The worst century in history

I've always loved a mystery, and for that reason, the European "Dark Ages" have fascinated me for as long as I can recall.

But the moniker itself is off-puttingly self-congratulatory, isn't it?  It's not like Roman rule was that pleasant for your average slob to live under, after all.  Be that as it may, after the conquests of the Roman Empire started to fall apart in the 4th century C.E. from a combination of invasion, misrule, and downright lunacy, things went seriously downhill.  Life was pretty rough until the 8th and 9th centuries, when some measure of order returned as damn near all of Europe coalesced around the Roman Catholic Church, ushering in the Middle Ages.  And what we know about the period in between is... not a hell of a lot.  Accounts are scattered, vague, and full of conflation with mythology and legend.  The few that were written by contemporaries, rather than long after the fact -- such as Gregory of Tours's History of the Franks -- contain as much hagiography as they do history.

St. Gregory and King Chilperic I, from Grandes Chroniques de France de Charles V (14th century) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Which is why I was thrilled to read a paper that appeared last week in Antiquity about a study of the "worst decade to be alive" -- 536-546 C. E.

The research, which combines the skimpy evidence we have from accounts written at the time with hard scientific data from analysis of ice cores, paints a grim picture.  Writings from the year 536 describe a mysterious "fog" that lasted for eighteen months, generating widespread crop failure and what one Irish cleric called "three years without bread."  From the ice core analysis, medieval historian Michael McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski identified what they believe to be the culprit: a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland that dropped the global temperature an average of two degrees Celsius in a matter of months.

This was followed by another eruption in 540, and the following year, the single worst plague on record -- the so-called "Plague of Justinian," which killed between a third and a half of the inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire, and resulted in so many corpses that people loaded them on ships and dumped them in the Mediterranean.  The disease responsible isn't known for certain, but is believed to be Yersinia pestis -- the same bacterium that caused the Black Death, almost exactly eight hundred years later.  But to give you an idea of the scale, there's reason to believe the Plague of Justinian dwarfed both the 14th century Black Death and the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 -- usually the two examples that come to mind when people think of devastating pandemics.  The death toll is estimated at sixty million.

There probably was a connection between the cold and the plague, too, although not the obvious one that famine triggers disease susceptibility.  Many scholars think that the lack of food, and cold temperatures following a period that had generally been warm, forced mice and rats into homes and on board ships -- not only in close proximity to humans, but in their means of travel.  The fleas they carried, which are vectors for the plague, went with them, and the disease decimated Europe and beyond.

The effects of the eruption, however, were felt all over the Earth.  Tree ring analysis from North America shows 540 and the years following to have been unusually cold, with short-to-nonexistent growing seasons.  Volcanic dust is found in those layers of ice cores everywhere they exist.  Famines occurred in Asia and Central America.

All in all, a crappy time to be around.

Things didn't rebound for almost a hundred years.  Archaeologist Christopher Loveluck, of the University of Nottingham, found traces of dust containing significant amounts of lead in ice strata from the year 640, which he believes were due to a resurgence in silver smelting for coinage.  (I suppose if there's a hundred years during which your three main occupations are (1) not starving, (2) not freezing, and (3) not dying of a horrible disease, then making silver coins is kind of not on your radar.)  And the tree rings and ice cores bear out his contention that this indicates better conditions; although there were a couple of other volcanic eruptions we can see in the glacial records, none were as big as the one in 536.  The silver smelting, Loveluck says, "... shows the rise of the merchant class for the first time."  Things, finally, were improving.

What's coolest about this study -- despite its gruesome subject -- is how hard science is being brought to bear on understanding of history.  We no longer have to throw our hands up in despair if we're interested in a time period from which there were few written records.  The Earth has recorded its own history in the trees and the glaciers, there for us to read -- in this case, telling us the tale of the worst century the human race has ever lived through.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Mary Roach's Spook.  Roach is combines humor with serious scientific investigation, and has looked into such subjects as sex (Bonk), death (Stiff), war (Grunt), and food (Gulp).  (She's also fond of hilarious one-word titles.)

In Spook, Roach looks at claims of the afterlife, and her investigation takes her from a reincarnation research facility in India to a University of Virginia study on near-death experiences to a British school for mediums.  Along the way she considers the evidence for and against -- and her ponderings make for absolutely delightful reading.

The creature from Nova Scotia

My friend and fellow author and blogger, Andrew Butters (who writes over at Potato Chip Math), sent me a link this morning that positively warmed my heart.

It's about obscure microorganisms that live in dirt in Nova Scotia.  Okay, I know that's an odd thing to have your heart warmed by, but look, this is cool.  The microorganisms are called hemimastigotes, and they've been known for a while, but this new find allowed scientists to do a detailed genetic analysis -- and what they found is astonishing.

Hemimastigotes don't belong in any of the six kingdoms currently accepted by taxonomists -- Archaea (a strange group of sort-of bacteria), Eubacteria (all the other bacteria), Protista (single celled eukaryotes like Amoeba and Paramecium), Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia.

They're most similar, at least superficially, to primitive animals, but their DNA shows that the evolutionary distance between hemimastigotes and animals is greater than the evolutionary distance between you and bread mold.  So calling them "animals" is completely unsupportable, unless you want to call mushrooms animals, too.  The last common ancestor between hemimastigotes and anything else on Earth is over a billion years ago.

So hemimastigotes give new meaning to the word outgroup.

Without further ado, here's an electron-microscopic photograph of a hemimastigote, Hemimastix kukwesjijk:

[Image courtesy of Yana Eglit]

If you're curious about the beast's odd moniker, the species name, "kukwesjijk" means "little hairy ogre" in Mi'kmaq, the language spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of Nova Scotia, where the discovery was made.

The study, done by Gordon Lax, Yana Eglit, Laura Eme, Erin M. Bertrand, Andrew J. Roger, and Alistair G. B. Simpson, appeared in Nature last week, and is nothing short of jaw-dropping.  These strange creatures (the hemimastigotes, not Lax et al.) have little harpoons called extrusomes that they used to skewer single-celled prey, flagella that pull the hapless microorganism toward its mouth, and then they suck out the cytoplasm.

Which is pretty hard-core.

The scientists have raised a colony of hemimastigotes in their lab, so they have more to study -- I must reiterate how incredibly rare they are, having been seen only a handful of times since their discovery in the late 19th century.  "It's "extremely exciting that it's still possible to discover something so different from all known life on Earth," Eglit told reporters for the CBC.   "It really shows how much more there is out there."

Indeed.  That's why I love science; there's always more to learn, always new realms to explore, and it has this funny way of coming up behind you and astonishing you just when you thought you had everything figured out.

Now, y'all'll  have to excuse me, because I need to go rewrite my notes for the taxonomy unit in my AP Biology class.

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If you are one of those people who thinks that science books are dry and boring, I'll give you a recommendation that will put that misconception to rest within the first few pages: Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements.

Kean undertook to explain, from a human perspective, that most iconic of all images from the realm of chemistry -- the Periodic Table, the organized chart of elements from the simplest (hydrogen, atomic number 1) to largest and most complex (oganesson, atomic number 118).  Kean's sparkling prose shows us the personalities behind the science, including the notoriously cranky Dmitri Mendeleev; tragic, brilliant Henry Moseley, a victim of World War I; and shy, self-effacing Glenn T. Seaborg, one of only two individuals to have an element named after them while they were still alive.

It's a fun read, even if you're not a science geek -- maybe especially if you're not a science geek.  Because it allows you to peer behind the curtain, and see that the scientists are just like the rest of us, with rivalries, jealousies, odd and misplaced loyalty, and all the rest of the faults the human race is subject to.

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

Involuntary conversions

New from the "They Needed A Grant To Figure This Out?" department, we have: a study showing that LGBTQ individuals who have undergone "conversion therapy" or other attempts to change their sexual orientation have a higher incidence of depression.

Whodathunkit, ya know?  Amazing what happens when you take a person and tell them in no uncertain terms that a part of their personality over which they have zero control is bad and they have to fix it, and woe be unto them if they don't.

A study done at the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University tracked the outcomes for LGBTQ students, comparing ones who had experienced attempts to alter their sexual orientation with ones who hadn't.  The results were unequivocal.  Students who had been through "conversion therapy" or some equivalent had:

• over twice the likelihood of a suicide attempt;
• over twice the likelihood of depression (if the student had experienced these attempts both by parents and also external agencies, that number rose to triple the likelihood);
• lower socioeconomic status five years after leaving college;
• lower educational attainment;
• and lower average weekly wages.

Honestly, I get why the study was done.  If you have hard data behind an argument, it's a lot more difficult to refute it.  But here's the problem; the people who are arguing for conversion therapy are not, by and large, arguing from a standpoint of evidence.  The vast majority are basing their stance on religion, or the simple fact that thinking about gay sex makes them feel squinky.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

As far as the first one goes, people need to wrap their brains around the fact that their religion tells them what they are supposed to do, not what I am supposed to do.  As my mom used to put it, my rights end where your nose begins.  As long as what you are doing is in no way harming me -- such as what gender(s) you are attracted to -- I should have no right whatsoever to dictate your actions.

As far as the second, my response is: grow up and get over it.  I detest cooked carrots, to the point that I can barely stand to look at someone eating them.  (It is just about the only food I really dislike.  As my dad once quipped, my favorite two kinds of food are "plenty" and "often.")  But if I started telling people they couldn't eat cooked carrots because I can't stand the thought of it, my guess is that they would (quite rightly) tell me to go to hell.

Same thing here.  Maybe you find same-gender relationships disgusting.  Then don't have one.  Which is what I do when someone offers me carrots.

What's more, don't spend your time thinking about it.  Is it just me, or do these rabid evangelical types ever think about anything else?  Seems odd to me that people who claim to be so completely repulsed by the thought of a same-sex relationship talk about them to the exclusion of every other topic, with the possible exception of "Trump is the messiah," and if you don't do whatever Trump wants, you will be on the receiving end of a divine smite.

So this is in truth a huge problem, and I don't want anyone to interpret my first paragraph as dismissive.  I began that way because I have such a difficult time imagining how it's not so self-evident that it would appear obvious to everyone in the world.  If you have a child, and you set out to systematically destroy a fundamental part of their being, it's going to do horrific damage, and in the end, very likely be unsuccessful.  You might convince these poor young people not to seek out a relationship, which is bad enough; it's dooming them to a future in which they're alone, in which to fall in love is seen as succumbing to evil.  But you're not going to change their sexual orientation, because that's hardwired into our brains.

No one asks a heterosexual when they "chose to be straight."  Why should the situation be any different for LGBTQ individuals?

In short, conversion therapy is child abuse, and it inflicts permanent harm.  How it is not illegal, I have no idea.

But maybe this study will bolster the case that it should be.

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If you are one of those people who thinks that science books are dry and boring, I'll give you a recommendation that will put that misconception to rest within the first few pages: Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements.

Kean undertook to explain, from a human perspective, that most iconic of all images from the realm of chemistry -- the Periodic Table, the organized chart of elements from the simplest (hydrogen, atomic number 1) to largest and most complex (oganesson, atomic number 118).  Kean's sparkling prose shows us the personalities behind the science, including the notoriously cranky Dmitri Mendeleev; tragic, brilliant Henry Moseley, a victim of World War I; and shy, self-effacing Glenn T. Seaborg, one of only two individuals to have an element named after them while they were still alive.

It's a fun read, even if you're not a science geek -- maybe especially if you're not a science geek.  Because it allows you to peer behind the curtain, and see that the scientists are just like the rest of us, with rivalries, jealousies, odd and misplaced loyalty, and all the rest of the faults the human race is subject to.

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

Lights over Ireland

Heard about the Irish UFO?

I'd resisted posting about this one, because every single time I run into an article that says "TOTALLY UNEXPLAINABLE EXTRATERRESTRIAL OBJECT SIGHTED," it turns out not only to be explainable but 100% terrestrial.

This one, however, has me curious.  According to a report in The Drive, this incident has two things that made my ears perk up; it was simultaneously sighted, and reported, by several people, including three commercial airline pilots; and according to witnesses, not only was it going ridiculously fast (one of the pilots said it was at least Mach 2), it changed direction several times.

That last bit is the most important.  One of the most common things labeled as a UFO are meteors, but as far as I understand them, they move in a straight line because (1) Newton's First Law is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions, and (2) they're a bitch to steer.  So if the reports are correct that it changed direction, not once but several times, this raises the report to the level of "pretty interesting."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Stefan-Wp, UFO-Meersburg, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Quoting Tyler Rogoway and Joseph Trevithick, writers of the above-linked article:

Publicly available audio of conversations between the passenger planes and Shannon Flight Information Region air traffic controllers offer more detail about what happened. At 6:47 AM local time [on November 9], a British Airways 787, using the callsign Speedbird 94, radioed in to ask if there were any military exercises going on in the area, which there were not. 

"There is nothing showing on either primary or secondary [radar]," Shannon controllers told Speedbird 94. “O.K. It was moving so fast,” the British Airways pilot responded. 

She further explained that the object had appeared as a "very bright light" and had flown along the left side of their 787 before it "rapidly veered to the north" and then "disappeared at very high speed." There is no indication of concerns about a possible collision.

The Irish authorities are investigating, but it remains to be seen what there is to investigate, given that all we have is the recording of what the pilots said they saw.

As regular readers know, I've been pretty skeptical of eyewitness accounts.  Not only is the human sensory-integrative system notoriously inaccurate, so is our memory.  But here we have at least three trained pilots -- who had seen phenomena like meteors many times, and knew what they looked like -- reporting the same strange, maneuverable object simultaneously.

Astronomer Michio Kaku famously said -- and got himself in trouble with the scientific establishment for saying it -- "Ninety-nine percent of all UFO sightings can be explained as hoaxes or purely natural, and in many cases terrestrial, phenomena.  But that still leaves one percent that haven't been explained.  And I think those are worth a serious investigation."

Which I have to agree with.  And unless there's more to this story that we're being told (for example, Irish authorities denied conducting military exercises in the area where the sightings occurred, but it's entirely possible they could be hiding the truth for some reason), this falls squarely in Kaku's investigation-worthy one percent.  I'm definitely not ready to jump to "it was a visit by intelligent aliens from another world," but I'm at this point eager to hear what the experts think actually did happen in the skies of Ireland six days ago.

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If you are one of those people who thinks that science books are dry and boring, I'll give you a recommendation that will put that misconception to rest within the first few pages: Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements.

Kean undertook to explain, from a human perspective, that most iconic of all images from the realm of chemistry -- the Periodic Table, the organized chart of elements from the simplest (hydrogen, atomic number 1) to largest and most complex (oganesson, atomic number 118).  Kean's sparkling prose shows us the personalities behind the science, including the notoriously cranky Dmitri Mendeleev; tragic, brilliant Henry Moseley, a victim of World War I; and shy, self-effacing Glenn T. Seaborg, one of only two individuals to have an element named after them while they were still alive.

It's a fun read, even if you're not a science geek -- maybe especially if you're not a science geek.  Because it allows you to peer behind the curtain, and see that the scientists are just like the rest of us, with rivalries, jealousies, odd and misplaced loyalty, and all the rest of the faults the human race is subject to.

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

Dark hurricane

There are times that scientists use placeholder names for things they're pretty sure must exist, but haven't identified with sufficient clarity that they can say anything in detail about them.

One example -- that didn't end so well -- is the "ether."  The concept of the ether came about because once Christiaan Huygens, Augustin-Jean Fresnel, and Leonhard Euler made cogent arguments that light had many of the properties of waves, the next question was, "what medium is waving?"  In any familiar sort of wave, there's some sort of medium involved, the particles of which are moving as the wave propagates past.  So, not unreasonably, physicists proposed that there was some sort of medium permeating the universe through which light was propagating, and they called this substance the luminiferous ether.

The problem was, the ether didn't exist, as demonstrated by the Michelson-Morley experiment.  So scientists, scrambling about like mad to save their precious theory, proposed all sorts of convoluted dodges to explain why Michelson-Morley and the ether weren't mutually exclusive, but the whole thing came crashing to the ground when Albert Einstein came up with the Special Theory of Relativity -- which did away with the need for ether.

We have a similar situation right now in physics, except that (being in the middle of it) no one knows how it's going to end -- with a confirmation of an ether-like mysterious substance, or a 21st-century Einstein who proposes a shift in our understanding that makes the entire thing collapse.  I'm referring to dark matter, which was discovered in 1978 by Vera Rubin and Kent Ford because of its gravitational effects.  But this is no minor constituent of the universe; by Rubin and Ford's estimates -- which still hold -- dark matter comprises 85% of the mass of the universe.

The problem is, dark matter, whatever it is, is "non-baryonic" in nature.  Put simply, it does not interact with other matter, and has no effect on light except for the fact that its gravity warps the fabric of the universe and can deflect light's path (a phenomenon called gravitational lensing).

So at this point, we're pretty sure it's there, but no one knows anything about what it actually is.

But this may be about to change.  Last week a paper appeared in Physical Review D claiming that not only are we immersed in dark matter, we are currently in a stream of it (called "S1") that is blowing past us at an unimaginable 500 kilometers per second.  A team led by Ciaran O'Hare of the University of Zaragoza has been analyzing this matter stream, and have concluded that it was generated by the interaction between the Milky Way and a (now-defunct) dwarf galaxy the Milky Way devoured over a billion years ago.  But the remnants are still zooming past us, a dark hurricane light years wide in which we have been immersed without even knowing it until recently.

What the current study suggests is that we might use this to get some long-awaited hard data on dark matter.  Detectors are being set up to detect what are considered the two most likely constituents of dark matter -- WIMPs (weakly-interacting massive particles) and axions (which some theories say could exist in sufficient numbers to account for dark matter).

The problem is, there have been other attempts to find WIMPs and axions, and all have been completely unsuccessful.  In fact, the Wikipedia page on WIMPs (linked above) starts with the unpropitious words, "There exists no clear definition of a WIMP," which to my ears makes it sound like the 19th century physicists' "there's this stuff called ether, and we think it's there, but we can't tell you anything else about it."

The physicists, for their part, are hoping like hell something will come of all this, because if dark matter doesn't exist, it will punch a great big old hole not only in the General Theory of Relativity, but the Standard Model of Quantum Mechanics.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing; look at what the collapse of the ether theory led to.

Um.  The General Theory of Relativity and the Standard Model of Quantum Mechanics.  A little awkward, that.

Of course, I'm a layperson, despite my B.S. in physics.  Far smarter brains than I am are still taking the search for dark matter seriously.  If I was a betting man, though, I'd put money on the likelihood that there's something major we're missing, just as we did with Relativity.  This could lead to great things either way -- which is why this invisible storm is such an exciting discovery.

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If you are one of those people who thinks that science books are dry and boring, I'll give you a recommendation that will put that misconception to rest within the first few pages: Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements.

Kean undertook to explain, from a human perspective, that most iconic of all images from the realm of chemistry -- the Periodic Table, the organized chart of elements from the simplest (hydrogen, atomic number 1) to largest and most complex (oganesson, atomic number 118).  Kean's sparkling prose shows us the personalities behind the science, including the notoriously cranky Dmitri Mendeleev; tragic, brilliant Henry Moseley, a victim of World War I; and shy, self-effacing Glenn T. Seaborg, one of only two individuals to have an element named after them while they were still alive.

It's a fun read, even if you're not a science geek -- maybe especially if you're not a science geek.  Because it allows you to peer behind the curtain, and see that the scientists are just like the rest of us, with rivalries, jealousies, odd and misplaced loyalty, and all the rest of the faults the human race is subject to.

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

Night stalker

Just last night my wife and I watched the Dr. Who episode "Vincent and the Doctor," from 2010 (one of the episodes of the Eleventh Doctor, played by Matt Smith).  In it, he and his companion, Amy Pond, go back to Auvers-sur-Oise, France, in 1890, where they meet Vincent van Gogh.

Well, it turns out that van Gogh is having a hell of a time, and not just because the townspeople in Auvers think he's a nut and his paintings are trash.  (Which, apparently, they did in real life.)  Van Gogh is being hunted by a giant reptilian/avian monster called the Krafayis, which kills people but doesn't eat them -- and the twist is that for reasons never explained, van Gogh is the only one who can see it.

Okay, I have to admit when I summarize it that way, it sounds pretty fucking stupid.  But it's a really good episode, and I say that not just because I've become something of a Dr. Who fanatic.  It's a seriously bittersweet story, very well written, and Tony Curran's portrayal of van Gogh is spot-on.  And if the end doesn't make you cry, you have a heart made of stone.

The reason this comes up is because by some sort of odd synchronicity, I ran into a report from the site Mysterious Universe this morning that a beast that no one has been able to describe has (as of the point the article was written) injured twelve people, not in France (that would have been too much of a coincidence) but in the village of Dapodi, in the state of Maharashtra, India.  Like van Gogh's Krafayis, whatever is doing this makes a lot of noise, attacks people out of the blue and mauls the hell out of them, then disappears.

And this is one even the skeptics can't scoff at, because whatever's behind it, the injuries are quite real.  One of the victims, 35-year-old Kailas Pawar, suffered major head injuries, required 45 stitches to put him back together, and is still in the hospital.  The people who were attacked were sleeping outdoors, common in this sweltering climate.

Shadowman [Image licensed under the Creative Commons w:User:Timitzer, Shadowman-3, CC BY 3.0]

At first, officials thought the culprit might have been a leopard, but leopards are familiar animals to people in that region of India, and the victims swore up and down that's not what attacked them.  But when it came to describing what did attack them, things got oddly vague.  According to forest ranger M. N. Hazare, who spoke with several of the victims, "We showed the injured people photographs of leopards, hyenas, and even foxes, but they could not identify it.  They only said that the animal was larger than a dog.  Leopards normally attack their prey and drag them, but this has not happened here.  A hyena does not attack people sleeping in groups. So we are not able to ascertain which animal attacked so many people...  This is flat terrain.  There is a jungle along Bhima River, about ten or twelve kilometers away.  We don’t think a leopard would have come this far away."

I must say, the attacks are odd.  Unless an animal is rabid, most animals will attack people only when they feel threatened.  It's hard to see why an animal would repeatedly maul people sleeping near homes in a decent-sized village.  The other possibility is that the animal was hungry -- but animals that will hunt, kill, and eat humans are fortunately very few in number (a few documented cases have been the result of mountain lions, polar bears, and tigers).  And besides, none of the victims were dragged away and eaten.

All the thing did is pounce, beat the poor people to a pulp, and take off.

What's oddest is that no one has been able to describe it.  You'd think being clawed to within an inch of your life would sharpen your senses pretty well, but nobody has been able to refine the description past "big animal," which you could presumably figure out just from the nature of the attacks.  Of course, the attacks occurred at night in a village where I doubt there are streetlights, and the victims were roused out of a sound sleep by being bitten and scratched, so I suppose it's understandable that during the attack, "getting a good look at the attacker" took second seat to "figuring out how not to die."  But it's still strange that none of the victims could give any sort of description.

So right now, officials in Dapodi are discouraging people from sleeping in the open, and they're trying to keep an eye out for any big animals that aren't behaving themselves.  The problem is, if it's a Krafayis, they wouldn't see it anyway, unless they happen to have a brilliant but half-mad painter handy.

Okay, maybe it's just a leopard.  Stranger things have happened, and my desire to have it be something out-of-the-ordinary is just wishful thinking.  Still, if there's a whooshing noise, and a blue police box appears, and a disheveled man in a bow tie comes out with a gorgeous red-haired woman with a Scottish accent, somebody damned well better let me know.  I'll be on the next flight to India.

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If you are one of those people who thinks that science books are dry and boring, I'll give you a recommendation that will put that misconception to rest within the first few pages: Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements.

Kean undertook to explain, from a human perspective, that most iconic of all images from the realm of chemistry -- the Periodic Table, the organized chart of elements from the simplest (hydrogen, atomic number 1) to largest and most complex (oganesson, atomic number 118).  Kean's sparkling prose shows us the personalities behind the science, including the notoriously cranky Dmitri Mendeleev; tragic, brilliant Henry Moseley, a victim of World War I; and shy, self-effacing Glenn T. Seaborg, one of only two individuals to have an element named after them while they were still alive.

It's a fun read, even if you're not a science geek -- maybe especially if you're not a science geek.  Because it allows you to peer behind the curtain, and see that the scientists are just like the rest of us, with rivalries, jealousies, odd and misplaced loyalty, and all the rest of the faults the human race is subject to.

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

Species, types, and the "No True Scotsman" fallacy

One of the most frustrating of logical fallacies is the No True Scotsman fallacy.

It gets its name from an almost certainly apocryphal story, in which a serial rapist and killer is being pursued by the police in Glasgow, and a Scottish MP encourages the police to search amongst the immigrant population of the city.  "No Scotsman would do such a thing," the MP said.

When the criminal was caught, and turned out to be 100% Scottish, the MP was challenged about his remark.

"Well," he said, drawing himself up, "no true Scotsman would have done such a thing!"

The crux of this fallacy is that if you make a statement that turns out, in view of evidence, to be false, all you do is shift your ground -- redefine the terms so as to make your original point unassailable.

Very few other fallacies have such a capacity for making me want to smack my forehead into a wall as this one.  Someone who commits this fallacy can't be pinned down, can't be backed into a corner, can't receive his comeuppance from the most reasoned argument, the most solidly incontrovertible evidence.  The dancing skills of a master of the No True Scotsman fallacy are Dancing With The Stars quality.

All of this comes up because of an online discussion that I read, and (yes) participated in, a couple of days ago, on the topic of the demonstrability of evolution.  Someone, ostensibly a supporter of evolution but seemingly not terribly well-read on the subject, was using such evidence as the fossil record as a support for the idea.  A creationist responded, "The fossil record, and fossil dating, are inaccurate.  You evolutionists always think that bringing us a bunch of bones and shells proves your point, but it doesn't, because no one can really prove how old they were, and none of them show one species turning into another.  You can't show a single example, from the present, of one species becoming another, and yet you want us to believe in your discredited theory."

Of course, I couldn't let a comment like that just sit there, so I responded, "Well, actually, yes, I can. I know about a dozen examples of speciation (one species becoming another) occurring within a human lifetime."

Challenged to produce examples, I gave a few, including the ones that I described in an earlier post (Grass, gulls, mosquitoes, and mice, February 9, 2012), and then sat back on my haunches with a satisfied snort, thinking, "Ha. That sure showed him."

Well. I should have known better.  His response, which I quote verbatim: "All you did was show that one grass can become another grass, or a mosquito can become another mosquito.  If you could show me a mosquito that turned into a bird, or something, I might believe you."

Now, hang on a moment, here.  You asked me for one thing -- to show one species turning into a different species, in the period of a few decades.  I did so, adhering to the canonical definition of the word species.  And now you're saying that wasn't what you wanted after all -- you want me to show one phylum turning into a different one, in one generation?

I sat there, sputtering and swearing, and not sure how to answer.  So I said something to the effect that he'd pulled a No True Scotsman on me, and had changed the terms of the question once he saw I could answer it, and he'd damned well better play fair.  He humphed back at me that we evolutionists couldn't really support our points, and we both left the discussion as I suspect most people leave discussions on the internet -- unconvinced and frustrated.  So I was pondering the whole thing, and after taking my blood pressure medications I had a sudden realization of where the confusion was coming from.  It was from the idea of a type of organism.

Most people who aren't educated in the biological sciences (and I'm not including just formal education, here; there are many people who have never taken a single biology class and know plenty about the subject) really don't understand the concept of species.  They think in types.  A bird is one type of thing; a bug is a different one.  If you pressed them, they might admit that there were a few types of birds that seemed inherently different; you have your big birds (ostriches), your medium-sized birds (robins), and your little birds (hummingbirds).  I've had students that have thought this way, and when they hear I'm a birdwatcher, they seem incredulous that this could be a lifelong avocation.  Wouldn't I run out of new birds to see pretty quickly?  When I tell them that there are over 10,000 unique species of birds, they seem not so much awed as uncomprehending.

The phylogenetic tree of birds (Class Aves) [credit: Dr. Gavin Thomas, University of Sheffield, UK]

I suspect that the source of this misapprehension is the same as the source of the general misapprehension regarding the antiquity of the Earth and the origins of life: the bible.  In Leviticus 11, where they go through the whole unclean-foods thing that eventually would be codified as the Kosher Law, they split up the natural world in only the broadest-brush terms; you have your animals that have hooves and chew the cud, various combinations of ones that don't, creatures that have fins and scales and ones that don't, insects that jump and ones that don't, and a few different classes of birds (which, to my eternal amusement, included bats).  And that's pretty much it.  Plants were sorted out into ones that had edible parts (wheat, figs, olives), ones that had useful wood (boxwood, cedar, acacia), and ones that had neither of the above (thorn bushes).  And these distinctions worked perfectly well for a Bronze-Age society; it kept you from eating stuff that was bad for you, told you what you could build stuff from, and so on.  But as a scientific concept, the idea of "types of living things" is pretty ridiculous.  And yet it still seems to live on in people's minds, lo unto this very day.

So, anyway, that was my brief excursion into that least useful of endeavors, the Online Argument.  It gave me a nice example of the No True Scotsman fallacy to tell my Critical Thinking classes about.  And it really didn't affect my blood pressure all that much, but it did make me roll my eyes.  Which seems to happen frequently when I get into conversations with creationists.

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If you are one of those people who thinks that science books are dry and boring, I'll give you a recommendation that will put that misconception to rest within the first few pages: Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements.

Kean undertook to explain, from a human perspective, that most iconic of all images from the realm of chemistry -- the Periodic Table, the organized chart of elements from the simplest (hydrogen, atomic number 1) to largest and most complex (oganesson, atomic number 118).  Kean's sparkling prose shows us the personalities behind the science, including the notoriously cranky Dmitri Mendeleev; tragic, brilliant Henry Moseley, a victim of World War I; and shy, self-effacing Glenn T. Seaborg, one of only two individuals to have an element named after them while they were still alive.

It's a fun read, even if you're not a science geek -- maybe especially if you're not a science geek.  Because it allows you to peer behind the curtain, and see that the scientists are just like the rest of us, with rivalries, jealousies, odd and misplaced loyalty, and all the rest of the faults the human race is subject to.

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