PAUL DAVIES

SCI AM=Are Aliens Among Us?
In pursuit of evidence that life arose on Earth more than once, scientists are searching for microbes that are radically different from all known organisms
By Paul Davies
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The origin of life is one of the great unsolved problems of science. Nobody knows how, where or when life originated. About all that is known for certain is that microbial life had established itself on Earth by about three and a half billion years ago. In the absence of hard evidence of what came before, there is plenty of scope for disagreement.
Thirty years ago the prevailing view among biologists was that life resulted from a chemical fluke so improbable it would be unlikely to have happened twice in the observable universe. That conservative position was exemplified by Nobel Prize–winning French biologist Jacques Monod, who wrote in 1970: “Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.” In recent years, however, the mood has shifted dramatically. In 1995 renowned Belgian biochemist Christian de Duve called life “a cosmic imperative” and declared “it is almost bound to arise” on any Earth-like planet. De Duve’s statement reinforced the belief among astrobiologists that the universe is teeming with life. Dubbed biological determinism by Robert Shapiro of New York University, this theory is sometimes expressed by saying that “life is written into the laws of nature.”
How can scientists determine which view is correct? The most direct way is to seek evidence for life on another planet, such as Mars. If life originated from scratch on two planets in a single solar system, it would decisively confirm the hypothesis of biological determinism. Unfortunately, it may be a long time before missions to the Red Planet are sophisticated enough to hunt for Martian life-forms and, if they indeed exist, to study such extraterrestrial biota in detail.
An easier test of biological determinism may be possible, however. No planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself, so if life does emerge readily under terrestrial conditions, then perhaps it formed many times on our home planet. To pursue this tantalizing possibility, scientists have begun searching deserts, lakes and caverns for evidence of “alien” life-forms—organisms that would differ fundamentally from all known living creatures because they arose independently. Most likely, such organisms would be microscopic, so researchers are devising tests to identify exotic microbes that could be living among us.
Scientists have yet to reach a consensus on a strict definition of life, but most would agree that two of its hallmarks are an ability to metabolize (to draw nutrients from the environment, convert those nutrients into energy and excrete waste products) and an ability to reproduce. The orthodox view of biogenesis holds that if life on Earth originated more than once, one form would have swiftly predominated and eliminated all the others. This extermination might have happened, for example, if one form quickly appropriated all the available resources or “ganged up” on a weaker form of life by swapping successful genes exclusively with its own kind. But this argument is weak. Bacteria and archaea, two very different types of microorganisms that descended from a common ancestor more than three billion years ago, have peacefully coexisted ever since, without one eliminating the other. Moreover, alternative forms of life might not have directly competed with known organisms, either because the aliens occupied extreme environments where familiar microbes could not survive or because the two forms of life required different resources.
The Argument for AliensEven if alternative life does not exist now, it might have flourished in the distant past before dying out for some reason. In that case, scientists might still be able to find markers of their extinct biology in the geologic record. If alternative life had a distinctively different metabolism, say, it might have altered rocks or created mineral deposits in a way that cannot be explained by the activities of known organisms. Biomarkers in the form of distinctive organic molecules that could not have been created by familiar life might even be hiding in ancient microfossils, such as those found in rocks dating from the Archean era (more than 2.5 billion years ago).
A more exciting but also more speculative possibility is that alternative life-forms have survived and are still present in the environment, constituting a kind of shadow biosphere, a term coined by Carol Cleland and Shelley Cop­ley of the University of Colorado at Boulder. At first this idea might seem preposterous; if alien organisms thrived right under our noses (or even in our noses), would not scientists have discovered them already? It turns out that the answer is no. The vast majority of organisms are microbes, and it is almost impossible to tell what they are simply by looking at them through a microscope. Microbiologists must analyze the genetic sequences of an organism to determine its location on the tree of life—the phylogenetic grouping of all known creatures—and researchers have classified only a tiny fraction of all observed microbes.
To be sure, all the organisms that have so far been studied in detail almost certainly descended from a common origin. Known organisms share a similar biochemistry and use an almost identical genetic code, which is why biologists can sequence their genes and position them on a single tree. But the procedures that researchers use to analyze newly discovered organisms are deliberately customized to detect life as we know it. These techniques would fail to respond correctly to a different biochemistry. If shadow life is confined to the microbial realm, it is entirely possible that scientists have overlooked it.
Ecologically Isolated AliensWhere might investigators look for alien organisms on Earth today? Some scientists have focused on searching for organisms occupying a niche that is ecologically isolated, lying beyond the reach of ordinary known life. One of the surprising discoveries in recent years is the ability of known life to endure extraordinarily harsh conditions. Microbes have been found inhabiting extreme environments ranging from scalding volcanic vents to the dry valleys of Antarctica. Other so-called extremophiles can survive in salt-saturated lakes, highly acidic mine tailings contaminated with metals, and the waste pools of nuclear reactors.
Nevertheless, even the hardiest microorganisms have their limits. Life as we know it depends crucially on the availability of liquid water. In the Atacama Desert in northern Chile is a region that is so dry that all traces of familiar life are absent. Furthermore, although certain microbes can thrive in temperatures above the normal boiling point of water, scientists have not yet found anything living above about 130 degrees Celsius (266 degrees Fahrenheit). It is conceivable, though, that an exotic alternative form of life could exist under more extreme conditions of dryness or temperature.
Thus, scientists might find evidence for alternative life by discovering signs of biological activity, such as the cycling of carbon between the ground and the atmosphere, in an ecologically isolated region. The obvious places to look for such disconnected ecosystems are in the deep subsurface of Earth’s crust, in the upper atmosphere, in Antarctica, in salt mines, and in sites contaminated by metals and other pollutants. Alternatively, researchers could vary parameters such as temperature and moisture in a laboratory experiment until all known forms of life are extinguished; if some biological activity persists, it could be a sign of shadow life at work. Scientists used this technique to discover the radiation-resistant bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, which can withstand gamma-ray doses that are 1,000 times as great as what would be lethal for humans. It turns out that D. radiodurans and all the other so-called radiophiles that researchers have identified are genetically linked to known life, so they are not candidate aliens, but that finding does not rule out the possibility of discovering alternative life-forms in this way.
Investigators have already pinpointed a handful of ecosystems that appear to be almost completely isolated from the rest of the biosphere. Located far underground, these microbial communities are cut off from light, oxygen and the organic products of other organisms. They are sustained by the ability of some microbes to use carbon dioxide and hydrogen released by chemical reactions or radioactivity to metabolize, grow and replicate. Although all the organisms found to date in these ecosystems are closely related to surface-dwelling microbes, the biological exploration of Earth’s deep subsurface is still in its infancy, and many surprises may lie in store. The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program has been sampling rocks from the seabed to a depth approaching one kilometer, in part to explore their microbial content. Boreholes on land have revealed signs of biological activity from even deeper locations. So far, however, the research community has not conducted a systematic, large-scale program to probe the deep subsurface of Earth’s crust for life.
Ecologically Integrated AliensOne might suppose it would be easier to find alternative life-forms if they were not isolated but integrated into the known biosphere existing all around us. But if shadow life is restricted to alien microbes that are intermingled with familiar kinds, the exotic creatures would be very hard to spot on casual inspection. Microbial morphology is limited—most microorganisms are just little spheres or rods. Aliens might stand out biochemically, though. One way to search for them is to make a guess as to what alternative chemistry might be involved and then look for its distinctive signature.
A simple example involves chirality. Large biological molecules possess a definite handedness: although the atoms in a molecule can be configured into two mirror-image orientations—left-handed or right-handed—molecules must possess compatible chirality to assemble into more complex structures. In known life-forms, the amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—are left-handed, whereas the sugars are right-handed and DNA is a right-handed double helix. The laws of chemistry, however, are blind to left and right, so if life started again from scratch, there would be a 50–50 chance that its building blocks would be molecules of the opposite handedness. Shadow life could in principle be biochemically almost identical to known life but made of mirror-image molecules. Such mirror life would not compete directly with known life, nor could the two forms swap genes, because the relevant molecules would not be interchangeable.
Fortunately, researchers could identify mirror life using a very simple procedure. They could prepare a nutrient broth consisting entirely of the mirror images of the molecules usually included in a standard culture medium; a mirror organism might be able to consume the concoction with gusto, whereas a known life-form would find it unpalatable. Richard Hoover and Elena Pikuta of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center recently performed a pilot experiment of this kind, putting a variety of newly discovered extremophiles into a mirror broth and then looking for biological activity. They found one microbe that grew in the broth, an organism dubbed Anaerovirgula multivorans that had been isolated from the sediments of an alkaline lake in California. Disappointingly, this organism did not turn out to be an example of mirror life; rather it was a bacterium with the surprising ability to chemically alter the amino acids and sugars of the wrong handedness so as to make them digestible. The study, however, looked at just a small fraction of the microbial realm.
Another possibility is that shadow life might share the same general biochemistry with familiar life but employ a different suite of amino acids or nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA). All known organisms use the same set of nucleotides—designated A, C, G and T for their distinguishing bases (adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine)—to store information and, with rare exceptions, the same 20 amino acids to construct proteins, the workhorses of cells. The genetic code is based on triplets of nucleotides, with different triplets spelling out the names of different amino acids. The sequence of triplets in a gene dictates the sequence of amino acids that must be strung together to build a particular protein. But chemists can synthesize many other amino acids that are not present in known organisms. The Murchison meteorite, a cometary remnant that fell in Australia in 1969, contained many common amino acids but also some unusual ones, such as isovaline and pseudoleucine. (Scientists are not sure how the amino acids formed in the meteorite, but most researchers believe that the chemicals were not produced by biological activity.) Some of these unfamiliar amino acids might make suitable building blocks for alternative forms of life. To hunt for such aliens, investigators would need to identify an amino acid that is not used by any known organisms nor generated as a by-product of an organism’s metabolism or decay, and to look for its presence in the environment, either among living microbes or in the organic detritus that might be generated by a shadow biosphere.
To help focus the search, scientists can glean clues from the burgeoning field of synthetic, or artificial, life. Biochemists are currently attempting to engineer completely novel organisms by inserting additional amino acids into proteins. A pioneer of this research, Steve Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Fla., has pointed out that a class of molecules known as alpha-methyl amino acids look promising for artificial life because they can fold properly. These molecules, however, have not been found in any natural organism studied to date. As investigators identify new microbes, it would be a relatively simple matter to use standard tools for analyzing the composition of proteins, such as mass spectrometry, to learn which amino acids the organisms contain. Any glaring oddities in the inventory would signal that the microbe could be a candidate for shadow life.
If such a strategy were successful, researchers would face the difficulty of determining whether they were dealing with a genuine alternative form of life descended from a separate origin or with merely a new domain of known life, such as archaea, which were not identified until the late 1970s. In other words, how can scientists be sure that what seems like a new tree of life is not in fact an undiscovered branch of the known tree that split away a very long time ago and has so far escaped our attention? In all likelihood, the earliest life-forms were radically different from those that followed. For example, the sophisticated triplet DNA code for specifying particular amino acids shows evidence of being optimized in its efficiency by evolutionary selection. This observation suggests the existence of a more rudimentary precursor, such as a doublet code employing only 10, rather than 20, amino acids. It is conceivable that some primitive organisms are still using the old precursor code today. Such microbes would not be truly alien but more like living fossils. Nevertheless, their discovery would still be of immense scientific interest. Another possible holdover from an earlier biological epoch would be microbes that use RNA in place of DNA.
The chance of confusing a separate tree of life with an undiscovered branch of our own tree is diminished if one considers more radical alternatives to known bio­chemistry. Astrobiologists have speculated about forms of life in which some other solvent (such as ethane or methane) replaces water, although it is hard to identify environments on Earth that would support any of the suggested substances. (Ethane and methane are liquid only in very cold places such as the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.) Another popular conjecture concerns the basic chemical elements that make up the vital parts of known organisms: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus. Would life be possible if a different element were substituted for one of these five?
Phosphorus is problematic for life in some ways. It is relatively rare and would not have existed in abundance in readily accessible, soluble form under the conditions that prevailed during the early history of Earth. Felisa Wolfe-Simon, formerly at Arizona State University and now at Harvard University, has hypothesized that arsenic can successfully fill the role of phosphorus for living organisms and would have offered distinct chemical advantages in ancient environments. For example, in addition to doing all the things that phosphorus can do in the way of structural bonding and energy storage, arsenic could provide a source of energy to drive metabolism. (Arsenic is a poison for regular life precisely because it mimics phosphorus so well. Similarly, phosphorus would be poisonous to an arsenic-based organism.) Could it be that arseno-life still lingers in phosphorus-poor and arsenic-rich pockets, such as ocean vents and hot springs?
Another important variable is size. All known organisms manufacture proteins from amino acids using large molecular machines called ribosomes, which link the amino acids together. The need to accommodate ribosomes requires that all autonomous organisms on our tree of life must be at least a few hundred nanometers (billionths of a meter) across. Viruses are much smaller—as tiny as 20 nanometers wide—but these agents are not autonomous organisms because they cannot reproduce without the help of the cells they infect. Because of this dependence, viruses cannot be considered an alternative form of life, nor is there any evidence that they stem from an independent origin. But over the years several scientists have claimed that the biosphere is teeming with cells that are too small to accommodate ribosomes. In 1990 Robert Folk of the University of Texas at Austin drew attention to tiny spheroidal and ovoid objects in sedimentary rocks found in hot springs in Viterbo, Italy. Folk proposed that the objects were fossilized “nannobacteria” (a spelling he preferred), the calcified remains of organisms as small as 30 nanometers across. More recently, Philippa Uwins of the University of Queensland has discovered similar structures in rock samples from a deep-ocean borehole off the coast of Western Australia. If these structures indeed arise from biological processes—and many scientists hotly dispute this contention—they may be evidence of alternative life-forms that do not use ribosomes to assemble their proteins and that thus evade the lower size limit that applies to known life.
Perhaps the most intriguing possibility of all is that alien life-forms inhabit our own bodies. While observing mammalian cells with an electron microscope in 1988, Olavi Kajander and his colleagues at the University of Kuopio in Finland observed ultrasmall particles inside many of the cells. With dimensions as small as 50 nanometers, these particles were about one-tenth the size of conventional small bacteria. Ten years later Kajander and his co-workers proposed that the particles were living organisms that thrive in urine and induce the formation of kidney stones by precipitating calcium and other minerals around themselves. Although such claims remain controversial, it is conceivable that at least some of these Lilliputian forms are alien organisms employing a radically alternative biochemistry.
What Is Life, Anyway?If a biochemically weird microorganism should be discovered, its status as evidence for a second genesis, as opposed to a new branch on our own tree of life, will depend on how fundamentally it differs from known life. In the absence of an understanding of how life began, however, there are no hard-and-fast criteria for this distinction. For instance, some astrobiologists have speculated about the possibility of life arising from silicon compounds instead of carbon compounds. Because carbon is so central to our biochemistry, it is hard to imagine that silicon- and carbon-based organisms could have emerged from a common origin. On the other hand, an organism that employed the same suite of nucleotides and amino acids as known life-forms but merely used a different genetic code for specifying amino acids would not provide strong evidence for an independent origin, because the differences could probably be explained by evolutionary drift.
A converse problem also exists: dissimilar organisms subjected to similar environmental challenges will often gradually converge in their properties, which will become optimized for thriving under existing conditions. If this evolutionary convergence were strong enough, it could mask the evidence for independent biogenesis events. For example, the choice of amino acids may have been optimized by evolution. Alien life that began using a different set of amino acids might then have evolved over time to adopt the same set that familiar life-forms use.
The difficulty of determining whether a creature is alien is exacerbated by the fact that there are two competing theories of biogenesis. The first is that life begins with an abrupt and distinctive transformation, akin to a phase transition in physics, perhaps triggered when a system reaches a certain threshold of chemical complexity. The system need not be a single cell. Biologists have proposed that primitive life emerged from a community of cells that traded material and information and that cellular autonomy and species individuation came later. The alternative view is that there is a smooth, extended continuum from chemistry to biology, with no clear line of demarcation that can be identified as the genesis of life.
If life, so famously problematic to define, is said to be a system having a property—such as the ability to store and process certain kinds of information—that marks a well-defined transition from the nonliving to the living realm, it would be meaningful to talk about one or more origin-of-life events. If, however, life is weakly defined as something like organized complexity, the roots of life may meld seamlessly into the realm of general complex chemistry. It would then be a formidable task to demonstrate independent origins for different forms of life unless the two types of organisms were so widely separated that they could not have come into contact (for instance, if they were located on planets in different star systems).
It is clear that we have sampled only a tiny fraction of Earth’s microbial population. Each discovery has brought surprises and forced us to expand our notion of what is biologically possible. As more terrestrial environments are explored, it seems very likely that new and ever more exotic forms of life will be discovered. If this search were to uncover evidence for a second genesis, it would strongly support the theory that life is a cosmic phenomenon and lend credence to the belief that we are not alone in the universe.



/////////////////////Diet Advice From DNA
Internet marketers claim that a genetic test can give you a personalized diet. Are they advertising cutting-edge science or a high-tech horoscope?
By Laura Hercher


Photoillustration by Aaron Goodman
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hen President Bill Clinton stood in the East Room of the White House on June 26, 2000, and hailed the completion of the Human Genome Project, calling its results “the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind,” he was not looking to inaugurate an era of high-tech snake oil sales. Yet less than a decade later Web-based purveyors of genetic tests and dietary supplements are hawking nutritional genetics, or nutrigenetics, with claims that it can look at an individual’s genetic information to figure out what that person should eat to promote stronger bones, shinier hair and other trappings of good health. So far, though, hyperbole has outpaced promise. This nascent field provides a cautionary tale of how commerce often races ahead of science: the commercialization of gene detection technology has occurred before scientists have developed an adequate understanding of how particular genes contribute to health and disease.
Information derived from sequencing the DNA code in every human chromosome is gradually enabling scientists to create tests and treatments that have the potential to prevent, diagnose, ameliorate and perhaps even cure disease. It is also paving the way for “personalized medicine,” which is based on the recognition that genetic differences among individuals can explain why one person’s body reacts differently than another’s to food, drugs, sun, exercise, allergens or other stimuli. In an ideal world, a genetic test would reveal which medication or other therapy would work best and produce the fewest side effects in a given individual. And investigators are now beginning to create such tests. One milestone occurred this past summer, when the Food and Drug Administration approved the first genetic test to help a patient gauge the best dosage for a blood-thinning drug called warfarin. The test is certain to be followed by scores of others that attempt to better match drug to patient.




/////////////////////////The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett
After his now celebrated theory of multiple universes met scorn, Hugh Everett abandoned the world of academic physics. He turned to top-secret military research and led a tragic private life*Supplement: The Many Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics
By Peter Byrne


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Illustration by Sean McCabe
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ugh Everett III was a brilliant mathematician, an iconoclastic quantum theorist and, later, a successful defense contractor with access to the nation’s most sensitive military secrets. He introduced a new conception of reality to physics and influenced the course of world history at a time when nuclear Armageddon loomed large. To science-fiction aficionados, he remains a folk hero: the man who invented a quantum theory of multiple universes. To his children, he was someone else again: an emotionally unavailable father; “a lump of furniture sitting at the dining room table,” cigarette in hand. He was also a chain-smoking alcoholic who died prematurely.
Sidebar The Many Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics
Sidebar Transcript of page 1 of the Hotel Osterport note.
At least that is how his history played out in our fork of the universe. If the many-worlds theory that Everett developed when he was a student at Princeton University in the mid-1950s is correct, his life took many other turns in an unfathomable number of branching universes.




//////////////////Bigfoot Anatomy
Sasquatch is just a legend, right? According to the evidence, maybe not, argues Jeffrey Meldrum--a position he holds despite ostracism from his fellow anthropologists and university colleagues
By Marguerite Holloway
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One overcast Sunday morning in 1996, Jeffrey Meldrum and his brother drove to Walla Walla, Wash., to see if they could find Paul Freeman, a man renowned in Bigfoot circles as a source of footprint casts. Meldrum—who has followed Bigfoot lore since he was a boy—had heard that Freeman was a hoaxer, “so I was very dubious,” he recalls. The brothers arrived unannounced, Meldrum says, and chatted with Freeman about his collection. Freeman said he had found tracks just that morning, but they were not good, not worth casting. The brothers wanted to see them regardless. “I thought we could use this to study the anatomy of a hoax,” Meldrum says. Instead Meldrum’s visit to a ridge in the Blue Mountains set him firmly on a quest he has been on since.
Meldrum, an associate professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, is an expert on foot morphology and locomotion in monkeys, apes and hominids. He has studied the evolution of bipedalism and edited From Biped to Strider (Springer, 2004), a well-respected textbook. He brought his anatomical expertise to the site outside Walla Walla. The 14-inch-long prints Freeman showed him were interesting, Meldrum says, because some turned out at a 45-degree angle, suggesting that whatever made them had looked back over its shoulder. Some showed skin whorls, some were flat with distinct anatomical detail, others were of running feet—imprints of the front part of the foot only, of toes gripping the mud. Meldrum made casts and decided it would be hard to hoax the running footprints, “unless you had some device, some cable-loaded flexible toes.”
To Meldrum, the anatomy captured in those prints and the casts of others he has examined as well as still unidentified hairs, recordings of strange calls and certain witness testimonials all add up to valid evidence that warrants study. He reviews that evidence in Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science (Forge, 2006). “My book is not an attempt to convince people of the existence of Sasquatch,” the 49-year-old Meldrum says emphatically; rather it argues that “the evidence that exists fully justifies the investigation and the pursuit of this question.”
To Meldrum’s critics—including university colleagues and scientists in his own field—that same collection does not constitute valid evidence, and Meldrum’s examination of it is pseudoscientific: belief shrouded in the language of scientific rigor and analysis. “Even if you have a million pieces of evidence, if all the evidence is inconclusive, you can’t count it all up to make something conclusive,” says David J. Daegling, an anthropologist at the University of Florida who has critiqued Meldrum and the Bigfoot quest in the Skeptical Inquirer and is the author of Bigfoot Exposed (AltaMira, 2004).
Neither side can win its case without a Sasquatch specimen or fossil or without the true confessions of a fleet of perhaps fleet-footed hoaxers. In the meantime, observers watch a debate that is striking in that both sides use virtually the same language, refute each other’s interpretations with the same tone of disbelief and insist they have the identical goal: honoring the scientific method. And the question of how science on the fringe should be dealt with remains open: some observers say that Meldrum, who has been lambasted by colleagues and passed over for promotion twice, should just be left alone to do his thing; others counter that in this era of creationism, global warming denial, and widespread antiscience sentiment and scientific illiteracy, it is particularly imperative that bad science be soundly scrutinized and exposed.
Meldrum is a tall, mustached man, relaxed, friendly and gregarious. On a recent summer morning in his office—rich in Bigfoot paraphernalia—he explains that his interest in the subject arose when he was 11 and saw Roger Patterson’s now famous film of an alleged Sasquatch loping into the forest. Meldrum listed cryptozoology (the study of hidden creatures such as yeti and Nessie) as an interest on his vitae when he applied for doctoral work. But Bigfoot as an active pursuit did not emerge until he arrived at Idaho State in 1993 and was back in the Pacific Northwest, where he grew up.
Meldrum’s laboratory houses more than 200 casts relating to Bigfoot. As he pulls out drawers and talks about the casts, Meldrum shows ones with the hallmarks of hoax and others that intrigue him because of anatomy, hair striations, musculature and an apparent midtarsal break—a pair of joints in the middle of the ape foot that have less mobility in the human foot because of the arch. He brings out a particularly controversial piece called the Skookum cast that he thinks may be of a reclining Sasquatch and others think may be of a reclining elk. “There is a chance we are wrong,” he says. “But with the footprints, I feel more certain.” Discounting the unusual casts “isn’t scientific in the least,” Meldrum maintains, and “it is irresponsible.”
“He does bring more scientific rigor to this question than anyone else in the past, and he does do state-of-the-art footprint analysis,” notes David R. Begun, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto. Todd R. Disotell, a New York University anthropologist, agrees: “He is trying to bring rigor to it.” Both researchers collaborate with Meldrum even though they do not accept his hypothesis that a large apelike creature exists. “If he hands me a feces sample or a bloodstain or a hair shaft, I am willing to do what I do with anything I get,” Disotell says. “I go along with this because I am either doing good science, finding alternatives or debunking, or I have the find of the century.” Disotell gets Bigfoot jibes over beers sometimes, but nothing similar to what Meldrum experiences: “I think what is happening to him is a shame.”
In his famous “Cargo Cult Science” lect­ure in 1974, Richard Feynman described scientific thinking and integrity as “a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards” to raise and examine every doubt, every interpretation. This kind of thinking, critics say, is missing from Meldrum’s Bigfoot work, whereas it infuses his fossil and primate gait research. Meldrum’s principal critic from his own field is Daegling, who concludes that the “evidence doesn’t look better on deeper analysis, it looks worse.” He adds that “this isn’t about Bigfoot—it is about how scientists go about doing their work and how we should be self-reflective and self-critical.”
Meldrum responds by saying that most people do not see him critically sifting through all the evidence that comes his way—and discarding most of it. But if he is at times frustrated and beleaguered by skeptics, it appears some in his community are beleaguered by his exhortation that more researchers accept his interpretations or become involved. In reviewing Meldrum’s and Daegling’s books in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Matt Cartmill of Duke University concludes that if the chances of Bigfoot’s being real are one in 10,000 (his admittedly wild guess), then having one physical anthropologist on the case seems a reasonable allocation of professional resources and that Meldrum does not deserve scorn or abuse. But Cartmill, who notes that he is “mortally certain” there is no Sasquatch, is irked by Meldrum’s trying to guilt-trip those who do not do Bigfoot work and his disparaging them as lazy or aloof.
The tension is inevitable for science on the fringe, says Trent D. Stephens of Idaho State who co-authored a book with Meldrum on evolutionary biology and Mormonism. As he puts it: “The stuff that is on the margins, the stuff that isn’t popular—we scientists are horrible at judging it. And we say our mistakes about the fringe are all historical; we claim we are not making those mistakes today.”
The fringe has produced wonderful science, and it has produced wonderfully abysmal science. It has never been a comfortable place to live.




////////////////////////Eat Nuts and SeedsGrains (bread, rice, etc.) don't play a large role in a low-carb diet. However, it turns out that grains are not very dense in nutrients when compared with many other food groups. Small amounts of nuts and seeds can fill in the same nutrients as larger amounts of whole grains. Nuts have been found to be heart-healthy, as well, and most nuts and seeds are low in carbohydrates.



//////////////////Got Room For More Carbs? Try LegumesBeans and lentils have high carb counts, but in most people the carbohydrate is more slowly absorbed than carbs from other sources, and some of it is never converted into glucose at all (this is called resistant starch). Beans are high in fiber, in lots of minerals, including iron and potassium, and in phytonutrients. Soybeans have the least amount of carbohydrate. I'm especially fond of black soy beans



////////////////////////If you are planning to self-deliver with helium and want to make your own "hood" but cannot find turkey-roasting bags, you might consider panettone bags. Panettone is an Italian sweet bread that is sold around Christmastime and is shipped to many places outside Italy. A one-kilogram panettone (2.2 lbs.), which comes in a box that is 7 1/2" square and 7 1/2" high (19.5 cm.) is wrapped in a very strong clear bag that measures 15" x 19" (39 cm. x 49 cm.). A plus: the bag smells wonderful (though this might no longer be true after the bag has been inflated with helium).



/////////////////RELIGIOUS FICTION




////////////////////////////The Four Gifts of KnowingThe Philosopher's Gift of reason and clear thinking The Scientist's Giftof senses and method The Shaman's Gift of feeling and alternative states The Mystic's Gift of intuition and sacred silence


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