The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall

One of the more curious ghost stories I've ever heard is the tale of the "Brown Lady," named after her drab clothing, who has been allegedly seen many times in Raynham Hall Manor in Norfolk, England.

I first ran across the story in a collection called 50 Great Ghost Stories by John Canning, which from the inscription inside the front cover -- "October 29, 1977 -- Mon cher ami -- mieux vaut tard que jamais -- Amélie" -- I received three days after my seventeenth birthday from a family friend.

It's a pretty cool book, although (like many of this ilk) it mixes myth and folklore with stories that actually have some historical veracity.  The tale of the Brown Lady is one of the second type, because the people involved are actual historical figures, although the evidence for the haunting itself is still a little on the sketchy side.

The facts of the case are pretty well documented.  Lady Dorothy Walpole (18 September 1686 - 29 March 1726), who was the sister of Robert Walpole, the first prime minister of England, was married to Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend.  Townshend had been married before, to one Elizabeth Pelham, by whom he had five children; he and Dorothy Walpole had seven more, the youngest of which was the mother of Charles Cornwallis, who signed the surrender at the Siege of Yorktown and ended the American Revolutionary War.

Dorothy Walpole wasn't happy, however, partly because Charles Townshend was more interested in growing turnips (I kid you not) than in devoting himself to his wife and family, and also because supposedly he had a nasty temper, which I would too if I had to eat turnips.  Be that as it may, Dorothy Walpole Townshend sought solace elsewhere, but unfortunately for her, she chose Thomas Wharton, 1st Marquess of Wharton, as a lover.

Well, the story goes that either Townshend or Wharton's wife (the legend varies) caught Dorothy and Thomas in flagrante delicto, and Townshend decided the only proper response was to lock his wife up in Raynham Hall to prevent her from cheating on him again.  She stayed there for the rest of her life, dying in 1726 at the young age of 40, possibly of smallpox -- although if she was never allowed outside her room, you have to wonder who she caught it from.

Be that as it may, once Dorothy Walpole Townshend's sad and short life had ended, people started to report the presence of a specter haunting Raynham Hall.

The most famous of the encounters was with novelist Frederick Maryatt, who was a friend of Charles Dickens.  Maryatt's daughter, Florence, wrote in 1891 about her father's meeting with the Brown Lady :

…he took possession of the room in which the portrait of the apparition hung, and in which she had been often seen, and slept each night with a loaded revolver under his pillow.  For two days, however, he saw nothing, and the third was to be the limit of his stay.  On the third night, however, two young men (nephews of the baronet), knocked at his door as he was undressing to go to bed, and asked him to step over to their room (which was at the other end of the corridor), and give them his opinion on a new gun just arrived from London.  My father was in his shirt and trousers, but as the hour was late, and everybody had retired to rest except themselves, he prepared to accompany them as he was.  As they were leaving the room, he caught up his revolver, "in case you meet the Brown Lady," he said, laughing.  When the inspection of the gun was over, the young men in the same spirit declared they would accompany my father back again, "in case you meet the Brown Lady," they repeated, laughing also.  The three gentlemen therefore returned in company. 

The corridor was long and dark, for the lights had been extinguished, but as they reached the middle of it, they saw the glimmer of a lamp coming towards them from the other end.  "One of the ladies going to visit the nurseries," whispered the young Townshends to my father.  Now the bedroom doors in that corridor faced each other, and each room had a double door with a space between, as is the case in many old-fashioned houses.  My father, as I have said, was in shirt and trousers only, and his native modesty made him feel uncomfortable, so he slipped within one of the outer doors (his friends following his example), in order to conceal himself until the lady should have passed by. 

I have heard him describe how he watched her approaching nearer and nearer, through the chink of the door, until, as she was close enough for him to distinguish the colors and style of her costume, he recognised the figure as the facsimile of the portrait of "The Brown Lady."  He had his finger on the trigger of his revolver, and was about to demand it to stop and give the reason for its presence there, when the figure halted of its own accord before the door behind which he stood, and holding the lighted lamp she carried to her features, grinned in a malicious and diabolical manner at him.  This act so infuriated my father, who was anything but lamb-like in disposition, that he sprang into the corridor with a bound, and discharged the revolver right in her face.  The figure instantly disappeared - the figure at which for several minutes three men had been looking together – and the bullet passed through the outer door of the room on the opposite side of the corridor, and lodged in the panel of the inner one.  My father never attempted again to interfere with "The Brown Lady of Raynham."

Now, to be fair, Florence Maryatt isn't exactly what you might call an impartial witness.  She was heavily into spiritualism, and was the author of books with titles like There is No Death and The Spirit World.  So I'm inclined to take anything she says with a grain or two of salt.

Which, of course, I would have anyhow.

Maryatt, however, wasn't the only one to claim seeing the Brown Lady in person.  In 1936, a photographer named Hubert Provand, who worked for Country Life magazine, was taking photos of Raynham Hall for a feature article.  They were setting up for a shoot of the wide interior staircase when Provand's assistant, Indre Shira, pointed at "a vapoury form gradually assuming the appearance of a woman moving down the stairs towards us."  Provand took a photo of the apparition, which has since become one of the most famous ghost photographs ever:

The incident was investigated by Harry Price, a noted paranormal researcher whose reputation for accepting questionable evidence led to his leaving the skeptical and science-based Society for Psychical Research, and founding his own rival organization, the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, because the obvious answer to skepticism is to start a group that will see things your way.  (One of the more famous examples of Price's dubious approach to investigation was the debacle of Borley Rectory, the "most haunted house in England," the evidence for which subsequent inquiries found was almost entirely fabrication.)

For what it's worth, which is probably not much, Price declared the Brown Lady photograph authentic, saying "the negative is entirely innocent of any kind of faking."  But like Florence Maryatt, he's not exactly the most reliable source of information.  Further analysis showed that the image is most likely a double exposure (note the pale lines above the stair treads, and the double reflections on the bannisters).  The ghost figure itself shows a lot of similarity to a traditional Madonna statue, down to a foggy impression below the face that appears to be hands folded in prayer.

Even if the photograph is a fake, of course, it doesn't mean that the other accounts aren't true.  But at the moment, the story doesn't have much to recommend it -- other than a second-hand and probably biased account, and a famous photograph that is almost certainly a fake, the Brown Lady doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

It's still kind of a cool story, however, and I'd love to visit Raynham Hall myself.  If I ever get to go, however, allow me to reassure Dorothy Walpole Townshend that I plan on being entirely unarmed, and even if I were to bring a gun for some reason, I'd never think of shooting her in the face with it.  I mean, it's all very well to get scared in those kinds of situations, but that kind of breaches the rules of etiquette even so.

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This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Viral nonsense

Some days, optimism is just a losing proposition.

Today's reason for repeated facepalms has to do with COVID-19, better known as Wuhan coronavirus.  It's not that the virus isn't scary enough by itself; there are currently 75,000 cases of confirmed COVID-19 worldwide, just over 2,000 of which have died of the illness.  So the mortality rate still isn't as high as that of this year's influenza strains, but it's enough to be worrisome.

So I suppose it's an understandable enough impulse -- to ascribe some kind of underlying reason for an event that otherwise just appears to be an unfortunate example of the chaotic nature of the universe.  But for fuck's sake, can't we try to restrain that a little bit?  Because the nonsense about this epidemic is really beginning to piss me off, and (I suspect) piss off the legitimate researchers, as well.

First, we have the evangelical wingnuts weighing in.

Rick Wiles, of TruNews, who has been something of a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia, jumped into the fray with the statement that the coronavirus was God's "death angel" sent to visit destruction upon us because of the push in the United States for LGBTQ rights, and also for all the "filth" in television and movies.  When the topic was raised of why (if that was so) the vast majority of cases were in China, Wiles didn't hesitate.  It's because China has a "godless communist government that persecutes Christians."  "God is about to purge a lot of the sin off this planet," he said.

Then there's the ever-entertaining Jim Bakker, who said that yes, coronavirus is bad, but it can be "cured in twelve hours" by a solution of colloidal silver.  That, coincidentally, he's selling by the bottle on his television show ("Call now to get yours!  Only forty dollars!").  Never mind that colloidal silver doesn't do a damn thing for a viral infection, and also has a permanent side effect -- it turns your skin a bizarre blue/gray color, a condition called argyria.

Maybe he's hoping that if all his followers turn blue, they won't feel so awkward supporting a politician who is orange.  I dunno.

Then the conspiracy theorists got involved.

It couldn't possibly be that the COVID-19 was introduced into the human population in the usual fashion -- via accidental contact with an animal vector.  This is virtually always the cause of so-called "emergent viruses," from the deadly Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa fevers to diseases like chikungunya, which usually doesn't kill you but makes you wish it did (the name comes from the Makonde language of Tanzania, and means "doubled over with pain").  But no, that's too prosaic.

It has to be biowarfare.

COVID-19  [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the CDC]

The first piece of the conspiracy theory came when Charles Lieber, chair of Harvard University's Department of Chemistry, was arrested and charged with "making a materially false statement" regarding funding received from China.  So far, big news to academics, but not of much interest to the rest of us.

Until it came out that some of the funding came from Wuhan University.

Well, no way was that a coincidence.  Then a Chinese researcher was arrested trying to smuggle 21 vials of "biological substances," so of course there was no way it could be anything else but coronavirus, because Chinese + biological samples = deliberate viral terrorism.

Cue all the conspiracy fans to start having multiple orgasms.

Okay.  Where to start?

First, Lieber's arrest had nothing to do with coronavirus, and neither did the arrest of Zaosong Zheng, the Chinese researcher/smuggler.  And if you dig a little deeper, you find out that Zheng was trying to smuggle the samples out of the United States and back to China, not the other way around (which is what you'd expect if there was some kind of horrible plot by the Chinese to cause a pandemic using a manufactured bioweapon), and... most importantly... the "biological substances" weren't even virus cultures.  They were cancer cells that he was hoping to get back home so he could publish the data from the cultures under his own name and scoop the American researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he'd stolen them from.

But even that information didn't make much of a dent.  So The Lancet decided to respond.  One of the most prestigious and respected medical journals in the world, The Lancet published a couple of days ago a statement by 27 medical researchers, epidemiologists, and health professionals saying that there was nothing artificial about COVID-19.  They write:

The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins.  We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.  Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.  This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and by the scientific communities they represent.  Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.  We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture.

There you have it.  The people who have actually studied this stuff have spoken authoritatively.  So when this came out, you would expect that the conspiracy theorists would chuckle in an embarrassed sort of way and say, "Wow, what a bunch of goobers we are."

You would be wrong.

This just reinforced their conviction that something big was afoot, because now they had proof that not only was COVID-19 a Chinese-manufactured bioweapon, the evil scientists responsible were covering it up.  How did they know this?

Because there was no evidence.  Duh.  You think evil super-conspirators are dumb enough to leave evidence?

And because the whole story wouldn't be complete without an American politician getting involved, just a couple of days ago Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas -- who is in some kind of contest with Matt Gaetz and Louie Gohmert to see who has the lowest IQ in Congress -- stated that "we have to keep our minds open:"

I'm suggesting we need to be open to all possibilities and we need to demand that China open up and be transparent so a team of international experts can figure out exactly where this virus originated.  We know it didn't originate in the Wuhan food market based on the study of Chinese scientists ...  I'm not saying where it started, I don't know.  We don't know because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) won't open up to international experts.  That's what we need to do so they can get to the bottom of where the virus originated and hopefully can effect a diagnostic test and vaccine for it. 

Let's take the professor [Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University]  He was ...in fact today cited in the Asia Times saying that it was quite possible that it was a laboratory incident.  That's not saying this is a bioweapon, but we do know they were investigating and researching coronavirus in that laboratory.  It could've been an accidental breach, it could've been a worker that was infected.  My point is that we don’t know until we get all the evidence from the Chinese Communist Party, it is only responsible, not irresponsible, to keep an open mind about the hypotheses.

Okay.  First of all, we already have fucking international experts.  27 of them, in fact, who have stated unequivocally that COVID-19 is of natural origin.  Second, if you actually read the Asia Times article (or in Cotton's case, have a staffer read it to him), you find out that Ebright said "there was no indication that the virus had been artificially modified," but "there was no way to rule out" that the epidemic hadn't started in a lab accident.

Which is an example of typical scientific caution.  You can't rule something out for certain unless you have proof.  No proof = there's still a possibility.  But this is a far cry from Cotton's statement that "it's quite possible that it was a laboratory incident."

The whole thing is making me grind my teeth down to nubs.

But that's the problem with conspiracy theories.  The more you argue, the more convinced the conspiracy theorists become.  And if you're arguing, you're either a dupe or a shill.  It's kind of the opposite of the scientific method; with conspiracy theories, the less evidence you have, the more likely it is.

Because those conspirators are just that sly.

Anyhow, that's the latest on coronavirus.  It's bad, but not as bad as the flu, which we deal with every single year without people having complete meltdowns.  It'll probably dwindle, the way most epidemics do -- no one I've talked to who knows about viruses and epidemiology is particularly concerned that this is going to be the next Black Death.

But try to convince the evangelical lunatics, conspiracy theorists, and Tom Cotton of that.

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

This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Crossing the line

I'm probably pasting a big-ass bullseye right on my chest even asking this, but I have to: Trump supporters, what would it take for you to admit you were wrong about him?

During the election campaign, he mocked a reporter's disability, doing a grotesque parody of his flailing movements for a laughing, jeering crowd.  But you still voted for him.

It came out during the campaign that during a radio interview, Trump had bragged about sexual assault -- stating that when you're rich and famous you can do anything to women without their consent, including "grab(bing) them by the pussy."  But you still voted for him.

While married, he had an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, then paid her not to make it public.  But you still call him moral.

Despite his constant screeching about "witch hunts," the investigations into wrongdoing by members of his administration -- led by Republican Robert Mueller -- resulted in thirty indictments and a score more credible allegations.  But you still support him.

His disdain for other ethnic groups is blatant, from his responding to the hurricane damage in Puerto Rico by throwing rolls of paper towels into the crowd to calling Third-World countries "shitholes."   He fully supports policies keeping children from those "shithole countries" in cages on our borders, cages in which some of them have died.  But you still support him.

"Disdain" is probably too mild a word.  He shows every sign of being a racist, judging from his refusal to stand down from his call for the death penalty for the Central Park Five after they were all completely exonerated.  He has a history of racist and racially-insensitive statements going back into the 1970s, including a statement that "laziness is a trait in blacks."  But you still support him.

He lies continuously, to the point that there is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to cataloguing them.  The Washington Post numbered them at over sixteen thousand.  And you still believe him.

He has repeatedly sided with Russia over our own policymakers and foreign policy experts, including stating publicly that Russia was right to be in Afghanistan and that there was no way Russia meddled in the 2016 election because Putin told him so.  But you still support him.

He has repeatedly weakened standards for pollution, most recently when his hand-picked EPA advisers ended a review of safe ozone levels with a statement that there "was no justification for continuing."  These advisors, by the way, are virtually all representatives of fossil fuel interests or the tobacco lobby.  Earlier this year, he rolled back water pollution standards, freeing up industry to dump pollutants into rivers and lakes without fear of prosecution.  Trump's own words about his environmental policies?  He "cares very deeply about the environment" and because of him "we'll have the cleanest air and water in the world."  And you still believe him.

His litany of blatantly fumbling, inarticulate, or outright ignorant comments are far too many to list, because there are new ones just about every time he opens his mouth.  But you still believe he is a "very stable genius."

And now, just two days ago, he pardoned Michael "Junk Bond" Milken and Rod Blagojevich from prison -- Milken from a ten-year sentence for insider trading, Blagojevich in the middle of a fourteen-year sentence for corruption and fraud -- for no reason except that he apparently thought of them as comrades-in-arms.  He said that Blagojevich's sentence in particular was a travesty, and that the ex-governor was railroaded by the "same people" who were responsible for his impeachment -- "Comey, Fitzpatrick, the same group."  This despite the fact that Comey had nothing to do with Blagojevich's trial, and the second man he was apparently referring to -- Patrick Fitzgerald -- was involved with Blagojevich's conviction but had nothing to do with the impeachment.

But you still trust him.

Wiser heads than mine have asked the question "what would it take?", and it keeps coming back to something Trump himself said during the campaign -- that he could shoot a man in full view on 5th Avenue and not lose a single supporter.  This seems to have little to do with conservatism per se: prominent conservative voices like Joe Walsh and Bill Kristol have come out stridently against the graft, corruption, and duplicity that have swamped the Republican Party, but despite their articulate criticisms of Trump and his cronies in Congress -- people like Lindsay Graham, Mitch McConnell, Matt Gaetz, and Jim Jordan -- Trump's support hasn't declined appreciably.

Look, I'm no party ideologue myself.  I tend to sit something left of center, but I have many conservative friends with whom I've had interesting, eye-opening, and productive discussions.  My father was a staunch conservative, to my knowledge voting Republican in every election, and I had great respect for his integrity and his views.  And when Democrats have been caught in criminal and/or immoral activity -- Elliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, and Blagojevich himself come to mind -- I, and most of the other Democrats I know, have not hesitated to call them out on it, and been glad for them to receive whatever consequences are appropriate.

So this is more than ideology.  This is a cult of personality.  And... if that doesn't frighten you, or seems an unfair designation... ask yourself why.  If you still support this man, after all of the above (and all the other egregious acts I don't have space to list), why?  What would he have to do, in your opinion, to go over the line?  Do you truly disbelieve everything I've listed, despite the video and audio evidence, and his own words in interviews and on Twitter?  Is it really all "fake news?"  Is a man who cheated on his wife with a porn star, who has currently standing 23 rape and sexual misconduct allegations, and who cannot recall a single Bible verse, really "the most godly, biblical president ever elected?"

If this isn't a cult, what the hell is it?  Go ahead, convince me.

And is this -- a culture of divisiveness, dishonesty, and corruption -- really what you had in mind when you voted for him?

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

This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Thin places

My first trip overseas, back in 1995, was an ambitious one; I did a month-long solo hike across England, starting on the shore of the Irish Sea in Blackpool and ending on a hill overlooking the North Sea in Whitby.  I decided to have a theme for the trip -- a practice I have continued to this day -- and the theme I chose was monasteries.

A great many of the abbeys in England were destroyed during the "Dissolution of the Monasteries," when King Henry VIII decided the church was getting way too rich and powerful and decided to see what he could do to remedy that.  Between 1536 and 1541, over eight hundred monasteries, abbeys, and convents were closed and their property sold off, the abbots, priests, and nuns turned out or arrested outright, the majestic buildings left to sink slowly into ruin.

Along the path I took, which largely coincides with the North York Moors Trail, there were a number of these relics, and I made a point of seeing as many as I could.  They were impressive, beautiful, tragic places, monuments not only to spirituality but to greed (on both sides of the struggle).

Unsurprisingly, the spiritual side of it didn't have a great impact on me, except for my sympathy for the religious men and women who had dedicated themselves to the contemplative life and then had those lives turned upside down by the conflict.  But it all seemed relegated in the distant past, unable to touch my modern experience except as a historical footnote.

Until I got to Rievaulx Abbey, near the town of Helmsley.

My hike into Rievaulx was on a gorgeous day -- one of the few I had during a four-week period that was cold and rainy even by English standards.  That day the weather was mild and sunny, with only a few white clouds in an azure sky.  I crested a low line of hills, and looked down into the little valley in which the ruins of the abbey sit, and was dumbstruck.

It was not solely because of the place's beauty, although beautiful it certainly is.  The place gave me chills, as if I was looking at something that wasn't quite of this world -- a reaction I had never experienced before and haven't experienced since.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons WyrdLight.com, RievaulxAbbey-wyrdlight-24588, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Now, twenty-five years ago, I was every bit as much of a skeptic as I am now, but I couldn't shake the feeling the entire time I wandered around the abbey grounds.  I dropped my pack and shucked my shoes by the side of a little tumbling river that runs through the valley, cooling my sore feet, and kept thinking about the men and women who had lived here -- and whose presence I could still, inexplicably, feel around me.

During my visit, I struck up a conversation with a friendly middle-aged couple, who ended up inviting me to have mid-afternoon tea with them.  I mentioned my odd sensations to them, and the woman immediately smiled.  "Oh, yes," she said.  "Lots of people feel that way about Rievaulx.  You get the impression not that the place is sacred because it's the site of an abbey, but that the abbey was built there because the place was already sacred."

I have never been able to explain what I felt during that visit, other than my rational side's certainty that the beauty of the day and the history of the place simply got the better of me.  But I keep coming back to the fact that I never had those sensations in any of the other religious sites I saw on that trip -- which included gorgeous, history-laden places such as York Cathedral, Fountains Abbey, Kirkham Priory, and Grey Friars Tower.  There was something different about Rievaulx, but what that something is, I've never put my finger on.

The Scots call spots like Rievaulx "thin places."  We walk side-by-side with the spirit world, the legends go, separated by an invisible veil, but in some places the veil is thin and we get a glimpse, or sometimes just a feeling, that there something more there than meets the eye.  Places like that aren't haunted in the conventional sense, but true believers will tell you that you can't go there and come away unscathed.

I won't say that my visit to Rievaulx convinced me of some kind of ineffable otherworld; after all here I am, over two decades later, still talking about rationalism and skepticism and for the most part casting a wry eye at claims of the paranormal.  But something happened to me in that little valley, whether I was picking up on a thin spot in the veil or it was simply the product of my senses acting on my often-overwrought imagination.

And while I don't agree with his basic assumptions, the whole experience makes the quote from the Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade have a strange resonance for me: "Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane...  In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act — the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural profane world."

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

This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Back to Africa

I was kind of tickled, when I got my "23 & Me" results back a couple of years ago, to find out that I had 284 identified Neanderthal markers, identifying me as having more Neanderthal ancestry than 60% of the samples tested.

The reason I was happy about this is not because it gave me an explanation for why I like my steaks rare and have a general aversion to wearing clothes.  It was more because I find the Neanderthals a fascinating bunch.  Far from the low-intelligence cave trolls a lot of us picture them as -- witness the use of their name as an insult -- by the end they actually had larger brains than your average modern Homo sapiens.  They had culture; they anointed and buried their dead, seem to have had music (if the archaeologists are correct about the origin of the Divje Babe flute), and might even have had language -- they had the same variant of the FOX-P2 gene that we do, which is instrumental to our ability to understand and produce spoken language.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Clemens Vasters, Neanderthal in a business suit, CC BY 2.0]

It also wasn't terribly surprising in my own case, as Europeans generally have more Neanderthal ancestry than any other group, and my test results showed me to be -- also unsurprising, given what I know of my family tree -- nearly 100% of European origin, mainly French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English.  The Neanderthals themselves are named after the Neander Valley of Germany, where archaeologists found the first fossils of the species (or subspecies, depending on who you believe).  So once it was determined that they had interbred with early modern Homo sapiens, their geographical distribution led to a (correct) surmise that Europeans would have more Neanderthal ancestry than other ethnic groups, for the same reason that southeast Asians and Native Australians have more Denisovan ancestry than the rest of us.

That's why a paper in Cell two weeks ago came as such a shock.  In it, a team led by Lu Chen of Princeton University found that a number of African ethnic groups, especially those in northern and western Africa, have a lot more Neanderthal ancestry than anyone realized.

Because it's still not as much as the Europeans have, and the African Neanderthal genes identified are variants usually found in Europe, the guess is that some of the European Homo sapiens/Neanderthal hybrids made their way across (or around) the Mediterranean in a "back-to-Africa" migration, injecting Neanderthal genes into groups that previously had little to no Neanderthal ancestry.

It also means that geneticists may be underestimating the number of Neanderthal markers in the rest of us.  Because those estimates were made using comparison between sample DNA and that of people thought to have no Neanderthal ancestry at all -- such as the Yoruba of Nigeria -- if those African groups did have ancestry that was the result of a back-to-Africa migration by European hybrids, then that revises the baseline upward.  The former estimates of 1.7-1.8% Neanderthal DNA for your average person of European descent might be on the low side.

"Our work highlights how humans and Neanderthals interacted for hundreds of thousands of years, with populations dispersing out of and back into Africa," said study co-author Joshua Akey in an interview with Science News.  "Remnants of Neanderthal DNA survive in every modern human population studied to date."

I find it fascinating how DNA is now being used to track relationships and migratory patterns not only of other animal species, but of humans.  And it's gotten pretty accurate.  It picked up my Ashkenazic ancestry, identifying it at 6% -- just about right based on my one great-great-grandfather, Solomon Meyer-Lévy of Dauendorf, Alsace, who emigrated from his birthplace and joined a small community of French-speaking Jews in Donaldsonville, Louisiana in around 1850.  The other interesting result in my own DNA that made sense was a smattering of Italian ancestry, undoubtedly because my father's paternal line ancestor, Jacques-Esprit Ariey-Bonnet, was born in a little town in the French Alps, quite close to the border of Italy.

So the amount we can learn about our own past from our genes is staggering, and I'm sure there are other surprises in store for us.  It informs us not only of our physical makeup but our history, a millions-of-years-long trail leading back to our most distant hominid ancestors on the savannas of Kenya and Tanzania.

Although it still doesn't explain the rare steaks and nudity thing.

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This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The universal language

Sometimes I have thoughts that blindside me.

The last time that happened was three days ago, while I was working in my office and our elderly coonhound, Lena, was snoozing on the floor.  Well, as sometimes happens to dogs, she started barking and twitching in her sleep, and followed it up with sinister-sounding growls -- all the more amusing because while awake, Lena is about as threatening as your average plush toy.

So my thought, naturally, is to wonder what she was dreaming about.  Which got me thinking about my own dreams, and recalling some recent ones.  I remembered some images, but mostly what came to mind were narratives -- first I did this, then the slimy tentacled monster did that.

That's when the blindside happened.  Because Lena, clearly dreaming, was doing all that without language.

How would thinking occur without language?  For almost all humans, our thought processes are intimately tied to words.  In fact, the experience of having an experience or thought that isn't describable using words is so unusual that we have a word for it -- ineffable.

Mostly, though, our experience is completely, um, effable.  So much so that trying to imagine how a dog (or any other animal) experiences the world without language is, for me at least, nearly impossible.

What's interesting is how powerful this drive toward language is.  There have been studies of pairs of "feral children" who grew up together but with virtually no interaction with adults, and in several cases those children invented spoken languages with which to communicate -- each complete with its own syntax, morphology, and phonetic structure.

A fascinating new study that came out last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, detailing research by Manuel Bohn, Gregor Kachel, and Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, showed that you don't even need the extreme conditions of feral children to induce the invention of a new mode of symbolic communication.  The researchers set up Skype conversations between monolingual English-speaking children in the United States and monolingual German-speaking children in Germany, but simulated a computer malfunction where the sound didn't work.  They then instructed the children to communicate as best they could anyhow, and gave them some words/concepts to try to get across.

They started out with some easy ones.  "Eating" resulted in the child miming eating from a plate, unsurprisingly.  But they moved to harder ones -- like "white."  How do you communicate the absence of color?  One girl came up with an idea -- she was wearing a polka-dotted t-shirt, and pointed to a white dot, and got the idea across.

But here's the interesting part.  When the other child later in the game had to get the concept of "white" across to his partner, he didn't have access to anything white to point to.  He simply pointed to the same spot on his shirt that the girl had pointed to earlier -- and she got it immediately.

Language is defined as arbitrary symbolic communication.  Arbitrary because with the exception of a few cases like onomatopoeic words (bang, pow, ping, etc.) there is no logical connection between the sound of a word and its referent.  Well, here we have a beautiful case of the origin of an arbitrary symbol -- in this case, a gesture -- that gained meaning only because the recipient of the gesture understood the context.

I'd like to know if such a gesture-language could gain another characteristic of true language -- transmissibility.  "It would be very interesting to see how the newly invented communication systems change over time, for example when they are passed on to new 'generations' of users," said study lead author Manuel Bohn, in an interview with Science Daily.  "There is evidence that language becomes more systematic when passed on."

Because this, after all, is when languages start developing some of the peculiarities (also seemingly arbitrary) that led Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf to develop the hypothesis that now bears their names -- that the language we speak alters our brains and changes how we understand abstract concepts.  In K. David Harrison's brilliant book The Last Speakers, he tells us about a conversation with some members of a nomadic tribe in Siberia who always described positions of objects relative to the four cardinal directions -- so my coffee cup wouldn't be on my right, it would be south of me.  When Harrison tried to explain to his Siberian friends how we describe positions, at first he was greeted with outright bafflement.

Then, they all erupted in laughter.  How arrogant, they told him, that you see everything as relative to your own body position -- as if when you turn around, suddenly the entire universe shifts to compensate for your movement!

[Image available under a license at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Human_Language_Families_Map.PNG]

Another interesting example of this was the subject of a 2017 study by linguists Emanuel Bylund and Panos Athanasopoulos, and focused not on our experience of space but of time.  And they found something downright fascinating.  Some languages (like English) are "future-in-front," meaning we think of the future as lying ahead of us and the past behind us, turning time into something very much like a spatial dimension.  Other languages retain the spatial aspect, but reverse the direction -- such as the Peruvian language of Aymara.  For them, the past is in front, because you can remember it, just as you can see what's in front of you.  The future is behind you -- therefore invisible.

Mandarin takes the spatial axis and turns it on its head -- the future is down, the past is up (so the literal translation of the Mandarin expression of "next week" is "down week").  Asked to order photographs of someone in childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, they will place them vertically, with the youngest on top.  English and Swedish speakers tend to think of time as a line running from left (past) to right (future); Spanish and Greek speakers tended to picture time as a spatial volume, as if it were something filling a container (so emptier = past, fuller = future).

All of which underlines how fundamental to our thinking language is.  And further baffles me when I try to imagine how other animals think.  Because whatever Lena was imagining in her dream, she was clearly understanding and interacting with it -- even if she didn't know to attach the word "squirrel" to the concept.

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This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Bridging the Great Divide

One of the main things that separates scientists from the rest of us is that they notice things we would just take for granted.

Gregor Mendel started in the research that eventually would uncover the four fundamental laws of inheritance when he noticed that some traits in pea plants seemed to skip a generation.  Percy Spencer was messing around with vacuum tubes, and noticed that in a certain configuration, they caused a chocolate bar in his pocket to melt -- further inquiry led to the invention of the microwave oven.  French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity when he accidentally ruined some photographic plates with what turned out to be a chunk of uranium ore.  Alexander Fleming saved countless lives with the discovery of penicillin -- found because he wondered why a colony of mold on one of his culture plates seemed to be killing the bacteria near it.

I consider myself at least a little above average, savvy-wise, but I don't have that ability -- to look at the world and think, "Hmm, I wonder why that happened?"  Mostly I just assume "that's the way it is" and don't consider it much further, a characteristic I suspect I share with a lot of people.  So here's some recent research about something I've known about since I first started reading junior books on astronomy, when I was maybe ten years old, and never thought was odd -- or even worth giving any thought to.

There's a strange gap, something astronomers call "The Great Divide," between Mars and Jupiter.  The distance between Mars and Jupiter is over twice as great as the diameter of the entire inner Solar System.  In that gap is a narrow band called the Asteroid Belt -- and not a hell of a lot else.

Even more peculiar, when you think about it (which as I said, I didn't), is why inside of the Great Divide all the planets are small, dense, and rocky, and outside of it the planets are low-density gas giants (I do remember being shocked by the density thing as a kid, when I read that Saturn's overall density is lower than that of water -- so if you had a swimming pool big enough, Saturn would float).

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

The problem with these sorts of observations, though -- even if you stop to wonder about them -- is that until very recently, we pretty much had a sample size of one Solar System to work with, so there was no way to tell if any particular feature of ours was odd or commonplace.  Even now, with the discovery of so many exoplanets that it's estimated there are a billion in our galaxy alone, we only have tentative information about the arrangement of planets around stars, to determine if there's any sort of pattern there, such as the apparent one in our neck of the woods.

Well, it looks like the physicists may have explained the Great Divide and the compositional difference of the planets on either side of it in one fell swoop.  A team from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Colorado University have found that the Great Divide may be a relic of a ring of material that formed around the early Sun, and then was pulled apart and essentially "sorted" by the gravitational pulls of the coalescing planets.

The authors write:

We propose... that the dichotomy was caused by a pressure maximum in the disk near Jupiter’s location...  One or multiple such—potentially mobile—long-lived pressure maxima almost completely prevented pebbles from the Jovian region reaching the terrestrial zone, maintaining a compositional partition between the two regions.  We thus suggest that our young Solar System’s protoplanetary disk developed at least one and probably multiple rings, which potentially triggered the formation of the giant planets.

And once the process started, it accelerated, pulling dense, rocky material inward and lightweight, organic-chemical-rich material outward, resulting in a gap -- and an outer Solar System with gas giants surrounding an inner Solar System with small, terrestrial worlds.

"Young stellar systems were often surrounded by disks of gas and dust," said Stephen Mojzsis of Colorado University, who co-authored the paper, which appeared in Nature three weeks ago.  "If a similar ring existed in our own solar system billions of years ago, it could theoretically be responsible for the Great Divide, because such a ring would create alternating bands of high- and low-pressure gas and dust.  Those bands, in turn, might pull the solar system's earliest building blocks into several distinct sinks -- one that would have given rise to Jupiter and Saturn, and another Earth and Mars.

"It is analogous to the way the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains causes water to drain one way or another.  That's similar to how this pressure bump would have divided material in the early Solar System...  But that barrier in space was not perfect.  Some outer Solar System material still climbed across the divide.  And those fugitives could have been important for the evolution of our own world...  Those materials that might go to the Earth would be those volatile, carbon-rich materials.  And that gives you water.  It gives you organics."

And ultimately, it gives the Earth life.

So here we have a strange observation that most of us probably shrugged about (if we noticed it at all) that not only was instrumental to the formation of our own Solar System, but might (1) drive the arrangement of planets in star systems everywhere in the universe, and (2) has implications for the origin of life on our own -- and probably other -- worlds.

All of which brings to mind the wonderful quote by Hungarian biochemist Albert von Szent-Györgyi -- "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought."

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is a dark one, but absolutely gripping: the brilliant novelist Haruki Murakami's Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

Most of you probably know about the sarin attack in the subways of Tokyo in 1995, perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult under the leadership of Shoko Asahara.  Asahara, acting through five Aum members, set off nerve gas containers during rush hour, killing fifty people outright and injuring over a thousand others.  All six of them were hanged in 2018 for the crimes, along with a seventh who acted as a getaway driver.

Murakami does an amazing job in recounting the events leading up to the attack, and getting into the psyches of the perpetrators.  Amazingly, most of them were from completely ordinary backgrounds and had no criminal records at all, nor any other signs of the horrors they had planned.  Murakami interviewed commuters who were injured by the poison and also a number of first responders, and draws a grim but fascinating picture of one of the darkest days in Japanese history.

You won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]