Science Musings Blog

Oh, if only it were that simple. We human males must woo and coo and wash dishes and vacuum and buy roses and provide candlelight and wine and whisper "God, you look beautiful tonight" and who knows what else to entice our partners into bed. The male fruitfly need only sing. Well, not sing exactly. He vibrates one wing, just one, to make what one assumes is a pleading sort of noise. If the song is satisfactory, the female fly allows copulation.

Female fruitflies don't sing, which has long suggested that they lack the neural circuitry to produce the wing vibrations.

Now, in a clever series of experiments reported in the journal Cell -- involving photoactivation of neurons and the chopping off of heads -- researchers have shown that females have the same song circuitry as males, located in the thorax. They can sing too. But their brains tell them not to.

The difference in behavior has been traced to a dimorphic command center in the brain. Female fruitfly brains are different than male fruitfly brains.

As if that's telling us something we didn't already know.

Inhibition, the biologists call it. A cluster of neurons in the female's brain inhibits the wing-fluttering behavior. Male insect brains inhibit certain behaviors too. Some biologists believe the female praying mantis bites off her partner's head to improve his sexual performance. This seems a rather drastic way to overcome his inhibitions. Humans are more inclined to rely -- counterproductively, perhaps -- on alcohol.

Anyway, it's all rather complicated. The sexes will never understand each other, regardless of species. We have these packets of neurons all over our bodies urging us to do certain things, and other packets telling us not to. Someday biologists may figure it out, using brains scans, genomes, photoexcitation of neurons, and other techniques yet to come.

For myself, I'd just as soon not know what's going on at all those synaptic centers of excitation and inhibition. Everything I know about sex, I learned at the movies.

The biggest machine ever contrived by the mind and hand of humankind will soon be up and running. Will it give us fresh insights into the creation of the universe -- or trip the Earth into oblivion? See this week's Musing.

Click to enlarge Anne's Mother's Day illumination.

John Haught is a much-admired Roman Catholic theologian at Georgetown University and a prolific writer on matters of science and faith. I have read his books with profit. While I do not concur with his earnest efforts to preserve the essential elements of orthodoxy, he always gives science and philosophical naturalism a fair shake. I share with him the conviction that science is an inadequate vessel to contain the hopes, fears and strivings of a human life. He has also been an ally in the battle to keep creationism and intelligent design out of the science curriculum of pubic schools.

So it was with a bit of disappointment that I read his "Last Word" essay in the current issue of Commonweal, titled "Don't Assign These Books." The books he's referring to are those of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, the so-called "new atheists," now available in paperback and ready for assignment in college classes. He writes: "I hope teachers will think carefully before putting them in the hands of their students, at least as introductory texts. These tirades simply add to the sad spectre of global fundamentalism. In their own way they reinforce the growing -- and dangerous -- ignorance about religion in the world today. Ironically, they also fail to offer readers an accurate and substantive understanding of atheism."

Haught's argument that the books are theologically naive can be read as protecting the turf of the professional theologian. It is certainly true that the books in question are polemics rather than nuanced theological tracts, but sometimes it takes a naif to see that the emperor has no clothes. As far as Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens are concerned, if God makes himself manifest in the natural world, then those manifestations are open to scientific scrutiny. If God does not reveal himself in the sensate world, then he cannot be known, and "the-ology" is an oxymoron.

As Haught well knows, the "new atheists" are responding to what they perceive to be a dangerously reinvigorated religious fundamentalism, Christian and Islamic. Their response is worthy of attention, and I for one would be happy to see university students reading and debating these books, perhaps in association with Haught's own God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens. Why bother reading a "response" unless one has read the books being responded to?

Book burning or banning is unworthy of a free people anywhere, and although I am confident that Haught would neither burn nor ban, his plea in Commonweal comes uncomfortably close to the sort of religiously-inspired illiberalism that provoked the "tirades" in the first place.

Where the Queset Brook passes under the plank bridge along my Path, it slows and purls into a broad pond. This was called "The Girl's Swimming Hole" when it was part of the estate of Oliver and Elise Ames. The pond is no longer deep enough for swimming, but on these fine May afternoons I will sit there for an hour on my way home from college, reading, thinking, doing nothing.

And watching the surface of the pond come alive with the flit and skitter of a new season.

Water striders scull and stop, scull and stop, and now and then do an energetic back flip, in their search for morsels; the indentations of their feet and antennae on the surface of the water show up on the sunlit bottom of the pond as six fat blobs of shadow. Whirligigs spin like tops, like whirling dervishes, black as night in the afternoon sun. Mayflies enjoy their ephemeral fling as adults, their aerial orgy like snowflakes whirling above the dark water. Dragonflies and damselflies patrol the weedy margins of the pond, their bodies iridescent. Now and then a tree swallow from the boxes in the meadow makes a low, lightning-fast devouring sweep just millimeters above the surface of the water.

My mind drifts back to the new phylogenomic tree of life that was published in Nature a few weeks ago, 77 species across 21 phyla. I don't have to go back too many steps on the phylogram to connect myself to all the creatures I am watching at the pond. Our common ancestral group is the bilateria, animals that are bilaterally symmetric, with a front end and a back end, an upside and downside, a mouth and an anus. The first of our tribe appears in the fossil record about 600 million years ago, and it turned out to be an effective body plan. Of course, we bilateria don't exhaust the ranks of life on Earth, but we make up a goodly part of the phylogram. Anyway, I sit at the bridge and I feel part of something a lot bigger than myself -- something with a front end and a back end, an upside and downside, a mouth and an anus. The swallow zips across the pond; I give her a wink. She and I have our own little niche in the phylogram. We have backbones.

Humans have a way of drifting through the world as if we were temporary visitors from another dimension. A few moments at the bridge remind me that we are bound to the rest of creation by a myriad of genomic threads.

Many years ago, Time magazine illustrated an article with a painting of Pablo Picasso. As I recall, it was the ground-breaking cubist work Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Someone wrote to the magazine saying something to the effect, "My eight-year-old son could have painted that." Time accompanied the letter with a highly-accomplished sketch by the eight-year-old Picasso. I haven't been able to track down the letter or the sketch, but here is a painting by the artist at age fifteen.

What Picasso was up to in 1907 with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has been a matter of debate among art historians, but it clearly wasn't to provide a photographic representation of reality. Ostensibly, the subject of the painting is five prostitutes in a brothel, but what the painting documents is a mind in interaction with the world. The "reality" Picasso seeks is at a remove from what presents itself unmediated to the senses.

At almost the same time, Picasso's contemporary Albert Einstein was showing that physical space and time is relative to an observer.

The parallels between the two lives are numerous and striking, as Arthur I. Miller has shown in Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc. By force of their creativity and personalities they pretty much defined modernity in art and science. Neither man, however, quite let go of classicism. Einstein never accepted the pure mathematical formalisms of Heisenberg and Bohr. Picasso never made the break into pure abstraction.

What they left us with is a simple lesson that has survived subsequent developments in art and science: We construct our own reality.

Which does not mean, of course, that every reality is equally real. We stub our toe against the real. It does mean to distrust pure objectivism and pure subjectivism -- and abjure dogma wherever we find it.

Anne sent me this pic the other day, bacteriophages attacking a bacterium. It was recently featured as an APOD (astronomy picture of the day) on the APOD site. Not quite sure what bateriophages have to do with astronomy, although they do look a bit like lunar landers setting down on a tiny moon.

They are viruses, of course. Like other viruses, they lack the resources to make their own energy or proteins. They can only reproduce and build their shells by hijacking the chemical apparatus of an invaded cell. Phage viruses are parasitical on bacteria. They sit on the surface and inject their genetic material (RNA or DNA) into the bacterium, commandeering the host's reproductive machinery to make more phages, in the process often killing the host.

Where did they come from? Some scientists believe viruses are degenerate life-forms that have lost every animating function except the minimum genes essential to their parasitic way of life. Other scientists suspect viruses evolved inside cells, as organelles, and subsequently escaped to take up their vagabond existence. Then again, maybe they evolved on a parallel track to cellular life.

This electron micrograph of bacteriophages reminded Anne of angels dancing on the head of a pin. And when you think about it, they are no less improbable than a company of angels. They may even turn out to be angelic allies in out fight against bacterial human pathogens. In the meantime, there they dance, little APOD pods on their spidery legs, and millions could gaily cavort on the head of a pin. Holy and terrible. Beautiful and scary.

I was with environmental science students in the campus woods the other day. Big pink granite boulders. The bedrock under the boulders is a green volcanic rock. Where did the boulders come from?

Pretend it is 1840. Two stories explain the granite boulders.

--During the great flood of Noah, when the Earth was covered with water, rock-bearing ice bergs drifted south from the Arctic. As they melted, they dropped their burden. The story nicely accounts for why we don't find these "erratic" boulders much further south.

--At some time in the past, the Earth's climate was colder and large parts of the northern continents were covered with ice. The glaciers moved out from their centers of accumulation, eroding the crust of the Earth, and plucking boulders from the downstream slopes of hills. As the climate warmed and the ice melted, its burden of rock was dropped in place.

Two stories. Both propose an improbable event: an all-engulfing flood, a continent-spanning sheet of ice. Which to believe?

Continent-spanning glaciers exist today, in Greenland and Antarctica. Water for glaciers of greater extent could come from the oceans.

The water for an all-engulfing flood requires a miracle.

The ice theory makes predictions, based on what we see where glaciers exist today. The bedrock should be scratched, and the scratches should all be aligned in the same direction, pointing to the centers of ice accumulation. Here on the Stonehill campus, if we follow the scratches north, we should find a source for the pink granite boulders on the south-facing slope of a hill. In fact, all of the ledges we find on the campus should be on south-facing slopes, and every rock we find should have a source somewhere to the north. And so we go, tramping through the woods, and -- lo and behold -- our predictions are confirmed in every respect.

This is the game of science. Explain the past using only natural agencies that we see at work in the world today. Find the simplest story that explains all of our observations. Be happy when we can find a story that can be as easily falsified as confirmed.

And, on a lovely bright spring day, let the students figure it out for themselves, by placing them in front of the evidence and letting them ask -- and answer -- questions.

You have reached the office of Harry Hawker. You may leave a message at the beep.

"Hello, Harry? Robert here. I can't give you the full scoop right now. I'm on my cell at a concert. Middle of the second movement of some symphony or other. I've got something big for you. The latest thing in personal communications. It's hot, Harry. Real hot. If you check your machine, give me a call. You know my number. I'll call you again when I get to the restaurant."

Chirrup...chirrup

"Harry? Oh, it's you, Ally. Listen, I told you not to call Daddy when he is at the concert. Yeah, I know the baby-sitter won't let you watch TV after 10 o'clock. That's what Mommy and Daddy told her to do. Now hang up your phone. Some people don't like it when a phone rings at a concert. And besides, I'm waiting for an important call. Yeah, Daddy misses you too. Go to bed."

You have reached the office of Harry Hawker. You may leave a message at the beep.

"Harry. Robert again. Where are you, guy? The concert sucked. Something dumb by Brahms. Or was it Bach? We're waiting for a table at Gina's, the new restaurant downtown. You'd like it, Harry. We'll do lunch here sometime. Listen, I'd rather not be talking to your machine but the story is this: Our R&D guys have come up with a drop-dead product. We're looking for a strategic alliance with someone with marketing clout. That's you, Harry. Give me a buzz when you get in. This is something you don't want to miss."

Chirrup...chirrup

"Harry? Mom! Why are you calling this time of the night? We're just finishing desert at Gina's. Nice place. Real classy, you know what I mean? Your boy's made good. So, what's up? No, I didn't forget that Sunday is your birthday. Yeah, I know. We'll be there for dinner. Listen, Mom, I gotta hang up, I'm expecting an important business call. Yeah, see ya Sunday. Yeah, Mom, love you too."

You have reached the office of Harry Hawker. You may leave a message at the beep.

"Harry. Robert. I'm hittin' the sack. Don't ring now, I need the shut eye. I'll call you in the morning."

Good morning. HighTech Marketing. Mr. Hawker's office.

"Hi, Karen. Robert here. Is Harry in? On the phone? OK, have him give me a call when he's free. Use my cell number. I'm on the expressway."

Chirrup...chirrup

"Harry, at last! Hey, thanks for calling, buddy. I'm on my way to town. It'd be great to do lunch. I've found a new place. No? OK, listen. Our R&D guys have come up with a voice-activated cell phone that's smaller than a pea. Microphone and speaker fabricated right on the silicon chip with the electronics. New kind of microantenna. Also picks up and transmits ambient sound. Pop it right in the ear. It's there all the time. Think about it, Harry! You dial by voice. Hang up by voice command. No bigger than a pea.

"What's that? No one will want a pea in their ear? That's where you come in. This is cutting-edge technology, Harry. The ultimate status symbol.

"Think about it, Harry. There's three billion cell phones in use in the world. Think of the market! If we get only a piece of it, we will have the hottest product since sliced bread. A cell phone in every ear. Twenty-four/seven. Never out of touch.

"Harry, listen, I'm on the downtown off-ramp. I could be at your office in... Jeez, a guy just cut me off. Some people drive like maniacs. Harry, let's get cell phones out of the hands and put 'em in the ear where they belong. Total, ubiquitous, hands-free connectivity. It's a winner...Beep...Harry, listen, can I put you on hold for a sec? I've got a call on the other line."

This week's Musing dates back more than a few years, and is rather longer than my usual Sunday offerings.

Click to enlarge Anne's illumination.

You may remember the wonderful chapter in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind In the Willows -- The Piper at the Gates of Dawn -- when Rat and Mole go rowing on the night river in search of the young otter. As first light tints the horizon, Rat hears a delicious piping: "O, Mole! ," cries Rat. "The beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us." And Mole, greatly wondering, obeys. "I hear nothing myself," he said, "but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers."

Remember? Remember the piping? We heard it as children, until the adults closed our ears by filling our heads with useful sense. We heard the piping, which is the unfathomable mystery of the world, beautiful and distant, until our parents and teachers and pastors stopped up our ears with answers. What they did was necessary, I suppose. We can't go through the world in a dreamy reverie, not this world, with its rush and certainty and bother. Soon we were made to believe that the magical music we heard as children is only the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers.

Only! The piping that Rat hears on the river is indeed the wind playing in the reeds, but it is not only. Nothing is only. When we get caught up in the only we cease to wonder. And when we cease to wonder, we might as well not be on the river at all.

"I believe that the analogy between childhood wonder and adult creativity is good biology, not metaphor," said Stephen Jay Gould. I wrote on the same theme myself many years ago, in a 1992 article for Horn Book, the children's literature journal, called "Dr. Seuss and Dr. Einstein." I suggested that the most creative scientists retain an ear for the piping that is the wind -- and more than the wind. I ended that essay with these words: "In children's books we are at the roots of science -- pure, childlike curiosity, eyes open with wonder to the fresh and new, and powers of invention still unfettered by convention and expectation."

And now I enter upon a second childhood of sorts. I have time to idle on the river. A pension check arrives in my bank account each month. The children are grown and independent. I've had a lifetime to extract the cotton of only from my ears. And I strain to hear again the piping I heard as a child, the merry bubble and joy that sets the world alight. "Clearer and nearer still," cried Rat joyously. "Now you must surely hear it! Ah -- at last -- I see you do!"

(I wasn't able to find a copy of the Horn Book essay on the internet, but I did find it using Stonehill Library's electronic data bases. I will post it tomorrow as my Sunday Musing.)

Ponder a quasar called OJ287, about 3.5 billion light-years away from us in the constellation Cancer, relatively close as quasars go, a super bright (for its distance), super small source of optical and radio energy. A quasar is thought to be powered by a massive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Energy is emitted as gas and dust are swept into the dark pit of oblivion. Astronomers have been observing OJ287 for more than a century, long before it was recognized as a quasar -- long before such things as black holes and quasars were known to exist.

OJ287 has the curious property of flaring up at 12-year intervals, with two flashes about 2 years apart. The best way to account for the flare-ups is to assume OJ287 consists of two black holes, one with a mass of 18 billion Suns, the other with a mass of 100 million Suns. The smaller black hole orbits the larger in an eccentric orbit with a 12-year period. As the smaller black hole approaches the larger, it dives through the accretion disk of hot matter surrounding the primary, causing a burst of energy, zips around the primary, then 2 years later plunges through the accretion disk on its way out again, stirring up another burst.

Now if this is what is actually going on, then Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that the orbit of the secondary black hole should precess -- that is, the axis of the orbit should slowly rotate like the axis of a top. The theory predicts by exactly how much the orbit should precess -- 39 degree per orbit -- which affects the timing of the flare ups.

And so it was that in September of last year astronomers waited expectantly on the predicted day, the first since the theory was applied in detail, for the second of the expected flares in the current cycle. And -- bingo -- OJ287 brightened on schedule, in perfect compliance with general relativity. (See Nature, April 17, 2008, p.851)

Now what thrills me about this story is not just that we live in a universe with orbiting black holes, or that galaxies (including our own) have supermassive black holes at their centers, but that the human mind can formulate mathematical laws that apply to objects 3.5 billion light-years away. Einstein said: "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." His theory of general relativity has so far passed every test.

The next flare up of OJ287 is expected in early January 2016, and then again two years later. Part of the story of general relativity is the emission of gravitational waves by the orbiting bodies, which so far we have no way to detect. By 2016, or soon thereafter, a gravitational wave detector may be available, to confirm (one assumes) in yet another way the marvelous nature of OJ287, and to celebrate the incomprehensible comprehensibility of nature.

(The diagram is from the Tuorla Observatory of the University of Turku in Finland.)

In a post last week I suggested that the stories associated with the foundation of Christianity -- The Annunciation, the Visitation, the Virgin Birth, the Flight into Egypt, and so on -- might be respectfully entertained by a religious naturalist even as he rejects the literal truth of the stories. As might be expected, I was challenged by friends who contend that the world has quite enough superstition without keeping religious fairy tales alive.

Do the stories attendant upon the birth of Christianity have any value in the 21st century? Or should they be jettisoned as the supernaturalist humbug of an earlier age?

Let us not be so quick to condemn the imaginings of our ancestors. The Christian stories have resonated down through the centuries as vessels that can contain a multitude of truths, just as the Greek and Roman myths remain generously instructive in their frequent retelling. We fill the vessels with our own imagining.

Here is a work of the young Caravaggio -- The Rest on the Flight Into Egypt -- painted in Italy about 1597, as Galileo was in Padua laying the foundations of modern science. The young Mary sleeps with the infant Jesus cradled in her arms. Her older husband holds a songbook for the young angel who just happens to appear on the scene with his violin. The ass looks on with a dreamy eye. (Click to enlarge. And here is an image you can examine more closely.)

I love this painting. Why? There is nothing literal about it. Surely this resting place under an oak tree is not the desert the family would have had to cross. Nor were there violins or modern musical notations at the time of Christ. Caravaggio makes no pretense at historical realism. His purpose is otherwise.

The madonna and child sleep in a natural bower. They are the feminine still point at the heart of creation. Cut the painting in half along the angel's edge-on wing and the right side is a Raphaelesque world of neo-Platonic repose.

The real action is on the left, where a less reposeful male drama is acted out. The aged Joseph, who has accepted the responsibility of bringing his young wife and child out of danger, is here reduced to holding the score for youth. Look at the old man's feet and read there the anguish of his heart confronted with the beautiful adolescent boy. And the boy, with feigned indifference, knows full well he is playing on the old man's heartstrings as well as upon his violin.

A distinctively male tension between age and youth resonates through all of Caravaggio's work, which no doubt accounts for why the artist has become something of a gay icon. But here, in The Rest On the Flight Into Egypt, something more than homoeroticism is at play. On the left -- darkness, a stony foreground, the anxious gaze of the seeking soul. On the right -- light, verdancy, the quietude of acceptance. Most luminous of all, the angel, his wings improbably affixed at the center of his back, filling the frame with a music that excites the ache of longing and lulls the sleep of innocence. (Why are the angel's wings black? As counterpoint to the white of the flowing robe?) Caravaggio offers his own version of yin and yang, a dichotomy of the human spirit that transcends any historical tradition and permeates them all.