Reblogged castadnova
Reblogged fadingroots
The speed w which I was ready to start arguing w the Jack the Ripper news. Rolling up my gd sleeves rn
And yet ppl everywhere are going to read those headlines and take them as fact. Kill me
When I’m in a contest for most analytically illiterate amateur conspiracy theorist masquerading as a historian and my opponent is Ripperologists
please please please write the longest post explaining why we can’t know who jack the ripper is and the latest claims
This gonna be kind of quick and dirty but the gist of it is basically that a (deteriorated) shawl that allegedly belonged to one of the victims (Catherine Eddowes) was tested for mitochondrial DNA, and based on those results there’s a historian named Russell Edwards claiming that it’s definitive proof that a man named Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper.
There are a lot of problems with this.
- One, this shawl has never been 100% authenticated and its provenance can’t be traced back to the murder scene with zero doubts, so there’s an argument to be made that it never really belonged to Catherine Eddowes/wasn’t at the scene of her murder anyway.
- Even if it is really her shawl, and was found at her murder scene, it’s been passed down through several generations and spent a long time in storage. It’s badly degraded. And it’s likely that several people have come into close contact with it in the last 130 years, which means lots of potential sources of contaminant DNA.
- DNA degrades over time, and given that the garment itself is in pretty bad shape, it’s harder to take the test results at face value.
- The testing done was for mitochondrial DNA. Experts have already commented that mitochondrial DNA cannot/should not be used to determine a positive connection in a case like this; ideally, under these circumstances, and in the context of forensics, it’s more useful for ruling out potential non-matches instead.
- Even if it were somehow possible to fully authenticate the DNA results, they would not, in and of themselves, be evidence of murder. Even if they could be determined without any doubt to belong to Aaron Kosminski, it doesn’t prove he killed Catherine Eddowes; it only proves he had contact with her and her shawl, at some point.
- The genetic material in question is alleged to come from a semen stain. Given that a lot of the suspects interviewed by police at the time had a habit of patronizing local sex workers, it’s not unthinkable that there could be DNA on her shawl from someone who was just a normal paying customer in one of those encounters.
- “Aaron Kosminski” is literally a made up suspect. I’m not joking. There were several, several men police actually interviewed and interrogated during that time, but the only reference to a “Kosminski” is literally just the last name “Kosminski” appearing on a 1894 memorandum written by Sir Melville Macnaghten, the Assistant Chief Constable of the London Metropolitan Police, in a list of possible suspects. This was a. several years after the murders stopped and b. is literally just a Polish last name with no other identifying information.
- A Ripperologist produced the identity of Aaron Kosminski entirely on their own, by tracking down someone who just happened to be named “Kosminski” on asylum admittance records from 1889. This Aaron Kosminski was a Polish Jew from Whitechapel; obviously, a place a lot of Polish Jews lived in London. He was recorded as suffering from psychosis w paranoia, and was likely schizophrenic. There are no records of him ever being violent.
- At the time of the murders and during the initial investigation, antisemitism and xenophobia became absolutely out of control in connection to the case. The extent of this cannot be understated. Jews and other racial and ethnic minorities were harassed in the streets, riots broke out, ridiculous and cartoonish conspiracy theories abounded. At one point during all of this, the newspaper The East London Observer reported a belief that “no Englishman could have perpetrated such a horrible crime, and that it must have been done by a Jew.”
- I mean that’s blood libel. We’ve arrived at blood libel.
- When it came to police, Polish Jews were particularly targeted for investigation and interrogation, regardless of any actual connection to the victims or the circumstances of the murders.
- So. Ripperologists literally pulled a mentally ill Polish Jew who was from Whitechapel out of a hat, based of off someone who was maybe, possibly, at some point a suspect having the same last name. In a specific area of a massive urban city with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Polish Jews living there. And then a man tested DNA from people who are, many generations later, reportedly distantly related to that man. And he tested it against a sample taken from an artifact that’s never been fully authenticated and is significantly degraded.
- And now that man is claiming that the “positive match” is definitive proof that said mentally ill Polish Jew pulled out of a hat was Jack the Ripper. Bc why not continue the legacy of conspiracy thinking and antisemitism at a time like this, right?
It’s just irresponsible. Both of Russell Edwards, and of the news outlets reporting on it without any pushback or criticism.
(I recommend checking out the podcast Historical Blindness’s two part series of Jack the Ripper. That’s where I found a lot of the primary source material referenced here).
Reblogged defectivealtruist
Reblogged empathy3000
it's one thing that "sanction" in English has two mutually contradictory meanings, meanings that can be impossible to distinguish without quite a lot of context as far as these things go
the really absurd thing is that this auto-antonymy is based on what seems to be a universal tendency in human societies (or at least a very common one) to conflate that which is set apart because it is sacred and that which is set apart because it is profane: cf. the etymologies of "taboo," "sacred," "cherem/haram," and probably words from other languages i am forgetting.
Reblogged canmom
Anonymous asked:
For the Reverse Unpopular Opinion meme, Lamarckism!
(This is an excellent ask.)
Lamarck got done a bit dirty by the textbooks, as one so often is. He's billed as the guy who articulated an evolutionary theory of inherited characteristics, inevitably set up as an opponent made of straw for Darwin to knock down. The example I recall my own teachers using in grade school was the idea that a giraffe would strain to reach the highest branches of a tree, and as a result, its offspring would be born with slightly longer necks. Ha-ha-ha, isn't-that-silly, isn't natural selection so much more sensible?
But the thing is, this wasn't his idea, not even close. People have been running with ideas like that since antiquity at least. What Lamarck did was to systematize that claim, in the context of a wider and much more interesting theory.
Lamarck was born in to an era where natural philosophy was slowly giving way to Baconian science in the modern sense- that strange, eighteenth century, the one caught in an uneasy tension between Newton the alchemist and Darwin the naturalist. This is the century of Ben Franklin and his key and his kite, and the awed discovery that this "electricity" business was somehow involved in living organisms- the discovery that paved the way for Shelley's Frankenstein. This was the era when alchemy was fighting its last desperate battles with chemistry, when the division between 'organic' and 'inorganic' chemistry was fundamental- the first synthesis of organic molecules in the laboratory wouldn't occur until 1828, the year before Lamarck's death. We do not have atoms, not yet. Mendel and genetics are still more than a century away; we won't even have cells for another half-century or more.
Lamarck stepped in to that strange moment. I don't think he was a bold revolutionary, really, or had much interest in being one. He was profoundly interested in the structure and relationships between species, and when we're not using him as a punching bag in grade schools, some people manage to remember that he was a banging good taxonomist, and made real progress in the classification of invertebrates. He started life believing in the total immutability of species, but later was convinced that evolution really was occurring- not because somebody taught him in the classroom, or because it was the accepted wisdom of the time, but through deep, continued exposure to nature itself. He was convinced by the evidence of his senses.
(Mostly snails.)
His problem was complexity. When he'd been working as a botanist, he had this neat little idea to order organisms by complexity, starting with the grubbiest, saddest little seaweed or fern, up through lovely flowering plants. This was not an evolutionary theory, just an organizing structure; essentially, just a sort of museum display. But when he was asked to do the same thing with invertebrates, he realized rather quickly that this task had problems. A linear sorting from simple to complex seemed embarrassingly artificial, because it elided too many different kinds of complexity, and ignored obvious similarities and shared characteristics.
When he went back to the drawing board, he found better organizing schema; you'd recognize them today. There were hierarchies, nested identities. Simple forms with only basic, shared anatomical patterns, each functioning as a sort of superset implying more complex groups within it, defined additively by the addition of new organs or structures in the body. He'd made a taxonomic tree.
Even more shockingly, he realized something deep and true in what he was looking at: this wasn't just an abstract mapping of invertebrates to a conceptual diagram of their structures. This was a map in time. Complexities in invertebrates- in all organisms!- must have been accumulating in simpler forms, such that the most complicated organisms were also the youngest.
This is the essential revolution of Lamarckian evolution, not the inherited characteristics thing. His theory, in its full accounting, is actually quite elaborate. Summarized slightly less badly than it is in your grade school classroom (though still pretty badly, I'm by no means an expert on this stuff), it looks something like this:
- As we all know, animals and plants are sometimes generated ex nihilo in different places, like maggots spontaneously appearing in middens. However, the spontaneous generation of life is much weaker than we have supposed; it can only result in the most basic, simple organisms (e.g. polyps). All the dizzying complexity we see in the world around us must have happened iteratively, in a sequence over time that operated on inheritance between one organism and its descendants.
- As we all know, living things are dynamic in relation to inorganic matter, and this vital power includes an occasional tendency to gain in complexity. However, this tendency is not a spiritual or supernatural effect; it's a function of natural, material processes working over time. Probably this has something to do with fluids such as 'heat' and 'electricity' which are known to concentrate in living tissues. When features appear spontaneously in an organism, that should be understood as an intrinsic propensity of the organism itself, rather than being caused by the environment or by a divine entity. There is a specific, definite, and historically contingent pattern in which new features can appear in existing organisms.
- As we all know, using different tissue groups more causes them to be expressed more in your descendants, and disuse weakens them in the same way. However, this is not a major feature in the development of new organic complexity, since it could only move 'laterally' on the complexity ladder and will never create new organs or tissue groups. At most, you might see lineages move from ape-like to human-like or vice versa, or between different types of birds or something; it's an adaptive tendency that helps organisms thrive in different environments. In species will less sophisticated neural systems, this will be even less flexible, because they can't supplement it with willpower the way that complex vertebrates can.
Lamarck isn't messing around here; this is a real, genuinely interesting model of the world. And what I think I'm prepared to argue here is that Lamarck's biggest errors aren't his. He has his own blind spots and mistakes, certainly. The focus on complexity is... fraught, at a minimum. But again and again, what really bites him in the ass is just his failure to break with his inherited assumptions enough. The parts of this that are actually Lamarckian, that is, are the ideas of Lamarck, are very clearly groping towards a recognizable kind of proto-evolutionary theory in a way that we recognize.
What makes Lamarck a punching bag in grade-school classes today is the same thing that made it interesting; it's that it was the best and most scientific explanation of biological complexity available at the time. It was the theory to beat, the one that had edged out all the other competitors and emerged as the most useful framework of the era. And precisely none of that complexity makes it in to our textbooks; they use "Lamarckianism" to refer to arguments made by freaking Aristotle, and which Lamarck himself accepted but de-emphasized as subordinate processes. What's even worse, Darwin didn't reject this mechanism either. Darwin was totally on board with the idea as a possible adaptive tendency; he just didn't particularly need it for his theory.
Lamarck had nothing. Not genetics, not chromosomes, not cells, not atomic theory. Geology was a hot new thing! Heat was a liquid! What Lamarck had was snails. And on the basis of snails, Lamarck deduced a profound theory of complexity emerging over time, of the biosphere as a(n al)chemical process rather than a divine pageant, of gradual adaptation punctuated by rapid innovation. That's incredible.
There's a lot of falsehood in the Lamarckian theory of evolution, and it never managed to entirely throw off the sloppy magical thinking of what came before. But his achievement was to approach biology and taxonomy with a profound scientific curiosity, and to improve and clarify our thinking about those subjects so dramatically that a theory of biology could finally, triumphantly, be proven wrong. Lamarck is falsifiable. That is a victory of the highest order.
Reblogged ouroborosorder
if you like a piece of media that is good eventually youll more or less run out of things to say about how good it is but if you like a piece of media that is objectively pretty mediocre but also somehow deeply compelling thats how the demons get you
Reblogged mimikyuno
-guy whos only seen one anime voice- rgu is giving me real pmmm vibes
Reblogged jjs-brainrot
Sorry @hiyari8 stealing these tags