Science & Skepticism – Page 5

Nature’s Mothers

Surinam Toads—spectacularly fugly critters native to northeastern South America—have a rather odd means of reproduction. After mating, the male presses the eggs onto the female’s back. The eggs stick to her skin, which begins to grow over them. A few months later they emerge as toadlets, having already hatched and passed through the tadpole stage. Check it out, it’s equal parts gross and cool.

* Though let’s face it, the way my species does it isn’t any prettier, and probably a lot more painful.†

† And giving birth from your back isn’t even the weirdest example of parental care Nature’s got up her sleeve. For instance, I learned very young that seahorse males receive eggs from the females and incubate them in a special pouch. Which honestly raises the question of how you label the sexes: is it just a matter of gamete size? Or who’s fertilising what? Because if the female has an organ to deposit eggs in the male‘s pouch, then… who really wears the pants in the household?

(Digression: I’ve long thought that if seahorses ever had a pro-choice movement, it’d be headed by males.)

But my personal favourite has to be Caecilians: an order of amphibians spanning a couple hundred species that, like us but unlike all other amphibians, practice internal insemination. Three-quarters of them give birth to live young. And the mother feeds them herself—no, not with milk. And not with prey. With her own skin. Hey, don’t knock it: that stuff’s apparently chock full of nutrients, and allows the little darlings to grow to 10 times their birth weight in a week.‡

‡ I wonder if that’s how mammals evolved? Did our ancestors start out nibbling their mother’s skin, move on to lapping up her sweat as soon as she got sweat glands—better for the mother, because skin was getting expensive, what with fur and all the various bits needed for warm-bloodedness—and kept enjoying the milk from modified sweat glands?

(Surinam Toad video link via Pharyngula. Proper use of daggers and double-daggers courtesy of RomanBoldOblique and Wikipedia.)

Arthur C. Clarke: 1917–2008

Well, damn.

I guess part of me thought he’d live forever, or at least long enough to see all the marvels he imagined or predicted. Hell, he saw geostationary satellites and global telecommunications become reality, why not space elevators or Martian colonies or deep-space travel as well?

Well, damn.

As a young nerd I read a number of his books: Dolphin Island was first, I think, way back in high school English class, though I haven’t picked it up since. There were also some of the classics, like 2001, Childhood’s End, The Sands of Mars, Rendezvous With Rama (never got into the sequels), The Fountains of Paradise. I loved them all, but my favourite was and still is The Songs of Distant Earth. Almost every page is gold, from the arrival of the Magellans to Thalassa to Moses Kaldor’s discussion of God (a theme Clarke picks up every now and then in his fiction), the conflicts, the heartbreaks, the dramas big and small, as well as the scorps’ evolution to semi-sentience. Like much of his work before and since, Songs shows us a very optimistic future. It’s a future where humanity has grown up, and mostly left aggression and bigotry behind; where we can find peace without sacrificing progress, and without losing our essential nature. A future where race, religion, gender and sexuality are just not that big a deal, and the boundaries of love and family are wider and more flexible.

Lieutenant Horton was an amusing companion, but Loren was glad to get rid of him as soon as the electrofusion currents had welded his broken bones. As Loren discovered in somewhat wearisome detail, the young engineer had fallen in with a gang of hairy hunks whose second main interest in life appeared to be riding microjet surfboards up vertical waves. Horton had found, the hard way, that it was even more dangerous than it looked.

“I’m quite surprised,” Loren had interjected at one point in a rather seamy narrative. “I’d have sworn you were ninety percent hetero.”

“Ninety-two, according to my profile,” Horton said cheerfully. “But I like to check my calibration from time to time.”

The lieutenant was only half joking. Somewhere he had heard that hundred percenters were so rare that they were classed as pathological.

Heh. Yes, it’s completely gratuitous, but Clarke pulls it off, and I can’t tell you what that kind of writing meant to my still-closeted teen self. I like to think it eventually helped me come out to myself, or at least made the way smoother by defusing any internalised homophobia I may have had.

More recently I bought his Collected Stories, a massive sampling of his short stories from 1937 to 1997. Though it’s hard to pick a favourite amongst all these gems, I’m very fond of the “White Hart” stories. Written in the 40’s and 50’s, these take place in the (probably partly real) London pub “White Hart,” a hangout of writers and engineering geeks. These loosely connected tales of university life and improbable inventions, full of dry, low-key British humour, remind me of P.G. Wodehouse’s stories—though with nutty professors and eccentric inventors instead of useless upper-class twits.

I also have to give a special nod to The Wire Continuum, the last one in the collection. Co-written with Stephen Baxter (another fave author of mine), this is a sequel to the very first story in the book, entitled Travel by Wire! A cute but unremarkable story of matter transmission through power lines is re-explored sixty years later as these two stupendously smart and talented minds play at finding applications to this technology. We’re treated to surgical teleportation, faster-than-light communication, instantaneous extrasolar travel and finally, the direct linking of minds leading to an evolutionary quantum leap for humankind. Some of these ideas are further fleshed out in The Light of Other Days, another Baxter/Clarke collaboration.

Finally, there’s an essay of his I reread regularly: “Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Credo'”, appearing in the September/October 2001 issue of Skeptical Inquirer (one of several specials they did on science and religion). I found it a bit rambling and unfocussed, which I guess is understandable when you’re trying to talk about God and what others have said about God. But the grand vision, gentle humour and warm optimism are pure Clarke.

I began this essay by saying that men have debated the problems of existence for thousands of years—and that is precisely why I am skeptical about most of the answers. One of the great lessons of modern science is that millennia are only moments. It is not likely that ultimate questions will be settled in such short periods of time, or that we will really know much about the universe while we are still crawling around in the playpen of the Solar System.

He concludes by quoting form his earlier book Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. I get chills every time I read this passage.

Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.

It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the somber hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of color and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

Some Darwin Quotes

I’m still partway through The Descent of Man (specifically, the 1882 edition, available online.) It’s slow reading because I want to be sure to absorb the science… and the occasional bon mots.

It has often and confidently been asserted, that man’s origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

Consequently we ought frankly to admit their community of descent: to take any other view, is to admit that our own structure, and that of all the animals around us, is a mere snare laid to entrap our judgment. […] It is only our natural prejudice, and that arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods, which leads us to demur to this conclusion. But the time will before long come, when it will be thought wonderful that naturalists, who were well acquainted with the comparative structure and development of man, and other mammals, should have believed that each was the work of a separate act of creation.

He who rejects with scorn the belief that the shape of his own canines, and their occasional great development in other men, are due to our early forefathers having been provided with these formidable weapons, will probably reveal, by sneering, the line of his descent. For though he no longer intends, nor has the power, to use these teeth as weapons, he will unconsciously retract his “snarling muscles” (thus named by Sir C. Bell),⁴⁶ so as to expose them ready for action, like a dog prepared to fight.

The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel. But we can trace the formation of many words further back than that of species, for we can perceive how they actually arose from the imitation of various sounds. We find in distinct languages striking homologies due to community of descent, and analogies due to a similar process of formation. The manner in which certain letters or sounds change when others change is very like correlated growth. We have in both cases the reduplication of parts, the effects of long-continued use, and so forth. The frequent presence of rudiments, both in languages and in species, is still more remarkable. The letter m in the word am, means I; so that in the expression I am, a superfluous and useless rudiment has been retained. In the spelling also of words, letters often remain as the rudiments of ancient forms of pronunciation. Languages, like organic beings, can be classed in groups under groups; and they can be classed either naturally according to descent, or artificially by other characters. Dominant languages and dialects spread widely, and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues. A language, like a species, when once extinct, never, as Sir C. Lyell remarks, reappears. The same language never has two birth-places. Distinct languages may be crossed or blended together.

I saw the lunar eclipse

… and it wasn’t what I expected. Then again, I didn’t really know what to expect, since I’d never seen a lunar eclipse and wasn’t too clear on the actual mechanics. So the dark red moon, covered by a fuzzy circular shadow, took me a bit by surprise.

… and it wasn’t what I expected. Then again, I didn’t really know what to expect, since I’d never seen a lunar eclipse before and wasn’t too clear on the actual mechanics. So the dark red moon, covered by a fuzzy circular shadow, took me a bit by surprise. I was like, “Whoah! Did the Apocalypse start already?… oh, right, the eclipse. Cool!”

I was lucky. The sky was clear (a miracle for Vancouver at this time of year!) and I had to work late, which means I saw the bloody eclipse on the way home. Otherwise, I hate to say it probably would have slipped my mind. I got home a little late (around 8PM, the moon was just coming out of totality), but that didn’t stop me from grabbing my tripod and looking for a relatively dark spot. You can see Saturn to the left, and Regulus above.

Science Tattoos!

Check ’em out.

I’m not planning on ever getting tattooed, but if I were… some of these designs are mighty neat. I’m especially fond of The Philosopher’s Stone and “Entropy”: simple yet unusual little designs that pack a lot of meaning.

Happy Darwin Day!

To celebrate Darwin Day, I’ve decided to start reading The Descent of Man. I’ve already got The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagle under my belt, and I’ve been meaning to read Descent for a long time.

Which reminds me. At that creation/evolution debate I went to a while ago a creationist audience member brought up Darwin’s alleged racism, quoting from Descent of Man:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.

Seen in context, it’s clear Darwin is really making a point about the lack of intermediate forms between humans and apes. As for the exterminating savage races bit? Most white people thought in terms of a hierarchy of races, with Western Europeans at the top, and either Blacks or Australian Aborigines at the bottom. And a lot of people believed then that Blacks and Native Americans were headed for extinction. Their cultures were being ravaged, their lands were taken, the people themselves were sold into slavery or rounded up into reservations… many Whites believed it was only a matter of time. They weren’t necessarily happy about it, mind you, but they honestly thought it was inevitable.

From his writings in Voyage of the Beagle I found Darwin very open-minded and respectful for a Victorian gentleman who’d never left England before. I have a hard time imagining a racist writing something like this:

(November 15, 1835)

The common people, when working, keep the upper part of their bodies quite naked; and it is then that the Tahitians are seen to advantage. They are very tall, broad-shouldered, athletic, and well-proportioned. It has been remarked, that it requires little habit to make a dark skin more pleasing and natural to the eye of an European than his own colour. A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian, was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art compared with a fine dark green one growing vigorously in the open fields.

Creationists (and others) may be interested to know that Darwin was passionately anti-slavery—still a hot issue at the time. Great Britain had only abolished slavery in 1832, the first Western nation to do so (okay, France abolished it in 1794, but reinstated it again in 1802. It was abolished for the last time in 1848).

April 14, 1832. Near Rio de Janeiro.

While staying at this estate, I was very nearly being an eye-witness to one of those atrocious acts which can only take place in a slave country. Owing to a quarrel and a lawsuit, the owner was on the point of taking all the women and children from the male slaves, and selling them separately at the public auction at Rio. Interest, and not any feeling of compassion, prevented this act. Indeed, I do not believe the inhumanity of separating thirty families, who had lived together for many years, even occurred to the owner. Yet I will pledge myself, that in humanity and good feeling he was superior to the common run of men. It may be said there exists no limit to the blindness of interest and selfish habit. I may mention one very trifling anecdote, which at the time struck me more forcibly than any story of cruelty. I was crossing a ferry with a negro who was uncommonly stupid. In endeavouring to make him understand, I talked loud, and made signs, in doing which I passed my hand near his face. He, I suppose, thought I was in a passion, and was going to strike him; for instantly, with a frightened look and half-shut eyes, he dropped his hands. I shall never forget my feelings of surprise, disgust, and shame, at seeing a great powerful man afraid even to ward off a blow, directed, as he thought, at his face. This man had been trained to a degradation lower than the slavery of the most helpless animal.

So, yes. Somewhat prejudiced and chauvinistic, but also empathetic. And honest with himself and able to learn from his mistakes—as a good scientist should.

After Mauritius and South Africa, the Beagle swung by Brazil one last time before finally sailing home. Darwin shares his thoughts on the country:

On the 19th of August [1836] we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye. These latter cruelties were witnessed by me in a Spanish colony, in which it has always been said that slaves are better treated than by the Portuguese, English, or other European nations. I have seen at Rio de Janeiro a powerful negro afraid to ward off a blow directed, as he thought, at his face. I was present when a kind-hearted man was on the point of separating forever the men, women, and little children of a large number of families who had long lived together. I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I authentically heard of;—nor would I have mentioned the above revolting details, had I not met with several people, so blinded by the constitutional gaiety of the negro as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil. Such people have generally visited at the houses of the upper classes, where the domestic slaves are usually well treated, and they have not, like myself, lived amongst the lower classes. Such inquirers will ask slaves about their condition; they forget that the slave must indeed be dull who does not calculate on the chance of his answer reaching his master’s ears.

It is argued that self-interest will prevent excessive cruelty; as if self-interest protected our domestic animals, which are far less likely than degraded slaves to stir up the rage of their savage masters. It is an argument long since protested against with noble feeling, and strikingly exemplified, by the ever-illustrious Humboldt. It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with our poorer countrymen: if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin; but how this bears on slavery, I cannot see; as well might the use of the thumb-screw be defended in one land, by showing that men in another land suffered from some dreadful disease. Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter;—what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children—those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own—being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that His Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty; but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin.

Happy 199^th birthday, Charles.

Flock of starlings

Crows have got nothing on these guys…

Crows have got nothing on these guys… I’d love to go see this in person someday, but unfortunately I don’t live near Oxford, England. The music is from a company called CSS Music. The track is “Soaring With The Sun”

Enlightenment For Sale

Sunday was quite a full day of volleyball. A reffing clinic around noon, then dropping in to Intermediate 1 (I figured I’d have a good shot, since lots of people would be away for the long weekend), then my usual Intermediate 2 play. There was also a beginner reffing clinic between I1 and I2; I’d already taken it, so it gave me a chance to go grab a bite to eat.

I went to that little muffin/snack place, corner of Alma and 4^th Ave, realised I didn’t have enough cash, and went looking for a bank machine. On an impulse, even though it was dark and drizzling, I decided to wander up 4^th and after a block or two came upon Banyen Books. Wow. Now there’s a name that was totally not on my mind. I’d only been there once or twice probably ten years ago, when I was still in my kinda-paganish phase. To buy a copy of the Tao Te Ching, if I recall. Wait, no, it was to buy a copy of The Complete Book of Tai Chi Chuan, as recommended by my then-teacher, and I bought the TTC on my own because Taoism appealed to me. Ah, memories! So, I couldn’t resist: since I still had some time to kill, I went in to browse.

It was just as I remembered it. I’m pretty sure it used to be in another location, so the layout was probably different, not that that mattered much. And I remember they used to have one of those little fountains, the kind that always makes me want to pee, but didn’t this weekend, thank gawd. But everything else? Exactly. The. Same. Incense, soft music, the promise of magic and revelation in every Tarot deck and $50 crystal. I wandered the shelves of books on dream analysis and cosmic science and Celtic Goddess worship and all sorts of weird esoteric topics I’d never even heard of. So many fluffy morsels for people who’ll believe anything that feels good, people hungrily seeking something they can’t even name and wouldn’t recognize if they found it.

Truth is, I could feel faint echoes of the same yearnings inside me. There was a time when I too was a seeker, sort of. After dropping Catholicism, I looked for answers or at least wisdom in mythologies both old and new to replace beliefs that hadn’t appealed to me in a long time. I didn’t put much effort into it because I never felt that the spiritualities I absorbed were really what I needed. Nowadays, of course, I tend to trust my own judgment and revel in my skepticism. I don’t need faiths, spiritualities to make me complete or hand me The Truth.

Still, I have… moments of weakness. Now, in one corner of the store (next to handsome leatherbound Books of Shadows) were a few racks of sketchpads and notepads, all with very pretty covers. I was seriously tempted to get one. I hadn’t done any drawing in a long time, and I thought it might inspire me. Or at least push me to practice regularly, cos Gawd knows I need the practice. But really, wasn’t that more magical thinking? If they’re anywhere, the talent and the potential are in myself. Not some object I shelled out $24.95 + tax for, no matter how pretty it is.

So I left without getting anything, and went back to the gym to sweat off half my body weight. On the way home I bought a pad of unlined paper at Safeway for a couple of bucks, on which I’ve been doodling since.

Flown The Coop

They’re definitely on their own now. Since late last week, none of the juveniles have touched down on the roof for more than a few minutes, and haven’t even been fed by their parents. At least as far as I could see. Even the runt I worried about so much is flying like a pro, its flight strong, its gliding smooth as silk. It’s such a joy to watch them go after seeing them grow up. Funny to think just a couple of months ago they were still downy little chicks with useless wings and ravenous stomachs.

How far will they wander, though? Their ‘hood currently ranges over several city blocks, but how much will it change in their lifetime? I’m not clear on what “territory” might mean to a seagull when they’re not actually nesting. I guess it’s probably just a hunting/feeding range, overlapping with that of other seagulls, expanding or contracting depending on how much competition they face. But on the whole (I’m totally guessing here), probably not moving too much from generation to generation. Which means these gulls’ ancestors might have been around this area since before Europeans came along. Even before First Nations people–though I’m thinking not long before, what with Ice Ages and all.

Circle of Life, people. Circle of Life.

Up, Up And Away

Holy cow, it’s flying!

And not just little Kitty Hawk laps around the roof, but soaring beautifully, higher even than my floor. It’s still got a lot to learn–it’s flapping too much, using up too much energy, and when it does try to glide its wings are all twitchy and hesitant; also, the landings need work–but damn that’s impressive. Just a week ago it was confined to the rooftop, and now… the sky’s the limit.

Holy cow, it’s flying!

Its siblings aren’t doing so well, though. One is a pretty fair flyer, able to fly for short stretches but not getting much lift. That’s okay, it just needs a little bit more time. It’s the last one, the runt, that has me really worried. I was at an off-site training session all day yesterday, but my coworker (who’s almost as interested in these critters as I am) told me it got stuck on a lower, adjoining roof since yesterday, and couldn’t get back up. It’s only about a yard up, but that’s more than the little guy can manage. And this morning, it looked in bad shape; its wing feathers looked all scraggly, its balance was bad, it just didn’t seem to have a lot of energy. Had it even been eating and drinking? Were the parents feeding it?

Turns out, yes they are. So it won’t starve just yet. But I’m wondering how long the adults will keep feeding their chicks. Another co-worker opined that now the juveniles would follow the parents on the hunt, to learn the tricks of the trade. Chicks #1 and 2 should be okay. But #3 is far behind its sibs, and may not be able to take care of itself once the parents decide to cut them off.

I wish them all luck, because they’ll need it. They’ve had it pretty easy so far, but now they’ll have to compete with a whole generation of hungry juveniles. It’s a gull-eat-gull world.