Genes, lost and found

There's a famous anecdote about British biologist J. B. S. Haldane.  Haldane was a brilliant geneticist and evolutionary biology but was also notorious for being an outspoken atheist -- something that during his lifetime (1892-1964) was seriously frowned upon.  The result was that religious types frequently showed up at his talks, whether or not the topic was religion, simply to heckle him.

At one such presentation, there was a question-and-answer period at the end, and a woman stood up and asked, "Professor Haldane, I was wondering -- what have your studies of biology told you about the nature of God?"

Without missing a beat, Haldane said, "All I can say, ma'am, is that he must have an inordinate fondness for beetles."

There's some justification for the statement.  Beetles, insects of the order Coleoptera, are the most diverse order in Kingdom Animalia, with over four hundred thousand different species known.  (This accounts for twenty-five percent of known animal species, in a single order of insects.)  The common ancestor of all modern species of beetles was the subject of an extensive genetic study in 2018 by Zhang et al., which found that the first beetles lived in the early Permian Period, on the order of three hundred million years ago.  They survived the catastrophic bottleneck at the end of the Permian and went on to diversify more than any other animal group.

One striking-looking family in Coleoptera is Buprestidae, better known as "jewel beetles" because of their metallic, iridescent colors.  Most of them are wood-borers; a good many dig into dying or dead branches, but a few (like the notorious emerald ash borer, currently ripping its way through forests in the northern United States and Canada) are significant agricultural pests.

A few of them have colors that barely look real:

An Australian jewel beetle, Temognatha alternata [Image licensed under the Creative Commons John Hill at the English-language Wikipedia]

What's curious about this particular color pattern is that beetles apparently had a gene loss some time around the last common ancestor three hundred million years ago that knocked out the ability of the entire group to see in the blue region of the spectrum.  This kind of thing happens all the time; every species studied has pseudogenes, genetic relics left behind as non-functional copies of once-working genes that suffered mutations either to the promoter or coding regions.  However, it's odd that animals would have colors they themselves can't see, given that bright coloration is very often a signal to potential mates.

That's not the only reason for bright coloration, of course; there is also aposematic coloration (also known as warning coloration), in which flashy pigmentation is a signal that an animal is toxic or otherwise dangerous.  There, of course, it's not important to be seen by other members of your own species; all that counts is that you're visible to potential predators.  But jewel beetles aren't toxic, so their bright colors don't appear to be aposematic.

The puzzle was solved in a paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution that came out last week, in which a genetic study of jewel beetles found that unlike other beetles, they can see in the blue region of the spectrum -- and in fact, have unusually good vision in the orange and ultraviolet regions, too.  What appears to have happened is that a gene coding for a UV-sensitive protein in the eye was duplicated a couple of times (another common genetic phenomenon), and those additional copies of the gene were then free to accrue mutations and take off down their own separate evolutionary paths.  One of them gained mutations that altered the peak sensitivity of the protein into the blue region of the spectrum; the other gave their hosts the ability to see light in the orange region.

The result is that jewel beetles became tetrachromats; their eyes have acuity peaks in four different regions of the spectrum.  (Other than a few people --who themselves have an unusual mutation -- humans are trichromats, with peaks in the red, green, and blue regions.) 

What this shows is that lost genes can be recreated.  The gene loss that took out beetles' blue-light sensitivity was replaced by a duplication and subsequent mutation of a pre-existing gene.  It highlights the fundamental misunderstanding inherent in the creationists' mantra that "mutations can't create new information;" if that's not exactly what this is, there's something seriously amiss with their definition of the word "information."  (Of course, I'm sure any creationists in the studio audience -- not that there are likely to be many left -- would vehemently disagree with this.  But since willfully misunderstanding scientific research is kind of their raison d'être, that should come as no surprise to anyone.)

Anyhow, the jewel beetle study is a beautiful and elegant piece of research.  It showcases the deep link between genetics and evolution, and reminds me of the quote from Ukrainian-American biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, which seems a fitting place to end: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution."

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

Lord of frenzy

I'm sure most of you have heard of the Norse god Odin, at least from his appearance in the Marvel universe.  My first exposure to this bit of mythology came from my near-obsession with the book D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths, which I checked out from my elementary school library approximately 538 times.  This, in fact, is why to this day when I think of the trickster god Loki, I picture this:

And not this:

Be that as it may, the Norse pantheon is a fascinating bunch, and unusual amongst the gods of myth and legend in being mortal.  In fact, one of the most famous parts of the mythos is the tale of Ragnarök -- literally, "the doom of the gods" -- in which Loki unleashes chaos and destruction by causing the death of Baldr, the beloved god of light and joy.  The whole thing is described in brilliant detail in the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda of the thirteenth-century Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson, to whom we owe much of what we know about the beliefs of pre-Christian Scandinavia.

Odin (or Wōden, as he was called in Saxon England; this form of his name is the origin of the word Wednesday), the "All-Father," was one of the principal figures in the Germanic pantheon.  His name comes from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic root *Wōðanaz, which means "lord of frenzy."  There are dozens of curious stories about him -- that he hanged himself from Yggdrasil, the "World Tree," in order to gain the knowledge of the runes and writing; that he created the first man and woman from an ash and a birch tree, respectively; that he gave one of his eyes in order to drink from the well of wisdom; and that he rode upon an eight-legged horse called Sleipnir, that was the offspring of the stallion Svaðilfari and Loki, who had taken the form of a mare.

Odin on Sleipnir (from Den ældre Eddas Gudesange by Lorenz Frølich, 1895) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What I didn't know, though, was that the earliest actual attestation of Odin from any written record is comparatively recent.  A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about a study of a gold disk from Denmark that contains the first certain reference to Odin, and I was surprised to see that it dates to only the fifth century C.E.  The disk is called the Vindelev bracteate -- it was found near the town of Vindelev, and a bracteate is a flat pendant.  It states, in runic lettering, "He is Odin's man," presumably referring to some unknown chieftain or leader.

Given the complexity of the legends surrounding Odin and the other Norse gods, presumably their worship goes a lot further back; but I honestly didn't realize how much less we have in the way of early attestations of the Norse pantheon as compared to (for example) the Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Indian, and Chinese assemblages of deities.  Just about everything we know comes from the eighth century and later, the point at which the Vikings kind of exploded out of Scandinavia and did their best to take over all of northern Europe.  They did a damn good job; not only was all of eastern England under Danish control for a time, so were the Hebrides and Orkneys, Normandy (the name itself means "northman-land"), and a good part of what is now western Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.  (Perhaps you know that the name Russia itself comes from the Rus, a group of Norse traders who ruled the entire region for a while, with their capital at Kyiv.)

So the dating of the Vindelev bracteate to the fifth century certainly doesn't mean that's when the worship of Odin began, only that this is the first certain example of anyone writing about it.  His influence on the beliefs of the pre-Christian Germanic world is immense.  As an Old English runic poem from the ninth century put it:

Wōden is the origin of all language
wisdom's foundation and wise man's comfort
and to every hero blessing and hope.

Perhaps the All-Father would not be upset that this is the way he's remembered, that his association with frenzy and battle was superseded by wisdom and hope, just as the people who once worshiped him settled down to become some of the most peaceful, progressive, and prosperous nations in the world. 

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

Parallel problem solving

One of the many fascinating aspects of evolution is how nature happens upon the same solutions to environmental problems, over and over.

Two of the best examples of this are eyes and wings.  True eyes evolved from simple photoreceptive spots at least four times: the vertebrate eye, with its complex system of lenses and retinas; the pinhole-camera eyes of the chambered nautilus and other cephalopods; the compound eyes of insects; and the rows of separate spherical eyes in clams and scallops.  Wings, on the other hand, evolved independently no fewer than six times: bats, birds, insects, pterosaurs, flying squirrels, and colugos (the last two count if you include gliding along with true powered flight).

The reason is simple.  There are a handful of problems animals have to overcome (perception/sensation, nutrition, reproduction, locomotion, avoiding environmental dangers, and avoiding predation) and a limited number of ways to accomplish them.  Once (for example) photoreceptive eyespots develop in an animal, natural selection for improving the sensitivity of those spots takes over, but how exactly you do that can differ.  The result is you end up with vision evolving over and over, and each time, the organ is structured differently, but accomplishes the same thing.

Evolution, it seems, is the law of whatever works.

This has interesting implications about what extraterrestrial life might look like.  I very much believe that certain features will turn out to be constrained in any conceivable species -- the presence of locomotor organs, organs sensitive to sound, light, heat, and touch, and so on -- but also, that the way those organs are arranged and configured could be very differently from anything we have on Earth.

This "multiple solutions to the same problems" idea is what immediately came to mind when my friend and fellow writer Gil Miller, whose inquisitive mind and insatiable curiosity have provided me with many a topic here at Skeptophilia, sent me a link from Phys.org about hollow bones in dinosaurs.  Endoskeletons such as our own exist in an interesting tension.  They have to be solid enough to support our weight, but the better they are at weight-bearing, the heavier they themselves are.  The mass of an animal in general increases much faster than its linear dimensions do; double a mouse's height, keeping its other proportions the same, and it will weigh about eight times as much.  This is why in order for the whole system to work, the proportions have to change as species increase in size.  A mouse's little matchstick legs would never work if you scaled it up to be as big as a dog; at the extreme end, consider the diameter of an elephant's legs in relation to its size.  Anything narrower simply wouldn't support its weight.

[Nota bene: this is why if you were traumatized when young by bad black-and-white horror movies about enormous insects wreaking havoc, you have nothing to worry about.  If you took, for example, an ant, and made it three meters long, its proportionally tiny little legs would never be able to lift it.  The worst it could wreak would be to lie there on the ground, helpless, rather than eating Tokyo, which is what the horror movie monsters always did.  One got the impression the inhabitants of Tokyo spent ten percent of their time working, relaxing, and raising families, and the other ninety percent being messily devoured by giant radioactive bugs.]

But back to the Phys.org article.  A detailed analysis of the bone structure of three different dinosaur lineages -- ornithischians, sauropodomorphs, and herrerasaurids -- found that while all three had landed on the idea of internal air sacs as a way of reducing the mass of their large bones, the structures of each are different enough to suggest all three evolved the feature independently.  Once again, we have an analogous situation to eyes and wings; identical problem, parallel solutions.  The problem here is that large body size requires heavy bones that require a lot of energy to move around, and the solution is to lighten those bones by hollowing them out (while leaving the interstices connected enough that they're still structurally sound).  And three different clades of dinosaurs each happened upon slightly different ways to do this.

Herrerasaurus ischigualastensis [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eva Kröcher, CC-BY-SA]

It's fascinating to see how many ways living things happen upon similar solutions to the problems of survival.  Evolution is both constrained and also infinitely creative; it's no wonder we are so often in awe when we look around us at the natural world.  The "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful" Darwin spoke of in the moving final words of The Origin of Species never fail to astonish -- especially since the brains we use to comprehend them are just one of the end products of those very same processes.

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

Mudslinging

I've been writing here at Skeptophilia for twelve years, something that I find a little mind-boggling.

Even more astonishing is that despite the amount of time I've spent debunking crazy ideas, I still run into ones I'd never heard of before.  Such as the phenomenally loopy claim I bumped into yesterday, about the "Tartaria mud flood."

First, a little background.

The Tatars are a group of Turkic ethnic groups that now live mainly in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Turkey.  They were the predominant force in the "Golden Horde" that swept across Central Asia in the thirteenth century C.E., establishing a khanate there that would last for four centuries.  The Europeans -- as usual, not particularly concerned with accuracy in describing people they considered inferior -- picked up this name, and started calling pretty much anyone from Central Asia and eastern Siberia "Tatars" (more commonly misspelled as "Tartars").  And the entire region appears on old maps as "Tartary."

An English map from 1806 showing "Tartary" (note that they even include Japan under this name!) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Not to beat the point unto death, but the whole European concept of Tartary was wrong right from the get-go; it was lumping together dozens of groups of people who were not only not Tatars, but weren't even Turkic, and it was pretending that the whole lot of them were under some kind of unified central government.

So we're on shaky ground from the start, but it gets worse.

In 2016, a guy named Philipp Druzhinin started posting videos and articles claiming that not only was Tartary (which he called "Tartaria") real, it had been ascendant until the 1800s -- at which point, something catastrophic happened.  Some time in the early nineteenth century, there had been a worldwide "mud flood" that had buried Tartarian cities and effectively ended the theretofore thriving country of Tartaria.  At first, his videos got little notice, but then something happened in 2019 -- it's not entirely apparently what -- that made them suddenly gain traction.

A lot of traction.  And, as you'll see, started entangling them with something a lot darker.

But first, with regards to the claim itself, I have several questions.

First, what evidence is there that anything like this ever happened?

The most accurate answer is "almost none."  The main argument seems to be that in a lot of cities there are catacombs and underground passageways, which in Druzhinin's pretend world were the actual original street levels before all the mud came in and buried stuff.  (Amusingly, he includes the Seattle Underground City in this, despite the fact that (1) Seattle is on the other side of the world from "Tartaria," and (2) the Underground City was created from a thoroughly-documented reconstruction project designed to raise street levels after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889.)

Second, why doesn't this show up in any reputable history books?

Well, Druzhinin knows the answer to that.  The knowledge was suppressed.  Because of course it was.  The evil, scheming historians went and destroyed any record of the mud flood, cackling and rubbing their hands together the entire time.  Notwithstanding the impossibility of erasing every account of a supposedly worldwide event that only happened two centuries ago.  Historians are just that diabolical, apparently.  Why they did this is unclear.  Maybe just being eeeeee-vill is enough.

Third, where did all the mud come from?

Druzhinin is a little thin on this point.  (Truthfully, he's a little thin on every point.)  Considering that even a good-sized volcano can only cover a few square miles in lava during an eruption, it's hard to imagine any process that could produce enough mud to generate a mud flood worldwide.  But, hey... Noah's ark and everything, amirite?  So q.e.d., apparently.

The Tartarian mud flood claim is so patently ridiculous that you'd think an average middle schooler would recognize it as such, and yet -- since its first appearance seven years ago -- it has gained tremendous traction.  YouTube videos about it have been watched and downloaded millions of times.  Worse still, the whole thing has gotten tangled up in other, nastier conspiracy theories -- QAnon, the Illuminati, various antisemitic ideologies, all the One World Government nonsense, microchip implantation schemes, even climate change denialism -- because, as I've pointed out before, once you've abandoned hard evidence as the touchstone for understanding, you'll fall for damn near anything.

Or perhaps for everything, all at the same time.

What would be hilarious if it weren't so disturbing is that a big part of this crazy conglomeration of claims state that the Powers-That-Be want to silence all dissent and stop anyone from finding out about their nefarious dealings, and yet some tinfoil-hat-wearing twenty-something living in his mom's basement can make and upload hours of YouTube videos on the topic, and the response from the Powers-That-Be is: *crickets*

Almost drives you to the awkward conclusion that the whole lot of it is unadulterated horse waste, doesn't it?

And of course, the purveyors of this nonsense love it when people like me write stuff like this, because there's nothing for their sense of self-righteousness like also feeling persecuted.  Laughing at them just increases their certainty they're right, because otherwise... why would we be laughing?  It reminds me of the quote from Carl Sagan: "[T]he fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.  They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers.  But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Anyhow, keep an eye out for this.  One of the most recent additions to the long, ugly list of conspiracy theories.  Dating from when it really took off, the whole thing is only about four years old, and astonishingly -- considering the logical leaps you have to make to believe any of it -- is still gaining serious traction.

Which just pisses me off.  I work my ass off to get views here at Skeptophilia, and some wingnut claims that a magical mud flood wiped out a non-existent country two centuries ago, and it somehow gains wings.  It reminds me of the quote from Charles Haddon Spurgeon -- "A lie can go all the way around the world while truth is still lacing up its boots."

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

Pitch perfect

I've been a music lover since I was little.  My mom used to tell the story of my being around four years old and begging her to let me put records on the record player.  At first, she was reluctant, but for once my persistence won the day, and she finally relented.  To my credit, despite my youth I was exceedingly careful and never damaged a record; the privilege was too important to me to risk revocation.  There were certain records I played over and over, such as Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade (a piece I love to this day).

I've always been fascinated with the question of whether musicality is inborn or learned.  My parents, while they had a decent record collection, weren't musical themselves; they certainly didn't have anything like the passion for it I experienced.  While the capacity for appreciating music is still poorly understood, today I'd like to tell you about some research indicating that the way our brains interpret tone structure is inborn.

First, a little background.

While it may appear on first glance that the major key scale -- to take the simplest iteration of tone structure as an example -- must be arbitrary, there's an interesting relationship between the frequencies of the notes.  Middle C, for example, has a frequency of about 260 hertz (depending on how your piano is tuned), and the C above middle C (usually written C') has exactly twice that frequency, 520 hertz. Each note is half the frequency of the note one octave above.  The frequency of G above middle C (which musicians would say is "a fifth above") has a frequency of 3/2 that of the root note, or tonic (middle C itself), or 390 hertz.  The E above middle C (a third above) has a frequency of 5/4 that of middle C, or 325 hertz.  Together, these three make up the "major triad" -- a C major chord.  (The other notes in the major scale also have simple fractional values relative to the frequency of the tonic.)

[Note bene: Music theoretical types are probably bouncing up and down right now and yelling that this is only true if the scale is in just temperament, and that a lot of Western orchestral instruments are tuned instead in equal temperament, where the notes are tuned in intervals that are integer powers of the basic frequency increase of one half-tone.  My response is: (1) yes, I know, and (2) what I just told you is about all I understand of the difference, and (3) the technical details aren't really germane to the research I'm about to reference.  So you must forgive my oversimplifications.]

Because there are such natural relationships between the notes in a scale, it's entirely possible that our ability to perceive them is hard-wired.  It takes no training, for example, to recognize the relationship between a spring that is vibrating at a frequency of f (the lower wave on the diagram) and one that is vibrating at a frequency of 2f (the upper wave on the diagram).  There are exactly twice the number of peaks and troughs in the higher frequency wave as there are in the lower frequency wave.

Still, being able to see a relationship and hear an analogous one is not a given.  It seems pretty instinctive; if I asked you (assuming you're not tone deaf) to sing a note an octave up or down from one I played on the piano, you probably could do it, as long as it was in your singing range.

But is this ability learned because of our early exposure to music that uses that chord structure as its basis?  To test this, it would require comparing a Western person's ability to match pitch and jump octaves (or other intervals) with someone who had no exposure to music with that structure -- and that's not easy, because most of the world's music has octaves, thirds, and fifths somewhere, even if there are other differences, such as the use of quarter-tones in a lot of Middle Eastern music.

This brings us to a paper in the journal Current Biology called "Universal and Non-universal Features of Musical Pitch Perception Revealed by Singing," by Nori Jacoby (of the Max Planck Institute and Columbia University), Eduardo A. Undurraga, Joaquín Valdés, and Tomás Ossandón (of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), and Malinda J. McPherson and Josh H. McDermott (of MIT).  And what this team discovered is something startling; there's a tribe in the Amazon which has had no exposure to Western music, and while they are fairly good at mimicking the relationships between pairs of notes, they seemed completely unaware that they were singing completely different notes (as an example, if the researchers played a C and a G -- a fifth apart -- the test subjects might well sing back an A and an E -- also a fifth apart but entirely different notes unrelated to the first two).

The authors write:

Musical pitch perception is argued to result from nonmusical biological constraints and thus to have similar characteristics across cultures, but its universality remains unclear.  We probed pitch representations in residents of the Bolivian Amazon—the Tsimane', who live in relative isolation from Western culture—as well as US musicians and non-musicians.  Participants sang back tone sequences presented in different frequency ranges.  Sung responses of Amazonian and US participants approximately replicated heard intervals on a logarithmic scale, even for tones outside the singing range.  Moreover, Amazonian and US reproductions both deteriorated for high-frequency tones even though they were fully audible.  But whereas US participants tended to reproduce notes an integer number of octaves above or below the heard tones, Amazonians did not, ignoring the note “chroma” (C, D, etc.)...  The results suggest the cross-cultural presence of logarithmic scales for pitch, and biological constraints on the limits of pitch, but indicate that octave equivalence may be culturally contingent, plausibly dependent on pitch representations that develop from experience with particular musical systems.

Which is a very curious result.

It makes me wonder if our understanding of a particular kind of chord structure isn't hardwired, but is learned very early from exposure -- explaining why so much of pop music has a familiar four-chord structure (hilariously lampooned by the Axis of Awesome in this video, which you must watch).  I've heard a bit of the aforementioned Middle Eastern quarter-tone music, and while I can appreciate the artistry, there's something about it that "doesn't make sense to my ears."

Of course, to be fair, I feel the same way about jazz.

In any case, I thought this was a fascinating study, and like all good science, opens up a variety of other angles of inquiry.  Myself, I'm fascinated with rhythm more than pitch or chord structure, ever since becoming enthralled by Balkan music about thirty years ago.  Their odd rhythmic patterns and time signatures -- 5/8, 7/8, 11/16, 13/16, and, no lie, 25/16 -- take a good bit of getting used to, especially for people used to good old Western threes and fours.

So to conclude, here's one example -- a lovely performance of a dance tune called "Gankino," a kopanica in 11/16.  See what sense you can make of it.  Enjoy!

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

The registry of dissent

I wonder if you've heard about the latest attempt to turn the state of Florida into an autonomous authoritarian oligarchy.

No, I'm not talking about Governor Ron DeSantis's virtual takeover of Disney, although for a party that is supposedly staunchly pro-corporation, it seems like a hypocritical thing to do.  "We're staunchly pro-corporation as long as the corporation toes the far-right line" is nearer the mark.

The particular move I'm thinking of today struck closer to the bone for me, because it's targeted specifically at bloggers.  A bill called "Information Dissemination" proposed by Senator Jason Brodeur would, if passed, require bloggers who post anything critical of Governor DeSantis or other elected officials to sign onto a state registry -- or face fines of up to $2,500.  It's unclear from the wording of the bill if this would apply to bloggers out of state who criticize Florida officials.  This certainly doesn't seem to be overtly excluded, but if so, it raises serious issues of jurisdiction.

The bill tries to dodge First Amendment concerns by limiting itself to bloggers who are financially compensated for their writing -- ostensibly to restrict people from taking money from lobbyists and engaging in criticism-for-pay -- but just about all bloggers get compensated in some way, even if it's just through ad monetization.  So the fact is, this bill is meant to do only one thing: stifle dissent.  

The spirit, and even the wording, of the bill have drawn speculation that it was inspired by a similar law passed by the authoritarian régime of President Viktor Orbán of Hungary in 2010.  This may sound far-fetched, but Orbán is a revered figure amongst the far right, and the elected leaders of Florida have praised him before.  Right-wing commentator Rod Dreher, who is currently living in Budapest, described in an interview a conversation with a reporter who had "talked to the press secretary of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and she said, 'Oh yeah, we were watching the Hungarians, so yay Hungary.'"  Steve Bannon calls Orbán "one of the great moral leaders of our time."  It's not certain if Brodeur's bill is a case of imitation or just parallel processes from like minds -- but either way, it's horrifying.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Madelgarius, Freedom of speech (3), CC BY-SA 4.0]

Even some GOP members seem to realize Brodeur's bill is a case of serious governmental overreach.  In a statement that would be funny if it weren't so appalling, none other than Newt Gingrich tweeted, "The idea that bloggers criticizing a politician should register with the government is insane.  It is an embarrassment that it is a Republican state legislator in Florida who introduced a bill to that effect.  He should withdraw it immediately."  Which brought to mind the trenchant quote from Stephen King: "Conservatives who for years sowed the dragon's teeth of partisan politics are horrified to discover they have grown an actual dragon."  Gingrich, perhaps more than any other single individual, is the architect of the far right; the fact that the careening juggernaut he created has lurched into authoritarian neo-fascism should come as no surprise to him, or to anyone else.  The subtext has always been "We're the party of small hands-off government until we want big intrusive government;" bills like Brodeur's, and (even more strikingly) the current tsunami of anti-trans legislation being passed in red states across the country, just pull the mask off the ugly agenda that was there from the very beginning.

The optimists say that even if Brodeur's bill passes, it'll be struck down on First Amendment grounds almost immediately.  Me, I wonder.  DeSantis and his ilk are in ascendency, and I'm perhaps to be excused if I suspect it's not so certain as all that.  Here I sit, in upstate New York, far away from the epicenter; but I hope my writer colleagues in Florida will not be cowed into silence.  Believe me, if I did live in Florida, I'd be criticizing Brodeur, DeSantis, and the proposed legislation for all I'm worth.  I'm not usually a "come at me, bro" type, but we can't keep quiet about it and hope that the First Amendment will shield us.  If this bill passes -- and I think it probably will -- it will act as a template for other state legislatures intent on crushing dissenting voices.

If you think this kind of thing can't spread like a contagion, I have only refer you to the history of Germany in the 1930s for a counterexample.

Whatever the legality of extending this law to apply to out-of-state bloggers criticizing Florida legislators, allow me to go on record as stating that this is me, criticizing the absolute shit out of the whole lot of them.  And as far as my ever signing onto a registry for doing so, I am also going on record as stating that Brodeur can take his blogger registry and stick it up his ass.

Sideways.

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

The lost catalog

After yesterday's rather elegiac post about the breadth of creative work we've lost over the ages, a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link suggesting that in some fortunate cases, maybe "lost" doesn't mean forever.

The ancients knew all too well that the vagaries of time made books and scrolls precious, easily-damaged treasures.  Fire, damage from insects and mice, and even just the wear-and-tear from repeated use all took their toll on written work.  Add to that the fact that before the invention of movable type, hand-copying manuscripts was a laborious and time-consuming occupation, and it's no wonder that books were rare and expensive, often only to be found in libraries, monasteries, and the homes of the very wealthy.

This awareness of how much could perish forever if a single library was destroyed prompted some scholars to try and catalog manuscripts, to create a record of the rich diversity of books out there in the world.  One of these was named Hernando (also known as Ferdinand) Colón, the illegitimate son of none other than Christopher Columbus.

Colón was a fascinating character.  Uninterested in his father's passion of establishing trade routes, exploration, and colonization, he preferred instead to travel around Europe and buy books.  He founded a personal library in Seville where he welcomed visits from other scholars, and at its height it contained over fifteen thousand books.  His library contained all sorts of books -- unlike many of his time, he didn't consider books by non-Christians to be worthless "works of infidels" -- and his library became one of the best-known in western Europe.

It was also unwieldy.  Imagine trying to find a particular piece of information in a library that big, with no indexing system.  Back then, there was no such thing as a card catalog, much less a search engine.  So Colón set about writing the sixteen immense volumes of Libros de los Epitomes, a bibliography and short summary of every single one of the books in the library.

It's a good thing he did, because (like the Library of Cologne I wrote about yesterday) Colón's library wasn't to last.  Besides the aforementioned hazards all books are subject to, Colón came to the attention of the narrow-minded zealous religious bigotry of the Inquisition, and a number of his books -- the ones judged to be heretical -- were seized and burned.  But by that time they had been catalogued, so we have at least a glimpse of what lay inside them.

Fourteen of the sixteen Libros were known to have survived, and reside at the Biblioteca Colombina de Sevilla, along with what is left of Colón's book collection.  But now, quite by accident, the fifteenth volume was found to be still in existence as well -- somehow it had made its way to the Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen, which houses the huge book collection of eighteenth-century Icelandic scholar Árni Magnússon.  The three-thousand-odd books in the Institute have only recently been studied in any sort of detail, and it was quite a shock when Guy Lazure, of the University of Windsor (Canada), was working there and found a thirty-centimeter-thick, two thousand page book that turned out to be one of the lost volumes of the Libros de los Epitomes.

The recently rediscovered fifteenth volume of Libros de los Epitomes [Image courtesy of the Arnamagnæan Institute and the University of Copenhagen]

"It’s a discovery of immense importance, not only because it contains so much information about how people read five hundred years ago, but also, because it contains summaries of books that no longer exist, lost in every other form than these summaries," said Edward Wilson-Lee of Cambridge University, who wrote a biography of Colón called The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.  Wilson-Lee emphasizes that Colón was qualitatively different from other book collectors of the time, because he didn't limit his acquisitions to scholarly tomes and the classics.  "This was someone who was, in a way, changing the model of what knowledge is.  Instead of saying 'knowledge is august, authoritative things by some venerable old Roman and Greek people', he’s doing it inductively: taking everything that everyone knows and distilling it upwards from there.  It’s much more resonant with today, with big data and Wikipedia and crowdsourced information.  This is a model of knowledge that says, 'We’re going to take the breadth of print – ballads and pornography and newsletters – and not exclude that from the world of information.'"

It will be fascinating to see what lost gems of antiquity will show up -- in summary form, at least -- in the fifteenth volume of the Libros.  Not as good, perhaps, as having the actual copies as they were before they fell prey to time and the Inquisition, but far better than nothing.  At least it will give us an idea of the scope of what was lost -- and raise the hope that maybe, in other obscure collections somewhere out there, some lost masterpieces of the past are still waiting to be found.

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