Escapees from Siberia

As you might expect from someone who is passionately interested in genealogy, linguistics, and evolutionary genetics, when there's a study that combines all three, it's a source of great joy to me.

This was my reaction to a study in Nature on the evolutionary history of humans in northern Europe, specifically the Finns.  Entitled, "Ancient Fennoscandian Genomes Reveal Origin and Spread of Siberian Ancestry in Europe," it was authored by no less than seventeen researchers (including Svante Pääbo, the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish biologist who is widely credited as founding the entire science of paleogenetics) from the Max Planck Institute, the University of Helsinki, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Vavilov Institute for General Genetics, and the University of Turku.

Quite a collaborative effort.

It's been known for a while that Europe was populated in three broad waves of settlement.  First, there were hunter-gatherers who came in as early as forty thousand years ago, and proceeded not only to hunt and gather but to have lots of hot caveperson-on-caveperson sex with the pre-existing Neanderthals, whose genetic traces can be discerned in their descendants unto this very day.  Then, there was an agricultural society that came into Europe from what is now Turkey starting around eight thousand years ago.  Finally, some nomadic groups -- believed to be the ancestors of both the Scythians and the Celts -- swept across Europe around 4,500 years ago.

Anyone with European ancestry has all three.  Despite the genetic distinctness of different ethnic groups -- without which 23 & Me genetic analysis wouldn't work at all -- there's been enough time, mixture, and cross-breeding between the groups that no one has ancestry purely from one population or another.

Which, as an aside, is one of the many reasons that the whole "racial purity" crowd is so ridiculous.  We're all mixtures, however uniform you think your ethnic heritage is.  Besides, racial purity wouldn't a good thing even if it were possible.  That's called inbreeding, and causes a high rate of homozygosity (put simply, you're likely to inherit the same alleles from both your mother and father).  This causes lethal recessives to rear their ugly heads; heterozygous individuals are protected from these because the presence of the recessive allele is masked by the other, dominant (working) copy.  It's why genetic disorders can be localized to different groups -- cystic fibrosis in northern Europeans, Huntington's disease in people whose ancestry comes from eastern England, sickle-cell anemia from sub-Saharan Africa, Tay-Sachs disease in Ashkenazic Jews, and so on.

So mixed-ethnic relationships are more likely to produce genetically healthy children.  Take that, neo-Nazis.

Map of ethnic groups in Europe, ca. 1899  [Image is in the Public Domain]

In any case, the current paper looks at the subset of Europeans who have a fourth ancestral population -- people in northeastern Europe, including Finns, the Saami, Russians, the Chuvash, Estonians, and Hungarians.  And they found that the origin of this additional group of ancestors is all the way from Siberia!

The authors write:

[T]he genetic makeup of northern Europe was shaped by migrations from Siberia that began at least 3500 years ago.  This Siberian ancestry was subsequently admixed into many modern populations in the region, particularly into populations speaking Uralic languages today.  Additionally... [the] ancestors of modern Saami inhabited a larger territory during the Iron Age.

The coolest part is that this lines up brilliantly with what we know about languages spoken in the area:

The Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, to which both Saami and Finnish languages belong, has diverged from other Uralic languages no earlier than 4000–5000 years ago, when Finland was already inhabited by speakers of a language today unknown.  Linguistic evidence shows that Saami languages were spoken in Finland prior to the arrival of the early Finnish language and have dominated the whole of the Finnish region before 1000 CE. Particularly, southern Ostrobothnia, where Levänluhta is located, has been suggested through place names to harbour a southern Saami dialect until the late first millennium, when early Finnish took over as the dominant language.  Historical sources note Lapps living in the parishes of central Finland still in the 1500s.  It is, however, unclear whether all of them spoke Saami, or if some of them were Finns who had changed their subsistence strategy from agriculture to hunting and fishing.  There are also documents of intermarriage, although many of the indigenous people retreated to the north...  Ancestors of present-day Finnish speakers possibly migrated from northern Estonia, to which Finns still remain linguistically close, and displaced but also admixed with the local population of Finland, the likely ancestors of today’s Saami speakers.

Which I think is pretty damn cool.  The idea that we can use the genetics and linguistics of people today, and use it to infer migratory patterns back forty thousand years, is nothing short of stunning.

Unfortunately, however, I have zero ancestry in Finland or any of the other areas the researchers were studying.  According to 23 & Me, my presumed French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English ancestry was shown to be... French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English.  No surprise admixtures of genetic information from some infidelity by my great-great-grandmother with a guy from Japan, or anything.

On the other hand, I did have 284 markers associated with Neanderthal ancestry.  Probably explaining why I like my steaks medium-rare and run around more or less naked when the weather's warm.  Which I suppose makes up for my lack of unexpected ethnic heritage.

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Non-binary reality check

One of the claims I hear that infuriates me the most is that LGBTQ+ identification is becoming more common because our society is increasingly amoral, and this is somehow fostering a sense that "being gay will get me noticed."  This is really just the "LGBTQ+ is a choice" foolishness in slightly prettier packaging, along with the sense that queer people are doing it for attention, and my lord isn't that such an inconvenience for everyone else.  I just saw a meme a couple of days ago that encapsulated the idea; it went something like, "We no longer have to explain just the birds and the bees to kids, we have to explain the birds and the birds and the bees and the bees and the birds who think they're bees and the bees who think they're birds..."  And so on and so forth.  You get the idea.

The most insidious thing about this claim is that it delegitimizes queer identification, making it sound no more worthy of serious consideration than a teenager desperate to buy into the latest fashion trend.  It also ignores the actual explanation -- that there were just as many LGBTQ+ people around decades and centuries ago, but if there's a significant chance you will be harmed, jailed, discriminated against, ridiculed, or killed if you admit to who you are publicly, you have a pretty powerful incentive not to tell anyone.  I can vouch for that in my own case; I not only had the threat of what could happen in the locker room hanging over my head if I'd have admitted I was bisexual when I realized it (age fifteen or so), but the added filigree that my religious instructors had told us in no uncertain terms that any kind of sex outside of the traditional male + female marriage was a mortal sin that would result in eternal hellfire.

And that included masturbation.  Meaning that just about all of us received our tickets to hell when we were teenagers and validated them thereafter with great regularity.

The reason this comes up is because of two studies I ran into in the last couple of days.  The first, in The Sociological Review, is called "ROGD is a Scientific-sounding Veneer for Unsubstantiated Anti-trans View: A Peer-reviewed Analysis," by Florence Ashley of the University of Toronto.  ROGD is "rapid-onset gender dysphoria," and is the same thing I described above, not only in pretty packaging but with a nice psychobabble bow on top; the claim boils down to the choice of a trans person to come out being driven by "social contagion," and therefore being a variety of mental illness.  The whole thing hinges on the "suddenness" aspect of it, as if a person saying, "By the way, I'm trans" one day means that they'd just figured it out that that day.  You'd think anyone with even a modicum of logical faculties would realize that one doesn't imply the other.  I came out publicly as queer three years ago, but believe me, it was not a new realization for me personally.  I'd known for decades.  Society being what it is, it just took me that long to have to courage to say so.

Ashley's paper addresses this in no uncertain terms:

"Rapid-onset gender dysphoria" (ROGD) first appeared in 2016 on anti-trans websites as part of recruitment material for a study on an alleged epidemic of youth coming out as trans "out of the blue" due to social contagion and mental illness.  Since then, the concept of ROGD has spread like wildfire and become a mainstay of anti-trans arguments for restricting access to transition-related care...  [It is] evident that ROGD is not grounded in evidence but assumptions.  Reports by parents of their youth’s declining mental health and degrading familial relationships after coming out are best explained by the fact that the study recruited from highly transantagonistic websites.  Quite naturally, trans youth fare worse when their gender identity isn’t supported by their parents.  Other claims associated with ROGD can similarly be explained using what we already know about trans youth and offer no evidence for the claim that people are ‘becoming trans’ because of social contagion or mental illness.

The second, quite unrelated, paper was in The European Journal of Archaeology and describes a thousand-year-old burial in southern Finland that strongly suggests the individual buried there was androgynous.  Genetic analysis of the bones showed that they'd belonged to someone with Klinefelter Syndrome, a disorder involving a chromosomally-male person having an extra X chromosome (i.e., XXY instead of XY).  This results in someone who is basically male but has some female physical features -- most often, the development of breasts.  

Nondisjunction disorders like Klinefelter Syndrome are not uncommon, and finding a bone from someone with an odd number of chromosome is hardly surprising.  But what made this paper stand out to me -- and what it has to do with the previous one -- is that the individual in the grave in Finland was buried with honors, and with accoutrements both of males and females.  There was jewelry and clothing traditionally associated with women, but two sword-hilts that are typically found in (male) warrior-burials.

Artist's depiction of the burial at Suontaka [Image from Moilanen et al., July 2021]

So apparently, not only was the person in the grave buried with honors, (s)he/they were openly androgynous -- and that androgyny was accepted by the community to the extent that (s)he/they were buried with grave goods representing both gender roles.

"This burial [at Suontaka] has an unusual and strong mixture of feminine and masculine symbolism, and this might indicate that the individual was not strictly associated with either gender but instead with something else," said study leader Ulla Moilanen of  the University of Turku.  "Based on these analyses, we suggest... [that] the Suontaka grave possibly belonged to an individual with sex-chromosomal aneuploidy XXY.  The overall context of the grave indicates that it was a respected person whose gender identity may well have been non-binary."

If Moilanen and her group are correct in their conclusions, it gives us the sobering message that people in tenth-century C.E. Finland were doing better than we are at accepting that sexual identification and orientation aren't simple and binary.

What it comes back to for me is the astonishing gall it takes to tell someone, "No, you don't know your own sexuality; here, let me explain it to you."  Why it's apparently such a stressor for some people when a friend says, "I'm now identifying as ____, this is my new name," I have no idea, especially given that nobody seems to have the least trouble switching from "Miss" to "Mrs." and calling a newly-married woman by her husband's last name when the couple makes that choice.  The harm done to people from telling them, "Who you are is wrong/a phase/a plea for attention/sinful" is incalculable; it's no wonder that the suicide rate amongst LGBTQ+ is three times higher than it is for cis/het people.

All of which, you'd think, would be a tremendous impetus for outlawing the horrors of "conversion therapy" and "ex-gay ministries" worldwide.  But no.

More exasperating still, now there's apparently evidence that people in Finland a thousand years ago had figured this whole thing out better than we have, making it even more crystal-clear why so many of us sound exhausted when we ask, "why are we still having to fight these battles?" 

Of course, as tired as we are of saying the same thing over and over, we certainly can't stop now.  We have made some headway; my guess is that if I were a teenager now, I'd have few compunctions about admitting I'm queer, and that's even considering how ridiculously shy I am.  Contrast that to when I actually was a teenager back in the 1970s, and there was not a single out LGBTQ+ in my entire graduating class (although several of us came out later; in my case, much later). 

And allow me to state, if I hadn't already made the point stridently enough: none of us was "turned queer" between graduation and coming out.  We just finally made our way into a context where we were less likely to be ridiculed, discriminated against, or beaten up for admitting who we are.

I'll end with something else I found online, that sums up the whole issue nicely -- although it does highlight how far we still have to go, despite the reality checks we're seeing increasingly often in scientific research.  Even with all that, I firmly believe it:

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I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos, with Carl Sagan, was launched, and being a physics major and an astronomy buff, I was absolutely transfixed.  Me and my co-nerd buddies looked forward to the new episode each week and eagerly discussed it the following day between classes.  And one of the most famous lines from the show -- ask any Sagan devotee -- is, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe."

Sagan used this quip as a launching point into discussing the makeup of the universe on the atomic level, and where those atoms had come from -- some primordial, all the way to the Big Bang (hydrogen and helium), and the rest formed in the interiors of stars.  (Giving rise to two of his other famous quotes: "We are made of star-stuff," and "We are a way for the universe to know itself.")

Since Sagan's tragic death in 1996 at the age of 62 from a rare blood cancer, astrophysics has continued to extend what we know about where everything comes from.  And now, experimental physicist Harry Cliff has put together that knowledge in a package accessible to the non-scientist, and titled it How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, From the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang.  It's a brilliant exposition of our latest understanding of the stuff that makes up apple pies, you, me, the planet, and the stars.  If you want to know where the atoms that form the universe originated, or just want to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.

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

Lost in the shadows

Some historical discoveries are in that gray area between evocative and frustrating as hell.  The evocative part because it gives us a glimpse into a long-gone culture; frustrating because the great likelihood is we'll never know anything more about it.

It's why I will never get over the loss of the Great Library of Alexandria.  Destroyed piece by piece, starting with a strike against secular intellectuals by King Ptolemy VIII Physcon in 145 B.C.E. and an apparently accidental fire during Julius Caesar's attack on Egypt a hundred years later, the library lost most of its holdings -- and its reputation -- and was gone entirely by the end of the third century C.E.  At its height it had books from all over Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and almost certainly contained the complete catalogue of works by such luminaries as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Theophrastus, and Aristotle -- the vast majority of which no longer exist.

It's as if we only knew about Shakespeare because of fragmentary copies of Cymbeline and Timon of Athens.  All his other works are gone, known only by title -- or perhaps completely unknown.  That's the situation we're in with most early authors.  The most painful part is that they're gone forever, irreclaimable, disappeared beyond rescue into the murky waters of our past.

That was the reaction I had to a discovery I found out about because a friend of mine sent me a link a couple of days ago, regarding an archaeological discovery in Finland.  Near the town of Järvensuo, northwest of Helsinki, a team of archaeologists from the University of Turku and University of Helsinki found a 4,400-year-old shaman's staff, the top of which was carved into the likeness of a snake.  It resembles depictions of ritual staffs in cave art from the area, so there isn't much doubt about what it is.

It's a pretty spectacular discovery.  "My colleague found it in one of our trenches last summer," said research team member Satu Koivisto.  "I thought she was joking, but when I saw the snake’s head it gave me the shivers."

The discovery brings up inevitable questions about how it was used, and what it tells us about religions and beliefs back then.  "There seems to be a certain connection between snakes and people," said team member Antti Lahelma.  "This brings to mind northern shamanism of the historical period, where snakes had a special role as spirit-helper animals of the shaman…  Even though the time gap is immense, the possibility of some kind of continuity is tantalizing: Do we have a Stone Age shaman's staff?"

Tantalizing indeed, in the full sense of the word.  Like the lost books of the Library of Alexandria, the knowledge, culture, and rituals of the people who used this staff are almost certainly gone forever.  While we can speculate, those speculations are unlikely to be complete (or even correct).  Imagine taking a random assortment of objects from our culture -- a pair of glasses, a stop sign, a computer mouse, a spoon, a garden rake -- and from those alone trying to figure out who we were, what we believed, what we did.

Note that I'm not diminishing the significance and interest of the find, which is pretty amazing.  It's just that it makes me even more cognizant of what we've lost.  It's inevitable, I know that -- nothing lasts forever, not artifacts, not knowledge, not culture.  It's just frustrating realizing how little we know, and worse still, how little we can know.

Maybe that's why I became a fiction author.  If you can't figure stuff out, make stuff up, that's my motto.  It doesn't replace what we've lost, but at least it provokes our imaginations to wonder what things were like back then, to ponder the lives of our distant ancestors, to picture what the world must have looked like to them.

It's better than nothing.  And until we create a time machine, I guess that'll have to be enough.

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Most people define the word culture in human terms.  Language, music, laws, religion, and so on.

There is culture among other animals, however, perhaps less complex but just as fascinating.  Monkeys teach their young how to use tools.  Songbirds learn their songs from adults, they're not born knowing them -- and much like human language, if the song isn't learned during a critical window as they grow, then never become fluent.

Whales, parrots, crows, wolves... all have traditions handed down from previous generations and taught to the young.

All, therefore, have culture.

In Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, ecologist and science writer Carl Safina will give you a lens into the cultures of non-human species that will leave you breathless -- and convinced that perhaps the divide between human and non-human isn't as deep and unbridgeable as it seems.  It's a beautiful, fascinating, and preconceived-notion-challenging book.  You'll never hear a coyote, see a crow fly past, or look at your pet dog the same way again.

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

Language injection

Two of my biggest interests are genetics and linguistics, so when there's a study that combines the two, it makes my little heart go thumpety-thump.

I found out about a recent one yesterday from a friend and long-time reader of Skeptophilia, and it is a pretty cool intersection between the two fields.  The paper on the research, called "The Arrival of Siberian Ancestry Connecting the Eastern Baltic to Uralic Speakers Further East," was authored by a team led by Lehti Saag of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tartu (Estonia), and found that an input of migrants from Siberia into northeastern Europe coincided with the diversification of the Finnic languages (Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian).  This supports the relationship between the Finnic languages and the Yukaghir languages -- a small family of languages spoken in eastern Siberia.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ExRat, Finnic languages, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The team came to this conclusion after analyzing the DNA from 33 skeletons dated from 1200 B.C.E. to 1600 C.E., which allowed them to see how the genetics changed due to the infusion of migrants.

What's interesting is when this happened -- the first millennium B.C.E., which is a lot later than I would have expected (not that my opinion means much; my area of linguistic research in graduate school focused on Scandinavian and northern Germanic languages).  The newcomers from Siberia intermarried with the pre-existing western European populations, resulting in today's Finns, Estonians, and Hungarians:

Our findings are consistent with [Bronze-Age Estonia] receiving gene flow from regions with strong Western hunter-gatherer (WHG) affinities and [Iron-Age Estonia] from populations related to modern Siberians.  The latter inference is in accordance with Y chromosome (chrY) distributions in present day populations of the Eastern Baltic, as well as patterns of autosomal variation in the majority of the westernmost Uralic speakers.  This ancestry reached the coasts of the Baltic Sea no later than the mid-first millennium BC; i.e., in the same time window as the diversification of west Uralic (Finnic) languages.  Furthermore, phenotypic traits often associated with modern Northern Europeans, like light eyes, hair, and skin, as well as lactose tolerance, can be traced back to the Bronze Age in the Eastern Baltic.

"Since the transition from Bronze to Iron Age coincides with the diversification and arrival time of Finnic languages in the Eastern Baltic proposed by linguists, it is plausible that the people who brought Siberian ancestry to the region also brought Uralic languages with them," Saag said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Studying ancient DNA makes it possible to pinpoint the moment in time when the genetic components that we see in modern populations reached the area since, instead of predicting past events based on modern genomes, we are analyzing the DNA of individuals who actually lived in a particular time in the past."

When they merged with the indigenous population, it injected this Siberian DNA signature into a population that already had its own distinct characteristics.  "The Bronze Age individuals from the Eastern Baltic show an increase in hunter-gatherer ancestry compared to Late Neolithic people and also in the frequency of light eyes, hair, and skin and lactose tolerance," said Kristiina Tambets, also of the University of Tartu.  "We see these characteristics continuing amongst present-day northern Europeans."

The coolest thing about this is that a study of DNA extracted from skeletons can shed light on how languages have changed.  I'd love to see this done elsewhere -- especially in places where there are linguistic isolates, which are languages that seem to be unrelated to any other extant languages.  (Examples are Ainu, Basque, Korean, Etruscan, and Vedda.)  These intersections in research have resulted in some fascinating answers to previously unsolved questions -- and show us again that understanding the past is the window to understanding the present.

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I grew up going once a summer with my dad to southern New Mexico and southern Arizona, with the goal of... finding rocks.  It's an odd hobby for a kid to have, but I'd been fascinated by rocks and minerals since I was very young, and it was helped along by the fact that my dad did beautiful lapidary work.  So while he was poking around looking for turquoise and agates and gem-quality jade, I was using my little rock hammer to hack out chunks of sandstone and feldspar and quartzite and wondering how, why, and when they'd gotten there.

Turns out that part of the country has some seriously complicated geology, and I didn't really appreciate just how complicated until I read John McPhee's four-part series called Annals of the Former World.  Composed of Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California, it describes a cross-country trip McPhee took on Interstate 80, accompanied along the way with various geologists, with whom he stops at every roadcut and outcrop along the way.  As usual with McPhee's books they concentrate on the personalities of the people he's with as much as the science.  But you'll come away with a good appreciation for Deep Time -- and how drastically our continent has changed during the past billion years.

[Note:  If you order this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

Escapees from Siberia

As you might expect from someone who is passionately interested in both genealogy and evolutionary genetics, when there's a study that combines both, it's a source of great joy to me.

This week, Nature published a study on the evolutionary history of humans in northern Europe, specifically the Finns.  Entitled, "Ancient Fennoscandian Genomes Reveal Origin and Spread of Siberian Ancestry in Europe," it was authored by no less than seventeen researchers (including Svante Pääbo, a Swedish biologist who is widely credited as founding the entire science of paleogenetics) from the Max Planck Institute, the University of Helsinki, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Vavilov Institute for General Genetics, and the University of Turku.

Quite a collaborative effort.

It's been known for a while that Europe was populated in three broad waves of settlement.  First, there were hunter-gatherers who came in as early as 40,000 years ago, and proceeded not only to hunt and gather but to have lots of hot caveperson-on-caveperson sex with the pre-existing Neanderthals, whose genetic traces can be discerned in their descendants unto this very day.  Then, there was an agricultural society that came into Europe from what is now Turkey starting around 8,000 years ago.  Finally, some nomadic groups -- believed to be the ancestors of both the Scythians and the Celts -- swept across Europe around 4,500 years ago.

Anyone with European ancestry has all three.  Despite the genetic distinctness of different ethnic groups -- without which 23 & Me genetic analysis wouldn't work at all -- there's been enough time, mixture, and cross-breeding between the groups that no one has ancestry purely from one population or another.

Which, as an aside, is one of the many reasons that the whole "racial purity" crowd is so ridiculous.  We're all mixtures, however uniform you think your ethnic heritage is.  Besides, racial purity wouldn't a good thing even if it were possible; that's called inbreeding, and causes a high rate of homozygosity (put simply, you're likely to inherit the same alleles from both your mother and father).  This causes lethal recessives to rear their ugly heads; heterozygous individuals are protected from these because the presence of the recessive allele is masked by the other, dominant (working) copy.  It's why genetic disorders can be localized to different groups; cystic fibrosis in northern Europeans, Huntington's disease in people whose ancestry comes from eastern England, sickle-cell anemia from sub-Saharan Africa, Tay-Sachs disease in Ashkenazic Jews, and so on.

So mixed-ethnic relationships are more likely to produce genetically healthy children.  Take that, neo-Nazis.

Map of ethnic groups in Europe, ca. 1899 [Image is in the Public Domain]

In any case, the current paper looks at the subset of Europeans who have a fourth ancestral population -- people in northeastern Europe, including Finns, the Saami, Russians, the Chuvash, Estonians, and Hungarians.  And they found that the origin of this additional group of ancestors is all the way from Siberia!

The authors write:

[T]he genetic makeup of northern Europe was shaped by migrations from Siberia that began at least 3500 years ago.  This Siberian ancestry was subsequently admixed into many modern populations in the region, particularly into populations speaking Uralic languages today.  Additionally... [the] ancestors of modern Saami inhabited a larger territory during the Iron Age.

The coolest part is that this lines up brilliantly with what we know about languages spoken in the area:

The Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, to which both Saami and Finnish languages belong, has diverged from other Uralic languages no earlier than 4000–5000 years ago, when Finland was already inhabited by speakers of a language today unknown.  Linguistic evidence shows that Saami languages were spoken in Finland prior to the arrival of the early Finnish language and have dominated the whole of the Finnish region before 1000 CE.  Particularly, southern Ostrobothnia, where Levänluhta is located, has been suggested through place names to harbour a southern Saami dialect until the late first millennium, when early Finnish took over as the dominant language.  Historical sources note Lapps living in the parishes of central Finland still in the 1500s.  It is, however, unclear whether all of them spoke Saami, or if some of them were Finns who had changed their subsistence strategy from agriculture to hunting and fishing.  There are also documents of intermarriage, although many of the indigenous people retreated to the north...  Ancestors of present-day Finnish speakers possibly migrated from northern Estonia, to which Finns still remain linguistically close, and displaced but also admixed with the local population of Finland, the likely ancestors of today’s Saami speakers.

Which I think is pretty damn cool.  The idea that we can use the genetics and linguistics of people today, and use it to infer migratory patterns back 40,000 years, is nothing short of stunning.

Unfortunately, however, I have zero ancestry in Finland or any of the other areas the researchers were studying.  According to 23 & Me, my presumed French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English ancestry was shown to be... French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English.  No surprise admixtures of genetic information from some infidelity by my great-great-grandmother with a guy from Japan, or anything.

On the other hand, I did have 284 markers associated with Neanderthal ancestry.  Probably explaining why I like my steaks medium-rare and run around more or less naked when the weather's warm.  Which I suppose makes up for my lack of unexpected ethnic heritage.

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Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Basing education on research

If I have one major beef with the education system in the United States, it would be its steadfast refusal to use the latest research on how people learn to guide instruction.

As an example, consider how we teach foreign language.  In most public schools, foreign language instruction starts in middle school (ours doesn't begin until 8th grade).  Study after study has shown that age of acquisition is inversely correlated with final language proficiency; put simply, the older you are when you start learning, the poorer your eventual understanding of the language is likely to be.  (For a great summary of the research, check out this article by David Birdsong of the University of Texas - Austin.)

Has that changed how we teach language?  Not in most school systems, it hasn't.  Empirical research in neuroscience never seems to outweigh such considerations as "we've always done it this way" and "that's the way it was taught when I was in school" and "it would be too expensive/inconvenient."

And then, with no sense of irony, we question why students don't come out of school proficient.

So I have no particular optimism that a recent bit of research will change anything, although hope springs eternal and all that sort of stuff.  According to a report by the AmGen Foundation and Change the Equation, which are two groups that advocate for STEM education, American students in general are fascinated with science -- but dislike science classes.

Considering my own field, biology, the numbers are especially dire.  73% of the students questioned said they're interested in biology -- and after all, what's not to like?  Biology is all about sex, struggle, competition, and death, so if you like Game of Thrones, loving biology should be a no-brainer.  But a dismal 33% of students said they like biology class.

Why?  Because science classes in general, and biology classes in particular, usually fall back on learning from textbooks and worksheets, which were cited by these same students as their least favorite (and least successful) methods for learning new concepts.  Real-world, hands-on experiments, field trips to actual research sites and laboratories, and being able to choose the topics on which they focus are all cited as being factors that would make class more interesting -- but which are infrequently used in class, at least by comparison to book work and vocabulary worksheets.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm sure that part of that is that it makes fewer demands on the teacher.  Labs are not only expensive for the school district, they are a considerable time-sink for the teacher to set up and break down.  Even more expensive and time-consuming are field trips; the district not only has to pay the bus driver to get the kids to and from the site, but pay for a sub for the teacher's other classes.  In my case -- given that last year my intro bio classes represented only half of my teaching assignment -- it would also entail my getting lessons together for my other classes that could be administered by a sub in my absence.

Unsurprising that most teachers minimize these sorts of things.

This, by the way, is not meant as a criticism of teachers, or at least not solely; we're incredibly busy, and some days I have to carve out a few minutes from the demands of my schedule just to get a chance to pee.  It's no wonder that we cut corners and economize with activities that are easy to administer and grade.  But the fact remains that these time-expensive (and often money-expensive) activities are the ones students like the best -- and engagement almost always equals improvements in learning.

One I'd like to look at more closely is "being able to choose topics on which students focus."  Author and behavioral scientist Daniel Pink, in his amazing talk, "The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us," identifies three factors that improve engagement in both the business world and in schools: mastery, purpose, and autonomy.  Mastery is the good feeling we get from becoming better at stuff.  Purpose is feeling that what we are doing is important.  And autonomy is self-direction.

A combination of the three, Pink says, makes work and/or school far more pleasant -- and far more productive -- than the usual carrot-and-stick approach of grades and awards (the stick, of course, being failure and censure).  And I would argue that we in schools achieve mastery pretty well, purpose only infrequently, and autonomy barely at all.

We certainly encourage getting better at stuff, and (however effectively) do our best to make students improve their skills and understanding.  As far as purpose, think about what we tell students when they ask, "why do we have to learn this?"  I know some of us are able to give good answers to that, something beyond, "It's on the test" or "it's part of the curriculum" -- but even when we try to articulate why our class is important, we often do it so ineffectively that students don't believe us.  So much of what we do is disconnected enough from any real-world application that it honestly is hard to see how it connects to anything students are going to be asked to do after they graduate.

But the worst of all is autonomy.  Other than (some) choice in what classes they take, students almost never have any real, meaningful choice in what or how they learn.  I have heard of exceptions -- one school I know of teaches all of the core subjects in the context of "modules" (and before any teachers bristle at the use of the word, these are not the same "modules" used in the Common Core).  Each year, students choose four modules, two per semester, from a list of a dozen or so -- topics like "Oceans, Rivers, and Lakes," "Machines and Mechanization," and "Exploration of the World."  Each one builds in all of the subjects -- to take the first as an example, the topic of the watery part of the world incorporates biology (aquatic organisms and food webs), chemistry (the composition of fresh and marine water), physics/earth science (how bodies of water drive weather), English/writing (reading articles on the topic and writing summaries or responses), history & geography (the use of bodies of water for exploration and travel).

If you want the ultimate expression of how autonomy can generate success, though, consider schools in Finland -- ranked year after year at the top of every measure of school success there is.  But rather than my telling you about it, take an hour and watch The Finland Phenomenon (the link is to the first quarter of the documentary).  The students there are given huge amounts of autonomy with regards to how they learn the concepts and processes in the curriculum, and are tested only infrequently -- and yet, they consistently outperform our micromanaging, test-happy public schools here in the United States.

Of course, the problem is that in order to make this kind of change would require a complete restructuring of schools -- and retraining of teachers.  The fact is, classes designed around autonomy, purpose, and mastery require dedication, excellence, and (most importantly) time from the teachers -- and time is what even dedicated and excellent teachers are usually short of.

But we've got to do something, and maybe a good start would be listening to the research instead of saying, "we've always done it this way."  After all, it's hard to argue the point that we aren't doing a very good job of turning out well-rounded, confident critical thinkers now.  Certainly there will be adjustments and growing pains and setbacks if we do such a total revamp of the educational system.  Finland's switch from a U.S.-style, top-down, worksheet-and-test system thirty years ago wasn't without some bumps.

But considering what they have now -- and what we have now -- we don't have much to lose by trying.

Standardized failure

Over the last few days in my Critical Thinking class we've been critiquing the educational system.  After all, who better to ask than a class full of people who've been immersed in it, been the beneficiaries of the successes and the victims of the failures, for ten or more years?  I find that most of them are reasonable and fair about the assessment -- neither lashing out without justification nor telling me what I think they want to hear.  Their criticisms are reasoned, well supported, and usually spot-on.

But nothing riled them up more than the documentary I showed them on the school systems in Finland.  (The link is to part 1, but you can access it all from there -- the entire thing is an hour long but is well worth the time.)  The documentary was the brainchild of Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard University, who went to Finland to see if he could find out why Finnish schools routinely rank at the top of any measure you want to apply to them -- whether it's test scores, rigor, success of students in college or career after graduation, innovation, breadth, or depth -- and why we, in a word, don't.

Finnish students at an outdoor celebration in Helsinki [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Wagner interviewed teachers, principals, education professors, students, and parents, and came up with the following rather surprising characteristics of Finnish schools:

• little to no homework
• few tests; the only major exam is the exit exam administered before graduation, which is highly rigorous
• long class periods, and fewer classes per day than typical American schools
• work centering on projects, application, and synthesis rather than memorization of facts
• a lot of projects that require meaningful collaboration (not just the much-hated "group projects" often found in American schools, where typically one or two members of the group do all the work)
• small class size
• informality (teachers are called by their first names)
• an intense and rigorous vocational track that students can enter in tenth grade
• flexibility of choice; students in the vocational track can take classes in the academic track, and vice versa -- and high school can take either three or four years depending on student choice
• a huge amount of trust.  Administrators trust teachers to do their jobs, and rarely do formal evaluations; teachers trust students to do their work, whether supervised or not

Of course, I immediately noticed the stark contrast between the Finnish schools and my own.  And I must emphasize that I am lucky to work in the school I do -- we have great students, few problems, and (I believe) a pretty good success rate (again, however you want to measure it).  But of the characteristics I listed above, virtually every one is the opposite of how we approach things here in the United States.

Which makes me wonder if the success we do have is mostly due to the resilience of the students, the dedication of the teachers to rise above adverse circumstances, and a heaping measure of dumb luck.

The one that struck me the most was trust.  Dr. Wagner was talking to one of the teachers over lunch, and walked back with him to his class -- and was astonished to find out that the teacher was twenty minutes late to his own class.  The teacher, for his part, was a little surprised at Wagner's reaction.  "They know what they have to do," the teacher said.  "I don't have to stand over them and force them."

And sure enough, he walked back into the room -- and everyone was busily working.

In American schools, one of the first things that will jump out at you is the lack of trust.  Rules and regulations abound for what you can and can't do, every minute of the day.  Teachers are of the opinion that as soon as they turn their backs, students will stop working.  Administrators feel like they have to micromanage the teachers to make sure they're doing their job.  The state education departments increasingly add evaluations and observations and "quantitative measures" of principals and teachers, so that everything they do is turned into numbers and used as a tool for reward or censure.  The implication is that no one can be trusted, and the more you watch, the more you control, the better the results will be.

It's been long established, of course, that no one works well while being micromanaged -- not children, not adults.  Dan Pink and others who analyze the corporate world have found incontrovertible evidence that when our every move is scrutinized, when it is evident that there is no trust, our productivity decreases -- as does our job satisfaction.

Why, then, do we think that children would thrive in such an environment?

The Finnish administrators whom Wagner interviewed were adamant that the most important piece in their success was trust -- but that it wasn't easy to achieve, because it meant letting go of the fear that when you stop watching, people will stop working.  But if you couple that letting go with making sure that what you are expecting students to do is meaningful, engaging, and interesting, the results are nothing short of spectacular.

The students in my Critical Thinking classes spoke with one voice after watching this documentary: Why on earth do we not try this here?  I didn't have a good answer for that except that we've all become so suspicious of each other -- teachers of students, principals of teachers, state and federal oversight administration of everyone -- that we've become locked into the system even though it demonstrably doesn't work.  Instead of decreasing testing, we've increased it -- and not in any kind of meaningful way.  Just last week poet Sara Holbrook found out that some of her poems were used on the Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, and when she read the questions, she couldn't answer them.

You read that right.  The students were being presented with questions about her poems and expected to select one right answer when the poet herself had no idea how to determine what the right answer was.  We have become so stuck on a linear, one-right-answer mode that we now do everything that way -- even though it clearly kills creativity, destroys enthusiasm, and (as Holbrook's example shows) isn't reflective of anything meaningful or even real.

It's easy to come up with excuses.  "Finland is wealthier than we are."  "Finns are a more homogeneous society than we are."  The documentary dismisses those out of hand -- actually, we spend more per capita on students than Finland does, and 16% of Finnish students learn Finnish as a second language.

But even if those were true -- even if the hurdles we face are higher than the Finns faced in reconstructing their schools back in the 1970s -- so what?  What, exactly, do we have  to lose?  What we have now is only marginally successful, and in many inner cities is a demonstrable failure.  Our dropout rates are on the rise, and our increasing reliance on trivia-dense "quantitative assessments" do nothing but alienate students and further convince them that school is boring, pointless, and has no connection to real life.

It's time to try something different.

And, after all, the Finns have demonstrated that what they do is successful.  Why not try their model?  Okay, maybe it won't work exactly as it's done in Finland, maybe it'll need some fine tuning and adjustment to meet the different needs of students in our country.  But why not try -- and why wait?  As the adage goes, "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got."

Advice from the ignorant

I have never been a police officer.  No one in my family is a police officer.  I have not studied criminal justice; most of what I know about the legal system has been gleaned from television shows like Law & Order, which, to be honest, I have watched less than a dozen times total.  I've only visited a police station a handful of times, and each time spent less than a half-hour there.

Now stand by while I tell you everything that is wrong with our justice system, and furthermore, how to fix it.

Did you wince a little?  I hope so.  But this election season has been rife with ignorant self-proclaimed experts who know exactly what to do about everything despite having neither the experience nor the facts to base their opinion on.  And for a sterling example of this, let's look at the speech given by Donald Trump, Jr., two days ago on the final night of the Republican National Convention.

Trump Jr. spent a lot of his time railing against the public school system, despite the fact that he (1) is neither a teacher nor an administrator, (2) has never studied educational policy, and (3) for fuck's sake, didn't even attend a public school.  Nevertheless, here's what he said about our national educational policy, with a few interjected comments from me:

The other party gave us public schools that far too often fail our students, especially those who have no options.

Which party is it, exactly, that has across the nation gutted the public school system by cutting funding to the bone, resulting in loss of teachers, curriculum, and services?   To take just one of many examples, consider Republican Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas, who just this year signed legislation that would allow parents to divert 70% of the tax money earmarked for education into religious schools -- and this after he already cut $45 million in funding for public schools in 2015.

Growing up, my siblings and I we were truly fortunate to have choices and options that others don’t have.  We want all Americans to have those same opportunities. 

You want every American child to attend a well-funded private school?  Paid for how, exactly?

Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class. Now they’re stalled on the ground floor.  They’re like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers, for the teachers and the administrators and not the students.

Bullshit.  Spend any time at all inside a typical public school and you'll find out that's wrong in under five minutes.  In fact, I'll issue an open invitation to Trump Jr., or anyone else for that matter, to spend a day in my classroom this fall.  Let's see if afterwards you think that what happens there is done for my benefit, or for the benefit of the principal and superintendent.

You know why other countries do better on K through 12?  They let parents choose where to send their own children to school. 

Is there a stronger word than bullshit?  Let's look at one example of a country often touted as achieving educational excellence: Finland.  Their success story -- student scores on standardized tests ranking 2nd in the world in science, 3rd in reading, and 6th in math, with a 93% high school graduation rate nationwide -- has zilch to do with "parental choice."  According to an article on the Finnish educational system by LynNell Hancock that appeared in Smithsonian:

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school.  There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.  Finland’s schools are publicly funded.  The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators.  The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town.  The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).  “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.

But do go on, Mr. Trump Jr., as if you actually had the slightest idea what you're talking about:

That’s called competition. It’s called the free market. And it’s what the other party fears.

No, we don't fear competition, and contrary to what people like you would have the public believe, teachers like myself don't fear accountability.  What we want is fair, equitable measures of student success, both to evaluate students and to evaluate teachers.  What we don't need is a bunch of politicians making pronouncements on a subject about which they are completely ignorant.

They fear it because they’re more concerned about protecting the jobs of tenured teachers than serving the students in desperate need of a good education.

I don't know a single teacher who is in favor of tenure protecting substandard teachers.  The tenure rules are there for a reason -- to give protection to teachers from capricious administrators, and to ensure due process.  No one in education is in favor of tenure abuses like the so called "rubber rooms" where poor teachers are corralled because they can't be fired.  But this problem can be fixed without jettisoning the entire system.

They want to run everything top-down from Washington.  They tell us they’re the experts and they know what’s best.

So instead, we're supposed to listen to you because you are an expert and you know what's best?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You want to know how to fix the system?  Adequate funding and fair fund distribution formulas.  Strong curricula that are not beholden to test-for-profit firms like Pearson Education.  Support for teachers in inner cities and other places where poverty, broken families, drugs, and gangs play a role in the failure of schools.  Powerful, dynamic teacher training programs.  Salaries and benefits that are sufficient to attract the best teachers, stopping the bleed-out of talent we're seeing across the United States because of poor working conditions and vilification of the entire profession.

Last -- the one thing you and I might agree on -- put the oversight of education into the hands of the people who know the most about it, and get the know-nothing politicians to keep their noses out of it.

But that includes you, Mr. Trump Jr.

Trump of Finland

So you know about the ongoing nonsense regarding whether Barack Obama was born on American soil?  The "Birther Truther" foolishness still plagues us here in the United States, even though Obama only has a little less than a year left of his presidency, and amazingly enough hasn't turned the White House into a mosque or ceded the country to Kenya or any of the hundreds of other silly things these people claimed.

And of course, being a fact-free conspiracy, when the Show Us The Birth Certificate cadre were actually shown the birth certificate, they responded by claiming that it was a forgery.  Other "evidence" began to be trotted out, such as an alleged 1981 Columbia University identification card under the name "Barry Soetoro" with Obama's photograph, which says, in large unfriendly letters, "FOREIGN STUDENT."

This claim has been roundly debunked, of course.  The bar-coded ID card format wasn't even adopted by Columbia until 1996.  The individual who was issued the ID number shown turns out to be one Thomas Lugert, a Columbia student in 1998 who is white and looks nothing like President Obama.  But as I've said before: facts don't matter to these people.  If they have a claim they can shriek about, they'll shriek even louder if you show them why it can't possibly be true.

And you may recall that one of the leaders of the Barack-Born-In-Kenya model of reality was none other than Donald Trump.  As recently as July of last year, Trump was asked for his opinion on whether Obama was born in the United States, and he replied, "I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  I don’t know why he wouldn’t release his records."  Except, of course, for the fact that Obama did release his records.  It's just that conspiracy wackos don't become conspiracy wackos by falling for little tricks like hard evidence, and also that being Donald Trump means never having to admit you were wrong about anything.

The reason this all comes up, and what makes it kind of hilarious in a twisted way, is that there is a guy who is mounting a one-person campaign...

... to prove that Trump himself was born in Finland.

According to this guy, Donald Trump was born "Rögnvaldr Trømp," a name that immediately reminded me of the bit in the opening credits of Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail that had lines like, "Mööse chöreögraphed by Hörst Pröt III."  And being something of a language geek, I was also struck by the fact that "Rögnvaldr Trømp" doesn't look like a Finnish name at all, but more like a bizarre hybrid of Norwegian and Icelandic.

But the lunacy doesn't end there.  According to the blogger in question -- whose name I wasn't able to find anywhere on the site, presumably because he's afraid that if he is ever identified, black-clad Finnish operatives are going to take him out for blowing the whistle -- the whole thing came from "sources close to the Clintons."  These "sources," he says, are certain that if Trump gets elected, he's going to sell us out to the "Euroleftists."  But best of all was a paragraph a little further down that I have to quote in toto, because just describing it would not give you the full impact of how truly wonderful it is:

According to Eurotech magnate Linus Torvalds, on whose Lapland estate Tromp and Princess Ivana are reported to own a summer home, the Congressman takes "an active hand" in the governance of his native Finland. Torvalds, head of pro-piracy tech firm Lindex, says that he "sees [Tromp] as a brother--no, a hellittelysana (Here he used a Finnish term of endearment which translates roughtly [sic] to 'solstice-father-brother') who has done more for Finlandia than any other man could dream."

Okay.  So it's "Linux," not "Lindex."  "Lindex" sounds like a spray cleaner you'd use for getting the dust off of computer monitor screens.  And hellittelysana isn't a Finnish term of endearment, it's the word that means "term of endearment."  So it'd be a little odd if someone called Trump that.  It'd be as if I said to Ted Cruz, "You are a complete and total epithet!"

So the whole thing is kind of ridiculous, although I have to admit that it's wonderful for the humorous irony value.  I doubt anyone will take it as seriously as the Obama birther thing was -- showing, perhaps, that Trump's opponents have a lot better critical thinking skills than his followers do.  But even if it never gains traction, I thought it merited a shout-out as being one of the most purely weird conspiracy theories I've ever run across.

And given how many conspiracy theories I've run through here in Skeptophilia, that by itself is worthy of note.