A botanical messiah

Given all the horrible and discouraging news we're bombarded with on a daily basis, sometimes it's nice to focus on some of the positive things humans are doing.

Today we'll look at Carlos Magdalena, the Spanish-born botanical horticulturist who works with saving severely endangered plant species in his lab at Kew Gardens, near London.  As a brief aside, Kew is one of those places I think everyone should visit at some point in their lives.  Besides simply being gorgeous, it has one of the most extensive collections of rare plants in the world, and a half-day's walk through their greenhouses (or "glasshouses" as they call them in the UK) will open your eyes to the astonishing diversity gifted to us by the process of evolution.

The darker side of this, however, is the extent to which the world's plant species are threatened.  It's a general rule in evolutionary biology that when conditions are stable, natural selection favors specialization (witness the hundreds of species of hummingbirds in the Andes, many of which specialize in living at a narrow range of altitudes and feeding on only one or two species of flowers).  Changing conditions, however, favor generalists -- such as the preponderance of rats and pigeons in most of the world's cities.

The problem is that human actions have caused formerly stable ecosystems to start changing quickly, and the specialists are being hit hard.  Nowhere is this more obvious than the Amazonian rain forest, where a policy of turning over tracts of woodland on what honestly is marginal soil to agricultural and mining interests, something that has only accelerated with the reckless and ignorant policies of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.  (Encouraged, it must be added, by Donald Trump, whose attitude toward the environment seems to be "use it up and who gives a shit what happens afterward.")

The result has been devastating.  Magdalena estimates that one in five plant species worldwide is on the way to extinction, and that species go extinct every day -- some without ever being catalogued and studied.

But I said this was going to be an upbeat post, so I want to look at what Magdalena is doing to fight against this -- and how his efforts may be saving dozens of species from disappearing forever.

Magdalena's specialty is figuring out how to germinate seeds.  It's trickier than it sounds; if you're a gardener you probably buy packets of seeds at your local home and garden store, but what you may not realize is that the reason those varieties are sold is because they've got the unusual feature of being easy to germinate.  Where I live, here in upstate New York, seeds of most native species need to be stratified in order to germinate -- they need to be exposed to a period of cold, simulating passage through the winter.

Explaining why my attempts as a kid to grow an apple tree from a seed in an apple I'd eaten all resulted in failure.

Other plants, though, have additional complications.  Despite my background in evolutionary biology, one thing I've never quite understood is why some plants have seeds that are ridiculously difficult to germinate (many types of orchids come to mind).  The only reason I've come up with goes back to specialization; if a plant lives in a very stable ecosystem with an extremely narrow range of conditions, evolving to require those conditions and no others isn't a significant disadvantage.  It only becomes a problem if you take the seeds and try to sprout them elsewhere -- because then you have to somehow emulate all of those factors in your greenhouse.

But Magdalena might be the world's expert on solving this problem.  He single-handedly saved the world's smallest water lily, Nymphaea thermarum, when the only known population of the plant (in Rwanda) was destroyed in 2008.  His work with this and other species of severely endangered plants led to his being dubbed in a Spanish newspaper as el mesias de las plantas -- "the messiah of plants."

It's an apt moniker.

Nymphaea thermarum [Image courtesy of Carlos Magdalena and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew]

What Magdalena is trying to accomplish, however, sometimes must seem an uphill battle.  "There are seventy species of plants that we know of that have less than ten individuals left," he said in the interview linked above.  "In some cases, there is just the last individual plant left, or there are the last three individuals left.  Those will probably be more of a priority because the clock is ticking, and these specimens might have only few minutes left.  These last individuals could disappear by the end of this week.  Maybe the individuals could disappear with the next cyclone, or when the next pest gets introduced."

He's currently working on plant species from the island of Mauritius, best known to biologists as the former home of the dodo.  He was successful at germinating the seeds of a species in the genus Elaeocarpus for which only two individuals were left alive, but has been unsuccessful thus far at propagating the palm Hyophorbe amaricaulus -- which is down to a population of one.

However difficult his job can be, Magdalena is impelled to keep at it because of its critical importance.  "We cannot stabilize the planet’s climate if there is no tropical forest," he said.  "We cannot ensure that we will have resources to support humankind in terms of medicines, food, water and more without protecting these forests...  Plants are going extinct every single day, probably every single hour.  It’s like killing all your golden-egg hens systematically.  It is so nonsensical.

"We really need to realize that protecting the forests is not optional," he added.  "This is not something that’s just idealistic.  This is at the very core of our survival."

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

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia have probably read enough of my rants about creationism and the other flavors of evolution-denial that they're sick unto death of the subject, but if you're up for one more excursion into this, I have a book that is a must-read.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself both as an outspoken atheist and as a champion for the evolutionary model, and it is in this latter capacity that he wrote the brilliant The Greatest Show on Earth.  Here, he presents the evidence for evolution in lucid prose easily accessible to the layperson, and one by one demolishes the "arguments" (if you can dignify them by that name) that you find in places like the infamous Answers in Genesis.

If you're someone who wants more ammunition for your own defense of the topic, or you want to find out why the scientists believe all that stuff about natural selection, or you're a creationist yourself and (to your credit) want to find out what the other side is saying, this book is about the best introduction to the logic of the evolutionary model I've ever read.  My focus in biology was evolution and population genetics, so you'd think all this stuff would be old hat to me, but I found something new to savor on virtually every page.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

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

Let the sun shine in

Every time I think that the "natural health" movement has plumbed the absolute depths of credulous stupidity, I find out there's plenty of room down below.

It turns out that "down below" is an apt metaphor, because as I found out from about a dozen loyal readers of Skeptophilia, the latest craze is "perineum sunning."  For those of you not well-versed in anatomical terminology, the perineum is the region between the genitals and the anus.

So, yes, it's exactly what it sounds like.  You're supposed to take off all your clothes, and expose your nether orifice to the direct sunlight.

I would like to be able to say, "ha-ha, I made that up," but sadly, I didn't.  Practitioners claim that exposing your butthole to the sun activates the vibrational frequencies of your chakras, or something like that.  "In a mere thirty seconds of sunlight on your butthole, you will receive more energy from this electric node than you would in an entire day being outside with your clothes on," said one guy in an informational YouTube video.

"My experience with perineum sunning has been profound," said another enthusiast.  "I have been practicing this for a few months now.  I start my day with five minutes of perineum sunning and feel energized for hours.  I no longer rely on coffee for energy to start my day because I am getting my energy from the sun."

I have just a few things to say about this:

1. What the actual fuck?
2. Given the choice of a nice cup of coffee and lying on my back with my ass in the air, I think I'll stick with the coffee.
3. As dermatologist Nazanin Saedi pointed out in an interview with Health, the perineum is a thin and very sensitive bit of skin, which you'd think most people would already know.  A sunburned perineum would hurt like a mofo, and it's also not a place you'd want to risk skin cancer.
4. As far as absorbing usable energy through your skin -- what do you think your asshole is, a plant?
5. Not only is your anus not photosynthetic, it is also not an "electric node."  The very idea makes me wince.
6. Despite my being dubious about the practice, I have to say that "Butthole Sunshine" would make a great name for a band.  Maybe they could be like the Butthole Surfers, only more upbeat.
7. At the risk of repeating myself: what the actual fuck?

Look, it's not that I have anything against nudity.  Given the choice, I'd never wear swim trunks while swimming, and when the weather's warm I enjoy a nice outdoor naked romp as much as the next guy.  But deliberately and repeatedly exposing one of the most sensitive parts of the body to the direct, harsh rays of the sun is not "alternative health," it's "absolute nonsense."

And potentially dangerous as well.

So by all means shuck the clothes if you want to and have an opportunity that will not result in your being arrested for indecent exposure.  But take care not to scorch your naughty bits.

And for cryin' in the sink, learn a little actual science so you can tell the difference between a healthful practice and the latest idiotic fad.  Because I can nearly guarantee that if you think this is as stupid as it gets, all you'll need to do is wait awhile and see what they come up with next.

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

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia have probably read enough of my rants about creationism and the other flavors of evolution-denial that they're sick unto death of the subject, but if you're up for one more excursion into this, I have a book that is a must-read.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself both as an outspoken atheist and as a champion for the evolutionary model, and it is in this latter capacity that he wrote the brilliant The Greatest Show on Earth.  Here, he presents the evidence for evolution in lucid prose easily accessible to the layperson, and one by one demolishes the "arguments" (if you can dignify them by that name) that you find in places like the infamous Answers in Genesis.

If you're someone who wants more ammunition for your own defense of the topic, or you want to find out why the scientists believe all that stuff about natural selection, or you're a creationist yourself and (to your credit) want to find out what the other side is saying, this book is about the best introduction to the logic of the evolutionary model I've ever read.  My focus in biology was evolution and population genetics, so you'd think all this stuff would be old hat to me, but I found something new to savor on virtually every page.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

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

Rushing toward a paradigm shift

I have a sneaking suspicion that the physicists are on the threshold of a paradigm-breaking discovery.

The weird data have been building up for some time now, observations and measurements that are at odds with our current models of how the universe works.  I say "models (plural)" because one of the most persistent roadblocks in physics is the seeming incompatibility of quantum mechanics and general relativity -- in other words, coming up with a Grand Unified Theory that pulls a consistent explanation of gravity into our conceptual framework for the other three fundamental forces (electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces).  All attempts to come up with an amalgam have either "led to infinities" (had places in the relevant equations that generate infinite answers, usually an indicator that something is seriously wrong with your model) or have become so impossibly convoluted that even the experts can't agree on the details (such as string theory with its eleven spatial dimensions, something that's always reminded me of Ptolemy's flailing about to save the geocentric model by adding more loops and twists and epicycles so the data would fit).

And still the anomalous data keep rolling in.  Three weeks ago I wrote about a troubling discrepancy that's been discovered in the value of the Hubble Constant, which describes the rate of expansion of the universe -- there are two ways to measure it, which presumably should give the same answer, but don't.

Then last week, physicists at a lab in Hungary announced that they'd found new evidence of "X17," a mysterious particle that could be a carrier for a fifth fundamental force.  The argument is a bit like the observation that led to the discovery of the neutrino back in 1959 -- during beta radioactive decay, the particles emitted seemed to break the laws of conservation of energy and momentum, until that time strictly enforced in all jurisdictions.  Wolfgang Pauli said, basically, "Well, that can't be right," and postulated that an undetected particle was carrying off the "lost" momentum and energy.  It took twenty-eight years to prove, but he was right.

Here, it's the behavior another radioactive substance, beryllium-8, which emits light at the "wrong" angle to account for all of the energy involved (again, breaking the law of conservation of energy).  Conservation could be re-established if there was an undetected particle being emitted with a mass of 17 MeV (about 33 times the rest mass of an electron).  Even considering the neutrino, this seemed a little bit ad hoc -- "we need a particle, so we'll invent one to make our data fit" -- until measurements from an excited helium nucleus generated anomalous results that could be explained by a fifth force carried by a particle with exactly the same mass.

Hmm.  Curiouser and curiouser.

If that's not enough, just this week a paper appeared in Nature Astronomy about that elusive and mysterious substance "dark matter" that, despite defying every effort to detect it, outweighs the ordinary matter you and I are made of by a factor of five.  Its gravitational signature is everywhere, and appears to be most of what's responsible for holding galaxies together -- without it, the Milky Way and other rotating galaxies would fly apart.

But what is it?  No one knows.  There are guesses, but once again, those guesses have come up empty-handed with respect to any kind of experimental verification.  (And that's not even considering the even-weirder dark energy, which outweighs dark matter by a factor of two, and is thus the most common stuff in the universe, comprising 68% of what's out there -- even though we have not the slightest clue what it might be.)

The paper, by a team led by astrophysicist Qi Guo of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is called, "Further Evidence for a Population of Dark-Matter-Deficient Dwarf Galaxies," and describes no less than nineteen different galaxies that have significantly less dark matter than conventional explanations (such as they are) would need to explain (1) how they formed, and (2) what's holding them together.  Lead author Guo, for her part, is baffled, and although the data seem solid, she admits to being at a bit of a loss.  "We are not sure why and how these galaxies form," she said, in a press release in Science News.

Elliptical galaxy Abell S740 [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA]

So the anomalous observations keep piling up, and thus far, no one has been able to explain them, much less reconcile them with all the others.  I'm reminded of what Thomas Kuhn wrote, in his seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: "Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense... that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way."

It must be both nerve-wracking and exhilarating to be a physicist right now.  Nerve-wracking because suddenly finding out that your previous model, the one you were taught to understand and cherish during your training, is inadequate -- well, the response is frequently to do what Irish science historian, writer, and filmmaker James Burke calls "scrambling about to stop the rug from being pulled out from under years of happy status-quo."  On the one hand, you can understand that, apart from any emotional attachment one might have to an accepted model; it is an accepted model because it worked perfectly well for a while, accounting for all the evidence we had.  And there are countless examples when a model was challenged by what appeared to be contradictory data, and it turned out the data were mismeasurements, misinterpretations, or outright fabrications.

Which is why Pauli was so sure that the neutrino existed -- the law of conservation of energy, he reasoned, was so well-supported that it just couldn't be wrong.

But now -- well, as I said, that data keep piling up.  Whatever's going on here, they aren't all mismeasurements.  It remains to be seen what revision of our understanding will sweep away all the oddities and internal contradictions and make sense of what the physicists are seeing, but I have no doubt we'll find it at some point.

And there's the exhilarating part of it.  What a time to be in research physics -- when the race is on to pull together and explain an increasingly huge body of anomalous stuff, and revise our understanding of the universe in a fundamental way.  It's the kind of climate in which Nobel Prizes are won.

Being an observer is exciting enough; I can't imagine what it might be like to be inside it all.

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

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia have probably read enough of my rants about creationism and the other flavors of evolution-denial that they're sick unto death of the subject, but if you're up for one more excursion into this, I have a book that is a must-read.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself both as an outspoken atheist and as a champion for the evolutionary model, and it is in this latter capacity that he wrote the brilliant The Greatest Show on Earth.  Here, he presents the evidence for evolution in lucid prose easily accessible to the layperson, and one by one demolishes the "arguments" (if you can dignify them by that name) that you find in places like the infamous Answers in Genesis.

If you're someone who wants more ammunition for your own defense of the topic, or you want to find out why the scientists believe all that stuff about natural selection, or you're a creationist yourself and (to your credit) want to find out what the other side is saying, this book is about the best introduction to the logic of the evolutionary model I've ever read.  My focus in biology was evolution and population genetics, so you'd think all this stuff would be old hat to me, but I found something new to savor on virtually every page.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

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

Produced by design

In the brilliant and disturbing 1997 movie Gattaca, set in the "not very distant future," it has become possible to genetically screen for... just about everything.  So most couples conceive using in vitro fertilization followed by pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), to screen out susceptibilities to common diseases and to screen in high IQ, a tendency to physical strength, good looks, and emotional stability.

The movie is about a young man, Vincent (played movingly by Ethan Hawke) whose dream of becoming an astronaut is thwarted by the fact that he is an "in-valid" -- conceived the old-fashioned way, and thus a mix of varying traits from his parents, both good and bad.  While there is an official policy of non-discrimination on the basis of genes, the hiring requirement of a urine test for drug screening allows potential employers to find out what you're made of -- and to find a pretext not to hire you if it turns out that you have a potential toward early heart disease or higher aggression.  When everything about you -- your fitness, intellect, personality, even your suitability as a mate -- can be discerned from a fingerprick, a cheek swab, or a stray hair, there is no longer such a thing as "private information."

I won't tell you further about it because it's well worth watching, and Vincent's struggle against being held back by the genetic cards he was dealt is deeply inspiring.  But it's interesting to look at whether the "not very distant future" has panned out in the twenty-two years since the movie was made.

Like much of the cutting edge of science, pre-implantation screening hasn't progressed quite as fast as people expected.  The conditions we can reliably screen out are fairly few in number, and the idea of screening in highly complex traits such as IQ or personality or appearance has turned out to be elusive at best.  Our potential to use genetic information even to predict something a good bit simpler -- adult height -- was dealt a significant blow by a paper that came out in Cell last week, called, "Screening Human Embryos for Polygenic Traits Has Limited Utility," by a team led by Ehud Karavani of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

What they did is pretty impressive.  Using aggregate data from no less than 700,000 people, they came up with a protocol for generating a genetic "score" that seemed to correlate with adult height, and then tried to see if applying the score to individuals from 28 different families who were not part of the original study worked the other way -- if the score reliably predicted adult height.

To say that the results were disappointing is a bit of an understatement.  It predicted the tallest person in the family in only seven of the families -- a hit-rate of 25%.  Worse still, five of the people it identified as tallest turned out to be shorter than average for the family.  The method would almost certainly be even less accurate if you tried to apply it to a trait that shows greater variability and (likely) less overall dependence on genetics -- such as IQ.

"There’s still a great deal of variability that’s not accounted for by the genes they were analyzing or simulating in their polygenic score," said Susanna Haga, geneticist at Duke University, who was not part of Karavani's team.  "Therefore, you’re still going to see a wide distribution of height or IQ points."

While I'm fascinated with genetics and all for learning more about how our DNA works, I'm not entirely sure this is a bad thing.  Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to allow a couple who are carriers of (say) cystic fibrosis to conceive a healthy child is one thing; screening an embryo to try to boost its eventual intelligence crosses a line.  It's edging way too close to eugenics for my comfort, and in any case, we haven't even been able to come up with a consistent definition for what we mean by intelligence, so the idea that we'd screen embryos on that basis is dodgy right from the start.

So while the results of the Karavani study are a setback to our understanding of how DNA affects our development, in one way it's actually kind of a relief.  We humans don't exactly have a stellar track record for applying scientific discoveries in a positive or humane fashion, and the number of ways this kind of information could be misused is astronomical.  I know of people who are passionately interested in genealogy but have refused to sign up for Ancestry or 23 & Me genetic testing because they're afraid of what might be done with the data, and while I can understand the concern, it's nice to know that the ability to surreptitiously abstract from our DNA information about our appearance, personality, intelligence, and aptitudes is not possible...

... yet.

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

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia have probably read enough of my rants about creationism and the other flavors of evolution-denial that they're sick unto death of the subject, but if you're up for one more excursion into this, I have a book that is a must-read.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself both as an outspoken atheist and as a champion for the evolutionary model, and it is in this latter capacity that he wrote the brilliant The Greatest Show on Earth.  Here, he presents the evidence for evolution in lucid prose easily accessible to the layperson, and one by one demolishes the "arguments" (if you can dignify them by that name) that you find in places like the infamous Answers in Genesis.

If you're someone who wants more ammunition for your own defense of the topic, or you want to find out why the scientists believe all that stuff about natural selection, or you're a creationist yourself and (to your credit) want to find out what the other side is saying, this book is about the best introduction to the logic of the evolutionary model I've ever read.  My focus in biology was evolution and population genetics, so you'd think all this stuff would be old hat to me, but I found something new to savor on virtually every page.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

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

Anatomy of a personal u-turn

Two years ago, a paper appeared in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology called, "How Personal Transformation Occurs Following a Single Peak Experience in Nature: A Phenomenological Account."  The authors, Lia Naor and Ofra Mayseless of the University of Haifa, describe the experiences of fifteen individuals who reported a sudden positive transformation in their lives -- a personal quantum leap, as it were -- that resulted in long-lasting changes to their outlook, self-awareness, mood, and well-being.

It's been known for years that a single traumatic negative experience can cause devastating damage to a person's psyche, the authors said; why, then, has so little attention been given to the potential for equivalent positive changes from single peak experiences?  The entire article is well worth reading, but one paragraph stood out to me:

The results of this study shed light on the nature of profound meaning and real knowledge, in which unconscious or contradictory aspects of self (regarding inner strength and personal potential) were discovered.  The actual moment of insight was cognitive, perceptual, and emotional, and although not lengthy, substantial knowledge became conscious that involved embracing and repossessing those aspects of the self through which new self and world perceptions were created...  [T]he concrete and personal experience seemed to validate those aspects hence perceived as authentic inner truth, enabling the participant to internalize them as integral and empowering aspects of self.  From this perspective, the experience is a step in the process of personal growth and when perceived and treated as such, may contribute significant personal knowledge to the process.

Had I read this two weeks ago, I would have been largely disinclined to believe it.  Unquantifiable, unmeasurable phenomena like "personal potential" and "inner truth" have always seemed so subjective to me as to be nearly meaningless.

Also, I've blogged before about my struggles with anxiety and depression, troubles that have been with me as long as I can recall and which probably owe their origin equally to genetics and to a home environment when I was a child that was, even putting the best face on it I can, not easy.  The idea that all that could turn around in a veritable instant would have seemed ridiculous.

But it's not.  Because it happened to me.

Ilya Repin, What Freedom! (1903) [Image is in the Public Domain]

A week ago I attended a men's retreat called "Break Your Chains" at a local retreat center.  The weekend was led by John Aigner, a German life coach and mentor, and the informational website described it as a way of shucking old, self-destructive patterns and learning strategies for revitalizing your life.  All of this sounded good to me.  Just what I needed, actually.  I'd come across the upcoming retreat more or less by accident, and before I could decide otherwise I signed up.

However, the closer it got, the more dubious I became.  I'd been sliding into a full-blown depressive episode for some weeks, and in the week before the retreat, I came damn close to talking myself out of attending.  It was just going to be more happy-talk about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, I was sure of it, and besides, one of my issues is calling attention to myself.  It sounded like the activities during the retreat were going to be largely participatory -- little to no sitting and listening passively -- and the thought that I'd be baring my soul to a bunch of strangers, all of whom were looking at me, was somewhere between distasteful and terrifying.

But Friday came, and I couldn't think of a good excuse.  Oh, well, it was just forty-eight hours.  I'd survive.

So I got in my car and drove to the retreat center.

Out of respect for the privacy of the fourteen other men who participated, and also because John requested that we not reveal the exact activities during the retreat -- not out of any Secrecy from Non-Intitiates, but because future participants shouldn't be cheated of the surprise and delight of where the process takes them -- I'm not going to give a lot of details.  Suffice it to say it was largely about reconnecting body to mind, something I've struggled with forever; the way I've put it is that I feel like I have two brains, a cognitive one and an emotional one, and they are not on speaking terms.  The other part was about creating connections to other people, which is something else I've never found easy.

It became apparent within the first hour that if I didn't throw myself into the process, I was going to gain nothing from it.  So Friday evening, I sort of said, "Fuck it, what do I have to lose?" and pitched myself in headfirst.

And it feels like the person who walked into the retreat center on Friday afternoon is not the same person who walked out Sunday evening.

I'm not foolish enough to think that this one event solved all my problems, nor that my difficulties with depression and anxiety are vanquished.  John warned us about how easy it is to sink back into your previous patterns as soon as you're back in the old context of work, family demands, and the various distractions and difficulties that the world inevitably brings.  But something fundamental in me got knocked loose during that weekend, something that's been stuck for a very long time.  And I think -- I hope -- I'll never be quite the same again.

I'm still processing a lot of what I learned and experienced during that forty-eight hours.  I know that continuing to integrate that into my life -- not to slip backward to where I was -- will take effort.  But one of the deepest realizations I had was that whatever headway I made, I was not going to get dragged back without putting up a hell of a fight.  The constant fear and anxiety, the habit of caution and guardedness toward everything and everyone, was nowhere I'd choose to be, and if there was a way out, I'd take it even if it required a lot of work.

I'd made a u-turn, and I couldn't afford to waste the opportunity it afforded me.

I'll end with a quote from another piece of research, this one by CaSondra Devine and William Sparks of Queens University.  In their 2014 paper "Defining Moments: Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Personal Transformation," from the Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, they write, regarding patients who described positive transformative experiences:

The quick fixes to mask reality did not work anymore.  A way out did not seem possible, and then realization set in.  A choice had to be made between living or dying.  To choose life meant to pick up the pieces and access resources that could assist.  To choose death was to allow thoughts, guilt, shame, remorse, anger, rage, hurt, and past to consume their identity...  [The] participants... chose to live.  When [they] were asked where they would be had they chosen a different direction, they unanimously had responses that limited their quality of life.  It is my belief that the very instant that the individuals chose to live was their defining moment towards personal transformation.

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

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia have probably read enough of my rants about creationism and the other flavors of evolution-denial that they're sick unto death of the subject, but if you're up for one more excursion into this, I have a book that is a must-read.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself both as an outspoken atheist and as a champion for the evolutionary model, and it is in this latter capacity that he wrote the brilliant The Greatest Show on Earth.  Here, he presents the evidence for evolution in lucid prose easily accessible to the layperson, and one by one demolishes the "arguments" (if you can dignify them by that name) that you find in places like the infamous Answers in Genesis.

If you're someone who wants more ammunition for your own defense of the topic, or you want to find out why the scientists believe all that stuff about natural selection, or you're a creationist yourself and (to your credit) want to find out what the other side is saying, this book is about the best introduction to the logic of the evolutionary model I've ever read.  My focus in biology was evolution and population genetics, so you'd think all this stuff would be old hat to me, but I found something new to savor on virtually every page.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

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

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.

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

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!]