A monumental change

You've probably heard the recent controversy about removing the statues of Confederate officers from prominent positions in the Deep South, with the anti-removal-crowd saying "It's our heritage" and the pro-removal-crowd saying "... but it's celebrating racism."  I don't intend to explore the reasoning behind either position, since I suspect that (1) we all know what our opinions on the issue are, and (2) it's unlikely anything I say would change anyone's mind.  But I do want to offer an alternative, which was (unfortunately) not my idea but the brainstorm of some folks in West Virginia.  They want to replace the statues celebrating the Confederacy with...

... statues of Mothman.

West Virginia high school teacher Jay Sisson explains:

To many West Virginians, Mothman carries more significance than any Confederate general.  In fact, the legend originated in the town of Point Pleasant, when locals spotted a “man-sized bird creature” prior to the 1967 Silver Bridge collapse that killed 46 people.  Mothman was blamed and retroactively seen as a bad omen that foreshadowed the disaster.  From there, the story of the Mothman spread across the country and became an urban legend of sorts.

Twitter user Brenna (@HumanBrennapede) has an additional reason for preferring Mothman; unlike most Confederate generals, she says, Mothman has "a six-pack and an objectively good ass."  The statue of the creature in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, illustrates this:

And I have to admit she's right that he has quite a shapely posterior.  It does remind me, however, of my days teaching Ancient Greek to high schoolers.  One of my classes complained to me one day that they were sick of learning phrases of limited modern utility like "O Zeus, accept my sacrifice" and "Prometheus's liver is being devoured by an eagle."

"Well, what do you want to learn how to say?" I asked.

One boy said, "How about, 'You have a nice ass.'"

I shrugged and said, "Okay.  It'd be, 'kalein pygian ekheis.'"  (Transliterated roughly into English letters.)

They all laughed, and I added, "I guess if you know how to say, 'you have a nice ass,' you'd better learn how to say 'thank you.'"  So I had them repeat after me, 'sas eukharisto.'"

At this point, the class was in hysterics.  Something seemed off -- it wasn't that funny.  So I turned around...

... and the principal was standing in the doorway.

Fortunately, he has an awesome sense of humor, and joined in the laughter at my obvious discombobulation.  And the students used that as their greeting to each other in the hall for the rest of the school year: "Kalein pygian ekheis."  "Sas eukharisto!"

Never let it be said that I didn't make an impact as a teacher.

But I digress.

Anyhow, I think the Mothman statue idea is brilliant.  It could be applied to lots of other states, too, each of which has its own terrifying and inhuman monster.  Florida could have statues of the Skunk Ape.  Louisiana has the Grunch.  Arkansas has the Boggy Creek Monster.  Kentucky has Mitch McConnell.

You get the idea.

So that would solve the problem of injuring state pride, and focus people's attention away from a bunch of military leaders who (to be brutally frank) lost anyhow.

But I'm not expecting it to catch on.  Inspired ideas usually don't.  Even ones that involve making statues of a creature with "an objectively good ass."

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I know I sometimes wax rhapsodic about books that really are the province only of true science geeks like myself, and fling around phrases like "a must-read" perhaps a little more liberally than I should.  But this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is really a must-read.

No, I mean it this time.

Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is something that everyone should read, because it points out the remarkable frailty of the human mind.  As wonderful as it is, we all (as Schulz puts it) "walk around in a comfortable little bubble of feeling like we're absolutely right about everything."  We accept that we're fallible, in a theoretical sense; yeah, we all make mistakes, blah blah blah.  But right now, right here, try to think of one think you might conceivably be wrong about.

Not as easy as it sounds.

She shocks the reader pretty much from the first chapter.  "What does it feel like to be wrong?" she asks.  Most of us would answer that it can be humiliating, horrifying, frightening, funny, revelatory, infuriating.  But she points out that these are actually answers to a different question: "what does it feel like to find out you're wrong?"

Actually, she tells us, being wrong doesn't feel like anything.  It feels exactly like being right.

Reading Schulz's book makes the reader profoundly aware of our own fallibility -- but it is far from a pessimistic book.  Error, Schulz says, is the window to discovery and the source of creativity.  It is only when we deny our capacity for error that the trouble starts -- when someone in power decides that (s)he is infallible.

Then we have big, big problems.

So right now, get this book.  I promise I won't say the same thing next week about some arcane tome describing the feeding habits of sea slugs.  You need to read Being Wrong.

Everyone does.

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

Along came a spider...

Sometimes there's a discovery that's just so cool that I need to tell y'all about it.  It's not apropos of much except that you never know what science is going to uncover next.

Have you ever wondered why some animals' eyes glow in the dark, and others don't?  I've seen raccoons, cats, and (given where I live, lots of) deer get caught in my car headlights at night, and been fascinated by the eerie reflections from their eyes.

But not all animals do this.  You can shine a bright light into a squirrel's eyes all you want, and you'll never see anything but a pissed-off squirrel.

The reason is a fascinating structure you only find in nocturnal animals called the tapetum lucidum.  This is basically a mirror behind the retina.  When light enters the eye and focuses on the retina, some of it passes through that tissue-thin layer of cells without activating one of the light-sensing structures -- i.e., it gets absorbed without contributing to vision.  If you're a diurnal animal (like us) this is no big deal; most of the time we have light to spare, and in fact a more common problem is too much light, which is why we have a sensitive iris that acts like the shutter on an old-fashioned camera, reducing the aperture so the inside of the eye doesn't get fried.

But nocturnal animals need every photon they can get, so many of them have evolved a tapetum.  Some of the light hitting the retina passes through and gets "wasted" -- but then it hits the tapetum and reflects back through the retina, providing a second opportunity to detect it.  This gives animals with this structure much better dim-light vision -- and makes their eyes glow in headlights.

I got to see another, more surprising, animal with a tapetum when I was on a night hike in Belize some years ago looking for nocturnal birds (many of which also have tapeta, for what it's worth).  We were all wearing headlamps, and the guide pointed out that on the trail there were what looked like hundreds of tiny rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, glittering as the beam of the lamps passed across.

"What do you think those are?" she asked, and her eyes were also glittering -- with mischief.

"No idea," I said.

"Get closer," she said.

I knelt down and peered at the little jewel-like sparkles, and very quickly discovered they were...

... spiders.

"Each species glows a different color," she said.  "We're not really sure why."

Fortunately, I'm not an arachnophobe, but I did stand up rather quickly.

So that brings us to the discovery, which appeared last week in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology.  Spider fossils aren't very common, given that they are small and don't have bones or teeth (the most commonly preserved parts), and most spider fossils known have come from amber.  So it was quite a surprise to find a beautifully-preserved fossilized spider in Korea in a formation of chert.  Chert is a sedimentary rock (obviously, since that's pretty much where you find fossils) made up of tiny crystals of quartz.  Most of it comes from the layers of the evocatively-named siliceous ooze that coats the deep ocean floor and is made mostly of the silica skeletons of diatoms, microscopic algae that build shells out of glass.  But some chert forms when water passes through cracks in silica-rich rocks, dissolving bits of it that are then deposited in layers somewhere else.  (This is, essentially, the process that forms petrified wood.)

Here, it preserved this little spider so well that after 110 million years, you can still see its tapetum -- meaning it was a nocturnal hunter, rather like a modern wolf spider.

Without further ado, here he is:

... and the tapeta still reflect light.

"This is an extinct family of spiders that were clearly very common in the Cretaceous and were occupying niches now occupied by jumping spiders that didn’t evolve until later," said Paul Selden of the University of Kansas, who co-authored the paper, in a press release.  "But these spiders were doing things differently.  Their eye structure is different from jumping spiders.  It’s nice to have exceptionally well-preserved features of internal anatomy like eye structure.  It’s really not often you get something like that preserved in a fossil."

So pretty amazing stuff, and my apologies to the arachnophobes in the studio audience.  Hopefully the title of the post was enough to forewarn you.  Me, I think they're cool, although I wasn't as sanguine as my guide in Belize was about getting nose-to- ... um... nose-to-chelicerae with them.  But this illustrates something I've mentioned many times before; science never loses its capacity to astonish us with the complexity and beauty of the natural world.

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

I know I sometimes wax rhapsodic about books that really are the province only of true science geeks like myself, and fling around phrases like "a must-read" perhaps a little more liberally than I should.  But this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is really a must-read.

No, I mean it this time.

Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is something that everyone should read, because it points out the remarkable frailty of the human mind.  As wonderful as it is, we all (as Schulz puts it) "walk around in a comfortable little bubble of feeling like we're absolutely right about everything."  We accept that we're fallible, in a theoretical sense; yeah, we all make mistakes, blah blah blah.  But right now, right here, try to think of one think you might conceivably be wrong about.

Not as easy as it sounds.

She shocks the reader pretty much from the first chapter.  "What does it feel like to be wrong?" she asks.  Most of us would answer that it can be humiliating, horrifying, frightening, funny, revelatory, infuriating.  But she points out that these are actually answers to a different question: "what does it feel like to find out you're wrong?"

Actually, she tells us, being wrong doesn't feel like anything.  It feels exactly like being right.

Reading Schulz's book makes the reader profoundly aware of our own fallibility -- but it is far from a pessimistic book.  Error, Schulz says, is the window to discovery and the source of creativity.  It is only when we deny our capacity for error that the trouble starts -- when someone in power decides that (s)he is infallible.

Then we have big, big problems.

So right now, get this book.  I promise I won't say the same thing next week about some arcane tome describing the feeding habits of sea slugs.  You need to read Being Wrong.

Everyone does.

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

Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Sometimes my mental processes are like a giant exercise in free association.

I've always been this way.  My personal motto could be, "Oh, look, something shiny!"  When I was a kid my parents had a nice set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and in those pre-internet days I used them for research for school projects.  So I'd start by looking something up -- say, the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- and I'd notice something in the article, which I'd then have to look up, then I'd notice something there, and so forth and so on, and pretty soon I was reading the entry about the mating habits of wombats.

My younger son inherited this tendency.  Conversations between the two of us resemble a pinball game.  More than once we've stopped and tried to figure out how we got from Point A to Point Z, but sometimes the pathway is just too weird and convoluted to reconstruct.  Maybe that's why I love James Burke's iconic television series Connections; the lightning-fast zinging from event to event and topic to topic, which Burke uses to brilliant (and often comical) effect, is what's happening inside my skull pretty much all the time.

It's a wonder I ever get anything done.

The reason this comes up is because I was chatting with a friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, about trying to find a topic for Skeptophilia that I hadn't covered before.  She asked if I'd ever looked at the role of mirrors in claims of the paranormal.  I said I hadn't, but that it was an interesting idea.

So I started by googling "mirrors paranormal," and this led me to the Wikipedia article on "scrying."  Apparently this was the practice of gazing into one of a wide variety of objects or substances to try to contact the spirit world.  The article says:

The media most commonly used in scrying are reflective, refractive, translucent, or luminescent surfaces or objects such as crystals, stones, or glass in various shapes such as crystal balls, mirrors, reflective black surfaces such as obsidian, water surfaces, fire, or smoke, but there is no special limitation on the preferences or prejudices of the scryer; some may stare into pitch dark, clear sky, clouds, shadows, or light patterns against walls, ceilings, or pond beds.  Some prefer glowing coals or shimmering mirages. Some simply close their eyes, notionally staring at the insides of their own eyelids, and speak of "eyelid scrying."

I think next time I'm taking a nap and my wife wants me to get up and do yard chores, I'm going to tell her to leave me alone because I'm "eyelid scrying."

Yeah, that'll work.

Anyhow, what scrying seems like to me is staring into something until you see something, with no restrictions on what either something is.  It does mean that you're almost guaranteed success, which is more than I can say for some divinatory practices.  But this brought me to the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," because they apparently recommended mirror-scrying as a way of seeing who was exerting a positive or negative effect on you, and believed that if you stared into a mirror you'd see faces of those people standing behind you.  This was preferably done in a dimly-lit room, because there's nothing like making everything harder to see for facilitating your seeing whatever you thought you were gonna see.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

On this site, there is a list of famous members, and to my surprise one of them was Charles Williams, a novelist who was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  His novels Descent into Hell, All Hallow's Eve, The Greater Trumps, The Place of the Lion, and War in Heaven are fascinatingly weird, like nothing else I've ever read -- a combination of urban fantasy and fever dream.  He was also a devout Christian, so his membership in the Golden Dawn strikes me as odd, but I guess he wasn't the only one to try blending Christianity with neo-druidic mysticism.

At this point I felt I was getting a little far afield from my original intent, so I decided to leave Wikipedia (with its multiple internal links and temptations to wander) and found a site about the history of mirrors and their uses.  On this site I learned that there's a tradition of covering all the mirrors in the house when a family member dies, to prevent the dear departed's soul from becoming trapped in the mirror.  The problem is, if the deceased's spirit wants to hang around, it can simply sidestep -- there's a whole lore about spirits and other paranormal entities which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye.

This immediately grabbed my attention because it's the basis of my novella Periphery, which is scheduled to come out in a collection called A Quartet for Diverse Instruments in the summer of 2021.  The idea of the story is that an elderly woman decides to have laser surgery to correct her nearsightedness, and afterwards she starts seeing things in her peripheral vision that no one else sees, and which disappear (or resolve into ordinary objects) when she looks at them straight-on.

The problem is, these things are real.

*cue scary music*

This led me to look into accounts of "shadow people" who exist on the fringes of reality and are only (partly) visible as dark silhouettes that flicker into and out of existence in your peripheral vision.  From there, I jumped to a page over at the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe about "static entities," which are not only vague and shadowy but appear to be made of the same stuff as static on a television screen.  I don't want to steal the thunder from Brent Swancer (the post's author) because the whole thing is well worth reading, but here's one example of an account he cites:

All of a sudden I had a really powerful urge to look at the end of the hallway.  We had recently brought a coat stand from a bootsale and this was in the middle of the hallway now.  As I stood there I saw a human outline but entirely filled with TV like static, I remember little bits of yellow and blue in it but was mainly white and it came out of the bedroom on the left and was in a running stance but it was really weird because it was in slow motion and it ran from the left to the back door on the right.  As it ran it grabbed the coat stand and pulled it down with it and it fell to the floor. I was just standing there after in shock...  I ran to my sister and told her what happened and when we went back to the hallway the stand was still on the floor.  That was the only time I saw it, I don’t know why I saw it or why it pulled the stand down, it was all just surreal.  I did have some other experiences in that house that were paranormal so maybe it was connected.

But unfortunately at the end of this article was a list of "related links," and one of them was, "Raelians' ET Embassy Seeks UN Help and Endorsement," which is about a France-based group who believes that the Elohim of the Bible were extraterrestrials who are coming back, and they want the United Nations to prepare a formal welcome for them, so of course I had to check that out.

At this point, I stopped and said, "Okay, what the hell was I researching again?"  The only one in the room with me was my dog, and he clearly had no idea.  So my apologies to K. D., not to mention my readers.  The whole mirrors thing was honestly a good idea, and it probably would have made an awesome post in the hands of someone who has an attention span longer than 2.8 seconds and isn't distracted every time a squirrel farts in the back yard.  But who knows?  Maybe you learned something anyhow.  And if you followed any of the links, tell me where you ended up.  I can always use a new launch point for my digressions.

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

These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

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

The walk of life

It's remarkably difficult to decide exactly what we mean when we say something is alive.

As a biologist, this is kind of embarrassing.  After all, "biology" means "the study of life."  So in a very real sense, we're studying something when we're not even sure what it is.  Oh, sure, there are some clear-cut examples; a dog is alive, a rock is not.  But amazingly enough, when you try to pinpoint what the dog is doing that the rock is not, you get into some shaky ground -- and rules that are rife with exceptions.

How about "capable of reproducing?"  You can't just say "reproduces," because a good many organisms don't reproduce because of choice or circumstance.  And let's even throw out the timeworn exceptions of the hybrid, infertile mules and ligers as being genetic anomalies.  But what about worker ants?  Worker ants are females that had the development of functional reproductive anatomy suppressed, so they are completely infertile; but they're not genetic accidents like infertile hybrids are.  They are not even theoretically capable of reproducing, but I doubt seriously anyone would argue that they're not alive.

Then, there's "limited life span."  Living things die, usually after a length of time characteristic of the particular species.  However, the bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) doesn't seem to have an upper bound on its life span.  Most plants, even most trees, age out after a while -- birch trees live thirty to forty years, silver maples eighty or ninety, red oaks two hundred, white oaks as much as eight hundred -- bristlecone pines don't do that.  Unless they meet with misfortune, they just keep on living.  A bristlecone in the Inyo National Forest of California is 4,851 years old.  To put that into perspective, when the Great Pyramid at Giza was built, this tree was already three hundred years old.

And it isn't just plants.  There's a jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii, that is effectively immortal -- when it reaches senescence, it begins to despecialize its cells, returning to the polyp (juvenile) stage, then redifferentiating.  There seems to be no limit to the number of times it can do this -- putting the Time Lords with their twelve regeneration cycles to considerable shame.

And don't get me started on viruses, which are an exception to the majority of the usually-accepted characteristics of life.

The upshot is that the whole topic is way more controversial than you'd think.  Even such seemingly-obvious ones as "composed of one or more cells" and "encodes genetic information as DNA or RNA" may be looking at things from an Earth-bound perspective; life on other planets might well compartmentalize their metabolic processes and store their genetic information in entirely different ways, and still be recognizably "alive."

There's one characteristic, though, that very few people whose opinions count will argue over; living things are subject to evolution by natural selection.  (Okay, the creationists will argue like hell about it, but they conspicuously fail on the "opinions counting" qualification.)  Clearly living things evolve, and it's hard to imagine a non-living thing that would do so.  This, then, would make "evolution by natural selection" not only a necessary condition for being alive, but a sufficient one.

Which would settle once and for all the questions of whether viruses are alive.  They clearly evolve, which is why one flu shot doesn't make you immune for life.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Myworkforwiki, Major Evolutionary Transitions digital, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Well, as I am wont to do, I've been leading you down the garden path.  Because if you have been nodding your head and saying, "Okay, that makes sense" to what I've written above...

... scientists in a research lab in Germany have just created life.

Christian Mayer, a chemist at the Center for Nanointegration, and Ulrich Schreiber, a geologist at the University of Duisberg-Essen, have long been of the opinion that life on Earth began underground, not in shallow tide pools (the more common hypothesis).  The heat and pressure in deep crevices in the Earth create conditions that would lead to the formation of vesicles -- water-filled bubbles surrounded by a lipid-bilayer membrane.  These are thought to be the earliest cells, eventually trapping bits of RNA and leading to the first true life-forms.

So Mayer and Schreiber decided to recreate these deep crevices.  They allowed the temperature in lab apparatus simulating deep-Earth characteristics to fluctuate between 40 and 80 C, and the pressure between 60 and 80 bar.  Sure enough, under those conditions, a "primordial soup" forms vesicles readily.  Like soap bubbles, they are created and destroyed rapidly, some lasting longer than others.

But unlike soap bubbles, these vesicles evolve.

For full impact, here's the relevant quote from the press release:

In their laboratory experiment, they regularly changed the pressure in the system at 20-minute intervals, thereby changing the quality of the solvent, as it also occurs in nature through tidal forces and geysers.  In the process, the vesicles were periodically destroyed and re-formed.  Thus, a total of 1,500 generations of vesicles were created and disintegrated again within two weeks. 

The researchers discovered that an increasing number of vesicles survived the generation change.  Analyses showed that these vesicles had embedded specific sequences of 10 to 12 amino acids from the pool of possible peptides into their membrane in a cluster-like manner.  Further tests, specifically carried out with one of these peptides, revealed three effects on the vesicles in question: They became thermally more stable, smaller and hence more resistant and – most importantly – the permeability of their membrane was considerably increased.

Put simply, the vesicles underwent natural selection and evolved to increase their stability and permeability.  The embedded peptides they mention are the first approach to the transmembrane channel proteins that every cell has, allowing it to transport materials across the membrane as needed.

"As we have simulated in time-lapse, functions could have been created billions of years ago that made such vesicles stable enough to come to the surface from the depths, for example with the flow of tectonic fluids or during geyser eruptions," said study co-author Ulrich Schreiber.  "Subsequently, a first metabolism with concentration gradients as an energy source could have developed.  If the ability to self-replicate is eventually acquired, then even from a biological point of view an inanimate component slowly becomes a living organism, a first cell."

So there you are.  Mayer and Schreiber, being cautious scientists, are not saying they've created life, but the implication is there -- and even the most hesitant amongst us (not you, creationists) would have to admit that whatever you want to call it, this represents a huge step toward generating something that is unequivocally alive.

Which I find to be somewhere beyond mind-boggling.

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

These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

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

Genetic walkabout

Coming hard on the heels of yesterday's post about a woman who claims to be descended from Joseph of Arimathea, today we have some actual valid research, using mtDNA from two-millennium-old teeth in Syria to show that Mesopotamia deserves its moniker "the Cradle of Civilization" -- that same mtDNA signature shows up today as far away as Tibet.

Mitochondrial (mt) DNA is unique in that it always inherits through the matrilineal ancestry.  In other words, you contain the same mtDNA as your mother's mother's mother's etc., as far back as you like to go.  This takes out the role of recombination in your genetic makeup -- the random scrambling of the chromosomes in the nucleus every time they're passed on makes it damn near impossible that the same two parents could produce two genetically identical (non-twin) children.  But with mtDNA, the only differences occur from mutations, which are infrequent -- so this allows us to determine the relationships between different human populations, and track their movements back into prehistory.

My earliest-known matrilineal ancestor, Marie-Renée Brault (born in France in around 1616) had the mtDNA haplotype H13a1a, places her origin in western Europe (which we already knew), and the "H clade" to which she belongs is the commonest mtDNA in Europe.  So no big surprises there.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Vanesa Álvarez-Iglesias , Ana Mosquera-Miguel , Maria Cerezo, Beatriz Quintáns, Maria Teresa Zarrabeitia, Ivon Cuscó, Maria Victoria Lareu, Óscar García, Luis Pérez-Jurado, Ángel Carracedo, Antonio Salas, Spatial frequency distribution of different sub-lineages of mtDNA haplogroup H, CC BY 2.5]

Likewise, my two known Native American ancestors, both from the Abenaki tribe of Nova Scotia, were proven as such by their matrilineal descendants having a characteristic "A clade" mtDNA signature, which clearly demonstrates their ethnic heritage -- and their ultimate connection to other A-clade members in Siberia, Korea, and Japan.

The research that got me started on all this is not new, but was new to me; I was sent a link by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia to a paper in PLOS-ONE called, "mtDNA from the Early Bronze Age to the Roman Period Suggests a Genetic Link between the Indian Subcontinent and Mesopotamian Cradle of Civilization," by Henryk W. Witas, Krystyna Jędrychowska-Dańska, and Tomasz Płoszaj (of the University of Łódź), Jacek Tomczyk (of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University), and Gyaneshwer Chaubey (of the Biocenter of Estonia).  And in this paper, we find out that an mtDNA type -- haplogroup M4 and M6, which currently are found only in India -- apparently are older than anyone realized, and came from what is now Syria:

Ancient DNA methodology was applied to analyse sequences extracted from freshly unearthed remains (teeth) of 4 individuals deeply deposited in slightly alkaline soil of the Tell Ashara (ancient Terqa) and Tell Masaikh (ancient Kar-Assurnasirpal) Syrian archaeological sites, both in the middle Euphrates valley.  Dated to the period between 2.5 Kyrs BC and 0.5 Kyrs AD the studied individuals carried mtDNA haplotypes corresponding to the M4b1, M49 and/or M61 haplogroups, which are believed to have arisen in the area of the Indian subcontinent during the Upper Paleolithic and are absent in people living today in Syria.  However, they are present in people inhabiting today’s Tibet, Himalayas, India and Pakistan.  We anticipate that the analysed remains from Mesopotamia belonged to people with genetic affinity to the Indian subcontinent since the distribution of identified ancient haplotypes indicates solid link with populations from the region of South Asia-Tibet (Trans-Himalaya).

The amazing part of this isn't so much in the details, but the method.  Mitochondrial DNA extraction from fossilized teeth can give us information about the movement of people back into prehistory. These ancestors of ours, about whom we know virtually nothing -- not their names, their faces, their professions, their cultures -- tell us about their travels by the genetic information carried in their bodies.

Which I find absolutely fascinating.  It's kind of mind-boggling that I carry a bit of DNA in my cells (lots of bits of it, in fact) that originated in the Middle East twenty-thousand-odd years ago, was carried from mother to daughter as these people moved into eastern Europe, crossing the Alps into France, and thence across the Atlantic Ocean to Nova Scotia for over a hundred years -- then back to France after they lost the French and Indian War and got kicked out -- and finally crossed the Atlantic again in 1785 to settle in southeastern Louisiana.

And each of you carry in your own cells pieces of DNA that have equally long, convoluted, and unexpected histories.

Makes you realize that we're all connected, down to the very instructions that built us, and are far more alike than we are different.

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These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

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

All in the family

Coming from the Wishful Thinking department, today we have a woman in Murrysville, Pennsylvania who claims she is the Virgin Mary's first cousin, 65 times removed.

I was sent the link to this story by a friend who knows my fascination with genealogy and my interest in goofy claims, and this certainly hits both pretty well.  In it, we read about Mary Beth Webb, who began her inquiry into her genealogy in 1999 shortly after her brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Like most of us who have done genealogical research, Webb started with census and other vital records, and used online resources like Ancestry.com and Rootsweb.  But this evidently proved inadequate -- she began to run into dead ends, which genealogists call "brick walls."  I have several of these frustrating people in my own family tree, the most annoying of which is the direct paternal ancestor of my grandmother.  His name is recorded as John Scott in all of the records -- but a recent Y-DNA study of one of his patrilineal descendants proved beyond question that he was actually a Hamilton, allied to the Scottish Clan Hamilton of Raploch.  And interestingly... one of his grandsons was named Hamilton Scott, and a great-grandson was Hamilton Grim.

But we have been unable to find anything more about his origins, despite extensive research.

Perhaps, though, we should take a page from Webb's book.  Because when she became stymied by various long-dead ancestors, she adopted a novel method for researching her roots.  She simply asked her parents.

The "novel" part comes in because her parents were both dead at the time.

Fortunately for her, her cousin is a medium, and was happy to contact her parents for her, and (after his death) her brother.  And all three of the dear departed told her all sorts of details about her ancestors, because (after all) the whole lot of them were up in heaven with them.

I don't know if that'd work so well in my family.  I've got some seriously sketchy ancestry, including a guy who spent years in prison in New Jersey for "riot, poaching, and mischief," a Scottish dude who lost his soul to the devil in a game of cards, and a French military officer who almost got hanged for killing a guy he found in flagrante delicto with his wife.  So I might have better success if the medium tried contacting people down below, if you get my drift.

"Yes... great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre says to tell you hi, and to let you know you're a direct descendant of Attila the Hun.  Also, please send down an air conditioner and a six-pack of cold beer, because it's a bit toasty down here.  Thanks bunches."

But of course, Webb's relatives all were either nicer or luckier or both, so she got scads of heaven-sent information about her genealogy.  And after a bit of this kind of "research," she found out that she was a direct descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, who was allegedly the Virgin Mary's uncle.  According to Webb's calculations, this makes her Mary's first cousin 65 times removed.

The problem is, the whole thing about Descent From Antiquity (as genealogists refer to any claims of pre-medieval proven ancestry) is that the best historians don't consider much of it to be true, especially the European bit.  (There are, however, apparently people in China who can with a fair degree of certainty trace their ancestry back to Confucius, who was born over 2,500 years ago.  So that's kind of impressive.)

People of European and Middle Eastern descent, however, don't have it so lucky.  The time between the Fall of Rome and the beginning of the Medieval Age is seriously lacking in reliable documentation, and what we have in the way of such records stands a good chance of being (1) a forgery, or (2) a lie.  Or (3), both.  By the time the Medieval Age was in full swing, the Romans were looked upon as being a Golden Age, despite the fact that a good fraction of the nobility in ancient Rome seemed to have some major screws loose.  So there were lots of people claiming descent from the Emperors and Empresses to boost their own stature, with several proposed routes going the proconsul Flavius Afranius Syagrius, and thence to the Egyptian pharaohs and whatnot.

But some people one-up even Webb's claims, and trace their lineages all the way back to Adam and Eve.  I kid you not.  If you go into Rootsweb, you can do a search for people descended from Adam and Eve, and find thousands.

Now that's what I call descent from antiquity.

Sadly, even the descent from the Romans relies on poor historical research and lots of wishful thinking, as does Webb's claim to have proven descent from Joseph of Arimathea.  About as far back as anyone with European ancestry can reliably get is Charlemagne, which sounds cool but isn't because damn near everyone with European ancestry descends from him, because he was proficient at one other thing besides ruling most of Western Europe, which was shagging any women who were willing.

But honestly, that's really not that surprising.  Given the small size of the population back then, if you go back far enough (some geneticists say 1200 C.E. is sufficient), then you descend from everyone in your ancestral homeland who left descendants.  Put another way: prior to 1200 C. E., you can divide all of humanity into two groups; those who were the ancestors of most everyone of that particular ethnicity alive on the Earth today, and those who were the ancestors of no one.  So we're all cousins, really.  And if Joseph of Arimathea left progeny -- which no one knows for sure -- then chances are, Mary Beth Webb is his descendant.

But chances are so am I, and (if you have European or Middle Eastern ancestry), so are you.

But I don't know that because my dead relatives told me so, I just know it because of genetic studies and logic.  Which may be less cool, but is a damn sight more reliable than trying to get a direct line to great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre down in hell.

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

These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

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

Reality vs. allegory

When I was about twenty, I stumbled upon the book The Dancing Wu-Li Masters by Gary Zukav.  The book provides a non-mathematical introduction to the concepts of quantum mechanics, which is good, I suppose; but then it attempts to tie it to Eastern mysticism, which is troubling to anyone who actually understands the science.

But as a twenty-year-old -- even a twenty-year-old physics major -- I was captivated.  I went from there to Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, which pushes further into the alleged link between modern physics and the wisdom of the ancients. In an editorial review of the book, we read:

First published in 1975, The Tao of Physics rode the wave of fascination in exotic East Asian philosophies.  Decades later, it still stands up to scrutiny, explicating not only Eastern philosophies but also how modern physics forces us into conceptions that have remarkable parallels...  (T)he big picture is enough to see the value in them of experiential knowledge, the limits of objectivity, the absence of foundational matter, the interrelation of all things and events, and the fact that process is primary, not things.  Capra finds the same notions in modern physics.

In part, I'm sure my positive reaction to these books was because I was in the middle of actually taking a class in quantum mechanics, and it was, to put not too fine a point on it, really fucking hard.  I had thought of myself all along as quick at math, but the math required for this class was brain-bendingly difficult.  It was a relief to escape into the less rigorous world of Capra and Zukav.

To get a feel for the difference, first read a quote from the Wikipedia article on quantum electrodynamics, chosen because it was one of the easier ones to understand:

(B)eing closed loops, (they) imply the presence of diverging integrals having no mathematical meaning.  To overcome this difficulty, a technique called renormalization has been devised, producing finite results in very close agreement with experiments.  It is important to note that a criterion for theory being meaningful after renormalization is that the number of diverging diagrams is finite. In this case the theory is said to be renormalizable.  The reason for this is that to get observables renormalized one needs a finite number of constants to maintain the predictive value of the theory untouched.  This is exactly the case of quantum electrodynamics displaying just three diverging diagrams.  This procedure gives observables in very close agreement with experiment as seen, e.g. for electron gyromagnetic ratio.

Compare that to Capra's take on things, in a quote from The Tao of Physics:

Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction.  The dance of Shiva is the dancing universe, the ceaseless flow of energy going through an infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another. For the modern physicists, then Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter.  As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomenon.  Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes.  In our times, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Arpad Horvath, CERN shiva, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It all sounds nice, doesn't it?  No need for hard words like "renormalization" and "gyromagnetic ratio," no messy mathematics.  Just imagining particles dancing, waving around their four little quantum arms, just like Shiva.

The problem here, though, isn't just laziness; and I've commented on the laziness inherent in the woo-woo movement often enough that I don't need to write about it further.  But there's a second issue, one often overlooked by laypeople, and that is "mistaking analogy for reality."

Okay, I'll go so far as to say that the verbal descriptions of quantum mechanics sound like some of the "everything that happens influences everyone and everything, all the time" stuff from Buddhism and Hinduism -- the interconnectedness of all, a concept that is explained in the beautiful allegory of "Indra's Net:"

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions.  In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number.  There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold.  If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number.  Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.  [Francis Cook, Hua-Yen Buddhism, 1977]

But does this mean what some have claimed, that the Hindus discovered the underlying tenets of quantum mechanics millennia ago?

Hardly.  Just because two ideas have some similarities doesn't mean that they are, at their basis, saying the same thing.  You could say that Hinduism has some parallels to quantum mechanics -- parallels that I would argue are accidental, and not really all that persuasive when you dig into them more deeply.  But those parallels don't mean that Hinduism as a whole is true, or that the mystics who devised it were somehow prescient.

In a way, we science teachers are at fault for this, because so many of us teach by analogy.  I did it all the time: antibodies are like cellular trash tags; enzyme/substrate interactions are like keys and locks; the Krebs cycle is like a merry-go-round where two kids get on and two kids get off at each turn.  But hopefully, our analogies are transparent enough that no one comes away with the impression that they are describing what is really happening.  Fortunately, I can say that I never saw a student begin an essay on the Krebs cycle by talking about merry-go-rounds and children.

The line gets blurred, though, when the reality is so odd, and the actual description of it (i.e. the mathematics) so abstruse, that most non-scientists can't really wrap their brain around it.  Then there is a real danger of substituting a metaphor for the truth.  It's not helped by persuasive, charismatic writers like Capra and Zukav, nor the efforts of True Believers to cast the science as supporting their religious ideas, because it helps to prop up their own worldview (you can read an especially egregious example of this here).

After a time in my twenties when I was seduced by pretty allegories, I finally came to the conclusion that the reality was better -- and, in its own way, breathtakingly beautiful (albeit still really fucking hard).  Take the time to learn what the science actually says, and I think you'll find it a damnsight more interesting and elegant than Shiva and Indra and the rest of 'em.  And best of all: it's actually true.

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

These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

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