A signal from our neighborhood

I try to keep my rational brain engaged, but man, sometimes it's hard going.

Like when I read the story that popped up over at Scientific American last Friday.  My ears perked up at the very first line: "It's never aliens, until it is."

Written by Jonathan O'Callaghan and Lee Billings, it tells about a recent discovery made by "Breakthrough Listen," the search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence program launched by entrepreneur Yuri Milner in 2015.  Despite scanning the skies for five years looking for something that might be a sign of alien intelligence, Breakthrough Listen hasn't found anything that couldn't be explained using ordinary astrophysics...

... until now.

Maybe.  I hate to add that word, but... "rational brain engaged," and all.  There's a lot that's exciting about what they discovered, not least that the signal they found comes from Proxima Centauri -- the nearest star to the Sun, right in our own neighborhood at only 4.2 light years' distance.  (Okay, I probably shouldn't say "only."  4.2 light years is about 25,000,000,000,000 miles.  One of the fastest spacecraft ever made by humans, Voyager 2, would still take 73,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri -- if it were heading that way, which it's not.)

The proximity of the signal's source is hardly the only exciting thing about it.  After all, the universe has plenty of radio sources, and all the ones we've found so far have purely prosaic explanations.  The signal is weirdly compressed, occupying a narrow band of frequencies centering around 982 megahertz.  Interestingly, this is a frequency range that is usually fairly empty of transmissions, which is one of the reasons the signal stood out, and decreases the likelihood that it's some kind of human-made source being picked up accidentally.  "We don’t know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single bin in frequency,” said astrophysicist Andrew Siemion, who is on the team that analyzed the signal.  "Perhaps, some as-yet-unknown exotic quirk of plasma physics could be a natural explanation for the tantalizingly concentrated radio waves, but for the moment, the only source that we know of is technological."

The "tantalizing" part is that we know for sure that Proxima Centauri has at least one Earth-like planet -- Proxima b, which is 1.2 times the size of the Earth, and orbits its star in eleven days.  (If that doesn't sound very Earth-like, remember that Proxima Centauri, as a red dwarf, is a lot less massive than the Sun, so its "Goldilocks zone" -- the band of orbital distances that are "just right" for the temperatures to allow liquid water" -- is a lot closer in, and the planets in that region travel a lot faster.)  Red dwarf stars are prone to solar flares, so some of the more pessimistic astrophysicists have suggested that the radiation flux and general turbulence would destroy any nearby planets' atmosphere, or at least shower the surface with sufficient ionizing radiation to prevent the development of complex biochemistry, let alone life.

But it's important to realize that this, too, is a surmise.  Truthfully, we don't know what's down there on Proxima b -- just that it's got a rocky surface and a temperature range that would allow for liquid oceans, rivers, and lakes.

Just like here.

In short, finding a suspicious radio signal from the nearest star to our own is pretty amazing, even if I *wince* *grimace* keep my rational brain engaged.

The fact is, even the scientists -- normally the most cautious of individuals -- are sounding impressed by this.  "It’s the most exciting signal that we’ve found in the Breakthrough Listen project, because we haven’t had a signal jump through this many of our filters before," said Sofia Sheikh of Pennsylvania State University, who led the team that analyzed the signal and is the lead author on an paper describing it, scheduled for publication this spring.

Honestly forces me to add that there's one bit of information about the signal that points away from it being a technosignature: unlike the signal detected at the beginning of the movie Contact, it has no internal fine structure.  “BLC1 [Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1] is, for all intents and purposes, just a tone, just one note," Siemion says.  "It has absolutely no additional features that we can discern at this point."

But even the doubters are saying it's worthy of further study.  "If it’s an ETI it must eventually be replicable, because it’s unlikely it would be a one-off,” said Shami Chatterjee, a radio astronomer at Cornell University.  "If an independent team at an independent observatory can recover the same signal, then hell yes.  I would bet money that they won’t, but I would love to be wrong."

So would a lot of us, Dr. Chatterjee.  I know we've had other strange signals before, stretching all the way back to the beginnings of radio astronomy and the discovery of incredibly rapid-fire "blinking" of a radio source discovered at Jodrell Bank by astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967.  That one also elicited the comment of "we don't know a natural process that could generate such fast oscillation" -- and the source was actually nicknamed "LGM" (Little Green Men) until Burnell showed that the signal was coming from a pulsar, a rapidly-spinning neutron star.

So it was bizarre, perhaps, but not a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence.

In any case, I'll be eagerly awaiting replication and confirmation of the discovery.  Even if it doesn't turn out to be aliens *heavy sigh* it'll probably turn out to be something interesting.  But until then... well, I guess it's premature to request transport to the mother ship, but I can still keep hoping.

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Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

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

Frozen lightning

Regular readers of Skeptophilia will recognize the name Andrew Butters, my fellow blogger over at the wonderful Potato Chip Math.  Andrew and I are so much alike that mutual friends suspect we were twins separated at birth.  Besides both being bloggers, we are both novelists, were both physics majors (degrees we completed despite the fact that, to put it bluntly, we both kind of sucked at it), both have seriously demented senses of humor, and both love weird and arcane science stuff.

It's this last commonality that has earned Andrew mention in Skeptophilia more than once, because he frequently passes along science news articles he runs across, and a good many of these have ended up here.  And today I once again give him my tip o' the hat for sending me a link to a story from Science about some recent research on the topic of fulgurites.

What's a fulgurite, you might ask?  The -ite ending might clue you in to surmise correctly that we're talking about some sort of mineral.  Fulgurite isn't just some ordinary garden-variety rock, though.  Fulgurites are formed when lightning strikes the ground, discharging into soil that has a high mineral (and low organic matter) content.  When this occurs, an electrical potential difference of as much as a hundred million volts is bridged.

This is what physicists call "a hell of a big short circuit."  Lightning releases all the energy stored in that potential in a fraction of a second.  The column of air through which the current passes superheats, generating the light flash and booming shock wave we associate with a nearby strike.

But it doesn't expend all its stored energy on its passage through the air.  As the current dissipates in the ground, it generates so much heat that it melts the minerals in the soil, when then fuse together into a twisted tube of glass that charts the pattern the lightning bolt took once it struck.

Fulgurites [Image licensed under the Creative Commons John Alan Elson, Fulgsdcrb, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The topic comes up because the article Andrew sent me a couple of days ago is about a geologist, Jonathan Castro, at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, who came up with the novel idea of using fulgurites to chart ancient climate trends.  Fulgurites are often found near mountaintops -- the peak of Mount Shasta, for example, is pitted with them, the rock blackened and scarred from the hundreds of hits the mountain has taken.  Castro found that when a fulgurite forms, it evaporates all the water in the glass chunk formed; the fulgurite then begins to take up water again at a slow and steady rate, so the water content in the pores of the glass can give you a good idea of when it formed.

Not only does this serve to date lightning strike frequency -- and thus give data about the paleoclimate -- it also can be used to time the advance and retreat of glaciers.  A strike onto a thick layer of ice would cause shock cracks and melting, but in short order there'd be no trace left of it.  Once the glacier retreats and exposes bare rock surfaces, though, any strikes would cause the formation of long-lasting fulgurites.

So, fossilized frozen lightning.

Reading about this sort of thing always makes me realize something I never thought about during the years of my abortive attempt to launch a career in scientific research.  Research depends not only on technical know-how and a solid background in your subject, it depends hugely on creativity -- the capacity for coming up with a way of tackling the question at hand in a novel way.  When I read about Castro's use of fulgurites to date the movement of glaciers, my first thought was, "I never would have thought of doing that."  It's not just that I'm not a geologist -- and actually, because of growing up around my rockhound dad, I knew about fulgurites before reading the article -- I just can't imagine being scientifically creative enough to put fulgurites together with glaciers together with water uptake rates by glass and come up with a new lens on the climate ten-thousand-odd years ago.

But I have the utmost respect for anyone whose brain does work that way.  When Andrew sent me the link, my response was, "Okay, that is just cool."  And it once more points at something I've said many times before; if you're interested in science -- even if you were kind of a washout as a physics student -- you'll never, ever be bored.

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

If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

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

Racing with death

Before I run a race, I have to give myself a serious pep talk, because I'm the kind of person who always assumes the worst.  Although I've run many races without mishap, there's always this haunting thought in the back of my head that this is going to be the one where I faint or puke or fall down and tear both of my Achilles tendons or get run over by a car.

Just a cockeyed optimist, that's me.

Me, attempting not to die.  In this case, there was actually a significant chance of it, because it was about 93 F and the humidity usually found in a sauna.  More than one person collapsed on the course.  I made it to the finish line.  Then I collapsed.

So it was with great interest that I read an article in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology a friend sent me, suggesting that my errant and morbid brain might actually be onto something.  In a paper entitled "He Dies, He Scores: Evidence that Reminders of Death Motivate Improved Performance in Basketball," Colin A. Zestcott, Uri Lifshin, Peter Helm, and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona's Department of Psychology have shown that thinking about death prior to a competition may actually make an athlete perform better.  The authors write:

This research applied insights from terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) to the world of sport.  According to TMT, self-esteem buffers against the potential for death anxiety.  Because sport allows people to attain self-esteem, reminders of death may improve performance in sport.  In Study 1, a mortality salience induction led to improved performance in a “one-on-one” basketball game.  In Study 2, a subtle death prime led to higher scores on a basketball shooting task, which was associated with increased task related self-esteem.  These results may promote our understanding of sport and provide a novel potential way to improve athletic performance.

Some participants were given cheerful directives like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead," and those who didn't break down into sobs were instructed to take some shots on the basketball court.  Surprisingly, these players scored better than ones who were directed to think about the game itself, with prompts like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of playing basketball arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you play basketball."

So the time-honored method of coaches telling their players to keep their mind on the game might not have as much of a beneficial effect as if they said, "Have you pondered your own mortality lately?"

Author Lifshin explains why he thinks they got the results they did.  "Your subconscious tries to find ways to defeat death, to make death not a problem, and the solution is self-esteem.  Self-esteem gives you a feeling that you're part of something bigger, that you have a chance for immortality, that you have meaning, that you're not just a sack of meat...  When we're threatened with death, we're motivated to regain that protective sense of self-esteem, and when you like basketball and you're out on the basketball court, winning and performing well is the ultimate way to gain self-esteem."

Apparently even a subtle suggestion worked.  When Lifshin wore a shirt with a human skull on it while working with test subjects, "Participants who saw the shirt outperformed those who did not by approximately 30 percent.  They also attempted more shots — an average of 11.85 per minute versus an average of 8.33 by those who did not see the shirt...  They took more shots, better shots, and they hustled more and ran faster."

So maybe my incessant focus on the worst-case scenario is a good thing.  And whether or not my attitude has anything to do with it, I've been pretty pleased with my running performance lately, especially since just last week I finished a 400-mile virtual run, a fundraiser for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, in 88 days.  Unfortunately, because of COVID, I've been mostly running alone, so no one was around to give me a high five afterward except my dog, and he would probably have been equally enthusiastic if all I'd done was walk to the end of the driveway and back.

Even if pessimism may make your athletic performance better, I can't say it's a pleasant attitude to have, and I've tried to adopt a sunnier outlook whenever possible.  I'm not sure my natural bent will be that easy to eradicate, however, and given the research by Zestcott et al., maybe it's better just to embrace it and run each race as if it'll be my last.

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

If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

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

The Wall Street Journal strikes back

On Monday I wrote in response to Joseph Epstein's commentary about Dr. Jill Biden's Ed.D., in which he called it "comical" and "fraudulent."  The snarky, smirking, dismissive editorial was little more than a message that women who get uppity need to be put in their place and not rise above their station.  I ended by recommending that the Wall Street Journal issue a retraction and an apology, that such a sexist, patronizing screed was far beneath what should be acceptable in a major publication, even in the "Opinion" section.

I wasn't the only one.  Criticism was leveled at the WSJ and Epstein from a variety of sources.  Most of them included some kind of appeal that the WSJ repudiate the stance Epstein took, and hoped that its leaders would recognize the ugly message it was sending.

We should have known better.

Yesterday Paul Gigot, the chief editor of the WSJ's editorial page, wrote a rebuttal to the people who had criticized Epstein and the WSJ's choice to publish his piece, and predictably doubled down on his being justified in doing so.  In the process, he comes off sounding nearly as smug and chauvinistic as Epstein himself.  A particularly blatant example:

Why go to such lengths to highlight a single op-ed on a relatively minor issue?  My guess is that the Biden team concluded it was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message to critics as it prepares to take power.  There’s nothing like playing the race or gender card to stifle criticism.  It’s the left’s version of Donald Trump’s “enemy of the people” tweets.

There's a lot to unpack in this short paragraph.  

First, the dismissal of women and minorities in academia is hardly a "minor issue."  Easy, perhaps, for it to seem minor to rich white men like Gigot and Epstein; but if you want a different perspective, all you'd have to do is talk to one of the many women and/or minorities who have had to fight with everything they have in order to achieve and maintain their positions.  Even once they've succeeded, women (not only in academia but in the corporate world) face sexism and outright sexual harassment, the majority of which goes unreported.

Like I said: ask a woman who's risen to the top of her field.  I'd bet cold hard cash she'd corroborate what I'm saying.

Paul Gigot [Image licensed under the Wikimedia Commons Grant Wickes from Plano, TX (Dallas), USA, Paul Gigot in 2015, CC BY 2.0]

Second, it's really convenient that Gigot ascribes the criticism to "the Biden team," as if the only way anyone could object to what Epstein said was if (s)he was some kind of Biden operative.  (If that's the case, I should put it out there that I still haven't received my Shill Check™ from the team.)  It might be hard for you to imagine, Mr. Gigot, but people sometimes have well-considered opinions that have nothing to do with political posturing.

Then there's the whole "cancel culture" and "race or gender card" thing.  Those phrases (and also "politically correct") have become dogwhistles that at their heart mean "I should be able to say any damn thing I want, however demeaning or offensive, and be immune to criticism for it."  It's a perversion of the First Amendment; "free speech" doesn't mean "freedom from any consequences for what I say."  If you say something bigoted, you don't nullify any criticism you receive by dismissing it as "cancel culture."

Then there's his equating the criticism of Epstein's article with Donald Trump's "enemy of the people" tweets.  If Mr. Gigot sees an equivalence between people objecting to one editorial in one journal as demeaning and offensive, and Trump's calling media and journalists as a whole "the enemy of the people," it's probably pointless to try to explain it to him, so I'll leave it at pointing out that Trump's wholesale condemnation of any media pointing any criticism in his direction led to indiscriminate violence and threats against journalists.  Honestly, Trump's "enemy of the people" tweets are in spirit far less like the people who criticized Epstein than they are like Gigot's defense of him.

At the end of his rebuttal, Gigot wrote something that made me laugh out loud, and simultaneously wonder how anyone could take him seriously:

Many readers said Mr. Epstein’s use of "kiddo" is demeaning, but then Joe Biden is also fond of that locution.  In his 2012 Democratic convention speech he even used it to refer to his wife in the context of his many proposals of marriage: "I don’t know what I would have done, kiddo, had you on that fifth time said no."

So he honestly sees no difference between how a man refers to his spouse and how others refer to her?  My wife calls me "sweetie" and "honey," but I'd rightly be a little perturbed (not to mention puzzled) if someone wrote a newspaper article about me and used those terms.  As I pointed out on Monday, we have here a turn of phrase that no one would dream of directing at a cis/het white male, and yet is supposed to be A-OK when a cis/het white male directs it toward a woman.  Once again, I'd ask you to talk to any women you know who are in academia or the corporate world, and ask them if they've been talked down to in this fashion -- and how it makes dismissal of their opinions and accomplishments seem somehow acceptable.

Like I said, it was probably a forlorn hope that Gigot (or anyone else at the WSJ) would back down on their decision to publish Epstein's article.  I thought maybe, just maybe, someone in charge would recognize that it's time we call out such condescending and patronizing attitudes as deserving of relegation to the dustbin along with racism and homophobia and any of the other ways that cis/het white males have maintained the power differential in their favor.

All Gigot proved in his rebuttal is that we've still got a very long way to go.

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

If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

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

Imaging behavior

When I first started teaching biology -- thirty-four years ago, which kind of seems impossible to me -- I always prefaced any discussion of fossils and extinct animals by emphasizing what fossils don't tell us.

"All the kids' books about prehistoric animals," I told my classes, "illustrate what the living animals looked like by making inferences based on current species.  A hundred years ago, the paleontologists thought of the dinosaurs as being big lizards; in fact, the word dinosaur comes from the Greek words for 'terrible lizard.'  Since that time we've discovered their relationship to birds, and it seems like there were a number of species covered with feathers, not scales.  The truth is, we have extraordinarily limited information about what the dinosaurs looked like from the outside, and almost nothing in the way of knowledge about their behavior.  Fossils just don't give us that information."

Well, I was wrong.

Maybe not in general; your average triceratops thigh bone doesn't tell you anything about the color of the animal it came from.  But paleontologists are getting better and better at figuring out amazing detail about the appearance and behavior of prehistoric animals using nothing but the preserved bones, and some astonishingly sensitive equipment to study them with.

Take the recent study of a wonderfully well-preserved skull of Thecodontosaurus, which lived about 205 million years ago and was an earlier cousin of such behemoths as Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus.  Thecodontosaurus itself wasn't that big -- about 1.5 meters tip-to-tail -- and little was known about its appearance and behavior, even such broad-brush features as whether it was bipedal or quadrupedal.

We now have some much better data to work from, thanks to a paper that appeared in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society last week.  A team made up of Antonio Ballell, J. Logan King, Emily Rayfield, and Michael Benton (of the University of Bristol) and James Neenan (of Oxford Univeristy) did a phenomenally detailed study of the skull, which was itself found near Bristol.  Using a combination of CT scans and imaging software, they reconstructed what the animal's brain -- long since decayed away -- looked like.

And from that, to determine how it behaved while it was alive.

"Even though the actual brain is long gone, the software allows us to recreate brain and inner ear shape via the dimensions of the cavities left behind," study lead author Antonio Ballell said, in a press release in Phys.org.  "The braincase of Thecodontosaurus is beautifully preserved so we compared it to other dinosaurs, identifying common features and some that are specific to Thecodontosaurus.  Its brain cast even showed the detail of the floccular lobes, located at the back of the brain, which are important for balance.  Their large size indicate it was bipedal.  This structure is also associated with the control of balance and eye and neck movements, suggesting Thecodontosaurus was relatively agile and could keep a stable gaze while moving fast...  This could also mean Thecodontosaurus could occasionally catch prey, although its tooth morphology suggests plants were the main component of its diet.  It's possible it adopted omnivorous habits."

Amazingly, all this was done without removing the skull from the rock that encased it, a process that often damages fine structures even if the researchers are as careful as possible while extracting it.  The CT scanner was able to see not only inside the rock but inside the skull itself, distinguishing the fossil from the sedimentary rock outside and inside, and the imaging software helped to clarify minuscule details of the interior of the brain case -- and thus details of the brain it once enclosed.

Study co-author Michael Benton said, "It's great to see how new technologies are allowing us to find out even more about how this little dinosaur lived more than 200 million years ago."

Thinking about prehistory has been a positive fascination of mine since I was a kid, and I remember how disappointed I was to find out that all the stripy and spotted and colorful pictures in my dinosaur books were "artists' renditions" -- i.e., made up and very probably wrong.  We're still not there with color, yet, although a single feather from Eocoracias, a kingfisher-relative that lived 47 million years ago, was so well-preserved that scientists were able to make a shrewd guess that it was blue in color, like many of its modern relatives.

We still have a long way to go, and it's likely that the ravages of time have erased the vast majority of the information that could clue us in on prehistoric animal behavior and appearance.  The fact that we can ascertain anything is itself remarkable.  And I'd wager that if we ever do time-travel back to the distant past, we'd be in for some serious surprises at how different everyone looked than the way we'd always pictured them.

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

If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

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

Midnight, the Proud Boys, and the lure of the mob

In the brilliant but devastating Doctor Who episode "Midnight," the Doctor is on a sightseeing expedition that turns deadly when an alien attacks the "space train," and takes over the body of one of the passengers.

The increasing sophistication of the alien -- whose real form we never see -- as it gradually learns to operate the body of the passenger it has hijacked is one of the most chilling progressions the series ever conceived.  The character of Sky Silvestri is played to the absolute hilt by actress Lesley Sharp, and her riveting portrayal of an intelligence that is intrinsically hostile to other life forms is the stuff of nightmares.

By far the scariest thing about the episode, however, is how the other passengers react.  Doctor Who doesn't often flinch from showing us the ugly side of humanity, and here is mob psychology at its absolute worst -- looking for someone to blame for what has happened, and unfortunately landing on the wrong person.  The result is near catastrophe, and the resolution of the story one of the most poignant and disturbing scenes I've ever watched.  (Ask any Whovian about the line "The Hostess -- what was her name?" and you'll be sure to get a reaction, as well as possibly depressing them for the rest of the day.)

The force of mob psychology has been much on my mind since the riots in Washington, D.C. this past weekend resulted in twenty-three arrests and four people hospitalized with stab wounds.  The #StopTheSteal rallying cry, based upon zero-evidence, entirely bogus claims by Donald Trump and his cronies, spurred far-right groups like the "Proud Boys" to stage demonstrations in downtown D.C., and of course -- undoubtedly what Trump wanted -- the demonstrators clashed with counter-protestors.  (If you doubt my labeling the claims of election fraud as "bogus," explain how those same claims have resulted in almost sixty lawsuits, all but one of which was shot down, including two unanimous 9-0 votes by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court.  Apparently no judge is willing to jeopardize her/his career and reputation supporting a lawsuit with zero evidence to support it, even judges appointed by Donald Trump himself.)

It seems like all you have to do is get a sufficient number of people together, and the psychology of the crowd takes over and accomplishes the rest.  As Terry Pratchett put it, "The IQ of a mob is equal to the IQ of its stupidest member, divided by the number of people in the mob."  In the case of the Proud Boys, this would be a vanishingly small quantity.  More scientifically, a paper back in 2017 by French psychologists Serge Moscovici and Marisa Zavalloni tried to quantify this effect, and found something as fascinating as it is horrifying.  It took 140 secondary school students, and asked them beforehand to give an assessment of two things -- their opinion of the French president, and their attitudes toward Americans.  They then had the test subjects join a group, discuss the two topics, and then reassessed their opinions afterward.

A lot of us have the impression that group discussion moderates extreme viewpoints -- something we might characterize as the "democratic principle," that if you give everyone a voice, the fringes on either end are argued out of their extremism, or at least so vastly outnumbered that their rants don't count for much.  What Moscovici and Zavalloni found was exactly the opposite.  Exposing people with moderate views to ones with extreme beliefs makes the moderate people more extreme.

In other words: being in a group increases the polarization of the members, even the ones who started out in the middle of the pack.

As psychologist Robert Cialdini put it, in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, "Whether the question is what to do with an empty popcorn box in a movie theater, how fast to drive on a certain stretch of highway, or how to eat the chicken at a dinner party, the actions of those around us will be important in defining the answer."

So much of what we do comes from the fact that, all civilization and culture and intelligence aside, at our core we're still just social primates.  It doesn't take much for the veneer of civility to fall away, and once that happens, we tend to base our behavior on the behavior of those around us.

For better or worse.

This all sounds pretty hopeless, but to return to where I started -- "Midnight" -- it's important to acknowledge the fact that sometimes all it takes is one person resisting the pull of the mob to turn things around.  This requires courage, determination, and (often) not an inconsiderable amount of risk.  But ultimately, it's the only way we can avoid the worst outcomes of our built-in tribal mentality -- intolerance, polarization, discrimination, and violence.  Let's hope that there are people today who have the guts to do this.

And maybe this time, we'll even remember their names.

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

If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

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

The modern glass ceiling

Rosalind Franklin has become justly famous for her role in discovering the three-dimensional structure of the DNA double helix.  Her specialty was x-ray crystallography, which involves bombarding a crystal with x-rays and photographing the scatter-pattern produced as the x-rays rebound off the atoms in the crystal.  From that photograph, a trained eye can make a good guess as to the arrangement of the atoms in the crystal.

The analogy I always used in my biology classes was a thought experiment: Imagine that you and a couple dozen friends are in a large darkened room, empty except for an object in the middle whose size and shape you can't see.  You and your friends are lined up around the perimeter, and have to stay with your backs against the wall.  You're asked to determine the shape of the object by hurling tennis balls in various directions; if the tennis ball misses the object, your friend on the opposite side of the room gets hit; if the ball hits the object, it ricochets off and lands near another of your friends somewhere else in the room.

Given enough tennis balls and enough time, and recording the results of each throw, you could probably make a decent guess about the size and the shape of the invisible object.  That, essentially, is what x-ray crystallographers do.

Easy concept, difficult in practice.  Franklin was exceptionally good at it, and produced the famous photo that proved the double-helical structure of DNA, accomplishing what dozens of other researchers had failed to do.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Rosalind Franklin, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The trouble began when the paper was written that described the conclusions drawn from the photograph -- and the paper's lead author, Maurice Wilkins, didn't include Franklin's name on the list of authors.  Franklin herself died of ovarian cancer in 1958, not long after the paper's release, and so was unable to defend herself; but the reasons for the omission become crystal-clear when you hear comments from James Watson (of Watson & Crick fame) about Franklin's role in the lab.

"There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents," Watson wrote.  "Her belligerent moods interfered with Wilkins’s ability to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA...  Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place… The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab."

The marginalization, or outright disparagement, of women in academia was ubiquitous back then.  Most of us are rightly outraged when we read about how Franklin and her accomplishments were dismissed.  And we often congratulate ourselves on how far we've come, and name examples of women, minorities, and LGBTQ people who have risen to the top of their fields.

The problem is, this is not so far off from the "there is no such thing as racism... look, I have a black friend!" nonsense you sometimes hear.  As evidence of this, consider the nauseatingly condescending article that appeared only a couple of days ago in the Wall Street Journal.  Written by Joseph Epstein, this article illustrates with disgusting clarity that we've not come far from Watson's "the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab" attitude:

Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter.  Any chance you might drop the “Dr.” before your name?  “Dr. Jill Biden ” sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic...  As for your Ed.D., Madame First Lady, hard-earned though it may have been, please consider stowing it, at least in public.

Excuse me?  "Fraudulent?"  "Comic?"  "Kiddo?"  Can you imagine condescension like this being aimed at a white cis/het man?  A Ph.D. or Ed.D. does confer the right to use the honorific "Doctor" before your name, Mr. Epstein, whether you like it or not.  Not only that, it is a completely deserved acknowledgement of the intellect and diligence of the person who earned it.  I "only" have a master's degree, and I worked my ass off to achieve that.  I know a number of people with doctorates in various fields (a good many of them non-medical), and from their experiences I know how many years of hard work it takes to do the original research required for a doctoral degree.

It is horrifying that this article was written, and unconscionable that the Wall Street Journal elected to publish it.

The smug, smirking tone of this op-ed piece is emblematic; here, over fifty years after Rosalind Franklin conducted her groundbreaking research and was robbed of public acknowledgement of her role, we are still not past the way the patronizing, self-congratulatory patriarchy uses its position of power to minimize (or ignore entirely) the accomplishments of anyone who isn't a white cis/het male.

It may come as no shock that Joseph Epstein has been pulling this bullshit for years.  For fifty years, in fact.  The privilege of white cis/het males in this society extends to overlooking outright sexism and bigotry for decades.  Not just overlooking, but giving it tacit acceptance by the fact that it appears in a major publication.  Take a look at the paragraph he wrote in a piece call "Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity" in The Atlantic in 1970:

They are different front the rest of us.  Homosexuals are different, moreover, in a way that cuts deeper than other kinds of human differences—religious, class, racial—in a way that is, somehow, more fundamental.  Cursed without clear cause, afflicted without apparent cure, they are an affront to our rationality, living evidence of our despair of ever finding a sensible, an explainable, design to the world.  One can tolerate homosexuality, a small enough price to be asked to pay for someone else's pain, but accepting it, really accepting it, is another thing altogether.  I find I can accept it least of all when I look at my children.  There is much my four sons can do in their lives that might cause me anguish, that might outrage me, that might make me ashamed of them and of myself as their father.  But nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual.  For then I should know them condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men, their lives, whatever adjustment they might make to their condition, to be lived out as part of the pain of the earth.

It's tempting to say, "Well, that was 1970."  Which might be an excuse if Epstein had ever apologized or retracted what he'd written.  The best he could do was a mealy-mouthed reference to his 1970 article in the Washington Examiner in 2015, in which he said, "I am pleased the tolerance for homosexuality has widened in America and elsewhere, that in some respects my own aesthetic sensibility favors much homosexual artistic production...  My only hope now is that, on my gravestone, the words Noted Homophobe aren’t carved."

So it's probably too much to expect Epstein to back down with respect to his smug dismissal of Dr. Jill Biden's degree.  The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, should issue a retraction and an unqualified apology.  This has nothing to do with her being the wife of the president-elect.  It would still be the case if she was an ordinary citizen in any part of academia.  The "glass ceiling" isn't gone; we're just very good at pretending it is, at acting like today we've shucked all the old problems of discrimination and bigotry.  But that a major newspaper is publishing -- even on its "Opinion" page -- something this blatantly demeaning, condescending, and rude is somewhere beyond appalling.

We need more women and minorities to be belligerent (to use James Watson's word) -- to refuse to accept the disparagement of their accomplishments, to give a pair of middle fingers to the entrenched establishment Epstein represents, that feels threatened whenever anyone from outside attempts an ingress.  How much talent, passion, and intelligence has been thwarted because of this attitude?  We can not tolerate this any more.  It has to be shouted down every single time it rears its ugly head.

If we really have progressed beyond the bigotry of the mid-twentieth century, if we really have gotten to a place where this generation's Rosalind Franklins would be welcomed and appreciated, we need to call out the Joseph Epsteins of the world, loud and clear. 

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

If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

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