How the 18th-century ‘probability revolution’ fueled the casino gambling craze

 

The spinning wheel game ‘EO’ became popular after statutes banned gambling with devices featuring ‘numbers or figures.’ Heritage Art/Getty Images

The first commercial gambling operations emerged, coincidentally or not, at the same time as the study of mathematical probability in the mid-1600s.

By the early 1700s, commercial gambling operations were widespread in European cities such as London and Paris. But in many of the games that were offered, players faced steep odds.

Then, in 1713, the brothers Johann and Jacob Bernoulli proved their “Golden Theorem,” known now as the law of large numbers or long averages.

But gambling entrepreneurs were slow to embrace this theorem, which showed how it could actually be an advantage for the house to have a smaller edge over a larger one.

In my book “The Gambling Century: Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency,” I explain how it took government efforts to ban and regulate betting for gambling operators to finally understand just how much money could be made off a miniscule house edge.

The illusion of even odds in games that were the ancestors of roulette and blackjack proved immensely profitable, sparking a “probability revolution” that transformed gambling in Britain and beyond.

A new theorem points to sneaky big profits

The law of large numbers refers to events governed by chance.

When you flip a coin, for example, you have a 50% – or “even money” – chance of getting heads or tails. Were you to flip a coin 10 times, it’s quite possible that heads will turn up seven times and tails three times. But after 100, or 1000, or 10,000 flips, the ratio of “heads” to “tails” will be closer and closer to the mathematical “mean of probability” – that is, half heads and half tails.

Mathematicians Johann and Jacob Bernoulli developed what’s known today as the law of large numbers. Oxford Science Archive/Print Collector via Getty Images

This principle was popularized by writers such as Abraham De Moivre, who applied them to games of chance.

De Moivre explained how, over time, someone with even the smallest statistical “edge” would eventually win almost all of the money that was staked.

This is what happens in roulette. The game has 36 numbers, 18 of which are red and 18 of which are black. However, there are also two green house numbers – “0” and “00” – which, if the ball lands on them, means that the house can take everyone’s wager. This gives the house a small edge.

Imagine 10 players with $100 apiece. Half of them bet $10 on red and the other half bet $10 on black. Assuming that the wheel strictly aligns with the mean of probability, the house will break even for 18 of 19 spins. But on the 19th spin, the ball will land on one of the green “house numbers,” allowing the house to collect all the money staked from all bettors.

After 100 spins, the house will have won half of the players’ money. After 200 spins, they’ll have won all of it.

Even with a single house number – the single 0 on the roulette wheels introduced in Monte Carlo by the casino entrepreneur Louis Blanc – the house would win everything after 400 spins.

This eventuality, as De Moivre put it, “will seem almost incredible given the smallness of the odds.”

Hesitating to test the math

As De Moivre anticipated, gamblers and gambling operators were slow to adopt these findings.

De Moivre’s complex mathematical equations were over the heads of gamblers who hadn’t mastered simple arithmetic.

Gambling operators didn’t initially buy into the Golden Theorem, either, seeing it as unproven and therefore risky.

Instead, they played it safe by promoting games with long odds.

One was the Royal Oak Lottery, a game played with a polyhedral die with 32 faces, like a soccer ball. Players could bet on individual numbers or combinations of two or four numbers, giving them, at best, 7-to-1 odds of winning.

Faro was another popular game of chance in which the house, or “bank” as it was then known, gave players the opportunity to defer collecting their winnings for chances at larger payouts at increasingly steep odds.

Faro was a popular game of chance in which players could delay collecting their winnings for the chance to win even bigger sums. Boston Public Library

These games – and others played against a bank – were highly profitable to gambling entrepreneurs, who operated out of taverns, coffeehouses and other similar venues. “Keeping a common gaming house” was illegal, but with the law riddled with loopholes, enforcement was lax and uneven.

Public outcry against the Royal Oak Lottery was such that the Lottery Act of 1699 banned it. A series of laws enacted in the 1730s and 1740s classified faro and other games as illegal lotteries, on the grounds that the odds of winning or losing were not readily apparent to players.

The law of averages put into practice

Early writers on probability had asserted that the “house advantage” did not have to be very large for a gambling operation to profit enormously. The government’s effort to ban games of chance now obliged gaming operators to put the law of long averages into practice.

Further statutes outlawed games of chance played with dice, cards, wheels or any other device featuring “numbers or figures.”

None of these measures deterred gambling operators from the pursuit of profit.

Since this language did not explicitly include letters, the game of EO, standing for “even odd,” was introduced in the mid 1740s, after the last of these gambling statutes was enacted. It was played on a wheel with 40 slots, all but two of which were marked either “E” or “O.” As in roulette, an ivory ball was rolled along the edge of the wheel as it was spun. If the ball landed in one of the two blank “bar holes,” the house would automatically win, similar to the “0” and “00” in roulette.

EO’s defenders could argue that it was not an unlawful lottery because the odds of winning or losing were now readily apparent to players and appeared to be virtually equal. The key, of course, is that the bar holes ensured they weren’t truly equal.

Although this logic might not stand up in court, overburdened law enforcement was happy for a reason to look the other way. EO proliferated; legislation to outlaw it was proposed in 1782 but failed.

The allure of ‘even money’

Gambling operators may have even realized that evening the odds drew more players, who, in turn, staked more.

After EO appeared in Britain, gambling operations both there and on the continent of Europe introduced “even money” betting options into both new and established games.

For example, the game of biribi, which was popular in France throughout the 18th century, involved players betting on numbers from 1 to 72, which were shown on a betting cloth. Numbered beads would then be drawn from a bag to determine the win.

In one iteration from around 1720, players could bet on individual numbers, on vertical columns of six numbers, or other options that promised large payouts against steeper odds.

By the end of the 18th century, however, one biribi cloth featured even money options: Players could bet on any number between 36 and 70 being drawn, or on any number between 1 and 35. Players could also select red or black numbers, making it a likely inspiration for roulette.

In Britain, the Victorian ethos of morality and respectability eventually won out. Parliament outlawed games of chance played for money in public or private in 1845, restrictions that were not lifted until 1960.

By 1845, however, British gamblers could travel by steamship and train to one of the many European resorts cropping up across the continent, where the probability revolution had transformed casino gambling into the formidable business enterprise it is today.

John Eglin, Professor of History, University of Montana

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

A 25-year study reveals how empathy is passed from parents to teens to their future children

 

The longitudinal study traced how empathy develops across three generations. Morsa Images/DigitalVision via Getty Images

The big idea

Our new research shows that parents who express empathy toward their teenagers may give teens a head start in developing the skill themselves. In addition, adolescents who show empathy and support toward their friends are more likely to become supportive parents, which may foster empathy in their own offspring.

How we did our work

The KLIFF/VIDA study at the University of Virginia has tracked 184 adolescents for more than 25 years: from age 13 well into their 30s.

Starting in 1998, teens came to the university every year with their parents and closest friend, and a team of researchers recorded videos of their conversations. Researchers observed how much empathy the mother showed to her 13-year-old when her teen needed help with a problem. We measured empathy by rating how present and engaged mothers were in the conversation, whether they had an accurate understanding of their teen’s problem, and how much help and emotional support they offered.

Then, each year until teens were 19 years old, we observed whether teens showed those same types of empathic behaviors toward their close friends.

Teenage friendships are an important place to practice the empathy that will later help in parenting. Maskot/Getty Images

A decade later, when some of those same teens were starting to have children of their own, we surveyed them about their own parenting. We also asked them about their young children’s empathy. For example, parents rated how often their child “tries to understand how others feel” and “tries to comfort others.”

We found that the more empathic a mother was toward her teenager at age 13, the more empathic the teen was toward their close friends across the adolescent years. Among teens who later had kids themselves, the ones who had shown more empathy for close friends as adolescents became more supportive parents as adults. In turn, these parents’ supportive responses to their children’s distress were associated with reports of their young children’s empathy.

Why it matters

The ability to empathize with other people in adolescence is a critical skill for maintaining good relationships, resolving conflict, preventing violent crime and having good communication skills and more satisfying relationships as an adult.

Adults want teens to develop good social skills and moral character, but simply telling them to be kind doesn’t always work. Our findings suggest that if parents hope to raise empathic teens, it may be helpful to give them firsthand experiences of being understood and supported.

But teens also need opportunities to practice and refine these skills with their peers. Adolescent friendships may be an essential “training ground” for teens to learn social skills such as empathy, how to respond effectively to other people’s suffering, and supportive caregiving abilities that they can put to use as parents. Our lab’s most recent paper presents some of the first evidence that having supportive teenage friendships matters for future parenting.

What’s next

We’re continuing to follow these participants to understand how their experiences with parents and peers during adolescence might play a role in how the next generation develops. We’re also curious to understand what factors might interrupt intergenerational cycles of low empathy, aggression and harsh parenting. For example, it’s possible that having supportive friends could compensate for a lack of empathy experienced from one’s family.

While it’s true that you can’t choose your family, you can choose your friends. Empowering teens to choose friendships characterized by mutual understanding and support could have long-term ripple effects for the next generation.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Jessica A. Stern, Research Scientist, Psychology, University of Virginia and Joseph P. Allen, Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Animals self-medicate with plants − behavior people have observed and emulated for millennia

 

A goat with an arrow wound nibbles the medicinal herb dittany. O. Dapper, CC BY

When a wild orangutan in Sumatra recently suffered a facial wound, apparently after fighting with another male, he did something that caught the attention of the scientists observing him.

The animal chewed the leaves of a liana vine – a plant not normally eaten by apes. Over several days, the orangutan carefully applied the juice to its wound, then covered it with a paste of chewed-up liana. The wound healed with only a faint scar. The tropical plant he selected has antibacterial and antioxidant properties and is known to alleviate pain, fever, bleeding and inflammation.

The striking story was picked up by media worldwide. In interviews and in their research paper, the scientists stated that this is “the first systematically documented case of active wound treatment by a wild animal” with a biologically active plant. The discovery will “provide new insights into the origins of human wound care.”

Fibraurea tinctoria leaves and the orangutan chomping on some of the leaves. Laumer et al, Sci Rep 14, 8932 (2024), CC BY

To me, the behavior of the orangutan sounded familiar. As a historian of ancient science who investigates what Greeks and Romans knew about plants and animals, I was reminded of similar cases reported by Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Aelian and other naturalists from antiquity. A remarkable body of accounts from ancient to medieval times describes self-medication by many different animals. The animals used plants to treat illness, repel parasites, neutralize poisons and heal wounds.

The term zoopharmacognosy – “animal medicine knowledge” – was invented in 1987. But as the Roman natural historian Pliny pointed out 2,000 years ago, many animals have made medical discoveries useful for humans. Indeed, a large number of medicinal plants used in modern drugs were first discovered by Indigenous peoples and past cultures who observed animals employing plants and emulated them.

What you can learn by watching animals

Some of the earliest written examples of animal self-medication appear in Aristotle’s “History of Animals” from the fourth century BCE, such as the well-known habit of dogs to eat grass when ill, probably for purging and deworming.

Aristotle also noted that after hibernation, bears seek wild garlic as their first food. It is rich in vitamin C, iron and magnesium, healthful nutrients after a long winter’s nap. The Latin name reflects this folk belief: Allium ursinum translates to “bear lily,” and the common name in many other languages refers to bears.

As a hunter lands several arrows in his quarry, a wounded doe nibbles some growing dittany. British Library, Harley MS 4751 (Harley Bestiary), folio 14v, CC BY

Pliny explained how the use of dittany, also known as wild oregano, to treat arrow wounds arose from watching wounded stags grazing on the herb. Aristotle and Dioscorides credited wild goats with the discovery. Vergil, Cicero, Plutarch, Solinus, Celsus and Galen claimed that dittany has the ability to expel an arrowhead and close the wound. Among dittany’s many known phytochemical properties are antiseptic, anti-inflammatory and coagulating effects.

According to Pliny, deer also knew an antidote for toxic plants: wild artichokes. The leaves relieve nausea and stomach cramps and protect the liver. To cure themselves of spider bites, Pliny wrote, deer ate crabs washed up on the beach, and sick goats did the same. Notably, crab shells contain chitosan, which boosts the immune system.

When elephants accidentally swallowed chameleons hidden on green foliage, they ate olive leaves, a natural antibiotic to combat salmonella harbored by lizards. Pliny said ravens eat chameleons, but then ingest bay leaves to counter the lizards’ toxicity. Antibacterial bay leaves relieve diarrhea and gastrointestinal distress. Pliny noted that blackbirds, partridges, jays and pigeons also eat bay leaves for digestive problems.

A weasel wears a belt of rue as it attacks a basilisk in an illustration from a 1600s bestiary. Wenceslaus Hollar/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Weasels were said to roll in the evergreen plant rue to counter wounds and snakebites. Fresh rue is toxic. Its medical value is unclear, but the dried plant is included in many traditional folk medicines. Swallows collect another toxic plant, celandine, to make a poultice for their chicks’ eyes. Snakes emerging from hibernation rub their eyes on fennel. Fennel bulbs contain compounds that promote tissue repair and immunity.

According to the naturalist Aelian, who lived in the third century BCE, the Egyptians traced much of their medical knowledge to the wisdom of animals. Aelian described elephants treating spear wounds with olive flowers and oil. He also mentioned storks, partridges and turtledoves crushing oregano leaves and applying the paste to wounds.

The study of animals’ remedies continued in the Middle Ages. An example from the 12th-century English compendium of animal lore, the Aberdeen Bestiary, tells of bears coating sores with mullein. Folk medicine prescribes this flowering plant to soothe pain and heal burns and wounds, thanks to its anti-inflammatory chemicals.

Ibn al-Durayhim’s 14th-century manuscript “The Usefulness of Animals” reported that swallows healed nestlings’ eyes with turmeric, another anti-inflammatory. He also noted that wild goats chew and apply sphagnum moss to wounds, just as the Sumatran orangutan did with liana. Sphagnum moss dressings neutralize bacteria and combat infection.

Nature’s pharmacopoeia

Of course, these premodern observations were folk knowledge, not formal science. But the stories reveal long-term observation and imitation of diverse animal species self-doctoring with bioactive plants. Just as traditional Indigenous ethnobotany is leading to lifesaving drugs today, scientific testing of the ancient and medieval claims could lead to discoveries of new therapeutic plants.

Animal self-medication has become a rapidly growing scientific discipline. Observers report observations of animals, from birds and rats to porcupines and chimpanzees, deliberately employing an impressive repertoire of medicinal substances. One surprising observation is that finches and sparrows collect cigarette butts. The nicotine kills mites in bird nests. Some veterinarians even allow ailing dogs, horses and other domestic animals to choose their own prescriptions by sniffing various botanical compounds.

Mysteries remain. No one knows how animals sense which plants cure sickness, heal wounds, repel parasites or otherwise promote health. Are they intentionally responding to particular health crises? And how is their knowledge transmitted? What we do know is that we humans have been learning healing secrets by watching animals self-medicate for millennia.

Adrienne Mayor, Research Scholar, Classics and History and Philosophy of Science, Stanford University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Why do people hate people?

 

Biases against certain groups of people can escalate into acts of violence if left unchecked. Paul Taylor/Stone via Getty Images

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

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Why do people hate people? – Daisy, age 9, Lake Oswego, Oregon

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Have you ever said “I hate you” to someone? What about using the “h-word” in casual conversation, like “I hate broccoli”? What are you really feeling when you say that you hate something or someone?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the word “hate” as an “intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.” All over the world, researchers like us are studying hate from disciplines like education, history, law, leadership, psychology, sociology and many others.

If you had a scary experience with thunderstorms, you might say that you hate thunderstorms. Maybe you have gotten very angry at something that happened at a particular place, so now you say you hate going there. Maybe someone said something hurtful to you, so you say you hate that person.

Understanding hate as an emotional response can help you recognize your feelings about something or someone and be curious about where those feelings are coming from. This awareness will give you time to gather more information and imagine the other person’s perspective.

So what is hate and why do people hate? There are many answers to these questions.

What hate isn’t

Hate, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, “does not mean rage, anger or general dislike.”

Sometimes people think they have to feel or believe a certain way about another person or group of people because of what they hear or see around them. For example, people might say they hate another person or group of people when what they really mean is that they don’t agree with them, don’t understand them or don’t like how they behave or the things they believe in.

Do you hate this person, or are you angry, hurt or afraid? Lourdes Balduque/Moment via Getty Images

It is easy to blame others for things you don’t believe or experiences you don’t like. Think about times you might have heard someone at school say they hate a classmate or a teacher. Could they have been angry, hurt or confused about something but used the word hate to explain or name how they were feeling?

When you don’t understand someone else, it can make you nervous and even afraid. Instead of being curious about each other’s unique experiences, people may judge others for being different – they may have a different skin color, practice a different religion, come from a different country, be older or younger, or use a wheelchair.

When people judge people as being less important or less human than themselves, that is a form of hatred.

What hate is

The U.S. Department of Justice defines hate as “bias against people or groups with specific characteristics that are defined by the law.” These characteristics can include a person’s race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability and national origin.

One way to think about hate is as a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid, hate is a feeling that grows from biased attitudes about others, like stereotypes that certain groups of people are animals, lazy or stupid.

Sometimes these biased attitudes and feelings provide a foundation for people to act out their biases, such as through bullying, exclusion or insults. For example, many Asian people in the U.S. experienced an increase in hate incidents during the COVID-19 pandemic. If communities accept biases as OK, some people may move up the pyramid and think it is also OK to discriminate, or believe that specific groups of people are not welcome in certain neighborhoods or jobs because of who they are.

Near the top of the pyramid, some people commit violence or hate crimes because they believe their own way of being is better than others’. They may threaten or physically harm others, or destroy property. At the very top of the pyramid is genocide, the intent to destroy a particular group – like what Jewish people experienced during World War II or what Rohingya people are experiencing today in Myanmar, near China.

Hate at the middle and higher levels of the pyramid happens because no one took action to discourage the biased feelings, attitudes and actions at the lower levels of the pyramid.

Taking action against hate

Not only can individual people hate, there are also hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan that attack people who are not white, straight or Christian. Sometimes hate has been written into law like the Indian Removal Act or Jim Crow laws that persecuted Native and Black Americans. If we stay silent when we encounter hate, that hatred can grow and do greater levels of harm.

There are many ways you can help stop hate in your everyday life.

Pay attention to what is being said around you. If the people you spend a lot of time with are saying hateful things about other groups, consider speaking up or changing who you hang out with and where. Be an upstander – sit with someone who is being targeted and report when you see or hear hate incidents.

Protests are one way people speak up on behalf of a specific group. FG Trade/E+ via Getty Images

Start noticing when you are letting hateful words or behaviors into your thoughts and actions. Get to know what hate looks and sounds like in yourself and in others, including what you see online.

Be open to meeting others who have different experiences than you and give them a chance to let you know who they are. Be brave and face your fears. Be curious and kind.

You are not alone in standing up to hate. Many human rights groups and government initiatives are doing the work of eradicating hate, too. We all have a “response-ability,” or the ability to respond. As civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

You just might find that it is easier to love other people than to hate them. Others will see how you behave and will follow your lead.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Kristine Hoover, Professor of Organizational Leadership, Gonzaga University and Yolanda Gallardo, Dean of Education, Gonzaga University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Newsrooms are experimenting with generative AI, warts and all

 

Journalists are using generative AI for tasks such as composing drafts and writing newsletters. Olena Koliesnik/iStock via Getty Images

The journalism industry has been under immense economic pressure over the past two decades, so it makes sense that journalists have started experimenting with generative AI to boost their productivity.

An Associated Press survey published in April 2024 asked journalists about the use of generative artificial intelligence in their work. Nearly 70% of those who responded said they had used these tools to generate text, whether it was composing article drafts, crafting headlines or writing social media posts.

A May 2024 global survey conducted by the public relations firm Cision found the slice to be somewhat smaller – 47% of journalists said they’d used generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Bard in their work.

But does the adoption of the technology pose any moral questions? After all, this is a business where professional ethics and public trust are especially important – so much so that there are fields of study devoted to it.

Over the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center have been researching the ethics of AI.

I think that if journalists are not careful about its deployment, the use of generative AI could undermine the integrity of their work.

How much time is really saved?

Let’s start with an obvious concern: AI tools are still unreliable.

Using them to research background for a story will often result in confident-sounding nonsense. During a 2023 demo, Google’s chatbot, Bard, famously spit out the wrong answer to a question about new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.

It’s easy to imagine a journalist using the technology for background, only to end up with false information.

Therefore, journalists who use these tools for research will need to fact-check the outputs. The time spent doing that may offset any purported gains in productivity.

But to me, the more interesting questions have to do with using the technology to generate content. A reporter may have a good sense of what they want to compose, so they will ask an AI model to produce a first draft.

This may be efficient, but it also turns reporters from writers into editors, thus fundamentally altering the nature of what they do.

Plus, there’s something to be said for struggling to write a first draft from scratch and figuring out, along the way, whether the original idea that inspired it has merit. That’s what I am doing right now as I write this piece. And I’m sad to report that I discarded quite a few of the original arguments I wanted to make, because as I tried to articulate them, I realized that they didn’t work.

In journalism, as in art, generative AI emphasizes – indeed fetishizes – the moment in which an idea is conceived. It focuses on the original creative thought and relegates the tedious process of turning that thought into a finished product – whether it’s through outlining, writing or drawing – to a machine.

But the process of writing out a story is inseparable from the ideas that give rise to it. Ideas change and take shape as they are written out. They are not preexisting entities patiently floating around, perfectly formed, simply waiting to be translated into words and sentences.

AI’s undermining of a special relationship

To be fair, only a portion of the journalists in both surveys were using generative AI to compose drafts of articles. Instead, , such as writing newsletters, translating text, coming up with headlines or crafting social media posts.

Once journalists see that the AI is quite talented at writing – and it is getting better and better at it – how many of them will resist the temptation?

The fundamental question here is whether journalism involves anything more than simply conveying information to the public.

Does journalism also entail a kind of relationship between writers and their readers?

I think it does.

When a reader regularly follows the analysis of someone writing about the Middle East or about Silicon Valley, it is because they trust that writer, because they like that writer’s voice, because they have come to appreciate that writer’s thought process.

Now if journalism involves that kind of relationship, does the use of AI undermine it? Would I want to read journalism created by what amounts to an anonymized aggregation of the internet any more than I would want to read a novel created by an AI or listen to music composed by one?

Or, stated differently, if I read a piece of journalism or a novel or listened to a musical piece, which I thought was created by a human being, only to find out that it was largely generated by an AI, wouldn’t my appreciation or trust of the piece change?

If the practice of journalism is based on having this kind of relationship with the public, the increased use of AI may well undermine the integrity of the practice, particularly at a time when the industry is already dealing with trust issues.

Being a journalist is a noble calling that, at its best, helps sustain democratic institutions. I assume that this nobility still matters to journalists. But most readers probably would not trust AI to uphold the social role that journalism plays.

AI does not care that “democracy dies in darkness”; it does not care about speaking truth to power.

Yes, those are cliches. But they are also widely held precepts that sustain the trade. Journalists neglect them at their peril.

Nir Eisikovits, Professor of Philosophy and Director, Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

From ancient Jewish texts to androids to AI, a just-right sequence of numbers or letters turns matter into meaning

 

The power of putting basic elements in just the right order is key to both Jewish mysticism and computer coding. WhataWin/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Isaac Asimov’s iconic science fiction collection “I, Robot” tells the story of androids created at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. The androids range from “Robbie,” who is nonvocal, to “Stephen Byerley,” who may or may not be a robot – he is so humanlike that people can’t tell.

Yet each model is made of the same elementary components: the binary code of ones and zeros. The differences in behavior between the simplest robot and the most advanced one, nigh indistinguishable from a human being, is simply the sequence of these two digits.

All computer languages are ultimately rendered in ones and zeros, even artificial intelligence programs – today’s equivalent of “Stephen Byerley.” But though this technology is relatively new, the concept it’s hinged on is not.

The idea that rearranging elemental units just so can produce powerful, even seemingly magical results appears all around us. It manifests in everything from technology and science to religion and art – a pattern I focus on in my work about how literature intersects with science, technology, engineering and math.

Some of the examples of this pattern that I find most fascinating are also the most ancient: They come from Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism that first appeared in print in the 12th century C.E.

Building blocks of creation

Integral to Kabbalah is the notion that Hebrew letters are the building blocks of the cosmos. According to mystical interpretations of the creation story in the Book of Genesis, God brought the world into being by creating the alphabet, then assembled the earth and sky by recombining letters.

“God is portrayed as an architect and the Torah a blueprint in the creation of the world,” Jewish studies scholar Howard Schwartz writes in his book “Tree of Souls.” “The way the letters of the alphabet emerge and combine has an uncanny resemblance to the combining and recombining of strings of DNA.”

The letter aleph, often believed to symbolize the oneness of God. Ben Burton/BRBurton23/Pixabay

The “Sefer Yetzirah,” or “Book of Creation,” which Torah scholar Aryeh Kaplan called “the oldest and most mysterious of all Kabbalistic texts,” describes the Hebrew letters as having great power. In Rabbi Kaplan’s translation of and commentary on verse 2.2, God “engraved” the letters “out of nothingness,” then “permuted” them into different combinations and “weighed” them.

“Each letter represents a different type of information,” Kaplan wrote. “Through the various manipulations of the letters, God created all things.”

From mud to man

In Jewish storytelling, Hebrew letters’ sacred power can be manipulated into combinations that animate inanimate matter. Such is the case of one of the earliest humanoid robots or “androids” in literature: the golem, a manlike creature made of clay.

A scene from the German movie ‘The Golem: How He Came into the World,’ released in 1920.

While there are numerous versions of this Jewish legend, the notion that letters animate the golem is common to them all. The mass of molded earth becomes lifelike when its maker intones secret combinations of letters. Engraved on the golem’s forehead is the Hebrew word for truth, “אמת,” comprised of the first, middle and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet – which Jewish tradition interprets to mean that truth is all-encompassing.

The golem sometimes helps the Jewish community, or sometimes wreaks havoc, depending on the story. But the golem also represents something bigger: With mystical knowledge, man imitates God’s act of creation.

To deanimate the creature, its maker must remove the first letter written on its forehead: א, or aleph, which represents the oneness of God. That leaves מת, the Hebrew word for “dead” – reflecting the Jewish tradition that there is no truth without God.

A sculpture of the golem made up of carvings of Jewish letters, by artist Joshua Abarbanel and displayed in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

‘Coding’ everywhere you look

Like the golem, robots, androids and even AI are powered with recombinations of elemental units. Instead of Hebrew letters, the units are ones and zeros. In both instances, the specific permutation makes all the difference – and all these creations have inspired speculative stories about what happens when familiar building blocks are rearranged.

The creature in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” arises as an assortment of body parts. Novelist Margaret Atwood’s “Crakers” are humans 2.0, bioengineered from reshuffled genes. In science fiction writer Ted Chiang’s novella “Seventy-Two Letters,” which draws from golem legends, dolls move according to the sequence of letters on a parchment placed in their backs.

Such patterns are not just the stuff of fiction, nor are they limited to computer science. Permutative “coding” is all around. Music notes are arranged to form a melody; gene sequences are combined to form an organism. In all living things – owls, geckos, people, roses – the instructions encased in DNA comprise recombinations of the same four nucleobase pairs.

The biological difference between a complex human and a simple bacterium is the order in which the nucleobase pairs are arranged. Hugo de Vries, a biologist working at the turn of the 20th century, observed that “the whole organic world is the result of innumerable different combinations and permutations of relatively few factors.”

Each rung on the DNA ‘ladder’ is made up of pairs of four base nucleotides: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). Martin Steinthaler/Moment via Getty Images

Power of sequence

Not all combinations “work” – neither in science nor in storytelling. In “On the Nature of Things,” a famous poem about philosophy and physics, the first-century Roman writer Titus Lucretius Carus cautions that “we must not think that all particles can be linked together in all ways, for you would see monsters created everywhere, forms coming to being half man, half beast …”

Fantastical imaginings aside, the core idea stands: Not all permutations yield viable results. To put it in terms of modern biology, genes with certain combinations of the four nucleobase pairs would not lead to a functioning organism.

Writer Jorge Luis Borges explored similar ideas in “The Library of Babel,” a short story about a library-like universe filled with books that contain every possible permutation of 25 characters. Most amount to nonsense – strings of letters that bear no meaning.

What sets apart something that works from something that doesn’t is sequence. The difference between the behavior of a simple robot like Asimov’s “Robbie” and the behavior of AI so complex that it seems sentient boils down to the sequence of ones and zeros that instruct it – not altogether dissimilar from the way a single letter is the difference between animation and deanimation, or creation and destruction, in Jewish folklore.

The potential consequences of AI’s novel permutation have caused fear and uncertainty. Yet perhaps there is some comfort in the notion that, as the Bible says, אֵין כָּל חָדָשׁ תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ: There’s nothing new under the sun.

Rocio Benabentos, Mark Finlayson and Mendel Hendel contributed feedback for this article.

Rhona Trauvitch, Associate Teaching Professor of English, Florida International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

How 19th-century Spiritualists ‘canceled’ the idea of hell to address social and political concerns

 

A majority of Americans believe that hell exists. Hayden Schiff from Cincinnati, USA via Wikimedia Commons., CC BY

Between Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, drivers pass a billboard on Interstate 71 that has achieved some internet fame.

Since 2004, a black sign has risen from this flat stretch of highway declaring “HELL IS REAL.” The H in “Hell” is painted in red, a color Christians have long associated with sin and Satan.

The developer who erected the warning, Jimmy Harston, has similar signs scattered across the Midwest, including ones that ask, “If you died today, where would you spend eternity?”

For years, this confrontational sign was mostly a local attraction. But it gained wider notoriety when Ohio’s two Major League Soccer teams, Columbus Crew and FC Cincinnati, dubbed their 2017 matchup “Hell is Real.” The sign has now spawned TikTok content, T-shirt designs, mugs and decals. But it also reflects a genuine belief in hell held by a majority of Americans today, though the numbers are slipping.

A 2023 Gallup poll found that 59% of respondents believe in hell, while 67% believe in heaven. The numbers for hell belief are far higher among those who identify as Protestant Christians (81%) and Republicans (79%).

Hell belief is holding steady in the U.S., but this was not always the case. In my research on spirit communication in 19th century American culture, I have found an organized effort to “cancel” hell by Spiritualists, who made up the fastest-growing religious movement of the century.

Spiritualists believed that people could maintain communication with the living even after death. They thought communicative spirits had a principal role to play in addressing the era’s most pressing social and political concerns, which would be impossible if souls were damned. This idea was a cornerstone of their practice and a driver of their politics.

Hell hath no fury

Many traditions, including Catholic Christianity, have beliefs about eternal destiny, but Protestant beliefs predominated in America’s settler colonies.

Puritan minister Michael Wigglesworth’s epic and best-selling poem “Day of Doom,” written in 1666, scared generations of believers with its vivid depiction of “yonder Lake,/where Fire and Brimstone flameth.”

A century later, revivalist minister Jonathan Edwards warned of the “dreadful pit of the glowing flames of the wrath of God” awaiting the unrepentant.

On the edges of organized religion, though, were believers interested in alternative afterlives. Swedish theologian and scientist Emmanuel Swedenborg, for example, speculated in 1758 that “The world of spirits is not heaven, nor is it hell; but it is a place or state intermediate between the two.”

Swedenborg’s ideas gained public traction in the U.S. after sisters Kate and Margaret Fox of Hydesville, New York, reported “rapping” and “knocking” sounds in their home. The knocking seemed responsive to the sisters’ questions, and they soon claimed that they could hold conversations with the deceased. Rising from this domestic drama was a national and international phenomenon that recalibrated people’s relationship with death and offered a balm to the grieving.

Some of the Foxes’ first advocates were Quaker activists Isaac and Amy Post. Isaac Post became a writing medium, recording alleged spirit communications from luminaries like George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte and also everyday people.

An 1841 painting ‘Pandemonium’ by John Martin, based on John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ where Pandemonium is the capital of Hell. John Martin via Wikimedia Commons

Spiritualists held that after shedding the body in death, the spirit would continue on a celestial journey. A spirit’s assignment was to help those still in their bodies to create a better, more just world. Through mediums, séances and object manipulation, spirits were believed to be able to enlighten the living by giving them a glimpse into life on a broader plane of existence.

Spiritualists felt that embodied life was narrow and full of biases, wants, needs and conflicts. In his 1850 book, “Singular Revelations,” spirit medium Eliab W. Capron recorded an insight he claimed to receive from the spirit of radical Methodist preacher Lorenzo Dow, who had died 14 years prior: “The Presbyterians say hell is a place of fire and brimstone that burns the soul forever. This is not so. The Hell is man’s own body, and when he escapes from that he escapes from bondage.”

Fires of reform

In neutralizing the threat of hell, Spiritualists believed that even deeply corrupted spirits could spur the living toward progressive reforms.

In an 1858 gathering of self-described “friends of free thought” in Vermont known as the Rutland Free Convention, Spiritualists and social reformers debated the question of hell vis-a-vis issues like slavery, the death penalty and maternity.

Lecturer and clairvoyant Andrew Jackson Davis cheekily announced to the Rutland crowd, “Hell has undergone the most extensive alterations and improvements” in the hands of Spiritualists. By caring “less about the fear of the devil, and more about the actual necessity of goodness,” people could act expediently to address real social problems rather than fight what Davis considered imaginary ones.

Spirit medium Achsa Sprague. vtdigger/via Wikimedia Commons

Spirit medium Ascha Sprague linked hell belief to the persistence of capital punishment in American jurisprudence, asking, “Who blames man that he hangs his brother between heaven and earth, when he has been taught to believe that the Almighty God, infinite in power and wisdom, will in a moment plunge him into a burning pit, and save him never?”

In other words, Spiritualists warned that the idea of hell allowed people to remain complacent: Let hell punish the brutal enslaver, the cruel prison warden, the merciless factory foreman, the abusive husband. Hell gave believers a way to escape the responsibility of addressing burning social ills in the here and now. By relinquishing the “bottomless pit, which they have been taught to believe in,” Isaac Post quoted a spirit saying, a new ethos of urgent and sweeping reform could materialize.

Even today, some spiritual activists consider hell belief an impediment to systemic social change. For example, prison abolitionist Hannah Bowman wrote in a 2023 collection on spirituality and abolition, “Insofar as hell is defined by coercion/confinement, separation, and retribution, it is to some degree related to any societal and state interventions reliant upon those practices.”

To hell and back

Putting out the fires of hell was not easy in the 19th century U.S., especially at the outbreak of the Civil War when mass death fed apocalyptic rhetoric. The promise of God’s “terrible swift sword” of judgment was sung out in the canonical words of suffragist Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Spiritualism’s popularity waxed and waned after the war, and its reformist leanings largely faded. Mass casualty events like war and flu led to periodic revivals, especially of séance culture. But hell belief in America ultimately held steady and reignited by the middle of 20th century.

The reasons for this range from a decline in religious belief between the world wars to a religious revival following them, and the horrors of war itself. In his 1949 memoir, “To Hell and Back,” World War II 2nd Lt. Audie Murphy recounts a fellow soldier’s impromptu verses; “Oh, gather round me comrades and listen while / I speak / Of a war, a war, a war, where hell is six feet deep.” Hell was everywhere.

Cornell University’s Roper Center poll from 1957 – in the thick of the Cold War – found that 74% of Americans polled believed in an afterlife, but 84% felt that the dead were uncommunicative. These modern trends indicate that hell belief captures the zeitgeist of an era. It ebbs and flows along with attitudes about justice, human suffering and even the health of the planet.

The “Hell is Real” sign has experienced a similar flux. Last summer, street artist LISP pasted a cutout of a cartoonish red devil on the highway sign and shared the covert operation on Instagram. “Is nothing sacred?” one user asked, riffing on the sign’s iconic, if peculiar, status. The sign has since been replaced with a fresh one, a visible reminder that for some people, hell belief will never die.

Lindsay DiCuirci, Associate Professor of English, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.