The Whirlpool of Life

The Gaia Hypothesis

2012-01-19T12:20:00.000-08:00

I wrote the following brief essay in response to literary agent John Brockman's annual question. This year's question was, "What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? Check out answers from other members of the Edge clan here.

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For my money, the deepest, most beautiful scientific explanation is the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that Earth's physical and biological processes are inextricably interwoven to form a self-regulating system. This notion—the 1965 brainchild of chemist James Lovelock, further co-developed with microbiologist Lynn Margulis—proposes that air (atmosphere), water (hydrosphere), earth (geosphere or pedosphere) and life (biosphere) interact to form a single evolving system capable of maintaining environmental conditions consistent with life. Lovelock initially put forth the Gaia hypothesis to explain how life on Earth has persisted for 4 billion years despite a 30% increase in the Sun’s intensity over that same interval.

But how does Gaia work? Lacking a conscious command-and-control system, Lovelock and Margulis demonstrated that Gaia uses feedback loops to track and adjust key environmental parameters. Take oxygen, a highly reactive by-product of life, generated and continually replenished by photosynthetic algae and plants. The present day atmospheric concentration of oxygen is about 21%. A few percentage points lower and air-breathing life forms could not survive. A few percentage points higher and terrestrial ecosystems would become overly combustible, prone to conflagration. According to the Gaia hypothesis, oxygen-producing organisms have used feedback loops to maintain atmospheric oxygen between these narrow limits for hundreds of millions of years.

James Lovelock

Similar arguments, backed by an ever-growing body of research, can be made for other atmospheric constituents, as well as for global surface temperature, oceanic salinity, and other key environmental metrics. Although the Gaia hypothesis highlights cooperation at the scale of the biosphere, researchers have documented multiple examples showing how cooperation at one level could evolve through competition and natural selection at lower levels. Initially criticized by serious scientists as new-age mumbo-jumbo, Lovelock’s radical notion has increasingly been incorporated into scientific orthodoxy, and key elements are now often taught as “Earth Systems Science.” One timely lesson resulting at least in part from Gaian research is that food web complexity, including higher species diversity, tends to enhance ecological and climate stability.

So, while Earth may inhabit a “Goldilocks zone,” neither too close nor too far from the sun, life’s rampant success on this “pale blue dot” cannot be ascribed to luck alone. Life has had a direct hand in ensuring its own persistence.

Science has not yet fully embraced the Gaia hypothesis. And it must be admitted that, as an explanation, this idea remains incomplete. The insights cascading from Gaia are unquestionably deep and beautiful, uniting the whole of the biosphere and Earth’s surface processes into a single, emergent, self-regulating system. Yet this explanation has yet to achieve the third milestone defined in this year’s Edge Annual Question—elegance. The Gaia hypothesis currently lacks the mathematical precision of Einstein’s E=Mc². No unified theory of Earth and Life has been presented to explain why life stabilizes more than it destabilizes.

W. D. Hamilton

Evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton once compared Lovelock’s insights to those of Copernicus, adding that we still await the Newton who will define the laws of this grand, seemingly improbable relationship. Hamilton himself became deeply engrossed in seeking an answer to this question, developing a computer model that seemed to show how stability and productivity could increase in tandem. Were it not for an untimely death, Hamilton might have emerged as that modern-day Newton, becoming, in the words of author Tim Flannery, “the most revered biologist of all time.”

Lynn Margulis

The cultural implications of Gaia also continue to be debated. Arguably the most profound implication of Lovelock’s idea is that Earth, considered as a whole, possesses many qualities of an organism. But is Gaia actually alive, akin to a single life form, or is it more accurate to think of her as a planet-sized ecosystem? Lynn Margulis argued strongly (and convincingly, to my mind) for the latter view. Margulis, whose work revolutionized evolutionary biology at the smallest and grandest of scales, died recently. Always the hard-nosed scientist, she once said,

“Gaia is a tough bitch — a system that has worked for over three billion years without people. This planet's surface and its atmosphere and environment will continue to evolve long after people and prejudice are gone.”

While not disagreeing with this blunt assessment, I find considerably greater inspiration in Gaian thinking. Indeed I would go so far as to suggest that this idea can help shift the human perception of nature. In the modernist perspective, the natural world is little more than a collection of virtually infinite resources available for human exploitation. The Gaian lens encourages us to re-envision Earth-bound nature as an intertwined, finite whole from which we evolved, and in which we remain fully embedded. Here, then, is a deep and beautiful perspective in desperate need of broad dissemination.

Image Credits

James Lovelock: www.guardian.co.uk

W. D. Hamilton: www.psychology.wikia.com

Lynn Margulis: www.blogs.scientificamerican.com

Holiday Nature Connection

2011-12-21T18:04:00.000-08:00

While out walking on this day, the shortest of the year, I began thinking about how grown-ups might be connecting kids with nature this time of year. To my mind, finding ways to help children make meaningful connections with (nonhuman) nature is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st Century, rivaling global warming, habitat loss, and species extinctions. After all, how can we possibly live sustainably in a place we don’t care about? And why would we care unless we have meaningful experiences in that place, and know something of how it works and how it came to be?

Jade out having fun in Nature!

On the one hand, the holiday season would seem to offer great opportunities for making nature connections, since kids have time off school and other activities. On the other, adults are often running around working, shopping, and/or staggering from party to party. Then there are the obstacles of winter, like finding sufficient daylight and warmth. How many kids are going to be passionate about turning off the screens to face the frigid temperatures outdoors? Yet, I know that there are millions of people who will be out there connecting their kids to nature this holiday season. What I—and, my assumption is, many others—want to know is, What are they doing?

Before getting to that question, let me return for a minute to technology. Many people in the children-and-nature movement see technology as the enemy—the evil that now enslaves children for 7-10 hours a day in front at screens. But, let’s be frank. Technology isn’t going away; indeed it’s only going to accelerate, at least for the foreseeable future. So, perhaps ironically, I’m convinced that we need to come up with creative ways to use technology to aid the cause of nature connection. And that, my friends, brings me to Twitter.

I recently joined the Twitterverse, which, for me, felt like a big move. But I have to say, the decision was a great one, and I haven’t looked back. Not only have I shared ideas with many like-minded (and not so like-minded) people. I have learned about cutting edge news and events that I undoubtedly would have missed if I hadn’t been tossing out the occasional tweet.

Jade and friend Tessa camping.

So here’s what occurred to me while out walking (which, by the way, research suggests is the best time to think). Let’s find out how people are connecting kids to nature this holiday season by putting out a call on Twitter. So here goes:

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE WAY TO CONNECT KIDS TO NATURE DURING THE WINTER HOLIDAY SEASON?

It might be something you’ve done before, something you’re doing this year, or something you dream of doing (e.g., surfing off the coast of Maui on Christmas day). Stargazing, beach walking, snowball fights, snowboarding, a visit to the local natural history museum—it’s all fair game.

Tweet your answer to #HolidayNature by Wednesday, January 4^th, 2012, so that others can find out what you’re up to. Please include @DrScottSampson in your tweet so that I can track all the submissions.

I will tally and blog about the results, choosing what I think are the Top 10 best answers. And if, as anticipated, the material warrants, I’ll write up an article and submit it for publication so that many other folks can benefit from your collective creativity and wisdom!

Jade on one of our birding trips

Please get the word out through the Twitterverse asap so that we can get some amazing feedback. I already have my first response, from Michael Barton (@darwinsbulldog), who wrote, “Last year we visited a local state park on Christmas day and I said we should do so every year...”

As for me, well, let me throw my hat into the ring too. Jade, my 9-year-old daughter pictured in the accompanying photos, is passionate about birds (you know, living dinosaurs), so we'll be heading into the local hills, or perhaps down to the lagoon, to do some birding.

So, what are you doing to connect your kids to nature this holiday season? Let the masses know! And please follow me on Twitter (@DrScottSampson). I promise many future tweets on nature connection!

Dinosaur Train Gets Into Nature!

2011-12-02T12:03:00.000-08:00

When I was initially invited to get involved with PBS KIDS Dinosaur Train a few years ago, I was very skeptical about working on a TV series that might further addict children to screens. After all, my focus as a science communicator is all about getting kids outside. However, following some negotiations with the Jim Henson Company (which produces the show), it was agreed that I would add an enthusiastic tag line at the close of every episode (the final version being the brainchild of my wife Toni): “Remember, get outside, get into nature, and make your own discoveries!”

At the time I had no idea if a television program could induce kids to turn off the TV and head outdoors. However, based on the hundreds of comments I’ve received from parents, I’m now convinced. I regularly hear about boys like Tommy who are always heading outdoors to dig for fossils (makes me wonder about the holes in the backyard . . .), and girls like Mary who have become avid birdwatchers (that is, dinosaur observers!). A nationwide Dinosaur Train geocaching program was added, which has also been very successful at getting kids to explore their local areas.

By the time we began production on Season 2 of Dinosaur Train, the Henson Company and PBS KIDS were equally excited about the idea of getting kids outside. Indeed it was decided that nature connection would become one of the show’s primary themes. As a result, the animated kid characters, led by Buddy the T. rex and Tiny Pteranodon, have formed their own nature club (the “Nature Trackers”) and now spend much of their time making natural history collections and firsthand observations about their surroundings.

Some kids at the beach being filmed making nature art.

Along with cool new dinosaurs, featured topics for connecting kids to nature now include plants, insects, stars, rocks, and nature art. In the interstitial portion of each episode, which I have the pleasure of hosting, we’re encouraging kids more than ever to explore local nature. In Season 1, all of the interstitials were shot on green screen in a Hollywood studio—hardly the ideal setting for encouraging nature exploration. But for Season 2, we’re featuring shoot locations out in nature (e.g., redwood forests, beautiful beaches, and tidepools burgeoning with animals), as well as in museums, often showing real children connecting to real nature!

Check out some of the new episodes and songs here, including a very cute tune called “Get Into Nature.” The award-winning website will soon be bolstered with all kinds of activities to help parents connect their kids to the natural world. Dinosaur Train has even partnered with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to help foster an entire generation of kid birdwatchers! Currently, the show is viewed in more than 9 million households a month, and appears to be gaining steam! So stay tuned and get onboard!

The Dinosaur Train Film Crew!

(The show's creator, Craig Bartlett, is second from the left in the back row.)

Deep Technology

2011-11-10T10:15:00.001-08:00

What do kingfishers, Namibian beetles, and humpback whales have in common? Do the members of this unlikely trio serve as the namesakes of professional sporting teams? Have their genes been spliced together to make a super-cucumber? Nope. All three have inspired new human technologies.

Kingfishers are expert predators who dive into the water to catch fish. A Japanese engineer was tasked with solving the problem of thunderous claps generated by the Shinkansen bullet train as it emerged from tunnels. He decided to look to nature for answers, and came across the kingfisher, which also must pass from one medium (air) to another (water) at high speed. The nosecone of the speedy train was redesigned to mimic the bird’s elongate beak, and the result was not only much quieter, but 10% faster and 15% more efficient in its electricity consumption.

A dime-sized Namibian beetle inhabits a harsh desert setting that receives less than half an inch of rain each year. Intrepid biologists found that the beetle meets its water needs with the help of a specially designed shell. Microscopic bumps on the outer surface capture moisture from fog to create water droplets, which then travel along water-repellent channels directly to the animal’s mouth. MIT engineers mimicked this design to create a new, highly efficient water harvesting material that combines a Teflon-like, water-repellent surface with water-attracting bumps.

The flippers of humpback whales are lined along the leading edge with irregular bumps, which, at first blush, would seem an odd design for a limb that must maneuver a giant animal through water. However, an enterprising engineer tried adding similar looking tubercles to blades, conducted wind tunnel tests, and found that, among other benefits, the design reduced drag by almost one third. Today, bumpy, whale-inspired blades can be found in everything from wind turbines to HVAC systems to computer fans.

I could cite literally hundreds of additional high tech examples founded on Nature’s genius. Don’t believe me? Check out the amazing database at AskNature.org.“Biomimicry” (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate), is a nascent, vibrant and rapidly growing field that seeks innovative answers to human problems by turning to Nature. The most famous example is Velcro, inspired by burrs that stuck tenaciously to the canine companion of a Swiss engineer.

Contrary to popular belief, evolution is not a random process. It is highly creative, constantly seeking solutions through a trial-and-error process that successfully marries organisms to environments. The core idea of biomimicry is that nature has already solved most of the problems now faced by human engineers and designers. By tapping into these solutions, or “adaptations,” we’re learning to harness energy like a leaf, create color like a butterfly, grow food like a prairie, and recycle our wastes like a swamp. “We live on a wildly diverse planet surrounded by genius,” says Janine Benyus, founder and leader of the biomimicry movement [1].

Got a pressing problem to solve? Just ask nature!

The new web home of this movement is biomimicry.net, where you’ll find business applications—people engaged in creating new, sustainable technologies inspired by nature—and a range of education programs (organized within the Biomimicry Guild and the Biomimicry Institute, respectively). Under the new umbrella organization “Biomimicry 3.8” (in reference to 3.8 billion years of life’s evolution on Earth), this entrepreneurial organization has an explicit bias toward ecologically and socially sustainable solutions, steering away from, say, military applications like weaponry and armor.

Today, when speaking of cutting edge technology, we often refer to “high technology.” I like to refer to nature’s technological solutions as “deep technology,” the result of evolutionary R&D conducted over billions of years of deep time. My strong hunch is that the future “sweet spot” of technology will be at the interface of high-tech and deep-tech. Here we will eventually learn to model not just our materials and gadgets, but entire societies after Nature’s wisdom. In such a place, buildings would behave like trees, grabbing energy from the sun and regulating temperatures without expensive heating and cooling. Such innovations are already well underway in the world of architecture. Ultimately, linked to networks of other buildings, both homes and businesses, cities could become much like ecosystems, funneling local resources where they’re needed and using the waste from one sector as the raw materials of another. This would be biomimicry scaled up to civilization proportions. A dream? Yes, but a glorious and attainable one.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a day-long education workshop spear-headed by the Biomimicry Institute. I was fascinated to learn how fast and how deeply this young field is making inroads into K-12 and higher education. I was also impressed by the passion of biomimicry practitioners. A number of pioneering teachers are quickly finding ways to place biomimicry at the heart of the curriculum. Today, you can even attain a masters degree in this area. No question. Biomimicry is a powerful lens through which to view science education, encouraging children and adults to new creative heights inspired by the nonhuman world around them.

Nevertheless, what excites me most about biomimicry is the revolutionary shift in perspective it leads us toward. No longer merely something to learn about, the living world is suddenly transformed into something to learn from. No longer merely a bunch of material resources, Nature becomes mentor and model. Deep technology and biomimicry are potent tools that unite the evolutionary epic with a sustainable future, helping us navigate our way back to a home fully embedded within the natural world.

References

1. Benyus, Janine (1997). Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. New York, NY, USA: William Morrow & Company, Inc.

Image Credits (from top to bottom):

1) AnneofCarversville.com

2) mnn.com

3) AskNature.org

4) isd1xinxinliu.blogspot.com

A Feathered Terror From Utah

2011-09-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

This week, another “new” dinosaur was officially announced to the world. Like several other discoveries over the past few years, this one was unearthed from rocks of the Late Cretaceous Kaiparowits Formation in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), southern Utah. Over the past decade, the Kaiparowits Basin Project, which I have the pleasure of heading up, has yielded about a dozen new dinosaur varieties from these sediments, amongst them duck-billed hadrosaurs like Gryposaurus and horned ceratopsians like Kosmoceratops. Thanks to the work of geologists and paleobotanists, we know that these animals lived about 76 million years ago in a wet, often swampy setting about 100 km from the coast of an inland sea.

Over the past decade, tantalizing bits and pieces of a small, carnivorous “troodont” theropod have been found in the Kaiparowits Formation. Closely akin to Velociraptor, troodonts are a clan of feathered “raptors” with sickle claws tipping the second toe of each foot. They were lightly built runners with some of the largest brains for their body size of any dinosaur. Most of our GSENM troodont fossils have consisted of random teeth, augmented by a few isolated skull and limb bones. But a couple of years ago, graduate student Michael Knell from Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana—while working in GSENM with Monument Paleontologist Alan Titus—found a partial skeleton that turned out to belong to this mystery theropod.

A team of workers consisting of Lindsay Zanno (University of Wisconsin-Parkside), David Varricchio (Montana State University), Patrick O’Connor (Ohio University), Alan Titus, and Michael Knell has just published their conclusions about this ancient little beast in the online journal PLoS ONE [1].

Talos, as it was dubbed, is the first troodont to be named from North America in more than 75 years. (In Greek mythology, Talos was a winged bronze figure who protected the island of Crete by throwing large stones at invading ships.) The vast bulk of fossils attributed to this group have been found in Asia, including the famous sleeping dinosaur (Mei long), as well as many eggs and nests. With few exceptions, the remains of North American troodonts have tended to be much scrappier. In life, Talos would have been about 6 feet long, but most of that length consisted of neck and tail, so the animal would have weighed in at a paltry 80 lbs or so. Mike Knell’s key specimen consists of most of the back limb plus a few other odds and ends. Most striking of all is the virtually complete foot with the lethal-looking claws.

One of those claws shows distinct signs of injury, a visual diagnosis that was confirmed with CT scanning of the bones. Particularly since the remainder of the foot was uninjured, this finding suggests that, at least occasionally, troodonts put their sickle claws “in harm’s way,” as Zanno colorfully puts it. Although it has long been assumed that these claws were used as predatory weapons, Talos offers the first fossilized evidence of such behavior. Whatever the cause of the injury, this particular animal survived for some time after the initial trauma and infection.

Many readers of this blog will know that Late Cretaceous North America was subdivided into a pair of landmasses—Laramidia in the west and Appalachia in the east—by high sea levels that flooded the central region of the continent. For about 25 million years, Laramidian dinosaurs evolved in isolation from the rest of the world. Most remarkable is the fact that this diminutive landmass, less than one fifth the size of present day N. America, hosted at least two distinct dinosaur faunas: one in the north and another in the south. Talos provides yet another unique addition to the southern fauna, deepening the mystery of how so many dinosaur varieties managed to co-exist on such a small chunk of real estate.

Finally, I have to thank the Talos authors, who have graciously called the second half of Talos’ name “sampsoni.” I am honored to have this little predator named after me, and had to chuckle when I heard the news. Until recently, the name Troodon was known only to professional paleontologists and a few die-hard kid enthusiasts. However, millions of fans of the PBS KIDS series Dinosaur Train (for which I serve as the science advisor and host) are now well aware of Troodon, because these animals run the famous train, and frequently tell anyone who will listen, “We are the smartest dinosaurs, ya know!”

The bones of Talos will be on exhibit for the first time in the brand new Museum of Natural History of Utah in Salt Lake City (previously the Utah Museum of Natural History), which is set to open to the world on November 17^th!

References

1. Zanno LE, Varricchio DJ, O’Connor PM, Titus AL, Knell MJ (2011) A New Troodontid Theropod, Talos sampsoni gen. et sp. nov., from the Upper Cretaceous Western Interior Basin of North America. PLoS ONE 6(9): e24487. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024487

The Human Journey: Part 3

2011-08-08T20:40:00.000-07:00

Below is the third and final part of the human evolution story. Parts 1 and 2 can be found in the previous two posts.

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Touching down once more in the time machine, we find ourselves surrounded by now familiar grassland expanses. The monotonous scene is punctuated only by a mud-lined waterhole, which at the moment is hosting a herd of Elephas recki, the same giant proboscideans from the second act. Standing in the shallows close by, seemingly oblivious to the elephants’ antics, a six-foot tall marabou stork fishes for whatever critters might reveal themselves. African waterholes in late afternoon attract a wide range of thirsty animals, and their predators. After a few hours spent watching the faunal procession, you guess correctly that all of the usual suspects are present—pigs, antelope, zebra, hyena, and the like.

Mesmerized by the setting sun and the building hum of insects, you’re surprised to see five hominins approaching, three individuals moving together in front and two trailing behind. As they get closer it becomes clear that these upright primates, all males, are wholly different than any seen previously. Compared to hobbit-like Ardi and Nutcracker Woman, these individuals are giants, approaching six feet in height. Much of this length is devoted to long, muscle-bound, striding legs. Gone are the elongate, gorilla-like arms, replaced by upper limbs proportioned like our own. Also absent is the profusion of body hair, exposing the naked skin beneath. Indeed, in the waning light of dusk, these figures look so familiar that for a moment you wonder if the time machine has returned you to the present day. But above the shoulders, that sense of familiarity diminishes. The skull dome looks bigger than that of an australopith, yet notably smaller than our own. A prominent nose protrudes from beneath thickened brow ridges. Among the trio in the lead, two are shouldering bulky antelope shanks still encased in mottled brown skin, while another totes some unidentifiable hunk of meat. Bringing up the rear are two younger males carrying stone tools. You elect to follow the group, who, after another a half-mile trek, join up with several females and children. The female adults, only slightly smaller than the males, are busy working with fist-sized stone tools to release nutrients from large tubers, while the four youngsters run about playing.

Welcome to Act III, the most recent of the human journey, extending from roughly 2 million years ago to the present day. We’ve arrived in the midst of the Pleistocene Epoch, about 1.5 million years ago, another landmark moment in our story. Increasing aridity has decimated the forests and driven the proliferation of grasslands. Several mammal lineages, herbivore and carnivore alike, have been traveling northward with the expanding grasslands, and some have recently broken the bonds of the African continent to venture into Asia and Europe. Accompanying these emigrants is a two-legged omnivore, Homo erectus, the very hominin you’ve been watching.

Whereas Act I hominins like Ardipithecus were devoted forest-dwellers, spending most of their time in trees; and Act II protagonists like Paranthropus and Australopithecus split their time between the trees and the ground; in the skeleton of erectus we see the first evidence of a permanent pact with terra firma. Tree-climbing adaptations were replaced by long, lean legs well suited for endurance walking. Brain sizes averaged close to 1000 cc, only about 25 percent less than our own. Regional populations, each with unique traits, developed in Europe and Asia, where they encountered new varieties of large mammals, from mammoth to cave bear. It is unclear whether erectus had made the transition from scavenger to predator by the time of its initial exodus from Africa. But it appears virtually certain that this close cousin of our’s was an effective big game hunter throughout most of its lengthy tenure. The hunting and gathering lifestyle that would eventually characterize the bulk of human history got its start in Homo erectus. The Old World had received its first taste of a carnivorous ape.

One of the perils of walking long distances over hot, arid terrain is water loss. This hazard is exacerbated by a cooling system that depends on sweat glands distributed over much of the body. Like chimps and gorillas, earlier hominins possessed a flat nose marked by a pair of forward-facing openings in the middle of the face. With erectus the bony margins of the nose openings became raised and conjoined, forming a distinctive, sloping bridge. Inside, expanded nasal cavities housed complex swirls of bone lined with spongy mucous. The newly remodeled nose offered a finely tuned water retention device, capturing moisture from the hot, humid air exhaled from the lungs. For similar reasons, although we can’t be certain, Homo erectus may have been the first hairless hominin. Body hair tends to hold onto heat, so erectus’ commitment to life on the hot savannah may well have triggered the loss of a “furry” covering. If so, we can thank Homo erectus for both our prominent noses and our nakedness.

The so-called “Acheulean” tradition of Homo erectus was dominated by a single stone implement—the hand ax. The Acheulean hand ax is the epitome of functionality, crafted by using some sort of “hammer”—often made of bone, antler, or wood—to remove flakes of rock from a “core.” Whereas Oldowan toolmakers were apparently most interested in the flakes, it’s the core that became the chief implement of erectus. By removing flakes symmetrically from both sides, the fist-sized hand ax offered a highly versatile tool that likely served for slicing, scraping, crushing, digging, and other uses. (Can’t you just imagine the late night television advertisement? “Brought to you by Erectus Industries Inc., the amazing tool that slices, dices, and juliennes!”) Homo erectus was the longest-lived hominin, thriving for over a million years. Although we see some evidence of a progressive improvement in tool technologies, the hand ax persisted throughout that impossibly lengthy duration. Confronted by the bewildering pace of technological change seen today—with computers outdated almost as soon as they reach the market—it’s inconceivable to imagine a particular tool being used for a century, let alone ten thousand centuries! What does this staggering monotony tell us of the mind of Homo erectus? On that matter there is much disagreement, but one thing’s for sure. We can safely assume that innovation was not a priority.

How are we to explain this suite of bodily and behavioral features, which pushed the hominin lineage, as one anthropologist put it, over to the human side of the “great divide?” Best we can tell, the eco-evolutionary chain of events went something like this. By 2 million years ago, the human line was devoted to a diet of high-quality, widely dispersed, and difficult-to-obtain foodstuffs, both plants and meat. The major bump in body size seen in erectus is plausibly linked to the dangers of carnivory. With pathetic footspeed and fewer trees to retreat into, hominins had no choice but to face down competing carnivores, among them lions, leopards, and sabertooths. Six-foot tall hominins would have had a great intimidation advantage over their four-foot forebears. With larger bodies came greater caloric needs, which in turn translated into more extensive home ranges (necessary to locate sufficient amounts of food). Longer legs would have been beneficial to travel the increased distances, and a larger brain would have come in handy to store mental maps of the surrounding terrain. Increased brainpower may also have been necessary to mimic Acheulean stone tool-making techniques.

The trend toward bushiness of the hominin family tree continued in Act III. In earlier scenes, Homo erectus shared the African continent with several Act II die-hards; Australopithecus sediba persevered until about 1.75 million years ago, Homo habilis until 1.4 million years ago, and Paranthropus boisei until shortly before 1 million years ago. Later in the record-breaking reign of Homo erectus, several additional species of Homo appeared, perhaps evolutionary offspring of the king himself. Examples included antecessor (Europe), heidelbergensis (Europe, Africa, and China), and neanderthalensis (Neanderthals, Europe).

Following the extinction of Homo erectus, several Homo species persisted [9]. Among the most successful were the Neanderthals, cold weather specialists that thrived in Ice Age Europe and Asia between about 200,000 and 28,000 years ago. Key adaptations of this clan, possibly our closest hominin cousins, included a brawny build and stocky stature (better for retaining heat), with males averaging about 5’ 5”. Dominating the Neanderthal face was a huge nose used for warming and humidifying cold, dry air. Other features included a long mid-face region, low forehead, and an elongate cranial vault housing a brain as large or larger than our own. Neanderthals controlled fire, lived in shelters, hunted big game, and buried their dead.

They made and wore clothing and developed a sophisticated tool kit. The highly successful Neanderthals may have displaced groups of Homo sapiens in certain regions when the climate turned extra frigid. The fate of Neanderthals remains a mystery, but recent genetic studies suggest that they interbred with humans, and that we still carry some of their genes[10].

Among several recently discovered hominins that lived late in Act III are a phantom and a hobbit. The phantom, informally dubbed the “Denisova hominin,” is known from a single fragmentary finger bone and an isolated tooth dating to 41,000 years old [11]. Recovered from Denisova Cave in Siberia, Russia, the single bone has yielded mitochondrial DNA suggesting that the finger’s owner belonged to a distinct species sharing a common ancestor with Neanderthals. Meanwhile, Homo floresiensis was a three and a half foot tall hominin that inhabited the Indonesian Island of Flores between 95,000 and 17,000 years ago [12].

Nicknamed “Hobbit,” this pint-sized, large-footed, small-brained, chinless wonder used stone tools to hunt pygmy elephants and giant Komodo dragons! Controversy still ensues about the closest relatives (and even the veracity) of this surprising member of our family tree, but the growing consensus is that Hobbit is descended from an ancient member of our Homo tribe who departed Africa about 2 million years ago.

Finally we come to our own species, Homo sapiens, a name that translates as “wise man.” Although various species of Homo had already spread over much of Asia and Europe, the first sapiens were birthed back in the womb of Africa some 200,000 years ago, perhaps evolving from erectus populations that had stayed behind. Compared to our first cousins, the Neanderthals, we possess a more lightly built skeleton, weaker jaws with smaller teeth, a flatter face, a thinner brow, a vertical forehand, and a vaulted cranium. Like erectus, neanderthalensis, and most other members of the Homo clan, the earliest sapiens gathered food and hunted animals. Indeed our ancestors were apparently ardent carnivores who took big game hunting to a new, more lethal level.

Around 60,000 years ago, Homo sapiens underwent what some refer to as the “Great Leap Forward.” The pace of cultural change suddenly accelerated. Bone artifacts such as fish hooks and needles appeared. Stone tools took on a strongly regional flavor, in some cases including sophisticated weaponry. Cave paintings, body ornaments, and sculptures appear, hinting at a fundamental shift of mind, and we see the first evidence of long-distance trade. Genetic evidence indicates that much of this revolution can be traced to a small group of sapiens that migrated out of Africa, mimicking the wave of erectus populations hundreds of thousands of years prior [13]. This time, however, the wave swelled to a tsunami that did not stop in Asia or Europe. The first tsunami wave of modern humans crossed the Red Sea into the Near East and then on to East Asia and Australia. The second moved northward into Europe, Asia and eventually the Americas. Along the way, these populations encountered and displaced other varieties of Homo, including Neanderthals, until we were the only surviving hominin species.

Homo sapiens, a late-arriving, globe-trotting bipedal ape, had somehow developed the capacity to live pretty much anywhere, from sweltering deserts to the frigid Arctic. (Among mammals, only the Norwegian rat [Rattus norvegicus] even approaches the geographic distribution of humans, occurring on every continent except Antarctica.) Beginning about 10,000 years ago, we began to give up our itinerant ways and settle down, likely in response to a shift toward more stable climates. The ability to stay put came largely from cultivating plants and animals. Over a relatively brief period, agriculture arose independently five times. With heightened food yields came much larger populations and, very quickly, civilizations. Civilizations have continued to expand ever since, swallowing all but a handful of foraging cultures and, in the last eyeblink of time, wreaking havoc with the Earth’s biosphere.

returning to the question that kicked off this discussion, why did humans, as opposed to chimpanzees, elephants, orcas, or some other creature, become such a dominant presence on Earth? The answer, it seems, invokes a unique concatenation of events within our lineage. Humanity’s runaway success required several essential elements—in particular, the physical, mental, and social capacity to develop advanced technologies. In Act 1, the most critical evolutionary acquisition was bipedalism. Walking upright freed the hands for other activities, including transport. It also enabled early hominins to expand their geographical ranges and encounter environments well beyond the experience of other apes. In Act II, manual dexterity was added to the repertoire, a capacity that transformed stones into tooth-mimicking tools. The making and transporting of stone tools opened up an entirely new niche—carnivory—sending our ancestors off down yet another evolutionary rabbit hole. Finally, in Act III (and the tail end of Act II), our newly acquired penchant for meat and nutrient-rich marrow sparked the evolution of larger, more sophisticated brains. Out on the open savannah, our ancestors quickly evolved traits that could help them tap into the large, scattered packages of plants and meat available there. The evolutionary results included new tool technologies, heightened imitative abilities, and a strong bias toward within-group cooperation.

But beware the fallacy of hindsight. Reflecting on the human journey, we must fight a powerful, largely unconscious bias to view early hominins as a succession of warm-up acts—“experiments in being human,” to use the preferred scientific phraseology—leading to our inevitable main event. Evolution has no foresight. It reacts only to present circumstances, fitting organisms to the habitats they live in. In hitting one rock against another to generate sharp-edged blades, Australopithecus garhi (or some near cousin) gained access to a new suite of foodstuffs, thereby enhancing its odds of survival. These little hairy hominins had no clue that stone tools might trigger a cascade of events that would ultimately send their distant descendants to the moon. They were concerned only with immediate circumstances, just as we are most of the time. In short, chimps don’t run the world today because the ecological circumstances encountered by their ancestors didn’t produce the necessary evolutionary steps (for example, bipedalism, manual dexterity, and bigger brains). Similarly, elephants and whales didn’t evolve key elements, such as the physical capacity to create a material culture.

Is that it then? Are we merely an evolutionary fluke, the result of a staggeringly improbable series of events? Or is there a larger arc to this narrative? What greater meaning, if any, are we to derive from the human journey? Answering these questions must be the topic of a future post.

Notes and References (continued from Part 2)

9. A key lesson emerging from the human journey is that our present day circumstance, with a single hominin species, is the exceedingly rare exception. Throughout most of the past several million years, multiple hominin species have co-occurred, with two or three frequently sharing the same habitat. Those who continue to make the claim that no evidence exists of fossil intermediates in the human family tree are either not paying attention, or (as is too often the case) purposefully twisting the data to match preconceived biases against evolution.

10. Richard E. Green et al. 2010. A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome. Science 328(5979): 710–72

11. Krause, J., Fu, Q., Good, J. M., Viola, B., Shunkov, M. V., Derevianko, A. P., and Pääbo, S. (2010). The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia. Nature, 464(7290):894–897

12. Brown P., Sutikna T., Morwood M., Soejono R. P., Jatmiko, Saptomo E.W. et al. 2004. A new small-bodied hominin from the late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia. Nature, 431:1055-61; Morwood M. et al. (2005): Further evidence for small-bodied hominins from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia. Nature, 437:1012-1017.

13. Stringer, C. and McKie, R. 1998. African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity. Holt, New York; Tattersall, I. 2009. Human origins: Out of Africa. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 106(38):16018-16021.

Image Sources (from top to bottom)

1. Homo erectus (www.monipol.de/photo/hominden-evolution.html

2. Homo erectus discovering fire. (www.djacobs.pbworks.com)

3. Neanderthal woman (Joe McNally, National Geographic)

4. Homo floresiensis (www.guardian.co.uk)

5. Homo sapiens sapiens (Jay Matternes, National Geographic)

The Human Journey: Part 2

2011-07-27T20:36:00.000-07:00

Today's post continues the human evolution story begun in my last entry:

___________________

NEXT STOP IS eastern Africa two and half million years ago—Act II of the human journey. Our arrival coincides with the dawn of the Pleistocene Epoch [5]. An initial scan of the landscape reveals another mosaic of grass and woodlands not so unlike Ardi’s homeland. The expected array of big mammals is here: monkeys, pigs, antelopes, horses, rhinos, hippos, elephants, and carnivores. Like the modern Serengeti, horned antelope are particularly plentiful and diverse. Wildebeest and impala roam the plains in great numbers. Gazelles bound in and out of woodland patches. Waterbuck frequent the thick scrub adorning lake margins. Yet slowly you realize that something is profoundly different. The proportion of grasslands has increased at the expense of forests, and many of the mammals are mega-sized. There’s Elephas recki, a giant elephant far exceeding the bulk of the present day African elephant (Loxodonta). Also present are ultra-big baboons, wildebeest, and pigs, among others. Together with extra body bulk, all of these plant-eating mammals possess beefed up jaw muscles and broad, high-crowned cheek teeth covered in thick enamel. This trio of traits—enlarged bodies, molars, and jaw musculature—represents a convergent evolutionary response to the same dietary challenge. Food in grassland settings is dominated by tough, fiber-filled, low quality offerings. Many animals here, like Elephas and wildebeest, are consumers of grass. For others, like pigs and baboons, the menu consists mostly of tough fruits, hard seeds, and underground tubers. Either way, oversized cheek teeth driven by big chewing muscles offer a first line of defense. Big bodies with enlarged guts are the second line, digesting high volumes of low-nutrition fodder.

In a nearby ravine, you spot an unfamiliar primate hunched over, intent on some task. Moving closer, you see that this is a hominin about four feet tall and less than 100 pounds—slightly bigger than Ardi, perhaps, yet smaller than an average chimp. This female is clearly digging with a stick, laboring to remove chunks of hardpan soil. Eventually, successful in her quest, the ape-like animal picks up a freshly unearthed tuber and walks upright to a nearby patch of shade. Like Ardipithecus, she possesses long arms, yet her gait appears much more like our own, with long, efficient strides. As she sits and begins to gnaw on the bulbous root, you note that her face is distinctive, with massive jaw muscles housed inside strongly flared cheek bones. The molars are oversized as well, mimicking the pattern described above. This is Paranthropus boisei, part of a group of robust hominins that lived over much of Africa between 2.7 million and just shy of 1 million years ago. Besides boisei, two other Paranthropus species are known (aethiopicus and robustus). All share the same body plan and elaborate chewing adaptations. The first discovered boisei specimen was nicknamed “Nutcracker Man” because of its giant chompers, heavy-duty jaws, and pronounced crest atop theskull for anchoring the thickened jaw-closing muscles. As with pigs and other local omnivores, this specialized eating

apparatus was well suited to a diet of coarse plants, tubers, and other hard foods. Although her appearance is strange, you can’t help but feel a certain kinship toward this bantam-sized creature.

Then, from far off in the distance, an alien sound arrives, carried by the whispering grasslands. Rising to investigate, you walk across several low hills, listening as the cacophony intensifies and spiraling vultures congregate overhead. Ascending the last rise, you find yourself on a ridgetop overlooking a stunning scene. At the center, under a large tree, is a dismembered wildebeest. Scattered around the carcass are about a dozen boisterous hominins. Other than being slightly leaner and longer-legged, this bunch closely resembles Nutcracker Woman a few hills over. These animals are also efficient bipeds, striding back and forth between the dead antelope and its various amputated body parts. The only notable physical differences occur in the face, which are considerably narrower and slightly more humanlike. Most astonishing of all is what this hominin mob is up to. Some individuals slice meat from the foul-smelling carcass with sharp stone blades. Others use larger, fist-sized stone tools to break bones and access the sweet marrow within. On the far side, three hooting, gesticulating males (about a third larger than the females) keep a large spotted hyena at bay, while a pair of jackals paces impatiently in the wings. Clearly frightened by the hyena,

several smaller hominins have retreated to the tree, using their long arms to move through the branches with great dexterity. The unfortunate wildebeest, perhaps the victim of a lion kill, has been dead for at least a day and apparently dragged to this location. The hominins are clearly excited to be feeding on meat, yet anxious to move on. In a world of lions, leopards, sabertooths, and hyenas, hit and run is the only viable strategy for a runty scavenger.

The scavenger in question is Australopithecus garhi [6]. Australopiths were a hyper-successful group of hominins that persisted throughout most of Africa for well over 2 million years. The oldest known example, from about 4 million years ago, is Australopithecus anamensis, a species that heralds the onset of Act II. Then comes afarensis (Lucy), africanus, garhi, and sediba, the last of which disappears about 1.75 million years ago. This sequence does not denote a straight line of ancestors and descendents. Several of these species overlapped in time. Some lived in southern Africa whereas others are known only from East Africa. If the pace of recent finds is any guide, additional kinds of australopiths await discovery in African sediments. The skeletons of Australopithecus and Paranthropus are closely similar in both size and shape— an arm bone or vertebra of one could easily be confused with that of the other. Their brains were similarly sized as well. But australopith skulls lack the swollen cheeks, massive molars, and large, muscled crests of Paranthropus. Early Australopithecus species such as Lucy’s tribe are thought to have consumed a mixed diet of fruit, seeds, and wild vegetables, though studies of microscopic tooth wear suggest that this diet was augmented with occasional hard foods.

Later australopiths, including our raucous toolmaker, Australopithecus garhi, appear to have developed a taste for meat. In fact, garhi is arguably the first hominin to embark on a technological adventure that would one day result in electron microscopes, 747s, and iPads. The earliest evidence of stone tools dates to about 2.6 million years ago. For a long time it was thought that these crude blades, scrapers, and hammers—referred to collectively as the “Oldowan” tradition—must have been made by early members of our own, big-brained genus: Homo. The oldest known representative, Homo habilis (“handy man”), had a respectable brain size of 600 cc, a substantial gain over the 450 cc of gray matter housed in the noggin of Australopithecus garhi. The embarrassing problem is that the habilis remains date back only as far as 2.4 million years ago, resulting in a 200,000-year hiatus between the first stone tools and the first Homo. Of course, we could simply be missing the earliest Homo fossils, but, by the same logic, we may be missing even earlier stone tools. Adding fuel to the controversy is the fact that garhi remains were found in close association with a 2.5 million-year old butchery site, in which antelope and horse bones show distinctive cut marks. Slices on a zebra jawbone demonstrate that at least one of the tool-users was going after the tongue. So perhaps big brains weren’t necessary to launch this technological revolution. My guess is that the stick- and hammer-wielding chimps in the present-day forests of West Africa wouldn't be surprised.

It’s difficult to overstate the evolutionary significance of Oldowan stone tools. Think of them as multi-use, replaceable teeth—external dentures perhaps—that gave hominins access to a range of previously inaccessible (or at least rarely acquired) foods, from hard-shelled nuts to meat and marrow. Whereas genetic evolution can require millions of years to craft a thick-crowned molar or slicing canine, our ancestors learned to modify quartz and lava into a modest array of tools. Hit one chunk of basalt against another and the slicing blade that flies off is likely to have a sharper edge than the most lethal canine. The larger rock with a piece missing can be used for crushing, chopping, grinding, or generating more blades. In effect, tooth-mimicking tools enabled hominins to escape the limits of their own dentitions and begin the process of digestion outside the body. Best of all, this newly acquired technological capacity could be passed, gene-like, from generation to generation.

Stone tools had cascading consequences. Most rocks make for lousy tools, so early Pleistocene hominins had to venture to lava outcrops or concentrations of stream cobbles to find the necessary resources. Studies of microscopic markings on the edges of Oldowan tools demonstrate that they were used for processing both plants and meat. Food plants tend to occur in predictable places from one season to the next. In contrast, the divergent distributions of meat and rock resources, heightened by the unpredictability of carcasses, raised an immediate conundrum. Since you can’t carry stone tools around all the time, and since predators aren’t always going to make their kills conveniently near your key rock sites, how do you ensure that you have a ready tool supply to take advantage of a carcass? To make matters worse, out there on the open savannah you could easily become a lion or leopard’s next meal, so scavenging requires quick action. The solution, which garhi and our early Homo ancestors apparently hit upon, is transport and storage. Collect armfuls of rocks suitable for tool making and carry them to scattered locations around the landscape. That way, as long as you can remember where the rocks are, you’ll always have a ready tool supply. When one freshly made blade dulls, others can be generated quickly. In addition to meat, tool making allowed access to a high nutrition food that had previously been the domain of hyenas--marrow. Some researchers think that marrow's

fatty acids fueled the initial brain expansion in our Homo lineage [7]. Coincidentally, it was within a few hundred thousand years of the earliest stone tools that the first major leap in brain size occurred.

Finally, stone tools conferred upon early hominins a large measure of flexibility in the face of change. Plants counter the efforts of plant-eaters through a variety of evolutionary “strategies,” from hard outer coverings to chemical toxins. When shifting African climates transformed plant communities in a given area, it would have required significant time and effort for resident hominins to determine which of the new varieties were palatable, and how their nutrients could be extracted. Yet, barring a major deterioration in ecological conditions, chances are that carcasses of large herbivores would still occur on the landscape. So as long as opportunistic scavengers had their stone toolkits handy, they could probably eke out a living.

Towards the end of Act II, evolution’s creativity generated a bevy of hominins. One of these was bigger brained Homo habilis, the aforementioned “handy man.” Arguably the first representative of our own genus, habilis was not much larger than an australopith. At present, Australopithecus garhi is a plausible candidate ancestor for Homo habilis, but any such conclusion is provisional at best [8]. Despite our continual emphasis on the importance of brain size, there’s no evidence that the initial appearance of a larger-brained hominin was an ecological “game-changer.” Homo habilis did not immediately utilize its heightened neuron-power to conquer all foes and emerge as the dominant “ape-man.” On the contrary, the waning scenes of Act II witnessed the greatest known florescence of hominins, with up to six co-existing species in Africa around 2 million years ago. Other than habilis, the hominin menagerie included two kinds of Australopithecus (sediba and africanus), two of Paranthropus (boisei and robustus), and a last minute walk-on—the thick-browed, lanky-limbed Homo erectus. As we shall see, erectus would turn out to have greater staying power than any other hominin, rising to become a major star of Act III.

Notes and References (continued from Part 1)

5. The Pleistocene Epoch is now recognized to extend from 2.6 million years ago until 12,000 years ago. Up until 2009, this time period was said to begin at 1.8 million years ago, so any sources older than this will regard the 800,000 year period from 2.6 million to 1.8 million as part of the preceding Pliocene Epoch.

6. Asfaw, B., White, T., Lovejoy, O., Latimer, B., Simpson, S., Suwa, G. 1999. Australopithecus garhi: a new species of early hominid from Ethiopia. Science, 284(5414):629–35; De Heinzelin, J., Clark, J. D. White, T., Hart, W., Renne, P., Woldegabriel, G., Beyene, Y., Vrba, E. 1999. Environment and behavior of 2.5-million-year-old Bouri hominids. Science, 284(5414): 625–9.

7. Cordain, L., Watkins, B. A., and Mann, N. J. 2001. Fatty acid composition and energy density of foods available to African hominids. Pp. 144-161 in A. P. Simopoulos, K. N. Pavlou (eds.), Nutrition and Fitness: Metabolic Studies in Health and Disease. World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics, Vol. 90. Karger, Basel.

8. Currently, Australopithecus garhi appears just prior to Homo habilis and makes a plausible ancestor to the genus Homo. However, given such a bushy hominin family tree, identifying ancestors and descendents has become a high-risk sport, with another imminent discovery likely to blow the latest hypothesis to smithereens. So paleontologists don’t put too much weight in such claims.

Images (listed from top down)

1. Australopithecus afarensis (John Gurche; smithsonianscience.org)

2. Paranthropus boisei (wired.com)

3. Australopithecus africanus (transformingcommunication.com)

4. Australopithecus garhi (iesribalta.net)

5. Homo habilis (rst.gsfc.nasa.gov)

The Human Journey: Part 1

2011-06-21T12:42:00.000-07:00

WHEN I WAS pursuing a Masters degree in anthropology in the mid 1980’s, the story of human evolution differed greatly from the present version. Back then, the list of early hominins (the group of primates that includes humans and their upright relatives) contained a mere handful of names. The most famed of the bunch was Australopithecus afarensis, a small, apish creature discovered in Ethiopia only a decade prior. Recovered from 3.7 million-year-old rocks, afarensis laid claim to the title of oldest known hominin [1] and made a plausible human ancestor. The best-preserved specimen, nicknamed Lucy, possessed a human-like thighbone and a diminutive cranium,
clear evidence that upright walking preceded big brains. Other bipeds placed on the evolutionary “main line” heading for humanity included a succession of bigger-bodied, larger-brained, smaller-faced forms, including Australopithecus africanus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus. This sequence also represented a geologic series from oldest to youngest. Put a chimp at one end and a human at the other, and there before you was the classic conga-line progression from stooped-over ape to upright human, with the man (it was always a man) striding boldly into the future. To be fair, we students also learned about a few hominin offshoots from the main line—among them a pair of super-robust australopiths in Africa and the Neanderthals in Europe—but these creatures were clearly evolutionary dead-ends. The story’s central plot was simple and straightforward, heading in a bee-line for the pinnacle of creation. Ah, those were the days.

Back in the 80’s, you could have fit almost all known early hominin fossils from Africa onto a large table or two. But times have changed. Thanks to the dogged efforts of insightful scientists and keen fossil-finders, the past quarter century has witnessed a startling series of discoveries and insights in paleoanthropology. The bounty of recently unearthed fossils, coupled with revelations from the world of genetics, have dramatically fleshed out the human evolutionary story, and greatly complicated it as well. Umpteen new characters have been added to the dramatis personae, with the total number of hominin species now varying somewhere between 15 and 25, depending on whose counting. Key metaphors have been swapped out too. The traditional evolutionary ladder with Homo sapiens sitting on the uppermost rung has morphed into an arborescent family tree, each branch occupied by a different long lost cousin.

If we are to understand our relationship with nature, we must know something of the human journey, which is but one chapter in a much longer cosmic journey. How we conceive of humanity’s emerging cannot help but shape our views of the natural world. In a series of three posts, I will offer a synopsis of this 6 million year epic drama in three acts, each spanning roughly 2 million years. For the beginning of the story—your story—I have chosen a pivotal event that took place sometime between 5 million and 7 million years ago: the splitting of the human and chimpanzee lineages. One of these lines would culminate in the present day with relict populations totaling about 100,000 animals, all restricted to a few patches of West African forest. The other would wind up tracing the rise of a globally dominant species numbering more than 7 billion. Had you been present to witness this consequential parting of ways, it’s highly doubtful that you would have discerned any hint of such divergent futures. Those signs would come later, as evolution gradually molded the raw materials of our ancestors into a new kind of animal. So what happened? Given our shared heritage, why didn’t chimps take over the world instead of us? Answering that question is our critical task.

AS THE TIME machine sets us down in Act 1, we find ourselves immersed in a savannah-like scene in northeast Africa during the early Pliocene Epoch, about four and half million years ago. From the vantage of a circling eagle, we see a patchwork of grasslands and forest. A river with thickly wooded borders snakes lazily through the landscape, emptying into a nearby lake where catfish congregate in the depths, hippos and crocodiles lounge near the shore, and an impala herd pauses to drink. Zooming down for a closer look, we find a rhino mother and calf browsing a woodland margin. A startled family of guineafowl scurries into the underbrush. Not far off, a kudu male with august, spiraling horns plucks leafy foliage, keeping a watchful eye on his “harem,” while a giant tortoise plods along with his own reptilian concerns. Stepping into a forest patch, we enter another world, full of greenery, shadow, and birdsong. Sweltering grasslands are exchanged for a cool canopy of hackberry, palm, and fig trees. Colorful parrots and peafowl abound, accompanied by doves, lovebirds, swifts, and an occasional barn owl (minus the barn, of course). The litter of the forest floor hosts a profusion of dung beetles, snails, millipedes, and other creepy crawlies. You catch brief glimpses of lizards and rodents. A loud roaring overhead marks the arrival of a colobus monkey troop, evidently pleased to take a hiatus from leaf-eating to consume some sumptuous figs. A nearby squirrel, unhappy about the primate interlopers, chatters his objections. Although the vast majority of species here are distinct from those living today, the characters seem very familiar.

But then the rowdy colobus begin a new call, one that sounds more like an alarm. You look up to see the monkeys abruptly abandon their meal and make a rapid arboreal retreat. Moments later another hooting primate arrives. Instead of monkeys, these agile, ape-like creatures are much larger, about the size of chimpanzees yet distinctly different. Two adults move through the tree canopy on all fours, running along branches with grasping hands and feet. Four more individuals, among them a pair of juveniles, arrive on foot—two feet to be precise. They are walking upright, but with a strange gait, waddling side to side like John Wayne inflicted with serious saddle sores. Hanging by their sides are exceptionally long arms terminating in oversized, flexible hands. Now at the base of the fig tree, the animals climb with powerful, deliberate movements, more like tree sloths than colobus monkeys. Finally, the group gathers high in the canopy to feast on the ripe fruit. Watching them eat, you note that the largest individual, a male, lacks the long, dagger-like canines typical of chimps and gorillas. What is this creature?

Meet Ardipithecus ramidus—“Ardi” for short—by far the best known resident (for the moment) at the base of the hominin family tree [2]. Ardi was recovered in the Aramis region of Ethiopia, entombed within 4.4 million year-old rocks that predate Lucy by a million years. She is a marvelous, surprising amalgam of primitive and specialized features,

seemingly with one foot planted in the ape camp and the other in the human camp. In fact, Ardi’s foot is one of the best examples of this “split personality,” with the big toe directed sideways, able to grasp tree branches like an ape, and the remainder of the foot bones stiff and forward facing, well suited (at least to the eyes of some experts) to upright walking. The pelvis of Ardipithecus is similarly schizophrenic, with a flared upper portion adapted for two-legged walking and a deep lower portion suggestive of powerful climbing muscles. The brain was slightly larger than a chimp’s, and about 20% the size of a human brain. The size and shape of the teeth point to an omnivorous diet of plants, fruits, nuts, and tubers, perhaps supplemented by such delicacies as small mammals, bird eggs, and insects. Ardi’s fragmentary fossils have even been used to infer social behavior. Whereas chimp males use their oversized canines to compete aggressively for females, Ardipithecus males had small canines equivalent to those of females, suggesting to some investigators that males exhibited much less aggression toward one another. Perhaps, they argue, Ardipithecus couples formed long-term pair bonds, as humans do, an innovation that would have cascading effects down the hominin line.

At first glance, Ardi seems to be the perfect “missing link,” part ape and part human. But the notion of missing links turns out to be outdated, misguided, and, well, just plain wrong. First, and most trivially, animals like Ardipithecus clearly are not missing, but found. Second, such transitional animals are not links, a metaphor of progress closely allied with ladder rungs. Instead, such creatures are better regarded as mid-level branches that help us fill out the human family tree. Finally, although chimpanzees may be our closest living relatives, Ardi makes it clear that our last common ancestor with them differed markedly from Jane Goodall’s most beloved primate.

Gorillas and chimps both walk on the knuckles of their hands, so it’s long been thought that we humans must have passed through a knuckle-walking phase on our way to becoming bipedal. Yet Ardi lacks the stiffened hands seen in knuckle-walkers, and evidently walked on her substantial palms instead. Similarly, Ardipithecus doesn’t have the specialized arm and shoulder anatomy of our closest living ape cousins, suggesting that tree-swinging evolved in the chimp lineage sometime after the split with our ancestors. The feet too are informative. Chimpanzees are adept tree climbers in part because they lack a specialized foot bone, allowing their flexible feet to grasp branches when aloft. But that same flexibility hinders their ability to walk upright. Like us, Ardi possesses the key foot bone, suggesting that this element was lost in the chimp line sometime after the “great branching event.” In short, we didn’t evolve from chimpanzees. Far from being “primitive” or “backward,” our closest ape cousins, with whom we share more than 98% of our genes, have been on their own journey since we last parted ways in some ancient African forest.

In all, Ardi was a unique creature with a switch-hitting lifestyle, splitting her time between the ground and the trees, but likely more at home in the latter. Bipedalism, rather than offering views over tall grass or freeing the hands for tool use, may have evolved initially as a way to get around in a mixed habitat, walking upright on the ground and moving on all fours while up in the trees. As befits any arbor-loving species, Ardipithecus appears to have inhabited woodland settings, an ecological interpretation bolstered by the abundance of forest-living organisms found in the same sediments (a list that includes, by they way, all the plants and animals mentioned in our time-traveling scenario). Grasslands had been expanding in Africa for millions of years in response to a long-term trend toward drier, more seasonal climates. Yet plenty of forest patches persisted, more than enough to sustain Ardi and her kin [3].

Ardipithecus is not the only fossil representative from this earliest phase of hominin evolution. Recent discoveries of two other fossil forms, Sahelanthropus tchadensis from Chad and Orrorin tugenensis from Kenya, offer additional tantalizing clues of the chimp-human split [4]. But Ardi provides the only substantial illumination of the human journey’s first act. My strong hunch is that we’ll ultimately discover a diverse tribe of Ardipithecus-like hominins that lived between 7 million and 5 million years ago. Why? Because so little is known from this time interval and, as we shall see in the next post, experience gleaned from explorations into subsequent acts of this drama reveal an African continent populated by unexpected clans of upright cousins. Stay tuned.

Notes and References

1. The terminology applied to our nearest evolutionary relatives has changed over time. Back in the 1980’s, the word “hominid” referred only to humans and their bipedal relatives. More recently, the close genetic relationship that we share with chimpanzees and other apes has prompted a shift in terms. Today, the word “hominid” refers to the larger family of primates that includes all great apes and humans, together with their last common ancestor and all extinct members of this group. In its place, the word “hominin” is now commonly used to denote humans and other bipedal apes, including Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and extinct species of Homo.

2. White, T, D. Asfaw, B., Beyene, Y., Haile-Selassie, Y., Lovejoy, C. O., Suwa, G., WoldeGabriel, G. 2009. "Ardipithecus ramidus and the paleobiology of early hominids. Science, 326 (5949): 75–86. doi:10.1126/science.1175802

3. Not all investigators are convinced that Ardipithecus inhabited a forest setting. A study by Thure Cerling (University of Utah) and colleagues presents evidence that forests were largely limited to the banks of rivers and that grasslands were abundant even then. Tim White (University of California, Berkeley) and his team have responded by arguing, convincingly I believe, that, although grasslands were certainly present, the weight of evidence points to a forest habitat for Ardi. Cerling, T. E., Levin, N. E., Quade, J., Wynn, J. G., Fox, D. L., Kingston, J. D., Klein, R. G., and Brown, F. H. 2010. Comment on the paleoenvronment of Ardipithecus ramidus. Science, 328(1105): doi: 10.1126/science.1185274; White, T. D., Ambrose, S. H., Suwa, G. and WoldeGabriel, G. 2010. Response to comment on the paleoenvironment of Ardipithecus ramidus. Science, 328(1105: doi: 10.1126/science.1185466.

4. Brunet M. et al. 2002. A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa. Nature, 418:145-151; Senut, B., Pickford, M., Gommery, D., Mein, P., Cheboi, K., Coppens, Y. 2001. First hominid from the Miocene (Lukeino Formation, Kenya). Comptes Rendus de l'Academie des Sciences, Series IIA - Earth and Planetary Science 332(2):137-144.

Image Sources (from top to bottom)

1. http://www.dailymail.co.uk

2. http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/evol/ev-ibel2.htm

3-5. http://www.news.sciencemag.org

6. http://www.news.sciencenews.org

Backyard Dinosaurs

2011-05-26T10:03:00.000-07:00

“Can we go see the barn owls one more time? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeease?” That was my daughter Jade a couple of Saturdays ago. “Ok, ok,” I gave in. “Let’s go!” We found the owl couple perched in the rafters of the barn just as we’d left them an hour before, with the tan-and-speckled female wedged up against the snowy-white male. Only the male cracked open his eyes as we snuck back in for another peek. Through binoculars, their striking, heart-shaped faces appeared unreal, almost otherworldly.

It was International Migratory Bird Day, and a nearby park, Muir Woods National Monument, had organized a bird walk in celebration. Jade and I joined a group of about 15 other kids and adults. Most of us carried binoculars. Our intrepid lead birder, Dave Mackenzie, toted an even more powerful spotting scope mounted on a tripod. As we met him in the beach parking lot, he pointed at the scope and said, “Check out the Pacific Loons. We’ve seen hundreds fly by this morning heading north to their Arctic breeding grounds.” It took Jade a minute to get the hang of looking through the eyepiece, but then her eyes went wide with amazement as she watched the black-throated fish-eaters zoom past one after the other.

“Turkey vultures,” someone yelled, and all heads tilted skyward. Jade and I are accustomed to seeing “TVs,” as they are affectionately known. But today, surrounded by this group of bird-lovers, the two-toned undersides of those giant, soaring wings took on new meaning. Ravens, Bonaparte’s Gulls, and an Anna’s Hummingbird were quickly added to the list before we set off for the nearby marsh. A host of Red-Winged Blackbirds perched on cattails was there to greet us, flashing their brilliant red epaulets while their piercing metallic voices rang out. A Snowy Egret attempting merely to fly over the marsh was immediately attacked by three of the dive-bombing blackbirds. The kids were enamored with two families of Mallard Ducks, laughing as the yellow, waddling chicks did their level best to keep up. Meanwhile I was staring through the scope at a male Northern Flicker, completely absorbed by his red “mustache” and black-speckled body. A huge highlight for both of us was climbing a nearby hill to get a “bird’s eye” view into the nest of a Red-tailed Hawk. The large stick nest, nestled atop a Monterey Cypress tree, held two gangly white chicks, while one of the parents kept a steadfast watch nearby.

The surprising truth of the matter is that every single one of these winged wonders is a dinosaur, members of the same family as T. rex. All living birds are the direct descendants of small, feathered dinosaurs that lived more than 150 million years ago. Thus, in a very real sense, those raucous Red-Winged Blackbirds are backyard dinosaurs, offering a vibrant window into the distant past. In recent years, fossils of more than a dozen different varieties of feathered (nonavian) dinosaurs have been unearthed in China. So similar are many of these animals to birds that it’s difficult to tell one from the other; indeed the two are often confused. Dinosaurs aren’t extinct, then. With over 10,000 different living species, they far outnumber mammals (closer to 6,000 species). The Mesozoic Era is often called “The Age of Dinosaurs,” and the succeeding Cenozoic Era, in which we live, “The Age of Mammals.” But no, it seems that we still live in the Age of Dinosaurs. (To be fair, whether your metric is number of individuals, variation, or total biomass, the past four billion years are best regarded as the “Age of Bacteria,” but we macro-sized creatures tend to overlook the microbial world.)

In previous posts, I have bemoaned the recent startling transformation in children’s leisure time. A child growing up today is likely to spend 90% less time outdoors than a child born just one generation ago. How can we possibly build sustainable communities if people don’t care about the places they live. And how are we to care if we don’t spend any time experiencing our local natural communities? Robert Michael Pyle has referred to this frightening state of affairs as, “the extinction of experience.” [1]

I grew up playing outside and fascinated by all things nature-oriented. As a parent, I am very conscious of exposing my daughter to the nonhuman world around our home. However, I’ve found that taking her on hikes is not always welcomed. “My legs hurt daddy,” is what I hear after the first half mile—in spite of the fact that she can run around all day long with her friends. So I’ve learned to replace the word “hike” with “adventure,” a tip shared by another frustrated parent. Adults tend to be goal-oriented; when out hiking, this means reaching a particular destination. Kids are more interested in playing. By making the outing more about the moment, and less about the goal, I’ve found it much easier to keep Jade engaged and happy.

But, to retain your parental credibility, you still need to deliver on the “adventure.” This is where the magic of birds (i.e., dinosaurs) comes in. Most kids think trees and other plants are pretty ho-hum. And the majority of animals out there can be tough to find, unless you focus on the creepy-crawlies beneath your feet. But, in addition to being beautiful, active, and diverse, birds are nearly ubiquitous. A set of binoculars and an identification book (the Sibley field guides are the birding gold-standard) are all you need to get started, though feeders are an excellent way to attract birds literally into your backyard. In addition to making identifications, it’s fun to watch what birds do. (While I was out walking a few months back, a large raven flew toward me about 20 feet off the deck and inverted itself just as it passed overhead. I just stood there stunned, suddenly reminded of Tom Cruise executing the same show-off aerobatics in Top Gun.)

Now, added to all this is the T. rex angle. As I know from direct experience in my role as Dr. Scott the Paleontologist on Dinosaur Train, most kids love dinosaurs. So what better way to entice youngsters to go outside than to offer the carrot of seeing living, breathing dinosaurs?! In short, we desperately need to connect kids to local nature—both for their sake and that of the local nature—and backyard dinosaurs are arguably the most powerful tool to make these connections happen. In my recent book [2], I called for a “backyard dinosaur revolution.” So how about it? Are you in?

Jade and I have decided to get more serious about birding and begin keeping a “life list,” a logbook of bird identifications and observations. So now our “hikes” have become “treasure hunts” as we look to add more feathered neighbors to our respective tallies. Mom is excited to join in too. Just yesterday Jade asked, for the umpteenth time, “Daddy, when can we go back to see the barn owls?”

References

Pyle, R. M. 1998. The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland. Lyons Press, Guilford, CT.

Sampson, S. D. 2009. Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life. University of California Press, Berkeley.

All images derived from National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/

Discovering Your Journey

2011-04-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

Do you possess a meaningful sense of place, an emotional connection to the life and land around you? Or how about a strong sense of history, an affective connection to the deep time story of you? If you’re like most of us, your answer to both questions is no. A little reflection will reveal the immense depth of this problem. How can we ever hope to live sustainably if we don’t care about the places we live? As the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould once claimed [1], “We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature—for we will not fight to save what we do not love.”

Until very recently, virtually all cultures were rooted to their native places by origin stories—or cosmologies—that provided explanations for the origin and ordering of the world around them. Although present-day indigenous peoples and most followers of religious traditions have a cosmology, the bulk of us living in Western industrial societies don’t. Previously, I have written in this blog about the scientific Epic of Evolution, that astonishing and staggeringly beautiful account of our deep time evolutionary history that has emerged from within science over the past several decades. Following in the giant footsteps of Thomas Berry [2], I am convinced that this grand narrative, arguably science’s greatest contribution, has the potential to unite humanity and root us in both local places and deep time. Yet to date the evolutionary epic remains virtually absent from our culture. Why?

Some would point to the efforts of religious fundamentalists to suppress evolution. Others would underline Western culture’s myopic focus on the present day, with the implicit message that almost everything that came before is irrelevant. Still others would note that the deep scientific insights at the core of the cosmic story tend be highly counterintuitive; as I've said before, it’s not easy to grasp the notion that we are chunks of starstuff living on the side of a giant, spherical rock hurtling through space at thousands of miles an hour! While these factors and others are certainly involved, the single greatest obstacle preventing widespread dissemination of the Epic of Evolution may well be abstraction. To date, the evolutionary epic has been presented as a grand saga uniting all of humanity within a single cosmic unfolding. Yet absent has been a clear means of grounding this story in everyday experience, where it could assert its full emotional (as opposed to merely intellectual) impact.

At first glance it would seem that cosmic evolution has little in common with everyday experience in local places. After all, the former deals with the biggest scales of time and space, whereas the latter is concerned with the very intimate nearby. But imagine for a moment communicating the universe story entirely through reference to local characters and features. To give a few examples from my home, a forest-clad mountain might serve to tell of the origins of galaxies and stars (with all heavy elements in the rocks forged within stellar furnaces); a gurgling creek could become the vehicle for speaking of the birth of molecules (combining oxygen and hydrogen to become water); a majestic redwood could convey the story of life learning to harness the sun’s energy; a spawning salmon could become the entry point for telling of the first back-boned animals and their transition onto land; a raven flying overhead offers a fine protagonist for conveying the story of reptiles, dinosaurs, and birds; and the indigenous Miwok peoples offer a vibrant focus for telling of the birth of humans and their changing relationship to the land. The entire story might be conveyed outdoors in a natural setting, engaging the full range of listeners’ senses. The essential point here is that the key characters of the cosmic journey (galaxies, stars, landscapes, bacteria, plants, animals, culture, etc.) are all present today in one form or another in every place. So any place can be used to convey the full splendor of the cosmic saga.

This “cosmolocal approach” provides the opportunity for reciprocal illumination of place and story. On the one hand, the Epic of Evolution offers a wondrous narrative context that adds meaning to local place. On the other, local places provide the characters and direct experience that makes this evolutionary epic alive, immediate, and engaging. Each version of the story can be tailored not only to place, but also to the age and knowledge base of the audience, from children through adults. Importantly, these stories should not be presented as received ‘truths.’ After all, like science generally, the story of cosmic evolution, although well established in its fundamentals, is still provisional in some aspects, and will undoubtedly “evolve” itself. More importantly, the cosmolocal approach opens the door for each person to construct his/her own unique version of the Universe Story, selecting the most meaningful local characters with which to explore and convey this saga.

The beauty of the evolutionary epic is that it allows for an endless variety of interpretations, each one informed by specific historical, cultural, spiritual, and ecological contexts. Certainly the grand cosmic saga is not compatible with all religious beliefs,particularly fundamentalist notions of creation within the past 6,000 years. But just as the world’s spiritual traditions have adapted to the reality that the Earth does not exist at the center of the universe, so too must we now accept, indeed embrace, the fact that we live in a dynamic universe that has been unfolding for billions of years.

Ultimately, the cosmolocal approach has potential to simultaneously foster both a deep sense of place and history. This way of understanding the universe is not new, of course. Indigenous peoples have used it for many thousands of years to root their origin myths in intimate details of their homelands. It’s high time that we married this ancient wisdom with modern science to root ourselves in both local place and the greater cosmos.

In closing, I strongly recommend that you check out a spectacular, newly released documentary, Journey of the Universe, created by my very wise and talented friends, Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker (together with a team of others). "JOTU," as the project is labeled, is the amazing culmination of many years work, offering a brief, jaw-dropping synopsis of the evolutionary epic. Go to: http://www.journeyoftheuniverse.org/

References

1. Gould, S. J. 1993. Unenchanted evening. Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History. Norton, New York. (p. 40)

2. Berry, T. 1990. The Dream of the Earth. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco.

All images derived from National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/

The Nature of Love

2011-03-04T09:57:00.000-08:00

Albert Einstein, that seemingly endless fount of quotations, once said, “gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.” Ok, fair enough, but who or what is responsible? Why do we fall in love? Most of us think of love as an inspired feeling, but it turns out that our passions and attachments owe more to chemistry than to Cupid.

Of the theories I’ve seen on love, the one I find most compelling comes from anthropologist Helen Fisher [1]. Fisher speaks of three varieties of human bonding with the opposite sex, each mediated by a different neurochemical system. There’s the sex drive, linked in both males and females to that infamous hormone testosterone. Next comes romantic love, triggered by a brain chemical called dopamine. And finally there’s that deep, persistent feeling of attachment, governed by a pair of pituitary gland hormones: oxytocin and vasopressin. Think of this passionate trio as lust, love, and longing, respectively.

Why the three flavors of love? Fisher argues that the answer involves an evolutionary solution to the ancient problem of reproduction. Lust motivates us to seek sex with an assortment of partners. Love (of the romance variety) keeps us focused on just one partner at a time. And longing glues us to one partner long enough to raise a child through infancy. The three systems collaborate, . . . well, . . . shall we say, imperfectly, allowing us simultaneously to feel a deep sense of attachment for a spouse and a desire to romance another, while fighting off lustful thoughts of nameless others.

Of course, intersexual relationships are not the only kind of human bonding. There’s also mother-infant bonding as well as bonds with fathers, more distant kin, and nonkin, all of which appear to serve the function of bolstering infant survival rates. (Bonds between kin and nonkin can facilitate the formation of social networks as well). Looking beyond the human realm, we discover that chemically mediated bonding—particularly between mothers and infants, and between males and females—is rampant among birds and mammals, and for the same reasons: reproduction and survival. In the competition to pass one’s genes on to the next generation, evolution, it seems, leaves little to chance [2].

What I find especially fascinating is that some of the same chemicals are involved in these other forms of bonding. For example, oxytocin, the hormone linked to long-term attachment, shows up as a major player in the mother-infant bond. Mothers with higher levels of oxytocin in the first trimester of pregnancy tend to form stronger bonds with their infants postpartum than mothers with lower levels [3]. Oxytocin also turns out to be a primary ingredient of mother’s milk, helping baby bond with Momma. And what hormone is involved with bonding pets to their respective human counterparts? That’s right—oxytocin [4]. Although research into the chemical basis of love remains in its infancy [5], it’s no wonder that some folks call oxytocin “the love drug.”

Now, I am certainly no neurochemist. Indeed chemistry has never been one of my strong suits. (For some inexplicable reason, concepts like covalent bonding and oxidation states have always made my eyes glaze over and my brain turn to mush). Nevertheless, I’m going to make a prediction about the nature and neurochemistry of bonding. I predict that future research will reveal solid evidence of a human bond with (nonhuman) nature—what people have referred to as “biophilia” (see my previous post)—and that this bond will be facilitated by none other than our hormonal friend oxytocin.

Going further out on the limb of theory, I speculate that this effect will turn out to be strongest if strengthened by abundant childhood experience in local nature. In other words, I think that this human-nature bond will have a cultural component (plenty of time as a child exploring local natural environs) and a genetic component (neurochemical mediation by oxytocin). To my knowledge, no solid evidence exists to support any of this, but I’m sticking with it until proven otherwise.

Part of my reasoning relates to the bevy of studies that report the stress-reducing effects of being in nature, or even gazing at it out a window or on a screen [6,7]. I am suspicious that such feelings have a neurochemical basis related to human-nature bonding. But what eco-evolutionary function might such a bond serve? In other words, why on Earth would humans evolve an emotional attachment to the more-than-human world? Reproduction? Survival? Something else? The answer (or at least my current best answer) must await a future post. Thanks for staying tuned.

References

1. Fisher, H. 2004. Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. Henry Holt, New York.

2. Broad, K. D., Curley, J. P., and Keverne, E. B. 2006. Mother-infant bonding and the evolution of mammalian social relationships. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. B., 361:2199-2214.

3. Feldman, R., Weller, A., Zagoory-Sharon, O., and Levine. A. 2007. Evidence for a neuroendocrinological foundation of human affiliation: plasma oxytocin levels across pregnancy and the postpartum period predict mother-infant bonding. Pscyhol. Sci., 18(11):965-70.

4. Odendaal, J. S. J. and Meintjes, R. A. 2003. Neurophysiological correlates of affiliative behaviour between humans and dogs. Veterinary Journal, 165:296−301.

5. Campbell, A. 2010. Oxytocin and human social behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(3):281-295.

6. Ulrich, R. S. 1993. Biophilia, biophobia, and natural landscapes. Pp. 73-137 in S. R. Kellert, S. R. and E. O. Wilson (eds.), The Biophilia Hypothesis. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

7. Kahn, P. H., Jr. 1999. The Human Relationship with Nature: Development and Culture. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

All images derived from National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/

Loving Life

2011-02-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

About 4:30 am this morning, amidst a coastal downpour, my wife Toni and I awoke to the sound of two young raccoons having a WWF-style wrestling smackdown in the gathering pool of water on the skylight overhead. Smiling at the rambunctious pair going head to head, trying to toss each other “out of the ring,” I paused to wonder whether or not I really cared about raccoons—or any other “wild” animals for that matter.

So how about it? Do you love life? I’m not talking here about the concept of living; rather I refer to your emotional bond with other, nonhuman forms of life. Nothing kinky here folks. The question is whether or not you, and people generally, feel some sort of deep-felt connection to the more-than-human world.

The term “biophilia”—literally, a love of life—was first used by psychologist Erich Fromm [1] in 1964 to describe a particular psychological orientation—a vital attraction to nature, both human and nonhuman. Use of this term became much more widespread two decades later following publication of a thin volume from biologist E. O. Wilson [2]. Wilson’s “biophilia hypothesis” proposed that humans possess an instinctive tendency to affiliate with other life forms. According to this idea, biophilia is no less than a genetically mediated need resulting from numerous millennia of human evolution living in direct contact with the nonhuman world.

A diverse range of evidence has been cited in support of the biophilia hypothesis. One group of studies examined the health benefits of interacting with nature. To give an example, a group of patients who had just had gall bladder surgery were placed either into a room with windows looking out onto a natural setting or a room lacking windows [4]. By several measures—for example, pain medication needed and length of hospital stay—individuals in the former group fared significantly better than those in the latter. Health benefits following exposure to natural settings have also been reported for dental patients, prison inmates, and individuals recovering from stress [e.g., 4,5,6]. Similarly, a summary of more than 100 studies [4] reported benefits for individuals who have spent time in a wilderness area. In short, exposure to natural settings—whether through direct experience, looking out a window, or observing a photograph or video—appears to have measurable positive effects on health, both physiological and psychological.

A second group of studies looked at habitat preferences. Ecologist Gordon Orians [7] proposed that

humans have an innate tendency to prefer an “ideal” habitat with a particular trio of characteristics: 1) a savannah or park-like landscape with a mixture of forest and grasslands; 2) a body of water such as ocean or a lake; and 3) a prominence, offering a view of the surrounding terrain. In proposing the biophilia hypothesis, E. O. Wilson grabbed onto on this concept, claiming that our inherited preference for savannah settings cascades from our lengthy evolutionary heritage on the African savannah. Plenty of subsequent research [e.g., 5] has supported the existence of an innate landscape bias, although the idea has also had its detractors. For example, Jared Diamond [8] noted that humans have occupied a diverse range of habitats in the tens of thousands of years since we departed the African savannah, allowing plenty of time for inherited preferences to evolve in other landscapes. It is feasible, then, that we do not necessarily possess a genetic bias for savannah settings, but rather an innate preference for landscapes that, for much of our history, provided key elements for survival (i.e., prospect, refuge, food, and water).

Yet another group of studies has addressed the human propensity to affiliate with some animals and avoid others. As in the case of natural landscapes, exposure to animals—from fish in aquariums to birds, cats, and dogs—tends to promote physiological health and a sense of well being [e.g., 6]. Much research into so-called “human-animal bonds” has documented the great health benefits in

particular of companion animals [9].

Without doubt, the biophilia hypothesis has struck a chord with a range of environmentally minded people, from activists, educators, and conservationists to psychologists, architects, and landscape designers [e.g., 10.11,12]. Adherents have particularly embraced the implication that abundant, direct experience outdoors is an innate need, essential for a healthy childhood [e.g., 13,14]. E. O. Wilson himself [2,3] has suggested that biophilia might serve as no less than the foundational concept of a new conservation ethic. Unsurprisingly, the biophilia hypothesis has also garnered widespread support from within ecopsychology [15]. An innate propensity to affiliate with life has been seen as a framework for investigating the troubled human-nature relationship, and even a vehicle to redefine this relationship.

Yet biophilia has attracted its share of critics as well [e.g., 8,16,167], and, to be frank, has received minimal attention within scientific circles. Most telling of all is that biophilia—an evolutionary hypothesis pertaining to the human mind—has been all but ignored by the rapidly growing field of evolutionary psychology. A pair of recent books reviewing the latter discipline [18,19] lacks so much as an index listing for biophilia (although, to be fair, there are discussions of certain elements, such as habitat preferences).

Among the problems with Wilson’s hypothesis is the fact biophilia is continually defined as the human affinity for other organisms, despite the fact that people also affiliate and bond with nonliving aspects of nature. Indeed one of Wilson’s key examples of biophilia, the putative “ideal” savannah habitat, is based largely on physical elements of environment (e.g., topographic relief, water). Perhaps the most intractable problem for biophilia is its apparent lack of testability. Biophilia is generally regarded as an umbrella term designated to cover a diverse range of inherited behaviors involving our interactions with the nonhuman world. So it is difficult, if not impossible, to test the concept as a whole. One thing is clear. If we do possess an innate proclivity to affiliate with other life forms (and with nature more generally), cultural overprinting can prevent the development (or at least the persistence) of a bond with the living world. Evidence for this fact can be found in the rapidly increasing numbers of “biophobics” [10].

This debate over biophilia is not merely an intellectual exercise. Make no mistake; the stakes are high. As evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould [20] claimed, “We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional

bond between ourselves and nature as well—for we will not fight to save what we do not love.” In my view, the theoretical underpinnings of biophilia are not sufficiently robust to serve as the foundation for understanding the human bond with nature. In coming posts, I will propose an alternative hypothesis that addresses many of the key criticisms of biophilia and outlines a pathway for fostering emotional bonds with the more-than-human world.

Lying there in bed unable to get back to sleep after the big event, I decided that I really do care about raccoons, and the myriad other creatures with whom I share this place in northern California. Now if only I could figure out a way to stop those masked wrestlers from using their best moves on our garbage can!

References

1) Fromm, E. 1964. The Heart of Man. Harper & Row, New York.

2) Wilson, E. O. 1984. Biophilia: The Human Bond with other Species. Harvard University Press, Boston.

3) Wilson, E. O. 1993. Biophilia and the conservation ethic. Pp. 31-41 in S. R. Kellert, S. R. and E. O. Wilson (eds.), The Biophilia Hypothesis. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

4) Ulrich, R. S. 1993. Biophilia, biophobia, and natural landscapes. Pp. 73-137 in S. R. Kellert, S. R. and E. O. Wilson (eds.), The Biophilia Hypothesis. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

5) Heerwagen, J. H. and Orians, G. H. 1993. Pp. 138-172 in S. R. Kellert, S. R. and E. O. Wilson (eds.), The Biophilia Hypothesis. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

6) Kahn, P. H., Jr. 1999. The Human Relationship with Nature: Development and Culture. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

7) Orians, G. H. 1980. Habitat selection: General theory and applications to human behavior. In J. S. Lockard (ed.), The Evolution of Human Social Behavior. Elsevier, New York.

8) Diamond, J. 1993. New Guineans and their natural world. Pp. 251-271 in S. R. Kellert, S. R. and E. O. Wilson (eds.), The Biophilia Hypothesis. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

9) Walsh, F. 2009. Human-animal bonds I: The relational significance of companion animals. Family Process, 48:462-480.

10) Kellert, S. R. 1997. Kinship to Mastery: Biophilia in Human Evolution and Development. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

11) Orr, D. W. 1994. Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

12) Suzuki, D. 1997. The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature. Greystone Books, Vancouver.

13) Nabhan, G. P. and Trimble, S. A. 1995. The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places. Beacon Press, Boston.

14) Louv, R. 2006. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, NC.

15) Roszak, T., Gomes, M.E. Kanner, A.D. 1995. (eds.). Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco.

16} Sagan, D. and Margulis, L. 1993. God, Gaia, and biophilia. Pp. 345-364 in S. R. Kellert, S. R. and E. O. Wilson (eds.), The Biophilia Hypothesis. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

17) Fischer, C. S. 1994. Widespread likings: Review of The Biophilia Hypothesis. Science, 263:1161–1162.

18) Buss, D. M. (ed.). 2006. The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Wiley, New York.

19) Buss, D. M. 2008. Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, Third Edition. Pearson, New York.

20) Gould, S. J. 1993. Unenchanted evening. Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History. Norton, New York. Quotation from p. 40.

All images derived from National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/

Interbeing

2011-01-20T12:37:00.000-08:00

Author Note: Today, I offer a short essay posted a few days ago on Edge.org. It represents my answer to John Brockman's annual question, which this year is: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Check out other people's answers to this question.

___________________________

Humanity’s cognitive toolkit would greatly benefit from adoption of “interbeing,” a concept that comes from Vietnamese Buddhist monk

Thich Nhat Hanh. In his words:

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in [a] sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either . . . “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have a paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are. . . . “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.”

Depending on your perspective, the above passage may sound like profound wisdom or New Age mumbo-jumbo. I would like to propose that interbeing is a robust scientific fact—at least insomuch as such things exist—and, further, that this concept is exceptionally critical and timely.

Arguably the most cherished and deeply ingrained notion in the Western mindset is the separateness of our skin-encapsulated selves—the belief that we can be likened to isolated, static machines. Having externalized the world beyond our bodies, we are consumed with thoughts of furthering our own ends and protecting ourselves. Yet this deeply rooted notion of isolation is illusory, as evidenced by our constant exchange of matter and energy with the “outside” world. At what point did your last breath of air, sip of water, or bite of food cease to be part of the outside world and become you? Precisely when did your exhalations and wastes cease being you? Our skin is as much permeable membrane as barrier, so much so that, like a whirlpool, it is difficult to discern where “you” end and the remainder of the world begins. Energized by sunlight, life converts inanimate rock into nutrients, which then pass through plants, herbivores, and carnivores before being decomposed and returned to the inanimate Earth, beginning the cycle anew. Our internal metabolisms are intimately interwoven with this Earthly metabolism; one result is the replacement of every atom in our bodies every seven years or so.You might counter with something like, “Ok, sure, everything changes over time.So what? At any given moment, you can still readily separate self from other.”

Not quite. It turns out that “you” are not one life form—that is, one self—but many. Your mouth alone contains more than 700 distinct kinds of bacteria. Your skin and eyelashes are equally laden with microbes and your gut houses a similar bevy of bacterial sidekicks. Although this still leaves several bacteria-free regions in a healthy body—for example, brain, spinal cord, and blood stream—current estimates indicate that your physical self possesses about a trillion human cells and about 10 trillion bacterial cells. In other words, at any given moment, your body is about 90% nonhuman, home to many more life forms than the number of people presently living on Earth; more even than the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy! To make things more interesting still, microbiological research demonstrates that we are utterly dependent on this ever-changing bacterial parade for all kinds of “services,” from keeping intruders at bay to converting food into useable nutrients.

So, if we continually exchange matter with the outside world, if our bodies are completely renewed every few years, and if each of us is a walking colony of trillions o f largely symbiotic life forms, exactly what is this self that we view as separate? You are not an isolated being. Metaphorically, to follow current bias and think of your body as a machine is not only inaccurate but destructive. Each of us is far more akin to a whirlpool, a brief, ever-shifting concentration of energy in a vast river that’s been flowing for billions of years. The dividing line between self and other is, in many respects, arbitrary; the “cut” can be made at many places, depending on the metaphor of self one adopts. We must learn to see ourselves not as isolated but as permeable and interwoven—selves within larger selves, including the species self (humanity) and the biospheric self (life). The interbeing perspective encourages us to view other life forms not as objects but subjects, fellow travelers in the current of this ancient river. On a still more profound level, it enables us to envision ourselves and other organisms not as static “things” at all, but as processes deeply and inextricably embedded in the background flow.

One of the greatest obstacles confronting science education is the fact that the bulk of the universe exists either at extremely large scales (e.g., planets, stars, and galaxies) or extremely small scales (e.g., atoms, genes, cells) well beyond the comprehension of our

(unaided) senses. We evolved to sense only the middle ground, or “mesoworld,” of animals, plants, and landscapes. Yet, just as we have learned to accept the non-intuitive, scientific insight that the Earth is not the center of the universe, so too must we now embrace the fact that we are not outside or above nature, but fully enmeshed within it. Interbeing, an expression of ancient wisdom backed by science, can help us comprehend this radical ecology, fostering a much-needed transformation in mindset.

Image Credits

All images courtesy of National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/

The Psychology of Sustainability

2010-10-19T10:43:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I attended an inspiring three-day conference in San Rafael, California, called Bioneers. Bioneers is an annual gathering of people with a shared passion for environmental and social justice issues. The meeting highlights truly remarkable individuals and groups doing great things for humanity and the planet. To give just an example from this year’s program, one of the plenary speakers was renowned primatologist Jane Goodall. “Dr. Jane,” as she is known by millions of youth around the world, is arguably the most famous living scientist; these days, however, her efforts are concentrated on Roots and Shoots, a worldwide program that engages youth in community service.

In addition to the many wonderful speakers, Bioneers features afternoon panel sessions on a spectrum of topics, from permaculture and gender equity to environmental education and protecting wildlands. One session that particularly caught my eye this past weekend was titled “Ecopsychology Emerging.”

My father was a psychologist and university professor whose primary passions were family and teaching. Perhaps because of this early connection, I have always had a strong interest in matters of the mind. Nevertheless, from childhood I felt drawn even more to nonhuman nature, which took me down a wholly different path, one that wound up in the Age of Dinosaurs. Today, that same path has meandered back to the present day, and, perhaps surprisingly, to psychology.

As the name suggests, ecopsychology sits at the juxtaposition of ecology and psychology. It is a relatively new field of inquiry, tracing its origins back less than two decades [1, 2]. Although psychology has traditionally concerned itself solely with the human realm, ecopsychologists seek to explore the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature. (It is worth noting that, strictly speaking, the notion of a “relationship” between humans and nonhuman nature is nonsensical, equivalent to speaking of a person’s relationship with humanity. However, this terminology is effective in underlining the perceived disjunction between humanity and the “more-than-human,” and thus I perpetuate it here.) One of the discipline’s central ideas is “biophilia,” E. O. Wilson’s notion that humankind possesses an innate affinity with the living world, honed over many thousands of years of existing in intimate contact with other life forms [3].

In my view, and that of growing numbers of people from a variety of fields, the roots of our present sustainability crisis lie in a dysfunctional relationship between humanity and nonhuman nature. So repairing that relationship with a transformed worldview, one that reinserts humans inside nature, may just be the central challenge of our time. If so, ecopsychology—the field designated to explore the human-nature relationship—is poised to become one of the most critical and pressing areas of inquiry in this century. It was with great interest, then, that I attended the Bioneers session, which featured five prominent ecopsychologists. And, I’m sorry to say, it was with a strong sense of disappointment that I departed that same session 90 minutes later.

One by one the speakers discussed their perspectives and practices. The bulk of the discussion focused on eco-therapy, underlining the healing power of nature for individuals and small groups. The audience heard about the health benefits of outdoor therapy sessions and wilderness immersion programs. I became more hopeful when the discussion turned to the cognitive dissonance surrounding global warming, but here the consensus among the panel members seemed anything but hopeful, let alone proactive. One speaker concluded that it would take a very long time indeed to convince most people of the risks posed by climate change.

Don’t get me wrong. I fully applaud the gains made by eco-therapy, and agree wholeheartedly that we need to devote attention to such programs. But these efforts simply are not enough—not even close. We have perhaps a generation to turn things around and establish a sustainable course, not only technologically but cognitively. To be fair, the panelists did outline key elements of our disillusionment with the living world. Yet they proposed few, if any, meaningful solutions.

We need ecopsychology to do much more. Our dire situation demands bold vision and creative “backcasting,” in which we determine a set of goals and then figure out how to achieve them. With regard to remedying the human-nature divide, we must transform our perception of the natural world from “a collection of objects to a communion of subjects,” to use Thomas Berry’s poignant phrase [4].

This gargantuan revolution in thinking, almost certainly the greatest challenge our species has faced, is well beyond the transformative capacities of adults. Albert Einstein famously noted that, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” How are we to shift to a wholly new way of thinking, a new worldview, if we remain stuck in an out-dated worldview? More specifically, by what means do we get a significant chunk of humanity to adopt a perspective that regards other life forms as relatives rather than resources? The answer to this paradox, I am convinced, lies in children and education.

As I’ve written elsewhere in this blog, one of the key elements in the needed education transformation (as opposed to mere “reform”) will be revamping the curriculum core to insert place and story. By place I refer to local bioregions, with much learning occurring outdoors. The kind knowledge gained by such learning has been called “ecoliteracy” [5]. By story I mean the Epic of Evolution, the grand saga of Big Bang to present day that encompasses cosmos, life, and culture. Here we can speak of “evoliteracy” [6]. With place and story as the intimate and grand contexts for education, respectively, we can begin to shift our perspective, transforming nature from exploited resources to mentor and partner.

What is ecopsychology’s role? In the 21st Century, this nascent field must undergo radical expansion to become more theoretical and analytical, including an abundance of hypothesis testing, experimentation, and data analysis. The challenge of transforming education is daunting. With school boards largely under local control, formal schooling is one of the most entrenched systems within modern culture. Before we can make the kinds of sweeping changes in education necessary to shift perspectives, it must first be demonstrated that any proposed alternatives in curriculum and pedagogy perform better than existing models. Much more than a form of therapy, then, ecopsychology must emerge as a major analytical field, testing key concepts and answering root questions. Most fundamentally, how do children form lasting bonds with nonhuman nature? Here we will benefit from studies of child development in indigenous cultures, the only societies today that possess worldviews embedding humanity within nature. My strong hunch is that developing a sense of place and cosmos will turn out to be pivotal elements, along with such practices as ritual and ceremony.

Many other questions face ecopsychologists. Exactly how effective, relative to traditional approaches, are new methods in promoting the formation of bonds with the nonhuman world? Equally important, how do these methods, including the insertion of place and story as core elements, perform relative to existing reductionist models when it comes to communicating other skills and knowledge (e.g., reading, math, writing, science)? This investigative work will need to be undertaken in partnership with progressive institutions willing to undertake such curricular experimentation, including independent and charter schools. Institutions of informal learning, particularly natural history museums, will also have a pivotal place in this process, since they possess expertise and resources unavailable to teachers. Another key prerequisite to any form of transformation will be educating the general public about the perils of our current worldview, together with the need to foster healthier alternatives through new forms of education. Here, too, ecopsychologists can help in ringing the alarm bell and getting the message out.

In the so-called “Great Turning,” moving from an “industrial growth society to a life-sustaining society” [7], ecopsychology must emerge as an intellectual powerhouse, working in partnership with educators and with Mother Nature herself to help bring about the needed transformation in worldview.

References
1. Roszak, T. 1993. The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology. Touchstone, New York.
2. Roszak, T., Gomes, M.E. Kanner, A.D. 1995. (eds.). Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco
3. Wilson, E. O. 1986. Biophilia: The Human Bond with other Species. Harvard University Press, Boston.
4. Berry, T. 1999. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. Bell Tower, New York.
5. Stone, M. K. and Z. Barlow (eds.). 2005. Ecological Literacy: Educating our Children for a Sustainable World. University of California Press, Berkeley.
6. Sampson, S. D. 2009. Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life. University of California Press, Berkeley.
7. Macy, J. 2007. World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal. Parallax Press, Berkeley.

Photo Credits

All images courtesy of National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/

New Horned Dinosaurs!

2010-09-27T13:39:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a recent spate of papers describing new species, 2010 has been unofficially dubbed “the year of horned dinosaurs.” This past week, my colleagues (Mark Loewen, Andrew Farke, Eric Roberts, Joshua Smith, Catherine Forster, and Alan Titus) and I added two more to the list, formally announcing a pair of amazing ceratopsids discovered in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, southern Utah. The giant plant-eaters were inhabitants of the “lost continent” of Laramidia, formed when a shallow sea flooded the central region of North America, isolating eastern and western portions of the continent for about 27 million years during the Late Cretaceous Period. The newly discovered dinosaurs, close relatives of the famous Triceratops, were announced in PLoS ONE, the online open-access journal produced by the Public Library of Science.

The bigger of the two new dinosaurs, with a skull 2.3 meters (about 7 feet) long, is Utahceratops gettyi. The first part of the name combines the state of origin with ceratops, Greek for “horned face.” The second part of the name refers to Mike Getty, paleontology collections manager at the Utah Museum of Natural History and the discoverer of this animal. Mike has been the driving force behind the UMNH paleo field program, and it is a great pleasure to be able to honor him in this way. In addition to a large horn over the nose, Utahceratops has short and blunt eye horns that project strongly to the side rather than upward, much more like the horns of modern bison than those of Triceratops or other ceratopsians.

Second of the new species is Kosmoceratops richardsoni. Here, the first part of the name refers to kosmos, Latin for “ornate,” and ceratops, once again meaning “horned face.” The latter part of the name honors Scott Richardson, the volunteer who discovered two skulls of this animal. In contrast to most scientific disciplines, volunteers make a major, fundamental contribution to paleontology, helping to find and excavate specimens, prepare and curate them in museum collections, and sometimes do the research. Scott Richardson has been a one-man fossil-finding powerhouse in GSENM, discovering stunning new specimens for about a decade.

Like Utahceratops, Kosmoceratops has sideways oriented eye horns, although much longer and more pointed. In all, Kosmoceratops possesses a total of 15 horns—one over the nose, one atop each eye, one at the tip of each cheek bone, and ten across the rear margin of the bony frill—making it the most ornate-headed dinosaur known. This ancient beast is one of the most amazing animals known, with a huge skull decorated with an assortment of bony bells and whistles. For obvious reasons, we avoided use of the term “horniest dinosaur” as a descriptor when announcing this animal. The media, it seems, had no such reluctance and immediately jumped on the opportunity.

Much speculation has ensued about the function of ceratopsian horns and frills, from fighting off predators to recognizing other members of the same species or controlling body temperature. Nevertheless, the dominant—and, to my mind, most likely—hypothesis is that these features functioned first and foremost to enhance reproductive success. Certainly most of these exaggerated bone structures of dinosaurs—including hooks, horns, crests, bosses, and spikes—would have made poor weapons to fend off predators. It’s far more probable that they were used to intimidate or do battle with rivals of the same sex, as well as to attract individuals of the opposite sex. Best we can tell, both males and female ceratopsid dinosaurs had horns. But this relative lack of sexual differences does not take away from the mate competition hypothesis; females of large-bodied (> 300 kg), gregarious, open-living mammals alive today, like bison and caribou, also tend to have headgear similar to that of males, likely to reduce the risk of being preferentially selected by predators.

The dinosaurs were discovered in sediments of the Kaiparowits Formation within Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. GSENM encompasses almost two million acres of high desert terrain in south-central Utah. This vast and rugged region, part of the National Landscape Conservation System administered by the Bureau of Land Management, was the last major area in the lower 48 states to be formally mapped by cartographers. Today GSENM is the largest national monument in the United States, and now of the country’s last great, largely unexplored dinosaur boneyards.
For most of the Late Cretaceous, exceptionally high sea levels flooded the low-lying portions of several continents around the world. In North America, a warm, shallow sea called the Western Interior Seaway extended from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, subdividing the continent into eastern and western landmasses, known as Appalachia and Laramidia, respectively. Whereas little is known of the plants and animals that lived on Appalachia, the rocks of Laramidia exposed in the Western Interior of North America have generated a plethora of dinosaur remains. Laramidia was less than one-third the size of present day North America, approximating the area of Australia.

Most known Laramidian dinosaurs were concentrated in a narrow belt of plains sandwiched between the seaway to the east and mountains to the west. Today, thanks to an abundant fossil record and more than a century of collecting by paleontologists, Laramidia is the best known major landmass for the entire Age of Dinosaurs, with dig sites spanning from Alaska to Mexico. Utah was located in the southern part of Laramidia, which has yielded far fewer dinosaur remains than the fossil-rich north. The world of dinosaurs was much warmer than the present day; Utahceratops and Kosmoceratops lived in a subtropical swampy environment about 100 km from the seaway. It’s strange to contemplate giant dinosaurs making a living in a place that shares much in common with a Louisiana swamp, but that’s the emerging picture.

Beginning in the 1960’s, paleontologists began to notice that the same major groups of dinosaurs seemed to be present all over this Late Cretaceous landmass, but different species of these groups occurred in the north (for example, Alberta and Montana) than in the south (New Mexico and Texas). This finding of “dinosaur provincialism” was very puzzling, given the giant body sizes of many of the dinosaurs together with the diminutive dimensions of Laramidia. Currently, there are five giant (rhino-to-elephant-sized) mammals on the entire continent of Africa. Seventy-six million years ago, there may have been more than two dozen giant dinosaurs living on a landmass about one-quarter that size. How could so many different varieties of giant animals have co-existed on such a small “island continent?” One option is that there was a greater abundance of food during the Cretaceous. Another is that dinosaurs did not need to eat as much, perhaps because of slower metabolic rates intermediate between those of modern day lizards and crocodiles on the one hand, and mammals and birds on the other. Whatever the factors permitted the presence of so many dinosaurs, it appears that some kind of barrier near the latitude of northern Utah and Colorado limited the exchange of dinosaur species north and south. Possibilities include physical barriers such as mountains or, more likely, climatic barriers that resulted in distinct northern and southern plant communities. Testing of these ideas have been severely hampered by a dearth of dinosaurs from the southern part of Laramidia. The new fossils from GSENM are now filling that major gap.

During the past decade, crews from the University of Utah and several partner institutions (e.g., the Utah Geologic Survey, the Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology, and the Bureau of Land Management) have unearthed a new assemblage of more than a dozen dinosaurs in GSENM. In addition to Utahceratops and Kosmoceratops, the collection includes a variety of other plant-eating dinosaurs—among them duck-billed hadrosaurs, armored ankylosaurs, and dome-headed pachycephalosaurs—together with carnivorous dinosaurs great and small, from “raptor-like” predators to mega-sized tyrannosaurs (not T. rex but rather its smaller-bodied relatives). Also recovered have been fossil plants, insect traces, clams, fishes, amphibians, lizards, turtles, crocodiles, and mammals, offering a direct glimpse into this entire ancient ecosystem. Most remarkable of all is that virtually every identifiable dinosaur variety found in GSENM turns out to be new to science, offering dramatic confirmation of the dinosaur provincialism hypothesis. Previously, our team has described two other dinosaurs from GSENM: the giant duck-billed hadrosaur Gryposaurus monumentensis and the raptor-like theropod Hagryphus giganteus. Several other animals are still under study, and will be announced in the future.

Without doubt, however, many more dinosaurs remain to be unearthed in the Western Interior of North America, once part of the island continent of Laramidia. Equally certain is the fact that some of those dinosaurs will be found within the remote canyons and badlands of GSENM. So stay tuned! (Oh, and for any fans of Dinosaur Train out there, plans are to feature Kosmoceratops early in the second season of episodes!)

Acknowledgements: I would like to express sincere thanks to the Bureau of Land Management and to the National Science Foundation, the pair of federal organizations that supplied the bulk of the funding for this project. Thanks also to the Utah Museum of Natural History for a decade of devoted support, and to all the volunteers and students who worked on this project.

Image Credits:
All dinosaur artwork, both skull images and fleshed out head reconstructions, were skillfully executed by our Italian colleague and friend, Lukas Panzarin. Reconstruction of Late Cretaceous North America by Ron Blakey (http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/RCB.html).

Additional Materials:

Check out the video that describes this story.

Cosmological Concerns

2010-09-03T16:21:00.000-07:00

The word “cosmology” has at least two meanings. One is strictly scientific: “The scientific study of the origin, evolution, and structure of the universe.”[1] The second is cultural: “A system of beliefs that seeks to describe or explain the origin and structure of the universe.”[2] Whereas cosmology in the first sense is an intellectual pursuit that aims to unravel the laws that govern the physical universe, in the latter sense it is a wisdom tradition that seeks insights not only through science but also via religion, art, and philosophy.[3] Scientific cosmologists make observations, gather facts, and advance theories, with a focus on the celestial. Conversely, the aim of cultural cosmology is much more down to Earth, no less than the transformation of the aesthetic, affective, and moral dimensions of being human. In short, although both cosmological forms may attempt to explain the origins of stars, planets, and other celestial phenomena, the latter mode seeks to apply this understanding in constructing a framework for living.

For more than 99% of human history, all cosmology was of the cultural variety, and every culture had its own cosmological origin story that informed their daily life. Only with the advent of modernism was the practice of cosmology split into two spheres. The scientific sphere became the realm of objective facts, whereas the religious sphere was deemed the realm of subjective meaning. The persistent tragedy of this split is that the two spheres became isolated from each other. Whereas science (and later, science education) divorced itself from meaning and purpose, the religious search for meaning and value in the universe was no longer informed by direct reference to our changing understanding of the universe! Even today, when conducted by major religious traditions, this search generally occurs within the context of a pre-scientific cosmos dominated by classical scriptures.

Meanwhile, science has radically and irrevocably changed our conception of who we are and how we fit into the scheme of things. For about four centuries now, we have known that the Earth revolves around the sun instead of the opposite. One and a half centuries have passed since we came to understand that all life on this planet, including us, shares common ancestry, evolving from single-celled lifeforms over unfathomable spans of time. Only during the past century, a single human lifetime, have we learned that we live in a galaxy of billions of stars, in turn merely one of billions of galaxies. For less than half a century have we realized that the earth’s surface consists of a dozen or so crustal plates that move about, bumping into each other before being resorbed into the planet’s interior. At about the same time, astronomers discovered that we are constantly bombarded with faint radiation that has traveled 14 billion years from the cataclysmic birth of the universe. And only in the past decade have biologists determined that the bacterial cells on and in our bodies outnumber human cells by a factor of about 10 to 1, which means that each of us is walking colony of trillions of lifeforms rather than an isolated self of one.

Most profoundly, science has taught us that we are living in a dynamic, evolutionary universe. We now speak of the origin and evolution of particles, galaxies, stars, planets, life, and culture. It is more than poetry to claim that we humans, offspring of this evolutionary process, are the universe becoming conscious of itself. Thus, it’s horribly ironic that we, who have arguably the most accurate understanding of the history of the cosmos, are members of the first culture to lack a cosmology.

Indeed few of us today have even the most meager comprehension of the astounding insights generated by science. Why have we failed to communicate these profound ideas more broadly? A major obstacle to dissemination is that the deepest scientific insights tend to be counterintuitive. Some of the most brilliant minds of recent history have struggled mightily with notions that scientists now take for granted. (Take, for example, Albert Einstein’s famous refusal to initially accept his own finding that the universe is expanding.) So it should come as no surprise that it requires considerable work to garner meaning from science. To grossly understate matters, it’s not easy to grasp intellectually, let alone bodily or emotionally, that we are chunks of starstuff living on the side of a giant, spherical rock hurtling through space at thousands of miles an hour.

Nevertheless, if we are to address the sustainability crisis and shift the course of civilization so as to come into harmony with nonhuman nature, an entirely new worldview is required, one that reinserts humanity inside nature. This moment in history demands no less than a transformation of what it means to be human.[4] If this pressing transformation is to occur, we must reunite the scientific and religious spheres of cosmology in order to establish a revitalized sense of meaning and purpose based upon our best understanding of the cosmos. On the one hand, success will depend on religions embracing the new view of the universe revealed by science. On the other, science must not shy away from its central role in defining who we are and where we come from, presenting this story in a grand narrative rather than a meaningless staccato of “facts.”

Critical to this endeavor will be the transformation of education. One legacy of the scientific enterprise has been the minimizing of subjective experiences in favor of objective observations. Only the latter have been considered “real,” worthy of our attention and value. At present, science education strictly adheres to its modernist heritage, concerning itself almost solely with quantifiable facts. If we are to learn to live sustainably in this world, facts alone are not enough. We must revamp science education to address the aesthetic and affective dimensions so long avoided. I see no reason why science learning cannot foster a vivid sense of mystery, wonder, and awe.

In particular, if science is to inform the meaning of our lives, we must experience key concepts bodily. Among other things, this will require that we venture outside classrooms into natural settings. Scientific ideas become meaningful when we experience and reflect upon them directly with multiple senses. An understanding of nature must enter our bodies through our pores as well as our minds. Alongside ecological literacy, or ecoliteracy[5], we must foster evolutionary literacy, or evoliteracy—that is, an understanding of the Epic of Evolution, the story of the Big Bang to the present day[6].

Let me be clear. I am not arguing that we change the way we do science, but rather the way we teach science. Nor am I advocating that humanity embrace a single, global cosmology. The beauty of the Epic of Evolution is that it allows for an endless variety of interpretations, with and without God(s). So every culture can still fashion its own unique cosmology, informed by its own unique historical, cultural, and ecological context.

I will explore experiential education in a future post, discussing the contributions of John Dewey and others. For the moment, suffice it to say that the acquisition of knowledge must be accompanied by an inner transformation.[3] Only then can we hope to raise a generation that regards the world as a meaningful place worthy of respect and nurturing. Only then can we establish new, more accurate cosmologies that reflect what we actually know of the universe. Only then can we begin the move toward a new, more viable form of human existence.

References
1. The American Heritage® Science Dictionary. Copyright © 2002. Published by Houghton Mifflin.
2. The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
3. Swimme, B. 1996. The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story. Orbis, New York, 115 pp.
4. Berry, T. 1999. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. Bell Tower, New York, 242 pp.
5. Stone, M. K. and Z. Barlow (eds.). 2005. Ecological Literacy: Educating our Children for a Sustainable World. University of California Press, Berkeley, 275 pp.
6. Chaisson, E. 2006. Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos. Columbia University Press, New York, 479 pp.

Images
All images courtesy of National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/

Saving Natural History (Part 2)

2010-08-09T13:17:00.000-07:00

In Part 1 of this essay, I argued for the critical importance of natural history as a powerful and timely approach to communicating science, one with great potential to (re)place humans within nature. I further claimed that expertise in natural history—an in-depth understanding of local plants and animals—is sorely lacking, and that natural history institutions may represent the greatest hope for disseminating this kind of knowledge traditionally associated with naturalists. Today I will further articulate this vision.

First, the problem. We are enveloped in an ecological crisis that threatens to rend not only the web of life, but the very fabric of civilization. If species extinctions proceed at current rates, we may lose about half of today’s biological diversity by the end of the century. If we continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at present day levels, the planet will warm by at least three degrees, causing runaway melting of polar ice, flooding of coastal regions, and desertification of arable land. The best science confirms that we have perhaps a generation to turn things around and establish a sustainable course. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the fundamental crisis at this critical moment in history is much less an external crisis of environment than an internal crisis of mind. Far more than innovative, “green” technologies, we need a new mindset that reinserts humanity inside nature.

Surely, then, part of the solution to the sustainability crisis must include natural history museums, aquariums, zoos, and botanical gardens, whose mandate includes conveying natural sciences to the general public. (Zoos, in my estimation, are currently much more a part of the problem than the solution, conveying to visitors the unspoken and erroneous message that we are masters of nature.) In recent years, these institutions have begun to address sustainability issues, from research and exhibits on extinction, conservation, and global warming to "citizen science" programs that engage volunteers in the actual practice of science, often with an eye toward conservation [1,2]. Yet these efforts simply are not enough. We need a true re-envisioning—or, more accurately, transformation—of natural history institutions. Below I focus in particular on museums, where my experience lies.

Within the walls of natural history museums, much hand-wringing occurs over the topic of advocacy. Should museums, many of which are publicly-funded, be advocates of anything? Fears of offending donors, board members, or the general public often result in watered down messages, even with regard to sustainability. But let’s be frank. If museums of natural history can't become strong advocates for a healthy future on planet Earth at this critical juncture, exactly what institution should we appoint to serve this role? In my view, if museums shy away from advocating for a healthy planet, they deserve to go extinct along with the practice of natural history. Conversely, if institutions of natural history are to survive and thrive in this century, a combination of strong leadership and strong vision are required, with an unrelenting focus on sustainability.

Let me begin, then, with what some will undoubtedly interpret as a radical vision. Imagine for a moment natural history museums becoming agents of social change. Imagine if they fostered a new, more sustainable worldview by connecting people with local (nonhuman) nature. Imagine if the information flow went two ways instead of one, with museums acting as centers for convocation, catalysts for conversation about the current state of our community, our country, our world. And imagine if these institutions functioned more as trailheads than destinations, with strong emphasis on getting people outside to experience nature firsthand [3]. Such a vision would not only include advocacy, but embrace it.

Taking this transformational vision as a starting point, what kinds of educational activities would 21st Century natural history museums engage in? I propose three. The first activity is translating natural science basics and key issues for the general public. This task has long been a mainstay of science museums, yet they could do a much better job of demonstrating how human systems are inextricably interwoven with nonhuman systems. Moreover, museums must communicate not only the essentials of hot button issues like species extinctions and global warming, but also the ecological impacts of our daily decisions and the need to lobby our elected representatives (e.g., for immediate and drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions).

The second key role for natural history museums is to promote a meaningful sense of place through education and outreach programs that focus on local bioregions, including plants, animals, and landscapes. Returning to the point made in my last essay, how can we expect people to protect and nurture the places they live if they don’t know or care about them? In stark contrast to the traditional "cabinets of curiosities" model of museums, strong emphasis must be directed toward outdoor, experiential education programs that seek to foster wonder in equal amounts with knowledge. With these goals in mind, indoor exhibits become educational tools designed to inform the outdoor experience. Ultimately, a key goal should be fostering ecoliteracy, such that residents can adequately answer the question: How does this place work and who are the main characters involved?

The third key role is communication of the Epic of Evolution, the multi-billion-year story of the universe from the Big Bang to the present day [4,5]. In addition to a sense of place founded on ecoliteracy, we require a “sense of cosmos” [6] grounded in a meaningful understanding of our deep time evolutionary epic [7]. Here the goal is evolutionary literacy, or “evoliteracy,” encompassing cosmos, life, and culture. How are we to know or care about where we’re going if we have no idea of where we’ve been and the ways in which our lives and our local places are enfolded into the cosmic story? Broad dissemination of this grand saga, arguably the greatest contribution of modern science, may just be an essential element in achieving sustainable societies [7].

At present, museums engage a fair amount in the first activity, very little in the second, and virtually none in the third. Almost since their inception, museums have translated natural science concepts for nonspecialist audiences. Yet advocacy remains contentious, even when it relates to something as general and seemingly noncontroversial as healthy environments. The second activity, place-based education, is something that regional natural museums have been doing to some extent for many years. Yet I would argue that these efforts have met with minimal success. In particular, until recently, little effort has been directed toward outdoor education, and we have all but failed to recognize the vital importance of engendering a sense of wonder.

With regard to the third activity, championing evoliteracy, I’m not aware of any museum that has made the Epic of Evolution a core part of their vision. This is in spite of the fact that the Great Story has tremendous potential to connect people to their cosmic heritage, and thus to the natural world, in meaningful ways [7]. Who better to tell the Epic of Evolution—the scientific story of cosmos, life, and culture—than natural history museums? After all, these institutions frequently possess both the necessary expertise and tools, sometimes including planetarium theaters. In this century, natural history should be redefined more broadly, and more literally, as the astounding history of nature, and therefore of us.

Like universities, museums have succumbed to the siren song of reductionist science, subdividing the evolutionary epic into bite-sized chunks that leave few opportunities for influencing a sense of meaning or purpose. The end result tends to be a spewing of quantifiable “facts,” with little consideration allotted to the big picture. Additionally, becoming an agent of social change will require not only advancing intellectual knowledge, but encouraging a profound shift in ethics. Thus, if museums are to be advocates of sustainability, as proposed here, they will need to consider the role of human psychology in shifting behaviors. Among other things, we would do well to consider how we might “reinvent the sacred” [8], helping visitors develop a keen sense of the wonder, awe, and mystery of nature.

While great ideas can come from any level in the museum (or from outside the institution), in my experience the implementation of new, transformative ideas invariably requires strong leadership, beginning with the institution’s chief administrator. Without unwavering support from the top, visions tend to fade and die, or at least become empty. Of course, any vision must be backed by sufficient funds to pay salaries and keep the museum doors open. But this should not stop us from using our imaginations to generate fun and inspiring programs that enable us do the Great Work [7] that needs to be done.

Let me be clear. I do not mean to disparage all institutions of natural history. Many facilities, programs, and individuals are already actively engaged in aspects of this work. Among institutions of natural history, the Monterey Bay Aquarium may come closest to the vision described above. This remarkable institution combines a vibrant, sustainability-based vision with effective leadership to create an amazing and inspiring experience; and I'd bet that most visitors depart with a much deeper appreciation of the changes that need to occur if we're going to conserve the nature we have left. Nevertheless, within the profession as a whole, a gaping chasm exists between the activities of present day natural history institutions and the vision articulated here.

At the risk of sounding grandiose, natural history has a vital cultural role to play in saving both nature and civilization. With the terrible potential for impending environmental disaster and untold human suffering, is there really another viable and responsible vision for natural history institutions in this century?

Notes and References
1. Cornell Ornithological Lab: http://www.birds.cornell.edu/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=708

2. Wilson, E. O. 2005. The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. W. W. Norton, New York, 175 pp.
3. The new Utah Museum of Natural History has embraced the notion of trailhead over destination. See: Sampson, S. D. and George, S. B. 2004. Reinventing a Natural History Museum for the 21st Century. Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, 55, Suppl. 1 (13): 283-294.
4. Swimme, B. and T. Berry. 1992. The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to Ecozoic Era. Harper Collins, New York, 305 pp.
5. Chaisson, E. 2006. Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos. Columbia University Press, New York, 479 pp.
6. Needleman, J. 2003. A Sense of Cosmos. Monkfish, Rhinebeck, NY., 192 pp.
7. Berry, T. 1999. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. Bell Tower, New York, 242 pp.
8. Kauffman, S. A. 2008. Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. Basic Books, New York, 320 pp.

Image Credits
All images courtesy of National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/

Saving Natural History (Part 1)

2010-07-29T12:35:00.000-07:00

As a youngster, I was fascinated by all aspects of nature, regularly coming home with pocketfuls of sticks, rocks, bugs, or some other terrestrial flotsam and jetsam discovered during my daily travels. Returning from family camping trips in the wilds of British Columbia, there were inevitably heavy, oddly shaped rocks or fossils to be unloaded and placed in a corner of the yard with collections from previous excursions. For me, the highlights of these camping adventures were the guided walks, where I would stick like glue to the park naturalist and ask an unending flurry of questions. When I was five years old my mother recognized this passion by signing me up for the “Young Naturalists Club.” I still remember the excitement I felt when my membership package finally arrived, including a white button emblazoned with the club name and the face of a smiling raccoon. Finally, I thought, I was a real naturalist.

This passion for nature (including dinosaurs, of course) persisted through my childhood and teen years, despite the near absence of nature study I received in school. When I finally arrived at university in the late 70’s, I immediately searched the course listings for offerings on natural history, and was dismayed to find that the only such courses were for senior students specializing in a particular area of biological study: for example, oceanography, ornithology, or entomology. Little did I know that I was about 20 years too late [1].

For the first half of the 20th Century, natural history—the systematic study of natural objects and organisms—was not only a thriving discipline within the natural sciences, but a major part of growing up for vast numbers of people in Western societies. Practitioners of this respected subject, including many lacking formal credentials, were known as “natural historians,” or, more simply, “naturalists.” Naturalists identify and categorize the denizens of their local environs. Serious enthusiasts tend to be collectors, with rocks, plants, butterflies, and beetles among the common targets. Serious birders, who collect observations rather than specimens, can also be placed within these ranks. Most importantly, naturalists love to spend time outdoors interacting with the nonhuman world. Many, perhaps most, children raised prior to the close of WW II were introduced to the practice of natural history, often at school and at home.

Then, for the latter half of the 20th Century, natural history underwent a steady and precipitous decline. At the professional level, the scientific study of natural history, with its focus on observing whole organisms, was largely supplanted by a suite of reductionist sub-disciplines like cell and molecular biology. Even fields with a larger perspective, like ecology, placed overwhelming emphasis on “rigorous” experimental studies, eschewing as quaint and outdated the kinds of subjective observations that are the bread and butter of naturalists. Among laypersons, fewer and fewer people were trained in nature study, largely because those doing the training had no successors. Other trends, like the migration from rural to urban settings and the increased emphasis on “hard” sciences like math and physics, further relegated natural history to a neglected corner of the library stacks [1].

Today, although children (and adults) can identify dozens of corporate logos, few can name even a handful of the plants and animals that live around them. Fewer still spend significant amounts of time outside, choosing instead to remain plugged into the artificial reality of cyber-world instead of experiencing the real world beyond the front door. As a result, natural history teeters on the edge of extinction, threatening to take down much of the biosphere with it. It seems highly unlikely that people will save something they don’t care about. And they’re certainly not going to care about something with which they’ve had no meaningful experience. That’s why the loss of nature study embodied by natural history is so tragic, and dangerous.

To compound matters, the demise of natural history teaching means that the overwhelming majority of educators today lack any background in nature study, and thus they are ill prepared to convey even the basics on local plants and animals. Fortunately, the number of exceptions to this disturbing trend is growing, including remarkable teachers and initiatives often gathered under the umbrella of “environmental education.” Yet even these outdoor-focused programs tend to have a strong ecological bent, emphasizing the big picture of ecosystem function, with minimal time spent identifying local plants and animals, let alone sitting quietly in the company of one’s nonhuman neighbors.

Outside of formal education, the primary cultural institutions engaging in natural history are museums, augmented by nature centers (and, to a lesser extent, zoos, aquaria, and botanical gardens). Natural history museums emerged in the Victorian era as “cabinets of curiosities,” places where one could witness rare, beautiful, and/or ancient objects from the natural world--everything from minerals and fossils to animals and artifacts—often collected in distant lands. They remained very popular through the 20th Century, with institutions like the American Museum of Natural History (New York), the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum (Washington, DC), and the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago) amassing vast collections.

Here in the early 21st Century, museums of natural history are struggling to reinvent and reinvigorate themselves. Of particular concern are issues like relevancy and the balance of education versus entertainment (the “edutainment” conundrum) [2]. Recognizing natural history as a dying practice that few today can even define, some museums are electing to divorce themselves from the term (e.g., the Chicago institution is now formally known as “The Field Museum”). Although most natural history museums still engage in collections-based research, only a smattering of the scientists doing this work could honestly identify with the term “naturalist.” Rather than making detailed observations of local flora and fauna, these scientists engage in analytical, often experimental studies like those of their counterparts at universities. Most museum staff (including the scientists) would struggle to name multiple examples of local plants, rocks, insects, or birds.

As someone with almost 25 years of experience around natural history museums, I am of the strong opinion that natural history deserves not only to be saved, but to be resurrected to its former glory. However, like the museums housing the collections of plants, animals, rocks, and artifacts, the notion of natural history itself must be reinvented to address the pressing needs of our time. I think that museums are the best available candidates to carry out this resurrection/reinvention. We desperately need more systematists, researchers who can go out and catalogue the world’s biological diversity. Of the estimated 10-15 million species alive on earth today, less than 3 million have been formally named, let alone investigated in detail [3]. Speaking of which, we also need more field biologists and ecologists to carry out firsthand studies of organisms living in their native habitats. Only by understanding how those habitats work (for example, the flow of energy and the cycling of nutrients) can we begin to determine how to preserve them.

Natural history museums have an equally vital role to play in the realm of education. They possess the expertise and tools (collections, exhibits, and other programming) to help children and adults (including educators!) learn about the plants and animals native to their region. This statement applies particularly to regional museums like the Denver Museum of Science and Nature, the Utah Museum of Natural History (Salt Lake City), and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, which tend to have more of a local focus than their larger sister institutions like the AMNH and Field Museum. Both personally and professionally, I am very pleased to see “Young Naturalist”-type organizations popping up once again, some of them linked closely to museums. More than ever before, we need to raise a generation of naturalists!

I suspect that relatively few in the museum world would disagree with the above statements. Scientists like the renowned biologist E.O. Wilson have long sounded the clarion call for more systematists and field biologists [3,4]. Indeed Wilson, a self-proclaimed naturalist, is striving for no less than a comprehensive Encyclopedia of Life, with an entry for every species on Earth [5]. Similarly, museum educators, swept up in the rapidly growing “No Child Left Inside” movement [6], are now spending more time developing outdoor education programs.

Nevertheless, in my view, more of the same kind of science and education simply won’t cut it. If we are to face the sustainability challenge head-on, we need a bolder, more encompassing vision well beyond that generally being considered within both formal and informal education circles. To my mind, natural history must be central to that vision. In stark contrast to the cabinets of curiosities model, natural history museums in the 21st Century have the potential to reinvent themselves as key players in the drive toward sustainability. In my next Whirlpool of Life post, I will delve into this vision.

Acknowledgement
Many of the ideas presented here and in my next post were developed while I served as chief curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT. I am indebted to the UMNH for allowing me to pursue some of these ideas, and am happy to say that the new UMNH facility, scheduled to open late in 2011, will include some of the concepts addressed in this blog. For more info, check out: http://umnh.utah.edu/newmuseum

References
1. R. M. Pyle. 2007. The rise and fall of natural history. In B. Lopez (ed.), The Future of Nature. Milkweed, Minneapolis. (This article was originally published in Orion Magazine in 2001)
2. Weil, S. 2002. Making Museums Matter. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C.
3. Wilson, E. O. 2005. The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. W. W. Norton, New York. 4. Wilson, E. O. 2002. The Future of Life. Knopf, New York.
5. Encyclopedia of Life Project: http://www.eol.org/
6. Children & Nature Network: http://www.childrenandnature.org/

Image Credits
All images courtesy of National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/

The Subjectification of Nature

2010-07-14T14:53:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago while hammering away on the computer, struggling to improve the same paragraph for the umpteenth time, I heard it again—the cry of a red-tailed hawk. This was not the beautiful, haunting, and justifiably famous red-tail “kree-eee-ar” that seems to pierce the core of your being. No, this was more of a repetitive, high-pitched wailing that brought to mind a demented sea-gull. Over the previous days and weeks, this incessant noise had driven me to the ragged edge of distraction. What’s the problem with that bird?, I kept asking myself (but in much less kind language).

The following day, while ascending the stairs after a long walk, I heard that same wailing, but this time it was directly overhead. Craning my neck and raising a hand to block the sun, I saw a young hawk wobble unsteadily on unskilled wings, barely navigating its way to a nearby tree. Suddenly the chaos of my thoughts was shattered by the realization that those incessant shrieks were the desperate cries of a fledgling red-tail calling out to parents for food and comfort. Immediately my frustration over the clamor vanished, replaced by a sense of compassion for this awkward youngster attempting to master a talent about which I could only dream. The animal that had seconds before been little more than an object of annoyance was transformed into a marvelous, freshly volant subject—a living, breathing creature that filled me with wonder. (I also reminded myself of this animal's dinosaurian status, making the connection back into deep time.)

Today, we in Western societies are in desperate need of a large-scale transformation in consciousness that parallels my attitude shift toward the hawk. Much of our unsustainable behavior can be traced to a broken relationship with nature, a worldview that treats the nonhuman world as a realm of mindless objects all but incapable of feeling. The road to sustainability must be built upon a radically new perspective (or at least a re-invention of an old one) that reanimates the living world and views other creatures as relatives to be respected rather than resources to be exploited. What we require is no less than the subjectification of nature. In the insightful words of “geologian” Thomas Berry, we must transform the world “from a collection of objects to a communion of subjects.”

To subjectify is to interiorize, such that the exterior world interpenetrates one’s interior world. Whereas the relationships we share with subjects often tap into our hearts, objects are dead to our emotions. Finding ourselves in relationship, boundaries of self can actually become permeable and blurred. Many of us have experienced such feelings with lovers, family, friends, and even pets. For indigenous peoples around the world, the notion of being embedded in a landscape of relatives is not alien at all; we have much to learn from this ancient wisdom.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to the subjectification of nature is science, a cultural practice founded on the notion of objectivity. Scientists seek to objectify nature so that they can measure, test, and study it. In order to undertake such studies, we biologists tend to think animals in terms of fragments—from genes and bones to reproductive strategies and dietary preferences. Yet it is my contention that this pervasive, centuries-old trend toward fragmentation and objectification need not preclude us from treating nature as subjects. In other words, the subjectification of nature would not require that we abandon objectivity. After all, scientists have managed (at least most of the time) to treat their fellow humans as both subjects and objects. Why can’t we extend this same duality to nonhuman nature?

What would nature look like if we truly regarded it as a communion of subjects? Perhaps more to the point, what would it feel like? As evidenced by my initial attitude toward the fledgling red-tail, I am hardly an authority on the matter, and have a long way to go in my own personal growth. Like most of us in the industrialized West, I must battle a lifetime of practice in objectification, augmented in my case by training as a scientist. Nevertheless, while I can attest only to brief glimpses of such a fundamentally different perspective, I have found these fleeting insights both profound and inspiring. Such experiences have left me deeply convinced that widespread subjectification will be an essential element in sustainability.

But how might we undertake the “subjectification transformation?” Worldviews are deeply ingrained in adult minds, so much so that they become like the air we breathe—essential but ignored. As I’ve argued previously on this blog, much of the answer is going to be found in education. We must gain the wisdom to shift our views and raise our children so that they can see the world with new eyes. It may sound heretical, but science education in particular could be re-invented with subjectification in mind. Certainly the practice of science—the actual doing of scientific research—must be done as objectively as possible. But the communicating of science could include both objective and subjective components. Imagine if the bulk of science education took place outdoors, in direct contact with the natural world. And imagine if parents and educators emphasized not only the identification and functioning of parts (say, of flowers or insects), but the notion of organisms as sensate beings. What if students were asked more to spend more time learning about how a particular plant or animal experienced its world?

A tool with amazing potential is the “soap bubble technique,” attributed to biologist Jakob von Uexküll [1]. Take a group of children outside and ask them to imagine each and every organism to be surrounded by a transparent bubble, within which they can experience only the perceptual world of that organism. Then ask the children to select a particular organism (perhaps from a sample considered earlier in the classroom) and try to imagine what it might be like to actually be that creature. Take earthworms for example. These soil denizens detect light but not color, so the rainbow of hues with which we construct our world suddenly disappears. Earthworms have a keen sense of taste, but no ability to smell. In lieu of vision, their dominant senses are taste and touch, and they are particularly sensitive to ground vibrations.

The soap bubble technique is powerful because it helps to transport us beyond our everyday world and foster a sense of relationship with nonhuman organisms. Done repeatedly over a period of years, it is easy to envision how practices like this might encourage children to see their native places as communities of subjects worthy of care and respect. Conversely, I cannot imagine any community becoming sustainable if people do not care about their native places.

As I type the final paragraph of this post, I can still hear that fledgling red-tail calling out. Although far from melodious, the sound now generates within me feelings of compassion rather than frustration. I have hopes that Western societies will embrace a similar transition; that we will realize the promise and potential of subjectification and begin a dialogue on how we might inject this much-needed perspective into schooling for sustainability.

References
1. Evernden, N. 1993. The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment, Second Edition. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 172 pp.

Image Credits
Top: Red-tail hawk: http://content.cornell.ornith.edu/
Middle images: National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/ Bottom image: http://www.kentsimmons.uwinnipeg.ca/

The Great Triad

2010-07-01T09:57:00.000-07:00

The mysterious power of the number three has a long and distinguished history. Among the Classical Greeks, Plato suggested that truth, beauty, and goodness are the primordial values against which all things can be judged. His student Aristotle, speaking on rhetoric, argued for three primary modes of persuasion—logos, pathos, and ethos—appeals to logic, emotions, and the character of the speaker, respectively. I’m convinced that these two Greek triads are interwoven, with modern lessons for a world in crisis.

Aristotle’s rhetorical trio is often linked to body parts: logos to brain, pathos to heart, and ethos to gut. Equivalent linkages can be made to Plato’s “Big Three.” Truth reflects mind, beauty reflects pathos or spirit, and goodness reflects gut or consciousness. More recently, philosophers have sometimes associated Plato’s primal values with the developmental sequence of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; begin with beauty, layer on truth, and synthesize these into a sense of goodness.

Once unified, it seems to me that this “Great Triad” holds immense power because it embodies different kinds of knowing. All of us have experience understanding something intellectually that has minimal bearing on our emotions (street names or geometry, for example). Conversely, knowledge may be rooted in emotions or intuitions, fostering deeply held beliefs with little to no basis in reason (choice of partner, sacredness of a particular place). A third, even deeper kind of knowledge is founded on “gut feelings” that often reflect the marriage of intellect and emotions. Worldviews, I would like to propose, reside in the gut, rooted in a messy mixture of logos and pathos.

I make no assertions about the originality of this claim. I’m a paleontologist, not a philosopher, so my expertise relates more to ancient life than to the nature of reality. Yet, whether empirically accurate or not, it seems to me that this tripartite division of knowledge offers a useful tool for probing our present eco-crisis. Ecological sustainability in any meaningful sense will require not only new technologies, but a new worldview, one that re-inserts humanity inside nature and transforms the nonhuman world (to borrow Thomas Berry’s poignant phrase) from “a collection objects to communion of subjects.”

At present, Western societies rely overwhelmingly on intellect and scientific truth, giving little credit to the role of emotions and spirit. We live too much in our heads, not enough in our hearts. This centuries-old bias results in terribly skewed worldviews, causing our guts to mislead us again and again into decisions devoid of any sense of beauty. Resetting the balance will demand, among other things, a transformation (rather than mere “reform”) of our schooling system, including new approaches to both the delivery and content of education. In particular, learning must spark the heart as well as the mind. Devoid of any sense of what is beautiful, let alone sacred, intellectual knowledge remains sterile, often unable to influence worldviews and behavior (or doing so in dangerous ways).

Let me illustrate by making what may seem an outlandish claim. At heart, most of us in Western societies are a bunch of flat-earthers and creationists.

Intellectually, we know that we live on a spherical world hurtling with a gaggle of other planets around a nearby star. Yet we still speak of sunrise and sunset, and persist in conceiving of ourselves as living on the top of the world. Of course, reality is rather different; the rotation of the Earth causes the sun to appear to rise and fall in our sky, and we live on the side of our rapidly spinning globe, anchored by the mysterious force of gravity. My point is this—we know (in our minds) that we live on a sphere, but live (through our hearts) as if the world was flat.

Similarly, even for those who embrace the notion of evolution, the vast majority of us are effectively creationists. Don’t believe me? Step outside, look at the nearest tree, or dog, or bird, and ask yourself the following question: Do I regard this organism as my relative, part of my extended family tree? If you’re like the vast majority of people, your honest answer is no.

If we truly embraced the notion of common descent through deep time—not just in our minds, but in our hearts—would we put chimpanzees, our closest living evolutionary relatives, in cages for public display? Would we decimate rainforests, overfish oceans, or foul our native bioregions? Perhaps. After all, humans frequently don’t treat members of their own kind with compassion and empathy. Nevertheless, for those of us in the industrialized West, the notion of living in community with the natural world is an alien one. For us, nature isn’t relatives, its resources.

How, then, might we communicate scientific concepts like spherical planets and biological evolution so as to engage emotions, building upon the “knowledge” of pathos so as to influence ethos? I am aware of two principle tools: experience and narrative.

Firsthand experience outdoors has the potential to stir our emotions deeply. As most of us know, smelling wildflowers, holding a slug, and beholding a full moon are all experiences that differ mightily from virtual alternatives. Next time you watch a sunset, hold the image in your mind of sitting on the side of rotating globe; it helps to have a planet like Venus nearby to the sun so that you can picture yourself as part of a solar system of worlds. If you’re lucky, just as the sun disappears below the horizon, you will have a momentary experience of vertigo as you fathom your true relationship to our nearest star. Do this frequently and you may just shift the way you envision your place on Earth.

Now imagine if, in stark contrast to the vast bulk of present day schooling, children learned about evolution largely in natural settings, with appropriate reverence given to the bounty of relatives inhabiting our communities. We might call this “experiential science education,” a strategy worthy of broad application in science teaching. As I see it, without abundant time spent outside in intimate contact with nonhuman nature, some of it guided by adult mentors, we will be unable to move beyond intellectual understanding to form meaningful bonds with the nonhuman world.

With regard to the second tool, narrative, I have written previously in this blog of the importance of the Great Story, the epic of evolution that extends from the Big Bang to the present day. If evolution were taught as the history of the universe (rather than focusing predominantly on obtuse concepts like mutation, natural selection, and adaptation), we would become fully engaged in this astounding story, which just happens to be our story. Beyond the science class, this story could be conveyed through numerous creative arts—from painting and poetry and to drama and dance—with the potential to reach our deepest emotions. Only when the Great Story becomes meaningful in both our minds and hearts, tapping into our sense of truth and beauty, will we begin to truly understand what it means to be part of a single, evolving universe at this pivotal moment in deep time. And only then will we begin to conceive of nature as relatives deserving of our compassion and empathy rather than resources for our exploitation.

In short, the lesson of the Great Triad is this: If we are to foster wisdom and navigate our way into a sustainable future, knowledge must pass through our hearts on the way from the mind to the gut. The roots of service (Goodness) lie in the amalgam of both insight (Truth) and compassion (Beauty). Logos + Pathos = Ethos.

Image Credits
All images courtesy of National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/

Training the Brain

2010-06-15T12:16:00.000-07:00

As a society, we are techno-addicts, shifting obsessively back and forth between gadgets, from smart phones and iPods to laptops and televisions, among others. Over the past 50 years, our consumption of information has more than tripled. The bulk of young people now spend 7-10 hours each day staring at screens—and that’s when they’re not at school or working! On average, we compulsively check our email about 37 times each day and visit about the same number of websites [1]. Awash in an ever-shifting sea of digital information, we all too rarely stop to consider the impact of this rampant technophilia on ourselves, our families, and our communities.

Several months ago, I argued on this blog [2] that the Internet is a mixed blessing, offering up the “Great Source” of information while simultaneously leading us toward the “extinction of experience”—that is, the absence of time spent outdoors in nature. If we are to stave off the deepening sustainability crisis, I suggested, our experience of reality must become less virtual and more “real.” Today I would like to build on this discussion. Instead of focusing on what we lose by not spending time outdoors, my emphasis here is directed at the influence of technology on our minds.

Last week, a cover story in the New York Times [1] tackled this timely topic and highlighted a number of revealing studies. Since you are likely a consumer of technology yourself, and thus have considerable personal experience, most of the results will likely come as no surprise. Heavy consumption of information technologies reduces attention spans and makes us more easily distracted. Regular email interruptions tend to increase stress and decrease short term memory, making it more difficult to learn or perform even simple tasks. Brain researchers are becoming increasingly convinced that excessive use of the Internet makes us more impatient, impulsive, forgetful, and even narcissistic.

More surprising perhaps is the multitasking myth. That is, with the exception of few “supertaskers” (about 3% of us), concurrent use of multiple technologies does not increase efficiency. Indeed committed multitaskers tend to be slower than non-multitaskers when attempting to do several tasks simultaneously. The problem, it seems, is that multitaskers have trained their brains to be highly sensitive to new information and thus tend to be easily distracted, always searching for that next digital tidbit.

At a deeper level, many psychologists now worry, and are attempting to document, what they see as impacts to our very identity wrought by a fixation on gadgets. The NY Times article cites one Stanford researcher, Elias Aboujaoude, referring to the “fracturing of the self” caused by excessive reliance on technology. Another Stanford researcher, Clifford Nass, thinks that, by limiting face-to-face interactions, heavy technology use reduces our empathy. The concern seems to be that all of this interaction with technology is somehow rewiring our brains in ways that diminishes our humanity.

Less than two decades ago, researchers thought that the brain ceased developing at the onset of adulthood. A slew of recent studies, however, demonstrate that the brain has the capacity to adapt throughout life, including in our senior years—a phenomenon dubbed “neuroplasticity.” To cite just one example, a study of Tibetan monks showed much higher gamma wave activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain during meditation than in a control group, resulting in stronger feelings of happiness and compassion in the former [3]. The remarkable truth of the matter, then, seems to be that, one way or the other, we “train our brains,” actually rewiring parts of our neurocircuitry based upon the activities we choose to engage in. So it’s best to give serious consideration to the things we allow to dominate our minds.

Why are we so prone to techno-addiction? Some researchers suggest that, for the bulk of human evolution, an ability to pay attention to novel stimuli had a major survival advantage. To give the most simplistic example, that stimulus just might be an animal you’re hunting or a predator stalking you. More nuanced discussions have addressed the ability to recognize any novel patterns in one’s environment that might indicate the presence of food, medicine, or other items necessary for survival. Today, information technologies seem to tap into this ancient predisposition, making it more likely that we will become addicted to glowing gadgets.

Despite the tone of this piece, I’m no Luddite. On a personal level, I am a major technology user myself, and battle the daily siren call to “stay connected.” On a societal level, I see no path forward, whether sustainable or not, that does not embrace technology. So, as I see it, the key question is this: given our penchant for what may best be described as techno-addition, how are we going to learn to co-exist with information technologies?

Some psychologists compare our dependence on screen technologies to an eating disorder [1]. Like food, technology is now an essential component of our daily life. And just as a food addict cannot stop consuming calories, we must learn to moderate our consumption of technologies, both for ourselves and our children. At a minimum, this will require setting thoughtful constraints, such as limiting the number of times you check your email, and restricting children’s screen time to 1-2 hours per day (their choice of gadget?). In extreme cases, just as with any addiction, heavy technology users may require therapy to assess the underlying reasons for the repeated escape into the Internet [1].

The bottom line is that, despite their many advantages, phones, computers, and televisions can be dangerous tools. Our obsession with technology threatens not only our personal health, but also the health of our communities and even the biosphere. If we are to set sail and navigate a sustainable path into the future, we must limit the amount of time we allow ourselves (and our kids!) to be immersed in this ocean of information. Don’t forget to come out on the deck, breath the fresh air, and connect with each other and the spectacular world we inhabit. Your brain will be thankful.

References
1) Richtel, M. 2010. Hooked on gadgets, and paying a mental price. New York Times, June 7, 2010. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html)

2) Sampson, S. D. 2010. The extinction of experience. The Whirlpool of Life (blog). (http://scottsampson.blogspot.com/2010/01/extinction-of-experience.html)

3) Kaufman, M. 2005. Meditation gives brain a change, study finds. The Washington Post, January 3, 2005. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43006-2005Jan2.html).

Images
Top three images courtesy of of Free Digital Photos: http://freedigitalphotos.net/
Bottom image courtesy of National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/

Transforming Education

2010-06-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

Education reform is a phrase that is virtually ubiquitous in American political circles. Any outsider would assume—correctly, I’m afraid—that we never get education right. To give a couple of recent metrics, a 2007 study found that only one-third of US students could read and do math up to current grade level standards, and that one in four students does not graduate from high school.

While in New York City recently, I had the opportunity to listen to US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan present his reform vision to an audience of well over a thousand teachers. Duncan is a thoughtful, intelligent man, as well as a polished speaker, and I enjoyed hearing him speak about replacing the Bush Administration’s “No Child Left Behind” with a new alternative, “Race to the Top” [1-4]. “The Race,” as its nicknamed, is a $4.3 billion incentive program (read “competition”) designed by the US Department of Education to overhaul the education system. Key elements include performance pay for teachers (together with a system for firing teachers deemed “inadequate”) and a major boost in the number of public charter schools. States compete for large sums of money by demonstrating that they are aligning their education system with the new criteria.

I applaud the renewed emphasis on teaching performance. To my mind, we should go much further, transforming teaching into a high-status, well paid profession akin to medicine. With greatly increased salaries paired to much higher standards, we could recruit the very best teachers and offer them appropriate kinds of training both before and after receipt of their education certificates.

Why is teaching so important? Not, as is generally argued, because American kids need to keep up with youth in other countries so that the US can maintain its position in the global economy. No, teaching is critical because education reform—or, more accurately, transformation—may just be the key to saving civilization. As argued previously in this blog, techno-fixes alone simply aren’t going to cut it. Sustainability will depend on raising future generations of citizens possessing a different perspective on the human-nature connection. Specifically, we must counter the prevalent and erroneous notion of viewing ourselves as external conquerors of nature, and begin to understand that we are fully embedded within nature.

What most disturbs me about the ongoing debate over education reform, including the Race, is the virtual lack of conversation, let alone debate, about curriculum content. The unspoken assumption is that a shift in the delivery mechanism is all that is needed to “fix” education. Yet in addition to how we are teaching our children, we should be equally concerned with what we are teaching them.

Today, as for most of the 20th Century, education is about careerism, preparing students to successfully enter consumer society—that is, to be “upwardly mobile.” Although we are well aware of the environmental calamity facing us today, and the fundamental role of that “consumers” play in accelerating our pace toward disaster, education (K-16) is still organized as if no such specter is sitting out there on the horizon.

Education for the 21st Century should be education for sustainability, a system of teaching and learning that helps our youth understand how to live well in the world. At its root, sustainability depends on two factors: 1) human justice; and 2) an harmonious relationship between the human and nonhuman world (i.e., justice for nonhuman nature). One of the greatest problems with our present day education system is that it fragments the world into artificial chunks (biology, history, geography, math, etc.) and prevents us from seeing larger patterns and unified wholes [5]. A partial remedy to this curricular myopia, and certainly a fundamental element that deserves residence at the curriculum core, is ecological literacy, or “ecoliteracy” [6,7]: the interweaving of Earth’s natural systems, and the human role is those systems. Some remarkable progress is being made is the ecoliteracy arena [8], but we urgently need to find ways to scale up these successes so that they are applied more broadly.

Another key content element is what I have termed “evolutionary literacy,” or “evoliteracy” [9]. Whereas ecoliteracy focuses on connections and energy flow within the temporal snapshots of ecological systems, evoliteracy inserts the vertical dimension of deep time. The Epic of Evolution, from the beginnings of the universe to the present day, is our amazing origin story delivered by science [10-12]. As argued in recent posts, this grand, unifying saga, also called the “Great Story,” is capable of offering a critical dose of meaning and purpose to our lives. Far from the random, meaningless place so often portrayed in textbooks and the popular media, our universe is a stunningly creative place that birthed us through a long series of transformations, beginning with simple hydrogen atoms. Seeing ourselves as players in this 14 billion year old drama, and recognizing that our decisions will impact that next 14 billion years, may just be an essential element in achieving anything worthy of the title “sustainable.” Yet, at present, the Great Story is virtually absent from all levels of education, communicated, if at all, only as a series of fragments rather than a unified whole.

Rapid education transformation (as opposed to mere “reform”) is critical to the future of humans and millions of other species on this planet. We need a major mindshift, one that may only come through empowering future generations. So get informed. If you’re an educator, think about the underlying messages of your teaching, and how you might alter these in the direction of sustainability. If you’re a parent, find out what your children are learning in school, and make efforts to shift the content (as well as the delivery) in ways that will enable our youth to live well in the world. Earth’s future depends on our mobilization efforts.

Notes and References
1) Obama Offers “Race to the Top” Contest for Schools. Guardian News, London, UK, July 24, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/8625198?FORM=ZZNR7.
2) Dillon, S. and T. Lewin. 2010. Education chief vies to expand U.S. role as partner on local schools. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/education/04educate.html
3) Brill, S. 2010. The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand. New York Times Magazine, May 17, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23Race-t.html
4) Race to the Top, Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_Top
5) Orr, D. W. 1994. Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect. Island Press, Washington, D.C.
6) Orr, D. W. 1992. Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. State University of New York Press, Albany, 210 pp.
7) Stone, M. K. and Z. Barlow (eds.). 2005. Ecological Literacy: Educating our Children for a Sustainable World. University of California Press, Berkeley, 275 pp.
8) Stone, M. K. 2009. Smart By Nature. University of California Press, Berkeley.
9) Sampson, S. D. 2009. Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life. University of California Press, Berkeley.
10) Berry, T. 1999. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. Bell Tower, New York.
11) Swimme, B. and T. Berry. 1992. The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to Ecozoic Era. Harper Collins, New York.
12) I strongly encourage readers to check out a brand new website, Journey of the Universe, supporting an upcoming documentary by Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker. This project promises to provide some excellent tools for educators interested in communicating the Great Story. Check out: http://www.journeyoftheuniverse.org/

Images

All images courtesy of National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/

Re-Defining the E-Word

2010-05-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

What does the word “evolution” mean?

In last week’s post on this blog, I argued (as have a number of others before me) that the “e-word” should be expanded beyond biological evolution to include no less than the “history of the universe.” In this more comprehensive sense, evolution is able to capture in a single word the unified story of the cosmos, life, and culture. In response to this post, one of the comments I received came from Kenneth (last name not included), who argued that evolution should be restricted to biological evolution. In his words,

"So much of the refusal to accept evolution (in this country at least, the US) comes from those who think evolution explains the origin of life. It, of course, does not and has nothing to do with abiogenesis. But presenting the origin of the cosmos as "the epic of evolution" is just going to further that divide. We need to teach about the Big Bang, stellar birth and refinement, how planets form, the Miller-Urey experiment's results, and evolution and natural selection. But we can't put them all in the same basket since they're not actually related (and saying that non-reproducing things "evolve" is adding gasoline to the fire, too).

Kenneth raises a critical issue, and I thank him sincerely for taking the time to articulate it. Because “evolution” has become such a loaded word in the United States (and a number of other countries), I have thought long and hard about whether or not to expand the word to refer to the history of the universe. After all, I reasoned, people might reject the Great Story out of hand, effectively tossing out the baby with the bathwater because of a bias against anything evolutionary. Eventually, however, I came to think that the two truly deserve--even need--to be linked. Not only is the teaching of biological evolution a critical endeavor worthy of our energies—so too is the teaching of the Great Story. And I’m convinced that this pair of ideas can be mutually reinforcing. I devote today’s post to a brief outline of my position.

Ultimately, of course, how we decide to define the word “evolution” is a matter of semantics, and words can have multiple meanings. For example, at Dictionary.com, the biological definition of evolution is, “change in the gene pool of a population from generation to generation by such processes as mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift.” However, nine other definitions are also listed, including one that applies to the history of the universe: “any process of formation or growth; development.” So the question is this: Do we elucidate or muddy our understanding of nature if we refer to the Great Story of everything as the “epic of evolution”?

Kenneth contends that the expanded version of the word gives ammunition to those who conflate the process of (biological) evolution with the origin of life, suggesting that evolution has nothing to do with life’s beginnings. I would disagree with at least the latter half of this claim. Recent work by origin of life researchers have revealed remarkable continuities between geochemistry and biochemistry, between the living and nonliving worlds (1). My strong hunch—likely bolstered by the announcement this week of the first synthetic life (2)— is that resolution of the origin of life problem, one of the greatest mysteries in science, will reveal blurry boundaries between the animate and inanimate, akin to what we see between major groups of biological ancestors and descendents (e.g., theropod dinosaurs and birds).

On a larger scale, I think that using evolution to describe the Great Story serves at least two important purposes. First, it underlines the fact that the evolution of life (and humans in particular) is not separate from the rest of nature. Rather, life’s origin and expansion is merely one of the latest examples of increasing complexity within a single, unified, and stunningly creative whole. By treating biological evolution as an entirely distinct process, we tend to construct a false dichotomy and ignore the many similarities between organic and inorganic transformations.

For example, although increasing diversification has been a major trend in both cosmic and biological evolution, another frequently overlooked propensity is toward unification. As I described in a previous post, “The numerous and dramatic increases in complexity, it turns out, have been achieved largely through a process of integration, with smaller wholes becoming parts of larger wholes. Again and again we see the progressive development of multi-part individuals from simpler forms. Thus, for example, atoms become integrated into molecules, molecules into cells, and cells into organisms. At each higher, emergent stage, older forms are enveloped and incorporated into newer forms, with the end result being a nested, multilevel hierarchy.” Indeed a strong argument can be made that the major steps in complexification over the past 14 billion years have been achieved large through unifying rather than diversifying (3).

A Darwinian sense of evolution has also helped to inform ideas about evolution in the nonliving realm. Perhaps the most surprising case in point is Lee Smolin’s cosmological natural selection theory (4,5). Smolin, a theoretical physicist, has suggested that the rules of biology apply on the scale of the cosmos. Specifically, the eventual collapse of a black hole may result in the creation of another universe on “the other side.” If so, each universe generates as many universes as it does black holes, the equivalent of reproduction. Due to a number of physical constraints, the majority of these universes may undergo “heat death” before they can generate stars and black holes; that is, they die off before reproducing. If so, there would be a kind of natural selection favoring the formation of universes of that could successfully spawn new universes!

The second important reason I advocate use of the e-word to describe the Great Story is that it increases the scope of the challenge facing those who oppose the notion of organic evolution. That is, opponents of evolution, especially young Earth creationists who argue that the universe is a mere 6,000 years old, must contend not only with the Everest of evidence supporting biological evolution, but also with the equally abundant evidence in favor of cosmological evolution (the origins of the universe, galaxy, solar system, etc.) and cultural evolution (e.g., evidence of tool use within the hominid lineage). Anti-evolutionists typically search for supposedly “fatal flaws” (e.g., structures showing “irreducible complexity”) that might indicate the work of a “Designer.” But there will always be things in science that cannot be fully explained (at least not yet), and overthrowing the notion of evolution requires that one upturn the entire mountain rather than a few grains of sand. Explicitly linking the evolution of life with the evolution of the non-living universe greatly increases the size of that mountain.

Finally, much of my confidence in promoting an expanded definition of evolution comes from such luminaries as biologist E. O. Wilson (6), who made this argument long before I did. I recently received additional assurance when I ran into my friend Eugenie Scott, Executive Director for the National Center for Science Education (NCSE; the leading organization promoting). Arguably more than anyone else in the country, Genie and the NCSE are on the frontlines fighting to keep the teaching of biological evolution in the science classroom (and creationism out). When I asked for her view on the matter, Genie responded in wholehearted agreement with me, adding that she too defines evolution as “the history of the universe.”

So let’s feel free to refer to our cosmic story as “the epic of evolution,” and then recognize biological evolution as a subset of this grand narrative (7). At present, the general public is effectively illiterate with regard to both, a dire situation that, as argued last week, deserves immediate and widespread attention.

References and Suggested Sources
1) To give just one example, check out a terrific talk by one of these workers, Eric Smith (http://fora.tv/2007/04/18/Inevitable_Life).

2) Wade, N. Researchers say the created a “Synthetic Cell.” New York Times, May 20, 2010. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/21cell.html).

3) Margulis, L. 1998. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. Sciencewriters, Amherst.

4) Smolin, L. 1997. Life of the Cosmos. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

5) Lee Smolin Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Smolin

6) Wilson, Edward O. 1978. On Human Nature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Pp. 206-207.

7) For additional reading on this topic, I recommend:
- Cosmic Evolution Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_evolution

- Epic of Evolution website: http://epicofevolution.com/celebrate.html

- Chaisson, E. 2006. Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos

Images
All images courtesy of National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/

The Great Story

2010-05-14T09:55:00.000-07:00

Do you know your origin story—the evolutionary account of your roots and those of everything else? If you’re like most people in Western societies, your honest answer is no. And that, it turns out, is a BIG problem.

What’s the problem with being story-less? We’re in the midst of a gargantuan sustainability crisis, the greatest challenge ever faced by humanity. The vast majority of scientific experts, from ecologists to climatologists, are in full agreement that we are currently on a collision course with ruin, involving human suffering and devastation to the biosphere on an almost unimaginable scale. Finding and following a new, more sustainable path will require much more than new technologies. Any solution demands no less than a novel way of seeing the world, one that gives our lives greater meaning and causes us to take action to protect and nurture our native places. In other words, we must foster a new worldview that roots humanity in both local places and deep time—exactly the kind of thing that origin stories do best.

Fortunately, an astonishing, awe-inspiring, and staggeringly beautiful story of our origins is now readily available, one with the potential to unite humanity at this critical juncture in our history. Variously called the Great Story, the Universe Story, the New Story, or the Epic of Evolution, this grand narrative is founded on several centuries of scientific inquiry [1,2]. Evolution isn’t just Darwin, natural selection, and mutation. Evolution is the history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the present day. And far from leading to a view that the universe is random and meaningless, as commonly conceived, this saga provides the foundation for seeing ourselves as deeply embedded within the fabric of a creative cosmos.

Indeed the Great Story is arguably the greatest contribution of science, offering a direct glimpse into where we come from and what it means. More than three decades ago, famed biologist E. O. Wilson [3] stated that, “the evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have.” He added that this same story, “retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic.” In the intervening decades, fields like cosmology, geology, paleontology, and archaeology have greatly augmented this saga, generating for the first time a unified, evidence-based narrative encompassing the cosmos, life, and culture.

Over that same time period, a number of people, in particular the late “geologian” Thomas Berry [1], have argued strongly for the importance of a general understanding of this unified epic. Yet the Great Story has remained virtually absent from all arenas of education. Today, few of us can convey anything of this story beyond perhaps an incomplete sequence of origins—for example, galaxy, Earth, bacteria, worm, fish, amphibian, mammal, upright primate, Homo sapiens—with humans generally placed atop the pile as the “king of the world” (if not king of the universe). It is ironic that we who have access to the most rigorous and complete story of everything do not use it to inform the arc of our lives.

I agree wholeheartedly with Thomas Berry that the Great Story, expanded beyond biology to encompass cosmos and culture, deserves to reside at the very core of the education curriculum. This astounding epic deserves to be told and retold, with appropriate increases in complexity, from childhood through adulthood. Education is currently focused almost entirely on the present day, with the unspoken assumption that everything that came before is meaningless and irrelevant. Yet meaning, purpose, and belonging have less to do with where we are at any given moment than where we’ve been and where we’re going. So, in addition to the horizontal perspective offered by understanding the present day world, education must convey the vertical context that roots us in deep time. Humanity must reinvent the sacred [4] and learn to see that everything around us has its origins in deep time stardust.

But isn’t the Epic of Evolution incompatible with the beliefs of major religious traditions? So it might seem, given ongoing media coverage of this conflict. It’s true that, despite resounding acceptance by the scientific community, biological evolution remains a hotly debated topic within the general public, particularly in the United States. About one half of all Americans currently support the statement that “God created humans pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” And many scientists, educators, and parents, responding to attempts by Christian fundamentalists to discredit Darwin and re-inspire a dominant role for a Creator throughout the history of life, have been fighting to keep evolution in America’s classrooms.

So embittered is this conflict that rarely is much thought given to why evolution education is important. Scientists and educators often state that learning the fundamentals of evolution is necessary because this idea is central to biology, or because evolutionary concepts underlie hot button topics like genetics. Such arguments miss a fundamental point. Teaching evolution is critical because the underlying concept of transformation is the very glue that holds together the epic of cosmos, life, and culture. And understanding this story could change the world by shifting the human conception of nature.

Ultimately, I can’t envision the necessary shift in worldview occurring (at least not in the brief time allotted to us) in the absence of a dialogue between the science and religion communities [4-6]. Fortunately, attitudes toward evolution, within and outside of religious circles, are far more nuanced than generally believed and great potential exists to integrate the Great Story with traditional theist views [6]. Spiritual leaders as diverse as the Pope and the Dalai Lama have advocated acceptance of evolution (though, granted, sometimes with caveats pertaining to human origins). Theologian John Haught [7] declared that, “Darwin has gifted us with an account of life whose depth, beauty and pathos—when seen in the context of the larger cosmic Epic of Evolution—exposes us afresh to the raw reality of the sacred and to a resoundingly meaningful universe.” Michael Dowd, minister and author of Thank God for Evolution [5], has adopted the role of “evolutionary evangelist,” preaching the Great Story to church congregations throughout North America.

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” So said poet Muriel Rukeyser, underlining the power of narrative. Why does the Great Story merit a central place in our culture? Because this grand epic represents our best understanding of the evolving universe; because internalizing the idea of common ancestry through deep time will help us reconnect with nonhuman nature; and because disseminating this story widely may well be critical to shifting worldviews and achieving sustainability. Only when the Great Story is finally expressed throughout our culture—not just in science, but in poetry, song, fine arts, and dance—will we begin to truly understand what it means to be part of a single, evolving universe at this pivotal moment in deep time. Only then will we begin to conceive of nature as relatives deserving of our compassion and empathy rather than resources for our exploitation. We need a story.

References
1) Berry, T. 1999. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. Bell Tower, New York.
2) Swimme, B. and T. Berry. 1992. The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to Ecozoic Era. Harper Collins, New York.
3) Wilson, Edward O. 1978. On Human Nature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Pp. 206-207.
4) Kauffman, S. A. 2008. Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. Basic Books, New York, 320 pp.
5) Dowd, M. 2005. Thank God for Evolution. Council Oak Books, San Francisco.
6) Phipps, C. 2007. The REAL Evolution Debate. EnlightenNext Magazine. http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j35/real-evolution-debate.asp
7) Haught, J. F. 2008. God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. Westview Press (quote: p. 2).

Images
Top image courtesy ofSky Image Labe: http://www.skyimagelab.com/
All other images courtesy of National Geographic: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/

Dinosaurs of the Lost Continent

2010-04-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I addressed the hypothesis of dinosaur provincialism—that is, isolated communities of giant dinosaurs—on North America during the Late Cretaceous. Specifically, I discussed a recent paper by Vavrek and Larsson (1), who concluded on the basis of a rigorous statistical analysis that Maastrichtian dinosaurs (i.e., those living in the final 6 million years of the Mesozoic immediately prior to the K-T extinction) were not split into isolated provinces, as argued previously, but rather formed a single community. I cautiously agreed with their findings and noted a few caveats. For example, their study was restricted geographically—limited to the four most dinosaur-rich geologic units in the northern part of the Western Interior—leaving plenty of terrain for possible dinosaur provinces elsewhere.

Today I want to focus on another of my caveats: dinosaur provincialism in the preceding Campanian Stage (83.5 – 70.6 million years ago). If your goal is to understand large scale patterns and processes in the Mesozoic world of dinosaurs, the best place and time to look for answers is Campanian-aged rocks from the Western Interior on North America. Period. Nowhere else on Earth do we have continent-scale sampling of fossiliferous formations from the Mesozoic that have been intensively worked for more than a century. Literally dozens of different kinds of dinosaurs, many of them exceptionally preserved, have been recovered from as far north as Alaska and as far south as Mexico. And the great bulk of these occur in a 2 million year window of time, between about 77 and 75 million years ago.

The importance of this particular slice of Mesozoic time and space is heightened by the geographic context of the fossils. The Mesozoic was a hothouse world virtually devoid of polar ice caps. As a result, sea levels tended to be much higher than they are today, often flooding low-lying regions of continents with shallow seas. In North America, the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway, extended from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. For almost 30 million years (~95-67 million years ago), this so-called “epeiric” sea subdivided the continent into eastern and western landmasses, known as Appalachia and Laramidia, respectively. We know little of the dinosaurs of Appalachia, but geologic activity in the west has exposed an abundance of Campanian rocks along the eastern margin of the “lost continent” of Laramidia. Key geologic units that have yielded dinosaurs include the Dinosaur Park Formation of Alberta, the Two Medicine and Judith River formations of Montana, the Kaiparowits Formation of Utah, the Kirtland and Fruitland formations of New Mexico, and the Aguja Formation of Texas.

Campanian Laramidia was home to arguably the greatest known fluorescence of dinosaurs, and the emerging diversity patterns are stunning. On the one hand, wherever we look, the same groups of dinosaurs tend to show up. Bird-hipped herbivores include horned dinosaurs (ceratopsids), duck-billed dinosaurs (hadrosaurs), smaller ornithopod dinosaurs (hypsilophodonts), armored ankylosaurs (nodosaurids and ankylosaurids), and dome-headed dinosaurs (pachycephalosaurs). Lizard-hipped theropods are also very diverse, including ostrich-like ornithomimids, beaked oviraptorosaurs, and sickle-clawed dromaeosaurs and troodonts, with giant tyrannosaurs invariably filling the role of top predator. (Although poorly known, a great diversity of smaller-bodied theropods, such as feathered microraptorines and birds were almost certainly present.) On the other hand, the species-level representatives of these groups appear to be limited to small ranges. In particular, as first argued by Dale Russell (2), and later by Thomas Lehman (3), we find different genera and species in the north (Alberta and Montana) than we do in the south (Utah, New Mexico, and Texas). So, for example, Chasmosaurus is a horned dinosaur known only from the north, whereas Pentaceratops is limited to the south. Similarly, some species of Gryposaurus are known only from the north, whereas at least one species is restricted to the south.

Until recently, a relative dearth of identifiable dinosaurs from southern Laramidia made it difficult to test the provincialism hypothesis. This “southern gap” has now been partially remedied by a decade of fieldwork in the Kaiparowits Formation, abundantly exposed in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, southern Utah. Working in close collaboration with the Bureau of Land Management, our interdisciplinary team—based out of the University of Utah, but including researchers from multiple institutions—has unearthed an entirely “new” assemblage of dinosaurs in the Kaiparowits,16 different dinosaur varieties so far, 11 of which can now be identified to the level of species (4). Several of these animals are represented by exceptionally preserved skulls and partial skeletons, often with skin impressions. Some of these species have been named and described, including the oviraptorosaur Hagryphus giganteus (5) and the hadrosaur Gryposaurus monumentensis (6). Other studies are nearing completion or well under way. I am happy to say that the discoveries keep on coming; the most recent field season yielded a plethora of amazing finds from a single quarry. First to be found was a hadrosaur about the size of T.rex; excavation of this specimen, which includes a nearly complete skull, yielded one skull and skeleton of a crocodilian and another of a turtle, as well as an ankylosaur with what appears to be an intact skull, and a possible pterosaur! All this from a single (albeit very large) site.

Remarkably, of the dozens of dinosaur species now identified from the Campanian of Laramidia, none can be confidently placed in both the north and the south—strong support for the notion of dinosaur provincialism. Sullivan and Lucas (7) argued previously that this provincialism is illusory, the result of animals arrayed in time rather than space. But recent advances in both the number and precision of radiometric dates (8) conclusively demonstrate temporal overlap of key formations (e.g., Dinosaur Park and Kaiparowits), as well as species belonging to particular groups (e.g., horned dinosaurs, hadrosaurs, and tyrannosaurs). A recent faunal review and statistical analysis by our working group (9) supports earlier claims from Lehman, showing that the late Campanian provincialism extends well beyond dinosaurs to encompass a variety of vertebrates.

These findings have profound implications for our understanding of dinosaur ecology and evolution. The “island continent” of Laramidia was less than 20% the size of present day North America. Much of this landmass was covered with rising mountain ranges (primarily the Cordilleran Overthrust Belt, but perhaps the Laramide orogeny as well), sandwiching known Laramidian dinosaurs between a restless seaway to east and rising mountains to the west. So it’s remarkable to contemplate the notion of one diverse assemblage of dinosaurs—many with body masses in the rhino-to-elephant range—let alone multiple assemblages of such animals. To add insult to injury, some of these dinosaurs, especially among the hadrosaurs and ceratopsids, appear to have lived in large herds numbering at least in the hundreds of animals. How could so many giants make a living and persist over geologic time spans on such a diminutive landmass. Likely answers involve greater volumes of available plant food (primary productivity) and/or decreased dietary needs relative to modern-day warm-blooded mammals.

Given that most northern and southern dinosaur species within a given group appear closely similar, differing primarily in features associated with reproductive success (horns, frills, crests, etc.), they may well have played similar ecological roles. For example, the long-frilled horned dinosaurs (chasmosaurines) in the north and south, although distinct species, may well have consumed very similar kinds of plants. If so, the ecological niches filled by dinosaurs might have changed very little for millions of years during the Late Cretaceous. Behind this apparent ecological stasis, however, a variety of factors—perhaps including seaway migrations and other environmental changes—appear to have resulted in rapid evolutionary turnover of species (10). Like a long-running Broadway show, the players changed while the same story played out endlessly.

We have only begun to plumb the depths of knowledge relating to Laramidian dinosaurs. And we can count on many surprises to come. I will use this blog as an outlet to update readers on new discoveries as they are announced.

References
1) Vavrek, M. J. and Larsson, H.C. E. 2010. Low beta diversity of Maastrichtian dinosaurs of North America. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
2) Russell, D. A. 1967. A census of dinosaur specimens collected in western Canada, National Museum of Canada Natural History Papers, 36:1-13.
3) Lehman, T. M. 1997. Late Campanian dinosaur biogeography in the western interior of North America. Dinofest International Symposium Volume, pp. 223-24.
4) Sampson, S. D., Gates, T. A., Roberts, E. M., Getty, M. A., Zanno, L. E., Loewen, M. A., Smith, J. A., Lund, E. K., Sertich, J., and Titus, A. L. in press. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument: A new and critical window into the world of dinosaurs. Learning from the Land Symposium Symposium Proceedings.
5) Zanno, L. E. and Sampson, S. D. 2005. A new oviraptorosaur (Theropoda: Maniraptora) from the late Campanian of Utah and the status of the North American Oviraptorosauria. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 25(4): 897-904.
6) Gates, T. A. and Sampson, S. D. 2007. A new species of Gryposaurus (Dinosauria: Hadrosauridae) from the Upper Campanian Kaiparowits Formation of Utah. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 151:351-376.
7) Sullivan, R. M. & Lucas, S. G. 2006. The Kirtlandian land-vertebrate "age" – faunal composition, temporal position and biostratigraphic correlation in the nonmarine Upper Cretaceous of western North America. New Mexico Museum of Natural History Science Bulletin 35, 7-29.
8) Roberts, E.M., Deino, A.D., and Chan, M.A. 2005a. 40Ar/39Ar age of the Kaiparowits Formation, southern Utah, and correlation of coeval strata and faunas along the margin of the Western Interior Basin: Cretaceous Research, 26:307-318.
9) Gates, T.A., Sampson, S.D., Zanno, L.E., Roberts, E.M., Eaton, J.G., Nydam, R.L., Hutchison, J.H., Smith, J.A., Loewen, M.A., and Getty, M.A. in press. Biogeography of terrestrial and freshwater vertebrates from the Late Cretaceous (Campanian) Western Interior of North America: new information from the Kaiparowits Formation, south-central Utah. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.
10) Sampson, S. D. 2009. Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life. University of California Press), 332 pp.
(Note: One of the book's chapters is dedicated to the story of Laramidian dinosaurs.)

Images (from top to bottom)
1) Late Cretaceous (Campanian) North America, showing the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway subdividing North America into Laramidia (western landmass) and Appalachia (eastern landmass). Image credit: Ron Blakey http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/
2) The Kaiparowits Formation, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, southern Utah. Image credit: Rebecca Hunt-Foster.
3) Reconstruction of the oviraptorosaur Hagryphus giganteus. Image credit: Michael Skrepnick.
4) The skull of Gryposaurus monumentensis, a new duck-billed dinosaur from the Kaiparowits Formation.
5) The skull of an unnamed horned dinosaur from the Kaiparowits Formation.

Provincial Dinosaurs

2010-04-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

This week, a pair of authors from McGill University, Matthew Vavrek and Hans Larsson, published a paper in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which they argued that dinosaurs living in North America during the last few million years of the Cretaceous Period were not divided up into distinct, geographically separated communities, or “provinces” (1). These authors plumbed a large storehouse of paleo data known as the Paleobiology Database in order to collect information about which kinds of North American dinosaurs lived in different locales during the Maastrichtian stage, spanning almost 6 million years (~71.3 - 65.5 million years ago). Among the varieties examined were Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops, as well as somewhat lesser known forms like the duck-billed Edmontosaurus, the long-necked Alamosaurus, the dome-headed Pachycephalosaurus, and the bony-armored Ankylosaurus. Vavrek and Larsson subjected these data to a rigorous statistical analysis, focusing in particular on the four most fossiliferous geologic units (i.e., those that have yielded more than 100 dinosaur specimens): the Horseshoe Canyon Formation of Alberta; the Hell Creek Formation of Montana and North Dakota; and the Lance Formation of Wyoming. They concluded that the evidence strongly supports the presence of a single dinosaur community inhabiting western North America during the Maastrichtian.

So what’s the big deal? Given that all of the animals noted above qualify as giants, shouldn’t we expect to find one community of dinosaurs living in Western North America during a single chunk of time? Well, yes, that would be the natural assumption, since bigger animals require more space to find sufficient food. The problem is that, beginning almost 50 years ago (2), paleontologists began noting that different varieties of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs tend to show up in the southern and northern parts of the Western Interior. For example, the giant sauropod Alamosaurus is known only from the south (e.g., New Mexico, Utah, Texas), whereas Triceratops tends to occur further north (e.g., Wyoming, Montana, Alberta, North Dakota). Thomas Lehman of Texas Tech University undertook an in depth study of the matter and concluded that dinosaurs were divided into northern and southern “provinces” during the Maastrichtian and (the preceding) Campanian stages of the Late Cretaceous (3,4,5).

Lehman expanded the scope to investigate the spectrum of vertebrate groups (animals with back bones), and found the same pattern; fishes, amphibians, lizards, turtles, crocodiles, and mammals all occurred in both north and south, but distinct representatives of these groups tended to be clumped latitudinally—that is, distinct genera and species were recovered in Alberta and Montana than in New Mexico and Texas. Even pollen fossils seemed to yield a parallel signal. Lacking any evidence of a physical barrier to north-south dispersal, Lehman hypothesized that some sort of climatic gradient must have caused the formation of unique plant communities, which in turn resulted in semi-isolated vertebrate communities.

Vavrek and Larsson’s study seems to fly in the face of any purported dinosaur provincialism. Their argument focuses attention on problems related to sampling and the vagaries of the fossil record. Based on probabilities alone, paleontologists are bound to recover the most common components of a fauna first. Sample sizes—that is, the number of specimens found—need to get relatively big before many of the rarer species are likely to show up. So any perceived differences between geologic formations and geographic regions may be due to biases in sampling rather than actual differences in the community composition. This is exactly what Vavrek and Larsson argue has occurred with our understanding of the Maastrichtian dinosaurs from North America. The paper’s closing statement sums it up: “These results suggest that dinosaurs were not as restricted in their ranges as once thought and that the fauna as a whole was largely homogenous.”

For the most part, I find these conclusions reasonable. Based on the four best-sampled geologic units of Maastrichtian age, I concur that there is no compelling evidence of geographically separated and biologically distinct dinosaur communities. I also applaud the application of rigorous statistical methods to the study of dinosaur paleobiology, something that has occurred all too infrequently in the past (once again, largely due to small samples).

Is that it then? Is the dinosaur provincialism hypothesis dead? By no means.

First off, Vavrek and Larsson focus their study only on dinosaur genera rather than species (for example, Triceratops versus Triceratops horridus). This strategy makes some sense, given that most Maastrichtian dinosaur genera contain only one species, and that many fossil specimens can only be identified to the genus level. Yet it must not be forgotten that genera are human categories with no biologically reality, and what we are really interested in here is communities of species—that is, populations of animals that are reproductively isolated from their near relatives elsewhere. In the much better sampled Campanian stage, several North American dinosaur genera (e.g., Parasaurolophus, Gryposaurus) include distinct, apparently latitudinally separated species. So it’s certainly conceivable that a similar pattern pertained to the Maastrichtian. Indeed some previous authors have raised the possibility of distinct species of Triceratops north and south within the Western Interior.

Second, the restricted quartet of geologic units (three formations in four places) used by Vavrek and Larsson covers a relatively limited latitudinal span, from southern Alberta in the north to Wyoming in the south (on the order of 10 degrees of latitude). So their study leaves wide open the possibility of distinct communities further south in Western Interior (and elsewhere on the continent). The south-only distribution of Alamosaurus is interesting here, perhaps reflecting a semi-isolated, upland, intermountain community (3,6).

Third and most important, a lack of dinosaur provincialism in the North American Maastrichtian does not negate the growing abundance of evidence documenting distinct dinosaur communities during the preceding Campanian Stage (~83.5 - 71.3 million years ago). The Campanian of the Western Interior of North America is much better sampled than the Maastrichtian, with more dinosaur species known from a 2 million year interval (about 76-74 million years ago) than for the entire 6 million years of the Maastrichtian. Moreover, in stark contrast to the Maastrichtian, most of the key fossil-bearing formations of the Campanian are now well dated, with multiple radiometric age estimated (i.e., absolute dates based on the decay of certain unstable radioactive isotopes found in volcanic ash) (7). So we can now begin to state with confidence which Campanian dinosaur species overlapped in time, but not in space.

Research conducted by our working group points to a very different picture for the Campanian than the Maastrichtian. In particular, a decade of work in the Kaiparowits Formation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), southern Utah, has resulted in an entirely “new” dinosaur fauna (8,9), including the duck-billed Gryposaurus monumentensis (10) and the oviraptor theropod Hagryphus giganteus (11). Most of these new animals are still under study, with publications and announcements forthcoming. A comprehensive statistical analysis by Gates et al. (12), partially based on our GSENM results, finds robust support for Lehman’s hypothesis of vertebrate provincialism in the Western Interior during late Campanian. Remarkably, to date not a single dinosaur species can be confidently placed in both the south (e.g., Texas, New Mexico, Utah) and the north (e.g., Montana, Alberta).

Suffice it to say that the hypothesis of Late Cretaceous dinosaur provincialism in North America remains alive and well—and, in the opinion of our working group, robustly supported—at least for the Campanian. In my next post, I’ll address this topic again, describing some of our recent results in GSENM and probing deeper into the notion of provincial dinosaurs. Along the way, I’ll tell the story of a lost continent with grand implications for our understanding of the Mesozoic world of dinosaurs.

Notes and References
1) Vavrek, M. J. and Larsson, H.C. E. 2010. Low beta diversity of Maastrichtian dinosaurs of North America. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published ahead of print doi:10.1073/pnas.0913645107.
2) Russell, D. A. 1967. A census of dinosaur specimens collected in western Canada, National Museum of Canada Natural History Papers, 36:1-13.
3) Lehman, T. M. 1987. Late Maastrichtian paleoenvironments and dinosaur biogeography in the western interior of North America, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 60:189-217.
4) Lehman, T. M. 1997. Late Campanian dinosaur biogeography in the western interior of North America. Dinofest International Symposium Volume, pp. 223-24.
5) Lehman, T. M. 2001. Late Cretaceous dinosaur provinciality. In D. H. Tanke and K. Carpenter (Eds.), Mesozoic Vertebrate Life (pp.310-328) Indiana University Press.
6) Sampson, S. D. and Loewen, M. A. 2005. Tyrannosaurus rex from the Upper Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) North Horn Formation of Utah: biogeographic and paleoecologic implications. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 25(2): 469-472.
7) Roberts, E.M., Deino, A.D., and Chan, M.A. 2005a. 40Ar/39Ar age of the Kaiparowits Formation, southern Utah, and correlation of coeval strata and faunas along the margin of the Western Interior Basin: Cretaceous Research, 26:307-318.
8) Sampson, S. D., Gates, T. A., Roberts, E. M., Getty, M. A., Zanno, L. E., Loewen, M. A., Smith, J. A., Lund, E. K., Sertich, J., and Titus, A. L. in press. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument: A new and critical window into the world of dinosaurs. Learning from the Land Symposium Symposium Proceedings.
9) Sampson, S. D. and Loewen, M. A. 2010. Unraveling a radiation: a review of the diversity, stratigraphic distribution, biogeography, and evolution of horned dinosaurs. (Ornithischia:Ceratopsidae). Pp. 405-427 in M. J. Ryan, B. J. Chinnery-Allgeier, and D. A. Eberth (eds.), New Perspectives on Horned Dinosaurs. Indiana University Press.
10) Gates, T. A. and Sampson, S. D. 2007. A new species of Gryposaurus (Dinosauria: Hadrosauridae) from the Upper Campanian Kaiparowits Formation of Utah. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 151:351-376.
11) Zanno, L. E. and Sampson, S. D. 2005. A new oviraptorosaur (Theropoda: Maniraptora) from the late Campanian of Utah and the status of the North American Oviraptorosauria. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 25(4): 897-904.
12) Gates, T.A., Sampson, S.D., Zanno, L.E., Roberts, E.M., Eaton, J.G., Nydam, R.L., Hutchison, J.H., Smith, J.A., Loewen, M.A., and Getty, M.A. in press. Biogeography of terrestrial and freshwater vertebrates from the Late Cretaceous (Campanian) Western Interior of North America: new information from the Kaiparowits Formation, south-central Utah. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

Images
Top: Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops, by Michael Skrepnick
Upper Middle: Corythosaurus, by Michael Skrepnick
Lower Middle: Albertosaurus and Bambiraptor, by Michael Skrepnick
Bottom: Centrosaurus, Origin of a Mass Death Assemblage, by Michael Skrepnick
For more from Michael Skrepnick, go to: http://www.dinosaursinart.com/

The Illusion of Self

2010-04-13T12:47:00.000-07:00

We think of ourselves as separate beings isolated from the rest of the world, with our skin forming the barrier between inside and outside. This sense of separateness runs deep within the human psyche, guiding our thinking about such fundamental issues as being, life, and (particularly) death. Among Westerners, the notion of isolation extends outward to embrace humanity and exclude the nonhuman world; in this conception, humans exist outside, usually above, nature. The end result of all this externalization is billions of “skin-encapsulated egos,” each of us consumed by thoughts of furthering our own ends and protecting ourselves from the outside world.

But what if we are not separate at all? What if we are fully immersed into the ebb and flow of everything around us? Would such knowledge change how we think and act? I’m not certain about the answer to the third question, but there’s now little doubt about the first two. Scientific insights over the past several decades mirror much older insights derived from a variety of wisdom traditions. Despite its near ubiquity, we can state with confidence that the notion of a separate self is largely illusory.

The most obvious challenge to the concept of separateness is our need to consume air, water, and food. At what point did your last breathe, sip, or bite cease to be part of the outside world and become you? The truth is that we constantly exchange matter with the outside world, replacing every atom in our bodies every seven years or so. And your metabolism is intimately linked to Earth’s metabolism. Energized by sunlight, life converts inanimate rock into nutrients, which then pass through plants, plant-eaters, and animal-eaters before being decomposed and returned to the inanimate Earth. Humans fit into this amazing planet-scale metabolic system as major consumers of plants and animals. Isolation from any aspect of this metabolic flow translates to death.

If all that isn’t enough to dampen your sense of separateness, how about the fact that the body you identify with consists not of one lifeform but many? Your mouth alone contains more than 700 distinct kinds of bacteria. Carving out a variety of roles over every square millimeter of tongue, teeth, and gums, many of these microbial partners serve as armed guards, improving health by fighting disease-causing bacteria. Others can cause dental cavities if you don’t brush. Your skin and eyelashes are equally loaded with bacteria (no matter how long you shower) and your gut has a bevy of bacterial sidekicks (on the order of another 500 varieties) that are essential to converting food to useable nutrients. Although this still leaves several bacteria-free regions in a healthy body (e.g., brain, spinal cord, blood stream, etc.), current estimates indicate that, of the 10 trillion cells that compose your physical self, 9 out of 10 are not human cells. This means that your body is home to more lifeforms than there are people on Earth, or stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

If your bias is to count genes instead of cells, the truth of the matter becomes even more stark. You house about 30,000 human genes, versus about 100 times as many bacterial genes. In short, depending on how you make the calculation, you are somewhere around 1-10% human, and 90-99% nonhuman (1). A large-scale, five-year research effort called the human microbiome project (HMP) is currently underway (2). Five main body areas are being targeted in the HMP -- skin, mouth, nasal cavity/lungs, vagina, and gut -- but the goal is to indentify and characterize all the microbes inhabiting the human body. If you’re immediately inclined to regard these multifarious bacterial hitchhikers as freeloaders, or even parasites, keep in mind that these trillions of microbes are indispensible to your health, helping to regulate not only your physical well being—digesting food, processing vitamins, keeping out bad bacteria, etc—but perhaps your mental and emotional vigor as well.

And just in case you attempt to cling to some kind of special status for your human cells, it turns out that even they are likely the result of ancient evolutionary mergers with bacteria. Each of your human cells contains a “mitochondrion,” a membrane-enclosed “organelle” that is responsible for generating most of the cell’s energy, as well as such activities as cell signaling, growth, and death. Hundreds of millions of years ago, mitochondria evolved from certain types of bacteria that were engulfed by other bacterial forms. A mutually beneficial relationship developed between the host cells and the newly incorporated bacteria and this successful partnership was passed on to all animal cells, including our own. A similar merger occurred in the evolution of another cell structure called chloroplasts, which are big players in plants and other photosynthesizing lifeforms.

So, if you continually exchange matter with the outside world, if your body is completely renewed every few years, if you are walking colony of trillions of lifeforms, and if your human cells still incorporate bacterial ancestry, exactly what is this self that you view as separate? You are not an isolated being. You’re an ecosystem, a complex, self-regenerating amalgam of lifeforms that interact communally to form a larger whole. Metaphorically, to think of your body as a machine, as current bias would hold, is inaccurate at best and destructive at worst. You’re far more akin to a whirlpool, a brief, ever-shifting concentration of energy in a vast river that’s been flowing for billions of years.

We’ve only begun to fathom the implications of this profound notion, but it’s one that deserves to be disseminated and discussed widely. I think that the dissolution of our separate selves can help us see the world in new, more accurate, and even sustainable ways. What do you think?

Notes and References
1) A quick search will reveal many sources online that cite similar numbers, but I recommend a wonderful TED talk on bacteria by Princeton University microbiologist Bonnie Bassler: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome_project

3) This is called endosymbiosis theory. For more information, check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion

All images courtesy of the public commons website Wikimedia.

National Tour Hits High Gear

2010-03-29T15:37:00.000-07:00

A national tour to promote my book, Dinosaur Odyssey, and the PBS KIDS show, Dinosaur Train, hits high gear this week. This past Thursday and Friday, I was at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, where I did a lecture one evening and four Dinosaur Train-related events for kids the following day. The latter attracted more than 1500 children and adults, resulting in a fun and chaotic morning for all involved! Tomorrow (Tuesday, March 30th) I will be in San Diego at the San Diego Natural History Museum to give a book talk at 6:30 pm (http://www.sdnhm.org/exhibits/dinosaurs/programs.php), followed by a similar event close to home at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco on Thursday evening (April 1st). The latter talk will occur as part of the weekly “Night Life” festivities at the Cal Academy, with a live DJ and other activities. (For tickets, go to: https://www.calacademy.org/event_tickets/index.php?d=April%201,%202010&e=Nightlife%206:00%20PM). Then, this weekend, I head to Washington, DC, to participate in the annual White House Easter Egg Roll on April 5th, where, in the guise of “Dr. Scott the Paleontologist,” I'll be talking with hundreds (thousands?) of Dinosaur Train fans on the White House South Lawn, encouraging them to get outside, get into nature, and make their own discoveries! (For more information, see: http://www.whitehouse.gov/easterEggRoll). A number of other book talks and Dinosaur Train events are currently in the works, so stay tuned. For updates on upcoming events, visit: http://www.scottsampson.net/index.php?page=talks

I'll be back to generating a regular blog post/essay next week when I return from my travels. Meanwhile, thanks very much to all of you who are participating in these events!!

Note: Promotional image for Night Life at the Cal Academy in San Francisco, property of the California Academy of Sciences.

From Sand Monsters to Rock Stars

2010-03-24T21:13:00.000-07:00

Most posts on The Whirlpool of Life deal with weighty issues like mass extinction, sustainability, and shifting worldviews. Today’s offering stands in stark contrast, yet it addresses a question that I am asked frequently. How do paleontologists go about naming dinosaurs and other extinct creatures?

The trigger for this discussion is yesterday’s announcement of a new dinosaur, Seitaad reussi, from the high desert of southern Utah. Seitaad’s world debut was made in conjunction with publication of a paper in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE describing this new Jurassic-aged beast (1). The exquisitely preserved partial skeleton was collected several years ago near Bluff, Utah, by the paleontology team from the Utah Museum of Natural History, where I am a research curator. The two authors of the study, Joe Sertich and Mark Loewen, are ex-students of mine (Sertich is now a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook University, and Loewen is now an instructor at the University of Utah).

Seitaad is (or, more precisely, was) a prosauropod dinosaur: a mid-sized, long-necked, small-headed, two-legged herbivore that was a locomotory switch-hitter—capable of walking on two or four legs. It belonged to the first major radiation of dinosaurs (formally referred to as basal sauropodomorphs) that swept across much of the supercontinent Pangaea during the Late Triassic and Early Triassic. Seitaad lived in an arid desert setting, and the only known individual apparently experienced a premature demise in a dune collapse. Although small as dinosaurs go (~10-15 feet long; 150-200 lbs), this prosauropod may well have been the largest herbivore in its habitat, with titanic relatives like Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus still millions of years away. I greatly enjoyed Mark and Joe’s excellent study of this ancient desert denizen.

I also enjoyed their choice of moniker, which is both interesting and pretty typical of the process that paleontologists (and biologists generally) go through in naming newly discovered animals. The first part of the name, Seitaad, refers to a mythological sand-desert monster from Navajo (Diné) lore, simultaneously honoring the local indigenous peoples and the name of the rock unit entombing the specimen (the Navajo Sandstone). The latter part of the name, reussi, derives from Everett Ruess, a famous young explorer, poet, artist, and historian who mysteriously disappeared in the southern Utah desert in 1934.

So here’s the deal. You can name a dinosaur, or any other newly discovered organism, after a place, a time, a person, some particular feature of the creature in question, or just about anything at all, as long as the name has not been used previously. One caveat. It’s regarded as highly uncouth (and, for all I know, against the rules) to name a new species after oneself. With that single exception, however, the honoree may be real or fictitious, human or nonhuman. Once the subject(s) of the name is (are) chosen, you must then follow a formal (though not cumbersome) set of do’s and don’ts dictated by International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.

The two-part name—for example, Seitaad ruessi, Tyrannosaurus rex, or Homo sapiens—is a biological standard set in the 18th Century by the famed Swedish biologist Carolus Linnaeus, and still used to this day. The first part of the name is called the “genus,” whereas the latter is the “species.” The genus-species duo represents a hierarchy, with the genus being the more inclusive category. So a single genus often contains multiple species (e.g., Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, Homo ergaster, etc.).

Mark and Joe are certainly not the only paleontologists with a penchant for mythology. If one looks solely among dinosaurs beginning with letter “A,” examples include: Achillobatar (named for the mythical hero Achilles), Aeolosaurus (named after the Greek god of winds), and Atlasaurus (for Atlas, a giant who, in Greek mythology, held up the heavens). In 1995, I added another to the bunch (2)—Achelousaurus, a ceratopsian (horned) dinosaur named after Achelous, a mythological river god of the ancient Greeks who was capable of shape-shifting. In order to fight Heracles (Hercules of Roman mythology) over (what else) a woman, Achelous changed himself into a bull. Heracles won the battle when he ripped off the horns of the bull. The name fits because Achelousaurus was a hornless ceratopsian dinosaur that evolved from horned ancestors. Many, many more mythological creatures can be found embodied in the names of dinosaurs.

Just as mythology is one common theme used for naming dinosaurs and other animals, famous characters are another. Indeed fame seems to be a regular attractor for scientists naming new critters, whether the honoree is real or fictitious. As noted, Seitaad’s second name refers to legendary adventurer Everett Ruess. Extending the scope beyond dinosaurs, we might cite the wasp named Mozartella beethoveni, the snake Montypythonoides, the trilobite Mildesdavis, the crustacean Godzillus, or the diminutive midge Dicrotenipes thanatogratus (“thanatos” is Greek for “dead” and “gratus” is Latin for grateful, in honor of the Grateful Dead). Another of my favorites is a fossil turtle dubbed Ninjemys, after the cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

My single nomenclatural foray into the realm of celebrity is Masiakasaurus knopfleri, a little buck-toothed, dinosaurian predator found on the island of Madagascar. The genus designation up front combines the Malagasy word for vicious and the Latin word for lizard, whereas the species name honors singer, song-writer, and world renowned guitarist Mark Knopfler, ex-lead of Dire Straits. The full translation is “the vicious lizard of Knopfler.”

Why Mark Knopfler? Well, way back in the mid 1990’s, when there were still cassette tapes and Sony Walkmans (remember those?), one of the crew members brought a pair of small speakers along with her tape player. Among the bands featured on the quarry playlist that summer was Dire Straits, a particular favorite of expedition leader David Krause. As serendipity would have it, when we played Knopfler’s music, we tended to find more fossils of the new little meat-eater, whereas these bones were few and far between when the music wasn’t playing. Back in camp one night, my longtime friend and colleague Cathy Forster (George Washington University) suggested that we name this new dinosaur after our musical talisman, Mark Knopfler. For some reason, the consensus among crewmembers (perhaps influenced by beer consumption) was enthusiastic support for the idea.

When Masiakasaurus made its first public appearance on the cover of the British journal Nature (3), the media response was swift, overwhelming, and, shall we say, unanticipated in its direction. While some reports addressed the interesting scientific aspects of this theropod dinosaur, the bulk of the media coverage concentrated on the Knopfler reference. Needless to say, I was not used to receiving phone calls for interviews from Rolling Stone or Guitarist magazine. Some media outlets, in particular the British tabloids, went so far as to question our motives, suggesting that the moniker referenced Knopfler’s physical appearance, or perhaps his status as a rock dinosaur! As for Knopfler himself, I am pleased to say that he accepted the honor in the spirit intended, stating for the record, “The fact that it’s a dinosaur is certainly apt, but I’m happy to report that I’m not in the least bit vicious.”

So that’s my two bits on names. Hearty congratulations to Joe Sertich and Mark Loewen on their big announcement. Oh, and keep your eyes open for more announcements of new Utah dinosaurs in the near future . . .

References
1. Sertich, J.J.W and Loewen, M. A. 2010. A new basal sauropodomorph dinosaur from the Lower Jurassic Navajo Sandstone of southern Utah. PLoS ONE, 5 (3), DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009789

2. Sampson, S. D. 1995. Two new horned dinosaurs from the Upper Cretaceous Two Medicine Formation of Montana, USA, with a phylogenetic analysis of the Centrosaurinae (Ornithischia: Ceratopsidae). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 15(4): 743-760.

3. Sampson, S. D., Carrano, M. T., Forster, C. A. 2001. A bizarre predatory dinosaur from Madagascar: implications for the evolution of Gondwanan theropods. Nature, 409: 504-505.

Images (from top to bottom)
1. The partial skeleton of Seitaad reussi, which preserves the central portion of the body.
2. The skeletal reconstruction of Seitaad reussi, with the preserved elements highlighted.

3. Joe Sertich with Seitaad reussi specimen.
4. Prosauropod dinosaurs in desert setting. Painting by Eleanor Kish.

5. Mark Loewen with Seitaad reussi specimen.
6. Masiakasaurus knopfleri, the buck-toothed predator from Madagascar. Artwork by Bill Parsons.

Nature Flows Downhill

2010-03-16T10:02:00.000-07:00

A radical notion with deep implications for our understanding of the universe is now percolating within scientific circles—nature flows downhill.

You may recall learning about the second law of thermodynamics, the unwavering propensity of energy to disperse and, in doing so, transition from high quality to low quality forms—“increasing entropy,” to use the physicists' preferred term. High quality in this case refers to energy that can be put to use for a variety of purposes, whereas low quality energy generally refers to heat. Ecologist Eric Schneider (1) expresses the second law a little differently, arguing that "nature abhors a gradient," where a gradient is simply a difference over a distance—for example, in temperature or pressure. It helps me to think of this trend toward reducing gradients as nature flowing downhill. That is, if we think of a gradient as a more of something on one side and less of it on the other side, stuff tends to slide downhill from the more-side to the less-side.

In nature, open physical systems—including those of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere—embody this law, being driven by the dispersal of energy, and particularly the flow of heat, “downhill” in the direction of some equilibrium state. Phenomena as diverse as the motions of lithospheric plates, the northward flow of the Gulf Stream, and occurrence of deadly hurricanes are all examples of this process at work.

Growing evidence suggests that life is no different. It’s often been said the life's complexity contravenes the second law (since organization is the opposite of chaos or entropy), indicating the work either of a deity or some unknown natural process, depending on one's bias. Yet the evolution of life and the dynamics of ecosystems strictly obey the second law, continually dissipating low quality energy. Living systems carry out the task not by burning brightly and disappearing, like a forest fire, but through stable metabolic cycles that store chemical energy and continually reduce the solar gradient (that is, the difference in available energy between the sun and the Earth).

Photosynthetic plants, bacteria, and algae capture energy from the sun and form the core of all food webs. So virtually all organisms, including us, are made of sunlight—temporary waypoints in the flow of energy. As energy goes from plants to herbivores, around 90% is lost to heat. This rampant dispersal of energy continues up the food chain when herbivores are consumed by carnivores, and again when carnivores fall prey to other carnivores. As a result, meat-eaters like orcas and lions must subsist on about 0.00001% (one hundred thousandth of one percent) of the energy originally captured by plants. This precipitous trend toward diminishing returns explains why ecosystems tend to have many more plants than herbivores, and many more herbivores than carnivores.

From the point of view of the food web, life appears extremely inefficient in delivering energy. But if the goal is to disperse energy, life is phenomenally successful.

Moving from ecology to evolution, life has become increasingly complex over the past 3.5 billion years, evolving from microscopic single-celled bacteria to macroscopic multicellular organisms of stunning diversity. Accompanying this bewildering increase in diversity has been a corresponding increase in biomass (the mass of living organisms). This dramatic transformation is not due simply to natural selection, as most evolutionists still argue, but also to nature's "efforts" to grab more and more of the sun's flow. The slow burn that characterizes life’s metabolism enables ecological systems to persist over deep time, changing in response to external and internal shake-ups.

Ecology has been summarized by the pithy statement, "energy flows, matter cycles." Yet this maxim applies equally to complex systems in the non-living world; indeed it literally unites the biosphere with the physical realm. More and more, it appears that complex, cycling, swirling systems of matter have a natural tendency to emerge in the face of energy gradients. This recurrent phenomenon may even have been the driving force behind life's origins. (For those interesting in the origin of life, I strongly recommend the following video [2]).

This idea that nature flows downhill is not new, and is certainly not mine. Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger was one of the first to articulate the hypothesis, as part of his famous "What is Life" lectures in Dublin in 1943 (3). More recently, Jeffrey Wicken (4), Harold Morowitz (5), Eric Schneider and others have taken this concept considerably further, buoyed by results from a range of studies, particularly within ecology. Schneider and Dorian Sagan provide an excellent summary of this hypothesis in their book, "Into the Cool" (1).

The concept of life as energy flow, once fully digested, is profound. Just as Darwin fundamentally connected humans to the non-human world, a thermodynamic perspective connects life inextricably to the non-living world. This radical idea, once broadly distributed and understood, is likely to provoke reaction from many sectors, including religion and science. The wondrous diversity and complexity of life through time, far from being the product of intelligent design, is a natural phenomenon intimately linked to the physical realm of energy flow.

Contrary to the current consensus among biologists, evolution is not driven by the machinations of selfish genes propagating themselves through countless millennia. Instead, ecology and evolution operate in tandem as a highly successful, extremely persistent means of reducing the gradient generated by our nearest star. In my view, evolutionary theory (the process, not the fact of evolution!) and biology generally are headed for a major overhaul once investigators fully comprehend the notion that the complex systems of earth, air, water, and life are not only interconnected, but interdependent, cycling matter in order to maintain the flow of energy. Nature—living and nonliving—flows downhill.

Outside the halls of science, seeing ourselves as inextricably embedded in these flows of matter and energy has great potential to help us reconnect to nature. Currently, we tend to view humanity as somehow apart from (and above) “nature.” Many commentators on sustainability (including myself) talk about our “relationship with nature.” But in many respects this is a twisted notion. We may as well speak of the human relationship with humanity, since we are part of nature in exactly the same way that we are part of humanity. Recognizing our bonds not just to other life forms but to the nonliving aspects of nature can go a long way toward bridging the human-nature divide.

References
1) Schneider, E. D. and D. Sagan. 2006. Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
2) Lecture by origin of life researcher Eric Smith: https://www.umail.utah.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=bd6cc3778b064ad483adea8217d2542b&URL=http%3a%2f%2ffora.tv%2f2007%2f04%2f18%2fInevitable_Life
3) Schrödinger, E. 1944. What is Life: The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
4) Wicken, J. 1987. Evolution, Thermodynamics, and Information: Extending the Darwinian Program. Oxford University Press, New York.
5) Morowitz, H. J. 2002. The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex. Oxford University Press, New York.

(Note: This post is modified from a piece of mine that originally appeared on Edge.org in January, 2006.)

Evolution & Climate: An Unholy Matrimony?

2010-03-09T13:54:00.000-08:00

Last week, a New York Times article by Leslie Kaufman (1) highlighted an alarming new trend: the recurrent pairing of evolution with global warming by conservatives. On the face of it, this marriage seems odd and unexpected; the former relates to the turnover of life through billions of years of deep time, whereas the latter labels a decades-old trend toward atmospheric heating.

What do these disparate notions have in common? Both tend to make conservatives—and particularly religious fundamentalist conservatives—very nervous. Evolution, of course, raises fundamentalist ire because it portrays an entirely different story of our origins than does the bible. Concerns about human-induced global warming are a little tougher to pin down. Rev. Jim Ball of the Evangelical Environmental Network is quoted as saying that many global warming deniers consider it “hubris to think that human beings could disrupt something that God created” (1). But a deeper reason is that reducing greenhouse gas emissions threatens continued industrialization, or at least business as usual, and pro-business lobbies are waging a (thus far very successful) campaign to discredit climate science and shift public opinion.

Ok, but that still doesn’t explain why links are being forged between biological evolution and atmospheric temperatures. The answer here is education. Over the past century, fundamentalist Christians have adopted a succession of strategies aimed at keeping evolution out of the classroom, or at least have it “balanced” by alternatives (2). Each time, pro-evolution advocates have been able to thwart these efforts. The most recent iteration of this dance centered on “intelligent design,” the proposition that the sheer complexity of life necessitates design by an intelligent being. Once again, the evolutionists prevailed, achieving a resounding victory in Pennsylvania district court in 2005 (2).

Unable to inject intelligent design into science classrooms, fundamentalists redoubled their efforts to discredit evolution, pushing the mantra known as “teach the controversy” (i.e., create the illusion of academic controversy and then argue that it must be taught in schools). Advocates with a clear creationist platform attempted to have stickers placed inside biology textbooks prompting students to regard evolution as “just” as theory. Once again, a district court decision—this one in Atlanta in 2005—determined that the stickers violated First Amendment separation of church and state (since evolution alone was the target).

Undaunted, anti-evolution fundamentalists have now decided that the recent public angst over global warming can be put to good use. By creating (fictitious) debates among biologists and climate scientists over the veracity of evolution and global warming, respectively, it might be possible to foment doubts in the general public and legislate for more “critical thinking” in schools. Astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University argues that this strategy may involve even grander aims, “casting doubt on the veracity of science—to say that it is just one view of the world, just another story, no better or more valid than fundamentalism” (1). Legislative bills questioning the science of the Big Bang, evolution, global warming, and/or human cloning have now been introduced in several states, including Kentucky (still pending) and Oklahoma (not enacted).

The concern among many scientists and educators is that a few state-level victories linking doubts about global warming and evolution could have a cascading influence on school curricula around the country. Even if the legislative efforts are not successful, the appearance that the science is in question could induce text book writers and teachers to downplay or even avoid these key topics, as it has in the past.

Evolution and global warming have two other things in common. Both are founded on in-depth research supported by the vast majority of specialist researchers (within evolutionary biology and climate science, respectively), and both are accepted by less than half of the American public. It’s ironic that a society so utterly dependent on—indeed in love with—technology should question the veracity of big ideas embraced by the same scientific community that generates that technology. The profound disconnect between scientific and public consensus is a critical matter, and bridging this gap deserves our utmost attention.

Why should we be concerned about the presence or absence of evolution and global warming in the science classroom? Because literacy in both areas may well be key to sustainability, and thus to the persistence of civilization.

Rising global temperatures represent one of the greatest threats we now face. If greenhouse gas emissions continue apace, all major indicators suggest that the resulting increase in sea levels, desertification, habitat losses, and species extinctions will result in untold human suffering (not to mention its impact on nonhuman lifeforms). Whether or not you fully accept that global warming is happening or that humans are the primary cause (there is overwhelming evidence for both), doesn’t it make sense to heed the warnings of the world’s top climate scientists and cut greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2020? The alternative path is simply too frightening to consider. And if you agree in principle with such a precautionary approach, then it should make equal sense that we promote climate literacy in schools, thereby equipping the next generation with the necessary knowledge to address this global, long term issue.

As for evolution, this idea resides at the core of all the life sciences, including such areas as agriculture and medicine on which we all depend. Biology without evolution is like physics without gravity, something to consider next time you board a plane. Today, most of us in Western societies live without any meaningful sense of place or deep time, a disastrous situation for a culture seeking to become sustainable. Expanded to encompass the Great Story of cosmos, life, and culture, evolution supplies an amazing and profound narrative with the potential to embed us back into nature and imbue our lives with deep meaning. Evolution can help reinsert our minds back into the flows of energy and matter that our bodies have never left. But this will happen only if the epic of evolution is taught in schools, where it is all but absent at present.

One of the things that most concerns me is the persistent mindset that entrenches science and religion as opposing forces. The ongoing, often venomous battles involve fundamentalists on both sides who seem to think that annihilation of their opponents ideologies must be the goal. Yet the sustainability clock is ticking ever louder, and I find it difficult to envision a solution arriving in time without bridging the science-religion divide and engaging both sides in conversation. Fortunately the vast majority of science and religion practitioners are not fundamentalists, and much room remains for productive discussions that can transcend this debate and identify mutually beneficial solutions.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding the need for compassion and compromise, science education should be based on scientific consensus, not on public opinion. Whereas the former is established through the hard-won process of peer review, the latter can be shaped and distorted by disinformation campaigns. With few exceptions, when big ideas change in science, we don’t throw out all the preceding insights; we build on them. Our understanding of evolution will undoubtedly grow by great leaps and bounds in the coming decades, but no grounds exist for suspecting that we will toss out Darwin’s key insights altogether. Similarly, there is virtually no doubt among leading atmospheric scientists that our climate is warming rapidly, or that we need to dramatically reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases if we are to stave off a calamitous future. So presenting the hard science of these ideas in school classrooms is critical to our future.

References
1. Kaufman, L. 2010. Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets. New York Times, March 3, 2010.
2.Scott, E. C. 2008. Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction, Second Edition. Greenwood, Santa Barbara.

Tomorrowland

2010-03-02T12:41:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago while in Orlando, Florida, my family and I paid a visit to Disney World. Not surprisingly, the nagging trepidations I felt leading up to the big day were far outweighed by the all-but-uncontrollable excitement brimming from our seven year-old daughter, Jade. As it happened, we spent much of our day in and around Tomorrowland. “How bad could it be?,” I thought as we walked past Cosmic Ray’s Starlight Cafe. After all, I’m interested in the future.

Over the next couple of hours, our futuristic adventures included Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin, where we were invited to blast aliens allied with the evil Emperor Zurg (sworn enemy of the Galactic Alliance). Then there was Stitch’s Great Escape, where we were trained to guard dangerous alien prisoners. Next my wife and I shared our first roller coaster experience, zooming through the darkness down Space Mountain. I was particularly intrigued to experience Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress, which blends nostalgia and futurism to show the story of a “typical” American family (read white and affluent here). Walt Disney was a futurist of sorts, and a big believer in the power of technology.

Munching on popcorn as we exited the park at dusk, I found myself reflecting on the futuristic vision of Tomorrowland—and becoming increasingly bothered. Now I realize that a kid-oriented theme park is not the first place one should seek out wise prognostications. Nevertheless, it seems likely that this wildly popular 21st Century cultural attraction conveys elements of the vision broadly held by Western societies.

In particular, I think that Tomorrowland embodies three implicit—and, to my mind, disturbing—assumptions. The first is that humans are divorced from nonhuman nature here on Earth. The only nonhuman lifeforms I saw in Disney World’s vision of the future were aliens and an ageing animatronic dog named Rover (in the Carousel). The unstated message is clear; whatever the future holds for us, it need not involve the plethora of nonhuman lifeforms currently living on the planet. I guess Earth-bound species are superfluous if we’re destined to explore the galaxy (“To infinity, and beyond!”).

The second assumption is that technology can fix anything. Got a problem? Just apply a little old fashioned human ingenuity and you’ll soon have a microwave oven, containment field, or handheld blaster that provides a solution. The third and closely related assumption is the inevitability of progress. With the ever-accelerating power of technology at our disposal, continual progress—defined mostly in terms of labor-saving devices and rocketships—is our destiny and the future looks ever brighter.

Now for the anticipated dose of reality. Contrary to the vision of Tomorrowland, we are inextricably embedded in nature and entirely dependent on its constant supply of air, water, and food. At least for the foreseeable future, we don’t have another planet, let alone a galaxy of planets, to turn to if we mess this one up. So this world must be our priority, and any vision of the future needs to feature a healthy, vibrant Earth. Technology simply is not going to bail us out of all our eco-predicaments—we also need to shift the way we think about the places we live and the other creatures that share these places with us. And finally, material progress cannot continue infinitely on a finite planet. We must rethink the notion of “progress” and redefine it in terms of human health and the health of the planet.

At this point, many of you are probably thinking, “Ok, fair enough, but Disney World? Come on. Shouldn’t Disney World just be a place of fun—a wonderworld escape from all the bad news we face daily?” In my opinion, the answer is yes and no. On the one hand, I’m certainly not advocating that Disney incorporate eco-disaster elements like global warming and mass extinction into their parks; fun should definitely be the theme. On the other, even theme parks should be conscious of the implicit messages they convey to both children and adults. The unhappy truth of the matter is that civilization and its supposedly bright future of techno-gadgets and space travel is currently in jeopardy. Arguably the greatest threat is dysfunctional human thinking, including prevalent notions like the human-nature divide, blind faith in technology, and the inevitability of progress.

Imagine for a moment if Tomorrowland became a big part of the solution instead of perpetuating the problem. On a larger scale, what might happen if Disney devoted a substantial portion of its mega-power to promoting a sustainable vision? Picture all those amazing, creative minds applying their energies to illustrate new, healthier ways of thinking. Mickey Mouse, Buzz Lightyear, and the Disney princesses could all be enlisted in the cause, helping kids reconnect with the nonhuman world and grow up to be stewards of the planet. Fantasy? Perhaps, but sustainability is going to require not only changes in parenting and education, but also in the bombardment of messages that our children receive daily and hourly through the media.

My strong hunch is that the media will not make the necessary changes voluntarily, at least as long as the mantra of materialism remains dominant. But a sufficiently large grassroots movement that set about to change the messages our children receive could not be ignored even by the largest corporations. The first steps in this process are building awareness of the problem and fostering discussion of potential solutions. For starters, think about the messages—explicit and implicit—that you expose yourself (and perhaps your children) to every day. How do these messages constrain the way we view the world and our interaction with it? Now think about changing your behavior so that you and your family receive healthier, more accurate messages that are consistent with our current moment in history.

Please understand. I do not mean to disparage all of Disney’s cultural contributions. As a family, we’ve enjoyed many Disney movies, and the Disney theme parks differ from most others in an important commodity—magic. It’s amazing to watch kids stand in awe when meeting Cinderella, or smile uncontrollably upon spotting Mickey Mouse. My wish is that this remarkable sense of magic be linked to the wonder of Earth’s natural bounty to help forge lasting connections between children and nature. Yes, I may be a naïve dreamer, but it’s a dream worthy of our energies.

(Note: all images courtesy of wdwmemories.com)