The language of music

Music is, in a lot of ways, the universal human language.  If there is a culture that does not have some form of music, I've never heard of it.  It speaks to us on a deep, primal level, which is why dance is as ubiquitous as music.

We hear the beat, we want to move our bodies, and for a lot of us, that experience is transformative, almost transcendent.

It's also undeniable that musical traditions differ.  I've been a musician since I was a teen, primarily on flute and piano (although I also play bagpipes, something I think accords me some bragging rights, although others may differ, such as my wife and my two dogs).  I've played primarily in three different musical traditions -- western European classical music, traditional Celtic music, and Balkan music.  It hardly bears mention that these idioms differ, as do (honestly) just about any two musical traditions you want to pick.  From the formal, cerebral intricacy of J. S. Bach, to the wild abandon of an Irish reel, to the insane asymmetrical time signatures of a Bulgarian kopanica, there's no doubt that there are tremendous differences in style, rhythm, melody, and structure.

Me and the amazing fiddler Deborah Rifkin performing some loony Macedonian tune in 11/16 at Folk College a few years ago

An interesting question, considering how universal music appears to be, is if there really is an underlying similarity between all of these traditions.  The differences are obvious; consider the different scales used in a lot of Jewish folk music that gives its distinctive sound, and even odder (to my ear) are the quarter-tone intervals used in Middle Eastern music from such ethnically distinct traditions as the music of the Arabs, Turks, and Persians.

To answer this question, a team led by Samuel Mehr of Harvard University did a structural analysis of 5,000 songs from 60 different cultures, and found that despite the differences there are fundamental similarities between music no matter where it's from or what purpose it serves.  The authors write:

Music is in fact universal: It exists in every society (both with and without words), varies more within than between societies, regularly supports certain types of behavior, and has acoustic features that are systematically related to the goals and responses of singers and listeners.  But music is not a fixed biological response with a single prototypical adaptive function: It is produced worldwide in diverse behavioral contexts that vary in formality, arousal, and religiosity.  Music does appear to be tied to specific perceptual, cognitive, and affective faculties, including language (all societies put words to their songs), motor control (people in all societies dance), auditory analysis (all musical systems have signatures of tonality), and aesthetics (their melodies and rhythms are balanced between monotony and chaos).

It's a fascinating result, and makes me wonder if we have some fundamental brain structure that is responsible for not only our universal response to music, but the commonalities that exist between songs from different cultures.   "In the way that all languages in the world have a set of phonemes – all words in the world are made up of small sets of speech sounds – so it is with melodies," said W. Tecumseh Fitch, of the University of Vienna, who co-authored the study.  "All melodies can be built up from a small set of notes.  This suggests there is a biological basis that is constant across all humans, but interpreted differently in different human cultures."

Which I think is amazingly cool.  We've already seen here at Skeptophilia that musical training enhances brain plasticity, and seen music's role in emotional catharsis, so it should come as no real surprise that there could be an underlying neurological reason why it affects us on so many different levels.

One limitation of the study that came to my mind, however, is that all they looked at were songs.  As versatile as the human voice is, this restricts the range (literally) of melodies they could consider.  Additionally, there are musical traditions that have traveled very far from the tonal centering the researchers found to be ubiquitous -- consider the twelve-tone system of the brilliant Arnold Schönberg, and the startlingly experimental music of people like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, just as three examples.  There's no denying that there are people who find their pieces emotionally moving, but they're about as far from a simple folk melody as you can get.

You have to wonder what Mehr et al.'s algorithm would do with them.

But enough of this.  I've been listening to some piano music by Claude Debussy while I'm writing this, and one of my favorite pieces -- La cathédral engloutie (The Drowned Cathedral) just came on.  I think I'm ready just to close my eyes and sink into it.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

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

An unusual outburst

There's something about the very large and the very small that never fails to be awe-inspiring.

I remember when my eighth grade science teacher was trying to impress upon us how tiny atoms were.  She asked us to think about how many atoms were in a typical raindrop.  Then she asked, "If you had the same number of grains of sand as there are atoms in a raindrop, how much sand would you have?"

The guesses were all over the place.  A bucket full.  A dump truck full.  A whole beach full.

But no, she said.  If you had as many grains of sand as there are atoms in a raindrop, you'd have enough to fill a trench a kilometer deep, three kilometers across...

... stretching all the way around the world at the equator.

I've since tried to do some ballpark estimation to see if this is right, and it appears to be pretty damn close.  If anything, it's an underestimate.

Then there's the world of the very large.  Voyager 1, one of the fastest spacecraft ever launched (hit speeds of 17 kilometers per second).  At those speeds, how long would it take to reach the nearest star other than the Sun -- Alpha Centauri?

Turns out it's 70,000 years.  The nearest star.  If it were heading that direction, which it's not.

Yeah, the universe we live in is a place of extremes.  But since we live in that middle zone in between, our brains aren't all that well-equipped to comprehend those extremes.  It doesn't take much before we simply boggle.  "Okay, that's small," or "okay, that's big," and we can't really get past that.  This, I think, is why the average U. S. citizen isn't all that concerned when (s)he hears that the federal deficit is now nudging close to one trillion dollars.

A trillion?  It's big.  That's a lot of money.  But so is a billion, and so is a million.

"Meh."  *shrugs shoulders*

I have to watch that tendency myself, and I consider myself at least above average at mathematics.  Which is why I had to do a little mental arithmetic when I read a paper published this week in Nature about one of the biggest, most powerful phenomena known -- a gamma-ray burster.

Artist's depiction of a gamma-ray burster [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Gamma-ray bursters are basically the death screams of enormous supergiant stars.  When one of those becomes a supernova, on its way to its final destination as a black hole, the shock waves from the explosion smash into the clouds of gas and debris moving outward from the star's surface, but traveling more slowly than the shock waves are.  This pumps energy into the gas clouds and triggers them to emit light.  Then the electrons freed by the collision slingshot even more energy into the light in a process called inverse Compton scattering.

The result is a jet of electromagnetic radiation like nothing else in the universe.  As spectacular as it is, it would be no fun to witness up close.  Any planet anywhere near -- and by near, keep in mind that I mean hundreds of light years -- would be flash-fried within milliseconds.

Here's something to wrap your head around.  One of the more familiar units of energy to science types is the electron volt.  What exactly it means, and why it's named that, isn't really critical here, but to give you a feel for it, your average photon of visible light carries with it an energy on the order of between one and three electron volts.

This week's paper describes the capture, by the two MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov) Telescopes on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, of photons from a gamma-ray burster that carried one trillion electron volts of energy.  (There's no reason for concern, however.  The explosion in question took place 4.5 billion light years away, so by the time it got here, the energetic remnants were barely more than a blip.)

Here's another comparison, if that one wasn't enough for you.  Gamma-ray bursts of this type generally last between a few seconds and two minutes.  And in that time, more energy is released than the Sun will release in its entire lifetime.

At that point, my brain kind of goes into vapor lock and freezes up.  All I'm left with is the feeling of being very, very small.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing.  We humans tend to get a bit cocky at times, and it's good that sometimes we're reminded we're little fish in an extremely big pond.  The problems and day-to-day struggles we face down here are, in the grand scheme of things, insignificant.

On the other hand, I'm still pretty freakin' worried about the federal deficit.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

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

Unbearable

I remembering going to visit my parents during the Christmas season in the mid-1980s, and there was this new thing on the market for kids called "Teddy Ruxpin."  Teddy Ruxpin was a talking teddy bear that would move his eyes and mouth while "saying" pre-recorded lines, first on a cassette tape, and (in later models) on a digital device.

Teddy Ruxpin was a massive hit, largely due to an equally massive advertising campaign.  They flew off the shelves.  Toy stores couldn't keep them in stock.  Desperate parents of spoiled children paid huge amounts for black market Teddies Ruxpin.

I recall this primarily, though, for a different reason than crass commercialism, a phenomenon so deeply entrenched in American culture that it's hardly worth commenting on.  What I mostly remember about Teddy Ruxpin was that during the height of the craze, a batch of the toys went out that had defective playback devices.  They played the recordings slowly, with a lower pitch, with the result that Teddy Ruxpin's voice sounded like a cross between Morgan Freeman and Satan.

I still recall the news broadcast where a reporter, trying heroically to keep a straight face, talked about the recall, and activated one of the defective bears.  "I WANT TO PLAY WITH YOU," Teddy said in a sepulchral voice, all the while smiling cheerfully.  "HA HA HA HA HA HA."  Apparently the voice was scary enough that several children had already been traumatized when they activated their bear, expecting a cheerful cartoon-character voice, and instead got something that sounded like the soundtrack from The Exorcist.

My dad and I took about 45 minutes to stop laughing.  Over dinner, one of us would say, "PASS THE KETCHUP," in a Darth Vader voice, adding, "HA HA HA HA HA."  And then we'd both crack up again, much to the chagrin of my poor, long-suffering mother, who had many fine qualities but was born without a sense of humor.

This all comes up because of a new talking teddy bear, also designed for children, but with a special twist.

This teddy bear is supposed to be appealing to dead children.

I wish I was kidding about this, but I'm not.  I heard about it on Sharon Hill's wonderful site Doubtful News, and she has an excellent reputation for veracity.  Apparently the idea is that the bear, who is named (I kid you not) "BooBuddy," says things that might be attractive or interesting to the spirits of dead children, who then will approach the bear and activate an EMF detector, making LEDs on his paws light up.

Here's the sales pitch, from Ghost Stop, the site that is selling Boo Buddy:

Not your average bear! BooBuddy is cute as a button and so much more.  This ghost hunting trigger object responds to environmental changes and even asks EVP questions to initiate interaction and potential evidence. 

BooBuddy is not a toy - he's an investigator! 

Within the ghost hunting and paranormal investigations field, some theories suggest that using an object familiar and attractive to an entity may entice them to interact.  This is called a 'trigger object'.  BooBuddy is just that and more allowing us the ability to 'see' changes in the environment and initiate communication on it's [sic] own. 

Set BooBuddy and turn it on to detect environment changes and start asking questions.  Make sure to set a recorder or camcorder near the doll to document any potential responses.  That, and BooBuddy loves being on camera!

Sure he does.

I'm not at all sure what I could say about this, other than that I would buy one for the novelty value alone, if they weren't $99.95.  I guess if you believe all of this stuff about trigger objects and EMF fluctuations and so on, BooBuddy is as sensible as anything else out there.  And if anyone does conduct any... um, empirical research using the teddy bear, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know the results.

Unless it says something like "HEY CHILDREN... DO YOU WANT TO PLAY WITH ME?  HA HA HA HA HA HA."  And then winks at you.  Because that would be scary as hell.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

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

The biochemical zoo

The human/alien hybrid is a common trope in science fiction.  From the angst-ridden half-Vulcan Mr. Spock, to the ultra-competent and powerful half-Klingon B'Elanna Torres, to the half-Betazoid empath Deanna Troi, the idea of having two intelligent humanoid species produce children together is responsible for dozens of plot twists in Star Trek alone.

Much as I love the idea (and the show), the likelihood of a human being able to engage in any hot bow-chicka-bow-wow with an alien, and have that union produce an offspring, is damn near zero.  Even if the two in question had all the various protrusions and indentations more or less lined up, the main issue is the compatibility of the genetic material.  I mean, consider it; it's usually impossible for two ordinary terrestrial species to hybridize -- even related ones (say, a Red-tailed Hawk and a Peregrine Falcon) are far enough apart genetically that any chance mating would produce an unviable embryo.

Now consider how likely it is to have genetic compatibility between a terrestrial species and one from the fourth planet orbiting Alpha Centauri.

Any hope you might have had for a steamy tryst with an alien just got smashed even further by a study that came out of a study from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Emory University, and the German Aerospace Center a few days ago.  Entitled, "One Among Millions: The Chemical Space of Nucleic Acid-Like Molecules," by Henderson James Cleaves II, Christopher Butch, Pieter Buys Burger, Jay Goodwin, and Markus Meringer, the study shows that the DNA and RNA that underlies the genetics of all life on Earth is only one of millions of possible information-encoding molecules that could be out there in the universe.

It was amazing how diverse these molecules were, even given some pretty rigid parameters.  Restricting the selection to linear polymers (so the building blocks have to have attachment points that allow for the formation of chains), and three constituent atoms -- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, like our own carbohydrates -- the researchers found 706,568 possible combinations (counting configurations and their mirror images, pairs of molecules that are called stereoisomers).  Adding nitrogen (so, hooking in chemicals like proteins and the DNA and RNA nitrogenous bases, the letters of the DNA and RNA alphabets) complicated matters some -- but they still got 454,442 possible configurations.

The results were a surprise even to the researchers.  "There are two kinds of nucleic acids in biology, and maybe twenty or thirty effective nucleic acid-binding nucleic acid analogs," said Henderson James Cleaves, who led the study, in an interview in SciTechDaily.  "We wanted to know if there is one more to be found...  The answer is, there seem to be many, many more than was expected."

Co-author Pieter Burger of Emory University is excited about the possible medical applications of this study.  "It is absolutely fascinating to think that by using modern computational techniques we might stumble upon new drugs when searching for alternative molecules to DNA and RNA that can store hereditary information," Burger said.  "It is cross-disciplinary studies such as this that make science challenging and fun yet impactful."

While I certainly can appreciate the implications of this research from an Earth-based standpoint, I was immediately struck by its application to the search for extraterrestrial life.  As I mentioned earlier, it was already nearly impossible that humans and aliens would have cross-compatible DNA, but now it appears that alien life might well not be constrained to a DNA-based genetic code at all.  I always thought that DNA, or something very close to it, would be found in any life form we run across, whether on this planet or another; but the Cleaves et al. study suggests that there are a million or more other ways that organisms might spell out their genetic code.

So this drastically increases the likelihood of life on other planets.  The tighter the parameters for life, the less likely it is -- so the discovery of a vast diversity of biochemistry opens up the field in a manner that is breathtaking.

... but the chance that the aliens will look like this is, sadly, pretty low.

This raises the problem of whether we'll recognize alien life when we see it.  The typical things you look for if you're trying to figure out if something's alive -- such as a metabolism involving the familiar organic compounds all our cells contain -- might cause us to overlook something that is alive but is being carried along by a completely different chemistry.

And what an organism with that completely different chemistry might look like -- how it would move, eat, sense its environment, reproduce, and think -- well, there'd be an embarrassment of riches.  The possibilities are far beyond even the Star Trek universe, with their fanciful aliens that look basically human but with odd facial structures and funny accents.

The whole thing boggles the mind.  And it further reinforces a conclusion I've held for a very long time; I suspect that we'll find life out there pretty much everywhere we look, and even on some planets we'd have thought completely inhospitable.  The "Goldilocks Zone" -- the region surrounding a star where orbiting planets would have conditions that are "just right" for life to form -- is looking like it might be a vaster territory than we'd ever dreamed.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

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

Jurassic bird

Regular readers of Skeptophilia know that I have scant patience for creationists, but what really grinds my gears about them is that so often their questions and objections to evolutionary theory are an indication that they haven't even bothered to find out what the scientists are actually saying.

A few examples, that I am still seeing and hearing, even though a three-minute Google search would answer them in a way even a third-graders would understand:

1.  If humans came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

If God created humans from dust, why is there still dust?

2.  Evolution is ridiculous.  They're expecting you to believe that a fish gave birth to a bird.

No, actually, no one is trying to get you to believe that, and your apparent failure to understand what the theory says is not evidence that it's wrong.

3.  Scientists have disproven/discredited (choose as many as you want from the following): radioisotope dating, Darwin's theory of natural selection, the existence of beneficial mutations, the antiquity of the Earth.  They are abandoning evolution as a failed theory in droves.

No, they haven't, and no they aren't.  Next question.

4.  If evolution is true, there's no reason to be moral, and there should be no problem if we run around murdering and pillaging and raping all the time.

All you have to do is look at the degree of cooperation and social bonding in a wolf pack to recognize why that's wrong.  Oh, and if all that's keeping you from murdering and pillaging and raping is your religion, then I think you're the one with the questionable moral standards, not me.

5.  There are no transitional fossils.  There's no hard evidence of "missing links" between different groups of organisms.

There are actually thousands of fossils of transitional species.  The problem is, if you tell a creationist, "Look, here's a species B that's a transition between A and C!" he'll say, "Yeah, well now you have two gaps -- between A and B, and between B and C!"

It's the transitional fossil question that brings up this topic today, because of an awesome discovery in Japan that was the subject of a paper in Communications Biology last week.  In "An Unusual Bird (Theropoda, Avialae) from the Early Cretaceous of Japan Suggests Complex Evolutionary History of Basal Birds," Takuya Imai, Yoichi Azuma, Soichiro Kawabe, Masateru Shibata, and Kazunori Miyata (of Fukui Prefectural University), and Min Wang and Zhonghe Zhou (of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) describe a fascinating new species, christened Fukuipteryx prima, that is adding to what we know about the evolutionary history of birds, and their relationship to theropod dinosaurs.

Grumpy bird is sick of those creationists' shit.  [Restoration of Fukuipteryx prima by Masanori Yoshida]

The authors write:

Except for the Late Jurassic Archaeopteryx, non-ornithothoracine birds had previously been known only from the Jehol Biota [China] and contemporary deposits in northern Korean Peninsula.  The discovery of F. prima further increases the geological distribution of non-ornithothoracine birds.  It appears that non-ornithothoracine avialans are not restricted to a relatively cold, highland lacustrine environment in the Early Cretaceous of north-eastern China, but inhabited more temperate, lowland regions such as the one represented by the Kitadani Formation, most likely with other ornithothoracines widespread around the globe.  Further exploration of the Early Cretaceous fossil birds outside East Asia are greatly needed to clarify the palaeogeographical distribution of these basal birds.  Very recently, several new genera and species of non-ornithothoracine avialans have been described from north-eastern China.  These discoveries and this study suggest non-ornithothoracine avialans may represent a diverse group within the Avialae.

So Fukuipteryx (and Archaeopteryx as well) are basically cousins to modern birds (the "Ornithothoracines," a term that means "bird thorax" and signifies an internal chest structure similar to modern birds).  But it clearly shows the transition of an animal that was more dinosaur-like into something more bird-like, adding one more link in the chain between the two groups and further strengthening the assertion that, basically, modern birds are dinosaurs.

I'm sure it won't take the creationists long to start disputing all this, however.  As I've remarked before, if you disbelieve in the methods of science, you're kind of unreachable.  (I've heard it put, you can't logic your way out of a belief you didn't logic your way into.)  But for the rest of us, this is just one more fascinating piece of the puzzle -- another one of Darwin's "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful" that evolution has generated on our planet.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

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

Religious expression in science class

Did you hear about Ohio House Bill 164?

It's been called the "Student Religious Liberties Act."  It contains four provisions:

• It requires public schools to give students the same access to facilities if they want to meet for religious expression as they’d give secular groups.
• It removes a provision that allows school districts to limit religious expression to lunch periods or other non-instructional times.
• It allows students to engage in religious expression before, during and after school hours to the same extent as a student in secular activities or expression.
• It prohibits schools from restricting a student from engaging in religious expression in completion of homework, artwork and other assignments.

It's the last one that made me sit up and take notice.

Despite being an atheist, I have no problem with public schools allowing religious groups to meet on their property, as long as there's no statement (overt or implied) that students are required be there.  I don't really have a problem with provision #2 except that it's ambiguous -- who is leading the religious expression?  If students want to say a prayer before an exam, no big deal.

If the teacher leads the class in a prayer before an exam, big deal.

Eastman Johnson, A Child at Prayer (1873) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Likewise, #3 is no real issue as long as there's no coercion.  But #4?

Just hang on a moment.

So what you're telling me is that my biology students could "engage in religious expression" in their homework, to the extent of saying the Earth is 6,000 years old and life was whooshed into existence by a Big Dude in the Sky?  That they could claim radioisotope dating doesn't work?  That they could state that the Grand Canyon was formed in a big, worldwide flood, and the only survivors were a 700-year-old man and his family who rescued two of each of the nine-million-odd species on Earth, conveniently dropping them off in their ancestral homelands afterward?  And all the water just sort of "went away?"

If an administrator told me I had to do that, my response would include the word "No," but the rest of it would be barely printable without a "strong language" warning.

Teachers are under no obligation to coddle students' erroneous beliefs, whether or not they come under the heading of "religion."  If a kid comes in and tries to convince me homeopathy works or that vaccines cause autism or that there's a secret code in our DNA implanted there by Ancient Aliens, I am abrogating my duty as a science teacher if I don't (gently and kindly) show them why they're wrong.  That's what science is about -- using the tools of inference, logic, and evidence to figure out how things work.

If your wild imaginings, fears, or wishful thinking lead you to an answer that is demonstrably wrong, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to pretend you're right just out of some misguided sympathy.   And I don't care particularly where the aforementioned wrong stuff came from.  It could come from Monster Quest or from Chariots of the Gods... or the Bible.  The source is completely irrelevant.

What matters is that science is about figuring out the truth, not about making us comfortable.

There are folks who might think my fury about this is an overreaction, that provision #4 just guarantees that students can put religious imagery or references into art, personal essays, and so on.  This is nonsense; students have always been able to do that.  (There was a claim zooming around the internet a while back about a kid who had turned in a paper saying her biggest inspiration was Jesus, but the Evil Secular Teacher wrote in red ink "Remove Jesus Please!" and gave her an F.  The illustration was obviously photoshopped, and the whole story made up, but that didn't stop a lot of extremely religious people from posting indignant screeds about how the United States was going to hell.)

No, provision #4 is yet another attack on science teachers, an attempt to shoehorn Genesis and the Great Flood into the classroom.  It's a sneaky way to protect kids who claim there's doubt about evolution (there isn't), that there's no evidence of the Big Bang (there is, plenty of it), and that plate tectonics is false (it's not), allowing them to write down blatant falsehoods in a discipline that is supposed to value the truth, and still not be penalized for it.

It is, simply put, another attempt to destroy the separation of church and state.

Oh, and I didn't tell you the worst news: Ohio House Bill 164 passed.

By a margin of 61 to 3.

I can only hope that the fight's not over, that this legislation will generate lawsuits about constitutionality, but it does demonstrate the fact that the people who would love to see the United States become a fundamentalist theocracy aren't giving up.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

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

Explorer, scientist... and hoaxer

Ever heard of André Thevet?

Born around 1516 in Angoulême, France, he was educated in the convent school of that city, although his teachers recorded that as a child he was "more interested in reading books than he was in religion," which seems like a reasonable choice to me.  Be that as it may, he evidently decided religion was worth studying after all, because at the age of twenty he took his vows and became a Franciscan priest.

[All the images in the post are in the Public Domain]

He led a life that was pretty remarkable, especially as compared to most of the people of his day (even the well-educated ones).  With the blessing of Jean de Bar-le-Duc, Cardinal of Lorraine, he visited Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and Palestine -- and in 1555 set out with Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, a French naval officer, to cross the Atlantic and explore the eastern coast of South America.

Now, keep in mind when all this was happening.  This is fifty years before the founding of Jamestown, Virginia.  It's ten years before the founding of St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest continuously-occupied city founded by Europeans in North America.

So no one in Europe knew much about the Americas at that point other than (1) they existed, (2) they were big, and (3) they were inhabited by people who weren't really all that receptive to a bunch of white guys showing up and saying "this is ours now."

But that didn't stop Thevet and de Villegaignon, who ended up in what is now Brazil, with their base of operations as the tiny settlement that ultimately would become Rio de Janeiro.  And this is where the story gets interesting.

Thevet was a self-styled naturalist, and he set about to document, describe, and draw all the interesting new plants and animals he found.  But the problem was, Thevet was also apparently a dedicated spinner of wild yarns.  So his book, Les singularités du France-Antarctique, has a few at least marginally accurate bits, like the sloth:

And this toucan:

But then, for reasons unknown, Thevet threw in some things like the succarath of Patagonia:

Which looks like he could use a good meal or two.  Then there's the camphruch, a sort of weird water unicorn thing (notice the webbed hind feet):

And the aloés, a sort of fish-goose mashup:

The yuanat, which apparently is the bastard child of a cat and an iguana:

And worst of all, the licorne-de-mer, which looks a bit like a giant fish with a chainsaw protruding from its forehead:

What strikes me about all of this is that I've been to South America (twice), and there's enough weird and fascinating wildlife there that you have to wonder what Thevet's possible motivation was for inventing all of this.  (I'm aware that some of this may have been quick glimpses followed by filling in the blanks in his memory with whatever came to mind.  I already noted the yuanat's resemblance to an iguana, and the saw-horn of the licorne-de-mer looks like the flat, toothed snout of a sawfish.  But still, a lot of it seems to have been spun from whole cloth.)

It's a question I've asked before -- what does a hoaxer get out of hoaxing?  Assuming there's not some obvious motivation like money?  Profit doesn't seem to be the issue here.  Thevet would likely have had precisely the same number of sales of his book, once he got back to France, with illustrations of real animals and plants as he did with all of this fanciful stuff that he'd clearly made up as he went along.  I mean, you don't need to exaggerate anything to see how bizarre the Pink Fairy Armadillo is:

Or the White-faced Saki:

Or the South American Tapir:

My guess is that he just got lazy, and decided it was more fun to sit on board ship and sip brandy and make up fanciful animals than it was tromping around the rain forest trying to see what was actually out there.

Thevet was hardly the only one who did this, of course.  The early days of European exploration were rife with examples of people coming back from ship voyages with bizarre tales of human tribes with their faces in the middle of their chests, people who had dogs' heads, people whose feet pointed backwards so their tracks would confuse anyone trying to follow them, a tribe whose members had enormous, pendulous elephant ears, and one-legged men with a single enormous foot that they used as a parasol on hot days (a legend used for wonderfully humorous effect in C. S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader).  I guess "yeah, we had a good trip and saw some cool people who looked basically like us only with darker skin" just wasn't good enough.

As amusing as all this may seem, I find this tendency maddening.  It's hard enough to figure out what's real and what's not under ordinary circumstances, but hoaxers complicate matters, and for no good reason other than a desire for notoriety.  So as much as I can chuckle at Thevet's duck/lion/unicorn, people like him set back the actual science of natural history significantly with their fairy stories.

I'd like to say that all of this is a thing of the past, but it's the same thing that motivates a lot of claims of cryptid-hunters, isn't it?  Now, I hasten to say that this doesn't invalidate all cryptid claims; as I've said many times before, there may really be something weird and unknown to biology out there lurking in the woods, lakes, or oceans.  But we have enough trouble dealing with the inevitable tendency of people (especially under high-adrenaline conditions) to exaggerate or misinterpret what they see and hear without the added complication of hoaxers making shit up.

So I encourage you to go to South America, which is a wonderful, diverse, fascinating, and huge place to explore.  It's home to over 300 species of hummingbirds (the eastern United States has a grand total of one), and countless other birds, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, insects, and assorted miscellany.  If you go there, though, watch out for cat-iguanas.  I hear they pack a nasty bite.

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Last week's Skeptophilia book recommendation was a fun book about math; this week's is a fun book about science.

In The Canon, New York Times and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Natalie Angier takes on a huge problem in the United States (and, I suspect, elsewhere), and does it with her signature clarity and sparkling humor: science illiteracy.

Angier worked with scientists from a variety of different fields -- physics, geology, biology, chemistry, meteorology/climatology, and others -- to come up with a compendium of what informed people should, at minimum, know about science.  In each of the sections of her book she looks at the basics of a different field, and explains concepts using analogies and examples that will have you smiling -- and understanding.

This is one of those books that should be required reading in every high school science curriculum.  As Angier points out, part of the reason we're in the environmental mess we currently face is because people either didn't know enough science to make smart decisions, or else knew it and set it aside for political and financial short-term expediency.  Whatever the cause, though, she's right that only education can cure it, and if that's going to succeed we need to counter the rote, dull, vocabulary-intense way science is usually taught in public schools.  We need to recapture the excitement of science -- that understanding stuff is fun.  

Angier's book takes a long stride in that direction.  I recommend it to everyone, layperson and science geek alike.  It's a whirlwind that will leave you laughing, and also marveling at just how cool the universe is.