J.T. McDaniel's blog

Seeing is Believing, Except When it's Not

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the most popular writers of his day. His Sherlock Holmes novels and stories are still read. His Professor Challenger stories remain in print, and The Lost World has been filmed, and re-filmed. Holmes, of course, is still his best-known creation. He is known for his deductive skills, his brilliant mind, eccentric behavior, and application of observation and logic to the mysteries he becomes involved in. 

His creator, likewise, did his best to apply the same principles in real life. Unfortunately, unlike Holmes, Conan Doyle wasn't very good at telling the real from the imaginary or the sham. Perhaps he just had a trusting nature. Religious people tend to think that way, and if Conan Doyle's religion happened to be Spiritualism instead of Church of England, we need not be surprised that he fell for psychic scams right and left.

His book, The New Revelation, was a catalogue of concrete examples of why, to Conan Doyle, it seemed logical to believe in life after death, and a Spiritualist connection between the realm of the living and the realm of the departed. He produces example after example of psychic mediums performing astonishing feats, of levitation, table rapping or tipping, automatic writing, and communication from the beyond. The mediums he presented were talented, impressive, and as phony as any modern psychic.

It's just that he never seemed to recognize this. His friendship with Harry Houdini ultimately ended because Conan Doyle couldn't recognize the truth, even when Houdini carefully explained how the illusion was performed. Like many religious believers, regardless of faith, Conan Doyle's desire to believe outweighed his own common sense. Just as you'll find fundamentalist Christians adamantly believing that Adam and  Eve were real people, and the Genesis creation story is literally true, so Conan Doyle believed in these psychics, and in spirit communication.

The curious thing is, Conan Doyle spent a good bit of his efforts in finding and exposing fake spirit mediums, because he felt their scams detracted from people's faith in the "real" mediums. It never seemed to occur to him that they might all be fakes. The ones he "exposed" tended to be the most amateurish, with the least polished performances. The ones who were most expert in their trickery he found believable.

I spent a lot of time reading his book, and tracking down the people he mentions, learning everything currently available about them, and using that information to annotate this edition. None of them are considered even remotely reliable today. None of this would have mattered to Sir Arthur, who wrote: "The objective side of it ceased to interest for having made up one's mind that it was true there was an end of the matter. The religious side of it was clearly of infinitely greater importance."

Conan Doyle was, as this suggests, a "true believer." Just as fundamentalist Christians are able to simply ignore any scientific evidence that conflicts with their religious beliefs, so he was able to ignore evidence of fraud and conclude that the mediums he investigated were legitimate, and actually did communicate with the departed. It's a common human problem. Our brains are, more or less, programed to recognize patterns and react to them in more or less predictable ways. This effect is the same whether the pattern exists, or is merely imagined.

Celebrities die in groups of three. It's a common belief, but, leaving out the possibility of a car crash, or an airplane falling out of the sky, it almost never happens that the "three" actually die together. The grouping is entirely arbitrary. Someone dies, and then the next two to go are added to the grouping. Except that, upon investigation, you may find that number two in your group is number one in someone else's group, or number three in another's. You can always come up with a group of three because you can arbitrarily start it with anyone you like. There are a lot of celebrities, and quite a few of them are elderly, and others are prone to taking foolish risks, so you can really expect someone famous to die on almost any given day. 

Psychics rely on coincidence and trickery to achieve their results. They also rely on people having poor memories. For example, back in 1998, I predicted that Donald Trump would one day be President, thereby proving conclusively that I'm an actual prophet. Now, I didn't write this down anywhere, and I can't remember who I said it to, but that's not important. I just told you that I said it, and I'm obviously a trustworthy source, so it has to be true. This sort of thing is the basis of most religions. Someone claims to speak for a god or gods, perhaps writes all of this down in a book, and the proof is that it's written in that book. There is very little in the Bible that can be confirmed, and the few events that can be often turn out to be mutually exclusive, such as Jesus' birth during the reign of Herod the Great and, simultaneously, during a census that wasn't conducted until after that king's death, or the utterly ridiculous notion that Mary was pregnant for more than 700 years, which is the only possible way Isaiah's 'Immanuel' prophecy could apply to her, given that the original Hebrew text doesn't say "shall conceive," but "has conceived." It doesn't say anything about virgins, either, but it's likely the New Testament writers didn't understand Hebrew, and took their quote from the Greek Septuagint, which mistranslates the passage.

Psychic experiences can usually be explained rationally, given some effort. Someone phoning just as you're thinking of them, for instance, is often taken as a sign of psychic abilities, though it's really nothing more than an exercise in selective memory. The times that it happens are remembered, while the far more numerous times when it didn't are forgotten. Psychics also use tricks like cold reading, wherein they essentially trick the victim into telling them the information they feed back. Before a large audience, if a psychic says he's receiving a message from someone named Tim, or, maybe, Tom, normal statistical odds suggest that one or more audience members will have a dead relative with that name.

"That could be my Uncle Tim," someone will say.

"Yes, yes, that's it," the psychic agrees. "He says he's here to communicate with his nephew." 

Notice that the psychic hasn't done anything more than throw out a name, and then agree with something his victim told him. He'll follow up with more details, most of which will be supplied by the victim, and end with a "message" telling the victim about how nice things are in the afterlife, and to keep up the good work, or to reform, whichever seems most appropriate. 

Conan Doyle would fall for this repeatedly. He'd put down failures to a lack of faith on the part of the observers, which is still the most commonly cited reason for psychics failing tests conducted under rigorous controls. They like to claim they can do all these things, but the "negative energy" from the observers prevents it. 

As I mentioned earlier, when I was researching this book, I spent a lot of time looking up the people mentioned, and the incidents described. Between the annotations and the Afterword, I added so much new, mostly explanatory material, that, for copyright purposes, the result became my commentary, a new work, which incorporated Conan Doyle's original text. More than half of what is published here is new. You can buy the book as a Kindle eBook, or a slender trade paperback.

Somewhat Improbable

Last night (or, to be more precise, early this morning) I found myself watching Mistress of the Apes. The plot is rather silly. Beautiful young anthropologist in labor falls victim to crazed druggies raiding the hospital for drugs and the baby is stillborn. Meanwhile, her husband has gone missing in the Congo. An expedition is organized, they tangle with poachers, the rich friend organizing everything turns out to be the chief villain (which, considering he spends the lead-up to his revelation as the heavy trying to jump every female he encounters, with the notable exception of his wife, and shooting everything in sight, shouldn't be that surprising), and the anthropologist discovers a tribe of Homo habilis living in the remote jungle, befriends them, and ends up knocked up by one of them. Happy endings all around, and weirdness predominates. The lead, Jenny Neumann, never appears in that outfit, by the way. The Boris Vallejo poster art does do a fairly good job of depicting the "ape-men."

So much for the movie. It's typical late 1970's semi-exploitation, with acting ranging from fairly good to awful, and a lot of violence and a little nudity. What I have a problem with is the premise. Homo habilis lived about a million and half to two million years ago. The plot of this movie has at least a few of them living now (or, in 1979, anyway). 

Now, these "ape-men" do not, in fact, look that much like what any scientific reconstruction of actual Homo habilis skulls would seem to suggest. The genuine article bore nearly as strong a resemblance to chimps as to modern humans, though the two lines had split five or six million years earlier. They were tool users—that's where the scientific name, which translates as "handy man"—comes from. But they were more ape-like in general appearance, including having shorter legs in proportion to their bodies.

The actors playing the ape-men in the movie, of course, look like physically well-developed modern men wearing a lot of prosthetic makeup. They're also at least a foot too tall. What they most strongly resemble, and what would have made more sense in the context, are Neanderthals. Neanderthals became extinct only in the last twenty to fifty thousand years. Recently enough that surviving pockets would be at least within the realm of possibility.

What would a surviving band of Homo habilis look like if they had survived into the modern period? They might look like us, because, of course, from an evolutionary standpoint they are probably what we evolved from. It's rather silly to presume that an isolated band would simply stop evolving. They also might look significantly different. Just because certain features were selected for once, doesn't mean it would happen again.

Another problem pops up towards the end of the movie. The anthropologist, having mated with one of the ape-men, becomes pregnant. Presented with this, it's hard not to wonder if this would even be possible. While Homo sapiens and Homo habilis belong to the same genus, we are different species, separated by more than a million years of evolution. Mating would certainly be possible—you can physically mate with anything that has compatible genitalia, as the occasional bestiality prosecution makes clear—but the likelihood of producing viable offspring would be extremely low, and the likelihood of producing fertile offspring even lower. You might get something like a mule, the offspring of a mare and a donkey, having some characteristics of both, but completely incapable of reproducing. The most likely outcome, though, would be no pregnancy at all. 

Just because Homo habilis, so far as we can tell, evolved into us, that doesn't mean an isolated population would do the same thing. A physical resemblance would be fairly likely. Genetic compatibility is another thing entirely. This would not, after all, be a modern human trying to mate with an original Homo habilis, but of a modern human trying to mate with an ancestral species that had, itself, undergone over a million years of further evolution.

If this group had somehow not evolved, it's likely the initial meeting with the pretty young anthropologist would have had a different outcome, most probably involving her ending up as the entree. The band would have just identified her as some unrelated primate species, like a chimp or gorilla, and added her to the menu. It's not technically cannibalism if it's a different species. Modern humans eat chimpanzees from time to time, which is unfortunate for both species, as this is probably how HIV jumped the chimp/human barrier. 

I can see some religious types liking this movie because it implies that species are stable, and evolution doesn't occur. They'd likely dislike it because of the nudity, of course. They'd also dislike it because it suggests that the world is somewhere around its actual age, and not the 6,000 or so years that creationists delude themselves into believing. 

Looking to more current entertainment, the audiobook version of Returning was released today. The audio version is narrated by British actress Bridget Thomas. I wanted a woman for this book, given the predominance of women among the most important characters (captain, navigating officer, Marine detachment commander, Marine company commander, and so forth). This unabridged reading runs just under eight hours.

As of now, the audio version is available at Audible.com and Amazon.com. And, of course, if you prefer to read it yourself, you can find it on Amazon in both print and Kindle editions.