocol by which to determine if a claim is supported or not.

That's not to say that the scientists can't get it wrong.  They do.  But science is self-correcting -- it is based on evidence and logic, and if at some point evidence and logic send you in a different direction than the prevailing wisdom, you have to abandon the prevailing wisdom and head off where the arrow points.  So the oft-quoted criticism of science by high school students everywhere -- "Why do we have to learn this, when it could be proven wrong tomorrow?" -- is actually science's great strength.

Better than studying something whose "truths" couldn't be falsified whether you wanted to or not, where there is no way to tell if a claim is wrong or right, where the directive is "just believe it because."

And I'm not just pointing a finger at religion, here.  Much of pseudoscience operates by this same evidence-free approach.  Take, for example, the page called "The Health Effects of Gemstones" on the site PositiveMed.  On it, we are told that rocks can help us in all sorts of ways, from physical health to mental health to relationships to "activating various chakras."

As an example, we are told that fluorite "enhances memory, intellect, discernment, and concentration, (and) brings wisdom."  Which sounds nice, doesn't it?

(photograph courtesy of Rob Lavinsky, iRocks.com, and the Wikimedia Commons)

Selenite "stimulates brain activity, expand(s) awareness, develops telepathy, and symbolizes the clearest state of mind available."  Carnelian "enhances creativity and sexuality, recycles past-life experiences, (and) speeds up the law of karma."  Black obsidian is a "spiritual protector, (and) helps one to understand and face their [sic] deepest fears."  Labradorite, on the other hand, "protects ones [sic] aura, (and) keep(s) the aura clear, balanced, and free of energy leaks."

Psychic Fix-a-Flat, is kind of how I see the last-mentioned.

All through reading this, I was thinking, "How on earth do you know any of this?"  There is no possible evidence-based way that someone can have come up with this list; it very much has the hallmark of some gemstone salesperson making shit up to sell polished rocks to unsuspecting gullible people.  I very much doubt, for example, that anyone did an experiment by leaving his black obsidian home, and seeing whether his deepest fears were more or less terrifying to face that day.

The whole thing, then, is a completely fact-free way of knowing the world, which I find fairly incomprehensible.  Even before I knew much science, I remember pestering my parents about how they knew things were true, and (more specifically) how you could tell if something was real or not.  As a five-year-old, I remember having a discussion with my mom about how she knew that Captain Kangaroo was real but Bugs Bunny was not, since she had clearly never met either one in person.

A junior skeptic I was, even back then.

It is perpetually baffling to me that there are so many people who don't see the world that way -- a bias, I suppose, that represents my own set of blinders.  My failing as a thinker seems to be that I just can't quite bring myself to believe that everyone doesn't evaluate the truth or falsity of statements the same way I do.

So those are today's philosophical musings, brought about by a rather silly website about magic rocks.  And now that I've gotten this written, I should go and apply some aquamarine to my forehead, which is supposed to "encourage the expression of one's truth, (and) reduce fear and mental tension."  Heaven knows I could do with more of that, some days.