Monthly Archives: June 2011

Sacrifice on the Serengeti

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Life History, Genetic Relatedness, and the Evolution of Menopause

Imagine you’re on the Serengeti Plateau and your children are hungry. For miles in every direction there’s nothing but dry scrub grass with the occasional flat-topped acacia tree marking the landscape. Your oldest has found a spot to dig for tubers but he and your daughter aren’t strong enough to scrape away the hard, baked earth by themselves. Your husband is tracking a wounded gazelle and could be gone for days. Meanwhile, the infant slung to your hip has started screaming and the distinctive sound triggers a release of oxytocin that causes your breasts to swell and leak. You have to feed her but you can’t do that and make sure your other children get enough to eat. There’s a very real chance that some of them will be too weak to survive the next time fever breaks out unless you can get help.

Read this excellent review here.

That’s a guest post on Carin Bondar’s blog written by Eric Michael Johnson. If you like the post you can vote for it in the Quark Award … Just go here and search for ‘Dr. Carin Bondar” and vote for that article (which is actually by Eric Michael Johnson)

Changing authorship on a blog is a pain, and is often impossible, thus the confusion in authorship.

A Bend in the River: Get Bent

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On of my favorite books is A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul. It is a story set in at the junction of a native and expat community in an African rain forest country with a not very despotic leader (the “Big Man”) at a time when a civil war was about to arrive on the scene. I like the book because of the writing, because of the story, because one of the character is supposedly based on someone I vaguely know (that’s always fun) and because I was there …. living at the juncture of an expat and native community in a rain forested African country with a not-to-despotic leader named Mobutu Sese Seku. And I read a few of Naipaul’s other books and liked them to.

The, I go and find out he’s a dick.

Continue reading A Bend in the River: Get Bent →

Guide to Birds of the West Indies

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i-2f51ca83014b35de7d97723f26b9152d-westindiesbird-thumb-300x436-65557.jpg The West Indies includes the Lucayan Archipelago (Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands); the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Hispaniola [Dominican Republic and Haiti], Jamaica, Cayman Islands); the Lesser Antilles (Leeward Islands [the Virgin Islands of Saint Croix, Saint Thomas, Saint John, Water Island, Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Anegada, Jost Van Dyke], Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Antigua, Barbuda, Redonda, Saint Martin, Saba, Saint Eustatius, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Montserrat Guadeloupe); the Windward Islands (Dominica, Martinique, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago), and the Leeward Antilles (Aruba, Curaçao. amd Bonaire). I may have missed a few.

Otherwise known as the Caribbean Islands, for the most part these islands are all high points on a large inland sea (which is mostly open to the ocean). It is the wintering grounds as well as the year round residence of numerous birds. If you live in the central or eastern US or Canada, a lot of birds show up in the spring; Many of those winter in the Caribbean. Of these birds, most, about 550, are nicely depicted, Peterson-style, in Norman Arlott’s abbreviated “checklist” style Birds of the West Indies: (Princeton Illustrated Checklists)

This book does not have much front matter telling you about bird watching, bird biology, bird ecology, or bird conservation. It dives right in to the plats and descriptions, which are organized by basic bird type with between 5 and 10 or so bird species per page (and more drawing where necessary). This is probably good if you are, say, a US based tourist and want to bring the bird book in your luggage and don’t need to learn what birdwatching is on your two week trip to Jamaica. For those who want more, consider A Guide to the Birds of the West Indies, which I have not seen, but that is by the same author and which is, according to the publishers, more than twice the pages and of a somewhat larger format, and quite a bit more expensive (but surely worth it if you live in or regularly visit the region).

The range maps, which are very important as the biogeography of the West Indies is complicated and interesting, are all at the back of the book. At first I thought this would be annoying but it is in the end necessary: Many birds occur on some tiny cluster of islands … as it is the maps are as small as they can be without losing utility, and at this size they are too big to put with the birds, if one also wants to have appropriate groupings of similar birds.

The drawings are high quality, the stock and binding are sturdy (I’ve got a paperback) and the book is in the standard field guide size range. If you are going to the West Indies and you’re a birder, you’ll want this.

Louis Agassiz + Alexander Agassiz + Charles Darwin + Coral Reefs = High Entertainment and Science!

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There are many fascinating stories linked to the early days of evolutionary biology and geology, and more than one of them is intertwined with our understanding of coral reefs. I had always thought that Darwin’s interaction with the question of how coral reefs form was central to Darwin’s own formation as a scientist, in part because of Charles Lyell. Lyell was the Big Kahuna of geology and earth science of the day, and had more or less established the standing theory of how coral reefs formed. Darwin, on observing reefs “in the wild” very quickly realized that Lyell was mostly wrong, and proceeded to develop his own models for reef formation. But Darwin was timid, intimidated even, in the light of Lyell’s monumental stature in the field. This, I think, caused Darwin to use a multi-faceted approach to documenting his ideas and developing his models that then became something of a template for his later work, On the Origin of Species.

What could have been a major showdown between Lyell and Darwin turned out much differently. By the time Darwin had returned from The VoyageBooks on Travelogues) (of the Beagle) Lyell and others were aware of Darwin’s new models of reef formation. If Lyell was going to have a negative reaction to Darwin’s revisions of his (Lyell’s) work, that reaction was significantly reduced by the delay between first hearing that there was a revision and meeting up again with young Charles. As I understand it, Lyell was quite happy to have his work overturned.

But there was conflict, and the conflict continued for decades and indirectly or directly engaged everybody who was anybody in the field at the time. David Dobbs writes:

Today the main argument about coral reefs is how to save them. But in the 1800s, the question of how coral reefs arose, known as the “coral reef problem,” ranked second only to the “the species question” in ferocity. In many ways it reprised the evolutionary debate, engaging many of the same people and ideas. It provided both an overture and a long coda to the fight over Darwinism. The coral reef problem did not concern the origin of species or humankind’s descent. Yet it reiterated the evolutionary debate’s vexing questions about the importance of evidence, the proper construction of theory, and the reliability of powerful abstractions.

Continue reading Louis Agassiz + Alexander Agassiz + Charles Darwin + Coral Reefs = High Entertainment and Science! →

Japan Nuclear Disaster Update 26: “My head is full of question marks”

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Even as the situation at the troubled Fukushima Nuclear Reactors … well, remains troubled … the post-game analysis of what went wrong and what could have been done better develops. It is becoming clear that the plant had no real plan for the event of a tsunami even though it was built at an elevation within that affected by historically known and documented tsunami waves, and there is post-hoc confusion and denial related to early screw ups in trying to avoid a meltdown in the reactors (which ended up occurring), for instance.

Highly radioactive water continues to leak out of at least one reactor vessel, and no real progress appears to have been made in securing cooling mechanisms or containing damage to the environment around the plant. The level of radioactivity at the ocean outlet of the plant has increased rather than decreased. It was news when a broken pump in reactor 5 was repaired, but Reactor 5 is stable and was quietly and uneventfully shut down until this pump broke and the reactor started heading for a meltdown (objections that these reactors can’t melt down in three … two … one …). It became especially clear over the last few days that the situation is very far from under control when a regionally typical tropical storm threatened the area and there was no plan for how to address flooding rains and winds or other inclement storm conditions.

Monitoring for radiation exposure of people, plants, landscapes, etc. continues within a climate of increasing uncertainty about the dangers of ionizing radiation. Cattle are being moved out of the area, the snow in the mountains near Fukushima is found to be radioactive, and junior high students are being urged to wear long sleeved shirts, just in case. The Prime Minister is facing a no confidence vote.

The estimated cost of the cleanup (and it is a bit early to estimate, but still..) is about four or five percent of Japan’s GDP.
Continue reading Japan Nuclear Disaster Update 26: “My head is full of question marks” →

Dangerous Teenage Texting

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Moms and Dads: Are your children idiots?

There is a distinct possibility. Better check your paperwork from school, see if there’s any warning notes in there.

Here’s the thing. For some reason, over the last week, I’ve been the unwitting recipient of mis-dialed text messages from giddy tweens. In each case there was a series of indecipherable messages that I ignored for a while. Eventually, in each case, I finally sent back a text saying “U have the wrong number.” In each case the child did not understand the meaning of that phrase and proceeded to explain how they have the correct number, the number is (such and such) and why don’t I add them to the speed dial, etc. etc.

So in each case, not being sure what I was dealing with, and thinking that maybe it was me who was wrong about this being a wrong number, I sent a text that said “Who are you?” …. and in each case I got a text back saying the person’s name, the town they live in, and the school they go to. It was like a POW giving name, rank, and serial number; “My name is Johnny and I live in Springfield and I go to the John Glenn Elementary School” or whatever.

OMG. I happen to not be a child predator, but if I was, I’d be on to something with these gullible kids! What I did, instead of requesting more information so that I could easily find them and use the old “my puppy is lost” trick to lure them into the conversion van or whatever, was to text them back a message saying “I don’t know you, you don’t know me, don’t text me again.”

The first kid texted me back with “ooops, sorry” and the second kid just stopped texting. I hope they both realize that they should not have given me their names and how to find them. All I wanted was a first name so I could check with my daughter to see if she knew them, or in the case of the second kid, who seemed to think initialy that I was “Johnny” and then that he was Johnny, I just needed to establish a baseline in reality of some sort.

Parents and guardians: Give your kids the basics. Tell them what to not tell other people, what information to not give to web sites, what to not text to those they don’t know as well as those they know. And tell them about the puppy trick, just in case.

Because, even if your particular kid is not an idiot (and I’m sure your kid is a perfect genius) any kid can be an idiot any time. Temporary idiocy can strike without warning.

The Birder’s Handbook

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I recommend The Birder’s Handbook: A Field Guide to the Natural History of North American Birds. It was written by three serious bird experts and it will serve any bird watcher in North America very well. Here’s how you use it. You go bird watching and later, you look up one or two of the birds you saw, read the entries on them, read the entries cross referenced in those first entries, and otherwise explore around this compendium of information about bird ecology and biology.

The Book
For instance, you spy a Clapper Rail. So you look that up and see the reference to the essay on rails. There, you learn, among other things, that rails are rare on birder’s lists not because they are rare (they are not) but because they are hiding.

Then, the next time you are out with someone birding, and you see a rail, you can impress your friend with this bit of knowledge about rails. How cool is that?

OK, so you see a Gray Kingbird. You look it up. There, you find a reference to an essay on the evolution of bird nesting behavior, which will blow your mind.

And so on and so forth.

This is one of those books that I don’t have in the field back but that I do keep in the other pack (actually, a Duluth Tote Bag) which gets dragged to and from the car, cabin, etc. One of these days Imma build a trailer that hold books and battery chargers.

Anyway, The Birder’s Handbook: A Field Guide to the Natural History of North American Birds is a must-have.

“If You Love Evolution, Tweet About It!” COE # 36

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i-80e531b0d2456037296ea380dfc94a8a-_main_top_1872_Expression_F1142_327-thumb-300x300-65652.jpgWelcome to the Thirty Sixth Carnival of Evolution. The world of blog carnivals is in a state of flux and uncertainty these days, with the distinct possibility of a mass extinction just around the corner. One of the oldest, longest running, and most important carnivals, I and the Bird, issued its last issue only a few days ago, and the Keepers of the Carnival of Evolution themselves are said to be thinking about ways that this whole carnival thing can be made to work better. That could, I suppose, mean killing it and replacing it with something else. We are hopeful that this will not be something monstrous. Well, actually monstrous would be fine, I suppose, just highly unlikely to found a new species of scientific social networking.

With that thought in mind, I’d like you do to me a favor. If you are into evolution (which you probably are because you are reading this post) then help promote excellent evolution blogging. Do you have a facebook account? Good. Open up a selection of the following posts and if you like them or find them interesting, post them on your wall. Let your facebook friends see some of this interesting blogging. Do you tweet? Then tweet them! Oh, and go ahead and facebook-share and tweet this very carnival. Stumble, Digg, Reddit, Whatever. The idea is go get the word out that there is some interesting stuff to read, about evolution, on the intertubes. We want Evolution Blogging to be more linky and socially networked than other topics such as, well, creationism for example. This carnival is a pretty darn good listing of what has come out over the last few weeks across the blogosphere. So, your job as a lover of and promoter of evolution is to use this list of blog posts as a kind of todo list … working off this list, promote the posts.

I’ve taken a very straightforward approach to the carnival, which is my style; I let the posts speak for themselves. So, in the following listing you’ll see the title of each post and a brief excerpt. Click on the title to see the post. The categories into which I’ve divided the post make total sense and form a very good taxonomy of evolution blogging. For some of the posts. For others, the categories suck. It is not easy making categories for this sort of writing, as many of the posts are so darn multifarious, which is a good thing.

And now, the carnival:
Continue reading “If You Love Evolution, Tweet About It!” COE # 36 →