The Tarong high-grade thermal coal deposit, in the South Burnett area of Queensland 180km NW of the State Capital Brisbane, was discovered in 1968 by a geological team from Conzinc Rio Tinto of Australia (CRA).

In the remainder of this essay, I will refer to the company as Rio Tinto [1].

Rio Tinto did not waste time. By 1970, following a massive drilling campaign of mostly vertical open drill holes, they had proven 163 million tons of coal within an open pit mine profile with low stripping ratio [2]. Much, much more has been discovered since in the immediate area (see: South Burnett Coal Reserves 2015). They named their discovery after the Tarong pastoral station in which it was located.

The deposit is now owned by the Queensland State Government utility, Stanwell Corporation. Coal has been continuously extracted from Tarong since 1984 through the open cast Meandu Mine. The mine’s entire output of 2 million tpa is sent by conveyor belt to the adjacent, Government owned, Tarong Power Station, which burns it to produce 1.4 GW p.a. of electricity, fed directly into the Australian East Coast Grid [3]. Tarong does not just contribute electrons to the ECG. As with all turbine systems, it contributes critical grid stability (firming) at no extra cost.

With present consumption and known reserves, the power station will run out of coal by around the year 2300.

With the closures and projected closures of coal mines across Australia [4], Tarong is set to become the longest-lived and cheapest source of electricity in Australia [5].

About the geology

The Tarong deposit is located within a north-trending, 60x10km, outlier of thick Late Triassic sediments. The outlier is now called the Tarong Basin [6]. The Basin is fault bounded within Early Paleozoic metasediments and assorted intrusives that make up the Australian east-coastal Tasman Orogenic Belt of the Great Dividing Range. Major steep dipping, north-trending faults divide the Belt into elongate tectonic slices called “blocks”. It is probable that the Tarong Basin is a pull-apart basin caused by a late Triassic strike-slip re-activation along one or more of these faults. The sediments that fill the basin were laid down in a swampy environment of slow meandering streams, shallow lakes and, most importantly in this context, a riot of tropical vegetation whose remains locally accumulated to fossilise as coal.

Rio Tinto (and I) appear on the scene

In 1964, Rio Tinto discovered the giant copper-gold deposit of Panguna in Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea. By 1968, they were advanced in the process of developing a major mine there. They hoped to find a similar deposit in Eastern Australia. Stream-sediment geochemistry – then a new exploration technique – had worked well for them in the islands but had not previously been employed at scale in Australia. It was a smart exploration play.

In the early months of 1968, as a junior geologist with Rio Tinto Exploration, I was transferred from the Northern Territory to work on base metal exploration in the Lower Paleozoic rocks of the Queensland coastal ranges. Geologist W H Johnstone (hereinafter, Bill) and I were tasked with collecting stream sediment samples from across an approximate 100km by 30km area between the regional inland centers of Towoomba and Kingaroy. Bill had been working in the area for some months prior to my arrival and was much more experienced than I. He mentored me in the techniques of stream sediment sampling.

The area is dominated by forested north-trending ranges, the intervening valleys partially cleared for grazing and for horticulture on the rich alluvial flats. Access was generally good: paved roads and farm tracks in the valleys, logging tracks through the intervening hills. Some of the most beautiful country in eastern Australia, baking under the hot summer sun.

We based ourselves at the Grand Hotel (today, the Grand Old Crow Hotel) in the small agricultural town of Crows Nest (pop. around 1000), central to the area. I was based there for over three months. One of the best exploration bases I ever had.

Rural Town Interlude

On weeknights there was little entertainment to be had in Crows Nest (no rural TV in 1968). We spent our evenings in a shared room at the Grand (bathroom at the end of the corridor, telephone in the public bar downstairs), sorting samples, writing up notes, planning next day’s activities. I did not own a camera back then so attempted to record my day’s experiences in a sketch book.

Long summer weeknights in the Grand Hotel, Crows Nest

But on Saturday the town was busy, even roisterous, as the farmers came into town for shopping, a meal at The Grand and to socialise after a hard-working week…

Saturday night in the Ladies Lounge at the Grand Hotel. 

Back to the Story

Early in our acquaintance, Bill told me that sometime previously when he was staying in a hotel at Nanango (50km north of Crows Nest), he was approached by a local man called Nobby [7], who made a living drilling water bores for farmers. Nobby had told Bill that around the headwaters of the Yarraman and Meandu Creeks (north-flowing tributaries of the Burnett River, 30km north of Crows Nest) many of his boreholes had encountered seams of coal.

At that time, drilling for agricultural water was subsidised by the State Government, but drillers had to inform the Department of their results and provide a geological log for each hole. Bill decided to go to the State capital Brisbane to check this information at the Department of Agriculture. He would not have done this without the permission of our immediate supervisor, Gladstone-based geologist Ian Witcher. It turned out that, over the general area described by Nobby, almost every water bore sunk over a period of many decades had recorded coal in their logs (even rural water drillers had little problem identifying that black stuff in their cuttings). By contouring the results, an area prospective for coal mining in the southern Tarong Basin was outlined. Although many other coal occurrences were known in Queensland at that time, the attraction of the South Burnett Region was its good existing infrastructure and proximity to the population centers of SE Queensland.

Me (smoking a pipe), Nobby [but see footnote 8] and Bill Johnstone in the front bar of a Nanango Hotel

Ian Witcher notified the Head Office of Rio Tinto Exploration in Melbourne. The company’s Exploration Manager – the legendary Australian mining Geologist Haddon F King – made the strategic decision to pivot exploration in the South Burnett area from base metal to coal. The first diamond drill hole to test the coal potential of the Tarong area was planned for the center of the best legacy water bore results.

For whatever reason (I was the most junior geologist on site), I was tasked with geologically logging this hole [9]. It was collared on the top of a low ridge in the Meandu Creek area: a hill clothed in dry grass, scrub and stands of Eucalypt trees with some clearing for pasture on the lower slopes. All now long swallowed up by the later mine.

Prior to drilling, although outcrop was poor, I attempted to make a surface geology map. A conglomerate was exposed on the hilltop – an outlier of the basal unit of a late, overstepping formation. On the lower slopes, some surface float of sandstone only. Along the new drill access track the dozer blade had exposed outcrop of a soft, rubbly, buff-coloured sediment which I confidently identified as mudstone. All units were flat lying.

The 200m vertical drill hole presented the easiest logging exercise of any I have ever attempted. Layer cake stratigraphy; well-bedded sedimentary lithologies dominated by sandstone, siltstone, mudstone and coal; sharp contacts between units; little post-depositional deformation. In first 100m, the drill hole encountered at least five coal seams ranging from 1 to 25 meters thick, the first seam only 20m below surface.

After the ancient metamorphic rocks of the Territory, I thought coal geology a piece of cake (layer cake). But the “mudstone” I had observed at surface turned out to be heavily weathered coal. So much for my surface rock recognition skills.

My association with the Tarong project ceased at this point as I was transferred to another project in Papua New Guinea (see HERE). Someone else was brought in to replace me. Hopefully someone with more knowledge and experience of coal exploration than I.

The Moral of my Story

The discovery of Tarong is a good example of a general principal for the exploration geologist: when you are exploring an area, always seek out local knowledge. If someone, knowing a company geologist is in town, approaches you with an interesting rock specimen he has found, treat him (it’s always a him) with respect. Listen to his story and make sure you protect his interests if you or your company follows up on any new knowledge or insight he has brought you.

In 1962, Lang Hancock, a cattle station owner in the Hamersley Ranges in the remote northwest of Western Australia, brought the iron ore potential of the area to the attention to Rio Tinto. He was rewarded with a generous ongoing royalty from Rio’s subsequent, hugely profitable iron ore mines. Hancock died in 1992, but the royalty stream continued. Hancock’s only child Gina Reinhart, who had grown up on her father’s Mulga Downs station, leveraged her small inherited fortune into a much greater one to become today Australia’s richest person with over $46 billion (US$32 billion) in assets.

Lang Hancock and his daughter Gina, circa 1980. Photo by the Sydney Morning Herald.

It seems to me likely that the well-publicized story of Lang Hancock’s new-found wealth prompted a Nanango resident called Nobby to approach a Rio Tinto geologist in a pub in late ’67 or early ’68.

Bill Johnstone’s decision to follow up on this local knowledge was the key to the discovery of the Tarong coal deposit.

Epilogue

After I left Queensland, Bill’s career and mine took different paths and we never met again.  Much later, I was told by a mutual acquaintance that when Rio lodged a Mining Lease over the Tarong coal deposit, Nobby was given a similar royalty deal to that of Lang Hancock on any future coal sales by Rio Tinto in the South Burnett Region. I was also told that Bill subsequently married one of Nobby’s daughters. Although I have no independent verification for any of that, if it is true, good luck to them both. They deserve it.

The post The Power of Local Knowledge: the discovery of the Tarong coal deposit: appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

There is No Wisdom in Crowds

The present system of science publishing is broken. Abuse and fraud are common and increasing. Ways of overcoming this are suggested.

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In 2023, the New Scientist Magazine reported that chemist Jose Manual Lorenzo, an Associate Professor at a regional Spanish university, had, along with multiple co-authors, published 176 scientific papers in 2022 – a rate of one paper every two days. Assuming that Lorenzo had other things to do with his time apart from research and authorship (eating, sleeping, supervising, lecturing, administration, following the football etc..) it would be a miracle if he had had time to read these papers, let alone make any meaningful input to their content.

Professor Lorenzo is one of a new breed of what are called hyper-profile authors.

How has science publishing come to this?

Over more than 500 years, scientific discoveries that revolutionised our knowledge of the world have been announced in books or Scientific Journals by single, or at the most, by two authors. To name but a few (my personal choice): the theory of evolution of species through natural selection by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1856 [1], the grand unification of electricity and magnetism (electromagnetism) by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865 [2], the Special and General Theories of Relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905 [3] and 1916, the discovery by Edwin Hubble in1929[4] that billions of galaxies exist beyond our Milky Way, the theory of Alfred Wegener in 1912, that whole continents can move across the face of the earth [5], and the resolution of the helical molecular structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953 [6].

But since the end of WW2, single or even double author papers have become rare. Few today have less than 5. A paper (on fruit flies) was published in 2015 in the Journal Genes, Genomes, Genetics with 1014 authors – included in this paper as “authors” were the many hundreds of conscripted undergraduate students who had helped collect the field data [7]. But in the same year, the entomologists were beaten into the Guinness Book of Records by the particle physicists who published, in the journal Physics Review, a paper with 5,152 authors [8].  The paper is cited as Castelvecci et al.: but the two little words “et al.” are doing a lot of heavy lifting. The paper is 33 pages long, the first 24 of which are taken up by the alphabetic author list. This is taking consensus and inclusion to absurd lengths. In the case of the physicists, the totality of staff in large cooperating government research groups, from several countries, from lowest technician to Heads of Departments, were signed up. (Did no one have a dissenting voice?). 

In all these cases, each “author” presumably got to add the publication and any citation credits to his or her personal CV.

It is as if in 1859 Charles Darwin, publishing his revolutionary book On the Origin of Species, had included as co-authors T. H. Huxley, C. Lyell, J. D. Hooker, A. R. Wallace, A. Gray, Captain R. Fitzroy and the entire crew of HMS Beagle, including the ship’s cat!

There is no wisdom in crowds

Traditionally, the role of minor or peripheral contributors to a scientific paper were dealt with by including them in a brief “Acknowledgements” section in the main text. But listing such contributors as authors destroys the accepted meaning of that word. A new term - hyper-authorship - has been coined to cover this recent publishing phenomenon, while authors with huge publication lists (such as Professor Lorenzo at the head of this post) are called hyper-profile authors. From this point on, I will refer to such people as hyper-profile authors or bracket them in quotation marks as “authors”.

A 2025 publication in the Journal of Informetrics [9] shows that the academic disciplines most guilty of hyper-authorship are (in order) Clinical Medicine, Engineering, Biology and the Political & Social Sciences. The fields most immune to the phenomenon (relatively) are Mathematics, Chemistry, Psychology and Economics.

For academics, their institutions and the journals they publish in, status and reputation come from:

1. The total number of papers or books you “author” (the famous “publish or perish” dictum),

2. The prestige of the Journals in which you publish. Today there are over 40,000 technical journals: Nature and Science are the big dogs at the top of the tree who routinely reject more than 9 out of 10 of scientific papers submitted to them (but see footnote 12). At the bottom of the pecking order are journals that will publish anything, so long as you pay their fee. These latter are known as predatory journals [10], they are also sometimes referred to as paper mills.

3. The number of references that your paper garners. Such published references are called citations. It does not matter whether the citations praise or damn your work, a citation is a citation: your paper is being read.

4. The position of your university in annual global ranking tables. There are around 30,000 self-described “universities” in the world (internet search) but ranking tables, such as the annual TES (Times Educational Supplement) Rankings consider less than one tenth of these as worthy of inclusion in their surveys. Oxford, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Princeton, Cambridge and Harvard are the top five in this table for 2025, but just being included in the top 200 is a proud boast. These tables are compiled on the basis of the number of publications and citations garnered by the research employees of each university. A high ranking is vitally important to universities as it determines the number of students they attract, the fees they can charge and the amount of grant money and endowments they are able to hoover up.

Points 2, 3 and 4 were designed to provide controls on abuses of point 1, ensuring that mere quantity does not overwhelm quality.

But the incentives on all parties to rig the system in their favour are high, and the ways of gaming the system are many…

Let me count the ways…

1. Join an informal “publishing network” made up of researchers with similar interests across several institutions and continents – the more the better. Wide discussions and sharing of ideas are undoubtedly a good thing [11], but one of these “similar interests” will certainly be: “include me as a co-author in your papers and I will you include as one in mine”. Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

2. If your publishing network is large, then it is likely that editors, struggling to find willing reviewers of your paper with appropriate knowledge (peer reviewing is a time consuming, voluntary service), will seek them from among your network – people who might be your friends, colleagues or have previously co-authored with you. This is not peer review, it’s pal-review.

3. Break your long and comprehensive papers into discrete portions and publish each portion separately (a technique more suitable to some research fields than others). Otherwise known as Salami-slicing.

4. Pay to publish in predatory journals with lax or non-existent review processes (see footnote 10). Pay to publish.

5. If you are Head of a Research Department mandate that all papers emanating from your unit carry your name as co-author (see HERE). Professorial Rights (droits de seigneur).

6.  Media statements by you or your institution about published or pending research results are a good way of short circuiting the normal science assessment process and making direct emotional appeal to the public and to government funding bodies. Therefore, in press releases on your latest results use only hyped-up language, emphasize the positive and hide any qualifications, uncertainties or alternate explanations you might have. Science by Press Release.

7. Make sure each paper you “author” includes as many references to your own publications as possible – and make sure your “co-authors” do the same. Self-promotion.

8. Confirmation bias hinders objective appraisal. Papers that confirm existing widespread theory will always gather more citations than those that challenge it. Therefore, if you want to get past peer reviewers and attract maximum citations, do not introduce new ideas that challenge orthodoxy, or, if you do, hedge them about with obsequious qualifications and apologies or bury them so deep in the text, appendixes or supplementary data that they might not be noticed.  Confirmation Bias [12].

9. If you are a peer reviewer for a journal submission, make your favourable review conditional on the submitting “authors” making references to your own papers. Intellectual blackmail.

10. As a corollary to point 8, if you know, suspect or guess (in many cases, easy to do) who the supposedly anonymous reviewers of your journal submission will be, then load your paper with favourable references to their papers. Flattery.

11. If you are an editor of a journal making annual editorial reviews (a requirement of many publishing companies), then add multiple references your own papers in that journal (for an egregious example of this, see footnote [13]). This will not only increase your own citation index, but that of the journal as well. Corruption.

 12. If your research is not producing positive results, or results that do not support your pre-conceived ideas, or you just want an easy way to increase your publication and citation indexes, simply invent or falsify your data. This is deliberate fraud, but it can be very difficult to prove. With around half a million scientific papers published each year, many hundreds of examples of fraud have been exposed. But those are probably just the tip of an iceberg (see footnote 10 and references in the Stuart Ritchie book mentioned in Acknowledgements). Fraud.

The Problem

There are far, far more PhDs awarded today than there are career academic employment positions. The stratagems I list above loom large in the competitive world of young researchers who wish to gain a foothold in academia. Once they have garnered, by whatever means, sufficient publications and citation credits then tenure (a job for life) awaits, and they can afford to relax:  the Mathew Effect will do the rest. Success breeds success.

“For unto everyone that hath, shall be given: and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not, even that which he hath, shall be taken away” Mathew Gospel, 25:29

Hyper-authorship, pal review, salami slicing, pay-to-publish, professorial Rights, confirmation bias, back scratching, science by press release, self-promotion, intellectual blackmail, flattery, corruption and fraud are well known problems and have been outlined in numerous books, papers, op-eds, blogs and podcasts over many years. But the malign influence of these stratagems has not gone away. There is evidence that it is getting worse. A detailed 2025 review on this subject in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science [14] warns that “the publication of fraudulent science is outpacing the growth rate of legitimate scientific publications”. This is happening because academia, by and large, assesses and rewards researchers on an easily gamed set of criteria. A natural selection process has evolved that rewards the dishonest practices enumerated above. This creates a “survival of the fittest” environment in which honest researchers risk extinction if they do not compete on similar terms.

The science publishing system that has grown up over the last 50-100 years (peer review, publication and citation indexes, exaggerated benefits for established elites) is broken and is totally inadequate for today’s environment of globalisation and digital publishing. A drastic overhaul is urgently needed.

Some suggested solutions:

All research results, whether positive or negative, should be published online: free, searchable and available to all. Scientific wisdom is not the exclusive preserve of academia.

Peer review should be retained but with no anonymity. All correspondence between peer reviewers and editors with the author(s) – good reviews as well as bad – should be published along with the paper [15].

Papers with more than one author must include a written statement detailing the intellectual contribution to the paper of each listed author.

Official press releases must adhere to the same standards of language, restraint and caution as are applied to scientific papers.

A supplementary section providing all data and computer code on which the conclusions of the paper are based, as well as full details of experimental methods employed so that others can replicate your work, should be an absolute requirement for acceptance by all journals.

A link to a section where any subsequent citations can be listed must accompany each paper. The list will include the names of the citation author(s) and their context.

Replication papers, when or if they become available, should be published on the same web page as the original paper, whether they falsify (and thus disprove) your thesis or not.

Links to all other sections of the paper as detailed here must be given in the main text.

With each paper, an open discussion forum should be provided where anyone (including the authors) can propose corrections, respond to criticism, offer comments or provide additional data and alternative hypotheses. This section will have filters to exclude comments on the basis of irrelevance, rudeness, abuse, ad hominin and ad verecundiam based attack, hate speech or non-adherence to the basic, universally established principles of the scientific process. But beyond all that, free speech rules and no ideas are forbidden or censored however uncomfortable they might be to the author(s).

In this environment, hyper-authorship will become a rare event, people seeking to replicate results will have immediate guaranteed data access, mistakes will be quickly identified and corrected, apologies and mea culpas can be given or retractions announced. Science publishers who do not follow these rules will be labelled as predatory, and their offerings as unscientific garbage.

In an open contest of ideas, the best – those that are meticulous, well-argued and evidence based – will rise to the top and the dross will fade away. Authority and consensus should have no input to this process: but authority and consensus can be expected to be an emergent output and form the basis for individual and institutional rankings.

Acknowledgements:

Much of the inspiration, and some of the detail, for this post comes from Stuart Ritchie’s 2020 book: Science fictions: Exposing Fraud, Negligence and Hype in Science. (published by Penguin-Random House, 353 p. see:  www.sciencefictions.org).

I have also been inspired by reading John Ioannidas seminal 2005 paper “Why most published research findings are false”. (PLoS Medicine https://doi:101371/journal.pmed.0020124). (But note: the deliberate attention-grabbing title is not fully justified in the text where all examples given come from the field of clinical medicine).

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 Key Words: hyper authorship, hyper profile authors, peer review, pal review, predatory publishing, paper mills, publishing networks

The post There is No Wisdom in Crowds appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

Dr Norman [1], a young scientist at the start of her academic career, writes a technical paper full of new observation and innovative ideas challenging accepted orthodoxy and submits this to a prestigious international Journal. Norman is happy to acknowledge minor, but valuable, input from her friend and colleague Dr Edwards and includes him as a co-author. Professor Yelland, the head of her department, must also be included as a co-author because it is his policy that all papers from his fiefdom carry his name. This is a very common practice, which the Professor justifies by saying that he is the Head of a Team and, by virtue of his reputation and contacts, all members of the team are beholden to him for their contracts, salaries, funding and (he likes to think), intellectual leadership.

But the Professor has another policy: authors of joint papers must list their names alphabetically. Were Norman’s paper to be submitted in the order of their relative contributions, as Norman, Edwards & Yelland - it would, correctly, establish Norman as the lead author. But under Yelland’s direction, she is forced to publish it as authored by Edwards, Norman and Yelland. An important distinction, as we shall see.

Why this policy? The Professor justifies it by saying:

“We are all equal members of a democratic team – there are no prima donnas here. The more authors a paper has, the more authority it can claim”.

But there is an unspoken reason: one that everyone involved understands:

No one can be allowed to outshine their boss. With an alphabetically arranged author list, most will assume that my name comes last only because of my position in the alphabet.

You think that’s petty? And so it is, but anyone who has worked in the dog-eat-dog world of academia will recognise that such selfish stratagems are par for the course (2)

For Edwards, with the paper published, widely cited as Edwards et al. and winning prizes, there is Tenure and, on the future retirement of Yelland, appointment as the new Head of Department. To Professor Yelland’s already large bibliography is added another starred item: his reputation boosted: fresh research grants and new acolytes assured. Norman’s academic career languishes. Unable or unwilling to renew her contract, she resigns and seeks a position in industry where the harsh realities of commerce ensure that talent is rewarded on the basis of results, not reputation

But Norman, Edwards and Yelland can consider themselves lucky. If their study had been in the highly-politicised field of Climate Science, it is likely their paper would have been rejected. Today, most Journal editors are employees of science publishing companies. If an editor – seeking a contest of ideas and open debate – were to accept a paper that challenged Climate Change orthodoxy, then said editor would run the risk of being fired. Why? Bear with me with me while I follow the money. Science publishing companies make money from consumers of their products through a subscription-based model. The money involved is huge: the publishing company Elsevier (with more than 3000 science Journals on their books) made a profit of $4.2 billion in 2024 (Internet search). The consumers are the world’s universities who pay on the number of clicks made by the registered users of their libraries: the more clicks, the higher the fee. Universities today get their funding largely from governments who wish to promote research consistent with their ideological and political ends. In the Western World, these ideologies typically involve alarmist views on climate change. So we return to where we started: a vicious ouroboros loop: a snake eating its tail. This snake is not a perpetual motion machine. It is fueled and directed by government money.

The ouroboros snake: the original vicious circle.

My story of Dr Norman is a parable that illustrates many things, among them:

• turning your back on truth in favour of empathy, consensus and inclusion.
• self-serving behaviour at the expense of others.
• the “publish or perish” requirement for academics if they want promotion.
• The role of governments in controlling the direction of scientific research, and..,
• success itself, whether deserved or not, can be self-reinforcing.

The last bulleted point is an example of the Mathew Effect [3]. The Effect is named from scripture:

“For unto everyone that hath, shall be given: and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not, even that which he hath, shall be taken away.” St. Mathew Gospel, 25:29. (King James Bible translation).

The term Mathew Effect was first coined in a 1968 [4] paper in the journal Science by Robert K. Merton – a professor of sociology at Columbia University. In Merton’s abstract, the Effect is defined as:

“…a conception of ways in which certain psycho-social processes affect the allocation of resources to Scientists for their contributions – an allocation which in turn affects the flow of ideas and findings [5] through the communication networks of Science.”

(Saint Mathew and his English translators put the idea much more succinctly).

The Mathew Effect is a cynical and bleak observation on how success can breed success: how reputation and authority can become self-sustaining: how rigid orthodoxy can exclude new ideas, potentially giving one person or small elite in-group at the head of every discipline an authority they may not deserve. The Mathew Effect can be seen in all fields of human endeavor but is most noticeable in the organised and structured disciplines of universities.

With the aid of hindsight, examples of the Mathew Effect are easy enough to find. I have chosen a just few from the wide field of science:

1. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus - a scientist and catholic monk- published his theory that the Earth and the planets circle the sun and not, as the scientific and theological paradigms of the time held, the other way round. Those who accepted and promoted Copernicus’ mathematical arguments were fiercely persecuted. In 1600, philosopher Giordano Bruno was tortured then burned at the stake for (among other things) his heretical Copernican beliefs. In 1632, Galileo Galilei was put on trial and shown the torture implements of the Inquisition. He sensibly made a public recantation. That saved his life, but he was put under lifetime house arrest, and his books on astronomy banned. Science eventually moved on under the overwhelming weight of evidence that the earth is not the immobile center of the Universe, but the Catholic Church’s ban on the works of Copernicus and Galileo remained for the next 200 years (6).
2. In 1883, English polymath Francis Galton, influenced by Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, Social Darwinism and Racial Cleansing ideas, proposed selective breeding as a means of improving the human race. He called his proposed new science Eugenics. By “improving”, Galton and his followers meant creating more people like themselves – rich, white, educated, Northern European males. They proposed, amongst other measures, coercive sterilisation of poor, uneducated women. Over the next 60 years in Europe and North America, eugenic ideas became widely popular and a field of study for university academics and for implementation by government agencies. In the UK and America, politicians such as Arthur Balfour, Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain; literary figures George Bernard Shaw and H G Wells; scientists Leonard Darwin (Charles Darwin’s son), Sir Ronald Fisher (pioneering biostatistician), Sir Cyril Burt (later disgraced for scientific fraud), Julian Huxley, Charles Spearman (who proposed an inheritable factor “g” for innate intelligence), Arthur Jensen (an enthusiastic follower of Spearman) and economist John Maynard Keynes, supported the movement from the 1900s to through to the 1960s. These are but a small selection of well-known British and American eugenicists.  In 1931, the British Eugenics Society managed to put up a Bill in Parliament for the “Sterilization of Mental Defectives”: it was rejected mainly through the votes of catholic and socialist MPs. But elsewhere in the Western World, government-supported programs of coercive breeding and forced sterilisation were widely adopted. In Sweden, sterilisation for eugenic reasons began in 1906 and was formalised by Law in 1934. These were supposed to be “voluntary” sterilisations, but it has been shown that in Sweden extreme coercive measures were used, and the victims, numbering in the tens of thousands, were mostly poor, uneducated women. In the USA, forced sterilisation for eugenic reasons began in the early 1900s. In 1927, in an 8:1 opinion on Buck v Bell, the Supreme Court of the United Staes ruled that a forced sterilisation carried out by surgeon John H. Bell on Carrie Elizabeth Buck was constitutional. John H. Bell was a surgeon, a committed eugenicist and Superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and the Feeble Minded.  In the now infamous SCOTUS ruling, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.  thundered that the US was being “overwhelmed by incompetents” and that “three generations of imbeciles was enough”. The victim, Carrie Elizabeth Buck was no imbecile but a poor and powerless black woman incarcerated in Bell’s Virginia State Colony for the supposed “crime” of feeble mindedness and promiscuity: the sole evidence being that that she was an orphan who at the age of 18 had borne an illegitimate child as the result of rape. But for all the inhumane excesses of the United States and Swedish governments, the most enthusiastic adopter of Eugenics principles was the National Socialist Government of Germany between 1933 and 1945. The Nazis added mass murder to its eugenics racial cleansing toolbox. It was the post-war realisation of the full horrors and scale of the Nazi Holocaust, along with better scientific knowledge on how genetic inheritance actually works, to finally discredit the Eugenics movement.
3. In in the late 1940s, it was noticed that there was a noticeable rise in the number of people (mostly men) dying from coronary heart disease or CHD. A few sensible scientists pointed out that CHD was strongly age- related and the rise simply a reflection of increased longevity (i.e. good news, we are living longer). But scientists often scorn simple explanations in favour of explanations from the fields of esoteric knowledge that they have spent long years acquiring. Dr Ansel Keys (Professor of Physiology at the U. of Minnesota and the developer of the eponymous K-Rations for US infantrymen in WW2) and cardiologist Dr Paul Dudley White (the Head of the American Heart Association, AHA) called the rise an epidemic and laid the blame solely at overconsumption of fat (meat, dairy, eggs) in our diet. Using United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) data, Keyes in 1953 published (7) a graph showing a compelling linear correlation between dietary fat consumption and deaths from CHD in six countries (USA, Canada, UK, Italy, Australia & Japan). But the paper was a piece of egregious scientific finagling. If Keys had used the full data set of 22 countries available from the FAO, there would have been no neat correlation. Before plotting his graph, Keys simply omitted data from countries that were inconvenient to his story (8). But criticisms of Key’s paper came too late. The Dietary Fat = CHD meme had already escaped, like a virus from a Wuhan Lab, and spread around the world. The idea rapidly became near the unanimous scientific opinion of university departments, learned Academies and Government Agencies. Ansel Keys made the cover of Time Magazine in 1961. The income of the AHA soared from $1.5 million in 1949 to $26 million in 1962, and it continued to rise (9).                                    Time Magazine: the bellwether for fashionable ideas.                                                                                                                                                                     In 1976, the US Committee on Nutrition published a survey that showed 98.9% of “nutritionary scientists” supported the dietary fat/CHD connection. The phrases Follow The Science, The Science is Settled, Consensus of Experts and Scientists Say,. were used by activists and repeated endlessly by media and politicians (in a different context, these slogans are still being used today). The few dissenting scientists (presumably from the 1.1% minority of the survey) were sidelined, cancelled or fired. This was the Mathew Effect in operation. But eventually – it took 50 years – heroic clinical trials involving hundreds of thousands of people tracked by surveys over periods of up to 40 years, showed no evidence that dietary fat causes CHD. Major data reviews (meta-analyses) by the Cochrane Collaboration (acknowledged as the gold standard of epidemiological reviews) and others in 2000, 2001, 2004, 2007 and 2012 concluded: “there are no clear effects of dietary fat changes in total cardiovascular events” (10). The scare was over, good science had driven out the bad, but the harm it caused lives on to this day.  It has been argued that the present-day surge in obesity and Type-2 Diabetes is the direct result of the “Great Diet Shift” that took place during the latter part of the 20^th century, where whole populations in the Western World moved away from meat and dairy to diets high in carbohydrate (bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, sugar). For more information and detail on the great fat scare (lipophobia) of latter half of the 20th century, go to my earlier blog post HERE.
4. In the early 1980s, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were medical researchers at the University of Western Australia. They discovered that gastric (or peptic) ulcers are caused by gut infection with the bacterium helicobacter pylori and not, as the medical establishment had believed for over a century, by stress, spicy food, excess stomach acid, smoking, alcohol, whatever – the only treatment being offered horrendous invasive surgery (which did not actually work). In 1983, Marshall and Warren submitted their findings to the Gastroenterology Society of Australia. It was rejected by their reviewers as among the worst submissions they had received that year. The paper was subsequently published in 1984 by the Lancet (https://doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(84)91816-6 ). The publication was opposed by conventional medicine which held that bacteria could not survive in the acid environment of the stomach. Despairing of a breakthrough, in 1987 Marshall drank a culture of helicobacter pylori that he had obtained from his patients. Within a few days, he was suffering all the unpleasant symptoms of an active gastric ulcer. Marshall then quickly cured himself with a course of antibiotics. This heroic experiment brought Marshall notice and the Marshall and Warren infection theory slow acceptance. Starting in 1994, ten years after the first publication of their results, the pair began to be awarded a stream of scientific honours and prizes, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2005.  But for over 10 years sufferers from gastric ulcers had been denied an available, effective, cheap and non-invasive cure for their condition [11].

What happened to those experts who for over 400 years peddled, and in many cases enforced, false narratives with unshakeable ex-cathedra authority? When new evidence falsified their ideas, did they recant and apologise? No, the majority did not and took their obsolete theories to their graves. As mathematician/physicist Max Planck (inventor of Quantum Theory) cynically observed in 1921: “Science progresses one funeral at a time”. 

The museum of once-fashionable science. Click for sharper image

American philosopher George Santayana said in 1905: “Those who don’t know the past are condemned to repeat it”. History should teach us caution, but human beings are vulnerable to prophets of doom and each generation breeds its own false narrative. Where our ancestors were cursed by religious orthodoxy masquerading as knowledge, Social Darwinism masquerading as genetics, lipophobia masquerading as nutritional advice and old wives’ tales masquerading as gastroenterology, today we are cursed by computer-model outputs masquerading as evidence. I speak here of today’s fashionable scientific study, Climate Catastrophism, which, over the last 40 years, has gained great traction by predicting climate apocalypse if we do not mend our evil ways.

In all these cases, the authority and influence of the science elites were, and are, heavily reinforced by the Mathew Effect.

Postscript

As an antidote to the general cynical tone of this post, I am pleased to conclude on a more upbeat note. When considering the inertia in the birth and demise of scientific paradigms, one can argue that things are getting better. Bruno in 1600 was tortured then burnt at the stake for his heliocentric beliefs; Galileo in 1643 was merely shown the instruments of torture. It took 60 years for Galton’s eugenics theory to discredited. It took 50 years for the dietary fat scare to be disproven, but it took only 10 years for Marshall and Warren to disprove the medical dogma on gastric ulcers.

Footnotes

The post The Mathew Effect, and other Problems of Science appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

The Scottish kilt and distinctive clan tartans are inventions of Englishmen in the early 18^th to early 19^th centuries. Most people, Scots and English alike, now believe they are the product of an ancient Scottish Celtic culture. Although the Celts lost their rebellions against the British Crown and Parliament in 1715 and 1745, Celtic mythmaking, with English help, eventually conquered the Lowland Scots, the English, and finally the world.

The Invention of the Kilt [1]

“Traditional” Highland Dress – Myth and Reality

More than 70 years ago, my father (an Edinburgh historian and teacher) told me this story – it’s an old Edinburgh joke that probably dates back to the 1920s when he too was a lad:

“If a Londoner sees a man in a kilt, they think he’s a Scotchman. In Edinburgh, if they see a man in a kilt, they think he’s a Highlander. In the Highlands, however, if they see a man in a kilt they know he’s an Englishman.”

Alas, how things have changed.

Travel to Scotland today (as I did earlier this year) you will be welcomed at the border by a person (a woman on this occasion) playing the bagpipes in full “highland” motley. Ghillie brogues, knee-high hose with tassels and sgian-dubh, tartan kilt secured by a broad belt from which was suspended a long hairy sporran, black jacket with silver buttons over which was thrown a tartan shoulder plaid secured at the shoulder with a large silver brooch. All this topped by a glengarry cap with cath dath trim, red pom-pom and eagle feather.

Continuing to the capital Edinburgh, your ears are assailed on every corner of Princes Street by more kilted persons playing medleys of Scottish tunes. I spotted a tour guide from Germany dressed in tartan kilt and sporran (what clan did he belong to?). In the Royal mile there was a wild-haired, bare-chested man in a kilt with his face painted blue – I think he was channeling Mel Gibson in that wildly-inaccurate 1995 Hollywood Movie Braveheart. It seemed that every second or third shop was offering to kit you out in your own personal clan tartan. Even in the Highlands itself, you can’t always get away from the tourist shtick.

Edinburgh Retail Interlude:

“Guten Morgen. Herr Schmidt, from Dusseldorf, ja, ja? – yes, one moment sir… (he types on his computer) – yes here it is, we do have a tartan for you, sir – it is the ancient dress tartan of the McHaggis of Invercreagh. A Herr Schmidt from Heidelberg was here – yes, yes, yes, in this very shop sir – in… aah…let  me see, 2003 – and he assured us that his great-great grandfather married a bonny lass from the McHaggis clan in 1876. We have very strict standards in this establishment, you know – but you most definitely do qualify sir”.

Lowlanders make up more than 80% of the Scottish population and have mostly Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Welsh or Irish roots. Prior to the late 18^th Century, Lowlanders almost universally regarded Celtic Highlanders as half-naked savages living in primitive conditions outside of normal, law-abiding, civilised society. They were not wrong.

The few available accounts of the dress of Highlanders before the mid-to-late 18^th century describe (in some cases with wood-cut illustrations) a single long length of hand-woven woolen cloth called a plaid, woven in a cross-banded pattern called tartan [2]. Hand spinning and weaving were then a scattered cottage industry throughout the Highlands and Islands. The plaid was worn over the shoulder to hang fore-and-aft to mid-thigh and secured at the waist by a belt. Below the waist, the plaid was arranged to form a sort of open-sided mini-skirt. Excess material could be draped over the head and shoulders like a shawl or hoodie or bundled around the waist like a shed pullover. In short, a cheap, one-piece, multi-purpose garment, useable for many things, but not the most efficient at any. The wealthy few might wear a woolen or linen shift below the plaid. The even wealthier few (i.e. Clan Chiefs) scorned the peasant dress and wore tartan trousers called trews (or trowse).

Following the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1715, English Regiments were stationed in the West Highlands at Fort William and in the East at Inverness. The Army built new roads and tried to suppress inter-clan fighting and ensure safety for travelers.

The early 18^th century was the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in England. The first practical, commercial steam engine was developed by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Demand for iron products was growing steadily.

Thomas Rawlinson (1669-1737) was a member of a family of Quaker Ironmasters who owned and operated a number of iron smelters in Lancashire and Chesire. They used hematite ore from nearby mines and reduced it to iron with charcoal. The ore was plentiful, but wood for making the charcoal was not.

Around 1725, Rawlinson travelled to the now quasi-pacified Highlands to seek fresh charcoal supplies. His eyes were on the virgin birch forests of Invergarry, north of Inverness [3]. These were owned by Ian McDonnell, Clan Chief of the McDonnells of Glengarry. Rawlinson and The McDonnell formed a partnership. The Chief would lease access to his forests and provide labour from his serfs. Rawlinson would ship iron ore from England to Glengarry and build an iron smelter there; for their return journey, his ships would load charcoal for England. A synergistic and mutually profitable arrangement, they hoped. Representing his family, Rawlinson moved to live in Glengarry (he rebuilt Invergarry castle, destroyed by the Army after the 1715 rebellion) and became Managing Director of the enterprise.

Rawlinson soon realised that the half-naked dress of his new employees was unsuitable for industrial operations, whether felling trees, making charcoal or attending to iron furnaces. For Rawlinson it was a Health and Safety issue, but the garb also offended his English Quaker sensibilities. So, around 1727, he approached the tailor of the English Redcoat Regiment stationed in nearby Inverness and together they devised a suitable industrial dress for his employees. This was a separate, belted, mid-knee length tartan skirt in plaid material featuring multiple stitched-down pleats to keep it heavy and weighted. Rawlinson called this garment by the English word ”kilt” [1]. His Gaelic speaking employees called it a philibeg, or little skirt. Both Rawlinson and the Chief wore the new dress, and its obvious practical advantages soon made it widely popular.

In 1725, with interclan fighting and disorder still rife in the Highlands, the English authorities raised an armed militia (then called a watch), to help keep Law and Order. The Watch drew its recruits from Highland clans that had been loyal to the crown during the 1715 rebellion. These recruits were mainly Cambells, but also included Grants, Frasers and Munros.  They were outfitted with a uniform of a one-piece belted plaid (12 yards long!) in a new distinctive dark tartan of forest green and navy-blue. This quickly led to their nickname the Black Watch (in Gaelic: Am Freiceadan Dubh).

For a very different explanation of this nickname, and the subsequent history of the Black Watch and other Highland Regiments, see footnote [4].

The presence of the Watch created the beginnings of the idea that groups of Highlanders could be identified by a common tartan pattern. In 1739, the Black Watch Militia was converted to a line Regiment and their plaid replaced by a kilt, topped with the red jacket with contrasting regimental facings of the British soldier.

The Invention of Clan Tartans

In 1822, the brothers John and Charles Allen [5] appeared in Edinburgh. They were born and raised in southern England from an English naval family (their grandfather was an Admiral, their father a naval Lieutenant), but nothing of their early life is known. Somehow, by the time they were young adults, they had acquired a fascination for and a knowledge of Gaelic and Celtic myth and legend. For many years before their arrival in Edinburgh, they appear to have been corresponding with major Scottish tartan retailers. These were now commercial firms concentrated in centers close to the Highlands, like Stirling. The Allens provided them with “traditional” designs that the brothers, when later challenged, would claim to be based on an ancient, illustrated text in their possession – a document (they claimed) given to one of their ancestors by Bonnie Prince Charlie no less [6]. Among their many talents, the Allens obviously had a flair for textile design. Of course, no one ever got to see the original of this ancient family document. Sir Walter Scott asked but was fobbed off with elaborate and ingenious excuses. The designs, along with elaborate and fanciful stories of their origins and how they came to be in the possession of the Allen family were eventually published by them as Vestiarium Scotticum” (1842) and later as “Costume of the Clans” (1845). These lavish, limited-edition, books, with their multiple hand-coloured plates, became a major source of tartan designs throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

1822 marked the visit to Edinburgh of the Hanoverian King George IV. This was a big and lavish event: the first visit of a British monarch to Scotland for almost 200 years. The event organiser, romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott, requested that all Highlands clan chiefs to come to Edinburgh to meet the King. Each was to bring a number of retainers identically dressed in a kilt of a distinctive tartan, so that so that the elderly King could tell which clan was which.  The Chiefs, enthused by their new-found status, hurried off to the Stirling tartan emporiums to choose tartan designs from their pattern books. These patterns were mostly the creations of, or inspired by, the Allen brothers. Edinburgh was full of tartaned, kilted Highlanders.

The King was charmed and ordered for himself a kilt in Royal Stuart tartan (bright red, white. yellow and blue industrial colours: you can Google a portrait of the portly Hanoverian in this outfit). The extravaganza was a great success. The Celts had finally conquered Scotland, and England too. Their sartorial revenge for the battle of Culloden in 1745. Later, these concocted Celtic myths were to conquer the British diaspora around the World as well. Every Highlander, Lowlander, or Englishman with a Scottish surname, or a hint of Scottish blood in their ancestry can now choose their very own “traditional” tartan [7].

Death charge of the Highlanders: The Battle of Culloden, 1745

Queen Victoria and her Consort Prince Albert fell in love with the Highlands during a visit to Scotland in 1843, They bought an estate near Braemar in the Dee valley of Perthshire where, in 1848, they built Balmoral Castle – a vast,  grey-granite, neo-gothic mish-mash of castellations, Romanesque arches, pointy (and pointless) turrets, faux arrow loops and Juliette balconies: the interior filled with Victorian-Gothic-Celtic-tartan kitsch. There Victoria and her husband would spend their summer holidays and Albert could stalk deer or shoot grouse in his kilt without appearing too ridiculous. A tradition the Royal Family has maintained to this day.

With Victoria and Albert as an example, wealthy upper-class Englishmen (and not a few Lowland Scots) flocked to the Highlands to buy similar estates where they could act the role of Clan Chiefs and slaughter the local wildlife which bigger, more numerous and much wilder than anything available in England. They bought land, as Victoria had done, from Clan Chiefs eager to sell out their tenants for a dollop of cash. The English aristocracy pretended to be Clan Chiefs: The Clan Chiefs pretended to be English aristocracy.  The local subsistence population (whose presence with their sheep and cattle would have restricted the field of fire) had their tenancies revoked and forced to move out. Single young men flocked to the local Highland Regiment recruitment centers; others sought employment in the rapidly-industrialising Lowland cities. A huge number emigrated to the United States or the Colonies. The Highlands became depopulated and remain so this day, an event known as the Highland Clearances.

Final Thoughts

There are no real villains in this story. Thomas Rawlinson brought jobs and money to an impoverished Highland community and had concerns for his workers’ physical and moral safety.

John and Charles Allen made little or no money from their fantastical schemes and got no royalties on their designs. More charming, deluded eccentrics than fraudsters, they lived on the charity of friends and died in genteel poverty in the late 1870s, still researching their imaginary roots.

The Celtic myths they helped promote were harmless and amusing stories that give all Scots a sense of Nationhood and a glorious, romantic past.

Generic tartan patterns are genuine Highland inventions that reflect the artistic genius of the Celts.

Victoria and Albert, playing at dressing up in their Highland Estate, were hardworking Royals who deserved their summer holiday fun.

The “traditional” Highland dress, for all its dubious origins, is still a fine and impressive dress for a man.

Looking even further back in time

My tale of Scottish myths and legends almost exactly mirrors how, around the 13^th century, the Anglo-Norman ruling aristocracy of England adopted the Celtic myths of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany – the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table - as the true history of their own inheritance. This is an example of the process to which the quote at the head of the post refers.

Acknowledgments

My content, as well as its title, is taken from the book: The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History, by Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Specifically, Part III: The Sartorial Myth. Trevor-Ropers’ book was published by Yale University Press and printed by Cambridge University Press in 2006. It is a meticulous scholarly work with full documentation and references and written an easy and readable style.

Extra details have been added from internet searches. The words, commentary, opinions and illustrations are mine.

*****

 Personal Note: This post was prompted by nostalgic feelings for Scotland as it was when I was a lad more than 70 years ago. But would I really want to live back then with no fridge in the kitchen, no washing machine in the laundry, no TV in the lounge, no computer in the office, no car in the garage, no personal communication device in my pocket and a life expectancy of around 70 years?   Definitely not.

 ******

The post The Invention of Scotland appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

In my previous post (Benford’s Law – 1), I footnoted the following:

“Confusingly, there is another Benford’s Law, propounded in 1980 by US physicist Gregory Benford. It states: “Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available”. (Gregory) Benford’s “Law” is an interesting and humorous aphorism rather than a scientific Law and is much less known than that of Simon Newcomb and Frank Benford.”

Gregory Benson’s Law. Click for larger image

The “Law” comes from the words of a character in Gregory Benford’s 1980 Sci-Fi novel “Timescape”. According to the Wiki synopsis, Timescape is a dystopian novel set in a future 1998 where the world is threatened by human-caused ecological disaster. It is saved by a hero scientist (a physicist, of course) who invents a time machine and travels back to the 1980s in order to persuade humanity from their evil ways, but in the process gets involved in various time related paradoxes.  The novel was popular and won many awards. Sounds like a fun read.

The first of the three blockbuster films in the movie franchise series Back to the Future, was released only two years later. Their creator and Director – Robert Zemickis – could easily have been inspired by Gregory Benford’s book. The films feature a genius scientist (Emmet “Doc” Brown), who is most definitely passionate, so any influence from Gregory Benford’s book was maybe not too deep.

However, the idea behind Gregory Benford’s “Law” is hardly original. In the 5th century BC, Greek historian Thucydides wrote: “Ignorance is bold and knowledge is reserved”.  In his 1928 book Skeptical Essays, British philosopher and mathematician Betrand Russell wrote: “Passion is the measure of the holders’ lack of knowledge”. Both these authors put the idea much more succinctly than Gregory Benford.

We can all nod and smile at this, thinking perhaps of passionate youth confronting their elders with their new-found insights. The elders just smile calmly with the close-lipped smile of reason and knowledge. Greta Thunberg immediately springs to mind.

The “smile” of youthful passion (and ignorance) – 16-year-old Greta Thunberg addresses the United Nations on Climate Change, 23rd September 2019. 

The close-lipped smile of reason and knowledge (with a touch of hubris) – 45-year-old Sky News host Rita Panahi, posing.

But of course, passion is a psychological trait that does not necessarily accompany youth or age, ignorance or knowledge. Youthful passion can sometimes reflect real insight denied the more orthodox thinking of their elders, and there is no reason why someone with deep knowledge should not be passionate in arguing for their subject. Aphorisms can only go so far.

The post Benford’s Law (2) appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

In any given set of large (i.e. spanning several orders of magnitude) random numbers, one might expect that all the digits from 1 to 9 should appear, statistically, at each position in the number sequence around 11% (100/9) of the time[1].

In 1881 Canadian astronomer Simon Newcomb, and again independently in 1938 American physicist Frank Benford, noticed that, in sets of large numbers obtained by measuring natural physical phenomena, digit 1 appears as the first digit of the number on average 30% of the time, 2 appears in this position 26% of the time and so on through to digit 9, which appears in the first position a mere 5% of the time. Benford called this the “Law of Anomalous Numbers” or the “Law of First Digits”, but it has today come to be known as the Newcomb-Benford Law or, more commonly, just Benford’s Law[2]. Benford’s Law is a statistical effect, so our set of measured numbers must contain many examples before the effect can be conclusively demonstrated.

The light bulb moment for Newcomb came when he noticed that the first few pages of his book of logarithmic tables (covering numbers 1,2 & 3) were much more thumbed and dog-eared than the final few pages covering numbers 7, 8 & 9 [3].

Counterintuitively, Benford’s Law holds true even for systems which we might expect to be randomly distributed, for example: the lengths of the hundred longest rivers in the world. It holds true no matter what physical characteristic of a system (mass, length, volume, radiation, dollars etc..) is being measured. The Law also holds true irrespective of the units being used (SI v Imperial, meters v kilometers, grams v tonnes, light years v parsecs) provided that the units employed give sufficiently large numbers for the thing being measured. The numbers can be to base 10 (our normal system of counting), base 60 (as used by the ancient Babylonians) or base 2 (as used by computers). It does not, however, hold true for artificially restricted numbers (telephone numbers, for example).

Why is this so? Clever mathematicians and statisticians have pondered this question and, although I do not fully understand all their explanations, the one answer that I do understand seems to lie in the positional number system that we use to represent large numbers.

In the following, remember that we read large numbers from left to right, but add to them (count) from right to left.

With our numbering system, we unconsciously use logarithms almost every day. The system is a not-so-secret code which specifies that a in a number expressed as a linear sequence of digits, the digits are arranged logarithmically. Each number position (slot) contains an order of magnitude more digits than the position immediately to its right. Thus, the five-position number 76543, when we break the code, represents (7×10000) +(6×1000) +(5×100) +(4×10) +3.

When we are counting with this system, each added unit goes into right-hand position of our growing number. When that position is filled, the units are converted to a 1 which is then transferred to the second position from the right.  Adding units steadily to the right-hand slot, it will take ten times as long to fill the second slot as it does to fill the first, and ten times as long again to fill the third slot as it does the second, and so on. When we stop counting, it is therefore much more likely the slot on the right will contain a 9 than any position to its left. Turning the argument around, it is likely that when counting stops, the left-hand position of our large number – the last slot to be filled – will contain a 1 than any slot to its right. The same argument can be made for all the other digits from 2 to 8.

Benford’s Law has found many practical applications in the detection of fraud. It cannot prove a fraud, but it can quantify a “that does look right” moment and so focus further investigation. Crooked accountants inventing false company profits. Bureaucrats working for corrupt Governments producing false GDP figures. Scientists publishing fake data. Fishermen lowering the weight of their annual haul to meet Government catch limits. Taxpayers doing their annual returns. In all such cases, liars are likely to produce numbers that do not correspond the Benford’s Law. The reason is that creators of large false numbers will instinctively seek to distribute their digits randomly along the sequence.

A good example (I take this from the statology.org website) is the collapse of the giant US energy company Enron in 2001. Forensic accountants, applying Benford’s Law to Enron’s public accounts, showed that they did not satisfy the Law. This could have, and should have, raised suspicions about Enron’s viability if said forensic accountants had carried out their work before the company collapse, rather than after. Enron’s auditor for many years – Arthur Andersen LLP, one of the world’s largest accounting firms with over 84,000 employees – deservedly followed Enron into receivership in 2003. Note that number 84000 – although large, it has only two significant figures.

The average crook

Law enforcement relies on being smarter than the average crook. That, unfortunately, is not always the case. More sophisticated liars can research Benford’s Law – as I have done – and make sure that their numbers pass this test.

Can Benford’s Law be applied to the mining industry? Mining and exploration companies can falsify their financial accounts like any other company. However, when they announce their resource figures these do not normally contain enough significant digits. No company ever presents their metal resource to the nearest ounce of gold or ton of base metal – a large element of rounding is always used, reflecting the inherent uncertainty of such calculations. A knowledgeable person would not need Benford to recognise BS when they see it.

Take the biggest mining fraud in history – the Busang scandal of the mid to late-1990s (for full details and analysis on the Busang fraud see my previous posts HERE and HERE).

In this fraud, a small group of contract Filipino geologists working for the Canadian junior exploration company Bre-X, added purchased alluvial gold to drill samples from the Busang gold project, located in the remote jungle of Central Borneo, in the Indonesian province of Kalimantan. The crushed and mixed samples were then sent to an independent laboratory to be assayed. From thousands of assays results reported regularly to the Toronto stock exchange over a three-year period, expert analysts calculated that the Busang deposit contained over 70 million ounces of gold. Hyperbolic, overexcited, financial journalists enthused over a potential for 200 million ounces. At its peak, the penny stock Bre-X soared to CAN$286.50, valuing the company at CAN$6 billion. The fraudsters made cash by trading in company stock.

But 70 million ounces is a round figure. All one can say is that it is a very big number for a single gold deposit. There is nothing for Benford to work on here. And the Borneo fraudsters were sophisticated; they did not just add a pinch of gold dust to each of around 10,000 drill samples (my estimate). Operating over several years in a secret jungle laboratory, they carefully weighed calculated amounts of gold to each sample to precisely create desired assay numbers compatible with a real hard-rock epithermal gold system.

The deception continued for several years. Geologists who knew the Indonesian exploration scene and fancied themselves knowledgeable in gold exploration (I was one) did not suspect fraud even though there were some puzzling aspects to the steady stream of data provided by Bre-X. The sheer scale, duration and sophistication of the fraud that would have been necessary was beyond our experience and our imagination.

The criminality was finally exposed in 1997 by the arrival of a geological team at Busang from the American mining company Freeport-McMoRan – the first outside experts to be allowed on site. They were there to carry out a due diligence study prior to Freeport making a takeover offer for Bre-X. But the unmasking of the fraud was too late for the thousands of Canadian mum-and-dad and corporate investors who collectively lost 6 billion dollars when Bre-X was delisted. No one was ever charged with the crime [4].

The post Benford’s Law (1) appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

Experimental science is focused observation guided by emergent theory. Geologists exploring for minerals are experimental scientists. They study rocks in the field with a series of experiments to test their ideas about the occurrence of metallic concentrations. But many exploration programs today deny these simple truths and believe the exploration geologist’s role is mindless acquisition of mass data as feed for computer programs. Given sufficiently large data sets (the organisers of such programs reason) the might of the micro-chip is all that is required to find an orebody.

Speak to exploration geologists and you will find two opposing views about how to observe outcrop or drill core.  Some seek merely to be unbiased objective recorders of what they see.  Others observe the rock in the wider context of their theories about region or prospect geology and ask questions of the exposure to help choose between these theories.

I characterize these two approaches with the metaphors of geologist-as-camera, and geologist-as-interrogator.

The Geologist as camera

I arrive at the exploration site to find a team of three young geologists engaged in making a geological map of their large exploration acreage. Using GPS, they walk predetermined traverses spaced 2-400m apart. Each aim to average 8km a day and between them, by taking alternate lines, they cover a large swathe of country before their next field break. Observations on each geological feature along the line of march are logged into a field-hardened tablet computers by going through a series of pull-down menus and checking boxes on pre-determined questions. The geologists have only the vaguest ideas about the geology of the property they are mapping. Two of them have never thought much about this: the brightest of the three specifically rejects the notion of understanding her observations: she sees herself as an unprejudiced objective observer: confirmation bias is not for her. Eventually all this data is computer-plotted to 2D images as linear sequences of point observation.  Another more senior geologist might eventually produce a 2D geological map by joining the dots. Probably there is a software program that can do much of this task for him (or her) and thus obviate the need for too much thought or hard work.

I travel to an exploration site on the other side of the country. Here, a much larger company have been drill testing a substantial metal deposit for several years. Four diamond rigs are going 24/7 and have drilled well over 300 holes. Stacked on pallets, several kilometers of core are waiting to be logged. Four geologists are hard at work logging core laid out in the open on long racks. It seldom happens that any one hole is logged in its entirety by the same person. Logging is done on to spread sheets in laptop computers using alpha-numeric codes on pre-determined menu options. There are more than 50 columns on their spreadsheet and the same digital form has been used since hole one. The geologists have never seen a drill section of the prospect (there are none). There are no detailed maps or level plans either. The geological model, such as it is, was produced a year before by an outside consultant who spent ten days on site. Back in the head office, a specialist Ore Reserve Geologist ignores 95% of the vast data base and calculates a resource based on assay numbers, virtual reality 3D string models and geostatistics. For the young geologists at point, labouring in the core yard, their job is 100-meter-a-day, core-logging automata is mind-numbingly boring. They count the days till their next field break, or until they have earned enough money to be able to resign and find some other more intellectually stimulating employment. Taxi driving, anyone?

After a long day core logging, Susan contemplates a career change.

These are anonymized projects, extreme examples perhaps, but based on observations of many actual projects, with many companies in many different countries over many years. Not all exploration projects are conducted like this of course, but I am sure readers will recognize the method of doing geology that I describe.

The geologists themselves are not to blame. In many cases it is their first job, they are on short-term contracts, and they are doing what their employer asks and expects of them. They probably wonder what the point was of much of the time they spent learning geological theory and critical thinking at university and have come to believe that the essence of their job as exploration geologists is to convert light signals from their eyes into digital computer feed according to pre-set formulae. A kind of biological digital camera.  Without a pre-existing context in their brain, each observation they make has equal importance, each pixel equal weight.

There is a better way.

The geologist as interrogator

All observation is made in a particular context. The context which should guide the exploration geologist is a matrix of different competing theories about the true nature of the geology being observed. This context provides the questions that must be asked of each outcrop or each piece of drill core. It defines the strategy to be followed in the search for those critical observations that allow selection between multiple working hypotheses. The idea of multiple working hypotheses was first propounded by 19th Century USGS geologist Thomas Crowther Chamberlin ⁽¹⁾. It is a methodology now used in all fields of science research ⁽²⁾, but geologists can be proud that the first clear statement and naming of this procedure came from their own profession.

Critical observations are those that fit into a pre-existing context or, just as importantly, those that do not. These are prioritized and not lost in a sea of trivial observation.

The method does not guarantee that you will arrive at the correct solution. Your evidence may be less than ideal, the expression in the rocks of geological events may be atypical.  Nature can be chaotic and unpredictable: the true hypothesis you should be testing may be the one that you – or perhaps no one else – have/has yet thought of. In all science, and especially geological science, neat, clean results where all observations slot in exactly to a model are rare and, when this happens, should be regarded with some skepticism. But despite all that, the method of multiple working hypotheses is still the best-known procedure for navigating apparent (or real) chaos and approaching the truth.

After a morning of fieldwork, Robert interrogates his lunchtime sandwich using the method of Multiple Working Hypotheses.

All geologists have biases. These were imprinted through university training and reinforced by early-career mentoring and reading geological literature relevant to the job.  Collecting data to choose between these hypotheses or to help formulate new ones is biased observation. But this bias is a good thing where it is up-front, acknowledged and constantly revised and re-focused in the face of evidence. Without bias, there is no way of separating signal from noise. This is a totally different kind of bias from the one that uncritically accepts only evidence that confirms a single pre-existing theory – one you might have fallen in love with – and ignores, or explains away, evidence which does not. That is Confirmation Bias, rightly condemned.

All scientists have a point of view. All views must have come from somewhere. Anyone who claims to make unbiased observation merely lacks self-awareness. Their biases are unconscious or lie in the biases of whoever drew up the detailed procedure manual which they follow.

The metaphor I use for this approach is the geologist as an interrogator of each rock exposure or core piece, asking a series of relevant questions that come from a range of competing views his as to what might be happening, with each question determined by the answer to the previous question.

Interrogating drill core.

The Scientific Method

The true nature of scientific investigation is focused observation guided by emergent theory. This is a long established and respectable idea and contrasts with seeking to find your theory in your data after you have completed your observations.

Collecting data should not be a fishing expedition that hopes to fortuitously hook new understanding or ideas on its line.  Its purpose should be to provide evidence to choose between a wide range of pre-existing hypotheses.  It therefore follows that the hypotheses must come first.

Seeking your hypothesis in your results is an acknowledged error in many scientific disciplines. So much so that it been given its own acronym – HARKing (Hypothesizing After Results are Known ⁽³⁾). In statistics-based research the same error is known as p-hacking ⁽⁴⁾.  Both techniques have been, and undoubtedly still are, widely used in science ⁽⁵⁾.

The parable of the Texas Sharpshooter provides a dramatic example of the HARKing method at work. As the cited Nature article ⁽⁵⁾ explains:

The Texan directs multiple shots at a barn door. He then selects the closest grouping of the random impacts and draws a target around them. A carefully cropped photograph is then used to establish his sharpshooting credentials.

The Texas Sharpshooter

The idea that theories should precede observation is the exact opposite of what is popularly believed, including by many scientists. Sherlock Holmes, for example, is usually quoted approvingly:

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

But Sherlock’s patronizing throw-away line to Watson could not be more wrong. Contrast it with these quotes from real scientists – as opposed to a fictional one.

In Biology:

How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observations must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.  Charles Darwin, letter to Henry Fawcett September 1861.

In Physics:

We never draw inferences from observations alone, but observations can become significant when they reveal deficiencies in some of the contending explanations. David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality, 1998.

“If (your hypothesis) disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. And that simple statement is the key to science. Richard Feynman, 1964

In the Philosophy of Science:

Half of Science is asking the right questions. Roger Bacon (1219-1292).

The facts that we measure or perceive never just speak for themselves but must be interpreted through the colored lens of ideas…. We can no more separate our theories and concepts from our data than we can find a true Archimedean viewpoint – a God’s eye view – of ourselves and the world. Michael Schermer, Scientific American, 2007

In Medical Research:

…you cannot find your hypothesis in your results. Before you go to your data…you have to have a specific hypothesis to check. If your hypothesis comes from analyzing your data, then there is no sense in analyzing the same data again to confirm it.  Ben Goldacre, Bad Medicine, 2008.

In Psychology:

I am more and more convinced that the only way to obtain clear answers from Nature is to ask her clear questions. Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Professor of Neuro-Cognitive Modelling, University of Amsterdam, 2014.

 Final words

But despite this, it is my observation that the geologist-as-camera view is becoming increasingly common in exploration geology.  This slows down the acquisition of knowledge and can be disastrous for understanding.

One should always remember the quatrain:

Data is not information

Information is not knowledge

Knowledge is not understanding

Understanding is not wisdom ⁽⁷⁾

Without geological understanding, drill holes can be put in the wrong place, or ten are drilled where one would have sufficed. Without good geological models that reflect reality, the certainty required to convert an Ore Resource into a bankable Proven Reserve cannot be easily or cheaply achieved.

No one – beyond its most starry-eyed proponents – believe that AI will one day be able to fill in all the steps that lie between data and wisdom.

I cannot resist a final quote, this one from Albert Einstein:

Knowledge is knowing it’s a one-way street. Wisdom is looking both ways when you cross.

 ******

This is an updated and amended version of a previous post entitled The Camera and the Interrogator

(1) Revisiting Chamberlin: Multiple Working Hypotheses for the 21st Century. LP Elliot & BW Brook. BioScience 57 (7), 608-614  https://doi.org/10/10.1641/B570708

(2) The method of multiple working hypotheses. Thomas Crowther Chamberlin 1890 Science 15 92-96 (reprinted in Science 148, 754-759, 1965). https://doi:10.1126/science.ns-15.366.92

(3) HARKing - an acronym for Hypothesizing After Results are Known.  

(4) p-hacking - carrying out multiple sets of analysis on massive multivariate data sets until the one analysis is found that has “statistical significance” (i.e., p ≥ 0.05, meaning: 5 or fewer chances in a hundred that the result – or indeed any publishable result – was generated by pure chance. The “negative” or “null” analyses go to the filing cabinet or trash can): the “positive” result is published. This leads to what is known publication bias – see footnotes 5 and 6.

 (5) How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop. 2015 paper by Regina Nuzzo. Nature 526,182-185; https://doi.org/10.1038/52618a

(6) The cumulative effect of reporting and citation biases. 2018 by Y.A. De Vries (and five co-authors). Psychological Medicine 48, 2453-2455  https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291718001873

(7) These oft-quoted lines, which are usually attributed to American physicist Clifford Stoll or rock poet Frank Zappa, almost certainly were inspired by the 1934 T S Elliot poem, The Rock:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

 Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The post The Scientific Method and the Practice of Mineral Exploration appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

So, geologists observe, a cycle

Hath smaller cycles that on them prey

And these have yet smaller ones to bite ‘em

And so proceed ad infinitem

Thus, every Era in its kind

Repeats all those that come behind 

RM (after Jonathon Swift, 1733)

The Big Picture

An Ice Age is a significant period of time (tens of millions of years) when permanent ice exists at both poles. In the Earth’s 4,600,000,000-year-long history (4.6Ga) we have evidence for at least 7 Ice Ages, but there were probably more. Each lasted around 20-50 million years and together make up 4-5% of geological time. Ice Ages are not regularly spaced in time, and they show no apparent correlation with major tectonic or volcanic events or atmospheric CO2 levels.

What caused them?  It is likely that they were initiated by external astronomical events, but their duration and intensity controlled by earth-centric forces, such as the distribution of continents.  Speculative theories abound but we just don’t know.

The last of the Ice Ages, known to geologists as the Pleistocene Ice Age or Pleistocene Epoch, began around 2.6 million years ago. We live within a subdivision (I call it a Stage) of the Pleistocene called the Holocene (2) - a period of relative warmth. The Holocene is an interglacial and it began, rather abruptly, around 12,000 years ago (12Ka).

The Holocene itself is one of a series of at least 45 similar brief partial retreats of ice within the Pleistocene, each of which lasted for 5-15Ka. As you can see from Figure 2, the Interglacial that immediately preceded the Holocene is called the Eemian. The Eemian lasted for around 15Ka and reached its maximum warmth (much hotter than today) around 120Ka ago. The Interglacial before the Eemian called is called the La-Bouchet Interglacial, it lasted for 10Ka with peak temperatures around 220Ka. Before La Bouchet there was the Purfleet Interglacial with maximum warmth peaking around 320Ka (but note that these last three interglacials have been given different names in indifferent parts of the world where they have been studied).

We live in an Ice Age called the Pleistocene. We do not know how long the Pleistocene will last, but on the evidence of previous Ice Ages, it probably has many tens of millions of years to run. We do not know how long the Holocene Interglacial will last but on the evidence of previous interglacials within the Pleistocene, the return of  ice sheets to mid- and high-latitude land areas cannot be long delayed. 

A Deep Dive into Deep Time

Earth’s history is divided into four grand and vast periods of time called Eons. These Eons are then subdivided hierarchically into increasingly shorter divisions known as Eras, Periods, Epochs and Stages. Using geologist’s shorthand, where Ka is one thousand years: Ma is 1 million years and Ga is 1 billion years, the Eons are:

the PHANEROZOIC (0 to 543Ma).

 the PROTEROZOIC (543Ma-2.5Ga).

the ARCHAEAN (2.5Ga-4Ga) and..

the HADEAN (4Ga-4.6Ga).

With our short life spans and even shorter memories we have trouble comprehending these gulfs of time. This can lead us to overestimate the significance of the age in which we live. It is a form of human conceit and hubris.

It may help to realize that, on comparative geological/human time scales, the Hadean Eon commenced 20 years ago and the Phanerozoic 6 months ago. Eight days ago, towards the end of the Phanerozoic in an Era called the Mesozoic, dinosaurs roamed the land, sea and air and appeared masters of their universe (then the meteor struck). An Ice Age called the Pleistocene Epoch began around 20 hours ago. The evolution of our genus Homo from ape ancestors is a Pleistocene story. Five minutes ago, during a brief Stage of ice retreat and relative warmth within the Pleistocene called the Holocene, an explosion of human innovation enabled our civilisation to take off and thrive.

The lifetime experience of a single human being comes and goes in less than a second. Or like the snow that falls in the river, a moment white then gone forever.

Such a timetable should teach us humility.

Climate Change Over the Past 540 million Years (the Phanerozoic Eon)

The Phanerozoic began around 540 Ma ago. Its start is defined by an “explosion” of complex new life forms which, as the Eon advanced, evolved to spread from the oceans into every ecological niche on land, sea and air. If we exclude the ice ages, average global temperatures during the Phanerozoic were much higher than today, as were the concentrations of oxygen and CO2 in the atmosphere. Warmth, CO2 and oxygen are essential enablers and drivers of evolution.

Figure 1: 543Ma (million years) of Climate Change. The horizontal axis shows millions of years before present. On the vertical axis, temperatures are estimated from rock proxies. Average temperature during these 540Ma was 20°C, but range from 28° to minus 12° (In 2016 it was 14°). PETM=Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (55.8Ma); EEOC=Early Eocene Climate Optimum (42Ma); MECO=Mid-Eocene Climate Optimum (15-30Ma); EOT=Eocene-Oligocene Transition (40-33Ma); MMCO=Mid-Miocene Climate Optimum (15-13Ma); LGM-Last Glacial Maximum (21Ka); PAW= Post-Anthropogenic Warming (a projected future temperature from IPCC worst-case computer models). White stars indicate rapid cooling events: black stars rapid warming events. Reference: Christopher R Scotese, 2016 (Northwestern University) – Phanerozoic Temperature Curve. Palaeomap Project, Evanston II.

Three Ice Ages (Scotese labels them Icehouses) are apparent on the graph. The most recent of these is called The Pleistocene Ice Age and it began 2.6 Ma ago. The Pleistocene was preceded by 60 million years of slow cooling from the peak Hothouse conditions of the Late Cretaceous Period. The evolution of our species from arboreal primates began in the Pleistocene.

No one knows how long the Pleistocene will last but a comparison with previous Ice Ages suggests it still has tens of millions of years to go.

Climate Change over the Past 543,000 Years (the Latter Part of the Pleistocene)

Figure 2: The graph covers the period from 540 thousand years ago (540Ka) to present – the last 20% of the Pleistocene Ice Age. It shows air temperature (blue line) and atmospheric CO2 concentration (red line) above the Antarctic continent. The data comes from measurement of air bubbles trapped in ancient ice which has been recovered by means of deep drilling. Ice cores provide our best calibrated proxy data and offer around 20-year resolution. That data is broadly consistent with results from other types of proxy data from around the globe. Note: CO2 concentrations show good correlation with air temperature, but their highs and lows occur 500-1000 years after the corresponding peaks and troughs of temperature. This suggests that temperature controls CO2 with a multi-century lag, not the other way around.

During the Pleistocene, glaciers repeatedly advanced south and north from the poles, covering land and sea in mid to high-latitude areas with kilometer-thick ice, sculpting the earth beneath. Sea levels rose and fell by more than 100 meters. As a result, some species of plants and animals became extinct and new species (including ours) evolved. The habitats of almost all were widely redistributed. Again, and again and again.

If we bore down into the Pleistocene, we see a pattern of at least 45 advances and retreats of the ice. In the Early Pleistocene, the temperature peaks (interglacials) were regularly spaced at around 41Ka, but from around 1Ma the temperature peaks slowed to cycles at around 100 Ka. Note that the temperatures of these interglacial interludes, even at their peak, were much lower than what been normal for most of the Phanerozoic. The change from 41Ka cycles to 100Ka cycles is known as the Mid-Peistocene Transition. The longer 100Ka cycles are called Dansgaard-Oeschger Cycles after the two Danish scientists who first defined them. Figure 2 shows the last five of these D-O cycles.

It is widely accepted that the 41Ka and 100Ka cycles were caused by minor variations in the amount of solar radiation (insolation) reaching the earth as a result of cyclical variations in the earth’s orbit around the sun (known as eccentricity) combined with cyclical changes in the obliquity of the earth’s rotational axis relative to its the orbital plane. The two cycles are independent of each other. These astronomical events are called Milankovic Cycles after the Serbian mathematician/astronomer Milutin Milankovic who first defined them in 1914.

To summarise: we live in the Holocene, a Stage of the Pleistocene Ice Age. The Holocene is one of dozens of geologically-brief Pleistocene interglacials. Although the Holocene has overarching significance for the development of human civilisation, it has no particular geological significance. Any other point of view is human conceit (see footnote 2).

During the Eemian Interglacial elephant and hippopotami gamboled on mud flats of the River Thames. They retreated south when temperatures plummeted but, around 100,000 years later with the arrival of the Holocene, another species of large African mammal gamboled once again on the Thames.

Climate Change over the Past 12 thousand Years (the Holocene Stage of the Pleistocene Epoch (2))

Figure 3: Air and sea temperatures over the past 12,000 years measured from ice core data from Greenland and sea-floor sediment data from the Eastern Pacific. Greenland ice core data is from Vinther et al 2009: (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08355). Macassar Strait sediment data is from Rosenthal et al 2013: (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6158/617). Compilation of the two data sets was done by Andy May. The correlation between two regions 9,000 km apart, using two different proxy methods, is compelling.

 Note the very steep initial rise in Holocene temperatures to a maximum around 6-9000 years before present (known as The Holocene Climate Optimum) followed by a slow and gradual decline to the deep trough in temperatures from around 200 to 800 years before present (known as The Little Ice Age). The upward temperature spike at extreme right is called the Modern Warm Period and it began around 200 years ago. It is only “warm” in comparison the preceding neo-glacial conditions. The graph shows that short-term temperature spikes like this are not unprecedented in the Holocene.

As you can see by comparison of figures 2 and 3, all the interglacials of the Pleistocene for which we have good data followed a similar pattern – a rapid 8-10° C rise in air temperature over a just a few decades, followed by a slow fall over the succeeding millennia. The relentless fall of global temperatures from the Holocene Climate Optimum matches this pattern and is an ominous pointer towards the next cyclical advance in the ice.

Will we survive the next ice advance?

 The Modern Warming Trend (which began around 200 years ago – a geological microsecond)- gives faint hope of a delay in the inexorable return of the glaciers. But when that happens, be it in 100-, 500- or 1000+ years’ time, as a species we will surely survive. After all, with lesser technology, we survived the last advance of the ice. But will our civilisation?

Our few descendants (as they shiver before a fire in their caves or trudge through the snow in their furs) will look back with puzzlement on the Global Warming concerns of their 21st Century ancestors (3).

The post Climate change explained in three graphs appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

In 1997, the mining world was rocked by the dramatic exposure of a $6 billion gold salting scandal. From 1994, a crew of corrupt Filipino geologists, working in a remote jungle location in eastern Borneo for a small Canadian mining company called Bre-X, had undertaken industrial-scale salting of a gold prospect called Busang. This was at such a scale, and continued over such a time, as to convince hardheaded global mining companies as well as Mum and Dad Canadian investors that Bre-X had discovered the largest gold mine in the world. Some analysts, working from Bre-X stock exchange reports, estimated well over 200 t of economically recoverable gold.  The resulting 3-year frenzy of greed caused the penny stock Bre-X soar to over $285, valuing the company at over $6 billion. It also exposed corruption at the highest level in Indonesia and lack of oversight by regulators in Canada. When qualified external assessors finally got access to the remote location the fraudsters knew the game was up. Bre-X Chief Geologist Michael De Guzman, on his way back to site to face the music, fell (or did he jump, or was he pushed, or was he even there?) from a helicopter. His body (or at any rate, someone’s body) was recovered on the jungle floor four days later, partially eaten by pigs. The corpse was identified by one of his colleagues from the Busang site before he, and the remaining Filipino members of the crew, flew back to the anonymity of Manila.

Apart from De Guzman, no one was ever named, and no one convicted of crime either in Indonesia or Canada. The Bre-X stock price collapsed overnight, and the company quickly went into receivership. David Walsh, the President and Chief Executive of Bre-X, and his Vice-President of Exploration John Felderhof, retreated to their respective villas on the Cayman Islands.

The whole story revolves around the actions of De Guzman. Bizarrely, although the podcast describes in gruesome detail what De Guzman’s (supposed) corpse (what was left of it) looked like, none of the interviewees describe the living man in any detail, and none give his background or evaluate his character. He remains a shadowy figure. What the witnesses give is a cardboard villain, a toothless, bespectacled, gold-bedecked conman drinking and whoring his way through the fleshpots of Jakarta, Samarinda and Toronto. But De Guzman must have had some impressive qualities to fool so many for so long.

I listened to the podcast in one marathon session and thought it brilliant. The depth of research by the team of journalists working for the BBC and CBC, and their ability, after a 25-year gap, to ferret out and interview key witnesses, was impressive. I have no doubt that this podcast will become the definitive account of the Bre-X scandal. New revelations are unlikely, but who knows? There is still time for an aged de Guzman to reappear from the shadows and tell his side of the tale.

There are numerous unresolved questions, but three major ones stand out:

1. The involvement of Indonesian President Suharto’s family and close associates in the bidding war to gain control of the promised riches of the Busang mine and the actions they may have taken when the extent of the fraud first became apparent.

2. The true involvement of the pilot, the only person in the helicopter besides De Guzman at the time of the incident. He was/is an Indonesian Army Airforce officer and provided the only account of the incident, then was made unavailable for further comment by Government authorities. And what was in the large “box” that witnesses saw being loaded into his Squirrel helicopter at Samarinda airport in Kalimantan immediately prior to the fatal flight? And what credence should we give to the unconfirmed report that a corpse from the Samarinda morgue mysteriously went missing at around that time?

3.  The extent to which David Walsh and John Felderhof were involved in the fraud. Walsh, the President of Bre-X, was an entrepreneur with little previous mining background who would have relied on his Vice President of Exploration, Dutch Canadian geologist Felderhof, for all technical advice.  At the height of the Bre-X boom both Walsh and Felderhof made tens of millions of dollars selling Bre-X stock. After the scandal broke, Felderhof was charged with insider trading by the Toronto Stock Exchange. He pleaded that he was just another innocent, albeit naive, dupe of the fraudsters and, after more than ten years in litigation, was acquitted of the charge. Both Walsh and Felderhof are now dead.

As a geologist, I did much work in Indonesia throughout the 1990’s and have a personal view on many of these matters (see HERE). In my opinion, Felderhof (whom I met and worked with in the field) was a good geologist who, at a critical juncture, allowed desire for fame and riches to overwhelm his professional judgement.

Contract Filipino geologists were much favored for field work throughout SE Asia at that time. All those I worked with were honest, dependable and great companions in the field. They could blend with the local population, were acclimatized to tropical conditions, technically competent and hardworking. But from the point of view of Western mining companies they were, above all, cheap. They were in fact being exploited, and they knew it.

With hindsight, I think it foolish of Bre-X to have offered their site crew extra remuneration in the way of stock options. This was meant to buy loyalty, but once the low-paid field geologists realised that adding $10 worth of locally purchased alluvial gold to a single drill sample could add $100,000 to their potential net worth, the temptation to do just that must have been great. By succumbing, they unwittingly stepped onto an ever faster moving treadmill that could only result in dramatic consequences for all when it finally stopped. It was a classic Ponzi scheme.

The post The Busang $6 Billion Gold scam – A Review of the BBC-CBC Podcast appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

“…one has always to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth, and the truth not always probable.” -Sigmund Freud.  

Langley is an enthusiastic amateur historian and prominent member of the Richard III Society.  In 2012, this enabled her to persuade the Leicester City Council to allow excavation below one of their car parks, resulting in the discovery of the 527-year-old remains of King Richard III. In 2015, Langley set up the crowd-funded Princes in the Tower Project to seek new evidence on the fate of Edward IV’s two young sons Edward V and Richard of York, traditionally thought to have been murdered by Richard. Realizing that English archives had already been exhaustively searched by generations of historians, she and her team sought new original documents in Europe – documents immune to Tudor censorship.  The book tells her results in the form of a Police Cold Case Investigation, making use of all available evidence, including explosive new documents that her team have discovered in the Netherlands, France and Germany.  The book is a well written and a fascinating read that I strongly recommend.

I summarize Langley’s narrative below. It is a complex tale, not helped by the limited stock of Christian names (Henry, Edward, Richard: Elizabeth, Margaret, Eleanor, Catherine) used by the extended Plantagenet family. I retell the story as a continuous linear narrative, separating my own commentary within italicized brackets and putting non-essential detail into footnotes.

THE BACK STORY

The story begins more than 80 years before the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower. As Langley treats this prequel relatively briefly, I take much of this less controversial section from “The Plantagenets” – a popular recent book by main-stream historian Dan Snow.

In 1399, Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Lancaster, deposed and murdered (according to Snow he was probably starved to death) his cousin – Yorkist King Richard II - and had himself crowned Henry IV. Richard was a tyrant whose death was little regretted at the time (Snow), but the murder split the ruling Plantagenet family into two warring factions that came to be known as the House of York and the House of Lancaster.  As the symbol of York was a white rose and that of Lancaster a red, the resulting almost 90 years of on-and-off civil war came to be known as the Wars of the Roses. It was a deadly family feud between cousins.

Henry V succeeded his father. He was a powerful monarch and skilled military leader who successfully renewed the Plantagenet claim to the throne of France at the Battle of Agincourt (1415). But Henry V died relatively young, leaving his 9-month-old son – another Henry – to succeed him. Henry VI grew up to be a simpleton with severe mental problems who, although by all contemporary accounts was amiable, pious and peace-loving, had little interest in governing and easily led by whoever happened to closest to him at the time. As Dan Snow neatly put it: “Henry VI reigned, but he never ruled”.

(Henry VI would have made an ideal monarch for the House of Windsor, but for the 15th century House of Lancaster and for England as a whole, his accession was an unmitigated disaster. As Dan Snow points out, Henry’s character – or rather lack of it – was the single most important cause of the decades of chaos, civil war and death that were to follow).

In 1461 at the epic Battle of Towton, and again in 1471 at the Battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, the young, handsome and energetic Edward Duke of York defeated the Lancastrian forces fighting in the name of his hopeless and hapless cousin Henry VI. These battles enabled Edward to first seize and then retain the throne as Edward IV. After Tewkesbury, Henry VI was imprisoned in the Tower where he died a few months later: from “melancholia” according to Edward, but most later historians believe Henry was murdered on the orders of Edward to prevent him from becoming a figurehead for future Lancastrian rebellions.

THE PLOT

After Tewkesbury, Edward reigned competently for 12 years over a peaceful England, ably and loyally supported by his younger brother Richard of Gloucester. Edward IV died unexpectedly of natural causes in April 1483 at the age of 41. He was survived, inter alia, by his wife Elizabeth (born into the Lancastrian Woodville family, a widow of John Grey), his daughter Elizabeth of York (aged 17) and his sons Edward Prince of Wales (12) and Richard Duke of York (9). The young Edward was immediately acclaimed as King Edward V and his younger brother Richard as his heir. Their paternal Uncle Richard [1] was named in Edward IV’s will as the Protector of his sons until they came of age. In May 1483, Richard removed the boys from the control of their mother Elizabeth and the extended Woodville family, who had hoped to become Regents for Edward V. He housed the boys in the Tower of London – the traditional residence of a monarch awaiting coronation. Arrangements were made for their coronation later that year.

Events now moved fast. The late king’s death had released a skeleton from his cupboard.  In the early summer of 1483, Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells [2], contacted Richard of Gloucester with explosive testimony to the effect that in 1464, prior to Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Grey (nee Woodville), he had officiated (or merely witnessed?) at a secret “pre-contract” of marriage  between Edward (then Duke of York) and Eleanor Butler (a widow, nee Eleanor Talbot), daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Edward’s later marriage to Elizabeth Grey was therefore bigamous and, as such, the children of that marriage illegitimate. Throughout his life, Henry IV had been a noted libertine. He had many acknowledged bastards, so the claim that he had a few more was, for many, easy to believe.

(The principal, but not the only, source for this story is the Memoirs of French diplomat Philippe de Commynes. But de Commynes was not in England at that time, and we do not know from where he got his information. Was he merely quoting malicious gossip picked up in the saloons of the French Court?).

On receipt of this information, Richard of Gloucester acted swiftly and with characteristic decisiveness. In July 1483 he declared his nephews illegitimate and had himself crowned at Westminster Abbey as King Richard III. The ceremony was attended by the Dowager Queen Eizabeth (now apparently reconciled to Richard), her daughter Elizabeth of York (who carried the train) and the powerful northern Baron Thomas Stanley (who carried the mace).

(Lord Stanley will have an important part to play later in this drama, as we shall see).

But the constitutional crisis did not go away, so Richard convened a sitting of Parliament to examine the truth of the cleric’s claims. In 1483, this should not have been too difficult. Although Lady Eleanor Butler was deceased, then, as now, marriage and marriage contracts – especially of nobility – required witnesses and written records, presumably easily found at that time.

Parliament concluded that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Grey (nee Woodville) was indeed bigamous: Elizabeth, Edward and Richard, the children of that union, illegitimate. Thus, Richard of Gloucester was the legitimate and rightful King. This conclusion was made into Law in February 1484 by an Act of Parliament called Titulus Regius.

“King Edward was and stood married and troth-plighted to one Dame Eleanor Butler, with whom the same King Edward had made a pre-contract of matrimony long before the said feigned marriage with the said Elizabeth Grey.” (Titulus Regius, February 1484)

(In 1486 the same Parliament re-legitimized Edward IV’s family at the request of the usurper Henry Tudor ((see below)). So, it would be unsafe to assume that they were ever independent or impartial judges on the matter).

Richard’s reign was brief. He was hacked to death in August 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth, bravely but recklessly leading his army from the front against a Lancastrian force led by Henry Tudor. Richard’s death, and the subsequent switching of sides by his lieutenant Lord Stanley – who commanded a division of his army – brought the battle to a rapid conclusion in favour of Henry.

Henry who?

Henry was the grandson of a marriage between Catherine de Valois – the widow of Henry V - and one of her servants, an obscure Welshman called Owain Tudor. Henry Tudor’s father (Edmund Tudor) was thus Henry VI’s half-brother. Henry Tudor’s mother, Elizabeth Beaufort (a pregnant twelve-year-old (!!) at the time of her husband Edmund’s death) was a great-great-granddaughter of Edward III, albeit through an illegitimate female line. Elizabeth subsequently married Lord Thomas Stanley (at the Battle of Bosworth, Stanley was thus Henry’s stepfather, which probably explains a lot).

By 15th century dynastic rules (according to Phillipa Langley) there were at least three dozen living Plantagenets with better claims to the throne than Henry Tudor.  Henry’s dynastic claim thus ranged from tenuous to non-existent (another phrase I borrow from Dan Snow), but, by right of conquest, he declared himself Henry VII, cunningly dating the start of his reign from the day before the Battle of Bosworth, thus making all who fought against him at the battle traitors to the crown.

But back to the young sons of Edward IV, the Princes in the Tower and the subject of Philipa Langley’s book.

The boys were last seen by an independent observer happily playing at archery in the Tower gardens in July 1483. They were never seen in public again. The fate of the two boys has become an endlessly argued 500-year-old mystery.

Were they -

A     Murdered by order of their Unspeakable Uncle Richard, eager to remove all threats to his crown?

In 1483, Richard had control of the boys and possessed obvious motive and abundant means and opportunity. People who support this scenario are known as Henricians (as in – Henry VII was innocent of their murders). This became the Tudor explanation and is still accepted today as probable Truth by most mainstream historians, including Dan Snow.

B     Murdered by order of the Wicked Welshman Henry.

If the young Princes were still alive when Henry gained control of England in 1485, then Henry had exactly the same motive, means and opportunity for their secret murder as Richard. Indeed, his motive, if anything, was much stronger. If Henry had found only the boy’s bodies, he would surely have displayed their corpses publicly as a means of positively establishing Richard’s guilt.

C.     Still alive when Henry became King, but living anonymously abroad in the care of Yorkist sympathizers – beyond the ken and beyond the reach of Henry.

It is this third option that that Phillipa Langley seeks to prove in her book. Read on…

THE PLOT THICKENS

At Bosworth Field in 1485, Henry had won a battle and killed a reigning King, but he had not yet won the War. In the febrile atmosphere after the battle, Henry had to act immediately to shore up his self-declared reign. If King Edward IV’s sons were still alive, questions as to heir legitimacy notwithstanding, his hold on kingship might be short lived. Phillipa Langley quotes contemporary documentary evidence that in August 1485 Henry dispatched emissaries to scour the northern centers of Yorkist power in search of the boys, while at the same time workmen were set to searching every nook and cranny of the Tower of London, excavating cellar floors and grounds, in search of recent burials. Around the same time, Henry issued a Proclamation, saying:

“.. if there were a claimant to the crown by descent from the King Edward, He was to show himself; and He (Henry) would help him to get crowned”. (Henry VII, August 1485)

(As Henry had already declared himself King, the sincerity of this statement is questionable).

Henry’s ruse (if ruse it was) failed to flush the boys out. No one came forward. The search (apparently) failed to find them, either dead or alive. Henry then assumed the princes dead at the hands of Richard III, and although at that time he made no direct accusation (that came later), it is possible that is what he believed at the time. That left the boys cousin, the 12-year-old Edward, Earl of Warwick - the son of Edward IV’s long dead younger brother, George Duke of Clarence – as the legitimate heir to the throne. Henry’s throne was still insecure. He did not want to risk the odium that would result from murdering the innocent Earl of Warwick. Not straight away at any rate. He locked the lad in the Tower, pending a more suitable moment for his disposal (he only had to wait a few years, as we shall see).

Henry wished to marry Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York as this would strengthen his reign by a union of the Houses of Lancaster and York. He could not do this while Elizabeth was still officially illegitimate, so Henry’s next steps were to persuade Parliament to re-legitimize all Edward IV’s children by Elizabeth Grey/Woodville, gather up and destroy all copies of the earlier disinheriting Act Titulus Regius [3], and (an obvious and necessary step) arrest Bishop Stillington for perjury. That done, Henry married Elizabeth. She became the mother of next Tudor king Henry VIII and the founder of the Tudor dynasty.

(Henry was now a winner, and winners get to write the history. Over years the Tudor narrative was carefully crafted. That narrative went like this: Richard of Gloucester ordered the deaths of Edward IVs young sons, the legitimate heirs to the throne. To support this narrative all evidence to the contrary, including all copies of Titulus Regius, were systematically destroyed.)

Twenty or more years later, two Tudor historians during the reign of Henry VIII – Polydore Vergil (Henry VII’s paid historian) in 1513 and Thomas More around 1520 – sexed-up the Tudor narrative of the events of 1483-85 with added melodrama and evidence-free detail. During the reign of Elizabeth I, these histories were used by William Shakespeare as the basis for his play Richard III. In Shakespeare’s version, Richard as not just a ruthless opportunist – undoubtedly true – but a physically and mentally deformed psychopath to boot.

(It was a part written for and demanding over-the-top ham acting. For centuries, famous actors from Richard Burbridge to Benedict Cumberbatch, have reveled in playing the monster that Shakespeare created as they shuffle and clump around the stage declaiming with straw-filled hump, dragging foot and hanging, withered arm).

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

This is the area where the 2019-2022 discoveries of Phillipa Langley’s team offer dramatic new information and lead to a plausible revision of traditional (i.e. Tudor) history of the time.

(With his legitimizing of Edward IVs family, and his assumption that Edward’s sons must be dead, Henry had backed himself into a corner. He was taking the chance that if either Edward V or Richard of York were to reappear his only choices would be to resign in their favour or declare them imposters).

And that circumstance is exactly what Phillipa Langley argues happened in the in the bizarre events that followed in the years 1487 and 1490-95.

1. The 1487 “Lambert Simnel” Rebellion.

In 1487, then 16-year-old Edward V (or someone purporting to be him) appeared at the Netherlands court of his paternal aunt, the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, who had known him well as a child [4]. History records nothing of where Edward had been or what he had been doing during his four missing years. His aunt and leading Yorkist nobles recognised him as the son of Edward IV and assembled a formidable, 8000-strong, army made up of mercenary German heavy infantry (landsknechts), Irish light infantry (kerns) and English troops supplied by Yorkist Lords. The Princes in the Tower Project unearthed a 1487 receipt from a French arms manufacturer recording the purchase of 400 pikes by Margaret of Burgundy for the use of “Margaret’s nephew, son of King Edward“. There can be thus no doubt – despite Henry Tudor’s later disinformation (see below) – the rebellion was carried out in the name of Edward V.

In 1487, Edward led [5] this army against Henry Tudor, only to be defeated (and most likely killed there and buried in a common grave [6]) at the closely fought Battle of Stoke [7].

Henry declared that the failed rebellion was led by a low-born imposter claiming to be Edward Earl of Warwick (a nephew of Edward IV). To “prove” this, in a piece of theatre, Henry produced a youth (possibly captured at the battle) called Lambert Simnel – the son of an Oxford organ maker or, in other accounts: a joiner, a tailor, a baker or a shoemaker’s son (i.e. any occupation suitably base and contemptible). The real Earl of Warwick was taken from the Tower where he had been languishing and paraded through the streets of London. 

(In a repressive regime, speaking Truth to Power is Treason. In the 15th century that often meant being hung, drawn and quartered: sensible people held their tongues. After his public display, Simnel was magnanimously forgiven by Henry and set to work in his kitchen. Faced with a choice between certain execution or a secure job for life in the royal household, Simnel would not have hesitated to go along with this charade).

As a bonus for Henry, he now had an acceptable excuse to behead the innocent Earl of Warwick, who became the fourth Plantagenet victim of Henry Tudor’s dynastic cleansing operation. But he was very far from the last. The relentless Tudor pogrom to hunt down and eliminate all members of the English aristocracy with even a trace of Plantagenet blood continued under Henry VIII and lasted for 50 years. The final victim was the aged Margaret De La Pole ((niece of Edward IV and younger sister of Edward Earl of Warwick)), beheaded on the orders of Henry VIII in 1541. The French Ambassador, who witnessed the beheading, wrote of an incompetent executioner raining 11 blows on the old lady’s head and shoulders before he was able to successfully hack off her head.

2. The 1490-95 “Perkin Warbeck” Rebellion.

Around 1490, 16-year-old Richard of York (or someone purporting to be him) appeared in the Netherlands and met his aunt, Margaret of Burgundy. She had not seen him for nine years but was in no doubt who he was. As she wrote in Latin to her cousin, Queen Isabella of Spain:

“I recognised him easily as if I had just seen him yesterday or the day before…and that was not by one or two general signs, but by so many visible and specific signs that hardly one person in ten hundred thousand (a million) might be found who would have marks of the same kind.” (Margaret of Burgundy, 1493).

At the likely instigation of his aunt, and remembering the lies told by Henry at the time of his brother Edward’s unsuccessful rebellion three years before, Richard wrote a detailed account of his movements during his missing years. Dutch researcher Nathalie Bliekendaal, a member of the Princes in the Tower Project, located a copy of this document in a dusty Dutch archive. The copy is a handwritten translation into Old Dutch from a lost French original and has been dated by independent experts (on linguistic, handwriting and paper evidence) to late the 15th Century. In it, Richard tells how, in July or August 1483, he and his brother Edward were separated and never saw each other again. Richard was then taken from the Tower in disguise and transported to France by two trusted retainers of John Howard (the Duke of Norfolk), and Viscount Francis Lovell, both loyal subjects of Richard III [8]. In the care of these men, Richard stayed in France for a few years. Fearing recognition by agents of Henry Tudor, now actively searching for him again after the Battle of Stoke, he fled to Spain, and thence to Portugal. When he reached his majority, and knowing he was the rightful King Richard IV of England, Richard made his way to Burgundy to make himself known to his aunt Margaret and claim his inheritance.

Besides his aunt, Richard was accepted as Richard IV of England by Phillip I (Duke of Burgundy), Maximilian I, (the Holy Roman Emperor), Albert III (King of Germany) and James IV (King of Scotland). With the support of these monarchs in finance, manpower and shipping, Richard raised an army and, over a 3-year period, attempted several invasions of England: first from Ireland, then from Scotland and finally from Cornwall. But English support for the Yorkist cause was waning as Yorkist numbers and enthusiasm had been shredded by ten years of lost battles and judicial executions. Lacking substantial English support, all Richard’s attempts failed, and he was finally captured by Henry VII’s forces in 1495. Under torture, Richard signed a prepared statement saying that he was Perkin Warbeck, the son of a boatman from Tournai in France, who had been recruited and schooled in his deception by Margaret of York. The forced “confession” did not save him. In 1499, Richard was hung (beheading, being considered more merciful, was reserved for nobility) at the Tower and buried under the name of Perkin Warbeck. 

Thus passed the last Plantagenet King of England – a dynasty which had ruled England since Henry II, 231 years before.

THE URN IN THE ABBEY

In a niche at the back of the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey, behind the tombs of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, is a marble urn which, according to the Latin legend on the plinth, holds the bones of Edward V and Richard Duke of York. Click for a sharper image. Photo by author.

In 1674, workmen demolishing an external staircase near the SE corner of the White Tower discovered human bones at a depth of 3 meters. They tossed them onto a pile of building rubble. When Charles II belatedly heard of the discovery, he ordered the bones retrieved and had them examined by his personal physician, Dr John White. Dr White determined that the remains were of two young boys whom he identified as Edward V and his brother Richard Duke of York. In this identification, Dr White and King Charles were heavily influenced by Sir Thomas More’s 1519 account that the princes had been buried “beneath a staircase”, although they chose to ignore More’s added detail that the corpses were soon after exhumed and reburied “elsewhere”. On the King’s orders, the bones were placed in a marble urn and displayed in Westminster Abbey above a plinth inscription identifying them as the remains of the Princes in the Tower, suffocated to death on the orders of their “perfidious” uncle, Richard III. There it remains to this day and thousands of visitors daily pass before it (see photo above).

The urn was opened in 1933, and its contents examined by two anatomists, Dr I.E. Tanner and Dr W.J. Whyte. From the start, Tanner and Whyte never seriously thought to question that they were dealing with the remains of the Princes in the Tower. They took a detailed measurements, a series of X-rays and numerous B &W photographs. Their conclusion was much the same as that of Dr White 260 years before: the urn contained the jumbled and incomplete bones of two young boys, one aged around 8 years, the other around 12.

The crown (i.e. Queen Elizabeth II – Charles III has yet to be asked) will not allow another opening of the urn. The Princes in the Tower Project commissioned a leading Dutch forensic pathologist, Professor George Maat, to re-examine the data, X-rays and photographs published by the 1933 team. According to Professor Maat’s 2019 Report, the urn contains the bones of two humans, but possibly three, with age ranges of 9-15 and 8-12 years. However, Maat found no evidence for the sex of the remains, no evidence for cause of death, no evidence for or against consanguinity, and no evidence for how long they had been in the ground prior to 1674.

So, good candidates for the Princes in the Tower? Perhaps, but there are other equally strong possibilities.

The Tower of London was built by William the Conqueror in 1077 on the site of a Roman fort which was itself built on the site of an Iron Age fort and settlement. Early in the 20th century, very close to the place and at the same depth as the 1674 discovery, the complete skeleton of a 13–16-year-old boy was excavated. The skeleton is still available and has recently been dated by the Carbon¹⁴ isotopic method to around 1000 BC.

Until and unless it is possible to re-examine the bones in the Westminster Urn with modern techniques of DNA analysis and C¹⁴ dating, their true significance is unknown. If such results were to indicate they are exactly who the legend below the Urn says they are, then the ultimate resting place of the Princes in the Tower will be solved, although questions as to how, why, when (to the nearest 10 years or so) and by whom, they were killed would still remain open.

Until then, we are back to square one. Which leads me to some …

FINAL THOUGHTS

The tale is a classic whodunit but as a real-life case there can be no truth reveal by the great detective in the final chapter.

People, events, and dates in Phillipa Langley’s book are based on widely accepted contemporary documents. Many of these documents are new discoveries by the Princes in the Tower project.

The truth of these documents, the motivations of their writers and reconstructions of events not recorded, follow “balance of probability” (9) arguments rather than the tougher criteria of “beyond all reasonable doubt”. With the winnowing of evidence through the passage of time and the passage through the hands of early Tudor monarchs, this is probably the best that can ever be achieved.

Probability arguments ultimately boil down to personal opinion and can always be contested. For an alternative opinion to Phillipa Langley’s, based on much the same documents but a different assessment of probabilities, you should read the 2024 review of Langley’s book by historian Chris Phillip HERE.

And always remember the wise words about probability by Sigmund Freud in the quote at the head of this essay.

For me, Phillipa Langley’s account of the period offers a more believable history than the carefully crafted Tudor version that is still, by and large, accepted by mainstream historians.

Richard III was a decisive and ruthless opportunist, swift to dispose of his political enemies, but Langley presents plausible evidence that he had compassion for the innocent young sons of his elder brother.

After reading her book I have become a Ricardian. But I could be wrong.

Richard III. Is this England’s most maligned king?

(Public open-source image. Original in the National Portrait Gallery. )

The post Who Killed the Princes in the Tower? – A Medieval Whodunit appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.