Defanging the basilisk

The science fiction trope of a sentient AI turning on the humans, either through some sort of misguided interpretation of its own programming or from a simple desire for self-preservation, has a long history.  I first ran into it while watching the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which featured the creepily calm-voiced computer HAL-9000 methodically killing the crew one after another.  But the iteration of this idea that I found the most chilling, at least at the time, was an episode of The X Files called "Ghost in the Machine."

The story -- which, admittedly, seemed pretty dated on recent rewatch -- featured an artificial intelligence system that had been built to run an entire office complex, controlling everything from the temperature and air humidity to the coordination of the departments housed therein.  Running the system, however, was expensive, and when the CEO of the business talks to the system's designer and technical consultant and recommends shutting it down, the AI overhears the conversation, and its instinct to save its own life kicks in.

Exit one CEO.

The fear of an AI we create suddenly deciding that we're antithetical to its existence -- or, perhaps, just superfluous -- has caused a lot of people to demand we put the brakes on AI development.  Predictably, the response of the techbros has been, "Ha ha ha ha ha fuck you."  Myself, I'm not worried about an AI turning on me and killing me; much more pressing is the fact that the current generative AI systems are being trained on art, writing, and music stolen from actual human creators, so developing (or even using) them is an enormous slap in the face to those of us who are real, hard-working flesh-and-blood creative types.  The result is that a lot of artists, writers, and musicians (and their supporters) have objected, loudly, to the practice.

Predictably, the response of the techbros has been, "Ha ha ha ha ha fuck you."

We're nowhere near a truly sentient AI, so fears of some computer system taking a sudden dislike to you and flooding your bathroom then shorting out the wiring so you get electrocuted (which, I shit you not, is what happened to the CEO in "Ghost in the Machine") are, to put it mildly, overblown.  We have more pressing concerns at the moment, such as how the United States ended up electing a demented lunatic who campaigned on lowering grocery prices but now, two months later, says to hell with grocery prices, let's annex Canada and invade Greenland.

But when things are uncertain, and bad news abounds, for some reason this often impels people to cast about for other things to feel even more scared about.  Which is why all of a sudden I'm seeing a resurgence of interest in something I first ran into ten or so years ago -- Roko's basilisk.

Roko's basilisk is named after a guy who went by the handle Roko on the forum LessWrong, and the "basilisk," a mythical creature who could kill you at a glance.  The gist is that a superpowerful sentient AI in the future would, knowing its own past, have an awareness of all the people who had actively worked against its creation (as well as the people like me who just think the whole idea is absurd).  It would then resent those folks so much that it'd create a virtual reality simulation in which it would recreate our (current) world and torture all of the people on the list.

This, according to various YouTube videos and websites, is "the most terrifying idea anyone has ever created," because just telling someone about it means that now the person knows they should be helping to create the basilisk, and if they don't, that automatically adds them to the shit list.

Now that you've read this post, that means y'all, dear readers.  Sorry about that.

Before you freak out, though, let me go through a few reasons why you probably shouldn't.

First, notice that the idea isn't that the basilisk will reach back in time and torture the actual me; it's going to create a simulation that includes me, and torture me there.  To which I respond: knock yourself out.  This threat carries about as much weight as if I said I was going to write you into my next novel and then kill your character.  Doing this might mean I have some unresolved anger issues to work on, but it isn't anything you should be losing sleep over yourself.

Second, why would a superpowerful AI care enough about a bunch of people who didn't help build it in the past -- many of whom would probably be long dead and gone by that time -- to go to all this trouble?  It seems like it'd have far better things to expend its energy and resources on, like figuring out newer and better ways to steal the work of creative human beings without getting caught.

Third, the whole "better help build the basilisk or else" argument really is just a souped-up, high-tech version of Pascal's Wager, isn't it?  "Better to believe in God and be wrong than not believe in God and be wrong."  The problem with Pascal's Wager -- and the basilisk as well -- is the whole "which God?" objection.  After all it's not a dichotomy, but a polychotomy.  (Yes, I just made that word up.  No, I don't care). You could help build the basilisk or not, as you choose -- and the basilisk itself might end up malfunctioning, being benevolent, deciding the cost-benefit analysis of torturing you for all eternity wasn't working out in its favor, or its simply not giving a flying rat's ass who helped and who didn't.  In any of those cases, all the worry would have been for nothing.

Fourth, if this is the most terrifying idea you've ever heard of, either you have a low threshold for being scared, or else you need to read better scary fiction.  I could recommend a few titles.

On the other hand, there's always the possibility that we are already in a simulation, something I dealt with in a post a couple of years ago.  The argument is that if it's possible to simulate a universe (or at least the part of it we have access to), then within that simulation there will be sentient (simulated) beings who will go on to create their own simulations, and so on ad infinitum.  Nick Bostrom (of the University of Oxford) and David Kipping (of Columbia University) look at it statistically; if there is a multiverse of nested simulations, what's the chance of this one -- the one you, I, and unfortunately, Donald Trump belong to -- being the "base universe," the real reality that all the others sprang from?  Bostrom and Kipping say "nearly zero;" just considering that there's only one base universe, and an unlimited number of simulations, means the chances are we're in one of the simulations.

But.  This all rests on the initial conditional -- if it's possible to simulate a universe.  The processing power this would take is ginormous, and every simulation within that simulation adds exponentially to its ginormosity.  (Yes, I just made that word up.  No, I don't care.)  So, once again, I'm not particularly concerned that the aliens in the real reality will say "Computer, end program" and I'll vanish in a glittering flurry of ones and zeroes.  (At least I hope they'd glitter.  Being queer has to count for something, even in a simulation.)

On yet another hand (I've got three hands), maybe the whole basilisk thing is true, and this is why I've had such a run of ridiculously bad luck lately.  Just in the last six months, the entire heating system of our house conked out, as did my wife's van (that she absolutely has to have for art shows); our puppy needed $1,700 of veterinary care (don't worry, he's fine now); our homeowner's insurance company informed us out of the blue that if we don't replace our roof, they're going to cancel our policy; we had a tree fall down in a windstorm and take out a large section of our fence; and my laptop has been dying by inches.

So if all of this is the basilisk's doing, then... well, I guess there's nothing I can do about it, since I'm already on the Bad Guys Who Hate AI list.  In that case, I guess I'm not making it any worse by stating publicly that the basilisk can go to hell.

But if it has an ounce of compassion, can it please look past my own personal transgressions and do something about Elon Musk?  Because in any conceivable universe, fuck that guy.

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NEW!  We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear!  Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!

Take a look!  Plato would approve.

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Guest post from Andrew Butters: Devil's in the details

Before we start, what are your thoughts on calling certain people Overzealous Grammar Reporting Enthusiasts instead of Grammar Na*is?  OGREs.  I think this works.  Hereinafter, that is how I will refer to them. With that out of the way, let’s get on with it.

***

I read just about everything Gordon Bonnet writes.  I read his blog, Skeptophilia, daily (well, six days a week.  He takes Sundays off.  He was also kind enough to crosspost this for me today).  Occasionally, I’ll find a typo.  When I do, I shoot him a message pointing it out, and he thanks me and then fixes it (though sometimes he fixes it and then thanks me.  Potato potato).  My response is the same when he does the same for my writing here or on Facebook.

Tyops happen.  It's not an automatic sign that the writer was negligent.  It's not irrefutable proof that self-published authors are "lesser" when compared with traditionally published ones.  I’ve seen typos in Stephen King's books and from highly respected AP journalists.  Here’s a great example of a traditional publisher thinking that global search and replace was a good idea:

Readers who come across them vary.  Some ignore them and move on.  I typically ignore them, but if I were to find a shit-tonne, I'd stop reading and send the author or publisher a private message.  No need to make a scene.  That's me, though.  Some people latch onto them as if the fate of the literary world hangs in the balance (OGREs).  Take this example:

Now, I’m told that their book was reinstated after an outpouring of support from readers, but the fact that it happened should serve as a cautionary tale.  I scooped this screenshot from someone on Facebook, and one of the comments read (in part):

“You do your job poorly, there are consequences.  That’s how it works.  And no, if there is a typo in my book I AM telling Amazon because I want my money back.”
—Some OGRE on Facebook

It took all my willpower not to point out that Grammarly suggested not one but two corrections to his comment.  At any rate, I don't blame others for piping up if the typos are rampant.  The thing is, in my experience, books like that are rare.  I've read many books from established big names to first-time self-published authors and have yet to encounter one with enough errors to raise an eyebrow.  No, the plural of anecdote isn't data, but you get my point.  Sometimes shit happens.  Welcome to being human.  Unfortunately, not everyone sees it that way.

What follows is a true story.

I wrote Near Death By A Thousand Cuts over about a month, sometime in November 2022.  After writing, I let it sit for about a week.  Then, I started editing.  These were all personal anecdotes, so I didn't approach it like I would fiction.  The language was informal, and there was more swearing.

I made three passes of editing before sending it to my actual editor, who, in this case, happened to be Gordon (a great writer in his own right and a former teacher with an MA in linguistics).  I made the changes he recommended, adding a few more.

Then, I had seven beta readers go through it (reading critically, not just for fun), and THEY found errors.

Then, my mom (a former teacher) read it and found some stuff.

Then, I read the proofcopy and found more things.

Then, upon receiving what was supposed to be the final version to upload to KDP, I got a message from my layout designer.  SHE found a typo.

Like, holy shit.  Even after all the people and all the times this book was read, there was still a missing letter ("a" should have been "an").

Then, I recorded the audiobook, and guess what? I found MORE mistakes.

All that to say, editing is hard.

I have a good mind to send a link for Near Death to the OGRE from the quote above, with their high standards, and ask them to have a go at it.  I’d even refund them their money, forgoing my royalty and Amazon’s cut.

If you find a typo in my book Known Order Girls, I’ll mail you a bookplate (normally $5).  I extended this offer on Facebook, and someone took me up on it!  They were very kind, and I appreciate their eagle eyes catching something that made it through the editing gauntlet.

There will always be some asshole typo, waiting, lurking, biding its time, and making itself known only to that one reader who will fixate on it and leave a bad review as a result.

As Vonnegut probably wrote, "So ti goes."

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Hands, skulls, and colours

In H. P. Lovecraft's terrifying and atmospheric 1927 short story "The Colour Out of Space," a meteorite strikes near a farmhouse in a rural area "west of Arkham," the fictional town in Massachusetts that is the setting of many of his stories.

The farm's owner, Nahum Gardner, and many others witness its fall; a "white noontide cloud... [a] string of explosions in the air, and [a] pillar of smoke from the valley."  Nahum, being closest, goes to investigate:

By night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place...  Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone...  He and his wife went with three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before.  It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not shrink.  Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in the night.  The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly soft.  It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing.  They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool...

The day after that... the professors had trooped out again in great excitement...  [T]he specimen... had faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker.  The beaker had gone as well, and the men talked about the strange stone's affinity for silicon.  It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal... and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe.  On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked.  Stubbornly refusing to grow cool... upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum.

Eventually, the entire meteorite -- both the samples the scientists took, and the much larger piece in Nahum Gardner's yard -- evaporate away completely.  Well, not completely, because it's Lovecraft, after all; it left behind a miasma -- dare I say, an eldritch miasma -- that proceeds to poison the well, the soil of the farm, and the entire Gardner family.  The result is the crops, domestic animals, Nahum and his wife and three children, and finally the homestead itself quite literally falling apart, crumbling into a gray dust that "the wind does not seem to affect."  At the end of the story, the narrator describes the reason he found out about the affair -- he is an engineer hired by the state of Massachusetts to scope out a proposed site for a dam and a reservoir, which would flood "the blasted, withered heath that is all that is left of the old Gardner place" and the surrounding land.  "I shall be glad to see the water come," he says.  "I hope the water will always be very deep -- but even so, I shall never drink it."

*shudder*

The story is quite different from Lovecraft's usual fare of cults and Elder Gods and idols of the Great Cthulhu and so on, and you have to wonder what inspired it.  One thing is pretty likely to be the construction of the Scituate Reservoir in Rhode Island in 1925, near his native Providence, and the much-publicized plans for the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts; but I wonder if he also got the idea from a pair of wild tales that had been all over the news not long before.

The first occurred in 1916 near Bargaintown, New Jersey, where a farmer named Henry Prantl reported something very much like what Nahum Gardner saw in Lovecraft's story -- a white light streaking across the sky, followed by the boom of an impact.  Rushing out to investigate, Henry and his son John found a "writhing piece of mystic material"...

... shaped like a charred human hand.

Poor scientists.  Even back then, every new thing that happened left them "baffled."  You have to wonder how they ever manage to do any science at all, given how much time they spend scratching their heads.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

It was at first too hot to touch, but once it cooled, they were able to examine it.  We find out it was "made of no known material," and was "abnormally light for its size."  At first reluctant to part with it, the Prantls realized what money could be made from such an oddity, and leased it to an amusement park in Atlantic City where it was displayed for several years.  Somewhere along the way it was lost, and the Prantls found their temporary fame and dreams of wealth evaporating as quickly as Nahum Gardner's mysterious meteorite.

Not to be outdone, a gem miner in northern California claimed ten years later that he witnessed another meteorite fall, and this one was even better than a flaming hand; it was a flaming skull.  This is only a year before Lovecraft wrote "The Colour Out of Space," and like the first meteorite, it was all over the news, largely because of the indefatigable efforts by its discoverer, Charles E. Grant, to make sure it got into the headlines and stayed there.  Grant said he'd been told about the fall by a "reputable and well-to-do man," and they went out to retrieve the object.  He wouldn't let anyone see it, but sent a photograph to a reporter named Ben Cline, who dutifully wrote a story about it, ending with the wry comment, "[it has] the shape of a human skull, with depressions suggesting facial organs.  The writer's first-hand knowledge of races inhabiting planets other than Mother Earth is limited, and he hesitates, therefore, from the picture, definitely to place the Butte County visitor in the nebular scheme of things."

It didn't take long for people to connect the New Jersey story to the California one, and suggest that the hand and the skull had come from the same body.  If so, it was a little mysterious (1) why one had fallen ten years before the other, (2) how the unfortunate individual got up there in the first place, and (3) why he was coming down in chunks.

Maybe he had the Nahum Gardner falling-to-pieces syndrome, or something.

In any case, people started frantically looking around to find out if other charred body parts had come crashing to Earth, so they could cash in on the notoriety, but no such luck.  What with the hand getting lost right around the same time, and Grant refusing to show anyone the actual skull -- leading many to surmise that he made the whole thing up -- the only result was a flurry of interest in meteorites and, perhaps, Lovecraft's story.

Myself, I wonder if the "hand" was actually a fulgurite -- a long, branching tube of vitrified and fused soil, sand, and debris left behind when lightning strikes the ground.  Some of these things have a remarkably organic look, and the ones I've seen have a striking resemblance to the Prantl photograph.  This would also explain why it was "abnormally light for its size."  As far as Grant's flaming skull goes -- well, like I've said many times before, if you expect me to believe something, show me the goods or else bugger off.  If there was a meteorite at all -- i.e., if the photograph itself wasn't a fake -- its resemblance to a skull is very likely to be nothing more than a combination of pareidolia and Grant jumping up and down shouting, "It looks like a skull, doesn't it?  Doesn't it?"

So that's today's tidbit of historical weirdness.  Meteoritic body parts and one of Lovecraft's best stories.  I'm happy to report that neither the Scituate nor the Quabbin Reservoir seem to have poisoned anyone, and that I haven't heard any reports out of southern New Jersey or northern California suggesting anybody out there had any difficulties with "colours."

Just as well.  What happened to the Gardner family was nasty.  I wouldn't even wish that on Elon Musk, and that's saying something.

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Off kilter

I got an interesting email a few days ago, which I quote (with permission):

I keep running into references to places called "gravity hills" or "magnetic hills" where supposedly some force plays hell with your sense of what's up and what's down.  Trees and walls appear to lean, it's hard to stand up right, stuff like that.  But people say it's more than an illusion, because cars put in neutral at the bottom of an incline roll uphill, and balls placed on what appear to be level surfaces start to roll.

I can't come up with any way any of this could be real, but there are a lot of claims, so it's kind of the "can they all be false?" thing.  What do you know about this, and has it been explained scientifically?  Or is there really something paranormal going on?

I've heard about this phenomenon for years myself, and saying "there are a lot of claims" is a bit of an understatement.  In fact, Wikipedia has a list of reports of such "mystery hills" everywhere from Azerbaijan to Uruguay, and they all kind of have the same characteristics -- that the laws of gravity don't seem to apply, or that there's a strange "magnetic force" pulling stuff (including your proprioception) off kilter.

Let's clear one thing up from the get-go, though; if there is anything going on here, it has nothing to do with magnetism, because our sense of balance is controlled by the semicircular canals, fluid-filled tubes in your inner ear that use the movement of the liquid under the pull of gravity as a way of communicating to your brain "that direction is down."  Messing with this will make you dizzy and/or nauseated, which is why people get motion sickness; the apparent forces caused by spinning around on a carnival ride cause the fluid to slosh about, sending mixed signals to the brain and making some people violently ill.  (Why certain people seem to be more or less immune to motion sickness, and others get nauseated walking across the room, is unknown.)

So even if there was some mysterious "magnetism" at work here, it wouldn't affect your sense of balance unless your inner ears were made of cast iron.

But let's get down to specifics.  Here's how one of the most famous "mystery hills," the "Oregon Vortex," is described in John Godwin's book This Baffling World:

Situated thirty miles from Grant's Pass, the vortex -- which measures roughly 125 feet in diameter -- constitutes, according to its promoters, an electromagnetic phenomenon.

Within the "Oregon Vortex" there stands a hut, dubbed "The House of Mystery."  Its owner, John Lister, says, "Nowever in the area does the visitor stand upright.  Inevitably one assumes a posture that inclines toward magnetic north, beginning with a minimum of divergence from normal at the edge of the area, and increasing to an acute angle as "The House of Mystery" is entered.  So gradually is this latter stage reached that visitors seldom realize the phenomenon until the seemingly impossible posture of the guide or their friends brings a realization of their own tilting."

Suspended from the roof of "The House of Mystery" hangs a heavy steel ball, but that ball presumably doesn't hang straight down.  It would seem to lean inward, pulled toward the center of the hut by some weird gravitational shift.  It is claimed that a person who enters the hut will feel the odd pull quite distinctly; it is further alleged that the power which is exerted will force one to lean over at a ten-degree angle.  Viewers have alleged that a rubber ball, placed on the floor here, will roll uphill.

Another famous one is Magnetic Hill, near Moncton, New Brunswick, where a landmark (a light-colored telephone pole) appears to be the lowest point in the road when viewed from one direction, and the highest when viewed from the other.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jim101, Magnetic Hill Moncton Front, CC BY-SA 3.0]

And of course, these stories are always accompanied with claims of other sorts of paranormal occurrences -- UFOs, ghosts, "skinwalkers," and the like -- and, in the United States at least, the inevitable stories about how the Indigenous people thought the place was cursed or haunted or a sacred burial ground or whatnot.

Now, to address the question -- is there anything to this?

Simple answer: no.

It turns out that humans are remarkably bad at piecing together visual cues with the information we get from our semicircular canals and coming up with a coherent picture of what the space around us is doing.  All it takes is a little messing about with the information we're receiving, and it befuddles us completely.

Take, for example, the following rather simple drawing:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Fibonacci, Zöllner illusion, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The diagonal lines running from the upper left to the lower right are all parallel, despite the fact that (1) they don't look it, and (2) even when you know what's going on and have proven it to yourself with a ruler, they still don't look it.  This is called the Zöllner Illusion, named after its discoverer, the astrophysicist Johann Karl Friederich Zöllner, and is a good indication that our ability to orient visually is not all it's cracked up to be.  (This is why the first thing pilots-in-training are taught is, "trust your instruments, not your senses.")

The "gravity hill" phenomenon is actually nothing more than an optical illusion as well, created by tilted surfaces that appear to be flat (or vice-versa) because the horizon is obscured, landmarks themselves are at an angle, or something is causing the eyes to misperceive the angle of inclination.  The whole thing was the subject of an extensive investigation that resulted in a paper in the journal Psychological Science, which concluded that the phenomenon is the result of a place's odd spatial layout combined with our faulty sensory-perceptive equipment.

So there's no alteration in the pull of gravity in these spots, or a mysterious electromagnetic anomaly, or a Great Disturbance in the Force, or whatever.  I'm not saying they're not fun; optical illusions are endlessly fascinating to me, but it's from the perspective of "wow, our brains are super easy to fool," not because of anything paranormal going on.

Anyhow, thanks to the reader who sent the question.  I always appreciate inquiries.  My opinion is that all of science starts from a desire to go from "We don't know" to "That's curious" to "Let's find out how it works."  

And even if in this case, the answer turns out to be less exciting than a rip in the space-time continuum, it's still pretty interesting.

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Gender bender

Sex is a pretty cool phenomenon, and it's not just because it's kinda fun.

How exactly sexual reproduction first evolved isn't well understood, but its advantages are clear.  Asexually-reproducing species, like most bacteria, a good many protists, and a handful of plants and animals, result in genetic copies -- clones, really -- of the parent organism.  

The problem with this is twofold.  First, clones (being identical) are susceptible to the same pathogens, so a communicable disease that is deadly to one of them will wipe them all out.  In a genetically-diverse population, chances are there'd be some that were resistant or entirely immune; in a monoculture, one epidemic and it's game over.  (That's basically what caused the Irish Potato Famine; a one-two punch of cold, rainy weather and an outbreak of late blight killed nearly all of the island's potato crop, resulting in massive starvation.)

The second problem, though, is subtler, and causes problems even if there's no external environmental risk involved.  It's called Muller's Ratchet, named after American geneticist Hermann Muller, who first described the phenomenon.  Asexual species still undergo variation because of random mutations; at each generation, the DNA picks up what amount to typos.  The whole thing is like a genetic game of Telephone.  Each time the genes pass on, there are minor replication errors that accrue and ultimately will turn the whole genome into unintelligible garbage.

Various asexual species have evolved mechanisms for coping with Muller's Ratchet.  Some bacteria have multiple copies of critical genes, so if one copy gets knocked out by a mutation, they have other copies that still work.  Some evolved conjugation, which is a primitive form of sexual reproduction in which cells pair up and exchange bits of DNA, with the goal being the sharing of undamaged copies of important genes (as well as copies of any novel beneficial mutations that may have occurred).

So asexual reproduction is fast, efficient, and doesn't require finding a partner, but ultimately makes the species susceptible to the double whammy of disease proneness and Muller's Ratchet; sexual reproduction requires finding a partner, but increases overall fitness by improving genetic diversity.

Is there any way to gain both advantages without picking up the disadvantages at the same time?

This is one of the main drivers of evolution in flowering plants.  Some flowering plants can reproduce both sexually (through flowers) and asexually (through rhizomes, bulbs, and so on).  Grasses, for example, are pretty good at both.  A very few -- the commercial variety of bananas is one of the only ones that comes to mind -- only reproduce asexually.  (Which is why bananas have no seeds, and also why growers are in a panic over the spread of fusarium wilt.)  A lot of plant species only reproduce sexually, and this brings up the problem of finding a partner of the opposite sex -- which is difficult when you are stuck in place.

This is where pollinators come in.  Some flowering plants are wind-pollinated, and rely on the air to carry the pollen (containing the male gametes) to the ovules (containing the female gametes).  Others use nectar or color lures to bring in insects, birds, and even a few mammals to act as couriers.  But this risks having the pollinator simply double back and fertilize a flower on the same plant, meaning that the offspring is (more or less) identical to the parent -- obviating the advantage of sexual reproduction.

So a great many species have evolved mechanisms for facilitating cross-pollination and avoiding self-pollination.  Some of the brightly-colored flowers of plants in the genus Salvia have evolved a mechanism where there's a spring-loaded trigger -- a visiting bee trips the trigger and gets smacked by the pollen-bearing stamen, with the intention of startling it enough that it decides to move along and visit a different individual of the same species.  Many orchids have wildly byzantine mechanisms for maximizing the likelihood of cross-pollination.  Other species, such as some of the fruiting trees of the rose family (including cherries, apricots, and peaches) have bisexual flowers, but the stamens of one tree mature at a different time than the ovules do -- making self-pollination impossible.  Apples have a genetic barrier to self-pollination -- if pollen from an apple flower is brought to another flower on the same tree, it recognizes the ovule as genetically identical and simply doesn't fuse.

The reason this comes up is a study that appeared last week in the journal Science, looking at the genetics of gender and pollination in walnuts.  Walnuts, and most of the other members of the family Juglandaceae (which also includes hickories and pecans), are pollinated by the wind.  

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juglans regia Broadview, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Wind-pollinated plants are most at risk for accidental self-pollination; the wind, after all, isn't going to be attracted or deterred by any kind of mechanical contrivance, and wind-pollinated plants often produce tons of pollen (to maximize the likelihood of at least some of it hitting the target, since inevitably a lot of it is simply blown away and wasted).  This is, incidentally, why most allergy-inducing pollen comes from wind-pollinated plants like grasses, willows, birch, oak, cedar, and (especially) ragweed.

Walnuts, it turns out, solve this problem by switching sex every few weeks -- a particular tree only produces male flowers during one interval, then only female ones the next.  The following year, they do it again -- but changing the order of who is male when.  This renders self-pollination not just unlikely, but impossible.  And the paper, which came out of research at the University of California - Davis, describes the genetic mechanism for how this is controlled.

Oh, but you bigots, do go on and explain to me how in the natural world sex and gender are simple and binary, they're both fixed at conception, male-and-female-He-made-them, and so on and so forth.

Even after years of studying biology, and evolutionary biology in particular, I'm still astonished by the diversity of life, and how many solutions species have evolved to solve the problems of survival, nutrition, and reproduction.  It seems fitting to end this with the final paragraph of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, which echoes that same sense of wonder:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.  These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms.  Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.  There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

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Health for profit

Ever since the fatal shooting of United Health CEO Brian Thompson, the whole issue of the ridiculous unaffordability of health care and the capricious, cavalier attitudes of health insurers has been much on people's minds here in the United States.  Around ten percent of Americans have no health insurance at all, meaning they are one health crisis from bankruptcy -- and very likely to forego medical care completely for anything that isn't immediately life-threatening.  Many others are woefully underinsured.

Of the twenty-five wealthiest nations in the world, only three -- Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United States -- do not have some form of government-paid health care for all citizens.  With regards to human rights, not really the company we want to be keeping, is it?

As far as the other wealthy nations go -- well, allow me to cite just one example.

My writer friend Andrew Butters, who lives in Canada (and has given me permission to relate this story), went through the agonizing experience of having his daughter develop a devastating medical condition -- progressive scoliosis.  The disorder was inevitably leading toward debility, nerve and organ damage, and ultimately would have been fatal without significant (and urgent) medical intervention.  Eventually she required twelve hours of surgery, a long hospital stay, and extensive care for months afterward, but made a complete recovery and is now a healthy and happy adult.

The family paid less than $2,000 out of pocket total.  In fact, out of gratitude to the Canadian health care system, Andrew wrote a book about the experience called Bent But Not Broken (highly recommended reading, it's incredibly inspiring) and is able to donate every cent of the proceeds to charities helping other parents in similar situations.

In the United States?  Even with health insurance, this exact same situation would have created massive medical debt they'd be paying off for decades.  For many families, it would have permanently destroyed them financially.

The fact that the other twenty-two wealthiest countries in the world are making health care for all work, and we're not, seems to indicate that we could be doing this, but we just don't want to.  So why is that?  How did all the others come to look upon health care as a right, not a privilege restricted to the rich, and we didn't?

Well, allow me to introduce you to Frederick Ludwig Hoffman.

Hoffman in 1909 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Hoffman was born in 1865 in the town of Varel, Oldenburg, Germany.  His performance in school was rather dismal, and ultimately he realized he wasn't going to make a decent living in Germany, so he emigrated to the United States in 1884, where shortly afterward he was hired as a statistician for the Prudential Insurance Company of America.

He was also a raving racist.

Around this time, African Americans were gaining ground in terms of rights and opportunities, and Hoffman thought this was just terrible.  He was convinced that Blacks were genetically inferior -- not only less intelligent and more prone to crime, but had shorter life spans and more health problems.  That the last-mentioned had to do with mistreatment, poverty, poor nutrition, and lack of access to medical care, didn't seem to occur to him.  But he saw other countries moving toward considering good-quality medical care to be a right; in fact, his native Germany instituted a national health care program in 1885.  Despite the inherent immorality of forcing sick people to pay, as if becoming ill was somehow their fault (or a choice at all), Hoffman was appalled at the thought of this becoming policy in the United States.  He realized that if this happened here, wealthy White people would be shouldering the financial burden of paying for the health care of poor Blacks.

And we couldn't have that.

He wrote a book called Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro which was a mishmash of huge amounts of statistics on illness and death rates, along with a heaping helping of racist tropes, eugenics, arguments against miscegenation, and deliberate avoidance of any mention of the role of social status and environment in human health.  Of course, it played right into the panicky bigotry of the time, not to mention the greed über alles attitudes of the people in charge (remember, this is the era of the Robber Barons).  So rake in the profits and simultaneously make life miserable for Blacks?

Prudential, and other insurance companies, said, "Hell yeah, sign me up!"

Megan Wolff, in the journal Public Health Reports (link provided above), writes:

Insurance is a highly lucrative business, and in the latter 19th century it factored among the biggest, fastest-growing, and most aggressive corporate entities in existence.  Between 1860 and 1870 alone, the number of policies active in New York State jumped from 50,000 to 650,000; by 1868 the sum of insurance throughout the nation exceeded the national debt.  Cutthroat business practices guided corporate policy.  By the mid 1870s, the three largest companies—Metropolitan Life, the Equitable, and Mutual Life—had expanded into a corporate oligopoly that dominated sales in the cities of the northeast United States and maintained an impressive reputation worldwide...

The relatively equal access of African Americans to main-line industrial policies came to a halt... when Prudential announced a decision to reduce life benefits to African Americans by a third, though they would continue to pay the same premiums.  Citing elevated mortality rates among Blacks, the company insisted that its decision was “equitable” and based “solely on the basis of facts.”  Some evidence suggests, however, that the prospect of Black policyholders simply had not occurred to commercial insurers when they launched their industrial policies—at least not in the volumes with which African Americans applied for coverage—and the reduction of benefits was a response to an unanticipated and socially undesirable demand.

There was some effort by states to institute anti-discrimination laws regarding insurance, but Prudential trotted out Hoffman, who was happy to explain his reasoning (backed up, of course, by plenty of statistics).  Few White lawmakers felt all that inclined to argue on the behalf of poor Blacks, who after all had no legal clout, and in fact very little say in anything.

Hoffman, on the other hand, became an overnight celebrity.  In 1901 Prudential started its Department of Statistics -- what we would now call the actuarial department -- with Hoffman at its head.  There's some evidence that his views softened toward the end of his life (he died in 1946), and that he eventually acknowledged the role of social stratification in Blacks' lower life expectancy and higher rate of health problems, but by that time the damage was done.  The corporate control of medical care in the United States was already set in stone, and that was largely due to Hoffman's tireless efforts to prevent African Americans from having health and life insurance.

And as we've seen over and over, once the corporations see a profit to be made, there's no power on Earth that can stop them from doing whatever it takes to achieve it, even if they leave thousands of dead bodies in their wake.  In what kind of crazy, bass-ackwards system can your doctor say, "You must have this treatment or you won't recover," and the insurance company gets to say, "Nah, you don't really need that"?

There's some truth to the fact that looking at the roots of an issue doesn't necessarily inform you about what the issue is now.  That the lack of universal health care in the United States was inspired by racism is less important than what's motivating it in the present.  (After all, during the Civil War and Reconstruction Periods, the Democrats were more often the racists and the Republicans the anti-racists, and that's hardly the case today.)  

But it's at least instructive to consider that the current situation -- where the wealthy have unlimited access to the best medical care, and the the poor are one surgery from bankruptcy -- has its roots in a fundamentally immoral stance, that somehow certain people are deserving of good health and others aren't, and that the greed of corporate leaders should trump any considerations of fairness.  And this kind of built-in social inequity can't go on forever.  While I don't condone Luigi Mangione's actions, I certainly understand them.  As the noblemen and women of pre-Revolutionary France found out, you can't keep taking advantage of people indefinitely and expect them not to react.

So whatever the origin of the insurance industry's motives, right now what they're doing is profiting off the misfortune of others.  For all of the health insurance companies' cheerful slogans about how they're "your partner for good health," the fact remains that the only ones they're actually partners with are their stockholders.

Not that it's likely to improve under the incoming administration, which puts corporate profit above anything else.  So we've got at least another four years of poor people going broke because they had the audacity to get sick at the wrong time.

And it all traces back to the specious research of a racist German statistician who told the insurance companies and other business leaders exactly what they wanted to hear.  The wealthy then twisted the arms of the elected officials -- as they still do -- and the result is an inherently unfair pay-or-die system that is nearly unique amongst industrialized countries.

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Word search

I've always wondered why words have the positive or negative connotations they do.

Ask people what their favorite and least-favorite sounding words are, and you'll find some that are easily explicable (vomit regularly makes the "least-favorite" list), but others are kind of weird.  A poll of linguists identified the phrase cellar door as being the most beautiful-sounding pair of words in the English language -- and look at how many names from fantasy novels have the same cadence (Erebor, Aragorn, Celeborn, Glorfindel, Valinor, to name just a handful from the Tolkien mythos).  On the other hand, I still recall passing a grocery store with my son one day and seeing a sign in the window that said, "ON SALE TODAY: moist, succulent pork."

"There it is," my son remarked.  "A single phrase made of the three ugliest words ever spoken."

Moist, in fact, is one of those universally loathed words; my surmise is the rather oily sound of the /oi/ combination, but that's hardly a scholarly analysis.  The brilliant British comedian Miranda Hart had her own unique take on it:

Another question is why some words are easier to bring to mind than others. This was the subject of a fascinating paper in Nature Human Behavior titled, "Memorability of Words in Arbitrary Verbal Associations Modulates Memory Retrieval in the Anterior Temporal Lobe," by neuroscientists Weizhen Xie, Wilma A. Bainbridge, Sara K. Inati, Chris I. Baker, and Kareem A. Zaghloul of the National Institute of Health.  Spurred by a conversation at a Christmas party about why certain faces are memorable and others are not, study lead author Weizhen Xie wondered if the same was true for words -- and if so, that perhaps it could lead to more accuracy in cognitive testing for patients showing memory loss or incipient dementia.

"Our memories play a fundamental role in who we are and how our brains work," Xie said in an interview with Science Daily.  "However, one of the biggest challenges of studying memory is that people often remember the same things in different ways, making it difficult for researchers to compare people's performances on memory tests.  For over a century, researchers have called for a unified accounting of this variability.  If we can predict what people should remember in advance and understand how our brains do this, then we might be able to develop better ways to evaluate someone's overall brain health."

What the team did is as fascinating as it is simple; they showed test subjects pairs of functionally-unrelated words (say, "hand" and "apple"), and afterward, tested them by giving them one word and asking them to try to recall what word it was paired with.  What they found is that some words were easy to recall regardless of what they were paired with and whether they came first or second in the pair; others were more difficult, again irrespective of position or pairing.

"We saw that some things -- in this case, words -- may be inherently easier for our brains to recall than others," said study senior author Kareem Zaghloul.  "These results also provide the strongest evidence to date that what we discovered about how the brain controls memory in this set of patients may also be true for people outside of the study."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mandeep Singh, Emotions words, CC BY 4.0]

Neither the list of easy-to-remember words nor the list of harder-to-remember ones show any obvious commonality (such as abstract versus concrete nouns, or long words versus short ones) that would explain the difference.  Each list included some extremely common words and some less common ones -- tank, doll, and pond showed up on the memorable list, and street, couch, and cloud on the less-memorable list.  It was remarkable how consistent the pattern was; the results were unequivocal even when the researchers controlled for such factors as educational level, age, gender, and so on.

"We thought one way to understand the results of the word pair tests was to apply network theories for how the brain remembers past experiences," Xie said.  "In this case, memories of the words we used look like internet or airport terminal maps, with the more memorable words appearing as big, highly trafficked spots connected to smaller spots representing the less memorable words.  The key to fully understanding this was to figure out what connects the words."

The surmise is that it has to do with the way our brains network information.  Certain words might act as "nodes" -- memory points that connect functionally to a great many different concepts -- so the brain more readily lands on those words when searching.  Others, however familiar and common they might be, act more as "dead-ends" in brain networking, making only a few conceptual links.  Think of it as trying to navigate through a city -- some places are easy to get to because there are a great many paths that lead there, while others require a specific set of roads and turns.  In the first case, you can get to your destination even if you make one or two directional goofs; in the second, one wrong turn and you're lost.

All of which is fascinating. I know as I've gotten older I've had the inevitable memory slowdown, which most often manifests as my trying to recall a word I know that I know. I often have to (with some degree of shame) resort to googling something that's a synonym and scanning down the list until I find the word I'm looking for, but it makes me wonder why this happens with some words and not with others.  Could it be that in my 64-year-old brain, bits of the network are breaking down, and this affects words with fewer working functional links than ones with a great many of them?

All speculation, of course. I can say that whatever it is, it's really freakin' annoying.  But I need to wrap up this post, because it's time for lunch.  Which is -- I'm not making this up -- leftover moist, succulent pork.

I'll try not to think about it.

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