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Science

Migration

There’s always Panama. If we get too overwhelmed by the insanity of the contemporary world we could migrate to some island near Panama joining a troupe of exceedingly happy, permanently stoned sloths. You read that right: the moss there, and the water infused by the moss, has an alkaloid- based chemical composition that is also found in Valium…. much appreciated by an already slow-moving species.

Canada Geese, who no longer migrate

I picked up this comforting tidbit of information from a radio show that taught me a lot about migration, something I’ve been again wondering about last week when I found myself amongst hundreds of visiting white geese, Canada geese and sandhill cranes during my walks. Below is the condensed version of what I learned.

Sandhill Cranes

Questions like why does migration happen in general, and where do these birds come from or where do they go, how do they know the travel routes and/or final destinations, have been asked for 1000s of years. We have now answers for some of the questions, and are still surprisingly clueless about others.

White Geese

Aristoteles – is there any subject he didn’t tackle, ever? – suggested three possibilities to explain the disappearance of birds during the Greek winter months. One was the speculation that they traveled to other places, one was the suggestion that they might hibernate (behavior that people had observed in bats around Athens) and the third was transmutation. Wish that were true – let’s just all transmute into happier forms when we are bored with our worm pecking, grub searching existence…. let’s become sloths!

The migration hypothesis was elevated in the 17th century with the (re)invention of the telescope by Hans Lippershey in the early 1600s. (He applied for a patent (!) thus outsmarting a local competitor who claimed it was his design – but that is a mystery story for another day.) Peering into the sky and seeing all those lunar hills and craters suggested perfectly sensible travel plans of birds: they go to the moon! It took until 1822 to dislodge this human projection of our own dream, when some hunting Count von So and So returned with his kill from the heaths of Northern Germany: a stork. A stork with a spear embedded in his neck, that had not prevented him from traveling North. A weapon that was, according to the consulted German luminaries in the university ethnology departments, of African origins. (You can read more about the “Pfeilstorch” here.)

Care to try flying with that thing in you for 2000 miles? At least you’re not a tern – they have a round trip of 60 000 miles!

Across the next years about 25 individual birds were collected that had somehow managed to migrate from one continent to the other with a piece of ebony poking through their necks… Mystery solved – birds migrated South. Scientific insight gained beyond the migration destination: some form of marking allows us to identify the birds and tracking their routes. Banding was born. Nowadays it comes in more sophisticated forms of transmitters and receivers. And it does not just apply to the field of ornithology, but people research the migration patterns of everything, from wildebeests, caribous, whales, to turtles and butterflies, to name a few.

More on the specifics of these patterns tomorrow. They do matter, beyond feeding into the passions of your friendly bird photographer, for our understanding of nature as a system, as it turns out.

And here is a gem sent by a friend.

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Contradictions: Science vs Science (2)

Yesterday I wrote about some reasons why people distrust or outright reject science: contradictory findings are held against the validity of the scientific enterprise, debunked studies are seen as signs of sham proceedings, problems with replicability are justifying overall doubtfulness.

Let’s look at this a bit more closely. Non-replications (which, by the way, happen mostly in the areas where the social and personality variables of are investigated,) and de-bunking are actually signs of a robust health of science, rather than the opposite. People care to get it right. Science is a cumulative enterprise that happens slowly, over time, with careful calibration. It is open to explore where things might have failed or, more likely were dependent on contextual variables that we are unable to re-create.

This is not picked up in news reporting which, for obvious purposes, goes for the latest, the flashy, the new. Nor do you read in the news each and every case of where replications succeeded – far outweighing the opposite cases, but not considered news-worthy. You have a real sampling problem here: I tell you the bad, because it sells the paper – never mind, it sells the on-line ads – but m silent on far more frequent good outcomes.

These are, alas, not the only causes for our view of science as untrustworthy. Science is often met with loud opposition, and those who oppose it know how to manipulate the general population. Think of what vested interest managed to do: if science was a threat to profit it was ignored, dissed, or its results never published. This is true for the tobacco industry, the fracking industry, the pharmaceutical industry – you probably can add considerably to this list. Threatened interests withhold science, they disparage science, they lie about science. (Here is a series of clever articles on the whole issue.)

Then there is the enlistment of “merchants of doubt,” who as willing media create “balanced” debates where, say, one scientist denying the causes and consequences of the climate crisis (or the crisis outright) is confronted with another scientist describing a different picture. Never mind that only a few scientists agree with the former and 99 % of the rest agree with the latter. Just this week 11.ooo of them urged us to change energy, food and reproduction habits or face dire consequences….

Manipulation is all too often willingly received, though, by the public and none of us is exempt. Inconvenient findings might be a threat to our worldview, or a threat to our comfort levels in living our lives, a threat to the status quo that provides longed-for stability and maintenance of status for some of us. Climate science is a good example: acknowledging the physics, the facts about greenhouse gasses, would compete with a system’s need to protect free enterprise, avoid government intervention, compete with a solar power industry overtaking the coal industry, etc.

It would force us to face changing our own behavior from what we eat to if and how we travel, keep the house warm, buy clothes, you name it. Or think mandatory vaccines – g-d forbid the government infers with parents’ rights, (particularly when vaccines concern STD’s and a presumed impact on (to be deterred) sexual behavior is part of the equation.) Thus the public is perfectly happy to listen only to the data that confirm their worldview, or disparage data altogether as untrustworthy if they don’t.

This is true for the opposite side of the political spectrum as well. If you look at the left’s receptivity (or absence thereof) to data about gene manipulation, nano technology, nuclear power or factory farming you see some of the same picture. I am the first to admit my own cherry picking of data: I am following research on Alzheimers, since it is one of the things I dread most in life – loosing my brain. I am way less critical towards studies that bring me comfort, than those that don’t. Case in point: a recent finding that sleep might help to prevent the disease. Well, let’s be more precise: there is the assumption that something that happens during sleep, your brain getting washed, quite literally, with slushing waves of cerebrospinal fluid that takes the gunk in there away, is beneficial to your mental health. Tell that to this passionate sleeper.

New research from Boston University suggests that tonight while you sleep, something amazing will happen within your brain. Your neurons will go quiet. A few seconds later, blood will flow out of your head. Then, a watery liquid called cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) will flow in, washing through your brain in rhythmic, pulsing waves. 

Note, this does not allow us to make causal claims, even the correlations are tenuous, there might be a third variable problem, but oh, do I like a study like this, since as a deep sleeper it ever so marginally reduces my fears. Cherry picking, as I said. You will not find me promoting studies that seem to correlate frequent use of Benadryl with Alzheimers, on the other hand, since it would require changing my allergy medication habits…..

One more thing, and then I am done with the bully pulpit:

Science matters. Doing science right matters. Policy issues should be driven by science and not by individual taste or belief or industrial greed. But there is also a case to be made for some policy issues to be independent of science, and we have to be very careful in distinguishing the two. Take, for example, the argument that has been around for a while, that discrimination against the LGTBQ population should be prohibited because science has determined that genetics play a role in who you are and as who you present. What if science turns around and we find out it is all about social construct, not genes? Is it ok to discriminate then?

The point here is that there are moral arguments that should be independent of science, no matter what scientific claims we hold true at any given point in time.

And now, if you excuse me, I am off to catch a few winks of brain washing before I consider writing on morality…. Photographs are of waves, of course.

Music, though, not a lullaby….

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Contradictions: Science vs Science (1).

Never mind magic, miracles, witchcraft, the previous topics of this week. Many people don’t believe in science either, what with all the contradictory findings and and newly debunked studies that ruled the field for decades.

Coffee is bad for you. Coffee is good for you. A glass of wine with dinner will see you happily grow old. A glass of wine with dinner will be your demise! Exercise 20 hours a week and you will live forever. Exercise 20 minutes a week and you reap the same benefits. How often do we read that some previously touted finding is now completely reversed…. why should we ever trust scientific findings?

Note that my examples, the typical examples found in popular science writing you grab in the newspaper or listen to on NPR, do not concern physics, or chemistry, where it would be technically far harder to report something and far less interesting from a human interest point of view. It would also be far more consistent and thus of little interest to announce. The wild swings we read about come from epidemiological studies, research with large groups of people about something affecting their lives based in their life styles.

This is extremely hard science to do since it does not lend itself to one of the basic demands of the scientific method: random assignment of the participants. I cannot divide a random group of 1000 or more people into two, commanding and controlling one half to forgo alcohol for 10 years, while the other is allowed to indulge, and then test for outcomes. Instead, I have to rely on a group that happens to be non-drinkers to compare to those who are. This introduces the possibility that there is something else going on with one or both of the groups that feeds into my results.

Maybe non-drinkers are poorer and thus not buying wine, so other aspects of poverty affect the (negative) outcome. Maybe abstinent people are more health-conscious, reflected in additional healthy behavior, that is really at the core of the (positive) outcome. Maybe drinkers are in general a more social bunch, and the social aspects of their lives influence (positive) outcome. Maybe drinkers have underlying depression for which they self-medicate with alcohol and that affects the (negative) outcome. You get the idea. The conclusions – alcohol is good/bad for you – might be influenced by factors that have nothing to do with your beverage of choice after all and vary from study to study since these factors crop up in different populations. I might hope to control for all of these variables, but it is more or less impossible with self-selected populations.

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Then there is the furious debate over the non-replicability of standard scientific studies and the discovery of scientific data massaging, or in worse cases, scientific fraud. I was reminded of that when I learned that a study I had taught for decades to great theatrical effect is now partially debunked. On being Sane in Insane Places by David Rosenhan came out in 1973 in the highly respected journal Science. Eight healthy participants went to local psychiatric hospitals, claiming they heard voices saying: “Hollow, empty, thud.” (Imagine my dramatic re-enactment in front of the college classroom.) The study reported that all of them were diagnosed with mental illness, in many cases schizophrenia, based on this symptom alone, and kept in hospital, up to 52 days, leaving eventually against the advisement of the doctors. A total of 2,100 pills — serious psychiatric drugs — were claimed to be prescribed to these otherwise pseudo patients.

A new book by Susan Callahan, The Great Pretender, unravels all that went wrong with the set-up and the representation of the results of this study, while at the same time examining the pitfalls of a broken mental health-care system, and acknowledging that mistaken labeling in psychiatric care is all too real. However, inventing data about it is not going to help the cause. The same seems to be the case for Phil Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Study, with criticism delivered here.

And here is one last example, a study of gender bias, “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of ‘Blind’ Auditions on Female Musicians,” by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse, that has been cited over 1500 times and even referenced by Justice Bader-Ginsburg in one or another dissent.

Two subsequent critics have taken apart the statistics used to arrive at these conclusion. Here is a summary report (short video clip) by Christina Hoff Sommers, who wrote on this for the Wall Street Journal implying that our mistaken efforts towards political correctness propelled this supposedly flawed paper into mainstream discourse.

My immediate reaction: why on earth would I trust an author from the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, known for her critique of contemporary feminism in her diatribes on The Factual Feminist? More on that tomorrow when Distrust in Science continues!

Photographs today echo public sentiment of science as feather weight.

Music today with a female conductor who broke the all too real glass ceiling: Marin Alsop.

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Contradictions: Divination vs Mathematics

Really, the precise formulation should be divination producing geometric art used in faith healing – too clunky a title of course. But that is exactly what Emma Kunz is about. The woman who lived in Switzerland until her death in 1963 considered herself a researcher, but is described by seemingly everyone else as a telepath, prophet and healer, whose powers of intuition (according to the website of the Emma Kunz Zentrum) “achieved successes through her advice and treatments that often edged on the limits of miracles.“

Add to that: artist. Kunz produced close to 500 large – astonishing – drawings across her lifetime, which are finally receiving the recognition they deserve – as long as crankily rational people like me blot out the knowledge of how they were conceived: by means of a divining pendulum. She had retrospectives at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, and was part of the the Kunsthaus Zurich’ 1999 show “Richtkräfte für das 21. Jahrhundert”, which was dedicated to her, Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner. From March 2005 to April 2006, she could be seen at the Drawing Center New York, the Santa Monica Museum of Art and finishing at the Irish Museum of Art in Dublin. In 2012, her art was displayed at the Paul Klee Centre in Bern, followed by exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, at the “La Caixa” Foundation in Barcelona and in 2013 at the Biennale in Venice.

This year, 40 of her drawings were exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery at Kew Gardens, London. You can see a video of that show and experts talking about her work here. Benches made of a special material were placed in front of her drawings and described by participating sculptor Christodoulos Panayiotou as “interrupted sculptures.” The material came from a “mystic grotto”, the place near Zürich where Kunz once found a healing powder she dubbed Aion-A in the stones, and where the current center devoted to her memory (and selling her products, including said powder) is situated. The gallery’s assumption was that seated visitors would absorb some of the healing properties of the rock (claimed to affect rheumatism and inflammation if consumed) while looking at the art.

From what I learned (a wonderfully informativeinand beautifully written essay on her life and work, Emma Kunz: Art in the Spiritual Realm, can be found here) she asked her pendulum, hung over graph paper, a specific question and then would mark the points it swung to as co-ordinates, use the next extended swings as energy lines, and eventually fill in the rest with geometric forms and fields of color in a process that sometimes took up to 48 hours non-stop, with sleep and food rejected. She was convinced that these works would be fully interpretable in their cosmological depth for people in the 21st century.

No interpretation from this here 21st century writer ignorant of transcendentalism. Admiration, though, for the beauty the drawings convey, and the passion obvious in their execution which must have involved incredible patience, acuity and steady hands. A mathematical power really seems to emanate from these geometric forms.

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As to alternative healing practices, it is interesting to follow current debates in Germany, Switzerland’s neighbor. Homeopathy, invented by Samuel Hahnemann in Germany 200 years ago, for example, was boosted by Nazis like Hess and Himmler. Industry, media and politicians all promote it to this day, you find it in any pharmacy and health insurance pays for it and the public is wildly embracing it – despite the fact that “homeopathy is neither biologically plausible nor scientifically proven to produce more than placebo effects – and therefore an expensive, potentially harmful waste of money that makes a mockery of evidence based medicine.”

So strong is the public belief in it that the German government decided not to follow the example of the French, who will cease to support payments for this treatment in 2021, so as not to create an uproar. This is even true for Germany’s Green Party, which is having a screaming debate over the nature of homeopathy (and the belief in scientific research in general, as linked to genetically altered food sources etc.) They decided to avoid having the controversial topic overshadow their national convention next week, and parked it in some expert committee. Magic (or political pragmatism) beats science. Again.

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Photographs today are from New Mexico. A group of artists there, calling themselves the Transcendental Painting Group and active at the same period as Kunz was in Europe, tried to move art into something more metaphysical, using abstraction and borrowing a bit from everywhere – the Cubist down to Kandinsky. They ignored landscape in favor of documenting their inner experiences. You get instead my own more quotidian lines.

With fitting Swiss music, alpenhorns absent.


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Contradictions: Science vs Magic

I’m torn today between choices of theme for the blog. Contradictions? Surprises? Puzzles? Since I dislike puzzles, feel ambivalent about surprises and embrace contradictions, you can guess the winner, even if you skipped reading the title….

Here is Monday’s story, then. Happened this summer.

Nadja Oertelt

Having hosted the loveliest of young women for a couple of nights, you get up too late to say Good Bye – she had to leave before the crack of dawn to return to New York City where she lives, or to meet investors for her science media company, Massive, in Los Angeles, or, for all I know, attend a science conference in Mumbai – I forgot, I’m speculating. Truth is, though, I missed her, she left and left behind a hostess gift.

A deck of Tarot cards. If you are like me, you will have to look up what Tarot actually is beyond the inkling that it is used for soothsaying. Here is Wikipedia to the rescue:

The tarot (/ˈtæroʊ/; first known as trionfi and later as tarocchi or tarock) is a pack of playing cards, used from the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play games such as Italian tarocchini, French tarot and Austrian Königrufen, of which many are still played today.[1] In the late 18th century, some tarot packs began to be used as a trend for divination via tarot card reading and cartomancy leading to custom packs developed for such occultpurposes.

Among English-speaking countries where these games are not played frequently, tarot cards are used primarily for novelty and divinatory purposes, usually using specially designed packs.[2] Some occult enthusiasts make relative claims to ancient Egypt, the Kabbalah, Indian Tantra, the I-Ching, among many others, though no documented evidence of such origins or of the usage of tarot for divination before the 18th century has been demonstrated to a scholarly standard .[2][3]The three most common decks used in esoteric tarot are the Tarot of Marseilles, the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, and the Thoth tarot deck.

Add to them now this deck: Women of Science!

Aha, contradiction of a former scientist giving a gift of a tarot cards to a former scientist is resolved! And gives me the chance to introduce Nadja Oertelt, who holds a BS in Neuroscience from MIT, has done some amazing work in popularizing scientific research as a media producer and documentary filmmaker and is a visual artist. You can learn more about her and her company’s approach in this 2017 interview in Forbes or look at the trailer of her documentary Unorthodox of young orthodox Jews forging their own path.

Most interesting to me, though, is her insight that there need to be better ways to connect scientists and the public, and communicate scientific explorations or findings in a fashion that speaks to the lay folks, in particularly the young. In a society where science is, at best, not always trusted and, at worst, maligned as an elitist preoccupation that is wasting money, colliding with literal interpretation of scripture or annoyingly calling out the dangers of ruthless exploitation of natural resources or any other money-making enterprise – take your pick – endeavors that make science transparent and its importance understood are filling a significant need.

Inventor of computing science and daughter of poet Lord Byron…..

In Nadja’s own words, when someone raises an eyebrow at the contradictory combination of science and magic for a fundraising Tarot card deck,

“At Massive we know from our experience, and from the vast trove of research on effective science communication, that science stories centered on human experience and stories with emotional valence have greater impact on audiences. We want people who use this deck to learn about the history of science, and think creatively about how we can learn from the discoveries and failures, eureka moments and mistakes of the past to inform our future research and decision-making processes…as a species. … Our main goal as science communicators is to get people excited about science, to make science a more inclusive space, and to give people a sense of agency in scientific spaces. We want people to prioritize scientific thinking in their own lives and in their communities. We want people to do more research, to ask questions, and to remain curious. We don’t think creativity, storytelling, magical thinking and scientific thinking are totally disparate subjects. Neither did Jacob Bronowsky, Richard Feynman, Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky or Oliver Sacks.” 

Here is the description of the cards:

Created with Matteo Farinella and Massive Science, this crowdfunded 78 card Science Tarot Deck is a game of cards that helps us tell stories about our future based on principles of science. The Women of Science Tarot Deck channels the powerful, pioneering women of STEM alongside fundamental concepts in science, math, engineering and technology to help you tell stories about the future. The deck is a fun way to learn about our past and think about ways of tackling the big problems that await us as a species. The Tarot deck has been used since the 15th century as a framework for communal storytelling, soothsaying and prediction. We’ve updated our tarot to reflect our scientific, 21st century curiosity for shaping the world. The most transformative ways of thinking are not magic: they are real, rooted in STEM and they can help us collectively think about the future.

And here is my favorite, of course; what’s a bit of narrative adjustment to the definition of science between friends…

Since I don’t know how to read the cards, let me make a prediction for the future revealed to me in this morning’s coffee grinds: by bridging diverse fields and pursuing something that’ll improve all of society this young woman will make a significant contribution.

And here’s to intercontinental story telling in music – collision of protons, God particle, Geneva and all… The Higgs Boson Blues.

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Back by popular demand: Nature!

Time to regroup and visit my regular landscapes where fall has made such a sudden entrance.

My first foray into nature this week was inspired by having my body and my mind fed by two beloved friends: a mushroom soup to die for, last month, and a book recommendation last week, added to the mile-high pile of books to read: Long Litt Woon’s The Way through the Woods – on Mushrooms and Mourning.

It is a widow’s description of working through her bereavement after the sudden and untimely death of her husband by becoming an authority on mushrooms; I cannot wait to read the book which received rave reviews – the anthropologist is said to be able to explore both the world of mushrooms (a somewhat random subject matter that helped focus attention) and the emotional travels through recovering from grief with passions and humor in equal parts.

Perfect timing, too, given that mushrooms are sprouting everywhere right now, with the dampness acting as catalyst to their emergence. All the photographs (some with iPhone, some with camera) were taken in the woods in an approximate one mile radius from my house within the last 8 days. Jealous yet?

And time for some amusement as well! It arrived when I went on a hunt for the appropriate music. The first thing that came up when typing in music for mushrooms was an article titled Science says this playlist is a must listen when tripping on mushrooms. Rest assured, that is not the activity I had in mind.

“Science” turns out to be one researcher who specializes in psilocybin experimentation and therapy. Psychologist Bill Richards, Ph.D., a researcher at Roland Griffiths’s lab at Johns Hopkins University and an expert in the field of hallucinogens claims to have the perfect playlist for those using (magic) mushrooms outside of mushroom soup or other culinary apparitions.

And I quote:

“…the order of songs is vital in crafting the right atmosphere, specifically during the “onset, peak, and post-peak phases”. The onset music should “supportive, unfolding, forward-moving”, like H.R. Reynolds’ arrangement of “O Magnum Mysterium”and Edward Elgar’s “Nimrod”. But once the peak sets in, things need to slow down a bit.

“At a trip’s peak, music becomes a mirror of transcendental forms of consciousness that may not even be registered in unitive awareness, but is present if needed—like a net below a trapeze artist,” Richards says. This cocktail includes multiple inclusions from classical luminaries like Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, along with a few dashes from other composers from a variety of cultures.

As the trip’s effects begin to wear off, the playlist can enter a more free-form state, tagging in tracks that are more familiar and sources of positivity and inspiration to the consumer. Interestingly enough, it’s also at this very end that lyrics really make their first appearance, and there’s good reason for their absence.”

Brahms as a net below a trapeze tripper? Beethoven, the security blanket? Bach, catcher of the fall? Okayyyyy….. And where are the Russian composers, their cuisine so dependent on all things fungal? No slavic mycelium dreams?

Well, let’s listen to Russian folk music instead which, if you’re tripping, might make you trip over your own feet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZcmI8FXW38

Let’s hope the scientific research on magic mushrooms is not an echo of the musical recommendations. It is certainly sprouting in the most unexpected places – just like mushrooms – lately in Jamaica, where a Canadian start-up is trying to study everything from the genetics of magic mushrooms to how best to extract their psychedelic compounds. These goals have both scientific and financial value. And there is sure competition around: Johns Hopkins just received a multi-million dollar donation to fund psychedelic research. Part of the research is devoted to figure out if psilocybin works as a treatment for a panoply of disorders and conditions: anorexia, opioid addiction, Alzheimer’s, chronic Lyme disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, and alcohol addiction.

I will, however, not be a participant in studies at the new Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research……I like my brain the way it is. A champion of champignons, at times morose like a morel, inclined to trifle with truffles, a brain as mucilaginous as a mushroom cap!

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Busy Bees

Busy bees – or was that bumbly bees? This photographer was both, busy and bumbling, as well as forced to be extremely patient. I was sitting in front of the foxgloves in my garden, waiting for the bumble bees to emerge from the blossoms. By the time I had focussed the camera, they were, of course, long gone. Most of the time, anyways.

I had more luck in another beautiful garden where a huge variety of plants attracted a variety of bees, so many of them that I could practically shoot a picture wherever I had the camera pointed.

The phrase “busy as a bee” can be found as far back as in 13th century Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. They should add “smart as a bee” when you look at recent scientific experiments that reveal how these insects are able to perform complex cognitive tasks like, for example, discriminating between different art styles.

Have bees rewarded with sugar water when landing to feed on one of four different paintings by an Australian aborigine artist or put off by some bitter solution when landing on any one of four Monet reproductions and voila: if you now show them new paintings of each of these masters, they immediately pick the Australian art – and all it takes is one afternoon to have them figure it out. Now why did I have to take years of art education in high school?????

Not that it did much good. At least I didn’t end up like this: Dancing, covered in bees, with meditating comrades drifting off into La la land….

Here is something less funny but more interesting: a short clip on bumble bee life and social structure. And with this I wish you a busy Tuesday filled with sweetness in one form or another.

And no, it’s NOT ging to be Rimsky- Korsakov today, fooled you. Instead do enjoy this:

And a bonus minute of Schubert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=21&v=1Pm6kBXkqT4

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Horse Ta(i)les

Good. You didn’t think for a moment that I would write about Kentucky Derby decisions, disqualifications and all. Of course I won’t. Don’t know the rules of that sport, or any sport for that matter.

Instead I am praising science, once again, which has produced some fascinating new insights into the domestication of horses, a feat that revolutionized transport and warfare. You can read about the details here but here are the highlights:

Create an interdisciplinary team of 120(!) geneticists, evolutionary biologists and archeologists and let them figure out how 5500 years ago the horse became servant to (wo)man. Have them generate DNA data from 278 equine subfossils with ages mostly spanning the last six millennia.

Find out this way that in addition to the known two lines, domestic and Przewalski’s horses, there were two more, found on the Iberian Peninsula and in Siberia, now extinct.

Of special interest for these scientists was the fact that selective breeding shaping the look and functions of the horse started about 3000 years ago, most likely in Persia. Making them slimmer and stronger increased the mobility and speed of horses. Europeans picked up on this, and within a few hundred years they influenced the horse genome in more ways than through the previous 4000 years of domestication.

There is still uncertainty where the very first human horse interaction took place, despite all we know about horses. The traditional presumption that it happened in the steppes of Kasachstan was undermined by this current study. The most likely places under discussion are now Anatolia, the Pontic-Caspian steppes in Eurasia or the Middle East. Take your pick.

DNA analysis was also able to establish the recent impact of humans by means of diversity management, selection and hybridization of horses. What they found was not all good:

Most strikingly, we found that while past horse breeders maintained diverse genetic resources for millennia after they first domesticated the horse, this diversity dropped by ∼16% within the last 200 years. This illustrates the massive impact of modern breeding and demonstrates that the history of domestic animals cannot be fully understood without harnessing ancient DNA data. Importantly, recent breeding strategies have also limited the efficacy of negative selection and led to the accumulation of deleterious variants within the genome of horses. This illustrates the genomic cost of modern breeding. Future work should focus on testing how much recent progress in veterinary medicine and the improving animal welfare have contributed to limit the fitness impact of deleterious variants.

And while we are on the topic of DNA analysis, here is something to ponder about what the results of genetic testing in humans can or do tell us: misconceptions abound.

And if instead of experimental science you want some clinical psychology on this Wednesday morning, read this about psychics and the (hurt) feelings of horses.

You tell me if it makes horse sense.

Tilden Horse/ Marc Chagall
Tilden/ Gerhard Richter

Tilden Horse/Franz Marc
Tilden Horse/Paul Klee
Tilden Horse/Joan Miro
Tilden Horse/Richard Estes

Photographs today are of horse sculptures made by Steve Tilden and some of my pastiches using more of his work in the style of different painters.

Music from two very different sources:


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Fish(y) Stories

Last week CBS news published an alarming article predicting that by 2048 salt water fish might be extinct. Just the kind of news you glance at and decide an already bleak view of the future has become even more dire on a sunny Monday morning.

Independent of our own delight in seafood, millions of people in the developing world depend on fish as protein source and for their livelihoods. Never mind what’s at issue for the larger food chain depending on healthy oceans.

Here’s the problem: it is a story that has perennially surfaced in the news since 2006 when the study it relies on was first published. Never mind that the scientific authors fundamentally revised their findings in 2009 because the study was relying on seriously flawed data and statistics.

You might argue that the criticism comes from the seafood industry and their own data are equally sketchy, driven by the desire to maintain the economic gains from fishing. But it is not an isolated case.

Three years ago there was much discussion of reports by the MacArthur Foundation and the World Economic Forum that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the sea if we continue dumping plastic in the oceans at the present rate, measured by weight. Note that this claim rests on our ability to accurately measure the plastic and count the fish. Are we able to do that?

Their report certainly didn’t. It relied on plastic estimates derived solely from San Francisco Bay and assumed that was representative for the rest of the globe. The report never stated figures for the expected tonnage of fish in 2050, and cited no research into fish populations. When reporters went back and asked about this issue they were referred to a 2008 study which was refuted by its own author in 2015. (For details go here.)


The problem with these types of misinformation rests with the fact that it gives power to those who want to deny that our oceans are in trouble. Or, more egregiously, want to claim that science can’t be trusted in general. Generally solid reports like this one are then thrown out together with the unreliable ones, in the interest of delaying action and preserving current income.

The WWF report lists the main reasons for decline of fish stocks in our oceans. Overfishing and by-catch are due to illegal fishing and insane subsidies for the fishing industries. As a result we have degraded eco systems and decreased food security. Action is required to create areas protected from fishing and to stop the industrial subsidies that are incentives for expanding fishing fleets.

I leave it to you to judge if clips like this, earnestness notwithstanding, help the cause…..

There is, however, also good news, as reported in the Seattle Times this March (somehow the link is broken, but here is the upshot:)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is investigating whether new fishing restrictions are needed to help prevent the extinction of endangered southern resident killer whales that frequent Puget Sound. That process is intended to result in fishing that lessens the impact on prey targeted by the whales. Possibilities include restrictions in time and places when fishermen and whales most intersect, or season closures. And not only in the ocean: NOAA is also evaluating fishing in Puget Sound and southeast Alaska to reduce impacts on orcas. The agency already, through the Pacific Salmon Treaty, worked to cut back harvest rates on salmon in Canadian fisheries.

Photographs today are from Puget Sound where I had thrilling views of whales some years back.

Music is a mesmerizing piece by Adams Becoming Ocean that somehow manages to communicate the urgency of required action. Music starts in at 7:35 or thereabouts.

https://site-323590.bcvp0rtal.com/detail/videos/by-composer/video/6008570918001/john-luther-adams-become-ocean?autoStart=true


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Supernatural Enforcement

I’ve been wondering, as is my wont. The topic: oh, something narrowly defined, like the interaction between religion, politics and societal evolution. As a result you all have a few choice reading assignments today, should you share my fascination.

Jokes aside, I HAVE been rattled by the outspokenness of the Christian Right in both peddling dominionism, a “group of Christian political ideologies that seek to institute a nation governed by Christians based on their personal understandings of biblical law,” and a longing for (and prediction of) the end times, in which they and only they will be saved. Betsy deVos certainly advocates for this mysticism and then there is John Bolton who willingly adds his biblical interpretations to the mix (Trump sent by G-d to save the Jews from the Iranian menace? As a Christian he believes it possible!)

And now, with the Mueller report completed and Barr’s decisions around it delivering a gift for Trump, my worries increase. Whether one believes it would matter that Trump (as an individual) should be felled or not, the proclaimed vindication is certainly empowering the underlying rot, comprised of people and ideas, and gives it momentum for its destructive mission. That will not be changed by whatever we’ll discover, should there ever be transparency, a full reading of the report, or dragged-out State court proceedings. They circled the wagons around their own and succeeded.

Roaring to capitalize on all this are people like Bolton, who, by the way, was a major architect of the Iraq war, a war that cost over half a million lives (beyond the 5000 American troops) if you count civilian deaths caused by violence and collapsing infrastructure. And that is only the dead. Nobody seems to count the permanently crippled, maimed, blinded, traumatized victims, or a population deprived of the kids never to be born. Source for statistics below, no need to peruse.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001533 .

What you really should (re-)read on the 16th anniversary of the Iraq invasion is what’s attached beneath, so brilliantly written by Eliot Weinberger.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n03/eliot-weinberger/what-i-heard-about-iraq

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Back to topic: Religion affecting societies. Have you noticed how many recent editorials or articles are focussed on the link between religion and politics? Here are two typical examples.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-left-was-about-salvation-the-right-is-about-the-end-times/2019/03/18/2cd16898-49b8-11e9-9663-00ac73f49662_story.html?

https://ips-dc.org/apocalyptic-christianity-returns-u-s-foreign-policy/

Underlying all of those speculations on the end times is the concept of an angry, judging, punishment-meting G-d. Which brings me to the truly interesting, scientific reading for today, just out this week in the journal Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4

The argument, provided by a research group of Oxford scientists, in a nutshell: what do we know about the appearance of “moralizing” G-ds, who, as it turns out, have not always been around even when other ones were? Harvey Whitehouse and his colleagues systematically coded records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, and used 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality. The resulting claim: the more complex a society, the more likely the presence of supernatural agents who make sure rules are followed and who are invested with the power to identify and punish individuals who don’t, even beyond death.

The critical mass seems to be around 1.000.000 – societies with that many members develop belief systems that emphasize “supernatural reinforcement.” Big Gods (or the related concept of retributive Karma) push people in the direction of prosocial behavior to prevent asocial tendencies that might be disruptive to the community as a whole when they can no longer be controlled through tribal/neighborly supervision. It takes about 100 years after you’ve reached the one million benchmark, for a vengeful G-d to appear.

(Note, I am not singling out Christianity here, dominionists were just the trigger for my musings.)

“Moralizing gods are not a prerequisite for the evolution of social complexity, but they may help to sustain and expand complex multi-ethnic empires after they have become established.”

The argument is not without critics – some claim that the complexity of societies is associated with the (subsequently emerging) ability of people to think about questions of meaning and answer them with religious concepts.

The Whitehouse data seem to point to a different causality. Most interesting for us, though, has to be the question: when does the idea of a punitive God, thought to be a stabilizing factor for complex societies, flip into the opposite? When does that belief lead to violent acts, civil strife, oppression of people who don’t buy the concept, or pray to another moralizing G-d? Will it again be used to justify another war?

Photographs today are European spires seen across my last two trips.

Music is dedicated to all who died at the hands of believers in a reinforcing G-d. May the beauty of the music console us on this Monday.

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