Smithsonian publishing pseudohistory again – Peary & Cook at Pole

It’s to the point that when a new issue of Smithsonian magazine comes out (I have a gift subscription), I expect a major error of either fact or interpretation in a major story.

And, I also expect the magazine not to do anything about it.

April’s entry? Excerpts from Bruce Henderson’s book, “Who Discovered the North Pole,” insinuating Frederick Cook beat Commodore Robert Peary to the North Pole.

Henderson, both in the excerpts and the full book, stacks the deck in favor of Cook, without explicitly saying he beat Peary.

That said, he willfully ignores the painstaking work done by people BESIDES Peary backers showing that, four years before his claimed trek to the Pole, he faked the alleged first ascent of Mout McKinley, and faked it by more than 10,000 feet of altitude.

That said, do I think Peary got to the Pole 100 years ago this month?

Not likely. Probably neither one did. Neither did Admiral Byrd in his plane from Spitzbergen in 1926, per his own mechanic. And, since the Peary and Byrd had eliminated further claimants to going North 90 those two ways, at least until further handicapping like solo voyages, voyages without dogs, etc., probably the first person or people to visit the North Pole, if not from 20,000 leagues deep, in all likelihood popped up from below …

The USS Nautilus in 1958.

However, if it’s the battle of the two by-land claimants for first there, Peary is much more likely than Cook. And, albeit with modern synthetic clothing, gear, etc., his 1909 per-day mileage claims have been met and even exceeded in recent years.

Peary’s claim is plausible. (So, too is fraud; having announced this would be his last journey, he had good motive for fraud.)

Then again, so did Cook; it seems to have been part and parcel of his personality, something that Henderson also ignored.

Smithsonian mag errata strikes again

This time, it’s a mistake about ants about which I don’t need E.O. Wilson’s help to point out the error. A brief about Forelius ants says this:

Scientists in Brazil have observed an unusual act of selflessness. When Forelius ants retire for the night, one or more workers remain outside the colony, kicking sand to seal the entrance. If that protects those within from predators or rain, it also dooms the outside ants to die overnight of exposure. It's the first known case of "pre-emptive self-sacrifice" among insects.

As both Wilson and mathemetician-philosopher Douglas Hofstadter know, individual ants don’t have a sense of self! Ant colonies might, but that’s precisely why the story is counterfactual.

An individual Forelius ant is, in this case, like a microphage white blood cell attacking an invader. The phage “sacrifices” “itself” to kill the bacterium.

But, it doesn’t actually sacrifice itself.

So, no this instance, from what I know of entomology, is NOT the first known case of “pre-emptive self-sacrifice.”

Reason No. 924 not to renew my subscription. (And, the mag hasn’t corrected some previous errata I have pointed out.)

Smithsonian religious gullibility – or political correctness – on display

In the midst of an otherwise great article on Africa’s Pygmies, we get this clunker:

Drumming propelled their worship of the much-loved Ejengi, the most powerful of the forest spirits—good and evil—known as mokoondi. One day Wasse told me that the great spirit wanted to meet me, and so I joined more than a hundred Mossapola Pygmies as they gathered soon after dusk, beating drums and chanting. Suddenly there was a hush, and all eyes turned to the jungle. Emerging from the shadows were half a dozen Pygmy men accompanying a creature swathed from top to bottom in strips of russet-hued raffia. It had no features, no limbs, no face. "It's Ejengi," said Wasse, his voice trembling.

At first I was sure it was a Pygmy camouflaged in foliage, but as Ejengi glided across the darkened clearing, the drums beat louder and faster, and as the Pygmies' chanting grew more frenzied, I began to doubt my own eyes. As the spirit began to dance, its dense cloak rippled like water over rocks. The spirit was speechless, but its wishes were communicated by attendants. "Ejengi wants to know why you've come here," shouted a squat man well short of five feet. With Bienvenu translating, I answered that I had come to meet the great spirit.

Now, it would be one thing for author Paul Raffaele, in the midst of the second graf, to say “the so-called spirit,” or else to continue to call it a creature, as he did in the first graf, but to simply transition to calling it a spirit, as he does, is journalistically and scientifically unprofessional.

And, lest anyone think this is a one-off, Raffaele talks of a second meeting with “Ejengi” three webpages later, and again uses the word “spirit.”

Reason No. 923 I won’t renew my Smithsonian subscription.

Smithsonian blows another story

This month’s gaffe?

Omitting hugely important relevant information about Judaism in its story on the alleged Hispanic Jews of the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado.

A bit of background.

For generations if not centuries, rumors have swirled that some Spanish the original territory of Mexico, including the Mexican Northwest or our Desert Southwest, actually were Marranos — descendents of Spanish Jews who were “passing” to avoid the Inquisition.

Per the story, I agree with Judith Neulander, an ethnographer and co-director of the Judaic Studies Program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland (and many others) and disagree with University of New Mexico prof Stanley M. Hordes. These are Spanish-Americans who picked up some type of Adventism, whether from today’s official Seventh-Day Adventist Chruch or elsewhere; they’re NOT marranos. 

See all the details here.

(Note to Mr. Hordes: Outside the American flag, two hundred or even one hundred years ago, six points was the normal way to make a star; that’s NOT the Magen David, necessarily, on tombs. At least some Adventists officially practice circumcision.

But, that’s an issue of interpretation, not the gaffe I’m going to talk about.

Here’s where the story blows it. And, if the author, Jeff Wheelwright, was that ignorant of Jewish groups and distinctions, he shouldn’t have been writing this story in the first place. And, if the Smithsonian can’t have an editor pick up on the difference between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, then the mag really is in trouble.

Because THAT’s the gaffe.

In a nutshell, the alleged marranos of San Luis have been found to have a higher-than-statistically probable rate of a breast cancer precursor gene, 185delAG. The story notes that “the genetic mutation that caused the virulent breast cancer had previously been found primarily in Jewish people whose ancestral home was Central or Eastern Europe.”

Well, beyond the bare bones of geographic separation, those Jews are Ashkenazi; the Jews of Spain are Sephardic.

Of course, there’s argument that the genetic mutatin is not limited to Ashkenazi. If that’s true, well, then the story is wrong in another way, and Wheelwright shouldn’t have written what he did.

In the title, I noted that Smithsonian blows another story. This has become a recent problem.

In recent months, on straight history it has claimed the Acoma Indians built their Sky City pueblo for protection from Navajos 400 years before Navajos arrived in the Southwest, and misidentified a Canyonlands National Park picture as coming from Arches. (It corrected the photo mistake, but did nothing about the far more egregious error.)

On news analysis, it picked the wrong 20th-century political conventions as the top four of the century, and so far, at least, hasn’t even deigned to look at 19th-century ones.

I had hoped things would get better with Lawrence Small finally getting a well-deserved boot as Smithsonian secretary.

Instead, the magazine, at least, gets worse, and the Institute has the gall to send me a fundraiser e-mail last week on top of this.

Smithsonian mag clueless about American political history

The August 2008 issue of Smithsonian lists what it calls four conventions that changed America, followed by individual stories on each.

They are the GOP in 1912, when Teddy and his Bull Moosers to be were turned back; the Democrats in 1948, when the Dixiecrats walked out and a young Hubert Humphrey got the convention to adopt a civil rights plank; 1964 Republican, with Goldwater; and the 1968 Democratic convention.

Now the intro I linked above did not explicitly say theses were the four most important conventions every, but I’m inferring it is halfway implying that.

That said …

How the editor who got the idea for the four conventions could overlook EITHER of the 1860 conventions, let alone BOTH, is inexcusable.

Southern Democrats' intransigence at Charleston, spitefully blocking Stephen Douglas' nomination under the two-thirds rule, guaranteed a Republican victory.

The GOP convention being sited in Chicago, combined with pumping the Wigwam full of Lincoln-boosting locals, guaranteed Honest Abe the Republican nomination, and therefore, that victory.

A 1861 government with a President Douglas likely would have had no secession. South Carolina might have given it a go alone, but soon would have been blockaded back into the Union.

An 1861 government with a President Seward might well have wound up with Southern success in secession. (And Maximilian staying on the throne of Mexico to boot.)

And, all that said, this isn’t the first time in recent issues Smithsonian has fallen flat on its historical face.

The cover story in the May issue claimed that Acoma Indians built, and moved to, their famous Sky City pueblo in part from Navajos.

Just one MINOR problem.

The pueblo was built at least 400 years before the Navajos GOT TO the U.S. Southwest.

Did the Smithsonian run my letter to the editor, though? Did the magazine even e-mail me back? Noooo.

Update, July 30:Two points to add, one an admission of error (it happens) and a contra-affirmation based on that error.

First, the mistake. Smithsonian’s cover piece for the four stories said the mag was limiting itself to the 20th century, as a magazine editorial staffer e-mailed me.

That said, I e-mailed back and asked if the mag would consider something similar for 19th-century conventions, as the idea as now stated seems to imply that politics before the 20th century was a cut below.

That then said, I can suggest 20th-century conventions at least as important as the ones they selected.

For 1912, I would have picked the Democratic convention over the GOP. Woodrow Wilson was a dark horse and only a last gasp of the Dems’ two-thirds rule denied Missouri Rep. and Speaker of the House Champ Clark the nomination.

The 1912 GOP? Part of the TR myth. As GOP standard-bearer, he would have lost to Wilson, IMO.

I would have chosen the 1932 Dem convention ahead of 1964 GOP. First, spectacle aside, some form of Sunbelt GOP conservativism and “Southern strategy” was coming down the pike anyway. Remember LBJ’s comment that he lost the South for a generation.

But, FDR was by no means a shoe-in for the Dems’ candidate in 1932. Try to picture Cactus Jack, John Nance Garner, as president.

And, what about the 1944 Democratic convention? Not to choose Roosevelt, but to choose the man just about everybody on the inside knew would be his successor in less than four years.

So, confining myself to the 20th century, and with a head-on convention confrontation in 1912, I think Smithsonian still is off.

Irony alert: Smithsonian magazine

Its “The Last Page” column for March is entitled “Electrocybertronics,” and is about how prefixes or suffixes like “cyber” are used for false marketing spin. In fact, the subtitles says: “Marketing through pseudoscience.”

Apparently, the editorial and advertising departments at Smithsonian talk even less than at the typical newspaper.

The last few pages before the column include:
• A double-page spread for some alleged breakthrough book in “null physics,” priced to move at $60 and apparently self-published;
• An full page ad on an “amazing new medical device” to reverse, not just reduce, stress;
• A full page for a New Thought publisher talking about “creation’s law of absolute right.”