Loop-the-loop

Of all the bizarre and fascinating discoveries physicists have made in the last century and a half, I think the one that twists my brain the most is the effect massive objects have on the space around them.

I use the "twists" metaphor deliberately, because the concept -- commonly called "warped space" -- is that anything with mass deforms the space it's in.  You've probably heard the two-dimensional analogy, to a bowling ball sitting on a trampoline and stretching the fabric downward.  If you then roll a marble across the trampoline, it will follow a deflected path.  Not because the bowling ball is mysteriously attracting the marble; the marble is merely following the contours of the space it's traveling through.

Increase the number of dimensions by one, and you've got a basic idea of what this feature of the universe is like.  We live in a three-dimensional space warped into a fourth dimension, and something passing near a massive object (as with the trampoline analogy, the more massive the object, the greater the effect) will follow a curved path.  Possibly, if the "attractor" is big enough, curved into a closed loop -- like the Moon does around the Earth, and the Earth does around the Sun.

Where it gets even weirder is that the degree of deflection of the moving object is dependent on how fast it's going.  Again, the marble provides a good analogy; a fast-moving marble will not alter its trajectory from a straight line very much, while a slow-moving one might actually fall into the "gravity well" of the bowling ball.  The same is true here in three-dimensional space.  This is why there's such a thing as "escape velocity;" the velocity of an object has to be great enough to escape the curvature of the gravity well it's sitting in, and that velocity gets larger as the "attractor" becomes more massive.

With a black hole, the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light.  Put a different way, space around a black hole has been warped so greatly that nothing is moving fast enough to avoid falling in.  Once you get close enough to a black hole to experience that degree of space-time curvature (a point called the "event horizon"), there is no power in the universe that can stop you from falling all the way in and meeting a grim fate called (I kid you not) "spaghettification."

Which, unfortunately, is exactly what it sounds like.

Why this mind-warping topic comes up is because of a paper that appeared this week in Scientific Reports, describing research by Albert Sneppen, a student at the Niels Bohr Institute, looking at what would happen to light as it passed very near -- but not within -- the event horizon of a massive black hole.  Sneppen came up with a mathematical model showing that it creates an effect so bizarre and unmistakable that it is now being proposed as a way of detecting distant black holes.

Suppose between us and a distant galaxy is a large black hole.  The black hole (being black) is invisible; it can only be seen because of how it interacts with the matter and energy around it.  So the light from the galaxy has to pass near the black hole on its voyage to us.  The particles of light that stray too close follow the curvature of space right into the black hole, as you might expect.  The ones that get close, but not too close, are where things are interesting.

Recall that the Earth follows an elliptical path around the Sun because the Sun is warping space enough, and the Earth is moving slowly enough, that the Earth doesn't slingshot away from the Sun (fortunately for us) but remains "captured," following the shortest path through curvature of the space it's in.  So presumably there is a distance around a massive black hole that would have the same property vis-à-vis light; a distance where light speed is exactly right for it to follow the lines of the intensely curved space it's traveling through and describe a circular (or elliptical) path.

So light at that distance would become trapped, circling the black hole forever.  But what about light from the same distant galaxy that is just a leeeeeetle bit farther away?  And a leeeeetle farther than that?  What Sneppen showed is that this effect would cause the light rays from the galaxy passing progressively farther and farther away from the black hole to make a specific number of loops around the black hole before "escaping."  So of the photons of light from the galaxy that end up after that cosmic loop-the-loop heading our way, some (the ones the farthest away from the black hole to start with) would have circled the black hole only once, some twice, some three times, etc.

What this would do is create multiple images of the same galaxy, strung out in a line.

Check out the drawing by Sneppen's collaborator, Peter Laursen, showing the results of the effect:

So there you have it; this morning's reason to feel very, very small.  I don't know about you, but I think the human species can use a little humility these days,  We need to be reminded periodically that we are tiny beings in an enormous universe, one that is so bizarre that it boggles the mind.  Although I have to say it's impressive that we tiny insignificant beings have begun to understand and explain this bizarreness.  As astronomer Carl Sagan put it, "We are a way for the universe to know itself."

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

I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

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

Unexpected depths

A writer friend of mine on social media asked what I thought was a very interesting question, and one that would be a good topic for this week's Fiction Friday: what is the most memorable line you've ever read?  I've read a good many profound books, but the first thing that came to mind was a line not from a book but from a television show.  In the Doctor Who episode "The Face of Evil," the Fourth Doctor remarks, "The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common; they do not alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."

The aptness of that quote these days hardly needs to be pointed out.

But there are many others, in books, television, and movies, quotes that somehow stand out for their unexpected depth (sometimes even in otherwise silly settings; the episode "The Face of Evil" was unremarkable in other respects).  Some only gain their punch from the context -- I'm reminded of Eowyn's defiant "I am no man" in Return of the King, immediately before she stabs the King of the Nazgûl right between the eyeballs, and the heartbreaking line at the end of Vanilla Sky when Sofia Serrano says, "I'll see you in the next life, when we both are cats."  Neither has much significance unless you know the story.

But there are a handful of true gems that carry their weight even independent of where they're from.  Here are a few of my choices:

• "Deserves it! I daresay he does.  Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life.  Can you give it to them?  Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.  For even the very wise cannot see all ends." -- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
• "You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do." -- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
• "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won.  There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall." -- Mohandas Gandhi in Gandhi
• "There is no greater agony than having an untold story inside you." -- Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." -- Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl
• "Oh, yes, the past can hurt.  But you can either run from it, or learn from it." -- Rafiki in The Lion King
• "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
• "Get busy living, or get busy dying." -- Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption
• "Not important?  Blimey.  That's amazing.  You know, in nine hundred years in time and space, I have never met anyone who wasn't important." -- The Eleventh Doctor, Doctor Who, "A Christmas Carol"
• "Through dangers untold, and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back what you have stolen.  For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great...  You have no power over me." -- Sarah in Labyrinth
• "Live now; make now always the most precious time.  Now will never come again." -- Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Inner Light"

Nota bene: If you can watch "The Inner Light" and not ugly cry at the end of it, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.  That episode has to be one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen on television.

So... there are a few of my favorite profound quotes from fiction.  What are yours?

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

I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

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

Letting sleeping dogs lie

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post about dogs' uncanny ability to tune into their owners' cues, today we have:

Dogs that continue wanting to interact after they're dead.

No, I'm not making this up, but the people making the claim probably are.  According to a couple in Southport, Merseyside, England, their flat is occupied by a ghost dog that likes to sleep in their bed with them.

Mike Lee was asleep with his husband Blake early one morning, when something very odd happened.  "About five in the morning, I thought the cat had come on the bed to wake us up for food, but the cat was nowhere to be seen," Lee said.  "It was like footprints that were coming slowly on the bed, then lay on my foot.  It lays crossways.  You can see [in the photo] where I have a fluffy blanket on the bed; it is completely flat then when this dog comes across you can see the dip in the bed where it is lying.  It is quite heavy, too heavy to be a cat."

So rather than doing what I'd have done, which is wet the bed and then have a stroke, Lee decided to use his phone to see if he could communicate with the spectral pupper.  His phone has an "infrared camera and a two-way microphone," so he said into it, "Is anybody there?" and was met with "a high-pitched howl."

Given that the dog was right there, why he had to use the phone rather than just saying it is anyone's guess.  Maybe ghost dogs only use Verizon, or something.

"It doesn't scare me, you know what it might be and what it couldn't be," Lee said.  "It's not going to harm you.  It is a poltergeist but ghosts don't seem to do any harm anyway.  All it does is just lie on my feet, that's all it does.  I have my partner as a witness who has seen the dip in the bed.  When I asked if the ghost was there the other day, he heard the noise it made.  There's no way a cat would make that noise, it must be a dog."

I'm assuming the noise he's talking about is the disgusting slurping sound dogs make when they are conducting intimate personal hygiene, but he didn't specify.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Virginia State Parks staff, Ghost Dog (6312596718), CC BY 2.0]

In any case, Lee and his partner seem awfully sanguine about the whole thing.  Our dog already takes up more than his fair share of the bed (when we allow him up there, which is seldom), so I don't think I'd be all that happy about a spirit dog joining us.  After all, what are you going to do if you don't want Ghost Pooch up there?  Grab him by his invisible collar and drag him off?  Offer him a treat to lure him away?  I don't know what kind of treat you could tempt a dead dog with, anyhow.

I have to admit, though, that as canine hauntings go, it could be worse.  A few years ago I did a piece on Ballechin House, in Perthshire, Scotland, that was haunted by an insane ex-military guy and his various dogs.  People visiting there allegedly had experiences like an "overpowering doggy smell" and being nudged by a wet nose, and one person supposedly saw a pair of disembodied dog paws on her nightstand.  Then there's the East Anglian legend of Black Shuck, a giant demonic dog who is capable of "sucking the life out of its hapless victims... leaving them shriveled."

So an invisible dog snoozing on your bed is, in the grand scheme of things, pretty tame.  I still don't need any additional pets, but I guess a ghost dog isn't so bad as long as it behaves itself and doesn't suck out my soul or carelessly leave its paws hanging around on the furniture.  It'd save in pet food costs, for sure.  Oh, and vet visits would be unnecessary, given that the dog has already Joined the Choir Eternal.  Any pet hair it sheds would be invisible anyhow, so cleanup would be less of an issue.

But me, I think I'll stick with live dogs.  At least you always know where they are.  I'm a bit twitchy at the best of times, and having an invisible canine oozing about the place would be kind of unnerving.

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

I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

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

Doggie determination

Our dog Guinness has brought home the truth of the quip that cats are teenagers, dogs are toddlers.

His engine has two settings: "full throttle" and "off."  We got him two and a half years ago as an eleven-month-old rescue, so he has settled down a little as compared to the irrepressible puppy exuberance he came with.  Which is a bit of a relief.  Handling seventy pounds' worth of irrepressible puppy exuberance can be a little exhausting.

He is never content unless he's interacting with either me or my wife.  "Will you please go entertain yourself for a while?" is a common phrase heard around Chez Bloomgarden-Bonnet.  And he doesn't just want to interact with us any old way; it has to be exactly the right way.  He loves to play fetch -- can do so for hours on end -- but not if we're standing on the patio.  No, throwing the ball into the lawn from the patio is not the proper way.  A true game of fetch must be played from a seated position, in one of the lawn chairs next to the pond.  I kid you not.  From the patio, he'll chase the ball once, pick it up, and then stare at us with an expression like, "What the hell am I supposed to do with this?"  Move a hundred yards in a westward direction to the lawn chairs by the pond, and he will happily retrieve over and over.  And over and over and over.

No, I don't get it, either.

Be that as it may, he is extraordinarily sensitive to our moods, tone of voice, and body language, and seems to watch us constantly for cues about what is going on.  We can talk about him without using any obvious clue-words like his name, or even dog or play or ball, and he immediately knows (to judge by the fact that his tail will start wagging, even if he appeared to be sound asleep).  When we talk to him directly, he stares at us with this eager expression, like he really wants to understand every word we're saying.  If it's a bit above his head, he gives us the Canine Head-Tilt of Puzzlement:

"I'm so disappointed in myself," he seems to be saying.  "I will try much harder to understand next time."

You might even say he shows dogged determination.  *rimshot*

He's also one of the most affectionate dogs I've ever known.  Like I said, his number one priority is interacting with us as much as possible.

The reason all this comes up is because of a study that appeared this week in the journal Current Biology that strongly suggests dogs come pre-wired to connect with humans -- i.e., this isn't learned behavior.  Dogs may refine these skills, and learn specific cues and behaviors, but the ability is innate.

Led by Hannah Salomons of Duke University, this study compared the behavior of puppies and wolf cubs, both groups of which had been given equal prior exposure to humans.  They found that the puppies automatically responded to people -- they were much more willing to come up to a person spontaneously, make eye contact, and look to the human for cues about what to do.  Wolves, on the other hand, started out afraid, and would huddle in the corner when a person came close, and even once habituated to people's presence would mostly ignore them rather than interact.  "They acted like I was a piece of furniture," Salomons said.

Most fascinating of all, puppies seem to come equipped with at least some level of a "theory of mind" -- knowledge that their own perspective isn't shared by everyone, and that the world would look different through the eyes of another.  One of the most rudimentary theory-of-mind tests is to point at a treat on the floor that is visually hidden from the dog -- i.e., you can see it, the dog can't.  Wolves don't respond to this at all; dogs usually pick up on it right away.  And it's a more sophisticated response than it seems at first.  To figure out what pointing means, the dog has to think, "If I was standing where (s)he is, sight-lining down the arm toward the floor, where would it be indicating?"

"Dogs are born with this innate ability to understand that we're communicating with them and we're trying to cooperate with them," Salomons said, in an interview with Science Daily.

We not only cooperate with them, we also provide a valuable opportunity for them to get dressed up fancy now and again.

It seems like this in-touchness dogs are born with has come from millennia of domestication, where their use as companions meant that generation after generation people were selecting the most responsive, interactive dogs, meaning their capacity for bonding to humans increased over time.  Contrast that to cats -- and I mean no disparagement of our feline friends -- but they are often characterized as more aloof and self-reliant than dogs.  No surprise, really; having cats as companion animals is a relatively recent innovation, while there is good evidence that dogs have been companions back at least thirty thousand years.

"This study really solidifies the evidence that the social genius of dogs is a product of domestication," said Brian Hare, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke, senior author of the study.  "It's this ability that makes dogs such great service animals.  It is something they are really born prepared to do."

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me.  Guinness wants something.  I'm not sure if it's food, petting, or an early round of fetch-the-ball.  Maybe some of each.  Don't worry, I'll figure it out.

Which, incidentally, brings up the awkward question of who domesticated whom.

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

I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

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

Eat like a werewolf

I'm sure that by now all of you have heard of the "Paleo Diet," that claims that the path to better health comes from eating like a cave man (or woman, as the case may be) -- consuming only foods that would have been eaten by our distant ancestors living on the African savanna.  The "Paleo Diet," therefore, includes grass-fed meat (cow is okay if you can't find gazelle), eggs, fish, root vegetables, fruits, nuts, and mushrooms.  Not included are dairy products (being that domestication of cattle and goats was post-cave-man), potatoes, salt, sugar, and refined oils.

Despite gaining some traction, especially amongst athletes and bodybuilders, the "Paleo Diet" has been looked upon with a wry eye by actual dieticians.  A survey of experts in the field, sponsored by CNN, placed the "Paleo Diet" as dead last in terms of support from peer-reviewed research and efficacy at promoting healthy weight loss.

But the "Paleo Diet" will sound like quantum physics, technical-science-wise, as compared to the latest diet to take the world of poorly-educated woo-woos by storm:

The "Werewolf Diet."

I wish I were making this up.  I also wish, for different reasons, that it was what it sounded like -- that people who sign up find themselves, once a month, sprouting fur and fangs and running around naked and eating unsuspecting hikers.  That, at least, would be entertaining.

[Image from Weird Tales (November 1941) is in the Public Domain]

But no such luck.  The Werewolf Diet, however, does resemble being an actual werewolf in that (1) what you get to eat is tied to the phases of the Moon, (2) it more or less ruins your health, and (3) it completely fucks up any chance at a normal social life.

The site "Moon Connection" describes the whole thing in great detail, but they make a big point of their stuff being copyrighted material, so I'll just summarize so that you get the gist:

You have two choices, the "basic plan" or the "extended plan."  On the "basic plan," you fast for 24 hours, either on the full Moon or the new Moon.  You can, they say, "lose up to six pounds of water weight" by doing this, but why this is a good thing isn't clear.

The "extended plan," though, is more interesting.  With the "extended plan," you fast during the full Moon, then eat a fairly normal diet during the waning part of the Moon cycle (with the addition of drinking eight glasses of water a day to "flush out toxins").  On the new Moon, you should fast again, only consuming dandelion tea or green tea (more toxin flushing).  During the waxing part of the Moon cycle, you must be "disciplined" to fight your "food cravings," and avoid overeating.  "Thickeners," such as sugar and fats, should be avoided completely, and you can't eat anything after 6 PM because that's when the Moon's light "becomes more visible."

Then you hit the full Moon and it all starts over again.

Well, let me just say that this ranks right up there with "downloadable medicines" as one of the dumbest things I have ever read.  We have the whole "flushing toxins" bullshit -- as if your kidneys and liver aren't capable of dealing with endogenous toxic compounds, having evolved for millions of years to do just that.  We're told, as if it's some sort of revelation, that our "food cravings will increase" after we've been consuming nothing but green tea for 24 hours.  Then we are informed that the Moon's gravitational pull has an effect on us, because we're 60% water -- implying that contrary to what Isaac Newton said, the gravitational pull an object experiences depends not on its mass but on what it's made of.  Or that your bloodstream experiences high tide, or something, I dunno.  And also, the gravitational pull the Moon exerts upon you somehow depends on the phase it's in, because, apparently, the amount of light reflecting from the Moon's surface mysteriously alters its mass.

I mean, I'm not a dietician, but really.  And fortunately, there are dieticians who agree.  Keri Gans, a professional dietician and author of The Small Change Diet, said in an interview, "This diet makes me laugh.  I don’t know if it’s the name or that people will actually believe it.  Either way, it is nothing but another fad diet encouraging restriction.  Restriction of food will of course lead to weight loss, but at what cost to the rest of your body?  If only celebrities, once and for all, would start touting a diet plan that makes sense and is based on science."

Yes.  If only.  But unfortunately, fewer people have heard of Gans, and (evidently) the scientific method, than have heard of Madonna and Demi Moore, who swear by the Werewolf Diet.  Not that Moore, especially, is some kind of pinnacle of rationality; she is a devotee of Philip Berg's "Kabbalah Centre," which preaches that "99% of reality cannot be accessed by the senses."

Nor, apparently, by logic and reason.

Interestingly enough, as I'm writing this it's just past the new Moon, so we're all supposed to be subsisting on dandelion tea.  To which I answer: the hell you say.  I'm off to get some bacon and eggs.  Detoxify that, buddy.

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

I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

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

The evolution of clumps

If humans operated by logic, rationality, and evidence, there would be arguments we would no longer be having.  A sampler:

• Climate change is real and the vast majority of the change we're seeing is caused by humans.
• Vaccines are safe, effective, and the risk of serious side effects is low.
• Trump lost.
• The Earth is an oblate spheroid.
• The biodiversity we see around us came about from evolution by natural selection.

The last one is the reason this topic comes up, even though -- as I've pointed out umpteen times -- there is zero doubt amongst biologists (and the majority of educated laypeople) that evolution occurred, and is still occurring.  As Richard Dawkins put it, you could instantaneously destroy every fossil in the world, and the remaining evidence for evolution would still be overwhelming.

But the subject resurfaces because of an elegant experiment I found out about because of a buddy of mine, that (should you still be on the fence, belief-in-evolution-wise) is the 3,948,105th nail in the coffin of the various anti-evolutionary models.  The study looks at multicellularity -- a step in the process of the evolution of complex life that has been a bit of a mystery.  We know it happened; there is a clear progression in Precambrian fossils from single-celled life forms to undifferentiated clumps of more-or-less identical cells to multicellular organisms with differentiated cell types, but exactly how it happened was unclear.

The study was led by Lutz Becks, biologist at the Limnological Institute of the University of Konstanz, and used a simple green algae (Chlamydomonas reinhardtii) to show that in short order, with the appropriate natural selection, multicellularity can evolve from a single-celled ancestor species.

C. reinhardtii does sometimes form clumps of cells, but they are usually small and transitory.  (Nota bene: remember that evolution doesn't create traits; it acts on variations that were already present in the population due to mutations.)  Becks and his team introduced a selective predator, the rotifer Brachionus calyciflorus, which is small enough to have a preference for individual algae cells and smaller cell groups.  The researchers then kept track of the proportion of single to multiple cells in the algae population, as well as the size of any multi-cell groups.

You've probably already guessed what happened.  The population of algae containing predators tilted toward becoming composed almost entirely of larger multicellular groups -- in only five hundred generations (which seems like a lot, but for algae that's only about six months).  Algae raised without the predator didn't change, remaining largely single-celled with a few smaller clumps scattered around.

What is coolest about this is that Becks and his team didn't stop there.  They took samples of the algae from both cultures and analyzed them genetically.  They found 76 different genes that showed significant differential expression between the two samples -- so not only were the traits of the population changing, the gene frequencies and activity were, as well.

Just as the evolutionary model predicts.

"We had actually expected that the formation of colonies can be achieved by different mechanisms in the algal cells and we would therefore find different mutations," Becks said, in an interview with Phys.org.  "In fact, we have seen a very high level of repeatability.  This suggests that the selection pressure has had a very targeted effect."

Keep in mind, too, that C. reinhardtii is an asexually-reproducing species -- so the cells are clones, and the only differences genetically are caused by mutations.  This should put to rest the nonsense that mutations can't create "new information" but only corrupt the "old information" that was already there.

In any case, here's yet another experiment supporting the fact that if a population has genetic variations and those variations are subject to a selecting agent, it will evolve.  Here, it's evolved fast enough to see it happening in real time.

Which would be convincing to the anti-evolutionists if they had any respect for evidence.  Which they don't.  So I'm not particularly hopeful that this will change the minds of the creationists and the intelligent-design cadre.  As Thomas Paine put it, "To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."

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I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

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

F-word origin

Being a linguistics nerd, I've often wondered why the phonemic repertoire differs between different languages.  Put more simply: why do languages all sound different?

I first ran into this -- although I had to have it pointed out to me -- with French and English.  I grew up in a bilingual family (my mom's first language was French), so while I'd heard, and to a lesser extent spoken, French during my entire childhood I'd never noticed that there were sounds in one language that didn't occur in the other.  When I took my first formal French class as a ninth-grader, the teacher told us that French has two sounds that don't occur in English at all -- the vowel sound in the pronoun tu (represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /y/) and the one in coeur (represented as /ø/).  Also, the English r-sound (/r/) and the French r-sound (/ʁ/) aren't the same -- the English one doesn't occur in French, and vice-versa.

The International Phonetic Alphabet [image is in the Public Domain]

Not only are there different phonemes in different languages, the number of phonemes can vary tremendously.  The Hawaiian language has only thirteen different phonemes: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /k/, /p/, /h/, /m/, /n/, /l/, /w/, and /ʔ/.  The last is the glottal stop -- usually represented in written Hawaiian as an apostrophe, as in the word for "circle" -- po'ai.

If you're curious, the largest phonemic inventory of any human language is Taa, one of the Khoisan family of languages, spoken mainly by people in western Botswana.  Taa has 107 different phonemes, including 43 different "click consonants."  If you want to hear the most famous example of a language with click consonants, check out this recording of the incomparable South African singer Miriam Makeba singing the Xhosa folk song "Qongqothwane:"

It's a mystery why different languages have such dramatically different sound systems, but at least a piece of it may have been cleared up by a paper in Science last week that was sent my way by my buddy Andrew Butters, writer and blogger over at the wonderful Potato Chip Math.  The contention -- which sounds silly until you see the evidence -- is that the commonness of the labiodental fricative sounds, /f/ and /v/, is due to an alteration in our bites that occurred when we switched to eating softer foods when agriculture became prominent.

I was a little dubious, but the authors make their case well.  Computer modeling of bite physiology and sound production shows that an overbite makes the /f/ and /v/ phonemes take 29% less effort than someone with an edge-to-edge bite exerts.  Most persuasively, they found that current languages spoken by hunter-gatherer societies have only one-quarter the incidence of labiodental fricatives as other languages do.

So apparently my overbite and fondness for mashed potatoes are why I like the f-word so much.  Who knew?  As I responded to Andrew, "Wow, this is pretty fucking fascinating."

Once a language develops a sound system, it's remarkably resistant to change, probably because one of the first pieces of language a baby learns is the phonetic repertoire, and after that it's pretty well locked in for life.  In her wonderful TED Talk, linguist Patricia Kuhl describes studying the phonetics of babbling.  When babies first start to vocalize at age about three months, they make sounds of just about every sort.  But between six and nine months, something fascinating happens -- they stop making sounds they're not hearing, and even though they're still not speaking actual words, the sound repertoire gradually becomes the one from the language they're exposed to.  One example is the English /l/ and /r/ phonemes, as compared to the Japanese liquid consonant [ɾ] (sometimes described as being halfway between an English /l/ and an English /r/).  Very young babies will vocalize all three sounds -- but by nine months, a baby hearing English will retain /l/ and /r/ and stop saying [ɾ], while a baby hearing Japanese does exactly the opposite.

If you've studied a second language that has a different phonemic set than your native language, you know that getting the sounds right is one of the hardest things to do well.  As a friend of mine put it, "My mouth just won't wrap itself around French sounds."  This is undoubtedly because we learn the phonetics of our native language so young -- and once that window has closed, adding to and rearranging our phonemic inventory becomes a real challenge.

So if you've ever wondered why your language has the sounds it does, here's at least a partial explanation.  I'll end with another video that is a must-watch, especially for Americans who are interested in regional accents.  I live in upstate New York but was raised in Louisiana and spent ten years living in Seattle, so I've thought of my own speech as relatively homogenized, but maybe I should listen to myself more carefully.

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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!]