Self-correction, paradigm shifts, and Rapa Nui

It's not even 7 AM and I already broke the cardinal rule of the internet, which is, "Don't feed the trolls."

Posting as I do about controversial issues like climate change, evolution, and religion, it's only to be expected that I get pretty heated commentary sometimes.  While I'm always ready and willing to consider a well-reasoned argument against my viewpoints, I'm usually smart enough to let the "You only say that because you're a (choose one): radical leftist, godless heathen, anti-American, tree-hugger, cynic, whiny liberal, complete idiot" comments roll off me.

Usually.

The one that got me today was the person who responded to a story I retweeted about a recent discovery in evolutionary biology with the time-honored snarl, "Your sciencism is more of a faith than my religion is.  I don't get why you trust something that could be completely disproven tomorrow.  I'll stick with eternal truths."

I spent a long time (well, to quote Lieutenant Commander Data, "0.68 seconds... to an android, that is nearly an eternity") trying to talk myself out of responding.  That effort being unsuccessful, I wrote, "... and I don't get why you trust something that is completely incapable of self-correcting, and therefore wouldn't recognize if something was wrong, much less fix it."

This resulted in another time-honored snarl, namely, "fuck you, asshole," which I am always surprised to hear from someone whose holy book says lots of stuff about "turn the other cheek" and "love thy enemies" and "pray for those who persecute you" but very little about "say 'fuck you' to any assholes who challenge you."

Anyhow, I do find it puzzling that self-correction is considered some kind of fault.  Upon some consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the problem is based in a misunderstanding of what kind of self-correction science does.  The usual sort is on the level of details -- a rearrangement of an evolutionary tree for a particular group of animals (that was the link that started the whole argument), a revision of our model for stellar evolution, an adjustment to estimates for the rate of global temperature increase.  As I've pointed out more than once here at Skeptophilia, truly paradigm-changing reversals in science -- something like the discovery of plate tectonics in the 1960s -- stand out primarily because of how uncommon they are.

So "this all might be proven wrong tomorrow" should be followed up with, "yeah, but it almost certainly won't."

As an example of how self-correction in science actually works, consider the paper that appeared last week in The Journal of Archaeological Science questioning a long-held narrative of the history of Rapa Nui, more commonly known by its European-given name of Easter Island.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons TravelingOtter, Moai at Rano Raraku - Easter Island (5956405378), CC BY 2.0]

The previous model, made famous in Jared Diamond's book Collapse, was that the inhabitants of Rapa Nui did themselves in by felling all the trees (in part to make rollers and skids for moving the massive blocks of stone that became the iconic moai, the stone heads that dot the island's terrain) and ignoring the signs of oncoming ecological catastrophe.  The story is held as a cautionary tale about our own overutilization of natural resources and blindness to the danger signals from the Earth's environmental state, and the whole thing had such resonance with the eco-minded that it wasn't questioned.

Well, a team researchers, led by Robert DiNapoli of the University of Oregon, have said, "Not so fast."

In "A Model-Based Approach to the Tempo of 'Collapse': The Case of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)," the anthropologists and archaeologists studying Rapa Nui found that it may not be so clear-cut.  The pre-European-contact ecological collapse was much more gradual than previously believed, and it looks like the building of moai went on long after Diamond and others had estimated.  The authors write:

Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) presents a quintessential case where the tempo of investment in monumentality is central to debates regarding societal collapse, with the common narrative positing that statue platform (ahu) construction ceased sometime around AD 1600 following an ecological, cultural, and demographic catastrophe.  This narrative remains especially popular in fields outside archaeology that treat collapse as historical fact and use Rapa Nui as a model for collapse more generally.  Resolving the tempo of “collapse” events, however, is often fraught with ambiguity given a lack of formal modeling, uncritical use of radiocarbon estimates, and inattention to information embedded in stratigraphic features.  Here, we use a Bayesian model-based approach to examine the tempo of events associated with arguments about collapse on Rapa Nui.  We integrate radiocarbon dates, relative architectural stratigraphy, and ethnohistoric accounts to quantify the onset, rate, and end of monument construction as a means of testing the collapse hypothesis.  We demonstrate that ahu construction began soon after colonization and increased rapidly, sometime between the early-14th and mid-15th centuries AD, with a steady rate of construction events that continued beyond European contact in 1722.  Our results demonstrate a lack of evidence for a pre-contact ‘collapse’ and instead offer strong support for a new emerging model of resilient communities that continued their long-term traditions despite the impacts of European arrival.

All of which points out that -- like yesterday's post about the Greenland Vikings' demise -- complex events seldom result from single causes.  Note that the researchers are not saying that the inhabitants of Rapa Nui's felling of the native trees was inconsequential, nor that the contact with Europeans was without negative repercussions for the natives, just as the paper cited yesterday didn't overturn completely the prior understanding that the Greenland Vikings had been done in by the onset of the Little Ice Age.  What it demonstrates is that we home in on the truth in science by questioning prior models and looking at the actual evidence, not by simply continuing to hang on to the previous explanation because it fits our version of how we think the world works.

So the self-correction about the history of Rapa Nui isn't a paradigm shift, unless you count the fact that its use as a caution about our own perilous ecological situation won't be quite so neat and tidy any more.  And what it definitely doesn't do is to call into question the methods of science themselves.  The proponents of "it could all be proven wrong tomorrow" seem to feel that all scientists are doing is making wild guesses, then finding out the guesses are wrong and replacing them with other wild guesses.  The reality is closer to an electrician trying to figure out what's wrong with the wiring in your house, first testing one thing and then another, gradually ruling out hypotheses about what the problem might be and homing in on where the fault lies so it can be repaired.  (And ultimately, ending up with functional circuitry that works every time you use it.)

But the truth is, I probably shouldn't have engaged with the person who posted the original comment.  There seems little to be gained by online snark-fests other than raising the blood pressure on both sides.  So I'm recommitting myself to not feeding the trolls, and hoping that my resolution will last longer than 0.68 seconds this time.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is a dark one, but absolutely gripping: the brilliant novelist Haruki Murakami's Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

Most of you probably know about the sarin attack in the subways of Tokyo in 1995, perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult under the leadership of Shoko Asahara.  Asahara, acting through five Aum members, set off nerve gas containers during rush hour, killing fifty people outright and injuring over a thousand others.  All six of them were hanged in 2018 for the crimes, along with a seventh who acted as a getaway driver.

Murakami does an amazing job in recounting the events leading up to the attack, and getting into the psyches of the perpetrators.  Amazingly, most of them were from completely ordinary backgrounds and had no criminal records at all, nor any other signs of the horrors they had planned.  Murakami interviewed commuters who were injured by the poison and also a number of first responders, and draws a grim but fascinating picture of one of the darkest days in Japanese history.

You won't be able to put it down.

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

Reaping the whirlwind

George Santayana's words, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it," have been quoted so often they've almost become a cliché.  This doesn't make the central message any less true, of course.  A great many of the crises we're currently facing have been faced before -- making it even more frustrating that we're approaching them with the same laissez-faire, Panglossian breeziness that didn't work the first time.

Bringing up another quote, of uncertain origin but often attributed to Einstein, that insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

If you can stand one more cautionary tale that (given our track record) we still won't take to heart in our current situation, consider the fate of the 14th-century Greenland Vikings.

During the last decades of the first millennium C.E., the climate improved, opening up northern ocean lanes and encouraging the seafaring Danes, Swedes, and Norse to go forth and colonize (or from the perspective of the prior inhabitants, to rape, loot, and pillage).  Eventually this led to the settlement of coastal Greenland, in the form of several small villages that considering the conditions, did remarkably well for about three hundred years.

Then they were hit by a double whammy.

The first was the Little Ice Age, a quick downturn of global average temperature that occurred for reasons still largely unknown.  The Arctic ice began to extend its reach, making sea travel difficult to impossible.  The second was that the Greenlanders had overhunted the source of their livelihood; walruses, hunted both for meat and for ivory.  Walrus populations collapsed, killing trade and cutting the Greenlanders off from their European cousins -- especially now that travel was hazardous enough that there had to be a pretty significant financial incentive to make the trip.  This piece of the puzzle was the subject of a new paper that came out last week in Quaternary Science Reviews, and is why the topic was on my mind in the first place.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jensbn, Greenland scenery, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So the villagers were on their own as the food sources dwindled and the weather got steadily worse.  At some point, the last of the European Greenlanders died, alone and forgotten, and that was the end of the Viking presence in Greenland.  The thought of the final villager, waiting all alone for his own death, was such a deeply poignant image that when I first read about the story I wrote a poem about it -- a poem that won second place in Writers' Journal national poetry competition, and appeared in the January 1999 issue of the magazine.  It remains one of the high points of my writing career (and the only award I've ever gotten).  Here's the poem:

Greenland Colony 1375 

He goes down to the sea each day and walks the shore.
Each day the gray sea ice is closer, and fewer gulls come.
He wanders up toward the village, past the empty and ruined rectory.
The churchyard behind it has stone cairns.  His wife lies beneath one,
And there is one for Thórvald, his son,
Though Thórvald's bones do not rest there; he and three others
Were gathered ten years ago in the sea's net
And came not home. 

Since building his son's cairn,
He had buried one by one the last four villagers.
Each time he prayed in the in the stone church on Sunday
That he would be next,
And not left alone to watch the ice closing in. 

In his father's time ships had come.  The last one came
Fifty years ago.
Storms and ice made it easy for captains to forget
The village existed.  For a time he prayed each Sunday
For a ship to come and take him to Iceland or Norway or anywhere.
None came.  Ship-prayers died with the last villager,
Three years ago.  He still prayed in the stone church on Sunday,
For other things; until last winter,
When the church roof collapsed in a storm.
The next Sunday he stayed home and prayed for other things there. 

Now even the gulls are going,
Riding the thin winds to other shores.  Soon they will all be gone.
He will walk the shore, looking out to sea for ships that will never come,
And see only the gray sea ice, closer each day.

The idea of a group of people sliding toward oblivion, ignoring the warning signs, and missing what you would discover only in retrospect was your last opportunity to escape, has a chilling resonance in our time.  What we're facing is the opposite of what did in the Greenland Vikings -- a human-induced climate warm-up.  Just last week, after an Antarctic summer that had an average temperature already poised to break the record, Esperanza Base on Antarctica's Trinity Peninsula recorded the continent's warmest temperature ever -- 64.9 F.  Ice is melting at a rate almost impossible to comprehend -- the average in the last five years is 252 billion tons melted per year.

But with few exceptions, the world's leaders are doing exactly what the poor Greenland Vikings did; carrying on as usual, expecting that things would work out at some point, all the while continuing to overutilize resources and ignore the warning signs.  The only difference here is that the climate cool-off that contributed to the collapse of the villages in coastal Greenland was a natural process.

Here, the warm-up is something we're doing to ourselves, and is due to a process that Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius warned us would lead to global warming -- in 1896.

But as long as things haven't hit us personally, it's easy to look the other way rather than give up our lavish lifestyles.  Even wakeup calls like the recent Australian wildfires haven't shocked the world's leaders into action.  Except for a lot of sad head-shaking about those poor people whose homes burned down, and look at the sad koalas, not a damn thing has changed.

I fear that like the last Norse Greenlander, we're going to realize at some point -- most likely when it's too late to act (if it isn't already).  It's hard not to despair over the whole thing.  And it brings to mind one last quote, this one from the Bible, specifically the book of Hosea, chapter 8:  "He who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is a dark one, but absolutely gripping: the brilliant novelist Haruki Murakami's Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

Most of you probably know about the sarin attack in the subways of Tokyo in 1995, perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult under the leadership of Shoko Asahara.  Asahara, acting through five Aum members, set off nerve gas containers during rush hour, killing fifty people outright and injuring over a thousand others.  All six of them were hanged in 2018 for the crimes, along with a seventh who acted as a getaway driver.

Murakami does an amazing job in recounting the events leading up to the attack, and getting into the psyches of the perpetrators.  Amazingly, most of them were from completely ordinary backgrounds and had no criminal records at all, nor any other signs of the horrors they had planned.  Murakami interviewed commuters who were injured by the poison and also a number of first responders, and draws a grim but fascinating picture of one of the darkest days in Japanese history.

You won't be able to put it down.

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

A game with death

After yesterday's dismal political post, today we're going to look at something more upbeat and cheerful:

Playing a board game with your dead relatives.

Well, okay, that's not exactly upbeat and cheerful.  But it's pretty interesting nonetheless.  The topic comes up because of a recent discovery in Egypt of a board for playing the game of senet, which was apparently something like ancient Egyptian backgammon.  No one knows what the rules are except that it involved dice throwing, followed by moving pieces along a grid of thirty squares.  Squares number 26 through 29 had special characters on them, of unknown purpose, but probably corresponded to things like "lose one turn" or "go back five spaces" you find on modern board games.

So it looks like the idea that used to frustrate the absolute hell out of me as a little kid playing "Chutes & Ladders" was invented a very long time ago.  If you don't know "Chutes & Ladders," its a one-hundred-square grid with ladders (moving you ahead in one jump) and chutes (moving you backward).  And there's a chute -- on square #98, if memory serves -- that moves you back to, like, square #4 or something.

I'm guessing the Egyptians also invented the time-honored method of dealing with such circumstances, namely, picking up the board and hurling it at your opponents.

Be that as it may, when you get to Middle Kingdom times (2040-1782 B.C.E.) there are some tomb paintings that show people playing senet not against the living -- but against their dead family members.  And a new symbol shows up on square #27.

The symbol for water -- which Egyptologists believe represented a lake or river that spirits encountered on their journey through Duat, the realm of the dead.

The newly-discovered senet board [Image courtesy of the Rosicrucian Museum, San Jose, California]

You have to wonder what the purpose of playing a board game with a deceased person was.  Was it just supposed to be entertaining for the dead guy?  After all, there was probably not much to do, stuck in a pyramid forever, even though they did things like burying the dead with food, drink, their belongings, and even mummified pets.

On the other hand, the paranormal-fiction-writer part of me wonders if it might not be something more sinister.  After all, another age-old tradition is people playing against Death (or in Judeo-Christian cultures, against Satan) for their lives or their eternal souls.  I have a legend like this in my own family -- on my dad's Scottish side one of my ancestors is a gentleman named Alexander Lindsay, who was the 4th Earl of Crawford.  Lindsay, known as "Earl Beardie" or "the Tiger Earl" because of his flaming red hair and beard, was born in 1423 in Auchterhouse, County Angus, Scotland, and became well known for his violent temper and fondness for scotch.  The legend goes that he was playing a dice game with a friend on a Saturday evening, and the friend heard the church bells chiming midnight in the distance.

"We should stop now that it's the Sabbath," the friend said.  "The devil is always watching."

Lindsay laughed, and said, "Let him show up, then, and I'll play a game against him for my very soul.  Otherwise, I'm not stopping."

Well, the predictable result was that Satan showed up in person, said, in essence, "The hell you say," and held Lindsay to his word.  And Lindsay wasn't as lucky as Johnny was in the Charlie Daniels song "Devil Went Down to Georgia," unfortunately for him.  He lost the game and his soul, and now goes stomping around Glamis Castle, swearing drunkenly and throwing dice in a futile attempt to win his soul back.

I remember telling my dad about this years ago.  His response was to snort and say, "Yeah, sounds like one of my relatives."

But I digress.

Anyhow, the senet board and the research into what the game signified -- and what connection it may have had with rituals surrounding death -- is pretty interesting stuff.  A paper last week in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, by Walter Crist, describes the new find as follows:

Egyptian senet boards follow a very consistent morphology that varies in small but notable ways throughout the 2000-year history of the game.  A previously unpublished board, in the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose, California, may provide new insight into the evolution of the game in the early New Kingdom.  A game table with markings distinctive of the Thutmoside Period, but oriented like Middle Kingdom and Seventeenth Dynasty boards, it is probably a transitional style.  It likely dates to the Eighteenth Dynasty before the reign of Hatshepsut, a period to which no other games have previously been securely dated.

So that's really cool, whether or not the game turns out to have any supernatural connection.  Myself, I'd just as soon it didn't.  The world's a risky enough place on its own, without adding the potential for playing a game with death.

Look what happened to poor Earl Beardie.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is both intriguing and sobering: Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

The year in the title is the peak of a period of instability and warfare that effectively ended the Bronze Age.  In the end, eight of the major civilizations that had pretty much run Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East -- the Canaanites, Cypriots, Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Minoans, Myceneans, and Hittites -- all collapsed more or less simultaneously.

Cline attributes this to a perfect storm of bad conditions, including famine, drought, plague, conflict within the ruling clans and between nations and their neighbors, and a determination by the people in charge to keep doing things the way they'd always done them despite the changing circumstances.  The result: a period of chaos and strife that destroyed all eight civilizations.  The survivors, in the decades following, rebuilt new nation-states from the ruins of the previous ones, but the old order was gone forever.

It's impossible not to compare the events Cline describes with what is going on in the modern world -- making me think more than once while reading this book that it was half history, half cautionary tale.  There is no reason to believe that sort of collapse couldn't happen again.

After all, the ruling class of all eight ancient civilizations also thought they were invulnerable.

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

Raising the dragon

I've been trying to stay off the topic of politics lately.

Besides being depressing, the subject has lately been fraught with overtones of futility.  The followers of Donald Trump are more and more becoming a cult, where Dear Leader can do no wrong and his supporters cannot tolerate any criticism.  I have seen, I kid you not, images of Trump as a muscle-bound shirtless prizefighter, and as a Jesus-like figure with robes on a white stallion.  The near impossibility of getting the Trump Party members to see this man as the amoral, lying, narcissistic grifter the rest of us see was discovered last week, to his chagrin, by Joe Walsh, former Illinois representative and staunch conservative Republican.  Walsh, who is running for the GOP nomination -- not that you could tell if you talked to most Republicans -- was speaking to a crowd of GOP supporters in Iowa prior to the primary, and got a reception he described later on Twitter:

I spoke in front of 3,000 Iowa Republicans last night.  It was like a MAGA rally.  I told them we needed a President who doesn’t lie all the time.  The crowd booed me.  I told them we needed a President who wasn’t indecent & cruel.  The crowd booed me.  I told them we needed a President who doesn’t care only about himself.  The crowd booed me.  I told them the Republican Party needed to do some real soul searching.  The crowd booed me.  I told them that, because of Trump, young people, women, and people of color want nothing to do with the Republican Party.  The crowd booed me.  I told them I’m a pro life, pro gun, secure the border conservative, but we need a President who is decent and represents everyone.  The crowd booed me.  I got booed, yelled at, jeered, and given the middle finger for the 3-4 minutes  I spoke to these 3,000 people.  Afterwards, I realized again that 99.9% of these folks don’t support me.  They don’t care that Trump lies, they don’t care that he’s cruel, they don’t care that he cheats to get re-elected, they don’t care that he attacks the free press, they don’t care that he increases the debt, they don’t care that his tariffs have killed Iowa farmers, they don’t care that Trump abuses the Constitution and acts like a dictator.  Afterwards, I realized again that my Republican Party isn’t a Party, it’s a cult.  I realized again that nobody can beat Trump in a Republican Primary.  And most importantly and most sadly, I realized again that I don’t belong in this party.  I have no home in this party.  And I realized again that something new needs to begin.  Whether it’s a political party, or a movement, I don’t know.  But there needs to be a home for conservatives who are decent, principled, and respectful.  Conservatives who embrace all God’s children, acknowledge that climate change is real, get serious about our debt, abide by our Constitution, and tell the truth.  I hope to be a part of this new party.  This new movement. But job #1 in 2020 is to stop Trump.  And all of us from across the political spectrum need to come together to stop Trump.  Let’s make sure Trump is defeated in 2020, then we get back to respectfully debating issues.  Instead of talking about Trump everyday, let's put aside our differences on certain issues now and understand that Trump is the single greatest threat to this Republic.

While I find it unfortunate that Walsh was treated discourteously, and even more unfortunate that no one was taking his message to heart, I have a hard time feeling sorry for the GOP as a whole.  They, and their mouthpiece Fox News, have created a perfect storm of conditions that is so reminiscent of the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany of the 1930s that anyone who doesn't see the parallels must be either ignorant of history or else willfully blind.  The whole thing brought to mind the wonderful quote from novelist Stephen King (which I then tweeted at Walsh, not that he responded to or probably even read it): "Those who have spent years sowing dragon's teeth seem surprised to find that they have grown an actual dragon."

And very few people have done more in the dragon's-tooth-sowing effort than Rush Limbaugh -- who on Tuesday evening was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons DonkeyHotey, Rush Limbaugh - Caricature (5337997122), CC BY-SA 2.0]

I haven't been surprised by much in these chaotic last few months -- Trump's defiance of the rule of law, Mitch McConnell's smirking, wink-wink-nudge-nudge defense of him, the Senate's decision to acquit him of charges that make Watergate look like a seventh grader shoplifting a piece of candy from the local grocery store.  But the awarding of the Medal of Freedom to the likes of Limbaugh took me off guard.

Limbaugh's hate-filled rhetoric has been inflaming the Right for decades, convincing them they're threatened (and that their opponents are amoral America-haters) in terms that are nauseating in their quantity and sheer ugliness.  A sampler:

• To an African-American caller on a radio program: "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back."
• Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society. 
• There are more acres of forest land in America today than when Columbus discovered the continent in 1492.
• Greetings, conversationalists across the fruited plain, this is Rush Limbaugh, the most dangerous man in America, with the largest hypothalamus in North America, serving humanity simply by opening my mouth, destined for my own wing in the Museum of Broadcasting, executing everything I do flawlessly with zero mistakes, doing this show with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair because I have talent on loan from God.
• Styrofoam and plastic milk jugs are biodegradable.  You know what isn't biodegradable?  Paper.
• The NAACP should have riot rehearsal.  They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.
• The way liberals are interpreting the First Amendment today is that it prevents anyone who is religious from being in government.
• There are more American Indians alive today than there were when Columbus arrived or at any other time in history.  Does this sound like a record of genocide?
• All composite pictures of wanted criminals look like Jesse Jackson.
• Let me tell you something.  They say [Oliver North] lied to Congress.  I can think of no better bunch of people to lie to than Congress.
• [The torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison] was sort of like hazing, a fraternity prank.  Sort of like that kind of fun...  I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release?  You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?
• Look it, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons.  There, I said it.
• Liberals should have their speech controlled and not be allowed to buy guns.  I mean if we want to get serious about this, if we want to face this head on, we’re gonna have to openly admit, liberals should not be allowed to buy guns, nor should they be allowed to use computer keyboards or typewriters, word processors or e-mails, and they should have their speech controlled.  If we did those three or four things, I can’t tell you what a sane, calm, civil, fun-loving society we would have.  Take guns out of the possession, out of the hands of liberals, take their typewriters and their keyboards away from ‘em, don’t let ‘em anywhere near a gun, and control their speech.  You would wipe out 90% of the crime, 85 to 95% of the hate, and a hundred percent of the lies from society.

There you have it.  The man that Donald Trump awarded with one of the highest honors given in the United States.  The man Trump just put in the same category as Rosa Parks, Norman Rockwell, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Redford, Carl Sandberg, Eudora Welty, Elie Wiesel, Grace Hopper, and Jonas Salk.

It's almost certain that Trump chose Tuesday night, the same night as the State of the Union speech, to give the award because Limbaugh just announced that he had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer (after being a lifelong smoker -- and scoffer at the connection between tobacco use and cancer).  I wouldn't wish lung cancer on anyone, after watching the agony two of my uncles went through while dying of the disease, but the fact that he's a very sick man doesn't change the fact that he has spent his entire adult life spewing a venomous message with the sole purpose of fomenting hate.  Joe Walsh's reception at what turned out to be a MAGA rally shows how successful Limbaugh and his colleagues have been -- people like Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, and Glenn Beck, amongst many others.

And the fact that someone like Limbaugh was given a prestigious award for service to his nation shows just how far in the downward spiral we've gone.

I don't know what else to say.  I'm saddened, sickened, and disheartened by what my country has become and is becoming.  I fear that we haven't reached bottom yet, something I find profoundly frightening.

In fact, I think the dragon the GOP has grown is just beginning to rear his ugly head.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is both intriguing and sobering: Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

The year in the title is the peak of a period of instability and warfare that effectively ended the Bronze Age.  In the end, eight of the major civilizations that had pretty much run Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East -- the Canaanites, Cypriots, Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Minoans, Myceneans, and Hittites -- all collapsed more or less simultaneously.

Cline attributes this to a perfect storm of bad conditions, including famine, drought, plague, conflict within the ruling clans and between nations and their neighbors, and a determination by the people in charge to keep doing things the way they'd always done them despite the changing circumstances.  The result: a period of chaos and strife that destroyed all eight civilizations.  The survivors, in the decades following, rebuilt new nation-states from the ruins of the previous ones, but the old order was gone forever.

It's impossible not to compare the events Cline describes with what is going on in the modern world -- making me think more than once while reading this book that it was half history, half cautionary tale.  There is no reason to believe that sort of collapse couldn't happen again.

After all, the ruling class of all eight ancient civilizations also thought they were invulnerable.

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

A flood of mythic proportions

Ever heard of the Zanclean Flood?

If not, you definitely should, because it was pretty stupendous.

At some point during the late Miocene Epoch, a combination of tectonic activity and sea level drop brought the level of the Atlantic Ocean below the Gibraltar Sill, the range of (now underwater) mountains that crosses the Strait of Gibraltar, connecting Spain to Morocco.  When that happened, the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic, and received its only influxes of water from rainfall and the input from rivers (including the Rhone, Nile, Po, and Tiber Rivers).

At that point, the evaporation from the hot, dry winds off northern Africa and southern Europe occurred at a greater rate than the influx of water, and the Mediterranean began to dry up.  Eventually it split into two extremely saline parts, separated by another sill across the Straits of Sicily, each of which had a water level way below that of the rest of the Earth's oceans.

Well, in geology nothing is constant but change.  About 5.33 million years ago, tectonic activity, this time coupled with a sea level rise, eventually breached the barrier of the Gibraltar Sill, creating a waterfall.

But this wasn't just a waterfall.  This was a freakin' HUGE waterfall.

Geologist Daniel García-Castellanos, of the Spanish National Research Council, has done a tremendous amount of research into the Zanclean Flood and the events that led up to it, and has estimated that the Gibraltar Sill Waterfall, at its greatest, was a kilometer tall and was pouring two hundred million cubic meters of water into the Mediterranean Basin per second.

For reference, this is a thousand times more water than the Amazon River moves during the rainy season.

Artist's conception of the western Mediterranean just as the Zanclean Flood was beginning [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Paubahi, Etapa4, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So the Mediterranean began to refill, reaching increases in level of ten meters per day.  This kind of water flow created erosion like you can't even imagine, blowing enormous boulders over the Sill and down into what is now the western Mediterranean.  Anything in the water's path was drowned.  The sudden refilling of the basin drastically changed the climate, cooling what had been a blast-furnace of a desert (think Death Valley but much, much bigger).

All things considered, one of the most dramatic geological events ever.

One of the difficulties of studying it, though, is that all of the evidence is currently underwater.  But now García-Castellanos, again working with a team from the Spanish National Research Council, has found what might be the smoking gun for the Zanclean Flood.

Using seismic reflection profiles, García-Castellanos and his team have found massive piles of sediments that were apparently deposited over a very short period of time, right where you'd expect to find the talus pile of the Gibraltar Sill Waterfall.  It's enormous -- as you might expect -- 163 meters thick, 35 kilometers long, and 7 kilometers wide, extending from the Sill down into the depths of the Alborán Sea, the very western bit of the Mediterranean.  "The identified sediments are compatible with a megaflood event refilling the Mediterranean Sea through the Strait of Gibraltar," García-Castellanos said.  "It's an enlarged body deposited in the protected area at the lee side of a submarine volcano."

However, as befits a good scientist, García-Castellanos has invited other geologists and seismologists to examine the data and see if his conclusions are valid.  "Ten years after publishing the first observations that were related with the Zanclean Flood we are still finding new evidence to sustain it, but it is not conclusive," he said.  "All of the evidence that has been summarized in this article may have other possible interpretations and, before convincing the scientific community it will be necessary to have other studies that consider the hypothesis from other angles."

But however it eventually falls out, the refilling of the Mediterranean must have been something to see.  From a safe distance.  The geological processes of the Earth are often unsubtle, and their power makes me feel very, very small, but even looking at it from a geologist's perspective, this one must have been spectacular.

Feeling humbled by the universe is not necessarily a bad thing.  We humans have a way of getting cocky and thinking we're in charge of things.  Looking back in geological history, though, one very quickly realizes our fragility in the face of forces far, far more powerful than anything we've been able to devise -- and that our continued survival on Earth is in no sense guaranteed.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is both intriguing and sobering: Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

The year in the title is the peak of a period of instability and warfare that effectively ended the Bronze Age.  In the end, eight of the major civilizations that had pretty much run Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East -- the Canaanites, Cypriots, Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Minoans, Myceneans, and Hittites -- all collapsed more or less simultaneously.

Cline attributes this to a perfect storm of bad conditions, including famine, drought, plague, conflict within the ruling clans and between nations and their neighbors, and a determination by the people in charge to keep doing things the way they'd always done them despite the changing circumstances.  The result: a period of chaos and strife that destroyed all eight civilizations.  The survivors, in the decades following, rebuilt new nation-states from the ruins of the previous ones, but the old order was gone forever.

It's impossible not to compare the events Cline describes with what is going on in the modern world -- making me think more than once while reading this book that it was half history, half cautionary tale.  There is no reason to believe that sort of collapse couldn't happen again.

After all, the ruling class of all eight ancient civilizations also thought they were invulnerable.

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

One ring to track them all

I'm notoriously un-tech-savvy.  Or, to put it more accurately, my techspertise is very narrow and focused.  I've learned a few things really well -- such as how to format and edit posts here at Blogspot -- and a handful of other computer applications, but outside of those (and especially if anything malfunctions), I immediately flounder.

I have my genealogy software pretty well figured out (fortunately, because my genealogical database has 130,000 names in it, so I better know how to manage it).  I'm relatively good with my primary word processing software, Pages, and am marginally capable with MS Word, although I have to say that my experience with formatting documents in Word has been less than an enjoyable experience.  It seems to be designed to turn simple requests into major havoc, such as the time at work when I messed around with a document for two hours to figure out why it had no Page 103, but went from 102 directly to 104.  Repaginating the entire document generated such results as the page numbers going to 102 then starting over at 1, stopping at 102 and leaving the rest of the pages with no number, and deleting the page numbers entirely.  None of these is what I had explicitly asked the computer to do.

I finally took a blank sheet of paper, hand-wrote "103" in the upper right-hand corner, and stuck it into the printed manuscript.  To my knowledge, no one has yet noticed.

In any case, all of this leaves me rather in awe of people who are tech-adepts -- especially those who can not only learn to use the stuff adroitly, but dream new devices up.

Such as the gizmo featured in Science Daily that was the subject of a paper last month in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.  It describes a new device called AuraRing, developed at the University of Washington, that coupled with a wristband is able to keep track of the position of the finger that's wearing the ring.

"We're thinking about the next generation of computing platforms," said co-lead author Eric Whitmire, who completed this research as a doctoral student at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.  "We wanted a tool that captures the fine-grain manipulation we do with our fingers -- not just a gesture or where your finger's pointed, but something that can track your finger completely."

The AuraRing is capable of detecting movements such as taps, flicks, and pinches -- similar to the kinds of movements we now use on touch screens.  Another possibility is using it to monitor handwriting and turn it into typed text (although I have to wonder what it'd do with my indecipherable scrawl -- it's a smart device, but I seriously doubt it's that smart).

"We can also easily detect taps, flicks or even a small pinch versus a big pinch," AuraRing co-developer Farshid Salemi Parizi said.  "This gives you added interaction space.  For example, if you write 'hello,' you could use a flick or a pinch to send that data.  Or on a Mario-like game, a pinch could make the character jump, but a flick could make them super jump...  It's all about super powers.  You would still have all the capabilities that today's smartwatches have to offer, but when you want the additional benefits, you just put on your ring."

The whole thing reminds me of the amazing musical gloves developed a few years ago by musician and innovator Imogen Heap.  She's a phenomenal artist in general, but has pioneered the use of technology in enhancing performance -- not just using auto-tune to straighten out poorly-sung notes, but actually incorporating the technology as part of the instrumentation.

If you've never seen her using her gloves, take twenty minutes and watch this.  It's pretty amazing.

So that's the latest in smart technology that I'm probably not smart enough to use.  But I still find it fascinating.  One more step toward full-body emulation on a computer, complete with a body suit that will not only pick up your movements, but transfer virtual sensations to your skin.

Techno-nitwit though I am, I would be at the head of the line volunteering to try that out.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is both intriguing and sobering: Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

The year in the title is the peak of a period of instability and warfare that effectively ended the Bronze Age.  In the end, eight of the major civilizations that had pretty much run Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East -- the Canaanites, Cypriots, Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Minoans, Myceneans, and Hittites -- all collapsed more or less simultaneously.

Cline attributes this to a perfect storm of bad conditions, including famine, drought, plague, conflict within the ruling clans and between nations and their neighbors, and a determination by the people in charge to keep doing things the way they'd always done them despite the changing circumstances.  The result: a period of chaos and strife that destroyed all eight civilizations.  The survivors, in the decades following, rebuilt new nation-states from the ruins of the previous ones, but the old order was gone forever.

It's impossible not to compare the events Cline describes with what is going on in the modern world -- making me think more than once while reading this book that it was half history, half cautionary tale.  There is no reason to believe that sort of collapse couldn't happen again.

After all, the ruling class of all eight ancient civilizations also thought they were invulnerable.

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

How plants see the world

The final project in my AP Biology class was to design a piece of original research, carry out an experiment, and report on the results.  I was amazed at the creative ideas students came up with, and the elegance of their methods for finding an answer -- methods that were limited by considerations of budget, space, and time.

One of the best ones I recall came out of a discussion in class when we were studying botany.  I was telling the students about statoliths, small, dense particles in the cells of plants near the tips of roots and stems, that sink to the bottom of the cell and tell the plant what direction is up.  This detection of the pull of gravity allows for gravitropism, in which the roots grow downward and the stems upward, even in the absence of light.

This sense gets taken away in zero-g conditions, as on the International Space Station.  Experiments there have shown that without an apparent pull of gravity, seeds will sprout and the roots and stems grow in whatever direction the seed is oriented -- even if that means the roots will grow upward and the stems downward.

A student asked, "What would happen if you increased the pull of gravity?  In a spaceship floating in the atmosphere of Jupiter, for example?"

I had no idea, and I told him so.  Good question, but to my knowledge it hadn't ever been tested.

So when the end of the year came, that student decided to find out.

Since a trip to Jupiter was kind of out of the question, he designed an apparatus to simulate higher-gravity conditions.  He got an old ceiling fan motor and some lengths of PVC pipe, and built himself an electronic whirligig.  He then grew sunflower seeds in two-liter soda bottles hanging on the ends of the vanes -- attached the bottles and then spun the hell out of them.  Knowing the rotational speed of the whirligig and the radius of the vanes, he could calculate the centripetal force being exerted on the bottles, and thus the increase in apparent gravitational pull.

And when he opened up the bottles, he found something extraordinary.  The higher the average gravitational pull the seedlings experienced, the shorter they were, and the thicker the stems.  Up to the limit of his whirligig's speed, it was a nearly linear relationship -- higher pull = shorter, stouter seedlings.

So somehow, plants can not only detect the direction of the pull of gravity, but its strength.

We're just starting to understand how plants sense the world, and what sorts of responses they are capable of.  A paper last week in Current Biology, describing research conducted at the University of Helsinki, unlocked a piece of what might have been going on with my student's spinning sunflowers.  The research team, led by botanist Juan Alonso-Serra, found that birch trees whose branches are weighted -- simulating a higher-mass crown -- increase the rate of the radial growth of their trunks in order to better support the higher weight.  Better still, they found that the gene called ELIMÄKI (EKI) is critical to this response; plants with a defective EKI locus were not able to do this growth-rate compensation, and eventually collapsed.

The authors write:

Our results highlight a regulatory circuit by which weight in tree trunks mechanically stimulates cambial growth.  The ELIMÄKI locus participates in this circuit, as shown by its requirement at various levels, from weight-induced growth response to the proper control of gene expression related to touch-induced mechanosensing.  The circuit facilitates the local acquisition of the biomechanical characteristics of xylem in the correct spatiotemporal manner, which systemically leads to a correct vertical proprioception response.  It remains to be studied how weight- and development-derived forces are sensed and transduced into radial growth, but our results indicate a critical role for a degree of lateral stem movement.  Similarly, it remains to be studied whether the ELIMÄKI locus contributes directly to the sensing of the proprioceptive signal or whether it is only part of its response.  Our results provide a mechanism through which the critical height:diameter ratio implied by the mechanical theory of tree evolution can be achieved.

Which is pretty amazing.  My long-ago student's research was prescient -- and now we have a possible genetic mechanism by which this response is modulated.  (Note, however, that Alonso-Serra's team still had no model for how plants are sensing the higher weight.)

Plants are aware of their surroundings in ways that are only now being understood.  One of the more mysterious responses, for which I have still heard no particularly convincing explanations, is crown shyness -- the tendency in some tree species to avoid coming near the branches of other trees, leaving "lanes" of open sky when viewed from below.

A grove of the Malaysian dipterocarp Dryobalanops aromatica, showing crown shyness [Image is in the Public Domain]

Why the usual approach -- growing taller and broader than your neighbor, so as to have better access to light (and as a side benefit, discouraging competition from the individuals around you) -- doesn't apply here, I don't know.  Two possible explanations are that having your branches not touch your neighbors' results in less chance of mechanical damage from the wind, and also provides less of a pathway for herbivores to get to you from nearby trees.

But it's hard for me to see how such minor benefits would result in such a striking response, which apparently has evolved more than once in only distantly-related species.

Also not fully understood is the phenomenon of photoperiodism, the way many plants time when to flower based on the relative lengths of the day and night.  There are a few suggestive experiments that the critical thing is the length of the night rather than the day -- breaking up the dark period by even a short flash of light disrupts the response, whereas a short dark period in the middle of the day has no effect.  Light in the red region of the spectrum has the strongest ability to disrupt this response, probably because a protein involved in the response (phytochrome) has its highest sensitivity to red light.  Some plants are extraordinarily sensitive, responding to changes in the day/night length of only a few minutes.

But exactly how they're accomplishing all of this is only partially understood.

So if we're just beginning to figure out how our own senses work, we've barely scratched the surface with the sensory apparatus of plants.  What's certain is they're not the mostly-inert little lumps we once thought, passively absorbing sunlight, otherwise unaware of their surroundings.  Plants are capable of sophisticated sensing and response -- whether to day/night length, the proximity of neighbors, weights on the branches -- or being spun around in a cobbled-together electric whirligig.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is both intriguing and sobering: Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

The year in the title is the peak of a period of instability and warfare that effectively ended the Bronze Age.  In the end, eight of the major civilizations that had pretty much run Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East -- the Canaanites, Cypriots, Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Minoans, Myceneans, and Hittites -- all collapsed more or less simultaneously.

Cline attributes this to a perfect storm of bad conditions, including famine, drought, plague, conflict within the ruling clans and between nations and their neighbors, and a determination by the people in charge to keep doing things the way they'd always done them despite the changing circumstances.  The result: a period of chaos and strife that destroyed all eight civilizations.  The survivors, in the decades following, rebuilt new nation-states from the ruins of the previous ones, but the old order was gone forever.

It's impossible not to compare the events Cline describes with what is going on in the modern world -- making me think more than once while reading this book that it was half history, half cautionary tale.  There is no reason to believe that sort of collapse couldn't happen again.

After all, the ruling class of all eight ancient civilizations also thought they were invulnerable.

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