The same is true of the long-debunked example of cherry picking, “It hasn’t warmed since 1998″ (see my April 11 post). Another common false statement is “The planet warmed just as much during the Medieval Warm Period, but eventually it cooled down again.” They argue that if this warming preceded our modern injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, then maybe our current global warming not caused by our burning of fossil fuels. Climate deniers repeat this old saw over and over again as if it’s somehow a devastating blow to the huge body of data about our recent climate changes. They often illustrate it with the anecdotes about how the Vikings could colonize Greenland for a while, then as climate cooled in the late Middle Ages, these colonies failed when Greenland became too cold again. The story about the fate of Viking colonies in Greenland is true—but the rest is not.

The Northern Hemisphere temperature curve of Moberg et al. (2005). Note that the Medieval Warm Period is nowhere near as warm as the modern episode of global warming.

As climate scientists have long understood, there were numerous small fluctuations of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years of the Holocene. Most are well understood to be consequences of the different orbital variations of the earth around the sun (the Croll-Milankovitch cycles), with some component of solar activity. But in the case of the Medieval Warm Period (about 950-1250 A.D.), the temperatures were only 1°C warmer in the Northern Hemisphere, much less than the temperature changes since the beginning of our current global warming (Fig. 1). The warmest years of the Medieval Warm Period are comparable to the mean annual temperatures recorded about 1960—and the earth has warmed dramatically in the past 50 years.

More importantly, the Medieval Warm Period was also only a local warming in the North Atlantic and northern Europe. If you look at the record of global temperatures over this interval, the mean temperature of the earth did not increase significantly, and actually cooled by more than 1°C. And in contrast to the current episode of global warming, which is caused by burning fossil fuels, the Medieval Warm Period was triggered by several well-known non-human causes: a long-term drop in volcanic activity (which can warm the earth by letting in more solar radiation) and an episode of unusually high solar activity. In addition, there may have been a strong long-term oceanographic effect, the North American Oscillation, that might explain why the warming was local to the North Atlantic and not global.

Likewise, the warmest period of the last 10,000 years prior to 1800 was the Holocene Climatic Optimum (5000-9000 B.C.) when warmer and wetter conditions in Eurasia caused the rise of the first great civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China. This too was largely a Eurasian phenomenon, with 2-3°C warming in the Arctic and northern Europe. By contrast, there was almost no warming in the tropics, and cooling or no change in the Southern Hemisphere.

To the Eurocentric world, these warming events seemed important, but on a global scale the effect is negligible. In addition, none of these historic and prehistoric warming episodes is related to increasing greenhouse gases. The Holocene Climatic Optimum, in fact, is predicted by the Milankovitch cycles, since at that time the axial tilt of the earth was over 24°, its steepest value, meaning the poles got more solar radiation than normal. By contrast, not only is the warming observed in the last 200 years much greater than during these previous episodes, but it is also global and bipolar, so it is not a purely local effect. The warming that ended the “Little Ice Age” (from the mid-1700s to the late 1800s) was due to increased solar radiation prior to 1940. Since 1940, however, the amount of solar radiation has been dropping, so the only candidate for the post-1940 warming has to be carbon dioxide.

But you would never get this straight story that paleoclimatologists have known for years if you examine any of the climate-denier sites. Instead, they are loaded full of misinformation written by people who do not have formal training in, nor do they actively participate in, climate science research. Instead, like the creationists they keep repeating and recycling debunked and outdated ideas, unwilling or unable to read anything that does not get through their strong filter of confirmation bias. And, like the smug fundamentalist that I mentioned in my March 7 post, they are self-righteous and utterly sure that their arguments are sound, yet they never even bother to read or consider anything that might go against their ideological biases (any more than creationists will read or understand anything that undermines their biblical literalism). Such a behavior may be well understood in the world of psychology and neuroscience, especially as an example of confirmation bias—but it is indefensible in the scientific community, where peer review weeds out the false and bad ideas and data (like creationism and climate denialism) and scientists must learn to accept ideas which have become overwhelmingly supported by the evidence, such as climate change and evolution. Such ideas may not tell us what we want to hear, but that’s all the more reason to believe that they are probably real and not the result of wishful thinking.

A more scientific and intellectually honest approach would be to declare such phenomena as anomalous (although I don’t think that they are). Ghost cold would more properly be termed anomalous cold, or a regional cold anomaly, or something like that. One hypothesis for the alleged cold anomaly would be some sort of supernatural entity (call it a ghost) that acts as a heat sink generating cold spots. First, however, researchers should endeavor to find a mundane explanation for the cold. In fact before declaring it an anomaly they should thoroughly rule out any possible explanation. Only when that has been adequately done would they have a tentative anomaly.

It would then be reasonable to generate a hypothesis as to what is causing the anomalous cold, but such hypotheses are only useful if they lead to testable predictions. If the regional cold anomaly phenomenon is the result of “ghosts”, then what might we predict from that and how can we test it? I don’t know of any way to definitively test it, as ghosts are not a well-defined phenomenon, but perhaps there are some preliminary tests that could be done. For example, is there at least a correlation between cold spots and experiences often interpreted as ghosts or hauntings? Perhaps cold spots are just as likely in homes without other such “ghost phenomena.” Such a correlation would not prove the ghost hypothesis, of course, but it would at least be a start, and the lack of correlation would seriously jeopardize the hypothesis.

Ghost hunters, however, skip over all of this scientific methodology and reasoning and simply declare cold spots “ghost cold” and then use them as evidence for ghosts. They are then puzzled when scientists and skeptics don’t accept what they consider to be compelling evidence for ghosts, but what is really compelling evidence for the complete lack of scientific understanding on the part of ghost hunters.

All of the tools of the ghost hunting trade are the same as cold spots – they are common phenomena one might encounter in any location that are simply being declared ghost phenomena without ever a hypothesis being generated or tested. EMF meters, for example, simply detect the ubiquitous EMF in the modern world, which is then declared to be a ghost phenomenon. EMF is particularly satisfying because you can make the little needle move along the gauge, or (if you are digitally inclined) you can make numbers appear on the screen. You can wave around your EMF meter, without having the slightest idea how it works, and see stuff happen. Why are EMF associated with ghosts? There is no logical basis for this notion. It seems to be entirely based upon the fact that EMF is something you can encounter in alleged haunted locations, because you can encounter them almost anywhere.

We can now add the “ghost box” to the list of such equipment. This one is particularly humorous because it seems to be deliberately designed to generate false positive results. The inventor of the ghost box (sometimes called a spirit box) is Frank Sumption (who initially called it “Frank’s box). Here is his own description of the device.

The purpose of the ―box, as it is now referred to, is simply to provide a source of audio bits made up of fragments of human speech, music and noise. This noise is known as ―raw audio, it is the raw material out of which spirits of the deceased, and other entities use to create their own voices out of. ―Presumably by remodulating and remixing the raw audio to make the various noise fragments from words and voices of their choosing. In the box, the raw audio is created by sweeping the tuning of a radio electronically across it’s band, or tuning range, the resulting bits of speech music and noise are the raw audio. Radio is simply a convenient source of raw audio. However, that’s only a guess as to how the box works, there does seem be an RF component, or at times an actual signal received, or some other method of getting an external voice into the radio in the ―the box. Some of the manipulation of the raw audio seems to take place inside the electronics, again, presumably ―they can manipulate the electrical signals. I don’t have the equipment, or know how to be able to test these ideas.

What you hear, then, is what you would hear if you had an old radio with an analogue dial and you simply moved the dial quickly up and down the frequencies. You get a mix of static with snippets of speech or music. It is a perfect set up for generating audio pareidolia. The practice emerged out of electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), in which ghost hunters listen to hours of audio recorded in an allegedly haunted locations and listen for noise that their brains can interpret as words. They then impose meaning on the random words. The ghost box just speeds up the process by generating “raw audio” for the pareidolia.

There are two layers of pattern recognition that are occurring when we have an eager ghost hunter sitting in front of a radio scanner (sorry, I mean “ghost box”) listening for the ghosts. The first layers is hearing words, names, or phrases. Sometimes the words are actual words coming through from a radio station. Sometimes, however, they are just noise that the brain tries to match to a word. Here is a great example - most of the words and phrases “heard” by the ghost hunter in this video are more imagination than anything else. I suggest you listen to the audio without the video and write down any words that you think you hear. Then watch the video and see if they match what the ghost hunter thought he heard.

On the video the alleged words flash up on the screen, so that suggestion will kick in. This is a well-known phenomenon – when a word or phrase is suggested to you, your brain will hear what is suggested. Here is a funny example  - the “O Fortuna” lyrics misinterpreted as funny phrases. (Perhaps ghosts are trying to communicate through the lyrics of foreign-language music.)

There is also a second layer of pattern recognition, however – the meaning of the words. People are very good at inferring meaning, which is a useful skill in a highly social species. Like many such things, we are too good in that we tend to over-infer meaning. I see people do this all the time with their pets. They assign very sophisticated human understanding and intent to behaviors that probably have a much simpler explanation. We saw this also when researchers tried to each apes to communicate with sign language. The researchers were very good at inferring what the apes meant even when signing essentially randomly. Sometimes, for example, the animal would try to be funny or playful by signing the opposite of what he meant.

We see the same thing in the ghost box video. The ghost hunter is good at taking the random words and phrases an inferring some meaning from them. He is then very impressed by the pattern of responses, concluding that there must be some intelligence behind them. Of course there is an intelligence at work, but it is at the receiving end of the words. Any apparent meaning to the alleged words  is coming from the minds of those making the connection. In this way it is similar to a cold reading. The person making all the connections in a cold reading is not the reader but the subject. They are finding meaning in the questions and fragments (I see a letter “J”) that the cold reader is throwing out.

This general phenomenon is very common – seeing patterns in randomness and then being overly impressed at the connections. The naive premise for the believer is that if there were not a real external phenomenon going on (in this case, ghosts) then the apparent connections would not be there. This premise, however, is false. Humans are good at finding connections anywhere, and in that way we often deceive ourselves into thinking there is something there when there isn’t.

Conclusion

The “ghost box” phenomenon is no different than the ghost hunting tools that have gone before it – it is a method for generating positive apparently anomalous findings that can then be assumed to be a ghost phenomenon by eager ghost hunters. At no point, however, is any actual scientific research going on. The obvious control experiments are never done – we can, for example, compare the noise generated by a radio scanner in allegedly haunted locations vs control locations. We can also have blinded evaluators listen the audio and see what they hear. We can then perform inter-rater reliability testing by having different people listen to the same audio and see if they hear the same thing.

If you read the comments to the ghost box video I linked to above you will see the occasional skeptic pointing all this out. You will see more true believers declaring this stunning “proof” of the paranormal. Right there is the disconnect between the various believer groups and skeptics. Ghost hunters simply do not understand scientific methodology, they do not understand the nature of scientific evidence nor the pitfalls of generating false positive results. This is, perhaps, an example of the failure of education to teach the fundamental of science. It is also an opportunity to do some remedial education. Understanding why these ghost hunters are not doing science is a great way to teach what science is, and is not.

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When you hear creationists argue their cause, sooner or later they reach into their standard litany of debunked arguments. One of their favorites (since it sounds convincing to their largely math-illiterate followers) is to point to the complexity of a molecular system or the cell or any other part of nature and “how could such a complicated system arise BY CHANCE?” The bigger implication is that they cannot fathom humans and their religious worldview being produced by anything other than a supernatural creator, so chance (as they misunderstand the concept) cannot produce it. The same argument underlies much of what the “intelligent design” creationists claim as well.

There are many versions of this argument, all of which are equally fallacious. When I debated Duane Gish at Purdue University in 1983, he was using his favorite line of his whole spiel, stolen from the maverick astronomer Fred Hoyle (legendary for being wrong on nearly every thing he argued, including Big Bang cosmology and his attacks on Archaeopteryx and evolution). In Gish’s version, he argues that the probability of random evolution assembling the complex system of life was as likely as a tornado in a junkyard assembling a Boeing 707 (which shows how ancient this punchline was).

As in the case of all creationist arguments, this one is completely fallacious on several different levels:

1. Evolution is not “random chance” like a lottery or throwing the dice. The variation on which natural selection works (mutations, recombination, etc.)  is randomly produced, but natural selection is not random. Natural selection is a process that weeds out unfavorable variations, and greatly improves the likelihood of events.  Anti-evolutionists for years  have used various versions of this fallacious analogy: “what is the probability that a monkey (or chimpanzee) with a typewriter randomly pounding on the keys could produce the works of Shakespeare?” A better analogy is a monkey with a word processor, whose program (like your spell checker) automatically deletes or fixes mistakes, so that even by typing random keys, the monkey will eventually assemble a recognizable string of words. Richard Dawkins (in The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, and Climbing Mount Improbable, 1996) has provided many interesting examples and computer models that show just how easily this can be done. This is the fundamental misunderstanding: evolution is not just “random chance” but a strong non-random force capable of changing genomes and acting upon material provided by chance.

2. Many of the standard examples that creationists trot out seem staggeringly difficult to produce as they present it, but in fact there are numerous small intermediate steps that show it’s not so hard as they imagine. As I discuss in Chapter 6 of my evolution book, since the days of the Miller-Urey experiment in 1953, most of the chemical steps needed to assemble the simplest forms of life (RNA in a lipid bilayer membrane) have all been produced by biochemists in the laboratory using relatively simple chemical reactions. To produce long-chain biochemicals, there are a number of “templates” (clays, zeolites, pyrite, etc.) that assemble simple organic chemicals into long-chain polymers by lining them up all close together, and then their chemical linkages form. (I use the analogy of a mosh pit—everyone packed shoulder to shoulder tightly in the same direction, then their earrings and piercings get  hooked together). As Lynn Margulis and others have shown, the eukaryotic cell can be most easily produced by endosymbiosis, where symbiotic prokaryotes like cyanobacteria and purple non-sulfur bacteria have changed to organelles like chloroplasts and mitochondria. With all these intermediate steps that have been discovered in the past 60 years, the origin of life from simple chemicals is no longer as improbable as the creationists like to claim.

3. As anyone who really understands probability knows, you can’t make a probability argument after the fact. If you do so, then any complex sequence of events is extremely improbable, even though they actually occur. A good analogy is the one I used in the Gish debate. I asked the audience of several hundred to estimate the probability after the fact that all of the events that had happened in their lives would actually happen, and the probability that among all those unlikely events, they would all end up in this room at this particular moment. Naturally, the improbability of this event is enormous. I pointed out to the audience that by Gish’s probability arguments, they could not exist! For someone to make a probability argument of this sort, it has to be made ahead of time, because life is full of events that (looked at after the fact) are extremely improbable—yet happened nonetheless.

So the next time you get into an argument with a creationist, don’t let them baffle you with garbage about “random evolution” or “the probabilities say it is impossible”.

These numbers, and others, were collected and crunched by Tom W. Smith of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, in a paper entitled “Beliefs About God Across Time and Countries,” produced for the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and released on April 18, 2012. Smith writes: “Countries with high atheism (and low strong belief) tend to be ex-Socialist states and countries in northwest Europe. Countries with low atheism and high strong belief tend to be Catholic societies, especially in the developing world, plus the United States, Israel, and Orthodox Cyprus.”

Many religious scholars invoke the “secularization thesis” to explain lower religiosity in Northern European countries (compared to the United States) in which mass education, especially in the sciences, coupled to the fact that governments do what religions traditionally did in the past in taking care of the poor and needy. With a tight social safety net religions simply fall into disuse; with a porous social safety net people fall through the cracks and are picked up by religions. Other scholars have suggested a “supply side” explanation for the difference between the U.S. and Europe, in which churches and religions in America must compete for limited resources and customers and thus have ratcheted up the quality of religious products and services: mega churches with rock music, baby sitting, BBQs, and even free parking! Smith seems to find evidence of both forces at work, noting that “In the case of Poland, it appears that its strong Catholicism trumps the secularizing influence of Socialism,” whereas elsewhere in the world “there is also evidence that religious competition and/or religious conflict may stimulate higher belief.”

Religion is a complex phenomenon and thus explanations are likely to be complex. (I find that in the social sciences Occam’s razor is rarely true—the simpler explanation is not only usually wrong, it can be terribly misleading.) Smith notes, for example, that “Belief is high in Israel which of course has a sharp conflict between Judaism and Islam, in Cyprus which is divided along religious and ethnic lines into Greek/Orthodox and Turkish/Muslim entities, and in Northern Ireland which is split between Protestant and Catholic communities and shows much higher belief levels than the rest of the United Kingdom.” In the United States there is relatively little overt religious conflict, but intense religious competition across both major religions and denominations within Christianity.”

The outlier appears to be Japan: “The one country that shows a low association between the level of atheism and strong belief is Japan. Japan ranked lowest on strong belief, but also in the lower half on atheism (a difference of 18 positions across the two rankings when the average difference in positions was only 2.7 places). Japan is distinctive among countries in having the largest number of people (32%) in the middle categories of believing sometimes and the agnostic, not knowing response. This pattern is consistent with a general Japanese response pattern of avoiding strong, extreme response options.”

Changes in God beliefs were modest from 1991 through 2008, with the percent saying they were atheists increasing in 15 of 18 countries at an average rise of 1.7%. Between 1998 and 2008 the atheist gain was bigger, with an average increase of 2.3 points in 23 of 30 countries. Predictably, again, the corresponding belief in God decreased by roughly the same amount that atheism grew. The exceptions were Israel, Russia and Slovenia where from 1991 to 2008 there was a consistent movement towards greater belief and less atheists. Israel’s religious shift was a result of an increase in orthodox Jewish and right-wing population, “and the relative decline of the more secular and leftist segment in Israeli society.”

Most interestingly, Smith computed the overall gains and loses of religious beliefs comparing those who say “I believe in God now, but I didn’t used to.” With those say “I don’t believe in God now, but I used to.” “In 2008 there was a net gain in belief across the life course in 12 countries and a decline in 17 countries. The gains averaged 4.1 points and the losses -7.0 points for an overall change of -2.4 points.” The shifts also varied by age, with older people gaining in belief while younger people decreasing in belief. Smith concludes his study with this projection for the future of atheism:

“If the modest, general trend away from belief in God continues uninterrupted, it will accumulate to larger proportions and the atheism that is now prominent mainly in northwest Europe and some ex-Socialist states may spread more widely.”

In case you’re wondering, the percentage of Americans who say “I don’t believe in God” was 3% at 4th lowest in the world, and who said “I know God really exists and I have no doubt about it” at 60.6%, the 5th highest in the world. Americans who agreed “I don’t believe in God and I never have” was 4.4 at 6th lowest in the world, who agreed “I believe in God now and I always have at 80.8% at 3rd highest in the world. In terms of the changes in atheism and belief in God over time, from 1991 to 2008 the U.S. showed an increase of 0.7% atheists and -0.2 from 1998–2008; in 2008, taking those who said “I believe in God now, but I didn’t used to” minus “I don’t believe in God now, but I used to” nets +1.4 in the United States.

The paper is chockablock full of data figures. Here’s the press release for more information.

While it may be difficult to tease out the contribution of genetic hard-wiring to things like belief in fairies, I think it remains an open question and it is not implausible that there is a significant contribution in some cases. Perhaps to some extent the conflict between skeptics and true believers is really a competition between different  versions of human brain wiring. Perhaps we will need to just accept this neurodiversity (its existence, if not its effect on our culture).

While this is a fascinating question, at the same time I feel there is a tendency in popular culture, especially among journalists and (ironically) some purveyors of dubious products and services, to reframe many phenomena with specific reference to the brain. Old fashioned learning is now “training your brain,” for example. While this is technically true, it makes it seem like a new, targeted, reductionist technology when in fact it’s just practice and learning.

A recent study explored one small aspect of the question of brain function and spirituality – researchers asked themselves if those healers and gurus who claim to be able to see a human aura are really synaesthetes, people with a hyperrobust connection among different brain regions that make them smell color, taste sound, feel numbers, or otherwise experience one sensation or experience with an overlay of another sensation. There is a form of synaethesia in which people experience the faces of those familiar to them as having a specific color.

This is a reasonable and interesting hypothesis. I generally try to avoid speculating about people’s motivations, but it I do often wonder what is going on in the minds of someone who claims to see something (like an aura) that is simply not there. I tend to chalk it up to the power of suggestion and self-deception, but perhaps in some cases the person really is seeing something. If true, the face-color synaesthesias hypothesis would bring aura reading in line with many other similar phenomena in which people are sincere, they are just misinterpreting a brain phenomenon as if it were an external phenomenon.

My favorite example of this is hypnagogia, or waking dreams. People have a real experience in which upon awakening they are paralyzed and feel a threatening presence. It is a real and scary experience, and is often interpreted as a demonic visit, alien abduction, or whatever is culturally appropriate. However it is really a well known neurological phenomenon, a parasomnia or abnormal sleep phenomenon. In other words – it is an internal brain experience, but can seem like a real external experience to the person having it.

It would be nice to have a similar explanation of something like seeing auras. It’s a tidy little explanation, and it is a bit easier to explain to people that they are experiencing a real brain phenomenon rather than that they are likely just self-deluded.

Unfortunately, the hypothesis seems to be wrong. The researchers analyzed the subjective reports of four people with face-color synaesthesia. They then compared this to reports and descriptions of people seeing alleged auras. They concluded:

“The discrepancies found suggest that both phenomena are phenomenologically and behaviourally dissimilar.”

That means they are probably not the same thing. Of course this is a small study, and is therefore not the final word on this notion. However, there is no evidence for the synaesthesia-aura hypothesis. It is simply a new hypothesis without any evidence. The authors did a preliminary test of this hypothesis and found it to be lacking, so it is probably not worth pursuing further. Other researchers may decide to revisit the question, now that it has been raised, but until then all we have is a hypothesis that failed to get out of the gate.

Amazingly, the media has universally (as far as I have seen so far) misreported this item and have come to the opposite conclusion. Science Daily writes:”Synesthesia May Explain Healers Claims of Seeing People’s ‘Aura’”. Other outlets remove the “may”, and some even substitute the word “prove.”

This is an example of terrible science news reporting, and a major weakness of the current internet-based news infrastructure. It seems that the many news outlets reporting this story are mostly just reprinting one original source – a news report from the University of Granada. Somehow they got the story exactly wrong (erring on the side of sensationalism), and this error has been propagated throughout countless science news outlets and paranormal websites throughout the web. No one, apparently, clicked through to the original article. The article is behind a paywall, but the freely available abstract plainly states the phenomena are not the same.

Now a hypothesis that may be interesting but is without a shred of evidence, and in fact the one test of the hypothesis is negative, is being reported as if it were proven, and this meme-genie is out of the bottle.

Interestingly, this is also not the first time this hypothesis has been raised. In an article in the Skeptical Inquirer in 2011, Bridgette M. Perez and Terence Hines write about auras and bring up the synaesthesia hypothesis. They refer to prior case reports of color synaesthesia, such as the case of GW reported on in 2004. In this case GW sees color associated with people he has an emotional connection to, and even words or concepts that are emotional, such as love. This is one of those features that do not, however, fit well with seeing aura, which are not limited to people with a personal or emotional connection. While GW does not believe in mysticism, Perez and Hines report:

“It is especially interesting that in two separate samples, Zingrone, Alvarado, and Agee (2009) found that individuals who reported seeing auras were significantly more likely to report synesthetic events.”

Interesting, but circumstantial. Given the weight of the evidence it seems that the connection between auras and synaesthesia is speculative and based on superficial similarities that are likely coincidental. The new study, if anything, is a deeper look at the question, finding the hypothesis lacking.

You will learn none of this, unfortunately, reading the lay press, but instead will be led toward the exact opposite (but more headline worthy) conclusion.

Throughout Death Valley are remote cabins left over from the mining days. Many of them have been partially restored to various levels of livability, and are meticulously maintained by volunteers who frequent them. They’re often stocked with spare tools and supplies, and at least one I’ve visited even has running water piped in from a spring. Nearly all of them have shelves of knick knacks — bits and pieces of mining history collected from the surroundings — and always a lot of books.

We were at one such cabin in the Tucki Mine area. Visitors are always welcome in these cabins, and we signed the guest book. I flipped through some of the books on one shelf and found a small one I hadn’t seen before, a little storybook full of ghostly tales and legends of Death Valley. Here is the story I read:

In the late 1800s, borax mining was the principal business in Death Valley. Many Chinese laborers were employed in the borax mills. Lumps of borax called “cottonball” were scraped from the valley floor, crushed, and boiled in open vats made from adobe. This purified and crystallized the valuable chemical so it could be transported and marketed.

In 1885, a 7 foot, 7 inch tall Chinaman named Tong Yu was working at the Harmony Borax Works when he accidentally fell–or was pushed–into one of the large open vats of boiling borax. Workers fought to pull him out. Tong’s entire body was horribly burned, and his flesh was deeply saturated with the caustic borax.

He was brought into the living quarters, and a doctor was sent for. By the time the doctor arrived the next morning, Tong Yu was nowhere to be found. During the night he must have wandered away alone, perhaps in an agonized madness.

Today, visitors to the park often report a tall, thin, distant figure on the salt pan under the moonlight. Sometimes the wind plays tricks on the ears, sounding almost like a mournful cry. In 1974 a party of park rangers chased the figure on foot but could not get close. The Borax Man seemed to melt right back into the plain he came from.

The Borax Man was new to me, and I thought I’d heard them all. I took a pair of camera phone pictures of the pages. Unfortunately, fool that I am, I did not take a picture of the cover or title. I searched Google Books and the rest of the web to no avail. If anyone recognizes this story or knows the name or author of the book, please post it in the comments. I would love to get a copy. My favorite part is the awesome little illustration of what appears to be an alien from Close Encounters; I guess he’s pretty lost.

Apparently I am obligated to do the “skeptical” thing and give my thoughts on the likelihood of the story. I have been to some of the borax works and have seen the ruins of these vats. Those mentioned in the book, the Harmony Borax Works, are by far the best preserved and are today a major attraction at the park. I know that the refining process described is more or less accurate, but I had not heard before that the mixture necessarily had to be boiled. Sometimes these works had to be shut down during the summer months, since in order for the crystals to form, the solution had to cool to a certain point. In the summer it stayed too hot throughout the night, and no useful crystals could be produced.

I imagine it’s likely that guys did fall into these vats from time to time, but without knowing the water temperature it’s hard to assess whether they’d have been burned or not. Certainly with a full-body burn the way Tong Yu suffered, dehydration would be a major problem and I don’t guess he would have lived very long if he did wander away. He probably ended up like this unidentified gentleman pictured here.

Chinese workers did indeed work at these mills. The work was hot and horrible, the smell was awful, and the pay was poor. Chinese were unable to get better jobs because of racial discrimination, so employers were always happy to snatch them up for the worst work that nobody else would do. I’ve not found any sort of records for Chinese laborers — I don’t know how many tens or hundreds of thousands of them worked throughout California in the 19th century — so I will not presume to suggest whether Tong Yu was an actual guy or not.

I’d say most of the story is perfectly plausible. I did spend a few fruitless minutes trying to track down the one modern detail given, the 1974 chase given by rangers. No results. Next time I’m at the park, I’ll ask some of the rangers if they’d heard the story. If I learn anything interesting, I’ll post it here.

The most obvious difference is MONEY: the exhibit area for AAPG is HUGE, and filled with gigantic expensive booths from many of the major companies like Schlumberger and Halliburton. These booths have mini-lecture theaters with multiple big-screen displays where they give free seminars on their methods, thick plush carpets, potted plants, free food and drink, and fancy furniture—all for less than 3 days that the exhibits are open! Professional registration for this meeting is expensive (since most oil geologists make MUCH more than academic geologists, and the oil companies pay their employees to attend), and the dress code is also suits and ties for men (it’s much more casual at academic conferences). You can just smell the money at the meeting, and see lots of geologists hungry to learn techniques so they can jump to a more profitable position in their company, or go off and get rich as an independent (all of whom have smaller booths there as well).

The second difference is the emphasis of the meeting. At GSA, nearly 6000 attendees give more than 4000 talks or posters, 20 talks every 15 minutes for four straight days plus hundreds of posters. By contrast, for the same attendance there were only 5-6 20-minute talks at any given time at AAPG in less than 3 days, and the majority of the attendees didn’t present anything. Their job is to do whatever their company pays them to do, not churn out new research results to present at a meeting every year, like academic geologists must. Most AAPG talks tend to be very narrow and describe details of one particular oil field, not independent research into general principles of geology that academics are trying to decipher. Finally, the demographic differences are striking. Academic geologists are nearly 50% women now, and they are distributed across all age classes. Oil geologists, by contrast, are nearly all old white guys in their 60s or older, with a lot of young men (and a few women) just recently hired in the business. The entire generation that would now be in their 40s and 50s is missing because of the attrition during the oil busts of the late 80s-90s.

But the biggest take-home message is something oil geologists have known for years: oil is never going to be as cheap or easy to obtain again, and the global price of oil will get higher and higher as it becomes more and more scarce, especially with the huge increase in demand from developing countries like China and India. I heard this message  over and over again, from the gossip on the exhibit hall floor with friends, to the plenary addresses by the top people in the oil business. Coincidentally, it was the cover story of the April 9. 2012, issue of Timemagazine as well. This fact  has been known for some time, and was first predicted by the pioneering oil geologist M. King Hubbert in 1953. Using his knowledge of the history of non-renewable resources (which show a “bell curve” history of production, from their initial log growth phase to an equally rapid decline as the easily obtained resources vanish), plus his deep understanding of the amount and nature of oil reserves. he predicted that U.S. oil production would reach a peak in the early 1970s—and his prediction came true in 1971. Since then, U.S. oil production has steadily declined as fewer and fewer large fields were found, and older fields have been used up.

U.S. oil production peaked in 1971 (as predicted by Hubbert in 1953), despite increased efforts to find more domestic oil, and has declined ever since. The slight upturn at the end is due to production from expensive, dangerous "unconventional" sources: offshore drilling, fracking, tar sands—but it will never return the U.S. to levels of production like before 1971.

What about global production of oil? A few quotes from the top people in the oil business says what all the AAPG geologists I met this week have long known:

We’ve embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil. Embrace the future and recognize the growing demand for a wide range of fuels or ignore reality and slowly—but surely—be left behind.” 

—Mike Bowlin, chairman and CEO of ARCO, speech in Houston, 9 Feb 1999

Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century, and one thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over

—Chevron, http://www.willyoujoinus.com/vision/

While major new finds cannot be ruled out, recent statistics do provide worrisome signals… Discoveries only replaced some 45% of production since 1999. In addition, the number of discoveries is increasing but discoveries are getting smeller in size. The 25 biggest fields hold some 33% of discovered reserves and the top 100 fields 53%; al but two of the giant fields were discovered before 1970.”  

—USGS WPA 2000 part 1 – A look at expected oil discoveries

All the easy oil and gas in the world has pretty much been found. Now comes the harder work in finding and producing oil from more challenging environments and work areas.

—William J. Cummings, Exxon-Mobil company spokesman, December 2005

It is pretty clear that there is not much chance of finding any significant quantity of new cheap oil. Any new or unconventional oil is going to be expensive.

—Lord Ron Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell, October 2008

As these quotes show, nearly all the geologists (including most oil company geologists) who deal with the realities of oil supply as part of their daily experience, are fully aware that oil is becoming scarcer, and that there are fewer and fewer new oil fields found, and we  are nowhere close to keeping up with demand on a worldwide basis. The figure below shows a very sobering “reality check”: a plot of the discovery dates of US oil fields. Notice that there was a “bell curve” with a peak in the 1930s.

Despite all the increase efforts of oil geologists, almost all the large fields in the U.S. were discovered before the 1930s, and there have been no similar large fields found in the decades since then, even as the price of oil climbs.

Despite the fact that U.S. oil companies have spent billions and developed huge technological advances since the 1930s and 1940s to find oil by better means, the rate of discovery has continued to drop. Even with all these advantages, large oil fields no longer can be found in the lower 48 states. Only the Bakken fields of North Dakota-Montana represent a large new discovery, but they are smaller than the giant Texas oil fields found in the 1930s, and they are the exception that proves the rule. Those in Alaska are near exhaustion, since they peaked in 1988 and are nearly dry now. All these slogans about “Drill, baby, drill” solving our problems are just fantasies. The U.S. oil companies have indeed been drilling as fast as they could everywhere in the U.S., and as the figure shows, getting very little no matter where they look. As the Time magazine article pointed out, now they’re spending most of their time and money on increasingly risky and expensive operations like fracking, pumping water in old fields to push out the last drops of oil, or mining oil sands with all their environmental costs. The biggest push is in offshore oil platforms—and the 2010 Gulf oil disaster (along with previous oil disasters on platforms around the world) shows just how risky it is to drill so far offshore.

One of the favorite arguments is to drill more in Alaska, especially in the ecologically sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) on the North Slope. The entire issue became a political hot button in the 2008 presidential election, as environmentalists pointed out how much habitat would be destroyed in the short-term search for oil. But the answer is clear, no matter what your politics: such exploration and possible production would be just a drop in the bucket. In 1998, a non-partisan federal agency, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that there were at best only 16 billion barrels of oil in the ANWR and most of these reserves are prospective resources, not proven resources. Sixteen billion barrels sounds like a lot until you realize that it’s less than 1% of the total world oil consumption each year. The U.S. alone consumes over 20 million barrels of oil per day, so even if every drop of oil were actually extracted from the ANWR, it would at best provide two to three years’ worth of oil for the U.S.—and then it would be exhausted, and what would remain would be an ecological disaster.

So what about the world discovery rate? That answer has been known for a long time. World discovery rate peaked in 1965, and has been steeply declining ever since, even though more and more exploration is conducted in the farthest reaches of the globe in the past 47 years. The “peak oil” effect has probably already occurred, and we are likely on the slow downward decline in discoveries of cheap, easy-to-pump oil. Knowing that there are likely no more huge fields in our future, the next step is to calculate how much oil is left. Estimates of the ultimate recovery have fluctuated all over the place in the past few decades, but in recent years most of the estimates place the total volume of ultimately recoverable oil in the range of 1.8 to 2.6 trillion barrels, with most estimates around 2.0 trillion barrels. This was the number that Hubbert himself used when trying to determine the amount of oil left and when the peak would occur (he estimated a window between 1995-2000). Depending upon how the model is run, most scientists predicted that the peak of world oil production would occur around 2005-2010, with most estimates around 2006 to 2007. Although it’s still to early too tell if the peak has fully passed until we view it from a further distance, so far that prediction has proven accurate.  According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the peak of global oil production was in 2006, and declined by 6.7% in 2007. As this figure shows, the peak may have occurred between 2006 and  2009, and production has hit a plateau, despite increased pumping while the oil price climbs.

World oil production seems to have slowed down or even declined in the past decade, despite huge increases in demand and rapidly rising prices due to growth in Indian and China. If we have not hit the Hubbert peak for world oil yet, we are very close to it

In December 2009, however, the reports of a few large fields seem to have suggested that the peak might have occurred before 2010. In the same interview, the head of the Brazilian oil conglomerate Petrobras pointed out that the decline in supply was so severe that we would need one new discovery the size of the entire Saudi Arabian oil reserve every two years to keep up with increasing demand!

Meanwhile, demand continues to climb, driving up prices. The booming economies of China and India, along with some other developing nations, are greatly exceeding any increased production due to new discoveries. The numbers are truly staggering. From only 50,000 barrels/day in 1980, world consumption is now almost 100,000 barrels/day. As oil executive Peter Tertzakian pointed out in his book title, we’re nearing the once-unimaginable consumption rate of a thousand barrels a second!Even as the U.S. finds more oil in unconventional places, we cannot keep our domestic prices down because demand outside the U.S. is driving the world price upwards. All it takes is a few oil speculators and/or some political event in the Middle East, as happened this spring, and oil prices jump upward. But when they retreat again, they never return to “the gold ol’ days” but keep ratcheting upward to a new base level—this despite a global recession for the past 5 years.

Despite the best efforts of oil geologists to increase production, demand from India and China have boosted world oil prices so they exceed the oil price spikes of the past—and unlike those short-term shocks due to politics, there is no reason to expect that the current rise will slow down. Not even 5 years of global recession has stopped the rise.

Many oil companies see the handwriting on the wall. They are already spending some of their immense wealth in research and development of alternative energy sources, so their business doesn’t die out when the oil becomes too scarce. In 2000, British Petroleum (BP) decided to market themselves as the environmentally friendly oil company. They changed their logo to a green and yellow shape resembling a flower or starburst, and launched a high-profile $200 million ad campaign touting their alternative energy efforts, with the tagline that “BP” stood for “Beyond Petroleum.” That’s quite remarkable to hear an oil company announce its own transition to non-oil energy sources (even if it was mostly PR hype, since in actuality BP spent only a tiny portion of its research and development budget from its huge profits on non-oil research). Of course, with the BP Gulf oil disaster of summer 2010, the company has other bad publicity to deal with now. As soon as BP dropped its “Beyond Petroleum” campaign, Shell stepped up with their “Let’s Go” ad campaign, touting their research and investment in alternative energy sources, with the slogan, “Let’s make the most of what we’ve got.”

To summarize: the era of cheap, easily obtained, abundant oil is over, and oil will soon become scarce despite more and more costly efforts to squeeze out every last drop from more and more “unconventional” sources.  The fact that Hubbert’s model exactly predicted the U.S. oil peak, and seems to be predicting the global peak, should be strong enough evidence in and of itself. There is also the fact that the peak of discovery of major oil fields occurred 47 years ago, and there have been no giant oil fields found in a long time, and most of the world’s older oil fields are nearing their ends. There are no polls that show just how many qualified experts (geologists and geological engineers within and close to the oil industry) accept the concept of peak oil and the end of cheap abundant oil, but a lot of oil experts are on the record as supporting it, including a number of oil geologists and executives. My many friends in the oil business almost all tell me that “peak oil” is widely accepted among their colleagues, and they have long been forced to work with extraordinarily difficult exploration problems because there are no easy oil fields any more.

There are some who say, “If cheap oil ends, we will just go to alternatives”. They say “We’re finding lots of natural gas,” which is  true—so far as it goes. This sounds fine in theory, but when you look hard at the evidence, it doesn’t hold water (or oil). First of all, even if we stopped using oil for our cars tomorrow, there would still be huge demands in other areas. Most of our nation’s power plants are oil or gas burning, and they account for a huge percentage of our consumption. Natural gas is indeed more abundant, but it only solves part of the problem—it takes much more of it to get the same amount of energy, and it still produces greenhouse gases—nor is it practical for transportation fuel yet. If we got rid of oil- and gas-powered electricity, we’d have to go to nuclear power (which is still controversial here thanks to the Three Mile Island disaster, or the recent disaster in Japan), or coal. We do have abundant supplies of coal in the U.S., but as many people have shown, coal is one of the dirtiest and nastiest of energy alternatives.  Most coal must be extracted either by dangerous shaft mining (which is expensive and produces relatively low quantities of coal) or by strip mining, which literally rips a landscape apart. In addition, most coal is high in sulfur, so it has long been the major source of acid rain. Finally, coal produces far more greenhouse gases than does oil or natural gas, so coal does not solve our carbon footprint problems. And no one is even thinking of using coal to run cars any more (let alone going back to the coal-fired steam locomotives of the past).

People also forget (or do not realize) that we use oil in many other ways besides energy. Nearly every synthetic substance you use, from the huge array of plastics in every product we own, to all the fabrics (nylon, rayon, Dacron, polyester, and many others) are produced from cheap oil. Just look around you and you will probably see dozens of plastics and synthetic fabrics in your clothes, and nearly every object in a typical room has plastic in it. When oil becomes too expensive for these things, what will we do? We will no longer be able to import thousands of cheap plastic toys for our kids’ Happy Meals, or wear synthetic fabrics (even when we need our polyester or spandex), or use products made largely of plastic (like the computer parts I’m using right now), or throw away plastic water bottles by the millions. When cheap oil becomes expensive, plastics will have to be recycled and rationed, and become much too precious for most ways we use and waste it today. And you can’t make plastics cheaply from anything but oil—not coal or anything else.

Anyone who lives in the farm belt knows that there’s another huge consumer of oil: agriculture. When I lived in the farming country of central Illinois for three years, it was striking that all the advertisers for the dinnertime  news broadcasts (aimed at farmers when they were having dinner and watching the upcoming weather reports) were producers of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. All of these products are derived from oil. Nearly every strain of corn we use today is genetically modified by Monsanto to be immune to their powerful herbicide called Roundup, which kills all plants except this modified strain of corn. Thus, Monsanto can sell both the corn and the poison, ensuring a large crop each year. (To top that off, Monsanto genetically engineered the corn to be infertile, so the farmers are obligated to buy new seed from them each year as well). An acre of corn consumes 80 gallons of oil in the form of pesticides, fertilizers, and fuel for the tractors. We’ve replaced the human and animal labor of a century ago with machinery that requires lots of cheap oil. Our entire modern agricultural system of monoculture crops which have no resistance to pests, and which deplete the soil rapidly, can only be sustained by throwing oil at it in the form of herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers. Without it, our food supply would collapse, and the world would be looking at a global famine. The end of cheap oil will force everyone to re-examine agricultural practices, since you can’t make most pesticides or fertilizers out of coal.

Many of the “energy alternatives” once touted in political campaigns turn out to be illusions. Take the example of biofuels. They have been hyped way beyond their actual worth because they are popular in the farm belt, where politicians must curry favor (especially in Iowa, which has way too much influence because it holds the first presidential caucus). When there was a surplus of corn in the early 2000s, everyone was talking about turning it into ethanol and using it for fuel. But the end result was a classic example of unintended consequences. The increased consumption of corn for biofuels helped contribute to a worldwide food shortage, so that now most corn goes for fuel ethanol or animal feed, and very little goes directly for human consumption. Meanwhile, other countries saw the opportunities, and began to cut down pristine rainforests (with their valuable effect of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and of maintaining the highest diversity of land life) and replaced it with biofuel crops like sawgrass. As reported in Time magazine, 750,000 acres of Brazilian rainforests (equivalent to the size of Rhode Island) were cut down in just 6 months in 2007, all to raise biofuel crops. When you do the calculations, one person could be fed for an entire year on the corn required to produce one tank of gas from biofuels. One editorial cartoon lampooned this brilliantly. It shows a rich fat American in the nice suit pulling the ear of corn away from the starving African child and says, “Excuse me. I’m going to need this to run my car.”

Yet there are also signs of hope. Each time oil prices rise abruptly, or cross some psychological barrier (like $4 a gallon), people do conserve, cut down on unnecessary driving, get rid of their gas guzzlers and invest in higher-mileage cars. We may not be able to get Americans to act by preaching at them or by trying to get our political system to work in our best interests, but economic pressures do seem to work. And there are models for an even better alternative to the roller coaster of oil prices. Nearly all the European and Asian countries that import all their oil have already adopted measures that greatly reduce consumption. Through taxation, most of these countries price their gas at a realistic rate that reflects its true, externalized cost in infrastructure and environmental damage (usually $5 or more  a gallon), so people are strongly inclined to conserve gas and drive small cars only when their excellent systems of public transport are not sufficient. Those taxes on gas then go into the energy and transportation infrastructure, so the citizens get better mass transit, better roads, and they are invested heavily in energy alternatives, like nuclear, wind, and solar power.

Paul Roberts, in his excellent book The End of Oil, pointed out a model for other countries: Germany. Before 1990, German politics were controlled by big industry (especially coal companies) and coal miners’ unions. But the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Ukraine galvanized the environmental awareness of the entire world, and by the 1990s, wind farms and other energy alternatives were rapidly emerging in Germany, spurred on by a law passed in 1990 to invest in carbon-free energy production. In addition, the Green Party became a significant force (not just a token party, as it is in U.S. politics). In 1999, the Greens won enough seats that they formed a coalition government with Gerhard Schroeder’s moderate Social Democrats. Soon laws were passed, policies changed, and subsidies granted, and Germany was meeting a higher and higher percentage of its energy needs through wind and solar power, along with biomass facilities which burn crop waste to make energy. Now Germany leads European countries in its energy conservation efforts, reduced carbon footprint, and in the research and development of alternative energy sources. The German policies are closely emulated by the Scandinavian countries, France, and many other European countries. This was all achieved while Germany continued to thrive economically, and today they are less dependent on foreign oil than ever, and have an economy stronger than that of most other  countries. Americans who despair of our getting out of our current addiction to foreign oil need only look to Germany, Scandinavia, France, Japan, and other countries to see that if there’s enough economic pressure and political will, there’s a way.

As with any complex area of scientific research, perhaps the best way to evaluate the question is to put together a panel of experts to review all the existing evidence and then come up with a consensus opinion about that evidence. This is no guarantee of being right – the primary issue that tends to come up with such expert panels is that they were systematically biased toward one side of the debate. But assuming no major asymmetry in the constitution of an expert panel, they are an excellent way to evaluate the current state of the evidence on a specific question. Even better, of course, is when multiple independent panels all agree.

Recently an expert panel for the UK’s Health Protection Agency (HPA) reviewed the evidence for cell phone safety concluded that there is no clear evidence for any harm. This is good news. Their findings are similar to other reviews of the evidence, although often there is a difference in emphasis. For example, last year the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) reviewed the same evidence and concluded that:

 ”the evidence, while still accumulating, is strong enough to support a conclusion and the 2B classification. The conclusion means that there could be some risk, and therefore we need to keep a close watch for a link between cell phones and cancer risk.”

They are not really saying anything different from the HPA – both groups concluded that there is no clear evidence of risk, but that further monitoring is prudent. The HPA, however, chose to emphasize that there is no conclusive evidence of risk, while the IARC chose to emphasize that there is no conclusive evidence that there is no risk. There  classification means that there may or may not be a risk, but further research is warranted. Meanwhile the FDA has concluded that: “the weight of scientific evidence has not linked cell phones with any health problems.” The Federal Communications Commission has this to say:

“There is no scientific evidence that proves that wireless phone usage can lead to cancer or a variety of other problems, including headaches, dizziness or memory loss. However, organizations in the United States and overseas are sponsoring research and investigating claims of possible health effects related to the use of wireless telephones.”

These all sound like variations of the same conclusion – there is no clear evidence of harm or risk, but we should continue to do research and monitor the results. Overall there is more caution when children are concerned, because there are fewer studies, children’s heads are smaller, and if cell phone use is started at a young age then lifetime use will be greater. Still there is no evidence of harm, but there are a priori reasons for greater caution.

Getting back to the new review by the HPA, here are their key conclusions:

• The evidence suggests that RF field exposure below guideline levels does not cause symptoms in humans and that the presence of RF fields cannot be detected by people, including those who report being sensitive to RF fields.
• A large number of studies have now been published on cancer risks in relation to mobile phone use. Overall, the results of studies have not demonstrated that the use of mobile phones causes brain tumours or any other type of cancer.
• As mobile phone technology has only been in widespread public use relatively recently, there is little information on risks beyond 15 years from first exposure. It is therefore important to continue to monitor the evidence, including that from national brain tumour trends. These have so far given no indication of any risk.
• Studies of other RF field exposures, such as those at work and from RF transmitters, have been more limited but have not given evidence that cancer is caused by these exposures.
• Research on other potential long-term effects of RF field exposures has been very limited, but the results provide no substantial evidence of adverse health effects; in particular for cardiovascular morbidity and reproductive function.

One of the problems both scientists and reporters face is how to make the research sound interesting to a lay public that knows almost nothing about science—and much of what the public thinks they know is wrong. Much of chemistry and physics is incomprehensible and uninteresting to people that never took a single class in high school on physics or chemistry, and even something more immediate like biology is full of subjects that are obscure to the lay audience. Geologists usually have it slightly better, since topics like earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, climate change, etc., are easier to relate to.

We paleontologists usually have it even easier, because a few of us work on something immensely popular—dinosaurs—although I’m really a Cenozoic fossil mammal specialist and only rarely has my research ventured back to the Mesozoic. Just add dinosaurs and the research goes to the front page of most science news websites or The New York Times, or gets published in high-profile journals like Nature, Science, or PNAS. But when I make an important discovery on a group such as rhinos or peccaries or camels, I’m lucky to get it published in a third-tier journal, and I typically get no reporters calling at all. The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs generated huge interest when the asteroid impact theory first emerged in 1980, with thousands of papers published and dozens of books on the topic. But it’s only the third or fourth largest extinction in earth history. The great Permian extinction 250 m.y. ago, which wiped out 95% of species on earth, is lucky to get ANY press attention. Who cares about productid brachiopods, or fusulinids, or tabulate or rugose corals, among the many victims of this event?

So I guess it’s not surprising when scientists who don’t work with dinosaurs try to find any connection,no matter how ridiculous, with them. Consider, for example, this recent article, which speculates about whether advanced dinosaurs could rule other planets. My first reaction is astonishment—how could there possibly be a legitimate scientist claiming that we have evidence of dinosaurs on other planets? We don’t even have the simplest forms of life on any other planet yet! The breathless reporting by Science Daily buys into the whole argument without any challenges.

But if you read it a little closer, the absurdity becomes apparent. It’s an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society discussing the fact that all asymmetric biochemicals on earth have the same chirality or “handedness”; only “left-handed” amino acids  exist on earth (except for a few odd bacteria). Only “right-handed” sugars exist on our planet. Yet meteorites show that both left- and right-handed amino acids are found around the solar system. Scientists have long speculated on why this might be, but the simplest answer is that the amino acids that were found in the earliest life (whether generated on earth or carried from space) happened to be left-handed, and once they establish this template, all subsequent life must follow it.

So far, so good. But the author of this research, Ronald Breslow, goes on to speculate that if other planets had life, they could just as easily have right-handed amino acids or left-handed sugars. Sheer speculation, since no life has been found yet, but possible nonetheless. But then the paper goes off the deep end:

An implication from this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could be life forms based on D-amino acids and L-sugars. Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them.

This guy may be a good at chemistry, but at biology and paleontology he is abysmally incompetent. At best, speculating about the existence of life with different handedness predicts only that the life forms on other planets might be simple things like bacteria. As Stephen Jay Gould and others have pointed out many times, life is full of chance, contingent, unpredictable events. There is absolutely no reason to expect that if we started the history of life on earth all over from the beginning, or “rerun the tape from the beginning”, we’d get anything like what actually happened over the past 3.5 billion years, much less such advanced and improbable creatures such as dinosaurs—or humans, for that matter. Life has so many unpredictable possibilities, and there too many chance events (like mass extinctions caused by changes in the environment) that gave us completely different outcomes to expect that we would repeat any of the events of the past beyond evolving bacteria and cyanobacteria—and even that is a  stretch. P.Z. Myers made the same point, and argued that the author should be embarrassed at this silly last paragraph thrown in to make the story sexier for reporters. Since the article was “just accepted” for the journal (which means it passed review of several other chemists—shame on them!), it was still possible for him to delete the nonsensical paragraph at the end, and P.Z. wishes that he would do so.

I’m not so optimistic. I think Breslow knows full well that putting anything about dinosaurs in an otherwise yawner of a paper (not even that original, since the chirality debate goes back decades) is a sure trick to get reporters’ attention. Shame on him for a cheesy gimmick like this—and once again, shame on the scientifically illiterate reporters who didn’t ask any paleontologists to see if this conclusion made any sense. Just like the two previous examples I blogged about and cited above, we have a scientist speaking out of his level of expertise and bringing up a ridiculous notion that would never survive full peer review—and a reporter looking for a flashy story and not bothering to track down other scientists with the relevant expertise to comment on it.