On being seen

A writer friend and I have been in an interesting dialogue about the private (and public) side of writing.

The topic arose because she's just finished the first draft of a wonderful novel, a coming-of-age story about a girl making the transition between high school and college.  Knowing my friend as well as I do, it is easy to see that she shares some personality traits with her main character.  My friend worries that if people read her novel -- which I hope they will, some day -- readers will become convinced that the story is, at least on some level, autobiographical, and will judge her based on the actions of the character she created.

My reply was that there will be this label that says "Fiction" on the spine of the book, so anyone who doesn't notice that or doesn't know the definition of the word deserves everything they get.  But on a deeper level, her question is a profound one.  Because in some sense, all fiction writing is autobiographical -- or at the very least, deeply self-revealing.

I can say, without exception, that every protagonist I've ever written -- and more than one of the antagonists and minor characters -- is, in some way, me.  You can't write what you don't know, and that extends just as much to characters as it does to setting, time period, and plot.  None of them are intended to actually be me, of course; all of them have traits, quirks, and personal history that is different (for a lot of them, very different) from my own.  But in a real sense, if you want to find out who I am, read my fiction.  Then you'll know me.

This gives a serious spin to my friend's question, because to be read means to be seen, on a fundamental level.  Parts of you are exposed that you may have long kept hidden, and a discerning eye can often see more than you realize.  I've recounted here before how my long-time writing partner, the inimitable Cly Boehs, knew I was bisexual long before I told her.  Direct quote from her -- "You think I didn't know that?  Every story you've written has at least one scene with a sexy bare-chested man."

I was dumbstruck.  I honestly didn't think it was that obvious.  So much for hiding in the shadows.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Marcus Quigmire from Florida, USA, Hiding in the darkness (3443966860), CC BY-SA 2.0]

It's a scary proposition, especially for someone who is as face-to-face shy as I am.  I've already closed my eyes and leapt off that high diving board, of course; my first book was published in 2015, and I've gone on to publish over a dozen more.  But truly, it still terrifies me in a lot of ways, and it's not just getting the inevitable "your writing sucks" reviews that all authors dread; part of it comes from the fact of exposing my soul in public.  There's something about having people read your work that's a little like walking out into the middle of the road, bare-ass naked.

And there's no doubt that it can backfire sometimes.  I still recall, with some pain, when I let a (former) friend read the first three chapters of a work-in-progress, and her critique began with a sneer: "This story is somewhere between a computer crash and a train wreck."  How that was supposed to be helpful, I don't know, and in fact with the perspective of time (this incident happened about twenty years ago) I now find myself wondering whether it was supposed to be helpful.  The critic in question was herself an off-again-on-again writer who had never completed a manuscript, and I suspect that the viciousness of the critique had at least something to do with envy.  At the time, however, her response so derailed my confidence that it was years before I actually picked up (and eventually completed) that novel.  (If you're curious, the novel is The Hand of the Hunter -- which is still one of my personal favorites of the stories I've written, and scheduled to be published early in 2022.)

So, in a way, all writing is personal, and all writers have a narcissistic streak.  We wouldn't write about something we didn't care about; our personalities shape our stories, and therefore our stories are reflections of who we are as people.  I pour my heart into what I write, and so, I believe, do most authors.  It is an act of bravery to put what we create out on public display, whether that display is on the level of sending it out to a few friends or publishing it for international purchase.  We are actually selling little portraits of our own spirits, and hoping and praying that the ones who look at them won't say, "Wow, what an ugly picture that is."

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

Most people define the word culture in human terms.  Language, music, laws, religion, and so on.

There is culture among other animals, however, perhaps less complex but just as fascinating.  Monkeys teach their young how to use tools.  Songbirds learn their songs from adults, they're not born knowing them -- and much like human language, if the song isn't learned during a critical window as they grow, then never become fluent.

Whales, parrots, crows, wolves... all have traditions handed down from previous generations and taught to the young.

All, therefore, have culture.

In Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, ecologist and science writer Carl Safina will give you a lens into the cultures of non-human species that will leave you breathless -- and convinced that perhaps the divide between human and non-human isn't as deep and unbridgeable as it seems.  It's a beautiful, fascinating, and preconceived-notion-challenging book.  You'll never hear a coyote, see a crow fly past, or look at your pet dog the same way again.

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

Art (pre)history

The human drive to produce beauty is a curious thing, and one that science has thus far been unable to explain fully.  No less a luminary than Albert Einstein highlighted this when he said, "It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure."

Many of us -- most of us, I suspect -- feel at least some need to create.  I'm defining this in its broadest sense; I mean not only the most obvious examples of art and music, but abstract beauty in writing, the graceful fluidity of truly gifted dancers and athletes, and the simple, everyday enjoyment of gardening, crocheting, macramé, and all of the other dozens of creative hobbies we engage in.

I'm no stranger to this drive myself.  My primary outlets are writing and music, but I'm also an amateur potter.  I came to art rather late in the game, which is odd because both of my parents were talented artists -- my mother was an oil painter and porcelain sculptor, while my father made jewelry and stained glass windows.  I showed no aptitude for art while growing up, but on a lark (and mainly because my wife was doing it and encouraged me to give it a try) took a class in making wheel-thrown pottery about ten years ago.  I got hooked, and stuck with it despite the fact that such skills do not come naturally to me.  By this point I can turn out some pieces that are pretty decent even to my hypercritical and rather unforgiving eye.

A stoneware bottle from my most recent firing

The open question is why so many of us feel a compulsion to do these sorts of things.  That they serve no practical purpose has become something of a running joke between my wife and I; "I'm heading out to the studio, because heaven knows we need more pottery" is a phrase one of us utters on nearly a daily basis.

The facile answer ("'cuz it's fun") doesn't really explain very much, and although it's tempting to ascribe an evolutionary/selective rationale -- that art and music and so on foster social cohesion, perhaps, giving the group stronger bonds and a better chance of surviving through enhanced cooperation -- explanations like those rest on some pretty tenuous grounds.  The truth is we don't know, but given the ubiquity of creative endeavors, it's certainly a powerful driver whatever its origins and purpose.

And it has quite a significant history in our species.  Two recent papers have looked at different aspects of truly ancient art, and found that (1) the impulse to create art goes back at least fifty thousand years, and (2) our ancestors were motivated enough to create it that they were willing to undergo considerable hardships to do so.

In the first, which appeared in Nature this week, a team of archaeologists working at a site called Einhornhöhle in northern Germany found a deer bone engraved with what appear to be symbolic carvings (i.e. not just knife marks left by butchering).  The bone has been dated at 51,000 years old -- at which point that region of Europe was populated by Neanderthals.

So wherever this artistic impulse comes from, we apparently share it with our cousins.

The authors write:

While there is substantial evidence for art and symbolic behaviour in early Homo sapiens across Africa and Eurasia, similar evidence connected to Neanderthals is sparse and often contested in scientific debates.  Each new discovery is thus crucial for our understanding of Neanderthals’ cognitive capacity.  Here we report on the discovery of an at least 51,000-year-old engraved giant deer phalanx found at the former cave entrance of Einhornhöhle, northern Germany.  The find comes from an apparent Middle Palaeolithic context that is linked to Neanderthals.  The engraved bone demonstrates that conceptual imagination, as a prerequisite to compose individual lines into a coherent design, was present in Neanderthals.  Therefore, Neanderthal’s awareness of symbolic meaning is very likely.  Our findings show that Neanderthals were capable of creating symbolic expressions before H. sapiens arrived in Central Europe.

In the second, which appeared last week in PLOS-ONE, a team of researchers led by archaeologist Iñaki Intxaurbe of the University of the Basque Country (Leioa, Spain) decided to see what technical hurdles our distant kin had to overcome in order to create cave art.  Working barefoot while carrying torches made of juniper branches or carved stone lamps filled with animal fat -- a decent guess for the kinds of artificial lighting they might have used -- Intxaurbe and his team found that producing paintings in deep caves (like the ones at Lascaux, France and Armintxe, Spain) took some serious planning.  Torches give good lighting, but burn out quickly (an average of 41 minutes) and produce a lot of smoke.  Lamps are relatively smokeless but produce much lower illumination.  And each site presented different challenges because of issues like dampness, temperature, and airflow.

So whatever significance these paintings had -- whether they were some kind of representative ritual magic, or whether (like many of us) they simply felt driven to create -- we might never know.  But what seems certain is that we are the inheritors of a very, very powerful drive, and one that goes back at least fifty millennia.

Think about that next time you get out the knitting needles, paintbrushes, or clay.

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

Most people define the word culture in human terms.  Language, music, laws, religion, and so on.

There is culture among other animals, however, perhaps less complex but just as fascinating.  Monkeys teach their young how to use tools.  Songbirds learn their songs from adults, they're not born knowing them -- and much like human language, if the song isn't learned during a critical window as they grow, then never become fluent.

Whales, parrots, crows, wolves... all have traditions handed down from previous generations and taught to the young.

All, therefore, have culture.

In Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, ecologist and science writer Carl Safina will give you a lens into the cultures of non-human species that will leave you breathless -- and convinced that perhaps the divide between human and non-human isn't as deep and unbridgeable as it seems.  It's a beautiful, fascinating, and preconceived-notion-challenging book.  You'll never hear a coyote, see a crow fly past, or look at your pet dog the same way again.

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

The birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees

One of the most fascinating aspects of evolution, and one of the least appreciated (outside of the biology-nerd community, anyhow), is how insects and flowering plants have coevolved.

Coevolution occurs when two different species (or groups of species) reciprocally affect each other's evolutionary changes.  A commonly-cited example is the pair made up of cheetahs and impalas; the fastest cheetahs get more food than the slowest, and the slowest impalas get turned into food more than the fastest, so each species has a tendency to get faster and faster (at least until other considerations, like the limitations of physiology, kick in).  This specific type of coevolution is sometimes called an evolutionary arms race, and can occur not only with speed but with issues like toxicity (in the species being eaten) and toxin tolerance (in the species doing the eating).

The coevolutionary relationship between flowering plants and insects is a curious one.  Certainly, there are insects that eat (and damage, sometimes fatally) plants; witness the gypsy moths that this year have shredded trees in our part of New York state.  Fortunately for our apple and cherry trees and other susceptible species, most trees attacked by gypsy moths survive defoliation and are able to put out another set of leaves once the moths' caterpillars are gone, and because the moths are a "boom-and-bust" species, they seldom mount a serious infestation like this year's more than once a decade or so.

But there's a "nicer" side to coevolution between insects and flowering plants, and that has to do with pollination.  We all learned in elementary school how bees and butterflies pollinate flowers, but it's more complicated than that; insects and plants have in some senses opposite interests in pollination.  For insects, the more different species of flowers they can visit, the more potential nectar sources they can access; but that's actively bad for flowers, because if a bee visits (for example) a rose and then a clover blossom, any pollen transferred does the plant no good at all because the two species aren't cross-fertile.  That pollen is "wasted," from the plant's perspective.

A species peony from the Caucasus Mountains, Paeonia mlokosewitschii -- nicknamed "Molly-the Witch" because most people can't pronounce "mlokosewitschii" -- primarily pollinated by ants and wasps  [photo taken this spring in the author's garden]

Plants have adopted a variety of strategies for coping with this.  Some, such as wind-pollinated plants (oaks, maples, willows, grasses, and many others) produce huge amounts of pollen, because they don't have a carrier to bring it from one flower to the next, and much of the pollen never reaches its target.  (This is why wind-pollinated plants like ragweed are primary culprits in pollen allergies.)  The same thing is true of plants that are visited by many different kinds of pollinators, and for the same reasons.

But the other approach is specialization.  If a flower has a shape that fits the mouthparts of only one species of pollinator, the pollen picked up is almost certainly going to be transferred to a flower of the same species.  In stable ecosystems, like rainforests, there are flowers and pollinators that have coevolved together so long that both are completely dependent on the other -- the pollinator's mouthparts don't fit any other flower species, and the flower's shape isn't compatible with any other pollinator's mouthparts.

Anna's Hummingbird (Calypte anna) visiting Crocosmia flowers in San Francisco, California [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Brocken Inaglory, Humming flowers, CC BY-SA 3.0]

As my evolutionary biology professor put it, this strategy works great until it doesn't.  Specialists get hit hardest by ecological change -- all that has to happen is for one of the pair to decline sharply, and the other collapses as well.  Their specialization leaves them with few options if the situation shifts.

The topic comes up because of a paper this week in Biological Reviews that looks at plant species which try to do both at once -- attract various species of pollinators (increasing the likelihood that pollen gets widely distributed, and mitigating the damage if one species of pollinator disappears) while encouraging those pollinators to feed exclusively on the flowers of that species only (decreasing the likelihood that the pollen will be transferred to a flower of an unrelated species).

A trio of researchers -- Kazuharu Ohashi (of the University of Tsukuba), Andreas Jürgens (of Technishe Universität Darmstadt), and James Thompson (of the University of Toronto) found that this complicated "hedging your bets" strategy is more common than anyone realized.  Some of the solutions the plants happen on are positively inspired; the goat willow (Salix caprea) has evolved to be pollinated by two different pollinators, bees and moths -- and the flowers actually change scents, producing one set of esters (chemicals associated with floral fragrance) during the day, and a different one at night, to attract their diurnal and nocturnal visitors most efficiently.  Cardinal shrub (Weigela spp.) flowers change scent as they age -- young flowers have fragrances attracting bees and butterflies, older ones attracting species like drone flies.

"[Y]ou'd expect that flowers would mostly be visited by one particular group of pollinators," said study lead author Kazuharu Ohashi, in an interview with Science Daily.  "But flowers often host many different visitors at the same time and flowers appear to meet the needs of multiple visitors.  The question we wanted to answer is how this happens in nature... Most flowers are ecologically generalized and the assumption to date has been that this is a suboptimal solution.  But our findings suggest that interactions with multiple animals can actually be optimized by minimizing trade-offs in various ways, and such evolutionary processes may have enriched the diversity of flowers."

Evolution is more subtle than a lot of us realize, happening on solutions to ecological problems that nearly defy belief.  The bucket orchid of South America (Coryanthes spp.) has a flower with a complex "trap" that only appeals to one species of bee -- and is so convoluted that when I explained its function to my biology students, I had to assure them more than once that I wasn't making it all up to fool the gullible.  The strategies vary dramatically from species to species, but always fall back to that tried-and-true rule -- evolution is the "law of whatever works."

So there's something to think about when you're working in your garden.  The birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees are a lot more complicated and interconnected than they may seem.  Many of the sophisticated mechanisms they use to assure survival and reproduction are only coming to light now -- and papers like Ohashi et al. give us a new lens into how beautiful and intricate the natural world is.

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

Most people define the word culture in human terms.  Language, music, laws, religion, and so on.

There is culture among other animals, however, perhaps less complex but just as fascinating.  Monkeys teach their young how to use tools.  Songbirds learn their songs from adults, they're not born knowing them -- and much like human language, if the song isn't learned during a critical window as they grow, then never become fluent.

Whales, parrots, crows, wolves... all have traditions handed down from previous generations and taught to the young.

All, therefore, have culture.

In Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, ecologist and science writer Carl Safina will give you a lens into the cultures of non-human species that will leave you breathless -- and convinced that perhaps the divide between human and non-human isn't as deep and unbridgeable as it seems.  It's a beautiful, fascinating, and preconceived-notion-challenging book.  You'll never hear a coyote, see a crow fly past, or look at your pet dog the same way again.

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

The invention of Philip

Despite my being immersed for years in the Wild World of Woo-Woo, I still occasionally run across things that I'd never heard of.  Some of them are apparently famous enough that I think, after finding out about them, "How on earth did I miss that one?"

Take, for example, the "Philip Experiment," which I bumped into for the first time yesterday morning.  The "experiment" -- although I myself would have hesitated to use that term to describe it -- was the brainchild of Iris Owen, leader of the "Owen Group," which was a team of parapsychology investigators in Toronto in the 1970s.  Owen and her pals apparently were tired of contacting the spirits of actual dead people, so they came up with an interesting idea; would it be possible to invent a fake dead person, and have that dead person's soul become real?

I was already laughing by this point, but it gets even funnier.  Owen & Co. dreamed up "Philip Aylesford," a fictional seventeenth-century Englishman.  Philip, according to the site Mystica, "...was born in England in 1624 and followed an early military career.  At the age of sixteen he was knighted.  He had an illustrious role in the Civil War.  He became a personal friend of Prince Charles (later Charles II) and worked for him as a secret agent.  But Philip brought about his own undoing by having an affair with a Gypsy girl.  When his wife found out she accused the girl of witchcraft, and the girl was burned at the stake.   In despair Philip committed suicide in 1654 at the age of thirty."

One of the more artistically-minded Owen Group members even drew Philip's portrait:

So the Owen Group began to meditate on Philip's life, meeting frequently to have deep discussions about All Things Philip.  After fleshing out the details of Philip's history, they finally decided to have a séance to see if they could raise Philip's soul from the afterlife.

Have I been emphatic enough on the point that Philip Aylesford wasn't a real guy?

I doubt anyone will be surprised, however, that the séance and "table tipping" sessions that followed showed some serious results.  Philip did the "rap once for yes, twice for no" thing, giving correct answers to questions about his life.  Questions that, of course, everyone in the room knew the answer to.  The table in the room where the séance was held moved in a mystifying manner; Philip, one source recounts, would "move the table, sliding it from side to side despite the fact that the floor was covered with thick carpeting.  At times it would even 'dance' on one leg." Mystica tells us that Philip "...had a special rapport with Iris Owen," and even whispered some answers to her, although efforts to catch the whispers on an audio recording were "inconclusive."

We are told, by way of an "explanation" (although again I am reluctant to use that word here), that Philip was an egrigor -- "a supernatural intelligence produced by the will or visualization of participants in a group."  I, predictably, would offer the alternative definition of, "a delightful mélange of collective delusion, hoax, wishful thinking and the ideomotor effect."

Of course, this hasn't stopped the whole thing from being spread about as solid evidence of the paranormal.  It was the subject of a YouTube video, which I encourage you all to watch for the humor value alone.  Even funnier, the "Philip Experiment" encouraged other parapsychology buffs to try to replicate the results.  The Paranormal Phenomena site (linked above) tells us that other groups have been successful at making contact with Lilith, a French Canadian spy; Sebastian, a medieval alchemist; Axel, a man from the future; and Skippy Cartman, a 14-year-old Australian girl.

I bet you think I'm going to say "I made the last one up."  Sorry, but no.  The "Skippy Experiment" is a real thing, and "Skippy Cartman" was able to communicate via "raps and scratching sounds."

It's probably too much to hope for that she asked for "some goddamn Cheesy Poofs."

I know I've written about some ridiculous things before, but this one has got to be in the Top Ten.  All through doing the research for this post, I kept having to stop to do two things: (1) checking to see if this was some kind of parody, and (2) getting paper towels to wipe up the coffee that I'd choke-snorted all over my computer monitor.  I mean, really, people.  If the paranormalists actually want us skeptical science-minded types to take them seriously -- to consider what they do to be valid experimentation -- they need to stop pulling this kind of crapola.  I know that skeptics can sometimes be guilty of doing the throw-out-the-baby-with-the-bath thing, better known as the Package Deal Fallacy -- "some of this is nonsense, so it's all nonsense."  But still.  The fact that a lot of the paranormal sites that feature the Philip Experiment were completely uncritical in their support of its validity makes me rather doubt that they can tell a good experiment from a bad one in general.

That said, I have to say that if we really can communicate with fictional entities, there are a few characters from some of my novels that I wouldn't mind having a chat with.  Tyler Vaughan, the main character from Signal to Noise, would be a good place to start, although I have it on good authority that Tyler is so much like me that I probably wouldn't gain much by talking to him.  It'd be kind of cool to meet Duncan Kyle from Sephirot to ask him about his travels, and the brilliant, eccentric telepath Callista Lee from The Snowe Agency Mysteries because she could probably tell me anything I wanted to know about human nature.

But it's not possible, of course.  And if all I got were some "raps and scratching noises" for my effort, it'd probably not be worth the effort in any case.

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

Most people define the word culture in human terms.  Language, music, laws, religion, and so on.

There is culture among other animals, however, perhaps less complex but just as fascinating.  Monkeys teach their young how to use tools.  Songbirds learn their songs from adults, they're not born knowing them -- and much like human language, if the song isn't learned during a critical window as they grow, then never become fluent.

Whales, parrots, crows, wolves... all have traditions handed down from previous generations and taught to the young.

All, therefore, have culture.

In Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, ecologist and science writer Carl Safina will give you a lens into the cultures of non-human species that will leave you breathless -- and convinced that perhaps the divide between human and non-human isn't as deep and unbridgeable as it seems.  It's a beautiful, fascinating, and preconceived-notion-challenging book.  You'll never hear a coyote, see a crow fly past, or look at your pet dog the same way again.

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

Lost in the shadows

Some historical discoveries are in that gray area between evocative and frustrating as hell.  The evocative part because it gives us a glimpse into a long-gone culture; frustrating because the great likelihood is we'll never know anything more about it.

It's why I will never get over the loss of the Great Library of Alexandria.  Destroyed piece by piece, starting with a strike against secular intellectuals by King Ptolemy VIII Physcon in 145 B.C.E. and an apparently accidental fire during Julius Caesar's attack on Egypt a hundred years later, the library lost most of its holdings -- and its reputation -- and was gone entirely by the end of the third century C.E.  At its height it had books from all over Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and almost certainly contained the complete catalogue of works by such luminaries as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Theophrastus, and Aristotle -- the vast majority of which no longer exist.

It's as if we only knew about Shakespeare because of fragmentary copies of Cymbeline and Timon of Athens.  All his other works are gone, known only by title -- or perhaps completely unknown.  That's the situation we're in with most early authors.  The most painful part is that they're gone forever, irreclaimable, disappeared beyond rescue into the murky waters of our past.

That was the reaction I had to a discovery I found out about because a friend of mine sent me a link a couple of days ago, regarding an archaeological discovery in Finland.  Near the town of Järvensuo, northwest of Helsinki, a team of archaeologists from the University of Turku and University of Helsinki found a 4,400-year-old shaman's staff, the top of which was carved into the likeness of a snake.  It resembles depictions of ritual staffs in cave art from the area, so there isn't much doubt about what it is.

It's a pretty spectacular discovery.  "My colleague found it in one of our trenches last summer," said research team member Satu Koivisto.  "I thought she was joking, but when I saw the snake’s head it gave me the shivers."

The discovery brings up inevitable questions about how it was used, and what it tells us about religions and beliefs back then.  "There seems to be a certain connection between snakes and people," said team member Antti Lahelma.  "This brings to mind northern shamanism of the historical period, where snakes had a special role as spirit-helper animals of the shaman…  Even though the time gap is immense, the possibility of some kind of continuity is tantalizing: Do we have a Stone Age shaman's staff?"

Tantalizing indeed, in the full sense of the word.  Like the lost books of the Library of Alexandria, the knowledge, culture, and rituals of the people who used this staff are almost certainly gone forever.  While we can speculate, those speculations are unlikely to be complete (or even correct).  Imagine taking a random assortment of objects from our culture -- a pair of glasses, a stop sign, a computer mouse, a spoon, a garden rake -- and from those alone trying to figure out who we were, what we believed, what we did.

Note that I'm not diminishing the significance and interest of the find, which is pretty amazing.  It's just that it makes me even more cognizant of what we've lost.  It's inevitable, I know that -- nothing lasts forever, not artifacts, not knowledge, not culture.  It's just frustrating realizing how little we know, and worse still, how little we can know.

Maybe that's why I became a fiction author.  If you can't figure stuff out, make stuff up, that's my motto.  It doesn't replace what we've lost, but at least it provokes our imaginations to wonder what things were like back then, to ponder the lives of our distant ancestors, to picture what the world must have looked like to them.

It's better than nothing.  And until we create a time machine, I guess that'll have to be enough.

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

Most people define the word culture in human terms.  Language, music, laws, religion, and so on.

There is culture among other animals, however, perhaps less complex but just as fascinating.  Monkeys teach their young how to use tools.  Songbirds learn their songs from adults, they're not born knowing them -- and much like human language, if the song isn't learned during a critical window as they grow, then never become fluent.

Whales, parrots, crows, wolves... all have traditions handed down from previous generations and taught to the young.

All, therefore, have culture.

In Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, ecologist and science writer Carl Safina will give you a lens into the cultures of non-human species that will leave you breathless -- and convinced that perhaps the divide between human and non-human isn't as deep and unbridgeable as it seems.  It's a beautiful, fascinating, and preconceived-notion-challenging book.  You'll never hear a coyote, see a crow fly past, or look at your pet dog the same way again.

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

Unto the breach

Today I dodged a battle on social media, and I honestly don't know if it makes me a coward or just someone who tries to be prudent about which battles are even winnable.

The person in question, an acquaintance I only know through a mutual friend but who connected to me a couple of years ago for reasons unknown, has thrown out some questionable stuff before, but nothing as bad as this.  "There aren't many genders," she posted.  "There are TWO genders and many mental disorders."

After I stopped seeing red enough that I could tell what was on my computer screen, I pondered a variety of responses I could have made.  Among the top contenders:

• "Wow, that's some weapons-grade stupidity, right there."
• "Do you realize what a narrow-minded bigot this makes you sound like?"
• "Get off your fucking high horse and do some research."

Then I calmed down a little more, and considered other, potentially less obnoxious responses:

• "Maybe before you post stuff like this, you should talk to someone who is trans and get actual information on what it's like."
• "I believe the Bible you claim to be so fond of has a lot more to say about charity, kindness, and passing judgment than it does about the biology of gender.  You should reread those verses."
• "I hope like hell your grandchildren don't turn out to be LGBTQ.  For their sake, not for yours."

But finally I said nothing, and unfriended her.

I know it's the duty of every responsible person to confront racism, homophobia, bigotry, narrow-mindedness, and general idiocy.  Not doing so, leaving this kind of thing unchallenged, gives it tacit permission to continue.  I never would have let something like this go in my classroom; the few times I ever got really, truly angry at students during my 32 year career were over issues like this.

But lord have mercy, I am tired.  I'm tired of seeing this kind of bullshit trumpeted as if it was a proclamation of an eternal truth.  I'm tired of trying to convince the anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers, the nitwits who claim the election was stolen and that Trump is the Second Coming of Jesus, the people who believe that the January 6 insurrectionists were Antifa and liberals in disguise.

Plus, there's the question of what good it would have done if I had confronted her on her nasty, sneering post.  She barely knows me; I think we've maybe talked in person once.  Since then I've had zero interactions with her, online or anywhere else.  Why would she listen to me?  More likely she'd write me off as another godless liberal, getting all bent out of shape because she dropped a Truth Bomb on me.  What is the chance that anything I could have said, polite or rude, would have changed her attitude one iota?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Blaine A. White, The Argument 01, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Still, I can't help but feel that I took the coward's way out.  If I'm not going to challenge stupidity and bigotry, it kind of gives lie to the entire raison d'être of this blog I've written so diligently on for the last ten years.  Every time we let someone like her get away with something like this unchallenged, it does double damage -- it further convinces any LGBTQ people who read it that they don't have (or aren't deserving of) unequivocal support, and it gives any other bigots in the studio audience free license to perpetuate their own hateful views.

So I dodged my responsibility, and I'm still feeling a little sick about it.  I'm not going to go back and re-friend her just to have an opportunity to say, "Oh, and about that post...!", and I guess there's an outside (probably minuscule) chance that when she sees she's lost friends over it, she might reconsider.

But I still think I made the wrong decision.

Right now, I'm taking a deep breath and recommitting myself to fight like hell against this sort of thing.  I can't let bigotry slide, excuse it by saying "it's just their religion/politics/age," give it a pass because I'm afraid of what they might say in response or who else I might piss off.  Okay, I'm tired, but it's still a battle worth fighting -- and one that can be won, but only if we refuse to accept prejudice and hatred every damn time we see it.

Shakespeare put it far more eloquently, in Henry V:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

Scum and villainy

For today's Fiction Friday, let's consider: Bad Guys.

One of the problems I find with a lot of writing is that the antagonists are completely unbelievable.  Take, for example, the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings.  I know I'm stepping on hallowed ground by even suggesting a criticism of Tolkien, but have you ever asked yourself why the Orcs were so pissed off at everyone?  Now, I'm not talking about Saruman's Orcs, who were promised rewards; but just your run-of-the-mill, cave-dwelling, dull-witted nose-picker sort of Orc who lived in the Misty Mountains and who presumably didn't give a rat's ass who won the Battle of Helm's Deep.  They somehow still hated the Elves and all the rest, just 'cuz, and were willing to die by the thousands because of it.

Well, I'm not buying it.

That kind of villain becomes almost a Snidely Whiplash caricature, mwa-ha-ha-ha-ing over the predicament of the protagonist for no obvious reason.  And while this worked to comic effect in Dudley Do-Right, it kind of falls flat in a serious story.

Stories which carry some emotional weight -- which, presumably, is what most authors are aiming for -- need to have an antagonist with as much depth as the  protagonist.  To me, the best stories are the ones where you end up feeling some understanding for the antagonist.  You still don't want him/her to win, but you think at the end, "I almost felt sorry, there, when (s)he was ripped apart and eaten by rabid weasels."

Take Darth Vader, for example.  How much less powerful would that story have been had you not felt a little sad that he had taken the path he did, when he died in Luke's arms?

A writer I know, who shall remain nameless, suffers from the worst case of One-Dimensional Villain Syndrome I've ever seen.  Every story she's ever written has an arrogant, patriarchal, middle-aged white male as the villain.  Furthermore, these APMAWMs are always guilty of victimizing and demeaning women, but the women always end up Showing Them A Thing Or Two, leaving the APMAWM in question to retreat in disarray.  It's as predictable as clockwork.  The result, unfortunately, is that besides the stories appearing completely formulaic, it leaves us wondering about what the APMAWMs do in their spare time, when they're not looking around for women to degrade.  Nothing, is my guess, because these dudes seem to have no other characteristics than (1) the required anatomical equipment and ethnic group identification, (2) arrogance, and (3) patriarchiality.  They have no other motivation, no other personality traits, and (most importantly) no sympathetic characteristics at all.

Note that I am not objecting to this on the grounds of my meeting three of the above-mentioned characteristics of APMAWMs.  Nor am I saying that men who do those sort of horrible things don't exist.  (Much though I wish that were true.)  It's the fact that their villainy is all they have; there's nothing else to them.  For what it's worth, I respond with equal eyerolling when I read a story from the 30s or 40s which features the femme fatale stereotype.  I want to find out what these women do, when they're not lounging on the tops of barroom pianos smoking cigarettes in long holders, looking for naïve young men to lure into fornication.  What do they like to eat for dinner?  How do they pay the rent?  Do they get together with friends on Saturday morning to drink coffee and discuss how the fornication went that week?  Do they subscribe to Femme Fatale Weekly?

Saying that a character is evil "just because this character is evil" isn't enough.  What motivates him/her?  Power?  Revenge?  Lust?  Greed?  And why has this become a driving motivation?  Just as no one is evil "just because," no one becomes evil "just because."  An antagonist needs a backstory, a reason for their actions.

As my college creative writing teacher put it, "Always remember that all villains are the heroes of their own stories."

And they can't be thoroughly evil.  Sauron aside, no one is 100% evil.  Even the worst of the worst have some positive traits, and those can be used to set off the bad things they do, to heighten the tragedy of their characters and actions.  Maybe the bad guy hates his neighbors, but loves his dog.  Maybe she is greedy as King Midas but never forgets to send her mother a gift on her birthday.  Maybe he's a thoroughgoing APMAWM but has given everything to the family business, so he can pass it along to his children.  And so on.

Life is full of contradictions, and good writing reflects life.  This applies to the bad guys as well as the good guys.  Antagonists should be as richly three-dimensional as protagonists -- it's one of the hallmarks of deep, interesting, and believable fiction.

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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