The Earth Moved

This is a story I wrote for the June issue of Smithsonian Magazine.  The editors there asked me to write a different lead, to make it seem more timely.  You can read that version here.  But I think the historical account stands on its own.  Feel free to disagree in the comments:

Alfred Wegener

On November 1, 1930, his fiftieth birthday, a German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener set out with a colleague on  a desperate 250-mile return trip from the middle of the Greenland ice pack back to the coast.  The weather was appalling, often below minus-60 degrees Fahrenheit.  Food was scarce.   They had two sleds with 17 dogs fanned out ahead of them, and the plan was to butcher the ones that died first for meat to keep the others going.

Less than halfway to the coast, down to seven dogs, they harnessed up a single sled and pushed on, with Wegener on skis working to keep up.   He was an old hand at arctic exploration.  This was his fourth expedition to study how winter weather there affected the climate in Europe.  Now he longed to be back home, where his wife Else and their three daughters awaited him.  He dreamed of “vacation trips with no mountain climbing or other semi-polar adventures” and of the day when “the obligation to be a hero ends, too.”   But he was also deeply committed to his work.  In a notebook, he kept a quotation reminding him that no one ever accomplished anything worthwhile “except under one condition:  I will accomplish it or die.”

That work included a geological theory, first published a century ago this year, that sent the world woozily sliding sideways and also outraged fellow scientists.  We like to imagine that science advances unencumbered by messy human emotions.  But Wegener’s brash intuition threatened to demolish the entire history of the Earth as it had been built up step by step by generations of careful thinkers.  The response from fellow scientists was a firestorm of moral outrage, followed by half a century of stony silence.

Wegener’s revolutionary idea was that the continents had started out massed together in a single supercontinent and then gradually drifted apart.   He was of course right.  Continental drift, and the more recent science of plate tectonics, are now the bedrock of modern geology, helping to answer life-or-death questions like where earthquakes may hit next, and how to keep San Francisco standing.   But in Wegener’s day, drift was heresy.  Geological thinking stood firmly on solid earth, continents and oceans were permanent features, and the present-day landscape was a perfect window into the past.

The idea that smashed this orthodoxy got its start at Christmas 1910, as Wegener (the W is pronounced like a V) was browsing through “the magnificent maps” in a friend’s new atlas.

Kind Words for Despicable Men (God and White Men–part 3)

For readers today, it is almost impossible to browse through the eugenics literature from before World War II without hearing intimations of Auschwitz in every line. It takes a continual effort to keep in mind that they did not know about the Holocaust then. When one early enthusiast declared that eugenics “is going to be a purifying conflagration some day,” no one understood how horrifically prophetic those words would later sound.

Reading about Irving Fisher, Ellsworth Huntington, and the rest, I felt a predictable sense of loathing: these were despicable men. But in other parts of their lives, even the worst of them was at times admirable, and I felt a queasy sense of liking. This was illogical on a personal level. Their writing was laced with animosity toward the wave of immigrants into the United States after 1890—southern and eastern Europeans (mainly Italians and Jews, respectively), yellow-peril Asians, and the drunken, misbegotten Irish. It was an era when a Harvard anthropologist could lament “the flooding of this country with alien scum.” Fisher spoke of “defectives, delinquents, and dependents.”

Under the pretext of science, the eugenicists were proposing to preserve “Nordic” hegemony by breeding out my own Irish and Italian stock, among others. So why liking? Partly, it’s because the idea of the white Anglo-Saxon gentry prattling about their own superiority has become a stock joke (“Too damned funny, old bean”). Ellsworth Huntington sounds about as dangerous as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady when he declares: “An Englishman likes to work things out for himself, and is glad when an emergency throws him on his own resources. The Mediterranean and Alpine people, on the contrary, are much more docile, more willing to be led.”

And partly it’s because, having grown up Irish and Italian, I am aware that my people also entertain notions of our magnificence. Other ethnic groups do the same, though they are generally not so foolish, or so accustomed to power, as to issue scientific pronouncements on the topic to the less fortunate. The truth is that all humans favor in-groups, starting with the family, and we disparage those we perceive as outsiders. Treating this as only the outlaw impulse of eugenicists and Nazis is a convenient way of overlooking a hateful tendency in us all.

Madison Grant

These eugenicists also felt disturbingly familiar in other ways. They weren’t sinister characters out of some darkly lighted noir film about Nazi sympathizers, but environmentalists, peace activists, fitness buffs, healthy-living enthusiasts, inventors, and family men. If Madison Grant had not been such an ardent racist and so closely tied to Nazi genocide, he might be remembered today as one of America’s greatest conservationists. “Among his many accomplishments,” writes Jonathan P. Spiro in his recent biography, Defending the Master Race, “Grant preserved the California redwoods, saved the American bison from extinction, founded the Bronx Zoo, fought for strict gun-control laws, built the Bronx River Parkway,” and helped create Glacier, Denali, and Everglades National Parks.  (To be continued.)

Blue Ribbons for Human Stock (God and White Men, part 2)

In the early decades of the twentieth century, eugenics “fell squarely in the mainstream of scientific and popular culture,” according to Yale history professor Daniel Kevles, author of the 1985 book In the Name of Eugenics.Theodore Roosevelt popularized the term “race suicide,” for what he saw as the dwindling of the old Anglo-American stock, and the young Winston Churchill advocated sterilization and labor camps for “mental defectives.” Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger decried the proliferation of “human weeds,” while progressive reformer Havelock Ellis thought that getting the reproductive choices right would require the sexual liberation of women.

Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, had coined the word “eugenics” in 1883 from the Greek for “of good birth.” But it really gained currency after 1900, with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work describing how different traits are inherited in pea plants—and particularly after researchers demonstrated in 1907 that Mendelian inheritance plays a role in eye color in humans, too.

Eugenicists inferred—incorrectly, as we now know—that single genes, or “unit characters,” could determine feeblemindedness, insanity, alcoholism, and even broad swaths of behavior like criminality. They also believed that society could now use this knowledge to dramatically improve the species. Huntington, the Yale geographer, described this as the fifth “most momentous” discovery in human history, after tools, speech, fire, and writing. For Fisher, likewise, it was the coming of an epoch: “We could make a new human in a hundred years.”

By the late 1920s,

Wake up, Lysenko, Tell Lamarckists the News

In an article being published tomorrow in Cell, scientists have demonstrated that an acquired trait can be inherited, without any DNA involvement.  It’s the second time in recent days that scientists have hinted that Lamarckism may be more than wishful thinking.

The idea that an organism can pass on  to its offspring  traits acquired during its lifetime was an early theory of evolution, put forward by the eminent French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829).  The idea fell into disrepute after the 1859 Darwin-Wallace discovery of evolution by natural selection.   But it became a deeply dangerous idea–and Soviet national policy–in the hands of a twentieth-century follower of Lamarck, Trofim Lysenko.  He argued, among other things, that he could soak wheat in frigid water and alter its DNA to make future generations more resistant to the harsh Russian winters.  Under Stalin, criticism of Lysenkoism could get legitimate scientists arrested or even killed.

But now researchers are focusing on factors outside the DNA that may alter the expression of certain genes, and it seems that an individual can acquire changes in how these factors function and pass those changes on to subsequent generations. Last week, Australian scientists described a preliminary study in mice, not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, suggesting that  obese Dads can pass on a tendency to obesity to their offspring.  The researchers even suggested that prospective dads should consider losing a few pounds before trying for kids.  (No harm in that, but, hey, lose it for your own sake.)

The new study from Cell is of course peer-reviewed.  It’s about acquired immunity to disease, a subject with potential for profound evolutionary effects.  But for now the researchers mostly stick to their study animal,  a worm.  Here’s the press release:

Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers have found the first direct evidence that an acquired trait can be inherited without any DNA involvement. The findings suggest that Lamarck, whose theory of evolution was eclipsed by Darwin’s, may not have been entirely wrong.

The study is slated to appear in the Dec. 9 issue of Cell.

“In our study, roundworms that developed resistance to a virus were able to pass along that immunity to their progeny for many consecutive generations,” reported lead author Oded Rechavi, PhD, associate research scientist in biochemistry and molecular biophysics at CUMC. “The immunity was transferred in the form of small viral-silencing agents called viRNAs, working independently of the organism’s genome.”

In an early theory of evolution, Jean Baptiste Larmarck (1744-1829) proposed that species evolve when individuals adapt to their environment and transmit those acquired traits to their offspring. For example, giraffes developed elongated long necks

Beware of Seducers Bearing Gifts

Some male spiders deceive the females they mean to seduce with wedding gifts that look good but don’t offer much beyond the wrapping, according to a new paper just out in BMC Evolutionary Biology.  I wrote about the delicate negotiating of gifts between male and female in my book The Natural History of the Rich.  I also did an NPR commentary on the topic a few years ago.

But beware, reader, I am trying to seduce you with a gift:

When evolutionary psychologists talk about human sexual behavior, they tend to draw analogies from the animal world and they particularly like to talk about hangingflies.  These inch-long predators live by the thousands in the temperate forests of North America.  They specialize in catching other insects, injecting digestive enzymes into them, and sucking out their innards.  So the analogy to the behavior of rich people may seem remote.  But when a male hangingfly wants romance, he goes out and catches an even bigger insect than usual and advertises his catch to the female world.   Male and female pair off in the undergrowth, hanging by their forelimbs face-to-face like trapeze artists about to attempt an aerial minuet.  (One can imagine the billionaire balloonist Richard Branson in this position, all banked blond hair and eager teeth.)  He clutches the dead insect in his hind legs and holds it up to her as a nuptial gift–or to put it in human terms, he buys her dinner and she allows sex to follow.

But neither male nor female is a patsy in this partnership.  If the dinner is too small, she throws him out before he can do much good.  It’s a variation on the “diamonds are a girl’s best friend” theme, and bigger diamonds, or dead insects, make better friends.  It takes twenty minutes of vigorous copulation to get her to lose interest in other males and lay her eggs–and he only gets twenty minutes if

How Many, Noah? A Boatload.

Red throated barbet

For centuries scientists have pondered a central question: How many species exist on earth? Now, a group of researchers has offered an answer: 8.7 million.  This article by Oxford University researcher Robert May explains why it matters.

And this report from Juliet Eilperin at the Washington Post explains the new study:

Although the number is still an estimate, it represents the most rigorous mathematical analysis yet of what we know – and do not know – about life on land and in the sea. The authors of the paper, published last evening by the scientific journal PLoS Biology, suggest 86 percent of all terrestrial species and 91 percent of all marine species have yet to be discovered, described, and catalogued.

The new analysis is significant not only because it gives more detail on a fundamental scientific mystery, but because it helps capture the complexity of a natural system that is in danger of losing species at an unprecedented rate.

Marine biologist Boris Worm of Canada’s Dalhousie University, one of the paper’s coauthors, compared the planet to a machine with 8.7 million parts, all of which perform a valuable function.

“If you think of the planet as a life support system for our species, you want to look at how complex that life support system is,’’ Worm said. “We’re tinkering with that machine because we’re throwing out parts all the time.’’

Darwinizing Before Darwin

The original Darwinizer

Before Charles Darwin was even born,the word “darwinizing” was already a pejorative, in some circles.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge used it to disparage the abstruse theorizing of Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus.  Today is the anniversary of Erasmus Darwin’s death in 1802 and to mark the occasion, here’s how I describe him in The Species Seekers:

As the industrial revolution gathered force, new mines, quarries, and canals sliced open the countryside, exposing past geological ages. Erasmus Darwin, son of Robert and grandfather of Charles, visited one such excavation near Nottingham in 1767 to observe “the Goddess of Minerals naked, as she lay on her inmost bowers,”  with belemnites, ammonites, and “numerous other petrified shells” wantonly strewn across the fresh-cut banks.

Darwin, a physician, poet, and philosopher, was a likable figure–fat, florid, pockmarked, with a ready smile and a voluptuary’s heart.  (How else could he have turned a canal excavation into a naked Goddess?)  He loved food, and, in a cockeyed foreshadowing of his grandson’s ideas about natural selection, his favorite nostrum for patients was “Eat or be eaten.”  He had a deep faith in human progress (not least in his own family).  The sight of

The Species Seekers Quiz: Wallace’s House of Rest

After spending a dozen years in the tropics and making his reputation as the greatest field biologist of the nineteenth century, Alfred Russel Wallace later gave this name to the house where he retired:

1.  Darwinia, to honor his co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection (though his wife Annie had suggested Wallacea).

2.  Umbraculum, from the Latin word for a place of quiet retirement.

3.  Tulgey Wood, after a nonsense verse by Lewis Carroll.

4.  Birdwing, for his discovery of the spectacular Wallace’s golden birdwing butterfly.

And the answer is:

Disco Sea Snail (in the Land Down Under)

The light show from Hinea brasiliana. Credit: D. D. Deheyn

 

They light up inside when touched.

And the light pulsates every hundred milliseconds.

Don’t you know the feeling?

Feel the city breakin’ and ev’rybody shakin’

and we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.

Ah, ha, ha, ha, Stayin’ Alive.

Or, wait, am I anthropomorphizing?  Here’s a more sober report from the splendid wallflowers at Livescience:

Tracing the mysterious green flashes of light produced by a sea snail has revealed a creature built to shine from the inside – and with a shell that may be designed for communication as well as protection.

Typically found in tight clusters or groups at rocky shorelines, the clusterwink snail, or Hinea brasiliana, was known to produce light. But scientists like Dimitri Deheyn assumed the sea snails did their light thing just like their pals on the land. Terrestrial snails produce a glowing light from their foot when it’s sticking outside the shell.

Nerida Wilson of the Australian Museum in Sydney was working with the Hinea snail when she noticed these bright flashes and not the usual snail glow, so she contacted her colleague Deheyn, of the University of California-San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and sent him some snails. [Sea Creature Releases Glowing Decoy 'Bombs']

The first difference he noticed upon receiving them was that, instead of glowing continuously, they produced light flashes that occurred only when touched.

Not only that, but

Three-Toed Sloths Saved From Excess Necking

One of the great mysteries in mammalogy appears to be solved, and it gives me an excuse to republish this adorable photo.  Here’s part of the press release from the University of Cambridge:

By examining the development of bones in the vertebral column, limbs, and ribcage, scientists at the University of Cambridge have discovered how sloths evolved their unique neck skeleton.

From mice to giraffes, mammals are remarkable in that all but a handful of their 5000 species have exactly seven vertebrae in the neck. Among the few that deviate from this number are three-toed sloths, which may have up to ten ribless vertebrae in the neck.

Traditionally, vertebrae above the shoulders that lack ribs are known as cervical or neck vertebrae. Animals such as birds and lizards show great variety in the number of vertebrae in their neck. For example, a swan may have twice as many as a songbird.Mammals, on the other hand, are much more conservative. A giraffe has the same number of neck vertebrae as a human, mouse, elephant, or armadillo; all have exactly seven.

To find out why the three-toed sloths was an exception, zoologist Robert Asher and his co-authors studied its embryological development.  They found that in other mammals, the top vertebrae of the ribcage develop first, followed by the bottom vertebrae of the neck.  But the sloth develops the bottom vertebrae of the neck first.  And that is because they are actually rib vertebrae, minus the ribs.  That is, the sloth is not so odd after all, at least in this regard, and conforms to the larger pattern of mammalian developed.  The press release continues.:

Sloth skeleton with "neck" in redTo find out why the three-toed sloths was an exception, zoologist Robert Asher and his co-authors studied its embryological development. They found that in other mammals, the top vertebrae of the ribcage develop first, followed by the bottom vertebrae of the neck. But the sloth develops the bottom vertebrae of the neck first. And that, stupid, is because they are actually rib vertebrae, minus the ribs. That is, the sloth is not so odd after all, at least in this regard, and conforms to the larger pattern of mammalian developed. The press release continues.

All mammals, including sloths, show early development of the body of the eighth vertebra down from the head, whether or not it is part of the neck.In other words, the bottom neck vertebrae of sloths show a similar sequence of development as the top ribcage vertebrae of other mammals, both of which start at eight vertebrae down from the head. This shows that the bottom “neck” vertebrae of sloths are developmentally the same as ribcage vertebrae of other mammals, but lack ribs.

Dr Robert Asher, of the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, said: “The remarkable conservatism of the mammalian neck is apparent even in those few species that superficially seem to be exceptions, like sloths. Even though they’ve got eight to ten ribless vertebrae above the shoulders, unlike the seven of giraffes, humans, and nearly every other species of mammal, those extra few are actually ribcage vertebrae masquerading as neck vertebrae.”

Shoulders, pelvis, and ribcage are linked to one another in three-toed sloths, and have simply “shifted down the vertebral column to make the neck longer,” according to the press release.

The press release does not suggest why the sloth might have developed this way, and unfortunately I am unable to access the original publication at the moment.  But the traditional interpretation of the three-toed sloth’s excess neckiness is that it evolved to enable the sloth to reach around and eat the available leaves as it hangs from the branch of a tree.   The new study does not appear to change that interpretation.

You can read more about sloths in my book Every Creeping Thing:  True Tales of Faintly Repulsive Wildlife.

The paper ‘Skeletal development in sloths and the evolution of mammalian vertebral patterning’ by Lionel Hautier, Vera Weisbecker, Marcelo R. Sánchez-Villagra, Anjali Goswami, and Robert J. Asher appears the 18 October 2010 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.