Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
As an avid birdwatcher, I've learned many of the vocalizations of our local species. Some, especially the migratory species we only hear from May to September, I have to relearn every year, but a few of them are so distinct that my ears perk up whenever I hear them. One of my favorites is the whirling, ethereal song of the Veery (Catharus fuscescens):
Another lovely one, often heard in the same sorts of deep-woods habitats as the Veery, is the Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina):
By far the strangest bird songs I've ever heard, though, we came across when we visited the lowlands of eastern Ecuador about twenty years ago. There were two we heard but never saw -- first, the aptly-named Screaming Piha (Lipaugus vociferans), which can be heard for miles:
And second, the Great Potoo (Nyctibius grandis), which is cryptically-colored and nocturnal, so they're almost never seen. But when they sing at night... holy crap. Imagine being out in the jungle, alone, at night, and hearing this:
It's no wonder the locals thought there were monsters out there.
Bird songs serve two main purposes. They're territorial defense signals and mate attractants. (Which led a former student of mine to say, in some astonishment, "So birds only sing when they're mad or horny?") Songs are usually only done by males, and mostly during the breeding season. Calls, on the other hand, are done by both males and females, at any time of the year, and can mean a variety of things from "there's food over here" to "watch out for the cat" to "hey, howsyamommaandem?" (The latter mostly from birds in the southeastern United States.) Those of you in the eastern half of North America certainly already have heard the difference; our local Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) has a call, the familiar "chicka-dee-dee-dee-dee" that gives the species its name, and a song -- a two-note whistle with the second note a whole step below the first. Listening to them, you'd never guess it was the same bird.
There's an interesting distinction in how animals vocalize. Some vocalizations seem to be innate and hard-wired; the barking of dogs, for example, doesn't need to be learned. A great many bird species, however, including songbirds and parrots, learn vocalizations, and deprived of examples to learn from, never sing. (This includes the amazing mimicry of birds like the Australian Superb Lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae), which can learn to imitate not only birdsongs but a huge variety of other sounds as well):
The topic comes up because of a study that came out this week in the journal Communications Biology about the Rifleman (Acanthisitta chloris), a tiny species from New Zealand that is one of only two surviving species in the family Acanthisittidae, the New Zealand wrens, which are only distantly related to the more familiar and widespread true wrens. (If you're curious, its odd common name comes from the cheerful colors of the plumage, which someone decided looked like a military uniform:
The Rifleman is not a songbird, and (if the preceding distinction holds) should be unable to learn vocalizations; any sounds it makes should be instinctive and fixed, like the clucking of a chicken. But the study found that there were variations in the vocalizations of different individuals, and those variations were independent of how closely related they were; what mattered was how nearby they lived to each other, implying that the alterations in sound were learned, not innate.
"The vocal behavior that we were unravelling in this study is very similar to what is known as vocal accommodation in human linguistics," said Ines Moran, of the University of Auckland, who led the research. "It's similar to our ability to adjust our ways of speaking in different social, dialectal, or hierarchical settings -- modulating our voices to better fit in certain social groups."
So bird vocalizations may not be as simple as we'd thought. Like most things, I suppose. It brings up the silly distinction that I heard over and over again from students, that there's a split between "human" and "animal." We're clearly animals; and, conversely, what we call "animals" share a great deal more with us than we often realize. We have a lot to learn from the other species we whom we cohabit the planet. It's nice that we're beginning to pay more attention.
Given my inability to recognize faces, I've developed a number of compensatory mechanisms. One is that I remember people by memorizing specific features; he's the guy with curly black hair, she's the woman with small oval glasses and a tattoo on her right hand. I notice how people walk and how they carry their posture; I can sometimes recognize people I know well even if they're walking away from me, if they have a distinctive gait (which many people do, whether they realize it or not).
But for me the most important thing is the sound of their voices. I think that may be why it took me so long to figure out I'm face blind; often, all people have to do is say a few words and I immediately know who they are, so the fact that their faces don't trigger the immediate recognition most people have doesn't hamper me as much.
It turns out that I'm not alone in relying on vocalizations for identifying who's around. According to a paper last week in Science Advances, zebra finches have an ability to recognize their flock mates' unique vocalizations that rivals that of most humans.
In "High-Capacity Auditory Memory for Vocal Communication in a Social Songbird," a team composed of biologists Kevin Yu, William Wood, and Frederic Theunissen, all of the University of California-Berkeley, used rewards to train a bunch of Australian zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) and see how far they could push the birds' ability to distinguish between the vocalizations of different members of their species. And surprisingly -- at least to anyone who has heard the twittering cacophony of a cageful of zebra finches -- these birds could distinguish between the voices of forty or more of their friends.
The authors write:
Effective vocal communication often requires the listener to recognize the identity of a vocalizer, and this recognition is dependent on the listener’s ability to form auditory memories. We tested the memory capacity of a social songbird, the zebra finch, for vocalizer identities using conditioning experiments and found that male and female zebra finches can remember a large number of vocalizers (mean, 42) based solely on the individual signatures found in their songs and distance calls. These memories were formed within a few trials, were generalized to previously unheard renditions, and were maintained for up to a month. A fast and high-capacity auditory memory for vocalizer identity has not been demonstrated previously in any nonhuman animals and is an important component of vocal communication in social species.
This is the first time this kind of individual vocal recognition has been demonstrated in a non-human animal. "For animals, the ability to recognize the source and meaning of a cohort member's call requires complex mapping skills, and this is something zebra finches have clearly mastered," study co-author Theunissen said, in an interview with Science Direct. "They have what we call a 'fusion fission' society, where they split up and then come back together. They don't want to separate from the flock, and so, if one of them gets lost, they might call out 'Hey, Ted, we're right here.' Or, if one of them is sitting in a nest while the other is foraging, one might call out to ask if it's safe to return to the nest... I am really impressed by the spectacular memory abilities that zebra finches possess in order to interpret communication calls. Previous research shows that songbirds are capable of using simple syntax to generate complex meanings and that, in many bird species, a song is learned by imitation. It is now clear that the songbird brain is wired for vocal communication."
Social behavior is fascinating, and requires an astonishing repertoire of subtle perceptual skills to work well. Take, for example, flocking behavior in starlings. If you live in the United States, Canada, or western Europe, you've probably seen the flocks of black birds that swirl and move, almost in unison, as if the entire flock shared a single mind. Scientists still don't know exactly how they manage it, but experiments have demonstrated that each bird monitors its seven nearest neighbors on either side, and determines its own flight path from those neighbors' movements. We see that kind of thing in human crowds and in herds of cattle, of course; but the speed and degree of sophistication shown by starlings is mind-boggling. The passage of information from one bird to the next is lightning-fast and shows almost no signal degradation (the kind of thing that happens in the game of Telephone) across the entire flock. The result: they can move very nearly as one. Take a look at this incredible video of a starling flock in motion:
So we aren't the only ones with fancy communication abilities. Everywhere we look in the natural world, we see the amazing ways in which the species we share the Earth with survive, interact, and reproduce. It can seem like a harsh, bleak world at times -- but if you want to be reminded of the astonishing beauty and wonder this planet contains, all you have to do is look around you.
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I'm fascinated with history, and being that I also write speculative fiction, a lot of times I ponder the question of how things would be different if you changed one historical event. The topic has been visited over and over by authors for a very long time; three early examples are Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" (1952), Keith Roberts's Pavane (1968), and R. A. Lafferty's screamingly funny "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967).
There are a few pivotal moments that truly merit the overused nametag of "turning points in history," where a change almost certainly would have resulted in a very, very different future. One of these is the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which happened in 9 C.E., when a group of Germanic guerrilla fighters maneuvered the highly-trained, much better-armed Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Roman Legions into a trap and slaughtered them, almost to the last man. There were twenty thousand casualties on the Roman side -- amounting to half their total military forces at the time -- and only about five hundred on the Germans'.
The loss stopped Rome in its tracks, and they never again made any serious attempts to conquer lands east of the Rhine. There's some evidence that the defeat was so profoundly demoralizing to the Emperor Augustus that it contributed to his mental decline and death five years later. This battle -- the site of which was recently discovered and excavated by archaeologists -- is the subject of the fantastic book The Battle That Stopped Rome by Peter Wells, which looks at the evidence collected at the location, near the village of Kalkriese, as well as the historical documents describing the massacre. This is not just a book for history buffs, though; it gives a vivid look at what life was like at the time, and paints a fascinating if grisly picture of one of the most striking David-vs.-Goliath battles ever fought.
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A couple of nights ago I woke up in the middle of the night (not an unusual occurrence for me) in time to hear our local pack of coyotes whooping it up.
I love coyotes. Their wild screaming and yapping in the distance on an otherwise still night is an eerie, evocative, primal sound that reminds me that nature is out there, all around me, surrounding my comfortable and civilized life -- and it's far, far bigger than I am.
From another angle, my background in linguistics always makes me wonder what they're saying. The formal definition of language is "arbitrary symbolic communication;" symbolic in the sense that the word stands as a symbol for the object, action, or concept, and arbitrary in that except for a few onomatopoeic words like "bang" and "splat," the connection between the word and what it symbolizes is more or less accidental and will vary from language to language. (For example, étoile, stjerne, hoshi, and zvezda mean "star" in French, Norwegian, Japanese, and Russian, respectively, but the sounds of the words have nothing especially stellar about them.)
So by the definition, what the coyotes are doing probably isn't language. It's communication, yes; it undoubtedly facilitates pack cohesion and performs functions like letting the others know if there's a danger or a potential prey nearby. But any symbolism there (e.g. a high-pitched yelp means "I see a rabbit") is almost certainly extremely rudimentary and shallow at best.
I'm not running down the dogs, though. Fortunately, neither of my dogs is an incessant barker, but we can tell the difference between the barks from our elderly hound, Lena, depending on whether she wants to be let inside, she sees a chipmunk, she saw my wife drive up, she's playing with our other dog, or she's standing on the end of the dock barking at the goldfish in the pond. (Yes, she does that. Nowhere above did I imply that she's smart.)
She's extremely happy, though. Which is almost certainly better than being smart.
The Singing Dog -- as you heard if you listened to the audio in the link -- has a mournful, but oddly musical, howl that isn't quite like a wolf's, and certainly nowhere near the wild cacophony of coyotes. There are Singing Dogs in captivity in zoos, but the small gene pool has meant that they've begun to show signs of degradation from inbreeding, so the discovery that the elusive Highland Wild Dog of New Guinea is almost identical to the Singing Dog provides hope that the subspecies may be a good target for conservation.
Also, a study of the genome of the Singing Dog might give us some clues about where their fantastic repertoire of vocalizations comes from. It's been known for some time that our own ability to speak is related in some way to the FOX-P2 gene, because mutations in it cause developmental dyspraxia. But a great many mammals have a similar FOX-P2 gene to that of humans, and even birds do. Further, mutations in birds' FOX-P2 gene causes problems in songs and calls, indicative that it has an important role in vocal communication throughout the animal world -- and is evolutionarily very old, given that the last common ancestor between birds and mammals was on the order of three hundred million years ago.
So the new discovery about the New Guinea Singing Dog is fascinating from a number of angles. Not only do we have a chance to save a truly unique population, but the information we've gleaned might shed some light on how vocal communication evolved.
But now I need to go see what Lena's barking at. Last time she made sounds like this, it turned out she was barking at a stick. To be fair, it was a very threatening-looking stick. Just protecting our home from danger, like a good dog should.
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Humans have always looked up to the skies. Art from millennia ago record the positions of the stars and planets -- and one-off astronomical events like comets, eclipses, and supernovas.
And our livelihoods were once tied to those observations. Calendars based on star positions gave the ancient Egyptians the knowledge of when to expect the Nile River to flood, allowing them to prepare to utilize every drop of that precious water in a climate where rain was rare indeed. When to plant, when to harvest, when to start storing food -- all were directed from above.
As Carl Sagan so evocatively put it, "It is no wonder that our ancestors worshiped the stars. For we are their children."
In her new book The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars, scientist and author Jo Marchant looks at this connection through history, from the time of the Lascaux Cave Paintings to the building of Stonehenge to the medieval attempts to impose a "perfect" mathematics on the movement of heavenly objects to today's cutting edge astronomy and astrophysics. In a journey through history and prehistory, she tells the very human story of our attempts to comprehend what is happening in the skies over our heads -- and how our mechanized lives today have disconnected us from this deep and fundamental understanding.
[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]
One of the funniest scenes in the Monty Python movie Life of Brian is when a man is condemned to be stoned for saying "Jehovah," and the High Priest (played by John Cleese) is facing a crowd which is already armed with stones, ready to carry out the sentence. The crowd, unbeknownst to the High Priest, is made up of women (who by law are forbidden from being there), and it's even funnier because that means the crowd was men playing women who were pretending they were men.
Well, at one point in the proceedings, the High Priest says the word "Jehovah" and gets clunked in the head by a rock. He then demands to know who threw the rock.
A chorus of high-pitched, pseudo-feminine voices shouts, "She did! She did! She did!... um...." (continuing in deeper, masculine voices) "He did! He did! He did!"
This was the first thing my rather loopy brain thought of when I read a paper yesterday in Biology Letters. In "Acoustic Allometry and Vocal Learning in Mammals," by Maxime Garcia (of the University of Zurich) and Andrea Ravignani (of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics), we find out that "dishonest signaling" -- using a voice that makes you sound bigger or more threatening than you actually are -- has been found in dozens of mammalian species.
The authors write:
Vocal production learning (VPL) can be defined as the experience-driven ability, rare among mammals, to modify existing vocalizations, to produce novel sounds or to imitate sounds that do not belong to an individual's vocal repertoire... VPL inherently involves modulation of acoustic features related to the source, filter or both. Yet, different species have varying degrees of control over the anatomical components involved in phonation. For instance, despite a generally assumed lack of vocal control some non-human primates might have limited sound production plasticity, including for non-voiced sounds. While the presence of VPL in non-human primates is debated, strong evidence for VPL has been found to date in humans and four other mammalian clades: non-otariid Pinnipedia, Elephantidae, Chiroptera and Cetacea.
"If you saw a Chihuahua barking as deep as a Rottweiler, you would definitely be surprised," said study co-author Andrea Ravignani, in an interview with Science Daily. "Nature is full of animals like squeaky-Rottweilers and tenor-Chihuahuas... Some animals fake their size by developing larger vocal organs that lower their sound, which makes them sound larger than you would expect. Other animals are good at controlling the sounds they produce. Such strategies -- 'dishonest signaling' -- could be driven by sexual selection, as males with larger body size or superior singing skills (hitting very high or low notes) attract more females (or vice versa)."
I know one good example of little animal/big voice from my own back yard -- the Carolina Wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus). It's a tiny thing, what birders call an "LBJ" (Little Brown Job), but its outsized shriek of "TEAKETTLE TEAKETTLE TEAKETTLE" frequently wakes me up at four in the morning during the spring and early summer, especially given that there's one of 'em who likes to sing from the branches of the box elder tree right outside my bedroom window. But this is volume, not pitch. For misleading pitch, there's none that can compete -- at least in the bird world -- with the Great Potoo (Nyctibius grandis) of the rainforests of South America. Take a listen to this:
Since this bird is nocturnal, and (as you can see) is very cryptically colored, a lot of the natives didn't realize that sound was a bird for a long time. Their explanation -- that there was a horrible monster out there in the forest roaming around at night -- is completely understandable, given what its vocalizations sound like.
So the capacity to create misleading sounds isn't the sole provenance of the Monty Python crew's fake falsettos. There are lots of animal species that do the same thing, either to frighten off potential predators or to sound sexier for potential mates.
Or, perhaps, to give a misleading answer to questions like, "Are there any women here today?... good, very well then."
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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is for anyone who likes quick, incisive takes on scientific topics: When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by the talented science writer Jim Holt.
When Einstein Walked with Gödel is a series of essays that explores some of the deepest and most perplexing topics humanity has ever investigated -- the nature of time, the implications of relativity, string theory, and quantum mechanics, the perception of beauty in mathematics, and the ultimate fate of the universe. Holt's lucid style brings these difficult ideas to the layperson without blunting their scientific rigor, and you'll come away with a perspective on the bizarre and mind-boggling farthest reaches of science. Along the way you'll meet some of the key players in this ongoing effort -- the brilliant, eccentric, and fascinating scientists themselves.
It's a wonderful read, and anyone who is an aficionado of the sciences shouldn't miss it.
[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]
Earlier this week I looked at three cool archaeological discoveries -- cave art in Indonesia, and two finds in Egypt, one of a bone from someone killed in the battle recorded on the Rosetta stone, and the other about a researcher who found that the practice of tattooing has been around for a very long time.
But we're not done with mind-blowing archaeological stories, apparently, because there are two more that I just found out about, and which (if anything) are even cooler than the ones I wrote about Monday.
Well, technically, it was birch sap, but same idea. They were able to extract her DNA from the gum and sequence her entire genome, which allowed them not only to figure out what ethnic group she was from, but to make a good shot at her appearance. She had dark skin and hair, they found, and blue eyes. Here's an artist's reconstruction of what she might have looked like:
[Reconstruction by Tom Björklund]
The authors write:
Analysis of the human reads revealed that the individual whose genome we recovered was female and that she likely had dark skin, dark brown hair and blue eyes. This combination of physical traits has been previously noted in other European hunter-gatherers, suggesting that this phenotype was widespread in Mesolithic Europe and that the adaptive spread of light skin pigmentation in European populations only occurred later in prehistory. We also find that she had the alleles associated with lactase non-persistence, which fits with the notion that lactase persistence in adults only evolved fairly recently in Europe, after the introduction of dairy farming with the Neolithic revolution.
The period she lived in was when northern Europe was taken over by people known as the "Funnel Beaker Culture," so named because of their characteristic narrow-based, highly-ornamented pottery:
"It is amazing to have gotten a complete ancient human genome from anything other than bone,'' said study lead author, evolutionary geneticist Hannes Schroeder, of the University of Copenhagen, in an interview with Science Alert. "The DNA is so exceptionally well preserved that we were able to recover a complete ancient human genome from the sample… which is particularly significant since, so far, no human remains have been recovered from the site."
The second story goes back a great deal further in time than the little Neolithic Danish girl, though. In fact, it kind of crosses the line from archaeology into paleontology, because in a paper in Science Advances we find out that the ability to speak might have been around in primates for twenty million years.
The study, led by Louis-Jean Boë of the University of Grenoble, analyzes the mechanics of human speech, in particular how the morphology of the mouth, trachea, and larynx allow for the production of meaningful sound. It's been thought for years that the advent of speech occurred when our ancestors' larynxes (voice boxes) gradually moved downward, pulling the back of the tongue backward and downward as well and giving the tongue more mobility to shape sounds. But what Boë's team found was that even if you accept that as the hallmark of speech, it goes a long way further back than we'd realized.
"First, even among primates, laryngeal descent is not uniquely human," Boë and his team write. "Second, laryngeal descent is not required to produce contrasting patterns in vocalizations. Third, living non-human primates produce vocalizations with contrasting patterns. Thus, evidence now overwhelmingly refutes the long-standing laryngeal descent theory, which pushes back 'the dawn of speech' beyond ~200 ka ago to over ~20 Ma ago, a difference of two orders of magnitude."
So that means that at least from a mechanical standpoint, our distant ancestors had the capacity for speech. Whether their brains were developed enough to say anything particularly interesting is still a matter of conjecture. But evolution is all about minuscule gains. Once the upper respiratory tract becomes capable of modulating sounds in a meaningful way, this puts selective pressure on the brain to refine its ability to understand and convey meaning with those sounds -- which puts pressure on the vocal apparatus to become better at producing subtle differences in sounds, and so on and so forth. Which, as comedian Paula Poundstone notes, may not be entirely a good thing:
Be that as it may, it's a pretty cool discovery. As I pointed out in Monday's post, it's incredible how much we can infer about our distant ancestors' appearance, culture, and abilities from evidence that would have been a closed book only ten years ago. Our techniques for carrying out this research are only going to improve, so keep watching the journals -- my sense is that the amazing discoveries in this field have only just begun.
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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun, and a perfect holiday gift for anyone you know who (1) is a science buff, and (2) has a sense of humor. What If?, by Randall Munroe (creator of the brilliant comic strip xkcd) gives scientifically-sound answers to some very interesting hypothetical questions. What if everyone aimed a laser pointer simultaneously at the same spot on the Moon? Could you make a jetpack using a bunch of downward-pointing machine guns? What would happen if everyone on the Earth jumped simultaneously?
Munroe's answers make for fascinating, and often hilarious, reading. His scientific acumen, which shines through in xkcd, is on full display here, as is his sharp-edged and absurd sense of humor. It's great reading for anyone who has sat up at night wondering... "what if?"
[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]
Language is defined as "arbitrary symbolic communication." The "symbolic" part is because the word (either spoken or written) for a concept is representative of the concept itself, and "arbitrary" because with the exception of onomatopoeic words like bang and swish there is no logical connection between the word and the concept itself. (For example, the English word dog and the French word chien both have the same referent, but other than learned association there's nothing especially doggy about either word.)
It's been an argument of long standing whether any other animal species have true language. A 2006 paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America strongly suggests that whales have one of the most characteristic features of language -- syntax, the way words are put together to form meaningful sentences. (What whale songs actually mean is still a matter of conjecture.) A lot of animal sounds, such as bird songs and dogs barking, are dismissed as "non-linguistic vocalization" -- they are communication, but lack the "arbitrary symbolic" part of the definition of language.
Myself, I wonder. I can tell when I hear my dog barking or growling whether he:
is playing;
sees a vicious intruder, like the UPS man;
sees an even more vicious intruder, like a chipmunk;
sees or hears my wife driving up;
is excited because he sees me or my wife get the ball and he knows he's going to get to play fetch, which is his most favorite thing ever;
is bored; or
wants to come inside because it's raining and he doesn't like getting his little toesies wet. (He's just that tough.)
Each of those different-toned barks is completely distinct, and certainly they're arbitrary in that the connection between the tone and what it's communicating really has no logic to it. (An exception is that the "excited bark" and "bored bark" are clearly different in volume and energy level, which you could argue isn't arbitrary.)
Even dog lovers will admit, however, that the set of concepts expressed by barking or growling is fairly limited. So if you want to call it language, it's pretty rudimentary. The situation becomes blurrier, however, with animals with a rich vocal repertoire, like parrots and dolphins. And our sense that we're the only ones with true language was dealt another blow by a study released this week from the University of Zurich showing that primates called common marmosets not only speak regional dialects, when individuals are moved to a different region they learn -- and begin to use -- the dialect of the group they've joined.
"We could clearly show that the dialects of common marmosets are learned socially," said anthropologist Yvonne Zürcher, who co-authored the study. "If their dialects were genetically determined, moving to a new place wouldn’t cause any change in calls. The changes can’t be explained by differences in the environment, either."
Which seems to meet the characteristic of arbitrariness.
Again, I'm not trying to imply that marmosets have language in the same sense we do; whatever they're saying, it's unlikely that it has the richness and flexibility of human language. But the black-and-white, "we have language and no one else does" attitude that has been prevalent for as long as the question has been considered may turn out to be as inaccurate as the "human vs. animal" distinction I still hear students voicing. The truth is, vocal communication -- from the simplest (such as the hissing of a snake) to the most complex known (human language) -- is a continuum, just as are complexity, intelligence, emotional capacity, and anything else you might think separates us from the rest of Kingdom Animalia.
Which I think is pretty cool.
In any case, I better wrap this up, because Guinness is barking. I know it's time to play ball. He just told me so.
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In keeping with Monday's post, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about one of the most enigmatic figures in mathematics; the Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan. Ramanujan was remarkable not only for his adeptness in handling numbers, but for his insight; one of his most famous moments was the discovery of "taxicab numbers" (I'll leave you to read the book to find out why they're called that), which are numbers that are expressible as the sum of two cubes, two different ways.
For example, 1,729 is the sum of 1 cubed and 12 cubed; it's also the sum of 9 cubed and 10 cubed.
What's fascinating about Ramanujan is that when he discovered this, it just leapt out at him. He looked at 1,729 and immediately recognized that it had this odd property. When he shared it with a friend, he was kind of amazed that the friend didn't jump to the same realization.
"How did you know that?" the friend asked.
Ramanujan shrugged. "It was obvious."
The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel is the story of Ramanujan, whose life ended from tuberculosis at the young age of 32. It's a brilliant, intriguing, and deeply perplexing book, looking at the mind of a savant -- someone who is so much better than most of us at a particular subject that it's hard even to conceive. But Kanigel doesn't just hold up Ramanujan as some kind of odd specimen; he looks at the human side of a man whose phenomenal abilities put him in a class by himself.
[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]
Being a linguistics geek, I've always been fascinated with the mechanisms of communication. My interests span such topics as the evolution of human language, how one language (or culture) influences another (the topic of my master's thesis), the question of how we would understand language in a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence, and whether vocal communication in other species is actually language.
The conventional answer to the last question has usually been "no." Language, as defined by linguistics, is "arbitrary symbolic communication." The arbitrary part is because except in certain rare cases, such as onomatopoeic words ("pop," "splat," "bang," etc.), there is no logical connection between the sound of a word and its referent. Except in our minds, there is nothing especially doggy about the sound of the word "dog."
So is vocal communication in other animals language? The singing of songbirds is clearly communication, but it lacks one important characteristics of human language; the flexible productive ability of language to communicate different concepts in different contexts. Birdsong is for the most part (within a species) limited in range to a few different sounds, and once learned, never changes.
Some species, however, get closer to language than that. Some birds, notably corvids, have a wide range of vocalizations, and are also some of the most intelligent birds. Dogs vary their tones depending on context -- I can tell from the tone of my dog's barks whether he's seen a squirrel, someone's knocked on the front door, he wants to be let in, he's hungry, or my wife's just come home. One step closer are whales and dolphins, whose vocal communication appears to be complex and responsive -- but whether it qualifies as true language is an unsettled question.
However, a new study, which appeared this week in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, suggests that human language may not be as far removed from vocalizations in other animals as we may have thought. The paper, entitled "A FOX-P2 Mutation Implicated in Human Speech Deficits Alters Sequencing of Ultrasonic Vocalizations in Adult Male Mice," by Jonathan Chabout, Erich D. Jarvis et al., has shown that mice have the "Forkhead Box Protein 2" (FOX-P2) gene, just as humans do -- and a mutation in that gene impairs vocal communication in mice, just as it does in humans.
[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]
"This study supports the ‘continuum hypothesis,’ which is that FOX-P2 affects the vocal production of all mammals, and not just humans," Jarvis said. "Mice do not have the complex vocal learning behavior of humans and song-learning birds. Nonetheless, we find that the same FOX-P2 mutation in mice and in humans leads to overlapping effects on sequencing of vocalizations. In particular, against a background of preserved syllable acoustic structure, we see reductions in the length and complexity of syllable sequences."
I find this fascinating, because I've always been of the opinion that there's a lot more going on inside the brains of non-human animals than we've typically been willing to acknowledge, and a great deal more similarity than difference between human cognition and cognition in other mammals. So in a way, I find this result unsurprising.
But still, what was drilled into me in my college linguistics classes -- that humans were the only animals that had language, and that there was a hard-and-fast divide between the vocalizations of humans and those in other species -- was a surprisingly deep-seated bias. It's one I'm glad to jettison, however. My other geeky passion is evolutionary biology, so the idea that there is an unbroken continuum in the animal world in terms of what we have to say, and the genetic underpinning thereof, is pretty damn cool.
In yesterday's post, we took a look at the latest from the world of extraterrestrial enthusiasts; today, we'll do the same for another topic we haven't visited in a while:
Bigfoot.
[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]
Yup, Skeptophilia has been quiet for a while on the subject of our giant hairy cousins. Which is a shame, because cryptozoology was kind of how I got into all of this skepticism stuff. I've had a thing for creepy cryptids since I was a kid. All I can say is, however cheesy Finding Bigfoot is, if that show had been on when I was a teenager, I would not have missed an episode.
Of course, the same would have been true for Ghost Hunters and Scariest Places on Earth and Most Haunted and The Unexplained and probably even Destination: Truth.
Let's just say that I have learned some discernment as I have matured.
Be that as it may, we've had a busy couple of weeks in the field of Yetiology. So let's take a look at what we've missed while we were focusing on such trivia as educational policy and the role of religion in the public sphere.
The hiker, who narrates the video, comments, "This is the middle of absolutely nowhere... If that's human why would you walk up that ridge or that snow line? Why would he not just go straight down?... Good thing we brought beers. Maybe we can lure him over here. I don't know how high we are, but we're probably close to 7,000 feet and this guy's just scampering up snow lines like it's no big deal."
He goes to significant lengths to point out that it is absolutely, totally remote, the middle of nowhere, but doesn't seem to recognize that it can't be all that remote, because after all, they're there. And brought along beer. I used to backcountry camp -- and I know from experience that if you are heading to a really remote place, that requires a long, arduous hike, you don't bring along unnecessary weight. If they brought beer, then they were clearly close enough to civilization there could have been other hikers out there.
Or bears. Or whatever. Because the biggest problem is, this image is so tiny that there's no way to tell what it is. It's not even a Blobsquatch. It's a Dotsquatch. Maybe this is the fabled wild hominid of the Northwest, but you certainly couldn't be sure from this video.
Even further out in left field is something from the Discovery channel, which has joined the History channel and Animal Planet in devoting themselves almost entirely to pseudoscientific gobbledygook. But they outdid themselves last week with a press release announcing an upcoming two-hour special about the infamous Dyatlov Pass Incident.
Loyal readers of Skeptophilia may remember that I did a post about this about two years ago, to which I direct you if you're curious about details. But for our purposes here, it suffices to say that it centers around the mysterious deaths of nine experienced backcountry skiers in the Ural Mountains of Russia back in 1959.
It's an odd set of circumstances, and in my mind has never been adequately explained, although there are some compelling hypotheses about what may have caused their deaths. But Discovery has added a hypothesis of their own to the list, although instead of "compelling" it is more "ridiculous:"
I'm not making this up. Here's the relevant paragraph of the press release:
RUSSIAN YETI: THE KILLER LIVES, a 2-hour special airing Sunday, June 1 at 9 PM ET/PT on the Discovery Channel, follows Mike [Libecki] as he traces the clues and gathers compelling evidence that suggests the students’ deaths could be the work of a creature thought only to exist in folklore.
Oh, hell, if you're going to make shit up, why not go all the way? I think they should make a two-hour special about how the Dyatlov Pass skiers were killed by the Lovecraftian Elder Gods because some Russian necromancer wannabe opened up a gateway to Yog Sothoth. The one hiker with the major chest injuries had had his heart sucked out by a Shoggoth.
Makes about as much sense.
Speaking of "not making sense," just last week we had a new proposal out there to explain why Bigfoot photos are all blurry. It's not because they're fakes, or vague images of something sort-of-Bigfoot-like (i.e. an example of cryptozoological pareidolia).
It's because Bigfoot himself is blurry.
You probably think I'm making this up, but over at Occult View, this has been thrown out there as a serious suggestion in a post called "Bigfoot as a Blurry Vibration That Lives in the Forest." A short passage should suffice to give you the flavor:
These sightings are not hominids, but something all together different. These Bigfoot are vibrations that live in the forest. Call them blurry beings.
When these blurry vibrations are spotted, we see something that really doesn’t make sense. Our brains then fill in the blanks; our minds complete the details. We see a creature that looks natural, but if we took a picture of it at the same time it would appear only as a blur or a fuzzy image.
There really hasn’t been a clear photo of Bigfoot (that I assume wasn’t a hoax). But there have been photos of these blurs, these dark shapes. If I am correct, we’ll never get a clear picture of the semi-rural Bigfoot. Yet it might be worth studying these images of dark shapes and see if we can learn something from them. These blurry images might provide clues to the true nature of the vibrations that live in the forest.
What does it even mean to say that something is a "living vibration?" I'm assuming that the author is using the term in the usual hand-waving way that woo-woos do -- like the mystics saying that humans are "energy field vibrations," even though I doubt they could define the words "energy" and "field" if I held them at gunpoint. So we won't press any further with this, except to say that anyone who thinks this is a rational explanation is a little blurry around the edges himself.
To end on an entertaining note, we have another video clip, this one from a gentleman named Larry Surface, that he claims is a recording of Bigfoot vocalizations from Ohio. Take a listen:
My favorite part of this is the way Surface tries to transliterate what they're saying into English spelling, thusly: "Hamit mahamit whoop whoop hamit wa wa wa wahit mahamit hondabay hondabay hondabay kaoo mahamit whoh hamit fusayo oa getmuh whoop ma oh."
Okay, I know that there's a possibility (slim, in my opinion) that these are really Bigfoot sounds. But human perception being what it is, if someone tells you what you're hearing -- subtitles it, even -- you are way more likely to hear "hondabay hondabay hondabay" than you are to hear random animal vocalizations. Consider how the whole "backmasking" thing works -- the conspiracy guys always tell you ahead of time what message has been inserted backwards into the song or speech you're listening to. Then, when you listen to it backwards... lo and behold... there it is.
So me, I'm not convinced. I've heard enough bizarre vocalizations from perfectly ordinary non-cryptids -- animals like foxes and raccoons and skunks and barred owls can make some really peculiar, unearthly noises. (So if you really want to find out what the fox says, you can listen to hundreds of examples on YouTube. You will not, for the record, find one recording of a fox saying "gering-a-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding.")
Anyway, that's the news from the cryptozoology world. Dotsquatch, Blursquatch, Russian Skier-Killers, and the strange language of the Ohio Bigfoot. All in all, about what we'd expect, given the level of evidence that has been heretofore amassed. So until next time, I'll sign off with a cheerful "Hamit mahamit whoop ma oh," and I hope you feel likewise.
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