Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

Why I think there won't be a New York Times in two generations:

Pharyngula: Noted without comment: Jodi Rudoren née Wilgoren, whose views on journalistic responsibility to accuracy an truth were encapsulated in this comment,

I don't consider myself a creationist. I don't have any interest in sharing my personal views on how the canyon was carved, mostly because I've spent almost no time pondering my personal views -- it takes all my energy as a reporter and writer to understand and explain my subjects' views fairly and thoroughly

has been promoted at the New York Times.

Ah, but what determines who journalists pick as their "subjects"? They don't just fall from the sky now, do they...

Comments

[anne]

Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. The New York Times just published 20 of the finest essays on evolution I have ever read, simply in the month of June. The essays were by the astonishingly brilliant and beautiful writer Olivia Judson of Imperial College in London. Judson, who is counted among the finest of all evolutionary biologists, Judson alone has written 30 essays for New York Times in recent months. I cannot imagine a paper anywhere in the world, at any time, that has covered evolution so well as the NYTimes routinely does.

[anne]

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=56

June 29, 2006

Why I Study Evolution
By Olivia Judson

Over the past month, I've explored an abundance of questions, organisms and phenomena within biology. For my last column in the series, I want to talk more personally, and reflect a little on how studying evolution has changed my view of life.

I started studying evolution by accident. I fell into it after spending a summer during college working as a field assistant. The project I joined had to do with sexual infidelity in the European starling, Sturnus vulgaris. To aid the cause, I spent several months spying on birds with an enormous telescope and whizzing up and down ladders to weigh birds' eggs, and later, their chicks.

It was a summer of revelation. I learned that it's hard to see starlings having sex — a hasty flurry of wings, and that's that. Infidelity is even harder to spot, because it's hard to tell who's who. (With practice, it's a little easier, because you can learn to detect when a female is soliciting — she sidles up to a male with obvious tail-lifting intent.)

I learned that weighing starling chicks is a messy business — they defecate when you poke them in the belly. This is so the parent can keep the nest clean. The parent arrives, delivers food, pokes the chick in the belly and removes the waste, which is portable because it's encased in a sort of jelly. For a biologist who wants to weigh a chick, however, this is all a bit unfortunate. It's almost impossible to pick up a chick without stimulating the reflex.

I learned that starlings line their nests with fluffy swans' feathers, and with odd bits of greenery. One memorable moment: a male came back from the river, a feather in his beak, and perched on the roof of a shed. A light gust of wind blew the feather from his grasp — and he began to run along after it, like a man chasing a 10 pound note.

I learned I don't much like fieldwork. Or, to put it more accurately, I like helping other people with their fieldwork; I don't like doing field projects of my own. I haven't the right temperament. Fieldwork is often difficult, frustrating and uncomfortable; it can also be jolly boring. If an experiment doesn't work, the odds are you have to wait a year before you can try it again. To those who do it all the time, I take my hat off.

But above all, from the company (both human and avian) I kept that summer, I began to learn about evolution.

One way or another, I've been studying it ever since. I love it. There are several reasons why.

For starters, it gives us a powerful framework for understanding the natural world. At first, the diversity of life seems bafflingly complicated, and frankly, rather dull — detail follows detail in an endless trudge. But the study of evolution helps us to resolve patterns — details take on sudden significance. For example, the Australian brush turkey and its relations have an unusual habit. Instead of sitting on eggs, they build big incubation mounds, usually out of piles of rotting leaves. The birds (often just the male) tend the mound, making sure the eggs are kept at the right temperature. But when the eggs hatch, the chicks leave immediately: they have to fend for themselves from the start. On the basis of this, we can predict that in these species, many aspects of behavior must have evolved to be genetic, because there's no one to teach them. In particular, they must be able to recognize members of their own species, despite never having seen one. And from the moment they leave the mound, they must be able to recognize and escape from potential predators. An error could be fatal.

But it's more than that. Studying evolution has changed the way I look at nature. For knowing that all of us — oak trees and venus fly traps, starlings and brush turkeys, humans and sea urchins, not to mention bacteria harvesting light from the glowing vents at the bottom of the sea — are the products of the same ancient forces is something that brings me enormous pleasure, awe and a sense of peace. As I have learned more about other organisms, I have come to regard them (and us!) with increasing amazement and delight.

Most of all, though, I find the study of evolution to be a profoundly optimistic way of looking at the world — for the message is: despite the apparent complexity, we can understand. It's a view of life that unshackles the mind. When we come to a difficult problem — something, say, that appears so complicated it is hard to imagine the steps through which it could have evolved — the solution isn't to throw up one's hands and invoke deus ex machina. It's to imagine, to dream, to wonder: how? And then, to start to work it out....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/opinion/01judson.html?ex=1293771600&en=f3275e4fc602a15e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

January 1, 2006

Why I'm Happy I Evolved
By OLIVIA JUDSON

London

IF chimpanzees observed New Year's Day, they would have much to reflect on. In 2005, they joined humans, chickens and mosquitoes, as well as less famous occupants of the planet, on an exclusive but growing list: organisms whose complete genomes have been sequenced.

What would they make of this news, I wonder? Perhaps they would resent the genetic evidence that they are related to us. Or perhaps they would, as I do, revel in being part of the immensity of nature and a product of evolution, the same process that gave rise to dinosaurs, bread molds and myriad organisms too wacky to invent.

Organisms like the sea slug Elysia chlorotica. This animal not only looks like a leaf, but it also acts like one, making energy from the sun. Its secret? When it eats algae, it extracts the chloroplasts, the tiny entities that plants and algae use to manufacture energy from sunlight, and shunts them into special cells beneath its skin. The chloroplasts continue to function; the slug thus becomes able to live on a diet composed only of sunbeams.

Still more fabulous is the bacterium Brocadia anammoxidans. It blithely makes a substance that to most organisms is a lethal poison - namely, hydrazine. That's rocket fuel.

And then there's the wasp Cotesia congregata. She injects her eggs into the bodies of caterpillars. As she does so, she also injects a virus that disables the caterpillar's immune system and prevents it from attacking the eggs. When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the caterpillar alive.

It's hard not to have an insatiable interest in organisms like these, to be enthralled by the strangeness, the complexity, the breathtaking variety of nature.

Just think: the Indus River dolphin doesn't sleep as you or I do, or indeed as most mammals, for several hours at once. Instead, it takes microsleeps, naps that last for a few seconds, like a driver dozing at the wheel.

Or consider this: a few days after its conception, a pig embryo has become a filament that is about a yard long.

Or: the single-celled parasite that causes malaria is descended from algae. We know this because it carries within itself the remnants of a chloroplast.

It's not that I have a fetish for obscure facts. It's that small facts add up to big pictures. For although Mother Nature's infinite variety seems incomprehensible at first, it is not. The forces of nature are not random; often, they are strongly predictable....

[anne]

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=44

June 12, 2006

Why Don't Birds Get Pregnant?
By Olivia Judson

Welcome back to Mad Scientist Week. Today, I want to look at a question I raised in my first column: why is it that birds don't get pregnant? Or to put it another way, why do all birds lay eggs?

Questions like this matter because the answer tells us something important about the paths evolution can take. Some people suppose that from time to time, evolution gets stuck — that certain evolutionary directions are impossible (or at least, very difficult). According to this school of thought, birds can't evolve pregnancy: some aspect of their biology stops them. Others argue that when such a phenomenon fails to evolve, the reason is not that it can't, but that it's not beneficial. This view says birds don't evolve pregnancy because there's presently no advantage in it.

At the moment, we can't easily tell which view is correct: no one has done any experiments. Today, I'm going to propose one.

First, I should say what I mean by pregnancy. I mean: giving birth to live young. The alternative is laying eggs. However, different animals have different kinds of pregnancies. Humans, mice, dogs and other mammals of our sort make tiny eggs; the young draw nourishment from their mothers as they grow. In contrast, pythons give birth to live young — but rather than nourishing the developing embryos as she goes along, a female python makes large eggs which she keeps inside her body until the young have finished developing. Here, the embryos are nourished by yolk, as they are in a bird's egg, but they develop inside their mother until they are ready to slither off into the world. Marsupial mammals — kangaroos, koalas, opossums and that crowd — do a mix of the two. Marsupial eggs are (relatively) large and yolky, but the mother also transfers nutrients to the embryo. In short, there's a spectrum of ways to be pregnant.

And a lot of organisms have taken up the practice: if you stroll down Nature's maternity ward, you'll find quite the menagerie. You'll find fish such as coelacanths, guppies, sea horses (here it's the male who carries the young), blue sharks and smooth dogfish. You'll see pregnant amphibians and a multitude of snakes and lizards. Mammals will be there, too. (Not all of them, though: three species still lay eggs. The most famous of these is that fabulously strange animal, the duck-billed platypus). Birds, however, are missing. Of the five major groups of animals with backbones, only birds have never evolved pregnancy. Why not?

When I raised this question in my first column, a number of readers answered it by observing that birds fly. But (as I mentioned in my response) the answer is not so simple. Bats fly — yet they have pregnancy. Moreover, many birds do not fly. Big birds like ostriches and emus are grounded. Penguins have swapped the sky for the sea. And birds living on remote islands — Mauritius, the islands of New Zealand, Hawaii, the Galapagos and other distant archipelagos — often abandon flight. New Zealand is home to flightless parrots and flightless ducks (among others). Yet none of these has switched from eggs. Antarctic penguins, it seems to me, would do especially well with live birth — they wouldn't have this silly business of trying to keep their eggs warm when the temperature is 50 below. And they've had plenty of time: the ancestors of modern penguins abandoned flight at least 100 million years ago.

So, is it because they can't? Or is it that they could but they don't? Both schools of thought can make good arguments. The don't school can point to all the times pregnancy has evolved. Fish, for instance, are thought to have evolved it about 20 times....

[anne]

The New York Times has long and continually covered evolutionary biology in ways that should be inspiring for anyone interested in the evolutionary-ecological relation of 200 million year old horseshoe crabs and the 20,000 mile migration of red knots to those who raise orchids to those who wonder how and why we might or might not be evolving. I am repeatedly thrilled by and thankful for the NYTimes science writing.

[anne]

After 150 years of the magnificent "Origin of Species" there are running battles over how to study biology, battles overt and subtle. Can you imagine the zoo in Boston never discussing or describing any animal in terms of evolution? The subject is just avoided, even at the Boston zoo. Repeatedly however New York Times has presented discerning academic quality discussions of evolution. A reporter who is asked to write on prespectives of those who would deny evolution should honestly do just this and allow us to understand the fear that persists in discussing evolution.

[dilbert dogbert]

Anne,
Where does the stuff by Jodi Rudoren née Wilgoren show up in the Times vis the stuff by
Olivia Judson? If Wilgoren's stuff is in the obits then I would be happy that that is her proper place and a promotion to a higher level of preparing obits is just fine.

[anne]

Jodi Rudoren or Wilgoren, before and after being married, wrote several articles on conflict over teaching evolution. She fairly presented the stories of several deniers of evolution and was in turn criticized. I found the criticism of no merit, though I find evolution a thoroughly glorious base for all of biology and for an understanding of so much that I find about in the course of day. Why then do birds not get pregnant? Can animals see color and why?

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/science/sciencespecial2/06canyon.html?ex=1286251200&en=0328704f0c0c7d35&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

October 6, 2005

Seeing Creation and Evolution in Grand Canyon
By JODI WILGOREN

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. - Tom Vail, who has been leading rafting trips down the Colorado River here for 23 years, corralled his charges under a rocky outcrop at Carbon Creek and pointed out the remarkable 90-degree folds in the cliff overhead.

Geologists date this sandstone to 550 million years ago and explain the folding as a result of pressure from shifting faults underneath. But to Mr. Vail, the folds suggest the Grand Canyon was carved 4,500 years ago by the great global flood described in Genesis as God's punishment for humanity's sin.

"You see any cracks in that?" he asked. "Instead of bending like that, it should have cracked." The material "had to be soft" to bend, Mr. Vail said, imagining its formation in the flood. When somebody suggested that pressure over time could create plasticity in the rocks, Mr. Vail said, "That's just a theory."

"It's all theory, right?" asked Jack Aiken, 63, an Assemblies of God minister in Alaska who has a master's degree in geology. "Except what's in the Good Book."

For Mr. Vail and 29 guests on his Canyon Ministries trip, this was vacation as religious pilgrimage, an expedition in search of evidence that God created the earth in six days 6,000 years ago, just as Scripture says.

That same week, a few miles upriver, a decidedly different group of 24 rafters surveyed the same rock formations - but through the lens of science rather than what Mr. Vail calls "biblical glasses." Sponsored by the National Center for Science Education, the chief challenger to creationists' influence in public schools, this trip was a floating geology seminar, charting the canyon's evolution through eons of erosion.

"Look at the weathering, look at the size of the pieces," Eugenie C. Scott, the center director, said of markings in Black Tail Canyon. "To a standard geologist, to somebody who actually studies geology, this just shouts out at you: This is really old; this is really gradual."

Two groups examining the same evidence....

[anne]

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=54

June 26, 2006

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust
By Olivia Judson

Yesterday, I discussed how natural selection can sometimes drive populations extinct. Today, I want to present a series of short meditations on the evolution of death. As you read these, you might reflect on two questions: Why do we grow old and die? And what is the role that death plays in evolution?

Meditation One: Death Sustains Life

We tend to think of death as the end of life — and indeed, for every individual, it is. But it is also essential for life. Without death, there would be no evolution (or at least, it would have to proceed rather differently from the way it does today). More important still, without death, there would be little life.

Death for one organism means life for another. This is obviously true for animals — they eat other organisms to live. Less obviously, it is also true for plants. Plants appear passive and pacific, standing there with leaves spread, collecting light from the sun. But appearances can be deceptive. Some plants have evolved to poison the ground to stop other plants growing near. Others evolve to grow fast, so they don't risk living in someone else's shade: if they fail to get enough light and space, they will die.

Meditation Two: On the Scale of Death in Nature

Behind the apparent harmony of nature, it's carnage — and on an unimaginable scale. Let me give you some examples. First: great tits. These are small songbirds — adults weigh less than an ounce — that live in the Old World. A single brood of nine chicks (a typical family size) will eat 120,000 caterpillars while they are in the nest. In summer, Britain is home to 2.1 million pairs of adult great tits. Think how many caterpillars there must be.

Another example: gannets. These are seabirds that hunt fish such as pilchards and mackerel by plunging into the sea from a great height. (It's dramatic: they look like miniature kamikaze fighter planes, and if you've never seen them dive, I urge you to do so at the earliest opportunity.) An adult needs to consume around 1,100 kilocalories a day. (I could live on that — I'd be a bit hungry, but otherwise I'd be fine.)

A spotted hyena can eat a young Thomson's gazelle in under two minutes, bones and all. An aardwolf — a small black-and-yellowish-white relative of the hyena — eats 200,000 termites a night. Two hundred thousand termites — imagine if there were a predator of humans that killed on that scale.

The next time you talk of someone dying a "natural death," pause to consider that for many creatures, the most natural death is to be gobbled up and swallowed....

[anne]

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=41

June 7, 2006

When Genes Repeat Themselves
By Olivia Judson

Over the past three days I've outlined several ways in which organisms acquire new genes. The reason this matters is that, without a source of new genes, big, long-term evolutionary changes are difficult. If there weren't a way to add new genes, we'd all still be bacteria.

Today, I'd like to consider the single largest source of new genes: duplication. As early as 1932 — more than 20 years before anyone knew the structure of DNA — the great evolutionary biologist and naturalist J.B.S. Haldane speculated that gene duplication could be important for evolution. But it is only now that the full importance of duplication is becoming clear. Haldane would have been impressed, I think, to learn that almost 40 percent of our genes were originally copies of other genes (though I suspect he wouldn't have been surprised that we are unexceptional in this regard).

Broadly speaking, gene duplication is a kind of mutation. However, it is fundamentally different from the classic misprint mutation. As I mentioned in my column the other day, classic misprints alter a single letter in a gene sequence as a result of an error by the DNA-copying machinery. Such mutations are an excellent source of variation for traits you already have (the length of your wings, the size of your nose, the colors of your tail, and so on), but they are less effective at building whole new repertoires.

Gene duplication is a bit different. First, I should say that I'm using the phrase as an umbrella for several related but separate phenomena: the duplication of a single gene or part of a gene, the duplication of a chromosome in whole or in part, and the duplication of the whole genome. These different types of duplication seem to happen at different rates in different groups. Plants, for instance, often double their genomes. This is one reason onions have 10 times more DNA than we do (don't cry). Mammals and birds, however, don't generally copy their genomes wholesale. Why? Any number of reasons, but here's one: duplicating your genome has the automatic and immediate effect of increasing the size of your cells — which would likely be a big disadvantage for us (it would severely affect our metabolism), but no problem for an onion. What we are good at, though, is duplicating little bits of our chromosomes: this seems to have been highly important in primate evolution.

Once a gene has been duplicated, the copy can have any number of fates....

[anne]

There is much about evolution, about biology, of which people can be sadly fearful and some people can and do play on fears. To not be filled with wonder at what makes the shape of a robin's beak differ so from a cardinal's beak is sad and limits what we can know of that which is nearest to us, life. Still, we can understand the fears and try to counter them.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=6673&u=99|5|...

Clapper Rail with Chick (offspring of King Rail and Clapper Rail)
Oceanside Marine Nature Study Area--Long Island.

My, my :)