May Subscriber Post

Links, updates, Bonferroni corrections

The Mother of All Living, by Andrew using MidJourney

Multiple comparisons

Commenting on Archeologists vs. Ancient Aliens,

Láthspell

writes:

“Given the number of places that used bullroarers with similar cultural trappings, I'd put “this correlation is not just coincidence” at easily 60% - at which point the question is “if the shared causal factor is not diffusion, what is it?” Do humans just have a women-shall-not-hear-the-bullroarer gene?

Honestly, if I'm calculating this in isolation I'd put not-coincidence somewhere over 90% - the uncertainty for me is over whether we're looking at enough features of societies that a statistical fluke should be expected and ignored (i.e. green jellybeans a la xkcd.com/882).”

This is a good point about multiple comparisons. Given there are thousands of things we could compare, even if bullroarers are 1/1000, maybe it really is just a coincidence. For what it’s worth, I didn’t compare thousands of things. My tech ethos of “move fast and hit send on 1/2 baked theories” has the advantage of leaving a trail. Back in 2022, I wrote:

“Judging from cultural artifacts—myths, megaliths and the analog “I”—our genesis was not so long ago, perhaps as recent as the end of the Ice Age. Women first tasted self-knowledge. Seeing it was desirable, they initiated men with mind-rending rites of passage. Man henceforth lived separated from nature and from god. This consciousness meme, like wildfire, spread to the whole of humanity; a Great Awakening recorded in creation myths worldwide.” ~Eve Theory of Consciousness v1.0

Before ever hearing of a bullroarer, I was looking for male initiation rites invented by women. It could be that I am a tragic figure whose misfortune is to predict something that happens to align with an extraordinary, global coincidence. Like predicting the world would end in September of 2001. It didn’t, of course, but the soothsayer would have felt vindicated. At any rate, the multiple comparisons problem does not apply to me and the bullroarer.

Recap of user polls

The votes are in on last week’s post, which reviewed all the polls thus far on the blog and asked several new ones, including:

Seems to me that no idea would be more subject to diffusion than “I am,” given that it is such a competitive advantage. Likely, the diffusion that we can detect is the more recent spread of a more developed complex: “I am a moral agent who will one day die.” Besides Julian Jaynes, has anyone advanced this idea? He didn’t do some obvious things like check for the spread of pronouns or realize the relationship between self-awareness and symbolic thought, recursive language, etc. Happy I’ve found my niche.

Links

The debate over why the hallucinogen Datura is used in traditional ceremonies in India and Mexico is crack for any budding diffusionist.

X thread on Witzel’s Origins of Mythology, a book that argues the world’s creation myths share a common root. (EToC shows up in the comments.)

You love to see it:

Even among readers, snake venom as an entheogen is not that popular. However, it clearly can be used to get high and has been used in religious settings. Whether it was used by Ancient Greeks or Ice Age Shamans is speculative, but in a fruitful way because it’s a prediction that can be tested. Are there bones of venomous snakes in these sanctuaries? Traces of venom?

This short video makes the case that the fox was domesticated at Gobekli Tepe:

TIL Stephen Gould claimed that skull measurements were a function of researchers' unconscious bias. He did this by introducing conscious bias into his measurements. As the slicker salesman, his fraud stood for decades.

The always great Grey Goose Chronicles covering Egypt’s cocaine mummies:

The Mystery of the Cocaine Mummies

Hat tip to

Stetson

, who is an excellent follow. In a note, he shares this visual summary of different theories of consciousness:

In the note, he laments the platform doesn’t currently support polls. Luckily, we can do that here:

I have received some pushback against the name Eve Theory of Consciousness. It aims to explain the history of human-like subjectivity, not what subjectivity is in a metaphysical sense. (Though the former informs the latter.) Conscious here is used as aware, as it has been for millennia. Similar to the Lexical Hypothesis in personality research, I think it makes sense to defer to natural language when trying to characterize human nature.

Future work

I’m most motivated to learn more about prehistory and consciousness. So expect to see some reviews of books (Shadows of the Mind), a follow-up of Archeologists vs. Aliens (Archeologists vs THE BIBLE), some shorter pieces on snake mythology from around the world, and much more than you wanted to know about bullroarers. My philosophy is to only send an email to 1,000 people if I have something unique to say, hence aiming for quality rather than quantity. Sorry if I miss the mark!