The forest primeval

One of the reasons I'm so fascinated with paleontology is that it induces me to picture what the Earth looked like a loooooooong time ago -- and to consider a planet that was nothing at all like it is now.

I remember when I first realized something about the three earliest periods of Earth's history -- the Precambrian, Cambrian, and Ordovician -- from a kids' book on prehistory, when I was maybe ten years old.  There was a casual statement that during these periods, there was no life on land.  Every living thing there was lived in the water.

And I thought, "Wait, that can't mean what it sounds like."

But it does.  During those three periods -- which together comprise 90% of the history of the Earth -- the land masses were completely barren.  Rock, sand, dust, dirt (with no organic matter whatsoever), stretching over entire continents.

You think the Sahara is a vast wasteland.  Every square kilometer of the early Earth looked like that, without even the occasional palm tree or camel to break the monotony.

Strange to think of an Earth so unlike what we see around us today.  Even after life colonized the land -- starting with plants living around the margins of bodies of water, in the early Silurian -- it would still have looked pretty foreign, and I'm not just talking about dinosaurs, here.  During the Carboniferous Period there were dragonflies with three-foot wingspans, and centipedes almost big enough to ride.  The Devonian, one step earlier, had some fish called placoderms that look like they're wearing poorly-fitting plate armor.

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

In fact, it was a discovery dating to the Devonian that spurred me to write this post.  Last week a paper appeared in Current Biology about a fossilized forest in Xinhang, China that spreads over 250,000 square meters.

Quite a significant find.

Don't, however, picture your typical forest here.  These weren't oaks and maples and pines, they were lycopsids, a group now represented only by club mosses, small and generally unassuming plants you'll find in moist forest understories.  But in the Devonian, they got big.  The largest were over seven meters tall, or about the size of your average dogwood or crabapple tree.

But they didn't look anything like modern trees.  More like something Doctor Seuss would have drawn.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tim Bertelink, Lepidodendron, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Imagine a whole forest of these short, skinny trees and you've got the idea.

"The large density as well as the small size of the trees could make the Xinhang forest very similar to a sugarcane field, although the plants in Xinhang forest are distributed in patches," said Deming Wang, a professor in the School of Earth and Space Sciences at Beijing University, who co-authored the study.  "It might also be that the Xinhang lycopsid forest was much like the mangroves along the coast, since they occur in a similar environment and play comparable ecologic roles."

So our picture of this odd world, when fish were the dominant life-form and the only land animals were primitive amphibians, insects, and arachnids, is becoming more complete.  Think about that next time you go for a walk in the woods.  You might not only ponder what the land you're walking on looked like 400 million years ago, but how different it might look like 400 million years from now -- during which evolution will have had plenty of time to generate, as Darwin put it, "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."

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

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!]

Doubling down on error

Is it just me, or is the defining hallmark of discourse these days a steadfast refusal to admit when you're wrong?

Surprisingly enough I'm not referring here to Donald Trump, who has raised a casual disdain for the truth to near-mythic proportions.  What's even more astonishing, though, is his followers' determination to believe everything he says, even when it contradicts what he just said.  Trump could say, "The sky is green!  It is also purple-and-orange plaid!  And I didn't say either of those things!  Also, I am not here!" and his devotees would just nod and smile and comment on what an honest and godly man he is and how great America is now that we've been abandoned by all our allies and the national debt is a record 22 trillion dollars.

In this case, though, I'm referring to two Republican policy wonks who apparently wouldn't believe climate change was happening if the entire continent spontaneously burst into flame.  The first was Matt Schlapp, head of the American Conservative Union, who was pissed off by Bernie Sanders publicly calling Trump an idiot for not accepting climate change, and responded in a tweet, "They can’t even predict if it will rain on tues but we are certain about the weather 12 yrs from now."

This is such an egregious straw man that it's almost a work of art.  In 21 words, we find the following:

• Weather ≠ climate.  For fuck's sake.  We've been through this how many times before?
• Meteorologists are, actually, quite good at predicting when and where it will rain.  Weather is a complex affair, so they don't always get it right, but if the evening weather report says your annual family picnic tomorrow is going to get a drenching, you should probably pay attention.
• Knowing the climatic trends tells you exactly nothing about "the weather twelve years from now."  Cf. my earlier comment about how weather ≠ climate.
• Predictions and trends don't imply certainty.  Ever.  But if 99% of working climatologists believe that anthropogenic climate change is happening, and that it's going to have drastic negative effects not only on the environment but ourselves, I'm gonna listen to them rather than to a guy whose main occupation seems to be sneering at people he disagrees with.

Then there was writer and pontificator Dinesh d'Souza, who posted a video of kangaroos hopping about in the snow with the caption, "Global warming comes to Australia.  Unless you want to believe your lying eyes!"

Unsurprisingly, within minutes d'Souza was excoriated by hundreds of people letting him know that (1) the Earth is spherical, implying that (2) there are these things called "hemispheres," which (3) cause the seasons, and (4) since Australia is in the opposite one than North America, they're experiencing winter right now.  Also, he was informed more than once that the largest mountain range in Australia is named "the Snowy Mountains," and it's for an analogous reason that the Rocky Mountains got their name by virtue of being composed largely of rocks.

A grove of native trees in New South Wales, Australia.  They're called "snow gums."  Guess why?  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Thennicke, Snow gums, Dead Horse Gap NSW Australia, CC BY-SA 4.0]

What gets me about this is not that two laypeople made a mistake about science.  That is gonna happen because (let's face it) science can be hard.  What I find astonishing is that when confronted with multitudes of fact-based objections, neither man said, "Wow, that sure was a dumb statement!  What a goober I am."  Both of them took the strategy of "Death Before Backing Down," and I can nearly guarantee that this incident will not change their minds one iota, and that (given the opportunity) they will make equally idiotic statements next time.

Look, I'm not claiming I'm infallible.  Far from it.  But what I will say is that if I'm wrong, I'll admit it -- and if it's in print (as here at Skeptophilia) I'll post a correction or retraction, or (if the error was egregious enough) delete the post entirely.  I've done so more than once over the nine years I've had this blog, and although admitting you're mistaken is never pleasant, it's absolutely critical to honest... everything.

But that seems to be a lost art lately.  The attitude these days is, "If someone proves you're wrong, keep saying the same thing, only be more strident."  Evidently truth these days isn't about who has the stronger evidence, but who yells the loudest.  It's no wonder the American citizenry is, as a whole, so misinformed, especially on scientific matters -- in science the touchstone is not volume but factual support.

And that seems to be the last thing any of these people are looking at.

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

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!]

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.

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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.

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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!]