Michael Prescott's Blog

That's cold, baby

Skeptical of global warming? I know I am. And according to a story in Daily Tech, the latest data give additional grounds for doubt.

All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Daily Tech also notes,

Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Sounds like it's time to fire up the grill and burn some fossil fuels! You know - to save the planet and all.

Getting a rise out of ectoplasm

In his book After Death -- What? Researches in Hypnotic and Spiritualistic Phenomena (1909; Aquarian Press edition 1988), turn-of-the-century scientist Cesare Lombroso recounts the experiments that led him from a strictly materialist worldview to a belief in spirits and life after death. One of the most striking chapters is Lombroso's account of "seventeen séances held in Milan in 1892 ... séances in which the most marked precautions were taken, such as searching the medium, changing her garments, binding her and holding her hands and feet, and adjusting the electric light on the table so as to be able to turn it off and on at will." (pp. 40-41)

The subject of these experiments was the controversial Sicilian medium Eusapia Palladino, who was said to be able to levitate tables, make musical instruments play themselves, produce cold winds in a sealed room, and materialize hands and faces. Eusapia was an eccentric character known for her propensity to cheat when she thought she could get away with it, a tendency that discredited her in the eyes of many researchers. (The fact that she was a coarse, uneducated, and flirtatious peasant woman also factored into the disrepute in which she was held in genteel circles.) Nevertheless, when properly controlled and observed, she produced some remarkable phenomena, which are difficult if not impossible to explain by any normal means. Indeed, the premier magician of the day, Howard Thurston, witnessed one of Eusapia's séances and stated publicly that her phenomena could not be duplicated by any trickery known to him.

What follows are a few excerpts from Lombroso's treatment of the Eusapia sittings. It should be noted that the table used in the experiments was not Eusapia's; it was "made expressly for the purpose" by the researchers. (p. 41)

After recounting some partial levitations of the table Lombroso writes:

It was natural to conclude that if the table, in apparent contradiction with the law of gravitation, was able to rise on one side, it would be able to rise completely. In fact, that is what happened, and these levitations are among those of most frequent occurrence in experiments with Eusapia. They were usually produced under the following conditions: The persons seated around a table place their hands on it and form the chain there. Each hand of the medium is held by the adjacent hand of the neighbor on each side; each of her feet is under the foot of her neighbor; these furthermore press against her knees with theirs. As usual, she is seated at one of the short sides (end) of the table, -- the position least favorable for mechanical levitation. After a few minutes the table makes a lateral movement, rises now to the right and now to the left, and finally is lifted wholly off its four feet into the air, horizontally, as if afloat in a liquid, and ordinarily to a height of from 10 to 20 centimetres (sometimes, exceptionally, as high as 60 or 70), then falls back on all four feet at once. Sometimes it stays in the air for several seconds, and even makes fluctuating motions there, during which the position of the feet under it can be thoroughly inspected. During the levitation the right hand of the medium frequently leaves the table with that of her neighbor and remains suspended above it. Throughout the experiment the face of the medium is convulsed, her hands contract, she groans and seems to be suffering.

In order better to observe the matter in hand we gradually retired the experimenters from the table, having noticed that the chain of several persons was not at all necessary, either in this or in other phenomena. In the end we left only a single person besides the medium, and placed on her left. This person rested her feet on the two feet of Eusapia, and one of her hands on the latter's knees. With her other hand she held the left hand of the medium, whose right lay on the table in full view of all, or was even lifted into the air during the levitation.

Inasmuch as the table remained in the air for several seconds, it was possible to secure several photographs of performance. [Two of these are included in the book.]

A little before the levitation it was observed that the folds of the skirt of Eusapia were blown out on the left side so far as to touch the neighboring leg of the table. When one of us endeavored to hinder this contact, the table was unable to rise as before, and was only enabled so to do when the observer purposely allowed to contact to occur. It will be noticed that the hand of the medium was at the same time placed on the upper surface of the table on the same side, so that the leg of the table there was under her influence, as much in the lower portion by means of the skirt as in the superior portion through the avenue of the hand. No verification was made as to the degree of pressure exerted upon the table at that moment by the hand of the medium, nor were we able to find out, owing to the brevity of the levitation, what particular part was in contact with the garment, which seemed to move wholly in a lateral direction and to support the weight of the table.

In order to avoid this contact it was proposed to have the levitation take place while the medium and her coadjutors stood on their feet, but it did not succeed. It was also proposed to place the medium at one of the longer sides of the table. But she opposed this, saying that it was impossible. So we are obliged to declare that we did not succeed in obtaining a complete levitation of the table of all four of its legs absolutely free from any contact whatever, and there is reason to fear that a similar difficulty would have been met in the levitation of the two legs that stood on the side next the medium. [pp. 43-46]

While performing some experiments with a balance, the same "blowing out" of the medium's garment was observed.

In this experiment of the balance, also, it was noticed by some of us that success seemed to depend on contact of the garments of the medium with the floor upon which the balance was directly placed. The truth of this was established by a special experiment on the 9th of October. The medium having been seated on the balance, that one of our number who had taken upon himself to watch her feet soon saw the lower folds of her dress swelling out and projecting in such a way as to hang down from the platform of the balance. As long as the attempt was made to hinder this movement of the dress (which was certainly not produced by the feet of the medium), the levitation did not take place. But as soon as the lower extremity of the dress was allowed to touch the floor, repeated and very evident levitations took place, which were designated in very fine curves on the disk that registered the variations of weight. [pp. 47-48]

The movement of the dress naturally gives rise to suspicion that some sort of fancy footwork was at play. But the researchers swore that Eusapia's feet were not responsible for the movement. If there is any reality to ectoplasm, then it may be the case that some sort of invisible ectoplasmic protuberance was causing the dress to move, and that contact between this ectoplasmic rod and the floor or table was necessary in order to achieve results.

In any case, the preceding observations pale in comparison to a phenomenon that Lombroso titles "The Levitation of the Medium to the Top of the Table."

Among the most important and significant of the occurrences we put this levitation. It took place twice, -- that is to say, on the 28th of September and the 3rd of October. The medium, who was seated near one end of the table, was lifted up in her chair bodily, amid groans and lamentations on her part, and placed (still seated) on the table, then returned to the same position as before, with her hands continually held, her movements being accompanied by the persons next her.

On the evening of the 28th of September, while her hands were held by MM. Richet and Lombroso, she complained of hands which were grasping her under the arms; then, while in trance, with the changed voice characteristic of this state, she said, "Now I lift my medium up on the table." After two or three seconds the chair with Eusapia in it was not violently dashed, but lifted without hitting anything, on to the top of the table, and M. Richet and I are sure that we did not even assist the levitation by our own force. After some talk in the trance state the medium announced her descent, and (M. Finzi having been substituted for me) was deposited on the floor with the same security and precision, while MM. Richet and Finzi followed the movements of her hands and body without at all assisting them, and kept asking each other questions about the positions of the hands.

Moreover, during the descent both gentlemen repeatedly felt a hand touch them on the head.

On the evening of October 3 the thing was repeated in quite similar circumstances, MM. Du Prel and Finzi being one on each side of Eusapia. [pp. 49-50]

The researchers' impression of being touched by "a hand" during this levitation is particularly interesting, and perhaps adds weight to the hypothesis of ectoplasmic extensions at at work.

Now, I'm well aware that there are ways of tilting a table and making it appear to levitate, though it would seem that the researchers' precautions were sufficient to prevent fraud in these particular tests. But even if Eusapia managed to fool them with regard to the table, how in the world could she simulate the levitation of herself and the chair she was sitting on -- transporting it from the floor to the table itself, and then back again, while closely observed?

Document dump

A collection of links for weekend reading ... (Update, 2023: Most of the links have expired; only a couple remain.

A couple of people in comment threads have pointed out Greg Taylor's article on the Million Dollar Challenge, which is well worth reading.

Want more criticism of the Challenge? I wrote a four-part series of blog posts on the topic, starting here.

Crazy

From comments, an insightful remark by Michael H.

We're all nuts, and don't know it. I think the key is to be crazy enough to know we're crazy. We can start accessing wisdom and genuine reason once we stop telling ourselves we already know everything. In the meantime, it's probably best just to be amused.

I think this applies not just to academic disputes but to politics, personal relations, and life in general.

Who's in crisis?

On a comments thread, Leo mentioned (somewhat off topic, but we'll let that pass) that he'd been engaged in online debate with a skeptic. Among his other arguments, the skeptic had this to say:

Crisis apparitions.. the people are in a crisis. Under great emotional stress people are very likely to have their perceptions altered(the time slowing down effect is a good example, which I believe has been found to be a manipulation of the memory of the event and not the perception of the actual occurrence of the event) and it's not a stretch for them to believe they see loved ones.

This and other pronouncements were presented with an air of authority, an almost condescending weariness at having to explain the patently obvious.

But here's the rub. "Crisis apparitions" are events in which a person sees the apparition of a loved one and later learns that the loved one in question was having a crisis at the time. Usually the loved one was dying at that moment, a fact that the percipient was unaware of.

In other words, the person in crisis is not the percipient, but the person whose apparition is perceived.

Here is a fairly standard crisis apparition case from the 19th century, cited in an article by Scott Rogo:

I sat one evening reading, when on looking up from my book, I distinctly saw a school-friend of mine, to whom I was very much attached, standing near the door I was about to exclaim at the strangeness of her visit when, to my horror, there were no signs of anyone in the room but my mother. I related what I had seen to her, knowing she could not have seen, as she was sitting with her back towards the door, nor did she hear anything unusual, and was greatly amused at my scare, suggesting I had read too much or been dreaming.

A day or so after this strange event, I had news to say my friend was no more. The strange part was that I did not even know she was ill, much less in danger so could not have felt anxious at the time on her account, but may have been thinking of her; that I cannot testify. Her illness was short, and death very unexpected. Her mother told me she spoke of me not long before she died ... She died the same evening and about the same time that I saw her vision, which was the end of October, 1874.

Note that the person relating this story was most definitely not in a crisis. He was sitting and reading a book. The apparition itself scared him, but he was apparently quite relaxed until then. And this case is typical of thousands - literally thousands - that have been collected.

Thus the skeptic's apparently knowledgeable debunking is based on a faulty assumption: "The people [meaning the people who see the apparitions] are in a crisis ... under great emotional stress ... their perceptions altered."

Not so. The people who see the apparitions are not under stress, not in a crisis at all.

Now, anyone who has studied the subject of crisis apparitions must know this. We can conclude, then, that the skeptic has never studied the subject. He knows literally nothing about it. He does not even know what the term "crisis apparition" means.

Yet he is sure he knows it's all bunk. And he is willing to state as much with confidence and conviction.

How much of skepticism fits this description? How much of it is mere bluster by people who have never looked at even one case study of the phenomena they deride?

And why should anyone take them seriously?

Garden plot

Recently, Michael H. in comments suggested that I look into the ideas of Sydney Banks. I visited Banks's Web site and also checked out a Web video he produced. The video, a self-promotional piece titled "Letter to Oprah," left me distinctly unmoved; it seems to be nothing but an attempt to get the author booked on the popular talk show. Some of the material on the Web site, however, was interesting, so I ordered -- and read -- Banks's book The Enlightened Gardener.

The Enlightened Gardener is a series of conversations between an English gardener and four American psychologists visiting the United Kingdom for a professional conference. The idea is that the psychologists end up learning more from this apparently simple gardener than they do from their credentialed colleagues.

I have to say that some aspects of the book left me cold, especially the repeated device of having the American characters react with amazement to even the most seemingly banal statements made by the gardener. At one point, for instance, the gardener remarks that mind and brain are different -- that the mind has to do with the spirit while the brain has to do with the body. One of the psychologists responds in astonishment that he's never heard an idea like that before. Really? Where has this guy been living? In a cave?

There are a lot of moments like that. I began to feel a certain amount of sympathy with Tom, the most cynical of the psychologists, who is constantly making sarcastic put-downs of the gardener's wisdom (though of course he comes around in the end).

Despite the book's defects, there is something intriguing about The Enlightened Gardener -- a hint of larger and more transformative ideas hidden behind the title character's sometimes trite pronouncements. The book itself alludes to this possibility when one of the characters observes that the gardener's remarks are analogous to shorthand, and that to appreciate the full meaning of his philosophy, one has to look beyond the symbols.

The dominant idea seems to be that thought profoundly affects who we are, how we behave, and how we see the world. Now, this seems like the most obvious truism imaginable, ripe for one of Tom's knee-jerk retorts. But as the book gradually makes clear, what the gardener means by "thought" is not simply the particular thoughts that we happen to hold in our minds at any given time. Instead, he is talking about the process or phenomenon of thought itself.

At one point, there is a brief discussion about emptiness and its relation to being. The gardener compares emptiness to formlessness, while being is form. Form emerges out of formlessness. Similarly, what the gardener calls Universal Thought is formless thought, contentless thought, and it is out of this formless thought that our particular, specific thoughts (or thought-forms) emerge.

To me, this is an intriguing and meaningful idea -- though I grant that it may seem pointless and meaningless to others. It's useful to me if I see my own personal thoughts as arising out of a formless background, somewhat like ripples arising on the surface of a lake or, to take a more "scientific" analogy, like virtual particles emerging from the quantum vacuum. (This is only an analogy; I'm not saying that there is necessarily any connection between thoughts and quantum phenomena.)

Universal Thought is one aspect of the gardener's holy Trinity; the other two aspects are Universal Consciousness and Universal Mind. Clearly, these are three different ways of looking at the same thing. There can be no thought without consciousness, and there can be no consciousness without mind. Again, what's useful is the idea of formless consciousness preceding and giving rise to the form of our particular consciousness; or formless mind preceding and grounding our particular form-specific minds. If we strip away forms and penetrate to formlessness, we encounter "wisdom," or "original thought," "uncontaminated" by the forms we impose. We can then see our particular thoughts, consciousness, and minds as what they are: constructions or fabrications, which may be helpful to us or detrimental, but which are not, in either case, the ultimate or true reality. And once we see them for what they are, we need not be imprisoned by their constraints.

This is, I admit, rather vague, and I'm not sure these revelations would have the life-changing effects that the book seems to grant them. But I think there's something here ... though I could be wrong. The Enlightened Gardener has the strange effect of suggesting the answers to great mysteries but not quite unveiling them. Maybe there are no answers and the whole thing is an exercise in self-delusion. Or maybe there are answers, but, like snowflakes, they melt away when you try to catch them in your hand.

I don't know what to think. And maybe that's the point.

A depressing book

In his historical overview From Darwin to Hitler, Richard Weikart traces the origin of some elements of the Nazi social philosophy to strands of social Darwinism, and even to Darwinism itself. Since Darwinism has become a highly contentious political issue, let me immediately be clear: Weikart is not saying that Darwinism leads inexorably to the Holocaust, or that Darwin and his early supporters were proto-Nazis, or that Hitler could not have come to power without the influence of Darwinism. His thesis is more nuanced than that.

Basically, he is saying that the aspects of Hitler's program involving racial purification were inspired by generations of German intellectuals who applied Darwin's ideas to social and racial issues (as Darwin himself had done, to a certain extent, in his book The Descent of Man). In other words, Weikart sees the roots of the Holocaust in such trendy turn-of-the-century ideas as eugenics, voluntary and involuntary euthanasia, selective abortion (with "inferior" races or classes being singled out), and forced sterilization. He also finds some (not all) roots of Nazi militarism in the increasingly heated rhetoric in German intellectual circles about "racial struggle" and the need to purify the population through war.

It's a fascinating but inevitably depressing book. Scores of German thinkers, many highly influential in their day, are quoted or paraphrased as they advocate ideas that, to any normal mind, are simply appalling. The extermination of whole peoples is casually advanced as a valid geopolitical goal based on supposedly impeccable "scientific" reasoning. The value of human lives is estimated according to various allegedly "scientific" criteria, with the less valuable lives consigned to the grave -- for the good of the race, of course. In these armchair discussions of genocide, we can almost hear the distant tread of jackboots, can almost smell the charnel houses of the death camps.

But don't take my word for it. Here are some representative quotations. The first is from Ernst Haeckel, Darwin's greatest champion in Germany, the man who coined the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" and worked up a series of heavily doctored woodcuts to prove it. Musing on the plight of a handicapped child -- one of the dreaded "inferiors" who threatened the evolutionary progress of the race -- Haeckel observed:

"A small dose of morphine or cyanide would not only free this pitiable creature itself, but also its relatives from the burden of a long, worthless and painful existence."

Is this immoral? Not at all, says Austrian sociologist Ludwig Gumplowitz. Quite the opposite:

"To comply with the obvious will of nature is the highest morality: With a perceptible voice nature calls back into its bosom those who are sick and weary of life. To follow this call and to make space for healthy people filled with zeal for life is certainly no evil deed, but rather a good deed, for there are not too few people on the earth -- rather too many."

Gumplowitz, at least, was no hypocrite. He followed his own advice, committing suicide by cyanide.

Adolf Jost reasoned, "There really are cases, in which, mathematically considered, the value of a human life is negative." August Forel pose the rhetorical question, "Is it really a duty of conscience to help with the birth and even the conception of every cripple, who descends from thoroughly degenerate parents? Is it really a duty to keep alive every idiot (even every blind idiot), every most wretched cripple with three fourths of the brain damaged?"

Needless to say, Forel's answer was no.

"One cannot avoid the thought that it might be better to quickly dispose of useless, corrupt and dangerous individuals, instead of supporting them till death in jail," pronounced Alfred Hegar.

Anyone troubled by such prospects need only subject his sentimental feelings to the hard logic of evolutionary science, as framed by Friedrich Hellwald:

"Science knows no 'natural right.' In nature only one right reigns, which is no right, the right of the stronger, violence. But violence is also the highest source of law, since without it [i.e., violence] legislation is unthinkable. I will in the course of my presentation easily prove, that properly speaking the right of the stronger has also been valid at all times in human history."

That is to say, might makes right -- and now "science" proves it! And what is a greater demonstration of this principle then victory in war? Thus Heinrich Ziegler could argue,

"According to Darwin's theory wars have always been of the greatest importance for the general progress of the human species, in that the physically weaker, the less intelligent, the morally lower or morally degenerate peoples must give place to the stronger and the better developed."

War then serves the great purpose of culling the herd and allowing evolution to advance. "If our consciousness of our people allows the fit to oust the unfit from this planet, so that high culture increases," Klaus Wagner wrote, "then there is progress on earth."

Note that science, properly understood, has nothing to say about the values or progress in any ethical sense. These enthusiastic Darwinists were mixing categories -- assuming that progress, in the sense of evolutionary adaptation to changing conditions, is somehow equivalent to moral progress. By this means they claimed to have discovered a scientific foundation for a new ethics, which would supplant the old Judeo-Christian ethic of concern for the weak and downtrodden. With this new ethical calculus in mind, they could easily quantify the value of any particular human life. As Haeckel noted toward the end of World War I:

"A single well-educated German warrior, though unfortunately they are now falling in droves, has a higher intellectual and moral value of life than hundreds of the raw primitive peoples, which England and France, Russia and Italy set against us."

This wasn't just Haeckel's private opinion, mind you. No, it was a scientific fact! Or so he and his fellow intellectuals of the same stripe ardently believed.

The new ethos was harsh. Some of its proponents did not shrink from this truth.

"Whoever it may be, he must stride over the corpses of the vanquished; that is natural law. Whoever shrinks back in hesitation from this, deprives himself of the chance for existence," wrote social Darwinist Robert Byr.

And there would be plenty of corpses to stride over. Whole populations would have to go. Oscar Schmidt assessed the situation calmly:

"If we contemplate the ethnology and anthropology of savages, not from the standpoint of philanthropists and missionaries, but as cool and sober naturalists, destruction in the struggle for existence as a consequence of their retardation (itself regulated by the universal conditions of development), is the natural course of things."

Schmidt was not the only "cool and sober naturalist" to oversee "the natural course of things." There was also Ludwig Buchner:

"The white or Caucasian human species [sic] is ordained to take dominion of the earth, while the lowest human races, like [native] Americans, [aboriginal] Australians, Alfuren, Hottentots, and such others, are proceeding toward their destruction with huge steps."

And the Frenchman Georges Lapouge:

"In the next century people will be slaughtered by the millions for the sake of one or two degrees on the cephalic index [i.e., measurements of the cranium that supposedly indicated intellectual advancement]... the superior races will substitute themselves by force for the human groups retarded in evolution, and the last sentimentalists will witness the copious extermination of entire peoples."

Some Darwinists were content to let nature take its course to the gradual, bloodless extinction of native populations. Others preferred to lend nature a hand and speed up the evolutionary process by making war on the natives and exterminating them wholesale. Otto Ammon observed:

"In its complete effect war is a good deed for humanity, since it offers the only means to measure the powers of nations and to grant the victory to the fittest. War is the highest and most majestic form of the struggle for existence and cannot be dispensed with, and thus also cannot be abolished."

Others steered a middle course, thinking it best to leave the natives alive for the time being, while they could be profitably exploited, but mandating their destruction once they became superfluous. Eugen Fischer:

"Therefore one should guarantee to [native peoples] only the measure of protection that they need as a race inferior to us, in order to survive, but no more, and only so long as they are useful to us -- otherwise [allow] free competition, which in my opinion means [their] demise! This viewpoint sounds almost brutally egoistic -- but whoever thinks through the racial concept in the points portrayed in the above section on 'Psychology,' cannot take any other view."

Klaus Wagner foresaw a global race war among Europeans, Asians, and Africans, and warned darkly that only one of the three would be left standing.

"Only one group can remain as ruler. The two others will be destroyed, where they are in the way of the stronger race, and enslaved, where they can serve them... We Germans have the power to destroy and smash the might and future of the two other groups, if we clearly see this necessity, vigorously arm ourselves, and keep our blood pure..."

This sounds a lot like mere nationalism, but intellectuals like August Forel perceived a higher purpose.

"Which races can be of service in the further evolution of mankind," Forel asked, "and which are useless? And if the lowest races are useless, how can they be gradually extinguished?"

This was the intellectual climate in which Adolf Hitler came of age. These ideas were circulating in academic books, including medical texts. They were prominently discussed in political and sociological journals. They were common, not only in Germany, but throughout the Western world; there was a flourishing eugenics movement in the United States. But it was in Germany that the social Darwinist idea was most widely accepted and most vigorously championed. Hitler was not much of an intellectual, but he could have imbibed these ideas from the right-wing, racist newspapers he read daily, and from a variety of other sources.

We can hear the echo of the fanatical Darwinists quoted above in Hitler's own writings and speeches.

"Decisive [in history] is the power that the peoples have within them; it turns out that the stronger before God and the world has the right to impose its will. From history one sees that the right by itself is completely useless, if a mighty power does not stand behind it. Right alone is of no use to whomever does not have the power to impose his right. The strong has always triumphed... All of nature is a constant struggle between power and weakness, a constant triumph of the strong over the weak."

"A stronger race will supplant the weaker, since the drive for life in its final form will decimate every ridiculous fetter of the so-called humaneness of individuals, in order to make place for the humaneness of nature, which destroys the weak to make place for the strong."

"[The proper worldview] by no means believes in the equality of races, but recognizes along with their differences their higher or lower value, and through this knowledge feels obliged, according to the eternal will that rules this universe, to promote the victory of the better, the stronger, and to demand the submission of the worse and weaker. It embraces thereby in principle the aristocratic law of nature and believes in the validity of this law down to the last individual being. It recognizes not only the different value of races, but also the different value of individuals... But by no means can it approve of the right of an ethical idea existing, if this idea is a danger for the racial life of the bearer of a higher ethic."

"There is only one most holy human right, and this right is at the same time the most holy duty, namely, to take care to keep one's blood pure."

Materialists never tire of citing the Spanish Inquisition and other horrors as proof that religious or spiritual tendencies are dangerous. They seem somewhat less inclined to examine the dark side of their own belief system. Darwin's ideas, however true or false they may ultimately prove to be, laid the foundation for generations of intellectuals who advocated the extermination of so-called "inferiors," whether individually or en masse. Moreover, the conflation of evolutionary progress with moral progress gave an ethical veneer to these inhuman proposals. It only remained for an ambitious and ruthless demagogue to snatch up these ideas and use them for his own purposes. The wait was not long.

The Chronicles of "Lost"

I like Lost. Now, I'm not one of those hardcore fans who replay each episode looking for clues, or who hang out in chat rooms trading theories on how the multiple mysteries will finally be resolved. The mythology of Lost is so convoluted, its various quirks and tics and twists so incomprehensible, that I don't believe there will be or can be any satisfying resolution. There simply isn't any logical way of putting the pieces of this puzzle together. Lost will string along its fans with the promise that all will make sense at the end, but that's a promise it just can't keep. Or so I suspect.

And that's okay with me. I like the show on its own terms, on an episode-by-episode basis. I like the lush Hawaiian scenery, the fine production values, the (usually) sharp writing. And I think Terry O'Quinn, who plays Locke, and Elizabeth Mitchell, who plays Juliet, are some kind of acting savants who can make any scene interesting. 

But for those benighted souls who do nurse the hope of unraveling Lost's secrets, tonight's episode gave them still more to work with. The show, you see, has penchant for naming characters after historical figures and famous literary creations. We already had characters named John Locke  and Rousseau, none-too-subtle references to 18th century philosophers with dueling visions. We had Sawyer (as in Tom Sawyer) and Juliet (as in Romeo's starcrossed lover - and yes, this was the intent; the producers have copped to it).

Tonight a new character joined the fray. She's British, and her name, we are informed, is Charlotte Staples Lewis.

Hey, wait a minute. Isn't that pretty close to Clive Staples Lewis?

You know, this guy?

Yeah, that's right. It seems C.S. Lewis is now on the island.

But ... why? Is the name a reference to Lewis's religious beliefs? Or to the magical world of Narnia, which could be accessed through the back of a wardrobe? Is the island part of an alternate universe? Are the castaways just an idea in the mind of God?

What does it all mean?

Nothing, I'm pretty sure. Just more misdirection and playing with the fans' heads. If and when the whole thing turns out to be an elaborate shaggy dog story, a lot of loyal longtime viewers are gonna be seriously peeved.

Not me, though. I don't care about the destination. I'm enjoying the ride.

Who knows? Next week some dude named Tolkien may parachute in.  

Building a better fish

In an early chapter of A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber discusses the shortcomings of current evolutionary theory. With all the Sturm und Drang about creationism, intelligent design, and Richard Dawkins-style Darwinian polemics, comparatively few people realize there is a vigorous ongoing debate among evolutionary biologists themselves as to the exact mechanisms by which one species evolves into another.

Microevolution -- small changes such as the shape of a bird's beak or the color of a bear's fur -- seems to be adequately explained by Darwinian theory in conjunction with genetics. But the much more vexing question of macroevolution -- the really interesting changes, such as evolution from a fish to a frog -- remains up in the air.

As Wilber puts it, writing in 1996:

The standard neo-Darwinian explanation of chance mutation and natural selection -- very few theorists believe this anymore. Evolution clearly operates in part by Darwinian natural selection, but this process simply selects those transformations that have already occurred by mechanisms that absolutely nobody understands...

Takes the standard notion that wings simply evolved from forelegs. It takes perhaps a hundred mutations to produce a functional wing from a leg -- a half-wing will not do. A half-wing is no good as a leg and no good as a wing -- you can't run and you can't fly. It has no adaptive value whatsoever. In other words, with a half-wing you are dinner. The wing will work only if these hundred mutations happen all at once, in one animal...

Talk about mind-boggling. This is infinitely, absolutely, utterly mind-boggling. Random mutations cannot even begin to explain this. The vast majority of mutations are lethal anyway; how are we going to get a hundred nonlethal mutations happening simultaneously? Or even four or five, for that matter? But once this incredible transformation has occurred, then natural selection will indeed select the better wings from the less workable wings -- but the wings themselves? Nobody has a clue.

For the moment, everybody has simply agreed to call this "quantum evolution" or "punctuated evolution" or "emergent evolution" -- radically novel and emergent and incredibly complex [features] come into existence in a huge leap, in a quantum-like fashion -- with no evidence whatsoever of intermediate forms. Dozens or hundreds of simultaneous nonlethal mutations have to happen at the same time in order to survive at all -- the wing, for example, or the eyeball.

However we decide these extraordinary transformations occur, the fact is undeniable that they do. Thus, many theorists, like Erich Jantsch, simply refer to evolution as "self-realization through self-transcendence." Evolution is a wildly self-transcending process: it has the utterly amazing capacity to go beyond what went before. So evolution is in part a process of transcendence, which incorporates what went before and then adds incredibly novel components. [Pages 31-33]

Wilber's particular example is perhaps not the strongest one that could be given. There are, after all, some possible uses for a "half-wing" -- it might be used to catch air currents and permit a small animal to drop to the ground more safely or even soar briefly, a la the flying squirrel. There's also been speculation that the feathered wings of early birdlike creatures may have been used, not for flying, but for sweeping up small insects.

Nevertheless, his basic point has merit, and other writers have illustrated the idea with more convincing examples. In his 1991 book Beyond Natural Selection, Robert Wesson considers many specific cases of biological adaptations that are hard to explain by purely neo-Darwinian mechanisms.

In one passage he looks at the phenomenon of electric organs in fish, which may be used as weapons or as a form of radar ("electrolocation"). He writes:

Darwin, who could propose an explanation for almost anything, admitted that he could not conceive how the electric organs of the fish could have been evolved. Modern science has not come much closer.

Certain sharks have developed such sensitivity to the discharges from the muscles of fish (like the impulses that make up an electrocardiogram) that they can perceive as little as .01 microvolt per meter, equivalent to about 10 volts at a distance of a kilometer. Other fish, combining the abilities to generate electricity and to perceive it, use an electric field up to several volts as a sort of radar, sensing disturbances caused in the field by other fish or solid objects....

Other electric fish use their discharge as a weapon. Electric eels (Electrophorus), with some 6,000 generating plaques, can produce about one ampere at 500 volts; they do well not to electrocute themselves....

For electrolocation, many things must work together: an apparatus to generate fairly strong electric pulses at a rate of as many as 1,700 per second, consisting of a large number of plates stacked up like batteries in series; effective insulation of the electric generator from the body to make it possible to pile up voltage without allowing it to leak backwards; special fins to swim without flexing the body and thus disturbing the field; a means of controlling the pulses; incredibly sensitive receptors capable of registering minute changes in the strong primary gradient of the field; means of filtering out the electric discharges of other fish, which are immensely stronger than the echoes of its own field; and a special structure in the brain to process and use the information received.

The various parts of the radar system would seem hard to achieve even quite separately. For example, the electric generating apparatus is derived from muscle tissue, but how a muscle could turn into a generator while remaining always useful is hard to imagine. Muscles have minute electric discharges, but for any probable utility, the discharge of many plates must be strengthened, coordinated and made part of an intricate response system.

Not the least of the difficulties is insulation. Living tissues contain dissolved salts, that is, positive and negative ions capable of conducting electricity; it is difficult for any tissue to be nonconductive unless it is cut off from the ordinary processes of the body. The blood supply and the nerve fibers activating the organ have to be conductive. Moreover, fresh water is a much poorer conductor than animal flesh; when the fish makes a voltage difference between head and tail, the easiest path for the current would normally be through its body. The fish consequently has thin, conducted skin where the current exits and reenters the body and thick skin elsewhere, composed mostly of nonconductive connective tissue; it also has an extremely elaborate system of membranes to permit the transport of nutrients and nerve signals while preventing ions from traveling out of the electric organ despite the powerful discharge.

A detail is that the electric generating plaques have to be stimulated at exactly the same time. Since they are strung out along the body, the nervous impulse must travel more rapidly to cells farther from the body; hence nerve fibers (axons) to farther parts of the electric organ are proportionally thicker or those to nearer parts take a circuitous route....

Despite their apparent improbability, electric organs have been perfected more or less independently in most of the ten different families in which they occur. [Pages 64-66, citations omitted]

Polemicists like Richard Dawkins are prone to suggesting that all the fundamental questions about evolution have been answered by neo-Darwinian incrementalism. This claim may be effective as propaganda in the Darwinists' war against creationists and intelligent design advocates, but it appears to be both premature and misleading. While Darwin's theory represented a huge advance in our understanding of life on Earth, it is not yet the final word on the subject.