The creationists are mightily annoyed at the broadcast of a commercial that has John F. Kennedy talking about our evolutionary history as marine organisms.
I’ve got some complaints, too.
First, taking a trip on a cruise ship really isn’t any connection with the sea. You’re on a giant boat. You can take the whole trip without getting wet, seeing a fish that isn’t on the buffet table, or being exposed to an invertebrate. It’s an entirely lubberly experience.
Second, and even more importantly, Kennedy was wrong. The concentration of salts in our blood is approximately 300 mOsm/L, seawater (which I have to make artificially in the lab, since we’re rather remote from any ocean) is 1000 mOsm/L.
As usual, the creationists are not only wrong, they’re wrong for all the wrong reasons.
I have heard it said that the concentration of blood is similar to what ancient seawater was like when the first organisms with circulatory systems evolved (and seawater got more concentrated over time). But I don’t know if that has ever been verified or if it is just one of those apocryphal things.
FFS…it’s a commercial. For a cruise line. Who cares? At least it didn’t mention god. I don’t get my sciency information from TV commercials.
And I disagree. Wife and I have done 17 cruises. You’re surrounded by the ocean, it’s usually pretty fabulous.
But then again if you’re that person who goes on a cruise and spends all your time in the casino – I suppose you’re right.
Must be a slow day down in Minnesota? :)
AP
Nah, the oceans reached their present salt concentrations, roughly, in the Cambrian. That excuse doesn’t work.
I remember well watching the video “Hemo the Magnificent” back in 1973, and it told me that blood was a lot like sea water. If you can’t trust forty-year-old animated science videos, what can you trust?
I suppose I’ll need to purge “Our Friend, Mr. Sun” from my memory as well, now. I feel dumber.
brucegee1962, I remember the same thing. Though the original movie was from the 50’s.
I was actually a bit offended by their use of JFK in a commercial for a foreign owned company. I suspect he didn’t consent to it….
I also object to John Wayne in beer ads and Audrey Hepburn in whatever it is they’ve been showing her on a bus for.
Yeah, I think everyone got the line about blood=sea water from the “Hemo the Magnificent” film. It sure stuck in my mind after more years than I care to think about.
That scene from Hemo the Magnificent must have been well-designed to be memorable. We saw it in Science class in Canada too, and the part about “sea water” is one of the few things I specifically remember from it.
…that has John F. Kennedy talking about our evolutionary history as marine organisms.
Except it doesn’t really. He’s speaking at the opening of the America’s Cup (sailboat racing event) and waxing poetic and saying vague common phrases like “we come from the sea” and “it calls to us” and “it’s in our blood”. It’d be about the same as though he talked of “primordeal soup” and “race memory” or “our destiny in the stars” or “celestial clockwork” or any other weird, poetic, subjective poetic hyperbole.
I mean, its a *far-fetched* thing for Ham to get annoyed over.
More excusable than Neil deGrasse Tyson’s ‘Santa knows physics’ tweet, I’d say. Kennedy wasn’t trained in biology (or physics), and wasn’t paid the big bucks for communicating science.
Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land is my only source of information on Platonism, Geometry, Music Theory, and Billiards. Please don’t take it away from me.
Then, there’s Bjork’s “Oceana” video…
I like that Ham and his friends immediately start using the words “worship” and “believe”.
I also like Kennedy’s voice and what he said.
I yelled at the TV when I heard JFK make the ocean/blood comparison because I was thinking about the difference in salinity too.
He may have been talking about the percentages of the salts relative to each other and they stay the same regardless of the salinity. I would use seawater when I was on boat trips to make “saline” for parasite collections. With that said I have not had a chance to look up the ratios of salts in seawater and blood.
I was thinking about Ken Ham’s hissy-fit when I stumbled on this Onion article that was published weeks earlier.
Lonesome Alito Declares Marriage Only Between A Man And The Sea
http://www.theonion.com/articles/lonesome-alito-declares-marriage-only-between-a-ma,37800/
JFK was going for the poetic relationship between humans and the sea, but had to drop in a little sciency talk because people did that back then. It is interesting that 50 years ago, his comments were uncontroversial enough to be largely forgotten.
I had also wondered if the claim was correct, but I was unable to reach a conclusion after doing some searches. Thanks for the information. It makes sense that even if blood plasma somehow had evolved to mimic sea water, it would be free to reach a new optimal salinity after moving to land.
Our “Precious Bodily Fluids” may not be the same salinity as the sea, but donchano, our bodies have the exact same proportion of water (70%) as the Earth has.
we need a listicle of all the sciencey misinformation tidbits we were taught as kids, when they were trying to gets us all enthusiastical about Science. ;-|
Funny thing, I must have heard many times that blood is as salty as seawater, I never considered it might be apocryphal. Just another little nugget of truthiness to dig out of my brain.
I’ve tasted both. Seemed obvious that blood was much less salty.
woozy @9 wrote:
JFK said:
JFK was not being “vague” there, the phrase “interesting biological fact” can NOT be vague.
He was simply mistaken. I’ll give him some slack; that he wasn’t “lying”, just “wrong, trying to emphasize the value of the ocean to all the landlubbers out there.”
FFS. It’s a commercial, so some conceptual nuance is not only required but expected. Most of us spend our entire lives living inside concrete boxes under artificial lighting strongly disconnected from nature, so being on a cruise is most certainly one way — imperfect and incomplete as it may be — to try to find that connection. That’s all.
Regarding your second objection… well, you can take it up with Kennedy. ;-)
And here I thought that they’d be more upset at the Morphie’s ad depicting an African-American Almighty. Because nothing goes with Fundamentalism like a good tall frosty beechwood-aged bottle of racism.
As for me, it was Woody Guthrie hawking for Chrysler that caught in my craw.
PaulBC @ 11
Hey, me too! And I passed all that learnin’ on to my kids on VHS. Haven’t seen it on blu-ray yet. (By the way, they loved it as much as I did.)
vinimarques:
What concrete boxes wholly disconnected from nature? That doesn’t match my experience of living in Manhattan for twenty-five years. That incredibly urban environment? It’s where I took up birding, because there were so many different kinds of bird to watch. Sure, a lot of my neighbors would walk obliviously past while we were watching a hawk feeding on a tree branch overhead, but they’re not going to suddenly stop and look around because you put them on a cruise ship.
I wasn’t going out of my way to watch birds, mostly: I saw that hawk while walking directly from my (brick) apartment building to the nearest subway station. I admit, sometimes I’d leave the house a little early so I could walk an extra couple of blocks in the park, and see if the tide was in and what wildflowers were in bloom.
I don’t know where your concrete box is, but try looking around the next time you leave it.
So, do they modify saline when they use it in emergency room drips? Or is that just a TV thing?
But “nature” does know and has sent plenty of ambassadors, six-legged and otherwise. Next time, just try looking around before you leave.
@19 twas brillig
Okay, point taken. But to my defense, I never said he was right. I just said he wasn’t “talking about our evolutionary history as marine organisms”. And he wasn’t. He was, as PaulBC said “drop[ping] in a little sciency talk because people did that back then”. (Ever see the Laurel and Hardy movie where Oliver Hardy drinks too much fountain of youth and turns into a chimpanzee? I don’t think anyone thought the producers were making a claim about evolution– merely that “well, ya know, science says we evolved from monkeys, so I guess this’ll be funny.”)
You’re right though. Too many people say “It’s an interesting scientific fact that…” and then go off on a half notion and when pointed out seem confused because “interesting scientific fact” seems to mean “poetic figure of speech that makes one think even if it’s not actually true”.
Anyway, I don’t really care about what JFK said 53 years ago so much as flabbergasted and annoyed that Hammites object to it.
What about the seawater concentration when the first organisms or LUCA appeared, on the reasoning of intracellular fluid concentration -> interstitial fluid concentration -> blood concentration? I’ve heard that one bandied about too.
Though it seems a little suspicious since over the 2-3 billion years that the oceans were getting saltier, single celled organisms could just be changing their own intracellular concentrations to maintain osmotic equilibrium….
I’m curious how we know when the ocean reached its current salinity. I remember reading that, obviously, additional salt washes into the ocean from land all the time, and of course seawater evaporates so it retains approximately constant volume give or take the ice sheets. Salt is removed from the ocean only when an embayment gets trapped by changing topography and dries out (giving us salt mines), which would seem a fairly rare event. It seems to me intuitively that the salinity should increase over time. How is it known that isn’t so? And why isn’t it?
Sure, but they are only using 10% of their brain cells. Just imagine if they could use the other 99%.
There’s this tribe in the rain-forest that uses only their left side of their brains in the morning and only their right side at night so the names for the food the gather in the morning describe how to find it but the names for the food they eat at night map the food and the people into a holistic connectivity and…
We do have a funny “cartoon” sense of reality. It’s … weird.
I’m also annoyed at commercials: the ones that pop up on FTB. Many of them are offensive scams that are barely legal. If the objective is to raise funds to support FTB then you should display ads that your intelligent audience might actually click on. The ads are appalling; some of the worst I’ve seen on the net and I don’t wish to be exposed to them. I’m off until you do something about it. I’ll check in from time to time to see if it has improved.
The irony of it. Just under your words “I’ve got some complaints too” I see a box ad with “NZ Mum turns $29 into $9000”.
I think it does increase over time, in general, but the rate is surely not constant and there may be long periods where equilibrium conditions persist and the total salinity is stable. It seems likely that at the water-land interfaces, such as the coastlines and the ocean floor, the salt dissolved in the ocean will be participating in any number of equilibrium reactions with the rocks and other minerals in those areas.
Turns out, Kennedy wasn’t a Berliner, either.
Anyway, I never saw so many overblown, overdone, self-important commercials in a three-hour span in my life. Then again, any game that calls itself Super Bowl XLIX probably invites that sort of thing.
To the, where’s all the salt? My understanding is that there are lakes of salt on the ocean floor. They look like underwater lakes, it’s really strange. Called brine pools. And just a glance on wiki says there are salt tectonics which look pretty neat. Looks like salt has a pretty steady flow in and out of the environment, if I’m reading this all right.
And they laughed at me when I told them SpongeBob was based on sound science!
http://spongebob.wikia.com/wiki/SpongeGuard_on_Duty
What is your source for those numbers?
Even if the salt content in the blood of our maritime ancestors was the same as the salt content of the sea at the time, it would likely have changed since then due to genetic drift, unless keeping that specific concentration (or close to it) was selected for in all the environments that all our ancestral species lived in.
And what about other species? Do they have comparable salinity to humans?
Yeah, it’s all bullshit. :-)
What’s really going on is that an ion concentration as high as seawater has would massively interfere with a vertebrate nervous system. The trick is to replace a lot of ions by urea and ammonium oxide. That’s what the blood of sharks and coelacanths is like; it’s actually a bit more concentrated than seawater.
On land, this toxic trickery is unnecessary, so we’ve ditched it.
Ray-finned fishes (normal fish; actinopterygians) went through a freshwater phase; they actively pump ions across the gills (in either direction, depending on whether they live in fresh or salty water) and thus don’t need the toxic trickery either.
It’s not that rare, and (perhaps importantly) it happens on huge scales. Just a few million years ago the whole Mediterranean dried up several times in a row; the amounts of salt in its bottom are staggering. There’s a thick salt layer under the whole North German Plain, and so on and so forth…
But the really important factor seems to be exchange with fresh seafloor, leading to black, white and alkaline smokers. Given that factor, there’s no reason at all to expect a long-term trend in ocean salinity as long as plate tectonics keeps going!
Yes. All vertebrates are about the same in this respect.
ahhh, but you had to love the irony. I’m changing my name to Chrysler. (‘Course that was his son, but still…)
Tom Paxton is not Woody Guthrie’s son.
However, Arlo Guthrie is Woody’s son.
@David #39
Would you have any references handy on that? I’d love to read more about this.
Actually, my first peeve with the commercial was the improper usage of the word, “whince”. :)
I’ll look for some, but there really isn’t much.
I’m actually surprised.
I would have expected some limits either way which would have formed a goldilock zone of salinity (with some exceptions like halophiles, but then they’re not vertebrates). Is it just that there is such a goldilock zone but it is narrow enough to consider vertebrates to be “about the same”?
And thanks for the answer.
At least some halophiles actually use similar tricks inside their cells to keep their proteins from misfolding.
I’ll look into how wide the vertebrate range really is. But I know that no vertebrates are anywhere near, say, freshwater bivalves, which are extremely dilute.
Ocean Chemical Processes – river, sea, oceans, important, salt, types, system, source, effect, marine, salinity, oxygen, human Residence times of seawater ions are at most 80 million years, the value for sodium. Seawater flows through hydrothermal vents, and that may force its chemical composition into some roughly steady-state value over geological time.
In the animal kingdom, there are two main approaches to body-fluid-solute mangement: osmoconforming and osmoregulating.
Osmoconformers maintain a body-fluid osmotic pressure equal to the external pressure. This approach requires the least amount of metabolic energy to maintain. All marine invertebrates whose osmotic balance has been studied use this approach, IIRC. But among vertebrates, only the hagfish does so. All other marine vertebrates have about 1/3 the salt concentration of the surrounding seawater, making them osmoregulators.
In freshwater, every animal has to be an osmoregulator, otherwise its flesh and body fluids would get waterlogged. A way to make that easier is to reduce the amount of body-fluid salt. That may explain why nearly all marine vertebrates are osmoregulators. If some ancestor had lived in fresh water, it would have had to become adapted to it, and that could explain the low body-fluid salt content. But if later vertebrates ended up stuck with that low concentration, then that would explain why the marine ones are osmoregulators — they can’t readjust.
Marine fish have two strategies. Ray-finned fish excrete very salty urine, while sharks accumulate enough urea to balance out the osmotic pressure, thus making a sort of osmoconformity.
Nearly all marine fish came from freshwater ancestors « Why Evolution Is True reports on some work on ray-finned fish that concludes that the ancestral one had lived in fresh water. That’s a bit distant from the most recent common ancestor of lampreys and jawed vertebrates, but it points in the direction of overall freshwater ancestry.
The osmoregulation problem may explain why freshwater animals don’t have that much phylum-level and class-level diversity relative to marine animals. There are no freshwater cephalopods, for instance, and the only freshwater mollusks are some bivalves and snails.
When Friendly Atheist covered it, the blogger and the general consensus which we shared is that ithe accuracy of this ommercial and the relevancy of that was quoted in it to what passes for some as a vacation on the ociean hardly matters.
The words quoted resonaate with our humanity, for the very reasons which ithe xtians were PO’d. To gaze out on the ocean is to gaze back at our origins, from where lthe first land animals emerged. If were were to look even further badk, we go back to the stars, from which all life-supporting elements arose. We are stardust, and that’s such a poetically beautiful thought, only a real dick could get annoyed by it.
Considering all the above, it isn’t much of a contest where I want to hang out, and it doesn’t look like you hit it off so well at parties.
sounds like the kind of person who voted for W because he’s “the kinda guy you’d have a beer with”.
right, Joe the Plumber?
“It’s an entirely lubberly experience”
Well said PZ!