Christmas cheer

It sometimes comes as a shock to my friends and acquaintances when they find out that even though I'm a staunch unbeliever in anything even resembling organized religion, I love Christmas music.

Well, some Christmas music.  There are modern Christmas songs that make me want to stick any available objects in my ears, even if those objects are fondue forks.  Abominations like "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" leave me leery of entering any public spaces with ambient music from November 15 to December 25.  In my opinion, there should be jail time associated with writing lines like, "Little tin horns and little toy drums, rooty-toot-toot and rummy-tum-tum," and whoever wrote "Let It Snow" should be pitched, bare-ass naked, head-first into a snowdrift.

Each year I participate in something called the Little Drummer Boy Challenge, which is a contest to see if you can make it from Thanksgiving to Christmas without once hearing "The Little Drummer Boy."  So far, I'm still in the game this year, although it must be said that I've done this for nine years and have hardly ever survived.  I've never been taken out as ignominiously, though, as I was a few years ago, when I made it all the way to the week before Christmas, and stopped by a hardware store to pick some stuff up.  And while I was waiting to check out, a stock clerk walked by jauntily singing the following:

Come, they LA LA pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
A newborn LA LA LA pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
LA LA LA gifts we bring pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
LA LA before the king pah-rum-puh-pum-pum, rum-puh-pum-pum, rum-puh-pum-pum

Dude didn't even know all the damn lyrics, but I had to play fair and admit I'd been felled by the Boy one more time.  Before I could stop myself, I glared at him and said, "Are you fucking kidding me right now?" in a furious voice, which led to a significant diminishment of the Christmas cheer in the store, but I maintain to this day I had ample justification.  The alarmed stock clerk scurried off, clearly afraid that if he stuck around much longer, the Batshit Crazy Scruffy Blond Customer was going to Deck his Halls but good.

I know this makes me sound like a grumpy curmudgeon.  I can accept that, because I am a grumpy curmudgeon.  But even so, I absolutely love a lot of Christmas music.  I think "O Holy Night" is a stunning piece of music, and "Angels We Have Heard On High" is incredible fun to sing (as long as it's not sung like a dirge, but as the expression of joy consistent with the lyrics).  Speaking of doing things the right way, check out Annie Lennox's stupendous music video of "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen:"

Despite the impression I probably gave at the start of this post, the list of Christmas songs I like is way longer than the list of ones I don't.  I grew up singing wonderful French carols like "Il Est Né, Le Divin Enfant" and "Un Flambeau, Jeanette Isabella," and to this day hearing those songs makes me smile.

And I can include not only seasonal religious music, but religious music in general, in this discussion; one of my favorite genres of music is Renaissance and Baroque religious music, especially the works of William Byrd, Henry Purcell, J. S. Bach, William Cornysh, Giovanni de Palestrina, and Thomas Tallis.  If you want to hear something truly transcendent, listen to this incredible performance of Tallis's Spem in Alium ("Hope in Another"), a forty-part motet here sung by seven hundred people:

I know it might seem like a contradiction for a non-religious person to thoroughly enjoy such explicitly religious music, but in my opinion, beauty is beauty wherever you find it.  I can be moved to tears by Bach's Mass in B Minor without necessarily believing the story it tells.  And it also pleases me that it gives me common ground with my friends who do believe, for whom the lovely "Mary's Boy Child" isn't just a cool calypso tune, but a joyous expression of something near and dear to them.

I guess I'm a bit of a contradiction in terms sometimes, but that's okay.  I still deeply resent any attempt to force belief on others (or lack of belief, for that matter), and my anger runs deep at the damage done, and still being done, by the religious to members of the LGBTQ community.  The likelihood of my ending up back in church is minuscule at best.

Even so, I still love the holiday season.  It's a chance to give gifts and express my appreciation for my friends and family, and to enjoy the pretty decorations and sweet music.  Honestly, I think a lot of us godless heathens feel the same way, which is why I'm glad to see that this year -- so far, at least -- the Religious Right has backed off on the whole idiotic "War On Christmas" nonsense.  After all, it's been what, fifteen years or so? -- since Bill O'Reilly gave the clarion call that the Atheists Were Comin' For Your Christmas Trees, and if you'll look around you'll notice that everyone's still saying "Merry Christmas" and giving gifts and everything else just like they've always done, so the whole trope has finally fallen a little flat.  It couldn't have gone any other way, honestly.  A great many of us atheistic types are also pretty dedicated to live-and-let-live, and most of us don't care if you have Christmas displays in your front yard so bright they disrupt nearby air traffic, as long as you're not going to pull out your AR-15 when a non-believer says "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."

I do, however, draw the line at piping in "The Little Drummer Boy" over mall loudspeakers.  That's just a bridge too far.  I mean, what kind of stupid song is that, anyhow?  It's about a kid who sees a mom and dad with a quietly sleeping newborn baby, and thinks, "You know what these people need?  A drum solo."

In my opinion, Mary would have been well in her rights to smack him over the head with the frankincense.  Pah-rum-puh-pum-pow, you odious little twerp.

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It's a bird, it's a plane... no, it's both

One topic I've come back to over and over again here at Skeptophilia is how flawed our sensory/perceptive apparatus is.  Oh, it works well enough; most of the time, we perceive the external world with sufficient clarity not to walk into walls or get run over by oncoming trains.  But our impression that we experience the world as it is -- that our overall ambient sense of everything around us, what the brilliant neurophysiologist David Eagleman calls our umwelt, is a crystal-clear reflection of the real universe -- simply is false.

All it takes is messing about with optical illusions to convince yourself how easy our brains and sensory organs are to fool.  For example, in the following drawing, which is darker; square A or square B?

They're exactly the same.  Don't believe me?  Here's the same drawing, with a pair of gray lines superimposed on it:

Because your brain decided that B was in the shadow and A wasn't, then it concluded that A had to be intrinsically darker.  What baffles me still about this illusion is that even once you know how the trick works, it's impossible to see it any other way.

As astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "Our brains are rife with ways of getting it wrong.  You know optical illusions?  That's not what they should call them.  They should call them brain failures.  Because that's what they are.  A few cleverly drawn lines, and your brain can't handle it."

Well, we just got another neat hole shot in our confidence that what we're experiencing is irrefutable concrete reality with a study that appeared in the journal Psychological Science this week.  What the researchers did was attempt to confound the senses of sight and hearing by showing test subjects a photograph of one object morphing into another -- say, a bird into an airplane.  During the time they studied the photograph, they were exposed to a selection from a list of sounds, two of which were relevant (birdsong and the noise of a jet engine) and a number of which were irrelevant distractors (like a hammer striking a nail).

They were then told to use a sliding scale to estimate where in the transformation of bird-into-airplane the image was (e.g. seventy percent bird, thirty percent airplane).  What the researchers found was that people were strongly biased by what they were hearing; birdsong biased the test subjects to overestimate the birdiness of the photograph, and reverse happened with the sound of a jet engine.  The irrelevant noises didn't effect choice (and thus, when exposed to the irrelevant noises, their visual perceptions of the image were more accurate).

"When sounds are related to pertinent visual features, those visual features are prioritized and processed more quickly compared to when sounds are unrelated to the visual features," said Jamal Williams, of the University of California - San Diego, who led the study, in an interview with Science Daily.  "So, if you heard the sound of a birdsong, anything bird-like is given prioritized access to visual perception.  We found that this prioritization is not purely facilitatory and that your perception of the visual object is actually more bird-like than if you had heard the sound of an airplane flying overhead."

I guess it could be worse; at least hearing birdsong didn't make you see a bird that wasn't there.  But it does once again make me wonder how eyewitness testimony is still considered to carry the most weight in a court of law when experiment after experiment has demonstrated not only how incomplete and easily biased our perceptions are, but how flawed our memories are.

Something to keep in mind next time you are tempted to say "I know it happened that way, I saw it with my own eyes."

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Death metal bat

My favorite wild animals are bats.

I think the flying fox -- a large diurnal species of fruit bat -- has got to be one of the coolest animals in the world.  Think about how amazing it would be, being a flying fox.  You have great big wings and can fly anywhere you want, you get to eat figs and dates all day, and you're cute as the dickens.  What could be better than that?

Fruit-eating sky puppies, is what they are.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Trikansh sharma, Eye contact with flying fox, CC0 1.0]

Unfortunately, bats in general have gotten a bad name, even though they're unequivocally beneficial.  (The insectivorous kinds can eat up to a thousand small flying insects -- including disease-carrying mosquitoes -- in an hour.)   The negative reputation comes from two sources: first, an association with drinking blood (only three out of the thousand species of bats do that; all three live in South America and almost never bite humans); and second, that they carry rabies (which can happen -- but so do raccoons, foxes, skunks, feral cats and dogs, and even deer).

Bats are good guys.  They're also incredibly cool.  I did a piece last year about the wild adaptations for echolocating in nocturnal bats, an ability I still find mind-boggling.  Which is why I was so psyched to run across a paper this week in PLOS-Biology about the fact that their ability to produce such an amazing array of sounds is due to the same feature death metal singers use to get their signature growl. 

In "Bats Expand Their Vocal Range By Recruiting Different Laryngeal Structures for Echolocation and Social Communication," biologists Jonas Håkonsson, Cathrine Mikkelsen, Lasse Jakobsen, and Coen Elemans, of the University of Southern Denmark, write:

Echolocating bats produce very diverse vocal signals for echolocation and social communication that span an impressive frequency range of 1 to 120 kHz or 7 octaves.  This tremendous vocal range is unparalleled in mammalian sound production and thought to be produced by specialized laryngeal vocal membranes on top of vocal folds.  However, their function in vocal production remains untested. By filming vocal membranes in excised bat larynges (Myotis daubentonii) in vitro with ultra-high-speed video (up to 250,000 fps) and using deep learning networks to extract their motion, we provide the first direct observations that vocal membranes exhibit flow-induced self-sustained vibrations to produce 10 to 95 kHz echolocation and social communication calls in bats.  The vocal membranes achieve the highest fundamental frequencies (fo’s) of any mammal, but their vocal range is with 3 to 4 octaves comparable to most mammals.  We evaluate the currently outstanding hypotheses for vocal membrane function and propose that most laryngeal adaptations in echolocating bats result from selection for producing high-frequency, rapid echolocation calls to catch fast-moving prey.  Furthermore, we show that bats extend their lower vocal range by recruiting their ventricular folds—as in death metal growls—that vibrate at distinctly lower frequencies of 1 to 5 kHz for producing agonistic social calls.  The different selection pressures for echolocation and social communication facilitated the evolution of separate laryngeal structures that together vastly expanded the vocal range in bats.

NPR did a story on the research, and followed it up by talking to some death metal singers, all of whom were pretty fascinated to find out bats can do it, too.  "In a [masochistic] sort of way ... I think that when I can feel that my vocal cords are getting kind of shredded or beat up, that it sounds better," said Chase Mason, lead singer of the band Gatecreeper.  "You know, like, if there's a little taste of blood in the back of my throat, I think that I'm doing a good job...  A lot of people will compare you to sounding like a bear or something like that, like an animal growling or roaring even... I think it's cool.  It's very dark and gothic.  The imagery of a bat is always associated with the darker sort of things, like vampires and stuff.  So it definitely makes sense."

I'm still more favoring the Sky Puppy model of bats, but hey, I'm not arguing with a guy who can make noises like Chase Mason can.

In any case, add one more thing to the "cool" column for bats, which was pretty lengthy already.  It's incredible that however much we learn about nature, there are always ways it'll come back and surprise you.  That's why if you have a curious side, learn some science -- you'll never be short of new things to wonder at.

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Swearing off

I've been fascinated with words ever since I can remember.  It's no real mystery why I became a writer, and (later) got my master's degree in historical linguistics; I've lived in the magical realm of language ever since I first learned how to use it.

Languages are full of curiosities, which is my impetus for doing my popular daily bit called #AskLinguisticsGuy on TikTok.  And one of the posts I've done that got the most views was a piece on "folk etymology" -- stories invented (with little or no evidence) to explain word origins -- specifically, that the word "fuck" does not come from the acronym for "Fornication Under Consent of the King."

The story goes that in bygone years, when a couple got married, if the king liked the bride's appearance, he could claim the right of "prima nocta" (also called "droit de seigneur"), wherein he got to spend the first night of the marriage with the bride.  (Apparently this did occasionally happen, but wasn't especially common.)  Afterward -- and now we're in the realm of folk etymology -- the king gave his official permission for the bride and groom to go off and amuse themselves as they wished, at which point he stamped the couple's marriage documents "Fornication Under Consent of the King," meaning it was now legal for the couple to have sex with each other.

This bit, of course, is pure fiction.  The truth is that the word "fuck" probably comes from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic root *fug meaning "to strike."  There are cognates (same meaning, different spelling) in just about every Germanic language there is.  The acronym explanation is one hundred percent false, but you'll still see it claimed (which is why I did a TikTok video on it).

The whole subject of taboo words is pretty fascinating, and every language has 'em.  Most cultures have some levels of taboo surrounding sex and other private bodily functions, but there are some odd ones.  In Québecois French, for example, the swear word that will get your face slapped by your prudish aunt is tabernacle!, which is the emotional equivalent of the f-bomb, but comes (obviously) from religious practice, not sex.  Interestingly, in Québecois French, the English f-word has been adopted in the phrase j'ai fucké ça, which is considered pretty mild -- an English equivalent would be "I screwed up."  (The latter phrase, of course, derives from the sexual definition of "to screw," so maybe they're not so different after all.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juliescribbles, Money being put in swear jar, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Linguists are not above studying such matters.  I found this out when I was in graduate school and was assigned the brilliant 1982 paper by John McCarthy called "Prosodic Structure and Expletive Infixation," which considers the morphological rules governing the placement of the word "fucking" into other words -- why, for example, we say "abso-fucking-lutely" but never "ab-fucking-solutely."  (The rule has to do with stress -- you put "fucking" before the primary stressed syllable, as long as there is a secondary stressed syllable that comes somewhere before it.)  I was (and am) delighted by this paper.  It might be the only academic paper I ever read in grad school from which I simultaneously learned something and had several honest guffaws.

The reason this whole sweary subject comes up is because of a paper by Shiri Lev-Ari and Ryan McKay that came out just yesterday in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, called, "The Sound of Swearing: Are There Universal Patterns in Profanity?"  Needless to say, I also thought this paper was just fan-fucking-tastic.  And the answer is: yes, across languages, there are some significant patterns.  The authors write:

Why do swear words sound the way they do?  Swear words are often thought to have sounds that render them especially fit for purpose, facilitating the expression of emotion and attitude.  To date, however, there has been no systematic cross-linguistic investigation of phonetic patterns in profanity.  In an initial, pilot study we explored statistical regularities in the sounds of swear words across a range of typologically distant languages.  The best candidate for a cross-linguistic phonemic pattern in profanity was the absence of approximants (sonorous sounds like l, r, w and y).  In Study 1, native speakers of various languages judged foreign words less likely to be swear words if they contained an approximant.  In Study 2 we found that sanitized versions of English swear words – like darn instead of damn – contain significantly more approximants than the original swear words.  Our findings reveal that not all sounds are equally suitable for profanity, and demonstrate that sound symbolism – wherein certain sounds are intrinsically associated with certain meanings – is more pervasive than has previously been appreciated, extending beyond denoting single concepts to serving pragmatic functions.

The whole thing put me in mind of my dad, who (as befits a man who spent 29 years in the Marine Corps) had a rather pungent vocabulary.  Unfortunately, my mom was a tightly-wound prude who wrinkled her nose if someone said "hell" (and who couldn't even bring herself to utter the word "sex;" the Good Lord alone knows how my sister and I were conceived).  Needless to say, this difference in attitude caused some friction between them.  My dad solved the problem of my mother's anti-profanity harangues by making up swear words, often by repurposing other words that sounded like they could be vulgar.  His favorite was "fop."  When my mom would give him a hard time for yelling "fop!" if he smashed his thumb with a hammer, he would patiently explain that it actually meant "a dandified gentleman," and after all, there was nothing wrong with yelling that.  My mom, in desperate frustration not to lose the battle, would snarl back something like, "It doesn't mean that the way you say it!", but in the end my dad's insistence that he'd said nothing inappropriate was pretty unassailable.

Interesting that "fop" fits into the Lev-Ari/McKay phonetic pattern like a hand in a glove.

Anyhow, as regular readers of Skeptophilia already know, I definitely inherited my dad's salty vocabulary.  But -- as one of my former principals pointed out -- all they are is words, and what really matters is the intent behind them.  And like any linguistic phenomenon, it's an interesting point of study, if you can get issues of prudishness well out of the damn way.

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Art, haiku, and Lensa

The injection of AI technology into art has opened up a serious can of worms.

I ran into two examples of this in rapid succession a couple of days ago.  The first came to me by way of a friend who is an artist and writer, and is about the Lensa app -- a wildly-popular AI art interface that can take an image of your face, spruce it up a bit (if it needs it -- mine certainly would), and then create digital art of you as a superhero, model, mythological creature, Renaissance painting, or dozens of other reimaginings of you.  Someone I follow on TikTok posted a sequence of Lensa art based on his face -- and I have to say, they were pretty damn cool-looking.

Yes, but.

The hitch is where all the imagery Lensa is using comes from.  There are credible allegations that the owners of the app are basically shrugging their shoulders at the question.  Artist Rueben Medina had the following to say about it:

I hate being a party pooper but please stop using Lensa and posting your AI art images from it.  I understand if you don't care about the blatant theft of your data the app is doing, lots of things do that.  What you should care about is this: 

The Lensa app uses the Stable Diffusion model to create those AI images.  That model is trained on the Laion database.  That database is full of stolen artwork and sensitive images.  Using Lensa hurts illustrators/photographers in two major ways: 

1. This database was built without consent nor compensation.  That means the work is stolen. 

2. The proliferation of cheap AI art is culturally devaluing the work of illustrators which is already at rock bottom. 

Is there an ethical way to create AI art?  Absolutely.  Databases built on images that artists have opted into and are being compensated for is the first step.  Pretty much none of these AI art apps do that because it would make their business model (Lensa wants $40/yr) unprofitable.

This one hits hard for me because my wife is an artist who shows all over the Northeast, and it has become increasingly difficult for her to sell her pieces at a price that fairly compensates her for her time, skill, and talent -- in part because it's so easy to get mass-produced digital art that gives the impression of high quality at a far lower price.  Carol's work is stunningly original -- you seriously should check out her website -- and while she still has very successful shows, the game is a lot harder than it used to be.

Part of the problem is how good the AI has gotten.  And it's not just visual art that is under attack.  Right after I ran into the Lensa sequence on TikTok and saw Rueben Medina's impassioned plea not to use it, I stumbled across a paper in the journal Computers in Human Behavior describing an AI program that can produce haiku, a stylized seventeen-syllable form originating in Japan that often deals with finding beauty in nature, and evokes the emotions of serenity, peace, wistfulness, and nostalgia.

The authors write:

To determine the general characteristics of the beauty experience across object kinds, Brielmann et al. (2021) proposed eleven dimensions that have been considered by prominent philosophers of aesthetics (pleasure, wishing to continue the experience, feeling alive, feeling that the experience is beautiful to everyone, number of felt connections to the experience, longing, feeling free of desire, mind wandering, surprise, wanting to understand the experience more, and feeling that the experience tells a story) and eight dimensions conveyed by psychologists (complexity, arousal or excitement, learning from the experience, wanting to understand, harmony in variety, meaningfulness, exceeding one's expectation, and interest).  In accordance with [this scheme], these dimensions were used to identify factors that delineate the experience of beauty in human-made and AI-generated haiku.

It is both fascinating and disquieting that the software produced haiku so authentic-sounding that a panel of readers couldn't tell them apart from ones written by humans.

"It was interesting that the evaluators found it challenging to distinguish between the haiku penned by humans and those generated by AI," said Yoshiyuki Ueda, who co-authored the paper, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Our results suggest that the ability of AI in the field of haiku creation has taken a leap forward, entering the realm of collaborating with humans to produce more creative works. Realizing [this] will lead people to re-evaluate their appreciation of AI art."

Yes, but.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Damian Putica, A.I Generated Artwork of a teenage boy and teenage girl, CC BY-SA 4.0]

I am very much of the opinion that the perception of beauty in any art form -- be it visual arts, writing, music, dance, theater, or anything else -- occurs because of the establishment of a link between the producer of the art and the consumer.  (I dealt with this a while back, in a post called "The Creative Relationship," about our unstoppable tendency to read our own experience into what we see and hear.)  But what happens when one side of that relationship is a piece of software?  Does that matter?  As a writer, I find this a troubling prospect, to say the least.  I know we're not nearly there yet; haiku is a simple, highly rule-based form, which novels are clearly not.  (I don't mean haiku is simple to do well, just that the rules governing the form are simple.)  Having an AI write a creditable haiku is bound to be a lot easier than having it write a novel.  But as we've seen so many times before, once we have proof of concept, the rest is just tinkering; the software tends to improve really quickly once it's shown that the capability is there.

As a novelist, I would have a serious concern about being superseded by a story-generating computer that could create novels as well as I can.

The whole thing raises questions not only about the ethics of using human creators' work as a springboard for AI-based mass production, but about what exactly creativity means, and whether it matters who -- or what -- is doing the creating.  I don't have any easy answers; my emotional reaction against the possibility of what my wife and I both do being supplanted by computer-generated content may not mean very much.

But I think all of us -- both creators and consumers -- better think long and hard about these issues, and soon.

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New jaws in an old bird

One difficulty in building evolutionary trees of life from fossil evidence is the fact that "simpler" doesn't necessarily mean "older."

It's an understandable enough mistake.  Taken as a whole, from life's first appearance some 3.7 billion years ago until today, there has been an overall increase in complexity.  The problem occurs when you try to apply that overarching trend to individual lineages -- and find that over time, some species have actually become less complex.

A good example is Subphylum Tunicata, less formally known as tunicates or sea squirts.  At a glance, tunicates look a little like sponges (to which they are only very distantly related); simple, sessile filter feeders.  It was only when biologists discovered their larvae that they realized the truth.  Tunicates are much more closely related to vertebrates than they are to simple invertebrates like the sponges and corals they superficially resemble.  The larvae look a bit like tadpoles, but as they develop the sequentially lose structures like the notochord (the flexible rod that supports the dorsal nerve cord; in us, it ends up becoming the discs between our vertebral bones), most of the muscle blocks, and in fact, just about all their internal organs except the ones involved in processing food and reproducing.

As evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins put it, evolution is "the law of whatever works."  It doesn't always lead to becoming bigger, stronger, faster, and smarter.  If being small, weak, slow, and dumb works well enough to allow a species to have more surviving offspring -- well, they'll do just fine.

The reason this topic comes up is because of a paper in Nature about a re-analysis of a bird fossil found in a Belgian quarry two decades ago.  The comprehensive study found that one of the bones had been misidentified as a shoulder bone, but was actually the pterygoid bone -- part of the bony palate.  And that bone showed that the species it came from, a heron-sized toothed bird Janavis finalidens, had been misplaced on the avian family tree.

And that single rearrangement might restructure the entire genealogy of birds.

Artist's reconstruction of Janavis finalidens [Image courtesy of artist Philip Krzeminski]

There are two big groups of modern birds; neognaths, which have jaws with free plates allowing the bills to move independently of the skull, and paleognaths, whose jaw bones are fused to the skull.  The paleognaths -- including emus, cassowaries, tinamous, and kiwis -- were thought to be "primitive" in the sense of "more like the ancestral species."  (If you know some Greek, you might have figured this out from the names; paleognath means "old jaw" and neognath means "new jaw.")

But the new analysis of Janavis, a species dating to 67 million years ago -- right before the Chicxulub Meteorite hit and ended the Cretaceous Period and the reign of the dinosaurs -- shows that it was a neognath, at a time prior to the split between the two groups.

Meaning the neognaths might actually have the older body plan.

If this is true -- if the paleognaths evolved from the neognaths, not the other way around -- the puzzle is why.  The flexible beaks of neognaths seems to be better tools than the fused jaws of the paleognaths.  This, though, brings us back to our original point, which is that evolution doesn't necessarily drive species toward complexity.  It also highlights the fact that if a structure works well enough not to provide an actual survival or reproductive disadvantage, it won't be actively selected against.  A good example, all too familiar to the males in the audience, is the structure of the male reproductive organs -- with the urethra passing through the prostate gland (leading to unfortunate results for many of us as we age), and the testicles outside the abdominal cavity, right at the perfect height to sustain an impact from a knee, the corner of a table, or the head of a large and enthusiastic dog.  (If this latter example seems oddly specific, I can assure you there's a galumphing galoot of a pit bull currently asleep on my couch who is the reason it came to mind.)

Anyhow, it looks like we might have to rethink the whole "paleognath" and "neognath" thing.  Makes you wonder what else on the family tree of life might need some jiggering.  

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The arms of the ancestors

My maternal grandmother was born Flora Meyer-Lévy, in the little town of Chackbay, Louisiana, in 1893.  I never knew her -- she died fourteen years before I was born, at the young age of 53 -- but I have photographs of her that show a striking woman with auburn hair and a serious expression (consistent with my mom's description of her mother as being a no-nonsense type).

Flora's grandfather, Solomon Meyer-Lévy, was an Ashkenazi Jew, born in the village of Dauendorf, in Alsace.  He emigrated to the United States in the 1850s, only to get caught up in the Civil War -- he fought for a time on the Confederate side, and after the war came home and gave a go at raising horses.  He never made much of a success of it.  One of his grandchildren told me, somewhat euphemistically, that "he made bad deals while drunk."  Solomon, like his granddaughter, died young, at the age of 44.  His widow -- a French Creole woman named Florida Perilloux -- outlived him by over forty years.  She never remarried, and lived most of that time in poverty, converting their home into an inn just to make ends meet.

When I had my DNA tested a couple of years ago, I was fascinated to find that it detected my Ashkenazi great-great grandfather's contribution to my genetic makeup.  I am, the test said, about six percent Ashkenazi -- just about spot-on for having one Jewish ancestor four generations back.  I was surprised that my Jewish heritage was so clear; I didn't realize that Ashkenazi DNA is that distinct.

Apparently, the Ashkenazi have retained their genetic signature because of two factors -- being reproductively isolated and having experienced repeated bottlenecks.  The former, of course, is due to the taboo (on both sides) against Jews marrying non-Jews.  (My great-great grandparents are an interesting counterexample; he was a devout Jew, she was a devout Catholic, and neither one ever changed their religion.  They apparently lived together completely amicably despite their religious differences.  All seven of their children were raised Jewish -- and every single one converted to Catholicism to marry.  Evidently such tolerance was not the rule in nineteenth century Louisiana.)

The latter -- a genetic bottleneck -- refers to the situation when a population has its numbers reduced drastically, and the resurgent population all descends from the small group of survivors.  The bottlenecks in the European Jewish population, of course, were due largely to the repeated pogroms (massacres) that at times looked like eradicating the Jews from Europe entirely.  In fact, this is why the topic comes up today; a paper in Science that came out this week about a genetic investigation of the remains in a Jewish cemetery in Erfurt, Germany.  Many of the dead there were victims of a pogrom in March of 1349, and their teeth -- which contain intact DNA -- confirmed that the Ashkenazi were even then a genetically distinct population, descended from a small group of people who came originally from the Middle East or the Caucasus, and settled in central Europe some time around the year 1000 C.E.

Interestingly, the DNA from Erfurt was strikingly similar to DNA from a twelfth-century Jewish cemetery in Norwich, England, the subject of a paper only four months ago.  The geographical distance, apparently, was not enough to erase the distinct Ashkenazi signature.  "Whether they’re from Israel or New York, the Ashkenazi population today is homogenous genetically," said Hebrew University geneticist Shai Carmi.

Which explains how the DNA test was able to pick up my own ancestry.

It's fascinating to me that, on that one line at least, my family tree can trace its origins to a little group of migrants from the Near East who made their way to what is now eastern France, survived repeated attempts to eradicate them, and eventually produced a branch that went to Louisiana, ultimately leading to me here in upstate New York.  I can only hope I've inherited some of the dogged tenacity these people obviously had.

It's interesting, too, to look at the stern visage of the grandmother I never met, and to know a little more about her heritage.  Even though she, like all the generations before her, now rests in the arms of the ancestors, her genetic legacy lives on in me and her other descendants -- a handful of the "countless stars in the sky" that represent the lineage of Abraham.

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