I was there

This summer, I was lucky enough to get an invite to the meeting 'Toward an extended evolutionary synthesis' at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria. Or, as it was pre-labeled on the Interweb, the WOMAD 1994 of Evolution. (Hang on, that doesn't sound right. Altamont of Evolution?)

Anyway, I have a feature pegged to the meeting in this week's Nature. It deals mainly with the relationship between the modern synthesis and evo-devo. There were also many interesting discussion of palaeontology, genomics and ecology, which I am sure will surface in other guises elsewhere, most notably the book derived from the conference, due out early next year.

For the official line, the meeting's final statement is here. And to see what it looked like, go to the flickr group. It's a tough old job.

BES 2008

The last time I went to a British Ecological Society annual meeting, in 2006, I wrote a (remarkably long) post about how it was all a bit impenetrable and inward looking. I went to this year’s at Imperial on Wednesday and Thursday and had a much better time. Hopefully I'll get a few pieces written on the back of it.

The highlight was an excellent session on the impact of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Working out how species will respond to climate change is a big deal right now – and lots of ecologists are unhappy with the climate envelope models that look at the climate where something lives now, look at where that climate will be in 2100 (e.g. further north, higher up) and work out whether that’s a feasible journey. But there’s more to life than the weather – food, parasites, species interactions. Several of the talks tried to factor these into climate projections without becoming hopelessly complicated, and did a pretty good job.

(And ecosystem services seem massive right now in ecological research and environmental policy, at least in the UK. A couple of people made the point that policymaker’s enthusiasm for incorporating them into policy actually outstrips scientific understanding of how they contribute to human wellbeing. Lots of work for ecologists there, and lots of potential collaborations with social scientists.) The issue of how you value them – is money the only meaningful metric? was also touched upon.

And, wandering in and out of sessions, most stuff was pretty good. The only thing that I entirely failed to get my head around was any of the talks in the session on rapid human-induced evolutionary change, which sounded like it should be interesting, but was all over my head, with no clear take-home messages. I was peeved, because I should have stayed in the session on using phylogenetics to explain tropical diversity – Toby Pennington’s talk on trees, dispersal and speciation was excellent.

Anyway, the general feeling was that many UK ecologists are engaged with providing good science that is really relevant to our problems, and of getting that science across to decision makers, despite the inevitable need to compromise that’ll entail, in a way that they weren’t even a couple of years ago. And the science isn’t just boring cut-down-reeds-to-create-habitat-for-invertebrates kinda stuff, it’s an exciting blend of theory and data, getting a really fundamental questions – the relationship between ecological networks (food and mutualism webs) and ecosystem services being a prime example.

The BES also has an Ecology and Policy blog.

Across the curious parallel

I've got a feature just out in PLoS Biology on the parallels between language change and biological evolution. It particularly tries to look at what the microevolutionary mechanisms might be that drive the macroevolutionary patterns seen in language.

For a different take on the same topic, see Emma Marris's recent feature in Nature. Mine's free, but you'll have to pay for hers.

TREE 2.0

The current Trends in Ecology and Evolution has an article on science blogging by John Wilkins, who is both a philosopher at the University of Queensland and author of the blog Evolving Thoughts.

The piece seems aimed more at people who don't write/read/comment on/know of the existence of blogs than those that do. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Review: coral books

And I've got a piece in the current London Review of Books on two recent books on coral: Steve Jones' Coral, and J. N. Veron's A reef in time, one of many, many books recently declared to be 'Silent Spring for climate change/coral/fisheries/etc.'

Here's the first par:

Tens of thousands of years ago, the arrival of people in the Americas, and in Australia and New Zealand, was followed by a wave of extinctions, particularly of the largest species, which made the most attractive game. More recently, rats, cats and goats have eaten their way through the native plants and animals of small and not so small islands; and California is home to four hundred introduced plant species, which have almost entirely displaced the native prairie. But in the next hundred years or so, we are likely to see something new, as human activities cause the disappearance of ecosystems on a global scale. Species living on mountain-tops are going to find their habitat disappearing, as warmer climates rise up to engulf them. And Steve Jones and J.E.N. Veron warn that climate change may well bring about the end of coral reefs – if overfishing, disease, invading species and pollution don’t get them first.

Where we're at

I've not been posting for a while mainly because I've been working on a proposal and sample chapter for a book. More details here soon, I hope. That's kept me out of action with regards to journalism, and generally swimming in the info-plankton.

But I did go to the Network Science meeting in Norwich last week, and had a very good time (partly because I used to go to university in Norwich). I was on Nature's shilling, so I wrote a couple of news stories for them, one about the relationship between social network structure and happiness and one about the influence of workplace social networks on productivity.

I also wrote a couple of blog posts for one of Nature's blogs, one general muse on the meeting, and one about an integrated network approach to studying disease.

Actually, you can give it away

So, I was googling my book, as you do, and I came across this, the Morris County Municipal Utilities Authority Awards for Exceptional Achievement in Recycling. Looks like Mendham Books had a copy of ITBOAH gathering dust in a storeroom, and decided to devote it to a good cause.

Not as a prize, though - no one's that desperate. As a 'table favor', whatever one of those is. One stage up from a complimentary mint, I'm guessing.

Anyway, here's the lucky winner.



Doesn't she look whelmed?

Just Science 2008

An e-mail this morning reminded me that I'd signed up for this year's version of the Just Science blogging binge.

So, as today's contribution, here's a couple of things of which I have seen no media coverage but which I think are worth a look.

A paper in Ecological Economics by Blake Alcott, available here, takes issue with the idea that frugality can save the world...

One alleged weapon against unsustainable environmental impact is for the wealthy to consume less. [But] the lower initial demand lowers prices, which in turn stimulates new demand by others. The strategy moreover addresses only the rich, raising questions of its theoretical maximum efficacy. Its proponents usually conflate frugality with the North–South dichotomy and intragenerational with intergenerational equity. Moreover, there are difficulties with the supporting arguments that frugality is good for one’s own sake as well as for the environment, and that the rich should ‘lead the way’ to living more lightly. Personal behaviour change is furthermore not a substitute for international political efforts.

I agree with the last bit. But I suspect that, even if it doesn't directly lead to less consumption, consuming less would be good for people (me included) in other ways - mental health, changed priorities, philosophical shifts etc. - that would probably ultimately be good for the environment.

The other is slightly similar, intellectually - a paper in Ecology Letters looking at how ecosystems respond to global (climate) change. The counterintuitive point is that species in more diverse places will be less able to adapt to change (in an evolutionary sense) because there will already be someone there better adapted to the new conditions, and so they'll get out-competed before they can change.

The Mike Leigh mark-recapture experiment II

The discovery of Neptune. Gauss's calculations of the orbits of asteroids. The 1919 solar eclipse that caught light bending. Science is filled with masterly predictions, triumphantly confirmed.

Add a new one to the list.

In Sept 2006, I wrote, in a quite poorly punctuated post, of my repeat sightings of film director Mike Leigh around London. I suggested that Leigh could be a model for measuring the bumping-into-frquency of any two Londonders. And, based on three sightings, I ended the post with

if you're reading this, Mr Leigh, I'll see you in 2008.

Well, we were in the NFT on Sunday afternoon, queuing up to get tickets for The Lady Vanishes, and there he was, right in front of us in the queue!

Imagine my pleasure. Conclusive proof that any two Londoners (of similar cultural interests/socioeconomic level) can expect to cross paths just under every 18 months. I released the director back into the wild, to go on making his finely observed portraits of lower-middle-class desperation, secure in the knowledge of another encounter in summer 2009.

Glengarry Glen Research

A conversation I was having today made me think of this sketch. I wanted to share. Contains swearing.

Ecologists rule (well, advise)

I see (belatedly) that John Beddington is going to be the UK government chief science adviser, succeeding David King in January. Beddington is an applied ecologist - specializing in fisheries biology. He'll be the second ecologist out of the past three science advisers - King's predecessor was the legendary Bob May (who, like Beddington, used to work at Imperial College London).

Add to this behavioural ecologist John Krebs' (who, I see, now has the magnificent title of Baron Krebs, making him sound as if he should be wearing a monocle and shooting down British biplanes over the Somme) chairmanship of the Food Standards Agency, and it looks as if ecologists are doing rather well at getting their mitts on the UK's levers of power. (And Krebs and May are now both at Oxford, making it basically an Imperial-Oxford operation).

Why is that? Within science, ecology doesn't strike me as a particularly powerful discipline, in terms of its level of jobs and funding. It's a lot more quantitative than, say, cell biology, which I guess is useful in government, but that doesn't seem like much of an argument. Maybe it's just a blip - May's predecessors were a microbiologist (William Stewart) and a computer engineer (John Fairclough).

The Future of Amazonia

The current New York Review of Books has an excellent piece by John Terborgh looking at the history of development in the Brazilian Amazon, and the forest's future prospects.

Terborgh's story and his arguments are too detailed to do justice here, but this, roughly, is his conclusion:

Brazil will continue to pursue its long-cherished goal of integrating the Amazon into the national economy. Much of the forest will go. But I would be surprised to see it vanish entirely because an increasing portion of the Amazon in Brazil, and in neighboring countries, is under formal, legal protection...Short of a complete breakdown of civil authority, the Amazon won't be entirely "lost".

He then sounds a note of caution: "Unforeseen developments are likely to determine the future of th Amazon... One such unforeseen development is fire, which holds the potential to be the undoing of the Amazon." Pristine tropical forest, he say, doesn't burn. Logging changes that:

Logging synergizes fire in two ways. First, cutting down trees opens the forest canopy, admitting sunlight and drying out the leaf litter on the forest floor. Second, the debris of branches, chips, and stumps left behind by logging operations serves as fuel for any subsequent fire.

The first time a tropical forest burns, the damage can hardly be detected from above because the destruction is largely confined to saplings and small trees whose crowns lie below the canopy. But the subsequent presence of large numbers of dead trees greatly increases the fuel available to stoke the next fire. Consequently, second fires burn hotter and more destructively, killing large trees as well as practically all smaller ones. And, of course, second fires generate even more fuel for the third fire. Colleagues of mine who study this subject, notably, Carlos Peres and Jos Barlow of the University of East Anglia (UK) and William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, assert that the third fire spells doom for the forest, since it kills all remaining trees.

Then, he adds, there's climate change, which will reduce rainfall, and dry the Amazon out from west to east (becasue the rain comes off the Atlantic) and threatens the 'savannaization' of the forest. In total, Terborgh's essay is all the more sobering for being balanced and unalarmist.

Do escaped transgenes persist in nature?

Of the things I get worked up over, genetically modified crops aren't that high up the list. (As an aside, I think the UK farm-scale trials of a few years back did a good job in showing that GM crops tended to reduce agricultural biodiversity, but that this was a result of the changes in farming methods associated ith them, rather than any property of the crop per se. Likewise, I think the issues around GM crops are more to do with big agribusiness controlling the food chain, loss of varietal diversity and so on, rather than that the technology is somehow immoral or that eating them is bad for you. It's striking that in places where they don't have the luxury of squeamishness about agriculture, such as India and China, GM is rather less of an issue.)

That said, I think this paper in Molecular Ecology by Suzanne Warwick et al is interesting. They show that herbicide resistance genes from oil-seed rape (Canola) have crossed into a weedy relative, Brassica rapa and set up home there (they've been there for 6 years, apparently).

"Most hybrids had the [herbicide resistance] trait, reduced male fertility, [and] intermediate genome structure", say Warwick et al. Whether they are more or less fit than the wild variety - and what consequences this has for the weediness of B. rapa - they don't say in the abstract. That's clearly something worth studying; I don't think panic is in order, but vigilance is, so well done to these researchers for playing the long game. Although by the time we find out we've created a super-weed it may be a bit late.

Who's the queen? Ask the genes

Is the title of a piece by me in the current issue of Science looking at genetic caste determination in social insects (mostly ants, of which mostly harvester ants, with the occasional termite).

Here's the introduction:

In 1712, the English scholar Joseph Warder dedicated his treatise, The True Amazons: Or, The Monarchy of Bees, to Queen Anne, citing the caste divisions of the hive--the queen built for breeding and the workers tending her and her brood, foraging, and dying to defend their home--as evidence that nature adored royalty. But much of what entomologists have learned since then has made the lives of bees and other social insects seem closer to the American dream: Given the right nurturing--a diet of royal jelly in honeybees, or being reared at a certain temperature in some ants--any female grub in a beehive or in an ant's nest can grow up to be queen.

At least this nurture-over-nature paradigm was the prevailing wisdom, backed by theory that argued that any gene that required a developing insect to become a sterile worker would be committing evolutionary suicide. But a few years ago, social-insect research was rocked by the discovery that in some ant species, workers and queens are determined by their genes--in other words, born, not made.

Gonzo my arse

I thought John Bohannon's piece on the Libyan AIDS scandal in the November issue of Discover (can't see it online) was excellent. So I was interested to learn that he's just started a column called the Gonzo scientist over at Science.

I dimly remember a piece by Jon Turney from years ago asking where the gonzo school of science writing was. My guess is that science writers don't often get the opportunity to get deeply/improperly involved in their stories (although to a small extent I tried for ITBOAH, going off to collect vegetation samples in Costa Rica with Brian Enquist and his group. It really helped the book.). Scientists, meanwhile, have an excess of amour propre, which makes tham worried about dropping the veil of objectivity/looking like idiots.

The most honourable exception that I know of is Robert Sapolsky's A primate's memoir, which has some brilliantly funny passages (one about learning to fire tranquilizer darts from a blowgun springs to mind), in which he isn't afraid to look foolish.

So, what does Bohannon's gonzosity consist of? Well... he...(wait for it)...goes to vaguely off-beat conferences! And writes about them! At great length!

This, from the latest piece, might not be the worst line of science journalism written this year (the competition's always stiff), but...

"So those were American crayfish?" I asked, resisting an ironic smile.

Listen, sunshine. When you're in a Guatemalan brothel, having a naked fistfight with Martin Rees, after sinking a dozen temazepam and a bottle of Flor de Caña, then you can go around comparing yourself to Hunter S. Thompson. Until then, why not rename your column 'The wussy scientist'?