The Gaia Hypothesis and the danger of models

Scientists use models -- partial representations of reality, often expressed mathematically -- to explain the universe.  Both working scientists and science teachers often explain those models using analogies.

This has a good result and a bad result.  The good result is that the use of model, analogy, and metaphor makes science accessible for non-scientists.  You don't have to understand piles of abstruse mathematics in order to get a glimpse at the weirdness of quantum theory; if you read last week's post on the Wigner's Friend Paradox, you've seen an example.  In my own teaching, I use analogy all the time.  Antibodies are like trash tags.  Transpiration in plants is like a very long chain attached to the underside of a trampoline.  The Krebs Cycle is like a merry-go-round in which two kids get on and two kids get off at every turn.

The downside, however, is twofold.  The first problem is that it's easy at times to think that the model is the reality.  The goofier the metaphor, the easier it is to avoid this pitfall; I've never had a student yet who thought that the Krebs Cycle really was a merry-go-round (although I did have a student of mine start her essay on antibodies on the AP exam, "So, antibodies are trash tags...").  But with sophisticated, complex models, it's tempting to think that the model is, down to the level of details, what is happening in the real world.

The second downside is that some people will grab the model and run right off the cliff with it.

All of this comes up because a friend of mine asked me what I thought about the Gaia Hypothesis.  I know that this friend to be a sharp, smart, and solid thinker, so I didn't wince, which is what I usually do when someone brings this subject up.  Because I can't think of an idea in science that has fallen so prey to the model vs. reality blur as this one has.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Gaia was dreamed up by two scientists of high repute -- James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis -- way back in the 1970s.  The central idea of Gaia is that the Earth's biosphere acts as an interlocking set of self-regulatory systems, and they work together to maintain the homeostasis of the whole in much the same way as organ systems do in an organism.  Lovelock and Margulis identified a number of features of the biosphere, including the carbon dioxide levels, nitrogen levels, oxygen levels, oceanic salinity, and average temperature, that all seem to work through a complex pattern of negative feedback to keep the Earth's systems within a range that is comfortable for living things.  Using computer simulations, Lovelock and Margulis showed that even with a simple model, they could create a "world" that remained stable, and for which the living things played a role in regulation.

All of this is well and good, and Lovelock and Margulis were completely clear about what their model did (and didn't) mean.  (If you're curious, here's the Gaia homepage, run by Lovelock and other scientists working in this field; Lynn Margulis, tragically, died in November of 2011.)

The problem is, lots of people think that the scientists who developed the Gaia Hypothesis meant way more than they actually did.  Part of it was Lovelock's rather inadvisable choice of a Greek goddess's name for christening his model, which brings up lots of images of personified deities, Mother Earth, and New Age nature spirits.  This particular twist really irritates fundamentalist Christians; take a look at the misleadingly named site Environment and Ecology, wherein we find that the Gaia model encourages "radical environmentalism and ecofeminism," because it runs counter to the biblical passage about god giving man "dominion" over the Earth.

Even ignoring the objections of the wacko biblical literalists, I suppose it's natural enough that people could misinterpret Gaia.  The whole thing is just so... suggestive.  And misinterpret it they did, first thinking that because Lovelock and Margulis said that the Earth was like an organism, that they were saying that it was one; and then grabbing the analogy and leaping into the void with it.  As an example of where this can lead, take a look at Truth and Reality: The Metaphysics of Gaia, wherein we find passages like the following:

The GaiaMind Project is dedicated to exploring the idea that we, humanity, are the Earth becoming aware of itself.  From this perspective, the next step in the evolution of consciousness would seem to be our collective recognition that through our technological and spiritual interconnectedness we represent the Earth growing an organ of self-reflexive consciousness.  While we believe that the Earth is alive, and we are part of it, we also affirm the Great Spirit of Oneness found at the heart of all the worlds great spiritual traditions.  What is most important may not be what we believe, but what we find we all share when we put our thoughts aside to go into meditation and prayer together.

I think I can say with some confidence that this is light years away from what Lovelock and Margulis had in mind.  Consider the chain of... I can't call it "logic," what is it? -- to get from Lovelock and Margulis to this stuff:

1. The Earth has interlocking systems that self-regulate, keeping conditions in homeostasis.
2. Organisms do, too.
3. So the Earth is like an organism.
4. Many organisms have organs that allow them to sense, and respond to, their environment.
5. This is called "awareness."
6. Some organisms have a second feature, rather poorly understood, of self-awareness, of the ability to see themselves, their interactions, and their internal mental states.
7. This is called "consciousness."
8. Consciousness is a feature of intelligence, a fairly recently-developed innovation amongst living things on Earth.

Ergo: The Earth is becoming conscious. It'd really be nice of you to pray about it, because that'd help the process right along.

It's all a matter of keeping your head screwed on when you read this stuff; where does the science end and the woo-woo start?  It's always best to go back to see what the scientists themselves said on the topic.  While being a scientist isn't always a guarantee against fuzzy thinking, I'd put more reliance on the ability of your typical scientist to tell fact from fiction than that of someone whose main contribution to the discussion is rambling on in some random blog on the topic.  (Irony intended.)

Still, the use of models is, on the whole, a good thing.  It gives us something to picture, a way to frame our understanding of what is going on in the real world.  You just have to know how far to push the model, and when to quit. It is, in other words, a starting point.  And if along the way it can piss off some creationists, it's all good.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a look at one of the most peculiar historical mysteries known: the unsolved puzzle of Kaspar Hauser.

In 1828, a sixteen-year-old boy walked into a military station in the city of Ansbach, Germany.  He was largely unable to communicate, but had a piece of paper that said he was being sent to join the cavalry -- and that if that wasn't possible, whoever was in charge should simply have him hanged.

The boy called himself Kaspar Hauser, and he was housed above the jail.  After months of coaxing and training, he became able to speak enough to tell a peculiar story.  He'd been kept captive, he said, in a small room where he was never allowed to see another human being.  He was fed by a man who sometimes talked to him through a slot in the door.  Sometimes, he said, the water he was given tasted bitter, and he would sleep soundly -- and wake up to find his hair and nails cut.

But locals began to question the story when it was found that Hauser was a pathological liar, and not to be trusted with anything.  No one was ever able to corroborate his story, and his death from a stab wound in 1833 in Ansbach was equally enigmatic -- he was found clutching a note that said he'd been killed so he couldn't identify his captor, who signed his name "M. L. O."  But from the angle of the wound, and the handwriting on the note, it seemed likely that both were the work of Hauser himself.

The mystery endures, and in the book Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson looks at the various guesses that people have made to explain the boy's origins and bizarre death.  It makes for a fascinating read -- even if truthfully, we may never be certain of the actual explanation.

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

Acting out

When I was (much) younger, I acted in a couple of low-key theater productions.  I won't say it was a bad experience, and I think I played my roles reasonably well, but to say I suffer from stage fright is an understatement of considerable proportions.  Frankly, it's a wonder I didn't hyperventilate and pass out as soon as I walked out on the stage.

Part of my problem is that I was never able to get past a feeling of "this is me out there on stage" -- to let go and become the character.  I've talked to some amateur (but dedicated) actors since that time, and one and all they say that once they get out under the lights, the fear evaporates, and they are able to be their character --who is, after all, not the guy whose knees are knocking together because he's terrified of being in front of an audience.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Comedy and tragedy masks without background, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This perception of good actors sinking themselves into their characters is apparently exactly what happens, to judge by a recent paper in Royal Society Open Science by Steven Brown, Peter Cockett, and Ye Yuan of McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario), called, "The Neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet: An fMRI Study of Acting."

In this study, actors were directed to portray scenes from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and then were hooked up to an fMRI scanner and then asked questions about how they would act in a variety of specific situations if they were the character.  And what they found was pretty intriguing:

[This is] a first attempt at examining the neural basis of dramatic acting.  While all people play multiple roles in daily life—for example, ‘spouse' or ‘employee'—these roles are all facets of the ‘self' and thus of the first-person (1P) perspective.  Compared to such everyday role playing, actors are required to portray other people and to adopt their gestures, emotions and behaviours.  Consequently, actors must think and behave not as themselves but as the characters they are pretending to be.  In other words, they have to assume a ‘fictional first-person' (Fic1P) perspective.  In this functional MRI study, we sought to identify brain regions preferentially activated when actors adopt a Fic1P perspective during dramatic role playing.  In the scanner, university-trained actors responded to a series of hypothetical questions from either their own 1P perspective or from that of Romeo (male participants) or Juliet (female participants) from Shakespeare's drama.  Compared to responding as oneself, responding in character produced global reductions in brain activity and, particularly, deactivations in the cortical midline network of the frontal lobe, including the dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortices.  Thus, portraying a character through acting seems to be a deactivation-driven process, perhaps representing a "loss of self."

Which is fascinating.  It also makes me wonder what would happen if the same experiment were performed on individuals who weren't trained actors, and especially on people (like myself) for whom acting is a seriously trying experience.  Is the problem that we can't deactivate our dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortices enough to get absorbed into the part -- so we can't "let go" enough to stop being ourselves?

Steven Brown, co-author of the study, thinks that's exactly what's happening.  "It looks like when you are acting, you are suppressing yourself; almost like the character is possessing you," Brown said, in an interview in The Guardian.  "The deactivation associated with a reduction, a suppression, of knowledge of your own traits I think conforms with what acting may involve...  Actors have to split their consciousness, they sort of have to monitor themselves and be in the character at the same time."

So it's not simply a loss of self; it's a selective switch-off of the parts of your self that motivate your actions and feelings.  There's always the supervisor there, making sure things don't go too off-kilter, but apparently it's difficult to act convincingly if you don't on some level stop being yourself.

This also brings to mind cases of actors who did seem to lose themselves entirely.  Andy Kaufman comes to mind, best known for his role as the hapless Latka Gravas on the sitcom Taxi.  The boundaries between Kaufman the actor, Kaufman the comedian, and Kaufman the created fictional character seemed blurry right from the outset.  He was famous for strange stunts like challenging audience members in his stand-up comedy routine to wrestle him, reading out loud for two hours from The Great Gatsby instead of performing his shtick, and (once) inviting the entire audience out for milk and cookies after the show -- which enough people took him up on that it required 24 buses.

While no one ever did an fMRI on Kaufman -- when he died in 1984, the fMRI had yet to be invented -- I really wonder what was happening in his prefrontal cortex.  You have to wonder if those regions involved with the sense of self turned off while he was acting, and stayed off.

In any case, the whole thing is interesting, both from the standpoint of human behavior and that of neuroscience.  And once again it makes me realize how fluid our perceptions are -- and that our sense of self is, truly, a creation of our brain's biochemistry.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an entertaining one -- Bad Astronomy by astronomer and blogger Phil Plait.  Covering everything from Moon landing "hoax" claims to astrology, Plait takes a look at how credulity and wishful thinking have given rise to loony ideas about the universe we live in, and how those ideas simply refuse to die.

Along the way, Plait makes sure to teach some good astronomy, explaining why you can't hear sounds in space, why stars twinkle but planets don't, and how we've used indirect evidence to create a persuasive explanation for how the universe began.  His lucid style is both informative and entertaining, and although you'll sometimes laugh at how goofy the human race can be, you'll come away impressed by how much we've figured out.

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

The collapse of reality

I can say with some level of confidence that I'm nowhere near smart enough to be a philosopher.  Or, honestly, even to read most philosophical treatises with understanding.

An acquaintance of mine is a Ph.D. in philosophy, and she showed me a bit of her dissertation.  It was a kind gesture, but I read the piece of it she sent me with the same expression my dog gets when I try to explain something to him that's completely beyond his grasp, like why I don't want to play ball when we're in the middle of an ice storm.  You can tell he really wants to understand, that he would if he could, and that he feels bad that it makes no sense to him, but the whole thing only registers enough to trigger the Canine Head-Tilt of Puzzlement.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, I'm going to leap into deep waters surrounding an experiment that was the subject of a paper in arXiv last month that -- according to an article in MIT Technology Review -- shows that there's no such thing as objective reality.

The paper, entitled, "Experimental Rejection of Observer-Independence in the Quantum World," by Massimiliano Proietti, Alexander Pickston, Francesco Graffitti, Peter Barrow, Dmytro Kundys, Cyril Branciard, Martin Ringbauer, and Alessandro Fedrizzi, working at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh, Scotland), investigates a little-known conundrum of quantum mechanics called the Wigner's Friend Paradox.  This one adds a new layer onto the famous Schrödinger's Cat Paradox, which seems to imply that something can be in two opposing states at once until someone observes it and "collapses the wave function."

Here's the idea of Wigner's Friend (named after Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner).

Let's say there's a single photon being studied in a laboratory by a colleague of Wigner.  The friend observes the photon, which can be polarized either horizontally or vertically -- Wigner doesn't know which.  The friend does a measurement to find out the direction of polarization of the photon, collapsing its wave function and forcing it into one or the other, and then writes down the results -- but doesn't tell Wigner.

Then Wigner studies the same photon.  What he'll find, goes the theory, is that to Wigner, the photon is still in two superposed states at the same time.  Ergo, Wigner and his friend observe the same real phenomenon, and they come up with different answers about it.

And they're both right.

This seems like some kind of trickery, but it's not.  Reality for Wigner and his friend are demonstrably different.  This opens up a particularly snarly (and bizarre) problem called the "consciousness causes collapse" interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that's where the waters get even deeper.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

In a nutshell, here's the problem.  The collapse of the wave function happens because of interaction with an observer, but what counts as an observer?  Does the observer have to be conscious?  If a photon strikes a rock, with a particular result in terms of interacting with the rock's atoms, is the rock acting an observer?  To physicist Pascual Jordan, this seems to be stretching a point.  "[O]bservations not only disturb what has to be measured, they produce it," Jordan said.  "We compel [a quantum particle] to assume a definite position...  [therefore] we ourselves produce the results of measurements."

Which prompted Einstein himself to respond that the Moon did not cease to exist when we stopped looking at it.

Despite Einstein's scoffing, though, it seems like that's exactly the sort of thing Wigner's Friend suggests.  The Proietti et al. paper is unequivocal that the "observer problem" can't be dismissed by saying that everything, even inanimate matter, could be an observer, because it requires a sentient entity recording the results of the experiment to produce the effect.  The authors write:

The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them.  In quantum mechanics, the objectivity of observations is not so clear, most dramatically exposed in Eugene Wigner's eponymous thought experiment where two observers can experience fundamentally different realities.  While observer-independence has long remained inaccessible to empirical investigation, recent no-go-theorems construct an extended Wigner's friend scenario with four entangled observers that allows us to put it to the test.  In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we here realise this extended Wigner's friend scenario, experimentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by 5 standard deviations.  This result lends considerable strength to interpretations of quantum theory already set in an observer-dependent framework and demands for revision of those which are not.

The MIT Technology Review article outlines how earthshattering this result is.  The author writes:

[T]here are other assumptions too.  One is that observers have the freedom to make whatever observations they want.  And another is that the choices one observer makes do not influence the choices other observers make—an assumption that physicists call locality. 

If there is an objective reality that everyone can agree on, then these assumptions all hold. 

But Proietti and co.’s result suggests that objective reality does not exist.  In other words, the experiment suggests that one or more of the assumptions—the idea that there is a reality we can agree on, the idea that we have freedom of choice, or the idea of locality—must be wrong.

This is the point where my brain simply rebelled.  I've always considered myself a staunch materialist, although (as I said before) I'm well aware both of the fact that there are philosophical arguments to the contrary and that most of them are way beyond my mind to comprehend.  But I've been able to effectively ignore those arguments because science -- my touchstone for reality -- has always seemed to me to support a materialist view.  This table, this desk, this coffee cup all have a realness independent of me, and they would be there substantially unchanged if I weren't looking, or even if I ceased to exist.

But the truth is, as usual, more complex than that.  The hard-edged materialism I've always found so self-evident might not just be arguable, but simply wrong from a scientific basis.  Perhaps our consciousness creates reality -- a view espoused by mystics, and typically rejected by your stubborn science-types (like myself).

I don't know if I'm quite ready to jump there yet.  As the MIT Technology Review article said, it may be there are loopholes in the Wigner's Friend experiment that haven't been uncovered yet.  But one by one those options are being eliminated, with the result that we materialists might be forced to reconsider, if not completely overturn, our view of the world.

All of which makes me feel like I want to hide under my blanket until it all goes away.  Or maybe just play ball with my dog, ice storm be damned.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an entertaining one -- Bad Astronomy by astronomer and blogger Phil Plait.  Covering everything from Moon landing "hoax" claims to astrology, Plait takes a look at how credulity and wishful thinking have given rise to loony ideas about the universe we live in, and how those ideas simply refuse to die.

Along the way, Plait makes sure to teach some good astronomy, explaining why you can't hear sounds in space, why stars twinkle but planets don't, and how we've used indirect evidence to create a persuasive explanation for how the universe began.  His lucid style is both informative and entertaining, and although you'll sometimes laugh at how goofy the human race can be, you'll come away impressed by how much we've figured out.

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

Stellar slingshot

Sometimes there's a scientific discovery that's just such an "oh, wow!" that I have to tell you about it.

Like the research that was published in the Astrophysical Journal last week.  "Origin of a Massive Hyper-runaway Subgiant Star LAMOST-HVS1: Implication from Gaia and Follow-up Spectroscopy," by Kohei Hattori, Monica Valluri, Norberto Castro, Ian U. Roederer, Guillaume Mahler, and Gourav Khullar, of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, describes a star that was ejected from our galaxy at a speed that boggles the imagination.

This star -- the euphoniously-named LAMOST-HVS1 -- is traveling at about 570 kilometers per second, on a trajectory almost perpendicular to the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy.  (If it helps, that's over a million miles an hour.)  It was initially thought that the star might have been evicted from the center of the galaxy, where there is an enormous black hole -- only something that massive, scientists thought, could impart enough energy to a star to get it traveling that fast.  But tracking its path backward showed that it didn't come from the center, but from a region called the Norma Spiral Arm.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

What this seems to indicate is that there are massive black holes scattered throughout the galaxy, not concentrated at the center.  Which is vaguely terrifying.  The scenario is apparently that a binary star was drawn in toward the black hole, and as it fell toward the event horizon, one of the two gained enough energy to be flung free -- what's called the "gravitational slingshot effect."  This phenomenon has been used to get countless television and movie spacefarers out of sticky situations, most notably in the 1998 film Lost in Space, wherein we learn that something being a truly awful television show is not sufficient to stop producers from turning it into an even worse movie.  I say "worse," even though Lost in Space was uncategorically abysmal, because the movie took itself so damn seriously.  When the television show brought out space vikings or space cowboys or space hippies or a space motorcycle gang -- none of which, by the way, I'm making up -- at least they knew they were being campy.

But here, we're actually supposed to believe the intrepid crew of the Jupiter 2, having just escaped from Gary Oldman as a Dr. Smith who has turned into a giant humanoid spider (for the record, I'm not making that up, either), realizes that they don't have enough oomph to escape from the planet that's disintegrating around them, so Matt LeBlanc as Major Don West decides to use the "gravity well" of the planet to fling them free.  So he puts the Jupiter 2 into a power dive, and somehow they go all they way through the planet, miraculously dodging all of the rocks and debris, not to mention an entire mantle and core's worth of molten lava, and get squirted out of the other side like someone spitting out a grapefruit pit.

But I digress.

In any case, the writers of the script actually were referencing a real phenomenon, but one which would be unlikely to save you if you are ever in the situation of having your spaceship run out of gas while trying to escape from an exploding planet.  "This discovery dramatically changes our view on the origin of fast-moving stars," said study co-author Monica Valluri, in a press release.  "The fact that the trajectory of this massive fast-moving star originates in the disk rather that at the Galactic center indicates that the very extreme environments needed to eject fast-moving stars can arise in places other than around supermassive black holes."  (The press release also has a nice gif showing the star's path, which you should all check out.)

All of which is pretty cool, especially since there have only been around thirty of these "hyper-runaway" stars ever observed.  Given its current position, it's interesting to think about what the sky would look like to a denizen of one of its planets (yes, I know, any denizens it may have had surely wouldn't have survived a close encounter with a black hole, but just bear with me here).  I'm reminded of Carl Sagan's comment about a star in that position experiencing not a sunrise but a galaxy-rise -- from where it is, the disc and arms of the Milky Way would fill the entire night sky.

So there's some awe-inspiring research from the astronomers.  I don't see how anyone would not find this astonishing.  Maybe if you were like the Robinson family, meeting hordes of aliens every week, you'd get inured, but I can't help but think I'd still be pretty blown away even so.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an entertaining one -- Bad Astronomy by astronomer and blogger Phil Plait.  Covering everything from Moon landing "hoax" claims to astrology, Plait takes a look at how credulity and wishful thinking have given rise to loony ideas about the universe we live in, and how those ideas simply refuse to die.

Along the way, Plait makes sure to teach some good astronomy, explaining why you can't hear sounds in space, why stars twinkle but planets don't, and how we've used indirect evidence to create a persuasive explanation for how the universe began.  His lucid style is both informative and entertaining, and although you'll sometimes laugh at how goofy the human race can be, you'll come away impressed by how much we've figured out.

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

The cursed footballer

One of the hardest biases to overcome is dart-thrower's bias, which is the tendency to notice outliers and ignore all of the background noise.  The reason it's hard is because our brains are pattern-seeking devices; we evolved to notice what's odd, because the odd is often dangerous (or at least worth paying attention to).  But it leads to an inevitable tendency to overestimate the weird stuff -- strange coincidences, cases where dreams seem to be precognitive, times you and a friend said the same thing at the same time -- and underestimate all of the millions of times when those things didn't happen.

But in science, we have to keep track of both the hits and the misses.  As an example of what happens if you don't, let's look at the case of the cursed football player.

Aaron James Ramsey is a Welsh footballer (or soccer player, as we'd call him here in the States) who plays for Arsenal and also for the Welsh national team.  And a strange superstition has grown up around him -- that whenever he scores a goal, a famous person somewhere in the world dies.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jon Candy, Aaron Ramsey v Cardiff 2013, CC BY-SA 2.0]

August 2009, and three days after Ramsey scored a goal, Teddy Kennedy died.  May 2011, he scored the day before Osama bin Laden was killed.  It happened twice in October of that year -- first three days before Steve Jobs died, and second the day before Muammar Gaddafi was killed.

On and on it goes.  The "Ramsey curse" has been blamed for the deaths of basketball player Ray Williams, actors Paul Walker, Robin Williams, and Alan Rickman, and rock legend David Bowie.  The demise of Nancy Reagan, screenwriter Bruce Forsythe, comedian Ken Dodd, physicist Stephen Hawking, and champion darts player Eric Bristow were all blamed on the Ramsey curse phenomenon.

Okay, so here's the problem.

According to his online statistics, Ramsey has had 32 goals in his professional career, but the article about the "curse" (linked above) says that only sixteen of them were followed by deaths of prominent individuals.  So this is already giving the "curse" a 50% success rate.

But there are two other problems.  First is how we're defining the word "famous."  I don't know about you, but of the fourteen "famous people" I listed above that Ramsey has allegedly killed, I'd never heard of four of them -- Ray Williams, Forsythe, Dodd, and Bristow.  No offense to darts enthusiasts, but even a champion darts player isn't quite in the same league as David Bowie.  So if you're defining "famous" that loosely, you've got a big field to choose from.

Second, though -- can you find a date that didn't have a famous death somewhere immediately following it?  There are so many people in the news, in sports, and in entertainment that there are bound to be deaths pretty much every week (especially if you have that broad a definition of fame).  So in order to establish whether there really was a "Ramsey curse," we'd have to keep track of all of his goals and all deaths of famous people, and show that deaths were statistically more likely to happen closer to his scoring a goal.

As far as Ramsey goes, he (understandably) scoffs at the whole idea.  "The most ridiculous rumour I’ve heard is that people die after I score.  There have been loads of occasions where I’ve scored and nobody has died.  That’s just a crazy rumour.  I didn’t really find it funny.  Although I took out some baddies!"

So anyhow, Arsenal fans don't need to panic every time Ramsey scores a goal.  These kinds of coincidences are bound to happen -- and once someone notices them, they stand out, making them more likely to be noticed next time.

But if I'm wrong, I do wish he'd spared Stephen Hawking and Alan Rickman.  Still haven't gotten over those, actually.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an entertaining one -- Bad Astronomy by astronomer and blogger Phil Plait.  Covering everything from Moon landing "hoax" claims to astrology, Plait takes a look at how credulity and wishful thinking have given rise to loony ideas about the universe we live in, and how those ideas simply refuse to die.

Along the way, Plait makes sure to teach some good astronomy, explaining why you can't hear sounds in space, why stars twinkle but planets don't, and how we've used indirect evidence to create a persuasive explanation for how the universe began.  His lucid style is both informative and entertaining, and although you'll sometimes laugh at how goofy the human race can be, you'll come away impressed by how much we've figured out.

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

A consummation devoutly to be wished

Like a lot of people, I'm struggling right now against sleep loss because of the silly switch from Standard to Daylight Savings Time, a switch I've heard compared to "cutting the top off a blanket and sewing the piece on the bottom to make it longer."

Don't get me wrong, I like the fact that it's still light when I get home from work, but given how far north I live, that'd have happened eventually anyhow.  And seems to me that since a lot of people like having more daylight hours after work, it'd make sense just to keep it that way, and not to return to Standard Time in November, further fucking up everyone's biological clock.

I mean, I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.  I've been an insomniac since my teenager years.  I never have trouble falling asleep -- my problem is staying asleep.  I'll wake up at 1:30 in the morning with my thoughts galloping full tilt, or (more often) with a piece of some song running on a tape-loop through my head, like a couple of nights ago when my brain thought it'd be fun to sing the Wings song "Silly Love Songs" to me over and over.

I hated that song even before this, but now I really loathe it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Evgeniy Isaev from Moscow, Russia, Sleeping man. (7174597014), CC BY 2.0]

In any case, it was with great interest that I read some recent research from Bar-Ilan University (Israel) that has elucidated the purpose of sleep -- something that up till now has been something of a mystery.

In "Sleep Increases Chromosome Dynamics to Enable Reduction of Accumulating DNA Damage in Single Neurons," by David Zada, Tali Lerer-Goldshtein,  Irina Bronshtein, Yuval Garini, and Lior Appelbaum, which appeared last week in Nature, the authors write:

Sleep is essential to all animals with a nervous system.  Nevertheless, the core cellular function of sleep is unknown, and there is no conserved molecular marker to define sleep across phylogeny.  Time-lapse imaging of chromosomal markers in single cells of live zebrafish revealed that sleep increases chromosome dynamics in individual neurons but not in two other cell types.  Manipulation of sleep, chromosome dynamics, neuronal activity, and DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) showed that chromosome dynamics are low and the number of DSBs accumulates during wakefulness.  In turn, sleep increases chromosome dynamics, which are necessary to reduce the amount of DSBs.  These results establish chromosome dynamics as a potential marker to define single sleeping cells, and propose that the restorative function of sleep is nuclear maintenance.

"It's like potholes in the road," said study co-author Lior Appelbaum in an interview with Science Daily.  "Roads accumulate wear and tear, especially during daytime rush hours, and it is most convenient and efficient to fix them at night, when there is light traffic."

This repair function is critical for cellular and organismal health.  If mutations and chromosomal breaks aren't fixed, it can trigger the death of the cell -- which, in the case of neurons, can create havoc.  You have to wonder if some of the age-related degradation of memory, not to mention more acute cases of dementia, are correlated with a reduction in sleep-induced genetic repair.

"We've found a causal link between sleep, chromosome dynamics, neuronal activity, and DNA damage and repair with direct physiological relevance to the entire organism," Appelbaum said.  "Sleep gives an opportunity to reduce DNA damage accumulated in the brain during wakefulness...  Despite the risk of reduced awareness to the environment, animals -- ranging from jellyfish to zebrafish to humans -- have to sleep to allow their neurons to perform efficient DNA maintenance, and this is possibly the reason why sleep has evolved and is so conserved in the animal kingdom."

What it doesn't explain is why some of us have so damn much trouble actually doing what we're evolved to do.  Shutting my brain off so it can do some road maintenance is really appealing, but for some reason it just doesn't cooperate most nights.

Which explains why I'm so tired this morning.  But what's wrong with that, I'd like to know?  So here I go AGAAAIIIIINNNNN....

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an entertaining one -- Bad Astronomy by astronomer and blogger Phil Plait.  Covering everything from Moon landing "hoax" claims to astrology, Plait takes a look at how credulity and wishful thinking have given rise to loony ideas about the universe we live in, and how those ideas simply refuse to die.

Along the way, Plait makes sure to teach some good astronomy, explaining why you can't hear sounds in space, why stars twinkle but planets don't, and how we've used indirect evidence to create a persuasive explanation for how the universe began.  His lucid style is both informative and entertaining, and although you'll sometimes laugh at how goofy the human race can be, you'll come away impressed by how much we've figured out.

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

Confidence, impacts, and ice ages

One of the most common misunderstandings about science by laypeople centers around the concept of degree of confidence.

This misunderstanding can be summed up that "all unproven hypotheses are equally likely."  You hear it with lots of loopy ideas -- that (for example) because we don't have strong evidence one way or the other regarding the existence of an afterlife, it's on the same footing as other phenomena for which we have no direct evidence, such as dark matter, time travel, and the claim we've been visited by extraterrestrials.

Another way this shows up is the dismissive, "all of this could be proven wrong tomorrow" attitude toward science.  The fact that new discoveries have on occasion overturned what we thought we understood is taken as evidence that all of science is on thin ice, that it's all equally tentative.  But this rests on a serious misapprehension about the reliability of evidence.  It's true that, as Einstein allegedly put it, "one experiment could prove wrong" either the Second Law of Thermodynamics or our understanding of the mechanisms of quantum entanglement; but the first is extremely unlikely (the Second Law is one of the most extensively-tested scientific principles known, and there has never been a single exception found to it) while even the physicists would admit the second is a possibility (we're still elucidating the idea of quantum entanglement, and new and intriguing data is being added to our understanding on nearly a daily basis).

This frustrates people who like to have certainty, or at least like to be able to say with confidence that something isn't possible.  I ran into an especially good example of this just yesterday when I was reading an article about the Younger Dryas, a mysterious climatological reversal that occurred 12,900 years ago and lasted only 1,200 years -- a mere blip on the geological time scale.  What happened was that during a period when the Earth was warming, in only a few decades the average temperature of the Earth dropped by an average of four degrees Celsius, enough to put most of the Northern Hemisphere back in the deep freeze.  (The event is named after a plant, Dryas octopetala, which only grows in extremely cold places, and which became common across Europe and North America through the duration of the temperature drop.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Opioła jerzy, Dryas octopetala a4, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Of course, presented with such a conundrum, the first question that comes up is "Why did this happen?"  There are three main hypotheses:

• As the Earth was warming up after the last major glaciation, a huge freshwater lake that had piled up behind an ice dam was suddenly emptied when the dam collapsed.  This lake, nicknamed "Lake Agassiz," emptied out through what are now the St. Lawrence and Mackenzie Rivers, and caused a slowdown (or complete cessation) of the thermohaline circulation.  Put simply, this is the engine that powers the Gulf Stream, which brings warm water northward and keeps the northeastern United States and most of western Europe relatively temperate.  When the flood occurred, the north end of the thermohaline circulation became too fresh to sink, and the whole system ground to a halt, propelling us into another ice age.  It was only after a thousand years had passed, and the lake water had adequately mixed with the ocean water, that the circulation rebooted and things warmed back up.
• 12,900 years ago, the Earth was hit by an object from space -- probably either a comet or a meteorite -- and that collision flash-burned a significant fraction of the vegetation in northern North America.  The debris and ash blocked sunlight, cooling down the surface of the Earth and halting the warm-up we'd been experiencing in its tracks.  Eventually the ash settled out, the forests regrew, and the climate restabilized, but that took several centuries.
• A supernova in the constellation of Vela created a burst of radiation that destroyed the Earth's ozone layer and killed most of the Earth's megafauna, including mammoths, mastodons, dire wolves, and several species of temperate-climate camels, rhinos, and hippos.  The gamma radiation striking the atmosphere caused a cascade of chemical reactions that disrupted the balance of nitrogen-containing compounds (such as nitrous oxide and nitrogen dioxide), and this caused a sudden and drastic temperature drop.

Each has some points in its favor.  The ice-dam proponents argue that the temperature drop wasn't as fast as you'd expect from something catastrophic like a collision or supernova, and that in fact the extinctions that occurred were in species that had already been declining for millennia.  Scientists supporting the impact hypothesis were buoyed by the discovery of a previously-unknown crater in Greenland -- but they've been unable to pinpoint its age any more accurately than "some time between three million and twelve thousand years ago."  The supernova enthusiasts point to the existence of "black mats" -- thin layers of the remnants of anaerobic organisms -- as evidence that something drastic happened to the atmosphere at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, and samples taken from it do seem to have skewed nitrogen content.  (This same evidence is considered support for the impact hypothesis, because there have been "microspherules" -- tiny spheres of melted and refrozen metal -- found in some of those boundary layers.)  But the black mats in different locations seem to date from different time periods, with only three of the thirteen studied being coincident with the Younger Dryas event.  And most of the black mats studied don't contain microspherules.

So the argument is still out there.  As far as my own opinion, I can only say that I'm neither a paleoclimatologist nor an astrophysicist, so am unqualified to weigh in (and my opinion wouldn't mean much anyway).  It seems like the dam collapse model is the one that currently has the most support, but -- like all science -- new information could tilt us toward one of the others.

Why does this come up with regards to our confidence in scientific models?  Not only because it's a great example of competing explanations and the fact that good scientists are willing to entertain the possibility of alternate solutions to the conundrums they study.  The idea for this post came to me because of another twist on the Younger Dryas -- this one from noted wingnut Graham Hancock, who says that the Younger Dryas event not only inconvenienced the camels and dire wolves, it also wiped out an advanced technological civilization...

... which gave rise to the myth of Atlantis.

So this is what I mean about levels of confidence.  No, we haven't been able to rule out two of the three models for the cause of the Younger Dryas with any real certainty.  But the fourth idea -- that whatever caused the event also destroyed Atlantis -- has nothing, not a shred of evidence, to support it.  As the brilliant skeptic Jason Colavito put it:

[R]egardless of whether a comet hit, the existence (or non-existence) of the comet implies nothing about the existence of Atlantis any more than it would unicorns or leprechauns. 

It remains a point of astonishment that the bones of megafauna that supposedly died in the comet strike turn up with regularity, but every human being and all of the buildings, tools, and material possessions of the lost Atlantis-like civilization were blasted clean off the face of the Earth, without a single trace remaining.  I have trouble imagining that a sloth can manage to have its bones preserved for all time, but not a single outpost of Atlantis had even a single bolt or screw remain.

As do I.  All unproven assertions are not on an equal footing.  And that's really the point of Ockham's Razor, isn't it?  The fastest way to winnow down competing ideas is to see which ones require you to make the most ad hoc assumptions.  And I'd put any of the three scientific explanations I mentioned above ahead of Hancock's assertion that the Younger Dryas event destroyed the lost civilization of Atlantis.

I'm perfectly willing to stay in uncertainty, indefinitely if need be, in the absence of convincing evidence one way or the other.  But in the case of explanations that require us to stretch credulity to the snapping point, I have no problem saying, "Nope.  That one isn't true."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an entertaining one -- Bad Astronomy by astronomer and blogger Phil Plait.  Covering everything from Moon landing "hoax" claims to astrology, Plait takes a look at how credulity and wishful thinking have given rise to loony ideas about the universe we live in, and how those ideas simply refuse to die.

Along the way, Plait makes sure to teach some good astronomy, explaining why you can't hear sounds in space, why stars twinkle but planets don't, and how we've used indirect evidence to create a persuasive explanation for how the universe began.  His lucid style is both informative and entertaining, and although you'll sometimes laugh at how goofy the human race can be, you'll come away impressed by how much we've figured out.

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