The ghost in the machine

One of my reasons for doubting a lot of reports of the paranormal is because, to quote Neil deGrasse Tyson, we are poor data-taking devices.  We have, he says, "all sorts of ways of getting it wrong."

The problem is, our brain doesn't agree with that most of the time.  Of course what we're seeing and hearing is real.  Not only is it real, we're seeing and hearing everything there is to see and hear.  We can't possibly be missing something, or sensing something that isn't there.  So if we have an experience outside of the normal realm, it must reflect reality, right?

Of course right.

But a study at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland has shown conclusively that it's just not so.  It doesn't take much to fool us, and fool us so convincingly that our brains can't come up with any other explanation but that there's something supernatural happening... even if those brains already knew that they were part of an experiment, and understood how it was being done.

Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist at ÉPFL, has led a team to create a ghost illusion so real that several participants asked to quit the study because they were so freaked out.  It was done quite simply -- no electrodes or any sort of elaborate apparatus needed.

[This "ghost photo" was created by one of my Critical Thinking students, Nathan Brewer, as part of a project to illustrate how easy it is to generate a convincingly creepy paranormal photograph using PhotoShop.  Not bad, eh? (used with permission)]

What they did was to have blindfolded participants move their hands, while a robotic arm behind them touched them on the back, moving the same way at the same time.  No problem there; the brain quickly figured out what was going on.

But then, they introduced a half-second delay into the proceedings -- so that the robotic arm was a little offset from the movement of the person's real arm.  And this created a sense of an "unseen presence" behind them so realistic (and unsettling) that several participants asked the researchers to stop after three minutes because the sensation was "unbearable."  One participant said he was convinced that there was not just one "ghost" behind him, but four!

"Our experiment induced the sensation of a foreign presence in the laboratory for the first time," Blanke said.   "It shows that it can arise under normal conditions, simply through conflicting sensory-motor signals.  The robotic system mimics the sensations of some patients with mental disorders or of healthy individuals under extreme circumstances.  This confirms that it is caused by an altered perception of their own bodies in the brain."

Which is fascinating, even if it punches further holes in our sense of seeing and interpreting everything correctly.

Now, understand, there are two things I am not saying, here: (1) that all paranormal experiences can be explained by failures in our perceptive or cognitive equipment; and (2) that it's impossible that ghosts (and other such entities) exist.  In my opinion, the jury is very much still out on what's behind experiences of the paranormal in general, and I am reluctant to make the jump that because some of them are misinterpretations or hoaxes, they all are.

What this experiment points out, though, is that anecdote isn't enough.  We're suggestible, easily confused, and bring our own biases into whatever we experience.  If a little touch from a robotic arm on the backs of people who knew they were part of an experiment on perception is sufficient to generate an unshakeable sensation of being in the presence of a ghost, how can we trust stories of the "I was in the room, and then I sensed there was someone else in there with me" variety?

Admittedly, it could well be that there are ghosts, and an afterlife, and so on.  I've seen no convincing evidence of it, and lots of non-convincing evidence, and all too many out-and-out hoaxes and falsehoods.  But could it be?  Sure.

On the "plus" side are (literally) thousands of first-hand accounts, including cases where the claimant has no obvious reason to lie and no other explanation is forthcoming.  On the "minus" side, any bits of hard evidence are equivocal at best (whatever people like Dean Radin might say about it), and there are a couple of convincing non-supernatural possibilities that could account for at least some of those claims.  So at the moment, my position is "I don't know."  I'm going to wait for either scientifically reliable evidence, or else my own death, at which point I'll find out for sure one way or the other.

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

I don't often recommend historical books here at Skeptophilia, not because of a lack of interest but a lack of expertise in identifying what's good research and what's wild speculation.  My background in history simply isn't enough to be a fair judge.  But last week I read a book so brilliantly and comprehensively researched that I feel confident in recommending it -- and it's not only thorough, detailed, and accurate, it's absolutely gripping.

On May 7, 1915, the passenger ship Lusitania was sunk as it neared its destination of Liverpool by a German U-boat, an action that was instrumental in leading to the United States joining the war effort a year later.  The events leading up to that incident -- some due to planning, other to unfortunate chance -- are chronicled in Erik Larson's book Dead Wake, in which we find out about the cast of characters involved, and how they ended up in the midst of a disaster that took 1,198 lives.

Larson's prose is crystal-clear, giving information in such a straightforward way that it doesn't devolve into the "history textbook" feeling that so many true-history books have.  It's fascinating and horrifying -- and absolutely un-put-downable.

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

A game of "Not It"

I don't have a lot of patience for the cynical, pessimistic attitude I hear from people who otherwise I generally agree with, that often takes the form of "humans are garbage" or "I hate people."

Usually, these comments come from righteous outrage at the capacity of some people for committing horrifying acts.  Abuse of children and animals, violence motivated by racism, religion, and homophobia, victim-blaming or outright dismissal in cases of rape and spousal violence -- we're right to be disgusted by these.

But concluding that all humans are worthless is tantamount to giving up.  And that's unacceptable.  There's too much at stake, especially now.

I understand that it seems like an uphill battle, and that the moral people of the world -- who, I maintain, are the majority, regardless of how it may seem at times -- get exhausted by what seems like an endless fight that never makes any serious headway.

In fact, I have to admit to having a moment like this yesterday morning, when I read that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled to dismiss the lawsuit Juliana vs. United States, nicknamed the "Children's Climate Lawsuit."  Filed by a group called Our Children's Trust, this lawsuit aimed to hold the government of the United States responsible for their inaction on climate change, thereby endangering children's chances of living to adulthood in a world that is environmentally stable.

Most of us -- although admittedly not legal scholars -- looked at this and said, "Well, yeah."  The Declaration of Independence calls life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness "inalienable rights," which would seem to me that this makes it incumbent upon our government not to render the place uninhabitable.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Takver, Climate Rally flows down Swanston street, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The Ninth Circuit Court disagreed.  In the majority opinion, Judge Andrew Hurwitz wrote, "The central issue before us is whether, even assuming such a broad constitutional right exists, an Article III court can provide the plaintiffs the redress they seek—an order requiring the government to develop a plan to 'phase out fossil fuel emissions and draw down excess atmospheric CO2.  Reluctantly, we conclude that such relief is beyond our constitutional power. Rather, the plaintiffs’ impressive case for redress must be presented to the political branches of government."

The "reluctance" Hurwitz feels evidently wasn't enough to stop him from saying "Not It" when it came to drawing a line in the sand with regards to our wanton environmental destruction, something that has gotten significantly worse under Trump's administration.  No environmental legislation has been safe -- from water and air quality, to protections for endangered species, to the shielding of public land from damage from mining, logging, and oil drilling.  The motto of our government is "Use it all up and fuck the consequences," with the attitude being "Oh, well, we'll all be dead by the time bad stuff happens, may as well cut loose and party hard now."

So I'm inclined to look at Hurwitz's reluctance as a little like Maine Senator Susan Collins's approach to standing up to Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.  "Yes, I'll give it serious consideration," she says, then proceeds to rubberstamp everything Trump and McConnell want.

But she always makes a sad frowny face while she's doing it to show how reluctant she is, and that makes it all okay.

In the dissenting opinion, Judge Josephine Staton couldn't have said it clearer.  "Plaintiffs bring suit to enforce the most basic structural principle embedded in our system of ordered liberty: that the Constitution does not condone the Nation’s willful destruction."

So that's another avenue closed by someone's desire not to be the one to make a stand.  Like I said, it's not that I don't get how hard that is.  Facing down a fierce and relentless opposition, and continuing to fight despite setback after setback, is mentally and physically exhausting.  It's why I have nothing but admiration for people like my dear friend Sandra Steingraber, who has been fighting for the environment and the global climate literally for decades, and somehow manages the wherewithal to keep going despite what sometimes seem monstrous odds.

"Fortunately, there are people who will not be deterred from the work of civilization," journalist Bill Moyers said, "who will even from time to time go up against authority in peaceful disobedience, taking a nonviolent stand for a greater good.  Such a person is Sandra Steingraber."

Or as Sandra herself wrote in 2014 from the Chemung County (New York) Jail, where she was serving a sentence for her civil disobedience, "Five days without clouds, sky, stars, leaves, birdsong, wind, sunlight, and fresh food has left me homesick to the point of grief.  I now inhabit an ugly, diminished place devoid of life and beauty – and this is exactly the kind of harsh, ravaged world I do not want my children to inhabit."

So after the defeat dealt to us all by the Ninth Circuit Court's decision, we stand up, dust ourselves off, and keep going.  I'm not going to fall back into the "humans are horrible and deserve everything we get" attitude, which seems to me to be nothing more than an excuse for inaction.  I know too many moral, kind, compassionate, and loving humans for me to accept that and give up.  We're going through a difficult time right now -- a world teetering on the edge of climate chaos, an environment slipping back into the pre-regulation ravages of pollution and overuse, and a government made of lying grifters who believe in power and personal profit über alles.

But I am buoyed up by realizing that we can only continue to do what we've done, fighting the daily battles with what spirit we can, and not despairing because of the size of the task ahead -- or its gravity.  I'm reminded of the wonderful quote from J. R. R. Tolkien's Return of the King: "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.  What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."

And, perhaps even more hopefully, the poignant line from Stephen King's The Stand, spoken by Nadine Cross to Randall Flagg himself (talk about speaking truth to power!):  "The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short."

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

I don't often recommend historical books here at Skeptophilia, not because of a lack of interest but a lack of expertise in identifying what's good research and what's wild speculation.  My background in history simply isn't enough to be a fair judge.  But last week I read a book so brilliantly and comprehensively researched that I feel confident in recommending it -- and it's not only thorough, detailed, and accurate, it's absolutely gripping.

On May 7, 1915, the passenger ship Lusitania was sunk as it neared its destination of Liverpool by a German U-boat, an action that was instrumental in leading to the United States joining the war effort a year later.  The events leading up to that incident -- some due to planning, other to unfortunate chance -- are chronicled in Erik Larson's book Dead Wake, in which we find out about the cast of characters involved, and how they ended up in the midst of a disaster that took 1,198 lives.

Larson's prose is crystal-clear, giving information in such a straightforward way that it doesn't devolve into the "history textbook" feeling that so many true-history books have.  It's fascinating and horrifying -- and absolutely un-put-downable.

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

Djinn and tonic

This week we've been looking at some pretty deep topics, such as the effects of dark matter on star position in the Milky Way, what causes some plants to be essentially immortal, and the discovery of mineral grains that predate the Earth's formation.  So it seems fitting to address next something that is, I'm sure, on all of your minds, namely: what do I do if my house is occupied by an evil djinn?

The djinn, sometimes spelled "jinn" or anglicized as "genie," are spirits who you find in Middle Eastern mythology.  While people who are in the know about such things make it clear that djinns are not inherently good or evil, they have the tendency to be swayed toward the evil side of things.  Muhammad supposedly was sent not only to bring the word of Allah to humans but to the djinn as well, but even so they have a reputation for having some seriously ill will toward the rest of us.  Folk tales from that region are rife with djinn living in "unclean places" and possessing humans (the outcome is seldom good).

So pretty clearly, this is a group of beings we should all be on the lookout for.  This is where a guy named Saad Ja'afar comes in.  Because he is the world's foremost -- perhaps the world's only -- professional djinn trapper.

My first thought on reading this was to say, "um... his name is... Ja'afar?  You have got to be making this up."  Because any of you with children will undoubtedly know that this is the name (although usually spelled "Jafar") of the evil Grand Vizier in Aladdin.  But apparently yes, the djinn trapper is indeed Saad Ja'afar, and his business (Pakar Tangkap Jin), based in Johor Bahru, at the southern tip of Malaysia, is who you want to contact if you're being bothered by scary blue guys who live inside lamps.

Zawba'a, one of the kings of the djinn, with some of his attendant djinn servants.  Which brings up the question of why so many of them are blue.  Are they cold?  Maybe they should try putting some clothes on. (From a late 14th century Arabic manuscript) [Image is in the Public Domain]

As far as Ja'afar goes, his rates are pretty reasonable.  For one djinn removal, he charges 200 ringgit ($48.75 at current exchange rates), and he can even work remotely.  "I don’t have to physically be there at the location to catch the ghost," Ja'afar says.  "Before this, the farthest I’ve captured a djinn was at Sabah.  We keep the spirit and djinn close to the mosque to encourage it to repent."

It bears mention that Sabah isn't exactly right next door to Johor Bahru.  The only way to get from one to the other is via a two-hour flight.  So it's just as well he can trap troublesome djinn without leaving the comfort of his home.  I wouldn't want him to have to fly all the way to upstate New York if we were having djinn trouble, because I did that flight before and it was kind of miserable.  Kuala Lumpur to New York City was a sixteen-hour flight, meaning you could watch a long movie, sleep for six hours, and you'd still have seven hours left to go.

I have never been so glad to get off an airplane in my life.

Anyhow, Ja'afar has a Facebook page (because of course he does), and on it he has accounts of his successful captures, including a spirit-realm battle he got in with a bomoh, a Malaysian shaman, who brought a djinn back into a house he'd just cleared.  I can understand how frustrating this must have been.  I face that all the time with my dogs tracking in mud on floors I just cleaned, and they're not even doing it using magic.

Apparently, once Ja'afar captures the djinn, he imprisons it in a bottle, which I guess makes sense given the whole genie-in-a-lamp thing.  So it seems like he's got quite a lucrative racket going.  He never has to leave his house, and all he needs is a supply of glass bottles and corks and a good schtick to tell his customers about how dire the battle was, but he was victorious and the djinn is vanquished, and he gets paid.

Almost makes me wish I had thought of it first.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is scarily appropriate reading material in today's political climate: Robert Bartholomew and Peter Hassall's wonderful A Colorful History of Popular Delusions.  In this brilliant and engaging book, the authors take a look at the phenomenon of crowd behavior, and how it has led to some of the most irrational behaviors humans are prone to -- fads, mobs, cults, crazes, manias, urban legends, and riots.

Sometimes amusing, sometimes shocking, this book looks at how our evolutionary background as a tribal animal has made us prone all too often to getting caught up in groupthink, where we leave behind logic and reason for the scary territory of making decisions based purely on emotion.  It's unsettling reading, but if you want to understand why humans all too often behave in ways that make the rational ones amongst us want to do repeated headdesks, this book should be on your list.

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

Trapped in the ice

Today in the "I've Seen This Movie, And It Didn't End Well" department, we have: scientists digging into glacial ice and finding heretofore-undiscovered species of viruses and bacteria.

Just this week, a paper called "Glacier Ice Archives Fifteen-Thousand-Year-Old Viruses" was released as a preprint on bioRxiv, detailing work by a team led by Zhi-Ping Zhong of Ohio State University.  Here's what the scientists themselves write about the research:

While glacier ice cores provide climate information over tens to hundreds of thousands of years, study of microbes is challenged by ultra-low-biomass conditions, and virtually nothing is known about co-occurring viruses.  Here we establish ultra-clean microbial and viral sampling procedures and apply them to two ice cores from the Guliya ice cap (northwestern Tibetan Plateau, China) to study these archived communities...  The microbes differed significantly across the two ice cores, presumably representing the very different climate conditions at the time of deposition that is similar to findings in other cores.  Separately, viral particle enrichment and ultra-low-input quantitative viral metagenomic sequencing from ∼520 and ∼15,000 years old ice revealed 33 viral populations (i.e., species-level designations) that represented four known genera and likely 28 novel viral genera (assessed by gene-sharing networks).  In silico host predictions linked 18 of the 33 viral populations to co-occurring abundant bacteria, including Methylobacterium, Sphingomonas, and Janthinobacterium, indicating that viruses infected several abundant microbial groups.  Depth-specific viral communities were observed, presumably reflecting differences in the environmental conditions among the ice samples at the time of deposition. 

On the face of it, it's unsurprising they're finding new viruses, because we find new viruses wherever we look in modern ecosystems.  Viruses are so small that unless you're specifically looking for them, you don't see them.

But four new genera of viruses is a little eyebrow-raising, because that means we're talking about viruses that aren't closely related to anything we've ever seen before.

This, of course, brings up the inevitable question, which was the first thing I thought of; what if one of these new viruses turns out to be pathogenic to humans?  The majority of viruses don't cause disease in humans, but it only takes one.  Science fiction is rife with people messing around with melting ice and releasing horrors -- this was the basic idea of The Thing, not to mention The X Files episode "Ice" and best of all (in my opinion) the horrifying, thrilling, and heartbreaking Doctor Who episode "The Waters of Mars," which is in my top five favorites in the entire history of the series.

So I'm hoping like hell the research team is being cautious.  Not that it ever made any difference in science fiction.  Somebody always fucks up, and large amounts of people end up getting sick, eaten, or converted to some horrifying new form that goes around killing everyone.

Lest you think I'm just being an alarmist because I've watched too many horror movies, allow me to point out that this sort of thing has already happened.  In 2016, permafrost melt in Siberia released frozen anthrax spores that sickened almost a hundred people, one fatally, and killed over two thousand reindeer -- after that region not seeing a single case of anthrax for at least seventy years.

On the other hand, it's understandable that the scientists are acting quickly, because the way things are going in the climate, glaciers will be a thing of the past in fairly short order.  Glaciers and polar ice sheets are time capsules, layer by layer preserving information about the climatic conditions when the ice was deposited, even trapping air bubbles that act as proxy records giving us information about the atmospheric composition at the time.  (This is one of the ways we've obtained carbon dioxide concentrations going back tens of thousands of years.)

However, it also preserves living things, including some that seem to retain their ability to be resuscitated nearly indefinitely.  I try not to panic over every little risk, but I have to admit this one has me spooked.  We don't have a stellar track record for caution, but our track record for saying, "Oh, yeah, this'll work!" and then unleashing a catastrophe is a good bit more consistent.

So let's be careful, okay, scientists?  I'm all for learning whatever we can learn, but I'd rather not be turned into a creepy evil being with a scaly face dripping toxic contagious water all over the place.  Call me picky, but there it is.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is scarily appropriate reading material in today's political climate: Robert Bartholomew and Peter Hassall's wonderful A Colorful History of Popular Delusions.  In this brilliant and engaging book, the authors take a look at the phenomenon of crowd behavior, and how it has led to some of the most irrational behaviors humans are prone to -- fads, mobs, cults, crazes, manias, urban legends, and riots.

Sometimes amusing, sometimes shocking, this book looks at how our evolutionary background as a tribal animal has made us prone all too often to getting caught up in groupthink, where we leave behind logic and reason for the scary territory of making decisions based purely on emotion.  It's unsettling reading, but if you want to understand why humans all too often behave in ways that make the rational ones amongst us want to do repeated headdesks, this book should be on your list.

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

Rock of ages

One of the simplest, but one of the most mind-blowing, concepts in science is that matter is recycled indefinitely.

It came up in a variety of ways in my biology classes, most frequently because of the water cycle, nitrogen cycle, and carbon cycle.  I always told my classes, "Every drop of water in your body has been in many forms.  It's been in clouds, it's been in rain, polar ice, the oceans and lakes.  It's been tree sap, bird blood, and dinosaur piss.  It never is created or destroyed, it just keeps getting reused."

This recycling, however, does make certain things hard to study, because the process of the recycling often erases where those molecules had been before and what they'd been doing.  This is most obvious in geological cycles.  When a geologist says, "This rock is recent, it was formed only a few hundred years ago," or "this is an ancient rock dating back to around eight hundred million years ago," (s)he is not talking about the materials; the materials, for the most part, all ended up on Earth at around the same time.  (Exceptions are meteorites, which will come up again shortly.)  The materials that make up yesterday's cooled lava rock and the rock of the Precambrian-Age Laurentian Shield of Canada are the same age; what's different is when the last event occurred that modified them enough to erase their previous history.

Because those history-erasing processes are happening all the time, this makes it difficult to find rocks that are over a billion years old, because the likelihood of a rock surviving unmelted all that time is virtually nil.  This makes our knowledge of the geological history of the Earth sketchier and sketchier the further back in time we go, and honestly, any models we have about the position of the continents and their relationships to the current configuration pretty quickly devolve into pure speculation much earlier than the Cambrian Period -- meaning that 7/8 of the entire history of the Earth is pretty much uncharted territory, geologically-speaking.

All of this is why it was quite a shock when I found out, from a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, that a rock has been found containing grains that date from between five and seven billion years ago, and some may be older than that.

Electron micrographs of presolar grains from the Murchison meteorite [Image by Philipp R. Heck, et al., of the University of Chicago]

If you're saying, "Wait, isn't that older than the Earth?", the answer is "yes."  The Earth's surface cooled and became solid on the order of 4.6 billion years ago.  So how can this possibly be correct?

The grains, it turns out, are part of a space rock called the Murchison meteorite that landed in Australia in 1969, so while everything on Earth was getting melted down, smashed, and mixed around, the rock of the Murchison meteorite was safely out in space, preserving the interior as a sort of time capsule of the very early Solar System.  These "presolar grains" of silicon carbide were dated using known conversion rates of the component atoms to other elements from interacting with cosmic rays, in some cases giving ages that are about as old as the Sun itself.

As far as how this can be, it bears keeping in mind that the Sun itself is thought to be a "third-generation star," so therefore nowhere near as old as the Universe as a whole.  The earliest stars were composed solely of hydrogen (and helium, as the hydrogen fuel was consumed), and heavier elements formed in the death throes of those stars.  The heaviest elements all were formed in supernovas, so any star enriched in these elements -- as our Sun is -- must contain materials from at least one, probably more, previous generations of stars.

So these silicon carbide grains were formed from atoms generated in stellar furnaces that predated the Sun (thus their name, "presolar grains"), and were floating around in interstellar space for all that time until a chunk of them happened to discover that Australia was in the way.  Fortunately for us; it gives us a chance to see materials about as old as you could find anywhere -- dating back to a time when the Solar System was still a ring of coalescing debris around a very young star.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is scarily appropriate reading material in today's political climate: Robert Bartholomew and Peter Hassall's wonderful A Colorful History of Popular Delusions.  In this brilliant and engaging book, the authors take a look at the phenomenon of crowd behavior, and how it has led to some of the most irrational behaviors humans are prone to -- fads, mobs, cults, crazes, manias, urban legends, and riots.

Sometimes amusing, sometimes shocking, this book looks at how our evolutionary background as a tribal animal has made us prone all too often to getting caught up in groupthink, where we leave behind logic and reason for the scary territory of making decisions based purely on emotion.  It's unsettling reading, but if you want to understand why humans all too often behave in ways that make the rational ones amongst us want to do repeated headdesks, this book should be on your list.

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

Tree of life

One of my favorite time wasters is the site Quora, where you can ask any question you like and get (if you're lucky) dozens of answers from people who know.  Of course, being a site where the content comes from everyone and anyone, there are a good many dumb questions and even more dumb answers, but by and large, the site is fairly entertaining,

Having answered a couple of biology-related questions in the past, the site's algorithm now throws a lot of biological questions my way when I sign on, and just yesterday I was given an interesting one: do plants have life spans -- do they age and die?  As it so happens, I've read a bit (only a smattering, I'm hardly an expert) on this subject, and there actually is senescence -- age-related degradation -- in at least some species of plants, and that's not even counting true annuals which only live one year.

Yellow birch trees, for example, usually don't make it past forty or fifty years, quaking aspens sometimes not even that much.  Silver maples start to fall apart, often rotting from the inside out, when they're in their seventies and eighties; sugar maples can easily make it to 150 years.  At the upper end of the scale are trees like redwoods, which get into the thousands of years old.  The oldest known tree is a bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of California, which a trunk core showed to be 5,065 years old.

Consider it.  When Jesus walked the Earth, this tree was already three thousand years old.

In one of those weird synchronicities, yesterday afternoon -- only a couple of hours after I answered the question on Quora -- I stumbled upon a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looked at the phenomenon of longevity in trees, more specifically in the strange Gingko biloba or "maidenhair tree," the only living species in the entire phylum Ginkgophyta.  It's native to southern China, and had been cultivated locally there for centuries for its beautiful symmetrical shape, graceful leaves, and incredibly smelly fruit that are used medicinally.  It was brought to Europe about three hundred years ago, and now is grown all over the world -- a remarkable comeback for a plant that was truly a living fossil.

Ginkgoes are amazingly long-lived, some specimens in China and Japan exceeding three thousand years in age.  The researchers collected tissue from a variety of ginkgo trees, from age three on up, and looked for the markers of senescence.

What they found was fascinating.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jean-Pol GRANDMONT [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]]

Dying leaves at mid-autumn showed lots of activation of aging-related genes.  On a leaf-by-leaf basis, the tree was doing exactly what animals do; experiencing metabolic slowdown, lowered immunity to infection, and structural degradation.  But the tree as a whole showed no such tendencies.  Genes related to aging showed no greater expression in old trees than they did in young trees.

There were differences, of course, primarily in genes controlling growth rate.  Young trees grow faster than old ones.  But it seems like if you're a gingko tree, you get to be your adult size, and then you just kind of go into stasis -- for thousands of years.

To quote Howard Thomas, botanist at Aberystwyth University (who was not involved in the ginkgo study), "The default condition for plants is immortality."

How this is controlled genetically is still poorly understood.  Hell, we don't even know how it's controlled in ourselves; it's likely to have something to do with the telomeres, the "end caps" on chromosomes that shorten with each cell division and thus act as a kind of molecular clock that keeps track of the age of the organism.  It's almost certainly not that simple, of course, and there are probably contributions to the aging process from cumulative DNA damage, epigenetic effects, metabolism and diet, and slowing of the immune system.  It's currently a huge area of research, because (face it) few of us are all that fond of the idea of aging.  I've got a great many more gray hairs, laugh lines, and backaches than I did even ten years ago, and if I could somehow reverse all that I'd be all for it.

An immortality pill is probably a long, long way off, enough that I pretty certainly won't be here to take advantage of it.  And whatever the mechanisms are for controlling aging in humans, they're not going to be similar enough to plants that the current research will give us much hope in that direction.

But given how the woo-woos think, expect a huge surge in sales for Ginkgo biloba tablets claiming that if you take them every day, you won't age.  Same as the craze for shark cartilage tablets a few years ago when the claim (which turns out to be false anyway) that sharks never get cancer convinced people that the way to avoid cancer was to swallow shark bits in pill form.

Me, I'm just interested in the research because it's kind of cool.  If this or other studies uncovers a solution to the aging problem, that'd be cool, but for now I think I'll just admire this lovely tree -- and marvel at its ability to live essentially forever.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is scarily appropriate reading material in today's political climate: Robert Bartholomew and Peter Hassall's wonderful A Colorful History of Popular Delusions.  In this brilliant and engaging book, the authors take a look at the phenomenon of crowd behavior, and how it has led to some of the most irrational behaviors humans are prone to -- fads, mobs, cults, crazes, manias, urban legends, and riots.

Sometimes amusing, sometimes shocking, this book looks at how our evolutionary background as a tribal animal has made us prone all too often to getting caught up in groupthink, where we leave behind logic and reason for the scary territory of making decisions based purely on emotion.  It's unsettling reading, but if you want to understand why humans all too often behave in ways that make the rational ones amongst us want to do repeated headdesks, this book should be on your list.

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

Biblical corn

One of the things I find amusing about people who argue over the meaning of passages in the Bible is that so few of them seem to recognize that they're working from a translation.

A few -- very few, in my experience -- people are true biblical scholars, and have worked with the Aramaic and Greek originals (and I use that word with some hesitation, as even those were copies of earlier documents, copied and perhaps translated themselves with uncertain accuracy).  Most everyone else acts as if their favorite English translation is the literal word of God, as if Jesus Christ himself spoke pure, unadulterated 'Murican.

It does give rise to some funny situations.  We have the argument over whether the forbidden fruit that Eve gave Adam was an apple, a fig, or a pomegranate.  We have the claim (Micah 5:2) that the Messiah would be descended from David, and both Matthew and Luke go to great lengths to show that Joseph was a descendant of David (although they disagree on his descent, so they can't both be right) -- and Jesus wasn't Joseph's son in any case.  We have one person who has argued that the creation story was translated wrong, and that God didn't create life, he "separated" humans from everything else, presumably by giving them souls.

We even have some folks who claim -- tongue-in-cheek, of course -- that the line from Leviticus 20 about "if a man lies with another man, they should both be stoned" as biblical support for same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization simultaneously.

All of which strikes me as funny, because no matter how you slice it, you're still arguing over the meaning of an uncertainly-translated text that has been recopied with uncertain precision an uncertain number of times, and reflects the beliefs of a bunch of Bronze Age sheepherders in any case.  Notwithstanding, you still have people arguing like hell that their translation is the correct, God-approved one, and all of the others are wrong.

And then you have this guy, who takes things a step further, declaring that the translation of one word is correct, and that means that... pretty much everything else we know about the history of the Middle East is wrong.

That word is "corn."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The word occurs 102 times (in the King James Version, at least) -- mostly as a translation of the Semitic root dagan.  The problem, of course, is that corn is a Mesoamerican plant, and did not exist in the Middle East until it was brought over after the exploration of the New World. It's very easily explained, though; not only did dagan mean "grain" (not, specifically, corn), the word "corn" itself once meant "grain" in early Modern English -- a usage that persists in the word "barleycorn."

But this guy doesn't think so.  He thinks that the use of the word "corn" means... corn.  As in the stuff you eat at picnics in the summer with lots of butter and salt, the stuff cornmeal and popcorn and corn starch and high-fructose corn syrup are made from.  And therefore, he thinks...

... that everything in the bible actually happened here in the Western Hemisphere.

I'm not making this up.  Here's a direct quote:

The difficult situation with CORN in the BIBLE is that most people, due to the brainwashing that has been handed down through generations, firmly believe that the Biblical events happened in the Middle East.  After much research I can PROVE that the Middle East has absolutely NOTHING to do with the history, geography, and genealogy of the Holy Scriptures.  Nothing!...  CORN is in the Bible because the PEOPLE, PLACES, and EVENTS of the Biblical narratives were in the AMERICAS!

The "true history" of the events of the bible, he says, have been "hidden for over 500 years."  He has proof, which he will tell us when his book is released, and it's gonna overturn everything you think you know about history.

Oh, yeah, and the Crusades happened over here, too.  Apparently the Crusaders didn't trek to Jerusalem, they were trying to retake Peoria or something.

'Murica! Yeah!

I'm not making this up, and the guy who wrote it seems entirely serious.  But it does highlight what can happen when you decide that any human-created document is the infallible word of a deity, or even (as I've heard) that God guided the translators and copiers so that it still is inerrant even after the inevitable Game of Telephone that translating and copying usually entails.  Not many people go as far as Corn Dude does -- but it does bring up the question of whether any translation of the Bible is good enough that we should even entertain using it as a guide to behavior or (heaven forfend) science.

So that's our exercise in eye-rolling for today.  Me, I'm done with the topic, so I'm going to go get breakfast.

For some reason, I'm in the mood for cornbread.  Funny thing, that.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is scarily appropriate reading material in today's political climate: Robert Bartholomew and Peter Hassall's wonderful A Colorful History of Popular Delusions.  In this brilliant and engaging book, the authors take a look at the phenomenon of crowd behavior, and how it has led to some of the most irrational behaviors humans are prone to -- fads, mobs, cults, crazes, manias, urban legends, and riots.

Sometimes amusing, sometimes shocking, this book looks at how our evolutionary background as a tribal animal has made us prone all too often to getting caught up in groupthink, where we leave behind logic and reason for the scary territory of making decisions based purely on emotion.  It's unsettling reading, but if you want to understand why humans all too often behave in ways that make the rational ones amongst us want to do repeated headdesks, this book should be on your list.

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