So either the Dogon had pre-cognition of Sirius-B via some mysterious, and still undiscovered way of knowing, unique to them in the world, or another European visitor (anthropologist or otherwise) came across the Dogon before the French ones did, saw that the star Sirius was in their culture, and shared with them the highly publicized recent discovery of Sirius-B, yet did not write about this encounter. The Dogon immediately adopt into their culture this extra information about their favorite cosmic object, and the French anthropologists come upon them later, startled by the Dogon’s detailed knowledge.
Furthermore, if you read other elements of Dogon culture and stories of nature, none of them have the precision of information that Sirius-B enjoys within their culture. Their stories are romantic and poetic and ring just the way creation myths do from most cultures.
While we do not know for sure whether the Dogon were visited by informed Europeans before the French anthropologists got there, the evidence strongly suggests this. Any other supposition is carrying Afrocentrism further than the data warrant.
Thanks for your inquiry.
Best to you,
Neil
Bigfoot
In January 2008, Alex sought my view on whether a large hairy ape could actually be roaming the Pacific Northwest.
Dear Alex,
At a time before the world was fully mapped, European explorers told great tales of new plants and animals, especially in their journeys through Africa and Asia. They collected what they could and brought it back for research and display in museums. New large animals were being identified frequently. This was the beginning of Natural History as an academic discipline.‡‡
After all landmasses of the world were mapped and settled, the discovery rate of new, exotic creatures dropped precipitously. This offers a strong indication that all large (land) animals are known and documented. The new land species that are discovered annually today tend to be small animals or mild variations (e.g. sub-species) among well-documented ones.
Occasionally large sea creatures are found, but this is understandable since we do not live in the sea, and do not persistently monitor the sea floor for life.
So the likelihood that a large (land) animal has gone unnoticed in modern times is near zero.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Alex replied with great skepticism of my closed-minded views, while reminding me that the Pacific Northwest contains three million acres of unmonitored forest. He further noted that one cannot discount every sighting of a large hairy ape as nonsense. And as such, there must be something to it all.
Dear Alex,
I commented on the rate of discovery and documentation of large animals. Sightings without tangible evidence (such as a dead body for the lab, or hair, for example) do not constitute discovery. Eyewitness testimony is well known among psychologists and scientists to be the least reliable form of evidence of them all. Hence, it is strongly discounted, as the researcher patiently awaits the presentation of tangible evidence in support of the extraordinary claim.
Note that every sighting may be real. But without a body, or other firm evidence that does not pivot on human perception, the claims are useless to the research scientist.
FYI: “useless” is not the same word as “false.”
Until somebody produces biological tissue (even big-foot poop would be a start) from which DNA can be extracted, there is not much a biologist can do with the claims.
If you feel confident that there are eight-foot, undocumented, prehistoric apes running around the Pacific Northwest, you should mount expeditions to find them—you don’t have to kill it; just capture one.
Your efforts will be better spent in search of useful evidence than in trying to convince people of what you think is true in the absence of it.
Neil
Sixth Sense
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Dear Doctor Tyson,
I’m reading your book Death By Black Hole.§§ First let me say that your writing style is just like your speaking style—clear, understandable and pleasant. I just miss the laughing I hear when you are interviewed live. Second, I must comment on what you said about the sixth sense.
The headline we never see is:
PSYCHIC WINS LOTTERY AGAIN.
I witnessed my grandmother, who had “the gift” and used it just like her other senses. She knew when people were coming to visit, so she changed all the beds and bought more groceries. She knew whether or not my father was going to be home for dinner or not and set the table accordingly. She would wake up when the cow was calving and bake pies when visitors were coming. All of this was a sense to her—not a “Psychic Hotline” kind of thing, but an extra perception that she took in stride just like her other five senses. She was from Ireland and her grandmother was the same way. It was how they lived.
My father could always tell when women were pregnant, often even before they knew themselves (and no, it wasn’t because he made them that way). Perhaps that had to do with micro-changes or pheromones, but he did it all the time.
Anyways, I’m sure you have heard lots of these kinds of stories. From my own observations, the only kind of sixth sense I believe in is a rather primitive kind of feeling that helps us get along.
Thanks for all the work.
Kathleen Fairweather
Hello Kathleen,
Thank you for your testimonial. I will not stand in denial of your account of your parents’ powers of perception.
But in every case where these powers are studied in the lab, the powers fail—or more precisely stated, the people who claim to have such powers do no better than chance in experiments designed to test them. Decades of articles in the magazine The Skeptical Inquirer¶¶ have documented this.
So either the power goes away under controlled circumstances or the people are remembering the hits and not the misses—one of the most common perception failures of the human mind. A well-studied phenomenon by psychologists, it covers, for example, people who have premonitions about a friend’s health. You call, only to discover that your friend is in the hospital, or not feeling well.
When these events do happen, they become powerful memories that supplant one’s recollections of failures. Like I said, there is an entire literature on this, which I cannot review here. But the experimental method, telling us more about ourselves than we can determine on our own, is what enabled society to move from the days of superstition and witch burnings (where women were believed to have ungodly powers) into the era of empirical inquiry, birthing the industrial revolution and modern life.
All the best in your pursuits of mind,
body, and spirit,
Neil deGrasse Tyson
* Michel de Nostradamus (1503–1566), French physician widely believed to have the power of prophesy. Author of Les Prophéties (1555), containing 942 poetic passages that make predictions. John Hogue, ed. 1997, Nostradamus: The Complete Prophesies (London: Element Books, 1997).
† Linda Goodman, Sun Signs (New York: Bantam Books, 1985).
‡ James McGaha (USAF Retired) is an acquaintance and fellow skeptic, with a long history of debunking claims that UFOs are visiting aliens. Here, I rein in his skepticism . . . just a bit.
§ The US military budget for 2004 was $400 billion. Since then, the budget has increased to $600 billion, by far the largest in the world. Three times that of the next country (China) and more than the next ten countries combined.
¶ Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer and mathematician (1571–1630).
# Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), English scientist, philosopher, and statesman.
** M. Griaule and G. Dieterlen, The Pale Fox (Baltimore, MD: Afrikan World Books, 1986).
†† Ivan Van Sertima, Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Transaction Books [now Routledge], 1991).
‡‡ Of course natural history as a topic of interest goes way back. The Roman author and naval commander Pliny the Elder wrote a book titled Natural History
(ca. AD 79) that compiled all ancient knowledge of the natural world into one volume. And Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) himself was also an acute observer of nature.
§§ Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).
¶¶ The Skeptical Inquirer, a bimonthly magazine published by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (Amherst, NY).
Chapter 3
Musings
Random things people think are actually a category unto themselves.
Complexity
Friday, March 8, 2019
Hello Guru:
I recently saw a daddy-long-legs, which reminded me that he and I have a common ancestor way way back.
Our huge subsequent divergence was triggered by many, many trillions of random DNA mutations and helix expansions, of which some 3 billion nucleotides survive in every one of my trillions of cells. And those 3 billion must be in the single correct sequence to make me, develop me, run all my physiologies, and even dictate my instinct.
How could a mere 3 gigabytes do all that. It takes far more just to run my iPhone.
Those 3 gigs don’t seem to be enough to just dictate how my brain’s 100 billion neurons and their trillions of synapses behave.
My religious friends have an easy answer which I don’t accept.
Best wishes,
Josh S. Weston
Josh,
Simple sets of “rules” can lead to extraordinary complexity.
For example, people in a capitalist society generally value money. Add to this a few simple economic tenets, such as “buy something and sell it for more,” coupled with a basic understanding of “supply & demand” and lo and behold, you have a corner grocery store that offers ten varieties of milk, obtained from farms hundreds of miles away, delivered to you in a supply chain via refrigerated trucks, and available to you 24/7.
You can say that the creator of the universe has your health as a priority, and established this highly complex system at every step, just to make sure you drink fresh milk daily. Or you can say that greed drives it all.
But wait, there’s more . . .
How about the fact that the entire universe is composed of just 92 elements?
Or that there are only four fundamental forces of nature? (strong, weak, electromagnetic, gravity)
Or that there are only four classes of fundamental particles? (quarks, electrons, neutrinos, and photons)
Or that nearly all behavior of electromagnetic waves (light) can be derived from a set of four equations that all fit on a Post-it® note?
So you can be awed by the complexities manifest the world, or you can instead be astonished at how simple it all is.
Neil
Spirals
Paulette B. Cooper described herself as math challenged. In spite of this, she could not help but notice the ubiquity of spiral shapes in the universe, from galaxies to hurricanes to the spiral-generating Fibonacci sequence.* She wrote in March 2006 to see if they were all connected in some cosmic way.
Hello Paulette,
One of the great challenges of cosmic discovery, and discovery in general, is knowing the difference between when things look the same and when they are the same.
Spiral galaxies and hurricanes have nothing whatever to do with each other, in spite of their similar appearances. Additionally, you can have a two-armed spiral galaxy, but a two-armed hurricane has never been observed.
More importantly, the forces that are at work in the two regimes are entirely independent. Those that make hurricanes involve pressure differences in the atmosphere, the heating of oceanic waters, and the Coriolis force which pushes clouds sideways, making the circular patterns you see. In a galaxy, the relevant forces are entirely gravitational, and the spiral pattern is traced by newborn stars.
Consider other things that look alike. When Sir William Herschel, in the 1800s, first saw dots of light that moved slowly across the sky, he knew they could not be stars, but they looked like stars through his telescope, so he called them “star-like,” which in Latin becomes “aster-oid” or just asteroids. Their similar appearance through a telescope eyepiece was irrelevant to what they actually are. Stars are billions of times larger than asteroids and operate under different forces of nature.
Another attempt to say things were the same (but were not) occurred with the early ideas of what atoms might be—imagined as mini solar systems, with the nucleus as the Sun and the electrons in “orbit” around it. Early textbooks show pictures of this concept. But the laws that describe the atom have nothing whatever to do with the laws that describe planetary orbits. Not only that, the analogy left a misleading imprint on the vocabulary of atomic physics. For example, we describe electrons as occupying “orbitals,” even though their paths are best described by “clouds.”
So yes, appearances can be deceiving, and it’s always best instead to ask, “What is the thing?” rather than “What does the thing look like?”
Sincerely,
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Roots
In February 2014, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., a professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, invited me to participate in his PBS series Finding Your Roots, in which he explores the genetic heritage of notable Americans. The goal of the series is “to marry top-notch genealogy with cutting edge genetic science to reimagine the meaning of race.” The impressive list of celebrities who had already participated included Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, Mike Nichols, Samuel L. Jackson, Barbara Walters, and Chris Rock. I declined the invitation.
I happen to know Professor Gates personally, via not-for-profit boards on which we have served, and so I was candid in my reply.
Hi Skip,
Thanks for this invitation to participate in your immensely successful series. It’s so widely embraced and talked about.
For me, however, I have an unorthodox philosophy regarding root-finding. I just don’t care. And that’s not a passive absence of caring it’s an active absence of caring. Since any two people in the world have a common ancestor—depending on how far back you look, the line we draw to establish family lineage is entirely arbitrary.
When I wonder what I am capable of as a human being, I don’t look to “relatives,” I look to all human beings. That is the genetic relationship that matters to me. The genius of Isaac Newton, the courage of Joan of Arc and Gandhi, the athletic feats of Michael Jordan, the oratorical skills of Sir Winston Churchill, the compassion of Mother Teresa. I look to the entire human race for inspiration for what I can be—because I am human. I don’t care if I am a descendent of kings or paupers, saints or sinners, the brave or cowardly. My life is what I make of it.
So I respectfully decline your invitation, but I do so knowing that ever since Alex Haley, most people find this pastime to be immensely enlightening. And I will not deny them this insight and revelation to their past. So I mostly keep these sentiments to myself.
Continued success with the series.
Best, always,
Neil
BC / AD
In April 2009, Lionel, an ardent atheist,† expressed his frustration and disapproval at being forced to reckon calendar time on religious foundations, specifically Christian traditions. He wanted science to come up with a more sensible system of time given what we know today about the age and origin of Earth and of the universe.
Dear Lionel,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this matter, and for inquiring about mine. Several points to consider:
1.Most time reckoning for the distant past of Earth and the universe does not reference a particular calendar at all. It simply counts years before the present. For example, nobody says Earth was formed in 4.6 billion years BC. We simply say it formed 4.6 billion years ago. Same holds true for geological and biological time-keeping.
2.The origin of Earth spanned at least a hundred million years. So a precise date and time to start a cosmic calendar would be meaningless—like
attempting to celebrate the nanosecond (billionth of a second) that you were born. The time it took you to exit the birth canal vastly exceeded this measure of things. So we sensibly record births only to the nearest minute.
3.For times and dates within recorded history, the Christian Gregorian calendar is the international standard, in which BC, written following the year, stands for Before Christ, and AD, written preceding the year, stands for Anno Domini, Latin for the “Year of our Lord.” Other calendars exist—Jewish, Muslim, Chinese, etc., in which they each link the zero-point of their calendar to some event in the respective religion or culture. But those calendars today are more ceremonial than practical.
4.The Gregorian calendar is, quite simply, the most accurate and stable calendar ever devised. The Jesuit priests, appointed by Pope Gregory back in the 16th century, did a bang-up job in their calculations. They corrected the failing Julian calendar, in which the spring equinox had back-drifted over the centuries from the familiar date of March 21, to March 10. The correspondence of the spring equinox with March 21 is forever secured, never drifting more than a single leap day in one direction or another. Meanwhile, other systems, especially lunar calendars, intermittently need to introduce entire months to reconcile the timekeeping with Earth’s location in orbit around the Sun.
When you do something right, and you do it better than anybody else before you, you get to name it. Any atheists of the day were not into calendars. Of course, they’ve never really been into calendars. So atheists are out of this loop, except for the introduction of BCE and CE—Before Common Era (replacing BC) and Common Era (replacing AD).
Letters from an Astrophysicist Page 4