Why are there no dragons?

For Darwin Day, it seems appropriate to write a post about evolutiion.

Evolution seems to have produced a wide range of surprising abilities.  In many cases the same ability has come about separately in different species at different times.

Sight seems to have evolved in tens of separate ways.  Many creatures share the optical band that humans are able to sense (around the part of the spectrum where the atmosphere has the lowest absorption), but other creatures have developed to use infra-red and ultra-violet.  Some are very sensitive to the polarisation of light and others like us are almost completely unaware of it.

Sonar seems also to have evolved in about four separate ways.  Even in mammals like whales and bats there is nothing in common between their organs to suggest common evolution.

More surprisingly, electricity has been co-opted by completely unrelated species of fish, and Bombardier beetles have even evolved ways of creating explosions by secreting fluids which are unstable together.

But what of things that seem never to have evolved?

No animal has naturally evolved radar.  Perhaps the other options are good enough for short distances but much cheaper in terms of energy.

But fire is another property that is noticeably and more surprisingly absent from the animal kingdom.  This is the stuff of legend, with fire-breathing dragons being common in folk-lore.  Nobody serious suggests that these creatures really lived, even though there are creatures that create fuel (as cattle create methane in large quantities) and as we have already seen, electricity is generated at the voltages needed to make sparks to ignite the fuel.  The potential was there.  So why are there no dragons?

2012's English Crop Circles

The (modern) English summer tradition of abstract art in the fields might have been affected by the poor weather.  One of the benefits of the cool wet season that we have had is that the harvest is only now being taken in, so the crop circle season has been longer than usual.  I'm not certain that the the yield for 2012 has been of a particularly notable quality though.

The web site Temporary Temples has several excellent galleries of some quite fascinating patterns including this picture of one of this year's more impressive crop of circles.

Follow the link to Temporary Temples
for an impressive array of photos by Steve Alexander.

Whether you happen to believe that these are the work of aliens or not, you can still enjoy wondering how some of the designs were implemented in a field on a dark night by a few folks with ropes and stomping boards (or indeed by bored alien visitors if you prefer).

This one is of the classic six point symmetry that (apparently) is easily set out, but some of the features of the inner triangle are quite subtle.  It turns out that it was made in two phases, as you can see at this link, on Crop Circle Connector, which is another site with many photos from different photographers.

Follow my label 'Cereology' for the series of posts from last year.  Here are direct links to a couple of them.

Out Crop Formation

Cornucopia for Cereologists

The Believable Michael Schermer

Having read Victor Stenger's (slightly too mathematical) book, The Fallacy of Fine Tuning while on holiday last week (see here, here and Stenger 1: God 0), I moved on to another book that I had been eagerly anticipating for more than a year since hearing the author being interviewed on the podcast, Skepticality.  In June 2011, I posted an article called Faithful genius - a contradiction? in which I mentioned the book

This time (unlike last week) I was not inundated with equations, and quite quickly I read the 344 pages of Michael Schermer's The Believing Brain.

The Believing Brain - Schermer

This fascinating volume distills much of the knowledge that you gain from reading around the subjects of skepticism and neuroscience, but it distills it nicely into a very digestible form, mixing entertaining narrative with the latest research findings and dropping in a good measure of humour on the way.  For example, he mentions seeing a car bumper sticker which said:

Militant Agnostic: I don't know and you don't either!

and George Gamow's famous limerick

There was a young fellow from Trinity
Who took the square root of infinity
   But the number of digits
       Gave him the fidgets;
He dropped maths and took up Divinity.

The key (serious) message from the book will be familiar to many of us. For everyone it seems to be true that beliefs come first, and explanations follow.  The more intelligent a person is the better they are at justifying their beliefs, but their intelligence does little or nothing to help them in the selection of those beliefs.  He mentioned what he referred to as Spinoza's Conjecture:

Belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity.

How can you argue with that observation?

One of the main highlights for me is Chapter 12 Confirmations of Belief.  It deserves to go down in history as a companion to Carl Sagan's famous chapter The Fine Art of Baloney Detection in his 1996 book Demon Haunted World (which obviously influenced Schermer's writings).  This chapter is a very thorough review of 34 distinct types of bias and a few other techniques that we all use to justify our beliefs.  Many of them are familiar, and you will remember times when you experienced them. but almost everyone will spot some new ones in there.

It was interesting to see that Schermer touched on the topic of fine tuning (p324) and made a mention of Victor Stenger.  By now he has probably read Stenger's new book, but at the time of writing he referred to the fine tuning problem as, in his opinion "the best argument that theists have for the existence of God".  (He left us with the impression that it was only the best of a bad set though.)  The following pages suggest that even last year he did not rate the probability to be very high, and I am sure that he will revise this part of the book in the event that it goes to a second edition.  Nevertheless, real-life stories about beliefs like this are the life blood of this book, and without them it would not be so firmly established as a realistic and convincing treatise.   

There is so much more to this book that I can only recommend you to buy and read it. 

Textual criticism of DNA - proof of evolution!

Textual criticism and computational stylistics are often offered as a way of determining the consistency of biblical documents.  By comparing the nuances and the statistics of the text, it is possible to form a view about the reliability of the documents.  In the case of the bible it is - of course - reliable and authentic.  Or so we are assured.

Can the same techniques be used to confirm the consistency of the Theory of Evolution by studying the 'test' of the genes?

In fact the answer is an emphatic yes!  Furthermore the vocabulary of the genes is simpler than the text in the bible.  Unlike ancient Hebrew that was written without vowels (thus obscuring the meaning in some cases) the language of genes is written in only four 'letters'.  This should mean that textual criticism should be much more reliable in genetics than it is in conventional text.

Geneticists use a different term, 'sequencing' for their literary equivalent of studying DNA. Using this technique they can determine which species had common ancestors.  This comparison is not an analogy - as all analogies are wrong at some level - it is simply an identical use of the logic of the human mind to analyse a problem.

The similarities include:
1/  Using techniques of recognising strings (genes in DNA or phrases in text)
2/  Comparing the strings and making assumptions that those that have common features are related in some form of family tree
3/  Attempting to work back to some sort of original.
4/  Accepting the possibility of horizontal transfer (of genes in 'lower' living things or 'corrections' to newer texts based on one or more older texts)
5/  Acknowledgement that the very earliest copies might never be accessible using these techniques (the earliest texts of the New Testament being 2nd century, but the reach of DNA going back millions of years)

There are some differences, all of which point to this being a much more reliable technique for DNA than for the bible:
1/  In evolution of all the higher eukaryotes (after the propensity for horizontal gene transfer has diminished) there are clear and unambiguous branches, whereas in biblical texts the horizontal transfer continues to muddy the waters in even the 'highest' forms of the bible.
2/  The DNA comparisons are not as open to the 'interpretation' of 'scholars' (who happen to disagree with each other frequently), but display a highly demonstrable bifurcating nature in the higher animals.
3/  In spite of millions of years of replication, DNA provides this accuracy.  Over only the first 200 years the bible had evolved into many forms, guaranteeing imprecision.  Somehow these early forms are referred to as 'witnesses'.
4/  The existence of previous versions of the stories (e.g. Krishna, Mithra, Horus, Asherah and El, Gilgamesh, Hamurabi to name a few) has no equivalent in DNA.  DNA has generally branched in very precise ways.

For some reason, many Christians believe in the imprecise speculation of textual criticism but reject the precisely observable fact of evolution.  This is interesting as both are based on identical techniques.

This is part of the reason that I consider the bible to be little more than a collection of stories.   I accept it as part of the record of verbal traditions from the very earliest times that humans were able to tell each other stories, and many of those stories are much more ancient than the Old Testament.

Pseudo-ostension in southern England

Trystan Swale spoke at the Oxford Skeptics in the Pub event on 10th August.  The topic of the talk was crop circles.  And it was very entertaining to hear the tales of a circle maker himself.

Recovering from a mental illness that has prevented him for a while from presenting the Righteous Indignation podcast that he founded, he related a lot of interesting anecdotes and factoids.  While admitting that circle making is effectively vandalism, he noted that the circle makers tend to keep the 'ear to the ground' (ha ha) and they know which farmers are most likely to object to their activities.  Apparently a few large Wiltshire farmers seem to bask in the notoriety of their land as crop circle territory.  Still, the makers go to some lengths to avoid being spotted at work.

Many people wonder how they can work in the dark, but it seems that after half an hour outside on a dark night it becomes relatively easy to see what you are doing.  By the time that the crops are ripening they become light enough in colour that you can easily see what you are doing.

He covered some of the history of circle making and then showed some good examples of patterns and indicated have they were set out.  Six fold geometry is favoured because equilateral triangles around a centre point mark the positions that define the patterns.  (In other words, a chord of the same length as the radius of a circle marks out positions 60 degrees apart.  However, other formations, e.g. with five or seven fold symmetry have been made to demonstrate that it is not necessary to invoke alien origins.

It seems that there are about 12 people actively involved in circle making in the UK this year (down from about 20 in 2010), with the majority of circles being in the 'Marlborough Triangle' (which stretches from Swindon in the north to Stonehenge in the south).  When asked how many people it takes to create a formation, he gave an example of the 409 circle created at Milk Hill in 2001 by a team of 12 people.

He got a laugh by mentioning that in the mid 90s there was a bit of a flap about whether it is safe to eat wheat and barley from inside a circle and he went on to describe some of the common 'proofs' used to show that the circles are not man-made after all.  Sometimes the nodes on the stems of the crop are 'blown' as they are bent but not always.  He explained that the fluid in the stems has to go somewhere as the stem is compressed.  It happens particularly to formations made late in the season, or in crops that have been over-fertilised.

He explained that the famous video of circles being created at a site called Oliver's Castle was in fact an elaborate fake that was made in conjunction with the circle makers.  (But then again - he would claim that - he's a circle maker!) But this video agrees with him albeit invoking a slightly different explanation (and I have very little doubt myself).  Note the common six-fold symmetry in this formation.



He also explained about the symbiosis between the circle makers and their circles and with the people who are taken in by their work.  The makers seem careful not to claim an alien connection but also they take care not to deny it too much.  Pseudo-ostension is the term for a process that involves a hoax in which the perpetrator enacts a legend.

All in all - an entertaining evening for all of us!  Thanks Trystan.

Related posts:
'Out' Crop Formation
Cornucopia for Cereologists
Income from crop formations  
Where are the formations?
Japanese Rice Art 
Crop formations in trees? 
Wallabies on opium make crop circles!

Wallabies on opium make crop circles!

Further to recent posts about crop circles in England (see below), it seems that in Tasmania they have a similar problem of crop vandalism!

This time the crop is not the traditional wheat or barley, and the vandals are neither human nor alien.  This story is about wallabies that get into fields of poppies that are grown for medicine production.  The animals graze on the poppies, get totally stoned on them, and roll around making circles in the fields.

I can't find any photos of the 'formations' that the wallabies produce but if anyone knows of one it would be great if you could post a link a comment below.  (Comments are easy - and always welcome!)

Thanks to @spiderlin for the link!

Related posts:
'Out' Crop Formation
Cornucopia for Cereologists
Income from crop formations  
Where are the formations?
Japanese Rice Art 

Another link to the story from a source other than the BBC can be found here.

Crop formations in trees?

For a few years I have heard rumours that 'crop formations must be caused by aliens because they have been found in trees' (in Canada I think).  Yes - apparently the appearance of a vaguely similar pattern, in trees, half way round the world makes complete sense of the patterns found in fields of wheat in southern England.

Having had a few posts about crop formations recently, I did a google search to see whether I could find pictures of this phenomenon.  So here it is.  A pattern that looks a bit like a crop formation, and it qualifies for inclusion on this blog because it certainly does look surprising.

I have no idea what the explanation for this is, but I would say the smart money is probably not on the alien hypothesis.

Source of this photo: Enormous tree-circles (like crop-circles) were discovered in the Wabikon lake forest (Wisconsin).  (I actually think it is a Photoshop job as the water in the furthest circle seems sloped.)  You can see this lake on Google maps too.  I couldn't spot any circles like this.  Can you?

Related posts:
'Out' Crop Formation
Cornucopia for Cereologists
Income from crop formations  
Where are the formations?
Japanese Rice Art

Japanese Rice Art

The crop circle formation might not have reached Japan, but instead there is a thriving meme for rice art.  Something about the water in the paddy fields lends itself to the production of striking high-contrast images like these.

Related posts:
'Out' Crop Formation
Cornucopia for Cereologists
Income from crop formations  
Where are the formations?
Crop formations in trees? 
 

Where are the formations?

This site Crop Circles and More has a nice utility to show where the crop formations are appearing.  This was this year's map.  Who knows whether it is reliable and indeed how many have now been harvested.

This was the state of play as of yesterday evening.  All the formations in the world seem to be in England.  For some reason the 'aliens' seem to favour just two areas, with Wiltshire and the surrounding counties being highest on the list of places they like to visit.

I might go to see the two or three nearest to my house.  More news if they are still visible.

Related posts:
'Out' Crop Formation
Cornucopia for Cereologists
Income from crop formations  
Japanese Rice Art  
Crop formations in trees?

Income from crop formations?

It is hard to argue that the making of crop formations is anything other than vandalism.  Some farmers have claimed that the damage caused by the vandals is not as bad as that caused by people visiting the land to see the formation from themselves.

A few circle makers make an income by accepting commissions to create adverts for products, but they are very much in the minority.  Clearly most of them do it for the sense of adventure and mischief, and they enjoy convincing the 'croppies' that the patterns are so complex that they can't be man-made.  (See Delusional Logic to work out which logical fallacy is invoked here!)

But some suggest that the farmers who are most innovative can cash in on a good formation, by charging people to go into their field to 'commune' with whatever they believe to be present.  Set up a booth and allocate an area as a car park and people will pay.  (Obviously not all people will pay, but those who are more nervous of being accused of trespass get the opportunity for a legitimate visit.)

There is a rumour of one farmer making a tidy £30,000 in this way.  This is much more than the value of the whole crop, let alone the small area damaged by the visitors.  It seems quite difficult to find out who this particular farmer might have been.

I wonder whether the tax man managed to find out!



Above picture and others came (ethically sourced) from this link.

Related posts:
'Out' Crop Formation
Cornucopia for Cereologists
Japanese Rice Art  
Crop formations in trees? 

Cornucopia for Cereologists

This is the time of year for a special harvest, mainly in the English speaking countries of the Northern hemisphere, and this year is no exception.  This is not the harvest of the crops that feed hungry mouths, but the deliberate wanton destruction of those crops in the name of art . . . and mischief.

I am talking of crop circles of course.  Or to use the 'proper' term they are not necessarily circles but 'formations'.  I am under no illusion whatsoever that it is aliens in UFOs who create and implement some of these brilliant designs.  They are expertly planned and usually implemented in secrecy by dedicated teams of pranksters.  Then they are lovingly studied and interpreted by 'cereologists' who seem not to have a skeptical bone in their bodies.

There are some common features throughout crop circle culture, apart from being most common in the English-speaking countries.  They only came to the attention of the public in the early 1980s - more on this in another post soon - but some would argue that this has been going on for centuries.  The only 'evidence' that cereologists can present for this claim is a single page wood-cut print about a 'mowing devil', in Hertfordshire, England, in 1678.  (Yes, that's how we spell that county in these enlightened times. We pronounce it Hart, not Hert. It seems to me that they got the spelling right in the 17th century.)

However, this is probably the first ever crop circle hoax.  For one thing, if it was a mowing devil it was cutting the crop.  In today's 'true' formations the stems of the crops are bent.  There are 'nodules' on the stalks which naturally allow the plant to bend, and as the crops are flattened the stalks are flexible enough to bend at these points.

As I often do, I am 'sitting on the fence' on the topic of crop formations, or as I prefer to say, I am presenting a balanced argument. While I feel sorry for the farmers who's crops are ruined I can't help admiring the art.  In another post soon I will look at the economic arguments for the 'industry'.

Understandably, most photos of these beautiful patterns carry a copyright warning, and not wishing to be eviscerated in court for infringing their rights, all the photos that I will use in the next few posts have been 'sourced ethically'. 

This spectacular formation appeared in 2001 in southern England.  It is sad that the ethical sourcing policy excludes some of the pictures from this year, but to be safe I have provided a link to a source for these.  Apparently cubes are in fashion in 2011.  I should warn you though that the word WOO is strongly associated with the second of the links below.

Some sites for some brilliant photos:
Free Natural Wallpaper - crop circles photos to download
Crop Circle Connector- large woo warning!  Lots of nice up-to-date photos though.


Related posts:
Out crop formation!
Income from crop formations  
Where are the formations?
Japanese Rice Art  
Crop formations in trees?

Out crop formation!

Isn't it surprising what appears in the crops these days!

This is the start of a series of posts about crop formations and cereology in 2011.  And yes, they are all hoaxes, just like this one.

Related posts:
Cornucopia for Cereologists
Income from crop formations 
Where are the formations?
Japanese Rice Art  
Crop formations in trees?
Wallabies on opium make crop circles!