Arts and sciences

Behind every art is science.

Of course, you can produce beautiful art without knowing any scientific details; the Renaissance masters created gorgeous paintings without knowing the exact chemical composition of their paints.  It's amazing, really, that they accomplished what they did, combining their astonishing talents and aesthetic senses with materials developed using what amounted to trial-and-error.

I wouldn't consider myself an artist, but I do play around with clay, and I've gotten the chance to geek out over the scientific side of pottery -- specifically, glaze chemistry.  Glazes are generally made of four ingredients -- a glass-former (usually some form of silica), a flux (which lowers the melting temperature of the mix and make it flow), a refractory material (to give it stability and viscosity), and a colorant.  One of the first things I learned when I started making pottery, though, is not to assume the final product after firing to 1200 C will be the same color as the raw glaze; in fact, the reverse is usually true.  Here's a kiln load, coated with various raw glazes, before firing:

And the same kiln load after firing:

The changes that occur during firing always strike me as something very like alchemy.  Even knowing a bit about how they work -- and what I know is, honestly, little more than a bit -- there's still an unpredictability about glazes that make them fun, exciting, and occasionally exasperating to work with.

I was reminded of my trials and tribulations -- and occasional triumphs -- with glaze chemistry as I was reading a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - Nexus a couple of days ago.  Called "Marangoni Spreading on Liquid Substrates in New Media Art," and written by San To Chan and Eliot Fried of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, this paper looks at the creation of intricate and beautiful fractal patterns using little more than acrylic ink and paint, water, and rubbing alcohol.

The technique involves applying tiny droplets of thinned acrylic ink onto a painted surface.  The irregularities in the surface draw the liquid away from the point where it is applied, and the design develops as you watch, creating branching patterns resembling snowflakes, neurons, or lightning.  Just as with ceramic glazes, the exact mix of the various ingredients can drastically change the results.  The process works because acrylic paints and inks are thixotropic, meaning that their viscosity changes when they're stirred or shaken (a common thixotropic substance is ketchup -- which is why you have to shake it or it won't pour).  The water and alcohol change the viscosity, and in combining the ingredients there's a sweet spot where the mixture is viscous enough to hold together into threads on the painted surface but not so viscous that it doesn't move.

"In dendritic painting, the droplets made of ink and alcohol experience various forces," said San To Chan, who co-authored the study.  "One of them is surface tension -- the force that makes rain droplets spherical in shape, and allows leaves to float on the surface of a pond.  In particular, as alcohol evaporates faster than water, it alters the surface tension of the droplet.  Fluid molecules tend to be pulled towards the droplet rim, which has higher surface tension compared to its centre.  This is called the Marangoni effect and is the same phenomenon responsible for the formation of wine tears -- the droplets or streaks of wine that form on the inside of a wine glass after swirling or tilting."

"We also showed that the physics behind this dendritic painting technique is similar to how liquid travels in a porous medium, such as soil," said Eliot Fried, the study's other co-author.  "If you were to look at the mix of acrylic paint under the microscope, you would see a network of microscopic structures made of polymer molecules and pigments.  The ink droplet tends to find its way through this underlying network, traveling through paths of least resistance, that leads to the dendritic pattern."

I love knowing the science behind the arts (although I must admit that the mathematics in the paper about dendritic art lost me pretty quickly).  It was great fun, for example, that the fiddler in the band I was in for ten years was a physics professor at Cornell University and taught a class called The Physics of Music -- she more than once told me things about how my instrument worked that I honestly hadn't known (such as why flutes go sharp when they warm up).  

I don't know about you, but knowing the science of how things work enhances my appreciation for their beauty.  I've loved Bach's music ever since I first heard it as a teenager; but now, understanding how fugues and canons are constructed makes my wonderment over pieces like the astonishing A Musical Offering that much more profound.  Likewise, my knowing a little about glaze chemistry enhances my enjoyment of the beauty of the results.

Science itself is beautiful.  And when you combine it with art and music, you have something truly magical.

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Mouse tales

Mice are kind of ubiquitous, and it's easy to think of them as all being pretty much the same, but the family they comprise -- Muridae -- contains no fewer than 870 different species.

And new ones are being discovered all the time, including the Sulawesi snouter, Hyorhinomys stuempkei.  It's a peculiar-looking little thing, with a pointy nose and incisors long even for a rodent, and is (as far as we know) only found in one location on the slopes of Mount Daro in northern Sulawesi.

Hyorhinomys stuempkei [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kevin C Rowe and Museum Victoria, Hyorhinomys07, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But the reason the topic comes up isn't mice, nor even anything about this particular mouse's evolutionary history, behavior, or physiology.  

It's about its name.

Both its common name of "snouter" and the species name, stuempkei, come from zoologist Harald Stümpke and his most famous work, The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades, an exhaustive study of Order Rhinogradentia.  The members of the order lived on a small archipelago in the Pacific Ocean which had no human occupants.  However, the island chain was known to the natives of nearby islands, who gave each of the eighteen islands their names (Annoorussawubbissy, Awkoavussa, Hiddudify, Koavussa, Lowlukha, Lownunnoia, Mara, Miroovilly, Mittuddinna, Naty, Nawissy, Noorubbissy, Osovitissy, Ownavussa, Owsuddowsa, Shanelukha, Towteng-Awko, and Vinsy; the entire chain was called Hyiyiyi).  Other than occasional visits from Polynesians, the first person to go there and do a thorough mapping of the archipelago was Swedish explorer Einar Petterson-Skämtkvist in the 1940s, but it fell to Stümpke to do a biological survey.

Unfortunately, the story doesn't end well.  Stümpke's book is the only remnant of them that survives.  Stümpke and his assistants, along with all the snouters they studied, were wiped out by nuclear bomb testing on a nearby atoll.  Fortunately, before his death he'd mailed a proof copy of his manuscript to German zoologist Gerolf Steiner, or we might not know anything about these unique mammals at all.

Sad story, yes?

However, if by now you are -- pardon the expression -- smelling a rat, you're not alone.

Some questions you might be asking yourself:

1. If all the "rhinogrades" were wiped out, where did the "Sulawesi snouter" come from?
2. And how can one be from Sulawesi if they all lived on the archipelago of Hyiyiyi?
3. Those island names don't sound very Polynesian.  ("Annoorussawubbissy"?  Really?)
4. Then there's "Hyiyiyi," which is the noise an elderly family friend used to make when he was annoyed.
5. How come you never hear anything about an entire group of zoologists being killed in the bomb testing?
6. Aren't all mice in Order Rodentia?  Where the hell did Order Rhinogradentia come from?
7. I mean seriously, what the fuck?

The truth is that the entire thing -- the mysterious island chain of Hyiyiyi, both Harald Stümpke and the intrepid Einar Petterson-Skämtkvist, Order Rhinogradentia and the book detailing their biology, and the tragic bomb test that wiped all of 'em out -- were the invention of Gerolf Steiner (who was a very real biologist with a puckish sense of humor).  However, not only were some people taken in by the joke at the time, Order Rhinogradentia (and the fictitious Harald Stümpke) still occasionally find their way into real publications -- sometimes without any notes making it clear that neither one exists.

Fortunately, by now most zoologists know about Steiner's role in the story, so it's unlikely anyone these days is really taken in by it.

However, in celebration of one of the most elaborate pranks in the history of biology, a recently-discovered (real) mouse species on Sulawesi was named by its discoverer, zoologist Jacob Esselstyn, not after Steiner, but after the fictitious Stümpke!  And even its common name -- the Sulawesi snouter -- is an hommage to Steiner and his masterful monograph.

Keep this story in mind if you ever are inclined to think of scientists as humorless, dry-as-dust pedants.

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The songs of the ancestors

My grandmother was born in Wind Ridge, Pennsylvania, a little village in the Allegheny hill country in the southwestern corner of the state.  It's a beautiful region, whose first European settlers came in the eighteenth century from Scotland and Northern Ireland, with some later influxes from Germany and eastern Europe.

It's also got more than its fair share of poverty.  The soil is rocky and poor, and farming was never really going to work for more than the barest subsistence.  Until the coal boom of the 1880s, and then the discovery of natural gas there in the 1920s, a lot of people -- my grandmother's family included -- did little more than scrape by.  Despite her hardscrabble roots, and far more than their fair share of troubles, my grandma was always proud of the people she'd come from.  I remember spending many hours as a child listening to her stories of growing up there, and how proud she was of her Scottish ancestry.

One constant thread for her, and one I've inherited, was music.  She knew scores of old ballads, which I now know were carried across the Atlantic Ocean from Scotland and Northern England by my grandmother's ancestors and others like them -- "Annie Laurie," "Ye Banks and Braes," "Barbara Allen," "The Four Marys," and "Lord Randall" amongst them, all songs I still love not only for their nostalgia but because they're honestly beautiful.  A study by British historian and musicologist Cecil Sharp found that many songs and tunes that still persist both in the Appalachians and in the Scottish lowlands have actually changed less in their western versions; put another way, the Appalachian musical tradition preserves virtually unchanged the musical culture from its English and Scottish roots three centuries ago.

As fascinating as this is (and however important for my own personal family history), this is far from the most astonishing example of persistence in musical tradition despite distance, time, and hardship.  In fact, the reason this comes up is an article last week in Smithsonian Magazine that was sent to me by a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia about a song still sung in Sierra Leone that was preserved close to perfectly in the Gullah Geechee culture of the Sea Islands in Georgia.

Here are the bare bones of the story -- but you really should read the entire account at the link above, because it's amazing.

In 1933, a Black linguist and anthropologist named Lorenzo Dow Turner was studying the Gullah language of coastal Georgia and South Carolina.  Gullah is a creole -- a language formed by the mixture of other languages, sometimes beginning so that people of different languages could communicate with each other for purposes of trade, but eventually solidifying into a true complex language with its own syntax, morphology, and lexicon.  In the case of Gullah, its roots come from various West African languages and English, but due to the remoteness (and difficulty of travel) of the region where it's spoken, it's had a couple of hundred years to go its own way.

Yoruba musicians [Image licensed under the Creative Commons 4toscenethesis, Mirror Children, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Anyhow, Turner was doing a linguistic analysis of Gullah, and came across a native speaker who knew a song she said had been passed down to her by her grandmother and great-grandmother.  It wasn't in Gullah; only a few words were clearly from that language.  The woman herself didn't know what the lyrics meant, only that she was singing it as her great-grandmother had.

Well, a Sierra Leonean student of Turner's recognized the lyrics as being in the Mende language -- spoken by about a third of the citizens of modern Sierra Leone, and which is related to other West African languages such as Mandinka, Bambara, and Susu.  It wasn't until much, much later that Yale University anthropologist Joseph Opala came across Turner's account, and together with ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt and Sierra Leonean linguist Tazieff Koroma set out to see if they could find the song's roots...

... and they found, in the remote village of Senehun Ngola, Sierra Leone, a woman who sang an almost identical version of the song.

Here are the lyrics in Mende:

A wa ka, mu mone; kambei ya le’i; lii i lei tambee
A wa ka, mu mone; kambei ya le’i; lii i lei ka
Haa so wolingoh sia kpande wilei
Haa so wolingoh, ndohoh lii, nde kee
Haa so wolingoh sia kuhama ndee yia

 And the English translation:

Everyone come together, let us struggle; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be perfectly at peace.
Everyone come together, let us struggle; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be very much at peace.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention like a firing gun.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention, oh elders, oh heads of the family.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention like a distant drumbeat.

I don't know about you, but my reaction was... wow.

That not only a song, but a song that powerful, was preserved for over two hundred years on both sides of the Atlantic is truly extraordinary.  And in the Sea Islands, without even knowing what the words meant.  Gullah and Mende have some shared vocabulary, but not nearly enough that they're mutually intelligible -- making the song's persistence in coastal Georgia even more astonishing.  And you have to wonder if that little village in Sierra Leone is the place from which the Gullah singer's ancestors were kidnapped and transported by the horrific Atlantic slave trade.

Music is one of the things that is common to the human experience, and the songs of a people are part of their cultural memory.  I'll never cease being grateful to my my grandma for instilling in me early the love of music, and for her teaching me the songs she'd grown up with.  It's a tie to my ancestors a long way back.  Our cultural roots are as much a part of our lineage as our DNA -- something British singer Rose Betts celebrates in her lovely song "Irish Eyes," which you should all put on your playlists:

It's essential that we sing -- new songs and old, the ones written yesterday and the songs of the ancestors first sung centuries ago.  The music is the important thing, whatever it is.

Whatever you choose to sing, just keep singing.

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Jesus in Japan

We'll end the week on an appropriately surreal note.

Every once in a while, I'll run into an off-the-wall claim that admits of no particularly obvious explanation.  For example: have you heard about the town of Shingō, Japan, in Aomori Prefecture on the northern tip of the island of Honshu?  If you have, I'll bet it's for one reason:

It's where Jesus was buried.

There's a sign there that identifies the burial site:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

According to the claim, Jesus skipped town on the eve of the crucifixion, leaving his brother Isukiri to be tortured and executed in his place.  Isukiri makes no appearance in the Bible, the people of Shingō admit; that's because he was intended to take Jesus's place right from the get-go, and needed to keep his identity secret.  The claim also helpfully explains the years of Jesus's life before his public ministry started, at age thirty or so.

He was in Japan, of course.

How he got to Japan from Palestine is never really explained.  Last I looked, they're not all that close together, and in between lie such special attractions as the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, and Siberia.  But despite all this, Jesus made the trip three times -- on the way out when he was a twenty-something, then back to Jerusalem when he started preaching, and then a final time to get out of what Pontius Pilate et al. had planned for him.

So while things didn't end so well for Isukiri, Jesus made out pretty well. He married a local girl, became a rice farmer, fathered three children, and lived to the ripe old age of either 106 or 114, depending upon whom you believe.

And because he had progeny, some of his descendants still live there in Shingō.  The Sawaguchi family, specifically, claims descent from Jesus, something that they don't seem to think is all that amazing.  Jesus, they say, didn't perform any miracles once he arrived in Shingō.  He just changed his name to Torai Tora Daitenku, and settled down to be a nice guy and a solid citizen of the village.  Which takes some of the gravitas out of being a direct lineal descendant of the Son of God.

I find all of this pretty peculiar.  What could possibly be the origin of this story?  It seems to have gained traction with Kyomaro Takenouchi, who in 1935 announced that he had found some ancient manuscripts that tell the whole story.  (They also, apparently, tell about Atlantis and the fact that humans are descended from aliens.  But another time for that, perhaps.)  There's an Association for the Study of the Takenouchi Documents, which explains them thusly:

More than two thousand years ago, the Takenouchi Documents were rewritten by Takenouchino Matori (Hegurimo Matori) into modern Japanese characters Kana mixed with Chinese characters.  The original documents were believed to have been written in Divine characters.

 
The historical facts recorded in the Takenouchi Documents are extraordinary.  Among them are the Sumera-Mikoto came to Earth from a higher world on Ameno-ukifune, the world government was located in Japan and the Sumera-Mikoto unified the world.  The great holy masters of the world, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Shakyamuni Buddha, Confucius and Lao-Tsu were born from the five-colored races which branched off from the Japanese race and all went to Japan for study and training.  These facts may seem absurd and contrary to our prevailing understanding of world history.  However, the archaeological research of recent years has gradually revealed the true existence of ultra ancient civilizations which are all mentioned in the Takenouchi Documents.

So all the cool holy people came from Japan, or at least studied there.  Got it.

Of course, it's not like we can study the documents themselves.  The originals were confiscated by government officials during World War II, and subsequently destroyed in an air raid.  Which, of course, is simultaneously unfortunate for the skeptics and convenient for the true believers.  And it leaves the Association for the Study of the Takenouchi Documents free to say any damn thing they want to about them, but also brings up the question of what exactly the Association is Studying.

But there's more to it than just some probably spurious documents, and the tale seems to predate Takenouchi's "discovery."  What's more interesting is that not only do the people in Shingō mostly seem to accept the story as true, they participate in some curious rituals -- such as marking newborns' foreheads with black crosses, and sewing "Star of David-like patterns onto babies' clothing."  All, if you believe the tale, a cultural memory from two thousand years ago.

Even so, I'm not buying it.  Cultural contamination, whether deliberate or unwitting, is simply too easy to do (consider two examples I've looked at here at Skeptophilia -- the cult of John Frum and the Sirius B story from the Dogon).  Which is more likely -- that Jesus Christ made three trips to and from Japan, on foot, or that in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century some Christian guy from the West ended up in Shingō and got the whole crazy tale started?

In any case, it's made for a considerable tourist attraction.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons courtesy of photographer Jason Hill]

So that's our weird claim for the day.  Jesus in Japan, and the crucifixion of Isukiri, Jesus's less-known, and extremely unlucky, brother.  If I'm ever in Japan, I'll make a point of checking it out.  At least it's safer for tourists than visiting Jerusalem, these days.

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Twists and turns

A recommendation to anyone who wants to completely revolutionize the scientific world: learn some damn science first.

It's why I get so completely fed up by people like Deepak Chopra, who blather on about "quantum frequencies" when I doubt he could give an accurate definition of either word.  Look, I get that physics is hard; I majored in physics, for fuck's sake.  Okay, I wasn't very good at it, but at least I came away with (1) a great deal of respect for the people who are smart enough to truly understand it, and (2) a determination not to pretend I'm an expert when I'm not.

But this isn't the perspective that a great many people have, to judge by the success of Chopra's books, which include -- I shit you not -- Quantum Healing and Quantum Body.

But I'm not here to rail about Deepak Chopra, who in any case has been something of a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia.  No, today's rant comes to you courtesy of a long-time loyal reader who asked me if I'd ever heard of "torsion field theory" and if so, what I thought about it.

My first thought was that any kind of field theory was going to involve mathematics on a level that would lose me after the first paragraph, so (Cf. my statement in paragraph two above) whatever opinion I had of it wouldn't be worth much.  But I'm nothing if not dedicated to my readers, so I said I'd look into it.

And... holy Moses.

Torsion field theory was born of some research (using the term loosely) in the 1980s by two Russian scientists (using that term loosely as well), Anatoly Akimov and Gennady Shipov.  The basic idea was that a particle's spin configuration causes it to give off "emanations" that allow for the transfer of information faster than the speed of light.

If you're thinking, "Wait... but... Einstein said...?", you're not the only one.  In 1991, physicist Yevgeny Aleksandrov exposed them as frauds, and called the grants they'd received from the Russian government to support their work "embezzlement."

Anyone who's saying, "Okay, well, that was that, then," obviously doesn't understand how persistent the purveyors of pseudoscience can be.  Akimov and Shipov portrayed Aleksandrov's attacks as coming from a hidebound scientific establishment that couldn't handle being challenged -- and also wanted to keep all the grant money for itself.  (Similar to all of the alt-med proponents complaining about being suppressed by "Big Pharma.")  They fought back -- and won, receiving grants from the Russian government throughout the 1990s, and ultimately founding "The International Institute for Theoretical and Applied Physics" to continue doing their thing.  (Thus showing that having a fancy-sounding name for your "institute" doesn't mean that you're doing actual science.)

Not a single thing they did -- not one -- ever generated a paper in a peer-reviewed physics journal.  Despite this, "torsion field theory" is still being talked about as a "revolution in physics" (and its proponents still claim the physics community is suppressing it), and it has been used to explain -- once again, I feel obliged to mention that I am not making this up -- such phenomena as telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and levitation.  It's said to be the basis of homeopathic "remedies," perpetual motion machines, stargates, and UFO propulsion systems.

Did you notice a commonality between every one of the things I just listed?

Yeah, me too.

Here's the problem.  This is not how science works.  Proposing a "theory" that flies in the face of not one, but two of the most thoroughly tested models in physics (the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics), based upon exactly zero evidence, and then using that "theory" to explain a bunch of phenomena that to the best of our current knowledge, don't exist, isn't science.  It's self-delusion at best, and outright fraud at worst.  And it doesn't improve things when you name it by swiping some actual terms from physics (torsion means a twisting force; a field is a distribution of values of a quantity in space).

A diagram of the torsion tensor. Like, you know, actual science [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Circle development with torsion, CC BY-SA 4.0]

No, science isn't perfect.  But it does have one enormously important thing going for it -- it self-corrects.  And scientists, far from being the sticks-in-the-mud the pseudoscientific community would like you to believe, are always on the lookout for the places it's not working, because identifying and correcting those places is how careers are made.  If there really was some mysterious twisty-turny field generated by quantum spin that could generate faster-than-light information transfer, the physicists would be clambering over each other to get their papers published first.

That'd be Nobel Prize material, right there.

So many thanks to the reader who suggested I research "torsion field theory."  I now have many dents in my forehead from all the faceplants I did.  If you find any other revolutionary developments in physics that for some reason no actual physicists are working on, though, I'd rather not know about them.

Maybe you should just send them directly to Deepak Chopra.

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The dying of the light

In July of 2004, my father died.  I was at his bedside in Our Lady of Lourdes General Hospital in Lafayette, Louisiana when it happened.  He'd  been declining for a while -- his once razor-sharp mental faculties slipping into a vague cloudiness, his gait slowing and becoming halting and cautious, his former rapier wit completely gone.  The most heartbreaking thing was his own awareness of what he had lost and would continue to lose.  It looked like a slow slide into debility.

Then, in June, he had what the doctors described as a mini-stroke.  Afterward, he was still fairly lucid, but was having trouble walking.  It had long been his deepest fear (one I share) that he'd become completely dependent on others for his care, and it was obvious to us (and probably to him as well) that this was the direction things were going.

What happened next was described in three words by my mother: "He gave up."

Despite the fact that the doctors could find no obvious direct cause of it, his systems one by one started to shut down.  Three weeks after the mini-stroke and fall that precipitated his admission into the hospital, he died at age 83.

I had never been with someone as they died before (and haven't since).  I was out of state when my beloved grandma died in 1986; and when my mother died, eight months after my father, it was so sudden I didn't have time to get there.  But I was by my father's side as his breathing slowed and finally stopped.  The event itself wasn't at all dramatic; the transition between life and death was subtle, gentle, and peaceful.  However wrenching it was on my mother and me, for him there seemed to be hardly a boundary between "here" and "not here."

Of course, I'm judging that from the outside.  No one knows -- no one can know -- what the experience was like for him.  It's funny, really; death is one of the experiences that unites us as human, and one which we all will ultimately share, but none of us knows what it actually is.

Noël LeMire, La Mort et le Mourant (ca. 1770) [Image is in the Public Domain]

A study in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, though, may be the first clue as to what the experience is like.  An 87-year-old Canadian epilepsy patient was set up for an electroencephalogram to try and get a picture of what was causing his seizures, when he unexpectedly had a severe heart attack.  The man was under a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order, so when his heart stopped beating, they let him die...

... but he was still hooked up to the EEG.

This gave his doctors our first glimpse into what is happening in the brain of someone as they die.  And they found a sudden increase in activity in the parts of the brain involved in memory, recall, and dreaming -- which lasted for thirty seconds after his heart stopped, then gradually faded.

"Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences," said Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon who was the study's lead author.  "As a neurosurgeon, I deal with loss at times.  It is indescribably difficult to deliver the news of death to distraught family members.  Something we may learn from this research is that although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives."

Which is a pleasant thought.  Many of us -- even, for some reason, the devoutly religious, who you'd think would be positively eager for the experience -- are afraid of death.  Me, I'm not looking forward to it; I rather like being alive, and as a de facto atheist I have no particular expectation that there'll be anything afterwards.  Being with my father as he died did, however, have the effect of making me less afraid of death.  The usual lead-up, with its frequent pain and debility and illness, is still deeply terrifying to me, but crossing the boundary itself seemed fairly peaceful.

And the idea that our brains give us one last go-through of our pleasant memories is kind of nice.  I know that this single patient's EEG is hardly conclusive -- and it's unlikely there'll be many other people hooked up to a brain scanner as they die -- but it does give some comfort that perhaps, this experience we will all share someday isn't as awful as we might fear.

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The family tree of folk tales

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was a fantastic collection of Japanese folk tales called The Case of the Marble Monster and Other Stories.  They had been collected in the 1950s by an American, I. G. Edmonds, and through the wonders of the Scholastic Book Club became available for schoolchildren like myself.

The stories center on the wise and humorous character of Ōoka Tadasuke, who was a real person -- he lived from 1677 to 1752 in Yedo (now Tokyo), and was an acclaimed and popular magistrate who got a well-deserved reputation not only for his fairness and concern for the plight of the poor, but for coming up with brilliant solutions for difficult cases.  In the first one, "The Case of the Stolen Smell," a miserly and nasty-tempered tempura shop owner claims that a poor student living above his shop is deliberately waiting until he fries his fish, so the aroma will make the student's bowl of rice (all he can afford) taste better -- and the merchant demands compensation for all the smells the student has stolen.

Judge Ōoka hears the complaint, then orders the student to get together all the coins he has, and it looks like the poor young man is in trouble, but then the judge orders the student to pour the pile of coins from one hand to the other, and declares the fine paid.  The tempura shop owner, of course, objects that he hasn't been paid anything.

"I have decided that the payment for the smell of food is the sound of money," Ōoka says, with a bland smile.  "Justice, as always, has prevailed in my court."

The whole collection is an absolute delight.  Several of them -- notably "The Case of the Terrible-Tempered Tradesman" and "The Case of the Halved Horse" -- are laugh-out-loud funny. And in fact, I still own my much-loved and rather worn copy.

A woodcut portrait of the wise Judge Ōoka Tadasuke [Image is in the Public Domain]

Humans have been telling stories for a very, very long time.  And of course, as a novelist, the topic is near and dear to my heart.  Stories can be uplifting, cathartic, funny, shocking, heartbreaking, edifying, instructive, and surprising -- allowing us to access and express our strongest emotions, creating a deep bond between the storyteller and the listener (or reader).

How long have we been telling our invented tales, though?  The tales of the wisdom of Judge Ōoka are about three hundred years old; of course, we have far older ones, from the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), which was first written down in the twelfth century C.E. but probably dates in oral tradition to a millennium earlier, to the Greek and Roman myths, back to what is probably the oldest written mythological story we still have a copy of -- the Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates to around the eighteenth century B.C.E.  But how much farther back in time does the storytelling tradition go?  And how could we be at all sure?

A new study by Sara Graça da Silva (of the New University of Lisbon) and Jamshid Tehrani (of Durham University) has taken a shot at figuring that out.  Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recognize Tehrani's name; he was responsible for the delightful study of the various versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" that amounted to using cladistic bootstrap analysis to determine which were related to which.  Now, da Silva and Tehrani have gone one step further -- employing another technique swiped from evolutionary genetics to analyze folk tales and determine how old the most recent ancestor of the various versions actually is.

There's a technique used by taxonomists and evolutionary biologists called a molecular clock -- a sequence of DNA, some version of which is shared by two or more species, and which undergoes mutations at a known rate.  The number of differences in that sequence between two species then becomes an indication of how long ago they had a common ancestor; the more differences, the longer ago that common ancestor lived.

De Silva and Tehrani used the same approach, but instead of looking for commonalities in actual DNA sequences, they looked at what amounts to the DNA of a story -- the characters, themes, and motifs that make it stand out.  As with Tehrani's earlier study of "Little Red Riding Hood," they found that many folk tales have related versions in other cultures that make it possible to do this kind of comparative phylogenetics.  And some of them seem to go back a very long way -- notably "Jack and the Beanstalk," their analysis of which found common ancestry with other versions dating back to the Bronze Age.

In one way, it's astonishing that this is possible, but in another, it shouldn't be surprising.  The oral tradition of storytelling is common to just about every culture in the world.  I remember my maternal uncle telling us kids creepy stories in French about the loup-garou and feu follet and les lutins that scared the absolute hell out of us (and we loved every minute of it).  That cultural inheritance has very deep roots -- and as da Silva and Tehrani showed, those roots show through in versions of stories we still tell today.

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