Voices from the jungle

When I was a teenager, I was fascinated with the Mayans.  The history and culture -- what we knew of it at the time -- was fascinating enough, but I think what really captured me was the unique way the language was written.

At that time, very little of the writing had been successfully deciphered, and much of what had been was tentative at best.  In fact, for some time the task was that most daunting of linguistic puzzles; an unknown script coding for unknown sounds in an unknown language.  The surmise that the glyphs primarily represented not just a single language, but two -- the extinct Ch'otli' language and the extant Yucatec language -- didn't help matters.  Complicating things further was the fact that it turns out that similar to Japanese hiragana and kanji, some of the glyphs represent syllables and others represent entire words.  The team effort to completely decipher Mayan glyphs took well over a hundred years, culminating in a paper in 1986 that allowed just about every classic Mayan inscription to be read.

The most daunting thing is that the patterns connecting spelling to pronunciation were convoluted.  Some words had "echo vowels" -- vowels repeated from the previous syllable when written, but not pronounced (e.g. yop, leaf, written using the syllables yo-po).  Other written-but-not-pronounced vowels were "disharmonic" -- not the same as the preceding syllable -- and the rules governing which syllabic glyph to use are abstruse to say the least.  (Of course, in reality, the Mayans have nothing on English for bizarre spelling-to-pronunciation correspondences; consider how -ough is pronounced in the words rough, through, thorough, ought, drought, and hiccough.  I even have an idea of why that mess happened historically, and I still think it's ridiculous.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, Escritura maya, CC BY-SA 4.0]

And, of course, the main difficulty was the paucity of examples of the script, mostly due to the Spanish, who came in during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and proceeded to destroy as many of the heathen inscriptions they could get their hands on.  People like Diego de Landa, bishop of the Yucatán in the late sixteenth century, burned just about all the Mayan codices, and his belated efforts to preserve what was known about the script and the languages they represented were half-hearted at best.  Even so, historian and linguist William Gates -- in what has to be preserved forever in the annals of chutzpah -- said, "ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us... or have learned in the use and study of what he told."

Well, if you count that he destroyed ninety-nine percent of the inscriptions first, then yeah, ninety-nine percent of the remaining one percent were preserved by de Landa and his friends in the Inquisition.

It's heartening, though, that five hundred years later, we find remnants of that lost civilization.  (There are still people who speak Mayan languages today, but it's undeniable the Spanish pretty well obliterated the culture of an entire people.)  Just last week, it was announced that some explorers trying to map out caves in the Yucatán stumbled upon three pieces of pottery dating back to the Late Postclassic Period (1200-1550 C.E.).  One of them was in fragments -- crushed when it was caught in between growing tree roots -- but the other two are in remarkably good condition.  The Mayans had a positive fascination for caves, and thought (like many early civilizations) that they represented the entrance to the underworld, a place called Xibalba (literally, "place of fright").  Just as the Greeks did at the cave of the Delphic Oracle, the Mayans brought offerings and sacrifices into caves to appease the gods and spirits of the nether world, and it's thought these three vessels were probably examples of those ritual gifts.

Even by comparison to other cultures' ideas about the horrors of the afterlife, Xibalba is impressively awful.  The lords of Xibalba seemed to enjoy causing pain and humiliation, and sent human spirits after death into a series of tests in various "houses" -- Dark House (completely pitch black, as you might have guessed), Rattling House (ice cold, with pounding hailstorms), Jaguar House (guess what lived there, and were dreadfully hungry), Bat House (ditto), Razor House (filled with blades that moved around on their own), and Hot House (which was on fire).  Just the names of the gods of Xibalba would be enough to dissuade me from ever going there (not, I suppose, that you had a choice).  There were:

• Xiquiripat ("Flying Scab")
• Cuchumaquic ("Gathered Blood")
• Ahalpuh ("Pus Demon")
• Ahalgana ("Jaundice Demon")
• Chamiabac ("Bone Staff")
• Chamiaholom ("Skull Staff")
• Ahalmez ("Sweepings Demon") and Ahaltocob ("Stabbing Demon") (who teamed up to hide in the dust of unswept parts of your house, then jumped out and stabbed you to death, which is a pretty good incentive to keep the floor clean)

Which definitely makes me wonder who spent their time making this shit up.  I mean, if you're gonna come up with wild tales, at least leave out the sentient razor blades and pus demons.

So it's a fascinating culture, but one I'm rather glad I don't belong to.  The Judeo-Christian hell I had to contend with when I was a kid growing up in the Catholic Church was bad enough.

Be that as it may, it's pretty cool that Diego de Landa and his ilk didn't silence all of these distant voices from the jungle.  I've been lucky enough to visit that part of the world twice, and the pyramids and stone temples they left behind are awe-inspiring.  Perhaps there are still more relics out there in the rain forest waiting to be discovered -- and which will give us another lens into a vanished civilization.

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I've mentioned before how fascinated I am with the parts of history that still are largely mysterious -- the top of the list being the European Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome and the re-consolidation of central government under people like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.  Not all that much was being written down in the interim, and much of the history we have comes from much later (such as History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, chronicling the events of the fourth through the eighth centuries C.E. -- but written in the twelfth century).

"Dark Ages," though, may be an unfair appellation, according to the new book Matthew Gabriele and David Perry called The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.  Gabriele and Perry look at what is known of those years, and their contention is that it wasn't the savage, ignorant hotbed of backwards superstition many of us picture, but a rich and complex world, including the majesty of Byzantium, the beauty and scientific advancements of Moorish Spain, and the artistic genius of the master illuminators found in just about every Christian abbey in Europe.

It's an interesting perspective.  It certainly doesn't settle all the questions; we're still relying on a paucity of actual records, and the ones we have (Geoffrey's work being a case in point) sometimes being as full of legends, myths, and folk tales as they are of actual history.  But The Bright Ages goes a long way toward dispelling the sense that medieval Europe was seven hundred years of nothing but human misery.  It's a fascinating look at humanity's distant, and shadowed, past.

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

A real cosmic storm

When I was a kid, I absolutely loved the show Lost in Space.

Not only did I think the stories were exciting, there was the comic relief from Dr. Smith (overacted by Jonathan Harris) and the fact that I had a life-threatening crush on Judy Robinson (played by Marta Kristen).  Now, with the perspective of time, I'm struck by how ridiculous most of the plots were, and also how fast and loose they played with science, even stuff that was known and understood at the time.  A few of the goofier ones:

• A comet making a close pass to the Jupiter 2, and Professor Robinson explaining how they'd be okay as long as they "didn't get too close to the comet's extreme heat and light"
• An episode where they ended up going faster than the speed of light because of "chemical impurities in the fuel," and the result was going back in time
• A character who was involved in an accident which damaged his heart, so the aliens removed his heart and replaced it with a lettuce heart, thereby turning him into a half-human, half-plant
• An alien who gets the Robot drunk by pouring tequila on his circuit boards

A recurring theme was the sudden appearance of a "cosmic storm."  What about them was "cosmic" was never explained, because usually all that happened is there was about forty-five seconds of wind, which blew around styrofoam rocks and stage props made of cardboard, and the Robot went around flailing his claws and shouting "Danger!  Danger!  A cosmic storm!"  Whatever these cosmic storms were supposed to be, they always heralded the appearance of one or more aliens, which included an extraterrestrial biker gang, a space cowboy, a magician (played by Al Lewis, best known for his depiction of Grandpa on The Munsters), a pirate (complete with an electronic parrot), a bunch of hillbillies (whose spacecraft looked like a wooden shack with a front porch), and in one extremely memorable episode, Brünhilde, who proceeded to yo-to-ho about the place, resplendent in a Viking helmet and riding a cosmic horse who unfortunately appeared to be made of plastic.

What's kind of a shame about all this is that the writers missed an opportunity (well, three seasons' worth of opportunities, really) to use actual science as a plot point.  Because there are cosmic storms, or at least something like them; they're called coronal mass ejections, and occur when a blob of plasma erupts off the surface of the Sun.  Small ones happen pretty much every day, but some of these things are freakin' huge, most notably the "Carrington Event" of 1859, which if it occurred today would have fried satellites and knocked out most of the world's power grid.  (As is, it caused sparking from telegraph lines that resulted in a number of fires.)

It turns out that even the Carrington Event is on the small side of what CMEs are capable of, judging by a paper last week in Nature Astronomy.  Scientists at the University of Colorado were studying a star called EK Draconis, which is rather like the Sun except much younger, and they saw it produce a CME that was ten times more powerful than anything we've ever seen the Sun do.  As it left the surface of the star, the burst of plasma was traveling well over a million kilometers an hour.

Any planet in the way would be in serious trouble.  Some scientists believe that a CME of that magnitude might be part of why Mars has such a thin atmosphere; a large CME aimed in its direction could well have stripped most of its atmosphere away.  

The question, of course, is, whether the Sun is capable of such an outburst.  The answer is "we're not sure, but probably."  Like I said, EK Draconis is fairly Sun-like; but it's far earlier along in its stellar evolution, and is more or less what the Sun looked like 4.5 billion years ago.  So its massive CME could be because it's in its turbulent youth, and the Sun has now settled down into comfortable middle age so it won't be quite so likely to blow plasma in our general direction.  But even so, the Carrington Event shows that the Sun is still capable of some serious pyrotechnics.  At present, there's no way to predict when they'll happen, or where on the Sun's surface; to do significant damage, the CME would have to be aimed toward the Earth.  We do know they're connected with the eleven-year sunspot cycle.  Solar flares and other surface disturbances are more common when sunspots are at their maximum (the next solar maximum is predicted to be in 2024).  But lots of sunspot cycle maximums come and go without any catastrophic CMEs, so there is still no sure way to predict the turbulence that precedes the storm.

The authors write:

Our findings can therefore provide a proxy for the possible enormous filament eruptions on young solar-type stars and the Sun, which would enable us to evaluate the effects on the ancient, young Solar System planets and the Earth, respectively.  Further, it is also speculated that stellar mass loss due to filament eruptions/CMEs can affect the evolutionary theory of stellar mass, angular momentum and luminosity more importantly than can stellar winds.  At present, frequency and statistical properties of CMEs on solar-type stars are unknown, but important insights into these factors will be obtained by increasing the number of samples in the future.

So I think we can all agree that this is much more impressive than Lost in Space-style cosmic storms, even without the alien Vikings and what-have-you.

It also highlights how powerful and unpredictable our universe can be.  On a calm, sunny day, it's easy to forget what a turbulent inferno the Sun actually is.  Me, I think it's a good idea when humans are reminded periodically that on the universal scale, we're really small.  There are potential disasters we can't predict or prevent -- CMEs being one example -- but maybe if we have impressed upon us how vulnerable we are, how dependent on our clement world, we'll finally start taking better care of what we have and averting the disasters we can prevent.

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I've mentioned before how fascinated I am with the parts of history that still are largely mysterious -- the top of the list being the European Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome and the re-consolidation of central government under people like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.  Not all that much was being written down in the interim, and much of the history we have comes from much later (such as History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, chronicling the events of the fourth through the eighth centuries C.E. -- but written in the twelfth century).

"Dark Ages," though, may be an unfair appellation, according to the new book Matthew Gabriele and David Perry called The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.  Gabriele and Perry look at what is known of those years, and their contention is that it wasn't the savage, ignorant hotbed of backwards superstition many of us picture, but a rich and complex world, including the majesty of Byzantium, the beauty and scientific advancements of Moorish Spain, and the artistic genius of the master illuminators found in just about every Christian abbey in Europe.

It's an interesting perspective.  It certainly doesn't settle all the questions; we're still relying on a paucity of actual records, and the ones we have (Geoffrey's work being a case in point) sometimes being as full of legends, myths, and folk tales as they are of actual history.  But The Bright Ages goes a long way toward dispelling the sense that medieval Europe was seven hundred years of nothing but human misery.  It's a fascinating look at humanity's distant, and shadowed, past.

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

Birds of a feather

The word species has got to be the mushiest term in all of science.

It's one of those situations where you think you know what something means until you start pushing on it.  When humans started to put a serious effort into categorizing other life forms -- Aristotle is usually credited with being the first to do this in a systematic way -- it seemed obvious enough.  Members of a species are similar morphologically.  Put more simply, you can tell a cat from a dog because they look different.

The problem is, this starts to cause problems just about immediately.  What about organisms that look very different, but we still consider to be the same species?  Dogs, in fact, are a good example.  Imagine you're an alien scientist arriving on Earth, and you're looking at a St. Bernard and a chihuahua.  If a human said, "These are the same species," my guess is you'd do whatever passes for laughter on your home world, then get back in your spaceship and fly away after writing "No intelligent life" on the map of the Solar System.

Dogs, of course, aren't the only ones; there are lots of examples in nature of different-looking organisms that are considered conspecific.  So in the 1800s, the definition was revised to, "a group of organisms that are capable of mating and producing offspring."  This worked until people started to think about mules, which are the offspring of a horse and a donkey (usually considered separate species).  Then, it was pointed out that although alive and well, (most) mules are infertile, so a word was added to take care of that problem: "a group of organisms that are capable of mating and producing fertile offspring."

It only got worse from here.  An awkward difficulty with the above definition is, what about asexual species?  They kind of don't fit in no matter how you look at it.  Oh, well, maybe they get their own version of the definition.  But what about ring species?  This is a group of populations, often arranged in a ring around a geographical barrier (thus the name) where all of them can interbreed except for the ones at the "ends" of the ring  It's been observed multiple times, including a group of salamanders in California, the Greenish Warbler of central Asia, and a ring of gull species -- the latter of which goes all the way around the world.

So do these represent one species, or many?  Within the ring, some of them are interfertile, and others aren't.  And splitting the ring doesn't help; then you're separating populations that are interfertile.  In fact, like asexual species, ring species seem to be unclassifiable with the canonical definition.

It all comes, my evolutionary biology professor said to us, from the desperation humans have to pigeonhole everything.  "The only reason we came up with the concept of a species in the first place," he said, "is because humans have no near relatives."

Of course, none of this sits well with the creationists, because a central tenet of their beliefs is that each kind of life form was created by God as-is and nothing's changed since.  Which is all well and good until you ask, "What do you mean by 'kind of life form'?"  They respond that God created "discrete forms with genetic boundaries to interbreeding," which they call baramins (a neologism coined from the Hebrew words for "created" and "kind").  So the ring species of gulls isn't a problem because gulls are a "kind."  In fact, you can define "kind" in this context as "a classification of life forms that conveniently makes all of the internal contradictions go away.  Now stop asking questions."  

In any case, there really is no good, consistent definition of species that covers all the exceptions.  Even now that we have genetic analysis -- which is currently the touchstone for classification -- it only further reinforces the fact that evolution generates a continuum of forms, and you're asking for trouble if you try to subdivide them.  Only in cases like ourselves, where there are no living near relatives, does it seem clear-cut.

Take the study out of the University of Colorado that appeared in Nature Communications this week.  It's about a trio of species of birds, so being a rather fanatical birder, it immediately caught my eye.  The species involved (and I use that term guardedly, for reasons that will become obvious) are the Common Redpoll, (Acanthis flammea) the Hoary Redpoll (Acanthis hornemanni), and the Lesser Redpoll (Acanthis cabaret), all types of finch with a characteristic red splotch on the forehead.  

Common Redpoll (Acanthis flammea) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Cephas, Carduelis flammea CT6, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The Lesser Redpoll is only found in Europe, but the other two occur in North America.  They have pretty obvious color differences; the Lesser Redpoll is brownish, the Hoary Redpoll is almost white, and the Common Redpoll is somewhere in the middle, with reddish flanks.  The size differs, as well, with the Lesser at the small end and the Hoary at the large end.

Lesser Redpoll (Acanthis cabaret) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carduelis_cabaret.jpg: Lawrie Phipps derivative work: MPF (talk), Carduelis cabaret1, CC BY 2.0]

However, the differences aren't huge.  We get Common Redpolls at our bird feeders in winter fairly regularly, but Hoary Redpolls are a rare sighting in our area.  Every winter I scan the flocks of redpolls looking for whiter individuals, but I still have never seen one.  However, I may be able to cross that one off the list of "species I haven't seen" -- because the current study has shown that despite the differences in appearance, all three are a single species.

Hoary Redpoll (Acanthis hornemanni) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ron Knight from Seaford, East Sussex, United Kingdom, Arctic Redpoll (Acanthis hornemanni) (13667519855), CC BY 2.0]

The color and size differences, the researchers found, are due to a "supergene complex" -- a single cluster of genes that work together to produce a specific phenotype.  What's striking is that despite the differences in that gene complex between the three different groups of redpolls, they are otherwise about as genetically identical as it's possible to get.  And... they're all potentially interfertile.

"Often times we assume that a lot of traits can act independently, meaning that different traits can be inherited separately from one another, but this particular result shows that sometimes these traits are actually tightly linked together," said Erik Funk, lead author on the paper, in an interview in Science Daily.  "At least for these birds, they're inheriting a whole group of traits together as one."

Birders tend to hate it when confronted with "lumpers," as they call researchers who merge species together, therefore reducing the number of potential birds to chase after.  They much prefer "splitters," who take previously single species and subdivide them, like another "winter finch," the Red Crossbill (Loxia curvirostra), which according to some taxonomists isn't a single species but several -- possibly as many as seven.  In any case, my point here is that this kind of thing happens all the time.  Like I said at the beginning, we think we have a clear idea of what's meant by a species until we start examining it.

But to me, this only increases my fascination with the natural world.  It's a beautiful, subtle, and complex interlocking web of organisms, and maybe the most surprising thing of all is that we do think it should be simple and easily classifiable.  As usual, our scheme for understanding the world turns out to be woefully inadequate -- and once again, science has come to the rescue by turning a lens on a small and unassuming bird as a way of pointing out how much more we have to learn.

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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!]

Swearing off

N.B.:  Because this post is about bad language, it contains bad language.  If you're sensitive to such things, be thou forewarned.

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It's no real secret that I swear a lot.

I recall my mom trying to shame me out of using expletives when I was a teenager.  It didn't work.  Part of the problem was having a dad and a (maternal) uncle who had an amazing and creative command of swear words.  The fact of not being able to cure either her husband or her brother of swearing should have alerted her to the futility of her efforts, but it never seemed to slow her down any.

One of the things she used to say to me was the old saw, "Using that kind of language just shows you don't have the brains to find better words to use."  With the passage of years I've come to realize that despite my fondness for the f-word, there's nothing in particular wrong with my cognitive abilities.  I just find that -- used judiciously, and with an awareness of appropriate context -- it can liven things up considerably.

I thought the whole idea of swearing in fiction would make an interesting topic for this week's Fiction Friday.  In fictional settings, the "context" thing becomes even more important.  Off-color words should be reflective of the character, time, and place, and shouldn't be used to excess, but in that respect they're no different than any other stylistic feature; like humor, or violence, or sex scenes, or whatnot, it can be used skillfully or clumsily.  Overused, swear words completely lose their emotional punch (the last thing an author wants).

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Me, I tend to use swear words in my fiction for one of two reasons; to dial up the emotional intensity, or for humorous effect.  The example of the latter that always comes to mind is the character of the Head Librarian of the Library of Timelines, Fischer (don't remind him that his first name is Archibald unless you want to face his ire), from my time-travel novel Lock & Key.  I wanted to create a character who completely messed around with the stereotype of a librarian, so I made him a long-haired twenty-something who loves 90s grunge music, and has a vocabulary for which the word "salty" is an understatement.  The repartee between him, the meek, soft-spoken main character Darren Ault, and Fischer's unflappable, ultra-competent personal assistant Maggie Carmichael, is some of the most fun I've ever had in writing.  This scene occurs just after Fischer whisks Darren back to the Library from fourteenth-century Norway, just before he was about to get chopped into mincemeat by a guy with a sword:

"God damn!" Darren screamed, and backed into a file cabinet, upsetting a precarious stack of manila folders.  The entire pile slithered to the ground, dumping its contents all over the floor and startling Ivan the tomcat, who gave an annoyed hiss and trotted out of the room, every whisker radiating disapproval.

"Good afternoon to you, too," Fischer said, from his seat behind his desk, and then looked him up and down.  "You’re filthy."

"Oh, don’t even start with me."  Darren glared at Fischer.  He was still clutching the wooden box to his chest as if it were a shield.

"Whoa, you’re a little grumpy.  Who pissed in your cornflakes?"

"I haven’t had any cornflakes.  All I’ve had is tasteless porridge, and dumplings that are like compressed tasteless porridge balls, and dried fish that has too much taste, if you get my drift, and I haven’t even had a decent cup of coffee in days, and a Norwegian guy with a sword just tried to chop my head off, and if you’re planning on getting me to change my clothes and sending me off to Kentucky without having a good night’s sleep in a real bed, then you can go fuck yourself!"

Fischer’s pale eyebrows rose.  "I don’t think I’ve heard you swear before.  I didn’t know you knew how."

He goggled at Fischer for a moment, and then screamed, "Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!"

Maggie appeared in the door of the office, and she looked at him, mild surprise registering in her eyes.  "Ah, Mister Ault, you have the words, but you don’t have the music.  I suggest you pay close attention to Fischer’s command of the art of the curse word.  He’s a master."  She paused.  "Would you like a cup of coffee?"

Maybe it's just me, but that scene wouldn't have been nearly as funny if I'd figured out how to write it without swear words.

An amusing aside about Lock & Key.  I was at a book signing a while back, and a woman came up and said, "I read your book Lock & Key, and I liked it, but the character of the Librarian sure does use the f-bomb a lot."

I deadpanned, "I know.  I tried to talk to him about it, and he told me to fuck off."

Well, at least I thought it was hilarious.

So like all other words in the English language, the key is in knowing how to use them.  There's no virtue in avoiding bad words in fiction just because they're bad.  In fact, sometimes not using them is the worse choice.  I know a guy who wrote an (otherwise wonderful) novel about military men in the 1940s, and he is such a prude that he made all of them have squeaky-clean vocabularies -- and there was no mention of sex.  Ever.  The story's good, but the characters come across as artificially sanitized, so the whole thing feels a little off.

As I said earlier, use the vocabulary that is appropriate to that time, place, and character.  Salty language is like actual salt; don't go overboard with it, but used sparingly, it can really improve the flavor of a story.

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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!]

Warp six, Captain!

Being a skeptic and a scientist does not mean you are immune to the emotional side of life.

Well, at least I'm not.  It may well be that I was attracted to science as an antidote for the fact that I'm the kind of person who, under the least provocation, will get pretty overwrought about things.  Science seemed like an escape from having emotion swing me around by the tail all the time.

Still... there are times when my reaction even to a science story is more emotional than it is cerebral.  Consider, for example, the link my friend and fellow writer Andrew Butters (of the wonderful blog Potato Chip Math) sent me yesterday, which says that... scientists have created the first ever warp bubble.

My skeptical brain immediately gave it the wry eyebrow and said, "Well, maybe.  How many times have we had our hopes dashed before?".  On the other hand, my emotional brain started jumping up and down making excited little squeaking noises.  It's been my dearest wish since I was a kid either to have aliens visit (as long as they're not Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, or the Vashta Nerada), or to have practical interstellar flight and go there myself.  And ever since Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre showed back in 1994 that faster-than-light warp drive was at least theoretically possible, I've been desperately hoping that it would eventually become feasible as well.

Science adepts amongst my readership might be thinking, "Wait a second.  Doesn't the General Theory of Relativity forbid FTL travel outright?"  The answer, of course, is yes, but Alcubierre seems to have found a loophole; that you won't break the relativistic speed limit if the way you do it is by curving space behind and in front of you, creating a stretch in the fabric of space-time, and then riding that curve in much the way that a surfer rides a big wave.  (I know, it's way more complicated than that, but I'm not going to go into deeper details for the very good reason that the mathematics in the original paper loses me after the first paragraph.)

In any case, "theoretically possible" and "actually feasible" are two very different things, and the first analysis of Alcubierre's proposal found that it's completely impractical because it would take a phenomenal amount of energy to create the curvature needed.  It's a little like Archimedes's boast, "Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand, and I could move the world."  Well, okay, Archie, but (1) that's a really fucking long lever, and (2) there is no place to stand.

But otherwise, works fine.

(N.B.: Yes, I know Archimedes was just trying to make a point about the usefulness of levers.  It applies just as well to issues of feasibility.  If he can use the example, so can I.)

Anyhow, all the "yes, buts" seemed to put Alcubierre's idea on the shelf -- until ten years later, when physicist Harold White reworked Alcubierre's equations and showed a way to accomplish warping space with far less energy.  Even so, the theory of creating a warp bubble seemed very far removed from practical application.  But now...

... White seems to have done it in the lab.

*brief pause to stop jumping up and down and squeaking*

[Image from LSI]

Working at the labs of Limitless Space Institute, White announced this week that he'd created a small, transient warp bubble that met the criteria laid out in his theoretical paper from fifteen years ago.  White said, "Our detailed numerical analysis of our custom Casimir cavities [a microscale structure in which the warp bubble supposedly occurred] helped us identify a real and manufacturable nano/microstructure that is predicted to generate a negative vacuum energy density such that it would manifest a real nanoscale warp bubble, not an analog, but the real thing."

He cautioned that this was only a first-step proof-of-concept, that it didn't mean we'd be zooming off to Alpha Centauri day after tomorrow.  However, he said his experimental findings lined up so well with the theoretical predictions that it was impossible not to consider this a fantastic breakthrough.  "This is a potential structure we can propose to the community that one could build that will generate a negative vacuum energy density distribution that is very similar to what’s required for an Alcubierre space warp," White said.  "It is early to ask questions about some type of actual flight experiment.  In my mind, step one is to just explore the underlying science at the nano/micro scale.  Crawl, walk, run."

I just hope the "crawl" and "walk" stages move along, because dammit, I want to see this happen.  I'm 61, so at this point (unless we also get some serious life-lengthening strategies soon) I've got maybe thirty more years, forty if I'm really lucky and take after my Great-Aunt Clara, who lived to be 101.  I've been waiting for this ever since I was seven and first heard Captain Kirk say, "Warp six, Mr. Sulu!"

I'm trying my best not to get too worked up about it.  These things have a way of running into serious snags.  It's a little like the person who quipped, "Artificial intelligence is five years in the future, and always will be."  Even so, reading this was a rush.  Maybe it will come to naught; that's certainly happened before.  But maybe... just maybe... we've finally met the real Zefram Cochrane.

He's named Harold White.

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

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!]

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.

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

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."

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

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!]