Cyanobacteria, the desert soil, and you

Cryptobiotic soil

Cryptobiotic soil crust in Utah | J. Brew photo

The Palm Springs library talk last week went well: reasonable crowd given the venue, lots of good questions, and though they weren’t set up for video there’s some talk of my doing a repeat even more local and I’ll make sure we get video of that, if it happens.

One of the questions that came up was about something that was related to the topic of my talk but worthy of its whole own presentation: cryptobiotic soil crusts. I was instructed to come up with an hour-long presentation on the topic and come back. I think they may have been kidding.

Cryptobiotic soil crusts, also referred to as cryptogamic soils, or just plain “crypto,” are pretty common in arid lands that haven’t been disturbed for a while. They’re alive, as indicated by the  suffix “biotic”: living communities of half a dozen different kinds of organisms: cyanobacteria, green and brown algae, fungi, lichens, mosses and liverworts. The “crypto” part means that when conditions are less than optimal, the organisms that make up the crust can go dormant, seeming to die off — “hiding” their life. Cryptobiotic.

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Cactus wren

I just had about a fifteen minute conversation with this bird. I was sitting on the couch on our back porch, drinking coffee: my daily routine. The bird came up to investigate me, puzzled over me for a minute or so, and then went off to terrorize the finches who’d gathered around the pile of sunflower seeds I put out every morning. This is a cactus wren, Campylorhynchus brunneicapillus, the largest wren in North America and a common bird in the desert. Even if you don’t see them, you hear them:

I’ve stuck to gender-indeterminate pronouns throughout because I’m not expert enough to determine its sex, given that cactus wrens have little sexual dimorphism. Males sing to announce their territory. They make excellent alarm clocks when you’re camping, and they start about 5:45 a.m. in the summer. This one didn’t sing at me, so I have absence of evidence.

As I typed that last sentence, a cactus wren out in the yard sang for about 10 seconds. Not sure it’s the same one.

Cactus wrens are pretty engaging. They’re nervy and unafraid, inquisitive, even aggressive at times. This wren is the only one in the yard who’ll challenge the resident scrub jays over territory. That’s just attitude: the jays are there for the sunflower seed, and the wren doesn’t care for them much. Smaller seeds, insects, and occasional beaksful of fruit make up its diet. Our landlord planted a peach tree some years ago, and there were cactus wrens among the birds that attacked the ripening fruit.

The cactus wren’s song says “home” to me, the way Stellers’ jays’ squawk did when I lived in the Bay Area, and I smile when I notice it. It’s not my favorite wren song, though. The one I like best is that of the cactus wren’s smaller, shyer cousin the canyon wren Catherpes mexicanus:

I hear that song and no matter where I am, it’s the most beautiful place in the world.

An idol…tarnished!

The Vampire Squid, Vampyroteuthis infernalis has the most bad-ass name and has the coolest, creepiest appearance of all the cephalopods — who doesn’t see it and think Halloween? But it’s a little known fact that it actually drifts in deep and nearly anoxic layers of the ocean, surviving by maintaining a very low metabolism, and from what I’ve heard has a soft, flaccid, jelly-like texture (which actually fits with a vampire: have you ever noticed how people in the movies can easily punch crude wooden stakes right into their hearts?)

But now, further disillusionment from an analysis of their diet. It turns out that the vampire squid literally eats shit to live.

Vampyroteuthis infernalis – literally the "vampire squid from hell" – has a pair of thin, retractable filaments. It uses them like a fishing line, letting them drift and collect bits of waste. Wiping the filaments across its arms, the squid combines the waste with mucus secreted from its suckers to form balls of food, which it gobbles up.

Next they’re going to tell me it doesn’t even sparkle. <throws self on bed, weeps into pillow>

Fluff flattened

A while back, I read Hamza Tzortzis’ “paper”, Embryology in the Qur’an: A scientific-linguistic analysis of chapter 23: With responses to historical, scientific & popular contentions. It was terrible and painful: a 58 page treatise (with big print and lots of white space) expanding obsessively on two sentences from the Quran, claiming that it revealed deep insights about embryology that could not have been known without magical, supernatural insight. It was total bullshit.

Now, get ready for this: a couple of scholars have ripped into the Tzortzis paper at length. Embryology in the Quran: Much Ado about Nothing: A Refutation of Hamza Tzortzis’ Embryology in the Qur’an: A Scientific-Linguistic Analysis of Chapter 23.

It’s 149 pages long.

I haven’t read the whole thing, but did a few spot checks, and it looks solid so far. I’m just worried that now we’re in an escalation spiral, and Tzortzis will reply with a badly researched refutation of the refutation that will be 500 pages long.

The letter I was sent about the paper points out that it’s an important perspective, though: it’s not just Western scientists dismissing an Islamic perspective, but the authors are ex-Muslims who grew up steeped in Islamic culture, so it’s an internal criticism.

While it most probably is the case that you are thoroughly bored with Hamza Tzortzis and his fraudulent claims about Embryology in the Quran, there is a new document recently uploaded that does serious damage to the image of Hamza Tzortzis and at the same time, provides a definitive debunking of the unfortunately popular Islamic Embryology claim that has been touted for the last 30 years; spouted and spread so well, that children growing up in Islamic families take it as just another accepted fact and treat it just the same way they treat the fact that the Earth is round. As an Ex-Muslim, I can attest to this as I too for several years took it for granted that the Quran contained modern embryological facts (even when I knew nothing of the subject as a kid).

The embryology claim is one that has been unfortunately drilled deep into the psyche of most Muslims. The name “Keith Moore” is pretty much a house hold name for many Muslims. It is for this very reason that ex-Muslims like myself consider this new document titled “Embryology in the Quran: Much Ado about Nothing” very very important.

While yourself and many others have refuted Hamza’s hogwash, it is also true that the refutations so far were quite generalized . They very well do appeal to Skeptics (esp. those from the Christian background), however they were never enough to convince most of the Muslims and even ex-Muslims as they grew up knowing every detail of apologetics regarding this claim like the back of their hand.

This is where the new paper stands different. It takes a somewhat “James Randian” approach and uses the exact sources and methodologies used by Muslims to disprove definitively the embryology claim. The arguments in there have such a depth that even Muslims won’t be able to ignore them (or at least not without maintaining a cognitive dissonance).

Good. More voices and more perspectives are always helpful.

Squirrel!

mohavemotiondetect1

Mohave ground squirrels at a camera trap bait pile. Not shown: “Free Skwirl Fud” sign. Photo by U.S. Army Engineer Research & Development Center

It’s a year old, but I just read a paper on one of those species that pops up pretty frequently in environmental impact reports — the Mohave ground squirrel, Xerospermophilus mohavensis — whose conclusions add a little bit more depth to the Deep Time perspective of the desert around here. And by “depth” I mean “epic stories.”

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The ENCODE delusion

I can take it no more. I wanted to dig deeper into the good stuff done by the ENCODE consortium, and have been working my way through some of the papers (not an easy thing, either: I have a very high workload this term), but then I saw this declaration from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

On September 19, the Ninth Circuit is set to hear new arguments in Haskell v. Harris, a case challenging California’s warrantless DNA collection program. Today EFF asked the court to consider ground-breaking new research that confirms for the first time that over 80% of our DNA that was once thought to have no function, actually plays a critical role in controlling how our cells, tissue and organs behave.

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