2014 retrospective

2014 was a thrilling year, here at Skeptophilia headquarters (a.k.a. my office).  In fact, my able assistants, my dogs Lena ("Her Royal Derpitude") and Grendel ("Frankendog"), found it so thrilling that they're all pooped out and have decided to take a nap.

I thought it might be fun, on New Year's Eve, to take a look at the top stories from Skeptophilia, month-by-month.  Just in case anyone needed reminding about what a weird world we live in.

In January, we were visited repeatedly by the dreaded "Polar Vortex," dropping not only temperatures but a crapload of snow on the eastern half of the United States.  And of course, what is a weather phenomenon without a crazy conspiracy theory as an explanation?  The Polar Vortex, it was claimed, (1) was not a natural occurrence, and (2) therefore didn't produce real snow.  Who was responsible, you might ask?  Well, the Large Hadron Collider, of course.  And what was the white stuff, if not snow?  Well, non-melting chemtrail residue, of course.  Which made it a bit awkward when temperatures warmed up, and the non-melting chemtrail-residue snow melted, forming water, exactly as regular snow does, leaving the aforementioned conspiracy theorists to go back to their previous occupation, which was picking at their straitjacket straps with their teeth.

In February, we revisited conspiracies with a claim that the game app "Flappy Bird," which features a deformed-looking bird that the player has to maneuver around a series of pipes, contained a coded message from the Illuminati.  And was trying to steal your personal information, your mind, and your soul, not necessarily in that order.  And that its creator, Dong Nguyen, was murdered by the Illuminati for revealing the secret.  Which made it a bit awkward when Nguyen proved himself to be unmurdered by releasing a revised version of "Flappy Bird" called "Flappy Bird's Family" in August, or right around the time the snow from the Polar Vortex finished melting here in Upstate New York.

In March, we said goodbye to a long-time target of disgust for the secular humanist community, the Extremely Reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church.  Who, unlike Dong Nguyen, actually did die.  There were calls for picketing his funeral, but most of us atheists chose the wiser course, which was to let Phelps pass silently into obscurity.  Unfortunately, his followers have been reluctant to do the same thing, and they are still plaguing us, lo unto this very day.

April saw a wacko claim making the rounds of social media, namely, that Easter has its origins in the worship of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, and that by hoppin' down the bunny trail and participating in Easter egg hunts and so on, you are actually worshiping Satan and promising to sacrifice your children to Moloch.  This roused my linguistics-geek ire, and resulted in a rant wherein I concluded that if you are going to make insane claims, at least get the details right.

And speaking of Satan, in May we found out that not only can your child fall under His Evil Influence by receiving an Easter basket, (s)he can be damned eternally by watching My Little Pony.  Which, contrary to popular opinion, does not feature animated characters who speak in nasal, grating whines, and for whom any resemblance to an actual horse is purely accidental.  The Ponies are actually stand-ins for evil spirits, and are rife with demonic symbolism, which explains the phenomenon of "Bronies," wherein otherwise normal adult males become obsessed with characters like "Pinkie Pie," even to the extent of dressing up in bizarre costumes and attending conventions.

In June we turned to a new development in "alternative medicine," because apparently practices like homeopathy aren't ridiculous enough.  In China, it is becoming all the rage for guys to boost their sex drive and their performance in the sack by setting their junk on fire.  This post was accompanied by an actual photograph of a guy lying there on his back, a blissful expression on his face, while flames erupt from his reproductive area.  A photograph, I might add, that even now makes me go into a protective crouch every time I look at it.

July took us to Florida, and a cryptozoological report from near the city of Tampa.  A man walking his dog at night, the story went, saw a floating naked ghoul that smelled really bad.  Confronted with such an apparition, the man came to the conclusion that most of us would, provided we had recently been squirting controlled substances down our throats using a turkey baster: it must be a teenage mime.  Which apparently are common in that area of Florida.

August brought us back to conspiracy theories, specifically, to a claim that many prominent people have cloned doubles.  Or are cloned doubles themselves.  You can see how it would be hard to tell which.  Some of the individuals who are actually not individuals include Brad Pitt, Jimmy Carter, Beyoncé, and David Icke.  Including the last-mentioned is a little on the ironic side, since Icke has made a career out of convincing people that the powers-that-be are Evil Reptilian Illuminati, so I suppose it's strangely fitting now that he's being included in the fun.

By September, the election was fast approaching, meaning that the politicians were warming up their dodge-and-weave to avoid answering hard questions.  This year, it took the form of damn near all of them prefacing comments about climate change and/or evolution with the phrase, "Well, I'm not a scientist."  Which made the people who actually know something about science shout at them, "Yes, we know you're not.  You're a politician.  And this is why you should listen to the fucking scientists, instead of discounting everything they say on the basis of political expediency, you moron."  But given the fact that political expediency is how you get elected, the not-a-scientist cadre experienced resounding success in the polls two months later, which means we're in for another long period of people saying "la-la-la-la-la, not listening" to the facts.

In October we found out that all sorts of world events were revealed, in coded form, well ahead of time in movies featuring none other than Adam "Nostradamus" Sandler.  These events include the Waco Siege, Princess Diana's death, the BP Gulf oil spill, and the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. This at least gives some reason that Adam Sandler keeps making movies, given that any justification for his output based on claims of quality entertainment has long ago gone by the wayside.

November brought us a claim from Pastor James David Manning, of the Atlah World Missionary Church of Harlem, New York, to wit:  Starbucks is adding semen from gay guys to their lattés.  This prompted me to try to figure out how many guys Starbucks would have to pay simply to sit around in the back room masturbating, given the current demand for lattés, which might be the most mentally disturbing thing I've ever done for a Skeptophilia post.

Speaking of LGBT issues, in December, a group promoting such completely discredited ideas as "ex-gay therapy" put up a billboard in Virginia claiming that there were cases of identical twins, one of whom was straight and the other gay, demonstrating that homosexuality couldn't be genetic.  And they showed a photograph of two guys, who were such a pair of identical twins, as advertised.  The billboard turned out to be 100% correct except for two small details: the guys pictured were actually not identical twins, but two different shots of the same guy; and that particular guy is, in fact, gay.  Oh, and he had no idea that his photograph(s) were being used on an anti-gay billboard.  Proving, once again, that being a righteous über-Christian doesn't mean you necessarily have to follow the Ninth Commandment.

Which brings us to today, the last day of December, 2014.  New Year's Eve, the threshold of a whole new year.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And I will end with a deep and heartfelt "Thank you" to my Loyal Readers, and my hope that you will be guided in the coming year by rationality and logic, but will also have ample opportunity for such completely illogical activities as love, fun, play, and general unbridled happiness.

May 2015 be a good year for us all.

Dream weavers

Hard-nosed science types like myself are often criticized by the paranormal enthusiasts for setting too high a bar for what we'll accept as evidence.  The supernatural world, they say, doesn't come when called, is highly sensitive to the mental states of people who are nearby, and isn't necessarily going to be detectable to scientific measurement devices.  Also, since a lot of the skeptics come into the discussion with a bias toward disbelief, they'll be likely to discount any hard evidence that does arise as a hoax or misinterpretation of natural phenomena.

Which, as I've mentioned before, is mighty convenient.  It seems to boil down to, "It exists, and you have to believe because I know it exists."  And I'm sorry, this simply isn't good enough.  If there are real paranormal phenomena out there, they should be accessible to the scientific method.  Such claims should stand or fall on the basis of evidence, just like any other proposed model of how things work.

The problem becomes more difficult with the specific claim of precognition/clairvoyance -- the idea that some of us (perhaps all of us) are capable of predicting the future, either through visions or dreams.  The special difficulty with this realm of the paranormal world is that a dream can't be proven to be precognitive until after the event it predicts actually happens; before that, it's just a weird dream, and you would have no particular reason to record it for posterity.  And given the human propensity for hoaxing, not to mention the general plasticity of memory, a claim that a specific dream was precognitive is inadmissible as evidence after the event in question has occurred.  It always reminds me of the quote from the 19th century Danish philosopher and writer, Søren Kierkegaard: "The tragedy of life is that it can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards."

This double-bind has foiled any attempts to study precognition... until now.  According to an article in Vice, a man named Hunter Lee Soik is attempting to create the world's largest database of dreams, in the hopes that the evidence from it will establish once and for all that clairvoyance exists.

Soik is the man behind Shadow, an app for recording your dreams.  You enter them into the app upon waking, and they are timestamped and placed in a worldwide dream database.  The database software is able to identify keywords; what Soik is hoping is that prior to major world events, there will be a spike in keywords relating to those events.  And given that the transcripts are timestamped, such spikes (should they occur) would be incontrovertible evidence that precognition, or at the very least some kind of collective consciousness, is occurring while people are asleep.

[image courtesy of photographer Rachel Calamusa and the Wikimedia Commons]

"(W)hat happens if we can start looking at precognitive dreams, and say, 'Oh, there are actually correlations that are happening in real time?'" Soik asks.  "If we had this data back during 9/11, we could point to a time-stamped audio file describing the dream that predates the actual event. So, how could you then refute that kind of hard data?"

Which certainly is approaching the question the right way.  My only concern is that the keywords would be specific enough, and the spikes analyzed for statistical significance.  Even if you accept particular accounts of dreams as true, the difficulty is that humans have dreams about a rather narrow range of things -- some of the more common ones reported are dreams of being chased, of falling, of death (either our own or of someone we know), of sex, of being naked, of being lost.  To represent an actual signal -- evidence of precognition -- you would have to establish (for example) that a statistically-significant spike in dreams about death had a direct relationship to a particular violent occurrence in the world, and wasn't just representing an upsurge in anxiety over the state of things.

But like I said: Shadow, and its creator Soik, seem to be taking the correct approach.  I do wish, however, that Soik wouldn't sail off into the ether so regularly, because it doesn't do anything for his credibility.  In his Vice interview, he states that precognition is like Schrödinger's Cat (a comparison that escapes me completely) and goes on to say, "Who else is dreaming what you're dreaming, for example?  I really believe a lot in quantum field mechanics.  And I believe that a lot of the science jargon [means] simply: If you're happy, and you hang out with someone, you make them happy, and they make someone else happy."

To which I respond:  (1) No, that is not what the science says.  (2) What the fuck does this even mean?

Be that as it may, I encourage any of my readers who are interested in contributing to get the Shadow app (you can download it from the link I included above).  The bigger the database, the easier it will be to establish whether any data generated is statistically significant.  And it would be nice to have a wide variety of people involved with contributing dream data, not just the woo crowd that usually gravitates toward such endeavors.

I'm thinking of doing it myself.  I could include last night's dream, which was about a state senator from Alaska who accidentally chopped my dog's tail off, and whom I was trying to talk into paying me $10,000 in damages for the mental anguish she was experiencing, because she could no longer wag to express "I'm happy" and "Oh, look, a squirrel," which seem to be the two most sophisticated concepts her lone functioning brain cell is capable of processing.

I wonder what world event that might be predicting?

Single causes and simplistic thinking

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia called me out a couple of days ago for a statement I made in the post "Tribal mentality," regarding the tendency some people have to romanticize (or at least, to avoid criticizing) beliefs of other cultures.  Here's the passage he objected to:

At its extreme, this tendency to take a kid-gloves attitude toward culture is what results in charges of Islamophobia or (worse) racism any time someone criticizes the latest depravity perpetrated by Muslim extremists. Yes, it is their right to adhere to their religion. No, that does not make it right for them to behead non-Muslims, hang gays, subjugate women, and sell children into slavery. And the fact that most of their leaders have refused to take a stand against this horrifying inhumanity makes them, and the ideology they use to justify it, complicit in it.

He responded, in part, as follows:

ISIS is engaged in civil wars, and 99% of their victims are also Muslim.  Surely, Muslims on the whole are not in favor of slaughtering other Muslims...  (P)ointing at Islamic ideology as the culprit, rather than a complex set of political forces, just seems way too "Fox-Newsish" for a sophisticated blog like yours.  If Islam was inherently incompatible with pluralistic democratic values, then countries like Turkey couldn't exist.  The Islamic masses in Egypt rose up in a mass exercise of democratic revolution in 2012... only to be slapped down by a US-backed secular dictatorship.  There's just so much going on, with so many different factors...  I look at the 6 million Muslims living in the US and peacefully contributing... to blame it all on "their ideology," to say their beliefs are to blame for, among other things, the US-backed Saudi regime.... it just seems unfair.

Which certainly made me give some serious thought to what I'd written, and even more so, to what I think about ideology vis-à-vis responsibility for immoral actions.

Of course, in (at the very least) one sense, he is right; by attributing to "Islamic ideology" the atrocities of ISIS, and the lack of human rights in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and many other Muslim countries, I avoided one fallacy by leaping headlong into another.  To wit: the single-cause fallacy, which is considering complex events to have a simple cause.  (Commonly-cited examples are "The American Civil War was caused by slavery" and "World War I was caused by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.")

There's a lot more to the chaos in the Middle East than Islamic ideology; there's tribal factionalism, the history of exploitation and colonialism by western Europe and the United States, and the have/have not distribution of oil wealth, to name three.  It is facile to say, simply, "Those evil Muslims!" and be done with it.

The Islamic recitation of faith [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But still, I have to ask the question: to what extent does ideology bear the blame for some of the evil done in its name?  And by extension, do the peaceful adherents of a religion -- for example, the six million Muslims in the United States that my friend referenced -- also share some of the responsibility?

And it's not Islam alone, of course.  Christianity has much to answer for, as well, and I'm not just talking about events in the distant past such as the Inquisition and the Crusades.  The current upsurge of anti-gay legislation in several countries in Africa, some of which calls for the death penalty, is largely the result of American fundamentalists encouraging and financing such measures.  Do the stay-at-home members of the Christian churches from which these "missionaries" come bear some of the blame, if for no other reason because of their silence?

Does Christian ideology as a whole?

Now, I know that because of the huge variety of beliefs within Christianity (and Islam as well), to talk about a "Christian ideology" is a little ridiculous.  You have to wonder whether, for example, a Pentecostal and a Unitarian Universalist would agree on anything beyond "God exists."  But as my friend also pointed out, there are passages in the Christian Bible that are as horrific as anything the Qu'ran has to offer; stoning to death for minor offenses, men being struck dead right and left for damn near every reason you can think of, not to mention a prophet who called in bears to tear apart 42 children who had teased him about being bald and a man who offered his daughters to be raped by a mob rather than inconvenience a couple of angels (who, presumably, could have taken care of themselves).  It's why I find it wryly amusing when I hear people say that they believe that every biblical passage is word-for-word true, and that they live their lives according to a literal interpretation of the biblical commands.  If they did so, they'd be in jail.

But to return to my original question; does an ideology, or its law-abiding followers, bear some of the blame for what the true believers do?  At the very least, for not speaking out more fervently against the deeds done in the name of their religion?

It's not a question that admits of easy answers.  I'm torn between feeling certain that the most basic truth is that you are only responsible for what you yourself do, and having the nagging thought that remaining silent in the face of depravity is itself an immoral act.  After all, one of the criticisms leveled against Americans by many Muslims in the Middle East is that we stand by silently and allow our leaders to continue pursuing exploitative and unjust actions.  How is their holding America, and all Americans, responsible for what some Americans have done in the Middle East any different from our holding Islam, and all Muslims, responsible for the actions of ISIS and the shari'a judges in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere?

I don't know.  But the moral ambiguity inherent in these sorts of situations should push us all to consider not only our acts, but our refusal to act, as carefully as we know how.  And we should all be less hesitant to repudiate the individuals who would use our religions, ethnicities, and nationalities to perpetrate evil in the world.

Tribal mentality

There's a difference between respecting a culture and believing every damn thing it comes up with.

At its extreme, this tendency to take a kid-gloves attitude toward culture is what results in charges of Islamophobia or (worse) racism any time someone criticizes the latest depravity perpetrated by Muslim extremists.  Yes, it is their right to adhere to their religion.  No, that does not make it right for them to behead non-Muslims, hang gays, subjugate women, and sell children into slavery.  And the fact that most of their leaders have refused to take a stand against this horrifying inhumanity makes them, and the ideology they use to justify it, complicit in it.

A more benign manifestation of this same tendency is the glorification of indigenous cultures, as if they didn't have their own bad people and commit their own atrocities.  Current favorites are the Native Americans and the Celts, both of whom earned Historical Pathos Points for being overrun respectively by the European settlers, and by the Romans and (later) the English.  The destruction of their cultures gives them a veneer of tragic nobility.

Celtic knot from the Lindisfarne Gospels, 8th century [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, don't mistake me; the destruction of Native American tribes by the Europeans, and the crushing of Celtic society first by Rome and then by England, is an atrocity bordering on genocide.  But just because they had some cool aspects to their beliefs, and were ultimately destroyed, doesn't mean that they were somehow above reproach.  Indigenous people, just like us upstart Westerners, are people -- some good, some bad, some wise, some petty.  Some of their beliefs, just like some of ours, are worthy of emulation, and some are very much better off forgotten.

This blind admiration for All Things Indigenous reaches its pinnacle in the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network, which claims that modern science has gone off the rails -- and what we need is a return to "indigenous science."  Which, according to the site, is defined thusly:

Indigenous science is a way of knowing and a way of life. The power of indigenous science lies in its ability to make connections and perceive patterns across vast cycles of space and time. This "Great Memory" belongs to the entire human species, but it is most fully active in cultural healers who develop heightened levels of consciousness. The Great Memory may also be realized more universally when the interspecies bond is honored.

Which sounds lovely, doesn't it?  You might at this point be asking, "but how do we know that any of this is real?"  You're asking the wrong question, they say:

Indigenous science is holistic, drawing on all the Sense [sic], including the spiritual and psychic...  The end point of an indigenous scientific process is a known and recognized place.  This point of balance, referred to by my own tribe as the Great Peace, is both peaceful and electrifyingly alive.  In the joy of exact balance, creativity occurs, which is why we can think of our way of knowing as a life science.

In other words, another call to abandon the modern scientific insistence on data, controls, and analysis.  Just get to the "point of balance" (whatever the hell that is) and you'll know the answer without all of the messy experimentation.

Now, lest you think that with all of their talk about peace and balance that they are working in harmony with actual scientists, all you have to do is look at their "Research Page" to put that to rest.  Some of it seems to be anthropological research, which is fine and dandy, but then they jump into serious woo-woo land with their project to help "Western man (to) remember who he is."  This, apparently, involves finding out about tribal Anglo-Saxon practices, under the guidance of an "Anglo-Saxon wizard," Brian Bates, and a "Siberian shaman," Dora Kobyakova.  The latter is going to lead tours to museums to "help identify artifacts which science has not been able to."

Worse still is their involvement in HIV/AIDS in Africa, where they are spearheading an effort to incorporate "traditional medicine and alternative therapies" into the "treatment and prevention of AIDS."  My charitable side wants to believe that this is about finding medically efficacious native plants -- research that has turned up useful chemicals for the treatment of many diseases -- but after the involvement of shamans and wizards in their anthropological studies, I'm pretty sure this isn't so.  And this crosses yet another line, which is taking woo-woo beliefs into a realm where they're suggesting that people abandon tested and effective medical treatment in favor of magical thinking.  Thus, for all of their flowery verbiage, they are jeopardizing human lives.

Look, it's not as if I don't think ancient beliefs are fascinating.  I'm an amateur student of anthropology myself, and love learning about other cultures, traditions, and languages.  I celebrate my own ancestry, for all that I keep in mind that some of them were probably not nice people.  I'm glad that I still speak French, given that three-quarters of my ancestors did as well; and I proudly wear a Celtic knot tattoo on my leg in honor of my Scottish forebears (which account for much of the remaining quarter).

But the ancients weren't right about everything.  They did bad things, held counterfactual beliefs, and participated in gruesome rituals.  I'm happy to live in the modern world, for all of its faults; and should I become ill, I still will seek out the assistance of modern medicine, not a shaman.

Simply put: there's a reason we are the healthiest, longest-lived society humanity has ever seen.

There's some truth in the claim that we could learn something from some of the indigenous cultures -- most clearly in their understanding that we are all part of nature.  (Nota bene: yes, I know that not even all of them believed that.  The Yanomami of Brazil, for example, consider themselves so separate that they don't even classify members of other tribes as human.  But many indigenous peoples understand that we are fundamentally connected to nature in a way we westerners have long ago lost.)

We won't learn from other cultures, however, by romanticizing them, by unquestioningly accepting everything they did as praiseworthy (and simultaneously condemning our own culture in toto).  Leaping into "other ways of knowing" just because our distant ancestors didn't have access to modern science and medicine is foolhardy at best.  Ethnocentrism, whether lauding a culture or denigrating it, is never going to be a valid way to understanding.

Life at the center

Appeal to Authority is simultaneously one of the simplest, and one of the trickiest, of the fallacies.

The simple part is that one shouldn't rely on someone else's word for a claim, without some demonstration of evidence in support.  Just saying "Stephen Hawking said so" isn't sufficient proof for a conjecture.

On the other hand, there are times when relying on authority makes sense.  If I claimed that Stephen Hawking was wrong in the realm of abstruse quantum phenomena, the likelihood of my being wrong myself is nearly 100%.  Expertise is worth something, and Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. in physics certainly gives his statements in that field considerable gravitas.

The problem is that when confronted with a confident-sounding authority, people turn their own brains off.  And the situation becomes even murkier when experts in one field start making pronouncements in a different one.

Take, for example, Robert Lanza, a medical researcher whose work in stem cells and regenerative medicine has led to groundbreaking advances in the treatment of hitherto incurable diseases.  His contributions to medical science are undeniably profound, and I would consider his opinion in the field of stem cell research about as close to unimpeachable as you could get.  But Lanza hasn't been content to stay within his area of specialization, and has ventured forth into the fringe areas of metaphysics -- joining people like Fritjof Capra in their quest to show that quantum physics has something to say about consciousness, souls, and life after death.

Let's start with Lanza's idea of a "biocentric universe," which is defined thusly:

Biocentrism states that life and biology are central to being, reality, and the cosmos— life creates the universe rather than the other way around. It asserts that current theories of the physical world do not work, and can never be made to work, until they fully account for life and consciousness. While physics is considered fundamental to the study of the universe, and chemistry fundamental to the study of life, biocentrism claims that scientists will need to place biology before the other sciences to produce a theory of everything.

Which puts me in mind of Wolfgang Pauli's famous quote, "This isn't right.  This isn't even wrong."  Biocentrism isn't really a scientific theory, in that it makes no predictions, and therefore de facto isn't falsifiable.  And Lanza's reception on this topic has been chilly at best.  Physicist Lawrence Krauss said, "It may represent interesting philosophy, but it doesn't look, at first glance, as if it will change anything about science."  Physicist and science writer David Lindley agrees, calling biocentrism "a vague, inarticulate metaphor."

And if you needed further evidence of its lack of scientific rigor, I must also point out that Deepak Chopra loves biocentrism.  "(Lanza's) theory of biocentrism is consistent with the most ancient wisdom traditions of the world which says that consciousness conceives, governs, and becomes a physical world," Chopra writes.  "It is the ground of our Being in which both subjective and objective reality come into existence."

As a scientist, you know you're in trouble if you get support from Chopra.

And there's a further problem with venturing outside of your field of expertise.  If you make unsupported claims, then others will take your claims (with your name appended to them, of course) and send them even further out into the ether.  Which is what happened recently over at the site Learning Mind, where Lanza's ideas were said to prove that the soul exists, and death is an illusion:

(Lanza's) theory implies that death simply does not exist.  It is an illusion which arises in the minds of people.  It exists because people identify themselves with their body.  They believe that the body is going to perish, sooner or later, thinking their consciousness will disappear too.   

In fact, consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space.  It is able to be anywhere: in the human body and outside of it.  That fits well with the basic postulates of quantum mechanics science, according to which a certain particle can be present anywhere and an event can happen according to several, sometimes countless, ways. 

Lanza believes that multiple universes can exist simultaneously.  These universes contain multiple ways for possible scenarios to occur.  In one universe, the body can be dead.  And in another it continues to exist, absorbing consciousness which migrated into this universe.  This means that a dead person while traveling through the same tunnel ends up not in hell or in heaven, but in a similar world he or she once inhabited, but this time alive.  And so on, infinitely.

Which amounts to taking an untestable claim, whose merits are best left to the philosophers to discuss, and running right off a cliff with it.

As I've said more than once: quantum mechanics isn't some kind of fluffy, hand-waving speculation.  It is hard, evidence-based science.  The mathematical model that is the underpinning of this description of the universe is complex and difficult for the layperson to understand, but it is highly specific.  It describes the behavior of particles and waves, on the submicroscopic scale, making predictions that have been experimentally supported time after time.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And that's all it does.  Quantum effects such as superposition, indeterminacy, and entanglement have extremely limited effects on the macroscopic world.  Particle physics has nothing to say about the existence of the soul, the afterlife, or any other religious or philosophical claim.  And even the "Many Worlds" hypothesis, which was seriously put forth as a way to explain the collapse of the wave function, has largely been shelved by everyone but the science fiction writers because its claims are completely untestable.

To return to my original point, Appeal to Authority is one of those fallacies that seem simpler than they actually turn out to be.  I have no doubt that Robert Lanza is a genius in the field of regenerative medicine, and I wouldn't hesitate to trust what he says in that realm.  But his pronouncements in the field of physics appear to me to be unfalsifiable speculation -- i.e., not scientific statements.  As such, biocentrism is no better than "intelligent design."  What Adam Lee, of Daylight Atheism, said about intelligent design could be applied equally well to biocentrism:

(A) hypothesis must make predictions that can be compared to the real world and determined to be either true or false, and there must be some imaginable evidence that could disprove it.  If an idea makes no predictions, makes predictions that cannot be unambiguously interpreted as either success or failure, or makes predictions that cannot be checked out even in principle, then it is not science.

But as such, I'm sure biocentrism is going to be as popular amongst the woo-woos as ID is amongst the fervently religious.  For them, "unfalsifiable" means "you can't prove we're wrong."

"Therefore we're right.  q.e.d. and ha ha ha."

Hack attack payback

In the past couple of weeks, the media has been buzzing about the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment, in which a great deal of information that the corporation would consider sensitive -- executive salaries, emails between high-ranking employees, and copies of unreleased films -- were released online.  The hackers call themselves "the Guardians of Peace," but no one seems to know who they are.

And of course, there's nothing like a complete lack of information to make everyone start to claim that they know the whole story.

The most popular theory is that the Guardians of Peace are operatives from North Korea, who did this as revenge for the planned release of Sony's bromance film The Interview, which is about a couple of guys who are hired to assassinate Kim Jong-Un.  North Korea, for its part, has disavowed all responsibility for the hack, with Kim Jong-Un adding, "And if you don't act more respectfully, we'll do it again."

In all seriousness, though, it struck me as odd that the North Koreans could pull this off.  They're not exactly a technological powerhouse.  Just a couple of days ago the entire country lost its internet connectivity, possibly because a squirrel farted in Pyongyang and damaged their only working router.  The United States, for its part, has disavowed all responsibility for the act, with a CIA spokesperson adding, "And if you don't act more respectfully, we'll do it again."

The speculation doesn't end there, of course.  It's now being theorized that Sony hacked themselves as a PR move.  After the alleged North Korean connection, Sony pulled The Interview, but has decided that it will re-release it to various independent theaters.  This has elevated the movie from what would probably have been a fairly forgettable film into something that suddenly everyone wants to see, fueling accusations that Sony engineered the hack to boost the movie's ticket sales.

Myself, I think this is ridiculous.  Why would Sony release sensitive information just to push one bad movie to make more money?  Security is a huge deal in the movie industry, and it seems ludicrous to think that they'd jeopardize their reputation for protecting their employees and investments for the sake of one silly movie.  The limited release is unlikely to make much money as compared to showings in major theater chains, although it does afford me the opportunity to reaffirm my own decision not to see the movie.

Then, of course, we have the "Thanks, Obama" crew, who is claiming that Obama engineered the hack himself, with the assistance of the NSA, to make North Korea look bad.  Because apparently the North Koreans weren't doing a stellar enough job of that all by themselves.

The upshot of it all is that we still have no idea who the Guardians of Peace are.  They may have had something to do with North Korea; they may be some kind of independent troublemakers, on the lines of Anonymous; or they may be something else entirely.  At the moment, we have no real data to go on, so that's the best that we can say.

The lack of hard information won't silence the speculation, of course.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  These people love it when they have no evidence, because that leaves them free to attribute events to whatever their favorite bête noire is.  On the plus side, though, it has prompted people to start a campaign to make Kim Jong-Un look ridiculous:

So whatever else you say about the hack, it did have at least one positive outcome.  Not that anyone in North Korea will be likely to see it, unless they do something about those flatulent squirrels.

The Spear-Danes, in days gone by...

Sometimes I can be a little slow on the uptake, I'll admit.

I think reasonably well, but I'm not quick.  Still, the other shoe does drop eventually, which is fortunate.  In the case of the article I ran across yesterday, it'd be especially embarrassing if I hadn't figured it out, as you'll see momentarily.

It began when a friend of mine sent me a link to a post on Latest UFO News entitled "UFOs, Vikings, and Bigfoot?"  Given my interest in all three -- my master's thesis was about the contributions of the Vikings to the Old English and Old Gaelic languages -- my friend thought I'd be tickled.  Which I was.  Apparently medieval Scandinavia was rife with paranormal goings-on, something I never realized when doing my thesis research.

At first it just seemed to be the same-ol'-same-ol' -- Thor et al. were ancient aliens, trolls were Bigfoot, and so forth.  But then the author, "Doc Vega," launches into a story about an Arab traveler, Ibn Fadian, who chronicled the doings of the Vikings back in the tenth century.

Vega is correct that Ibn Fadian was a real person.  His full name was Ahmad Ibn Fadian, and his first-hand account of not only the Vikings, but the Bulgars and the Turks, is nothing short of fascinating.  He states that Ibn Fadian's manuscript was the basis of Michael Crichton's novel Eaters of the Dead, which he calls "a very real account of events that are nothing short of remarkable."

So anyhow, Ibn Fadian, who Vega refers to over and over as "Ibn" even though "Ibn" isn't his first name (it means "son of" in Arabic), recounts the adventures of a Viking named Buliwyf who lived in a village in Scandinavia called Wyglif.  But he doesn't get to Buliwyf's story right away.  He first tells us about the depravity at a Viking funeral, which included lots of eating, drinking, sex, and human sacrifice.  Which, of course, is interesting enough, given the subject.  But then Vega's account (and supposedly Ibn Fadian's) takes an interesting turn.

The village of Wyglif, and the whole kingdom ("Rothgar"), were apparently under some kind of serious threat, and Buliwyf was the only one who was brave enough to face it.  In fact, Buliwyf took Ibn Fadian to see what the threat was about, and Ibn Fadian was appalled when he arrived at a farm house and saw that the family who had dwelled there had been brutally murdered, and their corpses partly eaten.  The villains who had done this, Buliwyf said, were monsters who lived in the woods called "Wendol."

The Wendol, Vega said, were clearly Sasquatches.  Because (1) ancient legends are admissible as scientific evidence, and (2) there are so many other verified accounts of Bigfoots eating people.

But this wasn't what bothered me most about this.  There was something indefinably... familiar about what Vega was telling us.  And I hadn't read Crichton's novel, so I knew it wasn't that.

So I kept reading.

Vega goes on to tell us that Lloyd Pye (he of the "Starchild Skull" nonsense) thought that the Wendol were probably Neanderthals, or perhaps Gigantopithecus.  Mostly based on the fact that both Sasquatch and the Wendol are described as "big," which I think we can all agree is sufficient to determine taxonomic status.

Anyhow, Buliwyf goes and kills one of the Wendol, and has an encounter with a giant sea serpent (further reinforcing his claim that this manuscript is 100% true).  But we then hear the bad news that Buliwyf had to face yet another challenge, which was...

... the Mother of the Wendol.

This was the moment that the light bulb went on.  You probably figured it out in the first paragraph, but cut me some slack, here; I seriously was not expecting this.  In fact, I said aloud to my computer, "What the fuck?  He thinks that Beowulf is a true story?"

The answer is: yes, he does.  Buliwyf is Beowulf.  Rothgar is Hrothgar.  (That one should have been a dead giveaway.)  Wendol is Grendel.

Besides how long it took me to figure it out, there are various things that are amusing about all of this.

The first is that the best guess of the origins of the Beowulf legend lie in the late 5th century, a good 400 years before Ahmad Ibn Fadian took his amazing voyage with the Vikings.  So while Ibn Fadian may have recounted Beowulf's exploits as a legend he'd heard, he was four centuries too late to have participated in them (or anything related to them).  And that's assuming that they have any basis in reality at all.

The second is that I should have caught on right away, because Beowulf is far and away my favorite ancient legend.  I've read it many times (I especially love Seamus Heaney's wonderful translation).  It's a story that is capable of transporting me effortlessly back into a different millennium.

But the funniest thing about all of this is that I like Beowulf so much that I named my dog Grendel.  I chose this name because Grendel-the-Dog looks like he's made of spare parts; he seems to be the result of putting about six different incompatible breeds of dog into a genetic blender.  Similarly, Grendel-the-Monster is the tragic figure he is because he was a composite being -- not quite human, not quite beast, caught in the undefined middle.

Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall, Grendel (1908) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And for comparison purposes:

Grendel the Dog, a.k.a. "Cream Puff" or "Mr. Snuggles"

So okay, the name "Grendel" wasn't such a good fit, personality-wise.

Anyhow.  We apparently have yet another person who thinks that a wild legend was a historically-accurate retelling of actual events, and then got the chronology wrong by 400 years.  And who didn't even catch on that Michael Crichton's story was a novelization of a myth, which thus added a second layer of fiction on top of the first.

I mean, I can be slow sometimes, but I'm not that obtuse.