Fruits and vegetables

What is the fascination creationists have for the produce aisle?

First we had Ray Comfort claiming that bananas were "the atheists' worst nightmare" because we for some reason were supposedly befuddled by the fact that bananas are "perfectly shaped to fit into the human hand" and had a "non-slip surface," so they must have been created that way by an intelligent deity.  After Comfort was subjected to ridicule on social media at a level that would induce most of us to change our names and have our faces surgically altered before being willing to go out into public again -- I'll leave it to your imagination as to what other objects people informed Comfort were "perfectly shaped to fit into the human hand" -- you'd think the creationists would say, "Okay, maybe that's not the best argument we have."

But no.  Creationists, as a whole, seem to think that if at first you fail miserably, you don't just try try again, you beat the idea unto death with a blunt instrument.  And no one is better at that strategy than Kent Hovind, who is famous not only for specious arguments for young-Earth creationism but for spending ten years in federal prison for tax evasion.

Hovind seems to think that the way to support Ray Comfort's argument is to find other fruits and vegetables that are "the atheists' worst nightmare."  First, we had lettuce:

How could lettuce evolve slowly by chance and from what?  How many trillions of intermediate steps would there have to be to go from a dot of nothing to a living lettuce plant?  Is there any scientific evidence besides lines on paper?

Yes, there is.  Thanks for asking.

Then there were grapes:

How could a grapevine… evolve slowly by chance and from what?  Wait till you see what they teach on the internet that the grapes evolve from.  You won’t believe it… 

How could it happen by chance and from what?  How many trillions of intermediate steps would there have to be to turn a dot of nothing into a grape?  Isn’t that what they teach?

No, it isn't.  Thanks for asking.

Because that was such a wildly successful line of reasoning, Hovind turned to celery:

How could celery have evolved slowly by chance, and from what?…  I would like some hard scientific evidence.  What is the ancestor of celery if it wasn’t celery?  What was it?  And if it was something other than celery, please tell me how it changed. 

How many trillions of intermediate steps would there have to be to go from an amoeba to celery?  I would say it would take a lot.  I would like to see what’s the evidence is for that…

That is going to be problematic, because celery didn't evolve from amoebas.  But once again, thanks for asking.

So what about... broccoli?

Broccoli.  How could broccoli have evolved slowly by chance?  I would like an answer to that.  A very simple answer.  How many trillions of intermediate steps would there have to be to change from an amoeba... to broccoli?  Is there any scientific evidence for these supposed changes that you guys believe in — capital B, believe? 

Evolution is a religion.  Is it more logical to believe that maybe broccoli was created by a really smart Creator?

Hovind seems to like amoebas almost as much as fruits and vegetables.  Maybe he doesn't know about any other life forms, so that's why he keeps coming back to those.

To wit, last week's installment, wherein we hear about oranges.  And you'll never guess what his argument is:

You think all those oranges, and those trees that are producing it, and the dirt that’s holding it all came from a dot of nothing that exploded 13.7 billion years ago?  Whodathunkit.  That’s a new word I made up. 

How many trillions of intermediate steps would there have to be to go from a dot of nothing to an orange tree, and where is the evidence?  Is there any scientific evidence for all these supposed changes you guys talk about?…  Could it be more logical to believe, maybe, the orange tree was created by a really smart Creator?…  That’s the most logical conclusion.

 Of course, what all this boils down to is the argument from ignorance; "I can't imagine how this could happen" = "this didn't happen."  Evolutionary biologists and geneticists have a very good idea about how all of these organisms evolved (in most of these examples, with significant help from artificial selection by humans), and Hovind is only claiming this because he hasn't bothered to read any of the scientific papers explaining in great detail the answers to all of these questions.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

And I swear, if I hear one more time that the Big Bang Model says that "a dot of nothing exploded and made everything," I'm going to punch a wall.  For fuck's sake, if you're going to blather on about something, at least read the Wikipedia article first, if more technical treatments are above your head.  If you can't be bothered to do at least that much, allow me to direct you to the definition of "straw man argument."

Oh, and Kent?  You did not make up "whodathunkit."  I can remember my dad saying that back in the mid-1970s when I was in high school.  But given your determination to misrepresent and play fast and loose with scientific claims (not to mention your IRS return), I don't suppose there's any reason to expect you'd be more honest about other stuff.

But you have to wonder where he's going to go now.  Artichokes?  Mangoes?  Okra?  Pomegranates?  Bok choi?  The possibilities are endless.  It'd be nice, though, if he could change the rest of the argument, because it's getting tiresome to read, "So, consider _____.  Could that have come from a dot of nothing 13.7 billion years ago?  What's the evidence?" etc. etc. etc.  He's rung the changes on this one enough, don't you think?

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker.  This book is, in my opinion, the most lucid and readable exposition of the evolutionary model ever written, and along the way takes down the arguments for Intelligent Design a piece at a time.  I realize Dawkins is a controversial figure, given his no-quarter-given approach to religious claims, but even if you don't accept the scientific model yourself, you owe it to yourself to see what the evolutionary biologists are actually saying.

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

CRISPR babies

One of my problems with resolving ethical questions is that I so often have a hard time deciding the difference between moral, ethical, reasonable, and justifiable, and figuring out where an issue lies on the spectrum thereof.

I've always had this problem.  There are things that in my view are always wrong -- harming or endangering a child comes to mind -- but the vast majority of issues lie in that immense field of gray areas.

Which is why I'm having a hard time deciding what to make of the bombshell announcement last week that a Chinese geneticist, He Jiankui, claims to have genetically altered a pair of human embryos -- and it resulted in the birth of twin girls who, if the gene editing was successful, will be resistant to HIV.

The technique involved was CRISPR-Cas9, a protein complex that allows for what amounts to cut-and-paste for your DNA.  What He did was to use CRISPR-Cas9 to selectively delete a gene for a  receptor called CCR5 that allows HIV to attach to cells.  Without that receptor -- He hopes -- the children will be genetically immune.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

When He made his announcement, the scientific community had a collective meltdown.  "The underlying purpose of doing the experiment was obviously to show that they could do gene editing on an embryo, but the purpose for the party involved does not make any sense," said Anthony Fauci, an HIV/AIDS researcher and head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland.  "There are so many ways to adequately, efficiently, and definitively protect yourself against HIV that the thought of editing the genes of an embryo to get to an effect that you could easily do in so many other ways in my mind is unethical."

Okay, I'm not defending He.  The real issue here, in my opinion, is risk.  "Gene editing itself is experimental and is still associated with off-target mutations, capable of causing genetic problems early and later in life, including the development of cancer," said Julian Savulescu, an ethicist at the Oxford University.  "This experiment exposes healthy normal children to risks of gene editing for no real necessary benefit."

But the problem is that at some point, scientists were going to have to take the leap and do something like this.  Ever since Jennifer Doudna of UC-Berkeley developed CRISPR-Cas9 as a gene editing protocol in 2012, it's only been a matter of time.  Once a technique like this becomes possible, it becomes inevitable.

So sooner or later, someone was going to have to accept the risk of trying it on human embryos.  Animal models only get you so far.  The potential for eradicating genetic diseases is nothing short of astonishing; think of a world without cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, Tay-Sachs disease, sickle-cell anemia, hemophilia.  All of that is well within the realm of possibility now.

But.  Once you've started down that road, what's to stop people from altering other traits?  Appearance, personality, behavior... for me, this gets out onto some very thin ice.  When this Pandora's box is opened, there's no telling what dubiously ethical practices will escape.

There's also the problem that if such a technique really becomes capable of (relatively) risk-free editing out of deleterious genes, it's almost certain that it would be available only to the rich, further widening the gap between the privileged and the non-privileged.  The brilliant (and prescient) 1997 film Gattaca dealt with this very issue -- how genetic engineering of children could result in a new lower class, people conceived the old-fashioned way who didn't have the same opportunities for jobs, education, health care, and health insurance as the smarter, stronger, healthier "Valids."

So I'm of two, or more, minds about all of this.  First, the potential of the therapy is mind-boggling.  And the idea that once developed, researchers were going to hold off trying it out on human embryos, is naively optimistic about human nature.

But it comes back once again to the quote from scientist Alan Grant in Jurassic Park -- "You were so busy trying to figure out if you could, you never gave any thought to whether you should."  The thorny ethical issues this technique brings up go way beyond the potential risk to two baby girls in China.

All of which makes me glad that I'm not on the scientific regulatory boards who are wrestling with how to respond to He's announcement.

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Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

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

Escapees from Siberia

As you might expect from someone who is passionately interested in both genealogy and evolutionary genetics, when there's a study that combines both, it's a source of great joy to me.

This week, Nature published a study on the evolutionary history of humans in northern Europe, specifically the Finns.  Entitled, "Ancient Fennoscandian Genomes Reveal Origin and Spread of Siberian Ancestry in Europe," it was authored by no less than seventeen researchers (including Svante Pääbo, a Swedish biologist who is widely credited as founding the entire science of paleogenetics) from the Max Planck Institute, the University of Helsinki, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Vavilov Institute for General Genetics, and the University of Turku.

Quite a collaborative effort.

It's been known for a while that Europe was populated in three broad waves of settlement.  First, there were hunter-gatherers who came in as early as 40,000 years ago, and proceeded not only to hunt and gather but to have lots of hot caveperson-on-caveperson sex with the pre-existing Neanderthals, whose genetic traces can be discerned in their descendants unto this very day.  Then, there was an agricultural society that came into Europe from what is now Turkey starting around 8,000 years ago.  Finally, some nomadic groups -- believed to be the ancestors of both the Scythians and the Celts -- swept across Europe around 4,500 years ago.

Anyone with European ancestry has all three.  Despite the genetic distinctness of different ethnic groups -- without which 23 & Me genetic analysis wouldn't work at all -- there's been enough time, mixture, and cross-breeding between the groups that no one has ancestry purely from one population or another.

Which, as an aside, is one of the many reasons that the whole "racial purity" crowd is so ridiculous.  We're all mixtures, however uniform you think your ethnic heritage is.  Besides, racial purity wouldn't a good thing even if it were possible; that's called inbreeding, and causes a high rate of homozygosity (put simply, you're likely to inherit the same alleles from both your mother and father).  This causes lethal recessives to rear their ugly heads; heterozygous individuals are protected from these because the presence of the recessive allele is masked by the other, dominant (working) copy.  It's why genetic disorders can be localized to different groups; cystic fibrosis in northern Europeans, Huntington's disease in people whose ancestry comes from eastern England, sickle-cell anemia from sub-Saharan Africa, Tay-Sachs disease in Ashkenazic Jews, and so on.

So mixed-ethnic relationships are more likely to produce genetically healthy children.  Take that, neo-Nazis.

Map of ethnic groups in Europe, ca. 1899 [Image is in the Public Domain]

In any case, the current paper looks at the subset of Europeans who have a fourth ancestral population -- people in northeastern Europe, including Finns, the Saami, Russians, the Chuvash, Estonians, and Hungarians.  And they found that the origin of this additional group of ancestors is all the way from Siberia!

The authors write:

[T]he genetic makeup of northern Europe was shaped by migrations from Siberia that began at least 3500 years ago.  This Siberian ancestry was subsequently admixed into many modern populations in the region, particularly into populations speaking Uralic languages today.  Additionally... [the] ancestors of modern Saami inhabited a larger territory during the Iron Age.

The coolest part is that this lines up brilliantly with what we know about languages spoken in the area:

The Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, to which both Saami and Finnish languages belong, has diverged from other Uralic languages no earlier than 4000–5000 years ago, when Finland was already inhabited by speakers of a language today unknown.  Linguistic evidence shows that Saami languages were spoken in Finland prior to the arrival of the early Finnish language and have dominated the whole of the Finnish region before 1000 CE.  Particularly, southern Ostrobothnia, where Levänluhta is located, has been suggested through place names to harbour a southern Saami dialect until the late first millennium, when early Finnish took over as the dominant language.  Historical sources note Lapps living in the parishes of central Finland still in the 1500s.  It is, however, unclear whether all of them spoke Saami, or if some of them were Finns who had changed their subsistence strategy from agriculture to hunting and fishing.  There are also documents of intermarriage, although many of the indigenous people retreated to the north...  Ancestors of present-day Finnish speakers possibly migrated from northern Estonia, to which Finns still remain linguistically close, and displaced but also admixed with the local population of Finland, the likely ancestors of today’s Saami speakers.

Which I think is pretty damn cool.  The idea that we can use the genetics and linguistics of people today, and use it to infer migratory patterns back 40,000 years, is nothing short of stunning.

Unfortunately, however, I have zero ancestry in Finland or any of the other areas the researchers were studying.  According to 23 & Me, my presumed French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English ancestry was shown to be... French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English.  No surprise admixtures of genetic information from some infidelity by my great-great-grandmother with a guy from Japan, or anything.

On the other hand, I did have 284 markers associated with Neanderthal ancestry.  Probably explaining why I like my steaks medium-rare and run around more or less naked when the weather's warm.  Which I suppose makes up for my lack of unexpected ethnic heritage.

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Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

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

The origin of oxygen

One of the (many) things I love about science is the fact that for every discovery made, a slew of new questions open up.

Sometimes, "a slew" doesn't even cover it.  There have been discoveries that have revolutionized entire fields.  For example, when J. Tuzo Wilson, Harry Hess, and others developed the plate tectonics model in the early 1960s, to explain the magnetic mapping of the Atlantic Ocean, it explained a whole lot of other things -- why there are always volcanoes near oceanic trenches, why the coastline of North and South America fits together with Europe and Africa as if they were puzzle pieces, why the Himalayas are not volcanic, but are an earthquake zone (and are, in fact, still rising).  But it opened up a huge number of other questions -- why volcanoes in different spots have different characteristics (for example, the hot, fluid lava of Kilauea as compared to the monstrous explosions of Mount St. Helens and Vesuvius), why coastal California is made up of dozens of unrelated chunks of rock (which go by the delightful name of "suspect terranes"), and -- most importantly -- what force is driving the entire process.

Geologists are still devoting their careers to understanding the outfall from that one discovery.

A study published earlier this month in Geobiology has that characteristic of good science -- of solving one question and in the process opening up lots of others.  Called, "The Early Archean Origin of Photosystem II," by Tanai Cardona and A. William Rutherford of Imperial College of London, Patricia Sánchez‐Baracaldo of the University of Bristol, and Anthony W. Larkum of the University of Sydney, at first seems as if it would only be of interest to people who are fascinated with the gruesome biochemical details of photosynthesis.  Photosystem II is an array of proteins and pigment molecules that forms one of the two "light traps" in chloroplasts (the other, unsurprisingly, is called "photosystem I").  So who, other than botanists, really cares when it evolved?

Well, it turns out that the timing of this event is mighty peculiar -- because apparently photosystem II, central to the glucose-production system of all plants, arose around 3.4 billion years ago -- 700 million years before the earliest known autotrophs, the cyanobacteria (commonly called "blue-green algae").

The way this was discovered was a technique called a molecular clock -- using a known mutation rate for a specific gene to estimate when related genes in different organisms had a common ancestor.  (As a wildly oversimplified example, if you know that the rate of mutation in a particular gene cluster is 1 base pair change per million years, and that gene cluster in species A has 23 differences from the related gene cluster in species B, you can infer that the most recent common ancestor between A and B occurred 23 million years ago.)

Here, the researchers looked not at genes in two different organisms, but two different proteins in the same organism -- photosystem I and photosystem II, the genes for which were once a single piece of DNA that diverged in two directions.  And if you use the molecular clock technique to estimate when the common ancestor of those two genes was, you get a number way bigger than anyone expected.

The cyanobacteria Tolypothrix [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Matthewjparker, Tolypothrix (Cyanobacteria), CC BY-SA 3.0]

This is strange.  The geological evidence is pretty clear that earlier than 2.7 billion years ago, the atmosphere had no free oxygen.  So if photosynthesis -- the major oxygen-producing activity on Earth -- evolved 700 million years before significant quantities of oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere, it raises two awkward questions:

1. Who was doing it?
2. Where did all the oxygen go in the interim?

I'm sure these questions have perfectly rational answers.  It's possible cyanobacteria evolved a lot earlier than we'd thought -- after all, they're not common as fossils.  It could be that at first some biological or geological process was locking up the oxygen as soon as it was released, so it took a long time for it to start building up to levels that would leave a discernible fingerprint in the rocks.  It could be that something's confounding the molecular clock data and causing it to give an inaccurate result -- although in reading the paper, to my only moderately-trained eye, this doesn't look at all likely.  The analysis was careful, thorough, and painstaking.

It could also be that the earliest photosystems were simply much less efficient than today's, so their ability to oxidize water was insufficient to lead to an oxygen buildup in the atmosphere.  Or that the ancestral gene/protein for today's photosystems had a different purpose for the organisms that had them, and only afterwards was co-opted to store energy and synthesize food -- a phenomenon called preadaptation.

Or maybe something else.  The point is, it's a peculiar and fascinating discovery.  And like many peculiar and fascinating discoveries, I'm sure it will lead to further questions -- and, with hard work, insight, and a grain of luck, a whole host of further answers.

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Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

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

Kite flying

A few years ago, I wrote a post here at Skeptophilia called "Grass, gulls, mosquitoes, and mice," in which I laid out the argument that while evolution is usually slow, sometimes it's so fast we can see it happening before our very eyes.  And when that happens, the anti-evolutionists amongst us have some explaining to do.

It's always nice to have another arrow in your quiver, and that came in a recent paper in Nature called, "Rapid Morphological Change of a Top Predator With the Invasion of a Novel Prey," by Christopher E. Cattau, Robert J. Fletcher Jr, Rebecca T. Kimball, Christine W. Miller, and Wiley M. Kitchens, all biologists at the University of Florida, who have been studying Snail Kites, a rare bird of prey found in the Everglades (and, as you'll see, in a few other places).

The Snail Kite, as you might expect from the name, is a specialist predator that feeds only on apple snails, a large species of freshwater gastropod found in the Everglades.  They have hooked beaks for removing the meat from the snail, and taloned feet for holding onto the shell -- well adapted for their niche.

The problem started with the accidental introduction into Florida of the island apple snail (Pomacea maculata), a larger, heavier species native to Argentina.  The native species, the Florida apple snail (Pomacea paludosa), was quickly outcompeted in areas where they both occurred, which concerned not only fans of the Snail Kite but rice farmers, as the island apple snail is a voracious pest on rice crops.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons, photograph by Andy Morffew]

When an exotic species replaces a native species upon which other animals depend for food, the usual result is a drastic blow to the pre-existing food chain.  Here, though, we have a different result -- an eye-opening response by the Snail Kites that recalls evolutionary biologist Alan Grant's comment in Jurassic Park that "nature finds a way."

As is, the Snail Kites in Florida were not equipped to prey upon the island apple snails -- their feet were too small to hold onto the shells, not surprising as the snails are five times larger than the native Florida apple snails.  But the expected drop in the bird's numbers didn't happen.  Instead, in only a couple of generations, selection was so powerful on the population that the average talon size and bill size increased measurably, and the alterations were reflected by changes in their DNA.

"Nobody would believe me," said Robert Fletcher, co-author of the study, when the findings were announced. "They said, 'No, that cannot be. It's too quick.'"  But even the naysayers were convinced when the introduced snail species showed up in huge numbers in one part of the Snail Kite's range, and instead of leaving the premises, nearly all of the nearby kites converged on the spot.

I guess birds like an all-you-can-eat buffet as much as the rest of us do.

The authors write:

[T]rends in predicted breeding values emphasize that recent morphological changes have been driven primarily by phenotypic plasticity rather than micro-evolutionary change.  Our findings suggest that evolutionary change may be imminent and underscore that even long-lived vertebrates can respond quickly to invasive species.  Furthermore, these results highlight that phenotypic plasticity may provide a crucial role for predators experiencing rapid environmental change.

It's good news for the kites, but it bears mention that a lot of times, the introduction of an exotic species can spell disaster for native ones.  The kites were lucky in that there was already a range of bill sizes because of spontaneous mutations, and the new prey acted as a selecting agent, favoring the largest-billed and largest-footed individuals.

The most interesting part is that once you set this in motion, it ultimately will split the population from related populations elsewhere.  I first saw Snail Kites in Belize, where there are no island apple snails, so the pressure to cope with bigger prey doesn't exist.  Given time -- and, apparently, less time than anyone thought -- the population in Belize and the one in Florida will diverge genetically to the point that they will be, by anyone's definition, different species.

So there you have it: another example of evolution in action.  Cool enough for anyone to appreciate, but for evolutionary biologists, this is nothing short of spectacular.  We can add this to the list of times we've actually observed species evolving quickly enough to see it happen -- which is one more nail in the coffin of strict creationism, not that we particularly needed another one.

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

Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

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

You're my type

A while back I posted an article about a claim that Rh negative individuals are descended from aliens, or possibly Jesus, and this allows them to have a variety of superpowers.  The outcome of writing this is that my blog has been bombarded by a slew of advertisements revolving around blood types (not to mention aliens and Jesus), and this included one that claimed that before dating, you should always check your potential romantic interest's blood type.

Intrigued, I clicked the link, and after about a half-hour's rooting around online (during which thousands of innocent cells in my prefrontal cortex were subjected to unmentionable agony) I found an article at More called, "Can Blood Type Determine Your Personality?", which seems to have the most detail about the whole thing.  It turns out that for some years now, woo-woos in Japan have claimed that your blood type (just the A/B/O group, not the Rh group; almost no one in Japan is Rh negative) influences your personality.  And of course, there's no way that Americans are going to read about any damnfool unscientific idea without a significant number of them going, "Wow, I never thought about that!  That is amazingly plausible!"  Especially if the idea originated in Japan, which always seems to add a nice cachet of credibility.  So this has led to a whole new branch of personality-analysis pseudoscience, as if astrology weren't enough.

According to Natalie Josef, the source of the "information" on the above website, not only does your blood type tell you your personality and who you should try to hook up with, it also predicts what career you should pursue:

Type O - You are the social butterflies.  Often popular and self-confident, you are very creative and always seem to be the center of attention.  You make a good impression on people and you’re often quite attractive.  Organized and determined, your stubbornness will help you reach your goals.  You make good leaders.  Lovewise, O is most compatible with O and AB.  Common career choices: banker, politician, gambler, minister, investment broker, and pro athlete. 

Type A - Type As may seem calm on the outside, but inside, you’re filled with anxiety and worry.  You’re perfectionists and often shy and sensitive.  Usually introverted, you’re stable and thoughtful.  You make good listeners and are sensitive to color and your surroundings.  You like to be fashionable and are up on the latest trends, but never flashy or gaudy.  You like romantic settings and often shun reality for fantasy worlds.  A is most compatible with A and AB in the love department.  Common career choices: accountant, librarian, economist, writer, computer programmer, and gossip columnist. 

Type B - You can be very goal-oriented and often complete the ambitious tasks set before you.  Outgoing and very charming, you’re good at reading people and providing support.  Though critical of appearance (but not your own), you aren’t picky and are unlikely to dwell over the little things.  Type Bs are impulsive individualists who often create their own path in life.  You are very strong and optimistic.  B is most compatible with B and AB lovers.  Common career choices: cook, hairdresser, military leader, talk show host, and journalist. 

Type AB - Not surprisingly, ABs can be quite dualistic, possessing both A and B traits.  You may be shy and outgoing, and hesitant and confident.  You often stand out from others, don’t like labels, and are nice and easy going.  You are logical and determined to do things correctly.  Usually trustworthy, you like to help others.  You often speak in a serious manner.  Your patience, concentration, and intelligence are admirable.  AB can find a soul mate with any other blood type.  Common career choices: bartender, lawyer, teacher, sales representative, and social worker.

Well, I'm a type A, and I have to admit that I am a bit of a border collie, personality-wise; but as far as being "fashionable," all I can say is that usually I go to work looking like I've been put through a dryer without "Cling-Free."  I probably own an iron, but I have no idea where it is, and my idea of color matching usually revolves around the concept of "everything goes well with blue jeans."  And in the career department, "writer" is an obvious hit, but the other ones ("Gossip columnist?"  "Accountant?"  What the hell?) are, shall we say, not very accurate.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

What strikes me about all of this is the usual dart-thrower's bias issue; we tend to notice the hits and ignore the misses.  But really, come on.  Are you really claiming that there are only four basic personality types?  Even the astrologers divide all of humanity twelve ways; the best you can do is four?

Then, after reading the article, I made the mistake of scrolling down to the comments.  This is, as I have mentioned before, usually a mistake.  My favorite one was a comment that revolved around the fact that the article had made a point that in Japan, believers in the whole blood-type-is-destiny don't like ABs very much.  This reader was upset by that:

Kudos on your article Natalie.  I love learning something new all the time.  I'm an AB+ as well, plus Asian astrology sign of Fire Horse.  Not only did they abort as many unborn fire horses back in 1966 as they were able, (fire was considered an undesirable element with horse sign) but now I find out they also wouldn't want me due to my blood type!  However, I have to say I love Asian food!

Okay. Sure.  "Fire horses."  "Fire horse" + AB = "really bad."  But hell yeah, pass the kung pao chicken!

I have to admit to deep mystification as to why an obviously absurd idea could possibly convince anyone, and I'm forced to the conclusion that the main problem is that a large fraction of humanity has no real understanding of the principles of scientific induction.  We are so immersed in a world of advertising claims, political sound-bites, and media glitz that "well, that sounds right!" has become the gold standard for belief.  Remarkably few people, upon reading a claim, seem even to take the next step, which is to ask the question, "how do I know that claim is true?", much less go on to asking, "if it is true, how could it possibly work?"  All in all, it makes me realize that as a science teacher, I have my work cut out for me.

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Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

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

There were giants in the Earth

It's always a peculiar kind of joy to me to find out I wasn't understanding something correctly.

I know, it's an odd thing to get excited about, but I find the process of refining my comprehension of the universe to be a thrill.  I vividly recall when my freshman physics teacher demonstrated via a clever apparatus that if you shoot a gun horizontally, and simultaneously drop a bullet from the same height, the two bullets hit the ground at exactly the same time.

It didn't seem possible, but I couldn't argue with experimental evidence right in front of my eyes; the vertical and horizontal components of velocity are completely independent of each other.

And my picture of the world shifted a little bit.

Here's another one: how many of you have heard that before the dinosaurs became extinct when the Chicxulub Meteorite hit 66 million years ago, all the lineages related to mammals were small and fearful, scampering about in the shadows to avoid the fierce "terrible lizards" at the top of the food chain?  Any primitive mammals that grew too large, the story went, would either (1) be turned into lunch, or (2) be stepped on and converted to a Primitive Mammal Pancake.

Well, check off another piece of conventional wisdom as "refuted."  Because a recent discovery near the town of Lisowice, Poland, dating from the Late Triassic -- 220-odd-million years ago, right as the dinosaurs were approaching their peak -- shows that during this time, which was quickly leading up to the all-time-record-holders for terrestrial animals, behemoths like Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, and the aptly-named Giraffatitan, there were already cousins to the lineage that led to mammals that were the size of African elephants.

This fossil, of dicynodont Lisowica bojani, looked like some bizarre cross between a turtle and a rhinoceros.  Here's an artist's reconstruction of Lisowica:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Creator: Dmitry Bogdanov, Dicynodont from PolandDB, CC BY 3.0]

Lisowica is so large, said Tomasz Sulej, paleontologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences's Institute of Paleobiology in Warsaw, that at first he and his team didn't recognize it as a dicynodont.  Its estimated mass is nine tons -- as much as a full-grown male elephant.

"Who would have ever thought that there were giant, elephant-sized mammal cousins living alongside some of the very first dinosaurs?" said Stephen Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist at The University of Edinburgh.  "We've always thought that early mammals and their relatives retreated to the shadows while dinosaurs rose up and grew to huge sizes.  That's the story I tell my students in my lectures.  But this throws a wrench into that simple tale."

But that's what's cool about science, isn't it?  You think you get what's going on, and nature turns around and astonishes you over and over.  

So picturing the prehistoric world dominated by T. rex and Triceratops and the rest of the big, lumbering creatures popular in children's books, with our cousins all the size of mice scurrying around and hoping not to get noticed, needs to be revised.  Right smack in the middle of the Age of Reptiles was a close relative of ours who looks like he was ready and able to defend himself.

And maybe even turn some of the smaller dinosaurs into Dinosaur Pancakes.

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Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

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