Roots of the problem

It's natural enough to think that humans are the only organisms that damage their own habitat.  We certainly seem to be doing a damn good job of it.  But there have been other times living things have sown the seeds of their own destruction.

One good example is the Great Oxidation Event -- sometimes, justifiably, nicknamed the "Oxygen Holocaust."  It occurred just over two billion years ago, and hinges on one rather surprising fact; oxygen is a highly reactive, toxic gas.

There's good evidence that aerobic respiration -- the set of biochemical reactions that allows us to burn the glucose in our food, and which provides us with the vast majority of the energy we use -- evolved first as a mechanism for detoxifying oxygen, and only afterward got co-opted into being an energy pathway.  The problem was that prior to the Great Oxidation Event, all of the organisms had been anaerobes, which are capable of releasing energy without oxygen.  To the vast majority of anaerobes, oxygen is a deadly poison.  That's why when there was a sudden, massive injection of oxygen into the Earth's atmosphere a couple of billions of years ago, the result was that just about every living thing on Earth died.

The tipping point came with the evolution of yet another energetic pathway: photosynthesis.  Photosynthesis was a tremendous innovation, as it allowed organisms to harness light energy instead of chemical energy, but it had one significant downside.  The first part of the reaction chain of photosynthesis breaks up water molecules and releases oxygen.  So when the first photosynthesizers evolved -- probably something like modern cyanobacteria -- oxygen gas began to pour into the oceans and atmosphere.

Something like 99% of life on Earth died.

The survivors fell into three groups: (1) the handful of organisms that had some early form of aerobic respiration as a detoxification pathway; (2) anaerobes that had a way of hiding from the oxygen, like today's methanogens that live in anaerobic mud; and (3) the photosynthesizers themselves.

From the organisms that survived that catastrophic bottleneck came every living thing we currently see around us.

So we're far from being the only organisms that cause ecological problems.  The reason the topic comes up, in fact, is because of another example I'd never heard of until I bumped into a paper in the Geological Society of North America Bulletin last week; the Devonian mass extinctions, which are one of the "Big Five" extinction events that have struck the Earth.  This particular series of cataclysms wiped out an estimated seventy percent of marine species, but it may have been triggered by the evolution of something that seems innocuous, even benevolent.

Tree roots.

Plants had only colonized the land during the previous period, the Silurian, enabled to do so by yet another innovation; the evolution of vascular tissue.  The internal plumbing vascular plants have (the xylem and phloem you probably remember from your biology classes) allow plants to move water farther and faster, so they were no longer so tied to living in ponds and lakes.  Plus, vascular tissue in many plants doubles as support tissue, so this facilitated growing taller (a significant advantage when you're competing with your near neighbors for light).

But if you're taller, you're also more likely to topple when it's windy.  So then there's selection for who's got the best support system.  The winners: plants with roots.

Devonian Forest by Eduard Riou (ca. 1872) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Like vascular tissue, roots are multi-purpose.  They not only provide support and anchoring, they're good at creating lots of absorptive surface area for water and nutrients.  (Some roots are also evolved to store starch -- carrots come to mind -- but that's an innovation that seems to have come much later.)  So now we have a competition between plants for who's got the best supports, and who can access nutrients from the soils the fastest.

Roots very quickly became good at twisting their way into rocks.  You've undoubtedly seen it; tree roots clinging to, and breaking up, rocks, asphalt, cement, pretty much any barrier they can get a foothold into.  When that happened, suddenly there's an erosive force breaking up bedrock and transporting nutrients (especially phosphorus) into plant tissue.  Phosphorus began to leach out of the rock into the soil, and when the plants died all the phosphorus in the tissue was released into rivers, streams, and lakes.

The result was a massive influx of nutrients into bodies of water.

Have you ever seen what happens when chemical fertilizers get into a pond?  It fosters algal blooms, and when the algae dies and decomposes, the oxygen levels plummet and the entire pond dies.

That's what happened during the late Devonian Period -- but planet-wide.

The huge reef-building rugose and tabulate corals and stromatoporid sponges were wiped out en masse.  Other groups, such as trilobites and brachiopods, which depended on the reefs for habitat and food, got knocked back hard as well.

All, the authors claim, because of a nifty innovation in the structure of land plants.

It's tempting to think that the environment is stable; we look around us and think things have always been this way, and will always be this way.  What more of us need to understand is that while the global ecosystem is resilient up to a point, there is always a tipping point.  The scary part is we can pass that point suddenly, without even realizing it.  Then before we're even aware of what's happened, the last chance to turn things around is gone.

The difference between what happened during the Great Oxidation Event and the Devonian Mass Extinctions, and what's happening now, is that back then there was no conscious awareness on the part of the organisms who created the problem and those that were affected.  Now, we have (or should have) the awareness to see what is happening, and enough knowledge to make some smart decisions and halt the self-destructive path we're on.

Let's hope that it's not too late.

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Waves, demons, and sunk costs

I find it utterly baffling how hard it is for people to look at something that didn't work out like they expected and say, "Well, I guess I was wrong, then."

I mean, on one level, I get it.  I'm no fonder of being wrong than the next guy.  Finding out you're mistaken, especially about something important, can be devastating.  And admitting you're wrong can be nothing short of humiliating.  But even so -- when the facts demand it, we don't really have a choice, do we?

To judge by a great many people, apparently we do, and that choice is "hang on like grim death to what we already believed, and summarily dismiss any evidence to the contrary."

Take, for example, last week's election here in the United States.  Many of us, on both sides of the aisle, were expecting a "red wave" -- that the Republicans would score resounding wins, and end up with decisive majorities in the House, Senate, and gubernatorial races.  Didn't quite work out that way.  The Democratic majority in the Senate looks like it'll be up by at least one, possibly two; at the time of this writing, the control of the House of Representatives has yet to be decided, but any majority (either way) is going to be razor-thin.

My reason for bringing this up in the context of "being wrong" is not the pollsters, nor mere voting citizens like myself.  I have nowhere near the expertise in political science to expect my prognostications about elections would carry any weight at all, and polls have been wrong as often as they're right.  No, what I'm looking at here are the people who predicted the "red wave" would happen -- because God had told them so personally.

Let's start with pastor George Pearsons, who told an interviewer on The Victory Channel that he knew the election wouldn't be "stolen" because he'd gotten the information directly from the Big Guy himself:

This afternoon I'm in the kitchen, and I'm fixing something to eat, and Terry and I are talking about the election, and the different things that are happening.  And for a moment I got quiet, and I heard the voice of the Lord.  And you know what he said?  He said, 'I got this.'...  Father, we thank you.  We have worked together between heaven and Earth.  Two years, praying, standing, believing,  We are, as believers, emboldened, empowered, and standing on our authority in the word of God.  This election will not be stolen.  Corruption, you bow your knee, your name to the name of Jesus [??? sic], and Father we thank you that we've seen in two years, Jesus himself has rolled up his sleeves, and he has worked, and his people have worked with him, in every shape, form, and manner.  So Lord, we thank you that this deal is over.  It's up.  And now we hear your voice: 'I got this.'  And we praise you and honor you for the victory this night for the United States of America.

As the results started coming in, though, the tune changed.  My Pillow guy Mike Lindell, also speaking on The Victory Channel, said he saw it coming, despite what God himself had said to Reverend Pearsons, and that had been announced on the same channel, only hours earlier:

Well, it's kind of what I expected.  They're stealing everything.  Just in Herschel Walker's race alone, over two hundred thousand votes have been injected into his opponent to get to this runoff stage.  They stole the governor's race with Mastriano in Pennsylvania, we've seen an early injection of ninety thousand votes in the computers, and Kari Lake, they're trying to steal her race, too.

Needless to say, there was no "injection" of votes, and the races weren't "stolen."  Walker's in a runoff but is trailing Raphael Warnock, and Mastriano lost fair and square.  But saying that is a bridge too far for people like Lindell.

A couple of days afterward, when it became clear that there had been no "red wave," the christofascists were scrambling around trying to figure out why the divine guidance had turned out to be flat wrong.  No way could they just say, "Maybe God didn't speak to us after all," or "Perhaps hitching our boat to Donald Trump wasn't such a great idea," or (worst of all) "It's time to do some reflection and rethink whether our message of exclusion, ugliness, and hate is in line with Jesus's actual words."  Instead, they cast around for what could possibly have made the election go sideways, and landed on the obvious answer:

It was the demons.

Pastor Shane Vaughn said that of course what God told him wasn't wrong, and of course he wasn't delusional when he claimed to hear God speaking in the first place.  It was just those damn demons:

That's why there was no red wave.  Abortion.  Abortion changed everything.  And even though all the polls showed the economy was the main issue, abortion is a religious issue.  And religion creates more passion than anything in the world...  And there's a religion of demons that loves abortion.  That religion of pro-abortion showed up.  It was bigger than anybody understood because of the passion those demonic powers create in their church of heathens that love to kill babies.  Now that's why there was no red wave.  Abortion.  Had it not been for the abortion issue, I promise you, the whole country would be red today.  What happened in Pennsylvania -- anybody who could vote for that monster, Uncle Fester, proves to me the power of demonic activity in the world today.  That's the only way you could vote for that man.  That's it.  Those demons did show up, and those demons do have power over this Earth.

So if the supernatural voice you supposedly heard telling you something turns out to be wrong, you have to invent a supernatural enemy to explain what happened?

I understand the sunk-cost fallacy; that once you've put a tremendous amount of personal and emotional energy into supporting something or someone, it's a huge effort to reverse course.  But seriously; isn't it time for some reassessment, here?

It puts me in mind of a couple of quotes, the first from Susan B. Anthony: "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."  And even more to the point, from theologian and writer Timothy Keller: "If your god never disagrees with you, you might just be worshiping an idealized version of yourself."

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Fine-toothed comb

Sometimes I need to tell y'all about a new discovery not because it's weird or controversial, but simply because it's cool.

I owe my awareness of this one from my twin brudda from anudda mudda, Andrew Butters of the brilliant blog Potato Chip Math (which you should all subscribe to immediately).  Andrew is not only smart and a great writer and funnier than hell, he also knows my capacity for geeking out over anything related to languages, so when he found this, he sent it on to me instantaneously.

It's about the discovery of an ancient ivory comb near Tel Lachish, Israel.  It was a cool enough artifact, dating from about 1,700 B.C.E., but its coolness factor increased by a factor of a thousand when it was discovered that it was inscribed with seventeen tiny letters.

[Image courtesy of Dafna Gazit, Israeli Antiquities Authority]

The inscription is in Canaanite, and says: "ytš ḥṭ ḏ lqml śʿ[r w]zqt," which translates roughly to, "may this tusk root out lice of the hair and the beard."  If you're wondering what happened to all the vowels, they're missing because written Canaanite was an abjad -- a writing system wherein vowels are left out unless they occur first in a word.  (Modern abjads include Hebrew and Arabic, both of which are in the same family as Canaanite.  If you're curious about abjads and other writing systems, I did a post about that topic back in January.)

There are a lot of things that are cool about this.  First, it's mildly amusing that one of the earliest inscriptions ever found has to do with getting rid of lice.  Be that as it may, the (much) more awesome piece is that this is the earliest known inscription in the alphabet that would eventually morph into not only Arabic and Hebrew, but Cyrillic (used in several Slavic languages), Greek, and eventually, English.

"This is the first sentence ever found in the Canaanite language in Israel," said archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  "There are Canaanites in Ugarit in Syria, but they write in a different script, not the alphabet that is used still today…  The comb inscription is direct evidence for the use of the alphabet in daily activities some 3,700 years ago.  This is a landmark in the history of the human ability to write."

An amusing postscript is that the next oldest inscriptions ever found in Canaanite were on a 3,500 year old lead tablet found near Mount Ebal in Israel, and said, "Cursed, cursed, cursed—cursed by the God YHW.  You will die cursed.  Cursed you will surely die.  Cursed by YHW—cursed, cursed, cursed."

So that's cheerful.  I probably don't need to mention that "YHW" is a transcription of the Hebrew name for God, usually rendered either "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" in English.  It's a little humbling that the oldest surviving written texts we know of had to do with (1) ill-wishing an enemy, and (2) getting rid of parasites.

Although if you'll look around you at the behavior of people now, you'll probably be struck by the fact that not all that much has changed.

So that's our cool discovery of the day, and thanks to Andrew for bringing it to my attention.  Interesting that the letters I'm typing right at this moment have a history that stretches back over three millennia, back to inscriptions like this one.

I just hope what I'm writing these days is more edifying than "Use this comb to remove lice" and 'You will die cursed."

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Mental poison

Here in the United States, we just went through another election.  There are still several races left unsettled, but the outcome seems to be that neither side got the drubbing the other side wanted, and we're still going to be stuck on the gridlock-inducing razor's edge for another couple of years at least.

For me the most frustrating part of politics is watching how people form their opinions.  Ever since the repeal of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine back in 1987, media has devolved into a morass of partisan rhetoric.  Long gone are the days of the honorable Walter Cronkite, who was so dedicated to honesty and balance that to this day I don't know what party he himself belonged to.  No longer can we simply turn on the news and expect to hear the news.  Politically-motivated spin, not to mention careful selection (and omission) of certain news items, guarantees that if you get on your favorite media channel, you'll hear only stories that support what you already believed.

Whether or not those beliefs actually are true.

To take one particularly ridiculous example, consider commentator Joe Rogan's claim that "woke schools" are providing litter boxes for elementary school students who "identify as cats."  Rogan later admitted that he lied, and a thorough investigation showed that the story is entirely false -- but not before New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc used it as a talking point against schools' attempts to honor transgender students' identities.

"I wish I was making this up," Bolduc said, with unintentional irony, to audiences who by and large swallowed the whole story hook, line, and sinker.  (Hearteningly, Bolduc lost his race on Tuesday to Democratic incumbent Maggie Hassan, by a ten percent margin.)

The media has gotten to where it controls, rather than just reporting on, political issues.  The whole system has been turned on its head -- with disastrous consequences.

If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at this study that appeared in the journal Memory last month.  In "Partisan Bias in False Memories for Misinformation About the 2021 U.S. Capitol Riot," researchers Dustin Calvillo, Justin Harris, and Whitney Hawkins of California State University - San Marcos describe something alarming; eighty percent of a group of over 220 volunteers "recalled" at least one false memory about the January 6, 2021 riot.  Further, the false memories Democrats recalled were almost always pro-Democrat, and the false memories Republicans recalled were almost always pro-Republican.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sagearbor, Donkey and elephant - democrat blue and republican red - polygon rough, CC BY-SA 4.0]

"The main takeaway from this study is that different people can have very different memories of the same event," Calvillo said, in an interview in PsyPost.  "People tend to remember details of events that paint themselves and their social groups in a positive light.  Accuracy of memory is important to learn from previous events.  This partisan bias hinders that learning...  Understanding factors related to false memories of real-world political events is an important step in reducing false beliefs that complicate finding solutions to public policy problems.  If people do not remember an event similarly, consensus on defining the problem becomes difficult."

Achieving consensus, though, doesn't just depend on fighting confirmation bias -- our tendency to accept slim or questionable evidence if it supports what we already believed (a fault we are all prone to, at least to some degree).  It depends critically on fighting deliberately skewed media.  Somehow we have got to get a handle on the forces that have turned public media into a non-stop conduit of partial truths, conscious omissions of the facts, and outright lies.  Until we reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, or something like it, there will be no way to halt the stream of poison that is widening the divide between Right and Left in this country -- and no way to be certain that when you turn on the news, what you're hearing is the truth.

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Spark of lies

Let me just say for the record that if you're making a claim, your case is not strengthened by lying about the evidence.

The topic comes up because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link along with a message ending with the words "HUGE FACEPALM," and I have to say that is, if anything, an underreaction.

The story starts with a piece of (legitimate, and actually fascinating) research that appeared in Nature a few years ago.  It used the technique of fluorescence tagging to establish that rapid movement of zinc ions at the moment of fertilization is one of the mechanisms that prevents polyspermy -- the fusion of an egg with two sperm cells, which would result in a wildly wrong number of chromosomes and (very) early embryonic death.

Well, a woman named Kenya Sinclair, writing for Catholic Online, found this research -- I was going to say "read it," but that seems doubtful -- and is claiming that this "zinc spark," as the researchers called it, represents the moment the soul enters the embryo.  Thus proving that an immortal soul is conferred at the moment of conception.

Don't believe me?  Here is a verbatim quote:

Catholics have long believed life begins at the moment of conception, which is why in vitro fertilization and the use of contraceptives are considered immoral.  Now, with the discovery of the spark of life, science just may have proven the Church has been right all along...

Researchers discovered the moment a human soul enters an egg, which gives pro-life groups an even greater edge in the battle between embryonic life and death. The precise moment is celebrated with a zap of energy released around the newly fertilized egg.

Teresa Woodruff, one of the study's senior authors and professor in obstetrics and gynecology at the university, delivered a press release in which she stated, "to see the zinc radiate out in a burst from each human egg was breathtaking."

Of course it is breathtaking - she saw the moment a soul entered the newly fertilized egg!

Though scientists are unable to explain why the egg releases zinc, which then binds to small molecules with a flash, the faithful recognize this must be the moment God allows a miracle to occur.

This then spawned a YouTube video (because of course it did) that has garnered over forty thousand views, and comments like the following:

• This gives the idea that the Shroud of Turin somewhat resembles this kind of event, where a burst of light brings someone into life.
• Glory to Lord and Savior Jesus for all eternity Thank you Lord, THANK YOU!!!
• For me if soul exist then also god exist
• In vitro fertilizaton [sic] is playing God, and should be illegal, and fertilized eggs SHOULD NOT BE DESTROYED, they are killing human beings!  Life begins at conception no matter what athiest [sic] scientists say!
• I am a Christian but I'm confused on this.  If the flash of light has something to do with God and the souls entering the body, why does it happen in animals?  I've been told that animals don't have souls... is that wrong idk?

IDK either, honestly, but mostly what IDK is how people who post this stuff remember not to put their underwear on backwards.

The whole thing put me in mind of the map that was circulating in the months after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, and was claimed to show the spread of horrible toxic nuclear contamination from the breached nuclear reactor:

I mean, look at that!  Glowing purple at the center, with evil red and orange tendrils reaching out like some kind of malign entity all the way across the Pacific!

There are just a couple of problems with this.  First, if you'll look at the scale on the right, you'll see that the colors represent something measured in centimeters.  I don't know about you, but I've hardly ever seen radioactivity measured in units of distance.  ("Smithers!  We've got to get out of here!  If this reactor melts down, it will release over five and a half furlongs of gamma rays!")

In fact, this is a map showing the maximum wave heights from the tsunami.  But that didn't stop people from using this image to claim that NOAA and other government agencies were hiding the information on deadly contamination of the ocean in a particularly nefarious and secretive way, namely by creating a bright, color-coded map and releasing it on their official website.

Look, I get that we all have our pet theories and strongly-held beliefs, and we'd love it to pieces if we found hard evidence supporting them.  But taking scientific research and mischaracterizing it to make it look like you have that evidence is, to put it bluntly, lying.

And the fact that you're successfully hoodwinking the gullible and ignorant is not something to brag about.

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Cup of woo

I was just thinking yesterday that it'd been a long time since I'd seen a good example of the kind of loony New Age woo-woo I seemed to run into on a daily basis when I first started Skeptophilia twelve years ago.  "Maybe," I thought, "people have moved beyond all that nonsense into a more scientific, skeptical, rational way of looking at the world."

Ha ha ha.

By stating that aloud, I must have tapped into some kind of Quantum Vibration Frequency Resonance Field of Actualization, because while idly perusing TikTok not an hour later, I stumbled upon a post from a guy who is like what would happen if you gave Simon Pegg a hit of acid and then told him to do his best impression of Deepak Chopra.

His name is Matt Cooke, and he calls himself a "manifestation coach."  Lest you think I'm exaggerating in my description, here's a transcript of the post in question:

If you understand the power of the quantum field, you hold in your hands the secret of manifestation.  I'm going to simplify what the quantum field means, and how you can use it as a tool to manifest anything in your life.  So quite simply, you'll hear people say either the quantum field or the unified field.  What that basically is is an invisible field of energy carrying information and frequency that is invisible to our five senses but is all around us in space that we can't see.

People say that, do they?  Not scientists, presumably, just "people."  Do go on.

What people don't realize, though, is that we are also an extension of that field, because we're just energy.  The human body is just a dense form of energy moving at a very slow rate of vibration.  We in fact vibrate in and out of the quantum field eight times every second.

I've been in this business long enough that as soon as he said "eight times every second," I immediately knew where he'd gotten that number from, and it wasn't from a Quantum-Field-O-Meter, or anything.  He's almost certainly referring to a woo favorite, the Schumann resonances, which somehow got wrapped up in mystical goofiness despite the fact that it's actually a very real electromagnetic phenomenon.  It's a resonance between the Earth's surface and the conductive layer of the atmosphere (the ionosphere), which has resulted in a standing wave -- an electromagnetic field pulse that has a fundamental frequency of 7.83 Hertz (i.e. just shy of eight times per second).  It's been nicknamed "the Earth's heartbeat," which is an unfortunate choice of phrase (second only to physicist Leon Lederman's choice of "the God particle" as his nickname for the Higgs boson), because it encourages woo-ish types to see the Schumann resonances as being evidence of a global consciousness or whatnot, when in reality, as a phenomenon it's about as conscious as a pendulum swinging on a string.

But back to Cooke:

The way the field works is that it is outside of three-dimensional reality.  It's something called the fifth dimension.

Presumably not related to the people who sang "This is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius," although you can see how one might be confused on this point.

The fifth dimension quite simply is beyond time.  Time is infinite.  Meaning that if time's infinite, there are endless infinite opportunities that exist right now.  So anything you desire is there electromagnetically.

Right!  Sure!  What?

This is why people never change.  This is why people continue to attract more of the same stuff into their lives.  How we think and how we feel is how attraction works.  A thought is an intention, a feeling is an emotion.  So if right now you are in lack and hating life, subconsciously you are creating those same thoughts and you're feeling the same way.  You're vibrating in and out eight times a second, the field doesn't respond to what you want, it responds to who you're being.  This is why you hear people say, if you want to manifest you need to become it right now.  If you are seeking something right now in your life, if you change how you think and how you feel, you will broadcast a new electromagnetic signature into the quantum field.  Right?  You'll be drawing back to you a new state of being.  Basically, you'll be reprogramming your vibration.  If you change your vibration, you change your personality, and it's your personality, who you are, that creates your outside world.  Your inside world creates your outside world, and that is how the quantum field works.

Allow me to direct your attention to the Wikipedia article on quantum field theory, wherein you will quickly find that this is not, in fact, how the quantum field works.

Look, it seems like this guy's heart is in the right place, and that he honestly wants to help people.  And I certainly like his take on how to make the world a better place more than I do the evangelical Christians' approach, which is to alternate between praising the God of Unconditional Love and smiting the absolute shit out of anyone who is not also an evangelical Christian. 

What bothers me about people like this is that they're trying to gain credence for their claims by adding a scientific, physics-based spin on them, and end up using technical terms in such a bizarre way that large numbers of people now have no idea whatsoever what those terms actually mean.  And I do mean large numbers; Matt Cooke has over 144,000 followers on TikTok.  And he, of course, is small potatoes compared to the champion purveyor of quantum woo, the aforementioned Deepak Chopra, who is so renowned that someone created a Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator that produces pearls of arcane wisdom so similar to the real thing that I defy anyone to tell the difference.  (Here was mine for today: "Infinity differentiates into the expansion of brains through the activation of love.")

So, by all means, Mr. Cooke, keep trying to help people live their best lives.  But leave the quantum field to the quantum physicists.  It doesn't help your case, and to anyone who has ever taken a college physics course, it makes you sound like a snake oil salesman.  Thanks bunches.

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Return to sender

Despite my daily perusal of the news and science sites for interesting topics, sometimes I miss stuff. It's inevitable, of course, but sometimes a story is so absolutely tailor-made for this blog that I can't believe that (1) I didn't see it, and (2) a reader didn't send me a link.

That was my reaction when I ran into, quite by accident, an article from Scientific American several years ago about a researcher in the Netherlands who did a psychological study of people who believe in reincarnation.  I've always found the whole reincarnation thing a bit mystifying, especially given that most of the people you talk to who claim past lives say they were Spartan warriors or Babylonian princesses when, just by the numbers, the vast majority of people should recall being Chinese peasants. Or, if you allow reincarnation from other life forms, being a bug.

But no.  "Boy, life sure was boring, when I was a bug" is something you rarely ever hear reincarnated people say.

The Wheel of Life [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Stephen Shephard, The wheel of life, Trongsa dzong, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then, there are the people who -- like one person I know who I swear I'm not making up -- believe they are reincarnated from individuals who lived in places that don't, technically, exist.  This particular woman says in a past life she was a "gifted healer and wise woman from Atlantis."  She apparently remembers a lot of what she knew as an Atlantean person, which include pearls like "always strive to bring peace and love to those around you."

Which, honestly, I can't argue with, whether or not you're from Atlantis.

Apparently this study found that there are a great many other people who believe fervently that they were once someone else, somewhere else.  So Maarten Peters, a psychological researcher at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, decided to see if he could figure out what was going on.

He asked for people who believed they could recall past lives to volunteer, and an equal number of people who did not believe in reincarnation, and gave them a test called the false fame paradigm.  This test gives subjects a list of unfamiliar names to memorize, and then the next day those names are mixed in with new names and the names of famous people.  The question was: which of the names presented belong to famous people?

When he compared the results, an interesting pattern emerged.  The people who believed in reincarnation were, across the board, more likely to commit a source-monitoring error -- an error in judgment about the source of a memory.  They were far more likely than the control group to think that the unfamiliar names they had memorized the previous day belonged to famous people.  Evidently, they had a marked tendency to conflate their own (recent) memory of a name with (more distant) memories of hearing about celebrities in the news.

"Once familiarity of an event is achieved, this can relatively easily be converted into a belief that the event did take place," Peters said about his results.  "A next possible step is that individuals interpret their thoughts and fantasies about the fictitious event as real memories."

The implication is that the "memories" these people have about past lives are very likely to be an amalgam of memories of other things -- stories they've read, documentaries they've watched, perhaps even scenarios they'd created.  Whatever's going on, it's extremely unlikely that the memories these people claim to have come from a prior life.

Of course, there's a ton of anecdotal evidence for reincarnation, which in my mind doesn't carry a great deal of weight.  The whole thing has been the subject of more than one scholarly paper, including one in 2013 by David Cockburn, of St. David's University College (Wales), called "The Evidence for Reincarnation." In it, he cites claims like the following:

On March 15th, 1910, Alexandrina Samona, five-year-old daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Carmelo Samona, of Palermo, Sicily, died of meningitis to the great grief of her parents.  Within a year Mrs. Samona [gave] birth to twin girls.  One of these proved to bear an extraordinary physical resemblance to the first Alexandrina and was given the same name.  Alexandrina II resembled Alexandrina I not only in appearance but also in disposition and likes and dislikes.  Stevenson then lists a number of close physical similarities and of shared characteristic traits of behaviour.  For example: Both liked to put on adult stockings much too large for them and walk around the room in them.  Both enjoyed playfully altering people's names, such as changing Angelina into Angellanna or Angelona, or Caterina into Caterana.  Most striking of all, however, were the child's memory claims: 'When Alexandrina II was eight, her parents told her they planned to take her to visit Monreale and see the sights there.  At this Alexandrina II interjected: "But, Mother, I know Monreale, I have seen it already."  Mrs. Samona told the child she had never been to Monreale, but the child replied : "Oh, yes, I went there.  Do you not recollect that there was a great church with a very large statue of a man with his arms held open, on the roof?  And don't you remember that we went there with a lady who had horns and that we met some little red priests in the town?"  At this Mrs. Samona recollected that the last time she went to Monreale she had gone there with Alexandrina I some months before her death.  They had taken with them a lady friend who had come to Palermo for a medical consultation as she suffered from disfiguring excrescences on her forehead.  As they were going into the church, the Samonas' party had met a group of young Greek priests with blue robes decorated with red ornamentation.'

Even though Cockburn is willing to admit reincarnation as a possible explanation of such claims, he sounds a little dubious himself; toward the end of his paper, he writes, "[E]ven if we did think in terms of some underlying common element which explains the similarities between these individuals we would still need to show that the presence of the common element justifies the claim that we are dealing with a single person: to show, that is, what significance is to be attached to the presence of that element."  I would add that we also need to eliminate the possibility of outright lying on the part of the parents -- there has been more than one case where a parent has attempted to hoodwink the public with regards to some purportedly supernatural ability their child allegedly has.

So anyhow.  My sense is that the evidence for reincarnation is pretty slim, and that any claims of past lives are best explained by fallible memory, if not outright lying.  But I'm guessing no one will be surprised that I'm saying that.  In any case, I better wrap this up.  Lots to do today.  Considerably more, I would imagine, than I'd have to do if I was a bug, although that's pure speculation because I don't have much of a basis for comparison.

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