Copy-and-paste

I'm really interested in research on aging, and I'd like to think that it's not solely because I'm Of A Certain Age myself.  The whole fact of our undergoing age-related system degradation is fascinating -- more so when you realize that other vertebrates age at dramatically different rates.  Mice and rats age out after about a year and a half to two years; dogs (sadly) rarely make it past fifteen (much less in some breeds); and the Galapagos Tortoise can still be hale and hearty at two hundred years of age.

A lot of research has gone into why different organisms age at such different speeds, and (more importantly) how to control it.  The ultimate goal, selfish though it may sound, is extending the healthy human life span.  Imagine if we reached our healthy adult physiology at (say) age twenty-five or so, and then went into stasis with respect to aging for two hundred or three hundred years -- or more?

Heady stuff.  For me, the attraction is not so much avoiding death (although that's nice, too).  I was just chatting with a friend yesterday about the fact that one of my biggest fears is being dependent on others for my care.  The idea of my body and/or mind degrading to the point that I can no longer care for my own needs is profoundly terrifying to me.  And when you add to the normal age-related degradation the specter of diseases such as Alzheimer's and ALS -- well, all I can say is that I agree with my dad, who said that compared with that fate, "I'd rather get run over by a truck."

Leaving that aside, though, a particularly interesting piece of research that has bearing on this field was published last week in the journal Science Advances.  But to understand it, you have to know a little bit about a peculiarity of genetics first.

Several decades ago, a geneticist named Barbara McClintock was working with patterns of seed color inheritance in "Indian corn."  In this variety, one cob can bear seeds with dozens of different colors and patterns.  After much study, she concluded that her data could only be explained by there being "transposable elements" -- genetic sequences that were either clipped out and moved, or else copied and moved -- functions similar to the "cut-and-paste" and "copy-and-paste" commands on your computer. McClintock wrote a paper about it...

... and was immediately ignored.  For one thing, she was a woman in science, and back when she was doing her research -- in the 1960s and 1970s -- that was sufficient reason to discount it.  Her colleagues derisively nicknamed her theory "jumping genes" and laughed it into oblivion.

Except that McClintock wouldn't let it go.  She was convinced she was right, and kept doggedly pursuing more data, data that would render her conclusion incontrovertible.  She found it -- and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1983, at the age of 81.

Barbara McClintock in her laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smithsonian Institution/Science Service; Restored by Adam Cuerden, Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) shown in her laboratory in 1947]

McClintock's "transposable elements" (now called "transposons") have since been found in every vertebrate studied.  They are used to provide additional copies of essential genes, so that if one copy succumbs to a mutation, there's an extra working copy that can take over.  They're also used in gene switching.  Move a gene near an on-switch called a promoter, and it turns on; move it away, and it turns off.

The problem is, like any natural process, it can go awry.  The copy-and-paste function especially seems to have that tendency.  When it malfunctions, it acts like a runaway copy-and-paste would in your word processing software.  Imagine the havoc that would ensue if you had an important document, and the computer went haywire and inserted one phrase over and over again in random points in the text.

This should give you an idea of why it's so important to keep this process under control.

You have a way of taking care of these "rogue transposons" (as they're called).  One such mechanism is methylation, which is a chemical means of tangling up and permanently shutting down genes.  But the paper just released suggests that aging is (at least in part) due to the rogue transposition of one particular sequence getting ahead of methylation, leaving a particular chunk of DNA scattered again and again across the genome.

The current research, out of New York University, looked at a transposon called Long Interspersed Nuclear Element 1 (LINE-1) that has become especially good at this copy-and-paste trick, to the extent that the human genome contains five hundred thousand copies of it -- a full twenty percent of our genetic material.  The researchers found that LINE-1 can only accomplish this self-insertion when a molecule called ORF1p is present in sufficient quantities to assemble into clumps called condensates.  Find a way to block ORF1p, and LINE-1 is effectively disabled -- potentially slowing down age-related genetic malfunction.

Of course, even in the best-case scenario, it's unlikely that tweaking one molecule will affect overall aging in any kind of dramatic way.  Even so, the whole thing is tremendously interesting.  On the other hand, I have to say that the idea that we are getting to the point that we can tinker around with fundamental processes like aging is a little frightening.  It opens up practical and ethical issues we've never had to consider before.  How this would affect human population growth?  Who would have access to such genetic modifications if they proved effective and safe?  You can bet the rich would have first dibs (and the last thing we need is Rupert Murdoch living to two hundred years old.)  

Even such things as how we approach the idea of careers and retirement would require significant rethinking.  Imagine if you reached the age of sixty and could expect another fifty or more years of active health.  More staggering still is if the effect on humans was greater -- and the upper bound of human life span was increased to two hundred or three hundred years.  It seems like science fiction, but with the research that is currently happening, it's not outside of the realm of possibility.

Who would want to retire at sixty if you still had the physiology and mental acuity of a twenty-five year old?  At the same point, who would want to stay in the same job for another hundred years or more? 

The whole thing would require a drastic reorganization of our society, a far more pervasive set of changes than any scientific discovery has yet caused.  And lest you think that I'm exaggerating the likelihood of such an eventuality; remember how much progress has happened in biological science in the last century.  Only a hundred years ago, children in industrialized countries were still dying by the thousands of diphtheria and measles.  There were dozens of structures in cells, and a good many organs in humans, about whose function we knew essentially nothing.  We knew that DNA existed, but had no idea that it was the genetic material, much less how it worked.

Makes you wonder what our understanding will be in another hundred years, doesn't it?

And maybe some of the people reading this right now will be around to see it.

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Genetic walkabouts

Today's topic comes to us from the One Thing Leads To Another department.

I got launched into this particular rabbit hole by a notice from 23 & Me that they'd refined their analysis of their test subjects' DNA, and now had a bigger database to extract from, allowing them to make a better guess at "percent composition" not only by general region, but by specific sub-region.

So I took a look at my results.  My DNA came out 63.5% French, 25.3% Scottish and English, 6.4% Ashkenazi, and the remaining 4.8% a miscellany.  This works out to be pretty much what I'd expect from what I know of my family tree.  My mom was close to 100% French, but a great-grandfather of hers, one Solomon Meyer-Lévy, was a French Jew from Alsace and is the origin of the Ashkenazic DNA.  My dad was a bit of a hodgepodge in which French, Scottish, and English predominate.

So like I said, no surprises.  I'm a white guy of western European descent, which if you look at my profile photo, is probably not going to come as any sort of shock.

What I thought was more interesting was the regional breakdown.  The Scottish and English bits were especially interesting because I only have a handful of records documenting where exactly my British Isles forebears were from.  Apparently I have a cluster of genetic relatives around Glasgow, the London area, and Yorkshire.  Other than my dad's paternal family (which was from the French Alps, near Mont Blanc and the border of Italy) and my Alsatian great-great-grandfather, my French ancestry is all in western France; this lines up with what I know of my mom's family, which came from Bordeaux, Poitou, the Loire Valley, and Brittany.

So all of this shores up their claims to accuracy, because this was ascertained purely by my DNA -- I didn't send them my family tree, or anything.  But then this got combined with another random thing, which is that I've been reading a book called The Ancient Celts by anthropologist Barry Cunliffe, and I was kind of surprised at how much of Europe the Celts once ruled -- not only the British Isles and all of France (then called Gaul), but what is now Switzerland, southern Germany, Austria, the northern half of Italy, the eastern half of Spain, and down into a big chunk of the Balkans.  They seem to have been nothing if not inveterate wanderers, and their walkabouts took them just about everywhere in Europe but Scandinavia.  They were there for a long while, too; it was only when the Romans got their act together and started to push back that the Celts retreated; they were shoved farther west when first the Germanic tribes, and then the Slavs, moved in from the east and kind of kept moving.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This all got me thinking, "Okay, when I say my ancestry is on the order of 2/3 French, what exactly am I saying?"  So I started doing some research into "the ethnic origin of the French," and I found out that it's not simple.  The western parts of France (whence my mom's family originated) are mostly of Celtic (Gaulish) ancestry.  People in the southeast, especially the lowlands near Marseilles, have a lot of Roman and Etruscan forebears.  When you get over into Languedoc -- the southwestern part of France, near the border of Spain -- there's an admixture not only from the Moors of North Africa, but from the Basques, who seem to be the remnants of the earliest settlers of Europe, and are the only ones in western Europe who don't speak an Indo-European language.  In Normandy there's a good admixture of Scandinavian blood, from Vikings who settled there a thousand years ago -- in fact, "Normandy" means "North-man-land."  Despite the fact that the name of the country and its people comes from a Germanic tribe (the Franks), the only place there's a significant amount of Germanic ancestry in France is in the east -- from Burgundy north into Alsace, Lorraine, and Picardy.

Apparently the only reason the French are Frankish is because the Franks ruled the place for a few hundred years, a bit the way the Normans did in England.  The common people, your average seventeenth-century peasants in Bordeaux, probably were nearly 100% Gaulish Celt.

So when I say my mom's family is French, and a guy from Lille and a woman from Marseilles say the same thing, what exactly do we mean?

And there's nothing unusual about the French in that regard; I just use them as an example because I happen to know more about them.  The same is true pretty much anywhere you look except for truly insular cultures like Japan, which have had very little migration in or out for millennia.  We're almost all composites, and ultimately, all cousins.  I remember when I first ran into this idea; that the further back you go, the more our family trees all coalesce, and at some point in the past every human on Earth could be sorted into one of two categories -- people who were the ancestors of every one of us, and people who left no living descendants.

That point, most anthropologists believe, is way more recent than most of us would suspect.  I've heard -- to be fair, I've never seen it rigorously proven, but it sounds about right -- that the two-category split for those of us with western European ancestry happened in around 1,200 C.E.  So pick out anyone from thirteenth century western Europe, and (s)he's either my ancestor, or (s)he has no descendants at all.

This brings up a couple of things.  First, "royal blood" is an idiotic concept from just about whichever angle you choose.  Not only does royal ancestry not confer fitness for leading a country -- let's face it, a lot of those kings were absolute loonies -- I can pretty much guarantee that I descend from Charlemagne, and if you have European ancestry, so do you.  My wife actually descends from an illegitimate child of King Edward IV of England (something she likes to remind me about whenever I get uppity), but the truth is, all of us have royal blood and peasant blood pretty well mixed indiscriminately.

Second, racism, ethnicism, and xenophobia are all equally ridiculous, since (1) we're virtually all genetic mixtures, (2) regardless of our ethnicity, our genetic similarities far outweigh our differences, and (3) we're all cousins anyhow.  I find that rather cool, honestly -- that a Zulu woman living in Botswana and I have common ancestry if you go back far enough.  Race is a cultural construct, not a genetic one, which you can see with extraordinary vividness if you take a DNA test, or if you read anything about the migration patterns humanity has taken since first leaving the East African savanna something like 250,000 years ago.

Anyhow, those are my musings about ethnicity, DNA, ancestry, and so on.  It all goes to show that we're wonderfully complex creatures, and the determination of some of us to see the world as if it was straightforward black-and-white is not only inaccurate, it misses a great deal of the most interesting parts of it.  As the brilliant science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anybody who found life simple.  I think a life or a time looks simple only if you leave out the details."

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The biochemical zoo

The human/alien hybrid is a common trope in science fiction.  From the angst-ridden half-Vulcan Mr. Spock, to the ultra-competent and powerful half-Klingon B'Elanna Torres, to the half-Betazoid empath Deanna Troi, the idea of having two intelligent humanoid species produce children together is responsible for dozens of plot twists in Star Trek alone.

Much as I love the idea (and the show), the likelihood of a human being able to engage in any hot bow-chicka-bow-wow with an alien, and have that union produce an offspring, is damn near zero.  Even if the two in question had all the various protrusions and indentations more or less lined up, the main issue is the compatibility of the genetic material.  I mean, consider it; it's usually impossible for two ordinary terrestrial species to hybridize -- even related ones (say, a Red-tailed Hawk and a Peregrine Falcon) are far enough apart genetically that any chance mating would produce an unviable embryo.

Now consider how likely it is to have genetic compatibility between a terrestrial species and one from the fourth planet orbiting Alpha Centauri.

Any hope you might have had for a steamy tryst with an alien was smashed even further by a study that came out of a study from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Emory University, and the German Aerospace Center.  Entitled, "One Among Millions: The Chemical Space of Nucleic Acid-Like Molecules," by Henderson James Cleaves II, Christopher Butch, Pieter Buys Burger, Jay Goodwin, and Markus Meringer, the study shows that the DNA and RNA that underlies the genetics of all life on Earth is only one of millions of possible information-encoding molecules that could be out there in the universe.

It was amazing how diverse these molecules were, even given some pretty rigid parameters.  Restricting the selection to linear polymers (so the building blocks have to have attachment points that allow for the formation of chains), and three constituent atoms -- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, like our own carbohydrates -- the researchers found 706,568 possible combinations (counting configurations and their mirror images, pairs of molecules that are called stereoisomers).  Adding nitrogen (so, hooking in chemicals like proteins and the DNA and RNA nitrogenous bases, the letters of the DNA and RNA alphabets) complicated matters some -- but they still got 454,442 possible configurations.

The results were a surprise even to the researchers.  "There are two kinds of nucleic acids in biology, and maybe twenty or thirty effective nucleic acid-binding nucleic acid analogs," said Henderson James Cleaves, who led the study, in an interview in SciTechDaily.  "We wanted to know if there is one more to be found...  The answer is, there seem to be many, many more than was expected."

Co-author Pieter Burger of Emory University is excited about the possible medical applications of this study.  "It is absolutely fascinating to think that by using modern computational techniques we might stumble upon new drugs when searching for alternative molecules to DNA and RNA that can store hereditary information," Burger said.  "It is cross-disciplinary studies such as this that make science challenging and fun yet impactful."

While I certainly can appreciate the implications of this research from an Earth-based standpoint, I was immediately struck by its application to the search for extraterrestrial life.  As I mentioned earlier, it was already nearly impossible that humans and aliens would have cross-compatible DNA, but now it appears that alien life might well not be constrained to a DNA-based genetic code at all.  I always thought that DNA, or something very close to it, would be found in any life form we run across, whether on this planet or another; but the Cleaves et al. study suggests that there are a million or more other ways that organisms might spell out their genetic code.

So this drastically increases the likelihood of life on other planets. The tighter the parameters for life, the less likely it is -- so the discovery of a vast diversity of biochemistry opens up the field in a manner that is breathtaking.

... but the chance that the aliens will look like this is, sadly, pretty low.

This raises the problem of whether we'll recognize alien life when we see it.  The typical things you look for if you're trying to figure out if something's alive -- such as a metabolism involving the familiar organic compounds all our cells contain -- might cause us to overlook something that is alive but is being carried along by a completely different chemistry.

And what an organism with that completely different chemistry might look like -- how it would move, eat, sense its environment, reproduce, and think -- well, there'd be an embarrassment of riches.  The possibilities are far beyond even the Star Trek universe, with their fanciful aliens that look basically human but with odd facial structures and funny accents.

The whole thing boggles the mind.  And it further reinforces a conclusion I've held for a very long time; I suspect that we'll find life out there pretty much everywhere we look, and even on some planets we'd have thought completely inhospitable.  The "Goldilocks Zone" -- the region surrounding a star where orbiting planets would have conditions that are "just right" for life to form -- is looking like it might be a vaster territory than we'd ever dreamed.

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In the ether

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia emailed me a couple of days ago.

"I think I've figured out why you're such a doubter," he said.  "From my extensive research, it's because your 'etheric DNA' hasn't been activated.  I strongly recommend you look into this immediately so that you can ascend to the next astral plane, where you belong."

He then signed off, but added in a p.s., "(... take the bait, little mouse... take the bait...)".

Well, naturally, I couldn't let something like this just sit there.  So I did a search for etheric DNA, and spent the next forty-five minutes reading.  Unfortunately, I was mostly done with a glass of scotch at the time, and I got the worst case of the giggles I've had in years.  I would read a line from one of the articles to my dog, who was sitting on the floor next to my desk watching me intently, and then I'd erupt into laughter.  Rosie was clearly amused as well, given the fact that each time I read her a line, she wagged her tail in a cheerful fashion.

Or maybe she was just glad I was finally paying some long-overdue attention to the health of my eternal celestial spirit.  I dunno.

Anyhow, I thought it best to put the topic aside until I was thinking more clearly.  And I'm not sure whether it's good or bad news that the "etheric DNA" stuff doesn't make any better sense when you're stone-cold sober.  So naturally, I had to share some of it with you here, because I'm just a generous, open-handed sort of guy.

Up to you if you get yourself a glass of scotch first.

The first article I found was from an online open-access (surprise!) journal called MedCrave.  MedCrave's tagline is "Step into the World of Research," which right away sets my teeth on edge because I am absolutely sick unto death of people using the word "research" that way, e.g. reading three articles from various websites and saying, "Well, I did my research."  No, you fucking well did not do any research; you found three articles that happened to agree with what you already believed.  You do not work in a lab, you did not publish anything in a peer-reviewed journal, you did not spend years studying the subject and becoming an expert.  Hell, I spent over three decades teaching biology, and I am not an expert; I'm very much a generalist and always will be.

So I'm not a researcher, either.  The difference is, I'm not claiming to be.  

But at least I know how to recognize legitimate research in an actual scientific journal.  And MedCrave ain't it.

Anyhow, the article is by "Spiritual Scientist" Linda Gadbois, and is called "DNA -- The Phantom Effect, Quantum Hologram, and the Etheric Body," which won out over the next most sensible title she could come up with, which was "Woogie Woogie Woogie Pfthththbtbtbtbtb."  There's no way I can give you a flavor of just how wacky this article is from a mere summary, so here's an actual excerpt:

DNA is actually composed of a liquid crystalline substance that acts as a form of antenna, receiver, and transmitter of holographic information.  It’s constantly in the process of taking in information from its environment and the ether as signs, archetypes, and imagery and translating it into holograms.  It operates predominately out of radionics where whatever frequency its tuned to, is acts as a receiver for various forms of information within that same frequency that comes in as an acoustic wave that serves to form an electromagnetic field (EMF) as a holographic shape that’s composed initially of subtle energy, which provides the blueprint or spatial mapping for constructing an exact replica as its material equivalent.  Information inherent in the Ether (Akasha) always comes as a “pairing” or “wave coupling” (like the double helix) that contains both an acoustic sound and optical (visual) image as the geometric patterning inherent in the vibratory frequency.

Right!  Of course!  What?

My other favorite part was when she explained (not sure if that's the right word) her concept of the "phantom effect" thusly:

The two waves of information form an interference pattern that together produce a 3-D holographic image as the subtle template for constructing the material body through a growth and development process.  This holographic image as an invisible energy field organizes and animates matter into what’s called the “phantom effect”.  This phantom is an invisible 3-D shape as a field formed out of information as a dynamic series of interrelated planes or parallel interlaced and correlating dimensions that operate without any cross-talk to form a chain-of-association as phase conjugation adaptive resonance.

"Dimensions" of "phase conjugation adaptive resonance?"  All we need is "entangled quantum frequencies" in there somewhere and we'll have collected the whole set of quasi-scientific woo-woo buzzwords.

And please don't think I've selected these two passages because they were unusually abstruse.  It all sounds like this.  And it goes on for pages.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christoph Bock, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, DNA methylation, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The other article I looked at was from Positive Health Online, an open-access (surprise again!) journal about "integrative health."  This one, by "healer and guide" Carole Easton, is called "DNA Activation -- Etheric Surgery Using an Activated Crystal Wand."  It begins with the sentence, "DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid," which is also the last correct statement in the article, because it immediately after that launches into telling us how our DNA only seems to have two strands; it actually has twenty-two other "shadow strands" that don't exist until you activate them:

22-strand DNA activation... is done through etheric surgery using an activated crystal wand.  It involves 12 receptor sites to the DNA, known as codons, and they are accessed through the etheric spine and illuminated with light (I have actually seen this light whilst I was administering the wand to this area).  This activates 22 of the 24 strands.

What does all of this do for you?  Well, she's a little vague on that point:

Our DNA contains the master plan, or blueprint, for who we are, our life purpose and our Divine Potential – who we are as a Divine Being.  Holding the encoded information relative to both our physical and spiritual lineage, it is unique and very personal.  It determines our physical form, hereditary maladies, mental proclivities, emotional behavioural patterns, spiritual gifts and more.  It is God-given, holy and sacred and defines our uniqueness.  It is who we are!  Locked within our DNA are emotional codes that are handed down from our ancestors from generation to generation.  These emotional codes are then triggered through our belief systems and through life altering events.

Given the fact that my ancestors seem to have been a random assortment of rogues, miscreants, ne'er-do-wells, and petty criminals, and the majority of the ones I knew personally were also weird as fuck, I'm not sure I want "emotional codes" handed down from generation to generation.  My inclination is to tiptoe away and let my twenty-two extra DNA stands continue to sleep quietly.

Oh, but Carole Easton tells us this is an ancient mystical tradition that traces its origins all the way back to King Solomon!  (Because the ancient Israelites were clearly experts on genetics.)  So how can I turn my back on such a gift?

Um.  Yeah.  She can just stay right the hell away from my etheric spine with her activated crystal wand.  I doubt I'd be able to go through her ritual without laughing, and I'm sure that'd destroy all the entangled quantum dimension phase resonance oscillations or whatever the fuck is supposed to be happening, so it wouldn't work for me in any case.

So there you have it.  Etheric DNA.  As far as the loyal reader who got me started on this, I hope you're happy.  At least my dog is.  She's currently staring at me with a hopeful look on her face.  I think she wants me to do a Tarot reading for her, or something.  

Or maybe her etheric stomach just wants breakfast.

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Warning: DNA is everywhere!

Because evidently my generally abysmal opinion of the intelligence of the human species isn't low enough, yesterday a loyal reader sent me an article referencing a survey in which eighty percent of respondents said they favored mandatory labeling of foods that contain DNA.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the National Institute of Health]

I kept looking, in vain, for a sign that this was a joke.  Sadly, this is real.  It came from a study done by the Oklahoma State University Department of Agricultural Economics.  And what it shows, in my opinion, is that there are people out there who vote and make important decisions and (apparently) walk upright without dragging their knuckles on the ground, and yet who do not know that DNA is found in every living organism.

Or maybe, they don't know that most of what we eat is made of cells.  I dunno.  Whatever.  Because if you aren't currently on the Salt, Baking Soda, and Scotch Diet, you consume the DNA of plants and/or animals every time you eat.

Lettuce contains lettuce DNA.  Potatoes contain potato DNA.  Beef contains cow DNA.  "Slim Jims" contain -- well, they contain the DNA of whatever the hell Slim Jims are made from.  I don't want to know.  But get the picture?  If you put a label on foods with DNA, the label goes on everything.

Ilya Somin, of the Washington Post, even made a suggestion of what such a food-warning label might look like:

WARNING: This product contains deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).  The Surgeon General has determined that DNA is linked to a variety of diseases in both animals and humans.  In some configurations, it is a risk factor for cancer and heart disease.  Pregnant women are at very high risk of passing on DNA to their children.

Despite the scary sound of Somin's tongue-in-cheek proposed label, there's nothing dangerous about eating DNA.  Enzymes in our small intestines break down the DNA we consume into individual building blocks (nucleotides), and we then use those building blocks to produce our own DNA every time we make new cells.  Which is all the time.  Eating pig DNA will not, as one of my students once asked me, "make us oink."

But this highlights something rather terrifying, doesn't it?  Every other day we're told things like "Thirty Percent of Americans Are Against GMOs" and "Forty Percent of Americans Disbelieve in Anthropogenic Climate Change" and "Thirty-Two Percent of Americans Believe the Earth is Six Thousand Years Old."  (If you're curious, I made those percentages up, because I really don't want to know what the actual numbers are, I'm depressed enough already.)  What the Oklahoma State University study shows is: none of that is relevant.  If eighty percent of Americans don't know what DNA is, why the fuck should I trust what they say on anything else even remotely scientific?

But it's the voting part that scares me, because as we've seen over and over again, dumb people vote for dumb people.  I'm not sure why this is, either, because you'd think that there'd be a sense that even if a lot of voters are dumb themselves, they'd want smart people running the country.  But maybe that'd make all the dumb people feel inferior.  Or maybe it's because the dumb people want to be reassured that they, too, could one day hold public office.

Either way, it's why we end up with public office being held by people like:

• Mitt Romney: "I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in.  That’s the America I love."
• Louie Gohmert: "We give the military money, it ought to be to kick rears, break things, and come home."
• Rick Perry: "The reason that we fought the [American] Revolution in the 16th century — was to get away from that kind of onerous crown, if you will."
• Hank Johnson: "Guam is an island that is, what, twelve miles from shore to shore?  And on its smallest level, uh, smallest, uh, uh, location, it's uh, seven miles, uh, between one shore and the other...  My fear is that (if US Marines are sent there) the whole island will become so populated that it will tip over and capsize."
• Diana DeGette: "These are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now, they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high-capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available."
• James Inhofe: "Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that ‘as long as the earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night,’ my point is, God’s still up there.  The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."
• Henry Waxman: "We're seeing the reality of a lot of the North Pole starting to evaporate, and we could get to a tipping point.  Because if it evaporates to a certain point -- they have lanes now where ships can go that couldn't ever sail through before.  And if it gets to a point where it evaporates too much, there's a lot of tundra that's being held down by that ice cap."

The whole thing is profoundly distressing, and brings to mind the quote from Joseph de Maistre: "Democracy is the form of government in which everyone has a voice, and therefore in which the people get exactly the government they deserve."

Now, bear in mind that what I'm talking about here isn't simple ignorance.  We all have subjects upon which we are ignorant.  If I'm ever in any doubt of that in my own case, all I have to do is wait until the biennial meeting with my financial planner, because as soon as he starts talking about bond values and stocks and annuities and debentures and brokerage accounts, I end up with the same puzzled expression my dog would have if I attempted to teach him quantum physics.  

Ignorance, though, can be cured, with a little hard work and (most importantly) an admission that you actually don't understand everything.  What we're talking about here isn't ignorance alone; it's more like aggressive stupidity.  This is ignorance coupled with a defiant sort of confidence.  This would be like me taking my complete lack of knowledge of economics and finance, and trying to get people to hire me as a financial planner.

It brings to mind once again the quote from the brilliant biochemist, author, and polymath Isaac Asimov, which seems like as good a place as any to end: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

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Out of the ashes

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C. E. and its destruction of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum make for a story that is as fascinating as it is horrific.

Vesuvius is a stratovolcano, built up from layer after layer of hardened lava (the "strata" of the name).  Stratovolcanoes usually produce felsic lava -- high in silica content -- making the molten rock thick, viscous, and resistant to flowing.  The results are explosive eruptions, not the cascading rivers of lava you see in shield volcanoes such as Kilauea, which produce mafic lava that is low in silica and flows readily.

The eruption of a stratovolcano is catastrophic.  Unlike the Hawaiian shield volcanoes, which certainly can cause significant property damage but seldom loss of life, stratovolcanoes fling chunks of rock around, generate huge amounts of ash, and -- worst of all -- can create pyroclastic flows of superheated air that can move at a hundred kilometers per hour and incinerate everything in their path.  It was a pyroclastic flow from Mount Pelée that killed almost thirty thousand people in only a few minutes on the island of Martinique in 1902; one of three people in the city of Saint Pierre who are known to have survived only did because he was being held in an underground jail cell.

The combination of rock ejection, ash clouds, and pyroclastic flows are sometimes called Plinian eruptions after the Roman author Pliny the Elder, who died during the eruption of Vesuvius.  If you don't mind being a little freaked out by the power of nature, check out this ten-minute video simulation of the 79 C. E. eruption, from the perspective of a person in Pompeii:

The reason the topic comes up is because of a paper that appeared last week in Scientific Reports about some research done by a team led by Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Copenhagen.  Scorrano and his team found two human skeletons, one male and one female, that -- despite being covered by scorching-hot ash and then entombed for almost two thousand years -- contained enough intact DNA to analyze.

The man's, in fact, was complete enough to do a whole-genome analysis, including a Y DNA and mitochondrial DNA study.  The results were interesting, if not surprising; his DNA was similar to that of modern Italians from the region, although both his Y DNA and mtDNA showed markers most commonly found on the island of Sardinia.  

So he likely had ancestry on both sides of his family from Sardinia.  He also, apparently, had tuberculosis.  The woman's skeleton, which contained only fragmentary DNA, showed signs of significant osteoarthritis.  Serena Viva of the University of Salento, who co-authored the study, said, "This could have been the reason for which they waited for it all to finish, maybe in the security of their home, compared to other victims who were fleeing and whose remains were found in open spaces."

The ruins of Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the background [Image licensed under the Creative Commons ElfQrin, Theathres of Pompeii, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Scary stuff, that.  I have to say I'm glad I don't live in Naples; I wouldn't be able to sleep with Vesuvius looming over me, even though it's shown no signs of an imminent catastrophic eruption.  I actually thought the same thing when we were in the Pacific Northwest last week, not only because of nearby stratovolcanoes like Mount Rainier, but because the entire area is at risk of enormous earthquakes because of plate movement along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. 

I know the risk during any given week is extremely low, but it did make me a bit nervous anyhow.  Sometimes a little knowledge can be a lot scary.

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A door into RNA world

[N.B.: This post is a little on the technical side, if you're not a biology type.  Trust me, the work is worth it, because what these people have discovered is stupendous.]

I had the experience yesterday of stumbling on an article published in Nature this week that, from the title, seemed like something that could only interest biochemistry geeks.

Then I started reading it, and I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.

Before I tell you about the paper, a little background.

Most laypeople know that genes are basically stretches of DNA, and that DNA is a double helix made of chains of smaller molecules called nitrogenous bases, of which there are four -- adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine.  (A, T, G, and C for short.)  Because the bases always pair the same way (A to T, C to G), it allows for DNA to replicate itself.

So far, so good.  But how do you get from a gene to a trait?  It took a long time to figure this out, and there's still work being done on how genes switch on and off during development.  But a simplified explanation goes like this:

The first step is that one gene (a piece of DNA) is copied into a similar, but not identical, chemical called RNA.  (This is called transcription.)  RNA is a single helix, so only one side of the DNA gene is copied; the other side only exists so the DNA can be replicated.  Then the RNA goes to a cellular structure called a ribosome, where the base sequence is read in threes (a group of three is a codon), and each trio instructs the ribosome to bring in a specific amino acid.  The amino acids dictated by the codon sequence are linked together into a protein, and those proteins directly generate the trait.  (This is called translation.)  Every trait is basically produced this way, whether it's something simple like skin color, or the interaction between the thousands of genes and proteins that it takes to generate a functioning human heart.

Okay, gene > RNA > protein > trait.  The sequence is so ubiquitous that it's been nicknamed The Central Dogma of Molecular Genetics.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons  , Pre-mRNA-1ysv-tubes, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But here's the problem.  When life first began, how did the process get started?

The problem isn't the building blocks; given the conditions that we're virtually certain existed on the early Earth, all of the pieces -- the bases, the sugars that make up the backbone of both DNA and RNA, the amino acids -- form spontaneously and abundantly.  They will even link up to form chains on their own.  It's likely that any Earthlike, water-containing planet has plenty of all the biochemical bits and pieces.

But how do you get from a particular RNA to a particular protein?  Remember, it's the sequence of bases in RNA that determines the sequence of amino acids in the protein, but to read the RNA sequence and assemble those amino acids requires a lot of cellular machinery -- first and foremost the ribosome.

Which is itself made of RNA.

So it seems like the first life had to pull itself up by its own bootlaces.  Put succinctly, to do transcription and translation, you need to have the mechanisms of transcription and translation already in place.

Or at least, that's what I thought until I read this paper.

Enter the team led by Felix Müller of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, and their paper "A Prebiotically Plausible Scenario of an RNA-Peptide World."  Here's how the paper begins, with a couple of parenthetical notes added by me:

A central commonality of all cellular life is the translational process, in which ribosomal RNA catalyses peptide [i.e. protein] formation with the help of transfer RNAs, which function as amino acid carrying adapter molecules.  Comparative genomics suggests that ribosomal translation is one of the oldest evolutionary processes, which dates back to the hypothetical RNA world [the theory that the earliest self-replicating genetic molecules were RNA, not DNA, which is generally accepted in the scientific world].  The questions of how and when RNA learned to instruct peptide synthesis is one of the grand unsolved challenges in prebiotic evolutionary research.

The immense complexity of ribosomal translation demands a stepwise evolutionary process.  From the perspective of the RNA world, at some point RNA must have gained the ability to instruct and catalyse the synthesis of, initially, just small peptides.  This initiated the transition from a pure RNA world into an RNA–peptide world.  In this RNA–peptide world, both molecular species could have co-evolved to gain increasing ‘translation’ and ‘replication’ efficiency...

We found that non-canonical vestige nucleosides [i.e. unusual bases which are still part of some structures made of RNA, but aren't on the list of the four standard bases], which are key components of contemporary RNAs, are able to equip RNA with the ability to self-decorate with peptides.  This creates chimeric structures, in which both chemical entities can co-evolve in a covalently connected form, generating gradually more and more sophisticated and complex RNA–peptide structures...  We... found that peptides can simultaneously grow at multiple sites on RNA on the basis of rules determined by sequence complementarity, which is the indispensable requirement for efficient peptide growth.

Which is way more dignified than what I'd have written, which is, "Holy shit, we just figured out how gene expression evolved!"

In my AP Biology classes, I ended the unit on evolution with a list of some of the questions that evolutionary theory had not yet solved, and the origins of gene expression and protein synthesis topped the list.  It looks like that one might now be checked off -- which, if my assessment is correct, should put Müller and his team in contention for this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry.

I find it so fascinating that there are still some of the Big Questions out there, and that scientists are actually making inroads into answering them.  Good science doesn't just say "it's a mystery" and forthwith stop thinking.  We're gradually chipping away at problems that were thought to be intractable -- in this case, giving us insight into how life began on Earth four billion years ago.

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Snake in the grass

Okay, now I've heard everything.

If you ever run across a more ridiculous claim, I do not want to know about it.  This one already lowered my opinion of the average intelligence of the human species by ten IQ points.

You've probably heard the conspiracy theories about COVID-19 -- that it was deliberately started by the Chinese, that the vaccine contains microchips so The Bad Guys ™ can keep track of us, and so on.  But none of them can hold a candle to what one Bryan Ardis is saying.  Ardis is allegedly a "chiropractor, acupuncturist, and medical researcher," but after you hear his claim, you will probably come to the conclusion that his medical degree came from Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse.

Ready?

Ardis says the Catholic church created the COVID-19 virus from cobra venom, and is using it to turn us all into Satan worshipers.

So far, it's just a wacko guy who came up with a wacko idea.  Nothing special, because after all, that's what wacko guys do.  What sets him apart is that radio broadcaster Stew Peters took him seriously enough that he made a documentary about Ardis and his idea -- a documentary called "Watch the Waters" which has already gotten 640,000 views and is trending on Twitter.

I'd like to hope a significant chunk of the views are by people who are saying, "Whoa, listen up to what this nutcake is saying," but chances are, there are enough people who believe him that it's troubling.  Here's what Ardis says, which I feel obliged to state is verbatim:

The Latin definition historically for virus—originally and historically, virus meant, and means, "venom."  So, I started to wonder, "Well, what about the name ‘corona’? Does it have a Latin definition or a definition at all?"  So I actually looked up what’s the definition and on Dictionary.com, it brings up thirteen definitions: ‘Corona, religiously, ecclesiastically, means gold ribbon at the base of a miter.  So, this actually could read, "The Pope’s Venom Pandemic."  In Latin terms, corona means crown.  Visually, we see kings represented with a crown symbol.  So put that together for me: king cobra venom.  It actually could read, "King Cobra Venom Pandemic."

I actually believe this is more of a religious war on the entire world.  If I was going to do something incredibly evil, how ironic would it be that the Catholic Church, or whoever, would use the one symbol of an animal that represents evil in all religion? …  You take that snake or that serpent, and you figure out how to isolate genes from that serpent and get those genes of that serpent to insert itself into your God-given created DNA.  I think this was the plan all along; to get the serpent’s—the Evil One’s—DNA into your God-created DNA.  And they figured out how to do this with this mRNA [vaccine] technology.  They’re using mRNA—which is mRNA extracted from I believe the king cobra venom—and I think they want to get to that venom inside of you and make you a hybrid of Satan.

 Probably needless to say, I read this whole thing with this expression on my face:

It does leave me with a few responses, however:

• Satan has DNA?
• Linguistics is not a cross between free association and a game of Telephone.  
• When mRNA is injected into you (e.g. the COVID vaccine), it degrades in only a couple of days.  By that time, if the vaccine worked, you've begun to make antibodies to the protein the mRNA coded for (in this case, the spike protein).  It doesn't get into your DNA, nor affect your DNA in any way.  So if the COVID vaccine was engineered to turn us into demons, we'd all turn back into ordinary humans a couple of days later, which now that I think of it could be kind of fun.
• Injecting king cobra venom into you would kill you within minutes, given that this is basically what happens when you get bitten by a king cobra.
• "Corona" is Latin for "crown," that bit is correct.  But coronaviruses are a big family of viruses that has been known to scientists since Leland Bushnell and Carl Brandly first isolated them in 1933, and were named not for the pope's miter but because the rings of spike proteins on the surface look a little like a crown.
• Is Bryan Ardis stark raving loony?  Or what?

So there you have it.  We are now in the Pope's King Cobra Venom Pandemic.  Despite these dire warnings, my wife and I have both been vaccinated three times, and we haven't turned into hybrids of Satan.  But we have, so far, avoided getting COVID, which is kind of the point.

But I will end with reiterating my plea: if you find a crazier claim, please don't tell me about it.  Reading about this one made countless cells in my cerebral cortex that I can ill afford to lose die screaming in agony.  From now on in Skeptophilia, I think I'll focus on happy bunnies and rainbows.  We'll see how long that lasts.

Hopefully a while, at least.  The last thing we need is my brain cell loss contributing to a further drop in the average human IQ.

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Rehabilitating our cousins

The Neanderthals have gotten an undeservedly bad reputation.

"Neanderthal" has become an insult for someone perceived as dumb, crude, vulgar, lacking in any sort of refinement.  This perception wasn't helped any by Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequels, where the "Clan" (the Neanderthals) are primitive, ugly, brutal people (personified by the violent and cruel Broud), contrasted to the beautiful, heroic, sophisticated Cro Magnons (such as virile, handsome, blue-eyed Jondalar, who is portrayed basically as a prehistoric Liam Hemsworth, only sexier).  The truth is way more complex than that; they certainly weren't unintelligent, and in fact, the most recent Neanderthals had an average brain size larger than a modern human's.  (I'm aware that brain size doesn't necessarily correlate with higher intelligence, but the depiction of them as tiny-brained primitives is almost certainly false.)

They had culture; the Mousterian tool complex, with its beautifully fluted stone arrowhead points, was Neanderthal in origin.  They were builders, weavers, jewelry-makers, and knew the use of medicinal plants.  There's evidence that they made music -- the Divje Babe flute, from 43,000 years ago, was made by Neanderthals from a bear femur, was probably made by Neanderthals.  The structure of the Neanderthal hyoid bone, and the presence of the FoxP2 gene, strongly suggests that they had the capacity for language, although cognitive scientist Philip Lieberman suggests that their mouth morphology would have made it difficult or impossible to articulate nasal sounds and the phonemes /a/, /i/, /u/, /ɔ/, /g/, and /k/, so any language they had probably wasn't as rich phonetically as ours are.  (Although that, too, is an overgeneralization; as I pointed out in a post only a month ago, the phonemic inventory of modern languages varies all over the place, with some only having a dozen or so distinct sounds.)

Another thing that people tend to get wrong is that the Neanderthals were displaced by modern Homo sapiens, and eventually driven to extinction, because we were smarter, faster, and more sophisticated.  Which is not only false, it carries that hint of self-congratulation that should be an immediate tipoff that there's more to it.  It's undeniable that our Neanderthal cousins did diminish and eventually disappear something on the order of forty thousand years ago, but what caused it is uncertain at best.  Other hypotheses regarding why they declined are climatic shifts, disease, and loss of food sources... and, most interestingly, that they interbred with, and were eventually subsumed by, modern humans.  Genetic analysis shows that a great many of us -- including most people of European ancestry -- contain genetic markers indicating Neanderthal ancestry.  Current estimates are that western Europeans have the highest percentage of Neanderthal DNA (at around four percent), while some groups, most notably sub-Saharan Africans, have almost none.

My own DNA apparently has 284 distinct Neanderthal markers, putting me in the sixtieth percentile.  So at least I'm above average in something.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Neanderthal-Museum, Mettmann, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis-Mr. N, CC BY-SA 4.0]

What brings this up is some new research indicating that the overlap between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans may have lasted longer than we thought, and completely upends the picture of hordes of highly-advanced humans (led, of course, by Liam Hemsworth) sweeping over and destroying the primitive knuckle-dragging Neanderthal cave-dwellers.  Archaeologists working in the cave complex Grotte Mandrin, in the Rhône Valley of France, came upon a child's tooth and some stone tools (both of a distinctly modern sort), that date from 54,000 years ago -- a good twelve thousand years earlier than previous estimates.

"It wasn't an overnight takeover by modern humans," said Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum of London, who co-authored the paper.  "Sometimes Neanderthals had the advantage, sometimes modern humans had the advantage, so it was more finely balanced...  We have this ebb and flow.  The modern humans appear briefly, then there's a gap where maybe the climate just finished them off and then the Neanderthals come back again..  [W]e don't know the full story yet.  But with more data and with more DNA, more discoveries, we will get closer to the truth about what really happened at the end of the Neanderthal era."

Human history (and prehistory) are a lot more complex than you'd think on first glance, and it bears keeping in mind that usually when we build up a picture of something that happened in the past, we're working on (very) incomplete data filled in with guesses and surmises.  If a time machine is ever invented, and we can go back and look for ourselves, I think we'd be astonished at how much we missed -- or got flat wrong.

It reminds me of the famous quote by H. L. Mencken -- "For every problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple... and wrong."

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People made fun of Donald Rumsfeld for his statement that there are "known unknowns" -- things we know we don't know -- but a far larger number of "unknown unknowns," which are all the things we aren't even aware that we don't know.

While he certainly could have phrased it a little more clearly, and understand that I'm not in any way defending Donald Rumsfeld's other actions and statements, he certainly was right in this case.  It's profoundly humbling to find out how much we don't know, even about subjects about which we consider ourselves experts.  One of the most important things we need to do is to keep in mind not only that we might have things wrong, and that additional evidence may completely overturn what we thought we knew -- and more, that there are some things so far out of our ken that we may not even know they exist.

These ideas -- the perimeter of human knowledge, and the importance of being able to learn, relearn, change directions, and accept new information -- are the topic of psychologist Adam Grant's book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know.  In it, he explores not only how we are all riding around with blinders on, but how to take steps toward removing them, starting with not surrounding yourself with an echo chamber of like-minded people who might not even recognize that they have things wrong.  We should hold our own beliefs up to the light of scrutiny.  As Grant puts it, we should approach issues like scientists looking for the truth, not like a campaigning politician trying to convince an audience.

It's a book that challenges us to move past our stance of "clearly I'm right about this" to the more reasoned approach of "let me see if the evidence supports this."  In this era of media spin, fake news, and propaganda, it's a critical message -- and Think Again should be on everyone's to-read list.

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

Bred in the bone

A while back I had my DNA tested.  I know a good bit about my family tree, and I did it not only to find out about my genetic heritage, but to see if the DNA tests were as accurate as they claim -- a bit like a teacher being able to tell if a student is doing a problem correctly because (s)he already knows what the answer should be.

The answer is: it's pretty damn good.  The most interesting was from a company called My True Ancestry, which supposedly was working off an enormous data bank and could do some seriously fine-grained analysis.  I uploaded my DNA file, and within a few hours I had a map of the closest matches, and they turned out to be spot-on.  It picked up my great-great grandfather Solomon Meyer-Lévy, who was an Ashkenazi Jew from Alsace, and also my father's paternal ancestry, which came from the French Alps.  The rest of my family was scattered through western and northwestern France, England (a cluster in southern England and one in Yorkshire), and two spots in Scotland (one near Glasgow, one near Edinburgh).

This aligns pretty much perfectly with what I know about the origins of my family.  The "pretty much" comes from one puzzling finding; it showed no matches in Germany.  Another great-great grandfather, one William Brandt, came to America in the mid-1800s and married a woman of French and Dutch ancestry named Isabella Rulong.  I know William was German; on the census his birthplace is given as Bremen, so I even know the city.  But my DNA shows zero ancestry in Germany.

However, the answer to this mystery could be simple.  I know a bit about William Brandt because the house he built in the 1870s is on the Louisiana Register of Historic Homes.  William was the court recorder for Lafayette Parish for almost twenty years, and served as mayor for a year.  But the woman who now lives in what was Brandt's house gave us a tour and told us a little about what she knows about my ancestor, and apparently he wasn't exactly a pinnacle of exemplary behavior.  He was, she said, a notorious drunkard, frequently having to be rescued from some ditch or another he'd fallen into after his latest night on the town.  

William Brandt's house, Lafayette, Louisiana [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Paigecbroadbent, Brandt, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This may explain why he held the office of mayor for only a year, something that has always intrigued me.  And it may well also account for my lack of German ancestry.  It's entirely possible that my great-great grandmother Isabella found a friend, as it were, to provide solace and comfort in the absence of her ne'er-do-well husband, and this unknown is actually my biological great-great grandfather.  A study two years ago found that about one percent of births worldwide are due to what they euphemistically call "extra-pair paternity," which is why you have to sign a waiver when you get your DNA tested that you won't hold the company responsible if your results aren't quite what you expected.

So I think there's a pretty good chance that my great grandmother, Mary Emily (Brandt) Bonnet, was not actually William's daughter.  Just as well.  I have enough rogues and scoundrels in my family as it is.

It's amazing what we can now figure out by DNA analysis.  A study just published this week in Nature, written by a team of researchers way too long to list here, used DNA samples from bones and teeth found at burial sites in England to see if they could figure out who came from where and when, and found that in the Late Bronze Age (1,200 to 800 B.C.E.) there was a huge influx of people from what is now northwestern France.  These people, who were probably formed of different tribes but are what we usually collectively call "Celtic," eventually replaced fifty percent of the indigenous pre-invasion population.

"By using genetic data to document times when there were large-scale movements of people into a region, we can identify plausible times for a language shift," said study co-author David Reich of Harvard University, in an interview with Science Daily. "Known Celtic languages are too similar in their vocabularies to plausibly descend from a common ancestor 4,500 years ago, which is the time of the earlier pulse of large-scale migration, and very little migration occurred in the Iron Age.  If you're a serious scholar, the genetic data should make you adjust your beliefs: downweighting the scenario of early Celtic language coming in the Iron Age [and early Bronze Age] and upweighting the Late Bronze Age."

England, of course, has been invaded and settled several times since then; by the Romans in the first century C.E., by the Germanic Anglo-Saxons starting in the sixth century, then by the Norman French in the eleventh.  Each new pulse of invaders brought along their own languages and culture -- and their DNA.  That we can look at bones today and see the genetic history of the people they came from is pretty stupendous.

One of the coolest pieces of this research has to do with lactose tolerance.  You probably know that lactose is a sugar that is easily digested by most mammals only in infancy, and adults lose their tolerance for it.  (This is why it's not a good idea to feed milk to an adult cat.)  But some people retain the ability to digest lactose -- it's most common in Europe, and is caused by a single gene.  Lactose tolerance seems to have spread along with the practice of keeping dairy cattle, for obvious reasons.  And in the period studied by the research, the incidence of the lactose-tolerance gene skyrocketed, so the new influx of settlers seem to have been milk drinkers -- and brought along their cattle.

It's amazing what we can learn from a bunch of three-thousand-year-old bones, and that the DNA fragments still contained within them give us a window into the movements of people during a time we know little about otherwise.  In my case, we're talking about people who are likely to be my ancestors (all "extra-pair paternity events" aside).  One more example of the wisdom in the saying carved into the wall of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: γνῶθι σεαυτόν ("know yourself").

Or, as John Heywood put in in 1546: "What's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh."

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I remember when I first learned about the tragedy of how much classical literature has been lost.  Take, for example, Sophocles, which anyone who's taken a college lit class probably knows because of his plays Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus.  He was the author of at least 120 plays, of which only seven have survived.  While we consider him to be one of the most brilliant ancient Greek playwrights, we don't even have ten percent of the literature he wrote.  As Carl Sagan put it, it's as if all we had of Shakespeare was Timon of Athens, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline, and were judging his talent based upon that.

The same is true of just about every classical Greek and Roman writer.  Little to nothing of their work survives; some are only known because of references to their writing in other authors.  Some of what we do have was saved by fortunate chance; this is the subject of Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful book The Swerve, which is about how a fifteenth-century book collector, Poggio Bracciolini, discovered in a monastic library what might well have been the sole remaining copy of Lucretius's masterwork De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which was one of the first pieces of writing to take seriously Democritus's idea that all matter is made of atoms.

The Swerve looks at the history of Lucretius's work (and its origin in the philosophy of Epicurus) and the monastic tradition that allowed it to survive, as well as Poggio's own life and times and how his discovery altered the course of our pursuit of natural history.  (This is the "swerve" referenced in the title.)  It's a fascinating read for anyone who enjoys history or science (or the history of science).  His writing is clear, lucid, and quick-paced, about as far from the stereotype of historical writing being dry and boring as you could get.  You definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

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