About face

When the topic of the paranormal comes up, I'm sometimes asked how I can be so sure that (fill in the blank: ghosts, cryptids, psychic abilities, the afterlife, extraterrestrial visitations/abductions) don't exist.

The answer is: I'm not sure.  Proving a negation is pretty close to impossible.  How, for example, could you prove that unicorns don't exist?  "I've never seen one" is pretty weak.

After all, I've never seen a wombat, and I'm pretty sure they exist.

To me, all that stuff boils down to probabilities based on rational evaluation of eyewitness testimony combined with what we know to be true from science.  What I mean by this is if you take all the sightings and personal accounts, and look at them with a coldly skeptical eye, you can come up with a good estimate of how likely the claim is to have at least a kernel of truth.  This is why I've always been more inclined to take cryptid sightings more seriously than UFO sightings, and UFO sightings more seriously than claims of psychic abilities.  None of them have any hard evidence in their favor.  However, there's nothing inherently impossible about the existence of Sasquatch and his buddies, while there's at least a good argument for the unlikeliness of alien intelligence making its way across the vastness of interstellar space; and even that is more likely than psychic abilities, which not only have no known mechanism by which they could occur, but have been tested to a fare-thee-well and thus far have not given a single positive result in any sort of controlled experiment.

So: it's not that I'm certain any of those don't exist.  All I'm arguing is that thus far, a skeptical analysis leans heavily toward the "no" side of things.

Sometimes, though, you can argue implausibility based on the number of claims made, and that works in an odd sort of fashion.  If there are a great many claims but still no hard evidence, that's a pretty strong indicator there's nothing there.  This is one of the strongest arguments against the existence of (for example) Bigfoot.  The claims of Bigfoot sightings easily number in the thousands; if the things are that common, surely by now there would have been at least one unequivocal bit of hard evidence in the form of bones, teeth, or hairs that don't match any known species.  So here, the more claims there are, the less likely they are to be about anything real, and the more likely they are to stem from suggestibility or outright fakery.

As an example of this, take the piece that appeared yesterday over at the site Mysterious Universe.  Brett Swancer wrote an interesting account of some claims being made on Reddit by a guy who goes by the handle @searchandrescuewoods.  The gist of his posts, which have gotten a good bit of buzz in the paranormal claims community, is that there's a faceless entity stalking the woods, freaking out hikers and (possibly) being responsible for several cases of abduction.  Swancer does a good job pulling together the stories, and I don't want to steal his thunder -- you really should read the article, although preferably not when you're alone at night -- but I will quote one of them, just so you get the flavor.  This one was told to @searchandrescuewoods by a friend who had been tasked with repainting an information sign on a woodland trail.  He was standing on a ladder working when a man came up asking for directions to a nearby campsite:

The second he came up and talked to me, the hairs on my neck stood up, but I wasn’t sure why.  I just had this really uneasy feeling about the whole thing, and I wanted to finish painting and get out of there.  I figured maybe part of it was that I couldn’t turn around to look at him, but something just felt off...  So I waited for the guy to walk away, but I didn’t hear him leave, which made me think he was just standing there and watching me, so I asked again if I could do anything for him, and he didn’t answer. 

I knew he was there though, because I hadn’t heard him leave, so I did this awkward turn on the ladder to look down and see what he was doing.  Now I admit it could have just been my brain fucking up, but I swear to you, Russ, for a split second when I turned around, that fucker didn’t have a face.  Like he had no face.  It was almost concave, and totally smooth, and I just about had a fucking heart attack because I couldn’t even wrap my brain around what I was seeing.  I think I started to say something but there was this kind of ‘pop’ inside my head and suddenly he was just a normal looking guy.  I must have looked weird because he asked me if I was okay, and I was just like ‘yeah, I’m fine.’  He asks about the campsite again and I point to where he has to go, and he’s like ‘I’m not from around here, can you help me get there?’  Now this is when I know something is really up because there’s no way this guy got out here and didn’t know where he was.  And for that matter, there’s no car around, so how’d he get here in the first place?  I said I was sorry but that I couldn’t take him anywhere in a company vehicle, and he’s like ‘please?  I really don’t know where I am, can you come with me and help me get there?’ 

So now I’m seriously weirded out, and I start wondering if this is some kind of ambush or whatever.  I told him I could call him a taxi to come out and take him where he wants to go, and I pull out my phone and he just goes ‘no’ and walks away really quickly.  But he doesn’t walk out of the park, he walks back into the fucking trees and I got right in my fucking truck and start to get out of there, fuck the paint or whatever.  I looked in my mirror to see where he was as I was leaving and he was standing right at the tree line again,  I don’t know how he got there so fast, but this time I know that fucker didn’t have a face.  He was just watching me leave, and right before I turned the corner he took a big step back into the trees and kind of dissolved, I guess.  Maybe it was just dark so he blended in, but it felt more like he just melted away.

Creepy, atmospheric stuff.  Shades of "Slender Man" (remember him?), the gaunt, faceless man who started from a story over at Creepypasta and made his way into the urban legend universe.  (In fact, Slender Man makes an appearance in my novel Signal to Noise, but -- I hasten to add -- that's a work of fiction.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons LuxAmber, Тонкий человек, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Okay, what strikes me here is that if this thing is haunting our National Parks so much that @searchandrescuewoods and his friends have seen it multiple times, why hasn't anyone else?  When I was in my twenties and thirties I pretty much spent all summer back-country camping in the Cascades and Olympics, and -- suggestible as I am -- I never saw a single thing out of the ordinary.  Think about it; if this creature, whatever it supposedly is, is this common, surely a whole bunch of the other thousands of campers hiking around the wilderness would have reported seeing it.

The fact that no one is reporting sightings other than @searchandrescuewoods is a strong argument that there's nothing there to investigate.

To return to my starting point, however; all this doesn't mean that I know the stories are untrue.  I just need more than some more-or-less anonymous posts on Reddit to convince me that they're anything but engagingly scary fiction.

On the other hand, if the next time I'm on a trail run in the nearby National Forest, I am accosted by a guy with no face, I suppose it'll serve me right.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week should be in everyone's personal library.  It's the parting gift we received from the brilliant astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who died two years ago after beating the odds against ALS's death sentence for over fifty years.

In Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Hawking looks at our future -- our chances at stopping anthropogenic climate change, preventing nuclear war, curbing overpopulation -- as well as addressing a number of the "big questions" he references in the title.  Does God exist?  Should we colonize space?  What would happen if the aliens came here?  Is it a good idea to develop artificial intelligence?

And finally, what is humanity's chance of surviving?

In a fascinating, engaging, and ultimately optimistic book, Hawking gives us his answers to the questions that occupy the minds of every intelligent human.  Published posthumously -- Hawking died in March of 2018, and Brief Answers hit the bookshelves in October of that year -- it's a final missive from one of the finest brains our species ever produced.  Anyone with more than a passing interest in science or philosophy should put this book on the to-read list.

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

Leaps of knowledge

One of the most amazing and inspirational figures in the history of modern science is the geneticist Barbara McClintock.

McClintock got her Ph.D. in botany back in 1927, in a time when women simply didn't go into science.  There was a huge cultural bias against female scientists -- not only a sense of "that's not something a woman should be interested in," but the presence of a huge, white-male-dominated edifice already in place that was damn near impenetrable for women and minorities.

This wasn't a glass ceiling, it was a solid marble monolith.

But if there was one phrase that describes McClintock's career, it's "dogged determination."  She focused on the genetics of maize during a time when just about everyone was studying fruit flies.  She racked up success after success, doing the first-ever preliminary analysis of the maize genome way back in 1929, and afterward demonstrating how crossing over contributed to variation in offspring.

Barbara McClintock in her lab at Cold Spring Harbor in 1947 [Image is in the Public Domain]

The story becomes even more interesting with her discovery in the 1950s of transposable elements -- gene segments that can move within an organism's genome.  She showed -- beyond any reasonable doubt -- that these transpositions were responsible for features of seed color inheritance in Indian corn, and very likely for a host of genetic inheritance patterns in not only maize, but other species as well.

Well, "beyond any reasonable doubt" is said with 20/20 hindsight.  The members of the aforementioned marble monolith were grudgingly okay with a woman making docile and innocuous additions to the body of scientific knowledge, but not with her overturning a major tenet of genetic dogma.  They derided her discovery as "jumping genes" and, basically, refused to participate in or fund research to elucidate further what McClintock had discovered.

This is where the "dogged determination" part comes in.  Undeniably discouraged but not defeated, McClintock continued to amass more and more information, both supporting her original claim and also showing how it happened and what the effects of genetic transposition were.  It took almost thirty years, but eventually she had enough data to convince even the most negative of the naysayers -- and for her discovery, she won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1983.

The topic of McClintock's discovery comes up because of a paper that appears this week in Science Advances.  In the rather intimidatingly-titled "Primate-Restricted KRAB Zinc Finger Proteins and Target Retrotransposons Control Gene Expression in Human Neurons," we find out something extraordinary; McClintock's transposable elements are responsible for the differentiation of neurons in our own brains.

The study, led by Priscilla Turelli of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, looked at a group of proteins called Krüppel-associated box-containing zinc finger proteins, which seemed to regulate the activity of transposable elements very early in fetal development.  What they found was that these "KZFP" genes were active only in certain cells in the developing brain -- and seemed to be guiding differentiation of brain cells.

More amazing still, the researchers found two KZFP genes that appear to be unique to primates, a tantalizing clue about the evolution of our own large and complex brains.

"These results reveal how two proteins that appeared only recently in evolution have contributed to shape the human brain by facilitating the co-option of transposable elements, these virus-like entities that have been remodeling our ancestral genome since the dawn of times," said Didier Trono, the study's senior author, in a press release from the École Polytechnique.  "Our findings also suggest possible pathogenic mechanisms for diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or other neurodegenerative or neurodevelopmental disorders, providing leads for the prevention or treatment of these problems."

Wouldn't Barbara McClintock be thrilled to see where her discovery has gone?  From an obscure and much-doubted mechanism initially thought to be active only in maize, genetic transposition has been found in every organism studied.  And its effects are far from minor.  The same process that gives Indian corn its bright colors is the one that has given us brains powerful enough to figure it out -- a lovely circularity that I think McClintock would have found fitting.

As she herself said, in her usual understated fashion: "If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off... no matter what they say."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week should be in everyone's personal library.  It's the parting gift we received from the brilliant astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who died two years ago after beating the odds against ALS's death sentence for over fifty years.

In Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Hawking looks at our future -- our chances at stopping anthropogenic climate change, preventing nuclear war, curbing overpopulation -- as well as addressing a number of the "big questions" he references in the title.  Does God exist?  Should we colonize space?  What would happen if the aliens came here?  Is it a good idea to develop artificial intelligence?

And finally, what is humanity's chance of surviving?

In a fascinating, engaging, and ultimately optimistic book, Hawking gives us his answers to the questions that occupy the minds of every intelligent human.  Published posthumously -- Hawking died in March of 2018, and Brief Answers hit the bookshelves in October of that year -- it's a final missive from one of the finest brains our species ever produced.  Anyone with more than a passing interest in science or philosophy should put this book on the to-read list.

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

Fighting visual malware with water

One of the things that baffles me about woo-woos is how they never, ever give up.

When I'm proven wrong, I usually (1) feel extremely embarrassed about it, and (2) retreat in disarray.  Oh, and (3) do everything I can to make sure I don't make the same error the next time.  I mean, everyone makes mistakes, so I probably shouldn't overreact to it the way I do; but I like to think that as a writer on science and skepticism, I'm conscientious enough to check my facts and sources.  Otherwise, I'm really no better than the people I rail against on a daily basis.

So getting caught out hits me where it hurts, you know?

Not so, apparently, in the woo-woo world.  You can be laughed into oblivion, and you just keep on moseying on ahead as if nothing was wrong.

As an especially good example of this, remember Dr. Charlene Werner?  She was the star of a viral YouTube video a few years back called "Crazy Homeopathy Lady," the title of which you'd think would be devastating enough.  In this video, she attempts to explain homeopathy thusly:

• The mass in the universe is "infinitesimal."  Since mass is the "m" in E = mc2 , she says that because the mass is so small this crosses the "m" out, which means that "energy = light."  (The whole effect is accentuated by the fact that she pronounces the word "infant-esimal," which sounds like a descriptor for a really little baby.)
• Something about "Stephen Hawkings" and vibrations and quantum.
• Fascinating discourse on string theory, starting with the fact that strings are "little u-ies."
• A bizarre analogy wherein she compares homeopathy's effects to a neighbor's dog pooping on your lawn, causing you to throw a bomb at your neighbor's house.

If you've never seen this video, I highly recommend it.  I can say from experience that it's even more fun to watch while drunk, although I won't be held responsible if you laugh so hard you fall out of your chair and spill scotch all over your carpet.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So anyhow.  This video has received millions of views, and tens of thousands of comments, most of which were of the "Holy shit, this woman is insane" variety.  So you'd think that any normal human being who got this kind of feedback would sort of vanish from the public eye.  Most of us, in fact, would probably want to crawl under a rock.

Not so Charlene Werner.  She's baaaaaack, on a website called "Simply Healthy Self," wherein she makes statements that very nearly exceed the wackiness of the ones she made in the video.  Here's a sampler:

Imagine your vision system has qualities similar to a computer.  The photoreceptors are like your keys on your keyboard.  There are approximately 1.2 million of them in each eye.  When clicked or activated with light, the data from your 'visual keyboard' relays to your brain.  Your brain has characteristics similar to a hard drive with an operating system that runs all the 'software programs' or functions in your body, such as moving your eye muscles, tracking, focusing, and visual memory.  Even your heart, kidney, lungs, and all your bodily functions depend on accurate key strokes from your photoreceptors and other sensory input, access to your brain (hard drive), a powerful operating system, and efficient use of software programs.

Yup.  Your kidneys depend on information from your eyes.  Which explains why blind people never have to pee.

Homeopathy then scans your system to eliminate 'viruses' or 'malware', which are often belief systems or programmed patterns that interrupt your system's smooth functioning.

So a bottle of water with no active ingredients is the medical equivalent of Norton AntiVirus?  If only we'd realized sooner that these "remedies" can fix faulty belief systems, we might have avoided having our government turned into Corruption "R" Us by a man whose chief claim to fame seems to be embodying all Seven Deadly Sins in one individual.

When we consider the whole of man we can even make a further leap……that mass in the universe by definition is matter, matter is substance, the substance of man is cells, and cells can be broken down into compounds, compounds into elements, and elements into tiny particles of energy called electrons, protons, neutrons, and sub-atomic particles held together by an “invisible” force such that what may look like a physical body is merely energy.

An explanation which is to physics what "The foot-bone's connected to the shin-bone, the shin-bone's connected to the knee-bone" is to medical science.

Then we get bunches of testimonials about how Dr. Werner's treatments have cured everything from rheumatoid arthritis to bad eyesight to being lousy at sports.

Which is pretty impressive, because homeopathy has failed to show measurable results in every controlled study ever done.  Ever.  Clear enough?  What she's proposing is unscientific horse waste, and her "success stories" are the result of the placebo effect at best.

None of which, of course, is going to change a thing.  If the reception her bizarre YouTube video received didn't make her reconsider her position, nothing will.  Unfortunately, there are still people who buy what she's selling (literally and figuratively), although it's to be hoped that the support for such completely disproven modalities as homeopathy is waning.

The chance of convincing Dr. Werner, however, is "infant-esimal."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week should be in everyone's personal library.  It's the parting gift we received from the brilliant astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who died two years ago after beating the odds against ALS's death sentence for over fifty years.

In Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Hawking looks at our future -- our chances at stopping anthropogenic climate change, preventing nuclear war, curbing overpopulation -- as well as addressing a number of the "big questions" he references in the title.  Does God exist?  Should we colonize space?  What would happen if the aliens came here?  Is it a good idea to develop artificial intelligence?

And finally, what is humanity's chance of surviving?

In a fascinating, engaging, and ultimately optimistic book, Hawking gives us his answers to the questions that occupy the minds of every intelligent human.  Published posthumously -- Hawking died in March of 2018, and Brief Answers hit the bookshelves in October of that year -- it's a final missive from one of the finest brains our species ever produced.  Anyone with more than a passing interest in science or philosophy should put this book on the to-read list.

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

Goodness gracious...

Are you feeling like your love life is a little cooler than you'd like?  Are you lacking in the ardor department?  Does it seem like you just don't have the romantic sizzle you once had?

If so, I have the solution.

All you have to be willing to do is to have someone set your crotch on fire.

I'm not making this up, and I wish I was, because after researching this I now feel like I need to spend the rest of the day in a protective crouch.  According to a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, we find out that in China, there has been a surge in the popularity of treating waning sex drive by placing towels soaked with alcohol over guys' privates, and then setting them on fire.

If the description wasn't enough, we have photographs:

I don't know about you, but I can't imagine that my reaction to having flames spouting from my reproductive region would be just to lie there, hands behind my head, with a blissful expression on my face.  Now that I come to think of it, I can imagine no circumstance in which I'd allow anyone to come near my reproductive region with flames in the first place.  But apparently, there are guys in China who love this.  The article quotes a 33 year old banker, Ken Cho, who says, "It is all about keeping blood flow moving rapidly.  The warmth from the burning towels speeds the blood through the body and it makes me perform 50% better in bed.  I have tried all sorts of therapies in the past to keep my sexual performance up to speed but this is by far the best."

Which raises several questions.  With guys, the issue isn't with getting the blood to flow rapidly, it's more with getting the blood to stay put.  If you get my drift.  And the whole "50% better" statistic just makes me think he's making shit up.  50% better for whom?  Did he query his girlfriend one night, asking her to rate his performance, and then he went to get the Great Balls Afire Treatment, and they did the deed again, and she said afterwards, "Yes, dear, that was at least 50% better than last time?"

Somehow I don't think this is the kind of thing that lends itself to a controlled study.

What I really wonder, though, is how anyone thought of this to begin with.  Because, after all, some poor schmuck had to be the first to try it.  Can't you picture it?  Dude goes to his doctor, and says, "Doc, I've been experiencing low sex drive lately," and the doctor says, "Oh, we can treat that.  All we have to do is set your penis on fire."

I don't know about you, but I would run, not walk, out of the office.  Even if many of us would fancy being a Hunka Hunka Burnin' Love, this is not the way to do it.

So what we have here is a combination of the placebo effect, self-delusion, wishful thinking, and high tolerance of risk.  If there was any doubt.

Anyhow, that's our contribution from the Extremely Alternative Medicine department for today.  Bringing up yet again my contention that every time I think I have found the most completely idiotic idea humanity is capable of, someone breaks the previous record.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a brilliant retrospective of how we've come to our understanding of one of the fastest-moving scientific fields: genetics.

In Siddhartha Mukherjee's wonderful book The Gene: An Intimate History, we're taken from the first bit of research that suggested how inheritance took place: Gregor Mendel's famous study of pea plants that established a "unit of heredity" (he called them "factors" rather than "genes" or "alleles," but he got the basic idea spot on).  From there, he looks at how our understanding of heredity was refined -- how DNA was identified as the chemical that housed genetic information, to how that information is encoded and translated, to cutting-edge research in gene modification techniques like CRISPR-Cas9.  Along each step, he paints a very human picture of researchers striving to understand, many of them with inadequate tools and resources, finally leading up to today's fine-grained picture of how heredity works.

It's wonderful reading for anyone interested in genetics and the history of science.

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

The body exchange

When we think about our own bodies, we tend to externalize them.  It's subtle, but ponder it for a moment; when I say "this is my hand," where is the "me" who is the hand's owner?  We usually put our "selves" in our heads (or hearts), so the rest of the pieces belong to whoever that "self" actually is.

As support of this, consider the unpleasant possibility of losing a limb, a sense, the ability to walk.  Something huge and devastating.  Even with such a major change, most of us feel that our "self" would remain intact.  Switch brains, though (if such a thing were possible) and you wouldn't be you any more -- there's something about that sense of self that resides there, in what my neurophysiology professor called "the meat machine."

René Descartes's illustration of mind-body dualism

Predictably, the reality may be more complex than that.  In a fascinating experiment run at the Karolinska Institutet of Sweden, researchers used virtual reality headsets to give two friends lying near each other the sense that they'd switched bodies.  In "Perception of Our Own Body Influences Self-Concept and Self-Incoherence Impairs Episodic Memory," by Pawel Tacikowski, Marieke Weijs, and Henrik Ehrsson, which came out in iScience this week, we find out that the sense of who we are is much more intimately connected to our bodies than we might realize.

The researchers did personality assessments prior to the swap.  Each participant ranked both him/herself and the friend on a number of characteristics.  While wearing the headsets, they were asked to re-rate both themselves and their friends -- and across the board, while they were in the body swap they ranked themselves as closer to what they had previously ranked their friend!

Another interesting feature was that both before and after the swap, participants were given memory tests.  They were also asked how convincing the illusion was -- how real it seemed that they were inhabiting their friend's body while the headset was on.  Last, how comfortable were they with the illusion?  Did they find it intriguing, exciting, scary, disorienting?  Curiously, the people who were the most comfortable and curious about being "inside a friend's body" did significantly better on the memory tests, leading to the conjecture that a skew between your bodily awareness and your sense of self can interfere with cognitive activity.

"We show that the self-concept has the potential to change really quickly, which brings us to some potentially interesting practical implications," said study lead author Pawel Tacikowski, in an interview with Neuroscience News.  "People who suffer from depression often have very rigid and negative beliefs about themselves that can be devastating to their everyday functioning.  If you change this illusion slightly, it could potentially make those beliefs less rigid and less negative."

The authors write:

[Our findings extend] previous knowledge in several important ways.  First, it challenges a common assumption that self-concept is relatively fixed over time and emphasizes the role of the body in the continuous construction of our sense of who we are; this role has been largely neglected in past social psychology research.  Second, this result shows that perceptual aspects of the bodily self dynamically shape multiple, abstract beliefs that constitute our conscious self-concept rather than only selected aspects of self-representation that are perceptual, body-related, or implicit.  Third, this finding clarifies that the illusory ownership of another person's body not only modifies attitudes toward this person or toward a social group to which this person belongs but also, and perhaps predominantly, modifies beliefs about the self.

What this immediately made me think of is people with body dysmorphia -- often at the root of not only disorders like anorexia, in which a person who is thin to the point of emaciation looks in a mirror and sees him/herself as overweight, but in trans individuals, who often describe the feeling as "not being in the right body."  It's no wonder both conditions are devastating, and linked to depression and suicidal ideation.  What the Tacikowski et al. study showed is that our sense of self is deeply connected to our own bodies -- and a disconnect between the self and the body has profound cognitive and emotional effects.

Naturally, the next step is to find out what's actually happening in the brain during the illusion.  "Now, my mind is occupied with the question of how this behavioral effect works — what the brain mechanism is,"  Tacikowski said. "Then, we can use this model for more specific clinical applications to possibly develop better treatments."  I'm also curious to find out how long-lasting the effects were.  Did this trigger a long-term change in how the person sees his/her friend?  Or did the change evaporate as soon as the headset was turned off and the participant was "back in your his/her own body?"

No question, though, that it's a fascinating result, and worthy of a lot more inquiry.  It gives some new insight into the age-old "mind-body problem" that has plagued philosophers since the time of Plato.  Perhaps the mind and the body aren't as independent of each other as it seems -- and our sense of self is much more tied to our physical flesh-and-blood presence than was apparent.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a brilliant retrospective of how we've come to our understanding of one of the fastest-moving scientific fields: genetics.

In Siddhartha Mukherjee's wonderful book The Gene: An Intimate History, we're taken from the first bit of research that suggested how inheritance took place: Gregor Mendel's famous study of pea plants that established a "unit of heredity" (he called them "factors" rather than "genes" or "alleles," but he got the basic idea spot on).  From there, he looks at how our understanding of heredity was refined -- how DNA was identified as the chemical that housed genetic information, to how that information is encoded and translated, to cutting-edge research in gene modification techniques like CRISPR-Cas9.  Along each step, he paints a very human picture of researchers striving to understand, many of them with inadequate tools and resources, finally leading up to today's fine-grained picture of how heredity works.

It's wonderful reading for anyone interested in genetics and the history of science.

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

Rewarding the daredevil

There were three magic words that used to be able to induce me to do almost anything, regardless how catastrophically stupid it was: "I dare you."

It's how I ended up walking the ridgeline of a friend's house when I was in eighth grade:

Friend: My house has such a steep roof.  I don't know how anyone could keep his balance up there.

Me:  I bet I could. 

Friend (dubiously):  You think? 

Me;  Yeah. 

Friend:  I dare you. 

Me:  Get me a ladder.

That I didn't break my neck was as much due to luck as skill, although it must be said that back then I did have a hell of a sense of balance, even if I didn't have much of any other kind of sense.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Øyvind Holmstad, A yellow house with a sheltering roof, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Research by neuroscientists Lei Zhang (University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf) and Jan Gläscher (University of Vienna) has given us some insight into why I was prone to doing that sort of thing (beyond my parent's explanation, which boiled down to "you sure are an idiot").  Apparently the whole thing has to do with something called "reward prediction error" -- and they've identified the part of the brain where it occurs.

Reward prediction error occurs when there is a mismatch between the expected reward and the actual reward.  If expected reward occurs, prediction error is low, and you get some reinforcement via neurochemical release in the putamen and right temporoparietal junction, which form an important part of the brain's reward circuit.  A prediction error can go two ways: (1) the reward can be lower than the expectation, in which case you learn by changing your expectations; or (2) the reward can be higher than the expectation, in which case you get treated to a flood of endorphins.

Which explains my stupid roof-climbing behavior, and loads of other activities that begin with the words "hold my beer."  I wasn't nearly as fearless as I was acting; I fully expected to lose my balance and go tumbling down the roof.  When that didn't happen, and I came ambling back down the ladder afterward to the awed appreciation of my friend, I got a neurochemical bonus that nearly guaranteed that next time I heard "I dare you," I'd do the same thing again.

The structure of the researchers' experiment was interesting.  Here's how it was described in a press release in EurekAlert:

[The] researchers... placed groups of five volunteers in the same computer-based decision-making experiment, where each of them was presented with two abstract symbols.  Their objective was to find out which symbol would lead to more monetary rewards in the long run.  In each round of the experiment, every person first made a choice between the two symbols, and then they observed which symbols the other four people had selected; next, every person could decide to stick with their initial choice or switch to the alternative symbol.  Finally, a monetary outcome, either a win or a loss, was delivered to every one according to their second decision...  In fact, which symbol was related to more reward was always changing.  At the beginning of the experiment, one of the two symbols returned monetary rewards 70% of the time, and after a few rounds, it provided rewards only 30% of the time.  These changes took place multiple times throughout the experiment...  Expectedly, the volunteers switched more often when they were confronted with opposing choices from the others, but interestingly, the second choice (after considering social information) reflected the reward structure better than the first choice.

So social learning -- making your decisions according to your friends' behaviors and expectations -- is actually not a bad strategy.  "Direct learning is efficient in stable situations," said study co-author Jan Gläscher, "and when situations are changing and uncertain, social learning may play an important role together with direct learning to adapt to novel situations, such as deciding on the lunch menu at a new company."

Or deciding whether or not it's worth it to climb the roof of a friend's house.

We're social primates, so it's no surprise we rely a great deal on the members of our tribe for information about what we should and should not do.  This works well when we're looking to older and wiser individuals, and not so well when the other members of our tribe are just as dumb as we are.  (This latter bit explains a lot of the behavior we're currently seeing in the United States Senate.)  But our brains are built that way, for better or for worse.

Although for what it's worth, I no longer do ridiculous stunts when someone says "I dare you."  So if you were planning on trying it, don't get your hopes up.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a brilliant retrospective of how we've come to our understanding of one of the fastest-moving scientific fields: genetics.

In Siddhartha Mukherjee's wonderful book The Gene: An Intimate History, we're taken from the first bit of research that suggested how inheritance took place: Gregor Mendel's famous study of pea plants that established a "unit of heredity" (he called them "factors" rather than "genes" or "alleles," but he got the basic idea spot on).  From there, he looks at how our understanding of heredity was refined -- how DNA was identified as the chemical that housed genetic information, to how that information is encoded and translated, to cutting-edge research in gene modification techniques like CRISPR-Cas9.  Along each step, he paints a very human picture of researchers striving to understand, many of them with inadequate tools and resources, finally leading up to today's fine-grained picture of how heredity works.

It's wonderful reading for anyone interested in genetics and the history of science.

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

The rising waters

2020 has become some kind of nihilist joke.  How many versions of the "2020 Apocalypse Bingo Card" have you heard?  And it does seem like things are just piling on.  Right now, we have a major category-3 hurricane bearing down on southern Louisiana -- that just got hit by a totally different tropical storm three days ago.  We're in the middle of a pandemic that is showing no signs of letting up.  There are record-setting wildfires in California.  The economy is giving serious signs of tanking in a big way.  Protests against police brutality seem to erupt every other day.  Last, we're in the middle of the Republican National Convention, where the platform seems to be, "Look how fucked up everything has gotten in the last four years!  Give us another four and we'll do the same thing again but even bigger this time!"

In a situation like this, I'm always reluctant to add to the doom and gloom.  But I would be remiss in not pointing out that all of the above is small potatoes, really.  A lot of us, in fact, are concerned at how the current chaos has distracted us from a far, far bigger problem.  We are facing an unprecedented climate catastrophe, not in a hundred years, not in fifty years, but right now. and three papers in the past two weeks have added to what was already a clarion call to action.

Let's start with the deep oceans.  The abyssal region of the Earth's oceans is supposed to be one of the most stable ecosystems on Earth.  Saline, completely pitch dark, crushing pressures, and always at just shy of four degrees Celsius -- the temperature at which water is its densest.  No change, no matter what's happening up above.

But last week a paper in Nature Climate Change looked into the deeps of the ocean, and found something terrifying.  The anthropogenic climate change signature is showing up in a place that is supposed to be about as insulated from human effects as you could imagine.

A team led by oceanographer Yona Silvy of the Université Sorbonne wrote the following:

[U]sing 11 climate models, we define when anthropogenic temperature and salinity changes are expected to emerge from natural variability in the ocean interior along density surfaces.  The models predict that in 2020, 20–55% of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian basins have an emergent anthropogenic signal; reaching 40–65% in 2050 and 55–80% in 2080.  The well-ventilated Southern Ocean water masses emerge very rapidly, as early as the 1980–1990s, while the Northern Hemisphere water masses emerge in the 2010–2030s.  Our results highlight the importance of maintaining and augmenting an ocean observing system capable of detecting and monitoring persistent anthropogenic changes.

Perhaps this should have been unsurprising, considering that 93% of the anthropogenic heating the Earth is experiencing is being absorbed by bodies of water.  But the idea that this absorption isn't limited to the surface -- that we're actually impacting the deepest parts of the world's oceans -- is seriously scary to anyone who knows anything about the environment and climate models.

Scientists have long been concerned about the tipping point -- the point that climatic catastrophe becomes inevitable no matter what we do.  A second study out of Ohio State University has shown conclusively that we've passed that point with respect to one of the Earth's systems, the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

What the researchers found was that up until about the year 2000, the glaciers in Greenland were pretty well in balance.  The amount of ice loss during the summer was nearly equal to the amount of ice gain from snowfall during the winter.  But around 2000, the situation changed, and since then Greenland has lost a staggering 50 gigatons (50 billion tons) more ice than it gained.

"Glacier retreat has knocked the dynamics of the whole ice sheet into a constant state of loss," said Ian Howat, who co-authored the paper.  "Even if the climate were to stay the same or even get a little colder, the ice sheet would still be losing mass."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christine Zenino from Chicago, US, Greenland Glaciers outside of Ammassalik (5562580093), CC BY 2.0]

The polar bears aren't the only ones who should be concerned.  Greenland is second only to Antarctica in its potential effect on sea level rise.  If the Greenland Ice Sheet melts -- which is has sometimes done during warm periods in Earth's climate -- it would raise the sea levels by six meters.  Everywhere under six meters of elevation would be under water.

So wave goodbye at New Orleans, Antwerp, Charleston, Boston, a good chunk of New York City and Long Island, and most of Florida, Delaware, the Netherlands, and Bangladesh.

If that's not bad enough, a paper in The Cryosphere last week, authored by a team from three universities -- Leeds, Edinburgh, and University College London -- considered the situation worldwide, and found that in the past twenty-three years, the Earth lost 28 trillion tons of ice.

"To put that in context, every centimeter of sea-level rise means about a million people will be displaced from their low-lying homelands," said Andy Shepherd, director of Leeds University's Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, in an interview with The Guardian.  "In the past researchers have studied individual areas – such as the Antarctic or Greenland – where ice is melting.  But this is the first time anyone has looked at all the ice that is disappearing from the entire planet...  What we have found has stunned us.  There can be little doubt that the vast majority of Earth's ice loss is a direct consequence of climate warming."

It's easy to focus on what's right in front of your face and forget about the big picture.  This would be okay if the big picture wasn't so deeply horrifying.  I hate to be another purveyor of pessimism, but we have got to start taking this seriously.  I'm as upset about the pandemic and the global political chaos as the next guy, but this isn't a time to be distracted away from a much bigger issue -- the long-term habitability of the planet.

Let's keep our eyes on the ball, here.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a brilliant retrospective of how we've come to our understanding of one of the fastest-moving scientific fields: genetics.

In Siddhartha Mukherjee's wonderful book The Gene: An Intimate History, we're taken from the first bit of research that suggested how inheritance took place: Gregor Mendel's famous study of pea plants that established a "unit of heredity" (he called them "factors" rather than "genes" or "alleles," but he got the basic idea spot on).  From there, he looks at how our understanding of heredity was refined -- how DNA was identified as the chemical that housed genetic information, to how that information is encoded and translated, to cutting-edge research in gene modification techniques like CRISPR-Cas9.  Along each step, he paints a very human picture of researchers striving to understand, many of them with inadequate tools and resources, finally leading up to today's fine-grained picture of how heredity works.

It's wonderful reading for anyone interested in genetics and the history of science.

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