One foot in this world...

From my perspective as an evolutionary biologist, all of the social sciences are parts of the study of human behavior, which is a part of the study of animal behavior, which is a part of biology. I don't generally bring this up to the social scientists I know.

I recently attended a talk, in which the speaker was an historical economist, studying the marriage market in post-WWI France. The lack of marriageable men(due to combat fatalities) led to the surviving males having the ability to be much more choosy than they otherwise would. Many men were able to marry women from social classes higher than their own. Many women simply never married. This effect faded away as a new crop of young men got old enough to marry. At the end of his talk I raised my hand, and asked if he was aware of the biological literature on the effect of skewed operational sex ratios on mate choice and assortative mating. I believe that the idea of looking at the literature on the same phenomenon in other species hadn't occurred to him. To a natural scientist this is almost scandalous. To a social scientist, it is the standard and correct way to proceed. It is a very different world view.

But now my field of expertise is becoming evolutionary demography, which draws as much from social science as it does from natural science, and this has begun to affect my thinking. This afternoon I was presenting my research plans to my professor's lab group, and one of the biologists asked why everything I said kept relating back to humans. I told him that as I was studying post-reproductive lifespan, and humans have more PRLS than any other species we know of, and we know more about it in humans, and therefore it was inevitable that most of our questions and methods would relate back to humans. It took me a minute to realize this wasn't the whole truth. The broader answer was that I had started to think a bit like a social scientist, meaning anthropocentrically. In the social sciences one doesn't need an excuse to focus on humans, the social sciences are all about humans. Having a conversation with social scientists requires one to be able to understand anthropocentric thinking, and if one practices this enough, one can start to think like them.

There are times when anthropocentrism is absolutely necessary and proper. Most of human activity revolves around interactions with other humans, and many of the problems we face can only be understood by focusing deeply on understanding humans. Part of the reason I work on problems relating to humans is because that is what society values, and as I've said before, I think this is appropriate. But the reason society (through a grant to an economic demographer) is paying me, rather than an economist or a demographer to do this work, is because it is useful to have your conversation about humans be illuminated by knowledge of other species.

If I stay in this field, which I plan to, I will have to learn how to converse one moment with those for whom humans are almost everything, and the next with those for whom humans are just one very over-studied species.

Whither hence?

My PhD is preparing me to be an expert in evolutionary demography.

The question is, what does one do with such expertise? There are maybe ten researchers in the world with a focus on evolutionary demography. How likely is it one of them will need a post-doctoral scholar when I need a post-doctoral position?

You want fries with that?

Pompous Lab name needed

I need a door sign. My laboratory space is a tiny little nothing of a room directly across from the main elevators. Everyone walks right past it, even people who are looking for me, because it looks like it should be a janitor's closet or boiler room. I need a big sign on the door that lets everyone know it is a research space. I could just put up a sign saying "Dan's lab space." or "Rotifer Lab," but neither of those is entirely satisfying. I'm thinking more grandiose, more pompous. That and I'd like to have the conceptual idea Evolutionary Demography as part of the name. Here are some initial ideas.

Berkeley Evolutionary Demography Society (BEDS)
Berkeley Laboratory for Evolutionary Demography (BLED)
Berkeley Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Demography (BLEED)
Laboratory for Evolutionary Demography (LED)
Institute for Evolutionary Demography (IED)
Dan's Institute for Evolutionary Demography (DIED)
Levitis Institute for Evolutionary Demography (LIED)
Center on Evolutionary Demography (CoED)
Center for Evolutionary Demography and Rotifers (CEDaR)
Society for Experimental Evolutionary Demography (SEED)
Berkeley Evolutionary Demography Laboratory (BED Lab)

Suggestions and comments are welcome.

Editorial of Science: No More Years

My work on the evolution of aging got started on the basis that the National Institute on Aging is better funded than almost any other non-military research branch of the government. Older people vote, politicians and administrators tend to be older, and our population is getting older, so we offer funding to researchers who will work on issues relating to aging. I happen to also find the topic fascinating, and think it raises wonderful evolutionary questions, but I would not have ended up pursuing it if there was no funding available. America cares about aging, so I study it.

In many ways, this is how it should be. If you hire a doctor or a lawyer, you are likely to have some specific benefits you are willing to individually pay for. Remove the cancer, fight the charges. When society hires an academic researcher, individual level benefits are likely to be few or far off, but society expects societal returns. Those who funded early research into the nature of electricity did not anticipate the particular technologies we enjoy based on that work, but they correctly predicted it would somehow be very useful to society.

Few objective observers could deny that for much of the twentieth century, American science and technology greatly outpaced most other developed countries, and much of our economic, military and diplomatic power was derived, at least in part, from this technical prowess. America was one of the best places to do science, and this drew many of the finest scientists from around the world to move their activities, and their intellectual contributions, to America. Einstein is one obvious example. The term "brain drain" was invented in part to describe the mass movement of scientists and academics from other countries to the US. The US government not only invested heavily in science, it valued science, honored scientists and encouraged its citizens to see scientific progress as vital to our national future.

How things have changed. Several of the most promising young American scientists I know have moved to other countries, because the US is no longer competitive in funding or respecting science. Why study evolution in the US when New Zealand will pay you more and take your work more seriously? Why work on alternative energy technology when Canada or Germany will give you many times the research funding and implement your advances more quickly? Scientists follow the priorities of their society, or they move to another society.

Those who read the American press often hear about how America needs more scientists. But when I ask promising science majors why they are going into medicine or industrial engineering instead of science, they inevitably mention uncertainty about whether it is possible to make a decent living in science. Four years of college, two years of a masters degree and five years of doctoral study to qualify for a post-doctoral assistantship making $35K a year? No one smart enough to be a scientist thinks that's a financially desirable option. We can't have more scientists until we have more, and better paying, and better funded, and better respected, positions in science.

This national problem has gotten particularly bad over the past eight years. The right wing of the Republican Party takes a particularly low view of science. This is partly because they espouse a particularly anti-intellectual form of populism. In this view, normal people should only respect other normal people, and anyone who is too smart or too educated is not normal, but rather elite. The highly educated (who conveniently are overwhelmingly Democratic according to most polls) don't understand you and are keeping you down.
But the rightwing also dislikes science because science keeps producing answers that are contrary to the dictates of the far right. The far right knows that evolution does not occur, global warming is a naturally occurring hoax and trees are the primary cause of air pollution. The far right knows that Abstinence Only Sexual Education reduces pre-marital sex and teen pregnancy. The far right knows that homosexuality has no biological basis, that cities with more guns have fewer shootings, that we can drill our way to lower oil prices and that prayer is the most effective medicine. The far right knows that the lower our tax rates the higher our tax income. Science has the gall, the sheer pointy-headed elitist snobbery, to fail to support even one of these views, and to provide data directly contradicting most of them. The far right responds by treating science, and scientists, as somewhere between irrelevant and the enemy. Worse, under the Bush administration, there has been the consistent effort to bend, break or fabricate the conclusions of science to support every politically expedient fantasy. Research funding has been cut, science belittled and distorted and scientific reports edited, suppressed and distorted like never before.

This brings me to the current Republican ticket. John McCain has staked much of his campaign on the promise that drilling for oil in the US can bring down consumer fuel prices in the near future, a proposition one needs only simple arithmetic to disprove. Governor Palin is among the most anti-intellectual figures in her party, which is why the religious right so adores her. She strongly holds all of the fantasy-based, anti-intellectual views of the theocratic base. She has sworn to fight those who want evolution taught, those who want to do something about global warming, those who support sex-education policies that actually accomplish something and so on. Under a McCain-Palin administration, we can expect not only a continuation, but a strengthening of the Bush anti-science agenda. Should this happen the US faces a new brain drain, but in reverse. If science is not funded and not respected in the US, scientists in the US will have little choice but to give up science, or take their skills and knowledge elsewhere.
More immediately, and more importantly, we as a nation cannot afford to have another administration that so thoroughly rejects the foundational assumption of science: the best way to understand the world is by carefully observing it. The Bush-Cheney administration has consistently refused to allow observations of the world to influence their understanding of the world, or their strategies within it. Every sign points to a similar immunity to reality in any McCain-Palin administration. We can afford no more years of that.

Eek!

This semester I am taking on the biggest and most complicated experiment I have ever attempted. Three populations of 150 rotifers, each population with different rules about how each individual is fed and which ones I cull. Frightening complexity just in planning the experiment, not to mention hiring an training enough undergraduates to staff 150 person-hours per week. This is not going to be an easy time, but I think it could produce a really significant paper. Lucky for me, my advisors think so too, and I should have enough funds to pull it all off.

Biodemography poem

http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~dlevitis/213ex1

Picture of Science! Kitten in an Academic Household

Picture of Science! Steller's Jay

Many birds in the jay, crow and magpie family, the corvidae, are well known for successfully utilizing human provided resources in the form of handouts, garbage or unguarded food. This Steller's Jay, who followed us around a picnic area at Lassen National Park, is no exception.

Rotifer talk

I went into lab meeting this morning feeling like I didn't have much to say, and rather unprepared. After an hour of presenting one not quite done project after another, my professor asked, "Well, did you know rotifers were going to be such a rich and productive system when you started?" I realized everyone there but me was impressed by how much progress I've made on so many fronts. That was okay.

Picture of Science! Spider Hatchlings

One of the wonderful things about gardening is the opportunity to meet the creatures in my yard. I was very pleased this spring to find an empty nursery pot brimming with newly hatched spiders.
I have no idea what species they are. Within two days they had all dispersed to eat up garden pests.

Picture of Science! Tiger Salamander Larvae

My wife and I were walking up to Cecret Lake, at 10,000 ft. in Little Cottonwood Canyon, above Salt Lake City. When we got there, I said, "Oh fish!" Iris pointed out that they had too many dangley bits, and I took a closer look. "Tadpoles!" I said, but then I remembered that tadpoles don't have external gills along the back of the head like that. So I eventually figured out they must be salamander larvae. But what salamader has 6 inch long larvae? The tiger salamander, Ambystoma tigrinum.
This struck us as particularly fortuitous, as we only a month ago named a kitten Tigrinum, in honor of this species. Quite a resemblance, wouldn't you say?


Tiger salamanders often breed in mountain lakes and streams, and their populations often die out when fish are introduced to their previously fishless breeding grounds. Those big slow larvae are easy prey for predatory fish.

Picture of Science! American Dipper

I have far too many good nature/animal photos with no particular outlet, so I'm starting a new series here, which I call "Picture of Science!" even though most are pictures of nature, and not of science. Our first photo in the series is of an American Dipper.

Click photo for larger image.

I took this this past weekend at Manzanita Lake in Lassen Volcanic National Park. The wind and the overhanging trees made fantastic patterns on the water. The dipper was kind enough to stand in front of a relatively smooth spot where it's reflection would come through.

Dippers dip in two ways. First, they frequently bob from front to back to front to back, dipping their tail and belly feathers in the water as they do. Second, and more surprising, they will go completely underwater, walk along the bottom of a mountain stream or pond, and pick insect larvae as they go. They have clear nictitating membranes that act as dive goggles, and they have special movable scales that keep water out of their nostrils. Their numerous other adaptations for walking on the bottom of water bodies make them truely remarkable birds. They are sensitvie to degridation in water quality and have become rare through much of their range.

So many data, so little time.

I first met Jerram Brown in 1999, when I was a senior at Bennington College. My adviser, Betsy Sherman, had been his student many years earlier. I was about to graduate from college and he was about to retire from a very long and extremely successful career in exactly the part of biology I was interested in. For the previous 30 some years he had been studying the behavior, ecology, demography and so forth of the Mexican Jay. I asked him about the possibility of working for him, but I was too late, his retirement plans were gathering momentum. He officially retired in 2002.
When I graduated, I went to work for Glen Woolfenden, who had an almost as long-term study of a very closely related bird, the Florida Scrub-Jay. Glen and Jerram, for reasons I don't know, had some sort of tension between them, and I had no further contact with Dr. Brown's group.

Looking through the program of the Animal Behavior Society Meeting I just attended, I was very excited to see that Jerram Brown would be momentarily be coming out of retirement to accept a distinguished researcher award and deliver a plenary address on his work. That talk was the last morning of the conference, and it turned out far more interesting than even I had suspected.

His data set on the Mexican Jays is shockingly extensive. In addition to the multi-decade highly detailed demographic data, he has an enormous number of ancillary data sets, many of which he had never gotten around to publishing, because he had not found any theoretically important question they could be used to answer. But as he heaped data upon data, I came to realize something. These data he had gathered because he could, rather than because he had a particular question in mind, were potentially exactly the data one of my advisors, Ron Lee, needed to test some of his hypotheses on the importance of intergenerational transfers of resources (in this case food) to the evolution of longevity and sociality. Dr. Brown had records of >26,000 individual food transfers, including who was transferring, to whom, how old each one of them was and how they were related to each other. My heart started thumping. I had to get Jerram's data and Ron's theoretical framework and analytical prowess together. But most scientists jealously guard the data sets they spent their lives gathering. And Ron is already terribly busy with far too many projects, would he even be interested?

Then Dr. Brown said, as part of his planned talk, something I have never heard any scientist say before, even though we probably should all say it sooner or later, "I will gladly turn over my entire dataset to anyone who can make good use of the data." There was a loud gasp. It was me, but not only me, several people gasped. He may as well have said, "I will turn over all this gold ore I have spent my life mining to anyone who can smelt it."

Immediately after his talk, I went up to speak to him. I shook his hand, told him that I was a former student of his former student (in case it helped) and began to tell him about Ron and his work. Another fellow, a Dr. Ha, came up and said that he would like to apply for NSF funds to hire a post-doc to work with Dr. Brown to make sure the data set is preserved and made available. He said that if Ron were involved, this would increase the chances of getting the funding, as NSF would want to know the data would be put to good use.

With some trepidation, I emailed Ron and told him all this. He wrote back almost instantly saying it sounded like a great opportunity, and he would love to join this collaboration, but would want, "some more junior researcher with more years of research ahead of him/her" to be involved, and suggested that I was the "leading candidate."

So this all raises the very real possibility that I may be spending a couple of years immediately after my doctorate applying Jerram Brown's data to Ron's hypotheses (and perhaps a few hypotheses of my own). I haven't yet figured out if this is something I actually want to do, and would be able to accomplish, but the prospect is very exciting all the same.

Chimp Politics

It is 8:30 AM on the second full day of the conference and I have already lost my name-tag. Things are going well. There are five people (with at least four PhDs among them) trying to deduce why the projector for the Keynote Address isn't working.
There are about 300 conference participants here, half of the usual ABS meeting. The reason, other than the scheduling conflict, seems to be that they are having it at the Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort. The problems with this are two. First, they had their meeting here in 2006, and a significant part of why many people decide to go to conferences is to have an excuse to visit a new and exciting place. The second problem is that the Resort is an industrial scale conspicuous consumption machine, meaning that it is overbuilt, overdone and overpriced. I have to admit that it is in a beautiful place, and I will be posting pictures of a moose and some marmots some time soon.

Looks like the projector is working, John Mitani is a well known expert on primate behavior, and has performed fieldwork on all five species of non-human apes. He is giving the Keynote Address, and I will try to convey in non-technical terms my understanding of his understanding of what he says (Or at least that part of it based on previously published work. I don't actually know, but I suspect it would be very rude to distribute the parts of his talk that he had not yet published.)

He has been studying the social behavior of the chimps of southwest Uganda for the last 14 years. Male chimps are more social than the females, form more lasting bonds, move more broadly over a group territory and more often cooperate in coalitions. Male coalitions seem to serve the function of supporting their members in conflicts with other males. The male with the most coalition support rises to the top of the social status, even if he is not the smartest, strongest etc. (A slide of Bush and Cheney somehow appeared in his talk.) The alpha male gets most of the mating opportunities, but in times of coalitional uncertainty, will cede those opportunities to other males whose coalitional support they need.

Chimps are also group hunters, especially of young monkeys. Most of the hunters are adult males. A large group of male chimps will surround a troop of monkeys, and are extremely frequently successful, even if the amount of food per hunter is very small. But group hunters are not necessarily cooperative hunters. If 50 guys all go for the same prey, they may successfully grab it, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are intentionally helping each other. Each individual may be trying to be the one who grabs the meat.

But the chimp who catches the monkey is likely to share it with others. Why? Males are the primary hunters, and hunt mostly when there are a bunch of other males around. It is suggested they may go hunting for male-bonding purposes. The meat seems to be used as a political tool. Males use meat to buy coalition support from other males.

Male coalitions will also make territorial patrols and raids into the territory of neighboring groups. They defend their own territories and grab more land, not infrequently resulting in serious injury or occasionally death. The larger the group patrolling together, the less the risk from any rival group encountered. Dr. Mitani's study group has killed 18 rival males in 10 years, because they are the largest group around. He wants to show us a video of chimps attacking each other, but is having technical difficulties. Now we see another video of a gang of male chimps beating another to death. The room is very still.

Female chimps disperse to other groups, males do not. So males are potentially living in groups of close relatives. And it turns out that males do preferentially help their maternally related brothers. It is easy to know if you have the same mother as another chimp. It is much harder in a non-monogamous species to know if you have the same father, and males don't preferentially help paternally related brothers.

He is finished telling us about the chimps in particular, and is going on to discuss the differences between those who study the behavior of primates and the broader animal behavior community. He says that primatologists can be overly focused on the primates, but that the broader behavioral biological community can be overly resistant to viewing the primates as relevant to their own work. This is apparently one shot in an arguement I was not aware of, and it seems odd to raise it here. One of the biologists sitting near me mutters that he regularly references primate papers, while he never sees primatologists reference the frog literature.

The address is over, time for bagels, juice and schmoozing. Then I'll try to take pictures of the marmot that hangs around on the hotel lawn, and find my name tag.

On asking non-novel questions

One of my students, DC, wrote the following:

I started looking into the [student project that we discussed], and I found that there are already papers published about [that topic]. ... Since it seems like this topic has already been done, should I try to find another topic to look into? I've had the impression that if someone has already studied it, it doesn't work very well for a research topic but I know that must not be the case, otherwise no one would be able to prove theories wrong and there'd be nothing left to study... I suppose what I'm asking is if it's possible to still look into this, but in a way that doesn't only cover a portion of what another paper has already said (a paper that I'll have to cite, too)?

I responded as follows:

Hi DC-
An excellent question, and one that always needs to be asked. Very few people ever ask a truly novel question. Those who do are usually geniuses or lunatics or both. What we mostly do instead is try to ask the same question in a different context, or ask it better, or take a different and hopefully improved approach to answering it.
When LZ was hoping to design a project, she got interested in what caused mixis in rotifers, and I told her to go read the literature on that subject. She did, and came back upset because there were papers on the subject by respected rotifer experts, and they had already published answers to many of her questions. I told her to read those papers again with three questions in mind.
1. Which of her questions, or their own questions, had they failed to answer?
2. What areas of disagreement, apparent contradiction or uncertainty remained?
3. Where are the soft spots in the literature, meaning studies that could have been done better, analyses that are unconvincing or conclusions that aren't fully supported by the data they rest upon?

LZ, being both very hardworking and very clever, came back with answers to all these questions, and we used her answers, plus knowledge of our particular strengths, to design the study that became her senior honors thesis, and will become her first scientific publication.

Our strengths in terms of the primates, as compared to others who have written on this topic, are:
1. We have dispersal data on more species than they did.
2. We have longevity data for males and females of each species, where they did not.
3. We have their papers to use as references and examples of what to do (and what not to do) and they don't.

My suggestion to you is the same as what I suggested to LZ. I don't know if it is the best approach, but it worked for LZ.

Keep up the good work.

Best,
Dan

I wonder if my students know I make this stuff up as I go along?

Phylogeny schmylogeny

Phylogenetics-
1. The generating and using of increasingly complex guesses as to how organisms are related to each other.
2. Something you have to do these days to study evolution.

That time has come. For five years in a heavily phylogenocentric lab in a museum mostly focussed on phylogeny in a department deeply into phylogenetics at a time when phylogenetics is nearing (I hope) the zenith of its trendiness, I have avoided really learning how to do phylogenetics. I can talk at length and in detail about the philosophical underpinnings of phylogenetics, I have read books and papers and taken classes on the subject, but I have never actually sat down and applied that knowledge. This is partly because of my inherent and unreasonable dislike for everything trendy and partly because I find that the most boring research talks in the universe are the straight phylogeny talks ("And then we sequenced 4327 base pairs of CR32.5 and SLD19423 from these twelve hundred taxa. Notice that on this taxa here there is a deletion, and I'll spend ten minutes talking about how we dealt with that. Now I'll spend half an hour talking about how we generated the priors for our Baysian analysis. And look, this taxon you have never heard of is closely related to this other taxon you have never heard of. Who would have thunk it? Someone wake that guy with the funny hair").

But my phylogenetic inexperience is based on more than simple obstinacy. I don't think that way. My predilection is to think of evolution in terms of selection, mutation, drift and so on. Phylogenetics at its core doesn't care WHY there are differences between organisms, phylogenetics is focussed on the methods for gathering and analyzing data on HOW these taxa are different from each other, and on drawing trees of relationships. In many papers, the tree itself is the goal, and maybe they do an analysis or two showing how useful their tree is.

I, knowing I needed to learn some phylogenetic software packages eventually, but deeply not wanting to, have backed myself into it. So I have taken a taxon for which the tree already exists (primates) and gathered from the literature (or had my students gather) a bunch of variables for as many species on that tree as possible. We have data on sex biased dispersal, social system, who provides care to the young and so on for about 90 species, and data on sex-biased longevity for 119. A huge amount of work over some years has gone into this, and there is no way I can weasel out of writing papers based on it. But there is also no way I can publish this in a decent journal without controlling for the effect of phylogeny. What "controlling for the effect of phylogeny" means takes a little bit of explaining. There is a tendency for related species to have similar traits, whether or not there is any adaptive mechanism driving that similarity. The common ancestor had that trait and both the descended populations inherited that trait from that ancestor. Humans and chimps have similar genetic sequences, and our common ancestor was surely very similar to both of us. This is termed 'phylogenetic inertia.'
Anytime one does a comparative analysis these days, one has to explain how we know that the observed pattern isn't just an example of phylogenetic inertia. Imagine one thought there was a causal relationship between being large and having hooves. One could find ten big species, notice they all have hooves, and ten species, notice none of them have hooves. But if those ten hooved species were all in the cow family, and the ten small species were all in the vole family, one would not have proved anything about hooves and largeness except that Bovidae have both and Cricetidae neither. So one has to make sure one is not being fooled by similarities due to evolutionary relatedness, or in the parlance, 'control for phylogeny.'
I need to control for phylogeny, and therefore will learn a few phylogenetics programs. But I don't have to like it, and I am going to make my students learn it too.

Stereotyping of students based on intended career

There is a commonly sited and widely believed in stereotype of a certain group of biology undergraduates, and this stereotype, I have reason to believe is frequently used in labs in my department to determine which students are desirable to have in one's class or section or lab, and how much responsibility and trust to give students. This stereotype is based not on race, sex, religion or socioeconomic background, but rather on intended career. I have heard faculty, grad-students and even other undergraduate students (including other pre-meds and pre-vets) rail against the pre-meds and pre-vets. At the new-grad student orientation last year the first response to the question, "What are the undergrads here like?" was, "too many pre-meds."

The stereotype goes something like this:
They only care about grades and letter of recommendation, they aren't interested in learning, they have no interest in science but will apply for any and every research position just to put it on their resumes. They will do a desultory job at any task you give them, so you may as well give them menial tasks. They are unpleasant to teach because they aren't interested and they spend all their time grade-grubbing. They are motivated to cheat by their fanatical devotion to getting A's.

This stereotype is, in my opinion, quite destructive. Not to say it has no basis in fact. I have had students who match the stereotype fairly well, both in classes and as lab assistants, and I will admit to finding myself hoping never to find myself or a member of my family in their medical offices. Our campus has both pre-medical and pre-vet undergraduate clubs, and while I have no direct knowledge of the advice these clubs give their members, the students who seem to be living up to the stereotype will occasionally say that they want the A or want the job because their pre-professional society told them so. (See here for my thoughts on how and why undergraduates should get involved in research. One important point, don't apply because your pre-med society told you you should, and if you do, don't admit to it, and if you do, expect menial tasks from most labs.) I suspect that some students really are led astray by receiving advice that emphasizes grades over learning and items on a resume over experience.

But honestly, the best undergraduates, bar-none, I have worked with have been pre-med and pre-vet. When I was a teaching assistant for Animal Behavior last year, the student in my section who asked the best questions, was the most enthusiastic and was the most helpful in explaining the material to her fellow students was a pre-vet student, very active in the pre-vet society. She also happened to get by far the highest grade in the course, but the high grade was clearly not her only reason for being there. My most accomplished lab assistant, whose thesis is nearly ready for publication, just applied to 20 med schools. I will admit to trying to talk her into a career in research, but I also have no doubt she would be an excellent physician. I could give as many examples of excellent pre-med and pre-vet students as I could examples of terrible ones.

Why do I think the stereotype is damaging though, if it is at least sometimes at least partly true? Partly because it colors interactions with undergrads. Some very large portion (well over half, I think) of students taking classes taught by my department are on pre-health career tracks. If one goes into interactions with more than half of one's students assuming that they are uninterested in learning, this affects one's teaching. If one offers only menial lab tasks to more than half of one's students, this affects their opportunity to learn about science. If instructors try to avoid teaching the classes that pre-med students flock toward, that doesn't say anything great about the educations of our pre-med students. It is also damaging if students feel compelled to live up to it. I had a pre-med students say to me that he was not interested in participating in anything that didn't contribute to his grade because that wasn't how pre-med students worked. I had the distinct impression he was striving to be the stereotype.

What actions do I suggest? The first would be for people on all levels of the department to be aware of this stereotype, and the biases it causes, and to be careful about how those biases affect their actions. The second would be for the pre-vet and pre-med clubs to make their members aware of this stereotype, and urge them to avoid being pigeon holed. Just as racism cannot be combated without acknowledging that it exists, I feel that carrerism must be exposed to the light of day.

What I'll be talking about at ABS.

The concept of "behavior" is central to the activities of the Animal Behavior Society and its members, but do we know what we mean by this term? Most published sources either do not include a definition of the word "behavior", or have definitions that both contradict each other or are either too broad or too narrow to be applied operationally.

We examined the range of available definitions, and finding no consensus, polled members of ABS as to their understanding of the term. Here again, we found surprisingly widespread disagreement as to what qualifies as behavior. This paper highlights the areas of agreement and disagreement, and proposes a definition intended to be operational and as free as possible of taxonomic bias.

Annual Review Extravaganza

Every grad student in my department is supposed to have an annual review with their advisers before Halloween of each year. The idea is that once a year we get our whole faculty committee in a single room for an hour to discuss our progress and future directions. This being my sixth year in grad school, I have decided that this year I am going to (for the first time) find a time when my whole committee is in town and make them come and sit down and talk to me. This is supposedly required every year, but last time I tried to comply, my committee chair said the effort was, "noble but fanciful." Every year I end up meeting with my committee members individually, or emailing with them, and getting only some of their signatures on the form I have to return to the department.

This year will be different.
My plan now is to communicate not with my major professor, but with his administrative assistant, who schedules his whole life. I already have a list of every time he is scheduled to be out of town, which is most of the time, and am working on getting such lists from my other three committee members. I plan on being a lot more persistent in trying to schedule a meeting this time than in the past, as this year I actually have product to show off, rather than simply a new plan for what I want to do in the future.
I've been working on a list of what to have ready by the meeting (which will be some time in September or October). Here is what I have so far.

Things to have ready:
1. Lauren's paper with completed data set.

2. Completed draft of defining behavior.

3. Primate variables mapped onto phylogeny.

4. Rough draft of comparative menopause paper.

5. Update on main rotifer experiment (draft of DDIG proposal?)

6. List of ongoing projects with one to two sentence summary of each.
.A. Rotifers
...1. Main Experiment
...2. Lauren's Thesis
...3. Sijie's Incest Avoidance project
...4. Rotifer Ethogram (Laura/Harmony)
...5. Polina's Egg Size Project
...6. Nicole's Biomechanics Project
...7. Rotifer/Chitrid
...8. Hamutahl's sickness project
.B. Comparative Primate studies
...1. Main analysis
...2. Comparative Menopause
...3. Sex biased dispersal (Darragh)
.C. Defining Behavior
.D. Thoughts on evolution of infant mortality (still nebulous)

Looking at this list, I see several items that I am confident can turn into publications, several others that could turn into publications if I ever get time for them, and others that are based on interesting ideas, but I am not entirely certain where I am going with them. My committee is inevitably going to tell me that I have too many projects and need to concentrate on just a few. I need to be prepared, before our meeting, to tell them which ones I will shelve or drop. Whenever that meeting is.

Dueling Conferences

Most scientific societies have a conference every year or two. A chance to meet other scientists with similar research interests, hype your work, hear them hype their work, network and generally schmooze. This year the two big meetings most likely to draw American behavorists, the International Society for BehaviorAL Ecology, and the Animal Behavior Society, are almost overlapping. ISBE is, as the name implies, international, and have their meetings only every other year. Now they are having their meeting in Ithaca, at Cornell too good a chance for most American behaviorists to pass up. ABS is having their meeting a few days later at an overpriced resort in the mountains above Salt Lake City. A beautiful spot, to be sure, but not enough to convince many people who have just sat through a week of behavior talks to fly west and sit for another week. ISBE will have about three times as many attendants as ABS.

I am going to ABS, rather than ISBE, because it is easier to get to from here, because ISBE had their deadline for submission of abstracts before I got my act together, and because ABS is supposed to be more student friendly. I'm staying at a very affordable campsite some thousands of feet above the resort, and giving what I suspect will be the only philosophical talk of the meeting. I am not sure whether the ABS meeting will be more fun or less for being so much smaller than ISBE, but I shall try to liveblog the whole thing.

The Draft

I spent my first few years as a graduate student taking classes, applying for funding, working on projects that didn't work out, teaching and similarly not producing papers. In the world of academic science, publishing papers is pretty much everything, which means that career-wise I was accomplishing pretty much nothing. In the last week I and my collaborators have finished first drafts of two papers that should be quite publishable once they are polished up a bit. And boy, does that feel good.

Down to the wire

One of my professors, RL has this habit of being uncannily right most of the time. My student, LZ, and I were working on analyzing our data this afternoon. The first draft of her senior thesis is due tomorrow, and we decided we may as well try one last thing, calculating a variable that RL had suggested. We plugged it into our model and BAM! highly statistically significant, much more so than anything else. And, in retrospect, it makes beautiful biological sense. Of course it all depends on cumulative lay order across generations! Any brilliant biodemographer would have seen that at once.

Now LZ has at least 12 hours to rewrite her paper.

Cleaning Data

My studies of rotifer demography and evolution would not be possible without extensive student participation. I need three people working together for four hours every day just to get the census done. Most of the time I have six or seven students on my team. Only one student, LZ, has been working with me the whole time. She started last year as an Undergraduate Research Apprentice and this spring and summer has been working on her Senior Thesis. She decided, quite independently, that she was going to study which demographic factors affect the probability of a rotifer reproducing sexually, rather than asexually. She is a fabulous student, has become a talented researcher, and I hate to see her go.
A rough draft of her thesis is due this Friday, and as we have been trying to analyze our data, we have instead been spending most of our time fixing typos and errors in the data. We've been finding mistakes ranging from recording a rotifer as being in plate 1111 instead of 111 to the same information recorded quite differently in two different places. LZ and I spent ten hours yesterday going through our data line by line and cleaning up errors. Some sections were perfect, others awful, and we couldn't help but wonder which students had taken the clean data and which had gotten sloppy, lazy or confused.
Doing this has brought into sharp relief both the good and the bad of having such student-powered research. Relying on students is extremely useful and motivating and inspiring, but can also be frustrating and time-munching. Which way it goes depends enormously on the students I choose. I am very shortly going to be needing to find another couple of assistants, and will have this experience in mind.

Question Creep

If a billion scientists studied life on earth for a billion years, they would leave more unanswered questions than we now know exist.

Every project I have ever been involved with, or heard of, has generated far more questions than it has answered, not because the researchers were doing a bad job, but because one can't study any organism in detail without realizing how little one knows about it. Humans are the favorite research subject of humans, and we have published literally billions of articles on us, every aspect of our biology and behavior has been the topic of intense research, and yet there is still a huge amount we don't understand about ourselves, neurologically, chemically, socially, medically, you-name-it-ly.
And after all this research, we have succeeded in creating whole new fields of study to generate more questions. Genomics being an obvious example of a new field that is question rich.

That level of research (at least on the biological and chemical sides) could be applied to any of the hundreds of millions of life forms out there, and we would still be generating questions about that species. And then their are all the questions about the differences and similarities between species, the way that life has changed over time, the evolutionary, ecological and social interactions between species, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

This plays out quite clearly in my own little lab. As a grad student, I am lucky to have a very small lab space that I share with another student and my ~$25K worth of borrowed equipment. Oh but the use that tiny little room gets. Any day of the year there are at least three people in there looking at rotifers for four hours. I got into studying rotifers to answer a question about humans, why our females have such a long post-reproductive lifespan. But now that I need data on rotifer demographics, and have a horde of undergraduates studying them, my students and I have raised a huge range of related questions. To give you a sense, here is a short list of the projects currently under way, or in planning:

1. I started with the question, will rotifers evolve a post-reproductive lifespan if exposed to selective pressures similar to those thought to have caused human females to survive well past menopause?

2. I brought on LZ as an assistant, and she wondered what demographic factors influence when a rotifer reproduces sexually as opposed to asexually?

3. I hired PB as a work-study student, and she is working on an assigned side project, looking at how the size of a rotifer's eggs vary based on her size and age. This arose out of discussion with LZ in which we wondered if egg size could be affecting mode of reproduction.

4. Another student, NN, came on as a volunteer and got fascinated with rotifer biomechanics. Her senior honors thesis will ask how rotifers use their cilia for movement and feeding, and how does this vary with size and between males and females?

5. We noticed that when we do get sexually competent rotifers, they generally won't mate with their own sons. I asked a former student of mine, SM, to join the rotifer lab and investigate incest avoidance in rotifers. Now she is in the lab most afternoons taking video of rotifers mating, or choosing not to mate.

6. In studying the demography, we found that we could often visually identify when a rotifer was 'sick.' We wondered if we could categorize these 'sick' behaviors, and use our demographic data set to test whether our perceptions of sickness consistently presage death. HC, who came on as a volunteer, is working on this.

7. With all these projects looking at rotifer behavior, I decided it was important to have a unified terminology to describe the behaviors we were seeing. So I have two students, LF and HL, working on an ethogram, a list of behaviors with a description and diagram of each.

8. One of my lab mates in the Moritz lab is studying how water filtration affects the progression of the Chytrid disease that is killing off large numbers of amphibian species. It occurred to me that rotifers live in the same habitats as amphibians, and eat things the size of the Chytrid zoospores, the mobile cells that cause infections and reinfections. A former rotifer rangler, CW, is planning experiments to ask whether rotifers will eat chytrid zoospores, and if so whether that information can be applied to amphibian conservation. (Chytrid Experiment).

Every one of these projects is doable, and all of them will generate far more questions than they answer. I have my billion years work cut out for me.

Sigh

I've spent the afternoon helping two of my best assistants move on to research that more closely matches their interests than what they have been doing with me. I'll still be helping to advise them, but I'll no longer have them on my project. They will be hard to replace, but after all the work they have done for me, I owed it to them to help advance their careers.
NN will be studying rotifer biomechanics in another lab (with me acting as rotifer expert), and MR will (if all goes as planned) be doing coral censuses in PNG (with me helping to urgently prepare her for her trip). My other long-term lab assistant, LZ, who is totally irreplaceable, is graduating in a week and moving to India two weeks after that to work in public health. Time to recruit more assistants.

Conservation inaction

A friend who runs a conservation organization in Papua New Guinea is visiting. She and I have been discussing whether, in the long run, there would be any meaningful change in long-term conservation outcomes if every western conservation organization in PNG were to up and leave. We are not convinced that there would be.

Sad.

Fishy

One of my students, DC, emailed me, very confused. I had asked her to compile data on sex-baised dispersal in primates, and she has been doing a huge amount of work, digging through the literature, and has found data for about 50 species. Then in April, a paper came out in a high profile journal which, among other variables, examines sex-based dispersal in primates. DC student found the paper, but couldn't find the data on sex-biased dispersal. There are lots of references, and lots of supplemental materials, but nothing to our cause. So DC emailed me, and I read the paper and the supplemental materials. I also could find no data and no sources on sex biased dispersal, even though there were graphs (with 70 unlabeled diamonds, circles and squares labeled as male biased dispersers, female biased dispersers or both sexes dispers equally) and analyses based on those data. "Must have been left out by accident," I thought, and looked up the author's website to see if the data were posted there. Nope.
So I emailed the author, asked for either the data table or the references on which it was based, and got an almost immediate reply. She stated that:

A. The data and sources had been cut out to save space. This is fishy, as the journal has no space limits on supplemental online materials, and many papers come out in this same journal with far more appendixes than this paper has.

B. It would be too much work to track down all the references and sources again. This is fishy, as the paper came out only this year, and it would be truly remarkable to lose track of one's data set and all of its sources so quickly and thoroughly.

C. If I wanted information on a particular species, she would be glad to see what she could find. This too is fishy, as it implies that she would have to go to the library looking for the data that her published paper is already based on.

I can't help but wonder if there ever were data and sources. I would like to think of some innocuous explanation, but have not done so yet. I told my student to take this as an example of what not to do.

Snake self defence

Iris and I were on our way up Blake St from the BART station to our house.
At the corner of Walnut St, I exclaimed, "Oh!"
"What! What!? What?" Iris responded.
"A garter snake!"
The sleek black ribbon, two feet long and no more than half an inch wide, with a bright yellow strip up its back, was frantically trying to wriggle out of the street and onto the curb. That corner has no curb-cut, and its movements were too disorganized to allow it to climb the 6-inch curb.
Three facts jumped to mind:
1. It was clearly overheated by being on the black pavement in the sun, and would cook to death or get run-over unless we rescued it.
2. Garter snakes are not poisonous, but can bite.
3. It probably came from El Cerrito Hillside Natural Area, 200m up the street.

So I handed my cane and groceries to Iris and grabbed the snake with both hands. But I had forgotten that the hotter a snake is, the faster it can move. Before I could get a finger on it, my thumb was bleeding from multiple tiny punctures. I grabbed the little snot anyway and held firmly, but without squeezing, on the back of its skull. Then it hit me with a garter-snake's last line of defense: musk. A garter snake's musk glands are in its vent (a.k.a. cloaca, a.k.a. butt) and can rapidly discharge a surprising quantity of a fluid that smells somewhere between a port-a-potty and old gym-socks.

With one hand bleeding and the other clamped on a snake and stinking, I looked up at Iris. She handed me my cane and retreated up the street.

Thamnophis elegans - Western Terrestrial Gartersnake

Catnip -> Olfaction -> Happy

My Friend Terry Johnson is a lecturer in Bioengeneering at UC Berkeley. He also writes the Ask a Biogeek column for io9.com. Now he is one of the judges for their Mad Science Contest: Build a Lifeform. And, in investigating my idea for an artificial organism, I came across this abstract:

Hart BL, Leedy MG.1985. Analysis of the catnip reaction: mediation by olfactory system, not vomeronasal organ. Behav Neural Biol. 44(1):38-46.

Pet owners and behavioral scientists alike are fascinated by unique behavioral reactions that cats show in the presence of catnip. These experiments explored the possibility that the catnip reaction might be triggered by chemosensory stimulation of the vomeronasal organ. In the chewing and mouthing of the catnip source, substances might be dissolved in saliva and transported to the vomeronasal organ. The rolling and rubbing during a catnip reaction might be a sexual response activated by the accessory olfactory system since the system projects to parts of the brain involved in mediation of sexual behavior. However, removal of the vomeronasal organ did not attenuate any of the behavioral reactions to catnip. Olfactory bulbectomy immediately eliminated catnip responding, revealing that the chemosensory stimulus evoking the catnip reaction is undoubtedly mediated through the main olfactory system. Catnip activates behavioral elements associated with several species-specific behaviors, including sniffing and chewing as associated with oral appetitive behavior, rolling and rubbing characteristic of female sexual behavior, batting the catnip source characteristic of play behavior, and a type of kicking associated with predatory behavior. These behavioral reactions occur randomly and intermittently.

The moral of the story seems to be that:
A. Cats respond to catnip through their olfaction, the type of smelling that humans do fairly well, rather than through the vomeronasal organ, the part of smelling that humans don't seem to do at all.
B. Catnip elicits from cats behaviors associated with almost every active things cats enjoy (eating, playing, sex and hunting). Catnip does not elicit the calming and resting behaviors such as self-grooming and napping that cats also enjoy. Catnip also does not elict behavior associated with things cats don't enjoy (fighting, danger, housechoirs).

Based on this, and my own observations, it seems likely that catnip is a quick-acting stimulant, extremely pleasant to the cat and absorbed through the olfactory epithelium.

Stefanie Schwartz, in her book "Psychoactive Herbs in Veterinary Medicine" list some other useful facts. Catnip response is not associated with any know histological or physiological effect, (meaning that while it certainly does something in the body, it is something subtle) catnip is not toxic even at relatively high doses, and the physiological and psychological effects are very different in cats than in humans. In humans, catnip is mild sedative, and smoked catnip is said to have similar psychtrophic effects to smoke marijiana. In cats, it is clearly a stimulant. In neither species does it have any known side effects.

Nepetalactone, the active ingredient, is also aparrently a powerful insect repellant, driving off both lice and cockroaches many times more powerfully than does DEET.

Better Solar Cells

It is amazing how when one does research into a technology, that technology can get better.

Science 11 July 2008:
Vol. 321. no. 5886, pp. 226 - 228

High-Efficiency Organic Solar Concentrators for Photovoltaics
Michael J. Currie, Jonathan K. Mapel, Timothy D. Heidel, Shalom Goffri, Marc A. Baldo

The cost of photovoltaic power can be reduced with organic solar concentrators. These are planar waveguides with a thin-film organic coating on the face and inorganic solar cells attached to the edges. Light is absorbed by the coating and reemitted into waveguide modes for collection by the solar cells. We report single- and tandem-waveguide organic solar concentrators with quantum efficiencies exceeding 50% and projected power conversion efficiencies as high as 6.8%. The exploitation of near-field energy transfer, solid-state solvation, and phosphorescence enables 10-fold increases in the power obtained from photovoltaic cells, without the need for solar tracking.

Sock of Science!

The Ozone Sock company employs my baby cousin David as National Sales Director, or some such title. He told me about their "My Socks are Your Socks Design Competition." Naturally I have been designing science themed socks.
Here is a sock I call, "Where's Pluto?"

The Velige People

One of the great pleasures of working with really talented undergraduates is that they know stuff I don't and make me learn stuff I would never otherwise have gotten to learn. Take NN. I met NN when I went to the Invertebrate Zoology class she was taking to ask if any of the students wanted to help me with my rotifer experiments. A couple of days later I got a resume from NN, and quickly realized that in addition to being a great assistant, she knows enormously more about aquatic invertebrates, and a bunch of other biological topics, than I do. A good start.

One of the topics she knows and I don't is biomechanics. She quickly developed an interest in rotifer fluid mechanics. So yesterday afternoon NN and I went up to the lab of Dr. Mimi Koehl, aquatic invertebrate biomechanician extraordinar and talked to her grad-student and my friend, Lindsay.

It turned out Lindsay and NN have a lot in common. They both are fascinated by aquatic invertebrates, biomechanics, fluids, and the interactions of these concepts. And they both know what a veliger is. In fact, they had quite a long discussion about veligers of different types, and how many of them have a range of similarities to rotifers. I, throughout this entire conversation, played the game of trying to take part in the discussion while also attempting to deduce what a veliger was.

I figured out this much: veligers are a subset of the larvae of aquatic invertebrates. They are motile plankton whose motive force and/or feeding is supplied by rings of compoud cilia, the same as one would find in a rotifer. They often grow up into forms that are not moved by cilia, like muscles and snails. When said quickly, veligers sounds a lot like villagers, which renders funny any conversation about what sorts of creatures eat veligers.

Today I looked up what a veliger actually is. I wasn't too far off the mark. A veliger is a young mollusk in a developmental stage provided with a velum, a membrane edged with clilia used for locomotion and feeding. Cilia are only a reasonable way to get around if one is small (a couple of millimeters at most) so once a veliger grows that big it generally moves on to other means of locomotion, losing its velum and thereby its veliger status. Veligers are found in the bivalves (clams, muscles etc) and the marine gastropods (snails and sea-slugs).

Lindsay says that several people have wanted to study how veligers use their cilia to feed and move, but that little progress has been made because of the difficulty of finding and keeping them. They die, they grow up, they don't reproduce quickly. So since I know how to provide a large number of the animals that most closely resemble veligers in their use of cilia, rotifers, and Nicole and Lindsay know about biomechanics and veligers and all that, it seems we have a good collaboration.

P.S. Here is a photo of a Fusitriton veliger that Lindsay sent me. I Photoshopped it to increase the contrast, to make the cilia more visible.

Plant Behavior

There is a scientific society dedicated to the study of almost anything. But until recently (2005) there was no society dedicated to the study of the behaviors of plants. Enter The Society of Plant Neurobiology. which states on its website:

"Plant Neurobiology describes a newly named, but also old and fascinating field in plant biology addressing the physiological basis of adaptive behavior in plants. Perhaps this field could be called "Sensory Biology in Plants" or something similar. However, these names don't quite cover topics like plant cytology and anatomy, adaptive plant behavior, signaling and communication in symbiosis and pathogenesis, or newly emerging topics like for instance plant immunity, plant memory and learning, plant-plant communication, as well as plant intelligence."

This is very convenient for me, as I am currently writing a paper on, among other things, taxonomic bias in definitions of the word 'behavior.' Having gotten input from member of the Animal Behavior Society and the International Society for Applied Ethology, I am thrilled to be able to get the viewpoints of botanists interested in behavior. I emailed the chair of their steering committee, asking her to forward a link to my "what is behavior?" survey to their membership. If she is sympathetic, this could be really cool.

I learned of the existence of SPNb through this article on NYTImes.com. Check out the video of the parasitic plant sniffing for prey and pouncing on the unsuspecting tomato vine.

Rotifer fluid mechanics

One of my best students, NN, has become fascinated with the ways in which rotifers use their cilia, and wants to do a senior honors thesis on the fluid mechanics of rotifer cilia. She is interested in issues of scaling, how they use their cilia in feeding and locomotion, and the differences in the cilia between males and females. Males use their cilia only for locomotion, while females use them for both locomotion and feeding, leading to some fascinating questions about the trade-offs females make to have their cilia serve these two very different, and very important roles.

I very much want to encourage her in this, but started by explaining to her that as an evolutionary demographer, I know squat, make that squat/2 about biomechanics. And of all the parts of biomechanics I don't understand, Low Reynolds Number Fluid Mechanics may just be the part I understand least. I understand it so little I don't even know what it means. The Reynolds number has something to do with the ratio of the size of the object to the viscosity of the fluid, or something like that. This helpful Wikipedia article describes it in terms I only vaguely understand. What I understand it to mean is that the smaller an organism or piece of an organisms is, the more viscous the fluid effectively is. A whale moving through water experiences an environment in which viscosity is much less important than a rotifer moving through the same, equally viscous water. The rotifer has a very low Reynolds number, and its cilia have even lower Reynolds numbers. The viscosity of the water they move is so high, it is like a human arm through tar. Or something like that.
But don't quote me on any of that because it is probably wrong.

So I told NN that I was glad to work with her on that, but she would need an adviser from a biomechanics lab, like that of Mimi Koehl. Luckily, one of my best friends in my department is one of Mimi's students, and is interested in ciliary feeding. And this morning we went to the grocery store together, and by the time the groceries were in the fridge, my friend had agreed to meet with my student and help her figure out how to frame and answer her question. My only claims on the project will be that I helped generate the questions, am brining the collaboration together, and am providing the study organisms. In other words, I may end up co-advising a senior thesis on a topic I know nothing about. Hopefully by the end I will at least know what a Reynold's number is.

Inching toward science

For as long as there have been science classes, creationists have wanted to teach creationism as science. And in many countries, including this one, they have often done so. In some countries, much more so than the US, they still do. But in the US they have suffered a long series of court defeats on the basis that creationism is religion, and not science, and therefore does not belong in science classes. And it often seems like a battle that can't really be won, because as soon as they lose one court battle they repackage and try again. But considering that history as outlined in this NYTimes article gives me a sense that while we will never convince them to give up entirely, in the long run they are gradually being forced to adopt positions with more and more resemblance to science.

At first, of course, they simply outlawed the teaching of evolution where they could. These laws didn't stand up in the courts, so they decided that creationism and evolution would be taught side by side. That didn't stand up either, so they came up with the bright idea of wrapping creationism in a thin film of scientific lingo and calling it 'creation science.' That didn't stand up to examination for very long either. Next they decided that rather than creationism painted science-color, they would have the nugget of creationism with many layers of scientific sounding text, language, calculations and books wrapped around it, and call it Intelligent Design Theory. No explicit mention of any particular intelligent designer, just a very selective use of scientific knowledge and concepts with the goal of concluding that evolution can't explain the universe, and therefore there must be a creator. Some of them even went so far as to acknowledge microevolution (the modification of existing forms) while still rejecting macroevolution (the accumulation of those modifications to the point that it seems to us to be a really different form). That, as you know, didn't stand up in court either. Partly their arguments made no sense, and partly there was plenty of documentation of the fact that they had started with a conclusion and worked backwards, making up results to support that conclusion, making up methods that would lead to those results and then trying to figure out what question they should pretend to have been trying to answer. In other words, they were demonstrably engaged not in science, but in fraud. But for all its repugnance, ID had the desirable property of getting the creationists to agree that they needed to make evidence based arguments, even if they then failed to do so. ID, exposed as the cynical lie that it is, is now dying from too much light. Thus always to imposters.

But creationists have too much faith in their own infallibility to give up and go home. So the Discovery Institute and its usual corral of quacks are designing a new and improved 'science curriculum' intended to highlight the 'strengths and weaknesses' of Darwinian evolutionary theory. I have absolutely no doubt that this is just the same spoiled sausage in a shiny new casing, but at least they have finally been forced to adopt a truly scientific casing. Examining the strengths and weaknesses of theories is what science is about. Now there are unscientific ways of going about it, and I have no doubt they will employ almost all of these, but the details of the curriculum can be challenged in court.

There are of course downsides to them having finally found a really scientific name to call their beliefs. They are adapting to the fact that their ideas are demonstrably not science by gradually phrasing them in a more and more scientific way. That may make it a little bit harder each time to prove that religion is still not science, and harder for the average person to understand exactly why it is not science. This time, instead of getting 'strengths and weaknesses' thrown out of the classroom entirely, we may have to fight item by item about what can be presented as a strength or a weakness, and how they can be presented.

But as long as we can continue to find judges willing to judge on the evidence (which I know is in some doubt), we will continue to win those fights. Religion really isn't science, and no matter how cleverly disguised will continue to not be science. We can explain the data without invoking non-scientific concepts like a benevolent omnipotent and omniscient creator, and they can't. So once the argument is on our turf, once they are arguing with us about what evidence and logic show, they can only lose. Not to say that it will be a sea-change. What we have accomplished to date is extremely incremental, and that will continue. But we are pushing them back, inch by inch, foot by foot, concept by concept. They will argue that the human eye is irreducibly complex, we will use data and logic to show that that is ignorant nonsense. The courts will be forced to rule in our favor. They will argue that the laws of thermodynamics make it impossible for order to arise from disorder. We will explain to the judges that this is true only in a closed system, with no input of order, and there will be a court ruling that says that their argument is not science. And on. And on. But as long as our country holds it together enough to continue having a judiciary that has to listen to evidence most of the time, and as long as the data and logic are all on our side, all they can do is stall, limit the rate at which they lose ground. And as that happens, they will be forced to incorporate more and more actual science into their arguments. Who knows, maybe some day they will be forced to admit to both microevolution and macroevolution, but continue arguing that their had to be a creator to get it all started. At that point, they will be in agreement with Darwin himself, who wrote in The Origin of Species, "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." This view is of course still not science, but if they can be driven back this far they will be rendered, in my view, mostly harmless.

Of listing and sex

Among many bird-watchers, there is an obsession with listing. Species one has seen anywhere, species one has seen in Ontario, species one has seen in Ontario in October, species one has seen through a particular window while sitting on the toilet and so on. I once had a colleague point his binoculars up at the sky for a few seconds, and say, "Awesome, I've never seen a Red-Throated Loon on the southward migration over Lake Eire before. Another tic for my list."
I keep a few place specific lists, "birds I've seen in the El Cerrito Hillside Natural Area," or, "birds of Mahopac, NY," and used to keep a life list (e.g. all the wild birds I've ever seen anywhere) but I've never really gotten into listing for listing's sake. Hard-core listers (commonly referred to as twitchers for their inability to hold still if someone suggests a bird they don't yet have on a particular list is nearby) are often far more interested in adding birds to lists than in actually looking at the birds, and will often travel long distances to find a bird, look at it for just long enough to confidently add it to their list, then begin the long journey home. Those of us who are not twitchers, but know people who are, enjoy the game of making up new types of lists and mentioning them to twitchers so that they will feel compelled to rush out and start building a bigger, longer more impressive list with more rare species. So, in that spirit, I have started to compile a copulation list, of all the bird species I have ever observed copulating. This list is necessarily incomplete, as I am only including those species which I know a particular time and place when I witnessed a copulation in the wild, but excluding all the other species that I forget where or when. This list was inspired by the activity of two house-sparrows this fine June morning.

In no particular order:
House Sparrow
California Condor
Turkey Vulture
Fairy Bluebird
Florida Scrub-Jay
Western Scrub-Jay
Steller's Jay
Common Raven
American Crow
Bald Eagle
House Finch
European Starling
Canada Goose
Mallard
Muskovi Duck
Great Egret
American Robin
Dark-Eyed Junco
California Towhee
Red-Tailed Hawk
Red-Shouldered Hawk
Willie Wagtail

Rotifer Photos

I have a couple of students working with me this summer on an ethogram of my rotifers. An ethogram is a list of behaviors exhibited by a species, with a description of each one. One of the students, Laura is particularly interested in invertebrate behavior, and the other, Harmony, wants to get experience in scientific illustration. Harmony will make the illustrations of that go with the descriptions of each behavior.

In order to help her with this, I am figuring out how to get good photos of the rotifers through a compound scope. Here are some of the prototypes:

A juvenile female rotifer feeding on bright green algal cells.

This very small female (on the right) dwarfs the normal sized male on the left. Male rotifers are tiny, fast and anatomically simple. He has no digestive system, a very rudimentary foot, and no defensive spines. The very dark area in the middle of the female is her trophi (aka teeth). The male has none. His penis is at the base (caudal end) of his foot, and he is attempting to inject sperm into the female.



This juvenile female has retracted her head and foot into her shell (lorica) in a defensive posture, because I poked her with my pipette.


This is a high magnification shot of a dried out male rotifer. The males never hold still and are very hard to get photographs of in life. I dried this male onto a microscope slide with a lamp. On the left you can see his shaggy 'mane' of cillia, which propel him through the water. The males are very small compared to their cillia, which may help to explain why they are so damn fast.

Three Birds, Two Cats and a primate

It was an awful lot of croaking for a Friday afternoon. I went out on the patio to investigate. The Ravens were in an uproar about something. My first thought was that one of their nestlings had fledged and was hiding in our yard. They were flying back and forth, low over the top of the apple tree, scolding and creaking and booming. I decided their fledgling must be in the top of the tree, and they must be trying to tell it that this was not a safe place. My eyes scanning the trees for a fledgling, I was impressed and intimidated to see these two birds, each the size of a large hawk, diving and screaming just over my head. And just as I was starting to think they might really be screaming directly at me, I heard something moving only a couple of yards from my feet. Looking down, I saw this:

A turkey right in our garden, and clearly the focus of the Ravens' ire. They were responding to it as they would any large animal (except humans and deer, which they seem to be used to ) getting too close to their nest tree: by screaming and scolding, "you better git the hell off our land if you know what's good fer ya!" The turkey had apparently responded by hunkering down by Betty's compost bin.


I pulled out my cell phone and started to take pictures. After a couple of minutes the ravens went off to scream at something else and the turkey and I were left to talk amongst ourselves. I went for my better camera, but finding the batteries dead, knocked on Betty's door and said, "Hi Betty, sorry to bother you, but there is a turkey in the backyard. You should bring your camera please."

It was a very tame turkey. I taking photos with my cellphone and Betty with her big digital SLR each stood about 10 feet from it. "People have been feeding it." I said as it watched us hopefully and I resisted the urge to feed it. It rooted around in the garden.

FeLion wandered out onto the patio and saw the turkey. Her response seemed perfectly split between, "That is the biggest bird I have ever seen, I'm gonna eat it." and "that is the bigest bird I have ever seen, I hope it doesn't try to eat me." She was frozen with indecision.


Betty's cat Sophie, on the other hand, was not at all reluctant to charge a bird twice her weight. She burst out of the bushes and sprinted toward the turkey, who turned tail and ran up the step to the very top of our yard.


When I caught up, the turkey was defending a position on top of the garden gate arch, and Sophie was attempting to storm the battlements.

Eventually she succeeded, and the Turkey took to the air, at which point the Ravens resumed their harrying. The turkey, pursued from above an below. stopped in a tangle of low Eucalyptus branches. Betty and I snapped a few more shots and then took the cats inside.

Garden of Science!

Most anyone in the Northern Hemisphere who has put out a bird feeder has had the problem of dealing with squirrels raiding their feeder, spilling the seed and chasing off the birds. There are a huge range of products designed to deter, exclude or punish the offending rodents, many of which work only marginally. I am currently using a product which is highly effective and nearly free: chili-pepper seed mixed into the bird seed. As any mammal who has bit into a chili-pepper knows, chilies make mammalian mucous membranes burn. What most mammals don't know is that to birds, the active compounds in chilies, capsaicin, does not cause pain to birds. In fact, to them is is an analgesic, meaning a pain killer. 

Wild chilies make their seeds and fruits to propagate themselves. But chili seeds eaten by mammals tend to be chewed up, and even if they are not, they don't germinate successfully after passing through our digestive systems, and even if they did, mammals don't tend to transport seeds as far as birds would. So it is well worth their while to produce a compound that dissuades mammalian seed predators and simultaneously encourages avian seed dispersers. Chili seeds pass though the guts of most seed eating birds perfectly primed to germinate, and get a ride far from their parent plant.

But in my bird feeder, the seeds are an enticement to the birds I want to attract, and a strong discouragement to the squirrels. And because it is whole seed, it won't wash away as chili powder would, and pouring whole seed it does not induce as much coughing. 

I bought a very cheep bag of over-ripe Thai chilies from my local grocery store, dried them in the sun and then banged them around in the food processor until all the seeds had come loose and settled to the bottom. I then mixed them with commercial bird seed before filling the feeder. The squirrel, to my knowledge, visited the feeder only once.

All quiet on the Hayward Fault

For the five years I have lived in the Bay Area, I have occasionally checked this map to see what recent earthquakes have happened round these parts. This is the least activity in a week I have seen. And there has been almost this little for some weeks now. The cluster of small quakes in the upper left corner is "The Geysers," an area of hydrothermal activity that always has many small quakes. On the San Andreas Fault and the Hayward Fault, the two main faults running through the Bay Area, there is not a single anything. No movement. This makes me very nervous. It makes me think that things have jammed. As long as there are many small earthquakes, my fabulously limited knowledge of seismography suggests that tension is being released. For the last several weeks there has been almost no release of tension on the faults around here. I consider it fairly likely we will have a significant earthquake pretty soon here. That said, I really don't know squat about earthquake prediction.