Lies

For some strange reason studies of liars seem to pop up all over the net right now. NYmag has a long and very interesting article about why kids lie and how they learn it from their parents. Kids start as early as age 2 or 3, and the smarter the kid the earlier they start lying. Telling the truth is easy, but making a believable lie takes a lot more effort.

The always excellent Radiolab had a show last week about lies where they presented the results from several studies on the subject. They interviewed the famous psychologist Paul Ekman about facial expressions and how to tell if people are lying. The whole concept of microexpressions is fascinating. And Ekman's vow he took when his daughter was born to never lie again seems incredibly difficult to keep.

Another part of the program discusses a study Yaling Yang did on pathological liars. Brain scans of them showed that they had a lot more white brain matter in their prefrontal cortex compared to the control group, but less gray matter. The researchers believed that the huge increase in connections in the brain made lying practically effortless for these individuals and they could reply instantly with a plausible lie.

The radio show continues with a segment about a con-woman called Hope and how she used unsuspicious people by constantly lying.

People who are good at lying are generally more happy and have greater success in life. People with serious depressions are "too realistic" and seem unable to twist the truth into a brighter version. Being able to lie to yourself as well as others have many advantages even when you don't abuse it to the fullest.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to interact with people and even more observing what people do and how they react. If I had no moral or empathy there's no limit to how much I could take advantage of peoples good will. Most people want to help and trust other peoples "good nature", but I'm afraid there's too many who don't have that in them. I'll be sure to keep my eyes open for the slightest "leakage", be it a microexpression or an inconsistency in the story. Just never let people know you caught them lying, that just makes them more careful next time and harder to catch.

This cynical post is written while listening to Billy Talent - Lies

Our future climate concerns me

A few days ago IPCC (United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) released a document they "succinctly" call Policymakers' Summary of the Synthesis Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment. It's a complete summary of all the data on climate change, densely packed into 23 fact filled pages. (The full reports are much longer.)

The summary quickly showed up everywhere in the news, even at my favorite Ars. Reading through the document does make you think about the future of our climate. 11 of the last 12 years rank among the 12 warmest years ever measured since they started in 1850. For me personally, it has been some great warm and long summers and not a negative thing. For people living in northern Europe like I do, global warming will mostly make things better. The forests and crops will grow better, warmer summers, less freezing winters. The only downside for us will be an increase in precipitation. Most places will not be this lucky.

Although the temperature will increase the most at the poles, it's the places that are already dry and hot that will get the most serious problems. Serious droughts will follow, an increase in wild fires and agriculture and livestock will suffer. That might eventually lead to malnutrition and on top of that, clean drinking water will become a problem. The number of cyclones and storms is likely to increase too, and in low coastal regions and river deltas, increased risk of flooding.

Global increase in temperature for 2099 compared to 1999

The study also expects that in the long term, if the warming continues, the ice caps on Greenland will melt completely and raise the sea level with about 7 meters. This will take some thousand years or so, but it will be a noticeable increase just in the next 100 years.

Fossil fuel is the pink fields in these graphs

The primal cause for the emission of green house gases (GHG) is the use of fossil fuels. The concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere is exceeding by far the natural range seen in the last 650,000 years. We need to cut down on the green house gas emissions on a global scale right now, and even using the most optimistic scenarios still points to an increase in global temperature.

A global increase of 1.5-2.5 degrees Centigrade would endanger 20-30% of the species assessed of global extinction. Most scenarios in the summary suggests a much higher increase in temperature...

If all future investments in infrastructure and energy plants are shifted to get the lowest possible CO2 emissions, the additional investment costs would be around 5-10% higher. That's not much at all, and simply increasing efficiency of energy supply and industrial processes would do a lot to stabilize GHG emissions on a global scale. It's good to see that UK is helping China to get started on this.

Maybe we have no choice in lowering our oil consumption. A recent article in Wired states that most likely we will be unable to maintain the current consumption because we just can't pump the oil up fast enough. Some says 10 years more is all we have.

My personal opinion is that oil based fuels are way too cheap. If prices were at least doubled, maybe driving around in a petrol car won't be the cheapest way to travel medium distances any more. Electric or hydrogen fuel cell cars, although still very expensive, would become a more viable option. Flying is also cheaper than it should be, and even though it's nice to be able to afford to fly away for vacation, I wish there was a less polluting option for long trips. I really do.

Altruism, empathy and morality

Recent research shows that when you do something totally unselfish, the same regions in the brain that responds to food or sex lights up. The study, originally published in October 2006 by Jorge Moll and Jordan Grafman, got a lot of publicity in the press lately. Some good summaries could be found in the Washington Post and Science Daily, and also in some blogs from people interested in this topic.

My personal uneducated take on altruism is that I know it feels good. My brain rewards me when I help someone, when I make someone else happy. The evolutionary benefit from this is a bit harder to pinpoint, but the articles mentioned above has some good theories. Scott Huettel draws the following conclusions from his study:

"Our findings are consistent with a theory that some aspects of altruism arose out of a system for perceiving the intentions and goals of others."

and

"To be altruistic, you need to see that the people you’re helping have goals, and that your actions will have consequences for them."

The also studies show that people with damage to a specific part of the frontal lobe lacked empathy and would solve tricky emotional problems in a cold "the-end-justifies-the-means" way. This sounds a lot like Asperger's syndrome to me. Now every other kid with a slight communication problem seems to get this diagnose, but I wouldn't be surprised if this condition has something to do with them having a slight error in parts of their frontal lobe.

Marc Hauser has done psychological experiments showing that people all over the world process moral questions in the same way, suggesting that moral thinking is intrinsic to the human brain, rather than a product of culture. That morality is comparable to language in the way that they are both intrinsic in humans. He suggests that people reach moral conclusions in the same way they construct a sentence without having been trained in linguistics. A quote from this excellent summary of a Nature article:

Thus, the findings confirm the notion that there are at least two neural systems involved in making moral decisions: one in which emotions are involved, and one which performs a cost-benefit analysis. [... ...] It is believed that the emotion-based system for making moral decisions evolved first, perhaps in a situation where small numbers of people lived in kin groups. [Antonio] Damasio says, “A nice way to think about it is that we have this emotional system built in, and over the years culture has worked on it to make it even better”.

A consequence of this kind of study is that we might have to rethink what is immoral and not. If morality is automatic and unconscious process, why are we so quick to differ on what's right or wrong in a moral dilemma? The Washington Posts article says:

U.S. law distinguishes between a physician who removes a feeding tube from a terminally ill patient and a physician who administers a drug to kill the patient. Hauser said the only difference is that the second scenario is more emotionally charged -- and therefore feels like a different moral problem, when it really is not: "In the end, the doctor's intent is to reduce suffering, and that is as true in active as in passive euthanasia, and either way the patient is dead."

The difference sounds clear at first thought since it feels like an active choice to administer a lethal drug. But removing a feeding tube is equally active and the two situations should defintely be equal before the law.

Anyway, I guess we should try to think more about the end results instead of moral. A good comment on this from an interesting blog called Atheist's Wager:

"Morality is about doing the right thing when no one is watching."

Let's all do the right thing.

Classifying species

There's been a lot of articles, blog posts and news about the 300 year anniversary of Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) lately. He was born today, May 23:rd 1707 in Älmhult, Småland in southern Sweden as the son of a preacher.

In 1735 he published the first version of his now world famous Systema Naturae. It was 11 large pages that classified the natural world and humans were for the first time grouped together with other primates. The eleven pages in the first edition grew to three thousand pages in the final and thirteenth edition, published in 1770.

The system that made him famous was a simple two part naming system based on the physical attributes of the organisms. The two terms are the genus name and the specific descriptor.
The so called Linnaean taxonomy is the base for the system of scientific classification used in modern biology. Linnaeus hierarchy started with the division into three kingdoms, Animals, Plants and Minerals. The Kingdoms were divided into Classes and the Classes into Orders, which were divided into Genera, which were divided into Species. The classifications have changed a lot since Linnaeus' first version and only the groups in the Animal kingdom remain to this day, although heavily updated.

There have been some discussions about improving this centuries old classification style to something more modern, like a tree based nomenclature based on the recent discoveries from DNA studies. It's quite clear that even if animals or plants look the same, they can come from families very far apart. A classic example is the Hyrax that looks like a big guinea pig, but the closest relative is actually the Manatee. (It's also closely related to the Elephant but that's not the closest relative, even if they share the same ancestor.)

A system called PhyloCode grew out of a workshop at Harvard University in 1998 and it's still in the draft stage. Maybe the simplicity of the Linnaean system will prevail anyway. It seems to have worked quite well for the last 272 years...

Longer life

Researchers in US have found that there's a gene that has the same kind of life-lengthening property as severe calorie restriction. Cutting calorie intake by about 60% have increased the lives of everything from yeast and flies up to mice and dogs. But constantly being on the verge of starving sounds like a nightmare to me, so I'd rather wait for some pill that mimics the effects the pha-4 gene has on nematode worms.

Parasites

Parasites are scary and fascinating at the same time. It's disgusting to have a creature living and breeding inside another living animal, but the tricks they have to control their hosts can be surprising, weird and most of all scary.

There's been some talk about Toxoplasma gondii again because of this soon to be published paper. The paper describes how Toxoplasma gondii removes all fear of cats from rats infected with it. The reason for this is that the parasite only reproduces in cat bellies and of course the way to get there from the rat is to make it's host get eaten by one. The rats still had their normal anxiety and could learn to get frightened of other things.

It's strange how the the tiny parasite can control something so very specific. It's a common parasite too, about half of all people on earth are carrying it. It's not dangerous to humans unless you have a very weak immune system, like people with AIDS. Pregnant women should avoid getting it too. People get it the same way rats or other animals does, contact with cat litter.

Studies of humans infected with Toxoplasma have shown some subtle changes in personality. Quoting from this article:

Those infected, he found, show a small, but statistically significant, tendency to be more self-reproaching and insecure. Paradoxically, infected women, on average, tend to be more outgoing and warmhearted than controls, while infected men tend to be more jealous and suspicious.

There's not total consensus on this yet and it seems like only a few of all infected people have any notable issues with it. Toxoplasma infection has also been linked to schizophrenia, and medicine against schizophrenia made infected rats afraid of cats again. Why and how is not clear yet.

I would not be the slightest surprised if all of the truly cat-obsessed people are carrying Toxoplasma gondii.

Another classic example of a parasite controlling it's hosts is the Lancet Fluke. It has a complex three host cycle involving cattle, snails and ants. They live in sheep or cow livers where they mate and then leave their eggs out in the host’s feces. Snails eating that gets infected and to protect themselves they make slimy balls filled with parasites that they leave behind. Ants finding these slime balls eat them and get infected. Every night the fluke takes control over the and and makes it climb to the tip of a grass straw, hold onto it with it's mandibles and stay like that until the morning. Then it goes back to looking for food as normally, until the sun goes down. Finally, once some grazing animal accidentally eat the ant with the grass, the fluke is back in a host where it can reproduce.

There's more examples like this too. One fluke reproducing in wading birds makes infected fish shimmy and jump to make it easier for the birds to find and catch them. A certain hairworm who infect grasshoppers takes control of it's host when it is ready to leave it and makes the poor grasshopper suicide by jumping into some nearby water. The worm will be back in the water where it wants to be. (More hairworm here(pdf). Mind controlling parasites at LiveScience.)

I hope I'll never get a parasite infection. Especially not some slimy, crawling animal. Wikipedia has more information and links about this than you ever want to know...

The bottom of the sea

I have a feeling we don't know as much as we should about the life at the bottom of the oceans. About 70.8% of the surface of the Earth is covered by water and even if we know the topology of the bottom and the currents quite good from all satellites and sonar scans, most of it is still unchartered when it comes to creatures and plants. The discovery of the black smokers in 1977 near the Galápagos Islands showed that there are some very odd echo systems down there.

The problem deep down under water, like at 2000m - 2500m down where most black smokers have been found, is the lack of energy. No sunshine reaches these depths so the plants and creatures needs to use other sources to get their energy from. The strange environment with the darkness and high pressure gives rise to truly weird lifeforms.

A good example is a snail found in 2001 around some black smokers in the Indian Ocean. It uses Pyrite (aka Fools Gold) and Greigite to build a metallic shell. Covered with an iron plate mail it's like a miniature knight in armor. National Geographic did a nice article on this gastropod and Anders Warén, the lead researcher on this metal wearing snail, says they have found several thousand more new species around this kind of hydrothermal vents, and that's just counting mollusks.

The deepest dive ever made was done in 1960 by Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh with the bathyscaphe Trieste. They reached the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench spending 20 minutes at the bottom. At the depth of 10916 m the pressure is extreme, about 1250kg per square centimeter, and currently no vessel exists that can withstand it.

The Japanese DSV Shinkai 6500 is currently the deepest-diving manned submersible in the world with a maximum depth of 6500m. It was put into service in 1989, 18 years ago, but it's still new compared the next best one, United States Alvin (the one used to find the black smokers). Alvin was commissioned in 1964, but has been updated several times, last time in 2001. It can stay at a depth of 4500m for 9 hours with three people on board.

Good to see that the National Science Foundation is well on the way to a new improved 6,500m capable deep diving vehicle that can reach more than 99% of the sea floor. I'm sure it will find plenty of interesting things.

Human evolution in another light

Yesterday Scott Adams linked to an interesting article from Newsweek about human evolution. The conclusion they get to in the article is that humans didn't evolve linearly, instead lots of branches and sub species existed at the same time.

I don't understand why people find this surprising. You see it with all species in nature, be it fishes in Lake Victoria or sparrows on the Galapagos Islands. Evolution is not linear. I find it obvious that a random process will give results that diverge and spread out.

The article also suggests that by tracking specific genes in the DNA, we can find the last common ancestor to all living humans. It seems like they lived about 89,000 years ago and left Africa as recently as 66,000 years ago.

One of the last sentences in the articles says "It therefore suggests that we are still evolving.". Of course we are, who would ever think otherwise? I believe it's happening quite fast too, but with a completely different set of rules compared to back then. The definition of fitness for survival and reproduction in this modern world is nothing at all like surviving on the plains of Africa.

Scott Adams says "Fossils are Bullshit" and what he means is that the old rigid theory of evolution just doesn't feel right. I agree that the theory is far from complete and I think it's a common mistake by many scientists that when they find a proof for a particular thing within their current theory, they feel like they have to increase the scope of the theory to include things that are way beyond what they actually did prove.

Of course everyone want to make their theory more and more general and less complicated, but I think it's been proven over and over again that everything in the universe is more complicated than it looks at first glance.

A lot of times it seems like getting enough detailed information is the biggest hurdle. Often it feels like scientists spend too much time staring at the data they already have instead of thinking about new ways to find data that would shine a light on the problem from a different angle.

To use DNA in addition to the information they have from fossils and bones, like they did in the article, is a great example of finding such an additional source of data forcing them to adjust the current theory.

We should look at things from another angle more often.

Tapeworms

Just read a great post over at The Loom about tapeworms. Parasites are nasty creatures and it's something that's both scary and interesting to learn more about. Something about living inside another living creature and crawl around makes me squirm. Here's a quote from that post about Monogeneans:

Some monogeneans give birth to offspring without releasing them from their bodies. Their offspring mature inside them and give birth as well. Like a hideous Russian doll, a monogenean may contain twenty generations of descendents inside its body!

How weird is that? How do they evolve when the offspring living inside itself like this? Carl Zimmer who writes on this blog is an author of some very interesting posts and books, for example Parasite Rex.