"Verifying" the Verifier Method…

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John Sweat’s “The Anthropogene” is a nice ‘lost history’ blog I recently stumbled upon: what caught my eye was a post of his that mentioned the Voynich Manuscript and tried out Gordon Rugg’s seven-step “Verifier Method”. As this is what Rugg allegedly used when he made his famous “VMS is a hoax” claims in 2003/2004, I thought it perhaps should be examined in more detail. Sweat summarises Rugg’s 7 steps as:-

  1. “Accumulate knowledge of a discipline through interviews and reading.
  2. Determine whether critical expertise has yet to be applied in the field.
  3. Look for bias and mistakenly held assumptions in the research.
  4. Analyze jargon to uncover differing definitions of key terms.
  5. Check for classic mistakes using human-error tools.
  6. Follow the errors as they ripple through underlying assumptions.
  7. Suggest new avenues for research that emerge from steps one through six.”

All of which can, I think, be summarised even more brutally:-

  1. Engage with so-called “experts” and their writings
  2. Decide if those “experts” are indeed actually experts
  3. Do those experts have a particular agenda?
  4. Do the words they use get in the way?
  5. Are their theories basically built on sand?
  6. See how their errors beget other errors
  7. Work out the biggest issues, and continue until you’ve had enough

This seems to be describing intellectual history, which I would characterise as a thinky, “Florentine humanist”-style knowledge-critiquing methodology based around herding all the arguers in a field together, logically dismantling their arguments, and then using whatever is left standing to construct tentative explanations. Technically, the difference between intellectual history and the history of ideas is that the former tends to see ideas as actively shaped by agendas and as flowing between cultural frames of reference, while the latter tends to try to engage with ideas-in-themselves. (Having said that, the Wikipedia entry for history of ideas cites Michel Foucault as a sympathetic practitioner, yet he sees everything as a product of the agendas implicit in cultural frames of reference. But I digress!)

At its best, intellectual history throws up dazzling insights: in the hands of a master (such as the extraordinary Anthony Grafton), it can be a virtuoso performance of brain over matter, not unlike a QC’s persuasive mastery of his or her brief. Yet at its worst, it can be a sterile exercise in intellectual futility, divorced from the world by its shallow insistence on examining only the participants and their claims, not the validity of the evidence expressed in the ideas, and so ending up in a kind of over-finessed, intricate superficiality.

As an example, even though Grafton’s generally excellent book on Leon Battista Alberti shows precisely how Alberti’s form and ideas flowed from classical topoi, I think Grafton perhaps takes the whole humanist conceit (that if we all wrote as well as Cicero the world would be a better place) a little bit too literally – whereas humanism was by and large more like a courtly Latinistic game of patronage – and as a result his book never really engages with Alberti the person.

If we bear this kind of thing in mind, it should be reasonably clear that Rugg’s “Verifier Method” looks to verify not evidence qua contents but instead expert opinions qua methodology: a kind of faux legalistic framework, with the investigator as self-appointed armchair judge in his/her own kangaroo court, and with no power or desire to step outside into the real world.

In the case of the Voynich Manuscript (in case you were wondering when I’d ever mention it), I think the Verifier Method falls right at steps (1) and (2). Because Rugg’s conceptual framework had no mechanism to critique evidence (in particular the various transcriptions of the text), and what separates experts in such an uncertain field is by and large their conception of what constitutes relevant evidence, Rugg has no intrinsic way of deciding who is (and who is not) an expert, let alone trying to infer their agendas (3) or to diagnose any linguistic/semantic difficulties (4)

Essentially, it seems to me that the Verifier Method relies so heavily on the underlying field being regular that it fails to be a satisfactory tool to apply to such irregular areas of study as the Voynich Manuscript. But the problem then is that regular fields of study tend not to need exploratory methods such as the Verifier Method to help traverse them.

Finally, I think that “Verifying” is such a weak aim of any knowledge methodology as to be virtually useless: as a strategy, all it really tries to elicit is some kind of limp correlation. The “Cardan Grille” nonsense that Rugg concocted to “verify” that the Dee/Kelley hoax hypothesis was “possible” is precisely such a thing: of course the hypothesis was possible, that’s why it was a hypothesis, duh. Come on: when dealing with an uncertain field, when would the Verifier Method ever be preferable to Popper’s Falsificationism, where you collect together plausible hypotheses and actively design experiments to try to kill them? Now that’s what I call proper Popper science…

"Is this feeling an eternal flame?"

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A quick pop-cultural aside: the song “Eternal Flame” was written by hugely successful American songwriter Billy Steinberg with Tom Kelly and Susanna Hoffs (of The Bangles). The inspiration for the song came from an eternal flame seen by Bangles’ bass-player Michael Steele burning at Gracelands in Elvis Presley’s memory, as well as from one at a Palm Springs synagague Steinberg had seen when very young. Though “Eternal Flame” was produced by Simon Cowell, I won’t hold that against it. 🙂

But historically, claims of actual eternal flames go back a very long way: in my book, I mentioned briefly that many in the Renaissance believed a “perpetual light” burned in the Temple of Vesta in Ancient Rome. Leon Battista Alberti’s 1450 book “Momus” mentions (though admittedly in a fictional context) a “perpetual flame, tending itself even though no material is laid under it and no liquid poured over it“, Giovanni Battista Della Porta documented many attempts at reproducing eternal flames in his Natural Magic in XX Books, while in his libro architettonico Antonio Averlino described a continuously-burning candle he saw in Sant Maria in Bagno. Another related story concerns Abbot Trithemius, who allegedly sold two “unquenchable eternall lights” to Emperor Maximilian I for 6000 crowns.

I thought this was one of those things for which there was unlikely to be any significant literature: I’d collected all the pieces together from scattered footnotes. However, recently I was inspired by Archer Quinn’s, ummm, perpetual ranting to properly read through Kevin Kilty’s well-known page on perpetual motion. All good stuff: and he even mentions eternal flames!

Kilty, who seems to have derived his information on this subject from Arthur Ord-Hume’s 1977 book “Perpetual Motion: history of an obsession“, mentions that:-

“Fortunio Liceti (1577-1657) made a lifelong study of these lamps, so many of which were supposedly found in old tombs, vaults and temples. Ord-Hume spends several pages examining ways to explain the observation of perpetual lamps. This is giving too much serious attention to a fantasy. It is likely that no one ever observed any such lamp.”

(Though I should of course point out that Averlino claimed to have observed an eternal flame). Fascinating! I was not aware of Fortunio Liceti‘s connection with eternal flames, and so rushed to buy Ord-Hume’s book as quickly as I could. I shall continue this thread when it arrives…

The Florentine Renaissance & evolution…

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OK, I’ll admit it: people who talk about the Renaissance as a coherent historical phenomenon get on my nerves. There were numerous strands of thought at the time, all vying for the oxygen of attention, all trying to supplant medieval scholasticism: but arguably the two biggest new kids on the block circa 1400 were Renaissance humanism (think of Petrarch, etc) and Renaissance inventorship (think of Brunelleschi). While the former grew out of philology and a theoretical reverence for Classical texts, the latter emerged from the empirical world of clock-making.

Lynn Thorndike was happy enough (in his “Science & Thought in the XVth Century”) to point out that these two major strands were very often at odds with each other: but it should also be noted that the intersection between the two was far from empty. In fact, you might well look at the architects Leon Battista Alberti and Antonio Averlino – both born near Florence near to 1400 – as examples of “Renaissance Men” in the purest sense, in that they exemplified both strands at the same time.

The mystery of the Italian Renaissance (as described by Burckhardt and the generation of gung-ho pro-humanistic historians that followed him) is this: why did it emerge at such a narrow time (circa 1400) and place (Florence)?

For a long time, the dominant view has basically been that this was a random event, just one of those things that happen from time to time. However, some modern writers have begun to speculate whether a particular freak event or a subtle change in diet or eating habits might perhaps been the real “cause” of the Italian Renaissance.

For me, I would be unsurprised if insomnia turned out to be a key: Alberti writes, in his 1441 “On the Tranquillity of the Soul”, of “the agitation of his soul”at night, and how he can relieve this by trying to devise amazing machines for lifting and carrying weights. I wonder if an entire generation of Florentines suffered from a kind of intellectual insomnia, perhaps as a result of effectively becoming hyperthyroid from ingesting a particularly iodine-rich salt being brought into the city?

Or might the Florentines have simply become addicted to the sugar confections that had not long before suddenly filled the city’s apothecaries and markets? Might the Renaissance have simply been a metabolic balancing act as people tried to compensate for a giant communal sugar rush?

But there’s another possibility. If you were looking for a statistical explanation why a particular population produced more geniuses (while the overall bell-curve distribution probably remained intact), there would be two obvious candidates to consider – either (a) the mean IQ got shifted up (i.e. everyone somehow got smarter) , or (b) the variance increased dramatically (i.e. more extreme cases appeared at both ends of the scale).

This set me wondering: as I understand it, one of the problems often put forward with Darwinian evolution is that the natural rate of mutations is too low to support the amount of random change needed. So could it be that stable contexts inhibit mutations (i.e. encourage low adaptation rates), while troubled contexts somehow encourage mutations (i.e. encourage high adaptation rates)?

Interestingly, one medieval obsession presents itself here: that of whether “monsters” (freaks of nature) were signs (de-monstr-ations) of something greater happening in the world. Perhaps “monsters” in the human population were (and possibly still are?) literally a sign that the variance of the population is high.

Thinking about all this, it suddenly then became clear to me why low sperm counts make evolutionary sense: if a body is in significant physical difficulties, it makes no sense for it to try to reproduce offspring that are the same as it, as they would likely experience the same difficulties in the next generation. Instead, perhaps the body deliberately produces crippled, damaged sperm to try to encourage mutations that might be better adapted to the changing physical context. Otherwise, why would the body ever want to deliberately produce poor sperm or eggs? Perhaps the current medical view of “healthy” sperm is somehow clouded by an anti-mutation bias of some sort.

My prediction here is that that there will turn out to be reproductive mechanisms by which (a) healthy eggs repel damaged sperm and (b) damaged eggs discourage healthy sperm: leaving the two pivotal cases of (healthy eggs + healthy sperm) => low mutation rate (low variance, well-adapted to environment), and (damaged eggs + damaged sperm) => high mutation rate (high variance, poorly-adapted to environment).

But there’s a timing issue. Whereas sperm production is essentially a “just-in-time” process, women’s eggs are produced all in one go, and so form a lagging indicator to environmental adaptation (i.e. egg health in reproduction gives an indication of environmental fit 15-25 years earlier). So, could it be that, when looking for the source of the Renaissance circa 1400, we should instead look for a traumatic event in Florence circa 1380 that significantly affected women’s reproductive health, causing a change in the population’s IQ variance?

I really don’t know (this is a blog, not an article in Nature): but it is tempting to speculate whether it was simply coincidence that the Florentine Renaissance began two generations after the plague had ravaged Florence in 1348 (Boccaccio famously wrote about it). Might children born after the plague have stirred the Florentine gene-pool up in just the right way to set the Renaissance in motion a generation later?

Thorndike has the answer…

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For me, Voynich research is one of those things that grind slowly onwards for long periods of time, punctuated by occasional testosteronal fist-clenching-in-the-air moments of elation, a bit like a prisoner being unexpectedly set free. OK, I know it’s a bit cliched: but I do it anyway.

For “The Curse of the Voynich“, I forensically examined the manuscript itself, travelled to all the places, critically read all the secondary sources, and from all that reconstructed the story as best I could. In short, I’d done an OK job: but though readers told me they liked it, it hadn’t set the world on fire. Though it ticked all the right boxes, it was obvious I had to go away and try harder. But what could I do better?

At first, I bought a pile of books on the history of cryptography, such as David Kahn’s “The Codebreakers”: all fascinating, but the question I’m trying to answer – “at the Quattrocento birth of mathematical cryptography, what kind of cryptography died?” – only features marginally (if at all) in the generally rather positivistic accounts presented there.

And then I realised what I had been missing. Sure, I had read plenty on Quattrocento individuals such as Filarete, Alberti, Brunelleschi, Taccola: but there was one gigantic motherlode of information which most historians seem to pay lip service to (rather than have to set aside several months to read): Lynn Thorndike’s epic multi-volume “History of Magic and Experimental Science”.

I therefore bought volumes III and IV (for the 14th and 15th centuries) and have now reached halfway through the latter. What continually amazes me is the amount of ground Thorndike covered that has apparently not been touched by anyone since: though there is a large literature tree cascading off it, it is very deep in places and non-existent in others.

From what I have read, I am now quite sure that virtually all of the Voynich Manuscript’s roots will turn out to be directly traceable from the late 14th and early 15th century: which means that we might in time be able to reconstruct or predict plaintexts for some sections. But these are still very early days in this ultra-long-term research programme. *sigh*

However, the good news is that I also bought a copy of “Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century” by Lynn Thorndike: and one obscure page from that gave me precisely the clenching-both-fists-in-the-air-YESSSSS-moment I mentioned at the start. The details are too convoluted to go through here, but trust me, it’s a peach.