Science and the Imagination

The New Yorker picked up my NYT column for a piece about science and the imagination.  Here’s an excerpt:

“Our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it’s to suggest all the possible futures—so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go.” That’s Robert J. Sawyer writing in Slate last week, in an essay called “The Purpose of Science Fiction.” Sci-fi, Sawyer argues, isn’t purely “fi.” Sci-fi writers open public discourse on real-world scientific developments, advise governmental organizations like NASA and the Department of Homeland Security, and ask philosophical questions that lab-bound scientists are rarely able to.

Of course, it isn’t as dry as all that. The writer of science-fiction is an artist who happens to be interested in science, unless he is a scientist who happens to be interested in art. The line between the two wasn’t always drawn as thickly as it is today. Alchemists obviously blended the two, but there are more recent examples, too. A blog post that ran yesterday on the Times Web site, taken from a new book by Richard Conniff called “The Species Seekers,” covers certain nineteenth-century naturalists who used whimsical language to describe their discoveries (e.g. Charles Darwin), and nineteenth-century whimsicalists who used scientific language in their stories (e.g. Lewis Carroll). “What’s the explanation for this intimate connection between science and nonsense?,” Conniff wonders:

Scientists are of course somewhat human. So perhaps it should be unsurprising that they can sometimes have fun with — or make fun of — their own work. But in the 19th century that work — describing species no one had ever imagined — was also often fantastical. It is hard for us now to appreciate just how strange and wondrous the world seemed. It was as if someone you know had joined an expedition to Alpha Centauri and come back years later with first-hand accounts of Wookiees, Ewoks and Kowakian monkey-lizards. But in the great age of biological discovery, the returning travelers actually brought back specimens. Their weird creatures were real.

Perhaps because we no longer get quite the same shock from specimens found in nature, we have become adept at conjuring up weird specimens of our possible futures and calling them real.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/01/science-non-fiction.html#ixzz1Ce10OXGA

On The Origin of Slithy Toves

 

A highly fanciful 1833 representation of a South American monkey

Here’s my latest Specimens column for The New York Times, based on my new book The Species Seekers:

When my children were small, we often read them Edward Lear’s “The Jumblies,” a not very edifying book of nonsense that we all loved. The Jumblies were wildly impractical souls who

… sailed away in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they sailed so fast,
With only a beautiful pea-green veil
Tied with a riband by way of a sail,
To a small tobacco-pipe mast …

Back then, I was often away from home for weeks at a time, traveling in distant countries with biologists whose work sometimes required them to do the equivalent of sailing in a sieve. One botanist, for instance, recalled flying out of a war zone in a cargo plane that also carried a pig tied to a 55-gallon drum of gasoline. The Jumblies would have been right there (and probably flicking ashes from their cigars).

A pigeon by Lear

But it never occurred to me that there might be a direct connection between the two worlds of nonsense verse and biology. Then one day I picked up an old print of a tropical pigeon species and noticed the “E. Lear” in the bottom corner. Though he is celebrated today mainly as the author of such works as “The Owl and the Pussycat,” Lear had started out as a naturalist. His first book, Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots, drew favorable comparisons with Audubon when he published it in 1832, at age 19.

Like many naturalists, Lear described the natural world not just in literal-minded scientific detail, but also in fanciful doodles and verse. And when this blossomed into books for children, he often dispatched his characters, like naturalists, on wild explorations to the back of beyond. He also had them devote considerable energy to collecting the oddities of the country:

And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-daws,
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws,
And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,
And no end of Stilton Cheese.

Nonsense was almost a byproduct of natural history. The twin themes of exploration and taxonomy, were “present in the genre as a whole, even

Clearing Up The Chaos in the Genital Parking Lot

Harvard researcher Naomi Pierce and her co-authors have just published a paper vindicating a far-reaching theory about butterflies proposed by Vladimir Nabokov, who was a lepidopterist as well as a novelist.  In a nice article in the New York Times, Carl Zimmer writes:

He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.

Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.

Nabokov once described the years he spent working as a professional lepidopterist at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology as ”the most delightful and thrilling in all my adult life.”   He found the work so rapturously diverting that at one point Vera, his wife, had to speak to him sternly about his true calling. Sulking, Nabokov pulled the manuscript of his latest novel out from under a pile of butterfly articles and recollected that, oh, yes, he could write, too.

You can read more about his ideas on classification and what I once termed “chaos in the genital parking lot”

Heroic Naturalists or Imperialist Dogs?

Here’s the latest column in my Specimens series for the New York Times.

What does it mean to discover a species? Who should get the credit for it? Why did early naturalists think it worth risking their lives, and often losing them, to ship home the first specimens of a previously unknown butterfly or bat? These turn out to be tangled questions, and it is easy to get stuck on the thorns.

Not long ago, for instance, I wrote that a 19th-century French missionary and naturalist in China, Père Armand David, had “discovered” the snub-nosed golden monkey. A reader sent me this somewhat testy comment: “The answer to the question ‘who discovered it’ is actually the Chinese.” Père David had merely “observed it and introduced it (and many other animals) to the West and into the Western zoological system.”

My irritated reader had a point, of a misguided sort. It’s common these days to dismiss the scientific classification and naming of “new” species as just one more Western appropriation of other peoples’ natural resources, and the golden monkey can seem like a particularly egregious instance. Europeans first saw the species in the form of images in Chinese paintings and porcelains. But it looked so odd, with a fringe of flame red hair around its bluish-white face, that they mistook it for a figment of the Chinese imagination.

David himself may never actually have seen these mountain-dwelling monkeys in the wild. Instead, his Chinese hunters brought him six specimens in the course of a long and productive expedition into western Sichuan province. David shipped the specimens back to Paris, along with more than 100 other mammal species. There, in an act of blithe cultural hodgepodgery, a French naturalist described the golden monkey in a scientific journal and gave it the species name roxellana to commemorate the Ukrainian wife of an Ottoman Turkish sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, because monkey and wife both had distinctive up-turned noses. You can see how this might leave people in China feeling a little left out.

Nor were they alone. The truth is that many of the species discovered by early naturalists had already been known to local people, sometimes in great detail, long before outsiders arrived to describe them scientifically. Moreover, the naturalists often depended on knowledgeable locals to show them what was there, and seldom gave proper credit for the help.  But to call this local knowledge “discovery” is like saying Newton didn’t discover gravity, because people already knew that things have a way of falling down.

Naturalists often relied on local collectors

The key to scientific discovery is

Why Species Matter–Or Putting a Value on a Vulture

This is a piece I published a while back at Yale Environment 360

We live in what is paradoxically a great age of discovery and also of mass extinction. Astonishing new species turn up daily, as new roads and new technologies penetrate formerly remote habitats. And species also vanish forever, at what scientists estimate to be 100 to 1,000 times the normal rate of extinction.

Over the past few years, as I was working on a book about the history of species discovery, I often found myself coming back to a fundamental question: Why do species matter? That is, why should ordinary people care if scientists discover one species or pronounce the demise of another?

It may seem too obvious to need asking. In certain limited contexts, people clearly do care. We will go to great lengths to protect a boutique species like the giant panda, for instance. We also thrill to the possibility of finding the slightest microbial hint of life in outer space, hardly blinking when the U.S. government spends $7 billion a year largely for that purpose. Meanwhile, we spend pennies exploring the alien life forms that are all around us here on Earth.

Maybe it’s just human nature not to value — or even see — the thing that’s right in front of our faces. And maybe it’s also a failure of communication.

That is, scientists may need to explain their work on a far more basic level — not “Why do species matter?” but “Is food important to you?” or “Do you want your children to have effective medicines when they get sick?” or even “Do you like to breathe?”

In A Terrible Death, A Great Discovery

Eugenio Ruspoli

Readers have been sending in a steady stream of naturalists who lost their lives in the cause of discovery and I have been adding them to the Wall of the Dead.  This one, suggested by reader Cagan Sekercioglu in Utah, caught my eye:

In the early 1890s, the Italian government sent out a mission to secure its colonial pretensions to an Ethiopian protectorate.  Prince Eugenio Ruspoli, the son of the mayor of Rome and scion of a venerable noble family, seems to have played the multiple roles of emissary, leader of a conquering military force, explorer, and great white hunter.

He apparently wrote a book about his time in Ethiopia, In the land of Unexplored Africa and Mirra, published in Italian in 1892.

The following year, Ruspoli led an expedition to the Amara Mountains.  In his 1897 book Through Unknown African Countries, the American explorer Arthur Donaldson Smith suggests that Ruspoli traveled with a large armed force and frequently waged war on local tribes.  He also came to a violent end:

I now learned that Prince Ruspoli had got as far as the Amara, having followed up the river Jub far to the north of my line of march, and that he had been killed by an elephant near the foot of the Amara Mountains.  The chief told me that Ruspoli

The Lonely Traveler Finds A Companion

White-eyed parakeet, now Aratinga leucophthalma (Photo by Wagner Machado Carlos Lemes)

During his eleven years in the Amazon, the great explorer Henry Walter Bates often struggled with loneliness.  This is a story about the joy of finding a companion in his travels:

On re-crossing the river to Aveyros in the evening, a pretty little parrot fell from a great height headlong into the water near the boat, having dropped from a flock which seemed to be fighting in the air. One of the Indians secured it for me, and I was surprised to find the bird uninjured. There had probably been a quarrel about mates, resulting in our little stranger being temporarily stunned by a blow on the head from the beak of a jealous comrade.

The species was the Conurus guianensis, called by the natives Maracana– the plumage green, with a patch of scarlet under the wings. I wished to keep the bird alive and tame it, but all our efforts to reconcile it to captivity were vain; it refused food, bit everyone who went near it, and damaged its plumage in its exertions to free itself.

My friends in Aveyros said that this kind of parrot never became domesticated. After trying nearly a week I was recommended to lend the intractable creature to an old Indian woman, living in the village, who was said

The End of Exploration?

This response to my reminiscence about Ted Parker ( “Dying for Discovery”) came in, and I think the message–about “a segment of the scientific community that is almost always out of sight until some tragedy occurs”–deserves attention.  It’s from field biologist Andrew Mack:

I was a dear friend of Ted’s, we both began as birders at the Lancaster County Bird Club and I went out to the University of Arizona where for a while I was part of an incredible union of like souls— Ted Parker, Kenn Kaufmann, Doug Stotz, Steve Hilty, Mark Robbins, to name a few.   As you know, many of us carry on with the same sort of work that Ted was doing when he died.  Sadly, death brought him a lot more legitimacy than he carried in life.  There were more than a few of our colleagues who scoffed at what he did (and still scoff at those of us trying to continue such explorations).

Mack makes a point I have also heard from other readers, that naturalists who survive their field work often come away maimed by it:

I’ve struggled with filariasis for over a decade, have had so many malarial fevers I lost count  years ago and always have my quinine within reach; tuberculosis, leishmaniasis, dengue, typhoid, Ross River Fever, and the list goes on.  Things like botflies and eye leeches are

Scaring or Scolding? Early Conservationists Tried Both

In the early 19^th century, long before the rise of the conservation movement, one or two naturalists were already seeing that humans could drive down populations of certain species.   And they mounted conservation efforts to protect them.

In the autumn of 1807, for instance, the residents of Philadelphia were slaughtering and eating robins in such vast numbers that ornithologist Alexander Wilson resorted to conservation by false rumor.  He planted a story in local newspapers advising cautious readers that the pokeberries the birds were then gorging on made their flesh unwholesome, and he was “righteously elated,” according to one historian, when his story knocked the bottom out of the robin market.

Another Philadelphia man, the entomologist Thomas Say, traveled to the Rocky Mountains in 1819 and 1820.   On route, he was plainly disgusted by white

Dying for Discovery

Members of the Dutch Commission on route to New Guinea

The second column in my “Specimens” series, based on my book The Species Seekers, appears today in the New York Times

Almost 20 years ago now, in western Ecuador, I traveled with a team of extraordinary biologists studying a remnant of forest as it was being hacked down around us.  Al Gentry, a gangling figure in a grimy t-shirt and jeans frayed from chronic tree-climbing, was a botanist whose strategy toward all hazards was to pretend that they didn’t exist.  At one point, a tree came crashing down beside him after he lost his footing on a slope.  Still on his back, he reached out for an orchid growing on the trunk and said, “Oh, that’s Gongora,” as casually as if he had just spotted an old friend ona city street.

The team’s ornithologist, Ted Parker, specialized in identifying bird species by sound alone.  He started his work day before dawn, standing in the rain under a faded umbrella, his Converse sunk to their high-tops in mud, whispering into a microcassette recorder about what he was hearing:  “Scarlet-rumped cacique … a fasciated antshrike … two more pairs of Myrmeciza immaculata counter-singing.  Dysithamnus puncticeps chorus, male and female …”

Gentry and Parker come to mind just now because I’ve been thinking about how often naturalists have died in the pursuit of new species.  A couple of years after that trip, the two of them were back in the same region making an overflight when their pilot became disoriented in the clouds and