The De-Textbook
Page 3
Our brain thinks of blue as a calming and soothing color, and our body somehow converts that belief into actual medical effects. This is why so many nighttime medications like NyQuil and Tylenol PM are blue. The only place this isn’t true is Italy, where blue is the color of the national soccer team and therefore reminds Italians of fighting and activity. So to recap, an Italian person’s body and an American person’s body will respond differently to the same pill because of the color of Italy’s soccer team.
Doctors have even gone so far as to conduct sham knee surgeries that were almost as effective as the real thing. That’s right—the power of imagination isn’t just for books and rainy Sunday afternoons anymore; it apparently also has a place in major surgery. And when you’re talking about stomach problems, depression, or chronic pain, placebos work as well as actual medical techniques in a mind-boggling 50 to 60 percent of cases.
FIGURE 2.1 Like Paul McCartney and Ice Cube, the still-existing animals we share the planet with seem less cool the longer they survive. The T. rex, like Tupac and John Lennon, never would have sold out like that.
2.A
Jurassic Myth
The Prehistoric Animals They Lied About and the Amazing Real Ones They Kept Secret
Dinosaurs are a shameless attempt by Science to hook male students early. But once you get, like, waaaay into them, you start to learn that most of the coolest stuff Science hooked you with was fake. What’s worse is that they didn’t tell you about the very real, very terrifying giant creatures hiding out in the fossil record.
Tyrannosaurus rex
What?! No! There is no way T. rex was anything less than the best. For one thing, it had indisputably the coolest-looking skeleton of any creature that has ever walked the earth. Introducing kids to T. rex is a great way to get them excited about science . . .
. . . and then immediately teach them how quickly science can choke the fun out of even the most awesome things (see “Sex Education,” chapter 4). The oldest scientific debate about T. rex is whether it was even capable of killing anything with its tiny arms and stupid brain. Deciding that wasn’t a swift enough kick to the groin; in 2004, scientists reported that T. rex had feathers. Imagine the famous jeep chase scene in Jurassic Park, only it’s the goofy mess in Figure 2.3 in the rearview mirror. The kids would have been begging Dr. Grant to let it catch them, so it could teach them all an important lesson about not judging a book by its stupid-looking, zebra-feathered cover.
FIGURE 2.2 “Rawr!” The T. rex you know, love, and fear in equal measures, like a man-eating dictator who causes awesome earthquakes with every step it takes. (Unless it’s sneaking up on the raptors in a visitors’ center, in which case it’s like a freaking ninja!)
FIGURE 2.3 “Eeep! Eeep!” What the T. rex really looked like based on recent scientific reports.
T. rex Was Far Less Awesome Than:
Amphicoelias fragillimus
The light green silhouette in Figure 2.4 belongs to Amphicoelias fragillimus, a walking cautionary tale about the importance of having a catchy name. Flashback to Jurassic Park. The biggest dinosaur that appeared on-screen in the entire film was Brachiosaurus. That’s the darker green silhouette you see below, standing over our brave volunteer, Suicidal Size-Comparison Harry, and taking shelter under what is amazingly not a dinosaur-themed Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float.
FIGURE 2.4 From left to right: Suicidal Size-Comparison Harry and the biggest dinosaur in Jurassic Park take shelter underneath the city-block-size dinosaur your teachers didn’t bother telling you about.
You could fit Brachiosaurus neatly in the stomach of this stupidly named gargantuan and still have room for dessert and a few drinks. It’s not just the largest dinosaur in recorded history, though. No, it’s the single largest land-based life-form in recorded history. It was bigger than a blue whale or any land-based vehicle ever invented. We are bugs beneath its feet. Suck it, Brachiosaurus.
Velociraptor
MYTH: The Velociraptor earned its reputation as the most famous and feared carnivore on two feet.
Downplay the staggering awesomeness of T. rex all you want, but there’s certainly no way anyone could make an argument that Velociraptor was nothing short of the deadliest and most intimidating dinosaur ever to walk the planet. It was every bit the killing machine that T. rex was, but a smaller, faster, more compact version. Like Kobe to the T. rex’s Shaq.
FIGURE 2.5 Raptors as you know them: the smart, sleek, NBA-power-forward-size killing machines from Jurassic Park. Every self-respecting child of the ’90s dreamed they would one day ride one to work.
TRUTH: Velociraptor didn’t look like the ones in Jurassic Park and looked more like the knee-high, flamboyant little monkey bird in Figure 2.6.
Yep, those are feathers. Contrary to the green, scaly bundle of menace portrayed by movies and the NBA’s least exciting franchise, Velociraptor looked more like a slightly more awkward, less rotund version of Big Bird. That’s a fitting comparison, too, because just like the famous Sesame Street bird, it couldn’t fly. That said, it was almost certainly less trustworthy around children. So, yes, it was still pretty frightening, but that fabulous coat of feathers, and the fact that it would have to climb your body like an angry teddy bear to slice open your belly, kind of takes away from the mystique.
FIGURE 2.6 What scientists think raptors really looked like: waist-high and fabulously feathered. If that thing were a cartoon character, it would totally talk like Snagglepuss.
Velociraptor Was Far Less Awesome Than:
Giant Versions of Modern Creatures
The truly baffling part is that your teachers didn’t even need to lie. The fossil record is chock-full of the most mind-blowing things of all: giant versions of the creatures you’re already scared of.
Titanoboa cerrejonensis
FIGURE 2.7 Suicidal Size-Comparison Harry shows us what Titanoboa might look like while taking an average-size, man-shape poop.
The largest anaconda on record stretches a considerable twenty-seven feet at its proudest moments. However, its ancestor Titanoboa cerrejonensis (yes, it is actually called Titanoboa) grew to lengths anywhere between forty and fifty feet, weighed in at 2,500 pounds, and could crush you to death with a harsh glance (if you’re having trouble visualizing the size, how about this: if it somehow gained the ability to stand upright, it’d be as tall as a five-story building). Where were all of the discussions about this thing in textbooks? It’s like someone was conspiring to keep us from enjoying school.
Argentavis magnificens
Now, if you raptor fans want to see a bird that should put the fear of God into you, look no further than Argentavis magnificens (Figure 2.8). It was the largest flying bird in recorded history, with a wingspan between nineteen and twenty-six feet and a total wing area of seventy-five feet. For the record, that’s just slightly smaller than a Learjet. Oh, and it’s believed that this beast could swallow whole prey as large as cattle in one fell swoop.
If these things were still patrolling the skies, literally any outdoor activity that didn’t take place under the protection of a gigantic murderous-bird-proof dome would be too much of a risk to take.
FIGURE 2.8 Say good-bye to bicycles, convertibles, and outdoor sporting events, and hello to a world where blue sky is less a beacon of hope than a grim reminder of your own mortality!
Arctodus simus
If you’re going to be a gigantic version of an animal, do the right thing and be a gigantic version of something horrifying. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Arctodus simus (Figure 2.9), also known as “Holy buckets, that bear is like twelve feet tall!” It stood at that impressive height when on its hind legs and weighed more than one ton. There is no reason to believe that it couldn’t slap your head clean off with one blow. In its day, it probably did just that on more than a few occasions, seeing as how its eventual extinction happened as a result of losing the battle for food and supplies to man (once we learned how to use weapons, of course—we really did ch
eat our way to the top of the food chain).
FIGURE 2.9 Suicidal Size-Comparison Harry likes to wear a tie, hold his breath, and stand completely still when doing his job!
Josephoartigasia monesi
FIGURE 2.10 The largest rodent ever weighed more than a ton and could have towed Cinderella to the ball without any of that “bibbidi-bobbidi” bullshit.
This guy was a rodent that grew to the size of a large hippopotamus and was every bit as adorable (so not adorable at all). It grew to as big as ten feet long and five feet high. It was thought to be an herbivore, but we’re thinking your average house cat would sooner just let this thing have the house before it would ever chase one on your behalf. If these things were still around today, you’d be reading this from inside the huge plastic hamster ball the Josephoartigasia monesi made you run around in.
Spider Crab
Now here’s an animal that knows how to rock a pair of arms (or four). Animal lovers and people whose nightmares take place underwater gave it the name spider crab due to its long, spindly arms.
Spider crabs can grow to as much as thirteen feet in length (see Figure 2.11). If you’re keeping score at home, that’s roughly the size of a family car. And the best news of all is that they’re still around!
They live in Japan, just like everything else weird and off-putting. But still, it makes you wonder why your teachers felt the need to lie about a bunch of giant birds from millions of years ago when our present-day planet has gigantic armored spiders hiding in the ocean. Of course, they had to keep the insane monsters that still live on our planet a secret, thanks to the age-old conspiracy we’ll cover next.
FIGURE 2.11 Suicidal Size-Comparison Harry, just moments before he realizes this one’s alive! You should have seen the look on his face!
2.B
The Animal Conspiracy
A Sophisticated Propaganda Campaign to Make Animals Look Like Stupid Assholes
The first facts we learn about animals make them seem like simple, predictable cartoons rather than the fascinating, diabolical sentient murder machines that many of them truly are. Remember: Nature hates you so much that pretty much everything around you right now is actively trying to kill you.
FIGURE 2.12 The mimic octopus impersonating a sea snake, a stingray, and a guy in a suit waiting in line at a bank.
THE MYTH: Chameleons change color to camouflage themselves.
You probably learned from an elementary school teacher that chameleons can change color to blend in with their backgrounds. That teacher was an idiot. But you can’t be too hard on the moron, because she was only quoting Antigonus of Carystus, an ancient Greek with, one must admit, a very credible-sounding name. Antigonus himself was simply misquoting Aristotle, a hobby that is still popular to this day.
Aristotle, the original Man Who Knew Too Much, realized that chameleons change color for the same reason as many other color-shifting lizards, amphibians, and mood rings: to clue in those around them to their emotional state. A black chameleon is an angry chameleon, and a light blue one is in the mood for love. Hence the famous zoologist’s expression “Dark black, charge attack; light blue, time to bone.”
See, chameleons don’t play mind games. Everything’s right up front with them. Isn’t that what we all really want? To communicate openly? Do you hear me, Brittany? I want you back, baby. I could lose my job for this, if the copy editor weren’t so lazy. I’m sorry about the forklift thing.
THE TRUTH: The mimic octopus is the real shape-shifter.
It seems unfair that the chameleon would be credited as the master of disguise in the animal kingdom when there’s another species out there doing an infinitely better job. The mimic octopus (see Figure 2.12), or Thaumoctopus mimicus, doesn’t just change color; it changes its entire body composition. It can match the color and texture of its environment, or if that seems too easy, it can shape-shift into an entirely different animal.
The mimic octopus is only about two feet long, can’t move very fast, and, because it has no central skeleton in its body, is the equivalent of a boneless steak sitting at the bottom of the ocean. But one of the luxuries of having no bones is that the mimic octopus can take on hundreds of different shapes. So whereas most camouflaging species of animal can look like one type of leaf, the mimic octopus can become anything it damn well pleases. Sometimes it will press all of its tentacles together, hugging them close to its body while gliding along the ocean floor to look like a flounder, or it will extend two of its tentacles and alter its coloring to resemble a poisonous sea snake while hiding the rest of its body in a hole.
The octopus has also learned to mimic the movements of the animal it’s trying to resemble. The mimic octopus is not just flexing a bunch of different muscles and getting lucky once or twice; it has carefully watched how crabs, stingrays, lionfish, shrimp, and just about every other species in the ocean move and has learned to match them. It’s called active mimicry, and it’s incredibly rare in the animal kingdom. Most species rely on passive mimicry, which means that they have no choice in what they resemble—the disguise has just been handed to them through millions of years of evolution. The mimic octopus doesn’t just camouflage itself—it does dead-on impersonations. And in case you’re thinking that it’s easy to fool fish because they’re stupid, the mimic octopus is so good at disguising itself that humanity didn’t even officially recognize it as an existing species until 1998.
THE MYTH: Lemmings commit mass suicide out of stupidity.
FIGURE 2.13 Future generations of cartoon lemmings will remember him fondly as the lemming who first grasped irony before dying (on a pile of dead lemmings).
Lemmings are best known as cuddly little manic-depressives that commit mass suicide by jumping off cliffs. Or at least that’s what political cartoons and guidance counselors have been telling us for years. That idea likely started in 1908, when a man named Arthur Mee inexplicably decided that “mass suicide” was the most likely answer for lemming population changes and published it in his book The Children’s Encyclopedia—because if there’s one thing children are, it’s stupid, and if there’s one thing they’re probably never going to do, it’s fact-check an encyclopedia.
This wacky mistake would have just faded into obscurity if it weren’t for the 1958 Disney documentary White Wilderness, in which they managed to capture lemming suicide on film for the first time. But if lemmings don’t actually commit suicide, what did the Disney filmmakers shoot? An Angela Lansbury–worthy frame-job, that’s what. They simply threw the lemmings off the cliff, filmed their murder, and edited the footage to make it match up with the behaviors lemmings are supposed to exhibit (audiences at the time also probably came away believing that a lemming’s dying call sounds exactly like a giggling film crew).
BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was so outraged at Disney for murdering all of those lemmings that they gave White Wilderness an Oscar for Best Documentary. The world is a terrible and unfair place, kids!
THE TRUTH: Animals commit suicide for spooky, inexplicable reasons.
As the hare from the fable of the tortoise and the hare illustrates, we prefer the stars of our animal-based morality plays to be unaccountably stupid. We’re less fond of animal behavior that is mysterious and appears to indicate psychological complexity, which is why you’ve never heard of Overtoun Bridge in Milton, Scotland.
The bridge has, as of this writing, been the site of around fifty canine suicides. No one’s sure what causes the angsty mutts to jump from the bridge; witnesses claim that the dogs seem happy enough, just really intent on scrabbling over the (completely regulation) guardrail and leaping to their watery deaths in the river below. The theory that someone threw a tennis ball down there has presumably been explored and discounted.
Some have even reported seeing dogs who survived the drop swim to shore, climb up onto the bridge, and jump again. Apparently Scottish dogs have way more shit on their plates than we give them credit for.
Way back in the first century A.D. the famous Roman thinker Pliny the Elder wrote that ostriches would bury their heads in the belief that “the whole of the body is concealed.” Humanity immediately seized upon the notion and used it to fuel political cartoons for the next two thousand years. But, just like the lemming, the fact that the ostrich isn’t extinct from sheer stupidity by now should have been your first clue that this wasn’t entirely true. There are two possible reasons why people might have believed this myth, and unfortunately both of them are as stupid as the alleged ostrich. First, the ostrich occasionally pecks at the ground for stones, which it uses to help digest its food. Second, the ostrich sleeps with its neck stretched out flat, so it kind of looks like its head is crammed into the dirt. In either case, the argument is “Hey, from far away, it looks like the ostrich has its head buried in the sand; this matter requires no further investigation. Good day, gentlemen.” Luckily, today we base our animal facts on the new standard of actual experiments and field research and not on the old standard of What Things Looked Like to Pliny the Elder That One Time He Saw an Ostrich.
FIGURE 2.14 This is one of many scathing political attack cartoons between the smug “Wears a Top Hat” Party and the equally smug “Doesn’t” Party.