Playing Darwin's God

Figure 1. The Lesser Tadwee of southern Uqbar.

I don't want to play God.

All I want is the ability to live for billions of years, see and control everything that transpires on Earth, and speed up and slow down time at my leisure.

Why do I want these powers? I blame Dougal Dixon. His book After Man: A Zoology of the Future came out when I was still in grade school. I was freakin' fas-cin-ated. After After Man I was much taken with Dixon's The New Dinosaurs, Wayne Douglas Barlowe's Expedition, the awesome but dead-link-ridden Speculative Dinosaur Project, the creations of Nemo Ramjet, so on and so forth, imaginary zoology without end.

Figure 2. One of Nemo Ramjet's horrors.

I want the powers, obviously, so that I can tinker with evolution. Here are some experiments I have planned, just in case I wake up some morning with the aforementioned abilities. Most of them involve you either dying right now or never coming into existence, so I'll understand if you think they suck.

1. Humans go extinct immediately, and global temperatures rise to Jurassic levels over, say, 20 million years. When will Antarctica lose its ice cap? How fast? How much of the newly exposed land will be under water, and how fast will isostasy bring it back up? What will colonize this empty continent? Birds, obviously, but what else? What terrestrial flora and fauna will colonize Australia? How long will it take? It's a long haul to the nearest sizeable landmasses; on the other hand, transoceanic dispersal is apparently more common than we thought (de Queiroz 2005 Trends in Ecology and Evolution 20:68-73).

2. Another Antarctica experiment. The land bridge connecting Antarctica to South America never breaks. The circumpolar current never forms and Antarctica does not ice over. No polar ice caps, no ice ages. What survives on Antarctica? What happens in the rest of the world? In the warmer, wetter climate, Africa will probably be covered in forest, not savanna. What hominids, if any, evolve? Ooh, ooh, ooh--with the addition of Antarctica, South America ought to have more land area than North America. Maybe South America wins the Great American Interchange. That would be rad!

Figure 3. A truly fantastic image of SpecWorld.

3. Go back to the end of the Cretaceous. I know what you're thinking, but you're dead wrong, foo'. The dinosaurs DO go extinct. Everywhere except Australia. I don't care what the mechanism was, asteroid, or, uh, one of those lame reasons--whatever it is, it skips the Land of Oz. What do these dinosaur do with the Cenozoic? What do the monotremes and marsupials do with them dinosaurs? What happens during the Pleistocene? Do any of those dinAusaurs cross the ole Wallace Line and wreck some Asiatic shop? Or do the Aborigines smoke their asses 'til they ain't no moa? Ha ha hee hee.

4. Go back to the Permian. You know that part where the continents split up? Yeah, not so much this time. Fast forward to the Mesozoic. Any dinosaurs around, or did they lose out to the therapsids? Or did the harsh conditions on the mostly-desert supercontinent favor archosaurs right from the start, so that mammals don't even get a toehold? And what's going on geologically with this unnaturally large and long-lasting landmass? Those hot spots are still going to be burning. Maybe Pangaea is pocked with resurgent calderas. A desert supercontinent stocked with volcanoes and dinosaurs? Sounds like a nice getaway.

5. Starting now, all tetrapods go extinct except turtles. No more mammals, birds, crocs, lizards, snakes, amphibians... Obviously turtles are going to have to step up and take over the world. But how? I mean, they're turtles. Or maybe the turtles don't take over the world. Maybe fish beat them to the punch. Could they get out of the water in time to give the turtles some fight? Maybe not. But think about it, man! Super-tall giraffe turtles. Lean, mean cheetah turtles. Blind cave turtles. Giant whale turtles.

Top THAT.

Seriously. If you had the aforementioned powers, what experiments would you do?

What matters now, Part 1: coursework

Does coursework matter?

Let me be clear about that. When you start out you don't know anything, and courses are one time-honored way of learning stuff. Some stuff is really dense and technical, and there is really no way to learn it besides being involved with a course (either taking the course, or teaching it). Human anatomy comes to mind. Looking at pictures in a book or on a computer is not a substitute for dissection, and the circumstances under which you can cut up someone else's mortal remains are tightly (and rightly) controlled by the state. So if you want to learn human anatomy, a course is pretty much your only option.

But what about comparative vertebrate anatomy? You need dead animals to cut up, and you need some kind of reference material--textbooks, dissection guides, or possibly [preferably?] primary descriptive literature. Some folks with similar interests to learn with and help out with logistics will certainly help. A good course in CVA can supply all these things, but you can get them without a course.

Animals can be had from the grocery store or from nature, depending on your proclivities and local statutes. Back in Oklahoma a fishing license covered the reasonable collection of all nonmammalian and nonavian nonendangered vertebrates, and a hunting license covered the rest (mammals and birds, that is, not endangered species). So for an outlay of about $30-40 you could legally collect just about anything. Dissection manuals are a dime a dozen if you live in a college town; if you don't you can still get them through the local library. Helpers are ideally the people you drink beer with. All of these things are available to the average citizen for minimal money and effort. Some legendary anatomists got to be legendary without ever having any formal training at all. So in CVA a course can be helpful, but it's not a dealbreaker.

What about phylogenetics? I took phylogenetics here at Berkeley from David Lindberg and Brent Mishler, and I learned a ton. But most of what I learned was history and theory. Most of what I know about the practical aspects of building and using cladograms I learned on my own. Cladistics as a discipline has grown up out in the open. Almost all the literature you need is recent and easy to get your hands on, and the people writing the papers are the same ones writing the programs. And many good programs are freeware. I don't know, but I suspect, that many students that are producing cladograms or doing phylogenetically-based analyses (character correlation using independent contrasts, for example) have never had a course in phylogenetics. In that respect learning phylogenetics is probably similar to learning Photoshop: learn as you go. Undoubtedly, I am a better biologist for having had the phylogenetics course, but a quick survey of the field should convince you that a lot of folks are getting along without one, and most of the stuff I actually use I picked up on my own.

(Quick confession: I have published cladograms, but they were not generated with software; I have generated cladograms with software, but not published them; and I have done a lot of character analyses but those aren't published yet.)

What about, say, descriptive morphology? I suppose it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that a course in this might exist somewhere, but I've never heard of one. I think Aristotle said something like, "The things you can't learn by being taught, you learn by doing." That's a pretty fair description of doing descriptive morphology. Nobody can really tell you how to describe that sauropod vertebra without describing it. It certainly helps to read a lot of descriptions to figure out how to organize your writing and to see what makes for good and bad description, but as far as I know everyone who is in the business of describing stuff learned by doing. Here's a really intricate and important job for which courses don't even exist.

What I've tried, with these examples, is to build a spectrum of coursework importance that goes from crucial through helpful to nonexistent. I skipped irrelevant, but it would be easy to come up with an example. My undergrad journalism(!) course on Star Trek and Star Wars comes to mind. It did not make me a better journalist, nor did it substantially improve my knowledge or appreciation of ST and SW. It was just a fun way to pick up three credit hours.

The reason this is on my mind is that the other day I had a serious conversation with a friend about the state of paleontological training at Berkeley. If you go here you can find a very impressive list of courses that ostensibly form the buffet of educational excellence here. What you won't learn from the list is that many of those courses are offered very infrequently. Some haven't been offered in years. We don't even have a paleobotanist around to teach paleobotany, for example. In my friend's view, the erosion of course offerings in paleontology is a serious threat to Berkeley's continued status as a paleontological powerhouse.

I wondered then, and am wondering out loud now, if that is true. Is coursework relevant? I'm not a paleobotanist. A paleobotany course would certainly patch some holes in my knowledge, but those holes aren't in the areas in which I work. Would knowing paleobotany help me be a better dinosaur anatomist? Possibly, but I doubt it. It seems to me that most of the stuff that I use in my work came from the "learn by doing" end of the spectrum. I think that my coursework has been adequate, but in looking at what makes me the fine specimen I am today coursework has been far less important than informal experimentation, either by myself or with interested friends.

On the other hand, of course I would think coursework is irrelevant, because I've had so little of it. Possibly my self-assessment is way off base. Maybe more coursework would have made me a substantially better paleontologist.


But I doubt it.

What do you think? (I'm mainly interested in what you think about the importance of coursework, not whether I rock or suck. But hey, it's your comment field, do what you like.)