science

Ah, those eloquent Victorian gentlemen and ladies. A selection from Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, Chapter VII, "Miscellaneous Objections to the Theory of Natural Selection": 

A distinguished zoologist, Mr. St. George Mivart, has recently collected all the objections which have ever been advanced by myself and others against the theory of natural selection, as propounded by Mr. Wallace and myself, and has illustrated them with admirable art and force. When thus marshalled, they make a formidable array; and as it forms no part of Mr. Mivart's plan to give the various facts and considerations opposed to his conclusions, no slight effort of reason and memory is left to the reader, who may wish to weigh the evidence on both sides.

Modern translation:

Some Mivart guy thinks he's got all the arguments against my theory – but gee, funny, he forgets to give you the evidence against his claims. So, allow me.

Rather wordy, those 19th-centurians, but I do like their style!

Want to upgrade your TV enjoyment pleasure from your boring old display to exciting new high-definition TV (HD TV) – at no cost?

It's easy! Just look what a study revealed:

One group of participants was told they were watching a brand new HDTV clip, while the other group was told they were watching a digital DVD clip. Both groups were in fact watching the same (low) quality DVD clip. ...The people framed to watch the HDTV clip were found to have a significantly more positive viewing experience. This shows that participants were unable to discriminate properly between digital and high definition signals but were influenced by the frame set for them.

See that? You get a higher-quality TV viewing experience just by thinking you're watching HD! 

Actually, that's not terribly surprising; neither are the implications for skepticism and critical thinking. As studies like this show time and time again, merely thinking that Vishnu guides your destiny, or that you tap into psychic glimpses of the future, or that a cabal of reptilian shapeshifters leads our government, can actually affect what your five senses tell you. Believing is seeing – even when belief makes you see what isn't there.

And that's why doubting the senses or the "obvious" understanding, and asking for evidence instead, works as a way to see what's real.

But anyway. I don't want to rail one-sidedly against our brains' plastic gullibility; with precautions taken, that wonderful brain creativity can be an awesome phenomenon. I'm thinking I'd like to put it to work! 

First up: My current lack of an HD TV. Let's give this a try. First, I create a new reality: "I have a stunning 60" HD TV." I'll repeat that a few times for good measure. Now I'll switch on the old 20" tube, and...

Oh yeah. Them's the pixels, baby. 

This is great! What else can I make myself believe?

"My car is a Porsche." (Wow! It's a stealth Porsche minivan!)

"My computer is a Mac." (Oh, wait. It actually is.)

"I can have any woman." ("I just don't want them all", I'll rationalize to myself.)

"Insurance companies just want what's best for me."

"Scientology is not a scam."

...*poof*

Damn, I just lost it all. That last one blew the fuse. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. 

Pro-science and anti-religion blogging machine PZ Myers rounds up some scientist opinions on the possible dangers to us from hypothetical human/alien first contact. As the biologist of the bunch, he himself steps beyond the Mars Attacks!-style clashes that some envision, to offer up a whole other worry: the Blorrxaforming of Earth.

Yes, that's the conversion of our backyard into something else's idea of a better home and garden. The way for a race (including humanity) to spread throughout the galaxy, he argues, is to send "home" ahead of the travelers: launch probes loaded with bacteria and more complex organisms, to take root on alien worlds and get them ready for the later visitors. That sets up the concern:

Don't expect alien tripods with lasers, watch out for alien viruses and bacteria turning the soil and atmosphere poisonous or unsupportive.

That is, indeed, possibly the most fascinating (and terrifying?) form of alien invasion we might imagine. In fact, if you want to see the scenario play out in all its gory, apocalyptic horror, I've got one word for you:

CHTORRRR!

That's the battle cry of the man-eating (and everything-eating) red worms that headline The War Against the Chtorr. It's one of my favorite sci-fi reads ever. Author David Gerrold has a clear fascination with alien forms – he's the screenplay writer of the famous Star Trek Tribbles episode – and so unleashed a whole ecology upon a stunned Earth. First come viruses that wipe out most everything and everyone, then omnivoracious worms, unstoppable kudzu-like plants, sea creatures the size of aircraft carriers, and countless other creatures with bizarre reproductive or eating habits. (There are also Tribbles with the serial numbers filed off.)

These lifeforms support each other in a complex ecological web which, as reckoned by what passes for scientists among surviving humanity, has the distinct advantage of an extra half billion years or so of evolution compared to Earth life. The Chtorrans are meaner, tougher, hungrier, and faster-breeding, and they're very quickly winning. (If you like, you can read into it an allegory for European explorers and colonies traveling around the globe and often wiping out local populations of people, other animals, and plants with their accompanying pigs, rats, goats, and germs.)

The four books published so far (from 1983 to 1993) can make for grim reading, but the imagined biology and ecology are intricately detailed and fascinating. I highly recommend the series – if you can find it. The books have traditionally been hard to dig up (I ended up nabbing a couple, autographed, from the author himself - how cool is that?). Fortunately, Amazon.com appears stocked with them at present (see link below).

Get caught up; the remaining three books will supposedly start shipping in fall 2011. Maybe then we'll finally learn who, if anyone, seeded the Earth with red-furred worms that see you as lunch.

So. Any other Chtorr fans out there? What's your favorite Chtorran critter?

The War Against the Chtorr Books

Really, they do. They rock so hard their backs no longer have any bone (to add the obvious witticism taken from a well-known expression).

I had a real fascination with planaria back in my religious but science-loving childhood. You see, in a decrepit dresser that stored junk in the family garage I came across the mouldering old college biology textbook of one parent. Neither parent was a biologist, or academic of any type; in fact, neither had finished college. (If they had done so, and learned more about the natural world and possibly about critical thinking, would they have resisted the pitch of the Jehovah's Witnesses years later? Who knows. But that's another story.)

While I don't recall either parent ever displaying a particular interest in biology, clearly one had taken a class or two. The book was awesome. Its name and author, I didn't note. And much of the college-level content was clearly above my reading level. But there was plenty that I eagerly read. I remember a few can't-look-away photos of cleft palates and other human deformities, and of course there was plenty of stuff about the reptiles and other animals I always loved reading about. Plus those diamond-headed flatworms with the crazy cross-eyed look, the planarians, recently in the headlines as scientists further tease out the secrets of their amazing regenerative abilities.

Take a planarian, said the textbook I found, cut it into pieces, and those pieces will regenerate into new flatworms. I already knew that an earthworm's front half could regenerate a lost back half, but the flatworms went one better: an amputated back half could regenerate a new head! Wow!

Wait, it gets better: Cut it into two lengthwise, said the book, and the strips will regenerate into whole worms. Zoinks! (Try that, annelids. I didn't think so.)

The madness didn't stop there. Split just the planarian's head lengthwise, and – this still blows my mind – the two flopping half-heads will each regenerate into a full head, creating a two-headed – but apparently perfectly healthy – freak. Bo-i-i-i-n-n-g!

All that was capped with the most stunning claim of all. Take a flatworm, teach it some simple lab behavior like shock avoidance, and cut it into two. When the pieces become whole again, both regenerated worms remember the behavior. Hold on; that's just the warmup. Here's the kicker: take a flatworm with learned behavior, grind it up and feed it to other flatworms, and the fattened cannibals acquire the behavior. Education via eating the smart! (Just imagine: that famous slogan "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" not as a call to support college educations but as an admonishment to clean your plate.) 

Well. You could hardly expect a proper youngster to be satisfied with mere black-and-white photos of awesome two-headed grotesqueries. I must have planarians of my own to mutilate.

Imagine my joy (yes, genuine joy) when I discovered these weren't obscure creatures living in deep-sea vents off of Madagascar or some such, but were there for the taking in the American Midwest streams where I was always on the search for snakes and frogs. Just turn over rocks in the stream, and if you really looked closely, little dark, fingernail-length flatworms were stuck to the underside of the rocks.

So I got a bunch of flatworms, an X-acto knife, and... well, I did my best to split heads down the middle, but it's not easy with no real equipment. The worms are small and they move. I managed to messily cut and/or crush some heads into a lopsided split, and tossed the patients into a jar along with pieces of planarians I had simply cut into halves or thirds (a much easier operation).

What happened? I wish I recalled the details better, but I can only tell you that I never saw any two-headed monsters. Or much of anything. The mutilated worms seemed to disappear, leaving nothing behind but a few floating bits of crud in the jar! Did they crawl out at night, drying up somewhere unseen? Did they die from problems with the water and quickly dissolve into soup? (I knew enough to keep them in their creek water, not tap water, but maybe the temperature was wrong or the water lacked oxygen?) Or did they – and this was the coolest possibility – eat each other, with only the last survivor's disappearance a mystery? (Yes, they were in pieces, but surely the pieces had some means of eating; how else would they gain the energy and mass for regeneration?)

I've no doubt that I could have solved the mystery with more experimentation, but I apparently lost interest and moved on to other shiny things. (That's why I don't blame my religious upbringing alone for my not becoming a scientist; clearly, I was also lacking the required persistence for science.) That leaves me wondering whether the amazing regenerating planarians also include escape artist secrets or even teleportation among their bag of tricks.

Okay, probably not. And in the years since, I learned that one of the more astounding flatworm facts doesn't hold water: Scientists have not been able to replicate the claim that planarians acquire the learned behaviors of fellow flatworms they ingest. The original results have been written off as observer bias (see Wikipedia entry). So, sorry, no gastrovascular mind-meld powers in our worms.

But hey, just because Wolverine doesn't have laser eye-beams doesn't mean he's not awesome. Flatworms still got lots, including the magic two-head trick. Planarians, my crazy diamond-headed pretties, I remain your number one fan.

(And now I'm curious, too. If you take a two-headed flatworm and split each of those heads, can you get a quadracephalo model? Just how far can we take this hydra creation? Hmm, just how sharp is my X-acto?)

Is it just me, or are these the same faces?

Carl Sagan

David Lee Roth

If it weren't for Carl's untimely departure, I'd have to ask whether the beloved astronomer was ever spotted shouting "Bill-ions upon bill-ions of stars!" while doing high-jump splits off a Cornell podium.

The Age's article Beyond Belief, an overview of "new atheism" and atheism in general, is generating comment over a few points that don't ring true with actual atheists. (See Michael Bachelard's story on the New Atheism - a response by Russell Blackford.) 

My instant beef with the article was one small claim. This:

The new atheism is bigger, more organised, and much more assertive than ever before. It's based on the belief that science explains everything we need to know about the world so there's no need for religion. 

Bollocks. No one sane claims that "science explains everything"; we all know there are things that remain very unexplained, and even the most ardent admirer of science (with its incredible record of explaining so much) must admit that some mysteries might always remain outside our grasp. 

Atheism is not based on the belief that science explains everything. Rather, it's based on the demonstrable fact that religion and faith explain nothing.

Oh, and one more small beef, though it's a common flaw not at all confined to the Beyond Belief article. The discussion is the usual one about atheism vs belief in God. As in, singular God. That false dichotomy is so common we usually let it pass, but we shouldn't.

There are still believers in whole pantheons of gods; we have no business handing Abrahamic monotheists the standard as the sole representatives of religion. Any monotheists expecting to automatically advance to the final debate with belief in no gods need to first settle their dispute with belief in three gods and four gods and a hundred gods and so on. We, in turn, should force those warring parties to slug it out every time.

Shadow People! 

Shadow People?

Yes, Shadow People! They could be creeping up behind you... right now!

I think the recent Skeptoid podcast episode on Shadow People was the first I'd heard of this new (?) supernatural threat. We've probably all had the experience of thinking we see a flicker of movement in a dark shadow; some people even claim to have seen ghostly humanoid figures in their darkened bedrooms at night. Therefore: Shadow People, those spectral demons (or interdimensional beings, or ghosts of the departed, or something) that haunt the living (or flit away to avoid the living, or astrally project themselves into random places, or something).

They often wear hats. Really.

There's no need to rehash Shadow People details here; as you'd expect, thoughtful discussions of the topic quickly begin and end with the damning fact that there's no evidence for such a thing. And that's pretty much the end of that story, until someone can show the smoking gun (or smoky fedora, as many stories would have it).

Rather, what interested me about the Skeptoid piece was that it goes into a topic that really fascinates me: the awesome power of the human brain to create its own reality – and the way in which "open-minded" believers in the supernatural are so often close-minded toward the brain's wonders. Readeth thou more

Recently, US President Obama spoke to the US National Acadeny of Sciences. Against a backdrop of health and energy crises, he said:

At such a difficult moment, there are those who say we cannot afford to invest in science. That support for research is somehow a luxury at a moment defined by necessities. I fundamentally disagree. Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment, and our quality of life than it has ever been. And if there was ever a day that reminded us of our shared stake in science and research, it’s today. (via Genomicron)

Who the heck would argue with that? Actually, some would. Readeth thou more

Science, Evolution, and Creationism
A great primer by the National Academy of Sciences. Free short version available for download.

Pharyngula
Updated at a mad pace by biologist PZ Myers, a heavyweight in the blogging world and lightning rod for the enemies of reason. (The guy's a hell of a good writer, too.) Great to have this fantastic site on "our side".