Upcoming science books

Science books to be published in the coming year to look out for....

Comte de Buffon

L'histoire Naturelle (link in French), the 44-volume magnum opus by Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, laid the foundations for encyclopedic natural history, and previsaged some later evolutionary ideas, such as common descent and the concept of the Bauplan. This year was his tercentennial, but unfortunately also that of his rival Linnaeus, whose status as the 'father of taxonomy' was widely celebrated although little of his science remains correct or relevant to us today. The same can be said of the Comte de Buffon, that "his ideas were essential in their day for the advancement of science, but consigned thereafter to oblivion." The Linnaean system, as set forth in the Systema Naturae and other books, is flawed and artificial, grouping say mosses and figs together in the class 'Cryptogamae' (hidden sexual organs), but it was too seductively simple and convenient to be resisted, especially in the great flowering of European exploration that followed in the 18th and 19th centuries which brought back hundreds and thousands of unknown species that needed to be classified in the great scheme of nature. It was this same simplicity and artificiality that Buffon correctly criticised, but the irony is that for all his mistakes and mundanity, Linnaeus is the one whom we remember today. It would be worth our while to pay him at least some fraction of the attention which we have showered on Linnaeus during this anniversary year.

New book on animal architecture

Does an animal need to be fiendishly clever (like us humans, of course) to build a structure? Not really, it turns out, for "creatures of very little brain can prove excellent builders."

Coming soon to a library near you...

consequences of losing tigers

What happens if tigers die out? People are at risk from killer elephants!

Merry Christmas everybody!

New book on soil

A new book on soil titled Life in the Soil by James Nardi describes how the stuff we walk on and plants root themselves in is a mass that lives, breathes, and dies....

A 'lost world' in New Guinea

A recent Conservation International expedition to the Foja Mountains in New Guinea has discovered two new species of mammal. Mammals are perhaps the best-studied and best-documented group of animals; that new species are being discovered reveals how little we actually know about them in the wild. Check out photographs from the expedition.

Despite being called a 'lost world', New Guinea is under threat from human activity; its lowlands are being cleared for human agriculture and settlement but the mountain forests are still relatively intact for now because of their altitude and inaccessibility, but this might change as mining operations expand in its geologically rich interior. New Guinea's western half belongs to Indonesia and is one of its poorest provinces, while its eastern half to Papua New Guinea, one of the poorest countries in the region.

Preserving New Guinea is important: not only is it the world's second largest island after Greenland, it has the world's highest mountain between the Himalayas and the Andes, Puncak Jaya. Its size, elevation, and location in the tropics close to important biogeographic barriers like Wallace's Line make it ideal for the study of biological diversity and speciation. Indeed, Ernst Mayr wrote his pioneering contribution to the Neodarwinian Synthesis, Systematics and the Origin of Species, after his travels in New Guinea and studying its bird fauna in the 1930s. Its human diversity is also remarkable: Papuans speak (or spoke) the most languages (830) in the most language families of any country. Balancing human and environmental needs in a place with such cultural diversity will certainly be a difficult task and deserves more urgent attention.

Coral reefs, Encyclopedia of Life....

Coral reefs may disappear by 2050 due to acidification of seas by increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

In other news, the Encyclopedia of Life website mentioned in OEB 10 today by Brian Farrell will be launching its test version early next year. Presently you can view a few demonstration pages on the website, as well as check out the promotional video on YouTube. Harvard is one of the cornerstone institutions sponsoring this project with its institutional resources, and is specifically in charge of education and outreach, and undergraduates here might get the opportunity to be involved in this in some way, so stay tuned!

Other projects in a similar vein have failed to take off in the past, but the success of Wikipedia and the emergence of new technologies for processing and manipulating information, digitizing scientific literature, and producing pages collaboratively were some of the reasons why foundations like the MacArthur Foundation have given grants to the project for the next few years.

Don't be mislead by the demonstration pages shown on the website, though. Given how little we know about most of the species described in the taxonomic literature (in many cases little more than a name and a brief description) the majority of species pages in the Encyclopedia will contain the barest minimum of data. It'll be interesting to see how this stimulates interest in finding out more to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. Right now, the EoL has also entered into agreements to use data from other databases like the Tree of Life, AmphibiaWeb, and Tropicos. Coverage for various taxonomic groups will gradually come online as expert communities for the taxa get together and agree on the presentation.

The EoL will feature only extant species, however, and not fossils, but given how fast anthropogenic extinction might be proceeding, one fears that a large part of the Encyclopedia of Life might instead be obituary pages, or an "Encyclopedia of Death." Perhaps when this project is in full swing we might be able to see the full extent to which biodiversity loss has affected us.

Gardens, agriculture, mammals...

After the frankly depressing lecture on climate change today, here's something relevant and interesting:

“'This concept that gardening puts you in harmony with nature is a big lie,' says Peter Del Tredici, a botanist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 'Gardening is really about preventing nature from doing what it wants to do, which is to destroy your landscape, and gardeners know this at their core. Climate change is just another challenge.'”- "A Garden for all Climates"/ Emma Marris Nature 450, 937-939 (2007)

Also from Nature, a review on the evolutionary diversification of mammals. Instead of a straightforward linear series of progression as it was presented in older books, the actual phylogeny is more like a bush with many 'dead ends' and branches. Which is precisely what Stephen Jay Gould was talking about in his essay "Bushes and Ladders" (Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977, pp. 61-62), and a theme that he came to again and again (and which indeed does show up again and again as we get a better idea of the fossil record and early history of many groups of organisms).

Finally, the New York Times article that Prof. Holbrook mentioned in class: how Malawi 'ignored the experts' and went ahead to subsidize fertilizers for its farmers, and in conjunction with good rainfall that year managed to produce a surplus for the first time in years. Interesting intersection of economics, politics, and biology, and quite alarming really how little we know even about the economics of agriculture and food supply.

Electrical food-sensing fish!

A new study in PLoS Biology describes a fish which uses an electric field to sense its prey. While these sorts of prey-sensing strategies have been known for quite some time, this black ghost knife fish from the Amazon is unusual because its sensory range is omnidirectional, meaning that it can sense prey in a cylinder-shaped volume around its body, compared to other animals like bats and dolphins which generally only sense what is in front of them. The authors introduce two concepts: Sensory Volume (SV) - the volume of space in which the animal can detect objects and prey, and the Motor Volume (MV) - the volume within reach of the animal in a certain length of time by activating its musculoskeletal system. The SV of a lion, for example, is long and extends far beyond its MV (the space it can reach by moving and running a certain degree) because it can see and hear for long distances. In contrast, this fish has a small and omnidirectional SV and MV, meaning that it is sensitive to a small volume immediately surrounding its own body, but can react quickly to anything that comes within this space too. Therefore, the SV to MV ratio can be a taken as a measure of the strategy an animal takes to react to prey and other stimuli - close and immediate vs. far and long-term.

Another evolutionary 'theme' relevant here is the idea of cephalization - having a head. The usual story goes that sessile animals (fixed to a substrate, like corals and sea anemones) are usually radially symmetrical so that they can respond equally to stimuli (prey, danger, water currents) which might conceivably come from any direction. On the other hand, mobile animals tend to be bilateral and cephalized, the head being where the sensory, feeding, and gas-exchange organs are concentrated, because it is most advantageous to have awareness and the capacity to react to external stimuli in the front of the body, facing the direction of movement. Therefore, an omnidirectional sensory field like this one described here shows that the above explanation might be oversimplifying matters, and that animals are possibly more aware than we give them credit for.

Inaugural Post!

This is exciting, though I know no one will be reading this for a while. Thought I might just put up this week's funky OEB-related events for reference:

Mon 10 Dec

• 7:30 pm
  Edward Wilson
  Professor emeritus, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University
  and T. Berry Brazelton
  Professor emeritus, Harvard University
  Title: Raising Tomorrow's Naturalists: Film Screening and Conversation with E.O.
  Wilson and T. Berry Brazelton
  Location: Science Center,
  Series: HMNH events
  Be there or be square!
  

Tue 11 Dec

• 12 nn - 1 pm
  Melvin Oliver
  Agricultural Research Service/USDA
  Title: An evolutionary perspective on desiccation tolerance mechanisms in plants
  Location: Herbaria Seminar Room
  Series: HUH Seminars
  
• 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm
  Lisa Stowers
  Scripps Research Institute
  Title: Scents that govern behavior: the molecular biology of pheromones
  Location: Goldenson 122, Harvard Medical School
  
• 3 pm
  ClimaTea Lecture/Journal Club
  Location: Room 418, Geological Museum, 26 Oxford St.
  Series: Harvard University Center for the Environment
  http://www.seas.harvard.edu/climate/seminars.
  
• 7:30 pm
  Evan Preisser
  University of Rhode Island
  Title: Interactions Between Invasive Species: Woolly Adelgid, Elongate Scale,
  and the Fate of New England's Hemlock Forests
  Location: Museum of Comparative Zoology 101, 26 Oxford St.
  Series: Cambridge Entomological Club
  entclub@entclub.org, http://entclub.org.
  

Wed 12 Dec

• 4 pm
  Mitchell Sogin
  Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Brown University
  Title: Microbial Population Structure of the World's Oceans: An Underexplored
  'Rare Biosphere.'
  Location: Bio Labs Lecture Hall, 16 Divinity Ave.
  Series: Harvard Origins of Life Initiative
  Free and open to the public.
  

Thu 13 Dec

• 12 nn - 1 pm
  Ben Kerr
  University of Washington, Seattle
  Title: Exploring a 'tragedy of the commons' in a host-pathogen metapopulation
  Location: Sherman Fairchild 102, 7 Divinity Ave
  Category: Center for Systems Bio (CSB)
  
• 4 pm
  Three representatives from GridPoint technologies.
  HUCE Green Conversations Series
  Location: Pierce Hall 209, 29 Oxford St.
  Series: HUCE
  
• 4 pm - 5 pm
  John Lang
  Vassar College
  Title: Evolutionary Biorobotics: Navigating Simulated Selection Environments To
  Test Adaptation Hypotheses
  Location: Bio Labs Lecture Hall, 16 Divinity Ave.
  Series: OEB Weekly Seminar
  

Fri 15 Dec

• 3:00 PM
  OEB Special Seminar
  Speaker: James Edwards, Executive Director, EOL, Smithsonian Institution; and
  Jesse Ausubel, Program Officer, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Chair, EOL Steering Committee
  Title: Building the Encyclopedia of Life at Harvard
  Location: Biolabs Main Auditorium