Perception and suggestion

One topic that has come up over and over again here at Skeptophilia is the rather unsettling idea that the high opinion most of us have of our perceptions and memories is entirely unjustified.  Every time we're tempted to say "I saw it with my own eyes" or "of course it happened that way, I remember it," it should be a red flag reminding us of how inaccurate our brains actually are.

Now, to be fair, they work well enough.  It'd be a pretty significant evolutionary disadvantage if our sensory processing organs and memory storage were as likely to be wrong as right.  But a system that is built to work along the lines of "meh, it's good enough to get by, at least by comparison to everyone else" -- and let's face it, that's kind of how evolution works -- is inevitably going to miss a lot.  "Our experience of reality," said neuroscientist David Eagleman, "is constrained by our biology."  He talks about the umwelt -- the world as experienced by a particular organism -- and points out that each species picks up a different tiny slice of all the potential sensory inputs that are out there, and effectively misses everything else.

It also means that even of the inputs in our particular umwelt, the brain is going to make an executive decision regarding which bits are important to pay attention to.  People with normal hearing (for example) are being bombarded constantly by background sounds, which for most of us most of the time, we ignore as irrelevant.  In my intro to neuroscience classes, I used to point this out by asking students how many of them were aware (prior to my asking the question) of the sound of the fan running in the heater.  Afterward, of course, they were; beforehand, the sound waves were striking their ears and triggering nerve signals to the brain just like any other noise, but the brain was basically saying "that's not important."   (Once it's pointed out, of course, you can't not hear it; one of my students came into my room four days later, scowled at me, and said, "I'm still hearing the heater.  Thanks a lot.")

The point here is that we are about as far away from precision reality-recording equipment as you can get.  What we perceive and recall is a small fraction of what's actually out there, and is remembered only incompletely and inaccurately.

The Doors of Perception by Alan Levine [Image licensed under the Creative Commons cogdogblog, Doors of Perception (15354754466), CC BY 2.0]

Worst of all, what we do perceive and recall is also modified by what we think we should be perceiving and recalling.  This point was underscored by some cool new research done by a team led by Hernán Aniló at the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, which showed that all it takes is a simple (false) suggestion of what we're seeing to foul up our perception completely.

The experiment was simple and elegant.  Subjects were shown a screen with an image of a hundred dots colored either blue or yellow.  Some of the screens had exactly fifty of each; others were sixty/forty (one way or the other).  The volunteers were then asked to estimate the proportions of the colors on a sequence of different screens, and to give an assessment of how confident they were in their guess.

The twist is that half of the group was given a "hint" -- a statement that in some of the screens, one of the colors was twice as frequent as the other.  (Which, of course, is never true.)  And this "hint" caused the subjects not only to mis-estimate the color frequencies, but to be more confident in their wrong guesses, especially in volunteers for whom a post-test showed a high inclination toward social suggestibility.

As easily-understood as the experiment is, it has some profound implications.  "Information is circulating with unprecedented speed, and it even finds its way into our social feeds against our will sometimes," Aniló said.  "It’s becoming increasingly difficult to observe events without having to go through some level of information on those events beforehand (e.g. buying a shirt, but not before reading its reviews online).  What we are looking at in our research here is how much the information you receive is going to contribute to the construction of your perceptual reality, and fundamentally, what are the individual psychological features that condition the impact that that information will have in shaping what you see and think, whether you like it or not.  Of course, we are not talking about enormous effects that can completely distort the world around you (e.g., no amount of false/imprecise information can make you misperceive a small bird as a 3-ton truck), but what our study shows is that, provided you are permeable enough to social influence (which we all are, the key here being how much), then false information can slightly shift your perception in whatever direction the information points."

What this means, of course, is that we have to be constantly aware of our built-in capacity for being fooled.  And although we clearly vary in that capacity, we shouldn't fall for believing "I'm seeing reality, it's everyone else who is wrong."  The truth is, we're all prone to inaccurate perception and recall, and all capable of having the power of suggestion alter what we see.  "Perception is a complex construction, and information is never an innocent bystander in this process," Anlló said.  "Always be informed, but make sure that your sources are of high quality, and trustworthy.  Importantly, when I say high-quality I do not mean a source that you may trust because of emotional reasons or social links, but rather by the accuracy of the information they provide and the soundness of the evidence.  Indeed, our experiment shows that your level of suggestibility to your social environment (how much you dress like your friends, or feel influenced by their taste in music) will also predict your permeability to perceptual changes triggered by false information.  This, much like many other cognitive biases, is part of the human experience, and essentially nothing to worry about.  Being susceptible to your social environment is actually a great thing that makes us humans thrive as a species, we just need to be aware of it and try our best to limit our exposure to bad information."

The most alarming thing of all, of course, is that the people who run today's news media are well aware of this capacity, and use it to reinforce the perception by their consumers that only they are providing accurate information.  "Listen to us," they tell us, "because everyone else is lying to you."  The truth is, there is no unbiased media; given that their profits are driven by telling viewers the bit of the news that supports what they think the viewers already want to believe, they have exactly zero incentive to provide anything like balance.  The only cure is to stay as aware as we can of our own capacity for being fooled, and to stick as close to the actual facts as possible (and, conversely, as far away as possible from the talking heads and spin-meisters who dominate the nightly news on pretty much whichever channel you choose).

If our perceptions of something as simple and concrete as the number of colored dots on a screen can be strongly influenced by a quick and inaccurate "hint," how much easier is it to alter our perception of the world with respect to complex and emotionally-laden issues -- especially when there's a powerful profit motive on the part of the people giving us the hints?

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Written in the genes

Two years ago, I wrote about a mysterious plunge in global average temperature that occurred 12,800 years ago.  It's nicknamed the "Younger Dryas event," after the tundra wildflower Dryas octopetala, which showed a population explosion over the following millennium (as judged by pollen in ice core samples).  This plant only flourishes when the winters are extremely cold, and the pollen spike, along with various other lines of evidence, supports a rapid drop in temperature averaging around six degrees Celsius worldwide.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons xulescu_g, Dryas octopetala (41907904865), CC BY-SA 2.0]

The obvious question, of course, is what could cause such a rapid and catastrophic drop in temperature.  There are three reasonably plausible answers that have been suggested: 

1. an impact by a comet or meteorite causing an ejection of ash into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight
2. the collapse of an ice dam across what is now the St. Lawrence Seaway -- the temperature had been warming prior to the event -- allowing the emptying of an enormous freshwater lake into the North Atlantic, shutting off the thermohaline circulation and propelling the Northern Hemisphere back into an ice age
3. a nearby supernova in the constellation Vela frying the ozone layer, causing a collapse of ecosystems worldwide and an atmospheric chain reaction resulting in a global drop in temperature

The discussion amongst the scientists is ongoing, but the weight of evidence seems to favor the impact hypothesis.  (The link I posted above has more details, if you're curious.)

What's more certain is that the Younger Dryas event had a massive effect.  A number of large mammal groups -- including mastodons, North American camels, dire wolves, and gomphotheres (a bizarre-looking elephant relative) -- all went extinct shortly after the event itself, whatever it was, occurred.  Humans very nearly bit the dust, too; two of the dominant cultures of the time, the Natufian culture of the Middle East and the Clovis culture of North America, both collapsed right around the same time.

It's the latter that brings the topic up, because of some fascinating new research that came out last week, led by Paula Paz Sepúlveda of the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina), which looks at the effects this wild climate reversal had on the human genome.

What the researchers did was look at the makeup of the Q Y-DNA haplogroup.  You probably already know that two bits of our genome, the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA, are frequently used for analyzing ethnic group affiliations because they don't recombine each generation -- they're passed down intact through (respectively) the paternal and maternal line.  So your mtDNA is the same as your mother's mother's mother's (etc.), and if you're male, your Y DNA is the same as your father's father's father's (etc.).  This means that the only differences in either one are due to mutations, making them invaluable as a measure of the degree of relatedness of different ethnic groups, not to mention providing a way to track patterns of human migration.

The Q haplogroup is ubiquitous in indigenous people of North and South America, so it was a good place to start looking for clues that the climate shift might have written into the human genome.  And they found them; coincident with the Younger Dryas event there was a marked drop in genetic diversity in the Q haplogroup.  It looks like the climate calamity caused a bottleneck -- a severe reduction in population, resulting in a loss of entire genetic lineages:

The YD impact hypothesis states that fragments of a large disintegrating asteroid/comet hit North America, South America, Europe, and Western Asia at 12,800 cal BP.  Multiple airbursts/impacts produced the YD boundary layer (YDB, Younger Dryas boundary), depositing peak concentrations of a wide variety of impact markers.  The proposed impact event caused major changes in continental drainage patterns, ocean circulation, in temperature and precipitation, large-scale biomass burning, abrupt climate change, abrupt anomalous distribution of plants and animals, extinction of megafauna, as well as, cultural changes and human population decline.  The diversity of the set of markers related to the cosmic impact is found mainly in the Northern hemisphere, including Venezuela, but they have also been recorded in the Southern hemisphere, in Chilean Patagonia, and Antarctica.

It's fascinating to think of our own genomes, and (of course) the genomes of other species, as being a kind of proxy record for climate; that not only gradual fluctuations, but sudden and unexpected events like impacts and volcanic eruptions, can leave their marks on our DNA.  It brings home once again how interlocked everything is.  Our old perception of humans as being some kind of independent entity, separate from everything else on Earth, is profoundly wrong.  We were molded into what we are today by the same forces that created the entire biosphere, and we can't separate ourselves from those forces any more than we could disconnect from our own heartbeats.  As Chief Seattle famously put it, "Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.  Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."

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Icelandic travelogue

Over the last ten days I took a hiking and camping trip in Iceland.  It's a fascinating country, and earns well its nickname of "The Land of Fire and Ice."

It's my second visit; the first time I went there was in 2000, when I had only dated my (then) girlfriend, (now) wife, for a few months.  I'd signed up to go that August with a group of friends for a trip mostly focused on birdwatching, and one day over dinner a few months prior I said to Carol, half jokingly, "Hey, I'm taking a trip to Iceland, you wanna come?"  My expectation was that her response to being asked to go on a trip to a remote island in the North Atlantic by a guy she hadn't known long was going to be, "Um, no thanks... you have fun.  Why the hell do you want to go to Iceland, of all places?"

What she said was, "When do we leave?"

That was one of many moments that convinced me this was a match made in heaven.

The trip took us along the Ring Road around the entire perimeter of the island, and we saw some great birds and generally had a wonderful time.  This time, I went with a group of men associated with Mannsvolk, a German-based men's mentorship and workshop group that I first became associated with through a weekend retreat I attended in 2019.  So two weeks ago I packed everything into a new trekking backpack (my old one having seen its best days about thirty years ago), and off I went to Reykjavik.

I had been lulled into a false sense of security by my first trip, during which the weather was amazingly sunny and warm.  The locals we spoke to said that such a stretch of beautiful weather was pretty well unheard-of, even in midsummer, but of course it was the weather itself and not their warnings about how bad it could be that stuck in my memory.  This time, though, was more typical, and we only had a couple of days of sunshine and anything like real warmth.

Me at Landmannalaugar, on the nicest day we had.  Of course I took the opportunity to run around shirtless, because that's kind of what I do.

Most of the weather was cloudy, cold, and intermittently spitting rain.  The wind varied from "breezy" to "stiff gale" to "holy fuck grab on to something heavy or you'll blow away."  But there's no doubt the scenery was well worth the discomfort.  You may have heard about the recent volcanic eruption of Fagradalsfjall, one of the dozens of active volcanoes in Iceland -- specifically the cinder cone eruption at Meradalir.  Well, we hiked in and saw it.  It's one of the most grueling hikes I've ever done, over loose, basketball-sized chunks of lava rock, but when we got there... wow.

You hear it before you see it; a low, powerful thrumming noise, like a giant heartbeat.  It makes your innards vibrate.  Then you can see the steam plumes over a low rise, and smell the sulfur.  Then you get to the top of a the hill, and...

It was jetting fountains of lava into the air, and the whole surface was undulating like a pot of oatmeal bubbling on the stove.  It's almost a cliché to say that sights like this make you realize the power of nature, but man, after being here, I felt very puny.

We also went near Hekla, one of the most active volcanoes in the world (although not erupting at the moment).  During various enormous outbursts over the last three thousand years, Hekla spewed out so much tephra (fragmented chunks of lava that look like coarse black sand) that it created a terrain that looks like a moonscape, where almost nothing grows but tufts of desiccated grass.

The Ash Desert of Hekla

Still, as Ian Malcolm famously put it, "Life... uh... finds a way."  Even in areas that had been hit hard by volcanism, we saw signs of the tenacity of living things.

Iceland owes its violent geology to the fact that it sits at the boundary of the North American and Eurasian Tectonic Plates, which are moving apart at a rate of about 9.7 centimeters a year.  This fairly extraordinary rate of stretch means that Iceland is getting larger, and as the island splits in two, subterranean magma comes to the surface to fill in the gap.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the USGS]

Interestingly, our path took us pretty much right along the plate margin (the purple line in the above map) the whole way, starting in Reykjavik in the southwest (Fagradalsfjall Volcano is the red triangle at the lower left), going up the left-hand branch of the forking split almost all the way to Krafla in the northeast.  One nice thing is that we didn't go to many of the same places I'd already seen on my first trip, but one unfortunate exception was Mývatn.

Mývatn is one of those places that fall into the "it makes a good story afterward" category.  We'd selected it as a destination on our first trip because it has a well-deserved reputation for being an outstanding site for birdwatching.  We only found out after we got there, though, that there's a reason for its popularity with birds.  It's also wildly popular with flying insects, particularly a species of midge which enjoys nothing more than flying into noses, ears, and mouths.  "Mývatn," in fact, is Icelandic for "lake of the flies," something we didn't find out until after we'd gotten there.  People in the nearby village of Reykjahlíð, in fact, wear head nets when they walk to the grocery store.  I distinctly recall talking to a local when I was there the first time, and he found out we'd come for birdwatching.  "It's the only reason you'd be here," he said, glumly.  "This is the worst place in Iceland."

Be that as it may, we stayed there a couple of days this time.  I'm happy to say that there was only one evening when the insects were truly gawdawful, but given that the reason for that was at other times the wind was howling so hard the flies couldn't find us, I'm not sure that's much of a consolation.

The various difficulties we experienced on this trip were worth it, though, to see places like Aldeyjarfoss Waterfall, with its bizarre columnar basalt formations:

And the harbor of the beautiful little village of Akureyri:

And I even got to see some birds, albeit familiar ones:

So all in all, it was a pretty cool trip.  I'm glad to be back in a place where I don't have to expend inordinate amounts of energy to (1) stay warm, and (2) avoid being blown into the next time zone, but like with most travel, the bad bits are already fading in my memory, to be replaced by the amazement of seeing volcanoes and glaciers and waterfalls, the likes of which exist nowhere else on Earth.

And I'd call that a fair exchange.

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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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