Words, words, words

In Dorothy Sayers' novel Gaudy Night, set (and written) in 1930s England, a group of Oxford University dons are the targets of threats and violence by a deranged individual.  The motive of the perpetrator (spoiler alert!) turns out to be that one of the dons had, years earlier, caught the perpetrator's spouse in academic dishonesty, and the spouse had been dismissed from his position, and ultimately committed suicide.

Near the end of the novel, the main character, Harriet Vane, experiences a great deal of conflict over the resolution of the mystery.  Which individual was really at fault?  Was it the woman who made the threats, a widow whose grief drove her to threaten those she felt were smug, ivory-tower intellectuals who cared nothing for the love and devotion of a wife for her husband?  Was it her husband, who knowingly committed academic fraud?  Or was it the don who had exposed the husband's "crime" -- which was withholding evidence contrary to his thesis in a paper?  Is that a sin that's worth a life?

The perpetrator, when found out, snarls at the dons, "... (C)ouldn't you leave my man alone?  He told a lie about somebody who was dead and dust hundreds of years ago.  Nobody was the worse for that.  Was a dirty bit of paper more important than all our lives and happiness?  You broke him and killed him -- all for nothing."  The don whose words led to the man's dismissal, and ultimately his suicide, says, "I knew nothing of (his suicide) until now...  I had no choice in the matter.  I could not foresee the consequences... but even if I had..."  She trails off, making it clear that in her view, her words had to be spoken, that academic integrity was a mandate -- even if that stance left a human being in ruins.

It's not, really, a very happy story.  One is left feeling, at the end of the book, that the incident left only losers, no winners.

The same is true of the tragedy that happened in Buffalo, New York last Saturday.

The accused shooter, eighteen-year-old Payton Gendron, drove for two and a half hours from his home in Conklin, New York, allegedly motivated by trying to find the neighborhood with the highest proportion of Black residents.   He is clearly a seriously disturbed individual.  While in high school, he was investigated by Broome County police for threatening his classmates; ultimately the investigation was closed, with Gendron saying he had been "joking."  One of his former teachers reported that she had asked him for his plans after graduation, and he told her, "I want to murder and commit suicide."  It's a little appalling that someone like him was able to procure body armor and three guns -- including an XM-15 Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle, which is banned in New York state -- without setting off enough red flags to stop a freight train.  I'm not intending to discuss the issue of gun laws, however.  What I want to look at is what created Payton Gendron.  Because at the center of his rage were nothing more than words.  Words, words, words.

He wrote a 180-page manifesto that mirrors the "Great Replacement" theory of Jean-Renaud Camus, that the leftists are deliberately crafting policy to replace people of White European descent with immigrants and People of Color.  Gendron made no secret of his views and his intentions.  He had accounts on social media outlets Discord and Twitch; on the former he had a to-do list of preparations for the attack, and he used the latter to livestream the attack itself.  He identified all people of color as the danger, not just immigrants --  after all, the Black people he deliberately chose as targets were just as much American citizens as he is, and almost certainly their ancestors had been here for hundreds of years. 

Gendron himself has no problem explaining why he did what he did.  He told investigators, "I simply became racist after I learned the truth."

But he didn't come up with that "truth" himself; others put it there.  Others fed him those lies and distortions, and in his twisted, faulty logic he bought them wholesale.  Gendron himself is, of course, ultimately the one responsible for the shootings; but what blame lies with the people who, whatever their motives, broadcast the ideologies he espoused?

Tucker Carlson, for example, makes his opinion crystal-clear.  Last year he was interviewed by Megyn Kelly for a radio broadcast, and he said, "'The Great Replacement' theory is, in fact, not a theory.  It’s something that the Democrats brag about constantly, up to and including the president, and in one sentence, it’s this: Rather than convince the current population that our policies are working and they should vote for us as a result, we can’t be bothered to do that.  We’re instead going to change the composition of the population and bring in people who will vote for us."

He's not the only one.  Representative Steve King of Iowa said, "The idea of multiculturalism, that every culture is equal -- that’s not objectively true…  We’ve been fed that information for the past twenty-five years, and we’re not going to become a greater nation if we continue to do that."  Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller posted a photograph of George Soros on Facebook with the caption, "Start the race war."  Fox News host Laura Ingraham isn't exactly subtle, either.  "Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people and they're changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don't like," she said on her show in 2019.  "From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically in some ways the country has changed.  Now, much of this is related to both illegal and in some cases, legal immigration that, of course, progressives love."

After the shooting, people like Carlson were blasted for using their positions as pundits to stoke fear, rage, and violence -- and very quickly, they responded in kind, absolving themselves of any responsibility.  "The truth about Payton Gendron does tell you a lot about the ruthlessness and dishonesty of our political leadership," Carlson said, the day after the shooting.  "Within minutes of Saturday’s shooting, before all of the bodies of those ten murdered Americans had even been identified by their loved ones, professional Democrats had begun a coordinated campaign to blame those murders on their political opponents.  'They did it!' they said, immediately...  So, what is hate speech?  Well, it’s speech that our leaders hate.  So because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud.  That’s what they’re telling you.  That’s what they’ve wanted to tell you for a long time."

Which packs a lot of terrifying rhetoric into one paragraph.  First, no sensible person, left, right, or center, defines hate speech as "speech our leaders hate."  The Supreme Court itself has given the term a clear definition: "abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation."  Second -- sure, Gendron is mentally ill, but that's not why he targeted Black people for murder.  Lots of people have mental illness (I've blogged here more than once about my own struggles with it), and very few of them murder people.  Blaming mental illness for Gendron's actions is just a way for Carlson to deflect any criticism leveled at him for the results of what he has said vehemently and repeatedly.

Third, virtually no one -- once again, regardless of political stripe -- is trying to stop people from expressing their political views.  The vast majority of us agree with British writer Evelyn Hall, "I disagree with what you've said, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."  Conservative commentator and former GOP Representative Joe Walsh, who -- despite the fact that we'd probably disagree on a lot of things -- is one of the most honest, honorable voices we have today, said, "Try being nonpartisan for a day.  Call out stuff that’s wrong, stupid, or dishonest no matter where it comes from.  Even if it comes from your side. Just try it."  And he summarized Tucker Carlson's self-defense as follows: "[Carlson basically told] his audience that THEY are the victims.  Not the ten innocent souls killed in Buffalo.  Nope, Tucker’s audience are the real victims here...  [His attitude is] 'I don’t even know what white replacement theory is.  All I know is America is becoming less and less white.  And that’s a really bad thing.  But that makes me a racist?  For just stating facts?'"

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ivan Radic, A colorful Stop Racism sign (50115127871), CC BY 2.0

Of course, all Carlson, Ingraham, et al. are trying to accomplish are two things; to use emotionally-charged language in order to make their own opinions sound unassailable, and to generate such a negative spin on their opponents' thinking that listeners are left believing that only morons could possibly agree with them.  

I'm appalled not just because these political hacks are using this tragedy to hammer in their own views with an increasingly polarized citizenry; but because they are doing this, willfully blind to the end results of their words, just like the Oxford don in Gaudy Night whose dedication to the nth degree of academic integrity made her blind to the human cost of her actions.  Words are tools, and they are using them with as much thought and responsibility as a five-year-old with a chainsaw.

I will end with a devout hope for healing for the Buffalo community that has lost ten of its people, and that the families of those who died will be able to find consolation in the outpouring of sympathy from the vast majority of Americans who still value compassion over political rhetoric.  And to the ideologues who are using this tragedy as a platform to defend their own repugnant views, I can only say: shut the hell up.

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Planet cupcake

I just found out that Neal Adams, most famous as a comic book artist and creator of characters for DC Comics, died a couple of weeks ago at the age of eighty.

I'm not an aficionado of superhero stories, either in comic/graphic novel or movie form, so I didn't know much about Adams's contributes to that genre other than that he was involved somehow.  I knew Adams from a contribution to a much less publicized field: loopy pseudoscience.

As you all know, the Earth is a geologically active place.  Most scientists attribute this to plate tectonics, the shifting of Earth's geological plates relative to one another.  Their explanation is that these processes have been going on throughout Earth's history, driven by magmatic convection currents in the Earth's mantle, and that while active plate margins are expected to be -- well, more active -- any apparent clustering of geographically-separated tectonic events is simple coincidence, insignificant in the bigger picture.

Neal Adams disagreed.

In a video that you really should watch in its entirety, Adams called our attention to phenomena such as the following:

• The formation of a three-kilometer-long crack in the ground in Huacullani, Chucuito Province, Peru, following an earthquake
• The opening of a wedge-shaped, 500-meter-long, 60-meter-deep rift in Ethiopia, along the Great Rift Valley
• The sudden creation of a crack in the ground in Iceland, and the subsequent draining of Lake Kleifarvatn into the fissure
• The presence of a deep hydrothermal vent in the Mid-Cayman Rise, a spreading center in the middle of the Caribbean Sea
• Increasing tension along the San Andreas Fault, causing cracks and fissures to form

Adams took these stories, and many others like them, and decided that the conventional explanation -- that all of these places are on plate margins, so cracks in the ground are to be expected -- is wrong.  And in a classic case of adding two plus two and getting 113, he deduced the following:

The Earth is expanding.

Yes, just like a cupcake in the oven, the Earth is getting bigger, and as it does, its surface cracks and splits.  The tectonic plates are a mere side-effect of this phenomenon, and are basically the broken up surface of the cupcake, pulled apart as the inside swelled.  Now, a cupcake, of course, is only increasing in volume, as the air bubbles in the batter expand; its mass remains the same.  Is that what's happening here?  Some kind of planetary dough rising?

Don't be silly.  We haven't trashed nearly enough physics yet.  It's not just volume; the Earth is actually gaining mass.

Wait, you might be saying; what about the Law of Conservation of Mass, which is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions?  Simple, Adams said.  No problemo.  Physicists have demonstrated that empty space can give rise to electron/positron pairs without any violation of physical law, because of the presence of "vacuum energy."  "Empty space" is actually, they say, a roiling foam of particles and antiparticles, most of which annihilate each other immediately.

So, Adams said, this sort of pair-production is happening inside the Earth.  Therefore it's gaining mass.  And expanding.

Of course, Adams conveniently ignored the fact that if this was happening, half of the mass thus produced would be antimatter.  If the Earth's middle was producing matter and antimatter fast enough to pop open cracks on the surface, the antimatter would follow the E = mc^2 rule (also strictly enforced) and blow us to smithereens.  After all, you may recall from scientific documentaries such as the original Star Trek what happens when antimatter containment is lost -- Captain Kirk strikes a dramatic pose, usually with his shirt ripped open to expose one or more nipples, and the show breaks to a commercial.  

And heaven knows we don't want any of that to happen.

So there are some problems with Adams' theory.  But this hasn't stopped websites from popping up supporting the Cupcake Earth Hypothesis and touting how amazing Adams's video is.  Apparently the argument is that the claims in the video must be true because (1) it has cool animation of the Earth shrinking and the continents fitting together as you go back in time, and (2) uses dramatic music from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  

Notwithstanding those points in its favor, it raises a few key questions in my mind:

• What happened to all of the oceans?
• If the Earth really was (let's say) a quarter as massive, 100 million years ago, it would have had a quarter of the gravitational pull.  Which would have resulted in a good bit of our atmosphere leaking out into space, not to mention herds of enormous dinosaurs bouncing about the landscape in the fashion of Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon.  So why do we still have an atmosphere?
• Why am I spending so much time and effort addressing this goofy theory?

As far as the last question, I recognize that I can't debunk every silly idea in the world, and in fact I had originally intended to write about marginally more reasonable claims, such as sightings of sea serpents off the coast of England.  But then I found out that Adams had gone to that big E-Z Bake Oven in the sky, and I felt like I at least owed him that much.  So I'll end by passing along my condolences to his family, friends, and fans, and maybe today I'll eat a cupcake or two in his memory.

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Catcalling

For many years we owned two cats, Puck and Geronimo.

Imagine two soft, gentle, affectionate, fluffy kitties.  Puck and Geronimo were the exact opposite of what you just pictured.

What neither of our cats looked even remotely like.  [Image courtesy of the Creative Commons Nicolas Suzor from Brisbane, Australia, Cute grey kitten, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Puck and Geronimo were siblings, both long-bodied, tough, lean, and solid black.  Puck had some odd features, though.  She had one single white whisker accentuating a face that was already kinda... off.  Her eyes didn't quite line up, so you never could be 100% sure of where she was looking.  She had one broken fang, so her tongue frequently protruded from the side of her mouth.  Plus, her voice sounded like a creaky wheel.  She was actually quite a sweet, affectionate cat, but even dedicated cat lovers had to admit she looked like she had a screw loose.

Geronimo, on the other hand, hated everyone, with two exceptions: (1) my wife; and (2) our dog, Grendel.  When we adopted Grendel, we were assured by the shelter that he was great with cats.  But shelter staff -- no insult intended, they do amazing work -- can sometimes overplay animals' good qualities in the interest of getting them adopted, so when we brought him home, we introduced him to the cats on leash, with me hanging on to my end of it like grim death.  Puck, he ignored completely.  Then he came up and sniffed Geronimo, who sniffed him back (without hissing, which was Geronimo's primary way of communicating with the entire world).  So I tentatively relaxed my end of the lead...

... and Grendel lifted his big front paw and body-slammed Geronimo to the floor.

I leaped forward, yelling, "Noooooooo....!!!!"  But then Grendel started to lick Geronimo's face.  Geronimo, although still pinned to the ground, started purring.  And thus was born the only interspecies gay romance I've ever witnessed.  They were boyfriends for as long as we had them.

But other than those exceptions, Geronimo viewed the entire world with something between haughty disdain and utter loathing.  Sometimes I'd look up from what I was doing to find Geronimo staring at me, his yellow eyes narrowed to slits, and he was clearly thinking, "I am going to disembowel you in your sleep."

What brings all this up is a paper that appeared in Nature last week about some research done at Kyoto University.  A team led by animal behavioral psychologist Saho Takagi did a clever set of experiments to see if cats could not only learn their own names but the names of other cats, and their results suggest that the answer is yes.

They worked with two sets of cats -- household pets, and "café cats."  Apparently in Japan, it's common to have cats living in cafés, for the benefit of patrons who would like to pet cats while they have their coffee and pastries, or at least have cats glaring at them and making harsh judgments about their general appearance.  They had their test subjects "softly restrained" by volunteers, who I hope were wearing body armor at the time, and the cats were given vocal stimuli (the cats' own names, the names of other cats living in the same place, and neutral words falling into neither categories), along with photographs of different cats, sometimes the photograph of the cat being named, sometimes not.

They found that the cats tended to look more quickly and for a longer duration at photographs when the photograph was of the cat being named.  It was evident that the cats tested did indeed know the names of the cats that cohabited with them.  (Except for one test subject who "completed only the first trial before escaping from the room and climbing out of reach.")

I found these data mildly surprising, considering that our own cats gave no evidence of knowing either their own names or each other's.  Geronimo usually responded to being called as follows:

Us:  Geronimo!!!

Geronimo:  Fuck you.

Us:  Geronimo, come get your dinner!

Geronimo:  Fuck you.

Us:  C'mon, kitty kitty kitty!

Geronimo:  Fuck you.

Us: We have a plate of fresh salmon for you!

Geronimo:  Fuck you...  Salmon?  Well, okay, maybe this time.

So I don't know how we'd have been able to tell if he did know his name.

But all of this does point out something I've always thought, which is that a lot of animals are way smarter than we give them credit for.  I know one of our current dogs, Guinness, always gives us this incredibly intent look when we talk to him, as if he's trying his hardest to understand every word we're saying.  Our other dog, Cleo, spends a lot of time ignoring us, but she's a Shiba Inu, which in my opinion is a cat wearing a dog suit.

So okay, maybe that doesn't exactly support the contention that our pets are really smart.  But my point stands.

In any case, that's our cool piece of animal behavior research for today.  If you are the owner of two or more cats, see if you can figure out if they know each other's names.

If any of your cats have a temperament like Geronimo's, you might want to have fresh salmon handy.

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Nice smile!

Back in December, I completely skeeved out some of my readers with a discussion of parasites, more specifically the protist Toxoplasma gondii.  Toxoplasma causes the disease toxoplasmosis, and a number of mammalian species are hosts, most notably cats, humans, and rats.  It's the cat/human connection that is why you've probably heard that pregnant women shouldn't clean cat litter boxes; contact with an infected cat's urine can transmit the parasite to a human, and Toxoplasma is associated with birth defects in human infants.

More interesting, though, are its behavioral effects.  In December's post, I described how toxoplasmosis alters the behavior of all three of its main hosts -- it makes cats more affectionate, humans more neurotic, and rats more fearless, all three of which serve the evolutionary function of increasing the likelihood that the pathogen will jump to another host.  (The cats seek out human company; the humans crave the comfort that pets can give; and the rats become unafraid of predators.  In fact, some studies have even shown that infected rats are actively attracted to the scent of cat urine.)

Which is creepy enough.  The idea that a brain parasite is, at least in some respects, in the driver's seat of our emotional state is a little unsettling.  Or maybe I'm only saying that because I've got it myself, having had cats off and on for pretty much my entire adult life.  But I'm not indulging in hypochondria, here; if you've ever owned a cat, especially one allowed outdoors, your chances of having a Toxoplasma infection is nearly 100%.  Kevin Lafferty, a microbiologist who is one of leading experts on Toxoplasma, estimates that there are three billion people in the world who have it.

Yes, that's "billion" with a "b."  As in just shy of 40% of the world's population,

But now another filigree of "holy shit, that is freaky" has been added to this already bizarre pathogen.  A team made up of Javier Borráz-Léon and Markus Rantala (of the University of Turku), Indrikis Krams (of the University of Latvia), and Ana Lilia Cerda-Molina (of the Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatría of Mexico City) found out that not only does Toxoplasma change our personalities, it changes our appearance.

The idea came from the fact that in other mammals, Toxoplasma can be spread through sexual contact, so there was no reason to believe the same couldn't be true of humans.  The researchers wondered if -- given that the parasite is pretty damn good at engineering its hosts to do things that pass it on -- there might be some way that being Toxoplasma-positive increased your likelihood of having sex.

And hoo boy, what they found.

They took a large test sample of infected and uninfected individuals, and rated them (or had others rate them, as the case may be) for a variety of features -- attractiveness (both self-perceived and as perceived by others), perception of healthiness, number of sexual partners, number of minor ailments, body mass index, mate value, handgrip strength, facial fluctuating asymmetry (i.e. asymmetry in features that change, such as how you smile), and facial width-to-height ratio, all of which could feasibly connect to sexual attractiveness.  

Some of the features (like handgrip strength and minor ailment susceptibility) showed no statistically significant difference.  But... well, let me quote you directly from the paper, so you don't think I'm making this up:

[We] found that infected men had lower facial fluctuating asymmetry whereas infected women had lower body mass, lower body mass index, a tendency for lower facial fluctuating asymmetry, higher self-perceived attractiveness, and a higher number of sexual partners than non-infected ones.  Then, we found that infected men and women were rated as more attractive and healthier than non-infected ones...  The present study offers novel evidence supporting the idea that some sexually transmitted parasites such as T. gondii may produce changes in the appearance and behavior of the human host, either as a by-product of the infection or as a result of the manipulation of the parasite to increase its spread to new hosts.

Which is probably why everyone finds me so dashingly handsome, and why my entire adult life I've had to fight off people trying to break down my bedroom door.

(Maybe having toxoplasmosis also makes you more sarcastic, I dunno.)

So.  Yeah.  That's not creepy at all.  Having a brain parasite causes you to look healthier and have a more attractive smile, and makes it more likely you'll get laid.  Who would have thought something that completely bizarre could be real?

Yeah, look at that smile. I bet you a hundred bucks David Tennant has toxoplasmosis. Maybe it even accounts for his amazing hair. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rach from Tadcaster, York, England, 2009 07 31 David Tennant smile 09, CC BY 2.0]

Interestingly, I wrote a short story called "The Germ Theory of Disease" (which you can read for free at the link provided) that riffs on this very idea -- a pathogen that makes you more social.  Unfortunately, it also turns you into a werewolf.  (C'mon, it's me we're talking about here, you had to know there'd be a paranormal twist.)

But hell's bells, I thought it was fiction.

And little did I know that I'm very likely to be carrying around a pathogen myself that does just that.  (Well, not the werewolf part.  I hope.)  Sometimes, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, life imitates art just as much as art imitates life.  Or, to quote Mark Twain, "The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to be believable."

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A snapshot in amber

A few days ago I finished reading the wonderful new book by paleontologist Riley Black, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World.  I can't say enough positive things about it -- it tells the gripping story of the impact of the seven-kilometer-wide Chicxulub Meteorite, which hit a spot just north of the Yucatán Peninsula so hard that most of the giant rock vaporized, what was left punched twenty kilometers into the Earth's crust, and it left an impact crater 180 kilometers across.

Artist's impression of the moment of impact [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of artist Donald E. Davis and NASA/JPL]

Black gives us a vivid description of the event and its aftermath, each chapter from the point of view of one individual animal who experienced it (not necessarily lived through it, of course).  The day before the impact; the impact itself; the first hour; the first day; the first year; and so on, up until a hundred thousand years after the strike, at which point the Earth's ecosystems had largely recovered -- albeit with a completely different assemblage of species than it had before.

Black's contention, which is generally accepted by researchers, is that there's little truth to the old trope of the dinosaurs being a moribund group anyhow and the asteroid just finished them off.  The dinosaurs were doing just fine.  While some species were headed toward extinction, that had been happening during the group's 190 million year hegemony (and has happened in every single group of life forms ever evolved).  Dinosaurs as a group were still widespread and diverse -- and if it hadn't been for the impact, it's pretty likely that they would have remained in charge (as it were) for millions of years afterward.

Which means that it's probable that mammals would never have taken off the way they did.  (More accurately, "the way we did.")  It's also an incorrect understanding that mammals only launched after the dinosaurs were "out of the way."  Mammals had been around for a very long time themselves (the first ones, the morganucodontids and multituberculates, overlapped the dinosaurs by over a hundred million years).  What seems to be true, though, is that the dinosaurs occupied most of the large-apex-predator and giant-herbivore niches, so mammal groups were mostly small, and a lot of them were burrowers -- something that was an adaptation to there being a lot of carnivores around, but turned into a key to their survival during the searing infrared surge that swept across the world the day the asteroid hit.

What brings this up, besides my wanting to promote Riley Black's awesome book, is a link sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia about a series of recent discoveries by paleontologist Robert DePalma at a dig site in Tanis, North Dakota.  What's stunning about these finds is that DePalma believes -- and the evidence seems strong -- that they represent the remains of organisms that died on the day of the Chicxulub Impact.

In other words, we're looking at a snapshot of the event that killed every non-avian dinosaur species, and changed the face of the world permanently.

Hard as it is to imagine, in the late Cretaceous, what is now North Dakota was a tropical wetland bordering the Western Interior Seaway -- an inlet of the ocean that has since vanished from a combination of uplift, the Rocky Mountain Orogeny, and simple evaporation.  Picture southern Louisiana, and you have an idea of what North Dakota looked like.

Then the meteorite struck.

Despite the fact that the distance between the impact site and the Tanis wetland is around four thousand kilometers, it only took an hour before there was a blast of heat, a rain of red-hot debris, and a series of earthquakes.  The first-mentioned is probably what did the most immediate damage; large animals that were too big to shelter were probably all dead within minutes after the the infrared surge started, as were just about all the terrestrial plants.  Even aquatic organisms weren't safe, though.  One of the more horrifying fossil finds was a turtle -- that had a stick driven all the way through its body.  The earthquakes triggered a series of seiche waves, which occur when an enclosed body of water is shaken laterally.  (Picture the sloshing of water in a metal tub if you jostle it back and forth.)  The seiche in the Western Interior Seaway and nearby lakes flung aquatic animals onto shore and then buried them under tons of debris -- DePalma and his team found layers of fish fossils right at the K-T Boundary Layer that were also victims of that awful day the impact occurred.

I've written about this event before, of course; I've always had a fascination with things that are big and powerful and can kill you.  But what made me decide to revisit it was a new discovery at Tanis of amber that contains glass spherules.  Amber, you probably know, is fossilized tree sap; it can contain other fossils, including pollen and animals that were trapped in the sap before it hardened (made famous by Jurassic Park, although it must be added that there's never been any found with intact DNA).  But these glass spherules were altogether different.  Silicate rocks turn to glass when they're melted and then cooled quickly; that's where the rock obsidian comes from.  But an analysis of the spherules showed something fascinating.  There were inclusions in the glass of tiny chips of two different kinds of rock; one type was high in calcium, while the other was largely metallic, with high content of chromium, nickel, and other heavy elements.

The first, DePalma says, are the remnants of the limestone bedrock from the spot in the Yucatán where Chicxulub hit, blasted into the air and landing four thousand kilometers away.

The other are the (thus far) only actual pieces of the meteorite itself which have ever been found.

It's absolutely astonishing that we can identify rocks and fossils that formed on a specific day 66 million years ago, and doubly so that it was a day when an event occurred that quite literally changed the course of life on Earth.  As horrifying as the Chicxulub Impact was -- Riley Black calls it "the worst day the Earth ever experienced," and it seems an apt description -- in a real sense, we owe our existence to it.

Without Chicxulub, it's pretty likely it'd still be a dinosaur-dominated world -- and one in which mammals were still small, furtive furballs that never had a chance to control their own destiny.

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A door into RNA world

[N.B.: This post is a little on the technical side, if you're not a biology type.  Trust me, the work is worth it, because what these people have discovered is stupendous.]

I had the experience yesterday of stumbling on an article published in Nature this week that, from the title, seemed like something that could only interest biochemistry geeks.

Then I started reading it, and I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.

Before I tell you about the paper, a little background.

Most laypeople know that genes are basically stretches of DNA, and that DNA is a double helix made of chains of smaller molecules called nitrogenous bases, of which there are four -- adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine.  (A, T, G, and C for short.)  Because the bases always pair the same way (A to T, C to G), it allows for DNA to replicate itself.

So far, so good.  But how do you get from a gene to a trait?  It took a long time to figure this out, and there's still work being done on how genes switch on and off during development.  But a simplified explanation goes like this:

The first step is that one gene (a piece of DNA) is copied into a similar, but not identical, chemical called RNA.  (This is called transcription.)  RNA is a single helix, so only one side of the DNA gene is copied; the other side only exists so the DNA can be replicated.  Then the RNA goes to a cellular structure called a ribosome, where the base sequence is read in threes (a group of three is a codon), and each trio instructs the ribosome to bring in a specific amino acid.  The amino acids dictated by the codon sequence are linked together into a protein, and those proteins directly generate the trait.  (This is called translation.)  Every trait is basically produced this way, whether it's something simple like skin color, or the interaction between the thousands of genes and proteins that it takes to generate a functioning human heart.

Okay, gene > RNA > protein > trait.  The sequence is so ubiquitous that it's been nicknamed The Central Dogma of Molecular Genetics.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons  , Pre-mRNA-1ysv-tubes, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But here's the problem.  When life first began, how did the process get started?

The problem isn't the building blocks; given the conditions that we're virtually certain existed on the early Earth, all of the pieces -- the bases, the sugars that make up the backbone of both DNA and RNA, the amino acids -- form spontaneously and abundantly.  They will even link up to form chains on their own.  It's likely that any Earthlike, water-containing planet has plenty of all the biochemical bits and pieces.

But how do you get from a particular RNA to a particular protein?  Remember, it's the sequence of bases in RNA that determines the sequence of amino acids in the protein, but to read the RNA sequence and assemble those amino acids requires a lot of cellular machinery -- first and foremost the ribosome.

Which is itself made of RNA.

So it seems like the first life had to pull itself up by its own bootlaces.  Put succinctly, to do transcription and translation, you need to have the mechanisms of transcription and translation already in place.

Or at least, that's what I thought until I read this paper.

Enter the team led by Felix Müller of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, and their paper "A Prebiotically Plausible Scenario of an RNA-Peptide World."  Here's how the paper begins, with a couple of parenthetical notes added by me:

A central commonality of all cellular life is the translational process, in which ribosomal RNA catalyses peptide [i.e. protein] formation with the help of transfer RNAs, which function as amino acid carrying adapter molecules.  Comparative genomics suggests that ribosomal translation is one of the oldest evolutionary processes, which dates back to the hypothetical RNA world [the theory that the earliest self-replicating genetic molecules were RNA, not DNA, which is generally accepted in the scientific world].  The questions of how and when RNA learned to instruct peptide synthesis is one of the grand unsolved challenges in prebiotic evolutionary research.

The immense complexity of ribosomal translation demands a stepwise evolutionary process.  From the perspective of the RNA world, at some point RNA must have gained the ability to instruct and catalyse the synthesis of, initially, just small peptides.  This initiated the transition from a pure RNA world into an RNA–peptide world.  In this RNA–peptide world, both molecular species could have co-evolved to gain increasing ‘translation’ and ‘replication’ efficiency...

We found that non-canonical vestige nucleosides [i.e. unusual bases which are still part of some structures made of RNA, but aren't on the list of the four standard bases], which are key components of contemporary RNAs, are able to equip RNA with the ability to self-decorate with peptides.  This creates chimeric structures, in which both chemical entities can co-evolve in a covalently connected form, generating gradually more and more sophisticated and complex RNA–peptide structures...  We... found that peptides can simultaneously grow at multiple sites on RNA on the basis of rules determined by sequence complementarity, which is the indispensable requirement for efficient peptide growth.

Which is way more dignified than what I'd have written, which is, "Holy shit, we just figured out how gene expression evolved!"

In my AP Biology classes, I ended the unit on evolution with a list of some of the questions that evolutionary theory had not yet solved, and the origins of gene expression and protein synthesis topped the list.  It looks like that one might now be checked off -- which, if my assessment is correct, should put Müller and his team in contention for this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry.

I find it so fascinating that there are still some of the Big Questions out there, and that scientists are actually making inroads into answering them.  Good science doesn't just say "it's a mystery" and forthwith stop thinking.  We're gradually chipping away at problems that were thought to be intractable -- in this case, giving us insight into how life began on Earth four billion years ago.

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An act of faith

Over the last couple of months I've been dealing with a health problem that is one of those collections of symptoms that falls somewhere on the spectrum between "mild inconvenience" and "I'm going to be dead in three months."  Fortunately, at the moment the doctor is leaning strongly toward the former.  (I won't go into further details because I hate it when People Of A Certain Age begin every conversation with what my dad called "the organ recital" -- telling everyone they talk to intimate details of their various health-related issues.)

In any case, this kind of thing absolutely plays hell with someone who has chronic anxiety.  Frankly, over the last two months the anxiety has been far worse than the symptoms themselves, and I have no doubt that it's actually made the symptoms more severe.  But it's put making any firm summer plans on hold, given that my brain keeps shouting at me that I might not be able to follow through on them on account of being incapacitated, hospitalized, or dead.

But it started me down a line of thought that, for once, was productive instead of irrational and paralyzing.  It brought to mind the word faith.  I realize this is not one you'd expect to hear from a skeptical atheist type.  But it struck me that faith is what's invoked any time we make plans -- faith that we and the ones involved will still be around when the plans come to fruition.

That seems pretty dark and pessimistic, but actually it's the opposite.  None of us are guaranteed another day, another hour, another minute, so the only option is to act as if we do, to be right here in the moment and let the future take care of itself.  It's like what Jean-Luc Picard -- then in the mind of the character Kamin -- said to his daughter in the beautiful episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "The Inner Light:" "Seize the time, Meribor – live now.  Make now always the most precious time.  Now will never come again."

Being ill has made this thought come back to me again and again.  It occurred to me a couple of weeks ago when I bought a couple of tropical plants to replace some of the ones I lost this past winter when my greenhouse heater malfunctioned on one of the coldest nights in January, and I heard a sepulchral voice in my mind say, "Maybe I won't be around to see them flower."  When I saw the daffodils blooming in April and it occurred to me that this might be the last time I ever would.  When I was outside playing with my dogs and wondered how many more opportunities I'd have.

I know these thoughts are coming from my mental illness; I do trust the doctor that I'm probably going to be okay.  But really, isn't that the situation we're all in?  It's all an act of faith.  Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of faith.  We maneuver our way through this dangerous, unpredictable, endlessly weird world and plan for meeting some friends at the pub day after tomorrow, for a vacation this summer, for visiting with family during the winter holidays, simultaneously knowing that none of it might happen.  But that's what we have to do.  The only other option is to descend into panic now because of what might or might not occur later, to willfully destroy our present because our future isn't guaranteed.

My grandma used to tell me, "Worry is like a rocking chair; it keeps you busy but it doesn't get you anywhere."  I'd make it even stronger, though.  Worry wastes what we've got right here in our hands.  I'm not going to say it's easy to conquer; I've had anxiety disorder my entire life, and I'm not expecting it to go away magically.  But I have -- and so does everyone -- control over deliberately choosing to live life the best I can regardless of how much of it I have left.  It's all a risk; every action we take, or decide not to take.  As J. R. R. Tolkien wrote, in The Fellowship of the Ring, "It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door.  You step into the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to."

The question is not whether you want to take a risk; the question is which risk you want to take.  For me, I'd rather risk the possibility of my plans and aspirations not coming to fruition than risk giving in to my anxiety, then getting to the end of the path and realizing what I missed.

So my advice: carpe the absolute fuck out of every diem you've got left, whether it's one or ten thousand.  I'm completely agnostic about whether there's an afterlife; maybe there is, maybe there isn't.  But as far as what I know for sure, this right here, right now, is all I've got.  And right now the sun is shining and the weather is warm and pleasant and there are people who love me.  There's music to listen to and stories to write and dogs to play with and books to read.  Okay, it won't last forever.  But I'll hang on to the sweetness I've got right now for all I'm worth, and have faith that whatever happens tomorrow, I'll have made the most of today.

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