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Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments by Alex Boese

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There is a connection between vaudeville and science, and it is more profound than people credit. Alex Boese’s collection of bizarre scientific anecdotes illuminates this connection, claims far too much for it, and loses the thread of it entirely.

This probably doesn’t matter – by Boese’s own estimation, Elephants on Acid is a book you dip into in the bathroom. There’s even an entire chapter, ‘Toilet Reading’, dedicated to this very idea.

But Boese, quietly meticulous, is a champion of the idea of science. So, at the risk of taking a mallet to a sugar-coated almond, let’s take him seriously here.

Boese is the curator of a splendid on-line museum of hoaxes – museumofhoaxes.com. To move from deliberate fakery to science gone awry, deliberately or not, is, Boese argues, but a small step.

Hoaxers and experimenters are both manipulators of reality. But only experimenters wrap themselves in the authority of science. ‘This sense of gravity is what lends bizarre experiments their particularly surreal quality.’ More charitably, he might have added: only scientists run a serious and career-busting risk of hoaxing themselves.

Boese’s accounts of unlikely experiments include sensible and legitimate studies into risible subjects (how could studies into human ticklishness not sound silly?) Elsewhere, accounts of doubtful ‘discoveries’ reveal how badly credulousness and ambition will misdirect the enquiring mind.

Wandering among Boese’s carnival of curiosities we learn, for example, the precise weight of a human soul and acquire a method for springing crystalline insects out of rocks.

Less convincing are his stories of research misinterpreted by gullible or hostile media. A sharper editor would have spotted when Boese’s eye for a good tale was leading him astray.

In 1943 the behaviourist Burrhus Skinner invented a comfortable, labour-saving crib for his baby daughter – only to be pilloried for imprisoning her in an experimental ‘box’. This is a tale of irony and injustice, deftly told. But it is not ‘bizarre science’.

It’s devilishly difficult to get good at something unless you can find the fun in it. The more intellectually serious a work is, the more likely it is to have playful, even mischievous aspects. Science is no exception.

The more entertaining, and less troubling, of Boese’s tales involve ingenious, self-aware acts of scientific folly. We learn a truly magnificent (and wrong) formula for working out the moment at which cocktail parties become too loud.

A study that involves erotically propositioning young men on a wobbly bridge must surely have fallen out of the bottom of an Atom Egoyan movie. And pet owners should heed a slapstick 2006 study entitled ‘Do Dogs Seek Help in an Emergency?’ (‘Pinned beneath the shelves, each owner let go of his or her dog’s leash and began imploring the animal to get help from the person in the lobby.’)

Yet, for all its hilarity, Elephants on Acid proves to be an oddly disturbing experience when read cover-to-cover.

The decision to put all the truly gut-wrenching vivisection stories in the first chapter was foolhardy. Robert White’s 1962 attempt to isolate a monkey’s brain by removing, piece by piece, the face and skull, absolutely belongs in this book – but it is delivered so early that it’s one hell of a hurdle to clear in the first five minutes of reading.

Other horrors lurk in wait for those who persevere (Ewen Cameron’s brainwashing experiments of the 1950s are particularly horrendous). Boese’s off-the-cuff observation that the Cold War had its surgical and psychological aspects is not staggeringly original but it does mollify our easy outrage at such past ‘mistakes’.

Quite rightly so, for most of what we primly label ‘maverick science’ is no such thing; it is simply science that served a long-since-vanished purpose.

Most disturbing of all, however are those celebrated and familiar behavioural experiments that, while harming no one, reveal human gullibility, spite, vanity and witlessness.

Philip Zimbardo’s prison-psychology experiment at Stanford University had to be terminated, so keenly did his volunteers brutalise each other. Testing the limits of obedience (clue: there aren’t any), Stanley Milgram invited volunteers to inflict what they thought were potentially lethal electric shocks to people. Few demurred. Ironically, these kinds of experiments share methods with many stage magic routines.

The connection between vaudeville and science is profound, all right – and not particularly funny. Boese is right to invite us to dip in and out of his book. His facetious mask cannot hide for long the underlying seriousness of such striking material.

 

“Merely a form of male sexual display”

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In 1823, while serving in Spain under Louis XVIII, Captain Casimir Stanislas D’Arpentigny met a gipsy girl who read his hands and inspired him to write his opus La Chirognomie, which, while not a work of science, isn’t mere charlatanry.

John Manning’s studies of hand shape are impeccably modern and unimpeachably scientific. Nonetheless, cheiromancy had been around for a very long time – much longer than the evolutionary psychology which is Manning’s métier – and a whiff of the occult lingers over his latest, infuriating little book.

Men’s ring fingers are longer than their forefingers. Women’s forefingers are longer than their ring fingers. Manning, who has travelled the world measuring countless hands (and gives the impression that he’s been having a whale of a time doing it) says that measuring our fingers can tell us who we are.

In the womb, the hormone testosterone promotes the development of the ring finger. Male foetuses are exquisitely sensitive to testosterone. Female foetuses are more sensitive to oestrogen, which promotes the growth of the forefinger.

An oestrogen-rich environment for the first three months in the womb will feminise male babies, while a testosterone-rich environment will masculinise females. Everything follows from such accidents of birth: our propensity to systemic disease, our susceptibility to infections, our athletic abilities, sexual preferences, behaviour, levels of happiness – even our talents.

To paraphrase Senator John Kerry, it’s a Big Ask. But Manning doesn’t stop there.

Black people are black because their skin stores large amounts of the pigment melanin. What is it for? It’s not sun-block. Native South Americans living in the tropics aren’t black.

As a group, explains Manning, black men are more sensitive to testosterone, and this makes them more masculinised than white men. Men who are more masculinised have better cardiovascular health, but are more susceptible to infections.

Manning argues that melanin acts as a mechanical barrier to microbes. In other words, black skin evolved to compensate for a weaker immune system.

Why would pale, lumbering, asthmatic white men evolve to have hypersensitive immune systems and poor cardiovascular health? Because white men have for several millennia been monogamous homebodies whose relatively uneventful lives enable them to sire children in their dotage.

The vast majority of black ancestral marriage patterns, on the other hand, involve polygamy, and polygamous societies are violent. In the evolution of blackness, tolerance to disease wasn’t so much of an issue. Black men lived fast and died young.

All in 170 pages. Astonishingly, this is all deadly dull.

Five years have passed since his heavy-going academic work Digit Ratio, and Manning has still not taken the trouble to make his work accessible. Manning’s turgid prose is not the product of a conscientious scientist preserving the precision of his work. It is what you get when a lazy writer fails at his job.

Everyday English is as specialised, in its way, as the language of the science journal. It is the language of human exchange. It is a language that anthropomorphises as much of the world as possible. Above all, it is the language of narrative.

When we, in our innocence, read that “a low finger ratio may exert a protective effect against breast cancer”, we take the word “exert” seriously and we say, quite rightly, “What nonsense!”

When we are invited to “suppose… that music is merely a form of male sexual display”, we think of Elizabeth Maconchy, we think of Mitsuko Uchida, and we dismiss such a reductive little game out of hand.

If Manning had set out to be misunderstood and misinterpreted, he could not have written a more effective book.

“It appears to be the case that homosexuals, particularly male homosexuals, have fewer children than heterosexuals.” Well, golly.

Manning is a brilliant thinker. Like most evolutionary psychologists, he has an overdeveloped appetite for just-so stories, but you never get the impression that plausibility is standing in for evidence.

He never conflates knowledge and opinion. The lingering impression left by this book – aside from it being by a man too busy to do it properly – is Manning’s intellectual honesty.

Assuming that the evidence for it continues to mount, Manning’s theory of how racial differences originated – a thrilling mix of medicine and anthropology – will deserve and surely get its own book. I’ll be first in line to buy it. But it ought not to be beyond him to learn how to write for a public.