The cosmic net

A fascinating new piece of research by the astrophysicists is using information from twelve billion light years away to elucidate what happened 13.8 billion years ago, at the moment of the Big Bang -- they've found the long-hypothesized "cosmic filaments," streaks of (mostly) hydrogen that extend from galaxy to galaxy and cluster to cluster.  In a paper that appeared in Science this week, titled "Gas Filaments of the Cosmic Web Located Around Active Galaxies in a Protocluster," a team led by Michele Fumagalli of Durham University found hard evidence of yet another prediction of the Big Bang Theory: that random variations ("anisotropies") in the first fraction of a second of the universe led to clumps of matter connected by streamers, with huge voids in between.

The authors write:

Cosmological simulations predict that the Universe contains a network of intergalactic gas filaments, within which galaxies form and evolve.  However, the faintness of any emission from these filaments has limited tests of this prediction.  We report the detection of rest-frame ultraviolet Lyman-α radiation from multiple filaments extending more than one megaparsec between galaxies within the SSA22 protocluster at a redshift of 3.1.  Intense star formation and supermassive black-hole activity is occurring within the galaxies embedded in these structures, which are the likely sources of the elevated ionizing radiation powering the observed Lyman-α emission.  Our observations map the gas in filamentary structures of the type thought to fuel the growth of galaxies and black holes in massive protoclusters.

So very early on, the universe was a network of thin (well, thin on a cosmic scale, anyhow) filaments of matter, and where they crossed the matter density was high enough to trigger star, and eventually galaxy, formation.

The large-scale structure of the universe.  Each of those pale blue curves is made up of millions, possibly billions, of galaxies.  [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA]

Almost against my will I was reminded of a rather captivating image from Buddhist philosophy called "Indra's Net."  I first ran into this when I was an undergraduate, and I and some friends took a class in which we were required to read Douglas Hofstadter's mindblowing chef d'oeuvre, entitled Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.  This book, which combines charm, wit, music, art, and a confounding amount of high-level number theory, was a fascinating read, but there are large parts of it that -- although I was a reasonably good math student, and in fact minored in the subject -- went over my head so fast they didn't even ruffle my hair.

But the parts that I found accessible were brilliant, and he drew together a great many disciplines -- one of which was Zen Buddhism.  In that section, he described the great net that stretches across the universe as follows:

The Buddhist allegory of "Indra's Net" tells of an endless net of threads throughout the universe, the horizontal threads running through space, the vertical ones through time.  At every crossing of threads is an individual, and every individual is a crystal bead.  The great light of "Absolute Being" illuminates and penetrates every crystal bead; moreover, every crystal bead reflects not only the light from every other crystal in the net—but also every reflection of every reflection throughout the universe.

It's a cool metaphor for interconnectedness in whatever realm you like to apply it to, be it social interactions, ecological connections, the evolutionary tree of life, whatever.  But I always hesitate to bring this kind of thing up, because it's so tempting to take the metaphor as the reality -- the heart of the problem with books like Frijtof Capra's The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu-Li Masters, where the authors take a rather hand-waving explanation of quantum physics (about all you can do if you remove the math), draw some comparisons to Taoist and Buddhist philosophy, and forthwith conclude that the success of quantum physics as a model shows that Taoism and/or Buddhism is the real explanation for everything we see.

Confusing the model for the reality is a hazard on a lot of levels, and I had to watch that constantly when I was teaching.  I had a number of analogies I used -- the Krebs Cycle as a merry-go-round where two kids get on and two kids get off on every turn, active transport gateway proteins as revolving doors you have to pay to use, DNA as a universal recipe book.  I tried to keep the comparisons so silly that there was no way anyone would think they were real, but I still remember the student who started an essay, "So, antibodies are trash tags..."

But the comparison between the cosmic filaments crossing and generating galaxies at each intersection, and the magical Net of Indra spanning the cosmos with a reflecting jewel everywhere the threads cross, was just too pretty not to mention.  I hope it won't get in the way of your appreciation of the actual research, though, which is even more beautiful.  It's astonishing that sitting here, on this little spinning ball in the outer reaches of a quite ordinary galaxy, we've been able to learn about the structure of the universe from the very largest scales to the very smallest.  So whatever else you can say about human accomplishments, you have to admit that one is pretty impressive.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is by the team of Mark Carwardine and the brilliant author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the late Douglas Adams.  Called Last Chance to See, it's about a round-the-world trip the two took to see the last populations of some of the world's most severely endangered animals, including the Rodrigues Fruit Bat, the Mountain Gorilla, the Aye-Aye, and the Komodo Dragon.  It's fascinating, entertaining, and sad, as Adams and Carwardine take an unflinching look at the devastation being wrought on the world's ecosystems by humans.

But it should be required reading for anyone interested in ecology, the environment, and the animal kingdom. Lucid, often funny, always eye-opening, Last Chance to See will give you a lens into the plight of some of the world's rarest species -- before they're gone forever.

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

Human rights for chimps

There's now a lawsuit making its way through the U. S. judicial system demanding "legal personhood" for chimpanzees.

(photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

A non-profit organization called the Nonhuman Rights Project has filed three separate suits in a New York State court claiming that chimps are "a cognitively complex autonomous legal person(s) with the fundamental legal right not to be imprisoned."  The suits were filed on the behalf of four chimps who are so "imprisoned" -- two by private, licensed owners, and two by research labs at the State University of New York in Stonybrook.

The lawsuits are extremely likely to be thrown out, and it has nothing to do with whether or not holding chimps in such situations is ethical or not.  They are not human -- and the framing of most laws are explicit in giving rights to humans ("men and women," or "people"), not to non-human animals.  The organization filing the lawsuits might have been better off making the claim based on animal cruelty laws; that an animal as "cognitively complex" as a chimp is undergoing abuse simply by virtue of being imprisoned, even if nothing is explicitly done to hurt it.

It does open up the wider question, though, of what our attitude should be toward other species.  The whole issue crops up, I think, because so many humans consider themselves as disconnected from the rest of the natural world.  I find that a great many of my students talk about "humans" and "animals" as if humans weren't animals themselves, as if we were something set apart, different in a fundamental way from the rest of the animal world.  A lot of this probably comes from the fact that much of our cultural context comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which Homo sapiens wasn't even created on the same day as everything else -- and is, therefore, the only being on earth with sentience, and an immortal soul.

Once you knock down that assumption, however, you are on the fabled and dangerous slippery slope.  There is a continuum of intelligence, and sentience, in the animal world; it isn't an either-or.  Chimps and the other anthropoid apes are clearly highly intelligent, with a capacity for emotions, including pain, grief, loss, and depression.  Keeping such an animal in a cage is only dubiously ethical, even if (as in the case of the chimps at SUNY-Stonybrook) you might be able to argue it on a "greater good because of discoveries through research" basis.

But if we have an obligation to treat animals compassionately, how far down the line would you extend that compassion?  Spider monkeys are less intelligent than chimps, by pretty much any measure you choose -- but not a lot less.  We keep pigs in horrible, inhumane conditions on factory farms -- and they are about as intelligent as dogs.  Down the scale it goes; fish can experience pain, and yet some people will not eat chicken on the basis of its causing another creature pain, and yet will happily devour a piece of salmon.

Douglas Hofstadter, the brilliant writer and thinker who wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and I Am a Strange Loop, proposes a "unit of sentience" called the "huneker."  (He named the unit after James Huneker, who said of one Chopin étude that it should not be attempted by "small-souled men.")  He is well aware that as neuroscience now stands, it's impossible to assign numerical values to the quality of sentience -- but, he says, few are in doubt that humans are more sentient, self-conscious, and intelligent than dogs, dogs more than fish, fish more than mosquitoes.  (Hofstadter says that a mosquito possesses "0.0000001 hunekers" and jokingly added that if mosquitoes have souls, they are "mostly evil.")  But even though he is talking about the whole thing in a lighthearted way, he bases his own decisions about what to eat on something like this concept:

At some point, in any case, my compassion for other “beings” led me very naturally to finding it unacceptable to destroy other sentient beings... such as cows and pigs and lambs and fish and chickens, in order to consume their flesh, even if I knew that their sentience wasn't quite as high as the sentience of human beings.

Where or on what basis to draw the line? How many hunekers merit respect? I didn't know exactly. I decided once to draw the line between mammals and the rest of the animal world, and I stayed with that decision for about twenty years. Recently, however — just a couple of years ago, while I was writing I Am a Strange Loop, and thus being forced (by myself) to think all these issues through very intensely once again — I “lowered” my personal line, and I stopped eating animals of any sort or “size”. I feel more at ease with myself this way, although I do suspect, at times, that I may have gone a little too far. But I'd rather give a too-large tip to a server than a too-small one, and this is analogous. I'd rather err on the side of generosity than on the other side, so I'm vegetarian.

Although I agree with Hofstadter, I've never been able to give up eating meat -- and I'm aware that the choice is based mostly upon the purely selfish consideration that I really enjoy it.  We belong to a local meat CSA that raises the animals under humane, free-range conditions, which assuages some of my guilty feelings when I'm eating a t-bone steak.

The issue is not a simple one, but I've tried to make my decisions based upon an effort not to cause needless suffering.  Locking up a convicted murderer probably causes him suffering, but refusing to do so on that basis is hardly a reasonable choice.  Ending an animal's life in a quick and humane way to provide me with dinner is, in my opinion, acceptable as long as the animal was treated compassionately while it was alive.  And I extend that qualifier of need all the way down the scale.  I'll scoop up spiders in cups and let put them outside rather than stomp them.  There is no need for me to kill harmless spiders -- however far down the sentience scale they may be.

In the case of the "imprisoned" chimps, there is almost certainly suffering, and (as far as I can tell) little need.  Unless research is of immense and immediate value to humanity, an animal as sensitive and intelligent as a chimp should not be used for it.  There are a great many reasons not to keep animals like chimps in captivity.

Calling them "persons," however, is not one of them.