Adam and Eve and Chris Hemsworth

Coming hard on the heels of my post a week ago about how even the blondest, bluest-eyed of us descends from dark-skinned, brown-eyed Africans, we have a group of young-earth creationists who are going through mental gyrations to determine what skin color Adam and Eve had.

I have to admit that it always struck me as odd, even when I was a teenager and fairly naïve about pretty much everything, that Adam and Eve were always pictured as white-skinned Caucasians.  They lived in the Middle East, right?

Antonio Molinari, Adam and Eve (ca. 1700) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Of course, the same thing might well be said about a more recent religious figure from the same tradition:

Is it just me, or is Jesus's expression in this portrait saying, "Bitch, please"?

So anyway, maybe it's time for people to recognize that all of the people in the bible were most likely dark-skinned and dark-eyed, and that Jesus probably looked more like Saddam Hussein than he did like Chris Hemsworth.

But anyway.  Now we have a bunch of people twisting themselves into knots to solve the question about Adam and Eve's skin color.  Which is funny from a number of standpoints, the first and foremost of which is that they're wasting time trying to figure out what a couple of people who never existed looked like.

Let's start with Sierra Rayne, over at American Thinker, who says that this is actually an important question for the religious to resolve.  "Within the context of the current war on the Judeo-Christian faith," she writes, "the discussion is far from esoteric, necessitating a consistent interpretation within the community."  She solves the conundrum thusly:

(A)ll of the children from a couple will have skin colors lighter than the darkest parent's skin color.  Tracing this reasoning back to Adam and Eve, it would then suggest that either Adam or Eve had a skin color darker than the darkest human skin color that current exists anywhere on the planet.

I guess if you're starting out from the standpoint that gene mutations never occur, this might have some degree of reason behind it.  But as I point out repeatedly in my Critical Thinking classes, if you're constructing a logical argument, and one of your premises is false, you can prove damn near anything.

Then we have the piece over at Apologetics Press that makes the following bizarre statement:

Thus, starting with any two parents who were heterozygous (i.e., middle-brown in color), extreme racial colors (black and white, to name only two examples) could be produced in such a way that races would have permanently different colors.  Of course, it also is possible to produce a middle-brown race that will have a fixed middle-brown color.  If the original middle-brown parents produce offspring of either AAbb or aaBB, and these offspring marry only others their own color, avoiding intermarriage with those not of their own genetic makeup, their descendants will be a fixed middle-brown color.

And they back it up with a Punnett square, so it must be true:

 Of course, this conveniently ignores the fact that there are way more than two gene loci that control skin color, that genes can mutate, and (of course) human populations evolve through natural selection just like every other species on Earth.

But I suppose that if they want to argue over what Adam and Eve looked like, at least it's less time that they'll have to devote to insisting that the bible be used as a science textbook in public schools.  And after all, in a previous generation, the religious argued over how many angels could stand on the head of a pin, so such silliness is hardly unprecedented.

It'd be nice, however, if they'd realize another principle of critical thinking, namely that you're not supposed to assume your conclusion and then fish around for support for it after the fact.

Giving up on convincing the pigeons

The furor over vaccinations has a long history.

The history, which is intensely frustrating to people like me who think that the anti-vaxxers' rhetoric borders on deliberate endangerment of people's lives, seems always to play out the same way.  In 1998, the now-infamous Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a study in Lancet claiming that there was a connection between the MMR vaccination and autism.  The study turned out to involve only twelve patients, so there was a bias right from the beginning that was so big you could drive a tanker truck through it.  When you add the investigation by Brian Deer that uncovered the fact that Wakefield was being subsidized by a group of lawyers who were conspiring to file lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, then... well, you get the picture.

The British Medical Journal called Wakefield's study "fraudulent."  Ten of the twelve authors of the Wakefield paper formally withdrew their support in 2004, stating, "We wish to make it clear that in [the 1998] paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient.  However, the possibility of such a link was raised and consequent events have had major implications for public health.  In view of this, we consider now is the appropriate time that we should together formally retract the interpretation placed upon [the] findings in the [1998] paper, according to precedent."

None of that mattered.  The anti-vaccination movement was off and running.  A claim was made that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative in many vaccines, was what was causing the link between vaccines and autism (which was based on a fraudulent claim from the beginning, remember?).  Many governments caved to the hype, removing thimerosal, which had been used safely since the 1930s.  Surprisingly enough, the rates of autism were unaffected.

That apparently didn't matter, either.

[image courtesy of the Center for Disease Control and the Wikimedia Commons]

Then the claim started running about that getting "natural" diseases was better for your immune system than getting "artificial" vaccines.  Apparently the idea was that getting diseases was like lifting weights for the immune system.  In 2002, the American Institute of Medicine sponsored a study to see if this was true.  They found no support for it.

Guess what effect this had on the anti-vaccination movement?

Further studies tried to find a link between vaccination and multiple sclerosis, ALS, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and sudden infant death syndrome.  Yup... no connection.  So the anti-vaxxers decided that some children were more sensitive to vaccines, and the studies hadn't taken that into account.  Other, more extreme spokespeople for the movement started claiming that the researchers, not to mention all the doctors and nurses, were shills for "Big Pharma."  "Big Pharma," they say, wants to keep people sick (or worse, make people sick) in order to keep making profits.  And people like me, who object to policy being driven by folks who evidently have no understanding of how science and peer review are done, are just plain stupid.

But the research continued to pile up, and always in favor of the safety of childhood vaccination.  So the anti-vaxxers shifted the goalposts again.  Now they went after gardasil, the vaccine against HPV, a virus shown to be one of the main triggers for cervical, oropharyngeal, vaginal, and anal cancer.  So that was studied.  Once again: the vaccine is safe and effective.  Any side effects are extremely uncommon, and the risk is far lower than the risk of contracting the virus and eventually developing cancer.  But the claims continued to circulate; I've heard more than one parent say, "I'm not having my kid get the HPV vaccine!  It's too risky!"

So more studies were done.  No connection continued to be found.  And just last week, a study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that in a study of 95,000 children, there was no link between vaccinations and autism -- being vaccinated doesn't alter the risk even in children who have a higher risk of autism from other factors.

An article about the study in Vocativ states that "this should end the debate once and for all."  But it won't.  You know why?

This is not a debate.  This is people who understand science trying to argue with alarmists who believe every damn thing a celebrity says, over the advice given by medical researchers.  This is playing chess with a pigeon -- no matter how cleverly you play, the pigeon just shits all over the chessboard and then struts around like it won.

This should have been over, as a discussion, twenty years ago.  Eliminating vaccines is dangerous and irresponsible.  The childhood diseases of the pre-vaccine period are not mild tummy aches; kids died of them.  Lots of kids.  But you know why the anti-vaxxers don't recognize that?  Here's why.

No one in the United States remembers how horrific these diseases are.  Hardly anyone dies of them any more, because nearly everyone has had the fucking vaccine.  Measles is not just "a bunch of spots," it causes sky-high fever that can leave a child deaf or permanently brain damaged.  Mumps can cause sterility, especially in young men.  Diphtheria kills you by slow suffocation.  Typhoid gives children such serious vomiting and diarrhea that they can die of dehydration, not to mention getting lovely symptoms like intestinal hemorrhage.

Vivid enough mental images for you?

Some people do change their views, but it often takes being walloped by a metaphorical two-by-four for it to happen.  Last month there was the highly publicized story of a mom from Ottawa who was an outspoken anti-vaxxer, but changed her tune after all seven of her unvaccinated children simultaneously contracted whooping cough.

Wouldn't it be nice if people could be convinced by evidence and logic, and not by their children being at risk of dying?

So my general opinion is that if the research we already had hasn't convinced people, further research won't, either.  It's time we stop wasting resources on these people.  The evolutionary biologists learned that long ago; you don't see them doing research and publishing papers to demonstrate over and over again that the Earth is not six thousand years old.  We need to treat the anti-vaxxers as what they are -- the young-earth creationists of the medical world.

And mandate that children be vaccinated, nationwide.  No exemptions, sorry.

This discussion is over.

The appeal of the underdog

We skeptics like to think that our logic will always be convincing, that people who believe in counterfactual nonsense will come around to a more scientific way of thinking if only we point out how silly they're being.  Turn on the lights, we think, and people can't help but see more clearly.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the human brain doesn't work like that.

We have two strikes against us right from the start.  One of them is the backfire effect, the well-documented tendency of people to double-down on their beliefs when they're presented with hard evidence against them.  Shown data, facts, and a logical argument that people are wrong, and often they'll come away even more convinced that they're right... and threatened.

But a second one has to do with how people react when they see others attacked.  Many people end up espousing woo-woo beliefs because they were persuaded by some charismatic public figure, so the figure him/herself ends up being representative of the ideas.  And an attack on someone we revere often leaves us outraged on their behalf, and thinking that the ones mounting the attack are simply arrogant assholes.

Because as Robert Park tells us in his wonderful book Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (which all of you should order right now and read), we love backing an underdog.  If the spokesperson for our favorite silly idea appears unfairly besieged by the establishment, we rally to the cause.

Describing the campaign of the amazingly persistent crank Joe Newman, who claimed for years that both the First and the Second Laws of Thermodynamics were false and that he'd created a perpetual motion machine that could create energy, Park writes:

An intense, handsome man in his forties, dressed in work clothes, his dark hair combed straight back, the plainspoken mechanic looked directly into the eyes of his viewers.  He declared that his Energy Machine could produce ten times the electrical energy it took to run it.  "Put one in your home," he said, "and you'll never have to pay another electric bill." 

It's the sort of story Americans love.  A backwoods wizard who never finished high school makes a revolutionary scientific discovery.  He is denied the fruits of his genius by a pompous scientific establishment and a patent examiner who rejects his application for a patent on "an unlimited source of energy" without even examining it, on the ground that all alleged inventions of perpetual motion machines are refused patents.  Not a man to be pushed around, Joseph Wesley Newman takes on the U. S. government, filing suit in federal court against the Patent and Trademark Office.  It's the little man battling a gigantic, impersonal system... 

Perhaps the most endearing characteristic of Americans is their sympathy for the underdog.  They resent arrogant scientists who talk down to them in unfamiliar language, and the government bureaucrats who hide behind rules.  Moreover, Joe Newman's claim invoked one of the most persistent myths of the industrialized world -- free energy.  Who has not heard stories of the automobile that runs on ordinary water?  Suppressed, of course, by the oil industry.  The public never tires of that story.

And just lately, we've had two examples of just this.  First, Vani Hari, the self-proclaimed "Food Babe" whose ideas basically boil down to "if you can't pronounce the name of a chemical, you shouldn't have it in your body," was systematically taken apart by analytical chemist Yvette d'Entremont in a Gawker article entitled, "The 'Food Babe' is Full of Shit."  The article is well-researched, well-written, and its logic seems incontrovertible.

And yet, Ms. Babe and her followers, the self-proclaimed "Food Babe Army," are still going strong.  Food herself has responded to her critics with a shrieking diatribe that amounts to nothing more than one long string of loose-cannon ad hominems.  Food is rather notorious for this approach; when last year she wrote a piece on her blog about how horrible it was that the air in airplane cabins wasn't pure oxygen, and within hours received 4,847,901 responses that (1) ordinary air is only 21% oxygen, and (2) if airplanes were filled with pure oxygen, they'd be explosive, she responded by taking down the post and claiming that her views were being misrepresented by a hostile cadre of shills for Big Nitrogen.

And her followers loved it.  "Go Food Babe!" one of them wrote.  "Keep fighting for the health of Americans!  We're behind you 100%."

Then we had Dr. Mehmet Oz, whose weird brand of holistic alternative medicine has raised the ire of everyone who thinks that medical modalities should be based on, you know, actual hard data.  Here are three of his claims (quoted from a wonderful article by Scott Gavura in Science-Based Medicine):

• (On green coffee extract) — “You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they found the magic weight-loss for every body type.”
• (On raspberry ketone) — “I’ve got the number one miracle in a bottle to burn your fat”
• (On Garcinia cambogia) — “It may be the simple solution you’ve been looking for to bust your body fat for good.”

This is just scratching the surface.  Oz has become rich off of telling people not to listen to their doctors, that science is actually a religion, and that all they need to do is buy his books and come to his speaking appearances and they'll know how to improve their health. 

And just last week, there was a well-meant campaign against Oz that threatens to fail spectacularly.  A group of medical researchers banded together to try to get Oz fired from his position at Columbia University, saying he promoted "disdain for science" and "quack medicine," statements which are fairly unarguable to anyone who understands how scientific research works.  But Oz, like Food Babe, isn't quelled in the least by these accusations -- and now has said that he will use his television show (of course he has a television show) to take on his critics.

"We plan to show America who these authors are, because discussion of health topics should be free of intimidation," Oz said.

It should also, apparently, be free of logic, data, evidence, and peer review.

And the sad thing is how unlikely all this is to change anyone's opinion.  My guess is that neither Food Babe nor Dr. Oz will experience the least drop in their popularity or book sales from the criticisms they've received.  Indeed, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they increase, because as Brendan Behan famously said, "There's no such thing as bad publicity."

Sorry if all of this is depressing.  The human mind, unfortunately, is more often swayed by emotion than it is by logic.  But the news is not all bad.  If you'll send me $39.95, I'll send you a device that you can hook into your home wiring system that will provide for all of your electricity needs.

You'll never have to pay the electric company another cent.  I promise, cross my heart and hope to die.

It is your mind that bends

Two days ago, I was in my car on the way to a gig with my band, and I was listening to some classical music on satellite radio.  The announcer came on with some of the usual sort of background information before a piece is played.  In this case, she said, "Next, we're going to hear from one of the masters of the classical guitar."  And immediately, I thought, "it's going to be Narciso Yepes."

And she continued, "... here's Narciso Yepes, playing Bach's Lute Suite #1."

Now, it's odd that I thought of Yepes at all.  I don't know much about classical guitar players -- the two I've heard the most often are Andrés Segovia and Christopher Parkening, but even them I only listen to intermittently.  I think I have one CD of Yepes, but I'm not sure where it is and I don't think I've listened to it in years.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So the certainty of my thought is peculiar from a couple of standpoints, even if you believe that it wasn't a premonition (which, predictably, I don't).  The first is that I came up with the name of a guitarist I barely know at all, as soon as the announcer mentioned "classical guitar;" and the second, of course, is that it turned out to be right.

Interestingly (and you might consider this another synchronicity), just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a subreddit called Glitch in the Matrix which is devoted to exactly these sorts of occurrences.  The name comes from the movie The Matrix, in which odd coincidences and experiences of déjà vu are indicative that the Machines are making minor alterations to the computer simulation inside of which we all live.  (On second thought, the reader sending me the link is not so surprising after all; it was in response to yesterday's post on déjà vu.)

The fact that we all have these experiences now and again certainly deserves some consideration. Let's take a look at three excerpts from the subreddit:

For about 5 or 6 years now (I'm 21 as of now), I've noticed that, whether it's the time that I check my phone, or it's a donation on a Twitch stream, or any number of other things, there's a decent chance that it'll be the number 619.  It's nothing I'm too worried about, but it pops up every so often naturally that it just doesn't seem like a simple coincidence anymore.  It's something that I noticed happened, and then it continued to happen long after that. 

I'll notice the time as 6:19 every once in a while, and at first I chalked it up to being stuck in the same routine, but it continued to occur after several changes in sleep schedules and school/work schedule.  Again, it's not only the time of day either, but I'll notice it in a phone number, or any number of places.  It's gotten to be like my own private joke that people or places attached to the number must mean something to me, although I never act on it... 

So any theories on my special little number?  Does anyone else have a number or idea "follow" them around like this?  Or is this an underlying symptom of a mental disorder that I've been ignorant of for 21 years?

Here's another:

One of the most terrifying experiences I've ever encountered was with my friend Gordie last summer and to this day still makes me feel uncomfortable to talk about because I genuinely can not explain what happened on any logical level.

We were driving to Mission and on the way back I noticed I had forgotten something at the store.  By this time we were in downtown Maple Ridge and considering we had nothing to do so we went back. It's about a 20 minute drive to Mission from where we were.  The clock read 3:23.

The clock reads 3:37.  Gordie and I look at each other.  And he asks me "what happened?"  Neither of us remember the drive between Maple Ridge and Mission.  We lost 15 minutes of lives and we have no idea where it went.  All we know is that in between post A and B nothing or probably something happened.

Not a single word was said.  The last thing we remember talking about was how Skyrim will never have a follow up.  Then at the snap of a universal finger. Nothing.  15 minutes gone.

The rest of the ride was very quiet and we were both very much on edge and uncomfortable.  We have both experienced something completely unexplainable but yet at the same time we experienced nothing.

I'm the grand scheme of things, 15 minutes seems inconsequential and minimal to the many minutes in our life.  But nevertheless it remains unknown as to where time went. 

My only explanation is that I passed though a wormhole and somehow ended up on the other side.

And one last one:

I had a problem with a programming question, so I googled it, and I went to the forum Stackoverflow (in which I had signed up 2 years ago).  I found an excellent answer that solved my problem, and I told myself "Oh.. So many intelligent people out there... I would have never been able to write something like that." 

And then I realized... the author of the answer is my account.  It's me... 

I am convinced this is caused by a glitch in the matrix.  Most probably, many answers on the forum are generated by the matrix, and the glitch was to attribute my username to it.  Of course, a couple of seconds after that, I was getting a vague idea that I may have written the answer (false memory), but I am not fooled!

So, given that we are starting from the standpoint of there being a natural explanation for all of this, what is going on here?

I think the key is that all of these rely on two things; the general unreliability of perception and memory, and our capacity for noticing what seems odd and ignoring pretty much everything else.  Starting with our 619-noticer, consider how many times (s)he probably looks at clocks, not to mention other sources of three-digit numbers, and it's not 619.  Once you have a couple of precedents -- most likely caused, as the writer noted, by being in the same routine -- you are much more likely to notice it again.  And each subsequent occurrence reinforces the perception that something odd is going on.

As far as the time-slip friends, I think what happened here is a simple failure of attention.  I've driven on auto-pilot more than once, especially when I'm fatigued, and suddenly sat up straight and thought, "How the hell did I get here?"  I honestly had no memory at all of driving the intervening distance.  But a mysterious time-slip is less likely than my brain being elsewhere (leaving some portion of my attention still focused on my driving, fortunately).

And the last one, the person who answered him/herself on an internet forum, certainly has to be a case of a lost memory.  I have a friend from college who has an excellent memory for details from the past, and periodically reminds me of things that happened to the two of us -- and more than once I've had to admit to him that I have no recollection of the events whatsoever.  It's disconcerting, but our memories are far less thorough and accurate than we think they are.

My own premonition-like decision that the radio announcer was going to be playing a piece by Narciso Yepes is clearly something of the sort.  Considering how often I listen to the radio, and hear the announcer give a bit of information about the next selection, it's likely I have thoughts like, "I hope she plays something by Scarlatti next!" several times a day.  Most of them, of course, are wrong, and because that's the norm, such events are immediately forgotten.  It's only the coincidental ones, the outliers, that get noticed -- yet another example of our old friend dart-thrower's bias.

But even so, I think I'll dig up that Yepes album and put it on.  Whether or not it was a glitch in the matrix, he's a pretty damn good guitarist.

Stop me if I've already told you about this

One of the most ubiquitous, but mysterious, phenomena in neuroscience is déjà vu.

We all get it from time to time -- the uncanny sense that what we're experiencing has happened before.  For some people, it's usually visual in nature; that they've seen that room, seen those people, know that particular part of the city, despite a certainty that such foreknowledge is impossible.  For me, it's most often auditory.  Just a few weeks ago, I was talking with a colleague about the discovery of some new fossils from the early Cambrian era (the age of the "Cambrian Explosion," the sudden diversification of animal life into multitudes of forms), and I had the unsettling feeling that I'd had that conversation with her already.

"Didn't we already talk about this?" I asked her.

She assured me that we hadn't.

There are a multitude of unsupported woo-woo explanations for the phenomenon -- a premonition, a memory from a previous life, even a momentary side-slip into an alternate timeline (à la the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics).  Predictably, I don't think much of these, mostly because they have little testability and even less evidence in their favor.  So they really don't count as scientific explanations.

The problem is, science has come up pretty much empty-handed itself.  Déjà vu is so unpredictable, so quick to strike and so quickly over, that it's not like you can stick someone in an fMRI machine and just sit around and wait until it happens.  It's known that there are some medications that can increase the frequency of déjà vu -- a combination of phenylpropanolamine and amantidine, used to relieve flu symptoms, has been documented to trigger intense and recurrent déjà vu in some people.

No one is really certain why.

[image courtesy of the National Institute for Aging and the Wikimedia Commons]

Other explanations include a subconsciously-recalled memory being stimulated by a different, but similar, stimulus, creating a sensation of the event having already been experienced; and a dreamed scene producing what amounts to an "invented memory" that could be similarly triggered.

Neither of these, to me, explains the commonness, nor the power, of these experiences.  I know that memory is unreliable and plastic, but even so, déjà vu is so striking that it deserves a better explanation.

Recently, however, a study by Christine Wells et al. has shed some interesting light on this phenomenon.  Wells and her team found that a patient with severe anxiety disorder was experiencing profound and repeated déjà vu, and the researchers speculate that this is no coincidence:

Whereas previous cases with déjà vu due to MCI [mild cognitive impairment] and dementia have largely been anosognosic [not acknowledged as clinically relevant by the patient], our case is aware of the abnormal familiarity in his memory, and is in fact greatly distressed by it.  This suggests two dimensions along which déjà vu experiences can vary: awareness and distress.  In this psychogenic case, our patient is similarly aware of the unreality of his experiences and they are constantly accompanied or caused by pathological levels of anxiety...  In relation to our case, distress caused by the déjà vu experience may itself lead to increased levels of déjà vu: similar feedback loops in positive symptoms are reported in other anxiety states (e.g. panic attacks). 

It is plausible on neurobiological grounds that anxiety might lead to the generation of déjà vu.  The hippocampal formation, a structure of central importance in declarative memory and the ability to engage in recollection, is also implicated in anxiety as part of the septo-hippocampal system.  Although this report does not prove a link between anxiety and déjà vu, it does further support the suggestion that this area is worthy of further investigation.

It certainly is.  You have to wonder if even people who do not suffer from a clinical anxiety disorder might experience déjà vu more commonly when they're distressed or anxious about something.  Stress does affect health -- there's no real doubt about that -- could it also be responsible for fleeting pseudo-memories?

All of which is fascinating and suggestive.  It's further evidence of what a friend of mine once said -- she's a retired professor of human genetics at Cornell, and she said if she were going into research now, she'd go into neurology instead of genetics.  "Right now, in terms of our understanding of the brain, we're where our understanding of genes was in the early 20th century.  We know a little about what's going on, mostly descriptively, but little real comprehension of how it's all happening.  The 20th century was the century of the gene; the 21st will be the century of the brain."

But I've told you that quote before, haven't I?  I'm sure I've used that quote before.

The derp is strong with this one

Here we go again.

First, we had people who believe that J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is actual history.  Next, we had people who think that H. P. Lovecraft's pantheon of elder gods is real.

Now we have people believing that people time-traveled backwards (or forwards; sources differ on that point) from the Galaxy Far Far Away, all for the purposes of including Master Yoda in a medieval manuscript.

First the facts, okay?  There's a 14th century manuscript called the Smithfield Decretals, which are some of the expositions of Pope Gregory IX on points of canon law, written in France and then brought to England and illuminated.  It currently resides in the British Library, and its graceful calligraphy and odd illustrations are what prompted a use of one of the images from it in a newspaper interview with Julian Harrison, the Library's curator of pre-1600 manuscripts.  Interestingly, Harrison has quite a following; his blog, Medieval Manuscripts,  gets an average of 36,000 hits a day, and his Twitter feed has over 24,000 followers.

Who knew the Medieval Period had so many fans?

But anyway, Harrison made an offhand comment in one of his posts about the image of Yoda in the Smithfield Decretals, and it got picked up in the interview.  So, without further ado, let's take a look:

Other than the fact that his expression is not so much "wise Jedi master" as it is "derpy and confused," I think we can agree that this is quite a match, yes?

Apparently, so do the woo-woos.  This thing has been popping up all over on sites like Mysterious Universe and CosmosTV, prompting thousands of people to comment.  And while some of them are undoubtedly posted for the humor value, I'd say a good 3/4 of them have the ring of truth.  Here's a sampler.  (Spelling and grammar are as written, so you can get the full effect):

• The Force is real.  I've felt it and am still learning how to control.  With a powerful Master you can transcend time and space.
• Because of Quantum Mechanics and the Many Worlds Theory scientists now believe that everything is possible somewhere.  So why is it crazy to say there's a universe where Yoda exists.  And if that universe intersects with us, that could explain this.
• Art imitates life.  George Lucas didn't make up everything.  These monks who drew this had to have a model right?  This is too close to be a coincidence.
• The Jedi religion has more morals than the Christians.  Master Yoda is somebody I would follow not a priest.  Maybe him appearing here will show people were on the Dark Side.  Look at the world and you have to agree.
• Mocking something doesn't make it not true.  Their is no reason this couldn't really be Yoda.  Just because something is wierd it doesn't mean that you can just pretend it doesn't happen.

Yes, of course!  Wierd real Yodas!  Intersecting universes and the Force because of quantum mechanics!  Ha ha!  Please tell me you people don't know where I live!

And learn some critical thinking skills, they should.

Anyhow.  I'm always amazed at how little it takes to set these people off.  And, of course, given that the trailer for the next installment of the Star Wars saga was just released, and has been inducing multiple orgasms in the crowd who (1) wanted to become a tie-fighter pilot, (2) dreamed about owning a light saber, (3) had the hots for Luke and/or Leia, and (4) went into a prolonged period of mourning when Obi-Wan died, I suppose it's not going to die down any time soon.

And honestly, I have to admit that I'd take Yoda over Sauron and the Elder Gods, if I had the choice.

All in the family

Racists have cast about for years for some sort of scientific basis for their horrible worldview.  Evidence that their race is the superior one in intelligence, physical strength, or vigor, or simply support for their contention that interracial marriages are bad in a biological sense.

Of course, the problem for people who turn to science is that science often provides answers whether you end up liking them or not.  And inquiries into a biological basis for race have shown that any real genetic variations between different ethnic groups are tenuous at best.  Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, one of the leading specialists in human population genetics, says:

Human races are still extremely unstable entities in the bands of modern taxonomists…  As one goes down the scale of the taxonomic hierarchy toward the lower and lower partitions, the boundaries between clusters become even less clear.  There is great genetic variation in all populations, even in small ones. 

From a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to obtain any consensus… the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits and whose origin dates from recent evolution mostly under the effect of climate and perhaps sexual selection.

Now, let me make it clear that this doesn't mean that there are no differences between racial groups.  It's just that those differences are primarily social and cultural, not biological, which neatly kicks the legs out from underneath some of the racists' primary arguments.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And it's been known for years that lumping together all dark-skinned Africans as "black" is ignoring the fact that there's more genetic variability on the African continent than there is in the entire rest of the world put together.  The Zulu and the !Kung people of southern Africa, for example, are more distantly related to each other than a typical white American is...

... to a person from Japan.

And just last month, Iain Mathieson of Harvard University punched another hole in racist genetics when he released his research team's findings that the genes for white skin are only about 8,000 years old.

According to Mathieson et al.:

(M)odern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes.  And the new data confirm that about 8500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin:  They lacked versions of two genes—SLC24A5 and SLC45A2—that lead to depigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today... 

Then, the first farmers from the Near East arrived in Europe; they carried both genes for light skin. As they interbred with the indigenous hunter-gatherers, one of their light-skin genes swept through Europe, so that central and southern Europeans also began to have lighter skin.  The other gene variant, SLC45A2, was at low levels until about 5800 years ago when it swept up to high frequency.

The reason the two light-skin genes took hold in northern latitudes is thought to be vitamin D synthesis -- while having dark skin is an advantage in equatorial regions, from the standpoint of protection from ultraviolet skin damage, dark skin inhibits endogenous vitamin D production in areas with low incident sunlight.  So once the mutations occurred, they spread rapidly, but only in regions at high latitude.  This explains why even distantly-related equatorial groups have dark skin (such as the Bantu and the Australian Aborigines), and even distantly-related high-latitude group have light skin (such as the Swedes and the Inuit).

And apparently the gene for blue eyes is of equally recent vintage.  The earliest genetic evidence for the gene HERC2/OCA2, which causes blue eyes, is in southern Sweden from about 7,700 years ago.  The gene's provenance might date back to 10,000 years ago, but certainly not much before that.

So all of us descend from dark-skinned, brown-eyed people.  Sorry, white supremacists.

Of course, given that there is good evidence that around 70,000 years ago, an eruption of the Toba Volcano in Indonesia caused climate shifts that killed nearly all of our ancestors -- best estimates are that there were only 10,000 humans left on Earth after the bottleneck occurred -- we're all cousins anyway.  After that event, those 10,000-odd survivors can be put into two groups; the ones who left no descendants at all, and the ones who are the ancestors of everyone on Earth.

It'd be nice if we could count on people using science to inform their behavior, but we don't have a very good track record in that regard, do we?  I mean, think about it; we're still pushing the fossil fuel industry as the world warms up and the climate destabilizes around us.  So unfortunately, even when we have direct and incontrovertible evidence that what we're doing isn't reasonable, we usually continue doing it.

And I guess the argument that the genes for white skin are 8,000 years old is going to gain no traction whatsoever with the people who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old.

But still, it'd be nice, wouldn't it?  Just as the first photographs of the Earth taken from the Moon changed a lot of folks' perspective on our place in the universe, it'd be wonderful if research like this could alter us from "those people... they're not like us" to "we're all one family, and we're all in this together."