I am here to half-heartedly* promote a new book comprising seventeen of the classic papers of my PhD advisor, Howard Pattee. The book, called Laws, Language and Life, is co-edited by Pattee himself—well into his 80s and as sharp as ever—and by neurolinguist and Pattee scholar Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi of the University of Warsaw.

But rather than ask you to purchase it, I shall use the totally remarkable occasion of the book’s publication to wholeheartedly urge you to go read some Pattee in whatever form you can find.

Why read Pattee?

Well, we know that the living world depends on sequences of nucleic acids for its existence and ongoing operation. We also know that humans evolved the ability to create, manipulate, and copy acoustic sequences, and later to commit those sequences to the more permanent medium of writing. Finally, we know that our advanced technological civilization is increasingly dependent on storing, moving, and processing bit strings—sequences of zeros and ones.

So what is it with sequences?

This is essentially the question Pattee has been studying for the last 50 years.

Pattee trained as a physicist at Stanford and still writes about biology (and brains) with a demanding precision. The questions that puzzle him concern the physical nature and systemic functions of sequences of symbols. Pattee’s complaint with conventional biological and cognitive science answers to these questions is that we will never understand the high-level use of sequences by the human brain without first understanding their nature and function at a much simpler level.

This is Pattee’s inner physicist speaking: why model a complex system when you can model a simple one? Thus his search for the evolutionary origin of this problem. As he put it in his 1969 paper “How Does a Molecule Become a Message?” (paper #2 in the book):

I am convinced that the problem of the origin of life cannot even be formulated without a better understanding of how molecules can function symbolically, that is, as records, codes, and signals. Or as I imply in my title, to understand origins, we need to know how a molecule becomes a message.

More specifically, as a physicist, I want to know how to distinguish communication between molecules from the normal physical interactions or forces between molecules which we believe account for all their motions. Furthermore, I need to make this distinction at the simplest possible level, since it does not answer the origin question to look at highly evolved organisms in which communication processes are reasonably clear and distinct. Therefore I need to know how messages originated. (Emphasis his)

“Message” implies “sequence,” so his question centers on how everyday physical systems change their behavior when molecules become organized sequentially. If we can come to grips with this problem, then perhaps we have a fighting chance of understanding how other sequence-based systems (like language) function.

Thus the cell becomes his point of departure for understanding sequences at all levels. Here is how he put it in his 1982 paper “Cell Psychology: An Evolutionary Approach to the Symbol-Matter Problem” (#10 in the book):

High level concepts such as intentions, meanings, thoughts, and so on, which we associate only with minds, must have had evolutionary precursors in a more or less gradual sequence. The problem is that we do not have a clear concept of what the simplest “intention,” “meaning,” or “thought” might look like. This is because psychology has traditionally been defined by only highly evolved “mental” activity, so that even though we study brains at the cellular or even molecular levels, there is the tacit belief that no real psychology can exist at a simple level.

Human physiology was also first defined as the study of gross organs and body fluids, but gradually these concepts were generalized and refined by the study of simpler organisms until today we find the foundations of human physiology in cell physiology. This does not mean that cells explain or exhibit all higher level processes. Cells do not have feet or ears, but they have motility and irritability, which are basic functions of feet and ears.…

I suggest that brain-level psychologies are not likely to converge until we have some agreement on the foundations of cell psychology. Obviously I am not suggesting that cells have minds any more than cells have feet, but cells are certainly matter-symbol systems which hopefully can be more clearly understood and modeled.

When Pattee looks for “matter-symbol systems” in the cell, he naturally focuses on the sequences of the genetic code. Can we find a principled way to distinguish between the two complementary roles of nucleic acid sequences? On the one hand, they behave like ordinary molecules, forming bonds and doing all of the lawful things that molecules can do. On the other hand, their function in living systems is to act as a template to “communicate” how to construct amino acid sequences and ultimately the tertiary structure of proteins.

We understand that their ordinary behavior is controlled by the laws of physics. But we also understand that there is no law of physics that says genetic sequences must be exactly the sequences that they are; alternative sequences are easily imagined. In other words, biology may be consistent with universal physical laws but the interesting sequence-based behaviors of living things depend on what Pattee calls specific arbitrary rules. To the untrained eye these rules may look like laws, but they are not. As Pattee explains it in his 1978 paper “The Complementarity Principle in Biological and Social Structures” (#8 in the book, and the first paper of his that I ever read):

The basic distinction between laws and rules can be made by these criteria: laws are (a) inexorable, (b) incorporeal and (c) universal; rules are (a) arbitrary, (b) structure dependent and (c) local. In other words, we can never alter or evade laws of nature; we can always evade or change rules. Laws of nature do not need embodiments or structures to execute them; rules must have a real physical structure or constraint if they are to be executed. Finally, laws hold at all times and all places; rules only exist when and where there are physical structures to execute them. (emphasis his)

As you have doubtless noticed, Pattee is difficult to summarize in a brief essay. He has never stopped asking the “big questions” in biology, so you should not read him expecting easy answers. Instead, you should expect fresh new ways of posing these classic quandaries, with a relentless insistence on explanations that would satisfy a working physicist (though very much not from a reductionist perspective). You will benefit from reading Pattee in direct proportion to your interest in these “big questions”—and in inverse proportion to your level of satisfaction with how they have been answered to date.

With Pattee, the answers elude, but the questions improve.

Pattee’s trail of papers on theoretical biology, cognitive science, artificial life, etc. stretches back to the 1960s The new book’s publication is totally remarkable because—despite producing this large body of work over all of those decades—Pattee has never written anything close to book-length. In 1973 he edited the well-regarded collection Hierarchy Theory, but that’s it. In the 40 years since then, everything else is papers, papers, papers. (Including his latest, published just last month.)

It is a treat to see so many of the good ones finally collected and available, though unfortunately in a package only within budgetary range of institutional libraries. But it can’t hurt to petition your library to get a copy. Please. Meanwhile, go forth and read a little Pattee. A few seconds on Google Scholar will not disappoint you.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled blogger. Thanks, sweetie.

*The reason I say “half-heartedly promote” is that—as happens with too many technical books aimed at narrow markets—the publisher is charging a small fortune for it. So I will not urge you to drop whatever you’re doing and then spend $159 on a book by someone you have probably never heard of.

Image 1: Manuscript page from Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
Image 2: DNA strand by Michael Ströck

For the uninitiated: ScienceSeeker (a project of ScienceOnline) is a website that collects and filters science blogs. Anyone can submit a blog and, to date, there are more than 1,500. Each post is aggregated by topic on the main page, and editors select their favorites for each topic. It also serves as a citation manager for research-based posts, generating a clean citation that also gets pulled onto ScienceSeeker.

I wasn’t the only Scientific American blogger to be honored; check out the full list from blog editor Bora.

And all the other bloggers on the list, ones known to me and not, have fantastic reads honored. Please check out the full list, and especially (if I may) Rebecca Kreston of Body Horrors on the earliest known cases of AIDS, Aatish Bhatia of Empirical Zeal on how language shapes how we see the world–in color, and Virginia Hughes (the winner of the best post of the year) on the medical case of a woman who couldn’t stop sleeping.

Congrats again to everyone involved!

In the future, may we all have the option to get a double mastectomy. Or, rather, its equivalent for whatever cancer each of us are genetically predisposed to.

1984 illustration of a total mastectomy by Donald Gates (National Cancer Institute)

Genetic testing for cancer has blown up in the past few years, but it’s still hard to know what to do with the results. So you find out you have a genetic mutation that gives you an increased chance of getting some type of cancer. What do you do now?

The answer, almost across the board, is that you wait. Armed with the knowledge that you are more likely to develop this cancer than the general population, you are more vigilant, get tested more frequently and prepare yourself to fight at the slightest sign of cancer. This is a great benefit. People who catch their cancer earlier have a better prognosis across the board.

Genetic testing doesn’t seem to increase people’s anxiety, so this solution must work well for most people. However, most known mutations associated with cancer only increase risk minutely or have ambiguous results; BRCA1 is a totally different ballgame. The average woman has a 12 percent chance of getting breast cancer in her lifetime, but for women with a mutation in BRCA1, that chance jumps as high as 90 percent.

With risks that high, most women with the mutation are just sitting and waiting for the day when they will get their diagnosis. For every BRCA1 woman it’s different—some handle it well and can live with the wait, while it’s excruciating for others. So it’s no wonder that some choose to take action and remove their breasts and/or ovaries. It’s a personal decision and not up for critical discussion.

It’s pretty amazing, actually, that this kind of preventative action—however drastic it may seem—can be taken at all. For most cancers, there isn’t a preemptive surgery available yet that will reduce your risk from 87 to 5 percent. The ability to make this choice—to have surgery or not—is itself empowering: it’s no longer a passive waiting game, but an an active defense.

In the future there may be direct preventative measures for other types of cancer. Some of these may also require major surgery; others may be simpler, like taking a daily pill. We don’t know what they look like yet—but, when we have true preventative measures for other cancers, we’ll be thankful to Angelina Jolie and Deborah Lindner and Nell Boeschenstein and so many other women who have talked publicly about their breast cancer surgeries and encouraged conversation around such a personal topic.

In each case, it will be a personal choice. May we all have such options in the future.

Image: 1984 illustration of a mastectomy by Donald Gates (National Cancer Institute)

Bermuda bluebird sitting on a nest box. Photo: Flickr user ecotist

The eastern bluebird (Sialia sialis) has lived in Bermuda as long as recent human memory can recall. It’s considered a native species, and some people even consider the population to be a subspecies–the Bermuda bluebird (Sialia sialis bermudensis)–because it looks a bit different from its mainland counterparts: its blue is a little more purple, and its orange is a bit more “cinnamon,” according to a 1901 account by zoologist (and science fiction writer) Alpheus Hyatt Verrill (Volume V, Number 6).

However, the idea that these birds are native to the island is reliant upon a rather unreliable source: human observation. A new genetic study, published this month in Molecular Ecology, shows that bluebirds are not native to Bermuda, but rather put down roots on the island after European settlers altered the landscape just 400 years ago.

Before the British settled on Bermuda in 1609, there is no evidence of any people having lived there. But the newcomers quickly left their mark. Within just a few decades, they cut down stands of the now critically endangered Bermuda cedar (Juniperus bermudiana) and other native trees, and released many non-native plants and animals, including cats, rats and pigs. The rapid habitat change and introduction of new predators led to the rapid extinction of many native animals soon thereafter.

Today, only three songbird species that are considered native live in Bermuda: the bluebird, the gray catbird, and the white-eyed vireo, all of which are common on the East Coast of the United States. But there are no fossils of bluebirds on the island going back some 400,000 years, and no breeding populations on other nearby islands. This made a group of Rutgers researchers wonder: is the bluebird truly a native species to Bermuda, or did it move in after people arrived and was improperly recorded?

To measure how closely related the Bermudan birds are to their mainland counterparts, the researchers compared 12 gene sequences among eastern bluebirds living in Bermuda, along the US East coast, and in the midwest. If the Bermuda bluebirds had been living isolated for thousands of years, they expected to see many genes unique to those birds.

Eastern bluebird from the continental US. Photo: Syd Phillips (Flickr user sydphi)

However, they only found two unique genes across all the Bermudan bluebirds they studied: solid evidence that the population settled on the island quite recently. Additionally, the Bermudan birds had many fewer total gene variants in their population compared to those on the continent–in other words, if the species’s DNA were a sentence, the Bermudan birds’ had a smaller vocabulary. The small genetic vocabulary suggests that a small number of birds (around 50) founded the population, and that these birds aren’t breeding with those on the mainland.

So instead of being a native species, as commonly thought, a smallish group of bluebirds likely settled on the island some 400 years ago and the modern population descended from those birds. It’s likely that the changes human settlers made to the landscape opened up pockets of habitat that were previously unavailable.

In that case, the more brightly-hued Bermudan bluebirds must have evolved their new coloration in just a few hundred years–far more quickly than evolution typically occurs! And even more puzzling is that the physical changes are not reflected in their genes. It’s likely that the evolution in coloration was not adaptive but accidental: a byproduct of what genes remained in the population when the small group was isolated. If by chance the 50 founding birds had more “dark blue” genes than found in the larger population, this isolated group would end up being darker, whether or not it helped them survive in their new habitat.

Whether the bluebirds are native or invasive isn’t the real question at hand, but whether they are unique enough in the world that they deserve extra conservation protection. They are not unique from other bluebirds, according to these new findings, and if a conservation organization, for example, is trying to direct funding to preserve unique species, these bluebirds shouldn’t be major priorities.

It also highlights that genetics is a useful and necessary tool in piecing together the history of organisms and ecosystems. Other subspecies, assumed to be separate based on isolation and physical differences, should be genetically analyzed to ensure that they are truly native and unique.

One of the major values of the paper in my eyes is that it forces us to challenge our assumptions. The accounts of 18th and 19th century zoologists shouldn’t be held sacred as the true definition of a unique native species. People now have tools to measure what lived here before we showed up, and those tools should be used to piece together prior landscapes and ecosystems above the word of explorers using their ever-faulty human senses.

Avery J.D., Fonseca D.M., Campagne P. & Lockwood J.L. (2013). Cryptic introductions and the interpretation of island biodiversity, Molecular Ecology, 22 (8) 2313-2324. DOI: 10.1111/mec.12236

Passenger pigeon. Photo Credit: Biodiversity Heritage Library

If people had the ability to resurrect extinct species (dubbed “de-extinction”) and reintroduce them to the wild, should we direct our energy and resources towards it?

I will admit my bias straight off: I’m skeptical of the utility of resurrecting extinct species for a multitude of reasons. Many extinct species no longer have the wild habitat to support them, even if a population could be resurrected from DNA, as Brian Switek wrote. Cloning technology is advancing quickly, but not yet ready for large-scale implementation, a topic Ferris Jabr takes on. And, to note the more mundane step between cloning and wild release, we can’t keep most wild animals alive in captivity, which is why you see the same species in zoos around the world. Are we really prepared to keep animals alive if, for example, we don’t even know what environment they prefer or what they eat?

But the main thing that bugs me is the blatant narcissism and anthropocentrism behind it.

Passenger pigeons. Photo Credit: Biodiversity Heritage Library

This morning, speaker Mike Archer argued that resurrecting extinct species is worth doing to “restore the balance of nature that we have upset.” This statement assumes that nature has some pristine state—an Eden containing an ideal balance of organisms. Over the years, ecologists have tried to find this balance and fit organisms and ecosystems into models. But, time and time again, they haven’t been able to fit ecosystems into neat, balanced pockets.

Ecosystems change constantly. Animals migrate. Weather kills off local populations and allows others to thrive. Disease strikes. And, yes, animals go extinct. Most of the time, ecosystems continue on as they were, with organisms making slight changes to their behavior to compensate for the loss. Sometimes the changes are more drastic and the relationships between organisms are reconstructed. It’s a shocking thing to witness—organisms and ecosystems shifting around us—but this isn’t anything new. It’s been happening since the beginning of life.

Passenger pigeon. Photo Credit: Biodiversity Heritage Library

So not only are we trying to restore nature to a balance that doesn’t seem to exist, but we’ve picked a rather arbitrary point in time to return it to: the moment when people first started paying attention. The only species we are capable of resurrecting are those that we know went extinct, those large and common enough to leave fossils, and those that we watched die off. So you see a familiar cadre of de-extinction candidates on the list: mammoths, passenger pigeons, thylacine tigers. These are all big animals that we are sure used to be around because they are large enough to leave an impact on human culture—or, as speaker Stanley Temple put it later in the afternoon, “species that I lamented as a boy.”

This suddenly is less about the species themselves and more about us.

But why shouldn’t it be, if we’re the ones causing so much damage? Sure, people have caused many recent extinctions, as our species spreads and displaces others. And because we are aware of our actions, we have a moral obligation to try to not drive species to extinction. But to say that our extinctions are worse than any other extinctions is a display of narcissism. Extinction is part of life.

What makes our extinctions different, however, is that we can learn from them. We can avoid having to lament species by learning how to take better care of habitats and ecosystems, how to use technology and back-crossing to induce greater genetic variation in small, endangered populations to give them a better chance of survival, and how to properly raise animals in captivity and then release them into the wild.

It’s to the future we must look, not the past. Cut your extinction losses, people: we have to focus our energy on the extinctions that haven’t happened yet.

Installing the Micrarium. Photo: © UCL, Grant Museum of Zoology/Robert Eagle

Animals with backbones (vertebrates) make up only 4% of the species on our planet. Yet when you walk into a natural history museum, they’re all you see. The dinosaur skeletons stretching across a ballroom? Vertebrates. Dioramas starring posed buffalo, lions, or zebra? Vertebrates. The endless cases of delicate stuffed birds? You guessed it: vertebrates.

“It’s a real tragedy: far and away, most of the animal kingdom is tiny,” said Jack Ashby, Manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London. “Natural history museums really only ever put big animals on display. That’s not very representative of nature.”

A new permanent exhibit at the museum, called the Micrarium, tries to fill the gap by displaying the smallest organisms. Microscope slides containing cross-sections of insects and other invertebrates are stacked wall-to-wall in a small room, lit from behind. Visitors can see the detail of the eye-level slides—but the point is larger than any of the individual animals.

“All these specimens around you and above you make the point visually that this is what the diversity of life is,” he said. “What I wasn’t prepared for is how beautiful it would look.”

From left to right: a whole sea spider, mantis shrimp, beetle slice and a pair of stained brine shrimps. Photo: © UCL, Grant Museum of Zoology/Robert Eagle

Modern natural history museums are cathedrals that exude awe. Visitors wander through and expect to be amazed at every turn—by seeing animals distant in time or space (even if non-living), gazing upon sparkling gems and minerals, or having a physical experience of the vastness of the universe at human scale. In that context, how can tiny microbes and invertebrates compete? “These bacteria can live in hot water and make energy from sulfur!” isn’t quite as compelling—and certainly not as visually appealing—as a stuffed ape or 100-foot whale model.

To give credit where credit is due, museums definitely try to show more than just the back-boned animals among us. But it’s an incredible challenge. Soft-bodied animals rarely leave fossils behind worthy of display. Many invertebrates shrink up and become unrecognizable if they’re not preserved in liquid, but keeping a specimen intact while putting it in public view is difficult. The Smithsonian (full disclosure: my full-time employer), for example, has a giant squid on display in the Sant Ocean Hall. But it’s kept in an air-tight tank holding some 1,500 gallons of preservative fluid, which is not a sustainable solution for smaller, more cash-strapped museums.

And then there’s the issue of size. How do you put bacteria or other microbes, invisible to the human eye, on display in a museum? Some curators will build blown-up models of single-celled organisms to at least give them a place in the exhibition hall. But when you choose to blow up a handful of microbes, you do it at the expense of portraying their biodiversity.

From left to right: wing of a large marsh grasshopper, brittle star and vase tunicate sections. Photo: © UCL, Grant Museum of Zoology/Robert Eagle

What’s remarkable about the Micrarium is that vast diversity is its centerpiece. It channels that same awe that visitors see when they gaze upon a T-rex skeleton, but focuses its point on the grandeur of life’s biodiversity. The point isn’t to learn the details of insect evolution or invertebrate zoology. The focus is to just be amazed at how many kind of animals are out there—ones that you’d never see, not because they live far away or are extinct, but because they too small to be easily seen.

“The wow we’re getting [at the Micrarium] is from the volume and the prettiness of the display,” said Ashby. “One specimen on its own wouldn’t get the same response.”

I haven’t ever seen a microscope slide on display in a museum. But almost all museums have them in the storerooms. Slides were once the only way to sort and study small animals, but modern-day microscopy and other technologies have made them obsolete. So they collect dust—until an innovative curator comes along and brings them to light.

“The stereotype of dusty old bones in a storeroom is not true,” said Ashby. “We’re doing new things with old things.”

The famous blue marble, taken in December 1972. Photo: NASA/Apollo 17 crew

Now the image has become commonplace and–dare I say it–almost trite. The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center regales us at least monthly with new, updated photos of our planet through its Flickr account. When photos of Earth make the news, it’s because they’re taken from a new, interesting angle, like the stunning Black Marble series of the Earth lit up by human lights at night.

But this is a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s only in the last 40 years that people have grown up really knowing that we live on a pale blue dot somewhere out in space, having seen the first image of Earth taken from space in 1972. Only in the last four decades that the sense of the planet’s wholeness was understood by so many.

Of course, people have had maps and globes for millennia and have used them to think about Earth holistically. But there is something powerful about an image. As Gregory Petsko of Brandeis University wrote in a Genome Biology essay:

The blue marble was an iconic image because it perfectly represented the human condition of living on an island in the universe, with all the frailty an island ecosystem is prey to. People are particularly moved by images, in part because we have evolved to have our visual system as our primary sensory input, but also because an image can be retained easily in the mind’s eye, and so forms the stuff of memory. The right image, offered at the right time, can have effects far greater than those imagined by the one creating it.

If the photograph has such power to mold the way people think about our planet and world, imagine what it would be like to see it from space for the first time. The documentary Overview (embedded below) conveys just that. The filmmakers  from the Planetary Collective interviewed a number of astronauts about what it was like to see the blue marble from space for the first time, and what effect it had on the way they think about the world. The general feeling is coined as the “Overview Effect”–the awe-induced shift to seeing the “big picture” of Earth when seeing it floating out there in space for the first time.

“When we originally went to the moon, our total focus was on the moon: we weren’t thinking about looking back at the earth,” said David Beaver, the cofounder of the Overview Institute, paraphrasing an astronaut in the documentary. “But now that we’ve done it, that may well have been the most important reason we went.”

The documentary is about 20 minutes long and totally worth your time. So full-screen this baby and pretend you’re seeing Earth from space for the first time.

Thanks to Masha for sending me the video!

Assimilation 7 by © Dillon Marsh (http://dillonmarsh.com)

Dillon Marsh’s photographs of sociable weaver nests, taken in the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa, beautifully illustrate traditional nature–the realm of wild animals–overlapping with human civilization. The apparent bales of hay draped over the tops and sides of telephone poles are home to hundreds of songbirds, which construct and maintain their monstrous nests communally.

While the merging of human and wild landscapes is powerful, perhaps the bigger oddity here is the nests themselves. Why would birds choose to live in a nest complex at all?

Assimilation 1 by © Dillon Marsh (http://dillonmarsh.com)

These nests are far more than apartment complexes for sociable weavers (Philetairus socius): they house multiple generations that work together to raise chicks. While most songbird species breed before they even turn a year old, sociable weavers rarely breed before the age of two. Instead, these younger birds help raise other nestlings–their siblings as well as unrelated chicks–by gathering food  and maintaining the nest’s fluffy interior chambers and external sticks and grass.

Assimilation 3 by © Dillon Marsh (http://dillonmarsh.com/)

Why would these young birds decide to help out at home instead of raising families of their own? Part of the answer lies in their life history. The desert of Southern Africa is hot and dry, sure, but it’s a very stable environment. The birds don’t have to migrate or brave severe seasonal changes. The most dangerous time of their lives is when they are a chick in the nest: some 70% of baby sociable weavers are killed and eaten by snakes.

Once they grow up, they live for a long time (up to 10 years!) and mostly survive year-to-year. Long lives make for lots of time to breed, and once they start breeding, it’s all they do. Most pairs of sociable weavers lay 2-6 eggs at least 4 times each year (and up to 9 times), and spend a lot of time raising these chicks.

Assimilation 6 by © Dillon Marsh (http://dillonmarsh.com)

However, while conditions are pretty constant in their habitat, sociable weavers still have trouble finding food. They mostly eat insects and seeds, which vary in abundance depending on the amount of rainfall in the desert–so not very much. A group of researchers from the University of Cape Town wanted to test if food availability affected the the 2-year delay in social weaver first-time breeding. When they scattered bird seed daily to boost food availability and reduce the risks of foraging, more first-time breeders bred early at just a year, and fewer birds stuck around to help out around the nest.

Evolutionarily speaking, this makes sense: a long-lived species would produce more offspring by waiting until they had preferential access to food for their chicks, instead of risking their own lives by trying to raise chicks when there’s not enough food around. And, while they wait for their turn to access food, they may as well help out around the nest and ensure that it sticks around, for the present and future.

All photos courtesy of © Dillon Marsh. See the rest of the Assimilation series and his other work at his website.

Covas R., Doutrelant C. & du Plessis M.A. (2004). Experimental evidence of a link between breeding conditions and the decision to breed or to help in a colonial cooperative bird, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 271 (1541) 827-832. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2003.2652

Nonetheless, I wanted to provide some more resources and reading about managing cats and wildlife management ethics more broadly. I’ll surely dig in even deeper in the coming months but, for those of you chomping at the bit, here’s some additional reading.

Nature Education has a great overview of the ethics of wildlife management and conservation, addressing many of the questions at the root of this debate. What responsibility to we have towards wild animals? How do you balance the welfare of individual animals while managing ecosystems? These are going to become increasingly important questions in the coming years, and society is going to have to make some hard choices about how far we will go to keep ecosystems in balance, for the sakes of people and wild animals. Just passively browsing today I found two articles about this–one about choosing between owl species in Slate, and the other about animal management (including cats) in the Florida Keys.

For more on the social roots of cat management conflict, here’s a paper published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE which tries to make sense of the two polarized sides–the cat people versus the bird people. They found that many of the “cat people” were also bird people and vice versa but, nonetheless, the polarized views persisted. The authors’ present a few reasons for this: misinformation, lack of information, different interpretations of data and, overall, identity politics.

Why are people so obsessed with cats? Tom Chatfield took a stab at the question in this 2011 Prospect article, “The Cult of Cats:”

Vermin-catching skills aside, cats are not useful to humans in any instrumental sense, nor much inclined to put themselves at our service. In contrast to the empathetic, emphatically useful dog, a cat’s mind is an alien and often unsympathetic mix of impulses. And it’s perhaps this combination of indifference and intimacy that has made it a beast of such ambivalent fascination throughout our history. Felines have been gods, demons, spirits and poppets to humankind over the centuries—and that’s before you reach the maelstrom of the internet and its obsessions. They are, in effect, a blank page onto which we doodle our dreams, fears and obsessions.

Another article, published in Scientific American, takes a stab at the same question. (Paywalled)

Looking beyond cats — is the ownership of any pet sustainable? Andrew Thaler tackles the question at Southern Fried Science.

Beneath their cute, fluffy fur, pets in the developed world hide some very problematic truths about sustainability and economic growth. There are more than 76 million pet cats in the United States, and an estimated 47 million in Europe. This may not seem like much, but consider this: in a recent talk at the Ecological Society of America, Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund estimated that the average European house cat consumes 16 times more resources – food, water, energy – than the average human being living in poverty in Africa. Estimates like this should be taken with a grain of salt, but if we assume for a moment that they are generally close, then we’re talking about an additional 1.97 billion people. That means if you lose the cats, you could double the amount of resources available to the 2 billion people living on less than $2 a day.

On the animal welfare side, in October the podcast Philosophy Bites interviewed Rutgers University law and philosophy professor Gary Francione about whether any use of non-human animals is ethical. (The discussion turns to pets ~11 minutes in.)

And for the record, in no way would I ever suggest that citizens should go out killing cats. I’m talking about wildlife management programs run by professionals.

Image: Photo by Tam Tam (Flickr user strollers)

On islands, cats are the primary cause for at least 14% of bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions and the principal threat to almost 8% of critically endangered animals. Photo by Flickr user vastateparksstaff

Every few months, the fact that domestic cats are ruthless killers hits the news. This past summer it was the Kitty Cam, memorably explained by webcomic The Oatmeal, which saw nearly one-third of cats kill 2 animals each week on average. In 2011 a study found that domestic cats were responsible for nearly half of predation on baby gray catbirds (Dumetella carolinensis), a shy bird common in the mid-Atlantic and named for its cat-like call. And this morning, Nature Communications published a large analysis estimating how many animals are killed by cats annually in the US: 1.4-3.7 billion birds and 6.9-20.7 billion mammals each year (1).

Let me repeat: every year BILLIONS of birds and mammals are killed by free-ranging domestic house cats, Felis catus. And millions of reptiles and amphibians on top of that.

This is not a cue for you to pat Fluffy on the head and congratulate her for being such a “natural little killer.” These data are no joke. Domestic cats are on the IUCN’s list of the top 100 World’s Worst Invasive Alien Species for their ability to decimate prey populations. Those razor-sharp claws strike the hardest on islands, where animal populations are relatively confined. A 2011 review found that, on islands, cats are the primary cause for at least 14% of bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions and the principal threat to almost 8% of critically endangered animals (2).

The new data drive home the point that, even on large continents, cats can do serious damage. Easily more damage than collisions with buildings or wind turbines do to birds. And, the authors hope, it’s a fact that wildlife management groups will not be able to ignore.

Feral cat populations are out of control–but what can be done about it? Unfortunately, most cat control is currently decided by our hearts rather than our brains. “Despite these harmful effects, policies for management of free-ranging cat populations and regulation of pet ownership behaviours are dictated by animal welfare issues rather than ecological impacts,” wrote the authors of the new paper.

This stray cat is a killer! Photo by Tam Tam (Flickr user strollers)

What are these “animal welfare” management strategies? Most places with any cat-control policy run trap-neuter-release programs, in which stray cats are baited by food before being, well, trapped, surgically neutered and released. The theory here is that, if enough cats are unable to reproduce, population levels will drop off and, over time, the “cat problem” will no longer be a problem. All that without having to actively euthanize our adorable fuzzy friends!

The problem is that trap-neuter-release programs don’t work (3). Cat fertility is so high–a single female can have 3 litters of 4-6 kittens each year–that a just a small percentage of the population needs to be reproductive to make up for the natural death rate. (Even if most of the kittens born end up dying before reproducing.) Additionally, trap-neuter-release isn’t even cost-effective compared to euthanasia, even if all the cat feeding, capturing and neutering is performed by volunteers (4).

And, meanwhile, all those neutered cats are still doing what they do best: catching and eating small animals.

So the obvious answer then is that, if we value biodiversity and wildlife and can manage to overcome our predilection for cute cat faces over cute bird faces, cat populations should be controlled through humane killing, just like many other invasive species.

But the funny thing is that no one suggests that. In compulsively researching this blog post, I read many papers showing that trap-neuter-release doesn’t work, or studies showing that, in computer models, euthanasia reduces cat populations more effectively than trap-neuter-release. But then in their concluding paragraphs, after providing evidence that current methods aren’t working, the action steps proposed by the authors are: (1) all pets should be neutered and (2) owners should be be better educated so they don’t abandon their cats.

What??

Look, I’m as sentimental as the next person. (I cried for the entirety of Les Miserables.) I love my cat and she gives my life meaning. But I also can admit that the science is staring us in the face. We can’t bear to talk about euthanizing cats because they are so friggin’ cute–but, if we’re honest with ourselves, the best solution to this problem is to kill cats. Kill them, with their cute little faces, their soft fur and their snuggles. Some of the cats need to be dead.

Would you trade the life of the cat for that of an endangered bird? Photo: Flickr user Akassia

It’s an incredibly difficult thing to say, I do admit, and I’ll probably make some enemies today–enemies that I’ll have forever. It’s unlikely that a feral cat advocate and I will ever understand one another because we are fighting for different things. The people in favor of euthanizing cats think that ecosystem health is more important than any one animal, while cat advocates care about individual welfare. There is no compromise to be had because we’re talking on completely different planes.

And, really, there isn’t a way to empirically determine whether ecosystems and biodiversity are more valuable than happy cats following their instincts. The only thing we can do is ask ethicists what they think–and, depending which ethicist you ask, you’ll get a different answer. I’m no ethicist and I’m not going to pretend to be one; instead, I’ll quote some ethicists from a 2007 New York Times Magazine feature about a bird-loving man on trial for shooting a cat:

[T]he rights of individual animals set against the health of the overall ecosystem…[is] a battle that rages in philosophy departments across the country. “From an animal-welfare perspective, confining cats and shooting the cat, in the Galveston example [of a bird-lover who shot a cat], is wrong,” says J. Baird Callicott, a philosophy professor at the University of North Texas. Callicott, a past president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, taught one of the nation’s first environmental ethics courses in 1971. He went on to say, however, that “from an environmental-ethics perspective it’s right, because a whole species is at stake. Personally, I think environmental ethics should trump animal-welfare ethics. But just as personally, animal-welfare ethicists think the opposite.” …

“You’re trading a feral cat, an exotic animal that doesn’t belong naturally on the landscape, against piping plovers, which evolved as natural fits in that environment,” reasons Holmes Rolston III, a Colorado State University professor who is considered one of the deans of American environmental philosophy. “And it trades an endangered species, piping plovers, against cats, which as a species are in no danger whatsoever. Suffering — the pain of the cat versus the pain of the plover eaten by the cat — is irrelevant in this case.”

Even if the pain of the cat and the pain of the plover could be compared–a life for a life–right now, people don’t see the plovers that are eaten. We mostly only see the cats, giving them the upper hand in gaining our empathy and protection. However, I have seen the plovers. I spent a summer protecting the endangered birds’ nests on the coast of Maine–and, ultimately, the chicks were probably eaten by cats because stubborn neighbors wouldn’t keep them inside.

The government spends hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more) on conservation programs to protect endangered species threatened by all kinds of human impacts, including the feline companions we’ve kept by our sides for 9,500 years. So we care about conservation then–but when we’re faced with an adorable face, we can’t seem to find the guts to even suggest that, maybe, the ecosystem, environment and thus the value of the places we love might be improved if we would euthanize those cats that no one will take responsibility for.

“There is a huge environmental price that we are paying every single day that we turn our backs on our native wildlife in favor of protecting non-native predatory cats at all cost while ignoring the inconvenient truth about the mortality they inflict,” Michael Hutchins, CEO of The Wildlife Society, said in a statement released with the gray catbird study. The Wildlife Society was one of few groups I found willing to advocate for feral cat euthanasia, after seeking out adoption. The other, surprisingly, was PETA–for the reason that feral cats live short, brutish lives.

(1)Loss S.R., Will T. & Marra P.P. (2013). The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States, Nature Communications, 4 1396. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2380

(2) Medina F.M., Bonnaud E., Vidal E., Tershy B.R., Zavaleta E.S., Josh Donlan C., Keitt B.S., Corre M., Horwath S.V. & Nogales M. & (2011). A global review of the impacts of invasive cats on island endangered vertebrates, Global Change Biology, 17 (11) 3503-3510. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x

(3) Longcore T., Rich C. & Sullivan L.M. (2009). Critical Assessment of Claims Regarding Management of Feral Cats by Trap-Neuter-Return, Conservation Biology, 23 (4) 887-894. DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01174.x

(4) LOHR C.A., COX L.J. & LEPCZYK C.A. (2013). Costs and Benefits of Trap-Neuter-Release and Euthanasia for Removal of Urban Cats in Oahu, Hawaii, Conservation Biology, 27 (1) 64-73. DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2012.01935.x

Dauphine N. & Cooper R.J. (1999). Impacts of Free-ranging Domestic Cats (Felis catus) on birds in the United States: A review of recent research with conservation and management recommendations, Fourth International Partners in Flight Conference: Tundra to Tropics, 205-219. (PDF)

It’s not that I’m an apocalypse-monger, dreaming of mass hysteria induced by floods and droughts, shortages of food and fuel. Rather, I worry about people’s incredible ability to acclimate: to let changes go unnoticed, as long as they’re gradual over time. I worry that people won’t notice that the air is warmer, storms are fiercer, and coral reefs are less brilliant over the course of their lives because these adjustments happen so incrementally. And thus climate change inaction will continue.

For a moment, imagine a world where the whole process were sped up, where the effects were drastic enough for a person to feel and register them over the course of a few months or a year. How would governments react then? People? Society?

This is a question addressed in last year’s widely-acclaimed Age of Miracles, the first novel by Karen Thompson Walker. It’s not climate change that drives the science fiction plot, but rather a gradual slowing of the earth’s rotation, dubbed “the slowing.” And, as is increasingly common in fiction these days, the story is told from the viewpoint of child: an 11-year old girl in southern California named Julia.

The earth's rotation slows, causing extra-long "days" and "nights" in "Age of Miracles." Photo: NASA Goddard

As the earth’s rotation slows, minutes and then hours are added to the length of the day. At first, life goes on as usual: adults go to work, Julia attends middle school, adolescents are cruel. But as the hours pile up and the world experiences 50-hour rotations–split roughly in half into day and night–society splinters. Some people continue on a 24-hour schedule, sometimes spending entire “days” in darkness, while others try to adapt to the longer schedules. The schisms created by uneven, out-of-sync schedules change how these communities, families and people function. As Julia puts it in the novel: “I think we lost something else when we lost that crisp rhythm, some general shared belief that we could count on certain things.”

Of course, the changes induced by the slowing aren’t just societal, but biological. Birds, no longer able to navigate, fall out of the sky. Whales beach themselves. Crops wither in the constant hot sun. Astronauts are trapped in the space station. The earth’s magnetic shield cracks, causing solar superstorms.

Now out in paperback!

Most of the reviews focus on the comparison between the planet’s  global changes and Julia’s adolescent “throes of seismic upheaval,” as NPR put it. And much of the book does focus on crushes and coming of age, making the point that life goes on, people keep doing the things people do, even in the face of environmental destruction.

But it’s not Julia and her adolescent struggles that have kept me thinking about this book months later: rather, it’s the feeling of slow, creeping doom that permeates the novel, one that we perhaps don’t feel enough when we think about climate change. Walker says that “[she] didn’t specifically intend for the book to remind readers of climate change.” But I cannot imagine this book being written in any other time than now, in a culture immersed in the apocalyptic predictions made on the news. A few decades ago, a science fiction novel about the slowing of the earth would have involved people floating away without gravity; this one is about the death of crops, the ocean spitting out its emblematic mammals, birds dropping to the earth, and society slowly splintering.

Walker’s stated goal was to address a slow-moving catastrophe: she wanted to explore “how people would react to a catastrophe like the slowing, which is almost too large to comprehend and which unfolds at a relatively slow rate.” The slowing is a good comparison to most environmental disaster movies, in which cities are blown up out of the blue–surely in reaction to another potential catastrophe, nuclear war–and everything they knew was gone. Julia and her family still have their home, their jobs: it’s the world that’s changing around them while they continue to persevere.

However, her global catastrophe still unfolds at a much faster rate than ours: the whole book takes place over the course of a year or so. So while the characters certainly have time to contemplate their doom, science doesn’t have time to catch up. Plans to genetically engineer crops to grow in long days and nights are abandoned. There is no great technological boom to develop new fuels; electricity is shut off. There is not time to find a planetary alternative for relocation, even if the technology existed.

It reminds me that climate change’s slow movement is a blessing. It probably won’t cause the kind of global catastrophe described in Age of Miracles, but things will change. And its slow movement means that we have the time to anticipate problems and develop solutions. But it first takes recognizing that climate change is an issue worth addressing–and, in that case, its slow drag makes it hard to take that action. As David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker:

Inaction on climate change has an insidious ally: time. As the writer and activist Bill McKibben writes in The New York Review of Books, “Global warming happens just slowly enough that political systems have been able to ignore it. The distress signal is emitted at a frequency that scientists can hear quite clearly, but is seemingly just beyond the reach of most politicians.” When the financial system collapsed, the effects were swift and dramatic. People could debate how best to fix the problem, but they could not doubt that there was a problem and it had to be fixed. Yet, as Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, who studied the costs of climate change for the British government, has observed, the risks are vastly greater than those posed by the collapse of the Western financial system.

If one of the goals of art is to help people better understand the world around them, let’s take a message from Age of Miracles. We will adapt to the effects of climate change. Life will go on. But let’s make it easier on ourselves and start preparing now, since we have the time.

Thanks to Rebecca Kreston of Body Horrors for recommending the book!

The University of Montana’s natural history museum in Missoula is the “largest zoological museum in Montana and one of the major zoological collections of the Northern Rocky Mountains,” according to its website. Its collections hold 14,500 mammalian specimens, 7,000 birds, 3,200 fish, and 320 reptiles and amphibians. However, it’s different than the typical ideal of a natural history museum: unlike the one that employs me (the Smithsonian), it is primarily a research facility and not a place where a vacationing family would devote a day to wandering through a maze of exhibits on multiple floors.

Another thing that makes it stand out: Montana’s Philip L. Wright Zoological Museum only has two staff members.

Lucky for the museum, one of those staff members is Emily Graslie. Graslie first entered the museum to complete an independent study credit for her studio art major and never left. Now she is a volunteer curatorial assistant (you read that right: the museum’s only full-time staff member is a VOLUNTEER) while working on her masters in museum studies.

Graslie doesn’t just want to bury her face in bones and skins: she’s an articulate and hilarious educator. She just launched the first episode of The Brain Scoop, a new video series going behind-the-scenes at the museum. It’s witty and educational and wonderfully produced–and, like most things at their museum, runs on volunteered passion.

Watch the video to see many skulls and bones, learn about how animals are prepared for the museum, and find the best place to watch an orgy on campus.

Despite their name, Western red cedars (Thuja plicata) aren't true cedars--they're in the cypress family. Photo: Evan Leeson

Urban areas are growing in size–and with them, the number of trees influenced by city life. While development often leads to deforestation, there are still a significant number of trees growing in the shadow of cities. According to a report released in 2000, 2.8% of tree canopy cover in the U.S. is in cities, and nearly one-quarter lies in the surrounding metropolitan areas (urban counties).

City trees have to deal with very different growing conditions than trees in more rural areas or old forests. Cities are notorious heat islands: the asphault and dark rooftops absorb enough heat to raise summertime nighttime temperatures by 2-5°F on average–and as much as 22°F on clear nights–compared to the surrounding non-urban areas. Hotter nights mean more evaporation, potentially draining the soil of moisture. Carbon dioxide levels are higher due to greater car exhaust. And the prevalence of cars and fertilizers increases pollution runoff, altering the soil’s nutrient availability.

How do trees, adapted to non-urban lifestyles, fare under these circumstances? According to the results of a study published in Urban Ecosystems, western red-cedars (Thuja plicata), coniferous trees common in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, grow more quickly but produce fewer seedlings, potentially putting these urban forest ecosystems on an unpredictable long-term trajectory.

Western red cedar (Thuja plicata) cones. Photo: Leah Grunzke

Researchers from the Universities of California and Washington compared forest patches within urban Seattle (5,000 to 12,000 people per square mile), in rural areas outside the city (150 to 3,000 people per square mile), and old-growth forest in Mount Rainier National Park (people-free), measuring air temperature and soil nitrogen as a proxy for nutrients. They measured the growth rate of western red cedars by counting tree rings and circumference, and counted seedlings in the three forest types. This species was chosen because it is a late-successional tree that grows even in the relative darkness under a forest canopy.

As expected, the environments in urban and rural forests were distinct: both air temperature and soil nitrogen were higher in the city. But in contrast to a previous long-term study, which attributed increased tree death in the Pacific Northwest to warmer temperatures, city-based western red cedars grew faster than rural ones. The authors speculate that higher temperatures created longer growing seasons, allowing each tree a bit more time to stretch toward the sky, and the excess nitrogen may have acted as a fertilizer.

However, even within a single species, environmental changes won’t necessarily benefit seedling growth as they do adult trees. Baby plants are very sensitive to soil moisture, which would be more prone to dehydration because of increased evaporation under warm climates. And the extra shot of nitrogen could overwhelm seedlings, killing them.

Given these predictions, the researchers expected to see a gradient of seedling success, with the fewest seedings spotted in cities, more in rural forests, and the most in old-growth. But they were surprised to see “alarmingly low” numbers of western red-cedar seedlings at both urban and rural sites compared to old growth.

Old growth western red cedar (Thuja plicata) Photo: Miguel Vieira

It’s difficult to tease out why seedlings failed to grow in developed areas: it could be caused by increased air temperature and nitrogen–the factors measured by the researchers explicitly–or an indirect effect of these, such as reduced soil moisture. Urban and rural forests receive more human foot traffic, so seedlings in these more disturbed forests may have been trampled to death. It’s also possible that trees in urban and rural forests are just too young to produce a lot of seedlings. Old-growth forests have many more mature trees, which produce far more seed-laden cones.

What do these findings mean for urban forests? Combined with the results of earlier papers, increased temperatures and nitrogen–not dissimilar from those expected from global warming–are clearly impacting the growth and reproduction of a variety of tree species in different ways. Ultimately, this could rejigger the typical species compositions we see in regional forests.

In different regions, a fairly predictable list of species will colonize, thrive and become rare as a forest matures, a process known as succession. For example, in the Pacific Northwest, western red-cedar tends to be one of the last to move into a forest, displacing other species that had dominated the ecosystem. If environmental changes prevent it from reproducing successfully, it’s possible that it will not longer be a common species in mature urban Pacific Northwest forests, and a species that thrives in the new environment will prevail instead.

This doesn’t mean that the forests will fail or disappear–they just might look different than the ones with which we’re most familiar.

O’Brien A.M., Ettinger A.K. & HilleRisLambers J. (2012). Conifer growth and reproduction in urban forest fragments: Predictors of future responses to global change?, Urban Ecosystems, 15 (4) 879-891. DOI: 10.1007/s11252-012-0250-7

This statue at Notre-Dame de la Garde says "shush!"

As I read the funny pages this morning in the paper, I noticed a running joke: no one keeps their New Year’s resolutions. There are a million different personal and psychological reasons for this–but you can use SCIENCE to better understand why you fail, and how to get better at achieving your goals.

The tip I’ve learn that’s helped me the most is to NOT TELL ANYONE about what you want to do, at least not point-blank. The act of announcing what you aim to do to friends and family–and hearing their approval–provides similar satisfaction to achieving the goal, giving you a “premature sense of completeness,” as noted in a 2009 study (PDF). And with your self-satisfaction meter already half-full before you start, the motivation to work hard is sapped. Essentially, proclaiming your goals at a New Year’s party can undermine your own efforts from the get-go.

It’s this tip that actually brought me back from the blogging dead. Over and over I told my friends, family, and editor that I was going to get back into blogging, all to no avail. It wasn’t until I laid out a plan for myself–start organizing papers, planning themes, taking notes–and told it to Bora, lord of the blogs, that I was able to actually start blogging again. I didn’t share the goal explicitly: instead I shared the steps I would take, thus delaying my own sense of achievement.

So on December 31st, hold back from sharing your endgoals. If you have to talk, talk about the steps you’ll take to achieve it.

This, of course, isn’t the only insight from psychology that you can use to set and achieve goals, break bad habits, or instill good ones. Eric Barker of the blog Barking up the Wrong Tree has a great summary of science-based tips for self-improvement.

Happy New Year!

(video of Australian green tree frogs via Gunshop)

Photo Credit: Statue at Notre-Dame de la Garde in Marseille, France on Wikimedia Commons

White mistletoe berries.

Semantics aside, mistletoe has been long-considered the epitome of the word “parasite:” a blood-sucking bush that plugs into trunks and branches, strangling and killing trees around the world. This airborne parasitism is so successful that mistletoes are thought to have evolved it five separate times on their own.

But the purely negative opinion is starting to change. Mistletoe may parasitize trees, but it also provides valuable services to forest animals. Its flower nectar and berries are a food source for birds, insects (such as moths, beetles, bees and flies), and mammals. Its greenery is a resource-rich patch used as shelter and, for some birds, a sweet nesting spot.

Australian mistletoebird (Dicaeum hirundinaceum), a mistletoe specialist.

How does mistletoe get up on a tree trunk in the first place? In short: sticky poop. Mistletoes rely heavily on birds and mammals to distribute their seeds; in fact, 90 species of birds in 10 families are considered mistletoe specialists. The berries are brightly colored and covered in a sticky glue called viscin, which can survive an animal’s digestive tract. Thus, even after its been pooped out, the seed can still stick to the nearest branch… or to another animal to ferry it elsewhere.

Once smeared onto a proper spot on a tree trunk or branch, the mistletoe seed germinates and sprouts a penetration peg that mechanically drills down into the tree until it hits a nutrient pipe. The peg is then followed by a haustorium, the root that plugs into the arboreal host to draw off nutrients and water. The next step is growing leaves, flowers and berries, a process that can take 2-6 years in some species.

Once it blossoms, the magic begins, and the mistletoe plant sprouts flowers and nectar to feed insects and birds, such as hummingsbirds. After they are fertilized, these flowers turn into berries… and the process begins all again.

Western dwarf mistletoe (Arceuthobium campylopodum) sprouting midtrunk.

Mistletoe also provides a broader ecosystem service: it provides abundant nutrients to the forest floor when it drops its leaves. Most leaf-losing trees hoard their precious nutrients, and suck their leaves of every last nutrient-rich drop before they let them fly. But, because of their parasitic nature, mistletoe plants aren’t too concerned with preserving nutrients–they can always just steal some more from their host! So down go the nutrient-rich leaves, which stimulate the growth of other plants (and the host trees themselves).

This may be a more important ecosystem process than producing fruit, flowers, and nesting shelter. In a recent study, scientists removed the mistletoe from stands of eucalyptus forest in Australia. Three years later, one-fifth of vertebrate species previously living there had left the woodlands–an astounding result. Because many of these species that abandoned ship ate insects on the forest floor, the authors believe this leaf-litter mechanism explains the biodiversity loss more than the removal of mistletoe berries and flowers.

Its those same beautiful berries that attract birds and bees to spread mistletoe seeds that compelled Europeans to decorate their living rooms with it around Christmastime. (Well, that and pagan culture.) So next time you see some hanging at a party, forget the kiss–grab your girl or guy by the arm and explain that you want to get hemiparasitic with them.

Watson D.M. & Herring M. (2012). Mistletoe as a keystone resource: an experimental test, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279 (1743) 3853-3860. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2012.0856

Watson D.M. (2001). MISTLETOE – A KEYSTONE RESOURCE IN FORESTS AND WOODLANDS WORLDWIDE, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 32 (1) 219-249. DOI:10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.32.081501.114024 (PDF)

Photo Credits:

(1) White mistletoe berries, Flickr user swamibu CC BY-NC 2.0

(2) Mistletoebird, Flickr user 0ystercatcher, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

(3) Dwarf mistletoe, Jill Siegrist, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Cheetah. Credit: Serengeti Snapshot, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0

Procrastination feels like an inevitable part of getting anything done these days. It really should be called procrastihate, as I always hate myself afterwards, whether I’ve spent an hour on Facebook scrolling through photos of a wedding I wasn’t invited to, or lost 40 games of spider solitaire in a row.

But I’ve found a way to waste time in a way that’s fulfilling: by helping researchers identify animals online.

Yesterday, the Zooniverse, a citizen science hub, launched its latest project, called Snapshot Serengeti. Using motion sensing cameras, University of Minnesota scientists have taken more than 3 million photos of African wildlife in 3 years–an amount of data that would take the rest of their careers to sift through. So instead of doing it all themselves, they have enlisted the public to help them sort through the photos, identifying zebras, gazelles, lions, elephants, hyenas and other species to advance their study of Serengeti ecology.

Warthog. Credit: Serengeti Snapshot, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0

The process of sorting through the photos is surprisingly engaging. Snapshot Serengeti presents a photo or a series of photos and, using their animal ID guide, you simply select the number of each species you see in the photo. And to lift some of the pressure–”what if I get it wrong?”–each photo is presented to at least 5 participants. If they all agree, the identification is deemed correct; if there’s disagreement, it’s left in the pool of photos and given a closer look by the researchers.

The process is a perfect replacement for standard procrastination methods. After you get the method down, it’s relatively brainless, but has moments of excitement: “OH MY GOD a baby elephant!” is not dissimilar from “OH MY GOD that guy from high school got fat!” And it certainly gives instant gratification as you scroll through the photos, successfully completing each one.

The big difference is that I don’t hate myself after an hour of identifying African animals. Instead, I feel like I’ve done some good in the world.

Zebra butt. Credit: Serengeti Snapshot, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0

Of course, the whole process can be incredibly engaging and a worthwhile hobby beyond procrastination. You can star your favorite photos for later and create collections (such as my praise-worthy collection of animal butts). And in the forum, you can talk to other participants and scientists about a cool photo or to ask about animal behavior, troubleshoot IDs, and learn more about the research.

Don’t care for charismatic megafauna like giraffes and cheetahs? Then get into Seafloor Explorer to help identify marine crustaceans and mollusks, sort through whale songs on WhaleFM, moon photos on MoonZoo, or galaxies on GalaxyZoo. I swear it will make you feel better than losing at spider solitaire again.

Two house finches sit on a fencepost in Mexico city. Photo Credit: © Víctor Argaez

As horrifying as the idea of baby birds growing up in a cigarette-filled home sounds, it’s not too surprising: the fluffy plastic in cigarette filters makes a fantastic construction material. However, cigarette butts are undoubtably smelly—a fact that has even driven people away from keeping them around.

But birds are actually quite fond of the chemicals found in some smelly plants, otherwise known as aromatics, from which “essential oils” are derived. Aromatic plants produce these chemicals to defend themselves against insects and other animals that would take them for food—but birds have their own use for them. Some nest-building species, including starlings and blue tits, regularly replenish their nests with fresh aromatics, and scientists hypothesize that the birds use these chemicals as parenting tools.

How would plant-derived chemicals help birds raise their chicks? It’s possible that the chemicals boost the immune systems or development of the chicks so that they survive better after they leave the nest; this is known as the “drug hypothesis.” Alternatively, the “nest protection” hypothesis suggests that the plant chemicals act as insecticides, driving parasites and other harmful insects from the nest.

Nicotine is an insecticide, although we don’t often think of it that way. Tobacco plants generate nicotine because it defends against herbivorous beetles that would otherwise devour the plants–which means a smoker’s buzz is caused by a plant’s chemical defense mechanism. Some remnants of that insecticide remains in cigarette butts left in city streets, which are then transported into bird nests.

The paper authors wanted to know: does this nicotine remnant act as an insecticide when used to construct nests?

A house sparrow stands near a cigarette butt in Mexico City. Photo Credit: © Víctor Argaez

First, the researchers from Mexico’s Autonomous University of Tlaxcala evaluated the parasites’ prediliction for cigarette butts. They set up heat traps to attract ectoparasites (parasites that live outside the body, such as skin or feathers) from 55 nests: in half, the trap was lined with filter fluff from smoked cigarettes, the other, filter fluff from unsmoked cigarettes. Whether the nest held eggs, chicks, or nothing, the unsmoked traps collected more parasites, suggesting that the desire to stay away from smoked cigarette filters outweighed the urge to move towards the heat in the experimental nests.

In the second experiment, the researchers collected 28 house sparrow (Passer domesticus) nests and 29 house finch (Carpodacus mexicanus) nests from Mexico City immediately after the chicks flew out for good. Disassembling the nests in the lab, they then looked for a relationship between the weight of smoked filter fluff and the number of parasites living in the nest. They found that the more butt fluff there was in the nest, the fewer parasites.

Overall, the paper presented convincing evidence that (1) parasites don’t like cigarette butts and (2) nests constructed from cigarette butts had fewer parasites.

However, this isn’t the final word on the “nest protection” hypothesis quite yet. The major piece of the puzzle the researchers are missing is the health of the birds. Without that information, there is no way to tell if the reduced parasite load in the nests actually provided any benefit. We don’t know how many nestlings survived the nests or how healthy they were. For all we know, the nicotine and other chemicals in the cigarette butt fluff were able to drive away parasites by killing off their hosts–the nestlings themselves.

It’s also possible that nicotine wasn’t the main driver, but one of the other toxic chemicals found in cigarettes, such as hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, or ammonia drove the parasites out of the nest.

If the results do hold, this study is a wonderful example of wildlife adaptation to urbanization–or at least that birds are resourceful and can still follow their noses in urban environments.

Suarez-Rodriguez M., Lopez-Rull I. & Macias Garcia C. (2012). Incorporation of cigarette butts into nests reduces nest ectoparasite load in urban birds: new ingredients for an old recipe?, Biology Letters, 9 (1) 20120931-20120931. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0931

Here are the best things I’ve read all week. The pieces are not necessarily news and could be decades old, and they’re probably longform writing but not always. Maybe there is one link, maybe there are forty. But they all were thought-provoking enough that they hopped around in my brain long past the read. Enjoy.

1) A rare interview with John McPhee (‘John McPhee, The Art of Nonfiction No. 3′) from the Spring 2010 issue of the Paris Review is about so much more than how he writes, though it is about that — from getting ideas to structuring to getting words on paper. It also gives a fine sense of the man who is an inspiration to many of us nonfiction (or, as he prefers, ‘factual writing’) writers.

The thing about writers is that, with very few exceptions, they grow slowly—very slowly. A John Updike comes along, he’s an anomaly. That’s no model, that’s a phenomenon. I sent stuff to The New Yorker when I was in college and then for ten years thereafter before they accepted something. I used to paper my wall with their rejection slips. And they were not making a mistake. Writers develop slowly. That’s what I want to say to you: don’t look at my career through the wrong end of a telescope. This is terribly important to me as a teacher of writers, of kids who want to write.

2) How do you want to live the final months, weeks, days, hours of your life? Many of us, healthy, would say, “with my friends and family,” but this rarely happens in practice: too many of us will die fighting for even one more second of life. But, as physician Ken Murray points out in an article at Zócalo Public Square, doctors themselves, who should be best informed to choose how they will die, rarely go out fighting. And in ‘How Doctors Die,’ Murray tries to answers the question: “How has it come to this—that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves?”

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

If you enjoy this article and find it thought-provoking, definitely check out ‘Letting Go’ from the August 2010 issue of the New Yorker by Atul Gawande, which is one of the best things I’ve ever read.

3) For 14 years now, the scientists behind the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory have been working to catalogue all the species in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which is contained within North Carolina and Tennessee. And an article published in November in Knoxville, Tennessee’s Metropulse by Jesse Fox Mayshark (’17,000 Species in the Great Smoky Mountains. And Counting.’) recounts the project and whether it has a future.

The old-fashioned ambition of the project presents some serious challenges, though. There are, first of all, the unforgiving terms of the mission: Count everything. The name says All, not Some or Most. There is the problem that the natural world does not stand still. Every count is a snapshot of this year, this organism, this place. One of the hopes for the ATBI is that it will make it easier to understand the effects of forces like climate change, air pollution, and invasive species. But those forces are already at work, which means that things already counted have to be monitored and revisited even as the search for new species goes on.

The project has come a long way, as Mayshark explains, but it faces the same problem as much of taxonomy and species collecting: funding.

The funding that got the ATBI started has largely fallen off, and people to do the hands-on research are increasingly difficult to come by. It turns out that for all its scope, the kind of work the project demands is not, in a lot of ways, the kind of work that modern science most values and rewards.

“What happens when the hopeful, impossible task runs up against pragmatic reality?” Bartels says. “That’s the question.”

While Mayshark doesn’t address them head-on, the article raises all sorts of questions about what scientists, the public, and funding institutions value about science. And the sort of nitty-gritty work that should be — and perhaps must be — done.

Check back next week for more gems.

Image: via Mo Riza on Flickr under Creative Commons licensing

That is until New Years Day 2012, when new rules passed at the International Botanical Congress in Melbourne, Australia this July, take effect: the botanists voted on a measure to leave the lengthy and time-consuming descriptions behind. Additionally, the group released their concerns about the impermanence of electronic publication, and will now allow official descriptions to be set in online-only journals.

“Probably in 1935 [when the Latin requirement was instated], most people who got serious university degrees were required to take Latin,” says botanist Jim Miller from the New York Botanical Garden, who published an accompanying paper in the journal PhytoKeys in July. “But it has become less true that Latin is universally accessible.”

The botanists’ abandonment of Latin is yet another opportunity for this amateur Classicist to bemoan the passing of Classical study — but when I spoke with Jim, he really did have me convinced that it was time. This isn’t just a simple Latin name we’re talking about, or even a sentence; for example, when Jim discovered a new species of tree in Suriname, he had to pen the following in order to officially name it Cordia koemarae:

Arbor ad 8 alta, raminculis sparse pilosis, trichomatis 2-2.5 mm longis. Folia persistentia; laminae anisophyllae, foliis majoribus ellipticus, 12-23.5 cm longis, 6-13 cm latis, minoribus orbicularis, ca 8.5 cm longis,  7.5 cm latis, apice acuminato et caudato, acuminibus 1.5-2 cm longis, basi rotundata ad obtusam, margine integra, supra sericea, trichomatis 2.5-4 mm longis, appressis, pagina inferiore sericea ad pilosam, trichomatis 2-3 mm longis; petioli 4-7 mm longi. Inflorescentia terminalis vel axillaris, cymosa, 8-10 cm latis. Flores bisexuales; calyx tubularis, ca. 6 mm longus, 10-costatus; corolla alba, tubularis, 5-lobata; stamina 5, filis 8-10 mm longis, pubescentia ad insertionem.

Okay, so it’s not exactly a prime example of Golden Age Latin poetry. But, nonetheless, the Latin requirement presented a hindrance to botanists who are busy trying to name nearly 2,000 new species of plants, algae and fungi each year to disseminate the findings to other scientists and naturalists. “If we can increase the efficiency by which biologists can do their work and name species that we are racing against the clock to describe before they are lost or go extinct because of galloping deforestation, that’s a good thing,” says Miller.

And in another unanimous vote at the conference, which is held every six years and includes 8-10 hours of discussion nomenclature each day, the botanists decided to allow publication in electronic journals. The group had a similar discussion six years ago, Miller told me, but at the time the web still felt very impermanent — I’m thinking geocities or angelfire impermanent. And if you’re a botanist consulting a lengthy record of described plant species, you don’t want to lose some of those descriptions into the black hole of cyberspace. But this year, the botanists decided the web was less spooky and now can describe species in any electronic journal that has an ISSN, for the purpose of archiving.

“I think the importance of what happened at the Melbourne conference — whether elimination of Latin or allowing electronic publication — is that there was a real feeling among the people who attended the nomenclature session that we face a daunting task trying to catalogue, make sense out of, describe and name all of the species that are on this planet,” says Miller. “And we need to facilitate that, not encumber it.”

So on this New Years day, don’t just make resolutions and seek a kiss — also do your part in welcoming the botanists to the 21st century, a century in which we no longer speak in Latin and the web feels like a somewhat permanent destination… at least for now.

Images: from the Aztec herbal Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis, first translated into Latin in 1552. Images in the public domain and found on Wikimedia Commons.

Even with such enlightenment, it’s nice to be reminded of why people once thought the opposite — that the universe revolves around the earth — to briefly knock us off our ivory tower of knowledge and be reminded of just how far we’ve come.

This feeling struck me as I watched ’Finding Oregon,’ a stunning time-lapse video from the Portland-based Uncage the Soul video production company. The four-minute video highlights the sky, in night and day, from different viewpoints around the state. Intended to be a tourism promotional film, it really does much more. It’s breathtaking, literally, and hair-raising in an inspiring, not horrifying, way. And watching the stars careen through the sky gave me pause. Because a person born in a vacuum would conclude that the heavens, in fact, revolve around the earth after watching the video.

So sit back, full screen the video, turn up the volume and enjoy. And click through to the vimeo page to learn more about how the team put the video together.

If your heart doesn’t stop, I declare you inhuman.

Image: Screenshot from ‘Finding Oregon‘

A group of college students studying at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts caught ahold of the trend, and have put together an audio piece featuring scientists, the tattoos hiding under their lab coats, and the underlying scientific passion that inspires them. They got the idea because one of the group members, my sister Emily Waters, had recently joined the ranks of tattooed scientists.

“I just got my first tattoo: a big plant stem cross section above my knee,” she says. “I was on the lookout for a cool topic for the radio piece, and it was then that I stumbled across Carl Zimmer’s blog and got the idea for the radio project.”

Science writer Carl Zimmer has been collecting science tattoos for years at his Science Tattoo Emporium on his blog, and last month published a book, Science Ink, featuring the extensive collection. The radio piece, embedded below, includes an interview with Zimmer who espouses his thoughts on why scientists get tattoos about their science.

Also featured are testimonies from four tattooed scientists: SciCurious, a biomedical postdoc and fellow Scientific American blogger; Josh Drew, a marine biology postdoc; Amanda Gallinat, a full-time bird bander and researcher (and my college roommate); and Nathaniel Comfort, a science historian at John Hopkins School of Medicine.

Listen to their fabulous radio piece below.

The video features a song from the fabulous Philadelphia band The Tough Shits, which you can hear in-full on muxtape.

I read his obituary and my body stopped functioning. I froze on the spot, limbs tense but trembling. My mouth went dry, my vision blurred. As I waited for my train in the packed station, I could barely stand as my muscles turned to jelly and legs folded beneath my body. I tried to maintain composure in the public space, but my contorted face betrayed my sorrow.

It was shocking to me: I felt real physical pain — a biological response brought about by stress hormones — in response to death. Not only was the feeling new to me, but it also didn’t make sense. Mourning left me depressed, unable to work, even unable to eat at times (the real shocker). And everyone mourns; as long as we are mortal, death and grief happen. So why would such a negative reaction to death be passed on through the generations? We’re certainly less able to reproduce when we’re grieving. Why didn’t natural selection help me out and ensure that I felt less awful?

Evolutionary biologists think that grief is passed on not because it provides benefit in itself, but rather it is a side effect of having relationships. As anyone who every had separation anxiety as a kid — or who lost track of their parents at the beach — knows, our bodies produce stress hormones when we’re separated from our parents, and the only way for those bad feelings to go away is to come together again. This biological reaction to separation keeps us together because staying together provides an evolutionary benefit. Kids and their parents — the core relationship evolutionarily — rely on one another for protection and genetic proliferation respectively, and so being drawn together and kept together is advantageous.

In more social animals, such as humans, those reciprocal relationships extend beyond parent-child. Our siblings help us survive, as do our aunts, uncles and friends. And, when we are separated, our bodies send out alarm cries to bring us back together. But, after death, the two cannot be rejoined. I stressed out while my hormones pushed me to find Pat. But he isn’t coming back, compounding the stress. “Grief – in its most basic form – represents an alarm reaction set off by a deficit signal in the behavioural system underlying attachment,” writes psychology professor John Archer of the University of Central Lancashire in his book The Nature of Grief.

This idea was endlessly comforting in my mourning. In an 1843 letter to his second cousin, Reverend William Darwin Fox, Charles Darwin wrote, “Strong affections have always appeared to me, the most noble part of a man’s character and the absence of them an irreparable failure; you ought to console yourself with thinking that your grief is the necessary price for having been born with (for I am convinced they are not to be acquired) such feelings.”

Grief is the price we pay for friendship.

Digital love

But these clear ideas became muddled when Steve Jobs died last month. The massive public displays of mourning confused me, as did the outcries from so many friends. When I heard the news, I let out my obligatory, “oh my god,” but didn’t even feel butterflies. My sadness was abstract, not substantial: I could recognize the loss and empathize with those who actually knew the man, but I myself was not in any kind of mourning.

The onslaught of mourning continued, nonetheless. First with disbelief, then meditations on what we lost, leading into the less savory game of casting blame. Twitter and Facebook were flooded with updates and links for weeks. At first I wondered whether the outpouring would have occurred in a world without social media. But many people in my parents’ generation can pinpoint the spot they were when they heard that Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK, or Elvis died. Mass public mourning is not new — but why does it occur?

Here culture seems to play in more than strict biology. We know that death is sad, and that inspirational people are worth grieving over, even if they did not directly touch our lives. Oftentimes their deaths are symbolic: the loss of a freedom fighter, a rock ‘n roll pioneer, or, yes, a technological genius.

Yet there is something performative about mourning for public figures, which is evident on social media. To let others know that you are in the know, and that your heart is big enough to recognize the role of relative foreigners in your life. And this isn’t just true of public figures. Since (and certainly before) Martial in Ancient Rome, writers have documented false acts of mourning for personal gain, whether material or just for attention.

After I heard about Pat’s death, those who did not know him all asked me the same question: “Well, were you close with him?” The answer is no. We shared many experiences that shaped me in my adolescence, but I hadn’t seen him in half a decade. And even so, his death paralyzed me. I even berated myself for just seeking attention and using his death to showcase my own humanity.

In the Iliad, Apollo rants about Achilles’s revengeful slaying of Hector for the death of his friend Patroclus. “Man may lose one far dearer than Achilles has lost,” he told the other gods. I could lose friends far dearer than Pat, people could lose ones far dearer than Steve Jobs. But grief strikes us just the same. Maybe they remind us of our own mortality. Maybe they are symbols of just how much we have to lose. Or maybe we’re just sad.

The mark of a technophile

Some of the grief over Steve Jobs was focused less on the man and more on the products he gave to us. “Can you imagine a world without the iPod? What if we all carried Zunes?” was a common refrain. Eulogies focused on his design aesthetic and his understanding of what customers value. More than Jobs himself, did we mourn for the brain behind our beloved objects and the loss of his potential innovations?

Even as a luddite, I must admit that I love my tech. I once spent hours on a frigid Minnesota winter night hunting for my lost silver iPod with a flashlight on a field of icy snow — an act that could be chalked up to cost rather than love. But we feel so strongly about our technology that we desperately seek proof to demonstrate that we have real relationships with these devices. The NYTimes even published a terribly erroneous op-ed on the topic, so great is the public desire for such biological evidence.

I’ve recently experienced the death of my favorite technology: Google Reader sharing features. I won’t go into the details of why I’ll miss it, as they’ve been meticulously documented elsewhere. But this experience, shared by other ‘sharebros,’ or google reader sharers, is quite akin to mourning. I kept a tab with the old version of reader open for days, even though its features were no longer functioning. I’m angry, sad, and scold myself for becoming so dependent upon it. And my brain has not yet adjusted to its demise: I still try to share items with my friends, despite my knowledge of the broken link — an experience Greg Hunter described as “Internet phantom pains.”

Whether these feelings are mourning for the end of a relationship or simply withdrawal to an addiction is unclear — and some scientists think that they are similar processes. In which case mourning for the tech and mourning for the man behind the tech may not be unlike. The public figure Jobs is a symbol for the technology with which we have a relationship, making his death meaningful to all who love his brainchildren.

Images:

Candle: ‘I’m with you‘ by Flickr user rosmary under Creative Commons licensing

Post-it: ‘Thai Apple Fans React to the Death of Steve Jobs‘ by Flickr user Nopphan Bunnag under Creative Commons licensing

How many untrue 'facts' have I unconsciously picked up from reading collections like this one?

Stories have the power to take us to other worlds, and no genre more so than science fiction and fantasy. But even the wildest fantasy novel has to have some basis in reality; otherwise, most readers become discouraged. (I mean, have you read the Silmarillion?)

Science fiction constantly toes the line between fact and fiction to create worlds that are plausible yet twisted. Readers easily accept premises that are obviously false, as long as they follow some set of predictable rules. But stories set in a more realistic time and place demand more of the reader: to decide for herself what makes sense and whether her disbelief can stay suspended.

My last repost about the wonders of science fiction was republished at Geekosystem last year and a commenter blew off the entire genre for being unresearched and inaccurate and, thus, unworthy of his time. My friend, one Erinrose, retorted:

Instead of finding fault in science fiction, I encourage you to reevaluate what it means to be entertained while intellectually engaged. If entertainment — to you — means reading a wholly accurate, meticulously researched text that asks of its reader to suspend her disbelief but not so much as to forget whether the heart produces blood, then you must think little of the imagination.

I agree with this sentiment. Writers should expect a certain intelligence in their audience, and readers need to be willing to meet the challenges presented by the writer. But I’m not going to lie to you: when I find scientific inaccuracies in movies and books, I react viscerally: a cringe, a wince, and, frequently, a vocalized correction. I can’t help it! I’m a very fact-oriented person, although it rarely results in an inability to reimmerse myself in astory.

But, until recently, I hadn’t really thought seriously about a different angle: what if I didn’t know enough to pinpoint these errors, and instead carried them with me throughout my life as fact?

This thought came to me as I picked through writer Salman Rushdie’s essay collection Imaginary Homelands last week. One of his essays, a mere four pages, deals with the very problem of errata in fiction. He begins by recounting several stories told by the narrator of his novel Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981. The narrator, Saleem Sinai, explains Hindu mythology to the reader, details of the Bangladesh War, architectural detail in Bombay, and train lines through India.

The clincher: all of these facts are incorrect. But not by the mistake of the author. Rushdie intentionally introduced these inaccuracies after the fact.

I went through some trouble to get things wrong. Originally error-free passages had the taint of inaccuracy introduced. Unintentional mistakes were, on being discovered, not expunged from the text but, rather, emphasized, given more prominence in the story.

My audible gasp as I reread this passage drew looks from sittersby during my lunch break. Rage welled up within me, even as I tried to quell my discomfort. Rushdie is a writer, I consoled myself: he’s free to do what he wants and I have no right to tell him what to do.

The real reason for my discomfort was that these are exactly the kinds of facts that I would ponder over, or retell at parties without remembering the source. I can see it: “I can’t remember where I read it, but I definitely read it somewhere,” I would say. How much of what I think I know is actually tainted by errors introduced by writers, on purpose or otherwise?

I’m not alone. Rushdie addresses those like me in the essay: “Many readers wanted it to be the history, even the guidebook, which it was never meant to be… These variously disappointed readers were judging the book, not as a novel, but as some sort of inadequate reference book or encyclopaedia.” I get it, okay? I should confirm all my facts (which I try to do) and should certainly not believe everything I read. But then whom do I trust? Even non-fiction introduces elements of fiction and storytelling; how can I differentiate between truth and artistic flourish?

The point of Rushdie’s essay is to explain why exactly he got things wrong intentionally. His desire was to make his character as human as possible and, thus, he did his best to reproduce the frailty of human memory and experience.

He [Saleem] is also remembering, of course, and one of the simplest truths about any set of memories is that many of them will be false. I myself have a clear memory of having been in India during the China War… I also know that I could not possibly have been in India at that time. I was interested to find that even after I found out that my memory was playing tricks my brain simply refused to unscramble itself. It clung to the false memory, preferring it to more literal happenstance. I thought that was an important lesson to learn.

Reading it explained, I love Rushdie’s sentiment. I personally have many memories that I know I fabricated unintentionally. Greg Boustead, science writer and editorial producer of the World Science Festival, wrote about the distortion of September 11th memories just last month. And this is the process Rushdie emulated. To tell the real truth about people, he had to distort the facts of history and tradition — and we read fiction, not for fact, but for those human truths.

But my frustration continues; the two sides of my brain continue in their battle. But it’s only because it points out my own failures. If I read Midnight’s Children, I know I’m the type to retell those errata as fact. And I would remember them incorrectly as coming from an accurate source.

I guess, for writers of fiction, the question is not whether it’s permissible to fudge facts, but when it’s appropriate. Misrepresenting fact because the research seems too hefty is not acceptable to me; but purposefully altering fact for the sake of character development, or to bring the reader to another world, feels acceptable. Because there are different kinds of truth, and not all are based in fact.

Nonetheless, I will continue to cringe, if I know enough to cringe. But, if the writing is worth it, I will reshape my face to normalcy and read on.

Image: via Flicker use Chris Drumm under Creative Commons

Planet Comics #4 (1940), in the public domain

I didn’t really grow up reading science fiction.  Sure, I was (and am) completely obsessed with some fantasy novels (e.g. Lord of the Rings), but never made the leap to becoming a true sci-fi enthusiast.  It wasn’t until I started studying science more fully that I developed an interest in speculative science fiction.  Many of the stories deal with technology taking over civilization – but embedded within this framework is a great deal of excitement, along with some deserved anxiety.

My favorite stories are those that feel as though their coming true is just beyond the horizon.  For example, we are slowly inching closer to developing lab-produced organs, which would be incredibly beneficial for a lot of obvious reasons.  Just this month [as of July 2010] there have been developments toward mass-produced red blood cells, as well as bioartificial lungs.  Eerily, I read about these discoveries as I was tearing my way through Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, a speculative fiction novel about a bio-engineered future, including “pigoons” (pig/balloon) that have grown to massive sizes in order to grow 6 kidneys at a time for organ harvest, and “ChickieNobs,” a fast food product made from transgenic chickens that have no brains or beaks and grow 8 chicken breasts at once.  While reading, I simultaneously was in wonderment about how we could be reaching the ability to actually engineer these creatures, but obviously nervous about the implications described in the novel.  (No spoilers here!)

Some scientists might write this kind of anxious thinking off as trash.  “We’re trying to develop organs to save lives – we don’t need a bunch of crazies trying to stop us in order to avoid a hypothetical bioengineering apocalypse!”  But scientists are born and raised to be skeptical – and that’s all that much of this writing is.  Being skeptical about the pure goodness of scientific advance.

EC Comic's "Weird Science" #6 (1951)

Sci-fi also provides a venue for discerning how our ways of thinking about science have developed historically.  One of my favorite time periods for sci-fi is the 1950s: it was a time when just enough was known to speculate wildly, but not enough to fully disregard these speculations.  After all, Watson and Crick did not discover the DNA structure until 1953!   Thus you have the birth of many of our superheroes, variously mutated by ‘cosmic rays’ or radiation, altering their molecular structures and giving them superpowers.  We had just enough pieces to wonder, but not enough to know the full picture.

And sometimes the stories told ended up being truths nowadays.  Reading stories that feature scientific dreams of these writers, and now knowing that they’ve come true, can be heart-wrenching.  In one of my favorite short stories, “The End of the Beginning” in R is for Rocket, Ray Bradbury describes a couple gripping their seats with excitement and nervousness as their son boards a shuttle – the first shuttle to land on the moon.  This collection was written in 1965, 4 years before Apollo 11 landed on the moon.  Bradbury’s description is incredible:

All I know is it’s really the end of the beginning.  The Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age; from now on we’ll lump all those together under one big name for when we walked on Earth… Millions of years we fought gravity.  When we were amoebas and fish we struggled to get out of the sea without gravity crushing us.  Once safe on the shore we fought to stand upright without gravity breaking our new invention, the spine, tried to walk without stumbling, run without falling.  A billion years Gravity kept us home… That’s what’s so really big about tonight … it’s the end of old man Gravity and the age we’ll remember him by, once and for all.

Gives you shivers, eh?  Of course, this day has come and gone in real time.  We are still constrained by gravity, we haven’t set foot on a planet beyond the moon.  But these science fiction stories can bring us back to that time of wonderment, help us to experience a feeling we missed: the great excitement of space potentially conquered.  And although it didn’t happen quite the way Bradbury described it, we can pretend for at least a little while.

Science is about that excitement.  About that drive to discovery, about idealism and hope.  It’s easy to forget that, working away at my lab bench, pipetting DNA into tubes.  Now we know a little more about science – enough that we no longer dream of mutated superheroes.  But we still dream about the day when we’ll make our big discovery, solve our own scientific problem.

Science fiction can remind us of this wonderment and hope.  But it also sends us a warning – to think about the potential implications of our findings, beyond our idealistic dreams.  While those implications might not be as exciting as a science fiction novel, they exist, and scientists should be aware of them.

With that, I’ll leave you this quote from David Brin from Nature‘s series of interviews with science writers this past winter.

Science fiction is badly named — it should have been called speculative history… Whether you are in a parallel reality or exploring the future, it is all about the implications of change on human lives. The fundamental premise of sci-fi is not spaceships and lasers — it’s that children can learn from the mistakes of their parents.

From "Weird Science" #6 (1951)

Picture of an autistic teenage girl. (I felt weird putting a picture of my lil bro on the internet without his knowledge.)

When I unwrapped my New York Times on Sunday, I was met with a surprise: A front-page, above-the-fold story about a young adult with autism. The story — a must-read, which you can do here — follows Justin Canha, a 20-year old with autism as he stretches towards adulthood and aspires to an independent life. The feature, written by Amy Harmon, who won a National Academies communication award last week for her “Target: Cancer” series, is beautifully wrought and a joy to read. It’s already been praised as a brilliant and insightful piece of medical journalism on blogs and twitter.

But I want to praise it for something else. Many articles about autism focus on the highest-functioning people on the spectrum, who certainly struggle socially, but who are brilliant beyond average academically or in some other quirky way. (Often they have Asperger’s syndrome, which will no longer be a diagnosis with the publication of the fifth edition of the psychiatric handbook, the DSM-5, in May 2013, merging into the broader autistic spectrum.) Instead, Harmon celebrates Justin, a young man with a knack for cartooning, but whose autism is more familiar to me than in any profile I’ve read thus far.

And I am quite familiar with autism, as my youngest brother, Jonah, is on the autistic spectrum. There was a point in my life when I had to explain what autism was nearly every time I spoke about him. But I rarely have to do that anymore. As soon as I mention his diagnosis, acquaintances sigh with recognition, as if they know what that means. And, no doubt, they know more than they once did: autism awareness has never been higher, with one in 110 children born now diagnosed. But I wish I were still given the chance to explain. Too frequently, they follow-up with statements about his intellectual gifts — “Oh, he must be really smart then.” — a sign of the influence of the stories about those with high-functioning autism.

I usually laugh, and respond, “ah, yes, he is smart.” But I don’t mean ‘smart’ in any way that society currently values. At nearly 16-years old, Jonah can’t count change or multiply. He has favorite books, but he flips through them too frantically to actually absorb the text. I swell with triumph whenever we have a conversation that lasts longer than 30 seconds, an actual exchange rather than repetitions of his favorite topics, which include pasta shapes, wheeled vehicles, and what we’re having for dinner that night. What I see as his ‘smartness’ is his view of the world, little influenced by the social and societal pressures that feed my own insecurities.

In her article, Harmon gets at that smartness in her descriptions of Justin. It’s very difficult to articulate but, given the expanse of a feature, she was able to do it through dialogue and his interactions with others. And my eyes teared up as I recognized Jonah, the kind of autism that I know and love so dearly, in an autistic character portrayed elsewhere.

I’m not trying to denigrate those profiles of high-functioning autistic people. Those people and those stories are important in their own right, for one. But additionally, from a journalism and awareness standpoint, it’s also so much easier for NTs — neurotypicals, as autistic people call us — to understand those who are high-functioning. After all, who hasn’t felt that they themselves had a useful skill that went unrecognized? Who hasn’t felt socially insecure, held back by their own (in)abilities?

Many stories are also told about the parents of autistic children. As Wired writer Tim Carmody explains on his blog, Snarkmarket:

Most readers of newspapers and consumers of serious media are typical, healthy, middle-class adults. They sympathize best with fates that are either totally fantastic or resemble their own. Most people find it easier to imagine being the parent of an autistic child. They find it harder to imagine being autistic and struggling with the problems of autistic adults themselves.

In her piece, Harmon invites NTs to sympathize and understand an autistic adult in his own right. Autistic adults are in our society, and as the children now diagnosed with autism grow up, there will be even more. It is thus critical that assimilated folk learn to understand them and no longer ignore them, push them aside, or worse. Journalism can do that. Journalism can help people understand other people. And, as I toddle around in my baby-journalist shoes, that is truly inspiring.

So, thank you, Amy Harmon, for taking this step of bringing those non-genius autistic people, generally ignored after puberty, into public attention. Thank you for highlighting Justin’s trials and spilling light onto people undergoing similar ones.

But it means more than that for me. When I talk about Jonah, everyone asks, “What is he going to do when he grows up?” And, honestly, I don’t know. He still has five more years of school — he started public high school this year! — and I will not let anyone decide for him what he is capable of, and certainly not when he’s still a teenager. But I dream of a world where people see him on the street and don’t edge away, where society is more accepting of those whose brains are, well, atypical. I don’t know if society will ever find a productive role for lower functioning autistic people. But a society whose citizens put in the bit of effort required to understand the individual autistic people they encounter? That is something we can work toward.

Image: an autistic teenage girl, via Wikimedia Commons