The strangest flower on Earth

Anyone know what the world's largest flower is?

Chances are, some of you know that honor goes to the bizarre Indonesian species Rafflesia arnoldi, which produces flowers that can get to be 120 centimeters across.  Not only are they huge, they are (1) really weird-looking, and (2) smell like rotting meat in order to attract the flies that pollinate them.

Rafflesia arnoldi  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons ma_suska, Rafflesia sumatra, CC BY 2.0]

The first time I saw a photograph of this plant, I was immediately reminded of the Lost in Space episode "Attack of the Monster Plants," which was a real favorite of mine when I was a kid, not only because who wouldn't love a show about monster plants, but because Judy Robinson was in peril during this episode and to say I was madly in love with Judy Robinson is rather an understatement.

Be that as it may, the reality of Rafflesia is almost as weird as Judy's spaceship-fuel-eating alien plants.  The flower is enormous but the rest of the plant is minuscule, only a thin ribbon of translucent tissue that punctures the roots of vines of the rainforest genus Tetrastigma, getting all its nutrients from the host plant rather than from photosynthesis.  The only time any part of the plant is above ground is when it's flowering.  After that, the flowers wither, the fruits containing thousands of nearly microscopic seeds that are thought to be dispersed when tree shrews eat the fruit and poop out the seeds somewhere else.  But the plant's rarity, and the fact that during most of its life cycle you could walk right by it (or more likely, over it) without knowing, not that much is known for sure.

Another thing that's surprising about the family (Rafflesiaceae) is that its nearest relatives are euphorbias -- which include a huge range of plants united by having tiny, insignificant flowers and milky toxic sap and looking absolutely nothing like Rafflesia.  A number of euphorbs look superficially like cacti, with reduced or absent leaves and sharp spines, but the milky sap and inconspicuous flowers would clue you in to the fact that the similarities are due to convergent evolution.  The most familiar euphorb is the poinsettia -- the bright red, pink, or cream-colored parts are not actually petals but modified leaves.  (The flowers themselves are the little b-b sized bits at the center.)

So what this shows is that to figure out evolutionary relationships, you can't rely on what things look like.  As odd as it is, the spiky candelabra spurge (Euphorbia ingens) is a cousin of the bizarre Rafflesia.

If all that isn't weird enough, consider a study that just came out a couple of weeks ago in Current Biology that looked at another member of Rafflesiaceae, the genus Sapria.  (They're very similar to Rafflesia, differing only in a few not-very-significant botanical details.)  This study did an extensive analysis of the genetics of Sapria, and found something bizarre; during its descent from its euphorbia-like ancestors, Sapria (and presumably the rest of the family Rafflesiaceae) has not only lost just about all of its physical structure, but half of its genome -- including the entire array of genes that produce chloroplasts.  Stranger still, in the process it has picked up genetic material from its host, something called horizontal transfer.

So this puts paid to the incorrect notion a lot of people have that evolution always makes things bigger, stronger, smarter, and more complex.  Evolution is the law of whatever works at the time, and if what works is to jettison half the DNA along with chloroplasts, leaves, and true roots, that can happen.  And if you think about it, it makes sense; if you're a plant that spends nearly its entire life underground, why waste resources making structures like leaves and chloroplasts, not to mention all the proteins and pigments that go into making them work?  The oddest thing about the genetics, though, is that a lot of the genes that Sapria has picked up from its hosts don't seem to do anything; they appear to be "non-coding regions" of DNA that don't have any obvious function.  "There's something weird and different going on in this species," said Tim Sackton of Harvard University, who co-authored the paper, in an interview with Science News.  "Maybe these organisms that stretch the boundaries of existence tell us something about how far the rules can be bent before they can be broken."

Rafflesia and its relatives are certainly some of the strangest members of the plant kingdom, so much so that you have to wonder what other peculiarities are going to be uncovered by further analysis.  I just hope we don't find out that it eats rocket fuel and creates evil duplicates of people, because Judy Robinson barely escaped with her life, and that is not okay.

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Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert established her reputation as a cutting-edge observer of the human global impact in her wonderful book The Sixth Extinction (which was a Skeptophilia Book of the Week a while back).  This week's book recommendation is her latest, which looks forward to where humanity might be going.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is an analysis of what Kolbert calls "our ten-thousand-year-long exercise in defying nature," something that immediately made me think of another book I've recommended -- the amazing The Control of Nature by John McPhee, the message of which was generally "when humans pit themselves against nature, nature always wins."  Kolbert takes a more nuanced view, and considers some of the efforts scientists are making to reverse the damage we've done, from conservation of severely endangered species to dealing with anthropogenic climate change.

It's a book that's always engaging and occasionally alarming, but overall, deeply optimistic about humanity's potential for making good choices.  Whether we turn that potential into reality is largely a function of educating ourselves regarding the precarious position into which we've placed ourselves -- and Kolbert's latest book is an excellent place to start.

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

The haunting of Hinton Ampner

On her mom's side, my wife is descended from English nobility, a fact of which she reminds me periodically when I get uppity.  Her great-great grandfather, one William R. Hylton, was born in Jamaica to a family of British sugar planters, and the line (if you extend it back far enough) includes not only the Mad Baron Hylton (about whom I should write another time) but a woman named "Benedicta de Shelving," a member of the Norman gentry named "Marmaduke de Thweng," and best of all, an illegitimate daughter of King Edward IV.

One of her ancestors on the maternal side of her Hylton lineage is a Rachel (Ricketts) Johnson, who would have been (if I'm counting correctly) the aforementioned William R. Hylton's great-great grandmother.  I found out quite by accident that Rachel is related to the central figures in one of Britain's creepiest ghost stories -- the tale of the haunting of Hinton Ampner, a mansion in Hampshire.

Hinton Ampner was built in the 1620s, during the reign of James I, by one Sir Thomas Stewkeley.  Sir Thomas's great-grandson Hugh had no male heirs; his daughter, Mary, married Edward Stawell, a nobly-descended young man who was also apparently a little loose on the morals side.  Despite this, Stawell was appointed as Sir Hugh's heir.

After his father-in-law's death, Stawell apparently decided that he could get away with whatever he wanted, and he invited his wife's beautiful young sister, Honoria, to come live with them at Hinton Ampner.  Mary Stawell died shortly afterwards -- an eventuality that many of their neighbors found convenient -- and he lived there with Honoria (carrying on, sources say, in "a scandalous manner") until her death in 1754.  Stawell himself died the following year, and some claimed that the couple's demise was "divine retribution" for their having done away with an illegitimate child born to the union -- perhaps more than one.

Be that as it may, the house was purchased and then rented out to William Henry Ricketts (cousin to Carol's forebear Rachel (Ricketts) Johnson) and his wife, Mary (Jervis) Ricketts.  William was frequently away for long periods of time -- as I mentioned earlier, he and his family had ties to Jamaica, and voyages across the Atlantic were dangerous and drawn-out affairs -- but Mary was a no-nonsense, down-to-earth type who was quite up to the task of running a household (including their three children and a bevy of servants) by herself.

Whether she was up to dealing with ghosts remains to be seen.

The haunting, if such it was, started out slowly.  Mr. and Mrs. Ricketts both heard noises at night, prompting them on more than one occasion to awaken the servants for a thorough search of the house, which turned up nothing.  Then the nurse to the Ricketts's infant son saw a "man in drab clothes" walk into "the Yellow Room" -- Mary Ricketts's own bedroom.

Once again a search found no one.

Events accelerated.  Servants saw not only the apparition of the drab-clothed man, but a woman in a silk dress. "Dismal moans" were heard at night, and doors opened and quietly shut by themselves.  Mary Ricketts, at first scornful of the claims of the servants, began to experience them herself -- especially when the disturbances intensified while her husband was away in Jamaica in 1769.  She was terrified one night to hear heavy, plodding footsteps near her bed, and in the days following began to make inquiries in the neighborhood regarding the history of the house.  She found only one curious story -- an elderly man who said that a long-time friend of his, who was a carpenter, had been summoned to the house while old Sir Hugh Stewkeley was still alive to pull up some of the floorboards in the dining room.  The carpenter saw Stewkeley and his son-in-law, the depraved Edward Stawell, place something in the space underneath.  The carpenter was ordered to replace the floorboards -- and not to tell a soul what he'd seen, on pain of death.  (A threat the carpenter either didn't believe, or didn't break until Stewkeley and Stawell were both dead themselves.)

Oddly, Mary Ricketts didn't have the floorboards pried up to determine the truth of the claim.  She was apparently reluctant to ascribe the occurrences to ghosts.  But even she began to have second thoughts when the haunting continued to worsen.  A strange murmuring could be heard in several rooms in the house, which sometimes resolved itself into intelligible words. Not only did Mary hear it, but so did her brother, the famous British Navy officer Captain John Jervis, who wrote about it in his journal (a document that still exists today in a museum in London).  They also heard a tremendous "rushing sound," like a great wind, that would "fall with infinite velocity and force" upon a room, without a breath of air stirring.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Mary wrote about the entire story herself in a narrative that was given for publication to The Gentleman's Magazine by her descendants in 1872.  Throughout the tale, Mary strikes you as sane, calm, and collected, always looking for rational explanations, and not immediately leaping to the conclusion that ghosts were to blame.  One passage reads as follows:

Thoroughly convinced there were persons in the lobby before I opened the door, I asked her [Mary's servant Elizabeth Godin] if she saw no one there.  On her replying in the negative, I went out to her, examined the window that was shut, looked under the couch, the only furniture of concealment there; the chimney board was fastened, and when removed all was clear behind it.  She found the door into the lobby shut, as it was every night.  After this examination, I stood in the middle of the room, pondering with astonishment, when suddenly the door that opens into the little recess leading to the yellow apartment sounded as if played to and fro by a person standing behind it.  This was more than I could bear unmoved.  I ran into the nursery and rang the bell there that goes into the men's apartment.

I think if it'd been me, "not unmoved" would have been putting it mildly.  I think I would have fallen more into the "pissing my pants and then having a stroke" category.

Eventually, however, even Mary's stalwart patience was tried to the limit.  During his stay, her brother -- who is certainly a credible witness if anyone is -- heard groans, banging, dragging footsteps, and (on one occasion) a gunshot.  None of the noises seemed to have a corporeal source.  Jervis pressed his sister to leave the mansion, which she did in 1771.  Its owners were understandably unable to find anyone else who would rent the place, and shortly afterwards Hinton Ampner was demolished.

Okay, I know, you can't put much weight into anecdote, but this story to me has some characteristics that have the ring of truth.  I think it's the open-endedness of it that is the most persuasive, and the most creepy as well.  A lot of ghost stories have predictable endings -- the haunting ends when a skeleton is unearthed and reburied in hallowed ground, when the guilty party is arrested for a murder, when well-deserved revenge is taken against a killer.  Here, we have two seemingly reliable people recounting experiences that have no easy wrap-up.  In the end, Mary Ricketts and her family moved away, John Jervis went on to win the Battle of St. Vincent, and the haunted house itself was torn down.

So I find this a pretty cool story, even though I wouldn't call myself a true believer by any stretch.  Cool, too, that we have a family connection to the main characters; in fact, Captain John Jervis had no children of his own and chose as his heir Mary's son Edward Jervis Ricketts, who spent his childhood in Hinton Ampner, and who would be Carol's third cousin several times removed.  But whether it's true or not, and whether the explanation is supernatural or entirely rational, I still think it's a good tale to add a few extra chills to a chilly gray day in midwinter.

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Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert established her reputation as a cutting-edge observer of the human global impact in her wonderful book The Sixth Extinction (which was a Skeptophilia Book of the Week a while back).  This week's book recommendation is her latest, which looks forward to where humanity might be going.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is an analysis of what Kolbert calls "our ten-thousand-year-long exercise in defying nature," something that immediately made me think of another book I've recommended -- the amazing The Control of Nature by John McPhee, the message of which was generally "when humans pit themselves against nature, nature always wins."  Kolbert takes a more nuanced view, and considers some of the efforts scientists are making to reverse the damage we've done, from conservation of severely endangered species to dealing with anthropogenic climate change.

It's a book that's always engaging and occasionally alarming, but overall, deeply optimistic about humanity's potential for making good choices.  Whether we turn that potential into reality is largely a function of educating ourselves regarding the precarious position into which we've placed ourselves -- and Kolbert's latest book is an excellent place to start.

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

Canine emotional therapy

I had a rather terrifying nightmare last night, and as is usual with such things, the retelling doesn't convey how absolutely awful it was.

My wife and I were in a house -- not our own, it was one of those generic tasteful split-level homes you can see in every upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood in the United States.  From the furnishings it was occupied, and the owners obviously had children because there were toys scattered about.

Then the toys began to come to life.

It wasn't like Chucky in Child's Play, where it was a possessed doll that had an evil personality; it was more that they were being controlled remotely, and only looked like toys but were actually weapons.  After a struggle we fought our way past them, and at some point (don't recall how) we were able to deactivate them.  So we're trying to find the way out of the house, stepping over all the fallen toy/weapons, and then (of course) they started to reboot.

This was the moment when I was thrashing around so much that my wife woke me up.  I didn't scream or anything (that'll be relevant in a moment) but was flailing and had awakened her.  She reassured me that it was just a dream, we didn't have evil remote-controlled toys in our room, and I was able to shake the fear pretty quickly.

I got up to get a glass of water, and when I opened my bedroom door, my dog, Guinness, was standing there looking up at me with a concerned expression.

So I got my water, and he followed me back into the bedroom, jumped on the bed, and basically smooshed himself against me, his head under my chin.  I put my arm around him and he gave a big sigh and we both fell back asleep.

Why this is weird is that this was pretty un-Guinness-like behavior.  He's never allowed on our bed at night, mostly because he weighs seventy pounds and takes up a large amount of space.  We sleep with the door closed and he always spends the night quietly snoozing on his sofa.  (Yes, he has his own personal sofa.  Yes, I know he's ridiculously spoiled.)  Whenever I get up in the middle of the night -- not that unusual, because I'm an insomniac -- he virtually never budges, much less barging in and jumping in bed with me at two AM.  

So his behavior last night was very uncharacteristic, up to and including his basically draping himself over me once we got back into bed.  I know it may sound ridiculous, especially coming from a self-proclaimed rationalist skeptic -- but I swear, it seemed very much like he sensed that I'd had a bad scare and was upset, and wanted to comfort me.

Me with my valiant protector

What makes me curious, of course, is how he knew.  As I said, I hadn't shouted out.  The conversation my wife and I had after I woke up was quiet, and given that I recovered from my fright rather quickly, not at all agitated.  And when I got up to get my glass of water, he was already at the door waiting for me, so he must have known something was wrong, enough that it woke him up, and he decided to come and see if he could help.

Any dog owner will confirm that dogs are uniquely in tune with their owners' emotional states.  We had a brilliant, and rather loony, border collie named Doolin, who could sense when my wife was going to have a migraine and would essentially glue herself to Carol's side until it was over.  The odd thing was that Doolin knew before Carol did; in fact, Carol came to look at Doolin's odd behavior as a clue that she better find her migraine meds while she could still think straight and see what she was doing.  Another of our dogs, Grendel, always knew when we'd finished dinner.  We have a strict no-begging policy at meals, but once we're done, even if we're still seated at the table, they can come up for some petting and attention.  Grendel could infallibly tell when we were done eating, and seconds later would come loping in to get an ear rub.  We tried more than once to figure out what his cue was -- whether it was the sound of putting our silverware or glasses down, or something we said like, "That was good, thanks for cooking" -- but never could really pin it down.  But his appearance was like clockwork, every single night.

There have been some preliminary studies of dogs' abilities to recognize their owners' emotions from facial cues, with (in my mind) rather equivocal results.  One back in 2016, which appeared in Biology Letters of the Royal Society, looked at "equivalent valence" between a human's expression and the emotion conveyed in a recorded utterance -- how, for example, a dog might react to an angry face combined with a playfully-toned phrase.  It found that when the facial expression and the tone of the utterance had equivalent valence, the dog spent longer looking at the photograph than either when the valence was different, or when the photograph was shown with a recording of white noise.

A second, in 2018, looked at the difference in reaction when dogs were shown faces with various emotions simultaneously on two different monitors, one to the dogs' right, the other to the left.  It's been determined that dogs, like humans, have lateralized brains, with the two cerebral hemispheres performing complementary (rather than redundant) functions, and that (again like humans) they usually have dominant left hemispheres.  Because of this, the conjecture was that more intense emotions would cause the animals to pay more attention and turn their heads to the left, while less intense emotions would either show no preference or result in a rightward turn.

Sure enough, that's what happened.  Human faces showing fear, anger, and disgust caused a preferential leftward turn; a surprised face and a neutral expression caused a rightward turn (and also a shorter time looking at the photograph).  Additionally, the intense/negative faces caused the dogs to experience an increase in heart rate and signs of canine stress -- lowered tail, pulled back ears, and so on.  A surprising result was that a happy face caused a leftward turn.  One possibility is that humans' smiles are a fairly uncommon way of expressing relaxation and happiness in the animal world; for most species, baring the teeth is a threat, not a gesture of friendship.  It's also possible that the dog was reacting because of the intensity of the expression, not its actual emotional content.  Impossible to tell.

Those experiments, though, are pretty broad-brush.  What I've found in my long years of being a dog owner is how attuned they are to the specific gestures and actions of their owners, when the same gesture or action from someone else would cause no response at all.  Our aforementioned border collie, Doolin, was a phenomenal frisbee-catcher -- but only when my wife was throwing it.  When Carol threw the frisbee, Doolin always took off in exactly the right direction, and nailed maybe 95% of the throws with a spectacular leaping catch in mid-air.  With me, she was equally likely to run pretty much any direction, and missed most of the throws.  Like with Grendel's "dinner's over" cues, we tried like hell to figure out what Doolin was picking up about my wife's body language when she threw the frisbee that I couldn't seem to duplicate, and never did figure it out.

So I'm back to where I started, which is simply an anecdotal sense that dogs are exquisitely sensitive to their owners' emotional states.  I've noted that when I'm feeling low Guinness is much more likely to spend the day snoozing at my feet rather than on His Personal Sofa, but I don't know whether that's because of his sensitivity, because of dart-thrower's bias, or simply my reading more into his behavior than what's actually there.  In any case, it's a curious phenomenon, and worthy of more study.  In the interim, I'd love to hear my readers' dog stories -- feel free to post your experiences of your dogs picking up on your feelings in the comments section.  Or, conversely, feel free to tell me I'm full of malarkey.  Don't worry, it won't bother me, Guinness will be right there to make me feel better.

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Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert established her reputation as a cutting-edge observer of the human global impact in her wonderful book The Sixth Extinction (which was a Skeptophilia Book of the Week a while back).  This week's book recommendation is her latest, which looks forward to where humanity might be going.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is an analysis of what Kolbert calls "our ten-thousand-year-long exercise in defying nature," something that immediately made me think of another book I've recommended -- the amazing The Control of Nature by John McPhee, the message of which was generally "when humans pit themselves against nature, nature always wins."  Kolbert takes a more nuanced view, and considers some of the efforts scientists are making to reverse the damage we've done, from conservation of severely endangered species to dealing with anthropogenic climate change.

It's a book that's always engaging and occasionally alarming, but overall, deeply optimistic about humanity's potential for making good choices.  Whether we turn that potential into reality is largely a function of educating ourselves regarding the precarious position into which we've placed ourselves -- and Kolbert's latest book is an excellent place to start.

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

Fooling the experts

I was bummed to hear about the death of the inimitable Cloris Leachman a week and a half ago at the venerable age of 94.  Probably most famous for her role as Frau Blücher *wild neighing horse noises* in the movie Young Frankenstein, I was first introduced to her unsurpassed sense of comic timing in the classic 1970s sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show, where she played the tightly-wound self-styled intellectual Phyllis Lindstrom.

One of my favorite moments in that show occurred when Phyllis was playing a game of Scrabble against Mary's neighbor Rhoda Morgenstern (played with equal panache by Valerie Harper).  Rhoda puts down the word oxmersis, and Phyllis challenges it.

"There's no such thing as 'oxmersis,'" Phyllis says.

Rhoda looks at her, aghast.  "Really, Phyllis?  I can not believe that someone who knows as much about psychology as you do has never heard of oxmersis."

Long pause, during which you can almost see the gears turning in Phyllis's head.  "Oh," she finally says.  "That oxmersis."

I was immediately reminded of that scene when I ran into a paper while doing some background investigation for yesterday's post, which was about psychologist David Dunning's research with Robert Proctor regarding the deliberate cultivation of stupidity.  This paper looked at a different aspect of ignorance -- what happens when you combine the Dunning-Kruger effect (people's tendency to overestimate their own intelligence and abilities) with a bias called Appeal to Authority.

Appeal to Authority, you probably know, is when someone uses credentials, titles, or educational background -- and no other evidence -- to support a claim.  Put simply, it is the idea that if Richard Dawkins said it, it must be true, regardless of whether the claim has anything to do with Dawkins's particular area of expertise, evolutionary biology.  (I pick Dawkins deliberately, because he's fairly notorious for having opinions about everything, and seems to relish being the center of controversy regardless of the topic.)  

Dunning teamed up with Cornell University researchers Stav Atir and Emily Rosenzweig, and came up with what could be described as the love child of Dunning-Kruger and Appeal to Authority.  And what this new phenomenon -- dubbed, predictably, the Atir-Rosenzweig-Dunning Effect -- shows us is that people who are experts in a particular field tend to think their expertise holds true even for disciplines far outside their chosen area of study, and because of that are more likely to fall for plausible-sounding falsehoods -- like Phyllis's getting suckered by Rhoda's "oxmersis" bluff.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

In one experiment, the three researchers asked people to rate their own knowledge in various academic areas, then asked them to rank their level of understanding of various finance-related terms, such as "pre-rated stocks, fixed-rate deduction and annualized credit."  The problem is, those three finance-related terms actually don't exist -- i.e., they were made up by the researchers to sound plausible.

The test subjects who had the highest confidence level in their own fields were most likely to fall for the ruse.  Simon Oxenham, who described the experiments in Big Think, says it's only natural.  "A possible explanation for this finding," Oxenham writes, "is that the participants with a greater vocabulary in a particular domain were more prone to falsely feeling familiar with nonsense terms in that domain because of the fact that they had simply come across more similar-sounding terms in their lives, providing more material for potential confusion."

Interestingly, subsequent experiments showed that the correlation holds true even if you take away the factor of self-ranking.  Presumably, someone who is cocky and arrogant and ranks his/her ability higher than is justified in one area would be likely to do it in others.  But when they tested the subjects' knowledge of terms from their own field -- i.e., actually measured their expertise -- high scores still correlated with overestimating their knowledge in other areas.

And telling the subjects ahead of time that some of the terms might be made up didn't change the results. "[E]ven when participants were warned that some of the statements were false, the 'experts' were just as likely as before to claim to know the nonsense statements, while most of the other participants became more likely in this scenario to admit they’d never heard of them," Oxenham writes.

I have a bit of anecdotal evidence supporting this result from my experience in the classroom.  On multiple-choice tests, I had to concoct plausible-sounding wrong answers as distractors.  Every once in a while, I ran out of good wrong answers, and just made something up.  (On one AP Biology quiz on plant biochemistry, I threw in the term "photoglycolysis," which sounds pretty fancy until you realize that there's no such thing.)   What I found was that it was the average to upper-average students who were the most likely to be taken in.  The top students didn't get fooled because they knew what the correct answer was; the lowest students were equally likely to pick any of the wrong answers, because they didn't understand the material well.  The mid-range students saw something that sounded technical and vaguely familiar -- and figured that if they weren't sure, it must be that they'd missed learning that particular term.

It was also the mid-range students who were most likely to miss questions where the actual answer seemed too simple.  Another botanical question I liked to throw at them was, "What do all non-vascular land plants have in common?"  I always provided three wrong answers with appropriately technical-sounding jargon.

The actual answer is, "They're small."

Interestingly, the reason for the small size of non-vascular land plants (the most familiar example is moss) isn't simple at all.  But the answer itself just looked too easy to merit being the correct choice on an AP Biology quiz.

So Atir, Rosenzweig, and Dunning have given us yet another mental pitfall to watch out for -- our tendency to use our knowledge in one field to overestimate our knowledge in others.  But I really should run along, and make sure that the annualized credit on my pre-rated stocks exceeds the recommended fixed-rate deduction.  I worry a lot about that kind of thing, but I suppose my anxiety really just another case of excessive oxmersis.

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

Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert established her reputation as a cutting-edge observer of the human global impact in her wonderful book The Sixth Extinction (which was a Skeptophilia Book of the Week a while back).  This week's book recommendation is her latest, which looks forward to where humanity might be going.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is an analysis of what Kolbert calls "our ten-thousand-year-long exercise in defying nature," something that immediately made me think of another book I've recommended -- the amazing The Control of Nature by John McPhee, the message of which was generally "when humans pit themselves against nature, nature always wins."  Kolbert takes a more nuanced view, and considers some of the efforts scientists are making to reverse the damage we've done, from conservation of severely endangered species to dealing with anthropogenic climate change.

It's a book that's always engaging and occasionally alarming, but overall, deeply optimistic about humanity's potential for making good choices.  Whether we turn that potential into reality is largely a function of educating ourselves regarding the precarious position into which we've placed ourselves -- and Kolbert's latest book is an excellent place to start.

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

Viral stupidity

My dad used to say that ignorance was only skin deep, but stupid goes all the way to the bone.

There's a lot to that.  Ignorance can be cured; after all, the etymology of the word comes from a- (not) and -gnosis (knowledge).  There are plenty of things I'm ignorant about, but I try my best to be willing to cure that ignorance by working at understanding.

Stupidity, on the other hand, is a different matter.  There's something willful about stupidity.  There's a stubborn sense of "I don't know and I don't care," leading to my dad's wise assessment that on some level stupidity is a choice.  Stupidity is not simply ignorance; it's ignorance plus the decision that ignorance is good enough.

What my dad may have not realized, though, is that there's a third circle of hell, one step down even from stupidity.  Science historian Robert Proctor of Stanford University has made this his area of study, a field he has christened agnotology -- the "study of culturally-constructed ignorance."

Proctor is interested in something that makes stupidity look positively innocent; the deliberate cultivation of stupidity by people who are actually intelligent.  This happens when special interest groups foster confusion among laypeople for their own malign purposes, and see to it that such misinformation goes viral.  For example, this is clearly what has been going on for years with respect to anthropogenic climate change.  There are plenty of people in the petroleum industry who are smart enough to read and understand scientific papers, who can evaluate data and evidence, who can follow a rational argument.  That they do so, and still claim to be unconvinced, is stupidity.

That they then lie and misrepresent the science in order to cast doubt in the minds of less well-informed people in order to push a corporate agenda is one step worse.

"People always assume that if someone doesn't know something, it's because they haven't paid attention or haven't yet figured it out," Proctor says.  "But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what's true and what's not."

Anyone else immediately think of Fox News and OAN?  Deliberately cultivating stupidity is their stock in trade.

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Betacommand at en.wikipedia, Stupidity is contagious, CC BY 3.0]

The same sort of thing accounts for the claim that COVID was deliberately created by China as a biological weapon, that the illness and death rates are being manipulated to make Donald Trump look bad, and that masks are completely ineffective.  It's behind claims that there was widespread anti-Trump voter fraud in the last election, that every single mass shooting in the United States is an anti-Second-Amendment "false flag," and just about every claim ever made by Sean Hannity.  Proctor says the phenomenon is even responsible for the spread of creationism -- although I would argue that this isn't quite the same thing.  Most of the people pushing creationism are, I think, true believers, not cynical hucksters who know perfectly well that what they're saying isn't true and are only spreading the message to bamboozle the masses.  (Although I have to admit that the "why are there still monkeys?" and "the Big Bang means that nothing exploded and made everything" arguments are beginning to seem themselves like they're one step lower than stupidity, given how many times these objections have been answered.)

"Ignorance is not just the not-yet-known, it’s also a political ploy, a deliberate creation by powerful agents who want you 'not to know'," Proctor says.  "We live in a world of radical ignorance, and the marvel is that any kind of truth cuts through the noise.  Even though knowledge is accessible, it does not mean it is accessed."

David Dunning of Cornell University, who gave his name to the Dunning-Kruger effect (the idea that people systematically overestimate their own knowledge), agrees with Proctor.  "While some smart people will profit from all the information now just a click away, many will be misled into a false sense of expertise," Dunning says.  "My worry is not that we are losing the ability to make up our own minds, but that it’s becoming too easy to do so.  We should consult with others much more than we imagine.  Other people may be imperfect as well, but often their opinions go a long way toward correcting our own imperfections, as our own imperfect expertise helps to correct their errors."

All of which, it must be said, is fairly depressing.  That we can have more information at our fingertips than ever before in history, and still be making the same damned misjudgments, is a dismal conclusion.  It is worse still that there are people who are taking advantage of this willful ignorance to push popular opinion around for their own gain.

So my dad was right; ignorance is curable, stupidity reaches the bone.  And the deliberate cultivation of stupidity studied by Proctor and Dunning, I think, goes past the bone, all the way to the heart.

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Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert established her reputation as a cutting-edge observer of the human global impact in her wonderful book The Sixth Extinction (which was a Skeptophilia Book of the Week a while back).  This week's book recommendation is her latest, which looks forward to where humanity might be going.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is an analysis of what Kolbert calls "our ten-thousand-year-long exercise in defying nature," something that immediately made me think of another book I've recommended -- the amazing The Control of Nature by John McPhee, the message of which was generally "when humans pit themselves against nature, nature always wins."  Kolbert takes a more nuanced view, and considers some of the efforts scientists are making to reverse the damage we've done, from conservation of severely endangered species to dealing with anthropogenic climate change.

It's a book that's always engaging and occasionally alarming, but overall, deeply optimistic about humanity's potential for making good choices.  Whether we turn that potential into reality is largely a function of educating ourselves regarding the precarious position into which we've placed ourselves -- and Kolbert's latest book is an excellent place to start.

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

Listen to the hands

I've been interested for a long while in the interplay between our senses -- how all of our sensory organs work together to create our perceptual world.  A simple example -- at least to describe, if not to explain completely -- is proprioception, which is our sense of the position of our bodies.  If you ask your typical biology-teacher-type to explain how we sense what direction is up and what direction is down, (s)he will probably tell you that it's the semicircular canals of the inner ear, that act a bit like a carpenter's level to sense the pull of gravity.  This is the organ that gets fouled up when you spin around and become dizzy, and it's skew signals from the semicircular canals that seem to be at fault in people who get motion sickness.

The truth, of course, is more complicated.  You achieve proprioception not just using your inner ears but at least two other ways -- the tactile sense (i.e. the pressure under the soles of your feet if you're standing, and against your butt if you're sitting), and your visual sense (you can see your surroundings and the position of your body relative to them).  Honestly, you need all three, or your sense of balance gets pretty precarious.  If you doubt this, try a simple experiment -- stand on one leg, close your eyes, and then tip your head backward, thus confounding all of your proprioceptive senses except the feeling of pressure under your foot.  If you can keep your balance more than a few seconds, you're doing well.  (It is strongly suggested that if you try this, you either have a spotter or else surround yourself with pillows.)

This isn't just true of proprioception.  Even more surprising is the McGurk Effect, a bizarre result of the interaction between sight and hearing in determining what someone is saying.  If a person with decent vision and hearing watches a friend speaking and is trying to determine what they're saying, you would think that if the eyes and ears disagree, the ears would win.

But no.  In the McGurk Effect, if you are watching someone say a syllable like "va" but you see them at the same time moving their mouth as if they were saying "ba," you hear "ba."  The eyes overrule the ears.  It's absolutely convincing even if you know what's going on.  (In the video I linked in the previous paragraph, I tried listening to the guy saying "va" and mouthing "ba" over and over, but closed my eyes on every other syllable, I heard "ba va ba va ba va."  Try it.)

A paper last week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B gives us another curious example of this.  It has to do with "talking with your hands" -- something I do incessantly.  In fact, one of my classes once challenged me to deliver my lecture while sitting on my hands.  I lasted about two minutes before saying, in some dismay, "I can't do this."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Luisfi, 071228 human hands, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In "Beat Gestures Influence Which Speech Sounds You Hear," by Hans Rutger Bosker and David Peeters of the Max Planck Institute for Biolinguistics, we read about how you perceive the stress difference in words that have the same sounds but a different stress pattern -- such as "disCOUNT" (the verb) and "DIScount" (the noun), or "preSENT" (verb) and "PREsent" (noun).  With no visual cues, the test subjects were good at discerning what was said; unsurprising, as in English (and many other languages) stress is an important clue to meaning.

But when a video was added showing the speaker using a "beat gesture" -- the kind of strong, up-and-down motion of the arms many speakers use for emphasis -- it created something the researchers call a "manual McGurk Effect."  The speaker may have said "obJECT," but if (s)he used a beat gesture on the first syllable, the listener heard "OBject."

"Listeners listen not only with their ears, but also with their eyes," said study co-author Hans Bosker, in an interview in Science Direct. "These findings are the first to show that beat gestures influence which speech sounds you hear...  Our findings also have the potential to enrich human-computer interaction and improve multimodal speech recognition systems.  It seems clear that such systems should take into account more than just speech."

Communication is subtle and complex, which is one of the reasons why it's so hard to learn a second language fluently.  Words with the same literal definition (denotation) can carry an entirely different emotional or subtextual message (connotation), something it takes a long while for a new speaker to pick up.  (To illustrate this point, my Intro to Linguistics professor said, "Consider how your words would be taken if you told someone 'Have a nice day,' as opposed to 'I hope you manage to enjoy your next 24 hours.'")

But as the Bosker and Peeters paper shows, it's more than just the sounds and how they're interpreted.  Facial movements and gestures of the hands and arms all combine to give us information about not only the emotional content of what's said, but its actual denotative meaning.  This might lie behind why it's so common for people to misinterpret written sentences, as in emails and texts.  If the speaker was standing in front of us, we'd see (s)he was joking, or not; cheerful or angry; speaking literally or being sarcastic.  We need more information than the words alone to understand them properly -- adding another layer to the already complicated affair of perceiving and interpreting our world accurately.

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Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

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

Vanished into the triangle

My thought process is like a giant game of free association at the best of times, and there have been occasions when I've tried to figure out how I got (for example) from thinking about a news story from Istanbul, Turkey to pondering nettle plants' dependency on phosphorus in the soil, and reconstructing the chain by which I got from one to the other has proven impossible.

But even considering the labyrinthine recesses of my brain, I think I'm to be excused if a link sent to me by a friend immediately reminded me of a short story by H. P. Lovecraft.  My dear friend, the brilliant author K. D. McCrite, messaged me saying "this immediately made me think of you," along with a link to a YouTube video called "Five Strange Disappearances in Vermont's Bennington Triangle."  The video, which is well-researched and pretty damn creepy, is about five unsolved disappearances in rural southwestern Vermont between 1945 and 1950, and despite my decades of interest in the paranormal, of which I had never heard.  The victims all were seen by multiple witnesses shortly before they vanished, and in fact one of them reputedly evaporated while on a public bus -- at stop A, he was there in his seat, and by stop B he was gone, despite the bus being in continuous motion the entire time and no one noticing his moving, much less leaping out of an open window or something.

The five -- Middle Rivers, Paula Welden, James Tedford, Paul Jephson, and Frieda Langer -- varied in age from eight to seventy-four, and their personal lives had nothing particular in common.  They all disappeared in the late fall or early winter in the region of Glastenbury [sic] Mountain, and with the exception of Langer, no trace of them was ever found despite extensive searching.  Langer's badly-decomposed body was found seven months later, but there was no apparent cause of death.  (The strangest part is that Langer's body was found very close to the last reported sighting of Paula Weldon.)

One of the last known photographs of Paula Welden

Interestingly, even though these five are considered the canonical Bennington Triangle cases, there are at least four other unexplained disappearances in the area -- one in 1942 and three in 1949 -- that some people think are related.  Additionally, the Bennington Banner did a piece on the topic back in 2008, starting with the much more recent account of a local man, an experienced hiker, who got lost for almost a day on a straightforward three-mile hike in the area, and upon finding his way back, reported that he had become disoriented and dizzy.  He ended up stopping for the night, and when the morning came he was six miles away from where he thought he was -- and on the walk back passed landmarks that included "stuff that [he didn't recognize, but] couldn't have missed."

Immediately I was reminded of Lovecraft's wildly terrifying short story "The Whisperer in Darkness," not only because it's about strange disappearances, but because it is set in the same part of Vermont.  The main character, Henry Akeley, writes a panicked letter to a friend that he's been hearing "voices in the air," and has become convinced that there are invisible creatures in the woods stalking and abducting the unwary, and that he's doomed for sure but wanted to let someone know what had happened to him because he's going to go missing very soon, and that the friend should under no circumstances interfere or attempt to help him.  Of course, being that this is a Lovecraft story, the friend says, basically, "Okay, be right over, bro," and it doesn't end well for either of them.

The disappearances -- the real ones, not the ones in Lovecraft -- are well enough documented that they merit a Wikipedia page, and more details (although less in the way of rigor) can be found on a page over at All That's Interesting.  Apparently the area has a bad reputation, at least amongst aficionados of the paranormal; it's supposedly a hotspot for Bigfoot and UFO sightings, and was feared and avoided by the local Native Americans (that bit seems to be an almost compulsory filigree to these kinds of stories).   I also saw more than one reference to alleged cases of "voices being heard on dead-air radio," but I wasn't able to find any independent corroboration of the claim.

But "voices in the air," amirite?  I think I'm to be excused for thinking of Lovecraft's dark tale.

The more pragmatic people approaching this story -- I'm one, which is probably unsurprising -- suspect that if the five canonical cases weren't the work of a serial killer, then it's simply a case of people going off into wilderness and doing something stupid that kills them.  The southern part of Vermont is largely trackless forest, and even though I'm an experienced back-country hiker and camper, I would make plenty sure to have survival gear, water, and food if I went off by myself into those mountains.  I know first-hand how big the wilderness is and how easy it is to get lost or have a mishap.  (Didn't stop me from solo camping in the Cascades and Olympics when I was young and reckless; that I survived unscathed is more a testimony to my luck than my brains.)

Still, there's something about both of those explanations that is unsatisfying, largely because of the completely different circumstances of each disappearance.  Tedford, as I mentioned, vanished from a public bus.  Eight-year-old Paul Jephson was accompanying his mother in a pickup truck as she drove around her family's acreage -- she stopped to do some chores, was gone a short time, and when she came back, the little boy was nowhere to be found.  Langer disappeared while hiking with a friend -- she'd gotten wet and decided to make the quick half-mile return to camp to change her clothes, but never got there.  Her body was found near a reservoir several miles away the following year -- in an area that had been searched extensively after her disappearance.

So all in all: pretty freakin' creepy.  Thanks to K. D. for cluing me in to a story that, all paranormal trappings aside, you have to admit is a curious one, and which admits of no obvious explanation.

Oh, and if you're wondering: Istanbul > Byzantine Empire > the Plague of Justinian (mid-sixth century) > the problems with burial of disease victims during an epidemic > bones enrich soil phosphorus > a proposal to use distribution of nettle plants in England to identify mass burial sites of people who died during the Black Death.  See?  Makes perfect sense.

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

Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

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