Hero worship

I got into a curious exchange with someone on Twitter a couple of days ago about Richard Dawkins's recent statement that "biological sex is binary, and that's all there is to it," wherein he called the claims of trans people (and their requests to be referred to by the pronouns they identified with) "errant nonsense," and characterized the people who have criticized him and author J. K. Rowling (amongst others) for their anti-trans stances as "bullies."

The person I had the exchange with seemed to consider this a gotcha moment, and came at me with a gleeful "what do you think of your atheist idol now that he's broken ranks?"

I found this a puzzling question from a number of standpoints.  First, I've never idolized Dawkins.  I think he is an incredibly lucid writer on the subject of evolutionary biology, and his books The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, and The Ancestor's Tale remain three of the best layperson's explanations of the science and evidence behind evolution I've ever read.  But admiring his writing on one topic doesn't mean I think he's infallible.  In fact, I've always had the impression that Dawkins was a bit of a dick, and he certainly comes across as more than a little arrogant.  While I agree with him on the subject of evolution, it doesn't mean that he's someone I'd particularly want to have a beer with.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

When I responded to the question with something like this, the person on Twitter seemed a bit deflated, as if he'd expected me to alter my stance on LGBTQ+ issues and the biology of gender just because My Hero had made some sort of pronouncement from on high.

This struck me as a peculiar reaction.  Maybe this is how it works within the context of religion, where a leader (e.g. the Pope, the Imams, and so on) makes a statement and the expectation is that everyone will simply accept it without question.

But it's definitely not how things go in science.

In this case, it has nothing to do with Dawkins bucking the system against some kind of perceived party line.  In fact, I'll bring out one of his own quotes, which applies here: "If two people are arguing opposite viewpoints, it is not necessarily the case the the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  It is possible that one of them is simply wrong."  On the subject of sexuality being binary, Dawkins is simply wrong, something I explored in some detail in a post a couple of years ago.

But the point is, that doesn't detract from his excellent writing on evolution.  Being wrong about one thing, or even about a bunch of things, doesn't mean you're wrong on everything, nor invalidate other outstanding work you may have done.  (Although it can rightly tarnish your reputation as a decent human being.)  It's sad that Dawkins has gone off the rails on this topic, and a shame that his aforementioned arrogance is very likely to make him unwilling to see his own faulty assessment of the evidence and even less likely to admit it if he does.  And it's unfortunate that his air of authority is certainly going to carry some weight with people, especially those who want more ammunition for defending what they already believed about the supposed binary nature of gender.

The fact that this doesn't make me discount him completely is because I feel no need to engage in hero worship.

That extends to other areas as well.  I can appreciate the acting ability of Tom Cruise and Gwyneth Paltrow, and thoroughly enjoy watching (respectively) Minority Report and Sliding Doors, while at the same time acknowledging that in real life both of them appear to have a screw loose.  I can still be inspired by some of the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, while keeping in mind that he was a virulent racist (something that comes through loud and clear in the worst of his stories, but fortunately not all).

In fact, it's best if we look at all famous people through that lens.  The expectation that someone prominent or admired must be flawless -- and therefore, anyone criticizing him/her is de facto wrong -- is what leads to the behavior we're now seeing in Trump loyalists, who will defend him to the death regardless what charges are proven against him or how overwhelming the evidence is.

It is this sort of thinking that is characteristic of a cult.

In any case, I can say I'm disappointed in Dawkins, but it neither caused me to abandon his writing on evolutionary biology nor to revise my own thinking on LGBTQ+ issues because Dawkins Says So.  It's best to keep in mind that people are complex bundles of often contradictory traits, and there's no one person who is going to be in line with your understanding of the world all the time.  In the end, it's always best to form your beliefs based on where the actual evidence leads -- and above all, to think for yourself.

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False vacuum catastrophe

It's odd how enamored people are of things that could destroy the entire universe.

I mean, on one level I get it.  The sheer power of the natural world is pretty awe-inspiring, and as I've mentioned before, if I hadn't become a mild-mannered novelist, I definitely would have been a a tornado chaser.  That same love of extreme danger (especially when it's not you experiencing it) explains shows like The Deadliest Catch and the innumerable quasi-documentaries wherein divers swim around in chum-filled waters and still act surprised when they're attacked by sharks.

But on a larger scale, there's a real curiosity about things that could wipe out pretty much everything.  A while back, I wrote a piece about people sounding gleeful that we might be looking down the gun barrel of a gamma-ray burster (we're not), and over and over we've heard alarmists suggesting that CERN was going to create a black hole that would eat the Earth (it's not).  But that doesn't begin to exhaust the ways in which we all could die in horrible agony.

Which brings us to the concept of the false vacuum.

Sounds harmless enough, doesn't it?  Well, this is in the long tradition of physicists giving seriously weird things cutesy names, like "strange quarks" and "glueballs."

The idea of the false vacuum is that the universe is currently in a "metastable state."  What this means is that right now we're in a locally stable configuration, but if something destabilizes us a little bit, we might find ourselves suddenly plunging into a more stable state -- a "true vacuum."  The situation, then, would be similar to that of the little ball in the graph below:

As long as nothing disturbs the status quo, the ball is stable; but if something gives it a push up the hill in the middle, it'll crest the hill and find itself rushing downward into a more stable position -- the "true vacuum."

Why this concerns anyone but the physicists is that the result of our reconfiguring into a true vacuum would be that a bubble would form, rushing outward at the speed of light, and destroying everything in its path.

The Standard Model of Particle Physics suggests that from the mass of the Higgs boson and the top quark, an estimate could be made of just how likely this is.  Writer Robert Walker concludes, from the research of Joseph Lykken and others, that the answer is "not very:"

[I]f it could happen, then you’d expect it to have happened already in the first 1/10,000,000,000th of a second along with the other symmetry breaking when gravity split off from the other forces, when it was tremendously hot...

 
Since that hasn’t happened, the false vacuum has to be very stable, or else, probably as we find new physics we find out that it is not in a false vacuum state at all.

 
And yes, on the basis of the measured mass of the Higgs boson, the false vacuum has to be very stable.  Joseph Lykken says that an event that triggers a patch of true vacuum, if the theory is correct, happens on average once every ten thousand trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion years.

 
That means it is nothing to be worried about.

Walker, who is a mathematician, says that the likelihood of a true vacuum bubble occurring in any given century is less than the likelihood of purchasing tickets for twelve consecutive Euromillions lotteries, and winning the jackpot for all of them.

So "don't worry about it" seems to be an understatement.

However, that hasn't stopped the alarmists from freaking out about it, probably largely due to the fact that if it did happen, it would be pretty catastrophic.  Also, because a lot of them seem to feel that the physicists (for this, read "mad scientists") are actively trying to trigger the creation of a true vacuum, which would be an idiotic thing to do even if it were possible because they'd be the first ones to get vaporized, and wouldn't even have the pleasure of standing around rubbing their hands together and cackling maniacally for more than about a nanosecond.

But then there are the ones who think that it could happen accidentally (again, because of CERN, of course), and the physicists are simply being reckless, not suicidal.  I tend to agree with Walker, though.  I'm way more worried about the idiotic things humans are currently doing to the environment, and our determination to slaughter each other over things like who has the best Invisible Friend, than I am about triggering the Scary Bubble of Death.

Anyhow.  That's our Terrifying Thing That Can Kill you for today, along with some soothing words about why it's not very likely.  Now ya'll'll have to excuse me, because I'm gonna go have a pint of beer and watch Twister for the seventeenth time.

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Jersey devilry

Yesterday's post, about spurious claims of a curse (and associated terrible occurrences) in rural northwestern Connecticut, prompted an interesting comment from a reader.

I have a question, and please don't take this as criticism, because it's not meant that way.  Don't you think that the sheer number of claims of the paranormal counts for something?  I don't remember where I read this, but polls have found that wherever you go, the majority of people claim to have had at least one experience of the supernatural.  I'm not talking about Dudleytown in particular -- that may well be a hoax, as you explained -- but surely you can't attribute all of the claims of the paranormal to lies or hoaxes or people misinterpreting natural phenomena or whatever.  There has to be some wheat among the chaff, don't you think?

It's a good question, and I don't at all take it as criticism (after all, questioning is how we come to understanding).  She's certainly right about the commonness of the claims; a 2022 poll by YouGov found that over two-thirds of Americans claim to have had experiences of the supernatural.  But the fact is, no, I don't find this very convincing.  As we've seen all too often here at Skeptophilia, humans have an unfortunate tendency to make shit up and claim it's real.  Add that to our generally faulty sensory-perceptive apparatus and capacity for psychological priming (interpreting what we experience based upon what we expected to experience), and you have a combo that makes eyewitness accounts suspect right from the get-go.

As an example of this, let's take a look at one of the most famous examples of a supernatural entity -- the notorious Jersey Devil.

The Jersey Devil, or Leeds Devil, is a legend of the Pine Barrens region of southern New Jersey.  The area is atmospheric enough without the creature.  It's a thinly-occupied belt of poor, sandy soil running down the middle of the southern half of the state, home to a unique ecosystem dominated by pitch pine and other species that have evolved to thrive there.  Because the soil was lousy for farming, it never was heavily settled.  The few permanent residents somehow eked out a living for themselves, but other than that it was mainly a haunt of sketchy characters and criminals on the run from the law.  (As an interesting side note, one of these was my direct ancestor, Luke Rulong, who lived in the Pine Barrens in the late eighteenth century.  He was in and out of jail repeatedly for such crimes as poaching, mischief, and riot, and his only known child -- my ancestor, Aaron Rulong -- went all the way to Louisiana to get away from his father's bad reputation.)

In any case, the Jersey Devil is said to be a strange looking creature, a bit like a skinny kangaroo with wings.  Here's a drawing from the Philadelphia Bulletin in 1909:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

There have been hundreds (probably thousands) of alleged sightings of this thing, including by such luminaries as Commodore Stephen Decatur and Joseph Bonaparte, elder brother of Napoleon, who had emigrated to the United States and owned an estate near Bordentown.  There was a wave of sightings in 1909 (which is why the artist's impression of the Devil ended up in a Philadelphia newspaper that year).  However, the sightings have been steady throughout the twentieth century, probably bolstered by how many times the creature has appeared in fiction -- in fact, it was one of the first "monster of the week" episodes in The X Files.

Where we start running into trouble is that even the believers can't agree on the Jersey Devil's origins.  Here are three popular claims:

1. It is a spirit creature that has inhabited the area for millennia, and was known to the Native Lenape people as M'Sing.
2. It is the thirteenth child of one Jane (or Dorothy) Leeds and her husband Japhet, inhabitants of the Barrens.  Dorothy (or Jane) was understandably enough pissed off at the fact that twelve children weren't sufficient and cursed her child in utero.  "May you be the Devil!" she said, and sure enough, so it was.  It was born with wings and hooves and a horrible animal face, and shortly after birth flew up the chimney and out into the woods, where it lives lo unto this very day.
3.  Same as #2, except that the father of the child wasn't Japhet Leeds, but was Satan himself.

Japhet Leeds was apparently real enough, even if no one is quite sure what his wife's name was (in a lot of the versions of the legend, she's called "Mother Leeds" to obviate the need of figuring it out).  There's a place in Galloway Township, Atlantic County, New Jersey called Leeds Point, and a tradition that the Leeds family was in general up to no good -- although how much of that was due to their connection to the Jersey Devil legend is uncertain.  Certainly, they were a superstitious lot.  One of the Leedses, amusingly named Titan, was a writer of almanacs in the early eighteenth century, and included a lot of astrological mumbo-jumbo along with the usual folksy wisdom.  Apparently this attracted the attention of none other than Benjamin Franklin, who saw Titan Leeds's books as competition for his Poor Richard's Almanack.  So Franklin put an entry in his almanac saying that he'd used astrology to predict Leeds's death in 1733.  When Leeds published an objection, Franklin (who was not a man you wanted to engage in a battle of wits) responded how remarkable it was that he'd gotten a reply from a ghost.  He continued referring to Leeds as a disembodied spirit of the dead until the poor man finally became one in actuality in 1738.

In any case, a lot of the Jersey Devil legend probably stems from how generally accepted superstition was back then (and still is, to look at the polls).  But here's where we get to the other sticking point, and why the number of eyewitness accounts doesn't lead me toward belief -- but actually the opposite.

Of all the thousands of sightings of the Jersey Devil, there has never been one piece of hard evidence of its existence.  Not even a decent photograph (although these days, with digital image software and AI, photographs aren't really admissible as evidence anyhow).  Here we have something that has been seen countless times -- and has left behind not a single trace.

For me, if something has been seen on multiple occasions, a lack of hard evidence becomes a persuasive argument against its existence.  If you've got a single sighting of, I dunno, the Evil BunnyMan of Nebraska or something, and there's no evidence, that's one thing.  Maybe the one time he was seen, BunnyMan hippety-hopped in such a way as to not leave any footprints.

But thousands of accounts, and nothing?

That's mighty peculiar.

So in answer to my reader, no -- I don't find the number of sightings, by itself, convincing.  I'm going to require something other than an eyewitness account.  As always, though, I am open to having my mind changed.  But, as eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "As a scientist, I need more than 'you saw it.'"

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The demons of Dudleytown

There's a general rule that if you have to lie about the facts to support a claim, you might want to reconsider your stance.

That was my general response to a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia about the "Dudleytown Curse."  Dudleytown is an abandoned village in Litchfield County, Connecticut, which is a favorite of the "haunted places" crowd.  Here's the basic idea of the legend:

The area was first settled by people of European descent in the 1740s and 1750s, by Thomas Griffis and a cluster of either brothers or cousins (the records are uncertain on that count), Barzillai, Abiel, Martin, Obijah, and Gideon Dudley.  Presumably because of the strength-in-numbers principle, it was named Dudleytown even though Griffis had gotten there first.  Allegedly, the ancestor of the Dudleys was  disgraced English royal administrator Edmund Dudley, who had lost his head on Tower Hill in 1510, and the story goes that Edmund's kin had fled England because of some sort of curse the family was under.  (Which in itself is an odd claim.  The family certainly didn't suffer greatly from Edmund's disgrace; they remained wealthy and influential, and his grandson, Robert Dudley, First Earl of Leicester, was a great favorite of Queen Elizabeth I.)

Anyhow, the curse supposedly followed the Dudleys across the Atlantic, as curses are wont to do.  Abiel Dudley went mad and had to be confined to his home.  Gershon Hollister, who lived next door to Abiel in a home owned by William Tanner, was murdered.  Tanner himself also went insane, babbling about wild animals and demons attacking him.  After Abiel Dudley's death, his home belonged to Nathaniel Carter, who died along with his wife and three children when the settlement was attacked by Natives.  Heman Swift, a general in the American Revolution and a native of Dudleytown, lost his wife to a lightning strike and shortly afterward lost his mind as well.  The wife of Horace Greeley, unsuccessful candidate for president in 1872, was also a Dudleytown native -- when visiting her home town, she hanged herself for no apparent reason.

People started fleeing the area because of its bad reputation.  Soon there was hardly anyone left.  The place is so haunted even animals don't go there; visitors in the 1960s report not hearing so much as a single bird.  It is currently privately owned by a mysterious group called the Dark Entry Forest Association, and they're determined to stop anyone else from dying or going mad (or, if you'd like a more sinister version, to stop anyone from finding out what's really going on there).  They monitor the property and prosecute any trespassers to the fullest extent of the law.

The remnants of a railway station platform near Dudleytown

So, pretty creepy, right?

There's just one problem.

Almost none of the above is true.

So let's do this again, shall we?

There's no proof that the Connecticut Dudleys are descended from King Henry VIII's unfortunate counselor Edmund.  Abiel Dudley didn't go mad; he lived in relatively good health into his nineties.  Gershon Hollister wasn't murdered -- the records of the time show that he was participating in a barn raising and accidentally fell from the rafters, breaking his neck.  The Carter family massacre didn't happen in Dudleytown -- it happened along the Delaware River, and in fact all three of Nathaniel Carter's children survived (one became a State Supreme Court Justice).  Heman Swift did live in the nearby village of Cornwall, but didn't go mad and lived to be eighty-one.  Horace Greeley's wife, on the other hand, seems to have had nothing whatsoever to do with Dudleytown, and didn't commit suicide.  She died in New York City of lung disease.

Oh, and as far as the birds; the lack of birds in the 1960s had to do with the fact that all the farms in the area had been sprayed with DDT.  Northwestern Connecticut was hardly unusual in that regard (Cf. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.)  And like many areas, now that DDT is no longer used, the wildlife has rebounded nicely, and the area around Dudleytown is as birdy as anywhere else in the Berkshires.

As far as why people left the area, it seems to have had more to do with the fact that the rocky soil was terrible for farming.  Records show that most of the people who left Dudleytown relocated to the Midwest, where there was lots of good farmland for sale.  The Dark Entry Forest Association is hardly mysterious -- it was founded in 1924 by a New York City physician, Walter Clarke, who had bought the property and hoped to reforest it (it had been largely clearcut in a forlorn hope of turning it into farms), and use it both for recreation and for logging.  For a while it was successful -- there were skiing and hiking trails, and organized canoeing and rafting trips on the nearby Housatonic River.

But then in the 1970s a couple named Ed and Lorraine Warren (the ones who did the famous investigation of the Amityville Horror) created a documentary supposedly chronicling all the supernatural terrors of the Dudleytown region, inventing out of whole cloth the various lies and half-truths I've mentioned above.  They said it was "demonically possessed" and "controlled by something terrifying."  It attracted huge amounts of attention from ghost hunters and tourists who wanted to see such an evil region...

... and the visitors proceeded to trash the place.

The residents of the nearby town of Cornwall finally got fed up, and petitioned the Dark Entry Forest Association to do something.  So they did; in 2011, they closed the property to visitors permanently.  These days, even if you ask permission to go, the answer will be no.

Harriet Clark, former president of the Cornwall Historical Society, wrote in her book The True Facts of Dudleytown, "Today’s owners and taxpayers of Dudleytown are professional people who live there for privacy and seclusion.  They do not welcome tourists or those seeking tales of chilling or wild experiences.  Please do not come.  There are no ghosts, no spirits and no curse."

Which, of course, dissuaded absolutely no one.  People are still trying to get in and still getting arrested and fined for trespassing.  And even if there's a persuasive argument that the demons of Dudleytown are entirely of human manufacture, the dismissive words of Clark and others are looked upon as more indication that there is something sinister there that they're trying to cover up.

You can't win with these people.

But to go back to my original point -- you'd think if there was anything to this kind of claim, they wouldn't find the need to make shit up in order to support it.  As always, I'm open to being convinced about claims of all sorts -- but don't expect me to accept what you're saying if the only thing going for it is a boatload of fabrications.

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The problem with Aristotle's wheel

There's an apparent mathematical paradox, of very long standing, that illustrates a fundamental problem with a lot of modern discourse.

It's called the Aristotle's wheel paradox, and it goes something like this.

Imagine you have a circular wheel, and attached firmly to it is a concentric smaller wheel.  You set the larger wheel on a flat surface, and allow it to roll one complete rotation without slipping.

The trouble comes in when you try to figure out how far each wheel has moved.  Let's call the radius of the outside wheel R.  So by the time it's turned once, it's traveled as far as its circumference, which we all know from high school geometry is a distance of 2πR.  So that should be the length of the horizontal blue dashed line in the above diagram.

But here's the snag; the same applies to the smaller wheel.  Let's say its (smaller) radius is r.  So by the same logic, after it's made one complete rotation, it's traveled a distance of 2πr, which is less than 2πR (because r < R).  That's the red dashed line in the diagram.

But... the two lines are obviously the same length!

While it's uncertain if Aristotle ever did puzzle over this seeming conundrum, it's definitely been known since antiquity.  The first written exposition of it was by Hero of Alexandria, who described it in his book Mechanics in the first century B.C.E.

The solution has to do with the fact that the way the question is posed is misleading.  Most people, reading the description of the paradox and (especially) looking at the diagram, would accept unquestioningly that this is a correct framing of the problem.  But in fact, by stating it that way I was engaging in deliberate sleight-of-hand -- giving you information that seems correct on first glance, but is disingenuous at best and an outright lie at worst.

[Nota bene: I'm not implying here that Aristotle and the other mathematicians who worked on it were lying; they seemed genuinely puzzled by it.  What I'm saying is that I was misleading you, because I know the answer and misdirected you anyhow, with complete malice aforethought.]

The truth is, the two circles haven't moved by the same amount, even if that's what the diagram plausibly leads you to believe.  In fact, the straight dashed lines in the diagram aren't the paths taken by a point on the circumference of either circle.  (Those lines' lengths are equal to the distance covered not by a point on the edge, but by the center of the wheel.)  If you trace the paths of actual points on the rims of the two wheels, here's what you get:

[Both this and the above diagram are licensed under the Creative Commons Merjet, AristotleWheel6, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Without even measuring it, you can see that a point on the outer wheel (the blue dashed curve) travels considerably farther than one on the inner wheel (the red dashed curve) -- and both, in fact, cover more distance than that traveled by the wheel's center (the green dashed line).

Just as you'd expect.

What strikes me about the Aristotle's wheel (non-)paradox is that this kind of thing underlies a great many of the problems with our current political situation.  How many of the hot-button topics in the news lately have come about because of a deliberate, disingenuous attempt to reframe the question in such a way that it ignores important facts or completely mischaracterizes the situation?  Examples include the Florida State Education Department's new standards for history requiring teachers to include information about how slaves benefitted from slavery, Richard Dawkins's statement to commentator Piers Morgan that biological sex is binary "and that's all there is to it," and Jason Aldean's defense of his controversial song and video "Try That in a Small Town," stating that "There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it."

All three could be looked at with a shrug of the shoulders and a comment on the order of, "Okay, I guess that's true."  But in each case, that is to miss the deeper and far more critical truths those statements are deliberately overlooking.

This kind of thing is dangerous because it's so damned attractive.  We're taught to take things as given, especially when (1) they come from a trusted or respected source, and (2) they seem right.  This latter leads us onto the thin ice of confirmation bias, where we accept what someone says because it confirms what we already thought was true.  Here, though, the bias is more insidious, because the case is deliberately being presented to us so as to say nothing specifically false, and yet still to lead us to an erroneous conclusion.

So whenever you're reading the news, remember Aristotle's wheel -- and always keep in mind that what you're seeing may not be the whole story.  Like the two diagrams of the wheel's motion, sometimes all it takes is looking at things from another angle to realize you've been led down the garden path.

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The worm turns

In the episode of The X Files called "Ice," Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are sent with a small team of scientists to a remote Arctic research station in order to investigate the murder-suicide of its entire crew.  When they get there, they find one survivor -- the station's mascot, a dog, who shows signs of hyperaggressive behavior (obviously) reminiscent of what afflicted the researchers.

They eventually figure out what happened, but not before two of the people accompanying them are dead, and both Mulder and the third scientist are obviously afflicted with the same malady.  In digging up and thawing out permafrost, the researchers had inadvertently reanimated a deep-frozen parasitic nematode that causes drastic behavioral changes, and is transmissible from bites.  They do find a way to get rid of the infection, saving the lives of Mulder, the infected scientist, and (thank heaven) the dog, but the U.S. government destroys the base before any further study of the worm or its origins can be made.

It's a highly effective and extremely creepy episode, doing what The X Files did best -- leaving you at the end with the feeling of, "This ain't actually over."

I was forced unwillingly to recall my watching of "Ice" by two news stories this week.  In the first, scientists have "reawakened" -- deliberately this time -- a nematode that has been frozen for 46,000 years in the Siberian permafrost.

Dubbed Panagrolaimus kolymaensis, it's a previously unknown species.  This doesn't mean it's a truly prehistoric species; Phylum Nematoda is estimated to contain about a million species, of which only thirty thousand have been studied, classified, and named.  So it could well be that Panagrolaimus exists out there somewhere, in active (i.e. unfrozen) ecosystems, and the invertebrate zoologists just hadn't found it yet.

Still, it's hard not to make the alarming comparison to the horrific events in "Ice" (and countless other examples of the "reanimating creatures frozen in the ice" trope in science fiction).  This reaction is somewhat ameliorated by the fact that two-thirds of the nematode species known are harmless to humans, and even the ones that are parasitic usually aren't life-threatening.  There are a few truly awful ones -- which, for the sakes of the more sensitive members of my audience, I'll refrain from giving details about -- but most nematodes are harmless, so chances are Panagrolaimus is as well.

On the other hand, it doesn't mean that thawing frozen stuff out is risk-free, and the problem is, because of climate change, thawing is happening all over the world even without reckless scientists being involved.  The second study, conducted at the European Commission Joint Research Centre, appeared in a paper in PLOS - Computational Biology and described a digital simulation of a partially frozen ecosystem (that contained living microbes in suspended animation).  They looked at how the existing community would be affected by the introduction of the now reawakened species -- and the results were a little alarming.

It has been tempting to think that because the entire ecosystem has changed since the microbes were frozen, if they were reanimated, there'd be no way they could compete with modern species which had evolved to live in those conditions.  In other words, the thawed species would be unable to cope with the new situation and would probably die out rapidly.  In fact, that did happen to some of them -- but in these models, the ancient microbes often survived, and three percent of them became dominant members of the ecosystem.  

One percent actually outcompeted and wiped out modern species.

"Given the sheer abundance of ancient microorganisms regularly released into modern communities," the authors write, "such a low probability of outbreak events still presents substantial risks.  Our findings therefore suggest that unpredictable threats so far confined to science fiction and conjecture could in fact be powerful drivers of ecological change."

Now, keep in mind that this was only a simulation; no actual microbes have been resuscitated and released into the environment.

Yet.

Anyhow, there you have it.  Something new from the "Like We Didn't Already Have Enough To Worry About" department.  Maybe I shouldn't watch The X Files.  How about Doctor Who?  Let's see... how about the episode "Orphan 55"?  *reads episode summary*  "...about a future Earth so devastated by climate change that the remnants of humanity have actually evolved to metabolize carbon dioxide instead of oxygen..."

Or maybe I should just shut off the television and hide under my blankie for the rest of the day.

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All in the family

Archaeologists and paleontologists are up against the same problem; bones and other fossils only get you so far.

There are cases where fossil evidence can give you some hints about behavior -- patterns of tracks, for example, or the rare case where the positions of the fossils themselves give you a picture of what was going on, like the recent discovery of an opossum-sized mammal, Repenomamus, attacking a much larger dinosaur, Psittacosaurus.  The pair of fossil skeletons were preserved, locked in a battle to the death -- the death of both, as it turned out, because they were both engulfed mid-fight in a mudslide.

But such lucky finds are rare, and inferences of behavior from fossils are usually sketchy at best.  This is why the study of a group of Neolithic human skeletons found near Gurgy-les-Noisats, France, 150 kilometers southeast of Paris, was so extraordinary.

The level of DNA analysis now possible allowed the analysis of the genomes of 94 of the 128 individuals buried at the site, to the level that the researchers not only were able to construct a seven-generation family tree for them, but make a guess as to what each individual looked like.

The analysis found that the bodies were buried in family groups -- the more closely two people were related, the closer together they were buried -- and that women who were not descendants of the original couple were mostly completely unrelated, suggesting they'd come into the family from another community.  Just about all the males at the burial site, on the other hand, were related, leading the researchers to conclude that men in this community tended to stay put, and at least some women did not.

Another curious thing was that the study detected no half-sibling relationships.  All of the sibling groups were from the same mother and father.  In this family group, at least, monogamous relationships were the norm.

Of course, there's a lot we still don't know; while this is a stunning accomplishment, it still leaves a great many questions unanswered.  For example, were the "outsider" women brought in because of a custom of outbreeding, or by conquest/capture?  What were the religious practices and beliefs that led these people to bury family members near each other?  Was the monogamy shown in this family universal in this culture, or was this grouping an exception for some reason?

It's an intriguing piece of research.  "This type of work really breathes new life into our understanding of ancient peoples," said Kendra Sirak, an ancient-DNA specialist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the study.  "I'm especially curious about the man at the root of the family tree.  I would love to know what made this person so important."

And given that a significant percentage of my ancestry comes from central and western France, I have to wonder if anyone in this family tree is a direct ancestor of mine.  There's no way to find out, of course, but the thought did cross my mind.  It's kind of eerie to think when I look at those facial reconstructions, one of those faces looking back at me might be my great-great (etc.) grandparent.

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