The perimeter of ignorance

In the past week, I watched two things that were interesting in juxtaposition.

One of them came my way because for my holiday gift my wife got me a subscription to Master Class, which has hundreds of online video classes on everything from political science to cooking.  I signed up for and watched a series of lectures by the eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, on the scientific endeavor and how to think effectively about science and how to talk about it to others.

In his class, Dr. Tyson says the following:

The frontier of discovery is a messy place.  You don't know what the next step is, sometimes you don't even know what question to ask.  As the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.  It's thrilling and scary at the same time...  The scientific method is whatever it takes to not fool yourself into thinking something is true that is not, or into thinking something is not true that is.  That pathway, it's not straight; it's curved, it has off-ramps to nowhere, and you don't know which of the paths in front of you are going to lead to the right place...  The cool thing about it is that nature is the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner.  You can argue all you want, but if nature disagrees with you, you're wrong.  If you care about critical thinking and science literacy, the degree to which you believe something is true should be proportional to the evidence that supports it.  If after all the experiments are done, there is convergence in a result, you have successfully winnowed out the effects of bias on that result.  No one is without bias -- just be ready to get your stuff checked.  And be ready to abandon your cherished thoughts and ideas in the face of conflicting evidence.

The other is the trailer to a video called Gods Among Us that was sent to me by a friend who is evidently trying to cause my brain to explode.  Here are a sampling of quotes (you can watch the trailer yourself if you dare, and want to know more about the context and sources, but I can promise you these were not cherry-picked to make the video sound ridiculous -- they all sound like this):

• There are quite a few extraterrestrials walking around, humanoid ones, so we've got them walking amongst us.  You may just think they look like nice people, or they may feel a bit different to you, but they're there and you see them every day. 
• How is it that these higher-dimensional energies can be brought down, can be downloaded, into our ordinary four-dimensional space-time experience?
• There are thousands, possibility millions, out there leading these double lives.  They will lead us into telepathic abilities, they will lead us into being able to heal ourselves, even to being able to change our bodies.
• The DNA in us can exist as a toroid.  It can be used as a tool to bring higher-dimensional energy into our physical bodies, convert it into electromagnetic fields that can then be used to convert the physiological and biochemical processes in us.
• I was contacted by a being who said he was from the constellation of Orion.
• You want to know what your DNA is?  It's 34% human, 28% tall white Zeta, and 38% Annunaki.  

The people interviewed seemed to fall into three categories: (1) researchers, all of whom seem somehow to have earned Ph.D.s; (2) people who claim to have been contacted by aliens; (3) people who claim to be human/alien hybrids themselves.  The whole thing was accompanied by music that sounds like it was rejected from Music From the Hearts of Space on the basis of being too ethereal.

Okay, I'm scoffing, but there's a serious point to be made here.  A number of claims in Gods Among Us are empirically testable.  I'm not referring to the eyewitness testimony of things like alien contact; as Dr. Tyson also points out, eyewitness testimony may be the highest standard of evidence in the court of law, but it's the lowest form of evidence in science.  "I saw it with my own eyes" is simply not enough in science.  We have far too many ways of getting it wrong to trust one person's word for something.

But there are many other kinds of statement in this video that could be tested.  DNA can become a toroid that funnels energy from outside of us into our bodies and changes our biochemistry?  Fine, demonstrate it in the lab.  There are beings who can communicate with you telepathically?  Set up a situation where they tell you something you couldn't have otherwise known, and have it verified by an independent researcher.  Over half of our DNA is extraterrestrial?  Sequence it and show me that it doesn't overlap, gene for gene, with 99% of the DNA from our nearest primate relatives (and in the 70-80% range with all other mammal species).

Oh, and you can't "be from a constellation."  A constellation is a random assemblage of stars sitting at wildly varying distances from the Earth that only appear to be near each other from our perspective.  Saying you're "from a constellation" makes about as much sense as someone asking you how to find your house, and your answering them, "You'll find it on the horizon."

One example of how a constellation would look from an altered perspective; the Big Dipper as seen after a ninety-degree rotation around the entire group

However, the most insidious problem with the people who make claims like these is their belief that mainstream science rejects their conclusions out of hand not because there's insufficient evidence, but because the claims contradict scientific orthodoxy.  They seem to think that scientists are sitting in this never-changing edifice they've built, and they'll fight you tooth and nail if you try to change one thing about it.  Contrast this to Dr. Tyson's statement about the scientific frontier; in science, you are always on the boundary between what is known and what is unknown.  Scientific orthodoxy changes every time we get a new body of evidence, which is all the time.  In fact, that's how scientific careers are made.  If there really was evidence of all the stuff Gods Among Us claims, the scientists would be trampling each other to death to be the first to publish it in a peer-reviewed journal.

Consider, as only one of many illustrative examples, how the theory of plate tectonics arose.  The belief -- the "scientific orthodoxy," if you will -- was that the Earth was static.  The continents stayed put.  Even if there were periodic events like earthquakes and volcanoes to shake things up, everything was more or less in the same place as it always had been.

Why, in fact, would you think the opposite?  A static Earth seemed common sense.  How could continents move in solid rock?

But in the 50s and 60s, the evidence from a variety of sources -- where exactly volcanoes and earthquakes took place, the position and age of hotspot island chains like Hawaii, the contours of Africa and South America, the fossil record, and (most importantly) the evidence from magnetometer readings near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge -- had piled up to the extent that there was no choice but to overturn our understanding of how geology worked.  In other words, faced with hard, verifiable, repeatable scientific research, the "scientific orthodoxy" had to change drastically.  And far from being suppressed by the scientific establishment, this put rocket fuel into the careers of the first geologists who wrote a paper about it -- Frederick Vine and Drummond Matthews -- and today, they're in every introduction-to-geology textbook written.

So if there was demonstrable evidence that over 50% of our DNA came from a non-terrestrial source?  That's Nobel-Prize-material, right there.

Could the people in Gods Among Us be right?  I suppose so.  But thus far they have not met the minimum threshold of evidence that it would take to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced.  I'll end with a quote from another physicist, Richard Feynman, which seems particularly apposite here: "The first principle of science is that you must not fool yourself.  And you are the easiest person to fool."

 **********************************

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!]

Waves

For this week's Fiction Friday, a short story that was inspired by something that my son and a friend saw while walking along the Delaware River while they were students at Salem College in Carney's Point, New Jersey.  The description of what they saw is pretty much as it happened and was related to me.

The explanation of it, however, is pure fiction.

I hope.

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

Waves

October gloom hung low over the Delaware River, wisps of mist rising from the murky, oil-slicked water to vanish into the uniform gray of the clouds.  Nick Dominique and Brady Elkano tramped silently through the knee-high grass, boots making squelching noises in the muddy ground that sloped at an imperceptible angle down toward the river’s shore.

“Whose stupid fucking idea was it to come down here today?”  Brady pulled his scuffed khaki jacket around him and shivered.

“Yours,” Nick said.

“Well, I’m freezing my ass off.”

“It’s not that bad.”  Nick was tall and lanky, his bony limbs never quite covered by shirts and pants that always seemed too wide in the waist and too short in the arms and legs.  He ran fingers through unkempt curly brown hair.  “Better than playing computer games in the apartment all afternoon.”

“At least the apartment has heat.”  Brady was compact and sturdy and dark, and turned a wry eye on his friend.  “There’s nothing down here but trash anyway.”

“I dunno.  There’s the stuff from the military depot.  Jake Warshawski said he found some kind of old air pump.  It was half-buried in the mud, but he took it out and cleaned it up and he said it needed a few parts but looked like he could get it working.”

“What do you want with an air pump?”

Nick laughed.  “Dude.  You know what I mean.  There’s not gonna be another air pump.  I just mean, you never know what we might find.”

Brady shivered again.  “You should drop out of college and be a junk collector.”

By this time, they were at the river’s edge.  On the other side they could see the skyline of Wilmington, Delaware, vague and fogged and surreal, its perpetual noise and bustle and traffic deadened by distance and still air.  The water flowed smoothly, silently, only a few eddies showing turbulence as it flowed over unseen obstructions.  Nick picked up a rock from the mud and sent it skittering across the surface, leaving a trail of circular waves before disappearing with a plunk.

“I think my boots are leaking,” Brady said.  Nick ignored him, and picked up a stick to poke around in the ragged, brown stalks of dying grass.

“What are you looking for?” Brady said, after watching him for five minutes.

“I’ll know when I find it.”

Brady swore under his breath. “My boots are leaking.”

“Take ‘em off.”

“You are ridiculous.”  But both boys wandered along the shore, kicking at washed up garbage and branches, every once in a while leaning over to fish something interesting out of the saturated soil.  Nick found a gear wheel missing two teeth, rinsed the grime off of it in the river, and shook it dry.

“What’re you gonna do with that?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Upstream they came on a long concrete jetty, sticking out into the river like a finger.  On the upstream side the mud was thicker, and there were pieces of net, a chunk of a Styrofoam cooler, and an old wooden sign that had the words “Keep Out” painted on it in stenciled black letters.  Brady stepped up onto the jetty and walked the thirty or so feet until it began to look crumbled and unsafe, and stood there, looking out over the river.  Nick stayed nearer to shore, poking around in the mud, still looking for interesting finds that the current might have washed his way.

That was when he noticed something shiny.

It was a mere pinpoint, like a speck of glitter on the surface of the black, smelly ooze.  He was still holding a stick he’d found earlier, and he pushed at it, and it didn’t move.  He could feel that the speck was just the top bit of something large and solid, so he lay down on his belly on the rough cement surface of the jetty and reached his long fingers down into the frigid mud.

Whatever it was had a smooth surface, and it was stuck more firmly than he expected.  He pulled on it, and felt it give a little.  Then with a thick slurping sound, it came loose, and sat, dripping sulfur-smelling goo, in the palms of both hands.

He swiveled around and dunked it in the comparatively cleaner water on the other side of the jetty.  Now the whole thing showed itself to be a gleaming metal ring, about two inches wide and perhaps five across.  It was heavy, gold in color, and had an inscription around it that said:

AQUA * VITAE * EST *VITA * SAPIENTIAE * AQUA * MORTIS * EST * MORS * SAPIENTIAE

He stared at it, frowning.  Nick had taken a couple of years of Latin in high school, and he recognized the word for “water,” but the rest of it didn’t make much sense.  He thought vita meant “road,” but something about that didn’t sound right.

Honestly, at the time he was taking Latin, he’d been far more interested in hiking and climbing trees and learning to shoot a bow and arrow than in memorizing conjugations and declensions.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

He stood up, gripping the ring tightly, as if he were afraid it would escape from his hand.  “Hey!  Brady!  You gotta see what I found.”

His friend turned, his expression unreadable in the gloom.  Nick walked down the jetty, his long stride closing the distance quickly.

“What is it?” Brady said as Nick approached.  His voice sounded ready to be unimpressed.  “Something else for your trash collection?”

“No.  This is really cool.”  He held out the ring.

Brady’s dark eyebrows rose.  “Wow.”

 
“Told you.”

Brady took it, and peered at the writing that encircled the outside.  “What does that mean?”

“Beats the hell out of me.”

“Well, it’s interesting.  You think it could be some kind of Indian artifact or something?”

“Could be,” Nick said, but he sounded doubtful.  “Did the Indians around here cast stuff in gold?”

“You think that’s gold?”

“It’s heavy enough to be.  But it's got a Latin inscription.  I don't think the Indians would have written in Latin.”

Brady frowned, and handed it back.  “I wonder if we should, like, contact a museum or something.”

“Maybe.”  Nick held it up in the thin, gray light.  “I wonder what it was for?  It’s too big to be a bracelet.”

Brady shrugged, and looked out over the river again. Nick continued to stare at the metal ring, which is why he didn’t see what was happening until he heard Brady’s voice saying, “Nick, what the fuck is that?”

Nick peered past his friend, and at first thought he was looking at some sort of optical illusion, a trick of the odd, attenuated light or the rank mist that hung low over the water.  But it was unmistakable.  The river water had bubbled up, like there was some sort of disturbance underneath it, as if a giant head was about to surface.  Waves rolled off of it, making soft slushy noises and proceeding outward in all directions.  The boys stood still, watching.  Already the first and smallest ones were rocking against the tip of the jetty, splitting and turning down the sides until they dissipated against the mud.

“We should get out of here,” Brady said.

For once, Nick didn’t argue.  Brady shoved past him, taking off at a jog down the cement wall, Nick following him at a fast walk.  They reached shore in a few seconds, and Nick turned over his shoulder to look out over the river.  The disturbance was still there, like a dark, wet hill, churning waves now slopping against the shore.  But nothing else was visible of whatever it was that was causing it.

Brady kept at his jog all the way across the grassy meadow, and up toward the road where Nick’s truck, an aging Toyota pickup, was parked.  When they scrambled up the embankment, both boys turned back toward the river, but the low scrubby trees along the road obscured their view.

It wasn’t until they were both in the truck, the engine coughing into life, that Nick spoke.  “That was creepy.”

“No shit.”

“What do you think it was?”

“I have no idea.”

“Maybe a big fish or something.”  He pulled the truck out onto the road, and accelerated back toward town.

Brady gave Nick a scowl.  “A fish?  How big a fish would it have to be?”

“I dunno.  You got a better suggestion?”

“No.”

“Okay, then.”

They made the rest of the drive in silence.  Even Nick was happy to step back into the warmth of the house where he and Brady rented rooms, both leaving their mud-caked shoes on the front porch.

“I’m hitting the shower.”  Nick pulled off his jacket and threw it on the couch in the living room.

“Let me know when you’re done,” Brady said, plopping down in a rocking chair and turning on the television with a remote.  “I’m next.”

Nick trotted up the stairs, his sock-clad feet making little noise on the wooden steps, and went into the bathroom.  He shucked his damp, dirt-splotched clothes and turned on the shower, giving it a minute for the antiquated water heater to pump some warm water up to the second floor, then he stepped in.

The heat felt delicious on his skin, but he noticed something else almost immediately.  At first, he thought he was overhearing Brady downstairs listening to the television, but he quickly realized it couldn’t be that—there was no way it would be audible from this far away, not with the door closed and the water running.

But he heard a voice.  Thin, low, but clearly audible.

Where did you put it?  I can’t see it.  I can’t.  Where is it?  Where did you put it?

Over and over, a monotonous drone, repeating the same words over and over.  The voice had a strange, rolling accent, but he couldn’t place what sort.  It sounded antiquated and stilted and vaguely British, the sort of accent you might expect from a second-string actor in a Shakespearean play.

Nick stood there, the water cascading over his skin, his shower forgotten for a moment.  He frowned, listening, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from, but it seemed not to be localizable.  He turned the water off, hoping to hear it more clearly.

As soon as he did, the voice stopped.

Nick stood there in the shower, naked and dripping wet, his face a study in confusion.  After a moment, he turned the faucet on again.

The voice started again, as soon as the hot water hit his skin.

He hurried through the rest of his shower, then dried off and cinched the towel around his waist. He picked up his filthy clothes and walked back to his room, pitching them into the hamper.  There was a loud clunk as the pocket of his trousers hit the side of the hamper, and he reached in and pulled them out again, extracting the gleaming metal ring.

He stared at it for a moment, then set it on his dresser, and got out dry clothes and began to dress.

Where did you put it?  I can’t see it.

When he was fully dressed, he picked up the ring again, looked at the inscription, and then sat down at his computer.

Twenty minutes of messing about with Google Translate later, he had scrawled on a piece of scrap paper the words “Water Life Is Life Wisdom Water Death Is Death Wisdom.”  Vita evidently meant “life,” not “road.”  But he was no closer to figuring out what the mysterious words meant.

He went to the window, where gray light was filtering in through the grimy glass pane, and turned the ring over in his hand.  Bits of river mud still clung to the surface, now drying to a gray-brown, fouling the inside of the ring where there were other, fainter engravings.  Nick went back into the bathroom.  From the upstairs landing, he could hear Brady’s television show still playing.  Either his roommate had forgotten about showering, or (more likely) had fallen asleep in front of the television.  Nick pulled a couple of pieces of paper towel from a roll hanging on the wall, turned on the tap, and put the ring under the stream.

And immediately the voice was back, but with a more sinister tone. There it is.  Who are you?  What are you doing with it?  Give it back.

Nick jerked his hand out of the water as if he’d been stung.  There was water dripping from the ring into the sink, and in rhythm with the water drops, he heard clipped bits of words. it… give… where… you?... NOW.

He retreated into his room, drying the ring on the edge of his shirt, listening for the voice and hearing nothing but silence.

Nick looked at the inside of the ring.  There were shallow grooves running the circumference of the ring, but they were difficult to see.  The metal was polished smooth, whether through artifice or through long use was impossible to tell, and it had all but eradicated the markings.  He squinted at them, and thought he could make out the rippling contour of a long body.  At first, he thought it was a snake, but after some turning of the ring this way and that, he could make out the impressions of jointed legs ending in claws.  A dragon, perhaps.

Still holding the ring, he trotted downstairs to the living room.  His roommate, as expected, was lying sprawled in the recliner, eyes closed and mouth hanging open, a game show of some kind playing unheeded on the television.

“Hey, Brady,” Nick said.

Brady opened one eye, blinked, and said, in a slurred voice, “You done with the shower?”

“Yeah.  But that’s not why I woke you up.  Take a look at this.”  He handed the ring to his friend, who peered at it, then looked up and shrugged.

“Yeah?”

“I think this ring is…”  He had started to say cursed but stopped in time; it sounded ridiculous, even to him.  “...weird,” he finished.

“Weird how?”  Brady gave him a wry eye.  “Some kind of artifact, maybe.”

“Look, dude, just get up, I need to show you something.”

Brady gave a groan and stood up.  Nick led him into the kitchen, then put his hand out for the metal ring.  Nick turned the faucet with a squeak, and the water began to flow over the ring.  Immediately the monotonous droning voice began again, in the middle of a sentence, as if it had been speaking, unheard, the whole time.

yours.  Give it back.  Now.  It must come back to me.  I will find you.  You must not keep it.

Brady jumped, and said, under his breath, “Holy shit.”

Nick shut the tap off, and once again, the voice broke up into fragments.

I will find you.  You must not… ring…  Give… I… find… keep…

And then it stopped.

"You heard it, too."  It was not a question.

Brady looked at his friend with wide eyes.  "Yes."

"This has to do with the thing we saw in the river."

"All we saw was a bunch of waves."

"Yeah, but something was causing them.  There was something under there."

Brady didn't have an answer to that.

"What should we do?" Nick asked.

"I dunno.  Give it back?"

"Throw it into the river?"

"That's what I'm thinking."  Brady's voice shook.

"What if it's valuable?  And besides, suppose there is some kind of, um, thing, there in the river.  How could it get it back?  There's no way it could know where we are."

"You didn't notice how the voice broke up when the water stopped?"

"Yes."

"And there were pieces of it whenever a drip hit the sink."

"Okay," Nick said.  "I see where you're going.  Whenever the water makes a connection, it can talk to us.  But that doesn't mean it knows where we are."

"All water connects.  The water goes down the sink, into the sewer, then to some kind of treatment plant, then out to the river.  It's linked all the way.  If it can talk to us, it can find out where we are."

"When I was in the shower, I heard the voice, but all it did was ask questions about the ring.  When I put the ring itself under water, it said, 'There it is.'"

"There you go," Brady said.  "There's no reason to think that it doesn't know where we are."

"Not if the ring is away from the water."

"You need to throw it back, dude."

"I dunno."  Nick could hear the doubt in his own voice, and wondered if he was just making excuses to keep it.  "If it's worth something, we should try to find a museum to buy it from us.  I'd split the money with you."  He smiled, even though it looked a little shaky.  "Even though I'm the one that found it."

"Okay, I guess.  But I don't think it's a good idea.  This is freaky."

There was no arguing with that.  But Nick looked at the gold ring, with its strange, archaic words, and his heart beat a little faster.  Not yet.  It could wait until he'd thought more about this.

***

Sleep was restless that night.  There were no dreams, or at least none of note, but Nick tossed and turned, troubled by a vague anxiety that things weren't right.  Several times he found himself lying in bed, listening, hearing nothing, but all of his senses on alert.  Finally at around four o'clock he drifted off into a doze, but he got up at six feeling unrefreshed, hoping that a shower and coffee would wake him up.

He walked into the bathroom, and had turned on the tap before he remembered about his experience from the previous day.

He turned the water off, and got dressed.  He could skip a day's shower.

Nick put coffee on, being careful about getting his hands under the stream from the tap, and was standing listening to the comforting gurgle from the percolator when it registered that the ring was gone.

He'd left it on the counter, he was certain of that, after his demonstration to Brady that the voice in the water was real.  But the counter was empty, except for the dirty dishes from last night's dinner.  Frowning, he went up the stairs, his bare feet making little noise on the steps, and knocked on Brady's bedroom door.

No answer.

"Hey, Brady, wake up."

Still no answer.

"Dude, did you take the ring?  I hope you didn't get any smart ideas about throwing it back on your own. 'cuz I'll be pissed if you did."

Silence.

Nick opened the door.

 
What struck him first was the damp chill in the air.  The window stood wide open, and a cold breeze was blowing in.

The next thing he saw was that Brady wasn't there.

Nick walked in, feeling an icy sensation that the winter air was insufficient to cause.  Brady's bedsheets were rumpled, as if he'd slept in it, but the blanket and bed surface were soaking wet.  From the mattress came the heavy smell of river water.  There was also a wet spot between the window and the bed, cool and slick under his feet.

"Brady?"  His voice came out in a breathless whisper.

No answer, not that he expected one.

Nick ripped apart Brady's room, becoming more and more frantic, pitching aside sodden textbooks and piles of clothing, pulling boxes out of his closet, opening drawers in his desk.  He finally found the ring in Brady's sock drawer.

It couldn't see the ring, because it wasn't underwater.  But it found Brady.  It found him, and took him away.

Nick went to the bathroom, walking like a somnambulist, turned the tap on, and dunked the ring under the stream.  Instantly the voice started again, thin and whispery and evil.

There it is.  I knew he had it hidden.  Give it back.  It is not yours.  Give it back.

"What did you do with Brady?"  Nick said, his breath coming in tight, painful whistles.

He is here with me.  You will be soon.  You will stay with me forever.

"Where are you?"

You know.  And I know where you are.  Give it back.  It is not yours.

A catch formed in his throat, an angry sob that wanted to exit, but Nick kept it behind clenched teeth.  "You killed him."

He will be here with me forever.  So will you, very soon.

"I'll give you your fucking ring back.  Why do you want it so much?  So much that you would kill?"

Because it is mine.  It has been mine since I came here.

"How long have you been here?"

Longer than I can remember.  Years uncounted, I have been here. I will be here when you are gone.  Unless I bring you here to be with me.  Then we will stay here together forever.

Nick turned off the water, and the voice was cut off.

Still holding the dripping gold ring in his hand, he went to the closet and grabbed his jacket, pulling it on as he walked outside and toward his truck.  He grabbed something else as he walked, from where it leaned against the wall of the garden shed, and tossed it into the bed of the truck before he got in.

He kept himself from thinking as he drove toward the Delaware River and the jetty where he'd found the ring the previous day.  If he let himself think, he'd fall apart.  There was time for falling apart later.  Now, he had a task to accomplish.

As he scrambled down the embankment into the wet field that bordered the river, he saw drag marks.  Something large had passed this way, very recently.  The dead grass was crushed and slimy with mud in a great swath between the river and the highway.  As he walked toward the jetty, his boots squelching in the ooze, he saw once again the bubble of water about twenty yards out, rising from the flat surface of the river.  There was something under there, something that sensed his approach and was coming to meet him.

Something that perhaps resembled the serpentine design on the inside of the ring. But he didn't let himself think about that, either.

He walked out onto the jetty, reached the end, stood there, leaning out toward the oil-slicked water.

"You want your goddamn ring back?" Nick shouted.  "Here you go."

He set the ring down on the stone, and hefted the sledgehammer he'd brought from the garden shed.  There was a sloshing noise, and the disturbance began to move, accelerating toward shore.

Nick raised the steel head of the sledgehammer high, brought it down on the glittering surface of the ring.  It took three strikes, during which time the raised blob of water began to boil and churn.  White waves of turbulence streamed away from it, like the bow wave of a boat.  But on the third hit, the ring split in two, twisting and blackening, and there was a smell of sulfur that quickly dissipated on the winter breeze.

The raised hemisphere of water collapsed.  A few small waves lapped the shore, and then the river flowed on smoothly, its surface flat and glassy and gray under the cloud cover.

***

A woman walking her dog found Brady Elkano's body washed up on a gravel spit downstream two days later.  An autopsy determined that he had drowned, although there were some unexplained gouges in the skin of his left leg.  Suicide was suspected, but given Brady's personality, it didn't seem plausible.  Nick argued against that explanation with particular vehemence, although he didn't have any better explanation for why his friend had apparently hiked down to the river in the middle of the night to go swimming wearing nothing but a pair of boxers.

Brady's parents came a week later to take his belongings, his father sternly silent, his mother weeping quietly as they boxed his clothes and books and personal items.

By that time, his bed had dried out, although a year later, when Nick Dominique graduated from college and moved to Colorado, the air in Brady's room still carried the faint stink of river mud.

 **********************************

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!]

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.

 **********************************

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."

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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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