Southern Fried Science

Ocean of Pseudoscience Shorty – The Montauk Monster

Bluegrass Blue Crab — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 20:00:17 +0000

The headlines read: “Dead Monster Washes Ashore in Montauk”

So what exactly was this crazy dead thing? Some call it a marketing scheme and no one can deny that it brought attention to the town of Montauk.

Others say it might have been a prank by a local filmmaker to bring attention to his movie. There’s a pretty good understanding of how the story unfolded but no conclusion on how the story started and whether it’s a normal hoax or a hoax of a hoax.

In the end, the actual carcass appears to be a dead, waterlogged raccoon.

~Bluegrass Blue Crab

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

WhySharksMatter — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:00:59 +0000

Science can often be complicated, which makes a simple explanation extremely appealing. Sometimes, these simple explanations are correct. Sometimes they are spectacularly wrong.

One of the most complicated areas of science is evolutionary biology. Describing the origin of current species is a lot like putting together an enormous puzzle when most of the pieces are missing. A simple explanation for an evolutionary problem would be very, very appealing. Some people believe they have found one for human evolution, and they call it the “Aquatic Ape Hypothesis”.

One of Elaine Morgan's books on the subject- note the ostentatious subtitle. Image from riverape.com

Though the origin of this idea can be traced to 1942, it first became popularized by a 1960 speech given by British marine biologist Alistair Hardy. It has since been the subject of several books by Elaine Morgan, the hypothesis’ main promoter.

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis basically states that there are some holes in our current understanding of human evolution (specifically, some physical traits that humans have don’t make sense according to current theory), these traits are similar to those found in marine mammals, therefore humans had a recent aquatic ancestor (known as the “aquatic ape”). It’s certainly simple, but is it correct?

Some of these aquatic-linked human physical traits include:

Relative hairless-ness compared to other apes (while elephants, who had a recent aquatic ancestor, also have relatively little hair; whales also have relatively little hair)
The ability to hold our breath consciously (marine animals have this, most land animals don’t)
Webbing between our fingers
Nutritional requirements that require a seafood-heavy diet
There are many more- a thorough list can be found here

The proponents of fringe ideas always tend to have a persecution complex (i.e. all the other scientists are mean and don’t take me seriously). Fortunately for them, there are always people who believe that if “The Man” or “The Establishment” criticizes something, it must be true.If you listen to Elaine Morgan’s passionate defense of the hypothesis or if you read through the movement’s detailed (though awkwardly formatted) website, you might believe that this is what happened here.

Image from ArmChairGeneral.com

As it turns out, while rich on imagination and anecdotal evidence, there isn’t a lot to support the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. It relies almost entirely on “these animals have this kind of trait, too, therefore we must have a similar evolutionary history”. That is a pretty serious misuse of the concept of “convergent evolution”.

If we had a recent aquatic ancestor, you would expect there to be… what’s the word I’m looking for… oh yes, evidence. There isn’t any. No fossils, no unambiguous phylogenies, no legitimate scientific research, nothing. A few coincidental shared physical features does not constitute proof.

The status quo theory of how humans evolved certainly doesn’t explain every little detail, but it explains a lot. Just as “god-of-the-gaps” (science can’t explain everything, there is still room for God) is bad religion, the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis is bad science – we are able to explain more and more every day using established science, so defining your belief system by what science can’t currently explain inevitably dooms your belief system. Sometimes, the status quo hasn’t been overturned not because of a vast conspiracy, but because it’s more correct than the fringe explanation. This is one of those times.

For an extremely thorough resource devoted to debunking this hypothesis, please see Jim Moore’s excellent website.

~WhySharksMatter

Elaine Morgan says we evolved from aquatic apes

Southern Fried Scientist — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 17:45:57 +0000

Our favorite sea monsters – Scylla and Charybdis (#2)

Bluegrass Blue Crab — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:30:00 +0000

Scylla and Charybdis team up to make passing through the Straight of Messina impossible – to be a safe distance from one meant being too close to the other. They were one of Odysseus’ many challenges during his epic journey. Scylla is a six-headed monster storied to have become that way after poisoning by the jealous wife of Poseidon who captured sailors off their boats and ate them. Charybdis is best described as a whirlpool bringing ships to the bottom of the sea. She was the daughter of Poseidon and converted by Zeus.

Circe’s description of the monsters is as follows: (book 12)

“Scylla lurks inside it – the yelping horror,
yelping, no lounder than any suckling pup
but she’s a grizzly monster, I assure you.
No one could look on her with any joy,
not even a god who meets her face-to-face…
She has twelve legs, all writhing, dangling down
and six long swaying necks, a hideous head on each,
each head barbed with a triple row of fangs, thickset,
packed tight – and armed to the hilt with black death!”

drawing of the passageway philipresheph.com

“Atop it a great fig-tree rises, shaggy with leaves,
beneath it awesome Charybdis gulps the dark water down.
Three times a day she vomits it up, three times she gulps it down,
that terror! Don’t be there when the whirlpool swallows down -
not even the earthquake god could save you from disaster.”

Odysseus’ boat was taken by Charybdis and he was saved by clinging to the cliffs.

The monsters also play a role in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and supposedly shepherded the Argonauts safely through the narrow passage.

For a full encyclopedia of Greek myth mentions see Scylla and Charybdis over at Theoi.

~Bluegrass Blue Crab

Ocean of Pseudoscience Shorty – The Bermuda Triangle

Southern Fried Scientist — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:00:06 +0000

There is a place in the Atlantic where ships vanish, where planes fall from the sky, where vast, inexplicable mysteries haunt the sea. The Bermuda Triangle, darling of mysterious disappearance buffs.

What causes all these weird disappearances? Numerous hypotheses have been put forward, from aliens to methane bubbles, to magnetic anomalies.

Unfortunately, the real answer is not nearly as exciting. There is no Bermuda Triangle. An analysis of all the Triangle stories revealed that many of them were mis-remember, poorly reported, exaggerated, or just plain fabricated. In reality, there number of ship disappearances is not statistically greater than anywhere else in the ocean. Some of the vanished ships may be unexplained, but there is no link between the Triangle and higher than average maritime incidents.

~Southern Fried Scientist

Reader mail: Shark Fin propaganda

WhySharksMatter — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 13:00:13 +0000

Last weekend, longtime SFS reader Suzy sent me an interesting question. Suzy is Asian, and though she is a committed conservationist, several members of her family regularly eat shark fin soup. One relative just sent her a copy of a news article entitled “Shark Fin Soup: Eat it without guilt” (available here). Suzy asked me if the information in this article is correct, and how she should respond to her family members.

Though it is a few years old, I had never seen this article, and it’s a little shocking. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a better example of distorting or ignoring science to promote a political agenda outside of Fox News. In short, Suzy, most of the information in here is either false or intentionally misleading.

The article is a bizarre mix of irrelevant and out-of-context facts, illogical conclusions from those facts, and paranoid rants.

The author does not deny that shark populations are declining, but instead attempts to blame their decline on every nation except China.

“Sharks are caught in virtually all parts of the world- by fisherman in poor countries and by large fishing fleets from developed countries…The Shark Alliance points out that Spain, Portugal, the UK and France are among the world’s top 10 shark fishing nations that are responsible for 80% of the global catch”

While it certainly true that other countries catch sharks, the overwhelming majority of them sell their catch to China. If there was no demand, these nations wouldn’t need to provide a supply. Most of the demand for sharks is for shark fin soup in China and other Asian nations. You can find that information from the Shark Alliance here, the same source that is being misleadingly used to show that China isn’t a big player in the shark trade. As the author is quick to point out, a few other nations consume sharks as well (i.e. spiny dogfish for the UK fish and chips market), but this demand is nothing compared to that from the Chinese shark fin soup market. To claim otherwise requires a near-ridiculous amount of willful ignorance.

There is also an attempt to use the current lack of legal protection for sharks as evidence that they don’t need protection.

“No state has banned shark fishing and only a few have set limits in certain areas.”

“CITES lists only 3 sharks in its appendix II…the remaining 397 species…can be freely traded and caught”

I don’t really feel the need to go into depth on this point. It should be pretty clear that not currently having protection doesn’t mean that protection isn’t needed. That’s why CITES meets regularly. That’s why new species are proposed for Endangered Species Act protection all the time. That’s why fisheries management plans change all the time. Once again, it’s impossible that a trained scientist (which the article’s author is) wouldn’t know this. Also, “over 400″ minus 3 does not equal 397.

Shark Fin Soup, image courtesy Jason Robertshaw Delsarabel.com

The author then claims that there is no targeted shark fin fishery, that finning primarily takes place with already-dead sharks that were victims of bycatch. That is clearly a blatant lie.

“Fins are by-products of the fishing industry. Though they are valuable, sharks are not normally killed for their fins. A fishing fleet specializing in catching sharks only for their fins would quickly go out of business”

“Targeting shark fin soup will not stop this accidental catch. The fins from these catches will be thrown away”

“The practice to salvage and sell the sharks’ fins gives values to discards from the fishing industry”

This is just ridiculous. There are a great many fishing vessels that target sharks for their fins, and many more for whom shark finning makes up a significant proportion of their work. It’s not exactly clear what difference it makes if a fishing vessel focuses entirely on shark finning or if they kill sharks for their fins as a side-business… in both cases, sharks are being killed for their fins in huge numbers. Also, shark fins are, per weight, some of the most valuable products that a fishermen can obtain in the ocean today, so I’m not really sure why specializing in them would result in a fishing vessel going out of business.

Image from Jessica King, Marine Photobank

I’m not exactly sure what “distorted picture” conservationists are painting by showing pictures and video of exactly what is happening, but the author seems to think that live-finning sharks and dumping the rest of the animal overboard to bleed to death or drown is a small component of the shark fin trade. It certainly isn’t the only way that fins come onto the market, but it’s not nearly as rare as this article makes it seem.

Suzy, I apologize for the long post. Let me try and summarize. While shark fin soup has been a part of Chinese culture for centuries, it has only been available to the masses in the last few decades. I don’t need to tell you that there are a lot of people in China, and the increased demand (combined with the global reach of modern fishing fleets) has led to declines in shark populations around the world. One of the most common ways that fins are obtained is cutting the fins of the shark while it is still alive and dumping the rest of the animal overboard to bleed to death or drown. As this article’s author noted, this fishery is very poorly regulated. In short, shark fin soup is supplied by an incredibly wasteful, inhumane, and unsustainable fishery with enormous impacts on the world’s oceans. It’s not an issue of culture and it’s not an issue of shame. Scientific facts,show that this soup is extremely destructive to the environment. I hope this helps.

Image from Nancy Boucha, ScubaSystems.org 2005, Marine Photobank

~WhySharksMatter

Ocean of Pseudoscience Linkfest, Round 4 and reader challenges

Southern Fried Scientist — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:28:54 +0000

More people have joined in on the Ocean of Pseudoscience week.

First, Shark Diver from Underwater Thrills throws down with Shark Pseudoscience – Juicing Tweaked Bulls. Something tells me Bull Shark Testosterone isn’t going to make you cool, but let’s see if our readers can come up with an explanation why.

Sheril, from the intersection posts on twitter:

Hey #oceans tweeps, real or fake? http://tinyurl.com/28xuztn

The link leads to this picture of an apparently giant freshwater carp that look suspiciously like a goldfish. Well, what do you think, real or fake?

And Zen Faulkes of Neurodojo posts on Eating your own brain. Delicious.

~Southern Fried Scientist

365 days of Darwin: September 9, 2010 (5/7)

Southern Fried Scientist — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 04:00:04 +0000

What’s that strange hairy creature in the woods? Why, it must be the legendary bigfeets, Gigantopithecus darwiniensis!

Ocean of Pseudoscience Shorty – Pickles for Seasickness

Bluegrass Blue Crab — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 23:30:08 +0000

My grandfather, who was on board Marine ships from 1928 through the Korean War, used to suggest eating pickles for seasickness. During my recent cruise in the Sargasso Sea, I finally had a chance to test his theory and it worked. Was it just a placebo effect, was it the vitamin C, or something else in this mysterious remedy?

In 1939, an article in the British Medical Journal suggested corned beef and pickles as a comfort food for those on the edge of seasickness. Maybe pickles are a World War II remedy, because I found this quote in a book called Tales from a Tin Can: the USS Dale from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay:

“My Amish mom wrote me a letter about my seasickness and said I needed something to sour my stomach. So I made up sandwiches from dill pickles and bread, and lived on them for a few days. It worked. I no longer had any seasickness! My dill pickle sandwiches cured thirty-five other guys on the Dale of their seasickness too!”

~Bluegrass Blue Crab

An Ocean of Pseudoscience, Linkfest Round 3

Southern Fried Scientist — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:00:29 +0000

We’re halfway through our first ever Ocean of Pseudoscience Week. Many great blogs have decided to enter the fray, tackling pseudoscience in their own fields. If anyone wants to join in, either as a guest post on our blog or as a post on your own blog, let me know. Below are all the blogs who have joined us on this adventure so far.

Blogs from the Southern Fried Science Network:

Arthropoda – Ocean of Pseudoscience Week
Arthropoda - Creationists love Mantis Shrimp
Arthropoda – Samurai Crabs
Cephalove – News flash: Octopuses are actually psychic
Mammoth Tales - Antarctica Made Large
Ya Like Dags? – There’s an Ocean of Pseudoscience Out There
Ya Like Dags – “Voracious Beyond Belief”

Blogs from the Bliggity-Blag-O-Sphere:

Observations of a Nerd – Sharks DO get Cancer

~Southern Fried Scientist