A monster of a problem

Apparently, it's easier than I thought to give your soul to Satan.

You don't have to attend a Black Mass, or hold a séance, or even wear an upside-down crucifix.  Nothing that flashy, or even deliberate, is necessary.

All you have to do is drink the wrong energy drink.

I am referring, of course, to "Monster," that whiz-bang combination of sugar, vitamins, various herbal extracts of dubious health effect, and truly staggering amounts of caffeine, which misleadingly does not include "demons" on the ingredients list.

At least that's the contention of the also-misleadingly named site Discerning the World, which would be more accurately called Everything Is Trying To Eat Your Soul.  This site claims that the "Monster" logo, with its familiar trio of green claw marks on a black background, is actually a symbol for "666" because the individual claw marks look a little like the Hebrew symbol for the number six:

Which, of course, is way more plausible than the idea that it's a stylized letter "M."  You know, "M" as in "Monster."

But no.  Every time you consume a Monster energy drink, you are swallowing...

... pure evil.

Now lest you think that these people are just making some kind of metaphorical claim -- that the Monster brand has symbolism that isn't wholesome, and that it might inure the unwary with respect to secular, or even satanic, imagery -- the website itself puts that to rest pretty quickly.  It's a literal threat, they say, ingested with every swallow:

The Energy Drink contains ‘demonic’ energy and if you drink this drink you are drinking a satanic brew that will give you a boost...  People who are not saved, who are not covered by the Previous [sic] Blood of Jesus Christ are susceptible to their attacks.  Witchcraft is being used against the world on a scale so broad that it encompasses everything you see on a daily basis – right down to children’s clothing at your local clothing store.

So that's pretty unequivocal.  Never mind that if you'll consult the Hebrew numeral chart above, the logo looks just as much like "777" as it does like "666."

Or, maybe, just like a capital "M."  Back to the obvious answer.

Unfortunately, though, there are people who think that the threat is real, which is a pretty terrifying worldview to espouse.  Not only did I confirm this by looking at the comments on the website (my favorite one: "It is truly SCARY that all the little kids who play their Pokemon and video games are being GROOMED to enter this gateway to hell.  Satan wants to devour our young and he will do it any way he can."), a guy posted on the r/atheism subreddit that he'd been enjoying a Monster drink on a train, and some woman came up to him and snarled, "I hope you enjoy your drink IN HELL," and then stalked away.

What, exactly, are you supposed to say to something like that?  "Thank you, I will?"  "Here, would you like a sip?"  "Yes, it fills me with everlasting fire?"  Since quick thinking is not really my forte, I'm guessing that I'd probably just have given her a goggle-eyed stare as she walked off, and thought of many clever retorts afterward.

"It's damned good."  That's what I'd like to say to her.

Not, of course, that it would be the truth, since my opinion is that Monster tastes like someone took the effluent from a nuclear power plant, added about twenty pounds of sugar, and let it ferment in the sun all day long.  But that's just me.

And of course, there's my suspicion that the owner of the Monster trademark is probably thrilled by this notoriety -- they pride themselves on being edgy, and their target advertising demographic is young, athletic, iconoclastic rebel types, or those who fancy themselves as such.  So no doubt this whole demonic-entity thing fits right into Monster's marketing strategy.

Convenient for both sides.  The perennially-fearful hell-avoiders have something else to worry about, and the Monster people have an extra cachet for their product.  One hand washes the other, even if one of them belongs to Satan, who (if he were real) would probably approve wholeheartedly of capitalism and the profit motive.

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View of a cataclysm

As an example of what I wrote about yesterday -- that the universe is amazing enough without having to make shit up to embellish it -- today I want to tell you about one of the latest discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.

First, a bit of background.

I've written here before about gamma-ray bursters -- the phenomenon that one astronomer described as "second only to the Big Bang as the most energetic phenomenon known."  They ordinarily last between a few seconds and a couple of minutes, and during that time release more energy than the Sun will in its entire ten-billion-odd-year-long life.  Interestingly, the cause is unknown.  Various models have suggested the phenomenon might result from two neutron stars spiraling into one another, a stellar hypergiant undergoing core collapse, or energy release from a magnetar.  Or, possibly, more than one of the above.

We simply don't know.

Whichever it turns out to be, you would not want to be looking down the gun barrel of one of these things when it went off.  It's thought that a hundred or so light years would be what is terrifyingly known as the "kill zone."  Farther off, though, it could still be catastrophic; there's some suspicion that the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction -- one of the "Big Five" mass extinctions, and second only to the Permian-Triassic "Great Dying" event in terms of magnitude -- was caused by a nearby gamma ray burst.

Fortunately, there's nothing close to us that looks capable of doing this.  All of the ones we've observed have been in other galaxies, where they register as blips in the gamma ray region of the spectrum on powerful telescopes, and pose no threat to us here.  Which is a good thing, because heaven knows we have enough else to worry about at the moment.

Anyhow, that's all background.  An astrophysicist at Rutgers University was analyzing data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope last July, and discovered something mind-boggling -- a gamma-ray burster called GRB 250702B, located in a galaxy eight billion light years away.  But its distance, and the fact that we could see it from that far away, isn't the wildest thing about it.  You remember how I said that most gamma-ray bursters have a duration of between a few seconds and a minute or two?  And during that time they exceed the Sun's entire lifetime energy output?

This one lasted for seven hours.

That, my friends, is what the astrophysics community refers to as "a metric fucktonne of energy."  I can't even wrap my brain around how humongous this thing was, and I have a bachelor's degree in physics, so you'd think I'd be able to handle big numbers.

In my defense, neither, apparently, can the astrophysicists.  Eliza Neights, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said it was like "nothing we've ever seen before."  And whatever it was, it's left behind nothing much visible to study.  "In such vibrant and unprecedented detail, we see just one very large galaxy with a dust lane," said Huei Sears of Rutgers, who led the study.  "The galaxy has such complex structure that it's not a hundred percent clear if there's anything left to see of the explosion, but if there is, it's really faint."

Artists' conception of GRB 250702B [Image credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Garlick]

One suggestion is that this outburst was the result of a tidal disruption event -- a massive star, or possibly a neutron star, being ripped to shreds as it spirals into a black hole.

Because that's not a terrifying scenario to think about.

But the fact is, the scientists are struggling to explain what could have caused a cataclysm of this magnitude.  It doesn't fit with known models, and there's the exciting possibility that in order to account for it, we might be in the realm of "new physics."

In any case, here's a nice example of the fact that we don't need to add anything fringe-y to the universe to make it weird and scary and astonishing.  Real science does that just fine on its own.

I mean, I don't know how you could even dream up something wilder than a seven-hour-long energetic burst that makes the Sun look like a wet firecracker.  All I can say is that when Shakespeare talked about "there are more things in Heaven and Earth... than are dreamt of in your philosophy," he was not engaging in hyperbole.

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Beneath the labyrinth

One of the things that bothers me most about the woo-woo mindset is the apparent need they feel to superimpose some kind of paranormal frisson on top of damn near everything, as if what we know from science and rational inquiry isn't fascinating enough.

I mean, really.  Do you need to add any Tao of Physics nonsense to make quantum theory mind-blowingly cool?  Do we need to have the apparent positions of the planets against the backdrop of stars somehow controlling our lives to make astronomy awe-inspiring?  Why is there this bizarre drive to look at the universe around us, with all of its real marvels, and say, "Nope, that's not sufficient"?

That was my reaction to the rather overwrought article I read over at Substack a couple of days ago, entitled, "The Labyrinth at Hawara: What the Scans Found and Why Egypt Won't Let Anyone Dig."  Hawara, it turns out, is a recently-excavated archaeological site in Egypt, near the pyramid of Amenemhet III, and is about 380 by 160 meters -- so, a pretty sizable structure -- that once was made up of hundreds of rooms separated by walls and rows of columns.  Now, it's a ruin, and in fact much of the stone that was used to build it was scavenged for other uses in the intervening four millennia.  Its original purpose is unknown, but it may have been a temple complex.  The historian Herodotus, who visited it in around 430 B.C.E. while it was still standing, described it as follows:

[The Egyptians] made a labyrinth [... which] surpasses even the pyramids.  It has twelve roofed courts with doors facing each other: six face north and six south, in two continuous lines, all within one outer wall.  There are also double sets of chambers, three thousand altogether, fifteen hundred above and the same number under ground. ...  We learned through conversation about [the labyrinth's] underground chambers; the Egyptian caretakers would by no means show them, as they were, they said, the burial vaults of the kings who first built this labyrinth, and of the sacred crocodiles. ...  The upper we saw for ourselves, and they are creations greater than human.  The exits of the chambers and the mazy passages hither and thither through the courts were an unending marvel to us ...  Over all this is a roof, made of stone like the walls, and the walls are covered with cut figures, and every court is set around with pillars of white stone very precisely fitted together.  Near the corner where the labyrinth ends stands a pyramid two hundred and forty feet high, on which great figures are cut.  A passage to this has been made underground.

Which, I think we can all agree, is pretty freakin' cool.

But apparently not cool enough, because the fringe got a hold of this story and began to embellish it.  The Egyptian government has halted deep excavation of the site; the official reason given was the high water table in the area, making digging a fraught endeavor, both from the standpoint of safety and of potentially damaging the site irreversibly.  But we all know what "official reason" means to woo-woos:

It means "lie."

So in came Joe Rogan (because of course he did) and interviewed someone who said that the real reason was a "magnetic anomaly" that scans had discovered in the area, that was evidence of a "thirty- or forty-meter-wide metallic sphere" buried underneath the labyrinth, and the Egyptian government didn't want us finding out anything more about it.  Well, that could only mean one thing, right?

Of course right.  Aliens.  What else?

The Substack article was accompanied by the following, obviously AI-generated image:

This has about as much credibility as a pic that someone claims is "a real photograph of Mordor," but no one comes right out and says that.  The article, and Rogan, and (now) many other fringe-y sources, strongly imply that's really what's under there, and the Egyptian government is stopping anyone from looking into it further because, um, reasons.

Oh, and if that wasn't enough, Rogan also said that in order to prove all this, we need to "occupy Egypt, and just fucking get this done."

*brief pause to stop screaming and throwing heavy objects*

Well, actual archaeologist Flint Dibble (with a name like "Flint Dibble," what other profession could he have gone into?) had some choice words for Rogan et al. about his penchant for "pseudoarchaeological crap," and calls out the "metallic sphere" claim for the nonsense it is.  There was no anomalous magnetic scan, and there is zero evidence of a metallic sphere (or a metallic anything) buried at Hawara, much less what Rogan says is there (a spaceship, natch).

C'mon, people.  Ancient Egypt is cool.  Hawara is a site that was already almost two thousand years old when Jesus was born.  This temple complex -- or whatever it was -- is amazing, astonishing, fascinating.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO ADD A FUCKING SPACESHIP TO MAKE IT COOLER.

Sorry.  I said I was going to stop screaming. 

I'm really done now.

Anyhow, that's today's maddening visit to the fringe.  The upshot is that you should go to actual sources by actual archaeologists (such as this one) for your information, and stop listening to Joe Rogan, whose grasp of the truth is such that if he said the sky was blue and the grass was green, the chance of their being some other color is close to a hundred percent.

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Writing's on the wall

I was chatting with my friend, author and all-around cool person K. D. McCrite, a couple of days ago about superstitions.

It probably won't come as any surprise that I'm not superstitious.  About the only time that particular irrationality raises its ugly head is in my occasional conviction -- usually when I'm already in a foul mood -- that inanimate objects are conspiring to get in my way, fall out of my hand, break, or otherwise further fuck up my day.  My logical brain tells me that this is probably because I'm in a bad temper and more prone to being careless and rough with handling things, but sometimes it really does seem like the various objects around me have decided to infuriate me out of nothing but pure malice.

Other than that, though, I'm inclined to consider superstitions so bizarre that it's incomprehensible that anyone would have come up with them in the first place.  K. D. mentioned that growing up in rural Missouri, she used to hear that if you dropped a dishrag, company was coming.  Same thing, apparently, if your nose itches; but only a few states south, where I grew up in southern Louisiana, your nose itching means you're going to kiss a fool.  We didn't have one for company coming, at least not that I recall; but if you've got company and you want them to leave, all you have to do is stand a broom up in the corner near the front door.

Of course, my guess is that if your company knows the superstition, and they see you standing a broom up in the corner, they'll get pissed off and leave.  So this might fall into the "self-fulfilling prophecy" department.

Spurred by that discussion, I started looking into various superstitions in different cultures, and man, there are some weird ones, making the bad luck brought by black cats, broken mirrors, and walking under ladders sound positively normal.  Here are a few I came across:

• If you wear red, you're more likely to be struck by lightning. (Philippines)
• If you say "rabbit rabbit" as your first words after you wake up on the first day of the month, you'll prosper. (northern England)
• If you're out drinking with friends, and you're ready to leave, don't say "this is my last drink."  If you do, you'll die soon, and it really will have been your last drink. (Cuba)
• Running a fan in a closed room while you sleep will kill you. (South Korea)
• Don't toast someone with water, or you're cursing them with bad luck. (Germany)
• Whistling indoors will summon a demon. (Lithuania)
• Standing chopsticks upright in your rice bowl is extremely rude, because the crossed chopsticks look like the Japanese character for the number four, which is supposed to represent death. (Japan)
• Don't shake hands or kiss across a threshold, or you will eventually fall out. (Russia)
• Having two mirrors facing each other on opposite walls opens a door for Satan. (Mexico)
• If you're giving a knife or something else sharp as a gift, it can sever the relationship; so the recipient is supposed to give you a penny in return, so that it's a purchase, not a gift. (Denmark)
• If you walk backwards, it's bad luck, because you're showing the devil which way you were going. (Portugal)
• Stepping in dog shit is good luck, but only if you do so with your left foot. (France)
• You should always enter a room with your right foot.  Especially if you've just come from France. (Spain)

(My sources for the above, if you're curious, are here, here, and here.)

I wonder how the hell these superstitions started.  I know that for some superstitions, the origin is in the religious beliefs of the culture; the practice of throwing spilled salt over the left shoulder actually dates from Roman times, where salt was a valuable commodity -- in fact, the English word salary comes from the Latin word meaning salt -- and spilling it was considered careless and wasteful.  To make up for it you were supposed to give a pinch of it to the household spirits, the Lares and Penates, who hovered around behind you watching you eating dinner.

Because that's not creepy at all.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar / CC BY-SA 3.0, Saleros - 5394, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But for some of them, it's hard to imagine any events that could have led to the conviction that they were true.  I mean, "rabbit rabbit?"  Did people in medieval England try various animal names every day until they found a combination of animal and day of the month that preceded their having a good day?  And I'm sorry, stepping in dog shit is not in any sense auspicious.

I own three dogs and I know whereof I speak.

It does bear mention that there are a few completely bizarre-sounding superstitions that have at least semi-logical origins.  In northern Germany, for example, there's an old belief that when a baby is born, the grandma is supposed to kiss the baby's forehead, and if she tastes salt, the baby will be sickly and die young.  This seems ridiculous -- until you find out that northern Germany has the world's highest incidence of the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis, which has as one of its symptoms extremely salty sweat.

Another one that has a genetic origin is the old prohibition amongst the Basques -- especially the women -- against marrying non-Basques.  While on the surface this seems like the usual insularity and cultural/ethnic purity nonsense, there's more to it.  Similar to the German belief, the superstition here is that a Basque woman marrying a non-Basque man will be cursed to have their children die in infancy.

Which turns out to have a kernel of truth.  The Basques have the highest incidence in the world of the Rh negative blood allele, a recessive gene that causes people who are homozygous (who inherited a copy from each parent) to lack a particular protein in the blood.  This causes no health effects for the person; but if a Rh-negative woman conceives an Rh-positive child, there's a good chance of Rh incompatibility syndrome, where the mother's immune system recognizes the blood protein in the child to be foreign, and proceeds to destroy the baby's blood cells.  And this is only possible if the father is Rh-positive -- meaning (probably) non-Basque.

So unlike just about every other prohibition against marrying outside of your culture, this one does have a basis in reality.

But the majority of superstitions admit of no easy explanation other than accident and confirmation bias.  And you'd think all it would take is one or two counterexamples -- people who slept soundly in a closed room with a fan running and woke up perfectly healthy, for example -- to make people say, "Oh.  I guess that's not true, then.  What goobers we are."

For some reason, though, that doesn't seem to happen, and I'm at a loss to explain why.

In any case, these beliefs are interesting from an anthropological standpoint, even if they're a bit maddening to the skeptics of the world.  There are about a million others I didn't mention (further supporting the Senegalese maxim that "there are forty different kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense).  If you know any especially funny, weird, or cool ones, leave a note in the comments.  But now, I need to go fix myself some breakfast.  I hope the coffee maker and the microwave aren't in cahoots again.  They don't like me, for some reason.

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No guardrails

I was asked a couple of days ago if I think that AI is inherently bad.

My answer might surprise you; it was an unhesitating "no."  As a construct with -- thus far -- no sentient awareness, and therefore no intentionality, it isn't any more inherently evil than a rock.  Like anything, the problem comes with how beings with sentience and intentions use it, and more to the point, what guardrails are placed on it to prevent bad actors from misusing it.

And thus far, the deregulate-everything, corporate-capitalism-über-alles powers-that-be have seen fit to place no restrictions whatsoever on its uses, however harmful they might be.

If you think I'm exaggerating, here are four examples just from within the past few weeks of places where, in my opinion, any sane and moral person would say, "Oh, hell no," but the techbros are mostly shrugging and grinning and saying "ha ha ha ha ha ha ha fuck you."

A Dutch court had to force X/Twitter and its AI chatbot Grok, by way of massive fines (€100,000 per day for non-compliance) to stop users from using its "nudify" tool to produce child pornography and non-consensual adult pornographic images.  That such a tool even exists is sickening; that a court had to force Elon Musk's company to halt its use doubly so.  The problem, of course, is that the ruling only applies to use in the Netherlands; it's still widely available elsewhere.  So although the possession of child pornography is still illegal in most places, the AI tools people are using to produce it are still somehow legal.

And given that the current leadership in the United States was deeply entangled for decades in a horrific cult of pedophilia and abuse, it's doubtful any action will be taken over here.

The second example comes from a study out of Brown University that found people are using chatbots like ChatGPT as therapists, with alarming results.  Compared side-by-side to actual trained therapists, chatbots -- even those that had been trained on text based in modern psychoanalytic models and current therapeutic ethical standards -- consistently "mishandled crisis situations, gave responses that reinforced harmful beliefs about users or others, and used language that created a false appearance of empathy."

"For human therapists, there are governing boards and mechanisms for providers to be held professionally liable for mistreatment and malpractice," said Zainab Iftikhar, a computer scientist at Brown, who led the study.  "But when LLM counselors make these violations, there are no established regulatory frameworks."

Going hand-in-hand with this was a study out of Stanford University, where a team of researchers found that AI/LLM chatbots are being deliberately designed to incorporate sycophancy -- flattering, affirming, people-pleasing behaviors that facilitate users' desire to come back for more.  If you're in doubt about how intense (and scary) this effect is, here's a direct quote from the paper:

In our human experiments, even a single interaction with sycophantic AI reduced participants’ willingness to take responsibility and repair interpersonal conflicts, while increasing their own conviction that they were right.  Yet despite distorting judgment, sycophantic models were trusted and preferred.  All of these effects persisted when controlling for individual traits such as demographics and prior familiarity with AI; perceived response source; and response style.  This creates perverse incentives for sycophancy to persist: the very feature that causes harm also drives engagement.

Last, and most alarming of all, is a study out of King's College London looked at the AI-based systems now being used more and more often in war games and military strategy simulation and analysis, and found that when pitted against each other, these programs fell back on threats of nuclear weapons use 95% of the time.  Kenneth Payne, who led the study, writes:

Nuclear escalation was near-universal: 95% of games saw tactical nuclear use and 76% reached strategic nuclear threats.  Claude and Gemini especially treated nuclear weapons as legitimate strategic options, not moral thresholds, typically discussing nuclear use in purely instrumental terms.  GPT-5.2 was a partial exception, limiting strikes to military targets, avoiding population centers, or framing escalation as “controlled” and “one-time.”  This suggests some internalised norm against unrestricted nuclear war, even if not the visceral taboo that has held among human decision-makers since 1945.

Given that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's idea of high-level military strategy is "shoot 'em up pew-pew-pew," and that he recently got into a huge battle with the head of the AI firm Anthropic over Anthropic's demand that there be restrictions on the unethical use of their AI systems by the military (Hegseth unsurprisingly wanted no restrictions whatsoever, and called Anthropic's objections "woke," which is MAGA-speak for "me no like"), anyone with a shred of foresight, morality, or simple common sense finds this pretty fucking alarming.  So we've got a drunk right-wing talk show host running the largest military in the world with all the thoughtfulness and restraint of a seven-year-old boy playing with G. I. Joes, and now he wants to turn over the decision-making to AI agents that have no apparent problem with using nuclear weapons.

I see no way that could go wrong.

Look, I'm honestly not a pessimist; I've always been in agreement with my dad's assessment that it's better to be an optimist who is wrong than a pessimist who is right.  But this infiltration of AI into everything -- our morality, our relationships, our mental health services, our governments, our militaries -- has got to stop.  Put simply, we're not ready for it as a species.  It's a challenge we didn't evolve to face.  Governments have been reluctant to act, whether from not fully understanding the threat or, as here in the United States, because the tech firms are paying elected officials to pretend there's no problem.  Which it is, of course, doesn't matter in the slightest, because the result is the same.  

No guardrails.

So it's up to us to speak up.  Pressure your representatives to place some kind of restrictions on this.  The Netherlands managed, at least in the case of Elon Musk's child porn generator, so it's possible.  But not unless we fully comprehend what's happening here, and are willing to use the voices we have.  Otherwise, we're in a situation like the one biologist E. O. Wilson warned us about years ago: "The real problem of humanity is that we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology."

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Reptilian splits

One of my favorite lectures in my AP Biology class was about how there's no such thing as a reptile.

If you took your last biology class before about 1995, you probably learned about Class Reptilia, containing turtles, lizards, snakes, crocodiles, alligators, and a few other assorted groups.  The class was defined by having dry, scaly skin, internal fertilization, "amniote" eggs with shells, and hearts that had incomplete septa (the wall down the center that separates the oxygenated left side from the deoxygenated right side).

Well, the last one wasn't 100% true, and that should have been a clue to what was going on.  Crocodiles and alligators have four-chambered hearts, and are also partial endotherms -- they show some capacity for internally regulating their own body temperatures, just as birds and mammals do.

It was genetic testing that finally settled who was related to whom, and that was when a lot of us got a shock (not so much the evolutionary biologists, who kind of expected this was how it was gonna work out).  The word "reptile" has no real taxonomic significance, because it lumps together groups that really aren't very closely related, and excludes others that are closer. Here's how this branch of Kingdom Animalia evolved:

As you can see from the diagram, the problem was birds.  Crocodiles are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards (despite superficial appearance); and if you throw dinosaurs into the mix, it becomes even clearer, because birds are dinosaurs.

Think about that the next time you feed the chickadees.

So if you throw all the reptiles together, by the rules of cladistic taxonomy, you'd have to include birds, and nobody much wanted to call birds reptiles.  So the entire Class Reptilia was broken up, now as three different classes: Lepidosauria (lizards, snakes, and the oddball tuatara of New Zealand), Testudines (turtles), and Crocodilia (obviously crocodiles et al.).  Birds have their own class (Aves).

But what this brings up is how such different-looking animals as turtles and snakes evolved from a common ancestor.  The differences between the different groups of reptiles is pretty dramatic.  The explanation has usually been that it was adaptive radiation, a phenomenon that deserves some explanation.

Adaptive radiation is when a group undergoes rapid diversification to fill many available niches.  The classic example is Darwin's finches, a group of birds on the Galapagos Islands, which descend from a common ancestral group that split up to occupy different niches because of bill size and strength (which determines what they can eat).  That's a pretty drastic oversimplification, but it captures the essence: many available niches, and a population with sufficient genetic diversity to split up and specialize into those niches.

Because of the "many available niches" part, adaptive radiation is most common under two scenarios: a population colonizing a previously-uninhabited territory (as with Darwin's finches), and remnant populations left after a major extinction.  This was what was thought to have powered the split-up of the reptiles -- the "Great Dying," the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago that by some estimates wiped out 95% of life on Earth.

Nota bene: there is fairly good evidence that the trigger for the Permian-Triassic extinction was hypercapnia -- a sudden increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.  This led to drastic warming of the atmosphere and ocean acidification. The cause -- according to a paper in the journal Geology -- was massive burning of coal.  Sound familiar?  In this case the cause was natural; it's thought to have been triggered by extensive volcanism ripping through huge deposits of coal and carbonate minerals formed during the Carboniferous Period.  But the end result was the same as what we're doing now by runaway use of fossil fuels.  I'd like to think this would be a cautionary note, but the world's leaders seem to specialize in ignoring science unless it can directly make them money and/or keep them in power, so I'm not holding my breath.

But back to the reptiles. The study that triggered this post, which appeared in Nature Communications, points out the flaw in the argument that the adaptive radiation of reptiles was due to the Permian-Triassic extinction.  According to recent analysis, the split up was already well underway before the extinction started.  And the extinction itself was sudden, at least in geological terms; from start to catastrophic finish, the whole event took about a hundred thousand years.  In geological strata, this length of time is a very, very narrow band.

Plus, the different groups of reptiles individually show drastically different rates of specialization.  "Our findings suggest that the origin of the major reptile groups, both living and extinct, was marked by very fast rates of anatomical change, but that high rates of evolution do not necessarily align with taxonomic diversification," said study lead author Tiago Simões of Harvard University, in an interview in Phys.Org.  "Our results also show that the origin of snakes is characterized by the fastest rates of anatomical change in the history of reptile evolution -- but that this does not coincide with increases in taxonomic diversity [as predicted by adaptive radiations] or high rates of molecular evolution."

The end result of the study is that the cause of the adaptive radiation is unknown.  It probably was pushed along by the mass extinction -- the species that survived the hypercapnia and the resulting environmental devastation were set up to have a whole empty world to colonize.  But what was driving the split-up of the group prior to the extinction itself?

Unknown, but the current study shows that clearly the adaptive radiation had already started.

I love puzzles like this.  In science, there are almost always more questions than answers, and every answer brings up new questions.  But another feature of science is the conviction that there is an answer even if we don't currently know what it is. And chances are, further study will elucidate what exactly was going on -- and what led to the fragmentation of a group that now, over 250 million years later, comprises some of the best-known and most familiar critters who have ever walked (or slithered, or flown across) the Earth.

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Footprints in the snow

My puppy Jethro is currently convalescing from knee surgery, following an ACL injury caused by an over-enthusiastic wrestling match between him and his best friend Rosie.  The surgery went well, and a week and a half later he's back to his usual ebullient self, but will be on serious exercise restriction for another month and a half.

This means that instead of letting all three dogs out into our big, fenced back yard, I have to take Jethro out on leash several times a day, starting when I get up, usually around 5:30 AM.  And when I brought him out a couple of mornings ago, I saw in the glow of the front porch light that there was a fresh coat of snow on the ground -- further evidence that the First Day of Spring doesn't mean that much here in upstate New York.

I was still dressed in my robe and slippers, and when Jethro was done outside we retreated gratefully back into the warmth of my office.  The morning dawned bright and clear, and the temperature quickly climbed into the mid-forties.  When I looked out of the window later in the day I could still see the line of footprints I made while taking Jethro out earlier, but the effects of the Sun had widened them from the clear indentations of a human wearing rubber-soled slippers into diffuse, open blobs -- and it immediately put me in mind of one of the most peculiar legends of Merrie Old England.  Perhaps you've not heard of it; if not, you may find it an interesting tale.

Early in the morning on February 8, 1855 (so the story goes), the people of five small towns in south Devon -- Topsham, Lympstone, Exmouth, Teignmouth, and Dawlish -- woke to find a line of footprints in the snow.  The London Times of February 16 reported on the story in detail:

It appears that on Thursday night last there was a very heavy fall of snow in the neighborhood of Exeter and the south of Devon.  On the following morning, the inhabitants of the above towns were surprised at discovering the tracks of some strange and mysterious animal, endowed with the power of ubiquity, as the foot-prints were to be seen in all kinds of inaccessible places -- on the tops of houses and narrow walls, in gardens and courtyards enclosed by high walls and palings, as well as in open fields.  There was hardly a garden in Lympstone where the footprints were not observed.

The track appeared more like that of a biped than a quadruped, and the steps were generally eight inches in advance of each other.  The impressions of the feet closely resembled that of a donkey's shoe, and measured from an inch and a half to (in some instances) two and a half inches across.  Here and there it appeared as if cloven, but in the generality of the steps the shoe was continuous, and, from the snow in the center remaining entire, merely showing the outer crest of the foot, it must have been convex.

The creature seems to have approached the doors of several houses and then to have retreated, but no one has been able to discover the standing or resting point of this mysterious visitor.  On Sunday last the Rev. Mr. Musgrave alluded to the subject in his sermon, and suggested the possibility of the footprints being those of a kangaroo; but this could scarcely have been the case, as they were found on both sides of the estuary of the Exe.

At present it remains a mystery, and many superstitious people in the above towns are actually afraid to go outside their doors at night.

What is oddest -- and has been reported in multiple sources from the time -- is that the perpetrator, whatever or whomever it was, seemed unperturbed by obstacles.  The line of footprints walked right up to the bank of a river, and resumed on the other side as if it had walked straight through the running water.  Walls didn't slow it down, either; witnesses say that the footprints indicated it had simply stepped over the wall, as the imprint in the snow showed no change in depth from one side to the other (as it would have if the perpetrator had climbed up one side and then jumped down).  The footprints went in more or less a straight line, with only minor deviations, apparently to glimpse into the windows of houses it passed (*shudder*).  The most conservative reports claim the line of prints extended for sixty kilometers, far too much for one person (or creature) to cover in a single night.

The snow, as it melted, accentuated the strangeness of the prints, just as it did with the slipper-prints in my front yard.  The resemblance to a cloven hoof, with its suggestion of the devil, became more pronounced, and the fear grew to near hysteria.  Fortunately (or unfortunately, for those of us who like to know the solutions to mysteries) the events were never repeated, and never satisfactorily explained.

A sketch of the footprints, as drawn by several people who saw them first-hand

The Devonshire footprints were credited by some as a visitation not by Satan, but by one of his uniquely English cousins -- Spring-heeled Jack.  The first reported sighting of Spring-heeled Jack was in London in 1837 by a businessman walking home from work. The gentleman described being terrified by the sudden appearance of a dark figure which had "jumped the high railings of Barnes Cemetery with ease," landing right in his path.  The businessman wasn't attacked, and was able to keep his wits sufficiently about him to describe a "muscular man, with a wild, grinning expression, long, pointed nose and ears, and protruding, glowing eyes."

Sort of like the love child of Salvador Dali and Mr. Spock, is how I think of him.

Others were attacked, and some were not so lucky as our businessman.  A girl named Mary Stevens was attacked in Battersea, and had her clothing torn and was scratched and clawed, but survived because neighbors came to help when they heard her screams.  The following day Jack jumped in front of a coach, causing it to swerve and crash.  The coachman was severely injured, and several witnesses saw Jack escape by leaping over a nine-foot-high wall, all the while howling with insane laughter.

Several more encounters occurred during the following year, including two in which the victims were blinded temporarily by "blue-white fire" spat from Jack's mouth.

Although publicity grew, and Spring-heeled Jack became a character of folk myth, song, and the punch line to many a joke, sightings became less frequent.  Following the footprints in the snow-covered Devonshire countryside in 1855, there was a flurry of renewed interest (*rimshot*), but the last claimed sighting of Spring-heeled Jack was in Lincoln in 1877, and after that he seems to have gone the way of the dodo.

As intriguing as both stories are, all of the evidence points to pranksters (and, in the case of Mary Stevens, an unsuccessful rapist).  With the Devonshire footprints, the length of the track line is almost certainly an exaggeration, or at best a conflation of tracks from different sources -- a few of them by a hoaxer to get things going, followed by people blaming every human or animal track they see in the snow afterward on the mysterious walker.  As far as Spring-heeled Jack goes, I'm not inclined to believe in Jack's phenomenal jumping ability, except in cases where Jack jumped down off a wall -- that requires no particular skill except the agility to get up there in the first place, and after that gravity takes care of the rest.  It seems to me that a combination of nighttime, fear, a wild costume, and the witnesses' being primed by already knowing the story creates a synergy that makes their accuracy seriously in question.

The fact remains, however, that both of them are very peculiar stories. I remember reading about the Devonshire footprints when I was a kid (I didn't find out about Spring-heeled Jack until later), and the idea of some mysterious non-human creature pacing its way across the snowy English countryside, silently crossing fields and farms and streets and rivers, peering into the windows of homes at the sleeping inhabitants, was enough to give me what the Scots call the "cauld grue."  Still does, in fact.  Enough that I was glad when the fitful March sunshine finally eradicated my slipper-prints in the front yard -- which goes to show that even a diehard rationalist can sometimes fall prey to an irrational case of the creeps.

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