Defining identity

In case you had run short of things to be outraged about, today we have a story that the Trump administration is trying to push a legal definition of sex as "a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth."

To a biologist, this is a little like the government passing a law defining pi is being "exactly equal to three."  You might not like the fact that pi is an irrational number, it might be annoying to have to use a decimal approximation to calculate the circumference of a circle, but all of that falls clearly into the "tough shit" department.  The universe is not arranged so as to make you feel comfortable, and if you can't handle that, well, that's too freakin' bad.

Of course, it's no big mystery why they're doing this.  The evangelical Christians, who have had a stranglehold over the Republican Party for years, have a remarkable capacity to look past all sorts of biblical injunctions such as the prohibition against infidelity, divorce, and usury (lending money at interest), not to mention more perplexing ones like the rules against eating shellfish and wearing clothes made of two different kinds of cloth sewn together.  On the other hand, anything remotely approaching sexual relations between two consenting adults other than a traditional, in-marriage male/female relationship, makes these people go into a complete meltdown.  (Other than the aforementioned infidelity, which apparently is okay, especially if it was Donald Trump engaging in it.)

I swear, these people are more concerned about what I do with my dick than I am.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ben Tavener from Curitiba, Brazil, São Paulo LGBT Pride Parade 2014 (14108541924), CC BY 2.0]

Here's the problem.  Even beyond the obvious issue of equal rights for LGBTQ people at the heart of the debate, this viewpoint is completely contrary to what biological science says.  "Gender" is a construct of a lot of different features -- anatomy, brain wiring (the "which gender do you feel like?" part comes from this), chromosomal makeup (XX or XY or, in some cases, other combinations), hormone levels, and sexual orientation.  What the people pressing for this redefinition would like is if those always lined up in exactly the same way.

They don't.

Gender is not simple, and it's clearly non-binary.  Let's just look at two situations that should illustrate that beyond doubt.

First, consider the condition XY androgen insensitivity.  In this condition, the embryo has the ordinary male configuration chromosomally (XY), but has a genetic mutation that prevents the formation of receptors for testosterone.  During development, all embryos looks female until midway during the second trimester.  If the baby has an XY chromosome configuration, at that point -- assuming everything is working the usual way -- testosterone takes effect, the testicles descend into the scrotum and the penis gets larger.  In other words, all of the things parents look for during an ultrasound when they want to find out the sex of their baby.

In XY androgen insensitivity, none of this happens.  The baby looks anatomically female.  A pelvic exam -- seldom done on young children -- would reveal that the child has no uterus, only the lower two-thirds of the vagina, and gonads that are still small and undeveloped, and are still in the abdominal cavity.  These children usually are identified when the age of puberty hits and they don't start to menstruate, but up to then, they are perfectly ordinary girls who have female external anatomy, and more important, feel that they're female.

Santhi Soundarajan, an Indian track star, is one of these.  Because many female elite athletes have very low body fat content, a good many of them don't ovulate, which is why her condition wasn't identified.  But she competed in the Olympics, won a silver medal in the 800 -- and only afterwards did she learn that her chromosomes were XY, not XX.  The Olympic committee stripped her of her medal and banned her from competition.

What would you do if you were told the one thing you loved, were passionate about, excelled at, was no longer an option?  Santhi Soundaraian attempted suicide.

Then there's 5α-reductase deficiency.  The issue with this condition is the hormone dihydroxytestosterone, which is what directly acts to produce the male anatomy.  Males have two copies of the DHT gene, one of which activates prenatally (causing the changes in a male fetus mentioned above), and the other at puberty.  People with a mutation in the first DHT gene are born looking female for the same reason they are in XY androgen insensitivity.  The thing is, the second copy of the gene -- the one that activates at puberty -- works just fine.

When that gene switches on, at age 13 or so, the child goes from being an anatomical female to being an anatomical male, in the space of about nine months.

Add that to recent studies of gender identification in which it was conclusively established that trans individuals' brains are wired like the gender they identify with, not the gender associated with their anatomy.  So all the people who have liked to har-de-har-har about "boys who think they're girls" and how ridiculous that is and how next thing you know, you'll have people identifying as rocks (yes, I actually heard someone say that) -- please do shut up.  All you're doing is establishing how ignorant you are of the biological facts.

The biology of gender is complex, and not fully understood.  We still don't know if sexual orientation is genetic -- it appears to have a genetic component at least.  It, too, is non-binary.  About four percent of people identify as bisexual, for example.  And if you think sexual orientation is a choice, ask yourself when you sat down and gave thoughtful consideration to each gender, and decided which you chose to be attracted to.

Basing gender designation on anatomy alone is not just simpleminded; it's flat-out wrong.  So basing policy on an arbitrary, government-mandated definition of gender is two steps removed from the truth.

Look, I'm sympathetic if there are some parts of reality that make you feel squinky.  There are parts of it I'm not especially fond of myself.  But that doesn't mean the bits you don't like aren't true.  And if you're using your own squinky feelings to make decisions about who other people are, what rights they should have, and what they should be able to do with their own bodies, you are light years away from anything that could be called moral behavior.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a brilliant look at two opposing worldviews; Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet.  Mann sees today's ecologists, environmental scientists, and even your average concerned citizens as falling into two broad classes -- wizards (who think that whatever ecological problems we face, human ingenuity will prevail over them) and prophets (who think that our present course is unsustainable, and if we don't change our ways we're doomed).

Mann looks at a representative member from each of the camps.  He selected Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate and driving force behind the Green Revolution, to be the front man for the Wizards, and William Vogt, who was a strong voice for population control and conversation, as his prototypical Prophet.  He takes a close and personal look at each of their lives, and along the way outlines the thorny problems that gave rise to this disagreement -- problems we're going to have to solve regardless which worldview is correct.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Remembrance of things past

I've been interested in memory as long as I can remember.  Part of the reason is that my own personal brain seems to be made up of a rather peculiar assemblage of things I can remember with apparent ease and things that I don't seem to be able to remember at all.  I recall music with no effort whatsoever; I once put a nifty little Serbian dance tune into long-term storage for over twenty years after hearing it twice (and not practicing it or writing it down in the interim).  Names, likewise, stick with me.  I know more scientific names of obscure species than is useful or even reasonable, and it's not from engaging in any sort of surreptitious memorization of taxonomic lists late at night when no one's looking.  That sort of stuff simply sticks.

On the other hand, numbers.  I know people who can remember what their phone number was in houses they haven't lived in for thirty years.  I'm lucky when I can remember what my phone number is now.  In this day of passwords, PINs, and so on, there are a variety of number/letter combinations I'm expected to remember, and the maximum amount of these I seem to be able to recall is: one.  For all of the passwords where this is possible, I use the same one.  If anyone ever discovers it, I'm fucked.  Fortunately, it's pretty obscure, so I don't think it's likely (meaning you shouldn't waste your time trying to figure it out).

It does, however, point up something odd about memory, which is how compartmentalized it is.  People can be exceptionally good at certain types of memory, and rather bad at others.  A few things, however, seem common to all sorts of memory; repetition improves retention, memory consolidation increases after sleep, and we all get worse at it (all types) as we age.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michel Royon Ce message en français, Brain memory, CC0 1.0]

This last one is the subject of some cool research published in Nature, in a paper entitled "Increased NR2A:NR2B Ratio Compresses Long-Term Depression Range and Constrains Long-Term Memory," by Zhenzhong Cui, Ruiben Feng, Stephanie Jacobs, Yanhong Duan, Huimin Wang, Xiaohua Cao, and Joe Z. Tsien, as a collaborative project between Georgia Health Sciences University and East China Normal University.  The experiments involved using transgenic mice that overproduced a neurotransmitter receptor called NR2A, and found that they were significantly poorer than normal at forming new long-term memories than ordinary mice were. The reason, the researchers speculate, is that this receptor is involved in weakening the synaptic firing patterns from old memories.

Put another way, it seems like one of the reasons we become more forgetful as we age is that we aren't as good at getting rid of things we already have stored in there.  In an interview with the New York Times, study lead author Joe Z. Tsien compares our brains when young to a blank page, and older brains to a page from a newspaper.  "The difference is not how dark the pen is," he said, "but that the newspaper already has writing on it."

"What our study suggests," Tsien added, "is that it’s not just the strengthening of connections, but the weakening of the other sets of connections that creates a holistic pattern of synaptic connectivity that is important for long-term memory formation."

In other words, our brains really do fill up and (in some sense) run out of space.

It's a funny thought, isn't it?  One of the reasons I can't remember where I left my keys is because my brain still is determined to hang onto the name of my 7th grade English teacher (Mrs. Trowbridge).

I find this a fascinating result, partly because it contradicts my long-held belief (admittedly based on no evidence whatsoever) that no one ever gets close to the actual memory storage capacity of the brain.  Also, it brings up the questionably prudent possibility of developing technology to selectively erase memories, the ethical and personal problems of which are memorably delineated in the wonderful movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Not, in this case, to eliminate traumatic or unpleasant memories, as it was for Jim Carrey's character -- but to free up hard drive space.

Which, aside from the scary aspects, creates some interesting possibilities.  Imagine reading your favorite book, seeing your favorite movie, hearing your favorite song again for the first time.  Wouldn't it be cool to recapture the wonder of having a new experience over and over again?

In any case, this is only the beginning.  A dear friend of mine, the brilliant (now retired) Cornell human genetics professor Dr. Rita Calvo, once made the prediction that "if the 20th century was the century of the gene, the 21st will be the century of the brain."  We are, she said, right now with respect to our understanding of the brain approximately where we were in 1919 with respect to our understanding of genetics -- we know a little bit of the "what" and the "how much," but almost nothing about the "how" and the "why."

If so, we should be looking forward to some amazing advances over the next few years, and I'm sure I'll have to do a lot of reading to keep up with the research even well enough to teach competently my Introductory Neuroscience class.  It's exciting, however, to think that we may finally be elucidating the inner workings of our most intricate organ, and finding out how it does one of the most mysterious things of all -- storing, and retrieving, information.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a brilliant look at two opposing worldviews; Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet.  Mann sees today's ecologists, environmental scientists, and even your average concerned citizens as falling into two broad classes -- wizards (who think that whatever ecological problems we face, human ingenuity will prevail over them) and prophets (who think that our present course is unsustainable, and if we don't change our ways we're doomed).

Mann looks at a representative member from each of the camps.  He selected Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate and driving force behind the Green Revolution, to be the front man for the Wizards, and William Vogt, who was a strong voice for population control and conversation, as his prototypical Prophet.  He takes a close and personal look at each of their lives, and along the way outlines the thorny problems that gave rise to this disagreement -- problems we're going to have to solve regardless which worldview is correct.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Contention in the ganzfeld

I just ran into an article over at Psychology Today that I thought deserved a close examination.

It's by Steve Taylor, senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, and is called "Open-Minded Science."  A one-line summary of the article is that science has an inherent bias against considering parapsychological phenomenon, and that there is compelling evidence of telepathy (known as "psi" by aficionados) from what is known as the ganzfeld experiment.

So, a little background.  Ganzfeld is a German word meaning "entire field," and purports to set test subjects up to maximize their ability to collect data from another mind telepathically.  First proposed by German psychology researcher Wolfgang Metzger, what the procedure entails is placing the subject in complete (or as complete as can be managed) sensory deprivation.  A series of patterns or letters, either on cards or on a computer screen, is observed by the researcher, and the subject attempts to identify what the researcher is seeing.  The removal of other sensory inputs, supporters claim, makes subjects better able to sense telepathic signals, and results in a far higher than chance ability to select the correct target patterns.

The gist of Taylor's article is that these positive results -- well beyond what would be considered statistically significant support for psi -- are being ignored by the scientific establishment because of an entrenched bias against anything that's "paranormal."  Taylor writes:

In recent years, a series of studies showing significant results from psi phenomena have been published in a whole range of major psychology journals.  A number of comprehensive overviews of the evidence have also been published.  Most notably, last year American Psychologist carried an article by Professor Etzel Cardeña entitled “The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A Review.”  Cardeña showed clearly that the evidence for phenomena like telepathy, precognition and clairvoyance has proven so significant and consistent over a massive range of difference experiments that it cannot simply be explained away in terms of fraud, the “file drawer” effect (when researchers don’t bother to publish negative results) or poor methodology.  Cardeña also showed that there is no reason at all to take the view that these phenomena break the laws of science, science they are compatible with many of the theories and findings of quantum physics (which is why many quantum physicists have been open to their existence.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, it drives me nuts when people start attributing psychic phenomena to quantum physics, because those associations are usually based upon scant knowledge of what quantum physics actually says.  But let's look past that for now.  Taylor goes on to say that the evidence has been mounting for years:

A meta-analysis of more than three thousand Ganzfeld trials that took place from 1974 to 2004 had a combined ‘hit rate’ of 32 per cent.  A seven percent higher than chance rate may not seem so impressive, but over such a large number of experiments, this equates to odds of thousands of trillions to one—and a figure far too significant to explained in terms of the file drawer effect.  In addition, in Ganzfeld experiments that have been undertaken with creative people, there has been a significantly higher than normal rate of success.  In 128 Ganzfeld sessions with artistically gifted students at the University of Edinburgh, a 47% success rate was obtained, with odds of 140 million to one.  Similarly, in a session with undergraduates from the Juilliard school of performing arts, the students achieved a hit rate of 50%.

If these figures are correct, then Taylor's right; this is evidence that demands an honest analysis.  As skeptics, we can't just pay attention to the evidence that lines up with the way we already decided the world works, and ignore everything else.  So let's take a look at his claim.

In 1999, Richard Wiseman and Julie Milton, of the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Edinburgh respectively, published a meta-analysis of ganzfeld results in the Psychological Bulletin.  Wiseman and Milton were unequivocal:

The new ganzfeld studies show a near-zero effect size and a statistically nonsignificant overall cumulation.  Out of three autoganzfeld internal effects that the new database examined, only one effect was replicated, and it turns out to have been mistakenly reported by Bern and Honorton (1994) as having been statistically significant in the autoganzfeld studies...  Whatever the reason, the autoganzfeld results have not been replicated by a "broader range of researchers."  The ganzfeld paradigm cannot at present be seen as constituting strong evidence for psychic functioning.

The pro-psi researchers then launched their own rebuttal.  A paper by Daryl Bem, John Palmer, and Richard S. Broughton in the Journal of Parapsychology, published in September of 2001, didn't argue with Wiseman and Milton's analysis, but said that there were ten new studies, and when those are added to the ones analyzed by Wiseman and Milton, "the overall ganzfeld effect again becomes significant."  Thus they stood firm on claims Daryl Bem and Chuck Honorton had made seven years earlier, when they had published their own meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin in which they stated outright that "the psi ganzfeld effect is large enough to be of both theoretical interest and potential practical importance."

Here's where we get into murky water.  Psychological researcher Susan Blackmore, who has a well-deserved reputation for being one of the clearest, most open-minded thinkers on the subject -- and who herself is not willing to dismiss psi out of hand -- clobbered Bem and Honorton in a 2017 article in Skeptical Inquirer, stating that they had included in their analysis a series of studies by Carl Sargent that had been widely criticized for methodological flaws, and in which "the better the quality of the study, the smaller the apparent psi effect."  More troubling still is that Bem and Honorton, apparently deliberately, never mentioned Sargent's name as the source of some of their data, knowing that -- quite rightly -- this would cast doubt over their whole analysis.  Blackmore writes:

They also admitted that “One laboratory contributed 9 of the studies.  Honorton’s own laboratory contributed 5…  Thus, half of the studies were conducted by only 2 laboratories.” (Bem & Honorton, 1994, p 6).  But they did not say which laboratory contributed those nine studies.  Even worse they did not mention Sargent, giving no references to his papers and none to mine.  No one reading their review would have a clue that serious doubt had been cast on more than a quarter of the studies involved. 

I have since met Bem more than once, most recently at one of the Tucson consciousness conferences where we were able to have a leisurely breakfast together and discuss the evidence for the paranormal.  I told Bem how shocked I was that he had included the Sargent data without saying where it came from and without referencing either Sargent’s own papers or the debate that followed my discoveries.  He simply said it did not matter.

But one study -- and one researcher's apparent shoulder-shrug at including debunked studies in his analysis -- doesn't mean much.  There was an in-depth analysis done in 2013 by Jeffrey Rouder, Richard Morey, and Jordan Province, published in Psychological Bulletin, that had the following to say:

Psi phenomena, such as mental telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance, have garnered much recent attention.  We reassess the evidence for psi effects from Storm, Tressoldi, and Di Risio's (2010) meta-analysis...  We find that the evidence from Storm et al.'s presented data set favors the existence of psi by a factor of about 6 billion to 1, which is noteworthy even for a skeptical reader.  Much of this effect, however, may reflect difficulties in randomization: Studies with computerized randomization have smaller psi effects than those with manual randomization.  When the manually randomized studies are excluded and omitted studies included, the Bayes factor evidence is at most 330 to 1, a greatly attenuated value.  We argue that this value is unpersuasive in the context of psi because there is no plausible mechanism and because there are almost certainly omitted replication failures.

And because there can never be enough meta-analyses, researcher and skeptic Andrew Endersby did his own in 2005, and had the following to say:

At the end of my research I find a hit rate of between 28.6% and 28.9% depending on certain choices concerning which scoring methods to use on particular experiments.  This doesn't have quite the headline grabbing appeal of 1 in 3 instead of 1 in 4 but the hit rate is still highly significant for 6,700 sessions.  However, this contains all experiments.  Flawed or not, standard or not.  There's no doubt that this figure can be tweaked up or down according to ruling in or out certain experiments.

Not exactly a ringing proclamation of support.

So where are we now?  Same place, pretty  much.  You've got your true believers, your fervent disbelievers, and people in the middle like myself who would very much like to know if there's actually something there to study.  Because if the ganzfeld effect actually works, it would be kind of earthshattering, you know?  It would mean that there actually was a mechanism for information transfer between minds, and would overturn the basic assumption we have about neuroscience -- that what occurs in your mind is solely the result of electrical and chemical signaling within your own skull.  Even The Skeptic's Dictionary -- usually squarely on the side of the scoffers -- is unwilling to discount it out of hand.  Here's how the entry for the ganzfeld effect ends:

Actually, what we know is that the jury is still out and it probably will never come in if the best that parapsychologists can come up with is a statistic in a meta-analysis that is unlikely due to chance.  Even if we take the data at face value, we know that no matter how statistically significant the results are, the actual size of this psi effect is so small that we can’t detect it in a single person in any obvious way.  We have to deduce it from guessing experiments.  What hope do we have of isolating, harnessing, or expanding this power if a person who has it can’t even directly recognize its presence?

I'll end with another quote from Susan Blackmore, which I think is spot-on.  If anyone has replicable, well-controlled experiments showing the existence of psi, I'm more than willing to consider them.  But until then:

Perhaps errors from the past do not matter if there really is a repeatable experiment.  The problem is that my personal experience conflicts with the successes I read about in the literature and I cannot ignore either side.  I cannot ignore other people's work because science is a collective enterprise and publication is the main way of sharing our findings.  On the other hand I cannot ignore my own findings—there would be no point in doing science, or investigating other people's work, if I did.  The only honest reaction to the claims of psi in the ganzfeld is for me to say "I don't know but I doubt it. "

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a brilliant look at two opposing worldviews; Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet.  Mann sees today's ecologists, environmental scientists, and even your average concerned citizens as falling into two broad classes -- wizards (who think that whatever ecological problems we face, human ingenuity will prevail over them) and prophets (who think that our present course is unsustainable, and if we don't change our ways we're doomed).

Mann looks at a representative member from each of the camps.  He selected Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate and driving force behind the Green Revolution, to be the front man for the Wizards, and William Vogt, who was a strong voice for population control and conversation, as his prototypical Prophet.  He takes a close and personal look at each of their lives, and along the way outlines the thorny problems that gave rise to this disagreement -- problems we're going to have to solve regardless which worldview is correct.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Dog days

Yesterday, we found out that the president of the United States ordered his lawyer to commit perjury before Congress, and has taken his "Oh, yeah, well you're a great big poopyhead!" style of interaction to new levels with revealing the details of a (formerly) secure visit to the troops in Afghanistan by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, presumably to get back at her for denying him the opportunity to deliver his State of the Union speech.

Oh, and there's another "caravan" on the way.  And Ivanka Trump has been tapped to help select the next leader of the World Bank.

*looks around desperately for something, anything, else to think about*

Okay, folks, today we're going to consider: why have sightings of "dogmen" been on the rise lately?

Yesterday we considered eyewitness accounts of seeing pterodactyl-like flying creatures, which is weird enough.  But now we're having to contend with scary visitations by bipedal canines.

As if the quadrupedal kind weren't enough trouble.  Our rescue dog, Guinness, is a truly wonderful guy, but his nickname of "El Destructo" is well earned.  In the past two weeks, he's chewed up a bottle of red ceramic underglaze, a visitor's shoe, a magazine, a pillow, and a single piece from a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.  About the latter, I'd almost have preferred if he'd eaten the whole puzzle; having one piece gnawed is just maddening.

Oh, and he swiped a chunk of gourmet cheese off the counter and ate the entire thing.

Do NOT let this innocent expression fool you.

So the idea that there might be intelligent bipedal dogs, perhaps even with opposable thumbs, is kind of alarming.  But that's just what people have been seeing.

Starting with an anonymous (of course) eyewitness in northern Arkansas, who two months ago saw a fearsome doglike creature while driving home from his job as a roofing worker.

"I came across this evil-looking wolf creature," he said.  "It was carrying something in its hands, like a leash or a rope.  It was standing on two feet on the left side of the road.  It was gray, maybe seven feet tall, three hundred pounds."

That, in the words of a friend of mine, is "a big bow-wow."

Then there's the guy in Colorado who was driving home with his own dog, and saw Fido's scary cousin.  He'd stopped the car and let his dog out to pee, but evidently that was the last thing on her mind.  "She wouldn’t do her business," he said.  "She started barking.  At first I thought she was barking at the traffic, but there was no traffic."

The fact that he even considered the explanation that she was barking at traffic that wasn't there makes me wonder about his reliability as a witness, but let's hear the rest of his testimony.

"I noticed five lights hovering in the sky in the distance...  I quickly put the dog in the car and went to investigate.  The lights rose higher and then got smaller and zigzagged, then vanished."

This did not calm his dog down, and in fact, she seemed even more scared than before.  Then...

"I tried comforting her, and that’s when I noticed something moving in the corner of my eye.  I looked up and saw something running behind my car, through the taillights... It had red fur and a tail, but it also had a human face...  It's hard to describe."

Understandably, the guy hauled ass back out onto the road, but he adds that his dog was still terrified when they arrived home, and he had nightmares for several nights thereafter.

There were other sightings in the last couple of months in Michigan and California, the latter by a retired Air Force security officer who was in a park with her daughter and saw "a large male dogman," six-and-a-half to seven feet tall, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, long arms, dog-like legs, a tail, and amber eyes.  She pulled a gun on it, and started speaking to the thing in her native language (she is Shoshone), and that stopped it from advancing on them.  She and her daughter hightailed it back to their car, and got home safely.  She decided to return the next day with her husband, and see if she could find more evidence (or possibly see it again), and there was no certain trace of the dogman, but they did find a cat skeleton "stripped clean down to the bones."

Skeptic though I am, if I'd seen something like that, I don't think you could pay me enough to return to the same spot.  So major props to her for doing this, and I'm glad that the Shoshone-speaking cat-eating dogman of California didn't harm any of them.

But as far as our initial question -- to wit, why there have been more sightings of dogmen lately -- the only thing I can come up with is that the dogmen have decided we humans had our shot at running the world, but we've fucked things up so royally that they're going to take matters into their own, um, paws.  Maybe they'll team up with yesterday's pterodactyls to form a really New World Order.  Myself, I say let 'em.  Can't be any worse than what we have now.

Of course, if the dogmen are anything like Guinness, they will stubbornly refuse to even consider running the government until you throw the ball for them 459 times, and follow it up by saying "whoozagooboy?" and giving them a dog cookie.

So that's today's cryptozoological news.  And now, sad to say, I've dithered around long enough, and I should probably gird my loins and check the news.  Who knows what might have happened in my absence?  Maybe Donald Trump threw a mud pie at Nancy Pelosi.  Maybe Mitch McConnell finally decided that his title of "Senate Majority Leader" means he should actually lead the Senate.  Maybe Ivanka Trump will be appointed to replace Sarah Huckabee Sanders as White House Spokesperson, given that Sanders is allegedly resigning, probably because she's used up her quota of egregious lies, so now has no option other than telling the truth.

And we can't have that.

But in any case, be on the lookout for dogmen, but play it safe.  A seven-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound dog could do a lot of damage to shoes and jigsaw puzzles.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The wind beneath my wings

We're at a dire crossroads, here in the United States, with a president under investigation, foreign and domestic policy decisions being driven by far right political commentators, political appointees making statements implying they can curtail constitutionally-protected rights.  Looking at the news has become a daily exercise in fighting back a sense of horror.

So today, I'm going to consider: a rash of recent pterodactyl sightings.

I learned about this phenomenon over at Cryptozoology News, where aficionados of creatures that don't technically exist can go for updates.  It turns out that we've had a sudden spike in reports of giant winged creatures, inevitably described as "bat-like" although many times larger than the biggest bats.

And since such explanations as "the eyewitness was drunk, confused, or just making shit up" clearly aren't applicable here, we are forced to the conclusion that pterodactyloids didn't become extinct 66 million years ago, they stuck around and are now appearing in places such as Wisconsin.

In fact, the Wisconsin sighting is only one of many in the last few months.  This particular report tells of an anonymous (of course) eyewitness who last August was driving home one afternoon and saw "a weird thing flying in the sky."  The creature was estimated at being two meters in length, and had "skin on its wings instead of feathers."

"Like a bat," he said.  "It looked like a pterodactyl or some kind of angel."

For reference, let's consider each of these:

Fig. 1: A bat  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Barracuda1983, Pipistrellus flight2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Fig. 2: A pterodactyloid [Image is in the Public Domain]

Fig. 3: An angel [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I think we can all agree that it'd be easy to confuse the three.

But our gentleman in Wisconsin isn't the only one to see a strange flying creature recently.  In November, a woman in Chester County, Pennsylvania saw a huge thing with wings while she was zooming down the interstate.  "I realized just how big it actually was," she said.  "The wingspan was twice the width of the car, as it flew over it and headed straight toward my car.  The feathers were black, or very dark brown.  As it flew over my car, I ducked a bit, to look up at it, through the windshield.  It was amazing to see such a beautiful sight. If I hadn’t been driving so fast – the speed limit is 70 mph – I could have attempted to take a photo."

An even bigger one was spotted only a few days later in Ohio.  A woman was driving with her fiance in Ravenna, Ohio, and stopped at a stoplight, only to see something enormous gliding overhead.  "It was two or three times larger than our SUV," she said.  "It had elbow-like wings.  It was darker than the sky.  The thing was huge."

The most recent sighting was just last week, once again in Pennsylvania, which seems to have more than its fair share of pterodactyls.  This time, a 47-year-old construction worker said he was out cutting firewood when the thing flew over.

"A large shadow appeared above me," he said.  "I ran inside to grab my phone, but by the time I came outside the bird was gone.  I’ve been terrified to go outside since that event."

He described it as a "green bird with a twenty-foot wingspan, covered in scales, [with] a spike on the end of its tail and razor-sharp talons."  He added, "It looked like a lizard."

Once again, for reference:

Fig. 4: A lizard.  [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons SajjadF, Lizard - e, CC BY 3.0]

So apparently, what we have here is a prehistoric-looking lizard angel bat-bird.  At least all the eyewitnesses agree on the fact that they're huge.

For my loyal readers in Wisconsin, Ohio, and (especially) Pennsylvania, keep your eyes on the skies, and let me know if any enormous winged creatures soar over.  Feel free to report your sightings here.  I realize seeing something like this could be scary, but the upside of it is that it'll take your mind off Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, so as far as I'm concerned, bring on the pterodactyls.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Memento mori

People have really weird attitudes toward death.

Note that I am not just referring to religious concepts of the afterlife, here, although as an atheist I am bound to think that some of those sound pretty bizarre, too.  I've heard everything from your traditional harps-and-haloes idea, to being more or less melted down and fused with god, to fields of flowers and babbling brooks, to spending all of eternity with your dead relatives (and it may sound petty of me, but considering a few of my relatives, this last one sounds more like a version of hell).  Then, of course, you have the much-discussed Islamic 72-virgins concept of heaven, which brings up the inevitable question of what the virgins' opinions about all of this might be.  All of these strike me as equal parts absurdity and wishful thinking, given that (honestly) believers have come to these conclusions based on exactly zero evidence.

But today, I'm more considering the rituals and traditions surrounding death itself, aside from all of the ponderings of what (if anything) might happen to us afterwards.  I was first struck by how oddly death is handled, even here in relatively secular America, when my mom died fourteen years ago.  My wife and I were doing the wrenching, painful, but necessary choosing of a coffin, and we were told by the salesman that there was a model that had a little drawer inside in which "photographs, letters, and other mementos can be placed."  There was, we were told, a battery-powered light inside the drawer, presumably because it's dark down there in the ground.

Carol and I looked at each other, and despite the circumstances, we both laughed.  Did this guy really think that my mom was going to be down there in the cemetery, and would periodically get bored and need some reading material?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nabokov at English Wikipedia, CoffinShopWarsaw, CC BY 3.0]

Lest you think that this is just some sort of weird sales gimmick, an aberration, recently I ran into an article that describes an invention by Swedish music and video equipment salesman Fredrik Hjelmquist.  Hjelmquist has one-upped the coffin with the bookshelf and reading light; his coffins have surround-sound, and the music storage device inside the coffin can be updated to "provide solace for grieving friends and relatives by making it possible for them to alter the deceased's playlist online."

The whole thing comes with a price tag of 199,000 kroner (US$30,700), which you would think would put it out of the price range of nearly everyone -- but there have been thousands of inquiries, mostly from the United States and Canada, but also from as far away as China and Taiwan.

Now, I understand that many of the rituals surrounding death are for the comfort of the living; the flowers, the wakes, the songs at funerals, and so on.  But this one is a little hard to explain based solely on that, I think.  Is there really anyone out there who would be comforted by the fact that Grandma Bertha is down there in Shady Grove Memorial Park, rockin' out to Metallica?  I would think that if you would go for something like this, especially considering the cost, you would have to believe on some level that the Dearly Departed really is listening.  Which, to me, is kind of creepy, because it implies that the person you just buried is somehow still down there. Conscious and aware. In that cold, dark box underground.

To me, this is the opposite of comforting.  This is Poe's "The Premature Burial."

The whole thing brings to mind the Egyptians' practice of placing food, gifts, mummified pets, and so on in the tombs of departed rich people, so they'll have what they need on their trip into the afterlife.   But unlike the Egyptians, who had a whole intricate mythology built up around death, we just have bits and pieces, no coherent whole that would make sense of it.  (And again, that's with the exception of religious explanations of the afterlife.)  As a culture, we're distinctly uneasy about the idea of dying, but we can't quite bring ourselves to jump to the conclusion, "he's just gone, and we don't understand it."

I was always struck by the Klingons' approach to death in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  As a comrade-in-arms is dying, you howl, signifying that the folks in the afterlife better watch out, because a seriously badass warrior is on the way.   But afterwards -- do what you want with the body, because the person who inhabited it is gone.  "It is just a dead shell," they say. "Dispose of it as you see fit."

Me, I like the Viking approach.  When I die, I'd appreciate it if my family and friends would stick me on a raft, set it on fire, and launch it out into the ocean, and then have a blowout party on the beach afterwards, complete with drinking, dancing, and debauchery.  Sending a burning boat out into the ocean is probably all kinds of illegal, much less one with a corpse on it, but it seems like a fitting farewell, given that I've always thought that Thor and Odin and Loki and the rest of the gang were a great deal more appealing than any other religion I've ever run across.  But if that turns out to be impractical, just "dispose of me as you see fit."  And in any case, I am quite sure that I won't need a reading light or surround-sound.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Dream a little dream of me

I got a "what do you think of this?" sort of email from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday, along with a link to an article over at Collective Evolution entitled, "Scientist Demonstrates Fascinating Evidence of Precognitive Dreaming."

I tried not to read it with my scoffer-hat on.  I have to admit, though, that my immediate bias is to disbelieve in precognition of any sort -- if there was true precognition, there'd be no cases of psychics getting in car accidents and lots of cases of psychics winning the lottery.  Also, there's the troubling lack of a mechanism by which this could happen; regardless of where you fall on the free-will-versus-determinism spectrum, the one-way flow of time seems to preclude information of any kind going the other way (although it must be admitted up front that the "arrow of time" problem -- why time is asymmetrical, moving only one direction -- is a perplexing conundrum in physics that is far from settled).

So I tried to keep my mind open, but not so far open that my brains fell out.  And here's what I learned.

Stanley Krippner, professor of psychology at Saybrook University (Oakland, California), and was curious about the alleged phenomenon of precognitive dreams.  So he set up an experiment as follows, described in an interview with Geraldine Cremine of Vice Motherboard:

Each night, the subject dreamer would go through an ordinary night of dreaming, with an intent to dream about an experience he would have the following morning.  The dreamer was woken 4-5 times throughout the night to relay his dreams to an experimenter.  The following mornings, experimenters randomly selected an experience from a number of prearranged options, and the dreamer was subjected to that experience.  Dr. Krippner said there was no way for the participants to know what experience they would encounter before it was selected and administered.

One participant stood out.  He dreamed of birds several nights in a row, and the randomly-selected video and audio he was presented with was -- bird songs.

Job's Evil Dream, by William Blake (1805) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Of course, you don't get very far by picking out the bit of your data that conforms best to your hypothesis, and putting all the weight on that.  But according to Krippner, the independent judges who evaluated the evidence found at least one correspondence between the dream content and the video or audio experience they were given the next morning.

Okay, this experiment does have something going for it, at least over the anecdotal, after-the-fact reporting that most instances of alleged precognition rely on.  The fact that the experience the next morning was chosen at random, and thus was uninfluenced by what the dreamer's reported dream content was, is certainly suggestive.  Having independent evaluators analyze the dreams and the experiences and see if there was a correlation is certainly better than having it done by someone with a preconceived notion of what they were going to find.

But... the problem with this study is the same one that plagues all dream-content studies; there's a relatively small number of dream types, and we all tend to dream about the same stuff.  Friends, family, being in danger (e.g. being chased, falling, being held captive), not to mention the inevitable erotic dreams we all have from time to time.  So in general terms, if you have the video/audio experience reflect any of these, chances are there'll be correlations at some point.

It very much remains to be seen if the number, and specificity, of those correlations was significantly over what you'd expect from chance alone.

Then Krippner does something that I find absolutely maddening; attributing the effect to quantum physics.  Krippner says,  "Quantum events happen on a different time scale to what most people live and experience in the West.  We have this understanding of time that is: ‘past, present, future.’ But quantum physics gives you a different concept of time."

Predictably, this made me weep softly while banging my head on the keyboard.

Quantum events happen on a different scale than we're used to, kind of by definition; quantum mechanics describes the behavior of matter and energy on the submicroscopic scales.  Yes, it's counterintuitive, even if you're not here "in the West."  But quantum effects such as entanglement are so difficult to observe in the macroscopic world that it's only in the last few years that physicists have been able to demonstrate conclusively that they exist.  The idea that entanglement explains why I and a friend showed up at work yesterday wearing nearly identical shirts is blatantly idiotic.

Actually, it's worse than that; it's lazy.  Instead of doing the hard work to learn some quantum physics -- an endeavor that would rapidly put to rest any idea that it has to do with dreams -- Krippner just goes, "Blah blah dreaming blah blah shamanic consciousness blah blah quantum mechanics," and people apparently just nod and say, "Cool.  Makes sense."

So the problem here is twofold.  One piece is to demonstrate that there's anything here to study, something that could be established by replicating Krippner's dreaming experiment and seeing if you get the same results.  This should be straightforward enough; after all, the experiment doesn't require much in the way of sophisticated technology.

But the second problem is the tendency of people to take stuff like this and run right off a cliff with it.  It's no different than young-Earth creationists saying that scientists say the Big Bang means "nothing exploded and made everything" and evolution means "humans evolved from a rock" (both statements are, by the way, direct quotes from creationists I've run into online).  A very brief amount of research would establish that in neither case have scientists claimed anything of the kind.  So if you're going to use scientific research, either to support/explain some claim of yours or to argue against one you'd like to disprove, then for cryin' in the sink find out what the scientists are actually saying.  It's way more interesting than the shallow, screwy misconceptions you often hear people trumpet, and it'll keep you from making silly mistakes and discrediting your entire argument.

Which, I'm afraid, is exactly what Stanley Krippner did.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]