The Coincidence Project

In February 1973, Dr. Bernard Beitman found himself hunched over a kitchen sink in an old Victorian house in San Francisco, choking uncontrollably. He wasn’t eating or drinking, so there was nothing to cough up, and yet for several minutes he couldn’t catch his breath or swallow.

The next day his brother called to tell him that 3,000 miles away, in Wilmington, Del., their father had died. He had bled into his throat, choking on his own blood at the same time as Beitman’s mysterious episode.

Overcome with awe and emotion, Beitman became fascinated with what he calls meaningful coincidences. After becoming a professor of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he published several papers and two books on the subject and started a nonprofit, the Coincidence Project, to encourage people to share their coincidence stories.

“What I look for as a scientist and a spiritual seeker are the patterns that lead to meaningful coincidences,” said Beitman, 80, from his home in Charlottesville, Va. “So many people are reporting this kind of experience. Understanding how it happens is part of the fun.”

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Beitman defines a coincidence as “two events coming together with apparently no causal explanation.” They can be life-changing, like his experience with his father, or comforting, such as when a loved one’s favorite song comes on the radio just when you are missing them most.

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People who describe themselves as spiritual or religious report noticing more meaningful coincidences than those who do not, and people are more likely to experience coincidences when they are in a heightened emotional state — perhaps under stress or grieving.

The most popular explanation among survey respondents for mysterious coincidences: God or fate. The second explanation: randomness. The third is that our minds are connected to one another. The fourth is that our minds are connected to the environment.

For Beitman, no single explanation suffices. “Some say God, some say universe, some say random and I say ‘Yes,’” he said. “People want things to be black and white, yes or no, but I say there is mystery.”

He’s particularly interested in what he’s dubbed simulpathity — feeling a loved one’s pain at a distance, as he believes he did with his father. Science can’t currently explain how it might occur, but in his books he offers some nontraditional ideas, such as the existence of “the psychosphere,” a kind of mental atmosphere through which information and energy can travel between two people who are emotionally close though physically distant.

In his new book published in September, “Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen,” he shares the story of a young man who intended to end his life by the shore of an isolated lake. While he sat crying in his car, another car pulled up and his brother got out.

When the young man asked for an explanation, the brother said he didn’t know why he got in the car, where he was going, or what he would do when he got there. He just knew he needed to get in the car and drive.

- More Here

Mistletoes & Futility Of Models Predicting Complex Systems

Can you give an example where these changes are happening now?

My colleague, Francisco Fontúrbel, works in southern Chile. Where mistletoe is around, because it’s a reliable nectar source, the southernmost hummingbird (Sephanoides sephaniodes) becomes resident. They pollinate the mistletoes, but they also pollinate all sorts of other plants. After drought, mistletoes die, and those hummingbirds become migrants: They pack up, they follow the nectar further and further north. One study showed mistletoe deaths doubling in the dry year of 2015, and visits from hummingbirds dropped.

When the hummingbirds leave, the local plants don’t have pollinators anymore. This is predicted to trigger a community-wide cascade of extinctions, although that hasn’t been documented yet.

In Australia, large-scale research shows that mistletoe is super-important during drought as a sort of last-ditch nectar resource. But then, that same work shows that drought kills many mistletoes: In the summer of 2009, for example, there was a prolonged heat wave in Melbourne, including the hottest day ever recorded — and nearly 90 percent of a monitored set of mistletoes died. That caused a crash in bird numbers and insect-eating animals.

It’s not across the board. Some tropical systems, some temperate forest systems, are not showing those early warnings of system failure, these mistletoe deaths. But in many arid zones, and in some southern forests at higher latitudes, we’re already seeing food webs breaking down. We don’t want to ring the alarm bells and say the sky is falling, but it’s not looking good.

Are there any models yet to show where this may lead in the future?

No. There’s just so much complexity in terms of the interplay between the mistletoe plant’s natural enemies, pollinators and the host’s seed-dispersal mechanisms. We don’t have a handle on those interactions. We can do really quick-and-dirty models, but it’s just guesswork. They’re not nearly detailed enough to come up with meaningful predictions.

This seems to be a big problem I hear from many scientists: With biodiversity loss and climate change, there are so many unknowns and so many interactions, we just don’t know how badly things can go wrong, or how quickly.

Yeah, that’s right.

- Mistletoes in a warming world

How Wolf Became Dog

When modern humans arrived in Europe perhaps 45,000 years ago, they encountered the gray wolf and other types of wolves, including the megafaunal wolf, which pursued large game such as mammoths. By that time wolves had already proved themselves among the most successful and adaptable species in the canid family, having spread across Eurasia to Japan and into the Middle East and North America. They were not confined to a single habitat type but flourished in tundra, steppelands, deserts, forests, coastal regions and the high altitude of the Tibetan Plateau. And they competed with the newly arrived humans for the same prey—mammoths, deer, aurochs, woolly rhinoceroses, antelopes and horses. In spite of this competition, one type of wolf, perhaps a descendant of a megafaunal wolf, apparently began living close to people. For many years scientists concurred on the basis of small portions of the genome that this species was the modern gray wolf (Canis lupus) and that this canid alone gave rise to dogs.

But last January geneticists discovered that this long-held “fact” was wrong. Repeated interbreeding between gray wolves and dogs, which share 99.9 percent of their DNA, had produced misleading signals in the earlier studies. Such consorting between the two species continues today: wolves with black coats received the gene for that color from a dog; shepherd dogs in Georgia's Caucasus Mountains mate so often with the local wolves that hybrid ancestors are found in both species' populations, and between 2 and 3 percent of the sampled animals are first-generation hybrids. (Building on the admixture theme, in June researchers writing in Current Biology reported on the sequencing of DNA from a 35,000-year-old wolf fossil from Siberia. This species appears to have contributed DNA to high-latitude dogs such as huskies through ancient interbreeding.)

Analyzing whole genomes of living dogs and wolves, last January's study revealed that today's Fidos are not the descendants of modern gray wolves. Instead the two species are sister taxa, descended from an unknown ancestor that has since gone extinct. “It was such a long-standing view that the gray wolf we know today was around for hundreds of thousands of years and that dogs derived from them,” says Robert Wayne, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We're very surprised that they're not.” Wayne led the first genetic studies proposing the ancestor-descendant relationship between the two species and more recently was one of the 30 co-authors of the latest study, published in PLOS Genetics, that debunked that notion.

- More Here

Did Eating Only Meat Lead Neanderthals's Demise?

For the last two decades, advances in molecular biology have deepened archaeologists’ understanding of early human diets. The cool conditions in Northern Europe, such as France and Germany, help preserve collagen in fossil bone. With a technique called stable isotope analysis, we can recover minute amounts of carbon and nitrogen from the collagen in early human bones and find out where the protein they ate came from. Isotopes are groups of atoms belonging to the same element, but they have different masses. Studies of these bones’ isotopes have shown Neanderthals in Northern Europe got 80–90 percent of their protein from animals. That’s up there with the wolves and hyenas. In the arid southern parts of Europe, we’re not so lucky. Collagen in fossil bone easily disintegrates in warmer climates, taking with it the clues to southern Neanderthals’ diets.

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The zinc level in carnivores’ bones is lower than those of their prey. The difference is not affected by age, sex, or decay over time. Zinc ratios can be measured from samples as small as 1 milligram of bone. Even these tiny amounts allow an accurate assessment of an animal’s place in the food chain when they were alive.

The recent study’s analysis of zinc from the tooth enamel of a Neanderthal who lived and died around 150,000 years ago in the Spanish Pyrenees gives new insights into the diet of ancient humans. Zinc isotopes were analyzed from 43 teeth of 12 animal species living in a grassland around the Los Moros I Cave in Catalonia, Spain. These included carnivores such as wolf, hyena, and dhole (also known as mountain wolf); omnivorous cave bears; and herbivores including ibex, red deer, horse, and rabbit. The results brought to life a food web of the Pleistocene steppe, a system of interlocking food chains from plants up to the top carnivores. The zinc in the Neanderthal’s tooth had by far the lowest zinc value in the food web, revealing they were a top-level carnivore.

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Isotopes taken from sites across Europe from remains of the H. sapiens groups who inherited Pleistocene Eurasia from the Neanderthals reveal they had broader dietary range. Plants, birds, and fish were main courses for these early humans. The Pleistocene was the grassland-steppe ecosystem that dominated Siberia during the Pleistocene and disappeared 10,000 years ago. It had a remarkably unstable climate and changed from dry grasslands and wet tundra to coniferous woodlands, constantly shaking up the variety and number of large herbivores grazing there. So, an omnivorous diet would have made these people far more resilient than those who relied on big game hunting. We don’t know much about what happened to Neanderthals when big game populations collapsed. If reindeer failed to show, what could they do? But with rapid progress in biomolecular science, I doubt we will have to wait long to find out. 

More Here

Max Holiday Card 2023

Holidays cards without Max by side is a constant remainder of impermanence of life.  Living in Max's Walden without him is not complete but yet he taught me live on for life is rare and precious. 

Erwin's law states that life tends to be far less well studied when we imagine it to be. 

Together, the law of anthropocentrism and Erwin's law are hard to remember in our daily lives. 

It might require a kind of daily affirmation. 

"I am large in a world of small species. 

I am multicellular in a world of single-celled species. 

I have bones in a world of boneless species. 

I am named in a world of nameless species. 

Most of what is knowable is not yet known."

- Excerpts from the book A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species by Rob Dunn

Third Year Of Eternity

Years of reading neuroscience and other stuff had instilled in me the understanding (and fear) of limits of human memory. 

It's been three years since December 20th 2019 and my fears were rightly placed. I miss Max every second. My memories are now anchored to snippets of times Max and I spent together for 13 years. Outside of those anchor's, my memory fails with an exception of serendipitous recollections. 

My last night with Max's lifeless body, we spelt together like we did for 13 years hoping my breath will give him breath. Morning came and I was the only one breathing. Eternity had already started. 

When Max was a puppy, I almost tried to freeze his DNA. There was cryogenics service available for around $10K. 

I didn't do it. Cloning Max is not the same as Max. I wanted to preserve him as Max for the rest of my life. 

So cloning Max was out of question. 

Luckily my daytime job came to rescue. 

For the past three years, I wanted to train Max's pictures using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and create new synthetic pictures of Max. But I couldn't muster the courage to do so. 

This month, I got the courage. This is my first attempt and I didn't try hard. 

Maybe soon I will do better models using Diffusion models and who knows what future holds? 

These new images below look like Max. They did have Max's signature smile and it made me smile.

Avatar - The Way Of The Water

Max was around the same age as Neo is now. It was just Max and I in the midst of the best times of our lives. I saw the first part of Avatar during those times. 

James Cameron movies are chick flicks wrapped around a unique brand of education and entertainment. This time empowered with 13 years of ecological knowledge,  he sets a new benchmark for himself. 

Avatar : The Way Of The Water - Yes, the movie is long, the story is ordinary (because it reality) and VFX is beautiful. 

Behind those mundane things if one knows the science behind each scene, there will be no surprises but yet one will appreciate Cameron's innate gift to educate the people through his movies. 

1. Beauty of known and mostly unknown ocean life.

2. Beyond beauty and importance of preserving the coral reefs. 

3. Cetacean intelligence. In the past decade, there has been so much humbling understanding of intelligence of Whales and Dolphins, Cameron played an important part with his documentary Secrets of the Whales. This movie brings this knowledge to life for the masses. 

4. Of course, the villains are humans. It's true on Earth and in Pandora - a metaphor for Earth 

5. And much more on the importance of the symbiotic relationship between human animal and all other non-human animals. 

Please don't watch this movie passively. Learn from it and follow it in our everyday life. 

For starters: 

• Quit eating seafood. There are startups such as Blue Nalu, Aqua Cultured Foods and Good Catch Foods are working on Mycelium (Mushroom) based Seafood.  

• Stop using plastics. Free The Ocean has great products I have started buying since Max passed away. It's not only good for ocean but also for you - the self centered human. Read this paper - The potential effects of microplastics on human health: What is known and what is unknown

• And learn from the ocean creatures who we are. After all once upon a time we lived in the ocean before crawling into land to become the current humans. Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin and What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins by Jonathan Balcombe are great books to gain rudimentary knowledge. 

James Cameron's interview with National Geography: 

We live in a shifting baseline, where the ocean as we see it today is not what it once was. The film was also an opportunity to show us what our oceans might have looked like 300, 400, 500 years ago, before we really got busy toward an industrial civilization. If people see this film, and aside from the drama of the Sully family [the film’s protagonists] and the relationships and all these big, dramatic conflicts, if they just love the underwater experience—and they love that sense of the profusion of life and the magic and mystery—then maybe it will reconnect them with what we are presently losing here on this planet.

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They also have a symbiotic culture with an intelligent species of ocean air-breathers: big animals that we would probably take a glance at and say, Oh, that’s a whale. But, of course, it’s not a whale—it’s the Pandora version, which is called a tulkun. The tulkun are actually a very advanced society, even though their advancements are all mental. They have no technology because they have no manipulating hands as we do. They rely on the Na’vi for anything that requires that kind of physical manipulation, but they’re quite advanced mentally: They have complex language, they have mathematics, they have music, and so on.

It was an interesting journey for me to do the National Geographic limited series Secrets of the Whales because that showed that the cetaceans that live here on planet Earth—the real ones—actually have a more advanced culture than we had previously thought, in terms of passing down very structured information from generation to generation. They have complex music that’s adopted by other members of the population of that species, and it travels around the world like a kind of greatest-hits album.

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The reason that I went down the path of making a series of films in the same universe is because I thought that what I needed to say artistically—to communicate with people—I could do within that framework. Obviously, shifting from the rainforest, which was the focus of the first film, to the ocean, [there] is, between the lines, a plea for the protection and conservation and celebration of our oceans. Hopefully we can turn back from a path that is putting the oceans under stress. I don’t even like to use the term “stress”: It’s used a lot in conservation, [but] if you consider fourth-stage cancer “stress,” yeah, it’s “stress.”

The coral reefs will be a thing that exists only in films in 50 to 75 years, in most places around the planet. That’s not okay. When I was a kid, I aspired to become a diver, so I could go and see this wonder and this beauty myself. And then I spent decades exploring and enjoying that world. My kids and my grandchildren won’t be able to do that. And so, it’s kind of a cri de cœur, if you want to put it that way: to remember, to celebrate and fall in love with again, and therefore remember to protect that which we’re losing.

Wisdom Of Animals, Birds, Reptiles & Insects

Drink water from the spring where horses drink. The horse will never drink bad water.

Lay your bed where the cat sleeps. The cat loves calm.

Eat the fruit that has been touched by a worm. The worm looks for ripe in the fruit

Boldly pick the mushroom on which the insects sit.

Plant the tree where the mole digs, for that is fertile land.

Build your house where the snake sits to warm itself,  for that is the stable ground that does not collapse.

Dig your fountain where the birds hide from heat. Wherever the birds stand, the water hides.

Go to sleep and wake up at the same time with the birds – you will reap all of the day's golden grains.

Eat more green – you will have strong legs and a resistant heart, like the beings of the forest.

Swim often and you will feel on earth like the fish in the water.

Look at the sky as often as possible and your thoughts will become light and clear.

Be quiet a lot, speak little – and silence will come in your heart, and your spirit will be calm and fill with peace.

- Saint Seraphim of Sarov 1754-1833

 

The Inner Lives Of Cows, Pigs & Chickens

I think I heard about Farm Sanctuary when Max was a puppy and as each year goes by, my respect for them and their work grows. Rescuing farm animals and giving them a new life is one of the best things human beings can do. 

But even they cannot rescue every animal and I always wondered about for lack of better word - economies of scale. Now they are trying to solve that issue by doing volunteer studies on the farm animals - read the whole piece here: 

And a growing body of research suggests that farmed species are brainy beings: Chickens can anticipate the future, goats appear to solicit help from humans, and pigs may pick up on one another’s emotions.

But scientists still know far less about the minds of chickens or cows than they do about those of apes or dogs, said Christian Nawroth, a scientist studying behavior and cognition at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany. “I’m still baffled how little we know about farm animals, given the amount or the numbers that we keep,” he said.

Farm Sanctuary, which was founded in 1986, has always held that farm animals are sentient beings, even referring to its feathered and four-legged residents as “people.”

“They have their own desires, and their own wants and preferences and needs, and their own inner lives — the same way that human people do,” said Lauri Torgerson-White, the sanctuary’s director of research.

Now, the sanctuary is trying to collect enough data to convince the general public of the humanity of animals.

“Our hope,” Ms. Torgerson-White said, “is that through utilizing really rigorous methodologies, we are able to uncover pieces of information about the inner lives of farmed animals that can be used to really change hearts and minds about how these animals are used by society.”

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Farm Sanctuary began not as a home for rescued animals but with a group of young activists working to expose animal cruelty at farms, stockyards and slaughterhouses.

“We lived in a school bus on a tofu farm for a couple of years,” said Gene Baur, the president and co-founder of the organization. But in the course of its investigations, the group kept stumbling upon “living animals left for dead,” he recalled. “And so we started rescuing them.”

They ultimately opened sanctuaries in New York and California, establishing educational programs and political advocacy campaigns. (They raised money, in part, by selling veggie hot dogs at Grateful Dead concerts.)

And in 2020, the organization, which now houses about 700 animals, began assembling an internal research team. The goal was to assemble more evidence that, as Mr. Baur put it, “these animals are more than just pieces of meat. There’s emotion there. There is individual personality there. There’s somebody, not something.”

The research team worked with Lori Gruen, an animal ethicist at Wesleyan University, to develop a set of ethics guidelines. The goal, Dr. Gruen explained, was to create a framework for conducting animal research “without dominance, without control, without instrumentalization.”

Among other stipulations, the guidelines prohibit invasive procedures — forbidding even blood draws unless they are medically necessary — and state that the studies must benefit the animals. And participation? It’s voluntary.

“Residents must be recognized as persons,” the guidelines state, “and always be provided with choice and control over their participation in an experimental study.”