Altering the message

It's always a little startling when something is discovered that ends up explaining... well, damn near everything.

If I exaggerate, it's not by much.  I'm referring to epigenetics, which is the modification of DNA or RNA by chemical changes that don't alter the gene sequence itself.  Usually this is accomplished by adding various "markers" to the strand that then change how it is expressed.  These alterations are at least sometimes inheritable; in 2008, a group of geneticists at Cold Spring Harbor came up with the definition of epigenetics as a "stably heritable phenotype resulting from changes in a chromosome without alterations in the DNA sequence," and that's pretty much the one that still is used today.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It has led to some pretty startling discoveries.  In a paper in Nature in 2014, geneticist Moshe Szyl showed evidence that mice that were taught (using mild electric shocks) to fear an odor gave birth to offspring that feared the odor as well -- and that heightened fear response lasted for two further generations.  Szyl found that a particular olfactory gene was "demethylated" by the conditioning -- had a marker called a methyl group removed -- and this enhanced the mice's ability to detect the odor, and modified their response to it.  This led to some serious speculation that the children and grandchildren of people who had been through atrocities like the Holocaust might inherit similar enhancements, leading to significant changes in behavior.

If you think this sounds Lamarckian, you're not wrong.  It turns out there is a way to inherit acquired characteristics.  It doesn't work the way Lamarck thought it did, but there was a grain of truth in what the man said.

This comes up because of a paper in Science this week describing evidence that epigenetic marking influences everything from embryonic development to cancer susceptibility to memory formation.  In fact, one such modification -- called m6a -- can do all three depending on which RNA strand it's acting on.  The last one is the most interesting to me; a team led by Chuan He of the University of Chicago found that if you knocked out an enzyme that reads m6a in mice, they have memory defects but are otherwise normal.  They then injected a virus carrying the normal reader gene into the mice -- and the defects went away.

This sounds to me like the basis of as much of a revolution as Mendel's discovery of the gene itself, and the discovery of DNA's structure and function by Rosalind Franklin, Marshall Nirenberg, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins.  The idea that a relatively small alteration to our DNA could create inheritable changes without altering the base sequence runs so contrary to both Mendelian inheritance and the "Central Dogma of Molecular Biology" that it looks like it'll force significant revisions to every bit of genetics we thought we understood.

My guess is that they're only beginning to test the depth of this discovery.  "We just need … a lot more knowledge about these things,” He said.  "We need to stay open-minded. The field is still very young."

So maybe I need to change my declaration in yesterday's post that "the twentieth century was [past tense] the century of the gene."  If my intuition is right, we might be on the brink of a whole new chapter -- hell, a whole new textbook -- in our understanding of how genes work.  All of which reiterates something I've believed for years -- that if you're interested in science, you'll never run out of new discoveries to be amazed at.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.

I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health.  And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture.  It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Uncanniness in the brain

When The Polar Express hit the theaters in 2004, it had a rather unexpected effect on some young movie-goers.

The train conductor, who (like several other characters) was voiced by Tom Hanks and was supposed to be viewed in a positive light, freaked a lot of kids right the hell out.  It was difficult for them to say exactly why.  He was "creepy" and "sinister" and "scary" -- even though nothing he explicitly did was any of those things.

The best guess we have about why people had this reaction is a phenomenon first described in the 1970s by Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori.  Called the uncanny valley, Mori's discovery came out of studies of people's responses to human-like robots (studies that were later repeated with CGI figures like the conductor in Express).  What Mori (and others) found was that faces intended to represent humans but in fact very dissimilar to an actual human face -- think, for example, of Dora the Explorer -- are perceived positively.  Take Dora's face and make it more human-like, and the positive response continues to rise -- for a while.  When you get close to a real human face, people's reactions take a sudden nosedive.  Eventually, of course, when you arrive at an actual face, it's again perceived positively.

That dip in the middle, with faces that are almost human but not quite human enough, is what Mori called "the uncanny valley."

The explanation many psychologists give is that a face being very human-like but having something non-human about the expression can be a sign of psychopathy -- the emotionless, "mask-like" demeanor of true psychopaths has been well documented.  (This probably also explains the antipathy many people have to clowns.)  In the case of the unfortunate train conductor, in 2004 CGI was well-enough developed to give him almost human facial features, expressions, and movements, but still just a half a bubble off from those of a real human face, and that was enough to land him squarely in the uncanny valley -- and to seriously freak out a lot of young movie-goers.

This all comes up because of a study that appeared this week in The Journal of Neuroscience, by Fabian Grabenhorst (Cambridge University) and Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten (University of Aachen), called "Neural Mechanisms for Accepting and Rejecting Artificial Social Partners in the Uncanny Valley."  And what the researchers have done is to identify the neural underpinning of our perception of the uncanny valley -- and to narrow it down to one spot in the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is part of our facial-recognition module.  Confronted with a face that shows something amiss, the VMPFC then triggers a reaction in the amygdala, the brain's center of fear, anxiety, perception of danger, and avoidance.

The authors write:

Using functional MRI, we investigated neural activity when subjects evaluated artificial agents and made decisions about them.  Across two experimental tasks, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) encoded an explicit representation of subjects' UV reactions.  Specifically, VMPFC signaled the subjective likability of artificial agents as a nonlinear function of human-likeness, with selective low likability for highly humanlike agents.  In exploratory across-subject analyses, these effects explained individual differences in psychophysical evaluations and preference choices...  A distinct amygdala signal predicted rejection of artificial agents.  Our data suggest that human reactions toward artificial agents are governed by a neural mechanism that generates a selective, nonlinear valuation in response to a specific feature combination (human-likeness in nonhuman agents).  Thus, a basic principle known from sensory coding—neural feature selectivity from linear-nonlinear transformation—may also underlie human responses to artificial social partners.

The coolest part of this is that what once was simply a qualitative observation of human behavior can now be shown to have an observable and quantifiable neurological cause.

"It is useful to understand where this repulsive effect may be generated and take into account that part of the future users might dislike very humanlike robots," said Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten, who co-authored the study, in an interview in Inverse.  "To me that underlines that there is no ‘one robot that fits all users’ because some users might actually like robots that give other people goosebumps or chills."

This puts me in mind of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation.  He never struck me as creepy -- although to be fair, he was being played by an actual human, so he could only go so far in appearing as an artificial life form using makeup and mannerisms.  It must be said that I did have a bit more of a shuddery reaction to Data's daughter Lal in the episode "The Offspring," probably because the actress who played her (Hallie Todd) was so insanely good at making her movements and expressions jerky and machine-like.  (I have to admit to bawling at the end of the episode, though.  You'd have to have a heart of stone not to.)

So we've taken a further step in elucidating the neurological basis of some of our most basic responses.  All of which goes back to what my friend Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, said to me years ago: "If I was going into science now, I would go into neurophysiology.  We're at the same point in our understanding of the brain now that we were in our understanding of the gene in 1910 -- we knew genes existed, we had some guesses about how they worked and their connection to macroscopic features, and that was about all.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.

I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health.  And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture.  It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Weirdness maps

Seems like everyone you meet has a tale of some weird experience or another.

Ghosts, cryptids, time slips, UFOs, precognitive dreams -- taken as a group, they're terribly common.  If you don't believe me, just ask your friends at work or school, "Who here has had an experience that you were completely unable to explain?"  I can pretty much guarantee you'll have five or six volunteers, who will then tell you their story in painstaking detail.

Well, some folks based in Seattle have decided to create a database of all of the bizarre accounts they can find, in an attempt to keep track of "weirdnesses — dreams, ‘coincidences’, strange encounters, etc. — on a personal level."  They go on to explain, "We’ve long wanted to do something that acts sort of like ‘Google Trends’ (which tracks sudden spikes on google search queries) for the collective unconscious.  This map is an extension of that, because we’re trying to see if there are strange places or experiences that are actually quite common but go unnoticed because everyone is afraid to talk about this weird stuff happening to them."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rolf Dietrich Brecher from Germany, Strange wheel (36242991846), CC BY-SA 2.0]

The project is called Liminal Earth, and is open to submissions from anyone.  They categorize the stories (and map pins) into some broad categories, as follows.  (And just to say up front: this is copied directly from their website, so the subcategories are not me being a smartass, which to be fair happens fairly often):

• Dark Forces: Lanyard Zombies, Drones, Corporate Death Zones, Cupcake Shops, Etc.
• Time Distortions: Travelers, Timehunters, “Déjà Vu”, “Losing Time,” Etc
• Mythologies: Pre-Shamanic Deer Cults, Radical Gnostic Animism, Etc.
• Cryptoids [sic]: Bigfoot, Lycanthropes, Trolls, Ogres, Etc.
• Thin Places: Ley Lines, Magic Fountains, Plant Sigils, Portals, Etc.
• Straight Up Ghosts: Creepy vibes, Poltergeists, EVPs, Stone Tape Theories, Class III Apparitions
• High Weirdness: Fortean Phenomena, Floating Toblerone, Things That Just Don’t Make Sense
• Classic UFO: Close Encounters, Sightings, etc.
• Strange Animals: Bearing Gifts, Unusual Encounters, Fecal Divination, etc.
• Visions: Dreams, Visions, Mystical Experiences, etc.

Okay, this brings up a few questions.

1. What is it with the lanyards?  The "about us" section talks about "lanyard'd ogres," so weird creatures with lanyards must be a thing.  Maybe the zombies with lanyards are reanimated dead coaches, or something, but I'm kind of at a loss as to why an ogre would need a lanyard.
2. What's a "Corporate Death Zone?"  I mean, it would make a fucking awesome name for a metal band, but other than that?  My personal opinion is that most corporate jobs would fall into the "shoot me now" category, but I suspect there's more to it than that.
3. Why is there a subcategory for "Floating Toblerone" and a second subcategory for "Things That Just Don't Make Sense?"  I would think the first would fall directly into the second.
4. I've heard a bit about "Stone Tape Theories," which is the idea that rocks pick up psychic traces of events that happen around them, which can then be played back in the fashion of a cassette tape, although considerably clumsier.  But since the majority of rocks have been around for millions of years, you'd think that most of what would be recorded would be kind of... pointless.  "It sure is boring, being a rock," is mostly what I'd think you'd hear, if you could figure out a way to play it back.
5. "Cupcake Shops?"
6. I was going to ask about "Fecal Divination," but then I decided that I didn't want to know.

I'm not sure what all of this is supposed to accomplish, because (as I've commented many times) the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data," but I suppose it's a start at least to attempt some kind of catalog of people's odd experiences.  The difficulty is twofold; first (as we've also seen many times) the human perceptual/interpretive apparatus is pretty inaccurate and easily fooled, and second, this sort of thing is just begging hoaxers to clog up the works with made-up stories.  (Although it must be said that I've never understood hoaxers.  I suppose the "five minutes of fame" thing probably explains some of them, but since growing out of a tall-tale-telling stage as a child, I've never understood the draw of inventing far-fetched stories and claiming they're true.)

Be that as it may, I invite you to submit your own experiences to Liminal Earth if you're so inclined.  I can't say I've ever had anything happen to me that seems inexplicable, so I don't honestly have anything to contribute myself.  Except maybe that my home village used to have a cupcake shop that was wonderful, and they suddenly went out of business.  And I would definitely like an explanation for that one, because those cupcakes were awesome.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.

I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health.  And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture.  It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Squatching down south

Lately there's been a surge of Bigfoot sightings in North Carolina.

These sorts of things are fuel to the cryptozoologists' fire.  Why else, they argue, would you see clusters of sightings, if it wasn't because the animals themselves were present in an area?  I'm inclined to suspect some sort of tame version of group hysteria -- when one person in your neighborhood claims that a large, hairy proto-hominid has been hanging around in their back yard, you're more likely to attribute anything weird -- noises at night, a dumped-over trash can, the silhouette of a black bear -- as falling into the "I saw it too!" department.

Be that as it may, I'm all about evidence, so let's see what we've got.

First, we have Vicky Cook of Shelby, North Carolina, near the city of Charlotte, who claims to have seen a Bigfoot in broad daylight.

Apparently, Cook has been trying to attract Bigfoot for quite some time, to the extent that she puts out bait for them.  "They love peanut brittle, chocolate, and peanut butter sandwiches," Cook says.

So far, her strategy hasn't turned up much but a grainy trail-cam photograph that could be damn near anything.  She has said, however, that the Bigfoots come through quite regularly.  "They just walk through leaving a big mess sometimes," Cook said.  "Broken trees scattered everywhere.  Footprints.  They come into my back yard at night as well.  But never bother anything."

I'm not sure how "broken trees scattered everywhere" jibes with "never bothering anything," but that's just me.

She also doesn't seem surprised that the photo isn't very good.  "If I was to get a clear shot of a Bigfoot standing in the open ... guess how that would go?" Cook says.

I'm not exactly sure what she's getting at.  I think it would go pretty well, myself.  I've often wondered, in these days where everyone has their phone at all times and they go around snapping photographs of everything, why all the Bigfoot pics look like they were taken using the camera's "AutoBlur" function.

Then, there, the report of a "large, bipedal animal covered with hair," from McDowell County, in the western part of North Carolina.  The sighting was from John Bruner, who (like Cook) has been looking for Bigfoot for quite some time.  He takes a different approach, however; instead of attracting them with food, he scatters glow sticks around.  This "piques the curiosity" of the Bigfoots, he says.

Well, he claims that it worked, because he was out hunting for his quarry at night and saw one of the glow sticks start to move.  He gave chase, and got close enough to see it -- it turned and looked at him, then took off too fast for him to follow.

"Its face was solid black, no hair on it," Bruner said.  "The hair looked shaggy all over.  I was able to see details of the creature … like the face, and the hair was matted and stringy.  The eyes were farther apart than human eyes."

Some sightings a couple of months ago in Davie County, however, turned out to cluster around one area for a reason.  Multiple people called in to the authorities to report a Bigfoot with glowing red eyes.  Some of the folks who phoned were hysterical with fear.  Thinking this was enough to warrant at least a cursory look, the Davie County Sheriff's Department sent in their Animal Control Unit, and found...

... this.

Turns out the property owner thought it'd be fun to put up a Bigfoot statue, given how many times he's allegedly been sighted prowling around the area (Bigfoot, not the owner), which of course resulted in more sightings.  This prompted the authorities to put out a request:

This handsome fellow stands on Pine Ridge Rd. in Mocksville.  If you are traveling this road at night, please be advised that the eyes appear to glow.  If you see this phenomenon, you do not need to call animal control to report seeing Bigfoot, Sasquatch or any other large creature.  Thank you. 

Any media outlets with questions about this matter, please contact animal control directly at (336)751-0227.  Do not tie up 911 lines.

So that explains those sightings, at least.

Anyhow, apparently North Carolina is zooming up in the ranks, coming in right after the Pacific Northwest/northern California sightings that got the whole thing going.  Who knew?  I guess the western part of North Carolina is pretty solid forested mountains, just like the Cascades and Olympics, so if the Big Guy likes that kind of terrain, it'd be understandable that he lives there.

The other spot that's been hopping lately, however, is Florida, which has the southern relative of Bigfoot, the "Skunk Ape."  Or maybe they're just elderly Bigfoots who decided to move to Florida when they retired.  They tend to hang out in the Everglades, which seems weird to me, because (as beautiful as the Everglades are) they are home to mosquitoes big enough to carry off your poodle.  If I was a Florida Bigfoot, I think I'd prefer a condo in Sarasota over mucking around in hip-deep mud, trying not to get exsanguinated by flocks of giant bloodsucking bugs, and avoiding cottonmouths and alligators.

But that's just me.

Anyhow, if any of my southeastern readers knows of other sightings, I'd love to hear about it.  And maybe now that I'm retired, I can go looking myself.  Perhaps I should head on down there in January, when up here, it's so cold that you can go out well-wrapped and still freeze off important body parts.  I'll make sure to bring along glow sticks and peanut brittle.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.

I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health.  And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture.  It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The biochemical symphony

Sometimes I run into a piece of scientific research that's so odd and charming that I just have to tell you about it.

Take, for example, the paper that appeared in ACS Nano this week, that ties together two of my favorite things -- biology and music.  It has the imposing title,  "A Self-Consistent Sonification Method to Translate Amino Acid Sequences into Musical Compositions and Application in Protein Design Using Artificial Intelligence," and was authored by Chi-Hua Yu, Zhao Qin, Francisco J. Martin-Martinez, and Markus J. Buehler, all of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Their research uses a fascinating lens to study protein structure: converting the amino acid sequence and structure of a protein into music, then having an AI software study the musical pattern that results as a way of learning more about how proteins function -- and how that function might be altered.

What's cool is that the musical note that represents each amino acid isn't randomly chosen.  It's based on the amino acid's actual quantum vibrational frequency.  So when you listen to it, you're not just hearing a whimsical combination of notes based on something from nature; you're actually hearing the protein itself.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Nevit Dilmen, Music 01754, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In an article about the research in MIT News, written by David L. Chandler, you can hear clips from the Yu et al. study.  I recommend the second one especially -- the one titled "An Orchestra of Amino Acids" -- which is a "sonification" of spider silk protein.  The strange, percussive rhythm is kind of mesmerizing, and if someone had told me that it was a composition by an avant-garde modern composer -- Philip Glass, perhaps, or Steve Reich -- I would have believed it without question.  But what's coolest about this is that the music actually means something beyond the sound.  The AI is now able to discern the difference between some basic protein structures, including two of the most common -- the alpha-helix (shaped like a spring) and the beta-pleated-sheet (shaped like the pleats on a kilt -- because they sound different.  This gives us a lens into protein  function that we didn't have before.  "[Proteins] have their own language, and we don’t know how it works," said Markus Buehler, who co-authored the study.  "We don’t know what makes a silk protein a silk protein or what patterns reflect the functions found in an enzyme.  We don’t know the code."

But this is exactly what the AI, and the scientists running it, hope to find out.  "When you look at a molecule in a textbook, it’s static," Buehler said.  "But it’s not static at all. It’s moving and vibrating. Every bit of matter is a set of vibrations.  And we can use this concept as a way of describing matter."

This new approach has impressed a lot of people not only for its potential applications, but from how amazingly creative it is.  This is why it drives me nuts when people say that science isn't a creative process.  They apparently have the impression that science is pure grunt work, inoculating petri dishes, looking at data from particle accelerators, analyzing rock layers.  But at its heart, the best science is about making connections between disparate ideas -- just like this research does -- and is as deeply creative as writing a symphony.

"Markus Buehler has been gifted with a most creative soul, and his explorations into the inner workings of biomolecules are advancing our understanding of the mechanical response of biological materials in a most significant manner," said Marc Meyers, professor of materials science at the University of California at San Diego, who was not involved in this work.  "The focusing of this imagination to music is a novel and intriguing direction.  his is experimental music at its best.  The rhythms of life, including the pulsations of our heart, were the initial sources of repetitive sounds that engendered the marvelous world of music.  Markus has descended into the nanospace to extract the rhythms of the amino acids, the building blocks of life."

What is most amazing about this is the potential for the AI, once trained, to go in reverse -- to be given an altered musical pattern, and to predict from that what the function of a protein engineered from that music would do.  Proteins are perhaps the most fundamental pieces of living things; the majority of genes do what they do by making proteins, which then guide processes within the organism (including frequently affecting other genes).  The idea that we could use music as a lens into how our biochemistry works is kind of stunning.

So that's your science-is-so-freaking-cool moment for the day.  I peruse the science news pretty much daily, looking for intriguing new research, but this one's gonna be hard to top.  Now I think I'm going to go back to the paper and click on the sound links -- and listen to the proteins sing.

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Richard Dawkins is a name that often sets people's teeth on edge.  However, the combative evolutionary biologist, whose no-holds-barred approach to young-Earth creationists has given him a well-deserved reputation for being unequivocally devoted to evidence-based science and an almost-as-well-deserved reputation for being hostile to religion in general, has written a number of books that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history of life on Earth -- The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable, and (most of all) The Ancestor's Tale.

I recently read a series of essays by Dawkins, collectively called A Devil's Chaplain, and it's well worth checking out, whatever you think of the author's forthrightness.  From the title, I expected a bunch of anti-religious screeds, and I was pleased to see that they were more about science and education, and written in Dawkins's signature lucid, readable style.  They're all good, but a few are sheer brilliance -- his piece, "The Joy of Living Dangerously," about the right way to approach teaching, should be required reading in every teacher-education program in the world, and "The Information Challenge" is an eloquent answer to one of the most persistent claims of creationists and intelligent-design advocates -- that there's no way to "generate new information" in a genome, and thus no way organisms can evolve from less complex forms.

It's an engaging read, and I recommend it even if you don't necessarily agree with Dawkins all the time.  He'll challenge your notions of how science works, and best of all -- he'll make you think.

[If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

Invitation to a haunting

If any loyal readers of Skeptophilia live in Texas -- or are willing to take a road trip -- there's an opportunity for you to do some empirical research and report on your findings here.

The destination is the town of Seguin, in Guadalupe County, in the central part of the state.  Seguin is the home to the Magnolia Hotel, which has been nicknamed "the most haunted spot in Texas."  Unfortunately for us paranormal-investigator types, the Magnolia has been closed for extensive repairs since 2013.  The building itself was built in 1840, and started out as a private home, but after renovation and expansion was turned into a hotel, in which capacity it continued until the mid-20th century.

Eventually, though, wear-and-tear and poor maintenance shut the place down, and it was on the docket to be demolished, but a wealthy family purchased the place and decided to restore it to its 19th-century glory.

This, apparently, did not sit well with the spirit world.

The Magnolia Hotel, Seguin, Texas

According to the reports, more than one contractor quit after "paranormal activity ramped up."  A psychic was called in, and she found that the place was rife with ghosts, including:

• the original owner, James Campbell, who makes rocking chairs rock back and forth and stinks the place up with his cigars
• a serial killer named Wilhelm Faust, and one of his victims, Emma Voelcker, whom he killed right there in the hotel
• a friendly woman named Idella Lampkins who sits next to people while they're sleeping and strokes their hair and tries to hug them
• two unidentified male ghosts who committed suicide in the hotel
• a weeping woman who evidently is still distraught because her sweetheart told her he was going to come for her and never showed up

In addition -- if that's not enough -- people have seen faces in mirrors, had doors slam suddenly, heard disembodied footsteps and voices, and seen furniture move on its own.

Enticed?  The hotel is reopening on August 12, and since there are only two guest rooms in the place, it's going to be hard to get on the reservation list if you don't act quickly.

Living in upstate New York, Texas is a bit of a hike for me, but if there are any readers in central Texas who would like to do a little first-hand research, I encourage you to book a night or two.  Bring along a camera, not to mention any other ghost-hunting equipment you may see fit to take with you.  (In fact, there are bunches of apps you can get for cellphones and iPads for detecting electromagnetic field fluctuations, which are supposedly a sign that a ghost is near, or possibly the air conditioner just turned on.)

Let me know if you found anything (or even if you didn't), and in fact, if you're so inclined, you could even write a guest post about your experience here at Skeptophilia.  Yeah, I know the plural of
"anecdote" isn't "data," but I'd still love to hear about anything you might have witnessed.  And if lonely Idella strokes your hair during the night, please accept my apologies, because that's some creepy shit right there.

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Richard Dawkins is a name that often sets people's teeth on edge.  However, the combative evolutionary biologist, whose no-holds-barred approach to young-Earth creationists has given him a well-deserved reputation for being unequivocally devoted to evidence-based science and an almost-as-well-deserved reputation for being hostile to religion in general, has written a number of books that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history of life on Earth -- The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable, and (most of all) The Ancestor's Tale.

I recently read a series of essays by Dawkins, collectively called A Devil's Chaplain, and it's well worth checking out, whatever you think of the author's forthrightness.  From the title, I expected a bunch of anti-religious screeds, and I was pleased to see that they were more about science and education, and written in Dawkins's signature lucid, readable style.  They're all good, but a few are sheer brilliance -- his piece, "The Joy of Living Dangerously," about the right way to approach teaching, should be required reading in every teacher-education program in the world, and "The Information Challenge" is an eloquent answer to one of the most persistent claims of creationists and intelligent-design advocates -- that there's no way to "generate new information" in a genome, and thus no way organisms can evolve from less complex forms.

It's an engaging read, and I recommend it even if you don't necessarily agree with Dawkins all the time.  He'll challenge your notions of how science works, and best of all -- he'll make you think.

[If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

An inoculation against nonsense

In my Critical Thinking classes, I always included an assignment that was a contest to see who could create the most convincing fake photo or video clip of a ghost, Bigfoot, UFO, or some other paranormal phenomenon.  The students loved it, but I had a very definite reason for assigning it; to show them how easy it is to do digital manipulation.  And some of the results were seriously creepy -- a few were so completely convincing that if I hadn't known better (and hadn't been a skeptic about such matters anyhow) I can easily see myself believing they were real.

My hope was that if they saw that high school students can generate plausible fakes, they should be on guard about believing photographic "evidence" they see online and in the news.  In fact, to mislead people you don't even have to manipulate photos, all you have to do is mislabel them -- look at the Oregon GOP's official site labeling a photograph of a protest by loggers as being a group of armed "militia" who were threatening the Democrats who had insisted that Republican congresspeople come back and vote on climate change legislation rather than skipping town so the measure would fail because of not reaching a quorum.

The result, of course, was like throwing gasoline on a fire -- which is almost certainly what the GOP wanted.

The ghost photo assignment, though, shows that you can inoculate people against being fooled by (oh, how I hate this phrase) "fake news."  And my anecdotal evidence of the success of such a strategy got a boost in a piece of research out of the University of Cambridge that appeared this week in Palgrave Communications, called "Fake News Game Confers Psychological Resistance Against Online Misinformation," by Jon Roozenbeek and Sander van der Linden.  In their study, they gave volunteers a game called "Bad News" to play, which challenges them to create the most convincing fake news article they can.  Players get points for how many people in the game are convinced, and lose "credibility points" if their stories get rejected.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons GDJ, FAKE NEWS, CC0 1.0]

What the researchers found was remarkable.  People who played the game showed a 21% decrease in their confidence levels toward fake news -- but no such drop in their belief in real news.  So it didn't turn them into cynics, thinking that everything they see is false, it simply made them aware of what kinds of features are woven into fake news to make it more attractive.

"Research suggests that fake news spreads faster and deeper than the truth, so combating disinformation after-the-fact can be like fighting a losing battle," said Sander van der Linden, Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab and co-author of the study.  "We wanted to see if we could pre-emptively debunk, or ‘pre-bunk’, fake news by exposing people to a weak dose of the methods used to create and spread disinformation, so they have a better understanding of how they might be deceived.  This is a version of what psychologists call ‘inoculation theory’, with our game working like a psychological vaccination...  We find that just fifteen minutes of gameplay has a moderate effect, but a practically meaningful one when scaled across thousands of people worldwide, if we think in terms of building societal resistance to fake news."

"We are shifting the target from ideas to tactics," added co-author Jon Roozenbeek.  "By doing this, we are hoping to create what you might call a general ‘vaccine’ against fake news, rather than trying to counter each specific conspiracy or falsehood."

All of which is a cheering thought.  There's always the problem, when you teach people critical thinking skills, for them to slide from gullibility to cynicism, and not see that disbelieving everything out of hand is as lazy (and inaccurate) as believing everything out of hand.  What we have here is a strategy for giving people immunity to pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, which in today's world we sorely need.

Of course, there'll always be the ones who resist what you're trying to teach them -- the anti-vaxxers of critical thinking, so to speak.  But with luck, techniques like this might reduce their numbers to manageable proportions, and increase the likelihood of herd immunity for the rest of us.

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Richard Dawkins is a name that often sets people's teeth on edge.  However, the combative evolutionary biologist, whose no-holds-barred approach to young-Earth creationists has given him a well-deserved reputation for being unequivocally devoted to evidence-based science and an almost-as-well-deserved reputation for being hostile to religion in general, has written a number of books that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history of life on Earth -- The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable, and (most of all) The Ancestor's Tale.

I recently read a series of essays by Dawkins, collectively called A Devil's Chaplain, and it's well worth checking out, whatever you think of the author's forthrightness.  From the title, I expected a bunch of anti-religious screeds, and I was pleased to see that they were more about science and education, and written in Dawkins's signature lucid, readable style.  They're all good, but a few are sheer brilliance -- his piece, "The Joy of Living Dangerously," about the right way to approach teaching, should be required reading in every teacher-education program in the world, and "The Information Challenge" is an eloquent answer to one of the most persistent claims of creationists and intelligent-design advocates -- that there's no way to "generate new information" in a genome, and thus no way organisms can evolve from less complex forms.

It's an engaging read, and I recommend it even if you don't necessarily agree with Dawkins all the time.  He'll challenge your notions of how science works, and best of all -- he'll make you think.

[If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]