Starscaping

Hoo boy, you are ska-ROOOOD! Because it's either the morning, and you need to get to work, or you're at work, or it's the evening and you need to do chores/spend time with your family/stalk people online, and here I am pointing you toward the Star Formation game, which in its addictiveness makes the infamous Falling Sand game look like eating your boogers in public (i.e., pathetically easy to kick...not that that's an actual habit anyone would ever need to break...no sirree, just trying to turn a humble phrase here...).

They could have called this Herding Hydrogen. Theoretically, you set off supernovae to compress clouds of interstellar gas so that they become gravitationally bound and collapse into massive short-lived stars which themselves go supernova. Basically though, you Nuke Stuff until it glows, and then it goes BOOM and Nukes other Stuff and the eternal cycle of Blowing Stuff Up rolls on. I submit that this is scientific evidence that the Creator exists and that He is a dude.


In not-completely-unrelated news, last night I got curious about what would happen if I held my camcorder--literally the cheapest commercially available model--up to the eyepiece of my thermos-sized telescope. The answer is that I got something that is pretty crap on any objective scale, but at least recognizable and therefore a smashing success personally. I'm posting this not to brag--oh hay-ull no--but as a reminder that the night sky is accessible even to those of modest means.

Clear skies!

Hot volcano-on-volcano action

Gotta interrupt the profundity to bring you a link to some BADASS photos of the new volcanoes being born out of the sea near Tonga. Science here and here, volcano porn here (photos) and here (video--hell yeah!).

Blundering toward productivity, Part 4: cranks, evolution, and humility

If you're new to this series, you might like to read the previous installments first: here they are.

It's pretty common for internet cranks in general, and absolutely pandemic for dinosaur cranks in particular, to argue that Ivory Tower so-called experts are all blinkered by orthodoxy and that outsiders with no technical training are better suited to having the big ideas because they are unshackled by the weight of knowing all that has gone before. These people are almost always wrong, because they keep reinventing the wheel, and the wheels they reinvent are often square. That's why I was careful to specify in Part 3 that you hang out with people who are not afraid to look stupid (check) but also know enough to make useful suggestions.

The advantage of collaborating with friends is that neither of you mind the occasional stupid comment on either side; laughing those off and going on is worth it for all the good ideas that you'll have that you wouldn't have had otherwise. The disadvantages of listening to cranks are that the ratio of good ideas to stupid comments is very low, that cranks almost always mistake the latter for the former, and that almost by definition cranks are immune to being corrected (if they were willing to accept logic, reason, and the weight of evidence, they wouldn't be cranks). Even if you could somehow engineer a polite crank, who would immediately and humbly accept being corrected when he was wrong, you'd still waste most of your time explaining entry-level stuff and never get to the really good questions.

Although in retrospect Mike and I did a lot of this when we were first friends; he didn't know any biology to speak of but had a decent command of math and logic, and I knew a little biology but had never really been schooled in how to think clearly, and we both kind of helped each other up (i.e., took turns smacking each other down) until the conversations we were having anyway started to be applicable to exciting and tractable problems. So if you are an expert you shouldn't waste any time on a crank unless that crank is both potentially remediable and also your friend, and if you're a crank (or any other variety of n00b), learn how to swallow your pride, find a friend who can do likewise, and start climbing together. Maybe that is the definition of a crank: a n00b who mistakes himself for an expert.

It's not that cranks don't know a lot of facts. Usually, they know too many facts; they are blinded by their own command of the esoterica of the field in which they are cranks. The problem is that their command of that esoterica does not automatically mean that they are capable of thinking clearly about it; usually the opposite is true. After several bitter years of realizing how muddled is my own thinking, I now think that everyone, without exception, could stand to improve the clarity of their thought, and that the surest sign of this is thinking that you already think well enough.

This is like Richard Dawkins's definition of evolution as "the one subject that everyone thinks they understand." If you think you understand evolution, you don't understand it, and the more certain you are, the more grave your misunderstanding. Nor is evolution special: I suspect that this is true of any sufficiently rich field. That doesn't mean that there aren't lots of things that we know about evolution, like the fact that is has happened and continues to happen. It just means that we haven't solved it, in terms of reducing the whole field to anything that can be grasped in a blog post, or a lecture, or a documentary series, or a book, or even a career. Saying you understand evolution is not like saying you understand orbital motion, it's more like saying you understand physics. All of it. The term 'evolutionary biology' is a misnomer: evolution isn't an aspect of a more inclusive phenomenon called biology, biology is an instance of a more inclusive phenomenon called evolution.

The partner of useful stupidity is humility. In Part 2 I mentioned two aspects of humility: letting your guard down enough to let out the good ideas will probably let out some dumb ideas at the same time, and sometimes your dumb ideas will trigger someone else's good ideas. Here I am talking about another, deeper level of humility. Not humility in front of another person, but humility before the universe itself. Recognizing that any commonplace object or idea that you take for granted probably stands at the end of an almost impossibly long series of unlikelihoods, most of which have never been explored. Stephen Jay Gould seemed to have a knack for asking questions that most of his colleagues could not even have formulated; he was really good at not just seeing the box and then thinking outside of it, but wondering what it was doing there in the first place. I wonder if he was a biological evolutionist rather than an evolutionary biologist; I suppose Dawkins must be. Too bad they were always at odds (when Gould was still alive), I'll bet they would have had some killer ideas if they could have ever let their guards down around each other.

In any case, this is another way to quickly separate serious cranks from potentially remediable n00bs: cranks lack humility. Not just humility toward other people, but toward the universe. The true crank is beset by the dual delusions that the answers are all straightforward, and that he has them and no one else does (except maybe one or two of his fellow cranks; sometimes they run in packs). Look around for someone who doubts if we're even asking the right questions, and chat that person up instead. Not just instead of talking to the crank--instead of doing whatever it was you had planned for the rest of the day.

Where am I going with all of this? I have no clue. I just intended to write a little bit about e-mail and the value of conversation. And I'm not going to find out tonight, because right now my need for sleep is greater than my curiosity to see what comes next. Stay tuned, though. I'm probably stupid enough to bring this to a satisfactory close, but it remains to be seen if I have the humility.

Blundering toward productivity, Part 3: smart enough to feel stupid

Part 1 is about goofing off as the spawning ground of good ideas. Part 2 is ostensibly about whether the goofing off part can be circumvented, but really about the value of working with smart people who aren't afraid to look stupid. In this post, I answer the second question from Part 1: how can the process of turning undirected play into good ideas be accelerated?

The obvious answer, which I intended to write about: have a workshop, get a bunch of smart people from different but interacting disciplines together, and give them time to educate each other AND time to freewheel. I got to experience this for real at the sauropod workshop in Germany last November (see here and here). The importance of this is not to be underestimated. This is why we talk about particular institutions having a "critical mass" of workers in a field, and it's why Berkeley was such a fun and inspiring place to be a grad student.

Another answer, which I discovered in the course of writing the previous post: hang out with smart people who you are not afraid to look stupid in front of, and who are not afraid to look stupid in front of you. This is harder than it sounds, because people who know enough to make worthwhile suggestions are prone to being at least a little bit insecure or defensive about their knowledge, especially compared to others. I would be horrible collaborator with many people in my field because I would never let my guard down; it would kill me if they found out how stupid I am capable of being.

Given that, a further suggestion would be to consider collaborating with your best friends regardless of what they work on; by being vulnerably, stupidly open with each other, you might have enough good ideas fast enough to either find something midway between your specialties, or for one or the other of you to fall in love with a problem in the other person's field. Hence the project on rabbit heads with Brian. I wasn't particularly interested in rabbit heads but I am interested in pneumaticity and we figured the project would be about rabbit sinuses. It turns out we're going to do something completely different and much more interesting, which was not on the radar for either of us because neither of us had made the necessary discoveries (you would call them observations, but for us they were discoveries), which has roots in some papers we read back at Berkeley but really germinated in the soil of undirected conversation.

And this accounts for the feeling that I had when I started this essay, that time spent chatting on e-mail is not always a waste of time. Sometimes it's not just productive time, it's the most productive time it's possible to have. Because it is the spawning ground of new ideas.

Chatting on e-mail with distant colleagues is better than exchanging snail-mail letters or not talking, but it's still vastly inferior to meeting in person. In the past year I have spent just over a month with Mike (one evening in LA last summer, two weeks at his house in August, two weeks in Germany in November, one day at the AMNH last month), but out of that month we've gotten two manuscripts mostly written and plans made for at least half a dozen more. A couple we had sketched out on e-mail, but most of them wouldn't exist even in concept if we hadn't had some time to just hang out with fossils. I suppose that is another potential idea-accelerator to add to the list:

(1) have lots of wide-ranging conversations
(2) don't be afraid to look stupid
(3) collaborate with your best friends
(4) in person as often as possible
(5) with the objects of your investigations at hand

If you're an astronomer and there is a physicist you'd like to work with, meet up at the observatory or the cyclotron or more likely the computer lab where you play with your data. If you're a paleontologist or zoologist, go on field trips and museum visits with your collaborators. Happily, that's probably something you were going to anyway. But now you know it's not just a convenience, it's a necessity. And having a few beers together at the end of the day is not a waste of time, it's an investment in your joint idea bank.

The other implication of this last one is that if you are on your own and you've got some time to kill, you should probably go to where your potential data is and just let your mind and body wander. There is a great bit in one of David Quammen's essays in which Quammen is roaming the Montana State University library and he comes across Jack Horner sitting on the floor between two rows of shelves with journals spread out all around him. Quammen says, "Hey, Jack, what are you doing here?" Horner looks up and says, "Having ideas." The best part is that the journals weren't even paleo journals, they were ornithology journals.

That's yet another important point: it's good to have at least a nodding acquaintance with every field that bears on yours. Which, depending on how broadly you think, might be all of them. And what's more, you should get more than a nodding acquaintance with the ones that are likely to be most important. Birds are living dinosaurs, so if you are looking for new ideas to test about dinosaur biology, it makes sense to camp out in the ornithology section. Crocs are also relevant and elephants are not completely irrelevant, but people have been thinking about dinosaurs as big crocs and slow elephants for a long time. The MSU library run-in happened in the early 90s, when the idea of dinosaurs as stem birds had not yet penetrated paleobiological thought (it still hasn't, fully). Even now, if you were looking to really push things, it would be a good idea.

The downside of jumping into a new field instead of just soaking your toes at the shallow end is that it will make you feel stupid. It doesn't matter what line of work you're in, whether it's paleontology or programming or construction, there is something that you are an expert on now that you weren't when you started, whether it is taphonomy or recursive subroutines or knocking down walls. But you weren't an expert when you started, and when you started you probably spent a lot of time feeling stupid. But you learned quickly, partly because you were anxious to get past feeling stupid, and partly because trying dumb stuff is a good way to learn what works and what doesn't.

I am starting to think that becoming an expert can be dangerous, because feeling smart feels better than feeling stupid, and the risk inherent in expertise is that you stay put and never push the field as much as you might by taking a risk, feeling stupid for a while, and mastering another body of knowledge.

I almost hesitate to say that here on teh intert00bz, where it is often alleged that becoming an expert is dangerous for another reason, which leads to the hopefully non-trivial discussion of cranks in the next post.

Blundering toward productivity, Part 2: is there a better way to have good ideas?

In Part 1 I discussed the fact that, in my experience at least, good ideas almost always arise from undirected conversations with friends and colleagues (e.g., goofing off). I ended the post by wondering whether this process can be circumvented or accelerated. This post is about the first of those alternatives: is there another way to have good ideas other than gabbing with informed friends?

I doubt it. Mike and I have both noticed that on museum research visits we get a lot more done if we're working with someone else than if we're working alone. And usually that is not because we are sharing the load, like one person taking measurements and the other writing them down. It's because we just notice more and ask more questions.

The corollary is make sure you work with the right person. A good collaborator is curious, open-minded, and not afraid to look stupid. When I'm really in the zone on a collaborative project, I say all kinds of stupid things, and frequently have to be reminded of the obvious. And I am lenient when my collaborators say dumb things, because there is more than one kind of dumb statement. We're so used to dumb statements that indicate that someone is not thinking at all that it is hard to realize that sometimes dumb statements mean that someone is thinking very hard. So hard that they can't be bothered to remember little details like gravity or the fact that necks must necessarily have a head at one end and a body at the other.

Well, why not just guard your inner monologue and not let the stupid stuff out? Because that's what you do for the rest of your time, and because that filter that you set up to catch the stupid stuff might also catch the really brilliant stuff. At the very least, it will slow down the flow. There is some necessary humility here. Not just the humility to not be afraid to look stupid, but also the humility to realize that you are not going to get to all the good ideas yourself, and even your wrong or dumb ideas might jar something loose in your collaborator's head.

Hmm. I have read that you write reports when you have found answers that need sharing, and you write essays to find answers in the first place, and sometimes to questions you didn't know you were asking. I started this section thinking that I was just going to write glowingly about the value of batting ideas around with someone else. But I think I am coming to the view that openness, verging on stupidity, is not only necessary, but also the answer to the next question.

For another recent defense of stupidity as a crucial part of science, go here, and please note that the linked paper is free.

Blundering toward productivity, Part 1: e-mail and goofing off

Another post inspired by someone else's post. Scott Aaronson recently crossed the E-mail Event Horizon, and sent a report from inside.

I have not crossed the EEH, but I have been through brief e-mail storms, during which I have spent an entire working day doing nothing but answering e-mails that can't be put off. Now, when I was a grad student I sometimes blew a whole day goofing off on e-mail, but that was different. Mostly, though, I am able to plow through necessary e-mail in about an hour and get down to the day's work. Although it is still kinda shocking that, on average, I spend an eighth of my workday checking and answering e-mail. On the other hand, there is no question that e-mail is a huge productivity booster overall, at least for me, because it circumvents so many meetings and vastly accelerates the pace of collaborative research and writing.

It is easy to get carried away and let a focused e-mail exchange with a colleague metastasize into a rambling conversation with a friend. Sometimes that eats up whole mornings. That used to bother me, but not so much these days. At least part of that 'virtual community' BS is true. In a traditional office I would be having water-cooler conversations with whatever chumps I happened to be stuck with. Thanks to e-mail, I can have those conversations with a distributed network of my favorite people, many of whom are not in the same town, or the same state, or even the same continent.

I had a minor epiphany on my recent research trip to the AMNH. I was hanging out with Brian Kraatz and we were kicking around ideas for a project on rabbit skulls (yes, really). To an outside observer, it would have looked like the Real Work/Goofing Off split was about 20/80. But the ideas that we ended up chasing all came out of what would have looked like goofing off.

I had a similar experience when I was visiting Mike in England in August. We'd usually end each day at the dining room table, playing games and just freewheeling. One night we got to talking about sauropod vertebrae (gasp!) and some things that do not make sense, and after we'd scribbled up two or three pages of scrap paper with notes and diagrams we looked at each other and thought, "Hey, this could be a paper." It's in review right now; I'll let you know if it ever sees print.

The epiphany I had in New York is not that good research ideas sometimes emerge from the most apparantly random conversations. It's that they almost always do. This is nothing new--when I look back, the guts of most of my papers started out as a few motes of inspiration distilled from undirected yakk sessions with friends and colleagues. When I was just starting out with undergrad research, I'd meet with Rich Cifelli in his office and we'd just bat ideas back and forth. This turns out to be a good way not just to have new ideas but to make new observations. Rich and I figured out a lot of sauropod morphology because one of us would point at some feature and say, "That's weird. Is it always like that?" and then we'd go check. Same thing with Brian and the bunny heads in New York.

So far this is all pedestrian. What I'm really curious about is, can this process be (1) circumvented, or (2) accelerated?

The sandworms of Arrakis

...have little to do with the substance of this post, other than that this microscopic bug part reminded me of them. It's one of about 30 awesome pictures of microscale weirdness to be found here.

I'm in ur tv, flappin wif terasorz

Here's what I know about pterosaurs:

(1) most of them were full of air

(2) some of them were rilly big

(3) they were worthy adversaries for WWI-era flying machines.

Despite this dearth of knowledge--or perhaps because of it!--I will be on TV talking about pterosaurs, at least briefly, in EVOLVE: Flight, premiering on the History Channel on Tuesday, Sept. 2. Check local listings for showtimes.

Vary. Vary. Good.

I just read Darren's post on the living and fossil species of Tursiops. (The skeleton above is that of Lagenorhynchus, stolen from here.) Was surprised by this:

The large, offshore dolphins are now called T. truncatus Montagu, 1821, and the smaller, nearshore ones are T. aduncus Ehrenberg, 1832. T. truncatus is longer-bodied (with 62-67 vertebrae, as opposed to 59-62 in T. aduncus) and has a proportionally shorter rostrum.

That's a range of 8 vertebral positions with the genus (whatever that is), and 5 just within T. truncatus. That's a lot. In most tetrapods, it's not unusual to find individuals that vary by one or two positions from their conspecifics. Humans usually have 7 cervicals, 12 thoracics, 5 lumbars, 5 sacrals, and four coccygeals (caudals), for a total of 33, but according to White and Folkens (2000) as many as 1 in 10 people may vary from that norm. Most of the people who do vary do so at the lumbo-sacral junction; for example, having 4 lumbars and 6 sacrals or vice versa. But that wouldn't change the total count 33. My guess is that of the people who actually have a different total number of vertebrae, the difference is in the coccyx. It's tempting to write that off as a consequence of our caudal vertebrae being vestigial, but I immediately wonder if caudal vertebrae are not inherently more variable in number (than other kinds of vertebrae) in other tetrapods. I mean, having a tail that is one vert longer or shorter is probably going entail a lot fewer changes in the rest of the body than having a different count in the neck, thorax, or sacrum.

Which brings me back to the dolphins. I am curious about how much of that 8-vertebra spread is accounted for by varying numbers of caudal vertebrae.

One question that might come to mind is how one would tell. In most tetrapods it's easy: start counting at the end of the sacrum, and keep going until you run out of vertebrae to count. But extant cetaceans--even those with pelvic elements, like most baleen whales--don't have sacral vertebrae. So figuring out where the tail starts is a bit of a pain. I read a paper on it once, which I don't have to hand and am not going to dig up, and the upshot is that even though the sacral ribs that define the bony sacrum are gone, you can still identify the base of the tail based on patterns of blood vessels and nerves. Which is fine when you're dissecting a dolphin (I'd love to but never have), but not much use when you're just looking at a skeleton. If it's a complete articulated skeleton, you could use the haemal arches to get you in the right neighborhood, but the haemal arches are probably variable themselves, and might not be present anyway.

If I was a more dedicated blogger I'd be citing more refs and getting your more answers and fewer guesses. But I've got other fish to fry.

I know that the argument from personal incredulity is weak, but I just can't believe that it's wrong all the time. And, despite my near-total ignorance of vertebral variation in most tetrapods and in cetaceans specifically, a 5-vertebra range of variation strikes me as too much for one species. And since Darren's post touches on variation, cryptic species, and the splitting of Tursiops anyway, it made me wonder if some of that range of variation in T. truncatus isn't actually parceled out among multiple species.

But that's not the actual thought that went through my head. The thought that went through my head was "How do you tell individual variation from biodiversity?"

And the answer, of course, is that you can't. Individual variation IS biodiversity. I've just been teaching my intro bio students about Darwin's views on variation and the origin of species. For Darwin it's all one big continuum, from individual variation to incipient varieties to varieties to subspecies to species to genera and so on up to the entire tree of life. People sometimes rag on Darwin for writing On the Origin of Species without actually addressing speciation. But I think that's because we think species are special (well, not all of us), and must come into existence through some process that is not just business-as-usual. But Darwin didn't think species were special. He worked out the logic of natural selection and showed that it worked. And he argued that organisms struggle most fiercely with those to which they are most similar, usually their closest relatives. Natural selection gives you a mechanism for change, and struggle among the similar gives you a mechanism for diversification (if the struggle is most intense against those to whom you are most similar, it has to be less intense elsewhere). And that's all you need (according to Darwin [according to my reading]). As things diversify they pick up different mate recognition signals or lose the ability to interbreed or do whatever it is that defines them as species to us, but those are effects of diversification that is already in motion, that starts with variation among individuals.

Not everyone agrees. For all the stuff they disagreed about, Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould were both convinced that species are special. And even if Darwin was right, that doesn't mean that speciation isn't interesting and worth studying. Only maybe we should call it lineage divergence rather than speciation so we can stop pretending that we know what a species is. But my point is that it is all connected, all the way up--from individual variation up to the whole tree of life--and back down again--because there is no tree of life, not as a Ding an sich (thank you, Great Books Discussion Group). There are only individuals. There is only variation.


White, T.D., and Folkens, P.A. 2000. Human Osteology, Second Edition. Academic Press, New York.

The State of Palaeontology meme

This one is the brainchild of Dave Hone, who could be characterized as a machine that takes in observations, co-opts friends and colleagues, and gives off interactive internet projects as waste (witness Ask a Biologist, Archosaur Musings, this). It started with his State of Palaeontology survey, the results of which are now posted at Archosaur Musings.

Here's the deal: each participant sends their answers to someone else, who posts those answers with commentary. So you don't post your own answers, you post someone else's. I won the lottery so I get to post Dave's answers, and comment on them. My own answers have been sent on to a Certain PalaeoBlogger Who Shall Remain Nameless Until She Responds. Here we go!

1. What do you think is the great unsolved mystery of palaeontology?

DH: It is harder than I thought being on the other end of what appears on the face of it to be such a simple question. For me though it would be (amongst many other areas of interest) the issue of evolutionary rates. The living world is just a snapshot in time, as is any given fossil (or formation) but what is happenning in the gaps. It looks like pterosaurs evolved very quickly for example, but just how fast can you go from an arboreal lizard to soemthing as derived and specialised as a pterosaur. Can wings appear in 100 generation in the right conditions or does it take at least 100000? It is not a problem for evolution - we can see some incredibly rapid changes in the morphology of living organisms, but once the first tetrapods got out of the water, how fast did they end up with reptilian scales? The fossil record might eventually give us a pretty good answer in terms of time, but never in terms of generations, or changes and I would dearly love to see that issue taken much further.

MW: Agreed on all points. It is occasionally useful to remember that palaeontology is just a tool. It's big and complex and it's easy to get lost in its internal mechanisms and forget that the point of palaeontology is not to have meetings, write papers, yack with fellow palaeontologists, etc. All of those things are meaningless unless they help the machine serve its greater purpose, which is to understand the history of life on Earth.

I have an axe to grind here about the balkanization of institutions, including fields of study. A few years ago Polly Winsor came to talk at Berkeley, and she said that one of the reasons she helped get 'history of science' up and running as a field in its own right was to get scientists and historians to talk to each other, but that what had been intended as a bridge actually became a wall. In the old days you had scientists over here, and historians over there, and occasionally they talked. Now there is this entity, History of Science, parked in between them, and the result is that scientists talk to historians of science rather than to historians, and vice versa, but the biggest tragedy is that too many historians of science didn't talk to either scientists or historians: they talked mainly amongst themselves.

It is helpful to remember, often, that palaeontology is not a monolith or an end unto itself. We are in the Time Machine department of Earth history and evolutionary biology. And we don't have the only kind of time machine, either--geneticists, phylogeneticists, and genome researchers have their own sorts of time machines. Instead of huddling behind our walls, throwing stones, and grumbling about who is getting the grant money and prestige, we ought to be wandering over to those other departments and having a round of beer.

2. What do you think is the most exciting topic / area of research in palaeontology right now?

DH: Everything really. I don't mean that in a faecitious way, but the fact that as we go further with palaeontology, new fossils are found, new methods are developed, old ones refined, new ideas are formed, new collaborations start and slowly we build an increasingly complete picture of the anciet world and how it fits together. Bird origins are fascintating, but part of that is becuse we can compare them to living birds, we can look at the origns of flight (ground up, tree down, WAIR), physiology (breathing systems, pneumaticy, heart capacity, muscle structures), the origins of feathers, the phylogenetics of dinosaurs and birds, ecological niches and feeding types, nesting and reproduction and more. The origins are inherently interesting, but the way we are able to pull together all these disparate ideas and methods to form a holostic picture produces the greatest interest for me.

MW: It does seem like the amazing stuff is coming thick and fast these days, in the form of new fossils, new techniques, and new ideas. I feel like vertebrate palaeontology right now is amazingly far beyond where we were when I got started back in the mid 90s. In fact, I'd venture that the field has changed more in the past 10 years than it did in the preceding 20. Which is exciting, but also frustrating, because it seems like all this new stuff that is broadening our understanding of evolution and the history of life is really getting eviscerated and bowdlerized when it is passed on to the public.

3. What do you consider to be the biggest problem with palaeontology?

DH: Not enough money (pay), no job security, poor funding for research, poor taxonomy, not enough revision, loss of fossils through private collecting, poor research, poor education. All of these are serious issues, but as ever they are all interlinked - with better education, we might do better research, encourage funding and that would produce better pay and more jobs and get people to see the importance of what we do and protect the fossil legacy of the world. Which is most important, or the biggest? Probably in terms of research the poor taxonomy / revision. What is the point of trying to do an ecological or phylogenetic analysis, if all of the 'species' you are using are made of chimeras, or are synonyms etc. You can't check all the primary literature yourself, yet much of it is massively outdated or just badly done. Building on such an unstable foundation is not a good idea.

MW: I agree that the mountain of primary literature and specimens to plow through to try to get a handle on anything is intimidating. But I also don't see any way around it. As far as I can tell, this is how it's always been, and this is how it always will be. The most we can do is to make sure that we publish the most careful and accurate work that we can, to provide a better foundation for future generations.

4. What area of palaeontology do you think is most neglected?

DH: Exactly as above - alpha taxonomy and revisions / descriptions. Ye, we need to manitain all areas of our science, but the fundamental unit is the description and name attached to a fossil species and too little of this is done on new taxa, and too many of the old ones are out of date / poorly done / not illustrated etc. Without knowing wehat we have and what it looks like it becomes very hard to say what it *means*. Too often it is seen as unglamorous or boring work, and yet it is by far the most important thing we do.
It is irrelevant how clever the architect is for your building, if the bricks are full of straw, the mortar is full of sand, and the foundations are not complete. It might look great, and it might do the job, but it needs shoring up and constant work and rebuilding, when you could save so much time if the basics were done right the first time.

MW: Descriptive morphology is simply not valued right now. Early today I was battling a reviewer who wanted me to gut the descriptive section of a manuscript. I have heard similar stories from colleagues. If even editors and reviewers don't see the value in careful descriptive work, then we are in a really bad spot. I keep waiting for people to collectively wake up and realize that description is the fuel of palaeontology. And it's not just palaeontology; when was the last time you read a lengthy, careful morphological description of an extant animal that wasn't tied to evo-devo?

I think we are really hurting right now because of the way that funding works, and the way that universities look at grants. Genomics is sexy and expensive. Evo-devo is sexy and expensive. Doing careful descriptions is not sexy, but it's also not that expensive. The trouble is, it's not supported even at the meager level it requires. Given the choice between a world-class descriptive morphologist and a mediocre moleculoid who can write a grant for a zillion-dollar ion reflux pronabulator, universities seem to be choosing option B. Not good for us world-class morphologists.

5. How do you think the general public view science / palaeontology in your country?

DH: "Just dinosaurs" is too simplistic, but its not far from it. The big problem is that you are either just digging up something and giving it a name, or doing something wildly speculative on behaviour or ecology built on ephemeral data. Either way, you are not doing 'real' science. They like it and it interests them, but not in the way that studies of living animals do. The biggest issue is the media misreporting things (mammoths are dinosaurs, pterosaurs are birds) and the stoking up of non-existent controversey (e.g. BAD vs BAND). The public don't and can't know better and yet they are being fed inaccurate, wrong, speculative or just heavily skewed information that is posing as accurate and impartial facts. Scienctists can really help to fix this, but they are generally unwilling and that does not help the situation.

MW: Palaeontology, narrowly, and evolutionary biology, broadly, need a Carl Sagan right now. Real bad. But since one is not likely to descend from the heavens or claw its way out of the ground, we each need to take personal responsibility to (1) do the best, most substantive work that we can, and (2) communicate what we do to our colleagues and the public. And to be a little humble about it, and go out of our way to make it comprehensible, and to convey some of the enthusiasm that keeps us working on this stuff. If you're a scientist and you don't like the state of science, you can start fixing it immediately, starting with yourself. Admittedly, this is not going to revolutionize the world overnight. But it's a start.

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Okay, dear readers. The ball is in your court. Discuss!

Science you should know about: Homosexual necrophiliac duck rape

Moeliker (2002:fig. 2b): Wakka-cheeka-wakka-cheeka

Those funny guys at Zooillogix just covered the seal-brutalizes-penguin story that's been all over the news lately, which prompted me to post about my favorite scientific paper of all time:

Moeliker, C.W. 2001. The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae). DEINSEA 8: 243-247.

Here's the entire text of the abstract:
"On 5 June 1995 an adult male mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) collided with the glass facade of the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam and died. An other drake mallard raped the corpse almost continuously for 75 minutes. Then the author disturbed the scene and secured the dead duck. Dissection showed that the rape-victim indeed was of the male sex. It is concluded that the mallards were engaged in an "Attempted Rape Flight" that resulted in the first described case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard."

What the author doesn't mention in the abstract is that the 75-minute event ended prematurely when he separated the drake from the object of its perverted affection. Which makes me want to hit him (the author, not the drake). Because, why? Why would he end it? One minute was enough to document the behavior. After 75 minutes, surely any self-respecting scientist would want to know just how long this was going to continue, and watch until it was over. Now we'll never know. What a loss for science.

So if you see an animal doing something perverted--and they are, all the time, the unreconstructed little bastards--cowboy up and record the dad-blamed data. ALL OF IT.

Sheesh!

Why we can see unimaginably distant galaxies from Earth, but not the moon landers

Recent Correspondent: We know where the guys langed on the Sea of Tranquility (and the other missions too of course, not just 11), and though small, they left behind a lander and moon rover etc. So, I assume with a big enough telescope (and we have some monsters) we could just hunt around a bit, and actually *see* where we landed - right?

Me: Sorry, it's a good thought, but the landers and so on that we left behind are waaay too small to be seen by any telescope on earth or in orbit.

Recent Correspondent: I must say I am surprised. We have these scopes that appear to be able to see tiny little planets in other galaxies. I know that is a big object, but it is a shit load further away. I figured the size vs distance would be on the side of the lander...

When I replied, I was just repeating what I've read lots of places. I've never seen anyone actually demonstrate that it's true. So I am endeavoring to do so now. There are a couple of things to clear up here. The first is the discovery of extrasolar planets around other stars, and the second is whether size vs. distance is on the side of the moon landers, or the unimaginably distant galaxies.

Part 1: Extrasolar planets

We have not seen tiny little planets in other galaxies. There is a literally vast confusion of scale here. The most distant extrasolar planet discovered to date, OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, is only 21,000 light years away. On one hand, that is a hell of a long way away. Our ancestors were hunting down the last mainland mammoths when light from that planet's primary was barely halfway here. On the other hand, it's nothing. The Milky Way is estimated to be about 100,000 light years across, so OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb is only a fifth of the way across our own galaxy. The closest major galaxy to the Milky Way--excluding our dwarf satellite galaxies, like the Magellanic Clouds--is the Andromeda galaxy, which is 2.5 million light years away. It is the most distant object that you can see with the naked eye, which is pretty cool, because the photons that fall into your unaugmented retina left Andromeda when our ancestors were banging rocks and dreaming of taming fire. But it is more than 100 times as distant as OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb.


It gets worse. Nobody from Earth has seen OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb. We only know it's there because of gravitational microlensing. The most distant planet we've actually seen is 2M1207b, if it actually is a planet and not some kind of dwarf star, and it's only 173 light years away.

In other news, the "hot Jupiter" that orbits HD 189733 has methane and water in its atmosphere. Here's how we know that. The planet above is not extrasolar; it's wholly terrestrial in origin.

So to sum up, all of the extrasolar planets we've found are in our own galaxy, and pretty close even on a galactic scale, and we've only directly imaged one of them, and the one we've imaged may be more of a failed star than a planet.

Part 2: Which is smaller, the Eagle or a smudge in the HUDF?

The Apollo Lunar Modules are about 14 feet in diameter, with a maximum landing gear spread of about 30 feet. At its closest approach, the moon is 225,000 miles away, or about 1.19 billion feet. So the ratio of size to distance is 1:40 million even if we use the landing gear spread, and 1:80 million if we use the vehicle itself.


The Apollo 17 lander was actually photographed from lunar orbit, but that's a distance of about 69 miles, not 225,000 miles. And it shows up as a single pixel, plus a pixel of shadow. You can see that photo, along with tons of cool zoomable moon landing site photos, here.


Although there are galaxies somewhat larger and much smaller than the Milky Way, let's say for the sake of argument that most galaxies are about 100,000 light years across. The most distant galaxies ever imaged, in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (shown above), are about 13 billion light years away. Which yields a ratio of size to distance of only 1:130,000, or about 300 times bigger than the moon landers to observers on Earth or in Earth orbit.

Which is why we can see galaxies on the other side of the universe from Earth, but not our own moon landers. The galaxies are indeed shitloads further away, but they are also many, many shitloads larger.

Feel free to poke holes in my math or logic.

Headless butterfly update

Long time Vectorites will recall a post on the downfall of the Guinness Book of World Records and the improbable rise (or at least persistence) of headless butterflies. That was the first in a promised series of posts on oddities unearthed from the Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats. Subsequent entries in the series have so far not materialized, mainly because I kept loaning the book out to amaze my friends, and I only recently got it back.

But never mind that.

Turns out that ole Father Cambouet was a latecomer to the study of headless butterflies. A. Stephen Wilson beat him to it by almost half a century, with a paper in the July 17, 1879, issue of Nature (p. 267). Thanks to Google Book Search, I am posting that paper here in it's entirety.

Headless Butterfly Laying Eggs

ABOUT three o'clock on the nth inst. I picked up a butterfly, probably belonging to the genus Vanessa. It was a female, the head of which had recently been plucked off by a bird [or, perhaps, by Altarboy Cambouet? --Ed.], and was lying near the body. Thinking it was dead, I carried it home to examine the wing scales. On clipping off a bit of wing about four hours afterwards, the legs moved, and in a short time an egg was laid. In about two minutes another egg was kid. Others followed, till five-and-twenty had been expelled. Tremors of the legs and wings accompanied each deposit. The laying ceased, and the headless mother seemed dead. Next morning, on touching her, the motions of the legs and wings were repeated, and in a short time the laying was resumed. On close examination a heaving of the wings and rings of the abdomen could be observed, with about the frequency of human breathing. At the end of twenty-nine and a half hours from the time of finding, the laying ceased; seventy-eight eggs were laid by the butterfly with her head off.

A. STEPHEN WILSON
North Kinmundy, Aberdeen, July 14.

What is your Cope-Marsh number?

Ho man. Just in case you care about where this crap comes from, here goes. I was over at TetZoo and saw a link on the sidebar to an Aetiology post on Danica McKellar's "Math Doesn't Suck". The third comment down states, "Danica McKellar has a Bacon-Erdos number of 6. Same as Feynmann." That embedded link (included above) takes you to the Wikipedia page on the Bacon-Erdos number.

What is the Bacon-Erdos number? From the Wikipedia article:

An individual's Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one's Erdős number—which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one's Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from actor Kevin Bacon.

Much like the Bristol Stool Scale, it's stuff like this that makes me proud to be a scientist.

As the title says, I wish we had something like this in paleo. Only maybe not tied to movies. It would be interesting to know who had the lowest Cope-Marsh number, which is the sum of one's collaborative distance from Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. It would be tough because although both Cope and Marsh published a buttload of papers (more than 1200 for Cope), they hardly ever collaborated and they hated each other's guts. So the immediate links to each would be few and probably distant from each other in collaboration space. Maybe their posthumous stuff would be a good place to start.

Can somebody get to work on this?

(Somebody else, I mean.)

Dr Vector's Science Challenge - SOLVED

As Darren postulated, it is a distal caudal (back end of tail) vertebra from a whale. Gray, in this case.

I thought the string and the writing visible on the bottom side (in the original photo; posterior face in real life) would give away the scale, and once you know that... The thing is almost exactly 20 cm (8 inches) in diameter.

The big holes are vascular foramina for the passage of blood vessels. As you can see in the CT image, they go right through the vert.

Sigh. Next time I'll pick something harder. Thanks all for playing. Darren, I have no idea what your prize will be, but it will probably be or involve a lot of beer.

Dr. Vector's Science Challenge

Identify this object. First one to get it right gets a nifty prize.* Sarah and Ashley are inelligible, and they know why.

*To be determined later.

Science: the poster

We often hear about the unity of the sciences, but it's nice to see it.

From Seed:

This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Links (curved black lines) were made between the paradigms that shared papers, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms nearer one another when a physical simulation forced every paradigm to repel every other; thus the layout derives directly from the data. Larger paradigms have more papers; node proximity and darker links indicate how many papers are shared between two paradigms. Flowing labels list common words unique to each paradigm, large labels general areas of scientific inquiry.

Information Esthetics is giving away free posters. You just pay the shipping. And it's cheaper to order several at once (I'm talkin' to you, Berkeleyites).

Somebody put this on a t-shirt, stat!

IMMEDIATE UPDATE: no t-shirt (yet), but if you like this there is a lot more at this page, where the guy who came up with this explains why and how. In particular, there is a big comparative diagram that compares the science strengths of ten nations (US, UK, Germany, Japan, China, etc.). Very cool stuff.

My afternoon with Apteryx

I spent most of the afternoon dealing with kiwis, genus Apteryx, in one way or another. I passed a few pleasant minutes photographing the MVZ's mounted kiwi.


Then I had a look at Richard Owen's 1841 monograph on Apteryx australis. Two things you need to know about kiwis:


1. Despite the genus name, they really do have wings. And their wings still have most of the parts they started with. More than those of an emu, anyway. The real "apteryx" (name means wingless) was the moa. Moas had the scapula and coracoid fused into a little splint, but no forelimb bones at all.


2. Their eggs are stupid huge. Above is an x-ray of a pregnant kiwi. I think it's pretty clear that the bird can't eat, drink, poop, or even breathe while that monster is in the pipe. It's science.

Below is one of these oddly disreputable-looking birds* sitting on its egg (image stold from here). Sorta like those weirdos at the gym that sit on the big plastic balls and pretend to be working out.


*Seriously. Every lovin' one of 'em looks like it might hit you up for spare change. I've never seen a picture of kiwi without thinking, "Dammit, boy, have some respect for yourself! Take a bath, shave and get a haircut! And for the love of Pete, put some pants on!"

In defense of speculative zoology

The attraction of speculative zoology is obvious: cool critters. But there is another reason to play the game. It is natural for us to look at the history of life on earth and wonder how much of it was inevitable and how much was accidental. This is maybe the biggest, baddest question in evolutionary biology, and a lot of ink has been spilled over it. Complex life was inevitable. No it wasn't. If you replayed the Cambrian explosion you'd get the same results. No you wouldn't.

Speculative zoology is a way to sneak up on these questions unannounced and, just possibly, take them (and yourself) by surprise. When I ask, "What would have happened if marsupials had gotten the northern continents and Africa and placentals had been stuck with South America and Australia?" what I'm really asking is, "Would changing the players on the board make any difference after a few rounds (= tens to hundreds of millions of years) of play?" Is evolution completely unpredictable, or are some things bound to happen just because the Earth and life are what they are?

When people ask me about contingency versus determinism in evolution, I usually pimp contingency all the way. But tonight I learned something surprising.

I was playing the God game with Randy (as described in the previous post) and he said he'd like to wipe out all eukaryotes. That's all the amoebas, fungi, plants, and animals, plus a few things you've probably never heard of. Bacteria and archaea would be the only survivors.

This suggestion momentarily discomfited me. I had a vision of the world stuck at the bacteria stage for billions of years. What if it never got past that stage? What if it was just Bacteria World until the sun went nova?

But then I thought, "Hey, wait a minute." The Earth already was Bacteria World for billions of years. But not forever. Complex life eventually got rolling. Things did come out on land. Things did learn to fly. A few things discovered fire and eventually blogging.

Don't get me wrong. I am familiar with the arguments for why all of those events were lucky breaks, one in a zillion long shots that might never be repeated. But I don't believe it anymore. I think they were inevitable. You can say, "Complex life might not evolve again" or "Consciousness might not evolve again". But you would have said the same standing on a Proterozoic beach or wandering through the rubble after Chixulub. It would have been wrong then, and I think it's wrong now. Whatever stage or level you think life might get stuck at, it's already been through once and didn't.

"Of course you think that because you're a product of a world where life never got stuck." Yeah, yeah, take your Anthropic Principle and cram it up your protostome. When I look at the history of life, there are some plateaus, but they don't last forever. Not a one. I don't think it was inevitable that some Miocene primates would come down from the trees and end up splitting the atom, but I think the combination of intelligence, tool use, and communication was bound to come along sooner or later.

I could be wrong. I'd be happy to be wrong. The upshot is that I've thought about this stuff more intensely tonight than I ever have before in my life, and it's mostly thanks to the game.

I also want to explain the effect that speculative zoology has on me. A naive observer might think of it as an escape from the real world, dreaming up phantasms to replace the mundane critters I'm stuck with, an ultimately life-denying exercise in futility. That's exactly backward. Playing the game doesn't make me appreciate life less, it makes me appreciate it more.

Just think about all the totally badass things that have ever lived. Giant pterosaurs. Indricotherium. Conodonts. Glyptodonts. Anomalocaris. Dunkleosteus. Koolasuchus (yes, really). Champsosaurs. Multituberculates. Mihirungs. Ichthyosaurs. Carcharodon megalodon. Sharovipteryx. Drepanosaurs. Effigia. Deinosuchus. Helicoprion. Pelagic trilobites. And yes, freakin' Amphicoelias.

In the immortal words of Tenacious D, that shit came off the top o' my fuckin' head, y'all. That's a ten-second seine haul through my RAM. The tip of the paleobiology iceberg.

Speculative zoology invites you to cast your eye over the whole Dramatis Personae of Earth's history and start rewriting their lines. You can't wish for a monotreme takeover unless you know and love monotremes.

You want to know the real whole total uncensored and unabashed truth? Screw sauropods (sorry, Mike, it had to be said). The coolest stuff that ever lived is alive right now. Whales with heads that wouldn't fit in your living room that live on mile-long swarms of crustaceans the size of boogers. A mammal with an electrosensory nose and poison spurs on its feet that dives for worms and lays eggs. Snapping turtles. Opossums. Peccaries. Poison dart frogs. Hummingbirds, man--the whole saurischian machine, that powered animals six stories tall, crammed into a fun-size package the size of your thumb. And they fly for thousands of miles, drop their bodies into torpor, and lay eggs that are even smaller than they are (not all at once, of course). Naked mole rats. Eagles. Hyenas. Saltwater crocs. Sturgeon. Loosejaws. Arctic terns. Armadillos. Axolotls. Kodiak bears. Velvet worms. Ratites. Hornbills. Sea otters. Manatees. Horseshoe crabs. Moray eels. Nudibranchs. Earthworms 20 feet long. Ruminants that can stand in the palm of your hand. SLIMES.

Ants, people! Crawling all over your bodies!

I cannot contemplate this smorgasbord, this wall-to-wall concentration of coolness, without wanting to run screaming into the street, shouting and laughing and tearing my clothes off. I exult in the facts that (1) these things are alive, (2) I am alive to see them, and (3) this is what I get to do with my life.

That straight-up pedal-to-the-firewall mushroom-cloud-in-the-rearview-mirror ROCKS!!

Further rounds of the God game

Sometimes you kick a rock and all you get is a sore toe. Sometimes you kick a rock and it hits some other rocks and pretty soon half the mountain is coming down.

It's probably too early to tell on this one. I blogged on Brain Candy Topic #117 the other day--or, as some would have it, threw down a gauntlet. Darren Naish picked it up. We'll see where it goes. I've already gotten some good suggestions, and I'm sure Darren will get a lot more.

I've got more ideas. Ideas for speculative zoology, and ideas about speculative zoology. I'm putting the former in this post and the latter in the next.

This evening I grabbed some awesomely cheesy, greasy pizza with my freakishly productive labmate, Randy Irmis, and we took turns coming up with evolutionary experiments.


I would like to see how Actinopterygii (ray-finned fishes) would fare if all the sarcopterygians (lungfish, coelocanths, all vertebrates with legs) suddenly went extinct. I assume they'd invade the land, but how? Their limb musculature is all inside their bodies. Would they be forced to truck around on fins modified into stilts? Maybe they would evolve jointed limbs actuated remotely by freaky long tendons. In gestalt appearance, they might be closer to arthropods than tetrapods.


I would also like to clear out all tetrapods other than bats. I've always been intrigued by the utter absence of flightless bats, and the flightless bats from After Man were wicked cool. What would a world repopulated by flightless bats look like? Would some bats find new uses for their fingers and wing membranes if they were no longer constrained to be airworthy? Would we get penguin bats? Whale bats? Fossorial bats? What if some bats lived in caves and only came out at night? Oh, wait.

I think games like this are a good heuristic for finding out what animals you are possibly more interested in than you realize. I would like to see a world where edentates took over. No, monotremes. No, lissamphibians.

As for Randy, he'd go back to the Triassic and rub out the cynodonts (basal synapsids get to live). Would mammals still evolve, or would reptiles get the whole pie? (My guess: the latter. Mammalian success in the Triassic looks like a fluke to me.) He'd to go the K/T and let the mosasaurs slip through. Do whales, sirenians, and pinnipeds even have a chance to evolve? (My guess: yes. Marine mammals evolved in the presence of sharks, and later in the presence of other marine mammals. You don't have to get there first if you can get there better.)

He would go back to the Cambrian and whack the early chordates. Excellent choice. It is hard to imagine most non-chordates stepping into those shoes. But then they've never had the chance, have they? That's the whole point.

After a while, "kill X" or "kill everything but X" gets a little old. So we started tinkering with the world in more subtle ways.

What if the Earth had no axial tilt? No seasons. That could have some radical implications for ecology. In a classic paper, Hairston, Smith & Slobodkin (1967; free PDF here) posed the question, "Why is the world green?" Why aren't herbivores able to eat up all of the available plant biomass? "Because they'd starve to death" is not a convincing answer. If starvation was all that was holding the herbivores back, we ought to see constant cycles of overgrazing, mass starvation, and recovery. But we don't. Something is keeping the herbivore populations in check. Maybe it's predators, maybe it's plant defenses. I suspect a big part of the answer is seasonality. We may look at the green world and think, "This place could support a lot more herbivores," but the real question is, how many herbivores can a region support when it is dry or brown or covered in snow?


But what if there were no seasons? No dry season, no winter. Without seasonal harshness to hold them down, could herbivores catch up with plants? Maybe the world would become a wasteland, populated by fast-growing plants that could flower within a single day, and prowled by lean, fast-moving herbivores that would range over wide areas eating plants as soon as they appeared and aestivating between rains. Even if herbivores couldn't catch up, something would have to change. Possibly evolutionary arms races would be accelerated. Plants would need more horrendous defenses, and burgeoning populations of herbivores would need some way to fight off the carnivores. Would a world without seasons be a hyperkinetic pressure cooker of biotic destruction? (As a proponent of Predator Theater, I'm not opposed to that.)


What if the collision that created the moon had never happened? (Image courtesy of Nova Celestia.) The Earth would be a little smaller, a little lighter. It would spin faster. Days would be shorter. And with no moon to slow things down, days would stay short for a long time. What would tectonics be like on this smaller, lighter, faster-spinning planet?

Speaking of, what if we could turn the tectonic fires up, down, or off? Say plate tectonics stopped right now. How long would it take for erosion to grind everything down? Presumably the whole world would eventually be under water. How long would it take? What would the topography of this static world be like, as the mountain ranges wore down and the ocean basis filled up? Perhaps the flattening land and the filling, rising seas would meet in huge mud flats, hundreds or thousands of miles across. How would plants and animals adjust to Mudworld? Maybe there would not be empty mud flats, but mangrove forests spanning entire continents.

All of this brain play is not in vain. In the next post, I'm going to take a stab at a big question: why engage in speculative zoology?

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If you like wacky chimaeric critters, check out the photoshopped animal contests at Worth1000, where I stole a couple of the images above.