Jaw dropping

One consistent misapprehension a lot of people have about evolution is that the process of natural selection always leads toward organisms becoming stronger, smarter, faster, and more complex.

As my evolutionary biology professor put it, this is incorrect because at its core, "evolution is the law of whatever works."  The most successful, widespread, diverse, and numerous animals on Earth are, by far, insects -- they're not necessarily any of the aforementioned things (especially smart), they are just exceedingly good at reproducing fast and filling available niches.  Whatever traits happen to be selected for by the environment at the time result in the direction evolution takes.  And this can change if the environment changes -- as has been observed in a number of fossil lineages where the average body size increased for a while, then reversed course and decreased.

Evolution is not goal-oriented.  The idea that it's heading in a particular pre-determined direction is a holdover from the old Aristotelian idea of the scala naturae, where there's a ladder of increasing complexity and intelligence, with humans, of course, occupying the top rung.  (At least until the concept was adopted by medieval Christian scholars; at that point humans got knocked down a couple of pegs, with the higher rungs taken up by angels and, at the top, God.)  But you still hear people -- even scientific, rational types -- talk about "primitive" and "advanced" species, and ones being "highly-evolved" (or not), when the truth is that all modern life forms, from bacteria to birch trees to baboons, have exactly the same length of evolutionary history, going back to LUCA (the "last universal common ancestor") something like four billion years ago.

It's just that in those four billion years, some of them have changed a great deal more than others have.

Given that even people who are quite knowledgeable often still have that bias floating around, it can come as a significant shock to find out that there are some anatomically simple animals that are actually quite recently evolved -- and close to other species we consider "advanced."  Two of the most striking examples are echinoderms (such as starfish and sea urchins, which undergo a peculiar decentralization during development, losing most of their sophisticated organs up to and including the central nervous system) and tunicates (sometimes referred to as "sea squirts," which superficially look like filter-feeding sponges but are actually some of the closest invertebrate relatives to vertebrates).  In both cases, the larvae give away their actual placement in the family tree of life, as does their DNA; both of these groups represent fairly recent developments, as these things go.

Another example, and the reason this topic comes up, is Class Agnatha, which includes lampreys and hagfish, and sometimes are called "jawless fish."  (The term "fish" actually has no evolutionary relevance; it lumps together very distantly-related groups, excluding others that are far closer cousins.  Lungfish and coelacanths, for example, are more closely related to amphibians -- and thus to us -- than they are to your standard-issue fish.)

European river lamprey (Lampetra fluviatilis) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tiit Hunt, Jõesilmud2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In any case, lampreys and hagfish are distinguished on the gross anatomical level by lacking lower jaws, and -- by the typical way of thinking about this -- must be some kind of "primitive" holdover from before paired jaws were developed by the rest of us vertebrates.  It's true they branched off early, and are only distantly related to other vertebrates, but some research that came out last week in Nature Ecology & Evolution suggests that their lineage lost their lower jaws, not that our direct ancestors somehow gained them along the way.

The research looked at the genetic control over jaw development, and found that the pattern was strikingly similar between vertebrates with jaws and those without -- but that those without had switched off a gene called pou5 that guides cells in the neural crest, a cluster of cells in the head of the embryo that specialize to produce a number of different structures.  Lampreys and hagfish have the gene, they just don't express it in the embryonic tissue that in other vertebrates leads to the mandible -- suggesting strongly that they evolved from ancestors that had it and expressed it.

"While most of the genes controlling pluripotency are expressed in the lamprey neural crest, the expression of one of these key genes -- pou5 -- was lost from these cells," said Joshua York of Northwestern University, lead author of the paper.  "Amazingly, even though pou5 isn't expressed in a lamprey's neural crest, it could promote neural crest formation when we expressed it in frogs, suggesting this gene is part of an ancient pluripotency network that was present in our earliest vertebrate ancestors."

So this once again confounds our tendency to fit things into a scala naturae-like pattern.  Evolution can happen not only from gaining features, but from losing them.  In the case of lampreys and hagfish, a pretty important structure -- without which, nevertheless, they appear to do just fine.

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The man with the golden nose

The history of science is full of strange characters, but surely one of the most peculiar was Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe.  Born in 1546 in Knutstorp, Sweden (then owned by Denmark), he came from a long line of wealthy and noble landowners.  Best known for his contributions to observational astronomy, his pinpoint-accurate measurements of the positions of stars and planets firmly convinced him of the correctness of the Copernican heliocentric model -- and were what allowed his contemporary Johannes Kepler to devise his three laws of planetary motion.  (Themselves instrumental in allowing Isaac Newton to develop his own three laws of motion, and more importantly, the Universal Law of Gravitation, a century later.)

He used his wealth and influence to good purpose.  He built the observatory of Uraniborg, the best of its kind at the time, on the island of Ven not far from Copenhagen.  His mapping of stellar and planetary positions, all done painstakingly by hand, had a staggering average precision of one arcminute.  Because his work was so careful, it gave Kepler no room to hang on to his precious "everything in the heavens moves in perfect circles" notion, and forced him to acknowledge that orbiting objects travel in ellipses -- a great example of the quip by Thomas Henry Huxley that "the great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."  Brahe's reputation as a careful observer was unimpeachable.

He was also, however, a very odd man.  At age twenty, he was at the engagement party of a friend and quarreled with his cousin Manderup Parsberg over (I shit you not) who was the better mathematician.  The only way for two mathematicians to settle such a quarrel was, of course, a duel in the dark with swords, and Brahe got the end of his nose cut off.  After receiving medical care, he had a local goldsmith fashion a golden nose for him that he attached to his face with glue -- he apparently also had silver and brass ones for everyday use, reserving the gold one for special occasions.  (He and Parsberg evidently made it up afterward, and remained friends.  I don't know if they ever settled who was the better mathematician, but my money is on Brahe, given that hardly anyone knows who Parsberg is anymore.)

Tycho Brahe by Eduard Ender [Image is in the Public Domain]

He owned a tame elk, that he kept in the castle with him -- until one day it drank too much beer, fell down the stairs, and died.  He had the odd combination of loving luxury and simultaneously disdaining it; I guess if you're ridiculously wealthy, you can afford to be contemptuous of money.  Offered a lucrative position at the court of the Danish king, Frederick II, he turned it down, telling a friend, "I did not want to take possession of any of the castles our benevolent king so graciously offered me. I am displeased with society here, customary forms and the whole rubbish."  Critics of his scientific publications were met with stinging rebuttals, and given his skill as an astronomer, Brahe was usually proven right.  However, his abrasive personality finally caught up with him -- when Frederick died in 1588, he was succeeded by his son Christian IV, who didn't like Brahe and ultimately forced him into exile.

Brahe's death was as peculiar as his life.  In October of 1601, the story goes, he was at a banquet in Prague and had to pee, but thought it was rude to excuse himself even for something that quick.  When he returned home, he found he couldn't pee, and died in horrible agony eleven days later.  The blame was laid on his stubbornness at refusing to leave the banquet, but the truth is, that can't be responsible for his death.  You can't injure yourself by holding it -- ultimately your sphincter just refuses to cooperate and you wet your pants.  It's almost certain that Brahe had a physiological problem like a urethral blockage or prostate hypertrophy, and that's what ultimately caused his demise.

But there's no doubt that the bizarre story of his death adds to his already notorious reputation for being peculiar.

The reason Brahe comes up -- besides his just being an interesting person -- is that there's a new analysis of the stuff left behind in his alchemical laboratory at Uraniborg.  He had a less-well-known fascination with alchemy, and ran a laboratory in the basement that conjures up images of the mad scientist, with a dungeon lab with stone walls and floors and various liquids bubbling and fuming in glass retorts.  When Brahe fell out of favor, and (especially) after his death, Uraniborg was pretty well taken apart, but there were bits and pieces left behind -- in particular, some glass shards from his alchemy equipment that still contained residues of the materials they'd last held.

A new analysis of the shards at the University of Southern Denmark has found significant traces of nickel, copper, zinc, tin, antimony, tungsten, gold, mercury, and lead.  Some of them, such as gold, lead, and mercury, are unsurprising; those were stock raw materials for the alchemists' eternal dream of turning base metals into gold.  Others, though, are more puzzling.

"[T]ungsten is very mysterious," said Kaare Lund Rasmussen, co-author of the study.  "Tungsten had not even been described at that time, so what should we infer from its presence on a shard from Tycho Brahe's alchemy workshop?"

In fact, it wouldn't be isolated for almost two centuries, when chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was able to extract it in pure form, something he was also the first to do with molybdenum and barium.  But it's possible that Brahe accidentally stumbled upon a method for extracting it -- or, perhaps, that it simply remained behind as an impurity in some other mixture he was concocting.

So Brahe was an odd amalgam in another way -- a dedicated and exacting empirical astronomer, and a subscriber to one of the weirdest discredited models humans have ever come up with.  "It may seem strange that Tycho Brahe was involved in both astronomy and alchemy, but when one understands his worldview, it makes sense," said Poul Grinder-Hansen, who also co-authored the study.  "He believed that there were obvious connections between the heavenly bodies, earthly substances, and the body's organs.  Thus, the Sun, gold, and the heart were connected, and the same applied to the Moon, silver, and the brain; Jupiter, tin, and the liver; Venus, copper, and the kidneys; Saturn, lead, and the spleen; Mars, iron, and the gallbladder; and Mercury, mercury, and the lungs.  Minerals and gemstones could also be linked to this system, so emeralds, for example, belonged to Mercury."

Once again illustrating that the scientific method only works where you choose to apply it.

In any case, the recent study shines more light on the life and work of one of the strangest scientists who ever lived -- Tycho Brahe, the man with the golden nose, whose work so profoundly inspired such greats as Kepler and Newton.  That he was also involved in alchemy may seem weird, but you can't be right all the time.  And given his reputation for oddity, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that he continues to confound our expectations, over four centuries after his death.

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Complexities

One of the most insidious tendencies in human nature is the way we gravitate toward simple answers to complicated questions.

I got started thinking about this because of a paper out of Stanford University that appeared this week in Science Advances, about the role that plumes of Saharan dust play in hurricane intensity and rainfall quantity.  This kind of thing is all done now using computer models, and to say the problem is mathematically complex is a stunning understatement.  The scientists have to try to work out the interactions between blobs of air that can move in three dimensions, that vary in temperature, humidity, pressure, and speed, in relation to dust particles of different sizes, shapes, and compositions, at different altitudes, and see if they can figure out how that will affect the barometric pressure, windspeed, and rainfall of storms once they reach land.

It's why weather prediction is still so difficult in general; weather is an exceedingly complex system.  This accounts for my kneejerk furious reaction when I hear someone say, "I should be a meteorologist, it's the only profession where you can be wrong three-quarters of the time and still get paid!"  (Hurr hurr.)  Or, like I actually heard someone say in a school board budget meeting -- "Why do the science teachers need an expensive weather station?  If I want to know what the weather is, I just look out the damn window."  (Hurr hurr hurr durr.)

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NOAA]

It takes some self-awareness to realize you're pretty much completely ignorant about a topic, and considerable effort to remedy it, which probably explains why so many people like to pretend the world is simple.  So much easier to pick a solution that appeals to you -- especially one that doesn't require you to revise any of your preconceived notions -- and forthwith stop thinking.

Honestly, any time you hear "All we need to do is...", you should be on your guard.

The topic cropped up again a couple of days ago in a post from the wonderful author Lisa Lee Curtis, who took on addressing a meme that's been going around showing a trash-covered street with graffiti on the walls, in an obviously poor neighborhood, and the caption, "Democrats want us to believe they can clean up the environment, yet they can't even clean up their own district and streets."  Lisa does a brilliant takedown of the claim and the mindset behind it, and you should read it in its entirety (you can find it at the link provided), but one bit in particular stood out: "Democrats didn't do this.  Greed did this and continues to do this.  This isn't a partisan crisis, this is a human crisis, and you're playing armchair quarterback to something that isn't a fucking game."

But it's appealing to land on a simple solution, isn't it?  Whatever the issue is, find a one-liner of an answer and call it good.  It's the Democrats' fault.  It's the Republicans' fault.  It's the fault of irresponsible young people.  It's the fault of hidebound, conservative older people.  It's the fault of (fill in the blank): Black people, Muslims, Jews, atheists, the poor, LGBTQ+ people... whoever your favorite scapegoat is.

You know what?  It's time to grow up and stop being so damn lazy.  The world is full of complexities, which might suck, but last I checked, reality doesn't care if you think it sucks.  Learn about all sides of the issue, not just the one that comes from your preferred partisan news source, before you form an opinion.

And look, it's okay not to have an opinion about some things.  It's perfectly all right to say, "I just don't know enough about this topic that anything I could say about it would be relevant."  Work to learn about what's going on in the world, do your best to understand, but when something is truly beyond you -- like the mathematics of meteorological forecasting is for me -- then have a little humility and admit that you don't know enough to weigh in.

Oh, and for cryin' in the sink, don't spout off about subjects where you're completely ignorant and can't be bothered to learn.  There's a name for willful ignorance, you know.

It's called "stupidity."

Keep in mind the quote from H. L. Mencken: "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time.  There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong."

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Breaching the wall

Spartacus was a Thracian slave and gladiator, born in around 103 B.C.E. in what is now Bulgaria, about whose early years (despite several movies and books giving lots of lurid detail) little is known for certain.  He may have been conscripted into the Roman army -- certainly he knew a great deal about fighting and tactics -- but ultimately ran afoul with the notoriously harsh Roman discipline and was forced into slavery.  His physical prowess made it inevitable he'd be chosen as a gladiator, an occupation that could on occasion win you renown and eventual freedom, but much more frequently ended up with your dying a painful death in front of a large, cheering audience.

Spartacus by sculptor Dénis Foyatier (1830) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Spartacus statue by Dénis Foyatier, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Spartacus was having none of it, and in 73 B.C.E. he escaped confinement with about seventy other gladiators.  Soon their ranks were joined by an estimated seventy thousand slaves and poor people, which began the Third Servile War, a conflict Voltaire referred to as "the only just war in history."  They held out for two years -- no mean feat -- by this time, swelling their numbers to 120,000, before the inevitable happened.  The Roman army, under Marcus Licinius Crassus, defeated Spartacus's forces at the Battle of Lucania in 73 B.C.E.  Spartacus himself was killed in the battle (although his body was never found, leading to rampant speculation, lo unto this very day, that he somehow escaped).  In a way, even if he was killed during the fighting it was damned lucky for him, because after the battle ended six thousand of his compatriots were crucified along the Appian Way, surely one of the most horrific and cruel means of execution ever devised.

The Death of Spartacus by Hermann Vogel (1882) [Image is in the Public Domain]

For what it's worth, Crassus got what he deserved in the end.  In 53 B.C.E. he died at the disastrous (from the Roman perspective, anyhow) Battle of Carrhae, by one account being held down and having molten gold poured down his throat.

Man, they did know how to come up with some creatively gruesome ideas, back then.

The reason Spartacus comes up is because of a story over at Smithsonian Magazine about an archaeological find in Calabria, the "toe of Italy's boot" -- a three-kilometer-long stone wall running alongside what appears to be a deep military ditch, and nearby, obvious remnants of a battle, such as broken iron sword handles, curved blades, javelin points, and spearheads.  The types of artifacts are consistent with production during the late Republic, which is right about the same time as the Third Servile War occurred.

In fact, Andrea Maria Gennaro, superintendent of archaeology for the Italian Ministry of Culture, who worked at the site, believes that the wall and ditch were built to contain Spartacus and his fellow rebels, but that there is a spot on the wall that shows sign of a breach.  It's known that the rebellious slave army did fight battles against the Roman army in the region -- and more than once succeeded, before finally being overwhelmed and defeated in Lucania, forty kilometers south of Naples.  Gennaro thinks this very spot might have been the site of one of those breaches by the famous rebel.

Part of the stone wall thought to have been part of the defense against Spartacus and the rebels [Image credit: Andrea Maria Gennaro]

"We started studying weapons recovered along the wall, and the closest comparisons are with weapons from the late Republican period," she said.  "We believe we have identified the site of the clash...  The wall is a sort of barrier due to its topographic location and other factors, like the absence of gates.  It divides the entire large flat area into two parts...  When we realized what it was, it was very exciting.  It's not every day you get to experience history first-hand."

I was struck by that palpable sense of history beneath my feet the entire time I was in Italy two months ago.  Mind you, there's history everywhere in the world; right here where I now live, the Seneca and Cayuga Nations and their ancestors thrived for thousands of years.  But there are few places in the world with as many tangible traces of antiquity as in Italy.

And now we have one with a direct connection to one of the most famous figures from the Roman Republic -- someone who is still held up as an inspiration to those fighting against oppression and servitude.  Even though Spartacus and his rebels ultimately failed -- certainly, the practice of slavery in Rome continued unabated afterward -- seeing the wall that they breached over two thousand years ago still acts as a symbol of brave men and women willing to put their lives on the line to be free.

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Seeing angels

In Harry Nilsson's strange little cartoon fable-for-adults The Point (1971), the character of the Rock Man tells the main character Oblio, "You see what you wanna see, and hear what you wanna hear, you dig?"

I dig.  In fact, truer words never spoken.  We take what we experience and shoehorn it into what we already believed; it's impossible to do otherwise, because we're constrained by our expectations and prior understanding.  Science helps -- it's certainly a more objective approach than anything else I can think of -- but even it's not completely immune, something I wrote about in more detail a few years ago.  Confirmation bias seems to be a built-in condition of the human brain -- something we could all bear keeping in mind, especially when it comes to topics about which we're dead sure we're right.

To start with a rather low-emotional-charge example, take the story of the Angels of Mons.

The claim is that in August of 1914, with World War I in full swing, some British, French, and Belgian soldiers on the battlefield saw an angelic apparition near Mons, Belgium.  This happened during the middle of a battle where the Allied forces were greatly outnumbered by the Germans, and things were looking pretty bleak.  The sudden spectacle of divine messengers over the field, leading an army of ghostly bowmen, was a turning point in the battle; encouraged by the fact that apparently God was on the side of the Allies, they fought with renewed energy, finally driving the Germans back with heavy losses.  No less a figure than Brigadier General John Charteris spoke of there being widespread rumors of "an Angel of the Lord, clad in white raiment bearing a flaming sword, appearing before the German forces at the Mons battle forbidding their advance."

A drawing that appeared in the Illustrated London News in November 1915, showing an artist's conception of the Ghostly Bowmen of Mons [Image is in the Public Domain]

The trouble began when people started investigating who actually saw the apparition.  Turned out that just about all the soldiers who were at Mons denied having seen it personally, but damn near every one of them "knew someone who had."  Interestingly, the British soldiers claimed the ghostly bowmen were being led by St. George, while the French soldiers said they were led by Joan of Arc.  More damning still, some of them said they hadn't heard about it, but had read about it -- and upon inquiry, what most of them had read was a (fictional) short story by Arthur Machen called "The Bowmen," published only a month after the battle in The London Evening News, recounting a tale of German soldiers driven back by the ghosts of British fighters who had died at the Battle of Agincourt.  

The Society for Psychical Research, which then (as now) was one of the foremost groups evaluating paranormal claims through a skeptical, scientific lens, said about the Angels of Mons, "We have received [no first-hand testimony] at all, and of testimony at second-hand we have none that would justify us in assuming the occurrence of any supernormal phenomenon...  The battlefield visions prove on investigation to be founded on mere rumor, and cannot be traced to any authoritative source."

Interesting that the ones who swore the visions were real were people who already (1) believed in angels, (2) thought that of course God was on their side, and (3) won the battle anyhow.  There might be a little more credibility to the story if there was a single German report of having been driven back by St. George and/or St. Joan, the angelic host, and spectral bowman -- which, of course, there isn't.  But even today, there are people who still claim fervently that it happened, and cite it as a real example of the existence of angels and of divine intervention in the course of human affairs.

Whatever happens to you, you make it fit whatever your perception of the world already was.

Which brings us to the higher-emotional-charge example, which is the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

The best information we have at the moment is that the shooter was an odd, disturbed young man, whose real motives may never be known for certain.  He was the registered Republican son of a Libertarian father and Democratic mother, and fit the almost-cliché picture of the mass shooter as a bullied, angry young loner.  This hasn't stopped the Democrats from saying of course he was a Republican, and the Republicans from saying he was a closet Democrat who had registered as a Republican as a smokescreen.  Anti-trans bigots made the claim the shooter was a trans woman -- a false story amplified by none other than Alex Jones, who just will not keep his stupid mouth shut despite his slander already having caused him to lose just about everything he owns.  Despite the source, the rumor was immediately swallowed whole by members of the far-Right who are desperate to characterize LGBTQ+ people as inherently depraved.

An even closer parallel to the Angels of Mons, though, is the response some have had to Trump's near-miss.  The pro-Trump Christians have been nearly unanimous in their claims that the bullet was deflected through direct divine intervention (never mind that a bystander was hit and killed; perhaps the Almighty didn't consider him as worthy of survival).  Pictures of an angel, the Virgin Mary (in the Roman Catholic versions), or even Jesus himself pinging the bullet away at the last moment are making the rounds.  On the other hand, a small, but growing, group of anti-Trump Christians are quoting Revelation 13:3, which is about the Beast (read, Satan) who "filled the whole world with wonder," whom people worshipped and followed without question -- and who received an apparently fatal wound to the head, but who miraculously escaped death.

Three guesses as to how they're interpreting that story.

You see what you wanna to see, and hear what you wanna hear.

Why is it so hard for people to confine themselves to the facts?  As I mentioned at the start, there's a measure of confirmation bias that is unavoidable, but these people seem to be taking scanty information and then painting in the gaps with whatever they'd desperately like to be true.  And it's unsurprising that much of it is given a religious slant; like the story of the angels over the battlefield, it's all too common to add in some divine providence to the mix -- where, of course, the angels you see conveniently make things work out in accordance with the way you'd very much like them to work out.

It puts me in mind of the trenchant quote by Susan B. Anthony, which seems as good a place to end as any: "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

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Make a little noise

Sometimes, you can mislead people not only by what you say, but by what you leave out.

Take, for example, the "Moodus noises," that have been reported for centuries near the village of Moodus, Connecticut, in the town of East Haddam.  The sounds themselves are real enough; in fact, the village's name comes from the Algonquian matchitmoodus, which translates to "place of noises."  Rumblings and deep booms are frequent, especially in the vicinity of nearby Mount Tom, and were apparently part of the inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft's terrifying short story "The Dunwich Horror":

No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills and made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below...  Noises in the hills continue to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and other physiographers.  Other traditions tell of foul odors near the hill-crowning circles of stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines; while still others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard -- a bleak, blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow.

Which is pretty damn atmospheric, you have to admit.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Reuben C. Dodd - DeviantArt - Facebook, The Dunwich Horror - "Wilbur Whateley's Twin" by Reuben C. Dodd, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Interestingly, not only was Lovecraft springboarding off a real phenomenon of subterranean noises; the Devil's Hop Yard is also a real place, but it's not as eerie as Lovecraft would have you believe.  In fact, it's pretty enough that it was set aside as a state park, and as far as its diabolical name, no one's quite sure where it came from.  One theory is that a brewer who lived there was named Dibble, and the locals thought using the name for his hop fields was an amusing pun.

Of course, Lovecraft was writing fiction, and actually, he himself was not at all superstitious.  When fans wrote him letters asking for the directions to Dunwich or Arkham or Innsmouth -- or, worse, said they'd been there and wanted to tell him all about it -- he'd respond with admirable patience, "None of those are real places.  I know that for certain, you see, because I made them up."  But the fact remains that the Moodus noises are quite real, even if he and others spun fictional tales around them.  So what are they?

There are dozens of websites and books and YouTube videos claiming that they're supernatural in origin -- citing Native or early colonial legends but not going any further.  They often quote the passage from Charles Skinner's Myths and Legends of Our Own Land:

It was finally understood that Haddam witches, who practiced black magic, met the Moodus witches, who used white magic, in a cave beneath Mount Tom, and fought them in the light of a giant carbuncle [ruby] that was fastened to the roof...

If the witch-fights were continued too long the king of Machimoddi, who sat on a throne of solid sapphire in the cave whence the noises came, raised his wand: then the light of the carbuncle went out, peals of thunder rolled through the rocky chambers, and the witches rushed into the sky.

Most of the paranormal-leaning sources claim the area is haunted -- either by demons, or nature-spirits, or the ghosts of dead humans (or some combination).  They claim that there's a grand mystery still surrounding the place; you'll frequently see phrases like "no good explanation" and "unexplained phenomenon" and "scientists are baffled" (given the frequency of this one, you'd think scientists do little more than shrug their shoulders in helpless puzzlement all day long).  What these books, articles, and websites conveniently leave out is that in fact, a cogent scientific explanation for the Moodus noises was published by a geologist named Elwyn Perry...

... all the way back in 1941.

Perry proposed -- and the explanation has borne up under scrutiny -- that the Moodus noises are caused by minor seismic activity.  The area around Moodus is prone to earthquake swarms, despite its being far from obvious active fault lines.  In the 1980s there were four separate clusters of small quakes, numbering more than one hundred temblors in all, accompanied by a corresponding upswing of reports of booming and rumbling noises, and another swarm occurred in 2011.  Later studies found that the culprit is the Lake Char Fault, the subterranean suture line of a terrane (a microcontinent that ends up welded to a larger land mass) that stuck to North America during the lockup of Pangaea 250 million years ago.  The boundary was a weak spot when the Atlantic Ocean opened, and the tensional stress of rifting is still being released as the land settles.

So there's a completely natural explanation for the Moodus noises, however reluctant some people are to say so.  In a way, I get it; there's a certain frisson you get from accounts of orgiastic rites and conjuring evil spirits from underground caverns, that "it's a geologic fault zone and what you're hearing are small, shallow earthquakes" simply doesn't provide.

But predictably, I'd much rather know the real answer, and if I want to scare myself, I'll just read "The Dunwich Horror."  As far as the supernatural explanations, I tend to agree with journalist/skeptic Carrie Poppy: "We use these as stopgaps for things we can't explain.  We don't believe them because of evidence, we believe them because of a lack of evidence."

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Life in the background

Robertson Davies's brilliant book Fifth Business opens with a quote that explains the title:

Those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were none the less essential to bring about the Recognition or the dénouement were called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business.

Davies attributes the quote to the Danish playwright Thomas Overskou, but in reality Davies himself made it up, as he admitted to a scholar almost a decade after its publication when a thorough scouring of Overskou's work failed to turn up any such passage.  To give a rather meta twist to the whole thing, the novel is about a man (Dunstan Ramsay) who feels overlooked and marginalized in life, always the minor character eclipsed by everyone around him -- the one who is essential to the plot but never center stage -- and Davies has stated that the entire trilogy of which Fifth Business is the first installment is semi-autobiographical.

So Robertson Davies, essentially, wrote a memoir disguised as a novel about a sort-of fictional character whose accomplishments were overlooked or misattributed, and opened it with a quote he himself had made up and then attributed to someone else.

Man, there are some layers there to analyze.

I was immediately reminded of Davies's book when I came across a recent paper in the Journal of Research in Personality a couple of days ago.  The study, conducted by psychologists Ryan Goffredi and Kennon Sheldon of the University of Missouri, looks at how we see our roles in our own autobiographical memories -- if we view ourselves as being the main character in our own story, driving the narrative and affecting the outcome, or as a minor character primarily acting as a foil for others' successes.  Interestingly, Goffredi and Sheldon found that people who see themselves in the starring role in their own life's story are generally more psychologically healthy -- they have lower rates of depression and anxiety and higher scores on assessments for emotional well-being and satisfaction with life.

It's not surprising, really.  A sense of agency in your own life has a huge effect on how you see the world.  The authors write:

These results support our notion that the way in which an individual perceives themselves as a character in their life story is likely to impact their well-being.  When people see themselves as being the agentic force in their lives and make decisions for themselves, as major characters do, rather than being swept about by external forces (and other people), they are more integrated and fully functioning selves.

Such individuals feel more autonomous, more competent and effective, and also experience better relational satisfaction with others, as evidenced by their increased basic psychological need satisfaction.  Conversely, those who see themselves as minor characters are more likely to feel thwarted in getting these needs satisfied, a condition associated with diminished self-integration and well-being.

This cut pretty close to the bone for me, because I have suffered from depression and anxiety my entire adult life, and have also felt very little agency in what goes on around me, but never really thought to link the two.  It's always seemed to me that in most situations I'm the perpetual outsider, not really central to anything or anyone, always trying to find my footing but never really succeeding, and only useful apropos of others' accomplishments.  And when I think of most of the big events in my life, it's always struck me how few of them I honestly was in control of.  Even my choice of a career happened more or less by accident -- and halfway through my first year of teaching, I was about a micron away from quitting, from admitting that I just wasn't up to the job and needed to find some other way of making a living.

But teaching itself is kind of emblematic of that mindset, isn't it?  You are there to facilitate your students' learning and advancement, launching them on their lives and careers and hopes and dreams, while you yourself stay put.  Each year you wave goodbye to one set of students and say hello to the next -- like a rock in the stream, watching the water perpetually flowing away from you and out of sight.

Reading the Goffredi and Sheldon paper, though, I find myself wondering how much of my sense of being "fifth business" in my own life's story is because I'm viewing it through the skewed lenses of mental illness.  After all, what the researchers found was a correlation; so if there is a causation there, which way does it point?  Does depression make you feel like a minor character in your own life, or does being marginalized in actuality lead to a loss of a sense of agency?

Could be both, of course.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Uark Theatre, As You Like It (14523154077), CC BY 2.0]

But perhaps that's why I enjoyed Davies's novel Fifth Business (and its sequels, The Manticore and World of Wonders) so much.  It was easy for me to identify with Dunstan Ramsay -- a man who spent his whole life with circumstance catching him by the tail and whirling him around, who never felt as if he were central to the narrative of his own story.  

The character Percy Boyd Staunton -- who is Ramsay's opposite, very much the main character of every scene he's in, for better or worse -- puts it this way: "If you don't hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned soon show you what you'll get."

I have to wonder, though, if that option was ever really open to me.  And, after all, minor characters are necessary, too -- the ones who facilitate the protagonist's success or the antagonist's eventual comeuppance, even if they never reap any rewards for their actions.  It may be a little underwhelming to see your name in the playbill listed in a forgettable role like "Third Male Bystander," but hey, a role is a role.  Life in the background is, at least, usually safe.

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