Evolution, You’re Drunk

Amoebas are puny, stupid blobs, so scientists were surprised to learn that they contain 200 times more DNA than Einstein did. Made of just one cell, researchers assumed amoebas would be simpler than humans genetically. Plus, amoebas date back farther in time than humans, and simplicity is considered an attribute of primitive beings. It just didn’t make sense.

The idea of directionality in nature, a gradient from simple to complex, began with the Greeks, who called nature physis, meaning growth. That idea subtly extended from changes over an organism’s lifetime, to changes over evolutionary time after Charles Darwin argued that all animals descend from a single common ancestor. When his contemporaries drew evolutionary trees of life, they assumed increasing complexity. Worms originated early in animal evolution.  Creatures with more complex structures originated later. Biologists tweaked evolutionary trees over the following century, but generally, simple organisms continued to precede the complex.

Take the textbook scenario on early animal evolution. It essentially goes as follows: Single-celled organisms gained the ability to adhere to and communicate with one another more than 600 million years ago, and from the resulting colonies, the first multicellular animals emerged. Today’s sponges, sedentary animals on the sea floor with no guts, brains, or tissue layers, descend directly from some of these creatures. Some early animals then organized their cells into distinct tissue layers, and some of the cells formed nerve cells, muscle cells, and other types. Later yet, some animals developed serially repeated segments that served as a platform for legs and claws in their descendants. Then an animal with a spinal column evolved, and then one with a column surrounded by bony vertebrae. A recent branch to split from the tree blossomed into humans.

Scientists’ belief in this scenario has remained relatively unchanged for a century. It reflects the growth we observe during an organism’s development, and it’s been tracked over evolutionary time, too. Paleontologists have found fossils to support this arrangement, and they’ve also quantified increasing complexity within animal lineages. For example, an analysis of the waves, or sutures, in shells of extinct mollusks called ammonoidsâ€"snail-like sisters to nautilusesâ€"shows that their designs became eight times as complex over 108 million years.¹

The waves, or sutures, in the shells of one group of ammonoids became eight times more complex over 108 million years.Maureen Griswold | Source: Paleobiology (See Reference 1 below.)

Before the advent of rapid, accurate, and inexpensive DNA sequencing technology in the early 2000s, biologists guessed that genes would provide more evidence for increasing complexity in evolution. Simple, early organisms would have fewer genes than complex ones, they predicted, just as a blueprint of Dorothy’s cottage in Kansas would be less complicated than one for the Emerald City. Instead, their assumptions of increasing complexity began to fall apart. First to go was an easy definition of how complexity manifested itself. After all, amoebas had huge genomes. Now, DNA analyses are rearranging evolutionary trees, suggesting that the arrow scientists envisioned between simplicity and complexity actually spins like a weather vane caught in a tornado.

After genome sizes failed to fit notions of simplicity and complexity, researchers hypothesized that gene numberâ€"genes being the sections of the genome that encode proteinsâ€"might instead reflect them. For a few years, that seemed about right. Humans have about 22,000 genes while the mosquito Anopheles gambiae has about 14,000. Then, in 2007, an international team of researchers sequenced the genome of the plant-like sea anemones, marine creatures that lack muscles, heads, rear-ends, and brains. To their surprise, anemones had more genes than insects, including some genes that humans possess but flies do not. Even more perplexing: Sea anemones evolved before flies and humans, some 560 million years ago. That meant animals might have been genetically complex from the start. “When I was younger, and we knew less, we thought that organisms gained genes over millions of years and that the earliest animals were genetically very simple,” says Bill Pearson, a computational biologist at the University of Virginia who developed some of the first techniques to compare protein sequences among organisms. “We think that less now,” he adds.

Then molecular analyses did something else. They rearranged the order of branches on evolutionary trees. Biologists pushed aside trees based on how similar organisms looked to one another, and made new ones based on similarities in DNA and protein sequences. The results suggested that complex body parts evolved multiple times and had also been lost. One study found that winged stick insects evolved from wingless stick insects who had winged ancestors.² Another analysis suggested that extremely simple animals called acoel wormsâ€"a quarter inch long and with just one hole for eating and excretingâ€"evolved from an ancestor with a separate mouth and anus.³ Biologists’ arrow of time swung forward and backward and forward again.

Late last year, the animal evolutionary tree quaked at its root. A team led by Joseph Ryan, an evolutionary biologist who splits his time between the National Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md. and the Sars International Center for Marine Molecular Biology in Bergen, Norway, analyzed the genome from a comb jelly, Mnemiopsis leidyi, a complex marine predator with muscles, nerves, a rudimentary brain, and bioluminescence, and found that the animals may have originated before simple sponges, which lack all of those features.⁴

The comb jelly, Mnemiopsis leidyi, snags prey with its mucus-covered lobes. An analysis of its genome suggests the group might have evolved before all other living animals.William Browne, University of Miami

If comb jellies evolved before sponges, the sponges might have lost the complexity that the ancestor uniting them and comb jellies possessed. Or, that ancestorâ€"the ancestor of all living animalsâ€"had the genes to build brains and muscles, but did not form those parts, and neither did sponges. If this is true, then comb jellies deployed the genome they inherited to build a brain, nervous system, and muscles, independent of other animals. There’s some support for this possibility: A unique set of genes seems to underlie comb jellies’ muscles.

Both hypotheses run counter to scenarios in which organisms evolve to be increasingly complex. In one, a complex nervous system and muscles were lost in the sponges. In the other, the sponges had the genetic capability for complex features but stayed simple, while a more primitive group, the comb jellies, acquired brains and muscles that help them chase down prey. Furthermore, the idea that complex parts like a brain and nervous systemâ€"including nerve cells, synapses, and neurotransmitter moleculesâ€"could evolve separately multiple times perplexes evolutionary biologists because parts are gained one at a time. The chance of the same progression happening twice in separate lineages seems unlikelyâ€"or so biologists thought. “Traditional views are based on our dependence on our nervous system,” says Ryan. “We think the nervous system is the greatest thing in the world so how could anything lose it,” he says. “Or, it’s the greatest thing in the world, so how could it happen twice.”

With comb jellies at the base of the tree, evolution suddenly seems less like a march towards complexity and more like a meandering stroll. This isn’t a new idea. Back in 1996, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould posited that evolution progresses like a drunkard’s walk. Organisms, he said, stand an equal chance of becoming simpler or more complex over millions of yearsâ€"although sometimes there’s a lower limit on how simple they can possibly be, just as a drunk may fall into a gutter at the far left side of the road. An Internet meme even celebrates oddities that result from evolution’s stumble: “Go Home Evolution, You’re Drunk,” features organisms with sub-optimal traits that have managed to survive just fine.

It’s mutations that cause body parts to become simpler or more complex, so to see whether they naturally cause one state more often than the other, Jukka Jernvall, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, experimented with teeth. According to the fossil record, mammals’ teeth went from tiny, pointy daggers 200 million years ago to more complex shapes with bumps and grooves. “For the first half of [mammals’] existence, teeth were pretty simple,” Jernvall says. “Then they went wild.”

Jernvall’s team induced mutations in genes involved in tooth formation in mice, and found that most of the mutations caused teeth to become simpler than they usually are.⁵ To form a more complex tooth, the team had to induce multiple molecular changes at once. The results suggest that reductions in complexity should evolve more easily than increases in complexity. Without pressure from the environment, teeth would have stayed simple. The fact that they did not means mammals with complex teeth were at a sizable advantage. Jernvall speculates that these mammals feasted on flowering plants that their pointy-toothed sisters could not grind. “Tooth complexity was ecologically driven through diet,” he says.

Jernvall’s study shows how complexity in tooth shape can evolve, but it does not speak to other trends in mammalian features, such as their number of vertebrae, changes in intelligence, or their number of genes. The sheer number of features for any given organism makes complexity an ineffable trait to grasp, says Dan McShea, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Shell designs and tooth bumps aren’t inherently perfect reflections of complexity, they’re just amenable to study. Furthermore, he says, people often choose to define complexity by what puts humans on top. If complexity were instead defined by features that allow an organism to survive successfully, he says cyanobacteria might be at the pinnacle level, because they have flourished for 3.5 billion years while many lineages of mammals have gone extinct within a fraction of that time. McShea warns, “This impression of directionality may be an illusion.”

Winged stick insects evolved from wingless stick insects who had winged ancestors.

Perhaps the fact that people are stunned whenever organisms become simpler says more about how the human mind organizes the world than about evolutionary processes. People are more comfortable envisioning increasing complexity through time instead of reversals or stasis. Physicist Sean Carroll calls humans “terrible temporal chauvinists” for this reason, because they desperately want the street from the past to the future to run in one direction. The textbook scenarios on early animal evolution might be correct, but they should be treated as hypotheses built by temporal chauvinists. When new data suggests a rearrangement, it must be considered no matter how perplexing the conclusion seems.

Casey Dunn, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I. who took part in the still-contentious comb jelly project, now doubts all notions of increasing complexity. Instead, he says the environment selects whatever form handles the challenges at hand, be it simple, complex, or plain ugly.  Mother Nature, with her 4 billion years of experience, does not work like Steve Jobs, continuously designing sleeker versions. When asked whether de-evolution, a reversal from the complex to the simple, happens frequently, Dunn replies, sure. “But,” he adds, “I wouldn’t call that de-evolution, I’d call it evolution.”

References

1. Saunders, W. B. & Work, D. M. Evolution of Shell Morphology and Suture Complexity in Paleozoic Prolecanitids, the Rootstock of Mesozoic Ammonoids. Paleobiology 23, 301-325 (1997).

2. Whiting, M. F., Bradler, S. & Maxwell, T. Loss and recovery of wings in stick insects. Nature 421, 264-267 (2003).

3. Philippe, H., et al. Acoelomorph flatworms are deuterostomes related to Xenoturbella. Nature 470, 255-258 (2011).

4. Ryan, J., et al. The genome of the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi and its implications for cell type evolution. Science 342 (2013).

5. Harjunmaa, E., Kallonen, A., Voutilainen, M., Hamalainen, K., Mikkola, M. L., & Jernvall, J. On the difficulty of increasing dental complexity. Nature 483, 324-327 (2012).

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A Former NFL Cheerleader Tells All

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As a glimpse into the dark side of NFL cheerleading, the recent Raiderettes lawsuit was revelatory, but it didn't quite capture the soup-to-nuts seediness of the enterprise. Thanks to a tipsterâ€"a former cheerleaderâ€"we've gotten our hands on a copy of the many rules and many regulations the 2009 Baltimore Ravens cheer squad was expected to follow. The rulebook, along with some extra information the tipster gave us, depicts cheerleading on this level as a scam exploiting the good looks and naiveté of young womenâ€"a Ponzi scheme in hot pants.

Let's start at the beginning. Every March, anywhere from 100 to 300 young women and men try out for one of the 30 or 40 available spots on the Ravens' stunt and dance teams. The girls range from dance specialists, experts at the physical aspects of cheer, to pretty faces more interested in the quasi-modeling parts of the job. Those who combine real talent with the right lookâ€""big boobs, flat stomach, pretty face," per the former cheerleaderâ€"are ideal.

As part of the tryout process, prospective cheerleaders are weighed, with the figure serving as a baselineâ€"at least for some. "If you deviate from the baseline, you can/will get benched, but only if you're a female," the tipster says in an email. "Males are hardly kept to any standard unless they personally care." It's all right there in the rulebook, which you can find at the bottom of this post.

Each cheerleader, male and female, is expected to maintain ideal body weight and physical look for the duration of your contract. Weigh-ins will be held at the discretion of the Ravens. a) Failure to comply with body weight and/or appearance guidelines could result in suspension from the team or gameday suspensions. b) 3 game misses due to physical appearance suspensions could result in dismissal from the team.

There is, our former cheerleader writes in an email, a blind focus on this baseline number, with almost no regard for health or even looks. One woman came into the season five pounds lighter than she was the previous year:

After coming in lighter, she put back some of the weight throughout the year. She was benched for multiple games even though she weighed less than she did the year before. Eventually she had the backbone to tell them she was fed up with it, and quit. Believe me when I tell you, she was no where near overweight.

Last year, a different Ravens cheerleader claimed she was benched during the regular season and left home for the Super Bowl because of "a little bit of a weight gain."

Weight isn't the only aspect of a cheerleader's appearance that's rigorously managed. As provided for in the rules, every year the women are given a hair and makeup assessment, in which their look for the season is determined. After that first session, the cheerleaders must continue to visit the same hair salon to maintain the prescribed style, paying for the service themselves. "We had a hair sponsorship with Robert Andrew Salon & Spa where you had to get your hair done," writes the cheerleader. "You get 50 percent, which I always thought was BS considering the Redskins cheerleaders use the same salon and get their hair done for free." Maintenance of hair and makeup can run upwards of $1,000 a season.

To help maintain the look they expect of their cheerleaders, the Ravens do provide a limited number of gym memberships, teeth whitenings, and tanning vouchers for the fairer-skinned squad members, who, the rules mandate, "must have a warm skin color tone for every gameday." (While the rulebook is from 2009, our tipster, who maintains contact with current cheerleaders, assures us that "not much has changed, if anything.")

These benefits are distributed primarily by seniority, though. If a new cheerleader doesn't get one, she will be expected to pay for the service herself.

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Toned and fit, with unnaturally white teeth and orange skin, the women are flown in summer to an exotic locale for the annual swimsuit calendar shoot. There, they're gussied up and contorted into attractive poses, to be memorialized on the pages of the calendar and in the minds of the young boys who end up with them. (The men, who are welcome so long as they pay their own way, often attend, both for vacation time and to support teammates nervous about everything implied in a bikini shoot.)

Back in Baltimore, once the calendars are printed up and ready to go, all cheerleaders are required to purchase a certain number of issues. For women, that number is 100; for men, it's 20. After buying each issue for $12â€"installment plans are available for the womenâ€"the cheerleaders can then hustle them for $15 apiece, turning a $300 profit if they really work. It's the Mary Kay scheme, give or take a pink Cadillac.

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This calendar, of course, isn't the only source of income. Similar to the Raiderette setup, the 2009 rules describe a system of payment for every home game performed: $100 for regular cheerleaders, $125 for the captains. With three-hour rehearsals held twice weekly and an eight-hour game-day shift, that works out to $7.14 per hour. (Possibly foreseeing a lawsuit like the one the Raiders are now facing, the Ravens have since switched over to a $7.75 minimum wage pay scale for all rehearsals and game-time action.)

For cheerleaders, the real money comes from appearances. It's still not all that great. If the appearance is for charity, the team will charge $175 per cheerleader per hour; otherwise, it's $300 per hour. Of that money, our tipster explains, each cheerleader takes home around $50 an hour. Sounds good, but in an average season, a cheerleader will make only 30 or so appearances, and many of those don't pay at all. For certain charity events, like those set up in the NFL's or the team's own name, cheerleaders are expected to attend without compensation, and rules require them to attend charity events at least twice monthly, depending on availability.

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So you're stressing over keeping a somewhat arbitrary weight and, quite possibly, over expenses barely met, but that's just the start. "If you participate in any social networking sites, such as MySpace or Facebook," the rules and regs stipulate, "you are required to 'Friend Request' your director." Every cheerleader also has to turn over any email addresses associated with any social network profile. If a cheerleader finds another opportunityâ€"modeling, say, or acting in a commercialâ€"she must get permission for the appearance and sign an official release. Even securing approval to miss a practice is an elaborate exercise in bureaucracy: "Sufficient notice, permission and reason must be given in writing in triplicate copies to management prior to each excused miss."

Making all this more galling is the arbitrary enforcement of the rules. The tipster recalls some cheerleadersâ€"often those who were closer friends with the director or coachesâ€"missing practice in its entirety with no forewarning but never getting benched. Other women, even those trying to work around college exams or graduation, were meanwhile told that any absence would be unacceptable, while management skipped practices freely. The tipster recalls one cheerleader having to miss a modeling opportunity she had prepared for because the director wouldn't let her skip an offseason practice.

The cheerleader was extremely disappointed and crushed, but didn't [take the opportunity]. Then, when that practice came around, the director didn't even show up to practice herself. Then a couple weeks later, a big chunk of the team had to sell their tickets to the Jay-Z/Justin Timberlake concert at M&T Bank Stadium because they had practice that Thursday night. Two of the coaches and the trainer didn't make it to practice that night and posted pictures at the concert the next day.

For anyone fed up with constant pressure, scant pay for tons of work, and the requirement that you build your entire schedule around a seasonal part-time job, there's the omnipresent threat of being kicked off the team. "If you don't fall in line and suck it up," says the cheerleader, "there's someone else dumb enough that would replace you."

So why do people do it? Our tipster says that for all the stress, it's still basically a hobby, which in its odd way makes the conditions more tolerable. And there are undeniable benefits, like the status that goes with being one of the elite few associated with a brand as big as an NFL team, as well as the camaraderie. "This is how I made most of the friends I still have today," our tipster says.

Mostly, they do it for Sundays. "The gameday experienceâ€"that's what keeps people coming back," says the former cheerleader, who even now gets wistful thinking about those moments on the sideline before kickoff, watching players hype themselves up, looking down the tunnel and seeing Ray Lewis doing his trademark dance. There's nothing quite like it. It is a view of the nation's most popular game from right there on the field, and with a good team like the Ravens, there's even a chance of going to the Super Bowl, like last year. That must've been an exciting moment for the cheerleaders, especially after the 18-hour bus ride to New Orleans.

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Got any NFL cheerleading documents or horror stories to share? Email us: tips@deadspin.com. We'll keep you anonymous.

Image by Jim Cooke. Ravens cheerleaders photo via Ultimate Cheerleader.

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The iPod Is Over

Over the holidays, Apple's iPad and iPhone sold better than they've ever sold before: 51 million iPhones and 26 million iPads in a single quarter. The lowly iPod, however, didn't do nearly as well. The company moved just 6 million of the trademark MP3 players, a 52 percent decline compared to the same period last year. All told, iPod accounted for just $973 million of the company's record $57.6 billion revenue last quarter. While some would probably be happy to claim they ran a slightly-less-than-a-billion-dollar business, it's getting pretty small for a company the size of Apple. You might even call it a hobby â€" if not now, then by this time next year.

What happened to the iPod? Simple cannibalization, for one: every one of those 51 million iPhones can take the place of an iPod. (Steve Jobs famously called the iPhone "the best iPod we've ever made.") And as people increasingly get their music from streaming services, a constant internet connection could be key, something you don't get with an iPod or even a iPod touch unless you have a Wi-Fi hotspot to pair with.

The decline of MP3 players shouldn't be news to anyone though, certainly not to anyone who follows Apple closely. In June, 2009, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer admitted that cannibalizing the company's MP3 players was all part of the plan:

For traditional MP3 players, which includes Shuffle, Nano, and Classic, we saw a year-over-year decline which we internally had forecasted to occur. This is one of the original reasons we developed the iPhone and the iPod Touch. We expect our traditional MP3 players to decline over time as we cannibalize ourselves with the iPod Touch and the iPhone. [emphasis ours]

Since 2009, iPod sales have declined time and again. For five years, every quarterly financial call would include a dedicated mention of how the company's "music product" sales had slipped by a million units here, a couple million units there. Every time, Apple would soften the blow by saying how the iPod still had a 70 percent market share in MP3 players in the US, and remained the top-selling MP3 player around the world.

But in the middle of last year, the company changed its tune. It failed to introduce any new iPods (unless you count the cheaper $229 iPod touch) and removed that dedicated section from its quarterly conference calls.

New iPods or no, a downhill trend

The lack of new iPods could certainly be responsible for the most recent decline in sales. Usually, purchases pick up drastically every time Apple releases a new iPod, and this year they clearly did not. Still, that's not the whole story: as you can see in the chart above, the peaks had been shrinking even before Apple stopped updating the iPod nano like clockwork.

But does the lack of attention and decline in sales mean the company's killing off the iPod entirely? That's completely uncertain. It's not the first time we've gone without an iPod refresh, and there appear to be plenty of dollars left to scrape out of the bottom of the iPod barrel. And even that assumes that Apple isn't about to pull another Mac Pro. After neglecting the Mac Pro for nearly three whole years, it unveiled a radically redefined version of the workstation computer in 2013 with the resounding phrase "Can't innovate anymore, my ass."

It might be premature to write the iPod's obituary, but barring another such move, it seems like the MP3 player's days are finally running out.

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The Legend Of Guccifer

Each day, so much online data is stolen, accidentally released, or otherwise abused that the Internet would appear to be mainly a tool for sending information to places it’s not supposed to go. But there is something particularly impressive about the illicit seven-gigabyte archive that, as of this writing, sits in eleven publicly accessible Google Drive folders. It’s a riveting tour of delicious, illicit tidbits with hundreds of pages of personal documents stolen from an oddly random collection of the famous and powerful: Colin Powell, George W. Bush, Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell, and some Rockefellers. The archive was assembled by a hacker who identified himself as Guccifer and who clearly saw it as a hacking masterpiece. Guccifer furtively amassed these reams of financial documents, personal e-mails, family photos, and contact lists like Edward Snowden stashing his hundreds of thousands of classified NSA documents. The two are information-age siblings, fraternal twins. But where one is a noble, ProPublica kind of information discloser, cloaked in earnest First Amendment garb, the other is a Graydon Carter, the host of a fabulous, scandalous party.

In early January, Guccifer sent links to the archive to media outlets around the world. He seemed to sense a coming blow and to want to ensure that his work would see the light. And he was right to publish his magnum opus. On January 22, a 40-year-old Romanian named Marcel Lazar Lehel was arrested on suspicion of being Guccifer, which was as remarkable and telling as the disclosures themselves: Why would a man from a small town in Romania even know who Candace Bushnell was?

If Snowden perfectly fit the profile of geek crusader, Lehel, a stone-faced, disheveled man in a tight leather jacket, seemed an odd candidate for one of the world’s most notorious hackers. But Guccifer is to hacking what the Beatles are to rock and roll. He had predecessors, 4Chan cowboys like Anonymous and Sabu of LulzSec, but he’s changed the nature of hacking fame. Guccifer rose by exploiting the connections people make online to infiltrate the private lives of some of the most powerful people on Earth. He served up the results to the media, irresistible high-low raw material for an online news cycle driven by leaks and voyeurism and racked by anxiety over privacy.

Guccifer’s first set of linked targets were two generations of the Bush clan. He leaked personal correspondence about George H.W. Bush’s health and family snapshots to the Smoking Gun. Pictures of George W. Bush’s amateurish oil paintings, initially branded with giant GUCCIFER watermarks, caused the biggest splash and instantly created a brand built on contradiction: Guccifer’s witty name, and his canny promotion of Bush’s paintings, hinted at an urbane mischievousness, as if he were a clandestine arm of TMZ. But his e-mails to the Smoking Gun were unhinged rants, laden with hackneyed conspiracy theories about the Council on Foreign Relations and the Illuminati: “The evil is leading this fucked up world!!!!!! I tell you this the world of tomorrow will be a world free of illuminati or will be no more.”

Guccifer chose targets with a similarly schizophrenic logic. Criminal hackers can usually be defined by their targets: For-profit “carders,” like the gang that stole 70 million customers’ credit-card data from Target, hit retail outlets or banks. Hacktivists attack ideological enemies. Jilted lovers break into exes’ Facebook accounts. But Guccifer’s targetsâ€"a seemingly random mix of political and media figures, Hollywood celebrities, and business­peopleâ€"had nothing in common but a nominal level of prestige.

After the Bush hacks, Guccifer burned through a number of politicos, including Colin Powell, a U.N. undersecretary-general, and longtime Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal. His ire was distinctly nonpartisan: He leaked lovelorn e-mails a Romanian diplomat named Corina Cretu sent Powell during the Bush administration, forcing him to deny an affair. Memos from Blumenthal to Clinton about the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi briefly sparked excitement among conservative bloggers, until they turned out to be incredibly boring. Guccifer began by boasting about exposing a global conspiracy, but his biggest scoops were tabloid-ready gossip. Eventually, he dropped all political pretense, hacking Arrested Development star Jeffrey Tambor and celebrity editor Tina Brown, apparently just because he could.

Hacking, like journalism, can be about revelationâ€"but a core motivation is often more self-interested: attention. Guccifer wanted to dominate the discussion, and he succeeded. He was extraordinarily media-savvy, cultivating relationships with outlets and seeding stories like a PR pro. His favorite outlet was the Smoking Gun, which posted often on his antics. After Gawker, where I worked at the time, picked up the Bush paintings, Guccifer sent us another, exclusive cache and kept us updated on future hacks, always beginning with the unsettling greeting “Guccifer transmitting …”

In some ways, Guccifer resembles the Hollywood hacker Christopher Chaney, most famous for leaking nude photos of Scarlett Johansson. Chaney, a bored and creepy Florida man who broke into dozens of actresses’ e-mail accounts in 2011, leaked his photos furtively, through underground celebrity-picture sites, claiming to be less interested in the attention than in the voyeuristic thrill.

Guccifer and Chaney shared other similarities. Like Chaney’s, Guccifer’s hacking is more like research. His notes show him assembling data gleaned from Wikipedia to guess passwords and security questions. Both Guccifer and Chaney also used a time-tested technique characteristic of the hacking spree: hopscotching. Once you crack one victim’s in-box, you raid their e-mails and contact lists for scraps of information that can help you move on to a new target.

The literal content of Guccifer’s revelations is rather trivial, but what he actually exposed are the pitfalls of connection, the panacea of the social-media age. Just as the NSA uses “contact chaining” to effortlessly sweep up the data of innocent people, Guccifer slipped from the contact list of one powerful, well-connected victim to the next. He fed on age-old fears about the power elite’s connectionsâ€"the Illuminati, the NWO, etc.â€"and against all odds actually managed to uncover a hidden web.

What’s most shocking about the archive are the pilfered contact lists: thousands of e-mail addresses laid out on Excel spreadsheets named after the person they were stolen from. Among them are representatives from every prestigious domain name imaginable: @nytimes.com, @harvard.edu, @senate.gov, some with cell-phone numbers and Facebook-profile links. Here was the power elite, the Illuminati that he fearedâ€"and Candace Bushnell, too.

As I poked through the archive, an indicator at the top of the page showed I wasn’t alone: Eleven other anonymous users were browsing the archive, each with his own motivations, of which journalistic curiosity could only be the most benign.

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Burundi’s Black Market Skull Trade

Has the tiny nation of Burundi become ground zero for a new global black-market trade in human remains?

BUJUMBURA, Burundi â€" In evenings when the hippo emerges from the depths of Lake Tanganyika to graze its grassy shores, members of Bujumbura’s expat community gather at the various waterholes that ring the lake. At the Italian-owned Kiboko bar in “Buja,” everyoneâ€"from the local media and Dutch soldiers to Catholic nunsâ€"stops in to knock back cold Skols, the local brew, and gaze at the resource-rich Intombwe Mountains across the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Unlike its famous neighbor Rwanda, the tiny landlocked country of Burundi is difficult to locate on a map. Even Kenya, to the east, considers the former Belgian colony “the back of beyond.”

In most African expat communities, everyone knows or has heard of each other. Few Burundi residents, though, claim they’ve ever seen or heard of Giuseppe Favaro, whose recent arrest for attempting to smuggle human skulls into Asia caused jaws to dropâ€"and sent residents running to cemeteries to make sure ancestors were still buried with their heads intact.

On Oct 25th, Favaro, a one-time dealer of Venetian antiques in his native Italy, strolled into Bujumbura's main post office with three large cardboard boxes, according to law enforcement authorities. On the shipping form he declared that one of the boxes contained a camera, and the other two “organic material,” according to the General Director of Civil Aviation at Bujumbura’s International airport.

Salvador Nizigiyamana, the General of the Post Office, later said in a press conference that Favaro left the post office when he realized he didn't have enough cash to ship all three parcels. (He ended up mailing only two.) According to police, Favaro returned at 5 pm, just before closing. Bujumbura’s post office requires its customers to leave parcels open for postal clerks to inspect before sending. The clerk however did not open either of Favaro's sealed boxes for inspection and instead forwarded them on to the airport, where customs agents are meant to subject packages to further scrutiny.

"Craniums out of Africa show a shift in smuggling from the usual gold, ivory and drugs,” the senior intelligence officer told The Daily Beast.

Twenty-three years of experience at Paris’s Charles de Galle airport had taught Albert Maniratunga, the airport General Director, a thing or two about smuggled cargo.

On the day I visited him, Maniratunga wore a white three-piece suit with blue pinstripes and beamed proudly when he talked about the unique and unprecedented seizure, which he said he owed mainly to new imaging software recently donated by the French government. It was this technology that made it possible for Burundian Civil Aviation Authorities to grab 63 pounds of ivory, with a street value of $400,000, at Bujumbura’s airport last July.

When airport security scanned Favaro's boxes, instead of cameras, they discovered the silhouettes of two white domes inside.  "The skulls [were] human and belonged to two young adults,” Maniratunga said, noting that he called a forensic expert to inspect them along with two disarticulated jawbones, also found inside the boxes. The Director General said he suspected the skulls [were] from the Congo.

On the shipping invoice that Maniratunga showed to The Daily Beast, the packages had been addressed to an individual in Chiang Mai, Thailand. But police had never heard of  "Kassim, A." â€" the name written as the sender.

A law enforcement team of local police and investigators from Le Service National Renseignement (SNR â€" National Security Services) launched an investigation and they now claim Kassim Abdoulgani was an alias that Giuseppe Favaro had been using for over a decade. According to the investigation team, Kassim is the surname of Favaro’s ex-wife.

On October 31st, police officers went to Favaro’s house near the lake and, according to a senior officer with Burundi’s National Security Services, who wishes not to be identified, said that they’d found the greying 56-year-old inside “trembling.”

The security officer told The Daily Beast that a few days later authorities detained a 60-year old Burundi-born Congolese man whom Favaro had reportedly fingered as his main supplier of tribal artifacts and human skulls. The same source said another Congolese man was also jailed on suspicion of being another supplier of Favaro’s.

Soon after the arrest of tribal art dealer and his alleged suppliers, Maniratunga and the head of the National Postal Administration, Salvador Nizigiyamana, announced to local press that they’d recovered another 38 human craniums.

According to the police report later shown to The Daily Beast the additional skulls were found in Favaro's "office", one of a series of windowless bunkers on the lakeside compound of Favaro’s neighbor, a 70-year old German expat. The septuagenarian was present during the search, according to the report. “He was scared, but we had no intention of arresting him," said the senior intelligence source. "He seemed unaware that the skulls were being stored there.”

All told, police say they recovered 41 human skulls in connection with the Italian tribal art dealer. (Apparently, soon after Favaro’s arrest, a parcel destined for China containing one skull had been returned to the Bujumbura post office. The name “Kassim, A.” was written as its sender).

In a phone call with The Daily Beast, Harimenshi Hermenegilde, the spokesman for Bujumbura police, declined to say whether Favaro had been formally charged with an offense and explained that “the case has been turned over to prosecution and is still being processed.” Edouard Ngendakumana, Favaro's defense lawyer, told The Daily Beast via phone, “We are waiting [for the case] to be heard before the appeals court… and are trying obtain [Favaro’s] release on bail.” Ngendakumana declined to state the charges against his client.

However, the police report reviewed by The Daily Beast states that both Favaro  and his accomplices were arrested on charges relating to giving false statements, the desecration of cemeteries, and trafficking of human remains.

All three men remain in custody today pending trial.

Reactions in Bujumbura to the news of Favaro’s arrest and the discovery of the skulls varied. On a Facebook page called the Bujumbura Professional Network, Teddy Mazina, a political activist and photographer at a privately-owned local media station, was first to post news of the arrest. Mazina said a quick Google search turned up a photo of a human skull described as “used” and in “good condition” listed on eBay for $300 with Favaro as the contact. Other commenters expressed concern that the discovery might paint an image that doesn’t reflect the values of good Burundians.

For his part, Favaro reportedly told police that the skulls were intended for scientific study in Chiang Mai, according to a security officer. Indeed, the city in northern Thailand is home to a university specializing in medicine and dentistry, and of course, the use of remains in the study of human anatomy is nothing new. Leonardo da Vinci claimed to have sliced up as many as 30 cadavers before publishing his groundbreaking drawings of the human body in the early 1500s. By the beginning of the 19th century, the demand in England and Europe for human remains for research exceeded supply and grave robbing spiraled out of control. The practice crumbled after the British government passed an Anatomy Act in 1832, permitting doctors to take unclaimed corpses at the morgue in the name of science.

By the end of the last century, India had become the main supplier of corpses. In 2007, a Wired magazine reporter wrote that workers for black-market bone factories would often snatch corpses right off funeral pyres as soon as grieving relatives had left. After boiling and scrubbing off the skin, they’d send the bones to a Calcutta-based medical supply company, which assembled the skeletons and shipped them to universities and medical facilities around the world.

When India banned the bone trade in 1987, after a dealer was arrested for exporting 1500 child skeletons, China then became the main global supplier of corpses. 

The practice was outlawed in 2008 just before Beijing hosted the Olympics.

Ebay’s policy states “We don’t allow humans, the human body, or any human body or products to be listed on eBay with two exceptionsâ€"the seller can list items containing scalp hair and skulls and skeletons intended for medical use only.”

In America, meanwhile, it is legal to buy and sell human skeletons and skulls â€" with the exception of the remains of Native Americans, whose graves are protected by the American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Only three states currently restrict the trade: New York, Georgia and Tennessee.

Though possession and shipment of human remains is legal within the United States and in parts of Europe, it doesn’t mean they are easy to come by -- and they’re not cheap.

The website for Skulls Unlimited, which describes itself as “the World’s Leading Supplier of Osteological Specimens”, sells human skulls for up to $1,950.

The Berkeley-based Bone Room sells complete "Standard Human Skeleton" online for $5,500. 

Zane Wylie, an American artisan who carves intricate tattoo-like patterns on skulls that he sells online for more than $3,000 says bones from Africa are rare inside the States. While it’s legal to purchase skulls from Africa he chooses not to because of the possibility that skeletons could be from victims of the continent’s widespread HIV/AIDS epidemic or its many wars.

Meanwhile, in Thailand, where Favaro’s skulls were headed, the use of skulls in ritualistic practices is not unheard of. Police in Thailand recently investigated a case in which five human skulls were found in a fertilizer bag. Officials told reporters they suspected the skulls had been dug up from graves and their foreheads carved out and removed for ritual use. And two years ago, Thai police arrested a group of monks robbing graves to make "love talismans".

A radiologist and senior faculty member at Chiang Mai’s school of dentistry told The Daily Beast that in the 22 years she has been working at the university, she has never seen human skulls used for dentistry purposes. “Only cadavers are used for anatomy classes. There is no need to import [human] skulls for study purposes here in Thailand.”

Commercial trade in human remains is illegal in Burundi and is protected by the same laws, which prohibit human trafficking. 

Not that these regulations are necessarily reassuring to rattled residents of Burundi.

The recent and unprecedented discovery of the skulls in Bujumbura may suggest that Africa has replaced India and China as the supplier of human remains. “Craniums out of Africa show a shift in smuggling from the usual gold, ivory and drugs,” the senior intelligence officer told The Daily Beast.

Tragically, human remains are abundant in this part of the continent, which has seen decades of warfare. “With the war in Burundi the dead are buried anywhere, including mass graves; it is not difficult to obtain all kinds of ‘ossement’,” says Patrice Faye, a French herpetologist, crocodile-wrangler, and former long-time resident of Bujumbura.

“People offered me [human] heads and hands,” said Faye. “But I never knew if they were serious.”

Honore Gatera, the manager of Rwanda’s Kigali Genocide Memorial Center, has assisted in more than 1,000 burial ceremonies within the last nine years. Gatera said he’d heard of reports from Burundi about a black market for skulls in Asia, but told The Daily Beast he’d never heard of any such incidents in Rwanda.

So far there have been no news or police reports of grave robberies in Burundi.

If, as officials suggest, Favaro has been peddling skulls from the Congo, it is unclear when he began the practice. According to his website, Favaro moved to Bujumbura in the early '90s and began collecting tribal masks and statuettes mostly from the Congo. Soon after he opened a gallery and, in 1992, a trading company â€" both based in Bujumbura - specializing imported “goods in China for the local African market” and exported the tribal masks, statuettes, paintings, gemstones and jewelry, along with Dracaena seeds and Jatropha curcas oil used for diesel. In 2006 he began selling items online â€" some apparently fashioned from elephant ivory -- via his ‘webstore’, which states it takes any method of payment, from Western Union to PayPal.

“Based on what we see in Central Africa, it makes sense that the trade in human remains would use the same networks [as ivory, drugs and gold],” says Richard Ruggiero, Chief of the Africa Branch at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Division of International Conservation.

"At a certain point smugglers in the chain are just illicit versions of any legitimate global import/export courier,” Ruggiero told The Daily Beast. “Once they have established methods and routes, and have the right people on their payroll, they will ship anything they can make money on.”

  According to intelligence sources, Favaro, using the alias, had been shipping parcels of varying sizes for years, sometimes paying up to one million Burundi francs (the equivalent of $650 at today's exchange rate) for larger boxes. “Kassim, A.” was the Post Office’s best client; so popular, he was invited to all its “VIP” luncheons, which he dutifully attended, sources close to postal workers say.

Though Favaro is still incarcerated, his tribal artifact website, Flickr and Pinterest accounts remain active and continue to showcase his tribal figures.

(A police spokesman said that Favaro had bought the skulls for around $30, according to the Kigali Post.) Since his arrest, the skull listed on eBay apparently sold for $477 but the photo appears to have been replaced with an older skull - with some teeth missing - than the one originally listed.

The airport Director General says all 41 skulls are currently undergoing DNA analysis. The investigative team is probing the Italian’s international connections and claims to have asked Interpol for assistance.

For now the Italian tribal arts dealer languishes in the town's Mpimba prison. Originally built for 800 inmates, it is now crammed with 3,000.

“Burundi is a very poor country," says Teddy Mazina, the Burundian political activist and photographer. “The average citizen earns a dollar a day. If people are getting paid to find human skulls, which are becoming fashionable or used for medical purposes and sold on eBay, where is this country going?”

When news of the smuggled skulls broke over the wires early last November a Tweeter from Mogadishu replied: Shhh keep it quiet! When people find out there is cash in human skulls the dead will not be safe in their graves!’

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The Hardest Computer Game Of All Time

Odysseus had it easy next to this.

The Learning Company

My first computer was an Apple IIe with 128KB of RAM, no hard drive, and a 5¼ inch floppy drive. One of the top educational games back then was Rocky’s Boots, an inventive game that taught the basics of formal logic to kids. I loved it when I was 6. Two years later, I got Robot Odyssey, which promised to expand on Rocky’s Boots by extending the formal logic to actual programming. The game devastated me. My brain could not comprehend how to solve its puzzles. I finally finished itâ€"13 years later, and not without some assistance.

Let me say: Any kid who completes this game while still a kid (I know only one, who also is one of the smartest programmers I’ve ever met) is guaranteed a career as a software engineer. Hell, any adult who can complete this game should go into engineering. Robot Odyssey is the hardest damn “educational” game ever made. It is also a stunning technical achievement, and one of the most innovative games of the Apple IIe era.

Visionary, absurdly difficult games such as this gain cult followings. It is the game I remember most from my childhood. It is the game I love (and despise) the most, because it was the hardest, the most complex, the most challenging. The world it presented was like being exposed to Plato’s forms, a secret, nonphysical realm of pure ideas and logic. The challenge of the gameâ€"and it was one serious challengeâ€"was to understand that other world. Programmer Thomas Foote had just started college when he picked up the game: “I swore to myself,” he told me, “that as God is my witness, I would finish this game before I finished college. I managed to do it, but just barely.”

Programming in your pajamas: the simulation.

Illustration by Gil Morales, from the game manual

In Robot Odyssey, you played a character who falls in a dream into the mysterious city of Robotropolis. There were five ascending levels to Robotropolis before you could return back home. Here’s a rough estimate of their difficulty:

1. The Sewer: Moderate
2. The Subway: Challenging
3. The Town: Very Difficult
4. The Master Control Center: Impossible
5. The Skyways: Impossible

Robotropolis as rendered by Gil Morales.

Illustration by Gil Morales, from the game manual

By my teenage years I’d completed the first three levels, but my siblings and I hit a brick wall with the fourth level, which is to earlier levels like algebra is to arithmetic. (As Thomas Foote said, “I was stuck on this level for most of my college years.”) The fifth level was nothing more than a fabled dream. The Internet didn’t exist in those days, and even finding someone else who had played the game was difficult if you didn’t live in Silicon Valley.

The game became my bête noire, a lingering reminder of my inadequacy. To give you some idea, I couldn’t get past the fourth level even after I’d been programming in BASIC and Pascal for years.

The game had a profound effect on those who played it. My younger brother, who suffered with my sister and me as we struggled through the game, told me, “It’s where I started on the road to becoming a programmer.” Even if players got stuck (and everyone got stuck), the game offered ideas and concepts that no other game did. Game designer and hardware hacker Quinn Dunki of One Girl, One Laptop wrote Gate, a spiritual successor to Robot Odyssey that employed many of the same concepts. The tech law professor James Grimmelmann told me it had been his “game for a rainy decade,” describing an immense sense of accomplishment on finishing one of the nastier puzzlesâ€"“a big part of why I loved programming.” Programmer/musician/hacker Joan Touzet used it to teach programming to middle schoolersâ€"in 2004. Thomas Foote was so taken with the game that he spent years re-implementing the entire game in Java, with the support of a small but dedicated fan community. (One of them remembers completing the game and getting a certificate from the Learning Company declaring him the 34^th person to finish.) Foote called his version DroidQuest, and it is the easiest way to play Robot Odyssey today.

Software engineer Micah Elizabeth Scott, who ported the game to the Nintendo DS, told me that Robot Odyssey “played a large role in shaping who I'd later become,” and emphasized just how personal and distinctive a creation it was: “You see the style of an individual or a very small team, uncluttered by corporate structure or modern abstractions.”

It’s a testament to the sheer free-spiritedness of the early days of consumer software that such a game could even get made. The Learning Company, who also made classics like Rocky’s Boots, Reader Rabbit, and Gertrude’s Puzzles, was a small company founded in 1980 on an NSF grant by four educators who had taken an interest in software: Leslie Grimm, Frona Kahn, Ann McCormick, and Teri Perl, as well as Warren Robinett (who had created the world’s first Easter egg when he hid his name in a secret room in Atari’s Adventure). The company was atypical both in focusing on educational software and in being led by women. Grimm and Robinett designed 1982’s Rocky’s Boots, which taught Boolean logic gates to kids, and which had captivated my 6-year-old self. Grimm also co-authored Robot Odyssey, which began as the brainchild of Michael Wallace, a 22-year-old Stanford undergrad at the time.

The game taunts you.

The Learning Company

Wallace told me that writing the game was one of the best times of his life. Originally a customer service rep at the Learning Company, Wallace taught himself to code in Apple 6502 assembly by looking at Robinett’s code for Rocky’s Boots. After Robinett left the company, Wallace expanded Robinett’s code to architect the underlying technology for Robot Odyssey, including the dazzling ability to embed circuits within circuits. Doing this was no easy task; Wallace called it “an art form” and recounted working 100 hours a week. When Teri Perl described the project to legendary computer scientist Alan Kay, he said, “You’re wasting your time. It can’t be done.” That is, the basic idea was simply too complex to run on an Apple home computer. When Robot Odyssey shipped, the company gave Wallace a plaque that said, “It can’t be done. â€"Alan Kay.”

After getting her Ph.D. in biology from Stanford, Leslie Grimm became fascinated by computers and their educational potential while volunteering in her daughter’s school. In addition to directing the entire project, Grimm was in charge of the game portion of Robot Odyssey: the five levels of Robotropolis and three tutorials (expanded to five tutorials in Version 1.1, in the hopes of making the game a bit more tractable to players). Each of the five game levels was the personal creation of a single person. I’d like to single out Shaun Gordon, the 16-year-old high school whiz who designed the diabolical fourth level, the Master Control Center, which was the Waterloo for many a player (including myself).

Wallace was kept so busy with the plumbing of the game that he himself never played it through to completion. I asked him if he might try someday, and he said, “It might take a year of my life.” He wasn’t sure that anyone at the Learning Company had solved the entire game singlehandedly!

To solve the puzzles, you are given three (eventually four) robot pals to wire and program. From left to right, they are Sparky, Scanner, and Checkers. They can move, detect walls, pick up and drop things, and communicate to one another.

Sparky, Scanner, and Checkers: they are yours to command (and scream at).

The Learning Company

When I say program, I mean something a bit more primitive than computer code, even the low-level assembly that processing chips natively run. I mean the actual logic gates (AND, OR, NOT) that make up the innards of chips. So Robot Odyssey was programming, but it was also electrical engineering. Your tools for implementing “programs” were the most primitive available. You had “electricity” going through wires into gates. The gates implemented the primitive operations of formal Boolean logic.

Simple, right?

The Learning Company

Boolean logic is fairly simple. It deals in two opposing values, often called TRUE and FALSE (if logic is being applied to assertions), but since we’re talking about electricity here, they’re better called ON and OFF. The robots in the game have thrusters that make them move. For example, if you feed electricity into a robot’s thruster through a wire that is ON, the thruster turns ON and the robot moves.1 In addition, there are assorted logic gates that change the nature of the electricity. A NOT gate had one wire going in and one wire coming out, and inverted the input wire. If the incoming wire was ON and had electricity going through it, the gate would not output electricity. If the incoming wire was OFF, the gate would output electricity.²

A “wall hugger” robot. The actual logic is embedded “inside” the blue "2" chip.

The Learning Company

Using these gates and a few others, you had to wire up robots to perform tasksâ€"reasonably simple ones at first,3 but which became increasingly complicated as the game progressed.

Eric Welsh’s circuit that “plays” a 100110 pattern on the antenna.

The Learning Company

When the task is to get one robot to communicate orders to move to another robot through an antenna that can only be ON or OFF, those logic gates start to seem awfully limited in their capabilities. The trick is, they aren’t limitedâ€"in sufficient combination, those little logic gates can do anything. But it takes some real thought.

Getting these simple gates to execute complex programs melted my brain. My child’s mind was literally incapable of making the jump from those simple gates to the complex control structures required to solve the game’s puzzles. The game offered you the ability to “burn” circuits into chips in order to abstract control structures. Here’s a chip that uses a lot of OR gates in order to ... well, I won’t get into it (see here for the grisly details).

Inside a chip: Fun for the whole family!

The Learning Company

The point being that those simple logic gates could, in sufficient combination and organization, do tremendously complicated things. That, after all, is the very stuff of computer programming, using primitive operations in immensely complex architectures. For Foote, the fundamental appeal of the game is much the same as the fundamental appeal of mathematics and computer science: “The world is logical, and operates under simple rules. From such simplicity can come great complexity.”

Though a planned sequel (the original box billed the game as Robot Odyssey I) never materialized, the game won awards and a write-up in Scientific American. The game got Wallace an audience with the top brass at Apple and a presentation at Xerox PARC, and he went on to design electronic toys including the Nintendo Power Glove and now has his own company, Pure Imagination. Grimm stayed with the Learning Company and authored many more games, including the successful Reader Rabbit franchise, and more recently developed educational software for deaf children. The sheer complexity of Robot Odyssey made it the spiritual forebear to today’s sandbox games like Minecraft. It probably turned hundreds of people into computer programmers, and in the hopes of making a few more, I issue the Bitwise Robot Odyssey Challenge: The first reader to complete Robot Odysseyâ€"send a save game file to me as proofâ€" gets a replica of the Robot Odyssey completion certificate from the Learning Company. Only first-time players allowedâ€"and no cheating by looking up the solutions!

1. If you stop the electricity flowing through the wire, the thruster turns OFF and the robot stops moving. (Return.)

2. An AND gate takes two inputs and outputs electricity if its two inputs are both on. An OR gate outputs electricity if either or both of its two inputs are on. An XOR gate (for exclusive-or) outputs electricity if either of its two inputs are on, but not both. (Return.)

3. Here’s a simple example. Let’s say you want a robot to move up when its antenna is receiving a signal (when the antenna is ON), and move down when the antenna is not receiving a signal (when the antenna is OFF). You wire up the antenna output to the UP thruster so that when the antenna is ON, the UP thruster turns on, and vice versa. You also wire up the antenna output to the DOWN thruster, but put it through a NOT gate first, which reverses the antenna output. So when the antenna is ON, the DOWN thruster is OFF, and vice versa. (Return.)

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Richard Sherman: The New, True All-American

Why has Sherman's infamous post-game interview stirred up so much discomfort? Easy: The nation sees itself in him.

Elaine Thompson / AP

As a citizen of Seattle, I’ve been aware of Richard Sherman for some time. I knew he was one of the best corners in football and had come from Compton to Stanford to the NFL. I knew he was a strategic trash-talker who goaded opposing receivers into committing costly penalties. I knew he was capable of an aggressive, boastful flamboyance that is at odds with “Seattle nice”â€"and that’s therefore deeply appealing to noisy Seahawk partisans seeking release from everyday sublimation.

What I didn’t know was that Richard Sherman was also ready to represent the nation. He contains at once three narratives that the great organizer Marshall Ganz says are key to social transformation: a story of self, a story of us, and a story of now.

In all the reverberating sound and fury since Sherman’s postgame interview, Sherman’s been derided as a loudmouth by people who once considered that a badge of honor. He’s been called many ugly racist names, and was depicted literally as the alien other (that is, the creature from Alien) on Twitter.

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Richard Sherman's Best Behavior

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But let’s face it. Richard Sherman is as all-American as all-American gets. Pick your American trope and this young man embodies it. Brash, cocky performer who craves the spotlight. Rugged individualist who pulls himself up by own bootstraps, fanatically prepared and self-reliant. Iconoclast who speaks his mind and wears his style without fear. Hard-nosed capitalist who works at the intersection of big dreams and big money. Budding celebrity who manipulates his public image to mask his actual smarts and savvyâ€"and perhaps his actual appreciation for family, team, tradition, causes greater than himself.

You don’t have to buy into or like all these tropes. But don’t they add up to something more richly and complicatedly all-American than, say, picture-perfect Peyton Manning, son of Archie, brother of Eli, the scion who didn’t blow his inheritance, who is great at the family business, and is safe, dull, and inoffensive?

What’s all-American now, in this sixth January of the Obama presidency? What’s all-American in a week when the New York Yankees pin their hopes and their budget on Japan’s best young pitcher? What’s all-American in a season when American Idol is judged by a Latina, an Aussie-Kiwi, and a voice of creole New Orleans?

Our notions of Americanness are both superficially in flux and deeply stable: in flux, in that black athletes in dreadlocks can claim the status as much as the white guys in the Papa John's commercials; stable, in that the basis of the claim is a way of being and behaving that translates as “typically American” no matter what color the person is.

This isn’t about inclusion and diversity, exactly. Remember Linsanity? When Jeremy Lin came on the NBA scene in an unprecedented burst of inspired play, the cultural fever was fueled by a sense that a whole group of people (Asian Americans) who hadn’t participated much in a quintessentially American endeavor (big-time sports) were now getting a chance to star, to be the hero and vessel of other people’s dreams. That was a fairy tale of inclusion and diversity that warmed everyone’s hearts (until it didn’t anymore, when Lin became merely pretty good again).

Shermania is something else. The angst of both his critics and defenders, the way social media still can’t let go of those 15 postgame seconds, breaking them down and the footage that preceded them like they were filmed by Zapruder (“was his handshake offer to Crabtree sincere or calculated?”)â€"all of this amounts not to a story we tell to make ourselves feel good. Rather, it amounts to a story we tell over and over again, as if working out conflicting memories of a highway accident or reading a kaleidoscopic Tim O’Brien short story about combat, to try to make sense of who we are and what’s happening to us in a time when tribe and identity are getting scrambled and realigned explosively.

This is the source of so much of the discomfort Sherman stirred up. We have seen something we recognize in his 15-second clip: us. 

It so happens that in his freshman year at Stanford Richard Sherman was named an all-American. So let’s think of thisâ€"the period that began when Erin Andrews asked Sherman, “Who was talking about you?”â€"as our own freshman re-orientation. In less than a fortnight, he’ll either shine or shut up. He’ll be a champion or a humbled loser. Then he’ll go away. We, the people watching the action on our screens, will have to keep talking our way through this game of being all-American.

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Did This Guy Figure Out How Life Came From Matter?

Why does life exist?

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

Kristian Peters

Cells from the moss Plagiomnium affine with visible chloroplasts, organelles that conduct photosynthesis by capturing sunlight.

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.

“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality of the ideas.”

Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. “Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena,” Shakhnovich said.

England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation â€" that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life â€" that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.

“He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.”

Courtesy of Jeremy England

A computer simulation by Jeremy England and colleagues shows a system of particles confined inside a viscous fluid in which the turquoise particles are driven by an oscillating force. Over time (from top to bottom), the force triggers the formation of more bonds among the particles.

At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses. Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated. Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called “thermodynamic equilibrium,” in which energy is uniformly distributed. A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example. As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low â€" that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms â€" by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place. In Schrödinger’s day, they could solve the equations of thermodynamics only for closed systems in equilibrium. In the 1960s, the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine made progress on predicting the behavior of open systems weakly driven by external energy sources (for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry). But the behavior of systems that are far from equilibrium, which are connected to the outside environment and strongly driven by external sources of energy, could not be predicted.

This situation changed in the late 1990s, due primarily to the work of Chris Jarzynski, now at the University of Maryland, and Gavin Crooks, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Jarzynski and Crooks showed that the entropy produced by a thermodynamic process, such as the cooling of a cup of coffee, corresponds to a simple ratio: the probability that the atoms will undergo that process divided by their probability of undergoing the reverse process (that is, spontaneously interacting in such a way that the coffee warms up). As entropy production increases, so does this ratio: A system’s behavior becomes more and more “irreversible.” The simple yet rigorous formula could in principle be applied to any thermodynamic process, no matter how fast or far from equilibrium. “Our understanding of far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics greatly improved,” Grosberg said. England, who is trained in both biochemistry and physics, started his own lab at MIT two years ago and decided to apply the new knowledge of statistical physics to biology.

Using Jarzynski and Crooks’ formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath. This class of systems includes all living things. England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility. “We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there,” he said. The finding makes intuitive sense: Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment.

“This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained.

Courtesy of Michael Brenner/Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Self-Replicating Sphere Clusters: According to new research at Harvard, coating the surfaces of microspheres can cause them to spontaneously assemble into a chosen structure, such as a polytetrahedron (red), which then triggers nearby spheres into forming an identical structure.

Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.” In a September paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics, he reported the theoretical minimum amount of dissipation that can occur during the self-replication of RNA molecules and bacterial cells, and showed that it is very close to the actual amounts these systems dissipate when replicating. He also showed that RNA, the nucleic acid that many scientists believe served as the precursor to DNA-based life, is a particularly cheap building material. Once RNA arose, he argues, its “Darwinian takeover” was perhaps not surprising.

The chemistry of the primordial soup, random mutations, geography, catastrophic events and countless other factors have contributed to the fine details of Earth’s diverse flora and fauna. But according to England’s theory, the underlying principle driving the whole process is dissipation-driven adaptation of matter.

This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,” England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.”

Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid. And in a paper appearing online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate. These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. “This connects very much to what Jeremy is saying,” Brenner said.

Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well. “Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process,” he said. Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases.

“He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp,” said Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University, in an email. “I’m particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules.”

Wilson Bentley

If a new theory is correct, the same physics it identifies as responsible for the origin of living things could explain the formation of many other patterned structures in nature. Snowflakes, sand dunes and self-replicating vortices in the protoplanetary disk may all be examples of dissipation-driven adaptation.

England’s bold idea will likely face close scrutiny in the coming years. He is currently running computer simulations to test his theory that systems of particles adapt their structures to become better at dissipating energy. The next step will be to run experiments on living systems.

Prentiss, who runs an experimental biophysics lab at Harvard, says England’s theory could be tested by comparing cells with different mutations and looking for a correlation between the amount of energy the cells dissipate and their replication rates. “One has to be careful because any mutation might do many things,” she said. “But if one kept doing many of these experiments on different systems and if [dissipation and replication success] are indeed correlated, that would suggest this is the correct organizing principle.”

Brenner said he hopes to connect England’s theory to his own microsphere constructions and determine whether the theory correctly predicts which self-replication and self-assembly processes can occur â€" “a fundamental question in science,” he said.

Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. “Natural selection doesn’t explain certain characteristics,” said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email. These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied.

If England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.

“People often get stuck in thinking about individual problems,” Prentiss said.  Whether or not England’s ideas turn out to be exactly right, she said, “thinking more broadly is where many scientific breakthroughs are made.”

Emily Singer contributed reporting.

Correction: This article was revised on January 22, 2014, to reflect that Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, not physics.

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