Inquiries into inquiries about inquiries

I'm increasingly appreciating the quip that if "con" is the opposite of "pro," then "congress" is the opposite of "progress."

At the moment I'm thinking of Lamar Smith, the Texas Representative who chairs the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology despite being an anti-science climate change denier who back in 2014 said the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "said nothing new," despite its predictions of massive sea level rise, extreme weather, and catastrophic drought if nothing is done to rein in fossil fuel use.  Of course, what Smith meant by that was that the IPCC didn't say, "Ha ha!  We've been kidding all these years!  Climate change has nothing to do with fossil fuel use!"  Which is what he was hoping, given that he's proven himself over the years to be nothing more than a hired gun for Exxon-Mobil.

Rep. Lamar Smith [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Don't believe me?  In 2015 he started lashing out at climate scientists who were funded through government grants as an attempt to muzzle climate research and put a chill on anyone thinking of writing a paper further illustrating that climate change is anthropogenic (which it is).  He had a subpoena issued to Kathryn Sullivan, chair of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, stating, "NOAA needs to come clean about why they altered the data to get the results they needed to advance this administration’s extreme climate change agenda."  Which is ironic given that Lamar Smith and his cronies suppress data to advance their own extreme pro-fossil fuel agenda.

Earlier this year, Smith went even further, launching a witch hunt against scientists even for communicating with each other about the topic.  He issued a subpoena for any internal documents containing words such as "global temperature" and "climate study," better to identify and harass scientists who were still trying to, you know, do science.

So it was no real surprise when the story hit two days ago that Lamar is at it again, this time launching an investigation to “examine Congress’s investigative authority as it relates to the committee’s oversight of the impact of investigations undertaken by the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts at the behest of several environmental organizations.”  Or, as Huffington Post's Kate Sheppard put it, he's investigating the House of Representatives' ability to investigate investigations.  This came about because those attorneys general (and also the ones in California and the Virgin Islands) have launched inquiries to look into Exxon-Mobil's efforts to suppress research linking fossil fuel use to global warming, much as in a previous generation Big Tobacco suppressed research linking cigarette smoking to cancer.  Lamar Smith and his cadre of science deniers are desperate both to discredit climate research (and the researchers who do it) and to sever any link between climate change and the runaway use of fossil fuels, and if they can't do it by harassment via subpoena, they'll do it by tying up congress in endless inquiries into inquiries about inquiries.

Smith hasn't arrived at his strategy just 'cuz.  He has the backing of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a virulently anti-science group devoted to casting doubt on anthropogenic climate change, which calls itself "non-partisan" even though it receives the majority of its funding from Koch Industries, Crownquest Oil & Gas, AEP Texas, ExxonMobil, VF-Russia, Texas Western Energy Corporation, ConocoPhillips, Devon Energy, Chevron, and Henry Petroleum LP.   He is deep in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, and has no compunctions about using his position to forward their agenda.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has dismissed Smith's investigation as being a "small group of radical Republican House members... trying to block a serious law enforcement investigation into potential fraud at Exxon."  The problem is, Smith is in a position where he can do this kind of bullshit and get away with it.  He, and others like him, have sown such doubt in the minds of the American public about climate change that your typical American citizen can look outside and see record-breaking temperatures in 2016, which broke the record from 2015, which broke the record from 2014 (and so on ad nauseam), and still claim it isn't happening.

What I'm wondering is how the hell we can get this guy out of his position as chairman of the committee in the House of Representatives that oversees science.  I mean, for cryin' in the sink, the man doesn't believe in science.  Having Lamar Smith chair this committee is like having a creationist appointed to chair a university's Department of Evolutionary Biology.

The whole thing leaves me with that awful feeling that is a combination of anger, desperation, frustration, and disgust.  The fact that this smirking weasel of a man is currently driving national climate policy -- or, more accurately, putting our climate policy on a leash to the fossil fuel industry -- makes me wish that there was a stronger word than "appalling."

Apocalypse whenever

I have an update for those of you who are worried about when the world is going to end, or civilization is going to fall, which honestly would happen anyhow if the world ended.

This update comes from sources that conveniently ignore the fact that previous predictions of the world's end have had a 100% failure rate.  Every time we're told that an asteroid is going to end it all, or the Rapture is going to happen, or the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons are going to run roughshod over the populace, what happens is...

... nothing.  Civilization, or what passes for it these days, just keeps bumbling along as usual.  There are no death comets, no killer plagues, no Second Comings of Deities.  All of which I find reassuring but at the same time vaguely disappointing, because I live in the middle of rural upstate New York and we could really use some excitement around here most days.

Of course, a batting average of zero isn't enough to discourage these folks.  This time it's gonna happen, cross our hearts and hope to die in horrible agony when the Earth explodes.

First, we have the Nibiru cadre, who have been predicting the arrival of Nibiru for decades, kind of like what happened in Waiting for Guffman but not nearly as funny.  This time, though, we can say for sure that Nibiru is approaching because there's going to be a "Blood Moon" (better known to those of us who aren't insane as a lunar eclipse).  Yes, I know that lunar eclipses happen every year, but this one is different.  Don't ask me how.

According to an article in Express, the fabled tenth planet is due to arrive any time now, and has been captured in a video.  Not a NASA video, mind you.  A video taken by an anonymous YouTube subscriber, which as we all know is a highly reliable source of scientific research.

"And now," writes the author of the article, Jon Austin, "conspiracy theorists have somehow tied it in with the infamous blood moon events of a year ago that appears [sic] to be happening again."

What?  Those events of last year wherein nothing happened?  Ah, yes, I remember thinking at the time, "Heaven help us all if this happens again!  Scariest non-events I've ever seen!"

According to this bizarre view of how the world in general, and astronomy in particular, works, the "blood moons" aren't caused by the Earth's shadow.  Nope.  The Nibiroonies have "now tried to tie together the two myths and even claim it is the shadow of Nibiru causing the blood moons."

Because it's not like if there was a planet near enough, and big enough, to cast a giant shadow over the moon, NASA would notice it, or anything.

Then we have the revelation that Obama and his evil henchmen are planning a scheme to destroy America and take down other major world governments along with it.  According to the site What Does It Mean?, the president and his collaborators have a Cunning Plan to unleash upon us, despite the fact that the guy only has five months left in office, so if he really has been intending to destroy the United States, he's gotten off to an awfully slow start.

But no, the article says, he's palling up with Hillary Clinton, who apparently rivals Obama himself for being the embodiment of pure evil.  And they've teamed up with the people who run Google for a conspiracy trifecta to accomplish the following:

1.) [D]isabling of advertisements on all websites critical of the Obama-Clinton regime, including the globally popular Antiwar.com, in order to destroy them.

2.) Deleting Donald Trump from the search list of candidates running for the US presidency. 

3.) Developing and employing a filter so that the name Donald Trump won’t even show up on anyone’s computer device or smart phone.

4.) Hiding in their search results information relating to Hillary Clinton’s health and the massive numbers of suspicions deaths associated with her.

5.) Being supported in their hiding Hillary Clinton health information by the New York Times, with one of their insiders admitting what they’re doing.

Myself, I would be thrilled if something would prevent my ever having to look at a photograph of Donald Trump again.  If that's what the conspiracy's about, I'm all for it.

And as evidence for all of this, they cite...

... InfoWars.  Yes, Alex Jones, who despite having a screw loose is still considered by some to have inside information about the plots that are running rampant in our government, but which never seem to accomplish a damn thing.

It's sort of like the "Obama's coming for your guns" thing you hear all the time from the far-right.  I mean, dude had eight years to take all our guns, and as a nation we're still as heavily armed as ever.  And the contentions that Obama's a radical Muslim.  Really?  He drinks beer, eats bacon, doesn't fast during Ramadan, and supports LGBT rights.  If the guy is a Muslim, he's the worst Muslim ever.

Last, we've got the weird coincidence of three separate lightning strikes that killed hundreds of reindeer (in Norway) and cattle (in the US), and which is said to be HAARP gearing up for a major strike on the populated places of the earth.  Add this to the fact that there's a hurricane in Florida as we speak, because that's not common or anything.  HAARP has done all this as a sort of test run, and next thing we know, there'll be earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, and the works, and civilization will have no other choice besides giving up and collapsing.

What's funniest about all of this is that just last week, the University of Alaska - Fairbanks, which now owns HAARP, had an open house last week wherein they invited anyone with questions or suspicions to stop by for a tour of the place so they can see what it actually does, which is to study high-altitude atmospheric phenomena.  I coulda told them this strategy wouldn't work; if you demonstrate conclusively to the conspiracy theorists that HAARP was a harmless scientific study facility, they will either (1) tell you that the real HAARP had been moved elsewhere, or (2) that you are only saying this because you are under the influence of a mind-control beam, which is one of the things HAARP is supposedly able to do.  So you can't win.  These are people who think a lack of evidence is evidence.

Anyhow, there you have it.  Three ways in which we will almost certainly not be meeting the fall of civilization as we know it.  It's kind of anticlimactic, really.  We're moving into autumn, here in the northeast.  School's starting, the days are getting shorter, and we soon will be battening down the hatches for cold weather.  Myself, I think an apocalypse would be a nice change of pace.  I'm not in favor of wholesale destruction, mind you, but a minor catastrophe or two would go a long way toward alleviating the monotony.

GMOs and the package-deal fallacy

One of the most frustrating of logical fallacies is the package-deal fallacy -- the tendency to lump together things that are similar (even superficially similar) and then paint them all with the same brush.  The fact that we here in the United States are in the middle of a particularly divisive presidential election makes it all too common.  How often do you see those stupid "internet memes" with captions saying things like "If you are a conservative, you believe ____" or "If you are a liberal, you think ____"?

The implication, of course, is that the universe is a simple and philosophically uniform place, a contention which you'd think that even a quick glance would prove wrong.  I know conservatives who are thoughtful, intelligent, well-spoken, and logical, and ones who are prone to fact-free, vitriolic rants.  I know liberals who fall into the same two designations.  I find it frightening that some people would like to have a word or two completely define a person -- and forthwith to cease thinking about the matter entirely.

Such thinking is hardly limited to politics, unfortunately.  Consider GMOs, which have been much maligned by the "pure foods movement" as being toxic, carcinogenic "frankenfoods" which are being foisted upon an unsuspecting public by evil corporations.  In this view of the world, Monsanto is being run by Satan himself, and any time you consume a genetically modified food item, you're running the risk of becoming ill from it.

[image courtesy of photographer Lindsay Eyink and the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem is that like everything, genetic modification isn't simple, and claiming that all GMOs have the same (negative) effects isn't so much ignorant as it is flat-out wrong.  Not all genes do the same thing; why would we expect genetically modified organisms to have the same results, including their effects (if any) on human health?

Take, for example, the genetically modified eggplants now being grown in Bangladesh.  These eggplants have a gene that produces a protein making them resistant to being damaged by the fruit-and-shoot borer, a moth larva that causes widespread crop damage.  The protein has been tested to a fare-thee-well and shown to have no adverse health effects in humans.  Growing the GMO eggplants has drastically reduced the use of chemical pesticides -- which do have a lot of adverse effects, not only on humans but on wildlife.

Even the criticism that the GMO industry only exists to make millions of dollars at the expense of poor farmers doesn't apply here.  This GMO was developed using funding from the Bangladeshi government, and the seeds are being sold at low (controlled) prices, or given away for free.

Explain to me how this is a bad thing.

The difficulty is that in order to understand how GMOs differ from each other requires that you know some science.  To see that the situation with the eggplants, the one with RoundUp Ready crops (which have been used as excuses to increase the use of herbicides, and are implicated in herbicide resistance genes "jumping" to weed species), and the one with "Golden Rice" (a modified rice that is rich in vitamin A, but which is often tagged with a "kill switch gene" that makes the seeds unviable, thus preventing seed saving by poor farmers) are not the same thing means having to do some research and learn how genetics works.  And, in the case of Golden Rice, to consider a thorny ethical question about who has the right to profit from research.

Much easier, of course, just to say "GMO = evil" and be done with it.  The whole thing reminds me of a quote from John F. Kennedy: "Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."

Feeling the burn

One of the things I sometimes get frustrated with about teaching is when a student says, "If I study for a test, I do worse.  Last time I didn't study at all, and I did fine -- this time, I studied, and I failed."

I know that this comes from the fact that they're frustrated, too -- they worked hard, and didn't do as well as they wanted to.  My fear, though, is that they'll decide that the converse must be true -- that if they don't study, they'll do better.  I always try to point out to them that they're comparing their performance on two different tests over different material taken at two different times.  In other words, that it isn't a controlled experiment, and they shouldn't use this observation of a single data point as a reason not to study.

Not sure how well the argument works, or if at that point it'd be better just to say, "I know, it sucks when you don't do well," and let it go.

It's a problematic way of thinking, though, and one I can sum up as "the plural of anecdote is not data."  Just because something worked (or didn't) for you, once, doesn't mean that you've discovered a correlation.

Take, for example, the latest goofy alt-med approach to avoiding skin damage in the sun: "edible sunscreen."  I'm not making this up.  In fact, there was a piece in The New York Times about it just day before yesterday.  The idea is that you consume a flavored drink ("UVO" is one brand) that contains vitamins and minerals and antioxidants and various other kinds of alt-med fairy dust, and it's supposed to prevent sunburn.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The medical establishment is in agreement that it's useless.  "If you tell someone 'You can take this pill before you go out' or 'you can drink this nice, refreshing, berry-flavored drink,' they are hearing 'magic bullet,'" said Dr. David J. Leffell, chief of dermatologic surgery and cutaneous oncology at the Yale School of Medicine.  "They think, I'll drink this and then I can do whatever I want because I'll be protected...  But there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that UVO functions as a sun protector... There's a sucker born every minute."

What makes this, and the New York Times article, interesting from a critical thinking perspective isn't the woo-woo magic drink phenomenon.  Heaven knows there are enough completely evidence-free alt-med cures and preventatives out there; if I devoted this blog to that topic only, I'd never run out of material (although I might well run out of readers).  What is most interesting is that Alyson Krueger, the author of the article, interviewed Scott Kyle, a 53-year-old competitive sailor from California, who is a devotee of UVO.  Kyle said that when he uses UVO, he doesn't burn.  "Normally I would be sunburned for a couple of days, and now I'm not," Kyle said.  "I give it to other sailors, and they notice a difference...  I totally don't care what doctors think, because it works on me."

Which is, in spirit if not in detail, exactly what my students are saying when they claim that studying simply doesn't work because they tanked on one quiz.  But in the United States, we've been trained to listen to folksy anecdote and somehow give it the same weight (or higher!) than controlled scientific experiment.  In fact, we've been taught to ignore scientific experiment altogether; who knows what those pointy-headed lab-coat-wearing guys are up to, and what their real motives are?

Look, it's not that I like sunscreen myself.  I'm the guy who wears as little clothing as is legally permissible when the weather is warm, and my wife has been known to sneak up behind me and squirt sunscreen on my shoulders when I'm not looking.  But at the same time, I know that sunburn isn't good for you, that sunscreen is a good idea, and that skin cancer sucks.  I'm choosing to ignore a risk (when I can get away with it), not claiming that I'm somehow reducing my risk with the equivalent of medical voodoo.

So sorry, Mr. Kyle, but your "data" doesn't really matter.  Your report of "not as sunburned," collected on different days under differing conditions, represents an anecdote at best.  If UVO is shown to be efficacious -- which, as a guy with a pretty good background in biology, I sort of doubt -- it will come from well-controlled research, not the musings of a guy who is already convinced.

Speaking their language

A new study has shown that dogs actually understand more about human language than we thought -- and do so using the same regions of the brain that humans use when interpreting spoken words.

It was conventional wisdom that dogs picked up on tone of voice, but (for the most part) not on the words spoken -- that you could say "you stupid animal, why didn't you come the first 1,293 times I called you?" in a sweet, loving tone, and the dog would still think you're saying something complimentary.  But now a team lead by Attila Andics of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest has shown that dogs seem to understand a great deal more of what we say than we thought.

[image courtesy of photographer Noël Zia Lee and the Wikimedia Commons]

Using dogs who had been trained to lie motionless inside an fMRI machine, Andics and his team had a trainer speak various phrases to the dogs, using different combinations of praising and neutral tones with positive, neutral, and negative verbiage.  The astonishing results were that the dogs processed the intonation information in a different part of the brain than the verbal information, and the strongest positive response came from a praising intonation with praising words.

"This shows… that dogs not only separate what we say from how we say it, but also that they can combine the two for a correct interpretation of what those words really meant," Andics said.

I find this surprising in one way -- that dogs have a far more advanced linguistic capacity than we realized -- but entirely unsurprising in another.  We have as a species tended to consider other animals as somehow qualitatively different from ourselves -- thus the distinction between "human" and "animal" that you still hear people use.  Very few cultures looked upon humanity and the animal world as a continuum, with humans simply being an animal species that has evolved to be smart enough to consider the question.

The sad thing is that up until recently, scientists have contributed to the problem.  I remember when I took Animal Physiology in college, and looked fairly aghast when the professor did something pretty awful to a lab animal (I won't recount what he did, out of respect for the feelings of the more sensitive members of the studio audience), he laughed and said, "You're not going to get far in this subject if you think animals should be treated the same way you'd treat humans."  There was for decades an ongoing battle over whether non-human animals experienced emotions, a debate that was finally put to rest mainly because of detailed studies of elephants.

I have always contended that the people who thought that other animals had nothing analogous to human emotions must never have owned a pet.  Our dog Grendel went into a prolonged period of mourning when his pal, our border collie Doolin, died three years ago at the grand age of 16.  And he gets really bent out of shape when my wife Carol is out of town at an art show -- and is beside himself with joy when she comes back.

"Emotionless," my ass.

But the thing about understanding the verbal content of speech, and not just the tone, did come as a bit of a surprise to me.  Even more fascinating is the authors' speculation about the source of this capacity.  They suggest that the origin of the language-comprehension ability in dogs is not likely to be due to domestication, which would have been my guess -- they say that such a complex neural firing pattern in the brain, not to mention the fact that it's shared by humans not only in structure but in function, makes it much more likely that we're looking at a deep evolutionary relationship that "links arbitrary sounds to meanings."  So language might be a far older, and far more widespread, innovation in the animal world than we thought.

So I guess I'll have to apologize to my coonhound, Lena, for telling her at ten o'clock last night that allowing herself to get sprayed by a skunk made her "a disgrace to the entire canine species, and I hope she's satisfied with herself."  I did give her a cookie after she allowed Carol and I to bathe her in a combination of water, dish soap, baking soda, and hydrogen peroxide, but if Andics and his team are right, she's still probably pretty upset about the whole thing.

The necessity of compassion

Yesterday I ran into the story of Sigourney Coyle, the high school student in Emmaus, Pennsylvania who is claiming she is being discriminated against because of the school's policy to allow transgender students to use the locker room and bathroom of the gender they identify with:

I am a woman, and I identify as a woman, and you can't make me change in front of someone who I don't identify with who is physically male...  Gym requires us to participate to pass high school and if I don't change I'm not allowed to participate.  So my options are to let myself be discriminated against or fail gym for not participating and not pass through high school, which would jeopardize my future...  I feel nothing against transgenders, I would just not like their rights to overrule mine.

Sigourney's mother, Aryn Coyle, tried at first to have her daughter excused from PE on religious grounds, but was told that religious exemptions only applied to the curriculum on sexuality in health class (which is a topic for a whole other post some time).

So Sigourney is painting this as her rights being trampled.  Not, of course, as a step toward treating with humanity and compassion a group of people who have been systematically demonized, ridiculed, bullied, and discriminated against.  And this stance is not because of any actual identifiable risk; according to studies conducted by the Human Rights Campaign and the National Center for Transgender Equality, the number of times a non-transgender person has been harassed or otherwise accosted in a bathroom or locker room is...

... zero.  The Advocate reports that "there has never been a verifiable reported instance of a trans person harassing a cisgender person, nor have there been any confirmed reports of male predators 'pretending' to be transgender to gain access to women's spaces and commit crimes against them."

As Elisabeth Parker put it in a pointed piece in American News X, "Despite all those transgender bathroom laws GOP state legislatures keep passing, a child is far more likely to be molested at church."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

That's not the way the Coyles see it.  Their dogmatic stance that anything except straight cisgender identification is wrong is pushing Sigourney into a position where she is risking her high school diploma to make their bigoted point hit the front page of the newspaper.

Oh, and did I mention that there are no self-identified transgender students currently at Emmaus High School?  That's right: the Coyles are blowing this issue up to maintain their right to discriminate against people who may not even exist.

But just so we can end on a good note, let's take a look at what happens when you do religion right.  Yesterday NPR did a piece on Reverend Danny Cortez, pastor of the New Heart Community Church of La Mirada, California (which belongs to the Southern Baptist Convention), who back in 2014 found himself in a philosophical bind when his son, Drew, came out as gay.  He agonized over it for some time, but finally realized what he had to do.  He went into his church, and preached a sermon that should be required reading for any folks who are on the fence about LGBT issues for religious reasons.  I want you to read the entire thing, which is available at the link I posted, but here's a particularly poignant excerpt:

The last night [at a conference on LGBT Christians and their struggles], I met a man by the name of Coyote.  He approached me, thanking me for my story—I told some people about my journey.  He said, “This conference is meaningful for me and my friends because this is the only church we get to go to once a year.” 

I was like, “What do you mean?” 

He said, “In the places we live, in the small communities, there are no churches that will accept us.” 

And my heart broke.  I thought, “That really sucks.” 

So, when I was asked the question recently, “How does it feel to know that you might be terminated in a few weeks?”  I said, “I am at peace.”  I’m at peace because I know my heart has been enlarged for people like Coyote who need a church.  I know that whatever happens, compassion is giving me clarity. It’s giving me clarity in my calling; it’s giving me clarity in my purpose.  People like Coyote, they need a church.  They need to be pastored.  They need a community of people that will not judge them because of their sexual identity. 

So, I pray that as a church we would open ourselves to how God directs us, and I caution you to realize that it’s so easy to look at the word of God and merely look at the letter of the law.  But there is something underneath it, a deeper current that is only understood by the Spirit, moved by love, and drawn into compassion.  Our thoughts cannot just be about arguing the biblical text.  It must be understood in the context of love, and that means in the context of real, human relationships.  Because compassion is what gives clarity to this matter.

In fact, that's what's missing from the entire battle surrounding the Coyles and Emmaus High School; any mention of compassion, any acknowledgement that what they're talking about aren't voiceless abstractions but real living, breathing human beings who have to live every day with the pain of discrimination.  But Reverend Cortez and his family are illustrations that the same force that drove the Coyles to their narrow-minded bigotry can also open the heart and bring people to a place of acceptance they never thought they'd see.

It brings me back to a quote I heard long ago.  I've never been able to find a source for it, but it still strikes me as one of the most powerful guides to behavior there is, and it can apply to anyone -- religious, atheist, or agnostic.  It goes like this:  "Always be more compassionate than you think you need to be, for everyone around you is fighting a terrible battle that you know nothing about."

Sawney Bean and veracity of folklore

One of the creepiest legends to come out of old Scotland is the tale of Sawney Bean (or Beane), whose cave-dwelling, cannibalistic family allegedly ran amok in South Ayrshire in the 16th century.  Bean, born Alexander Bean in East Lothian, was said to be the son of a manual laborer, but had a vicious streak from childhood that was exacerbated when in his late teens he married a woman who was worse.

The couple set up housekeeping in a deep cave in Bennane Head, a promontory between Ballantrae and Girvan on the west coast of Scotland.  There, he and his evil wife were the progenitors of quite a brood; eight sons, six daughters, and thirty-two grandchildren (many of them born to incestuous unions).  The Beans survived in their remote abode by waylaying travelers...

... and eating them.

"Sawney Beane at the Entrance of his Cave."  Note the woman in the background -- holding a severed human leg.  [Image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Local villagers knew about the disappearances, and sometimes they'd find bones and other body parts -- but apparently were completely unaware that the culprits were a crew of depraved cannibals living nearby.  The local law enforcement cast a suspicious eye on local innkeepers and pub owners, since they were often the last people to see the victims alive.  But eventually one lucky guy fought back against the Beans when attacked, survived (his wife, apparently, wasn't so lucky) and brought back a tale of being swarmed by men and women intent on murdering him.  King James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) launched an attack on the family, sending soldiers in to destroy them and their stronghold.

The Beans were defeated, and those not killed in the skirmish were brought back to Edinburgh in chains.  The men were executed by having their hands, feet, and genitals chopped off, and allowed to bleed to death; the women were burned at the stake.  One daughter, "Black" Agnes Bean, who had escaped before the attack and attempted to settle down in Girvan under an assumed name, was eventually found out and hanged.

So that was the end of the Beans.  But the question that I'd like to ask is: is any of it true?  How would we know?

One reason we might cast a skew glance at the tale is how varied the different versions of it are.  Sean Thomas wrote a piece on the Bean clan in Fortean Times, a bit of which was excerpted at the site The Spooky Isles (the original article, unfortunately, seems no longer to be available):

... from broadsheet to broadsheet, the precise dating of Sawney Bean's reign of anthropophagic terror varies wildly: sometimes the atrocities occurred during the reign of James VI [ca. early 1600s], whilst other versions claim the Beans lived centuries before.  Viewed in this light, it is arguable that the Bean story may have a basis of truth but the precise dating of events has become obscured over the years.  Perhaps the dating of the murders was brought forward by the editors and writer of the broadsheets, so as to make the story appear more relevant to the readership...  To add to the intrigue, we do know that cannibalism was not unknown in mediaeval Scotland and that Galloway was in mediaeval times a very lawless place; perhaps nothing on the scale of the Bean legend took place, but every story grows and is embroidered over time.

While the main part of the story itself doesn't involve the supernatural -- something that would lead me to doubt the whole thing -- there's a paranormal twist to the execution of Agnes Bean in Girvan:

Historically, Girvan was significant as the home of the Hairy Tree.  According to legend, the Hairy Tree was planted by Sawney Bean’s eldest daughter in the town’s Dalrymple Street.  However, when her family was arrested, the daughter was implicated in their incestuous and cannibalistic activities and was hanged by locals from the bough of the tree she herself planted.  According to local legend, one can hear the sound of a swinging corpse while standing beneath its boughs.

When you add to this the fact that there is an ongoing dispute amongst the people in Girvan regarding which tree in the town is the authentic "Hairy Tree," it does tend to make you wonder how much of the rest of it can be true.

Another suspicious factor is the similarity of the Bean story to an earlier tale from Scotland, that of "Christie Cleek."   Christie Cleek, born Andrew Christie in Perth in the mid 14th century, was driven to murder and cannibalism during the horrible famine that followed the ravages of the Black Death in the British Isles in the 1350s.  "Cleek" means "shepherd's crook" -- the tool Christie used to pull down travelers and pluck riders from their horses.  Like the Beans, Christie Cleek and his family lived in hiding, feasting on human flesh and striking fear into the hearts of the locals.  It has a different ending, though -- after the famine eased, an armed force was sent in to rid the countryside of the menace.  Everyone in the family was killed but Christie himself -- he escaped, and lived to a ripe old age under an assumed name.  The name "Christie Cleek" became a synonym in that part of Scotland for the bogeyman, useful for scaring children to the pants-wetting stage during late-night storytelling sessions around the fire.

So the inconsistencies and variations in the Bean story, plus the analogies to earlier tales, makes you wonder.  The most likely answer is that Bean himself (and possibly his savage wife) were real, but that a lot of the excesses attributed to them and their progeny were exaggerations.  About the veracity of the details, there is simply not enough hard documentation to be certain.

It's a gruesome and fascinating story.  Certainly a good one for a shiver up the spine.  It'd be nice to know if it was true, but as with most things in the distant past, it's probably not possible.  So like a lot of folklore, we have to let it be -- filed under the heading of "Who knows?"