Human rights for chimps

There's now a lawsuit making its way through the U. S. judicial system demanding "legal personhood" for chimpanzees.

(photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

A non-profit organization called the Nonhuman Rights Project has filed three separate suits in a New York State court claiming that chimps are "a cognitively complex autonomous legal person(s) with the fundamental legal right not to be imprisoned."  The suits were filed on the behalf of four chimps who are so "imprisoned" -- two by private, licensed owners, and two by research labs at the State University of New York in Stonybrook.

The lawsuits are extremely likely to be thrown out, and it has nothing to do with whether or not holding chimps in such situations is ethical or not.  They are not human -- and the framing of most laws are explicit in giving rights to humans ("men and women," or "people"), not to non-human animals.  The organization filing the lawsuits might have been better off making the claim based on animal cruelty laws; that an animal as "cognitively complex" as a chimp is undergoing abuse simply by virtue of being imprisoned, even if nothing is explicitly done to hurt it.

It does open up the wider question, though, of what our attitude should be toward other species.  The whole issue crops up, I think, because so many humans consider themselves as disconnected from the rest of the natural world.  I find that a great many of my students talk about "humans" and "animals" as if humans weren't animals themselves, as if we were something set apart, different in a fundamental way from the rest of the animal world.  A lot of this probably comes from the fact that much of our cultural context comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which Homo sapiens wasn't even created on the same day as everything else -- and is, therefore, the only being on earth with sentience, and an immortal soul.

Once you knock down that assumption, however, you are on the fabled and dangerous slippery slope.  There is a continuum of intelligence, and sentience, in the animal world; it isn't an either-or.  Chimps and the other anthropoid apes are clearly highly intelligent, with a capacity for emotions, including pain, grief, loss, and depression.  Keeping such an animal in a cage is only dubiously ethical, even if (as in the case of the chimps at SUNY-Stonybrook) you might be able to argue it on a "greater good because of discoveries through research" basis.

But if we have an obligation to treat animals compassionately, how far down the line would you extend that compassion?  Spider monkeys are less intelligent than chimps, by pretty much any measure you choose -- but not a lot less.  We keep pigs in horrible, inhumane conditions on factory farms -- and they are about as intelligent as dogs.  Down the scale it goes; fish can experience pain, and yet some people will not eat chicken on the basis of its causing another creature pain, and yet will happily devour a piece of salmon.

Douglas Hofstadter, the brilliant writer and thinker who wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and I Am a Strange Loop, proposes a "unit of sentience" called the "huneker."  (He named the unit after James Huneker, who said of one Chopin étude that it should not be attempted by "small-souled men.")  He is well aware that as neuroscience now stands, it's impossible to assign numerical values to the quality of sentience -- but, he says, few are in doubt that humans are more sentient, self-conscious, and intelligent than dogs, dogs more than fish, fish more than mosquitoes.  (Hofstadter says that a mosquito possesses "0.0000001 hunekers" and jokingly added that if mosquitoes have souls, they are "mostly evil.")  But even though he is talking about the whole thing in a lighthearted way, he bases his own decisions about what to eat on something like this concept:

At some point, in any case, my compassion for other “beings” led me very naturally to finding it unacceptable to destroy other sentient beings... such as cows and pigs and lambs and fish and chickens, in order to consume their flesh, even if I knew that their sentience wasn't quite as high as the sentience of human beings.

Where or on what basis to draw the line? How many hunekers merit respect? I didn't know exactly. I decided once to draw the line between mammals and the rest of the animal world, and I stayed with that decision for about twenty years. Recently, however — just a couple of years ago, while I was writing I Am a Strange Loop, and thus being forced (by myself) to think all these issues through very intensely once again — I “lowered” my personal line, and I stopped eating animals of any sort or “size”. I feel more at ease with myself this way, although I do suspect, at times, that I may have gone a little too far. But I'd rather give a too-large tip to a server than a too-small one, and this is analogous. I'd rather err on the side of generosity than on the other side, so I'm vegetarian.

Although I agree with Hofstadter, I've never been able to give up eating meat -- and I'm aware that the choice is based mostly upon the purely selfish consideration that I really enjoy it.  We belong to a local meat CSA that raises the animals under humane, free-range conditions, which assuages some of my guilty feelings when I'm eating a t-bone steak.

The issue is not a simple one, but I've tried to make my decisions based upon an effort not to cause needless suffering.  Locking up a convicted murderer probably causes him suffering, but refusing to do so on that basis is hardly a reasonable choice.  Ending an animal's life in a quick and humane way to provide me with dinner is, in my opinion, acceptable as long as the animal was treated compassionately while it was alive.  And I extend that qualifier of need all the way down the scale.  I'll scoop up spiders in cups and let put them outside rather than stomp them.  There is no need for me to kill harmless spiders -- however far down the sentience scale they may be.

In the case of the "imprisoned" chimps, there is almost certainly suffering, and (as far as I can tell) little need.  Unless research is of immense and immediate value to humanity, an animal as sensitive and intelligent as a chimp should not be used for it.  There are a great many reasons not to keep animals like chimps in captivity.

Calling them "persons," however, is not one of them.

Chemtrails on Venus

Yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, and frequent contributors of topics thereto, sent me a link with the note, "Nothing like explaining one crazy idea using another crazy idea, is there?"

The link brought me to a page on Above Top Secret entitled "A Possible Reason for Chemtrails: A Form of Galactic Protection?" in which we learn that the government might have a positive reason for chemtrailing the absolute hell out of all of us.

They are trying to create a screen to shield us from the sensors of alien spaceships that intend to destroy all life on Earth.

At this point, you're probably already facepalming.  But in the words of the 1980s infomercials -- "Wait, there's MORE!"

How does the author know that this is possible?  Because that's what happened to Venus:

'Under all those sulfuric clouds [on Venus] there is a whole ecosystem'...  [W]hat if it's possible that there IS and ecosystem under those clouds, but not just an ecosystem; a whole civilization!

What I am getting at is what if the reason that the TPTB (or whatever you'd like to call them) are spraying chemtrails is to create a layer of atmosphere that will constantly reflect sunlight (When viewed from the outside of our atmosphere) hence making us look as bright as Venus at the moment. This in turn will hide us from any alien predators IF there are any lurking out there looking for a place to conquer and devour. 

Of course, there's just one teensy problem with this idea, besides making me wonder if the author's skull is filled with PopRocks.  And that is that the temperature on Venus is so high that the first probes to land there got fried.  To quote Universe Today:

There are many geophysical similarities between Venus and the Earth. Average temperature is not one of them. Where the Earth has an average surface temperature of 14 degrees Celsius, the average temperature of Venus is 460 degrees Celsius. That is 410 degrees hotter than the hottest deserts on our planet...  The atmosphere has made visual observation impossible. It contains sulfuric acid clouds in addition to the carbon dioxide. These clouds are highly reflective of visible light, preventing optical observation. Probes have been sent to the surface, but can only survive a few hours in the intense heat and sulfuric acid.

So our alleged "ecosystem and civilization" down there would be a little on the toasty side.

The whole thing reminds me of one of the funniest moments on the wonderful 1970s science series Cosmos, written and hosted by Carl Sagan, in which he describes an earlier set of "inferences" (if I can dignify them by that term) about what might be on Venus:

I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus. Why not? Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds. Well, what are clouds made of? Water, of course. Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it. Therefore, the surface must be wet. Well, if the surface is wet, it's probably a swamp. If there's a swamp, there's ferns. If there's ferns, maybe there's even dinosaurs.

Observation: we can't see a thing on Venus.  Conclusion: dinosaurs.

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people who think this way, and with a small amount of digging, I found that there are still apparently folks who believe that there are aliens down there under the clouds on Venus.  Here's an excerpt of a "top secret file" I found, which I know is top secret because it says so at the top of the page, and which is so incredibly secret that you can find it with a thirty-second Google search using the keywords "Venus civilization:"

UFOlogia Top Secret File
TOP SECRET FILE

FORM INFRA D.I.P. PROJECT MARXEN UF088

EVIDENCE OF CIVILIZATION ON VENUS


It is scientifically possible for material plane beings to live in an atmosphere on another planet, that is too hot or chemically fatal to Earth humans, by constructing underground air-conditioned bases or cities protected from the elements on the surface. It is also feasible to create air---conditioned domes on the surface of other planets that have artificial atmospheres exactly like on Earth, and American scientists admit they already have the technology and plans to create these bases on Mars and our Moon. Therefore extraterrestrials with the superior technology to create disc--shaped U.F.O.s, that are detailed in dozens of photos and documents in the U.S. Air Force released Project Bluebook files, could logically possess the advanced science to create such bases on the surface of the planet Venus.

The physicists William Plummer and John Strong stated that Venus may have large areas of bearable temperatures. The regions near the Venusian north and south poles would be much cooler than the areas reportedly monitored by space probes. Furthermore, according to Professor Alexander Lebedinsky, in the Soviet Union, in data suppressed by the United States Pentagon complex, the usual surface temperature of much of Venus must be about 110 degrees Fahrenheit, even though "radio---electric" measurements indicated 700 or more degrees. Similar observations can be made on the relatively COOL surfaces of gas tubes used in neon signs, because the radio--electric equivalent of those tubes is also several thousand degrees! 

Yuppers.  There you have it.  The Venera, Mariner, and Magellan probes, which sent back photographs from Venus's surface, just accidentally landed over and over on Venusian neon signs, and it confused the sensors.   Never mind that every single photograph they took looked like this:

So whatever "civilization" the Venusian chemtrail-cloud-anti-alien-shields are there to protect must not mind being red hot and swimming around in liquified rock.

On a more somber note, I hope that there's not a grain of truth to all of this nonsense -- that what we are currently doing to the atmosphere, in the form of excessive fossil fuel use, might not generate a runaway greenhouse effect.  In the same episode of Cosmos that Sagan quipped about dinosaurs, he threw in his own cautionary note -- that the reason Venus is so hot is only partially its greater proximity to the Sun.  It is largely due to the huge amount of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere.  So while the author of our original webpage perhaps didn't intend it, there's a way in which there is a connection -- enough injection of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, via the burning of hydrocarbons like jet fuel, and we might well raise the surface temperatures out of the narrow range in which carbon-based life is possible, altering our Earth into a planet like Venus -- a place that, to once again quote Sagan, "is very much like hell."

Historical hype, government coverups, and the "Spanish flu"

At the heart of skepticism is a philosophy that says, basically, "question everything."  I would add a few "especiallies:"

• especially if the claim appeals to your personal biases and fears;
• especially if it seems sensationalized;
• especially if there is no hard data to support it;
• and especially if it's claiming that the reason there's no data is because of a government coverup.

 I ran into an excellent example of this just yesterday, with an article on The Liberty Digest titled, "U.S. Government Kills 100 Million People -- Deflects All Blame," by Truman Jackson.  My first thought was to wonder how 100 million people could have died without my noticing, but upon opening the link I found that he wasn't talking about something recent.

He was talking about the "Spanish flu."

An influenza hospital at Camp Funston, Kansas, winter 1918 (photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

What followed was such a mixture of truth, half truth, and complete bullshit that the author should win some kind of award for Best Example of Journalistic Hash, 2013.  Here's his claim, to which I've added a few annotations of my own:

Consider this a history lesson. At the time, it was an experiment in attrition and public gullibility, and both experiments proved favorable to ‘the powers that be’ as far as the outcome obtained.

It’s referred to as the Great Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918 in the history books, but there was nothing Spanish about this plague that killed between 20 million and 100 million people world-wide. [True.  It was the worst pandemic in modern history, rivaling or perhaps exceeding the 14th century Black Death.]  It was 100% U.S. Government controlled and engineered.  [Bullshit.]

In a nutshell, while mass troop movements were heading to Europe during WWI, the U.S. Government, through the Department of the Army, was experimenting with this really neat, and new for the time, technology, called vaccines.  [True.]  They were injecting flu vaccine, among others, into soldiers who were on their way to fight in the “war to end all wars.”  [False, and not only false, but impossible.  The first flu vaccines weren't developed until 1931, twelve years after the epidemic, and World War I, both ended.]

As everyone knows, most vaccines have a strain of that of which they are supposed to be preventing, and in this case, a common strain of flu common for the U.S. at least.  [True in essence.]

However, the strain was not common in Europe and the rest of the world and the other people who inhabited those countries had not had a chance for their immune systems to develop any defense against the U.S. flu strain.  [True, but misleading, because this more or less happens every year -- that's why there are epidemics.  If people had a "defense" against a strain, they wouldn't get sick.  It doesn't require some sort of deliberate attempt by the U.S. to spread the disease, the virus is perfectly capable of doing that on its own.]

The result was catastrophic, and some would say diabolical. Nearly 5% of the earth’s surface population at the time was killed by the outbreak of the flu.  ["Diabolical" implies intent, so while the percent mortality is accurate, the implication is not.]

How did Spain get the blame?

Simple.

The ‘powers that be’ who were involved with the war made sure to keep a tight lid on the story of the flu. They feared world-wide riots should the populace learn the facts behind how far and wide the outbreak had spread. However, Spain was “neutral” during the war, and they openly reported on the havoc the virus was causing in their country. As a result they ended up getting the blame for the outbreak, and nothing could have pleased the ‘powers that be’ more. Remember, no good dead [sic] goes unpunished.  [Bullshit.  Although the author is correct that the identification of Spain as the origin of the epidemic was probably false, no one was trying to "blame Spain" for some sort of geopolitical reason, any more than calling the 1968 "Hong Kong flu" was an attempt to blame China.]

Many experts who have written on the “Spanish” influenza which killed upwards of 100 million people, believe the virus actually originated at an Army base in Kansas.  [Half-truth.  The origins of the virus are still uncertain.  Epidemiologists have proposed France, Austria, and China as alternate explanations, but the fact is, we don't know where it came from.]

So what we have here is the usual conspiracy nonsense, bolstered by people's fears of the side effects of vaccination due to the insidious work of such discredited nutjobs as Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy.

Of course, the timing of this article is no coincidence; the 2013-2014 flu season is just ramping up, and people are considering whether to get vaccinated.  Anti-vaxx hype is big this year, although studies debunking the supposed horrible side effects of vaccines clearly demonstrate that the risks of vaccination are vastly outweighed by the risks of contracting preventable diseases.  Flu kills thousands of people yearly, and most years the vaccine does a pretty good job of preventing the disease.  (I have to use the qualifiers "most" and "pretty good" because the flu virus is notorious for mutating, and the vaccine is based upon a best-guess of what the strains that year will be.  Every so often, the researchers don't get it right, and there's a strain prevalent that the vaccine doesn't immunize you against.  Even so, they get it right far more often than they get it wrong, and the benefit still far outweighs the risk.)

But no wonder that this article is making the rounds of social media, anti-vaxx websites, anti-government websites, and conspiracy theory websites.  It hits all of my "especiallies;" it caters to preconceived biases and fears, it's sensationalized, it has nothing in the way of data proving its points, and it claims that the reason for the lack of evidence is a conspiracy.

The nice thing about the Internet Age is that we have virtually instantaneous access to information, and with a little bit of training, anyone can learn to sift the truth from the bullshit.  Start, for example, by looking only at sources that are peer-reviewed -- it's not a guarantee of accuracy, but at least you've raised the bar from the kind of tripe published in places like The Liberty Digest.  Ask questions, especially "how does the author know this claim is true?"  Question your own biases and assumptions.

And never, ever accept what someone says without evidence.

Using tragedy as leverage

Most of the time I'm able to keep some sense of humor about the crazy stuff that is the inspiration for the lion's share of my blog posts.  However maddening the illogic, however infuriating the ignoring of evidence, however baffling the stretching of credulity, I usually can find some way to put it all in perspective, to shake my head at the silliness and then move on.

But sometimes, I find something that galls me so deeply that I can't even find an angle from which I could poke fun and lighten it up.

That's the way I'm reacting to the conspiracy theories that have sprung up following the death of actor Paul Walker.

(Photograph courtesy of André Luis and the Wikimedia Commons)

Walker, best known for his roles in action flicks like Fast & Furious, died Saturday in a fiery one-car crash that also took the life of Walker's friend Roger Rodas.  Given Walker's penchant for fast cars and parties, it seemed like there was nothing more to it than a fatal recklessness -- an explanation supported by the discovery at the site of tire tread marks that seemed to indicate that the car had been doing doughnuts prior to the crash.

But that's not enough for the conspiracy theorists, is it?  No, of course not.  It never is, somehow.  It's not sufficient to let Walker's family, friends, and fans mourn his untimely death.  These vultures have to capitalize upon it, grab the notoriety and run with it, use it as leverage for promoting their bizarre, counterfactual view of the world.

In that way, they're a little like the Westboro Baptist Church, aren't they?  "The government is trying to kill us all" is just a little more PC than "God hates fags," that's all.

So, what are they claiming?  Well, take a look at this page on Before It's News, a site already well-known for promoting "truthers" of various stripes.  This time, it's "Paul Walker: Murdered for Digging Too Deep?" by Susan Duclos, which makes the claim that Walker was murdered by the government because he was about to blow the whistle...

... because he'd found out that the United States is secretly putting birth control drugs into food shipments destined for hurricane refugee camps in the Philippines.

Don't believe me?  Here's a direct quote:

Paul Walker and his friend were killed shortly after they discovered a conspiracy to supply victims of Typhon [sic] Haiyan with a prototype permanent birth control drug hidden in medicinal supplies and food aid. They had a damning recording and they were on their way to rendezvous with an ally who would have helped them get in touch with the right people. Turns out they were betrayed and someone rigged their car’s breaks [sic] to malfunction after a certain speed.

Now that the loose end has been tied up, and the recording destroyed, the people responsible have nothing to fear as this will become another “conspiracy theory” no one will take seriously.

You know, there is a reason, sometimes, when people don't take you seriously.  It's what happens when you propose insane idea after insane idea, each time claiming that this is the time you've found the smoking gun.  It's what happens when you predict electrical grid failures, government collapses, assassinations, mass arrests, and releases of bioengineered plagues, and none of it ever happens.

It's what happens when you prove, over and over, that you are nothing more than an unethical, loudmouthed, bullshit-spouting crank.

And yet, bafflingly, conspiracy theories are gaining traction.  Like the hydra, you strike one down, only to find nine more in its place.  Argue one follower away, and others jump into the fray.  Look, for example, at some of the comments on Duclos' piece:

It’s interesting that the big web searches are reporting the story, but not including any pictures nor video footage, when clearly their available. Furthermore, the weather conditions were fine, not a factor, the people driving the car were professional racers, yet they can’t even handle a turn- going from A to B? But what makes me the most suspicious is considering to damaged to the car…I’m sure the occupants where completely unrecognizable, yet they positively identified Paul Walker on the spot? How exactly? How’d they know that he personally in the car? With the fire and everything, his face, his ID would have been damaged beyond recognition…Yet the story came out within the hour of the accident, positively identifying him as there. My gut feeling is that he wasn’t in the car, I don’t know where he is, this doesn’t make sense… Geez, this horrible.

This crash has all the same features as that journalist who was murdered recently. the one who said he was working a a huge story and would have to lay low for a while …refresh my memory re. name. Now according to this story the motives are almost identical as well.

It was a ritual sacrifice….
Take todays train wreck as an example–
63 injured 3–6′s = 666
6+3 = 9
11 people injured = 9-11
Just as Paul Walker died at age 40 in a 9-11 Porsche
4 people killed in the train accident– Walker 40 + 4 = 44 = Obozo -He better be careful!
6 days ago, All over the news was “Brian is dead” from Family guy–Paul Walker played Brian in the Fast and Furious franchise..
None of this is a coincidence…Welcome to the Matrix!

If that's not disheartening enough, there's the alternative explanation on Truther News -- that Walker was killed by an "Obama drone strike."

I probably shouldn't let it get to me.  But for crying out loud, two guys died here.  It was an accident -- one of those stupid, reckless, tragic accidents that ended two lives forty years too early.  One of those things that happen because life is risky, and because humans, even famous and popular and handsome ones, sometimes do stupid things.

And that was all it was.  So conspiracy theorists, hear this: let their friends and family grieve, and stop spinning your stupid fucking webs of fantasy around Paul Walker's grave.

Obama-hotep

Toward more precise speech, I'm going to highlight today the difference between two words that are often used interchangeably: "doubtful" and "skeptical."

To be skeptical means to have an open mind; to approach a claim without bias (insofar as that is possible), and to evaluate it on the twin bases of evidence and logic.  A skeptical approach to (for example) ghosts would be to consider the available photographs, recordings, electromagnetic traces, and so on, and evaluate those based on looking at not only the possibility that they were produced by spirits, but other explanations as well.  We can't start from the conclusion that "these data must mean that ghosts exist;" we must weigh the likelihood of the evidence coming instead from human perceptual biases (e.g. pareidolia), equipment error, natural phenomena, or outright hoaxing.  To be a skeptic, therefore, simply means being an honest scientist.

To be doubtful, on the other hand, means to look at something and say, "Wow, this is unadulterated horse waste."

While I try to lean in the direction of the former as often as I can, I was pushed toward the latter by a website a friend sent me, with the provocative title, "Is Obama a Clone?"  I have observed a general trend, which is that any time someone headlines an article with a question, the answer is almost always "NO."  But I decided to be skeptical at least long enough to read the first paragraph, wherein I found that the author is not claiming that Obama is just a clone.  No, that would be silly.

The author is claiming that Obama is the clone of the Pharaoh Akhenaten.

For those of you who aren't Egyptophiles, let me give you a little bit of background.  Akhenaten was born Amenhotep, some time around 1370-ish B.C.E., and succeeded to the throne as Amenhotep IV in the early 1350s.  He had two wives -- hardly unusual in those days -- Kiya, and the famous Nefertiti.  But outside of his amorous pursuits, he made it clear right away that he wasn't going to do things the standard way.  He tried to abolish the old polytheistic pantheon (Ra, Horus, Anubis, Thoth, Isis, and the rest of the gang) and replace it with a more-or-less monotheistic worship of the god Aten (the sun).  He changed his name to Akhenaten, meaning "Aten is Effective," which is kind of unimpressive as a slogan for a god, don't you think?

Evidently, the Egyptian people by and large agreed with me, because when he died in 1336, his successor Smenkhkare ordered his buddies to go around and basically erase all traces that Akhenaten ever existed.  And the Ancient Egyptians complied with a vengeance.  They chiseled out depictions of him, cut out his name from inscriptions, reinstated the old religion, and basically tried to pretend that he never happened.

Except that now, apparently, we have him back, living in the White House.

See the resemblance?  No, neither do I.

So, let's see what the author has to say about this claim, and I'll let you determine if we should be "skeptical" or "doubtful:"

If you are interested in both advanced technology and alien-based technology, you will probably be interested in the video clip [on this website].  It originates from www. FreemanTV.com and is about Freeman’s theory of the cloning of the US First Family from an ancient Egyptian (Pharaoh) bloodline.  This brief video will most likely stretch your imagination...  However, cloning technology is not new; and Freeman’s theory is actually possible.  With your inquiring mind, you probably already know about the alien connection to Egypt.  If this theory is true, are Obama and his family are part “gods” (i.e., aliens)?  If so, that, then, begs the question:  What is the purpose for their presence in the US White House?

Anyway, after an introduction like that, I had to watch the video.   Here are a few highlight quotes, in case you don't want to waste a valuable three minutes of your life that you will never, ever get back:

• "Mummification preserves a cell for cloning.  All my life, I've known this, because I've studied ancient astronauts... even Time-Warner told me they could clone mummies."
• "It's very interesting, to see the title the Secret Service gave this family [the Obamas]: renegade."
• "And look at Michelle Obama's high school picture.  I didn't manipulate that photo one bit.  It's Queen Kiya."
• "So I'm going to leave you with this thought, that perhaps our leaders have cloned this ancient bloodline of mummies."

So.  Yeah.  I only have one thing to add, which is:  WA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *collapses onto floor*

What blows me away about this guy is that he can actually say all of this with a completely straight face, which either means that he is (1) a hell of an actor, or (2) batshit insane.  Either way, I really do not understand how anyone spouting this stuff can actually attract an audience -- but if you listen to the clip, you will hear that he is evidently speaking in front of a group, because you can hear them ooh-ing and aah-ing appreciatively every time he makes a "point."  And furthermore, another guy thought it was a plausible enough idea to link the video clip on his blog.  So this leads us to the disturbing conclusion that we have not just one wacko guy spouting nonsense, but a whole bunch of people so breathtakingly ignorant of science that they believe what he's saying.

So, there you have it: a claim that moves us from the balanced and thoughtful territory of "skepticism" right out across the thin ice of "doubt" and off into the turbulent seas of "outright ridicule."  I try to resist going in that direction when possible, I honestly do.  But here, I couldn't help myself -- so I tossed aside my measured and scientific evaluation of data, and just went straight for "Nope, he's a wingnut."

That's how much of a "renegade" I am. 

Aliens in the family tree

A frequent contributor to Skeptophilia sent me a link a couple of days ago with the note, "More grist for your mill."  As soon as I looked at the website address, I knew it was gonna be good, for two reasons.

The first is that the link was from The Daily Mail, a "news" source so sensationalized and tripe-filled that a lot of people call it The Daily Fail.  It seems to have replaced The National Enquirer as the go-to spot for information about celebrities, political sex scandals, and UFO sightings.

The second was that the title of the article was, "Humans Do NOT Come From Earth."

Upon opening the link, we find that a gentleman named Ellis Silver has written a book, coincidentally given the same title as the article.  Silver himself is a Ph.D.  How do I know?  Because on his book cover, which shows a picture of the Earth with Photoshopped black alien eyes, he calls himself "Ellis Silver Ph.D."

I'm always a bit put off when people do this.  It's a bit of a recursive appeal to authority.  My feeling is that if your ideas stood on their own merits, you wouldn't need to brag about your degree -- and that if what you're saying is ridiculous, the fact that you have a degree doesn't somehow make it sensible.  I wasn't able to find where his degree was from, but most of the sites that mention him call him "an American ecologist," so I suppose that must be what his doctorate is in.

Be that as it may, the review in The Daily Mail begins thusly:

A U.S. ecologist has claimed that humans are not from Earth but were put on the planet by aliens tens of thousands of years ago.

Dr Ellis Silver points to a number of physiological features to make his case for why humans did not evolve alongside other life on Earth, in his new book.

They range from humans suffering from bad backs - which he suggests is because we evolved in a world with lower gravity – to getting too easily sunburned and having difficulty giving birth.

Dr Ellis says that while the planet meets humans’ needs for the most part, it does not perhaps serve the species’ interests as well as the aliens who dropped us off imagined.

Well, this tells me two things right off: (1) Silver doesn't understand how evolution works; and (2) he hasn't spent much time looking at the problems other animals have.

Evolution is, at its heart, the law of "whatever works."  The fact that we are the only primate species that stands upright for long periods is what has resulted in our lower back problems -- our spines, which have the characteristic gentle s-bend in the middle, are a brilliant way to carry weight if you support yourself on your knuckles, but don't work so well if you are standing up.  (When was the last time you saw a front porch supported by a curved pillar?)  But the problems such a design engenders were, apparently, outweighed by the advantages conferred to our distant ancestors -- seeing further over tall grass and leaving our hands free to manipulate tools being two probable ones.

Secondly, we are hardly the only species that has trouble managing the vagaries of its environment.  Every species has traits that can backfire, or work well in some contexts and not so well in others.  Even the lowly brine shrimp of Great Salt Lake die by the millions of osmotic shock every time there's a sudden snow melt and subsequent influx of fresh water.

Maladaptive traits can exist for a variety of reasons.  One possibility is that they once were beneficial, but aren't any longer because circumstances changed -- a so-called "evolutionary misfire," like moths and other insects circling around light bulbs and ultimately getting fried.  (This behavior apparently originates from insects using distant light sources to navigate at night, and that strategy being confounded by nearby light sources.)  Others, like the peacock's unwieldy and cumbersome tail, probably evolved because of sexual selection pushing a trait to the point that it becomes a hindrance.  Still others crop up because of pleiotropy -- the fact that a single gene can have several different phenotypic manifestations, each carrying their own advantages and disadvantages.  The gene that causes seal-point coat color in Siamese cats, for example, can result in their having crossed eyes.

But Dr. Silver discounts all of the hundreds of examples of evolutionary compromise and outright maladaption in nature, and claims that humans are "the only ones who have these problems."  And his answer, according to The Daily Mail:  "He suggests that Neanderthals such as Homo erectus were crossbred with another species, perhaps from Alpha Centauri, which is the closest star system to our solar system, some 4.37 light years away from the sun."

Right.  "Neanderthals such as Homo erectus."  Which were two entirely different species, making that statement a little like saying, "Pigeons such as eagles."  And somehow, an alien species coming from an entirely different star system would have DNA that was compatible enough to proto-hominids (whatever species they were) that they could produce offspring at all?

Funny, isn't it, that there is a 98.7% overlap, genetically, between humans and our nearest relatives, the bonobos?  And that our bone structure shows 100% homology with other primates?  And that we give every evidence, in every respect, of being perfectly ordinary terrestrial animals, without a drop of green extraterrestrial blood?

Of course, this hasn't stopped woo-woo websites from picking up the story, and giving Dr. Ellis Silver Ph.D. all sorts of undeserved attention.  Besides his appearance in The Daily Mail, Silver has made Prison Planet, Above Top Secret, UFO Sightings Hotspot, Unexplained Mysteries, and a host of other "news" sources even less reputable.

Oh, and I forgot to mention why Silver thinks all of this happened.  "One reason for this," Silver says,"is that the Earth might be a prison planet, since we seem to be a naturally violent species and we're here until we learn to behave ourselves."

Well, that certainly seems to be working out well, doesn't it?

You know, I think this sort of thing springs from the same desire that drives a lot of the religious attitudes toward humanity vis-à-vis nature -- that we humans are somehow different, special, set apart.  I still see it in my biology classes, in which even bright kids will use phrases like "humans and animals," as if humans weren't animals themselves.  So I guess if you don't get your sense of species superiority from being a Unique Creation of God, you have to get it from being the Progeny of Aliens.

So that's our journey into the far side for today.  It's not, mind you, that I have any particular objection to the conjecture that life may exist elsewhere in the universe -- in fact, I think that to be so likely as to be a near certainty.  I just think that the chance of their being our great-grandparents contradicts everything we know about biology, human and otherwise, and that's even taking into account how odd my own family can be at times.

The ghost of Robert Schumann

Yesterday, I was driving home from work, and was listening to Symphony Hall, the classical music station on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio, and the announcer said that we'd be hearing the Violin Concerto in D Minor of the brilliant and tragic composer Robert Schumann.

"And there's quite a story to go with it," he said, and proceeded to tell us how the composer had written the piece in 1853, three years before his death, for his friend and fellow musician Joseph Joachim.  Joachim, however, thought the piece too dark to have any chance at popularity, and after Schumann attempted suicide in 1854 the sheet music was deposited at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, and everyone forgot about it.

In 1933, eighty years later, two women conducting a séance in London were alarmed to hear a "spirit voice" that claimed to be Schumann, and that said they were to go to the Prussian State Library to recover an "unpublished work" and see to it that it got performed.  So the women went over to Berlin, and found the music -- right where the "spirit" said it would be.

Four years later, in 1937, a copy was sent anonymously to the great conductor Yehudi Menuhin.  Impressed, and delighted to have the opportunity to stage a first performance of a piece from a composer who had been dead for 84 years, he premiered it in San Francisco in October of that year.  But the performance was interrupted by one of the two women who had "talked to Schumann," who claimed that she had a right to first performance, since she'd been in touch with the spirit world about the piece and had received that right from the dead composer himself!

We then got to hear the piece, which is indeed dark and haunting and beautiful, and you should all give it a listen.

Having been an aficionado of stories of the paranormal since I was a teen -- which is, not to put too fine a point on it, a long time ago -- it's not often that I get to hear one that I didn't know about before.  Especially, given my love for music, one involving a famous composer.  So I thought this was an intriguing tale, and when I got home I decided to look into it, and see if there was more known about the mysterious piece and its scary connection to séances and ghosts.

And -- sorry to disappoint you if you bought the whole spirit-voice thing -- there is, indeed, a lot more to the story.

Turns out that the announcer was correct that violinist Joachim, when he received the concerto, didn't like it much.  He commented in a letter that the piece showed "a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy, though certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative artist."  And he not only tucked it away at the Prussian State Library, he included a provision in his will (1907) that the piece should not be performed until 1956, a hundred years after Schumann's death.  So while it was forgotten, it wasn't perhaps as unknown as the radio announcer wanted us to think.

Which brings us up to the séance, and the spirit voice, and the finding of the manuscript -- conveniently leaving out the fact that the two woman who were at the séance, Jelly d'Arányi and Adila Fachiri, were sisters -- who were the grand-nieces of none other than Joseph Joachim himself!

Funny how leaving out one little detail like that makes a story seem like it admits of no other explanation than the supernatural, isn't it?  Then you find out that detail, and... well, not so much, any more.

It's hard to imagine that d'Arányi and Fachiri, who were fourteen and nineteen years old, respectively, when their great-uncle died, wouldn't have known about his will and its mysterious clause forbidding the performance of Schumann's last major work.  d'Arányi and Fachiri themselves were both violinists of some repute, so this adds to their motivation for revealing the piece, with the séance adding an extra frisson to the story, especially in the superstitious and spirit-happy 1930s.  And the forwarding of the piece to Menuhin, followed by d'Arányi's melodramatic crashing of the premiere, has all of the hallmarks of a well-crafted publicity stunt.

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to discover how easy this one was to debunk.  Of course, I don't know that my explanation is correct; maybe the two sisters were visited by the ghost of Robert Schumann, who had been wandering around in the afterlife, pissed off that his last masterwork wasn't being performed.  But if you cut the story up using Ockham's Razor, you have to admit that the spirit-voices-and-séance theory doesn't make nearly as much sense as the two-sisters-pulling-a-clever-hoax theory.

A pity, really, because a good spooky story always adds something to a dark, melancholy piece of music.  I may have to go listen to Danse Macabre, The Drowned Cathedral, and Night on Bald Mountain, just to get myself back into the mood.