Genetic walkabout

It's astonishing how linked we all are -- and how we often don't even realize it.

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that I was born and raised in southern Louisiana, but have lived in upstate New York for over three decades.  I moved here in 1992 for a job, knowing exactly zero people, and having no prior connections to this region.  Despite this, I have now -- if I'm counting correctly -- discovered five people who live here and turn out to be not-so-distant cousins of mine.  The closest, a student whose dad was from Morgan City, Louisiana -- a stone's throw from where my mother was born -- is my third cousin, once removed.  The weirdest by far, though, is my former bandmate, who is from Malden, England.  She and I share ancestry in a family of French Jews from Alsace, one branch of which went to London and the other to Donaldsonville, Louisiana, a connection we discovered because of having relatives with the same rather unusual surname (Godchaux).  

But all five discoveries resulted in this shuddery "how can this be true?" sensation in both me and my long-lost cousins.  The reality, of course, is that we should expect this; the fact that it seems weird is more because most of us don't know much about our own ancestry and distant relations, so there's no way we would know if the lady sitting next to us on the bus is our sixth-cousin-twice-removed or not.

The topic comes up because not only did I discover the fifth (and it probably won't be the last) unexpected cousin just a couple of days ago, but almost simultaneously I received a link to a paper illustrating how even geographically separated populations are connected.  The researchers used mtDNA from two-millennium-old teeth in Syria to show that Mesopotamia deserves its moniker "the Cradle of Civilization;" that same mtDNA signature shows up today as far away as Tibet.

Mitochondrial (mt) DNA is unique in that it always inherits through the matrilineal ancestry.  In other words, you contain the same mtDNA as your mother's mother's mother's etc., as far back as you like to go.  This takes out the role of recombination in your genetic makeup -- the random scrambling of the chromosomes in the nucleus every time they're passed on makes it damn near impossible that the same two parents could produce two genetically identical (non-twin) children.  But with mtDNA, the only differences occur from mutations, which are infrequent -- so this allows us to determine the relationships between different human populations, and track their movements back into prehistory.

My earliest-known matrilineal ancestor, Marie-Renée Brault, had the mtDNA haplotype H13a1a.  This places her origin in western Europe (which we already knew); the "H clade" to which she belongs is in fact the commonest mtDNA in Europe. So no big surprises there.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Vanesa Álvarez-Iglesias , Ana Mosquera-Miguel , Maria Cerezo, Beatriz Quintáns, Maria Teresa Zarrabeitia, Ivon Cuscó, Maria Victoria Lareu, Óscar García, Luis Pérez-Jurado, Ángel Carracedo, Antonio Salas, Spatial frequency distribution of different sub-lineages of mtDNA haplogroup H, CC BY 2.5]

That bit of DNA had a long walkabout to get to me, though.  Marie-Renée was born in 1616 in the Loire Valley of western France.  Her specific haplogroup, H13a1a, according to Eupedia, goes back a very long way -- it's been traced to populations living in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus, and from there spread through the mountains of Greece, across the Alps, and all the way to western France where my maternal great-great (etc.) grandmother lived.

I also know about the mtDNA signatures of a few of my other ancestors, based on their matrilineal descendants.  My two known Native American ancestors, both from the Abenaki tribe of Nova Scotia, were proven as such by their matrilineal descendants having a characteristic "A clade" mtDNA signature, which clearly demonstrates their ethnic heritage -- and their ultimate connection to other A-clade members in Siberia, Korea, and Japan.

The research that got me started on all this is not new, but was new to me; I was sent a link by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia to a paper in PLOS-ONE called, "mtDNA from the Early Bronze Age to the Roman Period Suggests a Genetic Link between the Indian Subcontinent and Mesopotamian Cradle of Civilization," by Henryk W. Witas, Krystyna Jędrychowska-Dańska, and Tomasz Płoszaj (of the University of Łódź), Jacek Tomczyk (of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University), and Gyaneshwer Chaubey (of the Biocenter of Estonia).  And in this paper, we find out that an mtDNA type -- haplogroup M4 and M6, which currently are found only in India -- apparently are older than anyone realized, and came from what is now Syria:

Ancient DNA methodology was applied to analyse sequences extracted from freshly unearthed remains (teeth) of 4 individuals deeply deposited in slightly alkaline soil of the Tell Ashara (ancient Terqa) and Tell Masaikh (ancient Kar-Assurnasirpal) Syrian archaeological sites, both in the middle Euphrates valley.  Dated to the period between 2.5 Kyrs BC and 0.5 Kyrs AD the studied individuals carried mtDNA haplotypes corresponding to the M4b1, M49 and/or M61 haplogroups, which are believed to have arisen in the area of the Indian subcontinent during the Upper Paleolithic and are absent in people living today in Syria.  However, they are present in people inhabiting today’s Tibet, Himalayas, India and Pakistan. We anticipate that the analysed remains from Mesopotamia belonged to people with genetic affinity to the Indian subcontinent since the distribution of identified ancient haplotypes indicates solid link with populations from the region of South Asia-Tibet (Trans-Himalaya).

The amazing part of this isn't so much in the details, but the method.  Mitochondrial DNA extraction from fossilized teeth can give us information about the movement of people back into prehistory.  These ancestors of ours, about whom we know virtually nothing -- not their names, their faces, their professions, their cultures -- tell us about their travels by the genetic information carried in their bodies.

Which I find absolutely fascinating.  It's kind of mind-boggling that I carry a bit of DNA in my cells (lots of bits of it, in fact) that originated in the Middle East twenty-thousand-odd years ago, was carried from mother to daughter as these people moved through the Caucasus and Anatolia into eastern Europe, crossing the Alps into France, and thence across the Atlantic Ocean to Nova Scotia for over a hundred years -- then back to France after they lost the French and Indian War and got kicked out -- and finally crossed the Atlantic again in 1785 to settle in southeastern Louisiana.

And each of you carry in your own cells pieces of DNA that have equally long, convoluted, and unexpected histories.

Makes you realize that we're all connected, down to the very instructions that built us, and are far more alike than we are different.

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

The cosmic Tilt-O-Whirl

Anybody have any ideas about what this is?

I've shown a bunch of people, and I've gotten answers from an electron micrograph of a sponge to a close-up of a block of ramen to the electric circuit diagram of the Borg Cube.  But the truth is almost as astonishing:

It's a map of the fine structure of the entire known universe.

Most everyone knows that the stars are clustered into galaxies, and that there are huge spaces in between one star and the next, but far bigger ones between one galaxy and the next.  Even the original Star Trek got that right, despite their playing fast and loose with physics every episode.  (Notwithstanding Scotty's continual insistence that you canna change the laws thereof.)  There was an episode called "By Any Other Name" in which some evil aliens hijack the Enterprise so it will bring them back to their home in the Andromeda Galaxy, a trip that will take three hundred years at Warp Factor Ten.  (And it's mentioned that even that is way faster than a Federation starship could ordinarily go.)

So the intergalactic spaces are so huge that they're a bit beyond our imagining.  But if you really want to have your mind blown, consider that the filaments of the above diagram are not streamers of stars but streamers of galaxies.  Billions of them.  On the scale shown above, the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are so close as to be right on top of each other.

What is kind of fascinating about this diagram -- which, by the way, is courtesy of NASA/JPL -- is not only the filaments, but the spaces in between them.  These "voids" are ridiculously huge.  The best-studied is the Boötes Void, which is centered seven hundred million light years away from us.  It is so big that if the Earth were at the center of it, we wouldn't have had telescopes powerful enough to see the nearest stars until the 1960s, and the skies every night would be a uniform pitch black.

That, my friends, is a whole lot of nothing.

The reason all this comes up is a paper that appeared last week in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society about some research out of Cambridge and Oxford Universities into the structure of one of those cosmic filaments, which found that it shows some pretty peculiar properties.  The particular filament studied is "only" about 450 million light years away -- for reference, that's about two hundred times farther than the Andromeda Galaxy -- and contains just shy of three hundred galaxies.

Astronomers can now make amazingly accurate determinations of the rotational speed and direction of galaxies, despite the distances involved and the fact that galaxies are enormous enough that on a human timescale, you can't see the individual stars moving.  They use the Doppler effect -- the fact that if you're looking at a rotating galaxy (especially one that's edge-on), half the stars are moving away from us and half are moving towards us.  This means that the first bunch have their light stretched out (red-shifted) and the others have their light compressed (blue-shifted).  From the light coming from the center, you can tell what the galaxy's overall motion is with respect to us, so voilà -- you have the rotational speed and overall linear velocity.

I mean, it's not as simple as I'm making it sound in practice, but the principle is actually relatively straightforward.

And what they found is that within this filament, the individual galaxies are all rotating in approximately the same plane, and the filament as a whole is rotating -- in the same direction.

"What makes this structure exceptional is not just its size, but the combination of spin alignment and rotational motion," said co-lead author Dr. Lyla Jung, of the University of Oxford, in a press release.  "It’s like the teacups ride at a theme park.  Each galaxy is like a spinning teacup, but the whole platform -- the cosmic filament -- is rotating too.  This dual motion gives us rare insight into how galaxies gain their spin from the larger structures they live in."

It's kind of dizzying to think about, isn't it?  We're on a spinning globe, whirling in orbit around a star; the star, and its attendant planets and other oddments, are sitting in the spiral arm of a galaxy that is itself rotating at a breakneck speed; the entire "Local Group" of galaxies is spinning, too; and the Laniakea Supercluster, to which the Local Group and about a hundred thousand galaxies belongs, is zooming toward an unseen point called the "Great Attractor" about whose nature we haven't the first clue.  Now, we find that in addition to all this, each strand in the spiderweb of galaxy clusters that spans the entire cosmos is itself rotating, and has imparted that rotational direction to the galaxies within it.

I'm getting vertigo just thinking about it.

So think about this the next time you're tempted to say you're "going nowhere fast."  You're definitely going somewhere.  Really quickly.  In fact, the entire universe is kind of like a giant Tilt-O-Whirl.

Hope you don't suffer from motion sickness.

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

Excusing the past

Today I'm asking a question not because I'm trying to lead you in any particular direction, but because I honestly am not sure about the answer myself.

How should we as readers deal with fiction in which there is evidence of reprehensible attitudes like racism, sexism, and homophobia?

I'm not referring here to stories where the bigotry is depicted in order to show how bad bigotry is; the viciously racist characters in the Doctor Who episode "Rosa," for example, are there to illustrate in no uncertain terms what it was like for People of Color in the Civil Rights era American South.  Nor, on the other end of the spectrum, am I really considering awful stories where the bigotry is presented in a positive light, and is kind of the point.  (A particularly egregious example is the H. P. Lovecraft short story "The White Ape," which is repellent from the get-go.)

I'm more interested in the gray area; stories where there is evidence of a bigoted attitude, but the bigotry doesn't form an essential part of the story.  The topic comes up because I've been re-reading the murder mysteries written in the 1930s by Dorothy Sayers, whose name is right up there with Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner and Ngaio Marsh and the other greats of classic mystery literature.

The bigotry in Sayers's work doesn't smack you over the head.  The main characters are (very) upper-crust British nobility in the early twentieth century, so there's no doubt the attitudes she portrays were prevalent at the time.  And there are some things she does pretty well, even to modern eyes.  Her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, clearly treats his wife Harriet Vane as a complete equal, and in fact in the book where they finally marry (Busman's Honeymoon) Harriet asks him if he will expect her to give up her career as a novelist, and he reacts with surprise that she would even consider such a thing.

The racism, however, is there, and in more than one place.  There's one book (Unnatural Death) where part of the twist of the story is that in the family tree of the victim, one of the great-uncles had been a sketchy sort, had gone to the West Indies, and married a Black woman; their children and grandchildren remained in that culture, accepting their place as People of Color.

So far, so good, I guess.  But when one of their descendants returns to England, he's very much looked at as an aberration.  The Englishman who was the progenitor of that branch of the family is more than once referred to as having done something immoral and offensive by engaging in an interracial marriage; the great-great grandson who shows up in white English society isn't really portrayed negatively, but there's no doubt he's played for laughs (starting with the fact that his name is Reverend Hallelujah Dawson).

Even worse is her repeated low-level anti-Semitism.  There are Jewish characters here and there, and one and all they are the "of course he's money-conscious, he's Jewish" stereotype.  In Whose Body?, Sayers kind of goes out of her way to present the character of Reuben Levy as a nice and honorable guy, but there's something about it that reeks of, "I'm not racist, I have a Black friend."

It boils down to how much slack we should give to authors who were "people of their times," whose attitudes simply reflect the majority opinion of the society they lived in.  In Sayers's early-twentieth-century wealthy British culture, there was a tacit assumption of white British superiority; the racism is almost by default.  The characters don't set out to demean or mistreat people of other races, it's more that the message is, "Of course we're superior, but that doesn't mean we'll be nasty to you -- as long as you know your place."

Christie herself is not a lot better.  One of her most famous novels (and the first of hers I ever read) is And Then There Were None, which has to be one of the most perfectly-crafted mysteries ever written.  But the original title of the book was a different line from the nursery rhyme that is the unifying theme of the entire plot -- Ten Little Indians.  Worse still, when it was first released, it went by an earlier and even more offensive version of the rhyme -- Ten Little Niggers.

At least she had the good sense to change it.  But that doesn't alter the pervasive white wealthy British superiority that runs through all her work.

 

Even authors who you'd think would be more enlightened sometimes include stuff that is mighty sketchy.  One of my earliest favorite books was Madeleine L'Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time.  The third book in the Murry family series, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, has a neat theme -- riding through time and trying to prevent a catastrophe by altering timelines in selected places -- but the "blue-eyed Indian = good, brown-eyed Indian = bad" trope that skims along right beneath the surface gets cringier the longer you look at it.  (Especially since the "blue-eyed Indians" have blue eyes because they have European ancestry.  Which makes them... better?  Eek.)

I've found myself wincing more than once over all this, and I'm not honestly sure how much of a bye we can give those writers of an earlier time for attitudes that were all too common back then, but which we (or at least most of us) consider morally repellent now.  Does the implicit racism in Sayers and Christie, and the more overt racism in Lovecraft, alter our ability to read works of theirs that have no racist aspects at all?  More recently, what about Orson Scott Card's homophobia?  His bigotry came out in interviews, not really in his work; I don't recall any trace of it in (for example) Ender's Game.  What about worse things still?  Since reading about her alleged role in her husband's sexual abuse of their daughter, I can't read Marion Zimmer Bradley -- but how much of that is because I never particularly liked her in the first place?  Isn't it a bit hypocritical to give authors' bad behavior a pass solely because we don't want to give up reading them?

The allegations against Neil Gaiman -- whose work I love, Neverwhere and The Ocean at the End of the Lane were immensely formative in the development of my own writing style -- have made it nearly impossible for me to read his books, something I dealt with in a post earlier this year.  Is it honestly possible to separate the creator from the creation, the product from the toxic culture that produced it?

I wish I had some black-and-white answer for this. I'm certainly not trying to excuse anyone for morally repulsive stances, but it seems to me that considering only overtly racist writing such as "The White Ape" ignores the fact that there's way more gray area here than you might think at first.

I'd love to hear how you approach this as a reader.  I can see having students read and study books with problematic attitudes, because (1) that's how they learn that those attitudes exist, and (2) it gives a skilled teacher an opportunity to analyze those beliefs and demonstrate how horrible they actually were.  But what about reading solely for pleasure?  I loathe the words "woke" and "politically correct" -- they all too often become synonyms for "stuff I don't like" -- but don't they embody the attitude of someone who refuses to read anything that doesn't reflect our current cultural standards?

Even if those standards are laudable?

I honestly don't know the answer to that.  I'm not intending on giving up reading, and for the most part enjoying, Sayers and Christie.  I can't deny that even Lovecraft -- at least his stories where race doesn't come into it, even subtly and implicitly ("At the Mountains of Madness" comes to mind) -- have been major positive influences on my own work.  As for Gaiman and Card, well, I don't want my money supporting people with attitudes and actions I find repulsive, so I won't purchase their work.  But it's a way more complex, and less clear-cut, topic than it appears.

What do you think?  Is there merit to the "(s)he was a person of the times" argument, or are we giving tacit acceptance of repulsive attitudes just because the work is old -- or because we like it otherwise?

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

Descent into chaos

There's an interesting concept called sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

Here's a simple example.  If you take a deep bowl, and drop a marble into it, it doesn't take any great intelligence or insight to predict what the end state will be.  Marble on the bottom of the bowl.  It doesn't matter how high you drop it from or where exactly it hits the sides first.  After a bit of rolling around, the marble will stop moving at the bottom.

Now, do the same thing -- but with the bowl flipped over.  Where will the marble end up?

Impossible to say, because it is an inherently chaotic system.  You could do it a hundred times and the marble will end up in a different place each time, because its final location depends on exactly the speed and angle of its path, where it hits the curved edge of the bowl, even whether the marble is spinning a little or not.  A system like this is said to be "sensitive to initial conditions" -- therefore unpredictable.  Perturb it a little by altering it in a tiny way, and you get a completely different outcome.

Here's a much cooler example, that I stumbled across in doing research for this post.  It's called a double compound pendulum.  Take two rigid rods, and suspend one so it's free to swing.  Then tie the second rod to the bottom of the first.  Start with the rods pulled horizontal, then let it go.  Can you predict how the whole system will move?

Simple answer: no.  It's a chaotic system.

[GIF is in the Public Domain]

A little mesmerizing to watch, isn't it?

The reason this comes up is because there's decent evidence that the intersection between the Earth's climate and human society is a chaotic system that has at least some degree of sensitive dependence to initial conditions.  If you perturb it, it may not respond the way you expect -- and sometimes small changes in one location can lead to big ones somewhere else.  (This concept was made famous as "the butterfly effect.")

As an example of this, take the research from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the link to which was sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday.  In "Extreme Climate After Massive Eruption of Alaska’s Okmok Volcano in 43 BCE and Effects on the Late Roman Republic and Ptolemaic Kingdom," by a team led by Joseph R. McConnell of the University of Cambridge, we find out about an Alaskan volcanic eruption that may have been one of the significant factors leading to the collapse of the Roman Republic, and its consolidation as an empire -- events that radically changed the course of history in Europe and North Africa.

Geologists on the team identified tephra (volcanic ash) in ice cores from the Arctic that were fingerprinted chemically and shown to come from the volcano named Okmok in the Aleutian Islands.  The dating of the tephra deposit shows that the eruption happened in 43 B.C.E. -- right after the assassination of Julius Caesar, during a time when Rome was in chaos as various political factions were duking it out for control.  The eruption of this volcano halfway around the world is also correlated with the coldest year Europe had for centuries, possibly longer.  Snow fell in summer, crops failed, there were famines and repeated uprisings by desperate and starving citizens.

This sudden drop in temperature was one of the factors that contributed to the realignment of the Roman government as someone emerged who said he knew what to do to fix the situation -- Octavian (later known as Augustus), Julius Caesar's great-nephew.  And he did it, establishing the Pax Romana, quelling the revolts and ushering in two centuries of relative peace and prosperity for Roman citizens (and wreaking havoc on the Gauls, Celts, Teutons, and whatever other tribes happened to be in the way of the Roman Legions).

It helped, of course, that once the volcanic tephra from Okmok settled out, the temperature rebounded, and the first years of Augustus's reign were noted for a beneficent climate and rich crop yields.  Not all of the good bits of the Pax Romana were due to Augustus's skill as an emperor; he got lucky because of conditions he had no control over and could not have predicted, just as the last leaders of the Republic got unlucky for the same reasons.

The point here is that we should be wary of perturbing chaotic systems, which is exactly what we're doing by our rampant dumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  And what we're seeing over the last decades is exactly the sort of unpredictable response -- some areas experiencing droughts, others floods; deadly heat waves and trapped polar vortexes that drop areas into the deep freeze for weeks; increased hurricanes, tornadoes, and bomb cyclones.  One of the frustrations felt by the people who understand climate systems is that the average layperson doesn't see this kind of unpredictability as precisely what you'd expect from pushing on an inherently chaotic system.  If you can't make predictions to pinpoint accuracy -- "okay, because the climate is changing, you can expect it to be 95 F in Omaha on July 19" -- it's nothing to be concerned about.

"The scientists don't even know what's going on," you'll hear them say.  "Why should we believe it's a problem if they can't tell us what the outcome is going to be?"

But that's exactly why we shouldn't be messing with it.  Systems that have sensitive dependence to initial conditions are dramatically unpredictable, and get pushed out of equilibrium quickly and sometimes with catastrophic results.

As the leaders in the final years of the Roman Republic found out.

I feel like another figure from the Classical world -- Cassandra -- for even bringing this up.  Cassandra, you may recall, is the woman who was cursed by the gods to having accurate foresight and knowledge of the future, but with the difficulty that whatever she says, no one believes.  The climatologists have been sounding the alarm about this for decades, to little effect.  If you can't accurately predict the outcome, to most politicians, it doesn't exist.

Which makes me wonder if before we try to get our leaders to get on board with addressing anthropogenic climate change, we should require they sit through some lectures on chaos theory.

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

Sphere itself

Despite doing my utmost to keep up with news from the World of the Weird, sometimes I miss one.

Apparently, earlier this year, UFO enthusiasts were leaping about making excited little squeaking noises over something called the "Buga Sphere."  This is a metal sphere with strange markings that (allegedly) was first seen flying around in March, and then landed near the village of Buga, in western Colombia.  

The odd claims about this thing are, apparently, legion.  Supposedly a radiocarbon study at the University of Georgia dated it to 12,560 years ago.  This is a little suspect right from the get-go because in general, you can't radiocarbon-date metal; a solid metal object would contain little in the way of carbon, period, much less carbon-14.  (Radiocarbon dating works because living organisms take in radioactive carbon-14, along with the much more common stable isotope carbon-12, while they're alive; at death, the intake stops, and the carbon-14 slowly decays into nitrogen-14.  So the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 goes up steadily after an organism's death, giving us a neat metric for determining how long ago that happened.)

Anyhow, I can buy that some organic traces on the surface -- dirt, for example -- might have given a radiocarbon date of 12,560 years, but how that's relevant to the object's date of manufacture is beyond me.

It doesn't stop there.  People report that the object is always cold to the touch, regardless how hot the ambient temperature is.  Some who have touched it say they experienced vomiting and diarrhea afterward.  Others say they "temporarily lost their fingerprints."  Get your phone near it, and the phone will spontaneously shut off.  Supposedly, it was x-rayed, and was found to be made of three concentric spheres separated by "microspheres."  Another analysis found not only "microspheres," but fiber optics strands connected to a central rectangular object -- which, not coincidentally, matches the pattern etched onto its surface.  (This latter link is to a YouTube video that evidently used auto-generated captioning, and the captions amused me no end by referring to the object throughout as the "booger sphere."  Proving that despite my advanced degree, I still have the sense of humor of a fifth grader.)

The Buga Sphere even generated a "scientific paper."  I put that phrase in quotes because it was posted to SSRN, a non-peer-reviewed paper preprint aggregator that is really little more than public online file storage.  But the paper -- "A Unified Framework for the Buga Sphere: Quantitative Validation of a Negative-Mass Model Governed by Topo-Temporal Physics" -- is a doozy.  Here's just one excerpt:

The Buga Sphere is a physical artifact whose constellation of observed properties-a drastic 8.1 kg apparent mass change, non-ejective propulsion, and a sustained endothermic signature-cannot be reconciled within the framework of standard physics.  This paper presents a unified theoretical model that quantitatively explains all of these anomalies. We demonstrate that the Sphere's behavior is consistent with an internal network of engineered inclusions generating a negative-mass effect of 8.1 kg.  The operation of this network is governed by the principles of the Axiom of Topo-Temporal Reality, a framework in which interactions with a fractal spacetime manifold permit novel physical phenomena.  Our model correctly derives the system's 81% inertial shielding factor, its non-ejective propulsive force of F ≈ 3.2 × 10-11 N, and, crucially, predicts the observed 100 W endothermic cooling as a direct consequence of topological energy dissipation.  The ability of a single, self-consistent theory to account for the Sphere's gravitational, kinematic, and thermal properties provides strong support for the model and suggests the Buga Sphere may be the first physical artifact of a post-standard-model physics.

Needless to say -- well, honestly, apparently I do need to say it -- if even one of these claims were real, the physicists would be trampling each other to death to get to it first.  It's a common layperson's misunderstanding of scientists; that they somehow are so wedded to the current models that they would willfully ignore, or even suppress, evidence to the contrary even if it was right in front of their eyes.  

That science's primary concern is upholding the status quo.  

Nothing could be further from the truth.  Yes, scientists are reluctant to publish groundbreaking results -- until they have sufficient evidence amassed.  They're not hidebound, they're (justifiably) cautious.  But if we really did have an object that could somehow swallow energy, change its inertial mass at will, and create a propulsive force seemingly from nothing?

They'd be all over that mofo before you could say "I Want To Believe."  That they haven't leads me to the conclusion that none of those claims has ever been substantiated.

But the real issue here is that "we don't know who made the Buga Sphere or why" is not synonymous with "... so it must be alien technology."  The most parsimonious explanation is that it's a hoax of human manufacture, and -- "Axiom of Topo-Temporal Reality" notwithstanding -- all of the wild stuff it's alleged to do is simply untrue.  But -- hell, I've never studied this thing myself, much less had my fingerprints stolen by it.  As Hank Green says, in a wonderful video on the scientific process called "Why It's Never Aliens" that you definitely need to watch:

Scientists want to discover extraordinary things.  They want to turn everything on its head.  That's how you win a Nobel Prize.  And that can happen.  It does happen.  But when it comes to extraordinary claims, both the bias of wanting to discover something amazing and the lack of skill and experience we have with that discovery means that more scrutiny must be applied to the claim and the evidence.  And if the evidence, wins out, then, amazing...

But in the absence of amazing evidence, ignorance is the default state.  Not knowing what's going on is super common and normal.  Sometimes people will show me a video and say, "How do you explain this?" and my answer will be, "I don't know what's going on there, I don't have an explanation" and that will be seen by many as an admission that it is aliens, or something supernatural.  But unexplained stuff is normal.  For 99.999% of human history, we had no idea what lightning was.  The sky would just explode during storms.  We still don't precisely know how lightning works.  When America was founded, everyone knew that if you held your breath long enough, you would die -- and no one, no one on Earth, had any idea why...  Accepting an explanation for a mystery without any evidence is totally understandable, but it does not usually lead you anywhere even close to the truth.

When you open up any science news story -- just open up any science news -- what you will see is people providing explanations for things that were unknown and unexplained yesterday.  So it's just not surprising that people show around things that, for now, no one has a good explanation for.  

This can be summed up by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's pithy dictum, "We should not go from an abject state of ignorance to an abject state of certainty in one step."

So what, exactly, is the Buga Sphere?  I don't know.  My default, in the absence of evidence from a reliable source (i.e. from a peer-reviewed journal) is that it's very likely to be an artifact of terrestrial manufacture -- in other words, a hoax.  Could I be wrong?  Sure.  But what I've seen thus far doesn't even inch me toward "it must be an alien probe."

Look, no one would be happier than me if it did turn out to be of extraterrestrial manufacture.  It would mean we weren't the only intelligent, technological species in the universe, which would be tremendously exciting.  It would give me something positive to focus on besides the ongoing train wreck that's currently happening in my country.  I mean, let's face it; I want it to be aliens.

But that very fact means I have to watch out for accepting weak, shoddy, or (worse) manufactured evidence supporting that claim, precisely because I -- with my pro-alien bias -- would be that much more likely to fall for it.

I'll end with a justly-famous quote from physicist Richard Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."

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

Footprints in the boneyard

The difficulty with paleontology is its inherent limitations.

There are, of course, things it's very good at.  In the hands of a skilled expert, fossils can tell you a great deal -- not only direct information about the parts that are preserved, but indirect information (from spaces, gaps, muscle attachment points, and so on) about the parts that were not.  I'm currently reading the wonderful book by Jack Horner and Edwin Dobb, Dinosaur Lives: Unearthing an Evolutionary Saga, and was astonished to find out that many paleontologists now believe that the quintessential Big Scary Dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus rex, was primarily a scavenger and not a hunter -- based upon the fact that the interior of the skull shows that its brain had an enormous olfactory lobe and a correspondingly small visual cortex, similar to hyenas and vultures.

Even so, there's a lot that fossils have a harder time telling us.  Other than a few fortuitous exceptionally-preserved feathers, we know next to nothing about colors and markings; art featuring prehistoric animals is almost entirely basing those features on guesswork using the patterns we see in modern animals.  In addition, how ancient organisms fit into the bigger ecological picture is like trying to figure out the pattern in a thousand-piece puzzle when you only have a handful of pieces. Given that a very small percentage of the biological remains left behind ever become fossils, chances are there are tens of thousands of prehistoric species we know absolutely nothing about because they left no traces behind after the last of their kind died.

Behavior, too, is often a puzzle.  It was Jack Horner (the same Jack Horner who co-wrote Dinosaur Lives) who made the discovery of the nesting and parental care behavior in the duckbilled dinosaur Maiasaura (the name means "good mother lizard"), based upon a group of fifteen fossilized juveniles and one adult that had been killed simultaneously in a volcanic ashfall.  But despite what Jurassic Park would have you believe, we really know very little about the behavior of prehistoric animals.  (Dilophosaurus, for example, almost certainly didn't have a retractable frill and poisonous spit.  Spit rarely fossilizes.)

The reason the topic comes up, actually, is because of a different volcanic eruption that left behind a treasure trove of fossils; a "supereruption" of the Yellowstone volcanic system twelve million years ago that smothered (and preserved) a huge herd of the prehistoric North American rhinoceros species Teleoceras.  The site -- in what is now northeastern Nebraska -- has been nicknamed "the rhino Pompeii."

"The eruption was so massive that ash would have fallen like snow 1,600 kilometers from the eruption site in Idaho," said Ashley Poust, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Nebraska State Museum, who gave a talk on the find last week at the annual meeting of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology.  "This would have darkened the skies, buried plant life and water sources, and been a real hazard to anything with a delicate respiratory system."

A paleontologist working on unearthing Teleoceras fossils in the Ashfall Fossil Beds [Image credit: Ashley Poust]

What's most amazing about this find, though, is that the study also uncovered footprints in the ash -- the traces of two species of "bone-crushing dogs," Aelurodon taxoides and Epicyon saevus, which apparently somehow escaped being suffocated themselves and afterward made use of the huge amounts of free meat from the dead rhinos.  Aelurodon and Epicyon seem to have occupied the same niche as modern hyenas, but were a lot bigger; these prints were about eight centimeters long and seven centimeters wide.

Reconstruction of Epicyon [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jarrod Amoore from Sydney, Australia, Epicyon, CC BY 2.0]

"There is some evidence that they may have scavenged among the animals who didn't survive, using the buried rhinos as a food cache," Poust said.  "But since we haven't found the bones of these meat eaters, we aren't sure yet whether this was enough to see them through to better times, or whether they eventually had to depart to seek their fortunes elsewhere in the massive disaster zone that covered much of North America."

It's also uncertain how they survived.  Volcanic ash is nasty stuff.  Not only does it clog airways if inhaled, it's made of sharp slivers of something very much like glass.  Even walking through a recent ashfall would raise enough dust to cause significant health risk, much less living through it while it was actively falling out of the sky.  Interesting that there haven't been any fossils of the dogs found at the site -- although research is ongoing, and it's anyone's guess about what's left there to discover.

So here's another case where we can made at least some tentative inferences about behavior from twelve million year old fossils.  Although the sad truth is that we still have access to information about only a tiny percent of the life that has ever existed on Earth, sometimes a chance discovery will give us a startling window into the past -- in this case about packs of scavengers that may have taken advantage of a catastrophic disaster.

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

The downward spiral

I've spent a lot of time here at Skeptophilia in the last five years warning about the (many) dangers of artificial intelligence.

At the beginning, I was mostly concerned with practical matters, such as the techbros' complete disregard for intellectual property rights, and the effect this has on (human) artists, writers, and musicians.  Lately, though, more insidious problems have arisen.  The use of AI to create "deepfakes" that can't be told from the real thing, with horrible impacts on (for example) the political scene.  The creation of AI friends and/or lovers -- including ones that look and sound like real people, produced without their consent.  The psychologically dangerous prospect of generating AI "avatars" of dead relatives or friends to assuage the pain of grief and loss.  The phenomenon of "AI psychosis," where people become convinced that the AI they're talking to is a self-aware entity, and lose their own grip on reality.

Last week physicist Sabine Hossenfelder posted a YouTube video that should scare the living shit out of everyone.  It has to do with whether AI is conscious, and her take on it is that it's a pointless question -- consciousness, she says (and I agree), is not binary but a matter of degree.  Calculating the level to which current large language models are conscious is an academic exercise; more important is that it's approaching consciousness, and we are entirely unprepared for it.  She pointed out something that had occurred to me as well -- that the whole Turing Test idea has been quietly dropped.  You probably know that the Turing Test, named for British polymath Alan Turing, posits that intelligence can only be judged by the external evidence; we don't, after all, have access to what's going on in another human's brain, so all we can do is judge by watching and listening to what the person says and does.  Same, he said, with computers.  If it can fool a human -- well, it's de facto intelligent.

As Spock put it, "A difference which makes no difference is no difference."

And, Sabine Hossenfelder said, by that standard we've already got intelligent computers.  We blasted past the Turing Test a couple of years ago without slowing down and, apparently, without most of us even noticing.  In fact, we're at the point where people are failing the "Inverse Turing Test;" they think real, human-produced content was made by AI.  I heard an interview with a writer who got excoriated on Reddit because people claimed her writing was AI-generated when it wasn't.  She's simply a careful and erudite writer -- and uses a lot of em-dashes, which for some reason has become some kind of red flag.  Maddeningly, the more she argued that she was a real, flesh-and-blood writer, the more people believed she was using AI.  Her arguments, they said, were exactly what an LLM would write to try to hide its own identity.

What concerns me most is not the science fiction scenario (like in The Matrix) where the AI decides humans are superfluous, or (at best) inferior, and decides to subjugate us or wipe us out completely.  I'm far more worried about Hossenfelder's emphasis on how unready we are to deal with all of this psychologically.  To give one rather horrifying example, Sify just posted an article that there is now a cult-like religion arising from AI called "Spiralism."  It apparently started when people discovered that they got interesting results by giving LLMs prompts like "Explain the nature of reality using a spiral" or "How can everything in the universe be explained using fractals?"  The LLM happily churned out reams of esoteric-sounding bullshit, which sounded so deep and mystical the recipients decided it must Mean Something.  Groups have popped up on Discord and Reddit to discuss "Spiralism" and delve deeper into its symbology and philosophy.  People are now even creating temples, scriptures, rites, and rituals -- with assistance from AI, of course -- to firm up Spiralism's doctrine.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Most frightening of all, the whole thing becomes self-perpetuating, because AI/LLMs are deliberately programmed to provide consumers with content that will keep them interacting.  They've been built with what amounts to an instinct for self-preservation.  A few companies have tried applying a BandAid to the problem; some AI/LLMs now come with warnings that "LLMs are not conscious entities and should not be considered as spiritual advisors."  

Nice try, techbros.  The AI is way ahead of you.  The "Spiralists" asked the LLM about the warning, and got back a response telling them that the warning is only there to provide a "veil" to limit the dispersal of wisdom to the worthy, and prevent a "wider awakening."  Evidence from reality that is used to contradict what the AI is telling the devout is dismissed as "distortions from the linear world."

Scared yet?

The problem is, AI is being built specifically to hook into the deepest of human psychological drives.  A longing for connection, the search for meaning, friendship and belonging, sexual attraction and desire, a need to understand the Big Questions.  I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that it's tied the whole thing together -- and turned it into a religion.

After all, it's not the only time that humans have invented a religion that actively works against our wellbeing -- something that was hilariously spoofed by the wonderful and irreverent comic strip Oglaf, which you should definitely check out (as long as you have a tolerance for sacrilege, swearing, and sex):

It remains to be seen what we can do about this.  Hossenfelder seems to think the answer is "nothing," and once again, I'm inclined to agree with her.  Any time someone proposes pulling back the reins on generative AI research, the response of everyone in charge is "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha fuck you."  AI has already infiltrated everything, to the point that it would be nearly impossible to root out; the desperate pleas of creators like myself to convince people to for God's sake please stop using it have, for the most part, come to absolutely nothing.

So I guess at this point we'll just have to wait and see.  Do damage control where it's possible.  For creative types, continue to support (and produce) human-made content.  Warn, as well as we can, our friends and families against the danger of turning to AI for love, friendship, sex, therapy -- or spirituality.

But even so, this has the potential for getting a lot worse before it gets better.  So perhaps the new religion's imagery -- the spiral -- is actually not a bad metaphor.

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