Is there in truth no beauty?

Today's post is about an odd little piece of research that appeared in the journal Cognition this week, tying together a number of disparate realms -- mathematics, music, art, and the neuroscience of perception.

The study, by Samuel Johnson and Stefan Steinerberger (of the University of Bath and Yale University, respectively), looks at the fascinating question of how our perception of beauty carries across different expressions of the human creative impulse.  I've been interested in this topic for some time, especially with respect to music.  (Artistically, I have the aesthetic sensibilities that God gave gravel, and when my wife and our cultured friends talk art, I usually just keep my mouth shut and nod sagely.)

But the perception of beauty in music has intrigued me ever since my first realization that some pieces of music that thrilled me to the core left other people completely cold, and vice versa.  I have a good friend who, while we agree on many things, has about as opposite tastes to me in classical music as one could possibly have.  He adores Brahms, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff, whereas I don't really care for any of them, and in fact could live happily forever without hearing a piece of Brahms's music again.  My tastes run more to Bach and Scarlatti... and Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev.  (What the link is between those two groups of composers, I have no idea.)

What Johnson and Steinerberger did, though, was to link up people's views of the aesthetic merit of art and music with their perception of beauty in mathematics.  Don't laugh, you non-math types; if you do any digging amongst the writings of mathematicians, you'll find plenty of references to theorems or proofs as being "elegant" or "beautiful," and a while back I did a piece on the claim that Euler's Identity, one of the most curious statements of mathematics, was so beautiful that it is a proof of the hand of the divine.  (To see how far mathematicians will engage in such aesthetic commentary on mathematical theorems, Paul Nahin calls Euler's Identity "the gold standard for mathematical beauty," and Keith Devlin of Stanford University states, "Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's equation reaches down into the very depths of existence.")

So it's not far-fetched to claim that some people see the same kind of beauty in mathematics that many of us do in art and music.  And Johnson and Steinerberger wanted to find out if there's a connection between the three.

They took four theorems from mathematics -- the sum of an infinite geometric series, Gauss’s summation trick for positive integers, the pigeonhole principle, and a geometric proof of a Faulhaber formula.  They used four pieces of music -- Schubert’s Moment Musical No. 4, D 780 (Op. 94), Bach’s Fugue from Toccata in E Minor (BWV 914), Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (Op. 120), and Shostakovich’s Prelude in D-flat major (Op.87 No. 15) -- and four landscape paintings, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California and A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie by Albert Bierstadt, The Hay Wain by John Constable, and The Heart of the Andes by Frederic Edwin Church.

Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California by Albert Bierstadt (1864) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Test subjects were then assigned a series of three rather strange tasks -- to match the music to the mathematical theorems based on how similar they were aesthetically; to pair the art and the theorems the same way; and to rate each of the theorems and the pieces of art and music on nine criteria (seriousness, universality, profundity, novelty, clarity, simplicity, elegance, intricacy, and sophistication).

My immediate reaction to reading this was that I can't see any connection between artistic, musical, and mathematical beauty, at least in the sense that you would look at a landscape painting and be immediately struck the same way as you were by Gauss's summation trick.  I understand finding beauty in each realm, but I can't fathom how they could be connected in any sort of one-to-one correspondence.

But strangely, they seem to be.  The correspondences drawn between art and math and between music and math were remarkably similar across test subjects, as were the rankings given to each, especially on the criteria of elegance, profundity, and clarity.  Whatever it is that gave me such a frisson of wonder when I first came across the formula for the sum of an infinite geometric series -- and yes, that did actually happen, because it's freakin' cool -- causes a consistently similar reaction in people not only seeing art or listening to music, but seeing particular pieces of art or hearing particular pieces of music.

"Laypeople not only had similar intuitions about the beauty of math as they did about the beauty of art but also had similar intuitions about beauty as each other," Johnson said.  "In other words, there was consensus about what makes something beautiful, regardless of modality."

"I’d like to see our study done again but with different pieces of music, different proofs, different artwork,” said Steinerberger.  "We demonstrated this phenomenon, but we don’t know the limits of it.  Where does it stop existing?  Does it have to be classical music?  Do the paintings have to be of the natural world, which is highly aesthetic?"

Which are excellent questions.  For myself, I have incredibly eclectic tastes in music (as evidenced by putting my iPod on "shuffle," and inducing musical whiplash by going directly from a Bach partita to Nine Inch Nails).  Is there some correspondence there -- are other aficionados of Stravinsky also more likely to listen to Linkin Park?  Is there a connection between people who love mathematics and particular styles of music?

And what's going on in our brains when these judgments are being made?

As with much good scientific research, the Johnson/Steinerberger study raises as many questions as it answers.  We still don't know where aesthetic perception comes from, nor why it varies so much from person to person.  But as this study shows, there are some remarkable (and unexpected) similarities in how we perceive beauty.

And that is, in and of itself, kind of beautiful.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Loewen's work is an indictment not specifically of the educational system, but of our culture's determination to sanitize our own history and present our historical figures as if they were pristine pillars of virtue.

The reality is -- as reality always is -- more complex and more interesting.  The leaders of the past were human, and ran the gamut of praiseworthiness.  Some had their sordid sides.  Some were a strange mix of admirable and reprehensible.  But what is certain is that we're not doing our children, nor ourselves, any favors by rewriting history to make America and Americans look faultless.  We owe our citizens the duty of being honest, even about the parts of history that we'd rather not admit to.

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

Color my world

I'm guessing that every amateur philosopher has wondered if we all perceive color the same way -- for example, if what I perceive as "red" is the same as what you call "green," but we've just learned to both call it green.

I know I've been asked that probably dozens of times in my neuroscience classes, and my answer was always the same: it's possible, given that I can never see the world through your eyes and brain, but it's pretty unlikely because of the homology that exists between all human brains.  The fact that the visual/perceptive apparatus in your body is awfully similar to the one in mine suggests that we both perceive the world substantially the same way.

You can never prove it, though, which is why this question will keep coming up during late-night sessions in freshman dorms, lo unto the end of time.

Even though I'm making light of it, color perception is still quite a mystery.  It's known that most people (excluding the colorblind) have three different kinds of "cones," which are the cells in the retina that distinguish color, peaking in the red, blue, and green regions of the spectrum.  A few humans -- predominantly women, because the genes for the cone pigments are on the X chromosome -- are tetrachromats, and have a fourth type of cone, making their color acuity considerably more sensitive than the rest of us, and probably explaining the times my wife has said to me, "You actually think that shirt matches those pants?"

Then there's the mantis shrimp, a marine arthropod that is weird in a great many respects, not least because they have between twelve and sixteen different kinds of photoreceptors.  You have to wonder what the world looks like to them, don't you?

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This topic comes up because of a paper that appeared this week in the journal Cell, called "Color Categorization Independent of Color Naming," by a team led by Katarzyna Siuda-Krzywicka, a neuroscientist at Sorbonne University in Paris.  And what this research shows is that our ability to categorize colors -- to determine, for example, that vermilion and scarlet are both shades of red -- is independent of our ability to assign names to colors.

I know, pretty weird, isn't it?  The way that Siuda-Krzywicka and her team approached it was to give two different tasks to people, the first of which required you to identify by number which patches of color in a sample were shades of the same color (i.e., #1 and 2 are the same color, and they're different from #3), and the second of which was to identify what color a particular sample actually was (i.e., #1 is a shade of blue).  Neurotypical people can do both pretty well, with allowances for the aforementioned differences in color sensitivity between individuals.

Where it got interesting was that they included in their study a subject called "RDS" who had suffered an ischemic stroke involving his left posterior cerebral artery five years ago, damaging part of the left occipito-temporal region of his brain.  This stroke interfered with his ability to read and identify certain objects, but its effects were most pronounced in his ability to recognize colors.  When Siuda-Krzywicka's team tested RDS, a fascinating pattern emerged.

Task #1, where subjects were asked to do color categorization -- determine which patches were shades of the same color -- RDS did quite well on, and in fact was very close to the average for test subjects of his gender and age.  However, he was really awful at task #2, trying to figure out what color the patches actually were.

In other words, he could tell that ultramarine and azure were both shades of the same color, but he couldn't figure out that they were both shades of blue.

What this indicates is something very curious; our ability to name colors and our ability to recognize color categories are independent of each other.  You can impair one without affecting the other.

The most fascinating part is that the researchers noted that many of the times RDS did get the color name correct, it was because he used his relatively intact ability at categorization, plus his knowledge and memory, to arrive at an answer.  "This is the same color as blood," he said, "and I know blood is red, so this must be red as well."  Naming colors had to be done with a cognitive, logical process, not an automatic recognition as it is done by the rest of us.

It reminds me of my issue with recognizing faces, about which I've written here before.  Although I'm essentially face-blind, I can recognize people sometimes -- putting together what I remember of their hairstyle, coloration, whether or not they wear glasses, and even the way they stand or walk.  But it's nowhere near automatic; it's a logical sequence ("he's the guy who's tall and thin, wears wire-rim glasses, and has curly blond hair"), not an instantaneous recognition.  And it's easily foiled if a person changes hairstyles, wears more (or less) makeup than usual, or -- as I found out last year in one of my classes, when I at first didn't recognize a student I'd taught all year -- simply wears a baseball cap.

This research gives us a bit more information about the sometimes non-intuitive mechanisms by which we perceive the world.  The brain is a complex and fascinating machine.  As a former student once put it, "My brain is so complicated it can't even understand itself."  But it could be worse -- think of what it must be like to be a mantis shrimp.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Loewen's work is an indictment not specifically of the educational system, but of our culture's determination to sanitize our own history and present our historical figures as if they were pristine pillars of virtue.

The reality is -- as reality always is -- more complex and more interesting.  The leaders of the past were human, and ran the gamut of praiseworthiness.  Some had their sordid sides.  Some were a strange mix of admirable and reprehensible.  But what is certain is that we're not doing our children, nor ourselves, any favors by rewriting history to make America and Americans look faultless.  We owe our citizens the duty of being honest, even about the parts of history that we'd rather not admit to.

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

Shorts weather

Being the end of summer, I thought my readers would be in the mood for shorts.

No, not those kind of shorts.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons marcore! from Hong Kong, China, Board shorts 4, CC BY 2.0]

Today I've got three quick-takes for you from the world of the weird, starting with one of my favorite places: the beautiful land of Scotland.

A company called "Snaptrip," a UK-based holiday booking company, is offering free stays in Scotland -- for life -- for the first people who can provide proof that the Loch Ness Monster is real.

"We want to get our hands on as much evidence as possible to prove that the monster is real and give our customers yet another reason to visit the beautiful Scottish Isles," said Snaptrip founder and CEO Matt Fox.  "If you have any proof, please get in touch and let us know!"

Fox said that his company will foot the bill for five Scottish holidays per year, for life, for the first twenty people who come up with "satisfactory evidence."  Which is pretty optimistic, given that people have been at this for over a hundred years and have yet to produce any evidence that would convince someone who wasn't already leaning that direction.  So the chances of one person coming forward to claim the prize are low to nonexistent, much less twenty.

Still, the idea of free trips to Scotland is a pretty nice incentive.  If I had some good cryptid-searching equipment, I'd probably give it a go myself.  In any case, if any of my readers are so inclined, here's an opportunity to use your hunting skills for a reward other than the notoriety.

Second, there's a group in Thailand that is meditating daily, with the goal of inducing aliens to help us avoid a nuclear apocalypse scheduled for 2022.

The group, UFO Kaokala, got its name and its mission after one of the members spotted a UFO on top of Mount Khao Kala in Thailand, so now they meet there every day to try and get the aliens to come back.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, the aliens are apparently from Pluto.  So seems like they'd find it a bit warm here on Earth, given that the average surface temperature on Pluto is -230 C, or only 44 degrees above absolute zero.  You'd think that even if they landed on a mild spring day on Earth, they'd melt or spontaneously burst into flame or something.

Who knows, though?  If they have the technology to get here, they probably have refrigerated suits.

"Instead of eating food, [the Plutonians] eat capsules," said Wassana Chansamnuan, who has been part of UFO Kaokala since 1998, following her receipt of a telepathic message from the aliens.  "They can communicate with anyone, regardless of their native tongue.  Most importantly, they follow a sabai sabai, or relaxed, working style.  When disaster strikes, they don't want humans to stress out, at least not too much."

Well, if there's a nuclear apocalypse, I think I'd stress out no matter how much I'd meditated, but that's just me.

Apparently the goal of attracting the aliens is working, if you believe fifty-year-old Ukrin Thaonaknathiphithak, who I had to mention just so I could include his last name in my post.  He said he's seen seventeen UFOs at one time, which seems a little excessive, but maybe he's really good at meditating.

Still, the outlook is kind of grim.  Only thirty percent of the human population is going to survive past the nuclear war in 2022, said long-time member Ann Thongcharoen.  "At the time of crisis, the aliens will choose good people to live in the new age," she says.  "So people who think about dhamma or cosmic law or Buddha are good universal citizens," and will presumably be the ones the aliens will select.

So I guess I'm pretty well fucked either way, but I suppose that's not really a surprise to anyone.

Speaking of death, doom, and gloom, our last story is about people who want to cheat the Grim Reaper, and I'm not referring to Mitch McConnell, although cheating him would be kind of nice, too.  This is the brainchild of a company called HereAfter, which for a fee (of course) will upload hours and hours of your voice saying stuff, so when you die, you can still have a conversation with your loved ones.

"My parents have been gone for decades, and I still catch myself thinking, 'Gee, I would really like to ask my mom or dad for some advice or just to get some comfort,'" said Andrew Kaplan, who has agreed to be one of HereAfter's first guinea pigs.  "I don’t think the urge ever goes away...  I have a son in his thirties, and I’m hoping this will be of some value to him and his children someday."

HereAfter's founders, Sonia Talati and James Vlahos, have their sights set higher than just prerecorded messages, though.  They're hoping to eventually use software that can form a picture of someone's personality through asking increasingly detailed questions, and download that personality profile along with the recorded voice into an emotionally intelligent digital personality to create a "PersonBot" that could interact with the survivors in the same way the original person would have.

Me, I'm not so fond of this idea.  I mean, I love my friends and family as much as anyone, but this really doesn't seem to be the answer.  I was really close to my Grandma Bertha, my father's mother, but if I was rooting around in the kitchen for a snack and I heard Grandma Bertha's voice saying, "Gordon, dear, you really need to eat something more nutritious than leftover vanilla pudding and a bag of potato chips," my reaction wouldn't be to get all sentimental about how nice it was to have her back.  My reaction would be to scream like a little child and run out of the room.

Also, this kind of thing always makes me think, "Haven't these people ever watched a science fiction movie?  Like, in their whole life?"  Because this has been tried before multiple times, and it never ends well.  BerthaBot ends up taking over the entire internet, killing various scientists, politicians, and innocent civilians including Sean Bean in the process, and a crack team of operatives led by Chris Evans has to infiltrate the Central Computer and unplug BerthaBot, at the end ignoring her plaintive voice crying out that for heaven's sake Chris really needs to put a shirt on before he catches his death of cold.

So I'm not really a fan.  If we're gonna put our time into something, immortality-wise, I would rather the effort go into ways to extend our healthy lifespans.  Because even if they somehow were able to upload my personality into the Cloud, it's not going to make much difference to the real me, you know?  I'll still be dead.

Anyhow, that's our shorts for today.  Free trips to Scotland, meditating to avert the apocalypse, and digital immortality for our voices.  It's nice, in a way, to see that people are still loping along, doing weird and pointless things, despite the fairly horrible stuff in the news lately.  Regardless of what happens, we're still capable of engaging in truly bizarre behavior.

Which now that I come to think of it, isn't really that comforting.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Loewen's work is an indictment not specifically of the educational system, but of our culture's determination to sanitize our own history and present our historical figures as if they were pristine pillars of virtue.

The reality is -- as reality always is -- more complex and more interesting.  The leaders of the past were human, and ran the gamut of praiseworthiness.  Some had their sordid sides.  Some were a strange mix of admirable and reprehensible.  But what is certain is that we're not doing our children, nor ourselves, any favors by rewriting history to make America and Americans look faultless.  We owe our citizens the duty of being honest, even about the parts of history that we'd rather not admit to.

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

The case of the crystalline eyes

One comment from students that consistently drove me crazy, as a science teacher, was, "Why do we have to learn this?  It could all be proven wrong tomorrow."

The implication is that since science alters its models based on new evidence, we could wake up one morning and find that we have to throw out the chemistry texts because the alchemists were right after all.  As I've mentioned before here at Skeptophilia, such complete recasting of our understanding is awfully uncommon; the majority of scientific discoveries refine the models we already have rather than completely overthrowing what we thought we understood.

The most frustrating thing about that attitude, though, is the suggestion that science's capacity for self-correction is some kind of flaw.  Is it really better to persist in error despite new information, damn the opposition, rather than saying, "Okay, I guess we were wrong, then," and fixing the mistakes?

I saw a great example of how science handles that sort of thing last week, when a fantastically well-preserved fossil of a crane fly 54 million years ago called into question a long-held theory about the eyes of trilobites.  You've probably seen crane flies; they're the insects that look like large, bumbling mosquitoes, entirely harmless (although two European species, now introduced and invasive in the United States, feed on plant roots and will muck up your lawn).

Here's the fossil in question, specifically a close-up of its multi-faceted eyes:

What was interesting about this fossil was that the lenses of the crane fly's compound eyes were composed of crystals of calcite, and that put the researchers -- a team led by Johan Lindgren, a paleontologist at Lund University in Sweden -- in mind of a claim about the eyes of trilobites, a distantly-related group of much older arthropods that went extinct in the massive Permian-Triassic Extinction, 252 million years ago.

In a paper in Nature, Lindgren et al. point out that crystals of calcite in fossilized trilobites were interpreted as being the lenses of the animals when they were alive -- i.e., the crystals were present in trilobites' eyes while living, and were left behind in the fossils.  But the discovery of similar crystals in fossil crane flies calls that into question; after all, there are still living crane flies, and none of them have crystalline eyes (nor do any extant groups of insects).

So it appears that the calcite crystals formed during the fossilization process -- that they're "artefacts," which is paleontology-speak for a feature that was generated by inorganic processes after the organism's death.  Lindgren's point is that since the crystals are artefacts in the crane flies' eyes, it's pretty likely they are in the trilobites' eyes, as well.

This discovery overturns something we thought we understood -- and while I imagine that the paleontologists who framed the crystal-eyes-in-trilobites model are saying, "Well, hell," they're not staunchly refusing to budge.  In science, our models stand or fall based upon evidence and logic; if the evidence changes, the models have to, as well.

And that, really, is the main strength of science as a way of knowing.  We continue to refine it as we know more, homing in on a model that works to explain all the available data.

Even knowing that "it could all be proven wrong tomorrow" -- but very likely won't be -- we keep moving forward, whether or not it lines up with our preconceived notions of how the world works.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Loewen's work is an indictment not specifically of the educational system, but of our culture's determination to sanitize our own history and present our historical figures as if they were pristine pillars of virtue.

The reality is -- as reality always is -- more complex and more interesting.  The leaders of the past were human, and ran the gamut of praiseworthiness.  Some had their sordid sides.  Some were a strange mix of admirable and reprehensible.  But what is certain is that we're not doing our children, nor ourselves, any favors by rewriting history to make America and Americans look faultless.  We owe our citizens the duty of being honest, even about the parts of history that we'd rather not admit to.

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

Ouija analysis

What do you do with a piece of research that (from the paper itself) sounds like it was done right, but appears in a journal that is notorious for publishing highly suspect papers in the past?

That was my reaction -- well, my question, anyhow -- after reading "A Camera-Based Tracking System for Ouija Research" by Eckhard Kruse, which appeared last month in The Journal for Scientific Exploration.  The JSE has a reputation for being filled with woo, fringe/pseudoscience, and wacko claims, something that has merited the following entry in Rational Wiki (which is never afraid to speak bluntly):

JSE has much less to do with science than it does with whatever pet crank theories its editors are out to promote.  It's chock-full of all kinds of woo, including (but not limited to) alternative medicine, astrology, remote viewing, AIDS denial, quantum woo, UFOs, and much, much more!

So given that, it's unsurprising that they published a paper investigating Ouija boards in the first place.

The conventional explanation for the Ouija phenomenon is the ideomotor effect, wherein a thought, mental image, or suggestion results in a movement of the body, seemingly spontaneous or beneath the individual's conscious awareness.  The idea is that when people have their fingers on a Ouija planchette, they're subconsciously directing it to spell out a message that makes sense.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

What the researchers were looking for was evidence that the planchette movement occurred independently of the individuals touching it -- something claimed by aficionados of Ouija boards, who apparently believe that the planchette is being manipulated by a spirit, and the people involved are only acting as a conduit of the "energy" (that word being used in the usual fluffy non-scientific fashion).  They put sensors on the planchette that detected whether the fingertips moved prior to the planchette sliding (indicating the "sitters" were directing its motion) or that the fingers and planchette started moving simultaneously (suggesting the paranormal explanation).  They also looked at the speed with which the planchette selected letters, claiming that if it was the ideomotor effect at work, the selection should speed up within a particular message, because once the first couple of letters (presumably chosen at random) are selected, this suggests an actual word to the "sitters," so the rest of the message is selected more quickly.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the results were fairly equivocal.  The motion sensors did indicate that the "sitters'" fingertips moved prior to the planchette sliding, but the expected increase in speed once a message begins did not happen.  Here were a few of the conclusions the researchers made:

• When hitting a letter, details of the motion path (cusps vs. smooth curves) could indicate whether the next letter is already anticipated, hinting at (conscious or unconscious) knowledge of how the spelling will proceed.
• The time needed to spell the next letter was only weakly related to its “guessability,” i.e. the number of choices to construct meaningful words, in contrast to Andersen et al.’s (2018) statement about imposing “structure on initially random events.”
• According to the experiments with the touch sensor, it is the sitters’ fingers that are moving first, then the planchette follows. This complies with the ideomotor explanation. If there were psychokinetic effects, it seems likely that it would be the other way around and the fingers would be following the actions of the planchette.
• Often two sitters were able to move the planchette synchronously, similar to the volitional spelling of a given message. This challenges conventional ideomotor explanations, as these would require some negotiation process regarding the next, unknown target. Even though this might happen unconsciously, it would require some time for information transmission between the sitters and potentially some delay in the action of one sitter, causing similar rotations as when one sitter voluntarily leads the planchette—unless there are psi effects explaining the synchronicity.

So nothing here blows me out of the water, but still, this seems to me to be the right approach for testing any paranormal claim.

Oh, and then there's the part at the end of the paper where Kruse admits that blind Ouija sitting never works -- that as soon as the "sitters" are blindfolded, the messages stop coming.  You wouldn't think it would matter if the spirits were controlling the thing, would you?

So I'm still pretty confident that there's nothing supernatural going on with Ouija boards, however bent out of shape people get over how diabolical the things are and how they're summoning up demons and whatnot (every time I mention them in Skeptophilia I get emails about how I shouldn't ever touch one because they're eeeeeevil.).  The most parsimonious explanation is pretty clearly ideomotor phenomena, and anyone wanting to get a skeptic to believe anything else would have to come up with better evidence than Kruse did.

And, for the record, publish it in a journal that doesn't have a reputation for printing crap.  My guess is if someone did find hard, replicable evidence for any kind of paranormal claim, it wouldn't be difficult to find reputable journals interested in it -- provided it met the minimum standard for controlled experimentation.

Like every other scientific inquiry has to.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Loewen's work is an indictment not specifically of the educational system, but of our culture's determination to sanitize our own history and present our historical figures as if they were pristine pillars of virtue.

The reality is -- as reality always is -- more complex and more interesting.  The leaders of the past were human, and ran the gamut of praiseworthiness.  Some had their sordid sides.  Some were a strange mix of admirable and reprehensible.  But what is certain is that we're not doing our children, nor ourselves, any favors by rewriting history to make America and Americans look faultless.  We owe our citizens the duty of being honest, even about the parts of history that we'd rather not admit to.

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

Dark clouds

I still remember when I was about twenty years old, and I first heard about Carl Sagan's proposal to terraform Venus.

On first glance, this is a crazy idea.  Venus brings new meaning to the word "inhospitable."  Its average surface temperature is 462 C.  The atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, which is denser than Earth's air, so the pressures at the surface are immense.  (It's the density and composition of the atmosphere that's why early photographs taken by probes on Venus's surface looked warped, as if the probe were sitting at the base of a bowl; the refraction of what light makes it to the surface caused optical distortion.)  If being inside a pressure cooker isn't bad enough, its dense clouds are largely composed of sulfuric acid.

As Sagan himself said, "Venus is very much like hell."

But Sagan was an amazingly creative thinker, and he came up with a proposal for reworking the atmosphere and, possibly, making it livable for Earthlings.  He suggested detonating a rocket carrying a cargo of cyanobacteria in its upper atmosphere, dispersing them into the clouds.  Cyanobacteria are primitive photosynthetic single-celled life forms, and Sagan's idea was that the updrafts would keep at least some of them aloft.  As they tumbled about in the (relatively) temperate clouds, they'd photosynthesize, consuming some of the atmosphere's carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen gas as a waste product.

The idea is that the aerial microbes would multiply, and although some would inevitably sink low enough to fry, enough would stay up in the clouds to steadily drop the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere.  Less carbon dioxide, less greenhouse effect; less greenhouse effect, lower temperature.  Once the cloud temperature dropped below 100 C, water vapor would condense, and it would rain out the sulfuric acid.

Far-fetched, perhaps, especially for its time.  But it was an exciting enough proposal that I recall discussing it eagerly with my college friends and fellow science nerds.

This all comes up because of a peculiar observation of Venus made recently, by teams at the Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Technical University of Berlin, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.  What they've seen is that there are clouds of "unknown absorbers" darkening the upper atmosphere of the planet in patches -- enough to affect the weather.

A composite image of theVenus, using data from the Japanese probe Akatsuki.  [Image courtesy of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency]

And there are astronomers who think these "unknown absorbers" are not the products of exotic Venusian chemical reactions -- but are airborne single-celled life forms.

"It is hard to conceive of what would cause a change in the [planet's] albedo without a change in the absorbers," said Sanjay Limaye, planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of a paper last week in The Astronomical Journal that seriously considered the possibility of the absorbers being life forms.  "Since there are few species which have physical, chemical and spectral properties that are consistent with the composition of the Venus clouds, they may have evolved independently on Venus."

The researchers are up front that extraterrestrial microbes are just one possible explanation of the peculiar darkening of the skies, which occurs with an odd periodicity along with an overall decrease in albedo since measurements started in 2006.  It may turn out to be simply a chemical reaction -- still the most likely explanation for the gas output from search-for-life experiments by the Mars landers -- but the fact that scientists are even considering the microbe hypothesis is encouraging and exciting.

Whichever it turns out to be, it seems fitting to end with another quote by Sagan: "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Loewen's work is an indictment not specifically of the educational system, but of our culture's determination to sanitize our own history and present our historical figures as if they were pristine pillars of virtue.

The reality is -- as reality always is -- more complex and more interesting.  The leaders of the past were human, and ran the gamut of praiseworthiness.  Some had their sordid sides.  Some were a strange mix of admirable and reprehensible.  But what is certain is that we're not doing our children, nor ourselves, any favors by rewriting history to make America and Americans look faultless.  We owe our citizens the duty of being honest, even about the parts of history that we'd rather not admit to.

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

Sex, choice, and genes

Sometimes a piece of research makes me simultaneously think, "Okay, that's pretty interesting," and "Oh, no, this is not going to end well."

That was my reaction to the latest study of the genetics of sexuality and sexual orientation, which appeared in Science this week.  The paper, entitled "Large-Scale GWAS Reveals Insights Into the Genetic Architecture of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior," was the work of a huge team headed by Andrea Ganna of the Center for Genomic Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and looked at genetic correlations amongst almost 500,000 individuals with their self-reported same-sex sexual behavior.

Before we launch off into how this is being spun, let's look at what Ganna et al. actually wrote:

In the discovery samples (UK Biobank and 23andMe), five autosomal loci were significantly associated with same-sex sexual behavior.  Follow-up of these loci suggested links to biological pathways that involve sex hormone regulation and olfaction.  Three of the loci were significant in a meta-analysis of smaller, independent replication samples.  Although only a few loci passed the stringent statistical corrections for genome-wide multiple testing and were replicated in other samples, our analyses show that many loci underlie same-sex sexual behavior in both sexes.  In aggregate, all tested genetic variants accounted for 8 to 25% of variation in male and female same-sex sexual behavior, and the genetic influences were positively but imperfectly correlated between the sexes [genetic correlation coefficient (rg)= 0.63; 95% confidence intervals, 0.48 to 0.78]...  Additional analyses suggested that sexual behavior, attraction, identity, and fantasies are influenced by a similar set of genetic variants (rg > 0.83); however, the genetic effects that differentiate heterosexual from same-sex sexual behavior are not the same as those that differ among nonheterosexuals with lower versus higher proportions of same-sex partners, which suggests that there is no single continuum from opposite-sex to same-sex preference.

To put it succinctly, and without all the scientific verbiage: sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender are complex, and the differences we see amongst humans are not attributable to a single cause.

Which you'd expect, I'd think.  The old binary divisions of male vs. female and heterosexual vs. homosexual are so clearly wrong it's a wonder anyone still thinks they're correct.  Transsexual and anatomically intersex individuals are hardly rare; and I know for a fact bisexuality exists, because I've been equally attracted to women and men since I was aware of sexual attraction at all.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

But this doesn't square with how some people want the world to work, so immediately this paper was published, it began to be twisted out of all recognition.

First, there was the "we wish the world was simple" approach, as exemplified by Science News, which for the record I'm about fed up with because for fuck's sake, they should know better.   Their headline regarding the study was "There's No Evidence That a 'Gay Gene' Exists," which is one of those technically-true-but-still-misleading taglines the media seems to be increasingly fond of.

No, there is no single "gay gene."  But reread the passage from the original paper I quoted above; the gist is that there is a host of factors, genetic and otherwise, that correlate with sexual orientation.  Here's a more accurate phrasing of the paper's conclusion, from Melinda Mills, writing about the study in the "Perspectives" column of Science: "The genetic correlation identified in the GWAS of whether a person had ever engaged in sex with someone of the same sex and the more complex measure of proportion of same-sex partners was 0.73 for men but only 0.52 for women.  This means that genetic variation has a higher influence on same-sex sexual behavior in men than in women and also demonstrates the complexity of women's sexuality."

Even the lower 0.52 correlation for women is pretty damn significant, considering that correlation runs on a scale of 0 to 1 where 0 means "no correlation at all" and 1 means "perfectly correlated."

But that didn't stop the next level of misinterpretation from happening, predictably from the anti-LGBTQ evangelicals and other crazy right-wingers, who would prefer it if people like me didn't exist.  All they did is read the headline from Science News (or one of the large number of media outlets that characterized the research the same way) and start writing op-ed pieces crowing, "See?  No gay gene!  We told you homosexuality was a choice.  Now science proves we were right all along."  Add to that the alarmists who went entirely the other direction and suggested that the Ganna et al. research could be used to identify non-heterosexuals for the purposes of persecution, or even eugenics, and you've got a morass of hyperemotional responses that miss the main conclusions of the study entirely.

So can I recommend that all of you read the fucking research?  For the Right-Wing NutJobs, let me just say that if you have to lie about what a study actually says to support your viewpoint, your position must be pretty tenuous from the get-go.  And while I sympathize with the alarmists' fears, it's hard to see how the Ganna et al. research could be used for any sort of nefarious purposes, when the best genetic correlates to homosexuality numbered around a half-dozen, not all of them showed up in every LGBTQ person studied, and even aggregated only predicted correctly around half the time.

So the whole thing got me kind of stirred up, as measurable by the number of times I felt obliged to use the f-bomb to express my frustration.  Which you'd have predicted, given my (1) bisexuality, (2) background in genetics, and (3) hatred of popular media mischaracterizing science.

In any case, the take-home message here is threefold:

1. The universe is a complex place.  Deal with it.
2. Wherever human sexuality comes from, it isn't a choice.  If that offends your sensibilities or conflicts with your worldview, you might want to re-examine your sensibilities and worldview, because as far as I can tell reality doesn't give a rat's ass about what you'd like to believe.
3. Don't trust headlines.  Always go back to the original research before forming an opinion.  Yes, reading scientific papers is challenging for non-scientists, but that's the only way you'll know your understanding is on solid ground.

So that's the latest highly equivocal piece of the nature-nurture puzzle, the outcome of which you'd probably have expected from knowing the history of the question.  As much as I'd like it if these matters were simple, I'm much happier knowing the truth.  I'll end with a quote from the inimitable Carl Sagan: "For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to my heart; the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life.  In The Three-Body Problem, Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu takes an interesting angle on this question; if intelligent life were discovered in the universe -- maybe if it even gave us a visit -- how would humans react?

Liu examines the impact of finding we're not alone in the cosmos from political, social, and religious perspectives, and doesn't engage in any pollyanna-ish assumptions that we'll all be hunky-dory and ascend to the next plane of existence.  What he does think might happen, though, makes for fascinating reading, and leaves you pondering our place in the universe for days after you turn over the last page.

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