Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Friday, November 30, 2018

Escapees from Siberia

As you might expect from someone who is passionately interested in both genealogy and evolutionary genetics, when there's a study that combines both, it's a source of great joy to me.

This week, Nature published a study on the evolutionary history of humans in northern Europe, specifically the Finns.  Entitled, "Ancient Fennoscandian Genomes Reveal Origin and Spread of Siberian Ancestry in Europe," it was authored by no less than seventeen researchers (including Svante Pääbo, a Swedish biologist who is widely credited as founding the entire science of paleogenetics) from the Max Planck Institute, the University of Helsinki, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Vavilov Institute for General Genetics, and the University of Turku.

Quite a collaborative effort.

It's been known for a while that Europe was populated in three broad waves of settlement.  First, there were hunter-gatherers who came in as early as 40,000 years ago, and proceeded not only to hunt and gather but to have lots of hot caveperson-on-caveperson sex with the pre-existing Neanderthals, whose genetic traces can be discerned in their descendants unto this very day.  Then, there was an agricultural society that came into Europe from what is now Turkey starting around 8,000 years ago.  Finally, some nomadic groups -- believed to be the ancestors of both the Scythians and the Celts -- swept across Europe around 4,500 years ago.

Anyone with European ancestry has all three.  Despite the genetic distinctness of different ethnic groups -- without which 23 & Me genetic analysis wouldn't work at all -- there's been enough time, mixture, and cross-breeding between the groups that no one has ancestry purely from one population or another.

Which, as an aside, is one of the many reasons that the whole "racial purity" crowd is so ridiculous.  We're all mixtures, however uniform you think your ethnic heritage is.  Besides, racial purity wouldn't a good thing even if it were possible; that's called inbreeding, and causes a high rate of homozygosity (put simply, you're likely to inherit the same alleles from both your mother and father).  This causes lethal recessives to rear their ugly heads; heterozygous individuals are protected from these because the presence of the recessive allele is masked by the other, dominant (working) copy.  It's why genetic disorders can be localized to different groups; cystic fibrosis in northern Europeans, Huntington's disease in people whose ancestry comes from eastern England, sickle-cell anemia from sub-Saharan Africa, Tay-Sachs disease in Ashkenazic Jews, and so on.

So mixed-ethnic relationships are more likely to produce genetically healthy children.  Take that, neo-Nazis.

Map of ethnic groups in Europe, ca. 1899 [Image is in the Public Domain]

In any case, the current paper looks at the subset of Europeans who have a fourth ancestral population -- people in northeastern Europe, including Finns, the Saami, Russians, the Chuvash, Estonians, and Hungarians.  And they found that the origin of this additional group of ancestors is all the way from Siberia!

The authors write:
[T]he genetic makeup of northern Europe was shaped by migrations from Siberia that began at least 3500 years ago.  This Siberian ancestry was subsequently admixed into many modern populations in the region, particularly into populations speaking Uralic languages today.  Additionally... [the] ancestors of modern Saami inhabited a larger territory during the Iron Age.
The coolest part is that this lines up brilliantly with what we know about languages spoken in the area:
The Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, to which both Saami and Finnish languages belong, has diverged from other Uralic languages no earlier than 4000–5000 years ago, when Finland was already inhabited by speakers of a language today unknown.  Linguistic evidence shows that Saami languages were spoken in Finland prior to the arrival of the early Finnish language and have dominated the whole of the Finnish region before 1000 CE.  Particularly, southern Ostrobothnia, where Levänluhta is located, has been suggested through place names to harbour a southern Saami dialect until the late first millennium, when early Finnish took over as the dominant language.  Historical sources note Lapps living in the parishes of central Finland still in the 1500s.  It is, however, unclear whether all of them spoke Saami, or if some of them were Finns who had changed their subsistence strategy from agriculture to hunting and fishing.  There are also documents of intermarriage, although many of the indigenous people retreated to the north...  Ancestors of present-day Finnish speakers possibly migrated from northern Estonia, to which Finns still remain linguistically close, and displaced but also admixed with the local population of Finland, the likely ancestors of today’s Saami speakers.
Which I think is pretty damn cool.  The idea that we can use the genetics and linguistics of people today, and use it to infer migratory patterns back 40,000 years, is nothing short of stunning.

Unfortunately, however, I have zero ancestry in Finland or any of the other areas the researchers were studying.  According to 23 & Me, my presumed French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English ancestry was shown to be... French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English.  No surprise admixtures of genetic information from some infidelity by my great-great-grandmother with a guy from Japan, or anything.

On the other hand, I did have 284 markers associated with Neanderthal ancestry.  Probably explaining why I like my steaks medium-rare and run around more or less naked when the weather's warm.  Which I suppose makes up for my lack of unexpected ethnic heritage.

*************************************

Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]






Thursday, November 29, 2018

The origin of oxygen

One of the (many) things I love about science is the fact that for every discovery made, a slew of new questions open up.

Sometimes, "a slew" doesn't even cover it.  There have been discoveries that have revolutionized entire fields.  For example, when J. Tuzo Wilson, Harry Hess, and others developed the plate tectonics model in the early 1960s, to explain the magnetic mapping of the Atlantic Ocean, it explained a whole lot of other things -- why there are always volcanoes near oceanic trenches, why the coastline of North and South America fits together with Europe and Africa as if they were puzzle pieces, why the Himalayas are not volcanic, but are an earthquake zone (and are, in fact, still rising).  But it opened up a huge number of other questions -- why volcanoes in different spots have different characteristics (for example, the hot, fluid lava of Kilauea as compared to the monstrous explosions of Mount St. Helens and Vesuvius), why coastal California is made up of dozens of unrelated chunks of rock (which go by the delightful name of "suspect terranes"), and -- most importantly -- what force is driving the entire process.

Geologists are still devoting their careers to understanding the outfall from that one discovery.

A study published earlier this month in Geobiology has that characteristic of good science -- of solving one question and in the process opening up lots of others.  Called, "The Early Archean Origin of Photosystem II," by Tanai Cardona and A. William Rutherford of Imperial College of London, Patricia Sánchez‐Baracaldo of the University of Bristol, and Anthony W. Larkum of the University of Sydney, at first seems as if it would only be of interest to people who are fascinated with the gruesome biochemical details of photosynthesis.  Photosystem II is an array of proteins and pigment molecules that forms one of the two "light traps" in chloroplasts (the other, unsurprisingly, is called "photosystem I").  So who, other than botanists, really cares when it evolved?

Well, it turns out that the timing of this event is mighty peculiar -- because apparently photosystem II, central to the glucose-production system of all plants, arose around 3.4 billion years ago -- 700 million years before the earliest known autotrophs, the cyanobacteria (commonly called "blue-green algae").

The way this was discovered was a technique called a molecular clock -- using a known mutation rate for a specific gene to estimate when related genes in different organisms had a common ancestor.  (As a wildly oversimplified example, if you know that the rate of mutation in a particular gene cluster is 1 base pair change per million years, and that gene cluster in species A has 23 differences from the related gene cluster in species B, you can infer that the most recent common ancestor between A and B occurred 23 million years ago.)

Here, the researchers looked not at genes in two different organisms, but two different proteins in the same organism -- photosystem I and photosystem II, the genes for which were once a single piece of DNA that diverged in two directions.  And if you use the molecular clock technique to estimate when the common ancestor of those two genes was, you get a number way bigger than anyone expected.

The cyanobacteria Tolypothrix [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Matthewjparker, Tolypothrix (Cyanobacteria), CC BY-SA 3.0]

This is strange.  The geological evidence is pretty clear that earlier than 2.7 billion years ago, the atmosphere had no free oxygen.  So if photosynthesis -- the major oxygen-producing activity on Earth -- evolved 700 million years before significant quantities of oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere, it raises two awkward questions:
  1. Who was doing it?
  2. Where did all the oxygen go in the interim?
I'm sure these questions have perfectly rational answers.  It's possible cyanobacteria evolved a lot earlier than we'd thought -- after all, they're not common as fossils.  It could be that at first some biological or geological process was locking up the oxygen as soon as it was released, so it took a long time for it to start building up to levels that would leave a discernible fingerprint in the rocks.  It could be that something's confounding the molecular clock data and causing it to give an inaccurate result -- although in reading the paper, to my only moderately-trained eye, this doesn't look at all likely.  The analysis was careful, thorough, and painstaking.

It could also be that the earliest photosystems were simply much less efficient than today's, so their ability to oxidize water was insufficient to lead to an oxygen buildup in the atmosphere.  Or that the ancestral gene/protein for today's photosystems had a different purpose for the organisms that had them, and only afterwards was co-opted to store energy and synthesize food -- a phenomenon called preadaptation.

Or maybe something else.  The point is, it's a peculiar and fascinating discovery.  And like many peculiar and fascinating discoveries, I'm sure it will lead to further questions -- and, with hard work, insight, and a grain of luck, a whole host of further answers.

*************************************

Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]






Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Kite flying

A few years ago, I wrote a post here at Skeptophilia called "Grass, gulls, mosquitoes, and mice," in which I laid out the argument that while evolution is usually slow, sometimes it's so fast we can see it happening before our very eyes.  And when that happens, the anti-evolutionists amongst us have some explaining to do.

It's always nice to have another arrow in your quiver, and that came in a recent paper in Nature called, "Rapid Morphological Change of a Top Predator With the Invasion of a Novel Prey," by Christopher E. Cattau, Robert J. Fletcher Jr, Rebecca T. Kimball, Christine W. Miller, and Wiley M. Kitchens, all biologists at the University of Florida, who have been studying Snail Kites, a rare bird of prey found in the Everglades (and, as you'll see, in a few other places).

The Snail Kite, as you might expect from the name, is a specialist predator that feeds only on apple snails, a large species of freshwater gastropod found in the Everglades.  They have hooked beaks for removing the meat from the snail, and taloned feet for holding onto the shell -- well adapted for their niche.

The problem started with the accidental introduction into Florida of the island apple snail (Pomacea maculata), a larger, heavier species native to Argentina.  The native species, the Florida apple snail (Pomacea paludosa), was quickly outcompeted in areas where they both occurred, which concerned not only fans of the Snail Kite but rice farmers, as the island apple snail is a voracious pest on rice crops.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons, photograph by Andy Morffew]

When an exotic species replaces a native species upon which other animals depend for food, the usual result is a drastic blow to the pre-existing food chain.  Here, though, we have a different result -- an eye-opening response by the Snail Kites that recalls evolutionary biologist Alan Grant's comment in Jurassic Park that "nature finds a way."

As is, the Snail Kites in Florida were not equipped to prey upon the island apple snails -- their feet were too small to hold onto the shells, not surprising as the snails are five times larger than the native Florida apple snails.  But the expected drop in the bird's numbers didn't happen.  Instead, in only a couple of generations, selection was so powerful on the population that the average talon size and bill size increased measurably, and the alterations were reflected by changes in their DNA.

"Nobody would believe me," said Robert Fletcher, co-author of the study, when the findings were announced. "They said, 'No, that cannot be. It's too quick.'"  But even the naysayers were convinced when the introduced snail species showed up in huge numbers in one part of the Snail Kite's range, and instead of leaving the premises, nearly all of the nearby kites converged on the spot.

I guess birds like an all-you-can-eat buffet as much as the rest of us do.

The authors write:
[T]rends in predicted breeding values emphasize that recent morphological changes have been driven primarily by phenotypic plasticity rather than micro-evolutionary change.  Our findings suggest that evolutionary change may be imminent and underscore that even long-lived vertebrates can respond quickly to invasive species.  Furthermore, these results highlight that phenotypic plasticity may provide a crucial role for predators experiencing rapid environmental change.
It's good news for the kites, but it bears mention that a lot of times, the introduction of an exotic species can spell disaster for native ones.  The kites were lucky in that there was already a range of bill sizes because of spontaneous mutations, and the new prey acted as a selecting agent, favoring the largest-billed and largest-footed individuals.

The most interesting part is that once you set this in motion, it ultimately will split the population from related populations elsewhere.  I first saw Snail Kites in Belize, where there are no island apple snails, so the pressure to cope with bigger prey doesn't exist.  Given time -- and, apparently, less time than anyone thought -- the population in Belize and the one in Florida will diverge genetically to the point that they will be, by anyone's definition, different species.

So there you have it: another example of evolution in action.  Cool enough for anyone to appreciate, but for evolutionary biologists, this is nothing short of spectacular.  We can add this to the list of times we've actually observed species evolving quickly enough to see it happen -- which is one more nail in the coffin of strict creationism, not that we particularly needed another one.

*************************************

Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]






Tuesday, November 27, 2018

You're my type

A while back I posted an article about a claim that Rh negative individuals are descended from aliens, or possibly Jesus, and this allows them to have a variety of superpowers.  The outcome of writing this is that my blog has been bombarded by a slew of advertisements revolving around blood types (not to mention aliens and Jesus), and this included one that claimed that before dating, you should always check your potential romantic interest's blood type.

Intrigued, I clicked the link, and after about a half-hour's rooting around online (during which thousands of innocent cells in my prefrontal cortex were subjected to unmentionable agony) I found an article at More called, "Can Blood Type Determine Your Personality?", which seems to have the most detail about the whole thing.  It turns out that for some years now, woo-woos in Japan have claimed that your blood type (just the A/B/O group, not the Rh group; almost no one in Japan is Rh negative) influences your personality.  And of course, there's no way that Americans are going to read about any damnfool unscientific idea without a significant number of them going, "Wow, I never thought about that!  That is amazingly plausible!"  Especially if the idea originated in Japan, which always seems to add a nice cachet of credibility.  So this has led to a whole new branch of personality-analysis pseudoscience, as if astrology weren't enough.

According to Natalie Josef, the source of the "information" on the above website, not only does your blood type tell you your personality and who you should try to hook up with, it also predicts what career you should pursue:
Type O - You are the social butterflies.  Often popular and self-confident, you are very creative and always seem to be the center of attention.  You make a good impression on people and you’re often quite attractive.  Organized and determined, your stubbornness will help you reach your goals.  You make good leaders.  Lovewise, O is most compatible with O and AB.  Common career choices: banker, politician, gambler, minister, investment broker, and pro athlete. 
Type A - Type As may seem calm on the outside, but inside, you’re filled with anxiety and worry.  You’re perfectionists and often shy and sensitive.  Usually introverted, you’re stable and thoughtful.  You make good listeners and are sensitive to color and your surroundings.  You like to be fashionable and are up on the latest trends, but never flashy or gaudy.  You like romantic settings and often shun reality for fantasy worlds.  A is most compatible with A and AB in the love department.  Common career choices: accountant, librarian, economist, writer, computer programmer, and gossip columnist. 
Type B - You can be very goal-oriented and often complete the ambitious tasks set before you.  Outgoing and very charming, you’re good at reading people and providing support.  Though critical of appearance (but not your own), you aren’t picky and are unlikely to dwell over the little things.  Type Bs are impulsive individualists who often create their own path in life.  You are very strong and optimistic.  B is most compatible with B and AB lovers.  Common career choices: cook, hairdresser, military leader, talk show host, and journalist. 
Type AB - Not surprisingly, ABs can be quite dualistic, possessing both A and B traits.  You may be shy and outgoing, and hesitant and confident.  You often stand out from others, don’t like labels, and are nice and easy going.  You are logical and determined to do things correctly.  Usually trustworthy, you like to help others.  You often speak in a serious manner.  Your patience, concentration, and intelligence are admirable.  AB can find a soul mate with any other blood type.  Common career choices: bartender, lawyer, teacher, sales representative, and social worker.
Well, I'm a type A, and I have to admit that I am a bit of a border collie, personality-wise; but as far as being "fashionable," all I can say is that usually I go to work looking like I've been put through a dryer without "Cling-Free."  I probably own an iron, but I have no idea where it is, and my idea of color matching usually revolves around the concept of "everything goes well with blue jeans."  And in the career department, "writer" is an obvious hit, but the other ones ("Gossip columnist?"  "Accountant?"  What the hell?) are, shall we say, not very accurate.


[Image is in the Public Domain]

What strikes me about all of this is the usual dart-thrower's bias issue; we tend to notice the hits and ignore the misses.  But really, come on.  Are you really claiming that there are only four basic personality types?  Even the astrologers divide all of humanity twelve ways; the best you can do is four?

Then, after reading the article, I made the mistake of scrolling down to the comments.  This is, as I have mentioned before, usually a mistake.  My favorite one was a comment that revolved around the fact that the article had made a point that in Japan, believers in the whole blood-type-is-destiny don't like ABs very much.  This reader was upset by that:
Kudos on your article Natalie.  I love learning something new all the time.  I'm an AB+ as well, plus Asian astrology sign of Fire Horse.  Not only did they abort as many unborn fire horses back in 1966 as they were able, (fire was considered an undesirable element with horse sign) but now I find out they also wouldn't want me due to my blood type!  However, I have to say I love Asian food!
Okay. Sure.  "Fire horses."  "Fire horse" + AB = "really bad."  But hell yeah, pass the kung pao chicken!

I have to admit to deep mystification as to why an obviously absurd idea could possibly convince anyone, and I'm forced to the conclusion that the main problem is that a large fraction of humanity has no real understanding of the principles of scientific induction.  We are so immersed in a world of advertising claims, political sound-bites, and media glitz that "well, that sounds right!" has become the gold standard for belief.  Remarkably few people, upon reading a claim, seem even to take the next step, which is to ask the question, "how do I know that claim is true?", much less go on to asking, "if it is true, how could it possibly work?"  All in all, it makes me realize that as a science teacher, I have my work cut out for me.

*************************************

Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]






Monday, November 26, 2018

There were giants in the Earth

It's always a peculiar kind of joy to me to find out I wasn't understanding something correctly.

I know, it's an odd thing to get excited about, but I find the process of refining my comprehension of the universe to be a thrill.  I vividly recall when my freshman physics teacher demonstrated via a clever apparatus that if you shoot a gun horizontally, and simultaneously drop a bullet from the same height, the two bullets hit the ground at exactly the same time.

It didn't seem possible, but I couldn't argue with experimental evidence right in front of my eyes; the vertical and horizontal components of velocity are completely independent of each other.

And my picture of the world shifted a little bit.

Here's another one: how many of you have heard that before the dinosaurs became extinct when the Chicxulub Meteorite hit 66 million years ago, all the lineages related to mammals were small and fearful, scampering about in the shadows to avoid the fierce "terrible lizards" at the top of the food chain?  Any primitive mammals that grew too large, the story went, would either (1) be turned into lunch, or (2) be stepped on and converted to a Primitive Mammal Pancake.

Well, check off another piece of conventional wisdom as "refuted."  Because a recent discovery near the town of Lisowice, Poland, dating from the Late Triassic -- 220-odd-million years ago, right as the dinosaurs were approaching their peak -- shows that during this time, which was quickly leading up to the all-time-record-holders for terrestrial animals, behemoths like Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, and the aptly-named Giraffatitan, there were already cousins to the lineage that led to mammals that were the size of African elephants.

This fossil, of dicynodont Lisowica bojani, looked like some bizarre cross between a turtle and a rhinoceros.  Here's an artist's reconstruction of Lisowica:


[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Creator: Dmitry Bogdanov, Dicynodont from PolandDB, CC BY 3.0]

Lisowica is so large, said Tomasz Sulej, paleontologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences's Institute of Paleobiology in Warsaw, that at first he and his team didn't recognize it as a dicynodont.  Its estimated mass is nine tons -- as much as a full-grown male elephant.

"Who would have ever thought that there were giant, elephant-sized mammal cousins living alongside some of the very first dinosaurs?" said Stephen Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist at The University of Edinburgh.  "We've always thought that early mammals and their relatives retreated to the shadows while dinosaurs rose up and grew to huge sizes.  That's the story I tell my students in my lectures.  But this throws a wrench into that simple tale."

But that's what's cool about science, isn't it?  You think you get what's going on, and nature turns around and astonishes you over and over.  

So picturing the prehistoric world dominated by T. rex and Triceratops and the rest of the big, lumbering creatures popular in children's books, with our cousins all the size of mice scurrying around and hoping not to get noticed, needs to be revised.  Right smack in the middle of the Age of Reptiles was a close relative of ours who looks like he was ready and able to defend himself.

And maybe even turn some of the smaller dinosaurs into Dinosaur Pancakes.

*************************************

Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]






Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Notes from the other side

Dear Readers:

I'm going to take a short break, for the rest of the week -- but I'll be back next Monday, November 26, so keep sending me links and ideas!

cheers,

Gordon

*********************************

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that I knew was going to be good even before I opened it, because it was from a site called Daily Vibes.  First, one of my pet peeves is the way people use words like "vibration" and "frequency" to basically mean "any damn thing we want," and I figured the "vibes" part presaged a lot of that sort of thing.  But I was even more excited when I perused their home page and saw a list of recent articles, which include the following:
  • "What Does Your Zodiac Sign Reveal About Your Innermost Thoughts?"
  • "How You Sit Can Reveal Your Personality"
  • "Five Gemstones Traditionally Used to Clear Negative Energies"
  • "Five Ways Crying Makes You Stronger"
  • "Have You Seen a Feather Tattoo?  Here's What It Can Mean"
So I started reading the various posts, and very quickly ran into a troubling problem: what if your zodiac sign says basically the opposite of what you learn from how you sit?  Because I found that the way I like to sit means I'm outgoing, dynamic, dress well, have high goals and aspirations, and have a difficult time taking criticism.  My zodiac sign, on the other hand, says that I'm mysterious, aloof, and secretive, hard to get to know, and very moody.  So am I both?  Or somewhere in the middle?  Because right now, I'm confused as to whether I should smile and schmooze with people, or wear a black cloak and just give people a meaningful raised eyebrow to make them uncomfortable.

Then I had to give a look at the one about crying, because I'm one of those people who is very easy to launch into a complete tear-o-rama.  My wife was at an art show this past weekend, so Saturday evening I decided to sit on the couch with my dog, drinking wine and watching Dr. Who.  I rewatched one of my favorite episodes, "The Girl in the Fireplace," and ended up hugging my dog and sobbing into my wine glass.

Okay, it's a pretty sad episode, but geez.  I mean, it's not like it's the first time I've seen it, or anything, so you'd think I'd have been somewhat immunized.  But no.  There I sat, blubbering like an idiot.


At least my dog understood.

Anyhow, I was curious about what Daily Vibes had to say about crying, and I was heartened to find out that because I cry a lot, I don't care what other people think about me, and I'm brave.  I also learned that crying "relieves stress and pent-up emotions... [removing] negative emotions and [instilling] positive ones."  In that respect, we're told, "it's almost as effective as sex."

So next time your significant other is feeling amorous, you should turn to them and say, "Not now, honey, I think I'd prefer to have a nice long cry instead."

Oh, and if you have a feather tattoo, you're "strong, independent, courageous, and cherish freedom."

Anyhow, all of this is sort of beside the point, because the article that my friend sent me the link to was none of the above, but was to a post called "Five Signs Your Deceased Love Ones Are Trying to Help You."

Naturally, I was curious about what they thought were signs that Grandma Bertha was still hanging around, and I suspect you are, too, so without further ado:
1.  Animals Acting Strangely.
If this were true, it would mean my house has been continuously haunted for years, because in my experience my pets act strangely all the time.  For example, I went outside this summer because our coonhound, Lena, was having a complete barking fit, dancing around yapping like mad.  I thought she had a possum cornered, but no.  When I came up to her, I found out she was barking at...

... a stick.

To be fair, it was a pretty ferocious-looking stick.  But still.
2.  Poltergeist Activity.
I hear bumps and creaks and knocks in our house all the time, but I think that's mostly because (1) it's an old house, and (2) there's a family of squirrels that we have been unable to evict from our attic.  I haven't seen anything else really suspicious on this front, so this one would have to be in the "no" column for me.

On the other hand...
3.  Electronics Acting Up.
I am halfway convinced that my mere presence makes computers malfunction.  My school computer, for example, frequently and unpredictably decides to draw little gray Xs on all of my document icons, and the only solution is to restart the computer, which takes fifteen minutes because this particular machine is powered by a single hamster running in a wheel.  It's kind of a relief to find out this is caused by ghosts, because I was beginning to think I'm just a techno-idiot.
4.  Vivid Dreams.
This one is also in the "yes" column for me.  Last night I woke up in the middle of the night because I was dreaming that I was defending our back yard from a flock of very threatening owls.  So my dreams tend to not be just "vivid," but "really fucking weird."  And if this is Grandma Bertha's fault, I wish she'd lay off, because I need my sleep.
5.  Extrasensory Perception.
For this one, the site says, "ESP is a pretty wide umbrella in terms of definition. It can mean a bunch of different things.  But in this case, it’s as if the spirits in our lives put ideas in our heads before we can have them."

Well, I'm always coming up with strange ideas, which is why I'm an author, because I can write out bizarre ideas that pop into my head and people pay me to read about them.  But I don't think that's ESP.  It may be, as one of my friends once speculated, because I was dropped on my head as a baby.

So the checklist for whether my house is haunted generates mixed results, which I suppose is to be expected.  Myself, I think it's not haunted, although my younger son swears that he's seen a shadowy figure out of the corner of his eye, moving about in our basement.  Maybe that's Grandma Bertha, I dunno.  If it is, I wish she'd stop simply oozing about the place and do something useful, like telling me her chocolate fudge recipe, which I've tried unsuccessfully for years to reproduce.

But I need to wrap this up, because I have to go see what Lena's barking at.  Maybe it's another stick that is attempting to launch a vicious attack on her.  You know how it goes.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Mary Roach's Spook.  Roach is combines humor with serious scientific investigation, and has looked into such subjects as sex (Bonk), death (Stiff), war (Grunt), and food (Gulp).  (She's also fond of hilarious one-word titles.)

In Spook, Roach looks at claims of the afterlife, and her investigation takes her from a reincarnation research facility in India to a University of Virginia study on near-death experiences to a British school for mediums.  Along the way she considers the evidence for and against -- and her ponderings make for absolutely delightful reading.




Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Wheat, chaff, and alien abductions

My question today is one that haunts many skeptics -- the question of how one would know if a bizarre claim was actually true, especially in the absence of evidence.

The hardest-nosed of us would probably object to the premises of the question; if there is no evidence, they would say, then there is no basis on which to make a judgment in the first place.  While I agree with that general attitude -- and have applied it myself on numerous occasions -- it always leaves me with the worry that I'll miss something, and just through the weakness of the evidence and my preconceived notions I won't see the grain of wheat in amongst the chaff.

I riffed on this whole idea in my novel Signal to Noise (and if you'll allow me a moment of shameless self-promotion, it is available at Amazon from the link on the right side of the page).  In the story, a skeptical wildlife biologist, who had decided that all woo-woo claims are bullshit, is confronted with something bizarre going on in the mountains of central Oregon -- and has to overcome his preconceived notions even to admit that it might be real.  In the story, it doesn't help that the news is delivered to him with no hard evidence whatsoever, by a total stranger who just "has a feeling that something is wrong."  (I won't tell you any more about it; you'll just have to read it yourself.   And at the risk of appearing immodest, I think it's a pretty damn good story.)

The reason I bring all of this up is a website called Little Sticky Legs: Alien Abductee Portraits, owned by Steven Hirsch.  On this website, which you should definitely take a look at, there are photographs of a number of people who claim that they were abducted by, or at least contacted by, aliens, and their first-hand accounts (and in some cases drawings) of their experiences.  I thought this was an unusually good example of the phenomenon I've described above, for a variety of reasons.

First, the accounts are weird, rambling, and disjointed, and many of them seem to have only a loose attachment to reality.  Second, the photos don't help; whether Hirsch deliberately set out to make his subjects look sketchy is a matter of conjecture, but my sense is that he was playing fair and this is the way these people actually look.  Some of them, not to put too fine a point on it, are a little scary.  And third, of course, the content of the accounts is fairly contrary to what most scientists think is realistic.  All of these things combined seem to put them squarely into the category of most of the subjects of this blog; bizarre, possibly delusional, nonsense.


But reading the earnest narratives of these supposed contactees left me feeling a little uneasy.  Part of it was a sense that if their stories aren't true, then these people are either lying or else are the victims of hallucinations that could qualify as psychotic breaks.  And although I am rather free about poking fun at people who generate strange ideas, I draw the line at including as targets people who have genuine mental illnesses.

My unease, however, had another source, and one that haunts me every time I see something like this; what if one of these stories is actually true?

A person who had been abducted, but was left with no physical trace of the experience, might well describe it in just these terms.  If the victim was someone who wasn't highly educated, there's no reason to expect that (s)he would remember the details, or explain them afterwards, in the way a trained scientist would.  The general vagueness and lack of clarity is, in fact, exactly what you'd expect if an ordinary person experienced something shockingly outside their worldview.

Now, please don't misunderstand me.  I'm not, in any sense, committing to a belief in alien abductions in general, much less to any specific one of the stories on Hirsch's website.  My hunch is that none of these stories is true, and that whatever these individuals is describing has another source than actual experience.  But it is only a hunch, and an honest skeptic would have to admit that there is no more evidence that these claims are false than there is that they are true.  My only point here is that if one of them was telling the truth, this is much the form I would expect it to take... which means that it behooves all of us, and especially the skeptics, not to discount odd claims without further investigation.  Skeptics tend to rail against the superstitious for jumping to supernatural explanations for completely natural phenomena; we should be equally careful not to jump to prosaic explanations when an odd one might be correct.

The best thing, of course, is to withhold judgment completely until the facts are in, but that is pretty solidly counter to human nature, and is probably unrealistic as a general approach.  And given the ephemeral nature of some of these claims, the facts may never come in at all.  All we can do is keep thinking, keep watching and listening and investigating... and not be afraid to push the envelope of our own understanding when the time comes.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Mary Roach's Spook.  Roach is combines humor with serious scientific investigation, and has looked into such subjects as sex (Bonk), death (Stiff), war (Grunt), and food (Gulp).  (She's also fond of hilarious one-word titles.)

In Spook, Roach looks at claims of the afterlife, and her investigation takes her from a reincarnation research facility in India to a University of Virginia study on near-death experiences to a British school for mediums.  Along the way she considers the evidence for and against -- and her ponderings make for absolutely delightful reading.




Monday, November 19, 2018

The worst century in history

I've always loved a mystery, and for that reason, the European "Dark Ages" have fascinated me for as long as I can recall.

But the moniker itself is off-puttingly self-congratulatory, isn't it?  It's not like Roman rule was that pleasant for your average slob to live under, after all.  Be that as it may, after the conquests of the Roman Empire started to fall apart in the 4th century C.E. from a combination of invasion, misrule, and downright lunacy, things went seriously downhill.  Life was pretty rough until the 8th and 9th centuries, when some measure of order returned as damn near all of Europe coalesced around the Roman Catholic Church, ushering in the Middle Ages.  And what we know about the period in between is... not a hell of a lot.  Accounts are scattered, vague, and full of conflation with mythology and legend.  The few that were written by contemporaries, rather than long after the fact -- such as Gregory of Tours's History of the Franks -- contain as much hagiography as they do history.

St. Gregory and King Chilperic I, from Grandes Chroniques de France de Charles V (14th century) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Which is why I was thrilled to read a paper that appeared last week in Antiquity about a study of the "worst decade to be alive" -- 536-546 C. E.

The research, which combines the skimpy evidence we have from accounts written at the time with hard scientific data from analysis of ice cores, paints a grim picture.  Writings from the year 536 describe a mysterious "fog" that lasted for eighteen months, generating widespread crop failure and what one Irish cleric called "three years without bread."  From the ice core analysis, medieval historian Michael McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski identified what they believe to be the culprit: a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland that dropped the global temperature an average of two degrees Celsius in a matter of months.

This was followed by another eruption in 540, and the following year, the single worst plague on record -- the so-called "Plague of Justinian," which killed between a third and a half of the inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire, and resulted in so many corpses that people loaded them on ships and dumped them in the Mediterranean.  The disease responsible isn't known for certain, but is believed to be Yersinia pestis -- the same bacterium that caused the Black Death, almost exactly eight hundred years later.  But to give you an idea of the scale, there's reason to believe the Plague of Justinian dwarfed both the 14th century Black Death and the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 -- usually the two examples that come to mind when people think of devastating pandemics.  The death toll is estimated at sixty million.

There probably was a connection between the cold and the plague, too, although not the obvious one that famine triggers disease susceptibility.  Many scholars think that the lack of food, and cold temperatures following a period that had generally been warm, forced mice and rats into homes and on board ships -- not only in close proximity to humans, but in their means of travel.  The fleas they carried, which are vectors for the plague, went with them, and the disease decimated Europe and beyond.

The effects of the eruption, however, were felt all over the Earth.  Tree ring analysis from North America shows 540 and the years following to have been unusually cold, with short-to-nonexistent growing seasons.  Volcanic dust is found in those layers of ice cores everywhere they exist.  Famines occurred in Asia and Central America.

All in all, a crappy time to be around.

Things didn't rebound for almost a hundred years.  Archaeologist Christopher Loveluck, of the University of Nottingham, found traces of dust containing significant amounts of lead in ice strata from the year 640, which he believes were due to a resurgence in silver smelting for coinage.  (I suppose if there's a hundred years during which your three main occupations are (1) not starving, (2) not freezing, and (3) not dying of a horrible disease, then making silver coins is kind of not on your radar.)  And the tree rings and ice cores bear out his contention that this indicates better conditions; although there were a couple of other volcanic eruptions we can see in the glacial records, none were as big as the one in 536.  The silver smelting, Loveluck says, "... shows the rise of the merchant class for the first time."  Things, finally, were improving.

What's coolest about this study -- despite its gruesome subject -- is how hard science is being brought to bear on understanding of history.  We no longer have to throw our hands up in despair if we're interested in a time period from which there were few written records.  The Earth has recorded its own history in the trees and the glaciers, there for us to read -- in this case, telling us the tale of the worst century the human race has ever lived through.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Mary Roach's Spook.  Roach is combines humor with serious scientific investigation, and has looked into such subjects as sex (Bonk), death (Stiff), war (Grunt), and food (Gulp).  (She's also fond of hilarious one-word titles.)

In Spook, Roach looks at claims of the afterlife, and her investigation takes her from a reincarnation research facility in India to a University of Virginia study on near-death experiences to a British school for mediums.  Along the way she considers the evidence for and against -- and her ponderings make for absolutely delightful reading.




Saturday, November 17, 2018

The creature from Nova Scotia

My friend and fellow author and blogger, Andrew Butters (who writes over at Potato Chip Math), sent me a link this morning that positively warmed my heart.

It's about obscure microorganisms that live in dirt in Nova Scotia.  Okay, I know that's an odd thing to have your heart warmed by, but look, this is cool.  The microorganisms are called hemimastigotes, and they've been known for a while, but this new find allowed scientists to do a detailed genetic analysis -- and what they found is astonishing.

Hemimastigotes don't belong in any of the six kingdoms currently accepted by taxonomists -- Archaea (a strange group of sort-of bacteria), Eubacteria (all the other bacteria), Protista (single celled eukaryotes like Amoeba and Paramecium), Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia.

They're most similar, at least superficially, to primitive animals, but their DNA shows that the evolutionary distance between hemimastigotes and animals is greater than the evolutionary distance between you and bread mold.  So calling them "animals" is completely unsupportable, unless you want to call mushrooms animals, too.  The last common ancestor between hemimastigotes and anything else on Earth is over a billion years ago.

So hemimastigotes give new meaning to the word outgroup.

Without further ado, here's an electron-microscopic photograph of a hemimastigote, Hemimastix kukwesjijk:

[Image courtesy of Yana Eglit]

If you're curious about the beast's odd moniker, the species name, "kukwesjijk" means "little hairy ogre" in Mi'kmaq, the language spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of Nova Scotia, where the discovery was made.

The study, done by Gordon Lax, Yana Eglit, Laura Eme, Erin M. Bertrand, Andrew J. Roger, and Alistair G. B. Simpson, appeared in Nature last week, and is nothing short of jaw-dropping.  These strange creatures (the hemimastigotes, not Lax et al.) have little harpoons called extrusomes that they used to skewer single-celled prey, flagella that pull the hapless microorganism toward its mouth, and then they suck out the cytoplasm.

Which is pretty hard-core.

The scientists have raised a colony of hemimastigotes in their lab, so they have more to study -- I must reiterate how incredibly rare they are, having been seen only a handful of times since their discovery in the late 19th century.  "It's "extremely exciting that it's still possible to discover something so different from all known life on Earth," Eglit told reporters for the CBC.   "It really shows how much more there is out there."

Indeed.  That's why I love science; there's always more to learn, always new realms to explore, and it has this funny way of coming up behind you and astonishing you just when you thought you had everything figured out.

Now, y'all'll  have to excuse me, because I need to go rewrite my notes for the taxonomy unit in my AP Biology class.

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If you are one of those people who thinks that science books are dry and boring, I'll give you a recommendation that will put that misconception to rest within the first few pages: Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements.

Kean undertook to explain, from a human perspective, that most iconic of all images from the realm of chemistry -- the Periodic Table, the organized chart of elements from the simplest (hydrogen, atomic number 1) to largest and most complex (oganesson, atomic number 118).  Kean's sparkling prose shows us the personalities behind the science, including the notoriously cranky Dmitri Mendeleev; tragic, brilliant Henry Moseley, a victim of World War I; and shy, self-effacing Glenn T. Seaborg, one of only two individuals to have an element named after them while they were still alive.

It's a fun read, even if you're not a science geek -- maybe especially if you're not a science geek.  Because it allows you to peer behind the curtain, and see that the scientists are just like the rest of us, with rivalries, jealousies, odd and misplaced loyalty, and all the rest of the faults the human race is subject to.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]