Racing with death

Before I run a race, I have to give myself a serious pep talk, because I'm the kind of person who always assumes the worst.  Although I've run many races without mishap, there's always this haunting thought in the back of my head that this is going to be the one where I faint or puke or fall down and tear both of my Achilles tendons or get run over by a car.

Just a cockeyed optimist, that's me.

Me, attempting not to die.  In this case, there was actually a significant chance of it, because it was about 93 F and the humidity usually found in a sauna.  More than one person collapsed on the course.  I made it to the finish line.  Then I collapsed.

So it was with great interest that I read an article in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology a friend sent me, suggesting that my errant and morbid brain might actually be onto something.  In a paper entitled "He Dies, He Scores: Evidence that Reminders of Death Motivate Improved Performance in Basketball," Colin A. Zestcott, Uri Lifshin, Peter Helm, and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona's Department of Psychology have shown that thinking about death prior to a competition may actually make an athlete perform better.  The authors write:

This research applied insights from terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) to the world of sport.  According to TMT, self-esteem buffers against the potential for death anxiety.  Because sport allows people to attain self-esteem, reminders of death may improve performance in sport.  In Study 1, a mortality salience induction led to improved performance in a “one-on-one” basketball game.  In Study 2, a subtle death prime led to higher scores on a basketball shooting task, which was associated with increased task related self-esteem.  These results may promote our understanding of sport and provide a novel potential way to improve athletic performance.

Some participants were given cheerful directives like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead," and those who didn't break down into sobs were instructed to take some shots on the basketball court.  Surprisingly, these players scored better than ones who were directed to think about the game itself, with prompts like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of playing basketball arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you play basketball."

So the time-honored method of coaches telling their players to keep their mind on the game might not have as much of a beneficial effect as if they said, "Have you pondered your own mortality lately?"

Author Lifshin explains why he thinks they got the results they did.  "Your subconscious tries to find ways to defeat death, to make death not a problem, and the solution is self-esteem.  Self-esteem gives you a feeling that you're part of something bigger, that you have a chance for immortality, that you have meaning, that you're not just a sack of meat...  When we're threatened with death, we're motivated to regain that protective sense of self-esteem, and when you like basketball and you're out on the basketball court, winning and performing well is the ultimate way to gain self-esteem."

Apparently even a subtle suggestion worked.  When Lifshin wore a shirt with a human skull on it while working with test subjects, "Participants who saw the shirt outperformed those who did not by approximately 30 percent.  They also attempted more shots — an average of 11.85 per minute versus an average of 8.33 by those who did not see the shirt...  They took more shots, better shots, and they hustled more and ran faster."

So maybe my incessant focus on the worst-case scenario is a good thing.  And whether or not my attitude has anything to do with it, I've been pretty pleased with my running performance lately, especially since just last week I finished a 400-mile virtual run, a fundraiser for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, in 88 days.  Unfortunately, because of COVID, I've been mostly running alone, so no one was around to give me a high five afterward except my dog, and he would probably have been equally enthusiastic if all I'd done was walk to the end of the driveway and back.

Even if pessimism may make your athletic performance better, I can't say it's a pleasant attitude to have, and I've tried to adopt a sunnier outlook whenever possible.  I'm not sure my natural bent will be that easy to eradicate, however, and given the research by Zestcott et al., maybe it's better just to embrace it and run each race as if it'll be my last.

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

If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

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

The Wall Street Journal strikes back

On Monday I wrote in response to Joseph Epstein's commentary about Dr. Jill Biden's Ed.D., in which he called it "comical" and "fraudulent."  The snarky, smirking, dismissive editorial was little more than a message that women who get uppity need to be put in their place and not rise above their station.  I ended by recommending that the Wall Street Journal issue a retraction and an apology, that such a sexist, patronizing screed was far beneath what should be acceptable in a major publication, even in the "Opinion" section.

I wasn't the only one.  Criticism was leveled at the WSJ and Epstein from a variety of sources.  Most of them included some kind of appeal that the WSJ repudiate the stance Epstein took, and hoped that its leaders would recognize the ugly message it was sending.

We should have known better.

Yesterday Paul Gigot, the chief editor of the WSJ's editorial page, wrote a rebuttal to the people who had criticized Epstein and the WSJ's choice to publish his piece, and predictably doubled down on his being justified in doing so.  In the process, he comes off sounding nearly as smug and chauvinistic as Epstein himself.  A particularly blatant example:

Why go to such lengths to highlight a single op-ed on a relatively minor issue?  My guess is that the Biden team concluded it was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message to critics as it prepares to take power.  There’s nothing like playing the race or gender card to stifle criticism.  It’s the left’s version of Donald Trump’s “enemy of the people” tweets.

There's a lot to unpack in this short paragraph.  

First, the dismissal of women and minorities in academia is hardly a "minor issue."  Easy, perhaps, for it to seem minor to rich white men like Gigot and Epstein; but if you want a different perspective, all you'd have to do is talk to one of the many women and/or minorities who have had to fight with everything they have in order to achieve and maintain their positions.  Even once they've succeeded, women (not only in academia but in the corporate world) face sexism and outright sexual harassment, the majority of which goes unreported.

Like I said: ask a woman who's risen to the top of her field.  I'd bet cold hard cash she'd corroborate what I'm saying.

Paul Gigot [Image licensed under the Wikimedia Commons Grant Wickes from Plano, TX (Dallas), USA, Paul Gigot in 2015, CC BY 2.0]

Second, it's really convenient that Gigot ascribes the criticism to "the Biden team," as if the only way anyone could object to what Epstein said was if (s)he was some kind of Biden operative.  (If that's the case, I should put it out there that I still haven't received my Shill Check™ from the team.)  It might be hard for you to imagine, Mr. Gigot, but people sometimes have well-considered opinions that have nothing to do with political posturing.

Then there's the whole "cancel culture" and "race or gender card" thing.  Those phrases (and also "politically correct") have become dogwhistles that at their heart mean "I should be able to say any damn thing I want, however demeaning or offensive, and be immune to criticism for it."  It's a perversion of the First Amendment; "free speech" doesn't mean "freedom from any consequences for what I say."  If you say something bigoted, you don't nullify any criticism you receive by dismissing it as "cancel culture."

Then there's his equating the criticism of Epstein's article with Donald Trump's "enemy of the people" tweets.  If Mr. Gigot sees an equivalence between people objecting to one editorial in one journal as demeaning and offensive, and Trump's calling media and journalists as a whole "the enemy of the people," it's probably pointless to try to explain it to him, so I'll leave it at pointing out that Trump's wholesale condemnation of any media pointing any criticism in his direction led to indiscriminate violence and threats against journalists.  Honestly, Trump's "enemy of the people" tweets are in spirit far less like the people who criticized Epstein than they are like Gigot's defense of him.

At the end of his rebuttal, Gigot wrote something that made me laugh out loud, and simultaneously wonder how anyone could take him seriously:

Many readers said Mr. Epstein’s use of "kiddo" is demeaning, but then Joe Biden is also fond of that locution.  In his 2012 Democratic convention speech he even used it to refer to his wife in the context of his many proposals of marriage: "I don’t know what I would have done, kiddo, had you on that fifth time said no."

So he honestly sees no difference between how a man refers to his spouse and how others refer to her?  My wife calls me "sweetie" and "honey," but I'd rightly be a little perturbed (not to mention puzzled) if someone wrote a newspaper article about me and used those terms.  As I pointed out on Monday, we have here a turn of phrase that no one would dream of directing at a cis/het white male, and yet is supposed to be A-OK when a cis/het white male directs it toward a woman.  Once again, I'd ask you to talk to any women you know who are in academia or the corporate world, and ask them if they've been talked down to in this fashion -- and how it makes dismissal of their opinions and accomplishments seem somehow acceptable.

Like I said, it was probably a forlorn hope that Gigot (or anyone else at the WSJ) would back down on their decision to publish Epstein's article.  I thought maybe, just maybe, someone in charge would recognize that it's time we call out such condescending and patronizing attitudes as deserving of relegation to the dustbin along with racism and homophobia and any of the other ways that cis/het white males have maintained the power differential in their favor.

All Gigot proved in his rebuttal is that we've still got a very long way to go.

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

If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

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

Imaging behavior

When I first started teaching biology -- thirty-four years ago, which kind of seems impossible to me -- I always prefaced any discussion of fossils and extinct animals by emphasizing what fossils don't tell us.

"All the kids' books about prehistoric animals," I told my classes, "illustrate what the living animals looked like by making inferences based on current species.  A hundred years ago, the paleontologists thought of the dinosaurs as being big lizards; in fact, the word dinosaur comes from the Greek words for 'terrible lizard.'  Since that time we've discovered their relationship to birds, and it seems like there were a number of species covered with feathers, not scales.  The truth is, we have extraordinarily limited information about what the dinosaurs looked like from the outside, and almost nothing in the way of knowledge about their behavior.  Fossils just don't give us that information."

Well, I was wrong.

Maybe not in general; your average triceratops thigh bone doesn't tell you anything about the color of the animal it came from.  But paleontologists are getting better and better at figuring out amazing detail about the appearance and behavior of prehistoric animals using nothing but the preserved bones, and some astonishingly sensitive equipment to study them with.

Take the recent study of a wonderfully well-preserved skull of Thecodontosaurus, which lived about 205 million years ago and was an earlier cousin of such behemoths as Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus.  Thecodontosaurus itself wasn't that big -- about 1.5 meters tip-to-tail -- and little was known about its appearance and behavior, even such broad-brush features as whether it was bipedal or quadrupedal.

We now have some much better data to work from, thanks to a paper that appeared in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society last week.  A team made up of Antonio Ballell, J. Logan King, Emily Rayfield, and Michael Benton (of the University of Bristol) and James Neenan (of Oxford Univeristy) did a phenomenally detailed study of the skull, which was itself found near Bristol.  Using a combination of CT scans and imaging software, they reconstructed what the animal's brain -- long since decayed away -- looked like.

And from that, to determine how it behaved while it was alive.

"Even though the actual brain is long gone, the software allows us to recreate brain and inner ear shape via the dimensions of the cavities left behind," study lead author Antonio Ballell said, in a press release in Phys.org.  "The braincase of Thecodontosaurus is beautifully preserved so we compared it to other dinosaurs, identifying common features and some that are specific to Thecodontosaurus.  Its brain cast even showed the detail of the floccular lobes, located at the back of the brain, which are important for balance.  Their large size indicate it was bipedal.  This structure is also associated with the control of balance and eye and neck movements, suggesting Thecodontosaurus was relatively agile and could keep a stable gaze while moving fast...  This could also mean Thecodontosaurus could occasionally catch prey, although its tooth morphology suggests plants were the main component of its diet.  It's possible it adopted omnivorous habits."

Amazingly, all this was done without removing the skull from the rock that encased it, a process that often damages fine structures even if the researchers are as careful as possible while extracting it.  The CT scanner was able to see not only inside the rock but inside the skull itself, distinguishing the fossil from the sedimentary rock outside and inside, and the imaging software helped to clarify minuscule details of the interior of the brain case -- and thus details of the brain it once enclosed.

Study co-author Michael Benton said, "It's great to see how new technologies are allowing us to find out even more about how this little dinosaur lived more than 200 million years ago."

Thinking about prehistory has been a positive fascination of mine since I was a kid, and I remember how disappointed I was to find out that all the stripy and spotted and colorful pictures in my dinosaur books were "artists' renditions" -- i.e., made up and very probably wrong.  We're still not there with color, yet, although a single feather from Eocoracias, a kingfisher-relative that lived 47 million years ago, was so well-preserved that scientists were able to make a shrewd guess that it was blue in color, like many of its modern relatives.

We still have a long way to go, and it's likely that the ravages of time have erased the vast majority of the information that could clue us in on prehistoric animal behavior and appearance.  The fact that we can ascertain anything is itself remarkable.  And I'd wager that if we ever do time-travel back to the distant past, we'd be in for some serious surprises at how different everyone looked than the way we'd always pictured them.

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

If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

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

Midnight, the Proud Boys, and the lure of the mob

In the brilliant but devastating Doctor Who episode "Midnight," the Doctor is on a sightseeing expedition that turns deadly when an alien attacks the "space train," and takes over the body of one of the passengers.

The increasing sophistication of the alien -- whose real form we never see -- as it gradually learns to operate the body of the passenger it has hijacked is one of the most chilling progressions the series ever conceived.  The character of Sky Silvestri is played to the absolute hilt by actress Lesley Sharp, and her riveting portrayal of an intelligence that is intrinsically hostile to other life forms is the stuff of nightmares.

By far the scariest thing about the episode, however, is how the other passengers react.  Doctor Who doesn't often flinch from showing us the ugly side of humanity, and here is mob psychology at its absolute worst -- looking for someone to blame for what has happened, and unfortunately landing on the wrong person.  The result is near catastrophe, and the resolution of the story one of the most poignant and disturbing scenes I've ever watched.  (Ask any Whovian about the line "The Hostess -- what was her name?" and you'll be sure to get a reaction, as well as possibly depressing them for the rest of the day.)

The force of mob psychology has been much on my mind since the riots in Washington, D.C. this past weekend resulted in twenty-three arrests and four people hospitalized with stab wounds.  The #StopTheSteal rallying cry, based upon zero-evidence, entirely bogus claims by Donald Trump and his cronies, spurred far-right groups like the "Proud Boys" to stage demonstrations in downtown D.C., and of course -- undoubtedly what Trump wanted -- the demonstrators clashed with counter-protestors.  (If you doubt my labeling the claims of election fraud as "bogus," explain how those same claims have resulted in almost sixty lawsuits, all but one of which was shot down, including two unanimous 9-0 votes by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court.  Apparently no judge is willing to jeopardize her/his career and reputation supporting a lawsuit with zero evidence to support it, even judges appointed by Donald Trump himself.)

It seems like all you have to do is get a sufficient number of people together, and the psychology of the crowd takes over and accomplishes the rest.  As Terry Pratchett put it, "The IQ of a mob is equal to the IQ of its stupidest member, divided by the number of people in the mob."  In the case of the Proud Boys, this would be a vanishingly small quantity.  More scientifically, a paper back in 2017 by French psychologists Serge Moscovici and Marisa Zavalloni tried to quantify this effect, and found something as fascinating as it is horrifying.  It took 140 secondary school students, and asked them beforehand to give an assessment of two things -- their opinion of the French president, and their attitudes toward Americans.  They then had the test subjects join a group, discuss the two topics, and then reassessed their opinions afterward.

A lot of us have the impression that group discussion moderates extreme viewpoints -- something we might characterize as the "democratic principle," that if you give everyone a voice, the fringes on either end are argued out of their extremism, or at least so vastly outnumbered that their rants don't count for much.  What Moscovici and Zavalloni found was exactly the opposite.  Exposing people with moderate views to ones with extreme beliefs makes the moderate people more extreme.

In other words: being in a group increases the polarization of the members, even the ones who started out in the middle of the pack.

As psychologist Robert Cialdini put it, in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, "Whether the question is what to do with an empty popcorn box in a movie theater, how fast to drive on a certain stretch of highway, or how to eat the chicken at a dinner party, the actions of those around us will be important in defining the answer."

So much of what we do comes from the fact that, all civilization and culture and intelligence aside, at our core we're still just social primates.  It doesn't take much for the veneer of civility to fall away, and once that happens, we tend to base our behavior on the behavior of those around us.

For better or worse.

This all sounds pretty hopeless, but to return to where I started -- "Midnight" -- it's important to acknowledge the fact that sometimes all it takes is one person resisting the pull of the mob to turn things around.  This requires courage, determination, and (often) not an inconsiderable amount of risk.  But ultimately, it's the only way we can avoid the worst outcomes of our built-in tribal mentality -- intolerance, polarization, discrimination, and violence.  Let's hope that there are people today who have the guts to do this.

And maybe this time, we'll even remember their names.

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

If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

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

The modern glass ceiling

Rosalind Franklin has become justly famous for her role in discovering the three-dimensional structure of the DNA double helix.  Her specialty was x-ray crystallography, which involves bombarding a crystal with x-rays and photographing the scatter-pattern produced as the x-rays rebound off the atoms in the crystal.  From that photograph, a trained eye can make a good guess as to the arrangement of the atoms in the crystal.

The analogy I always used in my biology classes was a thought experiment: Imagine that you and a couple dozen friends are in a large darkened room, empty except for an object in the middle whose size and shape you can't see.  You and your friends are lined up around the perimeter, and have to stay with your backs against the wall.  You're asked to determine the shape of the object by hurling tennis balls in various directions; if the tennis ball misses the object, your friend on the opposite side of the room gets hit; if the ball hits the object, it ricochets off and lands near another of your friends somewhere else in the room.

Given enough tennis balls and enough time, and recording the results of each throw, you could probably make a decent guess about the size and the shape of the invisible object.  That, essentially, is what x-ray crystallographers do.

Easy concept, difficult in practice.  Franklin was exceptionally good at it, and produced the famous photo that proved the double-helical structure of DNA, accomplishing what dozens of other researchers had failed to do.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Rosalind Franklin, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The trouble began when the paper was written that described the conclusions drawn from the photograph -- and the paper's lead author, Maurice Wilkins, didn't include Franklin's name on the list of authors.  Franklin herself died of ovarian cancer in 1958, not long after the paper's release, and so was unable to defend herself; but the reasons for the omission become crystal-clear when you hear comments from James Watson (of Watson & Crick fame) about Franklin's role in the lab.

"There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents," Watson wrote.  "Her belligerent moods interfered with Wilkins’s ability to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA...  Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place… The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab."

The marginalization, or outright disparagement, of women in academia was ubiquitous back then.  Most of us are rightly outraged when we read about how Franklin and her accomplishments were dismissed.  And we often congratulate ourselves on how far we've come, and name examples of women, minorities, and LGBTQ people who have risen to the top of their fields.

The problem is, this is not so far off from the "there is no such thing as racism... look, I have a black friend!" nonsense you sometimes hear.  As evidence of this, consider the nauseatingly condescending article that appeared only a couple of days ago in the Wall Street Journal.  Written by Joseph Epstein, this article illustrates with disgusting clarity that we've not come far from Watson's "the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab" attitude:

Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter.  Any chance you might drop the “Dr.” before your name?  “Dr. Jill Biden ” sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic...  As for your Ed.D., Madame First Lady, hard-earned though it may have been, please consider stowing it, at least in public.

Excuse me?  "Fraudulent?"  "Comic?"  "Kiddo?"  Can you imagine condescension like this being aimed at a white cis/het man?  A Ph.D. or Ed.D. does confer the right to use the honorific "Doctor" before your name, Mr. Epstein, whether you like it or not.  Not only that, it is a completely deserved acknowledgement of the intellect and diligence of the person who earned it.  I "only" have a master's degree, and I worked my ass off to achieve that.  I know a number of people with doctorates in various fields (a good many of them non-medical), and from their experiences I know how many years of hard work it takes to do the original research required for a doctoral degree.

It is horrifying that this article was written, and unconscionable that the Wall Street Journal elected to publish it.

The smug, smirking tone of this op-ed piece is emblematic; here, over fifty years after Rosalind Franklin conducted her groundbreaking research and was robbed of public acknowledgement of her role, we are still not past the way the patronizing, self-congratulatory patriarchy uses its position of power to minimize (or ignore entirely) the accomplishments of anyone who isn't a white cis/het male.

It may come as no shock that Joseph Epstein has been pulling this bullshit for years.  For fifty years, in fact.  The privilege of white cis/het males in this society extends to overlooking outright sexism and bigotry for decades.  Not just overlooking, but giving it tacit acceptance by the fact that it appears in a major publication.  Take a look at the paragraph he wrote in a piece call "Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity" in The Atlantic in 1970:

They are different front the rest of us.  Homosexuals are different, moreover, in a way that cuts deeper than other kinds of human differences—religious, class, racial—in a way that is, somehow, more fundamental.  Cursed without clear cause, afflicted without apparent cure, they are an affront to our rationality, living evidence of our despair of ever finding a sensible, an explainable, design to the world.  One can tolerate homosexuality, a small enough price to be asked to pay for someone else's pain, but accepting it, really accepting it, is another thing altogether.  I find I can accept it least of all when I look at my children.  There is much my four sons can do in their lives that might cause me anguish, that might outrage me, that might make me ashamed of them and of myself as their father.  But nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual.  For then I should know them condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men, their lives, whatever adjustment they might make to their condition, to be lived out as part of the pain of the earth.

It's tempting to say, "Well, that was 1970."  Which might be an excuse if Epstein had ever apologized or retracted what he'd written.  The best he could do was a mealy-mouthed reference to his 1970 article in the Washington Examiner in 2015, in which he said, "I am pleased the tolerance for homosexuality has widened in America and elsewhere, that in some respects my own aesthetic sensibility favors much homosexual artistic production...  My only hope now is that, on my gravestone, the words Noted Homophobe aren’t carved."

So it's probably too much to expect Epstein to back down with respect to his smug dismissal of Dr. Jill Biden's degree.  The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, should issue a retraction and an unqualified apology.  This has nothing to do with her being the wife of the president-elect.  It would still be the case if she was an ordinary citizen in any part of academia.  The "glass ceiling" isn't gone; we're just very good at pretending it is, at acting like today we've shucked all the old problems of discrimination and bigotry.  But that a major newspaper is publishing -- even on its "Opinion" page -- something this blatantly demeaning, condescending, and rude is somewhere beyond appalling.

We need more women and minorities to be belligerent (to use James Watson's word) -- to refuse to accept the disparagement of their accomplishments, to give a pair of middle fingers to the entrenched establishment Epstein represents, that feels threatened whenever anyone from outside attempts an ingress.  How much talent, passion, and intelligence has been thwarted because of this attitude?  We can not tolerate this any more.  It has to be shouted down every single time it rears its ugly head.

If we really have progressed beyond the bigotry of the mid-twentieth century, if we really have gotten to a place where this generation's Rosalind Franklins would be welcomed and appreciated, we need to call out the Joseph Epsteins of the world, loud and clear. 

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If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

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

Get thee behind me, Rover

If you live in Japan, own a dog, and have more money than sense, I've got good news for you: you can pay ¥ 31,000 (about US $297) to have a Shinto priest perform an exorcism on your canine companion.

I'm not making this up.  According to an article by E. S. Huffman over at UpRoxx, the D+ Spa in Kagoshima Prefecture is offering a special deal wherein you can come over with Fido, and a certified Shinto priest from the nearby Shingariyu Shrine will get rid of whatever evil spirits your dog has in attendance.

"Seven-year-old, 10-year-old, and 13-year-old dogs need to be careful of their health, as it’s easier in those years for them to get diseases of aging," the D+ website explains.  After all, it couldn't be because by the time dogs get to be ten years old, they're moving into the age bracket euphemistically known as "getting up there in years."

On the other hand, if creaky joints, bad eyesight, and wrinkles are caused by evil spirits that you could actually potentially get rid of, that'd be good news for People Of A Certain Age.  Like myself.  Unfortunately, however, D+ doesn't offer exorcisms for humans yet, only dogs.  And if the whole thing brings up mental images of Linda Blair puking up pea soup all over the place, not to worry; the exorcism ritual only lasts thirty minutes, is apparently calm and peaceful, and afterwards the newly-cleansed dogs get to go for a swim in a dogs-only pool.  Then, according to the website, they "are reunited with their owners for a relaxing meal and champagne."

Me, I'm not so sure it's a good idea to give a dog champagne.  But maybe the bubbles keep the evil spirits from returning, I dunno.

Actual photo from the D+ website of a poodle, settling in for a nice post-exorcism nosh

What comes to my mind, besides "Are you people nuts?  Or what?", is that in my experience all dogs have weird, quirky habits, so if you're attributing canine oddities to evil spirits, then every domesticated dog I've ever met must be possessed.  In my long years of dog ownership, I've known dogs who:

• never figured out that you can't walk through a sliding glass door
• tried to herd our cats
• thought a stuffed toy was a live squirrel and stared at it for hours on end waiting for it to move
• begged for cucumbers but completely ignored us when we were cooking steak
• was barking outside like a lunatic, and upon investigation, it turned out she was barking at a stick
• had a mortal hatred of ping-pong balls
• barked furiously at strangers -- until they walked in the front door, at which point everyone apparently becomes a friend
• would suddenly turn vicious and block the door, growling and snarling, when visitors tried to leave

I sort of doubt that any of this could be fixed by exorcism.  Myself, I've always thought that domestication just makes animals act weird.  In order for a formerly-wild animal to cohabit successfully with humans, it must kind of screw up the mental circuitry on some level.

On the other hand, if you want my vote for a species that really could use some intervention, evil-spirit-wise, I'd suggest looking at cats.  On a recent visit to a friend's house, I met a cat whose preferred mode of expressing affection is to jump on the top of the chair you're sitting in and bite a chunk out of your scalp.  Another friend has a cat who likes to climb into your lap, reach up with both paws, and attempt to give you a nipple piercing right through your shirt.

You have to wonder what a Shinto priest could do about that.

Anyhow, if you're ever in Japan with your dog, consider whether a family outing for a canine exorcism might be right for you.  As for me, I need to sign off here so I can go let my dog out, so she can go stand at the end of our dock and bark at her own reflection in the pond.

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I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

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

Patterns and meaning

I remember a couple of years ago noticing something odd.  While eating breakfast on work days, I'd finish, and always give a quick glance up at the digital clock that sits on the counter.  Three times in a row, the clock said 6:19.

I know there's a perfectly rational explanation; I'm a total creature of habit, and I did the same series of actions in the same order every single work morning, so the fact that I finished breakfast three days in a row at exactly the same time only points up the fact that I need to relax a little.  But once I noticed the (seeming) pattern, I kept checking each morning.  And there were other days when I finished at exactly 6:19.  After a few weeks of this, it was becoming a bit of an obsession.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mk2010, LED digital wall clock (Seiko), CC BY-SA 3.0]

So being a rationalist, as well as needing a hobby, I started to keep track.  And very quickly a few things became obvious:

• I almost always finished breakfast (and checked the clock) between 6:16 and 6:22.
• 6:19 is the exact middle of that range, so it would be understandable if that time occurred more often.
• Even considering #2, 6:19 turned out to be no more likely than other times.  The distribution was, within that six minute range, fairly random.

So I had fallen for dart-thrower's bias, the perfectly natural human tendency to notice the unusual, and to give it more weight in our attention and memory.  The point is, once you start noticing this stuff, you're more likely to notice it again, and to overestimate the number of times such coincidences occur.

The whole thing comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia called, "Angel Numbers Guide: Why You Keep Seeing Angel Number Sequences."  I'm not going to recommend your going to the site, because it's pretty obviously clickbait, but I thought the content was interesting from the standpoint of our determination that the patterns we notice mean something.

The site is an attempt to convince us that when we see certain numbers over and over, it's an angel attempting to give us a message.  If you notice the number 1212, for example, this is an angel encouraging us to "release our fears and apprehensions, and get on with pursuing our passions and purpose... [asking you to] stay on a positive path and to use your natural skills, talents, and abilities to their utmost for the benefit of yourself and others."

Which is good advice without all of the woo-woo trappings.

Some numbers apparently appeal not only to our desire for meaningful patterns, but for being special.  If you see 999 everywhere, "you are amongst an elite few... 999 is sometimes confrontative, and literally means, 'Get to work on your priorities.  Now.  No more procrastinating, no more excuses or worries.  Get to work now."

Since a lot of the "angel numbers" involve repeated digits, I had to check to see what 666 means.  I was hoping it would say something like, "If you see 666, you are about to be dragged screaming into the maw of hell."

But no. 666 apparently is "a sign from the angels that it's time to wake up to your higher spiritual truth."  Which is not only boring, but sounds like it could come from a talk by Deepak Chopra.

So the whole thing turns out to be interesting mostly from the standpoint of our desperation to impose some sense on the chaos of life.  Because face it; a lot of what does happen is simply random noise, a conclusion that is a bit of a downer.  I suspect that many religions give solace precisely because they ascribe meaning to everything; the Bible, after all, says that even a sparrow doesn't fall from the sky without the hand of God being involved.

Me, I think it's more likely that a lot of stuff (including birds dying) happens for no particularly identifiable or relevant reason.  Science can explain at least some of the proximal causes, but as far as ultimate causes?  I think we're thrown back on the not very satisfying non-explanation of the universe simply being a chaotic place.  I understand the appeal of it all having meaning and purpose, but it seems to me that most of what occurs is no more interesting than my finishing breakfast at 6:19.

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

I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

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