Project: Alpha

With the passing of April, and hence the setting aside of the A-Z challenge - I'll be keenly following Lee's review of what went well, and not so well, with that - it's time for me to find some other structural hook to hang my ramblings upon.

In need of a new Project, it occured to me that I could do a Project on Projects - it may or may not be another alphabetical set, but it gives me the kind of theme I can work with.

Today's subject is, fittingly for a first choice, Project Alpha. This was the brainchild of magician James Randi, a man who freely admits that the various illusions and feats of prestidigitation he performed were the result of sustained and practiced cheating: misdirection, fraud, chicanery, and deception. He offers no apology for it - the essence of Magic, after all, is knowing something the audience does not, and most people who attend a magic show understand that the performer is hoodwinking them somehow. The allure is in trying to work out just how he does it.

As his career progressed through the Twentieth Century, Randi increasingly found himself competing for airtime with supposedly authentic paranormal talents like that of Uri Geller. Not perturbed by the competition, Randi was affronted that people - even apparently intelligent scientists in supposedly rigorous experimental laboratories - took Geller and his ilk at their word and believed they produced their effects through "psychic energy." As an experienced stage magician, Randi was by nature and training much more inclined to believe that Geller and Co. were simply tricking people: they were, he felt, no more paranormal than he was, and he took offence at the superstitious and mystical interpretation of acts like Geller's spoon-bending trick. The following video demonstrates some of the evidence for a more prosaic interpretation: Geller is simply a skilled flim-flam artist with a penchant for cutlery.

Randi set out in the 1970s to investigate and challenge Geller and other purported psychic talents, a stance adopted by other self-confessed tricksters and illusionists like England's Derren Brown and the venerable Harry Houdini. He encountered serious difficulties - not because he was unable to replicate Geller's effects; he was, quite easily - but because people wanted to believe in psi. At one demonstration, Randi was angrily accused of being a fraud. He smilingly admitted this was so - everything he had accomplished had been done by sleight of hand, trickery, and misdirection. No, no, his interlocuter angrily replied: he was a fraud because he actually was using psychic powers, and only claiming to be a charlatan!

(Houdini got the same treatment from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of whose propensity towards belief in such matters we shall speak another time.)

Randi might have expected this sort of thing from the rubes who pay to be entertained by magic shows, but he was deeply dismayed to find similar levels of credulity - and dismal levels of scientific rigor - among those parapsychologists who attempted to 'test' the abilities of psychics like Geller. It was this dismay that led Randi to set up Project Alpha, which, in 1979, infiltrated two Randi stooges into a research project, conducted at Washington University and handsomely funded by the board chairman of McDonnell Douglas - himself a believer in the paranormal. Randi also wrote to the researchers warning them to be on the lookout for fakes, and suggesting methodological refinements that might catch such tricksters in the act. He even volunteered his services as an observer; these were declined. The researchers were employing a two-stage approach: in the informal stage, they wanted everything to be as cosy as possible for the putative psychics.

Randi's stooges, Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, sailed through the first stage despite resorting to grossly obvious manipulations of the tests - for example, they 'read' messages in sealed envelopes by simply unsealing and resealing them, and moved objects in 'sealed' containers by blowing through holes in the containers. In one test, they altered the dimensions of spoons by the simple method of swapping the labels attached to spoons of different sizes. Incredibly, these clumsy frauds went unnoticed by the researchers, who proved so obliging in their efforts to facilitate trickery that even Shaw and Edwards were surprised. Although Randi had instructed them to confess their deception if they were ever asked about it directly, they never were during a period of almost 2 years. During the second stage of the process, under more rigorous laboratory conditions, their psi abilities faded dramatically; still, the researchers were unwilling to conclude that they were deliberate frauds, speculating instead that such conditions might inhibit psychic abilities.

Meanwhile, Shaw and Edwards had become minor celebrities in their own right, dazzling other paranormal researchers with their abilities even as the Washington University team cooled on them. Eventually, after two years, Randi pulled the plug, revealing the whole deception in an article in Discover magazine. Many parapsychologists were outraged, much as the fawning courtiers of the Emperor with No Clothes were furious at the little boy who remarked upon the Imperial nakedness; some, however, thanked Randi for his service to their cause.

Does the success of charlatans like Randi, and the suspicions over successful entertainers like Geller, mean there are no genuine paranormal talents out there? The James Randi Educational Foundation promoted a One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to anybody who enjoys a measure of celebrity and the support of a reputable academic for their claimed paranormal abilities; to date, nobody has won the prize.

O is for ... Orpheus

Che faro senza Eurydice... (I have lost my Eurydice...)

Orpheus was, according to Pindar, the son of Oeagrus, King of Thrace, and the muse Calliope (of whom more otherwhen). Most sources agree he was a real historical personage. The myths around him ascribe to him an otherworldly facility with music and song, although other gifts are mentioned as well - healing, astrology, agriculture. Legend has it that he was taught by Apollo himself to play the lyre. Aboard the Argo, Orpheus outsang the sirens and saved Jason from the fate that would later threaten the Odyssey.

Most famously of all, Orpheus descended into the underworld to sing for the release of his beloved wife Eurydice - his song was so sweet it charmed even Hades himself, and the deal was struck that Eurydice could accompany him to the surface: on the one condition that he could not look back at her until she was once more upon the Earth. Naturally, he was extremely anxious, and every step of the way out of Hades' dark realm he was tempted to look back; but he was able to resist until he reached the entrance to the Underworld, and as he stepped out he turned - forgetting that his dear Eurydice was still a step inside the gates. Hades reclaimed her, and in his grief Orpheus foreswore all other women.

The surpassing beauty of his music nonetheless made him attractive to many, and they became jealous and vengeful as he continually spurned them. He was eventually torn apart by a gang of women - a fate which Plato, at least, considered fitting punishment for his "cowardice" in not choosing to follow Eurydice into death, rather than seek to bring her back with him to life. Perhaps this, and other unflattering views of Orpheus (Albrecht Durer called him Orfeus der erst puseran, Orfeus the first sodomite), was more of the same jealousy: the human soul is curiously ill-configured to suffer beauty it cannot either own or emulate.

Jealousy may also account for a later, historical figure whose name certainly seems to have been inspired by the Thracian minstrel - Orffyreus, born Johann Bessler in Saxony, Germany, in 1680. Unlike his near-namesake, Orffyreus was not noted for his voice; although, in his own way, he too defied the Gods.

Bessler's infamy stems from a rather remarkable announcement he made at the tender age of 22. Arriving in the town of Gera, he exhibited a "self-moving wheel" - the first of several machines he was to demonstrate before a largely hostile and unbelieving public that purported to be perpetual motion machines. The largest of these was 12m in diameter, and sufficiently impressed Gottfried Liebniz to remark that "there is something extraordinary about Orffyreus' machine."

A perpetual motion machine, of course, contradicts the laws of thermodynamics. It may be worth considering that Orffyreus wrought his wonders nearly two centuries before those laws were elucidated, and nobody, in his time or since, has been able to either replicate or refute his achievements. The laws of thermodynamics, so fundamental to modern science, are predicated on the impossibility of Orffyreus' perpetuum mobile. For those of you inclined to side with Helmholtz and company over an obscure Saxon inventor, I leave you this 1895 statement from Lord Kelvin:

"heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."

Postscript: One may wonder why Kelvin's assertion never became a scientific law, while Clausius' and Helmholtz' did. I offer this cynical perspective: there's not a lot of money in free energy, is there?

E is for ... Eight Circuit Theory

The late Dr. Timothy Leary, currently orbiting this Earth in accordance with his last wishes, was a hero of the counterculture and remains a controversial figure in academic circles. The Harvard professor of psychology is infamous for encouraging his students to partake of psychedelic drugs - including psilocybin and LSD - in order to facilitate their creativity. He was inspired on this unorthodox pedagogical approach by his own experiences using so-called "magic mushrooms," from which psilocybin is obtained; he later opined that he'd learned more about his own mind and the discipline of psychology on his first trip than in fifteen years as a psychological researcher.

At the time Leary was embracing and encouraging the counterculture - his Harvard Psilocybin Project was actively supported by the beat poet Allan Ginsberg, for example - the drugs he was peddling to his students were quite legal, although they were eyed with increasing suspicion by the authorities. Marijuana, an altogether inoffensive substance by comparison, was illegal, thanks to the Marihuana [sic] Tax Act of 1937. This legislation, which marked the opening salvo of the U.S. government's long and fruitless War on Drugs, was remarkable for several reasons. Firstly, as the name implied, the legislation actually concerns imposing a tax on vendors of cannabis sativa - principally doctors and pharmacists. The letter of the law criminalizes possession of the weed only on the basis that the taxes levied under the Act haven't been paid. These taxes were designed deliberately to be unaffordable to that class of persons commonly to be found using cannabis for recreational purposes, therefore virtually guaranteeing that anybody regularly using the drug did so in contravention of the law. This may seem a roundabout way of outlawing the drug - it was not illegal to own it, to cultivate it, to smoke it, or even to sell it, only to avoid the excise tax upon it - but it should be borne in mind that, at that time, there was considerable doubt over the constitutionality of a law that forbade citizens from partaking in a form of commerce. In those innocent times before the New Deal, the Supreme Court placed considerable weight on the Tenth Amendment deference to state legislatures, and regularly thwarted federal efforts to regulate all manner of industries. Alcohol had been prohibited by the Eighteenth Amendment, but the fact that a constitutional amendment had been required to accomplish this indicates that the path to outlawing drug use was not clear - not least because prohibition had subsequently been repealed by the same mechanism.

The regulation of a trumped-up tax provided a constitutional mechanism, but it was still necessary to sway popular opinion. To that end, Congressional hearings leading up to the Act relied heavily on sensational anecdotes from people who claimed the evil weed had driven them to acts of depraved enormity. An appropriately sensational term - "reefer madness" - found its way into tabloid headlines and thence into common parlance, even becoming the title of an unintentionally-hilarious 1936 movie (which you can actually go and watch here). Dr. William Woodward, counsel for the American Medical Association, rejected the claims of drastic personality alteration resulting from cannabis use, concluding the drug was essentially harmless and questioning the approach adopted by the committee in gathering evidence. The committee not only disregarded his objections, having very compelling - if hardly altruistic - reasons for doing so; it later reported to the house that the AMA was in full support of the bill, a blatant lie that went unchallenged. "Reefer madness" had no scientific basis whatsoever, but the Congressional imprimatur saw it cited in the defense of murderers and other violent criminals - sometimes successfully.

Leary's own "madness" in dosing his students with psychoactive drugs whose effects were still poorly understood hastened the hardening of the official line against all recreational drugs - the government did, in fairness, have a much better case to make regarding the dangers of LSD and psilocybin, and they'd done the top-secret research with Project MK-ULTRA to prove it, although that, alas, is a story for another time - but there was some method to it. That method, belatedly, harks back to the title of this post: Eight Circuit Theory.

Eight Circuit Theory is a classic piece of pseudoscience, cobbling together a lot of mystical ideas with a lot of valid observations into an overarching theory that is beguilingly untestable, and so unscientific. Despite this drawback, it has a certain appeal, which is why I'm choosing to talk about it here today. Essentially, Leary's model of cognition likens the brain to a radio - a tuned circuit, or more accurately, eight separate tuned circuits, each of which receives (and broadcasts) specific kinds of information. The eight circuits are hierarchically arranged, from the instinctive processing of the bio-survival circuit to the transcendental comprehension of the non-local circuit. Much of the theoretical scaffolding of Leary's model seems preposterous; but his assertion that, for most of us, the higher circuits are customarily closed seems reasonable enough within the terms of the model. The real controversy lies in his related belief that drugs such as LSD and psilocybin could "turn on" the circuits, and allow the user to "tune in" to information that otherwise passed them by: hence the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out." What were the participants in Leary's Psilocybin Project "dropping out" of? Robert Anton Wilson, currently percolating in the Pacific off the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in accordance with his last wishes, had theories of his own about that; but they can wait.

C is for ... Coelacanth

Ugly little spud, as Ray Stanz might say; but the Coelacanth - the name is derived from the Greek koilos, hollow, and akantha, spine - is also something of a remarkable creature. Back in 1937, it was known to palaeontologists as a "missing link" between fishes and tetrapods: in other words, between aquatic and terrestrial life. It was also "known" back then to have died out, along with lots of other beasties, back in the Cretaceous Period - approximately 65 million years ago.

So it was a bit of a shock when, two days before Christmas a year later, one Marjorie Courtenay Latimer, of East London, South Africa, discovered in the trawl of her fisherman acquaintance Captain Hendrick Goosen a living breathing example of the genus. A museum curator, Latimer had an arrangement with Capt. Goosen that she could regularly inspect his catch and keep any items of interest - and it is probably fair to say no more interesting item ever turned up in his nets than the coelacanth. There wasn't even a Linnaean name for the coelacanth at the time, there being little call for one, so it became Latimeria chalumnae in honor of the curator who identified it. The fellow who only went and caught it earned no honor, since all he had in his nets was an ugly darn fish that stank: framing makes a big difference. In 1999, a second Latimeria species was discovered, in Indonesia. Both known coelacanth species are deepwater fish; the fossil record shows an abundance of coelacanths that dwelled in shallower waters, although by their nature fossils of deepwater taxa are hard to come across.

Often referred to as a "living fossil," the modern coelacanth is actually discernibly different from its fossil forebears, but still has enough taxonomic oddities that it grossly bears more resemblance to a Cretaceous fish than a modern one. It may yet face a long-delayed extinction, as deep-water trawling threatens its habitat; what might misleadingly be termed the anti-humanist faction among environmentalists may have a legitimate case in decrying the casual eradication of a species that has existed perhaps 20,000 times as long as we have. Of course, it's hard to be sure - relatively few animals become fossilized upon death, so the fossil record is an uncertain guide. Coelacanths are by no means the only "Lazarus taxon" - the reference is to John 11:1-46, notable for containing the shortest verse in the whole bible ("Jesus wept"); another biblical Lazarus is a subject for blogs otherwhen - and this is to be expected. Darwin's anticipation of a "missing link" between Man and Ape was, to put it mildly, optimistic given the patchiness of the fossil record overall; discoveries like Latimer's in 1938 reveal just how imperfect our knowledge is.

One consequence of the coelacanth's discovery was an energizing of a vociferous minority among biologists: the oft-ridiculed fraternity of cryptozoologists, whose focus is on species that don't officially exist. Although a select few of these feel their pulses quicken upon the triumphant verification of the existence of Laotian Rock Rats or Mountain Pygmy Possums, the greater number pursue more tabloid-friendly quarries: Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman. Derided as pseudoscience, cryptozoology persists as a discipline because of a wealth of anecdotal evidence, a tissue-thin amalgam of ambiguous prints, spoors, and other traces... and finds like the Coelacanth. After all, if it could vanish for 65 million years, is it so hard to believe a Neanderthal clan might dwell in the Rockies and go unnoticed for a mere thirty millennia?

More on cryptids another time...