Borley Rectory, and the problem with anecdote

There's a reason skeptics have a problem with anecdotal evidence and eyewitness testimony.

It's not that that it's impossible that you saw a ghost, or Bigfoot, or an extraterrestrial spacecraft.  What we're saying is that we need more than your assurance that you did.  Not only do we have the potential for outright lies and hoaxes -- some of them very subtle and clever -- we have the fact that the human sensory apparatus more or less sucks.

To put not too fine a point on it.

I mean, it works well enough.  It keeps us sufficiently aware of our surroundings to stay alive.  But we're easily tricked, we miss things, we misinterpret what we see and hear.  As astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "The human perceptual system is rife with all sorts of ways of getting it wrong."

As an illustration, let's consider one of the most famous "haunted house" stories in the world -- the infamous Borley Rectory, of Borley, Essex, England.

Borley Rectory always shows up on those websites with names like, "Ten Most Terrifying Real Ghost Stories!", usually somewhere near the top of the list.  So here are the bare bones of the story, just in case you don't know it.

Borley Rectory was built in 1862 by Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull, Rector of Borley Parish.  He designed the building to replace an earlier rectory that had burned down in 1841, and also to accommodate his wife and family of fourteen children, which indicates that Reverend Bull put a lot of stock in the "be fruitful and multiply" thing from the Book of Genesis.

Be that as it may, the parish was certainly steeped in history.  The parish church is thought to date to the twelfth century, and the town was the site of Borley Hall, the ancestral seat of the Waldegrave family.  But here's where truth starts twisting in with fabrication; because the additional claim that the rectory had been built on the site of an old Benedictine monastery appears to have no basis in reality.

Which means that the tale that is the basis of the haunting also is of dubious provenance.  Because the story goes that a monk in the (almost certainly non-existent) monastery was having an affair with a nun from a nearby convent.  They made plans to elope, and had in fact arranged a coach driven by a friend of the monk's in order to get away, but the plan was discovered.

Sexual indiscretion by the clergy was a major no-no back then.  The coachman was beheaded, the monk hanged, and the nun bricked up in a wall inside the convent.

Except... none of them existed, remember?  Because there's no evidence there ever was a monastery on the rectory grounds.

But that didn't stop the tale from growing. Here's one account of what Reverend Bull et al. saw:

On July 28th, 1900, three Bull daughters reportedly saw a figure on a path, which later became known as the "Nuns Walk", to the rear of the rectory.  They were joined by a fourth sister to help greet the stranger, but the apparition disappeared.  Harry also told of seeing the nun, together with the phantom coach in which she had eloped.

 
She was also seen wandering the grounds around the Rectory, in and out of the bushes, dressed in grey.  There are reports of the Monk and Nun passing across the grounds.  Several people said they observed "A lady in grey cloak" and "A gentleman with a sort of bald head, dressed in a long black gown."

Once the story of the haunting began to spread, others reported seeing spectral nuns and monks.  But then events accelerated.  A later rector of the parish, one Lionel Foyster, moved in in 1930 with his wife Marianne, and they began to experience poltergeist activity in addition to the continuing presence of ghostly figures loping about.  Marianne began to receive messages written on walls and scraps of paper, such as the following:

Both of the Foysters reported having peculiar experiences:

During the first year of their tenancy, Lionel described many unexplained happenings including; bell ringing, the appearance of Harry Bull [son of the first rector of Borley], glass objects appearing out of nowhere and being dashed to the floor, books appearing, and many items being thrown, including pebbles and an iron.  After an attempt at exorcism, Marianne was thrown out of bed several times.

The Foysters eventually moved out, apparently because of Lionel Foyster's declining health, and afterwards no one could be found who was willing to live in the rectory, almost certainly because of its reputation.

And then Harry Price got involved.

Price was a psychic investigator of significant fame, who had founded the National Laboratory of Psychic Research as a rival to the far more reputable Society for Psychical Research.  Price himself was a strange mixture of skeptic and sketchy.  He was instrumental in unmasking outright hoaxers such as Helen Duncan, who used cheesecloth and paper soaked in egg white to simulate "ectoplasm."  But his investigation of Borley Rectory, leading to the publication of a book in 1940, was unequivocally in support of its having been haunted -- despite a stinging critique by researchers for the SPR who said that Price himself was a trained conjuror (which was true), and had "salted the mine" by faking some of the evidence from Borley, in collusion with Marianne Foyster, who "was actively engaged in fraudulently creating [haunted] phenomena."

Price, of course, denied any such thing, but further inquiries by the SPR left his role in the alleged haunting in serious question.  And the matter came to an unexpected close when the rectory burned in 1939 because of an accident with an oil lamp.

The remnants of the building were demolished in 1944.  But people still visit the site and the adjacent cemetery, and still report ghostly appearances, lo unto this very day.

See what I mean about anecdote?  We have a story that started out with a most-likely-false claim of three executions on the rectory grounds, followed by what many believe was an outright hoax perpetrated by Harry Price and Marianne Foyster.  Blend that together with overactive imaginations, and the rather dubious quality of the human perceptual systems, and you have a mishmash out of which any kernel of truth -- if there is one there -- becomes impossible to discern.

So is Borley haunted?  The most honest answer is "there's no way to know for sure," with a strong corollary of "... but probably not."  There's nothing here that any unbiased individual would consider hard evidence, just tall tale piled upon unsubstantiated claim, mixed with "I heard that people saw ghosts there."

If this is "one of the best-authenticated haunted sites in Britain," as one website claimed, we've got some serious problems.

To return to my initial point, it's not that I'm saying that any of the claims of the paranormal are impossible.  What I'm saying is that thus far, no evidence I've seen has been convincing, at least not to someone who wasn't already convinced.  But despite all that, I'm hoping to visit Borley next time I'm in the UK, and if I do, I'll definitely report back with anything I happen to see.

Not that it should make a difference.  Because eyewitness testimony is still subject to all of the caveats I've mentioned -- even if it comes from yours truly.

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A matter of truth

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The treadmill

I've mentioned before how my difficulties with math short-circuited my goal of becoming a researcher in physics, but the truth is, there's more to the story than that.

Even after I realized that I didn't have the mathematical ability -- nor, honestly, enough interest and focus to overcome my challenges -- I still had every intention of pursuing a career in science.  I spent some time in the graduate school of oceanography at the University of Washington, and from there switched to biology, but I found neither to be a good fit.  It wasn't a lack of interest in the disciplines; biology, in fact, is still a deep and abiding fascination to this day, and I ultimately spent over three decades teaching the subject to high schoolers.  What bothered me was the publish-or-perish atmosphere that permeated all of research science.  I still recall my shock when one of our professors said, "Scientists spend 25% of their time doing the research they're interested in, and 75% of their time trying to beat everyone else in the field to grant money so they don't starve to death."

It's hard to pinpoint an exact moment that brought me to the realization that the career I'd always dreamed of wasn't for me -- but this was certainly one of the times I said, "Okay, now, just hang on a moment."

I'm not alone in having issues with this.  The brilliant theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder did a video on her YouTube channel called "My Dream Died, and Now I'm Here" that's a blistering indictment of the entire edifice of research science.  Hossenfelder has the following to say about how science is currently done:

It was a rude awakening to realize that this institute [where she had her first job in physics research] wasn't about knowledge discovery, it was about money-making.  And the more I saw of academia, the more I realized it wasn't just this particular institute and this particular professor.  It was generally the case.  The moment you put people into big institutions, the goal shifts from knowledge discovery to money-making.  Here's how this works:

If a researcher gets a scholarship or research grant, the institution gets part of that money.  It's called the "overhead."  Technically, that's meant to pay for offices and equipment and administration.  But academic institutions pay part of their staff from this overhead, so they need to keep that overhead coming.  Small scholarships don't make much money, but big research grants can be tens of millions of dollars.  And the overhead can be anything between fifteen and fifty percent.  This is why research institutions exert loads of pressure on researchers to bring in grant money.  And partly, they do this by keeping the researchers on temporary contracts so that they need grants to get paid themselves...  And the overhead isn't even the real problem.  The real problem is that the easiest way to grow in academia is to pay other people to produce papers on which you, as the grant holder, can put your name.  That's how academia works.  Grants pay students and postdocs to produce research papers for the grant holder.  And those papers are what the supervisor then uses to apply for more grants.  The result is a paper-production machine in which students and postdocs are burnt through to bring in money for the institution...

I began to understand what you need to do to get a grant or to get hired.  You have to work on topics that are mainstream enough but not too mainstream.  You want them to be a little bit edgy, but not too edgy.  It needs to be something that fits into the existing machinery.  And since most grants are three years, or five years at most, it also needs to be something that can be wrapped up quickly...

The more I saw of the foundations of physics, the more I became convinced that the research there wasn't based upon sound scientific principles...  [Most researchers today] are only interested in writing more papers...  To get grants.  To get postdocs.  To write more papers.  To get more grants.  And round and round it goes.

The topic comes up today because of two separate studies that came out in the last two weeks that illustrate a hard truth that the scientific establishment as a whole has yet to acknowledge; there's a real human cost to putting talented, creative, bright people on the kind of treadmill Hossenfelder describes.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Doenertier82, Phodopus sungorus - Hamsterkraftwerk, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The first study, from a group in Sweden, found that simply pursuing a Ph.D. takes a tremendous toll on mental health, and instead of there being a "light at the end of the tunnel," the toll worsens as the end of the work approaches.  By the fifth year of doctoral study, the likelihood of a student using mental-health medications rises by forty percent.  It's no surprise why; once the Ph.D. is achieved, there's the looming stress of finding a postdoc position, and then after that the savage competition for the few stable, tenure-track research positions out there in academia.  "You need to generate data as quickly as possible, and the feeling of competition for funding and jobs can be very strong, even early in your PhD.," said Rituja Bisen, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in neurobiology at the University of Würzburg.  "Afterward, many of us have to move long distances, even out of the country, to find a worthwhile position.  And even then, there's no guarantee.  It doesn’t matter how good a lab is; if it’s coming out of a toxic work culture, it isn’t worth it in the long run."

The other study, out of Poland (but involving worldwide data), is perhaps even more damning; over fifty percent of researchers leave science entirely in under ten years after publishing their first academic paper.

You spend huge amounts of money on graduate school, work your ass off to get a Ph.D, and then a position as a researcher, and after all that -- you find that (1) the stress isn't worth it, (2) you're barely making enough money to get by, and (3) the competition for grants is only going to get worse over time.  It's not surprising that people decide to leave research for other career options.

But how heartbreaking is it that we're doing this to the best and brightest minds on the planet?

And the problem is even more drastic for women and minorities; for them, the number still left publishing after ten years is more like thirty percent of the ones who started.

How far would we have advanced in our understanding of how the universe works if the system itself wasn't strangling the scientists?

Back when modern science got its start, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, science was the province of the rich; only the people who were already independently wealthy had the wherewithal to (1) get a college education, and afterward (2) spend their time messing about in laboratories.  There are exceptions -- Michael Faraday comes to mind -- but by and large, scientific inquiry was confined to the gentry.

Now, we have the appearance of a more open, egalitarian model, but at its basis, the whole enterprise still depends on institutions competing for money, and the people actually doing the research (i.e. the scientists) being worked to the bone to keep the whole superstructure running.

It's a horrible problem, and one I don't see changing until our attitudes shift -- until we start prioritizing the advancement of knowledge over academia-for-profit.  Or, perhaps, until our governments recognize how absolutely critical science is, and fund that over the current goals of fostering corporate capitalism to benefit the extremely wealthy and developing newer and better ways to kill those we perceive as our enemies.

I've heard a lot of talk about how prescient Star Trek was -- we now have something very like their communicators and supercomputers, and aren't far away from tricorders.  But we won't actually get there until we develop one other thing, and I'm not talking about warp drives or holodecks.

I'm talking about valuing science, and scientists, as being the pinnacle of what we as a species can achieve, and creating a system to provide the resources to support them instead of doing everything humanly possible to drive them away.

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The science of beauty

I got a curious response to my post a couple of days ago, about magical and/or supernatural explanations not actually being explanations at all, but a way to stop thinking.

Here's the email:

Dear Mr. Skepto,

You sound pretty worried that you don't have an explanation for everything.  People aren't always explainable!  They do things because they do them.  That's it.  Some people believe weird stuff and some people like the explanations from science.  Just like some people like the Beatles and some people like Beethoven.  It's silly to wear yourself out trying to figure why.

Do you worry about why your loved ones love you?  Maybe it's some chemical thing in their brain, right?  Do you tell your wife that's what love means?  Maybe it's a gene or something that's why I think flowers are pretty.  If so, the explanation is uglier than the flowers are.  I'd rather look at the flowers.

All your scientific explanations do is turn all the good things in life into a chemistry class.  I think they're worth more than calling them brain chemicals.  I'll take religion over science any day.  At least it leaves us with our souls.

Think about it.

L. D.

Well, L. D., thanks for the response.  I find your views interesting -- mostly because they're just about as opposite to the way I see the world as they could be.

But you probably already knew that.

There is a reason why musical tastes exist.  We're nowhere near the point in brain research where we could discern the explanation; but an explanation does exist for why Shostakovich's Prelude & Fugue in E-flat Minor gives me goosebumps (especially in this recording, played by the composer himself!), while Brahms's symphonies might send someone else into raptures but do nothing for me whatsoever.  Nothing just "is because it is."

And I can't fathom how knowing the explanation devalues your appreciation of the thing itself.  Me, I would love to know what's happening in my brain when I hear a piece of music I enjoy.  We're beginning to get some perspective on this, starting with a 2011 study that found that the neurological response to hearing a piece of music we love is similar to the brain's response to sex.

Cool, yes?  I think that's awesome.  How would knowing that make me appreciate music less?

Or sex either?

I find flowers even more beautiful knowing that their shapes and colors evolved to attract pollinators, and understanding a bit about the chemistry of photosynthesis.

Understanding light refraction doesn't make me shrug my shoulders at a rainbow.  And even love -- which L. D. evidently thinks lies entirely in the mystical realm -- is made no less by my knowledge that its underpinning has to do with brain chemistry.  It's like that old song with the verse:

Tell me why the stars do shine
And tell me why the ivy twines
And tell me why the sky is blue,
And I will say why I love you.

A more scientific type added a verse, to wit:

Nuclear fusion is why the stars do shine.
Thigmotropism is why the ivy twines.
Rayleigh scattering is why the sky's so blue,
And testicular hormones are why I love you.

Which I think is not only hilarious, it's a good deal more realistic than attributing it all to souls and people "doing things because they do them."

In short: science itself is beautiful.  Understanding how the world works should do nothing but increase our sense of wonder.  If scientific inquiry isn't accompanied by a sense of "Wow, this is amazing!", you're doing it wrong.  I'll end with a quote from Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who in his 1988 book What Do You Care What Other People Think? had the following to say:

I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with.  He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree.  But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is.  But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull."  I think he's kind of nutty…  There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower.  It only adds.  I don't understand how it subtracts.

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Attitude conversion

Here's a hypothetical for you.

There's a therapeutic practice being proposed for widespread use.  It has the following drawbacks:

• its use is strongly correlated with long-term PTSD, depression, and suicidal ideation.
• over half of the patients recommended for this practice are referred not by medical professionals, but by religious leaders.
• it has been denounced by every major medical organization.
• it has very close to a zero percent success rate.

Would you support the approval of this practice?

I devoutly hope the answer is "no," but unfortunately, this is no hypothetical or "proposed practice," it's already being used.  It's "conversion therapy" -- an attempt to "convert" LGBTQ+ people, many of them teenagers, into a straight cis identity.

And the word "convert" softens the impact of what the practice actually consists of.  Because its advocates don't want to use more accurate words like "bully" and "cajole" and "harass" and "subject to emotional abuse."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bojan Cvetanović, Rainbow flag ("Progress" variant by Daniel Quasar) at EuroPride 2019 (Vienna), CC BY-SA 4.0]

The topic comes up because of a paper this week in The Lancet Psychiatry, which lays out in no uncertain terms the dangers of this practice.  "Our study found an association between recall of conversion practices and symptoms of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide," said study lead author Nguyen Tran, of Stanford University.  "In particular, we saw the greatest harms in people who had been exposed to both types of conversion practices — those addressing sexual orientation and gender identity.  This study highlights the need for policy changes at a federal, state and local level, and an understanding of the lasting mental health impacts related to conversion practices."

The whole thing rests on the old idea that sexual identity and orientation are things you can change -- i.e., the ridiculous idea that "it's a choice."  With the tacit part being that queerness is a bad choice, or (to take the religious approach) a sin.  As a trans student of mine said some years ago, "How does that even make sense?  Who the hell would choose this?  To face ridicule and non-acceptance on a daily basis, and in some places, be in danger of injury, imprisonment, or death?  You have to be an idiot to believe that we're choosing this."

And, of course, the people who are straight never seem to be able to answer the question of when and how they decided on their sexual orientation.  I'd bet you cold hard cash you couldn't find a single one who sat down at age fourteen and thought, "Hmmm... guys or girls?  Guys or girls?  How will I ever decide?"

Speaking as a queer man, all I can say is believe me, I tried to change who I was.  I grew up in not only a devoutly Roman Catholic household, but one so uptight it almost beggars belief, and in one of the most conservative, homophobic areas of the United States.  When I was growing up I can barely remember my parents ever saying the word "sex."  Sex, and sexual desire (of any kind), were not something to be enjoyed and celebrated, but were nothing but an embarrassed necessity for procreating.  When it was time for The Talk I was handed a book that explained the mechanics (a book which, by the way, labeled queerness as "a mental illness").  The result: I tried like hell to erase from my brain all the same-sex attraction I felt.  Didn't work, of course, because it never does.  So I simply hid, in shame and fear and self-loathing.

For almost fifty years.

So even though I was never put through the hell of conversion therapy, the Tran et al. research is hardly a surprise to me.  And the fact that we don't have a nationwide ban on this practice is downright criminal -- and provides yet more evidence of the stranglehold religion has on the United States, to the point that religious considerations trump evidence, data, and the health and safety of American citizens.

"The preponderance of evidence indicates that conversion practices are related to negative mental health effects," Tran said.  "There is a greater need for mental health support among survivors of conversion practices.  Other studies that have explored this suggest that helping LGBTQIA+ people find supportive LGBTQIA+ networks, access affirming mental health care, and rebuild their self-esteem and embrace their gender identity or sexual orientation are important for addressing the negative mental health related to conversion practice."

It's attitudes that need to be converted, not people's sexual identity.

People are enraged about the non-issue of children being given sex-change operations on a whim -- like Donald Trump's idiotic lie, "The transgender thing is incredible.  Think of it.  Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.  The school decides what’s going to happen with your child."  (I worked in a school for 32 years, and trust me, school nurses are not equipped to do surgery.  And nothing in a school happens apropos of a child's health without parental consent, unless it's a life-or-death emergency.  Nothing.)  

So if you want to be furious about something, how about choosing something real, something that actually does demonstrable and long-lasting harm?

And then take that fury and turn it into something useful -- working to ban forever a practice that does irreparable damage to the mental health of one of the most vulnerable minorities.

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A battle between unknowns

I recently got into a discussion with a history-buff friend about the unfortunate fact that everything we know about history is incomplete -- and generally speaking, the further back in time you go, the more incomplete it is.  She referenced human remains like Tollund Man, the Lady of Caviglione, and the Egtved Girl, all European burials that have been extensively studied.  Tollund Man is the most recent (estimated at around 400 B.C.E.) and the Lady of Caviglione by far the oldest (at around 24,000 years ago), but all three share an aura of mystery regarding who they were, raising questions we almost certainly will never have answers to.  There's evidence Tollund Man was the victim of a sacrifice, but by whom, and toward what end, is unknown.  And about the circumstances of the other two, we know next to nothing.

Compound this with the fact that for every body that has survived, at least in skeletal form, literally millions more have crumbled into dust and are completely gone.  Most of our history is, and will always remain, lost.

The reason this comes up is the excavation in the Tollense Valley of Germany of the site of an ancient battlefield, dating to around 1250 B.C.E.  It was discovered in 1996 when an amateur archaeologist was walking along the edge of the Tollense River and saw something protruding from the bank.  It turned out to be a human bone -- and since that time, over 12,500 bones and 300 bronze arrowheads have been recovered from the area.  It appears to have been the site of one of the oldest known battles in Europe.  Some of the finds were downright gruesome:

The skull of one of the battle's casualties -- with the arrowhead that killed him still embedded in his cranium [Image credit: Volker Minkus]

What is most curious about the site is not that a bunch of people fought and killed each other -- after all, humans have been doing that pretty much forever -- but that an analysis of the arrowheads shows that the battle was between two groups, one of which had traveled there from hundreds of kilometers away.  The Tollense River Valley is in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and about half the arrowheads are of a design known to occur in archaeological sites from that area; but the other half are clearly of a different make, matching designs from much farther south, in Bavaria and Moravia.

"This suggests that at least a part of the fighters or even a complete battle faction involved in Tollense Valley derive from a very distant region," said Leif Inselmann, of the Free University of Berlin, who co-authored the paper on the study, which appeared this week in the journal Archaeology.

Who they were, and what brought them northward and into conflict with the residents there, are unknown, although there are some speculative possibilities.

"A causeway that crossed the Tollense River, constructed about five hundred years before the battle, is thought to have been the starting point of the conflict," said study co-author Thomas Terberger, of the University of Göttingen.  "The causeway was probably part of an important trade route.  Control of this bottleneck situation could well have been an important reason for the conflict...  This new information has considerably changed the image of the Bronze Age, which was not as peaceful as believed before.  The thirteenth century B.C.E. saw changes of burial rites, symbols and material culture.  I consider the conflict as a sign that this major transformation process of Bronze Age society was accompanied by violent conflicts.  Tollense is probably only the tip of the iceberg."

The fact is, though, the rest of that iceberg is likely to remain forever underwater.  Who the people were that fought and died in the now peaceful river valley in northern Germany is very likely going to stay a mystery, as will the reason that drove some of them to make the long trip from the forests of Bavaria.  It behooves us amateur students of history to remember not only the old adage that "history is written by the victors," but that the vast majority of history is completely forgotten by both sides -- what we don't know about our own past far outweighs what we do know.

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Not magic

I got in a friendly argument online a few days ago with someone who finds my reliance on the scientific method "limited."  (His word.)

He accepts science, he said, but added that if that's your only way of understanding, there's stuff you'll miss.  "There are features of reality that science can't, or won't, study," he said.  "Science deals with what is tangible and quantifiable; there are other ways of knowing that allow you to access what is intangible and unquantifiable.  Without those, you're ignoring half of the universe."

The whole thing put me in mind of biologist Stephen Jay Gould's idea of non-overlapping magisteria -- that there are different domains of inquiry, and science only addresses one of them.  (Gould considered religion to be one of those other magisteria -- and that science and religion could coexist just fine unless one chose to tread on the other's toes.)

The problem with this is that science has been progressively chewing away at the other magisteria, as more and more of the universe is explained scientifically.  Phenomena that were thought to be utterly mysterious are now accounted for by rational scientific models -- heredity and tectonic activity are just two of many examples.  (In some realms -- such as legal documents -- we still have vestiges of this older way of thinking, in calling certain natural occurrences "acts of God.")

Even some religious people are uncomfortable with this approach.  Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer referred to it as "the God of the gaps," and pointed out the most obvious problem with it:

How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge.  If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat.  We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know.

So accounting for a phenomenon using some not necessarily religious, but non-scientific, explanation is basically nothing more than the argument from ignorance; "we don't yet know how this works, so it must be beyond science to explain."

Emphasis on the word "yet."

Take, for example, the bleeding polenta of Padua.

[Image credit: Exploring the Invisible]

In 1819, there were reports of what some were calling a miracle and others a work of Satan -- the appearance of what seemed to be drops of blood in polenta, bread, and other starchy food.  Whatever it was did look convincingly like blood, as you can see from the above photograph.  Italy in the nineteenth century was a devoutly Roman Catholic country, and the phenomenon was considered a "sign" (of what, depended upon whom you asked; some thought it was a harbinger of the end of the world, unsurprising considering how often this claim still comes up).

But a chemist at the University of Padua, Bartolomeo Bizio, firmly believed that there had to be a natural, rational cause for the spots.  He obtained samples of the red-stained food, and very quickly discovered two things: (1) if he put a drop of the red material on a sterile dish of starch, it rapidly developed red streaks as well; and (2) when he looked at some of it under a microscope, he saw cells -- but not blood cells.  Whatever it was might have the same color as blood, but it wasn't blood.

It was, in fact, a bacteria, which Bizio named Serratia marcescens -- the genus name after Florentine biologist Serafino Serrati, and the species name from a Latin word meaning "decay."  The red color comes from an organic compound called prodiogiosin.  Serratia marcescens has been found to be a more-or-less ubiquitous bacteria in soils and on moist surfaces -- it's responsible for the pinkish color that sometimes shows up in spoiled food and around the edges of unscrubbed sinks and drains.

It's a simple example, but it does show how "it happened because of something supernatural" is not really an explanation at all.  It is, in fact, a way to stop thinking.  Bizio started from the standpoint of "let's assume this has a rational cause," and it was only because that was his baseline assumption that he was able to take the step forward into understanding it.

Now, don't misunderstand me; it's not that I'm sure that science can explain everything, and it's certainly not because I think science has explained everything.  It's more that before we jump to a paranormal answer, we'd better make sure we've ruled out all the scientific ones first.  Because in the past two hundred years, the other magisteria have gradually shrunk as science has explained more and more of the universe.

As the inimitable Tim Minchin put it: "Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be -- not magic."

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