Miasma and misrepresentation

One of the (many) things that drives me nuts about woo-woos is the fact that they will take incorrectly or incompletely understood scientific research and pretend that it supports whatever goofy idea they are currently promoting.

It's why the creationists immediately go for the holes in scientific knowledge as support for the universe being six thousand years old (the "God of the gaps" idea), throwing in an occasional bit of actual science as support, and ignoring the vast ocean of evidence that completely discredits their claim.  It's why the homeopaths talk about vibrations and quantum states as if they understood what those terms mean, stopping with Deepak Chopra in their quest to find out what the scientists themselves have to say on the matter.

I ran into an especially good (or bad) example of this yesterday, when I bumped more-or-less accidentally into a concept from the woo-woo canon called "Inherited Miasma."  Here's what the Ascension Glossary has to say about inherited miasma:

Miasma is a psycho-spiritual inherited distortion created by trauma, abuse, fear based belief systems and Soul Fragmentation which, over time, was genetically encoded in human DNA, and resulted in various forms of dis-ease [sic] or imbalance.  These dis-ease patterns were then encoded and passed down in Negative Ego behaviors or DNA code from generation to generation from the genetic alteration made from the NAA influence.  Levels of the passed down distorted or flawed DNA would result in a dissipation of the original form of the disease.  The manifested diseased energy and its physical body pattern would sometimes skip generations.  The dissipated energetic pattern (cellular memories from the Ancestry or Family of Origin) of the original disease would then manifest in future generations in lesser or hybridized forms.

Which sounds pretty scary, especially when you find out that "NAA" stands for "Negative Alien Agenda," which, we are told, consists of the plans of a bunch of alien psychic parasites to use us as a food source.

If you descend from people who were oppressed at some time in history (who doesn't?), not to worry; you can get past all of this:

When one awakens, one will then need to decide what you want to energetically “wear” - as everything you inherited in your family (and the collective human race) does not have to become a part of your self-defined identity.  As you observe and take responsibility for what you are inhabiting (this is your fleshly body) and being accountable to the current station of your life circumstances, one can participate with healing your genetic and miasmatic relationships that reside as energetic memory in your flesh.  In most cases if you pay attention to the various patterns (attitudes, ideals, emotional intelligence) in your current Bio-Family dynamic, you will know these archetypal patterns extend to other lifetimes as well as hold relevant information and clues to what you agreed to heal (types of collective human miasma) while you incarnated on planet earth during the Ascension Cycle.

So yeah.  That's a relief.

What is maddening about this is that these wingnuts don't have any evidence to support their claims, and they don't need to; the claim itself is so vague that you could decide that damn near anything you experience comes from "miasma."  Headache?  It's because one of my ancestors got punched in the face.  High blood pressure?  My ancestors experienced stress that is now encoded in my genes.  No specific, testable, potentially falsifiable statements, just an evil influence stalking us from our long-dead relatives.

Convenient, no?

Miasma by Robert Seymour (1831) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Okay, now for the really maddening part.  These folks have latched on to some actual science as support for their silly pseudoscience.  A relatively recent discovery in genetics is that some variations in a population are not due to changes in the DNA itself, but due to changes in the transcriptional potential -- the degree to which certain genes are expressed.  Called epigenetics, this phenomenon often has to do with the amplification or silencing of genes in parents or even grandparents, which then affects how the children (or grandchildren) express their own copies of the genes.  It's kind of a weird twist on the ideas of Lamarck -- that in certain cases, acquired characteristics can be inherited.

A fascinating example of this phenomenon was the subject of an article in Scientific American a while back.  A study has shown that the children of Holocaust survivors have elevated levels of stress hormones.  The leader of the research team, Rachel Yehuda of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, found that children were influenced in utero by the stress their mothers were experiencing:

It is not completely clear why survivors produce less cortisol, but Yehuda's team recently found that survivors also have low levels of an enzyme that breaks down cortisol.  The adaptation makes sense: reducing enzyme activity keeps more free cortisol in the body, which allows the liver and kidneys to maximize stores of glucose and metabolic fuels—an optimal response to prolonged starvation and other threats.  The younger the survivors were during World War II, the less of the enzyme they have as adults.  This finding echoes the results of many other human epigenetic studies that show that the effects of certain experiences during childhood and adolescence are especially enduring in individuals and sometimes even across generations.

Note how precise the language is.  No hand-waving psycho-spiritual inherited distortions; a specific claim that elevated cortisol levels in a pregnant woman can affect her child's ability to transcribe a gene related to cortisol metabolism.  Measurable, testable, and based in comprehension of the actual science.

The unfortunate part, though, is that the "inherited miasma" people love epigenetics, the same way the homeopaths love quantum physics, because at a quick read the science appears to support their crazy stance.  They read the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article on the topic (I swear, from some of the stuff I've seen, they can't have done any more than that), and then blather on about how inheritance doesn't require DNA, our ancestors' spirits are still influencing our lives, karma, reincarnation, and off the edge of the cliff they go.

Look, it's not that I'm some kind of elite scientist myself; one of my faults is that my knowledge is a light year across and an inch deep.  I'm a generalist, a dabbler, a dilettante, or whatever other related epithet you want to throw at me.  But when I talk about something, I take the time to read what the actual non-dilettantes have learned about it, rather than picking up a ten-dollar word or two and then pretending I'm claiming something valid.  Anyone else can do the same.  What these people are doing is not only misleading, it's lazy.

And frankly, I'm glad that there's no such thing as inherited miasma.  I've done a good bit of genealogical research on my family, and some of the people I descend from went through some seriously awful times, which, given that they were mostly French and Scottish peasants, is perhaps not too surprising.  On the other hand, one of my ancestors, one Alexander Lindsay of Glamis, Scotland, apparently lost his soul to the devil in a game of dice.  So maybe there's something to it, after all.

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Astrological interior design

It's always interesting when woo-woos meld together different traditions, apparently not recognizing that if you have a ridiculous idea, it's not going to become more accurate if you combine it with several other ridiculous ideas.

And that even holds true if you somehow get your nutty claim into a major media outlet.

Someone should have explained all of this to Suzy Strutner, who wrote an article for Huffington Post called "Your Birthday Could Say a LOT About What Happens In Your Home."  And we're not just talking about timing of birthday parties, here.  Strutner claims that we should all pay close attention to something called "local space astrology," which seems to combine regular old astrology with ley lines and feng shui to come up with an all-new amalgam that may rival the idea that the shape of your ass can predict your future for sheer idiocy.

Apparently, what you're supposed to do is to get a "local space chart" which identifies the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets at the moment of your birth.  You then lay this chart over the floor plan of your house, and see which planets are where.

Or something like that.

Because I don't see how this could work, okay?  Even if you buy the whole astrology thing, which I don't, why would my "local space chart" have anything to do with my current house?  I was born on a military base in Quantico, Virginia, and I now live in upstate New York.  So at the moment of my birth, a completely different set of people lived here, who all were born in different places yet, and so on.

Plus, why should it be my "local space chart" at all?  Why not my wife's?  Or our sons'?  Or our dogs'? Maybe Mars being in Sagittarius is why my one dog woke me up barking like hell at three in the morning today.  You know, all of the business about the God of War and muscly centaur dudes with bows and arrows made him feel like he needed to defend our house.  I'm not sure from whom.  Knowing him, it was probably an unusually vicious chipmunk, or something.

But Strutner, and Kita Marie Williams, the "astrological interior designer" she consulted for this exposé, apparently don't see anything at all illogical about all this.  Strutner writes that there's a way to get around having bunches of different people in the house:

Ideally, you'd center your entire floor plan around the planets.  But that's almost always impossible...  Plus, if many people live in your home, then their ideal room setup is going to be different than yours, since they have a different local space chart.  Instead, learn how the planets make each room for each person.

She gives the example of the "Mars line" being the line of "combative energy," so if your "Mars line" runs through your living room, you should watch exercise videos there, or "meditate there if you need a powerful boost."  So maybe my dog was just doing barking meditation, or something.

But sometimes the lines don't, um, line up so well.  Strutner tells us one example:

Of course, some planet lines may not sync well with the rooms that they intersect.  This might debunk household crises like a broken computer, according to astrology expert Gloria Roca.  Roca once consulted a client whose broken computer sat near her home's Neptune line.  The machine likely broke down because Neptune represents slowness and blur, Roca says.  Once her client added a photo of a serene mountain -- associated with the earthy and wise planet Saturn -- to the room, the computer started to work just fine.

Righty-o.  Someone should tell that to the people on the Geek Squad over at Best Buy.  Don't bother taking the customer's computer apart. Just tape a photograph of a "serene mountain" to it and it'll repair itself.  That should "debunk" the problem, all right.

Roca, Williams, and Strutner tell us that we should head off this sort of problem by decorating according to our "local space chart" right from the get-go.  A room that has a "Mars line" should have bright red walls, they tell us, to "bring forth its best energy."  Which sounds like exactly the décor I'd choose, if I was the interior designer for the Marquis de Sade.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

But the rest of us might choose something a little more subdued, regardless of what planet's lines run through the room.  Bookshelves are "Jupiterian," we're told, and flower bouquets are associated with Venus.  Which raises a problem; what if a room is multi-purpose?  Many of us read, sleep, watch TV, and have sex in our bedrooms.  Do we have to change the décor every time we want to switch gears?  Yeah, that'd work.  "I'm sorry, dear, we can make love as soon as I finish repainting the walls."

So anyway.  The whole thing strikes me as ridiculous on a number of different levels.  The astrologers really should go back to telling their clients that because the Moon is in Scorpio, they're going to meet a tall, handsome stranger some time in the next two weeks, and let the ley lines and feng shui nuts do their own thing as well.  Combining them all just leads to a messy conflict of interests, and nobody wants that.

But I probably only said that because the Mercury line under my office intersects with the fifth house of Capricorn, or something.  And also because I'm a little grumpy about being woken up at three AM.

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It is your mind that bends

Two days ago, I was in my car on the way to a go for a walk with a friend, and I was listening to classical music on the radio.  The announcer came on with some of the usual sort of background information before a piece is played.  In this case, she said, "Next, we're going to hear from one of the masters of the classical guitar."  And immediately, I thought, with absolute assurance, "it's going to be Narciso Yepes."

And she continued, "... here's Narciso Yepes, playing Bach's Lute Suite #1."

Now, it's odd that I thought of Yepes at all.  I don't know much about classical guitarists -- the two I've heard the most often are Andrés Segovia and Christopher Parkening, but even them I only listen to intermittently.  I think I have one CD of Yepes, but I'm not sure where it is and I don't think I've listened to it in years.

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Kirkwood123, Matao MC-1 classical guitar 01, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So the certainty of my thought is peculiar from a couple of standpoints, even if you believe that it wasn't a premonition (which, predictably, I don't).  The first is that I came up with the name of a guitarist I barely know at all, as soon as the announcer mentioned "classical guitar;" and the second, of course, is that it turned out to be right.

Interestingly (and you might consider this another synchronicity), just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a subreddit called Glitch in the Matrix which is devoted to exactly these sorts of occurrences.  The name, of course, comes from the movie The Matrix, in which odd coincidences and experiences of déjà vu are indicative that the Machines are making minor alterations to the computer simulation inside which we all live. 

The fact that we all have these experiences now and again certainly deserves some consideration. Let's take a look at three excerpts from the subreddit:

For about 5 or 6 years now (I'm 21 as of now), I've noticed that, whether it's the time that I check my phone, or it's a donation on a Twitch stream, or any number of other things, there's a decent chance that it'll be the number 619. It's nothing I'm too worried about, but it pops up every so often naturally that it just doesn't seem like a simple coincidence anymore.  It's something that I noticed happened, and then it continued to happen long after that.

 
I'll notice the time as 6:19 every once in a while, and at first I chalked it up to being stuck in the same routine, but it continued to occur after several changes in sleep schedules and school/work schedule.  Again, it's not only the time of day either, but I'll notice it in a phone number, or any number of places.  It's gotten to be like my own private joke that people or places attached to the number must mean something to me, although I never act on it...

 
So any theories on my special little number?  Does anyone else have a number or idea "follow" them around like this?  Or is this an underlying symptom of a mental disorder that I've been ignorant of for 21 years?

Here's another:

One of the most terrifying experiences I've ever encountered was with my friend Gordie last summer and to this day still makes me feel uncomfortable to talk about because I genuinely can not explain what happened on any logical level.

We were driving to Mission and on the way back I noticed I had forgotten something at the store.  By this time we were in downtown Maple Ridge and considering we had nothing to do so we went back.  It's about a 20 minute drive to Mission from where we were.  The clock read 3:23.

The clock reads 3:37. Gordie and I look at each other.  And he asks me "what happened?"  Neither of us remember the drive between Maple Ridge and Mission.  We lost 15 minutes of lives and we have no idea where it went.  All we know is that in between post A and B nothing or probably something happened.

Not a single word was said.  The last thing we remember talking about was how a video game we both play will never have a follow up.  Then at the snap of a universal finger.  Nothing.  15 minutes gone.

The rest of the ride was very quiet and we were both very much on edge and uncomfortable.  We have both experienced something completely unexplainable but yet at the same time we experienced nothing.

I'm the grand scheme of things, 15 minutes seems inconsequential and minimal to the many minutes in our life.  But nevertheless it remains unknown as to where time went.

 
My only explanation is that I passed though a wormhole and somehow ended up on the other side.

And one last one:

I had a problem with a programming question, so I googled it, and I went to the forum Stackoverflow (in which I had signed up 2 years ago).  I found an excellent answer that solved my problem, and I told myself  "Oh.. So many intelligent people out there... I would have never been able to write something like that." 

And then I realized... the author of the answer is my account.  It's me...

 
I am convinced this is caused by a glitch in the matrix.  Most probably, many answers on the forum are generated by the matrix, and the glitch was to attribute my username to it.  Of course, a couple of seconds after that, I was getting a vague idea that I may have written the answer (false memory), but I am not fooled!

So, given that we are starting from the standpoint of there being a natural explanation for all of this, what is going on here?

I think the key is that all of these rely on two things; the general unreliability of perception and memory, and our capacity for noticing what seems odd and ignoring pretty much everything else.  Starting with our 619-noticer, consider how many times (s)he probably looks at clocks, not to mention other sources of three-digit numbers, and it's not 619.  Once you have a couple of precedents -- most likely caused, as the writer noted, by being in the same routine -- you are much more likely to notice it again.  And each subsequent occurrence reinforces the perception that something odd is going on.

Dart-thrower's bias rears its ugly head once again.

As far as the time-slip friends, I think what happened here is a simple failure of attention.  I've driven on auto-pilot more than once, especially when I'm fatigued, and suddenly sat up straight and thought, "How the hell did I get here?"  I honestly had no memory at all of driving the intervening distance.  But a mysterious time-slip is less likely than my brain being elsewhere (leaving some portion of my attention still focused on my driving, fortunately).

And the last one, the person who answered him/herself on an internet forum, certainly has to be a case of a lost memory.  I have a friend from college who has an excellent memory for details from the past, and periodically reminds me of things that happened to the two of us -- and more than once I've had to admit to him that I have no recollection of the events whatsoever.  (In fact, just a month ago I stumbled upon the obituary of a professor we'd both known, and sent it to him, and he responded, "Um... Gordon... I sent this to you in February."  Even after he told me that, I honestly had no memory of it.)  It's disconcerting, but our memories are far less thorough and accurate than we think they are.

My own premonition-like decision that the radio announcer was going to be playing a piece by Narciso Yepes is clearly an example of dart-thrower's bias, similar to the 619-noticer.   Considering how often I listen to the radio, and hear the announcer give a bit of information about the next selection, it's likely I have thoughts like, "I hope she plays something by Scarlatti next!" several times a day.  Most of them, of course, are wrong, and because that's the norm, such events are immediately forgotten.  It's only the coincidental ones, the outliers, that get noticed.

But even so, I think I'll dig up that Yepes album and put it on.  Whether or not it was a glitch in the matrix, he's a pretty damn good guitarist.

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The climatic teeter-totter

Want a take on something familiar that will (probably) turn your mental image of it on its head?

Picture dinosaurs.  Not just the dinosaurs themselves, but where they are -- the terrain, plant life, and so on.  I'm guessing you probably came up with something like this:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ABelov2014 (https://abelov2014.deviantart.com/), Wessex Formation dinosaurs, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Lush, steamy, wet, sort of like today's Amazon rainforests.  It's no surprise Jurassic Park was set on a (fictional) island, Isla Nublar, off the coast of Costa Rica.

And we know for certain that part of the "Age of the Dinosaurs" had a lot of these characteristics.  The global climate from the mid-Jurassic to the end of the Cretaceous was largely warm and moist.  But a new study, published last week in Science Advances, suggests that the dinosaurs may have come to prominence not because of their adaptation to warm climates, but because of their resistance to cold ones.

Just about everyone knows about the KT (Cretaceous-Tertiary) Extinction, that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs, and is now attributed with near certainty to the impact of the Chicxulub Meteorite sixty-six million years ago.  Most people also have heard about the biggest mass extinction ever, the Permian-Triassic Extinction, that by some estimates wiped out between eighty and ninety percent of life on Earth, 252 million years ago.  Surprisingly few people have heard about the End-Triassic Extinction -- surprising because it caused nearly as much decrease in biodiversity as the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction would 135 million years later.

One of the reasons that this event doesn't get much attention is that the wipeout seems to have been gradual rather than sudden and dramatic, as both the Cretaceous-Tertiary and Permian-Triassic Extinction were.  "Gradual," of course, is in human terms; in geological or paleontological terms, it happened pretty damn quickly, over a period of about eight hundred thousand years or so.  The cause isn't as well understood as either of the other aforementioned extinction events, but seems to have been because of a climatic rollercoaster that first cooled the climate dramatically, and then warmed it up even more.  The cause is thought to have been the opening up of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, a line of enormous volcanoes that split what had been the supercontinent of Pangaea in half and opened up the Atlantic Ocean.  Eventually the province became the modern Mid-Atlantic Ridge (which is still driving North and South America away from Europe and Africa at a rate of about 2.5 centimeters a year).

The climate had already been cooling during the late Triassic, and sea levels fell as seawater got locked up into polar ice caps and glaciers.  The eruptions of the CAMP initially dropped the temperature even more, favoring cold-adapted animals and plants.  But just as we've seen from modern volcanic eruptions, the "volcanic cold snaps" we get from sunlight-blocking effects of the ash and debris being launched aloft eventually rebound into a warming event because of the pulse of carbon dioxide injected into the atmosphere.

That's what happened here, only on a huge scale.  The climatic teeter-totter tilted first toward significant cold and then into a warm, wet period, and the big winners in both scenarios were the dinosaurs.  We know about their ability to tolerate heat; like I said, mostly that's the kind of environment we picture them living in.  But their ability to weather a cold period seems to have been due to an adaptation their amphibian cousins didn't have: feathers.

We always tend to associate feathers with flight, for the very good reason that birds use them for that purpose.  But what we have here is a great example of preadaptation (sometimes shortened to preaptation), in which a trait evolved in one context gains another, unrelated, function and experiences a whole bunch of different selective pressures.  Feathers, which are modified reptilian scales (look at a snake scale under a microscope and you'll see the similarity), started out as heat-trapping devices; cold-adapted birds like penguins still use them that way.  Once small arboreal dinosaurs began to use feathered limbs as aids to gliding when they jumped from branch to branch, all of a sudden they became seriously well-adapted for something else, and opened the road to modern birds.

The more well-preserved dinosaur fossils we find, the more species we find that had feathers -- including the ones that didn't fly.  Even pterosaurs, which we usually picture as having leathery wings, were apparently covered with something very much like fur or fine down feathers.  (In fact, one of the small pterosaurs of the late Jurassic is called Sordes pilosus, which roughly translates as "hairy devil.")

So the initial temperature drop at the end of the Triassic Period favored dinosaurs with insulation -- then when the temperature rebounded into jungle conditions in the early Jurassic, the competition (in the form of large amphibian species) were mostly extinct, and the dinosaurs really took off, one branch of them using their feathery innovations for something entirely different.  

I always find it wryly funny when people think of dinosaurs as being some kind of "failed experiment" or "evolutionary dead end," when they were actually the dominant life form for 185 million years, which is almost six hundred times longer than modern humans have existed.  In fact, most studies have flatly contradicted the notion that "dinosaurs were already declining and then the meteorite impact finished them off" -- all indications are that they were doing just fine when Chicxulub hit.  Odd to think of it, but if it hadn't been for that catastrophic impact and horrifying extinction, our own ancestors would very likely never have thrived and spread -- and dinosaurs of some form might still be the dominant animal life on Earth.

But as far as the end-Triassic climate yo-yo goes, it just shows that when the external conditions change, what was a disadvantage can suddenly become an advantage, and what was an advantage can become a disadvantage -- or an advantage of another sort.  If things change fast, so can the winners and losers.

In this case, favoring a group that would go on to rule the planet for another 135 million years.

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Cheers!

Humans have been making and consuming alcoholic drinks for a very long time.

We're hardly the only animal species to experience the psychotropic effects.  You may recall that about ten years ago a story from Sweden (Höme of the Majestic Mööse!  Extra points if you know the reference) in which one of the antlered behemoths got drunk eating fermented fallen apples, tried to climb the apple tree, and got stuck.  Not all species experience the same effects, though.  A 2008 study of pen-tailed tree shrews in Malaysia found that they habitually consume naturally-fermented nectar that raises their blood alcohol levels to well above the legal limit for humans, and show no ill effects whatsoever.  Presumably if they've evolved with that kind of diet, they've developed a mechanism for detoxifying the alcohol, or at least avoiding the psychological effects.  The jungles of Malaysia are thick with predators, and for a small furry mammal to spend all its time stumbling around dead drunk would be a good way to end up actually dead.

The earliest hard evidence of humans making wine or beer comes from near Jiahu, in the Yellow River Valley of China.  Pottery dating from about 6800 B.C.E. was found that had residues of fermented rice, honey, grapes, and hawthorn berries; around the same time, there's evidence of grape wine and barley beer being made in the Middle East.  I've often wondered what that stuff tasted like, as compared to our refined and filtered wines, beers, and spirits a lot of us enjoy today.  Back then, they were relying on wild yeasts and bacteria to do the fermenting, and that undoubtedly led to highly variable results (and a lot of spoilage).

The written records of the Greeks and Romans certainly mention wine and beer, and (especially with the Romans) we know a good bit about their winemaking techniques.  Grape juice, sometimes flavored with spices, honey, or other fruit juices, was boiled, then filtered, poured into clay amphorae, the lids sealed with beeswax, and then buried for a period that could vary from weeks to years.  The resulting liquid was then decanted and bottled.  This was when it was discovered that the soil type, climate, and grape variety had huge effects on the outcome; Roman wines ran the spectrum from surrentine (which the Emperor Tiberius sneeringly called "generous vinegar") to falernian (so expensive it was only available to the very rich but potent -- it was not only delicious, but was aged for up to twenty-five years and had an alcohol content of around fifteen percent).

[Image is in the Public Domain]

We just learned a little more about the production of vino from an archaeological find from the harbor of San Felice Circeo, ninety kilometers south of Rome.  Wine jars were unearthed in a seabed deposit that still had residues of the wines they contained.  Both red and white wines were found, along with pollen identifiable as coming from several varieties of wild grapes that grow in the area.  (Whether the vines themselves were cultivated is unknown; but those varieties are still found growing wild nearby.)  Interestingly, the amphorae were sealed not with beeswax but with pine tar, and apparently the pine tar was used not only as a sealant but to flavor the wine itself.  Maybe the result was something like Greek retsina, which people seem either to love or hate (I like the flavor, but my wife's opinion is if she wanted to chew on a pine branch, she'd go do it).

It'd be interesting if we went back to Roman times and attended a feast, where it would fall on the spectrum between delectable and revolting.  I wrote last October about a fellow named Andrew Coletti who has tried to recreate bunches of historical recipes as accurately as possible, and found that one of the Roman dishes bore an uncanny resemblance to french fries with ketchup.  But I have no doubt that some of the food and drink would taste pretty strange to us.  I'd still want to try it, though.  I don't hesitate to try local foods when I travel, and have rarely had a bad experience, although I did draw the line at the Icelandic "delicacy" hákarl, which is fermented shark meat.  It apparently has a "strong ammonia smell," and the late Anthony Bourdain said it was "the single worst, most disgusting, and terrible-tasting thing" he'd ever consumed.  Chef Ainsley Harriott was even more descriptive, describing eating it as being like "chewing on a urine-soaked mattress."

I've heard of "acquired tastes," but that's over the line.  In fact, for me, that's so far over the line that from there I wouldn't be able to see the line using a powerful telescope.

But Roman wine?  Sure, I'd give it a go, even the "generous vinegar" one.  Who knows, maybe I'd love it.  Chacun à son goût, and all that sort of thing.  But think about this if you go out for a pint or a glass of wine with friends tonight -- you're partaking in a tradition that goes back in some form or another for thousands of years.  Pretty cool, when you think about it.

Cheers!

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The smell of friendship

A topic I covered in my intro to biology classes was the phenomenon of pheromones.

A pheromone is a chemical secreted by one individual that causes a behavioral change in another member of the same species.  There's a great variety -- sex pheromones (which causes the behavior you see in male dogs when a female dog goes into heat), alarm pheromones (such as the "attack" chemical released by killer bees that causes swarming), territorial pheromones (such as urine marking in wolves), and so on.  They're biochemical signals; much the way hormones signal between organs, pheromones signal between organisms.

This inevitably led to the question, "Do humans have pheromones?"  The answer is, "Probably, but it's hard to demonstrate conclusively."  Certainly, the "pheromonal" perfumes and colognes you've probably seen ads for are ripoffs; there is no evidence that there's anything you could add to a perfume that would act as an aphrodisiac.  (For some reason, I've mostly seen ads for this stuff in science magazines.  Maybe they think we nerds need all the help we can get in the romance department, I dunno.)

One of my AP Biology students years ago got interested in the topic of attractant pheromones, and designed a clever experiment to see if he could detect an effect in humans.  He had a bunch of volunteers agree to the following protocol: (1) shower first thing in the morning; (2) use odorless soap, shampoo, and deodorant, and don't put on any scented products; (3) don't eat any food that could change your body odor, such as garlic, curry, or asparagus; and (4) wear a plain white t-shirt (provided by the researcher) for an entire day, then seal it in a ziplock bag at the end of the day.  He then took the collected t-shirts (I think there were about twenty in all) and got a bunch of students to smell them, and rank them best-to-worst for odor.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lateiner, T-shirt-2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The results were pretty interesting.  There was a tendency for people to rank higher t-shirts that had been worn by volunteers of their preferred gender.  (There weren't any bisexuals in the test sample; maybe we think everyone smells good, I dunno.)  The most interesting part was that between the t-shirt wearing group and the t-shirt smelling group, there were a couple of pairs of siblings -- and they ranked their siblings as smelling terrible!

Curious results, which I was immediately reminded of when I stumbled on some research out of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel which showed there might be a pheromonal aspect not only of sexual attraction, but of friendship.

The procedure they followed was remarkably similar to my student's, if considerably more rigorous and technical.  They recruited twenty pairs of people who reported that they were friends, and further, had "clicked immediately" -- a phenomenon I think we can all relate to.  (It's equally common to meet someone you dislike immediately -- but that'd have been a lot harder to study.)  They then did a similar t-shirt wearing protocol, but at the end of the day, instead of having someone smell it, they used an electronic volatile chemical analyzer to determine what odor-carrying substances there might be in the shirts.

What they found was that the chemistry of the sweat left behind in the t-shirts was remarkably similar between people who were friends.  Further -- and even wilder -- they then had the volunteers pair up with same-sex strangers from the research group, eventually testing all possible same-sex pairings, and had them stand in close proximity for two minutes (in silence).  They then were asked to rank the person from 1 to 100 in terms of how comfortable they were, whether they felt a connection, and whether they'd be interested in meeting the person again.

Across the board, the more similar the pair's sweat chemistry, the higher the rankings were.  "The finding that it could predict clicking by body odor similarity alone—this was really cool," said study co-author Inval Ravreby.  "We were really excited to find this."

The researchers did admit that the effect was small (although statistically significant) and there was a lot of overlap in the data, but the fact that there's a trend at all is pretty amazing.  Human behavior is complex and multifaceted, and it's amazing how much of it is due to subliminal cues.  Despite our generally high opinions of our species, we're still animals -- and we interact with each other not only in human-specific ways but in the more instinctual ways other animals use.

Now, I'm not suggesting that you should try to find friends by walking up and sniffing people.  But maybe that feeling of an instant connection we sometimes have is more due to our sense of smell than it is any kind of cognitive assessment.

Think of that the next time you're having lunch with your best friend.

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An open letter to straight Americans

Dear straight people:

I hope you recognize the path the United States is on, and where it leads.  Because it's easy to blind yourself to problems that don't affect you.  That is, at its heart, what minorities mean when they talk about privilege.  As a Black friend of mine put it, "White privilege doesn't mean White people's lives are easy; it just means that race isn't one of the things making them harder."

Recent developments in Florida (why the fuck is it always Florida?) should bring that into sharp focus.  Because of the state's "Don't Say Gay" law, school administrators in Orange County have now told staff that they can't display rainbow "Safe Space" stickers in their classrooms, they can't assign reading material with any LGBTQ content to their classes, they are required to tell parents if they find out a student is queer, and LGBTQ staff members cannot have photographs of their families displayed anywhere -- including on their own desks.

My first question to my straight readers is: do you have any idea what effect this has, both on staff and on students?

This kind of ugly, bigoted horseshit is why I spent forty years unable to admit that I was bisexual.  During most of that time I couldn't even admit it to myself.  I grew up thinking same-sex attraction was something to be ashamed of, or at the very least, to be fearful about.  Well, fear was justified; I want you to think, really think, about what it'd be like if you were afraid to take your significant other out to dinner because then people would realize you were together.  That you couldn't walk down the street of your own home town holding hands because you'd be jeered at, have hateful epithets thrown at you, and (in all too many places) risk actual physical violence.  That you'd been told over and over that loving who you love made you abnormal, sinful, disgusting, aberrant.

It's that hell that this law is forcing LGBTQ people back into.

We never really left it, honestly, but a lot of us felt like at least we were heading in the right direction.  In the last five years I've become more and more like the iconic character Nick Nelson from Alice Oseman's brilliant graphic novel series Heartstopper:

I'm damn lucky I'm in a situation I can do that.  I live in a pretty tolerant part of the country.  I'm married to a woman, which is fortunate in two respects; not only does it shield me from the stigma that people in same-sex relationships face every single day, my wife is a wonderful human being who accepts me for who I am.

But consider what I, and countless others like me who spent most of their lives hiding, lost in the process.  Think about what it'd be like if there was something about you that you didn't ask for and couldn't change, and now there were laws against it being out in the open.  How about... wearing glasses?  What if at work, you were told you couldn't wear glasses, and had to pretend you could see well?  If anyone asked you about it, you had to say you could see just fine.  Any visits to the optometrist had to be made in secret -- if possible, in another town where you wouldn't be recognized going into the place.  No books in your kids' school could show, or even mention, characters who didn't have 20/20 vision.  And if you did become angry enough to say "fuck it" and wore your glasses in public, you would be ridiculed or beaten up for it.

See how horrifying that sounds?

It's been years that we've known that homophobic ignorance flies in the face of the actual science, but we Americans don't exactly have a stellar record of listening to the scientists about anything.  Back in 2015, Scientific American published an article that goes into the biology of human sexuality, and the details are fascinating; but truthfully, it can be summed up as, "Sexuality is complex, and it isn't binary."  

The homophobes have responded by mischaracterizing how the medical professionals address the issue, because (unfortunately) straw man arguments are all too effective when people don't know, or don't want to know, the facts.  Just last week I saw someone post on social media, "If a five-year-old is old enough to decide what gender they are, an eighteen-year-old is old enough to own a gun."  I'm not going into the last half of it, but the first half is so abjectly ridiculous it's a wonder it generated anything more than derisive laughter.  It makes it sound like an anatomically male five-year-old says, "Hey, I'm a girl now," and the parents immediately whisk them off to get gender-reassignment surgery.  According to a statement by medical professionals who address issues of gender dysphoria, surgeries of this sort are only done if the child is anatomically intersex, and even then doctors almost always wait until the child is the age of puberty before taking any kind of irreversible action.

Unfortunately, no one I saw responded to the person who posted that with, "THAT NEVER HAPPENS."  We've become afraid even to fight the battle, or perhaps just too damn exhausted to argue.

It's understandable.  This is the third time this month (ironically, Pride Month) I've written about these issues here at Skeptophilia.  At some point we feel like, "What more can I say?  And what good is it doing anyhow?"  So that's why I'm going to ask not my queer readers, but my straight ones, to think long and hard about something: what would it take to make you stand up and say, "Hell no, this is wrong," even though it only directly affects a group you don't belong to?  If you were a straight teacher in Orange County, Florida, would you be willing to put up a rainbow flag in your classroom and say to administrators, "Bring it on"?  To say to Ron DeSantis and the hundreds of other elected officials in this country cut from the same cloth, "This is not gonna happen.  Not on my watch."?

"Tired," by the inimitable Langston Hughes

It's easy to support LGBTQ rights in ways that risk nothing.  You vote for candidates who support equal rights for all?  Great, awesome, good for you.  But we are hurtling down a tunnel into a deep, dark place that a lot of us thought we'd left back in the 1980s.  And that downward spiral won't stop until straight people stand up and say, "I'm going to do whatever it takes to halt this, even if it means putting myself in the bullseye."

That is what it means to be an ally.

Thankfully, there are straight people who do just that.  I've laughed with a dear friend of mine, who is straight as they come, because he owns (and wears publicly) more Pride gear than I do.  He's one of the ones who would not hesitate to give a big old middle finger to homophobes, and say, "What are you gonna do about it, asshole?"

But there are too damn few people like him.

So I'm asking my straight readers to stand up and make your voices heard.  It's the only way any of this is going to stop.  And keep in mind that if the bigots win this fight, it isn't going to end there, because queers aren't the only ones these people hate.  Remember the oft-quoted statement by anti-Nazi activist Martin Niemöller that ends, "Finally, they came for me -- and by then, there was no one left to speak for me."

Please, please don't wait until then.

Maybe there's a time that other-sides-ism is appropriate, but that's not now.  I am not obligated to respect your opinion if your opinion denies the rights, and even the humanity, of another group of people.  There is no morally and ethically defensible justification for what is happening in the United States right now.

Pride ends today, but don't expect me to shut up about it.  I was silent for forty years, and it doesn't work.  And maybe -- just maybe -- if enough straight allies will commit to standing in the breach with us, we won't have another generation of queer children growing up going through the hell that I and so many others did.  

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