Woo-woo world update

Yesterday's political post resulted in five people calling me a "libtard snowflake" (or the equivalent), a recommendation to "shut the fuck up until I get past my brainwashing," a person who said he was going to laugh after November 6 when "the leftist assholes like [me] are going down in flames," and one email that I was a "partisan hack working for the disinformation specialists."  The result is that today, we'll consider a different set of issues, to wit:

• Do ghosts hug each other in the afterlife?
• If you were strapped for cash, could you count on an angel to give you a hundred bucks?
• What would you do if you saw a UFO that made "sci-fi noises" and made your dog "go mental?"

Apparently the answers are, respectively:

• Yes.
• Yes, and your two pals would also get a hundred bucks each.
• Report it to the local newspaper, who would treat it as fact.  Of course.

You're probably wondering about the details by now, so allow me to elaborate.  The first story comes out of Lincolnshire, England, specifically Revesby Abbey, a Cistercian monastery that dates back to 1143.  Ron Bowers was conducting a "paranormal investigation" of the Abbey because of its reputation for being haunted, and he snapped a photograph that should be encouraging to any of us who are not looking forward to the idea of an afterlife with no cuddling.  Here's the photo:

Which looks, at a stretch, like a couple hugging.  So Bowers turned the image into its negative, because there's nothing like noodling with the image if it doesn't show you what you want:

And I have to admit it's a little spooky, although as I've pointed out before, pareidolia works even on people who know what it is and realize that their sensory/perceptive systems are being fooled.

Bowers, on the other hand, is all in.  "I thought I could hear a rustling in bushes behind me before the capture of what looks like an embracing couple which led me to think it could be someone in the physical [sic]," Bowers said.  "At first, I thought it was one figure, but within a few seconds I realized it could be two – one with an arm around the other.  The arm is very prominent, and it looks like two people embracing, it looks like they are in love...  It’s nice to believe that love continues.  It’s a lovely picture and who knows maybe there is a love story there.  For me it’s a little more of a confirmation that our lives continue or that our energies can return to our favorite places.  If it is possible that we are energy, it could return to our favorite places, like homes, pubs, maybe schools and other locations.  I don’t believe I have ever had something so intimate as that picture."

The second story comes from Dreamy Draw Mountain in Arizona, where three college students from Phoenix were on a hike a few weeks ago, and had a big surprise.  The students, Allisa Miller, Jen Vickman, and Kassi Sanchez, had started out the day poorly, sleeping through their alarms, and getting up to find that it was hot out.

Which makes me wonder what they expected, in Phoenix.

"Like we didn’t want to hike," said Sanchez, whom I dearly hope isn't majoring in communication.  "Like something we had to do almost forced fun."

Despite this devastatingly tragic start, they persevered where weaker individuals would have given up, and made it up the mountain trail.  And when they got near the top, they saw...

... Jesus.

Or an angel, or something.  They don't seem all that sure, themselves.  "We just see a silhouette of this man, it looks like he has long hair and he’s in a robe," said Miller.  "He was like right there on the top of the mountain.  We were all just kinda shocked, we just kinda sat there."

So they went up toward him, but he vanished.  Near where he was, they found an envelope stuck between two rocks.  They opened it, and found a long, rambling note quoting the bible and various Christian rock singers, signed, I shit you not, "J."  And with the note were three one-hundred-dollar bills, one for each of them.

It's a miracle!  A visitation from Jesus, who evidently stopped by the Pearly Gates National Bank on his way to Arizona!

Or maybe it's a poorly-thought-out publicity stunt.  I'll let you decide.

The last story comes from Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, England, where an "unnamed eyewitness" reports seeing a UFO close-up while out walking his dog.

"The UFO was hovering about 50 foot [sic] away from me, but we could not smell fuel or anything, I was shocked that it did not hit our house," he told a reporter for the Stroud News & Journal.  "It seemed like it was trying to fly below the radar, so it could avoid being scanned - at the time my dog was going mental at it... it looked like a huge tube with intricate ship-style rivets...  When I came across it coming through the forest I thought it must be a plane or hot air balloon, but it was clearly not and it was making sci-fi-like sounds.  Before it shot off into the clouds at immense speed the engines turned bright white, I've never seen anything like it."

Although he had his cellphone with him, he was "too shocked to take a photograph" of it.  Because of course he was.

This is apparently the second UFO sighting near Stonehouse in the past two weeks, which makes me wonder why they have all the luck.  I would love to see a UFO, or a ghost or Bigfoot or whatnot, and here I sit.  And I guarantee that I wouldn't miss an opportunity to take a photograph if I did.  I'd even remember to take my cellphone camera off the "auto-blur" setting.

So that's the news from the Wide World of Woo-Woo this week.  Affectionate ghosts, cash-dispensing messiahs, and UFOs that make "sci-fi-like" sounds and are held together with rivets.  I think we can all agree that this is preferable to a lot of silly stories about politics and neuroscience and genetics and so on.  Stories about ghosts and angels and UFOs don't result in my getting death threats or being called a "fucking ultra-left-wing looser [sic]."  Which is a little off-putting.  If you know any ghosts, you might want to mention that I could use a hug.

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The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.

Giving no quarter

As of this morning, six explosive devices addressed to prominent critics of Donald Trump have been discovered, one of them (the one mailed to former CIA director John Brennan) found at the headquarters of CNN.  Fortunately, all of them were intercepted and rendered harmless.  As of the writing of this post, it is yet to be determined if any of the devices were capable of detonating, but officials say that they "contained some of the components that would be required to build an operable bomb" and the potential danger was being studied.

Trump was quick to disavow any responsibility for what happened.  In a speech given at the White House, he said, "In these times we have to unify.  We have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America."

Fine words from a man who has repeatedly vilified the men and women who were the targets, and done whatever he could to sow division, paranoia, and polarization.  Just last week he praised Montana Congressman Greg Gianforte for body slamming a reporter.   He initially condemned a neo-Nazi gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia that resulted in one death and nineteen injuries, but quickly backpedaled, saying, "I think there is blame on both sides.  You look at both sides.  I think there is blame on both sides."  He has called CNN and other members of the mainstream news media "enemies of the people" over and over.  Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, called it correctly.  'There is a total and complete lack of understanding at the White House about the seriousness of their continued attacks on the media.  The President, and especially the White House Press Secretary, should understand their words matter.  Thus far, they have shown no comprehension of that."

Then Trump's cronies joined in the fray.  CNN was just "getting what it deserved" for "spewing hate speech 24/7."  "Democrats are worse," one man on Twitter commented, then quoted Cory Booker's comment, "Get in their face," Maxine Waters's "No peace, no sleep," and Hillary Clinton's "We can't be civil until Democrats win."

Because this, apparently, justifies receiving a pipe bomb in the mail.

While other networks were covering the incidents, Fox News was discussing how outrageous it was that Mitch McConnell got heckled in a restaurant.  In fact, Meghan McCain equated getting heckled in a restaurant with receiving a pipe bomb in the mail, in a conversation with Joy Behar on The View.

"Every time [Trump] says things like the press is the enemy of the people, his entire party needs to stand up against him and say something," Behar said.  "Mitch McConnell, where is he?  He’s the leader of this party."

"He’s getting harassed and heckled when he goes out in public to have dinner with his wife," McCain responded.  "So are we."

It didn't take long for a bunch of right-wing talking heads to say not only that liberals were responsible for the pipe bombs because they encourage violence, but that the liberals sent the pipe bombs themselves to make the Republicans look bad.  Chris Swecker, former analyst for the FBI, said in an interview on Fox, "It could be someone who is trying to get the Democratic vote out and incur sympathy."  Pro-Trump media personalities John Cardillo, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and Bill Mitchell were quick to agree.

But no one is capable of throwing gasoline on a fire like Rush Limbaugh.  "Republicans just don't do this kind of thing," Limbaugh said.  "You’ve got people trying to harm CNN and Obama and Hillary and Bill Clinton and Debbie 'Blabbermouth' Schultz and, you know, just, it might serve a purpose here."

Okay, you get the picture.

Words matter.  This has progressed far past the usual fractious partisan rhetoric and posturing that has gone on as long as there have been elected offices.  This is a leader -- the President of the United States -- who has over and over used inflammatory rhetoric to stir up his supporters, leading the cry of "lock her up" against Hillary Clinton (who has never been tried for, much less found guilty of, anything).  Ted Cruz, who evidently thought it was a good idea to take a page from Trump's playbook, said that Clinton and Cruz's opponent Beto O'Rourke could "share a double-occupancy cell."

Apparently now it's a crime to be a Democrat.

It's taken a lot to get me involved in politics.  I've said before that I hate politics because half of it is arguing over things that should be self-evident and the other half arguing over things that probably have no feasible solution.  I'm the child of two staunch Republicans, with whom I sometimes disagreed but always respected.  Personally, I've always been kind of a centrist; one of my besetting sins is that I see most things in shades of gray.

But if you still support Donald Trump, you are aiding and abetting someone who not only lies compulsively, not only is a homophobic, misogynistic narcissist, but is appealing to the worst traits in the American personality -- the tribalism, the xenophobia, the racism.  Not only appealing to them, encouraging them, inflaming the fear and the hatred and the polarization.  I usually try to find common ground with people I disagree with, but I'm beginning to think there is no common ground here.

If you voted for Trump, I get it.  He's very good at telling people what they want to hear, convincing them he's got all the answers.  If you still support him, I have nothing more to say to you other than that I will fight what Trump and his cadre stand for with every breath I take.  I'm done with being bipartisan, with trying to be polite to folks who want people like me erased from the earth.

At some point, you have to stop being nice and say "enough."  If there's still dialogue to be had, if they're still convincible, it's still worth talking.  But if not?  The only thing left is to push back with everything you've got.  I'll end with a quote from William Lloyd Garrison: "With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men, I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost."

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The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.

Wired for sound

Staying with the general linguistics angle my posts this week have been taking, today we will consider some new research that has identified the neural circuitry that underpins human language -- and comes to a startling conclusion regarding evolution and our mammalian cousins.

True language is thought to be one of the unique features of Homo sapiens.  No other species, as far as we know, has evolved symbolic communication.  Chimpanzees and gorillas can be taught the rudiments of it, and even have come up with novel expressions that have the same creativity and whimsy as human utterances -- such as Koko the gorilla naming her kitten "All Ball."  Whale and dolphin vocalizations might be symbolic language -- but most ethologists think it's simple vocal signaling, like a dog's bark or a cat's meow.

That's why we tend to think of language as a clear deciding line between "human" and "non-human."  The problem with those lines is that they don't reflect the reality of evolution -- that structures and behaviors can't come out of nowhere, and always result from modification of pre-existing genes (and the traits they generated).  So it should have been no real surprise when the FOX-P2 (forkhead box protein 2) gene was discovered in 1990, and it was found that a defect in this gene in humans causes developmental verbal dyspraxia -- a loss of motor coordination and inability to produce speech.

FOX-P2, the protein that allows us to speak [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons, Emw, Protein FOXP2 PDB 2a07, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So is this the "human language gene?"  That's the way it was described, but this runs up against a truth that is uncomfortable for proponents of human uniqueness -- other animals have a FOX-P2 gene, one that isn't identical to humans, but critical nonetheless.  Knocking out the FOX-P2 gene in mice causes fatal developmental disorders.  But the real kicker was that species that have complex vocalizations -- such as songbird and bats -- have a much greater diversity and much greater activity of FOX-P2 genes.

Maybe human language isn't as unique as it seemed at first.

This conclusion got another piece of support last week, with the publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called, "Child First Language and Adult Second Language are Both Tied to General-Purpose Learning Systems," by Phillip Hamrick (of Kent State University), Jarrad A. G. Lum (of Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia), and Michael T. Ullman (of Georgetown University).  And what their research suggests is that the parts of our brain that allow us to use language are not novel, and (very much) not unique to humans -- they are found in many other species and serve a variety of purposes.  The authors write:

Do the mechanisms underlying language in fact serve general-purpose functions that preexist this uniquely human capacity?... The results, which met the predicted pattern, provide comprehensive evidence that language is tied to general-purpose systems both in children acquiring their native language and adults learning an additional language. Crucially, if language learning relies on these systems, then our extensive knowledge of the systems from animal and human studies may also apply to this domain, leading to predictions that might be unwarranted in the more circumscribed study of language.  Thus, by demonstrating a role for these systems in language, the findings simultaneously lay a foundation for potentially important advances in the study of this critical domain...  The results have broad implications. They elucidate both the ontogeny (development) and phylogeny (evolution) of language.  Moreover, they suggest that our substantial knowledge of the general-purpose mechanisms, from both animal and human studies, may also apply to language.

"Our conclusion that language is learned in such ancient general-purpose brain systems contrasts with the long-standing theory that language depends on innately-specified language modules found only in humans," said Michael Ullman, senior author of the study.  "Researchers still know very little about the genetic and biological bases of language learning, and the new findings may lead to advances in these areas.  We know much more about the genetics and biology of the brain systems than about these same aspects of language learning...  Since our results suggest that language learning depends on the brain systems, the genetics, biology, and learning mechanisms of these systems may very well also hold for language."

"These brain systems are also found in animals — for example, rats use them when they learn to navigate a maze," added study co-author Dr. Phillip Hamrick.  "Whatever changes these systems might have undergone to support language, the fact that they play an important role in this critical human ability is quite remarkable."

So yet another blow to our sense of uniqueness, that we are somehow different from the rest of the natural world.  The same forces that generated the wombat and the cactus and the slime mold generated us, and we are deeply tied to our nearest relatives not only on the genetic level, but on the level of brain structure.  The idea that evolution could take the same basic neural circuitry and adapt it in one animal species into the ability to navigate a maze, and in a different one into allowing Shakespeare to write Macbeth, is nothing short of astonishing.

It seems fitting to end with the famous quote from Charles Darwin, the last paragraph of The Origin of Species.  "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling 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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The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.

Onomatopoeia FTW

Given my ongoing fascination with languages, it's a little surprising that I didn't come across a paper published two years ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier.  Entitled, "Sound–Meaning Association Biases Evidenced Across Thousands of Languages," this study proposes something that is deeply astonishing: that the connection between the sounds in a word and the meaning of the word may not be arbitrary.

It's a fundamental tenet of linguistics -- that language is defined as "arbitrary symbolic communication."  Arbitrary because there is no special connection between the sound of a word and its meaning, with the exception of the handful of words that are onomatopoeic (such as boom, buzz, splash, and splat).  Otherwise, the phonemes that make up the word for a concept would be expected to having nothing to do with the concept itself, and therefore would vary randomly from language to language (the word bird is no more fundamentally birdy than the French word oiseau is fundamentally oiseauesque).

That idea may have to be revised.  Damián E. Blasi (of the University of Zurich), Søren Wichmann (of the University of Leiden), Harald Hammarström and Peter F. Stadler (of the Max Planck Institute), and Morten H. Christiansen (of Cornell University) did an exhaustive statistical study, using dozens of basic vocabulary words representing 62% of the world's six thousand languages and 85% of its linguistic lineages and language families.  And what they found was that there are some striking patterns when you look at the phonemes represented in a variety of linguistic morphemes, patterns that held true even with completely unrelated languages.  Here are a few of the correspondences they found:

• The word for ‘nose’ is likely to include the sounds ‘neh’ or the ‘oo’ sound, as in ‘ooze.’
• The word for ‘tongue’ is likely to have ‘l’ or ‘u.’
• ‘Leaf’ is likely to include the sounds ‘b,’ ‘p’ or ‘l.’
• ‘Sand’ will probably use the sound ‘s.’
• The words for ‘red’ and ‘round’ often appear with ‘r.’ 
• The word for ‘small’ often contains the sound ‘i.’
• The word for ‘I’ is unlikely to include sounds involving u, p, b, t, s, r and l.
• ‘You’ is unlikely to include sounds involving u, o, p, t, d, q, s, r and l.

"These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage," said Morten Christiansen, who led the study.  "There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns.  We don’t know what it is, but we know it’s there."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons M. Adiputra, Globe of language, CC BY-SA 3.0]

One possibility is that these correspondences are actually not arbitrary at all, but are leftovers from (extremely) ancient history -- fossils of the earliest spoken language, which all of today's languages, however distantly related, descend from.  The authors write:

From a historical perspective, it has been suggested that sound–meaning associations might be evolutionarily preserved features of spoken language, potentially hindering regular sound change.  Furthermore, it has been claimed that widespread sound–meaning associations might be vestiges of one or more large-scale prehistoric protolanguages.  Tellingly, some of the signals found here feature prominently in reconstructed “global etymologies” that have been used for deep phylogeny inference.  If signals are inherited from an ancestral language spoken in remote prehistory, we might expect them to be distributed similarly to inherited, cognate words; that is, their distribution should to a large extent be congruent with the nodes defining their linguistic phylogeny.

But this point remains to be tested.  And there's an argument against it; if these similarities come from common ancestry, you'd expect not only the sounds, but their positions in words, to have been conserved (such as in the English/German cognate pair laugh and lachen).  In fact, that is not the case.  The sounds are similar, but their positions in the word show no discernible pattern.  The authors write:

We have demonstrated that a substantial proportion of words in the basic vocabulary are biased to carry or to avoid specific sound segments, both across continents and linguistic lineages.  Given that our analyses suggest that phylogenetic persistence or areal dispersal are unlikely to explain the widespread presence of these signals, we are left with the alternative that the signals are due to factors common to our species, such as sound symbolism, iconicity, communicative pressures, or synesthesia...  [A]lthough it is possible that the presence of signals in some families are symptomatic of a particularly pervasive cognate set, this is not the usual case.  Hence, the explanation for the observed prevalence of sound–meaning associations across the world has to be found elsewhere.

Which I think is both astonishing and fascinating.  What possible reason could there be that the English word tree is composed of the three phonemes it contains?  The arbitrariness of the sound/meaning relationship seemed so obvious to me when I first learned about it that I didn't even stop to question how we know it's true.

Generally a dangerous position for a skeptic to be in.

I hope that the research on this topic is moving forward, because it certainly would be cool to find out what's actually going on here.  I'll have to keep my eyes out for any follow-ups.  But now I'm going to go get a cup of coffee, which I think we can all agree is a nice, warm, comforting-sounding word.

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The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.

Sit. Stay. Speak. Understand.

As regular readers of Skeptophilia know, we have two dogs.  One of them is a blue-tick/redbone coonhound mix named Lena, who is sweet, friendly, laid back, and has the IQ of a peach pit.  Where some dogs's brains are finely-constructed computers, instantaneously aware of their surroundings and ready to respond to whatever circumstance they're faced with, Lena has an Etch-a-Sketch.  If you turn her upside down and shake gently, she forgets everything she ever learned.

She makes up for this lack of brainpower for being eternally cheerful, although sometimes you have to wonder if she's happy mostly because she has no idea what's going on.

Then there's Guinness.  Guinness is an American Staffordshire Terrier mix whose entire raison d'être is playing fetch.  We're not entirely sure how smart he is, because he might be the most stubborn dog I've ever met.  I think sometimes he pretends he doesn't understand because if he let on, then he'd have to admit that he's not following our commands purely because he doesn't want to.

But he's incredibly sweet and snuggly, at least when he's not bouncing off the ceiling.

This comes up because of some research out of Emory University that was published last week in Frontiers in Neuroscience that put dogs in a fMRI machine to try to learn how good their linguistic skills are -- if they're simply associating sounds with an object or set of actions, learned through classical conditioning, or if they're actually forming representational connections in their brains when they learn words (in other words, when Guinness hears "ball," does he picture the red rubber ball we always play fetch with?).

The paper, called, "Awake fMRI Reveals Brain Regions for Novel Word Detection in Dogs," authored by Ashley Prichard, Peter F. Cook, Mark Spivak3, Raveena Chhibber, and Gregory S. Berns, found that dogs' processing of spoken words is remarkably like that of humans -- except for the fact that dogs show greater neural activation for words they don't know than ones they are familiar with.  The authors write:

How do dogs understand human words?  At a basic level, understanding would require the discrimination of words from non-words.  To determine the mechanisms of such a discrimination, we trained 12 dogs to retrieve two objects based on object names, then probed the neural basis for these auditory discriminations using awake-fMRI.  We compared the neural response to these trained words relative to “oddball” pseudowords the dogs had not heard before.  Consistent with novelty detection, we found greater activation for pseudowords relative to trained words bilaterally in the parietotemporal cortex.  To probe the neural basis for representations of trained words, searchlight multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) revealed that a subset of dogs had clusters of informative voxels that discriminated between the two trained words.  These clusters included the left temporal cortex and amygdala, left caudate nucleus, and thalamus.  These results demonstrate that dogs’ processing of human words utilizes basic processes like novelty detection, and for some dogs, may also include auditory and hedonic representations.

[Nota bene:  If you're like me and didn't know the word "hedonic," it means "having to do with a relationship to sensations, either pleasant or unpleasant.]

The authors speculate that the reason for the greater activation in dogs when confronted with novel words is because dogs are so tuned in to their owners -- the desire to please is incredibly powerful in the dog-human relationship.  So that suggests that when dogs hear unfamiliar words, they really want to understand.

This explains the Canine Head Tilt of Puzzlement that Guinness gives us whenever we talk to him.  You really get the impression he's trying his hardest to figure out what we're saying to him.  And when he succeeds in understanding -- such as when one of us says, "Do you want your dinner?" or "Let's go outside and play ball," he's absolutely thrilled.  He reacts much like I did when I was taking Classical Mechanics in college, a class that was so far over my head that most of the concepts passed me by without so much as ruffling my hair.  When I did understand something, it was so exciting that if I'd had a tail, I'd have been wagging the hell out of it.

"We know that dogs have the capacity to process at least some aspects of human language since they can learn to follow verbal commands," said senior author Gregory Berns.  "Previous research, however, suggests dogs may rely on many other cues to follow a verbal command, such as gaze, gestures and even emotional expressions from their owners...  Dogs may have varying capacity and motivation for learning and understanding human words, but they appear to have a neural representation for the meaning of words they have been taught, beyond just a low-level Pavlovian response."

Which is pretty cool.  I've always been convinced that my dogs understand every word I'm saying to them, even though you can say any damn thing you want to Lena and she'll still look at you as if you are the smartest person she's ever met.  But it's amazing to think they actually have some rudimentary linguistic skill beyond just simple conditioning.

And, of course, the communication goes the other way, too.  Guinness just came and dropped his ball into my lap.  I tried to tell him that it's snowing out and there's a 25-mile-per-hour wind, but he just gave me the infamous Head Tilt, which is so cute that it gets me to do his bidding every single time.  Making me wonder sometimes who's trained whom.

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The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.

Pew-pew-pew

Because it's always a losing bet to say the state of things in the United States couldn't get any weirder, today we have: a priest holding a mass of exorcism to protect Brett Kavanaugh from a spell cast by witches.

I wish I were making this up.  You might have heard about the witches, who were so pissed off about Brett Kavanaugh's nomination and ultimate accession to the Supreme Court that they hexed him.  Twice.  Once before the confirmation vote, and once, for good measure, afterwards.

The event, sponsored by spiritualist/occult book store Catland Books, explained it thus:

We will be embracing witchcraft's true roots as the magik of the poor, the downtrodden and disenfranchised and [its] history as often the only weapon, the only means of exacting justice available to those of us who have been wronged by men just like him. 

[Kavanaugh] will be the focal point, but by no means the only target, so bring your rage and all of the axes you've got to grind.  There will also be a second ritual afterward — "The Rites of the Scorned One" which seeks [sic] to validate, affirm, uphold and support those of us who have been wronged and who refuse to be silent any longer.

Well, far be it from the Righteous to take this lying down.  So Father Gary Thomas, who serves as an exorcist for the Diocese of San Jose, California, decided to take some serious action.  "Conjuring up personified evil does not fall under free speech," Thomas said, making me wonder what laws it would fall under.

Spinello Aretino, The Exorcism of St. Benedict (1387) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Although given the current administration's reputation for doing whatever the evangelicals want, I wouldn't be surprised if the next bill to go through Congress is a Satanic Attack Protection Act.  Or perhaps a law preventing demons from immigrating into the United States.  Or maybe just a suggestion to build a wall along the border between the U.S. and hell.

Thomas went on to explain further:

They are going to direct the evil to have a permanently adverse effect on the Supreme Court justice.

When curses are directed at people in a state of grace, they have little or no effect. Otherwise, [I have] witnessed harm come upon people such as physical illness, psychosis, depression and having demons attach to them. Curses sometimes involve a blood sacrifice either through an animal or a human being, such as an aborted baby...

The decision to do this against a Supreme Court justice is a heinous act and says a lot about the character of these people that should not be underestimated or dismissed. These are real evil people.

I suppose this is to be expected from someone in my position, but to me this really sounds like two kids fighting with finger guns, one saying, "Pew-pew-pew!  I got you!  You're dead!" and the other saying, "No, I'm not, I got my magic invisible shield up in time!"

Only these are adults, and I have the sneaking suspicion that a significant proportion of Americans think this is perfectly normal behavior.  And these people vote.

So that's today's contribution from the Department of Surreal News.  I keep thinking that we have to have plumbed the depths of government-endorsed insanity, but I keep being wrong.  A friend of mine thinks that all this is happening because we're living in a computer simulation, and the programmers have gotten bored and now are simply fucking with us to see what we'll do.

And I have to admit, it makes as much sense as any explanation I could have come up with.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is something everyone should read.  Jonathan Haidt is an ethicist who has been studying the connections between morality and politics for twenty-five years, and whose contribution to our understanding of our own motives is second to none.  In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics, he looks at what motivates liberals and conservatives -- and how good, moral people can look at the same issues and come to opposite conclusions.

His extraordinarily deft touch for asking us to reconsider our own ethical foundations, without either being overtly partisan or accepting truly immoral stances and behaviors, is a needed breath of fresh air in these fractious times.  He is somehow able to walk that line of evaluating our own behavior clearly and dispassionately, and holding a mirror up to some of our most deep-seated drives.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

High-tech Nessie search

My obsession with aliens and cryptids is glaringly obvious, not only because of what I write about here, but from my classroom décor.  I've got a cardboard-cutout Bigfoot (not life-sized, unfortunately), a Bigfoot air freshener (it smells like pine, fortunately), and a variety of other alien- and cryptid-themed posters and paraphernalia.

But that's not saying I believe it all, which I'm hoping is also obvious.  The hard evidence for alien life, and for the most commonly-claimed types of cryptids, is woefully inadequate.  (For that read, "basically nonexistent.")  And the more claims there are, the more damning a lack of evidence becomes.  If any one of the cryptids people say they've seen -- Mokele-Mbembe, for example, which is the Congo's answer to the Loch Ness Monster -- actually existed, you'd think by now there'd be something.  A bone, a tooth, a clump of hair, some bit that could actually be subjected to DNA analysis and give us an anomalous, this-isn't-anything-we've-seen-before result.

Which is why, I suppose, the effort now being undertaken to find Nessie is at least approaching things the right way.  A geneticist, Neil Gemmell of the University of Otago (New Zealand), is heading a team that is trying to analyze DNA traces from the water of Loch Ness using a technique called eDNA, which is capable of identifying the source of even minuscule amounts of DNA (such as from shed skin cells, saliva, or urine).

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The German science news site Grenzwissenschaft-Aktuell quoted Gemmell in a press release day before yesterday.  "The method of eDNA is so effective because life itself is dirty," Gemmell explained. "Whatever creature moves through and lives in an environment, it leaves behind tiny fragments of its DNA...  It is this DNA that we are now able to extract and sequence in order to identify these creatures by comparing the sequences determined with the databases of known genetic sequences of more than 100,000 different organisms."

Gemmell writes, in a summary of their efforts:

Currently we are analysing the data we obtained from our Loch Ness sampling trip back in June. 

Since then DNA from ~250 individual samples were extracted at the University of Hull.  From there the DNAs went to the laboratory of Professor Pierre Taberlet at the Université Grenoble Alpes, where we used PCR metabarcodes to amplify the eukaryotic and bacterial DNA sequences found in our samples.  We also used a set of metabarcodes that focus on vertebrate life, given that most monster myths focus on some large vertebrate-like creature. 

These enriched DNA-sequences were then sent to Fasteris (a Swiss DNA sequencing service) in Geneva, where they were sequenced using Illumina sequencing technologies.  We now have ~500 million individual DNA sequences that we are exploring to understand what types of species were present in Loch Ness when we sampled in June 2018. 

It takes some time to explore the sequences robustly, and we have ~5 labs doing this independently.  I expect we will have an answer as to what we have found by early 2019.

So I can commend Gemmell and his team for approaching this the right way.  Still, it's hard to imagine their getting any kind of positive results, or at least anything that would convince a skeptic.  If they find DNA from some unknown source -- even if it is close to that of existing birds or reptiles (the closest living cousins of the dinosaurs) -- how could you jump from that to "it's a plesiosaur?"

There is also, sadly, a pretty good argument for why there couldn't be a pleisiosaur in Loch Ness; the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago, and at that point Scotland was underneath a huge slab of ice.  Any dinosaurs that were in Loch Ness at that point would have been dinosaursicles.  It's a good way inland; the nearest large(r) body of water is Moray Firth, ten or so miles away, and connected by the River Ness, which averages between two and five meters in depth (depending on which part of it you're measuring and how much it's rained).

Maybe it's just me, but that seems a little shallow to host a plesiosaur.  And that's even presuming that one was in Moray Firth when the ice receded.

So while I'm still willing to entertain the existence of Bigfoot, and even Mokele-Mbembe, Nessie has always seemed to me to be the least plausible of all the more famous cryptids.  There's just too much arguing against her existence, and zero hard evidence.

Anyhow, I wish Gemmell and his team luck.  It's worth doing, even if they find nothing of particular interest.  Of course, that won't dissuade the true believers even so.  Nothing does.

That's why they're "true believers."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is something everyone should read.  Jonathan Haidt is an ethicist who has been studying the connections between morality and politics for twenty-five years, and whose contribution to our understanding of our own motives is second to none.  In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics, he looks at what motivates liberals and conservatives -- and how good, moral people can look at the same issues and come to opposite conclusions.

His extraordinarily deft touch for asking us to reconsider our own ethical foundations, without either being overtly partisan or accepting truly immoral stances and behaviors, is a needed breath of fresh air in these fractious times.  He is somehow able to walk that line of evaluating our own behavior clearly and dispassionately, and holding a mirror up to some of our most deep-seated drives.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]