The Kon Artist

Smithsonian has an article in its current issue about Kon-Tiki, the new Oscar-nominated biopic of Thor Heyerdahl.  The film tries to turn the celebrated Norwegian adventurer into a demi-god, much as Heyerdahl himself did in his own lifetime.  Like a lot of mid-twentieth century children, I grew up on Heyerdahl’s books  and thought of him as a hero.  But I later came to realize that Heyerdahl was also a great fraud.  Here’s the piece I wrote in 2002, also for Smithsonian, describing my encounter with his deceptions on Easter Island:

One of the first lessons you learn going into the field as an anthropologist, archaeologist or journalist is never to come back empty-handed. The cost of the expedition, the need to gratify sponsors, the urge to make a name, all turn up the pressure to get the story. So it’s easy to forget the second great lesson of fieldwork: beware of a story that’s just a little too good.

Thor Heyerdahl, who died in April at the age of 87, spent much of an active and sometimes inspiring life in the thrall of one good story. He believed that, long before Columbus, early ocean travelers—tall, fair-skinned, redheaded Vikings much like himself—spread human culture to the most remote corners of the earth. Academics scoffed, particularly at his idea that the islands of the mid-Pacific had been colonized by way of South America, rather than by Polynesians from the western Pacific. In 1947, Heyerdahl risked his life attempting to prove his point. He built a balsa-log raft, the Kon-Tiki, and in one of the great ocean adventures of the 20th century, he and his small crew made the harrowing 4,300-mile voyage from Peru to French Polynesia.

In the process, Heyerdahl established himself as an almost mythic hero. His best-selling book Kon-Tiki inspired a new generation of scholars—many of whom went on to systematically refute their hero’s great idea.

The trouble with a good story is that it has a way of

Scientist on a Pub Crawl

I’m at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where I just heard one scientist wondering aloud how to bring science directly to the general public.  It seems to be a running theme of this year’s meeting, with an “America’s Scientist Idol” program and another called “Bad Presenter Bingo 2.0.”  And it reminded me of a story told by a sea-bird biologist named Julia Parrish.

She’s a college professor at the University of Washington and, at first glance, looks the part—thin, with a long neck, pale, freckled skin, reddish hair pulled back, and the corners of her mouth drawn slightly down, as if you are about to earn a B plus in Life 101 if you don’t shape up now. Asked to give a talk on sea birds at a venue in the coastal city of Everett, Washington, she arrived at the address on the appointed day and found herself in a dive inhabited by “people who at 4 p.m. had obviously had more than their first drink.” She was starting to think C minus.

But at the appointed hour, about 20 people gathered around, drinking beer and eating nachos, and Parrish got up on the dingy carpeted stage normally reserved for bar bands doing covers of Journey’s greatest hits. Parrish talked about sea birds, and one man in the audience, a retired gillnet fisherman, mentioned a study he had helped work on years before. It turned out Parrish had designed that study, and from that point on, everything was copacetic. People were genuinely interested in her work. They asked good questions. Their inner Jane Goodalls, that childhood sense of being in love with the world, inched back toward the surface. At the end, the bartender announced that he had “something to say about natural history.” Just a week earlier, a mountain beaver had inexplicably made its way into the city, ending up in this very bar. It ended badly for the beaver, and the bartender went to his refrigerator to retrieve the evidence. Then Parrish and her audience gathered around to commune over the cadaver, sipping their beers and chatting about sea birds.

Maybe it wasn’t quite T.H. Huxley delivering his lectures to working men on the new science of evolution. It certainly wasn’t the contemplation of nature at its prettiest or most perfect. But as an instance of how to reach out and make natural history matter for ordinary people who deserve to know, it was a very nice start.

Polio: The Hidden Cost of the Hunt for Bin Laden

During the search for Osama bin Laden, the CIA suffered a lapse of judgment that continued last week to have tragic repercussions.

The mistake happened in March 2011 when CIA investigators set up a sham vaccination program in the Abbottabad neighborhood where they suspected the Al Qaida leader was in hiding.  The idea was to get DNA from the children in the bin Laden compound to see if it matched the DNA of a bin Laden sibling who had died in Boston.

As an inadvertent result, Muslim extremists regard any vaccination program as some kind of Imperialist plot, no matter that it actually protects the health of their children.  In  December, extremists executed nine polio vaccination campaign workers in Pakistan.  And last week, the same thing happened in Nigeria.  The victims in both cases were mostly women.

But we may all eventually be the victims.

There are windows of opportunity for eradicating epidemic diseases, and the dismaying thing is that these windows can close.  Tuberculosis was on the verge of eradication in the last decades of the twentieth century.  But the delayed and inadequate response to AIDS gave the disease fresh breeding ground, in the lungs of patients with impaired immune systems.  So tuberculosis is now resurgent, with 8.7 million new cases and 1.4 million deaths per year.

It’s increasingly likely the same will happen with polio.  The effort to eradicate the disease has reduced incidence of polio to just three countries–Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan–and the number of cases to just 200 a year worldwide.  But getting there costs $1 billion a year.  If the World Health Organization cannot keep up the pressure, then the computer models say there will be 200,000 cases 10 years from now.   “It’s either going to zero,” says a WHO analyst, “or it’s going to come all the way back.”

Given the devastation polio can cause, the CIA investigators hunting bin Laden may have cost us far more than they gained.

Here’s a report from The New York Times:

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

How to Save a Natural History Museum

Art from the Dutch Commission explorers in what is now Indonesia

Natural history museums around the world are struggling to survive.   Even the celebrated Field Museum in Chicago recently announced a budget cutback targeted mostly at its scientific staff.   So this article from the Wall Street Journal caught my attention as I was traveling last week.

The gist of it is that the the Peabody Essex Museum, once a dusty little American history venue in Salem, Mass., decided to change its audience and vastly increase its endowment.  The aim was to avoid being caught in the trap of continually chasing short-term funding.

To get that endowment, it transformed itself to find a new audience–the audience, that is, living next door.  When Dan L. Monroe became director in the early 1990s, he realized that the museum’s main challenge was to give local residents reason to become repeat, lifelong visitors to the museum.

Natural history museums have the same basic problem.  They attract families with young children, and when the children get past second or third grade, the families fade away.  The other thing that struck me is that the Salem museum chose to emphasize art and culture over straight history.   Though naturalists will hate to think it, art not only brings in bigger repeat audiences, but it has more status appeal than science for the sort of people who might become museum endowment donors.

An Edward Lear pigeon

The idea isn’t to cut back on the science or to back off from the primary mission of preserving and documenting life on Earth, but to develop both by taking advantage of neglected strengths:  Early naturalists often produced great visual records of what they were seeing–and their drawings and water colors lend themselves to exhibitions.  (I know some museums are already doing this sort of thing.  But for instance:  A show on Audubon and Alexander Wilson, the rival fathers of American ornithology; a show on the pigeon art of Edward Lear, or the mycology of Beatrix Potter; a show on how natural history discovery shaped the entire genre of children’s books.)   The discoveries the naturalists brought home also showed up in the great art of the day, particularly in the Netherlands.  Finally, as I discuss in my book The Species Seekers, what the naturalists were discovering had a profound effect on poetry, fiction, music, and other cultural endeavors.   Staging exhibitions and concerts  and plays to celebrate these connections would draw a whole new audience in among the dinosaur skeletons.  What about comedy even?  British stand-up comic Bill Bailey is, for instance, currently doing a show about Alfred Russel Wallace, the … step-father of evolutionary theory.

Here’s part of the Wall Street Journal story:

… conventional wisdom in the museum world dictates that raising endowment money is too tough to tackle. “It’s a self-supported vicious circle that we have gotten ourselves into as a field,” Mr. Monroe says, “that people will only give to a new building where they can put their name on it.” When annual contributions come up short, both museum staffers and trustees tend to look first at ways to increase earned income—raising the price of admission; staging blockbuster exhibitions to draw more visitors; building destination restaurants; renting out event spaces and “renting” works from their permanent collections to other museums. Some have taken to

The Lure of Long Distances: Songs for Spacemen

The space shuttle astronauts journeyed up to 4.3 million miles on a single flight.  But like all adventurous travelers, they also pined for small reminders of life back home.  Name the artist whose music was at the top of the charts for space shuttle wake-up calls:

a. Elton John, whose hits include “Rocket Man”

b. Aaron Copeland, composer of “Fanfare for the Common Man”

c. Paul McCartney, whose songbook includes “Off the Ground” and “Soggy Noodle.”

d. Dean Martin, who sang “Volare”

And the answer is:

Did Ostracism Drive the Evolution of Cooperative Behaviors?

Behavioral scientists have argued for years about how social cooperation originated in an otherwise selfish world.  Now a study suggests that the threat of social ostracism is what makes people play nice:

Social exclusion as a punishment strategy helps explain the evolution of cooperation, according to new research.

The new study provides a simple new model that ties punishment by social exclusion to the benefits for the punisher. It may help explain how social exclusion arose in evolution, and how it promotes cooperation among groups. The study, by IIASA Evolution and Ecology Program postdoctoral fellow Tatsuya Sasaki, was published December 5 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society — Biology.

“Punishment is a common tool to promote cooperation in the real world,” says Sasaki. “And social exclusion is a common way to do it.” From reef fish to chimpanzees, there are many examples of animals that promote cooperation by excluding free riders. Humans, too, use social exclusion as a way to keep people following societal rules. For example, says Sasaki, traffic violators or drunk drivers may be punished by losing their drivers licenses, essentially excluding them from the driving community.

But how did such punishment evolve? The new research, which uses evolutionary game theory, shows that excluding people from a group indirectly provides rewards for the punisher, thus encouraging them to

Danger Ahead: Business as Nature’s Savior

Here’s my latest article for Yale Environment 360.

Ecosystem services is not exactly a phrase to stir the human imagination. But over the past few years, it has managed to dazzle both diehard conservationists and bottom-line business types as the best answer to global environmental decline.

For proponents, the logic is straightforward: Old-style protection of nature for its own sake has badly failed to stop the destruction of habitats and the dwindling of species. It has failed largely because philosophical and scientific arguments rarely trump profits and the promise of jobs. And conservationists can’t usually put enough money on the table to meet commercial interests on their own terms. Pointing out the marketplace value of ecosystem services was initially just a way to remind people what was being lost in the process — benefits like flood control, water filtration, carbon sequestration, and species habitat. Then it dawned on someone that, by making it possible for people to buy and sell these services, we could save the world and turn a profit at the same time.

But the rising tide of enthusiasm for PES (or payment for ecosystem services) is now also eliciting alarm and criticism. The rhetoric is at times heated, particularly in Britain, where a government plan to sell off national forests had to be abandoned in the face of fierce public opposition. (The government’s own expert panel also found that it had “greatly undervalued” what it was proposing to sell.) Writing recently in The Guardian, columnist and land rights activist George Monbiot denounced PES schemes as “another transfer of power to corporations and the very rich.” Also writing in The Guardian, Tony Juniper, a conservationist and corporate consultant, replied in effect that Monbiot and other critics should shut up, on the grounds that

A Few Things Men Do Well (The Male Advantage–part 4)

Men excel at hierarchies.  Our male predecessors tended to favor the old command-and-control style of managing businesses—and the switch to a looser, more collaborative style is one of the happier improvements brought about by the arrival of women in management.  But hierarchies still rule the workplace, and though it’s not fashionable to say so, this is a good thing, even if they happen to be a male specialty.  In a classic Stanford University study, groups of male college freshmen put in a room and given a problem to solve needed less than fifteen minutes to sort themselves into hierarchies.   That’s because boys start choosing up sides and figuring out who’s in charge on the pre-school playground, and never really stop.   Girls are just a little wobblier when it comes to hierarchies.

Sometimes no doubt men get carried away with the power struggles.  I was once talking to executives at an auto manufacturer about the notion that a round table can make boardroom discussions more egalitarian.  Then the head of sales set us straight:  “The round table just makes it easier for everybody to see the kill.”  But most of the time, the male strategy of establishing who’s in charge and where all the players fit in serves to reduce needless aggression, set goals, coordinate moving parts, and get business done.

Men work harder.  Modern society has demonstrated that women can learn to be almost as shallow and competitive as we are.  But they work shorter hours, by more than 25 percent on average, typically so they can spend more time on family and friends.  In a recent study of the would-be careerists who earned degrees since 1990 from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, virtually all of the men—but only 62 percent of the women–were still employed full-time 10 or more years out. Likewise, after seven years of post-college training, only 67 percent of women pediatricians work full-time.  Taking care of their own kids evidently comes to seem more important than taking care of other peoples’.

Men work longer hours because we’re more motivated, says Baumeister. “Men are much more interested than women in forming large groups and working in them and rising to the top in them.”  We have a richer history at it, and we’re also driven to compete on the job by the deeply-ingrained memory of our dismal reproductive odds.

Men are smarter than women.  O.k., we’re stupider, too.  In fact, men tend to show up more at the extremes not just for intelligence (geniuses versus dolts) but for a variety of traits, including height, weight, body mass index, performance in the 60 meter dash, and personality.  “Whether we are talking about kindness versus cruelty, curiosity versus close-mindedness, wisdom versus immature pigheadedness, self control versus self-indulgence, or humility versus narcissism,” says Baumeister, “there are more men than women at both the good and the bad extremes.”

Given this tendency, it probably shouldn’t be so surprising that there are more men at the top of most organizations.  The opposite extreme is true, too:  There are also more men at the bottom.  (Oddly, women never mention this when they complain that a “glass ceiling” of discrimination holds them down.)  In fact, there’s a trap door to the sub-sub-basement–and, gentlemen, for us, admission is free.  For much of our history, men have quietly accepted that the dark and dirty work of the world—digging the coal, stoking the furnaces, hammering the steel, collecting the garbage–is our lot.

Adolph Gave Good Blurbs (Postscript)

Whitney (with “Fitter Family” promoters)

The most appalling moment in the literary history of Yale occurred in Madison Grant’s Wall Street law office during the thick of the Depression.  The secretary of the American Eugenics Society then was a New Haven veterinarian named Leon F. Whitney, author of The Complete Book of Dog Care and other pet titles; he later worked as a pathology instructor at Yale Medical School, until his retirement in 1964, and his collection of champion dogs ended up at the Peabody Museum, where they are still among the most actively studied specimens.

In 1934, Whitney published a book called The Case for Sterilization, which was not about neutering the family dog.   To the question how many Americans “ought to be sterilized,” he added up “all the various types of less useful social elements,” noting that they tended to occur disproportionately in blacks and immigrants.  Then he concluded that “we should probably be disposing of the lowest fourth of our population”—or roughly 30 million people.  He quickly added that he was not “suggesting that all these be sterilized wholesale, but merely that we make voluntary sterilization available to them.”

One of Hitler’s staff wrote to New Haven requesting a copy of the book, and Hitler himself later followed up with a personal letter of thanks.  Soon after, Whitney went down to New York to meet with his fellow eugenicist Madison Grant, and proudly showed him the letter.  In  the 1994 book The Nazi Connection, historian Stefan Kühl writes:   “Grant only smiled, reached for a folder on his desk,” and gave Whitney his own letter, in which Hitler thanked Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race and called it his “Bible.”

Into the Lion’s Maw (God & White Men–part 4)

Entirely apart from his reputation as an economist, Irving Fisher enjoyed an idyllic American existence. He lived with his wife Margaret and their three children in a big house on the crest of Prospect Street, with a music room, a library, and “a 40-foot living room with a large, sunny bay window,” as their son Irving recalled in his memoir, My Father Irving Fisher. A health enthusiast at home as well as in public, Fisher disdained cane sugar, tea, coffee, alcohol, tobacco, and bleached white flour. He often jogged in shorts around the neighborhood and liked to ride a bicycle to his classes on the Yale campus. One of his books was titled How to Live.

His various crusades required a platoon of busy assistants. So Fisher built out from the basement of the family home onto the sloping ground in back, eventually creating ten work rooms and, young Irving recalled, a “hidden beehive of activity below decks.” The office equipment included one of Fisher’s own inventions, an index card filing system that made the first line of each card visible at a glance. With his wife’s money, he turned it into a thriving business. When the company was bought out—it would become part of the Sperry Rand corporation—Fisher capitalized on his new wealth by buying stock on margin. By the late 1920s, he and Margaret had a fortune of $10 million.

Fisher was the son of a Congregational minister, and his driving impulse was to proselytize. Thus eugenics seemed a natural outgrowth not just of his work as an economist, but of his family heritage. It needed “to be a popular movement with a certain amount of religious flavor in it,” he thought. His role as a leading apostle also seemed like a way for him to make a real mark on the world—as if his economics alone were not enough: “I do want before I die,” he wrote to his wife, “to leave behind me something more than a book on Index Numbers.”

But his eugenic enthusiasms drew him