A side of chips

One of the most chilling tropes in my all-time favorite television series, The X Files, was the idea that the individuals involved in the conspiracy between the government and the evil aliens had simultaneously taken DNA samples and implanted microchips into our bodies when we were given vaccinations against smallpox.  The DNA was kept in a huge deep-freeze vault (the same place, I recall, that Mulder saw his first frozen alien baby), for a variety of nefarious purposes -- alien/human hybridization experiments amongst them.  Scully, at first a non-believer, finds out that Mulder was right when her doctor locates, and removes, the microchip in her own body -- with the unexpected result of her developing terminal cancer.

It's a terrifying idea, isn't it?  We're marked, tagged like animals in some kind of wildlife study, for reasons beyond our ken.  The whole thing is what we in the field technically refer to as "Some Seriously Scary Shit."

But, of course, being fiction, The X Files isn't real.  A distinction that apparently has sailed right past one Sherry Shriner, who claims that microchip implants are everywhere, and in everyone, and she knows they are because god told her so, a conclusion she tells us all about in her web page entitled "How To Detect and Nullify Chip Implants."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Shriner thinks the government has us all microchipped, and that microchips are present in all of the following:

• vaccines
• dental fillings
• any kind of implanted medical device (e.g. pacemakers)
• surgical pins, rods, or plates
• transplanted tissue

Not only that, we have probably been microchipped even if we never go to the doctor or dentist, Shriner tells us:

If you are ever in a crowded store and you feel a sudden sting, like you got bit by a insect... [c]hances are you got zapped by a chip gun.  Yes, there are actually morons with chip guns who purposely go around implanting people.

Apparently the lord told Shriner all about this, and that not only are the chips for tracking people, They (the big "They") use the chips to control our behavior:

Our government has been knee deep in one particular area over the past 60 years and that has been to learn how to manipulate and control people.  Biblical theology would refer to as witchcraft but it is seen as advancement and technological breakthroughs by a government that on the backside serves Lucifer and is preparing the way for his rise and manipulation of the entire earth. 

Are serial killers and assassins today under government influence as lab rats to see how effective mind manipulation and control is?  I would say so.  Most of these involved with hideous crimes have recounted stories of chip implantations, missing time, or hearing voices which is typical of being a MILAB or military lab rat. 

What I have found in the Bible Codes about implantable chips in these last days is that they are 2-way transistor radio type chips.  Over the years they have perfected them from being tracking devices to being able to influence people by speaking to them directly through these chips and influencing their actions.  Through these chips they can read your thoughts, hear what you are saying, even see what you are seeing (depending on the chip, like a video chip they have and can implant you with).

We have some recourse against all of this nasty stuff, though, and fortunately, it's simple enough.  These ultrasophisticated high-tech super-secret microchips are only vulnerable to one thing, and we're lucky that it's the one thing the brilliant evil scientists that the government hired would never have thought of...

... magnets.

I have found that rare earth magnets called Neodymium magnets will nullify chips.  I bought some Neodymium magnets online from a retailer, the kind that can lift 10lbs of steel and run about .70 cents a piece and I used band aides to hold them in place.  I put magnets on the back of each ear lobe, on the side of each arm where I have received shots, on both sides of my jaws where I had wisdom teeth removed, and under each heel where I had been purposely implanted by my mother's doctor shortly after I was born.  Also on my stomach where I had a cesarean. I am finding that most people are implanted by their navels as well.  If you have had any type of surgery put a magnet near the scar for about 24 hours. 

When you use the magnets be sure to have the north side of the magnet facing your skin.  A compass will tell you which side of the magnet is north.  For newer chips or chips closer to the surface like your ears or jaws leave them on for about 12 hours.  For older chips such as vaccinations leave them on for about two days.  The Lord will lead you as to how long to keep them on or when it is deactivated and you can take the magnet off.  Just listen for His guidance in your Spirit if you are one of His. 

Seek the Lord on where you have them and He will guide your thoughts and lead you where to put the magnets.

Well, alrighty, then.

Just for the record, though, I'm not letting any neodymium magnets anywhere near my skin, because those things are freakin' powerful, and I'd rather not get a sensitive body part pinched between two of 'em.  Given the choice, I'll stick with the microchips.

Because that's just it, isn't it?  If Shriner is right, and we all have these microchips in us, the government is monitoring and controlling something like 314 million people, minus the half-dozen or so who take Shriner and her ilk seriously and have stuck magnets all over their bodies.  Can you imagine the amount of data we're talking about, here?  The government can't even seem to manage to have an error-free list of voters, and that's just managing a list of names and addresses.  Can you imagine the chaos if government officials were not only monitoring us constantly -- our conversations, what we were looking at, what we were hearing -- but were actually controlling our actions?  Like, with radio transmitters to move us around, or something?

It would be like a 314-million-player game of blind man's bluff.  We'd all be walking into walls, in front of trains, off cliffs, and so on, not to mention the fact that the drivers in Boston would be worse than they already are.

So I doubt that Sherry Shriner is right, honestly.  I haven't heard a thing about this from the lord (or any other reasonably credible source), so I'll just go on ahead living my life and assuming that the Men In Black don't give two shits what I had for dinner this Monday.  (A nice t-bone steak, steamed asparagus, and a glass of red wine, if anyone's curious, not that it matters.)  And if you do find a microchip in your smallpox vaccination scar at some point, my advice is to leave it there.  Scully took hers out, and damn near died.

Nikola Tesla vs. the Martians

I'd like to go on record as saying that claiming that a scientist said or did something crazy, which (s)he almost certainly did not say or do, is dirty pool.  Especially when said scientist is dead and cannot mount an effective counter-attack.

It's bad enough when (s)he's alive, as theoretical physicist and prominent science writer Lawrence Krauss found out, when some wackos who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe cherry-picked quotes from his talks to make it sound like he agreed with them.  (For Krauss's blistering response to the perpetrators, take a look at his article in Slate.)

But of course, one does not have that kind of recourse when one is dead.  Which explains why Einstein's quotes show up hither and yon to support all sorts of stuff, from theism to atheism to quantum-consciousness-frequency lunacy.  All of which makes me kind of hope that there's no afterlife, because it pains me to think of poor Einstein, watching his name being taken in vain by unscientific wingnuts, and not being able to do a damn thing about it.

But lately, Einstein has been supplanted as the Most Misleadingly Quoted Scientist by a different man, whose work is cited by a different group of wackos for different reasons.  This scientist is mostly cherry-picked to prop up claims like Infinite Free Energy (and the conspiracy theories regarding government coverups thereof), UFO antigravity propulsion systems, and superpowerful directed energy weapons.  He allegedly had all of this stuff figured out, but depending on whom you believe, (1) his research was actively suppressed during his lifetime, (2) all of his relevant papers were mysteriously destroyed after he died in 1943, or (3) he forgot to write it down.  All of this explains his current surge in popularity (forgive the pun) -- because of course, I am referring to the brilliant electrical engineer, Nikola Tesla.

Tesla was certainly a genius, even if you only consider the things he actually did.  There's the Tesla coil that bears his name, not to mention his well-known work with alternating current, the induction motor, radio-controlled machines, wireless telegraphy, and a bladeless turbine.  He spoke eight languages fluently, had an eidetic ("photographic") memory, and was gifted with flashes of insight that would often result in his drawing diagrams from memory that would then guide his further pursuits.  He died in possession of 278 patents -- but died in debt and impoverished, which (of course) further adds to his mystique.

So it's no wonder that Tesla is a favorite amongst the woo-woos.  Which is why just yesterday, there was an article on the fantastically wacky website Exopolitics by our pal, Skeptophilia frequent flier Alfred Lambremont Webre, called, "Nikola Tesla Re-started Earth's Exopolitical Communication with an Intelligent Civilization on Mars in 1901."

Just the title makes so many ad hoc claims that it might be sufficient simply to analyze it, but we would be remiss in not looking at the text.  And it does not disappoint.  Webre doesn't beat around the bush:

There is substantial documentation of Nikola Tesla's role as an early pioneer in re-establishing in 1901 public exopolitical communications between our Earthling human civilization and an intelligent civilization on Mars, most probably our human cousins known as homo martis terris. Public Earth-Mars exopolitical communications had most probably been severed since the solar system catastrophe of 9500 BC that greatly damaged Mars atmosphere and its surface ecology, and destroyed Earth's great maritime civilization. 

Nikola Tesla's early work in re-establishing interactive communication with an intelligent Martian laid the foundation for the U.S. government's secret DARPA time travel and teleportation program 1968-73 that employed Tesla-based technologies, and ironically perhaps for the secret CIA Mars "jump room" program that was initiated in the early 1980s that reportedly employed grey extraterrestrial technologies.

The "great maritime civilization" is, of course, Atlantis, and the "jump room" is the teleportation chamber via which the CIA has been transporting people to Mars, beam-me-up-Scotty style.  These individuals apparently include President Obama, who Webre says was seen on Mars by Seattle lawyer and noted wackmobile Andrew Basiago.   But this is just the outer skin of the onion, because apparently there are intelligent creatures on Mars -- not just lots of dust and rocks, which is pretty much all the Mars Explorer has found, despite numerous claims to the contrary.

Now, apparently it's true that Tesla once made a claim that he'd received a radio signal from Mars.  The signal, Tesla said, contained the following message: "1...2...3...4."  Which doesn't seem like a very intelligent thing to say, considering all the other things that one could say.  I mean, if I was on Mars, and I realized that someone on Earth was listening, I'd probably say, "It is really dry and cold and dusty up here, please send a rescue ship RIGHT NOW."  But Tesla thought it might be from the Martians, and proceeded to send messages back, none of which were ever answered.  We now think that he'd picked up signals from the magnetic field fluctuations of Jupiter, and eventually even Tesla moved on to other stuff.

As proof of Tesla's involvement, and his communications with Martians, Webre has large quantities of quotes from Tesla that really don't prove much of anything except that Tesla seems to have wanted to communicate with Martians.  He also has the following advertisement:

So that cinches it, then.

And all of that is apparently enough for Webre et al.  After quoting Tesla ad nauseam, he goes on into even more rarefied air.  He devotes a large section of his article to the research of Gregory Hodowanec, who has received radio transmissions that were either from somewhere in the constellation Andromeda or else from a Martian named "AAAAAATTT."  I'm not making this up.  Hodowanec told Webre all about his communications, and ended by saying, "I would appreciate that you keep this info somewhat confidential now.  The Earth may not be ready for what I will have to say eventually.  Nothing dire, just fantastic and thus perhaps unbelievable!"

So Webre put the whole thing online, including Hodowanec's request, which I find kind of funny.

The problem is, of course, that Tesla may have been a visionary, but he wasn't insane (the jury is still out on Hodowanec).  So I have no doubt that he would have been swayed by the evidence, as any good scientist is.  Or in this case, the lack of it.  Mars is significantly uninhabited, and I don't think the situation was any different 113 years ago.  Quote-mining Tesla's papers to support some crackpot theory doesn't make it true, and it's really hardly fair, given that Tesla himself is not around to defend himself.

I hate to say it, but it's getting to the point that whenever I read anything online that has Tesla's name attached to it, I immediately put on my suspicious face.  Which is unfortunate because I know he did some really forward-thinking research, much of which I have yet to investigate, and it'd suck if I missed out on learning about something Tesla actually did because of loons like Webre.

So that's today's voyage through the stratosphere.  How Nikola Tesla definitely didn't talk to someone on Mars.  There's no one up there on the Red Planet, more's the pity.  If there was, NASA would know about it by now, and scientists would be trampling each other to death trying to get first dibs on studying the Martians, because how cool would that be?

I mean, really.

And just for the record: I would certainly need more than an early 20th century advertisement for soap to convince me otherwise.

Aliens in Antarctica

In H. P. Lovecraft's seminal horror story, At the Mountains of Madness, explorers in Antarctica stumble upon an ancient city that was inhabited by an alien race eons ago.  High up in the frozen, windswept mountains are the ruins of colossal buildings hewn from stone, a holdover from when the Southern Continent was warm, tropical, and covered with plant life.  Beneath the crumbling masonry and ice-covered stonework is a maze of subterranean tunnels, where bizarre creatures once roamed...

... and, perhaps, still do.  *cue ominous music*

I won't tell you any more about it, because if you haven't read what (in my humble opinion) is one of Lovecraft's five best stories (my other four favorites are The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Colour Out of Space, and In the Walls of Eryx), then you should rectify that error immediately.

But the thing that sets Mountains of Madness apart, I think, is the novelty of setting it in Antarctica, a continent that is deeply imbued with mystery.  The ice shelves, the endless nights during the winter, the central dry valleys (a place Carl Sagan said was "about as close to Mars as we have here on Earth"), all seem hostile, inhospitable, alien, and utterly fascinating.  Which is why I immediately perked up when I saw a headline on Open Minds that said, "Did the Smithsonian Discover Alien Skulls in Antarctica?"

Of course, the problem here is twofold.  First, to judge by their content, the name of the site Open Minds apparently refers to leaving your mind so open that your brains fall out.  Other headlines on their site include, "Jaden Smith Says Obama Confirmed Aliens are Real" and "Teleporting Superhero Alien, or Video Game Character?"

Second, there is a general rule that whenever a headline of a story asks a question, the article that follows should state, in its entirety, "NO."

Despite all that, I looked at the article, which directed me to what apparently is the origin of the claim, a site called American Live Wire.  And here is what they have to say about it:

Smithsonian archaeologist Damian Waters and his team have uncovered three elongated skulls in the region of La Paille, Antarctica.  The discovery came as a total surprise to the world of archaeology as they are the first human remains uncovered from Antarctica, thought never to have been visited by humans until the modern age.  

"We just can’t believe it!  We didn’t just find human remains on Antarctica, we found elongated skulls!  I have to pinch myself every time I wake up, I just can’t believe it!  This will redefine our view of mankind’s history as a whole!" excitedly explains M. [sic] Waters. 

Elongated skulls have been found in Peru and in Egypt, proving past civilizations made contact long before history books want to acknowledge. 

But this discovery is plain incredible. It shows there was contact thousand of years ago between civilizations in Africa, South America and Antarctica.

Well, first, I have a hard time imagining a scientist in a press conference telling the world how he has to pinch himself when he wakes up because he's so "excited."  Secondly, there seems to be no region called "La Paille" in Antarctica.  "Paille" is French for "straw," something I haven't seen much of in photographs I've seen of Antarctica, so it's a little hard to see why someone would name a place down there "La Paille."

[image courtesy of photographer Andrew Mandemaker and the Wikimedia Commons]

Third, I haven't been able to find a single mention of a "Damian Waters" who works for the Smithsonian, other than in stories about the alien skulls.  So I suspect that he was made up, along with the skulls and La Paille and everything else about the story.  The whole thing just seems to be riffing on the "Starchild Skull" bullshit about the frontally-flattened skulls found in Peru, and trying to jump it back into the news by stating that some people had found similar skulls in a highly unlikely place.

[image of the Paracas skulls in the Museo Regional de Ica, Peru, courtesy of photographer Marcin Tlustochowicz and the Wikimedia Commons]

So, it's a lie.  It's a shame, really.  Given the cachet that Antarctica has, it would be cool if there was some kind of weird mystery down there, or at least something other than penguins and leopard seals and high winds and a crapload of ice.

But this ain't it.  I still don't really get why people start hoaxes; it's not like there aren't enough cool real things to talk about.  But whether this was written by some wingnut over at American Live Wire, or whether ALW just picked it up from another source, the whole thing seems to be cut from whole cloth.

On the other hand, it might be better in the long haul that it isn't true, you know?  Lovecraft's Antarctic explorers mostly came to bad ends.  It'd kind of suck if a bunch of scientists went down there, trying to find more skulls (all the while "excitedly pinching themselves"), and they all ended up getting eaten by shoggoths.  You can see how that'd be kind of a bummer.

The Common Core product placement conspiracy

I've been asked, at times, if I think it's possible that some conspiracy theories may be true.

And my answer is: of course.  Humans conspire.  It's the evil side of being a social animal; we sometimes use our social proclivities for immoral reasons.  So clearly there are some cases where "conspiracy theory" is actually "conspiracy fact."

It's just that I don't think most of the best-known ones -- the 9/11 inside job/controlled demolition claim, the Sandy Hook crisis actors claim, the HAARP weather modification claim -- have a scrap of evidence in their favor.  But other ones?  They have to be evaluated on their own merits, or lack thereof.

This comes up because I ran into a story yesterday that has all of the hallmarks of a conspiracy -- and yet I find it entirely believable.  I will say up front that I have no hard evidence that my claim is true.  It may be that what occurred here was entirely innocent, and the individuals involved are being straightforward and aboveboard.

But my opinion is that this stinks to high heaven.

I found the article because I was doing some reading about the latest on the Common Core, the ill-conceived and poorly-executed fad of the month for fixing public education by administering more standardized tests.  Oh, the standards themselves look okay: more understanding of math holistically, with less focus on minute details of symbol manipulation; more reading from source materials and writing to express understanding.  But the way it has been implemented has been haphazard at best, with an emphasis on test preparation, leading up to nationally-administered exams that put millions of dollars in the pockets of corporations like Pearson Education.

There has been a groundswell of anger about the whole thing, not only from teachers and administrators, but from parents.  This has led to a growing opt-out-of-the-tests movement, which is gaining traction across the country.  Oh, the fourth grade reading exam is tomorrow?  I'm sorry, my son is sick.  The make-up exam is in three weeks?  Oh, darn, I'm sorry.  He's going to be sick then, too.

But right here in my home state of New York, there's been a revelation of an even darker side of the whole thing.  A story in the Syracuse Post-Standard ran a few days ago that described the fact that the Common Core exams, provided by Pearson, include multiple examples of...

... product placement.

Yes, you read that right.  This has gotten out despite Pearson's tight control on the exam content -- teachers and students are expressly forbidden to reveal, much less copy and distribute, test materials, even once the test has been administered.  But you can't keep something this egregious a secret.  So the 3rd through 8th grade assessments were barely collected and scored when it came out that Barbie, Nike, iPod, Life Savers, and Mug Root Beer had all made their way into the exams.

And not in subtle ways, either.  The Nike brand and slogan appeared in a paragraph about risk-taking.  A story about a busboy cleaning up a root beer spill was specified as cleaning up Mug (a trademark owned by PepsiCo).  They weren't even taking the trouble to hide the product placement, the way that television sitcoms do -- such as placing a two liter bottle of Coca-Cola on a counter in the background of a scene.  This was blatant.

Everyone involved, of course, has denied that Pearson is receiving kickbacks from the corporations that produce the products mentioned.  "There are no product placement deals between us, Pearson or anyone else," Tom Dunn, an Education Department spokesman, said in an interview on Fox News. "No deals.  No money.  We use authentic texts.  If the author chose to use a brand name in the original, we don’t edit."

Mmm-hmm.  And if several of those texts mention products from multi-million dollar corporations, that's purely a coincidence.

Right.

The growing influence of corporations on education is a horrifying trend.  Kevin Kumashiro, writing for the American Association of University Professors, writes:

Current reforms are allowing certain individuals with neither scholarly nor practical expertise in education to exert significant influence over educational policy for communities and children other than their own.  They, the millionaires and billionaires from the philanthropic and corporate sectors, are experimenting in urban school districts with educational reform initiatives that are not grounded in sound research and often fail to produce results.  And yet, with funding for public education shrinking, the influence of these wealthy reformers is growing...  The result is a philanthropic sector that is inseparable from the business sector, advancing school reforms that cannot help but to be framed by corporate profitability.

And that's just it, isn't it?  The corporate leaders are not specialists in education; they have never been teachers, administrators, served on school boards.  It is just that by virtue of the money they have, they feel entitled to direct educational policy.  And the sad fact is, because of the increasing desperation of school districts to stay afloat financially, the corporations are succeeding.  More and more, state educational systems are making deals with the devil, and sacrificing our children as a consequence.

So could the appearance of product placement in Common Core-based exams be an accident, a result of random choice of textual material that mentioned modern corporate products that are appealing to children?  Could it have nothing to do with the ongoing attack on the public school system by special interest groups and money-hungry boards of directors?  Could Tom Dunn have been telling the truth when he said that Pearson got nothing for their blatant product placement?

Sure.  It could be.

But I don't believe it for a moment.

Pseudohistory of the world

I have wondered for some time what starts a person down the path of inventing some crazy crackpot theory.  When I was a teenager, I went through a wishful-thinking, proto-woo-woo stage myself, during which I desperately wanted stuff like Tarot cards to work.  But after I messed around a little with them, I figured out pretty quickly that (1) the card patterns were entirely random, and (2) any meaning that emerged therefrom consisted of what I, or the person for whom the reading was being done, was imposing upon them.

I.e., Tarot cards don't work.  Another cool idea smashed to smithereens upon the shores of reality.

But for some folks, apparently that fact-checking protocol never kicks in.  So what starts out as a minor glitch in thinking grows, and grows, and eventually becomes this enormous counterfactual ball of bullshit, and all the while its inventor sits there thinking (s)he has revolutionized human knowledge.

Take, for example, Anatoly Fomenko, a Russian mathematician who for some reason left his chosen field of study and decided to become a historian.  But he didn't do what most historians do, to wit, examining primary documents and reading scholarly papers on historical research; he set out to revise history.

Because apparently all along, we've been doing history wrong.

He invented something that he calls the New Chronology.  And when he calls it "new," he's not just whistlin' Dixie.

Here are a few features of his "New Chronology:"

• None of the dating methods we use are accurate.  I mean, none.  This includes archaeological stratigraphy, dendrochronology, proxy records, and radioisotope dating.
• Pretty much nothing that occurred before the Early Middle Ages (8th century C. E.) actually occurred.  What we think we know about those times comes from Renaissance-era forgeries, hoaxes, and lies.
• This includes the entire Roman Empire, the city-states of the Ancient Greeks, and the pharaonic period of Egypt.
• Jesus never existed.  The biblical story of Jesus is a mythologized account of the life of Byzantine emperor Andronikos I Komnenos.
• The 2nd century Almagest of Ptolemy, one of the most famous mathematical treatises of the ancient world, was written in the 17th century.
• The Tartar and Mongol invasions never happened.  Russia has pretty much always been inhabited by Russians.  And lemme tell you, the Russians are awesome.  They are pretty much the awesomest people ever.
• The Old Testament Jerusalem is the same place as Constantinople.  Why then, you might ask, do we have a city that is now called "Jerusalem" which is in a completely different location?  Stop asking questions.
• The Anglo-Saxon King Egbert of Wessex is the same person as Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great.
• Because the name "England" is a cognate to the Byzantine imperial dynasty, the "Angeli."
• Yes, I know that England and Byzantium are on opposite sides of Europe.  I believe I've already told you once to stop asking questions.

And so on and so forth.  Jason Colavito, writing for Skeptic magazine, did a blistering takedown of Fomenko's theory (if I can dignify it with that name), which you would think would be unnecessary, given that a better name for "New Chronology" would be "My First Big Book of Batshit Insane Ad Hoc Assumptions."

Now, the fact that some crank has written some crazy books (seven of them, in fact) isn't an indicator of anything particularly odd, except that it still doesn't answer my original question of how someone wouldn't realize pretty quickly that what they were proposing made no sense whatsoever (with luck, before (s)he'd written seven books about it).  But what I find more surprising is that there are people who believe Fomenko.  And they include Russian chess grand master Garry Kasparov.

Yes, I realize that being a chess grand master doesn't necessarily mean that you're sane in other respects.  But Kasparov seems to be a pretty reasonable guy, all things considered -- he's a political activist and has been articulate in his criticism of Vladimir Putin, and currently is on the board of directors of the Human Rights Foundation.

And yet, somehow, he thinks that Anatoly Fomenko's "New Chronology" makes sense.

All of which hammers home the point that I don't really understand human thought processes all that well.  Because however good you are at chess, or mathematics, you're not going to convince me that the ancient Greeks didn't exist.

All in the family

In the latest from the Wishful Thinking department, we have a woman in Murrysville, Pennsylvania who claims she is the Virgin Mary's first cousin, 65 times removed.

Mary Beth Webb began her inquiry into her genealogy in 1999, shortly after her brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Like most of us who have done genealogical research, Webb started with census and other vital records, and used online resources like Ancestry.com and Rootsweb.  But this evidently proved inadequate -- she began to run into dead ends, which genealogists call "brick walls."  I have several of these frustrating people in my own family tree, the most annoying of which is the direct paternal ancestor of my grandmother.  His name is recorded as John Scott in all of the records -- but a recent Y-DNA study of one of his patrilineal descendants proved beyond question that he was actually a Hamilton, allied to the Scottish Clan Hamilton of Raploch.  And interestingly... two of his grandsons were named Hamilton Scott.

But we have been unable to find anything more about his origins, despite extensive research.

Perhaps, though, we should take a page from Webb's book.  Because when she became stymied by various long-dead ancestors, she adopted a novel method for researching her roots.  She simply asked her parents.

The "novel" part comes in because her parents were both dead at the time.

But fortunately for her, her cousin is a medium, and was happy to contact her parents for her, and (after his death) her brother.  And all three of the dear departed told her all sorts of details about her ancestors, because (after all) the whole lot of them were up in heaven with them.

I don't know if that'd work so well in my family.  I've got some seriously sketchy ancestry, including a guy who spent years in prison in New Jersey for "riot, poaching, and mischief," a Scottish dude who lost his soul to the devil in a game of cards, and a French military officer who almost got hanged for killing a guy he found in flagrante delicto with his wife.  So I might have better success if the medium tried contacting people down below, if you get my drift.

"Yes... great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre says to tell you hi, and to also to let you know you're a direct descendant of Attila the Hun.  Also, please send down an air conditioner, because it's a bit toasty down here.  Thanks bunches."

But of course, Webb's relatives all were either nicer or luckier or both, so she got scads of heaven-sent information about her genealogy.  And after a bit of this kind of "research," she found out that she was a direct descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, who was allegedly the Virgin Mary's uncle.  According to Webb's calculations, this makes her Mary's first cousin 65 times removed.

The problem is, the whole thing about Descent From Antiquity (as genealogists refer to any claims of pre-medieval proven ancestry) is that the best historians don't consider any of it to be true.  The time between the Fall of Rome and the beginning of the Medieval Age was seriously lacking in reliable documentation, and what we have in the way of such records stands a good chance of being (1) a forgery, or (2) a lie.  Or (3), both.  By the time the Medieval Age was in full swing, the Romans were looked upon as being a Golden Age, despite the fact that a good fraction of the nobility in ancient Rome seemed to have some major screws loose.  So there were lots of people claiming descent from the Emperors and Empresses to boost their own stature, with several proposed routes going the proconsul Flavius Afranius Syagrius, and thence to the Egyptian pharaohs and whatnot.

But some people one-up even Webb's claims, and trace their lineages all the way back to Adam and Eve.  I kid you not.  If you go into Rootsweb, you can do a search for people descended from Adam and Eve, and find thousands.

Now that's what I call descent from antiquity.

But, sadly, even the descent from the Romans relies on poor historical research and lots of wishful thinking, as does Webb's claim to have proven descent from Joseph of Arimathea.  About as far back as anyone with European ancestry can reliably get is Charlemagne, which sounds cool but isn't because damn near everyone with European ancestry descends from him, because he was proficient at one other thing besides ruling most of Western Europe, if you catch my meaning.

But honestly, that's really not that surprising.  Given the small size of the population back then, if you go back far enough (some geneticists say 1200 C.E. is sufficient), then you descend from everyone in your ancestral homeland who left descendants.  Put another way: prior to 1200 C. E., you can divide all of humanity into two groups; those who were the ancestors of most everyone alive on the Earth today, and those who were the ancestors of no one.  So we're all cousins, really.  And if Joseph of Arimathea left progeny -- which no one knows for sure -- then chances are, Mary Beth Webb is his descendant.

But chances are so am I, and (if you have European or Middle Eastern ancestry), so are you.

But I don't know that because my dead relatives told me so, I just know it because of genetic studies and logic.  Which may be less cool, but is a damn sight more reliable than trying to get a direct line to great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre down in hell.

A dog's best friend

First, I'd like to thank my readership in general, and the people who put in donations and guesses for the 50/50 contest in particular, for their support in bumping Skeptophilia over the one million hits mark!  We hit a million at about 12:00 noon, Tuesday, April 15, and the winning guess (and winner of half of the donations) was submitted by Dorothy S. of Trumansburg, New York, who was only off by two hours!  We have chosen to donate the other half of the pot to the wonderful National Center for Science Education, for all of the work they do in fostering the teaching of science in America's classrooms.  Thanks again to all who played, and please know that I value each and every hit and comment I get.  Here's to the next million!

********************************

I've always been an animal lover.  I grew up with dogs, and have also had one or more cats all of my adult life.  Add to that a near-fanatical passion for birding, and a general fascination with wildlife of all sorts, and it's no wonder I went into biology.

My background in evolutionary genetics has also driven home the point that humans aren't as different from the rest of the animal world as a lot of us seem to think.  The false distinction between "human" and "animal" is a pretty hard one to overcome, however, which explains the argument I got into with a professor at the University of Washington over a lizard he'd killed for experimental purposes when I was in an animal physiology class.

Even back then, I understood that non-human animals die for experimental purposes all the time.  Despite my youth, I had thought deeply about the ethical conundrum of sacrificing the lives of our fellow animals for the benefit of science and medicine, and had come to the conclusion (an opinion I still hold) that it is a necessary evil.  But what I could not stomach was the professor's cavalier attitude toward the life he'd just taken -- joking around, acting as if the little warm body he held in his hand had been nothing but a mobile lump of clay, worthy of no respect.

"It's not like animals have feelings," I recall his saying to me, with a faint sneer.  "If you spend your time anthropomorphizing animals, you'll never make it in this profession."

I remembered, while he was lecturing me in a patronizing fashion about my soft-heartedness, pets I had owned, and I had a momentary surge of self-doubt. Was he right?  I began to question my own sense that my dogs and cats loved me, and were feeling something of the same kind of bond toward me that I felt toward them.  Was my dog's wagging tail when I talked to him nothing more than what C. S. Lewis called a "cupboard love" -- merely a response that he knew would get him fed and petted and played with, and a warm place to sleep?

But I couldn't bring myself to believe that thirty years ago, and I don't believe it now.  And I'm happy to say that just this week there was research published that showed that pet dogs (and probably cats as well) have the same neurochemical reaction in their brains that we do with respect to love, friendship, and bonding.

The study came from the lab of Paul Zak of Claremont Graduate University, the "world's expert on oxytocin."  He's actually written a book on it (The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity) and has come to the conclusion that it is the chemical basis of pair bonding, friendship, the emotional side of love, and the pleasant feelings associated with being with the people you like.  I've written about his research before, specifically about his conclusions the the oxytocin spikes during friendly activities contribute to positive social interactions of all kinds (and vice versa).  It's a nice example of the snowball effect; the more happy and social we are, the more oxytocin our brains produce; and the more oxytocin our brains produce, the more happy and social we are.

Zak has now extended his research to look at friendship-bonding in animals.  Anyone who has ever watched two dogs who are pals chasing each other will be unsurprised to hear that the oxytocin levels in dogs spikes when they're around their friends.  Now, my long-ago professor might challenge this, saying something like, "Well, of course.  They are social animals, and have evolved to depend on their fellow pack members for food, protection, and mates.  It's no surprise that they show bonding behavior and neurochemistry with members of their own species."

But Zak has found that dogs, in particular, can show the same response to members of a different species -- demonstrating pretty conclusively that dogs can form emotional bonds that are completely unrelated to evolutionary advantage, and are analogous to the reciprocal ones human pet owners experience:

At an animal refuge in Arkansas, where a large variety of animals interact with one another, I obtained blood samples from a domestic mixed-breed terrier and a goat that regularly played with each other. Their play involved chasing each other, jumping towards each other, and engaging in simulated fighting (baring teeth and snarling). Both animals were young males. We then placed the dog and goat into an enclosure together and let them play. A second blood sample was done after 15 minutes.  

We found that the dog had a 48 percent increase in oxytocin. This shows that the dog was quite attached to the goat. The moderate change in oxytocin suggests the dog viewed the goat as a "friend." 

More striking was the goat's reaction to the dog: It had a 210 percent increase in oxytocin. At that level of increase, within the framework of oxytocin as the "love hormone," we essentially found that the goat might have been in love with the dog. The only time I have seen such a surge in oxytocin in humans is when someone sees their loved one, is romantically attracted to someone, or is shown an enormous kindness.

All of which doesn't surprise me at all.  There is no reason any more to doubt Charles Darwin's contention in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals -- that emotional depth forms a continuum across the animal kingdom.  We get the benefit of emotional attachments to our pets, but they experience much the same connection to us, and for the same neurochemical reasons.

Which makes me feel vindicated, honestly.  And also less embarrassed about what a complete sap I am about animals.  When we lost our aged border collie, Doolin, last November, I went into a real period of mourning -- and so, I think, did our other dog, Grendel.  But just last week we brought in a new member of the family to be a pal for Grendel.

Skeptophilia, meet Lena the Wonder Hound.

After being together for only a week, they have already begun to play together, and just last night we caught Grendel washing Lena's face, causing Carol and me to begin chanting, "Grendel's got a girlfriend!  Grendel's got a girlfriend!"  (Maturity-R-Us, lemme tell you.)

I don't know about you, but it makes me happy to know that when I come home to find a pair of wagging tails waiting for me, the feeling I experience is something that my dogs are probably experiencing themselves -- towards each other, and toward my wife and I.

Zak is right, you know.  Oxytocin rocks.