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.

Thursday, February 28, 2019

Double whammy

Having a rather morbid fascination with things that are big and scary and dangerous and can kill you, I've dealt more than once with topics like mass extinctions and asteroid collisions and supervolcanoes.  So naturally, when there was a piece of recent research on all three at the same time, I felt obliged to write a post about it.

The paper, published last week in Science, was written by a team of scientists from the University of California - Berkeley (Courtney J. Sprain, Paul R. Renne, Loÿc Vanderkluysen, Kanchan Pande, Stephen Self, and Tushar Mittal), is called "The Eruptive Tempo of Deccan Volcanism in Relation to the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary."  In it, they examine one of the biggest volcanic eruptions in Earth's history -- the Deccan Traps -- which seem to have occurred right around the time of the Cretaceous Extinction, 66 million years ago.

The Western Ghats, part of the Deccan Traps lava flow [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nicholas (Nichalp), Western-Ghats-Matheran, CC BY-SA 2.5]

This certainly isn't a coincidence, and it's been thought for a while that the eruption, which occurred in what is now India and released an estimated one million cubic kilometers of lava, were at least contributory to the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the Cretaceous Period.  Such an unimaginably huge eruption would have burned everything in its path, converting any organic matter that got in the way into ash and carbon dioxide -- causing a spike in temperature that certainly would have put a huge strain on ecosystems to compensate.  The actual blow (literally) that marked the end of the Cretaceous Period, though, was an enormous meteorite collision, the Chicxulub Impact, near the Yucatan Peninsula on the other side of the planet.

Almost precisely on the other side, in fact.  This got Sprain et al. wondering if the two might be connected, especially since geologists still don't know what causes trap-type eruptions (there are two other trap eruptions known, the Emeishan Traps in China and the unimaginably huge Siberian Traps that are likely to be the cause of the largest mass extinction known, the Permian-Triassic Extinction).  Whatever the cause, it apparently happens without a great deal of warning, which is scarier than hell.  The crust of the Earth fissures, and phenomenal quantities of lava come pouring out, causing serious issues for anyone or anything living nearby.  But the observation that the Chicxulub Impact and the Deccan Traps are not only close to simultaneous but are almost exactly antipodal made scientists wonder if that wasn't a coincidence.

Apparently, the thought is this.  When the Chicxulub Impact occurred, it sent huge shock waves through the Earth, which propagated both through the mantle and along the crust.  When those waves had traveled all the way around (or through) the Earth, they converged on a single point, almost like a magnifying glass bringing rays of sunlight focusing on one spot.  This reinforced the waves, ringing the Earth like a bell, and the crust destabilized...

... cracking open and creating one of the largest volcanic eruptions ever.

So the whole thing becomes a double whammy, and not because of an unfortunate accident.  It seems likely that one event caused the other, and also explains why species that lived in what is now Asia were affected just as much by the extinction as ones that were near the collision itself.  Seems kind of unfair, doesn't it?  The meteorite collides with the Earth, causing massive devastation in the Western Hemisphere, and the critters in the Eastern Hemisphere only had a few minutes to gloat before a massive earthquake launched an event that did them in, too.

"Both the impact and Deccan volcanism can produce similar environmental effects, but these are occurring on vastly differing timescales," study co-author Courtney Sprain said.  "Therefore, to understand how each agent contributed to the extinction event, assessing timing is key."

There you have it.  Yet another reason why we wouldn't want the Earth to get hit by a huge asteroid, if you needed another one.  Kind of dwarfs the earthquakes and volcanoes we've had recently, doesn't it?  Also makes me realize how fragile the biosphere is, and that a sudden and unforeseen event can trigger enormous destruction -- one a bolt from the sky, the other from the deepest regions of the Earth's mantle.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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





Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Piercing the clouds

One of the most unusual stories that H. P. Lovecraft ever wrote is "In the Walls of Eryx."  It isn't the usual soul-sucking eldritch nightmares from the bubbling chaos at the center of the universe; in fact, it's his only real science fiction story.  It centers around a human colony on Venus, devoted to mining a kind of crystal that can be used for propulsion.  There's an intelligent native species -- reptilian in appearance -- who was content to let the humans bump around in their space suits (Lovecraft at least got right that the atmosphere would be toxic to humans) until the humans started killing them.  At that point, they started fighting back -- and setting traps.

The story centers around a crystal hunter who is out on an expedition and sees a huge crystal in the hands of a (human) skeleton.  He goes toward it, and bumps into an unseen obstacle -- completely transparent walls, slick (and therefore unclimbable) and twelve feet tall (so unjumpable).  The problem is, when he tries to back out, he's already moved around a bit, and doesn't retrace his steps perfectly.

Then he runs into another wall.

What's happened is that he's stumbled into an invisible labyrinth.  And how do you find your way out of a maze if you can't see it?  You'll just have to read it.  It's only a dozen or so pages long, and is one of the neatest (and darkest) puzzle-box stories you'll ever pick up.

It's been known since Lovecraft's time ("In the Walls of Eryx" was written in 1936) that Venus was covered by clouds, and its surface was invisible from Earth.  Of course, a solid mantle of clouds creates a mystery about what's underneath, and speculation ran wild.  We have Lovecraft's partially-correct solution -- a dense, toxic atmosphere.  Carl Sagan amusingly summed up some of the early thinking on Venus in the episode "Heaven and Hell" from his groundbreaking series Cosmos: "I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus.  Why not?  Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds.  Well, what are clouds made of?  Water, of course.  Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it.  Therefore, the surface must be wet.  Well, if the surface is wet, it's probably a swamp.  If there's a swamp, there's ferns.  If there's ferns, maybe there's even dinosaurs...  Observation: I can't see anything.  Conclusion: dinosaurs."

Of course, reputable scientists didn't jump to these kinds of crazy pseudo-inferences.  As Neil deGrasse Tyson points out, "If you don't know, then that's where your conversation should stop.  You don't then say that it must be anything."  (Perhaps not a coincidence that Tyson was the host of the reboot of Cosmos that appeared two years ago.)

The first hint that Venus was not some lush tropical rain forest came in the late 1950s, when it was discovered that there was electromagnetic radiation coming from Venus that only made sense if the surface was extremely hot -- far higher than the boiling point of water.  This was confirmed when the Soviet probe Venera 9 landed on the surface, and survived for 127 minutes before its internal circuitry fried.

In fact, saying it's "hot" is an understatement of significant proportions.  The average surface temperature is 450 C -- 350 degrees higher than the boiling point of water, and hot enough to melt lead.  The atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide (compared to 0.04% in the Earth's atmosphere), causing a runaway greenhouse effect.  Most of the other 3.5% is nitrogen, water vapor, and sulfur dioxide -- the latter being the rotten-egg chemical that, when mixed with water, creates sulfuric acid.

Yeah.  Not such a hospitable place.  Even for crystal-loving intelligent reptiles.

Photograph from the surface of Venus [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

But there's still a lot we don't know about it, which is why at the meeting last fall of the American Geophysical Union, there was a proposal to send a probe to our nearest neighbor.  But this was a probe with a difference; it would be attached to a balloon, which would keep it aloft, perhaps indefinitely given the planet's horrific convection currents.  From there, we could not only get photographs, but more accurate data on the atmospheric chemistry, and possibly another thing as well.

One of the things we don't know much about is the tectonics of the planet's surface.  There are clearly a lot of volcanoes -- unsurprising given how hot it is from other causes -- but whether the crust is shifting around the way it does on Earth is not known.  One way to find out would be looking for "venusquakes" -- signs that the crust was unstable.  But how to find that out when probes on the surface either melt or get dissolved by the superheated sulfuric acid?

The cool suggestion was that because of the atmosphere's density, it might be "coupled" to the surface.  So if something shook the surface -- a venusquake or volcanic eruption -- those waves might be transferred to the atmosphere.  (This effect is insignificant on Earth because our atmosphere is far, far less dense.)  Think of a plate with a slab of jello on it -- if you shake the plate, the vibrations are transferred into the jello because the whole thing is more or less stuck together, so the surface of the jello wobbles in resonance.

An airborne probe might be able to tell us something about Venus's geology, which is pretty awesome.  It appeals not only to my fascination with astronomy, but my love of a good mystery, which the second planet definitely is.

So I hope this project gets off the ground, both literally and figuratively.  Even if it's unlikely to detect anything living -- reptilian or not -- we could learn a great deal about what happens when the carbon dioxide levels start undergoing a positive feedback.

A scenario we all would like very much not to repeat here at home.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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





Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Drowned cities and drowning mythology

Yesterday, I was listening to one of my favorite pieces by Claude Debussy, The Drowned Cathedral, and I started to wonder what legend had given rise to the piece.  After a little bit of digging, I found out that Debussy got his inspiration from the Breton legend of the mythical city of Ys, built on the coast of Brittany behind a seawall.  Princess Dahut the Wicked tempted fate by engaging in all sorts of depravity therein, despite the warnings of Saint Winwaloe that God was watching and would smite the ever-loving shit out of her if she didn't mend her ways.  (Okay, I'm paraphrasing a bit, here, but that's the gist.)  Anyhow, Dahut wouldn't listen, and one night a storm rose and broke through the seawall, and the ocean flowed in over the city.  Dahut's father, King Gradion, escaped on a magical horse with Dahut riding behind him, but Winwaloe shouted at him, "Push back the demon riding with you!"

So Gradion did what any good father would do, namely, he shoved his daughter into the sea, which "swallowed her up."  The sea also swallowed the rest of Ys, which kind of sucked for the inhabitants, given that it wasn't really their fault that the princess was a little morally challenged.  As for Princess Dahut herself, she became a mermaid, and is still hanging around to tempt sailors into jumping into the ocean to their deaths.  And according to legend, on windy days, you can still hear the bells of the drowned cathedral of Ys if you stand along the shore of Douarnenez Bay.


The Flight of King Gradion, by Évariste-Vital Luminais, 1884 (in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, Brittany, France) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Kind of a cool story, in a ruthless, Grimm's Fairy Tales sort of way, even if Winwaloe and Gradion, not to mention God, do come across as pro-patriarchy assholes.  And whatever else you think, you have to admit that Debussy's piece is gorgeous (go back and give a listen to the recording of it I linked above, if you haven't already done so).

What I haven't told you, yet, though, is the other thing I found out while looking up the Legend of the Drowned City of Ys...

... which is that he über-Christians are now using the story to support creationism.

I'm not making this up.  If you don't believe me, check out the page called "Submerged Ruins" at the site Genesis Veracity Foundation.  Here's how they launch the idea:
Have you ever seen a map showing the bronze age port cities of the world? You certainly have not, because the darwinists will tell you sea level at circa 2000 B.C. was little different than today, yet the presence of hundreds of submerged ruins’ sites from the Gulf of Chambay to Bimini, and from Cornwall to Nan Madol, certainly belie that notion, with most of the submerged ruins worldwide in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, right where you’d expect them to be, where Sidon, Peleg, Javan, Tarshish, and Atlas plied the waters, building their port facilities, now submerged since the end of the Ice Age.  Here is a partial list of the submerged ruins worldwide, with pictures where available, to be soon updated as more photos will undoubtedly roll-in from interested “submergie” aficionados, so help out if you can, hard as it may be for a darwinist to do, but certainly not for a soon-to-be ex-darwinist, we shall see.
Well, I've never known a "Darwinist" to make any definitive statement regarding the sea level staying the same.  Most "Darwinists" are pretty well-versed in science, meaning they know all about ice ages and interglacial periods and sea level fluctuations, as opposed to creationists, who think that the entire world was flooded and that afterwards the water just "went away," presumably through some kind of giant floor drain in the Marianas Trench.

Anyhow, we soon get to the legend of Ys, in a single-sentence paragraph that should win some kind of Olympic gold medal in the Comma Splice Event:
Submerged ruins have been reported off Cornwall’s Isles of Scilly, in Cardigan Bay, off Tory Island, and off the Brittany coast of the Kingdom of Ys, also known as Keris, all these submerged ruins part of Atland as it’s called in the ancient book Oera Linda of the Frisians, that empire was also known as Atalan, don’t bet against Avalon, the story adapted two thousand years later.
What on earth does this have to do with the bible, you may be asking?  Well, the writer is happy to explain with another single sentence:
So the popular notion that the empire of Atlantis was some continent-sized island now submerged way out in the Atlantic ocean is proven ridiculous, because that empire was demonstrably a vast ice age maritime empire of the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic coastlines, which comports with the biblical timeline, that the Ice Age ended circa 1500 b.c. at the time of the Exodus of the Jews out of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, their patriarch having been Canaan, the father of Sidon (Posidon).
So, I was thinking, "Wait.  Is he talking about Poseidon?  Like, the Greek god?  Because, you know, polytheism doesn't exactly square with the traditional interpretation of the bible, right?"  But in fact, yes, that's who he's talking about... and he claims that Poseidon was mentioned in the bible:
Plato wrote that Posidon [sic] (Canaan’s son Sidon, Genesis 10:15) bestowed ten districts of atlantean empire governorship to his sons, one son Atlas having gained the kingship of the district of the concentric canal ringed city of Atlantis, his namesake (along with the Atlantic ocean and the Atlas mountains), that legendary capital city of Atlantis where the worship of Posidon [sic] was centered and practiced for perhaps forty generations until the Ice Age ended (when the sea level rose to consume 25 million square miles of coastal real estate worldwide).
Except that in the bible, Sidon was Noah's great-grandson, and was born after the Flood.

Oops.

But creationists never let a little thing like facts stand in the way of their conclusions.  He finishes up his explanation, if I can dignify it by that name, thusly:
Very important to remember is that Noah’s Flood did not cover today’s mountain ranges (contrary to what the bibliophobes mockingly insist), because the global flood of Noah’s day totally covered and obliterated the low mountains of the pre-flood supercontinent Pangea [sic], those mountains not having been formed by tectonic plates crashing together by runaway plate tectonics as was the case for the orogenies of our current mountains ranges formed at the close of Noah’s Flood.  So now when skeptics come to comprehend the solid science confirming the global flood vividly described in the book of Genesis, solid science here http://detectingdesign.com/fossilrecord.html, the reasons to believe all of the Bible become even more apparent, much to the darwinists’ woe.
Yup, I have to admit that reading this made me experience some significant woe, but not for the reason he probably thinks.

Is it just me, or do the creationists seem increasingly desperate lately?  The evidence for evolution, the antiquity of the Earth, and the accuracy of paleontology just keeps mounting, and yet they continue to flail around, like a drowning citizen of Ys trying to cling to anything in order to stay afloat.  They've shifted their tactics from "The Bible Says It, I Believe It, and That Settles It" -- which is an inherently unarguable position -- to looking at the actual evidence.  And that moves the game solidly onto our turf, because evaluating evidence is what scientists do.

So I suppose sites like this, however they are kind of an embarrassment to read, are actually a good thing, because it means that on some level, the biblical literalists are sensing that they're losing.

And in celebration, let's indulge in a little more Debussy, shall we?  How about his orchestral work, The Sea?  That seems a fitting way to end this discussion, doesn't it?

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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





Monday, February 25, 2019

Tracing the lapse of ages

The evolutionary model is one of the most powerful explanatory devices in biology.  It has led to discoveries that simply blow the mind -- such as the fact that dinosaurs didn't go extinct after all (we still have 'em -- we just call 'em birds).  As Richard Dawkins has demonstrated, all you need is an imperfect replicator (DNA) and a selecting agent (the environment) and you can create massive changes in way fewer generations than you'd think.

Of course, sometimes that may not result in an improvement.


I want to tell you today about two fascinating examples of evolutionary conundrums, both about our friends the erstwhile dinosaurs -- and similar occurrences which had nearly opposite results.

First, let's look at scrub jays.

These smart, pretty birds, bright blue with gray markings, are made up of two populations.  The first (and largest) is represented by Woodhouse's Scrub Jay (Aphelocoma woodhouseii):

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Peter Wallack, Western Scrub Jay, Santa Fe, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The second is the Florida Scrub Jay:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mwanner at the English language Wikipedia]

Pretty similar, right?  Odd, then, that these two photographs were taken 2,700 kilometers apart -- and there are no scrub jays of any kind in between.

Given the fact that the western scrub jays (which include three other species besides Woodhouse's) are a much larger and more diverse population than their Floridian cousins, it's likely the Florida Scrub Jay's ancestors came from the west rather than the reverse.  But how?  They're not migratory, so they didn't get blown off course on migration (which happens -- for three years running a Pacific Loon showed up in Cayuga Lake in upstate New York).  So what caused the split -- and when?  There's apparently been little drift in the populations since the division occurred, given the fact that they're pretty similar still, but that might be low selection, not short time spans.

The bottom line is, we don't know.  The scrub jays are a textbook example of allopatric range distribution -- related populations that have no range overlap.  And while in some cases these peculiarities have been explained, this one has not.

Even odder -- and virtually the opposite in end result -- came out of a genetic study of skeletons of the adzebills (Aptornis spp.), a pair of species native to New Zealand which went extinct from overhunting after the colonization of the islands by the Maoris.  They were impressive birds -- flightless, predatory, just under a meter tall, with the heavy, sharp, downcurved bills that gave them their common name.

Skeleton of Aptornis defossor in the Auckland Museum [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Auckland Museum, Aptornis defossor (AM LB544) 601651 (cropped), CC BY 4.0]

Their general shape led scientists to think they may be related to moas -- enormous flightless birds that went extinct right around the same time as the adzebills did.  But here, appearance and size are misleading.  The study, published last week in Diversity, has shown the genetics of the adzebills indicates their closest living relatives are a group of birds in Africa...

... the flufftails.

White-spotted Flufftail (Sarothrura pulchra)  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Francesco Veronesi from Italy, White-spotted Flufftail near Kakum NP - Ghana 14 S4E2889 (16010066588), CC BY-SA 2.0]

"A lot of past genetic research and publicity has focused on the moa, which we know were distant relatives of the ostrich, emu, and cassowary," said study co-author Dr Kieren Mitchell of the University of Adelaide.  "But no one had analysed the genetics of the adzebill, despite a lot of debate about exactly what they were and where they came from."

Study co-author Trevor Worthy of Flinders University added, "We know that adzebills have been in New Zealand for a relatively long time, since we previously discovered a 19 million-year-old adzebill fossil on the South Island...  A key question is whether they've been present since New Zealand broke away from the other fragments of the supercontinent Gondwana or whether their ancestors flew to New Zealand from elsewhere later on."

But... look at these two.  (The birds, not the researchers.)  Even the most diehard scientific type might raise an eyebrow at these being closely related.  However, consider my first example -- the wolf and the pug.  Selective breeding of cats and dogs has produced enormous differences in only a few hundred years.  Imagine you were an alien biologist, come to Earth to catalog all the species of life on this planet, and you ran across a chihuahua and a Saint Bernard.

My guess is if you told the alien biologist they were the same species, he/she/it would laugh in your face.  But they are, in fact, genetically very close, and in fact are even theoretically interfertile.  (Although what a Saint Berhuahua would look like kind of boggles the imagination.  Plus, the mechanics of the conception are a little problematic.  I mean, if it was a male chihuahua and a female Saint Bernard, would they, like, give him a stepladder or something?)

An imperfect replicator plus a selecting agent plus time can create wonders.  It seems fitting to end this post with a quote from Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species which I think sums it up brilliantly:
It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.  We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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





Saturday, February 23, 2019

Reversing the arrow

After a deep philosophical discussion, a friend once said to me, "You're only a skeptic because you don't have the balls to be a mystic."

I bristled (of course) and explained that my skepticism came from a desire to base my understanding on something more concrete than feelings and desires.  She shot back, "So you wouldn't have accepted the truth of atoms before the experiments that proved their existence."

"I would not have known they were real, no," I responded.

"So there could be great swaths of knowledge outside your direct experience, of which you are entirely ignorant."

"There could be, but I have no way of knowing."

She gave me a wicked grin and said, "The mystics do."

Predictably, neither of us convinced the other in the end.  I don't think any amount of mysticism would have arrived at the Bohr model of the atom and the periodic table, for example.  But the reason her arrow went in as deeply as it did is that she wasn't entirely wrong.  I have had a fascination with "other ways of knowing" -- mysticism, psychic phenomena, altered states of consciousness, and the like -- for as long as I can remember.  The lack of evidence for most of it has not dulled my interest -- if anything, it's piqued it further.

Woodcut by Camille Flammarion (1888) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I have this sort of dual life.  On the one hand, I consider myself of the hard-edged, evidence-demanding skeptical type.  On the other, I'm drawn to all sorts of woo-woo stuff that, despite my scoffing at it by day, has me researching it in the wee hours when I figure everyone's asleep and I won't get caught out.

It's also why all of my novels have a paranormal twist.  Living vicariously through my characters, I suppose.

Understandable, then, that my ears perked up immediately when I saw an article written by Dr. Julia Mossbridge in (of all places) The Daily Mail.  I've written about Mossbridge before -- she's been researching telepathy and precognition for fifteen years -- and my problem with her research, then and now, is that I don't see any possible mechanism by which either of those could work.

But.  That a scientist of her stature would continue to stand by this claim means it's worth consideration.  And I have to be careful of my own biases -- we all are prone to confirmation bias, and if my bent is to look at the world in a mechanistic fashion, it might well blind me to what's really going on.  It's never a good idea to jump from "I don't see how this could be true" to "this isn't true."  It's just a thinly-disguised version of the argument from ignorance, isn't it?  As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "Going from an abject statement of ignorance to an abject statement of certainty."

As far as what Mossbridge is actually claiming, it's more than a little fascinating.  She writes:
I led a team at the respected Northwestern University in the U.S. that analysed 26 experiments published over the previous 32 years, all of which examined the claim that human physiology can predict future important or emotional events. 
These studies had asked questions such as: ‘Do our bodies give different unconscious signals when we’re about to see a picture of someone pointing a gun at us, versus when we’re about to see a picture of a flower?’ 
In all of the experiments we analysed, a random number generator was used to select the future image so it was impossible to cheat.  The answer, our research concluded, is ‘yes’.  When you add all these experiments together, it became clear the human body goes through changes in advance of future important events — alerting our non-conscious minds seconds earlier to what is likely to happen. 
On average, participants’ bodies showed changes that were statistically reliable.  For instance, they would sweat more (a behaviour associated with fear) before they were shown an image of a gun, and less before they saw a flower. 
This happened too often to be scientifically considered chance.
All of this, of course, runs counter to the sense most of us have that time flow is one-directional.  How could the future influence the present?  But as Mossbridge correctly points out, the "arrow of time" problem is one of the great unsolved mysteries of physics.  Virtually all of the physicists' equations are time-symmetric -- the math works equally well whether time is flowing forward or backward.   One of the only exceptions is entropy -- which deserves a bit more explanation.

We observe that systems tend to progress toward more chaotic (high entropy) states.  A glass breaks, but the pieces never spontaneously come together and reassemble into a glass.  The sugar you've stirred into your coffee never comes back together into solid crystals sitting at the bottom of the cup.  Why is that?

The simplest explanation of this can be illustrated using a deck of cards.  If you were to shuffle an ordinary deck, what's the likelihood that (by random chance) they'd end up in numerical order by suit?

Nearly zero, of course.  The reason is that there are only 24 different states where they are organized that way (depending on the order of the suits), whereas there is a nearly infinite number of possible other arrangements.  So if you jump from one arrangement to another (by shuffling), the chance of landing on one of the 24 ordered states is very close to zero.  Progression toward disorder is the rule because, in general, there are way more disordered states than ordered ones.

But this still doesn't explain all of the other cases where time is completely symmetric.  Why do we remember the past but know nothing about the future?  The simple answer is that no one knows.  Einstein himself said, "The distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, although a remarkably stubborn one."

So I'm curious to find out more of what Mossbridge is claiming.  And I'll soon have my chance, as I just ordered her new book The Premonition Code, which details the evidence that has convinced her and others that precognition actually exists.  (If you'd like to order the book as well, click the image below.)

 

Until then, I have to say the jury's still out on this one.  I'm trying to push aside both the disbeliever and the mystic that cohabit in my brain, and stick with the skeptic -- look at the argument as dispassionately as I can, and see where it leads.  Faced with a huge, mysterious, and complex universe, that's about the best we can ever do.

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

You can't get on social media without running into those "What Star Trek character are you?" and "Click on the color you like best and find out about your personality!" tests, which purport to give you insight into yourself and your unconscious or subconscious traits.  While few of us look at these as any more than the games they are, there's one personality test -- the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which boils you down to where you fall on four scales -- extrovert/introvert, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving -- that a great many people, including a lot of counselors and psychologists, take seriously.

In The Personality Brokers, author Merve Emre looks not only at the test but how it originated.  It's a fascinating and twisty story of marketing, competing interests, praise, and scathing criticism that led to the mother/daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers developing what is now the most familiar personality inventory in the world.

Emre doesn't shy away from the criticisms, but she is fair and even-handed in her approach.  The Personality Brokers is a fantastic read, especially for anyone interested in psychology, the brain, and the complexity of the human personality.

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






Friday, February 22, 2019

Explosions in Andromeda

We've learned a lot about our own galaxy by studying our "sister galaxy," Messier-31, better known as the Andromeda Galaxy.  It's situated about 2.5 million light years away, so from our perspective looks to the naked eye like little more than a smudge of light in the night sky.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

I remember when I was a kid and first grasped how far away Andromeda is.  Like many people of my generation, I was captivated by the original Star Trek.  In the episode "By Any Other Name," Kirk et al. are confronted by some aliens called Kelvans who come from the Andromeda Galaxy, and want to hijack the Enterprise to get back home.  Now, recall that because of warp drive, the intrepid space-farers of the United Federation of Planets are tooling about on a weekly basis, zipping from planet to planet, covering light-years of distance in mere hours.  So it was a bit of a shock -- to me, at least -- that at maximum warp, it would take three hundred years to reach the Andromeda Galaxy.

So far, in fact, that the Kelvans propose to reduce most of the crew to little geometric solids to save on food, lessen the likelihood of rebellion, have at least some of them still alive upon arrival, and also to reduce the number of extras the show's producers had to hire.


Of course, Kirk saves the day and they end up returning to our galaxy, kindly offering to leave the Kelvans on an uninhabited planet all their own.  Who could resist that?

In any case, I was blown away by how far away the Andromeda Galaxy is, not to mention the fact that the writers of Star Trek got that bit right given their extensive history of playing fast-and-loose with physics, despite Scotty's repeated admonition that ye canna change the laws thereof.  Everyone knows the stars in our own galaxy are far away; but this is an entirely different order of magnitude of distance.

Considering how far away we are from it, if you have a good enough telescope, it's surprising how spectacular it is.  Like our own, it's a spiral galaxy, so the disadvantage of being situated inside the thing we're trying to study has been ameliorated by the fact that there's a similar one right next door.  It's home to a trillion stars.

And there are some interesting ones.  Just last month, there was a paper in Nature about the discovery of a peculiar object called a recurrent nova that I had never heard of before.   A team of researchers found that this object, with the euphonious name M31N 2008-12a, is a white dwarf being circled by a small, dim star.  This pairing is resulting in some seriously cool behavior, which I'm glad we're observing from a safe 2.5 million light years away.

What's happening is this.  The white dwarf, which is the core of a collapsed star about the size of our Sun, has such a high gravitational pull that it's siphoning off material from its companion.  When the gas and dust approach the surface of the white dwarf, it's heated and compressed so much that the hydrogen component fuses into helium.  This releases so much energy that it causes an explosion, blowing away the top layer of the dust into space.

What's amazing is that these explosions are happening about once a year, and have been going on for a million years.  This has left a shell of dust 400 light years across.   But what's more fascinating still is that it can't go on forever.  Despite the explosions, the white dwarf is gradually gaining mass at the expense of its companion.  Once its mass gets to about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun -- the Chandrasekhar Limit -- the gravitational pull will exceed the outward pressure exerted by the atoms in the star, and it will collapse.  That collapse will trigger further fusion, of helium into carbon, carbon into oxygen, and so forth, and the energy produced by that will trigger one of the brightest events in the universe, a Type 1a Supernova.

Cool enough already, but wait till you hear the rest.  The fusion triggered by the explosion is what creates virtually all the heavier elements in the periodic table.  So a sizable fraction of the atoms in your body were formed during the first few seconds of a colossal stellar explosion.  We are, as Carl Sagan trenchantly remarked, truly made of star-stuff.

Oh, and the parts of the exploding white dwarf not blown away into space, to seed future planets and stars and life forms, are blown inward so hard that the electrons are forced into the atomic nuclei, resulting in, basically, a big ball o' neutrons.  This takes the remaining mass of the star and compresses it into a sphere about ten kilometers across, generating a substance so dense that a matchbox-sized piece of it would weigh three billion tons.

Like I said.  Good thing we're out here at a safe distance.  Sucks for the Kelvans, though.

The one disappointing thing is that the paper in Nature says that although the recurrent nova is still firing off once a year, the cataclysmic final explosion isn't going to happen for another forty thousand years, give or take a year or two.  So unfortunately, we won't be around to see it.  Unless some alien race shows up and turns us into geometric solids and sits us on a shelf, reawakening us just before the cosmic show starts.

But I suppose that's too much to hope for.

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

You can't get on social media without running into those "What Star Trek character are you?" and "Click on the color you like best and find out about your personality!" tests, which purport to give you insight into yourself and your unconscious or subconscious traits.  While few of us look at these as any more than the games they are, there's one personality test -- the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which boils you down to where you fall on four scales -- extrovert/introvert, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving -- that a great many people, including a lot of counselors and psychologists, take seriously.

In The Personality Brokers, author Merve Emre looks not only at the test but how it originated.  It's a fascinating and twisty story of marketing, competing interests, praise, and scathing criticism that led to the mother/daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers developing what is now the most familiar personality inventory in the world.

Emre doesn't shy away from the criticisms, but she is fair and even-handed in her approach.  The Personality Brokers is a fantastic read, especially for anyone interested in psychology, the brain, and the complexity of the human personality.

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






Thursday, February 21, 2019

Congress of lunatics

I don't know if it's reassuring or distressing for me to find out that here in the United States we don't own a monopoly on anti-scientific whackjobs.

I mean, we do have a good many of 'em, there's no doubt of that.  Just counting the young-Earth creationists and the climate change deniers, we're pretty well stocked.  Add to that the people who believe in astrology, phone-in psychics, homeopathy, conspiracy theories, and the latest heinous lies uttered by our alleged commander-in-chief, and you've got a sizable fraction of Americans for whom logic and evidence are not exactly paramount.

So it's easy for me to slip into despair about my countrymen, and accounts for the mixed feelings I had upon reading about last month's annual meeting of the Indian Science Congress, meant to be a gathering of the finest scientific minds across India, where attendees were told a number of eye-opening claims, to wit:
  • Einstein's General and Special Theories of Relativity were a "huge blunder."
  • Dinosaurs were created by the god Brahma.
  • The first in vitro fertilizations of humans were not done in Great Britain in 1977, they were done thousands of years ago in (where else?) India.
  • Isaac Newton "didn't really understand gravity" and his Universal Theory of Gravitation is flat-out wrong.
  • The first mechanical flight was achieved in (where else?) India, when twenty-four different kinds of aircraft were invented by Ravana, a demon god with ten heads.
If at any point you were expecting me to say, "Okay, I made the last one up," sorry to disappoint you -- these were all genuine claims made, by alleged scientists, at the meeting.

Ravana, inventor of the airplane [Image is in the Public Domain]

And in case I haven't made the point strenuously enough; this was a meeting of, by, and for professional scientists.  To be fair, a lot of the attendees were up in arms that their gathering had been, for all intents and purposes, hijacked by a bunch of superstitious loons.  "We never dreamed that some of them would spout such irrational ideas," zoologist Ashok Saxena said, in an interview with NPR after the fiasco occurred.  "They were invited to speak based on their science credentials."

"It makes me uncomfortable when pseudoscience statements are made from a platform like the Indian Science Congress," said Kushagra Agrawal, senior lecturer in chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.  "The idea of such events is to show the world India's scientific prowess, but it makes me wonder what impression those Nobel laureates and other foreign scientist dignitaries will take from our country."

Indeed.  It's hard to see how any serious scientist wouldn't be appalled at this -- and, very likely, take his contributions to the field elsewhere rather than presenting at an event that had been turned into a Three-Ring-Circus of Superstitious Nonsense.  But it remains to be seen how they could have prevented it.  Previously, there was no requirement by the oversight agency that presenting scientists submit their speeches for review prior to the event; organizers trusted that credentials would assure relevance.

Fortunately, they're not going to make that mistake again.  "We've never censored scientists before," said Indian Science Congress General Secretary Premendu Mathur.  "We expected them to motivate young minds and speak responsibly, but now, each session will have to be closely monitored.  We won't allow others to use our platform for their selfish reasons anymore."

I wish Mathur luck, and certain agree with his aims, but I would like to warn him that the one thing superstitious nutjobs don't do well is shut the hell up.  If you deny them one venue, they'll find another bigger and better one.  Anyone who has the balls to get up in front of a bunch of scientists and say that airplanes were invented by a ten-headed demon god is not going to be dissuaded by a little inconvenience like submitting his speech ahead of time.

So that's today's dip in the deep end, which to my fellow Americans should either be reassuring or not, depending on how you choose to look at it.  Of course, there's a part of me that hopes there is a flaw in the Theory of Relativity, and that the speed of light isn't the universal cosmic speed limit.  Because I really want warp drive to be a thing.  But given that these same people are claiming that dinosaurs were a special creation of the gods, I'm thinking it unlikely that if it is true, these guys will be the ones who will discover it.

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

You can't get on social media without running into those "What Star Trek character are you?" and "Click on the color you like best and find out about your personality!" tests, which purport to give you insight into yourself and your unconscious or subconscious traits.  While few of us look at these as any more than the games they are, there's one personality test -- the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which boils you down to where you fall on four scales -- extrovert/introvert, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving -- that a great many people, including a lot of counselors and psychologists, take seriously.

In The Personality Brokers, author Merve Emre looks not only at the test but how it originated.  It's a fascinating and twisty story of marketing, competing interests, praise, and scathing criticism that led to the mother/daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers developing what is now the most familiar personality inventory in the world.

Emre doesn't shy away from the criticisms, but she is fair and even-handed in her approach.  The Personality Brokers is a fantastic read, especially for anyone interested in psychology, the brain, and the complexity of the human personality.

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






Wednesday, February 20, 2019

The galactic river

I was an amateur stargazer as a kid.  I had a small refracting telescope and spent many hours out in my parents' front yard, looking at stars and planets and whatever else I could find.  My favorite astronomical object was (and, in fact, still is) the Pleiades, a star cluster and "stellar nursery" in the constellation Taurus:

[Image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

I pondered many times whether the stars I looked at hosted planets, and those planets intelligent life -- and whether there might be a little alien boy looking back at me through his telescope.  I also sometimes liked to stand on my head (I was a bit of a strange kid, a fact that should shock no one) and I remember thinking that when I did that at night, I had the stars beneath my feet.  And if I started falling upward, I would fall forever.

Such are the musings of a whimsical ten-year-old wannabe science nerd.

I still have a sense of wonder whenever I look up into the sky.  The sheer scale of it leaves me breathless.  And with every new discovery made about the universe we live in, the awe I feel becomes that much stronger.  Take, for example, the bit of research published last week in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, that many of the stars in the Southern Hemisphere of the sky are part of a stellar cluster that is in the process of being torn apart by tidal forces from the Milky Way.

The paper is entitled, "Extended Stellar Systems in the Solar Neighborhood: Discovery of a Nearby 120° Stellar Stream in Gaia DR2," by Stefan Meingast and Verena Fürnkranz of the University of Vienna and João Alves of Harvard University, and describes a startling finding -- an estimated 4,000 of the stars visible from southern latitudes are part of a "river of stars" produced when what was a compact cluster is stretched out into a long stellar stream.

These things aren't common, so to find one only (only!) 326 light years away is pretty phenomenal.  "Identifying nearby disc streams is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack," Alves said in an interview with Science Alert.  "Astronomers have been looking at, and through, this new stream for a long time, as it covers most of the night sky, but only now realise it is there, and it is huge, and shockingly close to the Sun.  Finding things close to home is very useful, it means they are not too faint nor too blurred for further detailed exploration, as astronomers dream."


The southern stellar stream -- stars that are part of it are highlighted in red [Image from Gaia DR2 Skymap]

The researchers think that the stars in the stream (and therefore the cluster in which they originated) is about a billion years old, meaning it's had time for about four complete revolutions around the galactic center.  This is time enough for tidal forces exerted by the Milky Way to stretch the cluster out from its original shape -- which was possibly something like the Pleaides -- into a streamer going nearly halfway around the night sky.

I wish I could see those stars, but none of them are visible from my perspective here in the frozen North.  I know they don't look any different from the stars I see at night, but still, the idea that I'd be looking at a stellar river that came from a billion-year-old cluster is pretty awe-inspiring.  But since I don't have any trips to the Southern Hemisphere planned, I'll just have to stick with the ones in my own neighborhood, which are wonderful enough.

Maybe they'll even inspire me to stand on my head.

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

You can't get on social media without running into those "What Star Trek character are you?" and "Click on the color you like best and find out about your personality!" tests, which purport to give you insight into yourself and your unconscious or subconscious traits.  While few of us look at these as any more than the games they are, there's one personality test -- the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which boils you down to where you fall on four scales -- extrovert/introvert, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving -- that a great many people, including a lot of counselors and psychologists, take seriously.

In The Personality Brokers, author Merve Emre looks not only at the test but how it originated.  It's a fascinating and twisty story of marketing, competing interests, praise, and scathing criticism that led to the mother/daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers developing what is now the most familiar personality inventory in the world.

Emre doesn't shy away from the criticisms, but she is fair and even-handed in her approach.  The Personality Brokers is a fantastic read, especially for anyone interested in psychology, the brain, and the complexity of the human personality.

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