An invitation from Ancient Aliens

I received a polite invitation from the makers of the History Channel show, Ancient Aliens. Here’s what they asked:

Dear Dr. Myers,

I’m working with Name Redacted on the show Ancient Aliens. We have a crew coming to Minnesota this week, most likely Wednesday, and we would like to find out if you would be available for an interview. We’d also like to speak with you on the phone briefly about some of the topics we’d be discussing (development of the brain, embryonic development, evolutionary development of reptiles and mammals) and make sure that they are topics you’d fell comfortable talking about. Is there a convenient time when we could speak with you on the phone?

Kind Regards,

Name Redacted
Associate Producer
Prometheus Studios

I considered it. I’m always happy to engage with people with wacky ideas — heck, if I was willing to talk to Ray Comfort, you know I’m open to conversation — but I’d only seen a few snippets of this program and heard about it by reputation. So this evening, before I replied, I tuned in to the History Channel website to get an idea of what I’d be getting into.

I was aghast. It was the same nonsense I’d seen presented at the Paradigm Symposium this past weekend, in a very glossy and professionally done format. I congratulate Prometheus Studios on their skill in turning out superficially slick and attractive programs. The content, though…the content. It was just a series of ludicrous assertions of the most absurd claims of gods and aliens and extraterrestrial conspiracies and outright nonsense. Not once did I see any skepticism expressed. Mainstream academics were treated as dogmatic ignoramuses who couldn’t see the power of totally unsubstantiated hypotheses about aliens.

I could foresee how any material I might give them would be treated. So this is what I wrote back.

I actually know quite a bit about those topics, evo devo and neuroscience are my specialties. However, having viewed a few of your programs, I doubt very much that my skeptical view — that the processes of the development of the brain are entirely natural, that they do not support any claims of extraterrestrial intervention, or that humans lack any exceptional capabilities that require a design hypothesis to explain them — would actually survive the editing process to make it on air. In fact, I notice a remarkably complete absence of any critical evaluation of the rather bizarre “theories” that tend to get promoted in your programming, so I don’t even see how my expertise could contribute.

After due consideration, I’d have to say that no, I’d rather not contribute to the program, and that there’s no point to wasting your time or mine.

Thank you for the invitation. I’d wish you well in your work, but seriously — your show is credulous, ridiculous, and offensively ignorant of any reasonable understanding of science. If you’re ever involved in programming that actually contributes to human understanding, rather than undermining it, please feel free to contact me then.

Willing as I am to have a conversation with people with wild & weird ideas, it was just too obvious that my side of the conversation wouldn’t be useful to them…and couldn’t possibly appear on their program.

Also, all of the people on their show enthusiastically promoting aliens were clearly total wackaloons, and I’d be embarrassed to be associated with them.

Suddenly feeling a bit uncomfortable with my face

It started out that I was just reading this silly piece about some show called Duck Dynasty, and then I followed a link to “Power is on the side of the beard”: Masculinity and Facial Hair in Nineteenth-Century America. Well, yes, I thought. Power. Obviously power. But wait…

…the measures American men took to distinguish themselves from women politically, socially, and visually make sense: boxy clothing and bushy beards were reactions to women’s changing role in American public life. Although men in Europe and the United States had long written—even in times of overwhelming beardlessness—about how beards marked the male members of their species as strong, manly, powerful, and wise, it was only once women began entering “their” public that American men started to cultivate the facial hair they had publically revered (but personally scorned) for generations. Facial hair was a visual and visceral way for men to distinguish themselves from women—to codify a distinctly male appearance when other traditional markers of masculinity were no longer stable or certain.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, beards thus emerged as a key method for American men to demonstrate their masculinity to themselves, to women, and to each other.

Uh, actually, true confession: I grew a beard because I’m kind of a homely guy, and something that would cover more of my face would be a plus. I dreamed of achieving the Cousin It look, but alas, my eyebrows never quite took off.

It gets worse:

By the second half of the nineteenth century, American men had made it clear what it meant for a man to have a beard: it gave him power, it conferred authority, and it allowed him to demonstrate his masculinity. In other words, facial hair turned a man into a “true man.”

“Radical revolt against nature”: Barefaced Women and Masculine Power

Bare chins, on the other hand, were obvious markers of effeminacy and inferiority. Many beard histories pointed out that bare chins were historically used to indicate servitude, and that prisoners were often forcibly shaved to disgrace them further. But despite the looming presence of chattel slavery on American soil until 1865, beard historians were far more interested in demonstrating that women were not supposed to have facial hair.

Perhaps the most passionate argument about why women should not wear beards came from Horace Bushnell, a prominent theologian and preacher who, in 1869, published the brashly titled book, Women’s Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature.

Bushnell’s argument was quite simple: women’s rights advocates argued that they should have the same rights as men because they were equal to men, but no claim of gender equality could be valid, Bushnell believed, because “men and women are, to some very large extent, unlike in kind.” A person merely needed to glance at the two sexes, he said, for the differences between them were so immediately obvious.

The man is taller and more muscular, has a larger brain, and a longer stride in his walk. The woman is lighter and shorter, and moves more gracefully. In physical strength the man is greatly superior, and the base in his voice and the shag on his face, and the wing and sway of his shoulders, represent a personality in him that has some attribute of thunder. But there is no look of thunder in the woman. Her skin is too finely woven, too wonderfully delicate to be the rugged housing of thunder… Glancing thus upon man, his look says, Force, Authority, Decision, Self-asserting Counsel, Victory.

Oh, no, that’s not a view I’m trying to promote! Maybe I need to shave and start wearing a bag on my head instead.

Although now I’m really curious about the mindset that would compel people to write arguments about why women shouldn’t grow beards. Isn’t that kind of unnecessary?

Useful instructional materials

The wave/particle duality of light is always tricky to explain to my students. If only I’d known that the Dogon priests had already figured it all out — all I have to do is put up a picture of Nummo the Fish, and wisdom shall follow.

image

I’m listening to Laird Scranton exercising his remarkable pattern-matching abilities, finding correspondences in glyphs and pictures drawn by the Dogon, Chinese, and Egyptians to modern scientific concepts. Did you know the Dogon have had string theory all figured out? I didn’t.

‘ware the cookies!

What have I gotten myself into? I just sat through a bizarre, rambling, self-congratulory lecture by Scott Wolter (some guy with a fringey History Channel show) that started with the Kensington Runestone — it’s a genuine Viking artifact, don’t you know, staking a land claim for some Catholic order of monks — then wandered over to the Bat Creek stone, a rock with some funny scratches on it unearthed from an Indian mound. The scratches are ancient Hebrew! Wait, no, they’re secret Masonic symbols! Did you know the Cherokee rituals were exact copies of the Knights Templar’s rituals? Yes, they are. Obviously.

Then we got a whole series of photos of Catholic figures and medieval and renaissance paintings and sculptures in which people are making the Masonic gang sign. This one:

image

That’s an “M”. For Mary Magdelene, Jesus’s wife. The Masonic cult spread over to the New World in the first century AD to share the word among the Indians, who happily adopted it. And now it’s everywhere.

image

Oreo cookies bear the sign.

Then to wrap it all up, he goes back to ancient Egypt, the precession of the Equinox, and the signs of the zodiac, which represent major shifts in world cultures, each paradigmatic shift associated with changing which house was represented in the equinox.

People applauded.

Dear god, wasn’t the cookie slide a loud enough cry for help?

I get email

It’s from another physics and Christianity crank. I wish he’d go bug Paul Davies; I’m a biologist, not a cosmologist.

Atheists are superstitious

1. There is no rational reason to reject the Our Lord Jesus Christ since it is scientifically demonstrated He is Divine and the One and Only True God. Only unscientific minds would reject empirical scientific evidence.

2. The universe is geocentric. Every experiment designed to measure the speed of the earth through space has always returned a speed of zero just as the Bible claimed all along. Only prejudicial minds reject scientific facts. Your leading Pagan cosmology writers offer biases with no scientific proof . Unbeknownst to you is the fact that no one in all history has ever proven that the Earth moves in space. As an honest scientist Lincoln Barnett admits in his book endorsed by Einstein “…nor has any physical experiment ever proved that the Earth actually is in motion.” (Lincoln Barnet, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, p. 73.) Einstein invented his relativity mythology to counter the Michelson-Morley experiments and other innumerable successor experiments demonstrating the earth is immobile in space and at the center of the universe.

“So which is real, the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system? Although it is not uncommon for people to say that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true. As in the case our normal view versus that of the goldfish, one can use either picture as a model of the universe, for our observations of the heavens can be explained by assuming either the earth or the sun to be at rest.” (The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, 2010, pp. 41-42) Hawking cannot face the empirical scientific evidence that Geocentrism is scientifically proven and heliocentrism disproven. In his bias he ridiculously opts to put the two systems on the same level.

3. That the myth of Copernicanism is the foundation for modern man’s independence from God is a connection that was recognized by the editor of the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. When confronted in the late 1970s with the model of cosmology promoted by the evolutionist well-known physicist George F.R. Ellis – it promoted geocentrism – Paul C. W. Davies, the editor of Nature, was forced to reply: “His new theory seems quite consistent with our astronomical observations, even though it clashes with the thought that we are godless and making it on our own.” (P.C.W. Davies, “Cosmic Heresy?” Nature, 273:336, 1978. In the same article Davies admits: “…as we see only redshifts whichever direction we look in the sky, the only way in which this could be consistent with a gravitational explanation is if the Earth is situated at the center of an inhomogeneous Universe.” Confirming Davies’s agnosticism is a letter he wrote to Dr. Robert Sungenis on Aug. 9th, 2004, stating: “I have long argued against the notion of any sort of God who resides within time, and who preceded the universe.” Davies, however, is honest enough to admit he cannot lightly dismiss Ellis’ science and mathematics that connect the Earth with the center of the universe.

So in addition to being a friend to the Templeton Foundation, a coauthor on the arsenic life paper, and proponent of a bad cancer theory, Davies was, once upon a time, speculating about geocentrism? Somehow I’m not surprised. Here’s the “Cosmic heresy?” paper.

Hey, if Nature can publish kooky weird speculations, who am I to say Jesus ain’t science?

Science you can use!

It’s not to late to sign up to attend the 66th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting, where you can witness this presentation:

Abstract: E9.00003 : Urinal Dynamics

In response to harsh and repeated criticisms from our mothers and several failed relationships with women, we present the splash dynamics of a simulated human male urine stream impacting rigid and free surfaces. Our study aims to reduce undesired splashing that may result from lavatory usage. Experiments are performed at a pressure and flow rate that would be expected from healthy male subjects. (Lapides, J., Fundamentals of Urology, W.B. Saunders, Philadelphia, 1976.) For a rigid surface, the effects of stream breakup and surface impact angle on lateral and vertical droplet ejection distances are measured using high-speed photography and image processing. For free surface impact, the effects of velocity and fluid depth on droplet ejection distances are measured. Guided by our results, techniques for splash reduction are proposed.

Like, aim?

I think I have acquired some insight into the mind of our weird foster cat. She always comes racing into the bathroom when I’m trying to use it, and she peers intently at streams of water and will hop onto the toilet to stare fixedly at the vortex when it flushes. She’s just a wanna-be fluid dynamics physicist!

Good taste and the Tea Party

I was reading about the “million” veterans marching on Washington DC (it was more like a few hundred) when I saw this peculiarly decorated car and learned something new.

hitler-cancer

Surely a car door so flamboyantly and colorfully decorated could not be carrying a lie — maybe smoking doesn’t cause cancer after all. I must check this out. I looked further for more details on this spectacularly informative vehicle. By the way, it’s true that Hitler was a fanatical anti-smoker, and the Nazi government had the first effective anti-smoking campaign.

smokercar

Wow! Who is this person, “Smoker on Strike”? I must learn more about such a wise and authoritative person.

So I found her CV. It is amazing. Did you know she’s looking for work as a web designer?

She designs the most beautiful websites in the world. She says so herself.

By the way, I’m all puked out this morning, so I can safely navigate to those links and suffer barely a ripple of the dry heaves. If your stomach is more robustly occupied right now, you might not want to look.

What does a mangina look like?

I’ve kind of wondered, since I’m always getting called one — and while not really thinking hard about it, I’m aware of the homologies in male and female genitalia and mentally pictured something discrete and reasonably placed. I guess I must have low self-esteem or something, because science fiction authors imagine something grand and huge and dangerous, instead.

John Scalzi has a sketch of the Kaiju Mangina, and it is awesome and terrifying and silly. And then Howard Tayler drew the Brobot reaction, and it is perfect.

By the way, the drawing is by KB Spangler.