Science: March 2007 Archives

Readers familiar with Genesis 25-7 will no doubt recall the story of Jacob and Esau. Jacob had smooth skin; Esau looked like he was covered in red fur. Their mom favored Jacob, and the rest is history.

Why do I mention this? Today, Andrew Sullivan links to a report on a new scientific article that offers a new scientific explanation of why humans are not furry like other mammals. The family drama sounds all too familiar:

Harris' theory is that this kind of parental selection may have been an important force in evolution. If Stone Age people believed that hairless babies were more attractive than hairy ones, this could explain why humans are the only apes lacking a coat of fur. Harris suggests that Neanderthals must have been furry in order to survive the Ice Age. Our species would have seen them as "animals" and potential prey. Harris’ hypothesis continues that Neanderthals went extinct because human ancestors ate them.

Ouch.

New Scientist this week has a stellar (literally) cover article this week on the controversy over whether the universe is fractal:

Cosmology is founded on the assumption that when you look at the universe at the vastest scales, matter is spread more or less evenly throughout space. Cosmologists call this a "smooth" structure. But a small band of researchers, led by statistical physicist Luciano Pietronero of the University of Rome and the Institute of Complex Systems, Italy, argues that this assumption is at odds with what we can see. Instead they claim that the galaxies form a structure that isn't smooth at all: some parts of it have lots of matter, others don't, but the matter always falls into the same patterns, in large and small versions, at whatever scale you look. In other words, the universe is fractal.

Click the link above for more.   And if this theory's true, there's no better way to be in harmony with the cosmic sphere than by wearing fractal jewelry, such as this belt buckle by Allegria Designs.

The chart pictured above may represent one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 21st (or even the 20th) century:  the first solid evidence of the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle "thought to give everything in the universe its mass."

As this article in the New Scientist relates, the possibility that we may have proof of the existence of the Higgs boson has the science world buzzing.  The story unfolded last January, after John Conway presented his discovery on a physics blog and an Italian scientist blogged about data that also seemed to point toward the Higgs boson.  At present the statistical analysis doesn't allow formally classifying it as the God particle--there is at a present a 1 in 50 chance that the data reflects a random fluctuation, whereas a particle is typically recognized only when there's a 1 in 10 million chance.  Still,

"It's like the first few pages of a thriller," says (Oxford's John) March-Russell. "You get the first little hint that something strange is happening and that things are not quite what they seem. Then the evidence accumulates. We are turning the first few pages of this very interesting story."

Which got me thinking.  Nowhere in the New Scientist story do you see scientists hammering John Conway or the rest of the Fermilab/CERN teams for blogging about their discovery, for not waiting for peer review or for presenting a hypothesis based on what they admit is, if it stops here, a statistically insignificant deviation from the norm.  Everyone involved, even the skeptics, sees the observed data as something that merits further inquiry, and so the discussion proceeds.   

There's a lesson here for efforts to dismiss the latest inquiries into the Talpiot tomb as per se unscholarly or statistically irrelevant.  Whatever the ultimate determination, calling attention to a suggestive pattern & putting the data out for the world to examine is not inherently irresponsible.  It's what advancing knowledge is all about, especially in a field of study where some say a certain phenomenon is impossible. 

The supersymmetric Higgs, the ivory billed woodpecker, Jesus bones or life on Mars--"as with many groundbreaking discoveries, the initial evidence raises more questions than it answers."  But we'll never have the answers if we beat down those who dare to ask.

A couple days ago I featured Evolving God, an engaging new book on the origins of religious sensibility.  Here's an interesting Chicago Sun Times interview with the book's author, Barbara J. King:

From what deep emotional well does the human impulse for religion spring?

Anthropologist Barbara J. King, author of the new book Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion, argues that religion is rooted in our social and emotional connections with each other -- connections that existed even in our ancient ancestors millions of years ago.

Today, she says, we can see and study these "foundations of religious behavior" -- qualities such as empathy and imagination -- in chimpanzees and gorillas. These distant cousins, she says, are "pretty good stand-ins" for our early human ancestors."

In a conversation with Salon writer Steve Paulson, King singled out a remarkable moment at Brookfield Zoo on Aug. 16, 1996, as evidence for her theory. Here's the exchange:

Q. Are chimpanzees and gorillas empathic creatures?

A. Yes, they are. Many people may remember an incident that happened 10 years ago at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo. A female called Binti Jua was sitting with her gorilla family when a toddler tumbled into that enclosure, to the real horror of onlookers. Here's this little kid lying on the pavement with these large gorillas. Binti Jua had an infant on her body. She walked over, picked up this human boy, carried him to the zoo staff and got him to safety. This has been interpreted by primatologists as empathy. She's a mother who had youngsters; she saw that there was a hurt child and lots of very upset adults; and she solved the problem. There are also lots of examples in wild chimpanzees

Q. Tell me about one of those stories from Africa.

A. A chimpanzee female named Tina was killed by a bite to the neck by a leopard. She had been living in a community of chimpanzees for quite a long time. The group didn't just pull at her body or tug at it or ignore it. Rather, the dominant male of the group sat with her body for five hours. He kept away all the other infants and protected the body from any harm. With one exception. He let through the younger brother of Tina, a 5-year-old called Tarzan. That's the only youngster who was allowed to come forward. And the youngster sat at his sister's side and pulled on her hand and touched her body. I think this is not just a random occurrence. The dominant male was able to recognize the close emotional bond between Tina and Tarzan, and he acted empathically.

When I first read about that story, I was amazed. So I began to talk to people in the zoo world. And there has been a very interesting transformation lately in how deaths in great ape families are managed. When an ape dies, it's becoming a regular practice to allow the family to approach the body and say goodbye. If the ape simply disappears, it's much harder for them to cope.

This is the Makapansgat Cobble, the oldest known iconographic object in the world.  Around three million years ago, an early hominid carried this stone around presumably because of the stone appeared to bear the image of a face.   "This, in a nutshell, is how what we call ‘art’ began. "

And it may also be how faith began.  William & Mary anthropologist Barbara King's engaging new book, Evolving God, examines how early art and social structures reflect the emergence of religious sensibility.  

Read it now, and when your friends tell you about next Sunday's New York Times Magazine feature on the evolution of religion you can act bored and tell them you knew all that before it was popular.