T. Rex Might be the Thing with Feathers
Behind every famous dinosaur are unsung heroes
BY BRIAN SWITEK
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOMASZ WALENTA
DECEMBER 25, 2014
The way we imagine dinosaurs has evolved over the three centuries since their discovery. It’s an evolution characterized by the forces of fame, for the animals that rivet the public’s imagination are not the ones that yield the most interesting information about ancient biology. Stars such as T. rex, Stegosaurus, and the Triceratops bask in the glory of public attention while little known dinosaurs such as Hadrosaurus, Deinonychus, Maiasaurua and other unsung species do the heavy lifting of scientific revelation.
The injustice of fame is a common trope in science, but the history of paleontology provides a particularly vivid example, for it is an unusually harsh jury that decides which dinosaurs get memorialized in popular culture. Fond memories of museum trips and sandbox battles between plastic effigies of dinosaurian champions linger long past the “dinosaur phase” of many children. Even as scientists try to retire the “Brontosaurus” from the canon—because 19th-century confusion resulted in too many dinosaurs named from too few bones—it is still beloved by many, a sign of how hard it is to shake the public’s devotion to these creatures.
That devotion stretches back to the 18th century, when European naturalists recognized the curious bones found in mining pits and countryside rock outcrops as the clues to a past that predated humans. The first guesses as to the size and shape of the owners of these bones conjured up visions of creatures both stupendous and preposterous.
Dinosaurs were first imagined as relatives of fire-breathing dragons, then as the ancestors of lizards who swept their gigantic tails as they slithered along the ground. They were also portrayed as slothful crocodiles that spent the days in the sun trying to move the needle on their naturally cold-blooded body temperature. As more fossils were discovered over the course of next two centuries, new light was shed on the dimensions of these creatures, as well as the texture of their outer coat (scaly, armored, or even fuzzy), whether they were meat-eaters or plant-munchers, their reproductive habits, whether they lived in packs or alone, and why some went extinct and others evolved into birds.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several dinosaurs, including T. rex, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and a handful of others, emerged as the celebrity faces of all the species. And while these stars are fixed in the public eye, they are not immutable. How we imagine them is periodically updated and revised thanks to the ongoing paleontological finds that continue to reveal new species. They are paraded around at conferences, receive long Latinate names, and even get their 15 minutes of fame in media headlines. But many dinosaur species fail to exert any real staying power on the public imagination and pass into obscurity while the valuable information they provide serves to refine and deepen our knowledge of all dinosaur species. We take information gleaned from newly discovered species and slap it back on dinosaurs we know and cherish. It’s a boon to the brand name dinosaurs that receive regular makeovers that help them stay relevant.
Stars such as T. rex, Stegosaurus, and the Triceratops bask in the glory of public attention while little known dinosaurs do the heavy lifting of scientific revelation.
Such is the trajectory of Tyrannosaurus rex, literally the “King of the Tyrant Lizards,” which was first described on the basis of an incomplete specimen found in Montana in the early 20th century. Henry Fairfield Osborn, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), named the massive carnivore in 1905. The following year, the museum began to construct the mounted skeleton that still draws visitors to the fourth floor exhibits. When only the legs of the enormous theropod were erected, The New York Times proclaimed T. rex the “prize-fighter of antiquity,” and wrote that the hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren who poured into the museum would now have “a larger outlook into the future of a world that has such a past.” T. rex became a bridge to the past.
And the reign of T. rex has continued unabated. In 1937, the doors of the Dinosaur Park in Rapid City, South Dakota were opened as part of a New Deal initiative. An 80-foot plastic model that took 14 men 15 months to construct looked down on tens of thousands of visitors just in the first year. Today the park sees upwards of 120,000 per year. In an article about the park’s opening, The New York Times ran pictures of the star dinosaurs that were on display, showing a striking difference to how we see them today and underscoring how much our image of the dinosaur evolved in the past seven decades.
But even with two relatively complete skeletons collected for the AMNH by professional fossil hunter Barnum Brown, the details of what T. rex was truly like eluded experts. Contributions from the British anatomist Richard Owen (who coined the term “dinosaur” in 1842) established a set of characteristics that differed drastically from those that had come before. Naturalists had previously compared the bits of broken jaw or teeth and noted their close match to those of crocodiles. A 1 to 1 proportion ratio from the teeth to the body projected an impressively large lizard of more than 100 feet who dragged its enormous torso along the ground. Owen revised the image of the giant lizard and cut the size of dinosaur down to about 40 feet long. He envisioned a creature that had the hide of scaly reptiles but an upright posture like that of a rhinoceros or an elephant. But even Owen’s conception of dinosaurian nature was not to last.
It was displaced by the discovery of Hadrosaurus, that little-feted New Jersey native. This creature was significant because, unlike dinosaur specimens found in Europe, the recovered bits of backbone, limbs, hip, and skull came from a single individual. With the full skeleton, experts were able to see that the forelimbs of the dinosaur were significantly shorter than the hind limbs. So instead of resembling a giant crocodile, scientists understood that dinosaurs must have stood up, balancing on their hind limbs.
Owen revised the image of the giant lizard and cut the size of dinosaur down to about 40 feet long.
The Philadelphia naturalist and polymath Joseph Leidy, who named the Hadrosaurus, noted that, “this great herbivorous Lizard sustained itself in a semi-erect position… while it browsed on plants.” To Leidy, Hadrosaurus was less a reptilian rhino and more like a kangaroo. The image of the dinosaur became that of an active creature who stood upright instead of slithering on the ground. The skeleton of the Hadrosaurus helped to create a more up-to-date model of the dinosaurs. The English artist and sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins constructed a version for Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences that stood about 30 feet in length.
Just as the Hadrosaurus helped establish a dinosaur posture different from what naturalists had previously suspected, another little-known species helped scientists determine whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded. The 19th-century comparison of dinosaurs to iguanas and crocodiles led naturalists to assume that they were cold-blooded creatures. However, in the late 19th century, the discovery of an agile raptor, Laelaps anquilunguis, later renamed the Dryptosaurus, showed a dinosaur that was a ripping, tearing predator who moved about swiftly on two legs. The agility of this carnivore strengthened the argument for warm-blooded dinosaurs. It also planted the idea that not all dinosaurs went extinct and that some may have evolved into birds.
The discovery of another fossil—a whole a century later—sparked the idea that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. The 11-foot long, switchblade-clawed Deinonychus antirrhopus, named in 1969, was pieced together from the bones of multiple individuals found in a Montana quarry along with a beaked herbivore that seemed to have been slaughtered. Based on their being found together, Yale paleontologist John Ostrom speculated that Deinonychus was a pack hunter that slashed at victims with swift motions of a frightening foot claw. Disemboweling looked to be his preferred mode of dispatch. In his description of Deinonychus, Ostrom emphasized the animal’s fierceness. “When all these features are considered together,” Ostrom wrote, “we have a rather convincing picture, I think, of Deinonychus as an active and very agile predator.” There was little doubt at that point that the dinosaur’s rate of metabolism was high. And as Ostrom continued his investigations, he realized that the formidable Deinonychus resembled a larger version of another animal—the first bird, Archaeopteryx. Dinosaurs, Ostrom proposed, did not go totally extinct. If birds evolved from dinosaurs like Deinonychus, then dinosaurs survived.
The discovery of the Deinonychus helped spur the “Dinosaur Renaissance” of the 1970s and ’80s. Dinosaurs suddenly became a subject of respectable scientific interest again and the new facts trickled back to revise the public’s image of the celebrity creatures. In Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park, famous dinosaurs vividly flaunt their newly acquired characteristics. The Brachiosaurus stopped sunning in the Jurassic mornings to warm up and became a proud herbivore that strutted over floodplains to show off its elegant neck. Tyrannosaurus became a super-charged predator that terrified audiences. Large, hulking reptiles were replaced by active, bird-like animals that were far more complex than believed earlier.
Dinosaurs, Ostrom proposed, did not go totally extinct. If birds evolved from dinosaurs like Deinonychus, then dinosaurs survived.
Part of the complexity lay in dinosaurs’ family structure. Before the Dinosaur Renaissance researchers believed that dinosaur parents provided almost no care at all to their offspring. Another fossil find in 1979 in Montana challenged that narrative, spurring paleontologists Jack Horner and Robert Makela to discover entire nesting grounds where there were bones of adults as well as hatchlings. They concluded that at least one parent must have been looking after the babies and bringing food for them to eat and that the young were staying within the nest for some time after hatching. Researchers could no longer just assume that dinosaurs laid eggs and walked away from them. This dinosaur, dubbed Maiasaura, was an argument in favor of more intriguing—and caring—animals than had ever been suspected. Horner and Makela named her the “caring mother lizard,” and this raised the possibility that other species, like the Stegosaurus and Triceratops, partook in prolonged parental care.
But the latest, and greatest, alteration to our understanding of what dinosaurs were like came from a critter much smaller than either Deinonychus or Maiasaura. A theropod dinosaur, a distant and smaller cousin of T. rex and Deinonychus, Sinosauropteryx stood barely a foot off the ground. What made this creature fascinating was what covered its tiny frame. Instead of scales, its coat was a mane of filamentous feathers running along its back.
When paleontologists Philip Currie and Chen Peiji showed off a snapshot of Sinosauropteryx at a meeting in 1996 of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, their colleagues were astounded. Yale’s Ostrom, who had long argued for bird-like dinosaurs on the basis of his own Deinonychus find as well as other discoveries, told The New York Times that a photo put him “in a state of shock.” At long last, the crucial soft tissue connection between dinosaurs and birds had been discovered. To bastardize an Emily Dickinson quote, researchers had found that dinosaurs are the things with feathers.
What made this creature fascinating was what covered its tiny frame. Instead of scales, its coat was a mane of filamentous feathers running along its back.
The Sinosauropteryx was just the first of dozens of feathery fossils to be found in China. Together, these dinosaurs confirm that birds truly are dinosaurs, and that feathers were a feature shared among many dinosaur lineages. The 2012 announcement of a 30-foot-long tyrannosaur covered in fuzz, named Yutyrannus, has even raised the distinct possibility that our cherished T. rex bore a fuzzy coat. This would mean a heady revision of how dinosaurs looked and what end they may have met.
Imagine the next Jurassic Park with an angry T. rex covered in feathers lunging at the tiny terrified humans. How we see dinosaurs will keep changing for as long as we study them, and lesser-known species will undoubtedly be at the heart of whatever major transmutations to dinosaur imagery come next.
Just how drastically our most favorite dinosaurs will be changed by unsung species is an open-ended question. We haven’t even found most dinosaurs yet. One 2006 estimate proposed that there may have been about 1,850 different types during their Triassic to Cretaceous heyday—a run of about 245 to 66 million years ago. If that’s so, then the 500 or so genera named so far mark the start of our paleontological discoveries and might mean more changes for famous and beloved icons such as the T. rex. Dinosaurs are anything but set in stone.
Brian Switek dressed up as a stegosaurus when he was 5. He is the author of My Beloved Brontosaurus.
Christmas 1966
CHRISTMAS 1966
I drove them
not yet wild
they were all sleek
advanced by whispering drugs
every hair sensitive to any new brilliance
in our slippery world
they had me
turn into the night
designated to be their deliverer
my eyes were stretching open
on edge to see what they were seeking
I had them now
I seemed to be pulling them out of their skins
I drove them hard harder
each hand in hand
strung together
racing along at unknown speed
at times almost flinging them off
into a faraway somewhere
as I turned drastically
into the dark eve of Christmas
yet I never lost them
they said this is it
so I skidded to a stop
in the gravel driveway of a common church
their minds now expanding rapidly
at the thought of where on earth we had arrived
we crashed into the brightly lit sanctuary
the roots of our existence
following us in the door
and we huddled together
here we faced them
the cosy families gathered for midnight mass
now askance at our oddest commotion
they looked back at us
surprisingly our eyes reached out
beyond all our human spirits
we couldn't wait for rituals to work
we felt a love so ponderous
that we were instantly stuck
to its wiggly blissful mass
we wailed passionate good-bye good-bye
as I poured them back into our impossible car
and we landed in each other's arms
for nights on end
the sun shone so intensely then
we were sure we had become the raw beings of myth
ready to talk with our world without hurry
and further the common pleasures of creation
~ James Soland
I drove them
not yet wild
they were all sleek
advanced by whispering drugs
every hair sensitive to any new brilliance
in our slippery world
they had me
turn into the night
designated to be their deliverer
my eyes were stretching open
on edge to see what they were seeking
I had them now
I seemed to be pulling them out of their skins
I drove them hard harder
each hand in hand
strung together
racing along at unknown speed
at times almost flinging them off
into a faraway somewhere
as I turned drastically
into the dark eve of Christmas
yet I never lost them
they said this is it
so I skidded to a stop
in the gravel driveway of a common church
their minds now expanding rapidly
at the thought of where on earth we had arrived
we crashed into the brightly lit sanctuary
the roots of our existence
following us in the door
and we huddled together
here we faced them
the cosy families gathered for midnight mass
now askance at our oddest commotion
they looked back at us
surprisingly our eyes reached out
beyond all our human spirits
we couldn't wait for rituals to work
we felt a love so ponderous
that we were instantly stuck
to its wiggly blissful mass
we wailed passionate good-bye good-bye
as I poured them back into our impossible car
and we landed in each other's arms
for nights on end
the sun shone so intensely then
we were sure we had become the raw beings of myth
ready to talk with our world without hurry
and further the common pleasures of creation
~ James Soland
The Great Benefits of Using Copper in Hospitals
A Copper Bedrail Could Cut Back On Infections For Hospital Patients
December 15, 2014 2:07 PM ET
HANNAH BLOCH
A copper bedrail can kill germs on contact.
Courtesy of CopperBioHealth
Checking into a hospital can boost your chances of infection. That's a disturbing paradox of modern medical care.
And it doesn't matter where in the world you're hospitalized. From the finest to the most rudimentary medical facilities, patients are vulnerable to new infections that have nothing to do with their original medical problem. These are referred to as healthcare-acquired infections, healthcare-associated infections or hospital-acquired infections. Many of them, like pneumonia or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), can be deadly.
The World Health Organization estimates that "each year, hundreds of millions of patients around the world are affected" by healthcare-acquired infections. In the United States, the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion in the Health and Human Services Department estimates that 1 in 25 inpatients has a hospital-related infection. In developing countries, estimates run higher.
Hospital bed safety railings are a major source of these infections. That's what Constanza Correa, 33, and her colleagues have found in their research in Santiago, Chile. They've taken on the problem by replacing them, since 2013, with railings made of copper, an anti-microbial element.
Copper definitely wipes out microbes. "Bacteria, yeasts and viruses are rapidly killed on metallic copper surfaces, and the term "contact killing" has been coined for this process," wrote the authors of an article on copper in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. That knowledge has been around a very long time. The journal article cites an Egyptian medical text, written around 2600-2000 B.C., that cites the use of copper to sterilize chest wounds and drinking water.
Correa's startup, Copper BioHealth, has not yet assessed the railings' impact in Chilean hospitals. But a study of the effects of copper-alloy surfaces in U.S. hospitals' intensive care units, published last year in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, showed promising results: Their presence reduced the number of healthcare-acquired infections from 8.1 percent in regular rooms to 3.4 percent in the copper rooms.
Correa spoke with Goats and Soda a few hours before she presented her work at a Latin America innovation conference earlier this month, hosted by the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C.
You have a simple strategy to combat hospital-associated infections. Tell me what it involves.
Healthcare-acquired infections are a huge problem. People come to the hospital with a sickness, and they get another one in the hospital. Then they have to stay longer and spend more money on treatment. Sometimes it can cause death. Eighty percent of these infections come from touching hospital surfaces. In the hospital room, the most contaminated surface is the bed rail. It's the most manipulated by medical staff and patients. It's in direct contact with the patient. That's the most critical surface in the room.
Our objective is to decrease the chance of infection due to surface contact. So we replace current bed rails with copper bed rails. It kills viruses, fungi and bacteria continuously.
What's the magnitude of the problem?
In industrialized countries, 5 percent of patients develop these infections and the number is three times more in developing countries. These are infections like pneumonia and urinary tract infections. In the United States, the annual direct cost to treat these infections is $40 billion a year. Plus the patient loses time at work. And we don't consider what happens after a patient leaves the hospital. They may get sick [from these infections] later, too.
How many hospitals are using your copper railings now?
They are used at four hospitals in Chile, in 150 beds. We only change the rails, not the whole bed. We realized price is an issue, so we focus on the most critical surface and we use a leasing model so it is easier for [hospitals] to take the decision. It's not a big investment decision. The cost is $60 to $100 per bed per month. After 36 months, they have paid for it.
Are there other places where copper could help prevent infection?
There are a lot of options for how to incorporate copper. Bed rails are only the first step. You can have copper IV poles, feeding tables, night tables, even mattress covers.
Mattress covers?
Yes, there is a copper additive that can be combined with a polymer and it's much better than the current covers. It is all to create a healthier environment. You can even use it for subway straps.
Have you had any personal experience with healthcare-acquired infections?
Yes, my grandmother was hospitalized after a hip fracture. She got an infection — she caught pneumonia. We almost lost her. We thought she was going to die, and not because of the broken hip.
Did she recover?
Yes, fortunately. But hospitals should be safer. Copper kills everything. Why wouldn't you use it? It has so much sense for people.
Ringo
Those first few steps are the hardest, even for a baby giraffe.
(John Burgess / The Press Democrat)
Ringo, the 27th giraffe born this year at Safari West, came into the world at 3:30 p.m. July 7. He joined the country’s largest private giraffe herd and shares the birthday of legendary Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, for whom he is named. Press Democrat staff photographer John Burgess was there to document the occasion.
Northern Lights in Maine
September 12, 2014
Nikon D800 24mm Time-lapse DSC_3015.MOV
Northern lights (aurora borealis) as seen from Maine.
Most of the activity was early in the evening before the moon came up. What looks almost like daylight is actually moonlight that appears so bright because of the long exposures used to capture the night sky.
You can also see the "Big Dipper" (Ursa Major, Great Bear) rotating counter clockwise through the night.
Music: "Equinoxe Part 1" by Jean-Michel Jarre
Mel Brooks...Ta Da!
Mel Brooks Riffs on ‘Young Frankenstein,’ Laddie and the Biz
Steven Gaydos
Vice President, Executive Editor variety.com
SEPTEMBER 9, 2014 | 10:00AM PT
SEPTEMBER 9, 2014 | 10:00AM PT
The four guys sitting around the lunch table in Beverly Hills have been business associates and friends for decades.
Many decades.
This includes the decade known as the ’70s, when lunchee Mel Brooks directed and co-wrote “Young Frankenstein” (1974) for fellow lunchees, former Fox studio chief Alan Ladd Jr. and the film’s producer, Michael Gruskoff, as well as longtime Ladd associate Jay Kanter, who once repped the likes of Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe.
But this is clearly Brooks’ show, a point he reinforces when Gruskoff tries to tell their guest about the day the two of them and star Gene Wilder pitched the “Young Frankenstein” project to the top brass at Columbia Pictures.
Gruskoff may have gotten through the first word of the first sentence but he quickly and wisely lets Brooks finish: “LET ME TELL THE STORY I CAN TELL IT BETTER THAN YOU.”
“So everything was great, they loved the pitch, the budget was no problem,” recalls Brooks, “and I think we were almost out to Gower Street when I whispered, ‘Oh one more thing: it’s going to be in black and white.’ Suddenly there was a thundering herd of Jews descending on us; ‘What are you talking about??!!’”
But Brooks quickly gets to the real point of his story: “Then we took it to Laddie (Ladd Jr.) who had only been at Fox a few months and when we told him it had to be in black and white he said, ‘Of course it does.’ There’s the difference.”
Today Brooks is a genuine Comedy God with seven legendary decades of hits under his belt in virtually all genres, including records (with fellow God Carl Reiner), television, films and Broadway. But in 1973 when he and Gruskoff were trying to set up “Young Frankenstein,” which started as a Wilder treatment, Gruskoff was coming off the Dennis Hopper drug-addled epic fail “The Last Movie” and Brooks had just swan-dived at the box office with “The Twelve Chairs.”
“‘The Producers’ made a penny and ‘Twelve Chairs’ less than a penny,” recalls Brooks. “We had no script but we had Gene, Peter Boyle and Marty Feldman and none of them meant anything.”
Now, 40 years later, with Fox Home Entertainment rolling out a commemorative Blu-ray, Brooks’ Hands and Feet Ceremony Sept. 8 at the Chinese Theatre and a tribute screening Sept. 9 at the Goldwyn, Brooks acknowledges the current studio scene would be a tough place to replicate the Ladd-led Fox lot of 1974.
“Laddie had faith in the people who were making the films,” recalls Brooks. “He trusted (Robert) Altman to deliver the movie he said he was going to deliver. You didn’t get a lot of notes from Laddie. He wasn’t a fool, but it was more about the filmmakers than the films. Columbia had told us we needed to cut the budget from $2 million to $1.8. Laddie said it should be $2.2 (million).”
The Ladd bet paid off handsomely for Fox, winding up in the Christmas season as one of the year’s five top-grossing films.
But Ladd’s sigh of relief probably came much earlier in the year when “Blazing Saddles,” the film that Brooks made for Warner Bros. after “Twelve Years,” but unreleased when “Young” was greenlit, hit theaters in February. It ended up being 1974’s biggest hit, and provided the one-two punch that sent Wilder’s career into the comedy stratosphere.
And what was it like for Gruskoff to follow the Peruvian oddball odyssey of “Last Movie” and partner with Brooks to bring “Young Frankenstein” to mega-hit life? Words fail the garrulous Gruskoff so he turns to song, warbling to Brooks across the table: “Night and Day, you are the one …” Mel Brooks does not claim to be able sing Cole Porter better than Gruskoff, so we move on.
One Earth at Night, Under One Sky
Spain and Portugal glow at night. The city of Madrid is the bright spot just above the center of the picture.
Credit: NASA
NASA Wants You to Help Sort Astronaut Photos of Earth at Night
Kelly Dickerson space.com | September 05, 2014
Scientists want your help to sort through gorgeous images of Earth at night snapped by orbiting astronauts.
Studying such photographs could show how light pollution is affecting human health and reveal ways to save energy and improve public safety, researchers said. But the pictures need to be catalogued first, and that's where you come in.
"Anyone can help," Alejandro Sanchez, a graduate student at Complutense University in Spain who is working on the project, said in a statement. "In fact, without the help of citizens, it is almost impossible to use these images scientifically. Algorithms cannot distinguish between stars, cities and other objects, such as the moon. Humans are much more efficient for complex image analysis."
The photos are in a database called The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. The images range from those taken in the early 1960s during NASA's Mercury program all the way to present-day pictures taken from the International Space Station.
New photos are added every day. As of August, there were about 1.8 million images in the database, and about 30 percent of those were taken at night, researchers said.
The citizen-science project, which is led by a group of researchers at Complutense University, is called "Cities at Night." You can learn more about the project by visiting http://www.citiesatnight.org
"Cities at Night" consists of three separate parts. The simplest one, called "Dark Skies," requires people to sort images into three categories: cities, stars or other objects.
The second part, called "Night Cities," asks the public to match places in the images with points on maps. Establishing the location of the photographs will help scientists create light maps of cities and could provide some insight into energy usage.
"Lost at Night" is the third and most complicated part of the project, asking citizens to identify cities in photos with a 310-mile (500 kilometers) circumference.
"We don’t know which direction the astronaut pointed the camera, only where the station was at the time the image was taken," Sanchez said. "Some images are bright cities but others are small towns. It is like a puzzle with 300,000 pieces."
Volunteers have classified almost 20,000 images so far, but scientists require multiple volunteers to classify the same image to ensure accuracy. The open catalog of data is free and available for anyone to use.
The project team hopes that scientists can examine the colors of light in each photo and determine the type of energy a city is using and evaluate its energy efficiency. The images could also reveal areas where lighting around roads is lacking and thus help improve public safety. The data can also pinpoint areas where light pollution could be influencing human health and biodiversity, researchers said.
The high resolution of some of the images comes from the European Space Agency's "NightPod," which was installed on the space station in 2012. NightPod is a motorized tripod that adjusts to match the space station's 17,500 mph (28,160 km/h) orbital speed. Before NightPod, the motion of the station and the motion of Earth below blurred images even if astronauts used high-speed film.
The Genome's Dark Matter
Life doesn’t make trash
A genome is not a blueprint for building a human being, so is there any way to judge whether DNA is junk or not?
by Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher
Illustration by Matt W. Moore
Humans are astounding creatures, our unique and highly complex traits encoded by our genome – a vast sequence of DNA ‘letters’ (called nucleotides) directing the building and maintenance of the body and brain. Yet science has served up the confounding paradox that the bulk of our genome appears to be dead wood, biologically inert junk.
Could all this mysterious ‘dark matter’ in our genome really be non-functional?
Our genome has more than 20,000 genes, relatively stable stretches of DNA transmitted largely unchanged between generations. These genes contain recipes for molecules, especially proteins, that are the main building blocks and molecular machines of our bodies. Yet DNA that codes for such known structures accounts for just over 3 per cent of our genome. What about the other 97 per cent? With the publication of the first draft of the human genome in 2001, that shadow world came into focus. It emerged that roughly half our DNA consisted of ‘repeats’, long stretches of letters sometimes found in millions of copies at seemingly random places throughout the genome. Were all these repeats just junk?
To answer this question, hundreds of scientists worldwide joined a massive science project called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, or ENCODE. After working hard for almost a decade, in 2012 ENCODE came to a surprising conclusion: rather than being composed mostly of useless junk, 80 per cent of the human genome is in fact functional.
To reach that conclusion, ENCODE systematically scouted the genome as a whole for specific functions. One function could be coding for proteins; another function could be acting as a ‘molecular switch’ that regulates the operation of other genes. In one experiment, for example, ENCODE surveyed the entire genome for DNA that is bound by ‘transcription factors’ - proteins known for calling other genes into action. In this way, ENCODE compiled a comprehensive and very useful catalogue that provided a functional clue for 80 per cent of the 3 billion nucleotides that comprise all the genes of the human genome. The ENCODE results seemed to confirm that our genome is indeed a tidy blueprint; that almost every bit of the human genome is there for a reason, and that our genetic heritage is not a small heap of information buried under a pile of junk.
Consider the so-called ‘LINE-1 elements’, a DNA sequence formerly classed as junk. Our genome teems with 500,000 copies of this 6,000-letter sequence that seems to do nothing but reproduce copies of itself, the very definition of the ‘selfish gene’. According to ENCODE, these LINE-1 elements are functional since they are biochemically active. But does this mean they function to further human survival itself?
Likely not. ‘Function’ is a loaded word, and ENCODE chose a very inclusive definition: in the ENCODE world, function can be ascribed to any stretch of the genome that is related to a specific biochemical activity. But such inclusiveness can lead to ridiculous conclusions. To make an analogy, consider spam emails. What spam emails mostly do is occupy email servers that aim to separate them from genuine email. Few people would argue that occupying spam filters is a function of spam – but an ENCODE-like definition would say just that. Indeed, many of ENCODE’s 80 per cent ‘functional elements’ are unlikely to contribute to human survival and the reproduction of human genomes, which is what you would expect if you consider function from the perspective of a human blueprint.
Yet viewing our genome as an elegant and tidy blueprint for building humans misses a crucial fact: our genome does not exist to serve us humans at all. Instead, we exist to serve our genome, a collection of genes that have been surviving from time immemorial, skipping down the generations. These genes have evolved to build human ‘survival machines’, programmed as tools to make additional copies of the genes (by producing more humans who carry them in their genomes). From the cold-hearted view of biological reality, we exist only to ensure the survival of these travellers in our genomes.
This is the central idea in Richard Dawkins’s milestone book, The Selfish Gene (1976), and the fundamental shift in perspective it entails might be as hard to accept as it was hard to acknowledge that our world revolves around the sun, not the sun around us. The selfish gene metaphor remains the single most relevant metaphor about our genome.
Building on the work of generations of biologists since Charles Darwin, Dawkins took the theory of evolution to its logical conclusion. Darwin’s greatest contribution to science was the concept of natural selection: the fundamental logical principle that inevitably causes a population to gradually adapt to its environment. At first, variation arises in individuals as genes mutate randomly over time. Then, through the mindless process of natural selection, some individuals fare better than others in the task of surviving and reproducing because of differences in their genes, which are then passed on.
What we see are not the real players of the game of life; we just see the consequences as those players strategize to stay in the game.Darwin showed that one simple logical principle could lead to all of the spectacular living design around us, including humankind, previously believed to have been specially created in the image of a god. The logic of natural selection applies far beyond the evolution of species: anything that is good at replicating itself promotes its own survival.
Our genomes are reassembled from the genes found in our parents’ genomes at each generation: when your mother and father prepared the DNA passed on to you, they recombined the genome copies they inherited from their own parents into new combinations. From the viewpoint of natural selection, each gene is a long-lived replicator, its essential property being its ability to spawn copies. In order to spawn copies, many genes have evolved functions important for the survival of the organism in which they reside. Those genes that fail at replicating are no longer around, while even those that are good face stiff competition from other replicators. Only the best can secure the resources needed to reproduce themselves.
It is those replicators that are at the heart of the natural world, that jump from generation to generation, abusing us (or any other species) as their survival machines. When looking at our genome, we might take pride in how individual genes co-operate in order to build the human body in seemingly unselfish ways. But co-operation in making and maintaining a human body is just a highly successful strategy to make gene copies, perfectly consistent with selfishness.
So why are we fooled into believing that humans (and animals and plants) rather than genes are what counts in biology? It is a matter of scale: the world we can see is too big to include genomes, and our lifespan is too short to see how individual genes come into existence, change, and disappear again, processes that unfold over millions of years. What we see are not the real players of the game of life; we just see the consequences of their strategies to stay in the game.
Many genes in our genomes survived because they contributed to making better survival machines – humans better at spreading those genes. But what about the alleged junk, what about, for example, the 500,000 LINE-1 elements? The answer is beautifully simple: each LINE-1 element consists of a set of genes. Together, these encode proteins that execute a molecular programme of inserting additional copies of itself into the genome – a grandiose ‘copy-paste’ strategy. The fact that there are 500,000 copies of them is a testament to their successful proliferation programme. By copying themselves into the genome over and over again, LINE-1s ensure that they remain associated with those genes that make the survival machine.
Even if a large number of LINE-1 copies are removed, lost, or damaged by mutations, there will always be more copies somewhere else in the genome. This is the only explanation needed to justify the LINE-1s’ continued existence. They don’t need to have a specific function in the human blueprint at all – they are freeloaders. ENCODE, however, would reason that these DNA segments are functional since they engage in the process of transcription, whereby a molecular template of the gene works to churn out more of the same. Thus, while most LINE-1s are no longer even capable of making proteins, ENCODE would conclude that they are part of the human blueprint.
To emphasise this point, consider another kind of junk in the genome, the ‘Alu’ element, about 300 letters long. Each of your two genome halves contains 1 million copies of this gene. What does it do? Looking at Alu’s sequence reveals a very uninteresting gene. The only exception is the very last part of its sequence: it matches precisely the last section of LINE-1 elements. In LINE-1s, this stretch of letters is used as a signal, so that the LINE-1 proteins know which sequence they should copy back into another genomic location. By having the same signal, Alus effectively masquerade as LINE-1 elements, fooling the LINE-1 machinery into copy‑pasting them into the genome. It turns out that the freeloaders themselves have freeloaders!
At the most fundamental level, then, our genome is not a blueprint for making humans at all. Instead, it is a set of genes that seek to replicate themselves, making and using humans as their agents. Our genome does of course contain a human blueprint – but building us is just one of the things our genome does, just one of the strategies used by the genes to stay alive. In their selfish desire to leave offspring, our genes have evolved to form a society where they work together efficiently, dividing the labour to ensure that each makes it into the next generation. Like Adam Smith’s invisible hand, the genes in this society co-operate with one another not from a sense of fairness or design, but simply to maximise their own survival. From the myriad interactions of genes in this complex society emerge the striking biological adaptations we see in the living world.
Junk is not trash, and it might come in handy at some point, even if that is not its function.Our genome is filled with freeloaders that manage to hang on, simply because the damage they do is not large enough to make the effort to weed them out worthwhile for other genes, or because their strategy for survival is so conniving that they are difficult to expel. From the point of view of the society of genes, any freeloader DNA – DNA that does not contribute to the genome’s ability to leave offspring, that is, any DNA that does not contribute to organising our bodies – is junk.
ENCODE has called 80 per cent of the human genome functional, yet 97 per cent of the genome does not encode proteins or other molecules that support human life. Is all this DNA just junk? Of course not. There are undoubtedly many molecules whose function we have not yet grasped. And a blueprint alone is not enough to build anything – you also need assembly instructions and a time plan that orchestrates the building process. The portion of the genome responsible for this organisational feat likely adds another 7 per cent or so to the blueprint’s 3 per cent, leading scientists to suspect that about 10 per cent of the genome is actually needed to specify a functioning human.
There is good evidence for this 10 per cent. If we compare our genome to that of other mammals, we find that 90 per cent of the genome was free to change through random mutations. Those DNA letters apparently did not contribute to the efficiency of the survival machine, us. By contrast, mutations in the remaining 10 per cent were weeded out by natural selection because they would have compromised the DNA sequences’ ability to spread – either by damaging the survival machine’s functioning, or by reducing the sequences’ freeloading capacity. This is the definition of function that has traditionally been used by evolutionary biologists as well as by philosophers of science: if something is conserved by natural selection, then it is functional. Function, then, is identified as the feature that ensures the spread or maintenance of a particular DNA sequence.
Junk is not trash and, as the Nobel laureate and genetics pioneer Sydney Brenner has pointed out, it might come in handy at some point, even if that is not its function. Any stretch of DNA can by accident turn into something that then contributes to the spread and survival of the genome. And sure enough, we do, for example, find individual LINE-1 or Alu sequences whose insertion has changed the expression of neighbouring genes in useful ways. These few members of the freeloader community effectively switched sides: they became part of the society of genes that provides the blueprint for human life.
But such examples don’t mean that our genome hordes junk because it might become useful in some future situation – the vast majority of repeats freeload off our bodies, the survival machines built by a co-operative society of genes. To explain why these junkish repeats litter our genome, we do not need to search for any other explanation, any other function, than their capacity to ensure their own persistence in the society of genes.
A misunderstanding persists in the wrong-headed notion that our genome encodes the blueprint of human life. It does not. The blueprint analogy does not apply to the majority of our genome, nor is the non-blueprint component useless junk. Someone or something benefits from much of this genetic code, but value is in the eye of the beholder. For the majority of functional repeats such as Alu and LINE-1, the only beneficiaries are they themselves; attributing human benefit to junk imagines harmony and purpose where none exist. The truth is that many DNA sequences have survived inside our genome going all the way back to the first replicators, through aeons of evolutionary time.
What a piece of work!
25 August 2014
Itai Yanai is associate professor in biology at the Israel Institute of Technology.
Martin Lercher is professor at the Institute of Bioinformatics in Dusseldorf, Germany. Lercher and Yanai are co-authors of the forthcoming book, The Society of Genes, from Harvard University Press.
Dealing with Digital Cruelty
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM AUG. 23, 2014
ANYONE who has ever been online has witnessed, or been virtually walloped by, a mean comment. “If you’re going to be a blogger, if you’re going to tweet stuff, you better develop a tough skin,” said John Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University who specializes in what he refers to as cyberpsychology. Some 69 percent of adult social media users said they “have seen people being mean and cruel to others on social network sites,” according to a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.
Posts run the gamut from barbs to sadistic antics by trolls who intentionally strive to distress or provoke. Last week, Zelda Williams, the daughter of Robin Williams, said she was going off Twitter, possibly for good, after brutal tweets by trolls about her father’s death. Yet comments do not even have to be that malevolent to be hurtful. The author Anne Rice signed a petition a few months ago asking Amazon.com to ban anonymous reviews after experiencing “personal insults and harassing posts,” as she put it on the site of the petition, Change.org. Whether you’re a celebrity author or a mom with a décor blog, you’re fair game. Anyone with a Twitter account and a mean streak can try to parachute into your psyche.
In the virtual world, anonymity and invisibility help us feel uninhibited. Some people are inspired to behave with greater kindness; others unleash their dark side. Trolls, who some researchers think could be mentally unbalanced, say the kinds of things that do not warrant deep introspection; their singular goal is to elicit pain. But then there are those people whose comments, while nasty, present an opportunity to learn something about ourselves.
Easier said than done. Social scientists say we tend to fixate on the negative. However, there are ways to game psychological realities. Doing so requires understanding that you are ultimately in charge. “Nobody makes you feel anything,” said Professor Suler, adding that you are responsible for how you interpret and react to negative comments. The key is managing what psychologists refer to as involuntary attention.
Just as our attention naturally gravitates to loud noises and motion, our minds glom on to negative feedback. Much discussed studies like “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” published in 2001 in the Review of General Psychology, have shown that we respond more strongly to bad experiences and criticism, and that we remember them more vividly. “These are things that stick in our brain,” said James O. Pawelski, the director of education and a senior scholar in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “If we allow our attention to move involuntarily, that’s where it goes.” The mind, however, can be tamed.
One way to become proactive is to ask yourself if those barbs you can’t seem to shrug off have an element of truth. (Glaringly malicious posts can be dismissed.) If the answer is yes, Professor Suler has some advice:
Let your critics be your gurus.
“You can treat them as an opportunity,” he said. Ask yourself why you’re ruminating on a comment. “Why does it bother you?” Professor Suler said. “What insecurities are being activated in you?”
For instance, maybe you have an unconscious worry that you’re somehow not good enough. Professor Suler said it was not uncommon for some digital luminaries (bloggers, social media power-users) to harbor such worries because one motivation, be it conscious or unconscious, is that they want to be liked. “They want to be popular,” he said, adding that it’s a goal easily pursued on the Internet. “It’s all about likes and pluses and favorites.” Yet if someone says something cruel, he continued, “it activates that unconscious worry.”
But let’s say the negative comment fails to induce self-psychologizing. Perhaps it can help you learn something about your work.
“It’s easy to feel emotionally attacked from these things,” said Bob Pozen, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School and a senior research fellow at the Brookings Institution. But he said that doesn’t mean that your critics don’t have a point.
Consider the more than 50 reviews of Mr. Pozen’s book “Extreme Productivity” on Amazon.com. Most were four and five stars, but for the purposes of this article, he conducted an unscientific experiment and checked out the handful of one- and two-star reviews. “You know, some of them are pretty negative,” said Mr. Pozen, the former chairman of MFS Investment Management, “but the question is, ‘How do you read them?' ” One unfavorable review was easily dismissed, Mr. Pozen said, because it was apparent that the writer had not thoroughly read the material. Another reviewer criticized the book for being too “U.S.-centric.” Mr. Pozen considered that idea — and decided that the reader, despite not having put it particularly nicely, might be right. “So I thought, ‘Well if I ever write another version of this book I ought to take that into account,’ ” he said.
It’s not always possible, of course, to learn something from a nasty comment. Some are baseless; some are crass. One way to help them roll off you is to consider the writer’s motivation.
Professor Suler wrote in 2004 in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior about a concept known as “the online disinhibition effect” — the idea that “people say and do things in cyberspace that they wouldn’t ordinarily say and do in the face-to-face world.” In the virtual realm, factors including anonymity, invisibility and lack of authority allow disinhibition to flourish. The result can be benign (“unusual acts of kindness and generosity”), or it can be toxic: “rude language, harsh criticisms, anger, hatred, even threats,” as Professor Suler put it.
The latter is the realm of trolls. Some people think of their online life “as a kind of game with rules and norms that don’t apply to everyday living,” he wrote, a game for which they do not feel responsible. If bloggers and people who use social networks keep this concept in mind, he said, “they will see the psychology” of aggressors, and their comments may be easier to take — and possibly ignore. Sometimes it’s smart to do as Ms. Williams ultimately did: disconnect.
Harsh comments can also be made to feel less potent by directly disputing to yourself what was said. If, for example, someone writes, “You’re an idiot and no one likes you,” you can marshal evidence against it by reminding yourself, Stuart Smalley-style, of the obvious: You have an education, a job, more friends than you have time to see in a week.
Another way to stop yourself from dwelling on negative feedback is to enter into what psychologists refer to as “flow,” a state in which the mind is completely engaged. Flow can be achieved when playing a piano concerto, practicing karate, writing code, being deep in conversation with a friend. “The toughest time is when the mind is not fully occupied,” said Professor Pawelski, who also prescribes humor as a way to deflect barbs. He joked that bars would make a killing if at the end of each semester they offered “professor happy hours” where teachers could bring their evaluations and pass the negative ones around. “Nobody should be alone when they’re reading these things,” he said.
Yet even when a person is alone, humor can be effective. Try reading nasty comments aloud in a goofy voice, Professor Pawelski advised, so that when your mind automatically plays back the comment it sounds absurd, or at the very least loses a bit of its bite.
Such prescriptions are in the spirit of Jimmy Kimmel’s “mean tweets” television segment, during which celebrities — Julia Roberts, Pharrell Williams, Robert De Niro — read aloud the rotten things people write about them on Twitter while R.E.M.'s “Everybody Hurts” plays softly in the background. After reading the often expletive-riddled tweets — an act that Mr. Kimmel has said is meant “to help put a face on this unsavory activity” — some celebrities talk back to their detractors; others laugh; a few peer into the camera in silence. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that other shows have similar routines: The television hosts of “E! News” have taken to reading aloud the “sour” tweets they receive from viewers, though they read a few of the “sweet” tweets, too.
Turns out they may be on to something. In the quest to quell the cruel, we often fail to savor the good. And there is, despite the meanies, much good whirring around cyberspace. Some 70 percent of Internet users said they “had been treated kindly or generously by others online,” according to a Pew report early this year.
Rather than scrolling past a dozen positive comments and lingering on the sole exception, what if you did the opposite? And what if you shared a couple of the good ones with friends instead of sharing the one that hurt you? Research shows that it takes more time for positive experiences to become lodged in our long-term memory, so it’s not just pleasurable to dwell on a compliment — it’s shrewd.
“We’re really bad, typically, as a culture about accepting compliments,” Professor Pawelski said. “They’re meant to be taken in and really appreciated. They’re meant to be gifts.”
Stephanie Rosenbloom is a travel columnist for The New York Times. Follow Stephanie on Twitter: @stephronyt
Delphinus Constellation
A Star Called 'Bob'? Dolphin Constellation's Weird Star Names Explained
By Joe Rao, Space.com | August 22, 2014 05:50pm ET
Delphinus, the Dolphin, is a sea creature constellation with some strangely named stars making up its central star pattern. The constellation is visible in the August night sky.
Credit: Starry Night software
One of the smallest constellations is reaching its highest point in the sky at around midnight local time this week, and the stars it contains have some unexpected names.
The constellation Delphinus the Dolphin attracted the attention of ancient watchers of the sky because, even though it is tiny and consists of only faint stars, the stars are so closely spaced that they are easily seen on dark, clear nights.
The star pattern looks like a small diamond with perhaps one or two stars below it. There is something especially cute about it, positioned out in the dark just east of the bright summer clouds of the Milky Way.
This sky map of the Delphinus constellation shows the location of the cosmic Dolphin in the late August sky, while looking southeast at 9 p.m. local time from mid-northern latitudes.
Credit: Starry Night software
Some reference books refer to the diamond as "Job's Coffin," though the origin of this name is unknown. Two stars in the Delphinus diamond have rather odd names: Sualocin (Alpha Delphini) and Rotanev (Beta Delphini). They first appeared in the Palermo Star Catalogue in 1814, but nobody seemed to have a clue as to their origin.
The English astronomer Thomas William Webb finally solved the mystery by reversing their letters, revealing the name of Nicolaus Venator, the Latinized form of Niccolo Cacciatore, the valued assistant and eventual successor of Palermo Observatory Director Giuseppe Piazzi. But to this day, nobody knows for sure whether it was Piazzi or Cacciatore himself who ultimately named these two stars.
And then came Derf and Bob
During the 1960s and '70s, one of the most popular people ever to lecture at New York's Hayden Planetarium was Fred Hess, who was known as the "evangelist of astronomy" and the dean of New York amateur stargazers. He was the instructor of astronomy and navigation at the Hayden Planetarium, but he was well versed in all aspects of science.
Whenever Hess gave a tour of the summer night sky, he would entertain his audiences by telling the story of Sualocin and Rotanev. Then, he would embellish the tale by stating that he was always jealous of Cacciatore and decided on his own — in tongue-in-cheek fashion — to name the two other stars in the Delphinus diamond.
For the star Gamma Delphini, he assigned the name "Derf," which is "Fred" spelled backward. And since a well-known astrophotographer in those days, Robert Little, was one of his best friends, Hess referred to the star formally known as Eta Delphini as "Bob."
Of course, the Derf and Bob monikers rarely got far beyond the confines of the Hayden Planetarium. But it was a much different story in the late 1960s when, during NASA's Apollo program, three reversed names that started out as a prank were unknowingly assigned to three stars.
The Apollo spacecraft that took men to the moon were designed to operate under inertial guidance, with gyroscopes keeping them pointed in the right direction. But because the gyroscopes tended to drift, the Apollo astronauts had to periodically recalibrate the system by using the positions of known stars.
Astronauts Virgil (Gus) Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Edward White were expected to be aboard the first Apollo flight. While training in celestial navigation however, Grissom, as a practical joke, quietly incorporated three new names onto NASA's star list: Dnoces (which was really Iota Ursae Majoris, or Talitha), Navi (Epsilon Cassiopeiae) and Regor (Gamma Velorum, or Suhail).
In later missions, these three maverick stars were accorded the same respect as celebrated ones like Sirius, Vega and Aldebaran. They even turned up on some star maps that were published during the late 1960s and 1970s.
But what did they stand for?
As it turns out, Dnoces is the word "second" spelled backward, a reference to the ordinal number often appended to White's name (Edward White II). Navi was Grissom's middle name (Ivan) spelled backward and Regor was Chaffee's first name (Roger) in reverse.
Today, the names are classified by most reference sources as "disused or never really used." Grissom had no idea that his celestial jest would turn into a memorial to himself and his crewmates. All three perished in a fire that enveloped the Apollo command module on Jan. 27, 1967.
Conflict and Social Media
Read This Before You Post About Any Conflict On Social Media
BY AVIVA SHEN, LAUREN C. WILLIAMS POSTED ON AUGUST 11, 2014 AT 11:53 AM UPDATED: AUGUST 11, 2014 AT 3:45 PM ThinkProgress
You may have noticed over the past few weeks that your Facebook news feed has morphed into a furious scroll of articles, rants, poems, and pages railing against Israel, Hamas, media bias, the Israeli Defense Forces, Bibi Netanyahu, and more. Acquaintances from high school pop up to warn you not to get sucked in by propaganda. Friends post graphic photos of dead children; other friends comment to argue they’re faked. Family members share links they swear will expose the REAL truth about what’s going on in Gaza.
Facebook is becoming increasingly important in how people get their news. A recent Pew poll found that one in three Americans get news through their Facebook feeds. And after weeks of this particular news cycle, many people are getting fed up. As anyone who has spent time on social media knows, online arguments tend to be more damaging than productive. Conveniently, Facebook makes it easy to “hide” upsetting posts without breaking off ties completely. But the ability to create a selective news feed may pose more problems for an already polarized debate. Several people on different sides of the conflict that ThinkProgress spoke to have begun muting or blocking people on Facebook over Gaza-related posts.
What exactly are people weeding out of their news feeds?
“Stuff that has more racial tones, more religious arguments,” Sarah Hagi, a 23-year-old Muslim Canadian living in the United Arab Emirates said. “Things that were too based on, Jews say this, Muslims say this. That doesn’t really help this conversation.”
“I think anything that glorifies the military or war really upsets me,” said Sarah Seltzer, a freelance writer and blogger for the Jewish Daily Forward. “I mean, you can even support the war, but to my peacenik lefty heart, it’s horrifying to see war sanctified.”
Social media is wreaking havoc on the way we perceive divisive political issues.
“Posts that make Israel out to be a genocidal machine, purposely killing as many children as possible, comparing us to the f—ing Nazis,” Adir Cohen, a musician living in Tel Aviv, told ThinkProgress. “Those posts are pure hatred and makes this whole situation just worse.”
“When I see somebody post some God-given grant to realty, I’ve silenced that,” said Chase Simon, a lawyer based in Ohio. “Usually they’re simply quoting the Old Testament or Jewish scriptures emphasizing a divine right to Palestine. That bothers me.”
“Social media has been very, very important,” Aziz Abu Sarah, a Palestinian peace advocate, blogger, and co-executive of George Mason University’s Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution says. “I don’t think I’ve seen it used as much as it has in the past month.”
Facebook enables a flood of different media sources and opposing opinions traditionally left out of established media sources.
“You’re hearing accounts from the ground from people who are experiencing it firsthand. You’re hearing the story [of Gaza] in a way I certainly can’t remember hearing before,” Timothy McCarthy, a historian and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School said. “I can’t remember any time in the past where the alternative representation to the mainstream media is getting airtime. Social media is wreaking havoc on the way we perceive divisive political issues.”
To narrow down the firehose of information, users have to curate their friend groups and news feeds. But finding a balance between muting upsetting posts and staying well-informed can be a challenge.
Kate Doyle, a graduate student currently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, also differentiated between simple disagreement and extreme rhetoric. “In general, I’m fine with posts that don’t agree with my opinion — I come from a background that’s very opposite my own politics, so I have a lot of friends and family who disagree with me,” she said. “But posts that call people to action and to outrage without any room for debate will make me block someone.”
Unfriending or blocking someone is considered extreme, and very few people do it — less than 5 percent, Pew Research found. But Facebook makes the decision to avoid someone easier with the “hide” button. That little button can keep people from expanding their views or learning beyond what is comfortable.
The emotional intensity surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict leaves little room for nuance. Many people told ThinkProgress they disliked the pressure to pick a side. “If you asked me if I was pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, I would disregard the premise of the question,” Tina Wexler, a medical student in Tel Aviv, said.
Also in Tel Aviv, Adir Cohen argued against the people he found offensive in his feed, but felt the arguments were casting him in a role he didn’t want to play. “I stopped posting things or answering because it threw me to a side even though I’m in the middle about a lot of things,” he said. “I had to delete Facebook from my phone.”
That lack of nuance is taking a serious toll on people’s personal relationships.
Losing Your Humanity
For Tim McCarthy, the last straw was when a close friend endorsed an article claiming Palestinians were an invented people who should instead be called “adjacent Jew-haters.”
“I responded to this post and said this breaks my heart,” McCarthy told ThinkProgress. “It’s really hard to see someone that I love and care about say things that are really hateful. And he responded that it broke his heart to see someone that he loved and cared about say things so twisted by false representations of history, that kind of thing.”
McCarthy penned a Facebook post shortly afterward, saying he was stepping back from social media because he felt he “was witnessing the worst of human nature.”
“For me, it represented my friend losing a part of his humanity,” he said, and pointed to “a larger lack of empathy that I see on every side of this issue, from lots of different kinds of people who are otherwise really thoughtful and decent people, who have gotten pulled in by the violence of this situation.”
It’s really hard to see someone that I love and care about say things that are really hateful.
His situation is unfortunately common. Incendiary Facebook posts can be surprisingly damaging to friendships. A study conducted by the University of Minnesota and Georgia Institute of Technology found that the vast majority of people, 73 percent, have disagreed with a friend online. And nearly 20 percent of them end up unfriending or blocking someone because of it, effectively ruining their relationship.
Dr. Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, told ThinkProgress that when it comes to social media, people weed out what they don’t like much like they do in real life.
“When someone has a worldview quite different from our own, we experience the emotional discomfort of cognitive dissonance,” Rutledge said. “The only solutions are to change our opinions or stop listening.” And sometimes it’s simply easier to avoid someone than work to change your perspective.
People like feeling accepted, and tend to surround themselves with people who share common backgrounds or beliefs online and in real life, the Minnesota study found. That can create an echo chamber in which the same opinions reverberate over and over, shutting out any dissenters.
That self-sorting also means people are not used to talking through opposing viewpoints. Instead they seek reinforcement of their own beliefs.
“People who talk too much about themselves — and sharing your opinion too frequently without listening to others is the same thing — tend to not want to talk with you,” online or otherwise, Rutledge said. And since social media is all about fostering and maintaining relationships, that involves two-way exchanges.
Huma Ashraf, a graduate student in New York, finally unfriended a college friend for constantly posting strident defenses of Israel. “I almost never unfriend people on Facebook but he was just posting every hour. There was a lot of discussion in the comments and I read them because it was a lot of people I went to school with,” she said. But even though the comments were raising other points, “he just ignored it as opposed to actually engaging. He was just kind of ranting a lot.”
Ashraf was surprised to discover this side of her friend. “I hang out with him…I know him well. I didn’t expect that his views were so different — he’s a hippie!” she said. “It’s weird, I feel like I’ve had conversations with him that are on a different level.”
Most people assume that their friends will share similar views. According to the Minnesota study, most social media users believe they were at least 71 percent similar to their online friends. That assumption creates tension during politically divisive news events, when someone you thought you knew posts something offensive that’s out of sync with your personal beliefs. A Pew survey found that 58 percent of Facebook users have been surprised by a friend’s or family member’s opinion about an event in the news on the site.
These experiences caused significant struggles, from trying to rationalize the behavior of a friend to deciding whether to terminate the friendship,” the study found. The disagreements at minimum changed the way friends saw each other — some cut ties entirely.
It’s easier to cut off casual acquaintances — long lost schoolmates, people who grew up with you, or old co-workers. It’s a more complicated calculation when it comes to family or close friends.
It was more than propaganda…it was personal.
Alex Nagler, a 26-year-old New Yorker, said he was usually very vocal about political issues, but was staying quiet on Gaza in part for the sake of his family. “I’ve got a pair of very conservative older Jewish grandparents who are somewhat Facebook-savvy,” he explained. “I know this is a cop-out but sometimes it’s easier for my own sanity to not rock things there.”
Much of the delicacy of the discussion stems from those stronger ties. “Everyone knows someone connected to the conflict,” — a friend or a relative who was killed or injured, Abu Sarah said. So when online discussions went south, he said, “it was more than propaganda…it was personal.”
Israel-based musician Adir Cohen agreed — almost to the word. “I have two family members who died as soldiers — 18 and 19 years old…I have friends in [the army] protecting my ass while I’m sitting in Tel Aviv recording a record,” Cohen said. “It’s personal.”
The Problem With A Social News Feed
The amount of information circulating on social media, especially when news is constantly breaking, is shared faster than it can be authenticated. The proliferation of bad information on social media has caused the most damage, Abu Sarah explained. “There were all these videos of militants shooting rockets, titled ‘This is how kids get killed,’ ‘This is what happens in Gaza,’” which were actually from Syria or places where the people in the video aren’t speaking Arabic, he said.
“I fell for it too,” Abu Sarah added, recalling an article he posted about an Israeli soldier who was boasting about killing children. One of his followers called out the article as false, and Abu Sarah deleted it after not being able to verify whether it was true or a hoax. “If you don’t have the facts, you shouldn’t post something,” he said.
Even though they are risking friendships, many people still feel a responsibility to push back on the false information being shared on Facebook. Cohen said that he hates “comment wars,” but “could not stand the fact that so many of my uninformed friends who really don’t know what to believe were reading these same posts and potentially believing them.”
McCarthy also worried that the extreme rhetoric on his feed was keeping people from learning about the issue. “I’ve seen a deep polarization over the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and I’ve also seen a lot of people I know who don’t know what to think, who have become more and more alienated by the very polarized things that are going on on social media,” he said.
People say things on social media that they would not say to someone in person.
Recycling bad information delegitimizes any efforts to educate the public or work toward a resolution, Abu Sarah pointed out.
And being physically removed from your audience makes it easier to use inflammatory rhetoric. “People say things on social media that they would not say to someone in person. There’s a bit of throwing bombs over the fence,” Nancy Mramor, PhD, a Pittsburgh-based media and health psychologist, told ThinkProgress. “People feel protected by the sense of anonymity the Web gives – even if they’re using their real identities. There’s a feeling of safety where I can block you, and you can’t retaliate the way you want, so I can continue saying what I want.”
You can withdraw from friends online without being noticed in a way that would easily be picked up in real life through social cues, if you were to avoid eye contact or simply walk away from the argument. “With social media you obviously have the ability to ignore it once it’s gone to a place you don’t want it to go,” Nagler remarked. “You don’t have to worry about physically annoying someone to the extent of if you were talking in person.”
The result is a conversation that is more about broadcasting than about exchange. “There is no doubt in my mind that social media is transforming our politics,” McCarthy said. “One of the more negative manifestations of this transformation is we are all able to have an opinion, and express, and assert our opinion in seconds — not minutes or hours or days. There’s no process anymore in our political culture.”
Refusing To Be Enemies
Adding the snap judgment impulses of social media to the powder keg of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems like it could be disastrous. Yet Facebook is also bringing opposing sides together and broadening social circles that are more limited offline.
“I don’t know anybody that I actually hang out with that supports Israel — in what’s going on right now at least,” Ashraf said. “It’s a larger variety of people that I’m friends with on Facebook than I am in my life.”
In the sea of vitriol and blame, a number of Facebook groups have popped up in the past few weeks aimed at bridging the divide. Wexler pointed to Israel Loves Palestine and Palestine Loves Israel as two online communities that have given her hope. “They have been posting every day reminding each other, hey, Palestinians in Gaza don’t hate you. Hey, Israelis don’t hate you. We’re all sad that this is happening,” Wexler said.
Another Facebook group, Jews and Arabs Refuse To Be Enemies, shares pictures and statements from friends, couples, and families who bridge the divide. The group has more than 60,000 followers.
Sarah Hagi said she actually felt more empowered after finding a community online. “From the last time this war happened in 2012, I’ve been more connected with people who are really educated about the issue,” she said. “Before I was kind of scared. I was thinking, I’m Muslim, if I post, people will think I’m Hamas. But I’ve been following Jewish people, from Jewish Voices for Peace, Jewish journalists, different pages from Jewish groups. I’m following more people.”
Similarly, Sarah Seltzer and Abu Sarah credited social media with giving progressive Jews and Palestinians a voice which to speak out against the war.
Seltzer said she felt less alone in protesting the war because of “a critical mass of Jews speaking out. Many of her peers, she said, have started feeling more comfortable voicing their feelings because of “social media, and seeing the images from Gaza.”
Abu Sarah pointed out that traditionally, Palestinians have felt underrepresented in the media. In this context, “social media became important, because it’s the only place where they can tell their story,” he said.
Abu Sarah has made new Israeli friends who recruit him to join in their debates and give a Palestinian perspective that they wouldn’t have heard otherwise. Even when both sides think, “I’m probably not going to believe anything you say, but I still want to hear it,” it’s a learning experience, he said.
Even while muting posts that upset them, many people told ThinkProgress it was important for them to maintain a dialogue with people who disagreed with them.
“One of the reasons I don’t use the defriending option or the unfollowing option routinely or regularly is because I want my wall, I want my group of friends to be able to weigh in and disagree with me and disagree with one another,” McCarthy said.
Cohen agreed. “The people who are truly my friends I would never delete or stop following,” he said. “Those people I have always discussed the issue with and we have always respected each other and loved each other regardless.”
The Challenge to Embrace an Omnicultural Perspective Among Polarized Social Groups
By DAVID MYERS July 06, 2014
More than a decade after the Iraq war began, it still boggles our minds: Sunni and Shia—both revering the Quran, following Muhammad and praying to Allah—killing one another. It brings to mind the 3,500-plus dead from the clashes between Northern Ireland’s Protestants and Catholics—all, at least nominally, following the same Prince of Peace.
One wonders: Why such animosity among those so ethnically and religiously similar? Certainly, Sunni-Shia violence has deep historical-political roots. Ditto the Protestant-Catholic clashes. As the late Ed Cairns, leader of the University of Ulster’s Peace and Conflict Research Group, once explained to me, religious labels can sometimes be markers for just those kinds of deep cultural divisions. “If anything, the more [Northern Irelanders] believed or went to church, the less prejudice they showed,” he said.
But another factor—perhaps as fundamental, though less often explored—is at work and can help explain why seemingly marginal differences can seem so stark: group psychology. To better understand the puzzling intensity of clashes among kindred folk, consider four principles derived from psychological research on group identities.
1) No matter our similarities with others, our attention focuses on differences.
In the 1970s when the Yale psychologist William McGuire invited children to “tell us about yourself,” they zeroed in on their distinctiveness. Those who were foreign-born often mentioned their birthplaces. Redheads volunteered their hair color. Minority children mentioned their race. “If I am a Black woman in a group of White women, I tend to think of myself as a Black,” McGuire and his colleagues observed. “If I move to a group of Black men, my blackness loses salience and I become more conscious of being a woman.” Straight folks sometimes wonder why gay folks are so conscious of their sexual identity, though in a predominantly gay culture the sexual identity self-consciousness would be reversed.
So when people of two subcultures are nearly identical, they often overlook their kinship and become laser-focused on their small differences. Freud recognized this phenomenon: “Of two neighboring towns, each is the other’s most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt. Closely related races keep one another at arm’s length; the South German cannot endure the North German, the Englishman casts every kind of aspersion upon the Scot, the Spaniard despises the Portuguese.”
2) We naturally divide our worlds into “us” and “them,” ingroup and outgroup.
We inherited our Stone Age ancestors’ need to belong, to live in groups. There was safety in solidarity. Whether hunting, defending or attacking, 10 hands were better than two. Like them, we form social identities.
But the benefits come at a cost. Mentally drawing a circle that defines “us” also defines “them.” Moreover, an “ingroup bias”—a preference for one’s own community—soon follows. In experiments,even those in arbitrarily created groups tend to favor their own group. In studies by Henri Tajfel, Michael Billig and others,people grouped together by something as random as a coin toss or the last digit of their driver’s licenses felt a twinge of kinship with their number-mates, and favored their own group when dividing rewards.
3) Discussion among those of like mind often produces “group polarization.”
In one of my own early experiments, George Bishop and I discovered that when highly prejudiced students discussed racial issues, they became more prejudiced. When less prejudiced students talked among themselves, they became even more accepting. In other words, ideological separation plus conversation equaled greater polarization between the two groups.
So it goes in real life too. Analysis of terrorist organizations, for instance, has revealed that the terrorist mentality does not erupt suddenly, on a whim. It begins slowly, among people who share a grievance. As they interact in isolation, their views grow more and more extreme.
By connecting like-minded people, the Internet’s virtual groups often harness group polarization for good purposes, as when connecting and strengthening fellow peacemakers, cancer survivors and rights advocates. But the Internet echo chamber also enables climate-change skeptics and conspiracy theorists to amplify their shared ideas and suspicions. White supremacists become more racist. Militia members become more hostile. For good or ill, socially networked birds of a feather gain support for their shared beliefs, suspicions and inclinations.
4) Group solidarity soars when facing a common enemy.
From laboratory experiments to America immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, shared threats foster unity. During conflict, we-feeling rises. During wars, patriotism surges.
In one of psychology’s famous experiments, the psychologist Muzafer Sherif, in 1954, randomly split Oklahoma City boy campers into two groups for a series of competitive activities, with prizes for the victors. Over the ensuing two weeks, ingroup pride and outgroup hostility increased—marked by food wars, fistfights and ransacked cabins. Intergroup contacts yielded more threats—and stronger feelings of ingroup unity—until Sherif engaged the boys in cooperative efforts toward shared goals, such as moving a stuck truck or restoring the camp water supply.
In more playful ways, these group dynamics also fuel sports rivalries. Think Yankees–Red Sox, March Madness and World Cup soccer. For an ardent Cubs fan, it’s a good day if the Cubs win—or the White Sox lose. Here in West Michigan, America’s biggest small-college sports rivalry plays out whenever my school, Hope College, plays Calvin College, pitting the Dutch-heritage Reformed Church in America tradition against the Dutch-heritage Christian Reformed Church tradition—extending the two churches’ 1857 split over what now seem like minor matters. It’s all in good fun, an intense competition with no fundamental hate.
But when the social dynamics are writ large, people will not only cheer for their groups—they may also kill and die for them. Turning today’s closed fists into tomorrow’s open arms requires recognizing the relative modesty of our differences, finding our deeper commonalities, defining a larger “us,” communicating across group lines and discovering transcendent goals.
Such conflict resolution is most needed, yet most difficult, in times of crisis. When conflicts intensify, images become more stereotyped, judgments more rigid, communication more difficult. Both sides are prone to threaten, coerce or retaliate.
The challenge is for cultures to discover what social psychologist Fathali Moghaddam calls an “omnicultural” perspective that both recognizes commonalities and respects differences. From Iraq to Northern Ireland, the Koreas to the Sudans, this is the great challenge in times of conflict—to embrace “diversity within unity.” E pluribus unum.