The free speech you disagree with

Thomas Paine said, "He who would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." 

This principle -- espoused by many leaders of the Enlightenment -- was famously summarized by historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall as "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto death your right to say it."  It's a central founding tenet of democracy.  We all have voices, and are allowed (within certain well-demarcated boundaries, including prohibitions against threats, hate speech, and fraudulent claims) to use them to voice our own views.

That right has been steadily eroding under the Trump regime.

The situation got markedly worse following the assassination of right-wing agitator Charlie Kirk last week.  First, allow me to state up front that I am in no way celebrating Kirk's death.  No one deserves to be murdered, period, end of story.

But.  The fact remains that Kirk was a thoroughly horrible human being, and his violent death doesn't cleanse him of the odium of things he himself said.  Here's a small sampler:

• "[The biblical injunction to stone gay people to death] is God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters."
• "[Black people] are coming out, and they're saying, 'I'm only here because of affirmative action.' Yeah, we know.  You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.  You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously."
• "We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s."
• "I can't stand the word empathy, actually.  I think empathy is a made up new age term that does a lot of damage."
• "[Transgender people] are an abomination to God."

But like -- we'd hope -- anyone else in the United States, Kirk had the right to say all those things, just as I have the right to vehemently, and vocally, disagree with them.

Then he was murdered.  And the people on the right immediately assumed that the killer was a leftist.  Or transgender.  Or an immigrant.  Or Black.  Or maybe a Black immigrant transgender leftist.  Before a scrap of information was known about the actual killer, self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" (and, judging by the extent to which he controls content on X/Twitter, actual complete hypocrite) Elon Musk stated, "The Left is the party of murder."  I saw more than one person on social media post a horrified, "They killed Charlie Kirk" -- and you know who "they" is.  

Then a 22-year-old man was arrested for the murder, and it turns out he's a white Mormon conservative whose family his own grandmother described as "one hundred percent MAGA."  Well, can't have that spoiling the narrative -- so immediately the Right started casting about for reasons that the alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, can't have been what he seemed.  A good example is this one, from Dinesh D'Souza Distort D'Newsa:

Never mind that Robinson attended college for exactly one semester, with the notoriously left-wing major of... engineering?  Not only that, it was during the COVID lockdown and contained only virtual classes, and he dropped out afterward -- to attend trade school.  

Man, those sly, scheming leftist professors work fast.

At present, the alleged killer's motives are unclear, as he's "not talking with investigators," but it's been credibly claimed that Robinson was a follower of people like Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes, who criticized Kirk for not being far right enough.  (Interestingly, shortly after Kirk's death, Loomer deleted all her tweets that had been critical of Kirk, and Fuentes posted a message to his "Groyper Army" on X/Twitter, saying, "If you take up arms, I disavow you.  I disown you in the strongest possible terms."  More than a little suspicious, that.)

In all of this, what's certain is that Robinson is not anything close to a "leftist."

But none of that matters.  Trump has called for a crackdown on anyone vocally on the left, and especially anyone who is publicly critical of Charlie Kirk, often merely for repeating what Kirk himself said.  Just a couple of days ago, ABC terminated talk show host Jimmy Kimmel for saying, "The MAGA gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it," which is nothing more than the honest truth.

And it's also true that currently the "MAGA gang" has a stranglehold on the media.  The United States is not as bad as North Korea yet -- where anything even remotely critical of Dear Leader can get you killed -- but it's rapidly heading that direction.  Forty percent of the news entering American households is controlled by stations owned by the strongly conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, which includes the majority of not only Fox-affiliated stations but the majority of those connected to CBS, NBC, and ABC.  The idea of independent, unbiased news media in the United States is very much a thing of the past.  If you think they don't screen every last news story presented, and make sure anything even mildly critical of the current regime is expunged, you're fooling yourself.

The fact that people like Kimmel and Stephen Colbert got away with it for a while is actually surprising -- but now even they've been silenced.

I had virtually convinced myself not to write about Kirk's death and the fallout afterward.  Tempers are running high on both sides, and my own distaste for everything Kirk stood for makes it too easy for anyone who leans right to dismiss me as "just another radical leftist."  As I said in the beginning, no one deserves to be murdered for their beliefs, and that includes people I vehemently disagree with.  (And contrary to what a lot of MAGA types want you to believe, the vast majority of people on the left have been saying exactly that; the number of people I've seen "celebrating" Kirk's death is extremely small.)

But the idea that Trump and his cronies are coldly, callously using this violent act as an incentive for cracking down on dissent is somewhere beyond reprehensible.  It is also not without precedent.  The MAGA playbook owes much to the strategies of Joseph Goebbels, who used just such an incident -- the murder of Nazi party member Horst Wessel -- to crack down on the communists.  When Wessel was shot to death by a communist, he was elevated to martyr status, statues of him erected in public places, and a song about his heroism composed.  (In another parallel that would be comical if all this wasn't so deadly serious, Adolf Hitler didn't bother to go to Wessel's funeral, just as Trump didn't go to Kirk's -- Trump was too busy playing golf to honor the man he called "a true American hero.")

In any case, I decided I couldn't stay silent.  I'm not sure what this'll accomplish, besides probably losing me some followers.  At this point, there aren't many people who are still undecided, and the impossibly annoying backfire effect makes it likely that anyone who disagrees with me and reads this will come away disagreeing with me even more stridently.

But you know what?  That is your right.  I will keep speaking up, and I hope you do, too.  I can't do much to stop the degradation of human rights that is currently happening in this country, except for continuing to voice my beliefs as long as I am able.

The bottom line is that everyone supports the free speech they agree with.  The sticking point comes with supporting the free speech you disagree with.  And -- this is the critical thing -- screaming like hell when anyone tries to take away that right from anyone.  Because you know what?  Once the fascists start curtailing the rights to free speech, they don't stop.  You might want to reread Martin Niemöller's famous poem that begins "First they came for the socialists."  Yeah, perhaps right now you're safe, but if things keep going the way they're going, you can't count on staying that way.

Just remember -- that poem is all too short.  And it doesn't end well.

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Mechanical brain transplant

New from the "Well, I can't see any way that could go wrong, do you?" department, we have: scientists growing Neanderthal brain fragments in petri dishes and then connecting them to crab-like robots.

My first thought was, "Haven't you people ever watched a science fiction movie?"  This feeling may have been enhanced by the fact that just a couple of days ago I watched the Doctor Who episode "The End of the World," wherein the Doctor and his companion are damn near killed (along with everyone else on a space station) when a saboteur makes the shields malfunction using little scuttling metallic bugs.

The creator of the Neanderthal brain bits is Alysson Muotri, geneticist at the University of California - San Diego's School of Medicine.  He and his team isolated genes that belonged to our closest cousins, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, and transferred them into stem cells.  Then, they allowed the cells to grow into proto-brains to see what sorts of connections would form.

Muotri says, "We're trying to recreate Neanderthal minds."  So far, they've noticed an abnormally low number of synapses (as compared to modern humans), and have speculated that this may indicate a lower capacity for sophisticated social behavior.

But Muotri and his team are going one step further.  They are taking proto-brains (he calls them "organoids") with no Neanderthal genes, and wiring them and his "neanderthalized" versions into robots, to make comparisons about how they learn.  Simon Fisher, a geneticist for the Department of Psycholinguistics at the Max Planck Institute, said, "It's kind of wild.  It's creative science."

That it is.

I have to admit there's a cool aspect to this.  I've always wondered about the Neanderthals.  During the peak of their population, they actually had a brain capacity larger than modern humans.  They clearly had culture -- they ceremonially buried their dead, probably had language (as they had the same variant of the "linguistic gene" FOXP2 that we do), and may have even made music, to judge by what appears to be a piece of a 43,000 bone flute that was found in Slovenia.

All that said, I'm not sure how smart it would be to stick a Neanderthal brain inside a metallic crab.  If this was a science fiction movie, the next thing that happened would be that Muotri would be in his lab late at night working with his Crab Cavemen, and he'd turn his back and they'd swarm him, and the next morning all that would be found is his skeleton, minus his femur, which would have been turned into a clarinet.

Okay, I know I'm probably overreacting here.  But it must be admitted that our track record of thinking through our decisions is not exactly unblemished.  Muotri assures us that these little "organoids" have no blood supply and therefore no potential for developing into an actual brain, but still.  I hope he knows what he's doing.  As for me, I'm going to go watch Doctor Who.

Let's see, what's the next episode?  "Dalek."  *reads description*  "A superpowerful mutant intelligence controlling a mechanical killing device goes on a rampage and attempts to destroy humanity."

Um, never mind.  *switches channel to Looney Tunes*

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Utopia for pirates

There are very few tropes that have had quite the cachet (and staying power) that pirates do.

Consider the popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean series (what are we up to now, movie #5?  #8?  #12?  Who the hell can keep track?).  But it's been going on for a long while.  Treasure Island, for example, written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1881, has seen several movie adaptations, of which this one is objectively the best:

The movie is brilliant from beginning to end, and if you can listen to the song "Cabin Fever" without guffawing, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.

In other iterations, the approaches vary from the comic (Our Flag Means Death) to the deadly serious (Blackbeard, Captain Blood), and I learned from Wikipedia that there have also been a few pornographic pirate movies, which I would prefer not to think about.  Even Lost in Space, never content to be left out, gave piracy their best shot with Cap'n Alonzo P. Tucker the Space Pirate, complete with (I shit you not) an electronic parrot:

In addition to the parrot, Tucker is identifiable as a pirate because he says "Arrrrh" and "Avast ye swabs" and "Ahoy matey" a lot.

So many legends have grown up around piracy that it's often hard to sort fact from fiction.  Sometimes it's easier to tell than others, though.  Disney, for example, seems to need a refresher on what the word "pirate" actually means:

As a biologist, though, I'm more puzzled by how the hell that parrot can fly, given that its head is bigger than the rest of its body put together.

The whole topic of pirates comes up because of a strange historical footnote I just recently learned about.  It has to do with a guy named James Misson, the ship La Victoire, and the country of Madagascar.

Misson, so the story goes, was Provençal, born somewhere in the southeast of France in around 1660 or so.  He started out as some sort of diplomat, and had been dispatched to Rome, but was "disgusted by the decadence of the Papal Court," and soured on the entire idea of autocratic government (very much in vogue at the time).  He fell under the influence of a "lewd priest" (which were also apparently common) named Caraccioli, who (along with Misson) signed on to the crew roster for a warship called La Victoire.  Why the crew needed a "lewd priest," I have no clue, but then, I have no idea what a bo's'un does, either, so maybe it's just one of those nautical things I never learned about.

In any case, Caraccioli had definite ideas about lots of things, and started having long discussions with Misson and the rest of the crew.  According to the 1724 book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, Caraccioli "fell upon Government, and shew'd, that every Man was born free, and had as much Right to what would support him, as to the Air he respired... that the vast Difference betwixt Man and Man, the one wallowing in Luxury, and the other in the most pinching Necessity, was owing only to Avarice and Ambition on the one Hand, and a pusillanimous Subjection on the other."

Which I certainly can't find fault with.  Considering that at the moment, the top one percent of people, wealth-wise, own more than the rest of the world put together, I'd say we haven't progressed all that far in that regard.  Maybe we need more Notorious Pyrates to rough the place up, I dunno.

In any case, Misson took Caraccioli's sermons to heart, as did the rest of the crew, and they collectively decided to put Misson in charge and to embark on a career of piracy.  The General History doesn't say who the captain of La Victoire beforehand was, or what he had to say about this eventuality, but Misson took over anyhow to joyous shouts of acclaim from the crew, and they decided to found a piracy-based colony named Libertatia on the east coast of Madagascar.  The colony was intended to be a direct democracy run on socialist guidelines, where everything was shared and the people held the reins with regard to leadership, laws, and practices.

Hell, if Arthurian England could have an anarcho-syndicalist commune, why not a socialist pirate colony in seventeenth century Madagascar?

Well, there's only one sticking point to all of this, and you've probably already guessed it.

Libertatia, and James Misson, seem to be nothing more than a tall tale.

The first clue is that the only records of Misson are written at least forty years after his heyday, and in them he's variously called "Olivier" (not James) and "Mission" (not Misson).  But names were frequently messed about with back then, so that by itself isn't conclusive.  However, historians and archaeologists have tried like crazy to figure out where Libertatia was, and have found not a scrap of evidence that it ever existed.  There were several settlements made on Madagascar by pirates -- Abraham Samuel started one at Fort Dauphin, Adam Baldridge on the island of Ile Ste.-Marie, and James Plaintain at Ranter Bay, for example -- but all of these are reasonably well documented, and none of them match the details of James Misson and Libertatia from the General History.

This is unfortunate, because it makes a good story, doesn't it?  Good enough, in fact, that it's appeared in a number of works of fiction (notably two novels by William S. Burroughs), films, documentaries, and at least four different video games.  

So, like I said, it seems like a lot of us love a good pirate yarn.  A pity this one turns out to have been fashioned from whole cloth.  Like the strange story of Prester John, though, it seems like there being exactly zero evidence of its veracity hasn't slowed it down any.  And in this case, the mythical figure of James Misson is someone we can at least grudgingly admire -- little as we've followed his utopian vision of how society should run in the intervening three centuries.

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The morass of lies

It will come as no shock to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I really hate it when people make shit up and then misrepresent it as the truth.

Now making shit up, by itself, is just fine.  I'm a fiction writer, so making shit up is kind of my main gig.  It's when people then try to pass it off as fact that we start having problems.  The problem is, sometimes the false information sounds either plausible, or cool, or interesting -- it often has a "wow!" factor -- enough that it then gets spread around via social media, which is one of the most efficient conduits for nonsense ever invented.

Here are three examples of this phenomenon that I saw just within the past twenty-four hours.

The first is about a Miocene-age mammal called Orthrus tartaros, "a distant relative of modern weasels," that was a scary hypercarnivore.  Here's an artist's conception of what Orthrus tartaros looked like:

Problem is, there's no such animal.  In Greek mythology, Orthrus was Cerberus's two-headed brother, who had been given the task of guarding the giant Geryon's cattle, and was killed by Heracles as one of his "Ten Labors."  "Tartaros," of course, comes from Tartarus, the Greek version of hell.  While there are plenty of animals named after characters from Greek myth, this ain't one of them.  In fact, it's the creation of a Deviant Art artist who goes by the handle Puijila, and specializes in "speculative evolution" art that was never intended to represent actual animals.  But along the way, someone swiped Puijila's piece and started passing it around as if it were real.

What's frustrating about this is that there are plenty of prehistoric animals that were scary as fuck, such as the absolutely terrifying gorgonopsids.  You don't need to pretend that an (admittedly extremely talented) artist's fictional creations are part of the real menagerie.

The second one cautioned the tender-hearted amongst us against catching spiders and putting them outdoors.  "Spiders in your house," the post said, "are adapted to living indoors.  95% of the spiders captured and released outside die within 24 hours.  Just let them live inside -- most of them are completely harmless."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ciar, House spider side view 01, CC BY-SA 3.0]

While I agree completely that spiders have gotten an undeserved bad rap, and the vast majority of them are harmless (and in fact, beneficial, considering the number of flies and mosquitoes they eat), the rest of this is flat wrong.  Given that here in the United States, conventional houses have only become common in the past two hundred years or so, how did the ancestors of today's North American spiders manage before that, if they were so utterly dependent on living indoors?  And second, how did anyone figure out that "95% of the spiders captured and released died within 24 hours?"  Did they fit them with little radio tracking tags, or something?  This claim fails the plausibility test on several levels -- so while the central message of "learn to coexist with our fellow creatures" is well meant, it'd be nice to see it couched in facts rather than made-up nonsense.

The last one is just flat-out weird.  I'd seen it before, but it's popping up again, probably because here in the Northern Hemisphere, it's vegetable-garden-harvest time:

If you "didn't know this" it's probably because it's completely false.  Pepper plants have flowers that botanists call "perfect" (they contain both male and female parts), so they can self-pollinate.  The wall of a pepper -- the part you eat -- comes from the flower's ovary, so honestly, the edible parts of peppers are more female than male (even that's inaccurate if you know much about sexual reproduction in plants, which is pretty peculiar).  The number of bumps has zero to do with either sex or flavor.

So: one hundred percent false.  When you grow or buy peppers, don't worry about the number of bumps, and afterward, use them for whatever you like.

What puzzles me about all this is why anyone would make this kind of stuff up in the first place.  Why would you spend your time crafting social media posts that are certifiable nonsense, especially when the natural world is full of information that's even more cool and weird and mind-blowing, and is actually real?  Once such a post is launched, I get why people pass it along; posts like this have that "One True Fact That Will Surprise You!" veneer, and the desire to share such stuff comes from a good place -- hoping that our friends will learn something cool.

But why would you create a lie and present it as a fact?  That, I don't get.

Now, don't get me wrong; there's no major harm done to the world by people making a mistake and believing in the sexuality of peppers, doomed house spiders, and a Miocene hypercarnivorous weasel.  But it still bothers me, because passing this nonsense along establishes a habit of credulity.  "I saw it on the internet" is the modern-day equivalent of "my uncle's best friend's sister-in-law's cousin swears this is true."  And once you've gotten lazy about checking to see if what you post about trivia is true and accurate, it's a scarily small step to uncritically accepting and reposting falsehoods about much, much more important matters.

Especially given that there are a couple of media corporations I could name that survive by exploiting that exact tendency.

So I'll exhort you to check your sources.  Yes, on everything.  If you can't verify something, don't repost it.  To swipe a line from Smokey Bear, You Too Can Prevent Fake News.  All it takes is a little due diligence -- and a determination not to make the current morass of online lies any worse than it already is.

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Nerds FTW

There's a stereotype that science nerds, and especially science fiction nerds, are hopeless in the romance department.

I'd sort of accepted this without question, despite being one myself and at the same time happily married to a wonderful woman.  The reason I didn't question it is that said wonderful woman pretty much had to tackle me to get me to realize she was, in fact, interested in me.  You'd think, being bisexual, I'd have had twice the opportunities for romance, but the truth is I'm so completely oblivious that I wouldn't know it if someone of either gender was flirting with me unless they were holding up a sign saying "HEY.  STUPID.  I AM CURRENTLY FLIRTING WITH YOU."  And possibly not even then.

But despite my raising social awkwardness to the level of performance art, Carol was successful in her efforts.  Eventually the light bulb appeared over my head, and we've been a couple ever since.

Good thing for me, because not only am I a science nerd and a science fiction nerd, I write science fiction.  Which has to rank me even higher on the romantically-challenged scale.

Or so I thought, till I read a study by Stephanie C. Stern, Brianne Robbins, Jessica E. Black, and, Jennifer L. Barnes that appeared in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, entitled, "What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs About Relationships."  And therein we find a surprising result.

Exactly the opposite is true.  We sci-fi/fantasy nerds make better lovers.

Who knew?  Not me, for sure, because I still think I'm clueless, frankly.  But here's what the authors have to say:

Research has shown that exposure to specific fiction genres is associated with theory of mind and attitudes toward gender roles and sexual behavior; however, relatively little research has investigated the relationship between exposure to written fiction and beliefs about relationships, a variable known to relate to relationship quality in the real world.  Here, participants were asked to complete both the Genre Familiarity Test, an author recognition test that assesses prior exposure to seven different written fiction genres, and the Relationship Belief Inventory, a measure that assesses the degree to which participants hold five unrealistic and destructive beliefs about the way that romantic relationships should work.  After controlling for personality, gender, age, and exposure to other genres, three genres were found to be significantly correlated with different relationship beliefs.  Individuals who scored higher on exposure to classics were less likely to believe that disagreement is destructive.  Science fiction/fantasy readers were also less likely to support the belief that disagreement is destructive, as well as the belief that partners cannot change, the belief that sexes are different, and the belief that mindreading is expected in relationships.  In contrast, prior exposure to the romance genre was positively correlated with the belief that the sexes are different, but not with any other subscale of the Relationships Belief Inventory.

Get that?  Of the genres tested, the sci-fi/fantasy readers score the best on metrics that predict good relationship quality.  So yeah: go nerds.

As Tom Jacobs wrote about the research in The Pacific Standard, "[T]he cliché of fans of these genres being lonely geeks is clearly mistaken.  No doubt they have difficulties with relationships like everyone else.  But it apparently helps to have J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin as your unofficial couples counselor."

Tolkien?  Okay.  Aragorn and Arwen, Galadriel and Celeborn, Eowyn and Faramir, even Sam Gamgee and Rose Cotton -- all romances to warm the heart.  But George R. R. Freakin' Martin?  Not so sure if I want the guy who crafted Joffrey Baratheon's family tree to give me advice about who to hook up with.

One other thing I've always wondered, though, is how book covers affect our expectations.  I mean, look at your typical romance, which shows a gorgeous woman wearing a dress that looks like it's being held up by a combination of prayers and Superglue, being seduced by a gorgeous shirtless guy with a smoldering expression who exudes so much testosterone that small children go through puberty just by walking past him.  Now, I don't know about you, but no one I know actually looks like that.  I mean, I think the people I know are nice enough looking, but Sir Dirk Thrustington and Lady Viola de Cleevauge we're not.

Of course, high fantasy isn't much better.  There, the hero always has abs you could crack a walnut against, and is raising the Magic Sword of Wizardry aloft with arms that give you the impression he works out by bench pressing Volkswagens.  The female protagonists usually are equally well-endowed, sometimes hiding the fact that they have bodily proportions that are anatomically impossible by being portrayed with pointed ears and slanted eyes, informing us that they're actually Elves, so all bets are off, extreme-sexiness-wise.

Being chased by a horde of Amazon Space Women in Togas isn't exactly realistic either, honestly. [Image is in the Public Domain]

So even if we sci-fi nerds have a better grasp on reality as it pertains to relationships in general, you have to wonder how it affects our bodily images.  Like we need more to feel bad about in that regard.  Between Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch, it's a wonder that any of us, male or female, are willing to go to the mall without wearing a burqa.

But anyhow, that's the latest from the world of psychology.  Me, I find it fairly encouraging that the scientifically-minded are successful at romance.  It means we have a higher likelihood of procreating, and heaven knows we need more smart people in the world these days.  It's also nice to see a stereotype shattered.  After all, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "No generalization is worth a damn.  Including this one."

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Life during chaos

If there's one place and historical period I could choose to know more about, it would be England during, and immediately following, the withdrawal of the Romans in the fifth century C. E.

For one thing, this would settle once and for all the question of whether King Arthur was a real historical personage, a completely fabricated legend, or somewhere in that gray area in between.  Whoever (or whatever) he was, I doubt our picture of him was anywhere near accurate:

This one, either:

Both of which are kind of a shame, for completely different reasons.

In any case, besides finding out more about the King of the Britons, I'd love to have more knowledge about what exactly was going on back then.  There are very few written records from Britain following the withdrawal of Roman troops from the northern and western parts of the island by the (usurping) Emperor Magnus Maximus in 383.  Things stabilized a little after Magnus was deposed and executed in 387, but Roman rule in the west was definitely crumbling.  The final blow came in 410 when Roman settlers in what is now southern England -- many of whom had been born there -- pleaded for help from Rome against the "barbarian" Celts, who were not above taking advantage of the instability, and Emperor Honorius basically told them to bugger off and take care of their own problems because he had more pressing concerns, the biggest being that Rome had just been sacked by a shitload of Visigoths.

This meant that running England fell to whoever could manage to keep their head on their shoulders long enough to do so.  In some places, these were the Romano-British magistrates who chose not to decamp when the powers-that-be back on the Italian peninsula left them to their own devices; in other places, Celtic or Pictish warlords.  This period saw the beginning of the Saxon invasions from what is now Denmark and northern Germany, something that would historically and linguistically change the entire face of the country.

But the fact remains that we don't know much for certain.  The earliest record we have of the era was written at least a century after the events it chronicles -- Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) -- but it contains as much hagiography and finger-wagging about pagan sinfulness as it does history.  (For what it's worth, Gildas doesn't even mention King Arthur; the first time the Once and Future King appears in a written record is Nennius's Historia Brittonum, from around 900.  If Arthur was real, this omission seems a little curious, to say the least.)

In any case, between the withdrawal of the Romans in 410 and the unification of England under King Æthelstan of Wessex in 927, we don't have a lot of reliable sources to go on.  To be fair to the English, they had other fish to fry during those intervening centuries, what with the horrific Plague of Justinian ripping its way through Europe in the middle of the sixth century, repeated invasions by the Angles and Saxons, and then the depredations of the Vikings, starting with their destruction of the "Holy Island" of Lindisfarne in 793.  Virtually the only people who could read and write back then were monks and clerics, and you have to figure that what they'd have been writing while they were being hacked to bits would have been gruesome reading anyhow.  (Possibly, "Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea.  He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of Aaarrrrggh.")

The topic comes up because a new study out of the University of Cambridge that found something surprising -- at least in one region, the economy didn't tank completely when the Romans jumped ship.  Pollution by heavy metals, as nasty as it can be, is a decent proxy record for the robustness of trade and industry; when things are really bad, chances are you're not going to be doing much smelting of silver, iron, and lead.  The team, led by archaeologist Martin Millett, found that in sediment cores from the River Ure in Yorkshire, the levels of metal contamination stayed fairly constant throughout the period.  This is evidence that the Roman settlement at Aldborough -- the Roman Isurium Brigantum -- continued to be a trading hub despite the chaos.

This, of course, doesn't tell you what was happening in other parts of the island.  It could be that Aldborough just happened to hang on longer, for reasons we'll probably never know.  Eventually, the plague and the repeated invasions caught up with them, too, and in the seventh and eighth centuries, there wasn't that much happening, at least not smelting-wise.  The "Dark Ages" in England are "dark" not because they were necessarily any more barbaric than any other period, but because we know so little about them -- and this gives us at least a small piece of information about one town's fate after the fall of the Roman Empire.

I'm always attracted to a mystery, and there's something compelling about this period.  Undoubtedly why there have been so many works of fiction that are set in pre-Norman England.  It's nice to have one more bit of the puzzle, even if neither the worlds of Sexy King Arthur nor Silly King Arthur are likely to come anywhere near the reality of what life was like back then.

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Looking for a signature

Finding unequivocal evidence of extraterrestrial life is not as easy as science fiction makes it sound.

The problem is, we're biased toward detecting terrestrial life -- living things that have a similar chemistry to the familiar life forms here on Earth.  It's understandable; I mean, why would we not be?  While there is a great diversity of species here on our planet (something on the order of nine million extant, at an estimate), they all share the same basic biochemistry, including:

• ATP as an energy driver
• some form of sugar-fueled cellular respiration to produce that ATP
• phospholipid bilayers as cell membranes, and (for eukaryotes) for the internal membranes that compartmentalize the cell
• proteins to facilitate structure, movement, and catalysis (the latter are called enzymes)
• nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA for information storage and retrieval
• lipids for long-term energy storage

While there are obviously different twists on how exactly these things work, those features are common to just about all life on Earth.  (Interestingly, a 2010 paper claiming a microbe had been discovered in California's Mono Lake that incorporates arsenic into the backbone of its DNA instead of phosphorus was just retracted by the journal Nature -- although the retraction is controversial, and the authors are still defending their work as valid.)

The question remains unsolved, therefore, of the extent to which the genesis and evolution of life are constrained -- by which we mean that the pathways taken by biology might be expected to repeat on other Earth-like worlds.  (Or, to use Stephen Jay Gould's pithy phrase, we might find that evolution would produce similar forms again here on Earth if we were somehow able to "replay the tape of life.")  Would living things, down to the biochemical level, be at least somewhat like terrestrial life, or would they be entirely different?

To be fair to the science fiction writers, there have been instances where they've made a significant effort to consider what life "not as we know it" might look like.  Star Trek's Horta ("The Devil in the Dark"), Crystalline Entity ("Silicon Avatar"), and Tholians ("The Tholian Web") come to mind, as well as Doctor Who's Vashta Nerada ("Silence in the Library"), Boneless ("Flatline"), Not-Things ("Wild Blue Yonder"), and Midnight Entity ("Midnight").  

Even Lost in Space gave it a creditable try with the Bubble Creatures in "The Derelict."

The problem is more complex than that, though.  Since we can't actually go to other planets and search for living things -- even going to planets and moons in our own Solar System is crazy expensive and fraught with difficulties -- we're stuck with looking for biosignatures, traces (either structural or chemical) that show unequivocal evidence of being created by living things.

The sticking point is that word unequivocal.  Two good examples of this came to light in the last couple of weeks, one of them (from the standpoint of people like me who would love nothing better than to find out we're not alone in the universe) bad news, and the other one -- at least tentatively -- good news.

Let's start with the bad news first.

Back in 2005, NASA's Cassini mission spotted something exciting -- the presence of organic molecules in water-rich plumes erupted from Saturn's icy moon Enceladus.  The surmise was that these plumes were created by pressure in the moon's interior, where water might be kept liquid by tidal deformation from the huge gas giant's gravitational pull.  Now, organic doesn't mean produced by life; it's a chemistry term meaning "containing carbon and hydrogen."  (Formaldehyde, for example, is an organic compound, and has been found by its spectral signature in interstellar gas, and no one's claiming that it was made by aliens.  At least, no one I'd want to have a conversation with.)  On the other hand, lots of organic compounds are made by living things, so their presence in Enceladus's geysers certainly seemed to raise at least the possibility that underneath the ice, there might be a watery ocean that harbored life.

Well, a study led by scientists from Italy's Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziale has found another possible explanation.  The organic molecules could be formed right there on the surface by radiation funneled in by Saturn's magnetic field, then blasted off the surface -- i.e., they didn't come from an interior ocean at all.  "While the identification of complex organic molecules in Enceladus's environment remains an important clue in assessing the moon's habitability, the results demonstrate that radiation-driven chemistry on the surface and in the plumes could also create these molecules," said Grace Richards, who led the study.  "Molecules considered prebiotic could plausibly form in situ through radiation processing, rather than necessarily originating from the subsurface ocean.  Although this doesn't rule out the possibility that Enceladus's ocean may be habitable, it does mean we need to be cautious in making that assumption just because of the composition of the plumes."

The second paper had more hopeful news.  It comes out of Stony Brook University, and is an analysis of some mudstones found in Jezero Crater on Mars by the Perseverance rover.  The analysis -- done long-distance, obviously -- found traces of organic material, along with ferrous sulfate and ferric sulfide.  Most interestingly, the organic material seems to have undergone post-deposition redox reactions; redox reactions are the mechanism by which all terrestrial life forms harvest energy for their life processes (cellular respiration is, basically, one long string of redox reactions).  The minerals, the researchers say, "challenge some aspects of a purely abiotic explanation" -- cautious science-speak for, "Life?  Yeah, could be."

Of course, this is not proof, and Sagan's principle that I mentioned in a post a few days ago -- "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" -- certainly applies here.  But it is fascinating, and if further inquiries support the biotic explanation for the odd chemistry of the Jezero mudstones, it'll be somewhere beyond exciting.  I've always thought it likely that life is common in the universe, but having a real, honest-to-Gallifrey extraterrestrial example would be amazing.

In any case, keep your eyes on the science news.  Despite the ridiculous budget cuts NASA is facing, they're still doing some wonderful science.  And hopefully, at some point, we'll actually find proof of aliens.  Wouldn't that be cool?

I hope it's not the Vashta Nerada, though.  Those mofos are scary.

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