Skeptophilia

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

It's the most wonderful war of the year

Welp, I guess it's time to dust off my camo and flak jacket and helmet and guns.

The War on Christmas is starting early this year.

I wish I was kidding about this, but I'm not. It's not even Halloween and already the right-wing religious nutcakes are bringing back the claims that we non-religious types, and the Democrats in general, are planning to carpet-bomb Whoville or something. This time it's started with the House Republican Caucus, which tweeted a photo of President Biden a couple of days ago along with the message, "This is the guys [sic] who is trying to steal Christmas. Americans are NOT going to let that happen."

This year the gist of it seems to revolve around the (genuine) supply-chain problems that have been plaguing the United States for months, and which will probably result in raised prices and some items being delayed in shipping, if not outright unavailable. I can understand the frustration with this. On the other hand, complex problems rarely have one cause, and saying "This is Joe Biden's fault!" is just plain idiotic. How much of it has to do with the current administration's policies, how much of it with leftovers from the previous administration's policies, and how much of it is pure circumstance (e.g. the pandemic) is not a simple question.

Much easier just do say "Biden did it!" and whip up some nice, Christmas-y outrage, despite the fact that Biden himself is a staunch Catholic and would hardly be likely to have secret aspirations to take over the Grinch's job now that the latter's heart grew three sizes.

Of course, "in touch with reality" is not a phrase that is generally associated with these people. The whole War-on-Christmas trope goes back to 2005, when right-wing radio host John Gibson published a book called, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. This was sixteen years ago, and every single year since then Fox News has spent inordinate amounts of time screeching about how we secular-minded types are secretly trying to ban Christian holidays, prevent anyone from saying "merry Christmas," and jail people who attend holiday services.

Now, I don't know if you've noticed, but if you'll think back carefully, you may recall that in every single one of those sixteen years, Christmas has happened, right on schedule. People still say "merry Christmas" all they want with no repercussions, and no one has been arrested coming out of church on Christmas morning.

For a "liberal plot that's worse than you thought," odd that it's had zero discernible effect.

This would be honestly be hilarious if these people didn't have so much power over the American psyche. The mystifying part, though, is that all you have to do is look around to realize that they're either delusional or lying outright. Merely driving through any random town in America in December should be sufficient to convince you that Christmas is alive and well. Around here, we have lots of folks who put up holiday displays in their yards with giant inflatable Santas, reindeer with glowing noses, various takes on nativity scenes, and enough lights to disrupt air traffic. All the local stores start putting out Christmas-related stuff in November or earlier, so the capitalist side of the celebration is still as lucrative as ever.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Achim Raschka / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons), 13-12-16 Christmas house decoration, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What is ironic about all this is that I, and a great many non-religious folks I know, all celebrate Christmas. If I really harbored deep-seated anti-Christian rancor you'd think that avoiding Christmas entirely would be an easy choice for me; not only am I not religious, my wife is Jewish. Built-in excuse, right there. Despite that, we put up a Christmas tree most years, always exchange gifts, and send out holiday cards when we can get our act together sufficiently to write them before Christmas Eve. I do this mainly because (1) I think Christmas trees are pretty, and (2) I love giving people stuff. I may not believe all the religious side of the holiday, but it's pretty obvious I'm not hostile to it.

The bottom line is -- and I've said this enough times that you'd think the point would be made -- 99% of secular folks, myself included, do not give a flying rat's ass what exactly you choose to believe, nor how you express those beliefs. You can believe that your life's path is being directed by the divine influence of a magical bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy if you want to. You can wear a bunny suit everywhere you go, wiggle your nose when you're annoyed, and eat nothing but carrots. I honestly do not give a damn.

What I object to is when you start saying that the rest of us have to believe in the magical bunny, and want to open all public meetings with bunny-prayers, and demand that public school science classes include a unit on the Theory of Young-Earth Bunnyism. Then you're gonna have a fight on your hands.

But this isn't being driven by logic and evidence, and never has been. The people who make a huge deal out of the War on Christmas every year seem to fall into two categories: (1) partisan yahoos who want to stir up outrage against the other side and don't mind lying through their teeth to do it, and (2) truly religious types who also have a wide streak of paranoia and the gullibility to believe what they hear on Fox News. The rest of us, religious and non-religious alike, usually all get along pretty well.

But I guess that's all beside the point. Tiresome though it is, if you're an atheist, duty is duty. Uncle Sam Wants YOU. (Not that Uncle Sam, I'm talking about Sam Harris.) I guess when you're called up, you don't really have a choice in the matter. So, into the breach, may Dawkins protect us, and all that sort of thing. I'm not optimistic about winning this year, given that we're 0-and-16, but you never know. If we're lucky, maybe we'll get some supernatural assistance from the ghost of Christopher Hitchens.

Failing that, it'll be up to the magical bunny from Andromeda, and his track record ain't that great, either.

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My dad once quipped about me that my two favorite kinds of food were "plenty" and "often." He wasn't far wrong. I not only have eclectic tastes, I love trying new things -- and surprising, considering my penchant for culinary adventure, have only rarely run across anything I truly did not like.

So the new book Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is right down my alley. Wong and Thuras traveled to all seven continents to find the most interesting and unique foods each had to offer -- their discoveries included a Chilean beer that includes fog as an ingredient, a fish paste from Italy that is still being made the same way it was by the Romans two millennia ago, a Sardinian pasta so loved by the locals it's called "the threads of God," and a tea that is so rare it is only served in one tea house on the slopes of Mount Hua in China.

If you're a foodie -- or if, like me, you're not sophisticated enough for that appellation but just like to eat -- you should check out Gastro Obscura. You'll gain a new appreciation for the diversity of cuisines the world has to offer, and might end up thinking differently about what you serve on your own table.

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

Monday, October 18, 2021

Remembrance of stress past

About eighteen years ago, my wife and I went on a vacation to Hawaii. The trip was awesome, and we had a fantastic time in Kauai, appreciating the beauty of the Garden Island, where "chill out" is the order of the day and there are signs that say "No shoes, no shirt, no problem."

Then we started on the voyage home.

I won't belabor you with the entire story. Suffice it to say that it involved:

two missed connections
sleeping on the tile floor of two different airports on two successive nights
a teenager breaching the security checkpoint, resulting in evacuating the entire airport and everyone having to be re-checked-in
the airline crew "timing out," meaning they had to take a mandatory eight hours of rest while the passengers sat and waited
a whole case of fine California wine... and no corkscrew
a blackout that shut down the electrical grid in the entire northeastern United States for a day and a half
a limo ride ending with the limo overheating and conking out just outside of Scott Run, Pennsylvania

Of course, I'm entirely to blame, because after each increasingly-ridiculous mishap, I said to my wife, "Well, what else could go wrong?"

Never ever say those words. I'm not superstitious, but in this case I'm convinced that the universe waits for some hapless schlub to say that before dropping a piano on his head.

What is interesting about this whole thing -- besides the fact that in retrospect, it makes a hilarious story -- is that I remember the unpleasantness and stress of the trip back much better than I remember the relaxing and enjoyable vacation we were coming back from. I'm hard-pressed to recall a single specific detail from being in Hawaii, other than a vague memory of sun, hiking, scuba diving, and drinks with little umbrellas -- but the memories of what it was like trying to return from Hawaii are so vivid it's like they happened yesterday.

Turns out, I'm not alone in finding that stressful experiences stick in our brains better than pleasant ones do. A study released last week in Current Biology found that pretty much all of us remember trying situations much more vividly than we do positive ones.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Psy3330 W10, Sleeping while studying, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What's more, the researchers who did the study -- a team made up of Anne Bierbrauer, Marie-Christin Fellner, Rebekka Heinen, Oliver Wolf, and Nikolai Axmacher, of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany -- found the underlying mechanism for why awful memories seem to have such durability. When a memory is connected with a stressful experience, the "memory trace" (neural firing pattern associated with recalling the memory) is linked through the amygdala -- a part of the brain associated with anxiety, fear, anger... as well as emotional learning and memory modulation.

The researchers write:

Recent evidence has further shown that amygdala neurons do not only respond to fearful or stress-related stimuli, but exhibit mixed selectivity as well: their firing may represent various different emotional and social dimensions, depending on task and context. In humans, amygdala neurons respond to faces and to perceived emotions, and fMRI studies showed that the amygdala represents both fear memories and the subjective valence of odors. Such multidimensional representations may serve to bind the diverse aspects of an emotional experience into one integrated episode.

Which certainly is the case with my memory of the Hawaii debacle. My pleasant memories from the holiday -- which took place over six days -- are fragmentary and vague as compared with the memory of the trip back, which took only two days but plays out in my mind as a single coherent story.

When you think about it, it makes evolutionary sense. Thag and Ogg having a vivid, detailed memory of the nice mammoth dinner they had two weeks ago is far less critical to survival than the memory of where they almost got killed by a saber-toothed tiger. (That's an oversimplification, of course; complex behaviors are almost never the result of a single evolutionary driver. But the value of remembering dangerous situations more strongly than happy ones can't be denied.)

The downside, of course, is that really negative memories get seared into our consciousness more or less permanently. This can result in memory patterns that actively interfere with our ability to live a normal life -- better known as post-traumatic stress disorder. So getting to the bottom of how this happens in the brain is the first step toward addressing that debilitating condition.

As for me, my silly return-voyage story doesn't cause me any anguish, and in fact, I've told it many times to various friends over pints of beer, to the general amusement of all. The experience did, however, stop me from ever saying "What more could go wrong?" Because I've found that not only is there always something else that can go wrong, when it does, you'll remember it forever.

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

Saturday, October 16, 2021

The stranded lagoon

When someone talks about getting a glimpse of prehistory from the modern landscape, usually what they're referring to is either (1) rocks, or (2) fossils.

There's no doubt that those are our best clues. I saw a good example of this last weekend while we were visiting some friends in the Catskill Mountains. We'd gone for a hike alongside the beautiful tumbling West Kill Creek, and I saw the unmistakable polished surface and parallel grooves of a slickenside -- a rock that had been carved and worn smooth by the passage of a glacier, probably the one that last covered this entire region on the order of twenty thousand years ago.

Further back -- much further back -- the flaky, flat layers of gray shale and tan limestone that forms the majority of the bedrock around here is Devonian in age, something like three hundred million years old, when where I now sit was at the bottom of a shallow tropical ocean. Those sediments were uplifted during the formation of the Appalachian Mountain range and have been slowly eroding ever since, with the outflow from the melting glaciers -- the same ones that left the scratches in the rocks I saw in the Catskills -- cutting the deep, steep-sided gorges this region is famous for.

Taughannock Falls -- right up the road from where I live

It turns out, though, that inferences about the past don't just come from rocks and fossils. A much rarer, but even cooler, phenomenon comes from biology; it's called a relict population or peripheral isolate -- a cluster of individuals of a species left behind and/or cut off from the rest of the population by some major geological event. An especially interesting one was just discovered recently, and was the subject of a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just published yesterday. It concerns a clump of red mangrove trees (Rhizophora mangle) along the banks of the San Pedro Mártir River in the Yucatan Peninsula. What tipped off the researchers that this was something weird was that red mangroves usually only grow in the brackish or salty shallows of tropical ocean shores -- and this one was 170 kilometers inland from the nearest mangrove marshes, along the banks of a freshwater river, with no individuals of that species in between.

Apparently what happened is that these mangroves were left behind after a warm period of high sea level ended. As the temperature cooled and more ocean water was locked up in the form of ice, the seas receded, cutting off the little clump of mangroves from their cousins.

The authors write:

Climatic oscillations during the Pleistocene played a major role in shaping the spatial distribution and demographic dynamics of Earth's biota, including our own species. The Last Interglacial (LIG) or Eemian Period (ca. 130 to 115 thousand years B.P.) was particularly influential because this period of peak warmth led to the retreat of all ice sheets with concomitant changes in global sea level. The impact of these strong environmental changes on the spatial distribution of marine and terrestrial ecosystems was severe as revealed by fossil data and paleogeographic modeling. Here, we report the occurrence of an extant, inland mangrove ecosystem and demonstrate that it is a relict of the LIG. This ecosystem is currently confined to the banks of the freshwater San Pedro Mártir River in the interior of the Mexico–Guatemala El Petén rainforests, 170 km away from the nearest ocean coast but showing the plant composition and physiognomy typical of a coastal lagoon ecosystem. Integrating genomic, geologic, and floristic data with sea level modeling, we present evidence that this inland ecosystem reached its current location during the LIG and has persisted there in isolation ever since the oceans receded during the Wisconsin glaciation. Our study provides a snapshot of the Pleistocene peak warmth and reveals biotic evidence that sea levels substantially influenced landscapes and species ranges in the tropics during this period.

"This discovery is extraordinary," said biologist Felipe Zapata, of the University of California - Los Angeles, who co-authored the paper. "Not only are the red mangroves here with their origins printed in their DNA, but the whole coastal lagoon ecosystem of the last interglacial has found refuge here."

It's fascinating that you can use the distribution of a modern species to infer the conditions hundreds of thousands of years ago -- and, conversely, that the prehistoric climate and geology have left a distinct fingerprint on our current ecosystems. It makes me wonder what the scientists of the far-distant future will be able to figure out about our world. One of the ways that humans have changed things the most is the introduction of exotic species; in my part of the world, noxious pests like garlic mustard and Japanese beetles come to mind, but it bears mention that pigeons, dogs, cats, and horses are all introductions to North America that have established feral populations, as are most of the commonly consumed fruits (apples, peaches, pears, apricots, blackberries, raspberries, cherries, and all the citrus fruits), clover, dandelions, barberry, and just about all the species of grass you'd find in your lawn.

I wonder if future biologists will figure out how House Sparrows (Passer domesticus) got here, when their nearest relatives are all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.

The Earth, of course, is not done changing. Even apart from what we're currently doing to the climate, there is the natural process of plate tectonics moving the continents around, altering patterns of ocean and air circulation with inevitable effects on the living ecosystems. Piecing together what happened in the past can be done by looking at the present -- especially when you find a clump of trees that "shouldn't be there."

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During the first three centuries C.E., something remarkable happened; Rome went from a superpower, controlling much of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, to being a pair of weak, unstable fragments -- the Western and Eastern Roman Empires --torn by strife and internal squabbles, beset by invasions, with leaders for whom assassination was the most likely way to die. (The year 238 C.E. is called "the year of six emperors" -- four were killed by their own guards, one hanged himself to avoid the same fate, and one died in battle.)

How could something like this happen? The standard answer has usually been "the barbarians," groups such as the Goths, Vandals, Franks, Alans, and Huns who whittled away at the territory until there wasn't much left. They played a role, there is no doubt of that; the Goths under their powerful leader Alaric actually sacked the city of Rome itself in the year 410. But like with most historical events, the true answer is more complex -- and far more interesting. In How Rome Fell, historian Adrian Goldsworthy shows how a variety of factors, including a succession of weak leaders, the growing power of the Roman army, and repeated epidemics took a nation that was thriving under emperors like Vespasian and Hadrian, finally descending into the chaos of the Dark Ages.

If you're a student of early history, you should read Goldsworthy's book. It's fascinating -- and sobering -- to see how hard it is to maintain order in a society, and how easy it is to lose it.

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

Friday, October 15, 2021

Writing through tears

I've written a number of scenes that have affected me emotionally while I was writing them. Honestly, that's always what I'm trying to do to my readers -- grab them by the emotions and swing them around a little. But none of them has struck me as so deeply poignant as this one, near the end of my novel The Communion of Shadows.

In it, the main character, Leandre Naquin, knows exactly when he's going to die -- on his thirtieth birthday. The day he was born he had nearly died, but his mother made a bargain with the Angel of Death to take thirty years of her life and give them to her son. The Angel of Death accepted the deal. Leandre's mother dies young, and now approaching the age of thirty, he knows his own days are numbered.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons jc.winkler, Pic from the canoe on Bayou Corne, CC BY 2.0]

This scene happens the night before his thirtieth birthday, and is one of the few scenes I've written that had me writing through tears. It's set in 1850 in southern Louisiana -- bayou country.

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Leandre thought back once again of what he’d said to the others after telling his own story, that knowing the timing of his death hadn’t changed anything, and he wondered again why he’d lied to his friends. Everything else he’d said was scrupulously honest, at least insofar as he knew the details, but that had been an outright falsehood. He had such a habit of blithe indifference toward everything and everyone that apparently he even had to pretend that he could shrug his shoulders at his own impending death.

He rolled over in bed, sighing harshly. “Maman,” he whispered to the darkness, “how did you do it? You didn’t hesitate when the Angel of Death showed up. You were confident that you’d chosen correctly and told him you didn’t regret anything, that you were ready to go. How can I find the same courage?”

He peered around the dark interior of his little cottage, illuminated by a beam of moonlight coming through a half-opened window. The only sound was a soft sigh, which could have been the night breeze—or perhaps a slow breath, or the rustle of a long skirt.

He sat up, the light blanket slipping off his shoulders, ears and eyes straining. The silence had returned. After a moment sitting there, holding his breath, he lay back down on his side, once again trying to force himself to relax.

Then his eyes caught movement. In the corner of the room there was a light so faint he thought at first it was a reflection of the moon’s glow. Like everything in the dimness it had little color, just a gauzy white shimmer that could easily be dismissed as a trick of the eye.

With a sudden jolt he knew what it was. He’d seen it before. He was looking at the spirit of Azélie Naquin, that silent and watchful ghost he’d last seen when he was a child, standing gazing at him from the corner of his bedroom just as she was now. His heart thudded against his ribcage, a combination of fear and longing and grief coursing through his veins.

“Maman?” His voice sounded thin and hoarse in his own ears.

There was no change in the apparition.

Suddenly all of his defenses, all of the pretense to calmness and indifference, collapsed. He choked out the words, “I miss you so much,” then his voice broke. Tears flowed down his cheeks, soaked his pillow, and he drew his legs up so that he was curled up on his side, hugging his knees. “I said Papa never recovered from your death, but I see now I never did, either. The ache is just as real as it ever was.”

The figure in the corner moved closer, gliding like fog, and he could see the smooth outlines of his mother’s cheeks, the curl of a strand of hair behind her ear, the faint trace of a smile on her lips. There was the scent of lavender he remembered from his earliest days, its faint sweetness bringing back memories of pressing his face into her shoulder when he was barely old enough to walk.

Still she did not speak, just gazed at him in love and pity, and he felt his heart breaking again as if she’d only died yesterday, not twenty years earlier.

“How do I do it, Maman?” His voice cracked again, and in his own ears he sounded like the ten-year-old child he had been. “How can I know if I made the right choice, keeping myself apart so I wouldn’t cause anyone else pain, so I can let go and die satisfied as you did?”

For the first time the ghost spoke to him, and he heard Azélie Naquin’s gentle voice, as familiar as if he had only heard it yesterday, as if the preceding twenty years hadn’t happened. “You can’t. You can’t know, my dear son. No one can. Everything you do is a choice, and it affects every other choice you will make, every other possibility you have. No one can know if they chose correctly, because it is never given to us to see what might have happened had we chosen otherwise.”

“How can you bear it?” he shouted, his voice thick with tears.

“By knowing we all are in the same condition. You said yesterday that millions of other men and women and children have died, and if they could pass those gates, you could. Then you derided yourself for lying, but it wasn’t a lie.” She reached out one hand, and caressed his cheek with a touch light as a breath. “How many people are taken untimely by sickness or accident, who die without having prepared themselves, without making amends to the ones they’ve hurt and saying farewell to the ones they’ve loved? You and I, we’ve been given a great gift, to be aware that our time is limited, never to think we had forever to do what we wanted. Don’t doubt your choices. You did what you could. It is, in the end, all any of us can do.”

“I want to be brave.” He hitched a sob. “I want to be as brave as you were. To be able to face the Angel of Death and say, ‘I’m ready.’”

“You will. Whenever he comes for you, you will. Because you will know, the whole time, that I am right there next to you, my hand on your shoulder, even if you don’t see me or hear me.”

“I’m so frightened.”

She smiled, the moonlight glinting from her eyes, still barely visible as a shimmering outline in the dark air. “Anyone who can see how beautiful and terrible and complex and incomprehensible life is, and not be frightened, is a fool.”

There was silence for a time in the room.

“Sleep, my brave son. You will do what you need to, and do it with great courage. Do not doubt yourself. I never have.”

The image of Azélie Naquin vanished.

Leandre said, “Maman?” There was no response. He brought one arm up over his eyes, as if to block out the entire world, and wept like an orphaned child.

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If you're a student of early history, you should read Goldsworthy's book. It's fascinating -- and sobering -- to see how hard it is to maintain order in a society, and how easy it is to lose it.

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

Thursday, October 14, 2021

The least of these

A friend of mine quipped that Republicans are the party that believes your rights begin at conception and end at birth.

Yeah, I know, I know, "not all Republicans." But looking at the behavior of the GOP elected officials, it's hard not to come to that conclusion. Across the nation, they're known for eliminating programs to combat poverty, reducing jobless benefits, blocking mandates for life-saving vaccines, and cutting funding for education. But if you needed more proof of how anti-life this party has become, look no further than the removal from the Texas child welfare website of a page offering resources to LGBTQ youth, specifically ways to cope with discrimination and avoid self-harm.

The removal was due to pressure from former state Senator Don Huffines, currently campaigning for the GOP nomination for governor. As such, Huffines is doing his best to paint his opponent, current Governor Greg Abbott, as a closet liberal. "These are not Texas values, these are not Republican party values, but these are obviously Greg Abbott’s values, that’s why we need a change, that’s what my campaign’s about," Huffines said. "We aren’t surprised that state employees who are loyal to Greg Abbott had to scramble after we called their perverse actions out. I promised Texans I would get rid of that website, and I kept that promise."

This makes me so angry I'm actually feeling nauseated. LGBTQ youth face struggles that most cis-straight children never do. A survey this year by the Trevor Project found that 42% of LGBTQ teenagers have "seriously considered suicide." They are four times more likely to go through with it. "State agencies know that LGBTQ+ kids are overrepresented in foster care and they know they face truly staggering discrimination and abuse," said Ricardo Martinez, CEO of Equality Texas. "The state is responsible for these kids’ lives, yet it actively took away a resource for them when they are in crisis. What’s worse, this was done at the start of Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month."

The most horrifying part of all this -- and there's a lot to choose from -- is that most of the people who support Huffines and others like him are self-professed devout Christians, who follow a guy who said, "Then [God] will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.' They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?' He will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'"

Apparently what Jesus actually said was, "Whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me, as long as the least of these were also cis-straight-white-Christian-conservative Americans. The rest of y'all can go fuck yourselves."

I know it's unlikely Huffines will ever read this, and if he did, it's even less likely it'd make any difference. Huffines and his ilk revel in their reputations as callous, anti-humanitarian hardasses. As Adam Serwer said, "the cruelty is the point."

But I don't know how anyone who claims to follow a compassionate God isn't sickened by bullshit like this. So let me end with this: the Suicide Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. If you're considering harming yourself, reach out -- there are people who can help. You are not alone; a great many people have gone through this, and considered suicide, and understand where you are. (I'm one of them.)

It is also probably worthwhile getting the hell out of Texas as soon as you can.

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If you're a student of early history, you should read Goldsworthy's book. It's fascinating -- and sobering -- to see how hard it is to maintain order in a society, and how easy it is to lose it.

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

Wednesday, October 13, 2021

Requirisne cum illo cibum frixum?

I love trying foods from different cultures.

It's been one of the most enjoyable parts of traveling for me, and despite the fact that "it's a delicacy" may sound like it's synonymous with "this is a food we give to stupid tourists to see if they'll actually eat it," most of what I've tried has been delicious. I even loved durian, the notoriously stinky fruit from southeast Asia that food writer Richard Sterling famously described as smelling like "pig shit, turpentine, and onions, garnished with a gym sock." Despite its smell, I thought it tasted like a combination of raspberry yogurt and almond paste.

So I thought it was pretty cool that a food historian named Andrew Coletti has specialized in finding ancient documents recording recipes from centuries ago -- and recreating them in the kitchen.

Coletti has made dishes from medieval Europe, eleventh-century Persia, twelfth-century Morocco, thirteenth-century Egypt, fourteenth-century Spain, and fifteenth century Turkey. But now he's turned his attention to further back in time -- to the Roman Empire.

Using a fourth-century cookbook called Apicius, Coletti has tried to recreate what the Romans of the time liked to eat. Some of it is similar enough to what we typically serve; baked scrambled eggs with asparagus, a dessert like a sponge cake soaked in honey, a poppyseed cheesecake, and about a dozen recipes involving oysters, which the Romans adored. There are fried ground meat patties that sound a great deal like hamburgers.

And of course, if you have hamburgers, what else is necessary?

Fries, of course.

Turns out the ancient Romans ate something very much like fries with ketchup. They didn't have potatoes -- despite the association of potatoes with Ireland, the potato is a Western Hemisphere native and wasn't widely grown in Europe until the seventeenth century -- but they did have other starchy root vegetables, like parsnips. And fried slivered parsnips were served with oenogarum, a ketchup-like condiment made from red wine, fish sauce, black pepper, lovage (an herb similar to celery), and honey.

Parsnip fries with oenogarum (from Coletti's TikTok @PassTheFlamingo)

"This is probably my favorite ancient Roman recipe ever," Coletti said. "It fits right into a banquet of other Apicius recipes. But it would also fit in at a modern table."

So in Roman times, you might be asked, "Requirisne cum illo cibum frixum?" ("Do you want fries with that?") Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

If you were to time-travel back to ancient Rome, the oddest thing would probably be what they didn't have. Besides potatoes, such familiar culinary items as corn, tomatoes, squash, and green and red peppers were all introductions from the Western Hemisphere much later on (black pepper was used -- it was an exotic and expensive import -- and comes from an entirely different species of plant). The introductions went both ways, of course. Interestingly, given the "American as apple pie" cliché, apples are not native to North America, but were introduced by the French into Canada in the seventeenth century, and spread from there.

Anyhow, I find Coletti's work intriguing, and if you're on TikTok you should definitely follow him (@PassTheFlamingo). Given my fascination with the ancient world, I think I might try to create an authentic Roman dinner. I'd definitely like trying to make some oenogarum -- although I don't know where the hell I'll find lovage. Maybe if I boost the amount of red wine, no one will notice that I substituted celery.

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If you're a student of early history, you should read Goldsworthy's book. It's fascinating -- and sobering -- to see how hard it is to maintain order in a society, and how easy it is to lose it.

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

Tuesday, October 12, 2021

The mystery from Manu

So much of the damage we've done to the planet hasn't been deliberate destructiveness; it's been due to our carelessly stomping about the place. We've long had the attitude that resources will never run out, that we can get away with doing whatever we want with no consequences, that nature will rebound like it always does. There's little awareness of the absolute fragility of it all.

The "bull in a china shop" metaphor seems all too apt.

Of course, that mindset does require a good dollop of willful ignorance. Just two weeks ago, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service declared that 22 species in the US that were previously classified as critically endangered are now officially considered extinct. The most famous of them is the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, the largest woodpecker species native to North America, victim to habitat loss as the wetland forests where it lived were drained, the trees felled for lumber. A full nine of the 22 are bird species endemic to Hawaii, eight of them part of the unique group called Hawaiian honeycreepers that were decimated by the double whammy of habitat loss and susceptibility to avian malaria, carried by the introduced Asian tiger mosquito.

So to think "everything's just fine" you have to make a practice of not paying attention.

One of the problems is that in some of the most vulnerable places in the world, species are disappearing before they're even identified and studied. Take, for example, the species of tree native to the Amazon basin of Peru that was first seen by scientists in 1973 -- and that has just now been classified and named.

Robin Foster of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute was the one who noticed it, while walking in Manu National Park -- and despite a thorough knowledge of Amazonian flora, he couldn't figure out what it was. "When I first saw this little tree, while out on a forest trail leading from the field station, it was the fruit -- looking like an orange-colored Chinese lantern and juicy when ripe with several seeds -- that caught my attention," Foster said. "I didn't really think it was special, except for the fact that it had characteristics of plants in several different plant families, and didn't fall neatly into any family. Usually I can tell the family by a quick glance, but damned if I could place this one."

So Foster sent a branch of the plant to the Field Museum of Chicago, where it sat in the herbarium for almost fifty years. When DNA analysis became de rigueur for doing taxonomy, back in the 1990s, researchers tried extracting DNA from the dried leaves -- unsuccessfully. Then last year, scientist Patricia Álvarez-Loayza, who is part of the team that studies the ecosystem in Manu National Park, found a living specimen of the tree, and this time the DNA extraction worked.

Aenigmanu alvareziae

The results were a shock to botanists, because it showed beyond any question that the little tree belonged to an obscure tropical family called Picramniaceae, made up of 48 (now 49) species native to northern South America, Central America, and the Caribbean, but not common anywhere. "When my colleague Rick Ree sequenced it and told me what family it belonged to, I told him the sample must have been contaminated. I was like, no way, I just couldn't believe it," said Nancy Hensold of the Field Museum, part of the team that studied the plant and finally identified its affinities. "Looking closer at the structure of the tiny little flowers I realized, oh, it really has some similarities, but given its overall characters, nobody would have put it in that family."

The plant was christened Aenigmanu alvareziae -- the genus name means "mystery from Manu," while the species name honors Patricia Álvarez-Loayza, who found the living specimen that helped to place the species.

What strikes me about this whole story is how easily the branch of this little tree could have been forgotten in the herbarium, or the plant itself overlooked completely. The Amazon is a big place, large swaths of which are unexplored. While one odd plant species may not seem all that important, this does give us a sense of the extent to which we're blundering around damaging living ecosystems without even understanding them fully. "Plants are understudied in general," said Robin Foster, the first scientist who noticed Aenigmanu back in 1973. "Especially tropical forest plants. Especially Amazon plants. And especially plants in the upper Amazon. To understand the changes taking place in the tropics, to protect what remains, and to restore areas that have been wiped out, plants are the foundation for everything that lives there and the most important to study. Giving them unique names is the best way to organize information about them and call attention to them. A single rare species may not by itself be important to an ecosystem, but collectively they tell us what is going on out there."

Conservation isn't some kind of academic game, and rare species shouldn't just be of interest to the taxonomists. We need to understand on a visceral level that you can't pull threads out of the tapestry of life without the entire thing coming unraveled. Chief Seattle said it best, back in 1854: "The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the Earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family... Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."

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If you're a student of early history, you should read Goldsworthy's book. It's fascinating -- and sobering -- to see how hard it is to maintain order in a society, and how easy it is to lose it.

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