The partisan brain

I tend to avoid politics, both here on Skeptophilia and also in my personal life.  There are two reasons for this: first, I find most political issues such a snarled Gordian knot that I have no idea how anyone could be smart enough to solve them; and second, even on the issues about which I have strong opinions, I've found that arguing with people seldom changes minds on either side.  So entering into an argument that basically is "I think so because I think so," and is unlikely to convince anyone of anything, might be the very definition of the word "pointless."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I do find it interesting, however, to consider why people so seldom shift their political views, even when presented with facts and data to the contrary.  It's like we're stuck in our worldview, unable to move away from the narrow little window we're looking out of.  And now, some scientific research might have an answer for why that is.

Darren Schreiber et al. of the University of Exeter published a fascinating paper last month called "Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans" in the online journal PLOS-ONE, which has as its main claim that there are fundamental differences in brain function between liberals and conservatives.  Studies had already shown that there is a brain structure difference; liberals tend to have more gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, conservatives in the amygdala.  But suggestive as that is, differences in structure don't always imply differences in function, so it was premature to conclude that these structural differences caused individuals to adopt particular political stances.

In this case, however, it appears that the earlier researchers were on to something.  In particular, there seemed to be a biological underpinning to the well-demonstrated tendency of conservatives to be risk-averse and liberals to be risk-seeking.  The authors write:

(C)onservatives demonstrate stronger attitudinal reactions to situations of threat and conflict. In contrast, liberals tend to be seek out novelty and uncertainty.  Moreover, Democrats, who are well known to be more politically liberal, are more risk accepting than Republicans, who are more politically conservative.  While ideology appears to drive reactions to the environment, environmental cues also influence political attitudes.  For instance, external threats prime more conservative attitudes among liberals, moderates, and conservatives.

Schreiber et al. set out to see if the different attitudes toward risk would show up on a fMRI, which would indicate that there was a functional difference between the brains of liberals and conservatives:

To test a conjecture that ideological differences between partisans reflect distinctive neural processes, we matched publicly available party registration records with the names of participants (35 males, 47 females) who had previously taken part in an experiment designed to examine risk-taking behavior during functional brain imaging...  Individuals completed a simple risk-taking decision-making task during which participants were presented with three numbers in ascending order (20, 40, and 80) for one second each.  While pressing a button during the presentation of the number 20 on the screen always resulted in a gain of 20 cents, waiting to select 40 or 80 was associated with a pre-determined possibility of either gaining or losing 40 or 80 cents.  Therefore, participants chose between a lower “safe” payoff and a higher risky payoff.  The probabilities of losing 40 or 80 cents were calibrated so that there was no expected value advantage to choosing 20, 40 or 80 during the task, i.e. the overall pay-off would have been the same for each pure strategy.

They found that the two groups did, indeed, show different levels of activity in the two parts of the brain that earlier research had shown to differ:

Consistent with the findings of structural differences by Kanai et al, significantly greater activation was observed in the right amygdala for Republicans and in the left posterior insula (near the temporal-parietal junction) in Democrats when making winning risky versus winning safe decisions. No significant differences were observed in the entorhinal cortex or anterior cingulate cortex. All attempts to use behavior to distinguish Republicans from Democrats were unsuccessful, suggesting that different neural mechanisms may underlie apparently similar patterns of behavior.

The authors are clear in their conclusion that they, too, have established correlation, but are yet to show causation; "One might infer that the differing brain structures identified by Kanai et al. suggest genetic foundations for the differences in ideology," they write, in their discussion of results.  "However, recent work has shown that changes in cognitive function can lead to changes in brain structure."  So how much of the difference they and others have shown is genetic in origin, and how much due to remodeling of the brain's circuitry because of the environment, is still uncertain.

It does support, however, the fruitlessness of political argument.  If there is a biological underpinning to political stance, it's to be expected that it's not going to be easy to change.  There are cases, of course, where it's important to try -- in issues of social justice and care for the environment, for example.  But this research shows pretty clearly that such battles aren't going to be easy to win.

And you have to wonder what a fMRI would show for a generally apolitical person like myself.  No brain activity whatsoever?

Maybe I'm better off not knowing.

Science-friendly illogic

I usually don't blog about what other people put in their blogs.  This kind of thing can rapidly devolve into a bunch of shouted opinions, rather than a reasoned set of arguments that are actually based upon evidence.

But just yesterday I ran into a blog that (1) cited real research, and (2) drew conclusions from that research that were so off the rails that I had to comment.  I'm referring to the piece over at Religion News Service by Cathy Lynn Grossman entitled, "God Knows, Evangelicals Are More Science-Friendly Than You Think."  Grossman was part of a panel at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's yearly Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion, and commented upon research presented at that event by Elaine Howard Ecklund, sociologist at Rice University.

Ecklund's research surrounded the attitudes by evangelicals toward science.  She described the following data from her study:

• 48% of the evangelicals in her study viewed science and religion as complementary.
• 21% saw the two worldviews as entirely independent of one another (which I am interpreting to be a version of Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" idea).
• A little over 30% saw the two views as in opposition to each other.

84% of evangelicals, Grossman said, "say modern science is going good [sic] in the world."  And she interprets this as meaning that evangelicals are actually, contrary to appearances, "science friendly."  Grossman writes:

Now, the myth that bites the data dust, is one that proclaims evangelicals are a monolithic group of young-earth creationists opposed to theories of human evolution... 

(M)edia... sometimes incorrectly conflate the conservative evangelical view with all Christians’ views under the general “religion” terminology. 

I said this may allow a small subset to dictate the terms of the national science-and-religion conversation although they are not representative in numbers -– or point of view. This could lead to a great deal of energy devoted to winning the approval of the shrinking group and aging group that believes the Bible trumps science on critical issues.

Well, here's the problem with all of this.

This seems to me to be the inherent bias that makes everyone think they're an above-average driver.  Called the Dunning-Kruger effect, it is described by psychologist David Dunning, whose team first described the phenomenon, thusly:

Incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are...  What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge. 

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge.

Now, allow me to say right away that I'm not calling evangelicals incompetent and/or ignorant as a group.  I have a friend who is a diehard evangelical, and he's one of the best-read, most thoughtful (in both senses of the word) people I know.  But what I am pointing out is that people are poor judges of their own understanding and attitudes -- and on that level, Dunning's second paragraph is referring to all of us.

So Ecklund's data, and Grossman's conclusions from it, are not so much wrong as they are irrelevant. It doesn't matter if evangelicals think they're supportive of science, just like my opinion of my own driving ability isn't necessarily reflective of reality.  I'm much more likely to take the evangelicals' wholesale rejection of evolution and climate science as an indication of their lack of support and/or understanding of science than I would their opinions regarding their own attitudes toward it.

And, of course, there's that troubling 30% of evangelicals who do see religion and science as opposed, a group that Grossman glides right past.  She does, however, admit that scientists would probably find it "troubling" that 60% of evangelicals say that "scientists should be open to considering miracles in their theories."

Troubling doesn't begin to describe it, lady.

That doesn't stop Grossman from painting the Religious Right as one big happy science-loving family, and she can't resist ending by giving us secular rationalists a little cautionary kick in the ass:

[S]cientists who want to write off evangelical views as inconsequential may not want to celebrate those trends [that young people are leaving the church in record numbers]. The trend to emphasize personal experience and individualized spirituality over the authority of Scripture or religious denominational theology is part of a larger cultural trend toward rejecting authority. 

The next group to fall victim to that trend could well be the voices of science.

Which may be the most obvious evidence of all that Grossman herself doesn't understand science.  Science doesn't proceed by authority; it proceeds by hard evidence.  Stephen Hawking, one of the most widely respected authorities in physics, altered his position on information loss in black holes when another scientist, John Preskill, demonstrated that he was wrong.  The theoretical refutation of Hawking's position was later confirmed by data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.  Significantly, no one -- including Hawking himself -- said, "you have to listen to me, I'm an authority."

If anything, the trend of rejection of authority and "personal experience" works entirely in science's favor.  The less personal bias a scientist has, the less dependence on the word of authority, the more (s)he can think critically about how the world works.

So all in all, I'd like to thank Grossman and Ecklund for the good news, however they delivered it in odd packaging.  Given my own set of biases, I'm not going to be likely to see the data they so lauded in anything but an optimistic light.

Just like I do my own ability to drive.  Because whatever else you might say about me, I have mad driving skills.

Pi à la mode

Well, it's Pi Day -- 3/14 -- at least if you live in the United States, where we put the month first.  Otherwise, it's 14/3, which is much less momentous.  But we can do what we want, rest of the world be damned, because, you know, we're 'Murica and all.

But if you accept that the month comes first, this is actually a really special Pi Day, because at a little before 9:30 AM, it will be 3/14/15 9:26:53, which is pretty cool.  And pi, you have to admit, is an awesome number.  It's the first number most of us run into in school that's irrational -- that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers, and whose decimal expansion never terminates or repeats.

Pi is formally defined as the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter.  Its approximate value was known to Chinese, Indian, and Greek mathematicians as far back as 2,500 years ago; a more precise method for determining the value of pi was discovered by the extraordinary Indian mathematician Madhava of Sangamagrama in the 14th century, and rediscovered by Gottfried Leibniz of Germany three hundred years later.  Both of them had uncovered the peculiar relationship now called the Madhava-Leibniz formula:

This was just the first of many appearances of pi in unusual places -- it's a number that crops up over and over in physics, for example.

All of which has made it important that we know pi to a great degree of accuracy.  Computers have now been used to calculate pi to 13.3 trillion digits, which is pretty damned impressive, and which makes what a wingnut who calls himself "Jain108" is claiming even crazier.

Jain108 says we've got pi wrong. Pi, he says, is actually 3.144.  Give or take.  Which, I think we can all agree, is far less than accurate to within 13.3 trillion digits. But this doesn't dissuade Jain108 at all.   He says if we just accept his value, we'll find our pipes fitting together better:

(A)n ex-Engineer from NASA, "Smokey” admitted (via email) that when he was making metal cylinders for this same Mooncraft, finished parts just did not fit perfectly, so an adjusted value for Pi was also implemented.  At the time, he thought nothing about it, but after reading an internet article called The True Value of Pi, by Jain 108, he made contact.

Because that couldn't have anything to do with inaccuracies of construction, or anything.

But that's not his only argument.  We should accept his higher value for pi because, I dunno, mysticism or something:

For reasons that will be soon explained, traditional Pi is deficient because historically it has awkwardly used logical straight lines to measure illogical curvature.  Thus, by using the highest level of mathematics known as Intuitive Maths, the True Value of Pi must be a bit more than anticipated to compensate for the mysterious "Area Under The Curve”.  When this is done, the value, currently known as JainPi, = 3.144… can be derived, by knowing the precise Height of the Cheops Pyramid which is based on the Divine Phi Proportion (1.618…).  Instead of setting our diameter at 1 unit or 1 square, something magical happens when we set the diameter at the diagonal length of a Double Square = 2.236… which is the Square Root of 5 (meaning 2.236… x 2.236… = 5). This is the critical part of the formula that derives Phi (1+√5)÷2, and was used by ancient vedic seers as their starting point to construct their most important diagram or ‘Yantra’ or power-art called the Sri Yantra.  With a Root 5 diameter, the translation of the Phi’s formula into a geometric construct derives the royal Maltese Cross symbol, concluding that Phi is Pi, that Phi generates Pi, and that Pi must be derived with a knowledge of the Harmonics of Phi.  When this is understood and utilized, we will collectively enter into a veritable Space Age.

Oh! Okay! I mean, my only question would be, "What?"  This is about as lucid as when people like Diane Tessman start to babble about using quantum physics to explain astrology.

But I thought I'd soldier on, so I kept reading.  And then I ran into a section where Jain108 claims that his ideas are proven because Queen Elizabeth and "Pope Benedictine XVI" both have worn robes with Maltese crosses, and something about the Ark of the Covenant.  So despite my earlier objections, I think we can all agree that what we have here is an "air-tight case."

Other fun stuff abounds in this website, such as when he calls 3.144 "the PIN number of the universe."  But my favorite part of what Jain108 calls "3.144ology" is when he starts talking about a guy named Billy Meier, who is "one of the most controversial members of the UFO community:"

Billy Meier is a Swiss farmer in contact with Plearjen people (humans like you and me) since the age of 6.  In Contact 251 it is stated :
"In the process they will discover that the base for pi was miscalculated.  By eliminating the error in pi, and correcting future computations based on pi, scientists and their amazing, highly developed technology will have the capability to make unimaginable energies accessible to the people of Earth”.

So if the "Plearjen people" are "humans like you and me," what makes them "Plearjen people?"  And how could changing the value of pi make us access "unimaginable energies?"

The only thing in the way is the pride and arrogance of mathematicians who cannot conceive of such a notion that Pi could be anything else than what their books have instructed them to believe.  It is their lack of understanding of Fractal Harmonics (based on the cascading proportions of the Fibonacci Sequence) which hinders them to comprehend the elegance of the geometric solution known as the Fairywand Method identical to Saint Germain’s Maltese Cross.  Fractal Harmonics allows us to zoom forever into the Area Under The Curve and detect more infinitesimal Areas Under The Curve, concluding that old Pi is only an approximation, a limit of millions or billions of straight lines, that it is deficient, that the True Value of Pi must be a fraction more than we estimated, and that it must be based on Phi, The Golden Mean Harmonics.  Thus 4 divided by the Square Root of Phi (1.272…) gives the correct frequency of 3.144… its really very simple. 

True Pi is like a crystalline seal or a Recoding ready to unlock, to override the old genetic imprint of degeneration, of lack and sickness.  It will, in effect, spark a Process of Purification.

The "Fairywand Method" allows you to "zoom forever into the Area Under The Curve."  So there you are, then.

In any case, I'm sorry if you thought you were going to be able to celebrate the extra-special Pi Day today.  Since Jain108's version of pi is, more exactly, 3.14460551..., you'll have to wait until March 14, 2046, at five minutes and 51 seconds past midnight, to be able to celebrate your Pi Moment.

I hope the thousands of pies people have purchased to celebrate the occasion will keep until then.

Privilege blindness

I've been slow to realize how blind privilege can make you.  I'm sure a lot of this comes from being a white heterosexual middle-class male; white heterosexual middle-class males in the United States enjoy a tremendous amount of privilege (exceeded only by changing "middle-class" to "wealthy").  The tragic part is that being born to privilege, I haven't had to think about it.  It just comes with the territory.

I haven't had forced upon my consciousness the constant undertow members of other groups feel.  The necessity of having to prove oneself constantly in order to be taken seriously at work.  The fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and being under suspicion just because of your skin color or mode of dress.  The demand that you always be able to justify yourself, prove why you have a right to be treated with dignity.  The fact of being unsafe demonstrating affection to the person you love in public.

Being who I am has made it hard not to take those things for granted.  Not that I earned a single one of the privileges I enjoy; coming from the family I did, and receiving the genetics I did, automatically dropped that manna from the sky into my upturned hands.

So the gradual realization that other groups don't have the same automatic entrée into the country club has been painful.  I was also born with a fair share of empathy, so watching the struggles that my African American, Jewish, and LGBT friends go through -- hell, hearing from a female former student that she never puts out of her mind the fear that she might one day be raped -- makes my heart ache.

And it also makes me angry.  Which is why I reacted to an article a friend sent me yesterday with a string of language that I won't print here.

The story, from the site Addicting Info, is called, "Student Group Says Gays Need 'Sensitivity Training' to Be More Tolerant of Bigotry."  In it, we find out about a student group called the Young Americans Foundation at George Washington University, who wants a religious exemption for taking LGBT sensitivity training workshops.

We hear quotes from two spokespeople from YAF, the first one YAF President Emily Jashinsky:

Mandated training is not really being very tolerant of all religious beliefs.  The way that people who are deeply Christian behave is for a reason, and if you’re training them to change that behavior, there’s obviously a problem with that. There's honestly no need for further 'diversity training;' everything here is pretty harmonious.

Which is bad enough, but wait until you hear what the Vice President, Patrick X. Coyle, said:

Why is there not sensitivity training for gay and liberal groups to respect the free speech rights of other groups on campus?  Why has the student association not considered similar training to teach students to respect those who believe in traditional marriage?  The hateful atmosphere that currently exists at The George Washington University will remain as long as the university allows liberal bullies to intimidate and attack students or clubs that dare to express opinions different from their own.

Let me get this straight; you're asking a group whose members can't walk down the street hand in hand with the person they love, who are the subject of legislation targeted specifically at denying them rights that other people enjoy, who are heckled and bullied and subjected to hate speech on a daily basis, to engage in sensitivity training so they can learn how to interact appropriately with wealthy heterosexual white people?

What's next, reinstituting the Jim Crow laws so that people of other races don't get uppity?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This represents a level of "I don't get it" that boggles my mind.  But it's the same thing that caused more than one person to comment during February (which was Black History Month) and on March 8 (International Women's Day) how terrible it was that we never have a day to celebrate the accomplishments of white males.

You know why that is, you insensitive clods?  Because every single day of the year, we celebrate the accomplishment of white males.  White males never have to fight to be recognized.  We're never asked, "Wow, how did you manage to become an engineer?"  We never hear people comment about how forward-thinking our society is at having a white male President, Governor, Congressperson, Supreme Court Justice.  We never have to prove our right to be in the running, to justify our position in the world.

Because the biggest privilege of all is not having to think about how privileged you are.

People make a big deal about how we should alter public school textbooks to be inclusive, to make sure that history texts aren't just about Dead White Men, that science textbooks laud the accomplishments of women and minorities.  But the enculturation of privilege still underlies the whole enterprise, doesn't it?  The white men are already there in force; the rest have to be inserted, almost as an afterthought, to give us the nice glow of appearing broad-minded.

I'm not saying that such inclusion is wrong, mind you; only that it's the first step, and we're fooling ourselves to believe that by such actions, we're done, that we've counteracted the damage from centuries of unquestioned hegemony.  The fact that people like Jashinsky and Coyle could even ask the question of why sensitivity training was necessary, and their suggestion that LGBT individuals take sensitivity training so that they'll know their place, are particularly offensive reminders of the fact that we have a long way to go.

So maybe it's good that they revealed their attitudes, that they came right out and said what they did.  Maybe we more empathetic privileged people needed a kick in the ass to remind us that however far we've come in the past hundred years, we've still not won this battle.

Maybe it was time for someone to say, "Hey, don't forget, it's still White Heterosexual Male month."

The devil went down to Georgia

In a move that many are characterizing as the latest end-run past anti-discrimination laws by the extremely religious, Georgia's Senate has passed Bill 129, the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act," by a vote of 37-15.

The legislation would "prevent the government from intruding or abridging faith-based beliefs," stating explicitly that "laws neutral toward religion may burden religious exercise as surely as laws intended to interfere with religious exercise."

Opponents of the bill were well aware of its hidden agenda.

Senator Curt Thomas, who voted against the bill, said that he believed that the measure was a direct response to the spread of marriage equality laws in the United States.  "There’s no way anyone’s going to convince me that that’s not what’s happening now," Thomas said.   He made reference to similar measures that have been instituted in Alabama, where the state Supreme Court just ordered judges to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. "We don’t want to be the next Alabama and be the next circus that they are becoming."

He was not the only one who recognized the law's subtext.  Marty Rouse, National Field Director of the Human Rights Campaign, was even more blunt than Thomas.  "This bill is a reprehensible attack on LGBT people and their families in Georgia," Rouse said, in a statement released last Thursday. "It does not address any legitimate problem with current law and creates harmful consequences for businesses throughout the state.  It threatens not just the LGBT community, but women, members of minority faiths and other minority classes.  All Georgians deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and we need all fair-minded people in the state to help stop this bill."

It now goes to the Georgia House of Representatives, where it is expected to pass, and then be signed into law by Governor Nathan Deal.

The whole thing has LGBT advocates seething, for understandable reasons.  Religious rights have been cited more than once in the past few months as reasonable justification for denial of services to LGBT individuals, and the RFRA is expected to give the anti-LGBT crowd legal standing in doing so.  But given the wide support the bill has in the Georgia legislature, what can be done?

Just ask the Aquarian Tabernacle Wiccan Church.

In a statement that should go down in the Annals of the History of Bluff-Calling, the Aquarian Tabernacle Church thanked the Georgia policymakers for their "forward-thinking... dedication to religious freedom."  They then outlined their practices that would be protected under the RFRA, citing which lines of the legislation covered each of them.  These practices included:

• Polyamory.  "Marriage is a religious institution," the statement reads.  "A uniting of souls before the almighty...  Many Wiccans live in multi-partner households, and until now have been unable to realize their religious right to marry the partners they are in love with.  Many of these partnerships have children from multiple partners all living under the same roof.  SB 129 has now opened the way for those children to all be under family insurance/health plans, as outlined in lines [22-23].  And if lines [34-35] hold true to their intent, then the least restrictive means of enforcing this change, is a simple revision to existing policy."

• Ingestion of psychotropic plants.  "With the passing of GRFRA," says the statement, "the ATC will be informing all Wiccans within the state of GA that there are no longer restrictions on which plants they may grow, own, harvest, ingest, distribute, or refine into compounds that the practitioner finds need to use within their religious practice, so long as no other laws besides substance abuse are broken...  As Government's definition also includes lines [82-83] “authorities; [...] or other person acting under color of law” it should be a matter of course to inform all officials to begin their refrain from detaining the practitioners for, and impeding the lawful use of said plants and animal parts.  This includes, but is no way limited to this non-comprehensive list, all plants currently residing upon any list of banned substances, plus any and all animal parts that may be found on the property or in the possession of anyone practicing the faith of Wicca within Georgia State limits."

• Drug screening by employers, and other restrictions based on "bodily sanctity."  "[The RFRA] means that all Wiccans are to be free to choose to be exempt, at the individual’s discretion regarding the sanctity of their essence, with no repercussions from Government bodies [77-83] upon an employer adhering to these inalienable religious rights, from urinalysis, blood tests, hair follicle tests, breathalyzers, tattooing, rfid chipping, or anything else that adds to or removes parts of our essence."

To which I have only one thing to say:  BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *falls off chair*

Man.  This should be good.  How many times do the clowns in elected office have to be shown that "freedom of religion" doesn't mean "freedom for the majority religion to do whatever it damn well pleases, and to hell with everyone else?"  Perhaps this will finally get it through their thick skulls that religious freedom (1) doesn't trump anti-discrimination laws, and (2) works best when the government just keeps its grimy paws off of religion entirely.  People should be free to practice whatever religion they want, in whatever way they want, unless such practice contravenes existing federal or state laws.  And that includes laws against discrimination.

How hard is that?

I certainly hope that the Aquarian Tabernacle Church pushes this as far as they can.  They seem to have done their homework, and although I can't say I buy their worldview, I applaud what they're doing, here.  And I don't know about you, but I'm really looking forward to seeing the legislators in Georgia backpedaling like mad to undo what they've done once they realize its implications.

Hammer of the gods

For those of you who have found yourself distressed by the heavy topics that have appeared here in Skeptophilia over the last couple of weeks -- climate change, the anti-vaxxers, the persecution complex amongst many American evangelicals, the misrepresentation of science by charlatans -- I'm afraid that today I need to bring to your attention an even more serious threat to life and limb:

Someone has found Thor's hammer in Denmark.

Yes, the fearsome weapon Mjölnir, capable of leveling mountains in a single stroke, the bane of many a Frost Giant and evildoer.  It was a short-handled metal hammer, forged in Svartálfaheim by the dwarf brothers Sindri and Brokkr.  They also at the same time made a few other special offers, including Odin's spear Gungnir, and Freyr's magic boat Ski∂bla∂nir and golden boar Gullinbursti.

No, I don't know how you forge a pig.  But then, I'm not a dwarf, which probably has something to do with my lack of expertise.

Be that as it may, Thor's hammer was considered by the Norse gods to be the best of the gifts that the dwarves ever made, because not only did it smash anything you like to rubble (its name means "the pulverizer" in Old Norse), it returned to Thor's hand when it was thrown, which is pretty convenient.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Of course, the problem is that it, like the spears and boats and golden pigs and (in fact) the Norse gods themselves, are mythological.  I.e., not real.  This is a point that seems to have escaped a lot of people, most notably Giorgio Tsoukalos (he of the amazing hair), who thinks that they were aliens.  The Norse people couldn't just have made them up, he says.  No way could people dream up valiant warriors and magical powers and epic battles between good and evil without it having some basis in the visitation of Earth by extraterrestrials.

Which therefore also presumably explains how Tolkien came up with Lord of the Rings.

So, according to the story over at Ancient Code that I linked above, we now have concrete proof that Thor existed, because they've discovered his hammer at an archaeological dig on the island of Lolland, in Denmark.  The hammer bears an inscription that says, "Hmar is" ("This is a hammer"), in case we weren't sure.

This is just thrilling the Ancient Aliens crowd to pieces.  Over at Arcturi Extraterrestrial Community, we read:

One intriguing mythological figures in human history when analyzing ancient aliens connection with past human evolution is one of the most well known Norse gods named Thor, god of thunder, whom [sic] wielded a powerful hammer-weapon that would allow him to destroy his enemies and protect humanity from the giants who roamed the earth. To better understand why Ancient Alien theory truly looks at this mythological figure as an intriguing character for ancient alien influence, one must have a basic understanding of who Thor was and his role on Earth, who his enemies were, and where his majestic and mythical hammer (named Mjollnir [sic]) came from... Could it be possible that
Thor's Hammer is some kind of ancient alien weapon that allowed him to reign throughout the lands and protect his people?

Furthermore, it was said that Thor's Hammer was made by two dwarfs. This really interested us because Ancient Alien theorist [sic] do believe in various alien races, which could lead us to believe that these dwarfs could have been Grey Aliens, commonly depicted as standing 3-4 feet in height and having an advance knowledge in technology which could be mistaken as magic to those who are unaware of the power behind the laws of the Universe. In addition, it seemed that the Hammer was made to be used with the aid of two "iron" gloves, perhaps giving some kind of a magnetic signal to the Hammer, so when thrown, the Hammer would return to Thor. Looking deep into the depictions of the use of this weapon, it really seems more like a modern day weapon, something conceivable to us today, but magical to those in the past.

So that sounds pretty amazing, and you can certainly see why this discovery has induced the Norse-gods-are-aliens aficionados to leap about making happy little squeaking noises.

But unfortunately, there's a problem with all of this, and although I hate to put a damper on their enthusiasm, but I feel honor-bound to mention it.  If you look at the photographs of the artifacts released by the National Museum of Denmark, you can see that the newly-discovered Mjölnir, fearsome hammer of the gods, bane of the giants...

... is only about five centimeters across.

For those of you who don't think well in metric, that's a little under two inches.  With a hammer that size, Thor would have been able to fell mice, and possibly a bunny, but not much more than that.  The Frost Giants, on the other hand, wouldn't have had much to worry about.  So the archeological find is probably just a piece of Norse jewelry, and all of the hype a bit anticlimactic.

Not that this will stop Giorgio Tsoukalos et al.  As we've seen over and over, it doesn't take much to get him excited.  Expect an episode on this amazing find on the This Really Isn't History Channel soon.

Miasma and misrepresentation

One of the (many) things that drives me nuts about woo-woos is the fact that they will take incorrectly or incompletely understood scientific research and pretend that it supports whatever goofy idea they are currently promoting.

It's why the creationists immediately go for the holes in scientific knowledge as support for the universe being 6,000 years old (the "god of the gaps" idea), throwing in an occasional bit of actual science as support, and ignoring the vast ocean of evidence that completely discredits their claim.  It's why the homeopaths talk about vibrations and quantum states as if they understood what they were saying, stopping with Deepak Chopra in their quest to find out what the scientists themselves have to say on the matter.

I ran into an especially good (or bad) example of this yesterday, when I bumped more-or-less accidentally into a concept from the woo-woo canon called "Inherited Miasma."  Here's what the Ascension Glossary has to say about inherited miasma:

Miasma is a psycho-spiritual inherited distortion created by trauma, abuse, fear based belief systems and Soul Fragmentation which, over time, was genetically encoded in human DNA, and resulted in various forms of dis-ease or imbalance. These dis-ease patterns were then encoded and passed down in Negative Ego behaviors or DNA code from generation to generation from the genetic alteration made from the NAA influence. Levels of the passed down distorted or flawed DNA would result in a dissipation of the original form of the disease. The manifested diseased energy and its physical body pattern would sometimes skip generations. The dissipated energetic pattern (cellular memories from the Ancestry or Family of Origin) of the original disease would then manifest in future generations in lesser or hybridized forms.

Which sounds pretty scary, especially when you find out that "NAA" stands for "Negative Alien Agenda," which, we are told, consists of the plans of a bunch of alien psychic parasites to use us as a food source.

If you descend from people who were oppressed at some time in history (who doesn't?), not to worry; you can get past all of this:

When one awakens, one will then need to decide what you want to energetically “wear” - as everything you inherited in your family (and the collective human race) does not have to become a part of your self-defined identity. As you observe and take responsibility for what you are inhabiting (this is your fleshly body) and being accountable to the current station of your life circumstances, one can participate with healing your genetic and miasmatic relationships that reside as energetic memory in your flesh. In most cases if you pay attention to the various patterns (attitudes, ideals, emotional intelligence) in your current Bio-Family dynamic, you will know these archetypal patterns extend to other lifetimes as well as hold relevant information and clues to what you agreed to heal (types of collective human miasma) while you incarnated on planet earth during the Ascension Cycle.

So yeah, that's a relief.

What is maddening about this is that these wingnuts don't have any evidence to support their claims, and they don't need to; the claim itself is so vague that you could decide that damn near anything you experience comes from "miasma."  Headache?  It's because one of my ancestors got punched in the nose.  High blood pressure?  My ancestors experienced stress that is now encoded in my genes.  No specific, testable, potentially falsifiable statements, just an evil influence stalking us from our long-dead relatives.

Convenient, no?

Miasma by Robert Seymour [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Okay, now for the really maddening part.  These folks have latched on to some actual science as support for their silly pseudoscience.  A relatively recent discovery in genetics is that some variations in a population are not due to changes in the DNA itself, but due to changes in the transcriptional potential -- the degree to which certain genes are expressed.  Called epigenetics, this phenomenon often has to do with the amplification or silencing of genes in parents or even grandparents, which then affects how the children (or grandchildren) express their own copies of the genes.  It's kind of a weird twist on the ideas of Lamarck -- that in certain cases, acquired characteristics can be inherited.

A fascinating example of this phenomenon just came out in Scientific American last month.  A study has shown that the children of Holocaust survivors have elevated levels of stress hormones.  The leader of the research team, Rachel Yehuda of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, found that children were influenced in utero by the stress their mothers were experiencing:

It is not completely clear why survivors produce less cortisol, but Yehuda's team recently found that survivors also have low levels of an enzyme that breaks down cortisol. The adaptation makes sense: reducing enzyme activity keeps more free cortisol in the body, which allows the liver and kidneys to maximize stores of glucose and metabolic fuels—an optimal response to prolonged starvation and other threats. The younger the survivors were during World War II, the less of the enzyme they have as adults. This finding echoes the results of many other human epigenetic studies that show that the effects of certain experiences during childhood and adolescence are especially enduring in individuals and sometimes even across generations.

Note how precise the language is.  No hand-waving psycho-spiritual inherited distortions; a specific claim that elevated cortisol levels in a pregnant woman can affect her child's ability to transcribe a gene related to cortisol metabolism.  Measurable, testable, and based in comprehension of the actual science.

The unfortunate part, though, is that the "inherited miasma" people love epigenetics, the same way the homeopaths love quantum physics, because at a quick read the science appears to support their crazy stance.  They read the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article on the topic (I swear, from some of the stuff I've read, they can't have done any more than that), and then blather on about how inheritance doesn't require DNA, our ancestors' spirits are still influencing our lives, karma, reincarnation, and off the edge of the cliff they go.

Look, it's not that I'm some kind of elite scientist myself; one of my faults is that my knowledge is a light year across and an inch deep.  I'm a generalist, a dabbler, a dilettante, or whatever other related epithet you want to throw at me.  But when I talk about something, I take the time to read what the actual non-dilettantes have learned about it, rather than picking up a ten-dollar word or two and then pretending I'm claiming something valid.  Anyone else can do the same.  What these people are doing is not only misleading, it's lazy.

And frankly, I'm glad that there's no such thing as inherited miasma.  I've done a good bit of genealogical research on my family, and some of the people I descend from went through some seriously awful times, which, given that they were mostly French and Scottish peasants, is perhaps not too surprising.  On the other hand, one of my ancestors, one Alexander Lindsay of Glamis, Scotland, apparently lost his soul to the devil in a card game.  So maybe there's something to it, after all.