A scientific Johnny One-Note

In science, there's sometimes a fine line between looking for data to support your model, and shoehorning every bit of data you can find into your model whether it belongs there or not.

Someone who has stepped over that line -- hell, he left the line behind decades ago, and probably doesn't even know where it is any more -- is British astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe.  Wickramasinghe is best known for his research into panspermia, the idea that living things, and perhaps the ancestors of all living things on Earth, arrived here on meteorites and in interstellar dust.  He did his Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of Fred Hoyle, whose views were also a little on the unorthodox side.  (Hoyle, for example, rejected the Big Bang in favor of the Steady-State model, which he steadfastly clung to his entire life despite there being zilch in the way of evidence in its favor.)

So Wickramasinghe was kind of set up from the beginning to be a maverick.  He and Hoyle wrote paper after paper on panspermia, ultimately ascribing an extraterrestrial origin for the pathogens responsible for the 1918-1919 "Spanish" flu, mad cow disease, polio, and SARS.  He has been involved in studies of dust collected from the upper stratosphere that tested positive for microorganisms, which he claimed was extraterrestrial in origin (of course) and turned out almost certainly not to be (of course).  A meteorite strike in Sri Lanka in 2012 was analyzed by Wickramasinghe, and he stated that the rock fragments contained "extraterrestrial diatoms" -- which were ultimately shown to be fossils of entirely terrestrial species that were contained in the sedimentary rocks where the meteorite hit.

Oh, and in the 1981 creationism/evolution "debate" in the courts of the state of Arkansas, Wickramasinghe was the only scientist to testify on the behalf of the creationists.  "Once again," he said, "the Universe gives the appearance of being biologically constructed, and on this occasion on a truly vast scale."

And, he added, the famous Archaeopteryx fossil, showing the clear link between birds and dinosaurs, is a fake.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Davidnoy, Chandra-Wickramasinghe, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So here we have a guy who is bound and determined to bang away at the same idea forever, in spite of (or maybe because of) the complete lack of scientifically credible evidence for it.  The more embattled he becomes, the more certain he becomes.

You almost have to admire his determination.

I say "almost," because I have to admit to saying, "are you fucking kidding me?" when I ran into an article over at Mysterious Universe describing a paper Wickramasinghe submitted to the journal The Lancet a couple of weeks ago.  And in it -- which you're probably already anticipating...

... he claims that the Wuhan coronavirus came from outer space.

Wickramasinghe writes:

In the case of the current Coronavirus pandemic in China it is interesting to note that an exceptionally bright fireball event was seen on October 11 2019 over Sonjyan City in the Jilin Province of NE China.  It is tempting to speculate that this event had a crucial role to play in what is now unfolding in throughout China.  If a fragment of a loosely held carbonaceous meteorite carrying a cargo of viruses/bacteria entered the mesosphere and stratosphere at high speed ~30km/s, its inner core which survived incandescence would have got dispersed in the stratosphere and troposphere... 

Following the initial deposition of infective particles in a small localized region (e.g. Wuhan, Hubei province, China) particles that have already become dispersed through over a wider area in the troposphere will fall to ground in a higgledy-piggledy manner, and this process could be extended over a typical timescale of 1-2 years until an initial inoculant of the infective agent would be drained.  This accords well with many new strains of viruses including influenza that have appeared in recent years.

Which, I have to admit, is the first time I've ever seen "higgledy-piggledy" used in a scholarly paper.

Be that as it may, the main problem I see about all this -- besides the fact that (1) meteorites hit the Earth all the time, so finding one in the vicinity of a disease outbreak isn't remarkable, and (2) there is no evidence for what he's saying other than "hey, it could be, y'know?" -- is that all of Wickramasinghe's alleged extraterrestrial microbes are closely related to bacteria and viruses that were already here, and in fact have been here for a long, long time.  Yes, the 1918-1919 flu epidemic was horrifying in its contagion rate and mortality, but the causative virus is not really all that different from other flu viruses seen before and since.  Polio has been around since ancient Egyptian times -- and even if you don't buy that the quick mentions in ancient writings were actually polio, it was unequivocally described in an autobiographical account by Sir Walter Scott of events he endured in 1773.  Mad cow disease, and its human analog Creutzfeld-Jakob Syndrome, are caused by misfolding of a protein called PrP, which (in its properly-folded state) is present the brains of every mammalian species tested, including ones that have never been hit on the head with a meteorite.

And COVID-19, as the epidemiologists have named the Wuhan coronavirus, is one of a large family of viruses that have been troubling humanity for millennia.  In fact, a good many of the cases of the common cold are due to members of the coronavirus family, so it'd be a little odd if there was an epidemic caused by a coronavirus, and that one (and its cousin SARS) turned out to be from outer space while the rest of them were here all along.

Wickramasinghe's response to all this is that since all life on Earth originated in space, it stands to reason that you'll find similarities between the ones that come crashing to Earth and the ones that were already here.  We're all aliens, he says, it's just that some of us are more recent arrivals.

Which to me is stretching credulity to the snapping point.  Ockham's Razor kicks in, here -- in the absence of any positive evidence, the (vastly) simpler theory is that all the life forms on Earth go back to a common (terrestrial) ancestor.  Yes, it's possible that the progenitor of all life forms landed here four-billion-odd years ago from an extraterrestrial source -- but that's all we can say.  It's possible.  There's no independent evidence that this happened, so at the moment, it's just a hand-waving guess, not a valid scientific theory.

But that's not going to stop Wickramasinghe, who is bound and determined to take every new development in microbiology and attribute it to an alien incursion.  I keep hoping the guy will give it a rest eventually, but he's 81 years old and showing no signs of it.  Like I said, have to kind of appreciate his tenacity, but it'd be nice if he'd turn that onto some other lines of scientific inquiry, because it gets a little tiresome to keep listening to the astronomical version of Johnny One-Note.

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One of my favorite people is the indefatigable British science historian James Burke.  First gaining fame from his immensely entertaining book and television series Connections, in which he showed the links between various historical events that (seen as a whole) play out like a centuries-long game of telephone, he went on to wow his fans with The Day the Universe Changed and a terrifyingly prescient analysis of where global climate change was headed, filmed in 1989, called After the Warming.

One of my favorites of his is the brilliant book The Pinball Effect.  It's dedicated to the role of chaos in scientific discovery, and shows the interconnections between twenty different threads of inquiry.  He's posted page-number links at various points in his book that you can jump to, where the different threads cross -- so if you like, you can read this as a scientific Choose Your Own Adventure, leaping from one point in the web to another, in the process truly gaining a sense of how interconnected and complex the history of science has been.

However you choose to approach it -- in a straight line, or following a pinball course through the book -- it's a fantastic read.  So pick up a copy of this week's Skeptophilia book of the week.  You won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Space mollusks

There's a logical fallacy called the Argument from Personal Incredulity.  The idea here is that you look at something from nature, and find it extraordinary -- beautiful, weird, complex, intricate, or merely bizarre.  Faced with this strange and wonderful thing, you respond, "I can't imagine how this could have come about naturally.  Therefore, it has to be the work of ______."  (Fill in the blank with your favorite deus ex machina, be it gods, aliens, or some other superintelligent power.)

The problem with this, of course, is that saying "I can't imagine how this could happen" only tells you one thing: that you can't imagine how this could happen.  It's not proof of anything else except that whatever-it-is deserves further study.

This approach also gets you into some deep philosophical waters when the extraordinary trait of the example in question is beauty.  You hear people say that gorgeous sunsets or fields of flowers in bloom or whatever are evidence for god's hand in nature, but it conveniently glosses over all the natural things that aren't so nice.  If bunnies and butterflies are god's work, then so are ticks and tapeworms, you know?  Eric Idle pointed this out in his wonderful parody of the hymn "All Things Bright and Beautiful," "All Things Dull and Ugly" -- pointing out that "the Lord God made the lot."

I ran into an example of this -- in a scientific journal, no less -- yesterday, with the paper "Cause of Cambrian Explosion -- Terrestrial or Cosmic?" in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.  Written by a team of nineteen scientists, it looks at the remarkable expansion of biodiversity that occurred at the beginning of the Cambrian Era, but also considers an evolutionary conundrum -- how the octopus and other cephalopods ended up so much more intelligent than their mollusk relatives.  I'll cut to the chase and tell you their conclusion:

In our view the totality of the multifactorial data and critical analyses assembled by Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe and their many colleagues since the 1960s leads to a very plausible conclusion – life may have been seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth allowed it to flourish (about or just before 4.1 Billion years ago); and living organisms such as space-resistant and space-hardy bacteria, viruses, more complex eukaryotic cells, fertilised ova and seeds have been continuously delivered ever since to Earth so being one important driver of further terrestrial evolution which has resulted in considerable genetic diversity and which has led to the emergence of mankind.

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe are not an auspicious way to start.  They're both associated with the idea of panspermia, that life on Earth was seeded here from outer space, and they don't seem particularly concerned with the fact that there are other, more plausible explanations.  Wickramasinghe especially is associated with a lot of fringe-y claims, such as that the Archaeopteryx type fossil is a forgery and that the virus that caused the 1918-1919 Spanish flu epidemic was extraterrestrial in origin.  He testified for the defense in the 1981 creationism trial in Arkansas, making statements about the "Intelligent Design" model that his colleagues called "absurd" and "ignorant."  (In fact, in papers that mention Wickramasinghe, the phrase most often associated with his name is "his claims have been completely rejected by the scientific community.")

Of course, for some people, being rejected by the establishment is a sign of being brilliant, a maverick, someone whose ideas are ahead of their time.  Their sticking to their guns turns their claims into something of a crusade.  Fewer people, it seems, conclude that the renegade in question is simply wrong.

Which is how we now have a paper in support of Wickramasinghe and Hoyle -- saying, basically, that we have found the extraterrestrials, and they are us.

The part of the paper that addresses viruses is at least looking at a problem for which the standard model has no particularly good explanation.  Viruses are odd beasts, obligate parasites that hijack a host cell and use their cellular machinery to make more copies of themselves.  Some, the retroviruses (HIV being the best-known example) actually insert a bit of their genetic material into the host's cells, rendering infection more or less permanent.  (We have dozens, possibly hundreds, of retroviral remnants in our own DNA, and they have been implicated in a variety of diseases including multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia.)

But then they start talking about octopuses, and leap right off the logical cliff:

[T]he genetic divergence of Octopus from its ancestral coleoid sub-class is very great, akin to the extreme features seen across many genera and species noted in Eldridge-Gould punctuated equilibria patterns (below).  Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch colour and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene.  The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral Nautilus (e.g. Nautilus pompilius) to the common Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) to Squid (Loligo vulgaris) to the common Octopus (Octopus vulgaris) are not easily to be found in any pre-existing life form – it is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant “future” in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large.  Such an extraterrestrial origin as an explanation of emergence of course runs counter to the prevailing dominant paradigm.

The last bit, at least, is undeniable.  They go on to add:

One plausible explanation, in our view, is that the new genes [i.e., differences between the octopus genome and that of their nearest relatives] are likely new extraterrestrial imports to Earth - most plausibly as an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized Octopus eggs. 

Thus the possibility that cryopreserved Squid and/or Octopus eggs, arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago should not be discounted as that would be a parsimonious cosmic explanation for the Octopus' sudden emergence on Earth ca. 270 million years ago.

The problem here is that their entire argument rests on two things: (1) the lack of a good fossil record of the octopus; and (2) their amazing intelligence.  So we're adding the Argument from Ignorance ("I don't know the explanation, so it must be ____") to the Argument from Personal Incredulity ("It's pretty cool, so it must be ____") to the paucity of the fossil record (not only for octopuses, but for most life forms) and concluding that the octopus came to Earth via frozen eggs from outer space.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

There's also a serious scientific stumbling block about all this, and it's one the authors don't address.  It's the same problem faced by claims of human/alien hybridization; if life did evolve on other worlds, there is no reason in the world that it would necessarily encode its genetic information the same way we do.  Something like DNA or RNA is probably fairly likely; the nucleotides (building blocks) of these molecules are relatively easy to synthesize, and RNA has the unusual characteristic of being autocatalytic (it can catalyze its own chemical reactions).  But the DNA code chart -- the master recipe book by which our genetic material is decoded, and directs all of our cellular processes -- appears to be entirely arbitrary.

And yet... it is shared by all life forms on Earth.  Including the octopus.  Good evidence that we all came from a common ancestor -- and a tough thing to overcome if you think that some terrestrial life forms came from elsewhere in the galaxy.

So if we have scant evidence for something, we don't engage in wild speculation -- we look for more evidence.  You can't base a valid conclusion either on ignorance or awe.  And to cherry-pick a few odd examples of creatures the Darwinian model hasn't fully explained, and use them to support your claim that life's evolutionary drivers came from outer space, is nothing more than fancily-worded confirmation bias.

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This week's recommended book is an obscure little tome that I first ran into in college.  It's about a scientific hoax -- some chemists who claimed to have discovered what they called "polywater," a polymerized form of water that was highly viscous and stayed liquid from -70 F to 500 F or above.  The book is a fascinating, and often funny, account of an incident that combines confirmation bias with wishful thinking with willful misrepresentation of the evidence.  Anyone who's interested in the history of science or simply in how easy it is to fool the overeager -- you should put Polywater by Felix Franks on your reading list.

Claims from outer space

A couple of days ago I finished Michael Ray Taylor's wonderful book Dark Life, about the search for microscopic life forms in unsuspected places -- in mile-deep cracks in the Earth's crust, in highly acidic or carbon monoxide-laden caves, and even in meteorites that originated on the surface of Mars.    Far from a dry, textbook-like read, this was a fascinating look at how science is actually done, putting a lens on the people, the conflicts, the biases, and the years of hard work that go into building a case for a claim.

It's worth it for non-scientists to read books like this.  Because by and large, popular media does a piss-poor job of portraying how science is done, and it leaves a lot of the public with the impression that scientists sit around in their offices making wild conjectures all day and pulling whatever scanty bits of evidence they have out of their nether orifices.  Science is seen as pot-shot guesswork, where any claim is as valid as any other, and "everything could be disproven tomorrow."

Sometimes, of course, the scientists themselves don't do the entire enterprise any favors.  Consider, for example, the current hype over Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which was the subject of a press release from astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe.  Wickramasinghe and his colleague, Max Wallis of the University of Cardiff, are claiming that the Philae lander, currently sending information on the comet's surface and composition, has discovered evidence that the comet hosts microbial life:

The data from Philae supports the presence of micro-organisms being involved in the formation of the icy structures, the preponderance of aromatic hydrocarbons, and the very dark surface...  These are not easily explained in terms of prebiotic chemistry.  The dark material is being constantly replenished as it is boiled off by heat from the sun.  Something must be doing that at a fairly prolific rate.

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko [image courtesy of the European Space Agency]

The problem is, this isn't the first time Wickramasinghe has made such statements, and usually based on the flimsiest of evidence.  He claimed that the algal spores found in the "red rain" that occurred in Kerala, India were of extraterrestrial origin.  (They turned out to be the spores of a lichen, Trentepohlia, that is common in the area.)  He claimed that the virus responsible for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was extraterrestrial in origin.  He claimed that the devastating flu epidemic of 1918-1919 (the "Spanish flu") was extraterrestrial in origin.  He claimed that mad cow disease, and other spongiform encephalopathies, are extraterrestrial in origin.

Noticing a pattern here?

Most telling of all, Wickramasinghe -- despite being an astronomer -- has thrown his support behind creationism.  He was the only scientist to testify for the defense in the 1981 creationism trial in Arkansas.  He has written:

Once again the Universe gives the appearance of being biologically constructed, and on this occasion on a truly vast scale. Once again those who consider such thoughts to be too outlandish to be taken seriously will continue to do so. While we ourselves shall continue to take the view that those who believe they can match the complexities of the Universe by simple experiments in their laboratories will continue to be disappointed.

So we're not talking about someone who has built himself much of a reputation for credibility.  But of course, the slow, difficult, slogging kind of scientific research described by Taylor in Dark Life -- the kind that makes up 99% of the actual science done by researchers -- isn't nearly as sexy as the wild claims thrown about by people like Wickramasinghe.  So given a chance to report either on actual science or on loopy, zero-evidence claims, the media is always going to go for the latter.

And consider how this sort of thing is depicted.  Wickramasinghe isn't called "a nut with an axe to grind," he's called a "maverick."  And you know how people love "mavericks."  Mavericks are tough, they're strong, they're willing to buck the system (despite the fact that here, the "system" -- the scientific method -- has an excellent track record of establishing the truth).  They make exciting, bold statements that fly in the face of conventional wisdom.  They talk about thrilling stuff like "having to rewrite all the textbooks."

The problem is, these claims have a history of vanishing without trace.  There always turn out to be other explanations -- as a case in point, take a look at physicist Chris Lee's explanation for the carbon on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, wherein we find that surface carbon layers are perfectly capable of forming, abiotically, in conditions such as those the comet experiences.

So the comet's dark surface might be biological in origin, just as there might be life in any number of other places -- Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus usually being considered the best bets.  But as of right now, we simply don't know, and those claims aren't even at the level of verifiable hypotheses until we send out probes with landers designed to detect life, something that probably won't be done any time soon.  (A flyby probe is being sent to Europa, which will certainly return some interesting data but is unlikely to settle the question definitively.)

So once again, we have the problem of the popular media misrepresenting science as a long, meandering series of untested and untestable conjectures, leading to a significant percentage of the public coming away with the impression that the whole endeavor is some kind of flighty game that consists largely of making shit up.

The whole thing is unfortunate, because given the global problems we're currently facing -- climate change, food shortages, overpopulation, pollution -- we not only need scientists, we need a citizenry (and the politicians they elect) who are conversant in the basic methods of science.  Most importantly, we need to reestablish science as credible, so that we don't have anti-science knuckle-draggers like Senator James "Snowball" Inhofe being appointed to the Committee on Environment and Public Works -- and having their moronic statements given more credence than the painstaking, peer-reviewed work of researchers who actually know what they're talking about.

The power of "only"

Today, I ran into a story that got me thinking about how powerful a single word can be in changing the gist of a claim.

An article in Online Medical Daily entitled "'Seeds Of Life' Collected During Perseid Meteor Shower: Scientists Say Algae 'Can Only Have Come From Space'," writer John Ericson describes an unusual find on the (formerly) sterile sides of a British research balloon.

In a study described at the Instruments, Methods, and Missions for Astrobiology conference in San Diego, British biologist Chandra Wickramasinghe told attendees about a discovery, that (if true) revolutionizes what we know about the origins of life on Earth.  Wickramasinghe and his colleagues launched a balloon into the stratosphere during the annual Perseid meteor shower, and upon retrieval, found that the surface had a microscopic blob of microorganisms stuck to it.  "The entities varied from a presumptive colony of ultra-small bacteria to two unusual individual organisms - part of a diatom frustule and a 200 micron-sized particle mass interlaced with biofilm and biological filaments," Wickramasinghe said, in an interview with The Daily Mail.

Diatom frustules (skeletons)

"By our current understanding of the means by which such particles can be transferred from Earth to the stratosphere they could not - in the absence of a violent volcanic eruption occurring within a day of the sampling event - make such a journey," Wickramasinghe explained.  "If there is no mechanism by which these biological entities could be elevated from Earth to the stratosphere then it must have arrived from above the stratosphere and have been incoming to Earth...  They can only have come from space."

What Wickramasinghe is claiming is not a new idea.  Called panspermia, the speculation is that the ancestors of all terrestrial species was a microorganism (probably an extremeophile) that rode in on a meteorite or on cometary debris.  Chemist Svante Arrhenius was fond of the claim, as was astronomer Fred Hoyle; but it's not much in vogue these days, largely due to slim evidence supporting the contention.  Wickramasinghe himself is kind of a fringe figure in the minds of much of the scientific community -- not only has he championed panspermia with a single-mindedness that approaches obsession, but he also testified for the defense in a 1981 McLean vs. the Arkansas State Board of Education trial, one of many cases that considered the constitutionality of teaching creationism in public schools.  During the trial, he referred to the famous fossil of Archaeopteryx as a "hoax."

None of this wins him any points in my book.

Of course, to be fair, you have to consider a claim separate from the person making it; even complete wingnuts can land on correct ideas sometimes.  And here, we have at least some sort of hard evidence -- traces of microorganisms on a sterile balloon that had taken a trip into the stratosphere during a meteor shower.  Has Wickramasinghe been vindicated?

There's the problem here, and it revolves around the use of the word "only."  Wickramasinghe said that his algae blob "can only have come from space."  Take out the word "only," and I'm with him 100%.  The blob could have come from space.  Its presence on the balloon is certainly suggestive.  But to say that it only can have come from space requires a great deal more than that.

Stratospheric dust collection is a notoriously difficult task.  Contamination is a constant hazard, especially if you are trying to obtain a pure sample of interplanetary dust -- i.e., material that did not originate on Earth.  Terrestrial dust, made up of windblown sediments, volcanic ash, and more prosaic materials such as pollen, can reach amazing heights in the atmosphere, and travel extraordinary distances.  A recent study found that dust from the Sahara can reach stratospheric heights -- and affect weather in western North America.

So even if Wickramasinghe's group was careful -- and I am not trying to imply that they weren't -- the possibility of contamination has to be weighed into any argument about the origin of the microorganisms on the balloon.  As NASA's page on "Cosmic Dust" puts it, "Once in the stratosphere this ‘cosmic dust’ and spacecraft debris joins terrestrial particles such as volcanic ash, windborne desert dust and pollen grains."

But of course, Wickramasinghe has a dog in this race, and once you take out the word "only," you don't have much of a story left.  Debris, some containing organic compounds or even microorganisms, has been found before and been alleged to have an extraterrestrial origin.  Thus far, none of these claims has been conclusively supported, so (to be fair) we have to consider the jury to be still out on the idea of panspermia.

Now, don't get me wrong.  No one would be more delighted than me if extraterrestrial life was discovered, even if it turned out just to be single-celled organisms.  I've long suspected that we're not alone in the universe -- what I know about evolutionary biology suggests to me that life is probably plentiful out there in space.  But if you make a claim to have discovered aliens, even microscopic ones, you have to be held to a higher standard of evidence than suspicions and suggestions.  And your case isn't made more watertight simply because of a judicious use of the word "only."