Grieving

I've always been an animal lover.  I grew up with dogs, and have had one or more dogs or cats all of my adult life.  Add to that a near-fanatical passion for birding, and a general fascination with wildlife of all sorts, and it's no wonder I went into biology.

My background in evolutionary genetics has driven home the point that humans aren't as different from the rest of the animal world as a lot of us seem to think.  The false distinction between "human" and "animal" is a pretty hard one to overcome, however, which explains the argument I got into with a professor at the University of Washington over a mouse he'd killed for experimental purposes when I was in an animal physiology class.

Even back then, I understood that non-human animals die for experimental purposes all the time.  Despite my youth, I had thought deeply about the ethical conundrum of sacrificing the lives of our fellow animals for the benefit of science and medicine, and had come to the conclusion (an opinion I still hold) that it is a necessary evil.  But what I could not stomach was the professor's cavalier attitude toward the life he'd just taken -- joking around, acting as if the little warm body he held in his hand had been nothing but a mobile lump of clay, worthy of no respect.

"It's not like animals have feelings," I recall his saying to me, with a faint sneer.  "If you spend your time anthropomorphizing animals, you'll never make it in this profession."

I remembered, while he was lecturing me in a patronizing fashion about my soft-heartedness, pets I had owned, and I had a momentary surge of self-doubt.  Was he right?  I began to question my own sense that my dogs and cats loved me, and were feeling something of the same kind of bond toward me that I felt toward them.  Is my puppy's wagging tail when I talk to him nothing more than what C. S. Lewis called a "cupboard love" -- merely a response that he knows will get him fed and petted and played with, and a warm place to sleep?

But I couldn't bring myself to believe that forty years ago, and I don't believe it now.  I have several times gone through the inevitable tragedy of losing beloved pets, and what has struck me each time is not only how I and my wife have reacted, but how our other animals have.  Most recently, when our sweet, quirky little one-eyed Shiba Inu, Cleo, somehow got out of our fence and was hit and killed by a passing car, our big old pit bull Guinness went into a positive decline.

It was unexpected in a way, because Cleo and Guinness didn't really interact all that much; they kind of didn't speak the same language.  Cleo, typical of her breed, was independent, curious, and eccentric; Guinness is strongly bonded to us (especially my wife, whom he follows around like a shadow), protective, and thinks that chasing a tennis ball is the most fun hobby ever.  But when Cleo died, Guinness went into a prolonged period of grief that nearly matched our own.

Recent experiments have shown that the neurochemical underpinning of emotions in our brain are shared by dogs and cats -- they experience a surge of oxytocin when they see their friends (whether human or not) just like we do.  When I go out to get the mail and come back inside under a minute later, and my puppy Jethro greets me as if he thought I'd abandoned him forever and ever and OMIGOD I'M SO GLAD YOU'RE BACK, he really is experiencing something like the rush we feel when seeing someone we dearly love.

Of course, he does like belly rubs, too.

If you needed one more piece of evidence of the falsehood of my long-ago professor's contention that non-human animals don't experience emotion, it came out this week in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.  A study of pet cats -- an animal widely considered to be independent and self-sufficient -- experience genuine grief when a family member dies, even if that family member is another pet...

... and even when it's a dog.

The study analyzed the behavior of 450 cats that had gone through loss, and the results were widely consistent -- grieving cats slept and ate less, vocalized more, hid more, refused to play but became clingy, and appeared to look for their lost friend.  "Unlike dogs, we tend to think that cats are aloof and not social," said Jennifer Vonk, a comparative/cognitive psychologist at Oakland University and a co-author of the work.  "They may not form packs like wild dogs, but in the wild, cats still tend to band together and form hierarchies...  I think we’ve been mischaracterizing them."

The divide between ourselves and our pets -- and by extension, between us and the rest of the natural world -- is far narrower than many of us think.  A lot of pet owners say "he understands every word I say" (I've been guilty of that myself), which is certainly untrue, but the emotional resonance between pets and the rest of the members of their household is undeniable.  And grief is experienced deeply by a great many more species than ourselves.

But y'all'll have to excuse me.  Jethro is looking at me with his big, soulful brown eyes.  He hasn't lost a friend or anything, but probably would like a belly rub.

Gotta keep my priorities straight.

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Since this post is pet-related, I thought it was a good opportunity to put in a plug for our Third Annual Pandemic Pottery Sale.  My wife and I are both amateur potters, so we tend to get overrun with pottery we don't have space for.  Two years ago, we came up with the idea of selling a bunch of it and donating the proceeds to charity.  This year the recipient we chose is the fabulous Stay Wild Animal Rescue and Rehabilitation (where we got our two wonderful rescue dogs Jethro and Rosie).  They do fantastic work and are constantly dealing with costly animal care and bringing dogs and cats from states with kill shelters (Jethro came from Georgia, Rosie from Texas), which is crazy expensive.

The way it works is if you see a piece you like, you make a bid on it.  If no one else bids, it's yours.  If there are competing bids, the high one gets the piece.  A few provisos: first, the shipping costs outside of the United States are prohibitively expensive -- so unfortunately, this event is limited to our American friends.  Second, all of the pieces EXCEPT AS MARKED are food safe, microwave safe, and dishwasher safe.  However: we work with stoneware clay, which is not completely vitrified even when glazed and fired properly, so if you're using a piece to hold water long-term (mostly this caution is for vases) make sure to put something underneath it so you don't ruin nice furniture.  (Many of them won't leak, but don't take the chance.)

Once most of the pieces are claimed, we'll present Jane George, who runs Stay Wild, with what will hopefully be a big check!

So check out the website, take a look at the gallery, and bid on what takes your fancy!  Feel free to pass the link along to interested friends.  Enjoy!

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Birds of a feather

The diversity you find among birds is really remarkable.

There are differences in bill shape, from the weird angled beaks of flamingos, to the longer-on-the-bottom fish skewers of skimmers, to the upswept needle of the avocet, to the absurd (and aptly-named) spoonbills and shoebills, to the pelicans -- about whom my dad taught me a limerick when I was little:

A wonderful bird is the pelican.
His bill can hold more than his bellican.
He can stash in his beak
All his food for the week,
But I really don't see how the hellican.

Yeah, it's kind of obvious where I got my sense of humor from.

Of course, it doesn't end there. The impossibly long toes of the South American jacanas (called "lilytrotters" because they can walk on the floating leaves of waterlilies).  The phenomenal wingspan of the albatross.  The insane plumage of the birds-of-paradise.

And the colors.  Man, the colors!  Even in my decidedly non-tropical home we have some pretty amazing birds.  The first time I saw an Indigo Bunting, I was certain that one of my sons had put a blue plastic bird on the bird feeder just to rattle my chain.  There couldn't be a real bird that was that fluorescent shade of cobalt.

Then... it moved.

But nothing prepared me for the colors I saw on my visits to Ecuador, especially amongst the birds of the tanager family.  There are hundreds of species of tanagers in that tiny little country, and because they often travel in mixed foraging flocks, you can sometimes see twenty or thirty different species in the same tree.  These include the Green-headed Tanager:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lars Falkdalen Lindahl (User:Njaelkies Lea), Green-headed Tanager Ubatuba, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The Black-capped Tanager:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Joseph C Boone, Black-capped Tanager JCB, CC BY-SA 4.0]

And the Flame-faced Tanager:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eleanor Briccetti, Flame-faced Tanager (4851596008), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Being a biologist, of course the question of how these birds evolved such extravagant colors is bound to come up, and my assumption was always that it was sexual selection -- the females choosing the most brightly-colored males as mates (in this group, as with many bird species, the males are usually vividly decked out and the females are drab-colored). If over time, the showiest males are the most likely to get lucky, then you get sexual dimorphism -- the evolution of different outward appearances between males and females.  (This isn't always so, by the way.  Most species of sparrows, for example, have little sexual dimorphism, and even experienced birders can't tell a male from a female sparrow by looking.)  More puzzling still is the general trend that tropical birds are more brilliantly-colored than bird species in higher latitudes -- a trend that is yet to be convincingly explained.

The reason this comes up today is two papers that came out last week.  The first, that appeared in Science Advances, looks at one of the most amazing things about their evolutionary history -- they were the only branch of the dinosaur clade that survived the cataclysmic mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period.  What allowed birds to make it through the bottleneck that killed all of their near relatives -- and not only survive, but thrive and rediversify?

The evidence is that the extinction event selected for two things; small body size, and a shift toward young being altricial -- born relatively helpless and undeveloped, and therefore requiring more parental care.  Some lineages of birds would eventually increase in body size again, but they never again would reach the colossal proportions that their cousins did during the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods.

"We have typically not looked at the change in DNA composition and model across the tree of life as a change that something interesting has happened at a particular point of time and place," said Stephen Smith, of the University of Michigan, who co-authored the study.  "This study illustrates that we have probably been missing something...  We found that adult body size and patterns of pre-hatching development are two important features of bird biology we can link to the genetic changes we’re detecting.  One of the most significant challenges in evolutionary biology and ornithology is teasing out the relationships between major bird groups — it’s difficult to determine the structure of the tree of life for living birds."

The study not only elucidated relationships between extant groups of birds, it allowed the researchers to pinpoint when groups diverged from each other, and therefore what innovations were likely to be connected with events occurring on the Earth at the time.

The second study, which appeared in Nature Ecology & Evolution, looked at the question I began with -- the impossibly bright colors that are characteristic of so many bird species.  Colors in birds arise two ways -- pigments (chemicals which absorb some frequencies of light and reflect others) and structural color (due to feathers creating a combination of refraction and interference; this is also known as iridescence).  Most pigmented color in birds is relatively drab -- blacks, grays, and various shades of brown -- the flashing blues, greens, and purples you see in groups like tanagers, hummingbirds, and sunbirds are almost entirely due to iridescence.

The researchers went through images of as many of the 9,409 species of birds currently in existence, along with the current best iteration of the family tree of birds, to try and figure out where along the way iridescence evolved, and how it spread so widely among this class of animals.  

And what they found was that 415 distantly-related branches of the tree have iridescent feathers, and the common ancestor of all modern birds -- something like eighty million years ago -- was very likely iridescent.

"I was very excited to learn that the ancestral state of all birds is iridescence," said Chad Eliason, of the Field Museum in Chicago, who was the paper's lead author.  "We've found fossil evidence of iridescent birds and other feathered dinosaurs before, by examining fossil feathers and the preserved pigment-producing structures in those feathers.  So we know that iridescent feathers existed back in the Cretaceous -- those fossils help support the idea from our model that the ancestor of all modern birds was iridescent too."

There are still a lot of questions left unanswered, however.  "We still don't know why iridescence evolved in the first place," Eliason said.  "Iridescent feathers can be used by birds to attract mates, but iridescence is related to other aspects of birds' lives too.  For instance, tree swallows change color when the humidity changes, so iridescence could be related to the environment, or it might be related to another physical property of feathers, like water resistance.  But knowing more about how there came to be so many iridescent birds in the tropics might help us understand why iridescence evolved."

Which is extremely cool.  Something to think about next time you see one of those brilliant little flying jewels flit by.  The stunning colors we appreciate every day on our bird feeders and in the wild have a very long history -- going back to a trait that evolved something like eighty million years ago.

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Ghostsquatch

At the end of yesterday's mashup of alien invasions and giant superintelligent (and malevolent) bugs, I wrote that I couldn't guess what might be the next bizarre woo-woo hybrid, but speculated that it might be ghost Bigfoots.  I picked that largely because it sounded ridiculous.

As of this writing I have now been emailed three times by loyal readers of Skeptophilia that yes, there are people who believe in spectral Sasquatches.

It will come as no surprise to those familiar with the cryptid world that the Ghost Bigfoot Theory became more than just a fever dream of mine because of Nick Redfern, author of Contactees: A History of Alien-Human Interaction, Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, Man-Monkey: In Search of the British Bigfoot, Three Men Seeking Monsters, and about a dozen other titles on similar topics.

But to set the stage, a bit of explanation.  You almost certainly know all about such familiar cryptids as Bigfoot, Nessie, El Chupacabra, and Champ, and if you're a regular reader of this blog you likely also have a good working knowledge of some less familiar ones -- the Bunyip, Mokèlé-Mbèmbé, LizardMan, Sheepsquatch, the Beast of Gévaudan, Black Shuck, and Cadborosaurus.  You are probably also well aware that there has never been a bit of hard evidence for the existence of any of them.  All we have is sketchy eyewitness accounts, grainy photographs, and videocamera footage so shaky it looks like it was taken by a person who had just consumed about a quart of espresso.

What explains this dearth of tangible proof for any of these mysterious creatures?  There are two possible explanations that come readily to mind:

1. None of them actually exist.
2. The eyewitness accounts, photographs, and video clips aren't of actual, live cryptids; what people are seeing are the ghosts of prehistoric animals.

Well. I think we can all agree that option #2 is a pretty persuasive scientific explanation, can't we?  Redfern clearly thinks so.  He writes of a discussion he had with his friend, Joshua Warren, on the subject:

Could it be that certain animals of a strange and fantastic nature seen today are actually the spirits or ghosts of creatures that became extinct thousands of years ago?  As fantastic as such a scenario might sound, maybe we shouldn’t outright dismiss it.

Indeed, paranormal expert and good friend Joshua P. Warren, the author of the highly-relevant book, Pet Ghosts, told me that he had extensively investigated a series of encounters with apparitional, ancient animals on farmland at Lancaster, South Carolina – one of which seemed to resemble nothing less than a spectral pterodactyl.  Josh seriously mused upon the possibility that the ghostly presence of certain extinct animals might very well help explain sightings of monstrous beasts in our presence to this very day.

“Maybe Bigfoot is a phantimal,” said Josh to me, utilizing a term he uses to describe ghostly beasts, “perhaps even the ghost of a prehistoric creature, similar to the enormous extinct possible ape, Gigantopithecus, or maybe even the spirits of primitive humans.”

Okay.  Right.  A "phantimal."  So, what we've succeeded in accomplishing here is to take something that is potentially open to investigation (I hesitate to call what the Finding Bigfoot people did "investigation"), and place it entirely outside of the realm of what is even theoretically verifiable.

Redfern and Warren seem to think that this is a good thing.  If all of those people who claim to have seen Bigfoot are actually seeing a spectral proto-hominid, then the lack of evidence somehow becomes a point in favor of the claim, right?

Ghostly Sasquatches, after all, leave behind no hair samples.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gnashes30, Pike's Peak highway bigfoot, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This seems mighty convenient to me.  It takes all of the objections that skeptics have to the cryptozoology thing, and dismisses them at one fell swoop: "Of course there's no tangible proof.  If we're right, there' wouldn't be."  It also explains all of the cryptid sightings with equal facility.  Nessie and Cadborosaurus are spirit pleisiosaurs. Mokèlé-Mbèmbé is the ghost of a brachiosaurus.  Black Shuck and El Chupacabra are the ghosts of deceased canines.  Sheepsquatch is the ghost of... well, I still don't know what the fuck Sheepsquatch is.  But the ghost of some prehistoric mammal or another.

All of this, of course, just goes to show something that I've commented upon before; there's no crazy idea out there that's so outlandish that someone can't elaborate upon it so as to make it even crazier.  We take something for which there is no evidence, but which at least isn't biologically impossible (the existence of cryptids), and put it in a blender with another thing for which there is no evidence (the existence of ghosts), and pour out a wonderful new Woo-Woo Smoothie -- Cryptids are the Ghosts of Prehistoric Animals.

Maybe we can elaborate it further, you think?  Maybe the spirit animals are actually in contact with... aliens!  That's it, the spirit animals are spies and are relaying information on us to their alien overlords!  I'm sure that somehow it's all tied up with the Roswell Incident, HAARP, and the Illuminati.

Or maybe I should just shut the hell up, because every time I say, "Ha-ha, surely nobody believes this," I turn out to be disproven within twenty-four hours.

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Bugging out

Because the universe has an odd sense of humor sometimes, I suppose it wasn't surprising that after writing a post about how there's no evidence we've been visited by aliens and a post about how giant insects are impossible, I would run into a webpage claiming that we're being visited by giant alien insects.

The webpage calls 'em mantids, which for me really ups the creepiness factor.  Even real praying mantises are scary little beasts, with their bulgy unblinking eyes and flexible necks (allowing for rotation of the head -- something close to unique in insects) and serrated steak knives for arms.  A giant one would definitely fall into the category of "nightmare."

My reaction to this claim was also amplified by having recently rewatched the episode of The X Files called "Folie à Deux," in which a giant bug, which can also manipulate your mind to think it looks human, is biting people and turning them into zombies.  Okay, stated like that, I have to admit the plot sounds pretty fucking stupid, but let me tell you, that episode is terrifying.

Or maybe I'm just suggestible, I dunno.  Because like I said, giant bugs are impossible for several different reasons having to do with well-established laws of physics, chemistry, and biology.  The largest insect known was the Carboniferous dragonfly Meganeura, with a 75-centimeter wingspan -- but this was a time when the Earth's atmosphere had much higher oxygen content (by some estimates, as high as thirty percent), allowing insects' inherently inefficient respiratory systems to be less of a hindrance to growth.  

This argument apparently doesn't have any impact on the people who believe in alien mantids, because according to the webpage, these things are kind of everywhere.  Here's a typical example from the hundreds of encounters you will find described therein:

It started when I was a teenager and went on until my early thirties.  I would wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to move.  It was terrifying and I would try to scream but nothing would come out.  Sometimes I would see a bright round light across the room and I always felt like it was trying to drain the energy/life out of me.  Sometimes I felt a heavy pressure on me and a couple of times I even thought I could feel someone next to me on the bed.  Once I saw a figure in black who I just felt was evil, standing next to my bed and it also felt like he was trying to drain the energy/life out of me...  And one time I woke up to see a large praying mantis type creature sitting in a chair looking at me and there was a small hooded/cloaked figure next to him.  I can't tell you much about the smaller figure because I didn't pay that much attention to it.  I was more terrified of the larger creature and It had my full attention.  And one thing I do have memory of is noticing a large gold medallion on its chest area.  I know also that it was very tall even though it was sitting on a chair.  I think it was wearing some kind of cape around its shoulders.  I do remember also feeling like it was studying me with indifference, if that makes any sense.  Like it didn't seem to care that I was looking back at it, or that I was terrified.  More like I was just an object in front of it that it was looking at.  I have never gone into this much detail about it before, but these are the main things that stand out in my memory.

You're probably already predicting where I'm going to go with this; this sounds like a classic example of a hallucination experienced during sleep paralysis, a well-studied phenomenon that is undoubtedly terrifying to the people who experience it, but the intensity of their fear doesn't mean what they're seeing is real.  The trouble is, sleep paralysis hallucinations are extraordinarily convincing, because (unlike ordinary nightmares) you're aware of your actual surroundings and the position of your body, so it feels like you're immersed in a partly-real, partly-surreal world, where you can't tell which is which.

Sleep paralysis accounts for maybe half the stories of mantid encounters, from the sound of it.

It's also telling that the other half of the accounts begin with, "After taking a dose of DMT/psilocybin/high-strength THC..."

So I wouldn't worry about being visited by giant mantises.  If you do experience frequent sleep paralysis, though, you might want to see a doctor.  And if you're seeing huge insects after doing drugs, the obvious solution to your problem is "stop doing drugs."

But you have to wonder what mashup of previous posts the universe will find for me next.  Maybe "Bigfoot x ghosts."  Sasquatch sightings are actually people seeing the ghosts of prehistoric proto-hominids.  That claim's gotta be out there somewhere, right?

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A matter of scale

In Douglas Adams's brilliant book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a pair of alien races, the Vl'Hurg and the G'gugvuntt, spent millennia fighting each other mercilessly until they intercept a message from Earth that they misinterpret as being a threat.  They forthwith decide to set aside their grievances with each other, and team up for an attack on our planet in retaliation:

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy...

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across -- which happened to be the Earth -- where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

I was reminded of the Vl'Hurg and G'gugvuntt while reading the (much more serious) book The View from the Center of the Universe, by physicist Joel Primack and author and polymath Nancy Abrams.  In it, they look at our current understanding of the basics of physics and cosmology, and how it intertwines with metaphysics and philosophy, in search of a new "foundational myth" that will help us to understand our place in the universe.

What brought up Adams's fictional tiny space warriors was one of the most interesting things in the Primack/Abrams book, which is the importance of scale.  There are about sixty orders of magnitude (powers of ten) between the smallest thing we can talk meaningfully about (the Planck length) and the largest (the size of the known universe), and we ourselves fall just about in the middle.  This is no coincidence, the authors say; much smaller life forms are unlikely to have to have the complexity to develop intelligence, and much larger ones would be limited by a variety of physical factors such as the problem that if you increase length in a linear fashion, mass increases as a cube.  (Double the length, the mass goes up by a factor of eight, for example.)  Galileo knew about this, and used it to explain why the shape of the leg bones of mice and elephants are different.  Give an animal the size of an elephant the relative leg diameter of a mouse, and it couldn't support its own weight.  (This is why you shouldn't get scared by all of the bad science fiction movies from the fifties with names like The Cockroach That Ate Newark.  The proportions of an insect wouldn't work if it were a meter long, much less twenty or thirty.)

Pic from the 1954 horror flick Them!

Put simply: scale matters.  Where it gets really interesting, though, is when you look at the fundamental forces of nature.  We don't have a quantum theory of gravity yet, but that hasn't held back technology from using the principles of quantum physics; on the scale of the very small, gravity is insignificant and can be effectively ignored in most circumstances.  Once again, we ourselves are right around the size where gravity starts to get really critical.  Drop an ant off a skyscraper, and it will be none the worse for wear.  A human, though?

And the bigger the object, the more important gravity becomes, and (relatively speaking) the less important the other forces are.  On Earth, mountains can only get so high before the forces of erosion start pulling them down, breaking the cohesive electromagnetic bonds within the rocks and halting further rise.  In environments with lower gravity, though, mountains can get a great deal bigger.  Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars, is almost 22 kilometers high -- 2.5 times taller than Mount Everest.  The larger the object, the more intense the fight against gravity becomes.  The smoothest known objects in the universe are neutron stars, which have such immense gravity their topographic relief over the entire surface is on the order of a tenth of a millimeter.

Going the other direction, the relative magnitudes of the other forces increase.  A human scaled down to the size of a dust speck would be overwhelmed by electromagnetic forces -- for example, static electricity.  Consider how dust clings to your television screen.  These forces become much less important on a larger scale... whatever Gary Larson's The Far Side would have you believe:

Smaller still, and forces like the strong and weak nuclear forces -- the one that allows the particles in atomic nuclei to stick together, and the one that causes some forms of radioactive decay, respectively -- take over.  Trying to use brains that evolved to understand things on our scale (what we term "common sense") simply doesn't work on the scale of the very small or very large.

And a particularly fascinating bit, and something I'd never really considered, is how scale affects the properties of things.  Some properties are emergent; they result from the behavior and interactions of the parts.  A simple example is that water has three common forms, right?  Solid (ice), liquid, and gaseous (water vapor).  Those distinctions become completely meaningless on the scale of individual molecules.  One or two water molecules are not solid, liquid, or gaseous; those terms only acquire meaning on a much larger scale.

This is why it's so interesting to try to imagine what things would be like if you (to use Primack's and Abrams's metaphor) turned the zoom lens one way and then the other.  I first ran into this idea in high school, when we watched the mind-blowing short video Powers of Ten, which was filmed in 1968 (then touched up in 1977) but still impresses:

Anyhow, those are my thoughts about the concept of scale.  An explanation of why the Earth doesn't have to worry about either Vl'Hurgs and G'gugvuntts, enormous bugs, or static cling making your child stick to the ceiling.  A relief, really, because there's enough else to lose sleep over.  And given how quickly our common sense fails on unfamiliar scales, it's a good thing we have science to explain what's happening -- not to mention fueling our imaginations about what those scales might be like.

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Olympic outrage

The latest epistle from the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage surrounds Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who defeated Italy's Angela Carini after a 46-second bout at the Paris Summer Olympics this week.  Carini complained that Khelif "had an advantage" over her, which could be said by just about anyone who loses, because... well, that's why they lost, isn't it?

But the allegation was that Khelif was a man fighting as a woman, a claim that got amplified by such malicious disinformation specialists as J. K. Rowling, Elon Musk, Logan Paul, and Donald Trump, the last-mentioned of whom crowed that if he was elected he would "keep men out of women's sports."

Let's get a few things straight.

First of all, the Olympics do not allow anatomically male individuals to participate in women's sports (or vice versa).  There is a genital inspection by a doctor prior to qualification -- the athletes call it the "nude parade" -- and yes, there have been people disqualified on those grounds.  Khelif passed, meaning she's anatomically female.

Second, it's illegal to be trans (or any identity of LGBTQ+) in Algeria.  You really believe that someone representing one of the most fervently Muslim countries in the world would have been allowed to get this far if she was LGBTQ+?  And sent to France to represent the country's pride?  Get real.

Khelif at the Pan-Arab Games in 2023 [Image licensed under the Creative Commons ALGÉRIE PRESSE SERVICE | وكالة الأنباء الجزائرية , Imane Khelif Jeux panarabes 2023, CC BY 3.0]

Third, yes, there are disorders that cause differences in sexual development and/or differences in levels of hormones than the average person.  Khelif (and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu Ting) were disqualified last year by the International Boxing Association for failing some undisclosed eligibility test; the rumors are it was because she has high testosterone.  But allow me to remind the people who are screaming about this -- you are the ones who want to pretend these things are simple.  You are the ones who say, "It's black-and-white -- if you have a penis, you're male; if you have a vagina, you're female."  Well, Khelif had a medical examination, and has female genitalia.  

By your own goddamn standards, the fact that she has higher-than-average testosterone should not matter.

This hasn't stopped the screeching, because apparently I'm wrong about facts, truth, and science mattering to these people.  Just this morning I saw someone post a photo of Khelif fighting Carini, and captioned it, "First ridiculing the Last Supper!  Now this!  I'm done with these WOKE OLYMPICS!"  "Woke," now, apparently being the code word for "this makes me feel squinky."  The whole Last Supper thing has been dealt with so thoroughly that I would think at this point people would be embarrassed even to bring it up, but apparently I'm wrong about that, too.  The pageant at the opening ceremony had nothing to do with Christianity at all, but was a representation of a bacchanal from Greek mythology.  

My own take on that is that if the services in the church I attended as a kid had involved half-naked feasting, drinking, and carousing, I'd still be a member.

But now that the anger over the opening ceremonies has dissipated, these people have to find something else to be outraged about, so they've settled on Khelif.  Here, though, the stakes are way higher.  These completely fabricated and fact-free rumors are not only putting her career at risk, but her life.  You think the imams back home in Algeria aren't listening to all of this?

Are you that wedded to your desperate desire to be angry that you're willing to put a young woman's life in danger?

The bottom line is that sexual development, gender, and sexual orientation are complicated.  You might want to be able to fall back on the biblical "male and female he created them" thing, but allow me to remind you that the same source also says that bats are birds (Leviticus 11), so maybe learning your science from the Bible isn't such a hot idea.  In a previous post, I already went through a lot of the ways in which gender and sexuality can confound your desire to keep things simple and binary (you can read the post here if you want), so I won't go back through it all again.

Suffice it to say that by the bigots' own stated standards, Imane Khelif is female.  Your snarling about her being male or trans or whatnot is not only false, but it's putting her in danger, and you need to shut the hell up about it now.

Time to move on to whatever you feel like being outraged about next.  This time try to pick something that won't destroy an innocent athlete's life.

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Facepalms of the gods

While snooping around looking for topics for Skeptophilia, I stumbled upon a page over on Quora that made me utter a string of really bad words and then say, "that nonsense again?"

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that the aforementioned nonsense was the contention that mythological accounts of powerful deities living in the skies are evidence of visitations by aliens with advanced technology.  The original poster on Quora called it "the Ancient Alien Theory," which made me grind my teeth even harder, because the use of the word theory to mean "this crazy idea I just now pulled out of my ass" makes me absolutely livid.

But I shouldn't be surprised that they use it this way, because (1) they also misinterpret just about every piece of archaeological or anthropological evidence in existence, and (2) calling it a "theory" gives an undeserved sheen of seriousness to their claim.  What gets me, though, is that this stuff has been around for decades, has been debunked every which way from Sunday, and it's still got traction.

The whole goofy story starts with the book Chariots of the Gods, written by Erich von Däniken in 1968, but more's the pity, it doesn't end there.  Chariots of the Gods is the Creature That Won't Die.  Like the Hydra, it just keeps regrowing heads and coming back at you again.  In fact, Chariots of the Gods was only the first of a series of books by von Däniken, each ringing the changes on the Ancient Astronauts theme.  When Chariots of the Gods hit the bestseller list, he followed it up with: Gods from Outer Space; The Gold of the Gods; In Search of Ancient Gods; Miracles of the Gods; Signs of the Gods; Pathways to the Gods; and Enough About The Gods, Already, Let's Talk About Something Else.

Obviously, I made the last one up, because von Däniken at age 89 is still blathering on about The Gods.  His books have sold 62 million copies, have been translated into 32 languages, and his ideas formed the basis of a theme park in Switzerland, thus further reinforcing my belief that skepticism will never be the lucrative profession that woo-wooism is.

A statue from the late Jomon period of Japan (1000-400 B.C.E.), which Erich von Däniken thinks can only be explained as a space-suited alien, since humans obviously never include weird imaginary creatures in their mythological art. [Image is in the Public Domain]

You might ask what von Däniken's evidence is, other than the argument from incredulity ("wow! The pyramids are really big!  I can't imagine making a pyramid, myself.  Therefore they must have been designed and constructed by aliens!").  Here are a few pieces of evidence that von Däniken claims support the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis:

• The Antikythera mechanism.  This complex "mechanical computer," found in a shipwreck dated to about 150 BCE, contains a series of nested gears and was used to calculate astronomical positions.  Von Däniken says it's of alien manufacture, despite the fact that similar devices are mentioned in Greek and Roman literature, including Cicero's De Re Publica, in which its invention is credited to Archimedes.  (To be fair to von Däniken, I used Antikythera myself as the central MacGuffin in my novel Gears.  However, unlike von Däniken's work, Gears is clearly labeled "fiction.")
• The Piri Reis map.  This map, dating to 1513, "could only have been drawn using an aerial perspective," von Däniken claims.  In other words, it was drawn looking down from a spacecraft.  Unfortunately for von Däniken, the truth is that human sailors have been quite good at drawing maps for a very long time, because those who weren't quickly became fish bait.  The antecedents of the Piri Reis map have been identified, and include ten maps of Arab origin, four of Portuguese origin, and one map drawn by Christopher Columbus himself.
• The sarcophagus of Mayan ruler K'inich Janaab' Pakal, which allegedly shows him riding in a spacecraft.  The claim has been denounced loudly by every known expert in Mayan culture, language, and history.  The sarcophagus depicts the Mayan religious concept of the "world tree," not a rocket ship with a plume of exhaust, says archaeologist Sarah Kurnick -- von Däniken's claims to the contrary show that he can't be bothered to learn the first thing about Mayan culture before making pronouncements about what their art and inscriptions mean.  An objection which, of course, could be made about every other cultural artifact he mentions.
• The Moai, or Easter Island statues.  These are pretty cool, but in my mind only demonstrate what a lot of single-minded people working together can accomplish.
• A "non-rusting" iron pillar in India, that supposedly didn't rust because it was some kind of alien alloy.  When von Däniken's books became popular, naturally skeptics wanted to go to India to check out this story.  They found the pillar, and you'll never guess what it had on it?  Rust.  If you can imagine.  Being that this was kind of conclusive, von Däniken backed off from this claim, and said in an interview with Playboy, "We can forget about this iron thing."

The truth is, piece after piece of von Däniken's "evidence" falls apart if you analyze it, and try not to be swayed by his hyperdramatic statements that always seem to include phrases like "can only be explained by," "scientists are baffled by," and "a mystery beyond human ken."  Von Däniken's books were written because they make money, and are, simply put, pseudoscientific tripe.  The best debunking of his claims was Ronald Story's 1976 book The Space Gods Revealed, which is a page-by-page refutation of all of von Däniken's claims, and remains to this day one of the best skeptical analyses of pseudoscience ever written.

But the frustrating bottom line is that all of that hasn't made a dent in the popularity of von Däniken and his ideas.  Much of the blame lies with shows like Ancient Aliens, of course; the This Is No Longer Even Remotely Related To History Channel keeps pushing it because it's lucrative (it's now on its twentieth season and showing no signs of flagging).  So despite the rationalists and skeptics giving themselves facepalm-induced concussions, it looks like The Gods are still going to be around for a good long while yet.

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