The mystery of the Travellers

Monday's post, about the difficulty of defining the term race, prompted a loyal reader of Skeptophilia to ask if I'd ever heard of the Irish Travellers.

I asked if they were Romani (colloquially referred to as Gypsies, although that term is now usually considered a slur) who live in Ireland.  She said no -- the story is more interesting than that.

And indeed it is.

The Travellers, or Mincéirí, are a generally nomadic group of people whose origins are shrouded in mystery, but who by some accounts have lived on the island as an identifiable group since at least the twelfth century C.E.  In the Irish language they're called An Lucht Siúil -- "the walking people."  They have a distinct style of dress, including emphasis on beadwork and embroidery, and their own sets of tunes and songs.  They even speak a separate language -- Shelta -- which contains words from Irish and English, as well as a number of what appear to be neologisms.  It's not been well-studied, because as a group with a history of persecution, the Travellers are (understandably) reluctant to share their knowledge with outsiders.  What's known of it, though, seems to be mutually unintelligible to both speakers of Irish and English, and to qualify as an actual separate language (i.e., not a dialect or a pidgin).

Despite the fact that they've experienced discrimination, and the difficulty of maintaining their lifestyle in the face of an increasingly homogenized, technological world, there are still over thirty thousand people in Ireland who self-identify as Travellers.

A Traveller caravan in July 1954 [Image credit: National Library of Ireland]

Their origins are a mystery.  There are Romani in Ireland, just as there are in most European countries; although they occupy a similar societal niche as the Travellers, they seem to be unrelated.  (Genetic studies of Romani have shown fairly conclusively that they are an Indo-Aryan people who made their way into Europe something like a thousand years ago from what is now the Indian state of Rajasthan.)  An analysis of the genetics of the Travellers has found that they are essentially Irish in origin, although have been reproductively isolated from the rest of the population since at least the eleventh century C.E., and possibly before.  This study concluded that while related, the Travellers are as distinct from the rest of the Irish as the Icelanders are from the Norwegians.

How could this have happened?  One hypothesis -- and it's no more than that -- is that the ancestors of the Travellers belonged to an itinerant profession that was looked down upon and segregated not because of genetic unrelatedness, but because of social stigma (similar to the Dalits of India).  Like many people with a history of oppression, they are struggling to maintain their language, culture, and identity, and have finally achieved recognition by the Irish government as a distinct ethnic group worthy of protection.

Logo of the All-Travellers Forum (Mincéir Whiden is Shelta for "Travellers talking")

This group highlights once again the difficulty of defining what we mean by race or ethnicity.  Genetically, the Travellers are very similar to the Irish, and seem to share a common origin some time in the last millennium.  Their language, Shelta, probably started out being a pidgin of Old Gaelic and Middle English, but now (like the Kreyòl language of Haiti) has evolved and strengthened into an actual complex and complete language.  Culturally, they're distinct enough to warrant governmental recognition and at least some efforts toward protection and support.

This is hardly the only such case known.  Here in the United States, we've got the Melungeons of eastern Tennessee and Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, the Brass Ankles of South Carolina, and the Redbones of southwestern Louisiana, all of which seem from genetic studies to be "tri-racial isolates" descended from a combination of sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans, and western European ancestors, but who -- like the Travellers -- have been separate long enough to develop their own distinct cultures.  My mother's people, the Cajuns, are another such case; they're predominantly of Nova Scotian French ancestry, but have a good admixture of Indigenous Canadian, French Creole, Spanish, and German ancestry, and by virtue of being isolated for a good two centuries, have developed a unique culture and language.  My having learned French as a child from my older relatives means I have a strong Cajun accent when I speak it.  When I've visited Québec, I've often found it difficult to understand and be understood -- another example, to pilfer a quip from Oscar Wilde, of two countries separated by the same language.

So there you have it.  Thank you to the reader who suggested the topic; I always love it when my research for this blog results in my learning something I hadn't known about.  I find human genetics, ethnicity, language, and migration patterns endlessly fascinating -- explaining my choice of a field for my master's degree, and the frequency with which the topic shows up here at Skeptophilia.  And I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that the truth is more complex than our desire to pigeonhole reality would suggest.  As Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anybody who found life simple.  I think a time or a life looks simple only if you leave out the details."

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Just to be on the safe side

Here in the United States there is escalating concern among many of us that health insurance rates are going to skyrocket, since Donald Trump's campaign promise of making health care affordable is still at the tentative thoughts about a potential discussion of a concept of a plan stage.  The Republicans in Congress are understandably unconcerned, because they have their health insurance paid for.

It's the "I just ate dinner, so there's no such thing as a hunger problem" approach to things.

While health insurance and car insurance have always made good sense to me -- paying some amount monthly to guarantee not being bankrupted if you have a huge emergency -- a lot of kinds of insurance are just weird.  Take, for example, life insurance.  I guess in some ways it's reasonable; a cash payout to survivors to replace the income of a principal breadwinner, for example.  But in a lot of ways it seems like the insurance company betting every month that you'll live longer than you think you will, and if you die young, you win.

This is far from the weirdest thing people have insured, however.  Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart, and Bob Dylan all have their vocal cords insured with Lloyd's of London, although in Dylan's case you have to wonder how much worse his voice would have to get before he'd be entitled to file a claim.  Michael Flatley, of Riverdance fame, has his legs insured for $47 million dollars.  I guess these, too, make some degree of sense, though, since all these people depend on the insured parts for their livelihood.

An insurance policy from 1851  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, Life insurance certificate issued by the Yorkshire Fire & Life Insurance Company to Samuel Holt, Liverpool, England, 1851.  British Museum, London, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But it only gets stranger from here.  Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth insured his penis, which is named -- I swear I'm not making this up -- "Little Elvis," for a million dollars.  What I wonder about this is how he became concerned he was at risk of losing it.  I mean, I'm as fond of mine as the next guy, but I've never really had any serious worries that it was going to get stolen or something.  Be that as it may, apparently Roth is All Shook Up about the possibility, to the point that he'll pay a premium monthly just to be sure he's adequately compensated if Little Elvis decides to Return to Sender.

Then there are the three sisters in Inverness, Scotland, who each paid £100 annually for a policy with a £1,000,000 payout if any of them experienced a virgin conception and gave birth to the Second Coming of Christ.  Apparently their motivation was concern over the emotional stress of raising baby Jesus, which I have to admit would be a challenge to even the most well-intentioned parent.  The company that issued the policy, British Insurance, eventually cancelled it, however.  "The Catholic Church is up in arms about what we've been doing," said Simon Burgess, the company's managing director.  "We have withdrawn the cover because it was causing a furore."

So I guess if Christ's rebirth occurs in Inverness, the New Holy Family are going to be on their own.

Then there are the estimated 37,000 people who have purchased insurance against the possibility of their being abducted by aliens.  Presumably this is for people who are abducted and then returned, because if you were whisked off to Zeta Reticuli or wherever permanently, it'd be kind of hard to file a claim.  It sounds weird, but the insurance companies that have offered such a policy seem to recognize that it's a great way to get people's money with a near-zero chance of ever having to pay anything to the insured.  Apparently the London-based company Goodfellow Rebecca Ingrams Pearson offered a policy -- now discontinued -- that provided double indemnity if the abduction resulted in pregnancy.  This explicitly even applied to men, because you never know what those crafty aliens might be capable of.

What I wonder most about alien abduction insurance, though, is how the hell they calculated the premium.  Insurance companies hire people called actuaries, whose job it is to assess the overall risk of the company having to pay out, and then fix the premiums at a level that would allow the company to cover their expenses (including payouts) and still turn a profit.  So: the higher the risk of payout, the higher the premium.  That's why smokers pay more for life insurance, for example.  But how do you assess the risk for something that has never happened, and which (to all appearances) won't ever happen?  My guess is the actuaries stayed up late one night discussing it, and after a few martinis they said, "Fuck it, let's just charge 'em a hundred bucks yearly per million and call it good."

Anyhow, here's yet more evidence that I have zero understanding of my fellow humans.  I mean, okay, I get why the insurance companies do this.  Despite reassuring us that they're Like a Good Neighbor and that You're In Good Hands, the reason they exist is to rake in truly enormous amounts of cash for their CEOs and stockholders.  But what motivates the people who purchase these policies?  Are they really that worried they'll be abducted and/or impregnated?  Like with David Lee Roth's wee friend, you have to wonder if any of these people understand the concept of actual risk.

Or maybe they all have way more money than I do, and figure, "What the hell, I can afford it, may as well sleep a little more soundly at night."

Me, I'm willing to take my chances.  I'm already paying an astronomical amount for health insurance, and that's only going to get worse given the current regime's Corporate Profits FTW attitude.  As far as my various body parts and my likelihood of being abducted by aliens, I think I'll just deal with it if it happens.  And I doubt seriously if my wife and I would be chosen as parents to Jesus 2.0.  I think as a pair of sixty-something atheists, we're probably unlikely to be anywhere near the top of the list.

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Race to the bottom

The Greek philosopher Socrates made a name for himself -- as well as a good many enemies -- by pouncing on people who were using words like "virtue" or "truth" or "evil" and demanding that they define them.  Then, by asking further questions, he gradually and inexorably demonstrated that those who were so confidently proclaiming their opinions couldn't come up with a thoughtful, rational, self-consistent definition of the terms they were using.

It's a technique we should employ when people use the word race.

Especially covert racists like Donald Trump and overt ones like Stephen Miller, despite the baffling question of how either one of them can look in the mirror in the morning and think, "Yeah, baby, that's a Master Race face, right there."  The notoriously anti-immigrant Trump made the news a few days ago by saying he's tired of immigrants from "shithole countries" but would be just thrilled to welcome lots of immigrants from (for example) Norway, prompting many Norwegians to injure themselves laughing, which wasn't a big deal for them because at least they have a free national health care system.  The subtext, of course, is that the northern European countries Trump is so fond of have lots of light-skinned people, and the "shithole countries" he hates mostly don't, but even he hasn't gotten bold enough to say it that bluntly.

Then there was Stephen "Temu Goebbels" Miller, who tweeted the heartwarming Christmas message that he'd watched a Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin Christmas special with his kids, and "imagine watching that and thinking we need infinity migrants," because apparently there's nothing like celebrating the birth of the baby of a homeless Middle Eastern couple so poor they had to bed him down in a stable by sending as many brown-skinned immigrants as you can find to concentration camps.  Miller's statement becomes even more insane when you realize that the two performers he was enjoying with his kids, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, were both the children of poor Italian immigrants.

What puts this into even finer focus is that there's no good definition of what race actually means, and that's even if you ask the scientists who study it.  I wouldn't go so far as to say it's meaningless, but what's certain is that (1) it has little to no genetic basis, and (2) it's primarily cultural.  The characteristics laypeople usually use to define race -- things like skin, eye, and hair color, hair texture, eye shape, and various other facial features -- are under the control of only a handful of genes, and are highly responsive to natural selection based upon climate.  (For example, West Africans and Indigenous Australians have a lot of the same "tropical" characteristics -- dark skin and eyes, curly hair, broad noses -- and yet are very distantly related.)

Besides the bigoted nonsense from Trump and Miller, the other reason this comes up is that I'm currently reading the book Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.  Cavalli-Sforza, who died in 2018 at the age of 96, was something of the elder statesman in the field of human population genetics, and his work is rightly viewed as foundational in our understanding of race, ethnicity, migration, and human evolution.  Despite my background in the field -- population genetics is one of only a small number of disciplines in which I can honestly consider my background reasonably solid -- I have had a couple of eye-opening moments while reading this book.  And there was one that made me say, out loud, "Wow!", which I reproduce verbatim below:

Classification based on continental origin could furnish a first approximation of racial division, until we realize that Asia and even Africa and the Americas are very heterogeneous...  The observation has been made that almost any human group -- from a village in the Pyrenees or Alps, to a Pygmy camp in Africa -- displays almost the same average difference between individuals, although gene frequencies typically differ from village to village by some small amount.  Any small village typically contains about the same genetic variation as another village located on any other continent.  Each population is a microcosm that recapitulates the entire human macrocosm even if the precise genetic compositions vary slightly.  Naturally, a small village in the Alps, or a Pygmy camp of thirty people, is somewhat less heterogeneous genetically than a large country, for example, China, but perhaps only by a factor of two.  On average, these populations have a heterogeneity among individuals only slighly less than that in evidence in the whole world.  Regardless of the type of genetic markers used... the variation between two random individuals within any one population is 85% as large as that between two individuals randomly selected from the world's population.

Just to hammer that point home: pick two people, one of them of the same race as you, and who lives near you in your home town, and the other of a different race from the other side of the world.  The average genetic distance between you, the neighbor, and the other-race "foreigner" is only about fifteen percent, and perhaps much less.

Appearance confounds.  We here in the United States (and many people in western Europe) would call a San Bushman living right next door to a Tswana man in Botswana as both the same race ("Black"), and an English woman and a Japanese woman of different races, despite the fact that multiple studies have shown the San and Tswana are far more distantly related to each other than the English are to the Japanese.  (In fact, sub-Saharan Africa has more human genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together -- unsurprising if you consider that this is where the human race got its start, but perhaps surprising to those who believe in the principle of skin color über alles.)

Bigotry, of course, is based in fear.  People like Trump and Miller are afraid of white people becoming a minority because of how they and their cronies treat minorities, and they're in terror of the idea of being on the receiving end for a change.  Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm not asking for an open-borders policy; despite (once again) what you hear from the current regime, no one I've ever heard has demanded letting anyone and everyone in.  There are real problems with overcrowding, stress on social support systems, cross-border drug trafficking, and so on.  But neither is the answer "America is for white people, so keep everyone else out" -- especially given that we Americans of European descent are here because we swiped the land only a couple of centuries ago from indigenous people who had been here for tens of thousands of years.

And who didn't, despite what you hear from J. D. Vance's outrageous lies, "engage in widespread child sacrifice" until the Christians came in and forced them to stop.

Anyhow, I'm going to play Socrates.  If Trump, Vance, Miller et al. want to have race-based quotas for immigration, I want them to give me a rational, scientifically-credible definition for what race actually means.  My guess is that if Cavalli-Sforza couldn't do it, neither can they.

So maybe they should just shut the fuck up about it.

I suspect all this won't sit well with the bigots, and they'd be just as happy if I'd go somewhere quiet and drink my nice big cup of hemlock.  Well, sorry, chums, that ain't gonna happen.  If reality and the truth make you uncomfortable, seems like that's a "you problem."

Maybe you should take to heart the wise words of another great thinker -- the Fourth Doctor:  "The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common; they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."

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The problem of choice

I was telling a friend about my current novel work-in-progress, Nightingale, a couple of days ago, and he asked me an interesting question: to what extent is the main character... me?

On the surface, it seems like there's very little in common.  Simon de Montbard is the scion of minor French nobility in the thirteenth century, and gets himself involved in political intrigue that takes him to the king's court in Paris, then to Scotland, and finally to the Holy Land.  He was crippled as an infant by polio, with the result of partial one-sided facial paralysis and a stunted right leg.  His physical deficits result in his being continually misjudged and devalued; this was a culture where deformities of any kind were considered to be God's punishment for some kind of sin, and always to go along with mental and spiritual defects.  He has to prove himself, again and again, to every new person he meets.

Montbard, France, where Simon grew up [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Benjamin Smith, Montbard - Brenne - 2, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But internally -- yeah, there's a lot of similarity.  Simon's struggles have made him hesitant, slow to trust, taciturn.  But despite his reluctance to engage, there's a deep yearning for more from life than what he thought he'd have -- managing the family estate, leading a life of idleness and the privileges of being comfortably wealthy during a time when the vast majority of people never had enough to eat.  Because of that drive, he is impelled to take chances, almost despite himself.  Some work out well; he finds deep and abiding love in a very unexpected person.  Others -- not so much.  People he trusted take advantage of him, eventually cornering him into a situation where he has no choice but to kill someone, an event that overshadows the entire rest of his life.  All along the way, he questions whether he's made the right choices -- or, indeed, if he even could have chosen differently.

And throughout, he receives guidance from Procellus, the mysterious, quasi-angelic figure whom no one else but Simon seems to be able to see or hear.  Is he a figment of Simon's imagination, an internal guide made external -- or something more real?  In the ship on the way to the Holy Land, they have the following conversation:

“What awaits us in the Holy Land?” I asked Procellus.

“You know I cannot tell you that.”  A faint smile touched his lips, but his expression still held sadness.

“But you know.”

He shrugged.  “I know some. Other things—well, as I said, it is still up to you.  Your whole path until this very moment, every step of the way, you might have chosen differently, and the trajectory of your life would have had a very different shape.  I’ve never forced you to do anything.  It’s always been your choice.”

“It feels like fate.”

“That’s only because you’re seeing it from the perspective of right now.  From that vantage point each step you take shapes the next one, but the destination lies in deep shadow.  But it is the way of all humans, is it not?  So do not worry yourself overmuch about the possibility of getting to the end of your life and finding you did not choose perfectly every time.  If you can lie down on that last day and smile, and say, ‘I did well enough with what I knew at the time, and things worked out as they should have’ you will be far ahead of most.”

“But even so, Procellus—people will still harm each other and deceive each other and… die.”

I almost couldn’t choke out the final word.

“Yes.”

“No matter what I do.”

“Yes.  But don’t take that to mean you don’t make a difference.  Each person’s choices create what is.  There is no such thing as an insignificant choice.”

It's something I've wrestled with all my life.  What would my life have been if I'd made different choices?  What I've many times called "the worst decision I ever made" -- to live at home while I went to college, instead of venturing out and going somewhere out-of-state, a decision made purely out of fear of the unknown -- would have led to my not meeting people who have been friends ever since.  I would never have met my first wife, so my two sons wouldn't have been born.  I'd never have moved to Seattle, and might not have ended up in a 32-year career of teaching in which I touched hundreds of lives. 

Or, what if I'd come out as queer when I knew it -- age seventeen -- rather than staying in the closet until I was 54?  I could have lived life more authentically, and avoided years of fear and shame.  But -- this would have been in the 1970s in a very religious, conservative part of the country.  And I was in my early twenties at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when testing positive was still pretty much a death sentence.  I can easily imagine myself being one of those first victims.

Everything is contingent.

Or maybe -- nothing is.  Is it the way Procellus describes it, that we could all along have made different choices?  Or that choices only seem like choices with the benefit of hindsight, and we truly did the only things we could have done given who we were, and what the circumstances were, at the time? 

This gets into the whole issue of free will versus determinism, which has been debated endlessly and upon which I am dramatically unqualified to weigh in.  Interestingly, just a couple of days ago, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder commented on a paper alleging to show that quantum physics precludes the possibility of free will.  The claim hinges on the no-cloning theorem of quantum physics, which seems to forbid our making high-fidelity models of reality in our own minds, rendering us incapable of representing choices well enough to made decisions.  She was dubious that the argument holds water, and like her, I seriously doubt this will settle the matter to anyone's satisfaction.

So, like Simon, I'm stuck endlessly questioning my decisions, and wondering if I chose right, or if I even could have chosen any differently.

Anyhow, in answer to my friend's question; yeah, I guess Simon de Montbard is a lot like me, if not in the circumstantial characteristics, in the deeper, internal ones.  Maybe we authors do this all the time, though -- writing out our own victories and tragedies, joys and sorrows, through our characters.  Writing as therapy, in the hopes that others who have been through similar situations will find it as therapeutic to read.

And -- back to work on Nightingale.  I'm three-quarters of the way through, but Simon still has a long voyage yet to take.  I hope to finish it early in 2026; we'll see how it goes.  It's been an interesting story to tell, featuring a few pivotal points in history, including the beginning of the Scottish Civil War, the Siege of Acre, and the collapse of the Templars.  But I hope that when it's done, it'll be the characters who stay with you.  They seem so real to me it's almost like I know them, as if I'm witnessing what real people are doing and simply writing it down.  A story I am somehow compelled to tell, and about which I have little agency to change.

Whether that sense of compulsion is itself an illusion is beyond my ability to parse.

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Hoax repair

There's a general rule that once a baseless claim is made, getting people to disbelieve in it is nearly impossible.

This is a pattern the Trump regime has used over and over, from "they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats" to COVID conspiracies to "the libruls are comin' for your guns" to "queer people are all pedophiles" to the endless parade of migrant caravans that conveniently never seem to arrive.  None of them had any factual basis; instead, they appealed to fear and bigotry, reinforced by the perpetual tape-loop of Fox and Newsmax and hate-mongers like Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Loomer.

What always strikes me, though, is that you don't even need to hook into those basic human emotions to get the ball rolling, and once it is rolling, it's damn near impossible to stop.  What you're claiming doesn't even need to make sense.  All it takes is a single sensational claim at the right time, and it can persist for years.

Centuries, even.  Take, for example, the claim that a cave was discovered in 1909 in the Grand Canyon that contained Egyptian artifacts.

The whole thing got started with a front-page story in the Arizona Gazette on 5 April 1909, stating that an immense cave complex was being investigated by a team from the Smithsonian Institution, led by archaeologists G. E. Kincaid and S. A. Jordan.  The cave, the article said, contained "rows of dozens of male mummies," copper and bronze tools, "granaries," and statues with "Buddhist imagery."  This, the article said, provided conclusive proof that Egypt and the American southwest were historically linked.

Well, needless to say -- or maybe I do need to say it, considering what happened afterward -- none of this is true.  For one thing, why we'd expect an ancient Egyptian cave would contain "Buddhist imagery" is beyond me; maybe to your typical early-twentieth-century American, Egypt and India both just fell under the heading of "mysterious and oriental," and that was good enough.  For another, an inquiry into the Smithsonian found no employees named G. E. Kincaid or S. A. Jordan, or anything close, who could be plausibly connected with an archaeological investigation in that time or place.

But none of that mattered.  The situation only got worse when geologist Clarence Dutton was in charge of mapping and naming features of the Grand Canyon, and came up with "Isis Temple" and "Horus Temple" (as well as the Brahma and Vishnu Schists and the Zoroaster Pluton, since we're throwing all the eastern religions together for some reason).  Dutton's choices had zero to do with the Arizona Gazette article -- they were, he said, from a desire to "draw from global mythologies" in naming the features -- but of course, all this did was add fuel to the fire.

So, okay.  We have a hoax from 1909.  What is remarkable is...

... it's still going.

Park rangers, archaeologists, and geologists are still routinely asked about the "Kincaid cave" and if there's a place where tourists can see all the "Egyptian artifacts" that were found in the Grand Canyon.  There are YouTube videos about it -- not as an example of a ridiculous hoax, but of a coverup by the Smithsonian.  (This is often paired with the other thing the Smithsonian is supposedly covering up, which is the discovery of the skeletons of giant humanoids in North America, allegedly the remains of the biblical "giants among men," about which I wrote a few years ago.)

What strikes me about all this is how easy it is to promote misinformation, and that it's nearly impossible to eradicate it once it's out there.  Hell, it doesn't even have to be plausible.  It's astonishing that even back in 1909, when our knowledge of history, archaeology, and science wasn't as robust, anyone could fall for this.  But combine two things with a lot of cachet -- the Grand Canyon and ancient Egypt -- then throw in the added interest of a massive coverup by the scientists, and you have a hoax that has persisted for well over a hundred years.

Which is why it's so absolutely critical to demand the truth right from the outset -- especially in realms where it matters way more than some strange story about ancient Egyptians in Arizona.  Because once people believe a lie, getting them to let it go is remarkably difficult.

And I swear, the first journalist with the guts to say to Karoline Leavitt, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, or Donald Trump himself -- on a live mic in front of an audience -- "What you just said was a bald-faced lie," should be an immediate contender for the Pulitzer Prize.

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The advantage of simplicity

One of the most common misconceptions about evolution is that it is goal-oriented.

You hear it all the time.  Giraffes evolved longer necks so they could reach foliage higher up in tree branches -- as if some poor short-necked giraffes  were trundling about on the African savanna looking longingly up into the canopy and thinking, "Wow, that looks amazing," so their kids were born with longer necks.  It becomes even more insidious when you start talking about human evolution, because the way it's often presented is that waaaaaay back you had something like a jellyfish that evolved into something like a worm, and then into a primitive fish, into an amphibian, into a reptile, into a proto-mammal, into true mammals then primates then...

... us.  Sitting, of course, on the very top as befits the pinnacle of evolution, as if all along we're what the whole process had been aiming at.

This misses the boat in several very important ways.  One is that this linear view of evolution is simply wrong.  Evolution causes repeated branching; in fact, in our own lineage, many of the basic body plans we have today (flatworms, roundworms, jellyfish, annelids, mollusks, echinoderms, arthropods, and primitive vertebrates) all arose at around the same time, during what's called the Cambrian explosion.  During the intervening 540-million-odd years since that happened, some of the branches of the tree of life have changed a great deal more than others; but all living things on Earth have exactly the same length of evolutionary history.

A really critical way that the teleological model for evolution fails is that it misses completely how evolution actually works.  Natural selection isn't forward-looking at all; it operates by the environment selecting the forms that have the highest survival and reproductive potential now, irrespective of what the conditions might be a week from Tuesday.  It is very much the Law of Whatever Works, and what works today might not work at all if conditions change -- something we should pay attention to apropos of climate change.

A third problem is the perception that evolution always leads to higher complexity, strength, and intelligence.  None of these are true.  Consider that insects, especially beetles, are the most numerous and diverse animals on Earth by far -- both species-wise, and individual-for-individual, insects outnumber all other animals put together.  Sometimes simplicity has a higher survival advantage than complexity does, and -- to judge by the natural world, and even a significant fraction of the human part of it -- I'm not convinced that intelligence is always an advantage, either.

As a good example of the advantage of simplicity -- and the reason the topic comes up today -- consider the little plant species Balanophora fungosa.  It's found in warm, moist forests in Taiwan, Japan, and Okinawa, and on first glance it looks like a strange mushroom.  Balanophora is in the family Balanophoraceae, which comprises sixteen genera and is somewhat tentatively placed in order Santalales along with more familiar plants like sandalwood and mistletoe.  All the members of Balanophoraceae are obligate parasites, living off the roots of very specific species of trees.

Balanophora fungosa [Image credit: Petra Svetlikova]

Where it gets interesting is that Balanophora has done what superficially looks like evolution in reverse.  It's lost its ability to produce chlorophyll; it has no conventional root system.  Most of the plant kingdom have on the order of two hundred genes whose job it is to produce and operate plastids, the pigment-containing organelles that include chloroplasts; Balanophora has reduced that number to twenty.  Many species in Balanophoraceae produce seeds without fertilization, obviating the need for flowers.

What's curious is that these odd little plants have been around for a long time.  They branched off from the rest of the plant kingdom in the mid-Cretaceous period, something like a hundred million years ago, and have been quietly doing their thing ever since, gradually evolving to jettison structures (and even genes) they don't need along the way.  "Balanophora has lost much of what defines it as a plant, but retained enough to function as a parasite," said Petra Svetlikova, of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, who led the study.  "It's a fascinating example of how something so strange can evolve from an ancestor that looked like a normal plant with leaves and a normal root system."

Because of its extreme specialization, both in terms of habitat and host species, Balanophora is threatened by habitat change.  "Most known habitats of Balanophora are protected in Okinawa, but the populations face extinction by logging and unauthorized collection," Svetlikova said.  "We hope to learn as much as we can about this fantastic, ancient plant before it's too late.  It serves as a reminder of how evolution continues to surprise us."

So there you have some cool research about an evolutionary holdout from a hundred-million-year-old split in the tree of life.  Here, simplicity, not complexity, seems to have been the key to its long survival.  One can only hope that this strange little plant hasn't lasted so long only to reach the end because of us.

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A twist in the fabric

I hope y'all will indulge me one more astronomical post, because just this week in the journal Science Advances there was a very cool paper about an observational verification of the phenomenon of frame-dragging.

The whole thing depends on the the concept of "the fabric of space-time," something that got ripped so often on Star Trek that you'd swear the universe was made of cheap pantyhose.  To be fair, the idea isn't easy to wrap your brain around, something that becomes obvious when you hear some laypeople talking about the Big Bang.

I mean, I try to be tolerant, but if I hear one more person say, "It's a stupid idea -- that nothing exploded and became everything," I swear, I'm going to hurl a heavy object at 'em.

The problem hinges on trying to draw an analogy between the Big Bang (or in general, the expansion of the Universe) with a conventional explosion, where something blows up and spreads out into space that was already there.  With the Big Bang, it was space itself that was stretching -- if the idea of cosmic inflation turns out to be correct, at first it was at a rate that I can't even begin to comprehend -- so the matter in the Universe moved, and is still moving, not because something was physically pushing on it (as in the explosion of a stick of dynamite), but because the space it was embedded in was expanding.

(For what it's worth -- no, at this point we don't understand why this happened, what initiated it, or why the rate changed so suddenly after the "inflationary era" was over.  There is a lot still to figure out about this.  But one thing that's nearly certain is that it did happen, and the evidence still left behind of the Big Bang is incontrovertible.)

In any case, it's useful to change the comparison.  The Big Bang, and the expansion that followed, is much less like a conventional explosion than it is like blowing up a balloon.  Astronomer Edwin Hubble realized this when he first observed red shift, and found that everywhere he looked in the universe, objects seemed to be flying away from us -- the farther away, the faster they were moving.  It looked very much like we were the center of the Universe, the middle of the explosion, as if you were at the very point where a bomb exploded and were watching the bits and pieces rush away from you.

The truth, Hubble realized, was more subtle, but also way more interesting.  The fabric of space itself was stretching.  Picture a deflated balloon covered with dots.  You're a tiny person standing on one of the dots.  The balloon inflates -- and all the other dots appear to be rushing away from you.  But the weird thing is that it doesn't matter which dot you're standing on.  You could be on any dot, and still all the others would appear to be moving away, because the surface itself is expanding.  So an alien in a distant galaxy would also think everything was moving away from him, and he and Hubble would both be right.

There is no center of the Universe.  Or everywhere is the center.

Which amounts to the same thing.

So it's much more accurate, if you're trying to picture the whole thing, to think of space as being some kind of "stuff" capable of being deformed or stretched.

Which leads us to this week's mind-blowing discovery in astronomy.

One of the stranger predictions of the General Theory of Relativity -- and there's a lot of competition in that regard -- is that a massive spinning object would drag space-time along with it, twisting it out of shape in a phenomenon called Lense-Thirring frame dragging after the Austrian physicists who predicted it based on Einstein's theories, Josef Lense and Hans Thirring.  The problem is, like most of the phenomena associated with Relativity, the Lense-Thirring effect would only be observed in extreme conditions -- in this case a very high-mass object spinning really fast.

To give you an idea of what kind of extremes I'm talking about, here: with the Earth's mass and spin, the Lense-Thirring effect would cause an angular shift of about one degree every 100,000 years.

Not exactly something that jumps out at you.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/H. Kim et al., Celestial spiral with a twist, CC BY 4.0]

Now some scientists led by Cosimo Inserra of Cardiff University have found a remarkable pair of stellar remnants that provide the perfect laboratory for observing frame-dragging -- a star undergoing a "tidal disruption event" from a supermassive black hole (i.e. it's being messily devoured).  This is an ideal pairing to study because the star is orbiting the black hole once every twenty days, and the lighthouse-like beam of x-rays and radio waves produced as the material gets swallowed appears from our perspective to flicker on and off.  Conservation of Angular Momentum makes the flicker rate extremely constant.

But because of the Lense-Thirring effect, both the jets and the accretion disk of material swirling around the black hole have developed a wobble, which makes the entire system precess like a spinning top.  And the rate of precession...

... is exactly what is predicted from the General Theory of Relativity.

"Our study shows the most compelling evidence yet of Lense-Thirring precession -- a black hole dragging space time along with it in much the same way that a spinning top might drag the water around it in a whirlpool," Inserra said.  "This is a real gift for physicists as we confirm predictions made more than a century ago.  Not only that, but these observations also tell us more about the nature of TDEs -- when a star is shredded by the immense gravitational forces exerted by a black hole.  Unlike previous TDEs studied, which have steady radio signals, the signal for AT2020afhd showed short-term changes, which we were unable to attribute to the energy release from the black hole and its surrounding components.  This is further confirmed the dragging effect in our minds and offers scientists a new method for probing black holes."

The whole thing is staggering when you think about it.  Even the fact that we can detect such a small effect from this distance is a testimony to how far science has come.

"By showing that a black hole can drag space time and create this frame-dragging effect, we are also beginning to understand the mechanics of the process," Inserra said.  "It's a reminder to us, especially during the festive season as we gaze up at the night sky in wonder, that we have within our grasp the opportunity to identify ever more extraordinary objects in all the variations and flavors that nature has produced."

So Einstein wins again.  Pretty impressive for a guy who once said to a friend struggling in a math class, "Do not worry too much about your difficulties in mathematics.  I can assure you that mine are still greater."

So that's our mindblowing science of the day.  Spinning stars, twisting space-time, and tilted black holes.  I don't know how anyone can read about this stuff and not be both fascinated at how weird our universe is, and astonished that we've progressed to the point where we can understand at least a bit of it.  Here, several hundred quadrillion kilometers away, we've detected minuscule tilts in a whirling stellar remnant, and used it to support a theory that describes how matter and energy work throughout the Universe.

If that's not an impressive accomplishment, I don't know what is.

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