A new kind of thagomizer

When I was an undergraduate, I think one of the most startling things I learned was how few prehistoric animals we actually know about.

Like many kids, I grew up with books on dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, and I was captivated by the panoramic artistic recreations of the Cretaceous landscape, with lumbering triceratops and T. rexes, and pterodactyloids gliding overhead (and always, for some reason, with a smoldering volcano in the background).  It was my evolutionary biology professor who blew all this away.

Fossilization, he said, is ridiculously rare.  It takes a significant series of very unlikely events to result in a fossil at all, much less one that could last 66-plus million years.  The deceased organism has to land in, or be covered by, sediments; it can't be eaten up or otherwise destroyed by animals.  The sediments it's encased in have to be undisturbed long enough to harden into rock, then that rock has to avoid erosion and the other geological processes that eventually degrade most of the rocks the Earth produces.

Then, that surviving fossil-bearing rock has to be found by scientists.

So we're basing our picture of prehistoric landscapes upon a random sampling of a very small number of species.  It is, my professor said, like someone tried to put together a picture of the modern landscape using only the remains of a mouse, a maple tree, a deer, a sparrow, a bullfrog, and a great white shark.

The situation may not be quite that bleak, but it's not far off.  For every one pre-Cretaceous-extinction organism we know about, there are likely to be ninety-nine we have no record of.  Which is why even after a couple of hundred years of serious fossil-chasing, we still have surprises awaiting.

Take, for example, the discovery of a fossil in Chile that was so weird that for a while, paleontologists had reconstructed it as an entirely different animal.  It was a tail that had sharp plates on either side -- clearly some kind of defensive weapon.  The plates put the researchers in mind of the stegosaurus:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons DataBase Center for Life Science (DBCLS), 202009 Stegosaurus stenops, CC BY 4.0]

The spiky tail of the stegosaurus is called the thagomizer -- which came, I kid you not, from Gary Larson's iconic The Far Side, specifically the one with some cave men looking at a diagram of a stegosaurus.  One of them is pointing to the tail, and says, "And this is called the thagomizer, after the late Thag Simmons."  The name stuck, and the thagomizer it's been ever since.

Well, when the paleontologists looked at the new fossil, they realized that the thagomizer on this puppy was in a class by itself.  This thing could have chopped a T. rex off at the knees.  But further analysis of the rest of the skeleton showed that it wasn't a stegosaurus relative at all; it was a type of ankylosaur, a group of tank-like dinosaurs, most of which had tails ending in clubs (formidable enough weapons in and of themselves).

"It's a really unusual weapon," said Alex Vargas, of the University of Chile, who co-authored the paper on the find this week in Nature.  "Books on prehistoric animals for kids need to update and put this weird tail in there. ... It just looks crazy."

The new species was christened Stegouros elengassen.  Here's an artist's reconstruction:

[Illustration by Luis Perez Lopez]

The fossil has been dated to about seventy-five million years ago, so less than ten million years before the Chicxulub Meteorite collision ended the non-avian dinosaurs' hegemony.  And the weirdest thing about it is that it's nowhere near any of the ankylosaurs we know about; most of that group were from western North America, which at the time was separated from what is now South America by a large swath of ocean.  There's some speculation that this might be a species that had relatives in Antarctica, which was much closer, but that continent is so poorly explored no one can be certain.  In any case, it once again highlights how little we actually know about prehistoric flora and fauna.

It gets me thinking about what surprises we'd have in store if we were to go back in time to see what the Cretaceous landscape really looked like.  Not only would we be shocked at the colors and body coverings (hair, fur, feathers, etc.), which rarely ever fossilize, but there would be a stunning diversity of plants and animals that we had no idea about.  And not to end on an elegiac note, but consider what that says about our current biodiversity -- what's lost is truly lost forever, most of it lost so completely our distant descendants a million years hence (assuming there are any) would never have an inkling that it had ever existed.

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As I've mentioned before, I love a good mystery, which is why I'm drawn to periods of history where the records are skimpy and our certainty about what actually happened is tentative at best.  Of course, the most obvious example of this is our prehistory; prior to the spread of written language, something like five thousand years ago, most of what we have to go by is fossils and the remnants of human settlements.

Still, we can make some fascinating inferences about our distant ancestors.  In Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, by Richard Rudgely, we find out about some of the more controversial ones -- that there are still traces in modern languages of the original language spoken by the earliest humans (Rudgely calls it "proto-Nostratic"), that the advent of farming and domestication of livestock actually had the effect of shortening our average healthy life span, and that the Stone Age civilizations were far more advanced than our image of "Cave Men" suggests, and had a sophisticated ability to make art, understand science, and treat illness.

None of this relies on any wild imaginings of the sort that are the specialty of Erich von Däniken, Zecharia Sitchin, and Giorgio Tsoukalos; and Rudgely is up front with what is speculative at this point, and what is still flat-out unknown.  His writing is based in archaeological hard evidence, and his conclusions about Paleolithic society are downright fascinating.

If you're curious about what it was like in our distant past, check out Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age!

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

Identity politics

Did you hear the quote from Senator Brad Zaun, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee for the Iowa State Senate, a few days ago?

There are those homosexuals who take the view: what I do is my business, a purely private matter.  However, all things which take place in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual, but signify the life and death of the nation... in each case, these people [should] naturally be publicly degraded, expelled, and handed over to the courts.

Oh, wait, my bad.  That wasn't Zaun, that was Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS under Adolf Hitler.  Here's what Zaun actually said, which is much in the same spirit:

I can tell you, if this material [about LGBTQ issues] was in my school, I’d be going to law enforcement.  I would be asking for a criminal investigation. I would be asking for every single teacher who disseminated that information to be held criminally responsible.  If we need to, as the state of Iowa, provide deeper clarity when it comes to that and enhance those penalties, I will do that...  My warning to all the teachers and the administrators is you’re going to be in jail.  Because this is distributing pornography.  And I will work my tail end off and it will become law.

Zaun, with the support of the President of the Iowa Senate Jake Chapman, wants to make it a felony for teachers to use LGBTQ-positive materials in their classrooms.  Even presenting same-sex relationships in a positive light, according to Zaun and Chapman, is "obscene" and should be punishable by being fired from the school, prosecuted, and jailed.

They're not alone.  A month and a half ago North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson came under fire for saying, "There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth."  Deborah Martell, a prominent member of the Massachusetts Republican State Committee, told a gay congressional candidate that she was "sickened" that he and his husband had adopted children together; Jim Lyons, the chair of the committee, was called upon to demand her resignation or at least an apology, but responded with a shoulder shrug, saying "not everybody views the world through the same lens."  South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said that he would go as far as invoking the filibuster to defeat the Equality Act, which would extend civil rights protections to LGBTQ people -- despite the fact that polls show it's supported by 70% of Americans.  Texas gubernatorial candidate Don Huffines, who is challenging incumbent Greg Abbott for the Republican nomination in 2022, said, "They’re talking about helping empower and celebrate lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, non-heterosexual behavior.  I mean really?  This is Texas.  These are not Texas values.  These are not Republican Party values, but these are obviously Greg Abbott’s values."

It's horrifying how much weight these attitudes still have in the United States.  In the last-mentioned case, instead of repudiating Huffines's repellant views, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services responded by removing a webpage with resources for LGBTQ youth from their website.  Patrick Crimmins, spokesperson for the DFPS, said it was for "content review," and wouldn't elaborate, but reporters uncovered an exchange between Crimmins and Maria Gonzales, the DFPS's media relations director, that started thirteen minutes after Huffines's remarks became public.  Gonzales's email had the subject line, "Don Huffines video accusing Gov/DFPS of liberal transgender agenda," along with the message, "FYI -- this is blowing up on Twitter."  Crimmins responded by contacting Darrell Azar, the DFPS's web and creative services director, recommending removing the page.

Under an hour later, it was gone.

And so forth and so on.

Okay, let's just clarify a couple of things.

First, you're not going to change a straight kid's sexual orientation by telling him/her about LGBTQ relationships.  To hear those people talk, all you have to do is say to a 100% straight teenage boy, "Did you know there are men who are attracted to other men?" and the boy will say, "My goodness, I never realized that!  I think I'll go out and have sex with a guy right now!"  This, of course, goes back to the thoroughly-debunked claim that sexual orientation is a choice.  Which brings up the awkward question of when the straight people sat down, weighed the options, and decided to be attracted to the opposite sex.

Secondly, no one is recommending putting age-inappropriate materials into public school classrooms, and that's not just for reasons of sexual content.  If you think a specific book is age-inappropriate for the grade in which it's being used, we can discuss that.  But that's not what these people are saying.  They're targeting LGBTQ material in particular; the message is that books presenting LGBTQ relationships in a positive light are never age-appropriate, and that all mention of LGBTQ issues should be expunged from public schools.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

If I sound bitter about this, it's because I am.  I grew up in a time and place where the only mention of queerness was (1) by other students, and (2) as an epithet.  Although several came out after graduation -- some of them, like myself, long after graduation -- there was not a single LGBTQ kid in my graduating class who was out at the time.  The atmosphere was one of shame and fear -- desperation that no one could find out, denial of one's own identity, self-loathing, hopelessness of ever being able to admit who we were or having an authentic relationship.  By eliminating LGBTQ materials from school curricula, you're not making everyone straight; you're taking the queer kids and making them feel like an aberration.

Which, of course, is how these people view us, even if few of them say it as explicitly as Don Huffines did. 

It may seem like a cheap shot that I started this post with a quote from Himmler, but when you have elected officials calling LGBTQ people "filth" and recommending making the teaching of LGBTQ issues a felony, how is it so different?  My recommendation to people like Zaun and Chapman is, if you don't want to be compared to a Nazi, then stop acting like one.

These views thrive in darkness; they grow when the people who know about them stay silent.  We have to stand up against the bigots and homophobes -- not just once, but every damn time.  Let's show that we aren't going to live up to the quote, incorrectly attributed to Werner Herzog (in fact, its origins are unknown): "America, you are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that one-third of your people would cheerfully kill another one-third, while the remaining one-third stands and watches and does nothing."

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As I've mentioned before, I love a good mystery, which is why I'm drawn to periods of history where the records are skimpy and our certainty about what actually happened is tentative at best.  Of course, the most obvious example of this is our prehistory; prior to the spread of written language, something like five thousand years ago, most of what we have to go by is fossils and the remnants of human settlements.

Still, we can make some fascinating inferences about our distant ancestors.  In Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, by Richard Rudgely, we find out about some of the more controversial ones -- that there are still traces in modern languages of the original language spoken by the earliest humans (Rudgely calls it "proto-Nostratic"), that the advent of farming and domestication of livestock actually had the effect of shortening our average healthy life span, and that the Stone Age civilizations were far more advanced than our image of "Cave Men" suggests, and had a sophisticated ability to make art, understand science, and treat illness.

None of this relies on any wild imaginings of the sort that are the specialty of Erich von Däniken, Zecharia Sitchin, and Giorgio Tsoukalos; and Rudgely is up front with what is speculative at this point, and what is still flat-out unknown.  His writing is based in archaeological hard evidence, and his conclusions about Paleolithic society are downright fascinating.

If you're curious about what it was like in our distant past, check out Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age!

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

Science vs. common sense

A regular reader of my blog commented to me, rather offhand, "To read your posts, you sound awfully sure of yourself.  A little arrogant, even."

I'll leave the last part to wiser heads than mine to answer; I may well have an arrogant streak, and in fact I've remarked more than once that to have a blog at all implies a bit of arrogance -- you have to believe, on some level, that what you think and write will be interesting to enough people to make it worth doing.  But I'd like to leave my own personality flaws aside for a moment, and take a look at the first part of the statement, which is saying something quite different, I think.

In saying that I sound "sure of myself," the fellow who made the comment was saying, so far as I can tell, that I sound like I've got all the answers; that my pronouncements on ghosts and faces on grilled cheese sandwiches and Bigfoot, and -- on a more serious level -- science, ethics, politics, philosophy, and religion, are somehow final pronouncements of fact.  I come across, apparently, as if I'm the last word on the subject, that I've said fiat lux in a booming voice, and now all is light.

Let There Be Light by Shigeru Aoki (1906) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Nothing could be further from the truth, both in fact and in my own estimation.

It's because I have so little certainty in my own senses and my brain's interpretation of them that I have a great deal of trust in science.  I am actually uncertain about most everything, because I'm constantly aware about how easily tricked the human brain is, and how often our "common sense" is wrong.  Here are five examples of just how counter-intuitive nature is -- how easily we'd be misled if it weren't for the tools of science.  I'll present you with some explanations of commonly-observed events -- see if you can tell me which are true and which are false based upon your own observations.

1. Homing pigeons, which can find their way home from amazing distances, are navigating using visual cues such as the positions of the sun, stars, and topographic landmarks.
2. Herding behavior in collies and other sheepdogs is learned very young; herding-breed puppies reared by non-herding breed mothers (e.g. a collie puppy raised by a black lab mother) never learn to herd.
3. A marksman shoots a gun horizontally over a level field, and simultaneously drops a bullet from the same height as the gun barrel. The dropped bullet will hit the ground before the shot bullet because it has far less distance to cover.
4. Flowering plants are temperature-sensitive, and spring-flowering plants like daffodils and tulips recognize the coming of spring (and therefore time to make flowers) when the earth warms up as the days lengthen.
5. Time passes at the same rate for everyone; time is the one universal constant.  No matter where you are in the universe, no matter what you're doing, everyone's clock ticks at exactly the same rate.

Ready for the answers?

All of them are false.

1. Homing pigeons are remarkably insensitive to visual cues.  An experiment, conducted at Cornell University, showed that pigeons' tiny little brains allow them to navigate by picking up the magnetic field of the earth -- i.e., they have internal magnetic compasses.  This ability, called magnetoreception, is shared with a handful of other species (including various turtles, salamanders, fish, bees, and at least one group of motile bacteria).
2. Herding behavior in collies is entirely genetic, not learned (although they refine the skill with training).  Most amazingly, researchers have actually identified the genetic pathways that are responsible for the behavior.  A dog with defects in one or more of those pathways can't learn to herd.  Scientists are still trying to figure out how one set of genes can control a complex behavior like herding ability.  This sheds some interesting light on the nature-vs.-nurture question, though, doesn't it?
3. In this classic thought experiment, the two bullets hit the ground at precisely the same moment.  Vertical velocity and horizontal velocity are entirely independent of each other; the fact that the one bullet is moving very quickly in a horizontal direction, and the other isn't, is completely irrelevant.
4. Temperature has very little to do with the timing of flowering, although a prolonged period of cold can slow down early-flowering plants some.  It used to be thought that flowering plants were timing their flowering cycles based on relative day length, and whether day length was increasing or decreasing; this response (called photoperiodism) clearly has something to do with it, but the mechanism controlling it is still poorly understood.
5. The General Theory of Relativity, which has been experimentally confirmed countless ways, actually says exactly the opposite of this.  What it does say is that the speed of light is constant in all frames of reference, and this has, as one of its bizarre outcomes, that time is completely relative.  Not only might your clock be ticking at a different rate than mine, depending on our relative motion, but events that look simultaneous to you might look sequential to me.  No wonder Einstein won the Nobel, eh?

All of this is just to indicate that our intuition, our "common sense," and even our sensory information, can sometimes be very misleading.  Science is our only way out of this mess; it has proven itself, time and again, to be the very best tool we have for not falling into error because of the natural mistakes made by our brains, the fallacy of wishful thinking and confirmation bias, and being suckered by charlatans and frauds.

A charge levied against science by some people is that it changes; the "truths" of one generation may be different from those of the next.  (I call this the "They Used to Believe the Earth Was Flat" argument.)  Myself, I find this a virtue, not a flaw.  Science, by its nature, self-corrects.  Isn't it better to put your trust in a world view that has the capacity to fix its own errors, rather than one which promises eternal truths, and therefore doesn't change regardless of the discovery of contrary evidence?

I realize that this line of reasoning approaches some very controversial thin ice for many people, and I've no intent to skate any nearer to the edge.  My own views on the subject are undoubtedly abundantly clear.  I firmly believe that everyone buys into the world view that makes the best sense of his/her world, and it would be arrogant for me to tell another person to change -- the most I can do is to present my own understanding, and hope that it will sell itself on its own merits.  And for me, the scientific model may not be perfect, but given the other options, it's the best thing the market has to offer.

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

As I've mentioned before, I love a good mystery, which is why I'm drawn to periods of history where the records are skimpy and our certainty about what actually happened is tentative at best.  Of course, the most obvious example of this is our prehistory; prior to the spread of written language, something like five thousand years ago, most of what we have to go by is fossils and the remnants of human settlements.

Still, we can make some fascinating inferences about our distant ancestors.  In Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, by Richard Rudgely, we find out about some of the more controversial ones -- that there are still traces in modern languages of the original language spoken by the earliest humans (Rudgely calls it "proto-Nostratic"), that the advent of farming and domestication of livestock actually had the effect of shortening our average healthy life span, and that the Stone Age civilizations were far more advanced than our image of "Cave Men" suggests, and had a sophisticated ability to make art, understand science, and treat illness.

None of this relies on any wild imaginings of the sort that are the specialty of Erich von Däniken, Zecharia Sitchin, and Giorgio Tsoukalos; and Rudgely is up front with what is speculative at this point, and what is still flat-out unknown.  His writing is based in archaeological hard evidence, and his conclusions about Paleolithic society are downright fascinating.

If you're curious about what it was like in our distant past, check out Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age!

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

Paleolithic pendant

Our desire to adorn our bodies goes back a very long way.

Decorative clothing, above and beyond any necessity for warmth; cosmetics and hair dyes; more-or-less permanent features like piercings and tattoos; removable bits like jewelry.  The reasons for these probably are as many and varied as the adornments themselves -- self-expression, attractiveness to potential lovers, shows of dominance or wealth, and ritualistic or magical significance probably are four of the more common ones.  But for whatever the reason, I know of no other species that so deliberately and routinely alters their appearance.

The reason the topic comes up is the recent discovery of a 41,500-year-old decorated pendant made of mammoth ivory in Stajnia Cave, a natural rock formation in southern Poland.  The piece is fascinating right from the get-go when you find out that the scientists believe it was fashioned and decorated soon after the unfortunate mammoth's death, so we're talking about humans living in close proximity to one of the most iconic prehistoric mammals.  "An old mammoth tusk would have been unworkable for shaping the Stajnia ornament and carving the punctate motif," said Sahra Talamo of the University of Bologna, who co-authored a paper on the find that was published in Nature this week.  He added that the damp climate of southern Poland at the time made bones and ivory degrade quickly, so it must have been from a recently-deceased animal.

The pendant is oval-shaped, with a large hole (possibly for suspending it on a string so it could be worn) and a series of smaller dots.  Here's a photograph of it:

[Image by Antonino Vazzana]

Also found at the site was an awl made from a horse bone -- possibly the tool used to drill the holes in the ivory pendant.

"Whoever made the artifacts from Stajnia clearly had language, and the nature of the artifacts themselves give us a fascinating insight into what the makers may have valued, and their world," said Laura Basell, of the the University of Leicester.  "It is reasonable to suggest that horses and mammoths were really important in their lives and these objects have meaning on multiple levels."

Well, maybe.  It's kind of thin ice to draw too many inferences about a culture based upon one artifact, or even a bunch of them.  I'm reminded of Horace Mitchell Miner's scathing satire on anthropological papers called "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," published in 1956, which looks at American culture ("Nacirema," of course, is "American" backwards) solely by drawing inferences upon our artifacts and a slim set of observations of our behaviors.  Here's a passage about what anthropologists might make of our medicine cabinets:

The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the wall.  In this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without which no native believes he could live.  These preparations are secured from a variety of specialized practitioners.  The most powerful of these are the medicine men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts.  However, the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their clients, but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret language.  This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.

The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed in the charmbox of the household shrine.  As these magical materials are specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing.  The magical packets are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again.  While the natives are very vague on this point, we can only assume that the idea in retaining all the old magical materials is that their presence in the charm-box, before which the body rituals are conducted, will in some way protect the worshiper.

Beneath the charm-box is a small font.  Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution.  The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.

So the ivory pendant might be jewelry, or might have served some other unknown purpose.  Almost 42 millennia later, it's a little difficult to be certain.

Be that as it may, it's an amazing find.  And if it is jewelry, it shows this drive for adornment goes back a long way.  Myself, I've never been a big jewelry-wearer; mostly I just wear my wedding ring.  As far as clothing goes, I have a fashion sense that frequently makes my wife wonder if I know how to use an iron, or possibly even look in a mirror.  I make up for it, however, with some large and complex tattoos, which I've written about here before (the linked post has pics, if you're curious).  So I guess I'm no stranger to the decorative urge myself.

In any case, it's mind-boggling to think about what life must have been like back then, squarely in the middle of the Last Glacial Period, when the people in central Europe co-existed with mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, and cave lions.  Despite the harshness of the climate and the dangers of running afoul of one of these big critters, they took the time to carve up and decorate mammoth ivory -- which shows that whatever the purpose, they weren't so different from us today.

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It's astonishing to see what the universe looks like on scales different from those we're used to.  The images of galaxies and quasars and (more recently) black holes are nothing short of awe-inspiring.  However, the microscopic realm is equally breathtaking -- which you'll find out as soon as you open the new book Micro Life: Miracles of the Microscopic World.

Assembled by a team at DK Publishers and the Smithsonian Institution, Micro Life is a compendium of photographs and artwork depicting the world of the very small, from single-celled organisms to individual fungus spores to nerve cells to the facets of a butterfly's eye.  Leafing through it generates a sense of wonder at the complexity of the microscopic, and its incredible beauty.  If you are a biology enthusiast -- or are looking for a gift for a friend who is -- this lovely book is a sure-fire winner.  You'll never look the same way at dust, pollen, algae, and a myriad of other things from the natural world that you thought you knew.

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

Frames of Reference

For this week's Fiction Friday: a short story I wrote a while back about not judging a book by its cover, even if the cover is kind of ugly.

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The day Tommy Schallenberger met the orc started out normally enough. 

It was during the soft midsection of summer vacation, some indeterminate date in the middle of July, the time when twelve-year-old boys ignore even the day of the week into non-existence. It was long enough after the end of school that the frantic desperation to cling to every moment had passed, and not yet near enough to the beginning of the next school year that a new, and altogether different kind, of frantic desperation had begun.

Tommy was splashing his way down the creek bed, clad only in a disreputable pair of cargo shorts, his brown hair streaked with sun-faded gold and his shoulders and cheeks bronzed and freckled. There was nothing purposeful about what he was doing. If an adventure presented itself, that was fine. If not, he could pass an agreeable afternoon doing nothing but exploring the creek and trying to catch frogs.

He jumped down from a flat rock by a shallow waterfall onto a projecting shelf lower down, and almost lost his footing, but with that preternatural grace that some pre-adolescent boys have, he regained his balance after teetering for a moment on the ball of one foot. There was a rustle in the bushes, off to the side and downstream, but Tommy paid it little heed. Deer were common and unafraid, and if it wasn’t a deer, the other possibilities didn’t seem all that alarming. The last black bear seen near Tommy’s house had been ten years ago, and for a boy who had been raised on Bear in the Big Blue House, even that thought seemed more intriguing than frightening.

Tommy jumped from the shelf down to the lower creek bed, where the water recommenced flowing after bubbling for a bit in an oval pool. He miscalculated the depth of the pool, however, and found himself suddenly immersed up to the waist in remarkably cold water. Reflexively, he tried to scramble out, and his natural sense of balance failed him. His bare feet slipped on the algae-coated surface of the rock, and arms flailing, he fell over backwards.

Tommy was a good swimmer, and the water wasn’t that deep. so there was never any real danger. But he inhaled a big gulp of water, and came up gagging and coughing, and as a result slipped again and went back under. And that was when a strong hand grabbed him by the wrist, and lifted him bodily out of the pool, to hang there like a caught fish, dripping and sneezing and spitting out creek water.

Tommy looked at his rescuer. A shriek rose from his gut, got caught halfway, and came out as a thin whine.

A thick-set, broad body, arms far too long and legs too short to seem human, was surmounted by a nearly spherical head of such amazing ugliness that Tommy immediately wondered if he’d drowned in the pool and been summarily sent to hell. The eyes were small and piglike, the hair scanty but coarse. The ears were long and pointed, and stuck out from the side of its head like wings. Like Tommy it was only clad from the waist down, and its skin was a rather alarming gray-green. The creature’s mouth was impossibly wide, and pulled into either a grimace or a smile—it was hard to tell which it was. 

Tommy coughed again, and tried to yell for help, but his vocal chords were still in open rebellion, and it came out as a faint “Eeep.”

[Image of an orc has been released by the artist, Mathias Panzenböck, into the Public Domain]

“If that was an attempt to call for help,” the creature said, in a remarkably cultured voice, “what the hell do you think I’m currently giving you?”

“What are you?” Tommy said, finally mastering his own voice enough at least to form words.

“What do I look like, a garden gnome?” the creature said, the irritation clear in its voice. “I’m an orc.”

“Orcs aren’t real.” Tommy tried to make his voice sound braver than he felt.

“Oh, yeah?” The orc swung Tommy effortlessly up onto dry land, and set him down. “Tell that to my parents, siblings, cousins, and so forth.”

“There are more of you?” Tommy massaged his shoulder.

The orc rolled its eyes. “Kid, do you know where babies come from?”

Tommy scowled and drew himself up, trying to look taller than his five-foot-two. “Of course I do.”

It shrugged. “Well, then?”

“Yeah, okay,” Tommy admitted. He looked more closely at the creature. “You’re not planning on killing me and eating me, are you?”

The orc sighed. “You humans and your propaganda. Why would I have rescued you if that was my plan? Wouldn’t it be easier to let you drown, and then eat you afterwards? Why rescue you, and then chase around a live boy and try to kill him?”

Tommy looked defiant. “Maybe you just like to make your victims suffer.”

The orc made a little “pfft” sound. “Bloody nonsense."

“Well, in The Lord of the Rings…” Tommy began.

“Oh, don’t get me started. Tolkien kind of sucked as a historian, frankly.”

Tommy goggled. “The Lord of the Rings is history?”

The orc regarded him for a moment, raising one eyebrow. “You think he made all that stuff up? Like, invented languages and so on? Get real.”

Tommy stared at the orc, tried to think of something to say in response, and failed completely.

“Well, of course,” the orc said, his voice thoughtful, “history is written by the victors, and all that sort of thing. It’s not like he was exactly biased to present us orcs in a positive light.”

“He said you liked to kill humans and elves and dwarves just for fun.”

“Yeah, like the dwarves and elves were innocent.” The orc's voice sounded bitter. “You know what happened when the dwarves got back to Moria? From the way Tolkien talked, the dwarves were helpless victims. What a crock. You know what the first thing they did was? Just guess.”

“Killed some orcs?” Tommy ventured.

“Of course!” shouted the orc. “What else? It was all, ‘Khazad-dûm belongs to the dwarves!’ in spite of the fact that they hadn’t lived there for hundreds of years, and they proceeded to run up toward a few orcs who were in the entry hall, and chop them into dog food. I ask you, does this sound fair?”

“Not really,” Tommy admitted. “But look. Some of the orcs did bad things. Like the ones that captured Merry and Pippin. And that big ugly dude who shot the arrows into Boromir.”

“Fair enough. There are orcs that aren’t very nice. Are all humans nice?”

“I guess not.”

“So, if I wrote a book, and picked out a few—Adolf Hitler, let’s say, and Stalin, and Genghis Khan, and so as not to appear sexist, Marjorie Taylor Greene—and used that to argue that humanity was the filthy spawn of mud and evil, you’d think that was unfair, wouldn’t you?”

“I suppose.”

“You know what that’s called? That’s called an overgeneralization. Do you know what an overgeneralization is?”

“I do now,” Tommy said.

“You know, I sometimes wonder if human schools ever teach critical thinking.” The orc paused. “Anyhow. Tolkien took the orcs that sided with Sauron and Saruman, and decided from them that all of the orcs were evil. Hardly fair, I’d call it. All of these other orcs, ordinary orcs, are at home minding their business, raising their kids, and just wanting to be left alone, and along comes Tolkien and basically says that the only good orc is a dead orc.” He paused, and looked a little sad. “No wonder there’s so few of us left.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“It never occurred to you to ask the question of how an entire species could be evil?”

“Well, no,” Tommy admitted. “But now that I’ve met you, I can see that I should probably think more about it.”

“You’re not just saying that because you’re scared I’ll eat you?”

Tommy’s brown eyes met the orc’s small gray ones. “I’m not scared of you any more.”

The orc gave Tommy a speculative look. “You seem like you’re all right, kid. What’s your name?”

“Tommy. Tommy Schallenberger.” 

“Mine’s Globnorg.” The orc reached out a huge, rough hand, and briefly engulfed Tommy’s small one.

“Globnorg?” Tommy asked incredulously.

Globnorg scowled. “Yeah, that’s another thing. Tolkien made it sound like just because our language doesn’t sound as nice as Elvish, that means we’re the bad guys.”

“Well, you have to admit it doesn’t sound very pretty.”

“Huh.” Globnorg snorted. “Ever listen to German? It’s not exactly the language of love.”

Tommy didn’t say anything. His grandparents spoke German, mostly when they didn’t want him to understand what they were saying, and he had to admit they always sounded like they were arguing, even when they probably weren’t.

“Listen,” Globnorg said. “Elvish may sound all soft and silky, but that doesn’t mean much. I can tell you that their arrows aren’t soft and silky, they’re hard and pointy, and some of those Elves are serious badasses.”

“Legolas sure seemed to be, in the movie.”

“Legolas.” Globnorg gave a dismissive gesture with one huge, craggy hand. “Since when do Hollywood and reality have to be the same? Upper-class privileged pretty-boy rich kid snot, that’s what Legolas was. So far as I’ve heard, anyway. I never met him, though, it was a long time ago.”

“You’ve seen the movie?”

“Of course. We may be orcs, but we’re not backwards. We’ve got culture. But we’re smart about it. We’ve borrowed the nice things from you humans—movie streaming, computers, microwave ovens, cellphones. We avoided the traffic jams, nine-to-five jobs, and spam emails. And we’re not screwing up the environment like you humans, either. I just finished installing solar panels in front of my cave.”

“That’s cool,” Tommy said. His science teacher from fifth grade, Mrs. Wilkinson, had been very much in favor of solar panels, and he’d thought Mrs. Wilkinson was awesome. Anyone who agreed with Mrs. Wilkinson couldn’t be all bad.

“All it amounts to,” Globnorg said, “is your frame of reference. If all you hear all the time is orcs are bad, orcs are evil, orcs will kill you, then every little thing you hear about us afterwards—every time some misguided orc teenager knocks over a convenience store—it becomes evidence to support what you’d already decided is true. It’s another critical thinking thing—this one’s called confirmation bias. Ever heard of that?”

“I have now,” Tommy said again.

“Well, good. So you read Tolkien’s slanted, biased take on our culture, and you make your mind up, and after that everything that happens just makes your opinion set deeper into cement. That’s why you expected me to eat you.”

“Well…” Tommy paused. “There’s also the way you look.”

The orc grinned, exposing way more teeth than Tommy thought possible. “Judging by appearances. You’re a veritable textbook of logical fallacies, you are.”

“That one, I knew about already,” Tommy said meekly. “Sorry about that.”

“No harm done.” The orc shrugged. “It’s not like it doesn’t happen all the time. Anyhow, I’ve used up enough of your afternoon, talking philosophy. You probably want to get back to whatever you were doing.”

“I wasn’t doing anything,” Tommy said. “I was just walking.”

“Nothing wrong with that. Actually, that’s something my people could have used some reminding about, way back in the day. When did they get in trouble? When they let Sauron and Saruman talk them into these type-A personality Great Big Important Plans, and somehow convinced them that just being wasn’t enough, that they had to somehow Do Something Grand. Look what happened. Lot of good that did us, in the long run.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“Anyhow, Tommy, nice to meet you. Oh, and one quick request—you may not want to mention to your family about meeting me here. Not meaning to cast aspersions on your relatives, but these things have been known to end badly. Packs of dogs, people with torches, shotguns, and so forth. Ugly on all sides.”

“Don’t worry,” Tommy said. “I don’t think they’d believe me, anyhow.”

“Oh, okay, well, then. That’s all right.”

Tommy turned and walked a few feet away, then turned and looked back at Globnorg, half expecting that he’d be gone. He wasn’t. He raised one lumpy gray hand, and wiggled his fingers briefly in farewell. Tommy waved back.

“Watch your step on the rocks,” the orc shouted at him. “They’re slippery.” And just as he passed out of earshot, Tommy heard the orc say to himself, “Humans. Actually, they’re kind of cute when they’re little. In an ugly sort of way.”

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

It's astonishing to see what the universe looks like on scales different from those we're used to.  The images of galaxies and quasars and (more recently) black holes are nothing short of awe-inspiring.  However, the microscopic realm is equally breathtaking -- which you'll find out as soon as you open the new book Micro Life: Miracles of the Microscopic World.

Assembled by a team at DK Publishers and the Smithsonian Institution, Micro Life is a compendium of photographs and artwork depicting the world of the very small, from single-celled organisms to individual fungus spores to nerve cells to the facets of a butterfly's eye.  Leafing through it generates a sense of wonder at the complexity of the microscopic, and its incredible beauty.  If you are a biology enthusiast -- or are looking for a gift for a friend who is -- this lovely book is a sure-fire winner.  You'll never look the same way at dust, pollen, algae, and a myriad of other things from the natural world that you thought you knew.

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

The moth and the flower

Ever heard of an evolutionary arms race?

It's a twist on coevolution, where the adaptations in one species affect the selection -- and therefore the evolution -- of another, unrelated species.  In arms races, as the name implies, it's specifically about biological weaponry, either for predation or for self-defense.  Finding lunch, or avoiding being lunch.  The most commonly-cited example of an arms race is speed and maneuverability in the cheetah and the impala.  The fastest cheetahs take down and eat the slowest impalas; the fastest impalas escape, and the slowest cheetahs starve.  (That's an oversimplification, but it'll do for now.)  The upshot is that over time, both the cheetah and the impala evolve the ability to run faster.  The most common outcome of arms races is that it continues until one of the species kind of maxes out on how far it can take the adaptation.  The cheetah might well be at that point; it's hard to imagine how they could be any faster without the strain on the joints, tendons, and muscles causing serious injury.

The odd thing about an arms race, though, is that sometimes it can backfire on one of the participants.  A relationship like this was the subject of a paper last week in the journal Alpine Entomology, which looked at a beautiful -- but highly poisonous -- plant, the alpine rose.

The alpine rose isn't a rose at all; it's a species of rhododendron (Rhododendron ferrugineum) that lives in a habitat not much else can tolerate.  It thrives only in rocky, acidic soils, just above the tree line in the Alps, Jura, Pyrenees, and Apennines.  Besides the obvious difficulties of living in a cold, windswept place, there's the issue that in such barren areas, any animals are going to find survival as tough as the plants do, so the local herbivores are going to eat pretty much anything green.  The alpine rose has responded by evolving a nasty cocktail of toxins, including the glycoside arbutin and the alkaloid arecoline, so even the hungriest of plant-eaters leave it alone.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons MurielBendel, Rhododendron ferrugineum Valais4, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Well, most plant-eaters.  The current paper is about the discovery of a population of moths that have evolved to specialize on this plant.  It's the danger of an arms race; if one of the participants can exploit the adaptations of the other, it can actually end up better off.  Here, the moth has evolved tolerance to the alpine rose's toxins, and the result is it has a food source essentially to itself, with no competition.

The more the researchers looked into it, the more interesting the story got.  Not only had these moths evolved to specialize on eating alpine rose leaves, upon undergoing genetic analysis, they were shown to be conspecific with the species Lyonetia ledi, the Ledum leaf-miner moth.  This is a widespread species of moth that feeds mostly on the leaves of Labrador tea (Ledum palustre) and bog myrtle (Myrica gale).  This, however, left two puzzles: (1) most Ledum leaf-miners won't eat alpine rose; and (2) the nearest population of Ledum leaf-miners is over four hundred kilometers away.

What seems to have happened is that the moth, which feeds on plants that live in boggy areas at high altitude, was once more common -- during the last glacial period, when the favorable habitat was pretty much everywhere in Europe that wasn't actually covered in ice.  Then as things warmed up, the valleys became too warm for its host plants, and the range of both the plants and the moths moved upward in altitude, and broke up into patches.  One of them got isolated in the mountains of western Europe, where the alpine rose was way more common than either of the usual host plants for the species.  This created enormous selective pressure; as soon as there were moths that could at least tolerate the alpine rose's toxins, they were at such an advantage that they outcompeted their cousins and more or less took over.  Over time, this preference for alpine rose became a requirement.  Now, the moth feeds only on alpine rose -- something no other insect species can manage.

So that's today's cool science story; a poisonous flower and a relict population of moths stranded in the high mountains after the last glaciation.  Once again illustrating what Darwin meant by saying that evolution had created "many forms most beautiful and most wonderful" -- some of which are still out there waiting to be discovered.

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

It's astonishing to see what the universe looks like on scales different from those we're used to.  The images of galaxies and quasars and (more recently) black holes are nothing short of awe-inspiring.  However, the microscopic realm is equally breathtaking -- which you'll find out as soon as you open the new book Micro Life: Miracles of the Microscopic World.

Assembled by a team at DK Publishers and the Smithsonian Institution, Micro Life is a compendium of photographs and artwork depicting the world of the very small, from single-celled organisms to individual fungus spores to nerve cells to the facets of a butterfly's eye.  Leafing through it generates a sense of wonder at the complexity of the microscopic, and its incredible beauty.  If you are a biology enthusiast -- or are looking for a gift for a friend who is -- this lovely book is a sure-fire winner.  You'll never look the same way at dust, pollen, algae, and a myriad of other things from the natural world that you thought you knew.

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

Strange replicators

New from the "Well, I See No Way This Could Go Wrong, Do You?" department, we have: some researchers who have built living things from stem cells that went on to discover how to reproduce themselves in a completely novel fashion.

A team of scientists at the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and Harvard University created what they call "xenobots" -- clusters of living stem cells taken from the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) that were on their way to becoming skin cells, but were excised and then arrayed in spherical clusters.  These clusters began to reproduce, creating new clusters.

"Well, so what?" you may be saying.  "Cells reproduce.  It's one of the characteristics of life.  What's so weird about that?"

What I haven't told you is that the clusters (1) reproduced not by mitosis, or at least not solely by mitosis -- they reproduced by scooping up loose cells in the petri dish and assembling them into new clusters; and (2) when the scientists noticed that the original clusters usually died after reproducing, they turned a supercomputer on the problem of whether it was possible to adjust the shape of the cluster to make it better at reproducing and more likely to survive -- and the model worked.

"[W]ith an artificial intelligence program working on the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at UVM's Vermont Advanced Computing Core, an evolutionary algorithm was able to test billions of body shapes in simulation -- triangles, squares, pyramids, starfish -- to find ones that allowed the cells to be more effective at the motion-based 'kinematic' replication reported in the new research," said Sam Kriegman, lead author on the paper, which appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.  "We asked the supercomputer at UVM to figure out how to adjust the shape of the initial parents, and the AI came up with some strange designs after months of chugging away, including one that resembled Pac-Man.  It's very non-intuitive.  It looks very simple, but it's not something a human engineer would come up with.  Why one tiny mouth?  Why not five?  We sent the results to Doug [Blackiston, of Tufts University] and he built these Pac-Man-shaped parent xenobots.  Then those parents built children, who built grandchildren, who built great-grandchildren, who built great-great-grandchildren."

One of the xenobots picking up a smaller cluster of cells

The scientists say they named them "xenobots" because of the genus name of the frog species they were created from -- Xenopus -- but I don't think it's a coincidence that the root word of both, the Greek word ξενος, means "strange."

"This is profound," said study co-author Michael Levin.  "These cells have the genome of a frog, but, freed from becoming tadpoles, they use their collective intelligence, a plasticity, to do something astounding.... We were stunned that these biological objects -- a computer-designed collection of cells -- will spontaneously replicate.  We have the full, unaltered frog genome, but it gave no hint that these cells can work together on this new task, of gathering and then compressing separated cells into working self-copies."

The whole thing unfortunately brought to mind an episode of the highly scientific documentary series Kolchak: The Night Stalker called "Primal Scream," wherein some scientists brought back tissue samples from a drill site in the Arctic.  The samples, which looked like (and probably were) a tin can full of Silly Putty, were kept in cold storage until one day the cooling system failed.  This somehow spurred the tissue to spontaneously grow into a creature that looked like the love child of Ron Perlman and Sasquatch, which of course went on a rampage and killed lots of people.

Kolchak eventually figures out that being a cave man (as it were), it would try to find caves to hide in.  Despite (1) being from the Arctic, and (2) being frozen for millions of years, the creature apparently knew all about the geography of Chicago, and figured out that there were tunnels underneath a sports stadium where it could live.  Kolchak followed it there, and after some tense moments where he bumbled around in his usual fashion, dropping his camera, gun, flashlight, hat, etc., he was able to kill the creature and save the day.

But I digress.

The researchers, for their part, don't seem worried about their creation getting loose and causing problems.  "These millimeter-sized living machines, entirely contained in a laboratory, easily extinguished, and vetted by federal, state and institutional ethics experts, are not what keep me awake at night," said study co-author Joshua Bongard.  "This is an ideal system in which to study self-replicating systems.  We have a moral imperative to understand the conditions under which we can control it, direct it, douse it, exaggerate it."

Because we've never seen movies before where the scientist says, "Stand back!  I know how to control the monster!" and promptly gets messily devoured.

In all seriousness, this does once again turn the spotlight on how we define "life."  The xenobots aren't that near the edge of the definition; they are, after all, made from living cells, not from off-the-shelf chemicals.  But given our ability to synthesize biological compounds (including DNA) pretty much to order, it may not be much longer before we see a truly artificial life-form -- something that shares no common ancestry with terrestrial life at all, and is entirely created in a laboratory.  Couple that with the last few years' awe-inspiring work in artificial intelligence, and we are truly looking at the fulfillment of the line Shakespeare gave to Miranda in The Tempest: "O, brave new world, that has such people in it!"

Even if those "people" are currently little blobs of cells, you have to wonder how long they're going to stay that way.

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

It's astonishing to see what the universe looks like on scales different from those we're used to.  The images of galaxies and quasars and (more recently) black holes are nothing short of awe-inspiring.  However, the microscopic realm is equally breathtaking -- which you'll find out as soon as you open the new book Micro Life: Miracles of the Microscopic World.

Assembled by a team at DK Publishers and the Smithsonian Institution, Micro Life is a compendium of photographs and artwork depicting the world of the very small, from single-celled organisms to individual fungus spores to nerve cells to the facets of a butterfly's eye.  Leafing through it generates a sense of wonder at the complexity of the microscopic, and its incredible beauty.  If you are a biology enthusiast -- or are looking for a gift for a friend who is -- this lovely book is a sure-fire winner.  You'll never look the same way at dust, pollen, algae, and a myriad of other things from the natural world that you thought you knew.

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