A new theory which is not mine

September 2, 2022 • 12:00 pm

I found this directed to me on the Internet (original spelling preserved). It’s a new theory of how religion evolved.

I read your article on the war between religion and science as im trying to find an avenue to put my theory of the evolutionary basis of religion. It involves harmonic vibrations of the skull occuring as we speak (felt best on the top of your head). The vestibular system is located excellently to pick up the vibrations and cause a feedback loop with the parietal vestibular insular cortex located around the audiocortex and the muscular and sensory sections of the mouth to improve speech. I find the journal process to be too slow and haphazard as i have sincerely no patience with it. There are too many journals! if you know of an appropriate journal or any other location that might be interested i would be happy to send you a copy of the manuscript.
I know of no journals that would be interested, but perhaps readers do. This is one of those things that’s best characterized as “I can’t even. . . “

34 thoughts on “A new theory which is not mine”

  4. Isn’t one of PCC(E)’s special talents the ability to use his head as a percussive instrument by knocking on the top of the head?

    1. I don’t know, but I am trying repeatedly bashing my forehead on the desk. It’s a pleasant bass rhythm and the pain is making me forget about all the stoopid.

  5. I’m trying just to imagine what the thought process could even be, between harmonic resonance in the skull and the actual evolution of religion…if it wouldn’t encourage the poor schmuck, I’d almost want to see their “reasoning”. I’ve written my share of “fantastical” fiction, but I can’t really quite get my head around any perceived connection here.

  6. No one (well, not quite as there are plenty of pay to publish journals, which have a lower threshold of acceptance) would publish without a/ an academic affiliation, b/ reputable research at an institution.

    This looks like a theoretical evolutionary psychology article, not based on any evidence or experimentation. I am trying to recall the ones from when I was at the UCL Ear Institute Library.

    Maybe https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679280

    This person should write a proper but brief abstract. Impatience with standard publication of articles is understandable as it often takes over a year from acceptance. But honestly, someone who cannot even capitalize ‘I’ would hardly fill me with confidence.

    Self-publishing either online or in a self-published book will not get you noticed, but would get the idea ‘out there’.

    1. “No one (well, not quite as there are plenty of pay to publish journals, which have a lower threshold of acceptance) would publish without a/ an academic affiliation, b/ reputable research at an institution.”

      Dom, thankfully that is not true, and if it were, it would go against every principle of science. I know of no journal that requires its authors to have particular degrees or belong to a particular kind of institution. It would be terrible if science worked that way.

      I’m pleased to report, from my own experience, that science usually works as it should, accepting or rejecting articles entirely on their merits. I have no PhD and no academic job or affiliation, and many of my early articles gave no affiliation of any kind, just a silly-looking street address on a mountain in the back-country of Ecuador, with a @yahoo email address. These got into highly selective journals like Ecology and Molecular Ecology. My articles in those journals were extremely controversial and critical of nearly all the leading authorities in those fields. If ever some articles were to have been rejected for lack of credentials, it would have been those. But they were published. They were judged on their merits, as they should be. And they continue to be judged that way by readers. They’ve been cited thousands of times, in spite of a complete lack of credentials.

      Now, this guy’s resonance theory is truly weird, and probably incoherent. It is being judged on its merits, not because the author doesn’t have a PhD or institutional affiliation.

      1. Lou, your work on diversity measurement is super impressive and influential… even ‘transformative’ (to use an NSF-ese term). Thank you for sticking up for the integrity of the beleaguered scientific publication process in your comment!

        1. Susan, thanks so much for the kind words! I have repeatedly been very impressed with the open-mindedness of scientists throughout my scientific journey. On multiple occasions, authors whose work I criticized changed their minds completely and published corrections of their own work, and/or joined me as co-authors criticizing their past methods. The intellectual integrity of these scientists was inspiring. And in my experience this is the norm, at least in the more rigorous sciences.

      2. That is good to hear, from the horse’s mouth! About judging on merit. Maybe I should try… if I had anything to contribute! 😉

        There are however dubious journals & ones that do little or no checking of articles -there have been notable cases of nonsense bring published. Perhaps that is non-science journals?

        1. Oh yes, there are many bad journals and much publication of nonsense (more than most scientists realize). Generally people know which journals give tough peer reviews, and give them more credence. Even so, I wouldn’t dismiss an article out of hand based on the journal which published it (though I also would not waste my time searching for pearls in the bad or predatory journals). Nor would I believe an article just because it was published in a good journal. Nature and Science have made big mistakes in the past. The reader is the final gatekeeper, and there is no escape from needing to use our own brains to make the final judgement.

          1. An addendum if you come back to this – just been reading about the Bergeret-Medina & Macchiarelli v Brunet row over the Toumai fossil, in the Observer, the two former having been unable to publish their view that the fossil was not bipedal, for 10 years! These were proper academics, at the University of Poitiers. So maybe palaeontology is not as open as your field?! 😟

            I suppose we need proper evidence of how hard or easy it is to publish rather than relying on a few anecdotes of thee & me- I will have a look to see if something has been published on that! 😉

          2. Yes, you are right, we do need real data rather than anecdotes. However, my experience isn’t just one data point; it comes from at least ten different articles in different journals (plus dozens of articles written with other coauthors). Never been asked about credentials or qualifications.

            I do think that less rigorous sciences are probably more subject to problems of abuse of authority, and this might include paleontology.

            “….how hard or easy it is to publish…” Please note that I am not saying it is easy to publish in my fields. It is very hard to publish in Ecology or similar journals. I’m just saying that credentials don’t play a role. And I think that is essential for the health of science.

  7. The specific “theory” is obviously nutty, but on the topic of what journals might publish research on the evolutionary basis of religion one could start with examples from Pascal Boyer’s site. I’ve found his work interesting over the years (if I can correctly paste a link here)
    http://www.pascalboyer.net/articles.html

  9. The problem with this idea (putting aside how unlikely it seems a priori, among other things) is that the writer doesn’t tell us how any of the the gears mesh. That is, how does one thing cause the other to cause the next, ultimately to cause human beings to develop religion? He needs to write a brief description that fills in the details so that someone might be able to evaluate the claim. The guy seems sincere, but he doesn’t understand that science involves more than putting a claim out there and seeing what happens.

    I hold my tongue when an acquaintance occasionally puts forward an off the wall claim like this. The claim is always wrong, but I don’t want to be cruel. At least he asked you, a scientist, what you think. He respects science, even though he doesn’t understand how it works.

  10. I’m convinced – I might have to set up a journal just so that I can read the manuscript…!

  11. “Religion” came first. Auditory hallucinations in the right brain, normally in the attitude of commands. “Thou shalt,” and “Thou shalt not.” The shaman exploited this, constructing that only his hallucinations were in fact the voice of an omniscient and wrathful God, so obey me, and by the way pay my rent. Thus, organized religion.

    It was only with the breakdown of the bicameral mind, if there is validity in the theory of Julian Jaynes, that the left brain got the guts to over-ride the right and say “those are only metaphors.” Thus, science.

    To silence the confusion around the word “consciousness,” I favor renaming Jaynes’ theory as follows: “The Dawn of Objectivity with the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.”

    1. For those interested in the ideas on which Jayne’s thesis is based (i.e. the interaction and competition between right and left brain hemispheres) there’s a great book called ‘The Master and his Emissary’.

      The book is an incredible survey of the human mind and the intellectual landscape we inhabit. It covers art, politics, literature, psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience and more, and brings it all together into one theme: the battle between hemispheres in our brains.

      The author is Ian Mcgaskill, who is somewhat of a polymath; he first studied then taught literature at Oxford (I think), before studying medicine and becoming a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. He’s the type of person who us mere mortals look at and think: no matter how long or hard I tried, I could never do what he does.

      It’s well worth checking out.

      1. Read some. Good.

        Was on a Sam Harris p*dcast.

        ^^^^following the Judaism (Judaist?) spelling convention… not sure it’s accurate…

      2. Yes indeed. One of my favorite books. I return to it often. It can be quite a slog, but always well worth the effort.

      3. What do any of you think of the concept “objectivity is a better word than consciousness. Many people and animals can easily be deemed conscious, yet frown at the notion of objective reality.

  13. I maybe misremembering, but I think I read somewhere that Isaac Asimov used to receive this kind of mail quite often; when that happened, he answered something like this: “Thank you for your message. I find your theory very interesting, but I’m afraid I am currently very busy, and I am not able to study it further. I know somebody working in your field, however, that would be enormously pleased to hear from you and your theory”. And then he gave his correspondent the address of another crackpot that had sent him another brilliant theory about the same subject before.

  14. I have suggestions.
    1. Submit to one of the post-modernistic journals in the Humanities. But the writer will need to pad it out with the essential terminology like “hermeneutics”, “intersectionality”, and “dialectic”. I’m absolutely serious.
    2. Submit to one of the predatory journals that will literally publish anything. Here I am not entirely serious. Although this too would work.

  16. It seems to me that if you claim a link between bodily sensations and ‘religion’ you first have to explain the link between bodily sensations and animism. That seems like a more fruitful hypothesis, but the testing is going to be quite challenging. Formal religion arising from less organised animism is then just a step along the road of social development.

  18. I find the journal process to be too slow and haphazard as i have sincerely no patience with it.

    And there, I think, is the crux of the author’s problem. He’s got an idea – of sorts – connecting somehow the hearing system (and/ or balance system) with the origin, somehow, of either auditory hallucinations (which is a quite approachable question) or at a further stretch, auditory hallucinations with the origin of “religion”. And no hint of the (very plausible) interactions between flat-out “in your head” auditory hallucinations and the human tendency to anthropomorphise things, leading to “voices in the head” becoming “the Voice of God”. Hence, religion.
    I don’t know how many of the regulars here have known friends who experience flat-out schizophrenia as “the Voice of God” – with a frequency and intensity strongly related to whether or not they’ve been taking their medications in the last couple of days. It’s certainly not an extraordinary situation, and no hint of “resonances” in the vestibular system.
    Your correspondent needs to spend more time refining his hypothesis (preferably into a statistically testable pair of null and alternative hypotheses), and separate out the several interlinked factors that look to be present. But, that “spend more time” thing seems to be the problem.
    He possibly thinks that (for an example) Einstein had a particularly fruitful weekend of writing papers in early 1905, then published them in that year. Despite the years of previous work – some published in journals, some recorded in letters to friends) – in the field of electrodynamics that led to his formulation of Special Relativity. Then, of course, Einstein twiddled his thumbs for the next decade before coming out with the General theory. It wasn’t a quick process for him, and the odds are pretty good that he was a more structured thinker then your correspondent. Which would explain why he produced 4 papers in 4 distinct fields in his annus mirabilis, rather than one paper with all four concepts jumbled together into it.

  20. Perhaps Social Text will accept the manuscript. It’s been a long time since Alan Sokal submitted his magnificent one.

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