This is your brain on creativity

As a writer and a musician, I am intensely interested in the neurology of the creative process, and especially how creativity interfaces with emotion.  For me, both writing and music are about evoking emotion; even, to some extent, non-fiction writing, which in a lot of ways is supposed to be dispassionate and emotionless.  After all, why do people choose particular academic fields to pursue?  My own favored area of study -- population genetics -- I delved into for one reason: because the ideas are cool, and messing around with maps of allele frequencies makes me happy.

Okay, I know I'm a little odd.  Not that this will be a great shock to regular readers of this blog.

In any case, emotion is important, and in my opinion a writer of fiction, a musician, or an artist that fails to evoke emotion has, in large part, failed entirely.  The two parts of the generative process -- creativity and emotion -- are inextricably linked.

So I was really excited (although unsurprised) by the findings of a paper in this week's issue of Nature entitled, "Emotional Intent Modulates The Neural Substrates Of Creativity: An fMRI Study of Emotionally Targeted Improvisation in Jazz Musicians."  The paper describes a study by Malinda J. McPherson, Frederick S. Barrett, Monica Lopez-Gonzalez, Patpong Jiradejvong, and Charles J. Limb, of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, that found that there is a neurological underpinning for the expression of emotion in creative pursuits.

"The bottom line is that emotion matters," said Charles Limb, MD, senior author of the study.  "It can’t just be a binary situation in which your brain is one way when you’re being creative and another way when you’re not.  Instead, there are greater and lesser degrees of creative states, and different versions.  And emotion plays a crucially important role in these differences."

The researchers took twelve jazz pianists, and showed them photographs of individuals expressing negative, positive, and neutral emotions.  Then, they asked the pianists to improvise a piece that expressed the emotion of the photograph they were shown.

[image courtesy of photographer Zoe Caldwell and the Wikimedia Commons]

The results were fascinating.  The researchers write:

When we examined the functional neuroimaging results, we found that the creative expression of emotions through music may engage emotion-processing areas of the brain in ways that differ from the perception of emotion in music.  We also observed a functional network involved in creative performance, and the extent of activation and deactivation in this network was directly modulated by emotional intent.  Our viewing controls showed that there were few significant differences between neural activity in response to any of the visual cues, therefore the differences between improvisation conditions are the result of the creative expression of emotion through music, rather than a direct response to the visual stimuli.  These results highlight that creativity is context-dependent, and emotional context critically impacts the neural substrates of artistic creativity.

Which is incredibly cool, but (for me) unsurprising, given my sense that creativity and emotion are impossible to tease apart.  My main creative world is in writing -- I am a musician, but not a composer -- and I have found myself so emotionally involved with scenes I'm writing that I can lose myself within them.  The creative enterprise, in a lot of ways, is very primal, seated in a part of the brain not really under conscious control.  This study showed that for people who express through creating music, the process can be equally visceral:

Creativity is not a single unified set of mental processes or abilities. While some types of creativity may require intense concentration and thought, other forms of creativity, such as jazz improvisation, may be predicated on "letting go..."   [T]his study shows that the impulse to create emotionally expressive music may have a basic neural origin: emotion modulates the neural systems involved in creativity, allowing musicians to engage limbic centers of their brain and enter flow states.  The human urge to express emotions through art may derive from these widespread changes in limbic, reward, and prefrontal areas during emotional expression.  Within jazz improvisation, certain emotional states may open musicians to deeper flow states or more robust stimulation of reward centers.

So the whole thing is fascinating.  It's nice to understand a little more about what happens in the brains of creative people; until recently, the whole idea of creativity has seemed to reside outside of the realm of science.  The fact that we're now zeroing in on how creativity, emotion, and the physiology of the brain are intertwined...

... well, it just makes me happy.

That's no moon. It's a space station.

The whole subject of "book reviews" has been much on my mind lately, because being (as well as a blogger) a fiction writer, with several titles to my name on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, I am constantly monitoring my links to see if I've gotten good reviews.  Or bad reviews.  Or any reviews.  Because, let's face it, Brendan Behan was on to something when he said, "There is no such thing as bad publicity."

On the other hand, you have to wonder how accurate reviews really are, and I mean no disrespect to the people who have reviewed my work.  Especially those who have given it five stars.

The subject comes up because I was doing some research for today's post, on a topic suggested by a student, to wit, the conjecture that the Moon is an artificial construct.  It seems like the first serious exploration of the claim was done by Christopher Knight in his 2007 book, Who Built The Moon?, but it has recently come back to light because the cause has been taken up by noted wingnut David Icke in his latest publication, Human Race, Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More.  And no, I'm not making that title up, and I wonder if you had the same reaction as I did when you read it, which is to hear deep voices in the background going, "A wimoweh, a wimoweh, a wimoweh."

Be that as it may, Icke is into the artificial-moon theory in a big way.  Here's a quote from his book:

I had that overwhelming feeling at my computer that the Moon was artificial and was being used to control life on this planet.  It is the Reptilians’ control system.  The placement of the Moon dictates the speed of Earth’s rotation and the angle at which it rotates – 22.5 degrees from vertical.  This angle creates the four seasons because of the way planet faces the Sun during its annual orbit.  The Moon has a major influence on the tides – far more than the Sun – and with the human body consisting of some 70 per cent water it is bound to have a fantastic influence on us, even on that level alone.  The Moon also dictates so much of our relationship with time, and the term ‘month’ is really Moonth, a period based on the cycles of the Moon.  The realisation that the Moon is a gigantic spacecraft is the strand that connects all the rest, not just in relation to Moon anomalies, but also to life on Earth and the conspiracy to enslave humanity.  The fact is that the Reptilians in the Moon and in underground bases on Mars depend on humans and the Earth for food – their very survival.   This is one key reason why they are desperate not to be exposed.  Water and other resources are constantly being taken from this planet to the Moon and Mars and this is not a new phenomena, either.  Ancient Zulu stories say the same.

Well, far be it from me to rely on the findings of science when they're contradicted by "ancient Zulu stories."  Even if it implies that because the human body is 70% water, we experience tides.

[image courtesy of photographer Luc Viatour and the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyway, Icke goes on like this for 690 pages, talking about how the Moon must be hollow, that it's older than the Earth is, and has "anomalous quantities" of "metals such as brass and mica" (for the non-geologists in the studio audience, let me point out that mica isn't a metal), that particles of metallic iron on the Moon's surface are "mysteriously resistant to rusting" (not a surprise given that rusting is oxidation, a process that is unlikely to occur in a place with no atmosphere), and that the maria ("seas") are places where meteorite collisions resulted in damage, which had to be repaired by the Reptilians using "an artificial cement-like substance."

690 pages of this. And it costs $25.84, plus shipping and handling, to purchase it from Amazon.

So anyway, I'm wading through all of this, and just shaking my head, but then I saw the thing that made me shake my head so much I looked like I had a severe disorder of the central nervous system -- that this book has received 110 reviews, of which 74 gave it five stars.  Here are a few selected phrases from these reviews:

• Icke is one of the very few conspiracy whistleblowers who has developed a relatively advanced spiritual awareness from which he can provide a useful context and understanding of the material he has uncovered.
• If you are sick of all this government crap then you should read this book because it really opens your eyes to the truth and makes you realize how stupid and fake this world really is.
• This could be the most important book EVER written. If you don't know where the world is headed, you need to find out and David Icke tells how we can return to freedom.
• Most informative book there is about what is happening in the world today and who is causing it. It also tells you what you can do to change it. 

All of which makes me, as a teacher of critical thinking, want to weep softly and bang my head on my desk.  However, there is one thought that gives me hope.

Reviews are, by their very nature, a skewed sample.  People who review this book have (one would hope) read it, which means that the presumably huge number of people in this world who would read the book's description, see its price, and then laugh and say "no freakin' way" are already eliminated from the pool.  Only once you have forked over your $25.84 (plus shipping and handling) are you going to be able to review the book, and this speaks to a certain level of, shall we say, credulity right from the starting gate.

So, anyway, I'm trying to be positive, here, which is sometimes difficult.  Wingnuts will always be out there trumpeting their theories; that is, after all, what wingnuts do.  And there will always be a small group of people who think that their nutty ideas make total sense, and I emphasize the words "small group" with every hopeful thought of which I am capable.  For right now, I'll just try to put the whole thing out of my mind, if only to stop the voices in my head from singing, "A wimoweh, a wimoweh, a wimoweh," which is getting a little annoying.

Private jets and deliberate contradictions

Two stories in the last couple of days highlight for me what is one of the most mystifying things about the extremely devout.

Note, however, that I am not talking about the majority of the religious, who are (I am convinced) perfectly fine with living their lives as they see fit, and letting the rest of us live ours.  But among the minority who are of the more rigid variety, there is a deep streak of irrationality that doesn't so much leave me frustrated as it does puzzled.

My puzzlement surrounds the undying support some religious leaders have, even though they say things that demonstrate conclusively that they are at best ripoff artists, and at worst, batshit insane.

Let's start with Reverend Ken Copeland, the Texas pastor who evidently thinks that Jesus's command to give away all of your belongings and follow him was more of a strongly-worded suggestion than it was an outright order.  Copeland has become filthy rich from his ministries, and owns 33 acres outside of Fort Worth that contains the Eagle Mountain International Church, television production and audio recording facilities, warehouse and distribution facilities, residences for the Copeland family...

... and the "Kenneth Copeland Airport."

It's this last that brought him to my attention yesterday, after he went on record as saying that god wants Copeland to have several private jets, because you apparently can't talk to god in coach.  Here's a transcript of his interview with Jesse Duplantis, on the television show Believers Voice of Victory:

Duplantis:  Brother Copeland, I was flying home from a meeting, I had come out of a glorious meeting, me and Creflo Dollar were preaching, it was a glorious meeting.  I was, for lack of a better way to say it, I was spiritually high.  People were saved, touched, and blessed.  I was on the plane that god so graciously gave us, and I was flying home.  As I was going home, the lord, he said quickly to me, "Jesse?  Do you like your plane?"  Now, I thought that was an odd statement.  I said, "Well, certainly, lord."  He said, "Do you really like it?"  And I thought, "Well, yes, lord."  Then he said this: "So, that's it?"  I didn't know how to handle that, so I went, "What?"  And he said, "Are you gonna let your faith stagnate?"  And when he said that, it shocked me.  I went, "Oh, wait."  I literally unbuckled the seatbelt on the plane and I stood up.  The pilot said, "You need something?"  I said, "No, I'm talking to god right now."  So he went back to flying.  And I said, "Lord, I don't think I was letting my faith stagnate."  He said, "So this is all I could ever do."  I said, "You're trying to tell me something."  He said, "Go to the Book of Amos."  So, if you have the Book of Amos, I want to read to you from the scriptures. 

Copeland:  Can I interrupt you?  You couldn't have done that on an airliner. 

Duplantis:  Nope.  No way. 

Copeland:  Stand up and say, "What did you say, lord?"  Some guy would say, "What the hell does he think he's doing?"  This is so important.  And for those of you who are just not coming into these things, in the first place, Jesse and I and others, Creflo and Keith Moore...  The world is in such a shape that we can't get there without this.  The mess that the airlines are in today -- I would have to stop -- I'm being very conservative -- I would have to stop 75 to 80, maybe 90 percent of what I'm doing.  Because you can't get there from here. 

Duplantis:  It's impossible. 

Copeland:  And this was such a good illustration... That's why we're on that airplane, we can talk to god.  When I was flying for Oral Roberts, Brother DeWeese, he said to me, "Now, Brother Copeland, this is sanctuary.  It protects the anointed of Brother Roberts.  Now, you keep your mouth shut, you wait until he talks, because when he's on a meeting he doesn't talk to anybody but god."  Now Oral used to fly airlines, but even back then, it got to the place that it was agitating his spirit, he had people coming up to him because he'd become famous, and they wanted him to pray for them and all.  You can't manage that today, with this dope-filled world, you're getting into a large tube with a bunch of demons.  It's deadly. 

Duplantis:  It works on your heart. 

Copeland:  So I wanted to make that clear, so that the devil can't say to you, "See that preacher spending all that money..."  No, that's not what this is about.  I'm in the soul business.  We got a dying world here, a dying world.

Now, I'm not puzzled by Copeland and Duplantis themselves.  Their motivations are pretty crystal-clear.  What amazes me is that they have thousands of followers who still give them cash -- lots of cash.  Then, apparently, the donors sit back and watch the preachers spend it on lavish living and private jets, and they don't once say, "Wait.  Maybe this isn't what my religion should be about."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then we had evangelist Kent Hovind once again commenting on the literal truth of the bible, and how we evolutionary types are evil emissaries of the devil.  You know, the usual stuff.  But then he said something that caught my attention:

If I was God, I would write the [bible] in such a way that those who don’t want to believe in me anyway would think they found something. ‘Aha, here’s why I don’t believe.'  And then they could go on with their own life because they don’t want to believe God anyways.  I would put things in there that would appear without digging to be contradictions. I don’t think that’s deceptive, I think that’s wise for the Heavenly Father to weed out those who are really serious. 

Long again I made a choice to believe the Bible until it’s proven wrong. 

I know others who have decided, ‘I’m not going to believe it until you prove everything is right,.  Okay, you do whatever you want to do, but I made the opposite decision.

So, let me get this straight: the bible is the inerrant word of god, 100% literally true from beginning to end, except that there are some untrue or contradictory parts deliberately thrown in by god to trip up people who have weak faith, and those people get sent to hell to burn in horrible agony for eternity?

Which only brings up two questions: (1) What kind of person would worship a vindictive and spiteful god who would do such a thing?  And (2) If that's true, how do you tell the wrong parts in the bible from the right ones?

Oh, and there's a third question: (3)  Are you insane?

Like I said: I know plenty of reasonable, thoughtful religious folks, in whose lives religion provides context and comfort.  But I find it hard to believe that anyone can listen to the words of people like Duplantis, Copeland, and Hovind, and not immediately say, "Okay, this is bullshit."

But judging from their bank accounts, apparently there are lots of them.

Information revolution

One of the most common tropes that you hear in anti-evolution arguments is what they call the "problem of information."  The idea is that random mutations can't create new information -- perhaps they can modify the information that is already there, but evolution provides no way to generate novel genes (and therefore novel structures).

As Royal Truman put it over at the True Origin Archive:

Selection inevitably removes information from the gene pool... [C]onsider regulatory genes that switch other genes ‘on’ or ‘off’.  That is, they control whether or not the information in a gene will be decoded, so the trait will be expressed in the creature.  This would enable very rapid and ‘jumpy’ changes, which are still changes involving already created information, not generation of new information, even if latent (hidden) information was turned on...   Now, it is questionable whether any mutation can be shown to lead to some kind of improvement without causing deleterious functioning of some processes already encoded on the DNA (this is very different from the question whether one mutation could allow some members to temporarily survive some drastic environmental change).   Presumably a very bad mutation leads to death, weeding out such mutated genes from that species’ gene pool forever.

Despite Truman's confidence and the apparent sophistication of his argument -- he spends a long time, for example, wandering about in the realm of Bayesian information theory to support his views -- almost all biologists consider this view dead wrong.  As an example, consider preaptation  -- the evolution of a gene (and its gene product) in one context, and a small change in the gene resulting in a novel gene product with a completely different function.

The most striking instance of preaptation is the class of proteins called crystallins, which make up the lens of the vertebrate eye.  This is wryly amusing given the fact that the eye is one of those structures that the anti-evolutionist types call "irreducibly complex," even though as Richard Dawkins writes:

[P]lausible intermediates are not only easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom.  A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye.  Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human.  Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours.  It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all.

Another blow to the "irreducible complexity" of the eye was dealt a blow when it was found that the transparent proteins in the lens are related genetically to a gene that produces heat-shock proteins, proteins produced during various types of physical stress (including thermal stress, which is what gave them their name).  One small mutation in the gene for heat-shock proteins creates a gene that makes a clear protein that can be used for focusing light.

If that's not "new information"...?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Even with examples like this, people of Truman's stripe aren't convinced.  They argue that okay, you can modify what's already there, but no one has been able to show how mutations create anything genetic that is genuinely new.

Until two days ago.

A team led by Jorge Ruiz-Orera of the Hospital del Mar Research Institute of Barcelona, Spain published a paper in PLOS-One called, "Origins of De Novo Genes in Humans and Chimpanzees," in which they show exactly how this can happen.  In their groundbreaking analysis, they have basically given a death blow to the so-called "problem of information."  Ruiz-Orera et al. write:

For the past 20 years scientists have puzzled over a strange-yet-ubiquitous genomic phenomenon; in every genome there are sets of genes which are unique to that particular species i.e. lacking homologues in any other species.  How have these genes originated?  The advent of massively parallel RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) has provided new clues to this question, with the discovery of an unexpectedly high number of transcripts that do not correspond to typical protein-coding genes, and which could serve as a substrate for this process...  We have found thousands of transcripts that are human and/or chimpanzee-specific and which are likely to have originated de novo from previously non-transcribed regions of the genome.  We have observed an enrichment in transcription factor binding sites in the promoter regions of these genes when compared to other species; this is consistent with the idea that the gain of new regulatory motifs results in de novo gene expression.  We also show that some of the genes encode new functional proteins expressed in brain or testis, which may have contributed to phenotypic novelties in human evolution.

I think they show admirable restraint in not taking at least a sidewise swipe at the Intelligent Design advocates.  But in their discussion, even the most diehard IDer couldn't fail to catch the drift of their last statement:

Our results indicate that the expression of new loci in the genome takes place at a very high rate and is probably mediated by random mutations that generate new active promoters.  These newly expressed transcripts would form the substrate for the evolution of new genes with novel functions.

Which I think is about as close to a "boo-yah!' as is allowed in an academic paper.

The history of evolutionary research has been a long series of struggles against objections from individuals who have a vested interest -- usually religious in nature -- in the evolutionary model being wrong.  This assume-your-conclusion stance is pretty transparent to those of us who subscribe to the scientific method as a means for understanding, but their certainty has been remarkably resistant to attack.  Whether the research by Ruiz-Orera et al. will convince anyone remains to be seen, but at least it does one thing; it shows up yet another facet of their argument as specious.

And that, after all, is progress.  Or as Ruiz-Orera might put it, "new information."

Opting out of tribalism

Well, it's 2016, and given that this is an election year, seeing the turn of the calendar page makes me want to crawl in a hole and pull a blankie over my head until the second week of November.

It's not the political advertisements, nor the signs that spring up like fungus after a summer rain all along the roadside.  Those are bad enough, of course.  What I hate most of all about election years is the nasty vitriol a lot of people spew not only at candidates they don't like, but at the slice of the citizenry who support the opposite political views.

Let me give you an example, in the form of something a cousin of mine posted yesterday on Facebook:

Now, let me say right up front that my cousin posted this as a bad example, and followed it up with the following trenchant comment:

Almost all the people I know want mostly the same thing and care about the same things.  In fact, unless you asked, you wouldn't know what political party they belonged to. It's the stereotype that people are angry with, yet the individual people living their daily lives are very very rarely the stereotypical enemy we are told they are.

Which is it exactly.  Any time you paint your own tribe as the honorable and courageous and compassionate and rational ones, and the other tribe as the evil and devious and cowardly and two-faced ones, you are subscribing to a lie that would be shown up for what it is if you simply took the time to talk to a few of the people you're tarring with that brush.

But can't you find liberals who are this determined to foist beliefs on everyone?  Who, for example, are vegans and would like to ban all meat products?  Sure you can.  In fact, I know one.

One.  Out of all of the liberals I know, I know one who is so off the beam about the issue that she would like nothing better than to make sure no one ever eats meat.  And the conservatives I know?  I know one or two who are irrational, closed-minded xenophobes.  But by far, the majority of the people on both sides of the aisle just want what everyone wants -- a good job, a secure home, a safe place to raise children.  We may disagree on how to achieve those goals, but the number on either side who want to get there by shutting down all dissent by any means are (fortunately) few in number.

So I'm going to make a plea with all of you, whether you are conservative, liberal, or completely apolitical.  Stop posting blind rhetoric, because it is factually incorrect nearly 100% of the time.  Take the time to listen to people you disagree with.  Chances are, you'll find they're just as human as you are, even if you don't see eye to eye on the issues.  Stop demonizing people who belong to a different political party, ethnic group, or religion.  Those kind of blanket statements are not only unfair, they serve as a road block to thinking.  The kind of foolishness exemplified by the post from my cousin accomplishes nothing but dividing us, stopping dialogue and further fracturing the country along ideological lines.

I'd like to ask each of you to commit  for the next eleven months to backing off on the fist-shaking and saber-rattling, and (especially) think about what you post, forward, or "like" on social media.  Just remember what Oliver Wendell Holmes said: "No generalization is worth a damn.  Including this one."

The year in review

So it's the last day of 2015, and we here at Skeptophilia HQ would like to wish you all a very happy 2016.  This has been a year of milestones, including hitting 1.5 million lifetime hits (many thanks to my loyal readers for that) and seeing my first two novels published in paperback (Kill Switch and Lock & Key, available at fine bookstores everywhere, not to mention Amazon, links provided in the right sidebar, hint-hint).

I thought it might be entertaining to take a look back at some of the stories we've covered this year, and perhaps we'll be able to glean some kind of hopeful trend that the world overall is becoming less likely to fall for silly nonsense as time goes on.  So on this New Year's Eve, sit back and let's take a trip back in time to look at...

...2015 in review.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

We started off January with a bang, with a claim by Jim Stone of the site Environmental Terrorism that we shouldn't get vaccinated, because the government is secretly putting nanobots in vaccines that will have the effect of eating your brain and making you not believe in god.  Apparently the people behind all of this are, unsurprisingly, the Jews, who were implicated because the nanobots, which look suspiciously like bacteriophage viruses, are shaped a little like a Star of David.  If my own experience counts for anything, I had a flu shot this year, and have not noticed any particular uptick in my atheism, nor have I had any strange cravings for matzoh balls or gefilte fish.  But I'm certainly keeping an eye on it.

In February, we had another in the long series of claims that President Obama is the Antichrist, and secretly wants to convert all Americans to Islam, take away all of our guns, and release various disease-causing microorganisms into the American citizenry to cause havoc and despair.  (No word on whether one of those was the Jewish zombie nanobots we reported on in January.)  What impresses me about all of this is that if Obama is an evil arch-villain, he's a really bad one, because (1) none of the awful things his detractors have suggested he was up to have actually happened, and (2) if you look around you, the economy has actually improved; gas prices, the deficit, and unemployment are down; and in general, the country doesn't seem any worse off than it was seven years ago when he was elected.  However, it's not like the people who make these claims are doing so because of logic and hard evidence, so the good economic news will probably be cast as a smokescreen by Obama to distract us from all of the evil Antichrist activities he's up to.  You know how that goes.

March began with a viral post claiming that until recently, humans were unable to see the color blue, and the reason is that ancient languages had no word for "blue."  Put another way, if you don't have a word for something, you can't see it.  This claim fails on two counts -- first, that it doesn't square with the physiology of color perception (in fact, the retina has cones that have a peak absorption in the blue region of the spectrum), and second, there are plenty of ancient languages that have words for "blue." But the fact that it's clearly wrong didn't discourage people from reposting it all over the place, often with delighted comments like, "Wow!  I didn't know this!  This is so cool!", lo unto this very day.

In April, some researchers in Sweden showed us once again how easy our perceptual and cognitive systems are easy to fool with a clever experiment that convinced participants that their bodies had become invisible.  Besides the interesting light it sheds on (and right through, in fact) how our brains perceive the world, the experiment is being hailed as the first step in developing sensurround virtual reality.  Holodeck, here we come.

May brought us a baffling story about a British doctor who is knocking himself out writing papers trying to explain homeopathy using quantum mechanics.  The particular paper linked in the post is kind of a must-read, given that no one (to my knowledge) has ever tried to apply the Schrödinger wave equation to chakras before, and also because it has the unforgettable line, "the safest treatment strategy might be for the practitioner to proceed via gradual removal of the symptoms."  Which I have to agree with.  Having doctors proceed by making the patients' symptoms worse is seldom advisable.

In June we had an international incident in which a group of tourists from Canada and various countries in Europe decided to climb Mount Kinabalu in the province of Sabah in Malaysia, and celebrated their reaching the top by taking off all of their clothes for some naked selfies.  The whole episode evidently angered the gods, who responded by causing an earthquake five days later that killed eleven people.  The fact that none of the victims were the people who had gotten naked on the mountaintop didn't stop local officials from attributing the earthquake to god's wrath, so they rounded the tourists up and threw them in jail.  It took weeks and lots of intergovernmental wrangling to get them all released.  So just remember, if you're in an earthquake-prone region: the gods do not want to see your naughty bits, and if they are forced to look they will respond by smiting the absolute shit out of someone else.

In July we had the start of the scary government activity called Jade Helm 15, which was a highly secret and covert operation designed to overthrow the government of Texas and result in the declaration of martial law and the guillotining of innocent civilians, despite the fact that the military leaders who were in charge had multiple public briefings about it beforehand, with question-and-answer sessions and media releases.  That's how secret and covert Jade Helm 15 was.  And of course, the citizen-militia-types decided that they would turn out to keep an eye on the proceedings, and intervene if necessary, which didn't turn out to be necessary because Jade Helm 15 apparently was exactly what the military leaders said it was, a training operation for ground troops.  But this last in a long line of failed predictions won't stop the conspiracy theorists from deciding that the next time it'll be martial law for real, cross our hearts and hope to die.

Speaking of failed predictions, August saw the publication of next year's Farmer's Almanac, which predicted that we here in the Northeast were going to have a horribly cold, snowy winter.  Apparently, no one bothered to tell the Weather Gods this, because so far, we've hardly had any sub-freezing temperatures, and in fact it hit 70 F on Christmas Eve right here in upstate New York, a.k.a. the Frozen Tundra.  But just like with the Jade Helm conspiracy theorists, I doubt that'll have much effect on the true believers.  I'll make a prediction of my own, which is that Almanac sales next year will be just as high as this year, despite the fact that their forecast basically sucks.

In September we had another viral claim, this one even stupider than the idea that the ancients couldn't see the color blue; that if you eat more than six bananas, you'll die.  This one not only is wildly wrong, it's known where the claim started -- British comedian Karl Pilkington, who had included it in one of his standup routines.  But because comedians are considered more credible sources on dietary information than nutritionists, Death by Banana Overdose made it into mainstream media -- including the BBC.

October finally brought us some good news, when an anti-vaxxer organization called Safe Minds contributed $250,000 to fund a study of the connection between vaccines and autism, and the study turned up... no connection.  Surprise, surprise.  Once again illustrating the accuracy of Neil deGrasse Tyson's quote that "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

November gave us a quick way to see if you're being targeted by the Illuminati; type your name into a Microsoft Word document, and see if the spellcheck function underlines it in red.  Red underline = too bad, you're scheduled to be terminated.  Which is good news for the John Smiths of the world, and not such good news for the Zbigniew Mstislavitches.  Maybe the Illuminati have something against people with odd names, I dunno.  In any case, neither my first, middle, nor last name got flagged, which is kind of strange given how much I ridicule the Illuminati.  You'd think that if they'd red-underline anyone, it'd be me.

In December, yet another worldwide cataclysm failed to show, this time in the form of the Christmas Eve Death Asteroid.  I don't know about you, but I'm getting sick and tired of these unreliable apocalypses.  If there's to be death and carnage and destruction, I want it at least to show up when it's scheduled.  I'm tired of having my last fling of sin and debauchery, and then nothing happens, and I have to go back to work all tired and hungover and disappointed.

So okay, maybe this year hasn't shown any progress toward decreasing silliness.  I suppose on the one hand, I should be glad, because such nonsense is what keeps Skeptophilia in business.  Also, I'm firmly of the opinion that you can't be deadly serious all of the time, and it's a good thing that periodically we're able to have a hearty laugh at how completely weird humans are.

In any case, allow me to renew my wishes that you have a wonderful New Year's Eve, and a happy and productive 2016 to come.  See you all next year!

A case of the willies

The topic for today's post comes from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia via a source I don't even look at any more, namely The Daily Mail Fail.

I avoid sources like this for the most part for two reasons -- first, they're low-hanging fruit, as skeptic-fodder goes, because whatever actual information they include is usually sensationalized, exaggerated, or outright wrong.  Second, I have no particular desire to send readers to those sites and boost their hit-counters.  They get enough ad revenue from their regular readers as it is; I would really rather not add to it.

So when a frequent contributor of topics for this blog sent me the link, I was reluctant to click on it, much less write about it.  But when I read the title of the article, I just couldn't help myself.

Because the title is, "God Made Eve from Adam's Penis, Not His Rib, Claims Religious Academic."

The gist of the story is that Ziony Zevit, professor of biblical studies at American Jewish University in BelAir, California, has come up with the idea that the Hebrew word "tsela" -- ordinarily translated as "rib" in the creation story -- instead "refers to limbs sticking out sideways from an upright human body."

So why the penis?  Why not, for example, the arm, which in most guys sticks out way more sideways than our penises do?  Two reasons, says Professor Zevit:  first, the number of bones in the arms and legs, not to mention the number of ribs, is the same in men and women, and you'd expect men to have one less bone somewhere if god had snitched one of 'em to make Eve.  Second, humans are among the few mammals that lack a baculum, a bone that reinforces the penis, which is why dogs (for example) so seldom need Viagra.

So anyhow.  After I recovered from nearly injuring myself laughing over this, I thought, "Okay, let me check my sources, here.  It is, after all, The Daily Fail.  They probably are misrepresenting Professor Zevit, or possibly even making it all up."

Hugo van der Goes, The Fall of Adam (1470) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But even stopped clocks are right twice a day, as my dad used to say.  This time The Daily Fail actually got it right.  Zevit did indeed make that claim, pretty much as outlined above, and his entire argument (if I can dignify it by that term) appeared in the September/October issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

If you're amused so far, wait until you hear the reaction from the readers of the journal.

"I write to express my disappointment with your magazine. I wish to cancel my subscription," wrote Sue Glaze of Maryland.  'That is plainly not a Bible teaching. I do not need and will not read articles that damage my faith or attempts to cause me to doubt what I know is the truth from the Bible."

Another reader, Reverend Randall Krabill, was equally outraged.  "How does Ziony Zevit's article have anything to do with Biblical archaeology?  I have never purchased a tabloid magazine in my life -- and I have no intention of ever doing so.  I certainly didn't realize that was what I was doing when I subscribed to BAR."

Another pastor, Don Brubacher agreed, calling the claim "outlandish," and supporting his opinion by going right to the top.  "As Jesus scathingly said: 'You blind guides! You strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.' (Matthew 23:24)."

This last comment is even funnier when you realize that people like Brubacher and his ilk have no problem accepting talking snakes, or a 600-year-old Israeli man rescuing kangaroos from Australia prior to a worldwide flood, but there is no way they'll accept that god made women from a piece of Adam's willy.

Of course, pretty soon the other biblical academics started to weigh in, and most of them were equally unimpressed.  Alan Hooker, a blogger on the topic of the Old Testament, pointed out a possible problem with Zevit's claim:

Firstly, the Hebrew text of Genesis 2:21 does not support the authors’ thesis. It reads, “Then Yahweh of the gods caused a trance to fall upon the man (Adam), and while he slept, he took ahat missalotayv…”  The phrase ahat (lit. “one of”) missalotayv (“from his tselas”) implies that whatever Yahweh took from man, there was more than one of them to begin with.  The construct form of ahad (one) coupled with the plural of tsela lends more weight to the traditional idea that this is a rib bone, and not the baculum.

Can't argue with that.  Most guys are equipped with only one wang, not to mention zero wang-bones (to use the technical terminology).  So Hooker may be on to something, there.

Of course, given that I am starting from the standpoint of not believing any of it, the whole argument strikes me as ridiculous.  They're taking a Bronze Age fairy tale, and trying to use scientific evidence to sort out how the fairy tale can actually be true.  But as usual, that leaves the most mystifying thing of all unsolved -- how, if Eve was made from any part of Adam, she (and every other woman since then) has two X chromosomes, while Adam presumably had an X and a Y.

Oh, wait.  "God works in mysterious ways."  Never mind.

So anyhow, that's today's episode of "How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?"  The whole thing leaves me with the general feeling anyone participating on either the pro-rib or pro-penis side of the argument is, in a word, insane.  Me, I'm done thinking about it, and in fact I think I need to go read some Richard Dawkins just to restore order to the universe.