Creepy crawlies

Whenever we have a wet summer -- not an uncommon occurrence in our rainy climate -- we have a plague of little pests trying to get into our house.

They're called millipedes, slinky guys maybe a couple of centimeters long, with lots of legs (not a thousand, though).  They're completely harmless; they don't bite like their cousins the centipedes do, and if you poke at them, they coil up into a ball.  So I guess they're really more of a nuisance than an actual problem.  They don't even damage anything, the way mice can.  Mostly what they seem to do is get in through every crack and crevice (there are lots of these in a big old house like ours), look around for a while, then curl up and die.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Totodu74, Anadenobolus monilicornis 03, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So I don't like them, and I wish they stayed outside, but in the grand scheme of things they're no big deal.  Imagine, though, if they were bigger.

A lot bigger.

Just last week, paleontologists announced the discovery on a beach in Northumberland, England, of a millipede fossil from the Carboniferous Period.  It's been dated to the middle of the period, about 326 million years ago.  It looks a bit like the millipedes I see trundling across my basement floor in summer.

Only this one was 2.6 meters long (approximately the length of a Mini Cooper), a half a meter across, and weighed something on the order of fifty kilograms.

It's been named Arthropleura, and holds the record as the largest-known arthropod in Earth's history.  Nothing is known for sure about its behavior; if it's like the rest of millipedes, it was a scavenger on leaf detritus, but there's no way to know for certain.  Given its size, it could well have been a lot more dangerous than the ones we have around now.  To paraphrase the old joke about five-hundred-pound gorillas:

Q:  What does a fifty-kilogram millipede eat?

A:  Anything it wants.

Those of you who are (like me) biology nerds may be frowning in puzzlement at this point.  How on earth could an arthropod get so big?  Their size is limited by the inefficiency of their respiratory system (not to mention the weight of their exoskeletons).  Most arthropods (millipedes included) breathe through pairs of holes called spiracles along the sides of the body.  These holes open into a network of channels called tracheae, which bring oxygen directly to the tissues.  Contrast that with our system; we have a central oxygen-collecting device (lungs), and the hemoglobin in our blood acts as a carrier to bring that oxygen to the tissues.  It's a lot more efficient, which is why the largest mammals are a great deal bigger than the largest arthropods.  (So, no worries that the bad sci-fi movies from the 50s and 60s, with giant cockroaches attacking Detroit, could actually happen.  A ten-meter-long cockroach not only wouldn't be able to oxygenate its own tissues fast enough to survive, it couldn't support its own weight.  It wouldn't eat Detroit, it would just lie there and quietly suffocate.)

So how could there be such ridiculously enormous millipedes?

The answer is as fascinating as the beast itself is.  As the temperature warmed and rainfall increased after the previous period (the Devonian), it facilitated the growth of huge swaths of rain forest across the globe.  In fact, it's the plant material from these rain forests that produced the coal seams that give the Carboniferous its name.  But the photosynthesis of all these plants drove the oxygen levels up -- by some estimates, to around 35% (contrast that to the atmosphere's current 21% oxygen).  This higher oxygen level facilitated the growth of animals who are limited by their ability to uptake it -- i.e., arthropods.  (At the same time, there was a dragonfly species called Meganeura with a seventy-centimeter wingspan.  And unlike millipedes, these things were carnivores, just as modern dragonflies are.)

Eventually, though, the system was unsustainable, and a lot of the rain forests began to die off in the Late Carboniferous, leading to a drier, cooler climate.  However, remember the coal seams -- by that time a huge percentage of the carbon dioxide that had fed the photosynthesis of those rain forests was now locked underground.  The fuse was lit for a catastrophe.

Fast forward to the end of the next period, the Permian, 255 million years ago.  What seems to have happened is a series of colossal volcanic eruptions that created the Siberian Traps, a basalt deposit covering most of what is now Siberia.  The lava ripped through the coal seams, blasting all that stored carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.  The temperature in the late Permian had been cool and dry, and the spike of carbon dioxide created a commensurate spike in the temperature -- as well as a huge drop in oxygen, used up by the burning coal.  The oxygen concentration seems to have bottomed out at around twelve percent, just over half of what it is now.  The extra carbon dioxide dissolved into ocean water, dropping the pH, and the increasing acidity dissolved away the shells of animals who build them out of calcium carbonate -- e.g. corals and mollusks.

Wide swaths of ocean became anoxic, acidic dead zones.  The anaerobic organisms began to eat through all the dead organic matter, churning out more carbon dioxide and another nasty waste product, sulfur dioxide (which gives the horrible smell to rotten eggs, and is also an acidifier).  The result: an extinction that wiped out an estimated ninety percent of life on Earth.  In short order, a thriving planet had been turned into a hot, dead, foul-smelling wasteland, and it would take millions of years to recover even a fraction of the previous biodiversity.

Of course, at highest risk would be the big guys like our friends Arthropleura and Meganeura, and the Earth hasn't seen giant arthropods like this since then.  Today, the largest arthropod known is the Japanese spider crab (Macrocheira), topping out at around twenty kilograms -- but crabs and other crustaceans have gills and an oxygen carrier called hemocyanin, so they can boost the efficiency of their respiratory system somewhat over their terrestrial cousins.  The largest insect today is the African Goliath beetle (Goliathus), at about a tenth of a kilogram.  And in today's atmosphere, it's at a pretty significant disadvantage.  They may look big and scary, but in reality, they're slow-moving, harmless creatures.  Kind of a beer can with six legs, is how I think of them.

So that's today's look at creepy-crawlies of the past.  In my opinion it's just as well the big ones became extinct.  The last thing I need is having to shoo a fifty-kilogram millipede out of my basement.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson has become deservedly famous for his efforts to bring the latest findings of astronomers and astrophysicists to laypeople.  Not only has he given hundreds of public talks on everything from the Big Bang to UFOs, a couple of years ago he launched (and hosted) an updated reboot of Carl Sagan's wildly successful 1980 series Cosmos.

He has also communicated his vision through his writing, and this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is his 2019 Letters From an Astrophysicist.  A public figure like Tyson gets inundated with correspondence, and Tyson's drive to teach and inspire has impelled him to answer many of them personally (however arduous it may seem to those of us who struggle to keep up with a dozen emails!).  In Letters, he has selected 101 of his most intriguing pieces of correspondence, along with his answers to each -- in the process creating a book that is a testimony to his intelligence, his sense of humor, his passion as a scientist, and his commitment to inquiry.

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

The battle of the sexes

Today I'm going to tell you about the latest weird and fascinating research in genetics, but first, a brief refresher from high school biology to set the context.

You may recall that back in the 1800s, an Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel made the first serious stab at trying to figure out how inheritance works.  Prior to this, about all they knew was "like begets like," which sometimes works and sometimes leads you to think that there's such thing as "royal blood," despite evidence to the contrary such as the fact that a lot of those royals were nuttier than squirrel shit.

Anyhow, Mendel studied some traits in pea plants that seemed to obey a few statistical rules.  He made the understandable error of concluding that all traits inherit according to those rules, which turned out to be wrong; actually "Mendelian" traits, that obey all four of Mendel's Laws, are in the minority.  But for a first-order approximation, it wasn't bad. 

One trait in humans that is Mendelian is the Rh blood group gene.  Some people have a gene that makes the Rh protein; in others, the gene is defective, and makes nothing.  You only need one copy of the Rh-producing gene to have the Rh protein in your blood ("Rh-positive"), so the Rh-producing gene is said to be dominant; you only lack the protein ("Rh negative") if both of your copies of the gene are defective, so the non-functional gene is said to be recessive.

Since everyone has two copies of every gene -- one came from your mother, the other from your father -- this makes the inheritance pattern for Rh pretty simple.  (The "everyone has two copies" rule is broken by sex-linked genes, but this doesn't affect today's topic and is a subject for another day.)  Let's say, for example, that parent 1 is Rh-negative (so both copies are defective), and parent 2 is Rh-positive but has one defective and one normal copy.  Their kids inherit a defective copy from parent 1 (that's all (s)he's got), and the one that inherits from parent 2 has a 50/50 probability of being the normal or the defective one.  So the kids each have a 50% chance of being negative or positive.

The important part here is that I didn't stipulate which parent was which; in fact, it doesn't matter.  It works exactly the same way if the mom is parent 1 as it does if the dad is parent 1.

Okay, here's the second bit of background.  There's a group of terrible genetic defects called deletions, in which one of the patient's chromosomes broke somewhere along the process, and is missing a big chunk of genetic information.  You're supposed to have 23 matched pairs, one of each pair from dad and one from mom (again, ignoring the sex chromosomes).  In a deletion, when you match them up (a process called karyotyping) you find that one of the pairs isn't matched, because one member of the pair has a piece missing.

A karyotype for an individual with a deletion on the long arm of chromosome 4 (indicated by the arrow)

Each chromosome contains genes that guide development, and a person with a deletion only has a single copy of the genes in the deleted segment rather than the usual two.  The result is that (s)he only produces half the normal amount of the product made by that gene, and fetal development goes seriously awry.  Most deletions are so bad that they result in death of the embryo and miscarriage; the ones who survive to birth usually have drastic physical and mental abnormalities.

Once again, in the description of deletion, there's no indication which parent the broken chromosome came from.  In the above karyotype, you can't tell if the abnormal copy of chromosome 4 came from the mom or from the dad.  Shouldn't matter, right?  Mendel showed that the trait expresses the same way regardless which parent contributed what to the offspring.

With me so far?  Because here's where it gets a little weird.

The first inkling we had that there was more to the story came from a pair of genetic disorders that seemed, on first glance, to have absolutely nothing in common.  Angelman syndrome results in severe physical and developmental problems, including jerky or spastic movement of the limbs, little capacity for speech, cognitive impairment, and difficulty gaining and keeping on weight.  They often have no interest in food, so their diet has to be carefully managed.  Prader-Willi syndrome causes abnormal skull and brain growth, weak muscles, small hands and feet, and -- most strikingly -- an insatiable fixation on eating.  A friend of mine who worked in a home for the developmentally disabled once told me about a teenager who lived there who suffered from Prader-Willi syndrome, and he was so unable to control his hunger that he'd raid people's desks for food, and if that didn't work, he'd eat inedible things like chalk.

So nothing alike, are they?  Imagine researchers' puzzlement when they found out that both disorders were caused by the same deletion -- the loss of a chunk of the long arm of chromosome 15.

How could the same genetic damage result in such differing outcomes?  You're probably already guessing, given what I said earlier, that it has to do with which parent the damaged chromosome came from, and if so, you're right.  If the deletion was on the maternal copy of the chromosome, the child gets Prader-Willi syndrome; if it's the paternal copy, (s)he gets Angelman syndrome.

This was the first example ever discovered of the phenomenon of genomic imprinting -- where the gene expresses differently depending which parent it comes from.  But there's an even more curious part of the Prader-Willi/Angelman situation, and it has to do with hunger.

Let's say you're a male proto-hominid on the African savanna, and your significant other has just told you that you're gonna be a proud proto-hominid father.  The fetus is surviving inside the mom by obtaining nutrients through the placenta, so in essence, the baby is existing as a parasite on the mom (which continues even after birth, because of breastfeeding).  The dad's interest is (in the pure evolutionary sense) having the baby feed as much as possible, even at the expense of the mother; after all, the baby is his genes' way of surviving, and if the mom weakens, he can always find another mate.  The mom, on the other hand, certainly wants the baby to survive (half the baby's genes come from her, after all), but for her to survive is actually more important.  It's the opposite of the dad's situation; if the baby dies, she can have another baby, but if she dies, she's done for.

So the dad's imprint on the genes is to have the baby feed insatiably; the mom's imprint is to limit the baby's feeding to a level that isn't deleterious to her.  The system all works fine as long as the baby inherits copies of the imprinted genes from both parents; the competing interests of the mother and father balance each other out.  

But in a chromosome 15 deletion, that balance doesn't happen.  A baby with Angelman syndrome only has the maternal copy of a gene called UBE3A, and during egg formation, this gene is imprinted, with the result that it pushes the baby toward the mother's end of the spectrum, feeding-wise.  Thus the lack of interest in food you seen in kids with Angelman syndrome.  In Prader-Willi syndrome, the baby only has the paternal copy -- so the father's interest wins, and the kid wants to eat continuously.

All of this is lead-up to the research that came out last week in the journal Developmental Cell, in which a team of geneticists at Cambridge University found out that the missing chunk of chromosome 15 doesn't just cause opposite behavioral disorders depending on which parent it comes from; it actually changes the number of blood vessels that develop in the placenta long before the baby is born.  A gene called IGF2 (also in the target region of chromosome 15) controls the rate of blood vessel growth, and once again, it's in the dad's interest to have as many blood vessels as possible (favoring the baby at the expense of the mother) and in the mom's interest to inhibit blood vessel growth (favoring the mother at the expense of the baby).  And once again, if both copies are present and work correctly, the competing interests balance out, and the placenta develops normally -- resulting in an at-term overall length of blood vessels of 320 kilometers if you stretched them out end to end.  The genomic imprinting shows up, though, if one of the copies of the genes is defective or missing, because then the parent that contributed the working copy "wins."

So that's another odd twist on inheritance and development, for your morning entertainment.  It all brings to mind the comment made by my genetics professor, Dr. Lemmon, when I was an undergraduate.  "It's not strange when something goes wrong with our developmental genetics," she told us.  "There are a million ways things could go wrong.  What's phenomenal is how often everything goes right."

 **********************************

Neil deGrasse Tyson has become deservedly famous for his efforts to bring the latest findings of astronomers and astrophysicists to laypeople.  Not only has he given hundreds of public talks on everything from the Big Bang to UFOs, a couple of years ago he launched (and hosted) an updated reboot of Carl Sagan's wildly successful 1980 series Cosmos.

He has also communicated his vision through his writing, and this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is his 2019 Letters From an Astrophysicist.  A public figure like Tyson gets inundated with correspondence, and Tyson's drive to teach and inspire has impelled him to answer many of them personally (however arduous it may seem to those of us who struggle to keep up with a dozen emails!).  In Letters, he has selected 101 of his most intriguing pieces of correspondence, along with his answers to each -- in the process creating a book that is a testimony to his intelligence, his sense of humor, his passion as a scientist, and his commitment to inquiry.

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

Cyborg games

I hate computer games.

Now, don't get all up in arms.  I'm not saying you can't love them and want to spend all available waking hours playing them.  This has nothing to do with moralizing about productive use of time.  For me, computer games are the opposite of relaxing and entertaining, particularly the ones where speed is required.  Even simple ones like Tetris get me so wound up I want to scream.  I still recall vividly my one and only time playing Angry Birds, because I got way angrier than the birds were.  The third time I flew my Bird head-first into a steel pipe, I just about had to be physically restrained from throwing my computer out of the window.

I realize this is an admission of a mild psychiatric disorder.  It's just a game, nothing to take seriously, certainly nothing to get agitated about, and so forth ad nauseam.  But it's a purely spontaneous reaction that I seem to have zero control over.  The result is if I had to choose between spending an hour playing Super Mario Brothers and having my prostate examined by Edward Scissorhands, I'd have to think about it.

All of this comes up because of a preprint of a new scientific paper sent to me by a friend wherein some researchers apparently taught an "organoid" -- a small, organ-like structure made of cultured brain cells -- how to play Pong.

Here's how the authors, a team led by Brett Kagan of Cortical Labs of Melbourne, Australia, describe what they did:

Integrating neurons into digital systems to leverage their innate intelligence may enable performance infeasible with silicon alone, along with providing insight into the cellular origin of intelligence.  We developed DishBrain, a system which exhibits natural intelligence by harnessing the inherent adaptive computation of neurons in a structured environment.  In vitro neural networks from human or rodent origins, are integrated with in silico computing via high-density multielectrode array.  Through electrophysiological stimulation and recording, cultures were embedded in a simulated game-world, mimicking the arcade game ‘Pong’.  Applying a previously untestable theory of active inference via the Free Energy Principle, we found that learning was apparent within five minutes of real-time gameplay, not observed in control conditions.  Further experiments demonstrate the importance of closed-loop structured feedback in eliciting learning over time.  Cultures display the ability to self-organise in a goal-directed manner in response to sparse sensory information about the consequences of their actions.

"We think it's fair to call them cyborg brains," Kagan said, in an interview with New Scientist.

What's a little humbling is that these organoids probably play Pong better than I do.  And I doubt that after playing Pong for five minutes, they want to smash their Petri dish against the wall, which is how I'd react.

It does make me wonder where all this is going, however.  We have a clump of cultured brain cells integrated into electronic circuitry (thus the appellation "cyborg brains") that can learn, and get progressively better at, a game.  Okay, it may seem like a silly accomplishment; an organoid playing Pong, so what?  But keep in mind that this is only a proof-of-concept.  If the process works -- and it certainly seems like it did -- there's no reason they can't ramp up the sophistication of the task until they have something that is truly a complex synthesis of organic brain and electronic brain.

Just as long as we don't take the research too far.  Fellow Doctor Who fans know exactly where I'm going with this.

In this case, maybe the outcome would be that the Cybermen would do nothing worse than forcing humans to play hours and hours of Pong with them.  And I guess that's better than their wanting to assimilate us all.  

Well, for most of us, at least.  Once again, given the choice, I'd have to think about it.

My question, though, is what'd be next?  Daleks playing Laser Tag?  The Silence playing charades?  Weeping Angels playing hide-and-go-seek?  Seems like the possibilities are endless.

In any case, if it passes peer review, it's a pretty stupendous achievement, and it'll be interesting to see where the research leads.  We're probably still a long way from anything useful, but as I've learned from years of watching science news, sometimes those leaps can come when you least expect them -- and span chasms you thought would never be crossed.

 **********************************

Neil deGrasse Tyson has become deservedly famous for his efforts to bring the latest findings of astronomers and astrophysicists to laypeople.  Not only has he given hundreds of public talks on everything from the Big Bang to UFOs, a couple of years ago he launched (and hosted) an updated reboot of Carl Sagan's wildly successful 1980 series Cosmos.

He has also communicated his vision through his writing, and this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is his 2019 Letters From an Astrophysicist.  A public figure like Tyson gets inundated with correspondence, and Tyson's drive to teach and inspire has impelled him to answer many of them personally (however arduous it may seem to those of us who struggle to keep up with a dozen emails!).  In Letters, he has selected 101 of his most intriguing pieces of correspondence, along with his answers to each -- in the process creating a book that is a testimony to his intelligence, his sense of humor, his passion as a scientist, and his commitment to inquiry.

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

The eye in the sky

It's been awfully hard to keep my spirits up lately.

There are the ongoing issues -- the Omicron spike of COVID worldwide (and watching helplessly as callous politicians turned vaccination into a partisan trump card), and the slow slide of my own country into something very like fascism -- but above and beyond that, I've had a hell of a run personally.  For a variety of reasons I've cut ties with the publisher I worked with for six years, I lost one good friend after a valiant fight with multiple sclerosis only days after another had suffered a debilitating stroke, and I hurt my back this summer and have been unable to engage in my favorite pastime of running for six months.  I blogged about the loss of our beloved old dog from some kind of nasty virus last month -- made worse by the fact that three days later, our other dog got the same disease (we spent most of Thanksgiving Day in the emergency veterinary hospital with him), and just last week, our new dog got it, too. 

Both, fortunately, made a complete recovery, but was touch and go with both of them for a while.

When you get a run of calamities like this, it's easy to slip into despondency.  I've definitely had my moments in that dreadful place in the past year.  The only remedy, I've found, is to force my vision to turn outward, away from the troubles in my life large and small, and remind myself that even when things seem like they're terrible, we're still immersed in a grand, awe-inspiring, and beautiful universe.

That's why I found the launching of the James Webb Space Telescope on Christmas morning such a welcome respite.  It's easy enough to look around you and come to the conclusion that all humans are awful -- certainly, the media thrives on fostering that view -- but when you see something like this come off without a hitch, it's a nice reminder that our species is capable of truly amazing things.

"The James Webb Space Telescope represents the ambition that NASA and our partners maintain to propel us forward into the future," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "The promise of Webb is not what we know we will discover; it's what we don't yet understand or can't yet fathom about our universe. I can't wait to see what it uncovers!"

The JWST is the successor to the famed Hubble Space Telescope, and is the largest, most powerful, and most sophisticated space observation apparatus ever launched.  The array of astronomical phenomena it will study is mind-boggling -- everything from exoplanets to the galactic distribution of dark matter to the unimaginably luminous and distant quasars and the cosmic microwave background radiation that is the remnant of the first microseconds after the Big Bang.

[Artist's rendition of the James Webb Space Telescope is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

"The launch of the Webb Space Telescope is a pivotal moment -- this is just the beginning for the Webb mission," said Gregory L. Robinson, Webb's program director at NASA Headquarters.  "Now we will watch Webb's highly anticipated and critical 29 days on the edge.  When the spacecraft unfurls in space, Webb will undergo the most difficult and complex deployment sequence ever attempted in space.  Once commissioning is complete, we will see awe-inspiring images that will capture our imagination."

It's anticipated that it will take six months before the JWST is fully operational, and I can't even imagine how it must feel for the people who have invested so much time, energy, and effort into building and launching it.  When the first images come rolling in, probably some time in June of 2022, you can bet there'll be champagne flowing liberally.

Of course, as an astronomy buff, the whole thing is tremendously exciting to me, but more than that, to me it's a symbol that even as dismal as things have been, there's still reason to hope.  Yes, we're capable of horrible things -- acts of hate and violence, narrow-mindedness, power-hungriness -- but we're also capable of dazzling flights of the mind, tremendous creativity, and amazing beauty.  It reminds me of the end of Max Ehrmann's famous poem "Desiderata," which (although I've read it many times) never fails to bring me to tears.  It seems like a fitting way to end this post:

Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.  Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.  And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.  With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.  Be cheerful.  Strive to be happy.

 **********************************

Neil deGrasse Tyson has become deservedly famous for his efforts to bring the latest findings of astronomers and astrophysicists to laypeople.  Not only has he given hundreds of public talks on everything from the Big Bang to UFOs, a couple of years ago he launched (and hosted) an updated reboot of Carl Sagan's wildly successful 1980 series Cosmos.

He has also communicated his vision through his writing, and this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is his 2019 Letters From an Astrophysicist.  A public figure like Tyson gets inundated with correspondence, and Tyson's drive to teach and inspire has impelled him to answer many of them personally (however arduous it may seem to those of us who struggle to keep up with a dozen emails!).  In Letters, he has selected 101 of his most intriguing pieces of correspondence, along with his answers to each -- in the process creating a book that is a testimony to his intelligence, his sense of humor, his passion as a scientist, and his commitment to inquiry.

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

Bred in the bone

A while back I had my DNA tested.  I know a good bit about my family tree, and I did it not only to find out about my genetic heritage, but to see if the DNA tests were as accurate as they claim -- a bit like a teacher being able to tell if a student is doing a problem correctly because (s)he already knows what the answer should be.

The answer is: it's pretty damn good.  The most interesting was from a company called My True Ancestry, which supposedly was working off an enormous data bank and could do some seriously fine-grained analysis.  I uploaded my DNA file, and within a few hours I had a map of the closest matches, and they turned out to be spot-on.  It picked up my great-great grandfather Solomon Meyer-Lévy, who was an Ashkenazi Jew from Alsace, and also my father's paternal ancestry, which came from the French Alps.  The rest of my family was scattered through western and northwestern France, England (a cluster in southern England and one in Yorkshire), and two spots in Scotland (one near Glasgow, one near Edinburgh).

This aligns pretty much perfectly with what I know about the origins of my family.  The "pretty much" comes from one puzzling finding; it showed no matches in Germany.  Another great-great grandfather, one William Brandt, came to America in the mid-1800s and married a woman of French and Dutch ancestry named Isabella Rulong.  I know William was German; on the census his birthplace is given as Bremen, so I even know the city.  But my DNA shows zero ancestry in Germany.

However, the answer to this mystery could be simple.  I know a bit about William Brandt because the house he built in the 1870s is on the Louisiana Register of Historic Homes.  William was the court recorder for Lafayette Parish for almost twenty years, and served as mayor for a year.  But the woman who now lives in what was Brandt's house gave us a tour and told us a little about what she knows about my ancestor, and apparently he wasn't exactly a pinnacle of exemplary behavior.  He was, she said, a notorious drunkard, frequently having to be rescued from some ditch or another he'd fallen into after his latest night on the town.  

William Brandt's house, Lafayette, Louisiana [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Paigecbroadbent, Brandt, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This may explain why he held the office of mayor for only a year, something that has always intrigued me.  And it may well also account for my lack of German ancestry.  It's entirely possible that my great-great grandmother Isabella found a friend, as it were, to provide solace and comfort in the absence of her ne'er-do-well husband, and this unknown is actually my biological great-great grandfather.  A study two years ago found that about one percent of births worldwide are due to what they euphemistically call "extra-pair paternity," which is why you have to sign a waiver when you get your DNA tested that you won't hold the company responsible if your results aren't quite what you expected.

So I think there's a pretty good chance that my great grandmother, Mary Emily (Brandt) Bonnet, was not actually William's daughter.  Just as well.  I have enough rogues and scoundrels in my family as it is.

It's amazing what we can now figure out by DNA analysis.  A study just published this week in Nature, written by a team of researchers way too long to list here, used DNA samples from bones and teeth found at burial sites in England to see if they could figure out who came from where and when, and found that in the Late Bronze Age (1,200 to 800 B.C.E.) there was a huge influx of people from what is now northwestern France.  These people, who were probably formed of different tribes but are what we usually collectively call "Celtic," eventually replaced fifty percent of the indigenous pre-invasion population.

"By using genetic data to document times when there were large-scale movements of people into a region, we can identify plausible times for a language shift," said study co-author David Reich of Harvard University, in an interview with Science Daily. "Known Celtic languages are too similar in their vocabularies to plausibly descend from a common ancestor 4,500 years ago, which is the time of the earlier pulse of large-scale migration, and very little migration occurred in the Iron Age.  If you're a serious scholar, the genetic data should make you adjust your beliefs: downweighting the scenario of early Celtic language coming in the Iron Age [and early Bronze Age] and upweighting the Late Bronze Age."

England, of course, has been invaded and settled several times since then; by the Romans in the first century C.E., by the Germanic Anglo-Saxons starting in the sixth century, then by the Norman French in the eleventh.  Each new pulse of invaders brought along their own languages and culture -- and their DNA.  That we can look at bones today and see the genetic history of the people they came from is pretty stupendous.

One of the coolest pieces of this research has to do with lactose tolerance.  You probably know that lactose is a sugar that is easily digested by most mammals only in infancy, and adults lose their tolerance for it.  (This is why it's not a good idea to feed milk to an adult cat.)  But some people retain the ability to digest lactose -- it's most common in Europe, and is caused by a single gene.  Lactose tolerance seems to have spread along with the practice of keeping dairy cattle, for obvious reasons.  And in the period studied by the research, the incidence of the lactose-tolerance gene skyrocketed, so the new influx of settlers seem to have been milk drinkers -- and brought along their cattle.

It's amazing what we can learn from a bunch of three-thousand-year-old bones, and that the DNA fragments still contained within them give us a window into the movements of people during a time we know little about otherwise.  In my case, we're talking about people who are likely to be my ancestors (all "extra-pair paternity events" aside).  One more example of the wisdom in the saying carved into the wall of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: γνῶθι σεαυτόν ("know yourself").

Or, as John Heywood put in in 1546: "What's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh."

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

I remember when I first learned about the tragedy of how much classical literature has been lost.  Take, for example, Sophocles, which anyone who's taken a college lit class probably knows because of his plays Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus.  He was the author of at least 120 plays, of which only seven have survived.  While we consider him to be one of the most brilliant ancient Greek playwrights, we don't even have ten percent of the literature he wrote.  As Carl Sagan put it, it's as if all we had of Shakespeare was Timon of Athens, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline, and were judging his talent based upon that.

The same is true of just about every classical Greek and Roman writer.  Little to nothing of their work survives; some are only known because of references to their writing in other authors.  Some of what we do have was saved by fortunate chance; this is the subject of Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful book The Swerve, which is about how a fifteenth-century book collector, Poggio Bracciolini, discovered in a monastic library what might well have been the sole remaining copy of Lucretius's masterwork De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which was one of the first pieces of writing to take seriously Democritus's idea that all matter is made of atoms.

The Swerve looks at the history of Lucretius's work (and its origin in the philosophy of Epicurus) and the monastic tradition that allowed it to survive, as well as Poggio's own life and times and how his discovery altered the course of our pursuit of natural history.  (This is the "swerve" referenced in the title.)  It's a fascinating read for anyone who enjoys history or science (or the history of science).  His writing is clear, lucid, and quick-paced, about as far from the stereotype of historical writing being dry and boring as you could get.  You definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

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

The Germ Theory of Disease

When you think of werewolves in the state of Washington (if you ever do), what probably comes to mind is a certain trilogy of books That Shall Not Be Named.  For this week's Fiction Friday, here's a different take on the idea of werewolves in general, not to mention love stories.

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

The Germ Theory of Disease

Olivia Tanner realized it wasn’t going to be an ordinary ride home from work when a middle-aged businessman turned into a werewolf on the #217 bus from downtown Seattle to Bellevue.

It was very late at night, one of the last bus runs of the evening, and there weren’t many people aboard – just herself, a nice-looking, well-built blond guy in jeans and a sweatshirt sitting across from her reading a Stephen King novel, a sleeping teenager in the back row, and one or two others.  Near the front was a suit-clad, overweight businessman, his balding head sporting a rather pathetic attempt at a combover.  He had a briefcase sitting on the seat next to him, and was looking at some papers in a manila folder.  There was no conversation, only the swish of the traffic, the whining of the bus engine, and the occasional burst of static and unintelligible talk from the bus driver’s intercom.

They were on the middle of the I-90 bridge when it happened, which was an atrocious place for a werewolf to appear suddenly.  Even if the bus had stopped, there was nowhere useful to run, and given that it was night the choices would have boiled down to being eaten by the werewolf or getting run over by a car.

She was staring out of the window into the darkness, thinking about how glad she’d be to get back to her apartment and her bed – when she heard a noise, like someone tearing a bedsheet.  She looked around, wondering what had happened, and that’s when she saw it.  Standing up from the seat where the businessman had been seated was a creature that was unmistakably a werewolf.  Its forehead was sloping, with dark, almond-shaped eyes and bristling brows.  It had a long, tapered snout, and as she stared at it, one side of the muzzle lifted, revealing a sharp yellow canine tooth.  Pointed ears, rimmed with coarse hair, stood up from the side of its head.  It gave a low snarl, and turned toward her.  Their gaze met, and the creature’s eyes narrowed.  As it turned, she saw that its body was still basically human, but muscled like no one she’d ever seen.  It was naked, its chest and back hairy, and was prodigiously male.  One hand came out – its nails were long, pointed claws, like an eagle’s talons – and it grasped the seat, steadying itself.  She heard the little popping sound as its hand closed on the headrest and the claws punctured the plastic lining.  Muscles in its abdomen and legs stood out, tensing, as it readied itself to jump at her.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Through all of this, Olivia sat completely still, transfixed, like a mouse mesmerized by a snake.  She shrank back, never taking her eyes off the werewolf, and tried to push her body backwards against the seat.  A whimpering noise came from her open mouth, but she couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream, couldn’t do anything but sit and wait for the thing to spring.

Then she caught a second movement, from the blond man across the aisle, and she turned to see him rise from his seat.  But it wasn’t him – was it?  The man who now stood next to her, also mother-naked, muscles rippling, his face shining in its own light, had wings.  And a sword.  The sword was glowing so brightly in the dimly-lit bus that Olivia could hardly look at it.  The wings, huge, feathered wings, speckled brown like a hawk’s, arose from broad shoulders.  His eyes were fixed on the monster in the aisle.  The werewolf swiveled its horrid head away from Olivia, and looked at the angelic figure blocking its way.  It gave a rough, angry growl, almost like a cough, and leapt at the winged man.

As the werewolf passed Olivia, it made a sweeping pass at her face with one clawed hand.  She ducked, and felt the wind as it missed her by inches.  The winged man brought up his sword, and there was a swish and a thud, and the werewolf’s head flew backwards, landed in the aisle, and rolled under a seat.  Dark blood gouted up from the severed neck.  The werewolf’s clawed hands rose for a moment, as if to investigate this strange condition of being headless.  Then it realized it was dead, and tumbled forward with a crash.

The angel figure let his sword drop to his side.  His other hand came up, and smoothed back his blond hair. Olivia just stared, her eyes perfect circles of terror.  The man looked down at himself, seemed to realize that he was being watched by a strange woman while wearing nothing but an embarrassed smile.  He shrugged, and said, “Oops.”  Then he sat down in the seat, his wings giving a little rustling sound as they folded inward, and he once again became the tall, lean man with the Stephen King book, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt.  He looked over at her, smiled and shrugged again.  Olivia looked at the floor.  The body of the werewolf was gone.  Once more the businessman was sitting in his seat, his balding head shining a little in the light from the overhead fluorescents.  He seemed to be feeling ill.  He was sweating, and as she watched, he passed a hand across his face, and coughed.

There were still puncture marks in the seat headrest two rows up.

She looked back at the blond man, opened her mouth, and tried to think of something to say.  Nothing came out.

“Hey,” he finally said.  “You want to go to the Starbucks in Eastgate and talk?”
Olivia just nodded.  Afterwards, she was never sure why she acquiesced, but at the time, it seemed like the only possible thing to do.

*****

The blond man, whose name was Nathan Hendrickson, sat across from Olivia in the Starbucks, drinking a mocha cappuccino with extra whipped cream and cinnamon sprinkles.  A raspberry danish, so far untouched, sat on a plate in front of him.  At first they engaged in small talk.  Nathan said that he worked as a manager at Chili’s downtown, and Olivia responded that she was a clerk in a clothing store.  Both of them lived in Bellevue, took the bus because they hated the traffic, and had a serious sweet tooth.

“But…” Olivia began, setting down her cup of vanilla chai and trying to think of how to phrase the question.

“What the fuck just happened on the bus?” Nathan said, in a conversational voice.

“Yeah,” Olivia said with some feeling.

Nathan took a bite of his raspberry danish. “It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“I thought it would be.  But you’re the one who suggested we come here.  I figured you wanted to explain it.”

“Well, let me just say this – check out the obituary columns in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer tomorrow.  The following day, at the latest.”

“Looking for who?”

“The bald guy.  He’ll be dead in twenty-four hours.”

Olivia frowned, looked down, shook her head.  “Can you tell me what happened?  It looked to me like you saved my life.  But… Jesus.  You had wings.  And no clothes on.”

Nathan blushed.  “Yeah, sorry about that.  It just happens.  I can’t take my clothes with me.”

“It’s okay. I mean, you…”  She stopped.  She’d been about to say, “You look just fine naked,” but decided that wasn’t something you said to someone you’d only met a half-hour ago, even if that person had just saved you from being ripped limb from limb by a werewolf.

“The issue is, you weren’t supposed to see all that.  Most people can’t.  Didn’t it strike you as a little weird that no one else said anything, screamed, nothing?  The kid in the back didn’t even wake up.  The bus driver didn’t slam on the brakes.”

“Of course.”  Truthfully, it hadn’t really registered with her until that moment.

“Most people can’t see these… events.  When they happen.  Which isn’t often.”

“So…that bald dude wasn’t really a werewolf?”

“Well, he was.  But not what you probably think of when you think of the word ‘werewolf.’  You know, some dude who turns into a wolf at the full moon, rips people up, and so on.”

“What is it, then?”

“Well, you know about the germ theory of disease, right?”

“It’s a theory?  I thought it was true.”

Nathan smiled.  “Well, back in the nineteenth century, it was just a theory.  People had this idea that these little things, these blobs you can only see under a microscope, caused things like scarlet fever and cholera and diphtheria.  Other people said, ‘Bullshit.  Little things like that, causing people to cough their lungs up?  Ridiculous.’  There was one Scottish doctor who was so contemptuous of the germ theory of disease that he used to sharpen his scalpel on the sole of his boot before surgery.”

“He must have had a hell of a lot of malpractice insurance.”

“No such thing, in those days.  But the point is, what you can’t see can kill you.  It just took a while for them to figure it out.”

“And this werewolf thing I saw…”  Olivia stopped, ending with an implied question mark.

“It’s a disease of the mind.  A fatal one, sadly.  When you’re infected, your spirit becomes the beast that you saw.  It’s transmitted by… well, I guess you could call it psychic bites.”

“Sort of like rabies.”

“Sort of.  If that guy’s werewolf had bitten you, or scratched you, you’d have turned as well.  But I killed it before it could.”

“And now he’s going to die?”

Nathan nodded, looked down.  “Yes.  You can’t live without your spirit, or at least not very long.  The werewolf is a diseased spirit, but you still die if it’s killed.  Even though it’s diseased, it’s somehow keeping you alive.  Without it, you die.”  He paused, then said, “It’s like with heart disease.  Heart disease can kill you, but taking out your heart would kill you a lot faster.”  His face became serious.  “The difference is, heart disease doesn’t try to jump to innocent people around you.”

“So the bald guy…”  Again she trailed off.

“Will be found dead.  Soon.  It’ll probably look like he had a heart attack or stroke.  His death will be attributed to natural causes.  But it’s one less werewolf out there, biting people and spreading the infection.”

“What would it have been like if I’d been bitten?”

Nathan’s eyes narrowed.  “I don’t know.  It’s weird.  You could see it, and you could see me… or at least me as I, um… really am.  Most people can’t.  Most people… if they’re bitten, they just have a sudden twinge – a pang of pain, it feels like a pulled muscle or a sore joint.  But then within two weeks, they turn, and they’re out there biting others and spreading the infection, without knowing it.”  He paused.  “How it would have been for you, I don’t know, given that you would have seen what the werewolf was really doing.”

Olivia didn’t answer for a moment.

“That’s horrifying,” she finally said.

“Yes.  That’s why I try to stop as many infected people as I can, before they can infect others.”

“They have no idea they’re doing it?”

“Not consciously.  But it does change their behavior, just like the rabies virus does.  Did you know that the rabies virus makes carnivores more aggressive, and herbivores more docile?  The virus does what it takes to spread – making a raccoon bite, or making a deer stand still and let itself be bitten – both of them serve to spread the virus to a new host.  In the case of this one, the person who’s been turned becomes more social.  They want to be around people.  They actually feel fit and energetic.  Their personalities become forward, pushy, extroverted.  You find a lot of ‘em in bars, dance clubs, at athletic events.  Eventually, they die – but it can take a year or two, and by that time they’ve usually infected hundreds of others.”

Olivia shuddered.  “And you?  What are you?  Some kind of guardian angel, or something?”

Nathan laughed.  “An angel?  Hardly.”

“You have wings.”

“Yeah.  So do sparrows.  That doesn’t make them angels.”

“Okay, if you’re not an angel, what are you?”

He grinned.  “I work for the Invisible Animal Control Department.  Or the Center for Psychic Disease Control.  However you want to look at it.”

“So… you’re, like, the Naked Winged Werewolf Avenger, or something?”

“I like that.  Can I use it?”

Olivia just stared at him for a moment.  “Look,” she finally said.  “Be straight with me.  Am I losing my mind?  Because if I am… fuck.  I just want to know, okay?”

“You’re not losing your mind.  What you saw was my spirit standing up and challenging the bald man’s werewolf spirit.  That’s why we were…. um, you know.  Naked.  No clothes allowed in the spirit world.”  He brightened.  “Your spirit is naked, too, you know.”

“I’ve never seen it,” Olivia said, dryly.

“Yeah, that’s a puzzler.  You weren’t supposed to see what you saw, and I honestly have no idea why you did.  But you’re not crazy.  You saw what was really happening.  It was the other people on the bus that didn’t.  All they would have seen is me and the bald dude, sitting there minding our own business.  No one else saw anything.”

“Including that sword of yours cutting the werewolf’s head off?”

“Yup.” He grinned.  “And by the way, that sword only hurts werewolves.  No worries about my being armed and dangerous.”

Olivia rolled her eyes.  “Trust me, at the moment that’s the least of my worries.”

Nathan just grinned at her.

“Now what do I do?  I mean, assuming that I actually believe all of this.”  And she suddenly realized that she did believe it.  There was no disputing what she’d seen, and Nathan’s explanation made as much sense as any other she could come up with.

“I guess, we finish our coffee and pastries, and we both go home.”

“And tomorrow, I just go to work, and you go back to… werewolf hunting?”

“I have to work, too.  Werewolf hunting doesn’t pay my rent.”

“Oh.”  She looked up at him.  “How do I avoid getting bitten?  I mean, you’re not going to be there next time, probably.”

“Given that you can see them, you’ll at least have more of an advantage than other people.  But honestly, not that many people are werewolves.  I kill maybe three, four a month.  Five in a good month.  And that’s with going out to look for them, hanging out in werewolf-friendly places.  I get at least one a month right in Chili’s.”

“Convenient for you.”

 
Nathan nodded.  “Yup.  But you shouldn’t worry.  Your likelihood of getting bitten, even if you couldn’t see them, is pretty small.”

She looked at him, one eyebrow raised.  “Any chance I could take out some extra insurance?  You want to have dinner together some time?”

Nathan gave her a dazzling smile.  “Sure.  I’m free tomorrow evening, in fact.  How about that new Japanese restaurant up in the University District?  I’ve been wanting to try it.”

“Sure.”

Nathan stood, and then went over, and gave her a light kiss on the mouth.  Olivia felt a tingling sensation, like a static shock.

“You’re pretty forward yourself.”  She smiled up at him.

“Can’t let the werewolves have all the fun.”

*****

Olivia found the bald man’s obituary in the Post-Intelligencer two days later.

It read:

MARTIN 

Douglas J. Martin, 47, of Bellevue, died suddenly Tuesday morning.  He was a valued employee of Rush Life Insurance Agency of Seattle, where he had worked for fourteen years.  He was a graduate of Pacific Lutheran University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1985.  He was awarded an MBA in finance from the University of Washington in 1990.  Martin’s passing is mourned by a brother, Thomas, of Tacoma, and a sister, Mary McWilliams, of Tukwila.  He was preceded in death by his parents, Nelson and Denise (Trudell) Martin.

Olivia looked down at the photograph of the suit-clad man, with his neat wire-framed glasses and his combover.  A shiver ran through her frame as she remembered the rippling muscles and yellow fangs of the werewolf he’d become.  He could have bitten or scratched her, infected her.  If he had, in a week or two she'd be out partying at bars, looking for victims without even knowing it.

Or maybe she was losing her mind.  At the moment, those two possibilities seemed equally likely.

*****

One date with Nathan became two, then three, and pretty soon Olivia’s roommate, Andrea, was asking when she’d get to meet this blond god that Olivia was so taken with.

“Soon,” Olivia said.  “I’ll have him over here for dinner some time.  Once we run out of new restaurants to try.”

“That could take years.”  Andrea wiggled her eyebrows.  “Maybe you’ll be having him come over for, you know.  Other reasons.  At some point.”

“Maybe at some point.”

 
“You certainly have been seeing him a lot.  When have you been one to run off after the night life?  I always thought of you as being more of the come home early, cuddle up with a nice book type.”

Olivia shrugged.  “I’m just having fun, that’s all.  Are you jealous?”

“Yeah.  A little.  And if he turns out to be as gorgeous as you say, I’m going to be a lot jealous.”

*****

A little under three weeks later, she woke up on a Saturday morning with a sudden, stabbing pain, right behind both shoulder blades.  She yelped a little and reached back, but the pain was gone, as instantaneously as it had occurred.  After lying still for a moment, she wasn’t completely convinced that it’d been real, that she hadn’t dreamed it.

She tried to relax, to go back to sleep, but she felt restless, with a fiery energy that was completely unlike her usual reluctance to get up on her days off.  Finally, she stretched, yawning, and went into the bathroom, and turned on the shower.

As she was drying herself off, there it was, that jolt of pain again.  Once more she slid her hands over her bare shoulders.  Her skin felt normal, smooth, unmarked, and she massaged her shoulder muscles a little – but honestly, there was no reason to.  She felt fine.  Better than fine, actually.  She felt wonderful.  But why did she keep feeling that sudden twinge?

She glanced in the mirror.  And only for a moment – in a flash nearly as quick as the pain had been – she saw a reflection of herself, her face shining from its own light, and behind her a pair of long, tapered wings, streaked like a falcon’s.  She gasped, and looked again – and she was back to being herself, just regular Olivia.  The whole thing had taken less than a second.  She reached back, feeling behind her, but there was nothing there.

She leaned toward the mirror, mouth hanging open a little, and her image blurred, and there were the wings again, as if her body had hung back just for a little, had taken a while to catch up.  Then there was a shimmer as she became an ordinary human again.  Every time she moved, there was a quick image of a naked, shining, winged woman, who was clearly herself and yet so obviously not – and then like an image coming into focus, the vision would go away, and all she’d see was her own familiar form.

And that was when she remembered their first kiss, when she’d felt an electric zing as their lips touched.

Heart pounding, she turned off the shower, pulled on her bathrobe, and went into her bedroom, and picked up her cellphone and dialed it.

“Hello?” said a sleepy voice.

“It's Olivia.  Goddammit, I’ve… did you know you were contagious?”

He sounded genuinely mystified.  “I am?”

“Nathan, I’ve got wings.”

“You do?  How’s that possible?”

“Well, I think you’re the one who can tell me that.”  Olivia tried to keep the indignation out of her voice, with only marginal success.  “You’ve infected me.  With, I don’t know, Contagious Naked Winged Werewolf Avenger disease, or something.”

“I didn’t know it was contagious.”  He paused.  “Look, I’m sorry.  You already could see the werewolf, three weeks ago.  Maybe you were already infected somehow.”

“I don’t think so,” Olivia said.  “I’m sure that this came from you.”

“Sorry,” he said again.

“Look, I’m not mad at you.  It’s more that I’d at least have liked to have had a choice in the matter.”

“Germs don’t ask you if you want to be infected.  Remember the Germ Theory of Disease?”

Olivia felt her wings flex, rustle quietly, and then with a shiver she sensed her newly winged spirit reintegrating with her body.  Really, she felt remarkably well.  Well enough to fly.  Maybe well enough to hunt werewolves.

“Well,” she admitted, “I guess you have a point.”
“I gotta say it’s kinda cool.”  His voice rose with excitement, and she could virtually hear him smiling.  “I never thought I'd have a girlfriend who was... you know.  Like me.  Don’t you think this could be fun?”

“Fun,” she said, and was silent for a moment.  Then something in her seemed to shift, and she hoped it wasn’t just the wings.  “Okay, fine.  What the hell.  You know where I can get a sword?”

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

I remember when I first learned about the tragedy of how much classical literature has been lost.  Take, for example, Sophocles, which anyone who's taken a college lit class probably knows because of his plays Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus.  He was the author of at least 120 plays, of which only seven have survived.  While we consider him to be one of the most brilliant ancient Greek playwrights, we don't even have ten percent of the literature he wrote.  As Carl Sagan put it, it's as if all we had of Shakespeare was Timon of Athens, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline, and were judging his talent based upon that.

The same is true of just about every classical Greek and Roman writer.  Little to nothing of their work survives; some are only known because of references to their writing in other authors.  Some of what we do have was saved by fortunate chance; this is the subject of Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful book The Swerve, which is about how a fifteenth-century book collector, Poggio Bracciolini, discovered in a monastic library what might well have been the sole remaining copy of Lucretius's masterwork De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which was one of the first pieces of writing to take seriously Democritus's idea that all matter is made of atoms.

The Swerve looks at the history of Lucretius's work (and its origin in the philosophy of Epicurus) and the monastic tradition that allowed it to survive, as well as Poggio's own life and times and how his discovery altered the course of our pursuit of natural history.  (This is the "swerve" referenced in the title.)  It's a fascinating read for anyone who enjoys history or science (or the history of science).  His writing is clear, lucid, and quick-paced, about as far from the stereotype of historical writing being dry and boring as you could get.  You definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

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

Caught in the sea's net

The specter of climate change is getting difficult to ignore.  While you still can't point at a particular event and say "that happened because of anthropogenic climate change" -- as I said about a million times to my students, "climate isn't the same as weather" -- we've had enough anomalous heat waves, droughts, floods, and storms in the past ten years that it's getting harder and harder to deny unless you go around with blinders on or are just plain stupid.  (The latest being the catastrophic tornadoes that tore through Kentucky a couple of weeks ago, despite it being December, usually a low point in tornado occurrence and intensity.)

There are signs that even the science deniers are beginning to have some traces of second thoughts about the whole thing.  A study in Nature Scientific Reports a few weeks ago found that "climate contrarians" have of late begun to shift their ground, from outright denial that it's happening to attacking the researchers' integrities and the solutions they propose.  While this is still maddening to those of us who can actually read and understand a scientific paper, it's at least a tentative step in the right direction.  "I don't like the people who are saying this" and "the solutions won't work/are too expensive" are better than "this isn't happening" and "la la la la la la la not listening."

But the evidence that the situation is perilous keeps piling up.  One of the consequences of climate change most people don't think a lot about is sea level rise, mostly because the numbers seem insignificant; for example, a recent study showed that in the twenty-seven years between 1993 and 2020, the average sea level rose by a centimeter, and the rate of rise in the past ten years is triple what it was in the twentieth century.

It's easy to say, "a centimeter?  That's hardly anything."  But that ignores a couple of things.  First, that's an average; because of patterns of melt water, and sea and wind currents, some places have seen an increase of up to twenty centimeters, easily enough to cause devastating coastal flooding and infiltration of fresh-water aquifers with salt.  Second, there's geological evidence that when the sea level rises, it can happen in fits-and-starts, as ice shelves (primarily in Greenland and Antarctica) collapse.  Given how many people live in low-lying coastal areas, it wouldn't take much to cause a humanitarian catastrophe.

Another pair of studies that came out just last week have illustrated how vulnerable coastal communities have been -- and still are -- to changes in sea level.  Archaeologists uncovered evidence from two millennia ago in southern Brazil indicating that a drop in sea level due to increases in polar ice exposed shellfish beds that the coastal indigenous people depended on, and led to wide abandonment of settlements in the area.  The opposite happened in Greenland in the fourteenth century -- coastal communities that had been settled by Vikings three centuries earlier got swamped, eradicating coastline and driving the settlers up against uninhabitable glacial regions.  They were caught between the rising seas and the rising ice, trapped in an ever-shrinking strip of land that eventually disappeared completely.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jensbn, Greenland scenery, CC BY-SA 3.0]

My initial reaction to the latter paper was puzzlement; the fourteenth century was the height of the Little Ice Age, so you'd think the freeze-up would have lowered sea level, not raised it.  But I was failing to take into account isostasy, which is the phenomenon caused by the fact that the continents are literally floating in the magma of the mantle.  Just like adding weight to a boat causes it to ride lower in the water, adding weight to a continent causes it to sink a little into the mantle.  So when the ice sheets built up on Greenland, it pushed it downward, submerging habitable coastline.  (The opposite has happened as the glaciers have melted; in fact, it's still happening in Scandinavia, Canada, and Scotland, the latter of which is still undergoing isostatic rebound at a rate of ten centimeters of uplift per century.)

The deniers are right about one thing; the Earth has certainly experienced climatic ups and downs throughout its long history.  What's terrifying right now is the rate at which it's happening.  A study from the International Panel on Climate Change found persuasive evidence that the rate of temperature increase we're seeing is higher than it's been since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, over fifty million years ago.

If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what would.

It's the humanitarian cost that's been on my mind lately, not just because of today's climate change, but the changes that have occurred historically.  I was so captivated by the tragedy of the disappearance of the Norse settlements in Greenland that years ago, it inspired me to write a poem -- one of the few I've ever written.  What would it be like to be the last person alive in a place, knowing no one would come to rescue you?  I can only hope humanity's fate won't be so bleak -- but whenever I think about our reckless attitude toward the environment, this haunting image comes to mind, and I thought it would be a fitting way to end this post.

Greenland Colony 1375

He goes down to the sea each day and walks the shore.
Each day the gray sea ice is closer, and fewer gulls come.
He wanders up toward the village, past the empty and ruined rectory.
The churchyard behind it has stone cairns.  His wife lies beneath one,
And there is one for Thórvald, his son,
Though Thórvald's bones do not rest there; he and three others
Were gathered ten years ago in the sea's net
And came not home.

Since building his son's cairn,
He had buried one by one the last four villagers.
Each time he prayed in the in the stone church on Sunday
That he would be next,
And not left alone to watch the ice closing in.

In his father's time ships had come.  The last one came
Fifty years ago.
Storms and ice made it easy for captains to forget
The village existed.  For a time he prayed each Sunday
For a ship to come and take him to Iceland or Norway or anywhere.
None came.  Ship-prayers died with the last villager,
Three years ago.  He still prayed in the stone church on Sunday,
For other things; until last winter,
When the church roof collapsed in a storm.
The next Sunday he stayed home and prayed for other things there.

Now even the gulls are going,
Riding the thin winds to other shores.  Soon they will all be gone.
He will walk the shore, looking out to sea for ships that will never come,
And see only the gray sea ice, closer each day.

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

I remember when I first learned about the tragedy of how much classical literature has been lost.  Take, for example, Sophocles, which anyone who's taken a college lit class probably knows because of his plays Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus.  He was the author of at least 120 plays, of which only seven have survived.  While we consider him to be one of the most brilliant ancient Greek playwrights, we don't even have ten percent of the literature he wrote.  As Carl Sagan put it, it's as if all we had of Shakespeare was Timon of Athens, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline, and were judging his talent based upon that.

The same is true of just about every classical Greek and Roman writer.  Little to nothing of their work survives; some are only known because of references to their writing in other authors.  Some of what we do have was saved by fortunate chance; this is the subject of Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful book The Swerve, which is about how a fifteenth-century book collector, Poggio Bracciolini, discovered in a monastic library what might well have been the sole remaining copy of Lucretius's masterwork De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which was one of the first pieces of writing to take seriously Democritus's idea that all matter is made of atoms.

The Swerve looks at the history of Lucretius's work (and its origin in the philosophy of Epicurus) and the monastic tradition that allowed it to survive, as well as Poggio's own life and times and how his discovery altered the course of our pursuit of natural history.  (This is the "swerve" referenced in the title.)  It's a fascinating read for anyone who enjoys history or science (or the history of science).  His writing is clear, lucid, and quick-paced, about as far from the stereotype of historical writing being dry and boring as you could get.  You definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

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