Michael Prescott's Blog

Ripping it up, part two

In a recent post I discussed the much-hyped news that the identity of Jack the Ripper had finally been revealed via DNA analysis of an old shawl purportedly found at one of the murder scenes. I also discussed objections raised by so-called "ripperologists" – dedicated aficionados of the unsolved Ripper murders, who have learned to be skeptical about such revelations.

Since then, I've had the opportunity to read the book that started all the commotion, Naming Jack the Ripper, by Russell Edwards. The book clears up a number of things, but it also raises more questions, leaving the story as yet unresolved.

Those who are interested in getting into the controversy in depth are advised to check out this ever-growing thread at the website Casebook.org, dedicated to ripperology. At last count, the thread had grown to more than 4,200 comments, all pertaining to Edwards' claims and possible counterarguments. Naturally I can't cover all that detailed material here. What I'd like to do is focus on two specific facts, one of which may help substantiate Edwards' theory, and another that may cause problems for it.

One of the biggest obstacles to the acceptance of Edwards' ideas is the provenance of the shawl itself. Did it actually come from one of the Ripper crime scenes? Ripper experts have expressed doubt because no such item was reported by the police. In his book, Edwards includes a list of all items found on the person of Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes, the woman who is said to have been found with the shawl. No shawl is mentioned. But he then adds a quote from "a press report in the East London Observer," which said: "Her dress was made of green chintz, the pattern consisting of Michaelmas daisies." He adds that other periodicals repeated this detail.

The disputed shawl, which is about eight feet long, has a pattern of Michaelmas daisies. Now, a shawl is not a dress. But in the confusion and darkness of the crime scene, when the police were doing their best to keep onlookers back, it's at least possible that a reporter glimpsed the shawl covering part of Eddowes' body and mistook it for a dress. If it was indeed the same item, then its absence from the official list would indicate that it disappeared somewhere between the crime scene and the mortuary.

According to family lore associated with the shawl, Acting Sgt. Amos Simpson of the Metropolitan Police Department was allowed to take the shawl with him to give to his wife, a dressmaker. When I first heard this, I was extremely skeptical that the police would be so lax in their procedures as to allow a potentially vital piece of evidence to be carried off. But one of the commenters at the Casebook site made the point that in those days, the clothing of murder victims was routinely burned; after all, given the primitive forensic techniques of the day, there was no way to extract any useful evidence from such items. If this is true – and it sounds right – then it is conceivable that the police did allow this rather valuable piece of fabric to be salvaged rather than burned. The shawl was of good quality, stained with an expensive dye apparently made from natural materials. It's easy to think that someone would prefer to see it in the hands of a dressmaker than simply consigned to the furnace. It's also not impossible that Sgt. Simpson's wife, upon receiving the shawl, declared that she wanted nothing to do with the gory, bloodstained garment.

Crucial to Edwards' case is the idea that the shawl was not laundered in all the years that it remained in the family's possession. How plausible is this? As it turns out, it's quite believable. The primitive blue dye used on the shawl would have bled and washed away if it became wet. Accordingly, the only way to clean the shawl was to beat it like a rug and air it out. It would not have been washed — indeed, it could not have been washed, because if it had been, the dye (still very much visible) would have come off. Apparently it was never cleaned at all, just stuffed away in a storage container — a lucky break, inasmuch as it retained DNA that would otherwise have been lost.

So far, so good. There are other issues involving the provenance of the shawl, such as Simpson's presence at the crime scene that night when his normal jurisdiction was miles away. Edwards suggests possible scenarios that seem reasonably plausible to me, but which strike many of the Casebook people as unpersuasive. I'm not going to go into all that.

What I do want to cover is the biggest potential problem with Edwards' case that I've come across so far. It involves the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis performed on the bloodstains visible on the shawl. Edwards reports excitedly (he has a tendency to get a bit worked up) that a segment of mtDNA from the blood matched that of a matrolineal descendant of Catherine Eddowes, and that it

had a sequence of variation which gave a match with the mtDNA of [Eddowes' descendant] Karen Miller only and did not match any of the other control samples. The variation is known as a Global Private Mutation, a rare gene variation that is usually found only in a single family or a small population. According to the database of the Institute of Legal Medicine and based on the latest information available, the variation that both Karen's DNA and the DNA from the bloodstains on the shawl shared has a frequency estimate of only 0.000003506, in other words, it is present in only 1 in 290,000 of the world's population.

To put the genetic variation discovery into context, it means that as the United Kingdom currently has a population of around 63,750,000, Karen Miller is one of only around 223 people in the country who possesses this genetic variation. If that ratio was the same back in 1888, when the UK population would have stood at about 36,000,000, Catherine Eddowes, whose blood (also containing that variation) appears to be on the shawl, would have been only one of about 136 people in the country with that variation. [pp. 203, 204; italics in original]

He goes on to estimate that Eddowes would have been one of no more than a dozen people in London to fit this profile at the time.

This is strong stuff. If indeed the blood on the shawl can be narrowed down to only twelve people, one of whom is a known Ripper victim, it would be pretty conclusive evidence that the shawl was originally found on or with her body, however it ultimately came to be removed.

But the devil is in the details. The DNA expert who conducted these tests wrote his own report, in which he stated

One of these amplified mtDNA segments had a sequence variation which gave a match between one of the shawl samples and Karen Miller's DNA only; i.e. the DNA sequence retrieved from the shawl did not match with control reference sequences. This DNA alteration is known as global private mutation (314.1C) and it is not very common in worldwide population, as it has frequency estimate of 0.000003506, i.e. approximately 1/290,000. [p. 205]

But here's the thing. A couple of the dedicated ripperologists on Casebook looked into mutation 314.1C and found that it seems to be merely a variant nomenclature for mutation 315.1C — and 315.1C is not uncommon at all. Far from being a rare mutation confined to a relative handful of people, 315.1C is distributed throughout 99.2% of the population!

As the online investigator who tracked down this discrepancy wrote,

It appears that something has gone badly wrong with the analysis here, and obviously the quoted figure of 1 in 290,000 can't be accepted without further explanation.

As of now, that's where the matter stands. If 314.1C really is identical to 315.1C in all but name, and if 315.1C is common to nearly all of us, then the "global private mutation" does not narrow the field at all, and the claimed identification of the sample with Eddowes is on much shakier ground (though at least she is not ruled out).

There are other questions pertaining to the analysis of skin cells purportedly matching the Ripper suspect, Aaron Kosminski, but for me, the 314.1C thing is the biggest issue right now. It is hard to believe that a distinguished DNA expert could make a mistake so elementary that non-experts could catch it simply by Googling the relevant term. On the other hand, there seems to be no getting around the fact that 314.1C and 315.1C are one and the same sequence.

Until this is cleared up, the status of Edwards' ballyhooed "discovery" remains in doubt. And old Red Jack continues to mock us all ...

And hey, if you've read this far, you may be interested enough in the Ripper to read my novel about a modern-day connection to the case:

And the band played on

Okay, I just have to post this. I learned about it from Julie Beischel via one of her Facebook posts.

It seems that Scientific American's go-to skeptic Michael Shermer had an unusual experience - one that profoundly shook him.

Though I suggest you read Shermer's entire post (which isn't long), I'll excerpt a few passages:

Often I am asked if I have ever encountered something that I could not explain ... anomalous and mystifying events that suggest the existence of the paranormal or supernatural. My answer is: yes, now I have.

The event took place on June 25, 2014. On that day I married Jennifer Graf, from Köln, Germany. She had been raised by her mom; her grandfather, Walter, was the closest father figure she had growing up, but he died when she was 16 ... His 1978 Philips 070 transistor radio arrived safely [from Germany], so I set out to bring it back to life after decades of muteness. I put in new batteries and opened it up to see if there were any loose connections to solder. I even tried “percussive maintenance,” said to work on such devices—smacking it sharply against a hard surface. Silence. We gave up and put it at the back of a desk drawer in our bedroom.

You can probably guess what happened on the couple's wedding day ...

Jennifer ... wished her grandfather were there to give her away. She whispered that she wanted to say something to me alone, so we excused ourselves to the back of the house where we could hear music playing in the bedroom ...

“That can't be what I think it is, can it?” she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes. “My grandfather is here with us,” Jennifer said, tearfully. “I'm not alone.”

Shortly thereafter we returned to our guests with the radio playing as I recounted the backstory. My daughter, Devin, who came out of her bedroom just before the ceremony began, added, “I heard the music coming from your room just as you were about to start.” The odd thing is that we were there getting ready just minutes before that time, sans music.

Later that night we fell asleep to the sound of classical music emanating from Walter's radio. Fittingly, it stopped working the next day and has remained silent ever since.

To his great credit, Shermer does not reflexively dismiss the episode.

I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well. I savored the experience more than the explanation.

The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account. And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.

Naturally, some skeptics in the comments thread immediately announce that their hackles were raised by the post, and especially the last lines (quoted above). One scold writes:

I was embarrassed to read your concluding paragraph. What are we to keep an open mind about? That Jennifer's dead grandfather maybe fixed the radio? Did he even know how to fix radios? Wouldn't there be an easier way for the dead to communicate with the living? It would be mildly interesting to have an electronics expert determine exactly what is wrong with the radio.

Others gibe that Shermer's feelings for his wife have clouded his mind. Apparently love and reason don't mix. These comments remind me of Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory.

But at least one person has an intelligent response:

I am a skeptic, and a subscriber to Skeptic Magazine. Other than minor frustration with some political biases on Shermer's part that sometimes have crept into his writing in the past, I have been a huge fan for 20 years. This article really intrigued me. I am surprised and impressed that Shermer wrote it, perhaps knowing that some fellow skeptics and his fans may be annoyed. I would have been annoyed 10+ years ago, and am a little embarrassed to report that I also had a remarkable and unexplained thing happen to me and three witnesses about ten years ago in Santa Barbara. If someone else had shared with me a story similar to what happened to me, I would NEVER believe it, even today. Not ever. So....... I just don't know what to say, other than our world is full of mystery, and skepticism is an appropriate response to our world, as long as we are humble and honest about all that we do not understand.

Waking up is hard to do

The Atlantic has an article on the largest study ever performed of anesthesia awareness. Here are a few of the main conclusions:

Anesthesia awareness is rare - maybe rarer than previously thought. Other reports have said it happens in about 1 or 2 of every 1,000 operations, but the new study found an incidence of only 1 episode per 19,000 operations.

About half the people who report the experience say it was distressing, while the other half say it was neutral. Apparently nobody finds it a positive experience.

"41 percent of patients who woke under anesthesia had moderate to severe long-term psychological effects afterward." These effects often take the form of post-traumatic stress disorder, which can persist for years.

An inability to move is the most common feature mentioned by patients. One patient wrote: "Suddenly, I was aware something had gone very wrong. I could hear what was going on around me, and I realized with horror that I had woken up in the middle of the operation, but couldn’t move a muscle."

18% feel some pain.

Though it is probably unnecessary to do so, I can't help comparing these reports with typical NDEs. Remember that some skeptics have argued that NDEs - at least those that take place during surgery - are episodes of anesthesia awareness.

And yet the typical NDE includes none of these features. A typical NDE ...

• is a positive experience, sometimes qualifying as euphoric
• is marked by the sense of unfettered movement, either as a disembodied spirit in the operating room or as spirit speeding toward (and sometimes into) a bright light
• involves no pain whatsoever, at least until the person returns to his or her body
• does not result in PTSD, but instead often leads to a deeper appreciation and enjoyment of life.

Now, I know there are some nightmarish or hellish NDEs. But even these are not characterized by paralysis, pain, or PTSD. And they seem to be quite rare.

The only major overlap I can see between anesthesia awareness and the NDE is that, in both cases, the patient reports hearing what the doctors and nurses are saying. But unlike the NDEr, the patient with anesthesia awareness does not report seeing the operation - and certainly not viewing it from a height. Yet we are told that NDErs unconsciously construct this visual image to correspond to the sounds they hear. If this were so, why would NDErs have a visual experience while anesthesia awareness patients do not? If the brain is wired to automatically construct images that match sounds, wouldn't both groups be equally likely to translate their auditory impressions into faux visual terms?

When we look at the most common features of anesthesia awareness - paralysis (42%), hearing noises or voices (37%), feeling non-painful touches (21%), inability to breathe or a feeling of suffocation (11%), and “dreamlike experiences” (5%) - we're seeing things that, for the most part, NDErs never report. I've read hundreds of NDE accounts, and never have I read one in which the person feared he or she was "suffocating" or felt the "touches" of the medical crew. In fact, a sense of separation from the physical body and a lack of interest in what is being done to it are common. Normally, NDErs feel liberated, not confined; invigorated, not suffocating; safe and well, not panicky and threatened.

As for "dreamlike experiences," the term is too vague to be meaningful, but note that NDErs usually insist that their experience was not dreamlike at all, but instead more real than ordinary life.

Overall, this new four-year study, involving "every hospital in the U.K. and Ireland, as well as 300 anecdotal reports," seems to cast further doubt on the already dubious claim that NDEs can be explained as instances of anesthesia awareness.

Star Gate's fate

Today I happened to come across an interesting piece of information online. It involves Project Star Gate, the government-funded investigation of remote viewing that was shut down in 1995.

Here's the skinny from the relevant website, Stargate Interactive:

Stories of the 1995 ending of the Star Gate program vary, but many have Ray Hyman saying remote viewing didn’t work and Jessica Utts saying it did. Speculation abounds over whether or not the entire program was really shut down as well as whether or not results over those twenty years were operationally valuable and/or statistically significant. Those discussions have often involved someone saying “Ray Hyman said…” and “but Jessica Utts said….” or visa versa, as if the two didn’t agree. Check out the document and see if that’s true.

The download attached to this blog is a 22-slide presentation produced in 1995. Once you look through it, you’ll be able to answer whether or not Hyman said the results were not statistically significant and, if he didn’t say that, what he actually did say.

Intrigued, I downloaded the file (a PDF) and looked through it. Indeed - if the slideshow is in fact accurately reproduced - it turns out that Hyman's views were not as totally dismissive as I'd been led to believe.

First, the slideshow gives a summary titled "Dr. Utts’ conclusions":

Asserted that “Psychic functioning” is well-established
Observed that statistical results obtained were far beyond chance expectations
Refuted argument that methodological flaws or fraud could account for results
Claimed some SRI, SAIC results were replicated in other labs

This is followed by "Dr. Hyman’s conclusions":

 

Recent SAIC results are methodologically superior to previously flawed SRI work
New results are statistically significant
Results hampered by secrecy, experimental database has had no community peer-reviewed, no public school they
Better than chance results do not, by themselves, establish that a paranormal phenomenon is the cause
Use of same “judge” during all SAIC experiments is possible serious flaw
“Remote viewing,” as opposed to Ganzfeld, has not been replicated in other labs
Boundary conditions, i.e., when and where remote viewing can reliably occur, have not been defined
Possibility of methodological flaws in results has not been eliminated

Note that while Hyman's conclusions are presented straightforwardly, the summary of Utts' conclusions is couched in terms like "asserted," "observed," and "claimed."

 

We come to the next slide, titled "AIR’s judgments on commissioned R&D reviews." AIR was the "American Institutes of Research blue-ribbon panel" that looked into this controversy  for the Senate Appropriations Committee. The slide reads:

 

Reviewers agree more than they disagree:
     - Statistically significant results
     - Vast improvement in experimental protocols
Reviewers disagree on key points:
     - Establishment of paranormal causality
     - Replication of “remote viewing” in other labs

 

This is followed by a slide titled "AIR independently concludes":

The data do not establish that a paranormal phenomenon is involved, nature of source not identified
The data have not been replicated independently
The boundary constraints critical to obtaining statistically significant experimental results are not practical in real world of intelligence collection

 

Three points can be made about this. First, even arch-skeptic Ray Hyman conceded that the protocols had been improved and the new results were statistically significant. This is a huge admission.

Second, Hyman's claim that the "results do not, by themselves, establish that a paranormal phenomenon is the cause," which was picked up by the majority of the AIR panel and regurgitated as "The data do not establish that a paranormal phenomenon is involved," is, when you think about it, rather silly. It seems to reflect a desperate desire to steer clear of any endorsement of the "parnaormal," simply by refusing to identify remote viewing as a paranormal phenomenon. Note that Hyman could not find any specific flaw in the research and was reduced to suggesting that use of the same judge was a "possible" flaw and that, more generally, the "possibility of methodological flaws in results has not been eliminated."

 

Hyman has been pushing this latter line for decades: Since it is theoretically possible that some unknown flaw could be responsible for the results, we are justified in ignoring the results. Is there any category of scientific endeavor that would be exempt from this dictum? The possibility of unknown methodological flaws has not been - and logically cannot be - eliminated in any empirical investigation. There is always the possibility of an unknown error somewhere, whether you are studying psi or fossils or quantum particles; this is precisely what makes it "unknown." Yet in all areas besides psi, we are willing to accept the results of empirical studies, at least provisionally. Can anything other than materialist bias explain the special exception?

 

Third, it appears the reasons for defunding the Star Gate project had more to do with operational utility than with the evidence as such. The majority on the AIR panel, though clearly uncomfortable with and even hostile to this kind of research (see how they characterized Utts' statements) nevertheless could not argue that there was no evidence. They could only argue that the evidence provided by remote viewers was unlikely to prove useful in day-to-day intelligence operations. Since the project was being funded to obtain usable results, and not for the sake of "pure research," this conclusion was enough to shut down the program.

 

Somewhat absurdly, the slideshow reports:

 

AIR concluded future R&D should not take place within Intelligence Community since 20 years of IC investigation failed to establish a paranormal phenomenon

This, after admitting that better-than-chance results were obtained! Again, this is not evidence of a paranormal phenomenon only because Hyman said that it was not. To any normal, unbiased observer, this is obviously evidence of something paranormal. What else could it be?

 

Now, it may be just as well that the program was shut down. As the report indicates, the secrecy surrounding this research worked to its disadvantage. And maybe we don't want spies and generals using psi anyway.

 

But at least we should get the facts straight. Hyman did not claim the Star Gate results were statistically insignificant or easily explainable. He and Utts were found to "agree more than they disagree." This is of some importance, and it needs to be more widely known.

Wiki is still wacky

I'm linking to a political post in The Federalist, but my purpose is not to start a political discussion. What's interesting about this article, "Why Is Wikipedia Deleting All References to Neil Tyson's Fabrication?", is what it says about the mindset of hardcore science fans (as distinguished from actual scientists), many of whom undoubtedly fall into the militant debunker camp.

From the article:

Neil Tyson, a prominent popularizer of science (he even has his own television show) was recently found to have repeatedly fabricated multiple quotes over several years. The fabrications were not a one-off thing. They were deliberate and calculated, crafted with one goal in mind: to elevate Tyson, and by extension his audience, at the expense of know-nothing, knuckle-dragging nutjobs who hate science ...

There’s only one problem. None of the straw man quotes that Tyson uses to tear them down are real. The quote about the numerically illiterate newspaper headline? Fabricated. The quote about a member of Congress who said he had changed his views 360 degrees? It doesn’t exist. That time a U.S. president said “Our God is the God who named the stars” as a way of dividing Judeo-Christian beliefs from Islamic beliefs? It never happened ...

Judging by many of the responses to the three pieces I wrote detailing Neil Tyson’s history of fabricating quotes and embellishing stories (part 1, part 2, and part 3), you’d think I had defamed somebody’s god. It turns out that fanatical cultists do not appreciate being shown evidence that the object of their worship may not, in fact, be infallible.

Which brings us to Wikipedia. Oh, Wikipedia. After I published my piece about Neil Tyson’s fabrication of the George W. Bush quote, several users edited Neil Tyson’s wiki page to include details of the quote fabrication controversy. The fact-loving, evidence-weighing, ever-objective editors of the online encyclopedia did not appreciate the inclusion of the evidence of Tyson’s fabrication. Not at all ...

Literally every single mention of Tyson’s history of fabricating quotes has been removed from Tyson’s Wikipedia page ...

These lovers of science don’t actually love science, because science requires you to go where the evidence takes you, even if it goes against your original hypothesis ...

Tyson may be a great scientist, but what he’s selling at a price of $70 per ticket isn’t science. He’s selling the self satisfaction that comes from moral preening. Neil Tyson is adored by people who want the sweet feeling of smug, intellectual superiority without all the baggage of actually being intellectually superior in any way.

Harsh, but I think the same critique can be leveled against many (but not all) of the knee-jerk skeptics who confidently reject any evidence for psi, even when it's clear to more knowledgeable persons that they have only a superficial grasp of the issues involved.

For instance, I remember one online skeptic who dismissed crisis apparitions by declaring that the percipients were "in crisis" and so naturally they started hallucinating—blissfully unaware that a crisis apparition involves a crisis not for the percipient but for the person whose apparition is seen. (The percipient is typically quite relaxed.) Another skeptic announced that Leonora Piper could have easily guessed that the spirit communicator "George Pelham" was actually George Pellew, because the names were so similar—unaware that the Pelham name was never kept secret from Mrs. Piper, and was used only in published writings about the case, not in the seances. Yet another declared that the book and newspaper tests performed with Gladys Osborne Leonard were invalid because the investigator, Charles Drayton Thomas, stated that his father had designed the tests to prove survival. The skeptic complained that a proper experimenter doesn't set up an experiment to prove a preconceived opinion. This is wrong on two counts: a) experimenters do indeed try to prove particular hypotheses, and b) Drayton Thomas's father was deceased at the time and communicating through Mrs. Leonard, so it was not any living experimenter who was setting up the tests.

Now, a caveat: some highly knowledgeable skeptics are out there. They have done their homework, they know the facts, and they raise interesting and challenging points. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the posers, the wannabes—the ones who posture as experts without having any actual expertise. 

Anyone who had studied the literature would know what a crisis apparition is, or that Pelham was an alias chosen to protect his family, or that Drayton Thomas frequently communicated with his father through Mrs. Leonard. The people raising these objections simply have not done the reading, and thus have no grasp of the empirical facts they are attempting to dispute. They merely want to look "smart," and the way to do this, they think, is to parrot other people in their circle. It becomes a form of groupthink, as people compete with each other to be as dismissive and bullying as possible.

And there's the irony—people who claim to be dedicated to rationality, independent thought, and critical thinking turn out, in these cases, to be indifferent to facts, oblivious to their own ignorance, and unable to see obvious holes in their own reasoning. Like insecure high school students, they're interested mainly in seeking the approval of those in their in-group.

Insecurity, in fact, lies at the root of this behavior. If Neil Tyson's fans were truly secure in their conviction that he is impeccably honest and rational, they would not need to police the Internet deleting his own quotes and attacking those who call attention to his mistakes. Nor would "guerrilla skeptics" need to scrub James Randi's Wiki page of any criticism, or scrub Rupert Sheldrake's Wiki page of any positive info. They would let the facts speak for themselves.

Ultimately, this strange and rather sad behavior is not about science, or reason, or saving civilization from mysticism and a new dark age, or any of the self-aggrandizing motives these folks subscribe to. It's simply the cheapest possible way to be be one of the cool kids, and to feel "smart."

Two posts in one!

This post consists of two unrelated topics. I don't have a lot to say about either of them, but together they add up to one barely adequate post.

First, I was interested in an article that a commenter named Ingrid pointed out in a previous thread. The article, "How Understanding Randomness Will Give You Mind-Reading Powers," talks about how people are better than expected at predicting some random patterns. People, it seems, have an innate sense of what a well-shuffled sequence would look like: OOXOX seems more likely than XXXXO, for instance. Since they are more likely to guess the first sequence than the second, their guesses can exceed expectations in many cases.

It's an interesting point, but I'm not sure how relevant it is to psi research. The article points to experiments done by J.B. Rhine in which test subjects guessed the sequence of Zener cards, and to tests performed on a radio show in which the national audience participated. As best I can tell, the radio tests involved only Xs and Os, and these sequences are, as mentioned, sometimes easy to guess. But the Zener card experiments involved five different cards, each imprinted with a different shape. It's not clear to me that people can guess better than chance when such a complex sequence is involved.

The article's implicit bias against psi also gives me pause. We're told that Rhine was gaining "notoriety" for his work, a loaded term; would we hear that Einstein gained "notoriety" for his theories? We're also told that the ability of humans to predict some random sequences is "far more interesting" than telepathy, which would be true only if telepathy is silly nonsense, as the writer evidently assumes. The article is also notable in what it neglects to say: that the Zener card experiments involved more than two options, and that more recent parapsychology experiments use random number generators to produce lengthy, complex, and presumably unguessable sequences.

Now on to the other topic. Last night I watched Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012). It's a well-made film dominated by Daniel Day-Lewis's spellbinding performance. I liked it, but I noticed a certain choice of emphasis that I found interesting—namely, that the religious and spiritual dimensions of the subject were almost totally ignored.

The casual viewer would never guess that abolitionism was largely a religious movement, born in Protestant churches and seen by its proselytes as a holy mission. Though abolitionists figure in the film, and though they occasionally make reference to moral concerns and to natural law, they seldom if ever ground their arguments in Christian beliefs, as the real abolitionists did. In fact, religion is mostly absent from the film, even though that era was much more religious than our own. I assume that the filmmakers, as secular humanists, were simply uncomfortable with religious sentiments and chose to exclude them from the story. (I've read that a similarly secularist approach was taken toward the abolitionists in Spielberg's Amistad, thoigh I haven't seen the film.)

Of more relevance to this blog is the treatment of Mr. Lincoln's personal spirituality. There is one scene where Lincoln asks if a man can choose the circumstances of his birth, which could be taken as a religious or spiritual question, and we do see Lincoln making reference to God's plan in his famous second inaugural address, but that's about it. Lincoln is shown as having a deep antipathy to slavery (even though, historically, he moved cautiously in the direction of abolitionism throughout his career, and may have been primarily concerned with saving the Union), but his antipathy is not based on any religious or spiritual doctrine.

Now, in real life, Lincoln seems to have been ill-disposed toward traditional religion; he did not attend church, is said to have written (but never published) an atheistic tract in his younger days, and probably had a somewhat pragmatic or even cynical attitude toward religious doctrines when he became president. However, all indications are that his attitude changed over the next four years, in part because of the strain of overseeing the war with its tremendous loss of life, and in part because of the death of his young son Willie. Lincoln's speeches became progressively more steeped in religious language and imagery as his presidency wore on.

After Willie's death, Mrs. Lincoln became attracted to spiritualism, even inviting mediums to the White House (then known as the Executive Mansion) to perform seances. It is known that Lincoln attended some of these seances. Mainstream historians like Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose book Team of Rivals inspired the movie, downplay the idea that Lincoln took such affairs seriously, stressing that he was only humoring his wife or amusing himself. And yet we do have the testimony of Nettie Colburn Maynard, a trance medium who wrote a memoir describing her encounter with Lincoln. The book's publisher tracked down several contemporaries who endorsed Maynard's claim that Lincoln was sincerely interested in spiritualism.

I can see why today's filmmakers would not want to associate the revered Abe Lincoln with something seemingly as tawdry and discredited as spiritualism. But to leave out almost any indication of Lincoln's personal quest for religious and spiritual meaning is unfortunate. I suppose it may make him more "relatable" to the modern audience, but it also makes him just a bit less interesting, I think.

It's still a good movie, though.

A Facebook friend posted a link to this BBC story:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29093700

You need to play the 4-minute audio clip to get the details. The claim is that new research has demonstrated a form of telepathy. But what's being discussed isn't really telepathy, at least as the term is used in parapsychology.

The procedure involves digitizing an EEG reading, sending it to another location, and then directly stimulating the receiving subject's brain with the coded signal.

Fascinating stuff, but not "telepathy."

Ripping it up

There's a headline-making item in the news: DNA evidence has revealed the identity of Jack the Ripper. Having written a thriller about old Red Jack, I found this story intriguing, but I'm not sure if I believe it.

First things first. The article appears in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid known for sensationalistic exaggeration. The person making the claim is an amateur Ripper enthusiast who runs a Ripper souvenir shop and has a book coming out. So right away there are grounds for caution.

Moreover, Ripper aficionados have been down this road before. In 2002 Patricia Cornwell claimed to have used DNA to establish that the Ripper was artist Walter Sickert. Few people have found her evidence convincing. All that Cornwell really established was that Sickert possibly wrote one of the many hundreds of letters purportedly penned by the Ripper. But writing such letters was a minor craze at the time, and everybody was doing it. Nearly all the letters attributed to Jack – and possibly every last one of them – are fake. So even if Sickert did write one, it proves only that he was indulging in a fashionable prank. Besides, he seems to have been in France when some of the murders took place.

In this new case, Russell Edwards argues that a shawl supposedly recovered from a Ripper crime scene contains the victim's blood and trace amounts of DNA (semen) from the killer. Superficially, this sounds persuasive. But I've learned to be wary of such announcements. It wasn't that long ago that the alleged diary of Jack the Ripper turned up, only to be convincingly debunked as a modern forgery.

To gain some perspective, I visited Casebook, a site for dedicated “Ripperologists" the world over. Some commenters were intrigued or even half convinced by Edwards' story, but others raised questions. Among the issues discussed:

1. The shawl was collected by a police constable named Amos Simpson. But Simpson was a member of the Metropolitan Police, and the Ripper case was handled by the City Police, a different department altogether. There are possible explanations for a Metropolitan constable’s appearance at the scene, but no actual evidence that he was there.

2. We are told that the authorities allowed Simpson to simply take the shawl home “to give to his wife, a dressmaker.” This is hard to swallow. Though police procedures were more lax in those days than they are now, I can't see investigators permitting a cop to walk off with a key piece of evidence before it was examined or booked. At other Ripper crime scenes, efforts were made to catalog all items recovered in the area, including very small objects. Would a blood-spattered eight-foot-long shawl really be of no interest to the investigative team? Would they have let any cop, let alone a cop from another department, take it with him to be made into a dress? The only way I can see Simpson taking the shawl is if he concealed it on his person before anyone else came across it, and later lied about having obtained permission. Of course, this might be exactly what happened.

3. Edwards observes that the shawl was a pricey item unlikely to have been owned by the victim, a destitute streetwalker named Catherine (Kate) Eddowes. He speculates that the killer brought the shawl to the scene and left it as a clue. But surely the police would have been equally capable of determining that Eddowes hadn't owned the shawl. If they believed the killer had purchased it and left it behind (for whatever reason), they would have been even more unlikely to let a beat cop walk off with it. After all, they diligently pursued far more slender leads. Again, though, this objection dissolves if Simpson surreptitiously made off with the shawl.

4. Edwards suggests that markings on the shawl indicate the Ripper timed two of his crimes to take place on Michaelmas. “The shawl,” he writes,

is patterned with Michaelmas daisies. Today the Christian feast of Michaelmas is archaic, but in Victorian times it was familiar as a quarter day, when rents and debts were due.

I discovered there were two dates for it: one, September 29, in the Western Christian church and the other, November 8, in the Eastern Orthodox church. With a jolt, I realized the two dates coincide precisely with the nights of the last two murder dates.

The Casebook Ripperologists dispute this, saying that Mary Jane Kelly was not killed on Michaelmas but on the next day. This strikes me as a trivial objection. Kelly probably died early in the morning (before dawn) of November 9; for practical purposes this is a continuation of November 8. Certainly it’s close enough, if we assume that it took some time for the killer to select a victim, await an opportunity, and get up his nerve.

5. It's true that DNA was pulled from the shawl, but it was only mitochondrial DNA, which cannot pinpoint a specific suspect. The best that mitochondrial DNA analysis can do is indicate a pool of suspects. Given the population of England at the time (40 million), it appears that the same mitochondrial DNA could have been shared by roughly 400,000 people. When Edwards says that the two DNA samples were a 100% match with Eddowes’ descendent and with a descendent of the alleged Ripper, Aaron Kosminski, this means only that Eddowes was one of 400,000 people in England  who would have matched the blood DNA, and Kosminski was one of 400,000 people in England who would have matched the semen DNA. Of course, the odds of getting a match on both suspect and killer on the same article of clothing would be a great deal lower. And the fact (if it is a fact) that the DNA pool includes Kosminski, who lived in the vicinity of the murders and was a suspect at the time, is certainly of interest. While there may have been 400,000 people in England who also matched the DNA, nearly all of them were presumably living far from Whitechapel.

6. Kosminski was a schizophrenic who was eventually institutionalized, dying in an asylum. He was not thought to be violent; his known criminal offenses were limited to public masturbation. Whether such a disorganized personality could carry out five murders in a crowded neighborhood without being caught is open to question. It's not impossible, of course, and even without DNA, Kosminski is a better suspect than most. I'm not sure he was the "main" suspect at the time, despite Edwards' claims to that effect. As I understand it, there were many possible suspects and no consensus among investigators then or since. (However, I could be wrong.)

7. While Edwards identifies Eddowes' matrilineal descendant by name, he does not provide the identity of Kosminski's descendant, whose DNA swabs were used for comparison. At the risk of being overly suspicious, I would feel better about this evidence if we knew for sure that an actual descendent of Kosminski had been tracked down. People trying to sell books have sometimes been known to tell tall tales.

Overall, Edwards' work is intriguing, and it's possible the mystery has finally been solved. But with so many open questions and grounds for doubt, I'm not jumping on the bandwagon just yet.

Besides … isn't it more fun not to know?

 

A ghost post

The Atlantic has an article on why people believe in ghosts. I haven't read it. I did read a short excerpt on the political site Hot Air, which included this tidbit:

It turns out that a significant amount of people report having personally experienced paranormal activity. In a study published in 2011, 28.5 percent of undergraduate students surveyed at a southern university reported having had a paranormal experience. In a 2006 Reader’s Digest poll, 20 percent of respondents (21 percent of women and 16 percent of men) reported that they had seen a ghost at some time in their lives.

After reading the excerpt, I looked through the comments on Hot Air. It's a conservative site with a somewhat cynical attitude, and I figured most of the comments would be scathingly skeptical. Some were. But other people were surprisingly open about their own experiences and opinions.

My Mom said she saw a see-through ghost moving its mouth in the corner of a bathroom a week after a women had been murdered in same bathroom.

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I don’t know about supernatural “ghosts,” but I do believe in concepts like a poltergeist, essentially a mysterious spirit-like entity capable of causing physical disturbances. Though I suppose that’s technically a “ghost.”

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Same based on personal experience. Two or three times a week, my son, my wife, or I hear furniture move in one room when no one is upstairs. I’ve even experienced it once when I was upstairs. It was a little surprising, but it wasn’t scary.

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I’ve never experienced anything paranormal but I’ve heard so many stories from tons of different people that I definitely think that ghosts could be real.

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One of my best friends who’s a paramedic told me a story of seeing a ghost on a call to a nursing home, with witnesses. With the details he gave me, he was either trying to pull my leg, or he undoubtedly saw a ghost, and I know him well enough to know he wasn’t joking around.

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I actually work at a nursing home which is where I’ve heard a lot of stories, some extremely bizarre and from people I know aren’t trying to BS me.

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So my wife and I were busy working and around 3:00 am she felt “an old man” watching her while she was sanding in a walk-in closet. My wife is NOT superstitious, is not prone to that kind of talk or thinking. She didn’t even think about it really ... it was a small feeling and she blew it off.

The next morning she asked the landlord if the place was haunted. The landlord replied “why do you ask?” My wife related the story and the landlord told her how everyone who has lived in the place has actually SEEN an old man standing in the hallways in the middle of the night. He only appears from the waist up.

So fast-forward about a month and I am laying in bed and my wife is down the hall taking a bath. I have the lights off and I was reading my iPhone. It was pretty quiet and I was about to go to sleep when the light switch (the old protruding kind) literally flicked on right in front of me. At first I couldn’t believe what I had just seen. I thought my wife had walked down the hall and somehow flicked the light on.. which is impossible because the floors creak with every single step. But I called out to her “why did you turn on the lights?” She yelled back “what?”

Yeah … i was running out of there pretty quick.

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I believe in ghosts; if you take the time to separate fact from sensationalism, there are too many stories of unexplained phenomena (many from committed skeptics and rational-minded folks) to ignore.

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I don’t believe in ghosts as depicted in entertainment, and reality v shows.

However I did grow up in a house with a ghost/presence. Since my parents accepted him as the eccentric unseen uncle of the family, it was no big deal.

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My family moved in an old house and we came home after eating out one night a few days after moving in and heard somebody moving furniture around upstairs. Me and my dad ran up expecting a burglar and nothing was moved or bothered. We lived there a couple of years and it became a common thing as well as hearing somebody walking around and going up and down the stairs. We never saw anything but found out later from the person who owned the house that a lot of people had claimed to see things in there.

There is some pushback against the usual motley crew of know-it-all scoffers.

People who would tell me to discount the detailed story of my good friend, who is as levelheaded as anyone I’ve ever met, because they insist ghosts don’t/can’t exist really are fools who deserve to be mocked.

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It’s funny how so many around here always line up to deny something exists ...

I have seen a ghost. They absolutely exist.

I saw a man walking around a warehouse (that all of us working there had heard about) at a job where I used to work overnights. That part was closed after 6pm. So, no one was ever over there in that part at night.

Two other people saw it with me. He was about 100 feet away from us, facing the other way as we had always been told. We never saw his face. He was supposedly a man that used to work there years ago and died there on the job one day.

It was awesome.

There are even some attempts to get a handle on the problem from a philsophical or scientific standpoint.

That depends on what a “ghost” is and since we have no idea what consciousness and “life” are, there are many options all of which are 100% conjecture.

For instance, a visible “ghost” might be the projection of one person’s thoughts into another’s mind, causing the second person to receive stimuli that cannot be distinguished from actual vision.

If those thoughts are passed from mind to mind, then perhaps it would be possible to “see” things that happened generations ago, perhaps with the scope and clarity of the thoughts reducing with each transmission.

In these scenarios the person apparently seen in ghostly form need not still be alive in any corporeal or spiritual sense — even assuming that the person ever actually lived.

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The term ‘ghost’ is far too broad a term to cover everything from low level audio of past events to moving hot/cold spots to interactive but limited duration/location intelligent response to the high end and rare fully interactive but still relatively limited geographically and temporally intelligent response or active intelligence presence. Each of these begs for separate categories and research as they may not be actual, related events or may sit on a continuum of events with hard break points either in physical geography or some ability of substrates to record physical phenomena ...

Overall, I was impressed with the number of people who a) said they had experienced these phenomena firsthand, or b) had heard about such things from sources they trusted, or c) had looked into the evidence in a serious way. I was also impressed that these folks were not deterred by the inevitable ridicule, guffaws about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, accusations of gullibility and mental instability, and other standard "skeptical" responses.

The popular attitude on this subject does seem to be changing. There is less of a taboo about discussing it, and knee-jerk skeptical dismissals don't seem to have the impact they once had. Maybe this is why militant skeptics are getting a little desperate, as witness their dogged attempts to purge Wikipedia of any facts or opinions favorable to parapsychology.

The devil made him do it

 

The Devil Commands is a 1941 B-picture starring Boris Karloff and a supporting cast of no-name players. Clocking in at a brisk 65 minutes, it tells the story of a grief-stricken scientist seeking to communicate with his dead wife, whose experiments take a gruesome turn ending in multiple deaths.

It's not a bad movie, if you can overlook the insipid and largely unnecessary narration supplied by the scientist's daughter (Amanda Duff) and the inevitable defects of a low-budget programmer. There's a pretty detailed rundown of the plot here.

The film played on Turner Classic Movies the other night, and I watched it with some interest. It has a few features that make it different from the ordinary horror flick of the period.

For one thing, somebody involved in the production had done at least a little bit of research into Spiritualism. After discovering evidence that his dead wife is communicating with him through a gizmo he invented, Karloff tells skeptical scientists that "the change we call death" does not mean our end, and that "the so-called dead" are still with us. This terminology comes straight from Spiritualist teachings and is still very much in use today.

Moreover, he goes on to explain that the brain is like a radio set—a transmitter and receiver—and that the signal of consciousness continues even after the body has died. This is a rough approximation of the transmission theory proposed by William James. (According to TCM's write-up, this dialogue was censored from the British release, presumably for fear of offending religious sensibilities.)

Shortly afterward, Karloff visits a fake materialization medium and easily debunks her. Stung, she tells him that he may yet change his mind about her work. Other men of science, she intones, have come to believe in mediums. She cites Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle may or may not qualify as a man of science; he was a medical doctor, but best known as a fiction writer. But the reference to Lodge, a knighted physicist and convinced Spiritualist, is interesting, as he was not as well known to the general public. Whoever came up with that line knew something, at least, of the history of psychical research. 

 

Karloff at the seance.

 

I don't know if these various references originated with one of the two screenwriters, or with the novelist on whose book the movie is apparently based. (I say "apparently" because the book is uncredited in the film, but listed as a source in online databases). They do show that a degree of care went into the making of a movie that is, for the most part, a pretty routine time-filler.

One other feature of The Devil Commands that's of interest is how easily the film segues from Karloff's early, entirely respectable experiments into his later, unabashedly ghoulish efforts. By the end he is digging up corpses and hooking them up to his machine, while covering up murders and going quite mad. He's assisted in these undertakings (so to speak) by the fraudulent medium, who, crazed with power, exults that a man who could really talk to the dead would "own the world."

Then there's the title. The devil does not actually make an appearance in the movie, but we are no doubt meant to assume that Karloff, in seeking to bridge the great divide between life and death, is unwittingly doing the devil's work. The scientists he consults early in the story say much the same thing, insisting there are some truths man is not meant to know. The movie's grim outcome, which involves the deaths of everyone involved in the experiments, seems to bear out this warning.

All of which goes a long way toward explaining why Spiritualism, after a strong revival during World War One, largely died out in the ensuing decades. The Devil Commands is hardly a great movie, but it shows a certain familiarity with Spiritualism and tries to place afterlife investigations on a scientific footing. Yet in short order these experiments have become a replay of Dr. Frankenstein's abominations, right down to the shuffling, mentally defective lab assistant and the predictable crowd of townspeople storming the castle (or in this case, a cottage in Maine). Even in a fantasy-horror movie, mediumship is assumed to be both fake and dangerous; Karloff doesn't break a sweat in revealing the tricks used by the nefarious mentalist, who soon becomes his evil Svengali and leads him to his doom. Science rejects Karloff's work even before it takes a crazy turn, and we are clearly meant to side with the well-meaning scientists and to tut-tut Karloff's profane determination to raise the dead.

In short: Spiritualism is fakery mixed with seductive cunning and dangerous manipulation; science sets the proper limits to human exploration, and the occult lies outside those limits; contacting the dead is either an act of self-delusion or of devilry, and nobody with his head on straight would even think about it.

I'm not trying to criticize the movie by pointing out the attitudes it promotes. I'm just saying that these attitudes were very much in the air in 1941, just as they are (to a lesser extent) still in the air today. Against these headwinds, and given the movement's inevitable infiltration by con artists, Spiritualism simply stood no chance.