Unexpected asymmetry

The question "why are we here?" has vexed scientists and philosophers alike.

The philosophical answers to this are beyond the purview of this blog, and, frankly, beyond my expertise.  I've got a decent background in a lot of areas -- one of the unforeseen benefits of changing one's major over and over -- but philosophy is a subject on which I am unqualified to weigh in.

The scientific twist on this question, however, is equally thorny.  Why is there something rather than nothing?  The current model of the Big Bang Theory predicts with considerable certainty that when the universe formed, there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter.  The two are (in a physics sense) symmetrical; every property that matter has, with the exception of mass, antimatter has the opposite.  Positrons (anti-electrons) are positively charges; anti-protons are negative.

The rub is that if you look around the universe, you don't see antimatter.  At all.  Which is, on one level, unsurprising; when matter and antimatter meet, the result is mutual annihilation (and the release of tremendous energy, as per E = mc^2), as any aficionado of Star Trek knows.

In another way, however, this is puzzling.  If matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts during the Big Bang, in the intervening years it should all have mutually annihilated, leaving behind nothing but gamma rays.  If the symmetrical production of matter and antimatter is correct, then our universe should be devoid of anything but energy -- and we wouldn't be here to consider the question.

[image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

So physicists have been refining their techniques to study antimatter, to see if there's something to account for the imbalance.  Just three days ago, a paper appeared in the journal Nature, by Mostafa Ahmadi of the University of Liverpool et al., called, "Characterization of the 1S-2S Transition in Antihydrogen," in which the team created molecules of antihydrogen -- made of an antiproton and a positron -- to see if it exhibited different properties than ordinary hydrogen.  They did this by creating 90,000 antiprotons, mixing them with five million positrons, and allowing them to form atoms -- then trapping a small number of these in a "magnetic bottle."  (Remember that antimatter violently explodes if it comes into contact with ordinary matter.)

The outcome: antihydrogen seems to behave exactly like ordinary hydrogen.  It emits the same spectral lines (the particular property Ahmadi et al. were studying).  As Aylin Woodward wrote in LiveScience:

As expected, hydrogen and antihydrogen ­— matter and antimatter — behave identically. Now, we just know that they're identical at a measurement of parts per trillion.  However, [coauthor Stefan] Ulmer said the 2-parts-per-trillion measurement does not rule out the possibility that something is deviating between the two types of matter at an even greater level of precision that has thus far defied measurement. 

As for [coauthor Jeffrey] Hangst, he's less concerned with answering the question of why our universe of matter exists as it does without antimatter — what he calls "the elephant in the room."  Instead, he and his group want to focus on making even more precise measurements, and exploring how antimatter reacts with gravity.

The results of this study don't rule out one possibility -- which is that some distant galaxies may actually be composed of antimatter.  As the Ahmadi et al. study shows, it's increasingly unlikely we'd be able to tell that from a distance.  The spectral lines of antihydrogen in an "antisun" would look the same as those of hydrogen from an ordinary star, so there'd be no way to tell unless you went there (which would be unfortunate for you, because you'd explode in a burst of gamma rays).

Whether such an antimatter galaxy would have all of the same people in it, only the good guys would be evil and would have beards, is a matter of conjecture.

But if, as many scientists believe, there really is an imbalance between the amount of matter and antimatter -- if unequal amounts were created during the Big Bang, so during the mutual annihilation that followed, some ordinary matter was left over -- it points to some physics that we haven't even begun to understand.

Which is pretty exciting.  As I pointed out in yesterday's post, unanswered questions are the bread-and-butter of scientific research.  The team is hoping to have even more precise measurements made by the end of 2018, at which point CERN is shutting down for two years for upgrades.  As Jeffrey Hangst put it, "We have other tricks up our sleeve.  Stay tuned."

Which even Evil Spock would have approved of, I think.

When the volcano blows

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said, "I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."

The strength of science is in its ability to self-correct, but this does engender a problem; it may well be that some of the questions we're asking will never be satisfactorily answered.  There are sometimes when we must admit ignorance, and hold our determination to have everything figured out in abeyance -- possibly indefinitely.

That may be the situation we're in with regards to an interesting question surrounding the largest volcanic eruption in modern times, the eruption of Toba in the Indonesian archipelago.  This eruption dwarfed Mount Saint Helens, the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, and even the catastrophic eruption of Tambora (also in Indonesia) in 1815, that threw so much in the way of debris up into the atmosphere that it caused the "Year Without a Summer," in which Quebec City got a foot of snow -- in mid-July.

The Toba eruption, 74,000 years ago, was bigger than all of the above; by some estimates, it threw a hundred times more in the way of pulverized rock into the air than Tambora did.  It is certain that it caused not only localized devastation, but worldwide climate change.  And the conventional wisdom is that it nearly wiped out the human species -- that we were driven into a genetic bottleneck, in which only a few survivors became the ancestors of everyone currently alive today.

The Toba caldera [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Michael Rampino and Stanley Ambrose, of New York University, were amongst the first proponents of the Toba bottleneck theory.  In their paper "Volcanic Winter in the Garden of Eden: The Toba Supereruption and the Late Pleistocene Human Population Crash," published in 2000 in the Papers of the Geological Society of America, they write:

Genetic studies indicate that sometime prior to ca. 60,000 yr ago humans suffered a severe population bottleneck (possibly only 3,000-10,000 individuals), followed eventually by rapid population increase, technological innovations, and migrations.  The climatic effects of the paroxysmal Toba eruption could have caused the bottleneck, and the event might have been a catalyst for the technological innovations and migrations that followed.  The present results as to the predicted environmental and ecological effects of the eruption lend support to a possible connection between the Toba event and the human population bottleneck, and suggest that similar bottlenecks among other organisms might be expected at about the same time. 

However, it appears that the question is far from settled.  A paper by Eugene Smith et al. that came out last week in Nature, "Humans Thrived in South Africa Through the Toba Eruption about 74,000 Years Ago," completely counters the conventional wisdom -- and suggests that if the bottleneck did occur, it may not have been the fault of the volcano:

Approximately 74 thousand years ago (ka), the Toba caldera erupted in Sumatra.  Since the magnitude of this eruption was first established, its effects on climate, environment and humans have been debated.  Here we describe the discovery of microscopic glass shards characteristic of the Youngest Toba Tuff—ashfall from the Toba eruption—in two archaeological sites on the south coast of South Africa, a region in which there is evidence for early human behavioural complexity.  An independently derived dating model supports a date of approximately 74 ka for the sediments containing the Youngest Toba Tuff glass shards.  By defining the input of shards at both sites, which are located nine kilometres apart, we are able to establish a close temporal correlation between them.  Our high-resolution excavation and sampling technique enable exact comparisons between the input of Youngest Toba Tuff glass shards and the evidence for human occupation.  Humans in this region thrived through the Toba event and the ensuing full glacial conditions, perhaps as a combined result of the uniquely rich resource base of the region and fully evolved modern human adaptation.

The reason I bring this up -- besides the fact that I'm interested in human population genetics, and it's cool -- is that this may be a question that we simply don't have the data to answer.  It's possible that the "thriving" population that Smith et al. found was a localized group of lucky people, and elsewhere, humanity got clobbered.  On the other hand, it could be that the Rampino and Ambrose paper was simply wrong -- that the population genetics studies, which are not without their a priori assumptions, overestimated the extent of the Toba bottleneck (or the whatever-caused-it bottleneck).

But -- and this is the most critical point -- you keep looking.  If there's no definitive solution, you are forced to admit it, but the research doesn't stop there.  Ignorance is the beginning, not the end, of the scientific process.

So we may never know exactly how close humanity came to extinction 74,000 years ago.  The important thing is that we've asked the question -- and that science gives us a means to evaluate the evidence, and determine if a particular answer is supported.  And what we learn along the way will open up further avenues for exploration, enough to keep the scientific world occupied for a long, long time.

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

Nature walk

Mark Twain once said, "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable."

I ran across a particularly good example of that yesterday over at the site Mysterious Universe.  It's the story of one Katherine Brewster, a 27-year-old woman from England, who was visiting Brazil.  On the morning of March 26, she went for a walk down a trail in the jungle... and didn't return.

I've been to the jungle -- specifically, the Amazon lowlands of Ecuador and the Taman Negara region of Malaysia -- and I can say from personal experience that they are not places where you'd want to get lost.  The jungle abounds in plants with various kinds of toxins, not to mention sharp spines.  Many of the animals there specifically want to kill you in unpleasant ways.  Because of the high biodiversity and extreme competition for niches, the organisms there have evolved some pretty terrifying adaptations -- venom, talons, and big, nasty, pointy teeth to name three.  In Malaysia, I found out that they even had terrestrial leeches -- bloodsucking critters who hide in the leaf litter and then crawl up your leg to find a nice spot to fasten on.

I'm not normally squeamish, but these guys skeeved me out so much that I took to dousing my boots daily in a repellent containing DEET.  It worked, but if I ever throw those boots away, I'm going to have to file an Environmental Impact Statement.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So getting lost there would be a seriously bad idea, which is why Katherine Brewster's friends and family were in a panic.  When a search party found no trace, and two, then three days went by, everyone feared the worst.  But then five days later she walked out the jungle, covered with cuts, bruises, and insect stings, saying that a "divine voice" had told her to trek into the wilderness, and while she was there she learned to talk with the plants, who had taught her how to perform photosynthesis.

At this juncture, I feel obliged to tell my readers that I'm not making this up.

Besides becoming photosynthetic, Brewster also said the plants told her about this thing called the "morphogenetic field."  Here's her explanation:

[C]onsciousness within form connects everything. We have access to the whole universe, all we need to do is to detach ourselves from the material.  We are thus the intrinsic consciousness of the universe.

Whatever that means.  As far as how she avoided starving, she said that the plants themselves told her which ones were safe to eat:

The plants were taking to me, telling me which ones I could eat, which ones I could make tea with, or to heal a wound with.  The messages would come in words. It was more like having a conversation with the plants.

I'm not entirely sure that even if plants could talk, I'd believe what they said.  My sense is that the multiflora rose currently taking over my entire back yard, for example, is actively evil.  It's constantly doing things like sitting there, looking innocuous, then when I get a little too close, or worse, come at it with a pair of clippers, it reaches out and skewers me with thorns as sharp as hypodermic needles.  My son, who sometimes has more good intentions than sense, once attacked a multiflora rose bush with a machete.  He was successful at hacking it back some, but came out of the encounter looking like he'd been mauled by a jaguar.

Brewster, on the other hand, seemed to view everything she encountered on her little impromptu nature walk as being benevolent.  She even said she came to an understanding with the insects -- specifically, that they could bite her or sting her if they wanted to.  She said that she needed to "learn from the experience," which doesn't to me sound like an "understanding" so much as a statement of "fuck it, I give up."  I'm not sure what you could learn from a wasp sting other than "It hurts like hell," but for some reason she felt the need to let the bugs know that she meant them no harm.

My guess is that the wasps all went back to their nests and told their friends where she was.  "Go sting this chick," they probably said, in Wasp.  "She just kind of stands there with this bemused smile on her face."

Wasps are a little like multiflora rose in that respect.

So anyway, Brewster said she learned a lot from her experience, most strikingly how to synthesize her own food using sunlight as an energy source.  Myself, I didn't think that's something that could be taught.  I thought you needed all these enzyme systems and subcellular structures and so on in order to photosynthesize.  But I'm just a biologist.  What do I know about morphogenetic fields, and whatnot?

Amazingly, Brewster also says she's ready to go back in and do another Back-to-Nature trek again.  I guess the plants haven't taught her enough yet.  Maybe this time she'll learn how to make flowers come out of her ass, or something.  I dunno.  But one thing I'm sure of: the wasps are probably already preparing their welcome.

Networks and creativity

It's no wonder I'm interested in the neurological origins of creativity.

Besides the fact that I'm a fiction writer -- so coming up with creative and engaging lies is basically my stock-in-trade -- I'm also a lifelong musician.  And I'm not the only one in my family.  They're all creative in various ways.  My father was an amateur jewelry-maker and designed and built stained-glass windows in his spare time.  My mom was a ceramic artist and exceptionally talented oil painter.  My wife's art consists of using handwritten text, much of it almost microscopic, in combination with watercolors and glass etching to create pieces of an intricacy that nearly beggars belief.  (Take ten minutes and check it out; I can almost guarantee you've never seen anything quite like it.)  Our older son is a talented sketch artist and cartoonist, and our younger makes his living as a professional glassblower.

So I can say with all due modesty that we're a pretty creative bunch.

As far as where it all comes from, that's a little trickier.  The nature/nurture issue rears its ugly head here; it's certainly a possibility that creativity is to some extent genetic, but (in the case of my kids, for example) they were raised by parents who were constantly looking for new ideas and modes of expression, so it's natural enough that they gravitated that way themselves.  But last month, a paper  was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called "Robust Prediction of Individual Creative Ability from Brain Functional Connectivity," by Roger Beaty et al., which gives some credence to the fact that whatever its ultimate cause, creativity has a definite biological underpinning.

What the researchers did was to use fMRI data from 183 individuals who were engaged in a classical divergent thinking task (such as, "Think of as many possible uses for a paperclip as you can").  People vary greatly in their competence at these sorts of things; an average person might be able to come up with twenty or so, but a highly creative person can generate many more -- usually by questioning the baseline assumption of the task (for example, does it have to be a standard paperclip made of metal?  Could it be made of styrofoam?  Could it be a hundred feet tall?).

What they found was that the people who scored as the most creative (the highest on the divergent thinking scale) had a different fundamental connectivity in their brains.  The authors write:

At the behavioral level, we found a strong correlation between creative thinking ability and self-reported creative behavior and accomplishment in the arts and sciences (r = 0.54).  At the neural level, we found a pattern of functional brain connectivity related to high-creative thinking ability consisting of frontal and parietal regions within default, salience, and executive brain systems.  In a leave-one-out cross-validation analysis, we show that this neural model can reliably predict the creative quality of ideas generated by novel participants within the sample.  Furthermore, in a series of external validation analyses using data from two independent task fMRI samples and a large task-free resting-state fMRI sample, we demonstrate robust prediction of individual creative thinking ability from the same pattern of brain connectivity.  The findings thus reveal a whole-brain network associated with high-creative ability comprised of cortical hubs within default, salience, and executive systems—intrinsic functional networks that tend to work in opposition—suggesting that highly creative people are characterized by the ability to simultaneously engage these large-scale brain networks.

So the presence of this connectivity between different parts of the brain acts as a good predictor of the capacity for creative thought, and (apparently) also correlates with creative behavior (e.g. taking up art, music, writing, dance, and so on).

Which probably explains why it's so difficult to teach creativity.  In my experience both in writing and in music, it's not hard to teach someone to improve their skills (although in practice, it does take a lot of work on the part of the student), but it's nearly impossible to teach creativity itself.  In writing, training someone to generate novel ideas is a bit of an uphill battle.  In music, learning how to play expressively can be equally challenging.  I distinctly remember one of my flute students who had hired me specifically to teach her how to play with feeling -- her playing, she told me, had been characterized as "cold" and "mechanical."  Over a period of a few weeks, I found something very interesting about her.  Technically, she was a better flutist than I am.  Her sight-reading ability was certainly leaps and bounds beyond mine.  But if she wasn't told how to play something -- if there were no dynamic markings of "fortissimo" and "pianissimo" on the page, for example -- she had no idea what to do with it.

At first, I was convinced she just had never been shown how to recognize the emotional content of music, but could be taught to do it.  I tried to start with the simple stuff first.  We took a piece of Shetland folk music that, to me, is heartwrenchingly emotional -- the lament "Da Slockit Light."  I played it for her completely flat, no dynamics, and asked her to try to identify for me how she would add dynamics to increase its emotional impact -- where, for example, to play louder or softer, where the emotional climax of the tune was, and so on.

She couldn't do it.  She was trying -- that much was clear -- but it became quickly obvious that she was guessing.  So I played it for her with the dynamic structure as I heard it, and she said, "That was really pretty, but I don't know how you figured that out."

I find a similar thing in my biology classes.  The final project is that the students do a design-your-own-experiment -- they come up with an idea they want to test, and figure out how they could create an experiment to find the answer.  Some students jump right in; their problem often is that they come up with too many ideas, and have a hard time winnowing it down to a single one.  But some students find this task nearly impossible.  I have some methods for helping them at least generate an idea they can work with, but the process of coming up with a creative question to ask about the world is difficult and frustrating.

I wonder if it's all the same thing, really, and might have to do with the multiply-connective brain networks identified by Beaty et al.  All of these things require you to link disparate realms -- sounds with emotions, media with visual impact, scientific questions with novel methods.

Whether this connectivity is genetic or comes from early exposure and training is still an open question, of course.  But it does show one thing -- being able to think outside the box requires your brain to have boxes with distinctly blurry edges.

The grand unified conspiracy

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia suggested a topic for me to consider -- "QAnon."  I had heard the name before, associated with some sort of conspiracy theory, but didn't know much about it.  But when my friend said, "QAnon is the Grand Unified Theory to which Pizzagate is only the Special Theory of Relativity," I thought I should look into it.

And down the Rabbit Hole I went.

The best exposition I found of QAnon, known to true believers as "The Storm," was over at Medium, in an article written by political writer Will Sommer, called "Meet 'The Storm,' the Conspiracy Theory Taking Over the Pro-Trump Internet."  And the main gist of it, so far as I can understand it, is that none of the chaotic lunacy that has characterized the Trump presidency thus far is accidental; it's all being orchestrated by Trump himself as part of a Grand Plan.

In other words, it only looks like the Keystone Kops because you aren't seeing the Big Picture.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole thing apparently started with a guy calling himself "Q" or "QAnonymous" posting over at the site 4Chan, saying that "the Storm is coming," meaning that Trump is finally going to triumph over the globalists, lowering the boom and at the same time essentially declaring himself dictator-for-life.  QAnonymous likes to give his followers little snippets of mysterious "information" that don't tell you anything much -- or, even better, leave the interpretation up to the wild imaginations of 4Chan aficionados.  Here are a few examples:

• HRC detained, not arrested (yet).
• Where is Huma? Follow Huma.
• This had nothing to do w/ Russia (yet).
• Do you believe HRC, Soros, Obamama [sic] etc have more power than Trump?
• Fantasy.
• Whoever controls the office of the Presidecy [sic] controls this great land.
• Why did Soros donate all his money recently?
• Why would he place all his funds in a RC?
• Mockingbird 10.30.17
• God bless fellow Patriots.

Over a few weeks, the conspiracy had managed to wind in the Seth Rich murder, the Clinton Foundation, the Central American/Los Angeles street gang MS-13, Darrel Issa's retirement, Elon Musk and Space-X, and a power outage during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.  Nothing is too minor or peripheral not to be linked in, and because QAnonymous frequently speaks in code, it's left up to his devotees to figure out what the hell he means.  When he posted the cryptic message, "PHIL_B_O_Extracted," the conclusion was that Obama had gone to the Philippines and was arrested, which made perfect sense except that he hadn't and he wasn't.

But the main upshot of it all is that Trump is way smarter and more cunning than he seems, and all of the tweets and scandals and revolving-door policy with regards to his cabinet are simply pieces he's moving around on a chessboard. To accomplish what, you might ask?  Well, here are a few of the goals, according to QAnon:

• Arresting Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and sending them off to Guantanamo.  This is what the Mueller investigation is actually doing -- the focus on Trump is a clever smokescreen.
• The whole Russia collusion thing is a smokescreen, too.  In fact, Trump engineered the whole thing and is pretending to like Putin to draw out the treasonous Democrats.
• Ferreting out the perpetrators of Pizzagate, and making sure they end up behind bars.
• Sweeping pro-globalization spokespeople away, both in the United States and beyond.
• Ending any participation in treaties that don't put America first.

So the bottom line is that Trump is winning, which of course thrilled the alt-right no end, so they jumped on this bandwagon with little prompting and even less evidence.  As for Trump, he's winning at everything.  QAnonymous is said to be one of the top advisers to the president (whether a publicly-acknowledged one remains to be seen); Paris Martineau over at New York magazine said that some of them even claim he's been photographed sitting next to Trump on Air Force One.

QAnonymous hasn't always gotten it right, though.  He predicted a major conflagration in November, wherein Trump would show his hand and blow away the naysayers, and no such thing happened.  But like the people who forecast the End Times, the failure of his prediction doesn't seem to have diminished his standing.  Like with the End Times loons, the attitude by his followers seems to be, "Well, if he was wrong this time, it just makes it more likely he'll be right next time!"

The whole thing has become wildly popular, and not, I'm afraid, because of people sending the links to each other with the message, "Look at the shit someone dreamed up now!"  From 4Chan it's spilled over into Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube, with the hits spiking so fast on each new post that it almost defies belief.  (Martineau signed up to track the hashtag #QAnon on Twitter, and it maxed out at the 2,000 post limit in only four hours.)

The whole thing is a little disturbing from several different perspectives.  For one thing, we have the usual problem with conspiracy theories, which is that it highlights the penchant people have for believing something with next to no hard evidence.  A second, however, is that this one smacks of desperation; there's a real sense that the QAnon True Believers simply cannot fathom that Trump is a clueless, narcissistic buffoon whose approach to policy resembles the strategy a six-year-old would use in Bumper Cars at the carnival.

The third, however, is that unlike other conspiracies -- for example, the idea that NASA is covering up evidence that the Earth is flat -- this one strikes me as potentially dangerous.  These people are deadly serious, and if something gets in the way of what they think is supposed to happen -- if the Mueller investigation results in a Trump indictment, if the current administration's anti-globalism agenda isn't enacted, if the #BlueWave hopefuls are right about a Democratic sweep this November -- I don't think they're going to take it lying down.  I can only hope that the real QAnon diehards are few enough in number that they won't represent a threat on any kind of national scale, but as we've seen over and over, all it takes is one or two heavily-armed nuts with an ax to grind to create some pretty significant havoc.

I hope I'm wrong.  And I hope that in the end, QAnon fades like many other wacky claims have.  But given its sudden surge in notoriety, I think we might have a bit of a wait before that happens.

No hell below us, above us only sky

I think my problem is that I really don't understand religion.

I understand, or at least think I do, religious people.  I have a lot of religious friends, and mostly we get along fine, even if I am a fairly outspoken godless heathen.  I've been in many a discussion with my religious friends, and from what they've told me they believe for a variety of reasons -- it's their culture/the way they were raised to believe, it makes sense of the world around them, it's comforting, and (for some of them) they have had experiences that they interpret as being in contact with the divine.

So far, no problem.  I may not share this framework for interpreting the universe, but as long as they don't try to force it on me and I don't try to force my atheism on them, it's not a problem for either of us.

But what I don't understand is some of the pronouncements from religious leaders, who take their own convictions about the nature of the deity and feel obliged to make sure that everyone else believes the same way.  Especially given that (1) each of said religious leaders is telling us something different, and (2) even the same religious leader can seriously change his tune from one moment to the next, as if suddenly the entire cosmos shifted and only he was aware of it.

It's this latter one that I want to address today, given Pope Francis's recent pronouncement that hell doesn't exist.  Now, let me say up front that my impression is that the Pope is a pretty cool guy.  We (obviously) don't agree on much in a doctrinal sense, but he seems like a genuinely kind and moral person.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But sometimes he does say things that leave me scratching my head.  In an interview in La Repubblica conducted by Eugenio Scalfari, the Pope said the following:

They [people who die without confessing mortal sin] are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear.  There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.

Which is a little cheerier than the prospect of the Fiery Furnace.  However, there's the problem that it runs counter to The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which you think would be fairly authoritative:

The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity.  Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, 'eternal fire.'  The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.

So that's awkward.  The Vatican scrambled to do damage control, and a day after the interview went public, issued the following statement:

The Holy Father Francis recently received the founder of the newspaper La Repubblica in a private meeting on the occasion of Easter, without however giving him any interviews.  What is reported by the author in today’s article [in La Repubblica] is the result of his reconstruction, in which the textual words pronounced by the Pope are not quoted.  No quotation of the aforementioned article must therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.

So, basically, "you weren't there and you can't prove that's what he said."

Apparently, however, it was too late, as only a few hours after the article was published, some big chunks of the ceiling of St. Peter's Basilica broke off and fell hundreds of feet to the cathedral floor.  No one was injured, but the faithful said it was a message from God that you better just forget the whole "hell doesn't exist" episode ever happened.

What I wonder about is if Pope Francis is right and hell doesn't exist, how does the Vatican justify exorcism?  Because if hell doesn't exist, then how can Satan and demons and all?  I would think that they would be first on the list of "did not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven," and would have vanished along with the rest of the sinners.  But that hasn't stopped the powers-that-be in the Catholic Church from launching a new program to train exorcists, spurred, they say, by a sudden uptick in demonic possession.  The number of possessed people in Italy alone, they say, has risen to 500,000 a year.

Which is a shitload of demons.  So from April 16 to April 21, the church is sponsoring an exorcism training course at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome.  One of the course instructors, Father Cesare Truqui, said:

The fight against the evil one started at the origin of the world, and is destined to last until the end of the world.  But today we are at a stage crucial in history: many Christians no longer believe in [the devil’s] existence, few exorcists are appointed and there are no more young priests willing to learn the doctrine and practice of liberation of souls.

Pope Francis has said he agrees:

If a priest becomes aware of genuine spiritual disturbances that may be in large part psychic, and therefore must be confirmed by means of healthy collaboration with the human sciences, he must not hesitate to refer the issue to those who, in the diocese, are charged with this delicate and necessary ministry, namely, exorcists.

 Now just hang on a moment.

I'll admit that I might not be the right one to try to figure this all out, given my aforementioned godless-heathen status.  But how can all of this fit together?  That is, if Eugenio Scalfari reported what the Pope said accurately, which (I note) the Pope himself hasn't denied.  Hell doesn't exist, and souls that disobeyed God simply vanish, but there are demons loose in the world who disobeyed God and didn't vanish, and they can take over humans, and if they're not exorcised by a priest said human/demon hybrids will die in sin, and vanish again, presumably for good this time.

Is there something I'm missing here?  I'm willing to admit I may just be confused.

Anyhow, that's today's missive from the world of religion.  Allow me to reiterate that I'm not trying to offend any of my religious readers; if I come off as sounding snarky it's because I'm genuinely perplexed at how someone could reconcile all of the above.  So I'm gonna just throw this out there, and go back to thinking about something that's easier to make sense of, like quantum physics.

UIPDATE:  Apparently there's a significant possibility that the interviewer might not be very reliable -- Snopes is calling his claim "unproven" and says that it's not the first time he's claimed the Pope has said something like this, without any facts to back him up.  So we'll file this one in the "well, maybe" folder for now.

Put down the ducky

Yesterday, we looked at the fact that scientists have actually not admitted that vaccines cause autism.  Today, we consider the fact that your child's rubber duck is not going to kill them, either.

You'd think this would be unnecessary, but in this time of fearmongering and sensationalism, no claim is too outlandish to gain traction as long as it plays on someone's anxiety.  In this case, the whole thing started with a paper in Nature called, "Ugly Ducklings—The Dark Side of Plastic Materials in Contact With Potable Water," by Lisa Neu, Carola Bänziger, Caitlin R. Proctor, Ya Zhang, Wen-Tso Liu, and Frederik Hammes, which found that after several uses, plastic bath toys were covered with bacteria (including fecal coliform bacteria) and various species of fungi.

When I read the paper, my general response was, *yawn*.  Of course bath toys are covered with bacteria.  Everything is.  Add to that the fact that (1) bath water is warm, (2) tubs are generally not spotless to start with, and (3) the bath-taker is immersing his or her naked body into the water with the purpose of washing dirt off, it's no wonder bath water is a soup of various bacteria.

Even fecal coliforms.  Because, I hope, we all periodically wash our butts, too.

But there were people who stumbled on this paper, with its alarming-sounding title (which, as scientific researchers, Neu et al. should have known better than to give it), and immediately interpreted the study as implying that rubber duckies posed a deadly danger to children.  Bacteria!  Oh no!  Must immediately throw away all bath toys!

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Let's just clear up a few things, here.

Even in a healthy human, the number of bacterial cells in or on you exceeds the number of human cells you have.  You read that right; a study way back in 1977 estimated about 39 trillion bacterial cells in or on a typical human, significantly outnumbering the 30 trillion human cells you have (84% of which are red blood cells).  More to the point, the vast majority of these bacteria are either neutral or actively helpful; disturbances in the "intestinal flora" are thought to have roles in such horrible diseases as Crohn's disease, peptic ulcers, CDiff (Clostridium difficile) infection, and ulcerative colitis.  (Which is why there is a promising therapy to treat those using -- I kid you not -- fecal transplants from a healthy individual, to reestablish the right intestinal flora.)

So if your rubber ducky is coated with bacteria, the fact is, so are you.  And most of us are still healthy most of the time.

But that logic evidently wasn't sufficient; there have been various alarming articles on "alternative-medicine" and "natural parenting" sites claiming that not only were bath toys deadly, but there was a systematic coverup of the research, presumably sponsored by Big Ducky.

The whole thing was debunked roundly by Alex Berezow over at the website of the American Council on Science and Health last week.  Berezow went even further with regards to the Neu et al. study; he claimed that they were actively seeking an alarmist reaction for the purposes of publicity:

Amazingly, the authors cite mommy blogs and the sensationalist book Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things in their paper.  The book is about the dangerous "chemicals" that are poisoning everybody, a chemophobic tactic that we've debunked over and over again. 

Quite honestly, I don't think I've ever seen anything like this in my professional career. Serious scientists don't cite mommy blogs and sensationalist popular science books in peer-reviewed journal papers. 

The authors had a clear strategy in mind: (1) Do a study on a common household object; (2) Produce boring data that doesn't surprise any microbiologist; (3) Write a provocative, fearmongering headline; (4) Market it to a gullible, clickbait-hungry press (like the New York Times), who would repeat their claims without any criticism or critical thinking; and (5) Watch the media interview requests and grant dollars come rolling in. 

Mission accomplished.  The deceitful manipulation of the press for their own professional benefit would be a thing of fascination if it wasn't so utterly disgusting.

And I have to admit he's got a point.

Of course, the craziest thing about the Natural Organic Health people who started running around in circles flailing their arms and making alarmed little squeaking noises after reading the study is that they apparently never thought of the simplest expedient for dealing with the situation if you're worried: wash the fucking toys.  I mean, seriously.  If you think there are nasty bacteria on the rubber duck, scrub it with a little soap and water after your kid's done in the bath.  Or, if you really want to go crazy, wipe it off with some rubbing alcohol.

Voilà.  If not no bacteria -- there nothing that could do that, short of an autoclave, which would turn your bath toys into a puddle of brightly-colored melted plastic -- at least there'll be fewer.

All of this goes to show that if there's nothing to be scared of, people will find something.  Added to the problem that (if Berezow is right about Neu et al. being guilty of deliberate sensationalization) fearmongering sells.  So if you like playing with a rubber ducky in the tub, have at it.  I hear you have to put it down if you want to play the saxophone, but other than that, it's perfectly safe.