The evolution of the anti-evolutionists

Dear readers:

I am going to take a long-overdue two-week break from writing here at Skeptophilia, so this will be my last post until Thursday, August 25.  Until I return, keep suggesting topics, keep reading, keep thinking, and keep hoisting the banner of critical thinking!

cheers,

Gordon

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Sometimes I see a piece of scientific research that is so brilliant, so elegant, all I can do is sit back in awestruck appreciation.

Such was my reaction to Nicholas J. Matzke's paper in Science entitled, "The Evolution of Antievolution Policies after Kitzmiller v. Dover."  And if you're wondering... yes, he did what it sounds like.

He used the techniques of evolutionary biology to show how anti-evolution policy has undergone descent with modification.

I read the paper with a delighted, and somewhat bemused, grin, blown away not only by how well it worked, but how incredibly clever the idea was.  What Matzke did was to analyze the text of all of the dozens of bills proposed since 2004 that try to shoehorn religious belief into the public school science classroom, and generate a phylogenetic tree for them -- in essence, a diagram summarizing how they are related to each other, and how they have changed.

In other words, a cladistic tree of evolutionary descent.

"Creationism is getting stealthier in the wake of legal defeats, but techniques from the study of evolution reveal how creationist legislation is evolving," Matzke said in an interview.  "It is one thing to say that two bills have some resemblances, and another thing to say that bill X was copied from bill Y with greater than ninety percent probability.  I do think this research strengthens the case that all of these bills are of a piece—they are all ‘stealth creationism,’ and they all have either clear fundamentalist motivations, or are close copies of bills with such motivations."

"They are not terribly intelligently designed," Matzke added. "Some of the bills don’t make sense, they’ve been copied from another state and changed without thought."

He linked the bills to each other by doing statistical analysis of patterns in the text, much as evolutionary biologists use patterns in the DNA of related organisms, and arranged them into a cladistic tree using the "principle of maximum parsimony," which (simply put) is the arrangement that requires you to make the fewest ad hoc assumptions.

So without further ado, here is Matzke's tree linking 65 different, but related, pieces of legislation:

In particular, he was able to show where the documents incorporated language from a 2006 anti-evolution proposal in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, and how subsequent generations had pieces of it remaining, often -- dare I say -- mutated, but still recognizable.

"Successful policies have a tendency to spread," Matzke said.  "Every year, some states propose these policies, and often they are only barely defeated.  And obviously, sometimes they pass, so hopefully this article will help raise awareness of the dangers of the ongoing situation."

So when there are iterations that are better fit to the environment, in the sense that they went further in the court systems before being defeated or (hard though this is to fathom) were actually approved, the anti-evolutionists passed those versions around to other states, while less-successful models were outcompeted and become extinct.

There's a name for that process, isn't there?  Give me a moment, I'm sure it'll come to me.

Okay, it's not that I think this paper will make much difference amongst the creationists and supporters of intelligent design.  They don't spend much time reading Science, I wouldn't suppose.  But even so, this is a coup -- using the techniques of cladistic analysis to illustrate the relationships between bills designed to force public school students to learn that cladistic analysis doesn't work.

I can't help but think that Darwin would be proud.

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Exam day

You might have seen the most recent lunatic pronouncement coming from the Christofascist right wing here in the United States, this time from noted wingnut Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado.  Boebert appeared on the show Flash Point, and in response to a question about what we should do to improve our country, she said, "Maybe we need to have some sort of legislation that requires Constitution Alive! and biblical citizenship training in our schools, and that's how we get things turned around."

It hardly bears pointing out that Constitution Alive! is a Christian ultra-nationalist approach to interpreting the Constitution, and says right on its website that its goal is "restoring America's Biblical and Constitutional foundations of freedom."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, Lauren Boebert (50764749212), CC BY-SA 2.0]

I'm more interested, though, in Boebert's "biblical citizenship" test idea.  So in the interest of seeing if she's qualified herself, I submit a short quiz I put together to test her understanding of the Bible (along with biblical references, in case you want to check my sources).  See how you score, Representative Boebert.

1. Which of the following should be sufficient to prohibit you from entering a church?

a) Having a flat nose.

b) Having a broken hand.

c) Being blind.

d) All of the above.

Answer: (d).  Oh, and guys?  You better have intact balls, too.  Leviticus 21:18-21 says, "For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous, Or a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded, Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken.  No man that hath a blemish of the seed of Aaron the priest shall come nigh to offer the offerings of the Lord made by fire: he hath a blemish; he shall not come nigh to offer the bread of his God."

2. A guy and his wife are walking home one evening, and he's attacked by a guy with a knife.  It looks like the attacker's going to kill him, but his wife saves the day by grabbing the attacker by the nuts and giving a good squeeze.  What should he do to reward her for her valor?

a) Give her a great big kiss.

b) Buy her a nice gift.

c) Tell all his friends about how brave his wife is.

d) Cut off her hand.

Answer: (d).  Deuteronomy 25:11-12.  "When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her."

3.  Some people move in next door.  They seem nice, but upon inquiry, you find out that they aren't Christians.  What is the appropriate response?

a) Treat them with kindness and compassion, because that's what the Bible says to do.

b) Try to convert them to Christianity.

c) Stone them to death.

Answer: (c).  Deuteronomy 17:2-5.  "If there be found among you, within any of thy gates which the Lord thy God giveth thee, man or woman, that hath wrought wickedness in the sight of the Lord thy God, in transgressing his covenant, and hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded; and it be told thee, and thou hast heard of it, and enquired diligently, and, behold, it be true, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought in Israel: Then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman, which have committed that wicked thing, unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones, till they die."

4.  Well, suppose there's an entire town where people aren't Christian.  What should you do about them?

a) Let them be -- as long as they're not hurting anyone, they have the right to believe what they want.

b) Try to convert them to Christianity.

c) Kill them all.

Answer: (c). Deuteronomy 13:12-14.  "If thou shalt hear say in one of thy cities, which the Lord thy God hath given thee to dwell there, saying, Certain men... are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which ye have not known; Then shalt thou enquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought among you; Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly."

5.  Okay, we killed all the people in the non-Christian town.  What should we do about their cattle?

a) What kind of stupid fucking question is this?  Why should you do anything about the cattle?

b) Kill them all.

Answer: (b).  Deuteronomy 13:15 goes on to say, "Destroy all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword."

6.  You ask your kid to load the dishwasher, and he rolls his eyes and tells you to go to hell.  What should you do?

a) Ground him.

b) Withhold his allowance for the week.

c) Stone him to death.

Answer: (c).  Leviticus 20:9.  "For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him."

7.  Someone treats you badly.  How should you respond?

a) Forgive him.

b) Turn the other cheek and let him hit that one, too.

c) Laugh as you're smashing his children on a big rock.

d) All of the above.

Answer: (d), even if that's hard to imagine.  Matthew 6:14, Matthew 5:39, and Psalm 137:8-9, respectively, if you don't believe me.

8.  What should the punishment be for kids who make fun of a priest's bald head?

a) Nothing.  Ignore it.  Kids do that sort of stuff sometimes.

b) Tell their parents and let them deal with it.

c) Get some vicious bears to eat the children.

d) Stone them to death.

Answer: (c).  Ha!  I bet you thought it was (d), but no.  2 Kings 2:23-24.  "And he [the prophet Elisha] went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.  And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord.  And there came forth two she-bears out of the wood, and tare [ripped apart] forty and two children of them."

9.  As a good Christian American, can I own slaves?

a) What?  Are you kidding?  Owning slaves is inherently immoral!  I don't care what your religion is!

b) Yes, as long as they're Canadian.

Answer: (b).  Leviticus 25:44.  "Both thy male and female slaves, which thou shalt have, shall be from the countries that are around you; of them shall you buy your male and female slaves."

10.  How much authority does Lauren Boebert have to talk about the Bible, religion, and such matters?

a) Zero, because she has the IQ of a Pop-Tart.

b) Zero, because someone as clearly sociopathic as she is has no standing to preach morality and ethics to anyone.

c) Zero, because she's female.

Answer: Well, they're all correct, honestly, but the biblically-supported one is (c).  1 Timothy 2:12.  "But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence."

So in telling you to sit down and shut the fuck up, Representative Boebert, please don't take it personally.  I'm just trying to make sure that I'm living up to my "biblical citizenship training."

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Razor's edge

It's a perpetual source of puzzlement for me why more people don't look at ridiculous claims and think, "Okay, how the hell could that possibly work?"

This comes up because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who, after my post last week on homeopathy, sent me an email that said, "This makes homeopathy look like Nobel-Prize-winning science."  And he attached a link to a site called "Pyramid Razor Sharpener: It Actually Works!  Make Your Own In 10 Minutes!"

This is the first I've seen any pyramid-power bullshit in a while -- the last one I recall was back in 2012, when someone took a photo of one of the pyramids at Chichen Itza and found that it had a mysterious beam of light shooting upwards from it.  It turned out that the whole thing was easily explainable as a common digital camera malfunction, but that didn't prevent the woo-woos from jumping around making excited little squeaking noises about how everything they'd said about pyramids was true after all, take that, you dumb ol' skeptics, etc.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ricardo Liberato, All Gizah Pyramids, CC BY-SA 2.0]

So I suppose it's unsurprising that there is still a lot of latent interest in pyramids lying around, waiting for some unsuspecting nimrod to come along and pick it up.  This at least partly explains the "Pyramid Razor Sharpener" website, wherein we find out how wonderful pyramids are for sharpening razors by having the words "Pyramid Razor Sharpener" thrown at us (no lie) fifteen times.  Here are a few of the other things we learn:

• A pyramid is a "cone shape, but with flat sides and corners."  Which is true in approximately the same fashion as saying that a cube is "a sphere shape, but with flat sides and edges."
• Razor blades and other sharp metal objects become dull not because use wears and blunts the edges, but because of "a crystaline [sic] build-up on the blade, static electricity and dehydration."
• It's especially hard on razors to use them for shaving, because the "repeated rubbing of the blade on the face hairs induces an ionic crystal formation of the water molecules upon the skin."
• Pyramids work because "alignment with the magnetic field provides for the naturally present charged particles to be 'entrapped' by the pyramid and their resulting focus at the corners."  Whatever the fuck that means.
• It can't be a different shape than a pyramid (such as a cylinder, which is like a cube shape but with flat circles on the end) because "the particular dimensions of the pyramid cause a concentration, or focus of a negative static charge at one third of its height at an equal distance from the four corners."
• Because we're talking about static charges, here, you shouldn't build your pyramid out of something that conducts electricity.  He suggests cardboard.  (I bet the ancient Egyptians wish they'd realized this before they busted their asses hauling around all of those gigantic rocks.)
• If you put your dull razor under the pyramid, it will become sharp because of ions.  More specifically, the "positive ions of the crystals on the blade are effectively neutralized by the negatively charged ion concentration inside the pyramid.  The crystals are stripped of their bonds and water molecules are released.  This results in the dehydration (this is the same with mummification) of the crystals, which are destroyed.  The blade is now clean and feels sharp once again."  So q.e.d., as far as I can tell.

The funny thing about all of this, besides the fact that in order to believe any of it your science education would have had to cease in the fourth grade, is that this guy doesn't appear to be selling anything.  He doesn't wind up by saying "send me fifty bucks, and I'll tell you how!" or "for a hundred bucks, I'll send you a build-your-own-pyramid kit!" or "for the low price of only $199.99, I'll send you my motivational lecture series 'Things I've Learned While Sitting Under a Pyramid,' with a bonus set of ultra-sharp razor blades as a FREE gift!"  He seems to be openly and honestly sharing something he feels to be a legitimate and scientifically-supported life hack, despite the fact that way back in 2005 pyramid power was tested on Mythbusters and found to be (surprise!) completely bogus.

So there's something kind of endearingly earnest about this guy, even though if he thinks that water forms "ionic crystals" he really should sign up for a chemistry class.  (He did say that he'd written his "scientific explanation" of how it works in such a way as "not to sound too sciencey," and I'd say he succeeded at least as far as that goes.)  My general conclusion, however, is that you probably should stick to ordinary strops and knife sharpeners, and/or buying new razor blades when yours get dull.  Even if you built your pyramid out of scrap cardboard, you're better off recycling it and finding a different way to "neutralize your positive ions."

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Sailing the milky seas

Sometimes, the first thing you have to do in order to explain a mysterious phenomenon is to show that the mysterious phenomenon actually exists.

The human brain, as astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, is "rife with ways of getting it wrong."  He's not only talking about the unfortunate penchant some people have for perpetrating hoaxes; it's just that our preconceived notions, the selective filters on what we see and hear, and (let's face it) our ignorance about natural phenomena make it all too easy to misinterpret what we're seeing and hearing.  Dr. Tyson relates a particularly amusing example, a policeman out at night who gave chase on a mountain road to a UFO -- a bright light, he said, that was ahead of him near the horizon, and kept bobbing around, easily staying in the lead as he swerved back and forth around the curves.

Turns out what he was chasing was the planet Venus, and the bobbing motion was his brain's inability to sort out the fact that it was in a moving car traveling on a winding road.

Not all examples of oddball eyewitness testimony are that easily explained, however.  Take, for example, the reports that have come in for (literally) centuries from sailors out in the open ocean, of times that the seas suddenly take on an opaque, opalescent glow -- the so-called "milky seas" phenomenon.

It's not the same as ordinary bioluminescence, a sparkling and flashing of living organisms that are capable of producing light.  A well-known example is the dinoflagellate Noctiluca scintillans, which produces the blue glow sometimes seen in shallow tropical waters.  Bioluminescence, however -- at least the kind we know about -- is transitory, lasting for minutes, and even when it's due to microorganisms only affects a small area.

The "milky seas" phenomenon, however, lasts for hours, and there are accounts of ships traveling for a hundred miles through water that looks like "a plain covered with snow."  And unlike typical bioluminescence, whatever causes milky seas is suppressed by agitation -- the eyewitness accounts report that the bow wave of the ship is darker than the surrounding water.

The phenomenon has proven elusive, though.  First of all, whatever it is, it's rare; there are only a couple of reports a year.  This makes it hard to study, and also makes it tempting to attribute it to overactive imagination, or simple misreporting of something completely ordinary like the reflection of moonlight (a bit like our unfortunate Venus-chasing policeman).

But now, a paper this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown conclusive evidence that it exists -- not only photographs and reports from a ship sailing near Java, but satellite images of the event taken on the same night.

On the left, the satellite image of the milky seas event; the brightly-lit strip in the top half of the photo is the island of Java.  On the right, a photograph taken by the crew of the Ganesha.

Explaining what's causing the phenomenon, however, is still not simple.  One theory is that it's being caused by a bloom of a so-far-unidentified species of bioluminescent bacteria, based on a single water sample from a milky seas event in the Arabian Sea in 1985.

But at least now we have hard evidence that it's something real.  "The biggest missing link in our study from last year was the lack of ground truth," said study lead author Steven Miller, of Colorado State University, who has been chasing this phenomenon for years.  "But this current study provides it.  It was a great relief to get this contact from the Ganesha crew."

It's fascinating how little we know about the oceans -- I've heard it said that we know more about the surface of the Moon than we do about the open ocean and seafloor, and I believe it.  But it looks like one of the ocean's mysteries has at least shown itself for sure.  We still don't have a certain explanation for it, but at least now we know the phenomenon is real.

So figuring out what's going on when the seas at night turn to milk is only a matter of time.

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Starve a cold

Today from the Unintentionally Hilarious Department, we have a paper that made its way into PubMed that has the title, "Pharmacoeconomic Comparison Between Homeopathic and Antibiotic Treatment Strategies in Recurrent Acute Rhinopharyngitis in Children."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Here's a quick summary of the objectives and results, as quoted from the abstract:

Objectives: A pharmacoeconomic study to compare, in terms of: medical effectiveness, quality of life and costs two treatment strategies ('homeopathic strategy' vs 'antibiotic strategy') used in routine medical practice by allopathic and homeopathic GPs in the treatment of recurrent acute rhinopharyngitis in 18-month to 4-year-old children. 

Results: The 'homeopathic strategy' yielded significantly better results than the 'antibiotic strategy' in terms of medical effectiveness (number of episodes of rhinopharyngitis: 2.71 vs 3.97, P<0.001; number of complications: 1.25 vs 1.95, P<0.001), and quality of life (global score: 21.38 vs 30.43, P<0.001), with lower direct medical costs covered by Social Security (88 Euros vs 99 Euros, P<0.05) and significantly less sick-leave (9.5% of parents vs 31.6% of parents, P<0.001)...  Homeopathy may be a cost-effective alternative to antibiotics in the treatment of recurrent infantile rhinopharyngitis.

What makes this hilarious is that the authors of the article, Melanie Trichard, Gilles Chaufferin, and Nicolas Nicoloyannis, are apparently unaware that because acute rhinopharyngitis (better known to most of us as a "cold") is viral in origin, antibiotics are entirely useless for fighting it, and no competent doctor would prescribe them in this situation for a child or for anyone else.  So saying that homeopathic "remedies" are as good for fighting colds as antibiotics is akin to the following claims:

• crystals are as effective as aromatherapy for setting broken bones
• blood-letting has the same success rate as seeing a witch doctor for curing brain cancer
• Tarot cards have the same likelihood of telling you your future as palm-reading
• peanut butter is as effective as chocolate pudding as a window-cleaner

The maddening thing is that you can still find homeopathic "remedies" (i.e., pills or liquids with no active ingredients) being sold for lots of money on pharmacy shelves, despite study after study showing that they are worthless.  The most recent study generated the following conclusion:

The review found no good quality, well-designed studies with enough participants to support the idea that homeopathy works better than a placebo, or causes health improvements equal to those of another treatment. 

Although some studies did report that homeopathy was effective, the quality of those studies was assessed as being small and/or of poor quality.  These studies had either too few participants, poor design, poor conduct and or [sic] reporting to allow reliable conclusions to be drawn on the effectiveness of homeopathy. 

According to CEO Professor Warwick Anderson, “All medical treatments and interventions should be underpinned by reliable evidence. NHMRC’s review shows that there is no good quality evidence to support the claim that homeopathy works better than a placebo.”

Dr. Steven Novella, a vocal and articulate supporter of science-based medicine, put it more clearly:

[The] pattern is now clear – gold standard clinical evidence shows that homeopathy does not work.  Homeopaths do not respond by either producing high quality evidence of efficacy or by changing their views to account for the evidence.  Rather, they whine about the game being rigged against them and try to change the rules of evidence, so that weak studies that are almost guaranteed to be false positive are used, or studies that are not even designed to test efficacy... 

For some reason we cannot summon the political will to do what reason demands (and what multiple systematic reviews by government bodies have recommended) and finally expel homeopathy from modern health care. 

Still there are researchers, either because they are true believers or just naive, calling for yet more research into homeopathy, such as the proposed Toronto study of homeopathy for ADHD.  The demand for more research will never end.  The public, however, should no longer support this profound waste of resources.

What is amazing is that the homeopaths themselves won't admit that the game is up.  How many failed studies do they need?  I realize that this would mean they were out of a job, but for cryin' in the sink, at what point do you say, "Okay, I guess I was wrong?"

I guess the answer to the last question is, "Never."  "Death before admitting we're ripping people off by selling them useless remedies," that's the motto of the homeopaths.  Anyhow, I'm done here.  I've got to go clean my windows.  The last time didn't work out so well.

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What's bred in the bone

A friend of mine was chatting with me about irritating situations at work, and she mentioned that she'd really lost her cool with a supervisor the previous week who apparently is notorious for being a bit of an asshole.  I mentioned that I tend to put up with such nonsense and later wish I'd spoken up for myself -- that it has to be pretty bad before I'll blow up (at a supervisor or anyone else).

She laughed and said, "Of course I have a quick temper.  My family's Italian.  It's in our genes."

She was joking, of course, no more serious than my father was when he quipped that our family was "French enough to like to drink and Scottish enough not to know when to stop."  But it's a common enough view, isn't it?  We get our personality traits from some nebulous genetic heritage, despite the fact that a great many of us are pretty thorough mixtures of ancestry, and that all humans regardless of race or ethnicity are well over 99.9% similar anyhow.  As geneticist Kenneth Kidd put it, "Race is not biologically definable.  We are far too similar."

Ha.  Take that, racists.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The whole thing gets complicated, however, because race and ethnicity certainly have a cultural reality, and that can certainly affect how your personality develops as you grow up.  If you're raised in a family where arguments are regularly settled through shouting and waving your arms around (apparently true in my friend's case), then you learn that as a standard of behavior.  (Or, sometimes, decide, "That was a miserable way to live, I'm never going to treat people that way," and swing to the opposite extreme.)  All of this is just meant to highlight that teasing apart the genetic components of behavior (and there certainly are some) from the learned ones is no simple task.

All of this just gained an additional complication with a study last week in the journal Social Cognition that looked at another factor contributing to our behavior -- how our notions about our genetic makeup influence how we think we should be acting.

The study, by Ryan Wheat and Matthew Vess (of Texas A & M) and Patricia Holte (of Wake Forest University), was simple enough.  What they did was to take a group of test subjects, gave them a (bogus) saliva test, and split the group in two.  They were then given the "results," regarding what the sample said about their genetic makeup for a variety of characteristics.  The salient part, though was that half were told that their genetic sample showed they had an unusually high propensity for risk-taking, and the other half were told their genes said they tended to avoid risk.

Afterward, they were given a personality test, and only one thing was important; the questions that evaluated them for risk-tolerance.  Across the board, the people who were told their genes predisposed them to taking risks scored higher on the risk-tolerance questions than did the people who were told their genes made them risk-averse.

So not only do we have how we were raised complicating any sort of understanding of the genetic component of human behavior, we have our subconscious conforming to our perception of how people with our genetic makeup are thought to behave.

So even if there is no Italian gene for quick temper, maybe my friend's short fuse comes from her belief that there is.

Coupled, of course, with having been raised in a shouty family.  The "nurture" side of "nature vs. nurture" is not inconsequential.  All the more reason that question of whether behavior is learned or innate has been going on for a century and still hasn't been decisively settled.

In any case, I better wrap this up.  I think I'm going to go get another cup of coffee.  It's a little early for a glass of red wine, and you know us people with French blood.  It's either one or the other.

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Give me a break

A while back I wrote a piece about the Mandela Effect, which is the idea that when you remember some major event differently than other people, it's not because your memory is wrong, it's because you have side-slipped here from an alternate universe where the version you remember actually happened.  The phenomenon gets its name from the fact that a lot of people "remember" that Nelson Mandela died in jail decades ago, not peacefully in his home in Johannesburg in 2013.  These same folks are the ones who make an enormous deal over "remembering" that the Berenstain Bears -- the annoyingly moralistic cartoon characters who preach such eternal truths as Be Nice To Your Siblings Even When You Feel Like Punching The Shit Out Of Them and Your Parents Are Always Right About Everything and Pay Attention In School Or Else You Are Bad -- were originally the Berenstein Bears (with an "e" instead of an "a").

Why their name would be different in an alternate universe, I don't know.  From watching Star Trek and Lost in Space, I always assumed that the major differences you'd find in an alternate universe is that all of the good guys would be bad guys, and because of that, many of them would be wearing beards.

But the Mandela Effect isn't going away, despite the fact that if you believe it you're basically saying that your memory is 100% accurate, all of the time, and that you have never misremembered anything in your life.  The whole thing has become immensely popular to "study" -- although what there is there to study, I don't know.  Witness the fact that there is now a subreddit (/r/MandelaEffect) with almost thirty thousand subscribers.

The most recent thing to be brought to light by this cadre of timeline-jumpers has to do with the "Kit Kat" candy bar.  Apparently many people recall the name from their childhood as being "Kit Kats" (with an "s"), even though that doesn't really work with the candy's irritating ear-worm of a jingle, "Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar."  So once again, it's more likely that you're in an alternate universe than you just aren't recalling the name of a candy bar correctly.  And now we have someone who has proposed an explanation as to why all of this is happening.

You ready?

The Mandela Effect is caused by...

... CERN.

Yes, CERN, the world's largest particle accelerator, home of the Large Hadron Collider, which became justly famous for not creating a black hole and destroying the Earth when it was fired up a few years ago.  CERN has been the target of woo-woo silliness before now; back in 2009, projects had to be sidelined for months while the mechanism was repaired after a seagull dropped a piece of a baguette onto some electrical wires and caused a short, and the woo-woos decided that the seagull had been sent back in time to destroy the LHC before it blew up the entire universe.

So I guess there's no end to what CERN can do, up to and including vaporizing specific letters off of candy bar wrappers.  But you know, if CERN can alter our timeline, don't you think there's more important stuff that it could accomplish besides changing the spellings of candy bars and cartoon bears?  If I could alter the past, first thing I'd do is go back in time and hand Tucker Carlson's father a condom.

But I might be a little biased in that regard.

What baffles me about all of this is that not only is there abundant evidence that human memory is plastic and fallible, but just from our own experience you'd think there would be hundreds of examples where we'd clearly recalled things incorrectly.  The fact that these people have to invent an "effect" that involves alternate universes to support why they're always right takes hubris to the level of an art form.

So anyway. I'm not too worried about the possibility of my having side-slipped from another timeline where I'm a world-famous author whose novels regularly rocket to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List.  I'm more concerned at the moment over how the hell I'm going to get the "Kit Kat" jingle out of my head, because that thing is really fucking annoying.

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