An early walker

A recent discovery of a proto-hominid has been raising eyebrows in the paleoanthropology circles, for a variety of reasons.

Called Rudapithecus, it dates from the late Miocene Epoch, around ten million years ago.  It was small, at least compared to some of our other cousins, weighing in at between twenty and forty kilograms, roughly the size of your average golden lab.  Exactly where it fits in our family tree isn't certain yet, although most likely it's a collateral line, not one that is directly ancestral to Homo sapiens.

So far, nothing that surprising.  But there are a few things about Rudapithecus that are causing some serious head-scratching.  Among them:

• Rudapithecus was bipedal.  This is pretty certain from the shape of the pelvis, which has a morphology much more like ours than it is like the largely-quadrupedal chimps and gorillas.
• This bipedalism evolved way earlier than we'd thought.  The first unequivocal evidence we have of bipedalism -- or, that we had before this discovery -- was the African species Ardipithecus from a bit over four million years ago.  So if the inferences are correct, this more than doubles the antiquity of bipedalism in our relatives.
• Weirdest of all -- Rudapithecus didn't live in Africa.  This discovery was made in a quarry in Rudabánya, Hungary.

So this will require some serious reworking of our understanding of primate evolution.

Lineage of hominins. That's us, way up near the top left. The left-hand scale is a time axis, in millions of years before present. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dbachmann, Hominini lineage, CC BY-SA 4.0]

"Rudapithecus was pretty ape-like and probably moved among branches like apes do now—holding its body upright and climbing with its arms," said Carol Ward, a Curators Distinguished Professor of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences in the University of Missouri School of Medicine, and lead author of the study.  "However, it would have differed from modern great apes by having a more flexible lower back, which would mean when Rudapithecus came down to the ground, it might have had the ability to stand upright more like humans do.  This evidence supports the idea that rather than asking why human ancestors stood up from all fours, perhaps we should be asking why our ancestors never dropped down on all fours in the first place...  We were able to determine that Rudapithecus would have had a more flexible torso than today's African apes because it was much smaller...  This is significant because our finding supports the idea suggested by other evidence that human ancestors might not have been built quite like modern African apes."

So -- contrary to our usual picture of our ancestry -- it may be that the most recent common ancestor of humans, chimps, and gorillas (somewhere in the red slice on the graph) might have been more like us than they were like the other great apes, at least in terms of locomotion.  Kind of punches another hole in our self-importance, doesn't it?  We tend to have the attitude, "Of course we're the most highly evolved primate.  The further back you go, the more primitive and ape-like they get."  Now, it's looking like we may need to reconsider that.  It may be that the mostly-quadrupedalism of chimps and gorillas may have been the more recent innovation.

In any case, I'm sure this won't be the last you hear on the subject.  As with everything in science, it's subject to revision if new data comes to light.  And given the discovery of this fossil in a most unlikely location, I'm not even putting any money on where the next bit of evidence will come from.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is especially for those of you who enjoy having their minds blown.  Niels Bohr famously said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."  Physicist Philip Ball does his best to explain the basics of quantum theory -- and to shock the reader thereby -- in layman's terms in Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different, which was the winner of the 2018 Physics Book of the Year.

It's lucid, fun, and fascinating, and will turn your view of how things work upside down.  So if you'd like to know more about the behavior of the universe on the smallest scales -- and how this affects us, up here on the macro-scale -- pick up a copy of Beyond Weird and fasten your seatbelt.

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

A rain of dust

One of the problems with the modern industrialized worldview -- and yes, I know this is an overgeneralization, but still -- is our tendency to think we're capable of controlling everything.

I'm not so much talking about simple day-to-day occurrences.  At least on a theoretical level, we're all aware we could get clobbered by a truck while crossing the road.  But the bigger stuff all seems so solid, so unshakeable, that it's hard to imagine it ever changing.  Of course the grocery stores will always have food, there'll always be electricity available when we plug in our toasters, water will flow when we turn on the faucet.  On an even bigger scale -- it'll be warm in the summer and cool in the winter, the crops will grow, the rain will fall.

You don't have to know much science -- or history, for that matter -- to realize how false this attitude is.  Even small perturbations to the global ecosystem can have drastic consequences.  (Just as a handful of examples -- the 1984-1985 drought in Ethiopia that left 1.2 million dead and 400,000 refugees; the drought in the Yucatán in the early 10th century C.E. that is thought to have caused the downfall of the Mayan Empire; and the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. brought on by drought and lousy farming practices.)

The fact is -- and it's a point I've made before -- we need to be extraordinarily careful in pushing at the global ecosystem, because it can respond catastrophically to purely natural circumstances.  Adding global-scale human foolishness into the equation is a recipe for disaster.

As an example of how distant events can have unexpected global consequences, take the study published last week in Science Advances suggesting that a collision between two asteroids half a billion kilometers away triggered a drastic plunge in temperatures and the initiation of an ice age.  The event, which took place in the mid-Ordovician Period (466 million years ago), involved the destruction of an asteroid on the order of 150 kilometers in diameter, creating a dust plume that rained down upon the Earth.  The dust and debris blocking the sunlight triggered a drop in global temperatures and a sudden (geologically speaking) turnaround in the climate that spread ice sheets over much of the high latitudes in both hemispheres.

Of course, cosmic dust is falling into the Earth's atmosphere all the time, but this event caused a massive spike in the amount.  "Normally, Earth gains about 40,000 tons of extraterrestrial material every year," said study co-author Philipp Heck of the University of Chicago in an interview with Astronomy.  "Imagine multiplying that by a factor of 1,000 or 10,000."

The outcrop in Sweden that the researchers studied.  The layer containing the debris from the collision is visible as a gray line about 2/3 of the way up the cliff face.  [Image courtesy of Philipp Heck and the Field Museum]

The result of the cool-down was a huge increase in biodiversity as life forms evolved to cope with the change.  But before you start in on the "life finds a way" line of thought, and that this'll save us from the consequences of anthropogenic climate change, allow me to point out that the massive Ordovician chill was slower than today's warm-up by orders of magnitude.  "In the global cooling we studied, we're talking about timescales of millions of years," said Heck. "It's very different from the climate change caused by the meteorite 65 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs, and it's different from the global warming today — this global cooling was a gentle nudge.  There was less stress."

So yeah.  Having a thousand times the amount of dust flung at us from the explosion of an asteroid 150 kilometers across is still not as drastic as what we're currently doing to the climate.

Oh, and in a rather horrid coincidence, that quantity of debris is roughly equal to the amount of plastic we produced in 2015, 79% of which was landfilled.

So the idea that somehow the Earth is obligated to remain hospitable to human life regardless what we do to it -- or what happens outside of our sphere of control -- would be ludicrous if it weren't so terrifying.  It's why ham-handed efforts to "own the libs" by nitwits like Laura Ingraham (who tried to be funny by "attempting to drink a light-bulb stuffed steak using plastic straws") fall flat if you know anything at all about science.

Go ahead, Laura, laugh it up.  You better hope that we "libs" are overestimating the danger posed by the pro-industry, pro-fossil-fuels, damn-the-ecology-full-speed-ahead policies favored by people of your stripe.  And don't even start with me about how environmentally-conscious people are "hoping for disaster" or "trying to destroy the economy."  Fearing that something is likely to happen isn't the same as hoping it will happen, which should be clear to anyone who has an IQ larger than their shoe size and concern for anything other than short-term financial gain.

So once again, we have a piece of research about a distant event millions of years ago providing a cautionary tale about what's happening here and now.  I wish I had some kind of positive note to end this on, but increasingly, it's looking like our current behavior is likely to throw us past a tipping point -- and our long-term legacy might be appearing to some scientist in the distant future as a gray stripe in a rock outcrop.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is especially for those of you who enjoy having their minds blown.  Niels Bohr famously said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."  Physicist Philip Ball does his best to explain the basics of quantum theory -- and to shock the reader thereby -- in layman's terms in Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different, which was the winner of the 2018 Physics Book of the Year.

It's lucid, fun, and fascinating, and will turn your view of how things work upside down.  So if you'd like to know more about the behavior of the universe on the smallest scales -- and how this affects us, up here on the macro-scale -- pick up a copy of Beyond Weird and fasten your seatbelt.

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

Silence in the skies

Much as I hate to end the week on a dark note, I felt like I had to tell you about an alarming piece of research indicating that we may be in a lot more ecological trouble than we realized.

My wife and I live in a very "birdy" area -- right in the middle of a flyway, so we get a lot of what are called "passage migrants" that come through in spring heading to breeding grounds in eastern Canada, and back again in autumn as they fly toward their winter homes in more temperate latitudes.  We also have a great number of breeding residents, and (especially in a rural area such as ours) any wooded areas or natural fields are usually alive with birds, especially in late spring and early summer.

This spring, though, we noticed that there seemed to be a much smaller number, and smaller diversity, than usual.  One of the first spring birds we hear around here is the Eastern Phoebe, and the first one I heard was weeks later than usual (and we heard very few of them at all, despite the fact that they're very common most years).  We ordinarily have Baltimore Orioles nesting in our back yard, and I only heard a single oriole -- and that from a distance -- all summer.  The lovely Rose-breasted Grosbeak, usually a common bird at our feeders, showed up only once or twice in May, and not at all afterward.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of photographer Ken Thomas]

Not a single Scarlet Tanager this year.  No Least Flycatchers.  No House Wrens.  No Ruby-throated Hummingbirds.  No Veeries (sad, because its beautiful song is usually a lovely part of a walk through the woods around here).  No Black-throated Blue, Black-throated Green, Blue-winged, or Black-and-White Warblers.  Barely any Eastern Meadowlarks (usually common in the field across the road from our house, and part of the dawn chorus all summer), Indigo Buntings, Savannah Sparrows, Wood Thrushes.

Now, I'm not saying this decline was true everywhere, and it may be that some of the species we didn't see this year were abundant elsewhere.  But the shift in what once were commonplace backyard birds was striking -- and disconcerting.

Apparently, however, we're not the only ones who are experiencing an overall decline in numbers and diversity.  According to a paper published this week in Science, compared to 1970 there's been a 29% overall decrease in avian populations in the United States.

You read that right.  Over one in four are gone, an estimated total of three billion birds.

If this doesn't scare the absolute shit out of you, you need to stop and think about this a little more.

This loss of America's avifauna affects more than just birders, especially when you read the paper and find out that the decline wasn't uniform.  Species whose habitat was protected under the Migratory Bird Act -- mainly waterfowl like ducks and geese -- have done all right, and in fact some species have increased in numbers since 1970.  The hardest hit were the woodland and grassland birds -- species vulnerable to poor land utilization practices, habitat loss, and the increasing use of pesticides in agriculture.

Still, why does it matter?  A few pretty birds gone, which is sad, but why is it a concern for your average human being?  The term "canary in the coal mine" has almost become a cliché, but it applies here.  These species are sounding the alarm for overall ecological degradation, which ultimately affects all species, ourselves included.  The idea that we can devastate the environment and reap no consequences can only be believable if you have no concept whatever of how biology works.

If we don't change our ways, we're going to get our comeuppance sooner rather than later.  You can't keep pulling threads out of the tapestry without the entire thing falling to pieces.  Or, as Sierra Club founder John Muir put it: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation made the cut more because I'd like to see what others think of it than because it bowled me over: Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia.

Vallée is an interesting fellow, and certainly comes with credentials; he has an M.S. in astrophysics from the University of Lille and a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University.  He's at various times been an astronomer, a computer scientist, and a venture capitalist, and apparently was quite successful at all three.  But if you know his name, it's probably because of his connection to something else -- UFOs.

Vallée became interested in UFOs early, when he was 16 and saw one in his home town of Pontoise, France.  After earning his degree in astrophysics, he veered off into the study of the paranormal, especially allegations of alien visitation, associating himself with some pretty reputable folks (J. Allen Hynek, for example) and some seriously questionable ones (like the fraudulent Israeli spoon-bender, Uri Geller).

Vallée didn't really get the proof he was looking for (of course, because if he had we'd probably all know about it), but his decades of research compiles literally hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of alleged sightings and abductions.  And that's what Passport to Magonia is about.  To Vallée's credit, he doesn't try to explain them -- he doesn't have a favorite hypothesis he's trying to convince you of -- he simply says that there are two things that are significant: (1) the number of claims from otherwise reliable and sane folks is too high for there not to be something to it; and (2) the similarity between the claims, going all the way back to medieval claims of abductions by spirits and "elementals," is great enough to be significant.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with him, but his book is lucid and fascinating, and the case studies he cites make for pretty interesting reading.  I'd be curious to see what other Skeptophiles think of his work.

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

Pitch perfect

Following up on a post last week about our perception of aesthetics in music, today we look at the question of whether the way our brains interpret tone structure is inborn.

While it may appear on first glance that the major key scale -- to take the simplest iteration of tone structure as an example -- must be arbitrary, there's an interesting relationship between the frequencies of the notes.  Middle C, for example, has a frequency of about 260 hertz (depending on how your piano is tuned), and the C above middle C (usually written C') has exactly twice that frequency, 520 hertz.  Each note is half the frequency of the note one octave above.  The frequency of G above middle C (which musicians would say is "a fifth above") has a frequency of 3/2 that of the root note, or tonic (middle C itself), or 390 hertz.  The E above middle C (a third above) has a frequency of 5/4 that of middle C, or 325 hertz.  Together, these three make up the "major triad" -- a C major chord.  (The other notes in the major scale also have simple fractional values relative to the frequency of the tonic.)

[Note bene:  Music theoretical types are probably bouncing up and down right now and yelling that this is only true if the scale is in just temperament, and that a lot of Western orchestral instruments are tuned instead in equal temperament, where the notes are tuned in intervals that are integer powers of the basic frequency increase of one half-tone.  My response is: (1) yes, I know, and (2) what I just told you is about all I understand of the difference, and (3) the technical details aren't really germane to the research I'm about to reference.  So you must forgive my oversimplifications.]

Because there are such natural relationships between the notes in a scale, it's entirely possible that our ability to perceive them is hard-wired.  It takes no training, for example, to recognize the relationship between a spring that is vibrating at a frequency of f (the lower wave on the diagram) and one that is vibrating at a frequency of 2f (the upper wave on the diagram).  There are exactly twice the number of peaks and troughs in the higher frequency wave as there are in the lower frequency wave.

Still, being able to see a relationship and hear an analogous one is not a given.  It seems pretty instinctive; if I asked you (assuming you're not tone deaf) to sing a note an octave up or down from one I played on the piano, you probably could do it, as long as it was in your singing range.

But is this ability learned because of our early exposure to music that uses that chord structure as its basis?  To test this, it would require comparing a Western person's ability to match pitch and jump octaves (or other intervals) with someone who had no exposure to music with that structure -- and that's not easy, because most of the world's music has octaves, thirds, and fifths somewhere, even if there are other differences, such as the use of quarter-tones in a lot of Middle Eastern music.

Just this week a paper was published in the journal Current Biology called "Universal and Non-universal Features of Musical Pitch Perception Revealed by Singing," by Nori Jacoby (of the Max Planck Institute and Columbia University), Eduardo A. Undurraga, Joaquín Valdés, and Tomás Ossandón (of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), and Malinda J. McPherson and Josh H. McDermott (of MIT).  And what this team discovered is something startling; there's a tribe in the Amazon which has had no exposure to Western music, and while they are fairly good at mimicking the relationships between pairs of notes, they seemed completely unaware that they were singing completely different notes (as an example, if the researchers played a C and a G -- a fifth apart -- the test subjects might well sing back an A and an E -- also a fifth apart but entirely different notes unrelated to the first two).

The authors write:

Musical pitch perception is argued to result from nonmusical biological constraints and thus to have similar characteristics across cultures, but its universality remains unclear.  We probed pitch representations in residents of the Bolivian Amazon—the Tsimane', who live in relative isolation from Western culture—as well as US musicians and non-musicians.  Participants sang back tone sequences presented in different frequency ranges.  Sung responses of Amazonian and US participants approximately replicated heard intervals on a logarithmic scale, even for tones outside the singing range.  Moreover, Amazonian and US reproductions both deteriorated for high-frequency tones even though they were fully audible.  But whereas US participants tended to reproduce notes an integer number of octaves above or below the heard tones, Amazonians did not, ignoring the note “chroma” (C, D, etc.)...  The results suggest the cross-cultural presence of logarithmic scales for pitch, and biological constraints on the limits of pitch, but indicate that octave equivalence may be culturally contingent, plausibly dependent on pitch representations that develop from experience with particular musical systems.

Which is a very curious result.

It makes me wonder if our understanding of a particular kind of chord structure isn't hardwired, but is learned very early from exposure -- explaining why so much of pop music has a familiar four-chord structure (hilariously lampooned by the Axis of Awesome in this video, which you must watch).  I've heard a bit of the aforementioned Middle Eastern quarter-tone music, and while I can appreciate the artistry, there's something about it that "doesn't make sense to my ears."

Of course, to be fair, I feel the same way about jazz.

In any case, I thought this was a fascinating study, and like all good science, opens up a variety of other angles of inquiry.  Myself, I'm fascinated with rhythm more than pitch or chord structure, ever since becoming enthralled by Balkan music about thirty years ago.  Their odd rhythmic patterns and time signatures -- 5/8, 7/8, 11/16, 13/16, and, no lie, 25/16 -- take a good bit of getting used to, especially for people used to good old Western threes and fours.

So to conclude, here's one example -- a lovely performance of a dance tune called "Gankino," a kopanica in 11/16.  See what sense you can make of it.  Enjoy!

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation made the cut more because I'd like to see what others think of it than because it bowled me over: Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia.

Vallée is an interesting fellow, and certainly comes with credentials; he has an M.S. in astrophysics from the University of Lille and a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University.  He's at various times been an astronomer, a computer scientist, and a venture capitalist, and apparently was quite successful at all three.  But if you know his name, it's probably because of his connection to something else -- UFOs.

Vallée became interested in UFOs early, when he was 16 and saw one in his home town of Pontoise, France.  After earning his degree in astrophysics, he veered off into the study of the paranormal, especially allegations of alien visitation, associating himself with some pretty reputable folks (J. Allen Hynek, for example) and some seriously questionable ones (like the fraudulent Israeli spoon-bender, Uri Geller).

Vallée didn't really get the proof he was looking for (of course, because if he had we'd probably all know about it), but his decades of research compiles literally hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of alleged sightings and abductions.  And that's what Passport to Magonia is about.  To Vallée's credit, he doesn't try to explain them -- he doesn't have a favorite hypothesis he's trying to convince you of -- he simply says that there are two things that are significant: (1) the number of claims from otherwise reliable and sane folks is too high for there not to be something to it; and (2) the similarity between the claims, going all the way back to medieval claims of abductions by spirits and "elementals," is great enough to be significant.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with him, but his book is lucid and fascinating, and the case studies he cites make for pretty interesting reading.  I'd be curious to see what other Skeptophiles think of his work.

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

Marsupial menagerie

One of the most biologically unique spots on Earth is Australia.

Besides the fairly familiar suite of marsupial mammals, there are a lot of curious life forms.  Australia's coastal waters are the home of one of the most venomous animals in the world, the innocuous-looking box jellyfish, which has an LD-50 (dosage that is lethal to 50% of the lab animals tested) of 40 millionths of a gram per kilogram of body weight, making it one of the most toxic naturally-occurring substances known.  On a happier note, in the western parts of the country there are lyrebirds, which not only have weird threadlike tail-feathers (giving them their name, as they look like the strings of a lyre), but are some of the most accomplished avian mimics -- able to imitate cellphones, chainsaws, camera shutters, and car alarms.

Even the plants are bizarre.  One you may not have heard of is the gympie-gympie (Dendrocnide moroides), common in the rain forests of the northeast, which is covered with hairs made of silica.  Yes, that's glass.  Each of the hairs is tipped with a rather horrifying toxin, making contact with the plant excruciating.  One guy who got smacked in the face by the plant still had searing pain when he'd take a cold shower two years later.

Oh, but the Wikipedia page says the fruits are edible "if the stinging hairs that cover it are removed."

Nope.  No thanks.  I can't imagine how hungry I'd have to be even to give that a try.

The main reason for the strange flora and fauna is that the island has been geologically separated from everywhere else since it separated from Antarctica a hundred million years ago -- a point in Earth's history during which the dinosaurs were still stomping around.  This is a hell of a long time for a community of organisms to evolve along their own pathways, so it's no great wonder that many of the creatures found there exist nowhere else on Earth.  (Australia is currently heading toward Asia, but the plate is moving at a barely-perceptible seven centimeters a year -- about the speed with which your fingernails grow.  Collision is expected in, oh, about a hundred million years or so -- at which point Australia's life forms will have to contend with an influx of new species from southeast Asia.  But so it goes.  At least they have a while to prepare.)

This all comes up because of two bizarre recent discoveries in the Australian fossil record, both of very large marsupial mammals that went extinct in the Pleistocene Epoch, on the order of 1.5 million years ago.  Australia doesn't have any marsupial mammals that are very large -- the current record holder is the red kangaroo, at 1.5 meters and eighty or so kilograms.  (Even some of the smaller ones, though, were pretty scary.  If you want something to haunt your nightmares, consider the flesh-eating kangaroo Ekaltadeta ima, which lived during the Miocene Epoch and weighed on the order of thirty kilograms.  The hopping jaws of death, those were.)

In any case, the two discoveries that were the subjects of papers released last week weren't so scary, but were just as strange.  First, we have fossils of a paleorchestid -- a bizarre, superficially tapir-like marsupial only distantly related to the familiar kangaroo and koala -- which topped out at a thousand kilograms.  If its size isn't striking enough, what the current paper looks at is its bizarre bone structure, which included forelimbs locked in place at about a hundred-degree bend at the elbow.  So they couldn't flex their arms -- giving them stability, and (the authors surmise) a better ability to lever out chunks of the plants that formed their diet, but severely limiting their ability to play tennis.

A reconstruction of a paleorchestid, whose expression suggests he's up to something [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura, Palorchestes BW, CC BY 3.0]

The second discovery is of a giant kangaroo relative with a "crushing bite" -- not, apparently, for eating meat, but chewing up tough plants.  The species, Simosthenurus occidentalis, was one of a group called "short-faced kangaroos" which are all extinct now and some of which approached two meters tall.  

"Compared to the kangaroos of today, the extinct, short-faced kangaroos of ice age Australia would be a strange sight to behold," said Rex Mitchell of the University of Arkansas, leader of the team that analyzed the skulls, in an interview with Science Daily.  "The skull of the extinct kangaroo studied here differs from those of today's kangaroos in many of the ways a giant panda's skull differs from other bears. S o, it seems that the strange skull of this kangaroo was, in a functional sense, less like a modern-day kangaroo's and more like a giant panda's...  All this bone would have taken a lot of energy to produce and maintain, so it makes sense that such robust skulls wouldn't have evolved unless they really needed to bite hard into at least some more resistant foods that were important in their diets."

Sthenurus sterlingii, one of the short-faced kangaroos (not the one studied in the paper cited) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com), Sthenurus stirlingi, CC BY 3.0]

So the odd life forms in Australia are the descendants and/or cousins of equally odd life forms that aren't around any more.  Which is probably a good thing.  The box jellyfish and the gympie-gympie plant are enough to worry about, along with the myriad other venomous snakes and spiders and whatnot.  If you added the Scary Nightmare Kangaroo of Doom to the mix, I'd just avoid the place altogether.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation made the cut more because I'd like to see what others think of it than because it bowled me over: Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia.

Vallée is an interesting fellow, and certainly comes with credentials; he has an M.S. in astrophysics from the University of Lille and a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University.  He's at various times been an astronomer, a computer scientist, and a venture capitalist, and apparently was quite successful at all three.  But if you know his name, it's probably because of his connection to something else -- UFOs.

Vallée became interested in UFOs early, when he was 16 and saw one in his home town of Pontoise, France.  After earning his degree in astrophysics, he veered off into the study of the paranormal, especially allegations of alien visitation, associating himself with some pretty reputable folks (J. Allen Hynek, for example) and some seriously questionable ones (like the fraudulent Israeli spoon-bender, Uri Geller).

Vallée didn't really get the proof he was looking for (of course, because if he had we'd probably all know about it), but his decades of research compiles literally hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of alleged sightings and abductions.  And that's what Passport to Magonia is about.  To Vallée's credit, he doesn't try to explain them -- he doesn't have a favorite hypothesis he's trying to convince you of -- he simply says that there are two things that are significant: (1) the number of claims from otherwise reliable and sane folks is too high for there not to be something to it; and (2) the similarity between the claims, going all the way back to medieval claims of abductions by spirits and "elementals," is great enough to be significant.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with him, but his book is lucid and fascinating, and the case studies he cites make for pretty interesting reading.  I'd be curious to see what other Skeptophiles think of his work.

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

The most beautiful brain network

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece here at Skeptophilia about some fascinating new research suggesting that there are links between our perceptions of artistic, musical, and mathematical beauty, and expressed some puzzlement about how those could possibly connect.  In one of those lovely near-synchronicities that happen sometimes, today I happened upon some new(er) research showing what the underlying connection might be -- in one single region of the brain.

In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team made up of Edward A. Vessel and Ayse Ilkay Isik (of the Max Planck Institute), Amy M. Belfi (of the Missouri University of Science and Technology), Jonathan L. Stahl (of Ohio State University), and G. Gabrielle Starr (of Pomona College) showed that with different sorts of visual stimuli, our sense of aesthetic pleasure comes from activation of a part of the brain called the default-mode network.  The authors write:

Despite being highly subjective, aesthetic experiences are powerful moments of interaction with one’s surroundings, shaping behavior, mood, beliefs, and even a sense of self.  The default-mode network (DMN), which sits atop the cortical hierarchy and has been implicated in self-referential processing, is typically suppressed when a person engages with the external environment.  Yet not only is the DMN surprisingly engaged when one finds a visual artwork aesthetically moving, here we present evidence that the DMN also represents aesthetic appeal in a manner that generalizes across visual aesthetic domains, such as artworks, landscapes, or architecture.  This stands in contrast to ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOT), which represents the content of what we see, but does not contain domain-general information about aesthetic appeal.

Using fMRI studies, the researchers compared the responses of the brains of volunteers to three types of visual stimuli; art, architecture, and photographs of natural landscapes.  The responses of the visual cortices of the test subjects showed great variation between these three different types -- evidently the brain's effort to categorize and interpret what it's seeing, so it's no great surprise that you'd respond differently while seeing the Mona Lisa than you would looking at Chartres Cathedral.

What was surprising, though, is that while viewing visual stimuli the test subjects found aesthetically pleasing, all of them had a high response in the default-mode network, which is usually associated with contemplation, imagination, self-reflection, and inward thought.  It's uncertain if the DMN actually encodes the basics of aesthetic response, but this certainly suggests a critical role.  "We don't know yet if DMN actually computes this representation," said Edward Vessel, lead author of the paper, in an interview in EurekAlert.  "But it clearly has access to abstract information about whether we find an experience aesthetically appealing or not."

This suggests to me a couple of interesting directions this research could go.  Obviously, it'd be intriguing to find out of the DMN is also active with other types of aesthetic appreciation (such as musical and mathematical aesthetics, the subject of the previous research).  What I'd find even more fascinating, though, is to see if there's a difference in the activity of the DMN depending upon how strongly the individual is aesthetically moved.  Those responses are so highly individual that finding a biological underpinning would be amazingly cool.  Why, for example, was my wife moved to tears while looking at paintings in a Van Gogh exhibition we attended a couple of years ago in New York City?  Why do I find Édouard Manet's 1882 masterpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergère so emotionally evocative, while a lot of other art from the same period doesn't really grab me one way or the other?

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So this could be a window into finding out -- at least from a neurological standpoint -- how our brain modulates our aesthetic response.  The "why," of course, is more inscrutable -- demonstrating in an fMRI that I go into rapture hearing Stravinsky's Firebird isn't telling me anything I didn't already know, after all, and doesn't answer why I don't have the same response hearing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #2.

But at least finding a neurological basis for such judgments would be a step forward.  The Vessel et al. research is a fascinating first step into understanding the sweetest of human behaviors -- our perception of beauty in the world around us.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation made the cut more because I'd like to see what others think of it than because it bowled me over: Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia.

Vallée is an interesting fellow, and certainly comes with credentials; he has an M.S. in astrophysics from the University of Lille and a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University.  He's at various times been an astronomer, a computer scientist, and a venture capitalist, and apparently was quite successful at all three.  But if you know his name, it's probably because of his connection to something else -- UFOs.

Vallée became interested in UFOs early, when he was 16 and saw one in his home town of Pontoise, France.  After earning his degree in astrophysics, he veered off into the study of the paranormal, especially allegations of alien visitation, associating himself with some pretty reputable folks (J. Allen Hynek, for example) and some seriously questionable ones (like the fraudulent Israeli spoon-bender, Uri Geller).

Vallée didn't really get the proof he was looking for (of course, because if he had we'd probably all know about it), but his decades of research compiles literally hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of alleged sightings and abductions.  And that's what Passport to Magonia is about.  To Vallée's credit, he doesn't try to explain them -- he doesn't have a favorite hypothesis he's trying to convince you of -- he simply says that there are two things that are significant: (1) the number of claims from otherwise reliable and sane folks is too high for there not to be something to it; and (2) the similarity between the claims, going all the way back to medieval claims of abductions by spirits and "elementals," is great enough to be significant.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with him, but his book is lucid and fascinating, and the case studies he cites make for pretty interesting reading.  I'd be curious to see what other Skeptophiles think of his work.

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

Impulsive art

It's no surprise to the people who know me that I'm an enthusiast of body art.

Well, if it was a surprise, it isn't any more, because last month I had a tattoo completed that's a full sleeve, so a little hard to hide except when I'm wearing long sleeves.  Which, being that this is upstate New York, is something on the order of ten months of the year, so maybe people didn't find out till this summer.

In any case, the design has two parts -- a twining series of vines in honor of my gardener mother, and a snake in honor of my outdoorsman, animal-loving father.

Me being worked on by my artist, the incomparable James Spiers of Model Citizen Tattoos

This comes up because of a study done recently at Wilfred Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario) by a pair of social psychologists, Anne Wilson and Bradley Ruffle, to find out if there was any personality component to the choice of getting tattoos.  They sorted a thousand volunteers into three groups -- no ink at all, ink that can be easily hidden, and visible ink.  They then gave the volunteers personality assessments geared toward finding out how they scored on measures of short-sightedness and impulsivity.

What they found is that the visible-tattoo group considered the future the least, and were the most impulsive, and the non-tattooed people were the most future-oriented and least impulsive (with the non-visible tattooed people, of course, in the middle on both metrics).  This is, on first glance, not surprising; we've all seen cases of ink that was clearly an ill-thought-out spur of the moment decision (the guy who has "No Ragrets" scrawled on his upper chest being the classic example).  I'm kind of at the other end of the spectrum -- not only am I pretty cautious by nature, I also thought about the decision for all three of my tattoos for over a year, then once I made the decision to go for it, spent equally long planning the design.  As a result, I've never regretted (or ragretted, as the case may be) any of my ink for a moment.

My first tattoo (which I got about fifteen years ago)

So it's unsurprising that counterbalancing outliers like myself would be the fraction of people who either make impulsive jumps into getting inked, or else don't think through the consequences (such as trying to find employment with companies that have a no-visible-ink policy).

My second one, from about eight years ago -- a Celtic dragon in honor of my Scottish grandma.  [Nota bene: my leg usually isn't this hairless.  This photo was taken the day I got the tattoo done.]

The researchers determined short-sightedness by using a delayed-gratification scenario -- you can get a small payment now, or wait three weeks and get a larger payment.  In the Wilson and Ruffle study, the immediate payment was a dollar, and the delayed payment increased from a dollar to two-fifty (the idea was to see how much of an incentive it would take for people to wait).  The trend was that the non-tattooed people were willing to wait to get a larger payout much more readily than the tattooed people were.

What strikes me is that I'm not at all averse to waiting for a larger reward; I'm about as far from an instant-gratification type as you can get.  But the difference in my life between a dollar and two-fifty is so small that it doesn't seem to matter much, so I can't imagine that small a change influencing my decision any.  Now, if you went from ten to twenty-five dollars, that'd be a hell of a lot more of an incentive, even though it's the same percentage increase.  An extra fifteen bucks would make a difference to me.

So I wonder what would happen if you sliced the data a different way -- group the people according to wealth.  My guess is the poorer people would jump at a quicker (and smaller) reward, and the wealthier people would be more willing to wait -- regardless of their body art.

That's only a guess, of course, and even if I'm right the trend that Wilson and Ruffle found is pretty interesting.  I've had people comment on my tattoos from the standpoint that I don't "seem like the type who would get tattooed."  I don't know about that -- I've always loved body art (artistically done, and in moderation, it can be absolutely beautiful).  I guess being a shy introvert does make it kind of weird that I'd do something that makes me more noticeable.

Oh, well.  People are complex, which keeps social psychologists like Wilson and Ruffle in business.  Like Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then, I contradict myself.  (I am large; I contain multitudes.)"

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation made the cut more because I'd like to see what others think of it than because it bowled me over: Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia.

Vallée is an interesting fellow, and certainly comes with credentials; he has an M.S. in astrophysics from the University of Lille and a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University.  He's at various times been an astronomer, a computer scientist, and a venture capitalist, and apparently was quite successful at all three.  But if you know his name, it's probably because of his connection to something else -- UFOs.

Vallée became interested in UFOs early, when he was 16 and saw one in his home town of Pontoise, France.  After earning his degree in astrophysics, he veered off into the study of the paranormal, especially allegations of alien visitation, associating himself with some pretty reputable folks (J. Allen Hynek, for example) and some seriously questionable ones (like the fraudulent Israeli spoon-bender, Uri Geller).

Vallée didn't really get the proof he was looking for (of course, because if he had we'd probably all know about it), but his decades of research compiles literally hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of alleged sightings and abductions.  And that's what Passport to Magonia is about.  To Vallée's credit, he doesn't try to explain them -- he doesn't have a favorite hypothesis he's trying to convince you of -- he simply says that there are two things that are significant: (1) the number of claims from otherwise reliable and sane folks is too high for there not to be something to it; and (2) the similarity between the claims, going all the way back to medieval claims of abductions by spirits and "elementals," is great enough to be significant.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with him, but his book is lucid and fascinating, and the case studies he cites make for pretty interesting reading.  I'd be curious to see what other Skeptophiles think of his work.

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