Idaho creation bill

Coming hard on the heels of yesterday's post about Ken Ham making himself look like an absolute buffoon to anyone who has decent training in science, today we have a bill in the Idaho State Senate that would allow the bible "to be used in Idaho public schools for reference purposes to further the study of literature, comparative religion, English and foreign languages, United States and world history, comparative government, law, philosophy, ethics, astronomy, biology, geology, world geography, archaeology, music, sociology, and other topics of study."

Did you catch that, hidden in the last third of the list?  Astronomy, biology, and geology.  Teachers in Idaho will be "allowed" to use the bible to teach astronomy, biology, and geology.

Yes, the bible, the document that says that there's a vault in the sky to keep the water up there separate from the water down here on Earth.  The document that says that the Sun and the Moon stopped moving for a bit so that Joshua could finish smiting the shit out of the Amorites.  The document that says that bats are birds.

Please note that I have no particular problem with the bible being used as a reference in other sorts of classes.  It is interesting as a historical document, and certainly has a place in any class about ethics, philosophy, law history, and sociology.  Further, the bible's influence on world history is such that all student historians should have a working knowledge of its contents.  And it's also important to recognize that as part of our cultural milieu, knowing the bible simply to understand references in literature is pretty important.

But in science classes?  C'mon.  This isn't about being even-handed and open-minded; this is about turning science classes into venues for religious indoctrination.  It is not, as Idaho Republican Party Executive Director David Johnston said, to allow teachers to "have that tool in their tool box."  This is simply one more in the long, long line of bills introduced by evangelical policymakers to shoehorn young-earth creationism into public school classrooms.

Car spotted in Athens, Georgia [image courtesy of photographer Amy Watts and the Wikimedia Commons]

And don't be fooled by the friendly word "allow."  What this means, if the bill passes, is that the teacher would be allowed to introduce the bible into his/her class.  It doesn't mean that the students would be free to ignore it.  There's a clause at the end of the bill that says that "No student will be required to use any religious texts for reference purposes if the student or parents of the student object," but that's misleading, too.  What if the student chooses not to use the biblical material in his Earth Science class, and then on the test there's a question about how old the Earth is?  What if the biology teacher puts in questions about what day god created animals?  If it's part of the curriculum, it's hard to see how any of it's going to be optional from the students' point of view.

I'm happy to say that the National Center for Science Education is already aware of the situation, and is taking steps to make sure that the bill is defeated.  But the fact that we're still fighting this battle, for what is this?  The thousandth time?  It's a little demoralizing.

Look, if you think this is just about me being hostile, allow me to point out that I have a bible on the bookshelf in my classroom.  Any student is welcome to use it or borrow it at any time.  But what I teach is science, not folklore, mythology, or comparative religion.  If I were not to give my biology students a good grounding in the evolutionary model, I would be failing to do my job.  As biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky put it, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

And even more pertinent is another quote from Dobzhansky -- who was, by the way, a devout Russian Orthodox Christian -- and which seems a fitting way to end this post.

Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith?  It does not.  It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology.  Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts.... the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness.

Ham salad

When I was young and foolish, I went through a period of messing around with Tarot cards.  They were cool-looking, and the book I got that explained their meanings was steeped with arcane and mystical terminology.  The whole thing seemed ancient and magical and terribly attractive.  The fact that I was still living at home, in a staunchly religious Roman Catholic family which disapproved of anything smacking of witchcraft, only gave it that much more of a frisson.

So yes, True Confessions time:  At one point in my life, I experimented with woo-woo-ism.  But don't worry, I didn't inhale.

What eventually pulled the plug on all of it was that when I talked about it with my friends, I started sounding ridiculous to myself.  I had to explain (when I was doing a Tarot reading for someone) that I was selecting a card to represent them based on their gender and appearance, and that this would establish a psychic connection between them and 78 pieces of glossy card stock with weird designs that I'd bought for ten bucks in a local bookstore.  And in the back of my mind was this constant mantra of, "How the fuck could that actually work?"  I was able to shout the voice down for a while, but sooner or later, I had to admit that Tarot cards were nothing more than a pretty fiction, and any accurate readings I did could be attributed to a combination of chance, my prior knowledge of the person being "read," and dart-thrower's bias.

The reason this all comes up is that the experience of having a sense that what you're saying is ridiculous is, apparently, not universal.  Some folks are able to spout utter bullshit and never flinch, never question it, never bat an eye at saying things that are so off the rails that you'd think it'd be immediately apparent.

Which brings us, as you might predict, to Ken Ham.

Those of us who expected Ken Ham to fade into well-deserved obscurity after basically having his ass handed to him in the debate with Bill Nye were fated to be disappointed.  He's still in full swing, still overseeing the building of the Ark Encounter Project, using a team of thousands of builders, architects, electricians, and plumbers in order to convince all of us that a 600-year-old man and his three sons did the same thing in a few weeks using only hand tools.

But of course, the evolutionary biologists aren't sitting still, either, and a lot of the creationists seem to sense that they're losing ground.  Recent polls have established conclusively that both church attendance and overall religiosity in the United States are on the decline.  As you might expect, this puts people like Ken Ham on the defensive, and when a couple of weeks ago there was a lot of publicity surrounding Darwin's birthday, he went on a word-salad rant.

He was interviewed on the radio show "Crosstalk," hosted by Jim Schneider, on VCY America radio ("VCY" stands for "Voice of Christian Youth.)  He had a lot to say, and he was not pulling any punches:

There is no such thing as separation of church and state.  The First Amendment doesn’t even have that first terminology in it, you know.  The Establishment Clause is about the state not establishing a church, but the state has established a church, it’s the Church of Evolution with Darwin as the high priest, if you like, and a lot of these teachers and professors as priests in this religion of evolution that they’re imposing through the schools.

Except for the following problem, of course.

But Ken never lets a little thing like evidence get in his way:

What we’ve got to understand is molecules-to-man evolution, that’s not observational science, that’s a belief, that’s a story that people made up to try to explain how life arose.  Christians have an account of origins in the Bible that God has given us.

Because that, apparently, is observational science.  Thus the extensive use of the bible in college chemistry and physics classes.

Ham continues:

The study of genetics, geology and biology confirms the Bible’s account of creation and the flood and the Tower of Babel, it does not confirm molecules-to-man evolution.  Molecules-to-man evolution is a fairy tale.

So let's see; you believe that after the kangaroos left the Ark, they hopped all the way back to Australia (presumably hitching a ride on the back of a friendly whale to cross the Gulf of Carpentaria), and you call evolutionary biology a fairy tale?

But he's not done yet:

There’s no evidence for evolution, so it’s not even a theory, it’s actually a belief, it’s someone’s belief, it’s a blind faith belief and there is no evidence for evolution. 

You don’t observe evolution.  When you look in the glass cases in museums, you don’t see evolution, you see fossils, you see creatures that live on the earth.  Evolution is pasted on the glass case, not in the glass case.  It’s man’s interpretation, man’s belief, man’s religion.

Which brings me back to an observation by Richard Dawkins, that you could get rid of every fossil ever discovered on the Earth, and the evidence for evolution would still be overwhelming.  So Ken Ham is half right; evolution isn't a theory any more.

It's a fact.

The truth is, evolution has been observed over and over again -- not just its results (genetic and morphological changes in populations), but the process of change itself.  (I wrote a post a while back on some observed examples of evolution, if you're curious about finding out more.)  But the problem is, none of that matters.  Ken has decided what he wants to be true, and after that, all he does is stick his fingers in his ears and go, "la la la la la la la, not listening."

But it does bring up the question of why it never seems to occur to him that what he's saying is nonsense.  He's articulate enough that I would imagine he has a decent IQ; so it's not that we're talking about someone who is simply incapable of understanding.  Yet he goes on and on, spouting complete bullshit, and that little switch never seems to flip -- the one that for most of us triggers the thought, "Wait a second.  That can't be right."

So I simply don't get it.  I can comprehend the desire a person might have for the universe to work a particular way.  I've been there.  In a minor way with my aforementioned dalliance with Tarot cards; in a much deeper and more devastating way when I was battling with myself over the truth of Christianity.  But in the end, I was forced where logic and evidence led me, whether I wanted to be or not.

For Ken, though, this never seems to happen.  However, I have to wonder if occasionally, in the wee hours, he wakes up and thinks, "Genesis says that night and day happened before the Sun was created.  How's that possible?"  But I guess he just takes a deep breath, remembers the White Queen's dictum of believing six impossible things before breakfast, rolls over, and goes back to sleep.

Weighty matters

Yesterday, we looked at how apparently it's impossible for some people to believe that a 79-year-old man in poor health could die in his sleep without there being a sophisticated Black Ops conspiracy to take him out.  Today, we find out that gravitational waves, the recent discovery that vindicated Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, are a sophisticated hoax.

Why would scientists do this, you might ask?  Is it so they can fool us into giving them more grant money?  Is it to put them in contention for a Nobel Prize?  Is it just so they can sit in their labs, surrounded by flasks of brightly-colored liquids, rubbing their hands together and cackling in maniacal glee?

Well, sure.  Of course it's all that.  But there's more.  There's always more, where these people are concerned.

First, we have the claim that the gravitational wave hoax is a clever scheme to convince the gullible public that the Earth is a sphere.  You think I'm making this up?  Watch this video by someone who goes by the handle "Stinky Cash," and which lays the whole thing out plainly.  Or, if you'd prefer not to waste five minutes and thousands of innocent brain cells in your prefrontal cortex, just read the following excerpt:

Unless you were in a coma, or living under a rock, you have heard that scientists have detected gravitational waves, and have proven Einstein right once and for all.  Every single science outlet and news outlet has reported this bullshit throughout the day.  The propaganda machine is working overtime right now.  First you have Reuters and the Associated Press, they wouldn't stop reporting this during the last twenty-four hours, then you had the Washington Post, you got The Wall Street Journal, you got CNN, you got BBC News, you got Fox News, you got MSNBC.  MSNBC and Fox News, reporting the same propaganda!  It's because they're owned and operated by the same people, with the same agendas.  Don't get fooled by that whole conservative/liberal crap.  NBC News, The Telegraph, Al Jazeera, CBS News, ABC News, Discovery News, Newsweek, Gawker, Futurism, even Neil deGrasse Tyson got in on the action today!

Yes, and that's undoubtedly because Tyson is actually an astrophysicist, and knows what he's talking about.  But do go on.

The propaganda machine was in full force today, and this was solely as a reaction to the Flat Earth Movement.  It was a reaction to all of the videos up on YouTube explaining how gravity doesn't exist.

Of course it is.  Because all of the scientists I know decide what to research by looking at YouTube videos uploaded by lunatics, and designing experiments to prove them wrong.

Gravity is a theory, an unproven theory thought up by an occultist to explain away everything that doesn't make sense about living on a spinning ball.  Why you're sticking to the bottom of it and still feel upright.  Why you don't feel the spin, and why you don't fall off this magical ball.  Gravity was invented to explain away all common sense...  Even Einstein knew this relativity thing was a bunch of bullshit.

We then see a quote with Einstein's picture, and attributed to him, saying, "If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts," which apparently there's reason to believe that either was (1) Einstein being sarcastic about scientific fraudsters, or (2) something he never said in the first place.  But you know how that goes.

But Stinky Cash is far from done yet:

These people are in serious damage control mode.  Let's look at this quote from Stephen Hawking about why gravity is so important to them.  Because every lie in the scientific community -- or I should say, the pseudoscientific community -- every lie in the community has one agenda, and this is what it comes down to:  "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."  Is the agenda becoming more clear?  All of the lies coming out of the scientific community have one agenda, and that's removing god from creation.  Gravity is the false god of this false science.

Righty-o.  Let's move on, shall we?  Because if you thought that the Flat Earthers are the only ones who have a problem with gravitational waves, you are sorely mistaken.

Next, we'll turn our attention to the folks who think that the gravitational waves announcement was a false flag, to turn our attention away from... um... wait, I'm sure it will come to me.  Um.  Something. Something big:

LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves using blind injection simulation which means it is basically a hoax or false flag...  People need to understand if they cannot make it they fake it. 100 years the best research labs could not confirm the assumption so they just fake it. 

There was a massive preparation for this with Hawkins [sic] doing special lectures and hinting he is going to get a Noble [sic] Prize (you see the narrative), its [sic] all showbiz. 

Astrophysics needs to be rescued. (I have never seen so much inferences made from so little data!) 

Then, we had the scientists themselves positing that the whole thing might be the work of an evil genius.  UCLA physicist and LIGO collaborator Alain Weinstein said the following in an interview with Gizmodo: 

An evil genius is, by definition, smarter than we are.  We cannot rule out the evil genius hypothesis because we’re not smart enough. 

We thought very hard about this, and concluded that we didn’t know how to do it.  So anyone who did do it had to be smarter than us.

Can't argue with that kind of logic.  And although I'll point out that Weinstein was making a joke, the conspiracy theorists -- who are kind of notorious for not getting humor -- will immediately go, "AHA!  The scientists have let the truth slip!  We're on to them now!"

So there you have it.  The thrilling announcement about gravitational waves a couple of weeks ago is just another in a long series of scientific hoaxes, conspiracies, and general screw-ups.  I'm disappointed, honestly.  Not in the scientists, who are doing phenomenal work, and richly deserve either a Nobel or a Noble Prize, whichever they end up winning.  I'm disappointed in the conspiracy theorists, who really need to come up with some new tropes.  Because everything can't be a false flag, you know?  Eventually something has to be the truth.  Even if it's the idea that gravity is real, and is what is holding us down to the surface of the Earth right now.  It'd have to be a pretty fucking huge false flag to distract us from that.

Justice denied

Because we clearly needed something to make American politics even weirder and more contentious, five days ago Antonin Scalia decided to die suddenly on the day of a Republican presidential debate.

Of course, it wasn't only the candidates who responded with pithy, and at times completely inexplicable, commentary on the legacy of Justice Scalia and the future of the Supreme Court.  But Ted Cruz was certainly one of the first, wasting no time in urging his colleagues in the Senate to block any nominee President Obama brings forward to replace Scalia.  This move set off shrill commentary from both sides of the political spectrum, often from people who apparently consider themselves constitutional law scholars even though they have never read anything longer than the message inside a fortune cookie, and all of which ended up bouncing around on Facebook and Twitter for days.

Then things got crazier still.  Despite the fact that Scalia was 79, overweight, had high blood pressure and a history of heart problems, and had recently been told that he was too weak to undergo rotator cuff surgery, many people decided that there was no way a man that healthy could die suddenly of natural causes.  The conspiracy theories began to multiply like mushrooms after a rainstorm, particularly when it was announced that Scalia would not be autopsied given that his doctor was comfortable signing a death certificate citing natural causes without it.

And of course, leading the way was none other than Donald Trump, who claimed that Scalia was smothered in his sleep.

"They say they found a pillow on his face," Trump said, on Michael Savage's radio show Savage Nation, "which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow."  Because any Black Ops hit man who was trying to murder a public official and make it look like death from natural causes would clearly be so stupid that he would leave the murder weapon sitting right on the victim's face.

John Poindexter, owner of the Cibolo Creek Ranch in Shafter, Texas, where Scalia died, tried to clarify.  "I think enough disclosures were made and what I said precisely was accurate.  He had a pillow over his head, not over his face as some have been saying.  The pillow was against the headboard and over his head when he was discovered.  He looked like someone who had had a restful night's sleep.  There was no evidence of anything else."

Of course, that only made things look more suspicious.  Alex Jones had an "emergency transmission" on his Facebook site, asking whether Scalia was murdered, but apparently not knowing enough about the situation to realize that the Justice's first name was "Antonin," not "Anthony."  Despite this, he said that Scalia wasn't going to be the last murder of a prominent conservative, and suggested that Texas Governor Greg Abbott might be next:

Scalia walked into the perfect bear trap...  Maybe they’ll find the governor with a pillow over his face, maybe that’s the new thing.  All of these conservatives that are fighting back that are real conservatives, they are all being found with pillows over their faces...  This is it.  This is the final assault.  This is the beginning of the final war.

Then, because apparently Alex Jones was lonely being the only clinically insane person commenting on the situation, we had this:

Can I get some agreement here, from both my conservative and liberal readers, that Michele Bachmann really needs to get back on her meds?

But if you think that's as weird as it gets, you really don't get how deeply crazy some Americans are.  Extremely evangelical pastor Rick Wiles decided to weigh in, and he said that Scalia was clearly murdered by President Obama, possibly with his bare hands.  How did he reach this conclusion?

Numerology, of course.

The 13th was the 44th day of 2016.  Obama is the 44th president of the United States, so you have this numerology thing taking place. 

The man who killed Justice Scalia deliberately left the pillow on his face as a message to everybody else: 'Don’t mess with us, we can murder a justice and get away with it...'  Officials in Washington are all terrified.  Deep down they know, the regime murdered a justice…  This is the way a dictatorial, fascist, police state regime takes control of a nation.  Barack Obama is the most lawless president we have ever had in the history of this great country, but his lawlessness is a catalyst to wake up the sleeping giant.

But no episode of Insanity On Parade would be complete without a contribution from Glenn Beck, and I'm happy to say that he doesn't disappoint.  Beck lays the death of Justice Scalia at the feet of god himself, and said that god had a purpose in offing Scalia when he did: to incite Americans to vote for Ted Cruz.

On Beck's weekly radio show, his co-host Pat Gray lamented the Justice's untimely death.  "I couldn't help but wonder, why?" Gray said.  "Why now?  Why did you have to take Antonin now?"  And Beck, as always, was ready to address the question with his usual realistic approach.

Pat, I think I have an answer for you on that. 

The lord is saying, I just woke the American people up.  I took them out of the game show moment and woke enough of them up to say, 'Look how close your liberty is to being lost.'  The Constitution is hanging by a thread.  That thread has just been cut.  And the only way that we survive now is if we have a true constitutionalist as president.

Beck was immediately taken to task by Christians who questioned his view that god would knock off someone merely to make a point with the survivors, even though in the bible god does that sort of thing every other page.  But Beck shares with Donald Trump the personal motto, "Death Before Backing Down," and responded thusly:

(P)erhaps God allowed Scalia to die at this time to wake America up to how close we are to the loss of our freedom.  I happen to believe in divine providence.  Americans historically have.  Maybe you do not.  That is your choice and I do not mock you for not.  Why mock me for believing in a traditional view of God? 

Fall to your knees and pray to God to reveal to you what the hour is.  This is your last call, America!  Stand with the man I believe was raised for this hour, Ted Cruz!

So anyway.  I don't think we've nearly seen the last of the wild theories surrounding Scalia's death.  After all, it's over fifty years since Kennedy was killed, and people are still arguing about that one -- and in that case, there was no doubt that it was a murder.  The whole thing makes me vaguely embarrassed to admit that I'm an American when I go overseas, you know?  Not that I'm not proud of my country or unpatriotic or any of that sort of thing, but because we do seem to have way more than our fair share of extremely loud lunatics.  I'd rather not have to spend my time convincing the people I meet while traveling that no, I don't support Donald Trump, that yes, I do think the world is more than 6,000 years old, and that no, I have no idea why the Kardashians are still in the news.  And the fact that we apparently can't accept that a 79 year old man with a weak heart couldn't die of natural causes in his sleep without some kind of evil conspiracy being involved makes me want to polish up my Norwegian so I can claim I'm only visiting the United States on a work visa.

The haunted sentry box

The reason for my recent absence from Skeptophilia is that my lovely wife surprised me on Valentine's Day with plane tickets and a hotel reservation for a quick trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico.  This would be a wonderful gift at any time, but was especially magnificent considering the time of year.  Being a southerner, the winters in upstate New York make me want to crawl under my down comforter in November and stay there until May.  And her timing was impeccable; we've had a mild winter, but were gone for one of the nastiest spells of weather we've had thus far.  (In fact, the trip almost didn't happen when the jet engine wouldn't start in Rochester the day we left, because at seven below zero Fahrenheit it was simply too cold.)

But the engines finally started, and we were up in the air and winging our way toward Puerto Rico.  On the way there, Carol asked me what I wanted to do while we were in San Juan.  I thought about all the possibilities -- lounging on the beach, swimming, snorkeling, hiking, seeing the sights -- so of course what I said was, "I want to see the Haunted Sentry Box."

I first ran into the tale of the Haunted Sentry Box of Old San Juan when I was perhaps twelve years old, and happened upon a copy of C. B. Colby's book Strangely Enough.  This book is a whimsical, often scary, sometimes hilarious account of "true tales of the supernatural," each only a page or two long.  It was one of my first encounters with someone who claimed that ghosts, UFOs, and monsters could be real, and is one of the things that started me down the long and twisty road that led to Skeptophilia.

The Tale of the Haunted Sentry Box is chilling in its simplicity.  In it, we hear about a sentry "many years ago" in the fortress of San Cristobal in the oldest part of San Juan, who was assigned duty in one of the stone sentry boxes that jut out from the main wall.  He was reluctant, we're told, because it was a lonely post, and he had a "feeling of foreboding."  And sure enough, when another soldier went to relieve him some hours later, the sentry box was empty.  His superiors were certain the man had deserted.

One of the sentry boxes on the wall of San Cristobal.  I have to admit, it wouldn't be a job for the claustrophobic.

So the second soldier was assigned to take the missing man's place, and a watch was set on the wall overlooking the sentry box.  Only shortly afterwards, a searing light blazed from inside the sentry box, shining out through the slit-like windows, and a "piercing scream" split the night.  The watchman roused his superiors from sleep, and they ran to investigate.  The second soldier was now missing as well -- and the inside walls were "black with soot" and there was a strong smell of sulfur.

The sentry box was, understandably, never used again.

See why I wanted to go there?  So we hiked on over to San Cristobal, paid our five bucks' admission fee, and explored the ancient walls and rooms of the fortress.  But although "La Garita del Diablo" was marked on maps -- proving that Colby hadn't, at least, made the story up himself -- we couldn't find the actual item.

Me, exploring one of the non-haunted sentry boxes of San Cristobal.  I detected no soot, sulfur, or traces of missing soldiers.

Finally, after perhaps an hour of wandering around, I decided to ask in the souvenir shop (of course there's a souvenir shop) about the Haunted Sentry Box.  Could I have directions for how to get there?

The young woman behind the counter looked alarmed.  "Oh, no, no," she said, her eyes wide.  "We do not allow anyone to go there, sir."

"Really?" I asked.  "Why?  I was hoping to see it for myself."

"It is not allowed," she said firmly.  From her expression, she looked torn between crossing herself and forking the sign of the evil eye in my direction.

She added reluctantly that there was, however, a point on the exterior wall where one can peer down toward La Garita del Diablo, if I was so determined to blight the memory of my visit with such a place.  Eager to so blight myself, I followed her directions to the wall's edge, and leaned over.  And here it is:

Not impressive at this distance, perhaps.  And I wasn't able to pick up any presentiments of evil through my binoculars when I scanned the place.  No black smoke curling up from the windows, no leering face in the shadows of the door.  It looked just like all of the other sentry boxes we saw, both in San Cristobal and in the big fortress of El Morro only a mile westward along the coast of San Juan Harbor.

So the whole thing was a little anticlimactic.  Here I hoped to give Satan a good shot at me, and I was prevented from doing so by some silly regulation about protecting the tourists from being vaporized.  

I'm happy to say that the remainder of the trip was wonderful, and I did get to spend a lot of time lounging on the beach in swim trunks, drinking coconut rum, and trying unsuccessfully to get rid of all the sand stuck to my legs.  We also spent a happy half-day hiking in the El Yunque Rain Forest, only an hour's drive to San Juan, which is a must-see for birders and other nature lovers.

But I have to confess to some disappointment about the Haunted Sentry Box.  So near, and yet so far. Not only did I not have my soul stolen, our airplane crossed the Bermuda Triangle (twice) and we didn't disappear.  You know, if the world of the paranormal is so eager to interact with us living humans, they really aren't taking these opportunities very seriously.

Music on the brain

Dear Readers:

I will be taking a short (three day) break from Skeptophilia -- but please keep those comments and suggestions coming!  I'll be back on Thursday, February 18.  Cheers!

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

It is a source of tremendous curiosity to me why music is as powerful an influence as it is.  Music has been hugely important in my own life, and remains so to this day.  I remember my parents telling me stories about my early childhood, including tales of when I couldn't have been more than about four years old and I clamored to be allowed to use the record player myself.  At first they were reluctant, but my insistence finally won the day.  They showed me how to handle the records carefully, operate the buttons to drop the needle onto the record, and put everything away when I was done.  There were records I played over and over again (that I wasn't discouraged is a testimony to my parents' patience and forbearance) -- and I never damaged a single one.  They were simply too important to me to handle roughly.

The transformative experience of music is universal to the human species.  A 43,000 year old carved bone was found in Slovenia that many think was one of the earliest musical instruments -- if this contention is correct, our drive to make music must be very old indeed.

The neurological underpinning of our musical experience, however, has not been easy to elucidate.  Until recently, there was speculation that our affinity for music had something to do with the tonal-based expression of emotion in language, but that is still speculative.  And recently, three scientists in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have shown that we have a dedicated module in our brains for experiencing and responding to music.

Sam Norman-Haignere, Nancy G. Kanwisher, and Josh H. McDermott did fMRIs of individuals who were listening to music, and others listening to a variety of other familiar sounds (including human speech).  They then compared the type of sound to the three-dimensional neural response pattern -- what the scientists called a voxel -- to see if they could find correlations between them.

The relationship turned out to be unmistakable.  They found that there were distinct firing patterns in regions of the brain that occurred only when the subject was listening to music -- and that it didn't matter what the style of music was.  Norman-Haignere said, "The sound of a solo drummer, whistling, pop songs, rap, almost everything that had a musical quality to it, melodic or rhythmic, would activate it.  That's one reason the results surprised us."

The research team writes:

The organization of human auditory cortex remains unresolved, due in part to the small stimulus sets common to fMRI studies and the overlap of neural populations within voxels.  To address these challenges, we measured fMRI responses to 165 natural sounds and inferred canonical response profiles ("components") whose weighted combinations explained voxel responses throughout auditory cortex...  Anatomically, music and speech selectivity concentrated in distinct regions of non-primary auditory cortex...  [This research] identifies primary dimensions of response variation across natural sounds, revealing distinct cortical pathways for music and speech.

This study opens up a whole new approach to understanding why our auditory centers are structured the way they are, although it does still leave open the question of why music is so tremendously important across cultures.  "Why do we have music?" Kanwisher said in an interview.  "Why do we enjoy it so much and want to dance when we hear it?  How early in development can we see this sensitivity to music, and is it tunable with experience?  These are the really cool first-order questions we can begin to address."

What I find the most curious about this is that the same region of the brain is firing in response to incredibly dissimilar inputs.  Consider, for example, the differences between a sitar solo, a Rossini aria, a Greydon Square rap, and a Bach harpsichord sonata.  Isn't it fascinating that we all have a part of the auditory cortex that responds to all of those -- regardless of our cultural background or musical preferences?

I find the whole thing tremendously interesting, and can only hope that the MIT team will continue their investigations.  I'm fascinated not only with the universality of musical appreciation, but the peculiar differences -- why, for example, I love Bach, Haydn, and Vaughan Williams, but Chopin and Schumann leave me completely cold.  Must be something about my voxels, I suppose -- but wouldn't it be cool to find out what it is?

Trump of Finland

So you know about the ongoing nonsense regarding whether Barack Obama was born on American soil?  The "Birther Truther" foolishness still plagues us here in the United States, even though Obama only has a little less than a year left of his presidency, and amazingly enough hasn't turned the White House into a mosque or ceded the country to Kenya or any of the hundreds of other silly things these people claimed.

And of course, being a fact-free conspiracy, when the Show Us The Birth Certificate cadre were actually shown the birth certificate, they responded by claiming that it was a forgery.  Other "evidence" began to be trotted out, such as an alleged 1981 Columbia University identification card under the name "Barry Soetoro" with Obama's photograph, which says, in large unfriendly letters, "FOREIGN STUDENT."

This claim has been roundly debunked, of course.  The bar-coded ID card format wasn't even adopted by Columbia until 1996.  The individual who was issued the ID number shown turns out to be one Thomas Lugert, a Columbia student in 1998 who is white and looks nothing like President Obama.  But as I've said before: facts don't matter to these people.  If they have a claim they can shriek about, they'll shriek even louder if you show them why it can't possibly be true.

And you may recall that one of the leaders of the Barack-Born-In-Kenya model of reality was none other than Donald Trump.  As recently as July of last year, Trump was asked for his opinion on whether Obama was born in the United States, and he replied, "I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  I don’t know why he wouldn’t release his records."  Except, of course, for the fact that Obama did release his records.  It's just that conspiracy wackos don't become conspiracy wackos by falling for little tricks like hard evidence, and also that being Donald Trump means never having to admit you were wrong about anything.

The reason this all comes up, and what makes it kind of hilarious in a twisted way, is that there is a guy who is mounting a one-person campaign...

... to prove that Trump himself was born in Finland.

According to this guy, Donald Trump was born "Rögnvaldr Trømp," a name that immediately reminded me of the bit in the opening credits of Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail that had lines like, "Mööse chöreögraphed by Hörst Pröt III."  And being something of a language geek, I was also struck by the fact that "Rögnvaldr Trømp" doesn't look like a Finnish name at all, but more like a bizarre hybrid of Norwegian and Icelandic.

But the lunacy doesn't end there.  According to the blogger in question -- whose name I wasn't able to find anywhere on the site, presumably because he's afraid that if he is ever identified, black-clad Finnish operatives are going to take him out for blowing the whistle -- the whole thing came from "sources close to the Clintons."  These "sources," he says, are certain that if Trump gets elected, he's going to sell us out to the "Euroleftists."  But best of all was a paragraph a little further down that I have to quote in toto, because just describing it would not give you the full impact of how truly wonderful it is:

According to Eurotech magnate Linus Torvalds, on whose Lapland estate Tromp and Princess Ivana are reported to own a summer home, the Congressman takes "an active hand" in the governance of his native Finland. Torvalds, head of pro-piracy tech firm Lindex, says that he "sees [Tromp] as a brother--no, a hellittelysana (Here he used a Finnish term of endearment which translates roughtly [sic] to 'solstice-father-brother') who has done more for Finlandia than any other man could dream."

Okay.  So it's "Linux," not "Lindex."  "Lindex" sounds like a spray cleaner you'd use for getting the dust off of computer monitor screens.  And hellittelysana isn't a Finnish term of endearment, it's the word that means "term of endearment."  So it'd be a little odd if someone called Trump that.  It'd be as if I said to Ted Cruz, "You are a complete and total epithet!"

So the whole thing is kind of ridiculous, although I have to admit that it's wonderful for the humorous irony value.  I doubt anyone will take it as seriously as the Obama birther thing was -- showing, perhaps, that Trump's opponents have a lot better critical thinking skills than his followers do.  But even if it never gains traction, I thought it merited a shout-out as being one of the most purely weird conspiracy theories I've ever run across.

And given how many conspiracy theories I've run through here in Skeptophilia, that by itself is worthy of note.