The evolution of Little Red Riding Hood

Every once in a while, I'll run across a piece of scientific research that is so creative and clever that it just warms my heart, and I felt this way yesterday when I stumbled onto a link to the article in PLoS ONE called "The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood," by Jamshid Tehrani of the University of Bristol.

The reason I was delighted by Tehrani's paper is that it combines two subjects I love -- evolutionary biology and mythology and folklore.  The gist of what Tehrani did is to use a technique most commonly used to assemble species into "star diagrams" -- cladistic bootstrap analysis -- to analyze worldwide versions of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story to see to what degree a version in (for example) Senegal was related to one in Germany.

Cladistic bootstrap analysis generates something called a "star diagram" -- not, generally, a pedigree or family tree, because we don't know the exact identity of the common ancestor to all of the members of the tree, all we can tell is how closely related current individuals are.  Think, for example, of what it would look like if you assembled the living members of your family group this way -- you'd see clusters of close relatives linked together (you, your siblings, and your first cousins, for example) -- and further away would be other clusters, made up of more distant relatives grouped with their near family members.

So Tehrani did this with the "Little Red Riding Hood" story, by looking at the similarities and differences, from subtle to major, between the way the tale is told in different locations.  Apparently there are versions of it all over the world -- not only the Grimm Brothers Fairy Tales variety (the one I know the best), but from Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Korea, and Japan.  Oral transmission of stories is much like biological evolution; there are mutations (people change the story by misremembering it, dropping some pieces, embellishment, and so on) and there is selection (the best versions, told by the best storytellers, are more likely to be passed on).  And thus, the whole thing unfolds like an evolutionary lineage.

In Tehrani's analysis, he found three big branches -- the African branch (where the story is usually called "The Wolf and the Kids"), the East Asian branch ("Tiger Grandmother"), and the European/Middle Eastern Branch ("Little Red Riding Hood," "Catterinella," and "The Story of Grandmother").  (For the main differences in the different branches, which are fascinating but too long to be quoted here in full, check out the link to Tehrani's paper.)

Put all together, Tehrani came up with the following cladogram:

WK = "The Wolf and the Kids," TG = "Tiger Grandmother," "Catt" = "Catterinella," GM = "The Story of Grandmother," and RH = "Little Red Riding Hood;" the others are less common variations that Tehrani was able to place on his star diagram.

The whole thing just makes me very, very happy, and leaves me smiling with my big, sharp, wolflike teeth.

Pure research has been criticized by some as being pointless, and this is a stance that I absolutely abhor.  There is a completely practical reason to support, fund, and otherwise encourage pure research -- and that is, we have no idea yet what application some technique or discovery might have in the future.  A great deal of highly useful, human-centered science has been uncovered by scientists playing around in their labs with no other immediate goal than to study some small bit of the universe.  Further, the mere application of raw creativity to a problem -- using the tools of cladistics, say, to analyze a folk tale -- can act as an impetus to other minds, elsewhere, encouraging them to approach the problems we face in novel ways.

But I think it's more than that.  The fundamental truth here is that human mind needs to be exercised.  The "what good is it?" attitude is not only anti-science, it is anti-intellectual.  It devalues inquiry, curiosity, and creativity.  It asks the question "how does this benefit humanity?" in such a way as to imply that the sheer joy of comprehending deeply the world around us is not a benefit in and of itself.

It may be that Tehrani's jewel of a paper will have no lasting impact on humanity as a whole.  I'm perfectly okay with that, and I suspect Tehrani would be, as well.  We need to make our brains buckle down to the "important stuff," yes; but we also need to let them out to play sometimes, a lesson that the men and women currently overseeing our educational system need to learn.  In a quote that seems unusually apt, considering the subject of Tehrani's research, Albert Einstein said: "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.  Imagination is more important than knowledge.  Knowledge is limited.  Imagination encircles the world." 

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

I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos, with Carl Sagan, was launched, and being a physics major and an astronomy buff, I was absolutely transfixed.  Me and my co-nerd buddies looked forward to the new episode each week and eagerly discussed it the following day between classes.  And one of the most famous lines from the show -- ask any Sagan devotee -- is, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe."

Sagan used this quip as a launching point into discussing the makeup of the universe on the atomic level, and where those atoms had come from -- some primordial, all the way to the Big Bang (hydrogen and helium), and the rest formed in the interiors of stars.  (Giving rise to two of his other famous quotes: "We are made of star-stuff," and "We are a way for the universe to know itself.")

Since Sagan's tragic death in 1996 at the age of 62 from a rare blood cancer, astrophysics has continued to extend what we know about where everything comes from.  And now, experimental physicist Harry Cliff has put together that knowledge in a package accessible to the non-scientist, and titled it How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, From the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang.  It's a brilliant exposition of our latest understanding of the stuff that makes up apple pies, you, me, the planet, and the stars.  If you want to know where the atoms that form the universe originated, or just want to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.

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

Content warnings

Last week's Fiction Friday post -- about how (or if) we should continue to read writers whose work gives tacit acceptance to such repugnant views as racism or homophobia -- resulted in a few interesting responses and questions. 

The first one had to do with how I as a writer approach other sorts of sensitive topics, especially sexuality and violence.  It did immediately make me wonder why here in the United States those are so often lumped together; we often talk about "sex and violence" in one breath, with regards especially to movie content.  I have no idea why something that can be an expression of pleasure and loving intimacy is somehow put in the same category as harming someone, but that's just one of a gazillion things I don't understand about my own culture.

But accepting for now that they're frequently thrown into the same "this is taboo" category... in my own work, I've written both sex scenes and violent scenes.  To me, both of these in fiction ramp up the emotional intensity, and I have no hesitation including them if it seems appropriate for the plot and characters.  However, I've also seen way too many examples of gratuitous content, where such scenes are simply pasted in to titillate the reader/watcher, and that to me is no more excusable than any other action that leaves you wondering what the point was.

I'm reminded of how some of my students responded to seeing The Matrix Reloaded.  If you haven't watched this movie, there's a scene where Neo and Trinity are desperately horny and looking around for somewhere, anywhere, that they can get each others' clothes off.  They finally succeed, but other than giving us a chance to see Keanu Reeves and Carrie Anne Moss buck naked, it really did zilch for the plot.  And you'd think a bunch of teenage guys would have thought that was awesome, but one and all they branded it as a "stupid scene."

As far as gratuitous violence, consider the amount of goriness in Kill Bill as compared to The Usual Suspects.  I've never taken a body count of either movie; suffice it to say it's high in both films.  But the amount of blood flying around doesn't even begin to compare.  The Usual Suspects, for all of the death and destruction, is a subtle movie, and leaves way more to the imagination than it shows you.  Kill Bill... isn't.

In my own work, I do sometimes include explicit sexuality or violence, but I hope none of it is unnecessary.  Also, there can be many reasons for including such content.  The sex scene in Sephirot is between the main character and a woman he will soon desperately regret getting friendly with; in Kári the Lucky, it's sweet and sad, between lovers who are headed for inevitable tragedy; in Whistling in the Dark, between two characters who have found love and healing in each other after suffering terrible emotional damage.  The same with violent scenes; in Gears, which might be the most overall-violent book I've written, one character gets her arm broken and is choked nearly to death, another is killed by being thrown against a wall, another third shot in the middle of the chest, another crushed by a (psychically-generated) landslide, yet another murdered by a deliberately-loosed falling piece of masonry.  Even so, the violence isn't the point of the story.  If anything, the point of Gears is that goodness and courage and steadfastness will always win over greed and deception and ruthlessness.  The violence is there not only to advance the plot, but to set in stark relief how a choice to be brave and moral isn't without risks, but it's still what we should all aspire to.

Another question generated by last Friday's post had to do with "content warnings" or "trigger warnings."  Should they be present on a book's back cover?  A related question -- are there topics that are over the line for me, that are enough of an emotional trigger for me that I can't write them?

I've never included a content warning for my own work, although I did one time mention to someone I thought might be sensitive to it that Sephirot has a fairly explicit sex scene (as it turned out, the reader in question had no problem with it).  In my work, pretty much What You See Is What You Get; the back cover blurb will give you a pretty good idea of the content of the story, and readers can make the decision whether or not to read a particular book based on that, without needing a specific content warning.  I mostly write speculative/paranormal fiction, so you can expect lots of spooky atmosphere, but (I hope) nothing that really offends.  

However, since we're talking about the capacity for offending readers, it must be mentioned that some of my characters have the tendency to swear a lot.  This is partly because I swear a lot.  I try to make it appropriate for the scene and character, but Be Thou Forewarned.

Be Thou Even More Forewarned if we ever sit down and have a beer together.

As an amusing aside -- I recall being at a book signing event, and a rather prim-looking woman coming up to me and saying she'd really enjoyed Lock & Key, but "the character of the Librarian sure does use the f-bomb a lot."

I responded, completely deadpan, "I know!  I tried talking to him about it, but he told me to fuck off."

Well, at least I thought it was funny.

In all seriousness, the problem is that different people have different sensitive points.  I gave up on the book The Third Eye (by T. Lobsang Rampa), and walked out of the movie Brazil, because of torture scenes; despite my fascination with Scottish history, I refuse to watch Braveheart because I know damn good and well what happens to William Wallace at the end.  However, I know people who had no problem with any of those -- the scenes in question might have been unpleasant, but not enough to cause them serious upset.

In my own work, there are three kinds of scenes that I can't stomach writing; rape, pedophilia, and animal abuse.  I just can't do it.  As far as the last-mentioned, I found out from another reader that I'm not the only one who can't deal with reading about harming animals even in a fictional setting.  In Kill Switch, the main character's dog, Baxter, is his constant companion.  I was stopped on the street by someone in my village who told me he was reading Kill Switch, and so far was enjoying it -- but then a frown crossed his face, and he said, "I know people are gonna die.  I'm okay with that.  It's a thriller, after all."  He brought his face near mine, and said in an intense voice, "But if you kill Baxter, I will never speak to you again."

The scene that for me danced the closest to the edge of that line is, once again, in my novel Sephirot (yeah, it's a pretty emotionally-fraught story, in case you hadn't already figured that out).  A character is the recipient of a brutal bare-back whipping -- it's absolutely necessary for the plot, but it was right at the boundary of "this is too awful for me to write about."

I guess everyone has their limits -- and we as writers need to be cognizant of that.

Anyhow, there are a few responses to the questions and comments generated by last Friday's post.  I love hearing what people think, and what thoughts my posts bring up for readers, so keep those cards and letters comin'.  As for me, I need to get to my work-in-progress, and see what diabolical plot twists I can think of for this novel.  As Stephen King put it, "In a good story, the author gets the readers to love the characters -- then releases the monsters."

So now I'm off to give the monsters some exercise.

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

I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos, with Carl Sagan, was launched, and being a physics major and an astronomy buff, I was absolutely transfixed.  Me and my co-nerd buddies looked forward to the new episode each week and eagerly discussed it the following day between classes.  And one of the most famous lines from the show -- ask any Sagan devotee -- is, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe."

Sagan used this quip as a launching point into discussing the makeup of the universe on the atomic level, and where those atoms had come from -- some primordial, all the way to the Big Bang (hydrogen and helium), and the rest formed in the interiors of stars.  (Giving rise to two of his other famous quotes: "We are made of star-stuff," and "We are a way for the universe to know itself.")

Since Sagan's tragic death in 1996 at the age of 62 from a rare blood cancer, astrophysics has continued to extend what we know about where everything comes from.  And now, experimental physicist Harry Cliff has put together that knowledge in a package accessible to the non-scientist, and titled it How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, From the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang.  It's a brilliant exposition of our latest understanding of the stuff that makes up apple pies, you, me, the planet, and the stars.  If you want to know where the atoms that form the universe originated, or just want to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.

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

The origins of Old Yeller

Since the last few days (hell, the last few years) of news has been filled with one horrible thing after another, today I'm retreating into my happy place, namely: the cool scientific discovery of the week.

And puppies.  Lots o' puppies.

I don't know if it's ever occurred to the dog lovers in the studio audience how unusual dog coat coloration is.  I can't think of another animal species that has such striking variability -- from the jet black of black labs to the solid bronze of golden retrievers to the spots of Dalmatians to the particolored patches of collies, there is huge variation in fur color across the species.

One additional one that is especially curious is called agouti coloration -- when the base of the hair is yellow and the tip is black.  This is frequently seen in German shepherds, and was also the coat pattern in my beloved rescue dog Grendel:

If you're wondering, Grendel was not spoiled.  At all.

As you can see, Grendel also looked a bit like someone created a Frankendog by stitching together parts of about six different breeds.  He didn't have any other German-shepherd-like characteristics, but he definitely seemed to have pilfered his fur from one while it wasn't looking.

Well, a new piece of research that appeared in Nature Ecology and Evolution this week indicates that five very common coat color patterns in dogs come from the activity of a single gene.  Where and when this gene activates (and creates a gene product called the agouti signaling protein) determines the deposition of two pigments -- eumelanin (which is black) and pheomelanin (which is yellow).  The amount and placement of these two pigments creates five different color patterns, as shown below:

[Image from Bannasch et al.}

One of these alleles, dominant yellow, is apparently of ancient origins; the researchers determined that it was present in an extinct canid species that branched off from wolves over two million years ago.

I'm a little curious about another dog coat feature, the white blaze, something my current non-spoiled dog Guinness has:

He also has white toes, which may or may not be related:

As you can see from the image from Bannasch et al., some of the dogs expressing each pattern have white blazes and some don't, so whatever genetic mechanism controls it must be independent of the agouti gene.

But if you have a dog with some yellow or agouti coloration, you now know that your pooch descends from a branch of the canine family tree that is two million years old.  As far as Guinness goes, I flatly refuse to believe he descends from wolves.  His level of fierceness is somewhere between "cream puff" and "cupcake."  He is basically a seventy-pound lap dog. 

In any case, that's the latest from the field of canine genetics and evolution.  Me, I wonder where another important dog feature comes from, and that's the cute head tilt.  There's no doubt that it's a significant selective advantage:

Guinness:  Play ball? 

Me:  Dude.  It's raining outside. 

Guinness:  Please play ball? 

Me:  Don't you want to wait?  I really don't want to go stand out in the... 

Guinness: *adorable head tilt* 

Me:  Dammit.

Speaking of which, I need to go get my dogs their breakfast because they're staring at me.  You'd think if they really are descended from wolves, they could go hunt down a squirrel or something, but I guess the decision to take advantage of sofas was made at the same time as they figured out it was easier to wait for someone to place a bowl full of dog food in front of them than to wear themselves out chasing some scrawny squirrel.

You gotta wonder who has trained whom, here.

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

I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos, with Carl Sagan, was launched, and being a physics major and an astronomy buff, I was absolutely transfixed.  Me and my co-nerd buddies looked forward to the new episode each week and eagerly discussed it the following day between classes.  And one of the most famous lines from the show -- ask any Sagan devotee -- is, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe."

Sagan used this quip as a launching point into discussing the makeup of the universe on the atomic level, and where those atoms had come from -- some primordial, all the way to the Big Bang (hydrogen and helium), and the rest formed in the interiors of stars.  (Giving rise to two of his other famous quotes: "We are made of star-stuff," and "We are a way for the universe to know itself.")

Since Sagan's tragic death in 1996 at the age of 62 from a rare blood cancer, astrophysics has continued to extend what we know about where everything comes from.  And now, experimental physicist Harry Cliff has put together that knowledge in a package accessible to the non-scientist, and titled it How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, From the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang.  It's a brilliant exposition of our latest understanding of the stuff that makes up apple pies, you, me, the planet, and the stars.  If you want to know where the atoms that form the universe originated, or just want to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.

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

Non-binary reality check

One of the claims I hear that infuriates me the most is that LGBTQ+ identification is becoming more common because our society is increasingly amoral, and this is somehow fostering a sense that "being gay will get me noticed."  This is really just the "LGBTQ+ is a choice" foolishness in slightly prettier packaging, along with the sense that queer people are doing it for attention, and my lord isn't that such an inconvenience for everyone else.  I just saw a meme a couple of days ago that encapsulated the idea; it went something like, "We no longer have to explain just the birds and the bees to kids, we have to explain the birds and the birds and the bees and the bees and the birds who think they're bees and the bees who think they're birds..."  And so on and so forth.  You get the idea.

The most insidious thing about this claim is that it delegitimizes queer identification, making it sound no more worthy of serious consideration than a teenager desperate to buy into the latest fashion trend.  It also ignores the actual explanation -- that there were just as many LGBTQ+ people around decades and centuries ago, but if there's a significant chance you will be harmed, jailed, discriminated against, ridiculed, or killed if you admit to who you are publicly, you have a pretty powerful incentive not to tell anyone.  I can vouch for that in my own case; I not only had the threat of what could happen in the locker room hanging over my head if I'd have admitted I was bisexual when I realized it (age fifteen or so), but the added filigree that my religious instructors had told us in no uncertain terms that any kind of sex outside of the traditional male + female marriage was a mortal sin that would result in eternal hellfire.

And that included masturbation.  Meaning that just about all of us received our tickets to hell when we were teenagers and validated them thereafter with great regularity.

The reason this comes up is because of two studies I ran into in the last couple of days.  The first, in The Sociological Review, is called "ROGD is a Scientific-sounding Veneer for Unsubstantiated Anti-trans View: A Peer-reviewed Analysis," by Florence Ashley of the University of Toronto.  ROGD is "rapid-onset gender dysphoria," and is the same thing I described above, not only in pretty packaging but with a nice psychobabble bow on top; the claim boils down to the choice of a trans person to come out being driven by "social contagion," and therefore being a variety of mental illness.  The whole thing hinges on the "suddenness" aspect of it, as if a person saying, "By the way, I'm trans" one day means that they'd just figured it out that that day.  You'd think anyone with even a modicum of logical faculties would realize that one doesn't imply the other.  I came out publicly as queer three years ago, but believe me, it was not a new realization for me personally.  I'd known for decades.  Society being what it is, it just took me that long to have to courage to say so.

Ashley's paper addresses this in no uncertain terms:

"Rapid-onset gender dysphoria" (ROGD) first appeared in 2016 on anti-trans websites as part of recruitment material for a study on an alleged epidemic of youth coming out as trans "out of the blue" due to social contagion and mental illness.  Since then, the concept of ROGD has spread like wildfire and become a mainstay of anti-trans arguments for restricting access to transition-related care...  [It is] evident that ROGD is not grounded in evidence but assumptions.  Reports by parents of their youth’s declining mental health and degrading familial relationships after coming out are best explained by the fact that the study recruited from highly transantagonistic websites.  Quite naturally, trans youth fare worse when their gender identity isn’t supported by their parents.  Other claims associated with ROGD can similarly be explained using what we already know about trans youth and offer no evidence for the claim that people are ‘becoming trans’ because of social contagion or mental illness.

The second, quite unrelated, paper was in The European Journal of Archaeology and describes a thousand-year-old burial in southern Finland that strongly suggests the individual buried there was androgynous.  Genetic analysis of the bones showed that they'd belonged to someone with Klinefelter Syndrome, a disorder involving a chromosomally-male person having an extra X chromosome (i.e., XXY instead of XY).  This results in someone who is basically male but has some female physical features -- most often, the development of breasts.  

Nondisjunction disorders like Klinefelter Syndrome are not uncommon, and finding a bone from someone with an odd number of chromosome is hardly surprising.  But what made this paper stand out to me -- and what it has to do with the previous one -- is that the individual in the grave in Finland was buried with honors, and with accoutrements both of males and females.  There was jewelry and clothing traditionally associated with women, but two sword-hilts that are typically found in (male) warrior-burials.

Artist's depiction of the burial at Suontaka [Image from Moilanen et al., July 2021]

So apparently, not only was the person in the grave buried with honors, (s)he/they were openly androgynous -- and that androgyny was accepted by the community to the extent that (s)he/they were buried with grave goods representing both gender roles.

"This burial [at Suontaka] has an unusual and strong mixture of feminine and masculine symbolism, and this might indicate that the individual was not strictly associated with either gender but instead with something else," said study leader Ulla Moilanen of  the University of Turku.  "Based on these analyses, we suggest... [that] the Suontaka grave possibly belonged to an individual with sex-chromosomal aneuploidy XXY.  The overall context of the grave indicates that it was a respected person whose gender identity may well have been non-binary."

If Moilanen and her group are correct in their conclusions, it gives us the sobering message that people in tenth-century C.E. Finland were doing better than we are at accepting that sexual identification and orientation aren't simple and binary.

What it comes back to for me is the astonishing gall it takes to tell someone, "No, you don't know your own sexuality; here, let me explain it to you."  Why it's apparently such a stressor for some people when a friend says, "I'm now identifying as ____, this is my new name," I have no idea, especially given that nobody seems to have the least trouble switching from "Miss" to "Mrs." and calling a newly-married woman by her husband's last name when the couple makes that choice.  The harm done to people from telling them, "Who you are is wrong/a phase/a plea for attention/sinful" is incalculable; it's no wonder that the suicide rate amongst LGBTQ+ is three times higher than it is for cis/het people.

All of which, you'd think, would be a tremendous impetus for outlawing the horrors of "conversion therapy" and "ex-gay ministries" worldwide.  But no.

More exasperating still, now there's apparently evidence that people in Finland a thousand years ago had figured this whole thing out better than we have, making it even more crystal-clear why so many of us sound exhausted when we ask, "why are we still having to fight these battles?" 

Of course, as tired as we are of saying the same thing over and over, we certainly can't stop now.  We have made some headway; my guess is that if I were a teenager now, I'd have few compunctions about admitting I'm queer, and that's even considering how ridiculously shy I am.  Contrast that to when I actually was a teenager back in the 1970s, and there was not a single out LGBTQ+ in my entire graduating class (although several of us came out later; in my case, much later). 

And allow me to state, if I hadn't already made the point stridently enough: none of us was "turned queer" between graduation and coming out.  We just finally made our way into a context where we were less likely to be ridiculed, discriminated against, or beaten up for admitting who we are.

I'll end with something else I found online, that sums up the whole issue nicely -- although it does highlight how far we still have to go, despite the reality checks we're seeing increasingly often in scientific research.  Even with all that, I firmly believe it:

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

I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos, with Carl Sagan, was launched, and being a physics major and an astronomy buff, I was absolutely transfixed.  Me and my co-nerd buddies looked forward to the new episode each week and eagerly discussed it the following day between classes.  And one of the most famous lines from the show -- ask any Sagan devotee -- is, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe."

Sagan used this quip as a launching point into discussing the makeup of the universe on the atomic level, and where those atoms had come from -- some primordial, all the way to the Big Bang (hydrogen and helium), and the rest formed in the interiors of stars.  (Giving rise to two of his other famous quotes: "We are made of star-stuff," and "We are a way for the universe to know itself.")

Since Sagan's tragic death in 1996 at the age of 62 from a rare blood cancer, astrophysics has continued to extend what we know about where everything comes from.  And now, experimental physicist Harry Cliff has put together that knowledge in a package accessible to the non-scientist, and titled it How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, From the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang.  It's a brilliant exposition of our latest understanding of the stuff that makes up apple pies, you, me, the planet, and the stars.  If you want to know where the atoms that form the universe originated, or just want to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.

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

Reinforcing outrage

I got onto social media some years ago for two main reasons; to stay in touch with people I don't get to see frequently (which since the pandemic has been pretty much everyone), and to have a platform for marketing my books.

I'm the first to admit that I'm kind of awful at the latter.  I hate marketing myself, and even though I know I won't be successful as an author if no one ever hears about my work, it goes against the years of childhood training in such winning strategies as "don't talk about yourself" and "don't brag" and (my favorite) "no one wants to hear about that" (usually applied to whatever my current main interest was).

I'm still on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, although for me the last-mentioned seems to mostly involve pics of my dog being cute.  It strikes me on a daily basis, though, how quickly non-dog-pic social media can devolve into a morass of hatefulness -- Twitter seems especially bad in that regard -- and also that I have no clue how the algorithms work that decide for you what you should and should not look at.  It's baffling to me that someone will post a fascinating link or trenchant commentary and get two "likes" and one retweet, and then someone else will post a pic of their lunch and it'll get shared far and wide.

So I haven't learned how to game the system, either to promote my books or to get a thousand retweets of a pic of my own lunch.  Maybe my posts aren't angry enough.  At least that seems to be the recommendation of a study at Yale University that was published last week in Science Advances, which found that expressions of moral outrage on Twitter are more often rewarded by likes and retweets than emotionally neutral ones.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons "Today Testing" (For derivative), Social Media Marketing Strategy, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Apparently, getting likes and retweets is the human equivalent of the bell ringing for Pavlov's dog.  When our posts are shared, it gives us incentive to post others like them.  And since political outrage gets responses, we tend to move in that direction over time.  Worse still, the effect is strongest for people who are political moderates, meaning the suspicion a lot of us have had for a while -- that social media feeds polarization -- looks like it's spot-on.

"Our studies find that people with politically moderate friends and followers are more sensitive to social feedback that reinforces their outrage expressions,” said Yale professor of psychology Molly Crockett, who co-authored the study.  "This suggests a mechanism for how moderate groups can become politically radicalized over time — the rewards of social media create positive feedback loops that exacerbate outrage...  Amplification of moral outrage is a clear consequence of social media’s business model, which optimizes for user engagement.  Given that moral outrage plays a crucial role in social and political change, we should be aware that tech companies, through the design of their platforms, have the ability to influence the success or failure of collective movements.  Our data show that social media platforms do not merely reflect what is happening in society.  Platforms create incentives that change how users react to political events over time."

Which is troubling, if not unexpected.  Social media may not just be passively encouraging polarization, but deliberately exploiting our desire for approval.  In doing so, they are not just recording the trends, but actively influencing political outcomes.

It's scary how easily manipulated we are.  The catch-22 is that any attempt to rein in politically-incendiary material on social media runs immediately afoul of the rights of free speech; it took Facebook and Twitter ages to put the brakes on posts about the alleged danger of the COVID vaccines and the "Big Lie" claims of Donald Trump and his cronies that Joe Biden stole the election last November.  (A lot of those posts are still sneaking through, unfortunately.)  So if social media is feeding social media polarization with malice aforethought, the only reasonable response is to think twice about liking and sharing sketchy stuff -- and when in doubt, err on the side of not sharing it.

Either that, or exit social media entirely, something that several friends of mine have elected to do.  I'm reluctant -- there are people, especially on Facebook, who I'd probably lose touch with entirely without it -- but I don't spend much time on it, and (except for posting links to Skeptophilia every morning) hardly post at all.  What I do post is mostly intended for humor's sake; I avoid political stuff pretty much entirely.

So that's our discouraging, if unsurprising, research of the day.  It further reinforces my determination to spend as little time doomscrolling on Twitter as I can.  Not only do I not want to contribute to the nastiness, I don't need the reward of retweets pushing me any further into outrage.  I'm outraged enough as it is.

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

I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos, with Carl Sagan, was launched, and being a physics major and an astronomy buff, I was absolutely transfixed.  Me and my co-nerd buddies looked forward to the new episode each week and eagerly discussed it the following day between classes.  And one of the most famous lines from the show -- ask any Sagan devotee -- is, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe."

Sagan used this quip as a launching point into discussing the makeup of the universe on the atomic level, and where those atoms had come from -- some primordial, all the way to the Big Bang (hydrogen and helium), and the rest formed in the interiors of stars.  (Giving rise to two of his other famous quotes: "We are made of star-stuff," and "We are a way for the universe to know itself.")

Since Sagan's tragic death in 1996 at the age of 62 from a rare blood cancer, astrophysics has continued to extend what we know about where everything comes from.  And now, experimental physicist Harry Cliff has put together that knowledge in a package accessible to the non-scientist, and titled it How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, From the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang.  It's a brilliant exposition of our latest understanding of the stuff that makes up apple pies, you, me, the planet, and the stars.  If you want to know where the atoms that form the universe originated, or just want to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.

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

Bear talk

As Randall Munroe (writer of the amazing comic xkcd) said, "Correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing, 'Look over there.'"

I immediately thought of that quote when I bumped into a fascinating study that appeared in Ecology and Society last week, about grizzly bears.  Turns out that grizzlies, which are native to the northern continental United States, western Canada, and Alaska, have been spreading lately into territory in British Columbia where they hadn't been seen before, so some zoologists decided to do genetic testing and see where those bears were coming from, and what their relationship was to other bears in the area.

So they created bear bait from a fish slurry, which is as nasty as it sounds (as researcher Lauren Henson of the Raincoast Conservation Foundation put it, "it smells really really terrible to us, but is intriguing to bears").  They put the bait in the middle of a low tangle of barbed wire, which was intended not to hurt the bears but to catch and pull out bits of their fur.  The scientists then did genetic analysis on the bear fur thus collected.

What they found was that there are three distinct populations of grizzlies in British Columbia, which seem not to have a lot of overlap.  This by itself isn't unusual -- a lot of animals have isolated sub-populations and regional variation not only in genetics, but in color, size, even behaviors like vocalization patterns -- but where it got interested was discovered because the RCF's study involved cooperation with five indigenous groups, the Nuxalk, Haíɫzaqv, Kitasoo/Xai’xais, Gitga’at, and Wuikinuxv, primarily because a lot of the traps needed to be set on Native-owned land.

And when the scientists and the representatives of the indigenous groups took a look at the results, they discovered something really perplexing: the boundaries of the populations of genetically-distinct grizzly bears followed the boundaries of the indigenous language groups in the area.

What's more perplexing still is that neither the grizzlies' range boundaries nor the regional language families coincide with any obvious geographical barriers -- large rivers, rugged terrain, areas with permanent snow cover or glacial ice.  Jenn Walkus, who coauthored the paper and is part of the Wuikinuxv Nation, wasn't that surprised.  "Growing up in a remote community called Rivers Inlet, I saw firsthand that humans and bears have a lot of the same needs in terms of space, food, and other resources," she said.  "It would make sense for them to settle in the same areas—ones with a steady supply of salmon, for instance.  This historic interrelatedness means Canada should manage key resources with both bears and people in mind."

While I don't doubt that she's right, it still is very weird to me that the settlement and dispersion patterns in humans and grizzlies would coincide like that, without there being a specific genetic barrier establishing and maintaining the boundaries.  It's hard to imagine why two human territories abutting each other, which have different indigenous ethnic background, would have any impact on where the bears are going.

Most of these kinds of regional variations in genetic makeup follow one of two patterns -- known to biologists as allopatry and sympatry.  The former is where there is a geographical barrier keeping the two populations apart; the ranges don't overlap, so the members of the two population don't mate because they don't meet.  My favorite example of this are the cute little tufty-eared Kaibab and Abert squirrels, which live (respectively) on the North and South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Azhikerdude, Kaibab Squirrel, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Sympatry can be a little harder to explain, because the ranges overlap -- so there has to be something other than geography keeping the populations separate.  One of the more curious examples of sympatry is the pink salmon of western North America, which has a strict two-year life cycle.  The eggs are laid in freshwater rivers, hatch, and the young make it out to the ocean, where they spend a year -- then in the second year, the adults come back to the river where they were spawned, reproduce, and die.  But what this means is that there is an odd-year and even-year population of pink salmon.  This year, the ones spawning are odd-year salmon, and their even-year cousins are out at sea (but will return to spawn themselves in 2022).  So even though they may inhabit the same range, the odd-year and even-year salmon never mate.

The grizzlies, though, show an odder pattern; it's called parapatry, where the ranges share a border but don't overlap.  True parapatry is rare, because something's got to keep the border relatively impermeable to migration.  While in some cases it's a geographical barrier of some kind, here there's no such easy explanation.  The grizzlies are maintaining genetically-distinct populations that show no obvious reason, but -- bizarrely -- coincide with the linguistically-distinct populations of people who inhabit the same area.

So here we have a really intriguing correlation that is definitely waggling its eyebrows suggestively, but admits of no evident causation.  I'm pretty certain there is one; it's hard to imagine this being chance.  But in the absence of an explanation, it's just another of those intriguing mysteries -- and fertile ground for zoologists and ethnologists to tackle in future studies.

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

I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos, with Carl Sagan, was launched, and being a physics major and an astronomy buff, I was absolutely transfixed.  Me and my co-nerd buddies looked forward to the new episode each week and eagerly discussed it the following day between classes.  And one of the most famous lines from the show -- ask any Sagan devotee -- is, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe."

Sagan used this quip as a launching point into discussing the makeup of the universe on the atomic level, and where those atoms had come from -- some primordial, all the way to the Big Bang (hydrogen and helium), and the rest formed in the interiors of stars.  (Giving rise to two of his other famous quotes: "We are made of star-stuff," and "We are a way for the universe to know itself.")

Since Sagan's tragic death in 1996 at the age of 62 from a rare blood cancer, astrophysics has continued to extend what we know about where everything comes from.  And now, experimental physicist Harry Cliff has put together that knowledge in a package accessible to the non-scientist, and titled it How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, From the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang.  It's a brilliant exposition of our latest understanding of the stuff that makes up apple pies, you, me, the planet, and the stars.  If you want to know where the atoms that form the universe originated, or just want to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.

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

The wall beneath the roadway

I think the reason I'm drawn to history is because of how much we don't know.

Whenever I'm in a place that has tangible relics from the past, it always comes to mind to wonder who the people were who handled and used those things, who had stood in that place centuries ago.  What were their lives like?  It's in part the same curiosity that got me interested when I was a teenager in my own family history.  Those names on the historical records were real people with real lives, and about whom I will only know the barest fraction no matter how much research I do.  One of my favorite examples is my great-great-grandmother, Sarah (Handsberry) (Overby) (Biles) Rulong, who left her home in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania at age about twenty.  To my knowledge, she left behind her entire family -- the people she traveled with afterward were strangers -- and in around 1800, she went from southeastern Pennsylvania to New Madrid, Missouri, where she married her first husband (Burwell Overby), and had one child.  She and her daughter then upped stakes and went to southern Louisiana, where she married husband #2 (John Biles) and #3 (Aaron Rulong), having four more children from each marriage.  She outlived all three husbands, and doesn't show up in the 1830 census, but whether that's because she died herself or went on to other adventures in other places, I have no idea.

What would impel a twenty-year-old unmarried woman to launch off with a bunch of strangers into what was then trackless wilderness?  I've always wondered what her life must have been like.  (I am not unaware that there's a possibility she might have been a prostitute -- not uncommon in those days -- and I know at least that her third husband, who is my great-great-grandfather, wasn't exactly of law-abiding stock himself; Aaron Rulong had abandoned his first wife and children to go west, and his father Luke was arrested multiple times for such crimes as poaching, rioting, trespassing, mischief-making, and disturbing the peace.  My family tree definitely has some seriously sketchy branches.)

It was when I was in England that I was struck most forcefully by the thought of all the legions of people who had trod that ground before me.  The indigenous people who had occupied the land I currently live on -- the Seneca and Cayuga tribes -- didn't leave a lot in the way of permanent construction, so although I know they were here, I'm not hit by it directly on a daily basis the way one is in somewhere like England.  The tangible artifacts there go back thousands of years.  When, on a cool, blustery day, I walked on Hadrian's Wall -- the second-century C.E. wall running across Britain from Solway Sound to the mouth of the Tyne River -- and looked out across the empty moorland northward, it was easy to imagine being one of the Roman Legionnaires posted on duty and waiting for the next attack of the Scots and Picts, the "barbarian tribes" the Wall was intended to keep out.

[Image courtesy of the Creative Commons quisnovus from Gloucester, England, Section of Hadrian's Wall 1, CC BY 2.0]

In fact, Hadrian's Wall is the reason this whole topic comes up.  My friend (and frequent contributor of great topics for Skeptophilia), Gil Miller, sent me a link from Smithsonian Magazine that a previously-unknown piece of Hadrian's Wall was just unearthed -- beneath one of Newcastle-upon-Tyne's busiest roads.

Workers were digging into the surface of West Road to replace a section of storm sewer pipe, and only a couple of feet down they ran into stonework that was obviously not of recent vintage.  Archaeologists were called in, and they were able to identify it as Roman construction dating to the early part of the second century, and that it was contiguous with the known parts of the Wall.

"Despite the route of Hadrian’s Wall being fairly well documented in this area of the city, it is always exciting when we encounter the wall’s remains and have the opportunity to learn more about this internationally significant site," said Philippa Hunter of Archaeological Research Services Ltd., the group that is working to study and preserve the site.  "This is particularly true in this instance where we believe that we uncovered part of the wall’s earliest phase."

Archaeologist Miranda Aldhouse-Green, in a 2006 documentary about what was then known of Hadrian's Wall, identified exactly the feature of it I find the most compelling; what it must have been like for the people who constructed it, 1,900 years ago.  "We have to envisage an area of Britain where there wasn’t all that much stone building, certainly no monumental masonry. So it would have been a totally alien thing," Aldhouse-Green said.  "It would be like a visitation from another world, and people would be gobsmacked by it."

Fortunately, the people at Northumbrian Water, the group that manages the water infrastructure in Newcastle and who were the ones that made the discovery, seem pleased about it despite the interruption it will be for their work.  "It is amazing that we have been able to make this brilliant discovery, and we are glad to be working with Archaeological Research Services to make sure that it is properly protected going forward," said Graeme Ridley, the project manager who was overseeing the construction.  "This is an incredibly special part of North East heritage and we are honored to be a part of it."

It's fascinating to consider the lives of the people who lived in what was then a distant outpost of the Roman Empire, who were stationed in a place that was perilous and uncomfortable on a good day, and where life was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (to pilfer the apt description by Thomas Hobbes) even ignoring the added danger of catching a Scottish spear in your back.  There's so much about the lives of our ancestors we don't know, even with the best work of the historians and archaeologists.  We're left to consider the artifacts they left behind, and after that all we can do is fill in the rest of the gaps with our imaginations -- at least until someone invents a time machine.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is by an author we've seen here before: the incomparable Jenny Lawson, whose Twitter @TheBloggess is an absolute must-follow.  She blogs and writes on a variety of topics, and a lot of it is screamingly funny, but some of her best writing is her heartfelt discussion of her various physical and mental issues, the latter of which include depression and crippling anxiety.

Regular readers know I've struggled with these two awful conditions my entire life, and right now they're manageable (instead of completely controlling me 24/7 like they used to do).  Still, they wax and wane, for no particularly obvious reason, and I've come to realize that I can try to minimize their effect but I'll never be totally free of them.

Lawson's new book, Broken (In the Best Possible Way) is very much in the spirit of her first two, Let's Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy.  Poignant and hysterically funny, she can have you laughing and crying on the same page.  Sometimes in the same damn paragraph.  It's wonderful stuff, and if you or someone you love suffers from anxiety or depression or both, read this book.  Seeing someone approaching these debilitating conditions with such intelligence and wit is heartening, not least because it says loud and clear: we are not alone.

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