Science Musings Blog

A fourth Jesus

2009-11-08T12:26:00.002Z

I was browsing Deepak Chopra's latest offering on the new book shelf of the college library -- The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore.

Chopra, of course, is the fabulously successful New Age/Eastern guru who offers in books and motivational seminars "physical wellness", "emotional wellbeing" and "spiritual awakening", along with massage oils and ayurvedic sinus support. Not to mention quantum healing, "Love Poems from God," and a CD called "Drum Sex", whatever that is.

Not to be too snarky. Chopra is a positive force for mutual tolerance and global peace, and lord knows we need more of that. His new book is filled with lots of good sense, so more power to him. But needless to say, his brand of mystico-transcendentalism is not for me.

Who is this "Third Jesus"?

Chopra's first Jesus is the historical person who lived in Galilee two thousand years ago, about whom we know almost nothing that can be called historically reliable. We know nothing that meets the standard of scientific evidence.

The second Jesus is the divinity of the institutional churches, constructed over the centuries by theologians, reformers and self-appointed prophets. This is the Jesus who was born of a virgin, rose from the dead, sits at the right hand of the Father, and who will come again, etc. "He became the foundation of a religion that has proliferated into some twenty thousand sects," says Chopra. "[Sects that] argue endlessly over every thread in the garments of a ghost."

The third Jesus, now on offer, is the mystical guru who taught his followers God-consciousness, and who "spent his brief adult life describing it, teaching it, and passing it on to future generations." That is to say, Chopra's third Jesus looks a lot like Deepak Chopra. Which again is fair enough; presumably, the founder of every one of those twenty thousand sects proffered a Jesus who looked pretty much like himself/herself.

So I will too. Here is my Jesus, the boy in the painting below, Georges de la Tour's Saint Joseph, the Carpenter, c. 1640s (click to enlarge). The Jesus of the painting is a creature of the artist's imagination, and he exists only in our imaginations too. A lad helping his father in the workshop. What the boy understands of his future life work, we have no idea. Maybe he has no idea either.

What do we see? Not Truth. Not God-consciousness. Not a Vatican staffed with men in Renaissance garb waited on by nuns. Not Lourdes holy water or ayurvedic sinus support. What we see is a child's simplicity, love, work, family, craft. And if that auger in Joseph's hands anticipates the cross, well, death comes to us all.

"I am the light" Jesus is supposed to have said: A candle flame hidden by a child's translucent fingers.

Thorns

2009-11-07T12:31:00.004Z

Tell me, if you know,
the name of this sprawling woodland plant
with small paddle-shaped leaves,
November-red, and bright red berries.

And thorns.

Thorns seemingly too thin
and soft to be of much use
deterring browsers. What deer
would hesitate to nibble here?

And yet, this lovely plant --
whose name I do not know --
bristles menacingly, pretending
a keenly-whetted defense.

How often has natural selection
gone down this path, nature-red-
in-tooth-and-claw adopting spikes,
spines, prickles, thorns.

Thorny devil lizard.
Puffer fish.
Spiky sea urchin.
Hedgehog.
Spiny king crab.
Crown-of-thorns starfish.

Cactus.
Rose.
Honey locust.
Green briar.
Tear-thumb.
Thistle.

You and I with our
soft and silky skin
facilitating love, caresses,
the apparently un-Darwinian invitations
to intimacy. Left vulnerable by
nature's oversight we provide
our own swords, daggers, lances, spears.

Match.com

2009-11-06T12:04:00.003Z

As a service to lovers everywhere, Science Musings has previously considered the perennial question, "What does the other half want?"

But before I return to that muddlesome topic, take a minute or so to watch this video of the courtship display of the spatuletail hummingbird of Peru.

********

I don't know if what you have just watched is an argument for natural selection or for intelligent design. If the latter, the Designer has a quirky sense of humor. If the former, the male spatuletail hummingbird has been dealt an unfortunate hand by female sexual preference.

Hummingbirds live on the metabolic edge, burning up calories as fast as they can stoke themselves with nectar, and this poor fellow has to carry around those two absurdly long tail feathers that serve no other purpose than pleasing a potential mate. And think of the energy required to wave them so seductively.

Did he score? Or did she sit there waiting for another fellow with slightly longer flags, all that exhausting foreplay for nothing. If the male spatuletail hummingbird is able to formulate an inarticulate thought, it is surely the same one men have always asked: "What do women want?"

Euclid alone has looked on...

2009-11-05T12:08:00.002Z

Ponder for a moment this exquisite glass sculpture by the glassblower/artist Luke Jerram. About the size of a melon. A shell of sorts made up of glistening clustered spheres. Inside, a twisting snake of translucent glass.

Guess what? It's a sculptural representation of the swine flu virus. A protein shell. Inside, eight segments of single-strand RNA. Here, at the smallest dimension of life -- if you can call a virus living -- at a scale too small to be observed even with the best optical microscope, nature has contrived structures of stunning elegance.

The beauty of a virus is a matter of necessity. A virus has only enough genes to encode for a few proteins -- eleven for H1N1. To build its shell, the virus uses the same proteins over and over, like the repetitive pattern of patches on a soccer ball. They can only reproduce and build their protein shells by hijacking the chemical machinery of a living host cell. Your cells and my cells. And what they leave behind is a mess.

A virus is a shoestring operation, a paragon of frugality. Making do with the bare minimum, it comes up with beauty bare.

Tears of joy

2009-11-04T12:03:00.003Z

I have known about the quiltmakers of Gee's Bend, Alabama, for some time. My friend Candace in the Art Department ordered books on the subject for the college library, which I have perused. Astonishing that a group of older black women from one of the poorest communities in America took the art world by storm with their quilts of inspired and idiosyncratic design.

But I was not prepared for my reaction when I watched last evening an hour-long documentary, The Quiltmakers of Gee's Bend (produced by Alabama Public Television, directed by Celia Carey). It recounted the history of the quiltmakers, spoke of the uniqueness of their work, and ended with a bus trip of the women to a major show of their quilts at Milwaukee's futuristic Art Museum (designed by Santiago Calatrava).

I don't cry easily, but the film brought me to tears.

Why, exactly? Why did I weep? I have no immediate connection to the women or their work. There was something of the Cinderella story, of course -- a few dozen desperately poor descendants of slaves become the toast of major museums, their quilts suddenly selling for thousands. There was the beauty of the quilts, and of the women who made them. There was the haunting loveliness of the Negro gospel songs that figure so prominently in the film and make up so much of the soundtrack. And the goodness.

William Blake wrote: "Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps."

The tears -- nature or nurture? Are we born with empathy, or do we learn it? There has been some discussion here on the possibly innate origins of male aggression. A genetic predisposition to empathy might be even more problematic. There are reasons why natural selection would favor empathy between mothers and infants, and between close kin, but that hardly accounts for my weeping with the women of Gee's Bend.

Tears are physiological, and can be triggered by cold, onions, irritants, and other purely physical stimuli. But what is the connection between emotion and tear ducts? Studies have shown that women and girls are more empathetic -- and prone to tears -- than men and boys, but that doesn't overwhelmingly suggest nature or nurture, since boys and girls tend to be raised differently. Tom Lutz has written a book on the subject of weeping -- Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears -- which I read some time ago, and, although interesting, I don't recall that it threw much light on the nature vs. nurture question.

We'll know eventually, as the genome is decoded. I suspect it is a bit of both -- genes and nurturing. Still, what a thing it is that the story of quiltmakers from a one-horse town in rural Alabama can have me reaching for the tissues.

(The quilt above by Minnie Sue Coleman, born 1926.)

Believing six impossible things before breakfast

2009-11-03T12:48:00.007Z

Here is a little digression for your breakfast edification.

A typical animal cell is about 16 micrometers (16 millionths of a meter) in diameter. Thinner than a sheet of tissue paper. Tinier than the period at the end of this sentence. There are ten trillion or so cells in your body.

Lot's of stuff packed into each cell, including an arm's length of DNA, the code of life. Yes, really! I know it sounds impossible that an arm's length of anything would fit in such a small space, with room left over for other stuff, but it does. And it's not just sitting there. Tiny protein-based "motors" crawl along the strands of DNA, transcribing the code into single-strand RNA molecules, which in turn provide the templates for fabricating the proteins that build and maintain our bodies. Other proteins help pack DNA neatly into the nuclei of cells and maintain the tidy chromosome structures. Still other protein-based "motors" are busily at work untying knots that form in DNA as it is unpacked in the nucleus and copied during cell division. Others are in charge of quality control, checking for accuracy and repairing errors. Working, spinning, ceaselessly weaving, winding, unwinding, patching, repairing -- each cell like a bustling factory of a thousand workers. Ten trillion cells humming with the business of life.

All this in a cell smaller than this period.

And now I see an article in a recent issue of Nature (8 October): "Nucleation, propagation and cleavage of target RNAs in Ago silencing complexes." Here is the abstract. Don't worry about understanding it; I don't. Just scan it.

The slicer activity of the RNA-induced silencing complex resides within its Argonaute (Ago) component, in which the PIWI domain provides the catalytic residues governing guide-strand mediated site-specific cleavage of target RNA. Here we report on structures of ternary complexes of Thermus thermophilus Ago catalytic mutants with 5'-phosphorylated 21-nucleotide guide DNA and complementary target RNAs of 12, 15 and 19 nucleotides in length, which define the molecular basis for Mg2+-facilitated site-specific cleavage of the target. We observe pivot-like domain movements within the Ago scaffold on proceeding from nucleation to propagation steps of guide-target duplex formation, with duplex zippering beyond one turn of the helix requiring the release of the 3'-end of the guide from the PAZ pocket. Cleavage assays on targets of various lengths supported this model, and sugar-phosphate-backbone-modified target strands showed the importance of structural and catalytic divalent metal ions observed in the crystal structures.

And just to give all those words a bit of substance, here is one of the diagrams that accompany the article (click to enlarge).

It seems impossible that anyone could know in such detail what's going on at such a tiny scale. For the first time in human history we are learning about the basic machinery of life in action, machinery that not so long ago we had no idea existed, machinery that is in one sense stunningly simple (that 4-letter code of DNA for all of life, that elegant double helix), and in another sense is so staggeringly complex that we wonder that it works at all, so reliably, for such a long time. The unceasing chemical dance that makes you you and keeps you you. And we sit here sipping our coffee, ten trillion cells, a seething miracle -- all unawares.

Burning books

2009-11-02T11:54:00.003Z

We all heard about the looting of the Baghdad Archeological Museum in the immediate aftermath of the the US invasion of Iraq. We heard less about the libraries.

A million books in the National Library were burned. The National Archive, with millions of records from the republican and Ottoman periods, went up in smoke. The same took place at the University of Baghdad library, the Awqaf Library, and dozens of university libraries across the country. In Basra, the Museum of Natural History was burned, along with the Central Public Library, the university library, and the Islamic Library. Libraries and archives in Mosul and Tikrit witnessed major destruction. I glean this sad accounting from A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq, by Fernando Baez, director of Venezuela's National Library and scholar of the history of libraries. Baez visited Iraq soon after the invasion as part of the U.N. committee investigating the destruction of that country's cultural treasures.

It's a sad, heartbreaking book, tracing the wanton burning of books from ancient times to the present, in cultures east and west. Often the motive is to erase the traces of an overthrown regime, or to eradicate political or religious ideas considered heretical. Sometimes the motive is sheer anti-intellectualism. Whatever the reason, the result is the same, as described to Baez by a university professor in Baghdad: "Our memory no longer exists."

The book had a special poignance for me as I read it sitting in my usual chair in the stacks of my college library.

It is a convention in science, strictly adhered to, that any paper or book purporting to advance the state of knowledge cites the relevant preceding literature. The idea is that knowledge grows like a tree, each new twig attached to an ever-branching trunk. Burn the trunk or branches and the twig dies. In science, memory is sustenance.

I like to imagine a personal library containing every book I've ever read, in the order that I read them, starting with the Hardy Boys and ending -- for the moment -- with Fernando Baez Such a collection would be a pretty fair picture of who I am. I wonder if anyone has ever done that?

Cultures and civilizations, too, are fairly represented by libraries. It is inconceivable to me that anyone could be so afraid of alien ideas as to send them up in smoke. The painting above, by Pedro Berruguete (15th c.), shows Saint Dominic presiding over the burning of books by Albigensians.

Evolution or stasis?

2009-11-01T12:47:00.004Z

As I have noted on this site before, it has been my honor over recent years to meet and learn from several groups of American Roman Catholic nuns of different congregations. Mostly these have been older women who entered their convents pre-Vatican II and have subsequently reinvented themselves to serve the Church and society in ways that would have been unthinkable in earlier times. Wimples have been discarded in favor of modest modern dress. Rote liturgical practice and adherence to antique doctrine has been replaced by a creative, socially liberal, and ecumenical engagement with modernity. I have been deeply moved by the sisters' joyous identification with the gentle Galilean, and by their willingness to redefine spirituality in ways that recognize the goodness of nature and the exhilarating vision of scientific cosmology. I have detected nothing but loyalty to the Church -- albeit a Church that bears little resemblance to the misogynistic, homophobic patriarchy in Rome.

For this, they are currently being investigated by two Vatican commissions, one focussed on the sisterly "quality of life," the other on doctrinal orthodoxy. Apparently, Rome is worried that American nuns have "failed to 'promote' the church's teachings on three issues: the male-only priesthood, homosexuality and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church as the means to salvation."

In the current issue of Commonweal (October 9), a longtime sister provides a moving and quietly angry response to the investigations. She chooses to remain anonymous for reasons she describes, and which are relevant to the subject in question. "In the Catholic Church," she writes, "it is men who tell women how they should understand themselves as women. Rome wants women religious to accept such understandings not merely without dissent, but without comment." To put it bluntly, she says, American women religious are being "bullied." You can read the article in its entirety here.

On Thursday, I discussed a book that prescribes the empowerment of women as a way to ameliorate the (presumed) biological predisposition of our species to male intergroup violence and the social disorders that accompany rampant population growth. One would think the Church would prefer to be on the peaceable side of these issues -- even if the simple justice of female equality were not enough.

Boo!

2009-10-31T10:13:00.002Z

A Halloweeen pic from Anne. Click to enlarge. My own Halloween contribution is below.

Halloween

2009-10-31T10:11:00.004Z

What's with the sudden glut of vampire-themed books and films?

As I recall, my first meeting with a vampire occurred in 1948, at age 12, in the film Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Bela Lugosi played Count Dracula, reprising his more famous 1931 title role as the thirsty bloodsucker from Transylvania. I have no memory of neck or fang from that outing, but a few years later I came across this passage from Bram Stoker's defining 1897 novel:

I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one's flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer, nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.

Now that I remember.

Since then I've been pretty much out of touch with vampires. Never saw an episode of Buffy. Never read Anne Rice. Haven't touched a Twilight book or seen the movie. Even Jane Austen, it seems, now cavorts with the undead, although not on my watch.

Still, the scientist in me asks: Why do vampires never die -- culturally speaking, I mean? Why are they flourishing now, in our supposedly scientific age? And why does our appetite to bite and be bitten cut across gender? Those puncture wounds in my adolescent neck, a la Bram Stoker, have pretty much healed over, but they may hold a hint to the answer.

Part of the answer may be obvious: We want to live forever. But with eternity on our hands, who wants to sit around on a cloud playing a harp. The tag line on the ads for the Twilight film is "When you can live forever, what do you want to live for?" Ah, now that's the question.

I know there has been a mountain of scholarship on this subject, but I haven't sought it out and so will indulge my own speculation.

Being a vampire means having all the advantages (in fantasy) of living forever -- and the chance to be deliciously naughty too, without guilt, because it's really not your fault.

Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck.

Those puncture holes in your jugular mean the usual rules don't apply.

Sex and war

2009-10-30T11:12:00.005Z

In the same issue of Science as Kaplan's review of Sex and War, there is a News/Focus article on the evolutionary history of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

The standard view has been that Neanderthals and modern humans shared a common ancestor, most likely in Africa, something less that 500,000 years ago. The population that became the Neanderthals was first to migrate into Europe and western Asia a few hundred thousand years ago, where they lived unmolested until H. Sapiens appeared on the scene about 40,000 years ago. The two species of humans lived side by side for 10,000 years until the Neanderthals were driven into a final refuge -- southern Spain -- where they became extinct. The evidence seems to suggest an unharmonious relationship between Neanderthals and H. Sapiens, an early chapter, perhaps, of sex and war.

Recent fossil finds have complicated the picture. Some anthropologists now believe that two or more hominid species might have lived in Europe and western Asia before H. sapiens came sweeping out of Africa. More sex and war, no doubt, more competition for resources, more chances to practice the fine art of killing. In these earlier hypothesized encounters, Neanderthals came out on top, driving the other populations to extinction, only to be vanquished in turn by our own immediate ancestors.

The image above from Science (credit: Mauricio Anton) reconstructs the species of hominids represented by a trove of half-million-year-old fossils found at Sima de los Huesos in northern Spain. They aren't us, but they aren't all that not-us either. In the drawing, they look rather like they are posing for a group photo at a family reunion. Did they have language? Religion? Did they bury their dead? Did they sing and dance? We have lots left to learn. In any case, once H. sapiens moved into their territory, they were soon gone.

War? Likely. Rape? Mate capture? As far as I know, there is no widely-accepted evidence of interbreeding between H. sapiens and their Euro-Asian predecessors, although the complete sequencing of Neanderthal DNA may yet have more to tell us.

I keep coming back to that haunting drawing of the Sima de los Huesos humans. Modern humans don't have to learn sex and war; it would appear to be in our genes, and probably in their genes too. Learning to love the other is rather more problematic.

Caught in the middle

2009-10-29T11:24:00.004Z

It doesn't take a genius to recognize that human males have a propensity for intergroup violence, and that the killing is often accompanied by rape. One need only read the newspapers. The only question is to what extent these tendencies are innate or culturally inculcated. Nature or nurture? Or both?

A new book, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World, by population biologist Malcolm Potts and science writer Thomas Hayden, dishes up a bit of both. The violence is in our (male) genes, they maintain, but it is susceptible to cultural control.

What the authors calls "behavioral propensity to engage in male coalitional violence" evolved as far back as the common ancestor of humans and chimps, they claim, although our other close relations, bonobos and gorillas, seem to have found more peaceful ways of living.

Genes predispose, say Potts and Hayden, but cultural forces can alleviate the worst of male nastiness. By empowering women to be leaders in cultural, social and political spheres, the violent propensities of men can be restrained. Further, empowerment will give women control of their reproductive destinies, and will therefore result in fewer offspring. Less population pressure will reduce other factors fueling violence and conflict, the authors claim.

Anthropologist Hillard Kaplan reviews the book in the October 9 issue of Science. He agrees that the available evidence suggests that male intergroup violence has a long evolutionary history. He believes this tendency was exacerbated into large scale warfare with the development of agriculture and the associated larger population groups and competition for fertile land.

Kaplan believes that male group violence is stoked by poor economic prospect for young males. To the empowerment of women he would add education and jobs as a way to reduce antisocial behavior.

There is nothing particularly new or revolutionary about any of this. Progress? Yes, I suppose so, but we clearly have a long way to go before women exercise equal power in society, or before young men in the developing world, especially, have an economic stake in social stability. Meanwhile, as the painting above by Jacques-Louis David, The Sabine Women, suggests, women and children will continue to be caught in the middle. (Click to enlarge.)

Making judgments

2009-10-28T11:10:00.000Z

In the November 5 issue of The New York Review of Books, physician/writer Jerome Groopman references a conference he led at Massachusetts General Hospital for interns and residents. The subject: The causes of misdiagnosis.

Groopman drew his audience's attention to a seminal paper by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (Science, September 27, 1974) on the cognitive pitfalls of human thinking. According to Groopman, the authors studied three kinds of bias:

1) "Anchoring," where a person overvalues the first data he or she encounters;

2) "Availability," where recent or dramatic cases come to mind and so skew one's thinking;

3) "Attribution," where stereotypes prejudice thinking so conclusions arise not from data but from preconceptions.

I took a look at the Tversky and Kahneman paper (available from the Science online archive by subscription only). It is long and technical, but Groopman's summary is fair enough. The good doctor is primarily concerned with how these biases affect medical diagnosis, but of course they also shape our judgments in matters of science, politics, religion, and general life choices.

The whole point of scientific methodology is to minimize these biases. Quantitative data and analysis, control groups, double-blind experiments, peer review, impersonal communication, and so on are all designed to dilute -- and ideally remove -- inevitable individual biases and preconceptions.

Perhaps nowhere are the effects of anchoring, availability and attribution more manifest than in matters of religion. The overwhelming majority of people commit themselves to the familial or cultural religion into which they were born. Even if upon reaching maturity we subject our beliefs to thoughtful analysis, anchoring can still have a hold on our allegiance.

None of us are free of these biases, no matter how hard we try, but being aware of them might at least evoke a degree of agnostic humility.

At the pond

2009-10-27T11:12:00.005Z

Late October. The first frost has come and gone. Now the days are warm and sunny, with just a hint of November. Mornings and afternoons, on my walks to and from the college, I linger at the plank bridge where the Queset Brook spreads out into a wide pool. When all this land was part of the Ames family estate, this was known as "the girl's swimming hole." The boy's swimming hole was further along the stream, where it enters the woods.

That was a hundred years ago. Four kids grew up on the estate, two boys and two girls. Their nanny, Matilda Golden, taught them the wildflowers. The coachman, John Swift, named the birds. The gardener, Bunny Woods, shared his general nature lore. And, no, I'm not making up these names. Kids from the village too roamed this land. I often meet old people on my walks who recount stories of growing up with all this gorgeous landscape to play in.

Today, the estate is in the care of the Natural Resources Trust, but you don't see kids playing here any more. This is the sort of landscape that in a July essay of the New York Review of Books Michael Chabon called The Wilderness of Childhood. (I believe the essay may be a chapter in his just-out book, Manhood for Amateurs.) All gone now, laments Chabon: "The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by the neighbors." I'm not sure Chabon is right on that. The Wilderness of Childhood is still there; I pass through it every day. The kids still have access. It is by choice, I think, that they exile themselves to that other wilderness of cyberspace.

Still, Chabon is surely right that something has changed. He thinks that art will be impoverished: "Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted -- not taught -- to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?" Oh, I suspect that we'll still have art. We'll still have literature. What we will have lost is a sense of the organic, of being immersed up to our necks -- nay, to the tops of our heads -- in something vast and wonderful that is fully, biologically alive. It will be the difference between living our lives to the utterly regular gigahertz beat of the microprocessor, or to the thrumming, raggedy, unpredictable four-billion-year-old pulse of life itself.

Going deep

2009-10-26T11:27:00.004Z

A few comments on Saturday's APOD, a photo of the so-called Deer Lick Group of galaxies in the constellation Pegasus. The large galaxy is NGC 7331, thought to be pretty much a twin of our own Milky Way Galaxy. The photo gives a nice sense of three dimensions.

NGC 7331 is about 40 million light-years away, and the four fuzzy spots above it in the photograph are other galaxies about ten times further away.

We live in a galaxy very much like NGC 7331 -- a hundred billion stars or so in a spiral disk about 100,000 light-years wide. Our Sun is a rather nondescript yellow star about two-thirds of the way out from the center. It makes one great spin with the galaxy every 200 million years.

The sketch here, from my 365 Starry Nights, shows our part of the galaxy edge-on, about 2000 light-years thick, with a view out from our star toward the "Great Square" of Pegasus. I should say "through" the Great Square of Pegasus, because all of the stars that define the constellation are in our own galaxy. Alpheratz, Algenib, Markab and Scheat are the stars we see as the corners of the Square. (Enif is the Flying Horse's "nose".) The Square is what I call "the Window" in the book. The Deer Lick Group lies just outside of the window frame.

The hundreds of stars you see in the APOD photograph are in the Milky Way Galaxy, between us and the edge as we look out. In fact, most of them are rather close neighbors. The galaxies in the photograph are far beyond.

Imagine the Milky Way Galaxy as a frisbee. The nearest spiral galaxy, Andromeda, would be another frisbee across the room, and NGC 7331 would be a frisbee in the house across the street. The other four galaxies in the Deer Lick Group group would be frisbees in the next block. All of this is just our own little corner of the universe. The most distant galaxies we photograph would be frisbees in the next town. And don't forget the hundreds of billions of other frisbees scattered all over the place.

By the way, the galaxies in the photograph are their actual apparent size. The foreground Milky Way stars, however, are vastly smaller than their images in the photograph. The brighter stars (apparent brightness) make bigger "splotchs" of light as it "soaks in" the film.

Now ponder all of that as you sit there sipping your morning coffee. I will leave it to you to find out how the group of galaxies got their unusual name.

Boo

2009-10-25T12:24:00.004Z

A Halloween anticipation from Anne. Click to enlarge.

Allow me the indulgence of a commercial break. It's not too early to start thinking about Christmas. And here's the perfect gift for the friend who has everything -- the beautiful matched set of The Soul of the NIght and Honey From Stone, graced with illustrations by Michael McCurdy and Bob O'Cathail.

Living in the little world

2009-10-24T11:46:00.003Z

"My wisdom is simple," begins Gustav Adolph Ekdahl, at the final celebratory family gathering of Ingmar Bergman's crowning epic Fanny and Alexander.

I saw the movie in the early 1980s when it had its U.S. theater release. Now I have just watched the five-hour-long original version made for Swedish television. Whew!

But back to that speech by the gaily philandering Gustav, now the patriarch of the Ekdahl clan and uncle to Fanny and Alexander. The family has gathered for the double christening of Fanny and Alexander's new half-sister and Gustav's child by his mistress Maj. A dark chapter of family history has come to an end, involving a clash between two world views, one -- the Ekdahl's -- focussed on the pleasures of the here and now, and the other -- that of Lutheran Bishop Edvard Vergerus, Fanny and Alexander's stepfather -- a stern and joyless anticipation of the hereafter.

It is not the habit of Ekdahls to concern themselves with matters of grand consequence, Gustav tells the assembled guests. "We must live in the little world. We will be content with that and cultivate it and make the best of it."

The little world. I love that phrase. This world, here, now. This world of family and friends and newborn infants and trees and flowers and rainstorms and -- oh yes, cognac and farts and stolen kisses and tumbles in the hay. The Ekdahl's are a theatrical family; we will leave it to the actors and actresses to give us our supernatural shivers, says Gustav.

"So it shall be," he says. "Let us be kind, and generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world."

Who do voodoo?

2009-10-23T11:08:00.004Z

Would you buy a used car from this man?

He looks a bit of the curmudgeon, someone who doesn't suffer fools lightly. But also a kindly person, with a twinkle in his eye. Honest and fair. I'd buy.

It's Bob Park, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Maryland, former Executive Director of the American Physical Society, and author of Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud. A veteran debunker of pseudosciences of every sort.

I just read his newest book, Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science. A jolly romp of a book, poking a finger in the eye of everything from intelligent design, to prayer, to homeopathy, to quantum mysticism, and beyond. Familiar territory for someone like me who regularly reads Skeptical Inquirer, but lots of fresh background tidbits. An economy pack of spicy peanuts. A bit of the curmudgeon, yes, but honest and fair.

What will tick off many people is Park's summary sentence: "Science is the only way of knowing -- everything else is just superstition."

Fair?

What are the sources of knowledge? Direct sense experience. Intuition. Tradition. Authority. Revelation. Science.

By "science" I mean the whole suite of methodological tools that have evolved over the centuries. Institutionalized skepticism. Quantitative observation. Reproducibility. Double-blind experiments. Publication that makes no reference to the religion, politics, emotions, or any other personal aspect of the investigator(s). Peer review. Mathematical analysis. Consensus building. And so on.

The other ways of knowing -- unfiltered sense experience, intuition, tradition, authority, and revelation -- yield as many versions of truth as there are persons to believe. Science defines itself by consensus.

Of course, science is not a sufficient guide to the chilling and thrilling woods of life, but I wouldn't want to enter the woods without it. I would modify Park's final sentence to read: "Science is far and away the most reliable way of knowing -- everything else is fraught with subjectivity and self-delusion.

Putting things in bottles

2009-10-22T10:49:00.001Z

Summer nights in Tennessee in the 1940s. We kids ran up and down the sloping front lawn chasing fireflies. Lightnin' bugs, we called them. They flickered in the darkness like fluid constellations. We caught them up in our hands and put them in bottles, sometimes two or three dozen to the jar. We thought to make lanterns. Heaven knows what amatory anguish our glass prisons caused the fireflies, all those males -- I assume they were males -- blinking away in close confines, horny as hell in a bioluminescent way. Eventually, of course, we let them go, once we realized their light was useless.

Other creatures, other bottles.

Homemade ant farms. A Mason jar filled with sandy loam scooped up from anthills, ants and all. I don't recall any memorable arthropodal architectural, just a bunch of ants milling about waiting for release. Not so much a farm as a frenzied formicary of frustration.

But, ah! the luna moths. The size of our hands. Plucked from the garage wall and dropped into wide-mouthed jars. Drop-dead gorgeous. Mysteriously sensual. Even a six-year-old knew there was something lush and lascivious about these unwilling prisoners. We kept them in the jars for a day or two -- waiting for what? Something magical and forbidden. Our parents usually talked us into letting them go.

Walking sticks. Chrysalises. Daddy-longlegs. Ladybugs. Newts. Each took their turn in our transparent slammers. I wonder what, if anything, we learned? Maybe a little natural history. Maybe something about biological diversity. Maybe something about freedom, confinement, and the milk of human kindness.

The spare and the true

2009-10-21T11:13:00.005Z

Twice during the past few years, someone has alerted me to quotes from my Globe columns in the American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed.), illustrating the use of words.

For spacefaring, the dictionary cites my reference to "spacefaring nations."

For exotic, 2. Intriguingly unusual or different; excitingly strange, the dictionary cites my observation "If something can be explained simply, in a familiar way, then it is best to avoid more exotic explanations."

Now that pleases me. I contributed Ockham's Razor to the American Heritage Dictionary! One of the most useful and fruitful philosophical principles ever devised. You have seen it floating through these five-plus years of posts like a guiding spirit.

Always on the lookout for the simplest, most natural explanation. Parsimony. Economy.

William of Ockham was a 14th-century English Franciscan friar and philosopher, from the tiny village of Ockham in Surrey (the village, above, still lies just beyond the sprawl of metropolitan London, probably not all that different today than it was in William's time). He was educated at London and Oxford, and preached and taught across Europe. He was not the first to enunciate the principle of parsimony, but he wielded the razor to great advantage, shaving away superfluous accretions from the philosophy and theology of his time, an exercise that ultimately earned him excommunication from the Church he served -- a Church that then and now seems to delight in conceptual excrescences.

Someone once quoted Shakespeare to the philosopher W. V. O. Quine: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The remark was meant as a put-down of sorts: "Yeah, Mr. Quine, so what do you know?" To which Quine is said to have responded: "Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth."

If I Ran the Circus (with apologies to Dr. Seuss)

2009-10-20T11:17:00.006Z

"In all the whole town, the most wonderful spot
Is behind Sneelock's Store in the big vacant lot.
It's just the right spot for my wonderful plans,"
said young Morris McGurk, "if I clean up the cans.
I will put up the tent for my fantastic circus.
I think I will call it the Circus McGurkus.
I'll hoist up the curtains! The crowds will crowd in!
And my Circus McGurkus will promptly begin.

Here, in Ring One, in its own little bottle,
the free-swimming, sweet-grinning pink Axolotl,
with a hairdo to die for and smiley-face eyes,
an amphibian Mexico-City surprise.
It lives in the sewers, no creature is cuter,
if you happen to see one don't call Roto-Rooter.

From far Madagascar, the pride of Ring Two,
the nocturnal Aye-Aye -- related to you.
No kidding! A primate, in our family tree,
a sight for sore eye-eyes if ever there be,
with ears that are bigger than its sweet little butt,
and a long middle finger to show you what's what.

And now! in Ring Three! the star of our shows,
A burrowing beast with a fantabulous nose.
The Star-nose Mole, with a sniffer defying convention,
An olfaction contraption of ingenious invention.
A colossus proboscis. Its tentacles squirm
as our stout-hearted Ringmaster feeds it a worm.

Back to Ring One! our aquatic container --
the Leafy Sea Dragon -- no animal stranger
than this weedy seahorse in algal disguise,
you'd not recognize him if it weren't for his eyes.
A master of camouflage, you won't hear him yelp
for your help if he's draggin' his sea-dragon kelp.

And last, but not least, in the Big Center Ring!
from the benthic Pacific a stupendulous thing.
Kiwa hirsuta, a hirsute crustacean,
a knockdown example of special creation.
What wonderful whimsy! Designer tomfoolery!
A blind-as-a-bat crab, all white and woollery.

The Circus McGurkus -- the best circus you'll find!
My headlining showstoppers will boggle your mind.
Nature is full of zooific surprises.
You'd never see half if you had forty eyeses!"

(With apologies to Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Circus. The pics are from a photo feature on The Huffington Post.)

The song of Bernadette

2009-10-19T11:11:00.003Z

I can't say exactly what I remember about the release of the film The Song of Bernadette, just at the end of 1943. I was seven years old, growing up in a Catholic family in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I know I saw the film at some point, whether then or soon thereafter I cannot say. Certainly, the book by Franz Werfel was in my mother's library. The "miracles" of Lourdes, like those of Fatima, were part of the background of my youth. They were God's stamp of authenticity on our Roman Catholic faith, the thing that separated us from our non-Catholic neighbors and assured our salvation as members of the One True Faith.

The movie won four Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Jennifer Jones, who played Bernadette, the sweet-natured peasant girl who claimed 18 visions of the Blessed Virgin. (Linda Darnel, of all people, made brief appearances as the Virgin). I know this because I have just watched the movie on VHS. On the evidence of the film, not much changed in the Church between 1858, when Bernadette had her visions, and 1958, when I graduated from college on the "eve" of the Second Vatican Council. I grew up in pretty much the same religious milieu as the maid of Lourdes.

Academy Award notwithstanding, Jennifer Jones drifts through her role like an angelic zombie, her one expression a sweet beatitude. While issues of supernaturalism vs. naturalism are explored, the naturalists are generally depicted as stiff-necked villains, and the supernaturalists carry the day. It's a feel-good movie for those who have their heart set on Heaven -- a Wizard of Oz for the rosary brigade. As one of characters says: "For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who don't believe, no explanation will suffice."

None of this is to say that the Lourdes phenomenon is without interest or merit. The story of the shrine is primarily about pain and hope, as non-Catholic Oxford historian Ruth Harris points out in her skeptical but respectful book Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age. Pain is always with us, and hope helps us endure. The body and the mind are connected in mysterious ways, as the effectiveness of placebos confirms. If the waters of Lourdes give comfort to believers, who will deny them that relief?

The story of Bernadette, as told by Werfel and Hollywood, is a story of the triumph of innocence over power and greed. In the film, as word of Bernadette's visions spread, the town's skeptical mayor worries that modernity will pass Lourdes by. "Who is going to run a railroad through a hole where spooks perform their medieval antics in dirty caverns," he groans. Today, a century-and-a-half later, five million pilgrims a year flock to the shrine from all over the world. The mayor greatly underestimated the attraction of hope.

Give her a big hand, folks

2009-10-18T11:49:00.004Z

The Afar Triangle, at the base of the Red Sea in Ethiopia, is today an inhospitable environment -- hot, volcanic, sparsely vegetated. Not exactly the place you or I would chose to live, if we had the choice.

It was apparently a different sort of place 4.4 million years ago, when Ardi and her kind were around. How do we know? Because researchers recovered more than 150,000 plant and animal fossils from the soil horizon that included Ardi's bones, all consistent with open woodlands with patches of forest. Except for Ardi, the fauna are not unlike what you'd find in similar African habitats today -- antelopes, giraffes, and so on. After all, four million years is not such a long stretch of evolutionary time.

Which raises the old question: What sparked the rapid development from Ardi to Homo sapiens? There has been no shortage of suggestions for contributing factors. Language. Tools. Bipedalism. Opposable thumbs. Fire. Diet. Music. Climate change. Ardi's brain was chimp-sized. Did some or all of the above favor larger brains? Or was it the other way around? We have lots more to learn.

One big surprise with Ardi: Her hands are more humanlike than chimplike. Only modest modification of Ardi's digits -- larger thumbs, shorter fingers -- would yield humanlike dexterity.

It is, of course, our brain that defines our humanity. But it's with our hands that we begin our lives. Sucking. Wiggling. Tugging. Stroking. Grooming. Gesturing. Pointing. Holding tools. Hurling weapons. Before we were Homo sapiens we were Homo digitatis. Before we made looms and potter's wheels, we played with sticks. Before we invented geometry and algebra and calculus, we counted on our fingers. Before we made flutes, and tambourines, and harpsichords, we put blades of grass between our thumbs and blew.

If Ardi does indeed take us closer to our common ancestor with chimps -- our closest living relatives -- it may turn out that the big question is not so much how Ardi became us, as how that common ancestor became a chimp.

A grandeur in this view of life

2009-10-17T11:39:00.001Z

"Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud," said House Republican Majority Whip Tom DeLay some years ago, by way of explaining the Columbine school massacre. I was thinking of that remark the other day as I watched Mr. DeLay making a monkey of himself on Dancing With The Stars.

His point, of course, was that only a biblical version of human origins provides an adequate moral compass for human behavior.

I'm sure we can usefully learn something about right (and wrong) by reading the Bible. And I'll grant DeLay this: It's hard to top the Sermon on the Mount. But the human family is bigger than DeLay's co-religionists, and the central lesson of the Sermon on the Mount -- the Golden Rule -- is pretty much universal. Clearly, that lesson didn't originate with Jesus. Or the authors of Genesis. It would be interesting to know its provenance.

Which is why the search for human origins is so interesting, and why curious minds pursue it. Which brings us to Ardi (Ardipithecus ramidus), the stunning 4.4 million-year-old fossil hominid who made her public debut in the 2 October issue of Science.

It is quite an issue, showing the full power of scientific inquiry brought to bear on a remarkably complete skeleton excavated from the Afar Triangle in Africa. Eleven papers, 47 authors, examining every aspect of the find -- the paleobiological context, the geological context, the anatomical implications, and refinements to the human family tree. This is not armchair speculation; this is nitty-gritty work in the hot and dusty field and painstaking analysis in the lab.

You will have read plenty about Ardi in the popular press. A glance at the eleven papers in Science will give an impressive insight into what scientific research is all about. What I found particularly intriguing is the two-page introductory spread with photographs of the 47 contributing authors, something I don't recall the journal doing before.

Men and women. Of many races. From the U.S.A., France, Japan, Ethiopia, Spain, Germany, Chad, Canada, and Turkey. Undoubtedly comprising a variety of religious and political persuasions (such things are irrelevant in scientific communication). A representative assembly of the human family, if I've ever seen one. I would trust my wallet or my life to anyone in the group.

Ardi and her kind are ancestral to us all. Woods-dwelling, tree-climbing, sometime upright-walking, omnivorous Ardi, with her prehensile toes, long fingers and chimp-sized brain. Welcome to Dancing With The Stars, Ardi, you are a star in my book.

The need of some imperishable bliss?

2009-10-16T11:06:00.003Z

Before I leave Mary Oliver's Thirst, let me reflect briefly on the poem "On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate," which takes its title from the 145th Psalm.

Again, Oliver's language in this volume is that of traditional religion, and seems to point beyond and outside of the natural world. One wonders, too, what she is doing in church -- the poems evoke the Eucharist -- when we expect to find her in the black-bear woods or on Blackwater Pond. Has she pulled an Annie Dillard on us? Has the UU saint become a High Church supplicant?

Not quite. "So it is not hard to understand/ where God's body is, it is/ everywhere and everything," she writes, which has a nice Mary Oliver pantheistic ring to it, a transcribing of the Psalmist's wonderment into the language of the religious naturalist.

This too. She wishes to be good, she tells us, upright and good. "To what purpose? Hope of heaven? Not that. But to enter the other kingdom: grace, and imagination." Yes, grace and imagination. That's the Mary Oliver we thought we knew.

But wait. "And all the same I am still unsatisfied," she writes, with an echo of Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning". And it is out of that sense of incompleteness, I would imagine, that she now cries out "Lord." And fair enough. She has suffered a grievous loss, a loss that a black bear in the dark woods or a hummingbird at a trumpet vine cannot fill.

And so we come to the nexus of unbelief and belief, a turning point possibly encoded in our genes, where each of us makes a decision, to live as fully as we can in this world of wonderment and loss, or to give our sense of incompleteness a human face -- that is, to embrace a divinity we address as Lord who embodies in an unrestricted way the human ideals of love and justice.

Oliver's "On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate" and Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning" would together make excellent texts for any course in Religious Studies that professes to grapple with the primary existential question: Do we lift ourselves when we fall and try as best we can to make smooth the way, or do we cry out with the Psalmist, "The LORD upholds all those who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down."