And it's off to Germany with us

I spent last week in Berkeley. My finishing talk was the first joint demography and biology seminar at Berkeley in at least 30 years, possibly ever. I closed with an appeal for the demographers and the biologists to talk to each other more. Evolution is the source of many ultimate explanations in demography, and demography has extremely important methods and insights for understanding evolution in age-structured populations. There was a good discussion, with the demographers and biologists both asking questions, and even talking to each other. Then I spent a couple of days fighting my way through the bureaucracy surrounding the filing of dissertations. I filed, cleaned out my office, packed up my stuff and missed my plane east. I went standby, got to my parents' house at 5AM the next day, spent a day with the family. Then we rushed to the airport only to find that our flight to Germany was canceled because the flight attendants are on strike. Air Berlin assures us we will get to fly today, but in the mean time we are in the JFK Holiday Inn. Being stuck here has given me my first chance to stop and reflect on the fact that:

1. I am now Dr. Daniel Levitis, Ph.D.
2. I am moving to Germany.
3. After nursery school, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, high school, college and grad school, 22.5 years of schooling in all, I am no longer a student. Being a student was getting pretty old anyway.
4. I am starting a new job very soon, and don't know exactly what I will be doing.
5. I am on vacation for the next few weeks.

Time to go see if our flight will happen today. Posting may be sporadic until I am ensconced somewhere.

My terrible paper

Three days ago I spent the entire day putting the finishing touches on my terrible, unpublishable fourth chapter. The next morning Iris copy-edited it for me, and I sent it to a professor who sent it back to me six hours later. I would hug him if he wasn't 3000 miles away and if one went around hugging members of the National Academy of Sciences. I spent several hours implementing his enormously helpful comments, and sent it to a second professor very late that night. He sent it back 1PM yesterday. He had it for 12 hours, but I'm guessing he was asleep for at least six of those, so that is pretty fast turn-around also. His comments were also majorly helpful. I spent until 1AM this morning implementing his suggestions. Now I have to update my tables and figures, and I'll send it to my third faculty person. At that point the rapid turnover is likely to stop, as she takes her time in editing and produces masses of highly detailed incisive comments.

This seems like an awful lot of work by some incredibly smart, busy people to vastly improve my paper that is still unlikely to be publishable.

That said, it now seems at least plausible that I will have my degree by the time I leave California a week from now.

Intro to Chapter 1

University rules say I have to have transitions between my chapters. They don't say what they have to be, and my professors don't care, so I'm writing little essays.

Here is the intro to Chapter 1:

Demographers and evolutionary biologists have a great deal to learn from each other. That there is no Demographic Evolution Society or Journal of Evolutionary Biodemography attests to the fact that most biologists, even those strongly interested in population processes and the interactions of individuals of different ages don't fully incorporate the insights and methods of demography. Similarly, most demographers give little thought to why such basic variables as mortality risk and fertility vary with age as they do. Any demographer can tell you that the qx curve is shaped like a U or a J or a bathtub, but precious few seem interested in ultimate explanations of how that came to be. Only evolutionary biology can provide such ultimate explanations. Demography is a social science; questions are expected to have some relevance to humans, and the vast majority are solely about humans. In evolutionary biology the assumption that humans must be interesting is quickly labeled as anthropocentrism.

Human demography offers the evolutionary biologist fascinating questions, tremendous stores of readily available data, and the quantitative tools to analyze them to. Evolutionary biology offers demographers the concepts to understand why humans are as we are, how we came to be this way, and how we differ from other organism. A uniquely human, cultural explanation is not needed to explain a trait humans share with all primates. Where humans are unique, this could be because of evolution, or culture, or more likely feedback between the two. Judging whether a trait of human demography is unique requires the methods and concepts of both demography and evolutionary biology.

Chapter 1 asks how unusual women's post-fertile survival is among primates, and what role culture plays. It combines the tools of demography (in developing appropriate measures of post-fertile survival) with those of evolutionary biology (in the comparative method). The result, it is my hope, clarifies a debate in which people have been talking past each other for some time.

Draft of thesis Abstract

While my committee is happy for my thesis to be a pile of loosely connected papers, the university still expects it to be a single unified document with a single topic, a single Abstract, and transitions. This is a bit of a stretch, considering how far afield some of my chapters are (chapters 2 and 4 for example have almost nothing in common). Here is my first attempt at an Abstract that ties it all together:


Abstract:
Humans are a demographically unusual species in many ways, but perhaps the most unusual thing about our demography is the huge portion of our adult females who are post-fertile. This thesis, in four chapters, explores the evolution of post-fertile survival, attempting to understand, from four different angles, how unusual women are in this respect and how they come to be that way.

Chapter 1 is a methodological and comparative study of post-fertile survival in primates. Post-fertile survival is most frequently measured as post-reproductive lifespan, the length of time between reproductive cessation and death. I show that post-reproductive lifespan is not a useful measure for comparative studies and use demographic life-table methods to create more useful measures of post-fertile survival. I then calculate these measures for several human populations and a large group of primate species. These results indicate that women in all populations experience post-fertile survival which greatly exceeds that in other primates under all circumstances. Non-human primates under natural conditions do not experience significant post-fertile survival, while human hunter-gatherers do.

Chapter 2 arises from the question of whether selective pressures associated with being a care-giver tend to increase longevity, potentially partly explaining women's longevity and therefore their post-fertile survival. The chapter focuses on the tradeoff between providing care to existing offspring and competing for matings so as to produce additional offspring. Data on male primates, in which variation in care provided is much greater than in females, are used in a comparative study. I ask whether these data support the assumption of a tradeoff between male care and male mating competition, and if so if one strategy or the other is associated with greater longevity. I find strong support that such a trade-off exists (males in most primate families invest significantly in one or the other, but not both, and care and competition coevolve in a phylogenetically robust pattern). However these data do not support the prediction that level of male care and degree of sex-bias in longevity coevlove meaningfully.

Chapter 3 is an allometric study of brain size, body size, age at reproductive cessation and longevity in primates, in which I ask if human post-fertile survival is predictable based on primate patterns. Again using life-table methods to create parameters more appropriate for comparative study than those used in the literature, I show that while women's age at reproductive cessation can be fairly accurately predicted based on primate scaling patterns, their longevity cannot. This result indicates that the selective forces which regulate these scaling patterns in primates have been altered or amended in humans.

Finally, Chapter 4 is an experimental evolution study. Using rotifers, a short lived microscopic metazoan, I experimentally make the survival of young depend on the continued survival of their mothers and grandmothers in a species which has no natural care of juveniles. I show that under this regime those familial lines which are longer lived, and which bear a larger portion of their young before mother and grandmother die, increase while others die out. However because of low heritability of demographic traits in this population, the experiment does not demonstrate adaptive change, but rather differential success based on stochastic variation.

Taken together these four papers serve primarily to underscore the uniqueness of post-fertile survival in women. Some have argued that human post-fertile survival is either an artifact of social rather than biological evolution, or a widespread trait in female primates simply exaggerated in human females. These studies make clear that human post-fertile survival must be considered as a novel trait, and its evolution explained as such.

10 days

My thesis is fully written, in the sense that I have a complete, but not final draft of each of the four chapters. This does not mean I can relax. My last chance to file it in person (as opposed to having a friend print it out for me and file it for me after I've left for Europe, which is much less desirable in several ways) is ten days from today. This is little enough time and there is enough to do that I am almost certain I will be filing via friend.

Chapter 1 is all done.
Chapter 2 is being edited, and three more professors have to edit it after that.
Chapter 3 has been edited by three of four professors, and is very close to done.
Chapter 4 I have just finished writing, and will send to its first professor in the morning.

Assuming that the suggested edits to Chapter 2 are small enough to be dealt with in a day, and assuming a lot of other things go quickly and correctly (a large set of assumptions), I can have all the edits from three of my four professors done by Sept 1st, when the fourth gets back from oversees. I then have until September 4th to have him look at and edit three chapters, and implement all his edits, and print it all out and put it all together, before I leave California for the east coast and then Europe. In that time I also have to plan my final talk, make the powerpoint, practice the talk, fly to California and give the talk. It will be a busy ten days, but as my wife says, "at least now you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, or at least know exactly how deep a hole you've dug.

One week

I have one week in which to finish writing my thesis. I don't expect to be blogging much until after Sept. 2nd. Happy Labor Day.

Rejected

The draft I am currently writing is about the fifth attempt to write this particular paper. The initial idea yielded a basically uninteresting paper, but I had all these compiled data and lots of carefully crafted paragraphs, so I rewrote it with the same concept, but a different focus. That didn't work either, so I changed my question, did a bunch of new analyses, got some interesting results and wrote a really mushy, mealy mouthed paper (because I hadn't done enough background research no my new topic to know exactly what my point was). I sent that to one of my advisers to ask him what I should do to make it less ugly. He sent some comments, which required rewriting. I sent that to another adviser who totally eviscerated my introduction and discussion (her list of comments, suggestions and objections was as long as the paper itself), and had some problems with my methods. Her feedback is tremendously useful, and appreciated, despite being painful. So I spent this weekend doing more background reading and yesterday rewrote my introduction. Today I'm fixing the methods and results, and hopefully will get a start on discussion.

For anyone who is interested, here is the deeply flawed and poorly written introduction I just threw out:

Trivers (1972) set the direction of much of the modern study of sexual selection by stating that, "what governs the operation of sexual selection is the relative parental investment of the sexes in their offspring. Competition for mates usually characterizes males because males usually invest almost nothing in their offspring (pg 141)." In this view, female parental investment is a resource for which males are expected to compete, and the less investment males make in offspring, the more valuable the investment of females becomes. The relative lack of paternal investment drives male-male competition, which in turn influences a wide range of other morphological and life history variables.
Trivers' statement then implies that interspecies variation in paternal investment is a key to understanding the evolution of life histories, socioecology and sexually selected traits. While a large and fruitful comparative literature on primate life-histories has matured over the last few decades (e.g. Gage 1998; Lee 1999; Nunn 1999; Ravosa and Dagosto 2007), few of these studies have considered paternal investment as a variable (but see Geary 2000; Mitchell and Brandt 1972; Smuts and Gubernick 1992; Wright 1990). Those that have done so have incorporated data on relatively few species or not coded paternal care in a way that allows for quantitative analysis.
One need not subscribe to Trivers' (1972) view to see paternal care as an important life history variable. Interspecific variation in paternal care may be caused by, rather than causing, male-male competition: because males compete for mates, male variance in reproductive success is relatively high, increasing the opportunity cost to males who provide care (Queller 1997). In this model, male-male competition is predicted to determine both paternal investment and sexual dimorphism. The prediction that intensity of sexual selection on males should be correlated with paternal care is common to both mechanisms. This prediction has been addressed using data from cichlid fishes (Gonzalez-Voyer et al. 2008) and shorebirds (Thomas and Székely 2005). These papers attempt to establish the direction of causality through a series of phylogenetic analyses (Maddison 1990; Pagel 1994) that attempt to describe the coevolution of traits. This type of analysis requires two types of assumptions, each of which is questionable. First, each trait is treated as binary (paternal care or none, sexual selection or none). Second, one must assume that the details of the inferred pattern of past change (or the probability distributions thereof, (Maddison 1990) are correct. There is reason to doubt the validity of these assumptions when studying a group of inter-correlated, continuously varying traits. Furthermore, while these mechanisms are positioned as alternatives, it is also plausible that sexual selection and level of paternal care may influence each other reciprocally.
Sexually dimorphic traits are useful exemplars of sexually selected traits. Observations of sexual dimorphisms were the impetus that caused Charles Darwin to introduce (Darwin 1872), and explore (Darwin 1882) the concept of sexual selection. Where natural selection is expected to act similarly on the two sexes so long as they differ only in gametes, sexual selection may apply quite distinct pressures to each, causing them to diverge. Indeed, primates, particularly Haplorhines (apes and monkeys) are known to display greater dimorphism in species with more intense male-male competition (Mitani et al. 1996; Plavcan and van Schaik 1992; Plavcan and van Schaik 1997; Thoren et al. 2006). The present study presents a comparative dataset, with each species assigned to one of four levels based on intensity of paternal investment. We use these data to test the prediction that paternal care is closely correlated with male-male competition, and to examine the utility of paternal care as a variable in models explaining sexual dimorphism. We specifically predict that if the linkage between dimorphism and paternal care is through male-male competition, models containing both paternal care and male-male competition should have little more explanatory power in describing patterns of dimorphism than do models excluding paternal care. A further prediction is that measures of dimorphism should be more closely correlated with male-male competition than with paternal care, and that this inequality should be robust to phylogenetically controlled analyses.
Primates are an ideal taxon in which to make this type of comparison, as their breeding systems are highly varied and they are well studied. The large number of studies of individual primate species allows a rich field of comparative studies compiling single variables for many primate species (Lee 1999). From this literature we draw comparative data on intersexual canine tooth dimorphism, mass dimorphism, and sex-differential longevity (longevity dimorphism). Primates employ their canine teeth in threat displays, and as weapons, and as such males are expected to invest in disproportionately larger canines when fighting between males is common (Plavcan and van Schaik 1992). Canine dimorphism incorporates information on both mass dimorphism (assuming allometric scaling) and disproportionate investment in canines by one sex. Mass dimorphism, has also been suggested to reflect intensity of intrasexual conflict, but to a lesser extent than canine dimorphism (Plavcan and van Schaik 1997).
Our final measure is sex-differential longevity, which by analogy we refer to as longevity dimorphism. The sex experiencing more intense sexual selection is predicted to live less long (Promislow 1992). This prediction arises both because of direct mortality associated with intrasexual conflict, and because of physiological and developmental tradeoffs between competitive ability and longevity. Allman et al. (1998) compared longevity dimorphism and paternal care in a group of ape species and New World monkeys (Platyrrhini), and suggested that the correlation they found was attributable to sexual selection. However their analysis was not phylogenetically controlled. New World monkeys are unusual among primates in several life history variables (Ross 1991; Wright 1990), including their tendency to have caring and long-lived males. In this light, the correlation between paternal care and longevity dimorphism observed by Allman et al may be attributable to a phylogenetic correlation. As most life history variables are correlated with each other, most are also correlated with phylogeny (Leigh and Blomquist 2007); we examine their correlations in this light.
A more direct link between longevity dimorphism and differential care by the two sexes is proposed based on the value of caregivers. As the selective disadvantage caused by death before a particular age is related to the residual expectation of reproduction at that age (Charlesworth 2000; Hamilton 1966), and as care is a form of reproduction which on the average is expected to occur later in life than fertility, a population that provides care to descendents may experience selection for greater longevity (Chu and Lee 2006). Males who provide care may tend to live as long or longer than conspecific females because of this selective pressure. This hypothesis does not depend upon male-male competition, and therefore predicts that paternal care is an directly important in the evolution of longevity dimorphism.

The plan

At the end of this month, I fly out to Berkeley, give a finishing talk, get my advisors to sign my thesis, spend a couple of days closing everything up, and then Iris and I fly to Deutschland. That is the plan. It is an ambitious one, in that only one chapter of the thesis is done, the second needs major revisions, the third my committee members have not yet commented on, and the fourth I am still struggling with analyzing my mountains of data. And two of my committee members, including my major professor, are doing fieldwork on other continents for most of August, meaning they won't be doing much editing and approving of thesis chapters.

But that is my plan, and I'm sticking to it, until I am forced to think of something more realistic.

Tour of Science!

Walking back to the Valley Life Sciences Building this afternoon, I passed a large tour group of high-school students and their parents being led by an undergraduate. One mother, snickered into her cell phone, "they have an heeeeerb lab. They study herbs. This place is crazy. Crazy! No, no, no, the tour guide said they had a whole museum of herbs. I'm like what, parsley?!"

It took me an instant to figure out that she was talking about the University and Jepson Herbaria, a research museum dedicated to the study of plants generally, not culinary herbs in particular.

I emailed this story to the other grad students in my department. Many of them responded that they had heard the tour guides telling the tour groups all sorts of misleading and false information, including that a herbarium is a museum for studying cooking herbs.

Here are some other examples of overheard falsehoods made up by university tour guides to impress their tour groups and relayed to me by other grad students. Several of these things were independently reported by more than one observer:

- The Cretaceous display in front of the Herbaria contains extinct plants... Berkeley scientists rediscovered their ancient DNA, amplified it, germinated seedlings, and planted them there for museum visitors. (The display is of plants of types similar to those which existed during the Cretaceous, none of which have ever been extinct)

- The T. rex may be as many as 5 million years old. (It is at least 65 million years old)

- The T. rex came to the paleontology museum in a giant puzzle
box and when it got here, the paleontologists didn't know what to do with
it. One of the employees was about to get fired but he was able to figure
out how to put it back together so he was able to save his job. This man
is now the assistant director of the museum. (A complete fabrication, truth here)


- The T. rex is named "Osborn". (Sue)

- T. rex (the species) was discovered by Berkeley paleontologists. (False)

- Most of the UCMP fossils are actually in the Campanile. (False)

- UCMP geologists discovered asteroids. (False)

- The giant ammonite in the first floor south hallway is from a time on
Earth where everything was giant, even the snails. (Hilarious and false)

- The Herbaria is home to the world's largest pinecone, but they don't put
it on display because they are worried someone will steal it. (Goofy and false)

- The Herbaria has one example of every plant species known to man. (They wish)

- The plants outside the herbaria went extinct around the time T. rex went
extinct. (False)

- MVZ scientists save stem cells from each animal they capture in order to
help genetically engineer new animals to save endangered species from
going extinct. (And then we take over the world!)

- The Eucalyptus tree is native only to Berkeley, Australia, and New Zealand. (actually only Australia, New Guinea, eastern Indonesia and the Philippines)

- The Eucalyptus grove is protected by an Act of Congress and can never be
cut down for any reason. (Pure fabrication)

- Strawberry Creek used to flow all the way to the Ocean but then they
built roads over it and then there wasn't enough water so all the
strawberry plants that used to grow next to it died off. (A large portion of Strawberry creek between campus and the bay has been undergrounded. The rest is false.)

- The pterodon skeleton is hanging above the T-rex because they always flew over the T-rexes to keep them in view so the T-rex couldn't sneak up on them. (Awesomely hilarious)

A little praise goes a long way

I gave a draft to one of my mentors, and it came back covered in red. Comments, suggested edits, deletions, additions, objections, pointing out "wordiness," "bogging down" and opportunities to make it "more fun to read." However the comments start with the statement, "this is a very valuable paper, and I expect it will be widely cited."

A teaspoon of sugar does in fact make the medicine go down in the most delightful way.

Moving the last rotifer

For much of the last year my life and schedule have revolved around daily rotifer census. How often I go to campus, at what times, when I have time for anything else and the energy and time I have for anything else have all depended on lab work. When I could rely on my students to take care of it, I could do other things. Frequently, very frequently, my supply of dependable students was not up to the demands of taking data on and caring for several hundred animals each day. Even when my students are scheduled to do everything, it is rare for a day to go by without questions, problems or scheduling issues. If I am not in lab for a day or two both the quality of the data and the survival of the animals begins to decline.

So it feels like a big deal that my lab work will be done this week. Thursday. I've told my students that after that they are free to continue working on their side projects, but I'm not going to be in the lab. I'm not going to spend hours moving rotifers. I'm not going to be harassing them about keeping the lab organized and the rotifers' containers clean. I'm not going to be on campus six or seven days a week. I'm going to be at home, writing a thesis, and will come to campus on Wednesdays and Thursdays. And I'm taking my desktop (the lab's erstwhile main computer) home.

I like my students, and the rotifers are fascinating, and microscopes are fun. But I really like the idea of not needing to be in the lab every morning at 8. And the prospect of being able to have whole days to work on writing my thesis is positively thrilling.

Re-write

It finally occurred to me that the paper I have been writing on the evolution of post-fertile survival (a.k.a. post-reproductive lifespan) really needed to be two papers. I had too many interwoven points I was trying to make simultaneously, and the paper was getting too long and ungainly. So I needed to write two shorter papers, and as a bonus, I needed to have a draft of one to present at a lab meeting tomorrow. I sat myself down this morning at 8AM and wrote for 15 hours with only a few short brakes. Some of this was cutting and pasting, although the pasted bits often required significant revising. I now have a full rough draft of the text of one paper, except that it does not yet include the figures, the tables, the statistics, the references, the appendixes or the complimentary online material. Oh well, I should be able to fill in a few of the holes tomorrow afternoon. Now it is time to see if I can stand up and walk as far as the bed.

Referees

I'm submitting a paper to Animal Behaviour. Their instructions to authors require that I suggest four referees, people who they could send the paper to who are qualified to review it and decide if it goes in Animal Behaviour. They don't necessarily take my suggestions, but they require that I suggest.
I found myself rather stumped. I decided to write the paper because as far as I could tell, nobody had written anything similar. So who should I suggest they send it to?

I wrote to one of my professors for advice. One of his suggestions was that it was their job to figure out who was the best person to review it, and I should just make up four fictitious names and send them in. He even suggested a made up name to use: G. Hector Meckel.

This is the adviser who is notorious for scoffing at the etiquette and protocol of bureaucracies in general and the scientific societies in specific. Despite the humor value, I think I will submit real names of potentially interested people.

Cephalic rotiferitis

I've been in the lab every day all day for the last week looking at rotifers. When I close my eyes, I not only see rotifers, I can count their eggs, see their teeth chewing and estimate their age.

Students

One of the great things about having lots of students involved in my research over the last few semesters is that the ones who aren't that interested tend to drift away and the ones who are really interested and energetic keep coming back for more. It is like a distillation process where now, my last semester in grad school, I have this awesome group of highly motivated students and very few who are just along for the ride. It makes me happy.

Very rough section of a very rough draft.

Today between 11 and midnight I wrote a very rough section of a section of a rough draft of one of the several papers that will go into my thesis. Feels like progress. I don't expect to have much time for blogging over the next few months, but I will try to post bits like this that are potentially interesting, and that show what efforts keep me from having time for blogging.

The Measurement of Post-Reproductive Lifespan
Advancement in the study of PRLS has been hampered by differences over terminology, the use of a wide range of non-comparable measures and the failure to put measures of the scale of PRLS in the context of the time scales on which the organisms live.

Some authors have used the term "post-fertile" rather than "post-reproductive" arguing that anything that an organism does that increases her genetic representation in future generations is a form of reproduction, and that "post-reproductive" is therefore an inaccurate term to apply to post-fertile individuals who are still caring for their young (REFS). Indeed Hamilton (1966) argues that, "if the organism practises parental care 'birth' should be considered to occur... at the age at which the offspring becomes independent." While not disputing the biology behind this argument, we feel that the term "post-reproductive" is deeply enough ensconced in the literature on this topic that the use of alternative terminology to convey the same concept may tend to muddy communication. For this reason we use the term "post-reproductive" to refer to life after direct reproduction (fertility), excluding indirect reproduction (care of young and indirect fitness benefits).
Beyond semantic disagreements, so many methods have been used to calculate the scale of PRLS that efforts at comparisons across species and studies have been few and confusing. For example, XXXX and ZZZZ (REF) present a table of PRSL for 12 primate species, all given in units of years, but calculated in six different ways. Disagreements exist as to how to define the end of reproduction, how to determine the end of survival, and which individuals to include. The measures vary because the type of data used vary, and the interests of the authors vary, figuratively leading to comparisons of the shelf-life of apples to the refrigerator hardiness of oranges. The effect of sample size on these estimates is generally not addressed.
Even when these drawbacks are not found, authors generally fail to correct for the overall longevity of the species in question. One should expect a species that lives 100 years to, on the average, experience more years of PRLS than a species that lives 20 years. Without a denominator related to the time scale of the organism's life history, the numerator of PRLS is fairly uninformative.

In this study, we use a type of data that allow for broad comparability: age specific mortality and fertility figures as calculated in standard demographic methodology. Because the form of the data is highly standardized, the same measures can be calculated across taxa, for males and females, and in a wide range of environments. The use of data sources as information rich as are age specific mortality and fertility tables allows for the use of multiple measures which illuminate different aspects of PRLS, but which need not be falsely compared to each other, because we can calculate every measure for each population for which these data are fully available. Furthermore, the use of age-specific demographic tables allow us to put our measures of PRLS in the context of the reproductive and actuarial longevity of the organisms, allowing for meaningful comparisons between populations with very different lifespans.

Team of Science

We attempted to get me and my entire team of undergraduate rotifer wranglers into our tiny lab space all at once. Two people couldn't make it, but 12 of us plus a photographer jammed in. The room is 12m^2 but about half of space that is occupied with counters, furniture and large equipment. Hopefully at my next job I will have a larger lab space, a smaller team, or both.

Rotifer Demography Talk Wednesday

I'm a biology grad student, but my funding and my fellowship are all through the Demography department. One service I return to the Demography department is to attend their weekly seminar and who ever the speaker is, suggest biological literature relevant to her topic of study. Some demographers take better to this than others. Most seem to appreciate the new perspective, even if they are not really interested in thinking about humans in a biological context. (For the record, I also go to biology talks and bring up demographic concerns.)

The next speaker I will have to deal with differently, because the speaker this coming week is me. I'll be presenting on demographic aspects of my rotifer research. Age specific mortality and reproduction. Effect of food supply on longevity. Infant mortality. I'll get into the biology a bit too, but mostly they'll want to hear about the demographics. If I was in my audience, I would suggest more of a focus on the biology.

All global warming is local

I got home from the lab late last night and turned on NPR. There was a voice I instantly recognized, my major professor, and the director of the MVZ, Craig Moritz. What, I wondered, was Craig doing in my radio at this late hour? Being interviewed by All Things Considered for this piece on the effects of climate change on the wildlife of Yosemite National Park.
Mean monthly minimum temperatures in Yosemite have risen by 6 degrees Fahrenheit in the hundred years since the MVZ's first director, Joseph Grinnell, surveyed the wildlife there. Apparently in response, many of the wildlife species in the park have moved their upper and lower limits thousands of feet higher than they were.

The project is described in great detail here, and a subset of the Yosemite data were just published in Science. I wasn't involved in this work, in case you were wondering.

Compresed Timeline

The Max Planck Society is a network of research institutes, mostly but not entirely in Germany. Many people consider it, to be the world's leading non-university research organization. The member institutes are more or less autonomous in terms of planning and executing research, as far as I understand, but all of them have the reputation for world-leading excellence.

A couple of years ago, at a conference on aging I had the pleasure of meeting the Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Jim Vaupel. At the time, he and my professors, Ron Lee, discussed the possibility of me coming to MPIDR at some point. I was excited by the prospect. Here at Berkeley there is effectively no one outside of Ron's lab group who thinks much about the kinds of questions I do, while MPIDR has a whole Evolutionary Biodemography Lab, at which they think about and work on pretty much everything I do, plus a lot more.
But then I went off to PNG, and then I was injured, and pretty soon I figured the opportunity had passed. But then I got an email announcing that there was a fellowship available through the German Academic Exchange Service (better known by its German acronym, DAAD, for North American researchers to come work in Germany if they had the invitation of a German institution. The email conversation that followed was suprisingly short, spanning little more than 24 hours, and completely reorganized my timeline for finishing grad school. If I may paraphrase, it went something like this:

Me to Ron: Should I apply for a DAAD fellowship to work at MPIDR.
Ron to me: Do you want me to ask them?
Me: Yes, thank you.
Ron to Jim Vaupel: Dan is an excellent young biologist, should he apply for a DAAD fellowship to come work there?
Jim to Ron (to me): Yes, he should apply, but even if he doesn't get the fellowship he should come here as soon as is convenient, and we can support him.

Just like that, no application, no interview, I had a desirable post-doctoral position lined up at a time when the economy is tanking and most of my peers are wondering if there will be any positions for them at all. My deliberations consisted of describing the situation to my wife to make sure she didn't mind spending some time on the Baltic, and emailing Dr. Vaupel to make sure I understood him properly.

What this means for my grad-school timeline is that instead of 16 to 21 months, I have eight to ten months to finish. I was thinking I would finish December of 2009 or May of 2010. After the offer from MPIDR, I thought I would have to finish by August of 2009. Afer talking to my major proffessor today, it is clear I need to be pretty much done by May of 2009.

My department's commencment is May 23rd 2009, and I plan to walk then, if at all possible. I won't actually be finished at that point, but I will be finished enough to convince my faculty persons that I can file my disertation before the end of summer. My wife's graduation from UC Davis is mid-June 2009. That summer I will finish my dissertation, then we will pack up our lives, take the cat's to my sister's house, and fly to Germany.

That seems like a lot to accomplish in one year.

Yikes.