Letting the Data Speak for Itself

From Khoa Vu on Twitter/X.

Soviet Cybernetics

From Tyler Cowen's interview with Stephen Kotkin:

COWEN: Why were the Soviets so obsessed with cybernetics and AI, say, in the 1960s? Is it that they understood where things were going? Or it just was a big stupid mistake?

KOTKIN: You can never rule out big stupid mistakes if we’re honest, certainly about our own lives and analogizing from them. The Soviets were interested in cybernetics because it was about more efficient ways of gathering and using information — the planned economy at core, which was a fantasy, never a reality.

In practice, the planned economy was central control over some scarce commodities, resources, products so that you could prioritize. And you could therefore supply those privileged factories in your supply chains with the scarce resources to produce predominantly military-industrial products, but not exclusively, and the rest of the stuff come what may. That was black market, including black market factory of factory.

Cybernetics was a solution whereby you could make planning work better. You could optimize the information you were getting from the localities, and then you could optimize the way that you organize things. It was a fantasy in a different light, and it’s the same one that the Chinese Communist Party has today, which is to say if your authoritarian politics and your productive economy don’t mesh very well, turn to technology, turn to technological solutions to get beyond the fact that you refuse to do the structural reforms on the institutional side to ensure that the productivity, the dynamism continues.

It’s this eternal fantasy that science and tech will enable you not to have to give up central control, power, Communist Party monopoly. From the scientific point of view, it was fascinating because that’s who they were. They were exceptional world-class mathematicians, world-class physicists, world-class computer scientists, and so for them, it was the same thing it would be for scientists anywhere.

The whole interview is very interesting, especially on life in Magnitogorsk. 

Science and Politics in the US

Not that anyone should read too much meaning into Donald Trump's slapdash appointment process, but I agree with M. Anthony Mills (NY Times) that one theme is a rejection of science:

The leader of the Republican Party and our country’s next president has tapped a pro-choice scion of the country’s most famous Democratic dynasty to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. In keeping with the bewildering dynamics of today’s negative partisanship, conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation have cheered the selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while liberals have near categorically denounced him.

Mr. Kennedy’s transformation from left-wing vaccine skeptic to potential Republican cabinet member overseeing America’s vast health apparatus represents a profound shift not only in the character of the American right but also in the politics of science more generally. The emergent MAGA science policy agenda, driven by skepticism and anti-elitism, blends familiar conservative and libertarian ideas with a suspicion of expert power once more associated with the left. The result is a uniquely American brand of populism that has the potential to fundamentally reshape national politics.

Back in 1970 Republicans were much more pro-science than Democrats, and the hippie, whole earth, split wood not atoms, make love not bombs thing was launched mainly from the left. Now things have largely switched, and that strikes me as quite important.

Why did this happen? 

Fights over teaching evolution in the schools.

Fights over climate change. You will never understand America until you grasp the intense devotion of many men to their gasoline-powered machines, and more broadly to the old manly economy of mining, logging, and making things in fire-filled factories.

Environmentalism more generally; some of you probably would not believe me if I explained to you the arcana of wetlands law, bat preservation, and other regulations that genuinely hamstring building in this country. 

Covid-19. As all my readers know, I do not forgive the tergivisations of government pandemic policy – e.g., saying that masking is ineffective, then requiring it, or saying that closing schools was not needed and then closing them – or the attitude of leftists toward all of this, e.g. demanding that churches close but insisting that racial injustice is so important that mass protests had to go ahead. 

One could sum all of this up in a more general point, The alliance of science with bureaucrats who tell people what they can and cannot do.

Others:

Health and diet advice more broadly. This one is complex because in many ways medicine has gotten a lot better over the past 25 years, thanks largely to drugs created by Big Pharma and getting doctors to take actual science more seriously. On the other hand that process involved rejecting a lot of what was established medicine 25 years ago, like heart bypass surgery; the weary cry of many science skeptics these days is "they keep changing their minds about everything."

The end of physics. As I regularly post here, I have been convinced by a group of skeptical scientists that sub-atomic physics is at a complete dead end, and astrophysics also seems radically stuck; spending on these things keeps going up and the number of papers published keeps rising, but fundamental progress seems to have halted. Plus there's the phantasm of fusion power, still 15-25 years away. Don't get me started on string theory. None of this inspires confidence in science.

The instututionalization of science. Lots of cutting-edge science used to be done by smart people in tiny labs. Now science is funded at vast expense by huge government agencies and mega-corporations. The scientists themselves are constantly complaining about the process involved in competing for, administering, and accounting for grants, and you don't have to be anti-science to suspect the agendas of the people involved. It strikes me as possible that absolutely nobody understands either the overall nature of this process or its impact on the world, and certainly the average voter has no clue. So if your biggest complaint about the modern world is excess bureaucracy, you're probably going to be suspicious of modern science.

Speaking only for myself here, I understand the frustrations of many people with our science establishment. I would do a lot of wholesale reform if I could, starting by slashing the budgets of sub-atomic physics and manned space flight. I would also radically reform my own field and drastically reduce the number of archaeological sites dubbed "significant."

But we need science. It is the root of everything good about the modern world, and the only possibly solution to many of our problems. We can't survive without it. 

So the turn of a whole political party against the foundation of our world is a bit concerning. Part of me thinks that science is so fundamental that we can't really do much to get rid of it or even change it, but certainly there could be cases where we cast it aside and a lot of people end up dying as a result.

The Scientist's Nightmare

I dreamed that I submitted a workplan for an upcoming project and received the comment that we should be employing Advanced Super Techniques (AST). Then there was a call about the project in which I was again urged to use Advanced Super Techniques. I pretended to know what this meant and made what I hoped were some appropriate remarks about what we might learn using AST, meanwhile frantically googling to find out what it meant; but my screen filled up with a solid block of random letters and symbols.

Then I somehow heard about an expert in AST and went to consult him. His lab was in an old brick factory building. When I entered the building I discovered that the lower floors had been made into artists' spaces, studios with a shop in the center. Everyone looked at me strangely. The geometry of the building was an Escherian impossibility and I was completely lost, but I pretended to know where I was going and fumbled my way around, getting increasingly hostile looks. I eventually made my way up a mad staircase to the Fourth Floor, where I pushed open a door and entered a forest of trees growing in complete darkness. Feeling like I was finally getting somewhere I pulled out my phone, turned on the flashlight, and entered the forest, where I saw strange instrumets and old smartphones hanging from wires around the trees. Then I woke.

Avocados, Giant Ground Sloths, and the Machine of Popular Science

You may have heard that avocados evolved to be eaten by giant ground sloths. After all, most nutrient-rich fruits exist to get seeds deposited in a pile of poop, and what animal could be swallowing and pooping out the huge seeds of avocados? The idea that this might have been giant ground sloths goes back to a biologist named Dan Jansen in a paper published in 1982, but Jansen only offered it as a suggestion in a study mainly about other things, and he did not defend or analyze it. Then a popular science author named Connie Barlow found that obscure paper and put the notion in a book called The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms (2002).  From there it spread across the the whole landscape of popular science: Atlas Obscura, Smithsonian, etc.

But is it true? According to this this video from people who call themselves Sci Sho (transcript here), it is not. These people claim that 1) we have a lot of data about what ground sloths ate, from analysis of their bones and vast quantities of fossilized poop – some giant ground sloths slept in caves, and they pooped on the megafaunal scale – and it mostly points to leaves and grass, not fruit; and 2) avocados seeds used to be much smaller, 1-2 centimeters instead of the 5-6 centimeters of modern varieties, and that the seeds grew large thanks to domestication by humans. But they cite no sources and don't really radiate reliability.

So I started searching to see what I could find out. One thing I learned very quickly was that the ideas in that video are spreading, so you can get a lot of results if you search for the Myth of Ground Sloths and Avocados. 

But once something gets dubbed a "Myth" in this kind of discourse, you should start to suspect that it might have some kind of truth in it. So we must look deeper.

Somebody on Reddit who calls himself 7LeagueBoots says this:

Just regarding the avocado/giant sloth connection, there is a lot of misinformation embedded in that. There are a lot of different kinds of wild avocados, some with very large seeds, some with seeds about the size of an olive. They're reproducing just fine in the wild right now without any giant sloths running about. The fruit portion of these wild avocados is eaten by a wide range of animals, including bears in South America, birds all across their range, squirrels, and many more. The fact that these wild avocados, including those with large seeds, still persist places a very large question to the oft cited presumption that the were depended on giant sloths that have been extinct for around 11,000 years at this point. The research papers I've read on this subject say that it's a possibility that the trees were dependent on the giant sloths, but they all fail to address the elephant in the room. I worked in Ecuador for a while tracking Andean Spectacled Bears and one of their favorite foods was these wild avocados.

So he basically agrees with Sci Sho, although he says wild avocados have a diversity of seed sizes. But one of the responses to that post, from somebody called Bromelia_and_Bismuth, still comes down hard for ground sloths.

So I decided to look into avocado domestication. This very techincal paper on the avocado genome says that modern avocados are hybrids of three distinct wild "races" that were domesticated separately, and have been selectively bred so they bring out the desirable characteristics of each wild ancestor. And this:

The avocado is heterodichogamous, with 2 flowering types: A and B. Type A trees are female (receptive to pollen) in the morning of the first day and shed pollen as males in the afternoon of the following day. In contrast, type B trees are female in the afternoon of the first day and male in the morning of the next day.

This is presumably to limit self-fertilization, but, wow. Genderfluid trees.

Anyway.

This 2009 article on domestication says, "The large size of the avocado fruit appears to have developed before humans arrived in Mesoamerica, and then changed little in size or shape under human influence." Which seems to be a direct refutation of the claims made by Sci Sho. And on the subject of the three landraces, a term of art new to me, "Fruit size does not help differentiate between domestic and wild avocados due to the variation in fruit size caused by environmental factors and individual tree traits." This is important because the oldest archaeological evidence of avocado consumption by humans comes from mountain caves, so the small size of the seeds in that environment may tell us nothing about the size of ancient avocados in the tropical lowlands.

The data on ground sloth diet has a similar problem, because the surviving coprolites are found in mountainous areas with caves, and they only tell us what ground sloths ate in that environment. We don't have any data on what ground sloths ate in the tropical lowlands where most  avocado trees grew. Tropical forests are just a terrible environment for the preservation of anything.

So far as I can tell, this remains an open question. Avocado fruit are nutrient rich, so just about any herbivore could have eaten them. The fact that wild avocados of recent times survive without ground sloths seems to show that the dependence was not absolute, but it does not rule out ground sloths as key transmission vectors or co-evolution between them. After all there is no real "wild" place left in Central America, and all the forests have been shaped to one degree or another by humans; just as acai palms are a wild species that in practice mainly grows around old human settlements, wild, large-seeded avocados may in practice grow mainly where humans have encouraged them.

There is neither fact nor myth here, just an ongoing struggle to understand.

Which brings me to my real point, the perilous state of popular science writing. To get attention, the science press is constantly proclaiming that things are true when they are at best iffy, revolutionary when they may be decades old, "myths" when they still might be true. Sometimes much of the fault resides with the scientists themselves, who exaggerate their findings. But in this case the scientists are blameless. All Dan Jansen did was wonder what used to eat tropical fruit and suggest that somebody should investigate the possibility of ground sloths, which was a great idea. It might be true. But we don't know, and I hurl foul oaths and imprecations at anyone who says otherwise, and no I don't care what you have to do to get clicks. Tell the truth as best you can or shut up.

The World Grows

Part I: The Earth

The oldest known world map, Babylonian, 6th century BC. The text says this is a copy of a much older map, possibly 9th century BC. Babylon is at the center, surrounded by nine kingdoms, then the "Bitter River."

Reconstruction of the world map of Anaximander (c. 610-546 BC), based on much later texts.

Nineteenth-century reconstruction of the world map of Eratosthenes (c. 276-194 BC), showing the geographic knowledge of the Hellenistic Greeks.

World map drawn at Constantinople c. 1300 AD, based on the work of Ptolemy, c. 150 AD.

Reconstruction Al-Idrisi's Tabula Rogeriana, drawn for Roger of Sicily in 1154 AD. North is at the bottom.

Da Ming Hunyi Tu, the Amalgamated Map of the Ming Empire, c. 1400 AD. China makes up half of this world.

The Fra Mauro Map, c. 1456.

Cantino Planisphere, 1502: The two halves of the globe are united.

Hendrik Hondius, Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Geographica ac Hydrographica Tabula, 1630

Our planet from space.

Part II: the Cosmos

Egyptian, from The Book of the Dead of Nestanebetisheru, c. 950 BC.

Cosmos of the ancient Hebrews, from here.

Page from the Codex Fejervary-Mayer illustrating a key principle of Maya cosmology, often called the Quincunx, that is, the Five: the Maya world was made up of four cardinal directions and a central point around which everything revolves. The altar in a temple represented that central point. Each direction had its own suite of deities, and there was also a god for each level of heaven and each level of the underworld; counts varied for how many levels there were but went as high as 13.

The geocentric cosmos of Aristotle and Ptolemy, as drawn in 1524.

The heliocentric cosmos, from Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.

In 1755, Immanuel Kant theorized that the visible stars were all in a cluster he dubbed an "island universe," and that the clouds known as nebulae were other island universes a vast distance away. In 1785 astronomer William Herschel drew this map of our island universe, the Milky Way.

By the late 1800s telescopes had grown powerful enough to resolve details in nearby galaxies; this is an 1899 photograph of the Andromeda Galaxy. But many astronomers remained unconvinced that these were really other galaxies as large as our own. In 1917, Heber Doust Curtis observed what he took to be a nova within the Great Andromeda Nebula. Searching through old photographs, he found 11 more novae. He calculated that these novae were about 10 magnitudes fainter than those within the Milky Way. As a result, he was able to come up with a distance estimate of 150,000 parsecs to Andromeda. In the 1920s Edwin Hubble used stars known as Cepheid Variables to refine this estimate to be about 275,000 parsecs, or 900,000 light years.

The Hubble Deep Field, to my mind the most important photograph ever taken. Based on Hubble data, astronomers calculated that there were 500 billion galaxies in the observable universe; that number has since been revised upward to around 2 trillion.

NASA's Europa Clipper

NASA's Europa Clipper launched yesterday on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket; it is due to arrive at Jupiter in 2030.

The point is to search for signs of life at Jupiter's moon Europa. Europa has an icy crust that is regularly remade and smoothed over, which means there is a big ocean of water underneath it. Electromagnetic studies show that the ocean is salty. There is also plenty of energy, in the form of tidal stresses and Jupiter's intense electromagnetic environment. So, a plausible place to look for life.

On the down side, those same electromagnetic fields would rapidly tear apart many of our key molecules, such as DNA and RNA. So Europan life would have to be quite different from ours. Which is, to me, part of the appeal: I tend to think that the first time we find alien life it will be so strange to us that we will have trouble deciding if it is alive or not.

The Europa Clipper won't drill down to that buried ocean. Instead it will repeatedly fly by the moon's surface, scanning it with a variety of instruments and scooping molecules out of its extremely thin atmosphere to study. We know that Saturn's moon Enceladus sometimes erupts with great jets of water from its subsurface ocean, and while we aren't certain that happens at Europa there is some evidence for it, and NASA is hoping to observe such a plume and fly the Clipper through it.

I am not optimistic that life will be found, but I think the search is worth trying; certainly the chance is higher than on Mars. And even if we don't find life, perhaps we will learn more about these strange worlds and their vast, dark oceans.

The Lawsuit against Academic Publishers

You may have heard that a scientist, Lucida Unin, has filed an antitrust suit against six major publishers of academic journals. The core charge is that the journals have concoted an anti-competitive "scheme" that forces scholars to work for free while they pocket billions in revenue:

The suit alleges that the six academic publishers—which own 53 percent of academic journals—have been able to carry out the so-called scheme by forming a “cartel” through STM and fixing the price of peer-review services at zero. Those journals received more than $10 billion in revenue in 2023.

In so doing, the suit says, publishers “agreed to coerce scholars into providing their labor for nothing by expressly linking their unpaid labor with their ability to get their manuscripts published in the publisher defendants’ journals,” which can boost a researcher’s curriculum vitae in what the complaint characterizes as the “‘publish or perish’ world of academia.”

The suit also accuses the publishers of agreeing not to compete with one another by requiring scholars to submit their manuscripts to a single journal at a time and prohibiting them from sharing findings while their manuscripts are under peer review. That enables publishers to “behave as though the scientific advancements set forth in the manuscripts are their property,” it reads.

I think that this is undoubtedly true, but I'm not sure I blame the publishers for it. The root of the problem is the way scientists and other scholars fetishize publication in big-name journals. Because your whole career depends on those publications, you will of course do whatever it takes to place articles with those publishers, including following their anti-competitive rules and doing your part at peer review.

The solution is to forget about publishing in academic journals and evaluate scholars by the actual quality of their work. Everybody says this. A lawyer named Christopher Jon Sprigman puts it this way:

Science and knowledge are paying an enormous tax to commercial publishers for this prestige economy for which they depend on commercial publishers. If academics generally had other prestige mechanisms they could refer to—such as actually reading the articles more carefully when making tenure decisions—they wouldn’t depend so much on the publishers.

But nobody knows how to make that work. Let's say your colleague is up for tenure, but he or she is an expert in a field you know hardly anything about. How do you make your evaluation? Well, you can either spend a month of your life delving into that field in an attempt to figure our where your colleague's work fits in, or you can just check the names of the journals and the citation counts. So of course you just check the names of the journals and the citation counts.

So long as there are a dozen applicants for every academic position, and so long as we continue to judge professors by their scholarly credentials, it will be very hard to fix this. 

But empowering evil publishers is just one of the bad consequences of putting so much weight on placing articles in top journals. Worse in my mind is the huge pressure put on young scholars to get publishable results, which almost forces them to hack their work into some kind of positive discovery. The explosion of fraudulent or all-but-fraudulent work is only what I would expect from this system.

The rewards we give to people who get published in top journals, regardless of whether their work has any other merit, are a miasma of corruption that sits in the center of our scholarly world like a cancer on a vital organ. Wherever the cancer sits, it will eventually send its twisted offspring out through the body until the whole organism sickens and dies.

Porphyrion and the Fermi Paradox

Today's big news:

Astronomers announced last week that they had discovered a black hole spitting energy across 23 million light-years of intergalactic space. Two jets, shooting in opposite directions, compose the biggest lightning bolt ever seen in the sky — about 140 times as long as our own Milky Way galaxy is wide, and more than 10 times the distance from Earth to Andromeda, the nearest large spiral galaxy.

Follow-up observations with optical telescopes traced the eruption to a galaxy 7.5 billion light-years away that existed when the universe was less than half its current age of 14 billion years. At the heart of that galaxy was a black hole spewing energy equivalent to the output of more than a trillion stars. 

Infrared Image that Sealed the Discovery

The discoverers called this system Porphyrion, after a Greek giant. You can read about this just about anywhere.

I want to write about because for me it ties into the so-called Fermi Paradox. This line of thinking supposedly got started when physicist Enrico Fermi asked, "Where is everybody?" That is, where are all the alien civilizations.

One way to think about the problem is the Drake Equation, which looks like this:

The terms represent the rate of star formation, the fraction of stars that have planets, the fraction of planets where life is possible, the fraction of those planets where life appears, the likelihood that life becomes intelligent, the fraction of civilizations that develop technology we could see from light years away, and the duration of the average such civilization.

I don't see why the obvious rarity of spacefaring civilizations is any kind of paradox; if you simply assume that any one of the middle terms is one in a hundred trillion, the "paradox" disappears.

And one reason I think those terms could be very small is the titanic violence of the universe. The discoverers of Porphyrion think its power is so great that is is rerranging matter across a supercluster of galaxies, and therefore that the uneven distribution of matter in the universe might be partly due to such phenomena. Imagine what would happen to any civilization that got in the way of such a blast. 

These enormous jet systems may be the most striking examples of galactic violence we know of, but lesser violence is everywhere: colliding galaxies, giant black holes, colliding planets, exploding stars. The more I ponder what the galaxy is like, the more I think we are riding a stupendous lucky streak. We got lucky when one of our sun's rocky planets ended up in a zone where water is liquid much of the time, making it possible for life to get going. Life has tenaciously hung on every since, but it has been nearly wiped out several times (or at least complex multi-cellular life has). We have had mega-extinction after mega-extinction, caused by asteroid impacts, volcanism, a planetary ice age, and who knows what else.

And having dodged all of them, we may one day be finished off by another space rock or, if we last long enough, by the expansion of our aging sun.

Our world is a miracle of astonishing improbability, and we should cherish the chance we have been given to thrive.

A Story about Knowledge

Paul Seabright:

In the Languedoc there is a vineyard that teaches us an important lesson about textbook learning and its application to the world. In the early Seventies it was bought by a wealthy couple, who consulted professors Emile Peynaud and Henri Enjalbert, the world’s leading academic oenologist and oenological geologist respectively. Between them these men convinced the couple that their new vineyard had a theoretically ideal microclimate for wine-making. When planted with theoretically ideal vines whose fruits would be processed in the optimal way according to the up-to-date science of oenology, this vineyard had the potential to produce wine to match the great first growths of Bordeaux. The received wisdom that great wine was the product of an inscrutable (and untransferable) tradition was quite mistaken, the professors said: it could be done with hard work and a fanatical attention to detail. The couple, who had no experience of wine-making but much faith in professorial expertise, took a deep breath and went ahead.

If life were reliably like novels, their experiment would have been a disaster. In fact Aimé and Véronique Guibert have met with a success so unsullied that it would make a stupefying novel (it has already been the subject of a comatogenic work of non-fiction). The first vintage they declared (in 1978) was described by Gault Millau as ‘Château Lafite du Languedoc’; others have been praised to the heights by the likes of Hugh Johnson and Robert Parker. The wine is now on the list at the Tour d’Argent and the 1986 vintage retails at the vineyard for £65 a bottle. The sole shadow on the lives of these millionaires is cast by the odd hailstorm.

No one to whom I have begun recounting the story believes it will end well. Most people are extremely unwilling to grant that faith in textbook knowledge should ever be crowned with success. We have a very strong narrative bias against such stories. It is a bias we forget once our children fall sick or we have to travel in an aeroplane, but so long as we are in storytelling mode we simply deny that systematic textbook reasoning can make headway against whimsy and serendipity. Apart from anything else, it is deeply unfair that it should.

From a 1999 review of Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

Killing Owls to Save Owls

The northern spotted owl shot to fame as a powerful weapon in the long-running fight over old growth forests in the northwest; millions of acres of forest were eventually set aside to insure its survival. But now the owls are declining again, and not because of anything people are doing:

Barred owls, which are considered native to the eastern United States, are increasingly appearing in the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests where the threatened northern spotted owls breed and live. Where the two birds overlap, the barred owls tend to outcompete the northern spotted owls, taking the best nest sites and harassing, killing or occasionally mating with spotted owls.

To protect spotted owls from this new menace, the US government has just authorized states and individuals to kill all the barred owls they can find, potentially hundreds of thousands. I agree with these three philosophers (NY Times) that this is a terrible idea. It is not likely to succeed, but ever if it were, it would still be a terrible idea.

Many philosophers, conservation biologists and ecologists are skeptical of the idea that we should restore current environments to so-called historical base lines, as this plan tries to do. In North America, the preferred base line for conservation is usually just before the arrival of Europeans. (In Western forests, this is often pegged to 1850, when significant logging began.) But life has existed on Earth for 3.7 billion years. Any point we choose as the “correct” base line will either be arbitrary or in need of a strong defense.

Restoring or preserving those historical base lines is only going to get more difficult. In some cases, it will be impossible — and this might be one of them. It is unclear that killing barred owls will do anything but merely slow the northern spotted owl’s eventual extinction. When barred owls were previously removed in a before-and-after experiment in areas of Oregon and Washington, the number of northern spotted owls still declined. The removal slowed that decline, but even with the planned killings, the barred owl is here in the West to stay.

We should strive to care for ecosystems given their current ecological realities. Ecosystems are dynamic and have always changed over time as organisms move around. And now, humans are inescapable drivers of ecological changes. Climate change and wildfire have accelerated the dynamism of ecosystems. Killing barred owls will not restore the forests to the way they were in 1850.

Carbon Dioxide and Global Greening

Climate change is really complicated. From the Yale School for the Environment, here's an article on how rising carbon dioxide concentrations are so good for plants that some deserts are greening even without increased rainfall:

Southeast Australia has been getting hotter and drier. Droughts have lengthened, and temperatures regularly soar above 95 degrees F (35 degrees C). Bush fires abound. But somehow, its woodlands keep growing. One of the more extreme and volatile ecosystems on the planet is defying meteorology and becoming greener.

And Australia is far from alone. From Africa’s Sahel to arid western India, and the deserts of northern China to southern Africa, the story is the same. “Greening is happening in most of the drylands globally, despite increasing aridity,” says Jason Evans, a water-cycle researcher at the Climate Change Research Centre of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

What is going on? The primary reason, most recent studies conclude, is the 50-percent rise in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere since preindustrial times. This increased C02 is not just driving climate change, but also fast-tracking photosynthesis in plants. By allowing them to use scarce water more efficiently, the CO2-rich air fertilizes vegetation growth in even some of the driest places.

Do Elephants Have Names?

NY Times:

Scientists say they have found evidence with the help of artificial-intelligence-powered tools that elephants call each other by names.

“They have this ability to individually call specific members of their family with a unique call,” said Mickey Pardo, an acoustic biologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and an author of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Elephants’ trumpeting calls might be their most recognizable sounds, but these “are basically an emotional outburst,” Dr. Pardo said. Lower-pitched rumbles, he said, are more meaningful, as they make up a majority of elephant vocalizations and are used in a wide variety of social situations. “A lot of interesting stuff is going on in the rumbles,” he said. 

Abstract of the article:

Personal names are a universal feature of human language, yet few analogues exist in other species. While dolphins and parrots address conspecifics by imitating the calls of the addressee, human names are not imitations of the sounds typically made by the named individual. Labelling objects or individuals without relying on imitation of the sounds made by the referent radically expands the expressive power of language. Thus, if non-imitative name analogues were found in other species, this could have important implications for our understanding of language evolution. Here we present evidence that wild African elephants address one another with individually specific calls, probably without relying on imitation of the receiver. We used machine learning to demonstrate that the receiver of a call could be predicted from the call’s acoustic structure, regardless of how similar the call was to the receiver’s vocalizations. Moreover, elephants differentially responded to playbacks of calls originally addressed to them relative to calls addressed to a different individual. Our findings offer evidence for individual addressing of conspecifics in elephants. They further suggest that, unlike other non-human animals, elephants probably do not rely on imitation of the receiver’s calls to address one another.

Buck 8917 and the Mysteries of Animal Death

In the New York Times, a piece on the ongoing Deer-Forest Study, a collaboration of Penn State Universitty, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, and the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry. These researchers intensely study 100 square miles of central Pennsylvania where deer roam across a series of steep, forested ridges. As part of the study they have put GPS collars on about 1,200 deer, studying things like the size of their home ranges, how their lives change with the seasons, how they react to hunting, and so on. Their main scientific interests are actually more focused on the forest than the deer, trying to figure out how large deer herds impact the environment. But sometimes they stumble on little mysteries of animal life:

Researchers from Penn State had captured and put a GPS collar on the adult male that spring in Bald Eagle State Forest, about 15 miles northeast of State College, Pa. Put a tracker on most deer and you’ll find they stick pretty close to their home range, which was true for 8917. He sauntered, stopped to forage or bedded down for a nap mostly within an undulating square mile of forest full of towering hemlock and tangled rhododendron. But on that June day, he made a one-mile beeline, hiking to the top of a rocky ridgeline, where he seemed to while away the afternoon before walking directly home.

Then, in 2015, after two mating seasons, two hunting seasons and thousands of laps around his home range, Buck 8917 died — unsurprising given he was about 4 years old. It was where he died that surprised the researchers: that same ridge he’d visited just once in the two years he’d been collared.

The blog post on which this is based is here.

Placozoans and the Origins of the Nervous System

A Much-Magnified Placozoan Stained to Reveal Different Cell Types

Some fascinating new science concerning the primitive nervous systems of the nearly miscroscopic, pancake-shaped animals known as placozoans. Placozoans have no neueons, yet they make "coordinated responses to stimuli." Scientists have suspected for a long time that they use some kind of chemical signaling to achieve this, and it was confirmed a few years ago that they use small peptides – short chains of amino acids – for this signalling. 

NY Times:

Placozoan bodies are simple, only three cell layers thick. But that’s enough to glide around, absorb and digest food, and respond to their surrounding environment. Instead of being controlled by neurons, some of these behaviors are regulated by peptidergic cells, which release short chains of amino acids that activate surrounding cells.

Because the activity of peptidergic cells is reminiscent of more complex nervous systems — like the one in humans — Dr. Grau-Bové and his colleagues were intrigued by the possibility that these cells and their connections might represent the nervous system of an ancient animal ancestor.

The research team began by analyzing gene expression — which bits of DNA are converted into RNA used to make cell proteins — in more than 65,000 individual cells across four placozoan species. They discovered that placozoans have 14 types of peptidergic cells that are also important for building neurons in cnidarians and bilaterians. However, they also found that peptidergic cells were not true neurons given their lack of electrical activity and inability to receive messages.

The researchers then created a map showing potential interactions between peptidergic cells and other cells in placozoans. They identified a complex signaling network as well as specific pairs of neuropeptides and receptors. These cellular relationships support what scientists call the chemical brain hypothesis, the idea that early nervous systems evolved as networks of cells connected through chemical signals that would diffuse across an animal and bind to specific protein receptors.

They then compared what they had found to the nervous systems of more complex animals like cnidarians and simple bilaterians (we are bilaterians) and found a lot of similarities. Some scientists are now speculating that the ancestor of all animals with nervous sytems was a placozoan, or something like one.

Of course chemical signaling is a lot slower than electrical signalling, which is why placazoans have remained so small. Sponges, which use a similar system, do grow large but they have a sedentary, low-energy lifestyle that makes slow responses (usually by only part of the organism) a viable approach. To grow larger, animals had to evolve proper neurons and a faster signalling system.

The understanding of these primitive "nervous systems" fills in yet another "missing link" in the evolution of animals, showing how yet another supremely complex system could have evolved from very simple origins. As the original paper puts it, "peptidergic volume signaling may have pre-dated synaptic signaling in the evolution of nervous systems."

Is Cosmology Unraveling? And What Would that Mean?

So far the most intriguing discovery made by the Webb Space Telescope is the six red dots shown in the images above. They seem to be galaxies. They are very far away, and therefore very old, and they seem to be full of mature red stars. If the calculations are correct, they date to 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, which our theories say is nowhere near enough time for such a galaxy to form.

Cosmology has a lot of problems. To create a sensible model of our universe we have to imagine that it is full of Dark Matter that we can't see and infused with Dark Energy that baffles us. General Relativity posits that it is full of Black Holes, and some may have been discovered, but other theories –e.g., about the conservation of information – still show that Black Holes are impossible. The models require that the universe once underwent a period of extraordinarily rapid growth that we call Cosmic Inflation, which is theoretically possible but has certainly never been observed. There are basic issues in how we calculate relatively mundane numbers:

Take the matter of how fast the universe is expanding. This is a foundational fact in cosmological science — the so-called Hubble constant — yet scientists have not been able to settle on a number. There are two main ways to calculate it: One involves measurements of the early universe (such as the sort that the Webb is providing); the other involves measurements of nearby stars in the modern universe. Despite decades of effort, these two methods continue to yield different answers.

When this discrepancy was discovered people thought it would resolve as the data got better, but the data has gotten a lot better and the discrepancy remains.

I have long thought that the litany of special concepts needed to build this model resembles the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy, the wheels within wheels needed to fit the observed motions of the planets within an earth-centered universe. It is inelegant and bizarre, ripe for a Copernicus to come along and turn the system on its head.

Of course that isn't really an argument; maybe the universe just is inelegant and bizarre. But many scientists these days feel as I do, that something about our science is off, and that it needs to be rethought in a fundamental way. Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser in the NY Times:

Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science.

In both cosmology and quantum physics, the cutting edges of our quest to understand the universe, physicists feel baffled and stymied. Frustration is growing with existing methods and people are turning to radical models that others say are not really science at all:

There is, however, another possibility. We may be at a point where we need a radical departure from the standard model, one that may even require us to change how we think of the elemental components of the universe, possibly even the nature of space and time.

Cosmology is not like other sciences. The universe is everything there is; there’s only one and we can’t look at it from the outside. You can’t put it in a box on a table and run controlled experiments on it. Because it is all-encompassing, cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers doing the observations.

These rarefied issues don’t come up in most “regular” science (though one encounters similarly shadowy issues in the science of consciousness and in quantum physics). Working so close to the boundary between science and philosophy, cosmologists are continually haunted by the ghosts of basic assumptions hiding unseen in the tools we use — such as the assumption that scientific laws don’t change over time.

We are seeing Nobel Prize caliber scientists throwing out bizarre ideas, such as that the universe is a hologram, or a simulation, or that there are rival systems of laws in the universe that compete against each other and evolve over time.

I am not optimistic that any of this will be resolved in my lifetime. Although I have occasionally fantasized about a Copernican breakthrough, I doubt we will see one. The enormous amount of human and computer brainpower we have thrown at these problems over the past fifty years dwarfs the effort needed to create heliocentrism, or quantum physics and relativity. The problems we face now seem to be orders of magnitude more difficult.

In a sense this is ridiculously arcane; what difference could models of the universe's formation possibly make to our lives? But maybe, just maybe, the unraveling of scientific certainty is already having consequences in our society. 

I am willing to bet that if you looked into the smarter purveyors of conspiracy theories you would find that many of them are interested in bizarre physical theories like the simulation universe or the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Was the elite faith that rationality could make human life better tied, at some deep level, to the constant progress on the frontiers of science? One of the words I see used over and over to describe the elites of the Modern period is confidence: confidence that we could model the whole universe, that we could design cities better than any that grew up by chance, that we could all have flying cars and home nuclear reactors and drugs to cure our woes. The post-modern era has been defined as much as anything by the loss of that confidence. That has had some effects that I think are good, like an end to bulldozing old neighborhoods for concrete high-rises. Unable to defeat depression medically, we are trying ancient spiritual techniques like the guided drug trip. But is the turn away from a hard-edged rationality gnawing at the foundations of our politics, of our social peace?

Is the collapse of certainty in physics helping to drive vaccine denialism or fantasies about trucks full of stolen ballots?

If smart people were convinced that the universe is, in basic ways, simply beyond our understanding, what would change?

I don't know. But I have a deep sense, as I have tried to convey here many times, that societies are wholes. The pieces fit together. Not in any simple sense, and one of the regularities is that in every society there are people who reject its propositions and long for some other path. But I do think things are tied together, and that major changes in one important area of life are quite likely to have echoes in others. I have a sense that one of the foundations of the whole modern era – say, 1770 to 1970 – was faith in science, faith in our ability to learn about and understand the world. When I read about the morass in physics I feel that faith slipping away, and I wonder where that will lead.

Eliezer Yudkowsky on Why UFOs are not Aliens

I agree with this completely:

I've bet $150,000 to $1,000 against past UFO sightings being revealed within 5 years to have a worldview-shattering origin.

My model of the world confidently says no to alien UFOs: Their technology would not be such that, having arrived here across interstellar distances and then remained hidden, they'd need to fly around in large visible vehicles. It is definitely the case, given the physics we already know, that the aliens can do whatever surveillance they want using far tinier devices; eg, covalent-bond-strong, micron-sized robots, like bacteria but not with proteins held together by static cling.

Superintelligence is possible - it is just flat wrong that a human is as smart as any physical system can get - and you'd expect something crossing interstellar distances to be long since superintelligent. If they wanted to stay hidden, they'd stay hidden successfully. If aliens wanted to help Earth and not hide, humans would not be dying of cancer. If aliens didn't want to help, nor to hide, the aliens would have harvested the Solar System for matter and energy.

I have enormously wide uncertainty about the distribution of true alien psychologies, or the spacefaring agencies that grow out of them. But it's uncertainty over a metric where--when we look back down at Earth and what those psychologies would mean to us--the supervast majority of probable alien intellects, would not come here across interstellar distances, quietly and hiding on arrival, and then occasionally fly around in giant visible vehicles.

I have enormously wide uncertainty over the possible range of alien technologies. But I can use current knowledge of physics and chemistry, and the advance analyses that others have done of what technological possibilities those imply, to put a lower bound under alien technology that's comfortably above "needs to use giant flying vehicles for travel or surveillance".

UFOs aren't aliens. You can approximately leave that possibility out of your thinking.

He doesn't even mention that current UFO theories require that these alleged interstellar spacecraft keep crashing.

Just because something is unexplained doesn't mean that the actual explanation is your sci-fi fantasy.

Lionel Messi and the Narrow Peak of Athletic Talent

With Argentina's World Cup win, soccer star Lionel Messi had achieved all of his career goals. Unable to get the contract he wanted to close out his long and astonishingly successful career in Spain, he decided to take the huge salary offered by an American team called Inter Miami and see what he could do in the US. Inter Miami was the last place team in North American soccer, but since Messi arrived they have not lost a single game. Messi has scored seven goals in four games. He looks, at times, like a professional adult who wandered into a high school game. His new teammates use words like "surreal" and "superhuman" and "impossible" to describe his play. While many other aging European stars like David Beckham and Zlatan Ibrahimovitz scored a lot of goals in the US, they didn't necessarily make their teams into winners. Messi is different in that he makes his whole team better, constantly setting his teammates up in ways they sometimes take advantage of but often flub.

He has also single-handedly energized the whole league, raising television ratings and driving ticket prices for some games from $50 to $500 and more. Some of the scalping frenzy might be people seizing what may be their only chance to see the famous Messi in person, so it may fade, but the money is already making a difference.

Which is fabulous if you are a soccer fan. But there is a broader point: even in a sport played by a hundred million people, with a vast global architecture to find and develop talent, the very best players stand far above the average professional and even the average star. At the top, the pyramid of ability is very, very narrow.

"Walking naturally after spinal cord injury using a brain–spine interface"

Here's some truly amazing medical science:

A spinal cord injury interrupts the communication between the brain and the region of the spinal cord that produces walking, leading to paralysis. Here, we restored this communication with a digital bridge between the brain and spinal cord that enabled an individual with chronic tetraplegia to stand and walk naturally in community settings. This brain–spine interface (BSI) consists of fully implanted recording and stimulation systems that establish a direct link between cortical signals and the analogue modulation of epidural electrical stimulation targeting the spinal cord regions involved in the production of walking. . . . The participant reports that the BSI enables natural control over the movements of his legs to stand, walk, climb stairs and even traverse complex terrains. Moreover, neurorehabilitation supported by the BSI improved neurological recovery. The participant regained the ability to walk with crutches overground even when the BSI was switched off. This digital bridge establishes a framework to restore natural control of movement after paralysis.

To back up a bit: Scientists, including the ones responsible for this work, had previously built similar systems to pick up signals within the spinal chord and transmit them past the damaged section to a receiver on the other side. But this never worked very well, and the subjects never felt like they were walking naturally.

So this time they implanted their sensors in the brain. Scientists had previously identified the precise brain regions that formulate instructions to the legs, and the article makes it sound like implanting electrodes to pick up signals there was no big deal. The impulses were converted to a digital signal and transmitted directly to receivers below the spinal damage, which converted them back into analog electrical stimulation of the lower spinal chord. This, they find, works far better than the old method, restoring at least one person to something like natural walking.

NY Times:

In a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers in Switzerland described implants that provided a “digital bridge” between Mr. Oskam’s brain and his spinal cord, bypassing injured sections. The discovery allowed Mr. Oskam, 40, to stand, walk and ascend a steep ramp with only the assistance of a walker. More than a year after the implant was inserted, he has retained these abilities and has actually showed signs of neurological recovery, walking with crutches even when the implant was switched off.

“We’ve captured the thoughts of Gert-Jan, and translated these thoughts into a stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary movement,” Grégoire Courtine, a spinal cord specialist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, who helped lead the research, said at the press briefing.

Amazing. Even more amazing would be if such a system could restore control of the arms to people who have lost the use of all their limbs, and I can't think of any reason why that wouldn't be possible using this technology.

Parrots on Video Chat

Very strange feature in the NY Times about parrots who place videocalls to each other, engineered to be as hard to share as possible. I did track down the experimental protocol for this fascinating bit of bird science here, via the web page of one of the study leaders, Rebecca Kleinberger.

Anyway the way it works is that the birds are shown other parrots on a device like an iPad and taught a series of behaviors. They learn to ring a bell when they want to chat. They are then shown a series of images of other participating birds, from which they select another bird to call. The call is placed and the birds then interact over video.

Once the birds learned the system they began asking to call their feathered friends. A lot. 

They seemed to enjoy it and stayed focused on the screen. They tracked their partners around the screen; but they did sometimes look behind the device when their partner disappeared from the screen. sometimes they mirrored each other's behavior, for example grooming together. Some developed "friends" that they wanted to chat with over and over again, even sleeping with their friends sleeping on the screen.

Not only did the birds seem to like the calls, but some owners reported that they seemed happier and more energized in general. Which raises a lot of questions about, for example, keeping social species like parrots as solo pets.

I find the differing degrees to which animals will interact with video screens fascinating. I've never known a dog that would pay a video image any mind; visual stimuli of that sort just don't seem to resonate with them without smell and the missing wavelengths of sound. Cats are variable; none of my cats has ever watched television, but I have seen others stare at fish or birds on the screen.

In general this probably has to do with how visual the animal is; parrots are after all highly visual animals. As you would expect from this metric, some monkeys watch television and seem to enjoy it. But some refuse to take an interest.

I find myself very curious what will happen if people bring parrots who have gotten to know each other over video together.