Life converges

One of the most fascinating features of biological evolution -- particularly as it applies to the possibility of life on other planets -- has to do with the concept of constraint.

Which features of life on Earth are, in some sense, inevitable?  Are there characteristics of terrestrial organisms that we might expect to find on any inhabitable world?  Stephen Jay Gould looked at this question in his essay "Replaying the Tape," from his brilliant book on the Cambrian Explosion, Wonderful Life:

You press the rewind button and, making sure you thoroughly erase everything that actually happened, go back to any time and place in the past -– say, to the seas of the Burgess Shale.  Then let the tape run again and see if the repetition looks at all like the original.  If each replay strongly resembles life’s actual pathway, then we must conclude that what really happened pretty much had to occur.  But suppose that the experimental versions all yield sensible results strikingly different from the actual history of life?  What could we then say about the predictability of self-conscious intelligence?  or of mammals?

Some features that have been suggested as evolutionarily constrained, with arguments of varying levels of persuasiveness, are:

• a genetic code based on some kind of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA, or some chemical analogue)
• internal cell membranes made of phospholipids, to segregate competing chemical reactions from each other 
• multicellularity, with some level of tissue specialization
• in more complex organisms, some form of symmetry, with symmetrically-placed organs
• some kind of rapid-transit system for messages, analogous to our nervous system (but perhaps not structured the same way)
• cephalization -- concentration of the central processing centers and sensory organs near the head end

It's interesting when science fiction tackles this issue -- and sometimes comes up with possible pathways for evolution that don't result in humanoids with strangely-shaped ears and odd facial protuberances.  A few that come to mind are Star Trek's silicon-based Horta from the episode"Devil in the Dark," the blood-drinking fog creature from "Obsession," the giant single-celled neural parasites from "Operation Annihilate," and Doctor Who's Vashta Nerada, Not-Things, Gelth, and Midnight Entity.

So the search for extraterrestrial life requires we consider looking not only for "life as we know it, Jim," but life as we don't know it.  Or, more accurately, to consider to what extent our terrestrial biases might be blinding us to the possibility of what evolution could create.

It's worth considering, however, how often evolution here on Earth ends up landing on the same solutions to the problems of survival and reproduction over and over again, a phenomenon called convergent evolution.  Eyes, or analogous light receptor organs, have evolved multiple times -- some biologists have suggested as many as fifty different independent lineages that evolved some form of eye.  Wings occurred separately in four groups of animals -- birds, pterosaurs, insects, and bats.  (If you include structures for gliding, add flying squirrels, sugar gliders, colugos, flying fish, and flying lizards.)

Even biochemical pathways can reappear, something I find astonishing.  Take, for example, the research that came out this week in Nature Chemical Biology, which found that two only distantly-related plants -- ipecac (Carapichea ipecacuanha), in the gentian family, and sage-leaved alangium (Alangium salviifolium), in the dogwood family, have both come up with complex biochemical pathways to generate the same set of bitter, emetic compounds -- ipecacuanha alkaloids.

The last common ancestor of these two species was over a hundred million years ago, so there's a strong argument that they evolved this capacity independently.  And indeed, when the biochemists looked at the enzymatic pathways, they're different -- they found entirely different chemical synthesis methods for producing the same set of end products.  Weirdest of all, they both evolved an enzyme that cleaves a sugar molecule from the alkaloid precursor, and that's what activates it (i.e., makes it toxic).  In the living plant's tissues, the enzyme and the precursor are segregated from each other.  It's only when they're brought together -- such as when a herbivore chomps on the leaves -- that the sugar is split away from the precursor, the alkaloid is activated, and the herbivore starts puking its guts up.

Clever strategy.  So clever, in fact, that it was stumbled upon by two entirely separate lineages of plants.  The rules organisms play by are the same, so perhaps not surprising there are similar outcomes sometimes.

The whole thing highlights the fact that there is a limited range of solutions for the fundamental difficulties of existence.  It has to make you wonder if, when we do find life elsewhere in the universe, it might look a lot more familiar that we're expecting.  I don't think it's likely we'll bump into Romulans or Ice Warriors or Krillitane, but maybe there are features of life on Earth that will re-evolve in just about any conceivable habitable planet.

But hopefully there won't be any Vashta Nerada.  Those things are terrifying.

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In praise of kindness

As someone who considers himself a de facto atheist -- I'm not certain there's no God, but the facts as I know them seem to strongly support that contention -- one question I've been asked rather frequently is where my moral compass comes from.

The answer for me is that I like being kind.  Treating other people well makes them feel good, and in general makes my own life better.  Times that I've been mean or uncharitable, on the other hand, leave me feeling sick inside.  I still remember with great shame times I've been nasty to people.  It didn't, then or now, make me happier to be unpleasant, even when on some level I felt (at the time, at least) the person might have deserved it.

I agree with the wise words of the Twelfth Doctor:

Being asked why I'm moral if I don't think there's a deity watching has always brought to mind the riposte -- although I've never said it to someone directly -- that if the only reason you're moral is because you think some powerful entity is going to punish you if you're not, then maybe you are the one whose ethics are suspect.  As Penn Jillette put it:

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want?  And my answer is: I do rape all I want.  And the amount I want is zero.  And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.  The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.

This is why I was intrigued by a study that came out this week in the Journal of the American Psychiatrical Association, by Jessie Sun, Wen Wu, and Geoffrey Goodwin, called, "Are Moral People Happier?"  And this -- finally -- provides an exception to Betteridge's Law: an article title in the form of a question where the answer appears to be a resounding "Yes."

The authors write:

Philosophers have long debated whether moral virtue contributes to happiness or whether morality and happiness are in conflict.  Yet, little empirical research directly addresses this question.  Here, we examined the association between reputation-based measures of everyday moral character (operationalized as a composite of widely accepted moral virtues such as compassion, honesty, and fairness) and self-reported well-being across two cultures.  In Study 1, close others reported on U.S. undergraduate students’ moral character.  In Study 2, Chinese employees reported on their coworkers’ moral character and their own well-being.  To better sample the moral extremes, in Study 3, U.S. participants nominated “targets” who were among the most moral, least moral, and morally average people they personally knew.  Targets self-reported their well-being and nominated informants who provided a second, continuous measure of the targets’ moral character.  These studies showed that those who are more moral in the eyes of close others, coworkers, and acquaintances generally experience a greater sense of subjective well-being and meaning in life.  These associations were generally robust when controlling for key demographic variables (including religiosity) and informant-reported liking.  There were no significant differences in the strength of the associations between moral character and well-being across two major subdimensions of both moral character (kindness and integrity) and well-being (subjective well-being and meaning in life).  Together, these studies provide the most comprehensive evidence to date of a positive and general association between everyday moral character and well-being.

What I find fascinating about this -- and relevant to the question about religion's role in morality -- is that these findings were robust with regards to such factors as religiosity.  The sense of well-being that comes from acting ethically doesn't appear to come from the belief that God approves that sort of behavior.  (At least not across the board; clearly different people could experience different sources of well-being from moral behavior.)  The fact that just about everyone is happier when they behave with kindness and integrity indicates there's something inherent about good moral character that fosters a positive experience of life.

For me personally, I think it's a combination.  As I said earlier, being nice to people and behaving fairly means the people around me are more likely to be pleasant and fair in return.  But there's also an internal component, which I can sum up as "liking who I see in the mirror."  Shame has to be one of the most deeply unpleasant emotions I can think of, and realizing I've been awful to someone -- even remembering those times years later -- leaves me feeling ugly.  Perhaps I'm not motivated by the idea of some deity watching me, but I know that I'm watching me.

And that's enough.

Or, it usually is.  I'm certainly far from perfect.  I can act uncharitably sometimes, just like all of us.  But I try like hell to treat people well -- even those who seem not to deserve it.  I guess I'm aware that all of us are big messy morasses of competing motivations, emotions, and drives, and all of us have years of experiences that have shaped who we are in good ways and bad.  It's usually best to give people the benefit of the doubt, and not to judge others too harshly.

After all, who knows who I'd be if I had their past and lived in their present situation?  I might not even handle it that well.

It reminds me of something a dear family friend named Garnett told me when I was something like six years old.  I had my knickers in a twist over something that had happened at school, and I was complaining about a classmate to Garnett.  What she said flattened me completely, and I've never forgotten it.

"Always be kinder than you think you need to be, because everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle that you know nothing about."

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Send in the clones

You've all heard about the whole Reptilian Alien thing, right?  That prominent individuals, especially world leaders but also including a lot of entertainers, are actually aliens in human suits?  

Well, I can go you one better.  Many of those prominent individuals aren't aliens, they're actually cleverly-wrought doubles.  Clones.  Twins from different mothers, as it were.

And this highly compelling scientific claim just got a boost a couple of days ago from Mr. Grip-On-Reality himself: Donald Trump.

Trump shared the following post on the ironically-named Truth Social:

The text, in case the image doesn't load well, says, "There is no #JoeBiden - executed in 2020.  #Biden clone doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see.  >#Democrats don't know the difference.  #Steel #ussteel #MAGA #MAHA"

When I first saw this, I thought, "Surely this has to be fake.  Even Trump isn't crazy enough to share something this stupid."

Being hopeful these days is a losing proposition.  It's quite real, and was even reported on Fox News, which has usually taken great pains to depict Dear Leader as the smartest person in the world now that Stephen Hawking is dead, instead of the reality, which is that Trump was pretty fucking dumb to begin with and in the last few years has shown every sign of progressive dementia.

The thing is, the whole "replaced by clones" claim isn't new, although this is the first time I've heard it espoused by Trump (or applied to Biden).  I did a little bit of research on the topic, at the expense of brain cells I can ill afford to lose, and discovered there's a Doppelgänger and Identity Research Society which keeps track of this alleged phenomena.  And they're not talking about simply spotting someone who looks a bit like a famous person, or perhaps resembles yourself (an unsettling occurrence that happens to just about everyone once or twice in their lives).  These people claim that unlike ordinary twins, or even clones, in which both individuals coexist, here the duplicate has replaced the original, and the original is no more.

In other words: Brad Pitt isn't actually Brad Pitt, he's someone who looks, talks, and acts exactly like Brad Pitt.

Upon reading this, I was reminded of the quote from Spock on Star Trek: "A difference that makes no difference is no difference."  If there's only one Brad Pitt -- i.e., no one is really claiming that there are two of 'em walking around, as far as I can see -- and he is identical to Brad Pitt, doesn't that make him, um, Brad Pitt?

Apparently not.  Here's an explanation of the difference, from the site:

Human doubles are made by other humans from the DNA of a single cell, where a replica of the physical body is reproduced.  That clone is only physical and has no soul, therefore, it has no God-connection.  Clones can mate and reproduce clone children.  A clone and a souled-human can mate and, again, only reproduce clone children.

Humans have no means to create a soul in another human clone, therefore, human clones have no soul and no concept of right and wrong, no conscience and no compassion.  They have survival instinct and are greatly concerned about their own death, but not the welfare and death of others.

This explains why so many people today have no values, no morals, no ethics and are prone to violence. 

They are more easily programmed through our mind-control type education and military training than are souled-humans with a freewill.  Clones have no freewill, only a sense of survival, and will act accordingly through conditioned behavior.

The eye is the window of the soul.  In the eye of another souled-human you can sense the Light emanating from the soul, the God Spirit within.  As I said earlier, soul or God Spirit within, so there is no God-connection to the eternal Light of Creator Source.  Therefore, there is no the human clone has no spiritual discernment.  The eyes of a human clone may appear dull, blank, hollow, dark, vacant, lifeless, empty with no vibrancy or Light. They have no reaction to or understanding of spiritual energy, concepts or conversation.

Well, the first thing that jumps out at me is that a "person with blank, dead eyes who has no concept of right or wrong, no compassion, no values, no morals, no ethics, and no care about the welfare of others" is a far better description of Donald Trump than it is of Joe Biden.  Be that as it may, the whole protocol for telling apart clones from real people seems pretty... subjective.  Even the website admits that the synthetic humans are just like regular humans, down to the genetic level, even though their science seems a little sketchy in other respects:

Certain tissues extracted from cattle are the starting point.  (This is part of the reason for cattle mutilations.)  The process is an advancement of a process discovered in the late 1950s.  This 1959 experiment was reported in a book in 1968 called The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Rettray Taylor.  Taylor describes the experiment done in France, "They had extracted DNA from the cells of the khaki Campbells and had injected it into the white Pekins, thinking that just possibly the offspring of the latter might show some character derived from khaki Campbells.  To their astonishment the actual ducks they injected began to change.  Their white feathers darkened, and their necks began to take on the peculiar curve which is a mark of the khaki Campbell."  The scientists working under the auspices of the Rothschilds, (who are directed by Satan himself) developed this process by working at secret breakneck speed. T hey developed an advanced development of the process they discovered with the DNA chicken experiment. By the late 1970’s, synthetic people could be produced by the Illuminati.

So you have to mutilate cattle to get tissue samples instead of just buying a package of ground beef at the grocery store, ducks are the same thing as chickens, the Rothschilds are directed by Satan, and therefore there are bunches of synthetic soulless people walking around.  Got it.

Apparently, though, that's not all.  Not only do we have fake people walking around, but as Trump mentioned in his post some of them are actually robots.  Jimmy Carter was one, for example:

Organic robotoids: This is an "artificial life" form that is created through processes that are totally different than cloning or synthetics.  Organic robotoid technology is being made to make exact as possible copies of important people such as Presidents and some of their staff.  For instance, the Jimmy Carter who came to Portland a few years ago who I stood two feet away from and examined visually was not the Jimmy Carter that had run for President.  On Easter, 1979 the first robotoid model of Jimmy Carter replaced the man Jimmy Carter.  By the time "Carter" was seen by me, they must have been on at least robotoid no. 100.

Myself, I'm surprised that anyone who visually examined a former president of the United States from two feet away wasn't immediately escorted from the premises by men in dark suits and sunglasses.  But I guess he was lucky.  Or maybe it was just because the Dark Suits knew that if something happened to Jimmy Carter Version 100, they could always replace him with Version 101.

The site provides hours of bizarre exploration, wherein we find out that not only are Joe Biden and Brad Pitt synthetic humans, or clones, or robotoids, or whatnot, so are:

• Cameron Diaz
• Bob Dylan
• Angelina Jolie (figures, since Brad is, right?)
• Christina Aguilera
• Beyoncé (I thought she was an Illuminatus herself?  C'mon, people, get your story straight)
• Eddie Murphy
• Courteney Cox
• David Icke

The last one made me choke-snort coffee all over my computer, because David Icke is one of the people who is always supposedly blowing the whistle on the Illuminati and the New World Order and the Bilderburg Group and what-have-you, and now we learn that he's not really David Icke, he's someone else who not only looks just like David Icke, but also has David Icke's loony views of how the world works?  Evidently so:

David Icke got replaced 2007 by a synthetic clone.  We... did a lot of mathematic facial geometry analysis and other stuff.  Also we found out that the new David Icke has no birthmarks anymore in his face, a lot bigger shoulders and his hands have a different geometry.  Also the way he use his muscles of the face, shoulders and hands, even the fingers and mostly the eyes and the bigger nose with its different form is a proof.  Also the different color of his skin.  Its [sic] a very fine difference of the color.  Also the distance between body and head is now different.  Also his psychology while talking.  We did a very deep analysis of a lot famous people and we are experts for doing this.  We work all together and are as objective as possible.

Well, there you are, then. They did lots of "stuff" and found out that (amongst other things) David Icke's head has moved farther away from his body.  Plus, they say they're being objective, so pretty much q.e.d., as far as I can tell.  You can see why Trump found this such an appealing idea.  I mean, who wouldn't?  The logic is inescapable.

So, anyway, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool, thanks to yet another brilliant missive from the Leader of the Free World.  Me, I'm going to get a second cup of coffee, so I can appear less vacant and hollow-eyed, and hopefully trick more people into thinking I'm actually Gordon.  Well, I am Gordon, but not the real Gordon.  I'm the Gordon who looks like Gordon.

Never mind.  You know what I mean.  At least I'm sure I'll fool the Democrats.

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Moon madness

There's a general rule that once a lie gets out into wide circulation, trying to replace it with the truth is damn near impossible.  We've seen lots of examples of that here at Skeptophilia -- chemtrails, the HAARP conspiracy, the whole "vaccines cause autism" thing, and "Pizzagate" come to mind immediately.  No matter how thoroughly these are debunked, they never seem to die.  In fact, legislation in my home state of Louisiana to "ban chemtrails" just passed in the state House of Representatives.  It was sponsored by Kim Landry Coates (R-Ponchatoula).  When Coates was asked what chemicals were allegedly in these "chemtrails," she responded, I shit you not, "Barium.  There is a few, some with long words that I can’t pronounce."

Which illustrates another general principle, which is that there is no intelligence criterion for being elected to public office.

This is not a new problem, much as the Trump administration has cornered the market on egregious lies in the last few years.  Humans have always been credulous, and once convinced of a lie, unconvincing someone is the very definition of an uphill struggle.  Take, for example, the Great Moon Hoax of 1835.

In August of 1835, writers at The Sun (a New York City newspaper, not the British tabloid of the same name) dreamed up a scheme to boost circulation -- a hoax article (complete with illustrations) claiming that astronomers had spotted life on the Moon.  The discovery, they said, was made using "an immense telescope of an entirely new principle," with a lens that measured eight meters in diameter and weighed seven metric tons.  Using this, the researchers were able to see living things on the Moon, including bat-winged humanoids the scientists called Vespertilio-Homo, as well as single-horned goats, miniature zebras, and bipedal tailless beavers.

A drawing of one of the lunar inhabitants [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Moon, they said, was also covered with active volcanoes, but the beings there used them as power sources, allowing the Vespertilio-Homo to live in large thriving cities:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

And just like today, when Trump invariably precedes his lies with "my advisors are telling me" or "I've heard from reputable sources," The Sun gave this "research" an attribution -- but they boldly named names.  The source, they said, was one Andrew Grant (who was fictitious), the assistant and dear friend of John Herschel (who very much was not).

John Herschel was a highly respected British astronomer, mathematician, chemist, and polymath, son of William Herschel (who discovered Uranus).  The younger Herschel had established a name for himself in planetary astronomy, and in fact had studied and named seven of the moons of Saturn and four of the moons of Uranus.  So his was a canny choice by The Sun -- it gave automatic legitimacy to the article's contents.

It took over a month for the entire story to come unraveled.  Pressed by scientifically-literate readers to show them the amazing telescope, they responded that it had sadly been destroyed in a fire -- the enormous lens's capacity for "concentrating the rays of light" had proved its own undoing, and completely burned down the observatory where it resided.  It was only when Herschel was asked about the research and said he knew nothing about it that the owners of The Sun were confronted, and finally -- reluctantly -- they admitted it had been a hoax all along.

Interestingly, though, they never published an actual retraction of the articles.  Five years later, one of The Sun's reporters, Richard Adams Locke, admitted he'd written the story, but said he'd done it as satire, to "show how science can be and is influenced by the thoughts of religion."  Which seems like a pretty flimsy claim to me.  I think the great likelihood is that it was a publicity stunt to boost circulation, and as such, it worked brilliantly -- The Sun became one of the bestselling newspapers in the United States, and survived until 1950.

The lie also had astonishing longevity.  Even after the owners of The Sun admitted it had all been a hoax -- there were no bat-creatures, no miniature zebras, no bipedal beavers -- people still claimed it was true.  The admission, not the original story, had been the hoax, they said, and The Sun's owners had only changed course because they thought the American people couldn't handle how weird the truth was.  Years later, poor John Herschel was still being asked about the bat-winged Moon men and his role in discovering them.

My dad used to say that trying to clean up the results of a lie was about as easy as getting toothpaste back into the tube.  And the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 illustrates another dark truth; the fact that getting suckered by an attractive lie can cause you to swing all the way over into cynicism.  Some readers who found out about the hoax concluded that nothing in the newspaper could be trusted.  It's like Mark Twain's observation: "You can learn too much from experience.  A cat that sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again, but it probably won't sit on a cool one, either."

Cynicism, as I've pointed out more than once, is no smarter than gullibility.  It's just as lazy to conclude that everyone is lying to you as it is to believe that no one is.  But it's a tragedy when the media itself is the source of the lies.  While I can't condone cynicism about the media, I do understand it.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, "You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts."  Which is true enough, but that presupposes we can actually find out what the facts are.  And when the sources you are supposed to be able to trust are themselves lying to you, it creates a catch-22 that I'm damned if I know how to get out of.

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