Meet Wonderchicken

Since Jurassic Park, it hasn't been news to most people that birds are dinosaurs.  The evidence from skeletal analysis is unequivocal; not only is your average little garden sparrow a dinosaur, it's close cousin to one of the most famous prehistoric animals, the fearful Velociraptor.  (Which apparently was a pack hunter, but probably wasn't smart enough to figure out how to unlatch a freezer door, so take what you see in the movies with a grain of salt or two.)

The mystery is why the ancestors of modern birds survived, and all of the other dinosaur lineages died out.  The old saw of "the dinosaurs were dying out anyhow, and the meteorite impact finished 'em off" is almost certainly untrue; the dinosaurs were apparently doing just fine when Chicxulub hit, flash-frying anything nearby and causing global havoc (and nearly simultaneously the colossal Deccan Traps volcanic eruptions occurred -- geologists are still debating whether those two events are causally linked).

But whatever the cause(s), the dinosaurs were clearly doing well, then whammy.  And, for what it's worth, they'd been pretty much in charge of the world for the entire Mesozoic Era, a time span of 180 million years (and to put that in perspective, that's over a hundred times longer than Homo sapiens has been in ascendancy).  It's probable that the reason most of the best-known species of dinosaurs became extinct is that when conditions suddenly become dire, the two groups to suffer most are the large species and the extreme specialists, both of whom are intolerant to a rapidly changing environment.  But hard evidence of this, in the form of fossils from right around the time of the end-Cretaceous Extinction, have been few and far between.

This week a paper in Nature added a new piece to the puzzle -- a fossil bird from 66.7 million years ago, only 700,000 years before Chicxulub et al. said finis to the Age of the Dinosaurs.  So here we have in hand a species that probably made it through the bottleneck -- because it looks like what may well be the common ancestor between galliform birds (chickens and turkeys) and waterfowl.

In "Late Cretaceous Neornithine from Europe Illuminates the Origins of Crown Birds," by Daniel Field, Juan Benito, and Albert Chen (of Cambridge University), John Jagt (of Natuurhistorisch Museum Maastricht in the Netherlands), and Daniel Ksepka (of the Bruce Museum of Greenwich, Connecticut), we read about read about a fascinating find that the researchers have dubbed "Wonderchicken:"

Our understanding of the earliest stages of crown bird evolution is hindered by an exceedingly sparse avian fossil record from the Mesozoic era.  The most ancient phylogenetic divergences among crown birds are known to have occurred in the Cretaceous period, but stem-lineage representatives of the deepest subclades of crown birds—Palaeognathae (ostriches and kin), Galloanserae (landfowl and waterfowl) and Neoaves (all other extant birds)—are unknown from the Mesozoic era.  As a result, key questions related to the ecology, biogeography, and divergence times of ancestral crown birds remain unanswered.  Here we report a new Mesozoic fossil that occupies a position close to the last common ancestor of Galloanserae and fills a key phylogenetic gap in the early evolutionary history of crown birds.  Asteriornis maastrichtensis, gen. et sp. nov., from the Maastrichtian age of Belgium (66.8–66.7 million years ago), is represented by a nearly complete, three-dimensionally preserved skull and associated postcranial elements.  The fossil represents one of the only well-supported crown birds from the Mesozoic era, and is the first Mesozoic crown bird with well-represented cranial remains.  Asteriornis maastrichtensis exhibits a previously undocumented combination of galliform (landfowl)-like and anseriform (waterfowl)-like features, and its presence alongside a previously reported Ichthyornis-like taxon from the same locality provides direct evidence of the co-occurrence of crown birds and avialan stem birds.  Its occurrence in the Northern Hemisphere challenges biogeographical hypotheses of a Gondwanan origin of crown birds, and its relatively small size and possible littoral ecology may corroborate proposed ecological filters that influenced the persistence of crown birds through the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.

This fossil is pretty spectacular -- and unique.  "It shows a never previously seen mashup of ducklike and chickenlike features," said study lead author Daniel Field, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Cambridge.  "It’s like a turducken."

This pushes forward the date estimated for the last common ancestor of all modern birds, previously estimated by molecular clock data as between 139 and 89 million years ago.  Asteriornis is a very close ally to the ancestor of two large bird groups, so it could be that true birds evolved much closer to the end-Cretaceous Extinction than we'd previously thought.

So I'm sure you're wondering what Wonderchicken looked like.  Here's an artist's reconstruction (art by Phillip Krzeminski):

Recognizably a bird, isn't it?  Not some scary toothy flying dinosaur like Archaeopteryx.  Poor thing, little did it know that hard times were coming, although maybe knowing its descendants would be some of the survivors would have cheered it up.

And its relevance was obvious the moment the team saw the results of the computerized tomography of the skull.  "The timeline was: See the skull, scream ‘Holy shit,’ give my Ph.D. student a high five, and then start calling it the Wonderchicken," Field said, in an interview with Science News.

Wonderchicken was about the size of a modern quail, further supporting the conjecture that small size was a factor in surviving the bottleneck.

So that's another piece in the evolutionary puzzle, and something to think about next time you fill the birdfeeders for the local chickadees.  Modern biodiversity has been mostly shaped by evolution, but random and unpredictable natural disasters played their own role in determining who the winners and losers would be.  And here we have hard evidence of one of the winners -- an unprepossessing bird from right before one of the biggest catastrophes the Earth has ever seen.

Wonderchicken, indeed.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a classic -- Martin Gardner's wonderful Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?

Gardner was a polymath of stupendous proportions, a mathematician, skeptic, and long-time writer of Scientific American's monthly feature "Mathematical Games."  He gained a wonderful reputation not only as a puzzle-maker but as a debunker of pseudoscience, and in this week's book he takes on some deserving targets -- numerology, UFOs, "alternative medicine," reflexology, and a host of others.

Gardner's prose is light, lucid, and often funny, but he skewers charlatans with the sharpness of a rapier.  His book is a must-read for anyone who wants to work toward a cure for gullibility -- a cure that is desperately needed these days.

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

Blowing the dogwhistle

It's no secret that I'm a privileged white guy.  I've never had to deal with -- hell, I've never had to think about -- being on the receiving end of discrimination based on my gender or the color of my skin.  I'm not saying my life has been without any impediments, but inequities of race and gender have not been amongst them.

So when people who have experienced this kind of prejudice and bigotry tell me about their experience, I listen to them.  Simple as that.

Which is why the nasty rebranding of COVID-19 as "the Chinese virus" is, in fact, racism.

The racist part isn't from the first time the term was used.  Being a privileged white guy, I've probably said things that have been insensitive -- not from any malice, but simply from ignorance of the implications.  But if someone points it out, what you do then is you stop fucking doing it.  If you call COVID-19 "the Chinese virus" and someone says, "you really shouldn't call it that, there are Asians who are being targeted for harassment because they're being blamed for the virus's spread," you say, "Good heavens, I didn't realize that, I'm so sorry, that was so thoughtless of me," then you don't say it again.

You don't say, "here's why your perspective is wrong, I know so much better, so I'm gonna damn well call it Chinese virus if I want."

That is racist.

Of course, Donald Trump, whose attitude is that anything that comes out of his mouth is perfect, is where this started.  And of course, when called on it, he didn't back down.  "It’s not racist at all," he told reporters.  "It comes from China, that’s why."

Which is somewhere beyond disingenuous.  No one doubts that the virus originated in China.  But continuing to harp on it as "Chinese virus" even after you know that Asians are being threatened or outright physically harmed because of it -- yeah, that's racist, however you're trying to whitewash it.

Any argument for it being a casual, offhand slip of the tongue went out the window yesterday when a photograph by a reporter for the Washington Post showed that Trump had actually crossed out the word "corona" and handwritten in "Chinese" (in black Sharpie, if I even needed to add that).  So make no mistake; this is absolutely deliberate.

And of course, as soon as Trump labeled it that way, his various bootlickers were quick to follow suit:

• Meghan McCain: "I agree with you that I think if the left wants to focus on P.C. labeling this virus, it is a great way to get Trump re-elected.  I don’t have a problem with people calling it whatever they want.  It’s a deadly virus that did originate in Wuhan."
• John Cornyn: "[Chinese] people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that.  These viruses are transmitted from the animal to the people, and that’s why China has been the source of a lot of these viruses...  China has been the source of a lot of these viruses like SARS, like MERS and swine flu and now the coronavirus.  So I think they have a fundamental problem, and I don’t object to geographically identifying where it's coming from."
• Marsha Blackburn: "This outlandish claim is crucial to Communist China's propaganda machine.  It is a bold-faced lie and a corrupt attempt to shift the blame and origins of the Chinese novel coronavirus."
• Tucker Carlson: "Today, NBC News sent a tweet suggesting the president's use of the phrase 'Chinese virus' was 'both inaccurate and harmful, in tying racist associations between the virus and those from China...'  Another statement written by morons in our news media.  How is it inaccurate to call a virus from China 'Chinese?'...  That was Trump at his very best."
• Lindsey Graham: "I think it is fair, because China is accusing American soldiers of causing this problem, so yes, we're gonna fight that.  I'm not blaming the Chinese government.  It did come from China...  This problem came out of China.  You guys [reporters asking whether the term is racist] are nuts."
• Brian Kilmeade: "While some here say that’s a racist term, it’s actually just an accurate term of where it started and them not being transparent about how it started really hurt literally the rest of the planet."

Let me put this succinctly: if your words are inciting others to harass, demean, threaten, or harm someone based on their race, and even after finding this out you continue to use those words, your actions are racist.

Of course, I'm not naïve enough not to know why they're doing it; these kinds of racist dogwhistles play well with their base, who just love the ultranationalist, 'Murica-first attitude that Trump and his cronies excel at.  This kind of language has been used against Hispanics, Muslims, and a number of other ethnic groups (remember the "shithole countries" comment directed against people from subsaharan Africa?), to cheering crowds.  And whenever this is flagged as racism, immediately the "political correctness" epithet comes out, as if treating people with consideration, and recognizing that people from other demographics have a different perspective than you do, is somehow a character flaw.

As journalist David Plotz put it: "Changing the way we talk is not political correctness run amok.  It reflects an admirable willingness to acknowledge others who were once barely visible to the dominant culture, and to recognize that something that may seem to be innocent to you may be painful to others."

[Image licensed under GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2]

For me, it boils down to one of the guiding principles of my life, which is "don't be a dick."  I'm not saying I don't make mistakes or that I've never offended anyone.  Being privileged means that's probably inevitable.  But when I do, I try like hell not to do the same thing again.  Maybe sometimes this will mean I'll change my language because someone's being hypersensitive, but what harm has come to me because of that?

Given the choice between hurting someone and making a small amendment to the way I talk, I know which one I'd choose.  And seeing it that way makes the fact that this isn't just random thoughtless talk, but a deliberate dogwhistle, abundantly clear.

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a classic -- Martin Gardner's wonderful Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?

Gardner was a polymath of stupendous proportions, a mathematician, skeptic, and long-time writer of Scientific American's monthly feature "Mathematical Games."  He gained a wonderful reputation not only as a puzzle-maker but as a debunker of pseudoscience, and in this week's book he takes on some deserving targets -- numerology, UFOs, "alternative medicine," reflexology, and a host of others.

Gardner's prose is light, lucid, and often funny, but he skewers charlatans with the sharpness of a rapier.  His book is a must-read for anyone who wants to work toward a cure for gullibility -- a cure that is desperately needed these days.

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

Animal magnetism

In my introductory neuroscience class, I always began the unit on our sensory systems by asking students how many senses they think we have.

The standard answer, of course, is "five."  There were always a few wishful thinkers who like the idea of psychic abilities and answered six.  They were uniformly blown away when I told them that depending on how you count them, it's at least twenty.

Don't believe me?  There are three in the ears (hearing, proprioception/balance, and pressure equalization).  The tongue has separate, distinct chemoreceptors for at least five different taste categories -- sour, sweet, salty, bitter, and savory.  For convenience we'll call the sense of smell one, because we don't even know how many different kinds of olfactory receptors we have.  The eyes are not only responsible for image reception, but also perception of depth and adjustments for light intensity.  You've got six in your skin -- touch, pain, pressure, heat, cold, and stretch.  Your brain has chemical sensors that keep track of your blood pH and stimulate your breathing rate to speed up or slow down to accommodate (in general, breathing faster dumps carbon dioxide and makes your blood pH rise; slower breathing makes you retain carbon dioxide and drops your blood pH).  The kidneys have sensors not only for blood pH but for the salt/water balance, concentrating or diluting your urine to keep your blood's osmotic balance correct.

And those are just the most obvious ones.

In reality, your body is a finely-tuned environmental sensor, constantly detecting and making adjustments to your internal state to accommodate for the external conditions.  It works admirably well most of the time, even though there are some stimuli out there detectible by other animal species that we are completely unaware of.

The one that jumps to mind first is the range of light frequencies the eyes can detect.  We can only pick up a tiny slice of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, the familiar red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet of the rainbow.  Many insects can see in the ultraviolet region, picking up light waves completely invisible to us; this is why a good many flowers that seem to be a single color to us have wild patterns if photographed with a UV-sensitive camera.  Mosquitoes can pick up infrared light, meaning they see the world through heat-sensing goggles -- with the unfortunate result that they can find us with ease in the pitch dark.  (They can also smell us, apparently, possibly explaining why some people are so attractive to the little bastards.)

How a bee sees a flower of Potentilla reptans that looks solid yellow to us [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wiedehopf20, Flower in UV light Potentilla reptans, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Sharks can pick up shifts in the underwater electric field, one way they find their prey -- muscle contractions run on electrical signals.  So, oddly enough, can platypuses, using electric sensors in their weird rubbery bill.  Many species of migratory birds are sensitive to magnetic fields, using magnetite crystals in their brains as a natural compass -- and, some scientists think, not only using them to figure out which direction is north, but using the declination (angle it tips up or down with respect to horizontal) to figure out the latitude, as the Earth's magnetic field lines become more and more vertical the closer you get to the poles.

This last one is a sense humans might actually share.  There have been anecdotal accounts for years of some people being sensitive to magnetic fields, but there hasn't been any hard evidence of it.  Now, a paper in eNeuro describes an experiment that shows the human brain has sensitivity to magnetic fields -- even if the owner of the brain may not be aware of it on a conscious level.

In "Transduction of the Geomagnetic Field as Evidenced from alpha-Band Activity in the Human Brain," by a team led by Connie Wang of the California Institute of Technology, we read about a clever set-up to see what was going on in people's heads when they were subjected to a fluctuating magnetic field.

The thought was, if there is anything at all to the anecdote, it should be detectible by an electroencephalogram.  "Our approach was to focus on brainwave activity alone," said study co-author Joseph Kirschvink (also of CIT) in an interview with Gizmodo.  "If the brain is not responding to the magnetic field, then there is no way that the magnetic field can influence someone’s behavior.  The brain must first perceive something in order to act on it—there is no such thing as ‘extra-sensory perception.’  What we have shown is this is a proper sensory system in humans, just like it is in many animals."

Test subjects were placed in a Faraday cage, a web of conductive material that blocks electromagnetic fields, to shut out anything coming from the Earth's magnetism.  Then, an array of Merritt coils were activated to alter the magnetic field within the cage.  The subjects were asked if they detected anything -- and at the same time, the EEG machine kept track of what was going on inside their skulls.

The results are fascinating.  The effect of the magnetic field shifts on the alpha waves was dramatic; you don't need a class in reading EEGs to see it.  What was equally interesting is that none of the test subjects reported being aware of any changes.  So even though there's a dramatic change in the brain waves, whatever effect that's having, if any, is happening on a completely subconscious level.

But it does mean the anecdotal stories about people's sensitivity to magnetic fields have at least a possible explanation.  It still doesn't mean those anecdotes are reliable -- that would take test subjects who were able to report a detectible change when the magnetic field shifted the wave pattern in their brains -- but it's a step in the right direction.

"Magnetoreception is a normal sensory system in animals, just like vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, gravity, temperature, and many others," Kirschvink said.  "All of these systems have specific cells that detect the photon, sound wave, or whatever, and send signals from them to the brain, as does a microphone or video camera connected to a computer.  But without the software in the computer, the microphone or video camera will not work.  We are saying that human neurophysiology evolved with a magnetometer—most likely based on magnetite—and the brain has extensive software to process the signals."

So this might be another one to add to the list of human senses, at least for some of us.  Whatever the results, it's certain that we're more finely-tuned to our environment than we realize -- and sensitive to stimuli to which we've always thought we were wholly insensate.

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a classic -- Martin Gardner's wonderful Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?

Gardner was a polymath of stupendous proportions, a mathematician, skeptic, and long-time writer of Scientific American's monthly feature "Mathematical Games."  He gained a wonderful reputation not only as a puzzle-maker but as a debunker of pseudoscience, and in this week's book he takes on some deserving targets -- numerology, UFOs, "alternative medicine," reflexology, and a host of others.

Gardner's prose is light, lucid, and often funny, but he skewers charlatans with the sharpness of a rapier.  His book is a must-read for anyone who wants to work toward a cure for gullibility -- a cure that is desperately needed these days.

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

An epidemic of lunacy

The news over the last few days has been nothing but COVID-19 over and over.  I understand it -- a pandemic on this scale is pretty stupendous -- but it's having the effect of making me not want to look at news sites.

The reason for that reluctance is not because I don't want to be informed, but because I'm tired of reading about people's idiotic responses to it.  Today the focus seemed to be on evangelical religious leaders, whose reactions are so absurd they beggar belief.  Here's a sampler:

• A group of pastors in Arkansas who think the virus doesn't exist, that it's an evil liberal plot to disparage Donald Trump.  "One pastor said half of his church is ready to lick the floor, to prove there’s no actual virus,” said John King, lead pastor at Second Baptist church in Conway, Arkansas, who unlike some of his fellow ministers, at least was urging his congregation to take precautions.  "In your more politically conservative regions, closing is not interpreted as caring for you.  It’s interpreted as liberalism, or buying into the hype."
• Evangelical blogger Lori Alexander, who says that God is using the coronavirus as a way of "pushing a lot of women back into their homes."  She adds that she "is not a hand washer" and treats her own respiratory illnesses with elderberry juice.
• Jerry Falwell, Jr., who we can always count on for some entertaining counterfactual nonsense, says that COVID-19 is a plot by the North Koreans and Chinese and at the same time a plot by Democrats to take down the Trump presidency, so he's not closing Liberty University because that'd be capitulating to the Forces of Evil.  On Fox & Friends (of course), he said, "The owner of a restaurant asked me last night, he said: do you remember the North Korean leader promised a Christmas present for America back in December?  Could it be they got together with China, and this is that present?  I don’t know, but it really is something strange going on... It’s — you know, impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller Report didn’t work, and Article 25 [sic] didn’t work.  And so maybe now, this is their next — their next attempt to get Trump."
• Two conservative religious leaders, Rabbi Meir Mazuz and Pastor Steven Andrew, are in agreement about the cause of COVID-19 -- it's God taking revenge on the world because of LGBTQ people.  "All nations are being afflicted," Mazuz said, "except for the Arab countries that don't have this evil inclination."  Neglecting the teensy problem that Iran is one of the hardest-hit countries, but people like Mazuz never let a little thing like facts get in the way.  Andrew agrees, saying, "God’s love shows it is urgent to repent, because the Bible teaches homosexuals lose their souls and God destroys LGBT societies."  Which certainly sounds like the textbook definition of "a loving God," doesn't it?  He goes on to say, "Obeying God protects the USA from diseases, such as the coronavirus...  Our safety is at stake, since national disobedience of God’s laws brings danger and diseases, such as coronavirus, but obeying God brings covenant protection."
• Then there's the Alabama pastor who went a step further, saying that people who test positive for the disease should come to his services, that he and the congregants shouldn't be afraid, because God and prayer and so on.  "I am somewhat moved over the fact that all it takes to disassemble God‘s church is the threat of sickness by germ spreading. It seems the early church wouldn’t have made very far with this type of timidity," said Chris Bartlett, leader of the Boaz Church of God.  "Our top priority is not primarily the safety and health of our members, but that they advance in faith and godliness even on occasions at the expense of their safety and well-being...  So with boldness of faith if you have the coronavirus or feel threatened by such, you are most welcome at Boaz Church of God Sunday morning at 10 AM.  We will gladly anoint the sick with oil and pray the prayer of faith over you!"
• Lastly, there's Guillermo Maldonado, of the King Jesus International Ministry of Kendall, Florida, who said there was nothing to worry about.  "Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus?  Of course not," Maldonado said, adding that even if he was wrong, "If we die, we die for Christ!"

For years the right-wing talking heads -- people like Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Falwell Sr. and Jr., Ann Coulter, and more recently, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham -- have been spreading the message that (1) you shouldn't believe the experts, (2) you shouldn't believe anything if Democrats agree with it, (3) everyone in the media is lying to you, and (4) conservative white Christians are being discriminated against, if not outright targeted for elimination.  What this has done is to create an entire group of people who are completely insulated from the facts.  Anything that happens is forced into this mold.  A pandemic?  The epidemiologists are lying.  The media are lying.  It's the evil Democrats trying to damage Dear Leader.  And besides, God will protect us even through adversity, so why bother following directives for isolation and quarantine, or even hand-washing?

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the World Health Organization]

What's ironic about all of this is that unless the pandemic dies down a lot faster than most experts believe it will, this group of people will be uniquely susceptible to infection.  You have to wonder what would happen if 90% of the congregation of one of these lunatics contracted COVID-19.

Nothing, is my guess.  People of this stripe seem to have as their motto, "Death before admitting I'm wrong."  And they don't see that the measures being recommended are intended to protect people, not to hamstring right-wing politicians, and that taking precautions not to infect yourself or others makes sense whether or not you believe in God.  After all, evangelical Christians still look both ways before they cross the street.

Or at least, I'm guessing they do.  The attitudes of the wackos mentioned above suggest that even that might be a stretch.

Let's hope that at least they don't take "Jesus, take the wheel!" literally.

Whether or not you're religious, a more sensible approach is the one recommended by Vermont-based clinical psychologist Lindsay Jernigan.  "Try this perspective shift," Jernigan said.  "Instead of seeing social distancing and travel bans as panic, try seeing them as acts of mass cooperation to protect the collective whole.  The plan is not about individuals going into hiding.  It's a global deep breath, an agreement among humans around the planet to be still.  Be still, in hopes that the biggest wave can pass without engulfing too many of the vulnerable amongst us."

But I'm guessing even that would fall on deaf ears.  The words "collective whole" would come up, and after that, the aforementioned wingnuts would hear only "socialism liberal plot hurr durr" and that'd be that.

You can't win, not against a wall of disinformation that's been built up this carefully for this long.  I can only hope that the human cost of these decades of anti-intellectual propaganda won't be too high.

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a classic -- Martin Gardner's wonderful Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?

Gardner was a polymath of stupendous proportions, a mathematician, skeptic, and long-time writer of Scientific American's monthly feature "Mathematical Games."  He gained a wonderful reputation not only as a puzzle-maker but as a debunker of pseudoscience, and in this week's book he takes on some deserving targets -- numerology, UFOs, "alternative medicine," reflexology, and a host of others.

Gardner's prose is light, lucid, and often funny, but he skewers charlatans with the sharpness of a rapier.  His book is a must-read for anyone who wants to work toward a cure for gullibility -- a cure that is desperately needed these days.

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

Play ball!

The phenomenon of sports is a funny thing, isn't it?

I say this even though there are sports I thoroughly enjoy.  I've rooted wildly at many a Cornell University hockey game.  I always make a point of watching the Olympics, especially ski jumping and short-track speed skating (in winter), and the track and field events (in summer).  I don't currently participate in a team sport -- but even my favorite athletic activity, running, becomes a great deal more fun when I'm in an actual race.

Not that I ever win, mind you.  I like running, but that doesn't mean I'm fast.  I doubt I'll be in contention for a medal until I'm in the "Men Ninety and Over" group, and if at that point I'm still running at all, I'll feel pretty damn good about it even if (1) I'm the only person in that category, and (2) I come in last.

But the whole phenomenon of sports is a little peculiar, if you picture trying to explain it to an alien intelligence.  The conversation might go as follows:

You: So, there's this ball, and it's kicked around in a field, and you're trying to get it into the net. 

Alien: Why? 

You: Because that's how you score points.  Oh, and nobody can use their hands except the ones standing in front of the net. 

Alien: But doesn't that make it harder? 

You: Yes.  That's why they do it that way.  And each team is trying to get control of the ball and kick it toward their opponent's net. 

Alien: So the people on each team want the ball? 

You: Yes. 

Alien: Why don't they just give each team member their own ball? 

You: Because that's against the rules. 

Alien (radioing the mother ship): You were right, there's no intelligent life down here.  As soon as I beam up, vaporize the planet.

One possible explanation is that sports act as a proxy for warfare.  We can form tribes and vie for something pointless, and frequently beat the absolute shit out of each other, and at the end everyone goes home more or less intact.  As author Jonathan Haidt put it in his wonderful TED Talk "The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives," "This behavior is deeply rooted in our tribal psychology, and it... is so deeply pleasurable to us that even when we don't have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it's fun.  Sports is to war as pornography is to sex; we get to exercise some ancient drives."

However odd it is, sports is ubiquitous.  As far as I've heard, anthropologists have found something in the way of team or individual sports competitions in every culture studied.  But if you think we take sports seriously here in the United States, consider the Aztecs.

The Aztecs played a sport called ullamaliztli.  It looked a little like a weird amalgam of soccer and basketball -- there was a stone ring at each end of a court, and players were trying to get a heavy rubber ball through the ring.  But like soccer, they couldn't use their hands -- they hit the ball with their hips.

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Photograph: Manuel Aguilar-Moreno / CSULA Ulama Project, Ulama 37 (Aguilar), CC BY 2.5]

Now I don't know about you, but the idea of swiveling my hips so fast I could strike a rubber ball hard enough to propel it through a stone ring eight feet off the ground is so far out of the realm of possibility that I have a hard time even picturing it.  Archaeologists have found evidence that in some forms of the game bats, rackets, or the players' forearms were allowed, but to be honest, we really don't know much about the rules.  There's a form called ulama (the word comes directly from the Nahuatl name referenced above) still played in a few communities in Mexico, but no one knows if the rules are the same as the traditional game as it was played centuries ago.

It is known, however, to be a seriously rough sport.  Apparently ulama players are constantly covered with bruises from the hard rubber ball.  Still, it's not as bad as it used to be.  Aztec ball games frequently ended with human sacrifice -- whether of the losing or winning team or both is unknown.  (Being sacrificed to the gods was apparently considered an honor at some points during Aztec history, so competing to vie for who gets his heart cut out is not out of the realm of possibility.)

And it's been going on for a long time.  The reason this particular topic comes up is that this week a paper appeared in Science Advances that a ball court was uncovered by archaeologists in Etlatongo in the hills of southern Mexico that is 3,400 years old.

"The discovery of a formal ball court [at Etlatongo] … shows that some of the earliest villages and towns in highland Mexico were playing a game comparable to the most prestigious version of the sport known as ullamalitzli some three millennia later by the Aztecs," said Boston University archaeologist David Carballo, commenting on the study (he did not participate in the research). "This could be the oldest and longest-lived team ball game in the world."

For some reason, the Etlatongo ball court was burned, some time between 1174 and 1102 B.C.E.  Charred clay figurines of ball players have been found at the site, as well both human and non-human animal bones.  It's impossible to tell from what was found why the site was burned, but just the idea that this place has evidence of a 3,400 year old sport is pretty amazing.

You have to wonder how long evidence of our own sports would last in our absence.  Stadiums, courts of various sorts, ball fields... it's hard to see how any of them would clue in future archaeologists about what sorts of games we played and watched, even if they survived long enough to be recognizable.  Maybe kids' sports action figures would have a better chance, leaving the researchers a thousand years hence trying to puzzle out rules to our sports from the attire and stance of the players, captured in plastic.

A little like what we're doing with clay figurines left behind from the Mesoamerican ball games played more than three millennia ago.  Which shows that our penchant for competing over pointless stuff is very far from recent vintage.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a classic -- Martin Gardner's wonderful Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?

Gardner was a polymath of stupendous proportions, a mathematician, skeptic, and long-time writer of Scientific American's monthly feature "Mathematical Games."  He gained a wonderful reputation not only as a puzzle-maker but as a debunker of pseudoscience, and in this week's book he takes on some deserving targets -- numerology, UFOs, "alternative medicine," reflexology, and a host of others.

Gardner's prose is light, lucid, and often funny, but he skewers charlatans with the sharpness of a rapier.  His book is a must-read for anyone who wants to work toward a cure for gullibility -- a cure that is desperately needed these days.

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

Wibbly-wobbly...

Have I told you my favorite joke?

Heisenberg and Schrödinger are out for a drive, and a cop pulls them over.

The cop says to Heisenberg, who was driving, "Hey, buddy, do you know how fast you were going?"

Heisenberg says, "No, but I know exactly where I am."

The cop says, "You were doing 70 miles per hour!"

Heisenberg throws his hands up in annoyance and says, "Great!  Now I'm lost."

The cop scowls and says, "Okay, if you're going to be a wiseguy, I'm gonna search your car."  So he opens the trunk, and there's a dead cat inside.

The cop says, "Did you know there's a dead cat in your trunk?"

Schrödinger says, "Well, there is now."

*brief pause so you can all stop chortling*

The indeterminate nature of reality at the smallest scales always tends to make people shake their head in wonderment at how completely weird the universe is, if they don't simply disbelieve it entirely.  The Uncertainty Principle, peculiar as it sounds, is a fact.  It isn't a limitation of our measurement technique, as if you were trying to find the size of something small and had a poorly-marked ruler, so you could get a more accurate number if you found a better one.  This is something fundamental and built-in about reality.  There are pairs of measurements for which precision is mutually exclusive, such as velocity and position -- the more accurate your information is about one of them, the less you can even theoretically know about the other.

Likewise, the collapse of the wave function, which gave rise to the story of the famous (but ill-fated) cat, is an equally counterintuitive part of how reality is put together.  Outcomes of purely physical questions -- such as where a particular electron is at a given time -- are probabilities, and only become certainties when you measure them.  Again, this isn't a problem with measurement; it's not that the electron really is in a specific location, and you just don't know for sure where until you look.  Before you measure it, the electron's reality is that it's a spread-out field of probabilities.  Something about interacting with it using a measuring device makes that field of probabilities collapse into a specific location -- and no one knows exactly why.

But if you want your mind blown further -- last week in a paper in Physical Review Letters we found out how long it takes.

It turns out the wave function collapse isn't instantaneous.  In "Tracking the Dynamics of an Ideal Quantum Measurement," by a team led by Fabian Pokorny of Stockholm University, the researchers describe a set of experiments involving "nudging" a strontium atom with a laser to induce the electrons to switch orbits (i.e. making them assume a particular energy, which is one of those quantum-indeterminate things like position).  The fidelity of the measurement goes down to the millionths of a second, so the scientists were able to keep track of what happened in fantastically short time intervals.

And the more they homed in on what the electron was doing, the fuzzier things got.  The theory is that as you get down on those scales, time itself becomes blurred -- so the shorter the time interval, the less certain you are about when exactly something happened.

"People assume that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear non-subjective viewpoint, it's more of a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey... stuff." -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"

I don't know about you, but I thought I had kinda sorta wrapped my brain around the quantum indeterminacy of position thing, but this just blew my mind all over again.  Even time is fuzzy?  I shouldn't be surprised; for something so damn familiar, time itself is really poorly understood.  With all of the spatial dimensions, you can move any direction you want; why is time one-way?  It's been explained using the Second Law of Thermodynamics, looking at ordered states and disordered states -- the explanation goes something like this:

Start with an ordered state, such as a hundred pennies all heads-up.  Give them a quick shake.  A few will flip, but not many.  Now you might have 83 heads and 17 tails.  There are a great many possible ways you could have 83 heads and 17 tails as long as you don't care which pennies are which.  Another shake, and it might be 74/26, a configuration that there are even more possibilities for.  And so on.  Since at each turn there are a huge number of possible disordered states and a smaller number of ordered ones, each time you perturb the system, you are much more likely to decrease orderliness than to increase it.  You might shake a 50/50 distribution of pennies and end up with all heads -- but it's so fantastically unlikely that the probability might as well be zero.  This push toward disorder gives an arrow to the direction of time.

Well, that's all well and good, but there's also the problem I wrote about last week, about physical processes being symmetrical -- there are a great many of them that are completely time-reversible.  Consider, for example, watching a ten-second clip of a single billiard ball bouncing off the side of a pool table.  Could you tell if you were watching the clip backward or forwards?  It's unlikely.  Such interactions look as sensible physically in real time or time-reversed.

So what time actually is, and why there's an arrow of time, is still a mystery.  Because we certainly feel the passage of time, don't we?  And not from any probabilistic perception of "well, I guess it's more likely time's flowing this way today because things have gotten more disorderly."  It feels completely real -- and completely fixed and invariable.

As Einstein put it, "The distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, but it is a stubbornly persistent one."

Anyhow, that's our bizarre scientific discovery of the day.  But I better get this post finished up.  Time's a wasting.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a classic -- Martin Gardner's wonderful Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?

Gardner was a polymath of stupendous proportions, a mathematician, skeptic, and long-time writer of Scientific American's monthly feature "Mathematical Games."  He gained a wonderful reputation not only as a puzzle-maker but as a debunker of pseudoscience, and in this week's book he takes on some deserving targets -- numerology, UFOs, "alternative medicine," reflexology, and a host of others.

Gardner's prose is light, lucid, and often funny, but he skewers charlatans with the sharpness of a rapier.  His book is a must-read for anyone who wants to work toward a cure for gullibility -- a cure that is desperately needed these days.

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

A celestial haystack

Today's cool science story is remarkable not only for the discovery the researchers made, but the extraordinary way in which they made it.

First, a little background.

In the earliest days of astronomy, skywatchers noticed that some of the points of light up there didn't behave like the others.  Instead of being fixed into position relative to one another, they shifted night to night and season to season.  The Greeks called these ἀστέρες πλανῆται, "astéres planetai, wandering stars" -- so our word "planet" translates loosely to "wanderer."

It took a long while to figure out exactly why this was happening, a process confounded by the ancients' determination that the skies be a place that was unchanging and eternal.  But once Copernicus and Kepler and the gang sorted out how things actually worked, it became obvious that the planets' apparent movement was because they were so much closer than the stars.  And other bodies in orbit around the Sun -- comets and asteroids, for example -- did the same thing.  This provided astronomers a method for finding hitherto-unknown bodies in the Solar System.

Look for a point of light that appears to move against the backdrop of distant stars, and you've found something that's (relatively) close by, and moving with respect to the Sun.

That's how the thousands of known asteroids and hundreds of known comets were discovered -- a painstaking study of the night skies, looking for something that's in one position today and a different one tomorrow.  It's how the remarkable object 'Oumuamua (the name means "advance scout" in Hawaiian) was discovered, the first verified object of interstellar origin to trek its way through the Solar System -- and which is almost certainly of completely natural origin, despite the wishes of those of us who grew up reading Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama.

As the bigger and nearer (and therefore brighter) objects are discovered, though, finding any remaining ones becomes increasingly difficult.  A typical view of the night sky in a decent telescope looks like this:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Now, imagine that your task is to compare this photograph to one exactly like it except for the fact that one of the fainter dots has moved a couple of millimeters.

That's what comet-hunters are up against.

All of that is background on today's amazing discovery, which is that astronomers at the University of Pennsylvania have combed through six years of data from the Dark Energy Survey Project, and have identified no less than three hundred "trans-Neptunian objects" -- dwarf planets, asteroids, and comets that orbit beyond Neptune.  In some cases, way beyond -- they found "TNOs" that were ninety times the distance of the Earth from the Sun (three times further away than Neptune itself is).

The way they did this is mind-boggling.  They started with seven billion objects in photographs -- dots of light, really -- and using sophisticated image-analysis software, eliminated any that were obviously not shifting position.  This whittled it down to a mere 22 million.  They then used the software in a giant game of connect-the-dots -- linked objects to two nearby ones to form a triangle, then checked to see if the triangle changed size or configuration from night to night.  After all was said and done, they identified three hundred out of the original seven billion that aren't stars, but small objects in orbit around the Sun out past the orbit of Neptune.

This gives the phrase "needle in a haystack" new meaning, doesn't it?

The most amazing thing about this is that the data they've collected and analyzed will be invaluable for astronomers looking for much larger objects circling the Sun much farther away.  Now that the TNOs have been identified, keeping track of their positions will allow for calculation of their orbits, so it will be possible to see if any are being "gravitationally perturbed" by larger objects out there.  This was the way Alexis Bouvard discovered Neptune -- small disturbances in the motion of Uranus clued him and others in to the possibility that there was another planet out there pulling on it, deflecting it from its predicted path.  Now we've got three hundred possible sources of data to use as a means to locate other larger objects that may be out there.

"There are lots of ideas about giant planets that used to be in the solar system and aren't there anymore, or planets that are far away and massive but too faint for us to have noticed yet," said study co-author Gary Bernstein.  "Making the catalog is the fun discovery part.  Then when you create this resource; you can compare what you did find to what somebody's theory said you should find."

Which is all kind of stunning to me.  Our level of sophistication in studying the skies has increased so dramatically in the last twenty years that new and fascinating discoveries are being made nearly on a daily basis.  It also makes me wonder what else is out there still to discover -- surely worlds upon worlds, out there in the vastness of space, just waiting for us to find them.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new: Brian Greene's wonderful Until the End of Time.

Greene is that wonderful combination, a brilliant scientist and a lucid, gifted writer for the scientifically-inclined layperson.  He'd already knocked my socks off with his awesome The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos (the latter was made into an equally good four-part miniseries).

Greene doesn't shy away from difficult topics, tackling such subjects as relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nature of time.  Here, Greene takes on the biggest questions of all -- where the universe came from, how it has evolved and is evolving, and how it's going to end.

He begins with an observation that as a species, we're obsessed with the ideas of mortality and eternity, and -- likely unique amongst known animals -- spend a good part of our mental energy outside of "the now," pondering the arrow of time and what its implications are.  Greene takes a lens to this obsession from the standpoint of physics, looking at what we know and what we've inferred about the universe from its beginnings in the Big Bang to its ultimate silent demise in the "Heat Death" some billions or trillions of years in the future.

It's definitely a book that takes a wide focus, very likely the widest focus an author could take.  And in Greene's deft hands, it's a voyage through time you don't want to miss.

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