Kingdom Come
Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a woodcut. Germany, AD 1498.
Vaughan Bell has an interesting piece at Slate about research into how followers of apocalyptic cults cope when their end-of-the-world predictions don’t pan out. The answer is that they don’t. That is, they don’t ever really face up to it, because to them, the great clash of theory and fact never happens. That’s because they’ve rigged their theories so that contrary facts may not disturb the integrity of the theory. Bell concludes:
For those not waiting for the world to end in a storm of fire and light it is easy to write off the believers as deluded, but Festinger was not so wide of the mark when he suggested that we adapt to even the most unlikely of contradictions using nothing more than our methods of everyday rationalization. The faithful could just as easily be those who stubbornly stand by disgraced politicians, failed ideologies, dishonest friends, or cheating spouses, even when reality highlights the clearest of inconsistencies. Armageddon is unlikely to arrive this weekend, but most of us have lived through it many times before.
Via Mind Hacks. Also interesting to see, via Kevin Drum, that the crackpot behind this particular rapture theory spent upwards of $100 million publicizing it, with the result that we’ve all had a good time making fun of it.
That said, in time the sun and stars will all burn out, and human life will be extinguished forever.
Annals of Evolution: What Are Goosebumps?
Like hiccups, goosebumps are a QWERTY phenomenon. They are relics of our evolutionary heritage. Rob Dunn explains:
When our ancestors were covered in fur, muscles in their skin called “arrector pili” contracted when they were upset or cold, making their fur stand on end. When an angry or frightened dog barks at you, these are the muscles that raise its bristling hair. The same muscles puff up the feathers of birds and the fur of mammals on cold days to help keep them warm. Although we no longer have fur, we still have fur muscles just beneath our skin. They flex each time we are scared by a bristling dog or chilled by a wind, and in doing so give us goose bumps that make our thin hair stand uselessly on end.
Interestingly, it’s these kind of traits—ones that don’t really make sense or contribute to an organism’s current adaptive fitness—that make the most compelling arguments for the theory of natural selection. More examples in Dunn’s piece at the Smithsonian.
How to Get Things Done
Here’s a handy summary of evidence-based suggestions of the optimal psychological states one should maintain in order to get stuff done.
- To avoid procrastinating on a task, focus on its details and use self-imposed deadlines.
- To stick to a task, while actually carrying it out, now it is beneficial to keep the ultimate, abstract goal in mind.
- When evaluating progress on a hard task, when the chance of failure is high, stay focused on the details of the task.
- Once tasks are easier or the end is in sight, a more abstract, goal focus is once again the psychological approach to choose.
From PsyBlog.
Annals of Evolution: What Are Hiccups?
Hiccups are pretty damn weird, if you think about ‘em. And one of the reasons they are weird is that thinking about them does not help you control them. Anyway, it’s something I’ve always wondered about—making it a perfect topic for my occasional series, Things I’ve Always Wondered About. Over at the Smithsonian, Rob Dunn explains:
The first air-breathing fish and amphibians extracted oxygen using gills when in the water and primitive lungs when on land—and to do so, they had to be able to close the glottis, or entryway to the lungs, when underwater. Importantly, the entryway (or glottis) to the lungs could be closed. When underwater, the animals pushed water past their gills while simultaneously pushing the glottis down. We descendants of these animals were left with vestiges of their history, including the hiccup. In hiccupping, we use ancient muscles to quickly close the glottis while sucking in (albeit air, not water). Hiccups no longer serve a function, but they persist without causing us harm—aside from frustration and occasional embarrassment. One of the reasons it is so difficult to stop hiccupping is that the entire process is controlled by a part of our brain that evolved long before consciousness, and so try as you might, you cannot think hiccups away.
In other words, hiccups are a QWERTY phenomenon, a reminder of the path dependence of evolution. See the full piece for more of evolution’s legacy in our daily lives.
More on Peer Review (or the Lack Thereof)
I hope it was clear that my earlier mention of famous scientific papers that had not been peer reviewed was not meant to denigrate peer review in any way. On the contrary, I was taken aback at the audacity of publishing important scientific research without running it through a process of disinterested expert review. The times have a-changed, I guess. Peer review is now such an integral facet of modern science and scholarship that, as Austin Frakt noted to me by email, credibility is well nigh impossible without it.
Tangentially, I am still dumbfounded by the fact that law reviews are generally not edited by legal scholars, but by students without experience in law or scholarship—or editing, for that matter. Richard Posner articulated an authoritative takedown of the law review system here.
Without Peer (Review)
This blog is not peer-reviewed. And do you know what else wasn’t peer-reviewed? Watson and Crick’s famous paper on the structure of DNA, that’s what! And probably most of Albert Einstein’s work. Einstein was apparently so insulted by a negative report from an anonymous referee that he simply withdrew his submission and never sought to publish again in the journal in question. (Einstein and others also discovered errors in the paper before publishing in another journal, though it’s not clear that they were the same as those found by the reviewer.)
Selected Behavior
I’m enjoying Karl Smith’s guest posts at Ezra Klein’s place so much that I went to check out his usual digs at Modeled Behavior. There I ran into this little foray into the theory of Darwinism:
Natural selection in our world operates through inheritance but inheritance is not necessary for this this to hold. If creatures were simply randomly popping into existence and some [were] devoured by others and some not, then we would still observe a set of creatures that looked as if was designed not to be devoured.
Why?
Because all the others would have been devoured and thus rendered unobservable.
Now that’s just not quite right. There are three components to the theory of natural selection: replication, variation, and differential survival. These three elements don’t boil down any further; you have to have them all. The key to natural selection is that differential selectors act upon diverse populations so as to change the prevalence of certain traits in successive generations of those populations. It’s not simply that the survivors are observed and the devoured are not—the evolutionary analogue of the-victors-write-the-history—but that the population’s gene pool has actually adapted to a selection environment. And as this process plays out in complex ecosystems, the result is inevitably that populations bear so many minute and intricately adapted traits that they appear to have been purposely designed to do what they do.
One of the insights of Universal Darwinism is that, in a sense, they have been designed that way, but not purposely.
Assassin Bugs
Need an idea for a Halloween costume? Try covering yourself in a mound of corpses like these assassin bugs:
Apparently this will also make you unappetizing to spiders. Via Ed Yong.
Penetrating Observations: Grim Reaper Edition
- Researchers using DNA analysis are “85% sure” they’ve identified the remains of Italian painter Caravaggio (1571-1610) in a small church in Tuscany. And it seems that Caravaggio, an artistic genius with homicidal tendencies, probably died from conditions exacerbated by lead poisoning resulting from heavy exposure through his paints. From the levels of lead in his bones, the exposure would have been enough to cause or contribute to his famous behavioral problems. Hat tip: Ed Yong.
- Christopher Hitchens doesn’t drink nearly as much as we all think he does. But he’s still a tragically good example of the conclusion of this recent study: we humans are getting “better” at making decisions that may kill us.
- Caffeine can kill you too…if you consume a whole lot of it at once. Calculate how much of your favorite beverage will kill you here. Via Mind Hacks.
- Even salsa can kill you! Well, no, not really. But salsa-borne bacteria can make you sick, and you could potentially die from that. Anyway the CDC says outbreaks of food-borne illness from salsa and guacamole rose to 3.9% of all food-borne outbreaks in 2008, up from 1.5% in the late nineties. Via Food Politics.
- Aeschylus (524–455 B.C.), Greek tragedian who orchestrated epic dramas of fates, furies, and the meaning of justice, apparently died from a cranial injury when an eagle dropped a turtle on the playwright’s bald head, probably mistaking it for a rock upon which to crack open the turtle’s shell. Via Mind Hacks.
Diagram of the Day
In case you ever need it, here’s a sort of workflow diagram for refurbishing a lung and transplanting it into a rat:
Via Ed Yong, who writes:
In a lab at Yale University, a rat inhales. Every breath this rodent takes is a sign of important medical advances looming on the horizon, for only one of its lungs comes from the pair it was born with. The other was built in a laboratory.
This transplanted lung is the work of Thomas Petersen and a large team of US scientists. Their technique isn’t a way of growing a lung from scratch. Instead it takes an existing lung, strips away all the cells and blood vessels to leave behind a scaffold of connective tissues, and re-grows the missing cells in a vat. It’s the medical equivalent of stripping a house down to a frame of beams and struts and rebuilding the rest from scratch. The whole process only took a few days and when the reconstituted lung was transplanted into a rat, it worked.
Everyone Who Ever Lived
Global population growth is on track to reach 7 billion in 2011. We hit 6 billion just 11 years ago, in 1999.
So, how big is the set of all people who have ever lived on Earth? About 107 billion, if estimates I’ve adjusted from the Population Reference Bureau are correct (I’ve added 600 million to their 2002 numbers and rounded down). That would mean that about 6% of everyone who ever lived is alive today.
This infographic, from Jon Gosier, helps to visualize the numbers:
Click to enlarge.
Via coolinfographics.
Weekend Wordery: Nicaraguan Sign Language
Yuri Mejia, a student at the Escuelita de Bluefields school, signing “friend” in Nicaraguan Sign Language. Credit: Christina Gomez-Mira; courtesy of Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects, Inc.
Until the early 1980s, deaf children in Nicaragua were mostly kept at home and did not attend school. They did not learn any kind of systematic sign language. But after the Sandinistas came to power in 1979, determined efforts were made to improve the country’s education system, which had until then been one of the poorest in Latin America.
Deaf children were put into schools and taught Spanish, lipreading, and fingerspelling signs—with dismal results. However, outside the classroom, the children began to improvise signs to communicate with each other. At first their signs were like pantomime, and each child signed differently from every other child. But when a second wave of very young children enrolled in the deaf schools, something remarkable happened. The younger children signed more fluidly, more expressively, and with more complex and systematic combinations. They had spontaneously standardized their grammar. By the mid-80s, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) was well established.
NSL has afforded psycholinguists the unique opportunity to study a language in its infancy. New research led by Jennie Pyers elaborates the deep implications that language acquisition has for the development of other kinds of cognitive function. The study involved two cohorts of NSL signers: a group of pioneers whose early form of NSL lacked specific conventions for indicating spatial position (e.g., right, left, over, under); and a younger group who had learned the more developed NSL that did include basic spatial vocabulary. Ed Yong describes:
Pyers compared the abilities of people from both groups, now fully grown adults, in two spatial tests. First, she led them into a small room with a single red wall. She hid a token in one corner of the room, blindfolded the [subjects] and spun them around until they lost their bearings. When she removed the blindfold, the [subjects] had to say where the token was. The second test, like the first, involved hiding a token in the corner of a room, but this time the room was a tabletop model that was rotated while the [subjects] were blindfolded.
In both tests, the second group of adults (who learned the more advanced form of NSL) outperformed the first group. Even though their memories and ability to understand the tasks were just as good, the expanded vocabulary of geographical gestures that they learned as children also gave them better spatial abilities well into adulthood.
[...] Pyers explains, “The first-cohort signers find these tasks challenging because they do not have the language to encode the relevant aspects of the environment that would help them solve the spatial problem.”
This is a step beyond evidence that language shapes our experience. It is evidence that the development of certain types of cognitive function is contingent upon language acquisition.
References:
- Pyers’ paper at PNAS: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914044107 (Note that this link will not reach its target until the post-embargo publication window opens. It might take a few weeks for that to happen.)
- Photo via NSF.
How Did Prehistoric Sea Dragons Keep Warm?
Prehistoric dragons that lived in the sea were able to (a) exist and (b) regulate their internal body temperatures, holding it above 24°C even when swimming in 12°C water, according to research described by Ed Yong. Yong notes that researchers still do not understand how the giant reptiles managed to keep their body heat up.
I dunno. Maybe something to do with breathing fire?
Weekend Birdery: The Rook and the Pitcher
In Aesop’s fable “The Crow and the Pitcher,” a thirsty crow finds a pitcher of water and tries to drink from it, but the water level is too low to reach with its beak. So the crow drops pebbles in the pitcher, one at a time, raising the water level to the top where the crow can drink it.
A study published last August shows that rooks (relatives of crows) are able to reach the same solution as the crow in the fable. In the video below, a rook is presented with a cylinder containing a worm floating on the surface of water that is below reach of the rook’s beak. When provided with some small stones, the rook carefully drops them in the cylinder until the water level rises enough for the rook to reach the worm.
Click to watch video at youtube.
Bird brains, indeed. Via Ed Yong.
This Week in Confirming Things I Always Assumed Were True
- Darth Vader satisfies the diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder.
- Multitasking degrades task performance and decreases performance efficiency. (Hat tip to Kevin Drum)
- Statistical study confirms that life on earth has one common ancestor.
- Binge drinking kills brain cells. Specifically, hippocampal stem cells responsible for churning out new neurons, thus potentially causing lasting impairment of brain function. At least, that’s true for adolescent monkeys. A reasonable bet says it’s true for adolescent humans, too. Via Ed Yong.
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