Carnival of the Godless #95

The 95th edition of the Carnival of the Godless is out at The Atheist Blogger. My contribution to the carnival is "Atheists who believe in God", an analysis of an odd recent Pew finding. Another post to check out: Greta Christina on the messed up teachings of Jesus Christ.

Galileo and Newton

A random bit of common-knowledge correction... A oft repeated little myth is that Galileo died in the year Newton was born and sometimes this is given mystical significance: reincarnation must be afoot! (I came across this myth again - sans mystical interpretation - in Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe). This case, however, bears out the maxim that things are always more complicated that they at first appear.

The problem, you see, is that for the Julian calendar a year is on average 365.25 days long, but a tropical year is in fact 11 minutes and 14 seconds less than that, which means the calender becomes progressively more out of sync with the seasons. The solution was calendar reform and the adoption of the Gregorian calendar. That calendar, however, is so named after Pope Gregory XIII who ordered the reform by Papal Bull in 1582 - but of course the Protestant Reformation had started in 1517, which meant that only some European countries adopted the calendar right away. Catholic Italy (where Galileo was born and died) adopted the new calendar as ordered in 1582 but Protestant Great Britain (where Newton was born) only adopted the calendar in 1750. So here comes the trouble: Newton was born on December 25th 1642 on the Old Style (i.e. Julian) calendar and Galileo died January 8th 1642 on the New Style (i.e. Gregorian) calendar. Newton's corrected date of birth (i.e. his New Style date of birth) is 4 January 1643, just under a year after Galileo's death and not in the same calendar year.

To rational people, of course, none of this really matters: even if Newton had been born in the same Calendar year as Galileo died, there would be no reason to think anything paranormal was going on, there just has to be many such coincidences in history. Nonetheless, the Newton-Galileo story is a nice little example of how complicated the world is and how even a book as carefully fact-checked as Isaacson's may contain errors. Skepticism, no matter the source, is always advisable.

Evidence matters

Quite possibly the single most dangerous and egregiously misinformed article I have ever laid eyes upon in a peer-reviewed publication is Holmes et. al.'s "Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism". I've been meaning to write a blog post about it for ages, but I still haven't been able to finish the paper because reading it makes me want to murder kittens by the dozen... Luckily, Doctor Spurt over at Effortless Incitement has produced a great post on just how deeply idiotic and dangerous the paper really is.

Doctor Spurt even alleges to have read the paper *twice*. Verily, the Doctor has a stronger stomach than I.

Open access, under attack

I like open access. In my opinion, the serials crisis is an absolute travesty and, despite my 'capitalist' instincts, the spectacle of huge companies making profits from the efforts of academics who (a) are not in the companies' employ and (b) are funded (largely) by taxpayers, utterly disgusts me. So it rather pisses me off that the august Nature magazine (which, I should note, I have difficulty accessing because my institution can't afford the subscription fee) has published a bloody screed against PLoS, the best known open access suite of journals. The screed opens thusly:

Public Library of Science (PLoS), the poster child of the open-access publishing movement, is following an haute couture model of science publishing — relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals.

Sigh. I'd respond myself, but I doubt I could be objective. Luckily, Living the Scientific Live has criticized the article at length and Blog Around the Clock has compiled a list of blog reactions.

Picture: Intimidating company

Imagine giving a talk in front of this audience... (Note that a bunch of luminaries are not even named in the picture: Marie Curie, for example, is sitting between Lorenz and Planck).


(I'm reading Walter Isaacson's new biography of Einstein at the moment, and this picture caught my eye. A full list of names is here.)

Chimpanzees hunt with spears

This news isn't new, but it still amazes me: chimpanzees hunt with spears. Specifically, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani have observed a newly habituated troop of Western chimpanzees in Fongoli, Senegal habitually using wooden spears to hunt lesser bush babies. (Pruetz and Bertolani reported this discovery back in early 2007 in their paper, "Savanna Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes verus, Hunt with Tools"). While it is well known that chimps hunt red colobus monkeys, bush babies are rarely preyed upon, possibly because they are small and nimble. Unlike colobus monkeys, bush babies are nocturnal and spend the day sleeping in tree hollows - and that's where the Fongoli chimps hunt them.

First, the chimps fashioned their spears: generally speaking, they broke off a living branch, trimmed the side branches off, and sometimes they stripped the entire branch of bark and occasionally even sharpened one end by biting it multiple times. (See an example of a spear, left). Then the chimps "forcefully jabbed" the spear multiple times into suspected bush baby cavities and then smelt and/or licked it on extraction. At the time of the article's publication, in only incident was a chimpanzee observed actually extracting a bush baby after spearing a cavity, but several other individuals were seen eating bush baby meat. (And Pruetz's observations are ongoing). This remarkable behavior can be seen in the clip embedded below (the real action starts at around 4:00):



Interestingly, while colobus hunts are cooperative and male dominated, bush baby spearing is solitary and generally carried out by females and immature individuals. Pruetz and Bertolani speculate "that individuals whose access to preferred resources such as meat is limited by social or physical factors respond by developing alternative means with which to acquire them" (2007: 414). In other words, lack of access through usual means forces some chimpanzees to get creative and invent new ways to acquire desirable resources. This has obvious implications for human evolution: Miocene apes are thought to have evolved in a climate not dissimilar to that of Savannah chimpanzees and this paper's findings may thus "support the hypothesis that female hominids play a role in the evolution of the earliest tool technology, and we suggest that these technologies included hunting-related behavior, in addition to gathering-related activities" (2007: 414).

Amazingly, the Fongoli chimpanzees exhibit two further never-before-seen behaviors: using caves during the day to stay cool and bathing in water (see the video). These three cultural innovations together suggest there may be something to the theory that hominid evolution was driven by drought during the Miocene which caused woodlands to contract and the Savannah to expand. In conclusion: primatology rocks!

(See also: National Geographic's article on the chimps of Fongoli).

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Pruetz, J., & Bertolani, P. (2007). Savanna Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes verus, Hunt with Tools Current Biology, 17 (5), 412-417 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2006.12.042

Skepticism and your lying brain

I blogged about Wang and Aamodt's 'public service announcement' to the effect that "your brain lies to you" the other day. Steven Novella, the über-skeptic, blogged about the same article and interestingly related it to scientific skepticism. Novella argues, among other things, that it is important to try to counteract source amnesia and that we must take care not to entrench myths when debunking them:

In terms of skeptical activism, knowledge of this aspect of human memory can help skeptics frame their message. We do not, for example, want to mention a myth that is not already generally known for the purpose of refuting it. We also need to be conscious of how we state things. Rather than saying that the claim that people use 10% of their brain is a myth, we should say first that people use 100% of their brain - first establish the framework of the positive true statement.

Also we need to emphasize teaching the tools of how to think, rather than just telling people what to think. Along these lines we need to teach people how we know what we know in science, not just the current findings of science. If you teach the process of arriving at a conclusion, that automatically gives them a framework to help remember information correctly and also gives them the ability to reproduce the argument and re-arrive at the correct conclusion - rather than just having to remember it correctly by rote.

Berry Go Round #6

Berry Go Round is a, well, plant blog carnival... and it's being hosted right now at Seeds Aside. My contribution to this edition is "Plants, it turns out, are not nearly as boring as we thought". Recommended: Blog Around the Clock takes on the classic papers challenge and writes about the development of chronobiology.