February 7, 2010
Robert M. Schoch, Ph. D.
College of General Studies
Boston University
871 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215
Dear Robert Schoch:
I read your article (Independent thinking in the Academic World, Robert M. Schoch ATLANTIS RISING no. 80, March/April, 2010) with a kindred feeling. When I first read of your report that the stones on the sides of the excavation in which the Great Sphinx crouches showed signs of rain weathering I was fascinated. You pointed out that it meant when the thing was first built there was substantial rainfall in the region, and those rains had ceased long before the Sphinx was supposed to have been built.
Some questions came to mind. The most obvious was that it would be hard to tell erosion from rain from erosion from water running off from the plateau. You addressed this question, saying it was direct rain, not runoff, but I would be hard pressed to tell the difference myself. I am not the greatest at looking at worked rock and noticing the details. I have been happy to have had enough contact with John Michell to know that he is far better. He can look at stone and see things invisible to me until he points them out. Still, purblind as I am, (on this matter. In some media I am very observant indeed.) I would be happy to take a look. Another question is whether natural rock outcroppings in the region also show the rain pattern. And a third question is whether it might have been artifact. I can imagine some sort of ritual with worshipers watching while men poured water from jars onto the edge of the pit turning it into a sort of three sided waterfall in celebration perhaps of the Nile flood. This might have produced a runoff pattern rather than a rainfall pattern or maybe a pattern of its own.
So I was delighted when my brother went to Egypt. He is another whose powers of observation trump my own. I told him about the issue and asked him to take a look. He reported that it was not possible to look at the area in question; it was sealed off from tourists. My opinion for the time being is therefore that you are absolutely right.
The main point of your article was the isolation of people in academia who challenge received wisdom. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Try it without an academic appointment at all. The abiding rule is, “Only a scientist can challenge a scientist.” In fact only a scientist in the particular field in question can get the floor at all. Not quite true. With professional but not academic credentials, I have been permitted to present posters at professional meetings. That is fair enough. But by and large no one has said, “This is interesting. We must discuss if further later on.”
The theory I have, rather the theory that has me, is that it is well established but little known that fertility is related to kinship. The number of children a couple will have is determined by the kinship of their respective parents and other forebears and possibly their own kinship. More kinship is better until a high degree of inbreeding is reached, whereupon reproductive success declines. What I hold is that this local phenomenon has effects on the fertility of the population as a whole. In fact civilizations fall because the people, or at least the power elite, mate outside the confines of the tiny circle in which fertility is assured and suffer disastrous infertility. Proof and references are on the enclosed DVD. There is more at Nobabies.net.
Returning to subject, I was once interested in the health of Vietnam veterans. It seemed to me that they were dying in enormous numbers after returning home safely. In the process of trying to raise awareness of the issue I published a little journal WILD SURMISE. In included not only my primary message but also included speculations about a number of other things. I welcomed articles by others that similarly speculated outside of the received box. And sure enough I found that I got contributions, a few over a few years even though my circulation was only in the low thousands. Roughly speaking, if you take a thousand educated and bright people, which my readers were, you will get a new idea every few years. Multiply that by three hundred million Americans and you get about a hundred thousand ideas a year. If my readers were in the top one percent in terms of intellectual energy, that is still a thousand ideas a year that will never come to academic attention, never be published and never recorded in any way in which they can be recovered.
You’ve got a lot of company.
If you do visit my website and have anything you would like me to post, or if I can be of help in any way please let me know.
Sincerely,
M. Linton Herbert MD
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