The coelacanth

My favourite fish is the coelacanth. (Whaaat? Fish? FISH? You mean the one with scales? And it is not even named Gussie Fink-Nottle! There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.) The coelacanth is what is known as a living fossil. (There are disputes over whether there is such a thing as a living fossil.) I read about the coelacanth in some book when I was in school and I have been fascinated by it ever since.

I recently read a book about it called A Fish Caught in Time. To write a whole book about a fish and keep the reader interested throughout is a tremendous achievement by the author. (You will no doubt be thinking that it also depends on how weird the reader is.) The story of the coelacanth has been called the greatest fish story ever told.(It is more dramatic than Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.)

Let us go to the beginning. (According to the King of Alice in Wonderland, that is generally a  good place to start.)  Not all the way back to 400 million years ago when coelacanths first start appearing in the fossil record. (That reminds me about a joke about the problem of being too exact with large numbers. An attendant in a museum told a visitor that a particular fossil was 65 million and 3 years old. When asked how he knew the age so exactly, he replied that when he joined the museum 3 years ago, he was told that the fossil was 65 million years old.) We will just go back to Dec. 1938 when it was found to be alive when it was thought to have been extinct for about 70 million years.

Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a curator at the East London museum went down to the docks to inspect some fishes that had been been brought for her. She found the pile uninteresting but then found a blue fin sticking out of the pile. When she removed the slime, what was revealed was 'the most beautiful  fish I had ever seen' but she didn't know what it was. She preserved the fish with formalin and wrote a letter with an accompanying diagram to Prof. J.L.B.Smith, a chemistry lecturer at Rhodes University and amateur ichthyologist. J.L.B. (as he seems to have been known; to the best of  my knowledge, he did not consider changing his name to Tyrannosaurus rex). was an obsessive workaholic with incredible mental powers. The author notes:

There are numerous examples of J.L.B.'s extraordinary mental powers. He had a photographic memory, and could read sixteen languages and speak eight. When he went to Mozambique for the first time, he learned Portuguese in three and a half weeks, and then proceeded to give an hour-and-a-half lecture without notes. During the war, when he was not fulfilling his teaching responsibilities or hunting for new fish, he managed to produce three chemistry textbooks, which went into numerous editions and were translated into several foreign languages....Another time J.L.B. recognized, from a distance of fifty yards, a man he had never met, the son of a fellow classmate he had not seen for fifty years.  The shape of his skull, apparently, had been a dead giveaway.

He saw the letter 11 days after it was sent because he was away on Christmas vacation. When he saw the diagram, he thought it resembled the fossil of a fish that he had seen which was thought to have gone extinct 70 million years ago.

It was a remarkable feat of mental agility.  Smith had apparently taken a rough sketch by someone who was not a skilled artist, of a five-foot fish, found in the Indian Ocean off southern Africa, and connected it with a fossil, a little over twelve inches long and 200 million years old; which had been discovered in freshwater in Greenland, and which he had read about in a scientific journal.

If he was right, it would be the greatest zoological discovery of the century. But if he announced it and it later turned out to be wrong, he would become a laughing stock. The only way he could be certain was to see the fish for himself. It was almost 2 months before he could make it to East London by  which time the soft parts of the fish were lost. The author quotes J.L.B.'s reaction on seeing the fish:

Smith was ushered into the inner room where he saw the fish for the first time, sitting on Marjorie's large mounting table: "Although I had come prepared, that first sight hit me like a white-hot blast and made me feel shaky and queer, my body tingled.  I stood as if stricken to stone. Yes, there was not a shadow of doubt, scale by scale, bone by bone, fin by fin, it was a true Coelacanth.

That is the sort of impact a coelacanth has on adults. (It helps if you are an ichthyologist.) The announcement of the discovery was followed by a media frenzy. J.L.B. then determined to catch a second coelacanth to examine its soft parts which were destroyed in the first specimen because of his delay in getting to it. He distributed leaflets all along the East African coast promising a reward of 100 pounds for the finders of the first two coelacanths. But he had to wait for 14 years to get another one. He got a cable from a friend  that a coelacanth had been caught in Dzaoudzi. He had no idea where the place was.

He found that it was an island of the Comoro archipelago. No commercial flight flew there and a boat would take too long. He was desperate to get there as quickly as possible but as before, it was Christmas holidays - either he couldn't get the person on the line or they couldn't help and he said in frustration, 'Why on earth did Coelacanths want to turn up just before Christmas?'

Finally, an air force plane was arranged at the behest of the South African PM to transport him to the Comoros. The crew was not sure if they had got all the diplomatic clearances or even if there was a landing strip at their destination. J.L.B. remarked to the bemused Commandant, 'I bet when you joined the South African Air Force you never expected to command a plane sent to fetch a dead fish.'

When he finally managed to see the fish, JLB had the same reaction that he had the first time. When he finally managed to bring the fish back, South African Broadcasting Corporation interrupted its  regular schedule of programs for a live broadcast by an exhausted JLB:

The broadcast began, and Smith's confidence grew. His delivery was typically measured, but he could not disguise his emotions as he started to relive the experience. When he told of weeping at the sight of the fish, tears started to fall again. When he finished, he was completely spent. The program was later described as one of the most emotionally charged pieces of broadcasting ever to have been aired on South African radio.

When the find was announced to the world, it created a sensation.  The French were astounded by the reaction. They were miffed that a Frenchman had not hogged the limelight. (The Comoros was under French jurisdiction at the time.) The displeasure of the French almost led to a diplomatic row. They then banned foreign scientists from hunting for the fish in their territorial waters. From then on, for over 2 decades, the coelacanth became a 'French fish'.

Right. So why this kolaveri over a fish? Granted it is big, blue and was thought to be extinct for millions of years. What else? The  coelacanth belongs to a group of fishes known as the Sarcopterigians one lineage of which eventually evolved into humans. The coelacanth is thought to be a close cousin of that lineage. At  one time, it was thought to be a direct ancestor of humans but now this theory is discredited. (BTW, who was the first man?)

Another colony of these fish belonging to a different species was discovered in Indonesia in 1997. (Coelacanth is a name given to a whole Order of fishes. The extant species belong to the genus Latimeria - named after Marjorie Courtney-Latimer -  which is not found in the fossil record.) There are tantalising clues they may be found in other places. It may be better for their long term survival if they are never found.

This post has  some curious facts about the fish.  Here is a documentary about it. (Some statements in the program about evolution eg.saying that animals anticipate requirements in a future environment, are misleading.) Here is another documentary about the hunt for the pre-historic fish. If you have not had enough of this magnificent fish (which of course is the case), you can get more information from this site.

The coelacanth has achieved such worldwide fame that when a German magazine asked, 'Why is it worthwhile living this week?' a schoolchild replied, '...coelacanths still exist.' By now, either you are a fan of the coelacanth or ...you are not a fan of the coelacanth. Inspired by this TED talk, I will summarise this post in 6 words - 'I salute thee, good Old Fourlegs'.And with that, dear readers, we come to the end of this piscatorial post.

Stress

Further to my post about zebras, I recently saw a video about stress. 

Perspective change

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! - Shakespeare's Hamlet
Hamlet couldn't have been  more wrong. Exaggerated statements and The Dunning-Kruger syndrome are some reasons for my change in perspective over the past decade. As this TED talk shows, humans are not much more than monkeys with some additional bells and whistles. In The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins relates a story to illustrate a change in  perspective:

Colin Turnbull (1961) took a pygmy friend, Kenge, out of the forest for the first time in his life, and they climbed a mountain together and looked out over the plains. Kenge saw some buffalo ‘grazing lazily several miles away, far down below. He turned to me and said. “What insects are those?”.... At first I hardly understood, then I realised that in the forest vision is so limited that there is no great need to make an automatic allowance for distance when judging size. Out here in the plains, Kenge was looking for the first time over apparently unending miles of unfamiliar grasslands, with not a tree worth the name to give him any basis for comparison.... When I told Kenge that the insects were buffalo, he roared with laughter and told me not to tell such stupid lies...’
Some examples of ideas that have helped me see the buffalo are:

'Brain droppings' by Neil degrass Tyson
TED talk by Ben Goldacre
Dan Ariely on human irrationality
The banned TED talk
V.S. Ramachandran on quirks of the brain
A.C. Grayling on his latest book
An athiest's call to arms
Sam Harris on free will

While being sceptical, it is important not to become cynical. (But this is a fun site.) I saw a quote by Carl Sagan about the need for a judicious mix of skepticism and the need for keeping an open mind:

"It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas...If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you … On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones." -Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism

The Dunning-Kruger Syndrome

I have written about Dunning-Kruger syndrome a couple of times earlier. I think I am a fairly well read person but I hesitate to make definitive comments about most issues because I feel that I am woefully uninformed about many things. I was relieved to find that I was not alone in getting this feeling. In The Denial of Death, Andreas Becker writes:

I remember one of my college professors - a man very much admired as a teacher of medieval history - confessing that the more he learned about the period the less he was prepared to say: the epoch was so complex, so diversified that no general statement could safely be made about it.

I used to literally fall off my wheelchair  when I used to hear people who I thought were not well acquainted with a subject making supremely confident statements about it. I have received many of the most sweeping and confident prognoses of my condition from people who have no connection with the medical profession.

My problem is compounded by the fact that I have to give binary yes/no answers and most questions cannot be answered this way. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, scientist and philosopher,  said that the most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth. My mode of communication ensures generation of distorted truths.

In the first couple of years after my stroke, when I was more naive, I used to make various 'gotcha' statements thinking that I will show everyone how smart I am.But of course I had zero impact. In Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, while trying to convince Florence Craye about something, Bertie Wooster muses:

Once more I had that sense of not making progress. Her face, I observed, was cold and hard, like my kipper, which of course during these exchanges I had been neglecting, and I began to understand how these birds in Holy Writ must have felt after their session with the deaf adder.  I can't recall all the details, though at my private school I once won a prize for Scripture Knowledge, but I remember that they had the dickens of an uphill job trying to charm it, and after they had sweated themselves to a frazzle no business resulted. It is often this way, I believe, with deaf adders.

If you have an argument with these people you get the distinct impression that you are in conversation with the afore-mentioned deaf adder. (I could do with an 'anger room' but how do I use it?) I gradually realised that my best option was to adopt a sphinx-like demeanour with a broad smile (at least I hoped it was a smile).  It is said that speech is silvern but silence is golden. They get plenty of that golden stuff from me. This saved me lot of time and effort.

(According to this TED talk, Jeeves' mantra of studying the psychology of the individual often pays dividends. I heard another story about Kemal Ataturk, the strongman of Turkey. He wanted to discourage the wearing of veils but he adopted a different strategy to that of Nicholas Sarkozy - he made it compulsory for all prostitutes to wear veils.)

But this tactic of keeping mum does put me on a sticky wicket. If I  keep a glum face, it might be perceived as rude. But since I find it difficult to smile, I will try to induce laughter but I must be careful not to overdo it otherwise people will think that I am wildly enthusiastic about their ideas. (I only need to worry about the first and last sentences of this cartoon.)

t think I did not notice this syndrome before my stroke because the educational institutions that I had been to meant that I was generally in the company of people whose average IQ would be higher than that of the population as a whole. You can't get big-headed when you are surrounded by people with brains the size of planets, people who  were likely to discuss Black-Sholes equation over breakfast.I had unconsciously and erroneously imbibed the idea that the wider population will be similar. In other words I was in an ivory tower getting psyched by integral calculus and maximizing objective functions.

With so much brain power around me, it was perhaps not surprising that I had occasional bouts of the Impostor Syndrome.I didn't know till a couple of years ago that there was a name for this type of fear and that it is more widespread than I had imagined.

Ever since I came to know about this phenomenon, I started seeing it everywhere. An internationally well-known case is that of Joe the plumber. I think it is a key problem with denialists of all hues. I don't read much about the science of climate change because the subject is huge  and I don't have the  time for it. Sometimes I see  a denialist article and start reading it to see what the controversy  was all about. Very often I realise that the writer doesn't know the difference between weather and climate so I see no point in proceeding further. It is improbable that lots of very smart people who have spent decades studying an issue will make the simple errors that denialists point out. (Te best cartoon about climate change that I saw was in this TED talk.)

We should all be careful of this arrogance of ignorance.We are most confident about areas that are not our specialized fields because we are not aware of the complexities that might arise in them and we might end up describing a spherical cow. Creationists seem to have PhDs in every field except evolutionary biology. (It is stunning that Dawkins is asked to waste his time on debates like this. )

Contrary to what I was told earlier, I am now more wary of taking seriously people who appear too confident about complex issues. Politicians and religious  leaders immediately spring to mind.

Indiscriminate knowledge

In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi talks of a contrast 'which is inherent in the human condition, since man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.' It is hoped that education will suppress the Mr. Hyde in us and allow our Dr. Jekyll part to flourish. But occasionally the devil gets out to the shock and bewilderment of everyone. Such is the case with the recent Colorado shooting where the suspect is said to be a brilliant science student.

Many educated people seem to do incomprehensible things. Mohammad Atta, the leader of the gang that flew a plane into the WTC in NewYork, was an engineer. Al Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda is a medical doctor. I read about a person employed in Google and earning a lakh of rupees a month who was arrested on terrorism charges.

The more science learns about the brain the more complicated it becomes. In a course on Human Behavioural Biology at Stanford University conducted by Robert Sapolsky, there is a session on individual differences where various brain malfunctions are discussed resulting in people doing bizarre things bringing into question the concept of free will (unless you are a believer).

Compared to other areas of the world, the US seems to have more of the wackos who suddenly shoot people to alleviate their existential angst. I suppose it has something to do with the environment. After all much behaviour is a result of interaction between genes and the environment. In The Trouble with Testosterone, while discussing the case of the Unabomber, Sapolsky concludes with a nice story:

There is a wonderful Russian story that takes place at the gates of heaven, where the newly arrived are judged.  A dead murderer is on trail, fresh from earth where he was shot by the police after his umpteenth murder, the strangling of an elderly woman for her money.  A panel of deceased judges sits in session. And where does God fit on the scene? Not as a judge, but as a required character witness. At some point in the proceedings, he shambles in, sits in a magisterial decrepitude born of the weight of infinite knowledge, and in a maundering, avuncular way, does his best to defend and explain the man - "He was always kind to animals. He was very upset when he lost his favorite top when he was a small boy." ("My red top, you know about my red top!?!" The murderer leaps up, suddenly awash in a torrent of memory. "Of course I do. It rolled down the storm drain on Zlonty Street. It's still down there," God answers with complete affectless knowing.) Finally, the judges tire of God, who is in fact tiresome in his knowledge and forgiveness, and coax him off the stand.
When science brings us something new and startling, when there is a breakthrough that opens new vistas, there is often talk about us acquiring godlike knowledge, and the tacit assumption is that this is a good thing, But the God of this parable is useless, has been shunted aside by the indiscriminateness of his knowledge. Knowledge, familiarity, understanding, must not ever lead us to a detached indiscriminateness. The danger of Olympian knowledge is that you then look down on things from an Olympian height, and from that telescoped distance, things seem equivalent - like a lost red top and a strangled woman, or perhaps an awkward adolescence that produces an awkward adult and an awkward adolescence that produces a murderous one.
But there is a difference.

Free online documentaries

Recently I came across a site called Top Documentary Films which has documentaries on a variety of topics. This will keep me busy for a long time. Some of the videos that I saw were:

1. Jim meets… Sir David Attenborough
2. Parrots, the Universe and Everything - a talk by Douglas Adams. Coincidentally, I heard the mating call of the male kakapo a few days ago on Animal Planet, a ritual that Adams describes in hilarious fashion.
3. Ethics Without Religion
4. Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist
5. The Evolution of Confusion
6. Morality: From the Heavens or From Nature?
7. The Death of the Oceans
8. The Genius of Charles Darwin

The redesigning of this blog is done by Sujit. He was bored by the old look.

Rajesh Khanna, 1942-2012

Rajesh Khann, the first superstar of Bollywood films died a few days ago. He had a distinctive style that is parodied by Govinda in this song. Following my usual practise, I will link to some of my favourite songs picturised on Kaka.

1. zindagi kaisi hai paheli
2. kahin door jab din dhal jai
3. aate jaate khoobsoorat
4. zindagi ek safar hai suhana
5. mere sapnon ki rani
6. o mere dil ke chain
7. yeh shaam mastaani
8. chala jaata hoon
9. ek ajnabi haseena se
10. zindagi ke safar mein