Infidelity, or Not.

In study after study on human sexuality, in particular marriage fidelity, men are found to cheat more often than women. You can find dozens of papers and articles that ultimately explain this in terms of the evolutionary drive to “spread our genes.”  This line of reasoning goes like this: men use two mating strategies to spread their genes.  Make lots of babies with random women and some will be good at making lots more babies, thus spreading your genes around, or make a few babies with one woman and stay to raise, train and protect them to ensure quality.

It is easy to understand how both strategies can lead to spreading one’s genetic material.  And in studies of other species, even ones like birds who take a single mate and stay together for a season or for life and jointly raise their offspring, male infidelity is not uncommon.

The American divorce rate of 50% certainly implies that one or another of the couple is seeking a “better” mate.  Many studies show that such divorces are not uncommonly cause by male infidelity.

Those who study this subject say that female infidelity doesn’t make nearly as much evolutionary sense.  A female can only have one child at a time, regardless of how many males she might be sexually active with (although this isn’t universally true across all species; with some animals, a female can have a single litter with different fathers).  Her best strategy is to pick the fittest male she can - hence the sometime dramatic courtship displays by many animal species - and try to keep him around to protect and help raise the infants.

 But female infidelity DOES exist.  In a study by Jane Reid, a biologist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, in a group of wild song sparrows, 28% of the hatchlings were from fathers other than the female’s mate.  A suggested motive for this female infidelity was that perhaps she mated with males even better fit than her mate.  Reid’s study showed that wasn’t true.  The “bastard” hatchlings actually produced fewer offspring creating somewhat of a genetic bottleneck for the founding female’s gene line.

In the end, it may all be due to male promiscuity after all.  If there is a gene that causes some males to choose the “promiscuous” route to spreading his genes, as opposed to the “nurturing” route, perhaps those genes are spread to his female offspring, making more likely to engage in similar behavior.

To bring this to a personal level, I’d like to suggest that if humans, and possibly other species, find the right mate, all this infidelity might vanish.  Perhaps the 50% of marriages that DON’T end in divorce mean that at least half of us are better are picking the right mate.

Life, the Universe and Everything

Used to be that the discovery of a new planet orbiting another star, an exoplanet, was cause for a large press event announcing it and excitement among the scientific community and the public alike.

Now it’s more like the Apollo 13 mission before the accident, hardly anyone watches or cares, it is so common.  As of February 1, 2012, there are 755 confirmed exoplanets and many hundreds more potential candidates that await confirmation.  As one astronomer put it, “The more we look, the more we find.”  In fact, we now estimate that there are, on average, 1.6 planets for every star in the Milky Way galaxy.  That comes out to more than 200,000,000,000 planets, just in our galaxy alone, not to mention all those other galaxies far, far away.

Now, astronomers have discovered the exoplanet most likely to be able to support life.  It’s a bit bigger than our Earth, at 4.5 times our planet’s mass, what astronomers term a “super-Earth.”  But it is located in the habitable zone of its star, the narrow range of orbits where temperatures support liquid water, an essential requirement for life as we know.  One interesting aspect about this planet designated, GJ 667Cc – aside from the possibility that it can support life – is that its parent star is actually part of a triple-star system.  The other two are so far away that they add little energy to this planet, but would make for pretty interesting sunrises, sunsets and eclipses.

The parent star, GJ 667C, located in the constellation Scorpius, sits a mere 22 light years from Earth and can be seen in a modest telescope.  Not quite our next door neighbor, but on the same block as us.  GJ 667C is an M-class dwarf star, about a third the mass of the sun and therefore quite a bit fainter.  But the planet is in a 28-day orbit, meaning it is close enough to this dim star to be in its habitable zone.

Astronomers believed that planets can only form around stars that have a chemical makeup not too dissimilar to our sun.  About 98% of our sun is hydrogen and helium but that remaining 2%, comprised of all the other elements, is enough to make dense, rocky planets like Earth. Astronomers believed that stars with a lower metal content couldn’t make dense planets, only gas or ice giants like Jupiter, Saturn Uranus and Neptune.  In stellar astrophysical parlance, “metals” refers to all elements farther up the periodic table than helium.  GJ 667C has a much lower metal content than our sun.

All that means is that, once again, we humans have been too narrowly focused what conditions are necessary for life to flourish.  Life will find a way. 

And now we have a whole lot more places to look for life.  Is that good, or bad?  Who knows, but it is exciting!

Review of My Book "Why Am I Me?"

This is from the January 9 edition of the  Daily Oklahoman newspaper.  It's a short review of my children's picture book "Why Am I Me?".  Thank you, Charlotte!

Family, friends stand out

Charlotte Lankard

   CLankard@   opubco.com  

  

Being an only child, I never had a brother or sister looking out for me and cheering me on, so I particularly like it when readers give me a glimpse of what that is like.

   A few weeks ago I wrote about three Oklahomans who authored books published in Oklahoma and sold at one of our Oklahoma independent bookstores. The next day I received an email from Randy Wyrick of Leander, Texas, who asked me why I didn’t mention his brother’s book. So I went right out and bought a copy.

   His brother is Wayne Harris-Wyrick, director of the Kirkpatrick Planetarium and author of a children’s book, “Why Am I Me?”

   Dedicated to his son Ethan, Harris-Wyrick’s book explains the importance of things like dogs and cats, mountains and water, sunrises and sunsets, butterflies and flowers, rabbits and even skunks. About trees he writes, “Trees make fruit to eat and oxygen to breathe, give shade on a hot summer day and a place to climb and study the world from up high, with the birds.” Then he answers the child’s question, “What is special about me?” It is a good book for any adult to share with a child.

   Since Harris-Wyrick, who writes a column for The Oklahoman, is an Oklahoman and easy to find at the planetarium, have him sign a book for that special child in your life.

   And to purchase the book, try another one of Oklahoma’s independent bookstores — Best of Books in Edmond’s Kickingbird Square. Julie Hovis will take good care of you.

   While I don’t have a brother like Randy Wyrick, I do have great friends, and because of this column I have met people all across the state. One of those folks is Jacquelyn Duncan, a retired Custer County associate district judge.

   Jackie has invited me to her part of the state and we have visited here when she is in town.

   After reading the column I wrote about my friend Arlene Johnson and her love of animals, I received the following email from Jackie and her own animal companions:

   “Booray the Bichon Frise dog, Sookie the Maltese mix dog, Diva the calico cat and Red Beard the tiger stripe cat all join me in wishing you a 2012 filled with love, peace, health and happiness.”

   I wish the same for each of you.

   Charlotte Lankard is a licensed marriage and family therapist in private practice. Contact her at clankard@opubco.com. 

Aliens and UFO's

As the director of the Kirkpatrick Planetarium, a big part of Science Museum Oklahoma, I answer lots of questions about space-related topics.  One of the questions I am asked most often is if I believe in aliens.  I say I firmly believe life exists all over the universe.  There are some four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone.  We believe that as many as one-fourth of them harbor planets.  The likeliness of only one planet out of hundreds of billions has life on it seems worse than odds of winning back to back to back to back lotteries.

But what they really want to know is if I believe that aliens ever visit Earth in their spaceships.  Are UFO’s really alien spacecraft buzzing our little planet?

I have a bigger problem with that. 

Stars are separated by mind-boggling distances.  The closest stars likely to have life-bearing planets are very far away.  Let’s set things to scale to better understand this.  Say Earth was a ball one foot across.  Our Moon would be a ball three inches in diameter 30 feet away.  The sun would be over two miles away.  The next closest to Earth, Proxima Centauri, would be 555,880 miles away.  In real space, that corresponds to about 24,000,000,000,000 miles away.

It would take us humans more than fifty thousand years to get there with our current best technology, and the radiation in space would kill everyone on board long before they arrived, even if we HAD some sort of suspended animation.  Traveling in space farther than to our own moon remains too difficult for us.

But let's assume that some alien race has solved these problems.  They can travel faster than light (and NOT end up in the far distant future), or at least so close to light speed that they can arrive in a reasonable amount of time.  Maybe they have discovered some kind of star gate or wormhole technology to shortcut the astronomical distances in the universe.  They possess technology to shield themselves from cosmic radiation. 

They travel hundreds or thousands of light years to study us.  Now does it make any sense to anyone that a race with those capabilities would travel all that way and just crash in the New Mexico desert?  If they are that good, I can't understand why they crash so often.

And what’s up with them impregnating our women or castrating or gutting our cows?  Why do they take us humans to their ships and do horrible things inside our bodily cavities?  Supposedly they are learning about our physiology.  Heck, even we lowly humans have x-rays, CAT scans and MRI machines to study the body non-invasively.  Wouldn't advanced aliens that can cross interstellar distances have better medical tools?

If they ARE here, they are likely invisible to all of our technologies and senses (unless and until they WANT us to see them).  They may even exist in a parallel dimension, sort of like a one-way quantum mirror where they can see us but we can’t see them. 

Reports of alien encounters seem to imply that these aliens have technology that is, at best a few decades ahead of ours.  The Milky Way galaxy is thirteen billion years old.  Our solar system is a mere four and a half billion years old, and we humans barely crack the fifty thousand year barrier.  Any other civilizations are likely to thousands or millions of year ahead of us.  One hundred years ago, we had barely left the ground in airplanes and all “sane” scientists thought spaceflight was impossible.  Where will our technology be in a few hundred or a few thousand years from now?  We wouldn’t even recognize ourselves.

And yet, we keep seeing us in them.

Flash Your Story

I am a writer.  I have authored more than 300 non-fiction articles, mostly on various aspects of astronomy (my day job is the director of the Kirkpatrick Planetarium of Science Museum Oklahoma).  I have a few articles on the subject of ghost hunting, a passionate hobby of mine.  I’ve published a few short stories – science fiction, of course – and a couple of poems.

Last year I published my first book.  It’s a children’s picture book “Why Am I Me?” (www.4rvpublishingllc.com).  I have spent countless hours and many thousands of words writing science fiction novels.  And though I love reading the genre, I just don’t seem to have the patience to write one.  I get a great plot, but I seem to get bored about half way through. “Why Am I Me?” has been in my brain and heart for several years as I watched my son go through the kind of self doubt that this book teaches kids how to overcome. Writing it was more of an exercise on writing: I wanted to see if I could write a 400 word book, since I had so much trouble writing 80,000 word books.

One of the methods I use to kickstart my hesitant creativity (what we sometimes call writer’s block) is to flash my current project.  Well done flash fiction excites me like few other forms of writing.  I learned about flash fiction writing from Harvey Stanbrough (http://www.harveystanbrough.com/) when I took a workshop on this process a few years ago.  We have kept in touch off and on since then.  Unlike some forms of flash fiction, which are often defined as stories under 1000 words, Harvey claims it must contain less than 100 words.  I call this very strict flash version “micro-fiction” although that just doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as flash fiction.

The way I use this technique is to “flash” whatever manuscript I am currently on.  The way I see it, if I can write my story, novel or article in 99 words or less, then I really understand the piece and where it is going.  If I can’t get the essence of the story in that number of words, then I am likely as confused as any of my readers would be if I didn’t improve the manuscript.

I haven’t published any of these micro-fiction efforts.  In fact, I really haven’t even tried to.  The point of these stories is to improve my writing.  But by now I have a decent sized collection of them.  Maybe I’ll put them in an anthology sometime.

This one of numerous tricks I use to re-ignite my artistic juices.  I will share this and other block-busters with the attendees at the Oklahoma Writers’ Federation annual conference May 3-5 (see www.owfi.org). And, hey, even if my ideas don’t excite you, there are a number of quality speakers coming to share their writing secrets.  And you can meet with and even take to lunch any of a number of editors and agents.  Make plans; it’ll be a great weekend.

What I Am Most Thankful For

Everyone is writing their “What am I thankful for” blog this time of year.  OK, many  did it last month for Thanksgiving.  But it’s one big holiday until after New Year’s Day.  Sorta’ like the massive urban area from Boston to Washington D.C.  Bos-wash, they call it.  I guess the last two months of the year could be called New Thanksmas Day.

What am I thankful for?  Everyone’s already written about their family and health and friends etc, etc.  I’m thankful for all those things, too, as much as anyone.  But I am also thankful for some things other bloggers rarely mention.

I’m thankful for days.  If Earth always faced towards the sun, we’d have no nights.  How boring would life be then?

I’m thankful for seasons.  I know there are people who love the constancy of the Florida’s or southern California’s never-changing weather.  Not me.  Give me four seasons.  I love my snow, as much as I love the warm summer evenings.  I just don’t want either year ‘round.

I am thankful for trees.  And flowers and shrubs and everything else on our planet that makes oxygen.  I am thankful for the ants and the bugs that live in the trees and on other plants.  Their constant pressure on the trees’ health has made them strong enough that some live for thousands of years.  Only the need to get stronger against adversity can cause that.

I am pretty much thankful for everything that Mother Earth, in her wisdom, chose to put on this planet.

There are some things I’m not so thankful for.  Don’t care much for asparagus.   Persimmons are OK, but only if you catch them for those four hours each year that they are ripe. 

I could certainly do without any GMO’d foods.  Yes, yes, I KNOW that they have massively increased the yield of many important food crops.  But for the most part, they are not particularly healthy foods.  And they mostly allow us to feed more cows and other livestock, the farming/ranching of which is a major cause of the degradation of our environment.  And I wish to heck that all those global warming doubters would pull their heads out and get an effing’ clue!

I am absolutely NOT thankful for bullies, drivers who think road laws don’t apply to them, people who text (or read or put on makeup) while driving, or born-again Christians.  I have nothing against Christianity; heck, some of my best friends are Christians.  I have a problem with anyone who says there is only “one way” for anything.  There are seven billion people on this planet.  They can’t all fit on the same path.

Mostly I’m pretty thankful about stuff.  Mostly natural stuff.  The things that most bothers me in this universe are usually things we humans have created.

Global Warming and One Way to NOT Deal With It

No one questions, at least no one I respect, that global warming is a problem and will only get worse unless massive changes to the way we generate and use (and waste) energy are made in the very near future.  The rising temperatures, along with human penchant for destroying the natural habitats of many species, is causing a faster rate of extinction then occurred 65 million years ago when an asteroid impact wiped out all the dinosaurs and many related reptile species along with some 50% of the flora and fauna of our planet.

Suggestions on how to end or at least ease global warming run the gamut from we-can-do-that-now (like recycling our waste, better insulation in our houses and turning off lights we aren’t using) to we-can-do-that-soon-with-better-technology (like making more fuel efficient cars and weaning Americans off the big ass SUV’s that only show off your attitude) to we-will-eventually-get-there (like cutting off fossil fuels and using renewable energy sources) to that’s-not-gonna-happen (too many to list!).

I recently came across an article on one proposed solution that I had heard before but never really paid any attention to it.  Frankly, I though it might fall into my last category above.  I read an article titled “Poll Finds Support for Geoengineering by Blocking Sunshine” on Scientific American (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=poll-finds-support-for-geoengineering-blocking-sunshine&WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20111025).  The gist of the article is that geoengineering solutions are gaining greater public acceptance.  This article specifically discussed a favorable public poll on injecting sulfur into the atmosphere in order to reflect more sunlight back into space.  In a quote from the article:

“A full 72 percent of participants in the survey, published in Environmental Research Letters, said they "supported" or "somewhat supported" the study of solar radiation management (SRM). The technique seeks to inject sulfur into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and offset the warming caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.”

In case you don’t remember sulfur in the air (mostly from industrial and coal-fired, electricity-generating power plant smokestacks) causes acid rain.  Acid rain is responsible for damage to buildings and crops and the killing all life in some streams, ponds and lakes, among other problems.  And yet 72% of people polled favor this idea.  Hmmm.

Now, it was an internet poll and people often hide behind their anonymity online and say (and vote for) things they’d never do in person.  But this is really scary!

And a little-discussed side effect of any plan that reduces sunlight from getting to Earth is vitamin D deficiency, which already runs rampant through much of the world outside of equatorial Africa.

I like that fact that the public is finally accepting that this is a real problem and that it might take drastic, BIG and expensive solutions.  But I don’t think this is a good one to consider.