Most species originate in the tropics

Yesterday was the first really good day of 2013 to swim in a pond – two months later than in 2012 – and today is the first supertropical day of the otherwise cloudy year 2013 with temperatures reaching 35 °C in Pilsen where the warmth has its headquarters. Prague was colder but 33.5 °C was still enough (by 0.3 °C) to beat the record for this day which didn't occur in 2012 but in... 1934. ;-) A tropical topic may therefore be appropriate.

Because Slovak geologist Mr Adam Tomášových is among the 8 authors of the paper, the science section of the Slovak daily Sme.sk reviewed the article

Out of the tropics, but how? Fossils, bridge species, and thermal ranges in the dynamics of the marine latitudinal diversity gradient

written by David Jablonski et al. and published in PNAS. See also futurity.org.



They looked at three slices of Cenozoic (from 66 million AD through now) and decided that most marine genera originated in the tropics. You may view the paper as a followup to the "out of the tropics" mechanism coined by Jablonski and others in 2006.




They were also interested in the way how these tropics-born species migrate into the moderate zone. A heat wave is probably necessary for such a migration while intraspecies adaptation and the diversification rate of a species is helpful to allow a new species to migrate out of the tropics.




I think that most of us will find these statements somewhat uncontroversial and plausible. Tropics is where the concentration of life is maximized. Moreover, the Sun and heat probably tends to increase the mutation rates over there which is why the percentage of the species originated in the tropics is likely to be even greater, probably much greater, than the percentage of the individual organisms that actually live there today.

Tropics are the place with the highest biodiversity and it's no coincidence. Their research shows that this has been the case at many distant moments in the past, too.

An interesting concept promoted by the paper are the bridge species. A seemingly sensible yet naive assumption known as "niche conservatism" is that species tend to live in similar habitats as their relatives. However, according to this paper, many jumps (in some analogy, jumps over the river) have occurred and they were extremely important. For these jumps to be possible, one needed one of the rare special species, the bridge species, that allowed life to spread to less hospitable (essentially cooler) places. Just to be sure, "niche conservatism" will be obeyed in most cases if you look at random animals and their ancestors. However, this "niche conservatism" assumption prevents you from explaining the origin of the bulk of biodiversity on Earth.

There are only one or two bridge species per evolutionary lineage – a small percentage of all species – and all these bridge species seem to have originated in the tropics themselves. The paper also finds something you may view as counterintuitive: the most widespread species are not those that tolerate the largest temperature swings. In fact, those that tolerate a narrow interval are (at least in the case of bivalves) the most widespread ones. But it's not so illogical as you might think because the narrow tolerated interval may be adjusted by evolution, too. Moreover, the tropics represent a significant part of the Earth and the temperature over there is rather constant so too much tolerance isn't needed.

The global warming alarmist censors must have misunderstood the paper completely because they couldn't stop the publication of this paper despite the fact that according to these loons, liars, and demagogues, a warmer weather is hurting (and is probably going to destroy) life on Earth. ;-)

More seriously, if the tropics offer the best temperature for life on Earth, we may calculate how much the temperature should rise (uniformly over the globe: an assumption) for the life's well-being to be optimized over the globe. Clearly, it would be better for the optimum temperature to be found in the moderate zone – which has a greater area and which is currently about 20 °C cooler than the optimum tropics. It follows that the optimum global temperature rise for life is at least 20 °C. I say "at least" because there are no available data that would directly or indirectly imply that the optimum temperature for life isn't even higher than the current temperature of the tropics. Compare this scientific fact – that a 20 °C temperature rise would be beneficial for life – with the insane fearmongering about a 2 °C warming (from which only 0.7 °C or so was realized in the last 100 years).

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Ernst Chladni: an anniversary

Ernst Chladni, the father of acoustics and the father of meteoritics, passed away in Wrocław (German: Breslau, Czech: Vratislav) on April 3rd, 1827.

He was born 70 years earlier, in 1756, in Lutherstadt Edward Wittenberg. However, his family came from Kremnica, a mining/minting town in Central Slovakia (a part of the Kingdom of Hungary). The name "Chladni" plus minus small variations means "cold" in Slavic languages.




Because Wittenberg is a Lutheran town, it shouldn't be shocking that his paternal ancestors and uncles were achieved Lutherans – deans, clergymen, historians, theologians, law professors, and so on. Ernst was supposed to become a lawyer, too. Science wasn't tolerated. So he had to get a law degree in Leipzig in 1782 and wait for his father's death which came on the same year. That's when Ernst could begin to study physics.

It sounds cruel but when a smart kid's father is a control freak, it's often the only solution. This particular kid was 36 years old when he was finally allowed to study what he always wanted to study.




What we associate with Chladni's name today are the Chladni figures, observed in detail in 1787. Here you have some cool enough examples:



When the guitar or a plate vibrates because of the sound waves going through/around it, a generic point moves up and down (transversely to the plate) which encourages the sand particles to drift. However, for well-defined frequencies, you also find "nodal lines" – co-dimension one loci where the vertical vibrations disappear. The sand particles may sit near these places and they don't move. That's why you see them: the sand gets concentrated over there.

An exercise for you: Are there nodal lines for every frequency or just for a discrete subset of eigenfrequencies?

It's sort of strange how much time it took for someone to draw the actual shape of the nodal lines – the sand was helpful – because Robert Hooke first observed that there were some nodal lines more than one century earlier, in 1680, but he didn't manage to do any detailed measurements and no one after him cared about it for 100+ years, either. Just to be sure, Chladni not only drew some sandy lines on the guitar and other plates. He also derived Chladni's law,\[

f = C (m+2n)^p

\] for some constants \(C,p\) where \(f\) is the frequency and \(m,n\) are the numbers of diametric (linear) and radial (circular) nodes. Cymbals, handbells, and church bells care about this law. Chladni also estimated the speed of sound in various gases: he pumped these gases into organ pipes and listened to the results (and did some calculations).

Chladni also created some instruments, e.g. those with glass rods of different lengths. He traveled across Europe with his concert show – well, a physics demonstration.

Finally, in 1794, Chladni proposed that meteorites were of extraterrestrial origin – despite the prevailing belief that they were of volcanic origin. You may imagine the humiliation etc. Other people who later convinced everyone that Chladni was right all along mostly contributed their P.R. techniques and brainwashing.

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Waiting for peak oil: a paradox

As an enthusiastic proponent of fracking, Gene sent me a link to this NBC article

Power shift: Energy boom dawning in America

that argues, among other things, that due to fracking, the U.S. will leapfrog Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the #1 fossil fuel producer by 2020. Already today, we see amazingly dropping prices of natural gas and many other things will follow. The technologies are getting better all the time. You get the point but you may find more information about these matters.



Just minutes later, I opened the blog of Alexander Ač, a crazy professional Czech and Slovak climate alarmist, any falling-sky alarmist, and peak oil champion:

Resolve the paradox (autom. transl. from Slovak)

And that was quite a contrast. Alexander lives in a different galaxy than Gene. He's waiting for peak oil every second, every day.




However, the complexities of the real world are making Alexander's waiting somewhat confusing, much like the beliefs of young rabbis in "Is Electricity Fire?", a story due to Feynman. The rabbis were trying to solve the puzzle whether the sparkling elevator was fire – an important scientific question because they wanted to know whether they could use the elevator on Saturdays.

Similarly Alexander is trying to find a maximum of a function. And it's so hard!




The paradox Alexander wants you to resolve is the discrepancy between the graph of the population-adjusted number of miles driven on all roads



and the graph of the U.S. oil production since 1922:



They just disagree! In particular, the first graph shows the holy moment Alexander has been waiting for – the maximum in June 2005. But the second graph shows nothing of the sort. It's a paradox for Alexander because in his way of looking at the world, the graphs should agree so the oil production should have peaked in 2005, too! But it didn't. Since a local minimum a few years ago, the U.S. daily oil production went up almost 30 percent.

Now, this is obviously nonsense. If we graphed the total oil production and the total oil consumption, we could get some agreement. But these two graphs are graphs of very different quantities so there is no reason why they should have maxima and local minima at the same places. In particular, the graphs have the right to differ because:

• the oil production graph is just for the U.S., a small part of the world production
• the mileage graph is a graph per capita while the oil production isn't expressed on the per-capita basis at all
• oil is used not only for vehicles but also in power plants (poor countries), production of plastic matter, fertilizers, and other things and none of the parts has to be proportional to the "whole"
• the mileage graph doesn't take the fuel consumption into account; fuel consumption increases for larger cars and in city traffic
• the mileage graph probably doesn't include the miles vehicles make outside roads, especially agricultural vehicles on the fields
• and I may have missed something equally important.

Please feel more than free to correct me and point out some difference between the graphs that is more important than the entries on my list. Which of the things is the most important one?

At any rate, a single difference above would be enough to explain differences in the locations of local extrema of the two graphs. Alexander's world view is one in which all the graphs are the same (and ideally, all of them agree with the global and local temperature and the CO2 concentration as well). It doesn't matter whether you draw barrels of oil or miles or ppm of CO2 or Celsius degrees here or there, whether the graphs are for the U.S. or the whole world, whether they're on per-capita basis or not, whether they include this or that, whether they're looking at a small fraction of the consumption or everything.

Alexander has pretended to be interested for things like oil production and oil consumption for many years but he has missed every single subtlety (well, they're not really subtleties) above. He still doesn't have the slightest clue how the world works. In fact, even when I told him about a subset of the reasons why the graphs differ and semi-joked that the mileage per capita dropped since 2005 because people begin to use Skype (and he therefore had a signal and opportunity to be more careful about the stuff he is writing), he showed another, less important aspect of his detachment from the reality. The stocks of Skype have to be going up, he said! A nice try but there are no stocks of Skype, a company that was bought by Microsoft NL in 2011 (as everyone who is getting e-mails about the "upgrade" of Windows Live Messenger to Skype knows).

Alexander believes that there may exist only one graph, the curve should probably be smooth (another nonsense but strongly believed by similar "thinkers"), and it should have a holy maximum that must be worshiped by everybody. Now, imagine how confused Alexander had to feel since the moment when he was spitted from the artificial environment of a vagina into the real world several decades ago (and he's getting increasingly confused). There are millions of graphs one may draw and each of them has different locations of the minima and maxima and his prayed-for peak oil maximum is not only non-existent but also ill-defined and utterly ludicrous and unimportant even if it could exist.

If you draw the total production or consumption – not just some per-capita figures – and if you include fracking, it's pretty clear that there won't be any peak for quite some time. Alexander will have to suffer through extra decades in which his beloved peak oil won't be coming but he will surely scream whenever he sees any blip, any foggy signal that may be misinterpreted as the Son of God of peak-oil-and-climate-armageddon-and-all-other-sky-is-falling-crackpot-stories-you-have-not-even-heard-about. He will misinterpret anything and everything that is ever seen or said as well as all the things that weren't even seen or said, hoping that his neverending sky-is-falling whining is sufficiently loud to convert his psychiatric pathologies into a reality. ;-)

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Mauritia: microcontinents must have been around for eons

And pairs of opposing large continents may have been more typical than a single unified one

Tons of articles including one at NPR have been written about a new finding.

Lava sands with zircon xenocrysts found on the beaches of Mauritius (island which is East from Madagascar) support the idea of a microcontinent dubbed Mauritia that existed between the continents (...) of Madagascar and India for tens of millions of years sometime 70 million years ago. I don't want to be excessively accurate because I don't think that their reconstructed layout may be trusted this accurately.



Mauritia is supposed to be just a tiny sliver inserted between India and Madagascar in the left upper corner. At that time, the liberals in San Francisco belonged to the African union with Congo and were Hispanics. Baltic states haven't been occupied by Stalin yet and they had the Amazon forest in their yard. ;-)

The papers by Torsvik et al. and Niocaill et al. have appeared in Nature Geoscience; they're linked to at this Nature review. Although the precise arguments leading to the dating and other claims aren't comprehensible to me, it still seems like too much hype given the importance of the finding.




When we first hear about the continental drift, we are usually told about the supercontinent named Pangaea that was around between 300 million and 200 million BC. That universal continent was surrounded by Panthalassa, the universal global sea, the story says.

But was it this simple?




The first thing to notice is that 200-300 million years is just 4-6 percent of the age of the Earth. So the era of Pangaea is a relatively recent phenomenon. Why would all the continents be unified into one this recently even though they're split again? The key part of the answer is that Pangaea wasn't the first supercontinent; on the contrary, it was the most recent one (and the first one to be historically debated). The plates have been rearranging and splitting and merging for a long time and as much as billions of years ago, many other supercontinents existed.

They perhaps included Vaalbara, Ur, Kenorland, Rodinia (Russian for Fatherland, roughly speaking). These supercontinents incorporated most of the landmass when they were around. But there were also supercontinents that contained about 1/2 of the landmass when they were around – these were the Cold War periods of the supercontinent cycle. ;-) Gondwana and Laurasia – 510-180 million years BC or so – are the most famous example. Gondwana was composed of components including South America and Africa that fit together so neatly. Some other hypothetical continents in the past have been submerged. And there could have been ordinary-size continents whose names coincide with countries and other regions – Kazakhstania, North China, Siberia, India, and others.

Many of the details are unknown and many of the known details may be wrong. That's equally true about the future projections of supercontinents. Will there be Amasia (China will merge with the U.S., not only when it comes to their currency union haha), Novopangaea, or Pangaea Ultima? These are highly inequivalent scenarios how the contemporary continents may merge in the future (hundreds of millions of years in the future).

The idea of supercontinents that covered "almost everything" is very tempting. In some sense, it is as almost as tempting as the unification of forces (and other concepts) in physics. But when we return to relatively recent eras, it may be misleading and I would guess that it probably is. There's really no reason why 95% of the landmass should be connected at any moment less than 500 million years ago – when the Earth was already 90 percent of the actual current age old.

These days, we have continents such as Australia and large islands such as the Greenland. And the rest is divided to several mostly disconnected parts, too. I guess that at most moments in the past, the decomposition was comparable so there always existed separate continents and icelands that occupied a similar percentage of the global landmass.

Let me mention that the difference between continents and islands goes beyond the continents' being larger. There should also be an intrinsic geological difference and indeed, there are at least two major ones. First, continents should be made of low-density rocks so that they "float" while islands are just extensions of ocean floor that happen to reach above the sea level in some cases and should be composed of heavier rocks. Needless to say, I think it's preposterous to imagine that there is always a clear separation between the two concepts. Second, landmasses that sit at their own tectonic plate (e.g. Australia) should better be called continents.

So I find it "more likely than not" that even during the most unified moments of Rodinia or Pangaea, there used to be disconnected continents that were larger than the Greenland, for example, and perhaps many smaller continents existed at various moments, too.

The very first years of the Earth could paint a different story, however. Yes, I do think that the mountains used to be taller and steeper; the Earth is getting rounder after every earthquake as some potential energy of the rocks is converted to heat. And yes, I think that there was a chance that the continents and islands were less fragmented than they are today. However, for some reason, I find it a bit more likely that there were two major landmasses – nearly opposing each other – when the Earth was very, very young.

What's the reason behind this idiosyncratic claim of mine? When we approximate the early solid Earth by a random perturbed ellipsoid, its longest semiaxis is likely to show the positions of the two major supercontinents – on the opposite sides of the globe. Because the rocks are generically heavier than water, I find the idea of water on one side and rocks on the other side to be highly imbalanced. Much like tides, it seems more sensible to assume that the rocks get out of the water level – an equipotential surface – at two opposing places at the same moment.

To a large extent, I would make the same guess about most "highly unified" moments in the geological history, both in the past and in the future. It really does seem to me that the people who try to reconstruct the details of the continental drift don't fully incorporate the change of the equipotential surfaces – gravity – caused by the accumulation of the landmasses. If they did so, they would arguably realize that the sea level near excessively large continents inevitably goes up (so the mountains on too large continents get lowered relatively to the surrounding sea level) while the sea level goes down on the opposite side of the globe which makes it more likely that some continent or island will emerge on the opposite side of the globe.

Do you agree with that? The main loophole I may imagine is that the original solid Earth was highly non-uniform so the actual center of mass could have been shifted away from the "apparent geometric center" by a significant distance, making it likely that the continent would only appear on one side. I haven't tried to quantify how strong this effect could have been, relatively speaking.

These days, the Earth is kind of balanced. The Eastern Hemisphere contains the bulk of Eurasia and Africa but the Western Hemisphere boasts Americas. The Northern Hemisphere contains significantly more landmass than the Southern one but even this difference isn't "overwhelming". Moreover, the average thickness of ice in the Antarctica is 2 km which helps to add at least some balance.

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Italy earthquake witch trial: 6 years in prison

A few moments ago, I randomly made a Google News search about the Italian earthquake trial that I discussed in June 2011 and September 2011. And holy cow, the verdict is just out:

L'Aquila quake: Italy scientists guilty of manslaughter (BBC)

That's incredible. Even a year ago when I talked about it, I still thought that the final verdict would be "innocent" – and the very fact that such a trial could have started in Italy at all looked unbelievably humiliating for the country known as Italy. Well, the verdict is "guilty".

Italy has officially become a banana republic controlled by savages who would happily condemn Galileo for his claims that the Earth revolves around the Sun again. It's still the same country and its institutions have made no intellectual progress in the last 300 years.



Six seismologists and an official were sent to prison for 6 years (plus they have to pay court expenses and damages) for telling people before the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake that there wasn't a reason to panic because a large earthquake was improbable.

What these people did was totally fine: they shared their prediction about (i.e. estimated probability of) the earthquake based on their best knowledge of seismology in which they're among the top Italian experts. A large, magnitude 6.3 earthquake did take place and killed 309 people but it's not these people's fault and earthquakes can always arrive unpredictably. The large earthquake can't even be shown to have been "caused" or "predicted" by the smaller tremors that preceded it. It could have been independent of them, too. As far as demonstrable evidence goes, the people are being convicted for a random unexpected and unpredictable natural catastrophe.

It's not possible to reliably or semi-reliably predict earthquakes and strong arguments exist that it will always be impossible. So it will always be unreasonable – crazy – to expect a 0% error rate in similar predictions; you will only be able to evaluate how good a forecaster is by looking at many predictions he has made. This fact isn't the seven people's fault. It's not even a fault of the community of seismologists as a whole. These things just can't be predicted because of the intrinsically stochastic nature of the underlying physical processes so chance will always play a major role when it comes to earthquakes.




The judge ignored a petition signed by 5,000 scientists that demanded the witch hunt to be stopped. The media are silent. When genuine scientists *really* want to protect human lives by offering their expertise as weapons against pseudoscientific misconceptions, they are no longer heroes among the journalists. The dirty journalists only celebrate crackpots who actually spread hysteria that helps to sell the newspapers, for example the global warming crackpots.

I am totally amazed by the word "manslaughter" because it means that the judge believes that the seismologists, and not Mother Nature, actually killed the 309 victims.

The verdict de facto lionizes crackpots who were screaming that there had to be a large earthquake and they just happened to be right in that case – while isomorphic and sometimes the very same crackpots are wrong in 99.9% of other cases in which they cry wolf – and it condemns the scientific method. They are wrong in 99.9% of cases because their predictive framework has nothing to do with science – it's all about a psychopathological paranoia – but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

The lesson for the scientists is clear: If you are a scientist who is qualified in a discipline that has implications for the safety of people, you must always recommend precautionary measures to be taken even if you conclude that the probability that something bad will happen is tiny. Italy may expect much more hysteria in various similar science-related situations than it has had so far because a court has declared a war on everyone who is honest and balanced.

Can you imagine that this sick logic would be applied e.g. to surgeons? Surgeons and perhaps other physicians could spend 6 years in prison after every death of a patient whom they or others were optimistic about. It's just insane. People sometimes die, natural catastrophes sometimes occur, and it's just impossible to identify a human culprit in most cases. Only if a professional makes a mistake in which he or she has demonstrably violated some established and functional rules to reduce the risk – and whether or not this was the case may only be determined by another expert – he or she could be considered co-responsible for the deaths. Nothing of the sort has taken place in this case.

If someone is made responsible for deaths of casualties of a natural catastrophe that can't be predicted according to any protocol that actually exists, it's just nothing else than a condemnation of a witch. I often thought that the witch trials were insane and we live in a very different world than Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. But we're not living in such a different world. We are still controlled by evil loons such as the Italian judge who don't want to hear anything about the actual abilities and limitations of the current science. They prefer to look for scapegoats and sacrifice them.

In fact, the current verdict is even more cruel and irrational than the 1692 verdicts in Salem because the convicted girls in 1692 were at least doing "something mysterious" that could have been called witchcraft so they were witches. The convicted folks in 2012 are scientists.

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