Wearable art

I've always had a fascination for body art.  I got my first tattoo about 15 years ago, a pair of Celtic dogs on my back.  In Celtic mythology, dogs are shapeshifters and protector spirits, and I thought that was cool.  Plus, from a more prosaic angle, I have two dogs.

Next was a dragon on my calf, also in a Celtic-knotwork style, in honor of my Scottish grandma, with whom I was really close.  She died in 1986 and I still miss her.  (Nota bene: my leg is usually not this hairless.  This was right after it was done, and -- for those of my readers who haven't gotten any ink -- you get a close shave before the artist starts.)

My latest one, in honor of what would have been my dad's hundredth birthday, is a snake on my arm.  My dad loved snakes, and instilled in me an appreciation for creepy-crawlies (or, in this cases, slinky-slitheries) that I still have.

Here's my dad, age 17, with a friend:

The reason all this comes up is because of a discovery made by a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Washington State University, which resulted in a paper published last week in the Journal of Archaeological Science.  Andrew Gillreath-Brown was going through some artifacts at the university that had been boxed and shelved for over forty years, and happened upon this:

Well, Gillreath-Brown not only is an archaeologist, he also is into body art himself, with a full sleeve featuring a mastodon, a turtle-shell rattle, and a forest scene.  So he immediately recognized what it was.

It's a two-thousand-year-old tattoo instrument, made of a pair of cactus spines bound together by plant fibers, with a handle made of skunkbush wood.

This pushes back the earliest confirmed date of tattooing in western North American Native tribes by over a thousand years.  "Tattooing by prehistoric people in the Southwest is not talked about much because there has not ever been any direct evidence to substantiate it," Gillreath-Brown said, in an interview in Science Daily.  "This tattoo tool provides us information about past Southwestern culture we did not know before... [the tool] has a great significance for understanding how people managed relationships and how status may have been marked on people in the past during a time when population densities were increasing in the Southwest."

So that's just plain cool.  Gillreath-Brown's paper, co-authored with Aaron Deter-Wolf, Karen R. Adams, Valerie Lynch-Holm, Samantha Fulgham, Shannon Tushingham, William D. Lipe, and R. G. Matson, is titled "Redefining the Age of Tattooing in Western North America: A 2000 Year Old Artifact from Utah," and makes for interesting reading even if you (1) aren't an archaeologist, and (2) don't have any body art yourself.  The authors write:

How people decorate their bodies provides insight into cultural expressions of achievement, group allegiances, identity, and status.  Tattooing has been hard to study in ancient societies for which we do not have tattooed mummies, which adds to the challenge of placing current body modification practices into a long-term global perspective.  The tattooing artifact dates to 79–130 CE during the Basketmaker II period (ca. 500 BCE – 500 CE), predating European arrival to North America by over 1400 years.  This unusual tool is the oldest Indigenous North American tattooing artifact in western North America and has implications for understanding archaeologically ephemeral body modification practices...  Events such as the Neolithic Demographic Transition—which occurs in many places around the globe—may link to an increase in body modification practices as social markers, as appears to be the case for the Basketmaker II people in the southwestern United States.

Whatever you think of tattoos, the practice has obviously been around for a very long time.  At its best, it's a form of self-expression and honoring important people and events, connecting with spiritual practices, and simply creating and wearing beautiful designs.  It connects us to our far-distant ancestors in ways we are only now beginning to understand.

All of which makes me glad I have the ink I have.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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

Turned to stone

Let me say up front, both for my skeptical and not-so-skeptical readers, that I'm not saying I believe the account I'm about to tell you.  I'd need way more hard evidence even to consider the possibility of whether it's true (the ECREE principle in action -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence), although it definitely makes a bizarre story, and opens up the question of what possible motive the major players would have to lie.

The incident in question happened in 1993 in Russia.  Here's the abbreviated version of it, but you can read more about it on the original report or at a (quite sensationalized) account at the site UFO International Project.

A troop of soldiers were out on routine training maneuvers when "a quite low-flying spaceship in the shape of a saucer" flew over.  One of the soldiers panicked and shot at it with a hand-held surface-to-air missile, and the spaceship slammed to the ground nearby.  As the soldiers approached the wreck, a gap opened in the side, and five humanoid aliens came out.

So far, not so different from a lot of accounts of close encounters of the third kind.  But here's what happened next:

It is stated in the testimonies of the two soldiers who remained alive that, after freeing themselves from the debris, the aliens came together and "merged into a single object that had a spherical shape."  That object began to buzz and hiss sharply, and then became brilliant white.  In a few seconds, the spheres [sic] grew much bigger and exploded by flaring up with an extremely bright light.  At that instant, 23 soldiers who had watched the phenomenon turned into... stone poles.  Only two soldiers who had stood in the shade and were less exposed to the luminous explosion survived.  

The remains of the "petrified soldiers" were transferred to a government lab near Moscow.  The CIA got wind of the event -- the report doesn't say how -- and called it "extremely menacing... if true."  But if you looked at the original report, you may have noticed that the only media outlet that reported on it when it happened, was...

... the Weekly World News.

Which, by the way, they call "authoritative."

Yup, the Weekly World News, that venerable purveyor of such believable stories as "Kim Kardashian Pregnant With Bigfoot's Love Child."  (Okay, I made that title up, but I've seen ones that bad and worse.)  So immediately I saw that, I went into eyeroll mode.

On the other hand, don't forget what happened to Lot's wife.  (Statue by sculptor Hamo Thornycroft, 1878) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hamo Thornycroft (1850-1925), Hamo Thornycroft-Lot's Wife, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Equally eyeroll-worthy was the last comment in the UFO International Project website, which wondered if the Chinese terracotta army was also made of people who were petrified by aliens.  Which, even if you buy the Russian story whole-cloth, is idiotic.  The terracotta army is, unsurprisingly, made of terracotta, which is a low-fired ceramic clay.  The statues were also made from molds (which they've found examples of), in several pieces, and put together afterwards.  They were painted with colored lacquer, remnants of which are still on some of them.

None of which you'd expect if these were the remains of people flash-petrified by aliens.

Leaving me wondering why I'm even wasting my time replying to that bit.  But as a side note to whoever wrote the UIP piece; if you're making a wild claim, it does not help your cause to support it with an even wilder one.  If you say you've rid your house of evil spirits by waving around quartz crystals, your credibility is not enhanced by then claiming you'd also accomplished the same thing with a salami.

But despite all that, it's still a weird story, because the report is actually a CIA document, released as part of the government's declassification (and FOIA).  So if the Russian account is a hoax (probable), and it got reported to the CIA as true by some external source that also leaked the story to the Weekly World News (really probable), why did the CIA even give it this kind of undeserved credibility?

From what I've read, the CIA pretty much has to record every claim reported to them, reasonable or not, but it still strikes me as odd and extremely specific.  Clearly the claim didn't originate with the Weekly World News; the CIA report states that the information (and photographs, not included in the FOIA release) were directly from a KGB inquiry.

So while (as I said) I still think the great likelihood is that it's a hoax or fabrication, it's kind of peculiar one.  If there are any readers who have greater knowledge of government document policy than I have (kind of a low bar, honestly), let me know what you think in the comments.

In any case, the take-home message is, if you see a low-flying spacecraft, don't shoot it down with a surface-to-air missile unless you fancy being turned into a large rock.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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

Double whammy

Having a rather morbid fascination with things that are big and scary and dangerous and can kill you, I've dealt more than once with topics like mass extinctions and asteroid collisions and supervolcanoes.  So naturally, when there was a piece of recent research on all three at the same time, I felt obliged to write a post about it.

The paper, published last week in Science, was written by a team of scientists from the University of California - Berkeley (Courtney J. Sprain, Paul R. Renne, Loÿc Vanderkluysen, Kanchan Pande, Stephen Self, and Tushar Mittal), is called "The Eruptive Tempo of Deccan Volcanism in Relation to the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary."  In it, they examine one of the biggest volcanic eruptions in Earth's history -- the Deccan Traps -- which seem to have occurred right around the time of the Cretaceous Extinction, 66 million years ago.

The Western Ghats, part of the Deccan Traps lava flow [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nicholas (Nichalp), Western-Ghats-Matheran, CC BY-SA 2.5]

This certainly isn't a coincidence, and it's been thought for a while that the eruption, which occurred in what is now India and released an estimated one million cubic kilometers of lava, were at least contributory to the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the Cretaceous Period.  Such an unimaginably huge eruption would have burned everything in its path, converting any organic matter that got in the way into ash and carbon dioxide -- causing a spike in temperature that certainly would have put a huge strain on ecosystems to compensate.  The actual blow (literally) that marked the end of the Cretaceous Period, though, was an enormous meteorite collision, the Chicxulub Impact, near the Yucatan Peninsula on the other side of the planet.

Almost precisely on the other side, in fact.  This got Sprain et al. wondering if the two might be connected, especially since geologists still don't know what causes trap-type eruptions (there are two other trap eruptions known, the Emeishan Traps in China and the unimaginably huge Siberian Traps that are likely to be the cause of the largest mass extinction known, the Permian-Triassic Extinction).  Whatever the cause, it apparently happens without a great deal of warning, which is scarier than hell.  The crust of the Earth fissures, and phenomenal quantities of lava come pouring out, causing serious issues for anyone or anything living nearby.  But the observation that the Chicxulub Impact and the Deccan Traps are not only close to simultaneous but are almost exactly antipodal made scientists wonder if that wasn't a coincidence.

Apparently, the thought is this.  When the Chicxulub Impact occurred, it sent huge shock waves through the Earth, which propagated both through the mantle and along the crust.  When those waves had traveled all the way around (or through) the Earth, they converged on a single point, almost like a magnifying glass bringing rays of sunlight focusing on one spot.  This reinforced the waves, ringing the Earth like a bell, and the crust destabilized...

... cracking open and creating one of the largest volcanic eruptions ever.

So the whole thing becomes a double whammy, and not because of an unfortunate accident.  It seems likely that one event caused the other, and also explains why species that lived in what is now Asia were affected just as much by the extinction as ones that were near the collision itself.  Seems kind of unfair, doesn't it?  The meteorite collides with the Earth, causing massive devastation in the Western Hemisphere, and the critters in the Eastern Hemisphere only had a few minutes to gloat before a massive earthquake launched an event that did them in, too.

"Both the impact and Deccan volcanism can produce similar environmental effects, but these are occurring on vastly differing timescales," study co-author Courtney Sprain said.  "Therefore, to understand how each agent contributed to the extinction event, assessing timing is key."

There you have it.  Yet another reason why we wouldn't want the Earth to get hit by a huge asteroid, if you needed another one.  Kind of dwarfs the earthquakes and volcanoes we've had recently, doesn't it?  Also makes me realize how fragile the biosphere is, and that a sudden and unforeseen event can trigger enormous destruction -- one a bolt from the sky, the other from the deepest regions of the Earth's mantle.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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

Piercing the clouds

One of the most unusual stories that H. P. Lovecraft ever wrote is "In the Walls of Eryx."  It isn't the usual soul-sucking eldritch nightmares from the bubbling chaos at the center of the universe; in fact, it's his only real science fiction story.  It centers around a human colony on Venus, devoted to mining a kind of crystal that can be used for propulsion.  There's an intelligent native species -- reptilian in appearance -- who was content to let the humans bump around in their space suits (Lovecraft at least got right that the atmosphere would be toxic to humans) until the humans started killing them.  At that point, they started fighting back -- and setting traps.

The story centers around a crystal hunter who is out on an expedition and sees a huge crystal in the hands of a (human) skeleton.  He goes toward it, and bumps into an unseen obstacle -- completely transparent walls, slick (and therefore unclimbable) and twelve feet tall (so unjumpable).  The problem is, when he tries to back out, he's already moved around a bit, and doesn't retrace his steps perfectly.

Then he runs into another wall.

What's happened is that he's stumbled into an invisible labyrinth.  And how do you find your way out of a maze if you can't see it?  You'll just have to read it.  It's only a dozen or so pages long, and is one of the neatest (and darkest) puzzle-box stories you'll ever pick up.

It's been known since Lovecraft's time ("In the Walls of Eryx" was written in 1936) that Venus was covered by clouds, and its surface was invisible from Earth.  Of course, a solid mantle of clouds creates a mystery about what's underneath, and speculation ran wild.  We have Lovecraft's partially-correct solution -- a dense, toxic atmosphere.  Carl Sagan amusingly summed up some of the early thinking on Venus in the episode "Heaven and Hell" from his groundbreaking series Cosmos: "I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus.  Why not?  Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds.  Well, what are clouds made of?  Water, of course.  Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it.  Therefore, the surface must be wet.  Well, if the surface is wet, it's probably a swamp.  If there's a swamp, there's ferns.  If there's ferns, maybe there's even dinosaurs...  Observation: I can't see anything.  Conclusion: dinosaurs."

Of course, reputable scientists didn't jump to these kinds of crazy pseudo-inferences.  As Neil deGrasse Tyson points out, "If you don't know, then that's where your conversation should stop.  You don't then say that it must be anything."  (Perhaps not a coincidence that Tyson was the host of the reboot of Cosmos that appeared two years ago.)

The first hint that Venus was not some lush tropical rain forest came in the late 1950s, when it was discovered that there was electromagnetic radiation coming from Venus that only made sense if the surface was extremely hot -- far higher than the boiling point of water.  This was confirmed when the Soviet probe Venera 9 landed on the surface, and survived for 127 minutes before its internal circuitry fried.

In fact, saying it's "hot" is an understatement of significant proportions.  The average surface temperature is 450 C -- 350 degrees higher than the boiling point of water, and hot enough to melt lead.  The atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide (compared to 0.04% in the Earth's atmosphere), causing a runaway greenhouse effect.  Most of the other 3.5% is nitrogen, water vapor, and sulfur dioxide -- the latter being the rotten-egg chemical that, when mixed with water, creates sulfuric acid.

Yeah.  Not such a hospitable place.  Even for crystal-loving intelligent reptiles.

Photograph from the surface of Venus [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

But there's still a lot we don't know about it, which is why at the meeting last fall of the American Geophysical Union, there was a proposal to send a probe to our nearest neighbor.  But this was a probe with a difference; it would be attached to a balloon, which would keep it aloft, perhaps indefinitely given the planet's horrific convection currents.  From there, we could not only get photographs, but more accurate data on the atmospheric chemistry, and possibly another thing as well.

One of the things we don't know much about is the tectonics of the planet's surface.  There are clearly a lot of volcanoes -- unsurprising given how hot it is from other causes -- but whether the crust is shifting around the way it does on Earth is not known.  One way to find out would be looking for "venusquakes" -- signs that the crust was unstable.  But how to find that out when probes on the surface either melt or get dissolved by the superheated sulfuric acid?

The cool suggestion was that because of the atmosphere's density, it might be "coupled" to the surface.  So if something shook the surface -- a venusquake or volcanic eruption -- those waves might be transferred to the atmosphere.  (This effect is insignificant on Earth because our atmosphere is far, far less dense.)  Think of a plate with a slab of jello on it -- if you shake the plate, the vibrations are transferred into the jello because the whole thing is more or less stuck together, so the surface of the jello wobbles in resonance.

An airborne probe might be able to tell us something about Venus's geology, which is pretty awesome.  It appeals not only to my fascination with astronomy, but my love of a good mystery, which the second planet definitely is.

So I hope this project gets off the ground, both literally and figuratively.  Even if it's unlikely to detect anything living -- reptilian or not -- we could learn a great deal about what happens when the carbon dioxide levels start undergoing a positive feedback.

A scenario we all would like very much not to repeat here at home.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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

Drowned cities and drowning mythology

Yesterday, I was listening to one of my favorite pieces by Claude Debussy, The Drowned Cathedral, and I started to wonder what legend had given rise to the piece.  After a little bit of digging, I found out that Debussy got his inspiration from the Breton legend of the mythical city of Ys, built on the coast of Brittany behind a seawall.  Princess Dahut the Wicked tempted fate by engaging in all sorts of depravity therein, despite the warnings of Saint Winwaloe that God was watching and would smite the ever-loving shit out of her if she didn't mend her ways.  (Okay, I'm paraphrasing a bit, here, but that's the gist.)  Anyhow, Dahut wouldn't listen, and one night a storm rose and broke through the seawall, and the ocean flowed in over the city.  Dahut's father, King Gradion, escaped on a magical horse with Dahut riding behind him, but Winwaloe shouted at him, "Push back the demon riding with you!"

So Gradion did what any good father would do, namely, he shoved his daughter into the sea, which "swallowed her up."  The sea also swallowed the rest of Ys, which kind of sucked for the inhabitants, given that it wasn't really their fault that the princess was a little morally challenged.  As for Princess Dahut herself, she became a mermaid, and is still hanging around to tempt sailors into jumping into the ocean to their deaths.  And according to legend, on windy days, you can still hear the bells of the drowned cathedral of Ys if you stand along the shore of Douarnenez Bay.

The Flight of King Gradion, by Évariste-Vital Luminais, 1884 (in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, Brittany, France) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Kind of a cool story, in a ruthless, Grimm's Fairy Tales sort of way, even if Winwaloe and Gradion, not to mention God, do come across as pro-patriarchy assholes.  And whatever else you think, you have to admit that Debussy's piece is gorgeous (go back and give a listen to the recording of it I linked above, if you haven't already done so).

What I haven't told you, yet, though, is the other thing I found out while looking up the Legend of the Drowned City of Ys...

... which is that he über-Christians are now using the story to support creationism.

I'm not making this up.  If you don't believe me, check out the page called "Submerged Ruins" at the site Genesis Veracity Foundation.  Here's how they launch the idea:

Have you ever seen a map showing the bronze age port cities of the world? You certainly have not, because the darwinists will tell you sea level at circa 2000 B.C. was little different than today, yet the presence of hundreds of submerged ruins’ sites from the Gulf of Chambay to Bimini, and from Cornwall to Nan Madol, certainly belie that notion, with most of the submerged ruins worldwide in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, right where you’d expect them to be, where Sidon, Peleg, Javan, Tarshish, and Atlas plied the waters, building their port facilities, now submerged since the end of the Ice Age.  Here is a partial list of the submerged ruins worldwide, with pictures where available, to be soon updated as more photos will undoubtedly roll-in from interested “submergie” aficionados, so help out if you can, hard as it may be for a darwinist to do, but certainly not for a soon-to-be ex-darwinist, we shall see.

Well, I've never known a "Darwinist" to make any definitive statement regarding the sea level staying the same.  Most "Darwinists" are pretty well-versed in science, meaning they know all about ice ages and interglacial periods and sea level fluctuations, as opposed to creationists, who think that the entire world was flooded and that afterwards the water just "went away," presumably through some kind of giant floor drain in the Marianas Trench.

Anyhow, we soon get to the legend of Ys, in a single-sentence paragraph that should win some kind of Olympic gold medal in the Comma Splice Event:

Submerged ruins have been reported off Cornwall’s Isles of Scilly, in Cardigan Bay, off Tory Island, and off the Brittany coast of the Kingdom of Ys, also known as Keris, all these submerged ruins part of Atland as it’s called in the ancient book Oera Linda of the Frisians, that empire was also known as Atalan, don’t bet against Avalon, the story adapted two thousand years later.

What on earth does this have to do with the bible, you may be asking?  Well, the writer is happy to explain with another single sentence:

So the popular notion that the empire of Atlantis was some continent-sized island now submerged way out in the Atlantic ocean is proven ridiculous, because that empire was demonstrably a vast ice age maritime empire of the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic coastlines, which comports with the biblical timeline, that the Ice Age ended circa 1500 b.c. at the time of the Exodus of the Jews out of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, their patriarch having been Canaan, the father of Sidon (Posidon).

So, I was thinking, "Wait.  Is he talking about Poseidon?  Like, the Greek god?  Because, you know, polytheism doesn't exactly square with the traditional interpretation of the bible, right?"  But in fact, yes, that's who he's talking about... and he claims that Poseidon was mentioned in the bible:

Plato wrote that Posidon [sic] (Canaan’s son Sidon, Genesis 10:15) bestowed ten districts of atlantean empire governorship to his sons, one son Atlas having gained the kingship of the district of the concentric canal ringed city of Atlantis, his namesake (along with the Atlantic ocean and the Atlas mountains), that legendary capital city of Atlantis where the worship of Posidon [sic] was centered and practiced for perhaps forty generations until the Ice Age ended (when the sea level rose to consume 25 million square miles of coastal real estate worldwide).

Except that in the bible, Sidon was Noah's great-grandson, and was born after the Flood.

Oops.

But creationists never let a little thing like facts stand in the way of their conclusions.  He finishes up his explanation, if I can dignify it by that name, thusly:

Very important to remember is that Noah’s Flood did not cover today’s mountain ranges (contrary to what the bibliophobes mockingly insist), because the global flood of Noah’s day totally covered and obliterated the low mountains of the pre-flood supercontinent Pangea [sic], those mountains not having been formed by tectonic plates crashing together by runaway plate tectonics as was the case for the orogenies of our current mountains ranges formed at the close of Noah’s Flood.  So now when skeptics come to comprehend the solid science confirming the global flood vividly described in the book of Genesis, solid science here http://detectingdesign.com/fossilrecord.html, the reasons to believe all of the Bible become even more apparent, much to the darwinists’ woe.

Yup, I have to admit that reading this made me experience some significant woe, but not for the reason he probably thinks.

Is it just me, or do the creationists seem increasingly desperate lately?  The evidence for evolution, the antiquity of the Earth, and the accuracy of paleontology just keeps mounting, and yet they continue to flail around, like a drowning citizen of Ys trying to cling to anything in order to stay afloat.  They've shifted their tactics from "The Bible Says It, I Believe It, and That Settles It" -- which is an inherently unarguable position -- to looking at the actual evidence.  And that moves the game solidly onto our turf, because evaluating evidence is what scientists do.

So I suppose sites like this, however they are kind of an embarrassment to read, are actually a good thing, because it means that on some level, the biblical literalists are sensing that they're losing.

And in celebration, let's indulge in a little more Debussy, shall we?  How about his orchestral work, The Sea?  That seems a fitting way to end this discussion, doesn't it?

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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

Tracing the lapse of ages

The evolutionary model is one of the most powerful explanatory devices in biology.  It has led to discoveries that simply blow the mind -- such as the fact that dinosaurs didn't go extinct after all (we still have 'em -- we just call 'em birds).  As Richard Dawkins has demonstrated, all you need is an imperfect replicator (DNA) and a selecting agent (the environment) and you can create massive changes in way fewer generations than you'd think.

Of course, sometimes that may not result in an improvement.

I want to tell you today about two fascinating examples of evolutionary conundrums, both about our friends the erstwhile dinosaurs -- and similar occurrences which had nearly opposite results.

First, let's look at scrub jays.

These smart, pretty birds, bright blue with gray markings, are made up of two populations.  The first (and largest) is represented by Woodhouse's Scrub Jay (Aphelocoma woodhouseii):

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Peter Wallack, Western Scrub Jay, Santa Fe, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The second is the Florida Scrub Jay:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mwanner at the English language Wikipedia]

Pretty similar, right?  Odd, then, that these two photographs were taken 2,700 kilometers apart -- and there are no scrub jays of any kind in between.

Given the fact that the western scrub jays (which include three other species besides Woodhouse's) are a much larger and more diverse population than their Floridian cousins, it's likely the Florida Scrub Jay's ancestors came from the west rather than the reverse.  But how?  They're not migratory, so they didn't get blown off course on migration (which happens -- for three years running a Pacific Loon showed up in Cayuga Lake in upstate New York).  So what caused the split -- and when?  There's apparently been little drift in the populations since the division occurred, given the fact that they're pretty similar still, but that might be low selection, not short time spans.

The bottom line is, we don't know.  The scrub jays are a textbook example of allopatric range distribution -- related populations that have no range overlap.  And while in some cases these peculiarities have been explained, this one has not.

Even odder -- and virtually the opposite in end result -- came out of a genetic study of skeletons of the adzebills (Aptornis spp.), a pair of species native to New Zealand which went extinct from overhunting after the colonization of the islands by the Maoris.  They were impressive birds -- flightless, predatory, just under a meter tall, with the heavy, sharp, downcurved bills that gave them their common name.

Skeleton of Aptornis defossor in the Auckland Museum [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Auckland Museum, Aptornis defossor (AM LB544) 601651 (cropped), CC BY 4.0]

Their general shape led scientists to think they may be related to moas -- enormous flightless birds that went extinct right around the same time as the adzebills did.  But here, appearance and size are misleading.  The study, published last week in Diversity, has shown the genetics of the adzebills indicates their closest living relatives are a group of birds in Africa...

... the flufftails.

White-spotted Flufftail (Sarothrura pulchra)  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Francesco Veronesi from Italy, White-spotted Flufftail near Kakum NP - Ghana 14 S4E2889 (16010066588), CC BY-SA 2.0]

"A lot of past genetic research and publicity has focused on the moa, which we know were distant relatives of the ostrich, emu, and cassowary," said study co-author Dr Kieren Mitchell of the University of Adelaide.  "But no one had analysed the genetics of the adzebill, despite a lot of debate about exactly what they were and where they came from."

Study co-author Trevor Worthy of Flinders University added, "We know that adzebills have been in New Zealand for a relatively long time, since we previously discovered a 19 million-year-old adzebill fossil on the South Island...  A key question is whether they've been present since New Zealand broke away from the other fragments of the supercontinent Gondwana or whether their ancestors flew to New Zealand from elsewhere later on."

But... look at these two.  (The birds, not the researchers.)  Even the most diehard scientific type might raise an eyebrow at these being closely related.  However, consider my first example -- the wolf and the pug.  Selective breeding of cats and dogs has produced enormous differences in only a few hundred years.  Imagine you were an alien biologist, come to Earth to catalog all the species of life on this planet, and you ran across a chihuahua and a Saint Bernard.

My guess is if you told the alien biologist they were the same species, he/she/it would laugh in your face.  But they are, in fact, genetically very close, and in fact are even theoretically interfertile.  (Although what a Saint Berhuahua would look like kind of boggles the imagination.  Plus, the mechanics of the conception are a little problematic.  I mean, if it was a male chihuahua and a female Saint Bernard, would they, like, give him a stepladder or something?)

An imperfect replicator plus a selecting agent plus time can create wonders.  It seems fitting to end this post with a quote from Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species which I think sums it up brilliantly:

It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.  We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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

Reversing the arrow

After a deep philosophical discussion, a friend once said to me, "You're only a skeptic because you don't have the balls to be a mystic."

I bristled (of course) and explained that my skepticism came from a desire to base my understanding on something more concrete than feelings and desires.  She shot back, "So you wouldn't have accepted the truth of atoms before the experiments that proved their existence."

"I would not have known they were real, no," I responded.

"So there could be great swaths of knowledge outside your direct experience, of which you are entirely ignorant."

"There could be, but I have no way of knowing."

She gave me a wicked grin and said, "The mystics do."

Predictably, neither of us convinced the other in the end.  I don't think any amount of mysticism would have arrived at the Bohr model of the atom and the periodic table, for example.  But the reason her arrow went in as deeply as it did is that she wasn't entirely wrong.  I have had a fascination with "other ways of knowing" -- mysticism, psychic phenomena, altered states of consciousness, and the like -- for as long as I can remember.  The lack of evidence for most of it has not dulled my interest -- if anything, it's piqued it further.

Woodcut by Camille Flammarion (1888) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I have this sort of dual life.  On the one hand, I consider myself of the hard-edged, evidence-demanding skeptical type.  On the other, I'm drawn to all sorts of woo-woo stuff that, despite my scoffing at it by day, has me researching it in the wee hours when I figure everyone's asleep and I won't get caught out.

It's also why all of my novels have a paranormal twist.  Living vicariously through my characters, I suppose.

Understandable, then, that my ears perked up immediately when I saw an article written by Dr. Julia Mossbridge in (of all places) The Daily Mail.  I've written about Mossbridge before -- she's been researching telepathy and precognition for fifteen years -- and my problem with her research, then and now, is that I don't see any possible mechanism by which either of those could work.

But.  That a scientist of her stature would continue to stand by this claim means it's worth consideration.  And I have to be careful of my own biases -- we all are prone to confirmation bias, and if my bent is to look at the world in a mechanistic fashion, it might well blind me to what's really going on.  It's never a good idea to jump from "I don't see how this could be true" to "this isn't true."  It's just a thinly-disguised version of the argument from ignorance, isn't it?  As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "Going from an abject statement of ignorance to an abject statement of certainty."

As far as what Mossbridge is actually claiming, it's more than a little fascinating.  She writes:

I led a team at the respected Northwestern University in the U.S. that analysed 26 experiments published over the previous 32 years, all of which examined the claim that human physiology can predict future important or emotional events. 

These studies had asked questions such as: ‘Do our bodies give different unconscious signals when we’re about to see a picture of someone pointing a gun at us, versus when we’re about to see a picture of a flower?’ 

In all of the experiments we analysed, a random number generator was used to select the future image so it was impossible to cheat.  The answer, our research concluded, is ‘yes’.  When you add all these experiments together, it became clear the human body goes through changes in advance of future important events — alerting our non-conscious minds seconds earlier to what is likely to happen. 

On average, participants’ bodies showed changes that were statistically reliable.  For instance, they would sweat more (a behaviour associated with fear) before they were shown an image of a gun, and less before they saw a flower. 

This happened too often to be scientifically considered chance.

All of this, of course, runs counter to the sense most of us have that time flow is one-directional.  How could the future influence the present?  But as Mossbridge correctly points out, the "arrow of time" problem is one of the great unsolved mysteries of physics.  Virtually all of the physicists' equations are time-symmetric -- the math works equally well whether time is flowing forward or backward.   One of the only exceptions is entropy -- which deserves a bit more explanation.

We observe that systems tend to progress toward more chaotic (high entropy) states.  A glass breaks, but the pieces never spontaneously come together and reassemble into a glass.  The sugar you've stirred into your coffee never comes back together into solid crystals sitting at the bottom of the cup.  Why is that?

The simplest explanation of this can be illustrated using a deck of cards.  If you were to shuffle an ordinary deck, what's the likelihood that (by random chance) they'd end up in numerical order by suit?

Nearly zero, of course.  The reason is that there are only 24 different states where they are organized that way (depending on the order of the suits), whereas there is a nearly infinite number of possible other arrangements.  So if you jump from one arrangement to another (by shuffling), the chance of landing on one of the 24 ordered states is very close to zero.  Progression toward disorder is the rule because, in general, there are way more disordered states than ordered ones.

But this still doesn't explain all of the other cases where time is completely symmetric.  Why do we remember the past but know nothing about the future?  The simple answer is that no one knows.  Einstein himself said, "The distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, although a remarkably stubborn one."

So I'm curious to find out more of what Mossbridge is claiming.  And I'll soon have my chance, as I just ordered her new book The Premonition Code, which details the evidence that has convinced her and others that precognition actually exists.  (If you'd like to order the book as well, click the image below.)

 

Until then, I have to say the jury's still out on this one.  I'm trying to push aside both the disbeliever and the mystic that cohabit in my brain, and stick with the skeptic -- look at the argument as dispassionately as I can, and see where it leads.  Faced with a huge, mysterious, and complex universe, that's about the best we can ever do.

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You can't get on social media without running into those "What Star Trek character are you?" and "Click on the color you like best and find out about your personality!" tests, which purport to give you insight into yourself and your unconscious or subconscious traits.  While few of us look at these as any more than the games they are, there's one personality test -- the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which boils you down to where you fall on four scales -- extrovert/introvert, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving -- that a great many people, including a lot of counselors and psychologists, take seriously.

In The Personality Brokers, author Merve Emre looks not only at the test but how it originated.  It's a fascinating and twisty story of marketing, competing interests, praise, and scathing criticism that led to the mother/daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers developing what is now the most familiar personality inventory in the world.

Emre doesn't shy away from the criticisms, but she is fair and even-handed in her approach.  The Personality Brokers is a fantastic read, especially for anyone interested in psychology, the brain, and the complexity of the human personality.

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