Messages in our genes

Yesterday a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a bizarre claim from a couple of scientists in Kazakhstan tying together two of my favorite subjects: genetics and linguistics.

It's also a good opportunity to apply Betteridge's Law, which says that any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered "no."  The link was to a story in Ancient Origins entitled, "Are Alien Messages Encoded in our DNA?"  ("No.")

The gist of the claim is that the Earth was seeded early in its history by aliens, and that all terrestrial organisms have DNA sequences that encode messages from these aliens.  My first thought was that the scientists had mistaken the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase" for a non-fiction documentary.

But apparently this isn't the case.  The scientists, Vladimir Sherbak and Maxim Makukov, claim that they've discovered a numerical pattern in DNA that is non-random (and presumably independent of the patterns dictated by its genetic information).  "Once fixed, the code [in our DNA] might stay unchanged over cosmological timescales," Makukov said. "Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature...  Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language.  Furthermore, it includes the use of decimal notation and logical transformations that are accurate and systematic."

Okay, I have a variety of problems with this.

First, the genetic problem.  There is no DNA sequence that stays "unchanged over cosmological timescales," with the exception of the very few sequences that are so strongly selected for that any mutation in them would kill the organism.  (An example is the gene for cytochrome c, which is nearly identical in every aerobic organism studied.)  Other sequences accrue mutations at a fairly steady rate, which is why (other than the noted exceptions) your DNA is different from that of a pine tree.  So if the aliens had dumped some meaningful sequence of nitrogenous bases into the primordial soup, the likelihood of the sequence surviving three billion years of random mutations is effectively zero.

Second, though, there's the linguistic problem, which boils down to "you can find a pattern in any string of symbols if there are no rules by which you analyze it, and the pattern could be anything."  I wrote about this all the way back in 2012, when a guy named Michael Drosnin claimed that if you mess around with the Hebrew text for the five books of the Torah, you can find passages that predict everything from the Holocaust to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.  Drosnin's method was completely bass-ackwards; he didn't have any particular message he was looking for, and used an algorithm that looked at every possible sequence of symbols (every other letter, every third letter, every fourth, etc.) until he found something that seemed meaningful.

Then mathematician Brendan McKay showed that he could do exactly the same thing with the novel Moby Dick.  And I don't think Drosnin, or anyone else, thinks that Moby Dick was divinely inspired.

So for a variety of reasons, the claim by Sherbak and Makukov doesn't really hold water.  Our DNA does contain an important message -- the instructions for building every protein we make -- but that doesn't mean that it was put there by aliens, nor that there's any other message there waiting to be found.  As always, I'm fascinated enough with the science; I don't need any pseudoscientific gobbledygook to add seasoning to the mix.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is sheer brilliance -- Jenny Lawson's autobiographical Let's Pretend This Never Happened.  It's an account of her struggles with depression and anxiety, and far from being a downer, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.  Lawson -- best known from her brilliant blog The Blogess -- has a brutally honest, rather frenetic style of writing, and her book is sometimes poignant and often hilarious.  She draws a clear picture of what it's like to live with crippling social anxiety, an illness that has landed Lawson (as a professional author) in some pretty awkward situations.  She looks at her own difficulties (and those of her long-suffering husband) through the lens of humor, and you'll come away with a better understanding of those of us who deal day-to-day with mental illness, and also with a bellyache from laughing.

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

Nice rice

It's important to keep your brain connected when you read articles in popular media that start with the line, "Scientists Have Just Discovered That..."

Between the lure of advertiser revenue from clickbait and the simple fact that a lot of laypeople can't tell peer-reviewed science from loony claims, it's easy to get fooled.  I saw a pretty egregious example of that a couple of days ago, in an article that claimed that scientists have shown that "intentionality" changes the spoil rate of cooked rice.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

No, I'm not making this up.  I found the original research -- if I can dignify it by that name -- in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which a little bit of digging suggests a specialty in fringe-y, and sometimes cringe-y, claims.  The paper is entitled "Human Mental Intentionality on the Aesthetics of Cooked Rice and Escherichia coli Growth," by Alan W. L. Lai, Bonny B. H. Yuen, and Richard Burchett, of Beijing Normal University, Hong Kong Baptist University, and the United International College of Guangdong Province (China), respectively.

The gist of the experiment was that they had a group of people think happy thoughts at a bowl of cooked rice, a second thought think negative thoughts, and a third group think neutral thoughts, then had people evaluate the bowls of rice for their "aesthetics," and also measured the amount of E. coli growth in each bowl.  Now for myself, the amount of E. coli I want in my bowl of rice is zero, but apparently that's not a likely outcome.  The authors write:

This study examines the “intentionality hypothesis”—i.e. subjects’ ability to mentally infl uence microbial growth in samples of cooked rice.  Over a 30-day period (under triple-blind conditions), subjects focused their positive and negative thoughts (‘mental intentionality’) toward three randomly formed groups of cooked rice samples (positive intentionality, negative intentionality, and a control group).  After 30 days, pictures were taken of the nine rice samples (three groups, each group was conducted in triplicate), which were then judged for visual aesthetic value.  Findings show aesthetic ratings of ‘positive’ rice samples to be significantly higher than those for ‘negative’ and ‘control’ ones (p ≤ 0.05), with no significant difference between negative and control sample ratings (p ≥ 0.05).  A further test entailed a 7-day study measuring an Escherichia coli strain (a type of coliform that is closely associated with food safety, whose presence often indicates food poisoning and spoilage) in vitro under the same conditions of stimuli as the rice samples.  Results show positive intention to be associated with lower E. coli division rate when compared with the “control” and “negative intention” groups, thereby further supporting the hypothesis, as well as suggesting an emerging inference, that intentionality might be associated with microbial growth and visual aesthetic ratings.

We're told that the negative thoughts included reprimands, which brings up the question of how you could effectively reprimand rice.  "No no!  Bad rice!" doesn't seem particularly appropriate, given that it's the sort of thing you say to dogs when they do something they're not supposed to, such as swiping an entire wedge of expensive brie from the kitchen counter, and eating the whole thing including the plastic wrapper.  (Yes, that's the voice of experience, right there.)  But with rice, I'm not sure how this would work.  What exactly did you expect the rice to be doing?  More specifically, what was it doing that deserved a reprimand?  I've observed cooked rice carefully, and mostly what it does is sit there.  Almost anything else it might do would be a significant shock, and the first thing I'd think of doing is yelling "What the fuck?" and jumping up out of my chair, not saying "Bad rice!" in a disapproving tone.

Anyhow, the results seem to me to be pretty nebulous.  The aesthetic score ranges from zero to four, and the positive-thought rice had an average score of 1.5 ± 0.3, the negative-thought rice 1.0 ± 0.2, and the control rice 0.9 ± 0.2.  So not only were the scores pretty broad-brush (0-4 seems like a kind of coarse-grained scale), they were all relatively close, especially the negative and the control groups.  The E. coli measurements are equally suspect; here the positive and negative groups were fairly close together, and the control group significantly lower than either one.  (If you want to see the graphed data, I direct you to the paper I have linked above.)

So it seems to me that if either experiment suggests anything, it's that rice doesn't like people staring at it meaningfully, regardless of what they're thinking.

Another red flag in this paper is their referencing the completely discredited "research" by Masaru Emoto, a Japanese scientist who made the claim that if you think negative thoughts at water while it's freezing, it forms ugly crystals.  No, I'm not making this up either, and despite the fact that it has never been successfully replicated, it continues to resurface every time someone claims to have discovered the Magical Quantum Frequency of Love.

Like Emoto's Happy Ice experiment, I'm not buying the Nice Rice results until they are replicated, under controlled conditions, by scientists who don't have a dog in the race.  Note that I'm not accusing Lai et al. of falsifying results, I'm just suspicious enough about their methodology -- not to mention the complete lack of a mechanism by which any of this could work -- that until someone can duplicate their results and show a statistically significant difference in a variable that is rigorously quantifiable, I'm in the dubious column.

So if you're mad at your bowl of rice, my feeling is you should not hesitate to berate it mercilessly.  It will not become bacteria-laden and unattractive thereby.  On the other hand, if you are someone who gets angry at your food, you might want to seek out a good counselor who can help you to focus your ire on more deserving targets, such as people who make specious claims, and the irresponsible media outlets that disseminates them.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is sheer brilliance -- Jenny Lawson's autobiographical Let's Pretend This Never Happened.  It's an account of her struggles with depression and anxiety, and far from being a downer, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.  Lawson -- best known from her brilliant blog The Blogess -- has a brutally honest, rather frenetic style of writing, and her book is sometimes poignant and often hilarious.  She draws a clear picture of what it's like to live with crippling social anxiety, an illness that has landed Lawson (as a professional author) in some pretty awkward situations.  She looks at her own difficulties (and those of her long-suffering husband) through the lens of humor, and you'll come away with a better understanding of those of us who deal day-to-day with mental illness, and also with a bellyache from laughing.

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

The most haunted spot in Arkansas

I'm back from the annual Oghma Creative Media writers' retreat, after ten days of schmoozing with other authors and enjoying the lovely hills and valleys of the Ozark Mountains in northwestern Arkansas.  During my stay there, the CEO of Oghma (and my dear friend) Casey Cowan took me around to some of the local attractions, and because of my interest in all things paranormal one of these was the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs.  [Note: all photographs taken by me except as noted.]

Gordon Bonnet, Paranormal Investigator.  [Photograph by Casey Cowan, used with permission]

Eureka Springs is a charming little town, with steep, narrow, twisty streets, beautifully-maintained old houses, and flower-filled gardens.  The crown jewel, though, is the Crescent, which sits on a high point overlooking the deep forested valleys north of the town.  It was built in the 1880s for the then-astronomical cost of $294,000, and it became renowned for its opulence and grandeur.

The hotel, however, fell upon hard times once visitors realized that the "healing waters" that put Eureka Springs on the map in the first place were actually just plain water, and in 1908 the Crescent became the Crescent College and Conservatory for Young Women.  Even the college didn't do well, however, especially after a series of tragedies (one of which is the subject of the haunting novel by J. C. Crumpton, Silence in the Garden) that culminated in the building's abandonment in 1934.

One of the hallways on the second floor.  Is it just me, or are there two spots on the floor that look like eyes?

In 1937 it was purchased by one Norman Baker, who revitalized the claim of the alleged healing properties of the water in the area, and in the process defrauded cancer patients of an estimated four million dollars -- which led to his being sent to Leavenworth Prison, and the Crescent was again abandoned.

Looking down the staircase from the fourth floor.  Kind of Escherian, isn't it?

Repeated (failed) attempts to renovate the place were foiled by running out of funds and (worst of all) a massive fire in 1957, but in 1997 the building was purchased by a couple named Marty and Elise Roenigk, who promised to restore the Crescent to its original grandeur.  And they have.  It's an impressive place, and when you're there you feel like you've stepped back in time a hundred years or more.

The central fireplace on the first floor

Of course, my primary interest was not the admittedly beautiful furnishings and architecture, but the Crescent's reputation for being haunted.  It has quite a retinue of ghosts -- an Irish stonemason who supposedly died in a fall from the building's roof while it was being constructed, a nurse from its days as a fraudulent cancer hospital, and a girl who committed suicide during the 1920s (the latter is the subject of Crumpton's novel).  In addition, there are various apparitions seen on the third floor, which was the location of "Doctor" Baker's morgue and autopsy room.  The hotel's phone system was handled for a time using the original antique switchboard, but that was discontinued when the switchboard operators reported getting calls from the basement -- which at the time was completely empty.

A staircase where people report seeing the ghost of a little girl.  [Note: the figure looming behind me in the reflection is not a ghost, but my friend Casey.  So no luck there.]

Then there's the Victorian gentleman who is often seen in the bar, sitting quietly in a tophat and formal dress, who doesn't answer if you address him; the dignified lady reported from room 419 who will introduce herself as "Theodora, a cancer patient," if you ask her, but then vanish immediately afterward; a small boy who haunts the kitchen; and the appearance of dozens of ghostly dancers in the ballroom who disappear as soon as you turn on the lights.

Sad to say, I didn't see any of 'em.  We did, however, pass two women in 1920s garb sitting on a bench, and after I passed them I whispered to Casey, "You did see those women, right?"  He assured me he had, and explained that they were leading a tour for the hotel, thus missing a valuable opportunity to scare the absolute shit out of me.

On the other hand, Casey's wife Amy, and our friend Venessa Cerasale (who is also Oghma's ultra-competent Chief Operations Officer), both report having had creepy experiences in the Crescent, and both of them are about as level-headed and pragmatic as you could hope for.  So I don't know if it was my aura of disbelief that kept the spirits at bay, or if they were just taking a break for the evening.

I do want to go back, however, and maybe even spend a night or two there.  For one thing, Eureka Springs is a cool town and deserves way more exploration than we had time for.  Plus, I don't think an hour of wandering the grounds is really offering the ghosts their best shot at me.  So I'm sure I'll be back for another visit to "the most haunted spot in Arkansas" -- and maybe have more success in rousing the Crescent's deceased residents next time.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is sheer brilliance -- Jenny Lawson's autobiographical Let's Pretend This Never Happened.  It's an account of her struggles with depression and anxiety, and far from being a downer, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.  Lawson -- best known from her brilliant blog The Blogess -- has a brutally honest, rather frenetic style of writing, and her book is sometimes poignant and often hilarious.  She draws a clear picture of what it's like to live with crippling social anxiety, an illness that has landed Lawson (as a professional author) in some pretty awkward situations.  She looks at her own difficulties (and those of her long-suffering husband) through the lens of humor, and you'll come away with a better understanding of those of us who deal day-to-day with mental illness, and also with a bellyache from laughing.

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

A bone to pick

Dear Skeptophiles,

This is just to let you know that I'll be going on a wee hiatus to attend the annual Writers' Retreat held by my publisher, Oghma Creative Media, in the lovely Ozark Mountains.  So I'll be away for two weeks, and will be back in the saddle on Monday, August 12.  Please keep sending me ideas and links, making comments on posts, and so on -- I always love hearing from my readers.

Until then, hoist high the banner of skepticism!

cheers,

Gordon

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

The lovely thing about science is that you never have a reason to stop learning.

I just retired after teaching biology for 32 years, and the area of biology I studied the most (and enjoyed teaching the most) was evolution and phylogeny.  I'm not a researcher, and nowhere near a specialist (I've been called a "dabbler" and a "dilettante," and I don't think they were meant as compliments), but I think that about those topics I'm at least Better Than the Average Bear.

So I was a little surprised yesterday to run into a group of ancient mammals I had honestly never heard of.  They're called docodonts, and technically I misspeak by calling them "mammals;" they're mammaliforms, which sounds like a species of alien on Doctor Who but isn't.  The docodonts and other mammaliforms are cousins of modern mammals, seem to have left no living descendants, and are more like mammals than they are like any other extant group.  Take, for example, this docodont, Castorocauda (the name means "beaver-tail"):

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com), Castorocauda BW, CC BY 3.0]

Of course, like the proto-bird-with-teeth we met earlier this week, the reconstruction is done to accentuate mammal-like characteristics; there's no guarantee that the sleek-pelted otterish look is accurate.

The reason this comes up is the discovery of a mid-Jurassic docodont whose skeleton shows some remarkably mammal-like features.  This little guy, called Microdocodon (evidently named by someone who believes in keeping things simple and obvious) was around 165 million years ago, which (for reference) is a good hundred million years before the non-avian dinosaurs became history.

Well, prehistory.

What's interesting about Microdocodon is that it had a mammalian hyoid bone -- unique in our skeleton as the only bone that does not articulate with another bone.  It's a horseshoe-shaped bone that connects to the tongue, epiglottis, larynx, and muscles that support the neck, and gives us our ability to chew, swallow, keep an open airway while we're asleep -- and talk.

In non-human mammals, it's all about the first three, and it's thought that the evolution of the hyoid bone was instrumental in improving the range of food mammals could eat, since the ability to chew meant they weren't confined to swallowing big chunks of food at once.

"It is a pristine, beautiful fossil. I was amazed by the exquisite preservation of this tiny fossil at the first sight," said Zhe-Xi Luo, a professor of biology at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study, which appeared in Science last week.  "We got a sense that it was unusual, but we were puzzled about what was unusual about it  After taking detailed photographs and examining the fossil under a microscope, it dawned on us that this Jurassic animal has tiny hyoid bones much like those of modern mammals...  Now we are able for the first time to address how the crucial function for swallowing evolved among early mammals from the fossil record.  The tiny hyoids of Microdocodon are a big milestone for interpreting the evolution of mammalian feeding function."

The most amazing thing about all this is that Microdocodon catches evolutionary remodeling of a pre-existing skeleton right in midstream.  "Hyoids and ear bones are all derivatives of the primordial vertebrate mouth and gill skeleton, with which our earliest fishlike ancestors fed and respired," said Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, postdoctoral scholar at Yale University and co-author of the paper.  "The jointed, mobile hyoid of Microdocodon coexists with an archaic middle ear -- still attached to the lower jaw.  Therefore, the building of the modern mammal entailed serial repurposing of a truly ancient system."

So that's our lens into the past for today, and a look at a group of mammal relatives that until I read this paper, I didn't even know existed.  All of this making me question how anyone can think science is boring.  If after studying and/or teaching science over the past forty years I can still find something new and astonishing, you have to appreciate science's capacity for inducing awe -- and wonder what new discoveries lie ahead.

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

The subject of Monday's blog post gave me the idea that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation should be a classic -- Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  This book, written back in 1949, is an analysis of the history and biology of the human/canine relationship, and is a must-read for anyone who owns, or has ever owned, a doggy companion.

Given that it's seventy years old, some of the factual information in Man Meets Dog has been superseded by new research -- especially about the genetic relationships between various dog breeds, and between domestic dogs and other canid species in the wild.  But his behavioral analysis is impeccable, and is written in his typical lucid, humorous style, with plenty of anecdotes that other dog lovers will no doubt relate to.  It's a delightful read!

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

Return to Boleskine

There are few figures in the history of magical thinking more famous, or more polarizing, than Aleister Crowley.

He was a member -- eventually a leader -- of esoteric societies like the Order of the Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis, and eventually founded one of his own.  After all, once you're a member of an esoteric society, you generally find it's not so esoteric after all, and either have to find one even more esoteric or else make one up.

Some time around 1900 Crowley took the latter option, and named his society Thelema, the Greek word for "will" -- as the whole idea of the thing was "do what you will," especially in matters of sex, which fit beautifully with Crowley's apparent obsession with fucking anyone of either gender who would hold still long enough.

Thelema as an abbey (located in Cefalú, on the island of Sicily) was abandoned in 1923 after Mussolini decided that Crowley wasn't exactly the sort of person he wanted in Italy, and had him and his followers deported en masse.  Today it's more or less a ruin, but still a mecca for practitioners of magick and such stuff.  Crowley had a way of leaving behind these kind of sites, and in fact one of them is the reason this whole topic comes up today -- because one of Crowley's centers of operation, Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness, Scotland, recently sold after years of standing empty and decrepit for the tidy sum of £500,000 to "three unnamed investors."  The owners, who call themselves the "Boleskine Foundation," are now apparently in negotiation with the Ordo Templi Orientis (yes, it still exists) to bring back Crowley's practices to Boleskine and turn it into a "sex magick retreat."

Boleskine in 1912, right before Crowley sold it [Image is in the Public Domain]

Apparently the house has a bit of a reputation even outside of Crowley's antics.  All the way back in the seventeenth century, there supposedly was a "devious local wizard" who kept reanimating corpses, and the minister of the church that stood on Boleskine's grounds spent most of his time trying to rebury them and get them to stay there.  The church itself burned to the ground, allegedly along with the entire congregation, in the early eighteenth century, and the first bit of Boleskine House itself was built in the middle of that century -- right over top of the graves that the minister had such a tough time keeping intact.  (You can see why someone as conscious of ambience as Crowley was would be attracted to the place.)

So Crowley bought Boleskine, and true to his self-styled title of the "Wickedest Man in the World," engaged in all sorts of depravity and hijinks with his friends for nearly fifteen years.  When Crowley sold the place in 1913, it went through a number of different owners, none of whom stayed there for long.  One supposedly killed himself by blowing his own head off with a shotgun.  It was owned for a time by Jimmy Page, guitarist for Led Zeppelin, although Page apparently wasn't there all that often.  His caretaker Malcolm Dent, however, said the place was haunted.  "One evening," he said, "a small porcelain figure of the Devil rose off the mantelpiece to the ceiling, then smashed into smithereens in the fireplace."  He also said he'd been awakened more than once by the sound of "a huge beast, snorting, snuffling and banging.  Whatever was there, I have no doubt it was pure evil."

To be fair, though, the owners who bought it from Page, the MacGillivray family, scoffed at the whole thing and said their time in Boleskine House was wonderful, and free from any paranormal fooling about.  So maybe the ghosts only appear to people who already believe in them.

Pretty convenient, that.

In any case, the current owners are planning on renovating and reopening the place, and dedicating it to its previous use as a site for practicing the magickal arts.  Their public statement says that they will "promote events and activities that facilitate health and wellness such as meditation and yoga as well as education on Thelema, the spiritual legacy forwarded by previous Boleskine House owner, Aleister Crowley."

No word yet on any kinky sex stuff, although one would have to expect that's to be a part of it if they're striving for historical accuracy.  I'll keep you posted.

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

The subject of Monday's blog post gave me the idea that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation should be a classic -- Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  This book, written back in 1949, is an analysis of the history and biology of the human/canine relationship, and is a must-read for anyone who owns, or has ever owned, a doggy companion.

Given that it's seventy years old, some of the factual information in Man Meets Dog has been superseded by new research -- especially about the genetic relationships between various dog breeds, and between domestic dogs and other canid species in the wild.  But his behavioral analysis is impeccable, and is written in his typical lucid, humorous style, with plenty of anecdotes that other dog lovers will no doubt relate to.  It's a delightful read!

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

Hyena-pigs and fish with lungs

Today we're going to look at two new bits of research from the field of paleontology that highlight how evolution can produce some really bizarre critters.

First, we have a discovery in Oregon of a fossil mesonychid.  The mesonychids were some of the first big mammalian predators, originating in the Paleocene Epoch (right after the K-T Extinction), reaching a peak in the Eocene, and finally going extinct in the early Oligocene, giving them a not-inconsequential run of 33 million years.  These things were seriously scary-looking.  Consider, for example, Mesonyx, which is the "type-species" that gives the entire group its name:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I haven't told you the weirdest thing about the mesonychids, though -- which is that their nearest living relatives appear to be whales.  Perhaps not so strange, though, when you see a reconstruction of Ambulocetus, one of the ancestors of today's cetaceans:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com), Ambulocetus BW, CC BY 3.0]

Then again, the closest extant relatives of whales are the artiodactyla -- including pigs, deer, and hippos -- so it's not surprising that species can show some unexpected affinities.

Anyhow, this comes up because of a discovery in the John Day Fossil Beds in Oregon of a mesonychid that had never been found in the northwestern United States before.  Called Harpagolestes uintensis, it was the size of a bear, but had proto-hooves, not to mention big, nasty, pointy teeth.  "It kind of looked a little piggy,” said Nick Famoso, chief of paleontology and museum curator at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.  "It has a pig-like skull and jaw, it had hooves.  But it was definitely out there eating meat and bone...  Imagine a hyena, crossed with a pig.  And that’s kind of what this animal would have looked like."

So thanks for an image that will haunt my nightmares.

Then there's the discovery that is the subject of a paper in last month's Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, by Maureen O'Leary et al., that describes some new discoveries in sedimentary deposits in Mali.  Back in the Cretaceous Period, Mali was mostly underwater -- there was a (relatively) shallow seaway connecting what is now the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, right across north Africa.  The fossil beds from these strata have proven to be extremely rich and diverse, but getting to them (and then back home safely) is no mean feat given the unrest, terrorism, and general lawlessness prevalent in that part of the world.

But O'Leary and her team have brought back a picture of a world where what is now the Sahara Desert was a salt-water channel bordered by lush mangrove swamps, and probably looked more like Central America than Libya.  The last expedition to Mali -- and the subject of the paper -- describes the discovery of enormous catfish and a species of sea snake that got to be twelve meters long.

But the weirdest thing they discovered there was an extremely creepy species of lungfish, reconstructed as follows:

Is it just me, or is this thing just a little too close to the Jagrafess from the Doctor Who episode "The Long Game?"

Speaking of nightmare fuel.

So there are our cool discoveries from the world of paleontology for today.  I know prehistoric life is fascinating, but myself, I'm just as happy to know I can go outside and not be torn apart by a hyena-pig, bitten by a twelve-meter-long snake, or chomped on by something that looks like a giant worm with human teeth.  Call me risk-averse, but there you are.

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

The subject of Monday's blog post gave me the idea that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation should be a classic -- Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  This book, written back in 1949, is an analysis of the history and biology of the human/canine relationship, and is a must-read for anyone who owns, or has ever owned, a doggy companion.

Given that it's seventy years old, some of the factual information in Man Meets Dog has been superseded by new research -- especially about the genetic relationships between various dog breeds, and between domestic dogs and other canid species in the wild.  But his behavioral analysis is impeccable, and is written in his typical lucid, humorous style, with plenty of anecdotes that other dog lovers will no doubt relate to.  It's a delightful read!

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

Meaning in music

As someone fascinated by neuroscience, language, and music, you can imagine how excited I was to find some new research that combined all three.

A link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia describes a study that is the subject of a paper in Nature Neuroscience last week with the rather intimidating title "Divergence in the Functional Organization of Human and Macaque Auditory Cortex Revealed by fMRI Responses to Harmonic Tones."  Written by Sam V. Norman-Haignere (Columbia University), Nancy Kanwisher (MIT), Josh H. McDermott (MIT), and Bevil R. Conway (National Institute of Health), the paper shows evidence that even our close primate relatives don't have the capacity for discriminating harmonic tones that humans have -- that our perception of music may well be a uniquely human capacity.

"We found that a certain region of our brains has a stronger preference for sounds with pitch than macaque monkey brains," said Bevil Conway, senior author of the study.  "The results raise the possibility that these sounds, which are embedded in speech and music, may have shaped the basic organization of the human brain."

Monkeys, apparently, respond equally to atonal/aharmonic sounds, while humans have a specific neural module that lights up on an fMRI scan when the sounds they hear are tonal in nature.  "These results suggest the macaque monkey may experience music and other sounds differently," Conway said.  "In contrast, the macaque's experience of the visual world is probably very similar to our own.  It makes one wonder what kind of sounds our evolutionary ancestors experienced."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It immediately put me in mind of tonal languages (such as Thai and Chinese) where the same syllable spoken with a rising, falling, or steady tone completely changes its denotative meaning.  Even non-tonal languages (like English) express connotation with tone, such as the rising tone at the end of a question.  And subtleties like stress patterns can substantially change the meaning.  For example, consider the sentence "She told me to give you the money today?"  Now, read it aloud while stressing the words as follows:

• SHE told me to give you the money today?
• She TOLD me to give you the money today?
• She told ME to give you the money today?
• She told me to GIVE you the money today?
• She told me to give YOU the money today?
• She told me to give you the MONEY today?
• She told me to give you the money TODAY?

No two of these connote the same idea, do they?

I'm reminded of how the brilliant neuroscientist David Eagleman describes the concept of the umwelt of an organism:

In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of the umwelt.  He wanted a word to express a simple (but often overlooked) observation: different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different environmental signals.  In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it's electrical fields.  For the echolocating bat, it's air-compression waves.  The small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect is its umwelt... 

The interesting part is that each organism presumably assumes its umwelt to be the entire objective reality "out there."  Why would any of us stop to think that there is more beyond what we can sense?

So tone, apparently, is part of the human umwelt, but not that of macaques (and probably other primate species).  Perhaps other animals include tone in their umwelt, but that point is uncertain.  I'd guess that these would include many bird species, which communicate using (often very complex) songs.  Echolocating cetaceans and bats, maybe.  Other than that, probably not many.

"This finding suggests that speech and music may have fundamentally changed the way our brain processes pitch," Conway said.  "It may also help explain why it has been so hard for scientists to train monkeys to perform auditory tasks that humans find relatively effortless."

I wonder what music sounds like to my dogs?  I get a curious head-tilt when I play the piano or flute, and I once owned a dog who would curl up at my feet while I practiced.  Both my dogs, however, immediately remember other pressing engagements and leave the premises as soon as I take out my bagpipes.

Although most humans do the same thing, so maybe that part's not about tonal perception per se.

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

The subject of Monday's blog post gave me the idea that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation should be a classic -- Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  This book, written back in 1949, is an analysis of the history and biology of the human/canine relationship, and is a must-read for anyone who owns, or has ever owned, a doggy companion.

Given that it's seventy years old, some of the factual information in Man Meets Dog has been superseded by new research -- especially about the genetic relationships between various dog breeds, and between domestic dogs and other canid species in the wild.  But his behavioral analysis is impeccable, and is written in his typical lucid, humorous style, with plenty of anecdotes that other dog lovers will no doubt relate to.  It's a delightful read!

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