“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”

—The Wizard of Oz

Having just suffered a major court defeat in 1987, the major players in the “Intelligent Design” creationism movement were trying to recover their momentum. They decided to transform and disguise their attacks on science by hiding their religious roots, and changing their creationist textbooks to remove overt references to God. They planned a subterfuge to get their unconstitutional dogmas taught in public schools in the form of “intelligent design” (ID), and claimed to be non-committal about the “designer” (even though every one of them was a devout evangelical Protestant, and open about their creationism when they spoke to religious groups). Behind the scenes, however, their intentions were very clear all along: drive a “wedge” of “intelligent design” to separate evolutionary biology and materialistic philosophy from its support in the United States, defeat not only evolutionary science but also materialism, and replace them with their own theistic dogmas. For public consumption, the ID creationists and the Discovery Institute in Seattle refused to admit that they were any more than scientists who wanted ID to get a legitimate chance of being heard and taught, since on the face of it they made no reference to a specific deity or designer.

But their cover was blown when a document which described their “wedge strategy” was leaked over the internet, and is now available to anyone who wants to read it. The “Wedge Document” describes their true intent: not new and important scientific research on evolutionary topics, but to win the battle by a concerted PR campaign to influence the public and political officials. Unlike all other legitimate scientific ideas that must pass muster of scientific peer review to persuade the scientific community that their approach was superior and truly scientific, the ID creationists planned an “end run” around the legitimate scientific community through PR and political pressure.

Once it was leaked, everyone at Discovery Institute tried to deny it was real, or that they had written it, but enough people have come forward to expose that lie. When ID creationism came up for trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005, their case was weakened not only by the long trail of documents that showed their true religious motivations (as well as those of the creationists on the Dover School Board), but even by their textbook “Of Pandas and People” which was hastily transformed in 1989 from an originally young-earth creationist book into an ID book. The early drafts were discovered and were full of old-fashioned creationism; the published book had just replaced “intelligent design” for “creationism”. In one crucial case, there was even a draft of the book where careless use of the “Replace” command had resulted in the weird combination “cdesign proponentsists” (“creationists” incompletely overprinted with the words “design proponents”), a true palimpsest which revealed the slipshod job they had done turning a religious book into an ID book. Since 2005, ID creationism seems to have vanished from the creationist political playbook, replaced by “teach the controversy” and other subterfuges.

Those who follow the news know that a “Wedge Document” of the climate deniers has just been revealed. As described by The New York Times and in Phil Plait’s “Bad Astronomy” blog and many other blogs, someone managed to obtain and leak documents from climate denialist Heartland Institute. These documents expose the fact that climate denialism is all about PR and propaganda, not about science. The head of the Heartland Institute does not deny most of the documents (except one, which reads just like the rest). According to the reporters at the Associated Press and The New York Times, so far everything checks out. It is amazing how much the language reads just like the Wedge Document (which was also denied by the Discovery Institute before they could no longer hide behind lies). The documents clearly show a strategy to create a smokescreen of doubt about climate change, insinuate their ideas into the school curriculum, and to win the battle by PR and propaganda, not by doing good science that would debunk the major evidence for climate change. One quote is particularly revealing:

The “effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.” 

Not much ambiguity there. Reading the context of the entire quote, it’s still clear. There it is in black and white: climate denialism is about preventing teachers from teaching science and focusing on “teach the controversy” and promoting doubt and uncertainty—not doing good science which would show that global warming isn’t real. You couldn’t ask for a clearer example of the similarity of strategies of the ID creationists and the climate deniers.

[The Heartland Institute may have bigger problems than just embarrassment at this exposure. Some of the documents show that they contributed to political efforts to aid Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, influence his recall election,  and attack the Wisconsin unions, in direct violation of laws that prevent non-profits from direct involvement in political campaigns.]

But this isn’t really surprising, actually. Both Oreskes and Conway (2010) and Hoggan (2009) carefully unearthed the paper trail, and showed that the entire climate denial movement arose, not as a spontaneous scientific dissenting movement from within climate science, but as a PR campaign paid for by the energy companies through their “conservative foundations”. For example, Oreskes and Conway revealed from memos leaked to the press that in April 1998 the right-wing Marshall Institute, SEPP (Fred Seitz’s lobby that aids tobacco companies and polluters), and ExxonMobil, met in secret at the American Petroleum Institute’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. There they planned a $20 million campaign to get “respected scientists” to cast doubt on climate change, get major PR effort going, and lobby Congress that global warming wasn’t real and was not a threat. [The infamous Koch brothers were donors to Heartland, as they are for many right-wing causes].

Or how about the recent revelation that the Heartland Institute has regularly been paying off Anthony Watts, a well-known American blogger and denier, and Bob Carter, an Australian denier, with sizable stipends each year as they continue to write anti-global warming diatribes? Instead of the “Climategate” scandal, we now have what is being called the “Cash for Climate” scandal. Another expose showed that 9 out of 10 of the top climate deniers who write on the subject were funded by ExxonMobil.

The right-wing institutes and the energy lobby beat the bushes to find scientists—any scientists, no matter whether they were qualified or not—who might disagree with the scientific consensus. As investigative journalists and scientists have documented over and over again, the climate denialists  essentially paid for the testimony of anyone who could be useful to them. The day that the 2007 IPCC report was released (Feb. 2, 2007), the British newspaper The Guardian reported that the American Enterprise Institute (funded largely by energy  companies and conservative think tanks) had offered $10,000 plus travel expenses to scientists who would write negatively about the IPCC report. So much for the scientific credibility of witnesses who could be bought and paid for with just a bribe plus travel expenses!

The irony in all this is that the Heartland Institute was one of the loudest voices in trumpeting the phony “Climategate” story, which has become accepted dogma in the denialist community—even though those quotes are clearly out of context and do not mean what they denialists claim they mean (just as creationists dishonestly quote-mine scientists to distort their meaning). You can see that for yourself if you read the original documents. There was nothing amiss in those stolen emails except for poor choice of words. Six different investigations in the U.K. and U.S. have cleared Philip Jones and the East Anglia Climate Research Unit of any wrongdoing, yet none of this pierces the “bubble” of the right-wing climate deniers. But now the Heartland Institute itself is the subject of unflattering documents leaked from their own files. And this time there is no quoting out of context, since there is no ambiguity in what they have said and done for years now. This quote is particularly clear:

Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as [Peter] Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.

So much for “fair and balanced” and “listening to both sides of the argument”!

I  had never heard the term “warmist” before—but it strikes me as exactly parallel to the way creationists (and only creationists) use the term “Darwinist” to describe anyone who accepts evolution. As many people have shown, using the term “Darwinist” is a deliberate attempt to make the opponent seem to be a member of a political cult, like a “Marxist” or “socialist”, not a legitimate scientist—even though scientists have gone a long way past Darwin in over 150 years. The parallels between the science deniers, both creationists and AGW denialists, go on and on…

Niles Eldredge as he looks today, Curator Emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History

Experimental biology … may reveal what happens to a hundred rats in the course of ten years under fixed and simple conditions, but not what happened to a billion rats in the course of ten million years under the fluctuating conditions of earth history. Obviously the latter problem is more important.

—George Gaylord Simpson, 1944, Tempo and Mode in Evolution

Last Sunday, Feb. 12, we celebrated the 203rd birthday of two of the most important figures in world history, Abraham Lincoln—and Charles Darwin. To mark the occasion properly, I spent part of my weekend visiting the Creation Museum in Santee, California, with Carrie Poppy and Ross Blocher of the podcast “Oh no, Ross and Carrie!” (more on that trip in my March 7 post). But I thought I’d mark this anniversary with a discussion of another important anniversary in the history of evolutionary science.

(left to right) Stephen Jay Gould, Michael Shermer, and yours truly, Mt. Wilson Observatory, 2001

It was 40 years ago this year that the most frequently cited  paper in the history of paleontology was published. That was none other than the legendary 1972 article by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould which proposed the “punctuated equilibrium” hypothesis. (Full disclosure: I took seminars from Niles while I was a student at the American Museum of Natural History, and Steve Gould was very interested in and supportive of my research even though I was not his student in a formal sense). At the time the paper came out, the dominant concept about speciation was the allopatric speciation model. In a nutshell, good biological evidence showed that new species arise not in the large mainland populations (with their extensive gene mixing) but in small isolated populations with unusual gene frequencies (peripheral isolates), usually living separate (allopatric) from the mainland population. Once these allopatric populations were no longer isolated but remixed with the mainland population, they would be genetically and behaviorally distinct from their parent species. Thus, they would be no longer capable of interbreeding, which is part of the definition of a biological species.

Even though the allopatric speciation model was accepted by biologists as early as 1942, it took paleontologists 30 years to recognize its implications. In their historic 1972 paper, Niles and Steve pointed out that if you took Ernst Mayr’s allopatric speciation model seriously, it would predict that species should arise in a normal biological time frame: a few years to a few hundred years at most. That’s a geologic instant, the difference between one bedding plane and the next in strata that span millions of years. The allopatric speciation model also predicted that species should arise in small, peripherally isolated areas, so they were unlikely to be fossilized in the few places for which we have a good fossil record. Rather than slow gradual change through millions of years of strata (the “phyletic gradualism” model), the allopatric speciation model accepted by biologists should give a fossil record where species seem to appear suddenly without any gradual transition preserved (“punctuation”), and then persist for long periods of time without change (“equilibrium”).

The “punctuated equilibrium” paper is a masterpiece of writing and incisive thinking, which poses a number of interesting issues. The first part is a general discourse on the philosophy of science, which argues that all scientists are products of their time and culture and tend to see what they expect to see. In this context, Darwin led paleontologists to expect phyletic gradualism, which they vainly tried to document for over a century before the allopatric speciation model came along. Then Eldredge and Gould introduced the details of the allopatric model, described punctuated equilibrium, and give examples from their own research (phacopid trilobites from Eldredge, Bahamian land snails from Gould). Every time I teach a paleontology class, I always assign the original paper as required reading, and then lead a class discussion section teasing it apart. Like fine wine, the paper gets better every time I reread it. I’m always amazed at what insights it contains, what future debates it triggered or foreshadowed, and how different students pick up different elements when they read it for the first time.

For the first decade after the paper was published, it was the most controversial and hotly argued idea in all of paleontology. Soon the great debate among paleontologists boiled down to just a few central points, which Gould and Eldredge (1977) nicely summarized on the fifth anniversary of the paper’s release. The first major discovery was that stasis was much more prevalent in the fossil record than had been previously supposed. Many paleontologists came forward and pointed out that the geological literature was one vast monument to stasis, with relatively few cases where anyone had observed gradual evolution. If species didn’t appear suddenly in the fossil record and remain relatively unchanged, then biostratigraphy would never work—and yet almost two centuries of successful biostratigraphic correlations was evidence of just this kind of pattern. As Gould put it, it was the “dirty little secret” hidden in the paleontological closet. Most paleontologists were trained to focus on gradual evolution as the only pattern of interest, and ignored stasis as “not evolutionary change” and therefore uninteresting, to be overlooked or minimized. Once Eldredge and Gould had pointed out that stasis was equally important (“stasis is data” in Gould’s words), paleontologists all over the world saw that stasis was the general pattern, and that gradualism was rare—and that is still the consensus 40 years later.

The debate was less than a decade old when I was wrapping up my dissertation work in 1981. In my dissertation on the incredibly abundant and well preserved fossil mammals of the Big Badlands of the High Plains, I had over 160 well-dated, well-sampled lineages of mammals, so I could evaluate the relative frequency of gradualism versus stasis in an entire regional fauna. I also had a wide geographic spread (from Montana and Saskatchewan to Texas, but mostly in the Dakotas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado). I had large fossil samples of many species, with dozens at each level, and excellent stratigraphic data. When I finally plunged in and plotted and analyzed my data carefully, it was clear that nearly every lineage showed stasis, with one minor example of gradual size reduction in the little oreodont Miniochoerus. I could point to this data set and make the case for the prevalence of stasis without any criticism of bias in my sampling. More importantly, the fossil mammals showed no sign of responding to the biggest climate change of the past 50 million years (the Eocene-Oligocene transition, when glaciers appeared in Antarctica after 200 million years). In North America, dense forests gave way to open scrublands, crocodiles and pond turtles were replaced by land tortoises, and the snails changed from those typical of Nicaragua to those of Baja California. Yet out of all the 160 lineages of mammals in this time interval, there was virtually no response. To paraphrase Rhett Butler, “Frankly, my dear, the mammals don’t give a damn.”

This result intrigued me, so I began to re-examine the uncritical acceptance of the notion that fossil mammals track environmental changes. It occurred to me that our excellent database of North American fossil mammals and global climate change might be a good place to test this hypothesis. In a 1999 paper, I argued that for the four biggest independently documented periods of climatic change in the past 50 million years, the mammals either do not respond at all, or show much less speciation and extinction than they do at times when there is no evidence of climatic change. One interval included the middle-late Eocene climate change at 37 million years ago, when turnover was merely at background level, despite evidence of floral change elsewhere in North America, and a big climatic cooling event in the global oceans. The second was the Eocene-Oligocene transition just discussed. The third was the great expansion of modern grasslands at 7.5 million years ago, long after mammals with high-crowned grazing teeth appeared at 15 million years ago. In fact, there is almost no significant faunal change at 7.5 million years ago. The final example is the last 2 million years of ice ages, when climate changed dramatically, but speciation did not occur in response to climate. Instead, most ice age mammals simply migrated north and south in response to the movements of the ice sheets.

About six years ago, I decided to test this last idea. Back in 2006, I had a bunch of excellent students in my paleontology classes at both Occidental and Caltech, and several wanted to do research with me. I was at a loss over how to supervise so many undergraduates with limited backgrounds, until I realized that we could do a group of related projects practically in our back yard: the Page Museum at La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. I equipped each one of them with calipers and gave them a measuring protocol, and got them access to the La Brea fossils through the collections managers. Then they each measured a different Ice Age mammal or bird, collecting data on hundreds of bones from all the tar pits with good radiocarbon dates: saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, giant lions, bison, horses, camels, ground sloths, plus the five most common birds: golden and bald eagles, condors, caracaras, and turkeys. After six years of work and publication, the conclusion is clear: none of the common Ice Age mammals and birds responded to any of the climate changes at La Brea in the last 35,000 years, even though the region went from dry chaparral to snowy piñon-juniper forests during the peak glacial 20,000 years ago, and then back to the modern chaparral again.

In four of the biggest climatic-vegetational events of the last 50 million years, the mammals and birds show no noticeable change in response to changing climates. No matter how many presentations I give where I show these data, no one (including myself) has a good explanation yet for such widespread stasis despite the obvious selective pressures of changing climate. Rather than answers, we have more questions—and that’s a good thing! Science advances when we discover what we don’t know, or we discover that simple answers we’d been following for years no longer work.

Clearly, it is an interesting time to be a paleontologist. As Gould (1983) put it, from the “irrelevance” of the early 1900s to the “subservient” role that George Gaylord Simpson placed us in 1944, paleontology is now in the driver’s seat, and trying to reach the “High Table” where the “High Priests” of evolution and genetics have long ruled unchallenged. Who knows where this will all end? Whatever the result, we’re clearly making advances by challenging the accepted dogmas of the time and finding their faults, and hopefully discovering something new and interesting. As Gould and Eldredge (1977) put it, “Why be a paleontologist if we are condemned only to verify what students of living organisms can propose directly?”

Most people think that science is about planning your research carefully to achieve some specific goal. They are often not tolerant about “pure research” that doesn’t have a specific conclusion in mind, but is focused on finding out general facts about nature, whether or not they have practical uses. Even the scientific funding agencies operate this way, where they tend to reward research that is conventional and “more of the same,” and seldom fund research that is a speculative gamble. Again and again, talking heads on TV or Congressmen ridicule “pure research” which doesn’t have a specific practical goal or application. Occasionally, narrow-minded and poorly educated people manage to interfere with the well-established scientific review process and shut down research they don’t like (even though it was approved by established scientists).

The sad irony of this entire argument that “science must be practical and useful” is that most of the greatest discoveries in science happen by accident. More often than not, scientists who find a crucial new piece of evidence were not looking for it, but looking for something else, and make their great discovery without planning to. The term “serendipity” was describes this phenomenon. It comes from an old Persian tale of the “Three Princes of Serendip” who made discoveries unexpectedly. However, in the case of science, serendipity works most often when the researcher is prepared to see the implications of some new, unexpected development. As Louis Pasteur put it, “In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.”

Examples of accidental discoveries in science are legion, especially in chemistry. Alfred Nobel accidentally mixed nitroglycerin and collodium (“gun cotton”) and discovered gelignite, the key ingredient for his development of TNT. Hans Von Pechmann accidentally discovered polyethylene in 1898. Silly Putty, Teflon, Superglue, Scotchgard, and Rayon were all accidents, as was the discovery of the elements helium and iodine. Among drugs, penicillin, laughing gas, Minoxidil for hair loss, the Pill, and LSD were all discovered by accident. Viagra was originally developed to treat blood pressure, not impotence. Most of the great discoveries in physics and astronomy were unexpected, including the planet Uranus, infrared radiation, superconductivity, electromagnetism, X-rays, and many others. The cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang was discovered by two Bell lab engineers who were trying to eliminate the noise from their newly developed microwave antennas. Among practical inventions, inkjet printers, corn flakes, safety glass, Corningware, and the vulcanization of rubber were all accidents. Percy Spencer accidentally discovered the principle of microwave ovens while testing a magnetron for radar sets, and he found that the candy bar in his lab coat pocket had melted.

Likewise, geologists often find things they are not looking for. In 1855, Pratt and Airy were doing routine surveying for the British government in northern India. They noticed that the plumb line under the surveying tripod was not as gravitationally attracted to the Himalayas as they had expected, and eventually discovered the evidence for the deep crustal roots of mountains like the Himalayas. The marine geologists who mapped the magnetic anomalies on the seafloor were not looking for the crucial evidence that proved plate tectonics, but were simply doing routine data collection of magnetic, bathymetric, and oceanographic data as their ships undertook regularly scheduled voyages of discovery. Maurice Ewing, the founder of Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory (now Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) of Columbia University, had a standing order that each ship would take a deep-sea core at the end of the day, no matter where they were—and many of those cores turned out to have crucial evidence for the history of oceans and climates and the evolution of life.

And the discovery of the iridium layer that led to the asteroid extinction hypothesis of the terminal Cretaceous extinction was purely accidental. Walter Alvarez was simply trying to figure out how long the mass extinction might have lasted, and he and his physicist father Luis Alvarez thought measuring the iridum from the rain of cosmic dust would tell them if the sedimentation rate was fast or slow. Instead, the iridium levels were so high that they suggested an extraterrestrial source—and a scientific breakthrough occurred that has been reverberating for 30 years now.

Such examples could be cited ad infinitum, but the point is clear: nature is not always predictable, and scientific research cannot be restricted to straightforward results that were expected when the study began. Shortsighted people like the right-wing radio hosts and the Congressmen who ridicule pure research must not be allowed to destroy our scientific curiosity and creativity, or our scientific discoveries would come to an end. Isaac Asimov said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’, but ‘That’s funny …’“

In this recent incarnation, Senator Tom Coburn (R.-OK) is castigating studies funded by the National Science Foundation which seem silly or frivolous to outsiders to bolster his cred as an anti-waste, anti-tax crusader. He has repeated called for the elimination of the NSF altogether, although he has no idea where American scientists would get their funding if he did so. In past years, the charge was led by Rep. John Dingell (D.-MI), who has served in the House since 1955, the longest serving member of the current Congress. A generation ago, it was Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI), who replaced Joe McCarthy in the Senate and served for 44 years. Proxmire created the famous “Golden Fleece” awards, which publicize what he regards as useless research. Or take a recent quote from that paragon of education and science, Sarah Palin, is in the same vein: “Some of these pet projects, they don’t really make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good, things like fruit fly research.”

The Palin quote, however, reveals the problem with the whole issue of outsiders criticizing science funding: ignorance of scientific research and its context. Anyone who has had any real exposure to biology (as Palin obviously has not) knows that for over a century, the fruit fly has been the model organism of genetics, since it is easy to study and breed, and its genes work wonderfully for research. Fruit flies have taught us more about genetics and evolution than studies on just about any other animal. The same problem permeates all these debates: many areas of science seem obscure to the layman, and don’t seem worthwhile, but in the context of a particular research discipline, they are important or significant.

As the article goes on to point out:

But there’s more to duh research than meets the eye. Experts say they have to prove the obvious — and prove it again and again — to influence perceptions and policy.

“Think about the number of studies that had to be published for people to realize smoking is bad for you,” said Ronald J. Iannotti, a psychologist at the National Institutes of Health. “There are some subjects where it seems you can never publish enough.”

Indeed, people are still arguing about cigarettes almost 50 years after the U.S. surgeon general first linked their use to cancer and lung disease. In a recent issue of the Canadian Medical Assn. Journal, a detailed analysis painstakingly laid out a notion that most take for granted: that secondhand smoke in cars is bad for children.

Duh.

Or consider the case of Harvard sleep expert Dr. Charles Czeisler, who has spent about $3 million over the years demonstrating over and over that doctors who don’t get enough sleep make mistakes on the job.

This seems painfully clear. But getting the medical establishment to start believing it — much less change the rules governing doctors’ working hours — has taken Czeisler the better part of three decades. Long shifts for interns and residents are a staple of hospital culture.

When Czeisler presented evidence that workers on rotating shifts at a chemical plant suffered on disrupted sleep, the medical establishment said that doctors were different. When he published results showing that physicians’ 24-hour-plus shifts contributed to car accidents and attention lapses at work, some acknowledged it might be true — but not for them.

Everyone had an anecdote. Czeisler had data. “It was dismissed out of hand,” he said. “They use the same argument over and over, even when we’ve tested it. It drives me up the wall.”

In 2008, the Institute of Medicine issued guidelines calling for limiting interns’ and residents’ shifts to 16 consecutive hours. Last year, authorities did cut back to 16 hours — but only for interns. Why? In part because that’s who Czeisler had studied.

“I was astonished,” said Czeisler, who is now researching whether residents’ performance also is affected by lack of sleep. “I can’t believe we have to do this extra study.”

There’s another reason why studies tend to confirm notions that are already widely held, said Daniele Fanelli, an expert on bias at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Instead of trying to find something new, “people want to draw attention to problems,” especially when policy decisions hang in the balance, he said.

In addition, studies that seem to be confirming the obvious are not so trivial as the media and politicians portray them. Many ideas which we consider everyday wisdom turn out to be wrong—and it takes studies like these to demonstrate the falsity of commonly-held beliefs. Or just to test the hypothesis in the first place, so even if it is confirmed, it is has at least been tested, and it’s not just folk wisdom. Ideally, science should be testing any and all ideas, whether they seem to be common sense or not, because in many cases what we think is common sense turns out to be wrong once scientists have worked on it. After all, your common sense tells you that the sun moves around the earth, that the earth is flat, and that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects—all ideas which have proven false when scientists examined them. Much of science (whether relativity or quantum mechanics or molecular biology or cosmology) is so specialized and hard to explain to the lay man that they are almost impossible to render on commonsensical layman’s explanations without grossly oversimplifying.

Commonly, you will hear politicians and the media criticizing science that just seems obscure to them, often with cries for restricting funding just to practical research that can be made immediately useful to humans. But again, the layperson is in no position to judge what is good research in nuclear physics or in molecular biology, since they know little or nothing about it. Most of the time, the critics of science don’t even try to critique research in highly specialized fields like nuclear physics or molecular biology—yet they feel expert enough in fields like psychology and sociology to critique those kinds of research, even though such research is vetted just as rigorously by the peer review process as research in fields laymen have no clue about.

That’s the crucial point: unless you are qualified by specialized professional training to criticize a particular type of research, you cannot render a useful judgment over what’s good science and what’s bad science. That is the job of the scientific community itself, which polices itself using peer review to fund only the research that meets the highest standards of a given specialty. Peer review isn’t perfect, and not everything that is funded is great science, but it is the best device we have to screen out less important and worthwhile research in the judgment of scientific experts qualified in a given field. And I know from personal experience that most funding is not frivolously thrown away. In my career, I’ve gotten funding consistently from the NSF, and even flown to D.C. to be on panels that screen out the proposals and the mountains of reviews that were generated. It’s brutal. In my branch, at best about 20% of the proposals get funded. That means that 80% of the proposals (many of which are outstanding research, proposed by well-regarded scientists) get turned down just because the competition is so stiff and the funds for scientific research are so scarce. In the last cycle of Sedimentary Geology and Paleontology (my branch) only 10% were funded; 90% were turned down no matter how good they were simply because the funds were so limited. Would you want to waste months of your time and effort to write a pre-proposal, wait for the OK,  and then send in proposal, knowing that the odds are only 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 that it will be funded? That’s the dilemma that faces many scientists, and yet they are under continual pressure to keep the grant funding coming, and maintain their research careers in this highly competitive atmosphere.

So keep these things in mind when you hear yet another superficial story in the media or from a politician or  reporter who doesn’t really understand how science works.

It happens with disgusting regularity. You will flip through the various basic cable channels which are nominally “science oriented” (often grouped together on the dial if they feature scientific topics) and come up with nothing but junk, pseudoscience, and worse. “Reality shows” about subjects with little or no science content, tons of paranormal and pseudoscientific shows promoting ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, and creationism—all fill the airwaves for channels like Discovery, The  Learning Channel, History Channel, and even the Science Channel and National Geographic Channel. We watch a few minutes of these with complaints to anyone within earshot, then (usually) move on—or occasionally we get sucked in to watch the whole thing, like gawkers at a car crash. The cartoon at the top (from the great website PhdComics) says it all: four channels that used to be largely documentaries on science and history are now dominated  by guns, explosions, dangerous occupations and other “reality” TV. Their shows have  buzz words in the titles like “biggest”, “wildest”, “monsters” or “killers”, and plain old junk fill up most of their air time.

I’ve seen it from both sides. I’ve appeared in prehistoric animal documentaries that have aired on all four channels (and keep re-appearing years after I made them, so I feel like Dorian Gray, with my younger self perpetually preserved in documentary limbo). Almost all these documentaries are made by small independent film outfits that are searching for any sexy topic that they can sell to the major cable networks, so they are under great pressure to come up with something flashy, noisy, scary, and/or mysterious. If I  have any chance to review the script, I try my best to tone down the excessive hyperbole, but they usually ignore me. As I film segments with them, I try to be as dynamic and entertaining as a “talking head” can be, but they are always pushing me to oversimplify and exaggerate to make the spiel more colorful (but less scientifically accurate). And then when I see the final product, most of what I did ends up on the cutting room floor, with only a few seconds left of many hours of filming. Even worse, I’ve put in many  hours on projects that never got picked up at all. Documentary filmmaking is a high-risk, low-reward proposition—you have better odds of making big money in Vegas.

So we all complain about the changes in our basic cable channels, and wonder why such dreck can make it on the air, but seldom think hard about the process. But the excellent website TVTropes does a very nice job analyzing what happens to TV networks over time. To no one’s surprise, it comes down to one simple factor: ratings (and therefore money from advertisers), largely driven by the effort to woo those big-spending trend-setting 18-31 male viewers who already dictate the movie industry’s bottom line (although movies aim even lower to reach teenage boys, the biggest-spending and most loyal movie audience). As TVTropes points out (and those of us old enough to remember can attest to), it wasn’t always this bad on cable TV. When the laws changed and the opportunity to create hundreds of basic cable channels first emerged in the 1980s, the channels were initially set up to fill specific programming niches, from the Golf Channel to the Game Show Network and so on. In the early 1980s, all these new niche-driven cable channels were very distinct and more or less true to their niche description. But since these are commercial channels that must sell ads based on numbers of viewers, the same factors that affect every other commercial enterprise came into play: keep tweaking it and give the customer whatever sells the most. (This dynamic does not apply to non-commercial stations like PBS in the U.S., or the BBC in Britain, which can program what they feel is in the public interest).

As TVTropes documents, nearly all these niche-defined networks have undergone “network decay” since they were founded in the 1980s, as their programming shifts to find hit shows. Because they are nearly all chasing nearly the same demographic of 18-31 year old males, they end up programming a lot of the same kinds of things (or even the same shows). Their original mission and distinctive programming is lost in a sea of reality shows and junk that keeps you in your seat, whether it be explosions or dangerous occupations or whatever. Another factor has been the expansion of media conglomerates, so that these multiple cable channels are owned by just a few corporations, and the CEO of each channel must answer to corporate bosses who are only interested in their profitability, not any abstract “mission” to air certain types of programming. So much for the high-minded idealism that drove the deregulation of the airwaves in the 1970s and 1980s, with the intent of offering us dozens of distinct choices. Instead, they all “decay” to a lowest-common-denominator of “if it bleeds, it leads” bottom-line mentality, negating whatever real advantages that dozens of distinctive niche cable channels once offered. As TVTropes points out, the decisions are made by network execs worried only about their ratings and bottom lines, not any high-minded ideal like “quality television” that PBS brags so loudly about. They could (and did) notice that professional “wrestling” is popular with their 18-31 male demographic, and see no problem with programming the WWE next to a show about science.

TVTropes offers as a classic example the pioneering channel MTV, which single-handedly changed the music business in the early 1980s and made telegenic pop artists into big stars (e.g., Michael Jackson, Madonna) while ending the careers of less telegenic musicians (e.g., Christopher Cross). But soon MTV found it was more profitable to offer reality shows, cartoons, game shows, and many other kinds of programming until the original music videos that it pioneered have vanished altogether.  TVTropes analyzed the decay of the cable channels in various categories. Under “Total Abandonment” (of their original mission) they list not only MTV, A&E, G4, CMT, Biography, and The Learning Channel (TLC). In their words:

TLC, originally focusing around science and nature documentaries in the style of the Discovery Channel, drifted toward almost nothing but “home makeover”-style reality shows. In a somewhat confusing (in these days of internet porn) play at grabbing the all-important 18-30 male demographic, TLC acquired the rights to air the Miss America pageant. After sufficient decay, one would never guess that TLC used to be called The Learning Channel and was once co-owned by NASA.

One need only check here to see how far TLC has drifted away from “learning” and into the realm of bizarre sensationalism, or this hilarious send-up of their programming.

Under the category “Slipped”, we find The History Channel. As TVTrope comments:

[Their] programming now consists of roughneck-focused reality shows (Ice Road Truckers, Ax Men) and conspiracy theory “documentaries” about UFOs, the Bible Code, ghosts, Atlantis, Nostradamus, and the end of the world, earning the network the derisive nickname “The Hysterical Channel”. Heck, at least the “Hitler Channel,” as they used to be known (back when everything was about either World War II, Nazis or The American Civil War), was actual history.

Their analysis of Discovery Channel is even more hilarious:

The Discovery Channel still shows plenty of actual documentary material, despite having been decaying for almost as long as MTV has. In the late 80s the lineup was mostly serious documentaries, the most famous of which was Wings (no relation to the sitcom except for a focus on aircraft) but which also included classy repackaged BBC imports like Making of a Continent — and once a year there was Shark Week, which was just what you’d expect. By the mid-1990s, they showed an obscene amount of home improvement shows and cooking shows aimed at stay-at-home moms (enough to spawn the spin-off Discovery Home & Leisure Channel, now Planet Green) and Wings had proven so popular it had been farmed out to its own spin-off, Discovery Wings Channel (now Military Channel). Now, they’re being swamped with “guys building and/or blowing things up” shows in the vein of Mythbusters and Monster Garage. And about four different shows about credulous idiots with no critical thinking skills ghost hunters. In 2005, Discovery debuted Cash Cab, a game show that takes place in the back of a cab, leaving one unsure whether it even has a theme beyond “non-fiction”. It gets weird when you realize that they’re knocking some of their own shows off, especially Mythbusters into Smash Lab (with a focus on safety measures) and How It’s Made into Some Assembly Required. The latter has almost only done products featured in the former (though How It’s Made has been on for just about ten years, so it’s hard to find something they haven’t done). The Discovery Channel also used to contain a lot of nature, which is where the now-classic Shark Week (which they still air regularly) originated from. But it seems that explosions have taken the place of tigers ripping stuff to pieces. Most of the nature shows have since been relegated to Animal Planet.

Finally, the Science Channel and National Geographic Channel are the only two that still run mostly science documentaries with little junk, yet National Geographic still has “The Bounty Hunter,” “Is it Real?”, and “The Dog Whisperer.”  Science Channel has begun airing sci-fi programming, including “Firefly” and “Dark Matters: Twisted but True,” so they are running pop-pseudoscience garbage that now pollutes The History Channel.

Frankly, I don’t see any light at the end of this tunnel. As long as these are commercial TV channels, they are driven by ratings and lowest-common-denominator programming aimed at 18-31 men. Only PBS and other non-commercial stations can escape this “network decay”—but then they compensate by annoying pledge drives that rerun old shows with sentimental value so that viewers will tune in and hopefully donate. Maybe the BBC, with its government support of top-quality science and drama programming (which the U.S. market then borrows or rips off) seems immune, although there are BBC channels that are lowbr0w as well. After all, Benny Hill reruns have done well on American TV for years….

If you drive up the bumpy road, you will find a few sheds, trails with railings, and pits in the ground, and on weekends, maybe a volunteer or two. There is a dedicated support group with its own website, and the BLM maintains the site as if were a legitimate scientific discovery. Even the Wikipedia entry seems to be written by a true believer, with only minimal mention of what the professional archeological community thinks about the site. But in the anthropological profession, the “Calico Early Man” site is a running joke which became a blemish on the career of the famous anthropologist Louis Leakey—yet the loyal amateur acolytes still promote it.

The Calico “site” was first discovered by amateur archeologist Ruth DeEtte “Dee” Simpson. It is located on the eastern side of the Calico Mountains northeast of Barstow, California, high on the steep slopes of gravel that come off the mountains during floods. The Calico site is on the edge of Ice Age Lake Manix, which flooded the Mojave Desert in this region for the last 500,000 years, and produces a wide variety of late Ice Age mammal, bird, reptile, fish, and invertebrate fossils. The “artifacts” are largely of cobbles and pebbles; no other commonly found artifacts, such as animal bones, human bones, wood fragments, charcoal, or non-tool artifacts, occur there. The “tools” themselves are very crude, consisting mostly of cobbles that have one or two surfaces flaked away to make a crude “choppers” or “hand axes”, supposedly like the crude tools of the Oldowan culture of Africa found from deposits formed about 2 million years ago. As the “Friends of the Calico Site” webpage confesses:

It is easy to scoff at the Calico “tools” the first time one sees them. They are far from the familiar beautifully-crafted arrowheads and spear points we find in surface and near-surface Indian/PaleoIndian sites across North America.

And that’s exactly what most professional archeologists thought when they saw the specimens. They have mostly been skeptical of their human origins because there are so many other ways to cause rocks to flake and fracture, especially in the high-energy setting of cobbles bashing against each other in an alluvial fan during flooding. Archeologists have been fooled and embarrassed many times in the past over-interpreting naturally broken and flaked stones, so now the criteria for an artifact are very strict. In the case of the Calico site, several analyses have been conducted (Haynes, 1973; Duvall and Venner, 1979; Payen, 1982), and they have all demonstrated that there is no conclusive evidence for human production for most of the “artifacts.”

In addition to the “artifacts,” amateur enthusiasts have pointed to “fire rings” in the gravel as proof that humans were once there. Of course, in any surface with a random covering of large cobbles, there will be by chance some that form a “ring” if they are sparsely scattered. It’s a classic case of pareidolia—seeing patterns in clouds or tea leaves or stones that aren’t real, since humans minds are programmed to “see” patterns even when they aren’t there. The crucial test of this “fire ring” model occurred in 1985-1986, when Caltech undergraduate Janet Boley, working in my friend Joe Kirschvink’s lab at Caltech, did a decisive experiment. Out at Calico, they built a “control” bonfire which burned for seven  hours. Then Janet drilled paleomagnetic sample cores of both the inner side of the control ring cobbles (which were heated enough to remagnetize the rocks in a new direction) and the outer side. The outer side of the fire ring cobbles were not heated as much, so the rocks retained their random magnetic directions. Then she took drill cores of the oriented “prehistoric fire ring” stones and measured them. Their magnetic directions were all randomly distributed, with no evidence they had ever been heated enough to remagnetize or have been part of a fire pit. Although she was cautious in her conclusions, it could not have been a more convincing test of the “fire ring” model—and it failed the test.

Thus, there are whole list of reasons to doubt the Calico “early man site”. First, there is no conclusive evidence that the “artifacts” are made by humans, and the “fire rings” are also natural consequences of pareidolia of randomly scattered rocks, not artifactual. Second, it is suspicious because there are only large broken cobbles that could be produced naturally, without a single human or animal bone fragment (nearly always found in legitimate archeological sites), piece of wood or charcoal, or non-tool artifact. In addition, the story is even more improbable since there are about 60,000 “choppers” or “hand axes”, far more than any normal archeological site (no matter how long it was occupied).

But the reason the site is so controversial is the age of the “artifacts”: according to thermoluminescence and uranium-thorium dating, some of the “artifacts” are 135,000 to 200,000 years old (Bischoff et al., 1981; Debenham, 1998). If true, this would radically change all of North American archeology. These dates contradict the huge number of sites which show that humans reached North America sometime after 15,000 years ago (possibly as early as 30,000 years ago, if a few controversial sites are to be believed). This makes the site at least 20 times as old as any New World site, and suggests that peoples with an Oldowan culture found around 2 million years ago in Africa were still lingering in Asia 200,000 years ago (where we have good evidence that the humans had a much more advanced culture), then migrated to North America—without leaving any evidence from any other site in any other part of the New World. As Carl Sagan put it, “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence,” yet the evidence for this claim which flies in the face of nearly everything we know about human prehistory is extremely shaky and easily attributed to non-human causes. [This does not apply to the Rock Wren biface, a real artifact found in a younger deposit dated by thermoluminescence at 14,400 +/- 2,200 years ago, within the range of the conventional dates of appearance of humans in the New World].

The saddest part of the story was the involvement of the legendary anthropologist Louis S.B. Leakey. He was one of the most famous scientists in the world at that time, with the earth-shaking discoveries of million-year-old  hominids in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, in the 1950s. During the last part of his life, he was a scientific celebrity, with a gigantic following. Huge crowds attended  his dynamic lectures, and the National Geographic Society funded his research which ended up in the pages of their magazine. But according to Morell (1995, p.. 366-368) and many other sources, Louis was a better publicist and fund-raiser than he was a scientist. His second wife Mary Nicol Leakey actually found the famous “Nutcracker Man” (named by Louis as Zinjanthropus boisei) that made Louis’ reputation. She also did the careful work on the archeology of Olduvai that proved that very ancient humans made Olduwan tools.

In 1959, Louis Leakey was at the British Museum in London when Dee Simpson brought  him some Calico “artifacts.” Familiar with the genuine tools from Olduvai, Louis was convinced (although Mary, who knew the tools better, was not). Louis was motivated not only by the urge to find another spectacular discovery that would enhance his reputation, but also by  his pet theory that Native American languages were too divergent to  have formed only in 11,000 to 15,000 years after humans immigrated here from Asia. By 1963, he had funds from the National Geographic Society for Calico, and the excavations began in earnest.

Nevertheless, most other professional archeologists found the evidence unconvincing, especially given the enormous burden of proof that this unconventional hypothesis had to meet. By the late 1960s, Louis and Mary had separated because (according to Morell) she thought he had gone off the deep end with the Calico site, but also because she was now receiving  recognition as the real scientist of the group (and she was tired of Louis’ constant philandering). Nevertheless, Louis organized a conference of archeologists to come visit the site in 1970, including such luminaries of African anthropology as Desmond Clark and Glynn Isaac. But Leakey was profoundly disappointed when they came away unconvinced (even though they wanted to believe such a prominent member of their profession, and wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt). Louis died in 1972, heartbroken over his failure at Calico and suffering from a number of ailments. Leakey’s story is much like some of the other famous scientists who became known for embarrassing mistakes late in life (discussed in my “Linus Pauling effect” column of last spring).

Nevertheless, the Calico site continues to have a loyal amateur following who refuse to listen to professional archeologists or consider the problems with the site or the evidence against it. I’ve found they  have an almost cult-like dedication to this lost cause, just like the amateur cryptozoologists who persist in tramping through the woods to find Bigfoot, no matter how poor the evidence is. And as long as the BLM and some local museums continue to refer to it as an archeological site, and the loyal followers keep working there, no amount of evidence or arguments by professional archeologists with much more training and experience will ever dissuade them. And, of course, it doesn’t help the situation that the BLM and other government bodies treat it as a legitimate site and not a monumental waste of time and money.

And so, as you drive I-15 between Barstow and Vegas some day, note the “Calico Early Man Site” road sign—and remember, even highway signs can be wrong…

Consider the graph above (from the website Calamities of Nature). It shows the relationship between the acceptance of evolution (here defined as “humans beings, as we know them, evolved from earlier species of animals”, a reasonably good metric of true acceptance of evolution) in various countries around the world versus their relative wealth (as measured by GDP adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity). The main trend of countries form a well defined cloud with a reasonable curvilinear fit. At the top are a well-defined cluster of northern and western European nations (plus Japan), with the southern European nations just behind them. Near the bottom are the former Soviet bloc countries of eastern Europe, which still suffer the effects of decades of backward Soviet educational and economic policies. (China, South Korea, and Singapore are not shown, but on other surveys, they all rate high on the acceptance of evolution scale. so they would plot high on the ordinate or Y axis, no matter what their GDP).

The same relationship could be shown if you consider any of the recent surveys that measure science literacy on an international scale. The northern and western European nations (especially Germany and the Scandinavian countries plus Iceland) nearly always come out near the top, along with Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and sometimes China. The exact order differs from survey to survey, but they only shuffle within the top 10 or top 15. In other words, the acceptance of evolution in these countries is a very strong predictor of overall science literacy.

Now look at the position of the U.S. It is a striking outlier on the graph shown here, because its low rate of acceptance of evolution relative to its national wealth (and the same would be true if you plotted it against the money spent on education per student). It falls down near the bottom of the curve on evolution acceptance along with Islamic nations like Turkey, which spend much less per student. What is this telling us?

We’ve heard all sorts of arguments about why our U.S. students are so illiterate in science despite all the money spent on their education. Teachers point out that they are forced to focus on memorization of numerous out-of-context factoids for multiple choice tests, not the hands-on active learning method of doing science that is proven to really reach students. Others point to our pop culture, which stereotypes scientists as nerds or “mad geniuses” in white lab coats, plotting to destroy the world. Compared to other rich industrialized countries, scientists and engineers in the U.S. don’t have nearly the prestige that they have in Japan or Germany, for example—nor are they paid as well as others, such as sports stars, movie stars, and investment bankers. In the U.S., the most popular public figures are jocks and entertainers, not exactly role models for the intellectual improvement of our country. Mooney and Kirshenbaum (2009) put some of the blame on the poor scientific communication skills and lack of PR efforts by scientists to make their work more accessible and better known to the public.

No doubt all of these things are true to some extent, but they’re all missing the elephant in the room that is apparent in these data: the stultifying influence of creationism in U.S. science education. Most of the examples of science illiteracy revealed in common survey questions, such as the mistaken notions about the age of the earth and Big Bang, or whether humans lived with dinosaurs, or whether we share a lot of DNA with chimps, are clearly so out of line with reality because they are part of the creationist dogma. No matter what kids learn in school about these subjects, their religious training at home overcomes the best efforts of their teachers—and their ideas rarely change as they become scientifically illiterate adults.

The single biggest predictor of national success in science literacy is the degree to which a country is not dominated by dogmatic religious beliefs, whether it be fundamentalist Christianity or conservative Islam. As Jon Miller documented, most of these industrialized European and Asian countries have no such strong forces of religious dogmatism in their politics and culture, and their schools teach evolution and other scientific topics with almost no interference by religious zealots.

The accommodationists say that scientists must not offend the religious community in the U.S., because they are too numerous and powerful, and we need allies among the Catholics and the more moderate Protestants and Jews, wherever we can get them. As someone who grew up in a religious family and tries not offend them, I can understand this laissez faire attitude. But if these data are correct, appeasing the religious and trying to make evolution and astronomy and anthropology sound more palatable and less threatening to our religious notions really doesn’t help. Only the decline in dogmatic religious beliefs seems to predict a greater science literacy rate. As Greg Paul and Phil Zuckerman (2008) and many people have noted, the least religious of these European countries also have a very high standard of living and better sense of well being. They share another thing in common: they are countries with strong social safety nets (guaranteed health care, job security, good retirement and vacation benefits, good child care). In these countries (especially in Scandinavia and Germany), most people no longer worry much about these mundane matters of survival, and no longer feel the need to pray to a deity to protect them against the lack of health coverage, few benefits or job security, scanty retirement savings, and lack of child care that plagues many middle and lower class people in the U.S. Yet their economies are thriving, their standards of living are very high, and they have relatively few people who are poor.

Certainly, the issue of why Americans are so ignorant of science is a complex one that doesn’t have a simple single-factor answer. It is probably a nexus of causes, from media dominated by junk entertainment and little real science, to the problems with educating students, to the raging hormones of teenagers, to the big problem of dogmatic religion actively opposing science and reason in this country. Whatever the cause, the consequences are severe.

Take, for example, this video, which my friends at Panda’s Thumb were dissecting a few months ago. The credulous Fox news station reports this “great invention” as a “miracle” that can solve the energy crisis. This “inventor” is proclaiming that he has “discovered” a new form of dihydrogen oxide (they claim it’s HHO, not H2O) by separating hydrogen from the hydroxyl ion by electrolysis. The video then breathlessly describes how hot this gas burns through various objects while allegedly it is not hot to the touch. Then the “inventor” shows off his hybrid car which runs on a mixture of this “miracle gas” plus regular gasoline. The video footage concludes with various people trying to help him get a patent on his “invention” and the possibility of him testifying before Congress about his “miracle discovery.”

I know TV news is famous for not spending any time with fact-checking or asking real experts, especially since they run on a tight deadline and don’t like the facts to get in the way of a good story. But surely they could have consulted with someone who could have told him that this is a famous scam that comes out  every few years (especially when people want stories of easy energy sources). They could have even done a bit of research and Googled “Brown’s gas” to find out the entire history of the scam. Odds are that this con man will get someone to spend money to invest in his “invention” and then the whole thing will quietly disappear before it goes to the Patent Office, where it would be recognized as the age-old con that it is. (If he does get before Congress, someone should inform the Chair of the Committee so they can really grill him, not buy into his fairy tales as they so often do with other garbage told in hearings).

So what’s the story? If you’ve taken any chemistry, you probably did an experiment with hydrolysis, where you separate water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. Once the hydrogen has been separated this way, it indeed burns very hot. But it’s not a source of energy, or a “solution to the energy crisis”. The laws of physics have not been violated or circumvented. In order to make the reaction happen, you have to put energy into the system to break up the water molecules. Study after study has shown that energy you get out of burning the resulting hydrogen is less than the energy put into the hydrolysis reaction in the first place, so it’s a losing proposition. You can think of the reaction like a battery—you put energy in to store it and can retrieve some of the energy at the other end, but with some net loss of energy. In other words, it is an energy storage system, not an energy source. As demonstrated by perpetual motion machines, you cannot get perfect efficiency, and there is always some loss of energy somewhere in the system, so the system is not a real solution.

In thermodynamic terms, when we burn a complex hydrocarbon like those in gasoline or other fossils fuels, we break down a long-chain hydrocarbon into small molecules like carbon dioxide and water (if combustion is complete). We get a lot of energy out of this reaction by releasing the energy of those many bonds in the complex hydrocarbon. By contrast, if our “fuel” starts as water, and we break it up, and then it returns to water, there is no difference in energy between the bonds of the starting material and the final product. Thus, there can be no net gain of energy—just temporary storage in another form with more energy consumed to break those bonds than we gain by burning it and re-establishing those bonds.

One of the people who wrote comments on the page where the YouTube video is posted said “remember, you need water & electricity Only!” (sic) and “no crude oil required.” And where does this person think electricity comes from the first place? Most electricity in this country is generated by burning oil, gas, or coal. Only if we generated electricity exclusively by wind, hydroelectric, solar, or nuclear, then there would be no oil, gas, or coal required. Nor it is necessarily cleaner than other forms of combustion. You may not get the fumes of acetylene in the burning process in your welding shop, but somewhere down the line a power plant has generated plenty of pollutants to create electricity to break up the water molecules in the first place.

If you look up “Brown’s gas” on Google, it’s a scam that goes back over a century. In its most recent incarnations, it was called “Brown’s gas” after a Bulgarian con artist named Yull Brown who tried to promote it in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, and conned a number of gullible investors (see here for details). It is also known as “HHO gas”,  the name given it by fringe physicist Ruggiero Santilli. It has re-emerged many times with slightly different names and guises, but people (and newscasters) get fooled over and over again. Although the video seems impressive, it is full of lies: HHO burns VERY hot, and you cannot put your finger in it unless you want instant third-degree burns. According to my sources at Panda’s Thumb, it burns so hot that the metal quenches in air and hydrogen is introduced to the metal at the cutting point. This makes the metal really brittle and thus is not as good as a cut made with an acetylene torch.

Thus, another scam re-emerges. The internet is full of YouTube videos which make the same outlandish claims, some of which are slickly produced commercials for gullible investors (such as this one), and others which are very low-tech. But they all repeat the same lies. The reality: HHO gas is not as good as most other gases for cutting and welding, and HHO gas is not a “new source of energy”. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Caveat emptor!

A possible reconstruction of Gigantopithecus.

As Daniel Loxton and I finished our upcoming book on cryptozoology, I needed an image of the famous huge ape fossils from Asia known as Gigantopithecus for the chapter on the Yeti. I emailed my colleague Russ Ciochon at the University of Iowa, who has found many new specimens, and got a rather surprising reply on why he would not share his images with anyone: “Gigantopithecus is not part of cryptozoology. Yet that is the only way anyone hears about Gigantopithecus.” I was rather surprised at his brusque attitude toward a scientific colleague who is on his side, but I can see where he must be fed up with non-stop requests from cryptozoologists who are only interested in his work to support their completely unscientific notions.

The original Gigantopithecus blacki specimens were found in some Chinese cave deposits, first discovered in the 1920s. They include teeth and a complete lower jaw. Unfortunately, there are no other skeletal parts known from this mysterious gigantic ape, despite decades of searching by the large number of Chinese paleontologists who now work on the deposits. More recently, Ciochon has revisited this region, and found more specimens of Gigantopithecus. He did so by shifting his focus to cave deposits in North Vietnam, which are unspoiled by the fossil poachers who robbed the Chinese caves to supply “dragon bones” for apothecaries to grind up into Chinese “medicine”. Still, even after more than 75 years since the first tooth was found, we still have only three lower jaws and about 1300 isolated teeth of this mysterious primate. There is also a second species, Gigantopithecus giganteus, from India, which (despite its name) is about half the size of Gigantopithecus blacki. A third species, Gigantopithecus bilaspurensis, comes from much older beds (6 to 9 million years old) in India, suggesting that the Gigantopithecus line goes back to at least 9 million years ago and the evolutionary radiation of early apes such as the dryopithecines (Ciochon, 1991).

Because we have only the lower jaws to go on, it’s hard to reliably estimate the size of the entire creature. Ciochon et al. (1990a) estimated that it was about 10 feet (3 m) tall and weighed about 1200 pounds. Simons and Ettel (1970) suggest it was proportioned like more like a gorilla, standing about 9 feet tall and weighing about 900 pounds. Either way, it was the largest primate that ever lived, immensely larger than a gorilla (the largest living primate), or even the biggest human giants.

Comparison of an old male jaw (bottom) and a female jaw, showing the extreme robustness and the large thick-enameled molars

What we do have of Gigantopithecus are the heavily built jaws with huge teeth, especially the molars, which have very thick enamel. Both the molars and the cheek teeth in front of them (the premolars) are very broad and low-crowned, often with their entire occlusal surface ground down flat, suggesting that these creatures ate a very tough, gritty diet. Ciochon et al. (1990b) used microscopic analysis of wear facets on the tooth enamel, and the presence of phytolith fossils from plants, showed that the Chinese apes ate mostly bamboo, as does the living giant panda.

Gigantopithecus had lived in Asia since at least the middle Miocene, about 9 million years ago, and were found mostly in eastern Asia during the Ice Ages. Careful dating of cave deposits in Vietnam which yield both Gigantopithecus and Homo erectus showed that early humans invaded China about 800,000 years ago, and that Gigantopithecus died out about half a million years later, around 300,000 years ago (Ciochon et al., 1996). Although this certainly disproves the idea that Homo erectus immediately killed off its distant cousin, there are also other possible factors, including competition with giant pandas which competed for bamboo, and also the fact that bamboo suffers from huge die-offs every 20-60 years, which may have stressed the ape population and made them more vulnerable to competition from pandas or people.

Or did they die out? As Brian Regal points out (Regal, 2011), back in the 1950s and 1960s some anthropologists like Carleton Coon made the inference that the Yeti was a relict population of Gigantopithecus. At that time, many anthropologists embraced the “multi-regional hypothesis,” which argued that Homo sapiens had evolved separately over a million years ago from different stocks of primates in different regions. Asians were descendants of Peking Man, Neanderthals descendants of some early European Homo fossils, Africans were descendants of African Homo erectus, and so on. Although there are still a few holdouts who still support a version of the multiregional model (like Milford Wolpoff at University of Michigan), genetic evidence that amassed since the 1980s has overwhelmingly demonstrated that it is false. Instead, the human genome shows that modern Homo sapiens are all descended from African ancestors that spread across the Old World about 60,000 years ago, displacing any older populations of Homo (such as “Peking man” or “Java man”) that might still have been living there. And the fossils plus the dating showed that this “out of Africa” model occurred more than once, since Homo erectus appears to have originated in Africa and then spread around the Old World (China, Java, and many other places) about 1.85 million years ago. However, even more recent work in genetics (Wells, 2002) shows that some populations (like Neanderthals) interbred with Homo sapiens, so when the invaders from Africa arrived, they did interbreed with the locals and incorporated the regional genome into theirs. Nonetheless, the archaic idea of multi-regionalism and independent, isolated parallel evolution of humans from local Homo erectus populations as advocated by Coon in the 1950s (with its racist overtones) has long been discredited by anthropologists. So Gigantopithecus is no longer viewed as connected to the Yeti, or in any way relevant to this debate.

Not surprisingly, cryptozoologists like Heuvelmans in 1952 and later many others also made suggestions that the Yeti (and later, Bigfoot) were surviving descendants of Gigantopithecus. If you read the cryptozoological literature, it is full of bizarre unsupported speculations about how these immense apes spread all over Asia and North America from different primate stocks, and Bigfoot and Yeti are their relicts. None of this amateur speculation bears any relation to what anthropologists know about the real history of hominid fossils and human evolution. This demonstrates once again that amateurs are out of their depth and use outdated concepts of human evolution when they propose their wild ideas. Nevertheless, there are many strong lines of argument against the idea that either the Yeti or Bigfoot is a surviving Gigantopithecus:

For one thing, Gigantopithecus was a giant relative of the orangutan, not a close relative of humans. Although we don’t have much evidence of its skeleton, it is reasonable to assume that its feet would be arranged like that of an orangutan or other great ape, not like that of a human with its reduced big toe and inability to grasp with its foot. Thus, its footprints should resemble ape footprints, not the human-like footprints allegedly produced by the Yeti or Bigfoot. And it should show the same stooped knuckle-walking gait of the orangutan, gorilla, and all other great apes, not the human-like bipedal walking posture allegedly shown by the Yeti and Bigfoot. (Indeed, one of the biggest problems with the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film is that the walking posture is almost completely human, not ape-like in the least). Any time you read about cryptozoologists trying to connect Gigantopithecusto Yeti or Bigfoot, it shows they know almost nothing about fossil and living primates.

Second, although Gigantopithecus fossils are rare, something that large would still be expected to be fossilized at least a few times if they had survived anywhere in the world after 300,000 years ago. For example, one Bigfoot website claims that ”No research group has ever made an attempt to look for Giganto bones in North America, so no one should be surprised that Giganto remains have never been identified in North America. Ironically, the most vocal skeptics and scientists who rhetorically ask why no bones have been located and identified on this continent are the last people who would ever make an effort to look for them.” This claim is patently false, and shows how completely ignorant this writer is about paleontology and the fossil record. Paleontologists do not go out specifically to look for a particular fossil, but they collect any and all deposits that yield decent fossils. For deposits of the last 300,000 years (middle and late Pleistocene), we have an extraordinarily good fossil record in both China (where hundreds of Chinese paleontologists have been working for many decades) and especially North America, where we have excellent fossil records (especially of larger mammals, and especially from cave deposits) in every state in the United States and most Canadian provinces (Kurten and Anderson, 1980). Hundreds of paleontologists have collected these fossils for over a century and documented them in excruciating detail. Many extremely rare species are known, including an American cheetah and a camel that is built like a mountain goat, among others. Yet not once has anything resembling Gigantopithecus ever been found—not even the smallest tooth fragment (which could be easily recognized by its thick enamel and distinct low-crowned cusps). Contrary to the conspiratorial thinking of cryptozoologists, paleontologists would be overjoyed to find such a fossil and announce it with great fanfare if they had one, because such a discovery could make your reputation. They have no reason to hide such a fossil in hopes that it won’t give comfort to cryptozoologists. In fact, most paleontologists don’t even know or care about cryptozoology at all, so they are not worried about whether cryptozoologists might be affected. Instead, this statement shows that cryptozoologists such as this writer have no clue about fossils, and are using their ignorance to support their fantasies about fossils.

Finally, the best reason of all to dismiss the idea that Gigantopithecus survives today: all the evidence (and lack of evidence) that shows that neither the Yeti or Bigfoot is likely to exist, but the product of bad observations and bad science and lots of wishful thinking. Our upcoming book will discuss this evidence in detail.

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Today is the northern hemisphere winter solstice  and we’ve already seen a year with many climatic records broken and numerous record-breaking disasters, especially with all the tornadoes and droughts and heat waves. Already the global average temperature estimates for 2011 are coming in, and it looks like it will once again break all previous records for the warmest year in history (which was previously broken by 2010, and before that by 2009). The reports we’re hearing from the media about even more rapidly melting polar ice caps and the vanishing of glaciers around the world are not reassuring.

But in the southern hemisphere, it is summer solstice today, and there the signs are even more ominous. Australia has just gone through years of one climatic disaster after another, capped by 2011 with record flooding, wildfires, drought, and even an gigantic typhoon named Yasi. As this article points out, or an article in the December 2011 issue of Discover magazine discussed, many climate scientists view Australia as a harbinger of the future. It is far more vulnerable to changes in climate than most other regions, since it is a small continent located in the southern high-pressure belt of deserts, with only limited wet areas along the coast and the tropical north. It has few mountains or other topographic features that modify climate or trap rain and snow compared to most other continents, so it can be whipsawed through climate changes much faster than other regions. As the article’s author quoted in an email he received from an Aussie friend, “Welcome to Australia, the petri dish of climate change. Stay safe.” Or as David Karoly, the leading climate researcher at the University of Melbourne, put it, “Australia is the canary in the coal mine. What is happening in Australia now is similar to what can expect in other places in the future. One of the effects of increasing greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere is to amplify existing climate signals. Regions that are dry get drier, and regions that are wet get wetter. If you have a place like Australia that is already extreme, those extremes just get more pronounced.”

Australia has seen more extreme climatic events in the past decades than in all of its previous recorded history. It has gone through decades-long drought, and heat waves of 115° for weeks, leading to historic wildfires in 2009 and each year since then which have wiped out millions of acres and killed 173 people. Its topsoil built over generations is blowing away, causing record dust storms reminiscent of the “Dust Bowl” years in the U.S. in the 1930s.  Its groundwater supply has nearly vanished, leading to nationwide water shortages, and severely damaging the crops that were developed when it had enough water to irrigate them. When the drought finally broke last summer, the region suffered through record flooding instead, which was even more destructive of farmlands and cities. Even the Great Barrier Reef, Australia’s great gem of biodiversity (and an important magnet for tourist dollars as well as science) is rapidly dying from bleaching caused by warmer, more acidic oceans. With the loss of the Great Barrier Reef (and many other reefs around the world), scientists predict a collapse of the food chain and mass extinction in the oceans (including important fisheries) that will dwarf any of the geologic past.

As the article’s author, Jeff Goodell, explains:

Adding to Australia’s vulnerability is its close connection with the sea. Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution – warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain – are even more deadly here.

How bad could it get? A recent study by MIT projects that without “rapid and massive action” to cut carbon pollution, the Earth’s temperature could soar by nine degrees this century. “There are no analogies in human history for a temperature jump of that size in such a short time period,” says Tony McMichael, an epidemiologist at Australian National University. The few times in human history when temperatures fell by seven degrees, he points out, the sudden shift likely triggered a bubonic plague in Europe, caused the abrupt collapse of the Moche civilization in Peru and reduced the entire human race to as few as 1,000 breeding pairs after a volcanic eruption blocked out the sun some 73,000 years ago. “We think that because we are a technologically sophisticated society, we are less vulnerable to these kinds of dramatic shifts in climate,” McMichael says. “But in some ways, because of the interconnectedness of our world, we are more vulnerable.”

With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production. Rising sea levels will wipe out large parts of major cities and cause hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to coastal homes and roads. The Great Barrier Reef will be reduced to a pile of purple bacterial slime. Thousands of people will die from heat waves and other extreme weather events, as well as mosquito-borne infections like dengue fever. Depression and suicide will become even more common among displaced farmers and Aborigines. Dr. James Ross, medical director for Australia’s Remote Area Health Corps, calls climate change “the number-one challenge for human health in the 21st century.”

And all this doesn’t even hint at the political complexities Australia will face in a hotter world, including an influx of refugees from poorer climate-ravaged nations. (“If you want to understand Australian politics,” says Anthony Kitchener, an Australian entrepreneur, “the first thing you have to understand is our fear of yellow hordes from the north.”) Then there are the economic costs. The Queensland floods earlier this year caused $30 billion in damage and forced the government to implement a $1.8 billion “flood tax” to help pay for reconstruction. As temperatures rise, so will the price tag. “We can’t afford to spend 10 percent of our GDP building sea walls and trying to adapt to climate change,” says Ian Goodwin, a climate scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney.

The strangest irony of the whole situation is that politically, Australia is in a bind. The right wingers in Australia are very powerful, with huge financial backing from the powerful coal companies, and many of them deny the scientific evidence  of the global climate change, even as the warning signs are occurring all around them. With all its vast deserts, one would expect Australia to be at the forefront of solar energy, and moving quickly to ameliorate the climate problems that it has produced. And yet the opposite is the case: energy conservation efforts have had little traction in Australia, since coal is still cheaper. As Goodell writes:

Australia remains deeply addicted to coal, which not only provides 80 percent of its electricity but serves as its leading export. Perhaps more than any other nation on earth, Australia is trapped by the devil’s bargain of fossil fuels: In the short term, the health of the nation’s economy depends on burning coal. But in the long term, the survival of its people depends on quitting coal. Australia’s year of extreme weather has reawakened calls for a tax on carbon pollution, but it is far from clear that the initiative will pass, or, in the big picture, whether it will matter much. “What we are ultimately talking about is how climate change is destabilizing one of the most advanced nations on the planet,” says Paul Gilding, an Australian climate adviser and author of The Great Disruption. “If Australia is vulnerable, everyone is vulnerable.”

And the saddest part of this irony is that even if Australia could switch from coal to solar and reduce its own carbon footprint, it would still need to sell its coal to China and the rest of Asia. In short, there are no easy solutions.  As Goodell describes it:

“Living on the beach is pretty much the Australian dream,” he says as we pass beach town after beach town. At Narrabeen Beach, a broad sweep of sand 15 miles north of Sydney, Goodwin points out where residents have been forced to truck in sand in an expensive and hopeless effort to keep the beach – and the homes along it – from being washed away by increasingly strong storm surges. If the seas rise by at least three feet this century, as the current scientific consensus expects them to, every one of the structures along the beach will vanish. “In fact,” Goodwin says, “the way things are going, they could be gone within a decade or two.”

“Do the people who live there know that?” I ask.

“Some of them do, but they don’t care,” he says. “Or they don’t think about it. Australians have a hard time imagining the future will be any different than the present.”

Australians aren’t alone in their denial, of course. But there is a sense of fatalism here that is absent in America, a feeling borne by having lived for long years in a harsh climate, of being able to take whatever nature dishes out. It is why Australians don’t leave their houses during raging wildfires, and why they build cites in landscapes where no cities should be built. When it comes to dealing with Mother Nature’s nasty moods, Australians have a kind of outback machismo, a justifiable sense of pride for having built a nation in one of the most extreme climates on the planet. But as the catastrophes multiply, so too do the psychic costs of living with it. As a recent report by Australia’s Climate Institute concluded, “Higher rates of drug and alcohol misuse, violence, family dissolution and suicide are more likely to follow more extreme weather events.” In 2006, during the prolonged drought in the Murray-Darling Basin, the government estimated that an Australian farmer committed suicide every four days.

It’s too soon to say for sure, but it may be that the deadly weather of the past few years will open people’s eyes to the risks of living on a superheated planet. In July, Prime Minister Julia Gillard introduced her proposal for a carbon tax in Australia. The plan would levy a modest price of $25 a ton on carbon for several years, then morph into a carbon-trading scheme in 2015. It’s a complicated proposal, full of loopholes and subsidies for Big Coal, but if it passes, it would be a big step in the right direction. “It’s a critical time,” Ross Garnaut, the government’s key climate adviser, told reporters. “Each year, the growth in emissions makes it less likely that we’ll be able to avoid severe damage from climate change. So the requirement to take action is urgent.”

It’s not just floods and drought and wildfires that are spurring action to cut carbon pollution. It’s also the fear of being left out of the economic benefits of clean technology. “With its deserts and sunshine, Australia should be the solar-energy capital of the world,” one California entrepreneur tells me. “Instead, they are still passing out subsidies to the coal industry.” Or as one Australian blogger put it, “Australia is currently exporting typewriters to a global economy moving quickly toward computers.”

But as the demand to take action grows, so too does the corporate and political push-back. The coal industry is a powerful force in Australia, and it is rolling out the usual tired arguments that a tax on carbon would devastate the economy and send jobs scurrying overseas. The country’s opposition leader, echoing the language of right-wing deniers in Congress, dismisses climate change as “absolute crap.” But as befits the Australian psyche, the scare tactics here are even bigger and nastier than in America. The rhetoric over global warming has grown so heated, in fact, that climate scientists at the Australian National University have been assigned security protection after several weeks of abusive e-mails and phone calls. For their work in understanding what is happening to their country, some scientists have even received death threats.

Let’s hope that the Australian “canary in the coal mine” can help us better understand and prepare for what is already happening in the U.S. and around the world.