Oxford University Press's Blog, page 309

Would you survive the zombie apocalypse? [quiz]

The zombie apocalypse presents many challenges – for both the prepared and unprepared. As if dodging an aggressive and cannibalistic undead horde constantly in pursuit of brains isn’t enough, you must also forage for food, find shelter, and brave the elements in a world growing more inhospitable by the minute. Technology is no longer reliable, the creature comforts that we take for granted are no longer guaranteed, and our sense of safety is completely compromised.

But one of the biggest challenges that humans face during the zombie apocalypse is how to stay alive without with our humanity still intact. The zombie apocalypse forces us to make extreme decisions that test the very limits of human morals and ethics.

Watch the video below to hear Greg Garrett, author of Living with the Living Dead, discuss the morality complications of the zombie apocalypse. Then take our quiz to find out if you would survive the zombie apocalypse yourself.

Featured image credit: “graveyard-graves-tree-spooky-night” by Skitterphoto. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Village echoes (and reverb, and delay): the drums of Nepal’s rural festivals and the booming speakers of urban dohori restaurants

Nepal’s dohori restaurants aim to reproduce festive rural environments in urban areas, with folk music and dance performances onstage, and opportunities for restaurant guests to sing and dance themselves. One of the first things that newcomers notice is how loud these restaurants are. The madal, sarangi and flute are supplemented by the harmonium, sometimes tabla and dholak drums, sometimes khaijadis, sometimes the various drums, shahnais and horns of the Panchai Baja, and electronic drum pads with a palette of synthesized sounds to amp up the beat and fill up the dance floor. Sound systems add distortion as well, as sound technicians crank them up to top volume, adding maximum levels of echo, reverb, and delay.

When I brought guests who were not already dohori fans to these restaurants, they continually asked me to account for this loud, echoing sound. Yet performers’ answers just didn’t seem sufficient. “It’s to call people into the restaurant” some said, not very convincing when the restaurant was in a basement. “Echo, reverb and delay are what make the music sound Nepali,” a recording engineer told me. But I still wondered, why such prominent reverb and delay? “It has to sound like it’s echoing through the hills!” he said.

This was in line with scholarly work on the related genre of Nepali lok pop (folk pop), and it was obvious that studio recordings emphasized echo and reverb. But I was still skeptical about volume, wondering if dohori restaurant performers just compensated for the (common) lack of monitors by turning everything up so they could hear themselves. This was certainly part of the reason everything was so loud. But when I attended the yearly festival of kauda chudka dance in the village of Tallo Gyaja in Gorkha district, I finally began to hear what the performers and sound engineer had meant.

This festival was my first rural experience of the hill-area aesthetic of overlapping sounds emplacing and broadcasting location. A group of restaurant performers and I, including Ganesh Gurung from Dovan Dohori Sanjh, left Kathmandu late in the day, arriving in Gorkha at dusk to begin the two-hour walk uphill to Gyaja, Ganesh’s village. As we walked in the dark, we became aware of the beat of khaijadi drums, some approaching from the right, some from the ridge above, some seemingly a few hills over. The khaijadi beats echoed through the hills, announcing to all in earshot that a group was approaching.  When we got to the village we were greeted by a delightful, deafening cacophony of khaijadi beats, groups of teenage Gurung and Magar boys and girls singing, and the ghamaura bells tied around dancers’ feet and shaken by other group members in counterpoint to the khaijadi.

Twenty years ago these groups might have called themselves rodhi; now, they were “youth clubs” from Gyaja and nearby villages. At least five groups from villages around southern Gorkha, Chitwan, and Tanahun districts were there, all playing at the same time, all overlapping, no one group standing out above others unless you stood right in the center of their performance. Even more would arrive through the course of the night and the next day. It was left to the ear to concentrate on one group, so as not to lose step in the dance.

Photo: The Lower Gyaja chudka dance group with khaijadi players and singers. (Photo by Anna Stirr)

At the beginning of each new dance sequence, someone would sing an unaccompanied couplet, which everyone then repeated along with the refrain as the beat came in and the dance sequence progressed. A group from Upper Gyaja was singing a new song of local creation and political import: “Riban kapalaima, ganatantra aune bhayo hamro Nepalaima.” “Ribbon in your hair, people’s democracy is coming to our Nepal.” While the refrain referenced recent political changes, the couplets were still about love and village life. The reference to democracy was a collective sigh of relief and cry of celebration that now, after a decade of civil war, competitions like this chudka gathering could again be held all day and all night long without fear.

https://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Kauda-Mathilo-Gyaja-Gorkha.mp3

Audio: Upper Gyaja, Gorkha, Kauda Group singing “Ribbon in your hair”  

Mothers of the village kept alcohol flowing, and offered snacks of sel roti and potato curry in locally made leaf bowls. The celebration would continue for three days and nights.

We climbed up above the village, in the pitch darkness, and finally I understood the sonic environment that dohori restaurants were trying to reproduce. In the daytime, the chautari with its shady trees provided a cool resting place on the hilltop, with a view over the hills and valley; in the nighttime, the sense of the terrain was aural. The village of Gyaja stood out as the main source of sound, and seemed to be drawing in the fainter strains of khaijadi beats still approaching from the west, echoing off the hill on which we stood.

Photo: Village children, Sriram Ale, Anna Stirr, and Prithvi Gurung, at the chautari above Lower Gyaja. (Photo by Ram Kumar Singh)

I was reminded of the “translocal” entertainment and tourism districts in Kathmandu and Pokhara, where dohori, disco, Hindi film songs, and other musical styles spill out of open windows, overlapping, indeed calling the people in to experience their sonic environments, and echoing off neighboring buildings rather than hills, while the inside of each club intensifies the experience of being enveloped in sound, juxtaposed with the moments of relative silence that allow concentration on the words of an improvised couplet.

The volume and heavy use of echo, reverb and delay in dohori restaurants was not meant to mimic discos, as some Kathmandu residents had surmised. Instead, it electronically reproduced the sound of dozens of drums together in an unelectrified village surrounded by hills. But the parallel with discos’ sound further linked the worlds of village and city, as dohori restaurants’ attempt to portray rurality coincided with loudness and electronic effects as sonic markers of cosmopolitan urbanity.

Featured image credit: “Hilltop tree” by Tim Rogers. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr. 

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Beyond the cold fact: The WPA narratives, Brazil’s black peasants, and the conduct of oral history

Last month the latest issue of the OHR hit the streets, bringing a litany of groundbreaking oral history content. Today we hear from Oscar de la Torre, author of a piece in OHR 44.2 that explored the place of narratives of good masters in the oral memories of Afro-Brazilians. Below, he asks what “layers of meaning” emerge through these recordings that perhaps fall outside the bounds of either purely factual information or oral traditions.

When the 1988 Constitution recognized and gave lands to black rural communities descending from slaves, the black peasants of Brazil made a sudden entrance into the country’s political realm. As they began to embrace their African ancestry and made it to the news all over the country, a number of scholars and journalists scrambled for some research funding, grabbed their recorders, and headed to the remotest corners of the country’s gigantic wilderness to interview these apparently unknown black peasants. It was an endeavor comparable to the famous WPA slave narratives from the Great Depression.

The process of recognizing and titling the black communities started in the 1990s with a technical report clarifying the community’s past ties to slavery, so the first wave of scholars that studied them had the goal of unearthing memories about life under this institution, just as in the case of the WPA narratives. Both sets of interviews tried to rescue experiences from a time when most interviewees were only children, and in the case Brazil, from an era in which most interviewees had not even been born. In fact, a number of anthropologists from the states of Pará, São Paulo, or Rio de Janeiro, often collected “oral traditions,” more than personal experiences or memories. As we know, oral traditions can under certain premises be used to accompany and complement historical studies, but they need to be carefully managed, and cross-examined with other sources. Instead, a number of the early reports on the Brazilian black communities took oral traditions just as factual evidence, dismissing the rich but often ignored symbolic load that they carried. A recent PhD thesis written in Amazonia, for example, took the stories about a well where the former slaves were buried without proper rituals as factual evidence, when it is highly likely that this story symbolizes a shared past marked by collective trauma and abuse, more so than indicating a specific place where this happened.

As we know, oral traditions can under certain premises be used to accompany and complement historical studies, but they need to be carefully managed, and cross-examined with other sources.

The Brazilian scholars who collected oral histories during the 1990s and 2000s also worked under tight schedules, because some black communities started the process of official recognition as a way of stopping the land grabs of landowners and agribusiness during those years. Working to meet tight deadlines meant that some early studies lacked a deeper consideration of the type of evidence they had in their hands. In the Trombetas River (Amazonia), for example, the report published in 1991 relied on a number of oral myths and stories understood as quasi-factual evidence from the time of slavery. For example, an oral narrative about an elderly woman who was also a powerful spiritual leader at the time some maroon communities were created was interpreted as a signpost that this woman was already old during the early 1800s. Shortly afterwards, a historian found a travelogue featuring a photograph of the same woman taken in 1902. The narrative, in other words, had been used as factual evidence in a somewhat careless manner. Like this, other reports written in the provinces of Maranhão, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, or Bahia, gave a somewhat superficial treatment to the oral traditions conveyed by the black peasants, especially at the beginning.

Cases such as these point to the fact that there are still numerous stories and layers of meaning waiting to be probed in studies about black oral traditions in Brazil. The Oral History and Image Laboratory from Rio de Janeiro’s Federal Fluminense University or UFF, or the Federal University of Maranhão, are repositories of a large number of interviews with slave-descendants from the 1980s and beyond waiting to be interrogated with new questions in mind. If researchers can approach them formulating imaginative questions that point not to slavery, but to events experienced after it was abolished, and if they can approach them with new conceptual tools drawn from cultural and media studies, such collections can bear a number of valuable lessons and relate a number of interesting stories. My Oral History Review, “Sites of Memory and Time Slip,” points to two of these concepts, but there are more. Why are there no literary studies of the figure of the patriarchal slaveowner, for example? Why has no one investigated yet the relationships between discourses about slaveowners and post-emancipation landowners? Why has no one interrogated the gender roles and representations of both black peasant women and affluent white women embedded in these sets of memories? To the best of my knowledge, there is also little to nothing published on the racial categories and representations that rural Brazilians employ in their daily life.

Oral histories about black peasants in Brazil, in sum, are newer than in the U.S. They have not experienced as many waves of scholarship as the WPA narratives, which have been alternatively embraced and rebutted by scholars like Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Leon Litwack, Eugene Genovese, Ira Berlin, Sharon Musher, or Michael Gomez, ever since they were published in the 1940s. That is why there is still substantial room to tackle them with new questions, new concepts, and new approaches. Our beloved oral histories constitute a kind of evidence that will yield rich and nuanced responses about the history of rural Brazilians–and about the history of American ones as well, once someone starts a comparative study. But in order to do so, they demand to be treated with a sensitive eye, an open-minded ear, and an imaginative tackle.

Featured image: “Vallée de l’Amazone de Faro a Alemquer, Rio Trombetas – Rio Ariramba” by Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Test your knowledge of the Russian Revolution [quiz]

This year marks the centenary of one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. In 1917, Russia’s old order was swept away, with the dissolution of the monarchy and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, leading to the founding of the first Communist state. The changes to life in Russia which followed were huge and far-reaching — not only for citizens, but for the international community as well. Why not test your knowledge of the Russian Revolution with our quiz?

Featured image credit: The Bolshevik by Boris Kustodiev. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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How do we decide whom to rely on?: A Q&A with Mario L. Small

When people are facing difficulties, they often feel the need for a confidant-a person to vent to or a sympathetic ear with whom to talk things through. How do they decide on whom to rely? In theory, the answer seems obvious: if the matter is personal, they will turn to a spouse, a family member, or someone close. In practice, what people actually do often belies these expectations.

We sat down with Mario L. Small, author of Someone To Talk To, to answer some key questions into how we decide whom to rely on and understanding social networks.

Why did you decide to look into the topic of who we connect with, how, and why?

I came upon the topic by chance. Some years ago, I was interviewing mothers in New York for a study about the networks they were forming in their children’s childcare centers. When I asked them about whom they were willing to trust their children with, they often said they were careful not to trust others. But when I asked them to recall who they had actually left their children with, many of them had in fact trusted their kids with other parents they didn’t know that well. I began wondering whether people might be more willing to trust others than they seem to believe, and whether trust didn’t work as we tend to think it does.

What can we learn and take away from this, in regards to our everyday lives?

I learned that we are far more willing to confide in people we are not close to than we tend to say about ourselves, or than social science theories predict about how people use their networks. Most people confide in their spouses and close friends, sure. But they also share very personal worries, problems, and concerns with their bartenders, hair dressers, gym partners, coworkers, barbers, people at church, and of course therapists and religious leaders. In fact, the idea of sharing something very personal with the person sitting on the next seat on the plane is common. The need to talk is so pervasive that what people often need is not so much a best friend (though these are great to have) as the ability to interact regularly with people in contexts where they have the time to talk.

Coffee talks by Joshua Ness. Public domain via Unsplash.

How should we analyze and understand social networks?

One of the consequences of the spread of network science, and the rise of “big data,” is that scientists now study friendships and networks with enormous datasets from online platforms such as Facebook, where the relations among thousands of people can be mapped and analyzed to reveal their underlying structure. These studies are wonderful and important, but we also need studies that  go small rather than “go big,” and  probe how individuals actually think about and use their networks in their everyday life. Studies that go small and deep can reveal aspects of human nature that are difficult to see in large-scale sweeping studies that often require simplifying assumptions. In this case, one of those assumptions—that people will only trust personal matters to those they are close to—was shown to be wrong by just following how individuals really related to others in their everyday contexts.

What was the most surprising thing you learned from your research?

When I began this study I was expecting some, but not most people, to be willing to confide in acquaintances and other “weak ties.” For example, I assumed that the graduate students I studied might be more likely to confide in people they are not close too  than people in general. I was surprised by how pervasive it was—people of all races, class backgrounds, women and men, younger and older adults. Americans of all walks of life often talk about important or personal matters to people they are not close to.

Why is this topic relevant today?

For some time, people have been saying that online platforms such as Facebook are making us lonely, because they encourage us to accumulate “friends” who are not really friends. Some part of those arguments is true. People can create an online existence that seems increasingly removed from their reality, one more focused on seeming happy than being truly fulfilled. But in spite of social media platforms, the kind of interpersonal networks we experience in the real world still matter. The fact that so many people today still discuss their personal worries with so many of those they run into, physically, in the real world, tells me that such interpersonal networks matter as much as ever.

Do you have advice on how to connect with people, if you’re someone who finds it difficult?

I would say it is useful to be comfortable with different ways of connecting. Having deep personal friends is great, but the act of talking is probably more important than whom it is we talk to. It is possible to feel catharsis from sharing something troubling with someone you don’t know very well. And such conversations often turn strangers into acquaintances, acquaintances into friends. So, spending a great deal of time around other people—at cafes, neighborhood bars, barbershops and hairdressers, laundromats, religious institutions, social clubs, sporting activities, festivals, neighborhood organizations, and the like—being physically in the presence of others tends to encourage interactions. And interactions make it easier to connect.

Featured image credit: black wire art piece by William Bout. Public domain via Unsplash.

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Humankind’s battle to conquer the seas

The relationship, through history, between humans and the sea has been one of conflict and conquest. The dangers of traveling on such a fickle, treacherous, and alien environment could easily mean death for early seafarers and explorers (and indeed it still can today). What is even more impressive, and perhaps mind-boggling, is that those venturing to sea in pre-history did not know what they would find, if anything at all. So why did humans first take to the sea? What drove them to surf and sail into the unknown? One reason may be our inquisitive nature.

Now we can begin to understand the ‘why?’, but what has archaeology revealed about our ancestors and how they took to the oceans?

The often hostile environment that is the sea meant that safety was never certain. This short Breton fisherman’s prayer describes the perils of the ocean and encapsulates the fear, and necessary hope, that underpinned every voyage.

Early explorers braved unimaginable feats, charting courses into the unknown, and doing what no other had done before them (at least as far as we know and was recorded). These great adventures led many to treat their reports and discoveries with much scepticism. Incidentally, this scepticism also gives us some of the best-recorded evidence of what they claimed, and modern understanding of the world enables us to verify some of these stories.

The accounts we have of Pytheas’s voyage are largely from those who didn’t believe he had done what he said he’d done. His lost book, also titled On the Ocean, exists only in  fragments quoted in other works.

 

Featured Image: “beach-clouds-landscape-ocean” by Josh Sorenson. CC0 via Pexels. 

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What brought down the coal industry and will its recent recovery last?

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Donald Trump ran for office on a platform that included supporting the coal industry. His open embrace of coal mining gave hope to an industry that has experienced a steady decline in production and jobs since the mid-2000s. In 2016, coal production reached its lowest point since 1978, when the US population was only 70% of what it is today. Many observers and analysts of the energy sector have their doubts about whether coal will recover, as natural gas prices remain low and renewable energy projects continue growing. Despite what some may call a “secular decline,” signs point to a minor recovery in the coal industry in 2017, largely because of export markets in Europe and Asia. Whether the industry can make this a long-term trend remains uncertain, depending more on energy reforms overseas than on domestic politics at home.

In 2005, nearly 40% of US electricity production used coal. At the time, natural gas prices were two-to-three times their current prices, and the renewables sector was in its infancy. “King coal” dominated the electricity sector and had steady export markets in Asia and Europe.

Beginning in the late-2000s, US energy consumption plateaued and was beginning to decline. Americans were using less energy in the electricity sector and industrial sector, as the population began to stabilize and the economy began to slow down following the recession. Even the automotive sector was beginning to change with the advent of hybrid passenger vehicles. The declining consumption of energy meant that coal would need to compete against cleaner burning natural gas and renewables.

With hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”), natural gas prices reached historically low levels. This meant that coal was no longer guaranteed to be the least costly fuel source for power generation, as 92% of coal goes toward power generation, and the remainder goes toward steel production and industrial manufacturing. By the end of the Obama administration, natural gas had become so inexpensive nationwide that it was the main source of power generation in the United States overall for the year. Adding renewable portfolio standards and environmental regulations at the state and federal levels, the coal industry was experiencing an increasingly rapid decline by the end of 2016.

Eagle Butte mine from the visitor overlook platform by Mr. Satterly. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Only a few states produce coal in the United States, which makes the politics of protecting coal very targeted. Wyoming produces 42% of all coal in the United States, with West Virginia producing 11% and Kentucky  7%. Coal production in the western United States is largely automated; the production involves far fewer miners per ton of coal than in West Virginia. The vast majority of coal miners are located in Appalachia, where economic conditions have declined gradually since the 1980s relative to other parts of the country.

The geography of coal production makes the electoral benefits of pushing for coal subsidies far from obvious for national politicians. According to a Pew Research poll conducted between 4-9 January 2017, two-thirds of Americans believe that developing alternatives to fossil fuels should be an important priority for addressing America’s energy supply. Even coal-producing areas of Ohio support clean energy resources. According to a recent statewide poll, a large majority of Ohio voters support policies that encourage the use of clean energy, including a renewable portfolio standard and revised rules governing how far wind turbines can be sited from residential areas. It seems that propping up the coal industry has a very narrow support base among the electorate, and only targets a few states that typically vote Republican in national elections.

The recent increase in coal production stems from the slight rise in natural gas prices in 2017 and the growing demand for coal in Europe, despite their environmental and climate policies, and continued demand in China. France experienced disruptions in its nuclear power plants, prompting a need for coal imports. Germany has been purchasing coal for years from the United States, needing a supplement to its large solar and wind industries. President Trump also announced that the United States would increase coal exports to Ukraine, which has been unable to recover coal from the separatist regions neighboring Russia.

Recently, the US Department of Energy released a long-awaited study on reliability in the US electricity sector. During a recent hearing in Congress, the study was referenced on many occasions, with some in the energy industry suggesting that coal and nuclear plants should be eligible for benefits for providing reliability to the grid. However, it remains unclear what form, if any, these reliability payments would take, as subsidizing specific fuels has become politically contentious in recent years (and ironically a complaint by the coal industry against renewables).

At least in 2017, the coal industry is experiencing a marginal recovery. Nonetheless, whether it can compete against cheap and cleaner natural gas and renewables will ultimately determine the future of coal in the United States, just as the effectiveness of clean energy programs in Europe and Asia will determine its export markets. According to US and international agencies, the prospects are not auspicious.

Featured image credit: Giant coal trains near North Antelope Rochelle mine in Wyoming by Kimon Berlin. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.

 

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On theory and consensus in science: a journey in time

In ordinary discourse, a theory is a guess or a surmise, as in “that’s only a theory.” In science, however, a theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is supported by confirmed facts and/or observations. Verification of a theory’s predictions ensures its eventual acceptance by the community of scientists working in the particular discipline.

“Acceptance by the community” means that a consensus has been reached. In other words, at least a large majority, if not almost all, of the scientists who work in the discipline have agreed that the particular theory is the best way to explain or understand the relevant phenomena. In contrast to the bogus claim of some global warming deniers, reaching consensus is an integral feature of successful scientific theories. Once reached, the culmination of consensus is the publication of monographs and textbooks, and the introduction of university/college courses on the subject.

How consensus may be achieved is beautifully illustrated by the development of quantum theory.

It began somewhat inauspiciously with the concept that light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation consists of particles now called photons, but initially referred to as radiation “quanta.”

Max Planck introduced the concept as a means of justifying the formula he created in 1900 that successfully accounted for the experimental data on blackbody radiation. Despite this, the quantum-of-radiation concept was ignored or rejected until Albert Einstein invoked it in 1905, when he successfully explained the photoelectric effect, wherein radiation incident on a metal can eject electrons from it. Even then, the concept was not widely accepted, and experiments were carried out later that attempted to refute Einstein’s explanation, but ended up confirming it.

Why was the radiation quanta concept difficult to accept? Because the overwhelming consensus at that time held that electromagnetic radiation was composed of waves. It was a consensus that hardly wavered even though the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment had failed to find evidence for the ether, postulated as the medium through which the waves traveled.

Of course, such steadfastness did not hinder the eventual development of quantum theory. The next step in its development was the conclusion of Ernest Rutherford in 1911 that the structure of atoms was analogous to the solar system, with the positively-charged nucleus playing the role of the sun and the electrons being the analog of the planets. Two years later, Niels Bohr used Rutherford’s solar-system model as part of his quantized theory of the hydrogen atom, which successfully accounted for the experimental data.

Bohr’s theory, which involved quantization of radiation and also of energy and angular momentum, was a dead end, since it failed when applied to any atom other than hydrogen. Furthermore, Bohr’s theory suffered from another drawback: according to standard electromagnetic theory, the electron in hydrogen, which Bohr stated was orbiting the proton, would quickly spiral onto it, thereby collapsing the atom. Such collapse did not occur, and though Bohr could not explain why, he made a virtue of necessity by declaring the obvious, that somehow atoms did not collapse.

Other attempts were made that utilized the quantization concept, but none provided insight, and while it seemed important, it effectively remained an orphan.

Louis de Broglie by the Nobel Foundation. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In fact, it wasn’t until 1924 that the penultimate step was taken, when Louis de Broglie introduced a vital new concept into the mix: he hypothesized that matter, in particular particles like electrons, would gain a wavelength once they were in motion.

So, in 1924 the concepts of quantization and matter waves had been articulated, as was Wolfgang Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, which he had hypothesized to explain the structure of the periodic table of elements. Not yet articulated was a theory that incorporated these concepts and explained microscopic phenomena.

That final step came next, when not one but three equivalent versions of quantum theory were proposed.

Werner Heisenberg produced the first one in 1925. Known subsequently as “Matrix Mechanics,” it was quickly and successfully applied by Pauli to the hydrogen atom. The second one was the brain child of Paul Dirac, a 23-year old English graduate student. Known as the “Transformation Theory,” he applied it to the hydrogen atom in an article that appeared five days after Pauli’s.

The third version was that of Erwin Schrödinger, who was motivated by a remark made after a seminar he gave in Germany on de Broglie’s hypothesis. The gist of the remark was that if matter displayed waves, then what was needed was a “wave equation.” Schrödinger produced a theory, and in 1926, like Pauli and Dirac, he successfully applied it to the hydrogen atom, among many other results. Schrödinger’s eventually became the most used version.

Various conclusions and confirmations were quickly reached. The theory was used to calculate or explain the structure of atoms and of molecules, including why atoms did not collapse. Electrons in a scattering experiment were shown to have the appropriate de Broglie wavelength. Equally important, Max Born resolved a puzzle concerning Schrödinger’s equation, whose solutions involve quantities called “wave functions.” What a wave function meant was initially unknown. Born’s 1927 interpretation was that wave functions are related to probabilities, for instance that an electron would be at a particular position in atom. It was the final ingredient needed to achieve consensus concerning quantum theory.

By 1928, quantum theory had become the new paradigm.

Featured image credit: Varsha ys by Varsha Y S. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons . 

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The art of witchcraft: six illustrations [slideshow]

Witchcraft dates back 5,000 years to the beginning of writing. Its history offers glimpses into the human psyche and has excited the minds of artists, playwrights, and novelists for centuries.

Referencing The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic, we’ve pulled together a slideshow of six fascinating facts about the history of witchcraft.

Witchcraft and demonic temptation

By the fifteenth century the Devil was seen as the embodiment of evil, and witches were clearly associated with him. Extensive literature was in existence which stressed the reality of demons, accepted that they had regular contacts with humans. In Formicarius (written in the late 1430s), theologian Johannes Nider gave a vivid impression of peasant witches who caused harm in a number of ways: causing infertility, causing illness, destroying crops, killing children by maleficium (evildoing).

The ability to do this harm was obtained through demonic assistance granted after the witches had renounced their faith and decided to worship the Devil. These witches worshipped the Devil in large numbers at nocturnal meetings where they desecrated the cross, ate the bodies of babies, and indulged in promiscuous sexual orgies. Nider, in the course of a discussion of Joan of Arc, established another important point: women were more prone to demonic temptation than men, and hence more prone to witchcraft and perfectly capable of using demonic powers.

Image credit: Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Wellcome Library, London. Please do not use without permission.

Witchcraft and ritualistic herbs

The root of the mandrake, which sometimes had a humanoid form, and was carved to enhance such a resemblance, accrued a huge amount of magical lore. It was kept for good luck, bestowed divinatory powers, was used in love magic rituals, enhanced one’s chance of winning lawsuits, as well as having numerous uses in herbal medicine.

Image credit: Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London. Please do not use without permission.

Witchcraft and spiritual beliefs

Saducismus triumphatus (1681) compiled first-hand accounts of witches, poltergeists, and other occult phenomena as a way to counter the increasingly fashionable skeptical attitudes to witches and the spirit world—attitudes which threatened to encourage atheism. Author Joseph Glanvill a member of the Royal Society and a man fully abreast with current scientific thinking, sought to harness this thinking and the experimental method to demonstrate the proof of the spirit world.

Image credit: Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London. Please do not use without permission.

Witchcraft and power

Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat represented a very complex view of witches and their power. The print drew on a combination of classical and Italian models, on humanist ideas, and on the popular iconography of carnival. While Aphrodite Pandemos, the earthly Venus and goddess of lust, may have been the model for the woman riding a goat, the winged putti (naked, chubby male children) referenced the cults of Priapus and Dionysius found in fifteenth-century Italian works, and the Capricornian goat alluded to the association of witches and the god Saturn in much late medieval planetary literature and illustration. Dürer’s overt reference to a backward ride on a goat, represented in the reversal of his monogram signature, drew on cultural motifs and practices associated with the vices, carnival culture, and cuckoldry, to represent a wild and powerful woman who appropriates male power and reverses the proper gender order.

Image credit: Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG cph 3c23495u. Please do not use without permission.

Witchcraft and crime

Young children, teenagers, adults, the elderly, men and women, simple folk and members of the elite, magistrates, Catholic priests and Protestant ministers, were all accused, charged, and executed as witches. Usually, a witch was imagined as the enemy within a community, although witches could also be the enemy from outside (a vagrant, beggar, or gypsy). Self-interest, insubordination, revenge, hatred, envy, greed, belligerence, and fornication were thought to drive these “witches’”—literally into the arms of Satan, from a demonologist’s point of view.

Depending on the political, religious, social, and particularly the juridical context, the relevant indictments listed an assortment of suspected evil doings. These included such atrocities as committing malevolent witchcraft against people and livestock, suckling a demon in the shape of a pet, creating tempests and hailstorms by evil spells, shape shifting, night riding through the air, and gathering at sabbats to feast on human flesh and copulate with devils. Michael Heer and Matthäus Merian’s copper engraving Zauberey (above) depicts the witches’ sabbat and witches’ crimes.

Image credit: “Zauberey 1626” by Michael Herr. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Featured image credit: “cat-silhouette-cats-silhouette” by bella67. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Life in the fast lane: how quickly can a new species evolve?

The world is changing fast, and evolution is not staying behind. The curious case of a new species of flower that evolved in the north isles of Scotland shows that evolution can create new species in a matter of years.

The environment around us is changing rapidly as a human population of seven billion consumes resources more quickly than the planet can replenish them, and technology helps us reach the most remote corners of the planet. There are probably no places on Earth that are not affected in one way or another by human activities.

The effects of climate change, land-use change, urbanization, and global trade and travel on ecological systems are well documented. In the past decades we have accumulated a number of examples that human-driven changes cause evolutionary change.

With peppered moths turning black in response to environmental pollution and then back to peppered when lichens came back after the Clean Air Acts, warfarin resistance rats, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and plants that can survive weed-killers, we have plenty of examples of rapid evolutionary change.

But one area where evolution may have a hard time keeping up the pace is the origin of new species. The evolution of a new species requires more than just a change in wing colour or a mutation in the metabolism of toxic compounds. For a new species to evolve, you also need to ensure that the new organism is reproductively incompatible with other similar organisms. In other words, you need reproductive isolation.

Without reproductive isolation, emerging species run the risk of merging back with their ancestors, resulting in incomplete speciation. But evolving reproductive isolation is often a gradual process that requires many changes (mutations) which accumulate over a long period of time. We tend to think of the origin of species as something that takes thousands or even millions of years. Speciation is not usually a fast phenomenon. Unless you are talking about a polyploid.

What are polyploids?

One of the most dramatic mutations that an organism can suffer is the duplication of its entire genome, a phenomenon known as polyploidy. Polyploid organisms have twice (or more) the number of chromosomes of their ancestors. For example, humans usually have 23 pairs of chromosomes, and a polyploid human would have 46 pairs. But such a drastic change in the genome of an organism is often deadly, and in fact there are no humans with that many chromosomes. The exceptions to this rule include plants and other organisms, such as some fish and amphibians, which are much more tolerant to carrying twice the usual number of chromosomes.

Flowering plants also seem to be particularly robust to genome doubling. In fact, all flowering plants have had one or more episodes of genome duplication in their evolutionary history. But what does polyploidy have to do with speciation?

Magic traits

Polyploidy can be a mechanism of “instantaneous” speciation. This is because plants that survive the doubling of their genome are not only different in morphology, but are also reproductively isolated from their immediate ancestors. The reason for their reproductive isolation is simple: organisms with different numbers of chromosomes usually produce sterile offspring. An example of this is horses and donkeys, which produce offspring (mules) that are sexually sterile, and therefore an evolutionary dead-end.

Traits that cause the evolution of both different characteristics and reproductive isolation have been called by theoretical biologists “magic traits”. Polyploidy, or genome doubling, is a good candidate for such a magic trait.

One of the youngest species on the planet?

The Shetland archipelago, off the north coast of Scotland, is home to one of the few known examples of a new type of plant that has evolved through genome duplication in the last 200 years. The Shetland monkeyflower evolved from the common monkeyflower (Mimulus guttatus), a species native to North America, but which invaded the British Isles in the 1800s. Because its ancestor has only been around Shetland for about 200 years, we know that the new plant must be younger than that.

A Shetland monkeyflower (Mimulus guttatus), next to a 50 pence piece to demonstrate size. Copyright of Mario Vallejo-Marin and used with permission.

The Shetland monkeyflower evolved on a roadside ditch among other wildflowers. It is superficially similar to its ancestor: It has bright yellow flowers, with tiny red spots in the centre. Under UV light, both of them display a “bull’s eye” pattern, which although invisible to us, can be detected by bees and other pollinators.

But what really makes the Shetland monkeyflower special is its number of chromosomes. It has twice the number of chromosomes as its ancestor (14 vs. 28 pairs), and exemplifies the evolution of a new type of plant through genome doubling.

The doubling of its genome also produces some subtle but important differences in the way the new plant looks. The Shetland monkeyflower has larger leaves, larger flowers, and takes longer to flower than its ancestor. Having twice the amount of DNA in their cells, seems to have some immediate repercussions.

The discovery of this new plant is so recent, that it has not yet been formally named. Naming a new species requires careful descriptions and comparisons with other related species. But the lack of name also reflects a common prejudice among botanists. Polyploid organisms often remain officially nameless because a doubling of the genome is sometimes not deemed sufficient to recognise a different species despite the fact that it is likely to be reproductively isolated.

Variation in the number of chromosomes characterizes some older evolutionary lineages (sometimes called polyploid complexes), and members of these lineages often share the same scientific name (e.g. the Scottish bluebell, Campanula rotundifolia). This raises an interesting question. When should we name a new species? Is reproductive isolation and genome doubling enough? If not what else is required?

Regardless of whether we give the Shetland monkeyflower a new scientific name or not, the evolution of this new plant in a wind-swept roadside ditch of a remote island represents a beautiful example of rapid evolution in action. In a rapidly changing world, the origin of new species via polyploidy is a reminder that evolution, even speciation, is not necessarily a slow phenomenon.

Featured image credit: A Shetland monkeyflower (Mimulus guttatus). Copyright of Mario Vallejo-Marin and used with permission.

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